MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by creeble | 2026-01-22 17:20:40+00:00
Which reminds me of another "there, problem solved!" pet peeve of mine. I call it the Default Trap.

In many cases (Norman Doors are an example), there are two or more equally valid ways to do something. By "equally valid", I mean there is no clear standard for whether it should operate one way or the other, and if you ask 100 people which way it should work (which no one ever does), you get something approaching 50%.

So the product manager or perhaps developer simply says "make it a setting", and everyone agrees and declares the problem solved.

But the problem is, you have to choose a default. And 90% of the time, no one is going to change that default, or even discover how to. So you have to be very correct about assuming which value is the best default - and at that point, it probably doesn't matter that you make it an option.
by gruez | 2026-01-22 17:20:47+00:00
>That's a clever slight-of-hand.

>Sure, GM crops are not intrinsically bad... it's just that they enable the farmer to spray pesticides and herbicides which are very clearly linked to bad outcomes in people who consume the food.

You're accusing me of "clever slight-of-hand" when arguably the original offender was the OP. If it's really true that "GM crops are not intrinsically bad", then just say "pesticide ridden crops" or whatever? Isn't it a "clever slight-of-hand" to lump all GM crops together?
by _aavaa_ | 2026-01-22 17:20:51+00:00
The term you're circling is "grid defection".

> must be connected to the grid.

That's a legislative problem. If a home can prove it can produce enough electricity for itself, it should not be forced to be connected.

> You can 'fix' this by making it so every home has a fixed 'connection cost' and then a smaller 'usage cost' on top

A lot of places already do this.
by numpad0 | 2026-01-22 17:21:00+00:00
It's just garbage in garbage out. AIs reliably induce rage and negativity in humans. Humans become angry and violent if shown AI generated data. It's just a fact at this point.

And it's not even like software engineers are special in that regard. Everyone here is quick to spot and express their opinions on use of AI in articles and everyone seem to like to have their words on rampant vibecoded pull requests.

Freedom of thought and speech means you're free to expect people to thank you for spitting on them, and also that nobody else than you would be responsible for that insanity of yours.
by jeffwask | 2026-01-22 17:21:01+00:00
CoD is a different beast though. In 2021, PlayStation tracked that that 1 million players on their console only had CoD installed and played no other games. Most Ubi franchise aren't that type of game ouside Rainbow Six which has a lot of years on it now.

Ubisoft games used to be varied and innovative and they boiled a dozen IP's down to the exact same open world slop with different coats of paint while sending loved unique titles like Splinter Cell to the graveyard.

It's like the companies who have tried to be the next Destiny or WoW. Those games did not become what they were by copying predecessors but by innovating and creating something new and unique that engaged gamers.

This is what killed Bioware. Decades of innovation, each game something new and different. Improvements on previous design, ne styles of game play... then it became let's just copy what we did last time and what everyone else is doing.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-22 17:21:02+00:00
I'm kind of understanding, I think, but not fully. Regardless of how you structure this bot, there will be one entrypoint for the webhooks/callbacks, right? Even if there is sub-behaviours, the incoming event is passing through something, or are we talking about "sub-bots" here that are completely independent and use different GitHub users and so on?

Otherwise I still don't see how you'd end up with your own bot getting stuck in a loop replying to itself, but maybe I'm misunderstanding how others are building these sort of bots.
by randomtoast | 2026-01-22 17:21:20+00:00
I have done ayahuasca and many people report seeing something like this: http://pbmo.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/machine-elf-2.jpg I can say from my personal experience, that this is only one possible "hallucination" although quite common.

> it's not a "valid" trip unless you do
You can definitely have a life-changing experience without encountering machine elves.
by genewitch | 2026-01-22 17:21:38+00:00
apple, nvidia, microsoft, google, facebook, amazon, broadcom(!!!!), TSMC(!), and tesla all have way more than a trillion dollars.

