MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by H8crilA | 2026-01-13 13:06:11+00:00
A lot of this stuff doesn't work by changing people's mind on topic X, but rather by saturating the informational environment so that people declare epistemological bankruptcy. For example, one thing that you can quite often hear from a Russian that has been confronted with something unpleasant is "well, who knows what's true". This is usually not a figure of speech, not some kind of washing down of facts, but rather an accurate representation of their mind.

Between being fooled and being uninformed the latter is much more pleasant.
by sigmar | 2026-01-13 13:07:35+00:00
>FCC said the Verizon rule “required one wireless carrier to unlock their handsets well earlier than standard industry practice, thus creating an incentive for bad actors to steal those handsets for purposes of carrying out fraud and other illegal acts.”

Is there any evidence for the idea that 'phones are more likely to be stolen if they're carrier-unlocked.'

Seems implausible to me. Modern smartphones lock themselves well. Criminals can just buy cheap phones themselves for crimes. My understanding is that when they steal a phone and can't access it, they send it to Asia to be scrapped for parts (so it doesn't matter if it was carrier-locked). Are they confusing carrier-unlock with lockscreen-unlock? Or is the reason above just a pretext?
by accidentallfact | 2026-01-13 13:07:54+00:00
It also cites a study which says that the average loss is 5%. That isn't what most people imagine as "highly effective".

Weight also doesn't tell the whole story. The people don't get any better, they get (more) starved in addition to staying obese.

It's a disease with another cause, hunger is only a symptom.

Too much money has been wasted on proving and "educating" people that it's just overeating, while there is an overwhelming amount of evidence to the contrary.

The one that convinced me is horses. Horses get fat, and they need to wear a muzzle that makes eating difficult for them. Otherwise, they eat so much so fast that it literally kills them.

There seem to be AREAS that are affected and areas that are less affected. Either there are fat people in the area, or there are no fat peoplle in the area. People who move seem to quickly change weight to fit the local norm. There doesn't seem to be any clear correlation with dietary habits, or anything else that is commonly observed. The entire Japan appears to be spared.

It gets commonly missed that it isn't possible to get obese on purpose either. It's hard to eat more, and the body just seems to burn off the excess.
by joker3d | 2026-01-13 13:08:17+00:00
Hi HN — I'm Konstantin, building Swiftward.

I've been building distributed backend systems for a while. Working on LLM-based systems recently, I noticed a structural issue: policy logic (validators, guardrails, allow/deny rules) usually lives inline in application code.

That works at first. But when you need versioning, shadow testing, rollback, or reproducible decisions — it gets awkward fast. Especially on-prem.

Swiftward is my attempt to extract that logic into a dedicated policy runtime.

It's a self-hosted engine that evaluates events (LLM prompts/outputs, user actions, internal signals) against versioned rules and produces deterministic decisions with full execution traces.

What it focuses on:

- Deterministic evaluation (same input + version = same result)

- Versioned rules with shadow runs and rollback

- Full decision trace for debugging and audit

- Postgres-first, fully on-prem deployment

The repo has Docker Compose demos with pre-built images you can try locally. The engine itself is commercial (self-hosted license) — looking for design partners and paid pilots.

I'm new to Trust & Safety as a domain and looking to validate where this is useful and where it breaks.

Website + docs: https://swiftward.dev

Repo + demos: https://github.com/disciplinedware/swiftward

Happy to answer technical questions.
by neutronicus | 2026-01-13 13:08:37+00:00
Yes, I think of “paradox of tolerance” as a sort of glib rebuttal people give when enjoined to tolerate someone.

“Fuck you, that person is intolerant, I get to do whatever I want to them. And man, how uncultured are you that you would even suggest otherwise. You must never have heard of this philosopher!”
by rjknight | 2026-01-13 13:09:45+00:00
Doesn’t that also create a kind of immunity, though? If what I see is a cacophony of differing views, then I am unlikely to be influenced by any particular sock puppet account.

Whereas a community that tends towards groupthink might have a narrower range of views, but if those views begin to shift in a particular direction then it’s much harder for those who are disadvantaged by that shift to resist, because to do so requires violating the norms of groupthink.

