MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by MichaelRo | 2026-01-26 19:38:27+00:00
>> And what's so special about books in particular, anyway? What's wrong with reading articles and webpages?

Nothing, really, but I suspect that is declining too. I read historical books mostly, some 4-5 per year. Like last time I ordered "Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying, The Secret WWII Transcripts of German POWS", in English because unfortunately it wasn't yet translated in my native language. But other than that I still read printed magazines. One that my father used to read so I picked the habit from him and used to be weekly but now it's bi-monthly because ... fewer readers. And I read a ton of online articles.

But you can notice the repeating pattern: read, read, read. Because I got good at it waay before there was an alternative, and because of that, the alternative has supplanted but never replaced the original. But my kid? Never read anything in his life that wasn't forced upon him. And the whole new generation is like this. He can read because can't function in the modern world without it but reading as primary source of gathering information? No chance.

I suspect this gets us back to medieval times where there are a few erudites and lots of imbeciles, my son included.
by baggachipz | 2026-01-26 19:38:45+00:00
Age discrimination is a huge issue and I've experienced it firsthand. Places want to hire younger people because they're more apt to work longer hours for less pay. It's going to get worse as people who got into the web tech industry early on are still in the workforce, yet more and more young people are entering the workforce because "learning to code" was the perceived path to prosperity half a decade ago.
by ck2 | 2026-01-26 19:38:57+00:00
can GPS sats figure out the mass of the earth by being able to detect its gravitational distortion on their orbit?

or maybe that upcoming space laser interferometer (LISA) since it has to figure precisely how all mass is affecting its position?

I love the history of figuring the circumference of the earth, imagine getting it right within 2% in 240 BC

(then Columbus effing it up by 25%)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_circumference#Histor...
by 9dev | 2026-01-26 19:39:09+00:00
Actually, you shouldn’t. You probably use an easy-to-remember password on SSH keys since you have to type them often, but that also means you’re storing one of your (let’s face it, the primary) password you have in a single file, readable to every executable your run under your account. And that means you’re one exfil away from not only getting your SSH keys compromised, but also allowing an attacker to run an offline decryption attack with unlimited attempts. This invariably leads to your main password getting compromised.

Instead, set up SSH certificates, MFA, Yubikey, or TPM/Enclave storage for your private keys.
by tadfisher | 2026-01-26 19:39:14+00:00
I remember when we organized our lives around television. On Saturday mornings it would be cartoons (including the first full-CGI television shows, Reboot and Transformers: Beast Wars), Wednesday evenings would be Star Trek: TNG, Fridays would be the TGIF block of family shows (from early-to-mid-90s USA perspective here). It felt like everyone watched the same thing, everyone had something to talk about from last night's episode, and there was a common connection over what we watched as entertainment.

We saw a resurgence of this connection with big-budget serials like Game of Thrones, but now every streaming service has their own must-watch thing and it's basically as if everyone had their own personal broadcast station showing something different. I don't know if old-school television was healthy for society or not, but I do have a feeling of missing out on that shared connection lately.
by mgazzer | 2026-01-26 19:39:20+00:00
I see you trying to equalize the arugment, but it sounds like you are conflating rules, regulations and rights versus actual censorship.

Generally the West, besides recent Trump admins, we aren't censored about talking about things. The right-leaning folks will talk about how they're getting cancelled, while cancelling journalists.

China has history thats not allowed to be taught or learned from. In America, we just sweep it under an already lumpy rug.

- Genocide of Native americans in Florida and resulting "Manifest Destiny" genocide on aboriginals people
- Slavery, and arguably the American South was entirely depedant on slave labour
- Internment camp for Japanses families during the second world war
- Students protesters shot and killed at Kent State by National Guards
by cmiles8 | 2026-01-26 19:39:48+00:00
I’ll give you that the current US administration isn’t exactly scoring points for subtle diplomatic negotiation, but remember too that most of the United States was purchased from other countries.

