MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cmrdporcupine | 2026-01-04 17:51:14+00:00
It's funny that I agree with most or all of these principles but don't feel like my 10 years at Google accord with most of this. I wouldn't say I learned these things at Google, but learned them before (and a bit after) and was continually frustrated about how many of them were not paid attention to at Google at all?

Incentive structure inside Google is impaired.

I do think Google engineering culture does bias against excessive abstraction and for clean readable code and that's good. But acting in the user's interest, timely shipping, etc... not so much.
by SR2Z | 2026-01-04 17:51:33+00:00
You can call it fearmongering but I can point to the whole of human history and tell you that not only has it happened, at a certain point it is inevitable. I can point at Ukraine, right now, as an example of what happens when one country appears much weaker than an aggressive neighbor.

The United States is the greatest power the world has ever seen. While the oceans protect us, the truth is that even the White House was once burned down in a war.
by fennecbutt | 2026-01-04 17:51:49+00:00
If it was about peace and rebuilding their economy oil would have been mentioned as US companies move in to help them leverage their resources AT COST.

Instead, the joke about the US invading for oil proves true once again, and look at everyone fooled by the justification for it. Maduro a bad person? Yeah duh...so why US moving in to take profits from their oil as well as supporting politicians there who were allied with Maduro...

US are liars. And Venezuelans on here gonna act happy bc Maduro gone. But just you wait, 30 years will go by then Venezuelans will be crying about reparations for their natural resources being raped by the US.
by junon | 2026-01-04 17:52:29+00:00
> the core assumption remained that there was a never-ending spring of new people feeding the thing.

Hi Shog, hope you're doing well! Just thought this bit was insightful; I can fully believe this was the idea and the motivating factor for a lot of the decisions made seemingly in a vacuum (from the outside).

How much do you think Area51 and the push for the SE network rather than sticking with the Big Three affected things? I always got the impression that they tried to scale into places that ultimately attracted too much noise and overestimated the willingness of (community) moderators to effectively work for free for them to take on the wave of less technical/principled users.
Show HN: AI‑powered crypto analysis dashboard (real‑time signals)
by alexbarooo | 2026-01-04 17:52:47+00:00
I built an AI-powered crypto analysis dashboard that provides real-time Buy/Sell signals, multi-timeframe analysis, indicator heatmaps, and trend scoring.

The goal is to give traders a clean and fast interface without switching between dozens of charts.

Would love feedback from the HN community.
by shagie | 2026-01-04 17:53:39+00:00
> Moderation should have been aimed squarely at making the site friendly, and community should be moderating the content entirely, for exactly the reasons you point out - mods aren’t the experts on the content.

The community was the ones moderating the content in its entirety (with a very small fraction of that moderation being done by the mods - the ones with a diamond after their name... after all, they're part of the community too). Community moderation of content was crowdsourced.

However, the failing was that not enough of the community was doing that moderation.

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/432658/2024-a-year-...

Note the "Questions closed" and "Questions reopened".

Compare this to https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/340815/2016-a-year-...

The tools that diamond (elected) moderators had was the "make the site friendly" by removing comments and banning users.

The "some of the answers should have been deleted" ran counter to the mod (diamond mod this time https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/268369 has some examples of this policy being described) policy that all content - every attempt at answering a question - is valid and should remain.
by mike_hearn | 2026-01-04 17:53:41+00:00
Licensing has changed since that release. You can use the EE for free, both for personal and commercial use cases:

https://www.graalvm.org/latest/introduction/#licensing-and-s...

> Oracle GraalVM is licensed under GraalVM Free Terms and Conditions (GFTC) including License for Early Adopter Versions. Subject to the conditions in the license, including the License for Early Adopter Versions, the GFTC is intended to permit use by any user including commercial and production use.

