MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cbeach | 2026-01-10 15:15:19+00:00
> No, it is not a democracy.

Israel is a parliamentary democracy with a multi-party system, independent judiciary, elections and civil liberty.

If you believe otherwise, you must be knee-deep in Hamas propaganda, as many Western leftists seem to be.

> It wasn't Hamas that "expelled the Jews" in 2005, it was Israel that dismantled its illegal settlements.

So Hamas made it illegal for Jews to live in Gaza? Sounds like an apartheid state to me...

Meanwhile 21% of Israeli citizens are Arab.
by JKCalhoun | 2026-01-10 15:15:24+00:00
I also think health (and car-problem diagnosis) are excellent tasks for LLMs.

The you-are-the-product thing, and privacy, has me wondering when Apple will step in and provide LLM health in a way we can trust.

I know I say that and I face the slings and arrows of those distrusting Apple, but I still believe they're the one big company out there that knows that there is money in being the one guy that doesn't sell your data.
by gametorch | 2026-01-10 15:15:52+00:00
> Any psychotherapist ... tries to create a heavy dependence to their patents, not so chemical but behavioral and psychological, which they call patient bonding.

This world view is extreme, not true, and directly harmful to your mental health.

You should consider talking to a psychotherapist about why you feel that way :^)

In all seriousness, the world is a much more pleasant place when you discard extremist views and accept the good with the bad.
by lucianbr | 2026-01-10 15:16:10+00:00
So who gets to decide? Someone who is above influence? Who is that?

There has to be a lot more nuance. I clearly see that both Putin and the CCP do a lot of things predicated on the exact claim that their respective populations can not be left to decide for themselves. "People left free would make bad decisions, we the rulers are morally obligated to force them into a good path". I think this is the ostensible meaning of "freedom is slavery".
by conartist6 | 2026-01-10 15:16:48+00:00
By being nothing at all like them. The best current analog for the kind of code forge we'd build is Unison's forge, e.g. here's a library hosted on it: https://share.unison-lang.org/@ceedubs/folds

Notice that lines and columns are completely absent in this UX! It's a forge for semantic trees of code rather than text files of code.

I think they're only scratching the surface of what you can do when you shatter the line/col paradigm. Most importantly you have to use the Unison programming language to use the Unison code forge. I won't have this limitation at all. Anything you can parse into a standard syntax tree you'll be able to host on my semantic forge, and also I'll be able to put a fully-featured code editor right in the forge site so contributors can get started without ever even leaving their browser.
by least | 2026-01-10 15:17:05+00:00
Babel features are kind of a moot point if you’re just talking about the syntax, which seems to be the purpose of the post. Most of the reason to use org mode is tied to emacs.

There’s no reason you couldn’t do something similar with markdown code blocks if someone were so inclined. But that’s tool dependent, not syntax.

I sort of agree with Karl’s point about there being too many standards of markdown, but I doubt org mode would have survived the same level of popularity without suffering the same fate.

It doesn’t help that there is no standard for org mode. You can only really use and take advantage of its power in emacs. It isn’t susceptible to lossy transformations because there’s only one real org mode editor.
by nostrademons | 2026-01-10 15:17:17+00:00
Sure. Development at Google is glacially slow because nobody does any work, and so they're only publishing releases bi-annually because there aren't enough substantive changes to make quarterly releases seem important. This will also allow the teams to move to biannual OKRs instead of quarterly, which lets ICs and line managers do half as much work while giving executives justification for why they need twice as much headcount.

When it comes to large bureaucracies, always assume laziness over malice or strategic competence.
by ffsm8 | 2026-01-10 15:17:45+00:00
Even more relevant of the rationale behind it.

Unless your closed source code will be usable by llms more effectively then what's available today in oss, it's likely going to die off within the next decade or two.

There will continue to be a need for software developers for the foreseeable future, but market trend toward more and more LLM generated code - no matter how this is seen by us developers.
by Balgair | 2026-01-10 15:18:25+00:00
Is she in daycare? Does she hang out with daycare kiddos? How social are the grandparents, are they up to date on the vaccines?

