MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by w4rh4wk5 | 2026-01-09 19:31:36+00:00
First, I am not proposing anything.

I feel like we are already past the point where influential people have to play by the same rules as everyone else. I dislike this as much as 99% of the population, but I don't realistically see a remedy given how our governments (EU) are operating.

> Are you seriously comparing banning tools for openly forging nudes and sex pics of people to backdooring people's private communications?

I am not comparing these two things; I mentioned Chat Control as tackling CSAM is one of its main selling points. These forging tools are in the open and banning access and use of them is practically impossible. You could force platforms into setting up filters for public content, but this won't stop the nudes from being shared privately and likely still being accessible on the web _somewhere_. Just look at the bs on tiktok that's been publicly accessible and growing for years now...

IMHO public content filtering won't help much and the following steps will likely involve tapping into people's private content and messages. And this is where I draw the line.
by babilonczyk | 2026-01-09 19:31:50+00:00
Recently, I struggled to find a meaningful next read. Traditional lists felt noisy, and I wanted something more personal. So I asked one simple question:

If you could recommend only one book to another soul, what would it be and why?

The responses were surprising: thoughtful titles I’d never seen, each paired with a story about how it changed someone’s life.

Everyone seems to have one book they’d put above all others. OneBookList is a place to share that single, life-changing pick - so the shelf grows with only the best recommendations, each with a personal story.

If you could recommend only one book, make it count. What is your book recommendation and story behind it? :D
by the_af | 2026-01-09 19:32:41+00:00
> You don't know the first thing about me

That's rich, because you sure claim to know a lot of things about me. Oh, wait, it's because "I just provided the evidence". By "happily using English" while criticizing the US too, that gravest of offenses! Well, let's switch to Russi-- er, I mean, Mandari-- oops, Kore-- no! Farsi-- oh, no! I might have blown my cover.

> You've already decided I fit a common pattern and will troll your country!

You're hilarious. Do you not know how to read? I said: "I have nothing to gain by telling a bad faith troll my country". Let me parse it for you: "I have nothing to gain by telling (a bad faith troll) my country". I wasn't claiming that you would troll my country, how would you even achieve this? Would you call my compatriots, one by one, to tell them they fit a common pattern of anti-Americanism? That you would even do this deranged parsing of my sentence hints at a very jingoistic view of the world; it's "your country" that's getting "trolled" when I question things about the justification to use the Bomb. Why, you weren't even born when the bombs were dropped on Japan. But for some reason, it got you upset. Not because you care about my opinion, but because of some unseen "broader audience" who aren't "reading our nonsense" anyway.

I admit I cannot tell if you're obsessed with my country because you think I'm a Russian agitator, or because you want us to go over my country's flaws as if it had anything to do with the topic at hand. (My country has done heinous things too, but at least we never dropped an atomic bomb, probably because we never had one!).

> The fact of the matter here is that I disagreed with your points and said why, and all you did was accuse me of saying I ignored your arguments. But I did not, I addressed them head-on and shared my point of view.

Riiiiight. So, have you read Smelser & Davis or not? Third time's the charm!

> you can't bring yourself to criticize the Soviet Union

Probably because I'm not an LLM you can prompt into changing the subject to whatever you want.

I think the Soviet Union is heinous because they are stealing our bodily fluids. I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.
by FireBeyond | 2026-01-09 19:33:04+00:00
Even the fiance visa program (K-1), which I went through 19 years ago. is affected by similar requirements.

It's set up with a number of safeguards:

The USC has to apply for it on behalf of the immigrant, while the USC is physically in the country, and the immigrant must not be (to prevent coercion).

But the visa is set up to expect the USC to be the primary breadwinner. I get that part of this is to dissuade "buying a visa" (but these days, hah).

But my USC fiance was a student while I was an Australian IT professional. The government wanted us to demonstrate that we could support ourselves for months while I found a job, but literally didn't care what finances I contributed to that.

Ended up that her mother had to sponsor my visa using her house as surety. For which I am entirely grateful, but bleh.

They didn't expect her to pay for our lives, but meant that if I used any government resource such as Medicare/Medicaid, Social Security in my first ten years as a resident, that the IRS (I think) could be asked to effectively bill her for reimbursement of every dollar.
by MomsAVoxell | 2026-01-09 19:33:26+00:00
I carry around an pwnagotchi[1], it serves not only as a cute little paper display, but also a battery powered Linux box.

Can do everything you wanna do, in a cute little box attached to a backpack.

My battery lasts about 3 hours, but its easy to juice it up if we go hiking and need a common filesystem up some mountain somewhere, know what I’m saying ..

(PS - the pwnatotchi part is just an app you can disable if you just want your Linux box to be a Linux box, but it sure is a fun little toy also ..)

