MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Symbiote | 2026-01-20 09:21:56+00:00
If the somehow-trendy wood-burning stove a friend has recently had installed in the UK is anything to go by — and it was expensive — then "pretty clean" is relative. The air stinks outside his house, and the air stinks inside his house. I don't understand the appeal at all.

I was shocked on a recent trip to England where there was the smell of wood smoke in suburbia.
by praptak | 2026-01-20 09:21:59+00:00
There's an interesting coping mechanism (verging on the conspiracy theory) popular on some Polish forums, namely that the abysmal data comes from abundance of sensors combined with them being placed (by whom and why? here's where the conspiracy part kicks in) in the most polluted spots.

Here's a debunk by a popular Polish fact checking portal (in Polish): https://demagog.org.pl/analizy_i_raporty/smog-nie-taki-zly-j...
by jeroenhd | 2026-01-20 09:22:00+00:00
People probably ran into this all the time, but no single party large enough to have it gain attention produced the failure state.

If a small business or cloud app can't resolve a domain because the domain is doing something different, it's much easier to blame DNS, use another DNS server, and move on. Or maybe just go "some Linuxes can't reach my website, oh well, sucks for the 1-3%".

Cloudflare is large enough that they caused issues for millions of devices all at once, so they had to investigate.

What's unclear to me is if they bothered to send patches to broken open-source DNS resolvers to fix this issue in the future.
by Waffle2180 | 2026-01-20 09:22:35+00:00
I’m not a full-time COBOL dev, but I’ve worked adjacent to mainframe systems
(bank integrations, legacy batch jobs, and data pipelines).

From what I’ve seen, LLMs aren’t really a threat to COBOL roles right now.
They can help explain unfamiliar code, summarize programs, or assist with
documentation, but they struggle with the things that actually matter most:
institution-specific conventions, decades of undocumented business logic,
and the operational context around jobs, datasets, and JCL.

In practice, the hardest part isn’t writing COBOL syntax, it’s understanding
why a program exists, what assumptions it encodes, and what will break if
you change it. That knowledge tends to live in people, not in code comments.

So AI feels more like a force multiplier for experienced engineers rather
than a replacement. If anything, it might reduce the barrier for newer
engineers to approach these systems, which could be a net positive given
how thin the talent pool already is.
by Yemoshino | 2026-01-20 09:22:43+00:00
Its not plateuing at all. And the next things are already in the working like world models.

All this compute can also be used for other neural networks like finding new materials or drugs etc.

But what i meant was, that the outcry against AI is so much louder than bitcoin. The argument was brought up for sure but it was ignored plenty. No one forbid a company to restart a gas power plant in NYC to JUST burn it for bitcoin.
by qsort | 2026-01-20 09:23:50+00:00
> Closed-book exams, no note sheets, all handwritten. Add a verbal examination

You are describing how school worked for me (in Italy, but much of Europe is the same I think?) from middle school through university. The idea of graded homework has always struck me as incredibly weird.

> In the age of the LLM, I suspect this is triply true.

They do change what is worth learning though? I completely agree that "oh no the grades" is a ridiculous reaction, but adapting curricula is not an insane idea.
by vidarh | 2026-01-20 09:23:57+00:00
Yeah, I've had Claude work on my buggy, incomplete Ruby compiler written (mostly) in Ruby, which uses an s-expression like syntax with a custom "mini language" to implement low-level features that can't be done (or is impractical to do) in pure Ruby, and it only had minor problems with the s-expression language that was mostly fixed with a handful of lines in CLAUDE.md (and were, frankly, mostly my fault for making the language itself somewhat inconsistent) and e.g. when it write a bigint implementation, I had to "tell it off" for too readily resorting to the s-expression syntax since it seemed to "prefer it" over writing high-level code in Ruby.
by treetalker | 2026-01-20 09:25:00+00:00
I analogize him to a wildfire: a statistical inevitability, tragic, causing broad and profound destruction and suffering, difficult to control after blazing up, will eventually run out of fuel, will eventually be a source of renewal.

