MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alex1138 | 2026-01-18 22:17:28+00:00
Steve Huffman is an awful CEO. With that being said I've always been curious how the rest of the industry (for example, the web-wide practice of autoplaying videos) was constructed to catch up with Facebook's fraudulent metrics. Their IPO (and Zuckerberg is certainly known to lie about things) was possibly fraud and we know that they lied about their own video metrics (to the point it's suspected CollegeHumor shut down because of it)
by fritzorino | 2026-01-18 22:17:39+00:00
The primary source agrees with me, not you:

> I replied that the possible consequence of absorption of Denmark by a great power would create a situation which it would be difficult to meet other than by occupation of the Islands, and such action would undoubtedly cause serious consequences

> The other circumstance was that if Denmark voluntarily, or under coercion, transferred title to the Danish West Indies to another European power, which would seek to convert them into a naval base.

It is nowhere stated that they'd be annexed regardless.

I don't know what's up with you Americans so desperate to use the same international law that your fat retarded paedophile is shitting on every single day to justify imperial conquest. Come on guys, be consistent.
by jemmyw | 2026-01-18 22:17:54+00:00
This is the madness of the whole thing - the US could already build more bases in Greenland if they wanted to.

This isn't about building bases or military strategy or even resources. If it were about those things then the US could take over Greenland slowly with little effort. My understanding is the population there would have welcomed investment. The US could have done some minor leg work and in 10-20 years Greenland would have been closer / keen to join, or whatever.
by gejose | 2026-01-18 22:18:01+00:00
This sounds like an engineering quality problem rather than a tooling problem.

Well structured redux (or mobx or zustand for that matter) can be highly maintainable & performant, in comparison to a codebase with poorly thought out useState calls littered everywhere and deep levels of prop drilling.

Redux Toolkit has been a nice batteries-included way to use redux for a while now https://redux-toolkit.js.org/

But the popularity of Redux especially in the earlier days of react means there are quite a lot of redux codebases around, and by now many of them are legacy.
Show HN: Meepr – A Quiet Social Network
by neom | 2026-01-18 22:18:41+00:00
Hello. :)

I've noticed for the last few years it feels like everyone has been saying the same thing, that social media got baaad, timelines feel hostile, nothing you see is actually from people you chose to follow, and every platform seems optimized for outrage, screenshots, and engagement bait rather than the original microblog ideas of the early 2010s

I miss the 2010 social styles, where you have to share your @name with a friend IRL because search wasn't really search... A place where you followed people, saw what they wrote, stumbled into interesting discussions, and hashtags meant something because the people using them actually belonged there.

So I built meepr this weekend. I've been thinking about it daily for over year now, so I finally did it.

At the surface it looks very boring on purpose. Short posts. Replies. Follows. No quote dunking. No infinite algorithmic feed. Your main timeline is just people you follow, in order.

On meepr, hashtags act more like rooms than magnets for spam. If you browse a tag, you don’t see everyone on the internet trying to hijack it. You see people who actually talk about that thing, consistently, over time. You can't access a hash tag globally till you've used it a bunch, or at least discussed the topic the hashtag is about.. So, local tags feel local. Topic tags feel like real communities instead of drive by hot takes.

There is no trending tab. No engagement bait incentives. No rage sorting. You don’t get pushed content because it’s “performing well,” you get pulled into conversations because YOU find them.

This is very much an experiment. It’s small, opinionated, and probably not for everyone. It's also currently running on a tiny VM that I devops'd myself so it might crash. If people like and use it, i'll make it $3/mth to cover the infra + prevent bots.

https://meepr.co/je
by secretsatan | 2026-01-18 22:18:47+00:00
I’m a bit scared of this theory, i think it will be true, ai will eat the internet, then they’ll paywall it.

Innovation outside of rich coorps will end. No one will visit forums, innovation will die in a vacuum, only the richest will have access to what the internet was, raw innovation will be mined through EULAs, people striving to make things will just have ideas stolen as a matter of course.
by octoberfranklin | 2026-01-18 22:19:05+00:00
preventing normies from accessing Anna's Archive is what they care about

Seriously?

