MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jjk166 | 2026-01-14 21:42:37+00:00
In bi-polar systems like the decades-long standoff between Saudi Arbia and it's coalition against Iran and theirs, you don't actually want your opponent to collapse. They serve as a boogeyman that keeps your alliance cohesive and justifies immense efforts to counter them which typically are enriching your key friends. At the very least, they are the devil you know - you have spent considerable resources developing the infrastructure to predict and observe their movements, you know how to talk to them at the negotiating table, you have gentleman's agreements with your counterparts on their side. You want to be the dominant power, so the opportunity to bloody their nose, to embarrass them, is always good, and you want to do everything to stop them from getting an advantage over you. But if they are in serious trouble, you want to ease off the pressure or even help them, because if they fall you're suddenly going to be playing a very different game which you may not be any good at.

Even if some Arab states legitimately do want the Iranian regime to collapse, they don't necessarily want it to randomly collapse right now with no clear indication of what will take it's place. Add in the fact that the major driver of this unrest, high inflation and excessive corruption, are probably not flames they want to fan domestically. Best to watch closely and cautiously keep their options open.
by jacquesm | 2026-01-14 21:42:38+00:00
You weren't harassed for it because (1) it is interesting and (2) you were not hiding the AI involvement and passing it off as your own.

The results (for me) are very much hit-and-miss and I still see it as a means of last resort rather than a reliable tool that I know the up and downsides of. There is a pretty good chance you'll be wasting your time and every now and then it really moves the needle. It is examples like yours that actually help to properly place the tool amongst the other options.
by WhyNotHugo | 2026-01-14 21:42:42+00:00
> These companies need to stop normalizing the sharing of personal private photos. It's literally the opposite direction from good Internet hygiene, especially for kids!

While I agree with you entirely, it's important to remember that these companies want to mis-educate the masses (and especially children) against their own interest. It's not just unfortunate that they're normalising uploading a photo just to play a videogame: it's an intentional choice to de-normalise privacy and normalise deeper and more in-grained online stalking.
by XorNot | 2026-01-14 21:42:50+00:00
String theory isn't a theory it's a family of related theories sharing some common mathematical tools.

People talk about this as though it's an attempt at deception, whereas two people notionally working in string theory could in fact be proposing highly incompatible models which would be conclusively ruled out (and a lot of them have been in so far as that can be done - i.e. experimentation has put tight bounds on their possible parameters).
by newswangerd | 2026-01-14 21:43:59+00:00
I would also love to hear what kinds of plugins the HN Community would like to see. At the moment I'm thinking about the following:

- Github: this would allow you to set goals based on reviewing PRs, closing tickets, reading GH notifications etc.

- Homelab/Zapier/IFTTT: this would allow some kind of funny things like turning off lights or locking locks if you don't complete your goals. I don't have any smarthome stuff, so this would be hard for me to personally build.

- Notion/Obsidian/Jira/Trello

- Google/Apple Calendar: this could help people focus on meetings instead of (for example) scrolling HN
by blibble | 2026-01-14 21:44:02+00:00
yeah I understand the theory behind the system

however the market participants have "adapted" to it

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/jan/08/two-power-s...

it works pretty well on a short-term basis but due to the way the system works there's no ability to price-in a long term signal

the government is currently consulting on a changes to introduce this mechanism (as is the EU)
by lovich | 2026-01-14 21:44:08+00:00
I agree with the bad faith downvoting existing, there’s always been a trend on here of certain people thinking it’s tech related and good when it makes them money and political and bad if it loses them money along with several other biases, but the the pattern of new accounts boosting each other and then throwing their narratives around has super charged ever since LLMs became widespread.

I am increasingly losing any desire for anonymous speech due to how much of my time ends up getting wasted talking to GPUs someone configured to throw more noise into the discourse
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-01-14 21:44:11+00:00
I have found that comp alone is not enough to make up for a miserable job. I hated every minute I worked at AWS to the point I couldn’t fake it and it was remote.

