MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hypeatei | 2026-01-18 22:53:41+00:00
Right, because an agency supposedly meant for "immigration enforcement" being sent to cities of the President's opponents so they can crackdown on protests and harass citizens is different... how? Is being persecuted for your religion worse than being persecuted for your political beliefs?

There is a secret police force actively patrolling the streets, going door-to-door asking for papers, shooting American citizens and your response is "it's not that bad"?
by II2II | 2026-01-18 22:54:02+00:00
> No, the CPU doesn't have a special pointer value which is designated invalid

Sort of right, sort of wrong.

From my understanding: older, simpler, architectures treat memory location zero as a normal memory address. On x86 and x64, the OS can configure the MMU to treat certain pages as invalid. Many years ago, I ran across a reference to Sparcs treating accesses to memory location zero as invalid. In other words, it depends upon which architecture you're dealing with.
by collingreen | 2026-01-18 22:54:09+00:00
That isn't the muskets version of that argument I have heard.

The version I've heard is that the firearm technology when the second amendment was ratified was very different than today and that makes it worth evaluating if we want to amend it again.

Similarly the military landscape looks very different as well such that there's a very different risk of foreign armies taking ground and citizens everywhere needing to be ready to hold ground until the more official military forces can arrive.

If we want to get really pedantic about 2A where are the well regulated militias?

Even if someone really is saying the thing you're claiming, 2A doesn't mention muskets at all or any other specific technology so that would be a really dumb thing for those people to say.
by HNisCIS | 2026-01-18 22:54:24+00:00
The race is between the rich trying to achieve a level of surveillance based omnipotence such that rebellion/revolution/dissent/protest/etc are fundamentally impossible...and the US populace gaining class consciousness. I don't have high hopes for the second one winning.

I want people to think about that for a second though. Imagine in a decade cops have such a technological edge in both surveillance and force that you cannot even begin to protest billionaires enslaving you let alone stage a political revolution.
by thesz | 2026-01-18 22:54:25+00:00
> like graph relationships

Once upon a time during me being language modeling researcher I built and finetuned a big (at the time - about 5 billions parameters) Sparse Non-Negative Matrix Language Model [1].

[1] https://aclanthology.org/Q16-1024/

As this model allows for mix-and-match of various contexts, one thing that I did is to have a word-sorted context. This effectively transforms position-based context into a word-set based context, where "you and me", "me and you" and "and me you" are the same.

This allowed for longer contexts and better prediction.
by Spooky23 | 2026-01-18 22:54:25+00:00
I’m think you are overestimating humanity.

At the moment I am on a personal finance kick. Once in awhile I find myself in the bogleheads Reddit. If you don’t know bogleheads have a cult-like worship of the founder of vanguard, whose advice, shockingly, is to buy index funds and never sell.

Most of it is people arguing about VOO vs VTI vs VT. (lol) But people come in with their crazy scenarios, which are all varied too much to be a bot, although the answer could easily be given by one!
by yadavrh | 2026-01-18 22:54:27+00:00
Pricing: Yes, exactly. It is a flat fee for the whole team. $15/month covers your entire group (up to 20 people). No per-seat billing. We hate that "tax" as much as you do.
External Partners: You hit the nail on the head. We are building "Guest Access" so you can invite external partners to specific channels (single-channel guests) easily.Since we don't charge per-seat, adding a few clients/partners won't blow up your bill like it does on Slack.
Apps: We are launching as a high-performance PWA (Web) first. It installs to your dock/home screen and feels native, but allows us to iterate faster than maintaining three separate codebases. Native wrappers are coming, but we want the core experience to be rock solid first.
by hollowonepl | 2026-01-18 22:55:05+00:00
Interesting concept for all new social platforms that already live in federated, distributed environments that share communication protocols and communication data formats.

I bet more difficult to push existing commercial platforms to anyhow consider.

That would make marketing tools to manage social communications and posting across popular social media, much easier. Never the less Social Marketing tools have already invented we similar analogy just to make control over own content and feedback across instances and networks.

