MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by flkiwi | 2026-01-21 19:23:32+00:00
I've gotten more value out of it than just about any ongoing subscription I have. It's clean, fast, deeply customizable (i.e., excluding "answers" websites or any other domain you never want to see again), and, for what it is, inexpensive. Honestly if Google (or Bing) worked like Kagi does, I'd trade some of the privacy for the utility.
by palmotea | 2026-01-21 19:23:33+00:00
That was my mistake. I wrote "issues" when I could have been more specific and said "social issues."

I don't think addressing economic issues can be very alienating, except when they signal messed up priorities that exclude you. I don't think student loan forgiveness would have been that controversial if it were a smaller part of a larger package that overall addressed higher priorities or a broader base of people (e.g. a bunch of tariffs and programs to re-industrialize).
by tim-tday | 2026-01-21 19:23:36+00:00
It’s hard and not economically viable to catch up:

“Powerful lasers are fired at microscopic droplets of molten tin, turning them into plasma hotter than the surface of the Sun. That creates a pulse of extreme ultraviolet light, which is then reflected off a series of mirrors, each made with atomic-level precision and taking months to make, before the pattern is finally transferred to the silicon wafer.
The hardest part to replicate is the optics. EUV-grade mirrors are produced by a single supplier: Carl Zeiss SMT. They are the product of decades of tightly integrated development between Zeiss and ASML.
Even if a peer could replicate that technology, the economics do not work. Any new entrant would sell too few machines each year to recover development costs, yet those machines would still be expected to deliver near-perfect reliability from day one.”
by ragall | 2026-01-21 19:23:37+00:00
> A worker must be permanently hired after the first extension.

After the first extension the worker will not be hired again.

> Agencies can not be used indefinitely

Yes they can.

> A company is also not allowed to make an employee 'self-employed' by making them start their own company.

Wrong. I've seen this happening personally.

> I'm just talking about holland here but all over europe the conditions are similar.

You're talking about what you think is happening in Netherlands, and the conditions in many places in the rest of Europe are not like that.

> But those are mostly for in-between gig jobs. Not for stuff people make a career out of.

Not yet.
by observationist | 2026-01-21 19:23:45+00:00
A big part of it is about the legal minefield if you presented any sort of real threat to Google. Nobody wants to wager billions in infrastructure and IP against Google or Apple or Microsoft, even if you could whip up a viable competing product in a weekend (for any given product.)

Part of it is also the ecosystem - don't threaten adtech, because the wrong lawsuits, the wrong consumer trend, the wrong innovation that undercuts the entire adtech ecosystem means they lose their goose with the golden eggs.

Even if Kagi or some other company achieves legitimate mindshare in search, they still don't have the infrastructure and ancillary products and cash reserves of Google, etc. The second they become a real "threat" in Google's eyes, they'd start seeing lawsuits over IP and hostile and aggressive resource acquisitions to freeze out their expansion, arbitrary deranking in search results, possible heightened government audits and regulatory interactions, and so on. They have access to a shit ton of legal levers, not to mention the whole endless flood of dirty tricks money can buy (not that Google would ever do that.)

They're institutional at this point; they're only going away if/when government decides to break it up and make things sane again.
by cvoss | 2026-01-21 19:24:01+00:00
Yeah, weird to see a couple of linguistic mistakes like this in an article about linguistic mistakes. Another is the misuse of "latter-day". The article uses it to refer to an old thing that is analogous to a modern thing: "[a] latter-day 'yo!'" But "latter-day" actually describes something modern. (E.g., the "latter days" refers to the present age. See "Latter-day Saints".)
by t-3 | 2026-01-21 19:24:46+00:00
The reason so many people with aphantasia don't realize until adulthood is that we do everything you do. There's no real difference in capability, many things are identical or very similar, but the mental experience is different.

My understanding is: Each sense has an phantastic analogue for phantastics. The hyperphantastic can override their senses with their phantastic analogues. Most people have more-or-less full control(?) of their visual and auditory phantastic analogues. The aphantastic have no/very stunted analogues with limited control, or only a partial selection, but people with a visual analogue and without other senses would probably never realize, and so aphantistics can be assumed to missing at a minimum the visual analogue but very commonly have none.
by lenerdenator | 2026-01-21 19:25:03+00:00
> This is in response to new US tariffs and threats, not the other way around. Our previous diplomacy was cold with China.

