MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by armchairhacker | 2026-01-25 09:27:53+00:00
Truth exists and matters. Even for far-away events like news, where "truth" is impossible to prove beyond doubt like hard science. Even for informally-defined concepts like justice, where "truth" is ambiguous and partly subjective. There are answers for the former that are more probable, and for the latter that resonate with more people, and those tend to correlate with the answers that are more conducive to whatever goals one has (even greed), and especially (utilitarian) long-term human prosperity.

The truth is unfathomably complex yet coherent. White lies lead to bigger lies that eventually unravel, because the implications of a lie are more lies. Sometimes even lies that seem like they'd never "blow up in your face", because humans aren't perfect. Some obvious lies one can accept and pretend are the truth, and it does work...until it doesn't, because those lies have implications that can't be accepted.

Unfortunately it can take a long time, until the lie no longer matters and/or the liar is dead. But truth practically always wins in the long-term, even historically for the losers (yes it's impossible to disprove that people and groups have been erased, and random nobodies are forgotten; but today we can even read burnt scrolls and know lots about the "Lost Colony" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roanoke_Colony)). More importantly, I believe truth wins more often and faster than most people argue, to the point where one should generally assume it matters. Though I can't prove it, like the events/concepts I'm describing, assume otherwise at your own loss...

---

Related to the recent ICE shooting: even some conservatives oppose the MAGA narrative, look at https://www.reddit.com/r/Conservative/. Others will never defy MAGA, but they aren't the majority; Trump won but with barely over 50%. Truth exists and matters.
by retired | 2026-01-25 09:28:18+00:00
Last Friday I could pay €3 to spend 75 minutes, 35 of which walking, to get to my destination on public transport. Or I could pay €13 for an Uber, door to door, about 25 minutes while I typed on my laptop in the back seat.

If it was a deductible company expense and I could get the VAT back the real cost of that Uber would be around €8 net versus €2 net.

If self driving taxis can get that number even lower, I'm all for it. Wouldn't need my own transportation anymore.
by jodrellblank | 2026-01-25 09:28:45+00:00
Rarely in everyday life situations do I feel as claustrophobic as being in a car in traffic in a typical road.

Can’t change direction (one lane no junctions), can’t change speed (vehicles in front and behind), can’t stop (flow of traffic), can’t break concentration (driving), can’t change body position (car cabin is tiny, seats and hand/feet controls are fixed, no space to stand), can’t look away for more than a moment (responsibility of driving).

And the only places to go are on the predetermined road, from a car park, to a car park, following a lot of strict prescribed rules about how.

This meme of “freedom” is brainwashing and marketing (which has been picked up as an identity thing by the right wing recently)
by guilamu | 2026-01-25 09:28:49+00:00
I asked 6 llms "What do you think of Grokipedia as a factual source of information?". Results: https://pastebin.com/cuxfHAr4

I then asked Claude Opus to sumup: https://markdownpastebin.com/?id=aa29d92662ac4a9ea7f9b3c1d9a...

Bottom Line
All LLMs agree: Grokipedia is useful for quick orientation but unreliable for serious research, especially on political, controversial, or current event topics. Wikipedia remains the more trustworthy alternative.
by tetha | 2026-01-25 09:29:03+00:00
Also, an EV is as green as the grid. Hamburgs public transportation is heavily investing into electrical busses, because a bus is expected to function for 10 - 15 years. Meaning, a diesel bus built today will be as polluting in 2035 as it is today, though they are also looking at alternatives there. But an electrical bus will become cleaner and cleaner over time.
by oorza | 2026-01-25 09:30:36+00:00
The "smart but lazy" person in an agentic AI workplace is the dude orchestrating a dozen models with a virtual scrum master. It's much more possible today to get a 40h work week's worth of work done in 4h than it ever has been before, because the gains that are possible with complex AI workflows are so massive, particularly if you craft workflows that match problems specifically. And because it's absolutely insane to do such a thing with modern tools and the lack of abstractions available to you, even insaner to expect people to do it, so you can't set proficiency targets on that rubric. You might have to actually work 40h at the onset, but I definitely work with someone who is considered a super hero for the amount of work they do, but I know they dick around and experiment all day every day, because all they do is churn Cursor credits into PRs through a series of insane agents. They're probably going to get a bonus for delivering an impossible project on time, as a matter of fact.

