MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by superb_dev | 2026-01-10 02:30:01+00:00
> The car wasn't moving until they surrounded her car, that was the issue. She was blocking off traffic deliberately.

She wasn’t blocking the road intentionally. You can see her wave an ice vehicle through and they pass just fine.

She did not violently escape and she did not need to be arrested then and there. They had her license plate and she lived nearby. They would’ve picked her up in no time.

That officer put himself in danger and took a life for no reason. You are a sycophant mindlessly regurgitating the party line. You can’t see the truth in front of you
by saulpw | 2026-01-10 02:31:56+00:00
One of the things about "math" is how theorems need to be proven to work for all numbers. I remember reading a thought experiment decades ago about an alien mathematics which didn't prove a theorem formally but would consider it proven if it worked for all numbers up to some really large number. Perhaps even just some large number of spot checks. And statistically maybe that's a functional approach?

And that's what it feels like now. We have the "old school" developers who consider CS to be equivalent to math, and we have these other people like you mention who are happy if the code seems to work 'enough'. "Hackers" have been around for decades but in order to get anything real done, they generally had to be smart enough to understand the code themselves. Now we're seeing the rise of the unskilled hacker, thanks to AI...is this creating the next generation of script kiddies?
by wizzwizz4 | 2026-01-10 02:32:01+00:00
> One naive belief many people have is that proofs should be "intelligible" but it's increasingly clear this is not the case.

That's not a naïve belief. Intelligible proofs represent insight that can be applied to other problems. If our only proof is an opaque one, that means we don't really understand the area yet. Take, for example, the classification of finite simple groups (a ten-thousand-page proof): that is very much not a closed area of research, and we're still discovering new things in the vicinity of the problem.
by gdwatson | 2026-01-10 02:32:18+00:00
I realize you are tongue in cheek, but I hope people respect the logical limits of this sort of thing.

Years ago, there were some development tools coming out of the Ruby world – SASS for sure, and Vagrant if I remember correctly – whose standard method of installation was via a Ruby gem. Ruby on Rails was popular, and I am sure that for the initial users this had almost zero friction. But the tools began to be adopted by non-Ruby-devs, and it was frustrating. Many Ruby libraries had hardcoded file paths that didn’t jive with your distro’s conventions, and they assumed newer versions of Ruby than existed in your package repos. Since then I have seen the same issue crop up with PHP and server-side JavaScript software.

It’s less of a pain today because you can spin up a container or VM and install a whole language ecosystem there, letting it clobber whatever it wants to clobber. But it’s still nicer when everything respects the OS’s local conventions.
by dang | 2026-01-10 02:33:34+00:00
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

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

I'd especially hammer the point in this case, because clever hacks are very much on topic for Hacker News. They are, in fact, what gave birth to the word hacker and the idea of hacking in the first place. Not only that but it was precisely the clever hacks with no particular utility that were prized most highly!
by toxic72 | 2026-01-10 02:34:36+00:00
Since you're in industry, any thoughts on the Rellis "test bench" at Texas A&M?

"SMR Four" Consortium:

In early 2025, Texas A&M selected four other major SMR companies to deploy reactors at RELLIS:

Kairos Power: Developing fluoride salt-cooled high-temperature reactors.

Natura Resources: Working on liquid-fueled molten salt reactors (MSRs).

Aalo Atomics: Focused on factory-fabricated microreactors (the "Aalo-1").

Terrestrial Energy: Developing the Integral Molten Salt Reactor (IMSR).
by indigodaddy | 2026-01-10 02:34:39+00:00
So this is neat and useful and I think will/should get traction.

So let's say sprite is my building/dev ground floor. I get my thing/app to where I want it, but at the end of the day I think my thing/app is so awesome that it should be a production app for the whole world, and, I want to actually deploy it on fly, say.

Have you guys thought about that workflow, and what it might take to push button/migrate a sprite app over to fly?

Also, any plans for GPU sprites?
by xiphias2 | 2026-01-10 02:34:49+00:00
The part (as a person of another country) that I don't understand is why people even here on HN is so much against people whose job is to arrest people who broke federal laws.

