MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by irl_zebra | 2026-01-25 15:00:54+00:00
This sounds like a great half-day project. Just use Gas Town and create a team of product managers, senior and junior developers, designers, and architects and have them get on it. (I recommend keeping Opus as the senior, and Sonnet as the juniors). Once you do this, you can release it and you'll be a (very financially successful) hero!
by bluecalm | 2026-01-25 15:01:03+00:00
The problem with academia is that it's often more about politics and reputation than seeking the truth. There are multiple examples of researchers making a career out flawed papers and never retracking or even admitting a mistake.

All the talks they were invited to give, all the followers they had, all the courses they sold and impact factor they have built. They are not going to came forward and say "I misinterpreted the data and made long reaching conclusions that are nonsense, sorry for misleading you and thousands of others".

The process protects them as well. Someone can publish another paper, make different conclusions. There is 0 effort get to the truth, to tell people what is and what isn't current consensus and what is reasonable to believe. Even if it's clear for anyone who digs a bit deeper it will not be communicated to the audience the academia is supposed to serve. The consensus will just quietly shift while the heavily quoted paper is still there. The talks are still out there, the false information is still propagated while the author enjoys all the benefits and suffering non of the negative consequences.

If it functions like that I don't think it's fair that tax payer funds it. It's there to serve the population not to exist in its own world and play its own politics and power games.
by margalabargala | 2026-01-25 15:01:18+00:00
The Hyundai/Kia EVs do not have a mode that only regens when pressing the brake. The best you can do is limit the car to 2kW of regen braking when not touching the accelerator. You can't disable it entirely.

It's true though that using this mode will extend the life of your tires.
by user_7832 | 2026-01-25 15:01:29+00:00
> Eventually, we tried removing the dialogs altogether and the incident rate approached zero. If you take away the guardrails completely, it radically alters the psychology and game theory around user interaction. Imagine climbing a tall building with multiple layers of protection vs having none at all.

I think there's evidence and studies on this. IIRC removing traffic lights forces people to be much more alert, reducing accidents.

Fun fact: Bhutan is perhaps the only country in the world without traffic lights!
by stahtops | 2026-01-25 15:01:48+00:00
Plenty of ICE cars let you control the transmission, and not just MT. Engine braking is effectively the same as regen braking to tires.

Regen is lossy, so there’s no incentive in slowing down to capture 1W just to speed up and spend 1.1W

Porsche has modes for coast and regen. Applying brakes in coast mode will use regen up to a threshold and then use conventional pad/rotor.

So I am sorry to inform you that you’re just wrong.

There are EVs that can coast.

EVs are not braking more.

Whether you use conventional brakes, engine braking, or regen braking, it’s all the same to the tires.
by xtiansimon | 2026-01-25 15:02:30+00:00
> “Stochastic accounts often concern non-directive, cumulative rhetoric whose effects materialize unpredictably…”

And it would seem ever more rapidly.

I know I feel enervated by the videos I see from MN. More and more by at the speed of my scrolling.

And, video instances depict the behaviors of agents who, in the moment of encounter, are able to rapidly escalate situations.

I would argue the latter is agents learning tricks and shortcuts from other agents on how to dominate. The more unrestricted and unaccountable they are, the more individuals are emboldened to learn and strive for the approbation of their superiors. They have a quota.
Show HN: Free PDF Editor by TechRex – client-side PDF editing, OCR, compression
by Maaz-Sohail | 2026-01-25 15:03:02+00:00
Hi HN — I’m Maaz. I built Free PDF Editor by TechRex, a privacy-first PDF toolkit that runs entirely in the browser (client-side). No signup, no watermark.

Why: I was frustrated that many “free” PDF tools require uploads, add watermarks, or force accounts. I wanted a simple tool where files stay on-device by default.

