MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by spacebacon | 2026-01-29 06:15:26+00:00
Thank you. The HN audience demonstrates capacity for metapragmatic analysis, though institutional incentives favor semiotic complacency over methodological innovation.

The comfort of entrenched epistemological positions is precisely what the paper challenges. Algorithmic curation transforms semiotic underdetermination from productive interpretive flexibility into polarization infrastructure. Signs that previously functioned as fragmentary mosaics requiring contextual negotiation now aggregate into segregated meaning-spaces through automated enregisterment.

The empirical contribution lies in formalizing this transition. Traditional semiotics documented indexicality and enregisterment qualitatively. Computational systems generate quantifiable semiotic dynamics at scale. This enables measurement of phenomena previously accessible only through ethnographic observation.

The bifurcation model operationalizes what Kockelman's framework describes: semiotic agency under algorithmic mediation produces stable dual attractors where signs acquire systematically divergent interpretations based on enclave membership. "Defund the police" demonstrates this mathematically. Single signifier, dual signifieds, no shared interpretive ground. The system has bifurcated semiotically.

Applied semiotics requires acknowledging that meaning-making occurs within measurable dynamical systems, not transcendent hermeneutic spaces. The treachery is not that signs lie. The treachery is that signs now operate according to bifurcation dynamics while we continue analyzing them with pre-algorithmic frameworks.

The paper provides formal tools for empirical semiotics. Whether the field adopts them depends on whether methodological innovation overcomes institutional inertia. The dynamics documented in the paper apply to academic knowledge production as much as political discourse.

The Treachery of Signs Semiotic Mediation, Pitchfork Bifurcation, and Political Polarization in Algorithmically Curated Societies

https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5987495
by Jacques2Marais | 2026-01-29 06:16:17+00:00
I've been using .xyz domains for a while now because of how cheap they are (around $2 on Spaceship for first year), especially as a solo dev building all kinds of side projects that would benefit from having their own domains.

I recently launched an app on a .xyz domain that's been getting steady traffic and some people actually signing up for it (it's tinytune.xyz if you're curious to see).

Doing a quick Google search I found a few other popular services using .xyz domains:

1. MEE6 (the popular Discord bot): mee6.xyz

2. Together AI (used to be on .xyz before going over to .ai, an example perhaps of starting with a cheaper domain before going more expensive): together.xyz

3. Block (large fintech): block.xyz

4. Starship (millions in funding): starship.xyz

This pdf has some more: https://gen.xyz/downloads/xyz-10th-anniversary-registry-port...
by soulofmischief | 2026-01-29 06:16:36+00:00
There is a way for us to both get what we want out of software development without ideologically crusading against each other's ideals. We can each have these valid opinions about how generative technology personally integrates into our lives.

Of course, that might be less and less true about our work as time goes on. At some point in the future, hiring an engineer who refuses to use generative coding tools will be the equivalent of hiring someone today who refuses to use an IDE or even a tricked out emacs/vim and just programs everything in Notepad. That's cool if they enjoy it, but it's unproductive in an increasingly competitive industry.
by overfeed | 2026-01-29 06:16:54+00:00
> Lastly, even if they succeed, competition will catch up and the market will be saturated.

Waymo is already in the lead, and OEMs will be beating down Waymo's door to license a simplified Driver stack if L3 autonomy becomes a sales-driver (ha!)

Edit: Waymo already has strategic partnerships with Toyota and the Hyundai group, so OEMs are already further along this path than I thought
Show HN: Codex.nvim – Codex inside Neovim (no API key required)
by ishiooon | 2026-01-29 06:17:27+00:00
Hi HN! I built codex.nvim, an IDE-style Neovim
integration for Codex.

Highlights:
- Works with OpenAI Codex plans (no API key required)
- Fully integrated in Neovim (embedded terminal
workflow)
- Bottom-right status indicator shows busy/wait state
- Send selections or file tree context to Codex quickly

Repo:
https://github.com/ishiooon/codex.nvim

Why I built this:
I wanted to use Codex comfortably inside Neovim without
relying on the API.

