MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-09 21:46:18+00:00
> suggest you talk to some Gen Z people

I have Gen Z friends.

> they most definitely view Zionists as Nazi equivalent

Some of them do. They’re concentrated in a few cities. (Principally New York.)

Most of them see the back and forth and minority of extremists in each camp not representing the others. (There are more than two factions at play before we even figure on the international elements.)

> most of the non-Western world also holds

Most of the non-Western world doesn’t know what Zionism is because it’s irrelevant to them.

Ukraine was my pet war. I had to fight the tendency to reduce every geopolitical and domestic political issue through it. Because it’s not true. We aren’t abandoning Ukraine because of some Russia conspiracy, we’re abandoning it because most voters care much more about pocketbook issues.
by cheald | 2026-01-09 21:46:38+00:00
It still requires willpower, but to use a metaphor, it's much easier to travel down a well-trod path than it is to cut a new path through the jungle. Repetition and consistency establishes the path, so the willpower required to travel down it the next day is reduced over time. Establishing a pre-set time and committing to that time ahead of time removes the "will I or won't I" decision at "go time", when you're most likely to falter.
by D-Machine | 2026-01-09 21:46:41+00:00
Unfortunately, if exercise is only nearly as effective as therapy for depression, it really means that the benefits of exercise are not actually really clinically observable, if measured properly and not just based on arbitrary statistical significance.

Standardized effect sizes like the ones reported here have no clinical meaning, they are purely statistical. To measure if these kinds of changes matter, you need to determine the Minimal (Clinically) Important Difference [1-2]. I.e. can clinicians (or patients) even notice the observed statistical difference.

In practice, this is a change of about 3-5 points on most 20+ item rating scales, or a relative reduction of 20-30% of the total (sum) score of the scale [1-2]. Unfortunately, anti-depressants and most therapies are under or just barely reach this threshold [3], and so should be widely to be considered ineffective or only borderline effective, on average. Of course this is complicated by the fact that some people get worse on these treatments, and some people experience dramatic improvements, but, still, the point is, depression is extremely hard to treat.

[1] Button, et al. (2015). Minimal clinically important difference on the Beck Depression Inventory - II according to the patient’s perspective. Psychological Medicine, 45(15), 3269–3279. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291715001270 [https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/psychological-medici...]

[2] Masson, S. C., & Tejani, A. M. (2013). Minimum clinically important differences identified for commonly used depression rating scales. Journal of clinical epidemiology, 66(7), 805-807. [https://www.jclinepi.com/article/S0895-4356(13)00056-5/fullt...]

[3] Hengartner, M. P., & Plöderl, M. (2022). Estimates of the minimal important difference to evaluate the clinical significance of antidepressants in the acute treatment of moderate-to-severe depression. BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine, 27(2), 69-73. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjebm-2020-111600 [https://ebm.bmj.com/content/27/2/69.abstract]
by atoav | 2026-01-09 21:46:53+00:00
The thing this oversees is that the interface is important, simpler is not worse, it can in fact often mean better. For example while docbook may have some technical, the user experience for someone who just wants to write some basic stuff is absolutely horrible.

If I imagine beginner-coding me, the first thing I would ask for example is why the hell not just use html by that point. Markdown is a thing I could peesent my non-technical parents unrendered and they still would be able to read the content, just fine for the most part. Try that with docbook.

Now nerds like to pretend the more powerful format is automatically superior. It isn't. Markdown is sucessful because it is so barebones and opinionated and because it forces a focus on the content over formatting. If that is what you need markdown is perfect. If it isn't, go for Latex, HTML+CSS, Typst or use InDesign or whatnot.
by minimaxir | 2026-01-09 21:47:11+00:00
"flagged" generally means flagged by users, which is an option with enough Karma on Hacker News. Such posts will have a [flagged] tag and will not appear on the front page normally.

