MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by flipgimble | 2026-01-16 02:28:51+00:00
xAI is getting picked because their company is encouraging and enabling sexual abuse and child porn generation on a massive scale. When called out on it they turned it into a commercial feature, and whined how they are being prosecuted for free speech. Now they are trying to politicize it [1]. Garbage behavior.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/01/elon-musk-can...
this/685606/
by shevy-java | 2026-01-16 02:29:18+00:00
I liked the idea behind Prolog, but I absolutely detest the syntax.

IMO it would be better to have something like Prolog as part of a
"better designed" language per se. I can't come up with a good
proposal myself - language design is hard, including syntax design -
but imagine if Prolog would be a part of python. That feature would
then be used by more people. (This is just an example; just randomly
creeping in features into a more successful language, also often won't
work. I am just giving this as an example that MIGHT be better.)
by crosslayer | 2026-01-16 02:29:40+00:00
One thing that worries me about the “everything becomes an agent” framing is that it collapses coordination cost into abstraction. In real systems once everything is agentized, the dominant failure mode isn’t intelligence but loss of dimensional integrity / unclear authority boundaries, error amplification, and feedback loops that only appear under load.

At scale the hard problem seems less about making more capable agents and more about constraining where agency is allowed to exist so coordination geometry stays stable. Some components benefit from agency… others need to remain invariant anchors.

Curious how people are thinking about architectural limits here… not “can this be an agent?” But “what breaks if it is?”
by rhdjebejdbd | 2026-01-16 02:29:47+00:00
That's a lot of words, but how is that even possible?

Pointers and arrays are basically interchangeable in C, and you have to do that constantly in any large program. Even the blog post has a malloc in it.

Once you start passing around a pointer to the middle of the array all size info is lost.

Are you talking about -fsanitize=address? It's too slow to be used in production
by 2Gkashmiri | 2026-01-16 02:30:31+00:00
Dude.

Back in 2014 when briar or something similar came up, we found the app.needed to signed in "online" first then it could be used offline.

There were apps used in 2019 but it wasnt enough.

The government "banned" 14 appps including element "because use by terrorists" meant anyone using element after the ban got a loud knock on the door by the stazi with 100-300 personnel, fully ready to engage in battle.

Have seen horror stories.

They used isp data to locate homes where element was used and then staked them out and made a big show of attacking at night.

Then the usual. Phones are confiscated and literal spyware installed.
by zelphirkalt | 2026-01-16 02:30:59+00:00
I have Briar, but never had anyone to use it with. As an emergency text messaging tool, I guess it can be used, but not for any media transfer. The picture quality is abysmal. I also tried using it to sync some notes across devices, looking for a good use case of it all, but there was also some issue there. I believe once you created a "forum" you can no longer delete them. The desktop app is very slow. Sometimes had to wait for 10-20s for it to do something. I guess it is really just an emergency/offline text message tool.
by sejje | 2026-01-16 02:31:07+00:00
I use my knife like a fidget toy. Not usually in public, but one time a sales guy came in and it was just me and him. He's basically a friend.

I flipped the knife out and his eyes got huge, his arms went out sideways and he got in a football stance.

After he calmed down, he told me he was actually attacked with a knife when he was a kid.

Not long after, I finally wore out the fastener on that knife (a buck). Luckily I had already bought a twin for backup.
by whacked_new | 2026-01-16 02:31:40+00:00
I haven't thought through the entire use case. But it loosely revolves around the interaction designs provided by org-mode, ipython/jupyter notebooks, atuin desktop, aka "interactive documents", where the execution intent is embedded in text.

Jupyter is objectively more powerful from an interactivity standpoint, but the cell-based editing strategy has always fell short from a navigation and versioning standpoint. OTOH text-only interaction is sometimes too free, so after all these years, I still haven't found anything that feels just right.

Say you are writing devops documentation. Skipping the many ugly ways you can achieve this in jupyter (e.g. you need ssh logins and creds), or even slightly less ugly in atuin, in org-mode you'd use a begin_src / end_src block and eval that block. The block kind of breaks the text flow. A possibly better interaction mode would be a text "button", borrowing from GNU Hyperbole's terminology.

