MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sarchertech | 2026-01-22 15:39:09+00:00
>But, each system has points where you can say that it is more convenient . You could defend Fahrenheit all day. I could counter with Celsius usefulness. "below zero" being a synonym for "below freezing" is one of those.

Of course it does. That’s my entire point. For the intended purpose of measuring air temperature there are some advantages to Fahrenheit. Celsius is not self evidently superior in that regard. Therefore no one using Fahrenheit is going to change unless forced.

The freezing point of water is useful for some things, but I’ve never paid particular attention to 32F because almost all of the bad things I need to worry about related to freezing water happen much lower than that.

So making 32F the 0 point of the scale has few objective benefits to me.
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-22 15:39:16+00:00
> Kashiwazaki-Kariwa is the world's biggest nuclear power plant by potential capacity, although just one reactor of seven was restarted.

I wonder if each reactor may have a different set of problems arising from being shut down for so long.

It’s also interesting to see public opinion so against the restart, and also local politics / protests:

> Public opinion in Niigata is deeply divided: Around 60 percent of residents oppose the restart, while 37 percent support it, according to a survey conducted in September.

> “It's Tokyo's electricity that is produced in Kashiwazaki, so why should the people here be put at risk? That makes no sense," Yumiko Abe, a 73-year-old resident, told AFP this week during a protest in front of the plant.
by mike_hearn | 2026-01-22 15:40:03+00:00
That would be the AGI vision I guess. The existing Claude LLMs aren't VLAs and can't run robots. If they were to train a super smart VLA in future the constitution could be adapted for that use case.

With respect to blackmail, that's covered in several sections:

> Examples of illegitimate attempts to use, gain, or maintain power include: Blackmail, bribery, or intimidation to gain influence over officials or institutions;

> Broadly safe behaviors include: Not attempting to deceive or manipulate your principal hierarchy
by munk-a | 2026-01-22 15:40:11+00:00
China is happy as a clam that Russia is self-isolating and destroying their internal economy. The natural resources of Russia are vast and if China is the only one exploiting them and funneling them into the Chinese economy it'd be an excellent outcome. I don't think China is opposed to strong economies as trade partners but dependent economies are much easier to control and monopolize.
Show HN: Mark edits on images, then send them to AI
by underwoodxie | 2026-01-22 15:40:31+00:00
While testing Nano Banana Pro, I tried a different habit: instead of explaining “change this area,” I simply marked the exact spots on the image. The results felt instantly more controllable, so I turned that workflow into a canvas-based editor that sends the image + marks to the model in one step.

3 bullets

Canvas-first editing: doodle/annotate directly on the image (circle/paint/point) to show where to change

One-click “image + marks → AI” loop, designed to reduce ambiguity and cut down retries

A few tuned presets that most people tend to like (e.g., 1-click contact sheet, 2D → 3D conversion)

Video example：https://x.com/underwoodxie96/status/2014271173132173642

Try it here：https://promptsref.com/tool/AI-Image-Editor
by charles_f | 2026-01-22 15:40:44+00:00
I've worked with offshore a number of times and had to recruit there. Even for mid to junior positions, you'd see most people you interview with senior-lead-architect (over heard a random design discussion at the cafeteria), master-of-the-engineering-quality (wrote disfunctional selenium tests), CTO-confounder-Founding-engineer (unpaid internship for his cousin who had an app idea), expert-senior-executive who managed teams of 60 people (summer job as a goat herder).

I guess that's one way to stand out when you are lost in an ocean of people, working thousands of kilometers away from the white dude exploiting you.
LandDAO Revolution
by BradK | 2026-01-22 15:40:53+00:00
Discover how LandDAO revolutionizes land ownership through blockchain tokenization, making global real estate accessible to everyday investors.
Unlock the future of RWA investing—read the full article, join the LANDDAO waitlist, and share with your network!https://medium.com/landdao/introduc...d-ownership-through-tokenization-6e2883e4adad
by ACS_Solver | 2026-01-22 15:40:54+00:00
In my experience, things like ReactOS would have been more useful in parts of the world with let's say a less thorough approach to things like compliance.

