MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 1970-01-01 | 2026-01-17 16:32:54+00:00
A.

That's the most likely use case for anyone. You want the one-offs when cracking, and not a compressed 2GB blob of data that may or may not have your answer.

B. The king of search has held the goal of organizing and making information useful and searchable since dinosaurs roamed the WWW.

https://www.google.com/intl/en_us/search/howsearchworks/our-...

C. It's just lazy and shows that they don't actually care anymore. Making a custom search has been their bread and butter for decades. The last step is the easiest but they could not be bothered.
by yojo | 2026-01-17 16:34:30+00:00
I get that we’re all part of the same system, but I consider Office Space a nihilistic rejection of the entirety of that system. It’s not just “my boss is dumb,” it’s “this whole system is anti-human and dumb, and we’d all be happier working outside with our muscles.”

And it’s totally appropriate for that message to resonate with my boss, but it’s weird for my boss to make that message the focus of what is ostensibly a corporate team-building event.

Edit: just realized I used a “it’s not just this, it’s that” construction. I swear I’m not an LLM, but maybe their prose is infecting my brain.
by deaux | 2026-01-17 16:34:45+00:00
Are they designing it, or is the DOD - sorry, the Department of War that you're likely paying your taxes towards - designing it on their platform? As mentioned, who is providing the data necessary for such applications? For ICE, which this thread is about, it's clearly the likes of news.ycombinator.com's Flock (S17). Whether they put it in a simple Postgres instance or on Databricks or on Palantir's platform or on Microsoft Fabric, I think that's much less core than whose gathering and providing the data.
by cratermoon | 2026-01-17 16:34:50+00:00
Also this list of Windows bugs, just from this week.

- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/5709441/...
- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/release-health/sta...
- https://www.techspot.com/news/110848-onedrive-backup-feature...
by kleene_op | 2026-01-17 16:35:21+00:00
Spatial awareness was also a huge limitation to Claude playing pokemon.

It really seems to me that the first AI company getting to implement "spatial awareness" vector tokens and integrating them neatly with the other conventional text, image and sound tokens will be reaping huge rewards.
Some are already partnering with robot companies, it's only a matter of time before one of those gets there.
by wat10000 | 2026-01-17 16:35:26+00:00
A major difference is what costs money.

A civil engineer might work on a major bridge that costs a billion dollars to build. An automotive engineer might work on a car that has a cumulative billions of dollars in production costs. An aeronautical engineer might work on a plane with a $100 million price tag.

The engineer’s job there is to save money. Spend a week slimming down part of that bridge and you’ve substantially reduced costs, great! Figure out how to combine three different car parts into one and you’ve saved a couple of dollars on every car you make, well worth it.

Software doesn’t have construction costs. The “engineer” (I have the word in my job title but I hesitate to call us that) builds the whole thing. The operating costs are often cheap. Costs like slow rendering are paid by the customer, not the builder.

In that environment, it’s often not a positive ROI to spend a week making your product more efficient. If the major cost is the “engineers” then your focus is on saving them time. If you can save a week of their time at the cost of making your customers wait 50ms longer for every action, that is where you see your positive ROI.

When software contributes to the cost of a product, you tend to see better software work. Your headphones aren’t running bloated React frameworks because adding more memory and CPU is expensive. But with user-facing software, the people who pay the programmers are usually not the people who pay for the hardware or are impacted by performance.
by Deukhoofd | 2026-01-17 16:36:22+00:00
Crusader Kings is a franchise I really could see LLMs shine. One of the current main criticisms on the game is that there's a lack of events, and that they often don't really feel relevant to your character.

