MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by MiddleEndian | 2026-01-25 15:22:17+00:00
I already have a ton of gmail filters and folders, most of which I rarely check.

Any organization that continues to send marketing material after someone clicks Unsubscribe (with maybe a grace period of a few hours) should have all of their email considered spam for everyone by default. If they continue or ever start sending marketing materials afterwards because of some new bullshit category, all of their email should be considered spam by default as well. If their Unsubscribe process is more complicated than one or two clicks, you should be able to report this as well, and... you guessed it, I think all of their emails should be considered spam by default for everyone.

Obviously I don't expect Gmail to do actually do this (except maybe by accident sometimes lol). But I wish they did.
by throwawayqqq11 | 2026-01-25 15:22:32+00:00
Any suggestions where the billions for biased economic research, biased LLMs, skewed algorithms, selective ad revenue, massive botnet operations, campaign funding, corrupted influencal networks, media ownership -- and the most important part: a functioning education system to immunize people against propaganda so they can actually do ther own research against all odds -- should come from?

What would you suggest, when it turns out, that even with massive fact checking capabilities, lies just spread faster no mattet your factual accurracy?

Blaming the left for the current upheaval is a right prolaganda message too, so did my broadening reply work on you? No?
by jorl17 | 2026-01-25 15:23:52+00:00
I think I used to have that position as well, and in a way still do, but this particular project proved otherwise.

The first version was built pretty much that way, with a tiny microcontroller and extremely optimized code. The problem then became that it was very hard to iterate quickly on it and prototype new features. Every new piece of hardware that was added (or just evaluated) would have to be carefully integrated and it really added to the mess. Maybe it would have been different if the code had been structured with more care from the get-go, who knows (I entered the project already in version 2).

For version 2, the micro-controller was thrown out, and raspberry-pi based solutions were brought in. Sure, it felt like carrying a shotgun to fire at a couple of flies, but having a linux machine with such a vast ecosystem was amazing. On top of that, it was much easier to hire people to work on the project because now they could get by with higher level languages like python and javascript. And it was much, much, much faster to develop on.

The usage of the raspberry pi was, in my view, one of the key details that allowed for what ultimately became an extremely successful product. It was much less energy-efficient, but it was very simple to develop and iterate on. In the span of months we experimented with many hardware addons, as product-market-fit was still being found out, and the plethora of online resources for everything else was a boon.

I'm pretty sure this was _the_ project that really made me realize that more often than not the right solution is the one that lets the right people make the right decisions. And for that particular team, this was, without a doubt, a remarkably successful decision. Most of the problems that typically come with it (such as bloat, and inefficiency) were eventually solved, something which would not have been possible by going slowly at first.
Show HN: Right Click – Customizable Context Menu(Popup for Android) for Firefox
by mcavdar | 2026-01-25 15:24:37+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a customizable context menu extension for Firefox that works well on both Desktop and Android.

I often found myself missing powerful context menu tools when browsing on mobile. Native context menus on Android are typically limited, so I built "Right Click", which lets you select text and run custom API calls on it directly.

How it works:

Desktop: Adds items to the standard right-click context menu and custom popup.

Android: Automatically displays a custom popup when you select text, giving you immediate access to tools without fighting the native UI.
It supports some default actions (such as translation and text-to-speech), but you can add more.

Thanks for all feedback, especially on how the text-selection popup feels on different Android devices.
by spongebobstoes | 2026-01-25 15:26:03+00:00
labelling a person as "bad" is usually black and white thinking. it's too reductive, most people are both good and bad

> because they know they can get away with it

the point is that the paved paths lead to bad behavior

well designed systems make it easy to do good

> Exactly the opposite is taught.

"trained" doesn't mean "taught". most things are learned but not taught
by mike_hearn | 2026-01-25 15:26:40+00:00
Journals aren't really businesses in the conventional sense. They're extensions of the universities: their primary customers and often only customers are university libraries, their primary service is creating a reputation economy for academics to decide promotions.

