MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by geokon | 2026-01-18 18:32:08+00:00
This was a nice intro to AT (though I feel it could have been a bit shorter)

The whole things seems a bit over engineered with poor separation of concerns.

It feels like it'd be smarter to flatten the design and embed everything in the Records. And then other layers can be built on top of that

Making every record includes the author's public-key (or signature?). Anything you need to point at you'd either just give its hash, or hash + author-public-key. This way you completely eliminate this goofy filesystem hierarchy. Everything else is embed it in the Record.

Lexicons/Collections are just a field in the Record. Reverse looking up the hash to find what it is, also a separate problem.
by lvl155 | 2026-01-18 18:32:26+00:00
We have to do better to protect our government from religious groups. And I mean ALL religious groups. That’s really the root of the political problems right now. Ironic considering that the country was founded by people who fled similar malaise plaguing the Old World. Clearly separation of church and state is not explicit enough in our laws.

I am not even sure if this country can survive the next three years and come out of it unscathed. One group basically trojan horsed their way to top and destroyed global order indefinitely.
by Simulacra | 2026-01-18 18:32:43+00:00
I am .... optimistic that something can be arranged. I believe that Greenland is extremely important to arctic security, and America is the best country to defend that zone. At the same time I do not support the aggressive tactics by this administration.

Since this was first proposed I still hold the position that it is up to the people of Greenland - not Denmark - to decide their path. I hope they will hold a referendum.
by nerdsniper | 2026-01-18 18:32:54+00:00
That moment actually has a better Trump analogy, the time Trump stole the FIFA Gold Club World Cup trophy and FIFA had to eventually decide to make a statement that they were giving it to Trump - which is unlike anything that’s ever happened before for a FIFA trophy.

https://www.reddit.com/r/football/comments/1lzzsmc/trump_kep...
by elbci | 2026-01-18 18:33:44+00:00
> "Your phone will not just be a tool for consumption; it will be a weapon for truth. It will run its own blockchain node. It will prove ZK-statements in milliseconds. It will run state-of-the-art multi billion/trillion parameters LLM’s locally, meaning you will have an AI (probably AGI*) advocate that works only for you, not for a tech giant. You will be a walking center of power. You will be your own bank, your own identity provider, and your own judge."

... and flying cars will take us to Mars holiday spots.

Here's what will actually happen:

I will prompt the TSMC AI for a ASIC with hardwired certificates tied to my biometrics running instagram and X, maybe - if I can afford it - even a pay as you play minesweeper extension
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-18 18:34:12+00:00
> Who is “his base”?

Folks whose pet issue is IP reform, presumably. If that’s your drum, beat it. But it’s good context for anyone tuning in that it’s going to be your beat.

> What responsibility to affect meaningful trade regulation did he abdicate

What are you talking about? Where was this responsibility suggested?

All I did was point out hyperbole for what it is. Doctorow is speaking metaphorically. He isn’t literally suggesting tearing up trade agreements over IP because he isn’t an idiot.
by sdenton4 | 2026-01-18 18:35:08+00:00
This is how we had a major boom in middle-class wealth int he US post WW2.

If you are only selling coconuts, a single raw material, yes, you will run into supply constraints such that prices go up. But that isn't how economics works. Your zero-sum economics example is only applicable in short-term scenarios: over the longer term, new industries develop to solve persistent problems that people are willing to pay to solve.

Money solves the problems of the people that have the problems. If the problem is 'we need to eat', producers will diversify into new food sources to meet the demand, solving the problem, and capturing the money of the people who have that problem.

There is an enormous space of problems people have which cannot be solved due to lack of access to money. Increasing costs in childcare, elder care, and education are good examples.
by skybrian | 2026-01-18 18:35:43+00:00
This article goes into a lot of detail, more than is really needed to get the point across. Much of that could have been moved to an appendix? But it's a great metaphor. Someone should write a user-friendly file browser for PDS's so you can see it for yourself.

