MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rayiner | 2026-01-14 19:44:01+00:00
That's the wrong way of looking at it. We have evidence that national cultures affect prosperity, and that, at scale, immigrants bring their cultures with them: https://www.rorotoko.com/11/20230913-jones-garett-on-book-cu... ("For the last twenty years I’ve been asking the Adam Smith question: Why are some nations so much more productive than others? I’d found some new answers in my own research, summed up in my earlier book Hive Mind. But at the same time, I kept reading findings by a separate group of researchers, especially three excellent professors at Brown University: David Weil, Louis Putterman, and Oded Galor. Their work on the 'Deep Roots' of economic prosperity suggested that many of the important economic differences across countries began centuries, even millennia ago.").

The U.S. takes in millions of immigrants a year. At that scale, it's not a question of the individual merits of a single immigrant from a country. It's about the merits of the community that will be formed when 100,000 immigrants from that country come to the U.S. and settle in the same place and socialize their children into their culture. And the evidence we have is that, when that happens, they'll bring with them a lot of characteristics of their origin countries.
by joe_mamba | 2026-01-14 19:44:01+00:00
>basically no crime, no guns

How can people lie with a straight face and then get upvoted for it?

"Belgium recorded 184 firearm incidents in 2024 (mostly drug-related), causing 20 deaths and 81 injuries, with Brussels as the main hotspot. Antwerp has also seen surges, with 81 drug-linked shootings/explosions in 2022 alone."

Here's what I plucked from Wikipedia and news sites from the last ~10 years:

- May 24, 2014 - Brussels: Shooting rampage at the Jewish Museum by ex-ISIS fighter Mehdi Nemmouche, killing four people.
- March 22, 2016 - Brussels: Coordinated ISIS-claimed suicide bombings at Zaventem Airport (16 killed) and Maelbeek Metro Station (16 killed), totaling 32 deaths and hundreds injured.
- August 7, 2016 - Charleroi: Machete attack on two policewomen outside a station; ISIS claimed responsibility, two wounded.
- August 22, 2016 - Brussels: Machete-wielding woman attacked bus passengers, wounding three.
- October 5, 2016 - Brussels: Knife attack on two policemen in a suspected terrorist incident.
- May 28-29, 2018 - Liège: Radicalized prisoner Benjamin Herman killed a former accomplice, two police officers, and a passenger in a shooting and stabbing spree; ISIS claimed it, four killed total (including perpetrator).
- November 20, 2018 - Brussels: Knife attack on a police officer in the city center while shouting "allahu akbar," one wounded.
- January 9, 2023 - Antwerp: Shots fired into a house in a drug-related attack, killing an 11-year-old girl and wounding three others (her father and siblings).
- October 16, 2023 - Brussels (Schaerbeek): Tunisian national Abdesalem Al Guilani shot three Swedish soccer fans, killing two; claimed by ISIS, perpetrator killed by police.
- December 6, 2023 - Brussels: Gang-related shooting wounded five people.
- February 7, 2025 - Brussels (Anderlecht): Drug-trafficking-linked shooting killed one man in a known dealing hotspot; part of a week with multiple incidents wounding others.
- October 8, 2025 - Brussels: Two teenagers opened fire, wounding four; suspects arrested after a chase.
by JoshTriplett | 2026-01-14 19:44:21+00:00
Two of the major parties support it, but it's not entirely obvious how much public support there is; it's not most people's top issue, and it's easy to make polls say what you want depending on the question you ask.

You'd get different answers if, for instance, you ask "do you want to have to show ID or submit a picture of your face in order to access many sites on the Internet".
by cadamsdotcom | 2026-01-14 19:44:30+00:00
So many engineers could put the hours spent debugging GH actions to use developing expertise to run their own CI. But people either don’t believe they can, can’t convince decision makers to let them try, or just want to fix their own problem and move on.

I was convinced GH actions was best practice and it was normal to waste hours on try-and-pray build debugging, until one day GH actions went down and I ran deploys from my laptop and remembered how much better life can be without it..