If the flow of tax, student debt and philanthropic money were cut off, the journals would all be wiped out because there's no organic demand for what they're doing.
by lingrush4 | 2026-01-25 15:26:56+00:00
Nobody in the west actually cares about injustice. They just pretend to care when it's politically convenient.

Unfortunately, ABC and NBC haven't found a way to blame Trump for what's happening in Iran. Highlighting the atrocities perpetuated in the name of Islam is more likely to help Trump than hurt him, so this story must be minimized. It's just good, smart politics.
by alyandon | 2026-01-25 15:27:19+00:00
Exactly - the FTDI drivers refusing to work would have been reasonable and emitting a log or error message that my device was counterfeit would have actually been helpful. Instead, they vandalized end user equipment by permanently bricking the devices which is arguably illegal.

I am not nearly sophisticated enough as an end user to spot a counterfeit FTDI usb-to-serial device so I am not going to risk buying that brand and end up with their drivers intentionally bricking the device.
by giantrobot | 2026-01-25 15:27:20+00:00
I have not one but two Data Discmans, unfortunately neither works. I believe both need to be re-capped and disassembling them (correctly) is a bigger task than I'm interested in at the moment. I'm going to have to see if I can get the emulator running and try out the discs I have.

The Data Discman fascinated me ever since I first saw mention of it in a magazine. This was the early 90s so CDs were still Brobdingnagian compared to other storage media at the time. A portable device that could carry an encyclopedia? Amazing! To me at the time they were a Star Trek technology made real.

As an aside I still love Sony's consumer electronics industrial design from the 90s. It was a great intersection of functional and attractive.
by codyb | 2026-01-25 15:27:22+00:00
They're shooting us dead in the streets. Time to rise up.

Walked out of work Monday to protest at Trump tower.

Will be out the 29th at NYSE where Melania's ringing the bell.

Will be out the 3rd at NFL HQ to say no ICE at the Superbowl.

Will be out the 17th for the next thing that is on 50501.

Peaceful protests have a long history of success, it's why I went to the Floyd protests and we've seen progress in policing and media coverage since even if we're not all the way to where we want to be.

There's a reason the march on Selma is such a big thing in our history books, and it's cause it was effective, even if we're not where we want to be yet.

There's a reason the marches to the salt fields by Gandhi are so big in the history books, it's cause they were effective, even if we're not where we want to be yet.

We'll continue to stand up for our rights in a non-violent manner, and we need bodies. Come out and join.
by TeMPOraL | 2026-01-25 15:27:22+00:00
In other words: "who's gonna pay for that?".

The sad thing about continuing development of existing technologies is that all reliability, robustness, and multi-purpose capabilities get optimized away over time. In the ideal world, companies wouldn't even sell you hardware or software, they'd just charge for magically doing the one thing you want at the moment, with no generality and no agency on your end.

It's a miracle we still have electric outlets in homes, and not just bunch of hard-wired appliances plugged in by vendor subcontractors.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-25 15:28:01+00:00
I don't think UN is sounding the alarm of the planet running out of water all of a sudden, even they understand we have huge oceans that aren't going anywhere.

The report itself (https://collections.unu.edu/eserv/UNU:10445/Global_Water_Ban...) does actually talk about a lot of the background, why's and how we can start addressing it, in a very fleshed out form + an executive summary at page 13.
by jltsiren | 2026-01-25 15:28:08+00:00
Aerial bombardments typically target areas with ~0.01 people/square meter, and those people are often in hardened shelters. A protest may have 1–4 people/square meter out in the open. Attacks targeting the latter cause orders of magnitude more casualties for the same amount of firepower.

