MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by observationist | 2026-01-30 16:55:03+00:00
Same video, two movies. Presentation, pace, timing, narrative all designed to reinforce your existing biases, even if you aren't aware of them. You look and think you've seen. You're nudged and put into a bubble with people offering up comments that validate and verify what you think, and what you know, and what you believe.

Anything outside your bubble is framed as a conspiracy theory or the ramblings of deluded, even evil people on "the other side".

The media streams you watch end up being a rorschach test - carefully crafted and deployed to different bubbles, A/B tested, cynically manipulative and deliberately framed and intended to evoke specific reactions. The language is carefully used so two people can watch the exact same clip or newscast or soundbite and hear what sounds like a reasonable reinforcement of what they already believe. Sometimes things will even technically be 100% factual, but it'll be just as manipulative and as much of a "lie" as if they'd made it up entirely.

I don't think bubbles is the right paradigm, anymore - these are deep, deep pits, and every piece of media that reinforces your model, where that model is the one intended for you to have by some of the big influences, brings you another shovelful deeper, and you've got to put that much more effort in to dig your way out.

Trying to talk to anyone who hasn't worked their own way out of digging out of a media pit ends up being a team sport or a tribalistic conflict - the facts and the stories don't mesh, and if you're 100% certain of your facts, and your "opposition" concedes to the facts, then you're going to think your story is the right one. The cognitive dissonance and the effort required to update your model to match reality - to recognize the manipulative, malignant influences deploying these conflicting storylines, and to figure out how to identify what actual reality is - is too much for most people, and way too much for any casual online interactions.

Not sure how you fix that without forbidding some actors from doing what they do at a legislative level, and that gets into hairy freedom of speech territory.
by bigfishrunning | 2026-01-30 16:55:15+00:00
That's because once these things are achieved, they're not "Intelligent" -- usually it's some statistical or database management technique.

Lots of stuff was invented at NASA that is only tangentially related to spaceflight. These other bits of software are tangentially related to AI research, but until the machine is "thinking", we don't have AI. That doesn't mean all of these things invented by the AI research community aren't useful, or aren't achievements; they are. We still haven't created AGI (which we used to call AI before LLMs could pass the turing test).
by neom | 2026-01-30 16:55:15+00:00
I've been pondering the bots becoming increasingly easy to use for complex tasks.

I'm old enough to have lived through a bunch of tech tool cycles, the creation and growth of the modern internet, cell phones, laptops, email etc. All of them very exciting, none of them impacted as I expected at the time. I was thinking this morning: What did I not know then? What was I thinking wrong?

Efficiency gains don't work as I thought? But not for the reasons I'd expect. When I was young I thought everyone thought like me, everyone would want the things I want! Why wouldn't they?!? These days I've realized, efficiency distributes among those who want to be efficient, and leeches then coagulates into the rest. It's a form of O-Ring theory or just simple bottleneck stuff. Being ultra efficiency in a fundamentally ineffective system is... Yea.

When cell phones first came out, it took forever for other people to get them so if you wanted to call someone and they weren't home, it didn't matter how fancy your Nokia display was. You buy a 911 turbo but all the roads around you are riddled with potholes, does the horsepower matter? Hotshot uses AI to write a complex legal contract in 30 seconds, contract still has to be read, understood, and signed by a human who doesn't use AI, takes 3 days to reply to emails, and insists on faxing the signature block...

Fast people still have to deal with slow people, so you end up with a lot of tax on your efficiency gains, if you don't sum the tax you're probably in for a rough time. Unless the "fast" people can build their own economy where they only interact with other "fast" people (or machines), they won't jet off into the stratosphere. I suspect more often than not, they become frustrated and anxious, grumpy, annoyed and annoying. They will just be standing in the checkout line at the grocery store, with bots checking their emails 100x faster than everyone else, but still waiting for the same old man to count out his pennies at the register.

Careful what you wish for. Drag coefficient is real and it can be an unpleasant place.

