MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sd9 | 2026-01-30 16:03:42+00:00
There are about 20-30 death penalties imposed each year [1]. In contrast, a homocide occurs roughly once every 30 minutes [2], approximately 17,000 per year.

So it is incredibly atypical for a homicide to result in the death penalty.

The death penalty is reserved for crimes involving aggravating factors - committing other felonies simultaneously, e.g. rape, or mass murder, torture, prior convictions, child victim, etc.

In other words, this news seems routine, probably designed to outrage people who are unaware exactly how _uncommon_ the death penalty usually is.

[1] https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/research/analysis/reports/year-...

[2] https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/fbi-releases-2024-re...
by throwup238 | 2026-01-30 16:04:01+00:00
@dang has noted this phenomenon in various forms multiple times. The most recent one I can find:

> It's common, if not inevitable, for people who feel strongly about $topic to conclude that the system (or the community, or the mods, etc.) are biased against their side. One is far more likely to notice whatever data points that one dislikes because they go against one's view and overweight those relative to others. This is probably the single most reliable phenomenon on this site. Keep in mind that the people with the opposite view to yours are just as convinced that there's bias, but they're sure that it's against their side and in favor of yours.
[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42205856
by peddling-brink | 2026-01-30 16:04:04+00:00
While I completely agree with your premise, the software can be improved. It can be programmed to drop down to 5 miles an hour or less depending on street size, pedestrian proximity, school zone, etc.

If only the same could be said for the other parents in the school zone. I’ve seen people roar by in similar scenarios at 30+ miles an hour.
by MisterTea | 2026-01-30 16:04:24+00:00
Executing him would have two effects: Sending the message that killing someone with money and power carries a higher penalty than killing another pleb. Make Mangione a martyr possibly resulting in copy cats seeking to obtain a similar status.

I also think the current administration would highly favor execution to send a strong message that attacking the bourgeoisie will result in death. They would certainly turn up the propaganda to 11. I feel the judge is smart enough to recognize both situations and took that option off the table.
by CuriouslyC | 2026-01-30 16:04:28+00:00
One issue is that tooling and internals have been optimized for individual people's tastes currently. Heterogeneous environments make the models spikier. As we shift to building more homogenized systems optimized around agent accessibility, I think we'll see significant improvements

Elegantly, agents finally give us an objective measure of what "good" code is. It's code that maximizes the likelihood that future agents will be able to successfully solve problems in this codebase. If code is "bad" it makes future problems harder.
by maaydin | 2026-01-30 16:04:35+00:00
Hey everyone!

Quick update after the initial launch a couple of weeks ago, the Firefox add-on for DanceJump is now live!

DanceJump now works on Chrome, Edge, and Firefox.

Along with Firefox support, the last updates also include:

a proper welcome / tutorial page for first-time users

a visible menu button so settings are easy to find (no Firefox-extension knowledge needed)

multiple bug fixes and stability improvements

a download chart option for those who want to experiment further

DanceJump still does the same simple thing:
Turn any YouTube video into a rhythm game you can play directly on top of the video, using a keyboard, controller, or dance mat.

No accounts. No tracking. No ads.
Just music, movement, and fun.

I also want to say thank you to HN folks! A lot of the early feedback, questions, and criticism from the community directly influenced this release.

Even when opinions differed, the feedback was genuinely helpful. Thank you!

More improvements coming, but I wanted to share this milestone first.

Happy dancing!
by stevenjgarner | 2026-01-30 16:04:37+00:00
> Here’s my favorite fact: Papua New Guinea, with about 0.1 percent of the world’s population, hosts more than 10 percent of the world’s languages. Two villages, separated perhaps only by a few miles, will speak languages that are not mutually intelligible.

In the author's example of PNG, dare I ask "why does it matter what the population is"? If the bulk of the people are living their own lives beyond "civilization", speaking unknown languages, without the government providing any kind of infrastructure or services, then why is it important how many people there are?
by jghn | 2026-01-30 16:04:39+00:00
> My Pro plan is barely usable now, even when using only Sonnet. I frequently hit the weekly limit,

I thought it was just me. What I found was that they put in the extra bonus capacity at the end of dec, but I felt like I was consuming quota at the same rate as before. And then afterwards consuming it faster than before.