As I see those laws are not really knew, they were just not enforced during the previous administration as strictly, but people who broke those laws did it consciously.

Do people really care about the people who broke the laws or just hate the current administration so much?
by lotsofpulp | 2026-01-10 02:35:02+00:00
I’m a homeowner and have kids, and I’ve never written a check in my life. I can login to Bank of America and have them print and mail a check for free, but the recipient has to wait.

I only have to do this rarely, and it’s always because the recipient wants to charge a “convenience fee” for having me pay with ACH or debit card or credit card. (The seller is assuming people would rather pay an extra $3 to $5 to not have to write a check or mail anything).
by whattheheckheck | 2026-01-10 02:35:22+00:00
From my perspective they are most likely not heading in the right direction.

They are massively funded and will get more and more embolden to record their crimes and say do something about it.

Then it will be a wedge. Support ice or not. Armband or not. Salute or not. Which side are you on. Cowards will pick the more violent side for self preservation and will soon find a country that's not worth living in anymore.

For curiosity, when in history has the federal govt failed to suppress an uprising in the USA?
by dkbrk | 2026-01-10 02:36:38+00:00
That's not what "hot" means in this context. "Hot" means "highly radioactive", i.e. high number of decay events per second, high concentration of short half-life isotopes, high power/volume resulting from radioactive decay.

Nuclear reactors do not work off radioactive decay. U-235, for example has a half life of 704 million years. Radioisotope thermal electric generators [0] by contrast do run off radioactive decay, an isotopes used for that application have short half-lives, such as Pu-238 with 87.7 years.

Commercial nuclear reactors use unenriched or minimally enriched fuel. This means that, within a fairly short period of time, the percentage of fissile material in the fuel drops to the point where continuing to use it is no longer economical. At that point the fuel is a mixture of extremely hot fission products, transuranics, unreacted fuel, and non-fissile (but fertile) isotopes such as U-238.

It's not practical to use the decay energy from the fission products for power. What would make much more sense would be to remove the fission products and recycle the fuel that remains into new fuel (for a reactor that's designed to use it). This would be a much more efficient use of mined nuclear fuel (allowing nuclear power to be used for thousands of years), it would vastly reduce the volume of nuclear waste, and it would mean nuclear waste would only be hazardous for decades to centuries.

The US was on the path to this with the Integral Fast Reactor and Pyroprocessing [1] developed by the Argonne National Laboratory. This was killed [2] in 1994 by the Clinton administration. Not for any technical reason, but because it was a "threat to nuclear non-proliferation". How that makes sense when, to the best of my knowledge the process developed by Argonne couldn't be used to produce weapons-grade material, and even if it could the US already had nuclear weapons so it wouldn't be proliferating it to a non-nuclear country, I don't know. But, apparently, since some other forms of nuclear waste reprocessing can be used to generate weapons-grade material (by extracting Pu-239), it was a bad symbol so it had to go.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Integral_fast_rea...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Integral_fast_rea...
by UncleMeat | 2026-01-10 02:38:28+00:00
Hm.

Republicans scream at scientists and try to get them fired for doing climate science research, destroy funding bodies, pass legislation saying what professors can and cannot teach in class, and generally call the entire academic ecosystem a bunch of groomers. Fewer republicans choose to go to graduate school and become professors. This, somehow, means that research can never be done, justifying further destruction of academia.

I'm very sorry but I don't understand how not having a dozen race science people teaching about brain pans down the hall means my research is bunk.
by anonzzzies | 2026-01-10 02:39:02+00:00
I do connect 5 minutes past, but after the start of the meeting, just to miss the 'how was your weekend', 'let's do an introduction round' and other nonsense (the email invite already has intro's; i know people don't read, but that's not my problem).