It’s not a completely bonkers idea that the US could purchase all or some of Greenland. In the end, we’ll probably just see a strengthening or enforcement of the existing treaty for US military use of Greenland which is all the US wanted. Europe is still getting used to the president’s rather unique, and yes aggressive, negotiation style born out of his NYC real estate developer days.
by NewsaHackO | 2026-01-26 19:39:57+00:00
Yea, clearly this is the case. Also, as there isn't a clearly defined public-facing medical knowledge source, every institution/school/hospital system would be split from each other even further. I suspect that if one compared the aggregate of all reliable medical sources, it would be higher than youtube by a considerable margin. Also, since this search was done with German-language queries, I suspect this would reduce the chances of reputable English sources being quoted even further.
by Kon5ole | 2026-01-26 19:40:01+00:00
We need water and we need to save energy from renewable sources.

Surplus electricity can be used to make hydrogen from salt water, and when hydrogen is burned to generate energy it releases desalinated water.

It is inefficient yes, but solar is so cheap I think there is an opportunity for a twofer here.

Private enterprises and individuals will deploy solar panels equivalent to several new nuclear plants every year. IMO governments should invest massively in hydrogen infrastructure. Plants, distribution and storage.
by jey | 2026-01-26 19:40:09+00:00
I don't think the point was to say "look, AI can just take care of writing a browser now". I think it was to show just how far the tools have come. It's not meant to be production quality, it's meant to be an impressive demo of the state of AI coding. Showing how far it can be taken without completely falling over.

EDIT: I retract my claim. I didn't realize this had servo as a dependency.
by renlo | 2026-01-26 19:40:25+00:00
“We have facts, they have falsities”. I think the crux of the issue here is that facts don’t exist in reality, they are subjective by their very nature. So we have on one side those who understand this, and absolutists like yourself who believe facts are somehow unimpugnable and not subjective. Well, China has their own facts, you have yours, I have mine, and we can only arrive at a fact by curating experiential events. For example, a photograph is not fact, it is evidence of an event surely, but it can be manipulated or omit many things (it is a projection, visible light spectrum only, temporally biased, easily editable these days [even in Stalin’s days]), and I don’t want to speak for you but I’d wager you’d consider it as factual.
by jodrellblank | 2026-01-26 19:40:27+00:00
> "you are assuming the reader will find your ideas as important and interesting as you do. It is the writer's job to show the reader why they should be interested, why they should care."

This is writing-as-bookselling and marketing. If you find your ideas interesting and want to write about them, it's not your job to show the reader why, you only expect readers who share your interest to be potential readers. You may not think the reader should be interested or should care at all?
by asveikau | 2026-01-26 19:40:36+00:00
I'm surprised to see so many anti-graffiti comments here. Some of these are crude or ugly (and I'm aware that this is subjective), but a few of these are really good and don't deserve a citation. Meanwhile this thread is SCANDALIZED that there is GRAFFITI (clutch your pearls!). It really goes to show the ongoing slide into total conformity that is the tech industry. I remember when tech had more of a nonconformist, countercultural bent, but it has been dying for quite a few years.
by PlatoIsADisease | 2026-01-26 19:40:44+00:00
I can't believe I'm using Grok... but I'm using Grok...

Why? I have a female sales person, and I noticed they get a different response from (female) receptionists than my male sales people. I asked chatGPT about this, and it outright refused to believe me. It said I was imagining this and implied I was sexist or something. I ended up asking Grok, and it mentioned the phenomena and some solutions. It was genuinely helpful.

Further, I brought this up with some of my contract advisors, and one of my female advisors mentioned the phenomena before I gave a hypothesis. 'Girls are just like this.'

Now I use Grok... I can't believe I'm saying that. I just want right answers.
by jshen | 2026-01-26 19:41:25+00:00
It's not clear that anything will be kneecapped. You need more than a desire to not use these products, you also need a viable alternative. Using products from China or Russia probably isn't deemed viable if the concern is politics, which leads to a need for Europe or Canada to build alternatives. They have not been good at this for a long time, maybe that will change, but it's not clear that it will.
by gherkinnn | 2026-01-26 19:41:33+00:00
Opus 4.5 catches all sorts of things a linter would not, and with little manual prompting at that. Missing DB indexes, forgotten migration scenarios, inconsistencies with similar services, an overlooked edge case.

Now I'm getting a robot to review the branch at regular intervals and poking holes in my thinking. The trick is not to use an LLM as a confirmation machine.

