MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fluoridation | 2026-01-16 13:42:12+00:00
No, that's an incorrect analogy. The script of a movie is an intermediate step in the production process of a movie. It's generally not meant to be seen by any audiences. The script for example doesn't contain any cinematography or any soundtrack or any performances by actors. Meanwhile, a written work is a complete expressive work ready for consumption. It doesn't contain a voice, but that's because the intention is for the reader to interpret the voice into it. A voice actor can do that, but that's just an interpretation of the work. It's not one-to-one, but it's not unlike someone sitting next to you in the theater and telling you what they think a scene means.

So yes, I mostly agree with GP. An audiobook is a different rendering of the same subject. The content is in the text, regardless of whether it's delivered in written or oral form.
by colesantiago | 2026-01-16 13:42:35+00:00
It is not privacy oriented if you are sharing login, profile information with Google and Confer.

It wouldn't be long until Google and Gemini can read this information and Google knows you are using Confer.

Wouldn't trust it regardless if Email is available.

The fact that confer allows Google login shows that Confer doesn't care about users privacy.
by dcre | 2026-01-16 13:42:43+00:00
Growing up I would see authors listing particular species of trees when describing a scene, and I’d marvel at the idea of someone getting all the references. It seemed so old-timey. But during the pandemic, my wife and I got into plants because it was an outdoor activity. I used an app to identify all the trees in our neighborhood (then we found out our town has a map online of them all). I have my favorite ones I like go by on walks. In a given area there are really only 10 or 15 species you have to know to cover most of the trees you see.
by cle | 2026-01-16 13:42:54+00:00
> The issue is that "83 per second" is multiple orders of magnitude off the expected level of performance on any RDBMS running on anything resembling modern hardware.

This is just not true, there are so many scenarios where 83/sec would be the limit. That number by itself is almost meaningless, similar to benchmarks which also make a bunch of assumptions about workloads and runtime environments.

As a simple example if your queue has a large backlog, you have a large worker fleet aggressively pulling work to minimize latency, your payloads are large, you have not optimized indexing, and/or you have many jobs scheduled for the future, every acquire can be an expensive table scan.

(This is a specific example because this is one of many failure scenarios I’ve encountered with Graphile that can cause your DB to meltdown. The same workload in Redis barely causes a blip in Redis CPU, without having to fiddle with indexes and auto vacuuming and worker backoffs.)
by myrmidon | 2026-01-16 13:43:27+00:00
I think people generally vastly underestimate the negative effect of "nativism"/anti-immigration rethoric on desirable foreign workers. Even if those desirable foreigners are completely unaffected by actual policy.

I personally know at least two highly qualified STEM workers that went back to Europe after Brexit/Trump2 and from what I can tell this was at least 70% pure "spite" (instead of being affected by actual anti-foreign regulation or somesuch).
by bergie | 2026-01-16 13:43:47+00:00
This thread is going to be very contextual. I'm currently sailing on a small sailboat, and hence the items will be quite different than what would be useful ashore:

* Wacaco Nanopresso - manual espresso pump. Great coffee anywhere off-the-grid. We also have their grinder but that's not listed as it is above the $100 threshold

* Klean Kanteen insulated water bottle - fill up from watermaker
water, stays nice and cool

* Seeed T1000-e: waterproof Meshtastic radio that allows me to communicate with our boat and crew also when out of cell coverage

* Shelly 1: WiFi/Thread relay that makes it easy to automate navigation lights and other circuits

* Ruuvi Tag: waterproof battery-powered Bluetooth temperature/humidity/pressure sensor. Battery lasts arpund two years. We have a few of these around the boat, including one in the fridge
by Bjartr | 2026-01-16 13:44:31+00:00
This seems like an important insight. The other top comments are about what individuals can do to improve their situation. That's absolutely valuable advice, but is at its core a solution of the form of "this wouldn't be a problem if only everyone would just...", which is never actually a solution.

What you're describing here is an answer to the question "why aren't people 'just' being more social".