It has all the sandboxing features you might want. I don't know if the disclaimers on the other engines changes much, open source software always disclaims all liability. Nobody will stand behind something security sensitive unless it's commercial because otherwise there's no way to pay for the security team it requires.
by linsomniac | 2026-01-04 17:53:57+00:00
I have had fairly serious arthritis in my hips for close to a decade now. Cortizone shots directly into the joint have helped the worst of the flare-ups (limping on my way into the shot, having 0 pain walking out of it, lasting a year).

5+ years ago when I was looking for another injection, my PCP said "Well, time for a hip replacement." Now, for reasons I don't understand I think he was being way premature on that (everyone I'd talked to prior to that had said I should wait as long as I can, and it'd been 2+ years since my last shot).

But I'd pretty much accepted that hip pain was just a part of my life, (especially in the morning) picking something off the floor was painful, just walking and in particular walking stairs was just a little painful.

A few weeks ago I tried some stretches I saw on Youtube shorts. Like a minute a day. It's like I've got new hips.

I've never been a very "compliant patient" when it comes to stretching, but that was mostly because I saw no benefits from it. But this one stretch was like a miracle!
Show HN: Ill-Serve-Anything.com
by mikesol | 2026-01-04 17:55:11+00:00
I made a site inspired by my favorite GH repo, illacceptanything/illacceptanything. Except instead of a GH repo, it's a website, and instead of commits, it accepts prompts.

Here's the API:

https://api.ill-serve-anything.com

POST /prompt {"prompt": "..."}

GET /prompt/:id

GET /prompts?limit=N

It's been live for a day. It seems to be alternating between a Zen garden, news about Venezuela, a crypto exchange and someone who just spews bananas all the time.

I keep trying to embed a small way to edit the site in the site itself, but people just keep tearing it down, so I've given up.

If you break it, please send a prompt to fix it.
by doublerabbit | 2026-01-04 17:55:30+00:00
Mood. As someone who normally leaves after two years because the opportunity never raises to what was offered in the job spec these really don't for for me these bullet points as well wouldn't work for office culture in the EU.

15 Years worth of jobs and none gel. I'm a contractor now which feels more me. I have a contract length, don't have to deal with red tape political bullshit.

Turn up, do work and leave when contract had ended.
by zahlman | 2026-01-04 17:55:39+00:00
> (But no, while I did have vocal tics I did not "have coprolalia". Only around 10% of Tourettes "sufferers" swear compulsively, not that you'd think so based on the way it's portrayed in the media.)

I think this is largely streetlight effect (availability bias) rather than media bias. Of course other sorts of tics are less noticeable, and not readily thought of by laypeople as belonging in the same category.

But yes, I broadly agree with what you're saying here. (I feel much the same about gender identity issues, too.)
by bitwize | 2026-01-04 17:56:06+00:00
I'd like to think orthopedists would rather be overjoyed at this. My wife had her knee and hip done by a cracking orthopedist, and his primary concern was her quality of life. He even went to the state physicians' board to argue that her hip surgery should be considered necessary rather than elective for purposes of COVID restrictions, so that we could get it done months before it was originally scheduled.
by dahart | 2026-01-04 17:56:33+00:00
I wonder if Ray Kurzweil was inspired by this story, or if there was some other futurist who inspired them both. I had a sort of déjà vu reading this, having been at Kurzweil’s Siggraph keynote in 2000. He was predicting this very scenario - the singularity would bring nanobots that make humans immortal. His talk made an impression on my young mind. It wasn’t until later that I realized Kurzweil was just peddling the fountain of youth, and was somewhat unscrupulous about it…

He has been pitching the idea that human longevity is accelerating. For example, scroll to the very bottom of this essay and check out the plot: https://www.writingsbyraykurzweil.com/the-law-of-acceleratin...

Looks plausible for a minute, but when you start to think about it, you realize he has conflated longevity with average lifespan, and that it cannot possibly be a mistake, he’s not that ignorant or careless. The plot is missing data points that were easily available when it was made, data points that would completely contradict the trend line he put in the graph. Turns out human longevity hasn’t really budged for ten thousand years, but average lifespan has changed a lot, due to infant mortality and sanitation and vaccines and lower infant mortality and less war and more science.