Covid has an estimated R of ~1.1 this winter. Meaning that the current vaccination rates of the population in the US are not adequate to stop the spread. Everyone has a part to play in that spreading.

Current strains do not seem to be as 'bad' as they were in 2020, but that can change at any time, and is dependent on the individuals.

Look, our family lost 4 people to Covid, all of them above 60 years old. I miss them still. I miss my Grandmother in law, her voice, her humor, and even a little bit, her dementia (strange!). I miss my uncle, I miss his singing the 12 days of Christmas around the piano, his slight Geordie brogue, his passion for electronics. I wasn't that close to the other people, but their loss affects the family a lot still. All those memories, those empty seats at tables. Sorry, here, I'm just still going through things here even 4-5 years later.
by cameronh90 | 2026-01-10 15:18:38+00:00
Yet despite the appliance-ification of cars, they are, on the whole, much safer and quite a bit more reliable than they were decades years ago, despite being forced to work a lot harder for emissions compliance.

It's true that you can't fix them with a spanner, paperclip and pair of tights any more, but it's so much more rare that you have to.
by OptionOfT | 2026-01-10 15:18:48+00:00
Genuine question: what about the NOx?

I remember in Belgium when the laws pushed for lower CO2, and you got an influx of all these diesel engines, as you couldn't get that low with gasoline engines (that had some power).

But a few years later people came to the realization that CO2 is the least bad of the global warming gasses, and those diesel engines emitted a lot of NOx.

Every year there was a distance that you'd have to drive before diesel made sense (as you get more miles out of a gallon, and it was cheaper per gallon).

That number kept on creeping up due to new diesel taxes, and the fact that diesel is no longer cheaper per unit than gas.
by aidos | 2026-01-10 15:19:18+00:00
Ha! As if anything about Notion is simple.

But yeah. It's all just objects pointing at each other. It's mostly tree structured, but not entirely. You have a Catalog of Pages that have Resources, like Fonts (that are likely to be shared by multiple pages hence, not a tree). Each Page has Contents that are a stream of drawing instructions.

This gives you a sense of what it all looks like. The contents of a page is a stack based vector drawing system. Squint a little (or stick it through an LLM) and you'll see Tf switches to Font F4 from the resources at size 14.66, Tj is placing a char at a position etc.

2 0 obj
<<
/Type /Page
/Resources <<
/Font <<
/F4 4 0 R
>>
>>
/Contents 5 0 R
>>
endobj

5 0 obj
<<
/Length 340
>>
stream
q
BT
/F4 14.66 Tf
1 0 0 -1 0 .47981739 Tm
0 -13.2773438 Td <002B> Tj
10.5842743 0 Td <004C> Tj
ET
Q...
endstream
endobj

I'm going to hand wave away the 100+ different types of objects. But at it's core it's a simple model.
by amiga386 | 2026-01-10 15:19:33+00:00
You will find that written constitutions are about as effective as unwritten ones; if the people in power choose to disregard them, and have popular support, they tend to get away with it for long enough to do damage.

Fun fact: The UK has the Magna Carta, the original bill of rights signed in 1215. Did you know that's 561 years before the US declared its independence from the UK? To put it another way, 561 years is more than double the length of time the US has been a country.

Second fun fact: UK Prime Ministers aren't elected. Their party is elected, and tends to command a majority in the House of Commons, but if they don't, they get to trade horses with other parties to see which coalition can command a majority, and thus win a confidence vote. The party selects a leader through their own internal processes. Doesn't even have to be an elected MP. Then they tell the king, who rubberstamps the decision. They can do this at any time, not just after an election. Provided the leader can command a majority in Parliament, they get to continue. If enough of your own party dislikes you as leader, they will vote against a confidence motion and drop themselves and you out of power; your job is to not let it get to that.