>$1,000,000,000,000.00

They could give this project $10,000,000 per year for a decade and not notice. we're talking "slap on the wrist fine" levels of money here.
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-01-22 17:21:52+00:00
My neighbor rents out his family farm he inherited. The farmer that rented it had his crop fail this year. Because of DOGE's actions, the Government isn't paying out the insurance (insurance that this farmer paid for). The farmer decided to just be done farming (he is old and his farm is small so he rents/farms all the small farms around him). Most of the farms he rented are owned by adult children that inherited the family farm and couldn't bring themselves to sell it but now that they aren't being farmed will probably be sold for rich people estates.
by MetaWhirledPeas | 2026-01-22 17:21:58+00:00
> Eventually you may arrive at something like the H-index, which is defined as "The highest number H you can pick, where H is the number of papers you have written with H citations."

It's the Google search algorithm all over again. And it's the certificate trust hierarchy all over again. We keep working on the same problems.

Like the two cases I mentioned, this is a matter of making adjustments until you have the desired result. Never perfect, always improving (well, we hope). This means we need liquidity with the rules and heuristics. How do we best get that?
by w10-1 | 2026-01-22 17:22:02+00:00
The "Losers" framing is a bit American, but tragedy has a long history, illustrating the difficulty of being subject to conflicting forces (typically moral, since societies push their interests as such) as a way for understanding to at least explain the pain, taking away the panic and sometimes the isolation. Suffering with some kind of style shows that one is still free, and thus independent of the forces (think Mark Twain humor). Willa Cather's work is more about realizing the big picture itself makes our personal suffering relatively small.
by simonw | 2026-01-22 17:22:13+00:00
If you want to try out the voice cloning yourself you can do that an this Hugging Face demo: https://huggingface.co/spaces/Qwen/Qwen3-TTS - switch to the "Voice Clone" tab, paste in some example text and use the microphone option to record yourself reading that text - then paste in other text and have it generate a version of that read using your voice.

I shared a recording of audio I generated with that here: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/22/qwen3-tts/
by smallerfish | 2026-01-22 17:22:17+00:00
> I don’t have to do boilerplate, generally.

I meant this more in the sense of there is nothing new under the sun, and that LLMs have been trained on essentially everything that's available online "under the sun". Sure, there are new SaaS ideas every so often, but the software to produce the idea is rarely that novel (in that you can squint and figure out roughly how it works without thinking too hard), and is in that sense boilerplate.
by jerlam | 2026-01-22 17:22:21+00:00
Large gaming companies, like a lot of other big companies, are extremely risk adverse. Instead of creating new things, they innovate by buying companies that have done the hard work of innovating or creating new IP.

The creators and innovators in those acquired companies usually burn out from trying to work in a large, stifling corporate environment, and leave. So the large corporations are left with people who are not creators and innovators.
by ToucanLoucan | 2026-01-22 17:22:27+00:00
> It might be frequency-bias, but of the companies downsizing/closing in my area I see almost all of the published explanations are blaming wages.

And lest we leave it merely implied, the problematic wages for the company are the workers, who make the products being sold. The wages of middle management + executives who allegedly steer the ship are magnitudes larger, but those are completely fine.
by WorldMaker | 2026-01-22 17:22:33+00:00
It's also worth noting that this behavior evolved very slowly. It took Excel decades to learn how to best handle the defaults. Excel started with modals similar to VS Code's "Do you want to allow macros? This may be dangerous", found too many users self-trained on "Allow" as the only button that needed to be pressed and eventually built the current solution.

If VS Code is still on the same learning curve, hopefully it speeds up a bit.
by rngfnby | 2026-01-22 17:22:38+00:00
Largely agree, with one big nitpick.

Canada is a massive exporter of electricity to the USA. The more clean energy CND produces the more there is to displace North East's coal.

Of course, solar on Canadians' roof is a joke. A proper regulatory regime would encourage solar in Arizona and encourage lettuce Canada; not vice versa.
by jmyeet | 2026-01-22 17:22:42+00:00
I find almost all modern content producers to be a depressing business, fundamentally incompatible with being a large corporation. This includes movies, TV and video games.

The problem is the large corporation wants to remove creativity from the process. They want a repeatable formula that they can scale and infinitely reproduce.

The wet dream for the modern AAA studio is a "game" like FIFA that has annual releases and loot boxes to gamble on to get better pixels. Call of Duty and similar games are the next best because it's user-generated content ("UGC"). They still have to invest to create maps, which they don't like doing. But you still have micro-transactions for skins so that's good (for them).

