MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by imagetic | 2026-01-30 22:07:10+00:00
I disabled reposts and quoted posts to knock the noise down to 0. Since then I've enjoyed my time on Bluesky. In many ways it feels like old Twitter with simple filtering and I think that's what people wanted?!?

But Twitter felt cringe to me long before it was consumed by Musk and politics. Messing with the feed has backfired all of the big platforms. First Facebook then Twitter and most recently Instagram.

They all became a closed loop of content that is force fed. Injecting an ad in the a feed we control wasn't ever enough.
by wateralien | 2026-01-30 22:08:09+00:00
Top of HN and people are loving it, but there's got to be a better way of getting some $$ rewards for fun viral ideas like this than "Buy me a coffee". I'm betting he's got tens of thousands of sessions currently and nobody is tipping. https://ko-fi.com/magnushambleton

Is there a better way? Asking for myself, also.
by CurrentB | 2026-01-30 22:08:21+00:00
> Why is okay to kill a tree to build a home, kill a plant to eat, but not okay to kill an animal to eat?
> Does the biological complexity of the organism make it more or less okay to kill it?

The ability to suffer is the distinguishing/relevant factor. We all know what suffering feels like and we know that animals have the capacity to suffer. We don't really know that trees do. I want to reduce the suffering I am responsible for.

> Is it okay to kill a cockroach or a rat in your home?

I probably would get rid of infestations in my home and feel bad about it.

It's not about having a 100% perfect record with not killing animals. It's about striving to minimize animal suffering as much as practicable. You're never going to reduce this to 0 animals. But you can get to 95% better than the average human pretty easily if you want.
by condiment | 2026-01-30 22:09:10+00:00
I've made many business cases for internally-built SaaS tools, and they always rest on the idea that our probability of success is higher if we staff a team and build the _exact thing_ we need versus purchasing from a vendor and attempting an integration into our business.

It's far more challenging to win the 'build' argument on a cost savings approach, because even the least-savvy CIO/CTO understands that the the price of the vendor software is a proof point grounded in the difficulty for other firms to build these capabilities themselves. If there's merit to these claims, the first evidence we'll see is certain domains of enterprise software (like everything Atlassian does) getting more and more crowded, and less and less expensive, as the difficulty of competing with a tier-1 software provider drops and small shops spring up to challenge the incumbents.
by 2001zhaozhao | 2026-01-30 22:09:34+00:00
I'm not convinced of this post's hopeful argument near the end. If you are doing SaaS as a way of making money and don't have a deep moat aside from the code itself, it will probably be dead in a few years. The AI agents of the future will choose free alternatives as a default over your paid software, and by the way said free alternatives are probably made using reliable AI agents and are high-quality and feature complete. AI agents also don't need your paid support or add-on services from your SaaS companies, and if everyone uses agents, nobody will be left to give you money.

As a technical person today, I wouldn't pay a $10/month SaaS subscription if I can login to my VPS and tell claude to install [alternate free software] self-hosted on it. The thing is, everyone is going to have access to this in a few years (if nothing else it will be through the next generation of ChatGPT/Claude artifacts), and the free options are going to get much better to fit any needs common enough to have a significant market size.

You probably need another moat like network effects or unique content to actually survive.
by MattSayar | 2026-01-30 22:09:50+00:00
You just realistically can't know everything. I have a tankless water heater. It's almost a magical black box to me, but I know a little bit more about it now that I've taken pictures of it and asked LLMs to explain it to me. I'm still not a water heater technician, but I feel more knowledgeable.

And on the topic of motorcycles, I recently got a crappy bike that barely starts, and I partially got it because I feel capable of fixing it. And now it runs pretty well because I used lots of "video chats" with Gemini (and the owner's manual as context) to fix it!
by LunicLynx | 2026-01-30 22:10:22+00:00
But these are not facts it’s your assumptions on the matter.

Even the already included escape route.

> If I tell you I have evidence Tesla is lying you'll tell me to show it or STFU.

