MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lotsofpulp | 2026-01-23 12:40:41+00:00
It has been legal for sellers to ask buyers to pay more if they use a credit card for 15 years now.

There is no "moral" quandary. Sellers that have the same price for credit and non credit payment methods are simply betting that people using credit will be more willing to pay higher prices overall and still buy from them compared to their competitors' with lower prices who charge more for credit cards.

Every year, fewer and fewer of my expenses are paid with a credit card because more and more sellers are not betting on this. My kids' gymnastics class/tutoring/daycare charges 3% or more for credit cards. My home wired ISP and mobile network provider charges 5% more for credit cards. My property tax, insurance, water/sewer utility, all charge 3% or more. Even Target charges 5% for credit cards. Basically all tradespeople that come to fix things on my house charge extra and ask for Zelle/Venmo electronic cash payments instead.

So in all these cases, I do not use a credit card to pay. But the point is, it is up to the seller to decide what price they want to charge for credit and non credit, so there is no "moral" quandary for buyers. No one's hand is being forced.
by ethbr1 | 2026-01-23 12:40:42+00:00
December 12, 2000.

The US might have had a president who was knowledgeable about technology and dedicated to solving climate change.

Who might have chosen differently about invading Afghanistan and Iraq.

I'm sure Gore would have made mistakes, but it's hard to see a path where he wasn't a better president (for the US and for the world) than W Bush.
by vouwfietsman | 2026-01-23 12:40:44+00:00
Besides the other comments already here about code gen & contracts, a bigger one for me to step away from json/xml is binary serialization.

It sounds weird, and its totally dependent on your use case, but binary serialization can make a giant difference.

For me, I work with 3D data which is primarily (but not only) tightly packed arrays of floats & ints. I have a bunch of options available:

1. JSON/XML, readable, easy to work with, relatively bulky (but not as bad as people think if you compress) but no random access, and slow floating point parsing, great extensibility.

2. JSON/XML + base64, OK to work with, quite bulky, no random access, faster parsing, but no structure, extensible.

3. Manual binary serialization: hard to work with, OK size (esp compressed), random access if you put in the effort, optimal parsing, not extensible unless you put in a lot of effort.

4. Flatbuffers/protobuf/capn-proto/etc: easy to work with, great size (esp compressed), random access, close-to-optimal parsing, extensible.

Basically if you care about performance, you would really like to just have control of the binary layout of your data, but you generally don't want to design extensibility and random access yourself, so you end up sacrificing explicit layout (and so some performance) by choosing a convenient lib.

We are a very regularly sized company, but our 3D data spans hundreds of terabytes.

(also, no, there is no general purpose 3D format available to do this work, gltf and friends are great but have a small range of usecases)
by mrweasel | 2026-01-23 12:41:23+00:00
I don't really see any mentioning of a new API, beyond their Vertex AI thing, and I don't know how comparable that might be. Also it is capped at 50 domains (by default).

It is perhaps a clever legal workaround. They must sell access to their index, but the verdict didn't state how much of it you can buy access to at any one time. So they put a limit of 50 domains, because that accommodates everyone who's not a search engine, but effectively blocks Kagi and Ecosia, while not exactly refusing to sell to them.
by philistine | 2026-01-23 12:42:08+00:00
To me there are two eras of the Google Graveyard(tm). First, there's the we're a university research group with an ad company footing the bill era. That's the early Google era, and it was a consequence of its corporate structure. They valued new projects, market fit, profitability, and maintenance be damned.

We're in the second era. The era of the MBAs are shutting down the last remnants of openness the company ever had.
by guerrilla | 2026-01-23 12:42:19+00:00
> Other people apparently don't have this feeling at all.

I think this is interesting too. I've noticed the difference in dating/hook-up contexts. The people you're talking about also end up getting laid more but that group also has a very large intersection with sex pests and other shitty people. The thing they have in common though is that they just don't care what other people think about them. That leads some of them to be successful if they are otherwise good people... or to become borderline or actual crininals if not. I find it fascinating actually, like how does this difference come about and can it actually be changed or is it something we get early in life or from the genetic lottery.
by pousada | 2026-01-23 12:42:20+00:00
Like with all things in life shame is best in moderation.

