MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dijit | 2026-01-20 01:59:39+00:00
I’ve done more digging now because even though its apples to oranges, the UK itself is now no longer an empire, and we have a 50 year window on when it wasn’t…

So just for additional context on how wage growth compares across different periods (I’ve average across decades):

Victorian Britain (with empire):

- 50% real wage growth over 50 years (1800-1850)

Modern Britain (post-empire):

- 1970s-1980s: 2.9% annual real wage growth

- 1990s: 1.5% annual growth

- 2000s: 1.2% annual growth

- 2010s-2020s: essentially zero growth

Real wages grew by roughly 33% per decade from 1970 to 2007, then completely stagnated. By 2020, median disposable income was only 1% higher than in 2007; less than 1% growth over 13 years.

The really depressing bit? Workers actually did far better in the post-imperial period (1970-2005) than they ever did during the height of empire.

Which tells you everything you need to know about who was actually pocketing the imperial profits.

And the post-2008 wage stagnation shows the same pattern's still alive and well, just without colonies to extract from. Capital finds new ways to capture the gains; financialisation, asset inflation, whatever—whilst labour still gets the scraps.

Different methods, same fucking result.

The Victorian poor weren't sharing in empire's spoils, and modern workers aren't sharing in productivity gains either. I guess mechanisms change, but the outcome doesn't.
by jrm4 | 2026-01-20 02:00:30+00:00
But the thing is -- will it be?

Which is to say, let's take two extremes. The "vim" way vs. the ultra-Emacs way, right? The thing is, it will soon become trivially easy to modify your own "text editing environment," and by you I mean everyone?

The more I read this, the more I'm strongly predicting a resurgence in this sort of individualization.
by jadenpeterson | 2026-01-20 02:00:52+00:00
As someone who is eco-conscious, it's difficult to understand my social obligation to purchase a hybrid or electric vehicle. I've been driving the same shitty 2008 Hummer H2 (10-14 MPG) for years and I want to switch to electric, but I'm torn because it would put me further into personal debt to do so (and there's something to be said for the ecological impact of debt computing).

Obviously, there's a crapton of nuance here to unpack, but I'm fascinated by the tension between personal responsibility and the role of corporations here, and how those interact.
by FridayoLeary | 2026-01-20 02:00:59+00:00
Exactly. I won't even saying it's a good system, but it's a straw man he's attacking. Also, maybe i'm over sensitive but i feel like he's insinuating the constitution is wrong that it's inherently racist and elitist. Maybe i'm straw manning but sadly that choice of words often goes hand in hand with such ideas and reckless and poorly thought out solutions.
by baubino | 2026-01-20 02:01:27+00:00
This exactly. But the country never figured out how to deal with one state’s laws conflicting with another state’s laws (see the Fugitive Slave Act for example). The lack of resolution around conflict between the states (which remained unresolved even after a civil war was fought over it) is partly why the federal government began to grow as it took on the role of enforcing laws (like desegregation) that certain states would not.
by gnabgib | 2026-01-20 02:02:28+00:00
(2009) Popular:

9 months ago (227 points, 103 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43533826

2018 (223 points, 51 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17145811

2014 (450 points, 153 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7203095

2010 (80 points, 21 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1489497
by mullingitover | 2026-01-20 02:02:32+00:00
Believe it or not, people aren't buying Audis in China because they're thrifty.

China was a huge market for Audi in the past as luxury status symbol. However, now Chinese buyers are so enamored with new tech-heavy Chinese luxury cars that Audi had to go make a whole sub-brand specific to the Chinese market just to stay in the game[1].

[1] https://www.audi-mediacenter.com/en/press-releases/double-de...
by sklargh | 2026-01-20 02:02:33+00:00
I think a few things.

1. They do not have robust self-driving capability. At this level of expense I expect hands-free major highway driving.

2. They’ve removed a lot of physical buttons that improve quality of life, the level of technology in the cabin is simply overwhelming.

