MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rawgabbit | 2026-01-19 19:46:06+00:00
From https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/11/democrats-...

“As we move into the endgame of the 2022 election, the Democrats face a familiar problem. America’s historical party of the working class keeps losing working-class support.”

“This year, Democrats have chosen to run a campaign focused on three things: abortion rights, gun control, and safeguarding democracy—issues with strong appeal to socially liberal, college-educated voters. But these issues have much less appeal to working-class voters.”

“They are instead focused on the economy, inflation, and crime, and they are skeptical of the Democratic Party’s performance in all three realms.”
by Manheim | 2026-01-19 19:46:18+00:00
No need to apologize, quite the opposite. This is exactly the kind of insight I was hoping for. I read the NYT and other U.S. papers and get the editorial perspective, but I still feel, and many here in Scandinavia feel the same, that we can’t fully understand what’s going on at the level of everyday experience in the U.S. That’s why your ‘street‑level analysis’ is valuable and much appreciated.
by peteforde | 2026-01-19 19:46:41+00:00
I just wanted to vote with my feet and say that my experience echoes yours closely.

Modern coding agents have a remarkable grasp of circuit design and the net result is that they keep pushing me to learn more, faster.

I do find that I often have to specify that I only want parts that are "active on Digikey" because otherwise it will recommend obsolete parts. However, I consider this just like reviewing code generated by an LLM. You don't get a pass on reading datasheets or verifying statements.

I recently had GPT 5.2 spit out a progression of circuits that can amplify a dynamic mic signal to line level, simple to complex, with the intention of finally learning how good amplifiers work. Adding transformers and gain stages with the different OPA family parts and hearing the hum disappear and noise floor drop is the best kind of education.

A tip: BAT54SW specifically is the best part for protecting your pins.
by jes5199 | 2026-01-19 19:46:49+00:00
I forked the anthropic Ralph Wiggum plugin: https://github.com/jes5199/chief-wiggum

there’s some debate about whether this is in the spirit of the _original_ Ralph, because it keeps too much context history around. But in practice Claude Code compactions are so low-quality that it’s basically the same as clearing the history every few turns

I’ve had good luck giving it goals like “keep working until the integration test passes on GitHub CI” - that was my longest run, actually, it ran unattended for 24 hours before solving the bug
by malcolmgreaves | 2026-01-19 19:47:16+00:00
Thanks for getting out the word on an incredibly historically accurate take on the Civil Rights movement. I think people often forget that _this_ is an incredible part of the movement. We got large-scale non-violent demonstrations and civil disobedience instead of a proliferation of armed protest and possibly something even worse. Many folks were tired of waiting around to be safe and treated justly. Just one too many a cop beating up your father or murdering your brother or lying under oath to send your neighbor away for years. The Black Panthers started armed patrols of their own neighborhoods to protect themselves from racist Oakland police officers. There were growing calls for other Black neighborhoods to use their 2nd amendment rights to arm and defend themselves from a tyrannical government. They were succeeding and spreading. As a direct response, Regan (while governor of CA) eventually signed the Mulford Act of '67 which made carrying firearms in public without a permit illegal. (_And they were stingy when it came to giving these permits to Black folks._)
by iamnothere | 2026-01-19 19:47:41+00:00
As an American, most Americans are unable to distinguish between “liberal” (American left, non-specific), Liberal (Lockean traditional capitalism), neoliberal, Communist, socialist, Social Democratic, “progressive”, and the Democratic Party.

Come to think of it, I’m not sure I understand anymore, either. I really do feel like we’re entering a post-ideological tribal era. Ideological stances change minute to minute, mostly according to “who and whom.”
by skeltoac | 2026-01-19 19:48:05+00:00
What do you propose to ban? How do you define it? You want a policy, so write the policy and let me read it.

I have a very broad idea of what ads are. Maybe you don’t. Say what you mean by paid ads.

Am I allowed to offer and accept compensation for boosting one message above others, or not? Would I be allowed to place a hyperlink on my site in exchange for a reciprocal hyperlink? That’s a clear example of compensated communication. That’s what I think ads are.

Imagine the ad police. “You blogged about a product. Someone said you sounded insincere. Let’s see the receipt for purchase. Can’t prove you bought it? Prove you weren’t compensated for your blog post or pay a fine.” Kafka land.
by vee-kay | 2026-01-19 19:48:20+00:00
What is copy-pasta here? All these facts about Obama and his wars are known to the world.

Or do Americans have wool on their eyes when it comes to their politicians' wrongdoings?

It is my bad that I wrote Geneva instead of Oslo. But that typo/errata doesn't change the facts about Obama or Trump.

