MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How would you decouple from the US?
by yawa_me_worht | 2026-01-08 08:23:24+00:00
Dear Americans, please don’t take this the wrong way - I love the US, have friends there, and treasure memories I made there.

However, it seems plausible that the US is turning into a rogue, authoritarian, Russia-like state increasingly more friendly towards Russia and hostile towards Europe. I am a European who grew up in a country still occupied by Russia. I am increasingly more worried about building my projects on American platforms, using an American operating system, etc.

What if the US actually attacks Greenland or finds another way to be openly hostile to Europe? I am not saying it will happen. All I am saying is that it seems prudent to prepare. How would you do it?

It is currently impossible to unhook myself from the US, but I would like to minimize exposure.

I can’t do anything about things like building an alternative to VISA/MasterCard (except wait for the digital Euro), so I will focus on things I can actually do and ignore things like my government buying F-35s and possibly giving my health data to Palantir.

* Mobile phone - there are no real European alternatives; it’s just Apple vs Google. Samsung or HTC with Android seems like a less bad option.

* Operating system - I have been using Linux for ages, getting rid of Windows seems relatively easy.

* Social networks - I grew to hate them before the current US admin, never used TikTok or Instagram, and I mostly stopped using Facebook and Twitter around the time Musk bought Twitter.

* Stripe for payments - this will be hard, but I am experimenting with our local payment processor, and so far it seems surprisingly doable, but it is not a battle-tested solution like Stripe.

* Clerk authentication - doable, but a lot of work and worrying

* AWS - I had a surprisingly bad experience with AWS and switched to a local provider with a lot less functionality (that I mostly do not need) and a lot better support

* GitHub, Cloudflare... dear God, how could we Europeans allow ourselves to be that dependent on anyone? Everything I touch is American.

* Gmail - this will be hard (two decades of emails). Any advice?

* Anything AI-related - fuuu, I am lost here.

What am I missing/forgetting? What do/would you do in my place?

I really hope you will take this as a brainstorming exercise and not an attack on America. I really do love the US and hope its democracy turns out to be more resilient than it currently seems.

EDIT: Please kindly keep responses practical. Let’s not turn this into a political discussion. You might approach it as a “what if” exercise, even if you think what the current US admin is doing is great, Europeans deserve what they get, etc.
by kshri24 | 2026-01-08 08:23:27+00:00
Really sucks to see this happen! Been using Tailwind for past few years now.

All the more reason to go closed source. Except for few really vital components that have national security implications (OS/Kernel, drivers, programming languages), which can be funded and supported by universities, Governments etc, I am of the strong opinion that everything else should go closed source.

Enough with this BS. Stop feeding the slop.
by TigerUniversity | 2026-01-08 08:24:42+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cases_of_the_January_6...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cases_of_the_January_6...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cases_of_the_January_6...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cases_of_the_January_6...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cases_of_the_January_6...
by zkmon | 2026-01-08 08:24:45+00:00
So, humans lost all of their evolutionary learnings and confused about what to eat. This doesn't happen with any other animal. And humans call themselves as an advanced race of animals. Not knowing what to eat is regress, not progress.

Things went well as long as mind was a servant of the body. Then it became the master and dictator of body. The mind started posing itself as a scientist and started questioning everything that were well-tested over centuries. It came up weird things such proteins, vitamins etc, but it forgot that what mattered was the big picture.

Body suffered silently as it lost it's most critical servant whom it trained over millennia.

It was enough to know that water flows down the slope, apple falls to ground, Sun goes around the Earth and life follows a rythm of seasons. Human life never needed Kepler's laws, relativity, quantum physics, computers, cars or sugar.

It's not too late. Listen to your instincts and body signals. Live on a farm (farm means crops and gardens, not just animals). Eat like your ancestors did. Eat less, eat varied food, more of greens and grains, mostly raw with a bit of cooking or heating.
by swisniewski | 2026-01-08 08:26:22+00:00
The description from the summaries sound very flawed.