Happy to hear feedback and ideas!
by yoyohello13 | 2026-01-29 06:17:42+00:00
My company picked Azure. So I work with it every day and it is extremely painful to deploy anything that’s not a dotnet application on azure dev ops. One time the app service deployment pipeline just silently failed while trying to build our app. We only found out our new code didn’t deploy when someone asked about the new features expected to go out.

The management portal is super slow, every time you click a button it’s basically a roll of the dice whether the action will work or not.

And as with most things Microsoft these days there are reams of docs detailing every single feature, and none of it fucking works as described.

I will say, if you just want to deploy a quick app from VSCode from your local machine or whatever, it works great. But if you need anything off the golden path it quickly becomes frustrating.
by text0404 | 2026-01-29 06:18:06+00:00
Truly ridiculous. I briefly wondered if you actually believe this rhetoric, but then I saw your three-day-old account.

Not going to debate with someone who doesn't have the courage to stand behind their convictions. Your account is a throwaway and only exists to launder white supremacist talking points. Best of luck with your new American government, we all know it ended well for the leaders of Italy and Germany.
by fsloth | 2026-01-29 06:19:34+00:00
I agree with the OP:s statement

"With version control"

but there are 0 reasons you can't have that in a visual application as well.

It just needs good domain model design.

I mean it's _not_ trivial. To start with you have to first understand the relationships between your model entities, and how versioning strategy affects your model hierarchy (well, graph basically), and that potentially locks you down on a certain path. But it's totally doable as a hobby project (once you know CAD systems are built - so it's not suitable as ones first CAD project ofc).
by dasil003 | 2026-01-29 06:20:42+00:00
Middle management is a tremendous market for lemons. It's difficult to do well, and each layer requires a very different skillset. One of the side effects of the hypergrowth era of big tech between 2008-2023 is that a lot of managers were needed to support the amount of hiring, and they weren't very well trained, and often they could claim success for a rising tide almost by default as long as they didn't do anything too blatantly stupid.

The Peter Principle is of course well-known, but one of the insidious things is that once you have enough incompetent management and they are entrenched for a while, they will teach all the wrong lessons to an entire generation of new hires coming in. Due to the incentives and optics of large orgs, managers tend to spin everything in a positive light publicly, and the real unfiltered discussions of failure happen in tighter circles. At some point a lot of "successful" folks can have job hopped their way through a bunch of brand name companies just cargo culting on what they've seen done before with no real understanding of how their work actually impacts the company's bottom line.

This is one of the reasons I'm incredibly thankful to have spent most of my early career in small companies and startups where the big picture was so much easier to see.
by bsimpson | 2026-01-29 06:20:45+00:00
Checking out Plasma Manager was on my to-do list. Finally pushed me over the edge:

https://github.com/appsforartists/device-config/blob/master/...

I've got them bound for Plasma and Chrome now. I already had Mac keybindings for Ghostty - I need to port those over to use the new lib. Same for Sublime.
by cs02rm0 | 2026-01-29 06:21:12+00:00
"...while £4 million is admittedly chump change for the UK government..."

I know this is just the author deflecting the clichéd argument, but I hate that argument. The pennies do matter, otherwise the argument is made ad infinitum and you end up with a financially inept government running up a £200bn deficit.

These small websites should never be awarded to the mega-consultancies. Even if you paid the full £4m to a small webdev shop who'd feel like they'd hit the lottery I bet we'd get a better result and do more for the economy.
by pjmlp | 2026-01-29 06:22:16+00:00
It isn't.

I have done projects across Azure, AWS and GCP, and without a doubt would always pick Azure.

AWS is a master in complexity, one almost requires a PhD in cloud infrastructure to make sense of how everything works.

GCP is the usual "talk to the bots" when something happens, unless it gets escalated.

Azure can be as complicated as AWS, or one can enjoy the nice GUI tooling similar in spirit to VS or InteliJ like confort.

