MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by KronisLV | 2026-01-23 11:04:33+00:00
> During development you don't use prod data, though.

I’ve seen projects where testing is done in prod and also projects where API keys for some external services (e.g. Mapbox) are shared across prod and dev. Or cases where credentials end up in GitHub repos due to ease of use and how inadequate secret management solutions can be.

Luckily that’s not the majority of projects, but I bet it happens a lot more elsewhere. Definitely a bunch for your average outsourced/freelance/scrappy/non-funded project.

Whether anyone will actually use your secrets or even code that’s sent to these large AI shops, though, that’s another question. You might as well question using GitHub cause it’s owned by M$.
by halapro | 2026-01-23 11:04:41+00:00
Speaking of data loss, it's fucked up that Apple doesn't give a shit about your data.

Ages ago I shipped my iMac to them and it came back with a new HD. Hello? Maybe include the old drive so I can attempt to recover the data? I lost a year's worth of photos and a bunch of personal documents. This is when I started doing backups.
by Altimate | 2026-01-23 11:06:12+00:00
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by 2b3a51 | 2026-01-23 11:06:13+00:00
"In England, by law children are to be taught about the Holocaust as part of the Key Stage 3 History curriculum; in fact, the Holocaust is the only historical event whose study is compulsory on the National Curriculum. This usually occurs in Year 9 (age 13-14)."

https://www.het.org.uk/about/holocaust-education-uk

So not Province of Northern Ireland, Scotland or Wales.
Note that WW2 is not a statutory requirement in any of the key stages although it does feature in the examples (which are non-statutory). And a reminder that history is a required subject only to Key Stage 3, so many students won't take it after they are 14 and won't study for an exam.

Reporting on education in the UK does tend to be rage-baity and most situations are more complex when you look at them a bit closer.

(I have never taught history and never taught in the school sector)
by mierz00 | 2026-01-23 11:06:35+00:00
I’m really not sure I follow this argument.

A lot of software has friction to get to the value. This is often because of constraints not choice.

To give a concrete example of this, in my company we had users upload files for analysis. To get the export for the file, it took many steps. Not hard, but a lot to get done.

We switched it to an integration and now it’s 3 clicks. We’ve gone from 10% of users onboarding to 100%.

It doesn’t mean we get people to stay, but the barrier to understanding if our tool provides value to them has completely disappeared.

I’m very curious though, what value did you strip away when trying to make your product easier to use?
by wongarsu | 2026-01-23 11:08:03+00:00
Britain won, but it cost them pretty much everything. And while a lot of pride is connected to winning them, neither were wars Britain really had to fight.

WWI was caused by every European power thinking they could benefit from a war, leading to powder keg that blew up from a completely inconsequential event. For the British one of the motivations was getting Germany's African colonies that were in the way of building the Cape to Cairo Railway, which ended up never being completed anyways.

WWII at least had a clear villain. But it was a villain that made every indication that he didn't actually want to fight Britain. Maybe that was a ruse and Hitler would have attacked Britain after securing the continent, maybe it wasn't and a British and German empire could have coexisted. We will never know. What we do know is that fighting WWII required Britain to bleed its colonies dry, followed by losing most of them in the years after the war

I'm not going so far as saying Britain shouldn't have fought the world wars. At least WWII had justification beyond what can be seen on map. However without participation in those two wars Britain would have had a shot at continuing to be a wealthy empire
by halapro | 2026-01-23 11:08:28+00:00
Connection-related bugs are the worst. Here I am, wishing that after 15 years of hotspot software and WiFi/BT enhancements I'd get painless hotspot, airdrop and general WiFi connectivity. My bad, still not possible.

But yeah Liquid Ass surely is lickable.

Apple software, especially Mac software, tanked ages ago.
by giga_private | 2026-01-23 11:08:40+00:00
I have been closely following the debate around "Chat Control" in the EU and similar anti-encryption regulations worldwide. I’ve noticed that while the technical experts are worried, the general public still doesn't quite grasp what life after privacy actually feels like.