1. They only tested 2 Radiologists. And they compared it to one model. Thus the results don’t say anything about how Radiologists in general perform against AI in general. The most generous thing the study can say is that 2 Radiologists outperformed a particular model.

2. The Radiologists were only given one type of image, and then only for those patients that were missed by the AI. The summaries don’t say if the test was blind. The study has 3 authors, all of which appear to be Radiologists, and it mentions 2 Radiologists looked at the ai-missed scans. This raises questions about whether the test was blind or not.

Giving humans data they know are true positives and saying “find the evidence the AI missed” is very different from giving an AI model also trained to reduce false positives a classification task.

Humans are very capable at finding patterns (even if they don’t exist) when they want to find a pattern.

Even if the study was blind initially, trained humans doctors would likely quickly notice that the data they are analyzing is skewed.

Even if they didn’t notice, humans are highly susceptible to anchoring bias.

Anchoring bias is a cognitive bias where individuals rely too heavily on the first piece of information they receive (the "anchor") when making subsequent judgments or decisions.

They skewed nature or the data has a high potential to amplify any anchoring bias.

If the experiment had controls, any measurement error resulting from human estimation errors could potentially cancel out (a large random sample of either images or doctors should be expected to have the same estimation errors in each group). But there were no controls at all in the experiment, and the sample size was very small. So the influence of estimation biases on the result could be huge.

From what I can read in the summary, these results don’t seem reliable.

Am I missing something?
by visarga | 2026-01-08 08:28:16+00:00
I had an idea - take SerpAPI and save top-10 or 20 links for many queries (millions), and put that in a RAG database. Then it can power a local LLM do web search without ever touching Google.

The index would just point a local crawler towards hubs of resources, links, feeds, and specialized search engines. Then fresh information would come from the crawler itself. My thinking is that reputable sites don't appear every day, if you update your local index once every few months it is sufficient.

The index could host 1..10 or even 100M stubs, each one touching on a different topic, and concentrating the best entry points on the web for that topic. A local LLM can RAG-search it, and use an agent to crawl from there on. If you solve search this way, without Google, and you also have local code execution sandbox, and local model, you can cut the cord. Search was the missing ingredient.

You can still call regular search engines for discovery. You can build your personalized cache of search stubs using regular LLMs that have search integration, like ChatGPT and Gemini, you only need to do it once per topic.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-08 08:28:31+00:00
If you encase your computer in a block of cement an attacker will have great difficulty breaking into it. Nevertheless it might be useful to know if previous break ins were facilitated by a buffer overflow, a misconfiguration, or something else. Probably you can arrive at solution that is reasonably secure while being significantly more user friendly than the 55 gallon drum filled with a soon to be solid.

More seriously - scenarios that call for executing arbitrary tools during a build are common, an increasing number of languages enjoy compile time code execution, and quite a few of those languages don't go out of their way to place any restrictions on the code that executes (many lisps for example).
by dahcryn | 2026-01-08 08:28:35+00:00
Claude Code > Gemini CLI, fair enough

But I actually find Gemini Pro (not the free one) extremely capable, especially since you can throw any conversation into notebooklm and deep thinking mode to go in depth

Opus is great, especially for coding and writing, but for actual productivity outside of that (e.g. working with PDF, images, screenshots, design stuff like marketing, tshirts, ...,...) I prefer Gemini. It's also the fastest.

Nowhere do I feel like GPT 5.2 is as capable as these two, although admittedly I just stopped using it frequently around november.
by PaulRobinson | 2026-01-08 08:28:45+00:00
There is a lot of research that shows the type of calorie you consume determines to some extent the next calorie you want to consume. You are more likely to be "sated" (i.e. not want to eat more calories), if you eat protein than you are ultra-processed carbohydrates, low calorie soda will leave your body yearning sugar, and so on.

When you couple this with the motivations of industrial food companies (some of whom are now owned by tobacco companies), and the research they do into the neuroscience effects of flavour, texture, even packaging of food, you'll start to spot that a push to "Real Food", and for that food to be less processed and more inclined towards protein, is more likely to result in overall calorie reduction.

