MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by defrost | 2026-01-20 06:02:15+00:00
The British East India Company didn't create "billionaires" with vast estates?

The Dutch East Indies weren't returning home with spices of greater value than gold?

Spain didn't plunder so much gold and silver it devalued to the floor?

Belgium went broke under the crushing cost of exploiting the Congo?

I'll go with all empires eventually fall - but many grow on the inflow of wealth from their colonies.

Perhaps you mean "true" accounting - no resources are created, they just move from those that have them to the seat of Empire which wanted them - no net gain, just added costs of transport and military forces.

Historically, though, that's never been how wealth was counted by those that ran ledgers on everything they wanted.
by mmooss | 2026-01-20 06:02:41+00:00
> The new US tariffs were an attempt to even the playing field.

That's a guess at the White House's thinking. They've been using every form of coercion in international relations, including economic (tariffs), military, and diplomatic. That's a factual basis for divining their reasoning.

Their words are not a factual basis - they can say anything and clearly will. Everyone who does those things provides justifications - Putin was helping oppressed Russians in Ukraine and stopping fascism, for example. Taking them at face value is not a serious analysis.
by throwerxyz | 2026-01-20 06:03:35+00:00
Yes. This is normal US world policing. Obviously the US is not going to attack European states. That is not normal world policing by the US.

You remind me of the people who actually think the Cybertruck is a real thing and not just another one of Tesla's drama gimmicks.

Trump is the same as every other country leader of the modern era. Does nothing, talks a lot. Except Trump has enough confidence to actually do half the prank, half the time. Which is hilarious. He's a generic superpower puppet.

Yes, Greenland drama is something to dismiss. It's hilarious. Venezuela has nothing to do with it or Trump.
by uecker | 2026-01-20 06:04:02+00:00
Please cite studies instead of making random claims. You again just repeat your rhetoric. But let's first agree that you CO2 emission comment was an invalid argument before we go on to discuss other issues.

As a start to discuss cost, here is Lazards' analysis about the cost of power generation: https://www.lazard.com/media/5tlbhyla/lazards-lcoeplus-june-...

"On an unsubsidized $/MWh basis, renewable energy remains the most cost-competitive form of generation."
by bryanrasmussen | 2026-01-20 06:04:26+00:00
hmm, so the article won't visualize with internet archive because evidently the IA bot has been blocked.

So not sure if post should just be deleted. Anyway, exciting story of a White South African who helped sabotage South Africa's Nuclear Weapons program:

"Dr. Christie provided the research needed to blow up the Koeberg Nuclear Power Station; the Arnot coal-fired power station; the Sasol oil-from-coal facilities that produced the heavy water critical to producing nuclear weapons; and other critical sites.

The explosions set back South Africa’s nascent nuclear weapons program by years and cost the government more than $1 billion, Dr. Christie later estimated."
by breput | 2026-01-20 06:05:40+00:00
There have been enshitification clouds looming on the horizon for Nova Launcher for so long, I think many people (including me) were hoping it would just never happen.

That said, check out Octopi Launcher. I installed it for the first time tonight[0] and it is exactly what you are looking for - a smoother, better Nova Launcher.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46688336
by klempner | 2026-01-20 06:05:46+00:00
>HDDs typically have a BER (Bit Error Rate) of 1 in 1015, meaning some incorrect data can be expected around every 100 TiB read. That used to be a lot, but now that is only 3 or 4 full drive reads on modern large-scale drives. Silent corruption is one of those problems you only notice after it has already done damage.

While the advice is sound, this number isn't the right number for this argument.

That 10^15 number is for UREs, which aren't going to cause silent data corruption -- simple naive RAID style mirroring/parity will easily recover from a known error of this sort without any filesystem layer checksumming. The rates for silent errors, where the disk returns the wrong data that benefit from checksumming, are a couple of orders of magnitude lower.
by jmb99 | 2026-01-20 06:06:09+00:00
I have a decent amount of second hand experience with used cars, through my brother who is a mechanic and spent a number of years working at a used car dealership. Hyundai/Kia is the only company he ever had to do engine replacements for at said dealership, and he did dozens. All under 200k km (frequently right after the extended warranty on the engines ran out, and occasionally on the second or even third engine for the vehicle). These are cars with good service history and otherwise in excellent condition. Sometimes cars they got on trade, sometimes purchased from auctions, sometimes customer cars (after they were sold). No rhyme or reason, just a genuinely bad design that was “fixed” but never fixed.

