MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by estearum | 2026-01-07 03:14:13+00:00
If you were to approach this question with intellectual honesty, you would identify pretty quickly that there are far better ways to try to answer it.

Case-control methods, natural experiments, surveys of criminals, and meta-analyses of the prior.

Literally any method other than "pick 600 year period and say 'vibes shifted generally across a continent and then homicide went down'"

Of course this question has been studied extensively for decades and the current conclusion is: completely inconclusive!

There's some evidence it increases violent crime, some that it decreases it, most evidence doesn't clearly show any effect at all.

So whatever effect it may have, it almost certainly isn't very strong, or is countervailed by opposing effects.

I think that if we're proposing the State, which we know to be fallible in so many cases, should make irreversible decisions like "executing suspected bad guys" more frequently, then we should have extremely strong evidence that it would actually achieve the desired result.

> It's also at least quasi-testable; someone could fund a study on examining alleles associated with aggression in historical remains.

Good luck establishing how "alleles associated with aggression" contributes to violence. I'm pretty sure most of the people who adopt your position would argue that their "aggressiveness" is a virtue in whatever competitive landscape they choose to occupy.
by williamcotton | 2026-01-07 03:14:39+00:00
But the longer term implications could mean that software becomes cheap enough that more work can be put into running a tighter ship with less complexity and with more agility at the business level.

Cheap as in costs as well as amortization.

Software is a cost center at most businesses, either through outsourcing or managing developers.

There are a lot of possible knock-on effects.
by latentsea | 2026-01-07 03:14:50+00:00
You don't need a VPN to vibe code on your phone. I've been happily doing thumb-driven development for the last 4 months now using GitHub Copilot on github.com from my phone. It even has real-time chat with copilot as it works. Having your PRs deploy to an environment allows you to check it. I also have playwright tests that record screenshots and traces that get uploaded as artifacts I can check too.
Ask HN: How do you minimize dependence on US-based infrastructure?
by __warlord__ | 2026-01-07 03:15:26+00:00
With Donald current shenanigans and for companies operating in Europe and/or Latin America: are you doing anything to ensure your business can continue if major US infrastructure providers become inaccessible (for geopolitical, regulatory, or sanctions-related reasons)?

If yes, what stack choices and operational practices helped most (cloud, identity, observability, comms, CI/CD, payments, support tooling, backups)?
by tom_ | 2026-01-07 03:15:57+00:00
I used my desktop PC for the first time in a while yesterday, possibly the first time since doing the 25H2 update (but don't quote me on that), and noticed that the Windows 11 startup screen can't be dismissed. Previously, it's started by showing a screen the current time, which is still the case. Then I press a key, and it animates off, and there's the login prompt. But now? The animation never completes. It starts - and then snaps back to its initial state.

Pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del gets the login box, so I'm not completely stuck. and I'm sure that was probably always the case. But I'm still a bit bemused by this.

(Microsoft epithets have generally aged poorly, and I expect this one will be no exception, no matter how accurate it may currently actually be. See also: stuff like "Mickey$loth WinDOS")
by tripletao | 2026-01-07 03:16:06+00:00
> over a few years, the LED gets dimmer and dimmer

That shouldn't happen unless the LED is driven near the top of its current rating, which shouldn't be necessary unless you're pushing the limits of its rise/fall times (in which case a different part would be advisable as you say).

A random app note shows 95% of initial current transfer ratio after 25 years at If = 5 mA, and depending on the necessary bit rate we could probably design for at least 2x initial margin on that CTR. Such a design would last effectively forever.

https://www.we-online.com/catalog/media/o303314v410%20ANO006...

I think the galvanic isolation is mostly a feelgood here, allowing people to say it's "air-gapped" even though that's not directly relevant (since Wi-Fi is also "air-gapped"). A simple gate or level shifter can also enforce unidirectional data flow as you say.
by eru | 2026-01-07 03:16:19+00:00
> Without fractional reserve rules the banks could lend their money infinitely.

What's that supposed to mean?

