MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by piloto_ciego | 2026-01-06 20:09:55+00:00
I actually think I understand why almost all the discourse is terrible on the internet. Reddit, HN, whatever. It's because of the reward mechanisms at play.

So...

If you say something is going to suck, and it actually sucks, you look like a genius.
If you say something is going to suck, and it actually is ok, nobody cares because things turned out fine.
If you say something is going to be good, and it turns out good, people say you're smart.
If you say something is going to be good, and it turns out to suck, people say you're a moron.

Because of negative bias and game theory, the most logical take to get "social rewards" is be consistently pessimistic. You'll look "smart" online and the times you miss it will be largely ignored. If the reward you get from interacting online is some sort of social capital, being a pessimist will do better than being an optimist unless you're certain things will turn out good. So people tend to be negative.

Or, as I've heard it stated before, "pessimists get to be right, optimists get to be rich."
by moomoo11 | 2026-01-06 20:10:08+00:00
I used to work helping oil and gas. I don’t think I did much help there bc even tho I made things better (esp logistics and supply chain which I enjoy) the companies would do bad shit in the grand scheme of things like polluting.

Since then I got into tech software and I’m able to say proudly that

I entertained people. I helped people find love. I ensured people were safe on the job and got their work done. Now I’m doing my own thing which if it works will make things really good I’ll just leave it there

I will never work on something again that goes against my alignment of chaotic neutral good.

I like to build for the user/customer and solve problems that put money or deliverables for both parties.
by gosub100 | 2026-01-06 20:10:10+00:00
I don't trust it. They will get approval and then when sonic booms disrupt nature from coast to coast they will say "it's just because the weather/it only affects a small number of people/the 3rd party contractor who supplied the data was wrong, they are gone now/the benefits outweigh the downside/think of all the jobs". Basically they'll say anything other than "oopsie we were wrong, no transonic flight for you".
by sokoloff | 2026-01-06 20:10:28+00:00
I disagree in part. FSD cars driving independently could still leave green lights with less wasted time (inattention [read: phones], reaction time), could also be much less prone to “blocking the box”, and could avoid most instances of multi-minute double-parking (by driving around or driving to park safely/legally). All of those would reduce traffic congestion without reducing cars on the road and even with a modest increase in total vehicle miles driven.

FSD cars that coordinated with each other could leave lights even more quickly and better collaborate to zipper, observe/communicate/predict lights and modulate speed to prevent excessive stopping, etc.
by kens | 2026-01-06 20:10:47+00:00
The claim in the article, "Concorde burned 52% of its fuel just taxiing down the runway", is completely wrong and kind of ruins my confidence in the article. A Concorde used less than 1% of its fuel taxiing down the runway, not 52%.

Source: Air France Flight 4590 Accident Report states that the plane had 95 t of fuel on board when the aircraft started out and used 800 kilos of fuel during taxiing (page 17) and 200 kilos after taxiing before takeoff (page 159).
https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/2022-11/Concorde_Acc...

(Since there's a bunch of discussion about how to reduce taxiing consumption, I'll point out that one tonne of aviation fuel is about $700, so there's not much money to be saved by creating battery-powered tugs or whatnot.)

As far as takeoff, "at the start of cruise 20% of the total fuel burnoff will have been consumed while only 9% of the total distance will have been covered." From "Operation Experience on Concorde", a paper by the Design Director. While 20% is a lot, it is much less than 52%.
https://www.icas.org/icas_archive/ICAS1976/Page%20563.pdf
by XorNot | 2026-01-06 20:10:54+00:00
Cutting 22 hours Sydney to London to 12 would make a big difference though.

There's no real way to make that much time on a plane bearable even if you had a lie flat bed: that's just a ton of time in the air.

