MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by netsharc | 2026-01-10 14:48:19+00:00
That's interesting, on Linux there's the $EDITOR variable (a quick search of the 3 distros Arch, Ubuntu, Fedora show me they respect it) for the terminal text editor.

Maybe you can trailblaze and tell users your application will support the $LLM or $LLM_AUTOCOMPLETE variables (convene the committee for naming for better names).
by indiantinker | 2026-01-10 14:48:20+00:00
Designed in the era of Use-maxing vs Status-maxing. I think modern cars are taking a lot of car experience out and putting in the phone experience in. My Maruti Suzuki 800 was such a fun car to drive. Easy to repair. Decently efficient. Repair manual was understandable.

The new electrics are great. But they are less of a car and more of a transportation technology.
by firefax | 2026-01-10 14:48:30+00:00
I thought that's the UK's whole "thing"? They have these rituals that look like democracy, but at the end of the day the king can just kind of... do whatever he wants. He often doesn't, because he's heard of what happened in France etc... but at the end of the day there is no "bill of rights" -- part of their parliment is literally a "house of lords" -- which is akin to if we handed a bunch of decendants of the mayflower and rich industrialists and priests their own house of Congress. And when they "elect" a prime minister, the king has to "ascend" them -- so basically, there's this constant ritual of pretending they're a democracy when really it's only like that because the king current feels like it.
by hshdhdhj4444 | 2026-01-10 14:48:38+00:00
Japan has a different medical system, different levels of adherence, different cultural hygiene standards, different exposure risk profiles for different pathogens.

Comparing the U.S. to Japan, or any other system for that matter, with a simple “well the vaccine schedule is different there” is simplistic and almost certainly not useful.

What is useful is to compare the U.S. with and without a certain vaccine or when delaying certain vaccines.

And we know how that plays out because all these vaccines have been added because of specific threats and actual diseases faced by Americans.
by phatfish | 2026-01-10 14:49:18+00:00
One of the big issues I have with LLMs that when you start a prompting session with an easy question it all goes great. It bring up points you might not have considered and appears very knowledgeable. Fact checking at this stage will show the LLM is invariably correct.

Then you start "digging deeper" on a specific sub-topic, and this is where the risk of an incorrect response grows. But it is easy to continue with the assumption the text you are getting is accurate.

This has happened so many times with the computing/programming related topics i usually prompt about, there is no way I would trust a response from an LLM on health related issues I am not already very familiar with.

Given that the LLM will give incorrect information (after lulling people with a false sense of it being accurate), who is going to be responsible for the person that makes themselves worse off by doing self diagnosis, even with a privacy focused service?
by bryant | 2026-01-10 14:49:41+00:00
> Why be so secretive? This is not a military mission. These missions cost a lot of taxpayer money (money well spend you may argue), but we deserve full transparency.

We deserve as much transparency as we can get on the science we as taxpayers paid for, not full de-anonymization of the bodily happenings of living crew. There's certainly valuable science here, but the crew member doesn't have to be outed for it.

> You don't get to go to space on other people's money and expect privacy.

I don't think this is a healthy mindset, and there's a heck of a slippery slope with this argument. Would we apply this to companies receiving federal grants too? Contractors? Universities? Schools? That's a lot of people who'll lose medical privacy for something probably unrelated to their job, and there'll be a much smaller applicant pool for the jobs themselves if applicants are aware that their own internal issues might be disclosed when the public clamors for it.

> We might want to learn from what went wrong here.

Agree, NASA certainly will, and new science and engineering will come of it that we benefit from. But that doesn't have to involve breaching medical privacy and ethics.
by lotsofpulp | 2026-01-10 14:50:03+00:00
Health insurance companies in the US are not allowed to deny coverage, and can only price premiums based on age (highest premium capped at 3x lowest premium, location, and tobacco use.

https://www.healthcare.gov/coverage/pre-existing-conditions/

https://www.healthcare.gov/how-plans-set-your-premiums/

Health insurance premiums in the US are more tax than insurance. They also have low single digit profit margins with less than desirable shareholder returns (many are non profit in the first place), so they don’t have much room to lower premiums without also reducing healthcare expenses.