But it doesn't endeavor to ask exactly why the US is behaving this way.

The answer is simple: a mad king. You have a man who thinks the government should be run as his own personal enterprise and is being given license to do so by one of the country's two main political parties. The other half of the country is making it rather clear that they don't approve of this behavior, along with other things happening in the country. There are pictures from the last few days of people protesting while armed in Minnesota.

Tyranny is a problem, obviously, and it's one that has existed as long as power structures have existed in human societies. I can see why Canadians are angry at Trump and the US as a whole. I don't blame you, but if you want to solve the problem of the mad king, you don't sign trade deals that enrich a single-party totalitarian state. You can almost guarantee that come the next international dust-up over something - Oh, just spitballing, maybe freedom of navigation in the South China Sea - the PRC will use that new trade deal as leverage on Canada. It will happen. They will get a return on their investment. That's how authoritarians work.

A deal with literally anyone else would have been better.
by miyuru | 2026-01-21 19:26:02+00:00
Some info from NASA optical communication page.

"Even Earth’s atmosphere interferes with optical communications. Clouds and mist can interrupt a laser. A solution to this is building multiple ground stations, which are telescopes on Earth that receive infrared waves. If it’s cloudy at one station, the waves can be redirected to a different ground station. With more ground stations, the network can be more flexible during bad weather. SCaN is also investigating multiple approaches, like Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking and satellite arrays to help deal with challenges derived from atmospheric means."

https://www.nasa.gov/technology/space-comms/optical-communic...

Some more info on Optical
Communications for Satellites: https://www.kiss.caltech.edu/workshops/optcomm/presentations...
by esseph | 2026-01-21 19:26:02+00:00
It's a GUI designed to run from a CLI, not a GUI with a CLI bolted on.

I think you'll always pay the tax on Linux, and I'm not sure that's a bad thing from certain perspectives.

As far as app installations, system things come in from dnf on fedora 43. Everything else I install is usually a flatpak from flathub.
by nikkwong | 2026-01-21 19:26:07+00:00
Good luck. Amazon banned my seller account 7 years ago because my wife, who was also an amazon seller, used our shared CC (which has my name on it, although she's an authorized user) to pay her $45/month seller fee. The account had $48,000 in it at the time I was banned, and I was never able to get the money back; after an endless number of hours of pleads with their teams, mails to jeff@amazon, working on it from the inside, etc. etc. Be happy that your financial loss was limited.

edit: I posted about it on HN at the time [1]. Apparently looks like at that time I thought I was delisted for a bad review. To be honest, I still don't know why I was delisted, because at least at that time, Amazon would refuse to tell you why you were delisted. You just had to come up with reasons why you may have been, submit an appeal, and then they would come back to you with "sorry, that's not a sufficient appeal". So then you'd have to come up with another reason why you may have been delisted and try to submit another appeal (which itself was a grueling process, for which you would have to wait days/weeks for a response). It was beyond baffling as to why they would operate in that way; it was as if they were trying their absolute hardest to immiserate sellers in the most draconian and malevolent way possible. It was that bad. It was unbelievable to me at the time, and still today, that they could treat their sellers that badly. Yeah, fuck amazon. Seriously.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19551590
by thewebguyd | 2026-01-21 19:26:17+00:00
> but what does macOS offer a power user that Linux doesn't

A laptop with an excellent screen, speakers, touchpad, desktop-class performance,, great battery life, and runs cool and silent, and a *nix like OS that can run the proprietary/commercial apps I need.

I work on macOS the same way I'd work on Linux; From the terminal with a package manager, docker, etc. Only now I get access to a few commercial apps that aren't on Linux, on hardware that's genuinely a joy to use.

There's no other laptop on the market that touches the apple silicon macbook pros. None. Every close alternative sacrifices something I care about. I tolerate macOS for the hardware, and I'll remain on macs until such hardware exists in Linux land.
by sabslikesobs | 2026-01-21 19:26:17+00:00
I like that there's a list of primary sources at the bottom.

