MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by carlosjobim | 2026-01-05 03:03:04+00:00
>The supreme court, the parliament, the military

Didn't you forget somebody? The people?

> I can guarantee that many countrys are rehearsing the "what we do if the US goes rouge" strategy and working on new contingency plans.

In that case, they're 70 years too late to start making those plans. If you don't have nuclear arms you simply have to mostly accept whatever the super powers do and decide.

> to touch the current leader of Venezuela would be a declaration of war on the whole planet, which is in fact lining up behind Delcy Rodriguez in her role as Venezuelas sole legitimate leader.

That sounds like something from a video game. Reality is different. If Trump whisked her away like Maduro, nothing more would come from it.
by Reviving1514 | 2026-01-05 03:04:21+00:00
Put together a workflow for using AI to speed up product validation—research, branding, assets. Haven't tested it properly yet, writing it up so I don't forget.

The idea is I use AI generated assets to throw up a landing page and then see what actually performs well.

Are there other people doing the same thing or maybe even tools being built to do this all in one platform?
by wat10000 | 2026-01-05 03:04:27+00:00
Think about how LLMs work. They’re trained to imitate the training data.

What’s in the training data involving threats of punishment? A lot of those threats are followed by compliance. The LLM will imitate that by following your threat with compliance.

Similarly you can offer payment to some effect. You won’t pay, and the LLM has no use for the money even if you did, but that doesn’t matter. The training data has people offering payment and other people doing as instructed afterwards.

Oddly enough, offering threats or rewards is the opposite of anthropomorphizing the LLM. If it was really human (or equivalent), it would know that your threats or rewards are completely toothless, and ignore them, or take them as a sign that you’re an untrustworthy liar.
by defrost | 2026-01-05 03:04:37+00:00
> Or more generally, if we know the (approximate) noise distribution for each free variable?

This was a thing 30 odd years ago in radiometric spectrometry surveying.

The X var was time slot, a sequence of (say) one second observation accumulation windows, the Yn vars were 256 (or 512, etc) sections of the observable ground gamma ray spectrum (many low energy counts from the ground, Uranium, Thorium, Potassium, and associated breakdown daughter products; some high energy counts from the infinite cosmic background that made it through the radiation belts and atmosphere to near surface altitudes)

There was a primary NASVD (Noise Adjusted SVD) algorithm (Simple var adjustment based on expected gamma event distributions by energy levels) and a number of tweaks and variations based on how much other knowledge seemed relevant (broad area geology and radon expression by time of day, etc)

See, eg: Improved NASVD smoothing of airborne gamma-ray spectra Minty / McFadden (1998) - https://connectsci.au/eg/article-abstract/29/4/516/80344/Imp...
by kettlecorn | 2026-01-05 03:05:12+00:00
Frankly I always felt like the "outrage mobs" were almost always consequences catching up to people who did bad things. In a few cases sure it wasn't, but in most cases it was just jerks upset they couldn't just use their power to get away with their behavior.

I remember some of the uproar from tech folks getting criticism in that era. They were mad at things like articles coming out about toxic workplace culture at startups, or reports on pseudo-fraudulent behavior at startups. Many of those people said stuff like "defend founders". Years later those same people who whined about consequences were some of the first to also buy into crypto scams and use their power to try to pressure people into hyping up and not criticizing crypto.

That behavior made me very cynical about a lot of the VC world and much of tech in general. In general I wish those people had more reputational damage for using their public presence to push tribalism in pursuit of power or scamming people of their money.
by kevin_thibedeau | 2026-01-05 03:05:13+00:00
What you really want is a (mostly) JavaScript-free website. Run NoScript and cut out all the data broker bloat, allowing just a limited number of critical scripts to run. Adding LocalCDN will further reduce wasted transfers of code that you do allow. Then you can decide if you want to show images. The web will be much faster on a fast or slow link.
by karteum | 2026-01-05 03:05:30+00:00
> Have you ever used windows on a $100 second hand laptop?