> Anyone you'd interact with in a job in a HN-adjacent field has already cleared several bars of "not actually that lazy in the big picture" to avoid flunking out of high school, college, or quitting their office job to bum around... and so at that point there's not that same black-and-white "it'll help you but hurt you" shortcut classification.

I'm clearly not talking about the _truly_ lazy people. I'm talking about classifications within the group of already successful creative/STEM professionals that are the ones who are going to be maximally impacted by AI. Obviously you're not as lazy as you could be if you manage to have a 20 year software career, but that doesn't mean you aren't fundamentally lazy or have a terrible work ethic, it just means you have a certain minimum standard you manage to hold yourself to. That's the person I'm talking about - the person who works twelve hours a day more isn't going to be able to meaningfully distinguish themselves any more. The quantity of their work becomes immaterial, so what matters is the quality, and the smarter, lazier dude is going to have better AI output because he has smarter inputs.
by EdwardDiego | 2026-01-25 09:30:37+00:00
> Our robotaxis are all cleaned by Black Women who were diagnosed by Licensed Therapists with PTSD from the ICE raids, so we should be first in line to get a license.

I was wondering why the author was writing like a giant piece of shit, and then I googled him, and turns out that the author is that guy who begged Elon Musk for a chance to work fore free to fix everything and failed, and it really explains a lot.

> In 2022, shortly after the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk, Hotz announced that he had joined the company for a 12-week internship, with the task of fixing Twitter search as well as removing the pop up log-in screen displayed to users scrolling without being logged in to an account. On December 20, after less than 5 weeks at the role, he resigned, stating “appreciate the opportunity, but didn’t think there was any real impact I could make there”.
by B1FIDO | 2026-01-25 09:30:55+00:00
"Installing" has the connotation of doing it directly from the Play Store. This is also known as "Downloading" (because the data is on a server, in the cloud, and you're fetching it "downstream" to a local device.)

"Sideloading" doesn't refer to the installation process, but to the file transfer process. You're sideloading when you transfer, e.g. APKs from your notebook to your Android. Or, from a USB stick into your phone or something.

In general, though, "sideloading" also refers to any "non-app-store" installation. It's a kind of colloquial shorthand. It's not really a technical term. But it's adequate for getting the point across.

If you just called it "installing" without qualifying it, how would anyone know that it's a different process, or that it's accomplished not by navigating to the app store? It seems that you would invite ambiguity here!
by aebtebeten | 2026-01-25 09:31:51+00:00
LoA, I'm very ashamed to say, is in the category of: seen the inflight movie, but not even read "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" — should I remedy this sin of omission?

Jack and Leopold may well be centrist; I know all the thinkbois mostly by reputation, not as primary sources! (Indeed, I'm pretty sure I know who Jack must be, despite having bailed on his platform in its first year, but Leopold doesn't even ring a bell, unless he goes by a different handle?)

Here's my attempt to tl;dr my concept:

Soft bigotry: I know better than my neighbour how to live, so I deserve all sorts of good things. (Koerner notes that the way to spot social darwinists is that they're incessantly wringing their hands that the "unfit" are —somehow— outreproducing the "fit")

Hard bigotry: I know better than my neighbour how to live, so they deserve all sorts of bad things. ("patriots" get to kill "lunatics" in the street)

Now, I do believe some people do in fact know better than others how to live (unsurprisingly, I place myself among the former :-); I just also believe example works better than extortion as a means of proselytisation. (fishers of men should refrain from dynamiting the lake?)

Does the "kidult" have a large coupling constant with "growing old is obligatory; growing up is optional"?

Which M-H scales?

I'm surprised not to have run across alephnerd recently wrt Carneyism ["loz im gayn"? :)]; they seemed very great-game-adjacent, earlier...
by skrebbel | 2026-01-25 09:32:06+00:00
I simply don’t see the problem. What’s bad about a future with fast, door to door, automatic, public transit? That’s how every scifi movie showed the future to me and this guy is against it for… for what actually? A car maintenance hobby? Comma.ai stock value? I’m not sure.

