MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Meekro | 2026-01-25 06:02:11+00:00
The EU would have to put the US on a list of "foreign adversaries", with whatever political fallout comes from that. Not saying they shouldn't, but there will be downsides.

Since controlling these platforms is probably the best ROI for swinging public opinion, I'm sure it's a matter of time before they get seized (one way or another) and redistributed to reliable political allies.
by manuelmoreale | 2026-01-25 06:02:39+00:00
I’ll engage with this because I’m curious about your position. I’m not a TikTok user and I’m not American.

All the other American controlled social media platforms are exactly like your China description from my point of view: it’s American agencies and data brokers mining it and American interests pumping it.

Do you think a reasonable course of action is for us to force the sell of American platforms? I have no sympathy for what China is doing but I have no sympathy for what America is doing either.

Why do you think one’s more acceptable other than “it’s my country doing it”, assuming you are American that is.
by JimDabell | 2026-01-25 06:03:50+00:00
> behavior a machine must execute

This is not what HTML does. Tags are not instructions, they delimit the start and end of elements. They describe content, they do not specify behaviour.

In your pattern example, that is still just a description of what is acceptable input. It doesn’t execute anything. A paper form might specify the format DD / MM / YYYY but that doesn‘t mean the form is executing a program in your brain when you fill it out.
by nailer | 2026-01-25 06:04:23+00:00
Zahrah Sultana is a racist conspiracy theorist and not someone to take seriously on any matter.

https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/mps-mcdonnell-and-sultana-addre...

Sultana is also on record stating the grooming gangs were a racist smear (which is odd as there were multiple races involved)
by f30e3dfed1c9 | 2026-01-25 06:04:27+00:00
"of course, it was Path Finder! You could even have it respond to 'Reveal'"

This still works. I have been using macs since 1985 and have always hated the Finder. In the days of classic Mac OS, my go to for file management was a desk accessory called DiskTop, which was great. Super fast and easy to operate from the keyboard.

When I switched to OSX, I needed something better than the Finder, chose Path Finder, and have been using it ever since. I have my complaints about it but have not been able to find anything I like better.
by ffsm8 | 2026-01-25 06:05:06+00:00
Surveillance is a different issue to the one he talked about, which is geopolitical and international instead of domestic (surveillance).

all nations around the world are currently increasing their surveillance capability... And it's worth keeping in mind that at least some of us see that as an issue, that's actually not a broadly accepted fact. There are a lot of people that don't see an issue with it.

And you'll be able to find a topic you disagree with with all politicians, if you discredit everything they say afterwards, you're essentially left holding your ears closed to all dialog.
by Barrin92 | 2026-01-25 06:05:17+00:00
>A fairly high percentage of famous free soloists (I'd say over 25%) have died prematurely

Yes but I'd also say Alex is a bit of a different beast. He's clearly not a thrill seeker who attempts climbs he isn't sure about. And as he has once said, there's a very real risk of dying when you get in your car, play football, are a boxer, and so on.

People have a stark reaction to the visual of a guy being 200 meters above the ground but the reality is if you're a circus acrobat and you're 10 meters up the air you're also likely dead or maimed if something goes wrong. It doesn't get more dead than dead and in many ways he's probably more calculated and less reckless than people in other sports or performances.
by kortilla | 2026-01-25 06:06:00+00:00
Nobody on the Internet can send a packet to an internal IP on your network except for immediate L2 neighbors (I.e. your ISP).

Symmetric NAT 100% stops inbound unsolicited connections to the public IP. And using the public IP is the only way 99.999% can address you.

I implore you to write down (even if just for yourself) what the packet headers would be for you to get a packet from Starbucks WiFi to the device at your home at 192.168.0.5 that has made no egress connections.

You’ll quickly find what you’re suggesting is nonsense. port address translation requires an entry to function. It’s not some optional security feature. It’s required information to get the packet header rewritten to reach private devices.
by defrost | 2026-01-25 06:06:56+00:00
> In any other developed country it wouldn't be possible to escalate these situations like this regardless of what you were doing.

