MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by overfeed | 2026-01-18 17:16:53+00:00
Retraining models every time a advertiser wins a bid on a keyword is unwieldy. Most likey solution is training the model to emit tokens represent ontological entries that are used by the Ad platform so that "<SODA>" can be bid on by PepsiCo/Coca-Cola under food > beverage > chilled > carbonated. Auction cycles have to match ad campaign durations for quicker price discovery, and more competition among bidders
by torlok | 2026-01-18 17:16:54+00:00
Europe survived 2 devastating home wars in the last 100 years, a lot of it was under Soviet occupation, and has smaller natural deposits. The US economy is being propped-up by cheap credit and blitzscaling of tech, and the money is running out. Those companies have to start making money, and the european market is critical to that. The rest of the US market is stagnant at best. The US consumer market is being held up by the top 10% of spenders. The real US economy is disconnected from the stock market and GDP. The average US consumer is weak, and the US is not going to last a trade war with EU and China. Meanwhile the EU signing trade deals.
by foltik | 2026-01-18 17:17:27+00:00
People aren’t rats. Overall fertility is strongly regulated by education level, labor opportunities, cultural norms, etc.

If “infinite welfare” unavoidably led to a reproductive feedback loop, the richest, safest societies would already be there, which we don’t see.

Your comment seems to rest on the unstated assumption that hierarchy between humans is an essential stabilizing force, and that abundance without it is unsustainable. I don’t think that’s an empirically settled conclusion.
by coldtea | 2026-01-18 17:17:38+00:00
>2. The vibe is compounding, but we’re not capturing it.
Every organization generates thousands of vibe signals per day: The pause before someone unmutes on a Zoom call,
The choice to reply-all vs. reply, The vs vs decision tree, Calendar invite response times (Accepted in 4 minutes = engaged; Accepted in 4 days = resentful), The presence or absence of exclamation points in executive communications, Whether someone’s Slack status includes an emoji

These signals are real. They carry information. Humans process them instinctively. And right now, 100% of this vibe exhaust dissipates, unstructured and uncaptured, into the void

Time to get out of software and corporate work and into carpentry, OnlyFans, or farming. Even suicide would also be a better option than the world that this implies...
by mbulatnikov | 2026-01-18 17:18:04+00:00
Hey HN,

Built this over the weekend because I subscribe to too many newsletters (Lenny's, Tomasz Tunguz, Data Driven VC) but never read them.

It's a Python/FastAPI backend that accepts forwarded emails, processes them with Gemini 3 (using its large context window), and stores results in Supabase to generate a structured Sunday briefing.

Right now it's an MVP. I'm looking for feedback on the summarization quality vs the original emails.

You can try it here: https://sunday-dashboard.streamlit.app/
(It generates a unique email address for you to forward newsletters to).
by NiloCK | 2026-01-18 17:18:54+00:00
Given this specific family of product, the ads are essentially baked in - medium is the message and all.

LLM induced psychosis is one thing, but extremely subtle LLM induced brand loyalty or ideological alignment seem like natural attractors.

One day a model provider will be 'found out' for allowing paid placement among its training data. It's entirely possible that free-tier LLMs won't need banner ads - they'll just happen to like Pepsi a lot.
by sodapopcan | 2026-01-18 17:19:03+00:00
This isn't a conversation, lol.

I don't have much to offer here (and yes, sorry, after I made my snarky remark I realize you had indeed read the article). I recognize AI's capabilities but mainly don't use it primarily for political reasons but also because I just enjoy writing code. I'll sometimes use up the chatgpt free limit using it as a somewhat better search engine (and it's not always better) but there's no way I'm paying for agents, which is everything to do with where the money is going, not the money itself. Of course there are other reasons outside of how AI is used by programmers that would derail the general theme of these threads.

I'm just drawn to these threads for the drama and sometimes it triggers me and I write a snarky throwaway comment. If the discussions, and particularly the companies themselves, could shift to actual societal good it can do and how it is concretely getting there, that would hold my attention. Instead we get Sona etc.
by r_lee | 2026-01-18 17:19:17+00:00
Just wanted to say hi, I was pretty young at the time but I remember the whole thing with the PSN shit and the Keemstar interviews :DDdddd

good times man.