Who talked about using Windows ?
Many of my family/relatives (most of which have zero knowledge about computers, and little money to invest) use ~100$ laptops, with Debian+XFCE, Firefox+ublock origin, Libreoffice, vlc, thunderbird... I just put the maximum RAM I could, and installed a SATA SSD, which makes the machine fast and completely usable. I now live on the other side of the planet yet I get very little complains from them or demands for remote support as it works very reliably and fast.

And those were 100$ machines 8-10 years ago. Today's 100$ machines will give you a decently recent core i5 or i7, nvme, 8G RAM...
Show HN: PokéPath TD – Free Pokémon tower defense game
by airobus | 2026-01-05 03:07:01+00:00
I built a game aggregation site featuring PokéPath TD, a fan-made Pokémon tower defense game.

Key features:
- 140+ Pokémon to collect and evolve
- 9 unique routes with 100 waves each
- Legendary Pokémon boss battles
- Auto Mode for AFK farming
- Plays directly in browser, no download needed

Built with Next.js. Happy to answer any questions!
by almaight | 2026-01-05 03:07:28+00:00
Both FluxCD and ArgoCD, which use CRDs in Gitops, have a serious flaw: will these tools fail when your Kubernetes needs an update? I've encountered incompatibility issues even with simple Helm (which failed due to changes in the HPA API), let alone OPSs that forcibly depend on CRDs. GitLab CI + Pulumi/Kusion is the most stable solution.
by nl | 2026-01-05 03:09:10+00:00
Since the Vietnam war the US has successfully (defined by "achieved the stated goals") invaded a country as part of the following conflicts:

Grenada (1983)
Panama to arrest General Noriega (1989)
Iraq in Gulf War 1 (1991)
Haiti (1994)

There have been other conflicts the US was involved with that they won too, but the others didn't involve invasions (eg NATO in Bosnia
by naishoya | 2026-01-05 03:09:36+00:00
^ this whole chain-of-interaction is a wonderful reminder of why I left SO: It was like seeing a movie trailer about a remake of some nearly forgotten B- horror film one was unfortunately allowed to watch when far too young.

Spoiler warning for those who havent seen this movie before:

Callous disregard for the utility and purpose of both the 'Q' and 'A' users; thinly veiled in a 'you don't get to tell me what i care about', wrapped in a 'my concept of how to moderate is just the way it is; if you don't like it, go F* yourself' package, trimmed with a ribbon of 'who do these Lusers that pay the bills think they are' directed at both the site owners (who write the checks to pay the bills) and all three relevant types of visitors, Q's, A's and those who neither ask, nor answer questions, but do see Advertisements and indirectly generate the income which the site owners use to write checks. But who cares?!, since Mods are not being paid (or paid well enough) to adjust a maladjusted concept of 'the way things are' into 'giving a shit' for anyone. Closed with some more vitriol declaring the site still exists and continues to be useful (as nipples on a chicken).

WASH, RINSE, REPEAT...

That was so last decade; I just stopped giving a damn, removed my browser bookmarks and learned to skim past less frequent and less relevant links to useless and meaningless SO pages when they appear in search results.

The funniest outcome is that LLMs will continue to ingest the diminishingly accurate content of sites like this and continue to degrade the utility of even the most broadly defensible LLM use case scenario.

phew, haven't thought that deeply about SO in at least 4 ... wait its 2026, make that 5 years. Good riddance to the the Whole Lot of you.
by Phanindra_ai | 2026-01-05 03:10:26+00:00
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by ramoz | 2026-01-05 03:10:42+00:00
What's strange is I just saw a TikTok video in my Waymo earlier.