I'll add that, like a web server that's just serving up static files, a Bluesky PDS is a public filesystem. Furthermore it's designed to be replicated, like a Git repo. Replicating the data is an inherent part of how Bluesky works. Replication is out of your control. On the bright side, it's an automatic backup.

So, much like with a public git repo, you should be comfortable with the fact that anything you put there is public and will get indexed. Random people could find it in a search. Inevitably, AI will train on it. I believe you can delete stuff from your own PDS but it's effectively on your permanent record. That's just part of the deal.

So, try not to put anything there that you'll regret. The best you could do is pick an alias not associated with your real name and try to use good opsec, but that's perilous.
by leipie | 2026-01-18 18:35:45+00:00
I have had generations of ThinkPad, since the x30 series. And the older older all had a very stiff metal (magnesium) frame as a core and usually a metal lid. Nowadays they went to very stiff plastic and carbon to save weight and thickness I guess. But they are much more portable because of this. I think Apple patented the "unibody design" at the time btw. The current company macbook pro I use for work is very heavy compared to other devices, because of all the metal and glass. It is quite a lot to carry around.
by Mr_Hoder | 2026-01-18 18:35:56+00:00
The persistent discrepancy between the proton charge radius measured from muonic hydrogen ($r_p \approx 0.84 \text{ fm}$) and electronic hydrogen ($r_p \approx 0.88 \text{ fm}$)—the "proton radius puzzle"—suggests a potential violation of lepton universality or an incomplete understanding of vacuum structure at short distances. In this Letter, we propose a mechanism of \textbf{nonlinear vacuum metric response}. By treating the vacuum as a dielectric-like medium with a finite elastic modulus coupled to electromagnetic energy density, we derive a conformal scaling factor for the local metric. The contraction of the effective metric is analytically derived as $\eta = \alpha \ln(m_\mu/m_e)$, where the coupling factor arises from the summation over vacuum polarization modes. This formula yields a radius shrinkage of \textbf{3.8906\%}, which agrees with the experimental discrepancy of \textbf{3.9115\%} to within \textbf{0.02\%}. We further predict a radius of \textbf{0.823 fm} for tauonic hydrogen.
by Workaccount2 | 2026-01-18 18:36:31+00:00
>One wonders if some professional mathematicians are instead choosing to publish LLM proofs without attribution for career purposes.

This will just become the norm as these models improve, if it isn't largely already the case.

It's like sports where everyone is trying to use steroids, because the only way to keep up is to use steroids. Except there aren't any AI-detectors and it's not breaking any rules (except perhaps some kind of self moral code) to use AI.
by dehrmann | 2026-01-18 18:36:56+00:00
> but that's not the answer we wanted

You could have learned this if you were better about collecting requirements. You can tell the interviewer "I'd do it like this for this size data, but I'd do it like this for 100x data. Which size should I design this for?" If they're looking for one direction and you ask which one, interviewers will tell you.
by addaon | 2026-01-18 18:36:58+00:00
This was 20+ years ago, so the "sophisticated" baseline wasn't ML or AI.

I was looking into an initial implementation and use of order files for a major platform. Quick recap: C (and similar languages) define that every function must have a unique address, but place no constraints on the relative order of those addresses. Choosing the order in which functions appear in memory can have significant performance impact. For example, suppose that you access 1,000 functions over a run of a program, each of which is 100 bytes in size. If each of those functions is mixed in with the 100,000 functions you don't call, you touch (and have to read from disk) 1000 pages; if they're all directly adjacent, you touch 25 pages. (This is a superficial description -- the thousand "but can't you" and "but also"s in your mind right now are very much the point.)

I went into this with moderately high confidence that runtime analysis was going to be the "best" answer, but figured I'd start by seeing how much of an improvement static analysis could give -- this would provide a lower bound for the possible improvement to motivate more investment in the project, and would give immediate improvements as well.

So, what are all the ways you can use static analysis of a (large!) C code base to figure out order? Well, if you can generate a call graph, you can do depth first or breadth first, both of which have theoretical arguments for them -- or you can factor in the function call size, page size, page read lookahead size, etc, and do a mixture based on chunking to those sizes... and then you can do something like an annealing pass since a 4097 byte sequence is awful and you're better off swapping something out for a slightly-less-optimal-but-single-page sequence, etc.

