MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by catapart | 2026-01-19 14:38:35+00:00
no, I expect them to go to a store to buy the same product that their friend bought. then I expect them to use that product by scanning a QR code that comes up on their TV, and then registering an account using the site linked by that code (or, just using their tv's remote to sign up, with an on-screen keyboard, or whatever).

not "a server so simple, anyone could host it"; "a set top box that gives me a private social media storage, network data storage, secure external connections, and effortless integration with all of my other iot devices". note that the former requires you to know what hosting is, while the latter only requires that you know what you want to do, without having to understand the details of how its done.
by Dev_Master | 2026-01-19 14:38:43+00:00
SmartExcelGuardian is a Python desktop tool for inspecting and cleaning Excel files.
It detects missing values, duplicates, type coercion issues, and invalid formulas, then assigns a heuristic “column health” score (0–100).

Features include:

automatic missing-value imputation (mean/mode)

formula cleanup and regenerated SUM/AVERAGE rows

conditional formatting for high-risk columns

column name normalization

exports to Excel, PDF, JSON, and TXT

Built with pandas, openpyxl, reportlab, and tkinter/ttkbootstrap.
Primarily aimed at analysts and engineers who inherit messy Excel files and want fast, auditable cleanup without writing ad-hoc scripts.

Feedback welcome.
by JohnFen | 2026-01-19 14:39:18+00:00
This is incredibly true, and has been a growing problem from before LLMs came around. Even students from wealthy families who presumably have plenty of resources they could use to better their children's fates are failing their kids. My sister is a teacher in a well-off school district and has to buy food out of her own pocket (on a teacher's salary) to give to her students because so many haven't even had anything to eat before they show up.

I mean, these are bare minimum things, people.
by repelsteeltje | 2026-01-19 14:39:41+00:00
Okay, everyone's on edge, but:

> * Swedish aircraft will be part of NATO's incident preparedness in Iceland for two months as part of air defense in the Arctic region.

> * THE MISSION HAS BEEN PLANNED FOR A LONG TIME and is therefore NOT being carried out due to the tense situation surrounding Greenland.

> * They don't want to disclose how many aircraft Sweden is sending.
by sgarland | 2026-01-19 14:40:11+00:00
I mostly agree with you, with the exception that VMs are fully isolated from one another (modulo sharing a hypervisor), which is both good and bad.

If your K8s cluster (or etcd) shits the bed, everything dies. The equivalent to that for VMs is the hypervisor dying, but IME it’s far more likely that K8s or etcd has an issue than a hypervisor. If nothing else, the latter as a general rule is much older, much more mature, and has had more time to work out bugs.

As to updating VMs, again IME, typically you’d generate machine images with something like Packer + Ansible, and then roll them out with some other automation. Once that infrastructure is built, it’s quite easy, but there are far more examples today of doing this with K8s, so it’s likely easier to do that if you’re just starting out.
by bennydog224 | 2026-01-19 14:40:15+00:00
Most services lack privacy-by-design, allowing them to easily identify individual users through specific data attributes like API calls from an email or user ID.

Sometimes this is necessary, but often it's not. This can lead to your data being collected unnecessarily - placing your full trust in the service provider.

I studied Cloudflare’s Privacy Pass framework and implemented a modified version of it in my application Ward. As a result, Ward users can no longer effectively be tracked or identified at the app level for most requests.

Would love to hear from others’ perspective, whether you’re an security expert or everyday user, on this approach.

The average consumer is more privacy conscious than we may think. It’s our hope that architectural decisions like this early can help build and gain user trust earlier, especially in B2C products.
by danmaz74 | 2026-01-19 14:40:29+00:00
By the way, the emergence of LLM coding tools could make it even easier than before to reduce that dependence, as the cost of reproducing many of the mature technologies is going to cost less than it would have before. Ironically, doing that may require using US tools (like Claude Code), at least for now, but it could be a very interesting evolution/opportunity for Europe.
by sillyfluke | 2026-01-19 14:40:30+00:00
>The EU leaders falsely assume that US cloud services are essential and let themselves be blackmailed over and over again.