An LLM could potentially make events far more aimed at your character, and could actually respond to things happening in the world far more than what the game currently does. It could really create some cool emerging gameplay.
by bryanrasmussen | 2026-01-17 16:36:29+00:00
OK, I probably should specify closer, but while the other commenter has noted there is "burglary" in the UK, I was using burglary in the vernacular, meaning you entered someone's house without their knowledge and stole some shit. I was perhaps unclear with this and in fact in some places what entering someone's house that is not locked and stealing some shit may be a different crime than when it is locked both variations are still generally described, in common usage, as a burglary and are both illegal according to every legal code of every place I've lived, which I've lived in a lot of Western Civ type places.
by nightski | 2026-01-17 16:36:31+00:00
I own an induction stove, and overall really enjoy it. But there are certain types of cooking it's not nearly as well suited to (still possible, but not as good). One of those is cooking on a wok.

But really it comes down to heating. Heat pumps are not universally better. We are currently sitting at -25C or so which is pretty common in the winter (it can even get a fair bit colder at times). Hardly any of the contractors around here work with heat pumps, and even the ones that do aren't aware of the latest tech. That said even if you could get a cutting edge system through sheer money/will I am not sure how it would perform without at least a gas backup. At least from an efficiency standpoint.

Not to mention we have had electricity go out in the winter which can be life threatening or at least cause substantial damage to property. I can't remember ever having the gas go out. (we have generator backup but that couldn't run an electric furnace for very long).

Lastly we have a gas water heater (tankless) and damn that thing is efficient. A few therms a month...
Show HN: Cppsp v1.4 –– multi-var support: var a,b,C = 1,2,3 int
by user19870 | 2026-01-17 16:36:48+00:00
# cppsp --a transpiled script-like language that converts to c++

-var.....type: declare variables with/without values. Support multi variables and type can be written as int/float/char/string/bool. <{1+1}> is a value but 1+1 not(it's expression)

-example:

import string,iostream
var a,c,d = 1,
<{(2*2+6)/2}>
,4 int
var b = "hello world" string
var f1,f2,f3 float
var c1 char
var b1 = <{1+1==2}> bool
input(f1)
print(a," ",c," ",d," ",b," ",b1," ",f1)
by TimorousBestie | 2026-01-17 16:36:59+00:00
The book is okay (I think I gave it three stars on Goodreads?) but in my opinion it suffers from Neal Stephenson syndrome: the book kinda just ends without a whole lot of anticlimax or resolution. The pacing is all over the place and the supporting cast are more like character sketches than characters.

I think Foucault’s Pendulum is a significantly better novel that uses the basic themes in more compelling ways.
by Kye | 2026-01-17 16:37:01+00:00
I'm on a decent power co-op that keeps the lines clear and has a fleet of trucks ready to roll before storms, but it still goes out when some drunk fool takes a run at a power pole or when lightning hits the right spot. And then there's the wind. Good management can only do so much.

Outages only last 1-4 hours at most though, so a LED lamp plugged in to a UPS is more than enough.
by throwyawayyyy | 2026-01-17 16:37:17+00:00
In the rosiest view, the rich give their children private tutors (and always have), and now the poor can give their children private tutors too, in the form of AIs. More realistically, what the poor get is something which looks superficially like a private tutor, yet instead of accelerating and deepening learning, it is one that allows the child to skip understanding entirely. Which, from a cynical point of view, suits the rich just fine...
by ben_w | 2026-01-17 16:37:21+00:00
> They can't be as dumb as thinking no one would've noticed?!

With over 20 years of experience as an adult, and more years of noticing dumb mistakes of adults when I was a teen, I can absolutely assure you that even before LLMs were blowing smoke up their user's backsides and flattering their user's intelligence, plenty of people are dumb enough to make mistakes like this without noticing anything was wrong.