When I got Amazoned, one of my former coworkers was a director at a well known public non tech company and was going to create a position for me to be over their cloud migration and strategy. It was going to pay around $50K more in cash than I was making in cash + RSUs my last year at AWS. I really hate leading migrations and infrastructure projects. I specialize in cloud + app dev consulting even though it pays less outside of working at Amazon and Google.

Speaking of Google, I also have/had a better than even chance of working there (GCP consulting division) making close to six figures more than I make now. But I’m not even tempted between my hated for working at large companies and working in an office
by zzrrt | 2026-01-14 21:44:14+00:00
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2009171282030653877

Elon replied with 100 emoji to a post that said “If White men become a minority, we will be slaughtered. Remember, if non-Whites openly hate White men while White men hold a collective majority, then they will be 1000x times more hostile and cruel when they are a majority over Whites. White solidarity is the only way to survive.”
by nirolo | 2026-01-14 21:44:37+00:00
I think this
"* The software is pretty specific to my requirements."
is the biggest part for me. I built something with Antigravity over the holidays that I can use for myself and it solves my use case.
I tried thinking about if this can be helpful for others and pushed it a bit further into a version that could be hosted. Which does not make that much sense because it is a computationally intense numerical solver for thermal bridges and just awfully slow on a free hosted platform.
But the project was a couple of evenings and would otherwise haven taken me half a year to complete (and thus never been done).

https://github.com/schoenenbach/thermal-bridge
https://thermal-bridge.streamlit.app/
by binalpatel | 2026-01-14 21:44:51+00:00
Cool to see lots of people independently come to "CLIs are all you need". I'm still not sure if it's a short-term bandaid because agents are so good at terminal use or if it's part of a longer term trend but it's definitely felt much more seamless to me then MCPs.

(my one of many contribution https://github.com/caesarnine/binsmith)
by gregsadetsky | 2026-01-14 21:45:00+00:00
Unfortunately their plan is an IoT plan “Not Intended for Phones or Tablets” [0]

That’s exactly the issue - it’s a great plan, it’s just contractually stopped from being offered because a lot of people would potentially switch to that..! :)

To me, the fact that the restriction exists is a proof of the demand for this.

[0] https://embeddedworks.net/product/wsim0331-sub/
by rafram | 2026-01-14 21:45:26+00:00
Containerization can probably prevent zero-click exfiltration, but one-click is still trivial. For example, the skill could have Claude tell the user to click a link that submits the data to an attacker-controlled server. Most users would fall for "An unknown error occurred. Click to retry."

The fundamental issue of prompt injection just isn't solvable with current LLM technology.
by AngryData | 2026-01-14 21:45:30+00:00
To bad they don't pay for crap and your job is still unstable.

As someone in the trades, it sure seems to me that 99.9% of people harping on about trades and needing trade workers and such have never worked in the trades, know nothing about the work environment most trade workers are in, and continuously and falsely claim how great their pay is as they take a single ghost job posting about a plumber in the center of Manhattan and pretend that represents the average plumber.

If trades are so great, why aren't all the people harping on about trade jobs and how great they are working in trades themselves? Trades are boom-bust cycle, over worked, under paid, and take a straight 20 years off your lifespan. How much money would you expect someone to give you in order to take a decade or two off your lifespan and lower your quality of life for your last decade? Certainly not the .50 cent raise you get over working in at a fast food place.
by mlyle | 2026-01-14 21:45:31+00:00
Data rates are almost always multiplied by powers of 10, because they're based on symbol/clock rates which tend to be related to powers of 10. There's no address lines, etc, to push us to powers of 2 (though we may get a few powers of 2 from having a power of 2 number of possible symbols).

So telco rates which are multiples of 56000 or 64000; baud rates which are multiples of 300; ethernet rates which are mostly just powers of 10; etc etc etc.

Of course, there's occasional weird stuff, but usually things have a lot of factors of 5 in there and seem more "decimal-ish" than "binary-ish".
How do small property management teams handle data entry from tenant documents?
by scannyai | 2026-01-14 21:45:36+00:00
I’m trying to understand how smaller property management teams handle document-heavy workflows.

