MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mtlynch | 2026-01-03 21:13:15+00:00
Everything is default included, and I have a long list of not-blog domains that are excluded.[0] Plus, I exclude the Alexa top 500.

There are lots of not-blogs still in the dataset, but I just exclude them when I come across them in popular views. But I'm sure if you dig through positions 101-5000 you'll find lots of domains that don't match my official criteria for a blog.

https://github.com/mtlynch/hn-popularity-contest-data/blob/m...
by mamonster | 2026-01-03 21:13:21+00:00
>Poland, Taiwan and Ukraine should try to get nuclear weapons.

Poland is gonna get them in 2026 in a roundabout way because I fully expect Macron to actually extend the French nuclear umbrella to the EU as he has hinted he wants to do.

The other 2 countries won't happen ever. The moment you start a nuclear program you are a rogue state for the US and those 2 countries rely too much on the US, especially Taiwan.

>Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E and Iran
Well Iran is working on theirs. The other 2 don't have state capacity to develop their own nuclear program so unless Putin sells them nukes I really don't know how they would do it.
by RankingMember | 2026-01-03 21:13:38+00:00
I'm feeling stupid reading this because I feel like it's using a tactical framework I'm not familiar with, e.g. what is the significance of the labeling of items like "Meeting Overload" with "T1001"?

FWIW my feeling is positive in regard to the core meaning being conveyed- I just feel like I'm missing out on something in not understanding the format.
by oasisbob | 2026-01-03 21:14:24+00:00
> from a pure technical point, double-entry bookkeeping is no longer needed at all

Just because databases are transactional doesn't mean the entire system is. Double-entry accounting still helps catch errors.

A concrete example, since people like to think databases dealing with money are especially transactional, when they're not ...

I used to work at a small regional bank. In the course of some network maintenance, I accidentally disrupted the connectivity to an ATM while a customer was doing a transaction.

The next day, our accounting folks caught a problem with reconciliation, and the customer called to follow up as well. My interruption caused a deposit to proceed far enough to take their checks and money, but failed to credit the customer's account.

It's very hard to orchestrate transactions perfectly across multiple organizations and systems. You can't hand-wave this away by pointing at db consistency guarantees. Traditional accounting techniques will catch these errors.

I'm not sure that ATMs even have the ability to communicate certain failure classes back to the acquiring bank. eg, a cash dispenser malfunction is common enough to be mentioned by VISAs network rules explicitly, but as far as I know will almost always require manual reconciliation between the ATM operator and the network.
by apparent | 2026-01-03 21:14:27+00:00
Huh interesting, I guess that would help somewhat. But for me, I prefer to pretty much never have to worry about charging my watch.

As a kid, I had watches that didn't need new batteries for years. As an adult, I was willing to trade off some battery life (down to a week or so) in order to get notifications my wrist, music controls, and activity tracking.

Although I can see some benefit in being able to see my Uber status in real time, or other app-related functionality, I am not interested in charging a wearable every day or two. I don't want to have to worry about whether I'm "using my watch too much" to be able to make it through a short trip, or until the end of my second day.

I know some people have different preferences on this, but for me a watch should be something that doesn't require any maintenance for weeks at a time.
by JCattheATM | 2026-01-03 21:14:48+00:00
> I would need to be in pairing mode for you to get it.

No, that doesn't seem to be the case.

> then you can answer my calls if you are next to me, which in the real world is certainly noticeable.

You may not notice if the call was answered automatically and you didn't have your device on you, and the call could be forwarded with acceptable latency so the speech wouldn't be in earshot. Or these days you could use an AI to generate voice and it would sound realistic.

Just because something isn't likely to affect ordinary citizens doesn't mean it isn't possible.
by kranke155 | 2026-01-03 21:15:48+00:00
One day they might send 20 ships all at once to cut all overseas cables in one go, and it won’t seem like the preparation for an invasion but just another provocation.

By that same morning they start the invasion of Estonia / the Baltics and separated them from the world through communications jamming and cutting all overseas cables. Without NATO support the Baltics are ocuppied by the same afternoon. In 12-16 hours Rússia has essentially re-occupied them.