Without in any way excusing the clear and obvious excess of the US DHS and ICE here, you should at least read various Coroner's findings in respect of Australian police interactions with indigenous Australians.

eg: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-07/kumanjayi-walker-inqu...

Various police forces around the globe, in Australia, Canada, the UK, and elsewhere have their subgroups with encrypted chat accounts detailing at length their contempt for various others .. women, particular minorities and ethnicities, etc.

They often exchange grooming notes on provoking "officer-induced jeopardy" .. how to escalate a situation into what passes for "justified homicide" or least a chance to put the boot in.
by sothatsit | 2026-01-25 06:07:48+00:00
The solutions you suggest are multiple agents. An agent is nothing more than a linear context and a system that calls tools in a loop while appending to that context. Whether you run them in a single thread where you fork the context and hotswap between the branches, or multiple threads where each thread keeps track of its own context, you are running multiple agents either way.

Fundamentally, forking your context, or rolling back your context, or whatever else you want to do to your context also has coordination costs. The models still have to decide when to take those actions unless you are doing it manually, in which case you haven't really solved the context problems, you've just given them to the human in the loop.
by kelnos | 2026-01-25 06:07:56+00:00
> The news breaks almost immediately on TikTok

Not arguing against the rest of your comment, but I find the concept of "breaking news" to be generally terrible for society. News outlets should wait until they have enough information to present an event as accurately as possible, but the rush to be the one that gets there first means this is often not the case.

And I expect this goes double for randos publishing on TikTok.
by rswail | 2026-01-25 06:08:40+00:00
PHEVs are a very interim solution. There are some advantages while range anxiety is an issue.

Yes, EVs have a weight penalty of ~250-500kg of battery currently.

Battery technology is rapidly advancing, when Na-ion batteries are introduced more widely, the whole range anxiety issue will become moot, because a recharge will take as long as refueling an ICE vehicle.

The weight difference will also start to reduce, both due to newer batteries, but also moving to lighter weight construction and increased use of alternatives to steel.

Arguing for ICE technology in 2025 is like Blackberry/Nokia users complaining about the loss of keyboards & T9 texting.
by PorterBHall | 2026-01-25 06:08:47+00:00
In the United States, stochastic terrorism is neither a statutory offense nor a term of art in criminal codes; it is an analytic label used in scholarship and practitioner writing to describe probabilistic risks of violence linked to rhetoric. Recent legal and critical surveys stress that usage is heterogeneous and contested, and that the concept's value lies in describing a structure of communication and harm rather than in supplying a justiciable element test.[7]
By contrast, U.S. incitement law is anchored in Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), which protects advocacy short of speech that is intended to produce imminent lawless action and likely to do so. Stochastic accounts often concern non-directive, cumulative rhetoric whose effects materialize unpredictably, making the Brandenburg imminence and likelihood prongs difficult to satisfy absent clear exhortation.[2]
by akst | 2026-01-25 06:08:57+00:00
The paper is basically saying “we have evidence that supports language comprehension inconsistent independently of structural hierarchy” [1] (or at least that’s my read of it).

However I imagine linguists have a more precise definition than most of us, but instead of speculating, I’ve decide read the paper.

Something they explain early on is a concept called multi-words (an example incomplete this is an idiom) tend communicate meaning without any meaning grammatical structure, and they say this

> “… multiword chunks challenge the traditional separation between lexicon and grammar associated with generativist accounts … However, some types of multiword chunks may likewise challenge the constructionist account.”

I’m an amateur language nerd with a piecemeal understanding of linguistics, but I’m no linguist so I don’t know what half this means, but it really sounds like they have a very specific definition here, that neither of us are talking about, and possibly hasn’t been well communicated in the article.

That said I’m out of my depth here, and I have a feeling most ppl replying to this article are probably too if they are going off the title and article that linked to the paper. But I would be interested to hear the opinion of a linguist or someone more familiar with this field, and their experimentation methods.

