MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cucumber3732842 | 2026-01-21 14:10:31+00:00
What you're ignoring is that a hundred plus or minus is a good range for average humans to grapple with and Fahrenheit splits the temperature swings in a given region across an approximately 100deg range.

So using Fahrenheit results in a pretty decent "as high as it can be without being clumsy" measurement system that covers just about all earthly temperatures.

If we only cared about increments of five or so degrees you could go higher resolution and it'd be fine because rounding would occur like we do with vehicle speeds. Or we could go lower resolution and just make the degrees bigger, which is basically what celsius is.
by analog31 | 2026-01-21 14:10:34+00:00
>>> When BIOS interfaces weren’t sufficient they hit the hardware directly - and even if they weren’t doing that, they’d end up depending on behavioural quirks of IBM’s BIOS implementation.

This happened with the Apple II as well, and made it impossible for Apple to update their system. Even minor changes, from the Apple II to the IIe and IIc, broke some apps. And if an app broke, it was presumed to be the hardware maker's fault.

There was a book entitled "what's where in the Apple II" that documented all known variable locations and entry points in the Apple ROM and DOS. For instance people would just branch directly into weird places in the ROM, or poke directly into memory.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-21 14:10:38+00:00
> If something is not technically illegal that does not mean it cannot be bad.

Ok? I agree, but unsure what exactly that's relevant to here in our discussion.

> Open source software can have business models

I believe "businesses" are the ones who have "business models", and some of those chose to use open source as part of their business model. But "open source" the ecosystem has nothing to do with that, it's for-profit companies trying to use and leverage open source, rather than the open source community suddenly wanting to do something completely different from what it's been doing since inception.
by seec | 2026-01-21 14:10:52+00:00
They won't be able to solve the problem.
The only reason all those roadblocks exist is to control/regulate everything in a way to ensure the maximum possible taxation. At the same time, bureaucrats get to justify their existence, pretending to do meaningful work while they only take from productive people.

You can't even say they manage to regulate actual problems; they only reinforce the big players. The cookie consent banner nonsense and ongoing legal fight with Apple (and GAFAM in general) didn't bring anything of value to end consumers.

Cookies haven't disappeared; they have just become a major annoyance that you have to spend a lot of time clicking on and tracking hasn't been reduced, quite the contrary.
The iPhone is still a locked-down device, with Apple maintaining a monopoly on software access as well as repairability (their repair program is such a joke that they should be tried for contempt if the EU actually had any power).

Bureaucracy is just cancer, and the EU is fully metastasized; there is not much that can improve until a major failure happens.

If you want to create a business, you have to pay the bureaucracy before you even make a single cent. Business has become more profitable to the government than the actual business owners; those thriving are the big ones who can afford to play the lobbying game and engage in regulatory capture and offload most of the cost on the taxpayers while profiting overseas.
by shihab | 2026-01-21 14:10:53+00:00
To be practically useful, we don't need to beat vendors, just getting close would be enough, by the virtue of being open-source (and often portable). But I found, as an example, PETSc to be ~10x slower than MKL on CPU and CUDA on GPU; It still doesn't have native shared memory parallelism support on CPU etc.
by kajolshah_bt | 2026-01-21 14:11:29+00:00
Strongly agree. In my experience, asking “what concrete action changes if this works?” filters out most premature AI ideas. If no one can point to a changed decision, AI just adds cost and complexity without leverage.

When the answer is vague (“better insights”, “faster responses”), AI tends to add surface polish without leverage. The projects that stick usually start with a very boring question: what specific action will someone take differently tomorrow?
by epage | 2026-01-21 14:11:30+00:00
> In fact, a code fence need not consist of exactly three backticks or tildes. Any number of backticks or tildes is allowed, as long as that number is at least three

Unfortunately, some markdown implementations don't handle this well. We were looking at using code-fence like syntax in Rust and we were worried about people knowing how to embed it in markdown code fences but bad implementations was the ultimate deal breaker. We switched to `---` instead, making basic cases look like yaml stream separators which are used for frontmatter.
by ericmay | 2026-01-21 14:11:48+00:00
I’ve never been but the photos I’ve seen I would describe as lacking warmth and humanity. Maybe my opinion would change seeing it in person. I’m open to that.