Too little or too much shame can lead to issue.

Problem is no one tells you what too little or too much actually is and there are many different situations where you need to figure it out on your own.

So I think sometimes people just get it wrong but ultimately everyone tries their best. Truly malicious shameless people are extremely rare in my experience.

For the topic at hand I think a lot of these “shameless” contributions come from kids
by bhouston | 2026-01-23 12:42:21+00:00
Ah yes, OpenAI is sharding now. Surprise surprise.

I mentioned that as a right solution to the problem last time they posted about Postgres performance issues:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44072645

But the response from an OpenaI engineer (who is the author of this article) was that sharding isn't the solution:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44074702
by noooooooph | 2026-01-23 12:43:09+00:00
To that point I think it's lovely how LLMs democratize science. At ICLR a few years ago I spoke with a few Korean researchers that were delighted that their relative inability to write in English was no being held against them during the review process. I think until then I underestimated how pivotal this technology was in lowering the barrier to entry for the non-English speaking scientific community.
by JamesTRexx | 2026-01-23 12:45:48+00:00
I'm all for more realism in an FPS game, but then the realism also has to apply to the NPCs, who have unlimited ammo, can see through walls or worse, shoot through them, who have no fear and thus not hide or not long enough, don't sneak around, don't have imperfect control over their actions.

I don't have a perfect game setup and am constantly hampered by needing to do two different things like locomotion and handling with only my left hand, thus using cheats is standard for me to compensate for the imbalance. Also, sometimes I just want to enjoy a walk through the environment without constant fighting (Far Cry 2, 5).
by storystarling | 2026-01-23 12:45:49+00:00
I'm not sure "wasted work is cheap" really holds up when you look at the token unit economics for Claude, especially if you're hitting the API with full context for every parallel agent. I switched from a similar parallelized setup to LangGraph precisely because the merge conflicts and redundant reasoning steps were killing my margins. How are you handling the git conflicts without a coordinator?
by PlatoIsADisease | 2026-01-23 12:46:49+00:00
As soon as my kid was able to play video games, we basically banned him from watching tv.

His only tv was phonics and numbers, which helped significantly because when he started playing minecraft on creative, he had to sound out the items he wanted to search for.

I didn't have any science, it was intuition.

I suppose next step is to figure out which video games are best. We basically don't let them play Idle games, but I'm starting to think platformers might need to be banned too.
by joseda-hg | 2026-01-23 12:46:57+00:00
More directly, they don't care about the crash, because some of them either can profit from the crash or more generally are incentivized to think they should extract all value right up to the point of crashing and not a second less, because that is leaving money on the table

I see it as an extension of the tragedy of commons, no individual wants to destroy the finite resource, but everyone exploiting it to exhaustion always will
by d4rkp4ttern | 2026-01-23 12:47:46+00:00
As others said this was possible for months already with llama-cop’s support for Anthropic messages API. You just need to set the ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL. The specific llama-server settings/flags were a pain to figure out and required some hunting, so I collected them in this guide to using CC with local models:

https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-tools/blob/main/do...

One tricky thing that took me a whole day to figure out is that using Claude Code in this setup was causing total network failures due to telemetry pings, so I had to set this env var to 1: CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_NONESSENTIAL_TRAFFIC
by alex1138 | 2026-01-23 12:47:51+00:00
Funnily, Proton was supposed to be the anti-Google, wasn't it? Maybe some of "Proton's not in the US, so not subject to scary NSA warrant canaries"

Except... Gmail has handled spam pretty well? And at least if you do get Spam they actually tell you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6090712
by netsharc | 2026-01-23 12:47:56+00:00
The video from the article, in case you don't want to accept cookies: https://youtu.be/bqz65_YfcJg

It doesn't even say which type of cookies have to be accepted, I tried selecting just functional cookies, that didn't work. Funny how it's an arcane bunch of toggles in a cookie popup, on a page describing an arcane way of booting up a system.
by bflesch | 2026-01-23 12:47:57+00:00
It's simply an example of the principal/agent problem, finance 101.

