MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aleph_minus_one | 2026-01-16 11:40:02+00:00
>
Does anyone know other innovative PoW chains?

Wikipedia gives some ideas:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Proof_of_work&old...

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Proof_of_work&old...

For example

* Cuckoo Cycle: https://docs.grin.mw/wiki/miscellaneous/cuckoo-cycle/

* The paper "Ofelimos: Combinatorial Optimization via Proof-of-Useful-Work A Provably Secure Blockchain Protocol": https://crypto.iacr.org/2022/papers/538804_1_En_12_Chapter_O...

Quote from Wikipedia concerning Ofelimos: "At the IACR conference Crypto 2022 researchers presented a paper describing Ofelimos, a blockchain protocol with a consensus mechanism based on "proof of useful work" (PoUW). Rather than miners consuming energy in solving complex, but essentially useless, puzzles to validate transactions, Ofelimos achieves consensus while simultaneously providing a decentralized optimization problem solver. [...] The paper gives an example that implements a variant of WalkSAT, a local search algorithm to solve Boolean problems.|"
by magpi3 | 2026-01-16 11:40:21+00:00
> Purpose-driven institutions built around transparency, cooperation, and accountability empower individuals to take intellectual risks and challenge the status quo.

I am not sure if I am off-topic, but I am having a lot of trouble with this statement. Institutions are often opaque, and I have never belonged to an institution that empowered me to "take intellectual risks and challenge the status quo." Quite the contrary.
by intended | 2026-01-16 11:41:18+00:00
Come now. You mean the highly regulated, more competitive world of law? That too, as it is practiced in America? The once capital of economic competition?

That “cartel”?

Vs the leaders of an industry that built their tools through insane amounts of copyright infringement, and have forced the coining of “enshittification” to describe all pervasive business strategies?

The same industry which employs acqui-hire to find ways to cull competition?
by grunder_advice | 2026-01-16 11:41:37+00:00
I don't discount that people have different values and interests. I said that propaganda compounds on those divisions. I think aligning values is also something that is actionable, but that's another topic altogether. My general feeling is that our democracies would be much healthier without embellished fake new narratives about what is happening around us, irrespective of how different our values might be.

For example, let's take global warming as an example. The embellished fake news narrative is that any action at all to reduce our carbon footprint will bring about complete economic collapse, and that global warming is fake news anyway and extreme weather has a completely intangible effect on the life of people living today.

Both of those are false embellished fake news narratives that build upon real concerns. It's true that we should keep the economic health of the nation in frame when we discuss measures. It's true that we might to some extent insure ourselves against natural distastes. But the fake news narrative is the embellishment of these concerns.
by toofy | 2026-01-16 11:41:41+00:00
i think when most people bring up mistakes that these models make, much of their concern is that little can be done.

when one of the juniors makes a mistake, i can talk to them about it and help them understand where they went wrong, if they continue to make mistakes we can change their position to something more suited for them. we can always let them go if they have too much hubris to learn.

who do we hold to account when a model makes a mistake? we’re already beginning to see, after major fuckups, companies blackhole nullrouting accountability into “not our fault, don’t look at us, ai was wrong”

the other thing is, if you have done a good job selecting your team, you’ll have people who understand their limits, who understand when to ask for help, who understand when they don’t know something. a major problem with current models is that it will always just guess or stretch toward random rather than halt.

so yes, people will make mistakes, but at least you can count on being able to mitigate for those after.
by wvh | 2026-01-16 11:41:51+00:00
I used to think that way. Then, divorce, custody battle and the dark abyss. No home, nobody to talk to; just silence, loneliness, general apathy of the world around you. It's the trap of the middle-aged man: to focus on work, invest in family, and hope these things will be a constant because you are doing the right thing. We don't have enough emotional bonds, don't know how to create them, and if the wife leaves and takes the kids, there's nothing left.
by throwawayqqq11 | 2026-01-16 11:41:54+00:00
> Sorry, they've done [critizing trump] so much that people have become deaf to it.

You switched again! From "dems do too little" to "they actually do too much"! And the best part: by talking about the quantity and theater around it, you dont have to face the content. Even when the message doesnt get amplified by billionares and distributed to their usefull idiots, that critizism about trump might still be very relevant and valid! NO MATTER HOW MUCH REP. THINK 'UFF, HEARD THIS BEFORE'!

> Thinking like yours is a big reason the Democrats lose

> You basically want to lean all in on negative campaigning

Dude, Trump is the one who ran with deportation! Precisely because he has no better constructive vision! I EXPLAINED IT TO YOU IN ANOTHER ANSWER, THAT THIS IS THE MAIN DIFFERENCE BT. THE PARTIES. Conservatives only have their identity politics and thus is constructing and enemy (migrants, antifa, liberals) THEIR ONLY SHTICK!

