MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by motbus3 | 2026-01-27 20:33:02+00:00
Based on the information provided in the user's HackerNews profile, personal blogs (annoying.technology and blog.notmyhostna.me), and public comments, here is what can be gathered regarding these topics:
Gender
Context Details: The user has not explicitly stated a gender identity in their profile. However, in discussions about parenting, they have referred to themselves as a "father" (e.g., "As a father with a mortgage...").
Religion or Philosophical Belief
Philosophical Belief: The user shows a strong interest in Pragmatism, frequently referencing philosophers like John Dewey and Richard Rorty. They often apply a pragmatist lens to technology and social systems, focusing on "what works" and local utility over abstract ideology.
Religion: There is no statement of personal religious affiliation. They have expressed a critical view of religious influence on public policy, stating that "religious beliefs are fine as long as they remain private... but when they are used to shape reality [for others], they become dangerous."
Political Affiliation
Partisan Stance: The user does not align with a specific political party. They have described Western democracy as a "sham" and expressed skepticism toward both the "Left" and "Right," viewing them as equally prone to tribalism.
Focus: Their political interest is primarily local and systemic. They advocate for active participation in local community improvements (parks, schools) rather than national partisan movements.
Cynicism Toward Power: They frequently critique the influence of the "billionaire class" and "concentrated corporate power" on government and software.
Other Sensitive Info (Per Guidelines)
Income: No specific salary is mentioned, though they mention having a mortgage and being a software engineer based in Berlin, Germany.
Contact Info: The user publicly provides a dedicated email for HackerNews inquiries: hn@notmyhostna.me.
Location: They have publicly stated they live and work in Berlin, Germany.
by jiggawatts | 2026-01-27 20:34:27+00:00
I’ve done this kind of thing before: I wrote a 3D game engine that could switch between DirectX and OpenGL at runtime and also switch GPUs dynamically.

At some point the architecture becomes a toy to play with, like a train set. Trying to push the abstractions as far as they can possibly go within the bounds of the parent language is a fun challenge to tackle.

Of course, this is pointless and even counterproductive. I only did this decades ago when I was a junior developer. With more experience I now deeply appreciate simple, straightforward, to-the-point code.

I tell juniors: “Just do the thing.”
by peyton | 2026-01-27 20:34:50+00:00
Importantly this definition references an individual’s conscience. Seditious conspiracy is another matter. Here is the statute:

> If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both.

A group chat coordinating use of force may be tough.
by bijant | 2026-01-27 20:34:57+00:00
Why would you go to the effort to present faces on an "About Us" page when its only white men anyway ? Do you think Women and PoCs are incompatible with your vision of saving the Linux (not GNU, you don't mention GNU in your mission statement at all) World through germanic rigor ? Genuinely curious because you are based in Berlin where I have never been to a start-up office or techno club that wasn't at least as diverse as its SF or NYC equivalent. If you were based in Munich or Stuttgart this would be easier to pass off as a curious coincidence.
by pessimizer | 2026-01-27 20:35:00+00:00
When you force the sale of a company in order to control the political messages that its users post, the wailing and gnashing of teeth that comes when that power is exercised is entirely performative.

Weren't anti-ICE people just calling it "freeze peach" a minute ago? This is what that looks like. This is the group that repeated "nothingburger" over and over again when you said that government directly and publicly threatening private businesses if they didn't censor individuals was bad.

This is political. The Democrats began their open hatred of the left in the 90s when the Democrats cracked down on free speech during the anti-globalization protests (the introduction of fenced-in "free speech zones"), the party went all in on Iraq against the wishes of all people who were paying attention, Hillary Clinton mocked the left for objecting to a wall between Mexico and the United States, and Rahm Emanuel described people who wanted single-payer as "fucking retards."

Now the bizarre group of media-addicted partisans that now calls themselves the "left" fight for free trade and imported slave labor. They remind you that there are jobs that are too awful for Americans that are totally appropriate for Mexicans. That manufacturing is actually worthless, and we should import everything because as a reserve currency there's no need to produce anything. Trade deficits can be infinite, and America is meant to be a black hole, sucking in the worlds production and handing it to the rich. But the rich are bad, although we're giving them every single thing they want. Their politics judged on policy are to the right of Nixon. The only illegal immigrants they know are their employees. They've left behind Floyd, Illegal is the new Black.

Now, on HN, this isn't politics. This is something else. Only black people and women are politics. The creation of a masked, militarized federal police force filled with morons to enforce federal immigration law because Democratic cities and states are refusing to enforce it themselves? Not politics. The performance of Trump's street roundups to rally his base (and the working people in this country that are undercut by illegal labor, and the racists who think every Mexican is a rapist) while ignoring and writing exceptions for the corporations that employ illegal labor? Not politics.