I for one seriously doubt they assume such a thing. They are most likely given something in return that they think somehow makes such a trade worth it. Whether it's access to some fancy US intel/survelliance tech, "discounts" on US defense purchases or what have you, until you get transparency or clarity on the very specific items included in all these deals it's hard to determine the scale of their stupidity. It's either that or personal bribes, blackmail, and kickbacks to key EU politicians depending on the EU country in question.

If there was a "false assumption" above all others it was most likely the assumption that the post-WWII US foreign policy towards Europe would continue to the end of their lifetimes.
by pushcx | 2026-01-19 14:41:04+00:00
You got a DM and email with the title and URL when your story was removed. This would've been 2023-08-03 with the subject "Your story has been edited by a moderator", if you want to look back: https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/blob/86e1d0b6ac6bac5210...

But you're correct on the second part, there isn't a level of activity that entitles anyone to post a sales page with nothing to discuss on it. Your activity was taken into account, though. Typically if a new user's first activity is to post an ad I'll also ban the site or user. I understand the rules aren't as permissive as you wanted, but ads don't start good discussions.
by xvector | 2026-01-19 14:41:34+00:00
I promise you that virtually no people care about avoiding American products that much. You are being idealistic, and are simply out of touch with the average person if you actually believe this.

Virtually one will stop buying Coke. Virtually no one will stop wanting an iPhone. So on and so forth. They will gladly criticize the US while continuing to indulge in the biggest brand names.
by neomantra | 2026-01-19 14:41:38+00:00
I see what you are saying, and perhaps we are zeroing in on the importance of ground truths (even if it is not code but rather PLANs or other docs).

For what you're saying to work, then the LLM must adhere consistently to that initial prompt. Different LLMs and the same LLM on different runs might have different adherence and how does it evolve from there? Meaning at playback of prompt #33, will the ground truth gonna be the same and the next result the same as in the first attempt?

If this is local LLM and we control all the context, then we can control that LLM's seeds and thus get consistent output. So I think your idea would work well there.

I've not started keeping thinking traces, as I'm mostly interested in how humans are using this tech. But, that could get involved in this as well, helping other LLMs understand what happened with a project up to a state.
by cekrem | 2026-01-19 14:41:46+00:00
The Java interop compromise is probably the biggest weakness of the proposal - it works beautifully within Kotlin but degrades at boundaries. This is similar to how Kotlin's nullable types (String?) become platform types in Java.

I think it's good nonetheless to add stuff to Kotlin that won't translate 1:1 to Java, both because Java is evolving but also because Kotlin is used in "Native" (non-JVM) contexts as well (not extensively, but hopefully that'll change).
by codenighter | 2026-01-19 14:41:58+00:00
really appreciate your work sir, I too believe in compounding. But still I don't know why sometimes it feels hard continuing.. still learning coding the old way. I feel, someday it will give me some edge, I just love coding the old way. Sometimes I feel anxious and kind of unsure about my approach but I have decided to continue what I am doing as I am too young in my 20's so I think it's ok to explore till I enjoy doing it. Thank you for sharing your work sir. Hope you keep learning and growing.
by pydry | 2026-01-19 14:41:59+00:00
>That's the same energy as telling other professions to "just learn to code, bro" once they are displaced by AI. But I guess it doesn't feel nice once the shoe is on the other foot, though.

It's the exact same neoliberal elites who told everyone to code one year and told them they'd all be automated of a job the next year.

I dunno who exactly you think you're being condescending towards.
by Ntrails | 2026-01-19 14:42:19+00:00
> It is almost impossible to escape the constant barrage of takes and news headlines these days without being a total luddite

It really isn't that hard, if I'm looking at my experience. Maybe a little stuff on here counts. I get my news from the FT, it's relatively benign by all accounts. I'm not sure that opting out of classical social media is particularly luddite-y, I suspect it's closer to becoming vogue than not?

Being led around by the nose is a choice still, for now at least.
by danabramov | 2026-01-19 14:42:28+00:00
There is always one party "in control" of the lexicon and its canonical version.

