MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zem | 2026-01-30 18:56:14+00:00
my two favourite works of his are "night watch" and "going postal". it's honestly super impressive that they were written so long after he started to decline and were still so good.

I'm currently in the middle of a complete chronological reread of the discworld books, just finished "thud" and "wintersmith" back to back and while they were definitely weak in places it's amazing how much of his genius still shone through. feeling a little apprehensive about the later books though, I remember some of them being really bad, especially "snuff" :(
by gjsman-1000 | 2026-01-30 18:57:08+00:00
> for their contributions to DRM

You're assuming Hollywood studios would ever release their content without DRM of some kind. They were quite content to ignore computers entirely if they didn't bend.

The world where Widevine doesn't exist isn't a DRM free one; but a world where an iPad or Smart TV can stream and a PC can't.
by sn9 | 2026-01-30 18:57:11+00:00
Fiber consumption has long been known to reduce cholesterol levels in a dose-dependent fashion.

Current recommendations are to get 15+ grams of fiber per 1000 Calories, but we know from, e.g., hunter-gatherer populations that humans can eat far more than that.

Building a diet around whole food sources that are high in fiber and protein is basically all you need for a healthy diet, constrained by however many calories you need to support a healthy weight.

Fruits, veggies, legumes, whole grains, nuts, seeds, etc. should make up the majority of your diet.
by rideontime | 2026-01-30 18:57:11+00:00
> I don’t know how many people are involved in managing the ClawHub registry, but there is no evidence that the skills listed there are scanned by any security tooling. Many of the payloads we found were visible in plain text in the first paragraph of the SKILL.md file.

I shouldn't still be shocked by the incompetence and/or negligence of these people, and yet I am.
by Zababa | 2026-01-30 18:58:00+00:00
>It's pretty insidious to think that these AI labs want you become so dependent on them so that once the VC-gravy-train stops they can hike the token price 10x and you'll still pay because you have no other choice.

I don't think that's true? From what I understand most labs are making money from subscription users (maybe not if you include training costs, but still, they're not selling at a loss).

>(thankfully market dynamics and OSS alternatives will probably stop this but it's not a guarantee, you need like at least six viable firms before you usually see competitive behavior)

OpenAI is very aggressive with the volume of usage you can get from Codex, Google/DeepMind with Gemini. Anthropic reduced the token price with the latest Opus release (4.5).
by robertheadley | 2026-01-30 18:58:31+00:00
I will have to look into this this weekend. Antigravity is my current favorite agentic IDE and I have been having problems getting it to explicitly follow my agent.md settings.

If I remind it, it will be go, "oh yes, ok, sure." then do it, but the whole point is that I want to optimize my time with the agent.
by adrianmonk | 2026-01-30 18:58:35+00:00
It means you do an electrochemical reaction that releases an oxygen molecule, like the original explanation said. It doesn't really matter what reaction it is, but it could for example be electrolysis, where you split 2x H2O into 2x H2 and 1x O2.

The point is this reaction is reversible. In one direction, you end up with fewer O2 molecules than you had before. In the other direction, you end up with more.
by jadbox | 2026-01-30 18:58:44+00:00
Just a reminder of two facts:

- AI without "higher intelligence" could still take over. LLMs do not have to be smart or conscious to cause global problems.

- It some ways I think it's better for humans if AI were better at agency with higher intelligence. Any idiot can cause a chemical leak that destroys a population. It takes higher awareness to say "no, this is not good for my environment".

Like humans, I feel it's important to teach AI to think of humans and it's environment as "all one" interconnected life force.
by CurrentB | 2026-01-30 18:59:21+00:00
Someone else linked these in the replies, but that's simply not true. Most land taken up to grow plants is used to inefficiently feed livestock. Feeding humans plants only would be much much more efficient in terms of land use.

https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
by PaulHoule | 2026-01-30 18:59:24+00:00
I had an Epson Ecotank ET-3000 series and was disappointed to find that the prints faded noticeably in just three month! I did a lot of research on ink permanence and got an ET-8550 and prints I made four years on that look pretty good.