Even for timesharing like workflows with a cloud shell and Web IDE, it appears AWS and GCP take pride on being a clunky bad experience.
by AuryGlenz | 2026-01-29 06:22:42+00:00
Because, again, for home use we don't want a laundry robot, a dish washing robot, a cleaning robot, etc. We kind of have those (laundry machine, dishwasher, Roomba-types) but they all have big limitations. What people want is something that can do everything a human can do, so it can put away those dishes, wash a pan, clean the table, counters, etc. We've already scoped the problem and a humanoid-ish robot is probably the best option to do those things.
by mcintyre1994 | 2026-01-29 06:23:28+00:00
It might be when used now, but it was used by Microsoft internally at the time.

First part of that Wikipedia page:

> "Embrace, extend, and extinguish" (EEE), also known as "embrace, extend, and exterminate", is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found was used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used open standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and using the differences to strongly disadvantage its competitors.
by doubled112 | 2026-01-29 06:25:08+00:00
I had this happen at home. I'm not convinced it was a good idea to choose default subnets as /20.

It was pretty easy to cause myself problems with Docker compose. Eventually I run out of subnets in the 172.16 range and it happily created subnets in the 192.168. range. Some of them overlapped with subnets on my LAN.
by AuryGlenz | 2026-01-29 06:25:28+00:00
If you make a $10,000 robot that can do all of the dishes every damned household with kids in any semi-rich country will get one. A very good portion of our night is spent cleaning up after supper with just two kids, and that's time we can't spend with them. I'd even pay a subscription on top of that $10,000.

If it does laundry too? We'd easily pay $20,000, and we don't have FAANG type salaries.
by manuelmoreale | 2026-01-29 06:25:44+00:00
To be charitable, according to at least some reports, the Model Y was the best selling car of 2024.

I was googling the data for 2025 and it seems that it’s number 2 now (behind the RAV4 to my surprise) with the Corolla at 3.

No idea how accurate these are, finding global numbers was harder than I thought.
by dntrkv | 2026-01-29 06:25:59+00:00
This is most definitely an overgeneralization, but in my experience, engineers that constantly talk shit about management are either shitty engineers themselves or they're incredibly difficult to work with and blame everyone else for their shortcomings.

Middle management is playing a completely different game. I don't envy them one bit.

Sure, there are toxic cultures created by bad management, but that can be said about any leadership role. There is a reason for the hierarchy, if you think you have a better approach to structuring a company, have at it.
by OGsus | 2026-01-29 06:26:32+00:00
I built this interactive demo to visualize 'data drift' in industrial sensors.
It simulates a motor's vibration data in the browser. When you click 'Loose Bolt', it injects noise that increases the Coefficient of Variation without necessarily spiking the mean immediately.
The backend is Python (Flask + Numba) calculating a stability score on a sliding window of the last 30 points.
Thought it was a fun way to visualize a dry statistical concept. Let me know what you think!
by gostsamo | 2026-01-29 06:26:36+00:00
currently working on a personal project where part of the pipeline is recognizing lots of images. the employer let me use gemini for personal use, but wasting large amount of tokens on gemini3 pro ocr limited my work. flash gives worse result, but there are ways to retry. good for development, but long term, simpler parts of a pipeline could be dedicated to a local model. I can imagine many other use cases where you want large volume of low difficulty tasks at close to zero cost.
by al_borland | 2026-01-29 06:27:35+00:00
The business case for humanoid robots is simple... for lack of a better term, they're robot slaves. Companies or governments can buy them once, pay relatively minimal maintenance fees, and have an army of workers that don't need a salary, never take breaks, never complain, never unionize, and do things faster and more accurately than most humans ever will. Any company that can move to robots, will move to robots.

Imagine the profits companies will have when they can eliminate, or drastically reduce, their single largest expense... payroll. Not only the base pay, but 401K match, insurance, payroll taxes, etc. Poof... gone.
by tstrimple | 2026-01-29 06:28:12+00:00
This is my concern about Sanderson having full creative control. I know that show runners have developed a reputation for ruining all sorts of adaptions. But I also know that screen writing is different than writing a novel. And prose and characters and dialog have never been a strong suit of Sanderson. He's an amazing world builder. I love the exploration of how magic systems impact society. I can geek out on that all day just like I can geek out on Weir's protagonist's "problem solving" scenarios despite thinking the characters and settings and world building are particularly weak.
by tkgally | 2026-01-29 06:28:30+00:00
Lately high-rise buildings made of wood have been going up in Japan, too:

https://metropolisjapan.com/why-wooden-architecture-is-makin...

https://www.decn.co.jp/?p=167777

https://www.obayashi.co.jp/en/works/detail/work_2753.html
Ask HN: We're Shipping MCPs Blind
by tiluckdave | 2026-01-29 06:28:50+00:00
I built 25+ MCP servers in the last year. Everyone is talking about making MCPs enterprise-grade, but we don't know how to test them to support that claim.