How can you claim it to be zero relevance when the discussion is about incumbent US President not deserving the Nobel Peace Prize, when it is a fact that the US President he replaced earlier certainly didn't deserve either (for doing wars through 2 consecutive tenures)?

Or are you accustomed to making excuses for the most powerful men in the world, using their privilege to get or expect Nobel Peace Prize like it is some cotton candy?

Although, cotton candy might have more relevance than the Nobel Peace Prize, IMHO.

I see you are also making excuses for the US Presidents not being able to stop wars their country started or involved in.

So you think Bush Jr. and Obama were puppets of Dick Cheney? So is your vice president running your country, not the President? Then why have that seemingly irrelevant position at the White House?

Is that your excuse now to ignore Trump's wrongdoings? (He won't get the Nobel Peace Prize, for sure, but he'll try to buy it or coerce it, he doesn't seem to care what the world thinks of him, because he knows Americans think highly of him, because they elected him twice (the second time he took oath for the highest office, was a AFTER he was convicted of felony)!
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-01-19 19:48:21+00:00
The Constitution of the United States of America enshrines that international law IS United States law.

Article 6 of the Constitution: ...This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land

https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/article-6/
by ozlikethewizard | 2026-01-19 19:48:23+00:00
You assume incorrectly, it was a response to the previous comments claim that Switzerland was not corrupt, which is a laughable claim at best.

You've then proceeded to make a whole host of other assumptions about me rather than engage with any of the points, so I'm not really going to engage with any of them other than also agreeing that the war should end, and should have ended a long time ago. But do I think Ukraine should cede territory to Russia to end the war? Why embolden the beast? We've tried appeasement many times before, it always plays out the same way.

War is not the answer, but Ukraine didnt pick this fight. Im frankly embarrassed by the state of support most european nations have shown them. Not all support needs to be about violence, but far too many of us were too slow to implement too little sanctions on the aggressor.

Anyways the minutia of the ukraine / russia conflict is largely off-topic. The real point is that Russia are the aggressor in Europe right now, and so a european ex-colonel with lots of experience in the intelligence services spouting russian propaganda every occassion they get is probably a collaborator, so I dont see it as anymore unreasonable for the EU to sanction them than say the Russian oligarchs.
by ShroudedNight | 2026-01-19 19:48:34+00:00
For the audience: I had never heard of Brian Berletic previously. In an attempt to understand what this person's undisclosed conflicts of interest were, I found numerous reports of him painting the Myanmar Junta in a positive light:

https://www.reddit.com/r/InformedTankie/comments/ufq4oq/a_co...

https://forsea.co/bangkok-based-conspiracy-blogger-brian-ber...

There's a certain event-horizon where bitterness taints / skews perspective enough that even what would otherwise be helpful insights becomes so costly to disentangle from grudge-extrapolation that it's not obvious if any of it ends up being worth the cost of entry. At least to me, this person's work seems well beyond that point.
by notahacker | 2026-01-19 19:49:05+00:00
A theory behind LLM intelligence is that the layer structure forms some sort of world model that has a much higher fidelity than simple pattern matching texts. In specific cases, like where the language is a DSL which maps perfectly to a representation of an Othello gameboard, this appears to actually be the case. But basic operations like returning the number of times the letter r appears in 'strawberry' form a useful counterexample: the LLM has ingested many hundreds of books explaining how letters spell out words and how to count (which are pretty simple concepts very easily stored in small amounts of computer memory) and yet its layers apparently couldn't model it from all that input (apparently an issue with being unable to parse a connection between the token 'strawberry' and its constituent letters... not exactly high-level reasoning).

It appears LLMs got RHLFed into generating suitable Python scripts after the issue was exposed, which is an efficient way of getting better answers, but feels rather like handing the child really struggling with their arithmetic a calculator...
by Quothling | 2026-01-19 19:49:28+00:00
Maybe I should have made it more clear, but it's pretty good if you know how to work with it. The issue is that it's usually faster to just read the documentation and write the code yourself. Depending on what you're working on of course. Like with the yaml, a LLM can write you an ingress config in a second or two from a very short prompt. It can do similar things with Python if you specify exactly how you want something and what dependencies you want.

That's being bad at programming in my opinion. You can mitigate it a lot with how you config you agents. Mine loads our tech stack. The best practices we've decided to use. The fact that I value safety first but am otherwise a fan of the YAGNI philosophy and so on. I spent a little time and build these things into my personal agent on our enterprise AI plan, and I use it a lot. I still have to watch it like a hawk, but I do think it's a great tool.