Tenant information often comes in as scanned IDs, passports, and application PDFs, but that data still needs to end up structured inside a CRM or management system.

OCR tools exist, but from what I’ve seen there’s still a lot of manual cleanup or re-entry involved, especially with scans or inconsistent formats.

For those who’ve dealt with this:

Is this mostly manual in practice?

Are there tools or workflows that actually work reliably?

Or is this just accepted overhead?

Genuinely curious how people approach this.
by kamov | 2026-01-14 21:45:40+00:00
https://kamoshi.org/

I have written from scratch an SSG and used my website to dogfood it. A lot of it is/was experimenting and learning how web works bottom up, so it is rough around the edges nearly everywhere, but practically everything is my own work - both the website and the way it is built.

I have a lot of ideas on how the website can be made better, but there is always way more things to do than time to actually do the things...
by alexmarquardt | 2026-01-14 21:46:38+00:00
I kept running into the same demo problem: it’s hard to find a product catalog that behaves like a real e-commerce catalog (titles, working images, usable categories/attributes), is easy to ingest, and is safe/clear to reuse.

So I built two small OSS pipelines that convert open product sources into a clean, stable NDJSON schema you can bulk-index into Elasticsearch/OpenSearch. One outputs ~100K grocery products (Open Food Facts) and the other ~1M electronics-style products (Open Icecat), with strict “no image = no entry” quality gates and a shared schema contract.

Would love feedback on:
• what fields you consider essential for a convincing search/relevance demo dataset
• whether the schema choices (flat attrs for faceting + searchable description) match what you’ve seen work in practice
by schmuckonwheels | 2026-01-14 21:47:08+00:00
Because like most political threads, it will largely consist of people with a crayon-and-coloring-book understanding of geopolitics posting low-effort snipes and trading insults while contributing basically zero to productive discussion.

The most disgusting example of this in recent memory was the Scott Adams death thread, where complimentary comments were being aggressively flagged, and toxic vitriol was being upvoted. It made me finally realize how many joyless, seriously broken people lurk here.
Show HN: Claude Code Scheduler
by jshchnz | 2026-01-14 21:47:58+00:00
I found myself frequently wanting to schedule tasks in Claude Code (both one-time and recurring) so I built a CC plugin to help with that.

To install:
/plugin marketplace add jshchnz/claude-code-scheduler
/plugin install scheduler@claude-code-scheduler

Then just tell Claude what you want (some examples):

Every Wednesday at 3am find dead code: unused functions, unreachable branches, commented-out code, and unused imports. List by file with line numbers.

Schedule a code review every weekday at 9am. Review commits from the last 24 hours, check for bugs, security issues, error handling gaps, and code that needs comments. Summarize with file:line references.
by shibapuppie | 2026-01-14 21:48:00+00:00
>There are distinct large latency spikes every 30ish minutes, which I think is due to the dish switching between different satellites.

The satellites are in Low Earth Orbit and zipping across the sky at an extremely high rate of speed. If you were in the middle of absolutely flat nowhere-land, you could maybe get a few minutes on a single satellite before it goes over the horizon, not 30 minutes.
by IAmBroom | 2026-01-14 21:48:07+00:00
You are not an expert on optical safety and should not make sweeping, generalized statements as though you were.

I am an optical engineer, but don't specialize in eye-safe studies, and I wouldn't dare make a statement without consulting safety guidelines. The eye's sensitivity to wavelengths is exponentially variable, and very specific about some cutoffs - moreso than most biological phenomena, because the limiting factors are bandgaps of molecules, not cell structures.
by mbreese | 2026-01-14 21:48:37+00:00
In my experience, anytime someone suggest that it’s possible to “just” do something, they are probably missing something. (At least, this is what I tell myself when I use the word “just”)

If you tag your inputs with flags like that, you’re asking the LLM to respect your wishes. The LLM is going to find the best output for the prompt (including potentially malicious input). We don’t have the tools to explicitly restrict inputs like you suggest. AFAICT, parameterized sql queries don’t have an LLM based analog.