We mostly turned our internal and partner meetings around these days; meetings are organised and distributed by who thinks they are needed, everyone who could be needed is included (they basically have to answer when called upon during the meeting; that also keeps the meetings within bounds as no-one is going to answer anymore once the time passed) but they are called in only when needed which is to say, almost never in reality. This showed us the enormous waste of these meetings before.
by daniel_j | 2026-01-10 02:39:06+00:00
I think it's likely a problem with me specifically - I said no to going to celebrations like christmas lunch etc. But at the same time our team doesn't interact with each other socially in any other way. I'm very new to the job, so it isn't that I pushed everyone away from me, there just wasn't any closeness in the first place. It doesn't really help that I don't much like the job either.
by Dylan16807 | 2026-01-10 02:39:20+00:00
You have a good starting point, but using 6+1 bits is a bad way to encode 65 possibilities. If you use base 65, you'll see that 65^32 possibilities only require one more bit to store than 64^32.

And four promotion possibilities wouldn't be 4 bits, it would be 2. But even better is 5^16 squeezing into 38 bits.

Combining those cuts your strategy down to 192.7+37.2+4+6 bits which is 30 bytes.

The main savings the article has is being smarter about how to store promotions. And then it uses some tricks by swapping pieces to encode extra bits.

(But it turns out that storing which tiles are occupied, then listing each piece in order, works better than encoding locations.)
by guiambros | 2026-01-10 02:40:00+00:00
Email from Betterment one hour ago:

"Important update regarding unauthorized message

Earlier this evening you may have received a message referencing a crypto-related Betterment promotion.

This was an unauthorized message sent via a third-party system we use for marketing and other customer communications. Please note that this is not a real offer and should be disregarded. We apologize for any confusion."
by VariousPrograms | 2026-01-10 02:40:47+00:00
Alternatively, join my meetings on time. You click End Call, then Join. It takes 3 seconds.

You get Outlook reminders 15 minutes in advance. Webex/Teams notifications 5 minutes in advance. I’m sure you can make your watch vibrate or something.

People at my office join every meeting 5 minutes late because no one expects meetings to start on time anymore. So I guess we’re following this advice in all but the nominally scheduled time. Drives me nuts.
by mancerayder | 2026-01-10 02:40:49+00:00
>Motivation is fleeting but routine persists.
When there is something that you want to do regularly (exercise, doing the final boring part of some sideproject, cleaning the house...) you remove willpower from the equation and set a day and a time.

Absolutely!! Don't wait to Feel Like It, or Be Motivated... and especially do not depend on another person/trainer/weather to motivate you!

Fitness is a to-do, like laundry or grocery shopping or going to work. Now where the nuance comes in is finding what you enjoy. But a nuance of this nuance is, you don't know what you like until you have done it for a while, at least one month. Don't do boot camps or hacky gimmicky things people try to trick themselves into doing.

For a while I was deep into photography and writing. In both, I read and listened to people who were experts - successful writers and photographers. I learned this - they don't wait for inspiration. They commit X time per day to doing their craft, as habit.

I write this after coming from the gym, on a chilly night, after a relatively annoying day, and I feel 80 percent better.

Now the joint soreness and constant tightness are a problem, cuz I'm getting older. But it must be done.
by sothatsit | 2026-01-10 02:42:26+00:00
This often feels like an annoying question to ask, but what models were you using?

The difference between free ChatGPT, GPT-5.2 Thinking, and GPT-5.2 Pro is enormous for areas like logic and math. Often the answer to bad results is just to use a better model.

Additionally, sometimes when I get bad results I just ask the question again with a slightly rephrased prompt. Often this is enough to nudge the models in the right direction (and perhaps get a luckier response in the process). However, if you are just looking at a link to a chat transcript, this may not be clear.
by niqhtcrawler | 2026-01-10 02:43:20+00:00
I built Scaffold to solve a problem I kept hitting: I wanted to embed AI features (chatbots, content generators) in my projects, but didn't want to manage API keys, build backends, or pay per request.

The approach: Instead of calling OpenAI's API, Scaffold generates optimized prompts that users send to ChatGPT themselves. You build a form with custom fields, write a prompt template using {{variables}}, and your users get a perfectly formatted ChatGPT prompt.