Most MCP servers undergo a smoke test and are published. Thus, I am considering building a tool for this myself.

A few questions I had before I do so
- How are you testing your MCP servers today?
- Anyone using automated testing, multi-model, etc?
- Do you face a similar issue?
by teiferer | 2026-01-29 06:29:19+00:00
> Hopefully they're able to track down who did this.

Why? Was anybody harmed?

Hopefully they don't find out who did this. There was never any danger, and without this kind of joke, the world would be less fun.

(Obviously it should be harder to fool critical systems, so this served also as a warning, but if you want to attack such a system, a real bad guy would do this in more subtle ways.)
by csense | 2026-01-29 06:30:00+00:00
I'm surprised that a significant portion of western society has any sympathy for the Palestinian side after October 7. Hamas started a war and used a bunch of heinous tactics -- kidnapping and murdering a bunch of random civilians, putting bases in hospitals, stealing food aid, and so on.

Israel tries to avoid casualties when they can. For example when Hamas launches rockets at Israeli civilian targets, they shoot the rockets down with the Iron Dome and shrug it off. In my view Israel would be perfectly within their rights to return rocket for rocket into Palestinian civilian targets. That the Israeli rockets would have far more devastating effect as they'd produced by a nation state with a proper MIC, not what terrorists or smugglers can jury-rig, and the defenders don't have their own Iron Dome, Palestine would by far get the worst of the exchange, is something Hamas should be thinking of before they go around launching rockets at other people's civilian territory.

That Israel doesn't return rocket for rocket in this way tells me Israel is fighting with a significantly higher amount of restraint and morality than their opponent, and I'm confused as to how many otherwise intelligent people seem to feel otherwise.

I feel sorry for the civilians caught in the middle, but in my view, almost all the moral responsibility for the bad stuff happening to Palestine falls on Hamas. Hamas is always going around deliberately committing atrocities, Israel is often trying to show restraint while still maintaining reasonable military effectiveness against an enemy who likes using human shields.
by soulofmischief | 2026-01-29 06:30:10+00:00
I do say the same thing about the bomb. It was very cool science and engineering. I've studied many of the scientists behind the Manhattan Project, and the work that got us there.

That doesn't mean I also must condone our use of the bomb, or condone US imperialism. I recognize the inevitability of atomic science; unless you halt all scientific progress forever under threat of violence, it is inevitable that a society will have to reckon with atomic science and its implications. It's still fascinating, dude. It's literally physics, it's nature, it's humbling and awesome and fearsome and invaluable all at the same time.

> Not paying any attention to societal effects is not cool.

This fails to properly contextualize the historical facts. The Nazis and Soviets were also racing to create an atomic bomb, and the world was in a crisis. Again, this isn't ignorant of US imperialism before, during or after the war and creation of the bomb. But it's important to properly contextualize history.

> Plus, presenting things as inevitabilities is just plain confidently trying to predict the future.

That's like trying to admonish someone for watching the Wright Brothers continually iterate on aviation, witnessing prototype heavier-than-air aircraft flying, and suggesting that one day flight will be an inevitable part of society.

The steady march of automation is an inevitability my friend, it's a universal fact stemming from entropy, and it's a fallacy to assume that anything presented as an inevitability is automatically a bad prediction. You can make claims about the limits of technology, but even if today's frontier models stop improving, we've already crossed a threshold.

> Anyone who says they do is a liar.

That's like calling me a liar for claiming that the sun will rise tomorrow. You're right; maybe it won't! Of course, we will have much, much bigger problems at that point. But any rational person would take my bet.
by pjmlp | 2026-01-29 06:30:49+00:00
And yet Big Tech depends on technology owned by IBM, and also has luck the company isn't one that routinely does lawsuits due to patents.