We still live in a world where some would say BSKY some would say Mastodon is the future… while everybody still has facebook and instagram and youngsters tik tok too. Those are closed platforms where only tools to hack them, not standards persist
by Yizahi | 2026-01-18 22:55:09+00:00
But it's not US who is in charge of US, unfortunately. It's Project 2025 who is in charge of US, and it has a vastly different win and lose criteria. For Project 2025 dissolving NATO, UN, WTO and whatever is a win. For Project 2025 weakening dollar is a win. For Project 2025 isolation in the Americas is win. And US is no longer in charge. Congress has voluntarily surrendered its power and others are following the lead. Project 2025 may or may not become future US, we'll see how it goes this year.
by president_zippy | 2026-01-18 22:55:17+00:00
The big about textiles (curtains and bed fabric) functioning as insulation gave me flashbacks to my dad repeatedly complaining over the past decade about a couple small boxes of my stuff taking up space he "needs" in his 700 sqft attic.

I told him, "What's the big deal? It's free insulation during brutal north Texas summers. It's as good as vermiculite insulation minus the asbestos contamination!"

I only put about as much rigor into this as reddit PC builders making untested "gut calls" about thermodynamics, and I was mostly just being a smartass, but it's nice to see I had the same idea as English nobility who comfortably survived winters before the invention of HVAC as we know it.

Nice to see some proof I'm not completely full of crap.
by alphazard | 2026-01-18 22:55:20+00:00
The reddit bot story has been an interesting thing to follow. Either reddit is lying about views, or more that > 99% of views are from bots, or click through conversion of reddit humans is like 2 orders of magnitude lower than the typical human.

If they show those view numbers to advertisers, then it's fraud, especially if they know that the views are bots. What's also surprising is the advertisers should realize they are getting low conversion and stop buying reddit ads.

I suspect that company is a whistleblower away from an enormous scandal.
by sky2224 | 2026-01-18 22:56:44+00:00
Let me ask: in what way have you been proven wrong?

Have you simply just seen it build a pretty CRUD application that you feel like would take you many hours to do on your own? If that's the case, then you really shouldn't be too worried about that. Being able to build a CRUD application is not what you're getting paid for.

If you've seen something that involves genuinely emulating the essence of a software engineer (i.e., knowing what users want and need), then I'd ask you to show me that example.
by danabramov | 2026-01-18 22:57:22+00:00
I think there was a bit of a communication failure between us. You took the article as a random "what if X was Y" exploration. However, what I tried to communicate something more like:

1. File-first paradigm has some valuable properties. One property is apps can't lock data out of each other. So the user can always change which apps they use.

2. Web social app paradigm doesn't have these properties. And we observe the corresponding problems: we're collectively stuck with specific apps. This is because our data lives inside those apps rather than saved somewhere under our control.

3. The question: Is there a way to add properties of the file-first paradigms (data lives outside apps) to web social apps? And if it is indeed possible, does this actually solve the problems we currently have?

The rest of the article explores this (with AT protocol being a candidate solution that attempts to square exactly this problem). I'm claiming that:

1. Yes, it is possible to add file-first paradigm properties to web social apps

2. That is what AT protocol does (by externalizing data and adding mechanisms for aggregation from user-controlled source of truth)

3. Yes, this does solve the original stated problems — we can see in demos from the last section that data doesn't get trapped in apps, and that developers can interoperate with zero coordination. And that it's already happening, it's not some theoretical thing.

I don't understand your proposed alternative with web extension but I suspect you're thinking about solving some other problems than I'm describing.