Why this works:
- Zero infrastructure (no backend needed)
- Zero API costs (free forever)
- Works anywhere (iframe embed on any site)
- Users control the AI interaction

What it can't do:
- Conversational AI with memory (each submission is a new prompt)
- Embedded responses (opens in ChatGPT, not your site)
- Server-side processing (no programmatic access to responses)

Tech stack: Next.js 14, Supabase (auth + PostgreSQL), Vercel

Use cases:
- Blog post generators
- Email writers
- Study tutors with specific knowledge (via "fixed fields")
- Product finders

Try it: scaffoldtool.com

I'm 17 and this is my first real launch. Looking for technical feedback - what would make this a no-brainer for you?
by baby_souffle | 2026-01-10 02:43:51+00:00
> What it can't do (as far as I understand): complex layouts, precise typography,

Some "extended" flavors will allow you to embed HTML and CSS which solves the layout problem. It's not really markdown at that point, though.

> embedded binary content,

If you're using one of the extended variants, you can b64 encode images... but again, that's not really the spirit/intent of markdown.
by Joel_Mckay | 2026-01-10 02:44:05+00:00
Energy is finite, and asking the public to fund a private firms irrational project is unethical.

"Memoirs of extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds" (Charles Mackay, 1852)

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24518/24518-h/24518-h.htm

I look forwards to buying the failed data center assets. LLM make great search engines, but are not the path to "AGI". Neuromorphic computing looks more interesting. Have a great day =3
by vaishnavsm | 2026-01-10 02:44:52+00:00
This seems to be focused on Python, but for all the TS devs out there, what you'll see will be implicit `any` errors. Quick word of warning on having LLMs fix those - they love to use explicit `any`s or perform `as any` casts. This makes the lint error disappear, but keeps the actual logic bug in the code.

Even if you ask it not to use any at all, it'll cast the type to `unknown` and "narrow" it by performing checks. The problem is that this may be syntactically correct but completely meaningless, since it'll narrow it down to a type that doesn't exist.

The biggest problem here is that all of these are valid code patterns, but LLMs tend to abuse them more than using it correctly.
by jjk166 | 2026-01-10 02:46:56+00:00
You are the one who proposed birth estimates and casualty claims suggest population increased. How do you think population estimates work?

There is no census scheduled for 2027. Gaza (much like Israel) does not conduct full censuses on a regular schedule. Neither Gaza nor Israel have scheduled their next full census at this time. The most recent census for Gaza was 2017 (for comparison Israel's most recent was 2008). All population numbers of relevance are determined by statistical methods. For large numbers, this is perfectly adequate.

> As with pretty much any conflict, there's a ton of uncertainly, and people shouldn't be recklessly speculating based on things like WhatsApp chats.

Numbers of deaths aren't being estimated from WhatApp chats. The most widely agreed upon estimates are based on morgue data, which if anything should undercount the actual death toll as plenty of bodies never make it to a morgue operated by health professionals. These health professionals are the same ones giving the birth rate estimates.

> Responsible casualty estimates would look more like Ukraine, where for example Zelenskyy said "tens of thousands" (one significant digit) were killed in Mariupol.

That's not what one significant digit means. That is an order of magnitude estimate. I believe everyone is in agreement that the death toll of the gaza war was likewise in the tens of thousands. 1 significant digit would indicate how many tens of thousands. For example, death tolls for Mariupol range from between 20,000 and 90,000. Estimates for Gaza range between 60,000 and 100,000, or roughly half the band for Mariupol. Note that Ukraine does not have access to Mariupol to investigate, as the war is still ongoing, whereas we are several months past the ceasefire in Gaza. Based on pre-war numbers, natural deaths unrelated to the conflict should be a rounding error at this resolution.

