MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by spuz | 2026-01-20 12:26:27+00:00
This completely killed my OS and nearly took the PC with it. It started running ok but as it filled the screen, the FPS dropped and then my browser stopped responding, then the mouse started moving VERY slowly and then the screen went black and my Bluetooth got disconnected. At that point, even long-pressing the power off button did nothing and I had to switch off the PC at the wall...

I am going to put the blame on Firefox and Linux Mint but it's honestly impressive how a simple animated simulation can do this.
by IndieDev-Will | 2026-01-20 12:26:28+00:00
Appreciate the comment for visibility!

Since you are here, I’d love for you to take Explic for a spin if you have a moment. I'm currently trying to tune the "Socratic friction" (making sure it's helpful, not just annoying).

Please be brutally honest with your feedback—it's super helpful for me to improve the product!
by layer8 | 2026-01-20 12:26:54+00:00
You must be working in projects with a relatively small number of “problems to be solved” at any given time, and with the problems having relatively low complexity. In general there’s no way to keep everything in your head and not organize and track things across the team. That doesn’t mean that a lot of communication doesn’t still have to happen within the team and with the customers. Tickets don’t replace communication. But you have to write down the results of the communication, and the progress on tasks and issues that may span weeks or months.
by e38383 | 2026-01-20 12:27:08+00:00
The wording sounds like this is a problem or even something to solve. Why?

But let's start with the basics:
- Why are these people not countable? Shoudn't we not at least just be able to get a good statistical number on this? We do the same for all people on (and off) this planet.
- Let's assume we have a number: how to we know that they sit and are alone and every day? This sounds to me like an overspecific approach.
- Why would anyone join local groups? You normally can't find people you want to interact with within a specific range, that's the great thing about social media or the internet overall: you don't need to be in a geographic range.

And the last one: what are you trying to solve here?
by eru | 2026-01-20 12:27:20+00:00
> It would deter those who are not insiders from investing as returns would shift from them to insiders.

Retail investors should be index funds anyway.

Until fairly recently there was no 'insider trading' you could get in trouble for in commodities in the US. That hasn't stopped non-insiders from trading in commodities.

Also, even if insider trading is legal, that doesn't mean your company needs to allow it: you can still punish your own employees for it, and eg claw back bonuses and sue for breach of contract and breach of fiduciary duty.

The main thing the (American) laws against insider trading does what private contracts can't do is to make the golf buddy liable, too.

In any case, American insider trading regulation is already laxer than French insider trading law. And it doesn't look like French companies have an easier time raising capital.
by nedt | 2026-01-20 12:29:06+00:00
Yeah that was very visible when HBO Max launched here in Austria and Germany. The top result was HBO Max FYC (which by itself is a very bad name, but it's not for normal customers), then came other results with even other streaming services and only after scrolling a bit you got the normal HBO Max app. Didn't matter if you searched for "hbo" or the full name "hbo max".
by fruitworks | 2026-01-20 12:29:09+00:00
If I had to guess, cash - king + queen = credit (or money or something?). You are just asking the same thing as cash - man + woman, or "What is the feminine version of cash?" because queen - king ~= woman - man.

I say credit, because it is not as physical and direct as cash, so perhaps it is perceptually more feminine?

But I will have to check the next time I work with word2vec.
by vladms | 2026-01-20 12:29:51+00:00
It proves or disproves as much as the op which said:

> MacBooks tend to last a long time. I used my 2012 Macbook Air for 7-8 years easily. It's still working today.

There are multiple things that are valuable, without that being a proof or durability.

Note that I am not saying Apple products "are" or "are not" durable. But if we talk about anecdotes then there are both ways. I would have liked to find some neutral, longer term analysis, but a fast internet search did not turn up anything that seemed relevant (only anecdotes and opinions).
by s_dev | 2026-01-20 12:30:05+00:00
>Autocracy isn't a switch you can flick.