Sorry, I meant something something something Russia, China, Iran, Nazis. And some specious, offensive comparison of people who just got here in order to make money to Black Americans enslaved and segregated over centuries.
by ninalopatina | 2026-01-27 20:35:01+00:00
We have our agent on our docs page! (Hi I also worked on this with Jay) https://docs.contextual.ai/ - if you type a question into "ask AI", it's powered by agent composer just like the rocket demo. And we actually have a blog about an ecom agent coming out soon, it was one of our test cases due to a large, public dataset available in this space.
by john_moscow | 2026-01-27 20:35:42+00:00
Unpopular opinion: there has been a steady decline of standards in the research community in the past decade or two. First reproducibility crisis. Then, some topics becoming political taboo where the unorthodox opinion would get you fired and canceled. The credibility of the science in the West has been falling, and the recent change of administration is predictably axing something that has a perceived strong bias in the opposite direction.

An optimist in me hopes that we can get back to unbiased science, where it doesn't have to agree with the current side, but both sides perceive it as fair and agree to leave it alone for common good. A realist thinks that it will happen in China, and the West has just run out of steam.
by mrguyorama | 2026-01-27 20:35:48+00:00
>is that I don’t think this is causing people to actually believe that WD-40 is not a lubricant.

Why do you believe this? The vast majority of people commenting on the internet haven't used WD-40 in the past year. Why wouldn't they end up believing a wrong thing that has been confidently stated that they otherwise know nothing about?

People have always loved these factoids, long long before the internet. It was common conversation fodder for upper class folks in history to repeat outright falsehoods as "um actually"s or "You should know"s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions_...

Do you know how many people for whatever reason believe that Columbus believed the earth was round and everyone else thought it was flat, despite all historical evidence being contrary?

Basically "Common consensus is X but I'm super smart and know REAL truth Y" is like the optimal meme shape for the human brain. The biases in our brain will always support such an argument shape, and humans get a reward for relaying that info, correct or not. All our innate and fundamental physiological biases will be triggered by this kind of statement.

IMO the super interesting aspect is the second and third generations of "Um actually" where a previous "um actually" gets further "um actually!"d, and even that gets "um actuallyyyyy"d. I wonder if we will get a cycle at some point!
by legitster | 2026-01-27 20:35:57+00:00
It's often pointed out that the ball is only live for about 18 minutes of every game. But what makes football so fascinating is that for every play there are 22 different jobs being executed at the same time. And the jobs change every play.

For something like baseball, you can basically see everything happening in frame the whole time. But for football, the game is so information dense that you can spend hours unpacking the game afterwards to see what was going on. That's why replays and highlights are so much more satisfying. And that's what makes it fun to analyze and or watch videos during the week - you can find all sort of unique or interesting aspects just watching the same play again and analyzing a different personnel group.

It also explains why cameras are everywhere (besides them being just flat out cheaper for high school games, etc). Film study is a crucial part of the game for players - more than in any other sport.
by defen | 2026-01-27 20:36:13+00:00
I don't think the idea is that the speech in the chat is inherently illegal; it's that it could be used as evidence of illegal activity. Using that example - if someone in the chat asks about plate XYZ at 10AM, and if a phone linked to "Bob" posts to the group chat at 10:04 AM that license plate XYZ is used by ICE, and the internal logs show that Bob queried the ICE database about plate XYZ at 10:02 AM, and no one else queried that license plate in the past month, that is pretty good evidence that Bob violated the CFAA.
by simonw | 2026-01-27 20:36:17+00:00
This project terrifies me.

On the one hand it really is very cool, and a lot of people are reporting great results using it. It helped someone negotiate with car dealers to buy a car! https://aaronstuyvenberg.com/posts/clawd-bought-a-car

But it's an absolute perfect storm for prompt injection and lethal trifecta attacks: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/16/the-lethal-trifecta/

People are hooking this thing up to Telegram and their private notes and their Gmail and letting it loose. I cannot see any way that doesn't end badly.

I'm seeing a bunch of people buy a separate Mac Mini to run this on, under the idea that this will at least stop it from destroying their main machine. That's fine... but then they hook that new Mac Mini up to their Gmail and iMessage accounts, at which point they've opened up a bunch of critical data.

This is classic Normalization of Deviance: https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2025/the-normalization-... - every time someone gets away with running this kind of unsafe system without having their data stolen they'll become more confident that it's OK to keep on using it like this.

Here's Sam Altman in yesterday's OpenAI Town Hall admitting that he runs Codex in YOLO mode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpxv-8nG8ec&t=2330s

And that will work out fine... until it doesn't.

(I should note that I've been predicting a headline-grabbing prompt injection attack in the next six months every six months for over two years now and it still hasn't happened.)

