MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Someone | 2026-01-23 15:24:14+00:00
> Having the government manipulate mass-media material is frankly insane.

It’s repeating history. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_So... with, for example

“On May 5, 1920, Lenin gave a famous speech to a crowd of Soviet troops in Sverdlov Square, Moscow. In the foreground were Leon Trotsky and Lev Kamenev. The photo was later altered and both were removed by censors.”
by roromainmain | 2026-01-23 15:24:24+00:00
I can’t access the article… but honestly, I’ve been asking myself the same question for the past ten years.
The best answer I’ve found is: not yet — but the current backlash and drift toward authoritarianism in many democracies is actually the sign that something real is shifting.
In a way, the situation looks weirdly similar to Europe before WWII. Democracies were starting to integrate some of the socialist ideas that had emerged in the 19th century, and the dominant forces of capitalism pushed back hard. They let fascists rise, sometimes even supported them. That led to a war, millions of deaths, and then a massive change of mindset: after WWII, every European country implemented strong social protection and regulation.
Today, the shift is less about social security and more about cultural transformation — the end of patriarchy, and with it the decline of imperialism and Western dominance. Those foundations started being seriously questioned in the 60s. The dominant forces are resisting because, deep down, they’ve already lost — there’s no going back. But as always, they can still cause immense damage on the way out. And yes, if they refuse to let go peacefully, it could lead to conflict, and a lot of casualties.
But after, democracy will make a come back. I may be too optimist.
Show HN: Free white noise mixer I built to help me sleep
by sanhenuger | 2026-01-23 15:24:30+00:00
Hey HN,

I've been having trouble sleeping lately. Tried various white noise apps but most are either paid or cluttered with ads. So I built my own.

https://whitenoiseforsleeping.rest

Features:
- Mix 6 nature sounds (rain, thunder, fire, wind, stream, birds)
- 7 ambient scene backgrounds
- Sleep timer with fade-out
- Settings auto-saved to localStorage
- No signup, no ads, no tracking

Tech stack: React + Vite, hosted on Cloudflare Pages.

The rain + fire combo works surprisingly well for me - usually fall asleep within 20 minutes now.

Would love to hear your feedback or suggestions for improvement.
by awestroke | 2026-01-23 15:24:49+00:00
1. Zen Browser had remote debugging enabled by default and disabled the security prompt for it. Extreme incompetence or malice? https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/pull/927

2. Social trackers are selectively allowed, unsigned extensions are enabled by default, and Enhanced Tracking Protection isn't fully implemented.

There's just a theme of incompetence, trying to cover it up and just in general being clueless about security.
by Havoc | 2026-01-23 15:24:51+00:00
Unfortunately I suspect yes - for practical reasons not directly linked to demographics

It’s hard to beat the raw power of central control when you need something specific done sharpish at any cost.

See chinas quest for catching up with asml. Asml arose under the western order certainly but I don’t think the western order could will it into existence the way an autocratic government can. And that i think is going to become a big problem as progress speeds up and more of these pivotal junctures come up in quick succession
by aurareturn | 2026-01-23 15:25:12+00:00
“For this not to be a bubble by definition, it requires that the benefits of this are much more evenly spread,” said Nadella. He noted that a “tell-tale sign of if it’s a bubble” would be if only tech groups were benefiting from the rise of AI, rather than companies in other sectors.

“I’m much more confident that this is a technology that will, in fact, build on the rails of cloud and mobile, diffuse faster, and bend the productivity curve, and bring local surplus and economic growth all around the world,” he said.

Headline doesn't match his thoughts.
by skybrian | 2026-01-23 15:25:20+00:00
Yep, but I don’t intend to let that happen to my web app! It’s not that big and I intend to keep it that way.

Dependencies are minimal. There’s no CSS framework yet and it’s a little messy, but I plan to do an audit of HTML tag usage, CSS class usage, and JSX component usage. We (the coding agent and I) will consider whether Tailwind or some other framework would help or not. I’ll ask it to write a design doc.

I’m also using Deno which helps.

Greenfield personal projects can be fun. It’s tough to talk about programming in the abstract when projects vary so much.
by amiga386 | 2026-01-23 15:25:22+00:00
They can still be professional, but Tory cuts made there be a lot fewer police (23,500 police cut from 2010-2019: https://www.gmb.org.uk/news/shock-figures-reveal-23500-polic...) so they don't have the manpower to sit about waiting for speeders.

