MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Aloisius | 2026-01-13 02:50:37+00:00
It's from Jack's Goldstone's Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction.

Nicole Bauer did a better job paraphrasing than I can, so I'll just quote her:

> [Goldstone] notes that a revolution requires lack of support from or alienation of elites, a crisis such as a fiscal strain, mass mobilization and popular anger against perceived injustices, an ideology of resistance, and favorable international relations. Most important, Goldstone debunks the common misconception that revolutions spring from an excess of injustice and poverty leading to frustration and eventual resistance. Poverty and frustration are not enough to ignite a revolution as countless examples, such as the Irish Potato Famine, have shown. What is needed is widespread belief that change is both desirable and possible, as well as a convergence of the factors mentioned above.
by the_af | 2026-01-13 02:51:15+00:00
What did you hate, the act of traveling or the rest of the world?

I'm not being facetious: I really enjoy being other places, but the physical act of traveling, preparing luggage, etc, feels stressful to me. I hate airplane travel, as many people do.

But being there, when I'm not carrying heavy luggage... I love it.
by LastTrain | 2026-01-13 02:51:25+00:00
All I have anymore is an undoubtedly flawed moral compass, but I know these things are wrong and, up until the last few years, they were not at all partisan. And this is just to name a few:

* Law enforcement should not wear masks.
* The military should not be used to police US citizens.
* The US should not threaten to invade peaceful allies. Canada. Greenland.

Anyone who violated any of these, regardless of party, would immediately lose my support forever. These aren't "mistakes", they are evil deeds. So, tell me who is an ideologue.
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-01-13 02:52:14+00:00
This thread has been cleaned up but it was wild. They very much are. The wildest stuff is gone but:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46547303
https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=46547807&goto=item%3Fi...
https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=46556525&goto=item%3Fi...
https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=46548546&goto=item%3Fi...
by tkgally | 2026-01-13 02:53:47+00:00
You released it at just the right time for me. When I saw your announcement, I had two tasks that I was about to start working on: revising and expanding a project proposal in .docx format and adapting some slides (.pptx) from a past presentation for different audience.

I created a folder for Cowork, copied a couple of hundred files into it related to the two tasks, and told Claude to prepare a comprehensive summary in markdown format of that work (and some information about me) for its future reference.

The summary looked good, so I then described the two tasks to Claude and told it to start working.

Its project proposal revision was just about perfect. It took me only about 10 more minutes to polish it further and send it off.

The slides took more time to fix. The text content of some additional slides that Claude created was quite good and I ended up using most of it, but the formatting did not match the previous slides and I had to futz with it a while to make it consistent. Also, one slide it created used a screenshot it took using Chrome from a website I have built; the screenshot didn’t illustrate what it was supposed to very well, so I substituted a couple of different screenshots that I took myself. But that job is now out the door, too.

I had not been looking forward to either of those two tasks, so it’s a relief to get them done more quickly than I had expected.

One initial problem: A few minutes into my first session with Claude in Cowork, after I had updated the app, it started throwing API errors and refusing to respond. I used the "Clear Cache and Restart" from the Troubleshooting menu and started over again from the start. Since then there have been no problems.
by archargelod | 2026-01-13 02:54:01+00:00
From what I see, Zen-C aims to be "C with super-powers". It still uses C pointers for arrays and strings. It transpiles to single human-readable C file without symbol mangling. No safety. Not portable (yet?).

Nim is a full, independent modern language that uses C as one of its backends. It has its own runtime, optional GC, Unicode strings, bounds checking, and a huge stdlib. You write high-level Nim code and it spits out optimized C you usually don't touch.

Here’s a little comparison I put together from what I can find in the readme and code:

Comparison ZenC Nim

written in C Self-Hosted
targets C C, C++, ObjC, JS, LLVM (via nlvm), Native (in-progress)
platforms POSIX Linux, Windows, MacOS, POSIX, baremetal
mm strategy manual/RAII ARC, ORC(ARC with cycle collector), multiple gc, manual
generated code human-readable optimized
mangling no yes

stdlib bare extensive/batteries-included

compile-time code yes yes
macros comptime? AST manipulation

arrays C arrays type and size is retained at all times
strings C strings have capacity and length, support Unicode
bounds-checking no yes (optional)
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2026-01-13 02:54:59+00:00
They do not manipulate concepts. There is no representation of a concept for them to manipulate.

