MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Anonyneko | 2026-01-23 16:10:49+00:00
> Agricultural surpluses were skimmed by the church and the feudal lords

It's honestly amazing how this was the norm for so much of our history, given how much it demotivates the villages from growing more produce, which in turn means the lords can't get any more of it either (unless they wage constant wars against their peers, which they naturally did).
by afandian | 2026-01-23 16:10:52+00:00
And yet was an absolute marvel of engineering. I often used to wonder at the accuracy and reliability they got out of those stepper motors, trying to imagine the size of the tracks.

Fun thought experiment. The 128 GB SD card on my desk could store a 1-bit bitmap of 1,000,000 x 1,000,000 pixels. Imagine shrinking that down to the size of the die, and how small each (logical) cell is.
by mothballed | 2026-01-23 16:11:04+00:00
It is interesting to note Liberia has(had) a similar constitution, although they seem to have done better at preserving freedom, and overall a quite different result in what they've got. You can build a house without code psychopaths condemning it because you broke some silly rule, you can raise your children mostly as you see fit without fascist CPS agents who pretend to be the ultimate parent scrutinizing you, they do not have much of any functioning immigration police, not much of any enforcement on the "war on drugs", the government is overall a pretty low % of GDP, and they only have 10% the amount of prisoners per capita as the US.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-23 16:11:07+00:00
That implementation sounds really awesome but it raises a few questions for me (that I didn't immediately see when skimming the landing page although I realize answers might be in the docs somewhere).

I found the answer to one of them (how automatic pinning works) which I'll paste here because others are likely to wonder as well. Related, I assume there's a way to block overly large files if you run a seed node?

> They can vary in their seeding policies, from public seed nodes that openly seed all repositories to community seed nodes that selectively seed repositories from a group of trusted peers.

Suppose I'm A and I collaborate with B, C, ... Z. If I file an issue locally and sync to C, am I able to see if and when that propagates through the network to everyone else? I guess what I'm wondering about is what the latency, reliability, and end user understandability are like when using this to collaborate in practice. Like if I file an issue on GitHub I know that it's globally visible immediately. How does that work here?
Where is society heading, is there a plan for a jobless future?
by evo_9 | 2026-01-23 16:11:36+00:00
For the better part of a past decade, probably longer, I've had a running conversation with friends and my father before he passed away about this. I would say to them - set the timeline as short or wide as you like, the writing is on the wall that eventually we will automate virtually all jobs out of existence. Then what? How does society function, how does the government handle this? What will everyone do when there are no jobs left to be done? How will the ultrarich handle the seemingly inevitable end of money and wealth as we know it today?

I would argue that something like Universal Basic Income is necessary, and likely a short-term stopgap at best. While we might not reach AGI soon (or ever), that doesn't mean LLM's aren't going to continue to improve and continue to replace / displace job sectors - they're already 'good enough' to have an impact on the software industry. One could argue that physical labor jobs are safe, but that's only true while Boston Dynamics type robots are still too expensive to justify. Like everything, the cost will continue to come down on robotics, and the convergence of AI with something like Boston Dynamics will eventually impact non-white-collar work. Again, set the time-line as you like, it's 'not a will it happen', but a 'when will it happen'.

Are governments aware of all this? Are they planning for a sort of post-money world? What happens when all jobs are automated and companies achieve even higher profits? Taxing them more and has its limits. Who is going to buy their products if everyone is out of work? Are we heading toward a sort of Star-Trek style social structure where money is no longer a thing? I used to conclude with my dad that these were problems far off in the future - and that may very well be true still - but having two kids under 5, it feels like this future isn't as far off as it used to be, and I really wonder what kind of work/world they'll be living in when they're my age.
by dspillett | 2026-01-23 16:12:01+00:00
> When you explain a technical problem to someone who isn't intimately familiar with it you're forced to think through the individual steps in quite a bit of detail.

