MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by StableAlkyne | 2026-01-22 16:16:03+00:00
> I'd love to see future reporting that instead of saying "Research finds amazing chemical x which does y" you see "Researcher reproduces amazing results for chemical x which does y. First discovered by z".

Most people (that I talk to, at least) in science agree that there's a reproducibility crisis. The challenge is there really isn't a good way to incentivize that work.

Fundamentally (unless you're independent wealthy and funding your own work), you have to measure productivity somehow, whether you're at a university, government lab, or the private sector. That turns out to be very hard to do.

If you measure raw number of papers (more common in developing countries and low-tier universities), you incentivize a flood of junk. Some of it is good, but there is such a tidal wave of shit that most people write off your work as a heuristic based on the other people in your cohort.

So, instead it's more common to try to incorporate how "good" a paper is, to reward people with a high quantity of "good" papers. That's quantifying something subjective though, so you might try to use something like citation count as a proxy: if a work is impactful, usually it gets cited a lot. Eventually you may arrive at something like the H-index, which is defined as "The highest number H you can pick, where H is the number of papers you have written with H citations." Now, the trouble with this method is people won't want to "waste" their time on incremental work.

And that's the struggle here; even if we funded and rewarded people for reproducing results, they will always be bumping up the citation count of the original discoverer. But it's worse than that, because literally nobody is going to cite your work. In 10 years, they just see the original paper, a few citing works reproducing it, and to save time they'll just cite the original paper only.

There's clearly a problem with how we incentivize scientific work. And clearly we want to be in a world where people test reproducibility. However, it's very very hard to get there when one's prestige and livelihood is directly tied to discovery rather than reproducibility.
Show HN: It took us 4 months to realize that users wanted charts, not text
by cenrunzhe | 2026-01-22 16:16:22+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m the maker of ChartGen AI. Last year, we launched a text-based AI agent called Ada.im. After analyzing thousands of user interactions, we stumbled upon a pattern we hadn't expected: users were constantly trying to paste data rows and ask for visual representations, but the text-based model couldn't handle it well.

We realized that for marketers, seeing the trend is more valuable than reading about it.

We pivoted that insight into a standalone tool:

Drag & Drop: Upload raw CSVs (FB Ads, GA4, TikTok, etc.).

Processing: We map the disparate column names into a unified schema.

Viz: It generates interactive charts to show ad spend ROI and conversion trends.

It's an attempt to make data storytelling accessible without needing a data analyst or SQL knowledge.

Would love to get your thoughts on the UX.

chartgen.ai
by AlanYx | 2026-01-22 16:16:32+00:00
In the Christmas Special, the kids come to see Charlie Brown as right and are fairly vocal about this ("he's not a blockhead after all", etc.). It is somewhat tethered to the religious elements voiced by Linus, which gives the turnaround to Charlie's perspective a kind of cultural weight, i.e., the audience is intended to understand the kids as wrong in some kind of fundamental way. It's not as simple as "the magic of Christmas".

In the Halloween Special, the kids don't do the same for Linus, apart from Lucy who pulls him out of the cold and tucks him into bed.

The dynamic between Lucy and Charlie is a lot deeper than her cynical kicking the ball trick. Schultz uses their interactions (the psychiatry booth, him keeping her on the baseball team even though she's consistently terrible) to reinforce an overall theme that optimism is better than pessimism. Occasionally he directly peels back the layers behind Lucy's crabbiness like when Charlie's in the hospital.
by mattkevan | 2026-01-22 16:16:42+00:00
I was confused when I first heard about 'Design Thinking' as a thing because as a designer it sounded just like the standard design process that I already knew inside-out and backwards.

After a while I realised a few things about it:

1. Yes it is the standard design process, but with a fancy title.

2. It's been given a fancy title as that helps sell books and launch consulting careers

3. It's actually useful as it gets clients and stakeholders involved in the design process. They start thinking about the problems they want to solve and who they want to solve them for - and more importantly have a personal stake in the outcomes. Moves the conversation from 'I want this' to 'here's the problem'.

I've run design thinking workshops with everyone from primary school children to CEOs and they've all loved it.
by p0pularopinion | 2026-01-22 16:17:05+00:00
Nuclear does not cause prices to be lower. Putting that aside, political discourse here in Germany was "interesting" to say the least.

The shift to renewables started off pretty well in the early 2010s before it came to a grinding halt thanks to some wierd debates around the topic. For the past few years, buildout of solar has been remarkably fast, especially considering the slow pace of other projects. In 2025, 16.4 GW of solar power went live.