But the thing about not having any devices seized, is that real?

Some people I know have had run-ins with the NBI, and the first thing they do is seize your computers for like a year+?

If that's true then that's really weird...
by ynac | 2026-01-18 17:19:27+00:00
Somewhere in the late 90s, I worked on the IETF IP over TV broadcast. I mostly observed and tried to ask smart questions, but it was really fun to be a part of the group. I learned a lot about both the technical side of radio frequencies, how to contribute to a group when I only had one area of expertise (TCP/IP) of many required for success, and how to manage and be managed remotely by a decntralized group. To this day I use AM for pushing packets around the property. There's no doubt standard radio broadcasters are an awesome way to pick up where the usual networks fall down.
by ashirviskas | 2026-01-18 17:19:34+00:00
You get that association that is relevant to your project only if you can cram the whole codebase. Otherwise it is making rough estimates and some of the time that seems to be where the models fail.

It can only be fully resolved with either infinite context length, or doing it similar to how humans do it - add some LSP "color" to the code tokens.

You can get a feel of what LLMs deal with when you try opening 3000 lines of code in a simple text editor and try to do something. May work for simple fixes, but not whole codebase refactors. Only ultra skilled humans can be productive in it (using my subjective definition of "productive")
by bccdee | 2026-01-18 17:19:35+00:00
> Beads, which is basically some sort of issue tracker for agents, is 240,000 lines of code that … manages markdown files in GitHub repositories. And the code quality is abysmal.

I'd heard of beads as a lightweight issue tracker for agents, so this gave me a real shock. What could all that code POSSIBLY be doing? Going to the repo and poking around, I truly cannot tell. There's an enormous `docs/` folder with no hierarchy, containing files like `MULTI_REPO_HYDRATION.md`, which "describes the implementation of Task 3 from the multi-repo support feature (bd-307): the hydration layer that loads issues from multiple JSONL files into a unified SQLite database," and `ANTIVIRUS.md`, a 7KB text file about how `bd.exe` sometimes gets flagged as untrustworthy by antivirus software.

I opened a random go file, `detect_pollution.go`. This is a CLI command for detecting and cleaning up test tickets from a production database by (1) scanning ticket titles for testing-related prefixes like "debug," "test," or "benchmark," (2) scanning for short descriptions, (3) scanning for suspicious phrases like "sample ticket," and (4) scanning for batches of tickets that were created all at once. It uses these signals to compute a confidence score for each ticket that determines whether it should be deleted. This command was deprecated and replaced by `doctor_pollution.go`, which reimplements large parts of `detect_pollution.go` and is not, at a glance, substantially different. Two seconds of thought will tell you that this feature is unnecessary, since you can create tickets with a "#test" tag and then delete them by tag.

I don't want to come across as mean, but Steve should be embarrassed by this. It's grotesquely baroque and completely unmaintainable—proof positive that whatever he's doing isn't working.
by srcreigh | 2026-01-18 17:19:38+00:00
MapReduce is from a world with slow HDDs, expensive ram, expensive enterprise class servers, fast network.

In that case to get best performance, you’d have to shard your data across a cluster and use mapreduce.

Even in the authors 2014 SSDs multi-core consumer PC world, their aggregate pipeline would be around 2x faster if the work was split across two equivalent machines.

The limit of how much faster distributed computing is comes down to latency more than throughput. I’d not be surprised if this aggregate query could run in 10ms on pre sharded data in a distributed cluster.
by dsign | 2026-01-18 17:21:20+00:00
I don't know if I understand, grasp or agree with the geopolitics in your comment, but the weather in the north has indeed been getting nicer as of late; last summer I spent quite some time swimming in the beach without wearing thermal suits or anything at all really. So if anybody thinks that living in US is a tough bite to swallow lately, emigrating to Scandinavia or Iceland is not such a bad thing. Greenland though is still a little too bare tree-less and bare for my taste, and there my wild speculation[^1] is that the current US administration is looking for some harsh hell to set up forced labor camps to send anybody they don't like.

