MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by OkayPhysicist | 2026-01-27 21:19:49+00:00
That's a pretty weak take. The difference between philosophy texts on ethics and the better self-help texts are just the difference between pulp fiction and classic novels. Time needs to pass before anybody is willing to go "actually, this is worth analyzing". That said, there's a lot of self-help that isn't philosophical (or, more exactly, don't attempt to defend the philosophy that they present the conclusions of).

Consider the difference between. "Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not commit adultry" and "you shouldn't kill or sleep with your neighbor's wife because both actions cause more harm than they provide benefit, which ought be our goal because the conclusions of such a cost/benefit analysis closely align to most people's natural sense of right and wrong". The former is a statement of morals. If you include the "...because God said so, and God is always right", then it becomes an ethical argument, like the second. The key is arguing the why down to axioms, and defending those axioms as superior to other axioms.

A self-help book like "How to win friends and influence people" provides rules to follow, to achieve a desired outcome, and attempts to explain why the rules work. It doesn't spend much, if any (it's been a while) energy arguing why you should want the desired outcome, or if the desired outcome is actually a good thing.
by sebastos | 2026-01-27 21:20:27+00:00
Ok - it sounds like you’re right, but I think despite your clarification I remain confused. Isn’t the linked post all about how those two things always have a mingling at the boundary? Like, suppose I want to develop and distribute a c++ user-space application in a cross platform way. I want to manage all my dependencies at the language level, and then there’s some collection of system libraries that I may or may not decide to rely on. How do I manage and communicate that surface area in a cross platform and scalable way? And what does this feel like for a developer - do you just run tests for every supported platform in a separate docker container?
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-27 21:21:17+00:00
> What kind of time frame do you ballpark this would have taken you on your own?

I don't think I'd be able to do this on my own. Not that I don't know Rust, but because I don't know X11 (nor macOS or Windows) well enough to even know where to begin.

I've been a Linux user for almost two decades, so I know my way around my system, but never developed X11 applications or anything, I'm mostly a web developer who jumped around various roles through the years. Spent a lot of time caring deeply about testing, infrastructure, architecture/design and communication between humans, might have given me a slight edge in programming together with agents.
by WarmWash | 2026-01-27 21:21:19+00:00
Being killed by police is different than being murdered by police.

Police in the US kill somewhere around 1000 people a year. But of those, it's something like 5-10 that are murders. There is maybe 1 every few years where the cop is itching to shoot someone who is clearly compliant and not a threat.

The 990 police killing videos that become available every year now are not particularly compelling, because its bad actors trying to kill police and getting themselves killed.

Sorry, I don't know anything about France and police though. The US has a different dynamic because guns are everywhere, especially where crime is. Every cop knows about the ~50 cops who are killed by guns every year.
by sjsdaiuasgdia | 2026-01-27 21:21:38+00:00
No, I don't expect the Trump administration to operate in good faith.

The post you replied to didn't ask what they might be charged with. It asked what they "plan" to charge.

And you replied with internet rumor nonsense. It's actually fine to say "I don't know" or simply not reply at all when someone asks a question to which you do not have an answer.
by ux266478 | 2026-01-27 21:22:33+00:00
>It is absolutely an inferior and chatty protocol for any other application though, like try to watch a youtube video in chrome through it.

This is extremely misleading. Web browsers (and games) are the worst case for X11's network transparency. The overwhelming majority of applications belong in the same category as xeyes.

> the original X network transparency's modern analogue might very well be the web

It's Arcan, which solved this problem without sacrificing network transparency at the altar.
by wizzwizz4 | 2026-01-27 21:22:41+00:00
That's a proxy metric for what we really care about: acceptance of differences, tolerance of others, diversity of perspectives, etc. In principle, you can achieve these goals with a team whose members are all one ethnicity and gender; it's just that a fair selection process won't produce such a team often. And, as it turns out, optimising for the "people who look different" proxy metric doesn't do a terrible job of optimising for the true metric, provided the "cultural fit"-type selection effects are weak enough.

