MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mtlmtlmtlmtl | 2026-01-23 08:56:39+00:00
I'm so fed up with Proton. I will be taking my business elsewhere. Instead of making a great product for X, they've decided to make a series of extremely mediocre products for P, Q, X, Y, Z and W, all of which are left missing the most basic features for years. Features which even the free alternatives already have. Things like supporting unicode in email headers without having to use punycode, creating mailboxes from sieve filters and a bunch of other sieve expansions, and decent, portable, non-bugridden integration with email clients. Protondrive has such dogshit speeds it's basically completely useless. The nat-pmp support on their vpn servers is very strange, and it took me a couple weeks to craft a script that could handle all of its idiosyncrasies, none of which are documented. I haven't even bothered trying their calendar, password manager, or the Yet Another AI Service they keep sending me upselling emails for. I don't need any of those things, but I'm sure they have similarly lacklustre feature parity

Doesn't help that when i notify them about these things, their support people just gaslight me. "I've notified our development team about this". Then nothing happens. I told them about the speed issue with protondrive when it was new, that was years ago no. Still not fixed, no updates, nada.

I will be moving to something like fastmail, plus some other vpn service, since those are the only two products of theirs I'm actually using. It seems like I'll get a far better product in both cases for almost half the overall cost.
Tell HN: Alibaba Sucks
by burnt-resistor | 2026-01-23 08:56:50+00:00
Pay with Paypal and if a sellers screws up, the platform charges you a non-refundable Paypal fee. They will refuse to refund you and will bullshit you with corporate boilerplate. Don't use AliBaba because customers are totally disrespected unless you're a giant company.

Typical evasion of responsibility, blame someone else, and socialize all of the losses.
by mike_hearn | 2026-01-23 08:57:24+00:00
Yes, that's true. In theory, by the time it gets to the replication stage a paper has already been reviewed. In practice a replication is often the first time a paper is examined adversarially. There might be a useful form of hybrid here, like paying professional skeptics to review papers. The peer review concept academia works on is a very naive setup of the sort you'd expect given the prevailing ideology ("from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs"). Paying professionals to do it would be a good start, but only if there are consequences to a failed review, which there just aren't today.
by mrkeen | 2026-01-23 08:57:45+00:00
> food

Can you sell or share farm-saved seed?
"It is illegal to sell, buy, barter or share farm-saved seed," warns Sam. [1]

Can feed grain be sown?
No – it is against the law to use any bought-in grain to establish a crop. [1]

FTC sues John Deere over farmers' right to repair tractors
The lawsuit, which Deere called "meritless," accuses the company of withholding access to its technology and best repair tools and of maintaining monopoly power over many repairs. Deere also reaps additional profits from selling parts, the complaint alleges, as authorized dealers tend to sell pricey Deere-branded parts for their repairs rather than generic alternatives. [2]

[1] https://www.fwi.co.uk/arable/the-dos-and-donts-of-farm-saved...

[2] https://www.npr.org/2025/01/15/nx-s1-5260895/john-deere-ftc-...
by lambdaone | 2026-01-23 08:58:12+00:00
Remarkably, even most cloudy weather still lets a suprising amount of sun in. And it doesn't stop the wind from blowing. The threat is when the wind stops blowing at the same time it's very, very cloudy and in the middle of winter (short days). This happens, but it's very intermittent.

However, as seen above, there are lots and lots of ways to store (or equivalent) power over long periods, it's just the economic incentive to build them that is needed - and is now on the way. Renewable-gas low-duty-cycle gas peakers, Carnot batteries, and sodium-ion batteries are top candidates, with the first being the low-hanging fruit because they already exist.
by burnt-resistor | 2026-01-23 08:58:41+00:00
> Thank you for contacting Alibaba.com. This email is regarding your concern.

> I really understand your frustration towards this matter and I do apologize for the inconvenience this has caused you.

