MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by benrutter | 2026-01-19 13:01:24+00:00
> I personally don't think it's worth it to buy a Fair phone for the extremely low chance that a component breaks and you can't get it repaired.

I might be misreading you, but this comes across a little like "that one use case doesn't prove you need a fairphone so don't buy a fairphone".

I don't think most people are evaluating tech like that. Only a zealot is going to consider a fairphone as the only option, they probably are looking at a bunch of criteria and options.

There's no correct answer to "what phone should I buy?" in a way that could be proven / argued for. I think people here are just saying fairphones have great repairability.
by FergusArgyll | 2026-01-19 13:01:50+00:00
I second this.

Vibe coded projects can be cool (if they're impressive), articles about using AI can be cool (from the right people), articles about the future of AI can be cool. All of these can sometimes be too much and some of them are just poor projects / articles etc. But they should definitely be allowed; some of them are genuinely interesting / thought provoking.

Someone prompting gpt-4o "Write a nice reply comment for this <paste>" and then pasting it here is never cool. If you can't write in english, you can use google translate or even ask an llm to translate, but not to write a comment for you!
by granitepail | 2026-01-19 13:02:09+00:00
To me, it’s very obvious that the problem is social media. To social media, AI slop is peak efficiency. The affordances and incentives of the network encourage its creation. I don’t care for the media slop, but eg television media has more or less been producing crap like this for a while.

I don’t think LLMs and video/image models are a negative at all. And it’s shocking to me that more people don’t share this viewpoint.
by glemion43 | 2026-01-19 13:02:33+00:00
You clearly underestimate the quality of people I have seen and worked with.
And yes guard rails can be added easily.

Security is my only concern and for that we have a team doing only this but that's also just a question of time.

Whatever LLMs ca do today doesn't matter. It matters how fast it progresses and we will see if we still use LLMs in 5 years or agi or some kind of world models.
by chiantiM | 2026-01-19 13:02:56+00:00
The probability of landing on each number is the same—this is the theoretical stationary distribution, which can only be approximated and never perfectly reached within a finite number of steps. If we focus on completing the traversal within a finite sequence, the probability of being at 1 or 11 is the highest, while it's lowest at 6. In other words, the average number of steps to reach 6 is higher than for other numbers; it takes about 10 something steps to hit 6 than it does to hit 1, which is more than a full lap! The world of infinity is really strange, isn't it? Human intuition is always much closer to the finite.
by rr2841 | 2026-01-19 13:02:59+00:00
The machinist union requested the maximum speed to be lowered from 300 km/h to 250 km/h on multiple areas, the one where the accident happened being one of them. Both trains were driving under 210 km/h when the accident happened, so I don't think the "rattling" they reported was the issue.

As I mentioned before, this area was renovated last year, so attributing the accident to under-funding is highly unlikely. If the infrastructure happened to be the issue at the end, it might be because of different causes: eg. Planning the wrong materials for the amount of traffic / weather conditions / etc.

In general, when you talk about under-funding in the rail network it's often regional or small areas within the inter-city (larga distancia) and transport networks. High speed infrastructure is very well financed, it's not cheap to move trains close to 300 km/h.
by jurip | 2026-01-19 13:03:59+00:00
That's a serious overgeneralization. It's true for some people, but trains mostly don't bump and swerve enough for that to be a significant problem. Finnish trains have lots of seats facing backwards and while they're not anywhere as fast as something like a TGV, they're still often going 200+ km/h. People seem to be just fine. I just spent 1 hour 40 minutes yesterday sitting backwards, mostly reading a book, with no ill effects.
by antirez | 2026-01-19 13:04:14+00:00
Thanks, super interesting remarks. Funny enough I also went the route of implementing it backward :D Initially I totally skipped the text encoding part. Used Python to generate binary blogs. Also the easy 1 step test with image output correctness that you can implement immediately, with fixed seed and max pixel difference bound to floating point approximation errors, is super useful to provide the model with an immediate correctness feedback after a change.
by shevy-java | 2026-01-19 13:04:16+00:00
Their reputation actually dropped for many more reasons.

