MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by __jochen__ | 2026-01-10 10:39:24+00:00
Sorry, I'm going to be a downer. I've been around for a long time too, saw many formats come and go (even contributed to some myself). I think Markdown is super neat and handy, but this statement "The trillion-dollar AI industry's system for controlling their most advanced platforms is a plain text format... Their achievement is every bit as impressive as yours." ..is way off. NN math & engineering has been refined for ~50 years (give or take) and scaled to mindboggling levels. For better or worse, it is in the process of transforming how society functions (just like the internet and mobile phones did).
Building modern advanced NN/AI requires extremely sophisticated and advanced science, hardware & algorithms; the format of the prompts conventionally used by some are a handy but fairly trivial part of the endeavor.
by opan | 2026-01-10 10:40:15+00:00
>it seems to know when I've run a command in one tab/split while another is open where fzf doesn't seem to sync it all the time.

On my machine this is handled in zsh, not fzf (but then fzf still benefits). You can configure your shells to sync without exiting. You may need to run one command (or just hit enter with nothing typed, maybe) for the shell history to catch up, but then it should all be there. Relevant options:

# share history among terminals

setopt share_history

# append to the history instead of overwriting

setopt append_history

# append to history incrementally instead of when the shell exits

setopt inc_append_history

I think finding out about this is why I originally switched from bash to zsh several years ago.
by budududuroiu | 2026-01-10 10:44:19+00:00
How do you restrict the freedom of non-citizens without restricting the freedom of citizens too?

My parents and grandparents didn't fight against the Romanian authoritarian regime for reading of confidential communications to come back under a EU banner instead.

The EU is more of a threat to itself than Russia is, the only reason the "Russian propaganda" has teeth is because the current bureaucrat class in the EU Council have outlived their Mandate of Heaven
by derektank | 2026-01-10 10:44:27+00:00
The Blue Whale population has actually increased since the 70s. When they were critically endangered, their population numbered roughly 1,000-2,000 but population estimates for today put the number at roughly tenfold that. The 1966 worldwide moratorium on whaling has been incredibly successful and we’ve also seen recoveries in Humpback and Grey Whales.
by jillesvangurp | 2026-01-10 10:45:04+00:00
Markdown got there first/early depending on your perspective. Things like AsciiDoc got popular much later when AsciiDoctor was released around 2009 (though it technically existed already when Markdown was created) and is aimed at people who care about structured documentation. It's not aimed at casual users.

Likewise, things like org mode, which also emerged around the same time, catered to a niche of emacs using people. Which almost by definition is a subset of techies. It wasn't a logical choice for a mainstream blogging tool.

Markdown was aimed at people that used blogging tools (initially), and later any other kind of tool that accepted text. It spreading to tools like Slack, Github, etc. is no accident. Github actually has supported plenty of alternatives for documents. But they picked markdown for issue tracking, pull requests, etc. Because they had to just pick something and Markdown was the most popular.

By the time AsciiDoc became more popular (2009ish), Github was already being developed. With Markdown support. AsciiDoc was a niche thing, Markdown was already somewhat widely used then. It was an obvious choice. Them picking Markdown was important because the whole OSS community started using Github and got exposed to Markdown that way.

The rest is history. Other formats existed (textile, and various other wiki formats). They have features that are important to some people. But getting people to switch who don't really care about those features is hard. It's a bit like VHS over Betamax. Was it better. Not really. But it was there and video rental shops had to pick a format. And that wasn't Betamax when the dust settled.
by beAbU | 2026-01-10 10:45:35+00:00
Billionaires are rarely aligned on any political spectrum. They pray at the altar of Mammon and they are aligned to whatever "side" promises the biggest financial upside.

Musk cosied up with Trump because he saw a way boost revenue with lucrative government contracts and a prez that is buyable wrt whatever other projects he has planned (Orion/Starship, Robotaxi etc)

He had a falling out with Trump when he realized that the winds were blowing in the opposite direction than anticipated.