—-—-—-—-—-

[1] With the hypothesis testing typically done in science you can’t really accept a alternative hypothesis only reject a null one given you’re evidence, so you get titles like “may” or “might” or “evidence supporting x, y, z”, so you get these noncommittal titles like the one. In social sciences or nonnatural sciences I feel this is even more the case given the difficulty of forming definitive experiments without crossing some ethical boundary. In nature science you can put to elements together control variables see what happens in social sciences it’s really hard.
by jacquesm | 2026-01-25 06:11:17+00:00
> Or am I missing the gravity somehow?

Yes, there is the risk of cascading failures, some industrial processes are very hard to re-start once interrupted (or even impossible) and the lead time on 'some transformers' can be a year or more. These are nothing like the kind that you can buy at the corner hardware store. A couple of hundred tons or so for the really large ones.

Grid infra is quite expensive, hard to replace and has very long lead times.

The very worst you could do is induce oscillations.
by godelski | 2026-01-25 06:11:35+00:00
This only results in a race to the bottom. A self fulfilling prophecy. The unfortunate truth is that if you want the world to be better you need to be better to it than it is to you. It's the only way that can even work.

You can just do nothing and things will get better when others do more than they get, but by you doing nothing you've just shifted your burden to others. The burden of each individual is small. Almost insignificant even. It's not hard to be kinder to others than they are to you. But the burden accumulates and compounds. You don't have to pick up the slack, but you do need to do your part. The future is made by all of us
by petre | 2026-01-25 06:12:49+00:00
This stuff goes back to Yalta, so just forget parotting these ideas. The US never wanted Europe to be self reliant concerning security, up until Trump and the Paypal mafia. Fortunately De Gaulle gave the Americans the finger during his presidency because he knew better. Not being on the losing side meant that Framce wasn't under US "protection" and could develop their own nuclear program and military hardware, as opposed to Germany (and Japan).
by jeezfrk | 2026-01-25 06:13:43+00:00
The important point is what a deserter would use as logic when asked "What if everyone gave up and only responded to selfish fear?"

Then, sir, it would be foolhardy to contribute any part to that service because soon it will all collapse.

That's, in a historically commonplace fashioned see today, is what the top 10% are doing when seeing the top 1% abdicate all responsibility.

Low or no taxes? Sounds good ... but it's going to burn down soon.
by kelnos | 2026-01-25 06:14:00+00:00
Not the person you're replying to, but:

> Do you think a reasonable course of action is for us to force the sell of American platforms?

Yes, absolutely. If your country's people believe that WhatsApp, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, etc. are a threat in the same way, they should take the same action.

(Mind you, I don't believe for a second that this was the real motivation behind what's gone on with TikTok, but I think it's a reasonable course of action to take if you think there is a threat there, regardless of what company or country we're talking about.)
by mrtesthah | 2026-01-25 06:14:30+00:00
Universal health care wasn't as popular back then as it is now, so that's to be expected:

https://news.gallup.com/poll/4708/healthcare-system.aspx

This isn't about who wins campaigns -- this is about who influences the issues they campaign on. Since the Citizens United decision politicians have had to switch to the Super PAC model to be competitive, which gives drastically more power to dark money donors. And unsurprisingly, as cited in that study, the influence of average citizens on politics has been completely surpassed by businesses and economic elites:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-25 06:14:55+00:00
I agree with your suggestion, but I wonder if it is enough. Look at what happened today. Moments after the shooting, there was a coordinated campaign to flood the zone with misinformation. Twitter accounts for Trump, DHS (Kristi Noem), Vance, Miller all said someone tried to assassinate ICE officers and was shot in self defense. This was completely the opposite of what happened and given how quickly they put out these messages, they had no way of knowing either.

They simply put it out there because no matter what, this is what they will say in response to an ICE shooting. It is a way of confusing the messaging and preventing their side from being convinced by anyone else or any evidence. Once their base form that initial opinion, it is very hard to change their mind. So will intellectually actually reach those people effectively?