Continuing the button use case, say the devops document says "<run this> to check the uptimes of our servers". That button is simple enough. You can evaluate this and get a buffer, or like org-babel, insert the output into a block inline. Now we want to extend the functionality: "<query the ps of a given server>". We want parameterization, but without breaking flow. So here I'm thinking of injecting a disposable form at cursor. In a web-based toolkit, we'd use a popup or expandable form, but that switches focus out of the document and into a modal. Does that make sense?

I'm not sure how well it will all fit, but every now and then I feel the same itch, and it seems like in 10+ years of using different tools, Emacs is still the best for providing "structured, validated input for in-document interaction".
by TeMPOraL | 2026-01-16 02:32:06+00:00
My take is that:

1) LLMs cannot do everything humans can, but

2) There's no fundamental reason preventing some future technology to do everything humans can, and

3) LLMs are explicitly designed and trained to mimic human capabilities in fully general sense.

Point 2) is the "or else magic exists" bit; point 3) says you need a more specific reason to justify assertion that LLMs can't create new concepts/abstractions, given that they're trained in order to achieve just that.

Note: I read OP as saying they fundamentally can't and thus never will. If they meant just that the current breed can't, I'm not going to dispute it.
by shevy-java | 2026-01-16 02:32:51+00:00
Looks quite ugly, actually.

However had, there is one thing working for China: decision-making steps.

I don't have any illusion about the sinomarxist party and I don't suggest that their model - which is a dictatorship, just like the USA has transitioned into now too under an orange-painted TechBro minion - replaces democractic processes. But you do have to ask yourself what the EU is doing here, other than failing in epic ways. You can not assume that current wealth will be retained in the future; and while "green energy" is great, what we in reality see right now is simply price increases. That ultimately means wealth is deducted from a majority, and only a very few profit from this. That is a design-by-failure process now.
by hackyhacky | 2026-01-16 02:32:54+00:00
In short, "Here are my gripes about Prolog, a language that I don't understand."

It's perfectly fine to not like Prolog, but I do feel that if you're going to write an article about why you don't like it, you should at least spend some time figuring it out first.

He says of the cut operator "This is necessary for optimization but can lead to invalid programs." Imagine if a programmer new to C++ said the same thing of the "break" keyword. That's how ridiculous it sounds. Yes, cut can be used to prune backtracking and eliminate unneeded work, but that's hardly it's purpose. It leads to "invalid" programs (by which I assume he means, programs that do something other than what he wants) only in cases where you are using it wrong. Cut is no more "necessary for optimization" than break is. It's a control structure that you don't understand

Negation (\+) is confusing, and the author correctly provides examples where its meaning is unintuitive when applied to unbound variables. That's because it's not strictly speaking a negation predicate, but rather a "not provable" predicate. In that light, the examples in the article make perfect sense. Yes, Prolog is a programming language, so the order of terms matter, even if the order wouldn't matter in pure logic.

Look, Prolog is a weird language. It has a learning curve. It's not "just another language" in the Java, C++, Pascal, Python mold. I get it. But this article has the flavor of an impatient newbie getting frustrated because he can't be bothered to read the documentation.
by senordevnyc | 2026-01-16 02:33:18+00:00
I hear you, but counterpoint: if you had an AI that monitored social media for mentions, used vision and audio capture in cafes to see what people ordered and how they reacted to it, had access to customer purchase data to see if people kept coming back to particular cafes and what they ordered over and over again...

Granted, there's lots that's dystopian about that picture, I'm not advocating for it, but it does start to feel like the main value of the "curator" is actually just data capture. Then they put their own subjective take on that data, but I'm not totally convinced that's better than something that could tell me a data-driven story of: "Here are the top three banana breads in the city that customers keep coming back to have a taste orgasm for".