[1] - https://www.thingiverse.com/search?q=pwnagotchi
by rixthefox | 2026-01-09 19:33:32+00:00
Amateur Radio has entered the chat.....

Even as a licensed ham it's getting increasingly difficult to even get hardware that allows utilization of frequencies I'm duly licensed to transmit on in the 2.4 GHz band. Short of building and designing your own transmitters it's become impossible to repurpose hardware like it was before. Our club has aging M2 Rockets from Unifi that were modified for this use that are now decaying and dying. It's unfortunate too because once these stop working that's it. A few club members have been championing GLiNET but same problems. They are relying on older models which weren't as locked down and already show signs of suffering the same fate as the Rockets.
by mikestorrent | 2026-01-09 19:34:14+00:00
I like a lot of 4GL ideas. Closest I've come was working on ServiceNow which is sort of a really powerful system with ugly, ugly roots but the idea of your code being the database being the code really resonated with me, as a self-taught programmer.

Similarly, Lisp's homoiconicity makes sense to me as a wonderfully aesthetic idea. I remember generating strings-of-text that were code, but still just text, and wishing that I could trivially step into the structure there like it was a map/dict... without realizing that that's what an AST is and what the language compiler / runtime is already always doing.
by cal_dent | 2026-01-09 19:34:21+00:00
This is a wider concern. And partly the issue where economies have become very reliant on monetary policy being the controlling mechanism rather than a better mix of monetary and fiscal policy.

The fear now comes in the rock and a hard place issue that is ongoing here, whereby interest rates/monetary policy are arguably still not in restrictive territory enough that if a downturn was to occur, our coping tool is to loosen policy further but that would likely stoke further asset inflation and potentially general inflation compounding other issues.

It's why you get more leaning to the view that it might be necessary to just let things fail as a resetting mechanism, which I'm personally not sure about.
by charcircuit | 2026-01-09 19:34:23+00:00
The whole point of remote attestation is to prove integrity of remote machines.

>that's my right.

It's common for states to make fraud unlawful due to being an antisocial behavior. I similarly believe that lying about your the integrity of an app running is similarly antisocial behavior.

>Allowing third parties to measure it is a security violation

How does it break your security model?

>a freedom violation

It turns out that such freedom when given to bad actors turns into the freedom for them to ruin games by cheating. People still have the freedom to do whatever they want on their own computer, but they just can't hack a game and then fraudulently claim they aren't using hacks.
by garbawarb | 2026-01-09 19:34:36+00:00
One other thing about the US is that they're stubbornly protectionist when it comes to jobs. They're scared to introduce efficiencies such as automating things like manufacturing because some people will lose their jobs in the short-term, even though it's better economically for the long-term. It's ironic that the country run by a Communist Party isn't afraid to embrace innovation like the US is afraid.
by krissemmy | 2026-01-09 19:34:41+00:00
Location: Nigeria (UTC+1)

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies:

- Blockchain Node Operations (Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, HyperEVM, BNB)

- RPC infrastructure, node monitoring, benchmarking

- Data engineering (Python, SQL, Postgres, DynamoDB, ClickHouse)

- DevOps & Infra (Bash, Docker, Terraform, AWS, Grafana, Prometheus, Loki)

- Cost optimization and production reliability

Résumé/CV: https://www.krissemmy.com/resume

Email: krissemmy17@gmail.com
by Larrikin | 2026-01-09 19:35:11+00:00
Our fruit sucks and we basically have no street food culture worth discussing.

But we have the best pizza in the world. Detroit, Chicago and a decent NY are just better.

The northern part of the east coast easily has the greatest concentration of amazing sandwiches in the world. It was shocking to me just how bad a sub sandwich can be even if you are in a different location in the US, I never found one I would recommend in Chicago.

Most places I've traveled have a single style of sandwich maybe worth eating. Although sandwiches like the Banh Mi deserve to be discussed. But you can get those wherever there is any kind of Vietnamese population in the US and I haven't noticed much difference regionally personally.

Brisket BBQ was also invented here and most countries do not even a bad option for it.
by cthalupa | 2026-01-09 19:35:51+00:00
> if I were a citizen there I'd be looking for some wider deeper constitutional reforms and restructuring

Yep. It has become more and more obvious that there just isn't any actual mechanism to resolve the executive branch just doing whatever it wants the way things currently stand. As a US citizen, the rest of this term and the term or two after it are going to determine whether I remain in the country or not. How much farther do we slip? Do we realize this is all an awful idea? If the opposition takes power next time, do they use it to actually resolve the underlying issues, or do they just wield that same power against the other side?

