MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gooob | 2026-01-19 13:58:30+00:00
it's malware in the mind. it was happening before deep fakes was possible. news outlets and journalists have always had incentive to present extreme takes to get people angry, cause that sells. now we have tools that pretty much just accelerate and automate that process. it's interesting. it would be helpful to figure out how to prevent people (especially upcoming generations) from getting swept away by all this.
by elzbardico | 2026-01-19 13:58:34+00:00
Don't care about the critics. What you're doing is what people were doing in the 80s with their new PCs and tools that democratized this kind of development, like Basic and DBase.

Most developers are too full of themselves, in fact, most of us are a bunch of pretentious pricks. It is no wonder people are happy to be able to get what they want without our smugness and pretentiousness. Too bad some us are not like that and will end up getting unemployed anyway in the next few years.
by zerosizedweasle | 2026-01-19 13:58:37+00:00
"Oxfam, the world-renowned advocacy group, issued a report ahead of the Davos event which showed that billionaire wealth rose by more than 16% last year, three times faster than the past five-year average, to more than $18 trillion. It drew on Forbes magazine data on the world’s richest people.

Oxfam said the $2.5 trillion rise in the wealth of billionaires last year would be enough to eradicate extreme poverty 26 times over. Their wealth has risen by more than four-fifths since 2020, while nearly half the world’s population lives in poverty, the group said.

The Trump administration has led a “pro-billionaire agenda,” the group said, through actions such as slashing taxes for the wealthiest, fostering the growth of AI-related stocks that help rich investors get richer, and thwarting efforts to tax giant companies."

AI is killing humanity
by Forgeties79 | 2026-01-19 13:58:46+00:00
If AGI or something truly amazingly novel and useful for the market was about to get here, that’d be an unbelievable about of cash on the horizon. The promises they’ve made, it even half met, would be revolutionary. Ad placement means the business likely needs ads to work because the product isn’t near what they have been promising and won’t generate the revenue (at least not on its own) that investors have been promised because the hype was way too big.
by oreally | 2026-01-19 13:58:47+00:00
Because soft skills is also dealing with politics, you can't separate the 2.

> See it this way: You have two people in your team who disagree on a technical issue. You need to help them come to a decision.

You lay out a very hopeful scenario. Sometimes there are some issues where there are no clear cut answers (ie. you cannot apply a objective value judgement) and it's a purely political play. If you are asked to solve the issue, you have to take a side either way, and whichever side you take you will piss off the other, possibly for good. If the side you judged in favor of fails, you might end up being on the chopping block, or be 'marked' by the organisation with a 'never-do-well' label. This is -the- landmine I'm talking about.

You had better hope there are support in the org that can still support you, because depending on the severity of the fallout, you might be starting from 0. You'd better hope hard skills are still valuable by then.
by OGWhales | 2026-01-19 13:58:52+00:00
I've not found it that great at programming cobol, at least in comparison to its ability with other languages it seems to be noticeably worse, though we aren't using any models that were specifically trained on cobol. It is still useful for doing simple and tedious tasks, for example constructing a file layout based on info I fed it. I do really like being able to feed it a whole manual and let it act as a sort of advanced find. Working in a mainframe environment often requires looking for some obscure info, typically in a large PDF that's not always easy to find what you need, so this is pretty nice.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-19 13:59:14+00:00
Slightly unrelated (maybe?), here is a moderately nuanced summary video of the latest happenings in the ongoing court cases in "Rockstar vs Union": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnuipPQDd_w

I'm saying "maybe?" unrelated as it does sound like something a disgruntled employee might do, but could also be something completely else. I feel like it might be related though, hence the linking.
by empiricus | 2026-01-19 13:59:33+00:00
If electricity is cheap enough, you can take CO2 from air and make fuel (not sure what is the threshold? 5-10 times cheaper then now?). then you can use that fuel where you need its energy density. I agree that it seems pretty dumb to ignore China (and soon India) CO2 emissions. Again, if you manage to make nuclear cheap enough, you could just gift reactors to everyone that needs them. It can be argued that cheap and safe nuclear was not really tried.
by prewett | 2026-01-19 14:00:53+00:00
It's been discussed a number of times on HN. The Wall Street Journal even had an article about counterfeits on Amazon a few years ago. There's one at [1] (paywall, naturally).