The UK is not alone in using traffic cameras to enforce speed restrictions. There was a funny example in Germany where their automated cameras blur the face of any passenger... leaving them to be unable to see who was driving a UK left-hand-drive car with Animal from the Muppets in their passenger seat: https://boingboing.net/2008/10/27/german-traffic-cops.html
by michaelsbradley | 2026-01-23 15:25:40+00:00
I think you’re referring to the phenomenon named “incorruptibility”:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorruptibility

Recent case, died 2019, found not decomposed in 2023, had not been embalmed, unsealed wood coffin:

https://www.ncregister.com/cna/incorrupt-body-of-sister-wilh...
by faxmeyourcode | 2026-01-23 15:25:49+00:00
I'm sure the same could be said about tractors when they were coming on the scene.

There was probably initial excitement about not having to manually break the earth, then stories spread about farmers ruining entire crops with one tractor, some farms begin touting 10x more efficiency by running multiple tractors at once, some farmers saying the maintenance burden of a tractor is not worth it compared to feeding/watering their mule, etc.

Fast forward and now gigantic remote controlled combines are dominating thousands of acres of land with the efficiency greater than 100 men with 100 early tractors.
by bmitch3020 | 2026-01-23 15:26:15+00:00
Another year, another story written about the demise of Docker. This has been happening since before Kubernetes took off. My own take:

Docker had a choice of markets to go after, the enterprise market was being dominated by the hyperscalers pushing their own Kubernetes offerings. So they pivoted to focus on the developer tooling market. This is a hard market to make work, particularly since developers are very famous for not paying for tooling, but they appear to making a profit.

With Docker Hub, it's always been a challenge to limit how much that costs to run. And with more stuff being thrown in larger images, I don't want to see that monthly bill. The limits they added hurt, but also made a lot of people realize they should have been running their own mirror on-prem, if not only to better handle an upstream outage when us-east-1 has a bad day.

Everything else has been pushing into each of the various popular development markets, from AI, to offloading builds to the cloud, to Hardened Images. They release things for free when they need to keep up with the competition, and charge when enterprises will pay for it.

They've shifted their focus a lot over the years. My fear would be if they stayed stagnant, trying to extract rents without pushing into new offerings. So I'm not worried they'll fail this year, just like I wasn't worried any of the previous years when similar posts were made.
by mrweasel | 2026-01-23 15:26:33+00:00
I don't know about others, but we have special rules for Google, Bing, and a few others, rate-limiting them less than some random bot.

The problem is scrapers (mostly AI scrapers from what we can tell). They will pound a site into the ground and not care and they are becoming increasingly good at hiding their tracks. The only reasonable way to deal with them is to rate-limit every IP by default and then lifting some of those restrictions on known, well behaving bots. Now we will lift those restrictions if asked, and frequently look at statistics to lift the restrictions from search engines we might have missed, but it's an up hill battle if you're new and unknown.
Transformers are like great eyes, while Recurrent models are like a stomach
by MrPan | 2026-01-23 15:26:44+00:00
I’ve been training two small models on a classic long novel (Hongloumeng, 2.6M bytes) to see how they "learn" a story. After a few days of watching the logs, I noticed something interesting about where Transformers struggle.

The "Goldfish" Problem The Transformer is incredibly fast at learning how to finish a sentence. Because it uses "Attention," it’s like a student with perfect short-term memory. But it is "blind" to the long run. It only sees 128 characters at a time. It has no way to remember the beginning of the book while it's reading the end.

The Crossover My "Infinite Brain" model (a recurrent architecture) started out much worse. It was confused and the output was garbage. But around the 5th time reading the book, it "crossed over" and started beating the Transformer.

Because the Brain carries a small "memory state" forward forever, it eventually builds a "vibe" of the whole book that the Transformer just can't see.

What I learned:

Transformers are like great eyes: They see the immediate details perfectly.

Recurrent models are like a stomach: They digest the whole thing slowly, but they keep the "nutrients" of the story for much longer.

It’s a small toy experiment, but it reminded me that while Attention is powerful, having a persistent "soul" or memory state still matters for long-form data.