The systemd crowd are perhaps worse than GNOME, as regards "my way or the highway", and designing systems that are fundamentally inadequate for the general use-case. I don't think ethnicity or gender diversity quotas would substantially improve their decision-making: all it would really achieve is to make it harder to spot the homogeneity in a photograph. A truly diverse team wouldn't make the decisions they make.
Show HN: Git-Watchtower – Quickly Manage 5 plus Claude Code on the Web Threads
by drummel33 | 2026-01-27 21:22:56+00:00
I've been using Claude Code on the web a lot, often running multiple sessions on different branches at the same time. The problem is there's no easy way to know when a branch has been updated or what changed - you end up tab-hopping between GitHub and your terminal trying to keep track of everything.

So I built Git Watchtower - a terminal UI that polls your remote and gives you live updates when any branch gets new commits. When something changes you get a visual flash + optional audio notification, can preview the diff, and switch to that branch with a single keypress. It auto-pulls your current branch too, so you're always looking at the latest code.

What it does:
- Monitors your remote for new commits, new branches, and deletions
- Visual + audio notifications when updates arrive
- Preview commits and changed files before switching
- Auto-pull when your current branch is updated
- Activity sparklines showing 7-day commit history per branch
- Optional built-in dev server (static or custom command like next dev) that restarts on branch switch
by fasbiner | 2026-01-27 21:23:08+00:00
I suspect you're right, but what we are and are not surprised by is self-referential rather than evidentiary.

But are we supposed to be content with not being given enough information to make a meaningful differentiation between people with PhDs in human resources and $IDENTITY-studies vs PhDs in organic chemistry and climatology?

When there's hostility towards discernment, it makes me feel like the two political strains are working together to use a one-two punch of credentialism and anti-intellectualism to erode empirical investigation into reality.
by DonHopkins | 2026-01-27 21:23:27+00:00
I'm addicted to pro-Release-the-Epstein-Files, anti-Trump, anti-ICE, and Innocent-Americans-Being-Shot-Dead-in-the-Streets-Then-Accussed-of-Being-Terrorists videos, and they just cut me off cold turkey, dammit!

TikTok blocks Epstein mentions and anti-Trump videos, users claim. Alleged censorship comes after investors loyal to Trump take over social media platform.

https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/tiktok-epstein-trump-cens...

>TikTok users in the US have reported being unable to write the word ‘Epstein’ in messages amid accusations that the social media platform is suppressing content critical of President Donald Trump.

>The issues come less than a week after TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, was forced to divest a majority stake in its US operations to a group of investors loyal to President Trump, who was a close associate with the late convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
by nielsbot | 2026-01-27 21:23:39+00:00
Or even make new games with the LLM translating what you write into a restricted set of in-game commands.

One thing I noticed about the linked page: I said something like "what's in the mailbox?" and the answer was "That mailbox is closed." I think the next level would be able to string together multiple commands like "open mailbox" + "look in mailbox"
by ed | 2026-01-27 21:23:46+00:00
It's totally possible Peter was the right person to build this project – he's certainly connected enough.

My best guess is that it feels more like a Companion than a personal agent. This seems supported by the fact I've seen people refer to their agents by first name, in contexts where it's kind of weird to do.

But now that the flywheel is spinning, it can clearly do a lot more than just chat over Discord.
by publicdebates | 2026-01-27 21:23:54+00:00
TikTok's algorithm is significantly better and therefore more addictive. I'm speaking from personal experience, having spent about 12-14 hours a day on TikTok for probably 360 days during 2024. Getting banned from it was one of the best things that ever happened to me. Too bad it only happened in Jan 2025. Will never get that year back, or the mental health I lost from it. (I'm not going to sue, though I could definitely win such a suit.)
by iugtmkbdfil834 | 2026-01-27 21:24:16+00:00
Honestly, and I say it without a shade of irony, it might be for the best, if the collective 'we' stop attempting re-enact fictional events and lives in alternate worlds. It would do everyone, and I do mean everyone, a good solid needful, should they just stopped and thought about what they are doing and the likely course of the events given their actions.