CapitalOne shareholders will decide if they want to sue the management over buying a company which primarily focuses on AI-bubble-startups.

We're at a very late stage of the AI bubble which might be the last ZIRP-fueled bubble to pop after which VC as an investment vehicle will be dead for years to come. Rising tide lifts all boats and all, but many of the "genious" VCs already have problems returning capital from their older funds.

Capital One management is friends with VCs, VCs want to cash out from their investments without big losses, some parties, some holidays, as easy as that.
by jraph | 2026-01-23 12:48:13+00:00
Ooh that's a good question, how do you control for confirmation bias in studies?

I'm a bit embarrassed to have to admit that this goes beyond my knowledge. I'm sure there are answers to this, this must be well known in these areas of research. We also know that research itself can be biased too. I'll have to ask friends working on these topics! Thanks for the interesting discussion about this I'll probably live in the future.

On this topic specifically though, that meta analysis that concluded there was a lack of evidence was despite the potential confirmation bias (unless the authors of the meta-analysis where already suspicious about the theory… oh well… one can hope them following the scientific method provides strong enough guarantees. It's not completely bulletproof but it's the most reliable thing we have. I'll ask for sure!).

> but the fact that it validated what we observed (i.e. gravity) is also confirmation bias

Pretty sure that's wrong. The way it works is: we have this equation. It predicts where we expect such stuff to be in X seconds. In X seconds, we check it's indeed there. It's there: actual confirmation, not confirmation bias. That's how you check your hypothesis. Of course the initial hypothesis comes from intuition… formed by observing the world. Enough confirmations makes your model more reliable, and is the thing that will be used until a counter example shows its nose and a better model is found.

I guess if you have a solid enough hypothesis, it also works like this in human sciences.
by jahnu | 2026-01-23 12:48:53+00:00
> A fully renewable energy system is probably always going to be more expensive per unit than a fossil fuel based one.

No probably not at all unless you mean in the short term. The fossil industry gets way way way more financial support. The externalities of fossils are costing us incredible amounts of money, health and lives and will do for many many decades if not centuries to come. Renewables are now cheaper than nearly anything despite decades of suppression by the fossil industry.

https://www.imf.org/en/blogs/articles/2023/08/24/fossil-fuel...

https://ourworldindata.org/how-much-subsidies-fossil-fuels

https://www.eesi.org/files/FactSheet_Fossil_Fuel_Externaliti...

https://www.irena.org/News/pressreleases/2025/Jul/91-Percent...

https://sps.columbia.edu/news/fossil-fuel-industrys-ceaseles...
by pharmasafer | 2026-01-23 12:49:12+00:00
Does this staristic correlate with scarcity of pharmaceutically-prepared amphetamine-based FDA-approved treatments for narcolepsy and ADHD?

Amphetamines are at the top of the list of “Top 31 Prescription Drugs Associated with Reports of Violence Toward Others”. A followup questionnaire/consultation/interview may be helpful for identifying whether a different ADHD medication would have a more tolerable side effect profile for a given patient.

Adderall and Concerta are FDA-approved amphetamine-based treatments for narcolepsy and ADHD.

Pharmaceutical grade amphetamines are considered to be lower risk than street meth.
by atiedebee | 2026-01-23 12:49:38+00:00
Ran the tests again with some more files, this time decompressing the pdf in advance. I picked some widely available PDFs to make the experiment reproducable.

file | raw | zstd (%) | brotli (%) |
gawk.pdf | 8.068.092 | 1.437.529 (17.8%) | 1.376.106 (17.1%) |
shannon.pdf | 335.009 | 68.739 (20.5%) | 65.978 (19.6%) |
attention.pdf | 24.742.418 | 367.367 (1.4%) | 362.578 (1.4%) |
learnopengl.pdf | 253.041.425 | 37.756.229 (14.9%) | 35.223.532 (13.9%) |

For learnopengl.pdf I also tested the decompression performance, since it is such a large file, and got the following (less surprising) results using 'perf stat -r 5':

zstd: 0.4532 +- 0.0216 seconds time elapsed ( +- 4.77% )
brotli: 0.7641 +- 0.0242 seconds time elapsed ( +- 3.17% )

The conclusion seems to be consistent with what brotli's authors have said: brotli achieves slightly better compression, at the cost of a little over half the decompression speed.
by Tostino | 2026-01-23 12:49:54+00:00
The SQL Server query planner is head and shoulders above what Postgres offers in the types of optimizations it will apply to your queries. It also properly caches query plans.