Remember, this base has been told to distrust the academics and distrust science and distrust the news media.
by gyomu | 2026-01-25 06:16:12+00:00
> any reason these old tools can't be used nowadays

For Aperture specifically:

- it doesn’t run on newer machines. Sure there are workarounds (run it in a VM, use a dedicated old computer, …) but those are clunky and people want things to run smoothly within their current setups.

- it doesn’t support newer file formats (the insistence of many manufacturers to use proprietary RAW formats when there truly is no need to is its own rant-worthy rabbit hole…)

- even if people praise the UI and remember it fondly, there are a number of modern tools and conveniences one expects in photography software in 2025 that 2010 Aperture doesn’t have. Eg people care about things like AI denoising/upscaling now, support for HDR color profiles, etc.

> it seems like using and taking care of legacy tools is the best we're got

I’d vote for supporting independent developers and open source software.
by hdhdhsjsbdh | 2026-01-25 06:16:58+00:00
Here’s the difference between US and Europe: in US tech, productivity gains due to AI will lead to lower employment and higher expectations for the remaining employees. Salaries will remain the same and any increases in profit will of course go straight to the capital owning class. It will continue to be great for a vanishingly small number of people. On the contrary, Europe’s “socialism” makes them well-prepared to deliver the same level of productivity with AI using more people working fewer hours. And their “socialist” attitude toward where that value should go will result in an increased standard of living for everyone. You know, like the AI utopia we’ve all been promised.
by csb6 | 2026-01-25 06:17:04+00:00
I like the approach; it reminds me of Towards Zero Defect Programming by Allan Stavely and Dijkstra's idea of deriving programs mechanically from their specifications.

Were LLMs used to produce some of the writing? Not sure how to describe it, but it has a certain recognizable writing style (e.g. "The Problem"/"The Solution", lots of bulleted lists with bolded first words, etc.) Readers might appreciate if AI use is disclosed.
by godelski | 2026-01-25 06:17:33+00:00
I'll add that this is the whole purpose of a society. The social contract is that of a coalition. Our combined utility is greater than the sum of our individual utility.

To not have an obligation to society is to be a drain on it. Even if you don't recognize it you still get a lot of benefit from society. It could be better. It should be better. But that will never happen if you never put in your part.
by komali2 | 2026-01-25 06:18:04+00:00
They all forgo the safety measures of "don't smash into each other's heads" despite repeated studies showing NFL players frequently have long term brain damage from the sport.

It's an extreme sport and a thrilling thing to watch. The danger is exciting and makes his accomplishment all the more stunning. I think it's really cool that there are humans willing to push the limits of the human experience like this.
by joquarky | 2026-01-25 06:18:48+00:00
> I often feel like our industry has lost its sense of whimsy and experimentation from the early days, when people tried weird things to see what would work and what wouldn't.

The gold rush brogrammers took over. They only care about money and they have displaced most of the more whimsical (but competent) "nerds" over the past decade.
by roenxi | 2026-01-25 06:19:18+00:00
One of the major lessons of the 1900s is that the moral ills of your own tribe are more important than the problems other people might have. You don't live in some other country, you live in your own. Local concerns are by far the #1 issue.

Even in the 2000s, one of the most ironic outcomes is that US hegemony forced a bunch of countries into really dominant regional positions (thinking especially of Japan, China and Germany) because they had nothing else to do but fix their own internal problems and it turns out that is a dominant strategy over militarism. Moral positions like peace, law, consistency and fairness aren't vague nice-to-haves, they are principles that lead to better outcomes for the people who stick with them.
by smt88 | 2026-01-25 06:20:11+00:00
It has 200M users in the US (I'm not one of them), which is about half of all citizens. Do you really think it's possible they have no point?

For most people, it's a distracting little jolt of dopamine and a way to get quick news or commentary.

It's definitely not good for our brains for that to be the main kind of content we consume, but it's not useless.
by yourapostasy | 2026-01-25 06:20:12+00:00
Non-technical home users in my circles are fed up with Windows 11's changes from Windows 10 without a suitable transition that eases them into the changes. They are nowhere near good candidates to migrate to any flavor of Linux, though. There are still plenty of sharp edges. So lots of cursing and griping at Windows 11 continues.