It all smells very “they’re coming to take away our guns” to me. A rambly incoherent argument in favour of worse times.
by nicbou | 2026-01-25 09:32:11+00:00
The same is happening to a lot of website owners. You lose half or more of your traffic to AI summaries trained on your own content. The cost of producing original content is the same as before.

It makes research harder too, since more and more public information is infected by AI content. Both published posts and internet discussions are tainted.

And then the AI companies threaten to crash the whole economy if we don't let them do it.
by austin-cheney | 2026-01-25 09:32:12+00:00
Yes, I completely agree but it’s not as dire as it sounds. The people most capable of thinking will create their own gaps as necessary to continue thinking, which is inefficient but it’s also a preference. The more busy these people become the more they will work to drive that thinking time and that friction is the basis of innovation. That value is logarithmic.

For everyone else you need to occupy their time with tasks as much as possible because their value is linear.
by maelito | 2026-01-25 09:32:46+00:00
Yes, with a simple Deno server that writes local JSON.

https://codeberg.org/cartes/serveur/src/branch/master/atprot...

I haven't coded yet the fetching from zero on the server in case my "db" fails.

If it fails for a few hours only, it's easy to listen to the jetstream with a cursor. It it's more, we'd have to rely on exploring the graph : getting all PDS that have a record lexicon, and rebuilding the DB. Not too complicated I believe, but we'll see.

It's what https://quickslice.slices.network is supposed to do but I haven't been invited yet.
How would you approach long term data acquisition from real estate platforms?
by ashi-sal | 2026-01-25 09:33:33+00:00
I’m working on a real estate data project and trying to understand best practices for acquiring structured data from large online platforms in a way that’s reliable and scalable.

In cases where most of the useful data is surfaced through frontend behaviour (network calls, client side requests) and only limited official APIs are available, how do experienced teams usually approach this long term? I’m particularly interested in how people think about frontend observation vs backend data sources, designing resilient pipelines, handling frequent changes, and avoiding brittle setups that constantly break.

Would really appreciate hearing how others have approached this in real production systems and what they wish they had done differently early on.
by polyglotfacto | 2026-01-25 09:33:35+00:00
> The question then becomes who would fund such a thing

Historically new web engines came about when a new challenger wanted to have a stake in web standards development. The way it happened was never from scratch but with a fork of an existing engine. Last time this happened was with Google. The reason, I think, was wanting to evolve the web into an application-like platform(HTML5), and a new architectural idea: multi-process.

The person who was in charge of that effort is now at OpenAI.

Today there are also projects like Ladybird and Servo which follow a different model: started from scratch and driven by interest from a developer community. But so far neither has users in the real-world, and so they haven't had an impact on the Web in the way Chromium has, yet.

Already today, both development models could benefit from the productivity gains of AI; in 2029 the game may have changed entirely. I can imagine a combination of math(TLA+ like I've done at https://github.com/w3c/IndexedDB/pull/484), web standard in their semi-formal English, and then some further guidance in terms of code architecture(through a conversation-like iterative loop), and see a Fastrender-like approach that actually works. Humans would still be the ones defining and solving all the hard problems, but you'd be typing a whole lot less code...

I'm the one who was driving the efforts to start experimenting with AI in Servo, which was cut short by https://github.com/servo/servo/discussions/36379

I've been using AI on side-projects ever since, and in those I don't type any code by hand anymore and end-up doing things I would not even contemplate(due to time constraints) without the use of AI.

Example: https://medium.com/@polyglot_factotum/tla-in-support-of-ai-c...
by v_iter | 2026-01-25 09:34:27+00:00
Things like that don't protect countries. If a real threat arises, if there is no unified force, under the command of one central organ, they won't cooperate, it will always be inferior to the force that does have a single unified command center, like Russia for example or China. NATO or the EU cannot command, say Poland or Germany where to put their forces and what to do with them, but Russia and China can do that with their own. Although their military potential is on par (I mean NATO and Russia) My point is, although on paper NATO is great, it's still fragmented, and to some extent relies on who is in power politically, for example the tomorrow's president of an X country can say "Oh, we will leave NATO yata yata"
by ryanackley | 2026-01-25 09:34:47+00:00
I'm confused by this comment because there is an entire industry (personal injury attorneys) dedicated to extracting every dollar possible from the insurance company when an accident happens.