> I like Richard Wagner's theories/research on the subject, as in he actually asked for a loan and went through the books of the bank to verify where the money came from, it came from nowhere, they just credited their account and that's it.

That's a bit silly. Yes, when you get a loan and just let the money sit in your account, the bank can create the loan/deposit pair out of thin air (modulo legal requirements).

The constraint for the bank comes when you start spending that money. Most people take loans to spend the money, eg a company might invest in some new machinery or you might buy a house. The Mr Wagner in your story stopped his investigation too early.
by prewett | 2026-01-07 03:16:33+00:00
Musk used to be seen as an engineer. He co-founded a payments company that merged with PayPal (not sure if he did engineering, though). I believe he is widely seen as being a knowledgeable rocketry engineer. I also think that he contributed to engineering of early Teslas. Now he is completely over-committed, and seems to me like he is burnt-out but does not realize it, and is doing all sorts of crazy things which act to sort of paper that over. Twenty years ago he was seen as a high-level engineer (I've heard that Marvel's Tony Stark was based on Musk [I mean, obviously it was based on the comic book character, but hopefully you know what I mean]).
by oenton | 2026-01-07 03:17:16+00:00
Side tangent: On one hand I have a subtle fondness for PHP, perhaps because it was the first programming language I ever “learned” (self taught, throwing spaghetti on the wall) back in high school when LAMP stacks were all the rage.

But in retrospect it’s absolutely baffling that mixing raw SQL queries with HTML tag soup wasn’t necessarily uncommon then. Also, I haven’t met many PHP developers that I’d recommend for a PHP job.
by jackp96 | 2026-01-07 03:18:03+00:00
For my company, being able to view the user journey throughout the site in the analytics is pretty valuable.

We don't care who the specific users are - but the tracking gives us an idea of how many people use the site? do they have a good experience? are they giving us money? do we have a bug somewhere we're missing? etc.

All that is valuable as a business.
by jonas21 | 2026-01-07 03:18:10+00:00
> Electricity prices near data centers go up, right?

I hear this a lot, but the most comprehensive recent study I've seen [1] found the opposite -- that retail electricity prices tend to decrease when load from data centers and other large consumers is added to the grid.

[1] https://eta-publications.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/2025-10...
by danielmarkbruce | 2026-01-07 03:18:30+00:00
You might be right. It's also possible you are wrong though. Some things have a lot of moving pieces and if one piece is off the entire thing is wrong - so you have to commit to getting a grounding that is quite thorough to have any understanding at all. I'd argue accounting is one such subject, finance is one, the legal system is one, software engineering is debatable, math isn't one.
by eru | 2026-01-07 03:19:11+00:00
> It does not make sense for the exchange of good and services among one another to be held back because someone deciding to sit on a pile of tokens.

You are making it a bit too easy on yourself: these days we can create an arbitrary number of 'tokens', ie fiat money. The amount we create is limited by the amount of inflation we want to tolerate. If someone just sits on their tokens, they don't contribute to inflation, so we can print more. (But take them out of circulation, if the hoarders decide to spend.)

Just to be clear: I agree with what you are arguing for! But your argument is a bit too simple to work in modern times: legalising interest payments is still a good idea, even when we can create an arbitrary number of tokens. But the reasoning is a bit more complicated.
by arcfour | 2026-01-07 03:19:26+00:00
At the time it was overhyped because just by adding .com to your company's name you could increase your valuation regardless of whether or not you had anything to do with the internet. Is that not stupid?

I think my comparison is apt; being a bubble and a truly society-altering technology are not mutually exclusive, and by virtue of it being a bubble, it is overhyped.
by zdragnar | 2026-01-07 03:19:53+00:00
There's a difference between "choosing one over the other" and the original claim of shelf stabilized probiotics being not worth buying.

On a few occasions when my dog has gotten sick, or needed antibiotics, shelf stabilized probiotics cleaned their digestion right up.