Anything Red-Hat touches, like GNOME, GCC, Linux kernel, postman, anything Java is mostly done by Oracle, Red-Hat and IBM as the main ecosystem corporate drivers, PS3 used Cell,....
by jajuuka | 2026-01-29 06:32:46+00:00
It's super weird people are bitter about things that happened almost two decades ago. Much less there was no war. I think Ballmer said some mean words about Linux and Microsoft sued Lindows for infringement and won. After the rename to Linspire Microsoft actually worked with them on compatibility. The whole Windows v Linux "war" is completely contrived by some fans of Linux as some holy war.
by Nursie | 2026-01-29 06:33:40+00:00
I remember that!

Reminds me also of Motorola's attempt to have a hardware-expansible phone a few years ago, the Moto Z range and Moto Mods.

https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/gadgets-computers-software/25...

Obviously this is much more open than the proprietary moto-z stuff.
by t_mahmood | 2026-01-29 06:33:47+00:00
First, it's not destroying the planet, because the planet will chug along just fine, but it's making the planet inhabitable for us.

Dynamite is an efficiency tool, but in the wrong hand, it's used in ways that are not good.

And, greedy people using the efficiency tools without caring for the environment are devastating the planet's ecosystem, e.g. Amazon Rain forest

And in similar vein, our "Tech bros" are using technology for their satisfy their greed, which is resulting in loss of our privacy, democracy, and force fed of their agenda.
by subdude | 2026-01-29 06:34:02+00:00
The only lunatics in this scenario are the ones executing people in the street and dragging children out of their homes and into concentration camps as well as the people who think that's all reasonable. It's entirely reasonable, and right, to resist them.

"They are actively committing a crime against the citizens of the US."
What crime? You are confused if you think being an undocumented immigrant is a crime in it of itself. It's not, despite the right's attempts to paint them as "illegal." And, even if it were a crime, that doesn't suddenly make it "evil" or something that victimizes the "citizens of the US." The law is not the arbiter of good and evil, and very often it's on the side of evil. Miscegenation was a crime. Sodomy was a crime. Those acts were no more evil then than they are now.
by abstractbg | 2026-01-29 06:35:22+00:00
Okay, I'll bite. For the record, I own Tesla stock and I am generally bullish about AI.

I'll try to provide some counter-points specifically regarding the rate of progress.

3. It's much easier to catch up in capability (ex. LLMs) than it is to achieve a new capability (ex. replace humans laborers with humanoid robots). You can hire someone from a competitor, secrets eventually leak out, the search space is narrowed etc.

4(c). To me, what's most important is whether or not truly autonomous humanoid robots happens in 3 years, 5 years, 10 years, etc. rather than in our lifetime.

These timelines will be tied to AI development timelines which largely outside the control of any one player like Tesla. I believe the world is bottlenecked on compute and that the current compute is not sufficient for physical AI.

It's extremely easy to be too early (ex. many of the self driving car companies of the past decade), and so for Tesla, there is a risk of over-investing in manufacturing robots before the core technology is ready.
by Braxton1980 | 2026-01-29 06:35:28+00:00
>Also I was told there is no voter fraud. Is that just because nobody’s looking?

I was told you haven't raped anyone, is that because we haven't looked into it?

Unless there's evidence that something happened when decisions need to be made we assume it didn't.

It's so sad an engineer like you believe there was widespread fraud in the 2020 election even after all the investigations. It speaks volumes to your abilities in all aspects of life.
by ajcp | 2026-01-29 06:36:15+00:00
Having watched MSFT slowly chip away at their traditional bread-and-butter OS model with things like OneDrive and Office in the browser, Azure and then WSL, and listening to the Acquired podcast episodes on Microsoft, I wonder why they haven't simply released a Microsoft Linux by now, if only out of pride?
Do they feel that by doing so they're broadcasting that they're no longer a computing philosophy leader, and merely a market preference fulfiller (which is itself a backhanded way of saying they meet market demand I guess).