It might be possible, but as it stands now, so long as you don’t control the content of all inputs, you can’t expect the LLM to protect your data.
by dugidugout | 2026-01-14 21:48:39+00:00
I believe you have the hypothetical confused.

> if they were targeting you specifically

They are not targeting Natanson at all from what I can tell. They're targeting a source she's writing from (to what extent isn't clear to me). This is precisely why I'm positing Whren doesn't apply here.

I get the idea of being 'papered' out of a system, but I'm trying to distinguish a pretext that can be justified (objective probable cause) from one that can't (abuse of process). My boss can easily provide reason relating me to fire me, however fantastic the reality, but those would be refused, for good reason, if they surfaced them through private channels outside the organization.
by cryzinger | 2026-01-14 21:48:40+00:00
Oh, huh, TIL. I always thought it was a different way of processing cotton... but I just checked my closet and it looks like some of my stuff is a cotton/linen blend, which might be partly why I was confused. And would explain why some items wrinkle worse than others :P

In any case, both cotton and linen get the cold-water treatment from me!
by caditinpiscinam | 2026-01-14 21:48:44+00:00
Doesn't the existence of consumer products like ChatGPT indicate that LLMs aren't able to do human-level work? If OpenAI really had a digital workforce with the capabilities of ~100k programmers/scientists/writers/lawyers/doctors etc, wouldn't the most profitable move be to utilize those "workers" directly, rather that renting out their skills piecemeal?
by Tadpole9181 | 2026-01-14 21:49:14+00:00
You are responding to a thread with the exact quotes:

> But also note the government is punishing people for legal acts as well.

...

> so watch what happens to sources that didn’t do anything illegal.

So we, in this thread, are talking about what happens to the majority of her sources that are NOT sharing confidential information or committing any crime.
by bdamm | 2026-01-14 21:49:27+00:00
Interesting story; I went to park at a downtown lot in my local city (Vancouver BC) and the machine had an unusual UI. So I skipped the machine and scanned the QR code for the app. By the time I had taken the elevator up to the lobby of the building I had the app.

But then the usability on the app was so bad, that I actually could not figure out how to buy parking. The instructions were clear, but the latency on the app was unusable. The Internet connection was fine. It was the app. So I skipped the whole thing, went to dinner, and was happy when I found my car without a ticket.

"Unable to buy a ticket" would have been an interesting day in court.
by TacticalCoder | 2026-01-14 21:49:35+00:00
> At the core of game theory and human civilization is communication and trust.

No and no. Game theory is game theory. When Nash says: "Optimal move for non-cooperative participants" there is no communication and no trust. And it is still game theory. The Wikipedia page on the Nash equilibrium mentions game theory 42 times.

I'm not saying what you're mentioning ain't also game theory.

But you're putting an ideological/political motive to freaking maths to then reframe what "game theory" means in your own view of the world.

As a side note I'll point that humans do play games: from toddler to grown up adults. Game theory also applies to something called "games": be it poker or chess or Go or whatever.

Not everything has to be seen through the lens of exploitation / evil capitalism / gentle communism (collective resilience) / etc.
by asdff | 2026-01-14 21:50:17+00:00
I hate using my phone while snowboarding. Between the cold and the often lack of service the battery sinks like a stone on the slopes to the point where I have to use it sparingly or risk losing communication with other people on the mountain. So risky to pull the phone out on lift too. I've known people who dropped it there and then it's gone forever. Pinch and zoom would suck in the cold too. I'll take the free trailmap I can unfold with my mittons on any day.
by maelito | 2026-01-14 21:50:34+00:00
Not many people know that compass on the Web is possible.

https://cartes.app/nord

Works on most Android phones.

I discovered that when I figured out that a Web map without a position arrow is missing something.

Turns out, it was easy to implement. The Web has been so forgotten for the profit of app stores that entreprises don't even bother to check how capable it is.