Prime was one reason - I always hated it and I felt that when Prime came out, the general service elsewhere declined. I could not accept to be a second class citizen now. Either I'd have to also use Prime - or stop using Amazon. I opted for the latter.

But there were also more complaints that people made online, which was different before Prime. The opinion of others does influence me a little bit; I try to not let it influence me, but truthfully when there are many negative comments, one becomes suspicious too. Perhaps one reason Google disabled downvotes on videos, as this was a quality control step by some users, which helped a bit; I would not waste my time on horrible videos. And for the most part, users voting was working ok-ish.
by estearum | 2026-01-19 13:05:07+00:00
Boo hoo, Americans love to poke at Europeans (Europoors/French cowards/dainty Brits/lispy Spaniards/uptight Germans) too.

This is actually what friends do.

The idea of the US actually getting into armed conflict with any of them was totally beyond the pale, yet today the American President's actions and words are causing NATO to reposition assets to defend against a possible American incursion.

It is not Europe who has become totally unhinged, and again I'll say that if the stakes weren't so high, I would be literally laughing at your supposition that it is.
Ask HN: COBOL devs, how are AI coding affecting your work?
by zkid18 | 2026-01-19 13:05:42+00:00
Curious to hear from anyone actively working with COBOL/mainframes. Do you see LLMs as a threat to your job security, or the opposite?

I feel that the mass of code that actually runs the economy is remarkably untouched by AI coding agents.
by StephenMelon | 2026-01-19 13:05:45+00:00
The problem with the App Store model is that the app could just be switched off by the powers that be. It would be better if something like this could be built into the OS. If one decentralised use case took off, then there could be other applications, like hosting the internet archive, wikipedia or LLMs, or digital cash. Might need waystations to get into rural areas but it sounds like the best long term way to secure the free internet.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-19 13:05:46+00:00
Scaleway doesn't provide unlimited egress the last time I provided beyond 75 gigs if I remember correctly and scaleway feels great in some situations but I wouldn't try to force it in here if the project is bandwidth intensive.

I don't know but Upcloud gained my loyalty when I created my account and I don't have credit card but I could still use their service and go talk to their customer service for the 7 days my trial account is active and their support was so phenomenal and nice and just, man, They aren't kidding when they say that their support can have 1 minute times in things)

I do feel like Scaleway and Upcloud too might charge more than OVH and hetzner but they both have better support and long term its really worth it.

For what its worth, I really like scaleway's stardust servers as I had analyzed some servers in Lowendtalk and other websites etc. which had benchmarks and Scaleway's stardust development servers are one of the cheapest in the market for the development boxes but they are limited to 1/2 per account but I feel like scaleway does this to get people try scaleway in the first place and I do find this really fascinating idea and not many other do it.

EU cloud is definitely under-rated especially for egress related stuff (like this) because AWS,gcloud,Azure from what I hear costs like a bank of money for egress.

I do think that more people should evaluate the right option of cloud for their job using the right "tool" for the right job.

Glad that you liked scaleway tho. I haven't had experience with scaleway tho but I have heard that they have a good slack (ironic isn't it?) server where their devs are active.

Perhaps they will go to dock which might get one day hosted on scaleway, could be really cool :)
by tialaramex | 2026-01-19 13:05:53+00:00
> In my opinion, it seems easier to complement the former to catch issues afterwards (like this article)

Fil-C of course can't magically fix your incorrect program. It never had any defined meaning, but the compiled executable does something and Fil-C will ensure that if the thing it does involves say, a use-after-free at runtime now it exits reporting the error, but it can't fix the fact it's nonsense, that's not their purview.

There's no point in hoping that somehow Programming Languages will overturn Mathematics. I mean, I can't blame you for trying, Bjarne Stroustrup is a professor and still seems to think that should be attempted, but it's futile. We're definitely talking "Why can't I extinguish the sun with water?" level thinking.