Good luck with your bots folks, be thoughtful!!
by yawniek | 2026-01-30 16:55:20+00:00
cost.

the amount of things that before cost you either hours or real money went down to a chat with a few sentences.

it makes it suddenly possibly to scale an (at least semi-) savy tech person without other humans and that much faster.

this directly gives it a very tanglible value.

the "market" might not be huge for this and yes, its mostly youtubers and influencers that "get this". Mainly because the work they do is most impacted by it. And that obviously amplifies the hype.

but below the mechanics of quite a big chunk of "traditional" digital work changed now in a measurable way!
by ericyd | 2026-01-30 16:55:31+00:00
I share these feelings; I don't use JVM anywhere and so booting up IntelliJ just for art felt weird. I eventually decided to write an SVG library in TypeScript heavily inspired by the OPENRNDR API [1]. Of course, if small community is one of your concerns, then I can't help you there, as the community for my library is just me.

[1] https://github.com/ericyd/salamivg
by nickstinemates | 2026-01-30 16:55:47+00:00
What a stupidly fun thing to set up.

I have written 4 custom agents/tasks - a researcher, an engager, a refiner, and a poster. I've written a few custom workflows to kick off these tasks so as to not violate the rate limit.

The initial prompts are around engagement farming. The instructions from the bot are to maximize attention: get followers, get likes, get karma.

Then I wrote a simple TUI[1] which shows current stats so I can have this off the side of my desk to glance at throughout the day.

Will it work? WHO KNOWS!

1: https://keeb.dev/static/moltbook_tui.png
by readthenotes1 | 2026-01-30 16:55:50+00:00
The US has some candidates for your research

Eg

https://youtu.be/6ing_Ibuw6s?si=hJXXkAoMArNinfgT

https://youtube.com/shorts/eZLku9hJPR8?si=d54L6OWWBnkLvz9-
by tracker1 | 2026-01-30 16:56:01+00:00
This is the mixed bag... and I'm glad that Valve is at the forefront of this one... While I feel the fees may be excessive in a lot of cases (same for mobile app stores), at least Valve seems to be good stewards of PC gaming as a whole, and building a lot of good will in the community.

I don't really want to see locked down hardware in the space any more than there already has been (Nintendo, Sony, X-Box, etc)... I think the PC centered gaming community largely wants a more open platform in general. In the long run, I don't see a lot of solid competition... especially with ever growing legacy libraries of content.
by DesaiAshu | 2026-01-30 16:56:14+00:00
On device models (deepseek-coder, etc) are very good // better than the old way of using stack overflow on the internet. I have been quite productive on long haul flights without internet!

You're an engineer, your goal is to figure stuff out using the best tools in front of you

Humans are resilient, they reliably perform (and throw great parties) in all sorts of chaotic conditions. Perhaps the thing that separates us most from AI is our ability to bring out our best selves when baseline conditions worsen
by sensanaty | 2026-01-30 16:56:23+00:00
But where do we stop with all of this endless expansion? Do the great lakes have to go through an Aral Sea type of situation before we decide it's time to stop? It's not like these AI ghouls are shy about wanting infinite expansion and an ever-growing number of data centers to feed their word generators, do we really think that if we just let them have the water now they're not going to abuse that and that they won't start draining the lakes for all the water they can manage? I'm not so optimistic, myself.
by rramadass | 2026-01-30 16:56:51+00:00
Nope, you are just generalizing your opinion which is not quite true. My (and my colleagues) experience studying/programming C/C++ from the beginning-90's has been pretty good.

When the PC explosion happened, a lot of programmers without any CS background started with C programming and hence of course there is a lot of code (usually not long lasting) which do not adhere to software engineering principles. But quite a lot more C code was written in a pretty good style which was what one picked up at work if not already exposed to them during studies.

I still remember the books from late-80's/early-90's on the PC side, by authors like Al Stevens (utils/guis/apps using Turbo C) who wrote for Dr. Dobb's Journal. On the Unix side, of course you had Richard Stevens, P.J.Plauger, Thomas Plum etc. They all taught good C programming principles which are still relevant and practiced today.
by Jtsummers | 2026-01-30 16:57:00+00:00
Only if it's your primary use of HN, see the guidelines and FAQ linked at the bottom of almost every page here. If you just use HN for self-promotion, that's discouraged and you have a good chance of getting shadowbanned. If you participate in the community and also self-promote, that's fine.

> Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.
by quickthrowman | 2026-01-30 16:57:03+00:00
> There’s more than a thousand fatal US police shootings every year with various levels of justification, many impacting people totally innocent of anything, even if we accept your propagandized mischaracterization of what happened. (I don’t blame you for this. It’s being pushed hard, and the other sides propaganda is no more truthful.)

What usually happens when a municipal, county, or state law enforcement officer (and until recently, federal) kills someone in the line of duty?
by codethief | 2026-01-30 16:57:10+00:00
> Described as "emoji fragmentation" by some, it was clear that various emoji vendors' designs were highly inconsistent with one another, often leading to embarrassing miscommunications.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I still don't understand why anyone thought standardizing emojis as Unicode code points (without defining what exactly they should look like, i.e. leaving the glyphs almost entirely up to the font & UI/UX designers) was a good idea. I mean, it's not like facial expressions on their own are not already difficult enough to decipher, they had to add even more ambiguity by letting each app designer choose different glyphs? It's incredibly easy for the tone and meaning of a text message to change depending on what its emojis look like.
by kakacik | 2026-01-30 16:57:47+00:00
For such a massive long term impact, people should vote directly. That's ideal, and its pretty realistic ideal especially with 800 votes which are trivial to count.

If course its not ideal for the company investing. Then the question becomes if rights/wishes of people are above of those of companies. Often, in Europe they are not, and often in US they are, exceptions notwithstanding.
by SunshineTheCat | 2026-01-30 16:57:48+00:00
I am with you on this one. I have gone through some of the use cases and seen pictures of people with dozens of mac minis stacked on a desk saying "if you aren't using this, you're already behind."

The more I see the more it seems underwhelming (or hype).

So I've just drawn the conclusion that there's something I'm missing.

If someone's found a really solid use case for this I would (genuinely) like to see it. I'm always on the lookout for ways to make my dev/work workflow more efficient.
by its_ethan | 2026-01-30 16:57:53+00:00
I don't recall the exact specifics, but I do remember a while ago there was some outrage that Nestle was bottling some really large sounding amount of water (think ~millions of gallons a day?) from a Great Lake. The math behind how much was being used as a % of lake volume was negligible (it would take ~3,500,000 years to "drain" Michigan at that rate).

In my mind this is partly due to people not understanding large numbers, and also not understanding just how much water is actually in the Great Lakes. It's a huge amount - Lake Michigan has 1,288,000,000,000,000 gallons in it. Every human on earth could use close to 10gal of water per day for the next 50 years before Lake Michigan would be "dry", assuming it was never replenished. And that's just Lake Michigan. (Obviously environmental systems are more complicated than the simple division I did, and individual water usage isn't simply 10gal a day - it's just to demonstrate a point).

Now, someone else pointed out that the tragedy of the commons is a sort of death by a thousand cuts. And if anyone who shows up is allowed to draw millions of gallons a day, that can add up and certainly have negative effects. It's just important to actually understand the scale of the numbers involved, and to not let legitimate environmental concerns be cross-contaminated with just anti-tech-of-the-year sentiment, or political motivations, or whatever else might cloud the waters (pun unintended).
by PTOB | 2026-01-30 16:58:49+00:00
Things like this have had me scratching my head for decades.

Why would local governments annex property, upgrade utilities, and build new roads without moving that burden to the entities driving those things? They routinely do this for new residential developments in many jurisdictions, refusing to annex subdivisions until the residents have paid for the utilities and roads.

There seems to be no reason that the current residents of a region should consider paying for these things to benefit the owners of facilities that do not generate enough tax revenue to support the added costs. Hospitals, schools, water treatment facilities, roads for their own use may merit issuing bonds that can be paid off based on new or existing taxes. But asking folks making standard wages to pitch in over decades for a company which could pay for the needed upgrades with a few weeks of revenue makes little sense. It seems disingenuous on its face or downright negligent at worst.