And to test the tool chain, you might as well do a trivial one. How about we just alphabetize the symbols?

Guess which static approach performed best? Alphabetization, by a large margin. This was entirely due to the fact that (a) the platform in question used symbol name prefixes as namespaces; (b) callers that used part of a namespace tended to use significant chunks of it; and (c) call graph generation across multiple libraries wasn't accurate so some of these patterns from the namespaces weren't visible to other approaches.

The results were amazingly good. I felt amazingly silly.

(Runtime analysis did indeed exceed this performance, significantly.)
by tstrimple | 2026-01-18 18:37:42+00:00
Most high quality modern homes are built to be air tight and bring air in with exchangers. Monopoly framing is how they are approaching this with stick frame houses. They essentially create what looks like a building from the game Monopoly (no overhangs) with air tight materials and tape every hole they can find. They will install a blower door and measure how much air leaks from the building envelope. The overhanging features are installed outside of the air tight monopoly frame.

This is what a monopoly framed house looks like before the roof and siding are put on: https://www.afirsttimehomebuilder.com/img/pure_monopoly_fram...

All of the Zip boards are air and water tight and they use the tape on all of the seams to seal those. The roof will sit on top of the already water & air tight frame. Same with the siding.
by 9rx | 2026-01-18 18:38:03+00:00
Suppose someone did post that the moon landing was faked. What purpose would downvoting it serve?

1. If posted in good faith, they lose an opportunity to learn. HN should not be joining the ranks of the growing anti-education establishment.

2. If it is trolling, the downvote offers a "read receipt" telling that the wanted attention was found, which only further encourages more trolling. Do not feed the trolls.

There is no situation where downvoting would be a positive contribution. Well, unless you find enjoyment in reading the "why did you downvote this?" comments that sometimes follow. But be careful with that as someday you'll start to see them as just being annoyingly repetitive.
by Retric | 2026-01-18 18:38:10+00:00
Millions of working Americans don’t have cars. Also, you can make the median wage in the US without any collage education.

Poverty still exists, but vast inflation of what is considered’a basic standard of living’ hides a great deal of progress. People want to redefine illiteracy to mean being unable to use the internet not by the standards of the past.
by dyauspitr | 2026-01-18 18:38:25+00:00
I believe you’re right but at this point it’s a single issue cult for a lot of folks. For instance, I know a very rational, personable guy that seems generally progressive on a variety of social issues but calls for the extermination of trans people with a straight face. There’s no reasoning with these people, even the ones swayed by rational opinion in other parts of their life.
by Bewelge | 2026-01-18 18:38:35+00:00
>Food security is the last concern for Europe. How do you get that idea?

On the contrary, it is one of the main concerns of the EU. And has been since the beginning. The CAP still makes up 40% of the budget.

And frankly, for the first time I fully appreciate it. With the current state of the world it's nice that the EU isn't dependent on third parties for their food supply.
by teiferer | 2026-01-18 18:38:46+00:00
You can't just give any random job to any random person. Go out on the street, talk to the first homeless person and then tell me that for your mom's hip replacement surgery next week for which a Syrian doctor is scheduled, you rather see that person scheduled. And the rehab for which an Afghan immigrant is scheduled, you would prefer the homeless' friend next to him, smelling of Jägermeister. After you did that, we talk again.
by throw310822 | 2026-01-18 18:38:55+00:00
FWIW, Xu Qiliang said that war with the United States is inevitable because of the "Thucydides Trap", the theory that an incumbent power is not going to accept the rise of a competing power. In that case, the war would be started by the current ruling power, not by the rising power. I.e., by the US.

In 2014, Xi Jinping had already said "China fully understands that we need a peaceful and stable internal and external environment to develop ourselves. We all need to work together to avoid the Thucydides trap - destructive tensions between an emerging power and established powers … Our aim is to foster a new model of major country relations."
by arijun | 2026-01-18 18:38:58+00:00
> So you're not even sure what the problem is, but you're okay with banning it?

