MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by freejazz | 2026-01-08 16:35:12+00:00
>If it interferes with their opportunity to engage in their favorite narratives, such as espousing racial ideology, this turn of events can't have done anything except impair that.

Yet they did it.

>And you don't seem to be making the argument that they did this without realizing the consequences, or anything of that nature. Perhaps you are confused, I see that alot from people who don't use punctuation.

I'm not. I don't need to make any arguments. It is a fact that it was done and it is a fact who it was done by. There is no disputing that. You can guess whatever reasoning you want, I do not particularly care. It was done by the Texas Board of Regents, not liberal woke purple haired coast elites. Get a grip already.

> Perhaps you are confused, I see that alot from people who don't use punctuation.

Funny coming from the poster with a bunch of posts that are flagged. I didn't even flag them!
by lelanthran | 2026-01-08 16:35:23+00:00
> But sound quality in general is absolutely objectively measurable.

Sound quality is not the same as music quality.

To be more specific, Sound Reproduction Fidelity is not the same as Pleasant Music

To be even more specific, Signal Reproduction is not the same as "Pleasant Sounds*

The goal of music is not always high fidelity of reproduction; if it were, over-driven valve amps would never have been a thing.

The only thing objective in this context is signal reproduction, which is not the highest concern for music production.
by devilbunny | 2026-01-08 16:35:47+00:00
Credit cards are, oddly enough, one place in which the US has absolutely amazing consumer protection laws. Debit cards do not share these protections by law (though many banks offer some of them).

So, if you move to the US, getting a credit card, even if you never intend to carry a balance, is a wise idea.

- You cannot be held responsible for more than $50 of fraudulent charges

- You are not required to report a card missing within a short period of time to claim that charges are fraudulent

- Because your bank account is not directly linked to the credit card, fraudulent charges occur with the credit bank's money, not yours, so you do not have to fight to have them declared fraudulent before you can use money in your account
by mrcr | 2026-01-08 16:35:53+00:00
You can't hold the computer accountable, but you can still hold the companies that deployed the code responsible, and if they do a poor job, the business will suffer. And why can't an AI also make the product decisions? It's already writing the code.

I think the "billion dollar single employee plus AI company" is still a ways away, but not actually that far.
by s_dev | 2026-01-08 16:36:00+00:00
I have my fathers Sonos soundbar and a pair of speakers at home that I bought for him as Christmas gifts years ago. I still can't believe they knowingly released an app that bricked older devices.

I have to try and get them working again. The only solution I've heard of is to get an old version of the Sonos app APK, a dedicated old single purpose Android phone to acts as a bridge between your speakers and phone and connect that way.

Stay away from Sonos.
by lysace | 2026-01-08 16:36:07+00:00
Agreed. It's more likely to lead to poor user experience than anything else. Most end-user facing software/service companies will probably bet on the DRAM price peak being temporary.

Software takes a lot of time to build. Codebases live for decades. There's often an impossibly large cost in starting over with a less wasteful architecture/language/etc. Think going from an Electron/Chromium app to something built using some compiled language and native OS GUI constructs that uses 10x less resources.
by divan | 2026-01-08 16:36:16+00:00
> difficulty of writing if err != nil

Literally the simplest way to deal with errors (cognitively and character wise). Since AI autocomplete entered the scene, typing this repetitive (for a reason) pattern became not a problem at all (I'm not even talking about post Claude Code era)

> The only resort the consumer of this library has is to parse the string value of this error for useful information.

Well, no. See for wrap/unwrap functionality https://go.dev/blog/go1.13-errors

> In Go, errors are values. They just aren’t particularly useful values.

In his example author could easily use his `progError` type instead.

Gosh, why it's so tempting to write a post about bad language instead of just reading docs or article about idiomatic usage?
by nozzlegear | 2026-01-08 16:36:26+00:00
> I am sorry, but the damage is already done. It cannot be repaired. NEVER!