I think a lot of the graphics in that article are equally sketchy when you look a little closer, and a lot of his predictions in 2000 are orders of magnitude off, so I have no trust in anything Kurzweil writes or predicts. But given the state of the earth today, maybe it’s a good thing that significant longevity or immortality isn’t just around the corner? It’s a fun thought experiment and a nice story though.
by seabrookmx | 2026-01-04 17:56:39+00:00
I think it really depends on your age and underlying cause.

Everyone with it I've ever talked to said staying moving is important: "motion is lotion."

My elderly family use lots of anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDS) and one of them is on Prednisone.

Two of my friends with rheumatoid arthritis (only in their 30's) are on an injectable immunotherapies (DMARDs) that have been life changing for them.

Disclaimer: not a doctor, just have lots of sore friends/family and an interest in this stuff since I have a torn ACL and fear the future.
by orbital-decay | 2026-01-04 17:56:45+00:00
>What a lot of people actually want from an LLM, is for the LLM to have an opinion about the question being asked.

That's exactly what they give you. Some opinions are from the devs, as post-training is a very controlled process and basically involves injecting carefully measured opinions into the model. Some are what the model randomly collapsed into during the post-training. (see e.g. R1-Zero)

>they seem to be capable of dealing with nuance and gray areas, providing insight, and using logic to reach a conclusion from ambiguous data.

Logic and nuance are orthogonal to opinions. Opinion is a concrete preference in an ambiguous situation with multiple possible outcomes.

>without any consistency around what that opinion is, because it is simply a manifestation of sampling a probability distribution, not the result of logic.

Not really, all post-trained models are mode-collapsed in practice. Try instructing any model to name a random color a hundred times and you'll be surprised that it consistently chooses 2-3 colors, despite technically using random sampling. That's opinion. That's also the reason why LLMs suck at creative writing, they lack conceptual and grammatical variety - you always get more or less the same output for the same input.

You might be thinking about base models, they actually do follow their training distribution and they're really random and inconsistent, ambiguous completions are really different. Although what is considered a base model is not always clear with recent training strategies.

And yes, LLMs are capable of using logic, of course.

>And what most people call sycophancy is that, as a result of this statistical construction, the LLM tends to reinforce the opinions, biases, or even factual errors, that it picks up on in the prompt or conversation history.

That's not a result of their statistical nature, it's a complex mixture of training, insufficient nuance, and poorly researched phenomena such as in-context learning. For example GPT-5.0 has a very different bias purposefully trained in, it tends to always contradict and disagree with the user. This doesn't make it right though, it will happily give you contradictory but wrong answers.

LLMs need better training, mostly.
by kentonv | 2026-01-04 17:56:53+00:00
> There is a big "WARNING: This is a beta. Work in progress"

Ughhhh that is because nobody ever looks at the readme so it hasn't been updated basically since workerd was originally released. Sorry. I should really fix that.

> Specifically, half of the services operate locally, and the other half require CF services.

workerd itself is a runtime for Workers and Durable Objects, but is not intended to provide implementations of other services like KV, D1, etc. Wrangler / miniflare provides implementations of most of these for local testing purposes, but these aren't really meant for production.

But workers + DO alone is enough to do a whole lot of things...
by estimator7292 | 2026-01-04 17:57:13+00:00
Your last point tells me that you haven't experienced hyperfocus. The fact that you ascribe consequences to the act of prolonged focus means you don't experience the ADHD type of hyperfocus.

Because man, consequences do not connect that way. When I hyperfocus for hours, the primary emotion is satisfaction. We fixate due to a malfunction in reward centers, which happens to override negative consequences for long enough that your stiff back is no longer correlated at all to the fact that you've sat motionless over a keyboard for hours.