The point of Rubber Ducking (or talking/praying to the Wooden Indian, to use an older phrase that is steeped in somewhat racist undertones so no longer generally used) is that it is an inanimate object that doesn't talk back. You still talk to it as if you were explaining to another person, so are forcing yourself to get your thoughts in order in a way that would make that possible, but actually talking to another person who is actively listening and actually asking questions is the next level.
by inanutshellus | 2026-01-23 16:12:02+00:00
> research suggests it’s not true

You misread. Betteridge's law says it can be "no"...

I think though his "law" is referring to clickbait that imply a falsehood to get you to read it.

"New Research asks - Can your baby live entirely off of kelp?!" ... "wow can she? that's nuts! lemme read! oh. no."
by unethical_ban | 2026-01-23 16:12:27+00:00
I thought the same thing last night when this was first posted. Lots of "if they can't get this right do they even care about users" as if a slipped-up miscategorization of a marketing email is the same as an oil company leaking waste into a river.

I operate on the assumption they hold firm on their technical commitments of encrypted email, email obfuscation, decent VPN and a solid password manager.

Call them out on mistakes, sure, but this blog post was written like a manifesto for something so minor.
by Noaidi | 2026-01-23 16:12:51+00:00
> Starlink etc. use directed spotlight-like beams, so if you're not near a receiver (on the road) then no signal will be present. Why would they waste energy directing the signal anywhere other than where their dishes are?

You do not know how starlink downlinks work, so I can excuse your comments to ignorance. One person using a starlink antenna requires a beam from a satellite that covers about a 16 mile diameter with the power obviously being highest closest to the antenna. But anyone withing that hexagon will be exposed to mmWave radiation. It is not the "spotlight" you assume it to be. More like a flood light. "Narrow" is subjective in this case.

https://redlib.perennialte.ch/r/Starlink/comments/lwfj8v/map...

http://www.satmagazine.com/story.php?number=1026762698

This papare goes into the beam forming very expertly:

https://people.engineering.osu.edu/media/document/2022-10-12...

And it is not about only the power, it is about the effect. The same power used to push a 400 pound man vs a 40 pound child, you tell me the difference in outcome. As I said, you can be more skeptical and undecided and have a discussion with me, or just think that everyone has the same genetics and sensitivities and go on with your life.
by Const-me | 2026-01-23 16:12:53+00:00
> It was never the right choice for API payloads and config files

Partially agree about API payloads; when I design my APIs I typically use binary formats.

However, IME XML is actually great for config files.

Comments are crucial for config files. Once the complexity of the config grows, a hierarchy of nested nodes becomes handy, two fixed levels of hierarchy found in old Windows ini files, and modern Linux config files, is less than ideal, too many sections. Attributes make documents easier to work with due to better use of horizontal screen space: auto-formatted JSON only has single key=value per line, XML with attributes have multiple which reduces vertical scrolling.
by gajus | 2026-01-23 16:12:55+00:00
I started to use AI agents for coding and quickly ran into a frustrating limitation – there is no easy way to share my development environment logs with AI agents. So that's what is Teemux. A simple CLI program that aggregates logs, makes them available to you as a developer (in a pretty UI), and makes them available to your AI coding agents using MCP.

There is one implementation detail that I geek out about:

It is zero config and has built-in leader nomination for running the web server and MCP server. When you start one `teemux` instance, it starts web server, .. when you start second and third instances, they join the first server and start merging logs. If you were to kill the first instance, a new leader is nominated. This design allows to seamless add/remove nodes that share logs (a process that historically would have taken a central log aggregator).
by pmg101 | 2026-01-23 16:12:58+00:00
Yes I remember reading that too and it resonated. As a slightly depressed person I can't believe the delusionally positive spin people seem to put on everything and nonetheless this seems to be a winning strategy for them. I never could explain that.