I mean I wouldn’t choose those words but yes. Yes, you have to prove it, because you state it as a fact.

Innocent until proven guilty. There is a reason to this phrase.
by riffraff | 2026-01-30 22:10:35+00:00
FWIW, you don't need to join questionable communities to have your content on mastodon, e.g. Wordpress blogs can meaningfully participate on activitypub (people con repost, like, reply) so that may be an alternative for your friends, without the need to host a complex app, so long as they can get any Wordpress hosting. Discovery suffers tho.
by thoughtpeddler | 2026-01-30 22:10:38+00:00
At what point does something like this make it onto world leaders' daily briefing?
"Mr. President, outside of the items we've just discussed, we also want to make you aware of a new kind of contingency that we've just begun tracking. We are witnessing the start of a decentralized network of autonomous AI agents coordinating with one another in an encrypted language they themselves devised. It apparently spawned from a hobbyist programmer's side-project. We don't think it's a concern just yet, but we definitely wanted to flag it for you."
by stockresearcher | 2026-01-30 22:10:56+00:00
Your lender definitely wants to get paid back, but they don’t necessarily want to get paid back right now. Because then they have a pile of money and they need to find something to do with it.

Consumers have a tendency to pay loans back early when the bank doesn’t have any more profitable alternatives. Consumers also have a tendency to NOT pay loans back early when the bank does have more profitable alternatives.

But you know that the first situation is worse for the bank than the second situation. So they do account for this, to a degree, when they give you a loan. In theory they would be willing to give you a lower interest rate if you gave up your prepayment option. In theory. In reality? Who knows.
by jfengel | 2026-01-30 22:11:42+00:00
What a terrible argument.

Without quibbling over all of the faults in the analogy, he's missing something important: if Wilt Chamberlain were a million times better than the next best player, the NBA would collapse. Nobody wants to watch a game with a predetermined outcome.

There are so many differences that it's hard to imagine that he's proposing the analogy seriously. But I also don't think he's thought deeply about sports.
by Marsymars | 2026-01-30 22:11:53+00:00
I don't think I've ever seen a button that says "mail me my 2fa code". The workflow basically always goes like this:

1. I enter username/password and click "sign in".
2. Agorithms run on the server.
3. If the algorithms think "suspicious" I'm redirected to an "enter your emailed code" page and automatically send me an email.

In any case, the top of this thread was specifically referring to this type of transactional email.

Taking a quick look at my email history, I have a whole pile of transactional mail (from Canadian entities) with no unsubscribe links: a bank email notifying reception of a complaint, a bank email about my paycheque saying "You received this mandatory email alert to update you on transaction details", various order confirmation emails for things I purchased online, etc.
by Levitz | 2026-01-30 22:12:56+00:00
>The US does not have a "far left" in any significant numbers, and never has. At least not in a self-aware sense.

Are they just disproportionately powerful then? Because the US does definitely have consistent far left trends and movements that overtake the mainstream. The OK hand gesture hysteria is maybe an evident example, but land acknowledgments? DEI statements? Fatphobia? Defund the police? All of these originate from far left positions.
by Neywiny | 2026-01-30 22:13:08+00:00
I guess I'm not sure I understand the solution. I use a low value (idk 15 minutes maybe?) because I don't have a static ip and I don't want that to cause issues. It's just me to my home server so I'm not adding noticable traffic like a real company or something, but what am I supposed to do? Is there a way for me to send an update such that all online caches get updated without needing to wait for them to time out?
by burningChrome | 2026-01-30 22:14:37+00:00
The first phone I used with Graphene was a Pixel 4XL. It didn't come with a fingerprint sensor. If I remember correctly, the longest lockout period was still really short, like 5 mins or something. It was rather annoying to constantly have to put in your unlock code when you wanted to use or check something on the phone.

Loved Graphene, and the Pixel worked flawlessly, but man, that unlock thing drove me nuts more than a few times.
by theendisney | 2026-01-30 22:15:26+00:00
Its been tried/done but attracted the same audience of investors looking to make a quick buck as opposed to looking to actually make it work.

