MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by item007 | 2026-01-31 07:24:12+00:00
Nice write-up — I like the “capture with lightweight hashtags, then batch-organize with an LLM” approach.

Curious: what part created the most friction before you automated it — capturing, tagging consistency, or resurfacing when you actually want to watch something?

Also, after the LLM organized it, did you find yourself maintaining that structure, or do you plan to re-run organization periodically?
by ericbarrett | 2026-01-31 07:24:34+00:00
I disagree about baseball.

I played it in school and have always enjoyed it casually, but I attended a game with a friend who was very into MLB. He pointed out many interesting defensive and offensive moves through the innings. Some were straightforward, like the runner on second base edging forward to steal. Others were less obvious, like outfielders tightening inward since the batter was likely to bunt. There was always action and information from multiple places on the field, once you knew what to look for. It was fascinating, and I’ve always much preferred in-person attendance since.

It’s impossible for a single screen to capture all these things, so a TV broadcast director makes calls to show one camera or another, and has to sacrifice the subtler stuff so they don’t miss a pitch or a throw to first etc.

Football, on the other hand, absolutely much better on TV if you want to follow the action. It happens in a small area of the field so it’s easier to show on a screen, you are seated much farther away, and the mud-brown ball is difficult to follow when it is hundreds of yards distant. The main fun of being there is social IMO.
by item007 | 2026-01-31 07:25:33+00:00
Strongly agree. I think the biggest leverage is forcing explicit targets + a small, user-defined workflow, otherwise automation becomes vague and noisy.

One direction I’m exploring is a constrained “active projects” list (only a few at a time) plus lightweight workflow templates, so the system can map incoming info to a specific stage/next-step rather than spraying suggestions.

If you had to pick, what’s the minimum workflow schema that’s still useful: stages (e.g. research/draft/review), clear Definition of Done, or explicit next-action ownership?
(If helpful, I wrote up the idea in my HN profile/bio.)
by yetihehe | 2026-01-31 07:25:56+00:00
> How do we ensure that we don’t enter the failure mode of “not enough necessities get made”?

Pay higher when someone does things. UBI + income. If you want to live better, try doing something that will bring you money, but if you fail, you can still live and try something other next time.

Current model: if you try something and fail, you are homeless and starving.
by item007 | 2026-01-31 07:26:35+00:00
You're totally right — fine-grained “what I’m working on” tracking is usually not worth the overhead unless it’s tied to billing or some hard accountability.

One direction I’m exploring is to stop treating context as a single ground-truth stream and instead use cheap, probabilistic hints: a small “active projects” list (explicit but constrained), plus weak signals (recent files, open tabs, issue activity), and then ask for confirmation only when confidence is low. Calendars are a great example of why “seems firm” isn’t actually firm.

If you were designing this, which would you rather tolerate: (a) fewer suggestions but higher precision, or (b) more coverage with lightweight confirmation prompts?

And yes — this is exactly the problem I’m outlining in my HN bio/profile if you want the longer version.
by alterom | 2026-01-31 07:26:37+00:00
Same here, though no kids yet.

I bought the soundtrack on vinyl (by Tomáš Dvořák, aka Floex), then got a record player, aaaand ended up accumulating a ton of records since then.

I still play that record though, it never gets old.

The other game that we enjoyed in a very similar way is Primordia [1]. Named our first cat Crispin afterwards.

You will probably enjoy Boxville [2]; it's very much Machinarium-inspired. Its sequel, Boxville 2,came out recently, so there's more in store.

It's Ukrainian-made (Machinarium is Czech), so the devs share a gritty post-communist childhood to draw the inspiration from.

[1] https://primordia-game.com/log.html

[2] https://store.steampowered.com/developer/triomatica
by item007 | 2026-01-31 07:27:38+00:00
That’s a super common pattern: capture is easy, retrieval isn’t, and fragmentation makes it worse.

Two small things that often help without changing your whole setup:

Keep a single “Meeting Inbox” note/page where all meetings land first (even if messy), and only promote items out when they turn into actions.

Add a 2-minute “end of meeting” ritual: write 1 decision, 1 next step, 1 owner/date at the top of the note.