For example, I'm currently dealing with customer support people that can't seem to handle two simultaneous requests or read the documents they send me, even after being ordered to pay compensation by an Ombudsman. This kind of person can, of course, already be replaced by an LLM.
by AndrewKemendo | 2026-01-17 16:37:27+00:00
I think the thing that’s so weird to me is this idea that we have to all somehow internalize the concept of transistor switching as the foundational unchangeable root of computing and therefore anything that is too far abstract from that is not somehow real computing or something mess like that

Again ignoring completely that when you would program vacuum tube computers it was an entirely different type of abstraction than you do with Mosfets for example

I’m finding myself in the position where I can safely ignore any conversation about engineering with anybody who thinks that there is a “right” way to do it or that there’s any kind of ceremony or thinking pattern that needs to stay stable

Those are all artifacts of humans desiring very little variance and things that they’ve even encoded because it takes real energy to have to reconfigure your own internal state model to a new paradigm
by ForceBru | 2026-01-17 16:38:28+00:00
True, but teachers don't train LLMs. Good LLMs can only be trained by massive corporations, so training an "LLM for schools" must be centralized. This should of course be supervised by the government, so the government ends up deciding what needs pushback and what kind of pushback. This alone is not easy because someone will have to enumerate the things that need pushback, provide examples of such "bad things", provide "correct" alternatives and so on. This then feeds into data curation and so on.

Teachers are also "local". The resulting LLM will have to be approved nation-wide, which is a whole can of worms. Or do we need multiple LLMs of this kind? How are they going to differ from each other?

Moreover, people will hate this because they'll be aware of it. There will be a government-approved sanitized "LLM for schools" that exhibits particular "correct" and "approved" behavior. Everyone will understand that "pushing back" is one of the purposes of the LLM and that it was made specifically for (indoctrination of) children. What is this, "1984" or whatever other dystopian novel?

Many of the things that may "need" pushback are currently controversial. Can a man be pregnant? "Did the government just explicitly allow my CHILD to talk to this LLM that says such vile things?!" (Whatever the "things" may actually be) I guarantee parents from all political backgrounds are going to be extremely mad.
by axpy906 | 2026-01-17 16:39:02+00:00
I haven’t used their product so you’re probably right. I’m biased as an AI engineer because I get contacted to help implement AI in existing platforms. While I admire the pivot the reality is what they have is already quite behind. Anything I make these days is old in about three months… You’d ideally want to start fresh and not have to worry about codebase that is years old.
by snackbroken | 2026-01-17 16:39:02+00:00
> I don’t believe I’ve ever seen shape utilized in generated ASCII art, and I think that’s because it’s not really obvious how to consider shape when building an ASCII renderer.

Acerola worked a bit on this in 2024[1], using edge detection to layer correctly oriented |/-\ over the usual brightness-only pass. I think either technique has cases where one looks better than the other.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gg40RWiaHRY
by Aurornis | 2026-01-17 16:39:06+00:00
In the world of rationalist blogs, writing anything too negative about someone is dismissed as a "hit piece" which is license to ignore it. The only way to write negatively about a person is to write a both-sides style evaluation where you sandwich the criticism in between praise for the person. It's a way of signaling that you're a nice person who isn't just being mean, before you get to the meat of the issue.

This blog fits that format: It starts with praise for the person, some signaling about being their biggest fan, and then gets into the topic he actually wanted to write about.

When articles started coming out about the author of this blog and some of his problematic past with reactionaries and race science, the common tactic to dismiss any criticisms was to claim they were "hit pieces" and therefore could be ignored. In this community, you have to write in both-sides style and use "steelmanning" to pretend to support something before you're allowed to criticize it.
by lysace | 2026-01-17 16:39:10+00:00
Seems like stellar work. Kudos.

I am however am struck with the from an outsider POV highly niche specific terminology used in the title.

"ASCII rendering".

Yes, I know what ASCII is. I understand text rendering in sometimes painful detail. This was something else.

Yes, it's a niche and niches have their own terminologies that may or may not make sense in a broader context.

HN guidelines says "Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."

I'm not sure what is the best course of action here - perhaps nothing. I keep bumping into this issue all the time at HN, though. Basically the titles very often don't include the context/niche.
by niemandhier | 2026-01-17 16:39:17+00:00
This is dangerous advice.

You need to read the situation very carefully:

Antisocial behavior is often an attempt to gain status in the subjects in-group. Breaking rules in a way conveys power.

Violence against members of the out-group is an even more effective way to display dominance and hence gain status.