I don't know though, it's a brave new world and I'm skeptical of anyone who thinks they know how all this will play out.
by gchamonlive | 2026-01-16 02:34:26+00:00
Loneliness is a symptom of the loss of the third place. You can't solve loneliness, but we can as a society look at why many have lost their place for socializing.

Hyperfocus on productivity, the one dimensional man that know only rest and work, and the rise of narcisism and hyper individuality, all causes of the loss of the third place.

Everyone needs to take on the quest to find where they belong, but society needs to give people time to invest in this quest.

So I think it's as simple as working less and spending more time with people.
by bryan_w | 2026-01-16 02:35:11+00:00
If you're willing to put in the legwork, set up a event on your events platform of choice, take out an ad targeted locally and emphasize that it's free, and someone like me would sign up. I occasionally get ads for things happening locally but it's usually has some prepay component and feels like they are "dropshipping" an event. There are also [city] events pages on IG/fb
by gregbot | 2026-01-16 02:35:43+00:00
Proven Uranium reserves with breeder reactors will last 10,000 years. With a modest increase in the price of Uranium, extraction from sea water becomes viable and unlocks tens of millions of years of supply. Some geologiats have argued that rock weathering will replenish sea water Uranium concentrations faster than we would extract it making the supply last longer than the expected age of the Earth.
by Gratwick | 2026-01-16 02:36:13+00:00
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• Chief Technology Officer (CTO) - Lead technology strategy, platform development, and engineering teams. 10+ years technology leadership experience required.

• Chief Operating Officer (COO) - Oversee daily operations, scale processes, and drive operational excellence. 10+ years operations leadership experience required.

• Executive Assistant to CEO - Support the CEO with calendar management, communications, and strategic projects. 3+ years executive assistant experience required.

This is a unique opportunity to join a founding team and shape the future of entertainment from the ground up.

To apply: Send your resume and cover letter to gratwickdocuments@gmail.com
by FreshmanD | 2026-01-16 02:36:25+00:00
We built LoongFlow after struggling with prompt-heavy agent systems that
didn't improve across runs.

Instead of tuning prompts, we structure agent behavior as an iterative
plan–execute–summarize loop, where failures are explicitly summarized
and reused in later planning.

The repo includes runnable examples and evolution logs.
Happy to answer implementation or design questions.
by gamblor956 | 2026-01-16 02:36:28+00:00
It's very easy to do things like this when pesky things like property rights or environmental laws or labor protections don't get in the way.

In the U.S. and EU, if the government takes your land, they have to reimburse you for it, and you can fight them every step of the way. In China, the government can take your land and if you complain, you can spend the rest of your life in a labor camp.
by deaux | 2026-01-16 02:37:01+00:00
Probably mostly just people who work at companies that bought their software and know it's not special. It's a souped up version of Databricks. If you've worked with it it's always a laugh to see both their supporters on X who drank their koolaid, bought their stock and think it's some kind of one-of-a-kind magic, as well as people on places like HN who think they're data brokers. I guess HN is 90% people who have only worked in pure play tech plus academia. If you have any friends at Boeing, Airbus, Citibank, ask them if they've used it. Ironically most of it runs on the clouds from the average HNer's workplace on big enterprise contracts with AWS and Azure.
by MaxHoppersGhost | 2026-01-16 02:37:21+00:00
He’s correct there is oil but there is oil everywhere. Whether it’s feasible to extract it is another thing. Do you really think if they had worthwhile oil reserves that someone wouldn’t have thought to extract it? So I would say Greenland doesn’t have any oil which means they don’t have any worthwhile oil to extract.

Regardless, the US isn’t taking over Greenland for its oil. That is just ridiculous and there would be far easier targets to go after if that was the case.
by PaulHoule | 2026-01-16 02:37:55+00:00
AI-based product that slips past the defenses of people who think they hate AI, get turned off by branding like Copilot + PC, etc. A lot of people are really hoping it all dries up and blows away the way NFTs did.