I believe fiction can sometimes communicate these stakes better than a technical whitepaper ever could. I wrote this short story to explore the logical conclusion of these laws.
by shantnutiwari | 2026-01-23 11:08:54+00:00
> I think we must make it clear that this is not related to AI at all

Yeah, many companies do that. I unsusbcribed from newline, they still keep spamming me. Funny thing is, they realised they had made a mistake and promised to remove unsubs. One week later, the spam started.

The correct solution is the spam button. Always
by croon | 2026-01-23 11:09:07+00:00
> It can be reduced to scanning a QR code in an app. It is a bit of a mystery to me why you think that isn't easy, practical or is susceptible to coercion.

Because "scanning a QR code in an app" would lead to:

1) integrity loss, ie reduction of peers in the secret sharing concept.

and/or

2) privacy loss, ie vote coercion, "show me you voted for our dear leader or something bad happens".

You can either confirm your encrypted ballot is present, OR you can decrypt it before being cast, in which case it can't be cast anymore. Unless I'm missing something they're mutually exclusive. The entire premise of the mix net is not being able to verify what you voted for, only that your vote is there, right?
by ZeroGravitas | 2026-01-23 11:09:19+00:00
Not if you compare states with similar levels of economic development, like US states or EU countries.

Iowa, South Dakota, Kansas, Oklahoma have around 50% wind and 10 cent electricity.

When comparing EU states, the correlation is more about who taxes electricity and who builds wind. Comparing pre-tax prices has a very slight downward trend as the country has more wind.

You see a lot of propaganda graphs online that have the EU states clustered in the top right and a cluster of unlabelled Petro states and dictatorships who subsidize electricity in the other quadrant.

The intended implication is that you should emulate the countries they are afraid to name because it would make their graph ridiculous.
by davydm | 2026-01-23 11:09:52+00:00
This post brings up a lot of (imo true) points that I honestly can't share with the ai-lovers at work because they will just get in a huff. But the OP is right - we automate stuff we don't value doing, and the people automating all their code-gen have made a very clear statement about what they want to be doing - they want _results_ and don't actually care about the code (which includes ideas like testing, maintainability, consistent structure, etc).

It's extra hilarious to hear someone you _thought_ treated their code work as a craft refer to "producing 3 weeks worth of work in the last week" because (a) I don't believe it, not for one bit, unless you are the slowest typist on earth and (b) it clearly positions them as a code _consumer_, not a code _creator_, and they're happy about it. I would not be.

Code is my tool for solving problems. I'd rather write code than _debug_ code - which is what code-gen-bound people are destined to do, all day long. I'd rather not waste the time on a spec sheet to convince the llm to lean a little towards what I want.

Where I've found LLMs useful is in documentation queries, BUT (and it's quite a big BUT) they're only any good at this when the documentation is unchanging. Try ask it questions about nuances of the new extension syntax in c# between dotnet 8 and dotnet 10 - I just had to correct it twice in the same session, on the same topic, because it confidently told me stuff that would not compile. Or in the case of elasticsearch client documentation - the REST side has remained fairly constant, but if you want help with the latest C# library, you have to remind it all the time of the fact - not because it doesn't have any information on the latest stuff, but because it consistently conflates old docs with new libraries. An attempt to upgrade a project from webpack4 to webpack5 had the same problems - the llm confidently telling me to do "X", which would not work in webpack 5. And the real kicker is that if you can prove the LLM wrong (eg respond with "you're wrong, that does not compile"), it will try again, and get closer - but, as in the case with C# extension methods, I had to push on this twice to get to the truth.

Now, if they can't reliably get the correct context when querying documentation, why would I think they could get it right when writing code? At the very best, I'll get a copy-pasta of someone else's trash, and learn nothing. At the worst, I'll spin for days, unless I skill up past the level of the LLM and correct it. Not to mention that the bug rate in suggested code that I've seen is well over 80% (I've had a few positive results, but a lot of the time, if it builds, it has subtle (or flagrant!) bugs - and, as I say, I'd rather _write_ code than _debug_ someone else's shitty code. By far.
by jauntywundrkind | 2026-01-23 11:10:17+00:00
It's just so wild to me that people are so married to anti-features like this. That anti-interest do possesses the modern spirit, enraptures people so.