But the other issue with that property specifically is that it seems to be that it is built out of fear of humanity and that’s why elements of the property (again from photos) look like what you’d see in a bunker or if you were trying to hide. It lacks symmetry as well which introduces fear.

You can think of it as how one might feel looking at a painting of Dance in the Country by Renoir and Guernica by Picasso. If you find the former to be near perfection, full of vibrancy, warmth, and love you may as I do find Picasso’s work to be chaotic, disheveled, asymmetric, or even psychotic.
by willtemperley | 2026-01-21 14:11:52+00:00
There's an immediate solution: local-first software.

Keeping app data purely server-side is no longer viable for customers with data sovereignty requirements, and having a toggle button saying 'Keep my data in Europe' isn't enough either because it places too much trust in the SaaS provider.

With network monitoring verifying local applications are accessing user-verified endpoints, privacy reduces to OS-level security.
by InfinityByTen | 2026-01-21 14:11:53+00:00
It seems it's not easy to find a non-search-first, with an app drawer that allows for horizontal card/page scrolling launcher that would get out of my way ASAP.

The only widget I have is for the calendar. Pinning most used apps on the front page is an appreciated add on, but I think I could live without that too. I'll just pin 8 on them on home screen.
by pixl97 | 2026-01-21 14:12:04+00:00
>the one true programmer who has no need

Yea, I see these people on HN all the time. How they've written 45 billion lines of code without ever making a mistake and they put their life and dedication into being the best programmer that never sleeps and is available 24/7, and I'm like "How come I only see you people online and never see you working in the field".

Now, don't get me totally wrong, there's probably a few people out there like that, but trying to use 1%ers, or .1%ers as an example for anything is rather useless as supply and demand would make them a mythical creature with mythical pay. More often than I like I end up thinking ""I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question," after asking about the latest feature and the spaghetti .
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-21 14:12:13+00:00
Hah, after submitting my comment, I actually though about it because I knew someone would eventually ask :)

I'm fortunate enough to live a very comfortable life after working myself to death, so I think for 20,000,000 USD I'd do it, happily so. 2,000,000 would be too little. So probably between those sit the real price to purchase my morals and ethics :)
by mannykannot | 2026-01-21 14:12:38+00:00
I am not aphantasic, but I would not say that I "feel" pain when I see people undergoing painful events (depending on how much weight the quotes around 'feel' are carrying.) I can remember that hitting my thumb with a hammer was very unpleasant, how much of my body it affected, and how it faded over time. I know that the last time I did it, I recognized it as being pretty much identical to the previous times. What I cannot do is imagine it with anything like the vividness with which I can imagine what tonight's sunset could be like.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-01-21 14:12:38+00:00
> My own assessment is that I'm extremely skilled at making any kind of DB system yield to my will and get it to its limits.

Yes an according to my assessment I’m also very good in bed and extremely handsome.

But there is an existence proof seeing that you are running into issues yet millions of people use AWS services and know how to use the right tool for the job

I’m not defending Redshift for your use case, I’m saying you didn’t do your research and you did absolutely everything wrong. From my cursory research of Clickhouse, I probably would have chosen that too for use case
by rayiner | 2026-01-21 14:12:45+00:00
I’m sorry for using figurative language on the internet where Dutch people are around. The full relevant part is below:

> Denmark isn’t an “ally.” An alliance is a mutual relationship. Denmark offers the U.S. nothing. It’s a country the size of Maryland…

In the construction “it’s not an X, it’s a Y,” X and Y are read in contrast to each other. Denmark isn’t an “ally” in the sense that it can’t offer meaningful aid to the U.S. in a war because it’s a tiny country.
by bluebarbet | 2026-01-21 14:12:47+00:00
It shouldn't be relevant because it's an argument from authority, and one that I can't even prove.

Meanwhile, my actual argument (which, like my Wikipedia contributions, involved no help from AI) was reasoned.

