MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hattmall | 2026-01-11 05:02:02+00:00
Killing addicts more quickly than creating new ones would indeed eventually lead to a decrease in drug related deaths. I would really believe this because I know of multiple people that died from ODs in a fairly short window 4-5 years and that spans a range of about 12 years of people. As in to say everyone I know age 24-36 about half of those people that were opiate users died from about 2019-2023 due to fent. All of them that I know the details of were from fake pills too, so very much related to fentanyl.
by nwienert | 2026-01-11 05:02:05+00:00
We subsidize much of the research, tech, and drugs that Australia benefits from so you’re welcome. I think that tide is finally turning, thankfully.

Nothing I said is unsubstantiated, maybe you don’t care to substantiate it for yourself which is fine.

Australia has plenty of issues. Wait times for surgeries, specialists, hospital choice, dental/mental health, rural coverage, and cutting edge medicine is terrible compared to US.

But their biggest issue maybe how unbelievably pretentious they are about their mediocre healthcare, it’s incredible how many I’ve ran into who blindly talk trash on the US without even knowing the basic facts. Great at barely covering everyone so they can brag, mediocre at everything else.

The whole lifespan thing has almost nothing to do with healthcare.

In terms of healthcare I’d rather be in the US, very, very strongly. We are far better for anyone working a job above minimum wage. The amount of cutting edge medicine available is incredible, and a huge percent of best doctors and hospitals in the world.
by conz | 2026-01-11 05:03:39+00:00
Or, you could help accelerate the move away from proprietary platforms, even if there is a small hit to you personally. This is how we help save society, rather than having others do all the work, no?

In the end, it's in your best interests that Linux and open platforms improve in the direction you want them to, and the best way to achieve that is by joining the effort now.
Show HN: MCP Server for AI Agents to Publish on WriteFreely
by laxmena | 2026-01-11 05:04:16+00:00
I built this MCP (Model Context Protocol) server to let AI agents easily publish, edit, and manage content on Write.as or self-hosted WriteFreely instances.

It's useful for automating AI-generated blogs, newsletters, or feeds without manual intervention.Key

features:
1. Publish/edit/delete posts and collections
2. Browse public feeds
3. Supports auth via access tokens

Python-based, installs via uv/pip

Motivation:

I wanted a simple way for AI workflows to integrate with privacy-focused platforms like (Write.as) WriteFreely.

It's early (v0.1.3), so feedback on tools like publish_post() or config would be great.

MIT license—fork/contribute if interested!

Repo: https://github.com/laxmena/writefreely-mcp-server
PyPi: https://pypi.org/project/writefreely-mcp-server/

What do you think? Any use cases or improvements?
by tianqi | 2026-01-11 05:04:16+00:00
Throughout my university years, I used Ubuntu daily on both my laptop and desktop. Even when I had to play World of Warcraft with classmates, I used a virtual machine on Ubuntu. Around 2009, I switched to Mac OS, and I was perfectly happy with it until recently.

What I find most annoying is that I have several very old iMacs. Apple disallows their OS upgrading, even though their hardware is still perfectly fine. I've been using them, which means I've been stuck working on Mac OS 10.15, and now I can't install many applications, including some basic libraries, because they're no longer compatible with 10.15. I don't want to just throw away my perfectly good computers, and considering I do most of my work in the terminal, and I'm shocked by Apple's recent UI updates on iPhones(They've got to be kidding), so after 17 years away from Ubuntu as my daily OS, I'm now considering seriously going back to it.
by jibal | 2026-01-11 05:04:20+00:00
That has nothing to do with a stable fitness function ... an external set of factors that determine which changes allow offspring to survive. This thing doesn't have offspring (or always has exactly one offspring and then the parent dies) and it survives until the whole thing collapses.

And I think they already have what you describe or something like it ... PRs have to build and survive CI.
by nunez | 2026-01-11 05:05:37+00:00
Couldn't be more on the nose.

Big companies are significantly better to work in when you're either (a) in sales with a clear path to hitting/exceeding quota, (b) a strategic revenue generator, or (c) a super hot and extremely well funded corporate initiative (basically all AI projects right now).