Their only ideology is money, nothing else.
by scorpioxy | 2026-01-10 10:46:03+00:00
Not the person you're replying to but I am confused by your comment. What would you do? You'd try and meditate. If that doesn't work, you distract yourself with something else. The mind whirling keeping you up at night is rarely a productive thing, speaking from experience.

I hope my comment doesn't come off as dismissive but learning to meditate is practicing to "let it go". It isn't a switch. You're teaching your mind not to get "too attached" to anything you consider unwholesome.
by WalterGR | 2026-01-10 10:47:11+00:00
The US Smithsonian National Air and Space (NASM) museums are great.

For those that aren’t aware, one of the locations is on the Capitol Mall in Washington, DC and the other - the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center - is near the Dulles Airport in Dulles, VA.

The latter has the Space Shuttle Discovery, a Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, a Concorde… and the Enola Gay.
by riedel | 2026-01-10 10:47:19+00:00
If you look at those 'whole websites' it is nearly exclusively sites that do not comply with takedown requests regarding copyright (actually those blocking laws/procedures do mostly foresee any other reason). The question I was addressing is the judicial control and the abuse for censorship. DCMA takedown request are massively abused without any real judicial control. Sure you can fight those in court, but so you could fight ISP blocks. I thing the different methods simply stem from a different legal system with different types of fines (particularly in civil law)
by crote | 2026-01-10 10:47:24+00:00
Mobile is a massive chicken-and-egg problem. The main purpose of a smartphone these days is to run apps. Nobody is going to buy a smartphone which can't run the apps they need in their day-to-day life. On the other hand, no company is going to write apps for a platform with basically zero users.

OpenMoko & friends are selling devices which basically only run Firefox, and sometimes make calls as well. The only people interested in that are diehard FLOSS enthusiasts, which means they have to use ancient hardware because new stuff doesn't have open drivers, which means that even if you ignore the app ecosystem they compare incredibly poorly to mainstream smartphones. No wonder they keep failing.

Interestingly, the desktop/laptop market is heading the other way. The move to cloud SaaS products means a decent number of people now only need a browser. What's keeping a lot of people on Windows is often literally one or two applications. Valve's push for Proton is the perfect example of this: the Steam Deck is providing a huge incentive to fix those last few bugs keeping a game from running on Linux, and with the way Microsoft is screwing up W11 it is now ironically the gamers who are moving to Linux.

What you are seeing in "regular computer stores" is mostly irrelevant. That market is basically dead. Corporate gets its machines directly from Dell/HP/Lenovo, PC enthusiasts mostly get custom builds, and casual people stick with smartphones and tablets. In-store PC sales is now reduced to a university student's Google Docs machine - and Microsoft is doing a pretty good job bribing the manufacturers to push Windows there.
by dagiu | 2026-01-10 10:47:28+00:00
Hello everyone,

I’m a developer with a problem: I have 10 new ideas every day. Usually, I spend days coding a landing page, setting up a database for the waitlist, and struggling with copywriting... only to realize two weeks later that nobody wants the product.

I got tired of wasting time, so I built Lander.

The concept: You give it one prompt describing your idea, and in 60 seconds, the AI generates:

A clean, modern landing page.

Conversion-optimized copy.

A built-in waitlist to collect emails (no external tools needed).

Analytics to track interest.

The goal is to go from "Idea" to "Live Link" before the initial excitement fades.

I’ve just deployed the first version here: https://lander-landing.web.app/

It’s currently in early access. If you’re a serial builder like me, I’d love to get your feedback on the workflow. What’s the biggest friction you face when launching a new side project?

Special for IH: I’m offering 50% OFF Lifetime for the early adopters who join the waitlist today."
by foldr | 2026-01-10 10:47:54+00:00
The video shows someone who could just have taken a step back deciding instead to shoot someone multiple times in the face. Even if everything you’re saying were true (which anyone can verify is not the case by watching the video that you yourself have linked), it would be completely insane to try to stop a moving car by shooting the driver.