The real issue is that you (alone in this thread, I might add) are not taking my argument at face value. Indeed you seem to be accusing me of dishonesty. I must admit that I've never understood this kind of cynicism. I personally find it very easy to assume good faith on the part of others (which, incidentally, is a community rule here.). Anyway, that's all I have to say.
by buellerbueller | 2026-01-21 14:12:49+00:00
This is what the biggest names in the VC class want you to think as they continue to enrich themselves, while (in the USA at least) they support a regime that is growing in its authoritarian output.

Thiel, Musk, et. al., support, for example, Curtis Yarvin, who believes that democracy is a failed experiment and should be replaced with an all-powerful "CEO"
by cess11 | 2026-01-21 14:13:23+00:00
With permits and fees and accounting assistance you'd probably land around 1500 per year having a OÜ company in Estonia. If you aren't going to make more than that I don't really see the point of having a company, you might as well save up that amount in cash and hold it in case you personally become liable from whatever activity you want to do.
by entuno | 2026-01-21 14:13:49+00:00
Trust is a about the author, not the code.

Open source is a bare minimum, although even that's not worth as much given how much harder it is now to load extensions that you've compiled yourself.

But those features you're talking about sound like they need extensive privileges within the browser. And while your extension might do what it says today, what's stopping you sticking a load of malware and adverts in there tomorrow? Or selling it to someone else who does?

If the author is an established person whose been known for years to develop good quality extensions and not sell out, then that gives some assurance. If it's an organisation like the EFF, even better?

But a random anonymous person making their first extension? No chance.
by jmillikin | 2026-01-21 14:14:19+00:00
It doesn't matter, though. xxhash is better than crc32 for hashing keys in a hash table, but both of them are inappropriate for file checksums -- especially as part of a data archival/durability strategy.

It's not obvious to me that per-page checksums in an archive format for comic books are useful at all, but if you really wanted them for some reason then crc32 (fast, common, should detect bad RAM or a decoder bug) or sha256 (slower, common, should detect any change to the bitstream) seem like reasonable choices and xxhash/xxh3 seems like LARPing.
by Braxton1980 | 2026-01-21 14:14:32+00:00
>Even the Democratic Party has leadership so weak that in the current environment they will only talk about affordability and healthcare.

As opposed to what? The majority of people took away their power either by not voting for them or not voting at all.

Multiple universities have refused Trump's demands and Newsom even threatened universities in his state if they went along with it.

Democrats speak out about everything Trump is doing. They also worked with some Republicans recently on bills that Trump is against.

So please tell me how they are at fault?

Because it seems they are at fault when they are in power and they are at fault for Republicans when they are in power.

You're also generalizing the media. It's nearly impossible they are equally manipulative.

Since no political party will be perfect we should vote for the best option
by bux93 | 2026-01-21 14:15:03+00:00
OEM launchers often include annoying anti-features, like a screen you can't remove and that has the brand's voice assistant. They also tend to be slow, bad at search, and have all kinds of unnecessary phone-home functionality like sharing your location with their owners (austensibly to show the weather forecast).

Besides, I have a work phone and a private phone - different brands, same launcher.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-21 14:15:28+00:00
Wow thanks for your response man.

I was referring to temporary mode when I was saying (but I also considered private window to be much safe as well but wow looks like they log literally everything)

So out of all providers, gemini,claude,openAI,grok and others? Do they all log everything permanently?

If they are logging everything, what prevents their logs from getting leaked or "accidentally" being used in training data?

> As far as I know right now, OpenAI is under legal obligation to log all of their ChatGPT chats, regardless of their own policies, but this was a while ago (this summer sometime?), maybe it's different today.

I also remember this post and from the current political environment, that's kind of crazy.

Also some of these services require a phone number one way or other and most likely there is a way the phone number can somehow be linked to logs, then since phone numbers are released by govt., usually chances are that if threat actors want data on large & OpenAI contributes to them, a very good profile of a person can be built if they use such services... Wild.

So if OpenAI"s under legal obligation, is there a limit for how long to keep the logs or are they gonna keep it permanently? I am gonna look for the old article from HN right now but if the answer is permanently, then its even more dystopian than I imagined.