Obviously I can't speak to your own experience but for me certainly Rust is easier than C++.
by heffstaDug | 2026-01-19 13:06:21+00:00
I am still an "Engineer" but for years have been mostly meetings and Architecture, so I had same experience as you with Vibe Coding, I can get some of my ideas down quickly with my limited time available, but still apply my Engineering knowledge to drive the agents. it has been really enjoyable to get actual ideas out without hitting walls of blockers of getting things running. I know many people enjoy those problems, but I am one of those that after a day of solving hard problems, want to enjoy getting my personal ideas out. I wrote about one I built over Christmas: https://michaeldugmore.com/p/family-planner-vibe-coding-rule...
by 3rodents | 2026-01-19 13:06:39+00:00
> most people who hate Slack are probably using it because their org says so, and their org doesn't think it sucks

I agree in part but you are underestimating the power of inertia. A lot of organizations use Slack because they use Slack. Moving from Slack to something else is a headache. The OP could build an objectively better product than Slack by every single measure as accepted by every single stakeholder in a business, and still not take business away from Slack.

The current positioning is probably the best for right now. The people launching new startups who don’t love Slack might come across Dock and the pitch may resonate. As a mature product with thousands of paying customers, positioning as “Slack that doesn’t suck” won’t work to steal away Slack’s customers and Dock will need to mature their positioning, but that’s a future challenge for a different stage in growth.
by normie3000 | 2026-01-19 13:06:43+00:00
No, I went to a local electronics shop. I don't have a pile of decommissioned phones in my house, nor the eyesight or hand-steadiness for fixing things that small. User-serviceable is definitely a distinction, but I suspect family members would expect me to be their technician anyway, and I'd point them to the electronics shop due to physical issues above, and fear of bricking their devices.
by ethbr1 | 2026-01-19 13:06:47+00:00
Soft skills, in the context it's used here, include communication skills.

A key part of communication is being able to communicate ideas with someone not like you (different expertise, background, touchpoints).

Imho, a lot of software developers suck at that. (Obligatory: 'I talk to the customers so the engineers don't have to')

To the article's point, this becomes an increasingly valuable and critical skill the closer software development moves to the original requesting users. Or the closer the ability to code moves to people who were already talking to users.

Personally? I view myself as a problem solver: whether I solve a problem with code, a new technology, a conversation with a colleague, a deep dive discovery session with a SME, or a month-long series of political meetings with conflicting stakeholders, I don't care.
by Tade0 | 2026-01-19 13:06:56+00:00
> It would be nice if you got first-party parts for Samsungs, years after they're released.

I managed to have the curved screen in my 2017 Galaxy S8 replaced in 2023 or so. I don't recall there being an alternative manufacturer of those.

For flagships at least there seems to be a pool of new-old-stock parts.
by specialist | 2026-01-19 13:06:59+00:00
TIL To keep the price of Kenyan coffee low, the British set up markets and ratings. All the beans are commingled. Plus added bureaucracy. So no farmer would be directly incentivized to excel. Just a race to the bottom.

Insidious.

It perfectly described what Bezos did.

--

Sorry, I can't quickly find the article explaining the unique history of Kenyan coffee. Will add later if I do.

--

This org's page hits all the same points:

Kenya Coffee, Quality Decline & the Systemic Truth Behind the Cup
https://kenyacoffeeschool.golearn.co.ke/kenya-coffee-quality...

The article I read was written by a (western) coffee buyer explaining why he can't buy beans directly from Kenyan farmers. Whereas buyers can directly in every other country.

--

u/jrjeksjd8d found it. Woot!
by tucnak | 2026-01-19 13:07:08+00:00
If they were serious about helping us, they would bring boiler, turbine, and transformer parts.

> The project, underway since the end of 2023, is focused on the renovation and energy upgrade of a five-storey, 60-apartment block. [..] Heat pumps and solar energy now supply a large residential building in full, a first for Ukraine. Böhling urges: “Solutions like this should be prioritised over gas heating in EU-funded reconstruction.”