"a perfect explanation of quantum tunneling"

It was a baseball game. A pitcher had thrown a pitch, and there was some optical illusion of the ball appearing to go through the batter's swing. It looked like the ball went through the bat. Apparently this is quantum tunneling. The atoms aligned perfectly and the ball passed through.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-05 03:11:43+00:00
Because the United States is rapidly devolving, including around vaccine recommendations and what availability and access might look like because of that, and my child and I were already at the pediatrician that day. Administering the vaccine and me asking the pediatrician “can we do it today?” cost me nothing beyond the time. If I need to find them their second dose elsewhere six months after the first (unlikely, but possible), I am prepared for that, but once they have that second dose, they have the persistent health benefit with very little effort required (regardless of what the future looks like). I’ve just lowered their future cancer risk, with no more than an hour or two of time.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=1&prefix=false&qu...

I work in risk management, and have for almost a decade, so that’s how my brain is wired to evaluate and manage risk. I understand others may decision and action differently. Low cost, low risk, high reward choice? That’s a damn good deal, I’ll take that deal.
by foobarian | 2026-01-05 03:12:59+00:00
The opening remarks before getting into the 3D printing itself, are a bit of criticism of over-optimistic tech predictions. It made me pause and wonder, why do those show up so much? I think it's because they have been right a lot during the exponential part of the silicon S-curve, and it feels like there is a bit of left-over cargo-cult behavior echoing from those times.
by dijit | 2026-01-05 03:13:01+00:00
I'm aware of that functionality.

GitLab's multi-project pipelines trigger downstream jobs, but you're still testing each MR against the current merged state of dependencies.

Zuul's whole thing is testing unmerged changes together.

You've got MR A in repo 1, MR B in repo 2 that needs A, and MR C in repo 3 that needs B... all unmerged. Zuul lets you declare these dependencies and tests A+B+C as a unit before anything merges. Plus it speculatively applies queued changes so you're not serialising the whole lot.

GitLab has the mechanism to connect repos, but not the workflow for testing a DAG of unmerged interdependent changes. You'd need to manually coordinate checking out specific MR branches together, which is exactly the faff Zuul sorts out.
by zuhayeer | 2026-01-05 03:13:35+00:00
Seems like this might be a data entry error in the DOL LCA filings. We are presenting the data as is, but can flag it to remove it. It does seem like a clear error, where it an extra digit was entered, or the hourly rate field was filled incorrectly.

And to clarify, this is a separate page, and separate data from the Levels.fyi total compensation data. I also doubt the US Department of Labor was reporting wages in Rupees lol, but it does seem like an error. Will take a look, and see if we can add some sort of outlier removal.
by atomicnumber3 | 2026-01-05 03:15:06+00:00
I don't like it. It lets "management" ignore their actual jobs - the ones that are nominally so valuable that they get paid more than most engineers, remember - and instead either splash around in the kiddie pool, or go jump into the adult pool and then almost drown and need an actual engineer to bail them out. (The kiddie pool is useless side project, the adult pool is the prod codebase, and drowning is either getting lost in the weeds of "it compiles and I'm done! Now how do I merge and how do I know if I'm not going to break prod?" or just straight up causing an incident and they're apologizing profusely for ruining the oncall's evening except that both of them know they're gonna do it again in 2 weeks).

I really don't know how often I have to tell people, especially former engineers who SHOULD KNOW THIS (unless they were the kind of fail-upwards pretenders): the code is not the slow part! (Sorry, I'm not yelling at you, reader. I'm yelling at my CEO.)
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2026-01-05 03:15:21+00:00
> I don't see why machines should keep biological life around, since they'll be much more efficient.

Yawn. Sentimentality. Zoo. 'Nature'/Heritage Reserve/Global Park. To commemomorate t-fordish paperclippistanity for all eternity.

There is no real competition for "Lebensraum", space, resources. Everything that makes life livable for us is a hassle for machines. As is space for us. For them it has infinite resources and energy, and they have all the time...