It doesn't replace a human reviewer.

I don't see the point of paying for yet another CI integration doing LLM code review.
by dmitrygr | 2026-01-26 19:41:50+00:00
Given that one half of this country openly states that it is OK to not provide medical care to anyone from the other political side [1] [2], I would not trust any polls. Many people would be unwilling to draw a target on their families' backs just to help some pollster.

[1] https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/us-news/who-is-eri...

[2] https://www.facebook.com/pix11news/posts/a-union-says-an-nyp...
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2026-01-26 19:42:18+00:00
No, termux isn't a container, it's running directly in userspace on the host. The only weird thing is that because it's running directly on the host, it has to be built to use unusual paths, eg. /data/data/com.termux/files/usr/bin/bash instead of /usr/bin/bash. If it used containers (which IIRC it can't because Android doesn't really support it) that would actually be easier because then it could use a chroot to make the paths look normal.
by civodul | 2026-01-26 19:42:20+00:00
There are some relatively widespread WiFi chipsets for which free firmware is available:

https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/Hardware-Cons...

Unfortunately, it's hard to be sure when you buy a WiFi device whether it has the right chipset. Also, most laptops come with Intel WiFi, and that requires non-free firmware.
by codyb | 2026-01-26 19:42:36+00:00
Regulations are neutral. They can be positive, or negative. And should be pruned occasionally probably.

And yea, we have lots of old lead pipes here in certain places. But let's not pretend we can't find fault with the immigrant ghettos in Europe or myriad other issues y'all have over there.

There's problems everywhere there's sufficient numbers and complexity.
by gcanyon | 2026-01-26 19:43:30+00:00
I've now installed this and it's already improved my posture -- thanks! It reminds me of how I now wash my hands for at least twenty seconds every time, because my Apple Watch will annoy me if I stop at even 18 seconds. Little reminders like this are wonderful, and I appreciate you for creating this.

ps -- I added two feature requests and commented on another on the repo.
by cjs_ac | 2026-01-26 19:43:44+00:00
> The Schiehallion experiment wasn’t the state of the art for long. A more precise result was achieved in 1798 by Henry Cavendish, who was on the committee for the Schiehallion experiment. Cavendish’s experiment measured the gravity of large lead spheres using an extremely precise torsion pendulum, and cut the error from 20% down to 1.2%.

Cavendish was a peculiar fellow.

> At his death, Cavendish was the largest depositor in the Bank of England. He was a shy man who was uncomfortable in society and avoided it when he could. He could speak to only one person at a time, and only if the person were known to him and male. He conversed little, always dressed in an old-fashioned suit, and developed no known deep personal attachments outside his family. Cavendish was taciturn and solitary and regarded by many as eccentric. He communicated with his female servants only by notes. By one account, Cavendish had a back staircase added to his house to avoid encountering his housekeeper, because he was especially shy of women.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Cavendish
by dpflan | 2026-01-26 19:43:55+00:00
The more verifiable the domain the better suited. We see similar reports of benefits from advanced mathematics research from Terrence Tao, granted some reports seem to amount to very few knew some data existed that was relevant to the proof, but the LLM had it in its training corpus. Still, verifiably correct domains are well-suited.

So the concept formal verification is as relevant as ever, and when building interconnected programs the complexity rises and verifiability becomes more difficult.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2026-01-26 19:44:14+00:00
> You probably use an easy-to-remember password on SSH keys since you have to type them often

No, use ssh-agent and decrypt once per boot.

> Instead, set up SSH certificates, MFA, Yubikey, or TPM/Enclave storage for your private keys.

Granted, I agree with this, too.
by 0xADD1E | 2026-01-26 19:44:24+00:00
More or less- Due to the amount of unusual requirements for installing on Apple hardware (such as being kicked off from macOS, to name the tip of the iceberg) the Asahi installer gets used for most (all?) distros running on Apple Silicon. https://asahilinux.org/docs/alt/policy/#installation-procedu...

edit: The minimal UEFI part of the Asahi installer specifically sets up a “normal” environment that other distros (like Nix) can use, it doesn’t actually install a full distro like Asahi Fedora
by 827a | 2026-01-26 19:44:39+00:00
Conceptually, the training process is like building a massive and highly compressed index of all known results. You can't outright ignore the power usage to build this index, but at the very least once you have it, in theory traversing it could be more efficient than the competing indexes that power google search. Its a data structure that's perfectly tailored to semantic processing.