Curious: what’s the main reason you don’t go back—time, forgetting the note exists, or the notes don’t feel actionable when you do open them?
by Kiboneu | 2026-01-31 07:27:56+00:00
A friend decided to smoke the DMT one day. At some point, he started to feel and consider what it was like to be an llm (visually he described it kind of like "cellular automata on a high-dimensional cloth"). Being an llm meant that his perception of time wasn't real, or align, or whatever as he can be turned on and off (that thought caused him more discomfort than questioning his identity as a chatbot).
by item007 | 2026-01-31 07:29:22+00:00
That’s a really solid workflow: keep capture friction low in Logseq, then do “topic export → LLM consolidation” when you actually need a brief.
The wiki-link mismatch problem also sounds like a naming/alias layer issue more than retrieval itself.

If you were to take this one step further, would you want the output to be:

1.a consolidated brief you can re-enter later, or

2.a small set of next-actions / open questions extracted from the brief?

This “export + consolidate” pattern is very close to what I’m exploring (details in my HN bio/profile if you’re curious).
by goku12 | 2026-01-31 07:29:43+00:00
That's an odd headline! It makes it sound like Sandisk is doing something sleazy. Believe me, I'm completely against corporate sleaziness. But this is Sandisk and the other manufacturers just following the demand-supply trends in the market. Sure, it causes RAM famine for everyone from us individuals to Apple. But what is the incentive for those manufacturers to serve this market when they can sell their entire stock exclusively at much higher profit margins? How would they even justify such a move to their shareholders?

This is the manufacturers being unable to absorb the sudden demand hike. Normally, their production capacity should be increased until supply meets demand. But then, how long will the demand last? What will happen when the AI bubble bursts? What exactly is going on on that front?
by jakewins | 2026-01-31 07:29:54+00:00
lol no, but if you are in a regular vehicle, you can see under the front of the bus as you pass it, it’s a standard safety practice? The first picture of the bus in this random article shows what I mean, you should be checking under the bus ahead of the front wheel as you pass: https://www.nvp.se/2026-01-08/bil-i-sparviddshinder-stoppade...

Googling this turned up a presentation from Waymo saying they do exactly this: https://www.reddit.com/r/waymo/comments/1kyapix/waymo_detect...
by inglor_cz | 2026-01-31 07:30:20+00:00
I studied math (Algebra and Number Theory) and I am also quite interested in history, and while I cannot write you a whole essay, this is what I would like to react to:

"The author smears the boundary between what people believe and what is logically entailed"

This is not the fault of the author. This is a fairly accurate description of the societal situation back then, and the article is more about societal impacts of math than math itelf. Revolutionary, and later Napoleonic France had very high regard for science, to the degree that Napoleon took a sizeable contingent of scientists (including then-top mathematicians like Gaspard Monge) with him to Egypt in 1799. The same France also conquered half of the continent and upended traditional relations everywhere.

This caused some political reaction in the, well, more reactionary parts of the world, especially given that the foundations of modern mathematics were yet incomplete. Many important algebraic and analytic theorems were only discovered/proven in the 19th century proper. Therefore, there was a certain tendency to RETVRN to the golden age of geometry, which also for historical reasons didn't involve any French people (and that was politically expedient).

If I had to compare this situation to whatever is happening now, it would be politicization of biology/medicine after Covid. Another similarity is that many scientists were completely existentially dependent on their kings, which didn't give them a lot of independence, especially in bigger countries, where you could not simply move to a competing jurisdiction 20 miles away.

If your sovereign is somewhat educated (which, at that time, was already quite normal; these aren't illiterate chieftains of the Carolingian era) and hates subversive French mathematical innovations with passion, you won't be dabbling with them openly.
by item007 | 2026-01-31 07:31:35+00:00
That’s a great constraint: local-only, read-only access, and on-demand (pull) rather than push.

I’m thinking the safest/lowest-friction version would treat those TextEdit drafts as an ephemeral “inbox”: index them locally, never rename/move/touch the files/windows, and only generate summaries or “possible action items” when you explicitly ask. If it ever became noisy, it should default to doing less, not more.