I've personally known at least five people who have been in a car accident and then received a windfall of cash after paying off their medical bills and having their car repaired/replaced.

I don't know if this is still the case but years ago my friend, who was in a collision with a drunk driver, was told by his attorney that the insurance will just settle for 3x your total expenses (medical, car repairs, etc). He was being encouraged by his attorney to see chiropractors and specialists because of this.
by hsbauauvhabzb | 2026-01-25 09:35:36+00:00
America has eroded and treated privacy not as a right, not as a privilege, but as nothing. It has been doing this more and more blatantly across the world for the past 2 years and has now become an authoritarian state, threatening war across the globe while simultaneously destabilising the global economy. America IS bad, for multiple reasons.
by arjie | 2026-01-25 09:35:41+00:00
Very cool. Okay, I think you're right. Doing dedupe at the application layer is a much better idea. I do have 512 GiB of DDR5 (it's an Epyc 9755-based server) but I think you're right because I am fully aware of the data I'm storing (internet archive data) so I can simply delta-code on a per webpage sense.

Right, I knew from /r/homelab that many normal people now store petabytes in their nodes. My specific machine is going to be in a DC located some 1 hr from me so I don't mind noise, but I am particular about power consumption and so on.

Based on what you said I'm going to run RAIDZ2 on this. I happen to have a bunch of EXOS 18 TiB drives so I shall use those. Thank you for the advice from experience!
by B1FIDO | 2026-01-25 09:36:36+00:00
I do not own a vehicle, and most of my life I've depended on public transit. Lately, I take Waymos or I ride scooters, or use public transit as usual.

Sometimes, for special errands, I rent a car. For example, I intended to move across town last year, so I rented a car for 3-4 days.

It was the most excruciating pain I could have. I chose a little Mitsubishi Mirage, and firstly, it was the middle of July in the Sonoran Desert, and the A/C hardly worked, so I was sweating, and the car would heat up real good in parking lots. No sun shades, dark upholstery. Also, the USB connection was flaky, so sometimes my phone didn't charge, and whether or not, it was directly exposed to the Sun and overheating.

By the second day, my legs hurt a lot. I had spent an unexpected amount of time on my feet and walking around, despite the vehicle. Do you know how big parking lots are these days?!

I tried sitting down at every opportunity. I have a running gag/dispute at my bank to see whether they will allow me to "sit down" at the "ADA/Disabled" teller window.

Driving home at night on the last night, my leg cramped up really bad. I was in such pain, I nearly pulled over because it was my accelerator/brake leg and I was going to lose control of the car.

Thankfully I was able to hold it together, and returned the car the next day, but boy I did not want such a vehicle ever again. And it was not a stick-shift; it was an automatic transmission.

Next time I'm going to be really sure that the USB and A/C work. And that my legs are super-comfortable and has cruise control.
by nephihaha | 2026-01-25 09:36:57+00:00
It is clear at least two of us have fundamentally different definitions of a lot of these terms.

For example, I don't consider activism to be expressing an opinion in conversation, but to be taking a placard out onto the street and protesting etc. I consider ideology to be a complex system, not a single statement.

There do seem to be some sacred cows on here — one of them being criticism of Wikipedia — but I don't find the guidelines as clear as you do.
by aebtebeten | 2026-01-25 09:37:21+00:00
What about US Gen-Z and younger? They fall into the Oceania all-ages bucket?

Heh, just a note on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46541796 : imagine a therapist believing that the proper route is to help someone cognitively figure it out by asking the right questions! Almost as difficult as imagining a dev who believes the proper route is to write a script that does it... la déformation professionelle?