3. They’ve done a great job with the driving experience of the EVs but they have poor range relative to the competition.
by victoormt | 2026-01-20 02:03:38+00:00
Hi HN, i built PetMemories.io to help people dealing with the loss of a pet. Losing a furry friend is incredibly hard, and I wanted to use generative video to create a final, happy memory: seeing them peaceful and 'in heaven.'

How it works: The user uploads photos of their pet. The system processes these images using Nano Banana Pro for high-fidelity image synthesis and Veo 3 to generate the final emotive video. Once the AI finishes rendering the scene, the video is sent directly to the user's email.

The Tech Stack:

Frontend/Orchestration: Lovable (for rapid UI development).

Backend/Database: Supabase.

AI Video/Image: Veo 3 and Nano Banana Pro for the generation pipeline.

I know AI video can sometimes feel 'uncanny,' but for this specific use case, the feedback I've received is that it provides a unique sense of closure and comfort.

I’d love to get your thoughts on the output quality and the ethical considerations of using AI for grief and memorials. Happy to answer any questions about the integration with Veo or the workflow!
by SanjayMehta | 2026-01-20 02:03:49+00:00
I remember this term appeared around 2005 when Australia was upset with China over trade. Maybe it was valid rhetoric then, but since 2011 or so it's been linked in many countries with arbitrary policies made up in part by NGOs and think tanks.

One Indian economist has pointed out the circular nature of these "rules" - a hedge fund comes up with ESG rules, IMF et al adopt it and then use that to decline or foreclose on poorer country loans. International law and ratified treaties never come into the picture which is why this term "rules based order" is used: "we make the rules and will order you around."

(One of the reasons why the Chinese BRI is so successful is because the Chinese are much more clear in the transaction: resources for infrastructure. No silly ESG and climate rules.)
by belorn | 2026-01-20 02:04:22+00:00
Something that may be worth to know, women and men vote different in other countries and especially when it comes to left vs right. Women in Sweden votes with about 10 percentage points more towards left than men, and men vote 11 percentage points more towards right. Looking at the specific parties at far right and far left, around the 2/3 of the far right votes are from men while 2/3 of the far left is women.

A lot of research has been made on this subject and it should be noted that its primarily young voters that create this voting pattern.
by p_ing | 2026-01-20 02:04:25+00:00
Yes, deep async I/O has practical applications -- here's an example (which is now outdated, but sans io_uring, demonstrates the issues with "async I/O" on most Unicies sans Solaris) - https://speakerdeck.com/trent/pyparallel-how-we-removed-the-...

> Every OS will have to when it runs out of resources. No overcommitting means it's less resource-efficient too, so things aren't that simple.

NT does memory overcommit...

> When have OS personalities ever been a commercial success? Every product that built on it went nowhere.

Xceed made money off of it. Yes, every product has a shelf life. Just like every commercial Unix. They were successful at what they did until a replacement came along.

> Also, if you're extending this Linux / Windows comparison to include the userland, then Windows is no match for Linux. Not when Microsoft is actively sabotaging Windows.

You're not saying anything, here. "No match" how, exactly?

> There's more use to filesystems than mounting it at root. Are you really claiming that OS personalities are useful, but being able to mount any filesystem is not? That's absurd.

Absurd, how? Is mounting HFS /really/ that critical to your day-to-day?

> Which doesn't mean much without an ecosystem of programs using WinFsp that's comparable to Linux.

Movin' those goal posts!

> Uninformed? While an official Windows-themed Linux distro doesn't make sense,

You uh... did read the post, right? That's what the entire thing was about!
by ThrowawayR2 | 2026-01-20 02:04:34+00:00
The HN moderators have asked users to avoid summary comments: "Please don't post summary comments like this. I know they're well-intentioned, but they're not in the spirit of this site. HN threads are supposed to be curious conversations. Also, we want people to respond to the article, not to a summary." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39670657)
by wackget | 2026-01-20 02:05:04+00:00
> The top Stack Overflow answer on robots.txt has a discussion about Allow: / not being valid according to the spec. The only date for the comments is "Over a year ago" but given that the question is from 2010 the comments are probably from around that time.

Firstly, I detest that stupid "feature" of showing only relative dates. It makes screenshots impossible to date, and it's frankly useless for humans as proven by OP's article.