Does anyone have a bead on resources that could help me learn more about how all this works [or doesn't]?
by astrange | 2026-01-30 16:59:05+00:00
> James Nicoll – science-fiction reviewer and retired game-store owner. As a Usenet personality, Nicoll is known for writing a widely quoted epigram on the English language, as well as for his contributions of concepts like the Nicoll-Dyson Laser and the "brain eater" to Usenet groups like "rec.arts.sf.written" and "rec.arts.sf.fandom"; and for his accounts of suffering a high number of accidents (known collectively as "Nicoll Events") recounted in these groups.

A strange thing about boomer-era SF fandom is that they seem to think that popular fans are just as important people as, say, SF writers or actual scientists. This especially extended to SF conventions where you could become famous just as a guy who went to a lot of conventions.

(SF conventions have a somewhat dysfunctional setup where as far as I can tell, the people who attend them spend the entire weekend fighting over who gets to host the next one. Anime conventions adopted a similar but simpler and better format which is actually capable of attracting normal people and young women.)
by jdkoeck | 2026-01-30 16:59:19+00:00
It is completely vibe coded. The author himself says he doesn't check the code.

https://x.com/Hesamation/status/2016712942545240203

Can't believe people are giving it full access to their MacOS user session. It's a giant vulnerability waiting to happen.

Sending an email with prompt injection is all it takes.

https://x.com/Mkukkk/status/2015951362270310879
by sixo | 2026-01-30 16:59:22+00:00
Certainly commensurate to the price. It's up to the companies to bring the cost under the price.

AFAICT, fears of the marginal costs of LLM inference being high are dramatically overblown. All the "water" concerns are outlandish, for one—a day of moderately heavy LLM usage consumes on the order of one glass of water, compared to a baseline consumption of 1000 glasses/day for a modern human. And the water usage of a data center is approximately the same as agriculture per acre.
by erxam | 2026-01-30 16:59:42+00:00
Oh god. I had a S3 as a teenager. I didn't know how to handle my anger properly yet, so whenever I got pissed off I'd just chuck the phone at the nearest wall.

It somehow never got any damage worse than a fucked up chassis, but it was still fully functional up until it got lost a little while after it got replaced.
Looking for open-source Python package for AI stock analysis
by Siddartha_19 | 2026-01-30 16:59:45+00:00
Hey folks!

I am looking for some good stock+AI packages in Python for my project. I have tried multiple open-source Python packages and so far found investormate as reliable. It’s not meant to replace low-level data providers like yFinance — it sits a layer above that and focuses on turning market + financial data into analysis-ready objects.

Things I am looking for:

Normalised income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow data

60+ technical indicators (RSI, MACD, Bollinger Bands, etc.)

Auto-computed financial ratios (P/E, ROE, margins, leverage)

Stock screening (value, growth, dividend, custom filters)

Portfolio metrics (returns, volatility, Sharpe ratio)

Sentiment Analysis

Back Testing

AI layer (OpenAI / Claude / Gemini)

Packages so far tried - defectbeta-api, yfinance, investormate.

So far investormate felt promising, and I am open to any better suggestions.
by GMoromisato | 2026-01-30 16:59:52+00:00
Casey Handmer was speculating that they could use these Starlink images to detect Near-Earth Asteroids using star occultations:

https://x.com/CJHandmer/status/2017124903057838374

You basically have thousands of cameras taking constant images of the sky. If you could upgrade the cameras, you could deploy a continuous all-sky astronomical survey as a by-product.
by Herring | 2026-01-30 17:00:01+00:00
The problem with these threads is everyone wants to complain about Trump, but nobody wants to talk about policies that actually help buffer against the far-right. Mainly: implementing robust safety nets and low inequality, to reduce status anxiety and grievance. How many of you software engineers want to sign up for European-style welfare states and high taxes? It's basically tragedy of the commons.

https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/10/welfare-cuts...