Overall I agree that I sacrificed some "but why" in this article to focus on "here's how". For a more "but why" article about the same thing, you might be curious to look at https://overreacted.io/open-social/.
by yadavrh | 2026-01-18 22:57:52+00:00
Great point. We’re launching with a clear Fair Usage Policy to address exactly that—preventing abuse (like the "filesystem" hack) while keeping it truly unlimited for actual team communication. Our cost structure is different than legacy players; because we’re built on Cloudflare + our custom CRDT-hybrid store, the overhead for storing and searching text is low enough that we can avoid those arbitrary 90-day or 2-year cutoffs without it being a sustainability risk. We’ll be publishing our explicit "human use" guidelines on the site soon so there’s no "shadow" cap anxiety for legitimate teams.
by chongli | 2026-01-18 22:58:52+00:00
I can't remember the last time I was on the Reddit front page and I use the site pretty much daily. I only look at specific subreddit pages (barely a fraction of what I'm subscribed to).

These are some pretty niche communities with only a few dozen comments per day at most. If Reddit becomes inhospitable to them then I'll abandon the site entirely.
by WillAdams | 2026-01-18 22:59:10+00:00
One interesting mention I can recall of one was in a airport-kiosk type thriller/science fiction novel where a humanoid robot developed by the military wound up in the jungles of South America assisting a group of disparate individuals --- it made a small Stirling engine using a lathe to power itself from the communal campfire --- always wondered if the physics of that would work out numerically.
by Reubend | 2026-01-18 22:59:51+00:00
This looks cool. I see under the "current limitations" section that it only supports a single node. Are there plans to change that? I'd imagine that database instances which got started on a single node deployment would be hard to migrate to a multi-node setup later on if they weren't originally spun up in that configuration (though ofc not impossible, just tricky).
by skippyboxedhero | 2026-01-18 23:00:16+00:00
It isn't impossible to police. Players and referees are under supervision...I am not sure why you think this isn't the case. Regulated gambling companies i.e. not Polymarket, maintain lists of people who are connected to sports inc. through family. And they maintain systems that monitor unusual betting activity that is shared across the industry, it is quite easy to detect this activity because most of the flow that bookmakers see is uninformed. So if you see a customer that doesn't bet regularly put down $10k, line moves in their favour...that is obviously extremely suspicious because that won't happen with 95% of the volume you take.

As an example, there was a football player in England who had a friend that bet on a transfer market (a market that is extremely prone to inside information). It was detected immediately (despite being a relatively small bet of $10k), the player was banned, fined $500k, etc.

Btw, the reason these systems exist is because there are certain sports that are too lucrative not to make a market in but the economics/nature of the game mean that matches are easily fixed: 99.99% of this activity is low-ranked professional tennis, and surveillance has been very effective (all of this is funded, not by professional tennis, but by gambling companies). Generally, this isn't as prevalent with US sports because none of those preconditions exist for the major sports.
by jrm4 | 2026-01-18 23:00:48+00:00
Your last point is one that I used to be very strongly favor of, and today?

Nooooooooooo. No. No. No.

It's not going to happen and we shouldn't even consider it. Seriously. This thing we are doing here, which is "connecting people to each other," those forces for MANY will be far more powerful than "let me stop and think about the fact that this is forever." I just don't think we are wired for it, we're wired for a world in which we can just talk?

I think it's better to try to engineer some specific counter to "everything is recorded all the time" (or, as in here, not try to usher it into existence even more) than to try to say "welp, everything is recorded all the time, better get used to it."
by christophilus | 2026-01-18 23:02:41+00:00
I’ve been reading “The Unix Programming Environment”. It’s made me realize how much can be accomplished with a few basic tools and files (mostly plain text). I want to spend some time thinking of what a modern equivalent would look like. For example, what would Slack look like if it was file (and text) oriented and UNIXy? Well, UNIX had a primitive live chat in the form of live inter-user messaging. I’d love to see a move back to simpler systems that composed well.
by skippyboxedhero | 2026-01-18 23:03:12+00:00
There is a certain kind of person who thinks that all the news they disagree with is being faked by people who will spend multiple millions on Polymarket just to get a news story on CNN.