In this /active page, there are two posts pertaining to politics (without a direct tech angle) as user-flagged, as the Guidelines state that is off-topic.
Ask HN: What Happened to Coding Competions?
by krupan | 2026-01-09 21:47:16+00:00
I hadn't thought about these in a while, but what happened to Topcoder, Code Jam, etc.? I did some quick research and saw that those two shut down in 2023, but there wasn't much explanation as to why. I thought of this because people keep talking about how productive they are with LLM coding tools, and I thought it would be fun to put the people proclaiming this (along with their LLM tools) up against people not using LLMs in a topcoder competition. Turns out, those competitions don't exist anymore and I'm sad.
by TeMPOraL | 2026-01-09 21:47:30+00:00
In context of approximately everyone's education, the history goes like this: in the past people believe there's something in empty space, and used the name "ether" for that. You learn that, then you learn that MM showed there's no "something", no "ether", but that empty space is, in fact, empty, which is what "vacuum" means. And then if you pay attention or any interest to the topic, you learn that there in fact is no pure vacuum, there's always "something" in empty space.

The obvious question to ask at this point is, "so ether is back on the table?".

Turns out the mistake is, as GP said, thinking MM proved space is empty; it only disproved a particular class of substances with particular properties. But that's not how they tell you about it in school.
by bananabiscuit | 2026-01-09 21:48:26+00:00
You describe a very unfortunate situation, and it’s the reason why impersonating an officer is such a serious crime. In the case at hand, however, there is no mistaken identity.

I think for there to be any chance for government officers to do their jobs, and for there to not be any pointless deaths, their authority should never be challenged in the streets, and if they do abuse that authority, the officer should be severely punished.
by baincs | 2026-01-09 21:48:29+00:00
That may be true if you're severely depressed, but I think it can save you if you're starting to get depressed.
That's what happened to me at one point, and an online comment saved me.

I was like 60% depressed but on my way there. I just took my first computer science class in college but I was overly ambitious when I participated in an undergrad CS research. The stress and imposter syndrome was shoving me to the downward spiral.

I posted some gloomy thoughts on an online forum. It was long ago, but I remember the post contained how I could kind of relate to the villain while watching the movie The Dark Knight Rises.

Some online person advised me "lift weights". I had never tried seriously lifting weights, but I was living in a student apartment 10 minutes away from the student gym, so I decided to give it a try. I can't forget the sensation when I did a set of bench press. After a period of amassing so much stress, each rep felt like I was reaching my hand into my brain, directly scooping out the waste and tossing it away.

I became much more active after that, and successfully finished the research and the degree.

It's like how homelessness is more reversible for people who became homeless less than a year ago, and why organizations focus on those groups.
by akshayshah | 2026-01-09 21:48:50+00:00
Totally fair. At least in part, I blame the choice of <em> and <strong>: it's really not clear what the hierarchy between them is, so I just think of them as the online versions of italic and bold.

<mild> and <strong>, or <em> and <emem> (or <double-em>, or <very-em>) might have been clearer, but at this point we'll never know.

Edit: apparently <i> has been redefined to be "the idiomatic text element" rather than just italic - so perhaps it's a semantically appropriate choice here after all! https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-09 21:48:59+00:00
The Vietnamese government has close ties to China right? For example, they are pivoting their high speed rail network to interconnect to China’s high speed rail (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North%E2%80%93South_express_ra...). Between this and the change to not allow banking apps on rooted phones (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46555963), I wonder if they’re being fed a playbook and tools for control of the citizenry by the CCP.
by bloppe | 2026-01-09 21:49:00+00:00
That "perfectly capable mechanism" is one-off JS glue code, which is so cumbersome that approximately nobody actually uses it even though it's been an option for at least 6 years. It would be silly to mistake that for a satisfactory solution.

From my (outsider) perspective, I think the main roadblock atm is standardizing the component model, which would open the door to WIT translations for all the web APIs, which would then allow browsers to implement support for those worlds into browser engines directly, perhaps with some JS pollyfill during the transition. Some people really don't like how slowly component model standardization has progressed, hence all the various glue solutions, but the component model is basically just the best glue solution and it's important to get it right for all the various languages and environments they want to support.
by fabian2k | 2026-01-09 21:49:03+00:00
It is trigger-happy because there was no good reason to draw the weapon or shoot at all. Shooting the woman did not do anything to stop the car, to the contrary it resulted in the car accelerating and hitting another vehicle.