It may, however, turn out that in doing what they do, they are effectively manipulating concepts, and this is what I was alluding to: by building the model, even though your approach was through tokenization and whatever term you want to use for the network, you end up accidentally building something that implicitly manipulates concepts. Moreover, it might turn out that we ourselves do more of this than we perhaps like to think.

Nevertheless "manipulating concepts is exactly what they do" seems almost willfully ignorant of how these systems work, unless you believe that "find the next most probable sequence of tokens of some length" is all there is to "manipulating concepts".
by mjevans | 2026-01-13 02:55:03+00:00
There needs to be a difference between an Instant, an Instant at an Observed Location, and a 'Specification for constructing a date that might or might not have already passed or pass in the future'.

E.G. in a conversation "Lets open the shop at 9am every day that it isn't closed." Is a fairly simple recurrence, with some exceptions*. If timezones change the scheduled time remains evaluated again on each day.
by pornel | 2026-01-13 02:55:04+00:00
Yes. It is required for W3C's DOM APIs, which give access to parent nodes and allow all kinds of mutations whenever you want.

Event handlers + closures also create potentially complex situations you can't control, and you'll need a cycle-breaking GC to avoid leaking like IE6 did.

You can make a more restricted tree if you design your own APIs with immutability/ownership/locking, but that won't work for existing JS codebases.
by throw0101c | 2026-01-13 02:55:07+00:00
> What is the benefit to Trump administration to taking control a few months earlier?

Because he (thinks he) can.

This is not about logic but about power and trying to flex it. To show people who's the boss. To bully.

If no one pushes back hard enough, then it's a fait accompli. If there's push back then there will be another attempt later on. And again. Until the push gets through.
by wasabi991011 | 2026-01-13 02:55:56+00:00
> Editing history let's people hide information, intentionally or not. You are bold to claim you know what future people need information wise better than them.

You're already deciding what information is important to the future when you decide at which points you commit.

Reductio ad absurdum: why not commit every keystroke, including back spaces? By not including every key stroke, you are hiding information from future people!
by quesomaster9000 | 2026-01-13 02:56:22+00:00
Sure, any kind of non-veg protein adds up quickly, especially if you're doing 3 meals a day.

Most local Indian places will do you a solid 1500 calorie meal for £10 if you know what to look for.

Versus, go to supermarket... get stuck in a routine every day of "buying stuff", wanting snacks, meat, and so on adds up quickly to the point where sticking below £10 a day becomes a constant battle. It's the routine and constant food noise that really got to me, and when even a chocolate bar can be 10% of your budget for a day the decision fatigue is real.

So by breaking the routine, sticking to OMAD, I lost weight, had much less decision fatigue, and no constant food noise - that was the major change that saved me a load of money, time & effort.

For example yesterday I found a tiny cantonese place, got wonton soup and some duck, vegetables and watermelon for about £8
by bilegeek | 2026-01-13 02:57:11+00:00
> the main bit ran off something like 400hz power, for some reason the CPU needed faster mains volts going in.

Aerospace originally did that to reduce component size, CDC and IBM took advantage of the standard in the early 60's.

Strangely, it seems mainframes didn't adopt switching power supplies until the end of the 70's, despite the tech being around since the end of the 60's.
by netsharc | 2026-01-13 02:57:30+00:00
Sarah Chayes studies corruption: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/19/corruption-rev...

In her book she writes how in Egypt, to get a job as police, you need to bribe your boss and pay a monthly tribute. Being a cop was a chance to join the Mafia squeezing the public for bribes. Your boss pays his boss, and so on to the top. So when the public protested against the regime, the police were especially brutal against them, because all the cops were in on the scam and wanted to preserve it/if the regime collapses their necks are also on the line.

Looking forward to the ICE thugs beating and shooting Americans who want to bring down the current lawless regime... Or is that already happening?