The insurance business in general is very competitive and not very profitable, so an insurer that tries to collect outsized premiums will usually suffer a loss of business.
by midnitewarrior | 2026-01-10 14:50:15+00:00
Vendetta code is not going to get you far.

git works perfectly well. git is an afterthought. Engineers need to know git the same way they need to know markdown or SQL.

The complexity of git is becoming less relevant by the day as coding agents take over coding responsibilities.

If your git replacement is optimized for LLM use in ways that git cannot be optimized, you may get some traction.

By all conventional measures, git appears to be peak human-centered source control, with nearly every major company, software authoring tool, agent and SWE invested in using it.

This may be one of the reddest oceans out there.
by CGamesPlay | 2026-01-10 14:50:18+00:00
Oh, thanks, that works. My feedback:

- It doesn't really work for web development? I can either host a public website or an API that uses my sprite token. The sprite CLI allows forwarding ports to the sprite, but not from it. Hopefully I'm missing something.

- Region support would be great. Whatever region you put me in is ~200ms from me and the typing lag is terrible.

[append]

I think I can install my own tunneling into the VM (e.g. Tailscale), so that's not necessarily a deal-breaker. I'd say the region support is definitely a blocker for me adopting this immediately.
Show HN: Sigma Runtime – model-agnostic identity control for LLMs
by teugent | 2026-01-10 14:50:45+00:00
We’ve validated the Sigma Runtime architecture (v0.4.12) on Google Gemini-3 Flash, confirming that long-horizon identity control and stability can be achieved without retraining or fine-tuning the model.

The system maintains two distinct personas (“Fujiwara”, a stoic Edo-period ronin, and “James”, a formal British analyst) across 220 dialogue turns in stable equilibrium.
This shows that cognitive coherence and tone consistency can be controlled at runtime rather than in model weights.

Unlike LangChain or RAG frameworks that orchestrate prompts, Sigma Runtime treats the model as a dynamic field with measurable drift and equilibrium parameters.
It applies real-time feedback — injecting entropy or coherence corrections when needed — to maintain identity and prevent both drift and crystallization.
The effect is similar to RLHF-style fine-tuning, but done externally and vendor-agnostic.

This decouples application logic from any specific LLM provider.
The same runtime behavior has been validated on GPT-5.2 and Gemini-3, with Claude tests planned next.

We use narrative identities like “Fujiwara” or “James” because their linguistic styles make stability easy to verify by eye.
If the runtime can hold these for 100+ turns, it can maintain any structured identity or agent tone.

Runtime versions ≥ v0.4 are proprietary,
but the architecture is open under the Sigma Runtime Standard (SRS):
https://github.com/sigmastratum/documentation/tree/main/srs

A reproducible early version (SR-EI-037) is available here:
https://github.com/sigmastratum/documentation/tree/bf473712a...

Regulated under DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18085782 —
non-commercial implementations are fully open.

HN discussion focus:
– Runtime-level vs weight-level control
– Model-agnostic identity stability
– Feedback-based anti-crystallization
– Can cognitive coherence be standardized?
by EMM_386 | 2026-01-10 14:50:46+00:00
I've been a software engineer professionally for over two decades and I use AI heavily both for personal projects and at work.

At work the projects are huge (200+ large projects in various languages, C#, TypeScript front-end libs, Python, Redis, AWS, Azure, SQL, all sorts of things).

AI can go into huge codebases perfectly fine and get a root cause + fix in minutes - you just need to know how to use it properly.

Personally I do "recon" before I send it off into the field by creating a markdown document explaining the issue, the files involved, and any "gotchas" it may encounter.

It's exactly the same as I would do with another senior software engineer. They need that information to figure out what is going on.

And with that? They will hand you back a markdown document with a Root Cause Analysis, identify potential fixes, and explain why.