And the crowd itself can be deadly if it gets too dense, due to panic or otherwise. For example, there have been at least two crowd collapse events with >1000 deaths in the Mecca pilgrimage.
by silexia | 2026-01-25 15:28:26+00:00
The author touches on the truth in a lot of academic research today, which is that researchers need to get published to have a career and most journals will not publish science that runs contrary to the popular political narratives. This leads researchers to self-select as well as a journals to select for only showing one narrative. This means they're not doing science at all, hence the loss of faith in a lot of science, especially in the business and social areas.
by odo1242 | 2026-01-25 15:28:28+00:00
iOS apps consistently get updates a few weeks to months earlier than the Android version. Including some of Google’s own apps, sometimes.

To give examples:

- https://www.phonearena.com/news/google-photos-update-to-reac...

- https://www.t3.com/tech/iphones/google-maps-gets-an-iphone-u...

Both of the above are updates to Google apps that released on iOS but are planned on Android. Haven't seen any examples of the reverse.
by seanhunter | 2026-01-25 15:28:32+00:00
They simply are completely different things.

Financial engineering refers to the creation of complex financial products (usually derivatives) using techniques from financial mathematics[1].

Predatory lending is just lending to people who can’t afford to borrow. No engineering of any kind involved.

[1] https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/financial-mo...
by learingsci | 2026-01-25 15:28:40+00:00
I was young once too.

“Your email is too long.”

This whole thing is filled with “yeah, no s**” and lmao.

More seriously, pretty sure the whole ESG thing has been debunked already, and those who care to know the truth already know it.

A good rule of thumb is to be skeptical of results that make you feel good because they “prove” what you want them to.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-25 15:28:46+00:00
> This is my plea to the HN community: stop treating "offline-first" as a niche feature and start treating it as a human right. We need robust, decentralized mesh networks that bypass state-controlled gateways entirely. We need isolated documentation tools and local-first databases that can sync via Bluetooth or physical handoffs.

I don’t want to downplay the seriousness of the problems in Iran, but switching to a world where tools are design first for syncing via Bluetooth and offline methods just isn’t going to make a better world for all of us.

You need specialized tools for specialized situations. Trying to get the whole world to pay the overhead of mesh networks and Bluetooth handoffs and all of the design choices that go along with it would be a mistake.

The software world is not monolithic. Pleas for everyone to stop building for the way the world works and start building for highly unusual and specific use cases isn’t reasonable.

Build specialized tools for specialized circumstances. They will always serve the purpose far better than if you try to get everyone to build their general purpose tools around extremely rare circumstances.
by tazjin | 2026-01-25 15:28:54+00:00
I've only seen the carrier locked phones and long-term contracts in a handful of countries. I've lived in a lot of countries on three continents.

In many places the default is prepaid SIMs with separately purchased phones. Sometimes the prepaying can be automated (e.g. in Russia), sometimes it involves you physically going to a shop once a month or so (e.g. in Egypt).
by sidewndr46 | 2026-01-25 15:29:15+00:00
I guess it's possible to have a condensing station, but generally speaking you'd need to supply input energy to allow it to cool down and condense somehow. The bigger question here is if a datacenter using evaporative cooling where does the moisture go? If it just feeds a cloud system that rains on nearby fields, it's not much different than irrigating crops. If it feeds clouds that go offshore and rain into the ocean, it's similar to just diverting drinking water into the ocean
by crazygringo | 2026-01-25 15:29:16+00:00
Let me repeat myself:

> and people tend not to be overly optimistic and forget to account for things like sickness, meetings, etc.

> But again, for whatever psychological reason, people seem to be more realistic about the variance in actual delivered points per sprint, as opposed to when you try to measure things in hours or days. The points imply more of an estimated goal than a deadline guarantee, which helps keep both team expectations and management expectations more reasonable.
by antirez | 2026-01-25 15:30:41+00:00
Also Redis now includes the new Vector Sets data type that is not part of ValKey, and I'm right now working to a new data type that is not a niche use case as Vector Sets. So I expect them to diverge even more in the near future, and that certain use cases based on Redis or ValKey will be impossible to port easily to the other fork. But I believe this was unavoidable.
by mekoka | 2026-01-25 15:30:41+00:00
It doesn't need to be made into something other than logic.