I played Assassin's Creed Odyssey a lot. Some people don't like it because it's too CRPG. That's why I liked it. They paid a lot of attention to the environment. I've heard of teachers using it to portray ancient Greece.

They managed this even though it was a little formulaic. I suspect that any future AC releases will be even more formulaic.

The one exception to this "large game studio = bad" rule had been Rockstar. The various GTA3 titles and GTA4 were widely renowned because of their social commentary and wit, as well as being groundbreaking (at the time) for open world games.

But GTA5 was a turning point for me. Yes it was a sprawling, beautiful environment but the writing was complete ass. It had none of the intelligence and insight of earlier titles. The characters were awful. But Rockstar seemingly didn't care because they're discovered the GTA Online money faucet, something I don't care about at all.

I really wonder if GTA6 will be beautiful but soulless. It coudl go either way. RDR2 was released after GTA5, after all.

These big studios really do have a habit of killing successful franchises or simply sucking the life out of them. There are few bigger fumbles than the EA SimCity fiasco. I guess you can say Civilization has maintained... something. But honestly I haven't really felt compelled to play the franchise much since Civ4.

I do miss the days when games were games not just loot box slot machines with annual reskins.
by shagie | 2026-01-22 17:22:48+00:00
Not necessarily. Things like "where do pipes run" so can get tricky along with code requirements for access.

There's a NYT article on the challenges about this from a few years ago: So You Want to Turn an Office Building Into a Home? -- Here’s How to Solve a 25-Story Rubik’s Cube https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/03/11/upshot/office...
by bwestergard | 2026-01-22 17:22:59+00:00
You say you "100% agree" with the essay, and then say that LLMs are "like any technology it's neither inherently good nor evil."

Did you read the essay? It says:

"Instead of being merely “agnostic” as many argue, digital technology has amplified the ability of the princes of this world to feed the fallen man, to make him more docile and distracted while installing beliefs, morals, and feelings that are acceptable to the secular spirit of this age. AI may be the final technology that is weaponized to create this new man before the Antichrist arrives, who will be the human manifestation of AI---an ever-helpful problem-solver who people mistakenly feel they cannot live without."

Your position is diametrically opposed to this one.
by superkuh | 2026-01-22 17:23:08+00:00
This is nice, but PDF jumped the shark already. It's no longer a document format that always looks the same everywhere. The inclusion of "Dynamic XFA (XML Form Architecture) PDF" in the spec made it so PDF is an unreliable format. The aformentioned is a PDF without content that pulls down all it's content from the web. It even still, ostensibly, supports Flash (swf) animations. In practice these "PDF"s are just empty white pages with an error message like,

>"Please wait... If this message is not eventually replaced by the proper contents of the document, your PDF viewer may not be able to display this type of document. You can upgrade to the latest version of Adobe Reader for Windows®, Mac, or Linux® by visiting http://www.adobe.com/go/reader_download. For more assistance with Adobe Reader visit http://www.adobe.com/go/acrreader. Windows is either a registered trademark or a trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. Mac is a trademark of Apple Inc., registered in the United States and other countries. Linux is the registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the U.S. and other countries."
by somenameforme | 2026-01-22 17:23:18+00:00
Mail-in ballots tend to be counted (and received) after in person ballots, so you don't need to worry about in-person conflict. If we go the other direction (mail-in ballot rejected because the person had already voted), it was indeed in the tens of thousands. In 2024 about 584k ballots were rejected. [1] 11% of those, more than 64k, were because the person had already voted.

[1] - https://ballotpedia.org/Election_results,_2024:_Analysis_of_...
by simion314 | 2026-01-22 17:23:20+00:00
>Yes, and people should be annoyed by this

So you do not use busses,taxi or road travel? do you fly all the time?
Do you have stuff delivered by truck/cars or only by air?
What about shopping? do you think the items you buy or the things needed to make those items use roads ? In a perfect extremist capitalist word there would be a road tax included in the products and services so you would still pay the text for the roads.
by testing22321 | 2026-01-22 17:23:42+00:00
You know, when I was researching my system and if it would be worthwhile there were literally dozens and dozens of people who were adamant it couldn’t work here. Too much snow, too tight a valley, electricity already kinda cheap.

