MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by surgical_fire | 2026-01-19 22:38:44+00:00
Whatsapp was just too convenient at a time no good alternatives existed, and when Smartphones were not ubiquitous.

It was free while SMS was not, and it ran on basically every cellphone that existed, no matter how shitty it was.

Network effects mean that replacing it is extremely hard. I tried getting people I know into Signal, Telegram, anything else. All those attempts were short lived.

I can't see it changing without some actual external intervention (e.g.: Meta being barred from operating it in Europe, etc).

The example was just mentioned as an extreme thing that would move this particular needle, not as something I think can oe will realistically happen.
by Dylan16807 | 2026-01-19 22:38:47+00:00
> So: plea bargains. You say they apply unreasonable pressure. But what makes the pressure unreasonable? A prosecutor offering a reduced sentence for pleading guilty isn't force, threat, fraud, or intimidation. It's a straightforward trade: save the court's time and resources, get a lighter sentence. That's pressure, but it's not inherently unreasonable.

The biggest issue these days seems to be that people can't afford a proper trial. So instead of a relatively fair exchange of simplifying out the risk of trial for a certain outcome, reducing hassle for everyone, there's a five figure monetary weight tipping the balance. The prosecutor isn't causing this but the design of the system is.

> How often does that happen? You've now said you think plea bargains routinely produce false confessions. That's testable. Where's the evidence?

I don't know where the evidence is. Remember my first comment was saying you should bring in evidence for your strong claims. I don't have strong claims right now, I have worries.

> What error rate would you accept? Because without that, "we need way way way better" is just saying "it should be perfect," which isn't achievable.

We need a lot more information before I can say what an acceptable error rate.

But there's some obvious factors pushing us away from that, so we're very likely not where we should be.

> The original claim upthread was that the law is rarely applied justly. That's not a claim about error rates being too high, it's a claim that injustice is the norm. Do you actually believe that, or are you arguing something more limited about plea bargaining specifically?

If the vast majority of people feel unsafe going to trial, then the law is not being applied in a just way. And I think that is a very common feeling. The amount it pushes error rates is smaller, because a lot of those people are guilty. But often they're not guilty of the full accusation, and sometimes they're not guilty of anything.

So I think a lot of people are going through an unfair process, and some of them are getting incorrect sentences.

I think a general sentiment that the law is unjust, or that people are not getting due process, is a reasonable opinion to have about that process.

If you have a specific comment you want to refer to by "the law is rarely applied justly", I can look at that specific one, because I'm not sure who you are referring to. verisimi's crack was a pretty vague implication, and jakelazaroff was arguing that people don't get proper due process. Neither of those statements is making an extreme claim about error rates.
by amatecha | 2026-01-19 22:38:49+00:00
I remember when it was a news headline that Apple showed ads _at all_ in App Store. It's sad that they're straying even further into scummy ways to nickel-and-dime every ounce of profit they can get out of everyone using their products and services.

(Check out nice and simple it was in 2008: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xo9cKe_Fch8 )
by numpad0 | 2026-01-19 22:39:04+00:00
Apparently: the algorithmic timeline as it's implemented now has a daily pageview budget for each users. Once it's up, it's up, and the system hides the user from timelines. It doesn't matter if the user is followed by someone, or the user's tweets were retweeted. This applies to both Following and Recommended timelines, but so far not to Lists. This is breaking bunch of fundamental things about the system.

There are tons of real people using that site, who I suspect to be the ones they're trying to get rid of, and also by far the least affected by this chemotherapy. It's always been that way.
by catlifeonmars | 2026-01-19 22:39:31+00:00
> the attacker can harvest device information and force your phone onto an older, unencrypted protocol.

This is why you should always toggle the setting that disables 2g/3g fallback.

With 4G, for example, your device will refuse to connect fully unless the network can pass the cryptographic challenge that proves it shares the key material included in your SIM card (I know, I know, symmetric keys are not ideal). The best an attacker can hope to do in 4G+ is harvest your subscriber ID (IMSI) or deny you service while you are in range.
by readthenotes1 | 2026-01-19 22:39:34+00:00
"The general premise of tariffs is that a foreign product costs e.g. $100 whereas a domestic product costs $120."

