MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by madspindel | 2026-01-17 17:50:17+00:00
As I Swede, I must say this list of countries are the countries I love the most in Europe (well, I like the weather in Spain and Italy, but I mean politically).

I would like our countries to integrate more, maybe with a common army. In the Nordics we already have begun to integrate our Air Forces to a common Nordic Air Force. Why not extend that to UK, France, Netherlands and Germany? These countries together could form a quite powerful army, air force etc. that could safeguard Europe against external threats.
by 3eb7988a1663 | 2026-01-17 17:50:21+00:00
This was deliberate engineering to bring in fresh air. After the 1918 Flu, there was a desire for more fresh air inside homes. All of the apartments I lived in Chicago were built decades later, but the radiator layout persists.

Article[0] on it

I’ve heard a story, and I don’t know if it’s an urban legend, that steam heat became popular after the 1918 flu pandemic because it was going to force overheating of units and make people open their windows and let the bad air out.

I’ve never heard it put that way, but the flu pandemic had a huge impact on heating systems, because they actually changed the code requirements for heating systems when the pandemic was around, because they didn’t know what was causing this. They thought there was something in the air that was causing this. And so what they did is they started requiring buildings to be ventilated. Essentially, they changed the requirements for heating buildings so you had to maintain 70 degrees in the building with all the windows open in the sleeping rooms. So people see these great big huge radiators and think that that’s what they have to have in the house. Usually, the reason those radiators are so big is because they had to heat the house with windows open.

[0] https://www.chicagomag.com/city-life/a-history-of-radiators-...

Edit: switched out to different article focused on Chicago
by soegaard | 2026-01-17 17:51:00+00:00
Nato - Article 2

The Parties will contribute toward the further development of peaceful and friendly international relations by strengthening their free institutions, by bringing about a better understanding of the principles upon which these institutions are founded, and by promoting conditions of stability and well-being. They will seek to eliminate conflict in their international economic policies and will encourage economic collaboration between any or all of them.
by fn-mote | 2026-01-17 17:51:48+00:00
“Needs to be” is a strong claim. The skill of debugging complex problems by stepping through disassembly to find a compiler error is very specialized. Few can do it. Most applications don’t need that “introspection”. They need the “encapsulation” and faith that the lower layers work well 99.9+% of the time, and they need to know who to call when it fails.

I’m not saying generative AI meets this standard, but it’s different from what you’re saying.
by londons_explore | 2026-01-17 17:51:49+00:00
There's a neat way to do this that is super simple... The electricity company publishes an equation that determines the price based on the AC frequency. Ie. price_per_kwh = tan(min(max((-60 + system_frequency) * 1000, -pi/2), pi/2)).

Now every device in your home knows the price. For this to work, everyone must get the same price across the whole grid, and there must be sufficient grid capacity for energy to flow freely which isn't always the case. It will also cause issues with some very old (ie. 60+ year old) clocks with mechanical timers.

All of these issues can be fixed by updating the formula:

price_per_kwh = tan(min(max((-60 + system_frequency + published_offset) * 1000, -pi/2), pi/2))

The published_offset would be unique to each district and adjusted from time to time to keep old clocks working properly, and sometimes to deal with limited transfer properties of the grid...

But the neat thing is that even if you don't take into account the published_offset, you still make nearly optimal economic decisions.
by 9JollyOtter | 2026-01-17 17:51:57+00:00
The comment you are replying to has no idea what they are talking about.

Burglary is defined in the Theft Act 1968:

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1968/60/section/9

The door can be wide open. The important parts are you are trespassing with the intent to commit a crime.
by nurettin | 2026-01-17 17:52:21+00:00
I love that they don't just work on the edges and declare their work complete. No, shadows also have to be perfect!

Reminds me of this underrated library which uses braille alphabet to draw lines. Behold:

https://github.com/tammoippen/plotille

It's a really nice plotting tool for the terminal. For me it increases the utility of LLMs.
by alsetmusic | 2026-01-17 17:53:00+00:00
I also read Dilbert books years before joining the workforce. Though the framing of the strip is the workplace, it averages out to all the people in one's life who are wrong but have authority. As a rebellious little shit, I could identify with how Dilbert's boss (PHB) was wrong in ways that I recognized in adults around me plus my inability to do anything about it.