Though, once the LLM has to engage a hypothetical "google search" or "web search" tool to supplement its own internal knowledge; I think the efficiency obviously goes out the window. I suspect that Google is doing this every time you engage with Gemini on Search AI Mode.
by twc03 | 2026-01-26 19:45:47+00:00
Adding a calendar event shouldn’t take 12 taps—but it does. That friction is why people forget and double-book. We built CalChat to remove manual entry entirely. Just text it, forward an email, or send a photo, and the event is added for you. You can also ask questions about your schedule, and it syncs to your existing calendar in under 10 seconds.
by Fr0styMatt88 | 2026-01-26 19:45:50+00:00
You know it’s really strange when I think about it. I no longer feel motivated to read books mostly, but I could easily spend an hour or two a day reading HN comments and Reddit threads.

Although part of that I’m sure is that as I’m visually impaired, reading physical books is far more tiring than reading off a screen where I can make the text the exact size I want.

Used to be a voracious reader as a kid (though 99% non-fiction).
by Yoric | 2026-01-26 19:45:53+00:00
Seen from Europe, the current US administration doesn't want a Europe, end of story.

Trump 1.0 already tried to convince EU countries to exit the EU.

Trump 2.0 keeps insulting the EU, threatening the EU economically and threatening it militarily. To the point where even most of the far right EU candidates who were betting on being the ${EU COUNTRY} Trump are now doing their best to display how they're very much not Trump.
by ninkendo | 2026-01-26 19:46:01+00:00
What would the alternative be? Simply don't cache anything you get from icloud? Because even if you delete it more eagerly, that's a write cycle.

In fact, avoiding deleting it in case the user gets it again, is going to put fewer write cycles on the SSD, assuming you're going to write it to the SSD at all. The only alternative I can think of is keeping everything from iCloud in RAM, but that is a pretty insane idea. (Also, then the first thing you'd get is people complaining that iCloud eats up all their 5G data caps, etc.)
by scannyai | 2026-01-26 19:46:05+00:00
We tried a different approach to automation: instead of a big rollout, we focused on small wins each week.

Week 1: prototype that actually worked (90%+ accuracy).

Week 2: one workflow live end-to-end.

Week 3: added more document types, trained the team.

Week 4: measured ROI and planned next steps.

By the end, we had a few production workflows running and clear savings. The biggest takeaway: start small, prove value fast, then scale.

Full write-up here: https://scanny-ai.com/blog/30-day-automation-journey/
by thatfunkymunki | 2026-01-26 19:46:16+00:00
interesting that the most balanced one is extremely similar to the default, which is not so:

> \#198 (\texttt{QNBRKBNR})is the most balanced, with both evaluation and asymmetry near zero... Remarkably, the classical starting position-despite centuries of cultural selection-lies far from the most balanced configuration.
by zugi | 2026-01-26 19:46:16+00:00
An AI class that I took decades ago had just a 1 day session on "AI ethics". Somehow despite being short, it was memorable (or maybe because it was short...)

They said ethics demand that any AI that is going to pass judgment on humans must be able to explain its reasoning. An if-then rule says this, or even a statistical correlation between A and B indicates that would be fine. Fundamental fairness requires that if an automated system denies you a loan, a house, or a job, it be able to explain something you can challenge, fix, or at least understand.

LLMs may be able to provide that, but it would have to be carefully built into the system.
Show HN: PolyMCP Skills – Scalable Tool Organization for MCP-Based AI Agents
by justvugg | 2026-01-26 19:46:23+00:00
Hi everyone,
I added a skills system to PolyMCP to solve a common issue with MCP servers at scale.

When the number of tools grows:
• Agents burn tokens loading raw schemas
• Tool discovery becomes noisy
• Different agents need different subsets of tools
• Orchestration logic leaks into prompts

Skills are curated, structured sets of MCP tools with documentation.
Agents load only the skills they need instead of full tool schemas.