Not the first. I don't think some people realise this, but Ukraine is a country with highly-modernised, strong, and well spread-out industrial base. This is why it took the invaders three whole years to seriously damage our TEC onfrastructure to the point it cannot be repaired in a timely manner. And most new apartment blocks are built with heat pumps, geothermal anyway. Some smaller ones (such as the 5-story one they're taking about) were being retrofitted by housing cooperatives due to favourable economics of it. We are not third-world; most existing apartment blocks in all major cities are largely reliant on vast, redundant TEC infrastructure for power distribution and centralised heating. THAT is a solved problem.

What we need is more air defense platforms and replacement parts that we cannot easily manufacture, in numbers.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-19 13:07:19+00:00
> the information of the exact shade is discarded before the scene is committed to memory and before most conscious reasoning

I'm curious if we have any evidence for this. A lot of visual processing happens in the retina. To my knowledge, the retina has no awareness of words. I'd also assume that the visual cortex comes before anything to do with language, though that's just an assumption.

> it's not that the words we know are the reason for how we can think, it's that what differences we care about cause both the ways we think and the words we use

This is fair. Though for something like colour, a far-older system in our brains than language, I'd be sceptical of the latter controlling the former.
by jt2190 | 2026-01-19 13:07:33+00:00
It's a bit more complex and nothing new.

Roughly: An individual lawyer creates a "national brand" law firm and advertises it widely to find new clients. Of course, an individual lawyer can only take so many clients a year, so advertising nationally doesn't make sense since they'd quickly have more clients than they could ever manage. Additionally, a lawyer advertising nationally would need to be licensed in many jurisdictions and possibly also be able to handle many different legal specialties. This is essentially impossible for one person to do themselves.

Instead, the lawyer sends clients to their "associates" in the client's jurisdiction with the specialty that the client needs. For this referral, the lawyer gets a fee, agreed to beforehand.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-01-19 13:07:36+00:00
Two concepts of intelligence and neither have remotely anything to do with real intelligence, academics sure like to play with words. I suppose this is how they justify their own existence; in the absence of being intelligent enough to contribute anything of value, they must instead engage in wordplay that obfuscates the meaning of words to the point nobody understands what the hell they're talking about, and confuses the lack of understanding of what they're talking about for the academics being more intelligent than the reader.

Intelligence, in the real world, is the ability to reason about logic. If 1 + 1 is 2, and 1 + 2 is 3, then 1 + 3 must be 4. This is deterministic, and it is why LLMs are not intelligent and can never be intelligent no matter how much better they get at superficially copying the form of output of intelligence. Probabilistic prediction is inherently incompatible with deterministic deduction. We're years into being told AGI is here (for whatever squirmy value of AGI the hype huckster wants to shill), and yet LLMs, as expected, still cannot do basic arithmetic that a child could do without being special-cased to invoke a tool call. How is it that we can go about ignoring reality for so long?
by eigenspace | 2026-01-19 13:08:07+00:00
I'm cautiously hopeful (though not particularly confident) about Jolla trying again with their new phone running SailfishOS. I'm pretty tempted to pre-order one even if I know it likely won't be my daily driver.

For me, the two main blockers are camera quality, and access to banking apps. I'm in an awkward spot where I really value having as good as possible a camera on my smartphone, but I don't value camera quality so much that I'd be willing to carry around a separate device for it.

Regarding banking apps, I think this is something the EU is going to have to step in on if they want a non-America dependant phone ecosystem to grow in Europe. My vague understanding is that EU regulations basically require banks to implement 2FA where the requirements are strict enough that most banks just let Apple and Google handle it, and give zero option for alternative authentication. If the EU wants to loosen Apple and Google's hold, they're going to have to come up with a way to get citizens without Apple/Google phones to access their banks online.
by MarginalGainz | 2026-01-19 13:08:54+00:00
We are seeing this exact 'hostile information environment' play out aggressively in e-commerce search.

The 'Dead Internet' (specifically AI-generated SEO slop) has effectively broken traditional keyword search (BM25/TF-IDF). Bad actors can now generate thousands of product descriptions that mathematically match a user's query perfectly but are semantically garbage/fake.