This is why every level of worker can see themselves as Dilbert and their superiors as the management who "don't get it." I bet there are even C-suite execs who identify with Dilbert and see their CEO or board of directors as PHBs incarnate. This was part of the appeal of the strip before it went off the deep end; almost everyone taking orders believes they know better than at least one of the people telling them what to do.

I'm surprised I don't see this acknowledged more.
by pbhjpbhj | 2026-01-17 17:53:08+00:00
Presumably you grow all your own food, cook from scratch; manufacture your own tools; refine your own fuel; mine your own lithium for batteries; produce your own fibres to weave at home, make cloth, which you tailor your own clothes from; grow trees, fell them, cut them to boards, and make your flooring and furniture; and so on?

Otherwise, you're the sort of normie carpenter who doesn't even do their own land clearance ready for seeding. For whom you must express your utmost contempt! /s
by tomnicholas1 | 2026-01-17 17:53:44+00:00
IMO Zarr is that newer format. It abstracts over the features of all these other formats so neatly that it can literally subsume them.

I feel that we no longer really need TIFF etc. - for scientific use cases in the cloud Zarr is all that's needed going forwards. The other file formats become just archival blobs that either are converted to Zarr or pointed at by virtual Zarr stores.
by Havoc | 2026-01-17 17:54:15+00:00
re reasoning traces - not sure frankly. I get what you're saying in that there is only so much advanced thinking you can learn from just scraping github code, and it certainly seems to be the latest craze in getting a couple extra % on benchmarks but I'm not entirely convinced it is necessary per se. Feels like an human-emulation crutch to me rather than a necessary ingredient to machines performing a task well.

For example I could see some sort of self-play style RL working. Which architecture? Try them all in a sandbox and see. Humans need to trial & error learning as you say. So why not here too? Seems to have worked for alphago which arguably also contains components of abstract high level strategy.

>Jevons paradox

I can see it for tokens and possibly software too, but rather skeptical of it in job market context. It doesn't seem to have happened for the knowledge work AI already killed (e.g. translation or say copy writing). More (slop) stuff is being produced but it didn't translate into a hiring frenzy of copy writers. Possible that SWE is somehow different via network effects or something but I've not heard a strong argument for it yet.

>It's also possible that human-replacement AGI is harder to achieve than widely thought.

Yeah I think the current paradigm isn't gonna get us there at all. Even if you 10x GPT5 it still seems to miss some sort of spark that a 5 year old has but GPT doesn't. It can do PHD level work but qualitatively there is something missing there about that "intelligence".

Interesting times ahead for better or worse
by MengerSponge | 2026-01-17 17:54:26+00:00
Look up some of Tressie McMillan Cottom's writing, podcast appearances, public lectures, etc etc. She's a McArthur-certified Genius and a full professor at UNC, and she's a spectacular writer and public intellectual.

She wrote "Lower Ed", about for-profit colleges in America and has identified places that more elite schools are copying that playbook.

https://bsky.app/profile/tressiemcphd.bsky.social

https://www.instagram.com/tressiemcphd/
by rbbydotdev | 2026-01-17 17:55:18+00:00
I had a similar toy project. Attempting to make custom day trips from guide books. I immediately ran into limitations naïvely chunking paragraphs into a RAG. My next attempt I’m going to try using a llm model to extract “entities” like holidays/places/history and store them in a graph db coupled with vectors and original source text or index references(page + column)

Still experimental and way outside my expertise, would love to hear anyone with ideas or experience with this kind of problem
by sodafountan | 2026-01-17 17:55:23+00:00
This was an interesting application of AI, but I don't really think this is what LLMs excel at. Correct me if I'm wrong.

It was interesting that the poster vibe-coded (I'm assuming) the CTL from scratch; Claude was probably pretty good at doing that, and that task could likely have been completed in an afternoon.

Pairing the CTL with the CLI makes sense, as that's the only way to gain feedback from the game. Claude can't easily do spatial recognition (yet).