And because FoxNews and social media has grilled your brain so well, no matter what we "other" people say in response, in your head, it will be wrong. This entire subthread is just another case of insanity.

You cant imagine how frustrating this is. Conservatives need to grow an f'ing spine and oppose trump too, but reading your ad-hoc, brain-off replies ...
Show HN: Quint Visualizer – A GraphViz-like visualizer for Quint traces
by Noghartt | 2026-01-16 11:42:33+00:00
I started digging deeper into Quint (https://quint-lang.org/), but I missed a tool that let me explore trace samples, something like how TLA+ uses GraphViz to visualize the state graph.

So I vibecoded a small web tool that lets you upload a valid JSON file and explore Quint trace in different stages.
by b65e8bee43c2ed0 | 2026-01-16 11:42:53+00:00
>I also find it strange that in a page about solutions to loneliness, you reject one that, by your own admission, would introduce someone lonely to a wide variety of new people.

I don't see how sharing the bathroom and the kitchen with alcoholics, drug addicts, ex-cons, and mentally ill could possibly alleviate one's loneliness. and trust me, even a few of those per floor are enough to make living there an unpleasant experience.

you picture SRO as some kind of hippie commune thing. it's not. again: no one in their sane mind actively chooses to live in such inhumane conditions. it is utterly bizarre to me that someone would romanticize sharing a toilet with fifty other people.
by adrian_b | 2026-01-16 11:44:47+00:00
I do not see how it can be claimed that "LLMs are a spectacular demolition of that premise", because LLMs must be trained on an amount of text far greater than that to what a human is exposed.

I have learned one foreign language just by being exposed to it almost daily, by watching movies spoken in that language, without using any additional means, like a dictionary or a grammar (because none were available where I lived; this was before the Internet). However, I have been helped in guessing the meaning of the words and the grammar of the language, not only by seeing what the characters of the movie were doing, correlated to the spoken phrases, but also by the fact that I knew a couple of languages that had many similarities with the language of the movies that I was watching.

In any case, the amount of the spoken language to which I had been exposed for a year or so, until becoming fluent in it, had been many orders of magnitudes less than what is used by a LLM for training.

I do not know whether any innate knowledge of some grammar was involved, but in any case the knowledge of the grammar of other languages had helped tremendously in reducing the need for being exposed to greater amounts of text, because after seeing only a few examples I could guess the generally-applicable grammar rules.

There is no doubt that the way by which a LLM learns is much dumber than how a human learns, which is why this must be compensated by a much bigger amount of training data.

Seeing how the current inefficiency of LLM training has already caused serious problems for a great number of people, who either had to give up on buying various kinds of electronic devices or they had to accept to buy devices of a much worse quality than previously desired and planned, because the prices for DRAM modules and for big SSDs have skyrocketed, due to the hoarding of memory devices by the rich who hope to become richer by using LLMs, I believe that it has been proven beyond doubt that the way how LLM learn, for now, is not good enough and it is certainly not a positive achievement, as more people have been hurt by it than the people who have benefited from it.
by fatherwavelet | 2026-01-16 11:45:38+00:00
The printing press was also used to print witch hunting books and caused 200 years of mass hysteria around witches and witch trials.

Before the printing press, only the clergy could "identity" witches but the printing press "democratized knowledge" of witch identification at larger scale.

The algorithmic version of "It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so" is going to cause huge trouble in the short and medium term.
by solatic | 2026-01-16 11:46:13+00:00
Is there anyone out there that has actually, in the real world, realized CUE's promise of bundling type safety + data/configuration + task running in such a way that does not require wrapping it in shell scripts? Can you set up your CI/CD pipelines so that it's literally just invoking some cue cmd, and have that cmd invocation be reasonably portable?

The problem is, once you have to wrap CUE, the loss of flexibility within a special-purpose language like CUE is enough for people to ask why not just bother writing the scripts in a general purpose language with better ecosystem support. And that's a hard sell in corporate environments, even ones that find benefit in type safe languages in general, because they can just pick a general purpose language with a static type checker.
by Ray20 | 2026-01-16 11:46:22+00:00
> I hope the cartoon villain responses coming from the administration when they're challenged on any of this will get more people to stand up against it all.