What we need to be talking about are the additional amendments to the Constitution that are clearly necessary to ameliorate the current mess (e.g., fixing current Congress, fixing current Judiciary, electoral college, two-party system, Executive's ability to act without first getting permission, self-dealing, cancerous growth of federal over state power, etc.), and how to get them passed. I have a feeling that either we amend or the country fails and/or we end up in a second civil war.

Also, "Goddam, Cartman, that is one fat a$$!"
by Waffle2180 | 2026-01-20 09:25:15+00:00
I’ve noticed something similar, though I don’t think it’s literally “time of day”
so much as changing system conditions.

My working theory is that under higher load, the model is more likely to:
- take broader interpretive leaps
- attempt larger refactors instead of minimal diffs
- “explain its way forward” after a wrong turn rather than reset cleanly

That shows up as rabbit holes and self-reinforcing iterations, especially on
codebases where local consistency matters more than global cleverness.

What’s helped a bit for me:
- explicitly asking for minimal, localized changes
- telling it not to refactor unless necessary
- breaking requests into smaller steps and locking earlier decisions

It could also be variance from routing, context window pressure, or subtle
prompt drift rather than a predictable nightly degradation, but the pattern
of “overconfident refactor spirals” feels real.

A like-for-like experiment with the same prompt and context at different times
would be interesting, though hard to fully control.
by gadders | 2026-01-20 09:25:45+00:00
I'll do the googling for you though:

Demographics of Aston Ward (Local Area)

Asian/Asian British: A very large majority, with some reports showing over 70%, including a significant Pakistani community (around 38% of the total population).

Black/African/Caribbean: The second-largest group, making up about 26%.
White British: Around 18%.

Foreign-Born: Over 44% of the population was born outside the UK.

Religion: Islam is the most prominent religion (around 54%), followed by Christianity (26%).
by Waffle2180 | 2026-01-20 09:26:13+00:00
I’ve seen LLMs make money most reliably when they’re embedded into an existing
workflow rather than sold as “AI” itself.

One example: a small team built an internal tool for SEO/content teams that
generates structured content briefs and refresh plans from search data.
The value wasn’t faster writing, but fewer failed pages. Clients were willing
to pay because it reduced wasted content spend and made outcomes more
predictable. It ended up as a SaaS with recurring subscriptions rather than
a usage-based novelty.

Another case was customer support tooling for a B2B product. LLMs were used to
summarize long ticket histories, surface likely causes, and draft replies,
but humans stayed in the loop. The business impact showed up as lower support
headcount growth while revenue increased, which leadership cared about more
than raw “productivity.”

Across cases, the pattern seems to be:
- tie the model to a clear economic decision
- charge for risk reduction or revenue lift, not for text generation
- keep humans in the loop where mistakes are costly

Pure “LLM apps” struggled more unless they were tightly scoped or had strong
distribution already.
by snickerer | 2026-01-20 09:26:32+00:00
Reticulum is a full network stack with full user anonymity.
You can integrate it in every app that needs P2P network connections and that can live with a slow connection.
Reticulum is an alternative to TCP/IP and UDP/IP, using a mesh.

Meshtastic and Meshcore are mesh messengers, focusing on mesh text messages.
by taneliv | 2026-01-20 09:26:42+00:00
Oh, I see. I'm in a similar position, but would rather not see things escalate at all. Even so, it is difficult to see how the relations between Europe and the US would return to what they have been for a long time. But a real conflict would be an entirely different scenario, with very unpredictable, yet possibly world changing consequences.

We know that appeasement has never worked. Hence we must be prepared. But to wish for this sort of escalation is a step too much for me. I hope that people in positions of power have cool heads. But also that they remember history.

(I see I was downvoted quite a bit, not sure why, though.)
by rfarley04 | 2026-01-20 09:26:46+00:00
I live in Bangkok and we also get inversions during the "cold" (for Thailand haha) season, the same time that farms slash and burn, making this the worst time of year for our air quality as well.