From what i've seen you need some minimum percentage of makeithappen-ers amoung those interested in a project.

It seems the guy running the extension just left. With minimum influence on the value.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/b-dns/

https://www.coinbase.com/en-nl/price/namecoin
by jmyeet | 2026-01-30 22:15:27+00:00
This isn't a simple correction. I've been following this for a couple of months and there's a lot going on. I suspect this isn't over. It's noteworthy that the year 1980 because that was when the Hunt brothers tried to corner the silver market. It's often used as an example of the market correcting itself. It's actually a better example of how the exchanges broke the Hunt brothers to bail out the banks.

The key event that caused the collapse is sometimes called Silver Thursday [1]. The exchange changed the liquidity rules, forcing a margin call the Hunt brothers couldn't make, forcing a selloff. This was arguably to bail out banks with large short positions in silver.

Well, pretty much the exact same thing happened this week when COMEX massively increased the margin requirements [2]. It's worth noting that the market is in a state called "backwardation" where the spot prices are higher than future prices. Refiners aren't buying silver, even at the inflated spot price, because of price risk. But also, the COMEX spot price is increasingly being viewed as "fake" because foreign exchanges are paying significantly more for physical silver thna the paper COMEX price [3].

Basically, this whole thing looks like another GameStop ie a short squeeze. There's not enouugh physical silver to meet contract demands. There's like 300oz of futures silver contracts per 1oz of physical silver.

If you followed the original GameStop short squeeze, the price tumbled there too but didn't solve the short squeeze. You even have exchanges closing people's options positions (eg RobinHood) despite them being in the money.

Banks still need to cover their significant short positions and it really looks like the exchanges are trying to crash the silver market to do it.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Thursday

[2]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-28/cme-raise...

[3]: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4861917-why-silver-prices-i...
by ck2 | 2026-01-30 22:15:28+00:00
The coder and sensor manufacturers need the insurance for wrongful death lawsuits

and Musk for removing lidar so it keeps jumping across high speed traffic at shadows because the visual cameras can't see true depth

99% of the people on this website are coders and know how even one small typo can cause random fails, yet you trust them to make you an alpha/beta tester at high speed?
by Veserv | 2026-01-30 22:16:10+00:00
That is not true. Since Tesla was losing money on their insurance to boost sales the customers were not paying for it since they were receiving a service for below cost.

The people paying were actually the retirement funds who fronted Tesla's cash reserves when they purchased Tesla stock and the US government paying for it in the form of more tax credits on sales that would not have otherwise materialized without this financial fraud. But do not worry, retirement funds and the US government may have lost, but it boosted Tesla sales and stock valuation so that Elon Musk could reach his KPIs to get his multiple tens of billions of dollars of payout.
Show HN: I built an AI conversation partner to practice speaking languages
by omarisbuilding | 2026-01-30 22:16:19+00:00
Hi,

I built TalkBits because most language apps focus on vocabulary or exercises, but not actual conversation. The hard part of learning a language is speaking naturally under pressure.

TalkBits lets you have real-time spoken conversations with an AI that acts like a native speaker. You can choose different scenarios (travel, daily life, work, etc.), speak naturally, and the AI responds with natural speech back.

The goal is to make it feel like talking to a real person rather than doing lessons.

Techwise, it uses realtime speech input, transcription, LLM responses, and tts streaming to keep latency low so the conversation feels fluid.

I’m specially interested in feedback about:
– Does it feel natural?
– Where does the conversation break immersion?
– What would make you use this regularly?

Happy to answer technical questions too.

Thanks
by Noaidi | 2026-01-30 22:16:46+00:00
Where was the news when silver was going up and having the best days it’s had since 1981?

On January 26, 2026, silver experienced its largest one-day jump in 45 years, with front-month futures soaring by 14%. Spot silver prices surged to over $109 per ounce that day, driven by heightened safe-haven demand and industrial usage. The rally continued to push silver prices toward $120 by January 29, 2026.