I'm not sure if it is fraud, but it definitely aided and abetting counterfeiters, and I think it is a travesty that Amazon has not been fined for it. I also actively avoid buying from Amazon partly because of this (and this decision will make no difference; I have no interest in patronizing a company that does this, unless I see some repentance), although there really isn't anyone else for a lot of items.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-has-ceded-control-of-its...
by GuB-42 | 2026-01-19 14:01:03+00:00
I consider the early years of 3d acceleration to be pretty bad days for the demoscene on the "high end" side.

Problem was that fixed pipelines were seriously limiting. Most of the cool effects of software rendering couldn't be done, and the lack of direct access to the hardware meant that you couldn't do many of the hardware tricks the demoscene is known for. It doesn't mean people couldn't be creative, but it was mostly limited to doing interesting 3D geometry and textures. Things started changing with the advent of shaders.

About AI, I think thing the demoscene is rather welcoming of "AI" as long as you use it creatively instead of doing what everyone else does (slop). In the topic of Gaussian splatting, look at the Revision 2025 invitation [1], there is a pretty cool scene featuring it, people loved that part.

[1] https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=103537
by mike_hearn | 2026-01-19 14:01:03+00:00
FWIW the Look Up feature, whilst built in to macOS, can also be implemented using "services" which are a way to plug in to other apps and system features like text rendering and highlighting. I can also select text in your message, right click, services -> "Add to music as spoken track". That's a plugin offered by an app. It's only one extra click.

My perspective on why OpenDoc/OLE failed are different to yours. The model in which apps host targeted plugins which don't affect data formats proved very successful, the model in which an app is nothing but plugins wasn't. And if you want to talk about marketing and culture, well, OpenDoc and OLE both benefited from corporate marketing. Using OLE was part of Microsoft's "Designed for Windows 95" programme, which came with a badge and marketing dollars attached. This concept was heavily pushed at the time. OLE had more success than OpenDoc but only temporarily and only because it was a less pure implementation of the concept, closer to fancy plugins than truly decomposing apps into components.

I think the reason they didn't take off was a mix of technological problems and user demand problems. It wasn't people/policy related. Quite the opposite: both technologies lived on long after the real problems had become apparent.

Programming for both OpenDoc and OLE was extraordinarily complicated. The developer experience was atrocious. Making your app OLE embeddable required mastering not only COM and Win32 programming but dozens of other poorly documented and flaky APIs, like for compound documents. Code generation was rampant, everything was memory unsafe. I never did OpenDoc apps but I heard it was a very similar experience.

Then there was the user experience: if you embedded an object from an app and sent the resulting document to someone else who didn't have the app, or had an old version of the app, then the document would just have a hole in it. Useless. OLE tried to do a kind of weird mind-meld between totally different app GUIs, meaning that depending on where you clicked in a document the hosting app could look totally different. There were dozens of problems like this.

In the end it was all rendered irrelevant by the web. On the web, if you share a document with someone it always appeared for them correctly (or if it doesn't, it's a minor and quickly fixable bug). Reliable sharing mattered more than anything else and so all the non-web platforms started dying out.
by joe_mamba | 2026-01-19 14:01:44+00:00
Greenland invasion is just a distraction by Trump from the Epstein files. The US already have massive military presence in Greenland with permission from Denmark since the 1950s, they can already do whatever illegal things they want there (and they have, like installing a portable nuclear reactor), without the downsides that come with actual ownership of the island. They already have a really sweet deal.

Trump keeps talking about taking it because he knows the media will bite the bait and talk about that instead and forget about the epstein list and other illegal shit his administration did.

Remember how he was also talking about annexing Canada in his election? Trump just loves to bait the media by saying crazy stuff since the media feeds on sensationalist stuff like that.
by yunohn | 2026-01-19 14:02:35+00:00
> That’s a fallacy.

> Nothing is saved overall.

This might be the most ridiculous POV of the second-hand market I’ve ever read.

There’s definitely some people who are buying new phones purely because they are ok with eating the difference between the new phone’s cost price and the old one’s sale price. I’m certain that’s a tiny niche of the entire market. And there’s the even smaller niche that actually use their phone till its very last breath. On the other hand, there’s an immeasurably larger part of the new phone market, formed of people who just buy a new phone anyways when they feel like it and leave the old one in their drawer.

