MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-13 14:50:08+00:00
For-profit businesses tend to get bloated and eventually succumb to their own growth, one way or another.

Alternative: Start a newspaper who's goal is to be lean in operations, basically one person per role, and fund raise it from individuals, groups and government subsidies (if those exist in your country).

Seemingly people are able to fund things like Indie Games via Patreon subscriptions, surely for towns/cities with at least 100,000 people there would be a 1% of the residents interested in local news, right? 1000 people donating 15 EUR a month is already 15,000 EUR, assuming it only gets funded by monthly donations of individuals.
by s1mplicissimus | 2026-01-13 14:50:18+00:00
In more modern terms, I would call what Epictetus does here a reframing. It's used in therapy, marketing, PR and presumably other areas as well. Essentially it's saying "well, but if you look at it $this way$, it's not so bad, is it?" .

When strangers tell you that, it's very often with a malicious motivation, but it can be a helpful tool for coping with your own stuff.
by TZubiri | 2026-01-13 14:50:46+00:00
Before IBM's deep blue, apparently there was a chess program called Cray Blitz, I'm sure the cray had the raw power(20MHz? But with 64 parallel operations) needed to beat the top humans, but the software just wasn't there yet.

Blitz was ported to C and continued development FOSS as Crafty, mainly by a U of Alabama professor, but to this day it can't beat top humans on modern cpu (topping at 2650 elo instead of 2850 of, say, carlsen.)
by zaphar | 2026-01-13 14:50:48+00:00
I think you might be missing the posters point. He agrees with you on nearly every point you are making. He is however expanding on that saying that the problem is something of a self-own by the combination of science, science reporting, and science driven policy. Trust was so thoroughly lowered that there was almost no avoiding an event like Trump/RFK. It can be true that 1. RFK is not qualified and is likely to make things worse. 2. This is partly the responsibility of the establishment for squandering the trust that the public put in them.
by gghhzzgghhzz | 2026-01-13 14:50:51+00:00
An independent Scotland or Wales would have pretty much the same trading relationship with the EU, as England has.

At least for several decades after independence

The level of integration of everything, including trade and supply chains and finance etc, is so big as to be almost total.

In addition, I'm pretty sure that EU would not welcome another hard border with England, it's already waisted far too much time and effort on the issue in Ireland. I'm sure it doesn't want to have to go through that again.
by WmWsjA6B29B4nfk | 2026-01-13 14:51:16+00:00
There was no morality play. My point is your copy/use of software is equally "illegal" whether you just download a cracked copy or pretend to be an active college student and pay the student price, when you are not in fact an active college student. Either way, you won't have a valid license. So why bother paying?
by dataviz1000 | 2026-01-13 14:51:18+00:00
I would make Foie Gras Torchon which is Foie Gras that has been cured like gravlax and then wrapped in a cheese cloth (hence the name) and cooked slowly in duck fat, confit.

I would end up with a 1/2 gallon of foie gras infused (normal) duck fat.

Decided to make french fries using it. It was the best fries I have ever had.

Nonetheless, I would never eat like that today.
by thecupisblue | 2026-01-13 14:51:36+00:00
I would assume it's because younger generations of creatives are using their software less and less, increasing the risk of losing the market completely on the software side. At this pricing, more of them will turn to paying Apple rather than paying for multiple services, keeping them tied into the ecosystem.

Also so many people are paying for Canva, Capcut etc that taking a piece of that cake is quite a low hanging fruit if you have a distribution platform.
by tialaramex | 2026-01-13 14:51:41+00:00
Right. When I'm at a counter-protest facing the local† Nazis (who in this incarnation have decided to call themselves "patriots") among all the rhetoric accusing us of supporting terrorists (no matter where brown people may come from they're apparently "ISIS" or "Taliban" these days) or rapists or any number of weird conspiracies, one thing they often yell about is that Keir Starmer is (to quote them) "a Wanker" and I have observed to other protesters that uniquely this is probably a widely shared viewpoint. Yeah, he is, but, why you are you being so racist, why do you want to terrify my neighbours, what does that have to do with Keir?