Unless you play a repeated game with the other person there is little to gain for you by initiating conflict.

Even if you assume you have something to gain, always consider the other person might have little to lose and ( my opinion) never display aggression you are not willing to back up.

Sources:
1. Rory Miller: ”Meditations on Violence”

2. Life experiences, that match 1’s observations
by chongli | 2026-01-17 16:39:20+00:00
Heat pumps do not do well when it's -40 outside. You can say "fine, but how often does it get that cold?" but consumers are not going to be happy with a heat pump if their pipes freeze during an extended cold snap.

I live in Southern Ontario and I have a heat pump with an auxiliary natural gas furnace for emergency heating. The heat pump shoulders most of the heating load but the thermostat does kick on the furnace when the heat pump starts falling behind.

It should also be noted that although heat pumps are very efficient, even when it's below freezing outside, they cannot raise the temperature of the house very quickly. Consumers are generally quite unhappy when it takes 8 hours to raise the temperature of the house by 1 degree, so the thermostat usually calls for the furnace to start up before things get that bad.
by ghaff | 2026-01-17 16:39:31+00:00
"Something" would have fitted but it would have been a big volume downgrade. In any case, fire happened and all the cabinetry and appliances came out anyway. So things worked out. Had a bit of margin but not enough to accommodate a current French Door fridge.

(Suspect changes in energy regs would have made what I had difficult to accommodate.)
by dpc050505 | 2026-01-17 16:40:09+00:00
I sold a few billions of runescape gold I acquired through staking during the pandemic. It was worth several thousands of dollars at the time. I declared the income when I filed taxes in Canada, as one would if they're a law abiding citizen.

If I hadn't sold it I wouldn't have made any income and it would make no sense to disclose anything about what's happening in a video game.
by jadenPete | 2026-01-17 16:41:07+00:00
I think the point about tooling being the problem deserves more emphasis. I'm a firm believer that the right thing to do should be the easiest thing to do. Currently, the easiest place to innovate is at the top of the stack, using web technologies and languages like JavaScript.

You can see this with languages like Rust and Go—they're some of the first low-level programming languages with actually good tooling, and, as a result, they're becoming very popular. I can pull down some code, run `cargo build`, and not have to worry about the right libraries being installed on my system and whether I've generated a Makefile. Packages are easily searchable, hosted on popular platforms like GitHub, and I can file bugs and ask questions without having to join an obscure mailing list or deal with an unfriendly community.

If you want your language/library/framework/layer in the stack to become popular, make the tooling good and make it easy for folks to get their questions answered. Everything else will follow.
by alephnerd | 2026-01-17 16:41:16+00:00
Reuters is a business news wire like Bloomberg, so the impact on businesses is always included in reports. Additionally, these kinds of moves do have an impact on various portions of the financial market - from loan underwriting to lending to real estate sales.

Germany also enacted a similar law back in 2008, allowing for the Wohn-Riester, which is basically a 401k but for home purchases or paying off your principal. Allowing a 401k to be used for both retirement and home purchases allows for it to become a unified Riester.
by bob1029 | 2026-01-17 16:41:32+00:00
These do not address the concern of fault current handling. This is a much more localized and severe condition than frequency deviation. Think about dropping a literal crowbar across the output of a solar inverter. This is a situation the grid has to deal with constantly.

I'd argue that nothing that uses semiconductors would be suitable for the task. They get you to maybe 2x rated current capacity for a meaningful duration. A spinning turbine can easily handle 10x or more for a much longer duration.

We could put so many redundant transistors in parallel that we have equivalent fault handling, but then we are into some strong economic issues. There's also no room for error with semiconductors. Once you start to disintegrate, it's all over ~instantly. There is no way to control this. A synchronous machine can trade downstream maintenance schedule for more current right now. The failure is much more gradual over time. A human operator can respond quickly enough if the machine is big enough.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-17 16:41:36+00:00
I've been back and forth between manager and IC, too.