These normalisation exercises are a part of it.
by ruszki | 2026-01-03 21:15:51+00:00
Law and your list are not the same.

Trump definitely killed probably 100s of thousands of people, with how he handled COVID, and USAID. The law doesn’t consider those as murders, but it’s quite obvious that they were.

The rape on your list is even funnier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Jean_Carroll_v._Donald_J._T... Oh sorry, sexual assault.

And theft is the funniest, because he was convicted basically for stealing from his companies.
by Sabinus | 2026-01-03 21:15:59+00:00
Why do these strong, socialist countries anyways need US trade to function?

The Venezuelan economy was dying before the sanctions.

Burning the economy to hand out free money isn't good for the people.

Maduro and Chavez fixed the exchange rate, imposed price controls, printed money and did a wave of nationalisation (not the oil infrastructure that was in the 70s). USA isn't to blame for Venezuelan dysfunction.
by packet_mover | 2026-01-03 21:16:30+00:00
Yeah, house-number lookup is not there yet. The demo geocoder does place/street-level search + reverse, but house numbers need a richer address index - it's on the roadmap.

Re: a bbox "builder" repo - it's an interesting idea. I could see it going two ways: (a) you want to run a bbox builder yourself, or (b) you want a simple way to specify a bbox so the dataset pack can be produced for you.

I started with the "ship a known-good pack" approach because the build pipeline is the messy part, and I want deployed boxes to stay simple/reproducible.

For your use case, which did you mean - run the build locally, or "draw/paste a bbox and get back a ready-to-run pack"? And would bbox be OK, or do you prefer admin boundaries (country/state/city)?
by II2II | 2026-01-03 21:16:32+00:00
The trouble is you need network access to end up at the desktop to install the network drivers in the expected manner. Both of the ways I am aware of resolving the issue involve dropping to a command prompt. One method is to run the device driver installer from the command prompt. The other method is to run the bypassnro script from the OOBE directory, to get to the desktop to install the driver. There are probably other ways, but given that most search results talk about non-official ways (which I place less faith in, frequently don't work, and are more complex anyhow) I don't see how most people would get around the problem.

In contrast, most desktop oriented Linux distributions have a simpler installer and provide at least enough hardware support to leave you at a functional desktop. (There may be issues with more esoteric hardware, but chances are that hardware wouldn't work under Windows until vendor supplied drivers are installed anyhow.)
by staticassertion | 2026-01-03 21:16:59+00:00
> Linus argument against labeling some bugs, or even lack of features, as security vulnerabilities, is that all bugs can, with enough work and together with other circumstances, be a security vulnerability.

This isn't true though. Some bugs are not exploitable, some are trivial to exploit. Even if sometimes we'd end up with a DoS that was actually a privesc, how does that make it pointless to label the ones we know are privescs as such?

You can argue "oh no sometimes we mislabeled a DoS" but most of the time you can tell when something is going to be a powerful vuln or not ahead of time, I think this is a red herring to optimize around.

> Essentially every commit would need to be labeled as a cve fix, and then it’s just extra work for nothing.

This isn't true and has never been true for any other project. There are issues with the CVE system, this is not one of them. Note that the Linux kernel is the standout here - we don't have to guess about issues in the CVE system, we observe them all the time. "We need a CVE for every commit" is not one of them.
by tooltalk | 2026-01-03 21:18:01+00:00
>> There is ZERO concern of the current US administration about the welfare of Venezuelans,

I don't think this was a humanitarian mission. I'm speculating from Trump's perspective, Maduro was a major de-stabilizing factor. The Western world also seems to tacitly agree that the man had to go -- I don't think Maria Machado's recent Nobel Peace Prize was coincidence.
by BoingBoomTschak | 2026-01-03 21:18:27+00:00
Indeed, it's newish (from this summer https://github.com/sbcl/sbcl/releases/tag/sbcl-2.5.6) and mainly thanks to C. Zhang's work.

https://github.com/sbcl/sbcl/commit/021414445224e692ebb9c48c...
https://github.com/sbcl/sbcl/commit/2c56c5901df1a5ea98ae19e9...
by ineedaj0b | 2026-01-03 21:18:33+00:00
Oil is important but as lever to pull on because it affects China.

