MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by petercooper | 2026-01-25 11:51:45+00:00
It's interesting to see something through someone else's lens. Nearly all the things they complain about in this post are things that I like about Letterboxd, yet I can also see why they don't like them. I don't think that should mean death to Letterboxd, though, but more "let's make more alternatives for other people's tastes."
by metanonsense | 2026-01-25 11:53:00+00:00
Honestly a crappy situation. In Germany, Telekom is a monopolistic bully. In evening hours, any service behind Cloudflare more or less stops working (for instance, before I cancelled my subscription, chess.com web assets were delivered with neck-breaking 5kB/s, which made loading a 20MB wasm for stockfish analysis no fun).. but there are absolutely no viable alternatives that aren’t also crappy: Vodafone -> same peering idiocy, Starlink -> king Elon). VPNs make things complicated, but are often the only alternative.
by direwolf20 | 2026-01-25 11:53:53+00:00
You don't want a tier 1 carrier as your ISP because they are severely limited in connectivity — they only connect to paying customers and other tier 1s. They are to be used as a last resort by the tier 2 ISPs, who provide good packet routing by selecting the best routes from among several backbones.

Never thought I'd see this play out in practice, especially with a consumer ISP. Normally this comes up with server hosting, not consumer ISPs.
by sshine | 2026-01-25 11:54:59+00:00
My mom retired as an independent translator 5 years ago.

She worked freelance 40 years from age 25 to age 65.

In the 15 years that preceded her retirement, she would get less and less work.

Partly she's an introvert who relies on her network to provide work, and her network gradually retired.

But machine translation was the big killer.

Before LLMs, the early versions of Google Translate killed paid translation.

As the market adapted to machine translation, and as the internet became a globalised platform for knowledge work, it also opened up to lower grade translation, and there were suddenly many more translators willing to work at a lower wage.

Prior to Google Translate there were semi-automated systems that would fuzzy match from large databases.

But it'd still rely on a human-in-the-loop for adapting the sentences.

With Google Translate you'd get a super sketchy translation out, very crude and not at all correct or idiomatic in the target language. Any distance between the source and target language (e.g. English -> Chinese) and it'd be one big joke. With plain Google Translate it still is. But the market spoke: Probably you don't need a very good translation most of the time. Especially not if the shitty one is free.

In her later years she moved to transcription of board meetings. She'd type up everything that was said.

I work for a company now that automates transcription via the whisper model and generates summaries that can be adapted by the customer. You pay per minute of transcription, and you can regenerate summaries as much as you want after that until your prompts give the right results.

All of this manual labor that provided for my childhood is gone now.

I couldn't imagine being a professional translator today and not use AI extensively.

But unless I have a legal reason to consult with a professional translator, I probably don't even need one, since LLM-based translation is as good as it gets with just plain LLM usage, and near perfect with automated translation tools that will help you pick both the mood, formality and alternative formulations for your translation.

High-grade translation is massively parallelisable, and a human-in-the-loop is entirely for final proof-reading.
by pbhjpbhj | 2026-01-25 11:55:12+00:00
Isn't at least part of the problem with replication that journals are businesses. They're selling in part based on limited human focus, and on desire to see something novel, to see progress in one's chosen field. Replications don't fit a commercial publications goals.

Institutions could do something, surely. Require one-in-n papers be a replication. Only give prizes to replicated studies. Award prize monies split between the first two or three independent groups demonstrating a result.

The 6k citations though ... I suspect most of those instances would just assert the result if a citation wasn't available.
by mooracle | 2026-01-25 11:55:42+00:00
The manufacturing paranoia is justified. I've seen IIoT setups where the contract manufacturer had full firmware access during flashing. TPM or not, if your CM has the keys at production time, you've just moved the trust boundary.
What actually works: generate device credentials on-device after it leaves the factory, not during. Process design matters more than chip selection.
by Karsteski | 2026-01-25 11:56:17+00:00
This has absolutely nothing to do with the article. The entire point was the political rat race to obtain the first mover advantage to eventually monopolize local markets, backed by government hindrance to competition.

