MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pear01 | 2026-01-15 17:00:11+00:00
You should read James Baldwin. Or read up on the debates post revolutionary war in the United States about the French revolution.

The truth is the land of the free has always been quite conservative. Which frankly, is true of most societies. In many ways that's what a society is.

Worse still, ICE stomping people out in the street is what freedom means to a vast swath of Americans. The rest are scared and leaderless and let down by an opposition that betrays their trust at every turn.

And yes Europeans keep telling Americans how to protest, but really they are little better. "Far right" candidates are already projecting big wins in the UK today. To say nothing of the victories far right parties have already secured in Europe. Spain is more familiar with blatant facisim and toaltarianism than Americans are. So idk... imo Europeans really pat themselves on the back too much... what would you do?

Provoking a riot is of questionable value anyway when he won a pretty convincing national victory at the polls just a year ago... no one has any answers as far as I can see, only empty expressions of anger... protest harder means what? I think a better start would be a coherent, defensible list of demands than anyone from a governor to a street activist can convey intelligently. Then you can try to enforce it.

But ultimately you can't muster more force than the state. If that is your only suggestion then it's a fruitless one.
by dragonwriter | 2026-01-15 17:00:14+00:00
> This is what happens when one allows oneself to hide in "safe spaces" (like HN) where there's a "no politics" rule

HN does not have, and never has had (except for a very brief experiment that failed spectacularly and was very quickly aborted) a “no politics” rule, and, in fact, politics is usually all over the site.
by schmuckonwheels | 2026-01-15 17:00:27+00:00
It's common sense that if these people went back to being real estate agents and boring office workers—in lieu of playing capeshit dress-up and deliberately interfering with federal law enforcement investigations—they would never be thrown on the ground and detained.

If a bank was being robbed and the cops show up, is their first instinct to walk over and start waving their smartphones around in the cops' faces demanding to know what's going on? It's 100% entitled Karen behavior and I'm sick of the "news" framing all these stories as sympathetic innocent bystanders wronged, when it's clearly lying by omission in nearly every instance.

These people have been brainwashed to believe their smartphones have turned them into superheroes, and it's going to end poorly when reality hits them in every instance.
by mosura | 2026-01-15 17:00:51+00:00
Many people have been pointing at Waco for years. Even Janet Reno later admitted regretting that episode, and yet you do not hear the left in the US saying at all that this was a problem - in fact it is stereotypical far right recruitment material.

This is why it is clear the problem with ICE is not their mode of enforcement, which is far less egregious than the Waco situation, but the fact they are remotely effective.
by HillRat | 2026-01-15 17:01:10+00:00
Man, back when I was doing Big Consulting (including gov't/defense) I had to affirmatively declare every year to Legal that I wasn't directing any investment purchases or doing anything that could be construed as improper use of nonpublic knowledge. And now Palantir reps just out here pushing insider trading tips like it's nothing, smdh.
by reena_signalhq | 2026-01-15 17:01:13+00:00
This is really interesting! Japan is such a unique market for SaaS.

From what I've heard, the biggest challenges are:
- Preference for local payment methods (not just credit cards)
- Need for Japanese language support (not just UI, but customer service)
- Relationship-based sales culture (can't just do self-serve)

Curious what your experience has been. Did you need a local entity to close enterprise deals? And how important was having Japanese-speaking support staff?
by carlosjobim | 2026-01-15 17:01:21+00:00
Not among the standard things which every government always does. Are you thinking about crimes against humanity and such?

For example, I am a very strong supporter of free speech. And many or most governments oppress free speech. But I still think that taxing labour is worse than suppressing free speech. I still think taxing labour is worse than oppressing the population with curfews, which is also something almost every government engaged in during the covid pandemic, and which I am against.
by throwaway853578 | 2026-01-15 17:01:34+00:00
Yes because one of those can get my face smashed in by a baton. Moving is a far safer option for my family.