Kagi's AI assistant has been satisfying compared to Claude and ChatGPT, both of which insisted on having a personality no matter what my instructions said. Trying to do well-sourced research always pissed me off. With Kagi it gives me a summary of sources it's found and that's it!
by jarjoura | 2026-01-21 19:26:36+00:00
This is exactly the sentiment I have been trying to articulate myself.

The ONLY reason we are here today is because OpenAI, and Anthropic, by extension, took it upon themselves to launch chat bots trained on whatever datasources they could get in a short amount of time to quickly productize their investments. Their first versions didn't include any references to the source material, and just acted as if they knew everything.

When CoPilot was built as a better auto-complete engine, trained on opensource projects, it was an interesting idea, because it doing what people already did. They searched GitHub for examples of the solution or nudged them in that direction. However, the biggest difference, using other project code was stable, because it came with a LICENSE.md that you then agreed to, and paid it forward. (i.e. "I used code from this project").

CoPilot initially would just inject snippets for you, without you knowing the source. It was only later, they walked that back and if you did use CoPilot, it shows you the most-likely source of the code it used. This is exactly the direction all of the platforms seem headed.

It's not easy to walk back the free-for-all system (i.e. Napster), but I'm optimistic over time it'll become a more fair, pay to access system.
by hebejebelus | 2026-01-21 19:26:38+00:00
The constitution contains 43 instances of the word 'genuine', which is my current favourite marker for telling if text has been written by Claude. To me it seems like Claude has a really hard time _not_ using the g word in any lengthy conversation even if you do all the usual tricks in the prompt - ruling, recommending, threatening, bribing. Claude Code doesn't seem to have the same problem, so I assume the system prompt for Claude also contains the word a couple of times, while Claude Code may not. There's something ironic about the word 'genuine' being the marker for AI-written text...
by furyofantares | 2026-01-21 19:26:43+00:00
Any LLM output is a combination of its weights from its training, and its context. Every token is some combination of those two things. The part that is coming from the weights is the part that has no technical means to trace back to its sources.

But even the part that is coming from the context is only being produced by the weights. As I said, every token is some mathematical combination of the weights and the context.

So it can produce text that does not correctly summarize the content in its context, on incorrectly reproduce the link, or incorrectly map the link to the part of its context that came from that link, or more generally just make shit up.
by DvdGiessen | 2026-01-21 19:27:03+00:00
Running a number of production services on-premise on a big machine using native zones, a few using LX zones (the built-in Linux compatibilty layer), and a single bhyve zone. Actually, years ago this machine was the very first server we set up when our company was just getting started and for the first few years it ran pretty much everything. Zones were ideal for that, also to allow us to pack more services on less hardware, while having decent separation and everything snapshotting/backupping using ZFS. Nowadays we have a bunch more servers, with varying *nix operating systems (SmartOS, Debian, FreeBSD), as well as macOS and even Windows for some specific CI functions. (:

The global zone works great as a hypervisor if you prefer working over SSH in a real shell, and being able to run a lot of services natively just makes things like memory allocation to VM's and having a birds eye view of performance easier. Being able to CoW cp/mv files between zones because it's actually the same filesystem makes certain operations much easier than with actual VM's. Bhyve works well for the things that need an actual Linux kernel or other OS, at the cost of losing some of the zone benefits mentioned earlier.

Highlighting a few things we today run on SmartOS, grouped by their technology stacks: C (haproxy, nginx, PostgreSQL, MariaDB), PHP (various web apps), Java (Keycloak), Elixir/Phoenix (Plausible, fork of Firezone), Rust (rathole, some internal glue services), Go (Grafana, Consul, Prometheus). Most of those are readily available in the package manager, and a few offer native Solaris binaries which run fine on illumos. Others we do local builds in a utility zone before copying the binary package to the where it actually runs.

On LX zones we also run a number of services without problems, usually because they have Debian packaging available but are not in pkgsrc (for example Consul/Nomad, Fabio, some internal things that was already Linux-specific and we haven't bothered to port yet).