Or maybe the honest to God non-dull tool that has nothing to do with AI. Like a Photoshop clone that does everything in linear light, makes gorgeous images, and doesn't crash when you open the font chooser.
by svat | 2026-01-16 02:38:48+00:00
I see. I was talking about not the article itself, but this handwritten note on the front page:

> This article from Datamation is by someone from ADR - the name might be Moore. (It wasn't meant to be anonymous; that was accidental). A lot of people who knew me thought I wrote it. I wish I had!

> I particularly like his definition of a bad programmer. (My personal record is about 12 years.)

The scan comes from Knuth's personal collection scanned by the Computer History Museum. Many of the documents have similar notes by Knuth, so I assumed this was by him too. Though on closer look, I'm not so sure the handwriting is the same. (It would be ironic if a note about misattribution gets misattributed.) How do you know the note is by Chuck Baker?
by iamspoilt | 2026-01-16 02:38:51+00:00
Spent my 2025 building https://orchestera.com as a side project. The premise is simple - to give Data Engineers and Data Scientists the opportunity to spin up Apache Spark clusters on Amazon EKS without them needing to know all the infrastructure details, how Spark works on Kubernetes, auto-scaling etc.

The platform I am building allows users to launch Spark on Kubernetes in their own AWS account without adding any markup costs to the CPU/Memory on EC2 instances. For example, AWS EMR offering adds a 25% markup cost on top of the EC2 instance pricing. Databricks markup is even higher ranging anywhere from 30% to 100% markup.

To learn more, check out the docs for the project at https://docs.orchestera.com/
by danpalmer | 2026-01-16 02:40:10+00:00
This is fine if you're the sort of person who knows about IRC, is satisfied with content on Gopher, etc.

But most people depend on contacting family and friends via WhatsApp/Messenger/etc, they depend on YouTube for entertainment and education, their TV is increasingly online, they read their newspaper on a website with images, etc.

It's a privilege, and a lifestyle choice, to be able to live on 2.7KBPS.
by ajkjk | 2026-01-16 02:40:14+00:00
imo it's a cultural thing specific to organizations which are raking in money, as many tech companies are. The less actual competitive pressure there is the more everyone is pressured to just shut up and take their cut. Whether it's more or less than it could be is less important than just not rocking the boat.

Whereas if real existential need is on the line then people are incentivized to give a shit about the outcome more.

Tech is so rich in general that the norm is to just shut up and enjoy your upple-middle-class existence instead of caring about the details. After all, if this company blows up, there's another one way that will take most of you.

Not that this excludes the same behavior in industries that are less lucrative. There's cultural inertia to contend with, plus loads of other effects. But I have noticed that this attitude seems to spontaneously arise whenever a place is sufficiently cushy.

Also, this take doesn't (on its own) recommend one strategy or the other. Maybe it makes the most sense to go along with things or fight them for personal reasons, uncorrelated to the economic ones. But it's good, I think, to recognize that the impulse is somewhat biased by the risk-reward calculation of a rich workplace. Basically it is essentially coupled to a sort of privilege.
by LeafItAlone | 2026-01-16 02:40:41+00:00
I’ve tried most of the coffee making tools and fads, including the above mentioned recipe. I’ve spent thousands and hours and hours of time chasing the feeling others like you describe.

It was so easy for me to go back to a cheap drip coffee maker and pre-ground coffee. I realized that I’ll never appreciate the flavors and process as much as the investment would call for.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-16 02:40:51+00:00
+1 I feel like Remails should try to have a more flexible pricing as well (I would love it if they can have 1000 mails per x euros or similar to lettermint pricing), it seems decent but remails has a higher free tier than lettermint so I hope that remails can revamp its pricing to include middle points (similar to lettermint in this instance) while still being price competitive.
by 152334H | 2026-01-16 02:41:30+00:00
It's branched from how I think about TFR. To merge,

- the common sentiment of "child raising is too expensive"

- the reality that wealth has drastically gone up

I think: okay, it must feel expensive for some reason. Probably because the work involved, despite not changing too much in an absolute sense, is relatively much pricier compared to all modern cheap sources of happiness.

