MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ethbr1 | 2026-01-15 22:27:22+00:00
> Unarmed people are doomed to change things not only in authoritarian countries, but even in nominally democratic ones. Examples include peaceful and not-so-peaceful protests in Iran, Belarus, and Russia in the struggle against the authorities. Peaceful protests without the support of the army and the elite always end in failure.

I'd take issue with that, because once it becomes an armed conflict then the full power of the state military will be deployed.

And modern nation-states of mid-size or above all have militaries than can crush any civilian armed resistance, simply because of the lethality and capability gap between civilian and military weapons.

The only winning move for a populace, then, is to try and keep resistance sub-armed conflict (and avoid being bated into armed resistance).
by publicdebates | 2026-01-15 22:27:23+00:00
Sorry no, I think you misunderstood.

For the whole thread, it's open-ended. People can brainstorm whatever they want to based on the title. It's good that it's ambiguous. The more conversations, the better.

But for me, I'm looking for ways that I can help solve other people's loneliness, both on an individual basis, and eventually en masse, but still me doing something as one individual.

This is what all my replies have been about, and why I posted one top-level comment asking that very specific question. I want to know what individuals can do that's actionable to help other people.
by GrowingSideways | 2026-01-15 22:27:42+00:00
Yes. I work with teenagers and young adults teaching them how to program, both directly and as a support skill. These are bright young people who can work through problems with enough time—but LLMs allow them through these problems in a minute or two.

I've taken, particularly in people learning programming as a support skill, to teaching them how to verify the solution rather than asking them to deal with hours of frustration while their peers don't bother. A tool is a tool, as sad as it makes me to say looking back on teaching myself how to code 20 years ago.
by IshKebab | 2026-01-15 22:27:50+00:00
> In general, file systems make for poor IPC implementations.

I agree but also they do have advantages such as simplicity, not needing to explicitly declare which files are needed, lazy data transfer, etc.

> you'll also want some mechanism for the writer to notify the reader that it's finished, be it with file locks, or some other entirely different protocol to send signals over the network.

The writer is always finished before the reader starts in these scenarios. The issue is reads on one machine aren't guaranteed to be ordered after writes on a different machine due to write caching.

It's exactly the same problem as trying to do multithreaded code. Thread A writes a value, thread B reads it. But even if they happen sequentially in real time thread B can still read an old value unless you have an explicit fence.
by j2kun | 2026-01-15 22:27:51+00:00
Make a social app whose goal is to get people off their phone as quickly as possible. There used to be a slew of apps where you a press a button to indicate "I'm bored/free, who wants to hang out?" and then you get matched with your contact list and anyone else who pressed the button at the same time. But for whatever reason they all flamed out and died.
by nicbou | 2026-01-15 22:28:11+00:00
I often think about the speech that Chamberlain made to announce that Britain was at war with Germany. The tone is chilling. No pomp, no bravado, just sad resignation. Chamberlain did his utmost to prevent another murderous war, and he failed.

I fear nothing more than hearing such a speech in my lifetime, yet here we are, making lines in the sand before an indifferent, war-hungry America.

It makes me so sad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcSnKArKz8E
by o-o- | 2026-01-15 22:28:22+00:00
https://news.meaww.com/fact-check-did-donald-trump-take-out-...

> The ad’s central message—that US allies should pay their fair share—remains a core principle of Trump’s foreign policy today. His longstanding skepticism of NATO, confrontations with international leaders, and demands for more financial contributions from allied nations all stem from the ideas he publicly expressed in 1987.
by Desafinado | 2026-01-15 22:28:43+00:00
There is also the problem of familiarity. It's awkward.

Traditionally you'd live around the same people your whole life. Invariably they'd feel like family and it wouldn't feel awkward to get together. But that's not how modernity works. People move to different communities all the time, so it becomes difficult to build familial friendships with others.

That's the essential problem. The internet allows us to stay in touch with people who feel like family. That's what we want to do psychologically. If all those people were in the same city there'd be a lot more socializing.
Show HN: Ghostty Ambient – Terminal theme switcher that learns your preferences
by zimzima | 2026-01-15 22:29:00+00:00
I built a theme selector for Ghostty that learns which color schemes you prefer in different contexts.

It reads your Mac's ambient light sensor and considers:
- Time of day (morning, afternoon, evening, night)
- Ambient light level (dim, office, bright, daylight)
- System dark/light mode
- Weather conditions
- Power source (AC vs battery)

A background daemon watches which themes you use and builds a Bayesian model of your preferences. Over time it learns things like "in dim evening light, they prefer high-contrast dark themes with muted colors."