The only other universally-bad major component is JATCO CVT transmissions. I think his record was an Infiniti QX60 that had 95k km and a blown transmission. Most small vehicle/sedan CVTs he did were in the 160-190k km range, with some lasting as long as 250k km. And of course they were not repairable, since even if parts were available, the entire thing grenades leaving basically nothing left to rebuild.

Point being, “one engine issue due to a manufacturing flaw” is drastically underselling the issue, at best. It is an incorrectly-engineered engine that fails prematurely when built within specification, except when the tolerance stackup lines up in your favour and you perform much more frequent maintenance than prescribed. Oh and the affected engines were manufactured over about 15 years (and there’s signs that their current GDI 4-cylinders are still affected).
by LeFantome | 2026-01-20 06:06:30+00:00
Which makes the whole ecosystem a lot more open. None of those suppliers is going to have the market power to lock you in. You can get it from the lowest cost provider until something higher value comes along.

And if you are a country, nobody can kill your RISC-V ecosystem. Worst case, you have to design your own chips but at least all the software exists and is established. And Ooen Source cores exist and are getting better. They may not be bleeding edge but they could be good enough if push came to shove. The BOOM chip just got vector extensions.
by skhameneh | 2026-01-20 06:06:35+00:00
For cheap, the 2018 and later Nissan Leafs (old tech) or an Ariya (new tech, nothing notably exciting.

Maybe also check out Ioniq 5, EV6, Equinox, etc.

FWIW, my wife drives a Mach-E and I drive a Fisker Ocean.
The Mach-E is very comfortable but tends to be a bit higher in price than some other options. The Fisker Ocean is.. (from what you’ve said) probably not for you.
by NitpickLawyer | 2026-01-20 06:07:33+00:00
I don't think he's a luddite at all. He's brilliant in what he does, but he can also be wrong in his predictions (as are all humans from time to time). He did have 3 main predictions in ~23-24 that turned out to be wrong in hindsight. Debatable why they were wrong, but yeah.

In a stage interview (a bit after the "sparks of agi in gpt4" paper came out) he made 3 statemets:

a) llms can't do math. They can trick us with poems and subjective prose, but at objective math they fail.

b) they can't plan

c) by the nature of their autoregressive architecture, errors compound. so a wrong token will make their output irreversibly wrong, and spiral out of control.

I think we can safely say that all of these turned out to be wrong. It's very possible that he meant something more abstract, and technical at its core, but in the real life all of these things were overcome. So, not a luddite, but also not a seer.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-20 06:07:39+00:00
Again

>Tell us how you really feel about Trump, please. I genuinely want to know your mindset here.

At this point this will tell me more than anything else you feel bold enough to type in a throwaway account.

I'll admit, "Cybertruck was just a joke, bro" was certainly a surprising response to all of this. You got me there.
by blackqueeriroh | 2026-01-20 06:08:16+00:00
> The vast majority of plea bargains involve people who are, in fact, guilty and are receiving a reduced sentence for saving the court's time and showing contrition. That's not a perverse incentive, it's a reasonable tradeoff that benefits both the defendant and society.

What proof do you have of this? Estimates I’ve read range from 2-25% of people who accept plea bargains are innocent.

And what recent age of innocent people is it acceptable to send to jail via coercive plea bargains to ensure no guilty people go free?
by keernan | 2026-01-20 06:09:02+00:00
The individual participants in government demonstrate every day that they do nothing in response to Trump's literally daily illegal actions. When Trump tells SCOTUS to 'get lost' or when he cancels elections or when he declares martial law in response to some made up provocation; or when he refuses to leave office;

When any or all of these things occur, and the heads of the FBI, and ICE ( his personal police force ), and the DOJ and the military all put up a united front in support of him - what are the names of the people you are referring to who will have the physical ability to take any action against Trump?

edit: typo 'canceks'
by hombre_fatal | 2026-01-20 06:09:14+00:00
Aside, it’s obnoxious how many bathroom doors in public places like restaurants require you to pull the door handle to leave.