I’m not sure which is better. My own preference is to tolerate a wide range of views in return for robust disagreement being the norm, but I can imagine some (most?) people preferring the opposite.
by themaninthedark | 2026-01-13 13:09:50+00:00
So the EPA report is bullshit interpretation of the USDA study:
>A recent USDA survey found that in 88% of U.S households, people hop in their car to buy groceries, driving an average of 4 miles to their preferred store.2

USDA study:
>Overall, households are, on average, 2.2 miles from the nearest SNAP-authorized supermarket or supercenter, but their usual store is 3.8 miles away.

Based on these questions:
>This report presents initial findings from the FoodAPS survey on three key questions:

1. How do shoppers travel to their main store and how far do they travel to get there?

2. In what type of store (eg., supermarket, mass merchandiser, convenience store) do
U.S. households typically shop for groceries?

3. Do store and travel mode differ by participation in food assistance programs or food
security status?

This can only tell us the distance to the store and does not support "All these car trips result in carbon pollution: over 17 million metric tons of CO2 come from car tailpipes just from driving back and forth to the grocery store."

In order to draw that conclusion, you need to show that the travel to and from grocery store was single purpose. Which is not supported by the data.

Most people I know don't go out of their way to go grocery shopping nor do they take specific trips to do so. It will be done in conjunction with another outing or when returning from work.

This could also! explain the reason that food secure people travel greater distance, as they tend to travel greater distance overall they choose a location closer to their travel route rather than their dwelling.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-13 13:10:23+00:00
> QUIC-based, NAT-free

I realize it's intended to be an unsupported edge case but I'm curious. What happens in the event a NAT is present along the IPv6 network path? Do you just forward a port the same as you would with the various IPv4 solutions and move on? Or does it break catastrophically? Something else?
by joker3d | 2026-01-13 13:10:39+00:00
Here's what a simple policy rule looks like:

rules:
contains_hello:
all:
- path: "event.type"
op: eq
value: "create_post"
- path: "signals.text_contains_hello"
op: eq
value: true
effects:
verdict: rejected
response:
blocked: true
reason: "Post contains 'hello'"

Every decision is stored in Postgres:

{
"entity_id": "user_2558",
"decisions": {
"matched_rules": ["contains_hello"]
},
"effects": {
"verdict": "rejected",
"response": { "blocked": true, "reason": "Post contains 'hello'" }
}
...
}

To try locally (~2 min):

git clone https://github.com/disciplinedware/swiftward
cd examples/demo-minimal
docker compose up

No UI in minimal demo — just logs. There's also a UGC demo with full UI, A/B testing, and LLM classification, but it downloads ML models on first run (~10-15 min).
by zbentley | 2026-01-13 13:10:58+00:00
I think that’s primarily a Rust issue, not an LLVM issue. LLVM is at least competitive performance-wise in every case I’ve used it, and is usually the fastest option (given a specific linker behavior) outright. That’s especially true on larger code bases (e.g. chromium, or ZFS).

Rust is also substantially faster to compile than it was a few years ago, so I have some hope for improvements in that area as well.
by al_borland | 2026-01-13 13:12:09+00:00
As someone who hasn’t used Google Search in several years, I will be upset and less inclined to use the AI if it’s kicking me out to Google search result pages to show results. This is what I fear. Some of this already happens with Siri and Apple Intelligence today. I’m sure Google would love to see even more of it, to serve up ads and take advantage of their new revenue streams in agentic shopping.
Legacy code modernization – structured process, pay on delivery
by millhouse1112 | 2026-01-13 13:13:02+00:00
Fintech consultant here. I migrate legacy systems (COBOL, Delphi, VB6, old Java, etc.) to modern stacks.
Not "paste into Claude and pray" — a repeatable process where AI accelerates analysis and drafts translations, but architecture and business logic validation stay human. I've learned where LLMs hallucinate on legacy (PERFORM THRU, copybooks, JCL dependencies) so your team doesn't have to.
Pricing:

