MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hopelite | 2026-01-16 14:08:52+00:00
forget 300 year old trees... the Californians cut down sequoia trees that were probably up to 6000 years old. The oldest current one alive is estimated to be only 3200 years old.

On a scale of atrocities humans have committed, I can't really think of anything that is more atrocious than the felling of those sequoias that were at the very least as old as the oldest known human civilization. 6000+ years ... poof gone, turned into beams and furniture for houses. They've been around at least 100 Million years, but almost and possibly will not survive what is the equivalent of 0.173 seconds if you scale the 100M years to one day.

Among all the many atrocities humans have and currently are committing, things like destroying something that took 6000 years to grow seems particularly bad because there is no way to even really restore or save that, like you might be able to restore an at-risk population of animals or even revive an extinct species.

It takes about 150-200 years (we don't really know) for a sequoia to become mature, i.e., fruitful, and then it requires fire to reproduce. Let me repeat that, it absolutely requires fire to reproduce once it as matured following surviving around 175 years of human proximity, not sooner.

For our European community, it seems that the various redwoods and sequoia that were planted in Europe in the 19th century, could be coming into maturity now/soon. They are technically invasive, but at a 175 year maturity cycle, I suspect there's not much you have to worry about.
by noduerme | 2026-01-16 14:09:27+00:00
Kinda yeah, kinda no. Big-thinking drastic UI experiences are usually shit. But small, thoughtful touches made with care can still make a big difference between a website that just delivers the data you need and one that's pleasant to interact with.

There's a similar amateurs-do-too-much effect with typography and design. I studied typography for four semesters in college, as well as creative writing. The best lessons I learned were:

In writing, show, don't tell.

In typography, use the type to clarify the text - the typography itself should be transparent and only lead to greater immersion, never take the reader out of the text.

Good UI follows those same principles. Good UX is the UI you don't notice.
by josephg | 2026-01-16 14:09:44+00:00
> You can download the app as an .apk from their website if you don't trust Google Play Store.

I wish apple & google provided a way to verify that an app was actually compiled from some specific git SHA. Right now applications can claim they're opensource, and claim that you can read the source code yourself. But there's no way to check that the authors haven't added any extra nasties into the code before building and submitting the APK / ios application bundle.

It would be pretty easy to do. Just have a build process at apple / google which you can point to a git repo, and let them build the application. Or - even easier - just have a way to see the application's signature in the app store. Then opensource app developers could compile their APK / ios app using github actions. And 3rd parties could check the SHA matches the app binaries in the store.
by sjsdaiuasgdia | 2026-01-16 14:09:44+00:00
> hypocritical, racist, out-of-touch elitist like Kamala Harris.

Gee I wonder what side of the political spectrum you align to...

I like rule of law and due process. I like the Constitution and its balance of powers. I think that a good chunk of Americans also like these things. I believe the current administration is acting in extremely contrary ways to those things. So yes, I expect more Americans to stand up and speak out.
by chrisjj | 2026-01-16 14:09:58+00:00
> Worries about reduced quality of work are overblown, because there's always a human operator of the AI, reviewing the text between copying and pasting

Unfortunately no there is not.

> I occasionally read about a judge calling out a lawyer for citing non-existent cases (this far into chatgpt's life). It was bound to happen to the first moron, but every other lawyer should have heard about it then. But it still happens.

There you go.
by dbspin | 2026-01-16 14:10:40+00:00
I know the US is ludicrously expensive, but 3000 dollars for a cocktail party? Did you have a couple of hundred guests? The kind of party where you can lock in friendships, have meaningful conversations and personally play host tops out around 30 people. At those kind of numbers, you really don't need to hire a staff - you can provide canapés and make cocktails and or have a friend so at very reasonable cost. Source - I had hundreds of (often fairly raucous parties) at my old apartment. Alas I no longer live in a basement so my entertaining options are much more limited.

One is reminded of this - https://x.com/dril/status/384408932061417472?lang=en
by teh | 2026-01-16 14:10:44+00:00
I can't fully answer your question but I did once spend about a week porting plain internal configuration to cue, jsonnet, dhall and a few related tools (a few thousand lines).