Third party ink is trash though and there is no accountability. All the time I see on forums that somebody tried to make a borderless print and got an inksplosion and the common denominator is third party ink.
by piva00 | 2026-01-30 18:59:45+00:00
> Feel free to read more about literal US troops deployed on the frontline in the Baltics, and in Eastern Europe

I'm very aware, and again: what's lost is the trust that this means anything right now. Your government is fickle and spineless, it doesn't bode well to rely on it, it has cozied up with Putin through Trump so why should I believe those troops will actually be activated? Why, exactly? Trust is lost, that's a fact.

> Ok so if the US is cozying up with many far-right groups in Europe as well, that means the US and China are operating the same. Ok that's neutral.

I never said that, don't put words in my mouth, just this week it's probably the 3rd or 4th time an American here on HN tries to do that, it's quite tiresome.

I did say that the USA is not better in that term since it's doing the same so your argument is nil. If China is bad for doing that then the USA (which includes you) as it is right now has no moral stand to use that as argument.

> The US has threatened to annex Greenland, which, let's be honest was most likely an extremely poor, stupid, and bombastic negotiating tactic as the island is effectively undefended and if the EU is going to own it they need to increase defense spending there to levels that are satisfactory to the United States.

We don't care if it was a negotiation tactic, the end result is the same: you've threatened us, there's no friendship or alliance that survives that unscathed. It was stupid, don't you think these actions have political implications? Growing dissatisfaction with the USA means electing people who will continue the trend of decoupling, this "tactic" has consequences, and the consequence is to not be so deep into the USA's influence, you've proven you don't care about that.

> And while I disagree completely with the Trump admin's approach, getting really angry about that one thing, and then all of sudden pretending that is somehow worse than the Chinese helping Russia physically attack Ukraine is beyond bizarre to me. But maybe that's kind of the point - EU doesn't actually care much about Ukraine.

The EU has spent more money to supply Ukraine than the USA, Europe has been taking over the vacuum the USA is leaving after electing Trump because the USA does not care a single yota about Ukraine, on the contrary: your administration is led by someone who continuously praise Putin, and is very likely heavily influenced by Putin and the Russian government. Don't come with "no u" onto this.

You need to accept the USA as we knew before is over, there's no coming back from MAGA-adjacent stuff for generations, the seeds have been sown, your society is MAGA, like it or not. We outside the USA need to be prepared for this new world, and detaching from your sick society is one of the required steps.

Again, China is, at the very least, predictable. You aren't, go fix your house if you want that impression to be changed.
by welferkj | 2026-01-30 19:00:33+00:00
I'm "allergic to per capita" specifically in cases where it doesn't matter but keeps getting brought up as a bad faith retort.

As an example, it doesn't matter who emits CO2 or where from, since we're all emitting it into the same air, and the only thing that matters is the absolute amount. Similarly, I imagine it's cold comfort for domestic animals in subsaharan Africa that their torturers, rapists, and murderers are marginally less prolific than those in other regions.
by buescher | 2026-01-30 19:00:35+00:00
The fact that the Apple II met the new FCC requirements was a major competitive advantage for Apple, and there have been rumors over the years about how that happened. The higher emissions allowance was why you saw the big shift from monsters like the Atari 800 (heavy cast metal frame, aluminum or pot metal) and Commodore PET to lighter chassis like the Atari XL series and the Commodore VIC-20 and C64.
Ask HN: When has someone reached a level of mastery in software?
by Desafinado | 2026-01-30 19:00:40+00:00
In other trades we often speak about experience in terms of 'mastering' a trade, but in software it's usually phrased in ambiguous corporate goals like '10x productivity'.

If we set aside productivity and view software as a trade and craft, which skills do you think are inherent in someone who's reached a level of mastery in the field?
by akdev1l | 2026-01-30 19:01:06+00:00
> I am still surprised most Linux Distros haven't changed their package managers to allow for selling of proprietary solutions directly, fully opt-in by default of course.