Secondly, you can hover over the relative date string to see the actual date. But don't let that stop you from hating it.
by jrm4 | 2026-01-20 02:06:11+00:00
Exactly. My journey is similar, probably because I've never had to code for a living. I started learning Vim. I dedicated 2 years to Emacs + Org-Mode.

And eventually I left. I've come to realize (for me) anything that can't do CUA keybinding easily and well, usually out of the box, is useless to me because I use other software.

So now I'm riding this weird middle space between Vim and Geany mostly because I haven't had time to dig into making something different. But I'm just about 100% certain that I'll be able to make a perfect-for-me bespoke text editor very soon, thanks to AI. I know it would have been possible in Emacs, I just didn't have the time.
by ericd | 2026-01-20 02:07:13+00:00
I don’t think this is accurate, Chinese firms are increasingly moving up the quality chain. You might want to look at some of the reviews of Xiaomi’s recently launched car. Also, Tesla Shanghai is one of their best factories, much better quality scores than Fremont iirc.

Having a totally local, integrated supply chain pays dividends in a lot of ways, as does leading in production volume. Tim Cook also gave that interview where he was just talking about the incredibly deep bench of industrial talent that you just can’t find outside China at this point - that labor cost wasn’t why they produced there.
by nickff | 2026-01-20 02:07:19+00:00
The Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility is still open, and hosting detainees: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp

Obama rejected signing statements on the campaign trail, but his actions in office were more nuanced: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signing_statement#Obama_admini...

Eric Holder, notable AG under the Obama administration had a very mixed record, and did not support limitations of his power, or oversight of his actions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Holder#Tenure_as_Attorney...
by rayiner | 2026-01-20 02:08:07+00:00
Victorian England was the richest country in the world by GDP per capita. But the world was just very poor before the industrial revolution: a per-capita GDP around $900. By 1800 England was more than double that. Today almost every country is richer than England was in 1800: https://www.broadstreet.blog/p/how-the-world-became-rich-par...
by rnjn | 2026-01-20 02:08:31+00:00
Metric Registry https://metric-registry.base14.io/ is a growing searchable catalog of observability metrics extracted directly from source repositories across the OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, and Kubernetes ecosystems. It scans code, documents and websites to gather this data.

If you've ever tried to answer "what metrics does my stack actually emit?", you know the pain. Observability metrics are scattered across hundreds of repositories, exporters, and instrumentation libraries. The OpenTelemetry Collector Contrib repo alone has over 100 receivers, each emitting dozens of metrics. Add Prometheus exporters for PostgreSQL, Redis, MySQL, Kafka. Then Kubernetes metrics from kube-state-metrics and cAdvisor. Then your application instrumentation across Go, Java, Python, and JavaScript.

Each source uses different formats:

OpenTelemetry Collector uses metadata.yaml files

Prometheus exporters define metrics in Go code via prometheus.NewDesc()

Python instrumentation uses decorators and meter APIs

Some sources just have documentation (if you're lucky)

You can see the details of how the registry was built on the repo - https://github.com/base-14/metric-library . the current setup scans through many sources and has details for 3700+ metrics. The scan runs every night(/day depending on where you live)
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-20 02:08:58+00:00
China has a third of global manufacturing capacity (and have to run flat out to avoid deflation due to domestic consumption that will never grow to meet domestic production capacity). Only the unsophisticated could believe the US is going to increase domestic manufacturing capacity at the levels needed to make domestic sourcing superior in some manner. That’s why these tariffs are not grounded in reality.

In three years at the most, these tariffs are done. Cheaper to eat the premium in the short term versus suboptimally invest capital in long duration investments (ie local factories and equipment to fill them). Manufacturing jobs continue to decline, as they have since the election.