One of the things that isn't cutting through on this program is saying "eat protein" is assumed to mean "eat meat", which some assume means you can eat burgers. Nope. Healthy protein is not red meat that has been fried - that's going to take a bit more education, I expect.
by tomaskafka | 2026-01-08 08:29:03+00:00
> I think the even more unfortunate truth is that value adds were never a good solution to begin with.

This is the money quote for me - charging for a different thing than the one that brings the value is unsustainable, and AI is accelerating that realization.

Unfortunately, without free distribution, Tailwind would never gain anywhere close to its current mindshare, so there just might not be an opening there (save for a "this year is a year of Linux on desktop" dream of bots and pnpm install paying with micropayments for each download).
by shunia_huang | 2026-01-08 08:29:03+00:00
I believe the new UI libraries hit hard more than the AI impact. AI is not always that accurate so eventually if you want to deep dive in, you still have to turn around to the doc. But the new libraries though, they give the market another good choice, especially when shadcn came out, it's so huge that I personally even feels there's no need to go for the raw Tailwind experience, and what's worse is that shadcn is still evolving fast.

I believe the only way to let Tailwind survive is changing the business model.
by blub | 2026-01-08 08:29:32+00:00
(Not the OP)

For many years, all the projects I’ve been in had mandatory code review, some in the form of PRs (a github fabrication), most as review requests in other tooling.

This applies to everything from platform code, configuration, tooling to production software.

Inside a component, we use review to share knowledge about how something was implemented and reach consensus on the implementation details. Depending on developer skill level, this catches style, design issues or even bugs. For skilled developers, it’s usually comments on code-to-architecture mismatches, understandability, etc. Sometimes not entirely objective things, that nevertheless contribute to developing and maintaining a team consensus and style.
Discussions also happen outside and before review, but we’ve found reviews invaluable.

If a team has yearly turnover or different skill levels (typical for most teams), not reviewing every commit is sloppy. Which has an additional meaning now with AI slop :)
by resumenext | 2026-01-08 08:29:50+00:00
We have mandatory seat belts and air bags. A sensor on the hood to insure a car is not being used as a murder weapon seems minimal in comparison. Such a sensor would save many lives including the young lady involved in the incident today. We have strict gun laws, why does it make sense to let any psycho buy a cheap used car and go kill people with it? It’s a glaring inconsistency.
by directevolve | 2026-01-08 08:30:42+00:00
The did NOT test radiologists. There were NO healthy controls. They evaluated AI false negative rate and used exclusively unblinded radiologists to grade the level of visibility and other features of the cancer.

Utility of the study is to evaluate potential AI sensitivity if used for mass fully automated screenings using mammography data. But says NOTHING about the CRUCIAL false positive rate (no healthy controls) and NOTHING about AI vs. human performance.

See my main comment elsewhere in this threat.
by pbmonster | 2026-01-08 08:31:40+00:00
Yeah, ultra high voltage DC power lines have something like 3.5% loss per 1000km. American sun belt to European sun belt is at least 6000km, so you just gotta eat the 20% loss. Same ballpark as pumped hydro storage.

6000km sounds like a lot, but the Chinese have built a 3000km UHVDC line delivering 12 GW, and putting down submarine communications cables this long is complete routine today. Would be interesting how much aluminium/lead/copper such a project would take. EDIT: found a supplier that specifies a 1GW cable at 7000 tons per spool. A spool is 130km of cable, so that's 350 000 tons of cable per GW for the transatlantic link. So just the raw aluminium is around a billion dollars per GW.

Anyway, first we have to properly connect those two sun belts to the rest of their own continental masses with UHVDC, then we have a lot of political problems to solve, and then we can check battery prices...
by lurking_swe | 2026-01-08 08:32:07+00:00
requiring me to explicitly opt-out of something is NOT the same thing as getting my consent. So your argument breaks down there.

You know what getting my consent would look like? Google hosting a form where i can tell them PLEASE SCRAPE MY WEBSITE and include it in your search results. That is what consent looks like.

Google has never asked for my consent. Yet they expect others to behave by different rules.