Anyone can do a bad deed.

Anyone can also be a good person to someone else.

If a bad deed automatically makes a bad person, those who recognize the person as good have a harder time reconciling the two realities. Simple.

Also, is the point recognizing bad people or getting rid of bad science. Like I said, choose your victories.
by SeanLuke | 2026-01-25 15:31:11+00:00
I developed and maintain a large and very widely used open source agent-based modeling toolkit. It's designed to be very highly efficient: that's its calling card. But it's old: I released its first version around 2003 and have been updating it ever since.

Recently I was made aware by colleagues of a publication by authors of a new agent-based modeling toolkit in a different, hipper programming language. They compared their system to others, including mine, and made kind of a big checklist of who's better in what, and no surprise, theirs came out on top. But digging deeper, it quickly became clear that they didn't understand how to run my software correctly; and in many other places they bent over backwards to cherry-pick, and made a lot of bold and completely wrong claims. Correcting the record would place their software far below mine.

Mind you, I'm VERY happy to see newer toolkits which are better than mine -- I wrote this thing over 20 years ago after all, and have since moved on. But several colleagues demanded I do so. After a lot of back-and-forth however, it became clear that the journal's editor was too embarrassed and didn't want to require a retraction or revision. And the authors kept coming up with excuses for their errors. So the journal quietly dropped the complaint.

I'm afraid that this is very common.
by codyb | 2026-01-25 15:31:11+00:00
Okay, so then you should read the article?

"Four billion people face severe water scarcity for at least one month each year, and almost 75 percent of the global population lives in water-insecure or critically water-insecure countries, according to the U.N. report."

But thanks for pointing out that what I provided was examples.
by nickpsecurity | 2026-01-25 15:31:29+00:00
Leslie Lamport came up with a structured method to find errors in proof. Testing it on a batch, he found most of them had errors. Peter Guttman's paper on formal verification likewise showed many "proven" or "verified" works had errors that were spottes quickly upon informal review or testing. We've also see important theories in math and physics change over time with new information.

With the above, I think we've empirically proven that we can't trust mathmeticians more than any other humans We should still rigorously verify their work with diverse, logical, and empirical methods. Also, build ground up on solid ideas that are highly vetted. (Which linear algebra actually does.)

The other approach people are taking are foundational, machine-checked, proof assistants. These use a vetted logic whose assistant produces a series of steps that can be checked by a tiny, highly-verified checker. They'll also oftne use a reliable formalism to check other formalisms. The people doing this have been making everything from proof checkers to compilers to assembly languages to code extraction in those tools so they are highly trustworthy.

But, we still need people to look at the specs of all that to see if there are spec errors. There's fewer people who can vet the specs than can check the original English and code combos. So, are they more trustworthy? (Who knows except when tested empirically on many programs or proofs, like CompCert was.)
by trinix912 | 2026-01-25 15:31:33+00:00
So the national carrier importing them and selling them in their brick-and-mortar stores is "bootleg imports"? Not to mention that the EU is, legally speaking, a single market so the same rules should apply everywhere.

The reason they probably have them preinstalled over there is because they don't care about licensing so they can freely preload whatever they want. At least that's how it was with netbooks in the early 2000s that they were selling loaded with MS Office, Windows, even Adobe, of course with no COA stickers.
by ikamm | 2026-01-25 15:31:43+00:00
"Slow phone with slow animations" is a crazy assessment, I switched from Galaxy S7 to iPhone XR in 2018 because the Galaxy was (like every other Android I had) slow to do everything, applications would crash randomly and my phone would just give up and reboot without warning. Not to mention all of the killer Android features that Google had gotten rid of up to that point (RIP notification ticker, I miss you so much). What's the point of being able to sideload and customize when none of it works on a day to day basis? And when Google/other Android phone manufacturers insist on their phones being more and more similar to iPhone/iOS, the reasons to stay on Android go away too.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-25 15:31:50+00:00
> In other words: "who's gonna pay for that?".