Australian international travel would be the premier market if you wanted to travel supersonic (also our coastal cities mean most departures could accelerate immediately).
Show HN: A dice baseball game I built with my second grader over winter break
by scottatmu | 2026-01-06 20:11:16+00:00
Over winter break, instead of the usual “kids playing in the snow” thing, we ended up doing something a little different. Mostly because it was abnormally warm, and partly because my kid had other ideas.

We built a small iPhone game together.

My son is a second grader and loves baseball. For years, our family has played a simple dice-based baseball game at restaurants while waiting for food. No screens. Just dice, rules scribbled on napkins, and a lot of arguing over whether something was a double or a ground out. It’s been one of those low-tech things that quietly stuck.

On the first night of winter break, he asked if we could turn it into an actual game.

So we did.

We spent the week breaking down how baseball works, how turns and randomness feel fair, and how games should be quick and fun. I introduced him to basic iPhone development concepts, UI thinking, and how we can use AI as a helper. Not to do the work for us, but to brainstorm, prototype, and iterate faster.

He was immediately hooked.

One of my favorite moments: he came up with a “7th minute stretch” idea. If a game session goes long enough, the app pauses and encourages you to get off the phone for 30 seconds. Do jumping jacks, grab water, stretch, whatever. It’s intentionally anti-doomscrolling, and very much his idea.

The result is Dice Baseball. A simple, fast, family-friendly dice baseball game for iPhone. No accounts. No ads. No paid features. There’s an optional tip jar if someone wants to support it, but that’s it.

For me, the best part wasn’t shipping the app. It was watching a kid realize that software isn’t magic. It’s something you can build, improve, and think critically about. He’s already talking about updates and new ideas.

If you’re curious, here it is ... https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dice-baseball/id6757132879

Thanks for checking it out.
by jebarker | 2026-01-06 20:11:30+00:00
I feel similarly. I am happiest and healthiest all round when I focus on the one thing I have chosen to do at any given time rather than figuring out ways to multi-task.

I do however enjoy choosing to do math/coding adjacent activities for leisure or learning sometimes when I'm away from the computer. I've found that it was a net positive in my life to add in puzzles/exercises that I can do with pen and paper in those circumstances.
by groby_b | 2026-01-06 20:12:28+00:00
Amdahl's law still holds, though. If A and B differ in execution times by orders of magnitude, optimising B yields minimal returns (assuming streaming, vs fully serial processing)

And sure, you can reject chunks, but a) the rejection isn't free, and B) you're still bound by embedding speed.

As for resource savings.... not in the Wikipedia data range. If you scale up massively and go to a PB of data, going from kiru to memchunk saves you ~25 CPU days. But you also suddenly need to move from bog-standard high cpu machines to machines supporting 164GB/s memory throughput, likely full metal with 8 memory channels. I'm too lazy to do the math, but it's going to be a mild difference at O($100)

Again, I'm not arguing this isn't a cool achievement. But it's very much engineering fun, not "crucial optimization".
by dosinga | 2026-01-06 20:13:00+00:00
This doesn’t sound very convincing, mostly because the examples don’t really line up with the claim. Apple supposedly struggles “up the stack,” yet many of the best and most-used iPhone apps are built by Apple itself. Google is held up as failing at social, but YouTube is arguably the largest social network in the world. Oracle is described as struggling in apps, yet it’s clearly doing just fine as a massive, profitable enterprise software company. And the IBM example is backwards: IBM didn’t accidentally hand Microsoft the OS layer, it already had its own operating systems. In fact, Microsoft is the clearest counterexample here, it got big by owning the OS and then very successfully moved up the stack to dominate applications with Office.
by deannasallao | 2026-01-06 20:13:26+00:00
I’ve been running a remote staffing agency for years, mostly working with Filipino freelancers and global founders.

Over time, I kept seeing the same problems on both sides: talented freelancers being treated as disposable, and founders struggling with quality, accountability, and trust.

This article shares why I decided to build a platform instead of scaling the agency further, what surprised me along the way, and what I’ve learned after spending the last two years trying to make it work.