It works amazingly well if you work with it as a peer.
by anonity | 2026-01-10 14:51:01+00:00
Hey everyone,

I´m a solo founder launching a new social media, still fully free for the moment.

It´s a tree based application where each moment is a branch of a pretty tree!

Each moment can have up to 100 photos, 1 video, links, documents and gifs. Has lots of privacy features to boot.

It was originally a social media just for me and my friends but opening it up for everyone to use for free for now.

So, check it out, have fun and immortalize your groups on anonity!

Cheers
by crazygringo | 2026-01-10 14:51:10+00:00
> Apple's weather app still isn't as precise or accurate

Is it not? The rainfall-per-minute over the next hour on iOS seems about the same accuracy as Dark Sky had -- I used Dark Sky for years. It wasn't perfect but it worked well enough, same as iOS did after. You can even scrub the precipitation map predictions and they look the same to me.

I know the Dark Sky prediction accuracy was greatly dependent on where you lived -- this is something that was widely discussed back in the day. If you've seen a drop in accuracy, did you simply move?
by mrweasel | 2026-01-10 14:51:24+00:00
The whole security of both Android and iOS is a joke at this point. We know now that plenty of apps/games have proxy services built in, allowing the publisher to monetize their users, by selling proxy services to AI companies. If that can happen, with all the "security" those platforms and store supposedly offer, then I fail to see the point.

We're being prevented from installing and updating software on the devices we own, but Google and Apple will happily approve and sign malware in their stores?
by xtiansimon | 2026-01-10 14:51:35+00:00
I enjoyed this write-up on UI design and Visualization topic.

The table of user "context and situation" is a great document. You can easily envision authoring this table and scrolling to the right of your initial columns (A,B) to see further into the design process,

A) "When I hear about a storm, I want to prepare my loved ones, my property, etc.

B) Storm forecast ... :
- Where is the storm right now and is it heading my direction?

[...]

N) _Show the storm front using _directional arrows_ ... (compact and replaces need for animation)_

The last section concludes in praise of the design and includes this: _"rigorously iterated on data visualization design". I wish we would have seen evidence of this, principally in the form of older screen shots of the design.

I think design iteration is the difference between mere good design and good products, and legendary product design.

Personally, I'd love to see a write up of my favorite whipping post, Transit App. Oh boy did that app go down hill, and with such great potential.
by realberry | 2026-01-10 14:51:52+00:00
I built this because I wanted a faster, cleaner alternative to existing tools.

Vs. Levels.fyi:

- Source: This uses raw USCIS filing data, not self-reported salaries. It's the "official" base pay.

- Scope: Includes all industries (Finance, Law, etc.), not just Big Tech.

- Speed: Optimized for performance (200+ QPS on 4-core ARM).

- Privacy: No ads, no tracking, no login walls.

Check it out: https://openh1b.org

Feedback welcome.
by ninjagoo | 2026-01-10 14:51:57+00:00
Soviet Union - was that really opposition to oppression that succeeded or the state collapsed internally - disintegrated?

British India could be good example - but there's a case to be made that it was overthrow of an external colonial rule that never integrated with the local population, so not sure there is a good parallel with the Iran situation.

Indonesia - this appears to be a really good example, along with Phillipines (1986). So what's different about Iran - why the repeated failures there?
by vibecoding101 | 2026-01-10 14:52:12+00:00
Quick clarification based on a few DMs/questions:

This isn’t just “explore a CSV” — you can build full, interactive workflows (with AI) by connecting nodes (joins, transforms, reconciliations, agings, etc.), and inspect/modify the DuckDB SQL at every step.

Still very early and intentionally constrained (CSV-only, no persistence), but I’m especially interested in:
- workflows people repeat monthly
- primitives that feel missing
- points where the node model breaks down

Appreciate the thoughtful feedback so far.
by perihelions | 2026-01-10 14:52:48+00:00
Without taking a side, I'll share the interesting detail that NASA did not historically grant much medical privacy to astronauts. You can read medical reports of the Apollo-Soyuz crew here (documenting their poisoning by toxic rocket fuel, dinitrogen tetroxide),

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19770023791 ("The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project: Medical report" (1977))
by hshdhdhj4444 | 2026-01-10 14:53:15+00:00
No one is asking you to “believe the government”. We’re asking to believe the scientific literature and the non partisan experts who decide these recommendations.