Call it selfish if you want (hell, I'd even agree with you) but my priority is my family and my life. This idea that I have to care about "my country" is patriotic BS pounded into us to make it more likely to join the army.
by reena_signalhq | 2026-01-15 17:01:41+00:00
Love this concept! Debugging RAG retrieval is such a pain point right now.

Quick question: Does this work with any vector database (Pinecone, Weaviate, etc.) or is it specific to certain backends?

Also curious how you're measuring relevance - are you using LLM-as-judge or some other scoring method?

This could be really useful for optimizing chunk size and overlap settings!
by reena_signalhq | 2026-01-15 17:02:03+00:00
This is such an important question. I think technology is both the cause and potential solution.

Some ideas:
- Local community apps that facilitate in-person meetups (not just online chat)
- Coworking spaces that actually encourage interaction (not just silent desk rentals)
- Structured activities (book clubs, hiking groups, etc.) that give people a reason to show up

The key is creating low-pressure environments where people can connect naturally. Dating apps figured out how to get people to meet strangers - we need the same for friendships.

What approaches have worked for you personally?
by nickcw | 2026-01-15 17:02:12+00:00
The Sinclair C5 battery charger and battery was ahead of its time. I remember my Dad (who was something of a lead acid battery nerd) being very excited about it.

The battery in the C5 was designed to be run to 0% charge which would kill most lead acid batteries in no time, but if I remember rightly the charger would recover them by putting quite high voltages across them to de-sulphate them. Or something like that (not a lead acid battery nerd :-).
by fhd2 | 2026-01-15 17:02:12+00:00
Based on my own experience as someone taking the journey from junior developer to CTO of a mid sized company: No, you can't keep that mental model for long.

At first I would write code, which involves a ton of reading and _truly_ understanding code written by others.

Then I would increasingly spend my (technical) time on code reviews. At some point I lost a lot of my intuition about the system, and proper reviews took a long time, I ended up delegating all of that.

Finally, I would mainly talk to middle managers and join high level conversations. I'd still have a high level idea about how everything worked, but kinda lost my ability to challenge what our technical people told me. I made sure to carve out some time to try and stay on top, but I got really rusty.

This was over a time frame of perhaps two or three years. Since then, I've made changes, working at lower levels. I think I got my mojo back, but it took another one or two years of spending ~50% of my day programming.

Other people will be different, but that's how it was for me. To truly understand and memorise something, I need to struggle with it personally. And truly understanding things helps with a lot of higher level work.

But as with anything that takes a few years to materialise, you usually notice it quite a while after the damage is done. Long feedback cycles (like for business decisions, investments into code quality etc) are the root of all evil, IMHO.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-15 17:02:20+00:00
> you are receiving propaganda just like everyone else. It's filtered and manipulated to make the US appear worse than it is.

Of course, I realize that all news I read, from CNN, Guardian to Reuters, Fox and White House press release all have biases. Reading both sides gives you the in-the-middle perspective you need, and I recommend everyone to do the same, even if some sources like Fox are kind of hard to get through sometimes, but it's important to read both sides of every story.

> "Extra judicial murders" are federal ICE officers justifiably defending themselves. ICE is in Minneapolis and many other cities to deal with a huge population of illegals that need to be deported as expressed by the popular will of our recent democratic election.

ICE agents defending themselves isn't exclusive with "extra judicial murders", you can defend yourself but do so in the wrong way. You don't have permission to execute anyone you think might harm you, then the situation would be much worse.

Instead you have "proportional force" or similar, and I guess that's up to each observer to decide what they think that is, because it seems like the courts aren't even gonna have their input considered about it. Hence the "Extra judicial" part.
by sowbug | 2026-01-15 17:02:22+00:00
I'm sure you already saw this, but in case others haven't: https://blondihacks.com/veronica/ is required reading for anyone into 6502. I was trying to rehabilitate a Cocktail Joust arcade cabinet I'd had in storage for years, and instead went off into a 6809 time warp for a while. Quinn's 6502 blog articles were helpful for inspiration while I breadboarded a really basic 6809 computer.