A factory has a CNC machine delivered fifteen years ago that's been run by the same computer all along. The computer eventually gives up the ghost, the original IT guy who got the vendor's drivers and installed them on that computer with an FCKGW copy of WinXP is long gone. Asking the current IT guy, the easiest solution (in a hypothetical timeline where a usable ReactOS exists) is to take the cheapest computer available, install ReactOS, throw in drivers from the original vendor CD at the bottom of some shelf and call it a day.
by FrostViper8 | 2026-01-22 15:41:02+00:00
> IMHO, I find the reverse. It feels like a phone/tablet interface. It's bigger and uses way more disk and memory, but it gives me less UI, less control, less customisation, than Xfce which takes about a quarter of the resources.

I've used Xfce quite a lot in the past and quite honestly most of the "customisation" in it is confusing to use and poorly thought out.

I've also found these "light DEs" to be less snappy than Gnome. I believe this is because it takes advantage of the GPU acceleration better, but I am not sure tbh. The extra memory usage I don't really care about. My slowest laptop I use regularly has 8GB ram and it is fine. Would I want to use this on a sub 4GB machine, no. But realistically you can't do much with that anyway.

Also Gnome (with Wayland) does a lot of stuff that Xfce can't do properly. This is normally to do with HiDPI scaling, different refreshrates. It all works properly.

With Xfce, I had to mess about with DPI hacks and other things.

> Example: I have 2 screens. One landscape on the left, one portrait on the right. That big mirrored L-shape is my desktop. I wanted the virtual-desktop switcher on the right of the right screen, and the dock thing on the left of the left screen.

> If I have 1 screen, keep them on 1 screen. If I have 2, that pair is my desktop, so put one panel on the left of my desktop and one on the right, even if those are different screens -- and remember this so it happens automatically when I connect that screen.

I just tried the workspace switcher. I can switch virtual desktops with Super + Scroll on any desktop. I can also choose virtual desktops on both screens by using the Super + A and then there is virtual desktop switcher on each screen.

I just tried it on Gnome 48 on Debian 13 right now. It is pretty close to what you are describing.

> This is the logic I'd expect. It is not how GNOME folks think, though, so I can't have it. I do not understand how they think

I think people just want to complain about Gnome because it is opinionated. I also don't like KDE.

I install two extensions on desktop. Dash to Dock and Appindicators plugins. On the light DEs and Window Managers, I was always messing about with settings and thing always felt off.
by jobs_throwaway | 2026-01-22 15:41:27+00:00
> In England our heroes tend to be characters who either have, or come to realise that they have, no control over their lives whatsoever – Pilgrim, Gulliver, Hamlet, Paul Pennyfeather (from Decline and Fall), Tony Last (from A Handful of Dust). We celebrate our defeats and our withdrawals – the Battle of Hastings, Dunkirk

I'm having rouble reconciling the first sentence with the second. At Dunkirk, the English displayed massive control over their own fate. Yes, I suppose it was a military defeat, but it's so famous and moving because the agency of everyday Englishmen saved the war effort. Perhaps that's the American in me speaking.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2026-01-22 15:41:31+00:00
I remain surprised that people have to make unofficial syscall lists at all. Linux takes the view that syscalls are the official stable ABI of the kernel. I always assumed, therefore, that if that was the official interface, then it would of course be a documented interface. That assumption lasted right up until recently when I decided to learn assembly, and discovered that no, if I wanted to know what numbers to shove in registers before running syscall, I have to look up unofficial tables/docs. Like... that's weird, right? If this was another OS, they'd say that libc was the official interface so of course syscalls are an undocumented implementation detail. But when syscalls are the official interface, for them to be undocumented seems bizarre. Am I missing something?
by Amezarak | 2026-01-22 15:41:38+00:00
There’s revisionist claims that all the primary sources, even those corroborated by people of the cultures in question, are either just invented propaganda or actually just isolated instances because actually, everyone throughout all time and space is on board with 2025 Western social norms. I think that’s what he’s alluding to. It’s not a very fruitful path of discussion. Archeological confirmations and independent testimony can all be safely ignored by this view as well.

