MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by philipkglass | 2026-01-15 17:58:58+00:00
Is there another public source for encyclopedia-type articles that is better for geopolitical content? For example, if I have a philosophy question I'll often consult the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy instead of Wikipedia.

If there isn't a more neutral public source -- if there are only sources with different biases, or if the better sources are behind paywalls -- then I think that Wikipedia is still doing pretty well even for contentious geopolitical topics.

Usually disputes are visible on the Talk page, regardless of whatever viewpoint may prevail in the main article.

Apart from Wikipedia, speaking more generally, I think that articles with a strong editorial bias still provide useful information to an alert reader. I can read articles from Mother Jones, Newsmax, Russia Today, the BBC, Times of India, etc. and find different political and/or geopolitical slants to what is written about and how it is reported. I can also learn a lot even when I strongly disagree with the narrative thrust of what is reported. The key thing is to take any particular article or publication as only circumstantial evidence for an underlying reality, and to avoid falling into complacency even when (or especially when) the information you're reading aligns with what you already believe to be true.
by MrJohz | 2026-01-15 17:58:58+00:00
I had a course on natural language processing with Prolog, and the first third of the exam was just evaluating Prolog expressions and figuring out what syntax errors had been made. This of course took so long that everyone spent at least two thirds of the time on that one portion...

It was a weird course, though. Because we spent so long learning Prolog, the second half of the course was really rushed - lots of learning about English grammar and syntax trees, and how you could model them in different ways, and then the last lecture was just "oh, by the way, here are all the ways this doesn't work and is a complete dead end - your exam is on the 14th".

IIRC there was a part two to the course, but I think it clashed with something I was more interested in so I never took it. It was cool to learn Prolog, but I wish it had been a whole course on just Prolog and actual present-day use-cases, as opposed to this weird half-and-half course about an approach to NLP that even back then wasn't being pursued with much enthusiasm.
by tapoxi | 2026-01-15 17:59:21+00:00
It's not as bad as you think, I run the helm upgrade when patches come out, the backing store is S3 or managed SQL, it runs a nightly k8s cron called gitlab-backup which tarballs the whole thing into an s3 bucket with a single command restore should disaster strike. (This is part of the product, not a thing I wrote.)

I probably only babysit it for 30 minutes per year, including all the upgrades.
by xyzelement | 2026-01-15 17:59:36+00:00
I think your second part of the most makes my point -- most americans are overall OK with what's going on because of the underlying issue. That's why it doesn't look like Iran.

On the first part, I hope the last few elections made it clear that polling is... unreliable at best. For example, asking the question like "in light of the recent shooting of Renee Good, do you feel ICE is making your city safer" vs asking "Do you feel like having removed X,XXX illegal immigrants with prior convictions has made your city safer" would yield a very different result.

For what it's worth, as an immigrant myself and a typical over-educated NY liberal (at least, formerly) I don't like the details of what's going on but I understand why it is.
by unethical_ban | 2026-01-15 18:00:11+00:00
In Minneapolis and other cities, you do have protests, you have the people following ICE, and it's a valid discussion to have that without the protests and the "mostly peaceful" resistance from Minnesotans is helping the nation see what criminals ICE people are, and what an awful thing they're doing to the country.

Mass resistance movements tend to come at unpredictable moments. The killing or particularly well documented crime of a government, for example. Something acute will trigger it, like George Floyd or Renee Good (whose murder triggered widespread outrage, protests, and despite the bots on Twitter, some shift in the view on ICE from the middle and right).

If, for example, a brigade of soldiers or officers opened live fire on protesters, I think the country would shut down.

Another point, as others have mentioned: It's actually the massive amount of armament on both side of the equation that keeps people from taking the next step. The citizens of Minneapolis could probably take out a hundred ICE agents a day, but now we're in a civil war because the next steps are insurrection act, hundreds of people dead in days, potential of the MN state guard being activated to fight against national forces, and it's already three steps ahead of whatever would happen in Spain.
by ceejayoz | 2026-01-15 18:00:14+00:00
> Laughable for you to suggest that I'm the one with the ideological bent.