And at home a LX zone also runs Jellyfin just fine. (:
by nemothekid | 2026-01-21 19:27:21+00:00
>Many get just a modem and buy a cheap router which may not have a firewall

What cheap router are you buying that doesn't have a firewall. I think the problem is when people hear "firewall" they think the router is running pfSense or something. Even cheap routers will have a basic, non-configurable, firewall that will block inbound connections. That is separate from NAT and has nothing to do with IPv4/IPv6.
by baby_souffle | 2026-01-21 19:27:24+00:00
> Is ther eany OS/desktop where you dont pay the "linux tax" when it comes to how the GUI feels?

That'll depend on how much time you want to invest. /r/unixporn has a lot of _beautiful_ looking desktops but almost all of them come with a non-trivial list of configuration files and plugins ... etc.

> or have missed a lot of features that commercial OSes have, installing programs is a mix of flatpaks, APKs, and building from source.

To an extent, this is how things feel on macOS and windows. Some things from the native app store, some things through brew/chocolate and other things are the old "go to example.com/download and then move .app or click .exe" pattern.
by bitwize | 2026-01-21 19:27:38+00:00
No. Shut up. The idea-expression dichotomy is a common myth about copyright law, right up there with "if I already own the physical cartridge, downloading this game ROM is OK".

The ONLY things that matter when determining whether copyright was infringed are "access" and "substantial similarity". The first refers to whether the alleged infringer did, or had a reasonable opportunity to, view the copyrighted work. The second is more vague and open-ended. But if these two, alone, can be established in court, then absent a fair use or other defense (for example, all of the ways in which your work is "substantially similar" to the infringed work are public domain), you are infringing. Period. End of story.

The Tetris Company, for example, owns the idea of falling-tetromino puzzle video games. If you develop and release such a game, they will sue you and they will win. They have won in the past and they can retain Boies-tier lawyers to litigate a small crater where you once stood if need be. In fact, the ruling in the Tetris vs. Xio case means that look-and-feel copyrights, thought dead after Apple v. Microsoft and Lotus v. Borland, are now back on the table.

It's not like this is even terribly new. Atari, license holders to Pac-Man on game consoles at the time, sued Philips over the release of K.C. Munchkin! on their rival console, the Magnavox Odyssey 2. Munchkin didn't look like Pac-Man. The monsters didn't look like the ghosts from Pac-Man. The mazes and some of the game mechanics were significantly different. Yet, the judge ruled that because it featured an "eater" who ate dots and avoided enemies in a maze, and sometimes had the opportunity to eat the enemies, K.C. Munchkin! infringed on the copyrights to Pac-Man. The ideas used in Pac-Man were novel enough to be eligible for copyright protection.
by rhubarbtree | 2026-01-21 19:27:38+00:00
And the big European nations own ~ 23% of US debt.
This is not a one-sided contest.
Oddly, it does feel like trump is what europe needed to wake up from its slumber. With new AI / startup funding, the rebuild of their military, and opening up to china this could be the making of the EU into a true superpower. About time.

Edit: percentage down from 30% clarify debt
by genuser | 2026-01-21 19:27:45+00:00
As Apple’s perennial September event approaches, the rumor mill is churning with increasing fervor around the anticipated iPhone 18 Pro. This device, expected to headline alongside an iPhone 18 Pro Max and the potentially groundbreaking iPhone Fold, represents a pivotal moment in Apple’s smartphone evolution. While specifics remain shrouded in secrecy, a confluence of leaks from the global supply chain and industry analysts paints. A compelling picture of a device focused on refining the professional experience. The iPhone 18 Pro is rumored to deliver a major step toward a seamless display with under-display Face ID. Significant camera enhancements, and the raw power of a new-generation chipset. All while navigating the turbulent waters of global component costs that may influence its final price.
by 9rx | 2026-01-21 19:28:10+00:00
> MacOS is proprietary

Some of the drivers are. The core is open source, though. macOS' particular choice for its graphical user land is proprietary as well, but AT&T's UNIX had no such equivalent, aside from some experiments, so that doesn't make sense to use as a point of comparison. Not to mention similar systems in the UNIX-esq space, like SunView, NeWS, VUE, NeXTSTEP, etc. were proprietary too. That has always been par for the course in the world of "graphical UNIX". The so-called "Linux desktop" is the aberration.