I don't think we should expect people to stand up against all of this. Even if most of them don't like it, let's be honest, it's not a dealbreaker for them. Especially if the next election other party puts forward some deliberately hypocritical, racist, out-of-touch elitist like Kamala Harris.
by boelboel | 2026-01-16 11:46:29+00:00
So you're saying codemonkeys are mad they don't get seen as the 'cool guys', we have to kill the jobs 'cool guys' have. The codemonkeys will never be cool, just accept it, there's no way to fix it. These cool guys will for the most part be 'cool' even if you take away their jobs right now.
by amiga386 | 2026-01-16 11:47:24+00:00
I'm not saying Jimmy Wales is Wikimedia.

This promotional website is created by the Wikimedia Foundation (it says so in the About page), and "has no qualms with omitting information" (GGP's claim), as it fails to mention that Jimmy Wales is co-founder of Wikipedia alongside Larry Sanger. By contrast, Wikipedia does not omit this fact.
by chownie | 2026-01-16 11:48:15+00:00
I am hoping this space improves, I wanted to cast video to watch some stuff with friends last year and the software to accomplish this now is both really heavy (does EVERY part of the process need to run http server?) and convoluted.

We ended up just doing a discord screen share, which evaded all the tunnelling/transcoding/etc issues which made us give up on WebRTC.
by rolandog | 2026-01-16 11:48:36+00:00
> You have individuals who at best completely a BSc in Business Studies, and you are asking them to decide on COVID or climate change. That by itself is a hard ask. [...]

Personally, I don't think it's that hard of an ask. The problem was allowing the platforming of disinformation sponsored by adversary nation states that led to the mental pollution and radicalization of so many individuals.

Also, not protecting the neutral institutions and allowing that distrust be sown was a big mistake.

Finally, not taking the reports of infiltration of police and security agencies by extreme right organizations seriously has been proving to be a nation-ending level of an error.
by toofy | 2026-01-16 11:48:41+00:00
i think this is much much much closer to going in reverse back to when the church were the deciders rather than liberating knowledge the way the printing press did.

the church did the thinking for the peasants. the church decided what the peasants heard, etc… this is moving absolutely in that direction.

the models now do the thinking, the owners of the models decide what the models get to see.
owners of the models decide how much we have to pay to access it.
by Traumen | 2026-01-16 11:49:22+00:00
Looking at popular LLM agent frameworks, a consistent pattern emerges: most systems are directed graphs with shared state, conditional routing, and feedback loops.

Adding LLM-driven decision-making and cycles turns a traditional workflow into what we now call an “agent.” The distinction feels more like a spectrum than a clear boundary.

Curious how others define the line in practice.
by intended | 2026-01-16 11:49:32+00:00
I fear the title of this article is going drive most of the conversation.

I haven’t read through the whole thing yet, but so far the parts of the argument I can pull out are about how Institutions actually work, as in a collection of humans. AI, as it currently stands, interacts with humans themselves in ways that hollow out the kind of behavior we want from institutions.

“ Perhaps if human nature were a little less vulnerable to the siren’s call of
shortcuts, then AI could achieve the potential its creators envisioned for it. But that is not the world we live in. Short-term political and financial incentives amplify the worst aspects of AI systems, including domination of human will, abrogation of accountability, delegation of responsibility, and obfuscation of knowledge and control”

An analogy that I find increasingly useful is that of someone using a forklift to lift weights at gym. There is an observable tendency when using LLMs, to cede agency entirely to the machine.
by hojofpodge | 2026-01-16 11:49:43+00:00
Business owners turn fascist over economic anxiety. Hitler's funders were afraid they would be irrelevant in an international context.

The people have real grievances but tend to follow any *hole who has been the visible problem all along but can say the problem is that they were blocked from creating the ultimate vision of a perfect **hole.

I don't know the answer to representational democracy but I think there is something in systems like the Scandinavian judiciary where the jury is professional and competent.

A place like the US is a failure because there is a fear of setting any professional requirements on political positions. This is not irrational because the US has not dealt with its history of Jim Crow laws such that it will never happen again. The US is actually organized to make sure it happens again.
by globular-toast | 2026-01-16 11:49:44+00:00
Some projects, like Linux (the kernel) have always been developed that way. Linus has described the trust model in the kernel to be very much "web of trust". You don't just submit patches directly to Linus, you submit them to module maintainers who are trusted by subsystem maintainers and who are all ultimately, indirectly trusted by the branch maintainer (Linus).
by ben_w | 2026-01-16 11:49:51+00:00
> Every $1 taken by illegal workers is $1 stolen from Americans.

You say "taken", I say "earned".

> Every $1 not paid in tax by illgal workers and their employers is $1 stolen from Americans.

So find the employers and punish them, not the workers.

> They do not pay for themselves. They are a net negative on the economy.

They absolutely pay for themselves. They also feed you.