Loaded 2634700 bytes. Each batch chunk: 82334
Total steps to read book once: 643
Step 20 | Brain: 5.563 | Trans: 4.369
SAMPLE: 黛玉|)'Q:��t�д��T*��䎰�"��-��H�
Step 40 | Brain: 5.397 | Trans: 3.469
SAMPLE: 黛玉C9j������%�����H�)���IF�
Step 60 | Brain: 5.256 | Trans: 3.181
SAMPLE: 黛玉���f�XݪsʇGa���7��K��|)[o
Step 80 | Brain: 5.107 | Trans: 3.015
� ����EU) 玉�����.��-n�������:
Step 100 | Brain: 4.925 | Trans: 2.891
SAMPLE: 黛玉���5��X3�"��䜍��r��V:ی��;(�

......

Step 5540 | Brain: 2.057 | Trans: 2.327
SAMPLE: 黛玉，只賈王夫白說．這毫
Step 5560 | Brain: 2.079 | Trans: 2.354
SAMPLE: 黛玉了一大人，然時眾不要
Step 5580 | Brain: 2.112 | Trans: 2.381
SAMPLE: 黛玉姐的個
坐叫來．不著�
Step 5600 | Brain: 2.115 | Trans: 2.394
SAMPLE: 黛玉天豥太人說䟥這撆， �
Step 5620 | Brain: 2.026 | Trans: 2.290
SAMPLE: 黛玉奶歉打．命盞嚄看梅聴
Step 5640 | Brain: 2.134 | Trans: 2.414
SAMPLE: 黛玉圉起不又尚不什了，政
Step 5660 | Brain: 2.071 | Trans: 2.331
SAMPLE: 黛玉怎我古搬親就徴上一就
Step 5680 | Brain: 2.127 | Trans: 2.361
SAMPLE: 黛玉，，越于頭姐姒實眒頓
Step 5700 | Brain: 2.175 | Trans: 2.436
SAMPLE: 黛玉的你
又罜家中還太歉�
Step 5720 | Brain: 2.127 | Trans: 2.348
SAMPLE: 黛玉半，他面是以． "釳有�
Step 5740 | Brain: 2.141 | Trans: 2.394
SAMPLE: 黛玉，是難隄日既．阯要听
Step 5760 | Brain: 2.170 | Trans: 2.429
SAMPLE: 黛玉寶便吃，有了。”凌的
Step 5780 | Brain: 2.145 | Trans: 2.378
SAMPLE: 黛玉那好，乴日不拍說賈拿
Finished Read #9
Step 5800 | Brain: 2.092 | Trans: 2.376
SAMPLE: 黛玉人來，姐气有你兄話．
Step 5820 | Brain: 2.058 | Trans: 2.321
SAMPLE: 黛玉了．政遚的�，著嬑
家

https://github.com/MrPan2048/GeometricTransformer
by fzeroracer | 2026-01-23 15:26:44+00:00
> Did you pay any attention at all to the 2024 election? Biden's age? Inflation? The half-hearted, too-late pivot on border enforcement? What you say is nonsense. It's twisted misinformation. There was a lot more going on.

Did you? Biden and the Democratic party was entirely focused on attempting to appeal to 'centrists' and Republicans, exactly what you wanted and they lost because of it.

> Yeah, it's cathartic to act like a kid on a playground, and unleash your inner asshole because some other kid was mean, but it's stupid and immature.

No, it's called having an actual policy and stance. If someone's behaving like a dumb asshole then they should be called out on being a dumb asshole. We should expect more from our politicians and one of those things involves actually calling this shit out.

> The dems are weak, but that's because they want to stay exactly as they are instead of becoming a truly majoritarian party. If the dems make Trump-like power grabs (as many liberals fantasize about), it'll just make Trump stronger, because he can and will use the backlash.

At this point, the only recovery from the damage Trump has inflicted upon this country is going to be a massive power grab. That means dissolving ICE and arresting everyone involved, packing the supreme court, pulling out all of the Trump appointees and criminally investigating everyone involved with this administration. And let me be very clear: any Dem that does not agree not only deserves to lose, but they deserve to be harassed for the rest of their life and never, ever hold another job again. There is no middle ground anymore.
by atonse | 2026-01-23 15:26:45+00:00
I disagree. As much as I hate speed cameras, the way they’ve been implemented (meaning, the fact that you get a letter with evidence and it’s clear you committed the offense, and usually no points, like you might get from a cop) seems to strike a balance of fair punishment.

Now, whether they’re that effective at reducing speeding is a bigger question. Because people just slam the brakes for the 100 feet around the camera and then resume speeding.
by CodeMage | 2026-01-23 15:26:52+00:00
As GP pointed out, "hero" is a word with overloaded semantics. I think Adams was using different semantics for different occurrences of "hero" in that phrase. Arthur Dent has a "heroism", as in a kind of courage that people would want to emulate, without being "heroic", as in performing great sacrifices for a noble cause.