We've seen this happen time and time again. Just look at what OpenAI tried to do with their AI safety bullshit. They're the "only ones" that can distribute AI safely lest it destroy us all. No ulterior motives there whatsoever.
by brabel | 2026-01-25 11:57:45+00:00
> it was never going to actually happen.

That announcement is still on NATOs website to this day. To think it would never happen can only be seen as wishful thinking.

> try so hard to become NATO members?

If your intention is to align with the EU, it makes sense you want military protection against invasion in the future. Even Russia wanted at one point to join. The question is really why Russia should sit quietly while several countries around it join an alliance against it? Would the US be ok with Mexico and Canada doing that? Sounded ridiculous until a few months ago, now that is a sensible thing for them to seek. Look at how the US reacted to just a EV deal Canada made with China.
Show HN: Crystal Upscaler – AI image upscaler built for portraits and faces
by charlie0simmon | 2026-01-25 11:59:06+00:00
I built this because most image upscalers don't handle faces well - they blur skin and lose facial details. Crystal Upscaler focuses specifically on portraits, preserving natural skin texture and identity during 4x upscaling. Works in browser, free to try. Would love feedback from the HN community!
by direwolf20 | 2026-01-25 12:00:04+00:00
WhatsApp has been required to provide an open API, Apple has been required to provide alternative app stores. Neither one has actually done it because the EU is too pussy to enforce the law, but the legislators clearly had no huge principle disagreement when writing these laws.

Mobile networks have been forced to allow roaming with each other for free, and that is actually enforced.
by hobofan | 2026-01-25 12:00:21+00:00
> I’m not sure how reasonable it is to expect a business to continue offering the same product or service indefinitely if market forces are pushing it elsewhere

Market forces aren't pushing it elsewhere. The cornerstone of Microsoft still is Windows and Office. If those would not exist nobody in their right mind would choose Azure over AWS or GCP.

By letting their guard down on those fronts and letting Windows and Office degrade more and more, they are exposing themselves to the risk that someone ends up building a competitive company filling those niches and people risk the switching cost in order to get away from ever increasing Office 365 subscription costs.
by 13415 | 2026-01-25 12:00:37+00:00
That reply is verging on delusional. Linux vs Windows doesn't even matter. I'm a European who has been using Linux as a daily driver for the past 20 years and I know that the majority of popular Linux distros are mostly in US hands. If there was a real conflict between the US and Europe, whether an open conflict or "cold war" type, you could be absolutely certain that every supply chain you're using is going to be mostly under US control. Open source is irrelevant for that issue, you're not compiling your own Linux distro and all software and your compiler toolchain and use your own repo hosting. Funny enough, even if you did that, the hardware on which you run all this is almost certainly fully under US control. Guess where American Megatrends, Phoenix, AMD, Apple, Microsoft, Intel are located. The same for every phone operating system. Binary blobs nowadays either come from China or from the US and their chip manufacturers (e.g. in Taiwan).
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2026-01-25 12:02:51+00:00
So, yes, the second sentence in their [1] is a clear ad hominem but this is a pretty wild take:

> it takes a great deal of intellectual dishonesty to portray it as a defense of ICE in any way

Regardless of your opinion, I'll portray it as a defense of ICE, anyway.

> > So a U.S. citizen who is a legal, permitted gun owner with no outstanding criminal charges, legally carrying in public, who complies with the law and informs a DHS officer that they are legally carrying, is effectively subject to summary execution without due process.... a federal officer shooting and killing a legal gun owner solely for possessing a gun in their presence.

> This completely misrepresents what happened.

I don't strictly disagree with the idea that "solely for having a gun" is a misrepresentation, either (after all, the ICE agents had guns and they weren't executed), but it's not a "complete" misrepresentation. (The actual misrepresentation is that the victim was helping someone who was being abused by the agents and he had a gun.) Calling it a "complete misrepresentation" is seeking to emotionally prime the reader against the supposed illogic in the parent comment. That is indeed a defense of the ICE agents (and such defenses and excuses can be seen throughout their comment history, hence, I presume, the ad hominem).