It's much better this year but incredibly hard to police since officials often don't have jurisdiction where the pm2.5 originated, before getting trapped in the inversion
by azalemeth | 2026-01-20 09:26:48+00:00
My understanding is that (1) there is, as you say, a very nonzero risk of landing in a field and good visibility of what is _in_ that field is critical; (2) when riding thermals it is traditionally the case that many gliders soar in close proximity close to the core rising air mass, circling at quite a high bank angle – and collisions need to be avoided (many glider pilots wear parachutes for that reason…) and having visual references, particularly to mountains, really helps; and finally (3) it is common to be flying visually as one typically staircases in an altitude profile, as seen here, and go in and out of controlled airsapce (or deliberately avoid bumping into it, as I have done at 10 kft in UK airspace a long time ago).

In contrast, general aviation aircraft:

a) Have bright lights
b) Will fly in a straight line at a well defined altitude, meaning that vertical separation is sufficient to deconflict aircraft
c) Do not typically land in fields and do instead land on runways which often _also_ have bright lights.
by speeder | 2026-01-20 09:27:06+00:00
I am in Portugal right now. You know something we don’t have often here? Garages.

For example in my neighborhood most cars are parallel parked, people are living in centuries old houses converted into high density condos, there are no garages.

So what is more practical, charging your car overnight without an electric plug or going to the gas station for a few minutes?
by metalman | 2026-01-20 09:27:32+00:00
Most of the world is now operating in a legal no mans land where basic human rights are bieng violated on an industrial scale by
an unholy private alliance of beurocrats , billionares, and tech companys.
The casual ending of the right to private comunications that has been central to successfull civilisation for millenia, is at the core of the unfolding situation.
Add in the impossibility of verifying what comunications are legitimate ,local to an indivual and based on verifiable facts has pushed, countrys, most recently Iran, to cut themselves off from the internet.
As to implimentable solutions, there are technical changes to hardware and software that would establish a fully distributed internet with allocated space for everyone by law, with "platforms" bieng trimmed back into take it or leave it entertainment
channels that can never access personal information.
Personaly I am abandoning online services
unless there is income bieng generated directly from then.To make the point, yesterday I cancelled and deleeted my online bank account, with my hinky cheap phone and off brand browser it became untenable , not counting the online banking "service" bieng
massivly tilted towards selling things under cutsey labels.
I will go back in and remove most of my "payees" as I will no longer let the bank have access to a full picture of my financial activities, and I have done the same with Government and do ALL my interactions with them, in person.
No more figuring out where things are burried on sites, or the slow creap of adds,
updates and verifications.
What it boils down to is that I very strongly believe that civilisation can not be run by an alogorythm no matter how baddly beurocrats and people in power want it, and that the current situation is created by blaming people for that failure, which is of course continiously imenent, staid off by ever greater technical efforts and violations of citizens rights.
by keepamovin | 2026-01-20 09:27:52+00:00
Your hypothetical misses praxis: in my experience LLM can pick up any new syntax with ease. From a few examples, it can generate more. With a compiler (even partial on limited syntax), it can correct. It soon becomes fluent simply from the context of your codebase. You don't need to "train" an LLM to recognize language syntax. It's effortless for it to pick it up.

Or, maybe my lanng just had LLM-easy syntax - which would be good - but I think this is more just par for the course for LLMs, bud.
by JasonADrury | 2026-01-20 09:28:17+00:00
Even if you're correct that her being abused in her childhood is related to her choice of career, what do you think you're adding to the conversation by bringing that up?

What are you actually trying to do here besides shame her for having been abused as a child? That's really the only takeaway from your comment here, that people shouldn't read her writing about prostitution as a business because she was abused as a child. That seems particularly nasty on your part, even if unintentional.
by praptak | 2026-01-20 09:28:31+00:00
To be exact: the problem here is fossil fuel and wood being burned in inefficient furnaces/stoves/fireplaces where the fuel doesn't fully burn. There are efforts by the government to replace them but they aren't super effective yet (random example: https://um.warszawa.pl/kopciuchy).