I also believe Adams was trying to point out, very gently, the same cultural difference I called out in the comment I replied to, i.e. that the American culture attaches certain expectations and connotations to the word "hero" not because they are intrinsic to it, but because of American bias.
by pjdesno | 2026-01-23 15:26:59+00:00
Tesla finance seems legendary in this regard. A friend here in MA got hauled down to city hall because their auto excise taxes were 3 years overdue - they're the responsibility of the owner of a leased car, in this case Tesla finance. According to the person there, the town (50K people or so) had a bunch of Tesla owners in the same boat.
by graypegg | 2026-01-23 15:27:06+00:00
It's a !! Science Alert !!

I feel like I've seen enough of these "X is good/bad for Y" articles on these popsci explainer sites surrounded by the same ads for an entire lifetime. Not that I don't think this is actual research, it's just the canonical link we end up with here on HN is probably... not the ideal one.

I wanted to grab the journal link, but going back to the article now, I'm trapped in a "keep reading" loop that blocks the article, so I can be told "Mouse Study Suggests Nose-Picking Has a Surprising Link With Alzheimer's". If I could use an adblocker on the work PC I would.
by bzmrgonz | 2026-01-23 15:27:36+00:00
Amen to that.. those tripple-E bastards are likely to use that playbook again. Best advise is to seek fertile grounds where freedom grows. I can't wait for Europe's cloud offering, I believe they're gonna serve as the middle ground between greedy tech-bros and china's fake free as in free beer products. Pack up your bags IT HOBBITS, we're moving to middle earth.
by BugsJustFindMe | 2026-01-23 15:28:19+00:00
Transference doesn't matter, because exchange is not a requirement for gain. People get things merely from having prestige/influence/power all the time. It's sometimes called an award, and sometimes called tribute, and sometimes called currying favor.

> you can sell the bitcoins

Prestige is influence, and you can absolutely sell the use or effects of influence.

> There are exchanges that declare their exact value.

Payment does not need to have exact value, just non-zero expected value, which prestige definitely has. There is no exact value to startup equity either, but it's still rightly considered to be compensation for investment of labor and money.
by kkkqkqkqkqlqlql | 2026-01-23 15:28:29+00:00
Problem is, these kinds of media end up pushing nostalgia for a warped version of an old time. It's like anything based in the 50s or 60s in USA and is not full of racism. My go-to example these days is the Fallout tv show.

That said, you actually can create something positive set in that time while also portraying the bad. For instance, in Bill Burr's F Is For Family.
by oofbey | 2026-01-23 15:28:39+00:00
True. But “big beef” is complicated and difficult to make reliable. Horizontal scaling of unreliable servers is dirt simple to stay up through almost anything except sudden load spikes. And then it’s largely a matter of configuring your auto scaling and retries.

That said big beef is so simple to start with. And this story is a strong example that YAGNI is a practical reality for almost everybody wrt “distributed everything”.
by csense | 2026-01-23 15:28:45+00:00
When someone says "stream data over the Internet," my automatic reaction is "open a TCP connection."

Adding a database, multiple components, and Kubernetes to the equation seems like massively overengineering.

What value does S2 provide that simple TCP sockets do not?

Is this for like "making your own Twitch" or something, where streams have to scale to thousands-to-millions of consumers?
by pixl97 | 2026-01-23 15:28:53+00:00
>All Silicon Valley has to do is to grow up into a mature industry with sensible business practices

Negative sum game: Growing up is easy if it doesn't kill you. The problem with being ethical when everyone else is unethical is that you'll likely go broke.

The next issue is we're seeing, is not that Silicon Valley is ever going to improve, but the bullshit is spreading to eat up every other industry in the US. Engaging in outright fraudulent behavior is A'ok in the US (I mean we even elected a president convicted on a pile of counts of fraud).

Effectively industries cannot manage themselves, we need regulations to prevent them from being bastards. Problem, we elect bastards that cannot keep from committing fraud themselves.

It doesn't get better from here.
by formerly_proven | 2026-01-23 15:29:54+00:00
> I'm surprised such a library ever got popular.