Plenty of precedents for Autocrats to assume power in legit democracies and seem to flick it handily enough.

Hitler, Mussolini, Putin, Erdogan, Orban etc.

No battles or violence, just democracies that become autocracies through election.
by hombre_fatal | 2026-01-20 12:30:08+00:00
> it's a question I ask and almost never hear a coherent answer to.

There are a lot of coherent answers though.

One is that responding with HTML encumbers the server with brittle UI over the wire when it could instead be a simpler API server that any client can talk to.

Returning data instead of UI from the server is a clean separation of concerns.

There's nothing incoherent about that.
by anonymars | 2026-01-20 12:30:33+00:00
Because it's the whole topic of this conversation

> "From history we know that research left unchecked and unrestricted can start leading to some really dark and horrible things. Right now I think it's a problem that social media companies can do research without answering to the same regulatory bodies that regular academics / researchers would. For example, they don't have to answer to independant ethics committees / reviews. They're free to experiement as they like on the entire population."

For example maybe next they decide to research whether they can influence body dysmorphia, or suicide
by mapt | 2026-01-20 12:30:35+00:00
Or geographical situations. The UK serves dramatically better in that capacity than the US does at present.

Thing is, though... even the parts of Western history that aren't remembered as atrocities by modern standards were pretty thick with them. For example, thousands of homeless London orphans were enslaved and sent to the early American colonies for the crime of being homeless orphans, and very few of their names are recorded in subsequent colonial documents, so the assumption is that almost all of them died before reaching adulthood. Adult convict slaves commanded very low prices relative to African slaves, and children that weren't as effective laborers, and with fewer rights, were likely seen as burdens.

see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ec9Al5ezYs and source https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=3231742601...
by poszlem | 2026-01-20 12:30:39+00:00
Strongly agree with this. It may sound good in theory, but in practice, especially with real people, it can come across as overbearing, stifling, and exhausting for others. This isn’t meant as a dig at the OP. it’s just an observation based on personal experience with someone like that in my own family.

edit: I am not critiquing enthusiasm itself, but a compulsion that can be productive and unhealthy.
by mschaef | 2026-01-20 12:32:20+00:00
> The disinterest programmers have in using 80 bit arithmetic.

I don't know, other than to say there's often a tendency in this industry to overlook the better in the name of the standard. 80-bit probably didn't offer enough marginal value to enough people to be worth the investment and complexity. I also wonder how much of an impact there is to the fact that you can't align 80-bit quantities on 64-bit boundaries. Not to mention the fact that memory bandwidth costs are 25% higher when dealing with 64-bit quantities, and floating point work is very often bandwidth constrained. There's more precision in 80-bit, but it's not free, and as you point out, there are techniques for managing the lack of precision.

> A bit of background - I wrote my one numerical analysis programs when I worked at Boeing. The biggest issue I had was accumulation of rounding errors.

This sort of thing shows up in even the most prosaic places, of course:

https://blog.codinghorror.com/if-you-dont-change-the-ui-nobo...

In any event, while we're chatting, thank you for your longstanding work in the field.
by smnplk | 2026-01-20 12:32:21+00:00
Here is the latest and in my opinion the best interview with Ed Witten [1]

Things he talks about go mostly over my head. What disappointed me a little bit is that he seems to be a materialist. But that is pretty common position among physicists anyway, so not that surprising.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAbP0magTVY
by cakehonolulu | 2026-01-20 12:32:21+00:00
Indeed, the project has gone through a few iterations already (It was first a monolithic kernel module that required a secondary module to call into the API and whatnot). I've went towards a more userspace-friendly usage mainly so that you can iterate your changes much, much faster. Creating the synthetic PCI device is as easy as opening the userspace shim you program, it'll then appear on your bus. When you want to test new changes, you close the shim normally (Effectively removing it from the bus) and you can do this process as many times as needed.
by azangru | 2026-01-20 12:33:03+00:00
The HTML spec page[0] is the proper War and Peace of the web. It is 2,125MB of text gzipped, twice as large as War and Peace. It still makes some browsers weep, as was discussed in an episode of HTTP 203 podcast[1].