The mouse sharing ability is wild too. I might use librewolf at this point to prevent some of such tracking

Also what are your thoughts on the new anonymous providers like confer.to (by signal creator), venice.ai etc.? (maybe some openrouter providers?)
by ilaksh | 2026-01-21 14:15:51+00:00
Being allowed to serve data from your own device should be seen as a natural human right.

If the networks don't have capacity or something then we need networks that can support that.

The idea that all of that has to go in the Fediverse on a server or something is just gatekeeping.

Wait a few years as IPV6 becomes truly ubiquitous. This will become very obvious to everyone and standard. People must be allowed to communicate directly, even if they have a lot of clients.

The opinions are slightly similar to remote work. Telecommuting was an obvious next step for a long time, it just took a certain number of decades for society to realize it.
by bee_rider | 2026-01-21 14:15:58+00:00
Oh dang, thanks for the heads up. I was looking at them for the “next version” of my code.

The lack of a “blas/lapack/sparse equivalents that can dispatch to GPU or CPU” is really annoying. You’d think this would be somewhat “easy” (lol, nothing is easy), in the sense that we’ve got a bunch of big chunky operations…
Ask HN: Does "Zapier for payment automation" exist?
by PL_Venard | 2026-01-21 14:16:05+00:00
It's 2026 and I shouldn't spend 3 hours every month manually splitting $15K revenue:

• 50% to co-founder
• 10% across 3 contractors
• 5-10% to ~15 affiliates
• 30% to tax account

This should be automated. Maybe through a kind of workflow builder that can trigger money flows.

What I've tried:

- Stripe Connect: Only splits to one account
- Zapier: Can't actually move money (ToS restriction)
- Manual scripts: Works but I'm now maintaining financial infrastructure.
- Escrow.com: $100 min fee, designed for one-off transactions

What I want: Set rules once → money routes automatically each month.

Questions:

1. Does this exist? (Feels like I'm bad at searching)

2. If not, why? Regulatory? Nobody trusts automation with money? Technical blocker? Stable coins could maybe help shipping this.

3. What's your current solution? Custom code? Just manual transfers?

I've talked to ~20 founders. Most are either:
- Writing custom scripts (requires dev skills + maintenance)
- Paying accountants (expensive, still manual)
- Suffering through manual transfers (time sink)

Seems like a gap between "fully manual" and "build your own payment infrastructure."

Am I missing something obvious?
by kevin061 | 2026-01-21 14:16:10+00:00
Canada will suffer greatly, and possibly much more than the US. But appeasing US, in the position of Canada, is akin to trying to reason with a wife beater.

You don't reason. You remove the victim from the hands of the aggressor.

It will cost a lot of money, and the Canadians will suffer greatly. But the alternative is to join America, which Canadians have stated don't want to.
by tboyd47 | 2026-01-21 14:16:12+00:00
There are subtle verbal cues that give away the dominant modality the person thinks with: visual, auditory, or kinesthetic, then you can tailor the session for that modality, using inductions for feeling- or hearing-oriented subjects. My dominant modality is kinesthetic, so I tend to use those first anyway.

Even though we live in a visually stimulating environment, and society tends to express things to us in visual ways, the goal of hypnosis is to relax the person and guide them to a comfortable place, so we can relate to people how they are internally and we don't have to worry about making everything highly visual.
by dudewhocodes | 2026-01-21 14:16:13+00:00
> I am at the tail end of AI adoption, so I don’t expect to say anything particularly useful or novel.

Are they really late? Has everyone started using agents and paying $200 subscriptions?

Am I the one wrong here or these expressions of "falling behind" are creating weird FOMO in the industry?

EDIT: I see the usefulness of these tools, however I can't estimate how many people use them.
by alzoid | 2026-01-21 14:16:34+00:00
If you watch his speech and the follow up interview you he answers that directly (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDMyeGQm3NA @ 17:50). It's a good watch, better than the past 10 years of daily coverage by American media of what their dumb president and ex president is ranting about.