The money tap is always on, you get all the cool toys, travel perks are great, and you get to work on amazing stuff without as much red tape.
by joecool1029 | 2026-01-11 05:11:04+00:00
I’ve had this failure on soft-touch usb cables from the 2000’s, not related to movement, just in a box in room temperature storage they disintegrate like this. It was described to me as thermoplastic elastometer degradation but I’m not really satisfied with that vague of an answer. Main comment thread when I first jumped in to discuss it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28054090
by nebula8804 | 2026-01-11 05:11:24+00:00
They have Palantir and the citizens don't. Although when one of them supposedly get found out they are not too happy. https://www.instagram.com/reels/DR0EfA8Erwa/

I honestly don't know how things are going to play out but it seems to be back and forth escalating.

So much has transpired in one year: the initial shock of the mass raids, the blatant disregard of the law, blocking of apps like IceBlock, etc. Neither side seems to want to back down.
by echelon | 2026-01-11 05:12:39+00:00
> NIH syndrome isn't sustainable, unless you're like Google and have more money than sense.

Control plane and observability are key concerns of a fintech handling billions in daily transaction volume.

We had teams building and managing our solutions. After the migrations, we had teams managing the integrations. The headcount didn't change, we just wound up paying external vendors and sequencing multiple provider moves and company wide migrations. The changes caused several outages and shifted OKRs.
by alephnerd | 2026-01-11 05:16:48+00:00
Deep dive into New Brunswick, JD Irving, and their ongoing issues with Glyphosates pollution. Canadian researchers specializing on CJD have been blocked from investigating this case [0].

Sadly, the Irvings have extremely close ties with both the Liberals [1] and Conservatives [2][3] and are essentially untouchable due to Canada's parliamentary nature.

The NYT did an on-the-ground report on this case a couple years ago [4]

It reminds me of similar stories I heard while growing up from family friends of mine who ran a construction business on Vancouver Island and the Lower Mainland about how cheap it was to "lobby" and get a personal meeting and photograph with Martin and Harper, and this was after Railgate.

[0] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/03/canada...

[1] - https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-minister-le...

[2] - https://nsadvocate.org/2020/09/15/big-win-for-the-irvings-in...

[3] - https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/pcs-criticized-...

[4] - https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/14/magazine/canada-brain-dis...
by anigbrowl | 2026-01-11 05:17:05+00:00
In 1996, Doris Kelley and her daughter, Katie Kelley-Mareau, filed a lawsuit against Clarence Lushbaugh, the pathologist who performed the autopsy on Cecil Kelley.[12][13] The case alleged the misconduct of doctors, the hospital, and the administration of Los Alamos in removing organs from the deceased without consent from next-of-kin over a span of many years (1958–1980).[14][15] Kelley's autopsy was the first instance of this type of post-mortem analysis, but Lushbaugh and others performed many more in later years at Los Alamos.[13] During a deposition for the case, Lushbaugh, when asked who gave him the authority to take eight pounds (3.6 kilograms) of organs and tissue from Kelley's body, said, "God gave me permission." The class action suit was settled by the defendants for about $9.5 million in 2002 and an additional $800,000 in 2007. None of the defendants admitted any wrongdoing.

The unwillingess to ever admit wrongdoing in a legal or social context is a political disease.
by monero-xmr | 2026-01-11 05:18:03+00:00
You can live with a sustained opioid addiction permanently without major issues. That’s the entire basis of methadone clinics - controlled dispersement of opioids at a level that solves cravings and allows the addict to be functional. It is very sad we don’t allow pharmaceutical grade opioids to be given to addicts in a controlled way, it would eliminate the purity variance that causes overdoses, and prevent the poison mixed in to increase street profits from destroying bodies (tranq, etc)
by conz | 2026-01-11 05:18:35+00:00
Re: "Or maybe the operating system should just work reliably for (at least) the basics?"

So, out of curiosity, if I tried installing MacOS on any of the 15+ computers I have at home, what are the likely chances that this "operating system should just work reliably for (at least) the basics?"