Then, this notion of the cost-of-fun is easily transferred to general socialization & the loneliness problem.
by dude741 | 2026-01-16 02:41:56+00:00
Thanks for the reply. I've accepted reality, so not really hurting.

I've got a wife, kids, 2 dogs, and more work than I can possibly do. I have plenty to do, but I lean toward Nihilistic thoughts like what is the point of all of this. I'm religious and have faith that my life has meaning, but sometimes it's hard to see it.

Personally, I've found the most effective way to cope is just to accept things as they are and keep myself busy. The world is constantly saying that happiness is right around the corner if you are just smarter, richer, or better looking. Realizing that it's not true and finding contentment is the way to go.
by MaxHoppersGhost | 2026-01-16 02:42:32+00:00
Also, Idk what that source is but the US has way more barrels than that. Proven reserves mean that’s what’s been proven via drilling, not speculative (which is what the Greenland barrels are). There is a lot more “unproven” oil out there but it doesn’t make for a sensationalist statement that fools readers.
by iAMkenough | 2026-01-16 02:43:33+00:00
That's a good point. F1 has previously produced 360º after-the-event videos to "relive the moment" for fanatics that would make sense here.

For live perspectives I wonder if 5G UW provides enough bandwidth for a handful of popular drivers, or if acceptable upscaling would be possible in live events if bandwidth is restricted.
by plastic041 | 2026-01-16 02:44:07+00:00
Great article! I've always wondered how youtube implemented it. Love the interactive canvases too. But maybe it's just me, the canvases look blurry?

Rendering bezier curves on the client side seems reasonable. Calculating ~400 points and rendering 100 curves would not impact performance, but I wonder if these little interactions would impact performance if added up.

About YouTube's comment about Gangnam Style, it wasn't a tweet. You can't find the original post because it was google+, which is dead. Google said it was a joke shortly afterwards: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/gangnam-styl...
by zmgsabst | 2026-01-16 02:44:09+00:00
CloudFlare already does business that way — eg, enforcing local laws inside the country.

CloudFlare’s objection to Italy’s demands were that Italy demanded CloudFlare censor websites outside of Italy for everyone, globally. CloudFlare refused to do so and said they’d stop providing services to Italy.

Do you realize what you’re asking for in ClodFlare listening to Italy? The US will get total say over what content can be hosted anywhere in Europe (by CloudFlare), due to that precedent being set (and their greater ability to coerce ClodFlare).

Your comment is contradictory: you phrased it as respecting sovereignty, but your actual demand is that CloudFlare allow the US to enforce edicts on the EU.
by eli_gottlieb | 2026-01-16 02:44:19+00:00
Nonetheless, natural-gas and electricity prices are downstream of the past three or four or five Administrations' worth of public policy choices. I live in a place where electricity prices have shot up and it has taken us eight years to build transmission lines up to Quebec so we can import cleaner, cheaper energy from them. Eight years and tomorrow it's finally done: https://www.wwlp.com/news/massachusetts/massachusetts-poised...
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-16 02:45:27+00:00
I think you've misunderstood what's being discussed here. AI demand for silicone has exceeded supply capacity and thus driven costs sky high. What's being debated is the projected impact on consumer electronics other than RAM and dGPUs - such as SoCs.

GP suggests that AI hardware acquisition has outstripped the capacity to rack and power said hardware for the foreseeable future. If that's true we would expect orders to start getting postponed or even cancelled soon.

It's an interesting hypothesis but I'm not sure I believe it.
by Privavault | 2026-01-16 02:46:42+00:00
The zero-knowledge architecture here is solid. One thing I've been wrestling with in this space is balancing truly zero-knowledge encryption with features users expect, like full-text search and smart organization.

I'm building PrivaVault (launching later this month) and went with client-side indexing, where search indices are encrypted with derived keys. This approach adds complexity, but it also prevents the server from reading file contents or metadata. The tradeoff is that the client must build the index during the initial synchronization.

I'm curious about your approach to managing search in Stash. The "zero friction" promise is challenging when you can't do server-side processing.