Certainly too, social media has played a big hand in this, but for many people, myself included, these activities feel high-risk, with a low probability of reward. Regardless of the correctness of the perceptions that have led to this feeling, the feeling exists and it is becoming more and more pervasive across society. And, like most problems centered on feelings, "have you tried not feeling that way?" is rarely, though not never, effective.

I actually have an interesting story here. For a couple of years I found a third place for myself in VRChat. It was great, I made friends, I spent time socializing for its own sake on a daily basis for hours. But something changed over time. I'll hop on now, look at each person on my friends list, look at private and public rooms I can join, and instead of being able to just jump in, the same feelings of "this is high-risk" that hold me back IRL result in me closing the game after ten minutes or so.

So what exactly happened? My theory is that, being a completely new "kind" of space, my brain didn't see the choices as "social" in the same way as IRL. But over time it relearned the same lessons in this new context, driving me away from social interaction.

Why? What are the unconscious lessons I learned, and why did I learn them? What have I unintentionally internalized that turned an enjoyable, effective, low-stakes virtual third place into an emotional slog that incentivizes self isolation in the same way IRL socializing does?
by bluGill | 2026-01-16 13:45:08+00:00
Too late to edit, but there is one more factor: even in war, the easiest way to find an enemy ship is when it is leaving port. Thus you would expect even in war time the battles are mostly in shallow water just because that is usually what you find around good ports. (Today with radar, satellite and such finding ships at sea isn't nearly as hard, but it is still not easy if the other isn't cooperating)
by hopelite | 2026-01-16 13:45:23+00:00
So this is a sabotage agency operation? I am old enough to remember the "Arab spring" "intelligence" operation. Are people really naive about these types of Sabotage Agency supported projects and entities, regardless of the interest and curiosity about the technology?

And no, I know these things as a matter of fact for reasons that will need to remain my own.
by svat | 2026-01-16 13:45:54+00:00
Answering the question: the handwritten note is indeed by Chuck Baker (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12569853) — matches the handwriting at https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Knuth_Don...

It's interesting that the editor didn't know the author of one of the articles in their magazine!
by thephyber | 2026-01-16 13:46:54+00:00
LLMs reduce the marginal cost per unit of content.

When snail mail had a cost floor of $0.25 for the price of postage, email was basically free. You might get 2-3 daily pieces of junk mail in your house’s mailbox, but you would get hundreds or thousands in your email inbox. Slop comes at scale. LLMs didn’t invent spam, but they are making it easier to create more variants of it, and possibly ones that convert better than procedurally generated pieces.

There’s a difference between your cognitive brain and your lizard brain. You can tell yourself that mantra, but still occasionally fall prey to spam content. The people who make spam have a financial incentive to abuse the heuristics/signals you use to determine the authenticity of a piece of content in the same way cheap knockoffs of Rolex watches, Cartier jewelry, or Chanel handbags have to make the knockoffs appear as authentic as possible.
by senior-intern | 2026-01-16 13:47:03+00:00
Hi HN,

I am a developer and an aspiring Iron Man triathlete.

I built this tool because I got frustrated with existing fitness apps (Strava, TrainingPeaks). They felt either too bloated with social features ("kudos", feeds) or like enterprise software from the 2000s.

I wanted an "invisible app"—something that just tells me what to do tomorrow without making me scroll through a feed.

What it does:
- Takes your goal (e.g., Sub-5h Half Iron Man) and health status.
- Generates a structured weekly plan using AI.
- Syncs directly to your Google/Apple Calendar. (This is the main feature).
- Sends a minimalist daily email with the workout details.

It is currently an MVP built in a few weekends. The training logic is based on standard periodization principles.

I’d love for you guys to roast the idea or the execution.
by Yizahi | 2026-01-16 13:47:27+00:00
On one hand you're right that people tend to dismiss complexities of the jobs they are unfamiliar with, including IT crowd.