I am in the start up community in Canada. I can tell you that after the first threat from Trump every federal program to help tech start ups immediately pivoted to Asia and the EU. Before he started yapping, we were connected to Canadian representatives in the US, meeting about markets and opportunities. Now all programs are directed at forming partnerships elsewhere.
by cucumber3732842 | 2026-01-21 14:16:55+00:00
The unit itself doesn't actually matter. Even industries with the least precision set their stuff up with so much precision that the unit you use basically doesn't matter.

Your machine may spit out widgets that are plus or minus an inch. But when you set up the machine you set it up to the 1/16 regardless. Swapping all that to metric doesn't actually change anything other than the number the guy setting it up dials it in to.
by IAmBroom | 2026-01-21 14:17:41+00:00
I have a buddy who was a young entrepeneur, during the Dot-Com era. He renamed his company to Company Name Dot Com. A few months later the bubble burst, and those last two words were a smelly fart to potential investors.

He was forced to a buy-out, kept as a VP, intentionally forced out, and accepted cash to settle their violation of terms.

My hackles rose when he made the name change, but... not my business. Sad to see how quickly my intuition was validated. Would his company have survived else? Dunno, of course. But hopping onto the fad wave was, in retrospect, far more dangerous than simply navigating with the assets he had.
by metawake | 2026-01-21 14:17:58+00:00
Author here. Built RagTune to stop guessing at RAG configs.

Surprising findings:

1. On legal text (CaseHOLD), 1024 chunks scored WORST (0.618).
The "small" 256 chunks won (0.664). 7% swing.

2. On Wikipedia text? All chunk sizes hit ~99%. No difference.

3. Plot twist: At 5K docs, optimal chunk size FLIPPED from 256→1024.
Scale changes everything.

Code is MIT: github.com/metawake/ragtune

Happy to discuss methodology.
by maebert | 2026-01-21 14:17:59+00:00
This goes back all the way to the beginnings of Psychology. William James, who is considered the somewhat of godfather of Psychology, argued that all feelings are bodily feelings; ie. emotions are caused by bodily sensations. Your heart is not beating BECAUSE of anxiety, rather your beating heart IS anxiety. You don’t tremble because you’re afraid, you’re “afraid” (a complex emotion mediated by stories we have) because you tremble.

It’s a theory psychologists and philosophers still argue about.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-21 14:18:14+00:00
This should be available in your bank or other treasury management provider automation. Does your bank not support this? If you're not getting this from your current biz bank, I would shop around. I recommend Mercury (no affiliation, just a happy customer), but others provide some level of this too.

(workflow automation providers do not want this liability, as you note in Zapier's ToS, which is totally fair)
by chrislloyd | 2026-01-21 14:18:44+00:00
Most people's mental model of CC is that "it's just a TUI" but it should really be closer to "a small game engine". For each frame our pipeline constructs a scene graph with React -> layout elements -> rasterize them to a 2d screen -> diff that against the previous screen -> _finally_ use the diff to generate ANSI sequences to draw. We have a ~16ms frame budget so we have roughly ~5ms to go from the React scene graph to ANSI written. You're right that in theory we shouldn't have to do much work, but in practice that's required optimizations at every step.

For the GC pauses specifically, what mattered is predictable performance. More allocations == more GC == more frames where the VM is locked up seemingly doing nothing. On slower machines we were seeing this be in the order of seconds, not ms and when somebody is typing all they feel is the 1 character that's stuttering. Honestly, I was surprised about this too as GC in JS is often not something that's too impactful.
by GuB-42 | 2026-01-21 14:19:13+00:00
I remember at the time that donating CPU time was considered trivial. Not so much today.

At the time of SETI@home, a typical CPU used maybe 20W at full load, fans usually ran at constant speed, and power management was much more primitive. So you barely noticed the difference between idle and full load, both on your electricity bill and on the noise the PC made.

Now hundreds of watts is not uncommon if you also use the GPU, and people are much more conscious about how much power computers use. And at full power, fans spin up loudly, laptops get uncomfortably hot, etc... It means you are not going to do it as easily. It probably didn't help the "@home" projects.