(Solo dev here - but opensource CI on an EC2 instance can be just as nice)
by sargizsakoo | 2026-01-14 19:44:46+00:00
Thanks — this is really helpful feedback.

You’re right that most people don’t file claims often, and that’s something we’re actively thinking about. The core idea behind ClaimVault isn’t just during a claim, but making it much easier to be prepared before one happens — when photos, receipts, and context are still easy to capture.

That said, your point about usage-based or claim-window pricing makes a lot of sense, especially for renters or homeowners who may only interact with insurance a few times in a lifetime. We’re exploring options like pausing subscriptions, shorter-term plans around an active claim, or alternate models that better match how infrequently claims occur.

Appreciate you calling this out — it’s exactly the kind of perspective we’re hoping to learn from early on.
by iknowstuff | 2026-01-14 19:44:47+00:00
You are probably referring to ukraine and you should know that this was entirely fake news. It was never disabled. It had never been enabled in Crimea in the first place, in accordance with US gov policy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_in_the_Russian-Ukrain...

In 2022, Elon Musk denied a Ukrainian request to extend Starlink's coverage up to Russian-occupied Crimea during a counterattack on a Crimean port, from which Russia had been launching attacks against Ukrainian civilians; doing so would have violated US sanctions on Russia.[18] This event was widely reported in 2023, erroneously characterizing it as Musk "turning off" Starlink coverage in Crimea.

But you’re right of course that it might be in a sovereign country’s interest to build out their wired infrastructure instead of relying on external actors.
by Aloisius | 2026-01-14 19:44:49+00:00
I buy soda syrup to make soda, but even that's gotten expensive. Funny thing is that I do it to reduce how much I was putting in recycling, but even with the extra state tax for bottles/cans, it actually costs me slightly more to make it myself.

I've had great results making my own mineral water clones, so maybe I'll try making LabCoatz's coca cola clone syrup and see how it works with sucrolose or allulose.
by d1sxeyes | 2026-01-14 19:44:54+00:00
I have a lot of concerns about your presentation of this.

A. It’s also true that there is no safe level of alcohol consumption and yet we sort of see experimentation with alcohol as a rite of passage.

B. I mean, so is walking out your front door. I don’t see this as adding much to point A.

C. This is a big jump. First, we see more openness about sexual behaviour. While I’m prepared to agree that it has likely gone up, I would not be comfortable with the degree you imply. Second, while I do think it is likely that pornography has indeed contributed to this, pornography has also likely contributed to an increase in experimentation in general, with other sexual behaviours also likely seeing an increase (for example oral/anal sex, water play, etc).

D. I find this very hard to accept at face value. Do you have studies/evidence to support this claim?

E. Yes, I would likely agree, although whether “encourages sexual experimentation” is a bad thing or not is a question for further debate.

F. This conflates some very weird things. “Fighting words” are a specific type of restricted speech (i.e. you can’t go round shouting “I’ll kill you”). Sharing misinformation is broadly not illegal (except in very specific sets of circumstances-fraud, inciting violence, etc.). It’s also broadly speaking not against the law to tell the truth. “Some people like to choke each other during sex” is a true statement, even if it’s harmful.

Do you support a ban on porn all together? That’s quite a radical view.
by odedfalik | 2026-01-14 19:45:21+00:00
I built an unofficial CLI and MCP server for Lambda cloud GPU instances.

The main idea: your AI agents can now spin up and manage Lambda GPUs for you.

The MCP server exposes tools to find, launch, and terminate instances. Add it to Claude Code, Cursor, or any agent with one command and you can say things like "launch an H100, ssh in, and run big_job.py"

Other features:
- Notifications via Slack, Discord, or Telegram when instances are SSH-ready
- 1Password support for API keys
- Also includes a standalone CLI with the same functionality

Written in Rust. MIT licensed.

Note: This is an unofficial community project, not affiliated with Lambda.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-01-14 19:45:37+00:00
Every business is about buying something or producing something and selling it for a cost higher than it costs you. Why is rental property evil? Do you think building and running an apartment complex is wrong?