Anna's Archive hosts ebooks and scholarly journal articles.

Not the kind of stuff your average Instagram Influencer (TM) is into.

I'd be utterly shocked if more than 1% of the population had ever used Anna's Archive. This isn't like Hollywood movie torrenting sites or IPTV sports streaming piracy. It's a long way from mainstream.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-01-18 22:19:42+00:00
Here's my metric for "LLM-assisted" anything: if I, as someone who is well-informed on LLMs and pay close attention to the content I consume, can't tell an LLM generated the article/code/image/music/voice, it's fine and indicates that you as a person put enough effort into shaping the output to claim it as your own. If you can't even be bothered to do that much, to make it not completely obvious that an LLM generated it, you have no right to call it "assisted" or stake any ownership of the content. And I think it is frankly insulting to your readers that you would expect them to read something you couldn't even bother prioritising enough to write. If your ideas are actually worth sharing with the world, they would be worth making the time to write about.

And to be especially clear, my objection is not rooted in the moral aspect of LLM generation (although they are frequently used to plagiarise as well). My objection is that if I can tell the LLM generated it, it means the content is genuinely garbage. LLM output for writing is garbage. So too for code. So too for art. With enough human effort on top of it (usually more than doing it from scratch, IME), you can get it into a not-garbage state, but you didn't, and instead I wasted my time reading part of an article in which the writing was too bad for me to finish it.

From my perspective, the internet I once knew has been destroyed. The spambots won. Now spambots are openly accepted, promoted, reach the front page all the time. Somehow it is not a moderation policy to kill spambot posts and ban offenders. All because spambot technology advanced enough to fool people who are just consuming content passively. And now I have to sift through so, so much garbage to find the people who are still putting effort into creating content. Their work is being buried. It feels like living in a surreal nightmare for the past two years.

Footnote: Although I called the content you posted garbage, this is not an attack on you, because you did not write the content. I have not personally insulted you, so I hope that rather than taking this personally, you might reflect on whether this is really the way you want to express your ideas to the world. You might get views, but are your ideas really resonating? A lot of people mindlessly scroll the internet to kill time rather than critically engaging with content and digesting it. Is your ideal audience one who reads your idea and then forgets about it seconds later as they move on to the next shiny thing on the screen?
by holowoodman | 2026-01-18 22:19:44+00:00
Yes, what I told is a slight simplification. Since any company is usually not an end user and does something with its inventory that will sell to some end user, you can always get your VAT back. The way this works is that you as a company just never pay any VAT in the first place if you have a special VAT tax ID that you have to apply for and give to all your business partners. But that usually only works when not exporting or importing.
by djhn | 2026-01-18 22:19:45+00:00
CAC-LTV by itself is not a great long term strategy. But it can appear like one in the short term to investors.

So there is a plethora of companies happily dumping investor money into paid customer acquisition.

Blue Apron was a classic example of borderline fraudulent growth metrics and a cash grab IPO before the customer acquisition funnel collapsed.
by fritzorino | 2026-01-18 22:19:54+00:00
>"survived" - millions and millions were killed.

We're still here. Still the greatest civilisation on the planet. There's a reason that fat American retards talk about Western Civilisation, not American Civilisation, it's because they want to be us. But they aren't, they're not Western. We are. You guys are more like a Latin American country these days.
by bitshiftfaced | 2026-01-18 22:20:12+00:00
The imbalance comes from how VAT and US taxes work differently. A European car comes to the show floor free of VAT. A US car likely has sales tax still embedded into the costs, and tariffs get multiplied on top of it. I'm not saying that it's anyone's "fault", but it is an advantage for countries that have VAT.
by Loughla | 2026-01-18 22:20:23+00:00
The Hyperion Cantos hits this topic. We're the good guys and we're the bad guys. And sometimes we're the bad guys through no malicious intent, just volume and social norms (the consul's tale in the first book). Other times we're the bad guys to do good things (Lamia's tale).