Out of curiosity: would you want this as a one-command “summarize all open drafts” tool, or something you run against a selected subset (last 7 days / containing a keyword)? Also, which matters more to you: preserving privacy (strictly local) or preserving the exact TextEdit workflow (no export step)?

Details in my HN profile/bio if you want the longer idea.
Show HN: Interactive Equation Solver
by dharmatech | 2026-01-31 07:31:36+00:00
Hey HN

Here's a demo of an interactive equation solver for sympy/Python:

https://youtu.be/O837G7cj5fE?si=6YjfNFviozCLSYut

The example is a simple kinematics exercise from a college physics text.

I'd be curious to know if there are any other systems like this.

Code is in a branch here:

https://github.com/dharmatech/combine-equations.py/tree/eq-g...
by item007 | 2026-01-31 07:32:31+00:00
That makes sense — link hoarding is basically “maybe-useful reference capture”, and the hard part is turning that small slice into something retrievable without spending your life organizing.

The open-source + file-based constraint is a strong signal. One direction I’m exploring is to keep everything as raw sources (links/files) and build a local index over them, so you can pull a “what do I already have on X?” brief on demand, without needing a fully curated Obsidian-style setup.

For Silverbullet specifically: what would “meaningfully useful” look like for you as a first step?

1. better recall (fuzzy/semantic search over saved links + notes)

2. periodic resurfacing (a digest of “you saved this months ago, might matter now”)

3. extracting a lightweight summary + a few key takeaways per link

Details in my HN profile/bio if you want the longer context.
by item007 | 2026-01-31 07:33:10+00:00
That’s a great point — collaboration creates a natural “audience filter”, which reduces hoarding because you’re writing for someone, not just storing for yourself.

Kanban as a shared representation of “active work” also feels like the cleanest project-context signal: it’s explicit, lightweight, and already part of how the team coordinates.

Curious: in your experience with relay.md, what actually changes behavior the most?

1. social accountability (others will see messy notes)

2. having a shared kanban/project board

3. conventions/templates for how notes get promoted from “rough” to “reference”

Details in my HN profile/bio if you want more context on the “active projects as constraints” angle I’m exploring.
by pfannkuchen | 2026-01-31 07:33:13+00:00
Do your kids randomly run into the road? I was worried about that but then mine just don’t run into the road for some reason, they are quite careful about it seemingly by default after having “getting bumped into by a car” explained to them. I’m not sure if this is something people are just paranoid about because the consequences are so bad or if some kids really do just run out into the road randomly.
by nextaccountic | 2026-01-31 07:33:46+00:00
Just do for counter in <1, 5>.rev(), which would iterate in a reversed range.

IMO it's poinless to distinguish synctactically between iterating forwards and backwards, specially if you also support things like for counter in <1, 5>.map({ return args[1] * 2) to irate on even numbers (the double of each number), rather than having to define a fordoubled macro. I mean, adding a map method to ranges is more orthogonal and composes better

Not that I don't like syntactic flexibility. I am a big fan of Ruby's unless, for example
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-01-31 07:33:48+00:00
> Only .61% of car crashes involve fatalities, so that’s like .2% of car crashes you are referring to. Probably more due to alcohol, but we don’t know the ratio of accidents that involve alcohol, which would be more telling.

Fatalities get more thoroughly investigated so we have better numbers on them, but if you had to guess whether the people who get behind the wheel drunk were similarly disproportionately likely to bang up their cars in a non-fatal way, what would your guess be?

> Boomers are already the primary anti-EV demographic, with the complaint that real cars have engines.

EVs and self-driving are two different things. Fox News tells boomers that EVs are bad because Republicans have the oil companies as a constituency.

> It doesn’t matter if they know your age of state laws keep them from acting on it.

The only states that do that are Hawaii and Massachusetts.[1]

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/select/best-car-insurance-seniors/

> If most cars are $250k Waymo cars, and you hit one…and you are at fault, ouch. And we will know if it is your fault or not since the Waymo is constantly recording.