I'm hardly suggesting it.

> recovering from internal bleeding in his chest

Guy had a bruise.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2026/01/14/ice-ag...

"Internal bleeding covers a wide range of severity, from minor bruising to life-threatening injuries… The day after the fatal Jan. 7 shooting, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem told reporters Ross had been taken to the hospital, but he was released and home with family... DHS declined to answer USA TODAY's additional questions about the injury."
by tb_technical | 2026-01-15 18:00:21+00:00
The remote viewing article keeps being reverted as pseudoscientific when original research conducted by the CIA is cited. Such citations are removed swiftly. Any changes are denied or rolled back.

The rationale is that, even though the documents themselves are a primary source from an organization that poured significant resources into researching the phenomenon of remote viewing, the individual posting the declassified document isn't an authority on the subject.

Apparently if youre not a doctor, you can't read primary sources?

Many such cases.

Wikipedia is absolutely a powerful resource, but it it's clearly controlled by moderators with a bias, and there's no incentive to challenge said bias or consider alternative worldviews.
by littlecranky67 | 2026-01-15 18:00:32+00:00
Looks like the study refers to banning cigarettes for young adults under age 21. I was referring to a complete ban, all age groups. I doubt it will have a big impact on actual smokers, but similar effects as we saw in the 1920s alcohol prohibition. And I would imagine that a total ban would get actually more young adults to smoke (because it is illegal anyway, and dealers dont care for age verification).
by kemayo | 2026-01-15 18:00:33+00:00
To elaborate slightly, note that "reliable" is sort of Wikipedia jargon. When it applies to a news organization, it means that statements of fact are likely to be correct... or at least, not intentionally incorrect, because errors do happen. So a source can be reliable and biased at the same time, which means that if it says a thing happened you can largely trust that it really did happen... but any interpretation of that might be slanted, and so shouldn't be trusted.

The New York Post isn't "reliable" because it's a tabloid that doesn't care overmuch about fact-checking what it publishes (and, worse, has a history of just making stuff up sometimes). So the Wikipedia position is that you can't trust a citation to the NY Post without finding something else to corroborate it -- at which point you might as well just cite the corroborating reliable source instead.

Whereas Mother Jones will absolutely mostly publish articles which say good things about progressives and bad things about conservatives, but those things will all be true. Their bias comes in the form of selectively presenting these things -- they're unlikely to bother posting a "Ted Cruz just did a good thing" article -- and in their color commentary / opinion pieces, not in the form of just making things up.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources
by Dilettante_ | 2026-01-15 18:00:53+00:00
Every time any new product or model is released, there's always one or more of these articles about a "vulnerability found", and the vulnerability is just prompt injection.

It's not surprising nor annoying that bottomfeeders try this tactic to draw people to their product, what surprises and annoys me is that somehow every time they manage to get traction here on HN.

Or am I the discourse-equivalent of a bottomfeeder here who failed to see that there is more to it?
by quickthrowman | 2026-01-15 18:01:06+00:00
This is absolutely not true in areas where heating the air and water are done with natural gas. Everything in a house is more efficient due to more efficient motors and motor controllers.

I can’t think of an appliance from 1970 that consumes less energy than its modern equivalent. Anything with a pump or fan is more efficient and so is lighting. I also can’t think of an appliance that has become common in households that draws more than 100 watts since the 1970s, and that’s just ‘computers’.

If you convert your natural gas furnace to a heat pump, you will use more electricity but excluding that and HPWHs leaves only more efficient equipment.
by roxolotl | 2026-01-15 18:01:08+00:00
It’s so interesting seeing some of the comments about this. The sentence I wrote after that blames war and global devastation on fossil fuels. I was expecting to get flak for being too harsh to fossil fuels but somehow it swung the other direction. Which, as someone who shouts at the radio when the greenwashing oil ads play on NPR, is heartening.
by just6979 | 2026-01-15 18:01:19+00:00
You don't need to store the timezone anywhere, you just need to know the current local timezone when the stored UTC time is used. And that's why storing in UTC is better, because it only takes one conversion to represent it in some arbitrary local time.