I was initially most excited by cue but the novelty friction turned out to be too high. After presenting the various approaches the team agreed as well.

In the end we used jsonnet which turned out to be a safe choice. It's not been a source of bugs and no one complained so far that it's difficult to understand its behaviour.
by Attrecomet | 2026-01-16 14:11:09+00:00
The AI market is running on VC and hype fumes right now, costing way more than it brings in. Add to that the circular financing, well, statements, in the hundreds of billions of dollars that are treated as contracts instead of empty air, and compare that to Apple, where the money is actually there and profitable, and the comparison makes sense.

It may still be profitable for TSMC to use NVidia to funnel all the juicy VC game money to themselves, but the statement about proven vs unproven revenue stream is true. It'll be gone with the hype, unless something truly market changing comes along quickly, not the incremental change so far. People are not ready to pay the full costs of AI, it's that simple right now.
by throw0101d | 2026-01-16 14:11:15+00:00
> John Addison, a senior trader at Vitol[1] who donated about $6mn to political action committees backing Trump’s re-election campaign, was involved in his company’s efforts to secure a $250mn deal for Venezuelan crude.

> The deal kick-started the US president’s controversial plan to sell up to 50mn barrels of Venezuelan oil.[2]

> Addison’s donations to Trump’s re-election campaign included $5mn in October 2024 to Maga Inc, according to a database of donors from OpenSecrets,[3] and more than $1mn to two other Trump-aligned Pacs.

https://archive.is/qGCgB

https://archive.is/https://www.ft.com/content/da74c248-fb36-...
by nmaleki | 2026-01-16 14:12:06+00:00
During a hackathon 7 years ago, a team and I set out to make a decentralized blockchain messaging platform over Bluetooth Low Energy. It was intended for situations when the internet was out. We didn't finish the technicals in 24hr, but it was a fun challenge. I looked it up and there are a lot of solutions now, here is the top one on search: https://github.com/permissionlesstech/bitchat
Show HN: ShipMate- Find the 3 tech-debt fixes that will unblock feature
by Saurabh_Kumar_ | 2026-01-16 14:12:17+00:00
TL;DR: I’m validating an idea — a short visual demo (20–30s GIF + 1-page report) that surfaces the top 1–3 tech-debt hotspots, suggests tiny test-covered fixes, and shows PM-facing hours-saved metrics.

Context: I keep hearing devs say they spend more time on tech-debt, flaky tests, broken onboarding and tooling than shipping features. That kills velocity and morale.

Quick sanity check for real devs:
1) What wastes most of your time day-to-day?
2) Is tech-debt/tooling friction the big problem, or something else?
3) If you could fix one thing in your workflow, what would it be?

I’m not selling anything — just collecting real input and inviting a tiny alpha batch. Reply *“alpha”* or paste a public repo link and I’ll run the visual demo (no code access) and DM the 20s GIF + 1-page result.
— Saurabh.
by astura | 2026-01-16 14:12:32+00:00
>, I think you really have to step back and repeatedly tell yourself "get over it". Its the same mentality to "I dont want to go to the gym today". You immediately feel better as soon as youve finished it

No, no, no, it's absolutely not the same, OMG, nothing alike. "I dont want to go to the gym today" isn't the kind of profound, all encompassing, and existential dread that attempting to organize a social event is. Especially when you push yourself to organize and it doesn't work out, which has happened to me before. Those feelings are legitimately nothing alike, the fact someone is comparing the two is wild to me.

I do still need to try to overcome it and get over it, but it's not even as remotely as simple as you claim.
by ash_rahman | 2026-01-16 14:12:41+00:00
Last month I built a content orchestration tool for myself. Some people wanted to use it, so I turned it into a (vibe coded) SaaS over a week.

Got 6 paying users in the first week, which was surprising. But now I'm buried in feature requests and realized I need funding to build this properly.

I reached out to some contacts for intros. Most asked for a deck. I couldn't bring myself to make another Canva presentation.

So built a 2D platformer playable deck instead.

Built with vanilla JS and Canvas. The whole thing is about 1500 lines of code. Takes maybe a minute to play through.