Are strains that only survive when refrigerated probably a higher count? Maybe. Are there stains that are better but can't be freeze dried? Probably. Are there shelf stable probiotics that are worth buying, especially if you don't have access to refrigerated stuff? Absolutely!
by llmslave2 | 2026-01-07 03:20:47+00:00
Idk, I still see Micro$oft used a lot. Maybe not on HN but HN in general being filled with tech employees is often more sympathetic to big tech companies.

MS is betting hard on AI which has earned them this current moniker. If they keep doubling down on this bet I can see it sticking.

I find it interesting that they renamed Office to Copilot, and HN has been pretty quiet about that. It's been clowned pretty hard on other sites.

https://www.office.com/
by shermantanktop | 2026-01-07 03:20:49+00:00
Sure, I have them turned on for most of my devices.

Colorblindness isn’t exactly fixed by filters, for a few reasons. They help for some colors, but not others. And each person’s experience is different based on their specific deficiencies.

Anyway, this is a color-based game and that’s probably what it needs to be (unless size or shape could vary enough to substitute), so I’m not in the target audience.
by quotemstr | 2026-01-07 03:21:59+00:00
Alternatively, it requires cloud providers and such losing business if they refuse to support the latest features.

The "surface area" argument against io_uring can apply to literally any innovation. Over on LWN, there's an article on path traversal difficulties that mentions people how, because openat2(2) is often banned as inconvenient to whitelist using seccomp, eople have to work around path traversal bugs using fiddly, manual, and slow element-by-element path traversal in user space.

Ridiculous security theater. A new system call had a vulnerability in 2010 and so we're never able to take practical advantage of new kernel features ever?

(It doesn't help that gvisor refuses to acknowledge the modern world.)

Great example of descending into a shitty equilibrium because the great costs of a bad policy are diffuse but the slight benefits are concentrated.

The only effective lever is commercial pressure. All the formal methods in the world won't help when the incentive structure reinforces technical obstinacy.
by victorymakes | 2026-01-07 03:22:05+00:00
When building LaunchSaaS, I faced a critical decision: use Better Auth's built-in payment plugins or build my own payment system.

Better Auth is an excellent authentication library—we use it extensively for auth in LaunchSaaS. But when it came to payments, I chose to build custom. The post shows why that decision paid off, and how you can determine the right choice for your project.
by krauses | 2026-01-07 03:22:18+00:00
How is ease of opt out versus opt in objectively measured?

Most of the time both options are presented clearly and within a few pixels from each other, but opt-in is usually slightly more eye catching and/or more appealing. But the effort in terms of distance for mouse movement or number of clicks is the same. While that’s a design trick that will improve % of opt-in, how can it be argued that the opt-out was not as “easy”?
by stephen_g | 2026-01-07 03:23:05+00:00
This is what I quite like about Mastodon, since it's not inserting random users' posts into my feed (only people I follow, and then posts that they boost) you tend to have that experience much more like the chat and forums of old where you find a reasonably small group of active users who you mostly interact with.

Of course, 'influencer' kind of people tend to not like it because it's a lot harder to amass a huge following, but I'm fine with that!
by eru | 2026-01-07 03:23:33+00:00
> The regulatory capital ratio determines how much capital they must hold to support the assets.

That's one of the factors. But even in jurisdictions without regulations on capital ratio, banks tend to hold capital cushions.

The Scottish 'free banking' era in the 18th and 19th century is instructive here. (Canada had a similar arrangement.) In Scotland during that time banks regularly had about 2/3 deposits and 1/3 capital to finance their balance sheet, despite no fixed regulatory obligations on capital ratios.

Interestingly they barely held any reserves at all, perhaps 2% or less of assets.

These banks were extraordinarily solid and stable. And the arrangement contributed to Scotland's rapid catching up to England during their Industrial Revolutions.
by latexr | 2026-01-07 03:23:47+00:00
> the act of writing any cookie is actually covered under the law (because you're storing something on the user's computer). You're required to disclose that these cookies are in use.

The page describing the law has more examples of cases where you do not need consent than the ones you do.

https://commission.europa.eu/resources/europa-web-guide/desi...
by AlexErrant | 2026-01-07 03:24:27+00:00
This is a working paper... but it is "conditionally accepted at the Review of Economic Studies". https://maddalenaronchi.weebly.com/research.html

Note that the OP links to a version from 2021. A version dated October 29, 2025 is here https://maddalenaronchi.weebly.com/uploads/1/1/7/4/117435661...

