MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Crystalline Protocol – A blockchain with a built-in "Logic Firewall"
by strof | 2026-01-05 15:48:58+00:00
created Crystalline Protocol. It treats the blockchain state not just as a key-value store, but as a mathematical set governed by the Axioms of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory.

The PoC (written in Rust) demonstrates an "Axiomatic Engine" that enforces the Axiom of Regularity. It physically prevents circular dependencies (logical loops) at the VM level. If a transaction creates a cycle, the "Logic Firewall" rejects it before it can ever be executed.
by kqr | 2026-01-05 15:49:08+00:00
Oh, this one is difficult. I vacillated a lot in my early writing between I, we, and you.

Too many "I" sounds self-fixated and irrelevant for the reader. "You" is way too presumptive, unless addressing a specific person or specific group with actual evidence. "We" can also read as too presumptive, but I feel like it works in the case of processes the reader could volunteer to be part of. However, it must not be used to project emotions or experiences onto the reader.

For now, I've personally settled on "we" for most things (because the reader could hypothetically choose to follow along actively), but switching into "I" if I need to discuss something negative or a failing of my own. In other words, I would never project "a constant state of grief" on my readers – that I can only attribute to myself.

When I refer to something that cannot be experienced by myself, only by my readership (e.g. because it happens only to people who do not know where the article is going), I prefer "the reader" over "you", because while it might be true for the median reader, it might not be true for each and every individual reading.

I'm glad someone else also cares about this! I don't find it discussed very much.

-----

Here's a decent example of what I mean: https://entropicthoughts.com/packaging-perl-and-shell-for-ni...

(1) It starts out with "I" having trouble packaging – my readers are generally more intelligent and experienced than I am, so I won't assume they have the same trouble.

(2) Then we go into my experience, but phrased in a way where the reader could hypothetically follow along. Thus, I ask the reader to imagine "we" have a Perl script.

(3) Somewhere in the middle, the article refers to something that might be noticed by "the very attentive reader". I do not expect everyone to, not even the median reader, but I realise some readers might.

(4) The appendix contains a note in case "you" are very curious, because here I do address each and every reader individually.
by CamperBob2 | 2026-01-05 15:49:13+00:00
It's like taking a student who wins a gold in IMO math, but can't solve easier math problems

I literally don't know how to respond to a statement that stupid. That's a legitimate failure of thinking in itself, one that suggests I'm the stupid one. How do you solve in-depth math problems without breaking them down into smaller, easier subproblems?

I've tried to think of specific follow-up questions that will help me understand your point of view, but other than "Cite some examples of easier problems than a successful IMO-level model will fail at," I've got nothing.
by danans | 2026-01-05 15:49:23+00:00
> It seems like Apple's hardware design is universally loved with much acclaim, why is their software getting progressively worse?

It's not so different from the rationale for many consumer electronics products: novelty for marketing's sake rather than functionality. Similarly, notice the ridiculous trend of removing most physical buttons from car dashboards, started by Tesla and mindlessly aped by the other carmakers.
by palmotea | 2026-01-05 15:49:25+00:00
> Legitimately: Could they actually do this? The EU still has so many dependencies on tech provided by the US that could be turned off pretty much immediately which would shut the country down. How are they supposed to fight back if their government stops because Microsoft shuts down their Azure accounts, Outlook, Teams, etc.?

Or more relevantly: shuts down the flow of spare parts and supplies for military equipment.

Globalization makes this kind of stuff hard to reason about. The end result will probably be something like China can go to war (and win) whenever it wants, and no one else can fight without Chinese permission. The reason is the Chinese seems to be the only ones smart enough to prioritize manufacturing capacity and actually keeping their supply chains local, while everyone else's military supply chains will be low capacity and/or intersect with a Chinese choke point.
by bhouston | 2026-01-05 15:49:35+00:00
Very cool!

I did similar cigarette/ink-like smoke a few times in the VFX industry.

The first attempt was similar to yours using a grid: https://benhouston3d.com/siggraph/2005-2.html, but like yours it isn't that scalable (lots of memory and slow, but maps to GPUs well.)