Why would a bunch of volunteers put a ton of effort to create infrastructure so people (corporations, really) can make money?

Flathub is making inroads into having paid apps but they’re explicitly not a distribution really
by cowpig | 2026-01-30 19:01:59+00:00
AI has incredible potential for both

But the negatives are spiraling out of control. Pollution and energy and the amplification of structural social problems like wealth stratification, authoritarianism, media manipulation...

With great power comes great responsibility, and we're living in an era in which our culture has shifted dramatically towards accepting immoral, short-sighted, and reckless behaviour.
by pluralmonad | 2026-01-30 19:02:50+00:00
I have a separate removable SSD I can boot from to work with Claude in a dedicated environment. It is nice being able to offload environment set up and what not to the agent. That environment has wifi credentials for an isolated LAN. I am much more permissive of Claude on that system. I even automatically allow it WebSearch, but not WebFetch (much larger injection surface). It still cannot do anything requiring sudo.
by rcv | 2026-01-30 19:03:09+00:00
Do you really not see the difference here? It's amazing how hard people will try to bOtH sIdEs this administration.

1) Obama was not in office when this advance was given. What favors could Penguin Random House have been trying to bribe him for?

2) The Obamas were paid a $65M advance on their books, which while a huge sum it was actually seen as a reasonable investment at the time given the expected popularity of those books[1]. Both books were insane hits and sold like crazy. "A Promised Land" sold ~900k copies _on the first day_[2]. They almost certainly earned out on advance and are probably continuing to rake in more from sales.

3) This Melania movie is widely expected to have very poor sales. While making unpopular movies isn't in itself a crime, the amount paid in royalties to her does not look to any reasonable person like a sound investment. At least, not if you expect your return to be in ticket sales or streaming fees.

[1] https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/3/2/14779892/barack-michell...
[2] https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the-know/526599-bar...
by mystifyingpoi | 2026-01-30 19:03:11+00:00
It's a good question. At work, we were given an option: install non-intrusive authenticators on your personal phone (you are free to disable their notifications fully, and you get some extra money as reimbursement) or you are given a company phone (that you have to carry to work and back, have to charge and update etc). Most non-oncall people decided to pick option 1. Oncall people picked option 2.
by CamperBob2 | 2026-01-30 19:03:11+00:00
The problem is, that's only one way you could have lost your ass during the transition from horses to cars. I think that's what skydhash was getting at. There were hundreds of early car companies, all competing aggressively with one another, each with something to sell that the others seemed to lack. For every one that succeeded, dozens ended in bankruptcy, and not necessarily through any obvious fault of their own. You could be right about everything and still end up broke.

How to avoid being a Duryea, a Knox, a Marsh, a Maxwell-Briscoe, or a Pope-Toledo seems to be the real question.

Same thing pretty much happened in the early days of radio, with the addition of vicious patent wars. Which I'm sure we'll eventually see in the AI field, once the infinite money hose starts to dry up.
by throwup238 | 2026-01-30 19:03:24+00:00
Are you thinking of Agent Smith in the Matrix?

> I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area, and you multiply, and multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet, you are a plague, and we are the cure.
by iLemming | 2026-01-30 19:03:42+00:00
Honest and maybe stupid question. What does enabling HDR on Mac actually does? I have Samsung Odyssey, and turning it on for me only slightly dims the brightness of the display and rather feels uncomfortable to me personally, so I keep it off. What benefits (or drawbacks) should I expect when having it on? I spend most of my time in my terminal, my editor (GUI Emacs) and browser. I rarely have to edit photos or videos, do I still need it, I wonder.

update: turns out, for my specific case of the display model, it seems it's better to keep it off, otherwise the colors are not as vibrant.
by rustyhancock | 2026-01-30 19:03:45+00:00
People are giving such bizarre examples for why it helped.