I ended up giving away the Joust machine to a guy (https://web.archive.org/web/20200709102945/http://www.robotr...) who had poured his heart and soul into Robotron disassembly and also happened to be the Joust world-record holder in 1983, so I knew he'd appreciate it at least as much as I did. He happened to live in the area, and was more than happy to drive over and load it up. It's been 13 years since then. I hope he and it are doing well!

Factoid: It takes about six hours to reach 10 million points on Joust. Christian's record was 98 million points!
by zahlman | 2026-01-15 17:02:25+00:00
> When it comes to anything related to politics this problem is also exaggerated by editors selectively opposing changes based on whether they apply a desired slant to the text.

This is amplified by the fact that active editors socialize with each other heavily behind the scenes, and over a period of many years you end up with a core group that all desire to apply the same slant.
by kouteiheika | 2026-01-15 17:02:26+00:00
> Imagine you could run a stack of Mac minis that replaced your monthly Claude code bill. Might pay for itself in 6mo (this doesn’t exist yet but it theoretically could happen)

You don't have to imagine. You can, today, with a few (major) caveats: you'll only match Claude from roughly ~6 months ago (open-weight models roughly lag behind the frontier by ~half a year), and you'd need to buy a couple of RTX 6000 Pros (each one is ~$10k).

Technically you could also do this with Macs (due to their unified RAM), but the speed won't be great so it'd be unusable.
by FiveOhThree | 2026-01-15 17:02:27+00:00
To be honest I don't keep a list of examples, I usually raise an eyebrow and move on. It's typically on pages for smaller public figures where you get some extremely questionable descriptions.

It's also definitely a thing for contentious topics, a while back I tried to look up some info on the Gaza war and some of the pages were a complete battleground. I feel that there was a time when Wikipedia leaned away from using labels like "terrorist", but their modern policy seems to be that if you can find a bunch of news articles that say so then that's what the article should declare in Wikipedia's voice.
by llm_nerd | 2026-01-15 17:03:01+00:00
I honestly can't tell whether this is satire.

America's founding documents are effectively toilet paper at this point, and have been eroded to the point of being farce. America has a beholden press, a captured media, is governed by unchecked plutocrats, has a farcically busted justice system, and has the foot on the neck of Americans. Having Americans make proclamations at this point -- while their leader is openly threatening militarily annexing actual democracies that rate higher on every metric -- is simply incredible.

Every American needs to stop the online rhetoric about its once glory and spend some time doing some introspection, because Jesus Christ, this is ridiculous.
by arjie | 2026-01-15 17:03:11+00:00
I have a personal interest in getting fixes into Wikipedia. If you'll share here a couple of examples I can attempt a fix. Here are some stories of what I've done in the past where people mentioned that they've struggled with corrections (one says he was banned, another said his article was deleted, and the third said he couldn't get it corrected - I solved all of these):

https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2024-10-17/Path_Depende...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40655989

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Weierstrass_function#Accu...

One thing I should clarify is that Wikipedia's purpose is to aggregate the current general view on things. So even if you know something is true personally, you cannot put it in unless you can find a reliable place where someone has documented it. In the cases I have there I had to first find the appropriate backing references before I could make something happen so it's not a trivial fix. Getting Makoto Matsumoto in there took me many hours because I know only a tourist's amount of Japanese.

I've also edited controversial articles (the Mannheim stabbing, one of the George Floyd incident related convicts) successfully.

Anyway that's my resume. Bring me the work you need done and once I've got a moment I'll see what I can do (no guarantees, I have a little baby to care for).
by mindslight | 2026-01-15 17:03:24+00:00
Honest-to-God truthfully, reading Moldbug is what made me realize the speciousness of pure rightism and ushered my journey from a rightist-axiomatic "Libertarian" / ancap to a centrist-qualitative libertarian-without-labels that sees left and right thinking as both necessary parts of a complete whole. But YMMV, apparently!