The second approach, used in the Exocortex Slipstream VX plugin series, was much more efficient using "vortex method" thus not tied to a grid:

Demo video: https://vimeo.com/groups/slipstreamvx/videos/11901355

Harry Potter usage: https://benhouston3d.com/exocortex-intel-article-va10mag.pdf

Theory video: https://vimeo.com/69586020

The second method, vortices, can be mapped to GPUs via complex memory structures though:

https://vimeo.com/11928506
by komali2 | 2026-01-05 15:49:37+00:00
> You obviously understand what I wrote by "China split" because it is uncontroversial and rather obvious as a historical fact.

I also know, generally, what people mean when they say "goblin," but that doesn't mean goblins are real, and it's also true that two people might be thinking of very different things when a goblin is mentioned. Such is the same for the word "China."

> any sources can disprove.

Well then, should be pretty easy for you to disprove me with some sources then!

> So... why? Why do people get so attached to a narrative? Is it like religion, cult? Need to believe in sonething?

Please explain to us how you aren't also attached to a narrative. Are you a omnipotent entity, immune to human narratives, and the one true knower of Universal Truth? I think it's unintentional, but you come off that way, and that's why you're getting such a strong response here.

> Past history is what it is.

This sentence is genuinely meaningless.

The problem is, you've made some unsubstantiated claims (you can't even define "China"), presumed to be right, and then acted aghast when a bunch of people said "hm no, that's not quite right, here's why," and then you doubled down without providing any further substance to your argument other than just repeating in different ways, "I'm right and you're all wrong."

What's the point of talking with someone like that? I'm happy to have the conversation but I don't see the purpose when people behave like that.
by wvenable | 2026-01-05 15:50:26+00:00
"The United States provides over 40% of the world's humanitarian aid, and spends around 1% of its budget on foreign aid, including military aid. Surveys suggest that Americans believe 20% of the federal budget is spent on foreign aid, and that 59% of Americans believe the government spends too much on foreign aid"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_14169
by oldandboring | 2026-01-05 15:50:40+00:00
I don't doubt the trends cited in this article; it seems well-researched. However I will say that anecdotally, as the parent of two boys in the US, Nike's brand is still very strong. I have a 3rd grader who refused to let us buy him any sneaker brand other than Nike. When my older one was the same age it was the same thing -- all the cool kids were wearing fancy Nikes and we had to pony up. That seems to have faded for the older one in middle/high school though.
by sreekanth850 | 2026-01-05 15:50:47+00:00
What worked for me. Remind yourself every day, with convincing reasons, why you want to change, your brain will gradually rewire itself. don't know if this is technically proven.
I quit smoking (Was a chain smoker until 2013) and drinking this way. I also changed from being short-tempered (Had hyper tension) to rarely getting angry nowadays by using the same method.
by zamadatix | 2026-01-05 15:50:49+00:00
Centralized vs distributed feels like a largely orthogonal matter. E.g. phones are great at being clients, even for things which they could technically be the server for today, but they make pretty bad servers in terms of resource tradeoffs. Because of this, I think the endgame cares little about where the LLM runs as much as how much it costs for those devices to use one (which can be more than just money too - e.g. on phones it's battery, bandwidth, latency, privacy, or whatever else could be valued/scarce). That it's specifically on device is just one method of how to meet some of these attributes, not the exclusive method to use it.

Even as a techie tinkerer my dream is not that every device I have run its own LLM - it's that I can point them to where to find the LLM (and swap that at will). The dumber I can make my edges the more they can end up doing overall.
by rs999gti | 2026-01-05 15:50:52+00:00
> create a fair international market and let winners win.