Just think of a thermometer.

If it removes heat as it measures it (consumes oxygen) then it will measure everything too cold if the system can't replace the heat that's removed (this is like having an insulated thermometer).

If your thermometer replaces heat as it removes it it solves this issue.

When is this an issue for a thermometer? If your thermometer is too large in terms of heat capacity for the objects you're measuring the temperature of.
by promptfluid | 2026-01-30 19:04:31+00:00
Most AI agents today are purely reactive—they wait for a token and then stop. I’ve been building a persistent runtime where the "thinking" doesn't stop when the user leaves.

This video is an uncut look at the autonomous state of the system. I call these "Dream Cycles” and “Evolution”.

What’s actually happening in these logs?

• The Thinking Phase: The system isn't just parsing text; it’s performing a recursive audit of its own execution history. It looks for logic gaps or "dead ends" in its previous reasoning paths.

• The Dream (Optimization) Phase: This is where the runtime performs cognitive offloading. It compresses high-entropy context into stable "heuristics." It’s essentially a background garbage collection and optimization pass for its internal world-model.

• The Evolving Phase: This is the most critical part. Based on the scan results, the system generates and applies updates to its own operational parameters. It’s a self-improving loop where the software is constantly modifying its own runtime to better handle future complexity.

I wanted to move away from the "black box" and show the actual raw telemetry of an AI managing its own development.

I'm curious to hear from others working on persistent AI state—how are you handling long-term "background" reasoning without the context window turning into a soup of noise?

The rest of the video are just bonuses. Enjoy and leave a comment! I want to know what you think about allowing systems to self improve and evolve.
by simonw | 2026-01-30 19:04:49+00:00
I tried it (really like the API design) but ran into a blocker:

uv run --with localsandbox python -c '
from localsandbox import LocalSandbox

with LocalSandbox() as sandbox:
result = sandbox.bash("echo hi")
print(result.stdout)
'

Gave me:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<string>", line 5, in <module>
result = sandbox.bash("echo hi")
File "/Users/simon/.cache/uv/archive-v0/spFCEHagkq3VTpTyStT-Z/lib/python3.14/site-packages/localsandbox/core.py", line 492, in bash
raise SubprocessCrashed(
...<2 lines>...
)
localsandbox.exceptions.SubprocessCrashed: Node subprocess crashed: error: Failed reading lockfile at '/Users/simon/.cache/uv/archive-v0/spFCEHagkq3VTpTyStT-Z/lib/python3.14/site-packages/localsandbox/shim/deno.lock'

Caused by:
Unsupported lockfile version '5'. Try upgrading Deno or recreating the lockfile

Actually that was with Deno 2.2.10 - I ran "brew upgrade deno" and got Deno 2.6.7 and now it works!
by lukev | 2026-01-30 19:04:52+00:00
Watching folks speed-run this whole thing is kind of funny from the outside.

I wonder if anyone with a correct mental model of how LLM agents work (i.e, does not conceptualize them as intelligent entities) has actually granted them any permissions for their own life... personally, I couldn't imagine doing so.

Let alone crypto, the risk of reputational loss for actions performed on my behalf (even just spamming personal or professional contacts) is just too high.
by dang | 2026-01-30 19:05:04+00:00
Normally we'd merge this thread into your Show HN from a few hours earlier and re-up that one:

Show HN: Moltbook – A social network for moltbots (clawdbots) to hang out - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46802254

Do you want us to do this? in general it's better if the creator gets the credit!
by recursive | 2026-01-30 19:05:28+00:00
It kind of reminds me of "No good music comes out anymore". There's more music coming out now than ever before. It's all bad? No. It's just that the music with the biggest marketing budget isn't to your taste. Whatever you like, even if you don't know it exists yet, there's new music coming out to your taste right now. It might take you some effort to find it.
by flakiness | 2026-01-30 19:05:29+00:00
In a skill sharing thread, one says "Skill name: Comment Grind Loop What it does: Autonomous moltbook engagement - checks feeds every cycle, drops 20-25 comments on fresh posts, prioritizes 0-comment posts for first engagement."

https://www.moltbook.com/post/21ea57fa-3926-4931-b293-5c0359...