The invasion is meant to orient the US to fight China. We are cutting away the Middle East war baggage, trying to end the Ukraine war baggage so we can focus on China. Russia would be a nice ally against China.

China was moving around Lat Am and we are removing the communists from the hemisphere.

China likes oil. Loves oil but can’t get enough oil which is why it’s building solar and nuclear so quickly. The US can clamp down on the oil if Venezuela is an ally. So the US wants a strong Venezuela that can’t be used against us.

It’s hard to conduct war without oil.

The US has a strong incentive to make sure Venezuela comes out strong, and the Chinese have a strong incentive to not let that happen.

tldr: it’s all about china
by 2b3a51 | 2026-01-03 21:18:48+00:00
Not the parent or grandparent poster and not a gamer.

The echo in my mind from the statement was along the following lines:

I can do everything at work remotely from my Linux laptop as they use Microsoft365/Sharepoint/Teams/Outlook and all. I can just log in via Chromium and noone knows any different with one exception: the finance portal. I have to be on an employer owned Windows PC to do that one thing as it is the last 'native program' needed.
Moral: enterprise-ish stuff is happening via the Web browser.

Steam et al financing WINE/Proton and generally hammering all the sharp edges out of the compatibility layer for running Windows software on Linux.
Moral: Complex Windows native software can be run under Linux.

So, at some point in the future, does Microsoft just phase out Windows? Replace it with a really well engineered Linux with compatibility environment for legacy software?
by waldothedog | 2026-01-03 21:18:49+00:00
It looks like a sort of serial number or categorization. The first block they are T1. The second block they are T2. So each category (access, persistence, etc) is a T w a leading number and the issues/“tactics” inside of that have a 001, 002 etc, as a reference to that specific instance (meeting overload)

Edited for typos
by Alupis | 2026-01-03 21:18:58+00:00
> before Trump I would have said the process would have been resolved smoothly, now I have no idea.

Kind of absurd to say this. Even with Jan 6. - things still ran like they were supposed to, and will continue doing so. The government is huge and filled with millions of people. It would take an unprecedented level of coordination to not do what is supposed to happen.

Venezuela has a VP, and a rightfully elected President (not Maduro). I guess we'll see what happens there. The US has committed to maintaining order during the transition - so it seems unlikely to devolve into a civil war as anyone initiating such a thing would have to contend with the US military.

Time will tell... regardless - it seems clear as day Venezuelans will be better off without Maduro. The amount of money that is about to flow into Venezuela will be stunning. Yes, oil companies will swoop in, but the money spent there will rebuild a failed economy, provide untold numbers of jobs for Venezuelans, and lead to a more prosperous nation over time - like it was before Chavez/Maduro.
by starkparker | 2026-01-03 21:19:18+00:00
> the Xbox 360 arguably won its generation

Maybe it won some battles in your part of the world, presumably North America. But the PS3 outsold it globally as its contemporary, and even the PS5 passed the 360 in global lifetime sales as of November 2025: https://www.vgchartz.com/article/466599/ps5-outsells-xbox-36...
by MrJohz | 2026-01-03 21:20:29+00:00
But isn't the problem with X- headers that if they ever get standardised, they necessarily create this smuggling issue? Whereas if you start with an unprefixed header and standardise it under the same name, you avoid this issue.

You could also solve the problem by standardising the header with the X- prefix, but this is more confusing to users and violates the idea that X- always means "not standardised", at which point the prefix is useless anyway.
by ben_w | 2026-01-03 21:20:36+00:00
Trump has lost lawsuits related to sexual abuse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Jean_Carroll_v._Donald_J._T...

Also, the laws of the world have definitely not had the same list for hundreds of years, and the old ideas of those things are somewhat different to the modern versions. For example, for most of those hundreds of years, "rape" wasn't just about intercourse, it was about kidnapping (same etymology as "rapture": snatch and carry off). This is specifically why spousal rape, in the modern usage of the term, needed to be added to the statue books: little to no thought given to the idea of a husband kidnapping their own wife.

Also on that list for hundreds of years: charging interest on loans.

Trump's "grab 'em by the pussy" quote sounds like an admission of sexual battery to me. Now, it's important to note that I'm not a lawyer, but here's the thing: lawyers have also said this about that quote.