Starting with an accurate world model, no matter how dispiriting, seems to be a prerequisite for knowing the most effective action to take.
by ninkendo | 2026-01-23 16:13:04+00:00
It’s a compile-time check, and yeah it’s a lint rule. In fact it goes a little deeper than a lint can go, because it uses data from earlier compiler phases (in order to get access to what the borrow checker knows.) The correct terminology is a “rustc driver” from what I’ve heard. Lints like clippy run as a “LateLintPass”, which doesn’t have access to certain mir data that is intentionally deleted in earlier phases to lower the memory requirements.

Hopefully it’s something I can open source soon (I may upstream it to the sqlx project, as that is what we’re using for db connections.)
by mindcrime | 2026-01-23 16:13:18+00:00
Terminal? Hard to be sure, but I think there are glimmers of hope that the answer is "no" in the short-term.

Corollary question: should it be? Eg, is "liberal democracy" really the best we can possibly do? My take is that the long-term goal should be a society based on Voluntaryism with no use of force for anything other than self-defense. But if we ever get there, it won't be soon, and in the near-term the collapse of liberal democracy is trending towards the full-on advent of fascism and totalitarianism.

So at least for now, I believe liberal democracy is something worth fighting to protect.
by skippyboxedhero | 2026-01-23 16:13:41+00:00
I don't think I mentioned anything wrong with automatic enforcement. I think the claim was that when confronted with a financial incentive, people who drive recklessly will stop driving recklessly. Would this be the case if we paid people £50/month to drive better?

It makes no sense at all. The problem in policy is generally that you have people talking past each other: speed limits are effective for people who are generally going to comply with them anyway, they are not intended to stop serious accidents. The majority of accidents are not caused by "accidents" (as most people on here would think them), they are caused by people who drive recklessly a huge proportion of the time and eventually have an accident.

Again, the solution to this is simple: do not give these people driving licences. In the UK, you can kill someone with your car driving recklessly and be out of jail in 18 months. And I don't think people realise this is true, or that this won't have been the first "near miss" for these people...it will have been months and years of doing stuff that will kill someone, and eventually killing them. How are they supposed to kill people with cars if they can't own a car?
by mexicocitinluez | 2026-01-23 16:13:45+00:00
me: "I'm working on a Formik update to newest React features wtih Claude"

you: "WHY AREN'T YOU ON THE CONTRIBUTOR LIST!>!?!?!"

The irony in sharing that screen while it obviously shows it hasn't been maintained. lol.

lol go ahead, look at that commit. What did it do? And what about the one prior to that? Explain to me in your own words (no AI) how Formik has kept up to date with new React features?

> Are you Copilot, github-actions[bot], or jaredpalmer himself? (ref: https://github.com/jaredpalmer/formik/graphs/contributors?fr...)

But since you're on the repo, go take a look at the issues and discussions log. Go search for "Is htis repo dead"? Go read any number of the 10,000 comments about forms in React on any social media site of your choosing. If Jared works at Vercel and Formik, according to you, is still in "active development", why would they use RHF?

You're not a serious person if you think you can Google a few things and automatically understand the form ecosystem in React.
by tim-fan | 2026-01-23 16:13:47+00:00
I'm storing small items in numbered bags. I take a photo and have a web UI for easy searching. It also tracks which items are used frequently vs not used at all in years.

Bags are stored in numerical order for quick storage and retrieval.

With this you do your decluttering from the web interface: search for items that haven't moved in years, flag for removal.

For frequently used items the system doesn't make sense - the storage and retrieval overheads are too high. But it pays off for any item you might forget the location of, or forget if you have it at all.

I feel we're overdue to have these types of digital front ends over our household item storage.
by vfclists | 2026-01-23 16:13:57+00:00
How can liberal democracy not be in decline if it can only be discussed or seen behind a paywall which costs £59 a month to get over?

Are the voters a joke to the people who write such articles?

Am I a joke to them?

Is there a browser addon which can mark links on HN as behind paywalls?

Some sub-reddits tag them as such.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2026-01-23 16:14:25+00:00
Who cares? LinkedIn just locked my account (I don't log in often), and is demanding my driver's license to unlock it. Ostensibly to "protect me from identity theft".