'i don't know what it is but I'm not interested and it's probably scarey' is not, imo, befitting the cultures I personally want to see. There's times and places for extreme conservatism, but generally I am far more here for progress, for trying for aspiring to better, and I thought that was so clearly what the hacker spirit was about.
by vegabook | 2026-01-23 11:11:46+00:00
Ultimately what's happening here is AI is undermining trust in remote contributions, and in new code. If you don't know somebody personally, and know how they work, the trust barrier is getting higher. I personally am already ultra vigilant for any github repo that is not already well established, and am even concerned about existing projects' code quality into the future. Not against AI per se (which I use), but it's just going to get harder to fight the slop.
by chriswep | 2026-01-23 11:11:55+00:00
In my tests this doesn't come close to the years old coqui/XTTS-v2. It has great voice cloning capabilities and creates rich speech with emotions with low latency. I tried out several local-TTS projects over the years but i'm somewhat confused that nothing seems to be able to match coqui despite the leaps that we see in other areas of AI. Can somebody with more knowledge in this field explain why that might be? Or am i completely missing something?
by chrisjj | 2026-01-23 11:12:09+00:00
> I think we must make it clear that this is not related to AI at all, even if the product in question is AI-related.

It is not specific to "AI" but it is very much related to it.

> If too many users unsubscribe, they just add one more category and “accidentally” opt-in everyone

... and "forget" to add its opt-out to the list.
by rajhlinux | 2026-01-23 11:12:34+00:00
They just declined Meta's $800 million offer. What are they smoking? I just saw the specs and nothing is special about the Furiosa RNGD Gen 2 card compared to the RTX 5090. Sure, it has more SRAM, but that is not a deal breaker. The same goes for power consumption, data centers have incentives for power.

If each Furiosa RNGD Gen 2 card costs $10k while an RTX 5090 costs $2k, and the RTX 5090 has better performance for LLMs, you have to be mad stupid, have a personal grudge against Nvidia, or just want to burn cash for no good reason to rack up your data centers with Furiosa.

The value of their company is going to diminish and their next offer won't go over $1.5 billion. It will actually be less than $800 million since every year Nvidia, Intel, and other AI hardware startups introduce a better and faster card.

If Furiosa cards magically became cheaper than Nvidia's similar hardware, Furiosa might be worth a quarter billion dollars. I highly doubt this would ever happen because making AI compute with cutting edge lithography is hella expensive and involves heavy politics.
by briandon | 2026-01-23 11:12:44+00:00
At least one decades-old study that had purported to show that the herbicide glyphosate posed no health (esp cancer) risk to humans was retracted in late 2025 (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/02/climate/glyphosate-roundu...). Glyphosate may be applied multiple times in a season, both to control weeds but also onto the actual desired crop (i.e. the stuff that gets turned into food for humans and for other animals) as a desiccant a week or two pre-harvest. The official line is that glyphosate that isn't absorbed directly by leaves and other above-ground plant tissues "tightly binds" to soil and is quickly and completely broken down by soil bacteria, though it is also admitted that plant roots can absorb glyphosate and that it can subsequently be transmitted throughout plants. So I would not discount the possibility that some level of glyphosate accumulation in the soil and bioaccumulation in food crops could also be occurring alongside residues from spraying.

In other words, dietary fiber in general or specific forms (e.g. Metamucil aka Psyllium husk) could be effective in lowering CRC risk or could have been so in the past but consumption of real-world dietary fiber in the current era in which glyphosate-based herbicides are in increasingly wide use could now be increasing cancer risks.
by jraph | 2026-01-23 11:12:54+00:00
Anecdotes is already a plural, of anecdote. Data is not a plural of anecdotes, or anecdote, it is plural of datum (kinda, data is often used as a mass/uncountable noun, in which case it's not a plural).