The first book is really good by itself. The others are just as good but very different and way more political (meaning covering the politics of that universe, not political like involving current day politics).
by JohnLeitch | 2026-01-18 22:20:43+00:00
>I'm easily getting twice my workload done with AI, and I'm not even leveraging the full extent of the tools.

It seems that every person who says this never elaborates on the nature of their work. What exactly are you writing? What languages? Technologies? What does the LLM assist with? In what ways does it hamper more than help?

I ask these questions because I have yet to see any meaningful, real world application of AI at my job. There's definitely interest, but every exploratory effort seems to fall flat, sometimes comedically so e.g. recently we had Sonnet 4.5 recommend some JavaScript for a UI hang we were looking into. It also recommended we use WebWorkers to improve perf. Sounds great. Looks great, with nice markdown and whatnot. Too bad it was a legacy MFC application written in C and C++.
by ben_w | 2026-01-18 22:20:50+00:00
> NATO would likely do nothing substantive. No economic repercussions.

At best, you still lose all your allies.

At worst, why are you willing to make this gamble? You go immediately go from two nuclear armed nations who "threaten" US interests in Greenland, to four.

> Any kind of financial maneuver any country would try against the US would mostly hurt them more.

The former allies could cost you in the order of $1.3 trillion fairly directly.

Worth it, to defend their sovereignty. Especially as the other half of that trade is things they're already saying they want to move away from.

> All the rich people who run the world behind the scenes don’t want their assets to deflate.

And you think the US doesn't have this exact category of rich people, who will pull the US back from this seppuku?

There's a reason "TACO" was coined WRT Trump.

> The EU could fracture over any kind of major retaliation.

1. And you think the US is unified right now?

2. And you think the EU wouldn't be concerned about fracture over failing to retaliate?

> Don’t you feel the pantomime of it all?

No.

I am reorganising my assets on the assumption of a total, 100%, trade blockade. All potential backdoors in hardware and software being activated. All goods, all services, being subject to escalating tariffs to split the economies apart as fast as possible in order to show preparation and readiness for a hot war. With nukes being an open question by both sides, and MAD being relevant again, but preparing for that is beyond me.

How would the US respond to Russia trying this BS to get Alaska back?
by srcreigh | 2026-01-18 22:21:18+00:00
Somebody has to go back to first principles. I wrote pig scripts in 2014 in Palo Alto. Yes, it was shit. IYKYK. But the author, and near everybody in this thread, are wrong to generalize.

PCIe would have to be millions of times faster than Ethernet before command line tools are actually faster than distributed computing and I don't see that happening any time soon.
by shimman | 2026-01-18 22:21:58+00:00
Don't both, people like them hold society back. I suggest you go out and talk to your physical neighbors about taxing big tech, it has a huge amount of support. The only question is do you want a democratic administration to use said tax revenues to benefit the public or a republican administration to benefit a few private actors.

It's going to happen and I know what side I'd rather be on.
by al_borland | 2026-01-18 22:22:07+00:00
> part of the pitch was getting the buyer to come to a particular idea "all on their own" then make them feel good on how smart they were.

I can usually tell when someone is leading like this and I resent them for trying to manipulate me. I start giving the opposite answer they’re looking for out of spite.

I’ve also had AI do this to me. At the end of it all, I asked why it didn’t just give me the answer up front. It was a bit of a conspiracy theory, and it said I’d believe it more if I was lead there to think I got there on my own with a bunch of context, rather than being told something fairly outlandish from the start. That fact that AI does this to better reinforce the belief in conspiracy theories is not good.
by Animats | 2026-01-18 22:22:18+00:00
The parts of the command structure, Inspectors General and attorneys in the Judge Advocate General's office, that are supposed to enforce that have been gutted.[1] Secretary Hegseth said that the removals were necessary because he didn't want them to pose any "roadblocks to orders that are given by a commander in chief."