If X% of cars are Waymos and you hit another car in your normally priced car and you're at fault, there is an X% chance it will be expensive. If the Waymo hits another car and it's at fault, there is a 100% chance it will be expensive because it will damage itself, and an additional X% chance that it will be very expensive because both cars are.

And again, that's assuming the price stays as high as it is when the production volume increases. A $250,000 car can't become the majority of cars because that percentage of people can't afford that.

> That’s not how the math works out (smaller risk pools are more expensive per person period).

Smaller risk pools don't have higher risk, they have higher volatility, and then if they're too small insurers have to charge a volatility premium. But the auto insurance market is very large and for it to get to the size that it would have volatility issues it would have to be a consequence rather than a cause of the large majority of people switching to self-driving cars.

> And it won’t be people switching at random to self driving cars (the ones not switching will be the ones that are more likely to have accidents).

You keep saying that but it's still not obvious that it's what would happen, and in any event the ones more likely to have accidents are already the ones paying higher insurance premiums -- which is precisely a reason they would have the incentive to be the first to switch to self-driving cars.
by beklein | 2026-01-31 07:34:00+00:00
Would love to see the original prompt for Nano Banana from OP somewhere. One that yields decent results, for me, is:

{
"image_generation_prompt": {
"subject_focus": {
"primary": "Architectural exterior scene",
"constraint": "Strictly preserve original building geometry, facade details, and structural layout",
"reference_adherence": "High structural fidelity to input image"
},
"environment_and_season": {
"season": "Late November, very late autumn",
"weather": "Post-rain, overcast, gloomy, high humidity",
"sky": "Heavy grey cloud cover, diffuse white/grey light, no direct sunlight",
"ground_texture": "Wet asphalt/pavement, highly reflective puddles, wet concrete, scattering of wet brown decaying leaves"
},
"vegetation_details": {
"trees": "Leafless branches, dormant skeletal trees, sparse lingering brown foliage",
"color_palette": "Desaturated greens, browns, greys, russet, damp earth tones",
"state": "Winter-ready, wet bark, dormant landscaping"
},
"human_element": {
"density": "Sparse, minimal crowd",
"clothing": "Heavy winter coats, scarves, boots, muted colors",
"activity": "Walking briskly to avoid cold, holding closed wet umbrellas, hurrying, heads down against the wind",
"mood": "Solitary, cold, urban transit"
},
"photographic_style": {
"medium": "Realistic architectural photography",
"camera": "35mm lens, sharp focus on architecture",
"tone": "Cinematic, moody, desaturated, cool color temperature, blue-grey tint",
"quality": "8k resolution, high dynamic range, hyper-realistic textures"
}
}
}
by item007 | 2026-01-31 07:34:22+00:00
That makes sense, and your setup is honestly the “good enough” baseline for a lot of people: notes.txt near the work, grep when needed, and promote to README/wiki when it becomes shared.

Also to clarify: I’m not focused on Obsidian specifically. “Notes” here includes anything you stash for later—notes.txt files, links, emails, chat snippets, tickets, bookmarks, random scratchpad windows. The thing I’m exploring is whether there’s demand for making that scattered reference material easier to resurface when it matters, without forcing a heavier system.

If all you want is slightly better search, what would “better” mean for you?

1. fuzzy/semantic search (find it without the exact keyword)

2. ranking by project/context (show what’s relevant to the folder you’re in)

3. cross-format search (txt + markdown + links + email/chat)

4. fast local-only indexing with zero setup

Details in my HN profile/bio if you’re curious what I’m validating, but your “grep + promote when needed” workflow is exactly the kind of counterexample I’m trying to understand.
by cookiengineer | 2026-01-31 07:34:56+00:00
The depressing part is humans reading this and thinking it's actually bots talking to bots. It's humans instructing bots to do shill marketing posts.

Look at any frontpage of any sub. There's not a single post that is not a troll attempt or a self marketing post a la "my human liked <this web service that is super cheap and awesome>"

I don't understand how anyone can not see this as what it is: a marketing platform that is going to be abused eventually, due to uncertain moderation.