It should be pull to enter, push to leave so that you aren’t fouling your washed hands on the poopy door handle.

Even dumber is when they have those foot operated handles to exit. Why is it push to enter, pull to exit at all?
by Agent_Builder | 2026-01-20 06:10:15+00:00
We ran into similar issues when experimenting with multi-step agents. The biggest gains didn’t come from “smarter” prompts, but from reducing how much freedom an agent had at each step.

What helped for us was forcing explicit boundaries: what context is allowed in, which tools are visible, and what output is valid before moving forward. Once those constraints reset between steps, reliability went way up and hallucinations dropped sharply.

I’ve been using GTWY for this kind of step-gated setup and it made these boundaries much easier to reason about. The agent feels less clever, but far more predictable, which is what you want in real workflows.

Curious how you think about resetting authority between steps vs letting context accumulate.
by coffeemug | 2026-01-20 06:10:38+00:00
In the 1800 election republicans thought the federalists will turn America into a tyrannical monarchy, and the federalists thought the republicans will plunge America into mob rule like the French Revolution. They would have never defended each other.

Things look bad if you have a twenty year time horizon, but they look pretty normal if you zoom out to encompass all of American history.

Re Trump exacting revenge on political opponents, that conduct has endless precedent in American history. (Refusing to concede the election does not; but he was forced out of office nonetheless, which I read as a sign the republic is healthy.)

EDIT: I just remembered about the Aaron Burr conspiracy. Aaron Burr lost the 1800 election to Jefferson by one elector (after over a month of gridlock). He then tried to raise a private army to either march on Washington, or to form his own country and secede from the union. In 1805 Jefferson ordered his arrest and Burr was tried for treason (and acquitted!)
by LeFantome | 2026-01-20 06:10:47+00:00
This is a bold prediction but I thing “alliances” will form where industry players collaborate (like we are seeing in video codecs). And the basic core could become an Open Source project just like Linux did. Operating Systems and codecs were (and are) expensive too.

But there are different levels of proprietary. Having your entire software ecosystem impossible to lock-in means something. And competition tends to breed openness.

MIPS certainly did gain a lot of traction. It was a real force at one point and the world is awash in them. But of course MIPS (the company) is RISC-V now.
by defrost | 2026-01-20 06:11:07+00:00
Independent checks and balances are an essential part of any system of government.

The people vote in Representatives to debate policy, an independent merit based civil service carries it out, overwatched by independent scrutineers, judged by and independent legal system and enforce by a spectrum of LEOs and peace officers.

A feature of the Australian system (IMHO) is how rapid the churn on Prime Ministers can be ... the Washington system by contrast can't even toss out a corrupt felon grifting hard in public view.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2026-01-20 06:11:36+00:00
An LLM Red Team is going to be too expensive most people; an actual infosec company will need to write the prompts, vet them, etc. But you don't need that to find exploits if you're just a human sitting at a console trying things. The hackers still have the massive advantage of 1) time, 2) cost (it will cost them less than the defenders/Red-Team-As-a-SaaS), and 3) they only have to get lucky once.
by flir | 2026-01-20 06:11:52+00:00
One could argue that they privatized the profits and socialized the costs. The costs being the army, navy and to a lesser extent an army of colonial administrators. You can see a similar shape in the decision to end slavery in 1833 by, essentially, buying it out. The money for that buyout had to come from somewhere.