He could have stepped aside instead of drawing his weapon and there wouldn't have been any issue. He also shouldn't have walked around the car that way, that was entirely unnecessary and dangerous.

The woman is clearly distracted by the other ICE officer, that's just an all around dangerous situation they created entirely unnecessarily.
by azalemeth | 2026-01-09 21:49:43+00:00
I'm pretty sure I completed Morrowind for the first time ever using both wine and a celeron. Likewise before that with VirtualPC (remember that?) on Mac OS (note the space!) and Age of Empires (not even Rise of Rome!).

Single-digit FPS can _absolutely_ be playable if you're a desperate enough ten-year-old...
by alephnerd | 2026-01-09 21:49:48+00:00
Nope.

This is domestically led. Unlike China, VN's head of state is a MPS careerist, and much of the leadership spent their formative years in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Romania from 1988-93.

Additionally, VN's internal security apparatus tends to procure from Western vendors because of the ongoing standoff with China over Hoang Sa/Parcel Islands [0], with a significant portion of military leadership having served during the Sino-Vietnamese War and the subsequent dirty war that continued into 1991.

[0] - https://vietnamlawmagazine.vn/any-foreign-activities-in-hoan...
by DauntingPear7 | 2026-01-09 21:50:03+00:00
As a CS student who kinda knows how to build things. I do in fact get a speedup when querying AI or letting AI do some coding for me. However, I have a poor understanding of the system it builds, and it does a quite frankly terrible job with project architecture. I use Claude sonnet 4.5 with Claude code, and I can get things implemented rather quickly while using it, but if anything goes wrong I just don’t have that great of an idea where anything is, what code is in charge of what, etc. I can also deeply feel the brainrot of using AI. I get lazy and I can feel myself getting worse at solving what should be easy problems. My mental image of the problem to solve gets fuzzy and I don’t train that muscle like I would if I didn’t use AI to help me solve it.
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-09 21:50:18+00:00
I assume this will involve more “donations” (AKA bribes) solicited from American companies, so they can get special treatment on antitrust, other regulations, tariffs, etc. Nvidia not being scrutinized over their pseudo acquisition of Groq, is probably because Jensen Huang made an hefty donation to the ballroom project. Every single one of these unprecedented unilateral decisions is a vehicle for corruption.
by mindslight | 2026-01-09 21:50:24+00:00
Did her wife leave the car at any time? Or are you talking about verbal interaction, which is most likely Constitutionally-protected criticism of government agents?

Or is there something specific in the verbal interaction that establishes a mens rea to physically impede? If so, please quote it. (not that her wife's words establish a mens rea for Renee, but it would be a stepping stone)

FWIW I'm ambivalent on illegal immigration. But frankly I think people who think they are finally getting somewhere on illegal immigration are being taken for a ride, just as they have been for the past few decades.
by nathanlied | 2026-01-09 21:50:33+00:00
Football is extremely popular, and football clubs (and their owners) are quite influential (socially and politically). But it's a little bigger than that.

EU is pushing for measures against live-event piracy[1], because they frame this as a systemic threat to cultural/economic systems, giving national regulators broad cover to act aggressively.

While football is quite huge in Europe at large, the impact to GDP of these broadcasting rights is sub-1%; however, lobbyists have a disproportionate impact: you have the leagues themselves (LaLiga and Serie A for Spain and Italy respectively), you have the football clubs, and you've got broadcasters. Combined, they swing quite high, even if the actual capital in play is much lower than the total they represent.

Add to this politicians who can frame these measures as "protecting our culture", get kickbacks in the form of free tickets to high profile games, see rapid action because blocks are immediately felt and very visible, and incentives for increased funding from regulatory agencies because "we need the budget to create the systems to coordinate this", and you can see how the whole system can push this way, even if it is a largely blunt instrument with massive collateral damage.