If you stored it as a local time (ie: with TZ), then if it's ever later translated to a different local time (different TZ), you're now dealing with all the quirks of 2 different timezones. It's great way to be off by some multiple of 15 minutes, or even a day or two!

Heck, even if it's the same exact location, storing in local time can still require conversion if that location uses daylight savings! You're never safe from needing to adapt to timezones, so storing datetimes in the most universal format is pretty much always the best thing to do.
by seanw444 | 2026-01-15 18:01:34+00:00
I think the "social factors" section is the most significant. I've heard plenty of anecdotes of people stating that they "code defensively" in C, because it's too easy to mess things up. Whereas with a language such as Rust, you're able to be more aggressive in your optimizations without feeling like you're walking through a minefield unassisted. The end result is that the language with more constraints lets you be more safely free in your implementation.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-15 18:01:46+00:00
That's true, when workers are not aligned with each others, some get confused who is actually on your side vs against you, and frequently they believe the upper-class will protect them and provide them with support and wealth. I don't think I even have to share examples of how this works out in practice, yet for every revolution it keeps happening with the same results more or less.

You are fighting the upper-class, while some of the working-class people are mislead to fight on the other side. Slowly but surely they'll realize where to go, but often the promises of wealth and what not gets to strong for the individuals to at least try to move up.
by advisedwang | 2026-01-15 18:02:31+00:00
Eh, joining these datasets can be challenging. Names can be spelled differently or changed, dates of birth can be off, people can share names and dates of births, addresses change and are can be expressed in multiple ways, databases may store names as a single string or separate fields, middle names may be missing or initials, databases might not share IDs etc. So it's kinda hard to do well although nothing really exciting technology wise.

This, incidentally, is why the "confidence score" is needed. And why the app frequently gets data (including citizenship) wrong.
by DamnInteresting | 2026-01-15 18:02:33+00:00
I have been a fan of Wikipedia since I first learned about it, about six months after it launched. What a concept! Anyone can edit, citations are required, revisions are kept indefinitely. That's a recipe for building a clearinghouse of human knowledge with the power of iteration.

But I am also a non-fiction researcher/writer, and I experience some problems caused by Wikipedia:

1) I like to dig deep into historical stories--newspapers, archives, court records, FOIA requests--and I try to produce high quality, well-sourced articles about historic events. Inevitably, someone updates the Wikipedia article(s) to include new information I have surfaced, which exiles my article to the digital dustbin in favor of Wikipedia. Occasionally the Wikipedia editors cite my article in their updates, but much more often they just cite the sources that I cited, and skip over my contribution. It can be painful for my hard work to become irrelevant so rapidly.

2) Multiple of my writings have been plagiarized on Wikipedia by careless editors over the years, and I have been subsequently accused of plagiarizing from Wikipedia. That is unpleasant.

For a recent example, in 2006 I wrote an article about Doble Steam Cars[1]. A few months ago I had reason to visit the Doble steam car Wikipedia entry[2], and as I was reading, I realized that a large portion of the text was an uncanny, nearly verbatim copy of my article. I looked at the revision history, and found that a wiki editor had copied my text to revamp the article just a few months after I wrote mine in 2006. I visited /r/wikipedia and asked how to best handle this, and the Wikipedia editors there determined that it was indeed a violation, and they decided to revdelete almost 20 years of edits to purge the violation. It was quite something to behold.

To be clear, I am not happy that the huge revdelete resulted in so many lost subsequent good faith edits. But it's impressive that it was possible to roll it back so quickly and cleanly.

[1] https://www.damninteresting.com/the-last-great-steam-car/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doble_steam_car
Show HN: Okiro – spin up ephemeral codebases for parallel AI coding
by burcs | 2026-01-15 18:03:12+00:00
I built okiro because AI coding tools mostly felt like one-shots. They write directly to your files, and you either have to rollback or push forward. You don't really get to explore multiple ideas in parallel like you would if you were generating an image with AI.

okiro creates instant, zero-cost clones of your codebase so you can try several AI-driven approaches at once.