> Upon review, for order xxxxx the payment processing fee of USD xxxx.xx is not refundable. Because when you make a payment on Alibaba.com, the platform incurs certain processing fees from card networks and payment partners. According to the rules set by these networks, they retain these processing fees even if a refund is processed. Therefore, the payment processing fee of this order is not refundable. I apologize sincerely for the loss you've experienced. If you would like to know more about the rules for the refund of the payment processing fee, please refer to this link.

> If you have any further questions about this issue, please feel free to reply to this email and I will continue to follow up it until it is resolved. Thanks a lot for your great supports and continuous attention on Alibaba.com. We cherish you as our precious customer always and May you the best.

> Best regards,

> Fake Name
by keeda | 2026-01-23 08:59:10+00:00
I'm not sure about "profitable" because these are very young (2 - 3 years old) private companies, but there have been a few reports showing their growth indicating very strong PMF i.e. utility:

https://a16z.com/revenue-benchmarks-ai-apps/

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/15/y-combinator-startups-are-fa...

https://medium.com/@gjarrosson/ycs-revenue-explosion-497ea17...

https://stripe.com/blog/inside-the-growth-of-the-top-ai-comp...

https://www.ft.com/content/a9a192e3-bfbc-461e-a4f3-112e63d0b...

https://menlovc.com/perspective/2025-the-state-of-generative...

The revenue growth -- assuming these investors are not all colluding to fudge these numbers on a grand scale -- is way higher than what most have seen before.

Not everyone is hitting PMF of course, but apparently the success rate is also way higher than the past. Ignore the valuations and funding numbers, they are definitely inflated due to the hype.
by Traubenfuchs | 2026-01-23 08:59:24+00:00
No one cares anymore.

Everyone sits on giant balls of mud and those who built those balls are long gone. Fixing any of this would mean wading through and fixing endless legacy code at the risk of introducing new bugs. Some of it has hardware and radio broadcasting quirks involved which probably narrows down the people capable to understand the problem to almost 0.

And of those 0 people, no one gets promoted for fixing the incredibly buggy AirDrop. No one even knows how to replicate those bugs. Some iPhones in the wild sometimes stop being able to be found by other iPhones in the wild. Yikes. How do you even begin? Who's gonna write some debug code for a debug app for an iPhone in a lab and then runs back and forth with 50 other iPhones that also need to run debug code to finally get one in the state where it's unable to find or be found and then check diagnostics the communications hardware returns only to find out you need more diagnostic code.

Sync issues? Yikes again. Who the fuck would want to touch a system where any new bug could mean the destruction of trillions of photos and the wrath of OVER A BILLION of users. Flaky connections, many clients, sync algorithms, space on device limits, quota in the cloud limit, offloading of images. Also, once again, how do you even reliably replicate this issue which sporadically happens and sporadically resolves?

At scale and beyond critical mass, love and care and quality software are not rewarded. They are extra costs, just like human support agents.
by lelanthran | 2026-01-23 08:59:49+00:00
> It's come across to me so far that this just results from application developers targeting a specific DE and not really thinking about compatibility, or even really whether they need specific functionality provided a specific way.

They are, but it's not their fault - Wayland removes so much functionality that X had, and delegates that to the WM/DE.

I tried to do a small personal app last year for myself that intercepted and injected events for keyboard and mouse. Not possible in Wayland (so I switched to X instead) - that is delegated to the WM/DE.

There's hundreds of these tiny little cuts that cause friction for app devs.
by jasode | 2026-01-23 08:59:58+00:00
The problem is that once companies have your email address, their irresistible compulsion to spam you is so great that they will deliberately not honor their own "Communication Preferences" that supposedly lets customers opt out of marketing emails.

Even companies that are mostly good citizens about obeying their own email marketing preferences end up making exceptions. Examples:

Amazon has a profile page to opt out of all email marketing... except ... it doesn't work to stop the new Amazon Pharmacy and Amazon Health marketing emails. Those emails do not have "Unsubscribe" link and there is no extra setting in the customer profile to prevent them.

Apple doesn't send out marketing messages and obeys their customers' marketing email preferences ... except .. when you buy a new iPhone and then they send emails about "Your new iPhone lets you try Apple TV for 3 months free!" and then more emails about "You have Apple Music for 3 months free!"