For the industrial scale fossil fuel furnaces this problem is solved already (they are obviously still bad because of their huge CO2 emissions but that's a different problem).
by mrmlz | 2026-01-20 09:29:07+00:00
Poorly dried wood?

We just installed a second woodburningstove in our house, https://www.contura.eu/en-gb .. and i mean you can mess up your fire by burning wet wood etc. or... paper i dunno.

But dried wood burns really clean, absolutely no smell INSIDE the house (wtf?!) and outside you see a thin whisp of smoke from the chimney.
by jansan | 2026-01-20 09:29:18+00:00
It will depend on the student's mindset. A lazy student will use LLMs as a shortcut to generate presentations, solve homework, etc.. On the other hand, an eager student will have a much shorter feedback loop to cross check results of calculations, review code assignments, get ideas if stuck, etc.. You will have students who will dumb down, and others who will thrive and achieve things they would have never been able to do without LLMs.
by Traster | 2026-01-20 09:29:21+00:00
I'm kind of surprised the article doesn't spell out why these are "prediction markets". They're prediction markets because it used to be that what they were doing was illegal. It was illegal to just set up a gambling website in the US and so these "prediction markets" were the same thing as crypto, masking what was really happening behind some tech speak. In the same way that in the crypto market you regularly get behaviour that would get you locked up if it were to occur on the CME, what happens on these prediction markets would be illegal if you were just a betting company.

The reason they're getting big now though, is because we know none of those regulations are going to be enforced. So through regulartory arbitrage, these gambling sites are just going to eat the entire regulated industry until nothing is left.

It used to be Harry Enten's former boss would joke about Scottish teens, when talking about betting markets because frankly, the betting markets didn't seem predictive and were so niche, it seemed like the people on them were generally just betting with no idea what they were betting on.

But today, let's face it, soon we're going to see a contract on whether the S&P goes up or down tomorrow, and when you have that contract, gamblers are going to be betting on it instead of going to Robinhood and buying some Puts.

It's a real test to see if what all those people who talk about the halo effect of trusted well regulated markets are actually correct. The conventional wisdom is that most of the users of these sites are going to get their faces ripped off, and the companies will get very rich doing that.
by BSDobelix | 2026-01-20 09:29:24+00:00
>It isn't suited for real-time chat (nevermind secure)

It is encrypted on private channels and direct messages.

>and so I think you can't really make it work while respecting transmission regulations.

I don't know from where your information's are from, but for sure not from reality. Voice encryption/scramble on Amateur-Band's is not allowed, everything else is ok.
by rcMgD2BwE72F | 2026-01-20 09:30:12+00:00
How many miles of long trips? A quick search gives me half of them are long distance (50+ miles).

Since the short trips can all be done very efficiently on battery (recovering all the braking, too), I guess the weight isn't much of an issue for commuting if you can have the rest -half of the total driven miles- on EV with a full battery vehicle.

I wish I could find numbers on eCO2/miles for the short vs long trips.
by botacode | 2026-01-20 09:30:20+00:00
I am broadly in favor of the existence of prediction markets. They are powerful tools for forecasting complex events that can help enrich and empower folks from across a range of backgrounds.

The article has two core points, but fails to go deep enough in addressing either. This leads to a _somewhat_ incorrect scapegoating of prediction markets rather than acknowledging head on some more core issues with the state of American journalism. Bullet (1) addresses this core issue while bullet (2) tries to suggest some ways in which these prediction markets can better harnessed to serve the interests of journalists and readers/viewers. IMO the first point is far more important than the second to understand the broader challenges.

1. The centralization and roll-up of American media has led to a dangerous monoculture where truth and accuracy risk being compromised by pressure from big business as well as politicians.

This is by design. It is important for folks to recognize that these are systematic efforts to denigrate and marginalize critical/skeptical voices by individuals with tremendous amounts of wealth and power. A prime non-journalism example of this is the persecution and harassment of short sellers (like Andrew Left) in public markets.