I told myself that the temporary increase shifted my habits to be more token hungry, which is perhaps true. But I am unsure of that.
by jjice | 2026-01-30 16:04:51+00:00
I've automated the writing of many of these kinds of things away with LLMs over the last year. I'd recommend giving it a shot.

Another tangential use is to ask it to see if there are better abstractions that can be applied that maybe you haven't thought of yet. I find it's not the majority case that it offers a suggestion I like, but I have found it to be good some of the time. Worth the time of asking, at least.
by parineum | 2026-01-30 16:04:55+00:00
> So, let's exclude hitting fixed objects as you suggest (though the incident we'd be excluding might have been anything from a totaled car and huge fire to zero damage)

I don't know what data is available but what I really care about more than anything is incidents where a human could be killed or harmed, followed by animals, then other property and finally, the car itself. So I'm not arguing to exclude hitting fixed objects, I'm arguing that severity of incident is much more important than total incidents.

Even when comparing it to human drivers, if Tesla autopilot gets into 200 fender benders and 0 fatal crashes I'd prefer that over a human driver getting into 190 fender benders and 10 fatal crashes. Directionally though, I suspect the numbers would probably go the other direction, more major incidents from automated cars because, when are successful, they usually handle situations perfectly and when they fail, they just don't see that stopped car in front of you and hit it at full speed.

> That gets the crash rate down from an unbiased 9x to a lowball 2.66x higher than human drivers. That's with human monitors supervising the cars.

> 2.66x is still so poor they should be pulled of the streets IMO.

I'm really not here to argue they are safe or anything like that. It just seems clear to me that every assumption in this article is made in the direction that makes Tesla look worse.
by skydhash | 2026-01-30 16:05:13+00:00
The thing is if you’re working on a CRUD app, you probably have (and you should) a framework, which make it easy to do all the boilerplate. Editor fluency can add an extra boost to your development speed.

I’ve done CRUD and the biggest proportion of the time was custom business rules and UI tweaking (updating the design system). And they were commits with small diffs. The huge commits were done by copy pasting, code generators and heavy use of the IDE refactoring tools.
by jillesvangurp | 2026-01-30 16:05:25+00:00
> increases in worker productivity at best increase demand for labor, and at worst result in massive disruption - they never result in the same pay for less manual work.

Exactly. Strongly agree with that. This closed world assumption never holds. We would only do less work if nothing else changes. But of course everything changes when you lower the price of creating software. It gets a lot cheaper. So, now you get a lot of companies suddenly considering doing things that previously would be too expensive. This still takes skills and expertise they don't have. So, they get people involved doing that work. Maybe they'll employ some of those but the trend is actually to employ things that are core to your company.

And that's just software creation. Everything else is going to change as well. A lot of software we use is optimized for humans. Including all of our development tools. Replacing all that with tools more suitable for automatic driving by AI is an enormous amount of work.

And we have decades worth of actively used software that requires human operators currently. If you rent a car, some car rental companies still interface with stuff written before I was born. And I'm > 0.5 century old. Same with banks, airline companies, insurers, etc. There's a reason this stuff was never upgraded: doing so is super expensive. Now that just got a bit cheaper to do. Maybe we'll get around to doing some of that. Along with all the stuff for which the ambition level just went up by 10x. And all the rest.
by seabrookmx | 2026-01-30 16:05:36+00:00
You're assuming no game studio would test their windows executable on proton, just because they develop on Windows. If there's non-trivial market share to capture by being "Deck verified" I don't see why that would be the case. Game devs develop on Windows for PlayStation, Switch, mobile etc. At least with proton they don't even need to cross compile.
by robby_w_g | 2026-01-30 16:05:46+00:00
I was able to hack together a toy game with godot-rust several years ago, and it had some rough edges but I was able to integrate Bevy’s ECS with godot’s editor and rendering. I’ve loosely followed its development since then, and the roughest parts seem to have been smoothed out. If it’s important to the dev, they can absolutely use rust
by Amezarak | 2026-01-30 16:07:06+00:00
There’s more than a thousand fatal US police shootings every year with various levels of justification, many impacting people totally innocent of anything, even if we accept your propagandized mischaracterization of what happened. (I don’t blame you for this. It’s being pushed hard, and the other sides propaganda is no more truthful.)