Further, these recommendations are not new. They have a track record. You can look io the number of lives they’ve saved/reduced damage to.

The people who insist that we should throw out the expert advice based on openly available scientific research and literature in favor of one person’s feelings because he happens to hold a politically powerful position are the ones asking us to trust the government blindly. Actually, not blindly, but contrary to the evidence that our eyes see.
by rgoulter | 2026-01-10 14:53:36+00:00
> And I don't think org-mode's babel features really exist in Markdown

I think the neatest part of org-babel is the source code block execution, & the various ways it supports for configuring output. This allows for org files to be "plaintext notebooks" (like jupyter in plaintext"). -- It's really surprising that this part is not more common.

More niche is the "babel" part of that: because the code blocks can take variables as inputs, and output values, this allows a polyglot notebook where values from e.g. Python get passed to R and plotted or so. -- Cute idea, although I've never found it too useful. The supported types are (unsurprisingly) limited, and the language support for code blocks is held together by duct tape.

(Even more niche is the noweb syntax for proper "literate programming". Which is mostly discussed about how awful it is to use in practice?)

Of course, org also has a long tail of neat features (like how each heading can have properties attached to it, as well as tags, and the task management that relates to this).
by exsomet | 2026-01-10 14:53:37+00:00
This isn’t an accurate interpretation. The UK is a _constitutional_ monarchy, not an absolute monarchy, meaning that the monarchy exists and acts in accordance with the constitution.

In the case of the UK, some of the rituals (such as the one you’re referring to with the prime minister) are based on longstanding traditions, because humans are weird and we like those sorts of things, but the requirement to do that stems from the constitution, not from the King deciding if he likes the PM or not.
by acdha | 2026-01-10 14:53:51+00:00
Do they? All of the reporting I’ve read says that they’re a lot better at preventing this, so the popular choices before Grok were things like Civitai, not Google or OpenAI, because X explicitly embraced “spicy” mode as a growth strategy:

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/elon-m...
by azan_ | 2026-01-10 14:54:15+00:00
Please read my comment again. If you lived with chronic pain that multiple doctors failed to correctly diagnose and ChatGPT actually suggested correct diagnosis then you wouldn’t call it just perceived ease, but something that made your life much, much better. I’m doctor and I’m all for empowering patients (as long as they consult ChatGPT output with actual doctors). It’s very easy to criticize people resorting to llms if you do not have any rare debilitating condition that’s not correctly diagnosed.
by finghin | 2026-01-10 14:54:18+00:00
It’s incredibly grating to get into my mom’s car and see a FYP on her dashboard with podcast recs. It makes me feel like I woke up on the moon. It just makes no sense and it’s clearly harder (for her, and in general) to use than an old-school car radio.

It doesn’t help (but still besides the point) that they typically give the impression of being a stripped back Moto G4 a couple years out of updates.
by femiagbabiaka | 2026-01-10 14:54:31+00:00
Bernie Sanders was nearly the Democratic candidate for president and is still the most popular politician in American politics. However, this countries politics is completely and totally captured by moneyed interests. Our political leadership is openly corrupt and has been for decades. And of course about every decade the US commits another atrocity against some sovereign nation or the other. It does feel a bit hopeless at times
by jen20 | 2026-01-10 14:55:15+00:00
> Could you expand on why?

Perhaps I'm a plumber going to work on a house in a LEZ? Perhaps I need to deliver something? Perhaps deliver to the airport (!) inside the LEZ.

There are all kinds of reasons why someone might need to take a van into an LEZ, if you think for more than about quarter a second.