Somehow, still, I doubt that's the framing zahlman would accept about the situation, especially given their (obvious) defense of ICE's actions in their initial comment. Yes, the ad hominem statement you refer to should not have been included. But it is surely not intellectually dishonest regardless of how inappropriate it is for this forum. Given the quote from their initial comment, it seems that said dishonesty cuts the other direction.
by B1FIDO | 2026-01-25 12:03:05+00:00
I disagree that "it simply means installing".

Because when you install software that isn't from the app store, it's unvetted and untrusted.

There is a whole different structure of trust when you download and install an app from your provider's app store.

No, it's not perfect. No, it won't prevent malware or scams. But there is trust, and there is a vetting process, and there are automatic updates and in-app purchases and the other perks that you get with an integrated app store.

Sideloading, or "simply installing" from an APK, is a different procedure that involves mostly disabling the trust and certification features that your app store was providing. I have never needed to do this for any app on any Android device, and I've owned them since KitKat.

In fact, I will probably enable S-mode on my next Windows machine, because it's that easy to just avoid 3rd party apps and crapware.

So I don't know why people want to muddy the waters. You literally want to stamp out a differentiating term "because it's scary". Is that not censorship? Are you opposing freedom of speech now? Don't users and vendors have a right to call a thing what it is, or use different terms for different procedures?

It seems absolutely nuts to try and censor this word, because y'all believe it was foisted on you by "lawmakers". That's nuts.
by yayachiken | 2026-01-25 12:03:07+00:00
DTAG are also a consumer ISP. A consumer ISP should be considered a utility, and utilities can also be forced to provide certain services. In addition, Internet Exchanges have become so critical for the Internet architecture that they should also have some privileged status.

Legislation could focus on the following general rules, without favoring some providers over the others:

* If you participate on an IX node, there is no reasonable technical or financial reason not to peer with the other participants at that node. Of course this would also mean that participants have to be protected against price-gouging of IXs when they need to scale up their uplink for that reason.

* Alternatively, you could conditionally allow paid peering, but in that case require certain availability guarantees on your general transit connection.

* If you do not want to do business with a certain party, it should be all or nothing. Blacklist them organization-wide. No misleading to consumers that a content provider just appears slow, announce that you do not want to play with e.g. Netflix anymore and if your customers do not like it, they will switch.

* If you want to opt out of all of this regulation, you are free to run fiber yourself and just directly connect with everybody you are interested in. That is expensive? Too bad.
by Macha | 2026-01-25 12:03:14+00:00
> Choose a bank with viable web banking.

There are five options in my country, 3 of which require app push based 2FA to log into the web interface and 2 of which only have an app interfere.

Maybe I could get a EU bank from another EU country but my employer will not accept an out of country account for salary deposits because it makes their tax life difficult and my mortgage provider doesn't trust foreign accounts either.

> It's called a debit/credit card

Since about two years ago, activating a card requires the app.
by MaxBarraclough | 2026-01-25 12:04:02+00:00
I've read of a few cases like this on Hacker News. There's often that assumption, sometimes unstated: if a junior scientist discovers clear evidence of academic misconduct by a senior scientist, it would be career suicide for the junior scientist to make their discovery public.

The replication crisis is largely particular to psychology, but I wonder about the scope of the don't rock the boat issue.
by stephen_g | 2026-01-25 12:04:07+00:00
They are complicated, but standardised and commoditised. Ubiquiti, for example, sells an ONT (fibre modem) in a SFP form factor for US$39 [1], or a little standalone unit with an Ethernet port for US$49 [2].

1. https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/fiber-gpon/products/uf-i...

2. https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/fiber-gpon/products/wave...
by arter45 | 2026-01-25 12:04:17+00:00
Some say Mac OS X is (or used to be) slower than Linux at least for certain syscalls.

https://github.com/golang/go/issues/28739#issuecomment-10426...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/64656255/why-is-the-c-fu...

https://github.com/valhalla/valhalla/issues/1192

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13628320

Not sure what's the root cause, though.
by carlosjobim | 2026-01-25 12:04:22+00:00
>Do you want to use a different search engine other than google?