Update: here's a report of someone uploading a "skill" to the https://clawdhub.com/ shared skills marketplace that demonstrates (but thankfully does not abuse) remote code execution on anyone who installed it: https://twitter.com/theonejvo/status/2015892980851474595 / https://xcancel.com/theonejvo/status/2015892980851474595
by somethingsome | 2026-01-27 20:36:20+00:00
Hi, I looked into joint collaborations between many countries and EU, but honestly I didn't really find anything EU-China that was interesting, most funding agencies do not fund collaborative projects EU-China, or maybe I'm missing something, in any cases it didn't strike me. If you have some examples I would be curious.

There are way more opportunities with other countries that I'm aware of, mostly EU-EU.
by bluecalm | 2026-01-27 20:36:22+00:00
>>Tax on investments are averagely taxed compared to other countries.

That is only if you haven't accumulated wealth yet.
The combination of quite high capital gain tax with sky high wealth tax, pretty high income tax isn't very attractive if your plan is to accumulate some wealth.
If you just want to make enough every year to live there I guess it's reasonable though.
by michaelt | 2026-01-27 20:36:32+00:00
"Ubuntu Core" is a similar product [1]

As I understand it, the main customers for this sort of thing are companies making Tivo-style products - where they want to use Linux in their product, but they want to lock it down so it can't be modified by the device owner.

This can be pretty profitable; once your customers have rolled out a fleet of hardware locked down to only run kernels you've signed.

[1] https://ubuntu.com/core
by bayindirh | 2026-01-27 20:36:44+00:00
Before this point in time, Linux never supported being an immutable image. Neither filesystems, nor the mechanism to lock it down was there. The best you could do was, TiVoization, but that would be too obvious and won't fly.

Now we have immutable distributions (SuSE, Fedora, NixOS). We have the infrastructure for attestation (systemd's UKI, image based boot, and other immutability features), TPMs and controversially uutils (Which is MIT licensed and has the stated goal to replace all GNU userspace).

You can build an immutable and adversarial userspace where you don't have to share the source, and require every boot and application call to attest. The theoretical thickness of the wall is both much greater and this theoretical state is much easier to achieve.

20 years ago the only barrier was booting. After that everything was free. Now it's possible to boot into a prison where your every ls and cd command can be attested.

Oh, Rust is memory safe. Good luck finding holes.
by mothballed | 2026-01-27 20:37:10+00:00
If you let the government stomp on your constitutional rights and willingly go to jail on unconstitutional grounds, then that's not respect for the law. That's respect for injustice.

Accepting jail over 1A protected protests only proves you're weak (not in the morally deficient way, just from a physical possibilities way) enough to be taken. No one thinks more highly of you or your 'respect for the law' for being caught and imprisoned in such case, though we might not think lesser of you, since we all understand it is often a suicide mission to resist it.
by runjake | 2026-01-27 20:37:12+00:00
It's legitimate, but its also extremely powerful and people tend to run it in very insecure ways or ways where their computer is wiped. Numerous examples and stories on X.

I used it for a bit, but it burned through tokens (even after the token fix) and it uses tokens for stuff that could be handled by if/then statements and APIs without burning a ton of tokens.

But it's a very neat and imperfect glimpse at the future.
by gamarino | 2026-01-27 20:37:14+00:00
It is a non-moving GC.

The short pauses are a direct consequence of the immutable-by-default model. Once we collect the roots from thread stacks and global data during a brief Stop-The-World (STW) phase, those objects will not be modified by user threads. This allows the GC thread to perform the marking and sweeping phases in parallel with application threads without needing complex write barriers or locks.

Regarding mutability and cycles:

All mutable objects are managed through a centralized structure whose root is scanned during the STW phase.

Even this internal tracking structure uses immutable tree patterns, ensuring that once the GC starts its parallel phase, the pointers it is traversing remain stable.

Cycles are indeed possible in the object model, and the Mark-and-Sweep algorithm handles them naturally, ensuring that big systems with complex interactions don't leak memory.

The goal was to eliminate the standard synchronization overhead (locks/barriers) by leveraging the fact that 99% of the object graph is immutable and hardware-aligned.
by sheikhnbake | 2026-01-27 20:37:24+00:00
Sigh.

The US is in a weird spot. The electorate does not generally want education and research cut.

Republicans here have convinced their base that education and the educated are bad, which has fed their desire to cut academic funding and research at all levels.