I think it's important to distinguish this from the "every client adds their own features" thing. Technically yes, each app can add their own things to the open union that they support better. But it's also on each implementer's to consider how this would affect UX in other clients (e.g. if you add your own embed type, it seems reasonable to also prepopulate a link embed that acts as fallback). The problems you're describing are real, but I think we should give a bit more credit to the app builders since they're also aware that this is a part of their user experience design.

But still, whoever "owns" the lexicon says what's canonical. Then yes, some other software might not catch up to what's canonical but that's similar to what's happening with any platform that supports multiple clients today. Unless your outlook is that alternative clients in general are not competitive for this reason. I think that's a grim outlook, and if that were true, services wouldn't go to extra lengths to intentionally shut down their APIs, which so has been the trend with every network.

I think in longer term the bet is that the benefits unlocked by interop and a more competitive product landscape will become clearer to end users, who will be less interested in joining closed platforms and will develop some intuitions around that. This would not happen soon, so until then, the bet is that interop will allow creating better products. And if that doesn't happen, yes, it's pretty hard for open to compete.
by bluebarbet | 2026-01-19 14:42:56+00:00
Contrarian take: Wikipedia could use more AI, as well as less.

A major flaw of Wikipedia is that much of it is simply poorly written. Repetition and redundancy, ambiguity, illogical ordering of content, rambling sentences, opaque grammar. That should not be surprising. Writing clear prose is a skill that most people do not have, and Wikipedia articles are generally the fruit of collaboration without copy editors.

AI is perfectly suited to fixing this problem. I recently spent several hours rewriting a somewhat important article. I did not add or subtract information from the article, I simply made it clearer and more concise. I came away convinced that AI could have done as good a job - with supervision, of course - in a fraction of the time. AI-assisted copy-editing is not against Wikipedia rules. Yet as things stand, there are no built-in tools to facilitate it, doubtless because of the ambient suspicion of AI as a technology. We need to take a smarter approach.
by dkarl | 2026-01-19 14:43:06+00:00
Having different sites dedicated to different kinds of topics helps me partition my time and energy. Otherwise it would all go to the most emotionally salient content. I get that your current choice is to go all-in on the current political crisis in the U.S., but that isn't desirable or healthy for everybody. There are plenty of sites that can help you with that, and people who aren't well-served by that also need places to go. I use HN for professionally relevant content and tech-related diversions. I'll check in on politics elsewhere.

I don't think online engagement correlates much with political effectiveness, btw. Not that I think I'm more politically effective than the average person, but I know that being more engaged online doesn't make me more so.
by defrost | 2026-01-19 14:43:33+00:00
There are a lot of dirty sites about the globe.

* Naval Nuclear Waste Management in Northwest Russia - https://bellona.org/news/russian-human-rights-issues/nikitin...

* Yucca Flat - https://eros.usgs.gov/earthshots/yucca-flat-nevada-usa

* Hanford Nuclear Site - https://darrp.noaa.gov/hazardous-waste/hanford-nuclear-site

are just three, in no particular order.
by NelsonMinar | 2026-01-19 14:43:46+00:00
For anyone not reading the article, she did fundamental work measuring the geoid, the non-spherical corrections to Earth's shape that is fundamental to very accurate GPS positioning.

Here's some pictures of the EGM2008 geoid we use today: https://francis.naukas.com/files/2023/07/D20230711-Computers...
by giga_private | 2026-01-19 14:43:53+00:00
I think an engineer can vibe code if he/she just doesnt look at the code (even though he would know what is going on if he did).

IMO a better definition of vibe coding would be in regards to reading the actual code. Eg. I started videcoding this project but after I made it to X, I actually had to manually rewrite the code, thats where the vibes stopped.
by killerstorm | 2026-01-19 14:44:10+00:00
I don't believe this would be more efficient.

Use of common tools like `ls` and file patching is already baked into model's weights, it can do that with minimal amount of effort, leaving more room for actually thinking about app's code.

If you force it to wrap these actions into non-standard tools you're basically distracting the model: it has to think about app-code and tool-code in the same context.