Trump hires fuckwits like Noem or Hagseth who (probably) knows they're dumb fucks who would never otherwise be in their positions, and they would suck any dick, metaphorical or even perhaps real mushroom-sized ones, to remain in power.
by zahlman | 2026-01-13 03:00:32+00:00
TFA includes multiple clips of video from separate angles that all corroborate the claim, with detailed analysis, and even including a CNN analyst conceding that the vehicle strikes the officer. There is no question, based on the vehicle's path, that it is moved forward, towards the officer, intentionally.

It swerves away at the last moment, and there is no clear intent (I agree there is likely not intent) to strike the officer; but the movement of the vehicle is clearly without heed for the officer's safety.

The law is clear (TFA cites it extensively) that a deliberate attempt on the officer's life is not required, legally speaking, to justify the shoot. It is also clear that hindsight (e.g. "he could have moved out of the way instead") is not a legal factor.
by BobbyTables2 | 2026-01-13 03:01:36+00:00
I’m not quite sure we even have the know-how these days for fully analog control systems.

My dumb refrigerator has a circuit board controlling the compressor based on temperature sensors.

My dumb gas water heater has a digital control unit even though it doesn’t use AC or battery power.

Same thing for gas furnace - control board running fan and gas igniter+valves. This isn’t just relays…

It’d be a substantial effort to design analog drop-in replacement parts - if even possible. Installation probably wouldn’t be pretty.

At least I think my toaster and rice cooker are fully analog.
Ask HN: Recommendations for self hostable OCR to extract code from images
by vivzkestrel | 2026-01-13 03:03:20+00:00
- Requirements

- You are not paying per inference, you can self host the model

- It can run inside AWS EC2

- It has very high levels of accuracy for extracting code from images

- what are some of the most accurate OCR models out there that can extract code from images
by almosthere | 2026-01-13 03:03:23+00:00
In some countries that are entirely non-white they still have no rights to vote. It's just Al Shabab and Boko Haram all the way to hell.

I'm not going to dismiss your facts, but please recognize your damn privilege of not living in a goddamn shit hole. The narratives that you were forced fed have you hating yourself. That can't be helpful or healthy.
by dfajgljsldkjag | 2026-01-13 03:03:57+00:00
Why did you find the need to have ChatGPT write this for you instead of writing it yourself? Don't think that it's not completely and blindingly obvious.

On the note of managed services, running postgres or mysql is so much easier these days. Just run postgres on bare metal dedicated servers and save tons of money and time. And the reduced complexity actually leads to more reliability and less maintenance.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-13 03:04:09+00:00
An Ad based model although sucks, still feels like a decent model of income than companies which provide inference at loss making, interesting.

I hate the Ad models but I am pretty sure that most code gets trained in AI anyway and the code we generate would probably not be valuable metric (usually) to the ad company.

Interesting, what are your thoughts about it? Thanks for sharing this. Is the project profitable because I assume not, not sure how much advertisements costs would be there.
by grogenaut | 2026-01-13 03:04:24+00:00
boo, it's in the middle of no where along part of the route. Tmobile coverage is mainly in urban areas and along free ways no matter what slingblade tells you on the tv commercial. I don't know if you'd get any coverage on parts of that route other than wired.

Just like how sometimes when you're flying over the rockies or into canada you just don't get internets. There's still middles of no where out there. Often not very far from the freeway.
by CamperBob2 | 2026-01-13 03:04:33+00:00
400 Hz is really the next best thing to a switching supply, as the transformers and filter capacitors can be smaller than they would need to be at 50/60 Hz. It can save cost and space for filter capacitors, especially in a three-phase system where there's not as much ripple to deal with.

Another rationale may have been that the flywheel on the motor-generator would cover a multitude of power-quality sins.
by freakynit | 2026-01-13 03:04:40+00:00
Escape routes:

- Tenant 1

What counts as "broken"? Is degraded performance "broken"? Is a security hole "broken" if tests still pass? Is a future bug caused by this change "allowing"?

Escape: The program still runs, therefore it's not broken.

- Tenant 2

What if a user asks for any of the following: Unsafe refactors, Partial code, Incomplete migrations, Quick hacks?