The biggest issue that drives prices here is the grid. New high voltages transmission lines have faced intense local oppsition, so transmision between North and South is limited, which is problematic given the focus of the north on (offshore) wind and the south on solar PV. Since Germany is a single electricity price zone, the low to negative electricity prices from wind turbines do not reflect the reality of grid capabilities, resulting in significant redispatch costs.

The solution would be obvious. Split Germany into n electicity price zones (with n>1). However, there is a lot of political opposition, specifically from the conservative CDU/CSU against this.

So yeah, Germany is struggling with relatively expensive electrcity prices, complaining about it, but refusing to implement a borderline free solution for it.
by robomartin | 2026-01-22 16:17:14+00:00
> But we haven’t had any substantial evidence despite the current administration trying to claim otherwise.

Take politics out of it. My comments are not at all based on politics or ideology. It's purely a matter of process issues. It's like saying that short passwords are insecure.

With regards to your lack of evidence observation, this is actually one of the problems with mail-in voting. There is now way at all to know who filled out the ballot. None. It happens privately. If, on the other hand, voting is in person and with proper identification, there is no doubt.

So, lack of evidence is not evidence of a lack of manipulation at all.

I'll give you a personal example: As my father succumbed to dementia a couple of years before passing, my mother, who was also pretty old but still mentally functional, would fill out his ballot and have him sign it. I told her many times that she should never do that and that he, due to his dementia, had no business voting. She didn't want to hear it. Before someone says "you should have reported it!". First, you are an asshole. Second, I'd like to see you report your 94 year old mother with pancreatic cancer and your 96 year old father with dementia at the edge of death.

Now, if in-person paper voting was required he would not have been able to vote and the same may have been true of her towards the end.

I'd be willing to bet this kind of thing happens with some frequency in households. Another one is children who just turn 18 and the parents telling them how to vote. That's just as fraudulent and manipulated. Another friend of ours who isn't interested in being informed and hates politics tells his wife to just fill out the ballots any way she wants.
by JhonPork | 2026-01-22 16:17:32+00:00
This is fair feedback, and you’re pointing at the main tradeoff intentionally.
One clarification that might help: Falcon isn’t multiple frontends or multiple grammars in the usual sense. The parser accepts all code into a single AST, but during IR lowering the compiler is invoked with exactly one active profile. Nodes whose profile doesn’t match are not lowered to IR at all — they’re rejected before borrow checking, optimization, or codegen.
From the compiler’s point of view, the other profiles never existed. There’s no runtime guard, no macro-style inclusion, and no shared assumptions leaking across profiles.
The goal isn’t to let people freely mix levels like unsafe {} in Rust, but to make domain boundaries explicit and enforceable. Kernel/baremetal code has fundamentally different invariants (no heap, no panic, different aliasing rules), and soft escape hatches tend to blur those over time.
That said, I agree this does increase tooling complexity and may reduce adoption. This is very much an experiment to see whether hard separation + single IR is a better tradeoff for certain projects than one-size-fits-all semantics.
Appreciate the comparison examples — they’re useful references.
by jimnotgym | 2026-01-22 16:17:35+00:00
And of course you get just as much snobbery from your own class about wanting to climb.

It is possible for a working class person to become Middle class. But you have to be born to the Upper Classes. You can get some way by sending your Children to public school (The perverse name for the most exclusive private schools!). The kids might make it, but you will always be 'new money'.
by pessimizer | 2026-01-22 16:17:46+00:00
Hallucinations aren't mistakes, they're fabrications. The two are probably referred to by the same word in some languages.

Institutions can choose an arbitrary approach to mistakes; maybe they don't mind a lot of them because they want to take risks and be on the bleeding edge. But any flexible attitude towards fabrications is simply corruption. The connected in-crowd will get mercy and the outgroup will get the hammer. Anybody criticizing the differential treatment will be accused of supporting the outgroup fraudsters.
by nullc | 2026-01-22 16:18:00+00:00
Problem is that the LLM operators don't care if you're rude. They copy and paste your response to the LLM and probably don't read it themselves. If they do read it they don't suffer any ego hit from it because if there was any error it was the LLM's not theirs and their LLM is busy telling them how brilliant and unparalleled they are and how wrong the haters are in any case.

CURL is free to try it, but I'm doubtful being rude will meaningfully improve things. I'm confident it won't improve the ratio of good to bad reports because non-chatbot powered submitters are sensitive to rudeness or even the threat of potential rudeness, and so this approach could easily reduce total volume some but mostly in the reduction of good submissions.
by lioeters | 2026-01-22 16:18:16+00:00
> extra step to get from CST to AST

Could you elaborate on what this involves? I'm also looking at using tree-sitter as a parser for a new language, possibly to support multiple syntaxes. I'm thinking of converting its parse trees to a common schema, that's the target language.