Once it has enough data, it can generate a custom theme optimized for your current context.

ghostty-ambient # Interactive picker with recommendations
ghostty-ambient --ideal # Generate optimal theme for current context
ghostty-ambient --stats # See what it's learned about you

Install: uv tool install ghostty-ambient or pip install ghostty-ambient

GitHub: https://github.com/gezibash/ghostty-ambient

Built for Ghostty (https://ghostty.org) but the Bayesian preference learning could apply to any theming system.
by 6r17 | 2026-01-15 22:29:19+00:00
I'm wondering if there are any research groups led by sociologist that explore this topic which may be helped by a group of volunteer ?

I've always wondered why applications like Tinder etc... have not been completely destroyed by open-source already ?

We also forget that communities are essentially what allowed this escape in the first place ; I remember going to psytrance festivals but there are so many more escapes : theater, cinema groups, even in tech you have meetings for rust, programming languages and what not

There is definitely some kind of knowledge around being active in life ; and on that point I do not think that working count as active (I'm myself a workaholic so i'm definitely not the best example here)

There are other drivers for isolation than not knowing how to integrate though - it's not always easy to find people who share those common interest or mindset.

It's a very polarized time period which only exaggerate this - the best way to fight it off is to literally do something meaningless with people (eg : play)
by groby_b | 2026-01-15 22:29:42+00:00
LLMs are bad at creating abstraction boundaries since inception. People have been calling it out since inception. (Heck, even I got a twitter post somewhere >12 months old calling that out, and I'm not exactly a leading light of the effort)

It is in no way size-related. The technology cannot create new concepts/abstractions, and so fails at abstraction. Reliably.
by fasbiner | 2026-01-15 22:30:23+00:00
Ironically, this kind of mindset is exactly the one that Putin encouraged within Russia because it makes political pluralism impossible. If no matter who wins, 40% of the population is convinced the opposition is inherently wicked and intentionally trying to destroy the country as an agent of foreign (either literally or culturally) interest...

...you eventually end up in situation where most people agree that rule of law, political pluralism, free press and free speech, free inquiry and academic independence are luxuries we can no longer afford because of the foreign threat.

Because after all, we're under attack from evil people who want to destroy us! No compromise is possible and anybody who says they care about general principles is a fool or a traitor.

Trump has facilitated the continued transfer of tens of billions of dollars worth of weapons to Zelensky and accelerated the arming and training ukrainian forces in 2017.

Unless The Atlantic and Obama are in on the conspiracy as well, it's unclear why he would say this and express policy: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/04/the-oba...

Trying to explain the political and cultural problems of a country internally by reference to foreign plots has not once in history ended well or been evaluated as accurate by subsequent historians with no dog in that fight. The crisis of the present deserves real analysis, not conspiracy theories that crumble in the face of basic numeracy and mutually agreed upon facts. If you have counter-examples from before 2016, I'd love to discuss them and expand my worldview, otherwise I think it's prudent to go with the historical heuristic.

You are harming both yourself and the world by failing to distinguish between what is emotionally satisfying and what best fits the mutually agreed upon facts available without improvisationally multiplying entities that enlarge the scope of conspiracy without evidence.
by ptorrone | 2026-01-15 22:30:43+00:00
a follow up, sparkfun seems to still be doing business with while not doing business, "This message is to formally confirm that SparkFun Electronics intends to issue applicable royalty payment for Q4 2025 no later than January 31, 2026, in accordance with previously established timelines."

i get it, they want to keep selling those products. this was probably about money and margins.
by michaelt | 2026-01-15 22:30:53+00:00
> The few times I have been swarmed by bots on Reddit was when I touched on a topic where, say, Russia had a strategic interest

The thing is, bot operators know they can’t just post on Russia-related topics - they need a smokescreen of other ‘normal human’ activity, to avoid getting detected and banned.

If the bots that swarmed you want to appear as only 5% pro-russian, for every response you got they had to make 19 other posts. Predictable advice in advice subs, lukewarm takes in entertainment subs, reposts in image subs, repetitive worn out jokes everywhere.
by neilk | 2026-01-15 22:30:58+00:00
You have to be the one who creates things to do.

Really, that’s it.

You want to play D&D together, you host and DM.

You want to just hang out, you reach out and propose what you’re doing.

You want more purposeful and meaningful time, join a volunteer group you vibe with.

Even if it’s meeting for coffee. You have to be the one who reaches out. You have to do it on a regular cadence. If, like me, you don’t have little alarms in your head that go off when you haven’t seen someone in a while, you can use automated reminders.

I have observed my spouse (who is not on social media) do this and she maintains friendships for decades this way. Nowadays she has regular zoom check ins, book clubs, and more, even with people who moved to the other coast. You do now have the tools for this. I have adopted it into my own life with good results.