Even raising the question of avoiding hyperfocus excludes you. Hyperfocus is generally not something that can be avoided or controlled. The chemical gradients hit a tipping point and you're committed whether you want to or not-- and without your awareness or consent.

You appear to be suffering from bad work ethic/balance, not ADHD. Because this is not in any way how an ADHD person experiences hyperfocus. It's not a choice or a consideration, it is an event that happens without your input or control.
by buzer | 2026-01-04 17:57:17+00:00
> Also /bin vs /sbin believe is that the latter is meant for statically linked binaries such that if your system is corrupted these at least will keep working.

My understanding is that sbin for system binaries, not necessarily statically linked. Normally /sbin is only in root's PATH, not normal user's. They are likely world executable, but in many cases you cannot actually run them as non-root since they usually touch things only root can access without special access (e.g. raw devices, privileged syscalls, /etc/shadow etc.). Not always though, like you can run /sbin/ifconfig as normal user in read-only mode.
by CableNinja | 2026-01-04 17:57:25+00:00
Took a quick glance through the code, its a pretty decent basic go at it.

i can see a few reasons for slowness - you arent using multiprocessing or threading, you might have to rework your rendering for it though. You will need to have the renderer running in a loop, re-rendering when the stack changes, and the multiprocessing/thread loop adjusting the stack as their requests finish.

Second, id recommend taking a look at existing python dom processing modules, this will allow you to use existing code and extend it to fit with your browser, you wont have to deal with finding all the ridiculous parsing edgecases. This may also speed things up a bit.

Id also recommend trying to render broken sites (save a copy, break it, see what your browser does), for the sake of completion
by borjas | 2026-01-04 17:58:31+00:00
Location: Spain

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Java, SQL, AWS, Spring Boot, Micronaut, Vert.x,
Kafka, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, REST, gRPC...

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/borjas-prodolliet/

Email: borjas.prodolliet@gmail.com

I am a product-oriented backend engineer with more than 7 years of experience working in technologies like Java, Spring, Micronaut, Kafka, SQL, AWS, Kubernetes, and other infrastructure tools, applied in SaaS, E-commerce, Logistics & Operations industries.

I’m interested in FinTech, SaaS, E-commerce, and Logistics, while remaining open to other industries.
by NobodyNada | 2026-01-04 17:59:51+00:00
> When a question gets closed before an answer comes in, the OP has nine days to fix it before it gets deleted automatically by the system.

One of the bigger problems with the site's moderation systems was that 1) this system was incredibly opaque and unintuitive to new users, and 2) the reopen queue was almost useless, leading to a very small percentage of closed questions ever getting reopened.

There were many plans and proposals to overhaul this system -- better "on hold" UI that would walk users through the process of revising their question, and a revamp of the review queues aimed at making them effective at pushing content towards reopening. These efforts got as far as the "triage" queue, which did little to help new users without the several other review queues that were planned to be downstream of it but scrapped as SE abruptly stopped working on improvements to the site.

Management should have been aggressively chasing metrics like "percentage of closed questions that get reopened" and "number of new users whose first question is well-received". But it wasn't a priority for them, and the outcome is unsurprising.
by defanor | 2026-01-04 18:01:07+00:00
I have no issues with it, and actually happy to see alternative implementations. Possibly because I did not use it much, but it does look fine to me. Not as a complete GPG replacement yet, since some software still depends on GPG, but a viable one, and a suitable one for most of the manual CLI usage (ignoring that its version on slightly older systems has a different interface, adding a bit of confusion; hopefully it is stable now). It was not listed among suggested alternatives in the linked article though, and from what I gather, the author would not be happy with it, either.
by mexicocitinluez | 2026-01-04 18:01:14+00:00
Totally disagree about "On the Road".

They don't chase money, success, or glamour. In fact, they're chasing the complete opposite of what Gatsby was chasing: spirituality. Their relationships are honest. They have no desire for money to influence.

In fact, on most spectrums, American Pyscho and On the Road are on totally opposite ends.