$500 assessment — full analysis + roadmap, no code leaves your environment
$1,500+ module migration — prove the approach on something contained
Custom quotes for full systems — pay when delivered

If your team has bandwidth and wants to DIY, the assessment alone might be worth it. If they're stretched, I take it off their plate entirely.
Email me aquilarafaelholanda@gmail.com. Happy to do a quick no-code conversation first.
by exceptione | 2026-01-13 13:13:18+00:00
That is something we are susceptible to indeed. Our job is to grok complex systems, and that easily leads us to hubris like we can push historians and sociologists away.
I think the same can be observed in econometric circles, where I see inevitable complexity arising from human social dynamics, be it historic, cultural, sociological, or religious in nature, often gets ignored.
by agos | 2026-01-13 13:13:54+00:00
directives sort of kinda work if you squint the eyes, but only as a crutch and only if you can't/don't want to change the API.

> Or they could go all in on internal modules, like how you can import `node:fs` now. They could include corrected versions of globals like
`import Date from 'browser:date';`

This is what happened here, only the API changed as well
by wereknat | 2026-01-13 13:14:16+00:00
> If the architecture of my code doesn't enforce privacy and resistance to censorship by default

which is impossible.

- No code is feasibly guaranteed to be secure

- All code can be weaponized, though not all feasibly; password vaults, privacy infrastructure, etc. tend to show holes.

- It’s unrealistic to assume you can control any information; case-in-point the garden of Eden test: “all data is here; I’m all-powerful and you should not take it”.

I’m not against regulation and protective measures. But, you have to be prioritize carefully. Do you want to spend most of the world’s resources mining cryptocurrency and breaking quantum cryptography, or do you want to develop games and great software that solves hunger and homelessness?
by StopDisinfo910 | 2026-01-13 13:14:40+00:00
Google's strategy is as unreadable as ever. It feels like two companies fighting each other in one.

On the one hand, they apparently want to be a service provider Microsoft-style. They are just signing a partnership with their biggest competitor and giving them access to their main competitive advantage, the most advanced AI available.

On the other hand, they want to be another Apple. They are locking down their phone. Are competing with the manufacturers of the best Android phones. Are limiting the possibility of distributing software on their system. Things that were their main differentiator.

It doesn't make sense. It's also a giant middle finger to the people who bought the Pixel for Gemini. Congrats, you were beta testers for iPhone users who won't have to share their data with Google for training Gemini. I have rarely seen a company as disrespectful to its customer.
by mrec | 2026-01-13 13:14:47+00:00
I don't think that's a given, or even necessarily a strong likelihood. A majority of Scotland's trade is with the rest of the UK, unlike the Brexit situation where a shrinking minority of the UK's trade was with the rest of the EU, the only EU member for which this was the case. Scotland is accustomed to deficit spending and to large subsidies from the rUK, neither of which would be epecially palatable to EU finances.

And while I certainly think it's fair to describe the UK economy as a sinking ship, I also think that blaming that on Brexit is, to put it politely, "starting with your conclusion". UK growth has been higher than France, Germany or Italy since 2016. Brexit has obviously had impacts, but they haven't all been negative (the City in particular has zero enthusiasm to fall back into any EU alignment) and I think the COVID lockdown shambles and the Homerically inept current government have been bigger factors.

I found this a decent recent overview on the common analytical takes, if you're interested: https://julianhjessop.substack.com/p/what-the-nber-gets-wron...
by dfxm12 | 2026-01-13 13:15:17+00:00
Surely the number of Scottish people influenced by accounts making such outlandish claims is exactly zero.

The accounts appear to be suspended, so it is true that Scottish people are not being influenced by these accounts.

In fact, the link in the story about tanks in Edinburgh goes nowhere. Combined with the links to suspended accounts, the article almost reads like it was written by a sock puppet...
by speleding | 2026-01-13 13:15:31+00:00
The difference can be explained in large part by urban design: many US shoppers need a car to drive to the supermarket and only go there once a week or less. In Europe you live much closer to a supermarket, so you go more often and get more fresh food and less frozen or canned.