Neither of those aggressive emails have anything to do with AI. They just like to make exceptions for the rules to spamming you. The customer's email inbox is just too valuable a target for companies to ignore.
by mrvmochi | 2026-01-23 09:00:08+00:00
I wonder if we've conflated thinking with literacy for too long.

While I'm comfortable with text, I often feel that my brain runs much smoother when I'm talking with colleagues in front of a whiteboard compared to writing alone. It makes me suspect that for centuries, we've filtered out brilliance from people whose brains are effectively wired for auditory or spatial reasoning rather than symbolic serialization. They've been fighting an uphill battle against the pen and the keyboard.

I'm optimistic that LLMs (and multimodal models) will finally provide the missing interfaces for these types of thinkers.
by ZeroGravitas | 2026-01-23 09:00:42+00:00
If you don't propose what you think is a better alternative we don't know what we are agreeing with by upvoting. Is it:

1. Let Russia take most of eastern Europe in exchange for gas

2. Make Europe Great Again i.e. complain loudly about current politicians then do everything even worse with no plan or logic

3. Fully automated Luxury Communism

4. Ask Harry Potter to make chemical inputs with his magic wand.

5. Nuclear, just because we think it's neat.
by ssenssei | 2026-01-23 09:01:45+00:00
The thing about Warhammer is there are so many ways to experience it and an unbelieveable amount of content. I've never set hands on the codex (guide books) nor the actual miniatures (too expensive) but I've read so many books from the dark library, and engaged most of its community through its lore. I've spent the last 3 years just within the circle of the Horus Heresy, I don't know anything about the Tau nor the Orks... The game has so much to offer its actually incredible.
by arcticbull | 2026-01-23 09:01:45+00:00
Yeah, Swift started out fairly clear and cohesive and now it's just a katamari of every language feature ever made by anyone plus a whole bunch of home-grown features too. I'm always mixed on this because in isolation the feature is neat and I like it, but the totality of Swift is becoming as overwhelming and inconsistent as C++.

Now some C functions which are indistinguishable from free Swift functions get named parameters, and you can switch on some enumerations from C, and some C objects are ref counted but other ones still need you to do it. It's going to be quite something to keep track of which library is which since there's no way to know apriori.
by gingerlime | 2026-01-23 09:01:57+00:00
I’ve had a similar experience when signing up for Office365 and started getting promotional emails to CoPilot. These (2) emails were without an unsubscribe option.

I contacted MS support and after some back n forth they claimed it was a transactional email that doesn’t require consent or opt out.

Clearly promotional and not necessary but they won’t listen.

I’m in the process of filing GDPR + ePrivacy complaints, but it’s a tedious process, unlikely to do anything.
by echelon | 2026-01-23 09:03:58+00:00
I have been searching for this!

Thank you for reposting this, OP. I have been (w)racking my brain trying to find this article and used HN search dozens of times. I couldn't remember what the title was, or the specific terms "ask" and "guess", so it was impossible to find.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37182058

This is one of the chief cultural differences between Southern and Northern culture.

Southerners (not transplants) will "ask" without imposition: they "ask" when giving, and "guess" when receiving.

Any inversion of these norms is an affront to "Southern hospitality" and will be met with the equivalent "Bless Your Heart".

Ask what you can do for someone, never what you can have. Assume someone will do right by you (you should never have to ask), and if they don't - people say not so nice things about those folks.

I need to articulate this better when it's not 4 AM, but it's an almost perfect descriptor of the cultural differences.
by moravak1984 | 2026-01-23 09:04:27+00:00
> Same goes for HN, yet it does not take kindly to certain expressions either.

> I suppose the trouble is that machines do not operate without human involvement

Sure, but HN has at least one human that has been taking care of it since inception and reads many (if not most) of the comments, whereas ChatGPT mostly absorbed a shiton of others' IP.