More interesting to me however, are the macOS technical friends in my circles. A trickle of them are switching to various Linux desktop distributions. This was inconceivable to me a mere 10 years ago. But I have to admit the quality of the Apple ecosystem has slid an astounding amount, which is driving the more advanced technical users into the arms of Linux. There are still plenty of Apple ecosystem-specific integration points and features that are still not available on Linux, like Apple Notes/iMessage/AirDrop/AirPlay/Handoff between macOS and iOS, system-wide kinetic/momentum scrolling, iCloud sync, system-comprehensive battery management that includes working sleep and suspend, advanced trackpad gestures, uneven Unicode support, uneven human interface guideline adherence, limited laptop LLM inference, etc. So I'm not expecting this trickle to turn into a flood soon, but the solid lock Apple used to have on developer mindshare is not as solid any longer.
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-25 06:20:45+00:00
This is pretty dangerous because most people will not check the sources that LLMs are referring to. Grokipedia uses Grok and Grok trains on X, which is highly manipulated by both X itself (lots of people allege suppressed reach and other forms of shadow bans) and by bots. Not to mention the platform is naturally one sided when toxic content (racists, misogynists, outright supremacists, etc) drives away those of different views. For example look at Vivek Ramaswamy quitting X recently after all his posts got flooded with nearly 100% vile racist replies.
by NorwegianDude | 2026-01-25 06:21:15+00:00
You do have some weird takes on why I'm doing things. The game is free. Not because I'm trying to exploit someone, but because it's much harder and more expensive to market a paid game. I don't have DLCs, cause all content is free for everyone, and forcing players to pay to play by putting content behind paywalls is not something I want to do, and also something the same Norwegian Consumer Council says should not be allowed in games.
by drzaiusx11 | 2026-01-25 06:22:59+00:00
I live in a progressive state and unfortunately encounter "coal rolling" regularly. I also assume that's the point. Someone has to "own all the libs" as it were

However, I do agree that there aren't enough folks "rolling coal" in aggregate to really move any needles on planet-scale environmental impacts though. Just VERY unpleasant to be caught behind.
by smitty1e | 2026-01-25 06:23:32+00:00
The article was hilarious to me. To whom are we responsible? And who manages the "truth" supply?

If we're assuming a postmodern stance that there is no objective truth, or even a utilitarian stance that truth is a consensus, then life is reduced to some extended chemical reaction, and there is no difference between a Stalin and a Mother Theresa.

If one posits some religious definition of an objective truth, then at least there is a definition to measure against beside "Do as thou wilt".

I'm not a huge Chomsky fan anyway. Despite his appeal to truth, he tends to ring false for me.
by Saurabh_Kumar_ | 2026-01-25 06:23:50+00:00
Hi HN,
I've been building and maintaining repos for a couple years, and one recurring frustration is tech debt piling up—garbage code, flaky tests, outdated deps—making it hard to get buy-in from PMs for cleanup time.
Inspired by discussions here on HN about developer productivity and tooling gaps, I built a small open-source MVP: Cosmic AI.
What it does:

Connects to your GitHub repo (OAuth, read-only).
Scans for issues and generates a heatmap (red = urgent, yellow = watch, green = healthy).
Quantifies debt in dollars/ROI (e.g., potential $67k/qtr saved), with a basic calculator for team size/salary.

It's fully open source free to use, and no sign-up for basic scans (waitlist for advanced reports).
I'm a solo tech guy iterating on this—would love feedback from the HN community:

Does the dollar/ROI framing feel useful for convincing non-tech stakeholders, or is hours/grading scale better?
What metrics/integration would make this more valuable (e.g., SonarQube ties, flaky test detection)?

Site/try it: cosmic-ai.pages.dev
Thanks! If it feels off or simplistic, be brutally honest—I'll use the feedback to improve (or pivot if needed)."