That's right. They want me to send my identity documents to some third world contractor to protect me from identity theft. Apparently they're doing this with many people... I'm supposed to be worried about the NSA? I'm not a Russian spy, and I'm no drug cartel leader. The cops and NSA don't give a shit about me. Nor DOGE, come to that.
by tdb7893 | 2026-01-23 16:14:36+00:00
There's no way to stop them federally without a full coup since they are administered by the states. The US has a long history of not cancelling election but suppressing votes (e.g. literacy tests, gerrymandering, closing polling locations, etc).

I would look more for voting place shenanigans, voter ID laws with only a weird subset of IDs allowed, radical gerrymandering, and stuff like that. Some of it will be blatantly partisan but also people are using justifications like "restoring trust in elections" to advocate for things that reduce the general franchise. They don't need to do a lot since a few percent is enough to swing the general balance of things.
by OvbiousError | 2026-01-23 16:15:14+00:00
This is such a good write-up and something I'm struggling with very hard. Does quality of code in the traditional sense even matter anymore if e.g. CC can work with said code anyway. I haven't had imposter's in a long time, but it's spiking hard now. Whenever i read or write code I feel like I'm an incompetent dev doing obsolete things.
by pwg | 2026-01-23 16:15:15+00:00
But, ads directly correspond to revenue stream, and a loss of ad "impressions" would result in a reduced revenue stream, so a "protect the advertising" response is not at all unusual to consider as a portion of their (eBay's) reasoning for this ban.

Given how hard they push sellers to purchase their "extra cost listing enhancements" (i.e., purchase to have your listings show in the "advertisement" spots) it appears that they may make a decent revenue stream from these advertising angles. An AI-agent could find listings without going through the advertising displays and as such cut into this revenue stream.
by isaachinman | 2026-01-23 16:15:20+00:00
Yeah, Gmail's "implementation" of IMAP is essentially unusable. They basically force consumers to use their proprietary API.

We're building a cross-provider, cross-platform email client, and literally had to build special cases for all Gmail actions:

https://marcoapp.io

The upside is that it's fast... The downside is that it's NOT IMAP!
by tzs | 2026-01-23 16:15:21+00:00
> No AI-generated media is allowed (art, images, videos, audio, etc.). Text and code are the only acceptable AI-generated content, per the other rules in this policy

What's the reason for this?

Media is the most likely thing I'd consider using AI for as part of a contribution to an open source project.

My code would be hand crafted by me. Any AI use would be similar to Google use: a way to search for examples and explanations if I'm unclear on something. Said examples and explanations would then be read, and after I understand what is going on I'd write my code.

Any documentation I contributed would also be hand written. However, if I wanted to include a diagram in that documentation I might give AI a try. It can't be worse than my zero talent attempts to make something in OmniGraffle or worse a photograph of my attempt to draw a nice diagram on paper.

I'd have expected this to be the least concerning use of AI.
by svilen_dobrev | 2026-01-23 16:15:25+00:00
i wonder.. how much this maps into notion of cultural dimensions.

https://geerthofstede.com/culture-geert-hofstede-gert-jan-ho...

it's not completely black-and-white, and it similarly depends on group-level - whole-country vs region vs suburb vs family, and even domain-in-question..
by xpe | 2026-01-23 16:15:29+00:00
There is a phrase I like: don't fail with abandon. Just because the NSA broke public trust doesn't make it ok for anything like it to happen again.

This data breach from DOGE is worse in many ways. DOGE employees / contractors are have fewer scruples and guardrails. This data has been used primarily for Trump-and-Company's advantage. All to the detriment of American values, such as being for democracy and reasonable capitalism while standing against authoritarianism and kleptocracy.