In general I think whenever you take a "red pill", you end up confronted with a whole slew of new easy answers. Whether you end up buying into them or not really comes down to who you are as a person.
by micimize | 2026-01-15 17:03:27+00:00
Easiest to have different agents or turns that set aside the top-level goal via hooks/skills/manual prompt/etc. Heuristically, a human will likely ignore a lot of warnings until they've wired up the core logic, then go back and re-evaluate, but we still have to apply steering to get that kind of higher-order cognitive pattern.

Product is still fairly beta, but in Sculptor[^1] we have an MCP that provides agent & human with suggestions along the lines of "the agent didn't actually integrate the new module" or "the agent didn't actually run the tests after writing them." It leads to some interesting observations & challenges - the agents still really like ignoring tool calls compared to human messages b/c they "know better" (and sometimes they do).

[^]: https://imbue.com/sculptor/
Show HN: ChatCapture Pro – Auto-Save AI Conversations Locally (Chrome/Firefox)
by ChatCapturePro | 2026-01-15 17:03:35+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a browser extension that auto-saves your AI conversations locally.

Problem: I kept losing important ChatGPT/Claude conversations. No proper export,
chats disappear, browser crashes.

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Export as HTML, JSON, or plain text. 100% local, no cloud.

Tech: Manifest V3, MutationObserver for real-time detection, IndexedDB for storage.

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by watwut | 2026-01-15 17:03:46+00:00
> They blame MAGA, blame Trump for not being better, instead of looking in the mirror and becoming a party that people like enough that it can win.

Democrats should blame MAGA and Trump more. No amount of rational policy messaging will help against MAGA and Trump when you let them set the framing. All of this is caused by MAGA and Trump. Not by democrats. By republicans and especially conservatives.

It is ridiculous abuser logic to blame your immoral choices on opposition for not opposing you better. Right wing people, including farm people, should have own moral agency. They are not toddlers and yes they should be blamed.

> especially after all the scary warnings, is unfathomably incompetent and dysfunctional

None of that was scary to republicans and conservatives. They found the warning appealing.

> we wouldn't be in this mess if "farm state Democrat" was a category that was still allowed to exist. I watched one of the last of those fall, and it appeared she was hemmed in by ideological out-of-state donors who prevented her from adapting to local conditions.

Oh please. Yes we would, in fact we would be in the bigger mess. We would had two fascist parties instead of one.

The local conditions are: must hate and badmount cities at every occasion, must be attracted to violence, must have wish to mistreat liberals and everyone to the left of Trump. Because if farms voted by their economic interests, they would not voted for Trump. They voted for them because they share the values.
by amluto | 2026-01-15 17:03:47+00:00
> Sure, aluminum is a pain to work with

Really? In larger sizes, an equivalent ampacity aluminum cable is generally lighter and more flexible than copper. The main downside is that it’s thicker.

(Common terminations for larger wire sizes are often dual-rated for aluminum and copper. The engineering details for how to design lugs that work well for aluminum and copper were worked out long ago.)
by FiveOhThree | 2026-01-15 17:04:04+00:00
> Gamergate or GamerGate (GG) was a loosely organized misogynistic online harassment campaign motivated by a right-wing backlash against feminism, diversity, and progressivism in video game culture

Okay, what the actual fuck? IIRC it was people whining about the absolute state of games journalism in the 2010's.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-15 17:04:12+00:00
Intentionally choose community and the effort it takes to build and cultivate it [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]. People are work, but you cannot live without community [6].

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20250212233145/https://www.hhs.g...

[1] https://thepeoplescommunity.substack.com/

[3] https://www.tiktok.com/@amandalitman/video/75927501854034854...

[4] https://boingboing.net/2015/12/21/a-survivalist-on-why-you-s...