Yes, type yahoo.com into your browser, or install an app. Non-technical people love installing apps on their phones.

>Is there another email provider than gmail (for the non-technical person - i know you can run your own).

Yes, there are hundreds of good e-mail providers to use instead of Gmail. Easy for the non-technical person to use.
by cb321 | 2026-01-25 12:04:31+00:00
One aspect of the question is that "permissions" are mostly regulated at the time of open and user-code should check for failures. This was a driving inspiration for the tiny 27 lines of C virtual machine in https://github.com/c-blake/batch that allows you to, e.g., synthesize a single call that mmaps a whole file https://github.com/c-blake/batch/blob/64a35b4b35efa8c52afb64... which seems like it would have also helped the article author.
by Bluecobra | 2026-01-25 12:04:34+00:00
That sounds like there’s something else amiss because that definitely should not happen. For example, I was working on a family member’s Win 11 laptop (a budget 2018 HP laptop upgraded from Win10) that was absurdly slow. It would take 5 minutes to power on and open a web browser and even that was extremely sluggish. The specs were decent except for one thing—the local storage was a crappy 1TB 5200 RPM HDD. The drive was functionally ok, but I couldn’t find a way to get it out of 100% disk I/O. I ended up just cloning the drive to an old spare SATA SSD that was laying around and that immediately solved the issue. Windows was zippy and very usable again. I couldn’t believe they put up with this nonsense for years. Not sure if the HDD was just a lemon or something changed in Windows that rendered low RPM hard drives useless.
by privacat | 2026-01-25 12:05:09+00:00
I want you to take a minute and visualize yourself climbing a long ladder. The ladder is fixed in space, and you can’t tell exactly how many steps there are to climb. You heard from a friend that if you make it to the platform at the top of the ladder, you’ll receive an awesome prize. As you start to climb, the first few rungs are easy. You know that you can always climb down again if you decide it sucks. But for now, you decide to keep climbing.

Eventually, you climb up 100 rungs of the ladder, and you take a peek over your shoulder. You realize that the ground looks small and distant from this height. Also, the ladder has begun to wobble ever-so slightly. You’re not entirely sure that the ladder will remain structurally stable, but you’ve told yourself that whatever is up here, has to be good. Your friend wouldn’t lie to you, right? So you keep climbing. And climbing.

You’re now 300 rungs up--the ground is obscured by clouds. Birds are giving you side-eye. As you climb, some of the rungs below you break off and fall away. The ladder wobbles constantly now. You’re no longer confident you’ll be able to get down without help. But you’ve come this far... might as well keep going.

Now, if this were a physical ladder, I’m sure most of you would be like, “Nah man, I’d get down.” You’d tell yourself that you’re scared of heights, or that climbing an impossibly tall ladder just hanging there in space is suspect, or that peer pressure is beneath you. You’re elevated. You’re independent.

And yet, many of us (and I include myself in this bunch) are climbing an impossibly tall ladder, except that the ladder we’re climbing is not physical, but virtual. Still, just like a physical ladder, we take each rung one step at a time. We judge each step relative to the one preceding it. We never ask ourselves whether it makes any sense to keep climbing, or whether the goal is worth it, or who put this stupid ladder here in the first place. We’ve come all this way, after all, and maybe there really is something magical and life-changing at the top.

Keep the ladder image in your mind’s eye as you read. For today, gentle readers, I’m going to talk about the ladder OpenAI is building.

The first rung was, of course, ChatGPT in 2023. Then the Atlas browser, released in October 2025. ChatGPT Health, announced only a few weeks ago in January 2026, is yet another rung. But OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, are still adding rungs for us to climb. Each will seem reasonable in isolation, relative to the steps we’ve taken before, because each new feature will seem genuinely helpful, interesting, or useful to us. But OpenAI isn’t building a system (only) to be helpful. It’s building a system to know us, completely.