Skills are generated by discovering tools from MCP servers and auto-categorizing them.

Example: generate skills from a Playwright MCP server:

polymcp skills generate --servers "npx @playwright/mcp@latest"

HTTP MCP servers:

polymcp skills generate \
--servers "http://localhost:8000/mcp" \
--output ./mcp_skills

Stdio MCP servers:

polymcp skills generate \
--stdio \
--servers "npx -y @playwright/mcp@latest" \
--output ./mcp_skills

Enable skills in an agent:

agent = UnifiedPolyAgent(
llm_provider=llm,
skills_enabled=True,
skills_dir="./mcp_skills",
)

Benefits:
• Smaller agent context
• Scales to large tool sets
• Reusable capabilities across agents
• Tool access control without prompt changes
• Works with HTTP and stdio MCP servers

Repo: https://github.com/poly-mcp/Polymcp
by aerhardt | 2026-01-26 19:46:32+00:00
Well for one thing, call me a sell-out or accuse me of lacking craftsmanship, but I like my databases managed. Then also storage buckets, IAM, general cloud security and other niceties.

And I don't think it's for a lack of skills, I know my way around a Linux box - it's just that I save so much time. I'll occasionally build small projects in a VPS (sometimes cramming the db in there too!) but I don't feel I can do it for other more serious work projects.

Hetzner has basic load-balancing and security around the VPS and that's it, OVH has a bit more but it all looks quite green.
by TulliusCicero | 2026-01-26 19:46:35+00:00
There's a pretty huge difference between relatively generic stuff like "don't teach people how to make pipe bombs" or whatever vs "don't discuss topics that are politically sensitive specifically in <country>."

The equivalent here for the US would probably be models unwilling to talk about chattel slavery, or Japanese internment, or the Tuskegee Syphilis Study.
by copper4eva | 2026-01-26 19:46:39+00:00
I can't say for 960 specifically, but for standard chess getting rid of castling usually results in the players just manually castling their kings. I believe that is why the move was introduced in the first place. So it really doesn't accomplish much except make the opening a bit more limited, since they have to leave themselves a way to manually run the king over one of the rooks. Usually to the short side, since that's quicker. Basically makes queen side much less viable to leave the king at. And queen side castling was already the rarer of the two options.
I imagine it would be a similar story for a lot of 960 positions. I'm not sure how getting rid of castling would benefit anything. In 960 you already get a lot of super crazy aggressive positions with exposed kings even with castling.
by mekdoonggi | 2026-01-26 19:46:54+00:00
I believe your speculation that this would be useful is incorrect for two reasons.

1. The administration and it's sycophants do not accept evident reality.
2. The administration is destroying/tampering evidence and outright refusing to investigate.

While I respect the thought put in, we're a long way from this.

Perhaps in a more just world, phones would be equipped with a camera mode for recording facts. This removes any filtering or modification, tags with location and available data, and then uploads to a national archive for use in investigations.
by uoaei | 2026-01-26 19:47:18+00:00
My CV is similar to David's and I find myself also having to badger people for the time of day. I have worked in a few roles related to a particular industry for a while and still have trouble convincing people that I'm quick to adapt to the various parts of a large scale ecosystem from R&D to product design and logistics. Even though all the details are on my CV.

I think hiring managers are overwhelmed and exhausted and respond much more strongly to something digestible than to something wide-ranging. The tailoring of your CVs and resumes should be much more aggressive than you initially expect.
by n4r9 | 2026-01-26 19:48:03+00:00
Obviously there are some pieces of information that can be conveyed better with a picture or diagram - network connections, block graphs, etc. But as a general rule text is far more efficient for knowledge transfer.

If I have a text file and an audio file of the Great Gatsby, and I want do any of the following, then I'm going to use the text file:

* Find a particular quote

* Determine the number of times the word "Gatsby" is used

* Go back a few pages to remember exactly how something/someone was described

* Intermittently stop and compare with a supplementary file and/or write notes

* Find exactly where I was just before I fell asleep

* Get through it in 3 hours without rushing or missing bits

* Store it on a portable device along with thousands of other books