MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by amadeuspagel | 2026-01-25 17:15:43+00:00
If someone actually took this idea seriously, they would have to start with data about terrorism and then ask what speech might have inspired them, and they would end up banning pretty much all political expression. The Wikipedia article on Terrorism in the United States lists Attacks by Type[1], two of the types are left-wing and anti-government extremism and right-wing and anti-government extremism. That about covers all political speech.

But for people who refer to this idea, the starting point is always that they want to censor specific speech, and they look for acts of terror to justify that.

There's no advocate for censorship that couldn't make up their own "stochastic something", and I'm sure many have, I'm sure people have argued that porn is stochastic rape or something.

Anyone who has ever advocated for censorship has argued that the speech he wants to censor leads to violence and social breakdown. Do people who consider "stochastic terrorism" a serious concept see themselves in this tradition, just expressing themselves more formally or do they think they've invented something new here?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States...
by scarecrowbob | 2026-01-25 17:15:59+00:00
My point is that HN is, in fact, social media.

HN may be more normalized, in the way that alcohol is more normal than meth in my circles. And folks my find HN to be more "useful", in the sense that I find being able to have a drink and socialize useful but don't feel the same way about casual adderall usage.

Unlike caffeine, however, (and this is the point I am responding to), I don't think that the HN is any -less- social media.

Caffeine is indeed a drug but has relatively (to alcohol) minor effects, especially looking at the longer-term differences- that's the point of the parent post.

I think that, like most of the social drinkers I know, the users of HN don't feel like there's anything abusive about how they are using it. I also see folks who are definitely getting their social media fix off the site.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-25 17:16:01+00:00
If we expand "based on the data" to also include "based on my obviously correct ethical framework dictated by my obviously correct religion" then I figure the score is probably pretty close to even. The weird thing to me is how the far left has adopted behaviors that appear to be fundamentally religious in nature (imo) while fervently denying any such parallel.
by techjamie | 2026-01-25 17:16:16+00:00
I watched a video[1] recently that posited the idea of AI slop farms making large, auto-moderated spaces impossible to find meaningful human content in. With the idea that it'll lead to a renaissance for smaller, more personal websites like forums or other niche places to flourish.

I think that sounds a little too convenient and idealistic to be what really happens, but I did find the concept to be a potential positive to what's happening around it. Facebook is already a good portion of the way there, being stuffed with bots consuming stolen or AI content from other bots, with confused elderly people in the middle.

[1] https://youtu.be/_QlsGkDvVHU
by Sam713 | 2026-01-25 17:16:16+00:00
This links to a synchronized amalgamation of multiple video angles: https://streamable.com/udofq5

It clearly shows that Alex Pretti never drew a weapon, and his (legally owned and carried) CCW was removed by one of the agents from its holster seconds prior to other agents shooting Alex in the back. Agents are visibly using pepper spray, pistol whipping his head, and even though it’s 5+ vs one, don’t even appear to be attempting to handcuff or properly restrain.

Another video from a VFX editor showing position of hands during the incident: https://www.reddit.com/user/AriFeblowitzVFX/comments/1qmf89x...
by calvinmorrison | 2026-01-25 17:16:55+00:00
My logic is "OH NO I KEEP HITTING MYSELF IN THE HEAD WITH A RUSTY POKER WHY DO I KEEP BLEEDING!"

If we dont want a drought, stop messing with the water supply.

"Much of the water used in California comes from the Colorado River. By usage, ~79% of the river goes to crop irrigation (70% of which is cattle feed), ~13% to residential water usage, ~4% for commercial use, and ~4% for thermal power plants"
by game_the0ry | 2026-01-25 17:16:59+00:00
Depends on the context -- do you mean Gemini CLI for coding or Gemini the chat web app?

For the CLI -- no, I have not noticed and hallucinations.

For the chat app -- no, and the more I use it, the more it feels like its getting better with time.

(I pay for the $20 plan btw)
by terminalshort | 2026-01-25 17:17:08+00:00
This is a fundamental organizational and societal problem. An engineer would look at the situation and think "what is the best way to get the failure rate below a tolerable limit?" But a lawyer looks at the situation and thinks "how do I minimize liability and bad PR?" and a bureaucrat thinks "how can I be sure the blame doesn't land on me when something goes wrong?" And the answer to both of those questions is to throw an alarm on absolutely everything. So if there is a problem they can always say "our system detected the anomaly in advance and threw an alarm." Overall the system will be less safe and more expensive, but the lawyer's and bureaucrat's problems are solved. Our society is run by lawyers and bureaucrats, so their approach will win out over the engineer's. (And China's society is run by engineers, so it will win out over ours.)
by mnw21cam | 2026-01-25 17:17:35+00:00
A while back I wrote a piece of (academic) software. A couple of years ago I was asked to review a paper prior to publication, and it was about a piece of software that did the same-ish thing as mine, where they had benchmarked against a set of older software, including mine, and of course they found that theirs was the best. However, their testing methodology was fundamentally flawed, not least because there is no "true" answer that the software's output can be compared to. So they had used a different process to produce a "truth", then trained their software (machine learning, of course) to produce results that match this (very flawed) "truth", and then of course their software was the best because it was the one that produced results closest to the "truth", whereas the other software might have been closer to the actual truth.