US factory headcount falling despite Trump's promised manufacturing boom - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46638269 - January 2026

U.S. Among Top 3 Markets Manufacturers Are Leaving - https://www.manufacturing.net/supply-chain/news/22950252/us-... - September 16th, 2025

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TLMFGCONS
by p_ing | 2026-01-20 02:09:07+00:00
Home Depot used to have a large fleet of RHEL machines within the stores. Looks like they've more recently rolled to SuSe.

https://linuxdevices.org/linux-based-pos-rolls-into-home-dep... (2001!)

https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/data-center-site-selecti...
by aaarrm | 2026-01-20 02:10:16+00:00
It doesn't need to be tech. From the Guidelines section of HN:

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
by ipython | 2026-01-20 02:11:21+00:00
So it’s ok he was sent to CECOT in violation of an order not to in the first place? The original question was whether Trump ignored court orders. Id say that removing someone against a court order to a third country is a pretty big issue. Even if a year later after a huge public pressure campaign he is temporarily back in the states.

See https://marylandmatters.org/2026/01/16/whats-next-for-maryla...
by p_ing | 2026-01-20 02:12:44+00:00
> Windows is not actually backwards compatible; it's why they have something call "WoW" (Windows on Windows)

Boring semantics. Windows can run it. That's backwards compatibility.

NTFS is neither crappy or obsolete. Nor is ReFS. exFAT is crappy, but not obsolete. FAT32 is crappy and obsolete. UDF is well, UDF.

I think that's all of the on-disk formats Windows supports OOTB. But you can FUSE if you want more.

> device driver support isn't that great since it relies on vendors a lot still

As does Linux. Who do you think contributes those drivers to the kernel? Linus himself?
by skhameneh | 2026-01-20 02:13:36+00:00
This does read/interpret a bit odd, because the Hummer H2 doesn’t strike me as a reliable vehicle and I’ve generally heard of them to be cost sinks (completely disregarding the horrible efficiency).

Why not start off looking at the cheapest EV or PHEV that you can find without high mileage that’ll fit your daily driving habits, then give it a test drive?
Consider how much monthly expenses will cost (might save ~90% on fuel) and then consider if you like the driving characteristics more.
by K0balt | 2026-01-20 02:13:45+00:00
Bluetooth and specifically BLE is way more capable and versatile than most people understand. We are using it for a connectionless time synchronisation protocol that also contains a rudimentary control plane.

The clients can receive synchronisation data every minute and listen for a year on a coin cell. It’s broadcast, so a single beacon node can service hundreds of clients simultaneously.

BLE also can manage data connections over a kilometer and a half with reasonable (not great) antennas.

It’s not terribly fast, but modern radio protocols are opening up the possibilities. Lora and BLE are bringing the environment alive with communication.
by KnuthIsGod | 2026-01-20 02:13:51+00:00
Global sales of Porsche, Audi, Mercedes and BMW brand ( BMW Group sales increased marginally, but includes) have all declined.

The end is in sight for German cars as Chinese made electric cars take over.

I have had several German cars.
Never again !
Sticking to Japanese and probably Chinese cars in the future.

German cars were decent once.
Now they are notorious for poor long term reliability.
by sleepy_keita | 2026-01-20 02:14:50+00:00
I'm still pre-launch, but I've attended (and presented at) a couple conferences / industry events for my SaaS in Japan. You can get a lot of traction by getting out there and actually talking to people. Networking is important (probably this is the same anywhere?) and talking to other presenters is as important as talking to potential customers, because you can get that relationship going for mutual benefit.
by cosmicgadget | 2026-01-20 02:15:02+00:00
If you recall, this was my request:

> I am interested to hear your plan for Obama ending the wars that Cheney dumped on him.

Are you just trying to run out this clock with trying to relitigate who was ultimately responsible for Iraq and Afghanistan? I am guessing you have no answer because you can just barf copypasta about warmongering US presidents.
by BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 | 2026-01-20 02:16:42+00:00
You need to keep your nose on the grindstone for years to progress to glider cross country flying. Then you end up as an instructor and have to finagle time in your own glider. There's a bunch of time upgrading and updating flight instruments. You need a viable glider club to have enough people to get you in the air between working on club aircraft, equipment and airfield issues.

These guys had a big oxygen tank.