Aside from regular shootings, Obama (perhaps not so famously) killed a 16 year old US citizen overseas in a country we were not at war with, then refused to explain why. Off the record, officials said he should have had a better father (who had been killed in an earlier drone strike.) Somehow, everyone failed to turn out for this and similar abuses of power.

There’s nothing new or unusual about this.

> CITATION NEEDED.

I already provided you a citation showing that 75% of deportations in a prior administration happens without any due process, showing that even if this statement wasn’t true (obviously the weaker version is) then it’s not at all unprecedented. Yet all the rage is in the here and now.

It’s also worth noting that, as I alluded to, immigration court is administrative anyway, not judicial. “Immigration judges” are just DoJ employee, not judges.

The most concerning thing about this is how many people have been radicalized into believing committing felonies by interfering with, harassing, and assaulting LEO is not only legal but safe. Even blocking them is a crime. At this point we’re at a situation where millions of people believe the laws we passed as a representative democracy are so illegitimate violence - not just peaceful protest - is justified against the state. This is a really bad sign and it’s getting people killed.
by GoatInGrey | 2026-01-30 16:07:39+00:00
There are many poor characterizations here. Besides data centers clearly not employing the average worker, there are real impacts. In Farmington, for instance, has a data center planning to drain 900,000,000 gallons of water per year from the local aquifer. You have instances like Granville, Ohio where electric prices rose by 60% over five years after data centers went in. One proposed data center in Sherburne County is planning to consume 600MW of power alone (typical household uses 1.2 kW). This is also as there are roughly $500 million in state subsidies being drafted for these data centers.

So, essentially, Minnesotans are being asked to subsidize facilities that will employ only a handful of specialists, raise electric bills, strain water resources, produce outputs many residents actively oppose, and accelerate the automation of their jobs...all while the state offers ~$500 million in support to these companies and nothing to offset the costs borne by residents.
by throwaway0123_5 | 2026-01-30 16:07:40+00:00
> But I think we're still a long way off non-technical people being able to develop applications.

I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone do a case study, having truly non-technical people build apps with these tools. Take a few moderately tech-savvy (can use MS office up to doing basic stuff in excel, understands a filesystem) people who work white collar jobs. Give them a one or two-day crash course on how Claude Code works. See what is the most complicated app which they can develop that is reasonably stable and secure.
by sd2k | 2026-01-30 16:07:43+00:00
Cool to see more projects in this space! I think Wasm is a great way to do secure sandboxing here. How does Amla handle commands like grep/jq/curl etc which make AI agents so effective at bash but require recompilation to WASI (which is kinda impractical for so many projects)?

I've been working on a couple of things which take a very similar approach, with what seem to be some different tradeoffs:

- eryx [1], which uses a WASI build of CPython to provide a true Python sandbox (similar to componentize-py but supports some form of 'dynamic linking' with either pure Python packages or WASI-compiled native wheels)
- conch [2], which embeds the `brush` Rust reimplementation of Bash to provide a similar bash sandbox. This is where I've been struggling with figuring out the best way to do subcommands, right now they just have to be rewritten and compiled in but I'd like to find a way to dynamically link them in similar to the Python package approach...

One other note, WASI's VFS support has been great, I just wish there was more progress on `wasi-tls`, it's tricky to get network access working otherwise...

[1] https://github.com/eryx-org/eryx
[2] https://github.com/sd2k/conch
by bespokedevelopr | 2026-01-30 16:07:50+00:00
So add 0 jobs because people don’t like chatgpt and it won’t create the same amount as 1960’s manufacturing; or add some jobs to rural WI?

You only have to look at Hermiston/Umatilla OR to see how impactful data centers can be on rural communities. There’s a lot more than 40 new jobs there since Amazon started building data centers.
by bob1029 | 2026-01-30 16:07:52+00:00
> Does the AI voice/commentary add value or get irritating?