What it includes:
- Edit & annotate: type on PDF, highlight, draw/markup, add notes
- Add images/branding: insert images/photos, add a logo to a PDF
- Organize: merge, split, extract pages, delete pages
- Compression: compress for email/WhatsApp/portal uploads + target sizes (100KB, 200KB, 500KB, 1MB, 2MB, 5MB, 10MB)
- OCR: detect scanned PDFs, make PDFs searchable (Ctrl+F), improve copy/paste + conversion accuracy
- Converters: PDF ↔ Word/Excel/PPTX, image ↔ PDF, HTML ↔ PDF, PDF ↔ text, image-to-text

I’d love feedback on:
1) UX: should the homepage focus on Edit vs Compress vs OCR?
2) Quality: which formats/conversions/OCR cases break most for you?
3) Trust: what privacy assurances would you want to see (copy, UI, technical notes)?

Thanks — I’ll respond to every comment and prioritize fixes/features based on feedback.
by baubino | 2026-01-25 15:03:06+00:00
A labor strike is an economic protest, and it is by far the most effective economic protest if it can be fully pulled off. It targets the root of economic activity, which is the production of goods and services. A boycott, while helpful, targets the economic endpoint, which is consumption. The longterm effects of a labor strike, which disrupts the production of goods and services, are more profound than those of a boycott.
by mekoka | 2026-01-25 15:03:16+00:00
Connecting people's characters to their deed is a double edged sword. It's not that it's necessarily mistaken, but you have to choose your victories. Maybe today you get some satisfaction from condemning the culprits, but you also pay for it by making it even more difficult to get cooperation from the system in the future. We all have friends, family and colleagues that we believe to be good. They're all still capable of questionable actions. If we systematically tie bad deeds to bad people, then surely those people we love and know to be good are incapable of what they're being accused. That's part of how closing ranks works. I think King recognizes this too, which is why he recommends that Penalties should reflect the severity of the violation, not be all-or-nothing.
by luckylion | 2026-01-25 15:04:00+00:00
I disagree. Build for your target audience and your targeted application. We don't need for every vehicle to be off-road-capable when you're expecting to deliver cargo on paved roads. We can do that, but it will make things more complex and more expensive.

I'm not saying that nobody should ever consider "the state cuts off the internet" as a criteria when deciding what to do, but making that a foundational requirement is like starting out with "handle google-scale" as a requirement when you have zero reason to believe you will.

There are plenty of good reasons for local first apps, but "build for darkness" is pretty far down the list for me.
by ilmj8426 | 2026-01-25 15:04:32+00:00
This is a fantastic insight. You absolutely nailed why the 'dog on a beach' scenario is the ultimate stress test for temporal consistency.
You are right that the fundamental problem exists even in a film model composed of static images. The challenge isn't just filling the hole; it's dealing with the background's non-rigid, stochastic motion (like waves lapping).
A generative model can easily hallucinate a plausible static wave infill for a single frame. But ensuring those hallucinations transition smoothly across t-1, t, and t+1 without jittering or warping is exactly the 'uncanny valley' of motion we are trying to solve. It has to understand the physics of the wave motion, not just the texture.
Thanks for this thoughtful analysis.
by al_borland | 2026-01-25 15:04:40+00:00
Yeah, I’m already seeing it. Firefighting is rewarded, while actual planning and proactive work that avoids the need to firefight is viewed as lazy and people not doing anything.

People who write code with a lot of bugs end up looking like heroes, because they are always jumping in to fix their breaking code, while someone who takes the time to properly test and write solid code is seen as slow and less capable.

The house of cards just keeps growing, and everyone is on the verge of walking out.
by dgxyz | 2026-01-25 15:04:47+00:00
It went on for a few months. The source data for the paper was synthesised and it was like trying to get blood out of a stone trying to get hold of it, clearly because they knew they were in trouble. Lots of research money was wasted trying to reproduce it.

She was just done with it then and a pharma company said "hey you fed up with this shit and like money?" and she was and does.

edit: as per the other comment, my background is mathematics and statistics after engineering. I went into software but still have connections back to academia which I left many years ago because it was a political mess more than anything. Oh and I also like money.
by 1718627440 | 2026-01-25 15:04:56+00:00
> depending on the US to defend them was a poisonous mistake, even if a very seductive one.