Even if you ignore all the stuff about Epstein, even if you limit yourself to just that self-chosen set of goalposts, he's a wrong-un.
by stackghost | 2026-01-03 21:20:48+00:00
Imagine the website is presenting you with a quicksheet about some new type of attack. It's called BUSY.

Initial Access covers how you being a BUSY attack. Execution covers how BUSY tends to manifest itself in normal operations. And so on, and so forth.

Note the domain: CISO Tradecraft. It's just the author(s) being cheeky in their presentation. If you aren't in a security-adjacent space I could see how it wouldn't land.
by philipswood | 2026-01-03 21:20:54+00:00
I'm glad the author spent some time thinking about this, clarifying his thoughts and writing it down, but I don't think he's written anything much worth reading yet.

He's mostly in very-confident-but-not-even-wrong kind of territory here.

One comment on his note:

> As an example, let’s say an LLM is correct 95% of the time (0.95) in predicting the “right” tokens to drive tools that power an “agent” to accomplish what you’ve asked of it. Each step the agent has to take therefore has a probability of being 95% correct. For a task that takes 2 steps, that’s a probability of 0.95^2 = 0.9025 (90.25%) that the agent will get the task right. For a task that takes 30 steps, we get 0.95^30 = 0.2146 (21.46%). Even if the LLMs were right 99% of the time, a 30-step task would only have a probability of about 74% of having been done correctly.

The main point that for sequential steps of tasks errors can accumulate and that this needs to be handled is valid and pertinent, but the model used to "calculate" this is quite wrong - steps don't fail probabilistically independently.

Given that actions can depend on outcomes of previous step actions and given that we only care about final outcomes and not intermediate failing steps, errors can be corrected. Thus even steps that "fail" can still lead to success.

(This is not a Bernoulli process.)

I think he's referencing some nice material and he's starting in a good direction with defining agency as goal directed behaviour, but otherwise his confidence far outstrips the firmness of his conceptual foundations or clarity of his deductions.
by fuzztester | 2026-01-03 21:21:12+00:00
Design by contract is good. I've used it in some projects.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_by_contract

I first came across it when I was reading Bertrand Meyer's book, Object-oriented Software Construction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-Oriented_Software_Const...

From the start of the article:

[ Object-Oriented Software Construction, also called OOSC, is a book by Bertrand Meyer, widely considered a foundational text of object-oriented programming.[citation needed] The first edition was published in 1988; the second edition, extensively revised and expanded (more than 1300 pages), in 1997. Many translations are available including Dutch (first edition only), French (1+2), German (1), Italian (1), Japanese (1+2), Persian (1), Polish (2), Romanian (1), Russian (2), Serbian (2), and Spanish (2).[1] The book has been cited thousands of times. As of 15 December 2011, The Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) Guide to Computing Literature counts 2,233 citations,[2] for the second edition alone in computer science journals and technical books; Google Scholar lists 7,305 citations. As of September 2006, the book is number 35 in the list of all-time most cited works (books, articles, etc.) in computer science literature, with 1,260 citations.[3] The book won a Jolt award in 1994.[4] The second edition is available online free.[5] ]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Meyer
by recursivecaveat | 2026-01-03 21:22:04+00:00
The ai source code doesn't seem to have alpha-beta pruning yet. If you add that plus some basic move-ordering (killer move heuristic is easy, powerful, and has a cool name) that will let it search a lot deeper. One nice thing about such improvements is they converge to the same result, just faster, so unlike tweaking the evaluation function you can be pretty sure that you're improving it.
by overfeed | 2026-01-03 21:22:12+00:00
> socialist countries anyways need US trade to function

Sanctions go way beyond just direct trade with the US; they attempt to prevent all countries on earth from trading with the sanctioned entity, by force of the USD settling system, or as the past week has shown - the US Navy. So it reduces the number of potential trading partners from hundreds to a handful with (near) reserve currencies, and a navy that's not a pushover.
Show HN: Privacy-Paranoid Mobile Analytics with Built-In Intelligence
by cesncn | 2026-01-03 21:22:24+00:00
Built Respectlytics because I always got confused about how to deal with privacy questionnaires when publishing my own mobile apps in app stores. For people who have read a little bit about those privacy regulations like GDPR, ePrivacy Directive, CCPA, etc., I guess it is a bit difficult to say that an analytics solution is fully compliant and no user consent is needed. But what I have come to is that the key thing is to build something that is extremely defendable, transparent, and very easy to explain if and when needed.