The analysis following seems to think that the tariff is placed upon the retail price of the goods as opposed to the production cost, which excludes marketing, final transportation, storage, r&d, domestic staff costs, profit, etc.

A more important aspect not mentioned is getting rid of the de minimis exemption that allowed people to ship stuff tariffs-- free into the US as long as they declared the value less than $750.
by imiric | 2026-01-19 22:39:50+00:00
I'm not talking about unpredictable tradeoffs and consequences.

I'm talking about intentional actions that lead to deaths. E.g. [1] and [2], but there are numerous such examples. There is no plausible defense for this. It is pure evil.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Institute

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purdue_Pharma
by Marsymars | 2026-01-19 22:40:25+00:00
For me, the "For you" feed is basically the best-case scenario.

I don't follow anyone and rarely use Twitter, so it doesn't have much signal on me, but a short scroll of my "For you" feed is pretty innocuous.

If I venture into any comment section, it's absolute drek. Going to the feed for a few of my local news channels and clicking through a few of their posts from today, I'm treated to half the comments being stuff along the lines of the following:

"Gee…an immigrant…no surprise"

"Another 3rd world import"

"Can’t predict the weather two days in advance but sure, global boiling for the summer. Got it."

"Queue in the carbon tax. FmL wake up people, it is a scare tactics. Like acid rain, hole in the ozone, polar ice caps flooding the coasts, you NEED CO2 for vegetation to live, and for the vegetation to gove YOU oxygen. Enjoy the few weeks of heat we get."

"She is a communist cow who supports terrorists"
by AngryData | 2026-01-19 22:40:34+00:00
Well most large animals we raise or hunt either eat 95% grass and green foliage or eat rotten scrap food that we won't eat. Large herbivores also shit out fertilizer we need for growing human edible crops, and many crops we can grow to feed such animals produce even more fertilizer within their root systems, like alfalfa.

It is also much easier to capture and butcher a cow than the equivalent mass/protein of ants.
by remontsuri | 2026-01-19 22:40:43+00:00
Author here! Built this framework to address a $5B problem in the EV industry - battery failures from unmonitored telemetry.

Key features:
- 64+ automated tests (pytest)
- ML anomaly detection (Isolation Forest, 200 estimators)
- Pydantic validation for data integrity
- Docker + CI/CD ready
- MIT License

Tech stack: Python 3.12, scikit-learn, Pydantic, GitLab CI

Happy to answer questions about the architecture or ML approach! Also looking for feedback on what features would make this production-ready for Tesla/Rivian/Lucid scale.

Currently seeking QA/ML Engineer roles in the EV industry - this project showcases my testing + ML skills.
by terminalshort | 2026-01-19 22:41:04+00:00
And every single one of those ways to get in touch still exists. Advertising is, and always has been, optional. But of course those companies that pay for it get more customers. So in practice, almost everyone pays for it. That's not rent extraction. Paying for advertising is paying for attention. And you are in absolutely no circumstance ever entitled to anyone's attention. The only difference with Google is that you even get to appear at all without paying. No other ad supported platform is like that. It's pay up or GTFO. Nobody hijacked your URL bar. You can type in the URL just like you always could.
by AIorNot | 2026-01-19 22:41:14+00:00
the (multi) billon dollar question is when that will happen, I think, case in point:

the OP is a kid in his 20s describing the history of the last 3 years or so of small scale AI Development (https://www.linkedin.com/in/silen-naihin/details/experience/)

How does that compare to those of us with 15-50 years of software engineering experience working on giant codebases that have years of domain rules, customers and use cases etc.

When will AI be ready? Microsoft tried to push AI into big enterprise, Anthropic is doing a better job -but its all still in infancy

Personally for me I hope it won't be ready for another 10 years so I can retire before it takes over :)

I remember when folks on HN all called this AI stuff made up
by drillsteps5 | 2026-01-19 22:41:45+00:00
> Instead of applying broadly, identify 5-10 specific opportunities you genuinely want.