It was a decision that was necessary to not loose the second world war to Germany and/or the Sovietunion. Until 30 years ago separating from the US would have meant allowing the Sovietunion to expand to the Atlantic. Separating from the US has been an open discussion for the last 30 years, but it was always felt to be a security risk and the US has actively used its soft power to remain the status quo.
by timr | 2026-01-25 15:04:57+00:00
Please don't lazily conclude that he's gone crazy because it doesn't align with your prior beliefs. His work on Covid was just as rigorous as anything else he's done, but it's been unfairly villainized by the political left in the USA. If you disagree with his conclusions on a topic, you'd do well to have better reasoning than "the experts said the opposite".

Ioannidis' work during Covid raised him in my esteem. It's rare to see someone in academics who is willing to set their own reputation on fire in search of truth.
by stavros | 2026-01-25 15:05:00+00:00
I don't think this advice is useful. You're going to use your devices, so you won't control the temperature or, largely, the charge percentage.

I think good advice is to keep your devices as cool as you can (ie don't leave your cars in sunlight when there's shade), which you probably did anyway, and keep the battery between 20% and 80% as much as possible. If the battery is going to stay unused for a while, leave it at 3.8V (or close to it), or at 50%.

Batteries are ultimately consumables, so don't stress too much. Just care for them as much as convenient, and that's it.
by ilmj8426 | 2026-01-25 15:05:03+00:00
Thanks for the feedback on the formatting.
While I do use tools to help structure thoughts and edit for clarity (which might explain the lists and phrasing you noticed), the core technical analysis regarding the challenges of optical flow vs. spatiotemporal AI stems directly from our actual engineering work in building video restoration models.
The goal was to make complex concepts digestible, but I appreciate the note on style. I hope the substance of the technical argument still comes through.
by logicprog | 2026-01-25 15:05:22+00:00
It's interesting that Claude is able to effectively write Elixir, even if it isn't super idiomatic without established styles in the codebase, considering Elixir is a pretty niche and relatively recent language.

What I'd really like to see though is experiments on whether you can few shot prompt an AI to in-context-learn a new language with any level of success.
by mike_hearn | 2026-01-25 15:05:24+00:00
I explored this question a bit a few years ago when GPT-3 was brand new. It's tempting to look for technological solutions to social problems. It was COVID so public health papers were the focus.

The idea failed a simple sanity check: just going to Google Scholar, doing a generic search and reading randomly selected papers from within the past 15 years or so. It turned out most of them were bogus in some obvious way. A lot of ideas for science reform take as axiomatic that the bad stuff is rare and just needs to be filtered out. Once you engage with some field's literatures in a systematic way, it becomes clear that it's more like searching for diamonds in the rough than filtering out occasional corruption.

But at that point you wonder, why bother? There is no alchemical algorithm that can convert intellectual lead into gold. If a field is 90% bogus then it just shouldn't be engaged with at all.
by throwaway150 | 2026-01-25 15:05:33+00:00
> I’ve been in the car with some drunk drivers, some dangerous drivers, who could easily have killed people: that’s a bad thing to do, but I wouldn’t say these were bad people.

If this isn't bad people, then who can ever be called bad people? The word "bad" loses its meaning if you explain away every bad deed by such people as something else. Putting other people's lives at risk by deciding to drive when you are drunk sounds like very bad people to me.

> They’re living in a world in which doing the bad thing–covering up error, refusing to admit they don’t have the evidence to back up their conclusions–is easy, whereas doing the good thing is hard.

I don't understand this line of reasoning. So if people do bad things because they know they can get away with it, they aren't bad people? How does this make sense?

> As researchers they’ve been trained to never back down, to dodge all criticism.

Exactly the opposite is taught. These people are deciding not to back down and admit wrong doing out of their own accord. Not because of some "training".
by indubioprorubik | 2026-01-25 15:06:05+00:00
People can also vote against a consequence decoupled elite that rule by virtual signaling to each other which was okay in a resource binge, ignoring the results their previous choices had for the lower echelons.

To hit the captain with a shovel may look like mutineer madness on any boat, but maybe a sign of necessary changes and reality grounding on a ship called "titanic" where the captain yells "right on, right on" into a pipe that does gurgling sounds.
by natmaka | 2026-01-25 15:06:08+00:00
Hopefully all little tricks are now known...

> relatively on time and on budget

Nope. 7 years late (plan: 2017, last reactor diverged in 2024).