I recommended that the journal not publish the paper, and gave them a good list of improvements to give to the authors that should be made before re-submitting. The journal agreed with me, and rejected the paper.

A couple of months later, I saw it had been published unchanged in a different journal. It wasn't even a lower-quality journal, if I recall the impact factor was actually higher than the original one.

I despair of the scientific process.
by loudmax | 2026-01-25 17:17:40+00:00
Arguably, that's the point. For post-truth politicians, the objective isn't to present a narrative as objectively factual, but to bring the entire notion of factual objectivity into question.

It's not "This is the truth." Rather, it's "The truth is unknowable." If nobody knows what's true and false anyway, there's no reason to concern yourself with "facts" that disturb your preconceptions.
by chorizoking | 2026-01-25 17:17:44+00:00
Commenting from my alt to avoid doxxing myself. Have spent over a decade in various 'large' streaming video companies, the ones you absolutely know about today.

DTAG is bar none the worst ISP to work with. Everything they do is politics, they may decide to 'forget' to increase the bandwidth on a PNI until you take a meeting with german regulators. Almost every other ISP views PNI as the best way to uphold customer satisfaction without breaking the bank over a more expensive IX and will happily add ports when needed, DTAG on the other hand often requires concessions and selective agreements with a lot of strings attached.

I don't think Germans realize just how much DTAG is holding the experience back for end users (given it's partially state-owned)
by phil21 | 2026-01-25 17:17:51+00:00
Timely. I’m about to turn off severe weather alerts from my local city because they insist on spamming - multiple times per day - cold weather alerts.

And they start at pretty ridiculous temperatures in the double digits. The only way those would be dangerous to you is if you were homeless and lacked any form of winter clothing, at which point you either already know or are too far mentally gone for a text alert to help you.
by Spivak | 2026-01-25 17:18:06+00:00
Look I get that, but the parent was talking about there being just no alternative to 365 when it seems like nearly every product in the suite has plenty of competitors.

It does seem like you can put your money where your mouth is in this case. You can now put a literal dollar value on how much you actually care about being tied to US tech. And it's like $20-40/user/month. Which isn't nothing but it's not untenable amounts of money.
by codyb | 2026-01-25 17:18:18+00:00
Get out and protest, time for this regime to come collapsing down.

In NYC area...

- January 28th, 2026 - Melania rings the bell at NYSE

- February 3rd, 2026 - Petition delivered to NFL HQ demanding no ICE at the Superbowl

- February 17th, 2026 - Impeach, Convict, Remove, Defund

Find actions here - https://www.fiftyfifty.one - and presumably other spaces.

Donate to the lawyers in the courts by donating to organizations like the ACLU.

Vote of course. Get your friends out.

Boycott. Delete social media and stop giving the billionaires that line up to give Trump plaques and donations money and information. Boycott Amazon, Paramount, Disney, Apple, and all the rest, as much as possible. They all suck.

Stand up, fight back, it's not a foregone conclusion, but if you read enough history books you'll learn that shit gets really awful really fast with these things.

The time to act was yesterday, so start acting now.

I'll be out there with you!
by coldpie | 2026-01-25 17:18:52+00:00
I don't even know what a realistic plan to fix this looks like. How do you cult de-program 40% of the population of the most powerful country on the planet?

Nuremberg-style trials for every single person working under this administration is obviously the base minimum to start to get a handle on this. Anyone who is not pushing for that is not being serious about tackling America's problems. Then what? Extreme anti-trust enforcement and implement wealth caps to prevent the harm from recurring and hope most of the population eventually comes back to planet Earth?
by jyscao | 2026-01-25 17:19:23+00:00
Genetic diversity within continental races, including that of Sub-Saharan Africans, are mostly a consequence of genetic drift.

While genetic diversity between races are from selection. Thus the inter-racial genetic differences are more likely to manifest in trait differences that humans find more meaningful (which I use purely in a descriptive manner, not prescriptive), such as physiological (medical, metabolic), psychological & behavioral (personality), cognitive (intelligence), and of course physical (appearance, athletic).

The intra-racial differences that arise from genetic drift result in things that are still tangible genetic differences, e.g. ABO blood group frequencies, but don't map well onto characteristics that human societies place emphasis on as much.

And to address your point that:

>The genetic diversity of "black" alone exceeds the rest of the world combined.