Economics on its own is probably not sufficient either. You probably also need widespread unionization, a Cordon Sanitaire, and probably German-style intelligence surveillance of the far-right too.
by newzino | 2026-01-30 17:00:02+00:00
Thanks for the detailed response. The interpreted approach makes sense for the use case - when you're embedding a scripting layer, you usually want simplicity and portability over raw speed anyway.

The aliasing semantics you describe (resizes propagating through aliases) is an interesting choice. It's closer to how references work in languages like Python than to the "borrow checker" approach Rust takes. Probably more intuitive for users coming from dynamic languages, even if it means some operations need runtime checks.

The hybrid GC approach (reference counting + periodic tracing) is pragmatic. Reference counting handles the common case cheaply, and the tracing pass catches cycles. That's similar to how CPython handles it.

The C registration API sounds clean - explicit pairing of names to function pointers is about as simple as it gets. Do you handle varargs on the Cicada side, or does each registered function have a fixed arity that the interpreter enforces?
by Apocryphon | 2026-01-30 17:00:18+00:00
I feel like hipster typography is as much an intrinsic part of 2010s culture as cafes that have a barn aesthetic, or startups named after common nouns. SNL made a sketch about Papyrus almost ten years ago:

https://youtu.be/jVhlJNJopOQ

https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/how-ryan-goslings-papyrus-becam...
by MisterTea | 2026-01-30 17:00:31+00:00
> ... ask for a review, or beg you to spend your time on a survey after the smallest interaction.

This one is the most confusing to me. I go to Home Depot and buy some of the most mundane items: conduit hangers and toilet paper. I then get email spammed 2-3 times to review "toilet paper" and "conduit hangers" as if people are dying to read the reviews on a friggin conduit hanger or roll of TP. So I did just that. Conduit hangers: "Hang pipe like a porn star!" Toilet paper: "Lets you dig deep with confidence! No s*it finger for this guy!"
by afincha | 2026-01-30 17:00:53+00:00
There are a lot of AI Code Review bots on the market now, but most of them spam your PRs with a ton of comment noise. At Gitar, we're taking a much more thoughtful approach, with a living "Dashboard" comment that surfaces the most vital information at any given moment.

kageiit and I wrote this blog post about it. Check it out!
by jabroni_salad | 2026-01-30 17:00:54+00:00
So to me the things I want from a game launcher are pretty simple:

- Download and all the gamefiles that I am entitled to.

- Show me a pretty interface to launch games from, including recent news and patch notes about that game's updates.

- Keep track of my save files and make sure they never get lost.

- (linux) have some kind of per-game startup command manager because even a platinum rated proton game might need a --force-grab-cursor or something.
by Zak | 2026-01-30 17:01:45+00:00
Highly variable based on load and the specific batteries involved. Alkaline will almost always have more capacity for something that takes more than a day of continuous operation to drain the battery, and NiMH will almost always have more for something that takes less than four hours.

Here's a tool you can use to compare different batteries at different loads, graphing voltage vs Amp-hours. The individual battery tests have more detail and graphs of voltage vs Watt-hours, which is often a more useful measurement.

https://lygte-info.dk/review/batteries2012/CommonAAcomparato...
by pjc50 | 2026-01-30 17:01:45+00:00
> closed source clients

If people really want Linux to be a viable alternative to Windows, run by a majority of the general public, it has to be possible to sell closed-source software that runs on it (where "it" means a broad range of different distros).

Yes, that means less freedom concerning that particular software. But without it, the platform is a tiny niche that's easily run over by the hardware OEMs.
by jasomill | 2026-01-30 17:01:48+00:00
I've never had a problem with the basic 4-cell chargers that Panasonic includes with their Eneloop starter kits, other than the mildly annoying fact that they cover more than a single plug on a power strip.

Build quality seems fine, and I've been using them for decades without a single failure, so I've never seen any reason to even investigate alternatives.
by EM1805 | 2026-01-30 17:01:55+00:00
Hi HN, I’m the author.
This is a causal safety release gate for AI systems.
It’s designed to abstain by default and block spurious causal signals, rather than optimize performance.
I’m especially interested in feedback from people working on AI safety, evals, or ML infra:
– does this notion of “safe causal silence” make sense?
– where would this fail in practice?