As for the prize at the top?

It’s the complete picture of you.
by password4321 | 2026-01-25 12:05:56+00:00
> Why should I throw away all the timestamps, just because the file were temporarily in an archive?

In case anyone is unaware, you don't have to throw away all the timestamps when using "zip with no compression". The metadata for each zipped file includes one timestamp (originally rounded to even number of seconds in local time).

I am a big last modified timestamp fan and am often discouraged that scp, git, and many zip utilities are not (at least by default).
by sgjohnson | 2026-01-25 12:06:14+00:00
The difference between WhatsApp open API, alternative App Stores and forcing peering is that it costs virtually nothing for WhatsApp to provide an open API, and for Apple to allow alternative App Stores.

Roam-like-at-home is also not a particularly good comparison here, because the the roaming fees were basically a price gouging scheme.

Don't like DTAG? You're free to switch to another ISP.
Need academic volunteer for Guinness World Record verification
by princevashisht | 2026-01-25 12:06:21+00:00
I'm attempting a Guinness World Record for the largest collaborative non-fiction book, collecting perspectives from most professionals across different fields and countries on AI.

Guinness World Records requires independent specialist witnesses to verify the project.

Looking for:
- Librarian with Master's in Library Science
- English/Literature Professor
- Published non-fiction author

Requirements: 5+ years professional experience, independent (won't contribute to the book)

Volunteer role, acknowledged in the published book. Pre-approved by Guinness.

If you qualify or know someone interested, please comment or email (see profile).
by kaliades | 2026-01-25 12:06:32+00:00
Comment:

Since the fork, Valkey and Redis have been diverging, especially with the latest releases - new features like COMMANDLOG, per-slot metrics, and different optimization paths. Existing Redis extensions might connect to Valkey, but there's nothing built specifically for it.
I started the first Valkey-focused VS Code extension (search "valkey" in the marketplace - only result). Features: multi-connection management, key browser, CRUD for common data types (string, hash, list, set, sorted set), and an integrated CLI.
MIT licensed, contributions welcome: https://github.com/BetterDB-inc/vscode
by regularfry | 2026-01-25 12:06:40+00:00
> nobody in their right mind would choose Azure over AWS or GCP.

There's a really interesting dynamic here in that Azure has a solid spoiler role for large organisations that don't want to be commercially dependent on only AWS, and they can probably get really solid discounts if they're aready on board elsewhere. It's something that doesn't play out with Microsoft's other products nearly so much: you get shouted down if you want to have desktop diversity, but having a multicloud strategy is (in my experience) looked on as essential.
by wizzwizz4 | 2026-01-25 12:07:58+00:00
Funnily enough, I mostly hear about it from hyper-individualistic types. It's probably a facet of some American conservative-traditionalist belief cluster invented in the last 40 years, but it's hard to say for sure, because the people who say this tend to be bad at introspection, so can't answer my questions about it (even when they're curiously cooperating with my investigation).
by stabbles | 2026-01-25 12:08:01+00:00
What comes closest is scandir [1], which gives you an iterator of direntries, and can be used to avoid lstat syscalls for each file.

Otherwise you can open a dir and pass its fd to openat together with a relative path to a file, to reduce the kernel overhead of resolving absolute paths for each file.

[1] https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/scandir.3.html
by sgjohnson | 2026-01-25 12:08:52+00:00
Letting the government regulate peering will be the death of the internet as we know it.

I don't believe that there's a single lawmaker, anywhere in the world, who understands anything about the fundamentals of IP transit. But no doubt they have ISP buddies who understand everything about it, and no doubt they'll be the ones actually writing the legislation.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2026-01-25 12:09:01+00:00
lol.

Anyway, it's not even that. The article focuses on global metrics -- which basically means poverty reduction in China, India, Africa, etc. I don't doubt that life in those places is better than ever, and in fact, having travelled quite a lot over the past twenty years, I can personally vouch for it.

What definitely hasn't gotten any better is life in the US and Western Europe over the past twenty years. 2015-2025 was a very bad period for the US in particular.