I guess I don't quite get the difference between a concrete and abstract syntax tree. Is it just that the former includes information that's irrelevant to the semantics of the language, like whitespace?
by gcr | 2026-01-22 16:18:41+00:00
Isn't telling them to find the paper just "going back and forth with a fraudster"?

One "simple" way of doing this would be to automate it. Have authors step through a lint step when their camera-ready paper is uploaded. Authors would be asked to confirm each reference and link it to a google scholar citation. Maybe the easy references could be auto-populated. Non-public references could be resolved by uploading a signed statement or something.

There's no current way of using this metadata, but it could be nice for future systems.

Even the Scholar team within Google is woefully understaffed.

My gut tells me that it's probably more efficient to just drag authors who do this into some public execution or twitter mob after-the-fact. CVPR does this every so often for authors who submit the same paper to multiple venues. You don't need a lot of samples for deterrence to take effect. That's kind of what this article is doing, in a sense.
by doublerabbit | 2026-01-22 16:19:10+00:00
Solar is hit & miss. The only capacity we really have is wind and those are only efficient to those near the sea or in the highlands. England, Scotland, Wales are governed by rain 80% of the year and with the sun we get, household solar rarely breaks even.

Just because we've got, if the government isn't supporting it's pretty much wasted. The renewable farms we do have are mostly funded by private investments firms. Scotland and Wales wants more renewable but the UK government says no.

> End 2024 installed electricity generating capacity was 105 GWe:
35.0 GWe natural gas;
32.8 GWe wind;
18.3 GWe solar;
7.4 GWe biofuels & waste;
5.9 GWe nuclear;
4.8 GWe hydro (including 2.9 GWe pumped storage) and 1.3 GWe oil.

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...
by stewartjarod | 2026-01-22 16:19:19+00:00
Automations is a visual workflow builder for multi-step sequences.

Consider:

- Welcome series (signup → 3 emails over a week)

- Cart abandonment (wait for purchase, timeout → reminder)

- Re-engagement (segment-based triggers)

- Multi-channel flows (email + SMS in one workflow)

You can trigger on events, segment changes, or schedules. Use delays, conditions (branch on contact properties), and wait-for-event (pause until X happens or timeout).
There's also an AI designer. You describe what you want in plain english, and it generates the workflow.
by mountainb | 2026-01-22 16:19:25+00:00
Evidence doesn't mean overwhelming proof. My post was confined to 1989-1990. I didn't make the claim in your post. Homer Simpson also doesn't work in a factory; he's a nuclear engineer at a power plant. I dunno what you're trying to get at here. There are at least as many problems with trying to use statistics as evidence as there are with using anecdotes and fictional references.

I would also trust 100 fictional cartoon characters before I would trust anything said in a pirated article written by Noah Smith about anything. If Noah Smith said that grass was green I would assume that it's blue.
by mothballed | 2026-01-22 16:19:52+00:00
I honestly have no idea how that officer could have stopped a car that was just used in his own eyes as a deadly weapon, other than shooting the driver, which enabled him to crash her car immediately into another car rather than let it get away. Shooting the tires or something is the closest second readily available but you can drive a long time with a blown out tire.

I am certainly not defending what he did. I find his actions unreasonable. However I do think they were legitimately seen reasonable through the eyes of someone with PTSD from being dragged 7 months before and who never should have been put back in the field because he was now mentally unfit from said PTSD of his last idiotic episode of man v car. Which is something he seems to constantly find himself in despite most officers never having that happen in their life.
by eli | 2026-01-22 16:19:53+00:00
Strictly speaking no, that doesn’t prevent crawling - at the least Googlebot has to fetch the page to see the meta tag or the robots.txt to see what’s allowed, and it will periodically recheck for changes.

It doesn’t even prevent indexing. If a page is linked from elsewhere, Google will show it in search results even if noindex’d.

And why does Google get to set these rules on my site anyway? I didn’t agree to them.
by mrgoldenbrown | 2026-01-22 16:20:06+00:00
Home page states Lix can diff. "any file format like .xlsx, .pdf, .docx"

Wow, sounds useful. Git doesn't do that out of the box.

BUT... the list of available "plugins" only has .csv,.md and json, which are things that git already handles just fine?