Every business is about producing an income stream. My 23 year old son and his fiancé rent a house. They don’t want to buy a home and don’t even know whether they are going to stay in the city they are living in

There is nothing “small” about the fee that property management companies charge. It’s 50% of the first month’s rent for a new tenant and 10% of rent each month. Standard underwriting for rental income is assume 75% - 80% occupancy and you have to account for slow payments and long eviction processes. Even in a red state like GA it can take around 3 months to evict someone for none payment.

And again bringing the 2-3% of homes that are owned by institutional investors won’t make a dent in housing affordability.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2026-01-14 19:45:38+00:00
> rather innocuous comment

It may appear innocuous yet it normalizes ICE's actions as mere "immigration enforcement". Their actions are far more and far worse than that, as you note:

> ICE's current tactics seem overly aggressive to me and, yes, seem to be used politically.

It is not an issue of immigration laws being enforced, it is an issue of rights being infringed. The "overly aggressive" tactics being "used politically" is exactly the problem.
by drcongo | 2026-01-14 19:45:45+00:00
Musk's astroturf bot army. It's the same with any submission that points out how far into a fascist dictatorship the US has already plunged. It's either concerted botting, or comfortable US tech sector workers putting their fingers in their ears and saying "la la la I can't hear you" because as yet, it's not them getting shot in the street.
by _wire_ | 2026-01-14 19:46:03+00:00
The efficiency of compression systems is analogous to the efficiency of cleaning, no matter how clean you want to make anything, you have to face that you can only push dirt around, you can't get rid of it...

Regarding applying generative models to message passing, the system efficiency of any message includes the cost of setting up the model.

Of course, by placing the desired message space into a generative model, the amount of data required to activate a message of high complexity can be made very small. But it's not only the cost of invoking a message that matters to efficiency. The costs of maintaining the model must be considered.

For example, consider delivering a complex message by sending a storage device, say an old video tape with various video messages stored on it along with a schedule of its contents. Later, using a different channel than was used to arrange the video player, a complex message is manifest by sending an index to the schedule, and the receiver obtains the message by playing the portion of the tape indicated by the schedule reference.

The particular details of the message storage are important only to operate the mechanism of retrieval. The system could just as well be a book full of messages, and a tabular index. Marshall McLuhan referred to the lightbulb as "pure information" for this reason; the medium of the active bulb creates entirely new information environments that were impossible before its application and does so by simply attenuating the receivers visual field.

The point is that by carefully arranging the contexts of the sender and the receiver, an arbitrarily simple instance of communication can invoke (transmit) an arbitrarily complex message, or even environment.

But when considering efficiency, is the total amount of work to arrange the sending and receiving contexts properly included in the assessment? Without some normalization of setup costs between systems, how can "compression" efficiency be properly analyzed?

When you consider all the amazing complexity of thought that is manifest by the relatively trivial communicative forms of speech, human life might be determined to be the greatest balancing of concerns for efficient communication to be found in the known universe, so much as to reveal a seemingly supernatural gradient of distinction between the energy costs of context setup and open-ended capacity for message passing.

What Afred Korszybski coined "time binding".

More narrowly, it's clear that generative models are an entirely new paradigm for information management, and maybe the greatest promise lies herein, not in a pipe dream of AGI?
by simjnd | 2026-01-14 19:46:15+00:00
> There were similar negative reactions back ~15 years ago when Adobe switched to their minimalist icon style.

Adobe icons are terrible and should not be the standard. Photoshop 7, Illustrator 10, InDesign 2 were so much more memorable and recognizable than the lazy minimalist slop we have now. Even the first CS or CS2 icons were a thousand times better. The fact that the company behind the most powerful and popular creative software did this is unforgivable.

Some tasteless manager made a PowerPoint about "brand cohesion", got his promotion and ruined it for everybody else.
by nospice | 2026-01-14 19:46:22+00:00
> Here's a different aspect of utility: The F150 Lightning includes 120V and optionally 240V outlets, so it replaces the need to carry a separate gas-powered generator.