You can, of course, run an open source graphical user land instead, like Gnome, on top of macOS' UNIX-y fashioned bits if you so wish.
by vanderZwan | 2026-01-21 19:28:14+00:00
That works if more overdraw = more intensity is all you care about, and may very well be good enough for many kinds of charts. But with heat map plots one usually wants a proper mapping of some intensity domain to a color map and a legend with a color gradient that tells you which color represents which value. Which requires binning, counting per bin, and determining the min and max values.
by CausaNova | 2026-01-21 19:28:17+00:00
Hello HN,

I watched Alex Karp’s recent talk at Davos/WEF where he stated: "Half your enterprise doesn't work on the battlefield. It works in a lab on a PowerPoint."

As a self-taught architect fighting German bureaucracy, I felt that. So I built an engine to fix the "Execution Gap" between LLM capabilities and strict operational constraints.

The Solution: CausaNova I built a deterministic .NET 8 runtime (Zero-Dependency) that acts as a firewall between the "Intent" (AI) and the "Action" (Reality).

It is already domain-agnostic. While the demo shows a kinetic defense scenario, the engine doesn't care about the target. We have already implemented ontologies for:

HTML: Rendering strict UI components.

SQL: Enforcing safe query states.

Math: Solving geometric constraints.

PLC/Hardware: controlling signals. To CausaNova, these are just domains in a JSON DSL.

How it works:

Logic over Code: We stripped business logic out of the C# code entirely.

Ontology as Config: Rules are defined in a strict JSON schema.

The Resolver: The runtime uses an internal solver (SMT-style logic) to validate every request against the current state before execution.

Tactical Edge: No cloud required. Runs on low SWaP hardware.

Why? Because "Ethics" is a debate, but "Logic" is a binary state. I wanted a system where I can hot-reload the "Rules of Engagement" (JSON) without recompiling the kernel.

The Stack: .NET 8 (AOT), Zero external dependencies.

I’m looking for feedback on the ontology structure and offline-inference strategies. Roast my architecture.
by DoctorOetker | 2026-01-21 19:28:17+00:00
While we may run out of human written text of value, we won't run out of symbolic sequences of tokens: we can trivially start with axioms and do random forward chaining (or random backward chaining from postulates), and then train models on 2-step, 4-step, 8-step, ... correct forward or backward chains.

Nobody talks about it, but ultimately the strongest driver for terrascale compute will be for mathematical breakthroughs in crypography (not bruteforcing keys, but bruteforcing mathematical reasoning).
by abdullahkhalids | 2026-01-21 19:28:27+00:00
On the first page, I see 9 countries which it claims have a default risk of 50% or higher in the next 5 years. Which means a probability of at least 1-0.5^9=0.998 that at least one of them will default.

That's a crazily high confidence prediction. What is their track record? What did they predict 5 years ago and how did those predictions bear out?
by squeaky-clean | 2026-01-21 19:28:40+00:00
Not OP but for me the appeal would be in botting a game that's made for humans, and not a game made specifically made for botting. Let me use autohotkey, or modify the client, or do any of the things real botters do, don't worry about providing an API. Just let me register a character as a bot and restrict it to a separate server that can't interact with the main game servers/economy, and disable anti-botting protection. Maybe make it require something like CURLing an endpoint so that regular users can't accidentally create a character on the bot world.

But this would probably never fly because it would become a training ground for people who make malicious bots.
by cogman10 | 2026-01-21 19:29:01+00:00
I mean, say what you will, but a horse is likely to have a similar body temperature regardless their location on the planet. The same can't be said of boiling water. Pretty normal elevations make pretty big changes in water boiling temperature.

You can ultimately also average out temperatures for multiple horses to get pretty close to that 100F.

A better pin would have been something like the melting point of Gallium. Something that hardly changes with a change of pressure.