[0] - https://html.spec.whatwg.org/

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFA-v-CIxJQ
by sontek | 2026-01-20 12:33:18+00:00
This feels like it doesn't have accurate information. For example it has Domo on the list: "Domo was a startup in the Information space." and "Domo's demise can largely be attributed to its struggle to achieve sustainable profitability despite significant funding."

Domo might not be doing well but its still around and is a publicly traded company `DOMO` on nasdaq.

Same thing for Hootsuite, Evernote, OneLogin, Kik, etc.
by frderrin | 2026-01-20 12:33:26+00:00
> React is much more complex than the technology it's building on. Necessarily, to enable it's features

React, just like most software today, is excessively complex for the tasks it performs.

The only reason React is used is that many use it as a framework to attempt to provide more interactivity on the page without page reloads. There are other frameworks to do this, but none are as well-used.

Webpage interactivity with data was accomplished with page reloads via cgi-bin in the 1990s. Everything that has been done since then was not strictly necessary to produce the websites we use today; it would just be a more choppy experience.

A smoother experience didn’t require the overwhelming complexity that was introduced primarily in the 2010s in a framework war that React basically won. That complexity is the reason why many web and full-stack developers in the 2010s (such as myself) lost their minds and quit or seem incredibly depressed, grumpy, and confused much of the time today, and why some have invented strange new frameworks to attempt to reduce this complexity.
by maccard | 2026-01-20 12:33:32+00:00
> HR are idiots most of the time. HR, like real estate, has also very low entrance requirements

Soft skills are the most important. Calling a group of people you work with idiots because their role has a low barrier to entry reflects badly on you. Bad recruiters are beyond useless but a good one can read a resume, match it to the JD, learn what the hiring manager is looking for (do they keep saying no to people with too much experience or too little? Or in X tech stack), and they can glean out all of the really important job stuff - salary, location, flexibility, perks, etc. they can also get a read on whether the person is likely to be… difficult. The way they treat people they believe to be below them is how they’ll treat others when they’re frustrated/stressed or even succeeding.
by jansper39 | 2026-01-20 12:34:13+00:00
Putting the timing chain at the back of the engine away from the front is generally done to reduce torsional vibrations and tends to help with space claim, especially for pedestrian safety systems where you need a lot of travel space under the bonnet. But yeah, serviceability suffers.

Electric water pumps are a great idea though, instead of having an aux belt with tensioners and pulleys, you have on single part that can be unmounted and swapped out. Can run after the engine shuts off too to help cool it down.
by eru | 2026-01-20 12:34:56+00:00
Your graph is rather misleading: you adjust for inflation in two different ways to get 'real' data. One series uses CPI, the other uses the implicit price deflator for gross domestic product.

You can avoid this problem, by plotting nominal values and looking at their ratios. The price level will naturally cancel out.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1QI7c is a graph of the ratio of your two deflators (arbitrarily normalised to 1980 Jan 1 equal 100.)

As you can see, it trends up over time. Meaning that CPI grows faster than the GDP price deflator.
by adrian_b | 2026-01-20 12:35:45+00:00
This is one of many reasons why presidential systems are bad.

I find very strange that the presidential systems claim to be "republics", presumably because most people do not know what a "republic" had previously meant.

The most important principle of the Roman Republic was that it should not be allowed for any important civilian executive function to be occupied by a single human. All major functions should be held by 2 or more humans with equal power, e.g. 2 consuls for the supreme function (because it would be less likely for all of them to agree to do something abusive or illegal).

Only in exceptional circumstances, like war or natural catastrophes, it was fine to temporarily delegate power to a single dictator, to ensure fast decisions.

