MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by burnt-resistor | 2026-01-23 09:26:51+00:00
The threat of The Donald attacking Greenland has not yet passed.

If it happens, the economic fallout will be massive.. like 20-25% of GDP erased.

The activation of the 11th Airborne, as Malcom Nance indicated, is far too specialized for offensive Arctic warfare rather than domestic crowd control.

The activation may well be a negotiation bluff, but this new "concept of a framework" may also be a geopolitical feint to cover military operations. Such a military incursion itself would likely fail worse than The Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, and Afghanistan combined. "Why is this?" you ask? Because Greenlanders are well-armed and practiced with tens of thousands of what are effectively sniper rifles. Facebook Marketplace has listed suppressed rifles with optics for the equivalent of $700 USD. The weather is extremely bad, there aren't many useable runways or deep water ports near Nuuk, there are no highways, and NATO already sent more reinforcements. And the US military has exactly one icebreaker. Doing so would ruin NATO, the US economy, and US relations with almost every country.
by hvb2 | 2026-01-23 09:26:55+00:00
> Retailers(in the US) typically eat the cost

This is what I really have a problem with. It feels so incomprehensible to me that, assuming you're an adult, you can think this.

It's just a cost, if that cost didn't exist then either the price would be lower or the margin would be higher. In the end you're paying for it. You're the one exchanging money for a good/service.

This is proven by your other comment about how some sectors give you the option. I would rather have that option because those legal protections are useless for the majority of purchases. Good luck disputing that burrito you bought or those groceries. In such transactions you're basically just inviting a company to take a cut for 0 added benefit (aside from points).
by watwut | 2026-01-23 09:27:28+00:00
> It turns out there is a lot of fraud and to such an extent that it essentially makes the anti-immigrant sentiment look justified.

Does it? How exactly so? They have a case of fraud that was literally prosecuted by Biden administration. They do not have "more fraud by immigrants then natural born Americans" situation going it.

What do they have is "the most corrupt administration in history by white people" situation going on.
by redbell | 2026-01-23 09:27:33+00:00
Here we are! Day after day, I realize that even smaller tech companies suffer from or could not resist the temptation of Enshittification[1] once they start gaining some momentum. I feel this path had became inevitable since everybody is doing this, at scale. I barely could recall some names that stuck to their original motto over time.

____________________

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
by bitwize | 2026-01-23 09:28:31+00:00
The primordial form of American Protestantism is Calvinism. A bit hard to get more fatalistic than that. Calvinists see work as a duty before God, not something you engage in for benefits in this life or even the next—God's elect have already been chosen, arbitrarily, to receive mercy and salvation, and nothing you do or don't do can change this selection. They also favor frugality. Hard work and frugality can lead to abundance, and it was only after generations of applying this ethic that the kernel of the "American dream"—that with perseverance one can achieve success—began to take shape.
by lelanthran | 2026-01-23 09:29:17+00:00
> I think people will start valuing good software a lot more.

How will people determine what is good software and what is not? Even experienced engineers can't tell just by looking at the final product.

Some of the most solid rock-solid applications I see were built years ago and still look primitive (native Windows 7 controls, etc). Many of the worst, bug-infested anti-user software looks slick and modern.

> Claude code can deliver the first 90%, but we all know it is the last 90% that differentiates.

My experience with trying to complete that last 10% of a CC generated project is that it's all very alien looking; very uncanny-valley vibes, and I have serious velocity issues because of the lack of coherence.
Show HN: Thalo – A "programming" language for structured knowledge
by WilcoKruijer | 2026-01-23 09:29:42+00:00
Hi HN, I've been building Thalo, a plain-text format for structured knowledge. It's designed to be human-readable and version-controlled, while giving tools and AI just enough structure to work with it. It's inspired by plain-text accounting tools such as Beancount.

The format is simple: you define your entities (e.g. opinions, book reviews, facts) including type definitions for metadata fields. Then you write entries that the CLI validates against your schema. The value is the feedback loop: LLMs can easily extract information from unstructured text, but they need validation to make the data high quality. Thalo's "compiler" provides these rules.