[1] https://www.military.com/daily-news/2025/02/24/people-are-ve...
by win311fwg | 2026-01-18 22:23:29+00:00
Previously? There was an understanding of the problem trying to be solved. The gaps left the pangs of "this isn't right".

Now I have no way to know where things stand. It's all disconnected and abstracted. The ticket may suggest that something is done, but if the customer isn't happy, it isn't actually. Worse, now we have people adding tickets without any intent to do the work themselves and there isn't a great way to determine if they're just making up random work, which is something that definitely happens sometimes, or if it truly reflects on what the customer needs.

You might say that isn't technically a problem with ticketing itself, and I would agree. The problems are really with what came with the ticketing. But what would you need tickets for other than to try and eliminate the customer from the picture? If you understand the problem alongside the customer, you know what needs to be done just as you know when you need to eat lunch. Do you create 'lunchtime' tickets for yourself? I've personally never found the need.
by hirako2000 | 2026-01-18 22:23:36+00:00
Not my experience. All frontier models I constantly test, agentic or not, produce code less maintainable than my (very good) peers and myself (on a decent day).

Plus they continue to introduce performance blunders.

Crying wolves, on day maybe there will be a wolf and I may be the last of us to check whether that's true.
by cogman10 | 2026-01-18 22:23:41+00:00
People speaking out against Trump and ICE are getting shot in the head. So I really see no difference.

ICE is sending brown people and people with accents to concentration/death camps. Say what you will about the Uyghurs, but China provided them with their own rooms and toilet facilities. ICE has been forcing detainees to drink toilet water and eat moldy bread [1]. All while hiring rapists and violent criminals for their enforcement.

Really, the US is actually worse than what China was at this point and China was bad.

[1] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/12/estados-unido...
by brandonmb | 2026-01-18 22:24:10+00:00
Are you trying to make a distinction between writing software vs writing code? LLMs are pretty great at writing good code (a relative term of course) if you lay things out for them. I use Claude Code on both greenfield new projects and a giant corporate mono repo and it works pretty well in both. In the giant mono repo, I have the benefit of many of my coworkers developing really nice Claude.md files and skills, so that helps a lot.

It’s very similar to working with a college hire SWE: you need to break things down to give them a manageable chunk and do a bit of babysitting, but I’m much more productive than I was before. Particularly in the broad range of things where I know enough to know what needs to be done but I’m not super familiar with the framework to do it.
by jacquesm | 2026-01-18 22:24:28+00:00
Nice to see this posted. I spent probably too much time on Stirling engines and associated stuff (heat engines in general, the Vuilleumier family of devices and other interesting bits & pieces).

It's so tempting, you think there has to be a way to make it work. But I haven't found one yet and I more or less gave up on it. The most practical ones that I'm aware of are in spacecraft for extreme cooling and in a commercially available generator.

If you've never seen one up close I highly recommend building a model of one and watching it run, it is complete magic compared to internal combustion engines which tend to be noisy and dirty. Stirling engines run so quiet you have to be right up close to realize it is running at all (and even then you probably will subconsciously put your hand on it to verify that it is not just your imagination).

The Philips company, when it still meant something, put together a whole slew of pilots: a boat and a bus, and an endless number of them in the lab. Fortunes have been sunk in these and with preciously little to show for it other than an extreme appreciation for how hard it is to make a really good seal.

Wurm et al's book is the standard in the field, it is very thorough and gives a very good grounding in the theory as well as some appreciation on why this is both a tempting and very hard subject at the same time. Most engines are hard to think of and relatively easy to engineer once you've thought of them. There are two exceptions, Stirling engines and Wankel engines and both have very strongly related problems. Solve the seal issue and the world will pave the way to your door with gold.
by jitl | 2026-01-18 22:24:38+00:00
None of the systems I mentioned existed at the time the article was published. I think the author would love duckdb which is a very speedy CLI SQL thingy that reads and writes data in all sorts of formats. It fits in great with other Unix CLI stuff.