It would be orders of magnitude more productive if we did that.
by sixsevenrot | 2026-01-27 21:24:25+00:00
3...2...1... days left until ICE buys the social scoring app from China

3...2...1... years left until IBM ports their algorithm used to identify and kill Jews, Roma and gay people in 1930ies Germany from punchcards to Rust.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
by throw_away_8080 | 2026-01-27 21:24:31+00:00
Not a lawyer, but I think this is common knowledge: They are required to not only show it but provide a copy of the warrant on request. Furthermore the warrants are scoped, if the warrant specifies searching for firearms and the search your hard drive it can't be used in court unless you verbally allow it. Don't resist, but don't consent.
by dang | 2026-01-27 21:24:50+00:00
I don't see any evidence that r0fl's comments are astroturfing. Sometimes people are just enthusiastic.

I appreciate your concern for the quality of the site - that fact that the community here cares so much about protecting it is the main reason why it continues to survive. Still, it's against HN's rules to post like you did here. Could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html? Note this part:

"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
by adev_ | 2026-01-27 21:24:56+00:00
You are not going to find much because China is not yet part officially of Horizons (South Korea and Japan are but not China).

Most of these collaborations happens under the hood and are peer-to-peer and project based.

I can speak for the fields that I am close to:

- For Astrophysics, China already provide both hardware and computing resources to some projects. Conferences in China are in common and exchange are frequents. Rumors of collaborations on Space and scientific satellites are also on the way.

- For nuclear physics, China is actively participating in several software stack used for nuclear fusions. There is also mutual collaborations on some nuclear fusions reactors and they regularly hosts conferences where EU researchers are invited. They progressed tremendously compared to 10y ago.

- For particle physics, China was historically playing alone and was planning to create and operate their own particle collider LHC size. This is not on the table anymore. There is a deeper collaborations with several institutes including CERN, they also voiced their interest in the FCC project.

- For Neurosciences, their labs has permissions to execute wet experiments on animals that are forbidden on most EU territories and that I will not describe. A lot of data are shared both way between China and several EU labs. Many neurosciences related conferences have emerged in China, exchanges are much more common that they were.

- For HPC and A.I, this is by far the most active and pushed research domain actually. Alibaba, Tencent and others are even proposing computing resources for free on some projects in exchange of conference attendance in China and collaborations. There is not much collaboration on hardware (due to embargos and NDAs) but a lot of collaborations on software.
by derektank | 2026-01-27 21:25:01+00:00
>TV ownership? trending down.

Do you have sales or survey data to support this claim? I’m willing to believe individual households might be less likely to purchase TVs, but my understanding is that manufacturers are producing as many or even more screens than ever, though that might be for commercial or business use. Incidentally, it’s efficiency from this scale that allows manufacturers to sell televisions at such low prices, not a lack of demand.
Ask HN: What recent UX changes make no sense to you?
by superasn | 2026-01-27 21:25:05+00:00
For me, it is the shift toward thin, auto-hiding scroll bars. I see it on macOS, Linux (Mint), mobile phones and probably Windows too (though i haven't used windows in a while).

Is this a cleaner look? I have always loved visible scroll bars because they act as useful guides for where I am on a page and how much content remains and just easy to drag. Now you have to hover over it first.

I am curious what UX changes have stood out to you lately, for better or worse.. Maybe some designers reading this forum will take notes.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-27 21:25:11+00:00
> i think for this specific task having css-spec/html-spec/web-platform-tests as machine readable test suites helps a LOT

You know, I placed the specs in the repository with that goal (even sneaked in a repo that needs compiling before being usable), but as far as I can see, the agent never actually peeked into that directory nor read anything from them in the end.