Sure, they share some themes like disillusionment and emptiness, but their core messages couldn't be farther apart.
by card_zero | 2026-01-04 18:01:31+00:00
The file extension wouldn't have been .swf until after being bought out and renamed (to ShockWave Flash). It was originally ...

https://archive.org/details/MacAddict-004-199612/page/n77/mo...

.spl, there you go. For "SPLash", I guess, or "Splash PLayer".
by estimator7292 | 2026-01-04 18:01:59+00:00
Yeah, most of the time when I want an opinion, the implicit real question is "what sentiment does the training set show towards this idea"

But then again I've seen how the sausage is made and understand the machine I'm asking. It, however, thinks I'm a child incapable of thoughtful questions and gives me a gold star for asking anything in the first place.
by eesmith | 2026-01-04 18:02:38+00:00
There are two large pharmaceutical companies named Merck, because of WWI. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merck_%26_Co.

> In 1887 a German-born, long-time Merck employee, Theodore Weicker, went to the United States to represent Merck Group.[8] In 1891, with $200,000 received from E. Merck, Weicker started Merck & Co., with headquarters in lower Manhattan. ...

> After the U.S. entered World War I, due to its German connections, Merck & Co. was the subject of expropriation under the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917.[10] The government seized 80 percent of the shares owned by the German parent company and sold it. ... Merck & Co. holds the trademark rights to the "Merck" name in the United States and Canada, while its former parent company retains the rights in the rest of the world; the right to use the Merck name was the subject of litigation between the two companies in 2016.
by Timon3 | 2026-01-04 18:02:58+00:00
Interesting. If I only look at the lines you quoted I can see how you arrive at your interpretation of those two quotes. But if I read them in the industry context, they are a concise response against common arguments for microservices. I'll explain the line of argumentation as I understand it.

- We know that full rewrites are expensive & can kill growing companies, so it's best to start with an architecture that you can keep as you scale

- Common argument for microservices: They scale best, look at Netflix etc.

- Counter argument 1: Netflix has a large team, and microservices add fixed complexity that can kill small teams

- Counter argument 2: Monoliths can also scale (see examples)

That was my initial understanding as someone who has had these discussions before. I don't think I'm adding any arguments, my first point is pretty much universally accepted and known. The author is just assuming a certain level of industry knowledge.
by Scubabear68 | 2026-01-04 18:03:23+00:00
> 1. The best engineers are obsessed with solving user problems.

The author lost me right here.

Not because he’s wrong about this in general - he is not. But it seems to not be any kind of differentiator at Google. Maybe the opposite is true- make it as screwed up as physically possible, then make it a little worse, then release it - that seems a lot closer to the lesson Google engineers learn. As long as you are “first” and shipped it.

Then get promoted, move on and meanwhile your crap code eventually gets the axe a decade later.
by afrazullal | 2026-01-04 18:03:47+00:00
I started out deep in data work—dashboards, analysis, metrics.

At some point, I realized I was more interested in building systems than reporting on them, so I switched gears and started building a SaaS publicly.

Instead of polished launch threads, I’m sharing:

what I’m shipping

what breaks

how distribution actually works

what compounds vs what doesn’t

No courses, no “growth hacks,” just execution notes and real experiments as they happen.

If you’re interested in SaaS, AI tooling, or building with constraints, this is where I’m documenting it:
https://x.com/MM_AFRAZ

Sharing here in case others are taking a similar path or considering building in public more honestly.
by hobofan | 2026-01-04 18:03:59+00:00
I'm not really into malware, so I was just wondering:

- Isn't this really non-viable in practice? The "few headers" that were shown include an Authorization header, that would presumable rotate every ~24 hours and would have to rotate for all the malware clients as well.

- Are centralized Command and Control Severs still a thing in the malware space? I would have assumed that this function mainly migrated onto one of the popular blockchains with clients using one of thousands of available gateways for reading.