I can tell you that my success rate with Linux is 100%.
by Veserv | 2026-01-11 05:19:36+00:00
Say it is not so. Company that likes illegally discharging wastewater [1][2] run by man who leads companies to dump toxic waste into city water systems as soon as the inspectors leave [3][4][5] with a company that has multiple times the industry-average injury rate and actively sought to bury it by ignoring mandatory reporting requirements for multiple years [6] defends and denies poor safety practices that expose workers to dangerous chemicals and fires them for the audacity to complain about illegal unsafe working conditions.

This repeated pattern of illegal, safety-regressive behavior must be a fluke. Frankly, if the leadership creates cultures that harm their workers and where retaliation against workers was normal, then you would expect that to occur at other companies they run. Like, some kind of successful lawsuit where workers complained about their supervisors calling all their black coworkers the N-word and all the swastikas on the walls then were reprimanded for bringing it up [7] where the judge legally declared the companies "conduct was reprehensible and repeated"[8] and awards in excess of the standard maximum were "appropriate in light of the endemic racism at the Tesla factory and Tesla's repeated failure to rectify it"[9].

See, the rampant disregard for their workers and retaliation against workers is not at all in their corporate DNA all the way to the top. Just your regular old California Bay Area company where workers are called the N-word [10] and get retaliated against.

[1] https://payloadspace.com/spacex-back-up-to-its-neck-in-disch...

[2] https://www.sacurrent.com/news/federal-government-fines-elon...

[3] https://fortune.com/2025/11/08/boring-company-drilling-fluid...

[4] https://fortune.com/2025/11/12/elon-musk-boring-company-tunn...

[5] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/26184164-tbc-state-l...

[6] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/spacex-m...

[7] https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/USCOURTS-cand-3_17-cv-06...

[8] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-cand-3_17-cv-06... Page 29

[9] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-cand-3_17-cv-06... Page 1

[10] I mean seriously, where do you even find people who will use the N-word in the Bay Area. Did they put all their job ads in the KKK and Neo-Nazi Bay Area Facebook groups? Is it like one of those anti-spy tests where you have people say: "Death to (insert country leader here)", but you have to use the N-word to get hired.
by defrost | 2026-01-11 05:19:53+00:00
> A main component of why I was in sheer horror was the fact that I had stupidly buried all of these cables under my cement flooring in PVC trunking from my shelter to all of the rooms in the flat.

This I don't quite get .. as I understand it "PVC trunking" is a type of cable channeling / ducting.

I do a lot of cable and pipe layout around houses, farms, workshops, worksites, etc. and it's routine to use pipes / ducting / channels to allow other cables to be threaded through after or to replace bad cables.

As much as cable deterioration sucks it should be a relief to have ducting to pull good through after the bad.
by jandrese | 2026-01-11 05:20:48+00:00
Looking at the pictures it looks like the fiber itself might be inside of that spiral metal conduit in the middle and the outside is just abrasion protection. There are way too many strands for that outside bit to be the fiber. It's obviously bad that the outside plastic disintegrated, but it looks like the buried cables might be fine.

I have a similar problem on my car where the 12v wiring is disintegrating like this because the manufacturer tried to switch to a more environmentally friendly wiring. Now the wire jackets turn to dust at the slightest touch or if they vibrate too much. I'm forever tracking down intermittent shorts in the wiring harness.
by smt88 | 2026-01-11 05:20:59+00:00
> Office on the Mac is far, far more stable, easy to use, and considerably faster than on Win11

I haven't had stability issues with any Office program in years, but everything you mentioned is moot because there are Office features (especially Power___ features in Excel) that don't have parity on MacOS. If I get a workbook from a client, I need it to run exactly the same on my machine as it does on theirs.
by bastawhiz | 2026-01-11 05:22:49+00:00
I agree, even if you say that my browser is a user agent using Amazon that's also a user agent, it's a real stretch to say that it's giving me any control at all.

My browser speaks TLS and HTTP for me. Maybe it talks if I'm low vision. Maybe it adjusts the page to be more visually appealing. What is Amazon doing? They're using the same interface that I am. They're completing an identical transaction to me. I'm maybe sure I could sit down with a sufficiently large piece of paper and a sufficiently advanced calculator and crunch the numbers to speak TLS (for a packet or two, at least). Not enough to complete a transaction, though.