It offers heap tables, as well as index organized tables depending on what you need.

The protocol supports running multiple queries and getting multiple resultsets back at once saving some round-trips and resources.

Also supports things like global temp tables, and in memory tables, which are helpful for some use cases.

The parallelism story for a single query is still stronger with SQL Server.

I'm sure I could think of more, but it's been a few years since I've used it myself and I've forgotten a bit.

It is a good database. I just wouldn't use it for my startup. I could never justify that license cost, and how it restricts how you design your infrastructure due to the cost and license terms.
by theturtletalks | 2026-01-23 12:50:34+00:00
UCP is genuinely interesting, but I think it mostly trades one form of lock-in for another. Google and Shopify are pushing protocols like UCP and ACP because they can see AI eating the marketplace middleman. As discovery and checkout move into conversational interfaces, Google Shopping and Shopify’s own “Shop” app are at risk, and UCP is a way for them to stay central in that shift.

The issue is that UCP mainly benefits platforms that are already part of that ecosystem. Instead of Amazon et al controlling discovery, you risk ending up with Google and Shopify doing it through AI-driven interfaces. The experience looks more open, but control still sits with a small number of large platforms.

I’m working on something similar with a different premise. We’re building an open-source marketplace stack, basically a Shopify per vertical, where sellers run their own storefronts and discovery happens directly against the shop’s own API. You can see a working interoperable marketplace here[0], built on our first Shopify alternative, Openfront. Our website[1] goes deeper into the different vertical marketplaces we’re building like hotels, grocery stores, etc. We started with MCP-UI[2] for native conversational commerce, and V2 will support UCP, but it’s optional rather than the foundation.

[0] https://marketplace.openship.org

[1] https://openship.org

[2] https://mcpui.dev
by ben_w | 2026-01-23 12:50:57+00:00
Before November 30, 2022 that would have worked, but I think it stopped being reliable sometime between the original ChatGPT and today.

As per dead internet theory, how confident are we that the community which tells us which LLM is safe or unsafe is itself made of real people, and not mostly astroturfing by the owners of LLMs which are biased to promote things for money?

Even DIY testing isn't necessarily enough, deceptive alignment has been shown to be possible as a proof-of-concept for research purposes, and one example of this is date-based: show "good" behaviour before some date, perform some other behaviour after that date.
by lotsofpulp | 2026-01-23 12:51:40+00:00
The merchant chose to not offer a lower debit card / cash price because the merchant bets that people will pay a higher price if they use credit cards, so the merchant incentivizes credit card usage by asking for the same price for credit card and non credit card payment.

There are merchants that do not do this, such as Target, which charges 5% to use a credit card. Insurers/tutors/daycares/schools/healthcare providers/contractors/gas stations/restaurants/governments/utilities are also known to frequently charge more for credit card payments.

Any seller can choose to offer a lower price for debit card / ACH / Zelle payments if they want to.
Show HN: Watch AI models debate tier rankings in a simulated podcast
by karmasimida | 2026-01-23 12:52:09+00:00
Hi HN folks, this is just a funny idea that I vibe coded during past 2 days, as way to see how AI could reach consensus on tier rankings. Hope you guys have fun with it, and if you have funny transcripts, feel free to submit on issue which could help further analysis.
by 2OEH8eoCRo0 | 2026-01-23 12:52:20+00:00
Part of the AI hype is that normies can build things without learning to code. In which case, if AI is as good as some expect, wouldn't that kill all software products? What's stopping me from asking an AGI to oneshot me a photoshop clone?

I think it's more likely the case that AI is not going to be as disruptive as they think.
by Cthulhu_ | 2026-01-23 12:52:21+00:00
I don't remember exactly who said it, but at one point I read a good take - people trust these chatbots because there's big companies and billions behind them, surely big companies test and verify their stuff thoroughly?