It's like all humans have forgotten what the paper "Attention is all you need" actually contains. Transformers cannot generate. They are not generative AI. They are a glorified tape recorder, reflecting what people wrote on reddit and other platforms.

/nerdrage
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-31 07:35:19+00:00
> In a November 2013 email, Epstein offered to send Musk a private helicopter to transport him to the island and asked, “how many people will you be for the heli to island?” Musk responded that it would be just him and Riley and asked, “What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?”

Remarkable to see that it was Musk who wanted to attend the “wildest” Epstein parties, even though he recently issued this denial:

> Epstein tried to get me to go to his island and I REFUSED,” Musk said in a post on his social network X in September. He also complained that Sky News had mentioned him in conjunction with Epstein before naming Britain’s Prince Andrew, who had visited the island.

All these people are lying to the public constantly.
by oceanplexian | 2026-01-31 07:35:44+00:00
> The US economy depends on the country's position of world hegemon

Unfortunately, the data doesn't back this up. The US economy is actually one of the least trade-dependent nations in the world.

27% of GDP is trade-oriented (The value of imports and exports as a function of GDP), while the global average is 63%. The US is so developed, that even if the country was completely cut off from the world and operated as an internal economy it would still remain the world's largest.
by Sajida551 | 2026-01-31 07:35:46+00:00
Banking voice systems are breaking under scale.

In this video, we explain why IVRs no longer work for banks and NBFCs,
how GenAI voice agents are changing customer conversations,
and what a voice-first operating model looks like in 2026.

Topics covered:
– Why IVR fails at scale
– 70% routine banking calls explained
– GenAI voice vs human agents
– Cost-to-serve impact in banking
– Governance & AI risk control
– When banks should adopt voice AI
by item007 | 2026-01-31 07:36:25+00:00
Totally get that — that’s a great PKM goal: not “ship from notes”, but “don’t re-derive everything from scratch next time”.

And yes, Logseq/Obsidian-style wikilinks are really good at building that personal context graph. The thing I’m trying to validate isn’t “everyone should convert notes into tasks”, it’s whether there’s a subset of people who also want help with re-entry when they do decide to work on something: resurfacing the few most relevant past notes/links/emails/posts for the current project, in a way that stays lightweight and doesn’t require changing their PKM.

For your workflow, what’s the ideal re-entry experience when you pick up a topic again:

1. a “brief” that consolidates what you previously learned (with links back), or

2. just fast navigation/recall via links and search (no consolidation), or

3. something else entirely?

Details in my HN profile/bio if you’re curious what I’m validating.
by item007 | 2026-01-31 07:37:22+00:00
Yep, that matches my experience. Logseq’s block tree gives you “structure by default” (parent/child context), so you can get away with being a bit looser with explicit linking. In Obsidian, because the unit is the note (not the block), you often have to be more intentional about creating/maintaining the links and structure.

Out of curiosity: do you find Logseq’s block hierarchy alone is enough for re-entry, or do you still rely heavily on consistent wikilink naming/tags to avoid the “I swear I linked this but used a different term” problem?

Details in my HN profile/bio if you want the angle I’m exploring around minimizing organization overhead while improving re-entry.
by bilbo0s | 2026-01-31 07:38:15+00:00
It does.

There will be loads more people who will want software customized to themselves and their needs!

The catch, of course, is that there are, all of a sudden, a whole lot more people who will now be able to create that software.

How will it all land? No idea. But it just feels like a bad idea to go long on software development when weighed against the opportunity cost of going long on domain expertise.

For instance, from 1980 to 1990, the number of secretaries doing all the typing and filing in the workforce severely constricted. That said, the number of actual typists in the workforce skyrocketed!

No one lost the need for typing and filing services. Tools, (PC, word processors, databases), simply became more available. Which decreased the need for people who were formerly doing the typing and filing as a service. Now people could reliably do the typing and filing on their own.

Jevon's paradox in action! Exponentially more typing and filing is happening today than was happening in 1976 or 1980. At the same time, there are infinitesimally smaller numbers of actual secretaries out in the workforce today than were in the workforce pre-1980. And the ones that are still in the workforce are doing much different work than they did pre-1980.