Many of the projects I mentioned you could see as a response to OP and the 2015 “Scalability, but at what COST?” paper which benchmarked distributed systems to see how many cores they need to beat a single thread. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26925449)
by swyx | 2026-01-18 22:24:48+00:00
> Apps may come and go, but files stay—at least, as long as our apps think in files.

yes: https://www.swyx.io/data-outlasts-code-but

all lasting work is done in files/data (can be parsed permissionlessly, still useful if partially corrupted), but economic incentives keep pushing us to keep things in code (brittle, dies basically when one of maintainer|buildtools|hardware substrate dies).

when standards emerge (forcing code to accept/emit data) that is worth so much to a civilization. a developer ecosystem tipping the incentive scales such that companies like the Googl/Msft/OpenAI/Anthropics of the world WANT to contribute/participate in data standards rather than keep things proprietary is one of the most powerful levers we as a developer community collectively hold.

(At the same time we shoudl also watch out for companies extending/embracing/extinguishing standards... although honestly outside of Chrome I struggle to think of a truly successful example)
by jauntywundrkind | 2026-01-18 22:25:06+00:00
The sympathy I have for mods is very real. But I do want to mention that flagging is typically not a moderator activity (afaik). Hacker News allows anyone whose been around for a bit to join in suppressing whatever they feel like. There's very few checks or balances on this. There's no accountability. Silent veto, silent death.
by sethev | 2026-01-18 22:25:35+00:00
As you point out in your linked comment, the original essay captured the zeitgeist of the time. It also influenced and inspired many people. From that perspective, it's hard for me to agree that it was bad. However, I don't think the content was original at the time (perhaps that's what you mean by bad?) - in the sense that ESR wasn't out ahead of people blazing some new trail and it also didn't hold up very well factually.
by frabonacci | 2026-01-18 22:26:00+00:00
Correct, Containerization APIs are Linux VMs specific.

There's a kernel-level check in the Hypervisor framework that enforces the 2 VM limit, and bypassing it violates Apple's EULA.

Nice technical deep-dive on the how here: https://khronokernel.com/macos/2023/08/08/AS-VM.html
by MomsAVoxell | 2026-01-18 22:26:35+00:00
As a 13-year old, I didn’t have an assembler so had to write one first, in BASIC and then eventually in assembler. It was the lack of the thing which made me proficient in building the thing lacking. Plus, my 8-bit machine at the time (Oric Atmos) didn’t have much software distribution in my neck of the woods ..
by jchw | 2026-01-18 22:26:57+00:00
Containers are just processes plus some namespacing, nothing really stops you from running very huge tasks on Kubernetes nodes. I think the argument for containers and Kubernetes is pretty good owing to their operational advantages (OCI images for distributing software, distributed cron jobs in Kubernetes, observability tools like Falco, and so forth).

So I totally understand why people preemptively choose Kubernetes before they are scaling to the point where having a distributed scheduler is strictly necessary. Hadoop, on the other hand, you're definitely paying a large upfront cost for scalability you very much might not need.
by jijijijij | 2026-01-18 22:27:05+00:00
> So it’s not actually gone?

It is? Dude, just check yourself, instead of sealioning?!

It's in /active, not frontpage or 15 pages in as stated above. It's not marked anything, which would also show next to the title of the post itself. So what's your fucking offense? If all of this is of no concern to you, why bother commenting? Yeah, thanks for pointing out I can write mails somewhere. I should also write my representative and call the embassy. And sorry, I haven't read every thread ever to know what Dang said at some point in the past. Well, what did he say about opaque visibility manipulation? How about leaving a message in respective threads?

I was just pointing out there is intransparent, weird censorship for this post. I don't care as much about the alleged reasons. People should be aware this is a covertly distorted discussion.
by ytoawwhra92 | 2026-01-18 22:27:09+00:00
> I explained, from first principals, how it fits, and received feedback along the lines of "our engineers agreed with your technical assessment, but that's not the answer we wanted, so we're going to pass". I've had this experience a good handful of times.

Probably a better outcome than being hired onto a team where everyone know you're technically correct but they ignore your suggestions for some mysterious (to you) reason.