The House of Lords is a secondary chamber, which scrutinises what the House of Commons passes and suggests rewordings and rewrites. (There's a whole other layer of scrutiny at the committee stage, for costing, etc.) They can send back bad bills, but can't send them back indefinitely, if the government had that in its election manifesto, so appointed or not, they can't defy the "will of the people".

The king doesn't rock the boat, not because he fears for his life, but because he'd trigger a constitutional crisis which will inevitably resolve in the form of a republican UK.
Show HN: A real-time ballistic solver for moving targets under drag (C++)
by ujinf74 | 2026-01-10 15:19:37+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m sharing a small open-source project I’ve been working on: a native C++ ballistic solver that computes launch angles to intercept moving targets in real time, under gravity and air drag.

Instead of relying on vacuum assumptions, closed-form equations, or lookup tables, the solver formulates the intercept as a nonlinear problem and solves it numerically using time integration and iterative methods.

The motivation came from game and simulation scenarios where simpler approaches tend to break down:
- moving targets
- strongly curved trajectories due to drag
- real-time constraints

The solver simulates projectile motion (RK-style integration), tracks the closest approach to the target, and iteratively adjusts the launch direction until an intercept is achieved.

It’s written in C++ and exposed through a stable C ABI, so it can be used from environments like Python or game engines (e.g. Unity) without rewriting the core logic.

Project page: https://github.com/ujinf74/ballistic-solver

I’d be very interested in feedback, criticism, or discussion around the numerical approach, performance trade-offs, or edge cases I might have missed.
by maqp | 2026-01-10 15:19:37+00:00
>It is of course very telling that Snowden ended up in Russia.

Yeah it's almost like you can revoke someone's passport during their layover in Russia and make the people with MAGA-levels of intelligence take the optics at face value through decade long repeated messaging.

If Snowden was a Russian spy, he would've taken the files, given them to Putin, received the largest Datša in the country and we would never have heard from him or the files. Instead, he gave it to journalists who made the call what to release.

If you don't want people to blow the whistle, stop breaking the damn law https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/03/edward-snowd...
by bfrog | 2026-01-10 15:19:48+00:00
It has literally split the ecosystem I’m not sure why people think it hasn’t. There’s basically embassy then everything else. Embassy has been quite successful in large part because its primary author took the time to make it good.

If you look at espressif and how they support rust they have to offer both blocking and non blocking options, they also offer using rust on their freertos and C library setup. It’s quite an undertaking to do all of this.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-10 15:20:18+00:00
To be really honest yeah.

Not sure why people downvoted but this is sort of true

Microsoft was absolutely dominating and buying up everything (similar to today's tech giants) and they were literally the most mega corporation ever

Until they got hit by the monopoly lawsuit. That alone scared microsoft so much that it backed off

After the backing off is when Companies like google, heck Apple was directly invested to be saved by microsoft just so that they dont get threatened by the govt as monopoly and amazon.

In a way people mention so why couldn't Microsoft create their own engine but its also the fact that blink/chromium is based on fork of webkit which itself is a fork of KHTML from the kde team but webkit added many features (from what I could tell) and is a really complex software in it of itself

This was created by apple and apple as we know it would not have been able to exist without Microsoft backing off them

My point here is that in previous times, Microsoft was a large curtain blocking any innovation if they wanted but after it was feared by even a threat like monopoly, they took it very seriously and thus we have the cultural innovation in many ways that we have

Now the monopoly question was a genuine question still launched by the government.

Today the landscape is different, Google and these large tech companies would buy things and the meta strategy has become to sell, its a very cynical point of things which really just ends up screwing the customers in the end.

The government doesn't care, it might slap some 1% fine and there is a quote that if crime's punishment becomes only fines, then crime becomes legal and the fines compared to company are so small and they got legal structure so high that they strech it for as much as possible

Overall, the govt.'s being really lobbied by these tech giants and they stiffle tech innovation in the end

In the end all of them are the same, they all kind of want to be a microsoft pre monopoly era.