I hate to invoke Godwin's law, but Germany was once the most reviled country in the world and is now, arguably, the most influential country in the European Union. Clearly, damage much worse than what the US has done over Trump's two terms can be repaired over time.
by FunnyUsername | 2026-01-08 16:37:11+00:00
> Israeli estimates put the military wing of Hamas at having up to 17,000

Where did you see that estimate? Some estimates were ~40k, with many more recruits added during the war. And not everyone attacking the IDF was Hamas-affiliated. PIJ alone had thousands of fighters, and as we saw on Oct 7, sometimes random Gazans join in on fighting too.

> They've killed people in the hundreds of thousands in Gaza now.

Hamas themselves claim ~70k, which already includes fighters and non-combat deaths. There are a lot of questionable works trying to embellish the numbers. One of them used garbage data like WhatsApp chats. Another ended up with an estimate of 380k deaths for age 0-5, which is impossible since there were never that many in Gaza.

It's interesting to compare to Ukraine, because we don't see the same desperate attempts to embellish numbers there. Zelenskyy said "tens of thousands" were killed in Mariupol, which is one significant digit; he didn't pretend to have more precision than that. He didn't send out a Google form so that they could claim a specific (but dubious) count. We didn't see a bunch of Western academics desperately trying to justify higher death counts.
by vunderba | 2026-01-08 16:37:17+00:00
Big fan of Phaser. It’s a very solid framework (sounds, animations, input, physics) and probably the closest you can get to an all‑in‑one solution for game dev outside of something like Unity or Unreal.

I remember there being talk about Phaser 4 migrating to TypeScript so I'd be curious if that’s still going to happen.
by graemep | 2026-01-08 16:37:36+00:00
The Catholic canon has a lot of those, but not all so including just those common to both would still be something in the majority of Christian's Bibles. Not in the canon does not mean valueless or bad so I think a lot of people will still find books not in their denomination's canon of interest and may have read them.

Maybe offer options on which canon? Does not work well with daily format though. OTOH I would like to play more than once a day!

It is difficult. Maybe weighting towards the new testament (i.e. non-random selection) would make it easier? I think a lot of us are more familiar with it.
by r721 | 2026-01-08 16:37:59+00:00
>In particular, he mentions "Allow multiple, competing articles per topic", but I think that would go against the whole idea of an encyclopedia. As I see it, if we can't arrive at a single synthesized truth about a topic, then we don't have an encyclopedic article.

Reminds me of Knol - Google's attempt to create a Wikipedia competitor (closed in 2012):

>Any contributor could create and own new Knol articles, and there could be multiple articles on the same topic with each written by a different author.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knol
by dekhn | 2026-01-08 16:38:33+00:00
Yes, but the downside is even highly accomplished engineers feel unworthy.
For example, when I started in 2008, they said everybody should make a "Google Resume" (ongoing list of all the stuff you did at Google) and linked to Jeff's as an example.

He rewrote the entire indexing pipeline at a critical time enabling Google's rapid growth... created mapreduce... helped create bigtable & gfs... wrote the search engine that ran for over a decade... numerous improvements to search and ads quality (back in the days when search and ads quality meant something)...
and that was just the first few years.
Show HN: SkillFS – Git-backed persistent sandboxes for AI agents
by avyvar | 2026-01-08 16:38:43+00:00
We're Dari (YC F25). We're building browser automation agents with a deterministic caching layer; for that to work, we needed a way to save and rerun code across sessions. There's also no audit trail with traditional sandboxes; when something goes wrong, you have no idea what the agent actually did.

So we built SkillFS. The core idea is simple: every agent sandbox is a git repo. The agent does its work, commits its progress, and the session ends. When you start a new session, SkillFS restores the repo from a git bundle and the agent continues where it left off. And because it's git, you have a complete history of every action the agent took.