I could only handle it for about 2 seconds before I turned it off. This feature is a joke.

More broadly, there is clearly some obsession in Spotify's leadership with pushing anything vocal into listeners ears. This "DJ" feature is just a zero-effort extension of this. I still can't figure out why they are so obsessed with this. Perhaps there is some kind of correlation between tracks with affordable royalties and shitty vocal samples. I encourage anyone who is confused by my little rant to locate something like an instrumental-only EDM playlist on Spotify right now. You'll probably make it 2-3 tracks in before you get lit up with precisely the opposite of what you had requested.
by mlsu | 2026-01-30 16:08:04+00:00
From a "my opinion" standpoint, yes, I would love to see this.

From a tactical PR standpoint, it would be a disaster. Muh big truuuucks is like a third rail because Americans are car obsessed as a culture. They already hit a kid, best to save some energy for the next battle.

Besides if Waymo wins (in general) private car ownership will decrease which is a win regardless. And maybe Waymo can slowly decrease the size of their fleet to ease up the pressure on this insane car size arms race.
by skeeter2020 | 2026-01-30 16:08:16+00:00
I read a bit about Gas Town, and I'm still confused if it's a super-inception, metajoke that I don't get; or a clever, invite-only party to which I'm not invited. All the original article (and the discussions & responses to the responses) did was make me feel stupid, but I have enough experience and self-worth to know I'm not stupid so I'm just going to refuse to play. I recently spent more than a week pretty disconnected from this all and haven't felt that good in a long time!
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-30 16:08:26+00:00
I don't object to alcohol being tolerated. But I do think that distinguishing it from other drugs is odd. Particularly when the primary reason given for regulating other drugs is their addictiveness which alcohol shares.

We tolerate a recreational drug. Lots of people regularly consume a recreational drug and yet somehow society doesn't split at the seams. We should just acknowledge the reality. I think people would if not for all the "war on drugs" brainwashing. I think what we see is easily explained as it being easier to bury one's head in the sand than it is to give serious thought to ideas that challenge one's worldview or the law.
Show HN: HN Zeitgeist – what 40M HN comments reveal about 20 years of tech
by cigol | 2026-01-30 16:08:38+00:00
Hi HN! I analyzed 40M comments from 2006-2026 and organized them into ~10k topics using AI.

You can explore:
- Rising/falling trends over time
- Individual topics with sample comments + links to original threads
- Deep-dive reports (Bitcoin, Nvidia, self-driving, etc.)

Built in about a week. Feedback welcome!
by alecco | 2026-01-30 16:08:48+00:00
> Amazon’s quarterly free cash flow went negative—negative $4.8 billion—at the exact moment their capital expenditure hit $125 billion, the highest of any company on Earth, with 75% of it going directly to AI infrastructure. They raised $12 billion in debt this year to fund data centers. And then they eliminated 10% of their white-collar workforce.

Sounds about right.
by sidcool | 2026-01-30 16:08:58+00:00
Starship is iterating fast and flying in another 5 weeks. Boring company is executing slowly but steadily, the Vegas tunnel is progressing. Unsupervised robotaxis has started in Austin. Optimus started a few years ago only, it is disingenuous to expect it to be available immediately. Neuralink has 18 patients now. Mars is happening, Elon never promised it will be possible this decade.

Your comment makes it seem that Elon's companies have done nothing. I know you are being disingenuous, but I am trying my luck to respond.
by FireInsight | 2026-01-30 16:09:16+00:00
OPENRNDR is amazing and I love using it for generative art, especially installations, not so much for stuff to share on the web. I find the API is way more tuned to my programmer brain compared to Processing/p5.js. The only problems, I think, are:

- It's Kotlin/JVM. Looks pretty, is ergonomic to write in, runs everywhere. But also, I feel forever chained to IntelliJ and cant wrap my head around the build system at all.

- Small community. Searching for issues, tutorials, or anything of that sort doesn't yield that many results. Not a problem if you're self-sufficient enough, but might stop me from recommending it to a beginner. The development also seems kind of slow.
by kotaKat | 2026-01-30 16:09:23+00:00
Just to revisit this - I actually bought an "automatic setting" clock now that I saw one at Walmart.