I went ahead anyway because I’m a “I’d rather have hard numbers than speculation“ person, and it was literally $0 of my money.

Here we are 18 months later. I have all the hard data, numbers and proof that this system will cost me $0 in the short term, make me over $20,000 in the long term, requires no maintenance and is great.

And yet there are still people like you telling me it can’t work.

I’m proving it does, very well. Panel prices are falling so fast your “last time I looked into it” is woefully out of date.

Why are you denying reality?
by t1205-1227 | 2026-01-22 17:23:49+00:00
People used to get arrested for infringing copyright, now they get arrested (or murdered, see below) for defending it.

And the thieves sit in Davos, together with representatives of a party that wants to steal IP, Greenland, Venezuela and many other things.

And the press appeases the thieves instead of asking about the murder of Suchir Balaji.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-22 17:24:12+00:00
The US has forced [1] and child [2] labor as well. It's certainly not welcome, but context is important when casting the first stone.

[1] Forced prison labor in the “Land of the Free” - https://www.epi.org/publication/rooted-racism-prison-labor/ - January 16th, 2025

[2] [US] Child labor law violations are at their highest in decades. - https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2024/05/01/... - May 1st, 2024

(staunchly anti child and forced labor to be clear)
by mythical_39 | 2026-01-22 17:24:57+00:00
huh. I'm a professional data scientist, and my masters was in signal processing. In one class the final exam required us to transcribe fourier transforms of speech into the actual words. In another the final exam required us to perform 2d FFTs in our head.

Please be careful about generalizing.

I agree that many 'data science' programs don't teach these skills, and you certainly have evidence behind your assertation.
by Klonoar | 2026-01-22 17:25:06+00:00
The idea that there is one “valid” trip is essentially gatekeeping and should be pushed back on whenever it comes up. It leads to one of the more unhealthy sides of the psychedelic experience - nobody should feel that they have to continually chase something that’s not happening for them.

Like, I know at least two people who’ve done it in group settings with people who saw “elves” and they themselves didn’t see any.

“Valid” as a descriptor is probably best replaced with “average”.
by pc86 | 2026-01-22 17:25:07+00:00
This isn't arguing about whether or not murder is wrong, it's arguing about whether or not a particular act constitutes murder. Two people who vehemently agree murder is wrong, and who both view it as an inviolable moral absolute, could disagree on whether something is murder or not.

How many people without some form of psychopathy would genuinely disagree with the statement "murder is wrong?"
by gruez | 2026-01-22 17:25:37+00:00
>How is it different? It’s different because people do stop voting for right-leaning Democrats who are all talk, and then they lose and Republicans win, and then the Republican voters get exactly what they voted for (and everyone else gets it too).

Is there any indication this doesn't happen for Republicans? Around a decade ago there was a huge shift in the Republican party from being pro-globalization to protectionist.
by PxldLtd | 2026-01-22 17:25:40+00:00
No problem :) I asked a friend who's a bit closer to the space and he agrees, definitely Order Book Heatmaps. The speed you're getting would make this a killer feature.

Competitors typically have to snapshot/aggregate because their graphing libraries are heavily CPU bound. Being able visualise level 2/3 data without downsampling is a big win. Also being able to smoothly roll back through the last 12hrs of tick-level history would be really neat too.

I'd say the bare minimum feature set outside of that is going to be:

- Non linear X axis for gaps/sessions

- Crosshairs that snap to OHLC data

- Logarithmic scales, Candlesticks, Heikin-Ashi, and Volume profiles

- Getting the 'feel' nice so that you can quickly scale and drag (people are real sticklers for the feel of these tools)

- Solid callbacks for events for exchange integration, people hate leaving their charts to place an order eg (onOrderModify etc)

- Provide a nice websocket data ingestion pipeline

- Provide an api so devs can integrate their own indicators, some sort of 'layers' API or something.