Example:

2026-01-08T14:30Z create book-review "Designing Data-Intensive Applications" ^ddia #book
rating: "5"
author: "Martin Kleppmann"

# Summary
The definitive guide to distributed systems and data architecture. Dense but essential.

(In this example, ^ddia is a stable link identifier that can be used to reference this entry)

It's really up to the user how to use it. Some ways I'm using it:

- End of day journaling: blurt out thoughts, let AI extract insights, facts.

- Organizing my knowledge: using previous "content" I've written (blog posts, websites, my CV) to extract insights.

- Processing commits I've made to keep a living record of my work.

Because it's all plain-text, it allows you to open your knowledge base in any text editor or in Claude Code to do agentic search and analysis. I hooked up a simple Telegram bot to answer questions.

The tooling includes a CLI for validation, an LSP with completions and go-to-definition, a VS Code extension, and a Prettier plugin. There's also a simple scripting API that allows you to loop over entries and use the visitor pattern to traverse your knowledge base or write new rules.

I'd love to hear what use cases people come up with. Let me know what you think!

- Code (MIT): https://github.com/rejot-dev/thalo

- Landing Page: https://thalo.rejot.dev
by jasomill | 2026-01-23 09:30:16+00:00
“For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.”
by pseudohadamard | 2026-01-23 09:30:17+00:00
It's not just the pointless chaff, the SSH protocol is inherently very chatty, and SFTP even more so. The solution, for a high-performance game, is don't use SSH. Either run it over Wireguard or grab some standard crypto library and encrypt the packets yourself. You'll probably make a few minor mistakes but unless the other player is the NSA it'll be good enough.

For that matter, why does it need to be encrypted at all? What's the threat model?

If there really is a genuine need to encrypt and low latency is critical, consider using a stream cipher mode like AES-CTR to pregenerate keystream at times when the CPU is lightly loaded. Then when you need to encrypt (say) 128 bytes you peel off that many bytes of keystream and encrypt at close to zero cost. Just remember to also MAC the encrypted data, since AES-CTR provides zero integrity protection.
by wooger | 2026-01-23 09:31:06+00:00
Owning a car and living somewhere you have to use it for day to day everything is tedious. But the option of one for the weekend, trips out of town, into nature is ultra valuable, enough so that it's worth it to have a car sitting doing nothing during the week for us, even in a well connected large city, in a walkable area.

At present or I suspect future costs, any kind of taxi for an out of town trip (without any rail option) of 50-100 miles is way too expensive to consider, we'd sooner hire a car, if it was slicker and more convenient. But hiring a car anywhere but an airport terminal needs a trip to the hire place, and needs to start and finish when they're open to avoid spending an extra day or two of hire. Plus time taken on paperwork and insurance faff could easily be an hour.
by Piraty | 2026-01-23 09:31:51+00:00
I was involved in a very similar situation once.
I recommend wireguard for this, it's mature for years, has superb support in linux and some BSDs and there are userspace implementations if you need that.
It wraps traffic in UDP, the overhead is much smaller thus throughput mich higher than traditional TCP-based VPN (you want to avoid tcp-in-tcp!).
There were once patches posted to lkml that passed QoS-flags from the inner packet to the wireguard packet, if you need that. not sure if that landed upstream in the end.
key distribution and lifecycle management is what was still unsolved years back when this was evaluated, nowadays tailscale and its clones and similar oss should serve you well.
by mrandish | 2026-01-23 09:31:52+00:00
There was also a beige version released later (http://www.mainbyte.com/ti99/computers/ti99beige.html). I have both variants in my collection and they're both attractive machines, especially by the standards of the early 80s. The best part of the design was that it had a decent keyboard (unlike its predecessor the TI-99/4, which is much more rare - and for good reason). It also was the first home computer to have hardware graphics support in the form of TI's home-grown TMS9918 VDP chip which outlived the computer it was made for by many years. It was used in dozens of different 8-bit computer models from manufacturers around the world and spawned several improved variants, including the graphics chip in the Sega Master System console!