It uses filesystem copy-on-write (APFS on macOS, btrfs on Linux), so you can spin up dozens of variants of a large repo without actually duplicating it on disk. The copies only diverge when files change.

Example:

okiro 3 --prompt "add authentication"
# var-1: use Better Auth
# var-2: use Clerk
# var-3: roll your own with JWT

Each variant gets its own directory and an AGENTS.md with specific guidance. Open them side-by-side, let your AI tool work, then diff and keep the best result.

Would appreciate your feedback!
by rybosworld | 2026-01-15 18:03:16+00:00
> Why are Americans so passive?

I think it's important to realize how divided the U.S. is right now. Half the country is in favor of what ICE is doing in some form or another. Some people on the right are denouncing the _way_ ICE is accomplishing this. But they are far from outraged.

The other half of the country is as dumbfounded/shocked as the rest of the world.

This isn't like the French revolution where a majority of the country was suffering and rose up against the few.

This is very nearly 50% of the country wants to make the other 50% squirm.

It cannot be understated the role that Fox News has played to get us to this level of division.

The channel "The Necessary Conversation" has some good examples of just how radicalized some American's have gotten. It's 2 kids interviewing their MAGA parents. I think it's not uncommon for American's to know people like the parents in this video.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/hSysuwHw4KU
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-01-15 18:03:22+00:00
No, I think you have it wrong.

There are two levels of Max Chip, but think of a Max as two pros on die (this is simplification, you can also think of as pro as being two normal cores tied together), so a bad max can't be binned into a pro. But a high-spec Max can be binned into a low-spec Max.
by lxgr | 2026-01-15 18:03:44+00:00
My anecdata fully supports that conclusion.

I tried very hard to keep my battery healthy by only charging my phone to 80%, which resulted in me running out of battery quite often throughout the day, interrupted charging cycles etc., which apparently all were worse than just charging to full (via "optimized charging" which finishes the charge in the later hours) overnight.

I lost about 10% of reported battery health that way in less than a year, switched to just charging overnight or whenever getting close to empty, and have lost all of 3% over the second year of using this phone.

On top of that, swapping an iPhone battery is annoying, but having to worry about all of those battery health concerns is much more tedious.
by jeffyang | 2026-01-15 18:03:44+00:00
Rising Team | Senior Software Engineer | Remote (US, Pacific Time adjacent) | Full-time

At Rising Team we are transforming how the world's leading organizations develop high-performing managers and teams. Our mission is that everyone in the workplace feels understood, supported, and empowered.

If building with AI tools like Claude Code excites you and you find yourself thinking a lot about what great, high quality AI-powered engineering looks like, please apply! It's certainly something I've been thinking about a lot.

Job post: https://risingteam.com/careers-openings?bzid=2a63ef877906
by dmfdmf | 2026-01-15 18:03:59+00:00
Subreddits have dropped off too. I assumed the migration was to discord or tiktok or other plublic squares.

Specialized forum content, discussion and community suffered with the VerticalScope rollup that borged them all a few years back. They immediately upgraded the forum software to be phone app compatible (more eyeballs) and forum quality died soon after. No one is have good discussion, arguments, stories or history while phone posting on the can or in line at the DMV. It is all repetitive drive-by comments or questions that could be answered by a quick search of the forum so it is short attention span theatre now. I saw this across multiple forums that got rolled up by VS.

tldr; Vertical Scope and phone app use.

https://www.verticalscope.com/our-solutions/be-the-solution/
by gamerdonkey | 2026-01-15 18:04:04+00:00
> As an example: a an African American janitor in our kids' school voted republican in 2024 for the first time in his life, because the park in his Brooklyn neighborhood has become a shanty town and he can't work out there.