Some Americans are surprised to learn that many supermarkets inside cities do not even provide parking, everyone walks or bikes there. People go to the supermarket every day.
Confused between lowlevel and back end development – need guidance
by DRIVER_OCTA | 2026-01-13 13:16:10+00:00
Hi everyone iam a new bie,
Im 22 and have been lerning to code for about a year, but I wasn’t consistent because of some reasons ,for the past month I hve been learning C on and off, built a simple memory allocatr, and Im trying to polish it and intrested in building low level projects ,while also studying OS and networking basics.

At the same time, Ineed a job in the next 6-7 months most openings I see are backend roles. I have learned some go before but didn’t build any projects. Im also focusing on remote roles since I take care of my grandmother ,,I have recently started practicing DSA in Cpp i can give 7-9 hours/ day now ..as iam living with my parents now ,

I’m confused about what to focus on next should I continue going deep into low-level C and systems or shift fully to backend development go? I want to choose something that’s actually worth it job-wise. Any guidance would really help. Thanks ...
by bell-cot | 2026-01-13 13:16:19+00:00
> ...the current administration decided are not worth continuing...

At least in my part of the US, there are also "state", "county", "city", and "township" governments, which can do such things. They don't have magically unlimited competence and funding - but Washington has never had those either.

OOPS: I forgot school systems, community colleges, and public universities. Those generally control their own infrastructure, and have a lot of it. And the community colleges often have Trades programs - which can boost the workforce you need to replace energy wasting old furnaces, windows, and such.
by deanc | 2026-01-13 13:16:46+00:00
It goes without saying that social media is causing irreparable harm to the fabric of our society.

To use an analogy: if the village idiot went to the town square and shouted hate speech, he'd be laughed at or dealt with. Now anyone has a platform to go to the town square, except it's the world, and shout hate speech. And unlike before there will be hateful people, some of them unrecognisable from real people, who will support the village idiot. They will help amplify his voice and validate him and legitimise him.

We have to find a way to stop this. The only thing I can think of is require you to attach your real identity to social media accounts, and regulate the living daylights out of it to hold the networks accountable if their owners don't want to do the right thing. Free speech isn't free.
by rerdavies | 2026-01-13 13:16:57+00:00
What would you consider evidence? Emails between standards committee members agreeing to collude in order to screw pro-audio customers?

The evidence is: why on earth would anyone on a standards committee choose 44.1kHz, instead of 44.0kHz? The answer: 44.1kHz was transparently obviously chosen to make it impossible to perform on-the-fly rate conversions.

The mathematics of polyphase rate converters was perfectly well understood at the time these standards were created.
by nicoburns | 2026-01-13 13:17:18+00:00
> there is not a polity on earth where degrowth would get more than 20% support

Eh, I'm not so sure about that. Sustainability politics is mainstream in Europe in a way it isn't in the US. Aside from ethical concerns, a lot of people over here see climate change as a very real economic threat (likely to cause them material economic harm within their lifetimes).

You're probably right that a general degrowth strategy wouldn't ever be popular, but I bet a policy that say restricted AI and cryptocurrency with the aim of reducing electricity prices would be.
by aebtebeten | 2026-01-13 13:17:57+00:00
The long tail says we're not at the mercy of radio; we're still allowed to listen to the ones you know. I went to a certain CSNY song the other day and the comment section was full of people from 2026.

Here are two classics I like, plus a bonus track:

"Coat of Many Colors" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYAdKXzGtcY

"This Land" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRnHx3yVuf4

"Stop and Bust a Move": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYNSSkOOTBk
by notahacker | 2026-01-13 13:18:04+00:00
I think last time we had a tank at a protest the protestors had rented it! https://www.vice.com/en/article/yer-das-gone-rogue-guido-faw...

Northern Ireland is a big part of why the UK doesn't think the optics of deploying tanks are a show of strength and doesn't think it comes without a cost...
by tomhow | 2026-01-13 13:18:16+00:00
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by jifow | 2026-01-13 13:18:43+00:00
Speaking as someone who knows people on both sides:

It's going to be very hard to convince most iranians that this is anything other than Israel/USA backed terrorism. Especially with Israel and the US openly bragging about backing it.