This is because the level of genetic diversity as influenced by genetic drift is primarily a function of population size, and Africa being the origin of the Homo sapien species, and probably the Homo genus as a whole, has always had the highest level of effective population size. Thus genetic drift in Africans is least likely to be able to cause allele fixation on particular genes, and so such diversity is better preserved. But as already mentioned, these forms of genetic diversity is less likely to impact the observed traits that most humans, both academics/social scientists and your average joe, find "meaningful".
by password1 | 2026-01-25 17:19:23+00:00
There's a saying in mobile development that in most companies the Android version of the app is a second class citizen. It usually brings substantially less money and so less money are invested in it. As a result the Android team is often understaffed and the app is almost always behind in feature development, less polished and with overall worse UX and more bugs compared to the iOS app.

Also iOS still has a community of iOS only indie devs that publish polished apps for iOS, it's very common to find very popular iOS app with very curated UX that are exclusive to that platform and have a good fanbase.
by christkv | 2026-01-25 17:20:06+00:00
I enjoy running these kind of articles through an analysis using chatgpt. Language matters and this is a pretty terribly slanted article trying to hype up fear.

Sometimes I wonder if we would be better having a plugin that did this kind of analysis to give you a pointer towards if the writer is even trying to do their job of being objective or think they need to "make the news" to save the world.

The Smithsonian article uses a well-known set of high-impact narrative devices—catastrophic metaphor, point-of-no-return language, scale shock, authority stacking, vivid exemplars, moralization, and fear-to-action solution framing—to intensify perceived urgency and motivate concern.
by squigz | 2026-01-25 17:20:17+00:00
> And more horrifying are all the accounts replying in support of this. That’s evidence of the hardcore MAGA base that’ll support Trump no matter what he does, I guess.

I'd just like to say that judging public perception based on online comments, in 2026, is probably not a good indicator at all. Sort of ironic having to point this out in a thread about AI faked images, but...
by somenameforme | 2026-01-25 17:20:47+00:00
It's unclear to me how the definition you're using isn't biased to the point of meaninglessness. Let me use an example. Politicians know full well we stand no chance of meaningfully impacting climate change for a practical reason - most emissions are coming from relatively adversarial countries.

If we try to encourage them to reduce emissions via some form of ongoing compensation then we asking them to impair their development in exchange for accepting putting themselves into an exploitable dependency relationship with us. They will simply never accept this, so at best it will be superficial gestures that have no real chance of having a meaningful impact.

So is the rhetoric around climate change, and politicians/parties running on claims of being able to impact it, populist, in your usage? I'd imagine not. But is there a 'clean' way to explain how this is excluded while maintaining any degree of meaningfulness of the term as you are using it?

---

As for 'my' usage, I view populism as appealing to the genuine views of the masses, mostly in contrast to efforts to suppress or reshape them. It can certainly include demagoguery (which is largely what you're describing, but with a peculiar sort of bias built in), but it can also simply include leaders whose worldviews, or at least the worldview they espouse, happening to align largely with that of 'the masses.'
by torginus | 2026-01-25 17:21:04+00:00
The fundamental issue is that actual information of what the fck is going on in the world/your country and why is so far buried and removed from the public eye that people either accept the BS narrative, latch onto crazy conspiracy theories, or sink into total apathy.

It would be journalists' job to actually dig into this, but you know.

Working at an organization owned by a media conglomerate whose majority shareholder is a billionaire with very clear state connections usually qualifies as independent journalism among friends and state propaganda among enemies.
by burnerthrow008 | 2026-01-25 17:21:16+00:00
> And Google's strategy is to continue removing differentiating features from Android that also help them mitigate the threat of antitrust

Sigh. When will HN learn that the vast majority of customers dont see those as differentiating features.

One of the key things separating humans from other animals is being able to put yourself in another’s shoes.
by mothballed | 2026-01-25 17:21:39+00:00
It's nice that they're doing it. And they are certainly the bravest we have to offer; much braver than you or I.

That said, the bravest we have are asking that they please not be murdered. And then peacefully kneeling down to be executed, even when they are armed.

Obviously this only emboldens the murderers. The options moving forward look bleak.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-25 17:21:44+00:00
> You can do a blameless postmortem guiding a change in policy which ends in some people getting fired.

In theory maybe, but in my experience the blameless postmortem culture gets taken to such an extreme that even when one person is consistently, undeniably to blame for causing problems we have to spend years pretending it’s a system failure instead. I think engineers like the idea that you can engineer enough rules, policies, and guardrails that it’s impossible to do anything but the right thing.