Why? It's selfish, but since the US and EU sent jobs out to India and China. India and China, have created protections that make getting those jobs back nearly impossible short of stopping payments. At the same time, these countries have huge trading imbalances (see FR complaining that their CN trade imbalance is untenable) and have become the defacto for cheap labor.
by nkko | 2026-01-05 15:51:02+00:00
Author here (nibzard). I started this back in May as a personal learning log. I agree with the skepticism about jargon and novelty. However, if something reads like overly complex common sense, that’s a bug, and I’d like to fix it. If you can point out 1–2 specific pages that feel sloppy or unactionable, I’ll rewrite them (or remove them). I’m also happy to add flags or improve the structure. Also, contributing new patterns would be grand. Of course, some or even all patterns are explicitly “emerging.”
by iainmerrick | 2026-01-05 15:51:14+00:00
Most UX researchers today can back up their claims with empirical data.

HCI work in 1992 was very heavily based on user research, famously so at Apple. They definitely had the data.

I find myself questioning that today (like, have these horrible Tahoe icons really been tested properly?) although maybe unfairly, as I'm not an HCI expert. It does feel like there are more bad UIs around today, but that doesn't necessarily mean techniques have regressed. Computers just do a hell of a lot more stuff these days, so maybe it's just impossible to avoid additional complexity.

One thing that has definitely changed is the use of automated A/B testing -- is that the "empirical data" you're thinking of? I do wonder if that mostly provides short-term gains while gradually messing up the overall coherency of the UI.

Also, micro-optimizing via A/B testing can lead to frequent UI churn, which is something that I and many others find very annoying and confusing.
by NitpickLawyer | 2026-01-05 15:52:10+00:00
> Any tax reform that fails to reduce luxury consumption by the rich will completely fail to reduce economic inequality.

This is a weird one. I don't think the problem with rich people is that they consume luxury goods. That's actually a good thing overall. Let them have their megayachts, megacars, golden toilets, etc. Someone has to build those.

I think the problem is when they use their unlimited funds to purchase stuff they shouldn't own. Newspapers, TV stations, social media, etc. That kind of power, often flaunted openly (see the bezos scandal when they literally wrote something along the lines of "if you screw with us we have wapo at our disposal") is not something that should be in the hands of one person. Or a family. That's way way way more dangerous to society than them snorting caviar off of models' bodies, or eat gold leaf you won't believe they're not burgers with truffles on top.
by bccdee | 2026-01-05 15:52:15+00:00
Okay, nothing is secure against every threat model. The only way to secure against rubber hose cryptanalysis is by hiring a team of bodyguards, and even that won't protect you from LEOs or nation-state actors. Your threat model should be broad enough to provide some safety, but it also needs to be narrow enough that you can do something about it. At a software level, there's only so much you can do to deal with hardware integrity problems. The rest, you delegate to the security team at your data centre.

> "This system is unhackable, if the user doesn't do the thing that hacks it" is not very useful.

It's the best you're gonna get, bud. Nothing's "unhackable"—you just gotta make "the thing that hacks it" hard to do.
by wafflemaker | 2026-01-05 15:52:32+00:00
Norway has very strict pro-workers laws in general, it's just one facet of them.
One Norwegian explained it to me like that: in the late '60 when Norwegian oil industry started developing, workers realized that they can incur great losses on the companies if they organize/unionize and strike together. They used that as a leverage to both change their contracts (to include paid sick leave and such) and also get better working conditions (Norwegian platforms have both better safety and on platform to on land ratio).

And later other trades did the same. Some of the things in contracts trickled down to the law. But still some laws apply only to companies where at least a certain % (is it 50%?) are unionized.

The general picture is more or less like that, but please verify the details.
by jillesvangurp | 2026-01-05 15:52:36+00:00
The counter point here is that the US and EU have benefited with a lot of economic growth in the past few decades. The fact that this growth effect has now run its course just means that things may need to change again and that old assumptions may need to re-evaluated. Which might include looking at strategies to re-shore.

Not because off shoring was a mistake 40-50 years ago; but because technology now enables automating a lot of the type of jobs that we off shored. I'm referring to robotics and and other innovations in manufacturing and assembly that reduces the amount of cheap labor needed and calls for higher skilled labor that the west can still provide.