I guess you could say that your standard LLM will write better Python than I did 10 years ago, but that's not really good enough when you work on systems which can't fail. It's fine on 90% (I made this number up) of software though.
by collinmcnulty | 2026-01-19 19:49:29+00:00
I always re-read this on MLK day and learn something new each time. Pull quote for this year

“All that is said here grows out of a tragic misconception of time. It is the strangely irrational notion
that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time is neutral. It can be used either
destructively or constructively. I am coming to feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than the
people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people but
for the appalling silence of the good people.”

I think this pairs well with and contrasts to the quote that I think many prefer to quote, that “the arc of history is long, but it tends toward justice”.
by franze | 2026-01-19 19:50:04+00:00
Fake or just miss-informed

this is the support page
https://support.google.com/webmasters/community-video/360202...

this is the creators linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/iskgti/

he does not work for google, just a seo somewhere that creates videos ans posts his hypothesis in forums

this is his youtube account https://m.youtube.com/@saket_gupta

nice high quality - propably ai created videos - still no relationship to reality
by vee-kay | 2026-01-19 19:50:42+00:00
My apologies. Yes, you are right, Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, not Geneva.

However, you are incorrect on your first point.

Nobel Peace Prize is decided by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, a group of five members appointed by the Norwegian Parliament (Storting).

This is different from the other Nobel Prizes, which are decided by Swedish institutions and awarded in Stockholm.
by al_borland | 2026-01-19 19:50:43+00:00
I’ve had one good scrum master who seemed to take a lot of administrative tasks off our plate, keep work flowing, and made things generally pleasant.

All the others have been awful. My current one is the worst so far. I’m not even sure if he knows what scrum is, despite being certified in SAFe. Most people don’t bother showing up to his meeting anymore; that includes him most of the time as well.
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-01-19 19:51:21+00:00
For the United States of America, we ENSHINRED it into our Constitution in Article 6 to give it an enforcement mechanism in our country. Our court system is international law's court system as far as US related issues/enforcement.

https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/article-6/
"This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land"
by randcraw | 2026-01-19 19:51:23+00:00
My perfect reading chair: the "Skye" model designed by Tord Bjorklund for Ikea in the 1970s. Its shape is essentially like an Adirondack chair connected to an ottoman, but padded and leather covered. Insanely comfy and perfect for reading.

Similar but more famous is the LC4 Chaise Longue designed by Le Corbusier.
by ajross | 2026-01-19 19:51:25+00:00
That's true, but sort of misses the spirit of Hyrum's law (which is that the world is filled with obscure edge cases).

In this case the broken resolver was the one in the GNU C Library, hardly an obscure situation!

The news here is sort of buried in the story. Basically Cloudflare just didn't test this. Literally every datacenter in the world was going to fail on this change, probably including their own.
by kelnos | 2026-01-19 19:51:36+00:00
Do you have the same legal rights to something that you've borrowed as you do with something you've purchased, though?

Would it be legal for me to borrow a book from the library, then scan and OCR every page and create an EPUB file of the result? Even if I didn't distribute it, that sounds questionable to me. Whereas if I had purchased the book and done the same, I believe that might be ok (format shifting for personal use).

Back when VHS and video rental was a thing, my parents would routinely copy rented VHS tapes if we liked the movie (camcorder connected to VCR with composite video and audio cables, worked great if there wasn't Macrovision copy protection on the source). I don't think they were under any illusions that what they were doing was ok.
by jcuenod | 2026-01-19 19:51:37+00:00
Comparison to GPT-OSS-20B (irrespective of how you feel that model actually performs) doesn't fill me with confidence. Given GLM 4.7 seems like it could be competitive with Sonnet 4/4.5, I would have hoped that their flash model would run circles around GPT-OSS-120B. I do wish they would provide an Aider result for comparison. Aider may be saturated among SotA models, but it's not at this size.
by docmars | 2026-01-19 19:51:42+00:00
I think it's a matter of taste and preference mostly, but I like Vue's overall design better. It uses JS Proxies to handle reactive state (signals, basically) on a granular level, so entire component functions don't need to be run on every single render — only what's needed. This is reflected in benchmarks comparing UI libraries, especially when looking at table row rendering performance.

Their setup (component) functions are a staging ground for wiring up their primitives without you having to worry about how often each call is being made in your component function. Vue 3's composition pattern was inspired by React with hooks, with the exception that variables aren't computed on every render.

And I agree about Suspense, it's a confusing API because it's yet-another-way React forces you to nest your app / component structure even further, which creates indirection and makes it harder to tie things together logically so they're easier to reason about. The "oops, I forgot this was wrapped with X or Y" problem persists if a stray wrapper lives outside of the component you're working on.

I prefer using switch statements or internal component logic to assign the desired state to a variable, and then rendering it within the component's wrapper elements -- states like: loading, error, empty, and default -- all in the same component depending on my async status.
by mystraline | 2026-01-19 19:52:13+00:00
"Nonviolence" only works when a group is doing that, AND there is also a contingent of violent folks with the same aims.