[^1] With NATO, the security reason given by US makes no sense. And as for natural resources, I'm sure there are perfectly legal and inexpensive mechanisms that US can use to set up mining operations in Greenland.
by estimator7292 | 2026-01-18 17:21:46+00:00
Put it this way, I only retired my 2013 T530 last year. I think 3rd gen i5 2C4T.

The main limitation for my daily development was simply RAM. The system topped out at 2x8GB. Otherwise, I could run android studio and all my modern JetBrains stuff pretty well. Slow, but good enough.

Compile times were of course terrible, but most of what I do is small embedded firmware type stuff so it never took too long.

But as siblings mention, for anything super heavy it was just an ssh terminal into a beefy server. At a certain point, two real cores is just not enough.

I did upgrade it to the top-spec 4c8t processor right at the end, but it ran way too hot. Between keeping the system on the edge of thermal throttling and the halved battery life, it was not worth the money :(
by Nursie | 2026-01-18 17:22:03+00:00
The US used to have multiple military bases in Greenland during the Cold War. It has closed most of them and is down to one.

It could, at any time, reopen them and move troops there under existing agreements, or build more. Nobody would bat an eyelid.

To pretend this is about defence is nonsense. It’s about taking territory.
by _trampeltier | 2026-01-18 17:22:18+00:00
Don't forget, wars really end much much later. The civil war endet in 31. March 2020

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

> To answer your question: the US economy is going to last a very long time yet. So far it has lasted hundreds of years.

How old is the US?

> The dollar is the global reserve currency and is under no serious threat to be displaced

Everybody leavs the dollar since a while.
by epolanski | 2026-01-18 17:23:15+00:00
You reminded me of a time where one of my clients asked me to add a feature on a file uploader written in react/redux. This was early 2021.

I kid you not, there were 30+ redux actions chaining in the most incomprehensible ways, the form literally had a textual input, a button to open the file explorer and a submit button.

It took few weeks one of their Romanian team to build it and apparently that team was reassigned and nobody could touch it without them.

I remember writing pages and pages of notes to understand how this all tied up in those extremely complex chains and claiming progress after few hours when I achieved to simplify the flow by removing a handful of these actions. Hooray.

Then it suddenly dawned on me that...I could just rewrite it from scratch.

Nuked the entirety of that nonsense and replaced it with a single useState in a matter of few hours also implemented the newly requested features.

The client could not believe my progress and the fact I also removed many of their previous issues.

Then I had a second realization: React was useless too and it got dropped for native HTML forms and a handful of JS callbacks.
by fritzorino | 2026-01-18 17:23:53+00:00
> They think something fundamental is changing

What is not fundamental about the end of NATO? What is not fundamental about the US actively working to give up its role as global hegemon? The US may survive but that doesn't mean it's not fundamental.

I swear you yanks playing down every single thing that Trump does, as if history has ended, are insane.

The USA will reap what it is currently sowing and it frankly will deserve it.
by achierius | 2026-01-18 17:24:52+00:00
> The class conflict shouldn't be between workers and employers.

Then why don't employers, the ones with essentially all the power here, tend to choose actions that go against the interests of the working class? Simple: regardless of what you think "should" happen, a study of history tells us what actually tends to happen in reality, and that tendency is towards class war between the ruling and exploited classes.

Anyways, in what way is "ownership" not rent-extracting in general? If you own shares of a stock and you get paid a dividend, that is rent plain and simple. All the arguments you can make against that being the case -- eg that you deserve a premium for parking your capital in a risky asset -- apply to advertising conglomerates and even literally renting out land too, so either they're all renting or none are.
by daveguy | 2026-01-18 17:25:35+00:00
The party is already being taken over by the energy we need -- AOC, Mandami, and more. Trump going full fascist fuck is a catalyst. We can have the left-wing reaponse to the tea party that really changes the country back to decency. Or we can just sit around all defeatist and whining, because that's worked so well in the past.
by EastLondonCoder | 2026-01-18 17:25:40+00:00
This isn’t really about Greenland’s strategic value; it’s about the category error. You can trade goods, sign treaties, and negotiate basing rights. You can’t “buy” a people or their sovereignty especially when they don’t consent. That’s why Europe responds with process and principle: normalize coercion-as-bargaining among allies and you’re reviving a pre-1945 model of politics Europe built institutions to prevent.