Okay, first off, I am just very confused by this sentence. How is the "shanty town" preventing him from working? Does he work from his home in Brooklyn? Is the school located in the park? Does he want to work in the park but is force to work at the school? I know this isn't the most important part, but I haven't been able to parse the story.

Further, I don't understand how what is happening is supposed to solve the "underlying issue". How does 3000 federal agents breaking windows and shoving people in Minneapolis help a Brooklyn community poor enough to become a shanty town? It would be like if I, in my job, had an backend outage on our website, and I went to the design team and began berating them while I fixed a couple UI issues. Sure, I might solve some real problems, and it could feel good in some cathartic way (especially if I've had unanswered complaints for years). But I wouldn't call it "fixing the underlying issues".

I believe it is most likely that the people who still support this style of enforcement have been hurt much like you, some acutely but many just slowly over time, and have bought into the idea that some "other" is at fault. And they want to see that "other" dealt with in some way, any way. Even if it means people get hurt, because they themselves have been hurt. So why not the "other"?

But I don't believe a shanty town in the most populous city what is supposed to be the richest and most prosperous country on Earth is caused by the poorest few percent of people living here. I don't think an illegal immigrant in Minneapolis is at fault, even if they have a "criminal background" (insidious phrasing that inflates numbers by lumping in people who may have paid their debt to society). I don't want to see people hurt.
by abdelfane | 2026-01-15 18:05:15+00:00
Author here. I spent the last week analyzing this vulnerability from a security architecture perspective.

Key insight: This isn't a ServiceNow-specific problem. It's an industry-wide pattern of grafting AI agents onto legacy auth systems.

We built an open-source platform (AIM) that implements the prevention strategies outlined in the article. Happy to answer questions about AI agent security or the analysis.

GitHub: github.com/opena2a-org/agent-identity-management
by chrismccord | 2026-01-15 18:05:40+00:00
I've been working on the orchestrator side with Elixir and Phoenix, so happy to continue the discussion for curious minds. One of the coolest things we can do is things like this in Elixir - from any node we can reach out to a sqlite db across the planet:

OrgTracker.with_repo(org_id, fn ->

repo.all(from sprite in "sprites", select: ...)

end)

That will find or place an Elixir process on the cluster and rpc the target node with our code. Placements can be sticky so they pin to a machine so we don't have to suck down the db every start, but we also balance out the load and handle failover of durable processes automatically. Combined with litestream, the result is distributed sqlite with failover while treating it essentially like a locally reachable sqlite db. Yes there is the speed of light to contend with, but by sending the execution across the wire rather than individual queries, we only ever pay a single hop to reach the process/sqlite.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2026-01-15 18:05:44+00:00
The original Pis are still for sale, are cheap, and still do everything you need. This doesn't conflict with an expanded product line. The whole reason for Pi is still GPIO plus general purpose computing. AI is now a part of general purpose computing, so it only makes sense to adopt it too.

The things you can do locally with AI now are amazing. For several years there's been multiple open source products that can do both audio and visual processing locally using AI models. Local-only Home Assistant is almost equivalent to Siri. The more things you throw at it, the more computing power it needs (especially for low latency), and that's where the dedicated GPUs/NPUs (previously ASICs) are needed. And consider the expanded use cases; drones and robots can now navigate the world autonomously using a $150 SoC and some software.
by Someone | 2026-01-15 18:05:48+00:00
It certainly could. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carver_(automotive_company). Got raving reviews from testers

“On BBC's Top Gear programme in 2002, Jeremy Clarkson said, "I have to say, absolute hand on heart, I've never had so much fun in a car, really and truthfully, and I don't think I'd ever tire of it."”

There’s an electric two-seater now. Around €12k
by open-paren | 2026-01-15 18:06:01+00:00
I've been using a webapp I build to do the same thing, and I've really enjoyed it.

https://yazzy.carter.works/

Example: https://yazzy.carter.works/https://paulgraham.com/submarine....

https://github.com/carterworks/yazzy

It uses Steph Ango's/kepano's defuddle under the hood.

The live version is hosted on a single free-tier fly.io node, but it is easily self-hosted.