This person does not realise that most people do not pay attention to the news, that people in power are not glued to the news waiting for journalists to tell them what to say, or that the news is generally not very important...except to people like them who play out these fantasies about wealthy people mind-controlling them through CNN.
by gnabgib | 2026-01-18 23:03:28+00:00
(2025) Non-archive sources:

https://www.pacermonitor.com/public/case/61481114/US_News__W...

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/71970530/us-news-world-...

https://dockets.justia.com/docket/new-york/nysdce/1:2025cv09...
by wizzwizz4 | 2026-01-18 23:03:45+00:00
> Programmers like being able to null out a pointer field, 0 is an obvious "joker" value, and jump-if-0 instructions tend to be convenient and fast.

And there's nothing wrong with that! But you should write it

union {
char *ptr;
size_t scalar;
} my_nullable_pointer;
if (my_nullable_pointer.scalar) {
printf("%s", my_nullable_pointer.ptr);
}

not:

char *my_nullable_pointer;
if (my_nullable_pointer) {
printf("%s", my_nullable_pointer);
}

Yes, this takes up more space, but it also makes the meaning of the code clearer. typedef in a header can bring this down to four extra lines per pointer type in the entire program. Add a macro, and it's five extra lines plus one extra line per pointer type. Put this in the standard library, and the programmer has to type a few extra characters – in exchange for it becoming extremely obvious (to an experienced programmer, or a quick-and-dirty linter) when someone's introduced a null pointer dereference, and when a flawed design makes null pointer dereferences inevitable.

> The Hoare ALGOL W thing seems to be more relevant to null pointers in Java and the like.

I believe you are correct; but I like blaming Tony Hoare for things. He keeps scooping me: I come up with something cool, and then Tony Hoare goes and takes credit for it 50 years in the past. Who does he think he is, Euler?
by Yizahi | 2026-01-18 23:04:09+00:00
Consider the following - Trump has tried again and again to make a business deal with dictators, regardless of the previous outcomes. And since he is in a steep mental decline he is not likely to change his ways fundamentally. He also repeatedly expressed dissatisfaction of having to protect "others" with USA army, at least for free as he sees it. He repeatedly tried to break NATO and break Ukrainian support.

I think it is likely that he wants to stop protecting Taiwan, give it up to China and then expect to make a deal with China to buy stuff manufactured on the island with money, afterwards. It would be totally in character for him and match his actual actions across the world.
by thunderfork | 2026-01-18 23:05:10+00:00
Generally speaking, no, since a lot of what it does is now available natively, the odds that you'll need something from it are much lower.

There's probably some corner-case stuff it still makes easier if you're not using some framework, but I don't think there's a reason to go out of your way to use it just for the sake of using it.
by hrunt | 2026-01-18 23:05:10+00:00
Yes, people expect SCOTUS to rebuff Trump on the tariffs. [0]

Lately SCOTUS has been providing stricter textual interpretations of Constitutional questions. Many of these have aligned with Trump administration arguments based on the power of the executive as outlined in Article II. The text says, "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America," and, "he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." One of the key arguments is that Congress can't take that power away from him. For example, Congress can't tell him that he can't fire executive-branch staff, because the executive power rests with him, not with Congress.

One thing the Constitution is very clear on, though, is that only Congress can impose tariffs ("The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises"). Furthermore, recent rulings of this Court have established the major questions doctrine, which says that even if Congress delegates the specifics of implementing its powers to the Executive branch, that delegation cannot be interpreted broadly. It can't be used to create new broad policies that Congress didn't authorize.

Therefore, because the text of the Constitution explicitly grants the right to impose tariffs to Congress /and/ Trump's imposition of tariffs is both very broad and very substantial, many people believe that SCOTUS will deny Trump's tariffs.

The case as argued is about Trump's right to issue tariffs under the IEEPA (a law Congress passed to give the President some ability to take economic actions due to international emergencies, which do not explicitly include tariffs), and there is some debate about what a negative ruling would mean for the return of tariffs to merchants who have paid them. Both of those points require careful consideration in the decision. Will the ruling limit itself to just tariffs issued under the IEEPA or to the President's ability to establish tariffs under other laws? If the Court rules against the tariffs, will the government be required to pay people back, and if so, to what extent? It's not surprising that the decision is taking some time to be released. There's a lot of considerations, and every one is a possible point for disagreement by the justices.