† Local in the sense of being the ones who turn up, my guess is that a good number of them travel by car from quite some distance, personally I live five minutes walk away.
by ragazzina | 2026-01-13 14:52:01+00:00
Honestly I had the same experience, and I love exploring supermarkets in the US (I genuinely go there after work and spend hours just wandering around). I often found the variety of produce to be really limited, as in, half the kinds of fruit than you would find in a smaller supermarket in Europe. Jack's fresh market, Walmart, Hyvee and local chains.
by plagiarist | 2026-01-13 14:52:05+00:00
I mean, I could tell you are disingenuous from the get-go, so it is not surprising you would take an off-the-cuff metric which is accurate right now and invent a strawman scenario where I might continue to use it beyond a point where it makes sense.

Likewise, I would not use my flippant 3 times metric regarding durability to cover the quality of produce.
by 9JollyOtter | 2026-01-13 14:52:20+00:00
In the UK what you are going to need to do going forward is essentially have an official and a non-official presence online. You are also going to need to use the cockroach strategy (at least tech wise), until this stuff gets unpopular enough amongst enough people that there is large push back that can't be ignored.

> The surveillance and predictive systems now being assembled are being designed not only for the current moment, but in preparation for what comes next. Whether in response to renewed austerity, military escalation, or widespread resistance, these tools are positioned to contain unrest before it surfaces. What’s emerging is a model of preemptive policing—structured around behaviour, association, and predicted risk. Individuals are reduced to data profiles, tracked not for what they’ve done but for their statistical proximity to disruption. Suppression is exercised in advance.

That is why they are so keen to backdoor any popular encrypted messaging platform. They can't monitor communications. Unfortunately most people seem to supportive of this. I was quite surprised when my Father (who is a layman) told me he supported this, this is a person that doesn't vote largely for the same reasons that I don't.

Additionally. I was listening to someone that engaged at essentially Red Teaming for UK authorities (I forget who it was now). They stated that if you were a dissident, if you kept your activities offline and organise in person the authorities wouldn't be aware of this activity. I don't know if this is true, but it sounds plausible.
by roryirvine | 2026-01-13 14:52:21+00:00
...when the primary purpose of that algorithm, software, tool, technology, service, or device is to produce an individual’s photograph, voice, or likeness
i) without the individual’s prior consent [...]
ii) with intent to cause harm [...]

you need to read it together with the two sub-clauses, which make it much more selective (and a lot more reasonable!)
by shadow28 | 2026-01-13 14:52:38+00:00
Yeah, this article is quite funny in the context of today's men's tennis landscape, where an entire generation of players (90s born) were effectively blocked from the big prizes by being sandwiched between two generations of all time greats. Money is obviously an important factor in the growth and development of most athletes, but the article seems to be downplaying the importance of inherent talent and ability in sport.
by lou1306 | 2026-01-13 14:52:42+00:00
> I thought you meant a hello world or similar program only handling strings would be fundamentally insecure but rather you mean that it is hard to write secure code with C strings.

Disclaimer: I am not the author of the comment, and honestly I am more than happy if OpenBSD broke %n in printf because it looks awful from a security standpoint.

> you mean that it is hard to write secure code with C strings.

Indeed I do :) It is possible to write a "secure" hello world program in C; the point is that both the language and the standard library make it exceedingly easy to slip in attack vectors when you deal with strings in any serious capacity.
by miroljub | 2026-01-13 14:53:09+00:00
Well World Economic Forum (WEF) lists Tony Blair and his institute as one of the top Agenda contributors [1].

It's not even funny that you can trace almost any person responsible for the deterioration of human rights in Western society to one of the WEF alumni or associates.

These supernatural institutions and interest groups should be made illegal if we want to continue as a civilization.