The workflow looks like this:

1. Agent works in a sandboxed environment, making changes to files
2. Agent commits progress at meaningful checkpoints
3. Session ends, git bundle gets saved to storage (local or GCS)
4. Next session starts, bundle is restored, agent resumes
5. Need to debug? git log shows you exactly what happened

Key features:

- Persistent state via git bundles, with pluggable storage backends (local filesystem or GCS), so skills and scripts from previous sessions are reusable.

- MCP integration that lets you plug in any server. SkillFS also generates Python wrappers from MCP tool definitions and uploads them to the sandbox, so your agent can call any MCP tool as regular code to cache sequences of MCP interactions into deterministic scripts.

- Built-in LLM runner with standard tools (glob, grep, read/write/edit files, run commands), or you can bring your own agent loop.

- Runs on E2B sandboxes so agents execute code in isolated environments. Agent skills can also be easily imported from local files or from GitHub repos.

We're open sourcing this because agent persistence is a problem every team building with agents ends up solving differently, and we think bash+git is a good answer that more people should be using.

> pip install skillfs
by zozbot234 | 2026-01-08 16:38:52+00:00
Jevon's paradox. As AI gets more efficient its potential scope expands further and the hardware it runs on becomes even more valuable.

BTW, the absolute lowest "energy consumed per logical operation" is achieved with so-called 'neuromorphic' hardware that's dog slow in latency terms but more than compensates with extreme throughput. (A bit like an even more extreme version of current NPU/TPUs.) That's the kind of hardware we should be using for AI training once power use for that workload is measured in gigawatts. Gaming-focused GPUs are better than your average CPU, but they're absolutely not the optimum.
by everforward | 2026-01-08 16:38:57+00:00
> Sudden and unexpected changes that increase uncertainty make it harder to invest in retraining, rather than easier.

This largely ignores the uncertainty and costs of a revolving workforce, and the value of having a workforce that all knows each other, the way the company works, and cares whether it succeeds.

When I was younger, I did a bunch of short-ish stints at various companies (I think average tenure was a hair under 2 years) because someone else would offer more money, more exciting work, etc. It was incredibly inefficient for the employer. "Waiting for my laptop/credentials to be issued" was like a full percentage point of my time there. I barely cared whether the company did well because I wasn't going to be there long enough for my RSUs to swing wildly either way. I never got to the point where I knew offhand who to talk to about niche parts of the product, and never became "that guy" for anyone else.

Frankly a lot of our stuff was higher risk and took longer because of the revolving doors. People important to a project would leave in the middle, or the person who wrote an important system would quit so we were left with whatever tribal knowledge we had.

Things worked well when the lady that wrote our invoicing system 20 years ago was still around but in security now. Things went poorly when she quit 6 months ago and now I have to reverse engineer it to figure out why I get stack overflows on invoices that contain an image.
by aeturnum | 2026-01-08 16:38:58+00:00
Oh cool! I got a set of SoundTouch speakers years ago because they supported simultaneous Bluetooth playback as well as synced cloud service playback. This was in 2018 so options were more limited then. Since it became clear Bose was shutting them down I've moved over to Wiims[1] for managing playback (the SoundTouch app was always kind of odd and hard to manage) - but allowing local control is really nice. Currently you need to hit a button to enable playing from AUX on the soundtouches - they won't stay on the "dumb speaker" mode unless music is playing. Hopefully after this I'll be able to set them up as permanent speakers driven by the wiims.