Do that.

>Get in contact with current employees at the company. It is important that you send more than one email.

Don't do that.

>I've gotten dozens of emails asking for meetings and referrals.

I've never gotten one in my entire career, and I was hiring manager in multiple companies/roles.

>If the company is <30 people, reach out to the CEO directly.

Don't never ever EVER do that.

Edit: formatting
by rgovostes | 2026-01-19 22:42:03+00:00
In the classic MacOS days you could use the included Script Editor to record your interactions with applications like the Finder, generating AppleScript to replay the actions you took like resizing windows or creating new folders on the desktop. Then you could have fun making some procedural art wrapping the code in "repeat 100 times ... end repeat". Your parents would really love how you rearranged their documents.

Script Editor still exists in modern macOS but sadly Apple never made the Record feature work particularly well on Mac OS X and hardly any developers prioritize AppleEvent support.
by amatecha | 2026-01-19 22:42:10+00:00
Yeah, I miss those days, I would actively browse the "Top 50" of the different categories and find cool new stuff (especially games). I really miss that time period of when I got the 3GS and this stuff was all new and _actually good_. Since then, more and more cool apps and games have come out, but everything around those has become crappier and more exploitative, and far less pleasant to use :\
by baubino | 2026-01-19 22:42:11+00:00
> news outlets and journalists have always had incentive to present extreme takes to get people angry, cause that sells.

As someone who’s read a newspaper daily for 30+ years, that is definitely not true. The news has always tried to capture your attention but doing so using anger and outrage, and using those exclusively, is a newer development. Newspapers and broadcast news used to use humor, suspense, and other things to provoke curiosity. When the news went online, it became focused on provoking anger and outrage. Even print edition headlines tend to be tamer than what’s in the online edition.
by jltsiren | 2026-01-19 22:42:31+00:00
Ethnic Greenlanders living in Greenland are ordinary Danish citizens. Any Danish citizen can obtain almost the same legal rights by moving to Greenland.

Citizens of other Nordic countries can also live and work in Greenland without any permits. However, some jobs are restricted to Danish citizens who were born or raised in Greenland. EU citizens need a residence permit, because Greenland is not in the EU.
by bossyTeacher | 2026-01-19 22:42:37+00:00
> ou generate random code, purely random in raw machine readable binary, and simply evaluate a behavior. Most random generated code will not work. some, however, will work. and within that working code, some will be far faster and this is the code that is used.

Humans are expensive but this approach seems incredibly inefficient and expensive. Even a junior can make steady progress against implementing a function, with your approach, just monkey coding like that could take you ages to write a single function. Estimates in software are already bad, they will get worse with your approach
by xeniafont | 2026-01-19 22:42:41+00:00
oh okay so i had chatgpt generate the readme for me... and thats just how it came out... i dont really know how to shrink the size of the buymeacoffee banner... i didnt mean for it to be so big... i just have never done anything like this... ive never gotten so much flack from releasing a free font before... sheesh
by timschmidt | 2026-01-19 22:42:44+00:00
Oh I'm all for pragmatism. I think Fil-C is great in that regard. For shoring up legacy code and maybe even for new projects if you're a C/C++ shop and velocity is important and you can eat the performance and memory costs.

I've also written some bindings for C/C++ in Rust and it couldn't have been simpler. bindgen is amazing. So with the experience I have today, I wouldn't hesitate to start rewriting portions of a C/C++ project in Rust where it made sense. And keep the thing building before, during, and after.

I'm currently in process on a rewrite of the RepRap.org stack I helped write 20 years ago in C++ and avr-c++, Python, OpenSCAD, and other languages to idiomatic Rust in order to reduce the number of languages involved, support building a fast wasm user interface, build the interface and firmware in the same language and share types across the boundary, explore GPU compute, enable multithreading of interface and firmware, and explore async firmware architecture. And I'm enjoying it a lot.