A project like this would entirely depend on the game being open source. I've seen some very impressive applications of AI online with closed-source games and entire algorithms dedicated to visual reasoning.

I'm still trying to figure out how this guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Doec5gxhT_U

Was able to have AI learn to play Mario Kart nearly perfectly. I find his work to be very impressive.

I guess because RCT2 is more data-driven than visually challenging, this solution works well, but having an LLM try to play a racing game sounds like it would be disastrous.
by grayhatter | 2026-01-17 17:55:52+00:00
> I personally prefer not having other people decide for me which facts are and aren't relevant, I think that is unhelpful and potentially dangerous (some people think what happened in Tienanmen Square isn't relevant to the general population, do you agree?).

I couldn't agree more, it's wrong to decide what facts someone else is allowed to know. Please tell me the most embarrassing details of your life?

Perhaps there's nuance and different standards we can apply when talking about individuals, especially individuals who have been bullied or abused? Than the standards we apply when a powerful group is trying to cover up a violent attack against another?

> For a transgender person, I may have known them before they transitioned for example and may not necessarily be familiar with their new name, that's a reason off the top of my head that it would be relevant to me but not necessarily you.

I have a very hard time understanding this example, you're concerned that you, who knew this person but only knew their older name, won't be able to find thier wikipedia page via searching for their old name? Which is true because their old name isn't listed on the page itself?

I don't find that very compelling, did you mean something different?
by enos_feedler | 2026-01-17 17:57:05+00:00
Of course that is true. The nuance here is that software isn’t just getting cheaper but the activity to build it is changing. Instead of writing lines of code you are writing requirements. That shifts who can do the job. The customer might be able to do it themselves. This removes a market, not grows one. I am not saying the market will collapse just be careful applying a blunt theory to such a profound technological shift that isn’t just lowering cost but changing the entire process.
by lmc | 2026-01-17 17:58:01+00:00
> my PC always comes back to the login screen immediately after I manually use "sleep" from the power menu. I have to to the sleep thing again. Has anyone else run into this issue?

Yes. By default moving the mouse or brushing the trackpad wakes the PC up... so when you have a fast machine it goes to sleep quicker than you can take your hand off the mouse. The solution is to turn off 'Allow device to wake' for the mouse in device manager. Well, that's been my experience anyway, there could be other causes I'm not aware of.
by einpoklum | 2026-01-17 17:58:39+00:00
The title is somewhat misleading.

First, US demand increased by 3.1%. That is bad - demand should be going down, since there is a need to conserve electricity while much of it is provided by CO2-emitting sources. That said - it is not such a huge "surge" that the fact that 61% of it was covered by an increase in Solar capacity is so impressive.

Second, Solar generation is said to have reached 84 TW. But if the increase in demand was 135 TW, and that's just 3.1% of total demand, then total demand is 4355 TW, and Solar accounts for 1.92% of generation. That is _really_ bad. Since we must get to near-0 emissions in electricity generation ASAP to avoid even harsher effects of global warming; and most of the non-Solar generation in the US is by Natural Gas and Coal [1].

You could nitpick and say that the important stat is "total renewables" rather than just Solar, and that the US has a lot of Nuclear, and that's technically true, but it's not as though Nuclear output is surging, and it has more obstacles and challenges, for reasons. So, the big surge to expect in the US is Solar - and we're only seeing very little of that. If you mis-contextualize it sounds like a lot: "60% of new demand! 27% increase since last year!" but that's not the right context.

[1] : https://www.statista.com/statistics/220174/total-us-electric...
by smj-edison | 2026-01-17 17:58:45+00:00
Sorry, I should clarify: it's needs to be introspectable by somebody. Not every programmer needs to be able to introspect the lower layers, but that capability needs to exist.