On the other hand when countries feel the need to legislate a new law enforcing writing documents in the human understandable language, one doesn't need to be an expert to suspect there was a systemic rot in those industries. It is totally valid to cry foul when even a parliament is concerned about about reading texts they produce for 500$/h.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/111th-congress/house-bill/946

https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2022/0054/latest/...
by theandrewbailey | 2026-01-16 13:47:38+00:00
Back when my parents were alive, I would occasionally drive over to visit them from two states away. I would often call ahead to order from a favorite pizzaria there a few minutes before I drove into town. I needed to remember the long stretch of cellular dead zone I had to drive through, and pull over to call just after leaving it, in order to time it just right.
by TacticalCoder | 2026-01-16 13:47:55+00:00
Suggesting bash/curl'ing to get a 12 lines JSON file is just... Not great. We've seen a shitload of developers account getting compromised (with all the supply chain attacks) and developers account turning evil.

Also there's absolutely zero need to be sudo to put a JSON config file for Firefox on Linux.

You're basically bash/curl'ing the kitchen sink, with all the security risks that entails, executing a shell script as root (which may or may not be malicious now or at some point in the future), just to...

Put a 12 lines JSON file in a user's Firefox config folder.

Way to go my "fremen" brothers [1].

[1] the "fremen" in Dune as those who adore the Shai-Hulud
by crosslayer | 2026-01-16 13:48:30+00:00
+1 to treating LLM output as untrusted input.

The failure mode I keep seeing isn’t hallucination per se… it’s blurred responsibility between intent and execution. Once a model can both decide and act, you’ve already lost determinism.

The stable pattern seems to be-
LLMs generate proposals, deterministic systems enforce invariants.
Creativity upstream, boring execution downstream.

What matters in production isn’t making models smarter, it’s making failure modes predictable and auditable. If you can’t explain why a state transition was allowed, the architecture is already too permissive.
by visarga | 2026-01-16 13:48:44+00:00
> You can't scale your way out of hallucinations

You scale your way only out in verifiable domains, like code, math, optimizations, games and simulations. In all the other domains the AI developers still got billions (trillions) of tokens daily, which are validated by follow up messages, minutes or even days later. If you can study longitudinally you can get feedback signals, such as when people apply the LLM idea in practice and came back to iterate later.
by frm88 | 2026-01-16 13:49:34+00:00
Our study, covering 45 species across 91 countries, reveals that human-induced factors—predominantly electrocution, illegal killing, and poisoning—constitute the major threats to bird mortality, highlighting a critical issue in global biodiversity conservation.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000632072...

and from last year, US specific, endangered species:

A comparative assessment with data from the 2010 Red List reveals an increase in the proportion of threatened species recorded as being impacted by certain threats. Notably, the incidence of hunting and trapping as a documented threat has increased from 34% to 41% of threatened species. Similarly, the proportion of species assessments with fire/fire suppression, climate change, pollution, invasive alien species and energy production have each increased by 3-5 percentage points.

https://datazone.birdlife.org/articles/state-of-the-worlds-b...

Wind turbines are a significantly lower threat than windows, look it up!
by joe_mamba | 2026-01-16 13:50:12+00:00
>You are exactly not answering the question though.

WHich question did I not answer?

>weren't caused by recent decision in my view

No, but they could admit it was a fuckup of the political class, and tell us how they're planning to fix it, instead of gaslighting us for complaining about it. But let's be real they're not gonna fix it, since it's too profitable not to. We can't stop the music chair song from playing just yet. Just one more round I promise.

>Hard cutting immigration, Japan style, would probably have led to comparable economic stagnation from insufficient workforce (see post 1990 Japan).

This is disproven and untrue but has been repeated so many time it became the poster child argument of pro-illegal immigration EU propaganda. That open borders will magically save our economy. It didn't.

Regarding Japan's economy, is not fucked due to not importing millions of uneducated third worlders to live on welfare like Europe did, it got fucked starting from 1985 when the US forced them to sign the Plaza Accord in order to counter their massive trade deficit US had with Japan(and other powerful export economies), which increased the value of the Yen making Japanese imports suddenly expensive and uncompetitive. Then to combat this, the Japan central bank fucked up themselves by printing money like crazy with ultra low interest rates which instead of stabilizing the exports, caused a massive speculative real estate and golf membership(yes that's true) bubble which imploded in 1990, dealing the final blow to their economic growth since they ran out of levers to pull other than suppressing their labor into a losing race to the bottom with other low wage manufacturing economies of Asia.