This can create a feedback loop where the bad players realize they can get away with a lot because if they get caught they just blame the system for letting them do the bad thing. It can also foster an environment where it’s expected that anything that is allowed to happen is implicitly okay to do, because the blameless postmortem culture assigns blame on the faceless system rather than the individuals doing the actions.
by efreak | 2026-01-25 17:21:47+00:00
In practice, there's some bugs around this. There's no way to force Windows to update your password when you change it via Microsoft; I went through the password change due to Microsoft locking my Microsoft account, and Windows didn't update the password locally until I played around with group policy settings (that I'd never touched before) for password expiry and signed in via PIN and rebooted a dozen times (over the course of about 2 weeks).
by UltraSane | 2026-01-25 17:22:16+00:00
The Islamic theocracy in charge of Iran is deeply unpopular due to its repression and severe mismanagement of the Iranian economy. It has cut Iran off from the Internet.

"We should all be more sceptical"

This is very ironic coming from someone who actually believes anything the Iranian theocracy says. They are even less honest than Trump.
by tariqshams | 2026-01-25 17:22:24+00:00
Very interesting, how do you validate the correctness of the generated visuals? And that a previous lesson, say 5 videos ago ensures that the concept being explained now had its prerequisite covered?

I assume you could do a topological sorting of the content to ensure prerequisites are covered, but I'm curious on how automated this could be.

Looks super cool either way!
by pmontra | 2026-01-25 17:22:57+00:00
> In Elixir tests, each test runs in a database transaction that rolls back at the end. Tests run async without hitting each other. No test data persists.

And it confuses Claude.

This way of running tests is also what Rails does, and AFAIK Django too. Tests are isolated and can be run in random order. Actually, Rails randomizes the order so if the are tests that for any reason depend on the order of execution, they will eventually fail. To help debug those cases, it prints the seed and it can be used to rerun those tests deterministically, including the calls to methods returning random values.

I thought that this is how all test frameworks work in 2026.
by mike_hearn | 2026-01-25 17:23:29+00:00
Yeah I remember reading that article at the time. Agree they're in different categories. I think Gellman's summary wasn't really supportable. It's far too harsh - he's demanding an apology because the data set used for measuring test accuracy wasn't large enough to rule out the possibility that there were no COVID cases in the entire sample, and he doesn't personally think some explanations were clear enough. But this argument relies heavily on a worst case assumption about the FP rate of the test, one which is ruled out by prior evidence (we know there were indeed people infected with SARS-CoV-2 in that region in that time).

There's the other angle of selective outrage. The case for lockdowns was being promoted based on, amongst other things, the idea that PCR tests have a false positive rate of exactly zero, always, under all conditions. This belief is nonsense although I've encountered wet lab researchers who believe it - apparently this is how they are trained. In one case I argued with the researcher for a bit and discovered he didn't know what Ct threshold COVID labs were using; after I told him he went white and admitted that it was far too high, and that he hadn't known they were doing that.

Gellman's demands for an apology seem very different in this light. Ioannidis et al not only took test FP rates into account in their calculations but directly measured them to cross-check the manufacturer's claims. Nearly every other COVID paper I read simply assumed FPs don't exist at all, or used bizarre circular reasoning like "we know this test has an FP rate of zero because it detects every case perfectly when we define a case as a positive test result". I wrote about it at the time because this problem was so prevalent:

https://medium.com/mike-hearn/pseudo-epidemics-part-ii-61cb0...

I think Gellman realized after the fact that he was being over the top in his assessment because the article has been amended since with numerous "P.S." paragraphs which walk back some of his own rhetoric. He's not a bad writer but in this case I think the overwhelming peer pressure inside academia to conform to the public health narratives got to even him. If the cost of pointing out problems in your field is that every paper you write has to be considered perfect by every possible critic from that point on, it's just another way to stop people flagging problems.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-25 17:24:02+00:00
> Ejecting a single problematic person doesn't fix the underlying problem - how did that person get in the door in the first place? If they weren't problematic when they arrived, does that mean there were corrosive elements in the environment that led to the change?

This is exactly the toxicity I’ve experienced with blameless postmortem culture:

Hiring is never perfect. It’s impossible to identify every problematic person at the interview stage.

Some times, it really is the person’s own fault. Doing mental gymnastics to assume the system caused the person to become toxic is just a coping mechanism to avoid acknowledging that some people really are problematic and it’s nobody’s fault but their own.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-25 17:24:29+00:00
I suppose that depends on context. I think it's important to be pragmatic regarding urgency. Of course the most urgent thing is to stop the bleeding; removing the bullet can probably wait until things have calmed down a bit.

If Joe dropped the production database and you're uncertain about his intentions then perhaps it would be a good idea to do the bare minimum by reducing his access privileges for the time being. No more than that though.

Whereas if you're reasonably certain that there was no intentional foul play involved then focusing on the individual from the outset isn't likely to improve the eventual outcome (rather it seems to me quite likely to be detrimental).