[1] https://www.wiimhome.com/
by egglemonsoup | 2026-01-08 16:39:14+00:00
Great question. It picks a random book first (out of the 66 non-Deuterocanonical books (yet)) and then a random group of 3 back-to-back verses from that book. That way it's not weighted towards books with more of verses, which I wanted to avoid. It doesn't try to equalize between old/new testament.
by bee_rider | 2026-01-08 16:39:38+00:00
My thought process, if someone handed me this code and asked me to fix it, would be that they probably didn’t expect
df[‘index_value’]
to hold
df.index

Just because, well, how’d the code get into this state? ‘index_value’ must have been a column that held something, having it just be equal to df.index seems unlikely because as you mention that’s always been available. I should probably check the change history to figure out when ‘index_value’ was removed. Or ask the person about what that column meant, but we can’t do that if we want to obey the prompt.
by dematz | 2026-01-08 16:39:38+00:00
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Error interface means you can display the error as a string, but you don't have to? Like the err.Error() is idiomatic if you just want to display something, but you could also use the error itself

https://pkg.go.dev/errors#As

here's an example that uses a field from your blog example error type: https://go.dev/play/p/SoVrnfXfzZy

Also "In Go, errors are values. They just aren’t particularly useful values"

...sometimes user mistakes are due to the language being too complicated, maybe for no benefit, but I don't think that's the case here. It's a very good thing that you can just slap .Error() on any error to print it quickly, and not too crazy complex to say an error can be any normal type that you can use, as long as it also can print Error()
by mrtksn | 2026-01-08 16:40:08+00:00
Exactly, I wish EU enforced this.

Maybe the general rule should be something like, if something isn’t in the user control and the user doesn’t want it anymore or can no longer function despite not being damaged, then the company should take back the hardware and refund the user.

So the company still have two options, either refund or open source the systems needed for the device so that the user or third-party can continue supporting it.
by SecretDreams | 2026-01-08 16:40:09+00:00
> Even a developmentally disabled human tends to be significantly more complex than a stopped clock so the analogy doesn't work well.

I think it works perfectly, honestly. Maybe moreso after the above statement.

> Do you give out a cookie for the computer that works really well at serving content over port 80 despite it sucks for anything you enjoy?

No, I do not. Nor does the server ask for a cookie. It just does its job consistently without making a fuss. If governments could do that bare minimum thing, the world would be a better place.
by andrepd | 2026-01-08 16:40:11+00:00
> More companies should follow this approach

No, the law must mandate that. You either provide active support, or if you end it you must open-source all tools necessary to perform maintenance. It's one of those things that has to be mandated by law to provide a uniform floor on all companies and manufacturers, like food safety laws, fire codes, or accessibility for the physically disabled.
by ifethereal | 2026-01-08 16:40:19+00:00
May I ask what your impression of "the sum" is? Namely, what is "the sum of a game" to you? The question may sound slightly opaque (and, sure, maybe even pedantic), but here are examples of some aspects I am trying to garner:

• Do you see it as a single number (e.g., representable by a single floating-point value)? If not, how alike to a number is it? To what degrees does it lend itself to ordering (higher/lower/equal) and aggregation?

• Do you think the concept of "the sum" has a consensus interpretation (consensus across people, say)? For a particular game, do you think its sum has a consensus determination?

I'm less settled on precisely those aspects, and I think they tend to mask aspects that are worth clarifying/examining. Please do not see this as my claim that my stance is absolutely the only valid one. However, without a unified stance on these aspects, it feels hard to contribute further to the discussion.

My contention is that "a game" cannot be condensed down to a single number. (More specifically, I think that it should only be done so in a way that is unequivocally universal and objective. If this doesn't exist, any discussion should begin on more general premises, rather than the premise that a game can be condensed down to a single number.) From the perspective of evaluating whether capitalism installs incentives that result in a better world, I view it as overly simplistic to think about "a sum" and then consider whether that sum is zero/nonzero/positive/negative.

Of course, these are models, and I judge the merits of a model based on its ability to be useful. But here I really consider that such a simplistic model is a hindrance. I don't mean hindrance in the sense that it necessarily results in poor decisions being made (partially because the model seems to come with an intrinsic notion of "poor"). It's a hindrance in that it seems too ubiquitously adopted, to the extent that discussions on the alternative are hard to initiate/sustain/come by.