On top of all this, the ICE agents clearly had no legitimate reason to be interfering with this woman’s car anyway, as she was driving away from the scene and was not suspected of any immigration offense.
by nosianu | 2026-01-10 10:47:59+00:00
> scripting languages

The "script" is compiled all the way down to machine code by the runtime, for heavily used paths. The black/white distinction of "scripted" vs. "compiled" does not exist, has not for many years.

Too many of these discussions and arguments seem to be stuck in the 1990s technology level. It is much more mixed and complex now.
by loevborg | 2026-01-10 10:48:10+00:00
We've been using tsgo for a few months in our team and it just works (10x faster). We bumped into some small differences in behavior with tsc but it was always because we were doing something weird in our code, and it was easy to fix.

Mad props to the team, it's an amazing achievement

We're using tsgo only on the command line btw, we're not using the vscode plugin yet
by troupo | 2026-01-10 10:48:47+00:00
Time is finite.

I could spend that time tinkering with the internals of an ad-hoc informal system cobbled together in the 1970s and held together by spit and glue.

Or I could just not do that.

Also, the implication that fiddling with shell scripts is somehow a better engineering/programming practice than web programming is laughable at best.
by roryirvine | 2026-01-10 10:49:06+00:00
It's in relation to a run, though - what else could it mean but distance? Paces? Maybe, but I've genuinely never heard of that being used as a goal when running. Seconds? Again, it's a possibility, but it'd be more likely to say "1h23-ish" - and, besides, it'd be a really odd time to pick.

And even in the UK, where many people still measure longer distances in miles, I've never heard anyone talk about a run being however many thousand feet or yards or chains or whatever.

All of the first page results for a USA-based google search for "5k" are running-related too, so it can't be all that ambiguous there either.
by bmacho | 2026-01-10 10:49:27+00:00
> The problem is that that's too many characters to reserve (they all have to be escaped when you want the actual character) making the resulting text look awful in plain text mode.

They don't really, you can make them so they don't match the normal usages of *, _, and /.

So for example if there is a single * in a -p-a-r-a-g-r-a-p-h- comment, HN can automatically recognize and escape it. But it could be better, for example, never match "*," or don't match between paragraphs, and such rules.
by wildredkraut | 2026-01-10 10:49:40+00:00
Same here, running mactype on a 65" LG 4k OLED C5 TV with 100% scaling on Windows as my main display for all kind of stuff incl. coding. But i must admit that fonts on Linux looks noticeable better and mactype does not apply to all applications. But it's great, I'm sitting 2 arm length away from the panel. E.g. for LibreOffice i had to change the rendering engine(disable Skia) under options and on PDFGear mactype does not apply at all.
by beckit | 2026-01-10 10:50:03+00:00
This is a sweet idea, thank you!

My suggestion for minimal/readable:

/*usr/bin/env go run "$0" "$@"; exit;*/

- go fmt leaves it alone
- it preserves the exit code in case env or go breaks
- it "figures out" where go is, no need to hard code a path that breaks on yet another machine (where /usr/bin/env is "standard")

(
The first example:
- I'm not a big fan of the subtle extra work that the question mark in the original path imposes on the system. env is (almost) always going to be as /usr/bin/env and rarely would something else that matches exist. ls -d /?sr to see what outputs on your system. That being said, the extra work isn't very meaningful in this case...

- The trailing $? seems unnecessary as the final exit will convey the return code from env go regardless of if the $? is present or not
)
by chrismorgan | 2026-01-10 10:50:36+00:00
Years ago I got a Surface Book. By the end of its three year warranty, I was on my fourth unit: the first was replaced after almost two years due to a couple of broken keycaps (left Ctrl, and S or D was most of the way to split), minor battery bulging, some screen discolouration at the bottom edge, and there had also been slowly increasing connectivity issues between keyboard part and top part; the second was BSODing from the start, basically DOA; and the third stopped recognising the top part’s battery after nine months. The fourth unit was in poor shape by the time it was two years old (similar issues to the first unit), I replaced it before it was three, and a couple of years later when I tried to start it it wouldn’t finish booting. The power brick had developed issues over time too.