Source: User surveys and research I conducted in another life
by zipy124 | 2026-01-19 14:02:44+00:00
Not certain which type of sensor it uses, but in any case painting it wouldn't fix it. The problem with a scratch is now it will register that as a fingerprint ridge, but it is in a fixed location, so theoretically if you re-register your finger on the scanner and always position your finger in *exactly* the same space it would still work, but as soon as your finger moves slightly, the scratches position relative to your fingerprint changes, thus changing the fingerprint that is read. You would have to fill the scratch with the same material that it is coated with, provided the scratch is just in the coating, and it isn't say a capacitive type which you've scratched part of that capacitive coating. Thus for a home-repair likely out of luck I'd think.

I could be wrong, any hardware guys please feel free to chime in over me.

Note: slightly simplified explanation but mostly holds for the three common types of sensors.
by kriro | 2026-01-19 14:02:45+00:00
Some people care less about squeezing out performance and more about open standards. I like having more choices, especially open ones.

I am a user, I like to tinker, I'm fairly confident there's more than 1% of people who care about these things. If you live in a country that is threatened by export embargos and the like it also makes a lot of sense to prioritize open.
by aniviacat | 2026-01-19 14:03:45+00:00
> What is an ad? What isn’t?

Anything wie usually consider an ad/sponsored content/boosted content. That includes ad banners, video sponsors, boosted posts, billboards, etc. Really any way that a third party pays some organization to put certain content on their space (be it physical or digital) to be seen by people who are probably there for other reasons than to see that content.

An exact definition fortunately isn't necessary, since our legal system is well adapted to deal with terms that are difficult to define.

> Must all information be paid for by the audience?

Other monetization paths are still possible. E.g. some SaaS orgs could still run blogs to gain mind share, as they do now.

Hopefully most information will be paid for by the audience though.

> I worry that innovators and small businesses won’t be able to get their message out efficiently.

If ads are no longer a thing, people will find other means to get information.

You mentioned in another comment that you like ads in newspapers telling you about some local stores and events. If the readers are genuinely interested in this, the newspaper can still put that information there. Just instead of the highest bidder, they'll put the ones that are genuinely interesting.

Of course, if your product is not worth reading about, it will suddenly be much more difficult to promote it. In my opinion, that is a good thing.
by amiga386 | 2026-01-19 14:03:52+00:00
> Nothing is saved overall.

This is not true. You're missing that, if there is no second-hand market, phones get an early, premature grave, meaning more e-waste.

Imagine there are 10 million people in the world and they all want a phone. 1 million neophiles only ever want the latest phone, released yearly. The other 9 million are luddites who are OK with a second-hand phone. All phones last exactly 10 years before failing, and never become obsolete or damaged.

No second-hand market allowed: 1.9m phones sold per year, 1.9m discarded.

Neophiles buy and discard 1m phones (into the dump with 9 years of life left). Luddites buy and discard 900,000 phones (they have no second-hand market to buy from, so they buy new phones, but they use them for full 10 years instead of just 1, so the 9 million only buy/discard 900,000 phones per year on average).

Second-hand market allowed: 1m phones sold per year, 1m discarded. 900,000 less!

Neophiles buy 1m new phones but sell their old phones to luddites, discarding none. Luddites then use them for 9 more years before discarding. There are 9 million luddites with 9 years of phone use meaning they need an average of 1m second-hand phones per year, which happens to be how many are on the market thanks to the neophiles.
by zmfmfmddl | 2026-01-19 14:04:30+00:00
The point about the mass of code running the economy being untouched by AI agents is so real. During my years as a developer, I've often faced the skepticism surrounding automation technologies, especially when it comes to legacy languages like COBOL. There’s a perception that as AI becomes more capable, it might threaten specialized roles. However, I believe that the intricacies and context of legacy systems often require human insight that AI has yet to master fully.

I logged my fix for this here: https://thethinkdrop.blogspot.com/2026/01/agentic-automation...
Ask HN: Where to find VC fund or investor for project in Europe?
by nicksbg | 2026-01-19 14:04:48+00:00
To make a preface first: I am currently located in Belgrade, Serbia and I am trying to see where I could find potential investor for the project I am working on.

I know the places such as OpenVC https://www.openvc.app/, but I do not know anyone that had any experience with it. I am really not sure if anyone has invested in projects from Serbia outside ElevenFund, SouthCentral Ventures and few more.

For someone wondering why not to look for local investments: Aside from the current political turmoil, the investment here is not that encouraging - you give away a large percent of equity for the investment that is not enough to cover yearly costs in some cases.