A small generator costs few hundred bucks and fits comfortably in any truck actually used for work. It's a small perk that some pro users would probably pay for, but it's not a selling point for a radically different car design.
by steveklabnik | 2026-01-14 19:46:46+00:00
The ones I think, personally:

1. crates.io makes it easy to use complex data structures. Basically this argument https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2018/09/28/the-relative-perform...

2. Rust's safety guarantees making it easier to maintain more dangerous things over time.

3. On the C side, there's a lot more cultural understanding overall of how to use the language to get good performance results

4. It might be easier to find people who are experienced in heavily optimizing C code as opposed to Rust code.
by otterley | 2026-01-14 19:47:03+00:00
I would contend that it is impossible to know a priori what is wasted telemetry and what isn’t, especially over long time horizons. And especially if you treat your logs as the foundational source of truth for answering critical business questions as well as operational ones.

And besides, the value isn’t knowing that the waste rate is 40% (and your methodology isn’t sufficiently disclosed for anyone to evaluate its accuracy). The value in knowing what is or will be wasted. It’s reminiscent of that old marketing complaint: “I know that half my advertising budget is wasted; I just don’t know which half.”

Storage is actually dirt cheap. The real problem, in my view, is not that customers are wasting storage, but that storage is being used inefficiently, that the storage formats aren’t always mechanically sympathetic and cloud-spend-efficient to the ways they data is read and analyzed, and that there’s still this culturally grounded disparate (and artificial) treatment of application and infrastructure logs vs business records.
by datsci_est_2015 | 2026-01-14 19:47:12+00:00
> Unproven claim

Two biggest pieces of evidence I’ll bring to the table:

- Bots have always been an issue on Twitter, as even Elon expressed during his acquisition. I somehow doubt that one of Twitter’s biggest, most intractable issues is somehow being resolved with fewer employees.
- The fiasco of the account geolocation, showing that many generic rightwing talking point boosters were operating from LCOL and VLCOL countries.

It doesn’t take a leap of faith to connect the dots that when you monetize engagement, you’ll have bad-faith actors using underhanded techniques to farm engagement. Personal opinion inserted: this is the entire rightwing playbook at the moment and it’s working swimmingly.

> sounds like you just want to dismiss a counter-narrative platform

Sounds kind of like you just want to dismiss talking points that run counter to your own with thought-terminating clichés.
by tracker1 | 2026-01-14 19:47:29+00:00
I'm honestly a bit mixed on this... I don't think that (especially young) children should have access to explicit, graphic sexual content, especially kink. If you as a parent want your kids to have access, so be it... but then the onus should be on the parent.

On similar lines, I think that something between an unrestricted smart phone and the classic dumb phone is a market segment that is needed.
by bri3d | 2026-01-14 19:47:32+00:00
This looks like it was the output of running a Starlink app log through an LLM. The data is interesting but I don't think it supports the conclusions.

I'm also interested in whatever LLM was used not being able to use Google to determine that CADY is the Starlink internal clock module, and that on the latest board revisions it isn't present and I think the `false` state is expected and maybe a red herring.
by mjr00 | 2026-01-14 19:48:03+00:00
I don't see any entitlement at all, in fact it's the opposite.

The article: "I expect open source maintainers to maintain their codebases and add new features. I have unilaterally decided that $1/package is a suitable amount, universally applicable to all packages and maintainers." <--- this is entitlement

The comments here: "Open source maintainers don't owe you shit."
by rmoskal | 2026-01-14 19:48:07+00:00
I've used slack channels a means for application event and error alerting for years. The webhooks are super low friction and and Slack is often center of a teams work life.

The pain comes from repeated messages. If something fails 100 times, you're going to get a 100 messages. That's a strong signal, but might also be noise that covers up other errors. Plus you have to go in and individually delete all those message.

Over time, I've made improvements to the stock webhooks functionality. Rolling up repeating messages. Threaded logging. Bulk deletes. Recently, someone suggested I release it into the wild. Here it is.
by maerF0x0 | 2026-01-14 19:48:25+00:00
FWIW, a frugal person can't simply think to eat whatever has declined in price... It's worth realizing that, for example, a 20% rise on the 0.33 ramen is still one of your cheapest options.