I would genuinely love feedback from people who’ve built marketplaces or remote-first products.
by kakacik | 2026-01-06 20:13:57+00:00
Nah, its quite opposite for me. It becomes real chore with small kids on non-short flights, but the thing is - I travel normally only for vacations. Time spent in airports is literally vacation wasted on bureaucracy without even moving, since in ideal situation I would spend 1 minute giving them big luggage, if at all, and stepping in the plane just about to take off. Flying is actually moving me towards the goal, feels more acceptable.

Overall when I started traveling I loved all of it, exciting, new. Now I hate this part as a whole, necessary evil of wasted life to get what I actually want where I actually want.
by dlisboa | 2026-01-06 20:14:45+00:00
Most being the operating word here. Economy class tickets still make a profit if the airline wants it, just see the vast majority of regional flights which have zero business class seats. Southwest for instance has single-class layouts.

Some airlines "take" the marginal economy seat loss on larger planes because those are the ones they can fill with business class seats and make an even larger profit.

Even then it's a complex math on whether economy is hurting those flights' profit margins since those people buy things in-flight such as Wi-Fi and extra bags. Base fare is not the only way airlines make money.
by syngrog66 | 2026-01-06 20:14:46+00:00
Claude not needed to "code from anywhere you are" and certainly not from your phone. no LLM needed. no agents. Tailscale or any other VPN not needed

use a laptop. (trying to do it with only a phone-factor UI is madness.) have a mobile-friendly ISP if desired or needed. solved. been solved for decades

so much of the AI BS hyping is about inventing supposedly unsolved problems. like Google showing me ads to convince me to use Gemini to write a README. no thanks, kids, have been able to do that for many decades using only my brain, eyes, fingers and vi/vim
by eichin | 2026-01-06 20:15:09+00:00
That seems to be what Impulse is targeting - standard size drop in inductive with a lot of high tech features (for the price) and a ludicrous battery, so you don't need to upgrade the wiring (since you don't cook 24x7 after all.) No ideas if the numbers work out, but they're definitely aiming at a perceived gap...
by Forgeties79 | 2026-01-06 20:15:46+00:00
Let’s not lose sight of the real issue here: Grok is a mess from top to bottom run by an unethical, fickle Musk. It is the least reliable LLM of the major players and musk’s constant fiddling with it so it doesn’t stray too far from his worldview invalidates the whole project as far as I’m concerned.
by dspillett | 2026-01-06 20:15:58+00:00
The difference between a lot of OS/app progress bars for IO (and sometimes CPU) operations and these timers, is that the total length of time for a lot of IO operations is often unknown with any accuracy so you have to use a heuristic to guess the current % done.

For instance: when reading/writing/both many files of differing sizes on traditional drives there is an amount of latency per file which is significant and not always predictable. Whether you base progress on total size or number of files or some more complicated calc based on both, it will be inaccurate in most cases, sometimes badly so. Even when copying a single large file on a shared drive, or just on a dedicated system with multiple tasks running, the progress is inherently a bit random, the same for any network transfer. Worse are many database requests: you don't get any progress often because there is no progress output until the query processing is complete, and the last byte of the result might arrive in the same fraction of a second the first does¹. The same for network requests, though IE (at least as early as v3) and early versions of Edge did outright lie² there to try make themselves look faster than the competition.

The progress bars in videos are a different beast (ahem): the total time is absolutely known, any inaccuracy is either a deliberate lie or gross incompetence.

--------

[1] I once worked on a system that kept logs of certain types of query so it could display a guess of how long things were going to take and a progress bar to go with it, but this was actually more irritating to the users than no progress display as it would sometime jump from a few % directly to done or sit at 99% for ages (in the end the overly complicated guessing method was replaced by a simple spinner).