Certainly the claim that the population increase is proof of anything is absurd.
by Izkata | 2026-01-10 02:47:21+00:00
On the exact opposite side, I remember when I first started working and was used to keeping an eye on the clock because of, oh, 16 years of school that had us timed to the minute. I'd walk into meeting rooms right when it was supposed to start and interrupt whoever was in the previous meeting and was going over. Surprised a lot of people like that.
by maurycyz | 2026-01-10 02:49:05+00:00
I doubt that's going to be much of a problem: As long as the average power is within rated limits. It takes time for coils to heat up and cool down: The worst thing you can do for speakers is to play loud music on a hot day. (Music also has a high dynamic-range which maximizes mechanical loads)

Inductive kick won't be an issue either: amplifiers are designed as voltage sources, not current sources. They present a low impedance path for back-EMF to take without causing any problems.
by anonzzzies | 2026-01-10 02:49:24+00:00
People don't read the email itself, they just want to 'over it together' because lazy/no reading comprehension/whatever the reason is. So many meetings have 10+ people there who have no clue what this meeting is about while the agenda, questions, possible answers etc are in the email. So I usually start (if it's my responsibility to do so) with; how about you read the email for a few minutes before we start. Which is usually met with 'why don't you go over it line by line with us, share screen and read it'. Drives me bonkers. Granted, these are usually very big partner companies for which the employees (including middle management) see this as some break in their day, so they don't really care about the time spent or the outcome.
by LolWolf | 2026-01-10 02:49:29+00:00
Ooh, great question. Usually fractions (~1/20th?) of a turn for alignment, it’s hard to go below that since the mounts are so small and the springs don’t have the tension to keep it super stable. (This is plenty for such a “coarse” set up like a Michaelson but might not be up to par for more delicate ones. This can be improved very easily but it was enough for this experiment!) If you want to observe something on the outputs, you have to do something like exhale on one of the arms or put a soldering iron near one of them—merely touching one of the screws gives you indiscernible output, even if the mirrors are aligned.

Very interesting re: JWT, I will definitely take a peek, thanks !
by tombert | 2026-01-10 02:51:54+00:00
That's the main reason I still like writing Markdown (and Typst nowadays as well); I can "render" it in my head very quickly.

When I'm reading Markdown, I almost don't even see the symbols. Beginning a statement with a # immediately just looks like a heading, surrounding a word with asterisks looks italic to me, wrapping a string with backticks looks like code formatting to me, and my assumptions are generally right so I don't need to render very often (which is why the Pandoc -> LaTeX -> PDF pipeline didn't bother me that much).

If I'm writing LaTeX or something, I generally have a very rough idea of what something will look like, but it's not terribly reliable for me. I need to render frequently because my assumptions about how something is going to look is likely to be wrong.

I mostly use Typst now because it is similar enough to Markdown, and the compilation time is so categorically faster that I see little reason not to use it, but I still respect the hell out of Markdown for popularizing this kind of syntax.
by cfabuses | 2026-01-10 02:53:09+00:00
Cloudflare is a haven for abuse.

Most large scam groups now have their own ASNs and IP registrations, so CF just forwards them the report and tells you to contact fiberscam.co.za or whatever fake company the scam group has created. They are not cut out for this workaround and yet the largest scam groups have been using it since 2023.

I don't think they are currently doing any statistical analysis, one provider has just 3 /24s and hosts thousands of scam shops, hundreds of reports to CF and nothing done, they won't consider blocking the ASNs even when you show them a report that 98% of the IPs they own serve scam shops.

At this point I consider CF willfully negligent.
by xdennis | 2026-01-10 02:53:10+00:00
> That's punishing all of Italy's users including those whose job it is to call truth to power

Cloudflare is a business. If the fines for operating are several times the money it can get from Italian users, why should it stay in Italy at all?

It's like when Wikipedia went dark for a day. It punished all users, but the point is to show that politicians are forcing it to do so.
by throwaway2037 | 2026-01-10 02:53:37+00:00
> Of course in Canada we have a banking oligopoly that is effectively there just to rob people

Are there any OECD nations that don't have a banking oligopoly? I can think of at least one: Germany, because they have Sparkasse (community banks). Does Canada have community banks like Germany and the United States? If yes, then you should vote with your wallet and switch.