It'll be easier to see once I made all the agent sessions public, and I might be wrong (I didn't observe the agent at all times), but seems the agent never used though.
by notabee | 2026-01-27 21:25:17+00:00
I had a situation like that with an undocumented behavior and systemd-tmpfiles. I wanted it to clean up a directory in /var/tmp/ occasionally. The automation using that directory kept breaking, however, because instead of either finding a whole intact git repo to update or a deleted repo, it instead found only a scattering of files that were root-owned with read-only permissions. There was yet another undocumented feature in systemd-tmpfiles where it would ignore root-owned, read-only files regardless of explicit configuration telling it to clean up the contents of those directories. Eventually this feature was quietly removed:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1780979

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/a083b4875e8dec5ce5...

That was far from the only time that the systemd developers decided to just break norms or do weird things because they felt like it, and then poorly communicate that change. Change itself is fine, it's how we progress. But part of that arrogance that you mentioned was always framing people who didn't like capricious or poorly communicated changes as being against progress, and that's always been the most annoying part of the whole thing.
by chasd00 | 2026-01-27 21:25:28+00:00
just to let you know you're not alone, i'm in the same situation. I have a Tom Thumb 5-7min away depending on if i get caught in the one stop light. It has everything I need, capers to tampons, and i have the store memorized. There's also a pharmacy inside which is convenient. This is just SW of downtown Dallas TX ( maybe 3 miles ).
by mrandish | 2026-01-27 21:25:52+00:00
As a non-scientist (but long-time science fan and user), I feel your pain with what appears to be a layered, intractable problem.

> > who are looking to 'boost' their CV

Ultimately, this seems like a key root cause - misaligned incentives across a multi-party ecosystem. And as always, incentives tend to be deeply embedded and highly resistant to change.
Show HN: Control macOS with an Xbox Controller
by yuuuzeee | 2026-01-27 21:26:05+00:00
Built this small tool to control my Mac with an Xbox controller. It runs in the menu bar and maps buttons to mouse, keyboard, and common shortcuts.

Useful for when you want to browse from the couch or just prefer a gamepad for casual navigation. Nothing fancy – just Swift + IOKit HID.
by taurath | 2026-01-27 21:26:16+00:00
It would be nice if we lived in a world where civil lawsuits were not the only way to gain any recompense from companies greed, as well.

The law protects companies but rarely binds them, and the law binds citizens but rarely protects them. This is the only recourse, in our land where wealth and power mean more than the rule of law.
by bell-cot | 2026-01-27 21:26:22+00:00
Not an astrophysicist - but don't Primordial Black Holes, if fairly common in the solar system as the article suggests, have major "then why don't we see..." problems? Interactions with normal matter (asteroids, planets, moons) would be sharp gamma-generating events. And if even one wandered through the Earth's interior, seismographs would record some otherwise inexplicable data.
by ezst | 2026-01-27 21:26:56+00:00
As I understand it, the problem isn't publication or how it's changing over time, it's about the challenges of producing new science when the existing one is muddied in plausible lies. That warrants a new process by which to assess the inherent quality of a paper, but even if it comes as globally distributed, the cheats have a huge advantage considering the asymmetry between the effort to vibe produce vs. the tedious human review.
by stopbulying | 2026-01-27 21:27:00+00:00
"Immigration officers assert sweeping power to enter homes without a judge’s warrant, memo says":
https://apnews.com/article/ice-arrests-warrants-minneapolis-...

Search and Seizure >
United States:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_and_seizure

Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Amendment_to_the_United...
by kermatt | 2026-01-27 21:27:05+00:00
Interesting project, problematic name?

Searching for answers in the proper context was difficult pre-AI for some language languages (ex. "Go" vs "Golang" [1]), I wonder if search term collision with the word "script" is going to be better or worse with summarized searches.