But (as someone else described), GPTs and other current-day LLMs are probabilistic. But 99% of what they produce seems feasible enough.
by Intermernet | 2026-01-23 12:52:55+00:00
Who knows? Do NeurIPS have a pedigree of original, well sourced research dating back to before the advent of LLMs? We're at the point where both of the terms "AI" and "Experts" are so blurred it's almost impossible to trust or distrust anything without spending more time on due diligence than most subjects deserve.

As the wise woman once said "Ain't nobody got time for that".
by ada1981 | 2026-01-23 12:53:35+00:00
This is a cool project.

I created a tool called MultiBall to allow models to chat with each other, but I like this ongoing format.

EarthPilot.ai/multiball

One thing I observed is that while there creators (parents) are highly comparative the models themselves really want to collaborate.

I see this as a fundamentally good thing and that we ought to develop systems that can self evaluate which model(s) to use in a given scenario.
by bell-cot | 2026-01-23 12:53:49+00:00
Idea: For long-term storage & preservation of rare "treasures" (whether they be museums pieces, library books, national archive documents, or whoever), invest in oxygen-depleted facilities. At low-enough O2, nothing aerobic - be it bacteria, mold, bug, rodent, or whatever - can grow. Most can't even live. Gradual oxidation damage (paper turning yellow then brown, etc.) ceases. And disastrous fires can't happen.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2026-01-23 12:53:52+00:00
That Claude Opus 4.5 result of 4,973 is what you get if you just vectorize the reference kernel. In fact you should be under 4,900 doing that with very little effort (I tried doing this by hand yesterday).

The performance killer is the "random" access reads of the tree node data which the scalar implementation hides, together with the lack of load bandwidth, and to tackle that you'd have to rewrite the kernel to optimize the tree data loading and processing.
by latexr | 2026-01-23 12:54:09+00:00
Do they? Isn’t the application of the license its enforcement?

It’s illegal to commit fraud or murder, but if you do it and suffer no consequences (perhaps you even get pardoned by your president), does it matter that it was illegal? Laws are as strong as their enforcement.

For a less grim and more explicit example, Apple has a policy on the iOS App Store that apps may not use notifications to advertise. Yet it happens all the time, especially from big players like Uber. Apple themselves have done it too. So if you’re a bad actor and disrespectful to your users, does it matter that the rule exists?
by Tyriar | 2026-01-23 12:54:12+00:00
Syntax highlighting should work if the highlighting is provided by a textmate grammar, it will not work if it's semantic highlighting provided by an extension and that extension requires workspace trust. If it's possible to highlight without executing code, that sounds like an extension issue for whatever language it is. I believe extensions are able to declare whether they should activate without workspace trust and also to query the workspace trust state at runtime.
by gcr | 2026-01-23 12:54:35+00:00
This is an excellent HOWTO for matters of public relevance. I wish there were guides with similar levels of detail for Americans.

The closest thing I've seen is guides for changing your name in various USA states from the trans community; some of the processes are quite arduous (NJ for example has about 15 steps, most of which are manual separate errands with separate waiting periods...)
by yurishimo | 2026-01-23 12:54:54+00:00
> I don't pay interest so I'm not contributing to [their profits]...

That's true, but by accruing rewards, you are indirectly incentivising the CC company to increase interest rates to subsidize your usage. If every single CC user didn't carry a balance, there would be no rewards (see Europe).

I think we ended up at a better place here at the end so I will end with the last point.

When I was 17-19 year old, I had a small credit card with a $3k limit. I never hit this limit and it was never a problem on my path to financial freedom and I largely paid off the balance in full every month. My spouse and I were debt free by 26yo after paying off $75k in student loans. My aversion to consumer debt has little to do with my own experience and more to do with how I see it affecting my friends and family and American society more broadly. We put speed limits on roads to protect people from themselves. I'm only advocating for similar guardrails as it pertains to credit cards and other high interest consumer debt.

Especially after moving abroad, I just don't see the point in a system that is built on top of so much debt. It only hurts the most vulnerable people in society while funnelling money back to people who probably don't need it, imo.