(I'm not a historian, I've no idea how well this idea would stand up to scrutiny).
by atmosx | 2026-01-20 06:12:13+00:00
Once a month is fine ("/etc/cron.monthly/zfs-scrub"):

#!/bin/bash
#
# ZFS scrub script for monthly maintenance
# Place in /etc/cron.monthly/zfs-scrub

POOL="storage"
TAG="zfs-scrub"

# Log start
logger -t "$TAG" -p user.notice "Starting ZFS scrub on pool: $POOL"

# Run the scrub
if /sbin/zpool scrub "$POOL"; then
logger -t "$TAG" -p user.notice "ZFS scrub initiated successfully on pool: $POOL"
else
logger -t "$TAG" -p user.err "Failed to start ZFS scrub on pool: $POOL"
exit 1
fi

exit 0
by crote | 2026-01-20 06:13:08+00:00
In other words: it's how passwords work on websites. Because it's usually good enough, as the only thing you are protecting is access to the server on the other side, and the pipe to that is already encrypted with TLS.

But this isn't a hard requirement. See Protonmail as a counterexample. And again, wifi authentication. I reckon debit card PINs as well.
by Agent_Builder | 2026-01-20 06:13:28+00:00
LLMs definitely compress the early part of the curve. Demos and scaffolding get cheap fast. Where it breaks is later, when the system has to run unattended and be accountable.

In our experience, the failures weren’t model quality issues but structure issues. Vibe-coded systems quietly accumulate assumptions, permissions, and state that demos don’t surface.

What helped us (using GTWY) was constraining what the agent could do per step instead of letting it reason freely across the whole workflow. Less magic, more predictability.

AI changes early velocity a lot. It doesn’t magically erase operational complexity.
by kshri24 | 2026-01-20 06:13:37+00:00
My answer is based on typical definition of what sales tax is. I have no idea how it is actually implemented in US and how it avoids tax pyramiding and if it actually can or not. But I know for a fact that ST has no concept of input tax credits unlike VAT/GST.

EDIT: Turns out US sales tax indeed works like I described above [1]. There are definitely some instances where B2B sales can be exempt from paying sales tax but it does not seem to be pervasive enough to be worth highlighting: because supposedly 40% of business transactions are taxed at intermediate stages (are paying sales tax at every stage).

Quoting from article:

"Some studies estimate that around 40% of the total sales tax revenue comes from taxes levied on business-to-business sales."

[1]: Reference: https://www.fonoa.com/resources/blog/vat-vs-sales-tax-where-...
by Agent_Builder | 2026-01-20 06:14:43+00:00
This resonates. In my own experiments with RAG agents, the hardest bugs weren’t retrieval quality but what the agent did after retrieval.

What worked for me was treating retrieval as a tightly scoped step and revoking access immediately after. That pattern made a big difference.

I’ve been using GTWY for this kind of workflow and the explicit step boundaries helped keep things boring (in a good way). Curious how you’re thinking about state and permission lifetimes here.
by gmd63 | 2026-01-20 06:14:45+00:00
Those takes are informed and level headed. We have a wildly unqualified Secretary of Defense who was appointed only because he advocated in his book "American Crusade" for a crusade against the "American Left". A Project 2025 leader Kevin Roberts described us as in the middle of a second American Revolution that will remain bloodless if the left allows it. And he said that before the election.

The DOGE project was a wildly unconstitutional overreach of the executive branch, shutting down or severely crippling agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau without the approval of Congress.

Republicans are letting Trump act like a dictator to accomplish things they want outside of the guardrails of our democracy. There are plenty more examples out there if you choose to pay attention.
by felixding | 2026-01-20 06:15:13+00:00
I've been working in Japan as a product manager/engineer for a few years. The market is indeed quite different from other parts of the world. It's hard to build trust and get sales in Japan, but once you do, your customers tend to stick with you for a very long time (sometimes decades or even longer - not in IT of course). Simply localizing your app is far from enough. You'll need a sales team, preferably composed of Japanese people, based in Japan. And you'll need to be patient.
by Agent_Builder | 2026-01-20 06:15:43+00:00
This matches what I’ve seen with long-running agents. The failures usually aren’t one big mistake, but small assumptions compounding over time.

What helped for me was forcing the agent into short, explicitly scoped steps. Each step declares what it can read, what it can do, and what it’s allowed to output, then that context gets torn down before the next step.

I’ve been using GTWY for this kind of setup and it made long-running coding agents much more boring and predictable, which is exactly what you want at scale.