This is primarily a reason why you shouldn't drive a vehicle from the 1970s, as the article suggests, and why LEZs need practicality not to drive service inflation inside the area.
by kristopolous | 2026-01-10 14:55:18+00:00
I've been working on a more unixy version of his tool I call llcat

https://github.com/day50-dev/llcat

It might help things get closer.

Also for edge running look into the LFM 2.5 class of models: https://huggingface.co/LiquidAI/LFM2.5-1.2B-Instruct
by H8crilA | 2026-01-10 14:55:27+00:00
GrapheneOS does this just fine.

It comes with optional sandboxed Google Play Services and Store, meaning that these run just like any other app, with no special permissions. You can give them only Network access. The Play Store is still the most secure way to download everyday apps, so a lot of GrapheneOS users use Google's Play Store with a burner account in a separate profile, usually the Owner (the main) profile - since you can then disable apps in Owner and install them into other profiles. And the sandboxed google stuff can be used to run proper Google apps without any problem. Even sandboxed Android Auto works.
by kankerlijer | 2026-01-10 14:57:24+00:00
It's all part of an unfortunate cultural shift. Perhaps it was a combination of video games, internet/influencer culture, and the fascination with SOF units popularized more heavily during GWOT. There has always been an element of boys wanting to be cool in the military, which is fine if kept in check, but people aren't selected for SOF units based on their ability to wear gear or work out really hard. They're looking for people with reduced stress response and can make clear headed decisions (cosplay doesn't give you these things).
by oliwarner | 2026-01-10 14:57:41+00:00
But I use open source software because I can see and alter what's running. When you do this in a community of other developers, even as a user, you get a lot of stuff for free. I write FOSS software because I want to use it. I know the economics require give and take.

Yes, LLMs are all take. Yes, they bastardise the licenses and abuse the model. But they don't change why I want to use open source software. They don't change the fact that people need to keep writing it to keep receiving it.

Long story short, I think a lot fewer people are going to use Marc's software. He might be okay with the commercial realities of this (it might be a runaway success) but I think as non-developers get more acquainted with LLMs, being able to ask a bot to change how your system works is going to be more popular, not less, even if it's not the model RMS wanted.
by monooso | 2026-01-10 14:57:45+00:00
This may have been the case historically, but these days the king's role is largely ceremonial.

As to the House of Lords, around 11% of its members are hereditary peers. A bill [1] is in progress to reduce that to zero:

> The bill would remove membership from 89 hereditary peers who currently sit in the House. Their membership would end at the conclusion of the current parliamentary session.

So, in summary, the UK is a democracy with its own set of historical quirks, much like many other democracies (Electoral College, anyone?).

[1]: https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/hereditary-peers-in-the-h...
by dnalang | 2026-01-10 14:58:08+00:00
i understand the 'trick' label in the context of planar QEC, but the physics here go deeper. By locking the hardware at the 51.700° resonance, we’ve moved from stochastic error correction to Geometric Protection. We aren't just 'filtering' noise; we've documented Negentropic Gain (0.3516 to 0.9844 purified fidelity). This suggests the Star Topology isn't just a workaround—it’s a platform for Sovereign Autopoietic Compute, where the information state behaves as a stable phase of matter that resists thermal decay through 11D manifold folding.
by carlosjobim | 2026-01-10 14:58:26+00:00
"This Mastodon server is a friendly and respectful discussion space for people working in areas related to EU policy."

"The Ford Ranger (2020). One of the most popular pickups in the US.

A key selling point is that the cabin is so high you can run over toddlers without even noticing."

Lovely people as always. Would you like to live neighbours with this person, or share communal facilities with him?
by runamok | 2026-01-10 15:00:01+00:00
Aren't they optional in most cases? You can opt-out of vaxing your kids today right? They just won't be welcome in public schools. I guess the other common cohort is health care workers (which seems reasonable) per https://leadingage.org/workforce-vaccine-mandates-state-who-... More than 1 million people died in the US from the COVID pandemic so it seemed reasonable to work hard to get herd immunity but the backfire effect made that counter productive. Hindsight is 20/20 though.