Note: you are going to get well under a 50% success rate here. Accept that most people flake. It may always feel painful (and nerds like us often are rejection-sensitive). You have to feel your feelings, accept it, and move on.

You are struggling against many aspects of the way we in the developed world/nerd world live. We have a wealth of passive entertainment, often we have all consuming jobs or have more time-consuming relationship with our families than our parents ever did. We move to different cities for jobs, and even as suburban sprawl has grown, you’re on average probably further away from people who even live in the same city! You get from place to place in a private box on wheels, or alternatively in a really big box on wheels with a random assortment of people. You don’t see people at church, or market day, or whatever other rituals our ancestors had. On the positive side, you have more tools and leisure than ever before to arrange more voluntary meetings.
by irishcoffee | 2026-01-15 22:31:09+00:00
> I push them to their limits and have definitely witnessed novel output.

I’m quite curious what these novel outputs are. I imagine the entire world would like to know of an LLM producing completely, never-before-created outputs which no human has ever thought before.

Here is where I get completely hung up. Take 2+2. An LLM has never had 2 groups of two items and reached the enlightenment of 2+2=4

It only knows that because it was told that. If enough people start putting 2+2=3 on the internet who knows what the LLM will spit out. There was that example a ways back where an LLM would happily suggest all humans should eat 1 rock a day. Amusingly, even _that_ wasn’t a novel idea for the LLM, it simply regurgitated what it scraped from a website about humans eating rocks. Which leads to the crux: how much patently false information have LLMs scraped that is completely incorrect?
by quickthrowman | 2026-01-15 22:31:19+00:00
> Sure, but there are more appliances plugged in today than there were. The simplest evidence for this is that there are never enough outlets in an old (unrenovated) home.

Perhaps, but none of them are continuous load, which absolutely matters.

Rice cookers, microwave, stand mixers, air fryers, pressure cookers, etc are all short duration usage, not continuous load. If homeowners decide not to add dedicated kitchen circuits and instead use a 120V 12A load on a 120V 15A shared circuit and trip the overcurrent protection, that’s their own fault.

These loads don’t really matter in the way a heat pump, air conditioner, furnace fan, or water heater does, it’s a bunch of random kitchen appliances that you won’t be using simultaneously. Your utility does not even take the full non-continuous load into account when calculating the kVA demand of your electrical service. IIRC a random convenience duplex receptacle for non-continuous loads only adds like 180 VA (this is 1.5A at 120V with a power factor of 1) to the demand calculation.

You are correct in a technical sense that people have more devices they plug into a wall, but most of the power consumed by a home is to devices that are hardwired in, aka continuous loads, not cord and plug connected appliances.

The continuous load of a home should be lower than ever without electrifying heat. Every continuous load (which are almost exclusively motors and lighting) in a home is more efficient now than in the past due to variable frequency drives and electrically commutated motors.
by unethical_ban | 2026-01-15 22:31:26+00:00
>The argument is that people recklessly driving their vehicles with a total disregard for the lives around them are a danger to the people in front of their car and anyone else on the street

And my argument is that no matter what SCOTUS law one cites, or hand-waving about self-defense that is said, that shooting her in the head from the side of the car was not only tactically unnecessary, but objectively made the situation worse in a way that a competent person should immediately recognize.

One does not need slow-mo to see she wasn't trying to kill anyone.

>The minute you choose to endanger people around you in the presence of people with guns, you’ve rolled the dice on your life.

This is shorthand for "comply or die". Welcome to the free world. I wonder if Europe and Australia and New Zealand and the rest of the world know what they're missing by not having LEO as qualified as ICE running their streets.
by avadodin | 2026-01-15 22:31:27+00:00
Stock buy-backs can be part of an illegal scheme but, in general, they are one of the few mechanisms in corporate actions through which the regular joe shareholder doesn't get the short end of the stick.

How is owning a larger share of a company with proportionally less cash and a higher price per share than what you could have sold it for before bad.

Have you looked at precious metal charts as of late? Do 1/x and that's the value of the cash these companies are trading for a valuable business.
by hairofadog | 2026-01-15 22:31:45+00:00
It's both the fact that they're going after people here legally and even U.S. citizens, and the brutality and unconstitutional nature of their tactics. They are literally going house to house kicking in doors without a warrant. They're racial profiling. The ICE agents are completely out of control as their recruitment standards are nonexistent and higher-ups are signaling that they can do literally whatever they want, including killing people, and they'll face no consequences. I don't understand how any sane person can support it, much less the "don't tread on me" crowd.