It’s also lose-lose for the US. There isn’t a positive outcome. If it’s dropped, the damage is “just” reputational and partly repairable. If it’s pursued: tariffs, threats, coercion. It burns trust inside NATO, accelerates European strategic decoupling, and hands a propaganda gift to every US adversary. A forced takeover would be a catastrophic own-goal: legitimacy crisis, sanctions/retaliation, and a long-term security headache the US doesn’t need.

And the deeper issue is credibility. The dollar’s reserve status and US financial leverage rest on the assumption that the US is broadly predictable and rule-bound. When you start treating allies like extractive targets, you’re not “winning” you’re encouraging everyone to build workarounds. Part of the postwar setup was that Europe outsourced a lot of hard security while the US underwrote the system; if the US turns that security guarantee into leverage against allies, you should expect Europe to reprice the relationship and invest accordingly.

The least-bad outcome is a face-saving off-ramp and dropping the whole line of inquiry. Nothing good comes from keeping it on the table.
by Jcampuzano2 | 2026-01-18 17:26:17+00:00
Sloppy seconds seems to be his thing.

I can't imagine being somebody who voted for him and thinking this is what an "alpha" man does, bitch and moan about prizes and recognition instead of actually doing things of value.

I wouldn't be surprised if there is a large cohort of people who never admit they voted for Trump in the future out of embarrassment.
by tombert | 2026-01-18 17:26:57+00:00
I don’t really get your logic. Is it always “cowardly” to criticize dead people?

I don’t like Hitler, I think he was a bad person, but he’s also dead. Is it cowardly to insult him? You might argue that he died before I was born so it’s different but these kinds of dividers are getting kind of arbitrary at that point.

Just because someone dies should not make them immune to being insulted. Scott Adams is someone I have a complicated relationship with myself, but ultimately he said a lot of stupid, problematic shit. I was happy to insult him and make fun of him while he was still alive. I will also make fun of him and insult him while he’s dead.

I don’t know anything about Alexander but I don’t think it’s cowardly at all.
by CamperBob2 | 2026-01-18 17:27:11+00:00
What? In fact, we did make it difficult for "German grad students in Physics" to immigrate here [1].

Fortunately for us -- very fortunately -- we found a way to accommodate them and keep them on our side.

1: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/09/22/how-ivy-leagu...
by filoleg | 2026-01-18 17:27:36+00:00
If that's the case, then sure, that perspective is way more understandable.

I didn't take it that way, because "in public", to me, implies that other people are fully exposed to it. I don't consider "in a private stall" as public, just like I don't consider "taking your underwear off in a bathroom stall" (very normal) as "taking your underwear off in public".
by rwmj | 2026-01-18 17:27:54+00:00
As someone from the Fedora/RISC-V project, it'll depend on what our users want. We cannot support both RV64GC and RVA23 (because we don't have the build or software infra to do it) so we have to be careful when we move. Doing something like building with RV64GC generally but having targeted optimizations - perhaps two kernel variants and some libraries - might be possible, but also isn't easy.

Things are different for CentOS / RHEL where we'll be able to move to RVA23 (and beyond) much more aggressively.
by gls2ro | 2026-01-18 17:28:14+00:00
I did not crunch any numbers but I do think self-reliance with a high standard of living that means wanting and having access to everything from produce to luxury goods at a reasonable price for the majority of people cannot be achieved so easily.

You of course say self reliance on essential resources and I still think for most countries that could be very expensive very fast. People are complaining about the high costs specifically of the essential products when their prices are raising. Without a serious rethinking of our society we cannot probably fix that. And nobody is willing now to vote and agree to suffer for a generation to fix this system.
by Herring | 2026-01-18 17:28:21+00:00
> In a different world where there are higher wages, more people would have more spending power. Then companies wouldn't have to spend as many dollars on advertising, which they could split between higher wages, higher margins and lower prices.

Interesting hypothesis. I looked it up in Wilkinson and Pickett, The Spirit Level.