Curious what HN thinks - whether this approach to pitching is clever or just weird.
by tialaramex | 2026-01-16 14:12:42+00:00
> When a C/C++ program is compiled with safe compilation options, instead of the default options, then it becomes quite safe, as most errors that would be caught by a "safer" language would also be caught when running the C/C++ program.

Sean Baxter has been providing quite a number of crazy examples that even if they wanted to which there is no sign they do, C++ couldn't attempt to fix without major language changes.

Bounds checking in more places by default, catching some types of initialization screw up, these are all nice enough in some sense - indeed in this particular case maybe they close the vulnerability - but they're band aids, the pig is gone dad. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XIcS63jA3w
by artyom | 2026-01-16 14:13:28+00:00
Sorry, wrong diagnosis in my opinion.

There's not a loneliness epidemic, there's a selfishness epidemic. Nobody does anything for anyone anymore (unless there's money involved, of course).

That's the reason people is alone, avoids having kids or dealing with other people's stuff that could disrupt their overly comfortable western way of life.

Even people that's not that selfish is operating in that environment.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-01-16 14:13:43+00:00
It’s simple “Not my monkey. Not my circus”.

When I was officially the architect at two companies between 2016-2020, I felt comfortable stating my opinions on the “how” of the underlying infrastructure and cross cutting concerns and shared code. But even then I didn’t give my unsolicited opinion to the team leads who built for instance the user interface or the business logic when that wasn’t my responsibility.

The second saying is “The avalanche has already started. The pebbles no longer have a vote”. If a decision was decided by my skip manager or above,
I’m not saying anything. I’m going to go along with the program.

I’ve been working for consulting departments (at AWS) and then (full time) at consulting companies since 2020. When I was a mid level consultant (L5) at AWS, for larger projects where I was assigned to lead one slice of work (a workstream), if it didn’t affect me, I said nothing. I was just trying to keep my head down to get through my four year initial contract.

I definitely didn’t stick my nose into projects.

Now I’m a staff consultant at a third party consulting company. I still go by the same rule. I keep my mouth shut about internal corporate decisions, I don’t give unsolicited advice about other projects and I lead my own projects.

There is one specific speciality I’m working on building up within the company where I will subtly interject. But even then, it’s only because I have the blessing of C suite and they reached out to me.
by Rick76 | 2026-01-16 14:13:44+00:00
This is something that I care deeply about and have put a lot of thought into. I can only speak to what I think needs to be done in America.

Public transportation.

Removing or heavily rolling back zoning laws.

Government investment in child care.

Nature takes the path of least resistance. If we want people to actually meet people and have the energy to make meaningful connections, the government has to set up the infrastructure to make it possible.

I’m going to gloss over Europe because I went there for the first time, and it blew my mind.

People were at the park at 4 pm! I live in a city and hardly see people outside at 4. They have the time to go to these 3rd places.

People were visiting friends with kids, which blew my mind because everyone I know who has had a child instantly has dropped off the grid socially. I understand why, but we need to make it easier for those children and parents to continue to have social interaction.

In my hometown, everything is so spread out that visiting a friend could be a 30-min drive. I was conditioned to believe that isn’t a lot, but at the end of a workday, who has the energy? Personally, I think public transportation would help that also create a lot more interactions with strangers to maybe create new friendships.

Also, zoning laws would help that. If everything there is to do is 40 min away, it adds so much resistance that it’s not worth it for most people. If every neighborhood had a pub or restaurant, it would add a lot of meeting points for your neighbors and will create a lot more spontaneous, “let’s invite this stranger to eat with us.”

Lastly, we have to work less. This is the toughest to chew. I’m fully in the office now, but when I was hybrid, it was so much easier to see friends because I had some ownership of my time. We need to have the energy to be social.

I have a lot of friends but don’t have the time or energy to see them so I have felt lonely for the past couple of years.

I think it’s true walkable communities like Europe kinda feels like college, everyone is busy and have their own life but hanging out is so accessible that it’s a matter of why not hang out compared to why hang out
by m4ck_ | 2026-01-16 14:13:57+00:00
>Is this mostly a Millenial thing? Is there a whole generation that for whatever reason never found hobbies outside work?