They are claiming that those students are under-qualified either way. They only don’t know if they are “gaming the system” or it’s just a regular failure of the system.

> A standardized English test doesn't seem too hard to administer

I’ve seen a lot of claims of rampant cheating in China. Perhaps gp who doesn’t seem to have a high opinion of Chinese students would worry about cheating in a standardized test?
by tjr | 2026-01-18 18:39:26+00:00
If the economy is 100% coconuts — all supply is coconuts, all demand is coconuts — then coconuts are all. Business owners sell coconuts in exchange for coconuts in order to acquire more coconuts. Employees are paid in coconuts which they trade for more coconuts. Paying workers more coconuts gives them more of what they want, which is coconuts, that they turn around and spend on coconuts.
by rkuykendall-com | 2026-01-18 18:39:32+00:00
I found this VFX breakdown of the recent Superman movie to have a great explanation of what it is and what it makes possible: https://youtu.be/eyAVWH61R8E?t=232

tl;dr eli5: Instead of capturing spots of color as they would appear to a camera, they capture spots of color and where they exist in the world. By combining multiple cameras doing this, you can make a 3D works from footage that you can then zoom a virtual camera round.
by legitster | 2026-01-18 18:39:43+00:00
You are already able to use 401k funds for this! Either as a loan to yourself, or as an "economic hardship withdrawal" (not hard to do if you actually need the money for a down payment).

In essence, all they are proposing is a way for wealthy people to avoid taxes by putting money into a 401(k) and then pull it out tax free to spend on properties.

I bet they would combine this with a raise on the contribution cap.

Absolute grift.
by kfirg | 2026-01-18 18:39:53+00:00
Hi HN,

We’ve been integrating AI coding agents deeply into our development workflows and saw major gains once we let agents run in long loops (tests → build → search → refine). The problem: to be effective, agents need real access to the environment.

Our first approach was allowing agents to run bash. It works, but it’s obviously dangerous — arbitrary commands, no guardrails, and a lot of implicit trust.

OpenCuff is our attempt to fix this.

It’s an open-source tool that gives AI coding agents explicit, capability-based access instead of raw shell execution. Agents can run useful actions (tests, builds, searches, etc.) while staying within well-defined, auditable boundaries. The goal is to let agents run autonomously for hours without turning your machine or CI environment into a free-for-all.

This is an early, fast-moving project. We built it for ourselves, but we think others running AI agents at scale may run into the same tradeoffs.

We’d really appreciate feedback from the HN community — especially around:

threat models we may be missing

comparisons to sandboxing / containers / policy-based systems

what you’d want from a tool like this

Links:
https://opencuff.ai

https://github.com/OpenCuff/OpenCuff

Happy to answer questions and discuss design decisions.
by frogperson | 2026-01-18 18:40:09+00:00
I agree. The domains are just too large for anyone to be an expert in everything. Platform engineers are expected to know 3 clouds, k8s, cloudflare, security, SRE, python, javascript, CI/CD and about 20 other things. Its just not possible to be great at all the things at the same time.

Employers would rather pay one salary than 2. They are not punished for demanding more frim their employees.

We really ought to form some kind of union that operates across companies. We must demand better working conditions.
Show HN: Built my portfolio in one Claude Code session – 145 repos, AI chat
by bmedwar | 2026-01-18 18:40:19+00:00
Teacher by day, vibe coder by night. Built this portfolio in a single Claude Code session.

Features:
- Terminal aesthetic UI
- AI chat that knows my 145 repos (Groq/Llama 3.3)
- Searchable by vertical
- Live GitHub activity feed
- Stripe payments

Tech: Astro, Cloudflare Pages, Tailwind, TypeScript

Verticals: Education (Google Classroom automation), Healthcare (Folk Care platform), Music (Rust VST plugins), Gaming (Roblox), Data Science (Kaggle)

Happy to answer questions about the vibe coding workflow.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-18 18:40:20+00:00
> Trump threatened an extra 10% tariffs on countries that don't think the US should be taking over Greenland

And that would be a good reason for tearing up a FTA.