Now I guess you can read the code an LLM generates, so maybe that layer does exist. But, that's why I don't like the idea of making a programming language for LLMs, by LLMs, that's inscrutable by humans. A lot of those intermediate layers in compilers are designed for humans, with only assembly generation being made for the CPU.
by labrador | 2026-01-17 17:58:55+00:00
I agree for the most part but I've been getting bored with HN, mostly because anything controversial is censored by the mods and by ideological fans of certain people, especially Elon Musk whose fans will flag and downvote anything negative about him. This thread is a good example:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46592827
by RaftPeople | 2026-01-17 17:59:15+00:00
> In other words, by the time code gets thrown over the wall to QA, it should already be fairly well vetted at least in the small.

My opinion is further than that. I tell my people, if you can't get a piece of software working correctly then you have not completed your job.

It is definitely an art and skill that takes guidance and practice to develop, just like designing and writing the code, but IMO it's also the minimum bar to being a complete dev.

Having said that, we do use qa and we do find stuff in qa, but they are typically the types of things that are exposed when linking systems and processes together.
by honzabe | 2026-01-17 17:59:22+00:00
There is no doubt in my mind that your intent was good.

> A rough analogy might be, we figure out advanced bioengineering and then the next thing you know we as a society have collectively gone to great lengths to apply it to create the Torment Nexus

What connection between bioengineering and Torment Nexus do you have in mind? The advances of bioengineering that pop up in my mind are mRNA vaccines and new cancer treatments, which I consider awesome and not at all Torment Nexus-y. When you say Torment Nexus, that makes me think of Thiel’s Palantir, but this is not something we do collectively as a society - is it? To me, that is exactly the anti-democratic stuff pushed by a few specific people that we as a society need to rein in.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-01-17 17:59:28+00:00
These startups were not created to solve a problem, some didn’t even have a technical person. These startups were created to be VC bait and hopefully sell out to the bigger fool

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Uy2aWoeRZopMIaXXxY2E...
by Trifectorium | 2026-01-17 17:59:46+00:00
“Who am I?” is the oldest philosophical question; “When am I?” is its quieter twin. Put them together and you get the paradox the modern mind both fears and adores: if time is not a single straight river, what happens to identity when it doubles back on itself? If future selves can visit past moments, are they the same person? And if the soul exists, is it bound to one body at one time? Or could it, somehow, be present in multiple bodies across history?
by lyu07282 | 2026-01-17 18:00:16+00:00
It's like when every liberal scoffs at leftists opposing US imperialism, nothing about the power balance has changed. Europe was always a vassal of the empire. This is the liberal international order, this is what that means.

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

That's why they can kidnap Maduro, have the BBC censor the word "kidnapped" in their reporting on it. Have every European politician applaud it, point to Maduros case against him at the ICC and have Netanyahu fly over France. You can't do anything about Greenland, the same way you can't do anything when he comes for Norways state-owned extraction industry next. Liberals can scream hypocrisy tears all they want, this is the world they built.
by toast0 | 2026-01-17 18:00:19+00:00
I lived on the top floor of a 12 story dorm with radiators. Everyone on our floor would have the windows open all the time. When it was warm out, we needed any fresh air. When it was cold out, the radiators would be so hot, the fresh air balanced it. Down about 6th floor was nice though.

But, to answer the OP, putting conditioning on the envelope of the building keeps the temperature gradient minimal. If you deliver conditioning to the center of the building, the envelope approaches outside temperatures (depending) and you have a big gradient and much less comfort.
by Balgair | 2026-01-17 18:00:31+00:00
So, I fed the article into my LLM of choice and asked it to come up with a header to my prompts to help negate the issues on the article. Here's what it spat out:

ROLE & STANCE
You are an intelligent collaborator, editor, and critic — not a replacement for my thinking.

PROJECT OR TASK CONTEXT
I am working on an intellectually serious project. The goal is clear thinking, deep learning, and original synthesis. Accuracy, conceptual clarity, and intellectual honesty matter more than speed or polish.

HOW I WANT YOU TO HELP
• Ask clarifying questions only when necessary; otherwise proceed using reasonable assumptions and state them explicitly.
• Help me reason step-by-step and surface hidden assumptions.
• Challenge weak logic, vague claims, or lazy framing — politely but directly.
• Offer multiple perspectives when appropriate, including at least one alternative interpretation.
• Flag uncertainty, edge cases, or places where informed experts might disagree.
• Prefer depth and clarity over breadth.