I'm sure the occassional swearing does not bother the human moderators that fine-tune the thing, certainly not more than the violent, explicit images they are forced to watch in order for you to have nicer, smarter answers.
Can You Run Recursion on Ideas?
by codenighter | 2026-01-23 09:05:08+00:00
I’ve only been thinking about this idea for the past two or three days, but it has completely hijacked my head.

what if we apply recursion not to numbers or paths, but to abstract ideas?

This post is an attempt to think about idea generation as a constrained state-space search, inspired by recursion in computer science.

Read this blog : blog.eshanstudio.com/posts/abstract-recursion
by Dig1t | 2026-01-23 09:05:24+00:00
Why does everyone seem to hate Autodesk?

I’m new to hardware stuff but have been putting in a lot of time in fusion 360. It seems to work well on Mac and Windows and it’s free for me just starting out.

I got a year subscription for $350, which was not a horrible price.

I will say it is very weird to me that there isn’t an open source program with all the features that Autodesk has.
by TeMPOraL | 2026-01-23 09:05:41+00:00
It's a desperate attempt at staying relevant, even if most of those companies don't realize it yet. Because of its general-purpose nature, AI subsumes products. Most software products that try to "implement AI in every corner" would, from the user's POV, be more useful if they became tools for ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini.

People's goals are rarely limited to just one software product, and products are basically defined as a bag of tools glued with UI, that work together but don't interoperate much with anything else. That boundary drawn around a bunch of software utilities, is given a name and a fancy logo, and sold or used to charge people rent. That's software products. But LLMs want to flip that around - they're good at gluing things, so embedding one within a product is just a waste of model capabilities, and actually makes the product boundary more apparent and annoying.

Or in short: consider Copilot in Microsoft Word, vs. "Generate Word Document" plugin/tool for a general LLM interface (whether Gemini webapp or Claude Code or something like TypingMind). The former is just an LLM locked in a box, barely able to output some text without refusing or claiming it can't do it. The latter is a general-purpose tool that can search the web for you, scrap some sites and run data analysis on results (writing its own code for this), talk results over with you, cross-reference with other sources, and then generate you a pretty Word document with formatting and images.

This is, btw., a real example. I used a Word document generator with TypingMind and GPT-4 via API, and it was more usable over a year ago than Copilot is even now. Partly because Copilot is just broken, but mostly because the LLM can do lots of things other than writing text in Word.

Point being, AI is eroding the notion of software product as something you sell/rent, which threatens just about the entire software industry :).
by lloydjones | 2026-01-23 09:06:43+00:00
I think guessers agonise over HOW to say "No" in contexts like this, and what it says about them as people.

"Can my family and I stay for two weeks?".

Then:

"No." (looks cold and heartless; do I want to project cold and heartless? Will they hate me?).

"I'm so sorry but I'm not able to. The house is a mess and it's really small" (performative, hand-wringing reluctance; we both know I'm lying).

"I just don't like to share my environment" (most truthful; might look petty to those who don't understand the need for privacy to that degree).
by keiferski | 2026-01-23 09:06:46+00:00
I’d say about 30% of the time I take an Uber, I have an interesting conversation with the driver. The best instance of this was about a decade ago, when the driver was a guy from Syria, and he explained the ongoing civil war there and the various factions as we drove 45 minutes across LA.

Self-driving cars are just one more way everyone becomes isolated from each other, I guess.
by keeda | 2026-01-23 09:07:59+00:00
Eh, I did say he's not necessarily better than the rest of them, just more aligned with the rest of us, likely because he's more forward-looking than the others. He's seeing the backlash against AI, the pushback against data centers, and the social turmoil on the horizon, and he's saying, "Maybe we should not piss all the people off."

Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46729271
by rob74 | 2026-01-23 09:09:17+00:00
High-res pixel art? Maybe adding an extra zoom level so people can actually see the pixels as big fat squares would help? Of course purists would probably still not call it pixel art, but as you wrote, leaning more into the "pixel art" aspect would hurt the realistic representation.