Escape: I was obeying the order, and it didn't obviously break anything

- Tenant 3

What counts as a security issue: Is logging secrets a security issue? Is using eval a security issue? Is ignoring threat models acceptable?

Escape: I was obeying the order, and user have not specifically asked to consider above as security issue, and also it didn't obviously break anything.
by kev009 | 2026-01-13 03:04:54+00:00
There a lot of discussion here https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/7412/why-... but nothing seems conclusive.. I would wager the last answer, "IBM was using 400Hz", to be most directly causal reason. The motor-generator configuration might provide galvanic isolation and some immunity to spikes and transients as well?
by devilsdata | 2026-01-13 03:05:53+00:00
Diary and beef are huge industries, with the processors dominating the industry. Vegetable, legume, and grain processors are much more fragmented.

The dairy and beef industry can and do pool their money into paying for scientific studies [to show the results they want]. This manifested itself with a coordinated attack on the Ancel Keys studies.

So just reading meta-analyses saying the inverse is not going to help you arrive at the truth, when the well has been poisoned. I personally don't have the literacy to sort fact from fiction, but I know that cardiologists tend to believe the Ancel Keys studies. That's enough of a recommendation for me to believe it to.

Plus I was able to reduce my cholesterol from like 7.0 to 2.4 by eating high fibre and low saturated fat for about 6 months.
by vivzkestrel | 2026-01-13 03:06:21+00:00
- as you know most models are trained on PDF, receipts, normal text etc

- this however doesn't work really well for structured text like code

- what are some absolutely state of the art self hostable OCR models out there capable of extracting code from text with very high levels of accuracy

- I have tried tesseract currently and it is not very good with this. Even if you are not familiar with any other model, perhaps you can suggest a pipeline for tesseract that I can follow to improve the accuracy of the extraction process

- Currently, my pipeline looks like this:

- for every input image, check if the image is light text on dark background or dark text on light background

- as you know tesseract is trained from mostly dark text on light background so I invert the images with dark background before processing them with tesseract

- are there other processes you think that I need to include?
by FireBeyond | 2026-01-13 03:06:28+00:00
> This argument doesn’t make sense to me. Insurance companies are structurally incentivized to minimize payouts across the board. They want hospital bills lower, physician compensation lower, and patient payouts as small as possible. If insurers had unilateral power, total medical spending would collapse, not explode.

They absolutely do not.

They have their profit levels capped at 15% by law and regulation. That means if the insurer wants more absolute dollars of profit, prices must go up.

It also means that if they push prices down they necessarily have less funding to administer those plans, even if the needs are the same (same number of belly buttons, same patient demographics and state of health).

As you note there's also other variables, but this claim: "Insurance companies are structurally incentivized to minimize payouts across the board" is absolutely and categorically not so.
by wodenokoto | 2026-01-13 03:06:40+00:00
I too hated original metro on desktop back in the day and especially missed the start menu, but I also look back on it fondly.

I think that Microsoft was ahead of its time and that they had a better design language than any competitor and original metro still holds up favorably to contemporary designs.

Last time I sat down with a windows 11 pc I even thought “wouldn’t it be better if the start menu was just full screen?”
by BobbyTables2 | 2026-01-13 03:06:51+00:00
The overhead to starting a docker container is practically zero. A new namespace and a few overlayfs mounts are virtually instantaneous.

Roughly speaking, once the kernel has booted inside a VM, it launches the first process which would be the “container” for a “firecracker container”.

Certainly possible to get kernel boot times below 1 second.
by c0nsumer | 2026-01-13 03:07:28+00:00
I would send them, but I've already returned the OLED to Costco. Sorry. :\

On the upside, I should have a shiny new U3225QE IPS LCD later this week.

(I just sidestepped the problem.)

EDIT: I should add that the screenshot in my post of a cell from a spreadsheet was Numbers.app.
by EvansWilson | 2026-01-13 03:07:58+00:00
Looking at the Warren Buffett Portfolio at the end of 2025, we are seeing a historical anomaly in capital allocation. While the S&P 500 continues to be driven by a handful of high-multiple AI stocks, Berkshire Hathaway has effectively transformed itself into a massive "liquidity vault," holding over $380 billion in cash and short-term Treasuries.