It is different. I won't deny that.

However, politics and corporate absurdist formalities aren't exclusive to management. A lot of the corporate politics and face-palm worthy office games I've dealt with came from ICs, either as my peers, reports, or as some other manager's reports.

We just tend to give a pass to ICs when they do it because they're not viewed as having as much power in the office.
by mancerayder | 2026-01-17 16:42:10+00:00
What are you doing out in nature if you need to be around music and feel lonely? Stay in the city, leave the country to people who want to actually get a break from the city for their mental health.

In my case, listening to other people's music damages my mental health. If I encounter someone on a trail with music (this has not happened here in the northeast to me yet) they'll encounter a string of direct to-face insults from me.
by stephantul | 2026-01-17 16:42:19+00:00
Amazing post, I didn’t think this through a lot, but since you are normalizing the vectors and calculating the euclidean distance, you will get the same results using a simple matmul, because euclidean distance over normalized vectors is a linear transform of the cosine distance.

Since you are just interested in the ranking, not the actual distance, you could also consider skipping the sqrt. This gives the same ranking, but will be a little faster.
by strict9 | 2026-01-17 16:42:47+00:00
As I have heard from mid level managers and C suite types across a few dev jobs. Staff are the largest expense and the technology department is the largest cost center. I disagree because Sales couldn't exist with a product but that's a lost point.

This is why those same mid level managers and C suite people are salivating over AI and mentioning it in every press release.

The reality is that costs are being reduced by replacing US teams with offshore teams. And the layoffs are being spun as a result of AI adoption.

AI tools for software development are here to stay and accelerate in the coming months and years and there will be advances. But cost reductions are largely realized via onshore/offshore replacement.

The remaining onshore teams must absorb much more slack and fixes and in a way end up being more productive.
by could-of | 2026-01-17 16:43:06+00:00
According to MOS:GENDERID [1], a person's former name can be used when they were notable under that name. You're trying to make it out as if there's some nefarious double standard when there's not, editors just want Wikipedia to be clear and encyclopedic.

It's incredible that in a discussion about brutal violence against a child, the child victim is being painted as the "extremist"!

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Biog...
by mayswind | 2026-01-17 16:43:22+00:00
I'm pleased to announce the release of ezBookkeeping v1.3.0, a lightweight, self-hosted, open-source personal finance and bookkeeping application focused on privacy, performance, and flexibility.

What's new in v1.3.0

1. New language support: Kannada, Turkish, Slovenian

2. Insights Explorer: Building on the preset charts provided by ezBookkeeping's existing Statistics & Analysis features, Insights Explorer introduces a fully customizable query and charting system. You can define queries from scratch and turn them into visual charts. These queries and charts can be saved as Explorers, which you can reuse later to analyze data across different date ranges.

3. Transaction tag groups: Makes it much easier to manage merchants, payees, projects, members, or other classification dimensions.

4. Improved timezone & DST handling: Uses daylight saving time zones correctly during DST periods. Better support for IANA timezone names during data imports.

For those who are new to the project:

ezBookkeeping is designed to be easy to deploy (a single Docker command), resource-efficient, and scalable. It runs well on everything from a Raspberry Pi to NAS devices and servers. It offers a responsive UI for both desktop and mobile, supports PWA for a native-like mobile experience, and provides powerful bookkeeping, analysis, and import/export capabilities while keeping your data fully under your control.

Many other improvements and bug fixes, see full changelog: https://github.com/mayswind/ezbookkeeping/releases/tag/v1.3....

GitHub: https://github.com/mayswind/ezbookkeeping

Live Demo: https://ezbookkeeping-demo.mayswind.net
by microtonal | 2026-01-17 16:44:19+00:00
I think there wasn't a culture of buying ACs, because in most of Europe the climate was much more moderate. The summers are much hotter now than when I was a kid and heat waves are more regular. Many more people are buying air conditioning now.

Much of the US already had warmer summers than Europe when the impact of climate change was smaller, so AC is far more common.