The higher cost of skilled labor can be offset against the also substantial cost of shipping. A typical car from China costs between 1-2K $ to transport. And that's of course before tariffs. Also shipping is slow and building locally means faster delivery of custom orders, which is another thing enabled by modern manufacturing technology. There are many valid reasons to re-shore and re-thinking supply chains.

The Chinese are moving ahead applying the same kind of technologies in e.g. automotive than many other manufacturers with the exception of maybe relatively new companies like Tesla and Rivian that have embraced a software intensive approach to cars already. And that includes spinning up BYD plants on different continents. Compared to a BYD factory, GM and Ford look like they have a bit of catching up to do. Their lack of competitiveness on the international market has a lot to do with the fact that they failed to modernize their businesses. Also, they seem to be repeating their mistake of the nineteen eighties when the Japanese kicked their behinds with better cars and more modern manufacturing. Their reflex to blame the Japanese, Koreans, Chinese (or whomever) for their own failings is not a great one. It's going to yield the same result unless they change.
by princevegeta89 | 2026-01-05 15:52:36+00:00
I use an app called BuzzKill on Android for achieving this and many more things.
I usually keep my notification bar at an absolute minimum when it comes to the number of notifications, but this app allows me to set rules for notifications based on their content.
By default, all apps that I use have notifications turned off by default and they also get into deep sleep mode. So I'm sure they are not even running after a while. Only apps like WhatsApp, Slack, Signal can receive notifications. And by using the rules on Buzzkill, I am also able to automatically discard marketing notifications and useless notifications from these apps as well.

For an app like Google Maps though, I completely turned off notifications because there's really no need for me to have them. If you go into the notification settings through the Google Maps app, it's a big shitshow because it has some 40 categories that you will have to manually manage and I'm sure this was designed for the very purpose of letting users keep things as is.
Similarly, I do think the vast majority of the apps that we use don't need to send us any notifications at all. Thanks to Android for enabling this feature some four years ago, I guess.
by kelipso | 2026-01-05 15:52:38+00:00
You need to eat a ton of quinoa. Only the most dedicated vegan bodybuilder will eat that much quinoa. No thanks.

Also, only animal sources contain hydroxyproline amino acid in significant amounts, which you pretty much only get from collagen sources.

So while quinoa and other like even whey might advertise themselves as complete protein sources, no, they do not contain all the amino acids humans can use in significant amounts.
by jollyllama | 2026-01-05 15:52:43+00:00
> Did you mean to reply to me?

I think so.

> The person I replied to said, "that interface designers or even the average computer user understands more than in 1992 is highly implausible on its face"

Yes, I agree with this person.

>How is it highly implausible on its face that the average computer user in 2026 understands less than the average computer user in 1992?

I don't think it is. Particularly with the average user, the bar of understanding is lower now.
by 999900000999 | 2026-01-05 15:52:45+00:00
Yeah my first reaction was, what the heck is is this ?

Now I can imagine having specific campaigns. Let's say they need $50,000 to release an upgraded port of Shining Force.

Cool, I might be open to pre-ordering it at $25 so they can see if there's enough interest to proceed. But why am I going to literally just donate to a private company. I think the entire world has gone mad, there's not even a real product here. It's not like for that $5 a month they give you a random game or something. They just want money.
by soared | 2026-01-05 15:52:47+00:00
There is a more feasible future IMO that paints AI as the washing machine, calculator, computer, spreadsheet, automation, etc. Jobs AI can complete don’t lead to people getting let go, but rather those people sit on top of the AI who can do their job much better (sometimes at larger scale, sometimes not). Better outputs for the same cost (well wage+AI costs) -> more purchasing power, more efficient business, etc.

I don’t know if this is how AI will go, but this exact thing happened to me with deep learning. I did stupid math to optimize algos in 2012, but in 2022 deep learning was 100x better than me. I just babysat the AI, as it (and llms) still can’t talk to clients, understand business/culturual nuances, navigate an org, politic, innovate, etc
by marcosdumay | 2026-01-05 15:52:55+00:00
> express the sort of free market and foreign policy philosophy that has been mainstream since about the 80s

Let's see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve

Right on the introduction it clearly says that any argument based on the curve is pseudo-science.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Consensus

Is biased in claiming the consensus is a contentious topic, instead of only a tiny well founded minority ever supporting it. But it's the same bias you will see in any history book.