[0] https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/prediction-market-trade...
by bee_rider | 2026-01-18 23:05:43+00:00
Maybe the big players can get by with a smaller percentage of a huge number.

I’d also expect the competition in the “big leagues” to be more aggressive, resulting in leaner margins.

Also these are huge companies. Small companies might find a niche that is small in absolute terms, but large relative to the company. That niche might be underserved, allowing the small company to make large percentage based margins.
by chao- | 2026-01-18 23:06:10+00:00
I don't have strong negative feelings about the era of LLM writing, but I resent that it has taken the em-dash from me. I have long used them as a strong disjunctive pause, stronger than a semicolon. I have gone back to semicolons after many instances of my comments or writing being dismissed as AI.

I will still sometimes use a pair of them for an abrupt appositive that stands out more than commas, as this seems to trigger people's AI radar less?
by cafard | 2026-01-18 23:06:19+00:00
I don't think there's a substitute for listening to your body. I came to this conclusion after trying to run through a sore knee 45 years go. Somehow the memory faded, and about seven years ago I ran myself into a painful case of plantar fascitis. Runners tend to be that way.

A friend has a watch that seems curiously judgmental, and has rated runs of his as sub-par or the equivalent. I told him that I'd put such a watch on the driveway and run it over.
by strken | 2026-01-18 23:06:37+00:00
Musk, being the world's richest person, is something of an outlier. He can afford to give free money to the market for longer than anyone else, and the size of the market might not be big enough to handle the imbalance.

There's a level of irrational spending which only institutional investors can counterbalance, and they might not have the risk appetite to get into a single market on a relatively less regulated platform that could rug pull them.
by carlosjobim | 2026-01-18 23:06:47+00:00
Those who died weren't still there after the war. Those of them who didn't have any children left behind were effectively genetically exterminated - ending millions of years of their genetic heritage. And cultural heritage.

It was the greatest disasters in the history of Europe, and the effects are still deeply felt. The world wars were the greatest idiocy in the history of humanity.
by calf | 2026-01-18 23:07:21+00:00
The problem with Taiwanese (I am one) is ideological, they see themselves as too socially different than mainland China. Reliance on US support, or TSMC as another popular absurd copium, for security guarantee, is not realistic, and any Taiwanese can see this now. Absent other ways to secure its self determination, Taiwan is stuck playing a thin-line game between a crazy eagle and a very possessive panda.
by pjmlp | 2026-01-18 23:07:23+00:00
That is basically WinUI/WinAppSDK, the whole WinRT stack and related dev experience, where even plain .NET is faster.

However the team will advertise it as performance, due to being written in C++.

Pity it gets slowed down by COM reference counting all over the place, which cannot be optimised away, and the application identity sandbox.
by AuthAuth | 2026-01-18 23:07:51+00:00
During the Gaza conflict it was highly suspected most of the outrage was manufactured by organized propaganda networks and spread into the mainstream. During this conflict and the Sudan conflict we can see it confirmed, zero attention in the mainstream because its missing the influence of an organized propaganda network creating, disseminating, legitimizing and boosting a narrative. Isreal and the CIA are terrible at modern day youth propaganda they should boosting this like crazy.
by throw0101d | 2026-01-18 23:08:26+00:00
The Wikipedia article has every winner and nominee, including 2025, and all (?) of the books seems to have an article themselves so you can get a quick synopsis to see if the book matches what you want. You can probably do worse for a short list of reading candidates.

There are Youtube channels that focus on scifi reading, and they probably have recent 'best of 2025' videos.

(I haven't read "modern" sci-fi as much relative to my youth (GenXer), since I'm most doing non-fictional lately.)