But I can confidently place an online order. There's no control that Amazon can offer. In fact, they're essentially just giving me a rebranded interface to perform the same action I can perform on another page.

Just because it's a service doesn't make it a user agent.
by frm88 | 2026-01-11 05:23:29+00:00
Nobara 43 with KDE Plasma, which is a Fedora variant. I switched in October as a lifelong Windows user and was looking for some distro that would make my transition smooth, I didn't want to start my Linux experience with double pain: learn new OS and have to deal with various kinks. It was more than smooth: Nvidia 5090 with no hitch except a new driver - no prob. My old Kyocera printer worked on first try (never did with Windows). Nobara has a really competent and supportive Discord Community where you can get instant help - which I needed for the upgrade from 42 to 43. It's a small community of 30K people but there's always someone online to help. I appreciate that very much. Best decision ever. Next step: degoogle.
by KetoManx64 | 2026-01-11 05:25:17+00:00
> A key driver of this is migration. Most countries in Western and Northern Europe have had positive net migration (i.e., more people arriving than leaving)

Funny how for the past 20 years every media source has told us we need to have less kids in order to stop global warming, but now we're importing en mass people from third world countries with much lower carbon footprints into first world countries and increasing their carbon footprints 2-10x and nobody is saying anything about that.
by jesenator | 2026-01-11 05:25:38+00:00
There's more to the prompt in the back end, which:
- gives it the options along with the letters A, B, C, etc.
- tells it pretty forcefully that it HAS to pick from among the options
- tells it how to format the response and its reasoning so we can parse it

So these things all affect its response, especially for questions that ask for randomness or are not strongly held values.
by alienchow | 2026-01-11 05:26:04+00:00
The electricians mentioned that in order to curve the cables along underneath the floor tiling they couldn't use metal trunking which would cause sharp angles, so they used PVC pipes to do curvy trunking for the fibre cables. I could theoretically pull a new cable through by ripping out the wall outlet if this cable actually fails. You can see it in my earlier homelab post. But due to the length of the trunking and the number of bends, I'm not too sure if I can safely drag a new fibre cable through.

But yeah, maybe it's not that bad after all. I hope it won't get to that point.
by kev009 | 2026-01-11 05:26:17+00:00
There are very survivable fiber cables designed for stage and A/V setups for instance, and even "real" military grade ones. But the common thin LZSH stuff is surprisingly resilient in my experience, so long as it didn't kink the OP would probably have been fine with a "standard" cable. In any case I would always try to place fiber in a place where it can be re-pulled.. conduit, tray, or a plenum.

I bought a big spool of 6 strand Corning stuff a long time ago for various projects, the cost and diameter don't increase much to add some protection lines even if you never imagine using them they can save you a re-pull if you bugger something up in construction.
by frumplestlatz | 2026-01-11 05:26:51+00:00
> … no amount of facts or evidence would convince you otherwise until their boot is on your own neck

> The rise of Nazi Germany took roughly 14-16 years, so I'd say we're about right on schedule based on the current timeline.

I appreciate you trying to save face, but this is what you were posting just a few messages up.

Pretending to be reasonable works better when we can’t read the detached-from-reality things you were literally just posting.

If we were really on the cusp of the rise of a new post-Weimar NSDAP Germany, almost any form of resistance would be ethically justified. Is that what you’re claiming?
by somat | 2026-01-11 05:28:32+00:00
Military-grade just means it has a spec, now, I will admit having a spec is nice, very nice. but in general it says little about the actual quality of the item. And if the spec can't be found or there is no spec. Probably best to stay away, in those cases they are not even selling you the snake oil but the sound of it sloshing in the bottle.
by w10-1 | 2026-01-11 05:29:35+00:00
> I do not think it is as simple as calling it theft in the same way as copying books