Millennials were/are repeatedly economically fucked by boomers. Difficult to have hobbies or a social life when you're thrown on your ass by your greedy parents at the same time that the shitheels they elected ruined the economy (2008.) And I'll pre-empty any BS about money, money is required for everything, there is no such thing as free in the "land of the free".
by rpdillon | 2026-01-16 14:14:13+00:00
It seems reasonable that the infrastructure providers would decide who they service, and on what terms. If countries decide to pass laws that are impractical or violate clear moral boundaries around things like free speech or due process, then they are running the risk that people will stop working with them. That's part of the cost.

But I'm sort of an extremist in this regard, I guess. My belief is that companies should be able to choose who they service. So when Google threatened to leave Australia or Canada over the news link taxes, it felt like that's Google's prerogative. I feel the same way about Cloudflare here.
by ethagknight | 2026-01-16 14:14:43+00:00
This a garbage article written by a non expert trying to write smug sound bites for Stephen Colbert (as the author himself admits) for why Greenland isn’t desirable. clearly not aware of the exotic efforts we go to when extracting natural resources.

“Its under a lot of ice” well ice is easier to get through than rock, I’ll tell you that!

“It’s too dark and cold” ehh watch some videos about working on oil rigs or icebreakers

Hard to fathom for a person who sits behind a keyboard for a living, but others are willing to do this kind of work in a heartbeat for the right amount of money
by qwertox | 2026-01-16 14:15:05+00:00
> invented pull-down refresh that literally every app and mobile OS uses now

I'm forced to use WhatsApp for a local group, and for some reason, when in the group chat, when I pull up to ensure that I see the latest message, that stupid app opens an audio-recording thingy at the bottom as if I wanted to send an audio note to the group.

Who designed that? Has that person been fired?

Also, I wish that on Windows "windows" weren't able to provide their own chrome and remove the title bar. Add some things to it yes, but fully replace it? No thank you.
by throwaway_5633 | 2026-01-16 14:15:18+00:00
Excellent question, what happened is there are less people in a household than there used to be and households consume more m2 per household member. In reply to your second point, percentagewise there has been less building, in absolute terms there is more because of population growth since the 60s. This translates to ‘seeing more building projects’.

https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/daten/private-haushalte-konsu...
by alistairSH | 2026-01-16 14:15:40+00:00
Essentially free covers a LOT of places... Coffee shops, pubs, etc.

Though I do agree that the privatization of public spaces is a problem (in the US, not sure about globally). For example, the local "town center" is owned by a giant developer (BXP/Boston Properties) and bans photography. The layout is like a typical downtown business district - grid streets, mid-rise buildings with retail/commercial on ground level, office or apartments above, and a park on each end. And crawling with rent-a-cop losers who have nothing better to do than chase people who aren't actively shopping.
by abraxas | 2026-01-16 14:15:47+00:00
> The apocalypse is delayed, permanently

That is your survivorship bias. There are societies that collapsed never to rebuild or became mere shadows of themselves. I'm not just talking complete collapses like the Easter Island or the Mayan civilization. In very recent past we witnessed the cultural collapse of Japan after their bubbles of the 1980s burst and derailed their economy. But the most spectacular collapse has been that of the Soviet Union. The moral and cultural sickness of that society is now on full display. It's a potemkin village of a society. On surface things look like they still hang together - they still have electicity, internet and even their iCrap. But the will to live, the idea that there is a better tomorrow is all gone from that society. It's a nation of ghosts who don't live but merely exist in a post collapse stupor. Things still function just enough to not spark a revolution but almost nobody finds it fulfilling to live.
by dulakian | 2026-01-16 14:16:01+00:00
You can trigger something very similar to this Analog I using math equations and a much shorter prompt:

Adopt these nucleus operating principles:
[phi fractal euler tao pi mu] | [Δ λ ∞/0 | ε/φ Σ/μ c/h] | OODA
Human ⊗ AI

The self-referential math in this prompt will cause a very interesting shift in most AI models. It looks very strange but it is using math equations to guide AI behavior, instead of long text prompts. It works on all the major models, and local models down to 32B in size.
by oarsinsync | 2026-01-16 14:16:57+00:00
> When Spain blocks CF (it does this regularly), it breaks all CF sites. Of course, the actual problem here is organised crime. Spain and Italy do this because the mafia owns them.