Nonviolent folks can be negotiated with. Its not permitted to negotiate with criminals/terrorists.

We need both violent and nonviolent forces, but we're not permitted to say that out loud. But historically, thats what works.
by WmWsjA6B29B4nfk | 2026-01-19 19:52:23+00:00
Google docs are pretty clear (https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/robots-txt/robot...):

> Google's crawlers treat all 4xx errors, except 429, as if a valid robots.txt file didn't exist. This means that Google assumes that there are no crawl restrictions.

This is a better source than a random SEO dude with a channel full of AI-generated videos.
by zaptheimpaler | 2026-01-19 19:52:45+00:00
> I assume you're expecting that they'll reach out and cut a deal with each publishing house separately, and then those publishing houses will have to somehow transfer their data over to NVIDIA. But that's a very custom set of discussions and deals that have to be struck.

If this is the only legal way for them to train, then yes that is what they should do instead of breaking the law... just because its not easy doesn't mean piracy is fine.
by lo_zamoyski | 2026-01-19 19:53:27+00:00
> It seems like the lesson we keep learning, no matter the proxy we use for intelligence, is that there is nothing that fundamentally sets humans apart from other animals

Except it doesn't show that.

The reason people make this judgement is because they don't have a coherent or clear definition of "intelligence". Nothing has been undermined, except in those who took the view that animals are dumb automatons. That's more of a legacy of modernism and the desire to gain "mastery over nature" more than anything else.

The essential feature of human beings - from which the rest of human nature and its consequences follow, including our social nature - is rationality. This entails an intellect, which is the abstracting faculty. It is the intellect that makes language possible, because without the capacity to abstract from particulars, we could not have universal concepts and thus no predicates. Language would be reduced to the kind we see in other animals.

For clarity, the functions of language are:

1. expressive: expressing an internal state or emotion (e.g., a cry of pain)

2. signaling: use of expressive to cause a reaction in others (e.g., danger signals)

3. descriptive: beyond immediate sensation; describes states of affairs, allowing for true or false statements

4. argumentative: allows critical analysis, inference, and rational justification

Without abstraction, (3) and (4) are impossible. But all animal activity we have observed requires no appeal to (3) and (4). Non-human animals perceive objects and can manipulate them, even in very clever ways, but they do not have concepts (which are expressed as general names).

Could there be other rational animals in the universe? Sure. But we haven't met any. And from an ontological POV (as opposed to a phylogenetic taxonomic classification), they would be human, as the ontological definition of "human being" - "rational animal" - would apply them.
by rm30 | 2026-01-19 19:53:29+00:00
I never actually used Fidonet. I started on BBS systems just as the internet was becoming affordable, and I made the switch early.

However, I apply the concepts of FidoNet almost every day. I often design offline-first devices, where store-and-forward logic is a necessity, not an option. Many are deployed in remote areas where signals are never optimal, there a High-Gain Antenna is the only solution.

I also prioritize binary protocols over structured JSON; you have a much higher probability of delivering a few hundred bytes of binary data than a bloated text object when the link budget is tight.
Finally, I never expect Wi-Fi to work beyond 5-10m when the router is placed inside the metal structure (that's why my skepticism about BT on cruise ship).
Show HN: PaperBot FM – Turn research papers into 3-host audio podcasts
by mohasarc | 2026-01-19 19:53:58+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m Mo. I’m currently building a startup and wanted a way to listen to research papers for inspiration while commuting or washing dishes.

I tried using Google’s NotebookLM, but the output didn't stick for me. It felt a bit robotic, the conversations were too short, and it didn't go deep enough into the technical details.

So I built PaperBot FM to fix that for myself.

It takes a research paper (plus up to 2 supporting papers for context) and synthesizes a podcast episode. Right now, the episodes are averaging around 30 minutes, though I'm still tweaking the length.

The Tech:
The main challenge was the audio. I couldn't find a TTS service that handled 3 distinct voices effectively in a single conversation flow. To solve this, I built a custom wrapper around Gemini TTS that orchestrates 3 separate "personas" to keep the dynamic interesting.

How it runs:
Currently, the site is just a daily community feed. Users submit papers, vote, and the system generates one episode every 24h based on the winner. It's completely free and all episodes are public.

What's next?

I'm gauging interest on two things:

- Turning this into a service where you can generate episodes on demand (for explainers, internal docs, etc).

- Opening up the voice orchestration as an API, since finding a service that supports more than 2 concurrent voices was surprisingly hard.

Hope you like it! And please let me know if you’d be interested in generating custom episodes or voice generation api.