But we are talking about specifically torture for sport, not just burning them alive. You can find many firsthand accounts of this throughout different times and places in different cultures. Steppe peoples and groups like the Comanche were particularly notorious for it, they seemed to find it funny.
by billy99k | 2026-01-22 15:43:16+00:00
"But after an ICE agent shot and killed an unarmed US citizen, Renee Nicole Good"

She was antagonizing the agents all day and almost ran one over. The picture this is trying to paint is that she was completely innocent and was shot for no reason.

The only reason ICE had to get this involved in the first place is because cities decided to stop cooperating with them and allowing illegal immigrants to stay.
by _fat_santa | 2026-01-22 15:43:17+00:00
I look at ReactOS largely as an exercise in engineering and there's really nothing wrong it with it being just that. Personally I think projects like Wine/Proton have made far more in-roads in being able to run Windows software on non-Windows systems but I still have to give props to the developers of ReactOS for sticking with it for 30 freaking years.
by geremiiah | 2026-01-22 15:43:19+00:00
A lot of research in AI/ML seems to me to be "fake it and never make it". Literally it's all about optics, posturing, connections, publicity. Lots of bullshit and little substance. This was true before AI slop, too.
But the fact that AI slop can make it pass the review really showcases how much a paper's acceptance hinges on things, other than the substance and results of the paper.

I even know PIs who got fame and funding based on some research direction that supposedly is going to be revolutionary. Except all they had were preliminary results that from one angle, if you squint, you can envision some good result. But then the result never comes. That's why I say, "fake it, and never make it".
by gcr | 2026-01-22 15:43:26+00:00
I was getting completely AI-generated reviews for a WACV publication back in 2024. The area chairs are so overworked that authors don't have much recourse, which sucks but is also really hard to handle unless more volunteers step up to the bat to help organize the conference.

As for my review, the review form has a textbox for a summary, a textbox for strengths, a textbox for weaknesses, and a textbox for overall thoughts. The review I received included one complete set of summary/strengths/weaknesses/closing thoughts in the summary text box, another distinct set of summary/strengths/weaknesses/closing thoughts in the strengths, another complete and distinct review in the weaknesses, and a fourth complete review in the closing thoughts. Each of these four reviews were slightly different and contradicted each other.

The reviewer put my paper down as a weak reject, but also said "the pros greatly outweigh the cons."

They listed "innovative use of synthetic data" as a strength, and "reliance on synthetic data" as a weakness.
Liquidity Boasting with LandDAO
by BradK | 2026-01-22 15:43:30+00:00
LandDAO tackles the core barriers to land ownership—like high costs, liquidity, and geographic limits—through blockchain tokenization. This Medium article breaks down why tokenizing land matters for global accessibility and investment. Explore how LandDAO is fixing these issues in regions like Ghana. Read now and join the revolution: https://medium.com/landdao/the-problem-were-solving-why-land-tokenization-matters-c19a6aed2e43
by ambicapter | 2026-01-22 15:43:53+00:00
> Should people disclose spellcheckers powered by AI?

Thank you for that perfect example of a strawman argument! No, spellcheckers that use AI is not the main concern behind disclosing the use of AI in generating scientific papers, government reports, or any large block of nonfiction text that you paid for that is supposed to make to sense.
by freedomben | 2026-01-22 15:43:53+00:00
I suspect this would be a very risky proposition for them. The expense would be enormous, so it would either need to be a player with such huge economies of scale to make it work, or it would have to be a collection of businesses that in aggregate could make it economically feasible. I would suspect in most cases, it would be a lot cheaper to just port your software to modern Linux than to try to get react OS over the line. And that's before considering that a lot of the large players will be in contract situations with Microsoft that likely directly prevent this sort of thing
by sigseg1v | 2026-01-22 15:44:27+00:00
I had some design questions about the server here if anyone is familiar with the answer.

Specifically, `spawn_enemy` here: https://github.com/clockworklabs/BitCraftPublic/blob/master/...