Under which hypothesis (formulated before the observations), how you collect it and its statistical significance and then how you interpret it (guided by the hypothesis) are key.

Such data is nothing like anecdotes. Anecdotes are at best inspirations to formulate hypotheses.

Intuition is a core element in research (it guides the formulation of hypotheses) but doesn't constitute evidence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method
by yerushalayim | 2026-01-23 11:13:01+00:00
You’re right that a lot of software comes out of Anglophone or Western contexts, but that’s exactly why these issues persist. The problem isn’t that RTL is “hard” — it’s that most text engines, layout systems, and PDF toolkits were originally architected with implicit LTR assumptions baked deep into the rendering pipeline.

Once those assumptions are embedded in things like glyph ordering, bidi resolution, cursor movement, hit‑testing, line breaking, and font fallback, fixing RTL becomes a retrofit instead of a design principle. By the time a team realizes the gap, the shaping and layout stack is so tightly coupled that adding proper bidi handling feels like a massive rewrite.

You see this pattern everywhere: PDFium (used by all Chromium browsers), various UI frameworks, and even some OS‑level text components still mishandle RTL in 2026. The symptoms are always the same — disappearing text, reversed glyph order, broken cursor navigation, or failure to commit text at all.

This isn’t a niche corner case. Hebrew, Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, and other RTL scripts represent hundreds of millions of daily users. The real issue is that global language support is still treated as optional rather than foundational, and the technical debt from those early assumptions keeps compounding.
by cowboylowrez | 2026-01-23 11:13:49+00:00
I think the internet should be 18+ no exceptions, its easy to enforce because you have to have physical devices and communications agreements (phone contract, isp to connect to). once a kid actually has internet access its harder to enforce age limits or police behavior problems and additionally severely reduces security for adults also for having to verify their age with sensitive information and documentation. This way if a parent really insists on their child using the internet (sort of like the parent giving their kids alcohol or drugs) we can put the responsibility for the consequences straight on the parents where it was supposed to be all the time.

literally no reason at all why a kid should have internet access.
by unsignedint | 2026-01-23 11:15:07+00:00
Just my take: I don’t think “AI” automatically equals “slop.” There’s plenty of human-made slop too, and some AI-assisted content is genuinely useful. I’d rather see this framed as “report low-value/spammy content” than “report AI slop,” since the AI label tends to turn into “this looks AI” witch-hunting. That said, our baseline assumptions seem pretty different here, so we probably won’t fully agree.
by Cthulhu_ | 2026-01-23 11:18:17+00:00
> You can't wall all the fields but you can wall the village.

An interesting take on this is depicted in Attack on Titan, where they do in fact wall all the fields - the city (I don't remember if it's like the last vestige of humanity or whatever) is surrounded in concentric ring walls, the outer one which contains villages and farmland having a circumference of about 3000 kilometers for an internal area of 723,822 km², making its area just a bit smaller than Zambia and Chile.

Of course, a 3000 kilometer, 50 meter tall wall is ridiculous. But then again the great wall of China is 21.000 kilometers long. I believe there's more info about the walls and their construction in the source.
by epolanski | 2026-01-23 11:18:39+00:00
Honestly I don't care how people come with the code they create, but I hold them responsible for what they try to merge.

I work in a team of 5 great professionals, there hasn't been a single instance since Copilot launched in 2022 that anybody, in any single modification did not take full responsibility for what's been committed.

I know we all use it, to different extent and usage, but the quality of what's produced hasn't dipped a single bit, I'd even argue it has improved because LLMs can find answers easier in complex codebases. We started putting `_vendor` directories with our main external dependencies as git subtrees, and it's super useful to find information about those directly in their source code and tests.

It's really as simple. If your teammates are producing slop, that's a human and professional problem and these people should be fired. If you use the tool correctly, it can help you a lot finding information and connecting dots.

Any person with a brain can clearly see the huge benefit of these tools, but also the great danger of not reviewing their output line by line and forfeiting the constant work of resolving design tensions.