[1] The Go language developers at sometime asserted the name was not "Golang", but that produced much better search results.
by AshamedCaptain | 2026-01-27 21:27:27+00:00
In addition, the benefit is a bit ridiculous, like that of DRM itself. Even if it worked, literally your "trusted software" is going to be running in an office full of the most advanced crackers money can buy, and with all the incentive to exploit your schema but not publish the fact that they did. The attack surface of the entire thing is so large it boggles the mind that there are people who believe on the "secure computing cloud" scenario.
by WorldMaker | 2026-01-27 21:27:34+00:00
> why is there not 4 different broadcasts for major games that deliver products catered to casual viewers, enthusiasts, kids? The casual viewer would probably prefer to see a fan wearing a funny hat, but the enthusiast would prefer to see the formation 5 seconds sooner.

CBS Paramount directly explored that space a bit. They experimented with showing the same games on CBS or CBS Sports and on Nickelodeon. The Nickelodeon version would include things like "slime cams" and silly sound effects, you know for kids. (Or for adults watching a playoff game with less interest in who won and more interest in background viewing and distractions from other party topics like politics.) It was an interesting experiment. Possibly something to replicate, but also certainly with as many channels involved in Sports as serious business not something that will be easily replicated.
by dijit | 2026-01-27 21:28:27+00:00
The trick is the same: use a popular linux distribution and don't fight the kinks.

The people who had no issues with Pulseaudio; used a mainstream distribution. Those distributions did the heavy lifting of making sure stuff fit together in a cohesive way.

SystemD is very opinionated, so you'd assume it wouldn't have the same results, but it does.. if you use a popular distro then they've done a lot of the hard work that makes systemd function smooth.

I was today years old when I realised this is true for both bits of poetter-ware. Weird.
by epistasis | 2026-01-27 21:29:02+00:00
And importantly the DoJ attorneys who would be responsible for investigating g the murders resigned because they were prevented from performing the standard procedure investigation that happens after every single shooting. They were instead directed to investigate the family of the person who was shot:

https://kstp.com/kstp-news/top-news/nyt-6-federal-prosecutor...

We are through the looking glass, folks. This will be dropped and ignored like so many other outrages unless we demand answers from Congress, and hold SCOTUS responsible for partisan abdication of their constitutional duties.
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2026-01-27 21:29:06+00:00
Yep however that only exposes a value of "last time the user registered/verified their account via phone number activation" and "last day the app connected to the signal servers".

There isn't really anything you can do with that information. The first value is already accessible via other methods (since the phone companies carry those records and will comply with warrants). And for pretty much anyone with signal installed that second value is going to essentially always be the day the search occurred.

And like another user mentioned, the most recent of those warrants is from the day before they moved to username based identification so it is unclear whether the same amount of data is still extractable.
by bijant | 2026-01-27 21:29:13+00:00
As a long time Debian user I beg to disagree. Obviously I could switch to Devuan but white men like Lennart Poettering forced their system on my servers. I have yet to fully process this traumatic experience even though I've brought it up repeatedly with my psychoanalyst. I do not discriminate based on ethnic/gender characteristics and would view this project in a totally different light if it were headed by say RMS or Linus Torvalds. As it is headed by people who have in the past successfully lobbied the powers that be within our system of capitalist patriarchy to oppress my freedoms and have not shown any remorse for their actions or even signaled that they now understand why it is wrong to penetrate systems without user consent, their decision to staff the company exclusively with members of one gender and ethnic group indicates that they intent to continue down this unfortunate path.
by groby_b | 2026-01-27 21:29:21+00:00
fwiw, the same is true for humans. Which is why there's a whole lot of process and red tape around that button. We know how to manage risk. We can choose to do that for LLM usage, too.

If instead we believe in fantasies of a single all-knowing machine god that is 100% correct at all times, then... we really just have ourselves to blame. Might as well just have spammed that button by hand.