If the presidency and congress don't work to fundamentally implement an actual enforceable division of powers over the next decade, even if things don't "get worse" from here, I don't think it's a place that makes sense for me to stick around.
by vednig | 2026-01-09 19:36:07+00:00
let's wind it down

of-course, it's seemingly a card not present payment, because it's digital payments infra unless you keep a card reader present to convert it to, your processor via bank to complete txn.

yeah, it is different for all and a lot of things come into account payer can be anyone consumer or merchant, anyone who would like to do a txn.

but what has been your pattern, i'm curious?
by palmotea | 2026-01-09 19:36:12+00:00
>> Inability to differentiate between real and fake - less theoretical.

> This feels like a deeper, much more important topic that I'm at risk of writing thousands of words on. It feels like the distinction used to be .. more clearly labelled? And now nobody cares, and entire media ecosystems live on selling things that aren't really true as "news", with real and occasionally deadly consequences.

I don't think he's talking about "media ecosystems" but rather enforcement. If fake CSAM proliferates (that can be confused for the real thing), it would create problems for investigating real cases. Investigative resources would be wasted investigating fake CSAM, and people may not report real CSAM because they falsely assume it's fake.

So it probably makes sense to make fake CSAM illegal, not because of the direct harm it does, but for the same reasons its illegal to lie to a police officer or make a false crime report.
by Spooky23 | 2026-01-09 19:36:19+00:00
If you have a lot of resources to protect against or known risk, you segment.

For example, do most daily transactions at one bank, and keep the rest at another.

This happens a lot in companies and government - you outsource payable operations to different division of government or a contractor. Hire one to do custody of money, another to process disbursements.
by bpt3 | 2026-01-09 19:36:29+00:00
I figured not, apologies for not making it clear.

KK is basically encouraging people to go out in the world and say "what can this place do for me today?" which is bad enough on its surface, but he's doing it while interacting with people (in this story at least) who have much, much less than him in so many ways. I'm not sure what you want to call it exactly, but it feels exploitative and antisocial to me at a minimum.
by wvenable | 2026-01-09 19:36:31+00:00
The only reason AI can do anything good is that it's been trained all this clean, modular, and well designed code. What happens when it stops existing?

Even in my own use of AI, letting the AI get away with shit code means that it continues to do a worse job. When it sees examples of good code, it does better. What happens when there's nobody at the wheel?
by nunobrito | 2026-01-09 19:37:00+00:00
No need for "government official". There were plenty of non-government official branches such as media and social networks that were demonstrated to work as shadow tools for imposing heavy censorship around specific agendas. Up until the recent election so was the case for the large majority of mainstream social networks and legacy media.

The whole corona fabrication wasn't that long ago when governments directly mandated to silent dissident voices (even the scientific ones) and push a whole group of normal people into burning anyone who'd point out the obvious inconsistencies.
by thisislife2 | 2026-01-09 19:37:09+00:00
> What binding force do you think this Declaration has ...

The same as every other international treaty - all such treaties are made on the basis that if violated the other country will become their enemy. And if they are militarily stronger, will attack them in some form or even destroy them. (Also remember that, historically, no country has ever allowed part of its territory to become independent willingly - why do you think a country that has allowed so, will then accept when the newly independent territory makes an alliance with its enemies that seek to destroy it?)

> and was not pursuing NATO membership when the Russo-Ukrainian war began with the Russian invasion in 2014.

That's ignorance speaking. In 1994, Ukraine joined NATO's Partnership for Peace program, and in 1997, the Charter on a Distinctive Partnership was signed. In 1997 Charter on a Distinctive Partnership established the NATO-Ukraine Commission. In 2009 NATO Leaders reaffirmed the 2008 Bucharest Summit that Ukraine will become a member of NATO. ( https://www.nato.int/en/what-we-do/partnerships-and-cooperat... ).

In 2003, through Law #39 the Ukraine Legislature gave up its powers to make national security strategies and military doctrines and transferred that power to the President. In July 2004, he officially proclaimed that plans for Ukraine’s preparation for accession into NATO was being removed from Ukraine's military doctrine and policies. After the Orange revolution, President Viktor Yushchenko amended the doctrine stating that the country’s final security goal is accession into NATO. Later, President Viktor Yanukovich again rejected the idea of Ukraine joining NATO. During his administration the Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said if Ukraine was unwilling to join CSTO, Russia is not opposed to Ukraine choosing a path of neutrality. President Viktor Yanukovich was ofcourse, again, overthrown by pro-western forces. Petro Poroshonko, who took charge, and was propped up by the British, signed a constitutional amendment committing the country to becoming a member of NATO and the European Union.

Russia by then had enough of this drama and annexed Crimea in 2014.

Zelensky than campaigned on repairing ties with Russia and got elected. However, Zelensky's first official trip abroad as president was to Brussels in June 2019, where he met with EU and NATO officials. Russia knew where this was politically heading, and when Zelensky did not respond to Russians overtures, they invaded Ukraine before it could officially join NATO.