Total cost not known, at least 24.5 billion USD and maybe up to 32 according to Bloomberg (plan: 20). Koreans are even fighting: KHNP (a subsidiary of KEPCO, the company building the plant) officially seeks for about 1.2 billion USD in compensation ( https://www.businesskorea.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=... ) and it may worsen up.

Such a resounding success... as usual: https://www.fastcompany.com/90844859/why-massive-wind-and-so...
by londons_explore | 2026-01-25 15:06:16+00:00
Only takes 1 person to make a "safety system faker: Makes car run even with faults" which is a $20 thing you can buy from aliexpress and can be clipped anywhere onto the canbus - just two wires to hook into.

It then runs code which auto detects the car model (fairly easy from the messages on the bus), and has a database of the messages to send/inhibit to change the behaviour in the desired way.

Because so many cars use electronics that are common across a whole manufacturer of cars - ie. all GM cars, or all cars with a Bosche ECU - there won't be awful lot of work making it compatible with hundreds of models of car.

Such devices already exist for faking data for engine tuning, and for faking 'zero faults, all monitors pass' to pass government tests.
by xn | 2026-01-25 15:07:09+00:00
This why you should use confidence intervals for estimates. Use a 80% confidence interval, for example. 10% of the time, you should come in under the best case estimate. 10% of the time, it should take longer than the worst case estimate.

How do you know if your estimate is good? Would you rather bet on your estimate or on hitting one of 8 numbers on a 10-number roulette wheel? If you prefer one of the bets, adjust your estimates. If you're indifferent between the bets, the estimates accurately reflect your beliefs.

(The roulette wheel is from the book, How to Measure Anything by Hubbard. Confidence interval estimates are from LiquidPlanner, https://web.archive.org/web/20120508001704/http://www.liquid...)
Show HN: Open Computer-Animated Multivariable Calculus Course in 6 Languages
by sinaatalay | 2026-01-25 15:07:36+00:00
We just released a fully computer-animated multivariable calculus course in six languages: English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, and Portuguese. Free and open to everyone. Half the course is live now; the rest is coming very soon.

We're an early-stage edtech startup. Our goal: use AI to build high-quality, computer-animated versions of every STEM course in the world, in every language, and bring them together on a platform like Coursera, but built for the AI age, with deep LLM integration. We want that literally. Every course. Every language.

This project simply couldn't exist without generative AI. We're two co-founders, and we don't speak five of the languages we just published in. There may be mistakes, but these courses wouldn't exist in those languages otherwise.

We produce lectures fast with AI. But once a lecture is done, adding another language is even faster, it's O(1). So we just made this in six languages. We could keep going.

These videos aren't static MP4s, they're open for improvement. If you have ideas, suggestions, or find mistakes, please open an issue on GitHub: https://github.com/academa-dev/multivariable-calculus

Would love your feedback. Happy to answer questions.

Join the waitlist for upcoming courses at https://academa.ai.

Tech stack: We forked 3Blue1Brown's Manim, synced TTS with animations using OpenAI Whisper, and used Inworld AI for text-to-speech.
by phtrivier | 2026-01-25 15:07:44+00:00
I'm probably picturing "junior" as "people still in college preparing to get their first job".

My point is that a luxury of the software engineering craft is that you can practice "at pro level" very cheaply.
Even as a teenager, learning and using vscode/python/react/etc... on your own is a possibility.

Learning Salesforce and SAP and the internal support tool of BigCo is not.

That being said, I completely agree that we're going to put a generation of "wannabee white collar" in a dire situation. Cynically, this might be an overdue correction from the years of "college degree for everyone", and maybe (just maybe) some people will actually thrive in the "hard-to-llm-ize" profession if they can retrain.

(If the market laws apply, someone will build "turn advertisement-copy writers into electricians", and it would not necessarily be for the worst ? I know, easy to tell for me, who got the opposite deal by being a software engineer on demand at the right time at the beginning of my career.)
by katzgrau | 2026-01-25 15:08:08+00:00
It’s not really subjective if you don’t believe it’s your place to judge the human to begin with.

If you were in their exact life circumstance and environment you would do the same thing. You aren’t going to magically sidestep cause and effect.