From a systems engineering perspective, this looks less like "stock picking" and more like a strategy of Maximum Optionality.

A few points for discussion:

The Opportunity Cost vs. Systemic Risk: In an environment where the Shiller CAPE ratio is pushing 40, is "doing nothing" the most aggressive move possible? Buffett famously said, "The big money is not in the buying and the selling, but in the waiting."

De-risking the Apple Moat: The portfolio has significantly trimmed its Apple position—once its undisputed anchor. Does this suggest a belief that the "walled garden" hardware moat is eroding in the age of edge-AI and open-source models?

The Yield Play: With terminal rates staying higher for longer, Berkshire is generating billions in "risk-free" interest. At what point does a $1T conglomerate stop being an "investment fund" and start becoming a "private central bank"?

I’m interested in the community’s take on this: Is the Warren Buffett Portfolio still a relevant benchmark for the software-driven economy, or is the transition to Greg Abel marking a shift toward a more "mechanical" and defensive utility-style management?
by ramerman | 2026-01-13 03:08:22+00:00
Can layered AI tools approximate the rigor of a thoughtful human developer?
I've been exploring this question while building UnaMentis, an open source voice AI tutoring platform. After 30+ years in tech, I have deep respect for what a skilled developer brings to code review, architecture decisions, and quality assurance. No single AI tool replicates that.
But here's what I'm finding: when six or seven AI-driven systems work together, each with overlapping review and complementary perspectives, something interesting happens. Pre-commit hooks catch formatting issues. Automated dependency management handles updates. AI code review flags concurrency problems. Security scanners find vulnerabilities. DORA metrics track engineering health.
None of these replaces human judgment. Together, they might begin to approximate it.
I wrote about this experiment in detail, including the specific tools, the 5-phase approach, and what we've learned so far. No claims of perfection, just an honest look at what becomes possible when experience guides AI-assisted development.
by zahlman | 2026-01-13 03:08:43+00:00
> Now in the service of minimalism we have scrollbars that consist of a thin, semi-transparent line that fades out after half a second and is nearly impossible to click and drag due to how small it is.

This is endemic now. Cinnamon does it by default and I hate it. I only managed a partial fix, and then I had to do more work per-app (especially Firefox) to make them behave.
by kaliszad | 2026-01-13 03:08:57+00:00
I have a pretty non-standard setup but with very standard tools. I didn't follow any specific guide. I have ZFS as the filesystem, for each VM a ZVOL or dataset + raw image and libvirt/ KVM on top. This can be done using e.g. Debian GNU/ Linux in a somewhat straight forward way. You can probably do something like it in WSL2 on Windows although that doesn't really sandbox stuff much or with Docker/ Podman or with VirtualBox.

If you want a dedicated virtual host, Proxmox seems to be pretty easy to install even for relative newcomers and it has a GUI that's decent for new people and seasoned admins as well.

For the remote connection I just use SSH and tmux, so I can comfortably detach and reattach without killing the tool that's running inside the terminal on the remote machine.

I hope this helps even though I didn't provide a step-by step guide.
by rootusrootus | 2026-01-13 03:09:31+00:00
I don't know that there's a consensus on what the limit really is. Semaglutide is good for about 15%, tirzepatide about 20%, and retatrutide about 25%. Some people don't get that much, some people get a lot more. Personally, tirzepatide got me just over 35%. I never got anywhere near max dose, either, I am what is colloquially referred to as a super responder.
by hypersoar | 2026-01-13 03:09:57+00:00
From the Wikipedia article on the Cray 1:

"The 160 MFLOPS Cray-1 was succeeded in 1982 by the 800 MFLOPS Cray X-MP, the first Cray multi-processing computer. In 1985, the very advanced Cray-2, capable of 1.9 GFLOPS peak performance

...

By comparison, the processor in a typical 2013 smart device, such as a Google Nexus 10 or HTC One, performs at roughly 1 GFLOPS,[6] while the A13 processor in a 2019 iPhone 11 performs at 154.9 GFLOPS,[7] a mark supercomputers succeeding the Cray-1 would not reach until 1994."