[1] https://www.weforum.org/stories/authors/tony-blair-2/
by dizlexic | 2026-01-13 14:53:21+00:00
I really want to know other's opinion on this, but the critique that Ai pushes spaghetti / barely maintainable code doesn't carry a lot of weight because that's all I've ever seen in production anywhere.

If I can spin up in a week what used to take me 6 months and it kind of works. That's absolutely insane. I really wish we could all step back and acknowledge that. Instead, I only hear people talking about how bad the code is.

Honest question, so what? If I can monetize a bad product in a miniscule fraction of the time it used to take. Then optimize it while funded, what's the issue? I get this may upset purists but for product companies it's always been about the MVP.

Make it work

Make it pretty

Make it work well
by Plasmoid2000ad | 2026-01-13 14:53:43+00:00
Yes - but perpetual purchases have an interesting gotcha that Microsoft didn't realise at first. To encourage subscription over perpetual, ongoing or evergreen updates are limited to subscription version.

Office 2024 has every feature that was added since Office 2021 to the subscription version - while a chunk of loyal customers are unaware of them.
Back when Google was competing hard with Google Suite, a big perception problem formed with the perpetual customers believing and convincing others that Google were far ahead, with collab editing and other features - after Office had added equivalent.

So for me, If there's a subscription and one-time option - I wonder if the one-time gets all updates going forward. If it doesn't, I realise that they'll regret that if competition picks up, and try to fix it later.
If it does include updates... I worry it will be like many other lifetime updates one-time purchases - when competition is low they'll renege on that promise.
by dec0dedab0de | 2026-01-13 14:54:02+00:00
I almost mentioned that too, but I thought I was going to expose myself for being bad at maintaining my house.

Going down the same line of thought, how many people are attempting DIY repairs that they never would have before because of youtube and other resources? I know that I have done way more work on my home than my parents or grandparents ever did.
by rsolva | 2026-01-13 14:54:11+00:00
Centralisation generally leads to efficiency, but when pushed to far it will corrode core human values.

Democratic processes will always have to contend with the messiness of humans, and we have to find a balance. Currently I feel the consolidations in many aspect of modern society has been pushed to far. If we keep pushing, we end up in an authoritarian or fascistic state with no wiggle room for the squishy humannesses that is the pesky, but unavoidable ingredient in a vibrant and free democratic society.
by badocr | 2026-01-13 14:54:16+00:00
It's not later than 2001 since the dude closed the site on "Sunday 25th November 2001 ". I used to frequent it all the time back in 2000~2001 since it was the only SP review site still being updated. He was notorously grumpy.

Here's what he posted when shutting down the site:

Site closed.
This site is now closed. This is because I haven't enjoyed reviewing at the site
for about 9 months, and because I am no longer interested in supporting the Quake
mapping scene. My email address is also closed. The current content will remain
here as an archive.
by everdrive | 2026-01-13 14:54:19+00:00
I agree in part. You could read Epictetus as saying "just try not caring about people," which I think is the incorrect reading. Instead, I think he's saying something like "take a step back and realize that your deep personal attachments don't look so important when you step outside your perspective. You can use this realization to help get past the deep emotional pain that is normal for people to feel."

However, the line about other's indifference I think can only be read as dark funny to a modern reader:

> has someone else's child or wife died? There's no one who wouldn't say 'So it goes.'
by Ntrails | 2026-01-13 14:54:43+00:00
> prioritizing BT over wired earphones

Bluetooth sucks, needing to charge headphones sucks. I'm still bitter :p

> I am glad, though, that they were forced to stick with USB-C if I'm not mistaken.