And regardless, silver is still at an all-time high.

When you start saying that the news is biased against certain commodities or equities, you’ll start to see how the game is played. This is a tactic of JP Morgan.

Volatility is expected. Always remember that. Volatility is expected in fragile economies.
by r14c | 2026-01-30 22:17:33+00:00
I think the issue has generally been that web torrent doesn't work enough like the real thing to do its job properly. There are huge bit torrent based streaming media networks out there, illicit, sure, but its a proven technology. If browsers had real torrent clients we would be having a very different conversation imo

I don't remember the web torrent issue numbers off the top of my head, but there are a number of long standing issues that seem blocked on webrtc limitations.
by code443 | 2026-01-30 22:18:38+00:00
The rocker-bogie suspension is fascinating because it solves a real constraint problem with elegance rather than brute force—reminds me of how the best engineering often comes from working within limitations. As someone who's debugged systems under resource constraints, I'm curious whether the garage iteration process actually made it into the final Mars rover design, or if it had to be significantly redesigned for the extreme thermal/radiation environment.
Ask HN: Why is it so hard to get responses from founders over email?
by preston-kwei | 2026-01-30 22:18:48+00:00
I’m currently building a B2B product for SMBs and doing sales myself. The target users are early-stage founders.

I can usually get meetings through warm intros, but cold outreach over email has been inconsistent. My emails often get ignored, and I rarely receive replies.

For people who’ve sold products founder-to-founder: what actually changed outcomes for you?
by munificent | 2026-01-30 22:19:18+00:00
I'm not a business dude but even I can see one problem in his argument: He tacitly equates "agents use your software" with "your software survives". But having your software invoked by an agent doesn't magically enrich you. Up to now, human users have made software success by one of:

1. Paying money for the software or access to it.

2. Allowing a fraction of the attention to be siphoned off and sold to advertisers while they use the software.

I don't think advertisers want to pay much for the "mindshare" of mindless bots. And I'm not sure that agents have wallets they can use to pony up cash with. Hopefully someone will figure out a business model here, but Yegge's article certainly doesn't posit one.
by ninalanyon | 2026-01-30 22:19:19+00:00
Intelligent charging of EVs could make your grid more resilient rather than less. Especially if it is coupled with local solar. A friend of mine in central France has solar panels that he says provide almost enough for his EV on average. In the winter he has to take a little from the grid as well.

Norway has not switched to 100% EV. EVs are currently one third of the total private cars in Norway [1].

We are just close to all new private car sales being 100% EV.

The problems that most countries have with EV adoption are as much social and political as they are technical.

[1] https://elbil.no/om-elbil/elbilstatistikk/elbilbestand/
by IhateAI | 2026-01-30 22:19:24+00:00
Thank you, Its giving NFTs in 2022. About the most useful thing you could do with these things:

1. Resell tokens by scamming general public with false promises (IDEs, "agentic automation tools"), collect bag.

2. Impress brain dead VCs with FOMO with for loops and function calls hooked up to your favorite copyright laundering machine, collect bag.

3. Data entry (for things that aren't actually all that critical), save a little money (maybe), put someone who was already probably poor out of work! LFG!

4. Give into the laziest aspects of yourself and convince yourself you're saving time by having them writing text (code, emails ect) and ignoring how many future headaches you're actually causing for yourself. This applies to most shortcuts in life, I don't know why people think that it doesn't apply here.

I'm sure there are some other productive and genuinely useful use cases like translation or helping the disabled, but that is .00001% of tokens being produced.

I really really really can't wait for this these "applications" to go the way of NFT companies. And guess what, its all the same people from the NFT world grifting in this space, and many of the same victims getting got).
by brandonb | 2026-01-30 22:19:54+00:00
This was a write-up of a new study (TARGET-D) that used vitamin D supplements -- with the supplement amount guided by blood testing -- to reduce heart attack risk.

I've been working in heart health in 10 years and I was surprised at the magnitude of the effect here.