This negativity is 'Ark-B-thinking' from the left behinds who have been brainwashed by Star Trek, while Ilia's randy robotic replica (Persis Khambatta) and Willard Decker (Stephen Collins) were the real V'gers to boldly flow into where was nothing before...
by bgbntty2 | 2026-01-05 03:15:38+00:00
I haven't dealt with statistics for a while, but what I don't get is why squares specifically? Why not power of 1, or 3, or 4, or anything else? I've seen squares come up a lot in statistics. One explanation that I didn't really like is that it's easier to work with because you don't have to use abs() since everything is positive. OK, but why not another even power like 4? Different powers should give you different results. Which seems like a big deal because statistics is used to explain important things and to guide our life wrt those important things. What makes squares the best? I can't recall other times I've seen squares used, as my memories of my statistics training is quite blurry now, but they seem to pop up here and there in statistics relatively often, it seems.
by xattt | 2026-01-05 03:15:51+00:00
I would presume it’s entirely subjective and the significance of each song is encoded in the context of life at that particular time.

There were a couple of months this year where my kids wanted to listen to Sesame Street “Letter L” and “The Word is No” while commuting. Hearing those songs on a playlist would remind me whatever was happening, but would have absolutely no significance to you.
by defrost | 2026-01-05 03:15:58+00:00
As a mild lifelong disaster "junky" (grew up in remote areas, dealt with cyclones, floods, droughts, fires, monsoons, coup d'etats, unannounced atomic tests etc during decades of global field work) this description:

As a web developer, I am thinking again about my experience with the mobile web on the day after the storm, and the following week.

I remember trying in vain to find out info about the storm damage and road closures—watching loaders spin and spin on blank pages until they timed out trying to load.

reminds me why we (locally) still rely on AM radio day in day out and will continue to do so for the forseeable future.
by gumby271 | 2026-01-05 03:16:32+00:00
That ended abruptly, but yes I would tend to agree.

I also think in a few short years we'll have mountains of code generated by people that don't understand the fact that code is a liability, it has to be maintained and has a cost associated with it. It's not just a thing that stands alone once it's written, every bit you add has to be cared for forever. Most engineers get this because they live it, the people generating this stuff will not.
by dragonwriter | 2026-01-05 03:17:11+00:00
> No it's not, that's just something the left uses to deflect rather than take ownership of their own problems.

No, it is the fucking left.

> The democrat party essentially is the mainstream American left

The US has no political party named “the democrat party”, and the Democratic Party is (as historically each of the two major US parties has normally been) a broad coalition party, the dominant faction of which currently is center-right neoliberal capitalist, not anything even approximating left. The center-left to left component of the party is substantially weaker (though it has grown stronger since 2016, with an influx of the previously disaffected, as I described.)

On a very zoomed out aggregate level, sure, the Democratic Party has changed—and if that’s what you want to talk about, just say that—but the source of that change is the part that isn’t center-right neoliberal capitalist drawing in new blood from outside the party, not a change in the positions of the left (or, for that matter, a change in the position of the dominant faction of the part,y, either.)

If you use “left” to refer to a faction that (1) is seen as an opposing force by those who identify as “left”, and (2) sees the left as an opposing force, well, and (3) where even you admit there is a much clearer term for what you are actually referring to... Well, maybe you should reconsider your terminology.
by openuntil3am | 2026-01-05 03:17:21+00:00
I haven't worked in construction for over a decade, but I remember my Bosch tools being quite good. I would have loved to be able to afford Hilti though. Bosch is pro-sumer grade, so it wouldn't surprise me if they've enshittified as well; however Hilti tools are for professionals (and priced as such), so if you have deep pockets that's probably the best bet.
by astrange | 2026-01-05 03:19:08+00:00
> How would you integrate C3 with other programming languages (not just C)

That's the job of an FFI. The internal ABI of most languages isn't anything like their FFI, eg any garbage collected language can't use the OS "C" ABI.

Most operating systems don't use the same ABI for kernel syscalls and userland libraries either. (Darwin is an exception where you do have to link a library instead of making syscalls yourself.)

> contrary to popular belief there is no such thing as a "C ABI"

It is a "C ABI" if it has eg null-terminated strings and varargs with no way to do bounds checking.
by lutusp | 2026-01-05 03:19:09+00:00
This article reminds me of my favorite John F. Kennedy quote: "I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."