Detaining and/or deporting people here illegally to their home countries with due process: OK

Detaining, deporting, and/or killing people here illegally, legally, and U.S. citizens, without due process, to private detention camps or third countries: NOT OK
by xorcist | 2026-01-15 22:32:00+00:00
The stated objectives for this administration was to be understood as: Weaken USD. Cheaper oil. Weaken NATO.

This should surprise no one. Undermining NATO fits the now well known negotiation style perfectly, you can try to get a good deal from allies to put it back together, while simultaneously playing those allies against an alternative and opposite deal with Russia for doing business again. The latter has the added bonus of even cheaper oil. Neither is good for Ukraine and Taiwan unfortunately.
by MomsAVoxell | 2026-01-15 22:32:32+00:00
It’s pretty clear that the design of the Z80 Membership Card is intentionally steered towards the micro-computer ethos. The distinction between a microcomputer and a microcontroller is a subtle one; in fact, it’s up to the use-case whether either term is applicable. Microcontrollers do, indeed, provide lots of I/O and rudimentary computation capabilities - whereas Microcomputers have computing power, of a sort, and some facility for I/O which may - or may not be - expansive.

So the stretch is not much more than a matter of semantics, imho. I’ve used Z80’s as microcontrollers, I’ve also used them as microcomputers.
by sixothree | 2026-01-15 22:32:46+00:00
Maybe if it had a memory of your mental health issues it could at least provide some grounding truth. It can be a sad scary and lonely world for people with mental health issues.

"The things you are describing might not be happening. I think it would be a good time to check in with your mental health provider."
or
"I don't see any worms crawling on your skin. This may not be real."
Or whatever is correct way to deal with these things.
by mbreese | 2026-01-15 22:32:46+00:00
Yes. I probably should have included the link.

I stated using devcontainers through VSCode and find them incredibly helpful. It’s great for me to be able to load up exact coding environments on different computers. But, I only used them through VSCode.

When I wanted to branch out a bit (and especially using coding agents), I started using the CLI version more. I find devcontainers a great way to work with different coding projects and wanted to make sure people knew that there was a way to use them outside of VSCode.
by ben_w | 2026-01-15 22:33:03+00:00
> World war today could be 1) nuclear and we're doomed, or 2) kids playing with toy drones breaking windows at each other's factories - you're mostly safe, unless you work there.

Cyber war, especially insufficiently defended industrial equipment control systems.

And about those drones: the category scales up and down, all the way from toys to things that rip apart apartment blocks.

And about quantity, Ukraine is estimated to be at the scale of millions of units last year, expended like munitions rather than like vehicles.
by toasterlovin | 2026-01-15 22:33:19+00:00
But Nvidia wasn't able to compete with Apple for capacity on new process nodes with Nintendo volumes (the concept is laughable; compare Apple device unit volumes to game console unit volumes). What has changed in the semiconductor industry is overwhelming demand for AI focused GPUs, and that is paid for largely with speculative VC money (at this point, at least; AI companies are starting to figure out monetization).
by tialaramex | 2026-01-15 22:33:33+00:00
> at a rate that’s possibly less than what it cost to buy fuel?

You might need to sit down for this. The wind farms don't use fuel. Wind just happens, it's a natural phenomenon that has no real regard for our stupid "wind farm" even as we're harvesting gigawatts of power the wind doesn't ccare.

If you were thinking "Wait I thought all the providers have these contracts, not just renewables" then er no, they're a subsidy, the CfD is a subsidy scheme. That cheap to make, expensive to run open cycle gas turbine some asshole put on a local industrial estate doesn't get a CfD, it can offer to sell the resulting electricity at market prices, and really the big problem is as you observed, that's possibly less than what it costs to buy fuel. Yeah, it is, bad idea to keep building Open Cycle Gas Turbines I reckon. Sure enough the UK almostly exclusively has more expensive to build but cheaper to run Combined Cycle plants.

CfDs are used to subsidise renewable future power. A long term energy independence strategy. Even if you don't care about the planet warming and the sea levels rising you won't be burning all this gas in a thousand years 'cos there's not enough gas. Whereas the sun will shine until long after we're gone, and the accompanying winds won't stop either.

The size of the subsidy varies, if you're building a pilot plant of a new technology that you're sure will revolutionize clean energy but, alas, no-one ever made one that worked before, the government might be willing to pay you four or five times as much money for your energy, partly because they're not expecting you to actually make any energy because you will likely fail. If your plan's big problem is that it's way less mechanically reliable than you'd like, this is a big incentive to incrementally improve that reliability. If your device that involves being in and out of an incredibly powerful tidal stream of corrosive sea water at freezing temperatures makes power but doesn't crack, tear, fall to pieces or explode in the scheduled period of operation you're that much closer to actually having a useful technology and paying you five times over the odds for the MWh you did make is a reasonable price.