Unfortunately, the 99/4a was brutally hobbled by some bizarre design choices that nerfed its performance including forcing the 16-bit CPU onto an 8-bit system bus which halted the CPU to spread each 16-bit read/write into two sequential operations. This was made worse by the fact the CPU used a memory-to-memory architecture (even for most of its own registers) and all the memory was behind that '8-bit wall' - except for 256 bytes of 'fast scratchpad' (aka just 'normal memory' on other 8-bits). Plus the GROM was on PROM chips that were even slower than RAM, introducing more latency.

The whole GROM thing could have been a nice idea if it weren't for the 8-bit bus and slow PROM chip speed. Unfortunately, TI execs were more interested in finding a home for excess PROM chip inventory than making their home computer the best it could be. So, it was hard to extract high-performance game graphics from the system, requiring significant ingenuity from developers.
by jasode | 2026-01-23 09:32:05+00:00
>I desperately wanted a C64 for Xmas but my Dad was somehow convinced to buy one of these.

I'm guessing it was because of the "home computer price wars" where TI-99/4A was aggressively priced much cheaper than Commodore, Atari, Coleco Adam, etc. In addition to the lowest in-store price, TI-99/4A also had rebates.

Texas Instruments was losing money on the TI-99 and they wanted to exit the home computer business. Retail stores were blowing them out at the lowest prices.
by qcnguy | 2026-01-23 09:32:09+00:00
Don't bother filing issues there. Their issue tracker is a galaxy-sized joke. They automatically close issues after 30 days of inactivity even if they weren't fixed, just to keep the issue count low.

The Reasonable Man might think that an AI company OF ALL COMPANIES would be able to use AI to triage bug tickets and reproduce them, but no! They expect humans to keep wasting their own time reproducing, pinging tickets and correcting Claude when it makes mistakes.

Random example: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/12358

First reply from Anthropic: "Found 3 possible duplicate issues: This issue will be automatically closed as a duplicate in 3 days."

User replies, two of the tickets are irrelevant, one didn't help.

Second reply: "This issue has been inactive for 30 days. If the issue is still occurring, please comment to let us know. Otherwise, this issue will be automatically closed in 30 days for housekeeping purposes."

Every ticket I ever filed was auto-closed for inactivity. Complete waste of time. I won't bother filing bugs again.
by hvb2 | 2026-01-23 09:33:02+00:00
Sat, past tense. Yes there's still quite a bit in there but the Netherlands is VERY densely populated. And public opinion has swayed towards letting it sit there.

The real reason it's off limits is simply because of externalities. The NAM just doesn't want to pony up the the money to pay for repairs of houses. It's rare for that to backfire like this in the fossil fuel industry.

Might not be a bad call to leave it. I'm sure we'll find a novel use for natural gas decades down the line which might be way more valuable than just burning it.
by th2o34i32p43k2j | 2026-01-23 09:33:34+00:00
Reminds me of the dream of the Lisp-o-sphere : where anything and everything (and its source) is at your fingertips and editable at your whim (this is what RMS wanted to do with GNU).

There's also a story about Emacs at Amazon, where secretaries would code up elaborate things to automate their stuff. It tells you how silly our world is : we're happy with shitty uninteractive systems, languages and OSs, only so that we can fix it with the next version of "genius" AI systems which can barely do anything more than remove pain of dealing with the insane bloat.
by dxdm | 2026-01-23 09:33:35+00:00
Just want to say thank you for being patient and rational. Reading your comments in this thread, they're like a soothing bandaid over all this flustered upset.

I wish there were more comments like yours, and fewer people getting upset over words and carrying what feels like resentment into public comments.

Apologies to all for this meta comment, but I'd like to send some public appreciation for this effort.
by moonshotideas | 2026-01-23 09:33:55+00:00
Same here, I created a prompt enhancer gpt and a prose enhancer gpt, and I tend to chain all my prompts through them, then I use an extension to remove markdown + replace Unicode, and then add tabs and proper formatting to product a final version of all my prompts. This tends to result in prompts that perform 20-25% better for all difficult or multi-part tasks.