We had to pivot our entire discovery stack to Semantic Search (Vector Embeddings) sooner than planned. Not just for better recommendations, but as an adversarial filter.

When you match based on intent vectors rather than token overlap, the 'synthetic noise' gets filtered out naturally because the machine understands the context, not just the string match. Semantic search is becoming the only firewall against the dead internet.
by fooker | 2026-01-19 13:09:08+00:00
> There's no point in hoping that somehow Programming Languages will overturn Mathematics.

Maybe you misunderstood my point?

Getting rust to a more complete state would be overturning mathematics here, as you note you can’t have both soundness and completeness.

What I say does not require overturning mathematics, ie allow unsound programs to compile but have different methods of catching them, both statically or dynamically.
by vjerancrnjak | 2026-01-19 13:09:40+00:00
I remember being quite surprised that my implementation which uses manual stack updates is much slower than what compiler had with recursion.

Turns out, I was pushing and popping from stack on every conceptual "recursive call", but compiler figured out it can keep 2-3 recursive levels in registers and pop/push 30% of the time, had more stuff in memory than my version as well.

Even when I reduced memory read/writes to ~50% of the recursive program, kept most of the state in registers, the recursive program was faster anyway due to just using more registers than me.

I realized then that I cannot reason about the microoptimizations at all if I'm coding in a high-level language like C or C++.

Hard to predict the CPU pipeline, sometimes profile guided optimization gets me there faster than my own silliness of assuming I can reason about it.
by yorwba | 2026-01-19 13:10:46+00:00
Nuclear fuel reprocessing plants release iodine into the atmosphere. The prevailing wind direction at European latitudes is west to east, so when the iodine comes back down in rain, it'll likely do so over Russia (emptying into the Arctic Ocean), Central Asia (emptying into the Caspian Sea and various lakes) or Northeast Asia (emptying into the nortwestern Pacific Ocean, including the Yellow Sea.) This paper has an illustration: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03043...
by xenospn | 2026-01-19 13:11:16+00:00
I’ve made my career in startups (early employee of a success startup, founder of a failed startup, and now CTO of an early stage startup). Seems like the “cost” of starting something new is basically zero these days. You can “start” 5 different companies in an afternoon. The big differentiator is audience - if no one knows who you are, it’s so much harder to reach potential customers. I’d focus on building an audience first (LinkedIn/twitter), which will make things so much easier for you. You also don’t really need cofounders, it’s much faster building alone when you’re starting from zero.
by ThisNameIsTaken | 2026-01-19 13:11:53+00:00
As Fairphone owner I have become somewhat sceptical of their repairability claim.

Mine fell on its side on some pebble stones. The power-button, unprotected by the case, got scratched. The button doubles as a fingerprint reader, which ceased working due to the scratch. At first, I thought "no worries, this phone is friendly to those who want to repair it."

It turns out, this part is not available for replacement. I think this is an oversight; just like the screen, it is an outward facing part, hence, bound to be damaged for some.

Then, I brought it to my local repair shop. The owner had to tell me that they cannot repair Fairphone's, and that, for him, it is one of the worst companies to deal with. They try to centralise all repairs in their own repair center. Which means sending the phone -- which I need -- away for 2 weeks; paying a fee for diagnosis, an unknown cost for repair, and the hassle of a flashed phone. I already know what's broken, I just want the part.

I feel this is a real shame, as I am fully supportive of the stated aims of the company, and I want the product to be good.

[Aside: suggestions on how to deal with a scratched fingerprint reader are most welcome. E.g. can the scatch be re-painted? The phone thinks the reader is there, but it doesn't register any touch. ]
by faidit | 2026-01-19 13:11:59+00:00
This Chinese study says it was dispersed through global atmospheric circulation and mentions the liquid and gaseous discharge from nuclear facilities at Sellafield (UK) and La Hague (France) as sources. Russian tests are mentioned as well but they are apparently not the sole or primary source.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00489...