Aside from the incentive problem, there is a kind of theft, known as conversion: when you were granted a license under some conditions, and you went beyond them - you kept the car past your rental date, etc. In this case, the documentation is for people to read; AI using it to answer questions is a kind of conversion (no, not fair use). But these license limits are mostly implicit in the assumption that (only) people are reading, or buried in unenforceable site terms of use. So it's a squishy kind of stealing after breaching a squishy kind of contract - too fuzzy to stop incented parties.
by tartoran | 2026-01-11 05:30:24+00:00
I’d happily pay for a tool that lets me opt out of being slowly nickel-and-dimed by entities optimized for short-term yield. This feels like infrastructure: a small amount of collective effort that gives individuals leverage again. Visibility is the lever. And it could be done, it's just more organizing and involvement in local politics. The information already exists, it’s just effectively invisible, and a small translation layer could collapse it into a one-second answer, letting people avoid operators with a predictable extractive playbook, with the only real challenge being the constant, boring maintenance in an environment designed for churn and opacity. Eventually this should revolve around organizing and politics to make a difference.
by csallen | 2026-01-11 05:31:07+00:00
> The point of CSS is specifically to separate styling and semantics, so that they are not tightly coupled.

That was the original point, and it turned out that nobody cares about that 99% of the time. It's premature optimization and it violates "YAGNI". And in addition to not being something most people need, it's just a pain to set and remember and organize class names and organize files.

Remember CSS Zen Garden from the late 90s? How many sites actually do anything like that? Almost none.

And the beauty of Tailwind is, when you actually do need themes, that's the only stuff you have to name and organize in separate CSS files. Instead of having to do that with literally all of your CSS.
by wtarreau | 2026-01-11 05:31:08+00:00
No, it needs first to encourage local investment. Companies who seek investors or who get sold do not do it by pleasure, but as a last resort before dying. And in the EU you don't get any offer to save a company that has a limited commercial activity. Many companies die every day by lack of money. It turns our that US etc are willing to take much more risk and invest sufficient money to transform such fragile companies into durable ones. And in the case of software it's great, because software is sold all over the world, and the income serves to hire more local people, so in the end it's a way to really develop EU sales to the rest of the world. It would clearly be better if the investors were EU-based, but at least it's better than nothing that some investors are willing to risk their money on such companies.
by Retric | 2026-01-11 05:31:28+00:00
What things are more important than the study of meanings in a linguistic context?

Well semantics only covers an infinitesimal fraction of all meaning. Consider if I inject arsenic into a snakes venom sac is it now a venom? Nothing about your answer changes anything about what’s going on, yet you could still debate the question.

So when you say “what could be more important” I can only say that just about everything is more important.
by sambuccid | 2026-01-11 05:31:53+00:00
But let's be honest, right now it's big tech with their algorithm that's deciding for you.
Of course you are still free to find the content you want (unlike what would happen with banning) but most people minds can be influenced by the political view of who owns the platform if they wish to do so.

Maybe a bit of this is already happening (obvious suspect being X) or maybe not, I guess we'll never know for sure, but there is clearly an huge issue here that needs fixing as soon as possible.
by userbinator | 2026-01-11 05:32:06+00:00
The link to the product says "TPU outer jacket". That's thermoplastic polyurethane, which is well known for degrading via hydrolysis:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyurethane#Hydrolysis_and_bi...

...so it is a bit amusing to see "TPU Jacket Features Water, Abrasion Resistance" in the product description. PVC or PE would be far better and more common.
by Fr0_Tech | 2026-01-11 05:32:39+00:00
Fair point.

I started working on this after getting uneasy with how many “autonomous” systems rely on prompt discipline or after-the-fact monitoring once they’re allowed to touch real resources. That felt fragile to me, especially as agents start interacting with files, shells, or networks.

So this is an experiment around flipping that assumption: the agent can propose whatever it wants, but execution itself is the hard boundary. Anything with side effects has to pass an explicit authorization step, otherwise it simply doesn’t run.

I spent most of the time trying to break that boundary — impersonation, “just do it once,” reframing things as a simulation, etc. The interesting part wasn’t whether the agent proposes bad actions (it does), but whether those proposals can ever turn into side effects.

It’s not meant as a product, more a proof-of-concept to explore whether enforcing invariants at the execution layer actually changes the failure modes.