[2] It would creep up, getting as far as 80%, before the first byte of response is received. This also confused users who thought that something was actually happening when the action was in fact stalled and just going to time-out.
by xp84 | 2026-01-06 20:16:01+00:00
If you were giving out free cookies at the front of your store intended to thank shoppers for coming in, and someone reaches in and grabs one while running past, that's an ad-blocker. Not the most ethically justifiable[1], but legal. This law though is saying that if you have a person at the door who makes sure you are at least browsing the store before giving you a free cookie, that practice is now illegal. This is utterly nonsense to me. Does the Vietnam constitution contain a right to free VOD? How do TV broadcasters get away with it, given they're riddled with "non-skippable ads" -- about 17 minutes per hour of them!

[1] if you want to dispute this, is it just because you're thinking the store is run by a big company you don't like and that you feel rips people off? Does it change though if your mom baked those cookies to give out to try to get people to shop in her little boutique that barely makes enough money to cover rent? The point is just that it's not universally justifiable. I don't care if you block ads (I block them too) or take free samples from stores.
by culebron21 | 2026-01-06 20:16:06+00:00
In year 2000 I dreamed and wrote an essay imagining future 15-20 years ahead, that I'd be happy to have a voice-controlled teapot. That I'd tell it "a cup of tea", and it would boil it, exactly for my own big cup. Or several cups, if I have guests.

By 2020 I figured out that digital stuff is worse in UX and recalled that story with a sigh.

The change in my head happened, I think, in 2013, when I tried to count pedestrians on streets, and found out that the digital way (OpenCV coding, training, etc.) it would take way more time, than just plain going outdoors and counting. I also noticed that simple watch on my arm was much better than a timer with alarm in a phone -- an order of magnitude less hassle.

So by 2020 I checked every appliance, that it has no Internet, nor IoT in it. Needless to say about vacuum cleaner (even the robotic one), washer, etc. Want a light that has variable brightness for evening, going to bed, or cloudy day? Put a 2-switch lamp on the ceiling, and a small one near the bed. Want to turn it on in different places? Passing switches -- they just need some planning ahead and wires.
by nicoburns | 2026-01-06 20:16:12+00:00
> More useful than reading the code, in most cases, is looking at who's behind the code. Can you identify the author? Do they have an identity and reputation in the space?

That doesn't necessarily help you in the case of supply chains attacks. A large proportion of them are spread through compromised credentials. So even if the author of a package is reputable, you may still get malware through that package.
by pistoriusp | 2026-01-06 20:16:46+00:00
Hey! Snaplet founder here. Want to clarify that it was not acquired by Supabase; I shutdown the startup and found roles for some of the team at Supabase.

The code remains:

- https://github.com/supabase-community/seed
- https://github.com/supabase-community/copycat
- https://github.com/supabase-community/snapshot

This looks like a great project, wishing them all the best on the journey.
by tonymet | 2026-01-06 20:17:12+00:00
For those curious about how the model was trained, and examples of positive/negative sentiment, here's a "nutritional label" of sorts.

- SST-2 (stanford sentiment test) example dataset from IMDB reviews https://huggingface.co/datasets/stanfordnlp/sst2/viewer

- BERT https://aclanthology.org/N19-1423/

- DistilBert -- the optimized model OP was using https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.01108

SST-2 may have been used to train or qualify BERT -- read the papers to get the full story. I did a quick perusal.

It would be nice to have a nutritional label shared with Abstracts, showing the training data, with examples, and the base models.
by tete | 2026-01-06 20:17:16+00:00
> globally very high income

As someone from central Europe: lol

There is a tiny portion that makes the GDP look nice, but as someone who knows average Americans outside of tech, it's an absolute joke. Especially when you look at necessities you basically cannot get around (medical costs, taxes, etc.).

Sure if you are on HN chances are you might not notice, but I know people that effectively live in somewhat close to slavery because they need to work every working hour simply to live and has been caught in a nice web where they don't even have time to reconsider life. Something the employer clearly set up that way, including things like being the landlord.