For what I wanted at the time, all that was acceptable. But as a first-generation product of a new category, I wouldn’t have tried it without that three year warranty. There were bound to be issues.
by bjackman | 2026-01-10 10:50:38+00:00
> The biggest predictor for people who prefer starting late is how crowded their schedules are. Managers tend to have very crowded schedules which means they want a break between meetings, while ICs prefer not having to waste time waiting.

I have had a few senior managers (at Google) who ask for all the meetings _they_ attend to start 5 minutes late.

This seems 100% reasonable to me. No need for it to be an org policy. Just a affordance for the people who spend 95% of their working hours in meetings.

I've also had several senior managers at Google who _don't_ do this, but are 5 minutes late for every meeting anyway. This alternative is pretty annoying!
by roenxi | 2026-01-10 10:50:44+00:00
> That's quite a claim. I see you provided no sources.

Why do I need to source anything? Nobody credible ever claimed the vaccines would slow the spread, no evidence was ever provided that vaccines slow the spread and theory suggests they probably won't slow the spread. The people making things up in defiance of the obvious are the ones who need to start providing sources on this one.

If you want to check the numbers; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Australia - we've got 22 million vaccinated people on a population of around 25 million in 2021. We see ~12 million confirmed COVID cases and in the immediate post-lockdown period the testing system crumbled under load. Do the math. An exponential process that everyone was exposed to was downgraded to ... still an exponentially growing process that everyone was exposed to. Maybe it spread the pandemic phase out to 2 months instead of 1 (based on my memory of watching the stats at the time).

The vaccine didn't cut down on the number of infections. It was strictly personal protection. Members of my family regularly get COVID.
by frm88 | 2026-01-10 10:51:05+00:00
Let me help you with the link: https://archive.li/PkWxL archived version of the original LinkedIn post. Snopes veryfied a couple of facts mentioned in the reddit post but cannot ultimately vouch for its authenticity: https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/01/28/elon-musk-billionaire...
by wiether | 2026-01-10 10:51:10+00:00
Sorry if I'm stating something obvious for some, but, exercise doesn't HAVE to be something pushed by the industry like running or going to the gym.

I got great success converting friends and coworkers to... walking.

Not going on a multi-hours hike on the weekend, but just walking around the block or in a park for half an hour at mid-day, and going through the same routes so you don't have to think about finding your way.

By doing so, not only you are physically active, which is a big positive overall for most of office workers, but it requires so little of focus to achieve it that your mind is now free to wander as it please.

During this free period, you can come up with a solution to an issue you've been stuck on during the morning or for days, or you'll think about plans for the future, or you'll just get back to work with a clear mind, ready to tackle the issues of the afternoon.

> I give up mental capacity that could have been used for something else

That's the beauty of _just walking_, it requires no mental capacity, it frees it actually.
Don't overthink things, like where should I walk, when, do I have the right gear... Just get outside, put the appropriate clothing depending on the weather and, enjoy your free mind compute credits!

Once you see how it works, it feels like cheating.

Afterwards you'll feel better physically and mentally.

All the gym/running/zone 2 stuff is something different altogether that could come up once you're converted to the light exercise/big effects of _just walking_.
by falcor84 | 2026-01-10 10:51:14+00:00
Let me put it like this: I expect AI to replace much of human wage labor over the next 20 years and push many of us, and myself almost certainly included, into premature retirement. I'm personally concerned that in a few years, I'll find my software proficiency to be as useful as my chess proficiency today is useful to Stockfish. I am afraid of a massive social upheaval both for myself and my family, and for society at large.
by ricardo81 | 2026-01-10 10:51:20+00:00
Are they parasites though? It may be symbiotic, especially if the relationship between the species has spanned over many years. e.g. their presence may promote the production of rhodopsin.

OTOH it may be natures way of allowing natural selection to take place in the sharks since their lifespan is so long. The wiki article seems to imply that's not the case though.
by piker | 2026-01-10 10:53:53+00:00
What you’re saying makes no sense. Unless I'm misunderstanding it (and I am in fact a lawyer), the data indicates that 53% of the people have either been convicted of or charged with a crime.