The authors provide cross-sectional data across 23 rich nations, showing a strong positive correlation (r~=0.70) between income inequality (Gini coefficient) and advertising expenditure as a percentage of GDP.

They attribute it to increased status competition & anxiety in more unequal societies, leading to pressure to consume more.
by teiferer | 2026-01-18 17:28:57+00:00
Had Merkel not opened the border in 2015, Germany would be far worse off. If you ever set foot into a German retirement home, hospital, restaurant, random shop at the central station, cinema, xmas market, you name it, you realize that all those immigrants are currently carrying the economy.

She should get a prize for this instead of being blamed. Even if you don't care about the moral aspect of helping refugees.
by cubefox | 2026-01-18 17:29:41+00:00
"You replied by saying "So what? There are probably also many cases where seemingly useless science became useful later." You seemed to be treating the latter as if it negated the former"

No, "so what" doesn't indicate disagreement, just that something isn't relevant.

Anyway, assume hot dogs taste not good at all, except in rare circumstances. It would then be wrong to say "hot dogs taste good", but it would be right to say "hot dogs don't taste good". Now substitute pure math for hot dogs. Pure math can be generally useless even if it isn't always useless. Men are taller than women. That's the difference between applied and pure math. The difference between math and science is something else: Even useless science has value, while most useless math (which consists of pure math) doesn't. (I would say the axiomatization of new theories, like probability theory, can also have inherent value, independent of any uselessness, insofar as it is conceptual progress, but that's different from proving pure math conjectures.)
by tokai | 2026-01-18 17:29:47+00:00
>US might take over Greenland that the EU pays to fortify it so the US doesn't have to

Does not make sense. Denmark had already budgeted with a huge increase of military capabilities on Greenland. If US wanted more they could talk with their allied.

And the 'lol just pay them' argument is tone deaf and insulting to the Greenlanders. If you followed along you would know that they have already stated that they would not take money. To say nothing about the laws that governs the Kingdom and the process of leaving the it. Which can not be deferred by paying anyone. But I guess americans have a really hard time understanding the rule of law now.
by jijijijij | 2026-01-18 17:29:48+00:00
Okay, but why isn't it visible in /news

This post is ranked 7th in /active, now. Quickly cross-checking /active and /news, I've found no other post in /active not visible in /news. It went from 100 to 200 points, since I noticed the delisting. /active is an obscure list, I doubt, that's how many people find this post.

Whatever HN is doing, it seems to be completely intransparent and selective. Some A/B-ing, or geofencing. In any case, questionable and manipulative. Like they are trying to hide interference and engineer popularity/engagement to whatever end.

And you have to wonder, if this has anything to do with the fact this particular political move seems to have greatly backfired on every possible axis, apparently even within the conservative and MAGA base. May turn out as exceptionally stupid, especially before midterms. I've seen impeachment calls in /r/conservative (lol), and they are usually an extension of Trumps digestive system. Diplomacy with Europe is basically dead, France wants to trigger the EU's extortion clause and it's a sunday.

Maaaybe there is active damage control going on.
by servercobra | 2026-01-18 17:30:08+00:00
Because employers don't tend to make choices about the "interests of the working class", they make choices about what benefits them specifically in the moment or near future. You need to get some sort of alignment on their interests and the interests of the working class to create change, whether that's via government intervention or otherwise.

And I hear you on ownership. It's "just" figuring out how to make that change.
by k1m | 2026-01-18 17:30:10+00:00
Many in Norway and Sweden distanced themselves from the Nobel Peace Prize at the time it was awarded to Machado because it was obvious it was such a bad decision.

Julian Assange even filed a criminal complaint in Sweden last month to try to stop the Swedish Nobel Foundation paying out over $1 million dollars to her, arguing it's going against Alfred Nobel's will, and they have a responsibility to respect his will.

He wrote last month: "Using her elevated position as the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, Machado may well have tipped the balance in favour of war, facilitated by the named suspects."

I find it funny that what many saw as a terrible decision has now come to pass, and the Nobel Institute is scrambling to save face.

https://x.com/wikileaks/status/2001260159432290686