This principle of the Roman Republic was intended for avoiding the abuses of power, like those typical for kings. There is very little difference between most presidents of countries with presidential systems and absolutist monarchs, even if their function hopefully is not hereditary, but even this is not always true.
by DonaldFisk | 2026-01-20 12:35:48+00:00
It's telling that king – man + woman = queen is the only example I've ever seen used to explain word2vec.

I prefer the old school

king(X) :- monarch(X), male(X).
queen(X) :- monarch(X), female(X).
queen(X) :- wife(Y, X), king(Y).

monarch(elizabeth).
female(elizabeth).
wife(philip, elizabeth).
monarch(charles).
male(charles).
wife(charles, camilla).

?- queen(camilla).
true.

?- king(charles).
true.

?- king(philip).
false.

where definitions are human readable rules and words are symbols.
by mgaunard | 2026-01-20 12:35:54+00:00
VG10 edge retention isn't that amazing in my experience, and it's harder to sharpen than carbon steel. Burr feels gummy rather than crisp, and carbon steel goes as high as 65 HRC vs 62 for VG10.

It's sad that the market is flooded with high-performance stainless steels which are inherently worse and more expensive, just because the average person is afraid of rust and knife maintenance.
by Zababa | 2026-01-20 12:37:00+00:00
>If you have this great resource available to you (an LLM) you better show that you read and checked its output. If there's something in the LLM output you do not understand or check to be true, you better remove it.

You could say the same about what people find on the web, yet LLMs are penalized more than web search.

>If you do not use LLMs and just misunderstood something, you will have an (flawed) justification for why you wrote this. If there's something flawed in an LLM, the likelihood that you do not have any justification except for "the LLM said so" is quite high and should thus be penalized higher.

Swap "LLMs" for "websites" and you could say the exact same thing.

The author has this in their conclusions:

>One clear conclusion is that the vast majority of students do not trust chatbots. If they are explicitly made accountable for what a chatbot says, they immediately choose not to use it at all.

This is not true. What is true is that if the students are more accountable for their use of LLMs than their use of websites, they prefer using websites. What is "more" here? We have no idea, the author didn't say so. It could be that an error from a website or your own mind is -1 point and from a LLM is -2, so LLMs have to make two times less mistakes than websites and your mind. It could be -1 and -1.25. It could be -1 and -10.

The author even says themselves:

>In retrospect, my instructions were probably too harsh and discouraged some students from using chatbots.

But they don't note the bias they introduced against LLMs with their notation.
by graemep | 2026-01-20 12:37:43+00:00
> Retail investors should be index funds anyway.

That does does not solve the problem as insider traders will still be shifting profit to themselves. You still need non-insiders (not necessarily retail investors) to make the market work - even for insider trading to work you need a non-insider to trade with.

> Until fairly recently there was no 'insider trading' you could get in trouble for in commodities in the US. That hasn't stopped non-insiders from trading in commodities.

Can you show that it had no impact on how non-insiders traded? How recently was recently?

> Also, even if insider trading is legal, that doesn't mean your company needs to allow it: you can still punish your own employees for it, and eg claw back bonuses and sue for breach of contract and breach of fiduciary duty.

A lot less of a deterrent, and a lot of people with access to inside information have a lot more to gain than to lose.

> In any case, American insider trading regulation is already laxer than French insider trading law. And it doesn't look like French companies have an easier time raising capital.

Both do have insider trading laws so both are probably good enough, and there are a lot of other variables.
by curtisblaine | 2026-01-20 12:37:46+00:00
Immediate feedback informs the visual language in order to convey meaning in a easier way to a larger public. You may know what an eventually consistent system is, but many users don't, and they want visual information abstracted to something they can understand. It's reassuring.

Also, not everything can be reduced to static forms. Charts with knobs, drag and drop interfaces, interactive diagrams are all useful visual aids that you would like to erase because... they don't conform with your naive views on how things should look like?
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2026-01-20 12:38:04+00:00
In a hyper-partisan age, it seems good to have some collegiality and requirements for cross-partisan cooperation.