It would cost Europeans more, financially, than the tariffs. Probably tip the EU into a recession without significant deficit spending and ECB intervention. But I think it’s the sort of thing that’s geostrategically worth threatening if your population and political structure lets you credibly do so.

(Note: shredding trade deals to the point that IP stops mattering != ratifying the new thing.)
by contrarian1234 | 2026-01-18 18:40:32+00:00
Okay they have a small limited amount of border disputes that wrapped up in their nationalism. But they're not instigating coupe-detats is other countries to get favorable regimes, or significantly militarily meddling in other regions of the world to get favorable outcomes.

I'd say on the whole, given their size, military strength and economic connections, they've been remarkably restrained - borderline isolationist - when it comes to international interference. I don't see how they're a danger to democracy outside of their own borders - with the exception of maybe troll farms that are trying to shape cultural narratives
by noelwelsh | 2026-01-18 18:40:42+00:00
This, Local-first Software [1], the Humane Web Manifesto [2], etc. make me optimistic that we're moving away from the era of "you are the product" dystopian enshittification to a more user-centric world. Here's hoping.

[1]: https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/local-first/

[2]: https://humanewebmanifesto.com/
by PaulHoule | 2026-01-18 18:41:38+00:00
That PDF is amazing but I would need some way to cook it down to get interpretations quickly. I'd like to be able to function electronics-free but I do pack a phone and tablet most of the time and probably the tablet is going to be part of another kind of field demonstration I do.

I find it interesting the directions that popular works and I Ching scholarship are going: on one hand there is the market demand for a system of fortunetelling that is more positive and on the other hand that desire to unearth the real text behind that interpretation -- and notably the Chinese language has changed so much in that time that a literate Chinese reader is going to struggle with it.

The important thing for me is something that is easy to run but still has a good symbolic and mythic quality to it. I don't really know how to run tarot for instance and don't really want to learn.
by gambiting | 2026-01-18 18:41:41+00:00
>>The US needs control of arctic sea lanes

I literally couldn't care less about what US "needs". Russia "needs" Ukraine and similarly no one should be respecting them for it. You Americans think you own the world - you don't.

>>This is pure national security and economic security pragmatism.

Yes and I'm sure Putin sells his war in the same way to his citizens.

>>and I don’t want my country to collapse economically or militarily so taking Greenland is easy to reconcile.

If you think taking Greenland will do anything of that sort then you are deeply delusional. Trump and the other fascists will stuff their pockets and the inevitable conflict that follows will make your defence companies rich.

>>We kept the Soviets at bay

I'm sorry, what are you talking about exactly? The Soviets that fought with you to defeat the Nazis? The Soviets you have subsidized with billions of dollars during WW2 with weapons and supplies to defeat Hitler? Those Soviets?

>>The US propped up Europe for 70 years after WW2 and paid for its defense

I assume you never actually sat down to think why that is, and if it might have something to do with the fact that US both wanted to do this and it was in their interest to continue doing so. To now say something as stupid as "the bill is due" is uneducated at best, malicious at worst.
by jesse__ | 2026-01-18 18:42:36+00:00
Meh .. I've played that game; it doesn't work out well for anyone involved. I optimize my answers for the companies I want to work for, and get rejected by the ones I don't. The hardest part of that strategy is coming to terms with the idea that I constantly get rejected by people that I think are mostly <derogatory_words_here>, but I've developed thick skin over the years.

I'd much rather spend a year unemployed (and do a ton of interviews) and find a company who's values align with mine, than work for a year on a team I disagree with constantly and quit out of frustration.
by networkadmin | 2026-01-18 18:43:29+00:00
I just created my own OS, with my own init system that does things how I think it should be done--and it does it every time, without the bizarre bugs that come from Linux Puttering's shitware code.

It's the same thing any corporation should be doing if they were smart, instead of outsourcing everything to RedHat, Microsoft, Google, etc.