Of course, open source is a different beast. The people committing may not be professionals and have no real stakes so they get little to lose by producing slop whereas maintainers are already stretched in their time and attention.
Show HN: A verified foundation of mathematics in Coq (Theory of Systems)
by Horsocrates | 2026-01-23 11:19:34+00:00
I’ve spent the last few months formalizing a new structural foundation for mathematics called Theory of Systems (ToS) in Coq.

The goal was to derive classical results (like the uncountability of [0, 1]) from a single principle of distinction ("A = exists") rather than starting with ZFC axioms.

Key Technical Highlights:

135 theorems, 0 Admitted for the main uncountability proof.

Solves Digit Stability: Instead of digit extraction, it uses geometric interval trisection to prove uncountability constructively.

L5-Resolution: Implements a deterministic "leftmost" rule for argmax, ensuring that optimization processes are Cauchy even on flat plateaus.

No Axiom of Infinity: The infinite emerges as a property of the process levels (P4).

I'm currently looking for an ArXiv endorsement (cs.LO or math.LO) to publish the full 60-page preprint.

Repo: https://github.com/Horsocrates/theory-of-systems-coq

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the E/R/R (Elements/Roles/Rules) framework and the inclusion of the "Law of Order" as a 5th law of logic.
by londons_explore | 2026-01-23 11:19:48+00:00
Two-phase commit provides an eventual consistency guarantee only....

Other clients (readers) have to be able to deal with inconsistencies in the meantime.

Also, 2PC in postgres is incompatible with temporary tables, which rules out use with longrunning batch analysis jobs which might use temporary tables for intermediate work and then save results. Eg. "We want to send this marketing campaign to the top 10% of users" doesn't work with the naive approach.
by croon | 2026-01-23 11:19:57+00:00
While they will always have premiere models that only run on data center hardware at first, the good news about the tooling is that tool calls are computationally very minimal and no problem to sandbox/run locally, at least in theory, we would still need to do the plumbing for it.

So I agree that open source solutions will likely lag behind, but that's fine. Gemini 2.5 wasn't unusable when Gemini 3 didn't exist, etc.
by sevenseacat | 2026-01-23 11:20:20+00:00
Most users expect everything to be cloud these days. In the cross-stitching community (which is mostly older non-technical folk), the amount of people that get mad every day because the most popular app is local-only, is phenomenal. What do you MEAN they smashed their device, bought a new one, and all their WIP projects aren't there anymore?
by grugdev42 | 2026-01-23 11:20:22+00:00
It sounds like you have four separate problems:

---

1. Being sure your cronjobs ran

Use a heartbeat monitoring system like this:

https://uptimerobot.com/cron-job-monitoring/

Append their URL to ping after your cronjob. Like so:

* * * * * * python /home/foo.py && curl https://example.com/heartbeat

If your cronjob doesn't run, or runs and fails, the heartbeat won't get called because of the &&.

---

2. Make sure your scripts return error codes:

Your scripts should return 0 for success, or greater than 0 for errors.

This ties into point number one. Without proper error codes your heartbeat monitoring won't work.

---

3. Standardised logging:

Make sure you send/pipe your errors to ONE place. Having to look in multiple places is just asking for trouble.

And then check your logs daily. Better yet, automate the checking... maybe you send the contents of the log to Slack once per day? Or email it to yourself?

---

4. More robust scripts:

I'm not trying to be unkind, but your scripts sound like they're erroring a lot!

Maybe they need to be tightened up... don't blindly trust things, check return types, verify the previous step using code, log more information to help you track the problems down

---

If you do all of these things I think you will fix your problems. Good luck :)
by Cthulhu_ | 2026-01-23 11:20:40+00:00
I've seen clips of medieval reenactments, iirc in Poland they don't really hold back. But they try to use swords on people in full plate armor, which... does nothing, really.

Anyway, you mention Space Marines, there's animations and lots of media about them. Some depicting them as basically invulnerable (like the 40K episode of Amazon's Secret Level), but plenty of them where they die en masse - because while they're super suits, they're up against the worst the universe can throw at them (like the British).