That is to say, the federal government doesn't have a popular mandate to do any of this. They simply hold all levers of power through a slim majority of the voting populace.
by mkl | 2026-01-27 20:37:45+00:00
No it wouldn't, as we already think it's pretty likely. Chimpanzees use tools, so our most recent common ancestor with them, something like 6 million years ago, may well have used tools too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_use_by_non-humans, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzee%E2%80%93human_last_...
Show HN: I could build the translation tool I've wanted for 10 years
by luxpir | 2026-01-27 20:38:02+00:00
Hi HN,

In 2014 my idea of a futuristic translation tool was a souped up Vim plugin or an ncurses TUI app that would autocomplete typing and do hyper-fast translation memory lookups. A decade+ later and I moved out of full time translation and into dev work for translation/localisation agencies. Google developed the transformer model in their translation research, having already given us the neural network improvements from around 2016. Then workable coding agents surfaced and ideas continued to percolate. A few discussions with colleagues, who'd done similar pre-AI, and projects that failed to gain traction with clients later, I thought I should give it a go myself.

I knew exactly what I needed to build, what stack I wanted to use, had been testing LLM editing of machine translation (of NN type) in an elaborate script with batching and RAG and error handling and so on. But models and "harnesses" have kept improving, the features I thought would be months of work were a week (a video dubbing and subbing suite, with cloned voices, time alignment etc.). Performance and security audits from multiple models tightened things up. Continue to do so. Django takes care of secure basics, I work on bugs and performance everywhere else.

I have now a next gen translation tool. It can do really useful things that the existing SOTA CAT tools cannot (yet) do due to inertia and massive corp culture.

I've got 100s of tasks still to do (todoist mcp ftw) and doubtless many more bugs to iron out. But I'm slowing down on features now and switching to marketing, distribution, talking to audiences etc. so I can concentrate on delivering value.

Keen to hear thoughts. Homepage for the "Studio" is here: https://studio.languageops.com and if you're not interested in the tool, come and spin a 3D globe which says hello in every language of the world as you hover over it: https://languageops.com. Easter egg somewhere south.
by foresto | 2026-01-27 20:38:02+00:00
Here are a few examples of problems systemd has caused me:

System shutdown/reboot is now unreliable. Sometimes it will be just as quick as it was before systemd arrived, but other times, systemd will decide that something isn't to its liking, and block shutdown for somewhere between 30 seconds and 10 minutes, waiting for something that will never happen. The thing in question might be different from one session to the next, and from one systemd version to the next; I can spend hours or days tracking down the process/mount/service in question and finding a workaround, only to have systemd hang on something else the next day. It offers no manual skip option, so unless I happen to be working on a host with systemd's timeouts reconfigured to reduce this problem, I'm stuck with either forcing a power-off or having my time wasted.

Something about systemd's meddling with cgroups broke the lxc control commands a few years back. To work around the problem, I have to replace every such command I use with something like `systemd-run --quiet --user --scope --property=Delegate=yes <command>`. That's a PITA that I'm unlikely to ever remember (or want to type) so I effectively cannot manage containers interactively without helper scripts any more. It's also a new systemd dependency, so those helper scripts now also need checks for cgroup version and systemd presence, and a different code path depending on the result. Making matters worse, that systemd-run command occasionally fails even when I do everything "right". What was once simple and easy is now complex and unreliable.

At some point, Lennart unilaterally decided that all machines accessed over a network must have a domain name. Subsequently, every machine running a distro that had migrated to systemd-resolved was suddenly unable to resolve its hostname-only peers on the LAN, despite the DNS server handling them just fine. Finding the problem, figuring out the cause, and reconfiguring around it wasn't the end of the world, but it did waste more of my time. Repeating that experience once or twice more when systemd behavior changed again and again eventually drove me to a policy of ripping out systemd-resolved entirely on any new installation. (Which, of course, takes more time.) I think this behavior may have been rolled back by now, but sadly, I'll never get my time back.

There are more examples, but I'm tired of re-living them and don't really want to write a book. I hope these few are enough to convey my point:

Systemd has been a net negative in my experience. It has made my life markedly worse, without bringing anything I needed. Based on conversations, comments, and bug reports I've seen over the years, I get the impression that many others have had a similar experience, but don't bother speaking up about it any more, because they're tired of being dismissed, ignored, or shouted down, just as I am.

I would welcome a reliable, minimal, non-invasive, dependency-based init. Systemd is not it.
by mattmaroon | 2026-01-27 20:38:09+00:00
Last year in my area, a food truck decided to call itself Leggo My Egg Roll, and obvious play on Eggo waffles tagline.

Kellogg sent them a cease and desist, they decided to ignore it. Kellogg then offered to pay them to rebrand, they still wouldn’t.

They then sued for $15 million.
by iugtmkbdfil834 | 2026-01-27 20:38:09+00:00
<< Its either one or the other.

Why would that be a given? If we remove tiktok and replace it with anything else, that replaced influence does not automatically negate my will? Case in point, when I call my mother to talk a new car purchase, does her disliking my choice automatically mean I either influenced and therefore have no will?

I am not certain you considered edge cases here.