Marginal Revolution post https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/11/da...

Podcast with the author https://www.thevisiblehand.uk/episodes/episode-27
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2026-01-07 03:24:36+00:00
>Why is that?

One, nobody exactly allows independent observers so we only really get seismo readings from those tests. And they don't make alot of sense. Yields should've been higher for plutonium cores, it's not lightweight stuff. And I wouldn't put it past them to have somehow pulled a fast one to fool foreign intelligence agencies (though stockpiling thousands of tons of high explosives fake a successful nuclear test seems beyond farcical). Just seems wrong.
by conditionnumber | 2026-01-07 03:24:39+00:00
Sorry, what I was clumsily trying to say is something like: "As an outsider to the startup world, your project has made me curious about the shape of the startup ecosystem as a whole. I bet you have the data to generate that picture! It is unfortunate that our market system is not yet sophisticated enough to compensate people for the difficult/valuable work of data collection, while also maximizing availability of data for those curious to use it."

At first I did not explore the tree visualizations in your web app: I simply noticed an index of company trees. Using the tree visualizer (which shows founders' names and pictures), I immediately realized that these trees represent complex human stories involving thousands of years of individual people's hard work. Interpreted that way, the data deserve a degree of awed respect that I did not show in my original comment. Truly sorry for that.

If you're curious about the shape of the startup ecosystem the way I am, there are a few things you could try. (In what follows I'm assuming "full graph" means company-company links with timestamps, not stories about individual people). pyvis has a feature that allows you to build a static html file with an embedded interactive representation of a graph. The data is embedded in the file, so you might not be able to share that unless you dropped enough information to conform such sharing to your data license. IIRC the static file has limited query/filter functionality so it can be difficult to make large graphs manageable for visualization. If that happens you can try using a graph database with a query UI. I remember another HN submission last year that (IIRC) used neo4j as a backend and provided a web UI with this kind of query/visualize workflow. I believe they also shared Github repos with the front-end/back-end code.

Anyway, thank you for sharing your project and sorry for the shit comment.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45066060
by credit_guy | 2026-01-07 03:25:50+00:00
That is not quite true. The advantages of LNG are much more important for high supersonic jets (Mach 2.5 and higher) than for subsonic jets. There are disadvantages too, and they are quite significant for all jets, but altogether the tradeoff is worth it at high speed long endurance supersonic jets.

Here's why. LNG offers 2 main benefits. The first is the higher energy density (53.6 MJ/kg vs 43 MJ/kg, so 25% more [1]). Airplanes are subject to the rocket equation, even if they are not rockets. The rocket equation says that the mass of the fueled vehicle is the mass of the vehicle at the end of the trip times the exponential of delta-v divided by the exhaust velocity. For airplanes, it is not exhaust velocity, but "effective exhaust velocity", because they borrow a lot of reaction mass from the atmosphere (the air used as oxidizer, and more importantly, the bypass air). The effective exhaust velocity is very high for subsonic airplanes, and much lower for high supersonic airplanes. The delta-v for subsonic airplanes is lower than the delta-v for supersonic airplanes because of the lower drag (although not as much lower as one would expect, because they need a higher attack angle). Overall, the benefit from the high energy density LNG is much more pronounced for high supersonic jets.

The second benefit is the use of the cryogenic LNG to cool off the engine. For very high speed engines, this is huge. So huge that the famous (but never materialized) SABRE engine was supposed to use liquid hydrogen, which is stored at much lower temperatures.

The disadvantage of LNG is, surprisingly, not the need for cryogenic storage. It is the lower volumetric energy density. It is 22% lower than that of jet fuel. The rocket equation does not care about volumes, only about mass, but larger volumes means bigger airplanes, so more drag.