In some cases it does make sense to encourage the model to create utilities for itself - but you can do that without enforcing code-only.
Show HN: Ghost Engine – generate weights on the fly
by saznlamsal | 2026-01-19 14:44:24+00:00
Hello HN, I’m the author of Ghost Engine.

I built this to challenge the assumption that we are strictly bound by the "Memory Wall." My hypothesis was that modern consumer silicon (like Apple M-series) has enough spare compute to decompress weights procedurally faster than it can read them from RAM.

The Architecture: It uses a "Predator-Prey" method:

Predators: We identify and preserve the high-magnitude outliers (the "Alpha" weights) in FP16.

Prey: The remaining weights are compressed into ternary masks {-1, 0, 1} and a block-wise scalar.

Reconstruction: A bitwise kernel reconstructs the layer in L2 cache during the forward pass.

Results: I validated this on Llama-3-8B (Layer 20, SwiGLU).

Compression: ~3.0 bits per weight (effective).

Fidelity: 0.915 Cosine Similarity (weights) / 0.912 (outputs).

Size: Brings an 8B model down to ~3GB.

The repo is currently a "Proof of Engine" in Python/MLX. The math works, but to realize the theoretical speed gains (125 t/s), I am working on porting the decompression kernels to Metal/CUDA.

Happy to answer questions about the compression logic or the "Predator" selection algorithm!
by andsoitis | 2026-01-19 14:45:10+00:00
> Mussolini introduced women suffrage, I'm not joking.

No single person introduced women suffrage. It emerged through independent movements across different countries.

That said, it is generally accepted that New Zealand (1893) was the first self-governing country to grant women the right to vote nationally. Key figure: Kate Sheppard.

Earlier partial or local suffrage: Sweden 1718 - 1772 (limited), US 1869 (Wyoming territory).

Key global leaders of women suffrage: UK - Emmeline Pankhurst, US - Susan B Anthony, Elizabeth C Stanton (results in 19th Amendment)

Global timeline: 1893 New Zealand, 1902 Australia (with racial exceptions), 1913 - 1918 Nordics, 1918 - 1920 UK and US, 1945-1960s Much of Asia, Africa, and Middle East, 1971 Switzerland!
by pizlonator | 2026-01-19 14:45:17+00:00
Fil-C is as compatible with C as different variants of C are with one another.

The porting effort is usually a less than if you were going from 32-bit to 64-bit for the first time. For some programs, you need zero changes.

In Qt I think the changes were stuff like:

- Use an intrinsic instead of inline assembly for cpuid.

- Change how a tagged pointer works (I.e. a 64-bit value used to store some integer bits and a pointer)

(Source: I’m the Fil-C guy and I watched the Qt porting happen from the sidelines.)
by c22 | 2026-01-19 14:45:23+00:00
If you're not comfortable tolerating a wide range of sometimes abrasive behaviors from the hugely-divergent set of people you might encounter in public then you don't get to go out in public. Hopefully you make enough money you can afford to insulate yourself from others.

I find it mind-blowing that so many commenters in this thread forgot the 2nd half of the golden rule: Be conservative in your outputs and liberal with your inputs.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2026-01-19 14:45:35+00:00
The full text of Title 5 US Code Section 3331 is as follows

5 U.S.C. S: 3331 - Oath of office

An individual, except the President, elected or appointed to an office of honor or profit in the civil service or uniformed services, shall take the following oath: "I, AB, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God." This section does not affect other oaths required by law.
by hairofadog | 2026-01-19 14:45:40+00:00
No doubt the distraction from the Epstein files is a contributing factor, but it’s a mistake to think he won’t do incredibly harmful things simply because they seem insane and without purpose to us, who grew up post World War II.

His decision tree is like

Does it make me feel like a tough guy? -> Is there some way I can leverage it for grift and personal gain? -> Does it make my political enemies and undesirables feel angry and helpless? -> Is it a decision I can make unilaterally? -> Then YES
by jackzhuo | 2026-01-19 14:45:54+00:00
That 'hybrid' workflow (Physical Coins + Digital Lookup) is exactly what I had in mind for my 'Direct Interpret' mode.