As opposed to what? Everyone pays the overhead and price of apps designed for things like local-first Bluetooth sync?

This is a situation where the market will prevail and people would go toward (and therefore pay for) apps designed to fit their needs, not apps designed around rare and unusual scenarios.

Build specific tools for specific situations. You won’t get anywhere trying to get all general purpose apps to focus on niche requirements.
by ajross | 2026-01-25 15:31:56+00:00
> theres no drought in california.

CA is not in a drought right now. CA has been in conditions of persistent drought, with no more than a year or two of respite, for two decades. The last sustained period of sustained at-or-above-desired-level precipitation ended in 2007.

As always, Wikipedia explains this well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droughts_in_California

Your logic amounts to "I'm not poor because I just got paid! Let's go to the bar tonight!"
by jvanderbot | 2026-01-25 15:31:58+00:00
Expecting all apps to go offline-first is probably a nonstarter.

Expecting a robust ecosystem of offline-first apps, ideally compatible with everyone else's existing apps, would be awesome.

An opt-in facebook streaming offline mode where posts are queued and sent...

or an opt-in signal mode where p2p messaging is possible via transient connections (imagine the data mule movie that would be coming out in 2030). All this is technically possible, just not prioritized.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-25 15:32:01+00:00
> There’s a toxic idea built into this statement: It implies that the real root cause is external to the people and therefore the solution must be a systemic change.

Not necessarily, although certainly people sometimes fall into that trap. When dealing with a system you need to fix the system. 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?

When a person who is a cog within a larger machine fails that is more or less by definition also an instance of the system failing.

Of course individual intent is also important. If Joe dropped the production database intentionally then in addition to asking "how the hell did someone like him end up in this role in the first place" you will also want to eject him from the organization (or at least from that role). But focusing on individual intent is going to cloud the process and the systemic fix is much more important than any individual one.

There's also a (meta) systemic angle to the above. Not everyone involved in carrying out the process will be equally mature, objective, and deliberate (by which I mean that unfortunately any organization is likely to contain at least a few fairly toxic people). If people jump to conclusions or go on a witch hunt that can constitute a serious systemic dysfunction in and of itself. Rigidly adhering to a blameless procedure is a way to guard against that while still working towards the necessary systemic changes.
by tazjin | 2026-01-25 15:33:19+00:00
These weird anti-Graphene posts confuse me. I use GrapheneOS, fwiw, and I believe some things the project does (like its attacks on F-Droid) are misguided for orthogonal reasons.

However, it all makes sense from the perspective of Graphene not attempting to be a general purpose OS like Lineage, but explicitly a security focused OS. Security is often in conflict with what the average consumer wants, and they can go use Lineage or whatever.

It's like writing lots of comments complaining about OpenBSD devs coming across as grumpy and refusing to support Bluetooth. That is part of their value proposition! You're just not the target audience and that is okay.
by jesse_faden | 2026-01-25 15:33:45+00:00
In a large city in southern India, our house would get water supplied one day of the week during summers. Our small one bedroom flat had barrels of water drums stored inside the house. We even had one in the bedroom.

I was 14 and I would go down to the street to fetch ground water and fill those barrels up. This was in 2014.
by Cyph0n | 2026-01-25 15:34:03+00:00
Thanks for clarifying. HN is ~generally more software centric, so this context is helpful.

So SPICE is a low-level circuit sim, and PLECS is a bit higher level as it ignores non-linearities at the device level. Does PLECS simulate at a level similar to that of the popular EDA tools like Cadence?
by anonym29 | 2026-01-25 15:34:10+00:00
It's only a pollutant until you leave it out in the sun for a few days, after which all of the water has evaporated back into the atmosphere and you're left with mostly sodium chloride, but also a few other healthy micronutrients like potassium, magnesium, and calcium.

This process costs $0, requires zero energy (besides that provided by the sun) and has worked reliably for many thousands of years.