[1] - https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=intcom%3...
by dang | 2026-01-09 21:50:43+00:00
HN has had plenty of large frontpage threads fitting each of those descriptions. What we don't want is too much repetition. Otherwise the small handful of hottest topics on the internet would dominate everything else, and HN isn't that kind of site.

Lots of past explanations at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so..., https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so..., many more available on request!
by kaycebasques | 2026-01-09 21:51:17+00:00
I stumbled on this work while researching cyborgs. There's quite a bit of jargon on this official page. The main idea (as I understand it) is that previously, when you got an amputation above the elbow (for example) the bicep and tricep muscles became dead ends. They would just attach the ends of the muscles wherever feasible. Apparently the act of one muscle like the bicep contracting (agonist) while another related one like the tricep extends (antagonist) is a really important feedback loop in our brains. AAMI essentially restores this feedback loop, making the prosthetic feel like part of the body. The lead researcher is apparently himself a double amputee.

Osseointegration was another example of interesting real-life cyborg technology that I stumbled upon.
Hermit-AI – An offline, privacy-first RAG chatbot for ZIM files
by ImDelivered | 2026-01-09 21:51:20+00:00
chat with the entire Wikipedia library (and your own docs) without a single bit of data leaving my machine.

What makes it different? Standard RAG often picks the wrong chunks or gets confused by similar articles. Hermit uses a Multi-Joint Architecture:

Entity Extraction: It understands who or what you're asking about before searching.
JIT Indexing: It dynamically indexes only the relevant articles into an ephemeral FAISS index for every query.
Verification Gate: A final joint verifies the premise against the source text to kill hallucinations.
It runs on GGUF models via llama-cpp-python and supports any ZIM file (Kiwix).

Check it out: [https://github.com/0nspaceshipearth/Hermit-AI] I'd love to hear your thoughts on the multi-joint pipeline approach!
by nineteen999 | 2026-01-09 21:51:26+00:00
It may be worth looking into childhood trauma if that's something that may be applicable. I had a similar experience, after losing 35kg over 3 years I felt and looked great on the onsite, even having to overcome back surgery during that period as well, felt like I'd conquerered the world. I thought I'd "done enough work", but as I found out, sometimes there is work to be done on the inside as well.
by DocTomoe | 2026-01-09 21:51:33+00:00
I'm more concerned that someone decides to prompt for 'analyze these logfiles, then clean up', and the LLM randomly decides the best way to 'clean up' is a 'rm -rf /' - not on the first run, but on the 27th.

That kind of failure mode is fundamentally different from traditional scripting: it passes tests, builds trust, and then fails catastrophically once the implicit interpretation shifts.

In short: I believe it's nice this works for the engineer who knows exactly what (s)he is doing - but those folks usually don't need LLMs, they just write the code. People who this appeals to - and who may not begin to think about side-effects of innocent-sounding prompts - are being given a foot machine gun, which may act like a genie with hilarious unintended consequences.
by j-krieger | 2026-01-09 21:51:37+00:00
> So you are basically arguing that it's hard to distinguish, therefore we shouldn't try

No, I said because it's hard to distinguish, therefore we can not use it as an excuse to enact censorship.

> By that logic, we couldn't prosecute fraud

Fraud is illegal.

> couldn't have espionage laws

Espionage is illegal.

No matter what you do or what you write, enacting "desinformation laws" would require a ministry of truth to decide what is fact and what isn't, a task governments are famously incredibly bad at because they always have vested interests in not telling the truth.

> A state funded operation running hundreds of fake accounts pretending to be American citizens, artificially amplifying divisive content, is something different, it's basically a form of information warfare

And yet it is still speech and not distinguishable from genuine Russians sharing their opinions. It is easy to refute the opinions of many a people by discrediting them to be of the origin of a manufactured propaganda machine. Once you start doing this for foreign people, the next logical step is to continue this strategy for local activists or political opponents.