Unfortunately, Sharp is lying. "Accu-Set(tm)" is them factory-programming the clock IC and just shipping a button cell in the box and hoping it holds time. My clock was 5 minutes behind and I have to manually set it. No RDS, no radiotime, nothing.

Oi... guess I have to be even more specific in my product hunt.
by krisoft | 2026-01-30 16:09:44+00:00
> You don't get to throw out "fondness for throwing Nazi salutes" slander, based on an hoax immediately debunked at the time, and then act like you're doing democracy a favor.

Just to clarify. This is the video context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VfYjPzj1Xw

Are you claiming that this is not an accurate depiction of what happened on stage? (That is the video is in some form fake. A deep fake, or special effects, or an Elon impersonator or whatever.)

Or are you claiming that the gesture seen is not a nazi salute?
by ocdtrekkie | 2026-01-30 16:09:58+00:00
100%, I am a huge fan of actual detachable batteries and I also store most electronics with them removed. I generally consider any rechargeable battery a risky thing to store. (Some explode.)

One thing I really love is power tool systems though: I have some Ryobi tools that are over 20 years old and they work with batteries sold in stores today. (The battery tech has changed but as long as your charger is for your battery tech, the tools are all good.) I rarely use a given tool enough to justify replacing batteries in it every 2-4 years, but I use one of my Ryobi tools or the other frequently enough to justify keeping a couple good batteries available at any given time.

I have a modern drill and impact driver because I use them a lot. But the handful of couple decade old saws are plenty adequate for the very rare occasions I need a jigsaw, circular saw, or sawzall.
by jeffbee | 2026-01-30 16:10:04+00:00
It helps because the NDA enables a regulatory function of the local government that they otherwise wouldn't have. If there's no state or local statute that says the proponent has to reveal a given fact to the local government, then the local government has no way to demand it. The NDA is a negotiating instrument, they get to know the thing they want to know without having to go pass a law.
by aziz_sunderji | 2026-01-30 16:10:07+00:00
Bay area employees of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity are using secondary share sales to fund home purchases, fueling a rebound in the local housing market. In mid-2023, the San Jose metro area—home to Silicon Valley—ranked 3rd-worst out of the 100 largest US metros for year-over-year home price growth. In the second half of 2025, it ranked 20th. This map (see link) shows the hottest Bay area ZIP codes are those with the highest proportion of tech workers.
by ggambetta | 2026-01-30 16:10:14+00:00
May I add Computer Graphics From Scratch, which covers both rasterization and raytracing? https://gabrielgambetta.com/computer-graphics-from-scratch/i...

I have to admit I'm quite surprised by how eerily similar this website feels to my book. The chapter structure, the sequencing of the concepts, the examples and diagrams, even the "why" section (mine https://gabrielgambetta.com/computer-graphics-from-scratch/0... - theirs https://lisyarus.github.io/blog/posts/implementing-a-tiny-cp...)

I don't know what to make of this. Maybe there's nothing to it. But I feel uneasy :(
by esafak | 2026-01-30 16:10:25+00:00
> But FLOSS software is mainly made by developers. Who like writing new flashy features, but are awful at UX, and making sure all the small kinks are worked out.

That is what product managers are for; someone to lead the product's direction, ensure quality control, and to instill taste. That requires being able to say when a feature is poorly implemented or outright bad and unnecessary -- it's not always just kinks. The problem is that this collides with the collaborative ethos of open source software. But when it's not done it's the users who suffer.
by darvid | 2026-01-30 16:10:46+00:00
I like it, I listen to it frequently. it often surfaces music that I forgot about that I had on repeat a while ago, kind of like a discover weekly but with a higher density of... certified bangers, and fewer skips.

the voice and "personality" of DJ X is annoying but it's infrequent enough that I can live with it. my only gripe is that in longer sessions, he tends to play music I have no interest in, e.g. "what's hot right now" - my library is 10k+, I would have hoped he wouldn't run out of material and resort to current top 10 country or something.