Logically this makes sense, the probabilites for next tokens the model produces follows the pattern it observes from the initial input, if your prose reflects that which individuals with higher intelligence tend to use, the model will continue this high in response and vice versa

I’m curious to see what happens as the % of training input using synthetic data generated by models tips the scales so that markdown reflects higher intelligence inputs - I wonder when this will occur
by rurban | 2026-01-23 09:33:57+00:00
Wait, go back to the first sentence:

> I am working on a high-performance game that runs over ssh. The TUI for the game is created in bubbletea 1 and sent over ssh via wish.

> The game is played in an 80x60 window that I update 10 times a second. I’m targeting at least 2,000 concurrent players, which means updating ~100 million cells a second. I care about performance.

High performance with ssh and wish? For sure not. Rather use UDP over secure sockets. Or just normal sockets. Even Claude would come up with much faster code than the ssh/wish nonsense. Or mosh, but this also too complicated.
by pjmlp | 2026-01-23 09:34:37+00:00
> If you are a graphics engineer or a kernel engineer: you will (probably) not like macOS.

On the contrary, Metal is the most developer friendly of the modern 3D APIs, and macOS is the best desktop OS having graphical debugging tools in the box, with modern language tooling without the mindset only C and C++ are worthy to be used in graphics programming.
by imtringued | 2026-01-23 09:35:20+00:00
This is something people don't seem to understand when it comes to pairing up and forming families. If there is no reliable method to do so and you leave it up to chance, then what's gonna happen? Of course, people will stop forming families at the rate they used to.

In a society where people only have enough children to replace themselves, having people without children means that society will slowly fade away and disappear.

There are a bunch of modern ideologies that don't try to understand or even deny that having children is the most powerful kind of democracy in life. When you are having children, you're essentially saying "I want more people like myself in this world". Under this premise, the western world is saying "I don't want to be here anymore".
by defrost | 2026-01-23 09:35:38+00:00
They may well be using the term much as it has been used in Australia to refer to the visible public actions of the Trump Administration as a clown show.

By which we refer to the frequent mentions of Finland instead of Greenland, the Mixed and ALL CAPS rants on twitter, contradiction riddled statements, waffling, 10 years of Trump sounding very much like a drunken brother in law, etc.

We do concede it may well be part of some deeper multi dimensional chess strategy to confound, confuse, unbalance and grift and applaud such genius... but it does veer toward what one expects from a gerontocracy.
by jraph | 2026-01-23 09:35:59+00:00
> Both are evidence-backed simplifications

Which evidences do we have for this asker-guesser thing? Naive intuition doesn't count. That's not how robust knowledge works. There's a freaking meta analysis finding we don't have strong enough evidence. This is pseudo science. It could be discovered later that this stuff indeed works, but we don't know yet. It's a sexy topic, the lack of any convincing publication for all this time makes this pretty unlikely.

> Yes.

Ok, I'm done here.

If you don't see how an internet comment from a random person and a proper paper written by Newton (or even by a random scientist) are fundamentally different when it comes to robustness and reliability of the described knowledge, even accounting for all the flaws scientific publishing has, I don't see how this discussion can be productive any longer. This won't lead to anything interesting.

I think I've written everything I had to write on the topic, several times. I'll leave you with your pub / armchair science. You do you.
by rendaw | 2026-01-23 09:36:52+00:00
I definitely feel this. So many "I made an alternative to X that fixes these issues, or is better in these ways" met with "Well X is fine for me, and I don't need those things, so why change?" These posts are obviously meant for adventurers, people looking to improve on the status quo, have some experimental budget left, etc.

Reading the repo, I'm not sure what it offers. It's still CGO for Go (edit: it's not, it's purego, but can that be used for SQLite too?), Rust already has `rusqlite`. It's beta, so it doesn't have stability, and 99% of why I and many other people choose SQLite is stability.