As a result, I think there is a lot more elaboration needed before landing on this dichotomy:

> But to argue that externalities make capitalism zero-sum is to argue externalities always exactly match whatever value was gained by capitalist transactions. Which is even harder to prove than the already dubious argument that externalities are larger than the value of capitalism.

Namely, I don't readily see that there is a dichotomy in the form of either (1) "externalities always exactly match whatever value was gained by capitalist transactions" or (2) "externalities are larger than the value of capitalism". The dichotomy doesn't easily stand to me because it seems attached to an oversimplified way to compare outcomes/merits of a game ("exactly match whatever value", "larger than the value of").
by jackblemming | 2026-01-08 16:40:32+00:00
Jeff Dean is a lot smarter than me, more accomplished, and more talented. But let’s be honest. He was a big part of TensorFlow and TensorFlow sucks. And I imagine it reflects a lot about Jeff Dean internally. Smart, clever, but maybe over complicated or over engineered. And that itself reflects hugely at what Google tends to like, and why he’s so successful (at Google).

And if we’re being brutally honest, I wonder how he would have faired at somewhere like Bell Labs ;)
by ljm | 2026-01-08 16:40:33+00:00
I get that impression too - but also it's HN and enthusiastic early adoption is unsurprising.

My concern, and the reason I would not use it myself, is the alto frequent skirting of externalities. For every person who says "I can think for myself and therefore understand if GPT is lying to me," there are ten others who will take it as gospel.

The worry I have isn't that people are misled - this happens all the time especially in alternative and contrarian circles (anti-vaxx, homeopathy, etc.) - it's the impact it has on medical professionals who are already overworked who will have to deal with people's commitment to an LLM-based diagnosis.

The patient who blindly trusts what GPT says is going to be the patient who argues tooth and nail with their doctor about GPT being an expert, because they're not power users who understand the technical underpinnings of an LLM.

Of course, my angle completely ignores the disruption angle - tech and insurance working hand in hand to undercut regulation, before it eventually pulls the rug.
by throwforfeds | 2026-01-08 16:40:45+00:00
> What are the objective benefits of meditation - what is the exact/specific process and what specifically does it accomplish?

There is no one form of meditation, and each practice has different results, but the majority of them share proven reductions in anxiety, stress, depression, and improvements in all sorts of gauges of mental well being.

One of the fundamental teachings of Buddhism is the interdependence of all phenomena [1], and when you begin your practice you'll start seeing that when you sit, you might notice less daily anxiety, which might translate into better physical health. Or you might notice that being slightly less depressed makes you engage in your relationships with friends and family better. You might notice that your hips open up, which might mean less lower back pain.

The point being there are tons of positive benefits from a meditation practice that don't include some metaphysical nonsense that might be hard to take at face value. As my meditation teacher often emphasizes, if the practice doesn't deal with your day to day, quotidian problems of being alive, then it's just nice philosophy and nothing else. The Buddha taught that we should put first things first, and that's dealing with the suffering and stress of our lives. [2]

Also, "zoning out" is pretty much the opposite of meditation. Meditation is to be fully without distraction, whereas "zoning out" is giving in completely to the distraction.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prat%C4%ABtyasamutp%C4%81da

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Poisoned_Arrow
by esseph | 2026-01-08 16:40:58+00:00
As someone in networking, it checks out, and I also know the author.

Imagine an overworked, underpaid, network engineer. Mistakes happen. This time though, the entire world is hyper fixated on what amounts to an easy to make mistake and now your mistake is in the intel briefs of 50 countries. Oops. Rough day at the office.
by pdntspa | 2026-01-08 16:41:30+00:00
Another thread, another HN user dismissing readers because we "don't represent the general population"

I realize so many of yall are brainwashed into this majority-rules bullshit. Size-of-userbase is not the only metric that determines whether a product is important or not.

I don't know about everyone else but I am tired of being dismissed by people who wield "rational" discussion like a club, beating down those who articulate less-than-majority wants and needs.

Go back to your gantt charts, Mr Manager