Because it is not popular.

pg_query (TFA) has ~1 million downloads, the postgres crate has 11 million downloads and the related tokio-postgres crate has over 33 million downloads. The two postgres crates currently see around 50x as much traffic as the (special-purpose) crate from the article.
by ano-ther | 2026-01-23 15:30:07+00:00
He got some free programming lessons as well. Not sure if that makes me trust his ”verification device to fraud-proof money transfers.“

> The next morning they bring this guy named Chris, a technical expert. He says, “Come out here, explain your tech.” I do my pitch. I say, “Look, I’m not a very good hardware engineer, but I’m a great user of AI.”

> Chris and I go line by line through the code. I don’t know the language that the code was written in because it was written in AI, so Chris actually explained the code to me.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-01-23 15:30:18+00:00
These vapid fanboy-esque comments make me significantly more likely to believe that Proton is astroturfing than the inverse that you are implying, that some unspecified actor is engaging in a conspiracy to impugn Proton's reputation. That said, if criticising Proton is indeed a paid vocation and you have some concrete details about where I can get paid for my comments daring to doubt the uncompromising holiness of Proton, I'm all ears.
by sensecall | 2026-01-23 15:30:20+00:00
It's a ludicrous system – I've experienced it first hand.

If for some reason the letter isn't delivered (or indeed sent), the original offence is scrapped and a new offence issued for Failure to provide information.

Frustratingly, there is no obligation on the Police to provide proof of posting, and per the law, it is deemed received once sent.

Try proving you didn't receive something...
by graemep | 2026-01-23 15:30:23+00:00
> This kind of behavior is much more common in 3rd world countries. One of the key differentiators in western society is how much we value trust, and “doing the bare minimum to get it done” is low trust.

Having lived in both a developed western country and a third world one I think this is simplistic.

As far as quality goes there were (there are fewer now) there are lots of Sri Lankan manufacturers that used to produce high quality (at least in terms of reliability and durability), and some Indian ones that were popular there too.

As far as trust in general what you trust is different. In Britain I have more trust in being able to enforce a written contract through the courts because they are faster and more accessible (e.g. an easy not navigate small claims court, far less time to get to a judgement in most courts) but I would generally be more willing to trust an individual to keep their word in Sri Lanka (with caveats about how and in what circumstances) because reputations matter more.
by Devasta | 2026-01-23 15:30:47+00:00
Its really bizarre, you talk about Rust or TypeScript and everyone understands how doing a little bit extra planning up front yields to great results as everyone can work from solid foundations, but you suggest they do the same for your data by using XML and its wailing and gnashing of teeth, bringing up anecdotes about SOAP and DTDs like we're all still living in 2003, concatenating strings together for our XML and trying to find answers to problems on forums or on ExpertSexChange.

The vast, vast majority of devs today have never known anything except JSON for their React frontends, but honestly if they gave XML a try and weren't working from second hand horror stories from 20 years ago I think a lot more people would like it than you expect.
by endiangroup | 2026-01-23 15:31:19+00:00
AD: I'll take a stab, but I am a new joiner!

Each repository is governed by an identity document which is signed by a set of delegates, each delegate currently corresponds 1:1 to someones ssh-key. We are working to adjust this mechanism so you can have group identities, but its a hard problem and we're not the only ones working on it (note theres light at the end of this tunnel at this point).

Seeing as you studied philosophy I'd argue what then do you mean by a solution? Aren't all solutions transmutations of prior 'things'? In the complex domain we have a word for it, exaptation - the radicle repurposing of something in a new context.

That aside, how do you know which people to trust when you meet them? And how do you signal trust in those you've met? In Radicle holding stable cryptographic identities doesn't resolve the zero-to-some trust problem but it does resolve the some-to-more trust problem, I can continue trusting once I recognise and know an identity.

So to answer "how is that trust distributed to parties in the network" - by stable cryptographic identities.

To answer "how do I know which stable repository identities to trust" - by socialising, like you know how to trust people you meet in the world because you were introduced to them by someone else you trust.
by orlp | 2026-01-23 15:31:44+00:00
Bloom filters also become full.

As it fills up the false probability rate goes up. Once the false probability rate reaches the threshold of unacceptability, the bloom filter is full, and you can no longer insert into it.

That most interfaces still let you do something that looks like an insert is an interface failure, not a bloom filter feature.

If you find this controversial and want to reply "I don't have a threshold of unacceptability", I'll counter that a false probability rate of 100% will be reached eventually. And if you still find that acceptable, you can trivially modify any probabilistic filter to "never become full" by replacing the "is full" error condition with setting a flag that all future queries should return a false positive.