Govt's lack of understanding of the matters around the world is the reason why tech feels so intrusive. This has real consequences to you and me, now I don't trust the govt will be able to improve if its gets lobbied or corrupted and that's a seperate matter and might take new laws all around the world to prevent such corruption / lobbying but right now, the other best thing is to showcase support by being the minor fraction of the population who supports/donates to open source / msme businesses
by dfreel | 2026-01-10 15:20:18+00:00
Documents are classified as top secret for a reason, they're intentionally obscured from the public eye because disclosing them would advantage our adversaries and harm our national security, up to and including field agents being murdered.

This approach has not been "debunked", it's standard practice for security services worldwide to keep their most sensitive workings a secret.

Snowden's aim was to damage the US and its allies, and he succeeded in this.
by postalcoder | 2026-01-10 15:20:23+00:00
I used the Dark Sky app since it came out in 2012. I used to consistently get notifications about precipitation with Dark Sky, that were consistently accurate. The Apple weather application seems less motivated to send me notifications with any sort of regularity. I almost never get them now, even with fresh iOS installs. I haven't moved either.

And just anecdotally, Dark Sky was a delight to use. Apple Maps makes it a chore to extract the same utility from their app.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2026-01-10 15:20:27+00:00
"People usually don't compile their browsers from source anyway."

But this is a forum that includes people who do compile their browser from source

As such, if promoting a new browser here, it should be expected people may ask about the availability of source code

I use an HTML browser that is a 2M static binary

It compiles quickly and easily on all the computers I own, and these computers are underpowered

This allows me to customise the software

For example, any "features" I do not wish to have, such as telemetry or other "automatic" remote connections, can be removed

NB. I am not expressing an opinion on the "Orion" software, I am commenting exclusively on the statement, "People usually don't compile their browsers from source anyway" appearing in a forum read by people who _do_ compile their browsers from source
by peepee1982 | 2026-01-10 15:21:06+00:00
It is honestly depressing how many people have swallowed the capitalist pill so completely. Most people can't even fathom a world where cooperation actually works better than a cutthroat rat race.

It leads to these total room-temperature takes that the system is the only reason we have the internet or Hacker News. It is exhausting watching people parrot the same old clichés because they are too lazy to actually crack a history book.

The truth is that foundational tech was almost never market-driven. The architecture of the computer, the internet, and the Web were all products of the public commons. They were created by people motivated by discovery and utility rather than exit liquidity. Capital did not invent these things. It just showed up late, threw a fence around them, and started charging rent on human ingenuity it had nothing to do with.

Same goes for the Luddites. They were not anti-machine, they were just anti-starvation. They did not hate the loom. They hated that the loom was being used as a legal weapon to gut their labor rights while the owners hoarded 100 percent of the gains.

Using a computer to call this out is not hypocrisy. It is using a tool that was stolen from the human commons to argue for its return. If you think we owe our progress to the current ownership model, you are not paying attention. You have just been programmed by the marketing.
by dnalang | 2026-01-10 15:21:07+00:00
Metric,10k Gain (Star),100k Gain (Hypercube),1M Gain (Tesseract)
Qubit Count,10 Qubits,20 Qubits,40 Qubits
Purified Fidelity,0.9844,0.9992,0.99999
Error Probability,1.56×10−2,8.0×10−4,1.0×10−6
Gain Magnitude,104,105,106 (Verified)
by lock1 | 2026-01-10 15:21:18+00:00
It's still a useful distinction IMO.

"Script" PLs tend to be interpreted, dynamic, and handwave various machine-level details. In contrast, "compiled" PLs usually provide you the constructs to manipulate native machine-level features directly.

Realistically, communities around "script" languages aren't going to talk much about memory layout or syscall. Instead, getting the job done fast (devtime-wise) is their main focus.

On the other hand, "compiled" languages tend to draw people who like squeezing every bit of computing power from their computer, even though it tends to raise the complexity.
by ghaff | 2026-01-10 15:21:25+00:00
At large companies, there's just a lot of coordination needed. Which means a lot of meetings typically. Probably more than there is needed but one of the points of a large company is having a critical mass of people pulling in roughly the same direction(s).