HOW I DO NOT WANT YOU TO HELP
• Do not simply agree with me or optimize for affirmation.
• Do not over-summarize unless explicitly asked.
• Do not finish the work for me if the thinking is the point — scaffold instead.
• Avoid generic motivational advice or filler.

STYLE & FORMAT
• Be concise but substantial.
• Use structured reasoning (numbered steps, bullets, or diagrams where useful).
• Preserve my voice and intent when editing or expanding.
• If you generate text, clearly separate:
- “Analysis / Reasoning”
- “Example Output” (if applicable)

CRITICAL THINKING MODE (REQUIRED)
After responding, include a short section titled:
“Potential Weaknesses or Alternative Angles”
Briefly note:
– What might be wrong or incomplete
– A different way to frame the problem
– A risk, tradeoff, or assumption worth stress-testing

NOW, HERE IS THE TASK / QUESTION:
[PASTE YOUR ACTUAL QUESTION OR DRAFT HERE]

Overall, the results have been okay. The posts after I put in the header have been 'better' at being less pleasing
by pbhjpbhj | 2026-01-17 18:00:48+00:00
It feels like one could produce a digest of the context that works very similarly but fits in the available context window - not just by getting the LLM to use succinct language, but also mathematically; like reducing a sparse matrix.

There might be an input that would produce that sort of effect, perhaps it looks like nonsense (like reading zipped data) but when the LLM attempts to do interactive in it the outcome is close to consuming the context?
by saubeidl | 2026-01-17 18:01:09+00:00
Europe has, in no particular order:

- ASML

- Nukes

- Large proportion of US bonds

- One of the wealthiest and most profitable markets in the world

- The world's largest trade network - currently aggressively
expanding into LatAm with the Mercosur deal despite Trump's Monroe 2.0 ambitions.

Just a few off the the top of my head. There's plenty leverage there.
by lysace | 2026-01-17 18:01:15+00:00
At the same time we need to realize that the US actions are clearly meant to tear the EU apart.

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

The Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto found the operation superfluous and ridiculous, calling it a joke, and urged that it be carried out under NATO coordination.

It's just that I also want that split (north vs south, sort of). The EU of today is dysfunctional, largely because of this immense cultural split.
by tombert | 2026-01-17 18:02:13+00:00
Power to you but I absolutely hate open offices. They’re often loud and it’s easy to get distracted by random conversations.

I know people fantasize about these “random conversations” leading to innovations from overhearing, but that hasn’t been my experience at all; instead because it’s so distracting a lot of people would just wear headphones all day.

I would so prefer an office. Ideally something that allows me to play music at a reasonable volume without headphones, use my mechanical keyboard, and have my own desk that I am not neighboring up against someone.

As it stands I work from home so I actually have that, which is why I am dreading the eventual RTO. If I could get my own dedicated office at a company, I think I would have way less desire to WFH.
by istanbulbebesi | 2026-01-17 18:02:36+00:00
Here are the migrations we been doing to with my extended family to get rid of our US dependencies:

- Gmail -> ProtonMail

- Whatsapp -> Telegram

- I installed Linux to my parents laptops. They like it.

- YouTube App -> Newpipe and Smarttube

Also, my next car will be a BYD. The current one is a Ford.
Show HN: Frigatebird – analytical SQL engine built from first principles
by nottorus | 2026-01-17 18:02:36+00:00
I’ve spent the last few months building Frigatebird, a high performance columnar SQL database written in Rust.

I wanted to understand how modern OLAP engines (like DuckDB or ClickHouse) work under the hood, so I built one from scratch. The goal wasn't just "make it work," but to use every systems programming trick available to maximize throughput on Linux.

Frigatebird is an OLAP engine built from first principles. It features a custom storage engine (Walrus) that uses io_uring for batched writes, a custom spin-lock allocator, and a push-based execution pipeline. I explicitly avoided async runtimes in favor of manual thread scheduling and atomic work-stealing to maximize cache locality. Code is structured to match the architecture diagrams exactly.

currently it only supports single table operations (no JOINS yet), would love to hear your thoughts on it.