Yes, people who are charged are innocent until proven guilty. Nobody is implying any of those charged people are guilty.

Fifty-three is a high percentage of any population to face criminal charges, innocent or guilty. That’s it.

What do you think is the delta between "charged" and "pending charge"?
by ricardo81 | 2026-01-10 10:53:58+00:00
Reminds me of the film 'In Time' where the rich can be immortal.

It does seem that nature has it 'programmed in' that we are to die due to telomere shortening and for natural selection to take place. Our modern and constantly changing society likely means that any kind of evolutionary adaptation doesn't have long enough to prove itself.

Interestingly how people would handle immortality could change that.
by aebtebeten | 2026-01-10 10:57:07+00:00
Pendleton: probably mostly due to a low overall population, but I must admit the karst and the panorama would've made them feel right at home: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendleton_County,_West_Virgini...

Whoah. Just started Type 56[0]; no wonder people were so uptight about "don't trust anyone over 30" — put in the CR context it sounds much more inflammatory than in the context I had had hearing it; that would explain the buckshot at Berkeley. (I guess one strong advantage of going to one of the Haidian Unis would be that the student population there can undoubtedly demonstrate with relative impunity; after all Mr. Chen will be on their side?)

Does 中共中央马克思共产主义学校 sell merch? I think I might be tempted to order a container load of "Party School of the Central Committee..." T-shirts; if the slang in the States hasn't changed they'd probably go like hotcakes there!

I'm pretty sure the triads in Operation Magpie/Oriole [I can believe orioles eat mantises, but magpies are great at theft] weren't deadheading[1]; wonder what they took out on the HK-PRC leg? (payment doesn't make sense, as many goods are valuable yet small and light... crypto is about as small and light as one can get; does it even obviate the need to wash money?)

Also on the to-read list: Edmund Wilson's criticism of Ernest Hemingway; maybe I just bounced off the ad-copy vibe of his style?

[0] I've always heard stories like we use such and such so the enemy can't use our stores, but it seems that everyone: Oceania, (Eu)Rasia, and EastAsia, has standardised on 7,62?

[1] People are saying: Thing is, when you have a perfectly set up system for smuggling something out, why not smuggle something in as well?
by onion2k | 2026-01-10 10:58:33+00:00
unless you have money to burn

All these flagship devices are aimed at people who do have money to burn. The ordinary models based on 5 year old tech are absolutely amazing at all the things people do with their devices. No one really needs any of the newer features.

This is the problem that any mature product industry faces - once the basic product is good enough for 99% of the users it becomes a boring commodity. Innovation stops selling devices because it only adds things most people don't want. The result is either cost driven price reduction as manufacturing processes get cheaper, or silly features (like fragile folding mechanisms) that the company can advertise to keep the perception of being high-edge expensive cutting-edge tech despite most buyers opting for a product that doesn't have any of that stuff but are still willing to pay for the status of having the brand.
by latexr | 2026-01-10 11:00:01+00:00
Not going to happen as long as the society we live in has this big of a hard on for capitalism and working yourself to the bone is seen as a virtue. Every time there’s a productivity boost, the newly gained free time is immediately consumed by more work. It’s a sick version of Parkinson’s law where work is infinite.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
Ask HN: Agentic AI to manage warranty for your hardware startup?
by udit_50 | 2026-01-10 11:00:40+00:00
Hi everyone,

I’m doing a short research project on how appliance brands manage after-sales service and warranties (physical devices, appliances, etc).

If anyone here works with appliance brands, service vendors, dealerships, or after-sales operations, I’d love to ask 2–3 questions.

Please tell if this is a need of an hour?
by falcor84 | 2026-01-10 11:01:57+00:00
> It requires constant feedback, critical evaluation, and checks. This is not AGI, its cognitive augmentation.

To me that doesn't sound qualitatively different from a PhD student. Are they just cognitive augmentation for their mentor?

In any case, I wasn't trying to argue that this system as-is is AGI, but just that it's no longer "ridiculous", and that this to me looks like a herald of AGI, as the portion being done by humans gets smaller and smaller