From my perspective (ie, in the USA) it can still be hella cheap if you're willing to cook food yourself from scratch. Rice, Beans, Lentils, and frozen veggies can give you the baseline of very nutritious meals (but boring af) for like $2 a day.

you can eat (all dry/unprepared weight) 100g white rice, 100g black beans, 100g black lentils, 225g frozen mixed veggies for about $1 if you buy in small bulk (like 2-5lbs at a time)
by neilv | 2026-01-14 19:48:28+00:00
> At some point, you may have been faced with the decision yourself: should I continue to use this service if I have to verify my age?

An excellent question, which I didn't see the article really get into.

> If you’re given the option of selecting a verification method and are deciding which to use, we recommend considering the following questions for each process allowed by each vendor:

Their criteria implies a lot of understanding on the part of the user -- regarding how modern Web systems work, widespread industry practices and motivations, how 'privacy policies' are often exceeded and assurances are often not satisfied, how much "audits" should be trusted, etc.

I'd like to see advice that starts by communicating that the information will almost certainly be leaked and abused, in n different ways, and goes from there.

> But unless your threat model includes being specifically targeted by a state actor or Private ID, that’s unlikely to be something you need to worry about.

For the US, this was better advice pre-2025, before the guy who did salutes from the capitol was also an AI bro who then went around hoovering up data from all over government. Followed by a new veritable army and camps being created for domestic action. Paired with a posture from the top that's calling harmless ordinary citizens "terrorists", and taking quite a lot of liberties with power.

We'll see how that plays out, but giving the old threat model advice, without qualification, might be doing a disservice.
by lacoolj | 2026-01-14 19:48:51+00:00
Am I the only one that has no idea what this is talking about? Even the "About" section just dumps a ton of jargon about something being a problem for "pubs" - which, very unclear from the homepage, is actually talking about bars/places to drink beer/etc in the UK.

But again, now I know it's talking about that kind of pub, what is the actual issue? Some sort of rate being added to something? What rate? Is this related to a rating system? Taxes? Is it affecting the consumer? The owner?

So confused.
by callc | 2026-01-14 19:48:58+00:00
I really wish there was more transparency. We can’t see flagged posts without a direct link.

How about a flagged section?

What about a feature to challenge the flag?

What about a justification for the flag? Do flagged posts need to be approved by a mod?

I love HN. Flagged posts are the worst part. I can’t tell if the community is being taken over by a subset of bad actors, or YC is asserting opaque editorial control. Feels bad.
by anon84873628 | 2026-01-14 19:49:08+00:00
IMO it should not be hard for large services like Roblox and Instagram to get together with device makers to come up with a sensible solution.

When you create a new profile on Netflix you mark it as "kids" and voila. Devices should have kid profiles with lots of sane defaults. The parent profiles have a thorough monitoring and governance features that are dead simple to use.

As always it's not perfect but it will go a long way. Just getting a majority of parents on sane defaults will help unknot the broader coordination problems.
by labcomputer | 2026-01-14 19:49:10+00:00
No, not a mystery, in fact.

Each keypress is appended to an 80 line prompt (key name along with timestamp of keypress and current text shown on the screen) and fed to a frontier LLM. Some of the office staff banged on the keypad for a few hours to generate training data to fine-tune the LLM on the task of denouncing key presses.

Thanks to some optimizations with Triton and running multi-GPU instances, latency is down to just a few seconds per digit entered.

You see, we needed to hit our genAI onboarding KPIs this quarter…
by gpm | 2026-01-14 19:49:24+00:00
I'm confused by the handwaving away of the ozone production. It's well established that ozone is toxic. If these are producing it - and it seems to be agreed upon that they are - that's an obvious issue. The suggestion that "you can just filter it with mechanical air filters (activated carbon)" seems strange because you can just filter viruses with mechanical air filters in that case...

I'm a big fan on the idea of improving air quality/reducing viral load in air to improve health. But I'd really prefer to see more of a push towards the "effective quiet (currently DIY) mechanical air filtration systems" the article links to then a technology with obvious and poorly quantified health risks.