The NSA's bulk metadata collection, while later found to violate FISA and likely unconstitutional, operated under a formal legal architecture: statutory authorization via Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act (from 2006 onward), FISA Court orders renewed approximately every 90 days, and at least nominal congressional oversight — though most members were kept uninformed of the program's scope until 2013.
by WorldMaker | 2026-01-23 16:15:38+00:00
Seems more a reason to never use stuff you don't actually control and are reserved for future purposes. Everyone knew who was in charge of DNS TLDs and that while they were being at first conservative in how many they assigned, they reserved the right to assign as many as they wanted.

But also, yes Microsoft documentation used .local before mDNS reserved it, and IIRC Microsoft was also involved in suggesting it for mDNS as mDNS came out of the multi-company standardization efforts from Apple's Bonjour. That said, my impression of most of that documentation from that time is that it was incorrectly using .local as a fake TLD where they should have been using .example or .example.com and also pointing people to the RFCs that those were not valid choices in a real setup. A problem with such documentation is that it is too easy to take literally. A follow up problem was sort of the "accidental security through obscurity" benefits of using non-globally resolvable addresses becomes "best practice" through essentially stubbornness and status quo (related to all the recent rediscussions on HN about NAT44 is not a firewall except by accident and you can have very good firewalls that aren't NAT44).
by alephnerd | 2026-01-23 16:15:47+00:00
Functional doesn't mean "more democratic". What matters is institutions, jurisprudence, and norms.

And after having dealt with the experience of opening a large foreign office in Czechia, there absolutely is a democratic deficit (sure it's extremely efficient, but we just needed to keep a handful of decisionmakers and "phone a (now deceased) friend" in a non-democratic manner).
by realitydrift | 2026-01-23 16:16:23+00:00
One pattern I keep noticing is that when the future gets harder to predict, the first visible response is not innovation but a tightening of legal and risk frameworks. Platforms start hardening contracts and banning edge behaviors because internal models can no longer reliably track downstream consequences. A subtle form of constraint collapse where rules substitute for orientation.

Feedback still flows through metrics and policies, but it no longer carries enough of a cue to guide real learning, so it gets inverted into compliance and arbitration instead. Risk management becomes the substitute for understanding, and when context collapses, meaning drifts.
by boringg | 2026-01-23 16:16:58+00:00
The idea that the marketing team has the ability to really push back against senior management doesn't align with the reality I have seen. The best they can do is say that this will do brand damage -- but they don't have the ability to really call the shots. Most organizations marketing is not in a real seat of power - more like an advisory position.

I'm not trying to unfair to marketing - they do have an important role - I have hardly seen a company give marketing real power at an org. So the idea that this is because marketing don't push back on senior management -- is because they know they don't have the power to do this.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-23 16:17:00+00:00
Not too bad, considering the space it sits in.

Another "physical modeling synthesizer" which I've been looking at for the last few weeks (https://www.ericasynths.lv/steampipe-3153/) goes for €990, which is more or less the same as the phase8, when you consider the currency difference.

Edit: Actually, seems phase8 will be slightly cheaper, my local (Spain) shops seems to sell it for around €950.
Tell HN: Cloudflare's D1 service degraded since 2 days
by iowahansen | 2026-01-23 16:17:49+00:00
Public service announcement: if you're seeing very slow Cloudflare D1 query latencies, you're not alone.

I just burned hours trying to figure out why basic D1 SQL queries against a 100MB database are taking 20-30 seconds wall time. Turns out there's an ongoing D1 issue, but it's only being acknowledged in Cloudflare's D1 Discord channel, while cloudflarestatus.com says everything is a-ok.

Posting here in case it saves someone else the debugging rabbit hole.
by crazygringo | 2026-01-23 16:18:23+00:00
> Has anyone else noticed that the AI industry can’t take “no” for an answer? AI is being force-fed into every corner of tech.

And yet this blog post is guilty of the exact same thing. It's just a complaint about which marketing messages get categorized as which newsletters you can opt in or out of (a valid complaint but pretty boring), but slaps "AI Consent" in the title to turn it into clickbait because the marketing message happens to be about an AI product.

This spam has been a problem for decades. It didn't arise with AI. I haven't even noticed any uptick with AI.