I actually already have this live at: https://castiching.com/interpret

You can skip the digital casting entirely. Just throw your coins in the field, note the numbers, and plug them in there. It instantly pulls up the interpretation without the clicking.
by saznlamsal | 2026-01-19 14:46:18+00:00
Hello HN, I’m the author of Ghost Engine.

I built this to challenge the assumption that we are strictly bound by the "Memory Wall." My hypothesis was that modern consumer silicon (like Apple M-series) has enough spare compute to decompress weights procedurally faster than it can read them from RAM.

The Architecture: It uses a "Predator-Prey" method:

Predators: We identify and preserve the high-magnitude outliers (the "Alpha" weights) in FP16.

Prey: The remaining weights are compressed into ternary masks {-1, 0, 1} and a block-wise scalar.

Reconstruction: A bitwise kernel reconstructs the layer in L2 cache during the forward pass.

Results: I validated this on Llama-3-8B (Layer 20, SwiGLU).

Compression: ~3.0 bits per weight (effective).

Fidelity: 0.915 Cosine Similarity (weights) / 0.912 (outputs).

Size: Brings an 8B model down to ~3GB.

The repo is currently a "Proof of Engine" in Python/MLX. The math works, but to realize the theoretical speed gains (125 t/s), I am working on porting the decompression kernels to Metal/CUDA.

Happy to answer questions about the compression logic or the "Predator" selection algorithm!
by mikeyouse | 2026-01-19 14:46:22+00:00
J6 was a completely standard use case to confirm someone’s location in the Capitol with the location data from providers. It wasn’t some novel or breakthrough use, and not everything in life is a slippery slope so it’s completely rational to approve of a technology to convict those involved in a crime and decry more advanced and less legal means purely for surveillance of people who haven’t committed any crimes.
by isodev | 2026-01-19 14:46:51+00:00
> There's no seam between servers.

This is false, if we're to believe it's possible to exist outside the moderation control of Bluesky corp.

It's also false today while everyone is still on the same "instance" - e.g. ICE joining Bluesky and being verified is making waves... apparently being _that_ is not enough to violate Big Blue's community guidelines.
by matrss | 2026-01-19 14:46:59+00:00
> “No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.”

This wording always bothers me. If a person were to circumvent a technological measure that tries to control such access, then the circumvention itself proves that this measure was not effective at doing what it is supposed to be doing. Therefore the person is not circumventing something that _effectively_ controls anything. They just showed that it is ineffective, and therefore the law does not apply to them.

Of course, no one who actually has to interpret these laws shares my opinion.
by lordnacho | 2026-01-19 14:47:17+00:00
No, you have to be fluent in the domain. That is ultimately where the program is acting. You can be confident it works if it passes domain level tests.

You save all the time that was wasted forcing the language into the shape you intended. A lot of trivial little things ate up time, until AI came along. The big things, well, you still need to understand them.
by vlovich123 | 2026-01-19 14:47:26+00:00
I hope you realize how your critique is identical to the critiques people have about IPv6

Is your claim that the borrow checker is the problem? That’s a really difficult design space to beat Rust in:

1. Shared mutable data structures to allow high performance code

2. No GC to allow high performance code

3. Non lexical lifetimes to allow flexibility in memory ownership for expressivity and performance (ie you can’t restrict allocations to never escape a lexical lifetime)

Capability based systems might avoid the Rust borrow checker but they’re even more verbose with annotations and complex than Rust.

Effects systems show some promise but not yet proven they can actually be a general purpose language like Rust (ie do the ideas scale well to multiple different problem domains).

Anyway, there’s lots of alternative ways of designing languages but they all come with undesirable tradeoffs. Would be better if you actually made some concrete proposals that Rust gets wrong rather than “it’s too complex - they should have made it simpler” without taking any position - always easier to critique from the sidelines without making a proposal of your own that can be critiqued.
by dancrystalbeach | 2026-01-19 14:47:48+00:00
Every day I go out and do the Lord’s work for y’all. On an average evening or weekend, you can find me setting up cloud instances, generating data, deploying code, and running tests. I don’t answer to anyone. I write what I please and what I find. The simple approach: poke things, turn over rocks, ruffle the feathers of many powerful people.