> And what I write here isn't theoretical, coordinated influence operations have inflamed ethnic tensions from the Balkans to Myanmar, not to mention Russian-Ukraininan conflict propaganda. These aren't just "opinions we disagree with", they're documented operations with measurable effects on real world violence. I mean this is a form of war, in which some countries want to destroy your society fabric for their advantage

I know this to be factual. I'm not denying it's existence at all. I'm making a point here. I don't want the government to hold these tools you propose. Any law enacted and every power given will not only be wielded by a government of parties you support, but also at one point by factions you disagree with entirely.
by taeric | 2026-01-09 21:51:42+00:00
Who said these were "easy" fixes, though? I am emphatically not claiming that "just doing something" will work. Though, fair that what I put there can seem that way.

I am more trying to claim that "just doing something" has an annoying track record of looking like "it" is what worked. I would fully believe that, in reality, the thing that worked was already at play before the success started happening. That is, fully depressed people don't succeed at any of these things.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-09 21:51:49+00:00
These are strong feelings. I can appreciate strong feelings. I would also keep in mind that there are only 20k to 30k total ICE agents in the entire country (as of this comment). The federal government may not rein them in, but there are enough other humans on US soil to do so. They can also be pursued for the rest of their lives using documentation and evidence after this administration ends, so collecting and preserving that historical record will be important and relevant work.

In the interim, protect yourself and your community.
by BrenBarn | 2026-01-09 21:52:01+00:00
Part of the problem though is that people often try to use GDP (or GDP per capita) to compare within the top of the list. Like they try to draw conclusions about whether "Germany is doing better than Italy". It's true that big differences in GDP per capita can distinguish between really good and really bad places, but so can many other measures (like life expectancy or education expectancy). Plus, even on a coarse rubric GDP isn't perfect. I'm pretty sure I'd rather live in Spain than Qatar or Greenland. :-)
by falloutx | 2026-01-09 21:52:07+00:00
> First, more people are going to try more ideas faster. This is good.

This is not good universally. Even if you become 10x coder along with your team, the users are not going to become 10x users instantly. They will pay the same and would want the software to be more or less same day to day. If you develop 10x features a week, they will just get frustrated after a while as your software become completely unpredictable by the amount of unneeded changes.

Does every photo editing app needs to be Photoshop? No, users come in all different capabilities and you as a project leader has to decide which features are gonna be important for your users, and for many apps that list is limited. We all think about an app which we used to like it in the past but became complete mess as more ideas were added. HN itself is a good example of not putting all ideas into a project.
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-01-09 21:52:29+00:00
Even if you were correct (you aren't) using 'blocking law enforcement' as part of some cumulative guilt she acquired that justifies a moms murder is weak fucking sauce man. The bar you are trying to set for justifying extra-judicially killing her is un-American as fuck.

'blocking law enforcement using their SUV and then try to flee' has zero relevance as the when law enforcement is authorized to use deadly force. Why the fuck are you trying to expand those actions to death sentences? It's not coming from American law nor authority granted to law enforcement.
by tzs | 2026-01-09 21:52:47+00:00
> Well, normal people generally can’t be trusted with cars: in one country of only 3.5% of the humans we kill two jumbo jets worth of people with them every day.

If you mean Indonesia (the county closest to 3.5% of the human population) or the US (the nearest above 3.5% at 4.1%+) then you are high by an order of magnitude. Two jumbo jets are around 1000 people. US car deaths are around 100 a day and Indonesia is a little lower.

If you mean Pakistan (the next country after Indonesia at 2.9%) you are high by close to two orders of magnitude. They have around 15 deaths a day.
by shevy-java | 2026-01-09 21:53:05+00:00
Man has a rather unkind history.

The even worse thing is that in 2026 this hasn't quite improved significantly. What is the main poison used today? I guess that may depend on the definition, probably particles being taken in by the lung in general. But specific poison it may be antifreeze? Or perhaps that is just more famous. Food poisoning probably is among the highest, but it would not be deliberate usually, so it should be counted in another category.