2. Prediction markets are not being described / addressed with sufficient uncertainty. The article touches on this, but fails to go so far as to suggest a fix. Prediction markets should, as the editors/implementers at orgs in the article suggest they do, serve as another data point rather than the whole story.

They should be addressed with the skepticism applied to any source (a lot of "journalists" don't even do this anymore though) with the source, values and market depth questioned.

Editorial standards need to be improved to accommodate this (don't report on very thin markets, acknowledge high amounts of uncertainty, signs of manipulation, and provide a bit of market structure analysis education to readers. All of this is more feasible than ever with good analysis tooling that can be re-appropriated from what professional market analysts (and gamblers) use to assess their odds.

If journalists want to add market information to their reporting then great, just do it responsibly instead of yeeting some number from strangers on the internet.

--

Fight back by voting with your dollars and speak up in favor of the truth. Boycott garbage sources and platforms that are trying to one-shot your friends/parents and support strong investigative and local journalism with your money. Talk to your friends and family and encourage them to do the same. Voting with your dollars and presence is one of the most powerful tools you have in our heavily market based society.
by piokoch | 2026-01-20 09:30:42+00:00
Funnily enough, Kraków region has the longest live expectancy in Poland (see https://stat.gov.pl/en/topics/population/life-expectancy/lif...).

Which is interesting, as either air quality does not matter that much or those data are just bogus.

Well, air quality matters probably, so we are left with the data. Let's check what is the origin of this information: https://www.iqair.com/poland/lesser-poland-voivodeship/krako...

6 stations. One from "corporate contributor" named Arek (common Polish first name, short from Arkadiusz so does not look like a big corp) plus 5 other individual contributors.

What equipment those 6 stations have? No idea. Are the instruments calibrated properly? No idea. Are they placed in the right spot, not on the balcony near the chimney? No idea. Are they placed evenly across Krakow to give reliable city-wide data? Looking on the provided locations - not really.

Iqair seems to "crowdsource" their measurements so they get "crowdsourced" data, which can be total crap. Do they even verify those data? How? No idea.
by Sam6late | 2026-01-20 09:31:44+00:00
Which professions are similar on mileage here? I think Chappelle was spot on, when he used the book ‘The Story of My Life by Iceberg Slim’ to confront the entertainment industry highlighting a concept from the book regarding "mileage on a hoe" (prostitute). He explains that a pimp understands there is a finite amount of "bad things" or work a person can endure before they "lose it" or break down.
by nusl | 2026-01-20 09:31:55+00:00
I've seen a lot of weird stuff out of this. People now get angry about things they didn't get angry about before, or get angry with people/players where that didn't exist before.

If you're just someone playing a game of Chess, and someone decides to bet on you via some platform, and then you lose, you now face the fury of random strangers where none existed before.

This applies to all sorts of things. I've seen live streamers get bad treatment because people bet on some outcome on their streams, like innocent Track of the Day races in Trackmania; not even a commercial event.

This sort of thing will suck the fun out of literally everything, and then replace that fun with stress/anxiety/anger/frustration when outcomes aren't met, and when they are met, dangerous monetary/emotional/brain-chemical feedback.

Even disregarding the dangers of gaming the system with insider trading or other fraud, the way that everything is increasingly having a monetary value attached to it is destroying that thing just being itself.

I really, really hate how money corrupts literally everything. In part I think the current financial fuck-ups causing living expenses to be unsustainable leads many to find other ways to make some money, but people have always done this even when times were better. So I guess it's somehow human nature combined with greed and opportunity.

Other things like Pokemon cards are also increasingly about money and not at all about Pokemon itself anymore. People buy packs of cards, look for the high-value ones, then throw the rest out. It's fucked.

I don't really know where this is going but the Cyberpunk 2077 feels like a good predictor. Literal corpo hellscape, and much of it is self-induced by grubbing for the next buck at every innocent opportunity.

Similar to the VC/investment landscape. Take a good product/company, add some VC/investment, and now the incentives are aimed at satisfying shareholders over providing value to customers.