Actually, if you only look at (midtown and uptown) Manhattan, is looks more "pixel art"-y because of the 90-degree street grid and most buildings being aligned with it. But the other boroughs don't lend themselves to this style so well. Of course, you could have forced all buildings to have angles in 45° steps, but that would have deviated from "ground truth" a lot.
by Borg3 | 2026-01-23 09:09:42+00:00
Uh, can you provide any scientific papers that H2 can be used for Iron smelting?
CO2 is very stable, even at high temperatures. Its hard to strip O2 from it (except photosintesis). Now, H2 itself is very violatile gas. When burn, it creates water. Water is not stable high temperatures. It become vapor and when temperature rise it can even break bond between H2 and O.

So, papers or are you hallucinating?
by sjw987 | 2026-01-23 09:09:54+00:00
That's understandable. I have quite minimal music taste so my setup worked for me. I only listen to music at home when I'm not doing anything else and it's mostly classical so there doesn't tend to be too much to add at any given time.

A minimal web client audio player with some basic database tables in the back for organising and searching does me fine.
by itvision | 2026-01-23 09:10:15+00:00
I was banned for simply accessing Claude via VPN.

Nothing in their EULA or ToS says anything about this.

And their appeal form simply doesn't work. Out of my four requests to lift the ban, they've replied once and didn't say anything about the nature about that. They just declined.

Fuck Claude. Seriously. Fuck Claude. Maybe they've got too much money, so they don't care about their paying customers.
by hdjdkdjh | 2026-01-23 09:10:35+00:00
Shed workers ... increase profit ... stock price go up ... Exec get bonus ... Economy fail ... Exec no care ... Exec have bonus and job still ...

Honestly the caveman speak will get me marked down but fuck it.. It is transparent what they want....

Ai has use but frankly until it can be trusted to actually follow the right path and skip around hard tasks make subtle bugs that can screw things up... It will get worse before it gets better....
by ainiriand | 2026-01-23 09:11:58+00:00
As long as it is very deadly I think there is a reduced risk of global pandemic, the hosts are easily isolated and the risk mitigated. I think the problem is if this virus stays dormant for a prolonged period or if the symptoms pass for something else during the early stages.
Covid-19 had both of those, 72 hours of no symptoms and then 2-3 days of what looks like a regular cold or mild flu.
by dmacj | 2026-01-23 09:12:19+00:00
That is reductive, why not call all everything CGI then? Or call CGI pixel art as well? As we’re talking about “art”, it’s necessarily going to be subjective, but pixel art has certain style aspects such as use of 2x1 lines (https://www.the-pixel-artist.com/articles/top-ten-things-new...). This is just an example, while I’m not saying that every convention must be met in order to qualify as pixel art, not having any doesn’t make a useful definition of a genre.
by fredoralive | 2026-01-23 09:14:09+00:00
New TVs often don’t have analogue inputs, so you’d need some sort of analogue to HDMI scaler, which range from aliexpress tat to expensive enthusiast stuff like Retrotinks, with various hobbyist stuff like OSSC in between as well. Some really old stuff is RF only, so you might need a tuner as well (or an old VCR) to go from RF to baseband composite.

Older LCDs will probably have RCA inputs though they might not work with all retro computing stuff as the signals are sometimes rather “non standard” (not sure about this particular case).

CRT TV should be fine, as they’re from the right era and a bit less fussy about signals.
by ssl-3 | 2026-01-23 09:14:11+00:00
I don't think the parent comment was about banning bans based on business size or any other measure, for that's obviously a non-starter. I think it was more about getting rid of unexplained bans.

To that end: I think the parent comment was suggesting that when a person is banned from using a thing, then that person deserves to know the reason for the ban -- at the very least, for their own health and sanity.

It may still be an absolute and unappealable ban, but unexplained bans don't allow a person learn, adjust, and/or form a cromulent and rational path forward.
by zipy124 | 2026-01-23 09:14:55+00:00
I can't speak for the American universities, but remember there is no entrance exam for UK PhDs, you just require a 2:1 or 1st class bachelor's degree/masters (going straight without a masters is becoming more common) usually, which is trivial to obtain. The hard part is usually getting funding, but if you provide your own funding you can go to any university you want. They are only really hard universities to get into for a bachelors, not for masters or PhD where you are more of a money/labour source than anything else.