So, for subsonic airplanes the advantages of LNG are not all that important, while the bulkier tanks are a pretty big downside. For high supersonic jets, the advantages of LNG are so high that they simply open up possibilities that are not there with jet fuel. The fact that the LNG is cheaper is a nice thing to have, but it's really not that important, since the economics of high supersonic jets are more impacted by the construction cost and very high maintenance cost than by the fuel cost.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Chemical_reacti...
by _mocha | 2026-01-07 03:26:19+00:00
I wouldn’t necessarily agree. I owned a few domains related to my name (e.g., variants of <firstname><lastname>.com), but nothing as obsessive as what Steven Wolfram is known for, and I’ve probably owned them for as long as domains have been available. I never found much utility in it. Toward the end of my career, I considered using one as a professional profile not tied to LinkedIn, but I wouldn’t say it was a better use of my time than spending it with my grandkids. Many people in our industry could benefit from stepping away from creating work solely to stand out and instead enjoying their free time.
by tguvot | 2026-01-07 03:26:41+00:00
a) they were not ethnically cleansed. even article says "displaced". this is what usually called "internally displaced". My relatives in Ukraine are "internally displaced". There was also 500k Israeli that were internally displaced during war.

b) most of cities/population in gaza is west of yellow line

d) CMCC is currently developing protocols for how to let population move east of yellow line (while preventing militants doing so), because this is where international community starts reconstruction efforts and where ISF will be deployed
by tripletao | 2026-01-07 03:27:28+00:00
The "RS-232" part is important here, since directly connecting the UART pins for the two MCUs without the RS-232 level shifters may trivially permit bidirectional dataflow, for example by reconfiguring the pins to GPIO and bit-banging a UART in the reverse direction, as already noted below. That wouldn't be directly exploitable (since you'd need to somehow bootstrap that reconfiguration in), but it would widen the attack surface.

If the cable wires control signals like DTR and RTS, then you'd need to cut those too. The goal in any case is one wire (plus ground) out of the transmitter and one wire into the receiver, with something in between that enforces data flow in only one direction. An optoisolator can do that, but a buffer without galvanic isolation (like the RS-232 level shifters) can do that too.
by quesejoe | 2026-01-07 03:27:41+00:00
Wie Ghets. Hope youre condition has improved. I went through something similar 10 years ago. I eventually isolated the cause of my illness. Its a general allergy to fungus probably. It is believed that after being infected with a virus, your mastocytes encode to react to fungus. As such, vast numbers of mastocytes are constantly firing off when you encounter mold or fungus. Here's the thing that took me a while to figure out. Traces of these protiens are common in food. Effectively, any food that isn't alive or microbe free, will cause a mild to moderate reaction. Foods that didn't cause problems, where things like, fresh meat, eggs, fresh leafy green (still alive). Anything that might have been stored in bulk, or might have had microbial activity, would cause a mild reaction. The good news is that with dietary restrictions and a clean dush and mold free home, you can live a comfortable life. Also, I think it may be the case that the encoded mastocytes eventually die out after 24 months and with it, the allergy. Not sure, but eventuntually i returned to normal and no longer am sensitive. Hope you are getting better.
by bflesch | 2026-01-07 03:27:49+00:00
The airborne mycotoxin I was exposed to is a scientifically proven carcinogen and class A indoor toxin, confirmed by an official lab. It was direct cause of my eosinophilia/asthma/sinusitis. It is the biggest gaslighting ever because two people share a place and both nearly die but from totally different diseases.

All the communities suggest you throw away everything once you leave a mold-infested place, but most can't afford that. Many keep their furniture and regret it.

I truly wish this experience upon everyone so the denial finally stops. A proper cancer would've been easier because because there is at least support network and hospitals have a damn handbook for it.
by kaashif | 2026-01-07 03:28:11+00:00
I think there is a subjective difference. When a human builds dogshit at least you know they put some effort and the hours in.

When I'm reading piles of LLM slop, I know that just reading it is already more effort than it took to write. It feels like I'm being played.

This is entirely subjective and emotional. But when someone writes something with an LLM in 5 seconds and asks me to spend hours reviewing...fuck off.