Compared to writing it the first time, I am spending zero time fighting build systems, able to reuse much more code from libraries much easier, and have been able to delve deeper into complex issues like advanced numerical representations, ensuring algorithmic determinism under all possible cases, and the implementations of the underlying mathematical constructs which are the foundation my code is built upon. Even egui, the UI toolkit I've been using, seems simpler and easier to work with than QT or GTK or anything I've worked with save FLTK which was dead simple. I've really enjoyed Rust for that.

I have the sense, after working with rust, that I am much less likely to get myself into trouble with it than with C++, and much more likely to know where that might happen. Past some point, my big C++ projects got big enough that it got difficult to hold a coherent picture of the whole thing at runtime in your head all at once, to understand it's behavior. That point seems to be farther out, for me, in Rust.

These are just observations from my position, as a person with a big legacy C++ codebase, currently rewriting in Rust. And occasionally working in other languages, of course. I have lots of projects.
by ars | 2026-01-19 22:42:47+00:00
This is a bad study. What it actually measured was that heavier social media use is not correlated with mental health.

It DOES NOT say that social media use is, or isn't, correlated with mental health because it did not track teens who did not have access to social media.

Australia will be an excellent natural experiment/study on this: We'll see if things change after their recent law, you can compare the same kid before and after, and you can compare Australian kids to other kids.
by asdff | 2026-01-19 22:42:47+00:00
Compute is always increasing on this planet. It makes no sense to stick with seven decade old paradigms from the time when we were simply transmuting mathematical proofs into computational functions. We should be exploring the void, we will have the compute for this. Randomness will take away the difficulty as we increase compute to parse over these random functions in reasonable time frames. The idea of limiting technological development to what our ape brain can conceive of on its own on human biological timescales is quite a shackle, honestly.
by Barrin92 | 2026-01-19 22:42:50+00:00
that's what happens with stuff that is so popular it becomes infrastructure. It's like the guy who goes "ew I haven't touched Java in ten years" while half the stuff he uses runs on it. WhatsApp in some countries is less of a ChatApp you use than a thing you live in.

Like the psychology bit that Freud seems absurd because all that's left to us are his mistakes because the rest has been so thoroughly absorbed you don't even realize it
by bryant | 2026-01-19 22:43:10+00:00
> The study tracked pupils’ self-reported social media habits, gaming frequency and emotional difficulties over three school years

This study is dead in the water. Teens have zero near-term incentives to be honest about any of these events.

For a study with this scope to be effective, parents will have to opt in with tracking and monitoring of child habits. And even then, you might only be able to establish correlations with events serious enough to warrant mental health medical visits.
by Wobbles42 | 2026-01-19 22:43:29+00:00
This is primarily an article about restrictions that all makers are going to have to deal with. Gun control is just the casus belli.

The comments here have already turned into a spirited discussion about gun control itself. This is a valid discussion, but may be a distraction in this context.

This doesn't bode well for defeating legislation like this. It's directly adjacent to an emotional issue that will drive a wedge between people who otherwise agree on the bill.

If I was more conspiracy minded, I'd even suggest this is intentional.
by cadamsdotcom | 2026-01-19 22:43:54+00:00
The counter-argument here is Popcorn Time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popcorn_Time) which brings together search and bittorrent with a nice UI and makes piracy a bit too easy.

Or Firesheep (https://codebutler.com/2010/10/24/firesheep/) which made impersonating someone’s facebook account a breeze by sniffing their credentials which were sent in clear text (eg. on cafe wifi) and showing them in a UI and made stealing credentials a bit too easy, leading to wide calls for broad adoption of https everywhere.

Or Dropbox, which the nerds derided as pointless “because I can build my own”.

It’s fuzzy and individual, but there’s a qualitative difference - a tipping point - where making things too easy can be irresponsible. Your tipping point just happens to be higher than the average.
by gjsman-1000 | 2026-01-19 22:44:09+00:00
> the destruction of institutions

More like the exposure of institutions. It’s not like they were more noble previously, their failings were just less widely understood. How much of America knew about Tuskegee before the internet? Or the time National Geographic told us all about the Archaeoraptor ignoring prior warnings?