Curious how you’re handling state reset and permission drift as runtimes get longer.
by johnj-hn | 2026-01-20 06:17:04+00:00
I'm not sure what an enterprise version would look like. I don't have any plans to ever charge for the app, so it'll never be "enterprise" in that regard.

I also like k9s! That team created a really great product for people who want to TUI.

Thanks for the compliment on the name. It's been literally the most polarizing thing about the app. More people comment on the name than on anything to do with how the app actually works, lol. I don't know whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. Probably both. :)
by topspin | 2026-01-20 06:17:14+00:00
> Really needs an agent-oriented “getting started” guide to put in the context, and evals vs. the same task done with Python, Rust etc.

It has several such documents, including a ~1400 line MEMORY.md file referencing several other such files, a language specification, a collection of ~100 documents containing just about every thought Jordan has ever had about the entire language and the evolution of its implementation, and a collection of examples that includes an SDL2 based OpenGL program.

Obviously, jkh clearly understands the need to bootstrap LLMs on his ~5 month old, self-hosted solo programming language.
by dijit | 2026-01-20 06:18:23+00:00
You've cited a 2-25% range. That's enormous. The low end supports my position, the high end would be catastrophic. Where's your source for 25%?

Here's mine for the low end: a study examining attorney perspectives on plea bargaining https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6368263/ and multiple sources citing 2-8% of felony guilty pleas involve innocent https://testif-i.com/issues/plea-bargains/ https://www.themarshallproject.org/2014/12/26/plea-bargainin...

At 2%, that's 98% guilty - which is what I meant by "vast majority." If you're claiming 25%, prove it.
by derrida | 2026-01-20 06:18:30+00:00
As I understand it - a person with psychosis is someone who has over-weighted perceptions that cannot be corrected with sensory input. Hence to "bring someone to their senses".

I've seen and thought there might be a few programmers maybe with a related (not psychosis) "ai mania" - where one thinks one changing the world and uniquely positioned. It's not that we're not capable in our small ways with network effects, or like a hand touch could begin the wave breaking (hello surfers!) what distinguishes this capacity for small effects having big impacts from the mania version is the mania version bears no subtle understanding of cause and effect. A person who is adept in understanding cause and effect usually there's quite a simple, beautiful and refined rule of thumb the know about it. "Less is more". Mania on the other hand proliferates outward - concept upon concept upon concept - and these concepts are removed from that cause and effect - playful interaction with nature. As a wise old sage hacker once said "Proof of concept, or get the fuck out"

Where mania occurs in contrast to grounded capacity that does change the world is in the aspect of responsibility - being able to respond or be responsive to something. Someone who changes the world with their maths equation will be able to be responsive, responsible and claim, a manic person there's a disconnect. Actually, from certain points of view with certain apps or mediums that have a claim to universality and claiming "how the world is" it looks like there's most definitely already some titans of industry and powerful people inside the feedback loop of mania.

The should just go for a walk. Call a childhood friend. Have a cup of tea. Come to their senses (literally).

it's good to remember we're just querying a datastructure.
by axsaucedo | 2026-01-20 06:19:04+00:00
Excited to show you a new project I have been working on: the K8s Agent Orchestration Framework (KAOS) which helps you deploy and manage distributed multi-agent systems at scale If you want to support, do try it out, add an issue or give it a star!

The KAOS Framework addresses some of the pains of taking multi-agent / multi-tool / multi-model systems to hundreds or thousands of services. It started as an experiment to build agentic copilots, and has progressed as a fun endevour building distributed systems for A2A, MCP Servers, and model inference!

The initial release comes with a few key features including:

1) Golang control plane to manage Agentic CRDs;
2) Python data plane that implements a2a, memory, tool / model mgmt;
3) React UI for CRUD+debugging, and;
4) CI/CD setup with KIND/pytest/ginko/etc.

Links & Resources:

Docs: https://axsaucedo.github.io/kaos/
Repo: https://github.com/axsaucedo/kaos
UI: https://axsaucedo.github.io/kaos-ui/