If we can't agree on anything then maybe we shouldn't do anything. If it ain't broke don't fix it. Why are so many people so desperate to move here if things are going so badly? Much of the discontent is performative. How willing would you actually be to give up your spot and switch places with someone in Guatemala?

Maybe we need filibuster-style restraints for the executive too. Executive overreach is a major complaint people have about the current structure, correct?
by tclancy | 2026-01-20 12:39:18+00:00
> I don’t mind the ways in which my job is dysfunctional, because it matches the ways in which I myself am dysfunctional

As a fellow traveller, I offer one caution: learn to turn this down in personal relationships as it can be counterproductive. It took decades for my wife to finally get through and explain not every problem she voices is something that needs a solution. Some times people just want to be heard. It bugs the hell out of me because I tend to need to solve All The Problems before I can do any self-care, but rather than seem heroic, I think this attitude can seem transactional or uncaring as though everyone is just a screw that needed a bit of tightening, etc.
by Esophagus4 | 2026-01-20 12:39:46+00:00
Same here in the US - 10,000 miles per year, so an $75 oil change every six months. Change the spark plugs myself every 4 years for $20. No big deal.

All the other maintenance I do would be the same with an electric vehicle (suspension fixes, flat tires / new tires, brake pads / brake fluid, etc).

ICE car maintenance isn’t a problem for me either. That alone isn’t going to make me buy a new $40k EV with no physical buttons because it’s one giant unusable touch screen that is a safety hazard to me and anyone else around me.

(Looking at you Polestar - your entire interior UX is garbage.)

Hybrids are a better option for me since I don’t have a charger at my house nor do I want one, but they’re also very expensive.
by stevepotter | 2026-01-20 12:41:16+00:00
We went out of business, but I made a web app for videographers to collaborate during production. Same things as frame.io. This was over 15 years ago. Frontend was pretty vanilla except relied heavily on jQuery. The main section of the app allowed you to commend on specific frames in a video. The code is split up amongst multiple files. Here is one: https://github.com/StevePotter/Takeoff/blob/main/Takeoff.Web...

Look at any of the sibling `app-productions-details*.js` files. Combined they formed a single interface. It was dicey. But damn the interface was snappy. I mean, instant. Code would have been much less these days but probably nowhere near as responsive.
by BigJ1211 | 2026-01-20 12:41:37+00:00
I don't really keep up with these Tech/Soft tubers, but watch a video on occasion. Can't really say I find something-imagen guilty of this, but like I said I watch the occasional video, not the stream. What I've watched from him is generally about what he agrees/disagrees with and he also tells you why he thinks that. Often reading articles/blogposts. Not to dismiss your opinion, but I would put him in the entertaining with substantive arguments category.

IMO software education/tainment suffers much worse though. They teach you how to do X in only this specific way with these specific tools, generally sponsored. Not the admittedly far more boring basics to do it yourself, or how to actually use these tools in a broader sense.
Ask HN: What's an API that you wish existed?
by tornikeo | 2026-01-20 12:42:44+00:00
Here are some APIs that I personally wish existed:

1. A public Google Trends API. It's currently in Beta, and I can't access it.
2. I'd pay a pretty penny for an API for OpenAI trends (or Anthropic trends), etc. To discover what people are talking about.
3. I'd also love a discord 'trends' API. Again, the main question I'm looking to answer is 'what topic are people talking about right now?'.

What's an API that you wish existed?
by BoppreH | 2026-01-20 12:43:13+00:00
I managed to add a Shazam Now button using a Shazam widget, not a shortcut. Give it a try!

I just installed Octopi on this thread's recommendation. Pretty good so far, and I'm happy to remove the useless Google search bar from the bottom of my Pixel (I use Kagi and Firefox, neither of which can be configured on that bar). Also satisfied how you can resize widgets to any size, regardless of what the widget asks for.