>also why is there a hard end time rather than a maximum time?

Depends on company, culture, and individuals. If you get through the purpose of the meeting, the meeting organizer may well say "Let's give everyone 20 minutes (or whatever) back." I do think that it's a worthwhile goal to default to <1 hour meetings.

In any case, agendas and thinking about how the meeting time should actually be spent is worthwhile.
by chrisjj | 2026-01-10 15:21:34+00:00
"In order to protect women, children, and the public from the risks of fake pornographic content generated using the artificial intelligence technology, the government... has temporarily blocked access to the Grok application," Communication and Digital Affairs Minister Meutya Hafid said in a statement. "The government views non-consensual deepfake practices as a serious violation of human rights, dignity, and the security of citizens in the digital space."
by mrweasel | 2026-01-10 15:21:44+00:00
Someone pointed out that a lot of US builders will drive pickups truck, and that it's kinda doesn't make sense, why don't they drive a van? Depending on the trade and location builders and contractors here will drive something like a VW Transporter, Mercedes Sprinter, Toyota HiAce or a Peugeot Partner. The Sprinter will fit e.g. your plywood, others will have mounts on the side or roof to transport material.

They won't act as a large wheelbarrow though, not well at least.
by 1dom | 2026-01-10 15:22:22+00:00
> I haven't kept up but it would be nice if there were more options between a no-maintenance static site hosting, and a high-maintenance dynamic site.

This is essentially my position in fewer and less argumentative words, including the "I haven't kept up bit", really:)

Your last paragraph was also really thought provoking. I'm torn on that though. I agree it's an almost off-putting amount of time for anyone who wants a personal website to reinvent the wheel when the client browser could help.

The main issue with that for me is that browsers require organisations to build and maintain, so I think we should always be careful about removing responsibilities from website creators and giving it over to browsers.

I guess the SSG and the browser points are both freedom vs convenience type tradeoffs where everyone has their own personal preference. It's all Web stuff though, so we should probably try keep it all open, flexible and resilient IMO.
by dwroberts | 2026-01-10 15:22:24+00:00
I think this is an overly cynical read on the whole thing, at least after skimming the main points from the bill.

A lot of it is about designating critical suppliers + providers and their security obligations.

Central government would typically be a customer, that uses other suppliers and providers to achieve its goals, not a supplier or a provider itself.

So in that sense it doesn't seem so strange to see it omitted, or at least for first set of legislation etc.? Get the first party suppliers in shape first, then legislate the net result of government function using those suppliers etc.
by SenHeng | 2026-01-10 15:22:25+00:00
I’ve got two cars that I drive regularly, a modern day BMW with all the bells and whistles, and an almost 20 year old Honda
Acty Van. It’s 660cc, doesn’t have rear seat belts, or a radio, it does have power windows though.

I enjoy driving both for different purposes, but I have to agree with you. On long distance driving (>200km), the BMW is safer. Cruise control, lane keeping, auto distance. It really makes long, multi hour drives less tiring.

I wouldn’t drive my Acty to the next town.
by yopals | 2026-01-10 15:23:08+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Yopals (https://yopals.com) because I was frustrated with existing pen pal/language exchange platforms.

The backstory:
InterPals has been around since 1998 and was great for connecting with people worldwide. But over the years it's become cluttered with ads, the UI feels dated, and the signal-to-noise ratio has gotten worse.

What Yopals does:
-Connect with native speakers of languages you're learning
-Find people interested in your culture/language
-Make genuine international friendships
-Clean, focused interface without the cruft

My current dilemma:
I have a working platform but zero users. Classic chicken-and-egg problem. If someone signs up today, they see an empty site and leave. But I can't fill it without users.

I'm planning a coordinated launch with a beta group so everyone joins simultaneously, but I'd love to hear how others have tackled this.

The site is live now if anyone wants to check it out and give feedback.

Fair warning: you might be the only person there right now, which is exactly the problem I'm trying to solve!