(And from a purely superpower political perspective, in some ways they were smart to do so - even if Ukraine is not a member of NATO, Russia is today fighting a NATO trained Ukrainian military, equipped with NATO arms.)
by EA-3167 | 2026-01-09 19:37:11+00:00
The problem is that the same is true for many medications and other treatments, but if you're in the "lucky" minority (a pretty large one) for whom there's some relief... it's worth the try. It's not like choosing bleeding and emetics instead of chemotherapy for cancer, it's just the best we have right now to treat a complex system that we barely have the earliest understanding of.
by jedwhite | 2026-01-09 19:37:15+00:00
I know there are two polarized camps on the topic of AI coding. Even for people who are concerned about it and prefer to use traditional scripting, there are some benefits worth considering in having runnable, composable prompt modules.

There are some tasks that are challenging to achieve with traditional code, but where modern LLMs perform strongly.

Examples include summarization, complex content formatting and restructuring, natural language classification, and evaluation judgements.

I’ve found that it is useful to be able to easily incorporate these along with traditional Shell scripts and command line tools as part of workflow pipelines. And I hope it can be useful for other people too.
by jgru | 2026-01-09 19:37:59+00:00
Our hope is that beyond being a take-home challenge people can get competitive and it can turn into more of a passion project. I think the problem has sufficient depth that this could be the case! Hence the leaderboard and visualization tooling.

Around cheating, we've never been too worried about this. The real cost is wasted time later down the pipeline, but we can always tell then whether the person lines up with the work in the takehome.
by dent9 | 2026-01-09 19:38:00+00:00
This is such a big deal and I wish more people talked about it in these types of blog posts.

I used to be a Python programmer and there were two things that destroyed every project;

- managing Python dependencies

- inability to reason about the input and output types for functions and inability to enforce it ; in Python any function can accept any input value of any type and can return any type of value of any type.

These issues are not too bad if it's a small project and you're the sole developer. But as projects get larger and require multiple developers, it turns into a mess quickly.

Go solved all these issues. Makes deployment so much easier. In all the projects I've done I estimate that more than half have zero dependencies outside of the standard library. And unlike Python, you don't have to "install" Go or it's libraries on the server you plan to run your program on. Fully static self contained executable binary with zero external files needed is amazing, and the fact that you can cross compile for any OS+ CPU arch out of the box on any supported system is a miracle.

The issues described by the original post seem like small potatoes compared to the benefits I've gotten by shifting from Python over to Go
by westurner | 2026-01-09 19:38:09+00:00
Roadway heating to reduce snow melt costs sounds like a good use for waste process heat, for example from datacenters.

FWIU typically it's necessary to amp up waste heat in order to get it to move through a heat pipe under a street.

There are LEED Green buildings that are heated by datacenter waste heat.

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42694570 :

> Most datacenters have no way to return their boiled, sterilized, [demineralized] water for water treatment, and so they don't give or sell datacenter waste water back, it takes heat with it when it is evaporated.

> "Ask HN: How to reuse waste heat and water from AI datacenters?" (2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40820952

A green thermofluid xould increase the efficiency and sustainability of heat recovery and reuse operations
by jgru | 2026-01-09 19:39:01+00:00
Submission actually takes you to a full featured visualizer! So you can go back and forth on it and see your robots run. You can then choose to submit to the leaderboard if you'd like (otherwise nothing goes to our servers) which will collect your email. No plans to do anything with those yet besides serve the leaderboard.

Hoping to get a better understanding of whether success on this correlates with things that we think are important for AI-enabled software engineering success. I think this is largely a question of the problem depth, and how much does a solution still need to be driven by that person's creativity, vs the model suggesting the next obvious idea.
by mikestorrent | 2026-01-09 19:39:47+00:00
> There's some magical "right context" that will fix all the problems.

All I can tell you is that in my own lived experience, I've had some fantastic results from AI, and it comes from telling it "look at this thing here, ok, i want you to chain it to that, please consider this factor, don't forget that... blah blah blah" like how I would have spelled things out to a junior developer, and then it really does stand a really solid chance of turning out what I've asked for. It helps a lot that I know what to ask for; there's no replacing that with AI yet.

So, your own situation must fall into one of these coarse buckets:

- You're doing something way too hard for AI to have a chance at yet, like real science / engineering at the frontier, not just boring software or infra development

- Your prompts aren't specific enough, you're not feeding it context, and you're expecting it to one-shot things perfectly instead of having to spend an afternoon prompting and correcting stuff

- You're not actually using and getting better at the tools, so you're just shouting criticisms from the sidelines, perhaps as sour grape because you're not allowed by policy / company can't afford to have you get into it.

IDK. I hope it's the first one and you're just doing Really Hard Things, but if you're doing normal software developer stuff and not seeing a productivity advantage, it's a fucking skill issue.