[5] https://boingboing.net/2008/07/13/postapocalypse-witho.html

[6] How A Decline In Churchgoing Led To A Rise In ‘Deaths Of Despair’ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46408406 - December 2025 (2 comments)
by AnimalMuppet | 2026-01-15 17:04:45+00:00
Well, first, props to you because you're actually doing something to initiate contact. That's a really big deal; more people need to do that. (Maybe even some that don't wrestle with loneliness.)

But what's you're next step? Someone comes up and marks that they feel really lonely. Do you get contact information? Invite them to something? (Invite them to what? You may have to create something - a board game night at your house, or a "lonely people shopping together" time at a grocery store, or something. You probably have to create that "something", because you're the one who's able to at least reach out, and the ones who are responding probably aren't there yet.)

You're finding people that need something. The next step is to find a way to connect them - with you, or with each other, or with someone.

For any activity you come up with, some people won't be able to, due to time or temperament or personality or something. So maybe what you need is more than one. (Eventually. Look, don't get overwhelmed by that. Just one is the next step, in my view. And maybe some helpers.)
by gwbas1c | 2026-01-15 17:05:11+00:00
Without context, it looks like the interviewer was a jerk and ambushed him.

I've seen plenty of stalling like that on major news programs, and the interviewer always knows to move on (and possibly edit something in to provide context.)

---

That being said, "who started what" and "who had what idea" are silly topics to obsesses about. It always come down to who put the long-term work in. I think Wales was "in the right" to walk off; or at least say something like "I can't tell the story accurately, so please move on to a different question."
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-15 17:05:12+00:00
> Maybe I’m wrong but I don’t think any rioters in countries like Spain go to a protest with a bet real chance on their minds that they might die.

That's the thing, they do, and have in the past too. Some might even recall riots ~70 years ago that kind of spiraled out of control and led to a civil war.

Looking at what's happening in Iran as we speak might be a good idea as well, where they've had enough, know that there is a good chance of their regime literally executing them on the spot, yet they're brave enough to continue fighting, because they realize what's at stake, and have run out of other options.

> The ICE officers are armed and absolutely will use their weapons if given half a chance to

So this was the whole point with the 2nd amendment right, that when/if the government repress you in that way, you have weapons to fight back? Or am I misunderstanding what that part is/was about?
by publicdebates | 2026-01-15 17:05:18+00:00
We don't know that it's Copilot's fault yet. Just because Microsoft is pushing more and more of its devs to use GitHub Copilot, and is bragging about how much internal code is being written by GHCP, and has had several serious crashes coinciding with this timing, this is no evidence that GH-crashes are CP-related. Let's just wait and see that Microsoft tells us it had nothing to do with GHCP. Then we will know that GH crashes had nothing to do with CP.
by burnt-resistor | 2026-01-15 17:05:22+00:00
Utopian lionization that doesn't reflect reality or the bullshit. Unqualified people have the power to tell experts who were there that their contributions are insignificant, wrong, or that details don't matter. That's just stupid and pointless, and so less people contribute to hostile and idiotic half-assery.

I'll take curated information that is better and rigorous every time.
by bjt | 2026-01-15 17:05:30+00:00
You're not the first to have the idea. For languages that are only sparsely represented in the LLMs' training data, this has actually done a lot of damage. The LLMs spew out a bunch of hallucinations, and there aren't enough qualified human editors to review it, so the human record of that language itself becomes tainted.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/09/25/1124005/ai-wikip...
by davydm | 2026-01-15 17:05:57+00:00
1. so it's banned in NY. That just means everyone else carries on as per usual.
2. how do you ban printing guns? Are printers going to be required to have some kind of AI recognition system for what they're printing? Because even if a printer can ban a specific model, tweak it here, tweak it there, and you have yourself a new model.
3. and what even is the point when you (or a friend, or a stranger you've paid) can just walk into a walmart and buy a gun? Even if there is a purchase record with id attached - you've never heard of fake ids? It's like the old slogan - if you ban guns, only criminals will have them. It's law that weakens the lawful person and strengthens the criminal.