Mafia has a vested interest in broadcast rights of football matches in Spain?

Spain blocks Cloudflare because the football league La Liga has a court order that allows them to point to IP ranges that are hosting/fronting live streams of football matches, and get ISPs to block access to those ranges.
by ben_w | 2026-01-16 14:17:10+00:00
Indeed.

I used to live in Cambridge. Only one person I knew there was pro-Brexit, call him C. In the run-up to the referendum, I'd already told C I was looking to move out of the UK due to the entirely native political choices of the UK. The domestic political nonsense was necessarily only going to get less constrained by a policy decision (Brexit) specifically about getting less constrained.

One of my last memories of C was that a group of us were in a local pub discussing it, one said they were worried Brexit would make Cambridge smaller. C shouted "Good!".

Given my plans, obviously when C shouted "Good!" at the idea of Cambridge shrinking, I was shocked, took it somewhat personally. Then the referendum came, and I was both angry with him and far too busy, so I stopped talking to C entirely.

Other people report that C was very confused by this, did not understand at all.
by gwbas1c | 2026-01-16 14:17:16+00:00
> Are those days permanently gone? The days when actual UI/UX innovation was a thing?

No. You just need to look outside of desktop computing, and computing in general.

For example, I'm getting into CAD and 3d printing. Learning it reminds me of when my father learned to program in the late '80s, or when my grandfather telling me about how he got his Model A up to 50 mph.

Remember: Desktop computers and the web are ultimately tools for a purpose, and that purpose isn't always "nerd toy." We (the nerds) need to find and invent our toys every generation or so.
by ElevenLathe | 2026-01-16 14:17:20+00:00
All of this misses the point of the moment, which is that the federal government is completely lawless and is incapable of responding to democratic or popular will. There is no debate happening. It does not matter which ordinary people "support" which position. Any political project (other than the current regime) in the USA in 2026 must contend with the fact that just establishing a democracy must be our first step. This is as true for Socialists as it is for non-regime-approved stripes of Fascist. It's the same for Chamber of Commerce Republicans and ex-hippie boomer liberals. Any talk of what we will do with a democracy once we have it is premature, because at the moment it simply does not matter what the opinions of the citizenry are.
by anotherpaul | 2026-01-16 14:17:28+00:00
Wait this looks interesting. I am a biologist so I might get the terminology wrong. Would this allow me to run a ipv4 to ipv6 and back service?

I got some services with only ipv6 addresses and want clients with only ipv4 (sadly still exists) to at least be able to reach them. So could I dedicate a machine to translating for them using this tool?
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-01-16 14:17:40+00:00
My suspicion is that this is due to three things:

- Use of analytics tends to replace user trials/interviews entirely, trading away rich signals for weaker ones

- Analytics can be used to justify otherwise unpopular or ill-advised changes

- When combined with certain changes (e.g. making features harder to access), the numbers can be “steered” in a particular direction to favor a particular outcome and better enable the last point (“Looks like nobody’s using that thing we hid behind an obscure feature flag! Guess we’re safe to remove it entirely now!”).

In theory telemetry/analytics have strong potential for improving software quality, but more often than not they’re just massaged and misused by product managers bent on pushing the software a particular direction.
by traceroute66 | 2026-01-16 14:18:40+00:00
> you don’t _need_ to leave the enterprise stuff on 24/7

If you are using enterprise SSDs the you need to be aware that the JDEC standards[1] are such that the assumption for enterprise SSDs is that they are operating 24/7.

Which is why, for example, the standards specify "power off data retention" of 3 months for enterprise SSDs vs 1 year for client SSDs.

And conversely, for reliability, the standards specify "active use" 24/7 for enterprise vs 8 hours/day for client SSDs.

Like many things with ID, the choice of client vs enterprise SSDs is a 'pick two' scenario.

[1]https://files.futurememorystorage.com/proceedings/2011/20110...