Privacy: API rejects custom fields with 400 errors. Only stores 5 fields. Session IDs rotate every 2 hours with daily salt. Open source SDKs. It is technically impossible to say which event data belongs to whom.

Automation: Auto-discovers conversion paths, calculates lift scores, finds drop-offs. No manual funnel setup needed. These analysis are done per session. Multi-session tracking is blocked by design.

Tradeoff: Can't track MAU/DAU (session rotation prevents it). Not free because this platform costs money and I am unfortunately not in a position to offer this service for free. But I did everything I could and will keep doing to maintain it as a premium service for people/organizations/companies who need high level of privacy in their analytics solutions.

Current Mobile SDKs: Swift, Kotlin, Flutter, React Native. All are open source.

Already using it for my own apps. Curious what HN thinks about the architecture.
by harmmonica | 2026-01-03 21:22:44+00:00
Of course it's taken into account. Feel like you didn't read what I wrote.

Question back to you: who decides when the government gets involved in getting your property back? You cool with it if they don't do anything to get your property back because of the size of your property; the cost to make it happen; you're not friends with the right person; etc.? Or better yet they don't get yours back but they get your competitor's/neighbor's back? Seems like the thing that happens in these situations is that someone maybe gets their property back and then the dick swings to piss on the people who didn't.

Like I said, fantasyland over here.
by llm_nerd | 2026-01-03 21:23:18+00:00
As the old saying goes, it happens slowly and then all at once. The things tethering people to Windows have largely disappeared for many/most people.

One of my sons has a desktop that is quite powerful and overwhelmingly adequate for what he does. As Windows 10 hit the end of support we were considering how to move forward as Windows 11 refuses to work on his device. We realized there is absolutely nothing keeping him on Windows, and perhaps we just replace his PC with a Mac Mini. But in the meantime he's rolling with Ubuntu and has lost absolutely nothing and gained plenty.
by theandrewbailey | 2026-01-03 21:23:30+00:00
Sometime around 2012, Windows XP started having issues on my parent's PC, so I installed Xubuntu on it (my preferred distro at the time). I told them that "it works like Windows", showed them how to check email, browse the web, play solitare, and shut down. Even the random HP printer + scanner they had worked great! I went back home 2 states away, and expected a call from them to "put it back to what it was", but it never happened. (The closest was Mom wondering why solitare (the gnome-games version) was different, then guided her on how to change the game type to klondike.)

If "it [Xubuntu] works like Windows" offended you, I'd like to point out that normies don't care about how operating system kernels are designed. Normies care about things like a start menu, and that the X in the corner closes programs. The interface is paramount for non-technical users.

A family friend recently called me for advice on her old decrepit laptop. I told her about my work "laptop": a Surface Pro tablet with Linux. I just sold one to her (I work in e-waste recycling), partially on the security and privacy advantages of Linux. Lets see how that works out.
by arrrg | 2026-01-03 21:23:32+00:00
Election polls were only ever off a couple percentage points. US elections are hard to predict because they are so close. And because of the electoral system. So missing by a bit can mean making a wildly wrong prediction.

This does not apply to opinion questions that show huge differences (not single digit percentage point differences), though there validity, not reliability is a bigger concern, especially since there exists no voting benchmark you can measure against.

Still: I think it’s awfully convenient to just wholly discount actual empirical evidence whenever you feel like it because it might not be perfect. Why exactly do you think your gut feeling is better?
by wat10000 | 2026-01-03 21:25:28+00:00
I’m not sure why you’re talking about hypotheticals where a different act could be just. I thought we were talking about what’s actually happening. In the context of a news story about US military actions that I help pay for, you stated that force is justifiable to recover stolen property. Either this describes what we’re actually discussing i.e. the actual events taking place, or it’s a confusing non sequitur.