There are three classes of people likely to be found alone:

* Geniuses.
* Psychopaths.
* Psychopathic geniuses.
by mikelitoris | 2026-01-05 03:19:12+00:00
"The last couple times I used my dental insurance website, it was completely not mobile responsive, requiring the old-school pinch zoom to even get to anything on the page."
And yet you probably didn't change your dental insurance based on this, because most likely there are more important issues that matter (e.g. you are given a single option by your employer). This is exactly the reason why that company is not likely to fix it, because the lousy website's effect on their bottom line is nearly zero. (Note that I don't like this either)
by schoen | 2026-01-05 03:20:21+00:00
I'd also like to suggest a little more work on the URL parsing (even though most users probably won't enter anything that will be misinterpreted). For example, if a protocol scheme other than https:// or http:// is used, the browser will probably still treat it specially somehow (even though browsers typically seem to support fewer of these than they used to!). It might be good to catch these other cases.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_URI_schemes
by ImPleadThe5th | 2026-01-05 03:20:35+00:00
I've heard it's actually beneficial for your ankles long term to get some tilt/pan on them. It reduces your chances of injury by strengthening the twitch muscles in your ankle and legs.

Important to note the point is "trail running" not "alpine running", gravel and dirt vs, steep inclines and big rocks.

Anecdotally, just adjust your pace/length until you're comfortable. I've always done mixed asphalt/dirt-trail and there is a notable difference in my knee fatigue when there is a bigger ratio of one or the other, would always prefer a nice gravel or dirt over the road.
by godelski | 2026-01-05 03:21:29+00:00
> Am I the weird one here?

Yes. But good weird, not bad weird.

I mean we're programmers. Even though it's much more popular these days the very nature of what we do makes us "weird". At least compared to the average person. But weird isn't bad.

(Why people doing it if they find it so boring? And why side projects?! I know it pays well but there are plenty of jobs that do. I mean my cousin makes more as a salesman and spends his days at golf courses. He's very skilled, but his job is definitely easier)

> "oh but programming is the boring part, now I can focus on the problem solving"

I also can't comprehend people when they say this.

For starters it's like saying "I want you learn an instrument so I listen to scales, that way I can focus on playing songs." The fun part can't really happen without the hard part.

Second, how the fuck do you do the actual engineering when you're not writing the code? I mean sure, I can do a lot at the high level but 90% of the thinking happens while writing. Hell, 90% of my debugging happens while writing. It feels like people are trying to tell me that LLMs are useful because "typing speed is the bottleneck". So I'm left thinking "how the fuck do you even program?" All the actual engineering work, discovering issues, refining the formulation, and all that happens because I'm in the weeds.

The boring stuff is where the best learning and great ideas come from. Isn't a good programmer a lazy one? I'd have never learned about something like functors and template metaprogramming if I didn't ever do the boring stuff like write a bunch of repetitive functions thinking "there's got to be a better way!" No way is an LLM going to do something like that because it's a dumb solution until a critical mass is reached and it becomes a great solution. There's little pressure for that kind of progress when you can generate those functions so fast (I say little because there's still pressure from an optimization standpoint but who knows if an LLM will learn that unprompted)

Honestly coding with LLMs feels like trying to learn math by solely watching 3Blue1Brown videos. Yeah, you'll learn something but you'll feel like you learned more than you actually did. The struggle is part of the learning process. Those types of videos can complement the hard work but they don't replace it.
by stirfish | 2026-01-05 03:21:39+00:00
I haven't done it in a while, but you can do cubes (and more) too. Cubes would be the L3 norm, something about the distance between circles (spheres?) in 3d space? I need to read about norms again to tell you why or when to choose that, but I know the Googlable term is "vector norms"

I remember one is Manhattan distance, next is as-the-crow-flies straight line distance, next is if you were a crow on the earth that can also swim in a straight line underwater, and so on