Depressing economic situations is what leads people to stop having kids, not the other way around.

Ever since the 1980s, Germany and other European models already knew population trends were gonna be fucked in the future, all the way back then. Did they take any measures and do anything to help the European population have more kids and prevent this? No. But they have the nerve to blame us for not having kids in a stagnating economy with crazy real-estate prices then gaslight us that salvation lies in illegal immigration, then introduce speech control laws for anyone who criticizes this.

Case in point, Poland's economy has been growing like crazy so IT IS doable to grow your economy without importing illegal migration and associated issues.

>It is unclear to me if averting demographic change would've even been feasible at all, and even if it was, it would have come with a plethora of undesirable side-effects (e.g. insanely high youth unemployment).

Good point. If you already have high youth unemployment, why do you need to import illegal migrants? Just to lower their bargaining power further?
by happyzombies | 2026-01-16 13:51:18+00:00
It'll be good to just use the browser again, so I will def be trying this out. But I can't help but feel that for simple dumb questions it's a lot easier to just ask AI bots instead of searching on a web browser. Does this just depend on the context? Example most recently I wanted to know how many miles would a pair of running shoes last. AI can answer this instantly (hooray instant gratification) and googling something like this would take longer. And of course this is why they shove this stuff on the browser.

I guess then, the browser and AI just serve different purposes now?
by hopelite | 2026-01-16 13:52:36+00:00
The saddest part of this is that we really have no idea just how many or the oldest redwood trees that were felled in California and on the western cost of the USA that were possibly multiple thousands of years old, i.e., 4000 years, possibly even 6000 years based on old images and accounts of trees, and that's just what we do have signals about.

Side note; there are several places in Europe where Sequoias were planted at various times and are basically infants at 150-200 years old, having been brought back to Europe by explorers and aristocrats.
by DannyBee | 2026-01-16 13:52:47+00:00
This is fair - but i think you are undershooting what is normally thought of as plastics - because it includes most coatings. So the stuff sprayed on your cabinets, rolled onto your floor, paint on walls, etc, are all polymers of various sorts that are not uv stable.

The average dry film thickness of these things is going to be a few mils total (~100% will be 2-6 mils). So very thin.

Pretty much any indoor coating is not going to resist UV well, whether it yellows or not. The acrylic based resins i guess will be okay. The reason all the lights in houses are UV filtered is not entirely about safety - the amount of UV radiation they would produce is fairly miniscule from a human perspective - but if they weren't filtered, leaving the lights on in your kitchen too often would likely, over the course of five years, be really bad for the cabinets, floors, walls, etc.

I think this in practice, the killer. Even if you could deal with plastics themselves, there is just so much you will now have to protect or change.
by maqp | 2026-01-16 13:53:15+00:00
Or, he took a barely niché messaging app plugin (OTR), improved it to provide forward secrecy for non-round trips, and deployed the current state-of-the art end-to-end encryption to over 3,000,000,000 users, as Signal isn't the only tool to use double-ratchet E2EE.

>broken SGX metadata protections

Citation needed. Also, SGX is just there to try to verify what the server is doing, including that the server isn't collecting metadata. The real talking is done by the responses to warrants https://signal.org/bigbrother/ where they've been able to hand over only two timestamps of when the user created their account and when they were last seen. If that's not good enough for you, you're better off using Tor-p2p messengers that don't have servers collecting your metadata at all, such as Cwtch or Quiet.

>weak supply chain integrity

You can download the app as an .apk from their website if you don't trust Google Play Store.

>a mandate everyone supply their phone numbers

That's how you combat spam. It sucks but there are very few options outside the corner of Zooko's triangle that has your username look like "4sci35xrhp2d45gbm3qpta7ogfedonuw2mucmc36jxemucd7fmgzj3ad".

>and agree to Apple or Google terms of service to use it?