> I am not being sarcastic

I didn't say you were, I said my response was.

> It is even worse by your model, you invite people in my home and force me to cook for them.

You're not being forced to cook for anyone. Rather the opposite: a sizeable part of the people who grow and harvest your crops, the basic ingredients in your meals, who allow you to eat, they're the people who you're complaining about.

Kick them all out of the US? America. Will. Starve.

If you really can't tell the difference between your home and your country, then you must accept that everyone else in your country has as much ownership of it as you, as much right to decide who to invite in.

If you think your analogy is worth anything, you must open your door to all others of your nation, cook for them, like you think you're being forced to do by letting in immigrants.
Tell HN: YouTube gave my username Switzerland to a half government organization
by faebi | 2026-01-16 11:50:06+00:00
I had the username @switzerland since 20.03.2006.
Swiss tourism had another username since 17.10.2006.
Now recently google gave my username away to swiss tourism without any notification. Their other username was fine for literally 20 years.

Worse, the app still showed my username for a long time meanwhile youtube.com/@Switzerland already showed that of swiss tourism (Schweiz Tourismus) and I was not aware of that. Hence, I lost it some months ago.

Why do I tell you? You might loose your username and you aren't even aware of it.
by hagbard_c | 2026-01-16 11:50:36+00:00
Seeing how your thumb normally rests somewhere in the vicinity of the space bar and the 3 buttons underneath it it is possible but not the most ergonomically sound way to do it. Normally you'd operate it with your middle finger, use your thumbs for the buttons and space bar and that way your hands do get to rest in their assigned areas on the keyboard. It sits between the g/h/b keys so you can try simulating using one on any keyboard you have, just imagine three buttons - two wide ones with a raised smaller one between them - just underneath the space bar.
by roel_v | 2026-01-16 11:50:38+00:00
GP said 'open bar with 2 bartenders'. I.e. commercially priced drinks, and staff. Did you have those? If so, pro tip, next time just get a few cases of various drinks, plonk them on a table with a bunch of glasses (rented, if need be) and call it good. People can't drink soft drink for more than, say, 3 USD worth in an afternoon; and even if you served 12 years Glenfiddich to everyone including the children, enough of it to knock them all out, you still wouldn't have spend more than $1000.

So yeah still wondering what sort of party you threw. I mean, yeah it's easily possible to spend that much, but it's also possible to do it for much less and you don't even need to really try.
by myrmidon | 2026-01-16 11:51:45+00:00
You are exactly not answering the question though.

It is easy to complain about energy dependence, struggles with immigration/integration and precarious national budgets, but the conditions for those weren't caused by recent decision in my view (instead, namely, lack of local oil/gas, unstable north africa/middle east and bad demographics with too many old people).

All those problems are really costly and difficult to solve. Sure, the EU could've tried a super-scale Messmer plan 20 years ago, and could then maybe rival current renewable power with nuclear output, but this would have been orders of magnitude more costly.

Hard cutting immigration, Japan style, would probably have led to comparable economic stagnation from insufficient workforce (see post 1990 Japan).

It is unclear to me if averting demographic change would've even been feasible at all, and even if it was, it would have come with a plethora of undesirable side-effects (e.g. insanely high youth unemployment).

I personally think that environmental policies are the absolute bare minimum.
If you want to prevent worst-case global climate effects (say, +4°C global average temperature rise within the century) then what we are doing right now is not even enough.
by _heimdall | 2026-01-16 11:51:58+00:00
In my opinion these types of problems always boil down to fear. When a person or people are afraid they act erratically. At a large scale it often leads to the wrong type of leader stepping up to use that fear for their own gain, in many cases they pull the majority together by pointing at a smaller group and claiming they're the cause of all the problems.

The only reliable solution I know to that is for people to be principled. People need to know what core fundamentals matter to them and they need to stick to those guns consistently.

Today it seems like we've lost that almost entirely. Most people hold strong views on certain topics or policies but they aren't driven by principles, that becomes clear when their strong opinions contradict themselves at a pretty fundamental level.

There are plenty of symptoms of the problem and I'm oversimplifying here, but if I could wave a magic wand and change one thing it would be to restore principles back in the average person. I honestly don't care what their principles are, I don't think that's the point, we simply can't move in a good direction without people knowing what matters to them.
by cogman10 | 2026-01-16 11:52:23+00:00
It had logic to it. The issue is that the same logic that powered MAD led to WW1.

In short, everyone had treaties signed with everyone else which effectively guaranteed a WW if any nation attacked another nation. The thinking being "nobody would ever start a war because of what it'd lead to".

MAD suffers the same problem, one demented leader can end all life by being irrational.