About the project: I come from the HR field, and in current climate finding job is really hard. A lot of candidates apply, and at the same time a lot of positions are saturated with applications, that most of the time are not even viewed. This in turn makes finding job even harder.

The traditional ATS model feels like black hole where you just throw your resume and hope for the best. With the addition of AI to analyze and pick resumes it gets even worse. Additionally, a lot of them are saturated with features which most people either don't use or know how to use at all.

Getting rejected from one company shouldn't be the end of the road when searching for job, it should be just the start until it is finished and concludes with hiring somewhere.

The idea itself is to connect applicants (with their consent) that have been rejected, with other companies that are looking for same profiles. This cuts Time To Hire saving the costs for company on the one side, and at the same time it cuts the time for people to find a job, since the system matches them with potential companies in a similar way like dating apps. It can also reduce reliance on hiring agencies as time goes by.

As more people use the ATS the database will get bigger, thus the quality of the matches will get better. The AI here can be used for better matchmaking and building better recommendation system, while making sure that there is human behind the feels to check every match, resume and so on.

I have already built an MVP that shows how it would function, and am currently in the process of working out with friend in making it to be in usable state for others. I've researched PMF (Product Market Fit) and how it fits in current market. As for the monetization I have additional ideas aside for the typical subscription payed per seat/package.

The product itself is B2B oriented with both the individuals and companies being the beneficiaries of it.

I am open to hearing more on how should I proceed in this regards and where to go next really because finding investment from Serbia seems like looking to find a needle in a haystack.
by rob74 | 2026-01-19 14:04:56+00:00
Since "Cola" is listed in the "popular alternatives" box, I think it's important to mention that most European Coca-Cola bottlers operate as franchises, i.e. they license the Coca-Cola brand and get the syrup for the drinks they bottle from the Atlanta-based HQ, but other than that they are locally-owned companies. So if you boycott Coca-Cola brands, maybe 20% of the impact goes to Coca-Cola US, while 80% is felt by the local company and its employees.
by Gander5739 | 2026-01-19 14:05:06+00:00
> Why is the protection of a page relevant?

>> those protecting the page have meddled with the title too

> Why is this "consensus not to include the claim" relevant when the claim was already included?
Because anyone can dispute anything. But saying it's some kind of agenda by a group of admins is incorrect.

> Why did it have to go to dispute at all?
Because someone disputed it. Though, really, it may not have been necessary in this case. You may also refer to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/One_against_man...
by PurpleRamen | 2026-01-19 14:05:07+00:00
You can replace AI with any other technology and had the same situation, just with slightly different words. Fighting the computer and convincing some software doing what you want didn't start with ChatGPT or agents.

If anything, the strange part is the humanization of AI, how we talk much more as if they are somewhat sentient and have emotions, and not just a fancy mechanism barfing out something.
by withinboredom | 2026-01-19 14:05:10+00:00
Worked with a guy that used this to his advantage. He sold CD's and DVD's through FBA. He would get them "new enough" looking via buffing them out (often making them unplayable), shrinkwrapping them, and then hope whomever got them wasn't him that got the commission for that sale and instead the person who bought "from him" got one of the actual new ones. He made a killing off of this since "used" inventory was incredibly cheap for a whole pallet of them.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2026-01-19 14:05:15+00:00
I don't really disagree with you in principle, but at least the notion of a rules based international order (no matter how hypocritical it was) was a good thing. We SHOULD all try to be better and not just focus on our own narrow self interests.

I think that the UN has been pretty crap (because of the security council and hypocrisy), but like a lot of unsatisfying compromises, we'll miss it when it's gone.
by ungovernableCat | 2026-01-19 14:05:35+00:00
Some are saying "finally, AI does all the busywork and we focus on the business domain"

But what if the business is soulless? As in what if the business you're working on is just milking value out of people through negative patterns which... is ... well a lot of tech businesses these days. Maybe the busywork enabled engineers to be distracted from the actual impact of their work which makes people demotivated.
by snarfy | 2026-01-19 14:06:35+00:00
The amount of software needed and the amount being written are off many orders of magnitude. It has been that way since software's inception and I don't see it changing anytime soon. AI tools are like having a jr dev to do your grunt work. Soon it will be like a senior dev. Then like a dev team. I would love to have an entire dev team to do my work. It doesn't change the fact that I still have plenty of work for them to do. I'm not worried AI will take my job I will just be doing bigger jobs.