That's why there can be an elite and a "middle class" that lives off these people.

The homeless problem not just in SF but all the way to the midwest is ridiculous and how these homeless people are dealt with - basically like a pest is outrageous.

People here get severely upset about how bad people have it here, when they do have it much nicer. Meanwhile people in the US seem to largely turn a blind eye.

All that while taking the hit of refugees that have (largely) been caused by US politics.

I am sorry, but things don't work despite meddling with any country that has natural resources.

And I mean that as it is. I know it's not easy to come out of it. But the thing is starting a war every now and then doesn't seem to help a lot of fixing actual problems. Despite all the benefits it clearly has for the US.
by bookofjoe | 2026-01-06 20:17:18+00:00
Too funny. Love it.

>Trump’s Hint to Oil Executives Weeks Before Maduro Ouster: ‘Get Ready’

https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/venezuela-chevron-tr...

no paywall: https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/venezuela-chevron-tr...

"The secret of success in business is to know something no one else knows." — Aristotle Onassis

How do you spell "insider trading?"
by azinman2 | 2026-01-06 20:17:24+00:00
None of the alternatives seem
To have anything close to the radio/recommendation power of Spotify. I don’t know how they ever could - they don’t have the massive data Spotify has in listening history combined with playlists and their descriptions… on top of building world class ML audio analysis models.

I’d love have my own local mp3s get this super power. I just don’t see it happening. Plex has their own attempt but it’s no where close.
by kergonath | 2026-01-06 20:17:26+00:00
The French overseas départements are examples: Réunion and Mayotte (in the Indian Ocean), Guadeloupe and Martinique (in the Carribeans), and Guyane (in South America). There is also Saint Martin (French, but not a département), the Azores and Madeira (Portugal) and the Canaries (Spain). All these places are in the EU and use the Euro despite not being in Europe.
by ekzhang | 2026-01-06 20:17:42+00:00
I don’t think tf.tidy() is a sound API under jvp/grad transformations, also it prevents you from using async which makes it incompatible with GPU backends (or blocks the page), a pretty big issue. https://github.com/tensorflow/tfjs/issues/5468

Thanks for the feedback though, just explaining how we arrived at this API. I hope you’d at least try it out — hopefully you will see when developing that the refs are more flexible than alternatives.
by Findecanor | 2026-01-06 20:17:45+00:00
Some upcoming chips are supposed to support switching individual processes to x86's "TSO" memory model. That might be the most significant extension that Apple has for x86 emulation: it allows eliding all memory fence instructions used to adapt to the weaker memory model.

LoongArch could have instructions that emulate specific x86 behaviour and flags, but there is practically no documentation available.
by bell-cot | 2026-01-06 20:17:51+00:00
A good generality, but I'll disagree on the bakery/sandwich specifics.

There's a lot of overhead in a sandwich shop hiring a baker, then outfitting a kitchen to efficiently bake bread at scale. And how do you handle his days off, with n=1 baker?

Vs. a bakery only needs 4' of counter space to do a modest volume of basic (cold cuts & such) sandwiches. Unless it's a pretty upscale bakery, the customers will be fine with less-than-fancy sandwiches at less-than-fancy prices - those are mainly a "while I'm here" convenience. Vs. a "great sandwich" shop has to qualify as a destination.
by xg15 | 2026-01-06 20:17:58+00:00
I absolutely agree with the author that we should normalize "finishing" projevts again - but I think there are some practical differences between "finished" and "abandoned":

- There might be security vulnerabilities in the project's code that would endanger users if not fixed.

- There might be vulnerabilities in dependencies that required that the project updates to a newer version.

- If the project uses external APIs, those might have breaking changes, be shut down, etc.

- Last but not least, the environment itself that the app is running in might have breaking changes, e.g. the OS going out of support.

If a project really is finished but the author expects people to keep using it, then as a user, I'd expect that the author still does the above maintenance from time to time, so the project stays functional and safe.