The act itself is bad.

The human performing the act was misguided.

I view people as inherently perfect whose view of life, themselves, and their current situations as potentially misguided.

Eg, like a diamond covered in shit.

Just like it’s possible for a diamond to be uncovered and polished, the human is capable of acquiring a truer perspective and more aligned set of behaviors - redemption. Everyone is capable of redemption so nobody is inherently bad. Thinking otherwise may be convenient but is ultimately misguided too.

So the act and the person are separate.

Granted, we need to protect society from such misguidedness, so we have laws, punishments, etc.

But it’s about protecting us from bad behavior, not labeling the individual as bad.
by bluGill | 2026-01-25 15:08:26+00:00
There are large implementation differences in touch screens. My wife's care needs several second: turn the radio on, wait for the splash screen, press the drives heat control, wait for it to appear (100s of ms - long enough to notice) then find the button in the miedle of the screen - finally I can change the heated seats. My car that button is always has the button at the bottom of the screen in the same place so is is ms to look and see.
by ambicapter | 2026-01-25 15:09:05+00:00
The entire point of recognizing bad people is to make it harder for them to work with or affect you in the future.

> If we systematically tie bad deeds to bad people, then surely those people we love and know to be good are incapable of what they're being accused.

A strong claim that needs to be supported and actually the question who’s nuances are being discussed in this thread.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-25 15:09:23+00:00
I agree, but I think there's a second relevant question as well: Does generative AI output original creative works of its own? Obviously the goal here should be maximizing societal benefit. Specifically encouraging the creation of works that we (as a group) find directly useful or otherwise desirable. At least to my mind, human exceptionalism is an explicit non-goal.

I'm already finding the ability of LLMs to synthesize useful descriptions across disparate sources of raw data to be immensely useful. If that puts (for example) scientific textbook authors out of a job I'm not at all sure that would prove to be a detriment to society on the whole. I'm fairly certain that LLMs are already doing better at meeting the needs of the reader than most of the predatory electronic textbook models I was exposed to in university.

> If the answer is "no", which it clearly is,

Why are you so certain of this? It clearly breaks many (most?) of the existing revenue models to at least some extent. But we don't care about the existing revenue models per se. What we care about is long term sustainable creation across society as a whole. So are consumer needs being met in a sustainable manner? Clearly generative AI is (ever increasingly) capable of the former; it's the latter that requires examination.
by 1718627440 | 2026-01-25 15:10:06+00:00
> There's no perceived Soviet juggernaut and Russia can't even conquer Ukraine.

It looks a bit like that to be the case, but legally Russia still isn't at war with the Ukraine, according to their own internal law. Hence the use of mercenaries and "volunteers" and the pinky promise that conscripts are not used near the Ukraine.
by sandreas | 2026-01-25 15:10:31+00:00
It's probably not a flaky USB cable. Androids charging limit of 80% includes a policy to charge 100% every 14 days to recalibrate the battery controller.

A possibility to limit charging to ~65% does not exist per se but you can measure the time it takes to charge from 25% to 65% and use a power timer to shut down charging after that period of time. It's not accurate but easy to implement.

Another factor is fast charging... The battery loses capscity significantly faster if you fast charge often...

I personally only use the 80% limitation...
by kcplate | 2026-01-25 15:10:38+00:00
> sadistic vengeance"? I don't know what you're talking about

A couple of quotes from your comments above…I added the emphasis that highlights your sadism and vengeance:

“You know, I look forward to the day this unjust system that you blindly and stupidly trust bites you, too”

“I'll just have to say that I hope you run into someone just as horrible when the corrupt system chews you up and spits you out too.”

If you want to claim ignorance about what you wrote, fine. But it’s here for all to see. With every word you post I become more and more convinced that your perception of justice is tilted outside societal norms.
by usagisushi | 2026-01-25 15:11:47+00:00
I recently got a junk M2 MacBook Air (16GB/512GB) with a broken screen for $250.
It idles at just 0.2W (!) when accessed via SSH. While it offers zero expandability, lacks wired LAN, and runs on a non-free OS, it's an interesting candidate for an ultra-low-power inference server.