Yeah that's what happens when you create a phone app for the masses.
by kmarc | 2026-01-16 13:53:21+00:00
Unfortunate; This morning my firefox profile didn't start up, draws the empty window, and spins the CPU. I started my workday with downgrading FF and restoring my previous profile from a backup.

Now this.

FWIF, for this particular problem, the workaround from the linked reddit post works:

Edit 3: This workaround seems to fix it:

type about:config in the URL bar
search for network.http.accept-encoding.secure
replace gzip, deflate, br, zstd with gzip, deflate, zstd

Alternatively, set network.http.dictionaries.enable to false.
Show HN: Brodocs deep onprem knowledge harvester
by BroTechLead | 2026-01-16 13:53:42+00:00
Hi HN,

Sharing onprem version of markdown knowledge harvester and publisher https://brodocs.io. It should make easy setting up internal tech docs portals from multiple git repos like micro/nano services, terraform modules, ansible roles, arch docs.

To start just: docker run -it --rm --name brodocs -p20000:20000 ghcr.io/brodocsdev/brodocs:0.14.0

then init some site from git repository: curl -X POST 'http://localhost:20000/api/sites/init' -F "repo=https://github.com/brodocsdev/docs.git"

then go to: http://localhost:20000/10b0eb6e1dc27c0babd/docs/README.html

Features already built:

- add more repos to init with -F "repo=url" -F "repo=url2" ...

- if key is needed: -F "key=...", it is stored encrypted in container

- it will check for changes every 5 minutes, so no need to setup ci/cd pipilines, just drop it on vm or k8s

- PlantUML conversion built-in, no need to commit image (mermaid still missing since it needs chrome, container size goes over 1GB),

- building cross team sites with top menu: https://brodocs.io/d248c24a335845277b6/docs/Multisites%20wit...

Any suggestions what operations expose on MCP, how to construct llm.txt, are welcome.
by asgerhb | 2026-01-16 13:53:52+00:00
The question is about systemic solutions:

- Invest in 3rd places:

·Zoning that allows small businesses and cafés to be near where people live.

·Invest heavily Il public libraries.

·Invest in public parks and spaces. For places where it rains a lot, maybe that should include roofed structures.

·Increase and promote funding for social organisations. Give money to orgs for every member.

- Create more free time:

·Make legislation that accommodates and promotes work weeks shorter than 37 hours.

·Ensure decent and reliable support for people who cannot (find) work, so their time is freed up to support their community.

- In disaster readiness checklists, include a point about knowing the names and special needs of your neighbours.

- Invest in mental health services. Both serious stuff and some light-weight sit-and-talk-groups.

- Set up laws that promote public transportation and carpooling.

- Anti-trust social media companies. Promote competitive compatibility between social media platforms. This is to let consumers choose the services that give them the best outcomes.
by tclancy | 2026-01-16 13:53:54+00:00
This isn’t quite true. I’m in the last stages of organizing a record club (basically a book club with a much lower commitment) and I started by talking to a small handful of close friends who I knew were music nerds because I am picky and shy by nature and the most annoying thing is how many people got wind of it and wanted in. People are starving for these sorts of things. Try. Fail. It’s ok, it’s just going to take a couple of us to make a few hits and we can start to sew some of the fabric of society back together.
by arghwhat | 2026-01-16 13:54:31+00:00
I wouldn't consider implementing a B-tree in C any more "arduous" than implementing any other notable container/algorithm in C, nor would making a library be "brutal" as moving data really isn't an issue. Libraries are available if you need them.

Quite frankly, writing the same in Rust seems far, far more "arduous", and you'd only realistically be writing something using BTreeMap because someone else did the work for you.

However, being right there in std makes use much easier than searching around for an equivalent library to pull into your C codebase. That's the benefit.
by jcelerier | 2026-01-16 13:55:54+00:00
But here we're talking about not being able to notice whether calc.exe opens in less than 300 milliseconds, not how fast we can react to it opening? It's the same thing with audio latency (and extremely infuriating when you're used to fast software where you can just start typing directly just after opening it without having to insert a pause to cater to slowness)