Sorry if I can't be of more help as I'm just a hobbyist in this area!
by sbuttgereit | 2026-01-22 17:25:43+00:00
It's interesting. I wonder how much large-company disfunction is derailing these things.

Recently Hytale, a would-be Minecraft successor, released early access. That project started around a decade ago as something of an indie project, was purchased by Riot, then cancelled by Riot, then recently sold back to the original project people... who basically undid a lot of fruitless work done by Riot and... as I said... now released as early access. A well received early access as far as I can tell.

I wonder why we don't see more indie games and new developers that are more able rising to challenge what look like dysfunctional incumbents?

I'll be the first to admit that I don't know anything about that industry, but it seems like there's space to make progress for newcomers.
by jklinger410 | 2026-01-22 17:25:46+00:00
When your entire job is confirming that science is valid, I expect a little more humility when it turns out you've missed a critical aspect.

How did these 100 sources even get through the validation process?

> Isn't disqualifying X months of potentially great research due to a misformed, but existing reference harsh?

It will serve as a reminder not to cut any corners.
Show HN: Token Count – multi-agent AI comedy podcast with Temporal and GraphRAG
by helsinki | 2026-01-22 17:25:51+00:00
I built Token Count, a daily-ish AI comedy podcast where three recurring characters argue about other podcasts and internet culture. Latest ep (#10) is “Pretzels, Pigeons, and the Tall Whites” (47m): it starts with modern-male nonsense and pivots into Laos travel/medical chaos, Kill Tony clip discourse, pigeon-fighting masculinity, and “Tall Whites” UFO lore.

The interesting part (for HN) is the architecture: it’s not a single prompt that “writes a podcast.” It’s a multi-stage, retrieval-grounded pipeline:

- Ingest: RSS → download audio → chunked STT → segment + score

- Storage: embeddings in Qdrant + entities/relationships in a Postgres graph (Apache AGE)

- Compose: generate a beat outline (target seconds + button/turn lines)
- Per-beat GraphRAG bundles: pull transcript segments + add do-not-say, temporal context, character memory, and running gags

- Write: a “writers’ room” sequence (pitch → draft → table read → punch-up → editor)
- Verify: grounding/redundancy/pacing/risk checks before render
- Render: multi-voice TTS + audio assembly into a publishable episode

I’d love feedback on:

1) Is it enjoyable to listen to?
2) Is it funny?
3) What you might prefer to hear?

Apple Podcasts (if Spotify is not your thing): https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/token-count/id18664643...
by JodieBenitez | 2026-01-22 17:25:52+00:00
> They do it once, and then that whole project is toast.

You wish !

It's funny that you mention DNS blocks because these have already been abused in my country. Nobody cares.

I don't want that much state control on my life, they have too much already. Your proposal is straight up Orwelian stuff to me.
by truenfel | 2026-01-22 17:25:54+00:00
If anyone's interested in how environment shapes behavior: I wrote "Leave the Door Open." It's about designing spaces that reduce isolation and relax the nervous system.

Based on research like the Rat Park experiments showing environment beats willpower. Practical room-by-room changes.

The Substack for Open Enough Design is here: https://OEDmethod.substack.com and you can find a link to the book there too.

Full disclosure: I'm the author.
Ask HN: What is your opinion on non-mainstream mobile OS options (e.g. /e/OS)?
by sendes | 2026-01-22 17:26:06+00:00
Pretty much the title. Context: I have to change my phone, and I thought it is also an opportunity to think about what I would value in a phone OS (privacy and control) vs what I would need for convenience (app availability, seamless connectivity, etc.).

I am gathering opinions, and where else to ask this but here?

What is your experience/thinking on mobile OS options? Would you recommend any brands that use non-mainstream OS versions (eg Fairphone)?
by temp0826 | 2026-01-22 17:26:16+00:00
Fwiw having drank ayahuasca hundreds of times, I've never seen elves (have seen plenty of other weird stuff though). Only times have been with breakthrough doses of smoked dmt. I guarantee it doesn't make it any less/more valid. There are so many more profound things to see, I don't know why people get so hung up on elves lol (if you ever experience meeting the medicine of a master plant/tree spirt during a traditional dieta you'd be flabbergasted).