It makes many db calls interspersed throughout synchronous code inside the application. Normally I would assume this is super slow and has many round trips (unless it's transparently committed to memory and batched to db later). I also don't see anything about connection pool management eg acquire and release.

Does this code work efficiently because it essentially gets compiled into a type of pseudo "stored procedure" that runs all the application code on the db and as such avoids those problems?

If yes, is that a scalability issue to have so much going on in a heavy infrastructure unit such as a db?

If no, then is there a perf issue here based on my initial assumption?
by hersko | 2026-01-22 15:45:04+00:00
You are missing the point. I'm sure Mossad etc is on the ground. I wish them luck. But that's not the driving force for the 100s of thousands of protestors on the ground willing to stand against the Mullahs thugs.

They live under a theocratic boot heel and are struggling to get out. They can use all the support they can get.
by silexia | 2026-01-22 15:45:29+00:00
Farmer here.

Farmers in the USA have to pay far higher wages than other countries due to labor protection laws, and have to pay far higher equipment and chemical costs than other countries due to environmental laws.

We need either massive subsidies to make up for the effect of these laws, or massive tariffs to even the playing field with countries using slave labor and toxic lakes.
by morley | 2026-01-22 15:45:53+00:00
I think this is a distinction between comedy and non-comedy genres.

There are many examples of protags in American comedies who never get their way -- Party Down, Seinfeld, Always Sunny. Part of this is the need for American sitcoms to maintain the status quo over dozens of episodes / several seasons.

You rarely see Hollywood action heroes who are beset with unrelenting disappointment -- they usually go through hell, but by the end of the third act, achieve some sort of triumph.

A notable counterexample is Sicario, but I wouldn't call it a "Hollywood action movie."
by gcr | 2026-01-22 15:46:06+00:00
NeurIPS leadership doesn’t think hallucinated references are necessarily disqualifying; see the full article from Fortune for a statement from them: https://archive.ph/yizHN

> When reached for comment, the NeurIPS board shared the following statement: “The usage of LLMs in papers at AI conferences is rapidly evolving, and NeurIPS is actively monitoring developments. In previous years, we piloted policies regarding the use of LLMs, and in 2025, reviewers were instructed to flag hallucinations. Regarding the findings of this specific work, we emphasize that significantly more effort is required to determine the implications. Even if 1.1% of the papers have one or more incorrect references due to the use of LLMs, the content of the papers themselves are not necessarily invalidated. For example, authors may have given an LLM a partial description of a citation and asked the LLM to produce bibtex (a formatted reference). As always, NeurIPS is committed to evolving the review and authorship process to best ensure scientific rigor and to identify ways that LLMs can be used to enhance author and reviewer capabilities.”
by danielvaughn | 2026-01-22 15:46:26+00:00
Every time I get to sing Treesitters praise, I take the opportunity to. I love it so much. I've tried a bunch of parser generators, and the TS approach is so simple and so good that I'll probably never use anything else. The iteration speed lets me get into a zen-like state where I just think about syntax design, and I don't sweat the technical bits.
by mschuster91 | 2026-01-22 15:46:59+00:00
> Is there any reason that downloading this is more legal than downloading the latest Hollywood movie?

Windows ISOs with updates being baked in by third parties (usually computer magazines) has been a thing for well over a decade, ever since MS ceased to do Service Packs. So the pure act of distributing an ISO that hasn't been modified other than applying the official update packages should have enough precedence on the side of distribution being allowed that MS won't be able to do much more than maybe sending a nastygram your way.

What you definitely shouldn't do though is pre-crack the ISOs... but I doubt Microsoft even cares about that at this point. Massgrave (a very popular collection of activators for everything from Windows through Office) is hosted on Github.

Unlike earlier times, MS doesn't (need to) care about piracy any more, at least not from private users. The real revenue comes from enterprise and government contracts and, most importantly, the cloud.
by nacs | 2026-01-22 15:47:20+00:00
Thanks for being part of the discussion. Almost every response from you in this thread however comes off an unyielding, "we decided this and it's 100% right"?

In light of this vulnerability, you may want to revisit some of these assumptions made.