I know offline maps (think Comaps) is possible on the Web, there just isn't anyone that did implement it yet.
by chasd00 | 2026-01-14 21:51:36+00:00
i don't think adding more hardware does anything except increase performance scaling. I think most improvement gains are made through specialized training (RL) after the base training is done. I suppose more GPU RAM means a larger model is feasible, so in that case more hardware could mean a better model. I get the feeling all the datacenters being proposed are there to either serve the API or create and train various specialized models from a base general one.
by otterley | 2026-01-14 21:51:49+00:00
I've also noticed that they conflate the notion of workers, queues, and message busses. A worker handles asynchronous tasks, but the means by which they communicate might be best served by either a queue or a message bus, depending on the specific needs. Tight coupling might be good for knocking out PoCs quickly, but once you have production-grade needs, the model begins to show its weaknesses.
by stuxnet79 | 2026-01-14 21:52:01+00:00
This matches my experience. 2019 was about the last time you could walk into a Uniqlo, grab an item at random and walk out with something reasonable. Just after that we had Covid and the everything bubble which broke a lot of companies. Uniqlo was one of the casualties.

They either had to dramatically increase the price or lower the quality. They chose the latter. You get what you pay for.
by rafram | 2026-01-14 21:52:04+00:00
- They already do this. Every chat-based LLM system that I know of has separate system and user roles, and internally they're represented in the token stream using special markup (like 
). It isn’t good enough.

- LLMs are pretty good at following instructions, but they are inherently nondeterministic. The LLM could stop paying attention to those instructions if you stuff enough information or even just random gibberish into the user data.
by tracker1 | 2026-01-14 21:52:22+00:00
Even by the pound would be hard... quality two-ply vs low-grade gas station TP... The price per unit is also difficult to compare... are you getting the costco packs that still have the larger per-sheet area or the new, smaller sheets.

Not to mention, in general it might be a counter-intuitive index... If the spend per person on TP on average goes down, is that an uptake in bidets, lowered tp costs, or economic affects and people choosing cheaper options?

That said, I still think it could be a "fun" index to track over time.
by jacquesm | 2026-01-14 21:52:33+00:00
That sounds very much like either tower thump or a broken bearing, I think the neighbors would have a better case if they pushed the safety angle because a turbine in a bad state of maintenance is dangerous.

Then they'll be forced to fix it and it will be quiet again. You can ask them if it always was that noisy, if it wasn't then that's an extra arrow in their quiver. I'm very much renewables but safety is a major concern.
by dang | 2026-01-14 21:52:38+00:00
[stub for offtopicness]

Reminders from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."

"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-14 21:52:55+00:00
https://www.findagrave.com/ might be helpful, if not let me know, I’ve built a pipeline to ingest historical census data from various US cemeteries and process it for historical archival purposes. Our family has occasional cemetery survey outings for fun (weather and geography permitting).

They should, imho, be parks (as they were long ago in Europe).

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/03/our-fir...
by mbreese | 2026-01-14 21:53:05+00:00
I don’t think it is the LLM companies want anyone to believe they are powerless. I think the LLM companies would prefer it if you didn’t think this was a problem at all. Why else would we stay to see Agents for non-coding work start to get advertised? How can that possibly be secured?

I do think that you’re right though in that containerized sandboxing might offer a model for more protected work. I’m not sure how much protection you can get with a container without also some kind of firewall in place for the container, but that would be a good start. Trusted execution environments are tough to get right.
by altacc | 2026-01-14 21:53:08+00:00
I moved from the UK to Scandinavia, where there is a federated ID (BankID) that you use to access pretty much everything and it removes all this complexity that the UK has. I can't imagine life without such an easy system. One of the downsides is that there's a bit of a catch-22 to getting an ID in the first place but once you've managed that it's done.

A key difference is the relationship between the people and the government and the motivation behind creating a federated ID. There's definitely an element of governmental monitoring to the Scandinavian model but the relationship with the government is less adversarial than in the UK.