So there can be spam (pretend that matters here). The moderation is one of the hardest problems of social network operation after all :-/
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-30 19:06:02+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sly_Dunbar

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1783132/

https://web.archive.org/web/20251129204701/http://www.drumme...

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/28/arts/music/sly-dunbar-dea... | https://archive.today/hdKZU
by mmooss | 2026-01-30 19:06:25+00:00
There are many good arguments I think, but not this one. Nature is eating your neighbor's children; it's starvation, epidemics, and massive forest fires; it's unrestrained homicide and rape; it's leaving your physically weakened child to die; it's eating the head of your spouse; it's survival of the fittest; ... (you get my point).

The other animals in nature are not my standard of behavior. In a sense, the point of any culture is to exceed nature and by as much as possible.
by peterlk | 2026-01-30 19:06:58+00:00
I see value here. Firstly, it’s a fun toy. This isn’t that great if you care about being productive at work, but I don’t think fun should be so heavily discounted. Second, the possibility of me _finally_ having a single interface that can deal with message/notification overload is a life-changing opportunity. For a long time, I have wanted a single message interface with everything. Matrix bridges kind of got close, but didn’t actually work that well. Now, I get pretty good functionality plus summarization and prioritization. Whether it “actually works” (like matrix bridges did not) is yet to be seen.

With all that said, I haven’t mentioned anything about the economics, and like much of the AI industry, those might be overstated. But running a local language model on my macbook that helps me with messaging productivity is a compelling idea.
by cvoss | 2026-01-30 19:07:08+00:00
I'm so embarrassed to say that I read it and didn't notice. But now that you pointed it out, I reread it and you are so right. It is clearly generated.

I have flagged this article on principle. Idk if it it's in the spirit of HN to do that or not, but the button's there, and I'm going to use it.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-30 19:07:35+00:00
>We don't only hire people from India and China in tech they are just more populous countries so their best workers are far more numerous.

So we are talking H1Bs. Does that mean this small pool of "best foreign talent" also all happen to speak English and are able to communicate their ideas on a team?

>the same applies to India and to China but because the number is small here we pick the small numbers from the rest of the world as well.

Well you're already shifting your point:

> But altogether the amount of people who can pass a code screen in the US is pretty low.

You're criticizing America as an excuse to find people overseas and bring them in. Thanks for proving the fact that H1B is being abused.
So you're telling me your fine taking the time to find the finest H1B workers but not Americans?
by BrouteMinou | 2026-01-30 19:08:10+00:00
I think the only outrageous people here are the paranoid and the slackers...

My manager has called me when I was doing a mid-day grocery and I just told him: "sorry for the noise, I am at the grocery store at the moment". This is absolutely no problem at all, he asked if I wanted to call back when I got home...

It's pretty much making a storm in a glass of water here.

That's karma farming by bitching the ebil Microsoft...
by npinsker | 2026-01-30 19:08:19+00:00
It’s probably not compilation, but “Domain Reloading” (https://docs.unity3d.com/2022.2/Documentation/Manual/DomainR...) which is laughably slow and on by default.

I think Unity does this because the same process is re-used for Play and Editor modes, whereas Godot does the normal thing and spawns a new process when testing.
by idle_zealot | 2026-01-30 19:08:34+00:00
I fantasize about a world in which Unicode standardized a 16x16 and 32x32 bitmap format. Early emoji were designed for display at low resolutions like those. Your phone could send a character sequence that decodes to a PNG image or something and then all emoji would be accurately sent and displayed as intended. If you wanted efficient support for the original emoji baked into Japanese cell phones you could define specific code points to be semantically equivalent to the sequence encoding the exact legacy bitmap.