Wrt: "once you know the right 20-30 people or their friends or colleagues" it makes me wonder if a good corruption coefficient might be "how many zeros does it take[0] before you stop seeing impartial institutions and start seeing corruption". I believe those 20-30 people exist in almost all countries, it's just in some lucky countries you don't notice them at USD 6-7 zeros, but do start noticing them[1] at 9-10 — and in some other countries, you even have the 20-30 people in the quarter who are corruptible for 2-3 zeros.

[0] or maybe an even better index would be calibrated to wealth distribution within the jurisdiction?

[1] ask anyone investing in US offshore wind about US institutional impartiality these days!

Q. Should I read a translation of "Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka za světové války" sometime?
by arjie | 2026-01-25 09:37:54+00:00
I suppose archival is as close to realistic as possible. It's intended for a personal Internet archive of a subset of sites I wish to crawl and store. I will query the data rarely, but I intend to store recent updates and so on. I have lots of CMR disks so I intend to use those. I intend to use zfs and I'm hoping I can add more disks later to the pool. What is your experience in gradually growing your storage and having to resilver? Do you just create new volumes?
by samiv | 2026-01-25 09:38:06+00:00
Microsoft is an end stage software company that has exhausted natural growth in its desktop segment. When that happens to a company that is beholden to Wall Street the only ways are to start shitting on their "customers" and their employees. Cut costs and try engage in dark patterns and other shenanigans in order to keep getting the customer money and show growth. The relationship turns adverserial. I think this already happened way before but I speculate that the aggressive drive to slop and vibe coding while reducing head count is now coming around to start showing their effects in the software quality.

I further speculate that before they had some senior/principal engineers that were the backstop holding things together but they've been let go too now. So there's nothing to stop AI slop taking over.
by arter45 | 2026-01-25 09:38:35+00:00
Another source says:

> It "involved an attempt to disrupt communication between generating installations and grid operators across a large area of Poland".

I doubt we will have all details, but I suspect this kind of communication occurred over the Internet (hopefully, at least a VPN).

Also, even completely airgapped networks are not 100% secure, if you can install a device or convince someone to do it by accident (social engineering).
by remus | 2026-01-25 09:38:44+00:00
Yes, Freerider (the route he climbed on El Capitan) is much harder than the climbing on Taipei 101. The style of climbing is also very important, some of the moves on Freerider are very insecure and hard to climb in a reliable way, whereas on Taipei the difficulty largely comes from doing the same moves over and over again which means your body gets tired in a specific ways.

The climbing on Taipei was way more chill for him than the climbing on Freerider.
by rvz | 2026-01-25 09:38:49+00:00
But that is the author's point. I don't see many of the same alternatives years later.

They have either shut down, got acquired or were sold off and then shutdown. Even Uber and Lyft had their own self-driving programs and both of them shut theirs down. Cruise was recently taken off the streets and not much has been done with them.

The only ones that have been around from more than 7 years are Comma.ai (which the author geohot still owns), Waymo and Tesla and Zoox, but they ran out of money and is now owned by Amazon.
by enether | 2026-01-25 09:39:57+00:00
Peter (the author) is a really, really cool guy. We recorded a 3hr 30m podcast[0] with him a month ago. For anyone interested in the Kafka space, performance optimization in Rust and the general "why yet another Kafka", I'd shamelessly recommend the video:

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJQ7hcsI1Dw
by ddacunha | 2026-01-25 09:40:31+00:00
I have converted 'RJ11 phone plugs' to Ethernet in multiple rentals to the delight of the landlord. One should also not that event Cat 5 can carry 1Gbps (instead of 100Mpbs) and Car 5e can carry 10Gbps (instead of 1Gbps) depending on the length and other factors such as which switch is used.
by pjmlp | 2026-01-25 09:41:09+00:00
While I agree it has a certain Perl feeling and I used to advocate for functions/operators, e.g. reflex or similar, it still feels better than unicode operators in FP languages or the two macro systems used by Rust.

At least being based on compile time execution infrastructure means you can debug it on IDEs, Clion already has some work into that direction.

https://blog.jetbrains.com/clion/2025/09/introducing-constex...