Now I have a boatload of apple chargers which will all be made into landfill for the good of the planet when i next upgrade my phone. Thank you so much.
by hagbard_c | 2026-01-13 14:54:51+00:00
A simple static page is not equal to 'starting to become usable', that'd be 'passes the first experimental test'. By 'starting to become usable' I mean Nextcloud and all related apps I've tested work as intended and I'm posting this message from within servoshell. I've kept track of its progress just like I did back in the time of its spiritual predecessor - Mozilla, then Phoenix which became Firebird which became Firefox - and was until recently not able to get it to show much more than that simple static page you mentioned. While it may have passed a bunch of verification suites it - servoshell if not the Servo rendering engine itself - it was not usable for much more than showing that static page. Now, it is. Its usability resembles that of early, pre 1.0-versions of Firefox. I used those just like many others did, warts and all, and reported and where possible fixed bugs.

Why now post this for Servo and servoshell? Because it seems to be close to the same state as Firefox was when it became somewhat usable and with that it became possible for others to start using it and report any bugs and hiccups. The more people do this, the fast the progress will be. A usable alternative browser engine and with that usable alternative browsers is a big, BIG thing and worth reporting as well as supporting in its progress.
by sigseg1v | 2026-01-13 14:55:01+00:00
THIS is the hill I will die on.

Why do we advocate destroying information/data about the dev process when in reality we need to solve a UI/display issue?

The amount of times in the last 15ish years I've solved something by looking back at the history and piecing together what happened (eg. refactor from A to B as part of a PR, then tweak B to eventually become C before getting it merged, but where there are important details that only resulted because of B, and you don't realize they are important until 2 years later) is high enough that I consider it very poor practice to remove the intermediate commits that actually track the software development process.
by labenni | 2026-01-13 14:55:04+00:00
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by frodothebrave | 2026-01-13 14:55:14+00:00
Hi HN,

I built this over the weekend as a social experiment. The concept is stupidly simple: it's a global leaderboard where you pay to own the #1 spot in your city.

It’s basically digital graffiti. The highest bidder ranks #1 and gets a permanent backlink until someone outbids them.

The Tech Stack: I forced myself to use Vanilla JS (no build step, no frameworks) + Firebase Realtime DB.

Frontend: Just one index.html file.

Backend: Netlify Functions to handle the Stripe webhooks securely.

Payments: Stripe Elements.

The hardest part was actually the "Delete" button—I had to hash the admin password in the client (SHA-256) and verify it on the server side to prevent people from nuking the database via the console.

I've already bought "Keller, Texas" for $2. Curious to see who takes San Francisco.

Roast my code (or my capitalism) below.
by slfreference | 2026-01-13 14:55:20+00:00
I think we can safely the problem isn't lack of information at the local or national level. The problem is nobody is taking action on it when informed. It takes only 1 person to report a problem but the responsibility to take action is swallowed by the void, noise and we the people are helpless.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43877301
by sharkbird2 | 2026-01-13 14:55:37+00:00
I see it more as being about acceptance. If your wife dies, at some point, you will have to accept that your wife died and move on. This doesn't mean that you are cold or insensitive to it, it just means that you have accepted and processed this sorrow fully and are now ready to move on.

Stoicism for me is about practicing a sort of pre-acceptance of such things. To understand that everything bad that can happen eventually will happen (if you live long enough) and to accept it even before it has happened.
by dmschulman | 2026-01-13 14:55:43+00:00
It's not healthy in the least, but attempts to help fans understand why it is so are met with resistance due to ingrained biases and skepticism of the establishment.

The pushback against "institutional nutrition" has been a long time coming and is honestly welcomed as health and nutrition science have evolved from the days of telling us to avoid all fat and offering consumers "low calorie" processed foods that didn't do our bodies much good.

In the same way the bacon craze of the 2000s was a successful marketing effort from pork farmers, cattle farmers (and their lobbying groups) are now having a moment with beef and subsequent beef products. Good nutritional science has been pointing to many fats (but not all fats) actually being good for our diet, contrary to those old institutional guidelines, but there's a lot of nuance around adding fats back to a person's diet. Many aren't making the distinction between saturated vs unsaturated fat as well as UDL and LDL cholesterol that ends up in our bloodstream (one of those is not good for us!).