But they bluntly say you should use it instead of SQLite: "The next evolution of SQLite" (trademark ok?). This not only implies that SQLite has some significant design issues that merit a new version, but it also implies that they, not the SQLite author, are the ones who are capable of doing this. My guess is this is what's rubbing so many people the wrong way.

It's not being sold on its merits, and I think if they're going to make that sort of statement it's fair to make the standard somewhat high. If it's an AI-oriented database, sell it that way, not as an SQLite replacement.

I don't think uv had a negative reaction, because it had a really compelling case.
by 01jonny01 | 2026-01-23 09:38:02+00:00
Google quietly announced that Programmable Search (ex-Custom Search) won’t allow new engines to “search the entire web” anymore. New engines are capped at searching up to 50 domains, and existing full-web engines have until Jan 1, 2027 to transition.

If you actually need whole-web search, Google now points you to an “interest form” for enterprise solutions (Vertex AI Search etc.), with no public pricing and no guarantee they’ll even reply.

This seems like it effectively ends the era of indie / niche search engines being able to build on Google’s index. Anything that looks like general web search is getting pushed behind enterprise gates.

I haven’t seen much discussion about this yet, but for anyone who built a small search product on Programmable Search, this feels like a pretty big shift.

Curious if others here are affected or already planning alternatives.
by cztomsik | 2026-01-23 09:38:43+00:00
And I thought that I'm the only one saying that. I bought my first mac just because of that, it was rock-solid, it was unix, and it came with ruby/python/xxx preinstalled so that I could just worry about doing the work.

But from (let's say) El Capitan, I am always postponing upgrades, and recently I've been only upgrading by buying a new machine every 2 ys (except this year, I had to upgrade because of Metal, but I'm still one version below, still scared to upgrade to Tahoe). Every new feature they add to their OS I'm just disabling, every time I upgrade. Either I am not their customer anymore, or they are more and more clueless.

And it's not that hard, I just want it to work so that I can focus on my own stuff.
by specproc | 2026-01-23 09:38:57+00:00
Their success is down to a bunch of factors: near monopoly position in their niche, total vertical integration, obsession with design and marketing, and I think crucially, having the kids who grew up playing coming into a high-spending age bracket.

That said, I think there's something to the comment. The vertical integration is key, IMO. They own the IP, manufacture and distribution. There's a lot of power in that business model: short supply chains, all profit kept in house, a lot less faffing around with third parties.

The have kept skills in house. Two of their great original designers have retired at the company in the last few years. I don't think that's been the one critical in their success, but they're well-respected figures who knew the business and were very much a part of building that fanatical brand loyalty. One of my gaming group occasionally plays with the great John Blanche.

And man, keeping manufacturing in the UK. As a Brit, despite my many misgivings about how they operate as a company, I gotta love that. Again, I don't know if it's they key factor here, but they've been doing this for decades, they're good at it, and that's got to help the bottom line.

Keeping things in the UK would have been a difficult decision to maintain, particularly as overseas manufacturing was taking off, but it's clearly paid off in the long run.
by lelanthran | 2026-01-23 09:39:39+00:00
> People in general would recoil in horror if they knew how many essential operations are backed by a mess of Excel sheets with formulas and VBA nobody understands anymore.

Yeah, but that mess is deterministic! With a little bit of rigour, someone with no experience of that specific mess but knowledge of excel from a previous employer will dive in, make a small change, see if the results are messed up, back it out, try again with a different change, and repeat until they get what they want.

Good luck asking an LLM to modify something made by a different LLM 5 years ago.
by bitwize | 2026-01-23 09:40:07+00:00
> Could "Mr. Bean" only be created by the Brits, or if not, where is his U.S.-American counterpart?

Pee-wee Herman, perhaps, at least in his original adult-comedy form?

Pee-wee was originally created because Paul Reubens couldn't do jokes in the traditional stand-up comedy sense. So he created a character who told jokes that always miss, but had the mentality of a child and thought his own material was hilarious.