If we go extreme in another direction, this one has the same bias of representing fringe views as equally represented in a debate:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism

If we go here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_science

There's a clear neoliberal bias. But if instead we go here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_administration

There's a strong modernist bias, with a secondary classical liberal one. What is about exactly the same bias you would see on the main literature of both subjects.

So, no, except for behaving like an encyclopedia and reflecting the literature biases, I fail to see how the wiki is neoliberal as a whole.
by brightball | 2026-01-05 15:53:00+00:00
Manufacturing jobs bring the entire supply chain of the manufacturer with them.

The area where I live, Greenville, SC used to be the textile capital of the world and then became essentially destitute when the entire industry offshored.

BMW and Michelin locating their US HQ here essentially rebuilt this entire corner of the state with jobs and associated supply chains. Now, Greenville is booming with a more diverse economy but all that manufacturing is the root system of prosperity here.
by mpetkova | 2026-01-05 15:53:09+00:00
In 2026, power grid data quality is still a global blind spot. And while OpenStreetMap (OSM) is today the only global, free, and open database describing power grid infrastructure, one question keeps coming back : Can OSM power grid data be used with confidence, and under which conditions? GridInspector aims to answer this question at a scale.
by kqr | 2026-01-05 15:53:19+00:00
Swedish also has the "man" and I hate when people use it to project feelings or experiences on me that I don't have.

I know for some people it's just how they speak – instead of saying "I get the urge to scream" they say "one gets the urge to scream" and they mean themselves only. But my computer-diseased brain interprets it literally and I get the urge to contradict them and say, "No, I don't!"
by hebejebelus | 2026-01-05 15:53:19+00:00
> but typically don't use flashcards

Can you elaborate on this? I watch an unhealthy amount of University Challenge and I assumed that the vast majority of contestants would use flash cards as a trivia retention tool. Most people I've met who need to rely on large amounts of accurate but relatively dispersed knowledge (law students, say, or specific historical professions) use flash cards in one way or another. It surprises me greatly that 'professional quizzers' wouldn't. Perhaps _some_ of them wouldn't - I'm sure as with anything there are some who are preternaturally excellent.
by MisterTea | 2026-01-05 15:53:24+00:00
None of these feel good things matter when someone victimizes a child because they mistakenly thought people will forgive them for their natural tendencies. You can argue from points of logic until you are blue in the face but talk to parents and you'll be laughed out of the room or have an angry mob on your hands.

I am also going to guess that you don't have children. I've seen all of my friends with children change how they think. Never, ever underestimate the emotional investment that family brings to the political table. I've witnessed card carrying Democrats vote Trump with no qualm.
by tonnydourado | 2026-01-05 15:53:29+00:00
I don't agree with the optimal path of The HiPPO War. The founder very explicitly said he thinks shipping the current user experience is Bad™, that he'd rather loose the 50k in ads. It doesn't make sense that he would accept shipping it anyway because "We can ship a 'Soul' update" later.

Also, you're commiting the team to deliver something you (probably) don't have the technical knowledge to estimate, so you might be adding another week of death March after just 1 weekend.

The lesson at the end is not wrong, but the characters don't seem realistic.

That said, I have always been IC for a reason, so what do I know.
by Cthulhu_ | 2026-01-05 15:53:31+00:00
Just because a company doesn't have their IP available for modern systems doesn't mean they abandoned the IP, see also all the remasters and remakes coming out today.

That said, my gut feeling says it's mainly about them not willing to invest in it, because they can't see the economic viability. If GoG were to go to the rights holders and say "Hey lad, we have a platform and a lot of experience in reviving older games, you'll get x% of revenue", I'm sure some would be like "ok".

Of course, I'm also sure these rights holders have received offers like that from various parties for a long time now.