It's nice to see they were using an Air Glide S and managed to make their goal against the odd 56kt headwind.
by thaumasiotes | 2026-01-20 02:17:21+00:00
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cop_it

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cop_out

I don't see a gloss for "cop out" that matches the one you give, and the only one I'm personally familiar with is most similar to sense 1, "perform in an insufficient, negligent, or superficial manner".†

And even there, I would think of the derived noun as being the basic vocabulary item, even if the etymology is the other way around.

That said, the sense I get from "Cop cops it after Copilot cops out" is 'this is using vocabulary I don't know, because it's British', not 'how is it possible to put the words together this way?'. It looks like a fairly normal sentence using exotic vocabulary.

† As a separate issue, I don't think the gloss you give can be correct here, because the thing that's supposed to have copped out is Copilot, and what it did was to produce false statements, not surrender before a fight.

If we want to rephrase this headline to avoid any use of the token "cop(s)", it looks something like "Policeman gets in trouble after Copilot screws up" to me.
by cmrdporcupine | 2026-01-20 02:18:09+00:00
On my ASUS GB10 (like NVIDIA Spark) with Q8_0 quantization, prompt to write a fibonacci in Scala:

HEAD of ollama with Q8_0 vs vLLM with BF16 and FP8 after.

BF16 predictably bad. Surprised FP8 performed so poorly, but I might not have things tuned that well. New at this.

┌─────────┬───────────┬──────────┬───────────┐
│ │ vLLM BF16 │ vLLM FP8 │ Ollama Q8 │
├─────────┼───────────┼──────────┼───────────┤
│ Tok/sec │ 13-17 │ 11-19 │ 32 │
├─────────┼───────────┼──────────┼───────────┤
│ Memory │ ~62GB │ ~28GB │ ~32GB │
└─────────┴───────────┴──────────┴───────────┘

Most importantly, it actually worked nice in opencode, which I couldn't get Nemotron to do.
by Beijinger | 2026-01-20 02:18:25+00:00
I tried this a lot. It did not work for me. But I also only sent one email and did not follow up. A few points:

1. Getting rejected does not say anything about you. The guy they hire says a lot about the company.

2. "If the interviewer(s) in question feel like you're trying to circumvent them, you're probably making your case worse"

This is the whole point. In most cased you don't deal with an expert, but with HR. HR are idiots most of the time. HR, like real estate, has also very low entrance requirements. This does not mean that all people are idiots, but the field attracts idiots.

3. A job is a sale. You have to sell yourself. And unfortunately there is only one way to make the buyer happy: Sell him what he wants, not what he needs.
by Tachyooon | 2026-01-20 02:18:49+00:00
It's amazing to hear it's visible in such a big city. I don't have a good intuition for all the metrics that describe how strong this storm was/is, but when put like this it hits home.

Nice to hear earth weather apps also work great in space haha. I'll keep that in mind when I set up my own notifications. Hopefully I have time to look into it before the next storm hits.
by kalleboo | 2026-01-20 02:18:53+00:00
I still log into Facebook monthly to see updates from my parents/relatives, who still use it somewhat regularly. I can't remember the last time I saw a post from anyone I know personally under the age of 60, aside from the one guy who posts political rants every day.

I hear a lot of people talk about Facebook Marketplace, but that's not a thing where I live, that probably pushes up the numbers a lot. When I do log in I sometimes check on some of the retro tech/homelabbing communities and they seem pretty popular with many posts a day, so there are definitely people there.
by numpad0 | 2026-01-20 02:19:03+00:00
>> Social media itself is a grand experiment. What happens if you start connecting people from disparate communities, and then prioritize for outrage and emotionalism?
> It is a choice by the biggest social media companies to make society worse in order to increase profits.

I think there can be more pointy way to frame this ongoing phenomenon, such as that, the US invested in social media assuming it'll be the mainstay of its cultural dominance into the 21st century and it wasn't, but more of a giant oil pipeline with a check valve for US to be completely prone to East Asian influence, and it's scrambling at damage control.

US as it is has no cultural industrial base to produce social media contents. East Asian contents, if not East Asian indigenous social media, easily win the Internet leveraging universally strong public education, without even being intentional. That's what happened, and that must be the intent of shift into rage political shows which the US/EU can at least produce, even if it weren't useful.