But in an era of memes, misinformation, and context collapse good luck trying to have that more complicated discussion with people when the nutritional aspect is brought up (the book is closed on the flavor debate of course, it's delicious)
by tbrownaw | 2026-01-13 14:55:47+00:00
> As an outside observer of this beef tallow trend, it looks to me a lot like a fad driven by some internalized machismo: "It's not proper food if it's not from a dead animal."

Well, it's a response to the green/eco push for making do with protein from insects and plants only and that it's bad and wrong to have nice things because global warming and sustainability.

It's not a "something died for this so therefore it's better", it's "stop commanding me to not have nice things".
by dot_treo | 2026-01-13 14:56:03+00:00
In the past I've been trying to adopt the stoic mindset, but always struggled. But I continued to read and learn about it.

Unrelatedly, I came across a recomendation for David Burns "Feeling Good" here on hackernews a couple of years ago.

Reading it with my interest in stoicism in mind, I honestly found it to be probably the best modern day handbook to actually adopting the stoic mindset - without ever mentioning it.

As far as I understand stoicism, it is all about seeing things as they are, and understanding that the only thing that we really control is our reaction / interpretation of events. And the CBT approach that is explained in Feeling Good/Feeling Great is exactly how you do this.

With this perspective Marcus Aurelius Meditations suddenly make a lot more sense. They are his therapy homework.
by iamflimflam1 | 2026-01-13 14:56:27+00:00
Definitely feeling my age. Growing up we had a "dripping bowl" that was kept in the fridge and received any left over fat from roasting meat.

This would then be used for frying etc.. I imagine my parents would have used it when they were young for "dripping" sandwiches.

Maybe this was just a UK thing?
by zkmon | 2026-01-13 14:56:36+00:00
Ofcourse, it applies to younger people as well. I didn't exclude them.

Other than, if it sounds like "ai slop" to you, you probably did not expect a properly written statement from real people. It gotten to a point someone saying real world experience witnessed by me as "ai slop". This HN land became unfamiliar alien land to me now. Do I need to force myself to sound trivial, incorrect, slangish?
by mschuster91 | 2026-01-13 14:56:37+00:00
> Third, it may be due to increased rates of obesity. A CDC study found that obesity increased the propensity for someone to fall in a laboratory setting. And obesity rates among people 60 and older rose from about 32.8% in 2001-2002 to 38.5% in recent years.

It's not just the chance of falling itself that warrants a look. More weight also means more energy dissipated.

On top of that, the problems with falls start to get really serious once fractures get into play [1].

What I can't find any data on is a change of floor material compositions. Anecdotally, I remember many of my older relatives having really soft carpets in their homes, while in more modern homes and even care institutions you will find hard material - hard carpet, wood, tiles or in institutions, straight concrete. All of these have the advantage that you can keep them clean and hygienic with far less effort - but damn, even as a younger person it hurts much more tripping over my cat when in areas with hard flooring. And they're slippery when wet!

For an older or obeser person, it sounds at least plausible that the flooring material contributes to more severe (and, consequentially, more fatal) fall events.

[1] https://www.rechtsdepesche.de/hohe-sterblichkeit-nach-gefaeh...
by ksec | 2026-01-13 14:56:43+00:00
>Can the DOJ and FTC look into this?

I guess this venture into politics more than anything else. And I am opinionated on the subject.

But other than that, the point worth centred on is Apple no longer care as much as being the best. They care much more about extracting best business deals and money out of their current position. Which is very different to Steve Jobs era, No money can put crap on his plate.
by game_the0ry | 2026-01-13 14:56:48+00:00
I have been contributing code for 10+ years, and I have worked on teams that did rebase and others that did not.

Not once have a ever debugged a problem that benefited from rebase vs merge. Fundamentally, I do not debug off git history. Not once has git history helped debug outside of looking at the blame + offending PR and diff.

Can someone tell me when they were fixing a problem and they were glad that they rebased? Bc I can't.