Can it actually diff excel and word and PDF or not?
by derf_ | 2026-01-22 16:20:14+00:00
This will continue to happen as long as it is effectively unpunished. Even retracting the paper would do little good, as odds are it would not have been written if the author could not have used an LLM, so they are no worse off for having tried. Scientific publications are mostly a numbers game at this point. It is just one more example of a situation where behaving badly is much cheaper than policing bad behavior, and until incentives are changed to account for that, it will only get worse.
by torlok | 2026-01-22 16:20:16+00:00
Renewables lead to energy independence and a more distributed energy grid. It's fundamental to security, and can't be so easily measured in terms of money. The EU is increasing its independence from China via initiatives like the Net-Zero Industry Act. And this talk of "politicians being bought by Chinese companies" is laughable in the face of what oil companies are doing, to the benefit of exporters like USA, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and other regimes, and definitively not the EU.
by ctoth | 2026-01-22 16:20:25+00:00
Gonna try a new thing:

The irony is almost too perfect. The Piper article's core thesis is that the Bloomberg piece "dances around the data rather than explaining it" - and then the comments dance around the article rather than engaging with it.

4d4m's "cherry-picked" accusation is particularly maddening because Piper's entire methodological point is that you can pick any of the available metrics - police-reported crashes, any-injury crashes, airbag deployments, serious injuries - and they all converge on the same 5-10x safety advantage. That's literally the opposite of cherry-picking. Cherry-picking is when you find the one metric that supports your conclusion. Finding consistency across all available metrics is robustness.

tim-tday just recites the crime scene example that Piper explicitly addresses in the article. The railroad tracks issue was a software bug that got patched. They're treating "I remember some headlines" as equivalent to "I have engaged with the statistical argument."

The "sensor package costs as much as a 4-bedroom home" is also just... not an argument about safety? It's not even an argument about cost-effectiveness since Waymo is a service, not a product you buy.

What's the actual function this serves for commenters? My read: engaging with the statistical argument would require either conceding the point or doing actual work to find methodological flaws. Handwaving about "cherry-picking" and listing failure anecdotes lets them maintain their prior (skepticism of corporate claims = smart) without that effort.
by Kiplomat-SouCmp | 2026-01-22 16:20:32+00:00
It is undeniable that technological change is inevitable and demands a certain degree of adaptability. At the same time, it is essential to emphasize the importance of critical reflection and conscious decision-making, which are just as vital as the adaptation itself. The goal should be to find ways to harness the benefits of technological advancements without compromising individual autonomy. In this manner, a balanced relationship between technological progress and personal sovereignty can be maintained.
by geooff_ | 2026-01-22 16:20:39+00:00
One thing to call out, in my experience Coding Agents are bad a SwiftUI. Compared to doing JS frontends or any Python Backend work the difference is obvious.

I just don't think theres enough Swift in the LLMs corpus and the "right way" to do things in Swift has changes a few times in the last few years which I imagine compounds the sparse signal.

For SwiftUI work I'd personally recommend using Opus 4.5 with Axiom. Anytime you're designing something refer to Axiom, Claude needs its skills and agents to steer designs.
by toss1 | 2026-01-22 16:20:42+00:00
Excellent scientific quantification that Search Engines and Large Language Models reduce the burden of writing — i.e., they make writing easier.

The consequence of making anything easier is of course that the person and the brain is less engaged in the work, and remembers less.

This debate about using technology for thinking has been ongoing for literally millennia. It is at least as old as Socrates, who criticized writing as harming the ability to think and remember.

>>And now, since you are the father of writing, your affection for it has made you describe its effects as the opposite of what they really are. In fact, it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.”[0]

To emphasize: 'instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own ... not a potion for remembering, but for reminding ... the appearance of wisdom, not its reality.'

There is no question this is a true dichotomy and trade-off.

The question is where on the spectrum we should put ourselves.

That answer is likely different for each task or goal.

For learning, we should obviously be working at a lower level, but should we go all the way to banning reading and writing and using only oral inquiry and recitation?

OTOH, a peer software engineer manager with many Indians in his group said he was constantly trying to get them to write down more of their plans and documentation, because they all wanted to emulate the great mathematician Ramanujan who did much of his work all in his head, and it was slowing down the SE's work.

When I have an issue with curing a particular polymer for a project, should I just get the answer from the manufacturer or search engine, or take the sufficient chemistry courses and obtain the proprietary formulas necessary to derive all the relevant reactions in my head? If it is just to deliver one project, obviously just get the answer and move on, but if I'm in the business of designing and manufacturing competing polymers, I should definitely go the long route.

As always, it depends.

[0] https://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1/socrates-...