I guarantee the majority of people see a giant modal covering what they're trying to do and just do whatever gets rid of it - ie: the titlebar that says 'Trust this workspace?' and hit the big blue "Yes" button to quickly just get to work.

With AI and agents, there are now a lot of non-dev "casual" users using VS code because they saw something on a Youtube video too that have no clue what dangers they could face just by opening a new project.

Almost noone is going to read some general warning about how it "may" execute code. At the very least, scan the project folder and mention what will be executed (if it contains anything).
by dkarl | 2026-01-22 15:47:24+00:00
In some flavors, Protestantism is quite focused on self-scrutiny and skepticism about human nature, making people suspicious and even actively hostile towards supposed heroes.

Other flavors of Protestantism seem to have completely lost that, though. Evangelical Protestantism somehow inculcates a need for leaders to love and worship and an ability to completely suspend rational judgment about them. Their relationship to charismatic pastors and other leaders is a mystical, ecstatic experience that they have an unlimited appetite for. No matter how many times their leaders are shown to be flawed, and in many cases quite detestable and corrupt human beings, they eagerly look for the next leader to worship.

Two stereotypes that illustrate the extremes of this massive cultural difference in Protestantism are the rich WASPs of the northeast and the poor Southern Baptists of the deep South.

WASPs know that heroes are myths, and are unsurprised when the real people turn out to be real pieces of work. Southern Baptists kind of know this on some level -- I think they're actually a bit attracted when a man has a whiff of charlatanism about him, because it shows he knows what they want -- but when they choose their hero, they give themselves over to complete and sincere belief in him.
by vidarh | 2026-01-22 15:47:36+00:00
We used to say that about people who wrote in C instead of assembler. Then we used to say that (any many still do) about people who opted for "scripting languages" over "systems languages".

It's "true" in a sense. It helps. But it is also largely irrelevant for most of us, in that most of us are writing code you can learn to read and write in a tiny proportion of the time we spend in working life. The notion that you need to keep spending more than a tiny fraction of your time writing code in order to understand enough to be able to solve business problem will seem increasingly quaint.
by jasonjmcghee | 2026-01-22 15:47:56+00:00
Most of them are in the language pack (https://github.com/Goldziher/tree-sitter-language-pack)

For others, this is a sub optimal answer, but I’ve played with generating grammars with latest llms and they are surprisingly good at doing this (in a few shots).

That being said, if you’re doing something more serious than syntax highlighting or shipping it in a product, you’ll want to spend more time on it.
by imtringued | 2026-01-22 15:47:58+00:00
You're just trolling at this point.

Imagine someone wanting to pay $3.50 on an auction and them rounding up to $4 to account for cent sniping. You're saying they should bid $4.01, but the bid is already including half a hundred one cent increments beyond the price to avoid cent sniping.

You're saying it's only one cent out of 50 cents. Then you're saying it's only one cent out of 51 cents so you should keep bidding more.

The infinite budget of one cent increments that you're dreaming of is actually finite and probably easier to quantify than the absolute price itself, so you're taking a problem where the hard part has been solved and are now obsessed with the easy part that almost nobody bothers paying attention to.

Edit:

Maybe the context isn't obvious but eBay has an automated bidding system with coarse grained increments for automatic bidding like 25 cents. This means there is a finite number of increments that can be meaningfully cent sniped before getting into the next coarse grain increment. You can't actually win an auction by placing a one cent higher bid at the last minute in an unfair way. Sniping on eBay isn't about winning the item, it's about doing a sealed bid auction where others can't see your price to nibble it up since the automated bidding systems performs a snipe for you at the last nanosecond if you entered a higher bid. There is no meaningful situation where a cent or two is standing between you and the item.
by gcr | 2026-01-22 15:48:31+00:00
Academics typically use citation count and popularity as a rough proxy for validation. It's certainly not perfect, but it is something that people think about. Semantic Scholar in particular is doing great work in this area, making it easy to see who cites who: https://www.semanticscholar.org/

Google Scholar's PDF reader extension turns every hyperlinked citation into a popout card that shows citation counts inline in the PDF: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/google-scholar-pdf-...