It doesn't help that they're probably mostly right. And looking at the genocide in gaza and how many of the people backing the protest are basically holocaust deniers, it looks really horrible to much of the islamic world.
by api | 2026-01-13 13:18:54+00:00
We can power it all and then some with renewable and nuclear energy. We elected a regime openly hostile to that and openly pro fossil fuel. Like they literally ran on burning more coal, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that we are burning more coal.

AI doesn’t matter. If it’s not AI it’ll be EVs. Or if you’re pro immigration (as I am) then what do you think letting more people into the country does for power demand? It’s something like 5kW averaged out over 24/7 per head. That’s probably conservative when you do a full accounting of all demand per head. Every new immigrant is probably equivalent to a rack of GPUs.

Degrowth is political fantasy. It will establish a populist backlash every time. Or are you going to line up to be the first to become poorer?

I look at that stuff as a very privileged fantasy. Only the rich can romanticize poverty. The people who fantasize about green back to the land scenarios are usually wealthy middle or upper class people in developed nations who have zero first hand experience of what that actually means outside the Avatar films.
by realusername | 2026-01-13 13:19:17+00:00
"Expected variability" is nonsense, you can't just say "yeah it doesn't work, that's normal"

> How would add nuclear power to this grid mix? Yes, that is over 100% of demand being generated by rooftop solar.

Absolute nonsense again, Australia has one of the dirtiest electricity generation of the developed world with 65% fossil. Nowhere near the totality of the demand is covered by solar, even if again they have almost no real winter.
by maxglute | 2026-01-13 13:19:38+00:00
No denying US increased crude oil production from 5 to 13 million barrels per day and lng from 50 to 112 billion cubic feed per day. It just so happens PRC widget exports count as PRC emissions but US fossil exports don't count as US emissions. If they did US would be emitting roughly the same as 2005 or 30% higher, depending on if you believe industry or climate scientists. Industry claims lng is cleaner than displaced coal. Scientist claim lng leaks substantially higher than industry admits.
by Forgeties79 | 2026-01-13 13:19:39+00:00
This has to be the 4th or 5th time I’ve shared this link on HN. Sadly the WH made it very clear that they do not care about the real cost of coal. Here they proudly shout about “beautiful clean coal.” Anyone who believes this ridiculous rebranding of coal really should not be making decisions on it, and those who know better but repeat it are even worse: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/rein...

We’re moving backwards. They actually think we want to work in coal mines again by the hundreds of thousands.
by andai | 2026-01-13 13:19:46+00:00
I forgot what Malcolm Gladwell called them but I imagine the small minority of users affected here have disproportionate influence over their peers.

Power users?

Any such users in the thread? I used third-party clients for a little while but I did not see the benefit.

(I was more likely to do the opposite, and run Claude Code with a proxy which allows me to use it with other models. Though after much experimentation I ended up back on Claude.)
by GJim | 2026-01-13 13:20:35+00:00
> Russia and friends would seem to have an interest in Scottish independence as it undermines the UK.

Famously, Alex Salmond (at the time, the leader of the Scottish National Party) was given a regular programme on Russia Today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Alex_Salmond_Show

Say what you want about Scottish independence (its for the Scots to decide), but a break up of the UK would serve Kremlin interests no end.
by datsci_est_2015 | 2026-01-13 13:20:52+00:00
The through line of the success many AI ventures seems to be the shifting of liability, sometimes towards the consumer, sometimes to a third party, and sometimes to the nebulous void.

With self-driving cars, companies appear to be offloading the liability of their own software to the driver (“it’s not _fully_ self driving, hands on the wheel!”), or even pedestrians (“wasn’t in the crosswalk”).

This case appears no different. The thought experiment would be, for me at least, is if Grok was just any other user that was somehow capable of creating these images at scale? Who would be liable, the image prompter or the image generator?

Or how about a system that asked the user to approve or disapprove of the image being posted before it’s posted?

Or how about a system that posted the generated image under the prompters username, and not Grok’s?