The above view is also wildly myopic. You thought modern society overcame populist ideas, extreme ideas, and social revolution being very popular historically? Human nature does not change.

Another thing that doesn’t change? There are always, as evidenced by your own comment, always people saying the system wasn’t responsible, it’s external forces harming the system. The system is immaculate, the proletariat are stupid. The monarchy didn’t cause the revolution, ignorant ideologues did. In any other context, that’s called black and white thinking.
by h4kunamata | 2026-01-19 22:44:17+00:00
Reading some comments, people do not understand.....

Anything that does not involve having govs and the middle man, will never be allowed, legally.

Long frequency radios, phone-to-phone communication, decentralized payment systems, anything.
If the gov cannot track you or cannot make you pay tax for it, it will never become popular for obvious reasons.

It is legal in 2026 for Sony and others to delete digital content you bought and paid tax for because it doesn't belong to you, yet, it is illegal to download such content via torrent.
That tells you a lot.
by Dilettante_ | 2026-01-19 22:44:24+00:00
We would of course need to specify the behaviors to test for. The more precisely we specify these behaviors, the more complexly our end product would be able to behave. We might invent a formal language for writing down these behaviors, and some people might be better at thinking about what kind of tests would need to be written to coax a certain type of end result out of the machine.

But that's future music, forgive a young man for letting his imagination run wild! ;)
by GibbonBreath | 2026-01-19 22:44:34+00:00
They allege these 3 questions aren't answered in the article and then use that as a jumping off point to further allege that using LLMs have damaged the writer's mind, but the article does address each one of their questions and they would've noticed that if their engagement hadn't been skin deep.

So their comment is really a vehicle for them to deliver an insult and doesn't represent significant engagement with the material or a thoughtful digression that could foster curious conversation.

Note that that doesn't mean it's a good article or that Ralph is a good idea.
by Finnucane | 2026-01-19 22:44:40+00:00
There's a pretty wide gap between 'eats insects' and 'eats only insects.' Other primates eat ants, and there are human cultures where ants and other insects are routinely eaten. Other food may also be involved. Hunting large animals doesn't preclude eating other things. HUmans will eat anything they can get into their pie-hole.
Show HN: Cmdarg, argument parsing for bash scripts
by akesterson | 2026-01-19 22:44:47+00:00
About 15 years ago, I was unhappy with the state of argument parsers available for bash, so I wrote a better one. I've been quietly using it everywhere I've went for the past 15 years. I recently accepted a pull request for some minor maintenance, and it got me thinking, "people are still struggling with this same set of problems 15 years later, to the point where this library is still getting pull requests". So I thought it's worth sharing it to a larger audience.

If you need to write bash scripts, you probably have to accept arguments, and so I can tell you there are some minefields that you will step on over time. Feel free to use my code, which was built in the shadow of many exploding landmines, and keep both your feet intact.

The github link talks about what it does and how. It doesn't really talk about why other solutions are unacceptable, and why I keep using it after all these years. For that, I just posted a recent blog post about the tool, that you may also find useful:

https://aklabs.net/2026/01/19/This-Old-Tool-cmdarg/
by asdff | 2026-01-19 22:45:59+00:00
But you have selected an algorithm with a "good" flying trait already for making airplanes. Just with another avenue to get to it versus pure random generation. The evolution of the bird has came up with another algorithm for example, where they use flapping wings instead of thrust from engines. Even among airplane development, a lot was learned by studying birds, which are the result of a random walk algorithm.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-19 22:46:24+00:00
I think this is just another case of HN being hyper-critical of studies that don't fit the narrative. Contrast this with, for example, some of the extremely flimsy studies linking psychedelics to mental health improvement that have no control groups and n<30 subjects that are seemingly accepted without question.

Self-reporting is common in studies like this. Everyone knows it's not perfect.

Parental reporting is also heavily flawed. Parents have drastically different ideas about how their own kids are feeling and different children are more or less secretive with their parents. Parental self-reporting would likely be less accurate, not more.