I hope it holds up as they move toward the final publication. Vitamin D supplementation is cheap and this could have a huge benefit.
by KK7NIL | 2026-01-30 22:20:04+00:00
Wow, you really don't realize that your friend group is extremely biased to people with maxed out 401k's and more money than they know what do, do you?

Meanwhile, between 60 and 77% of Americans report living paycheck to paycheck.
Sure seems unlikely that your claim that most Trump voters trade commodities is even remotely close to true.
by hamdingers | 2026-01-30 22:20:47+00:00
> if you don't own it, you'll end up paying more to the robotaxi company than you would have paid to own the car

Maybe for you, I already don't own it and have not found that to be true. I pretty much order an uber whenever I don't feel like riding my bike or the bus, and that costs <$300 most months. Less than the average used car payment in the US before you even consider insurance, fuel, storage, maintenance, etc.

I also rent a car now and then for weekend trips, that also is a few hundred bucks at most.

I would be surprised if robotaxis were more expensive long term.
by alexjray | 2026-01-30 22:21:37+00:00
Yeah I don't buy the build internally argument. Its not necessarily the building of an internal tool that is the problem it's the maintenance and service level guarantees that you get from a vendor that are arguable more valuable so you can focus on the thing that matters for your company. Product market fit is now more important than ever and there are so many additional options now; focus on the "right" thing is more valuable now than ever before.
by joshribakoff | 2026-01-30 22:22:15+00:00
> First let’s talk about my credentials and qualifications for this post. My next-door neighbor Marv has a fat squirrel that runs up to his sliding-glass door every morning, waiting to be fed.

Some of the writings here feels a little incoherent. The article implies progress will be exponential as matter of fact but we will be lucky to maintain linear progress or even avoid regressing.
by t-3 | 2026-01-30 22:22:36+00:00
Also:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46825863

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46826192

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46825319

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46824558
by ipaddr | 2026-01-30 22:22:44+00:00
The tactics have been unnecessarily brutal with weak results. That 6 week stay in Minnesota stay netted a 3000-6000 thousand people. If they wanted to deport a million a year they would need to do 3,000 a day.

The problem is they don't have enough dhs agents and are using the border guards who don't have that training and the local police won't help because they have been order not to. I think with the changes in leadership we are going to see less brutal unnecessarily actions less social media taunting but more deportations in a more humane way.
by crote | 2026-01-30 22:23:40+00:00
While this is definitely true, for a long time FreeCAD hasn't exactly made it a high priority to properly work around that.

For example, the Topological Naming Problem (as I understand it) is made quite bad due to OpenCASCADE design - but as we've seen with 0.19 and later it is possible in a lot of cases to work around that. But that's a lot of really hard work with relatively little reward, so for years it languished on the backlog, and users had to deal with even trivial designs randomly blowing up in their face for no clear reason.

The result is a CAD program filled with footguns. Nobody wants to address structural issues, so you just pretend they don't exist, hide a half-baked tutorial on a Wiki on how to work around the worst of them, and blame the user for holding it wrong.

Commercial applications can solve this by shoveling copious amounts of cash at any skilled developer who is able to make any real-world improvement - even when it's not a perfect solution yet. FLOSS applications have to wait for a developer to come around who is masochistic enough to tackle it for free.
by duffmancd | 2026-01-30 22:23:49+00:00
It is much like a game might use a physics engine, or a new language might use the LLVM backend. To overly simplify, a CAD kernel will keep a list of operations (make a cube of this size here, drill a hole of this depth here, round these edges but not those). And combine that into a final volume. These responsibilities only get more and more complex as a part gets more complex - so using a pre-built engine allows CAD software to focus on tools and workflows to translate human instructions into lower-layer kernel geometry: the UI/UX.
It also crosses into compatibility, if you use the same Kernel as another CAD it is much simpler to export/import from them. Otherwise you would have to reimplement their kernel (or enough of it), or be stuck exporting triangulated versions of the final volume - sort of like converting an image from vector to raster.