Now where google may have a reasonable case is that google scrapes with the intention of offering the data “for free”. SerpAPI does not.
by genewitch | 2026-01-08 08:32:48+00:00
i'm over 40; this is anecdotal, but I've talked to a lot of people all over the country; however i'm not asserting this is 100% factual:

in the US most days include a meat in at least 1 meal. Now, i'm framing this as "fish, eggs, fowl". Cereal with milk, bagel with cream cheese, not meat, but meat adjacent. Waffles have eggs. we love "deli meats" in the US, every store has a deli counter where you can get meat sliced right before your own eyes; or you can go to the 4-8 door cold case where the pre-sliced meats are. And dinner, well i can think of a couple of vegetarian dishes that are "staples" like red beans and rice (can be vegan/vegetarian), or pasta with marinara (vegetarian).

When presented with something like the Mediterranean diet, most americans would balk at the bird and rabbit food they were now expected to eat.

I can expand, but yes, meat is like, a huge deal in the US. Especially beef. part of it is our chicken and pork is kinda bland and merely "just food" but our beef ranges from "ok if i'm real hungry" to "really very good, actually". Fish is hit and miss, depends where you live in the US as to how popular it is. also most of the cow is used for food in the US, very little is wasted, to my understanding. brain, eyes, tongue, glands, lungs, etc are all sold, bones sold as fertilizer, hide is obviously leather, and so on.

for the record i wish animals were treated better, in fact, i have been searching for a local beef farmer for a decade and all the ones i run in to sell their beef to texas!
by themk | 2026-01-08 08:32:54+00:00
Not the poster, but, usually what people are referring to is all the other stuff that comes along.

Per calorie beef and broccoli are actually surprisingly similar, but broccoli comes with fiber, calcium and vitamin C, while beef comes with saturated fat.

Of course, broccoli is not very calorie dense, so you would need to eat a lot.

More realistically, tofu, which has about as much protein per calorie (and almost as much per gram) as middling lean beef. But has half the saturated fat, more iron, more calcium, and fibre.

You just get more good stuff, and less bad stuff with veg.
by globular-toast | 2026-01-08 08:33:41+00:00
But it's not "correct" and doesn't make sense for the vast majority of people. Can you at least agree that a car doesn't lose any value just by driving it off the forecourt? Can you agree that people can have value in their lives that can't be written on a balance sheet?

Most people would do well to stop thinking value exists on a single dimension. It's utterly absurd when you really think about it, but too many people are indoctrinated into this world of money and just can't think any differently.

Sadly, we do all have to play the game to some extent. But you only need to understand enough about it to get by, you don't need to play day trader or treat yourself like a business that might be liquidated at a moment's notice.

The point of a post like this is to strip back the bullshit and just say it like it is: finance is a bunch of children in adult bodies playing games, making bets and doing deals with each other. It's not complicated, they just have their own secret language, just like the kids in the other clique at school did.

I guess it's upsetting to people who are either in the clique or want to be in the clique, though.
by SilverSlash | 2026-01-08 08:34:04+00:00
While that may be your personal experience, but for me Gemini always answers my questions better than Claude Opus 4.5 and often better than GPT 5.2. I'm not talking about coding agents, but rather the web based AI systems.

This has happened enough times now (I run every query on all 3) that I'm fairly confident that Gemini suits me better now. Whereas it used to be consistently dead last and just plain bad not so long ago. Hence the hype.
by timr | 2026-01-08 08:34:13+00:00
I never personally wanted Tailwind as a product, but really feel for them when I see comments like this one [1]:

> Here's a friendly tip for the Tailwind team that you should already know, but I will repeat anyways: If your goal is monetizing your software, then making your software as easy to use for people's workflows, is paramount.

I made the horrible life mistake of starting a company around developer tools, and I would never, ever repeat the experience because of “friendly” stuff like this. I don’t know why software developers are so entitled, but it’s a serious culture problem.

[1] https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is...
by trissim | 2026-01-08 08:35:09+00:00
Fair point. I've added Ssot/Inconsistency.lean (zero sorry) which formalizes inconsistency as a Lean Prop, not a comment.

It proves ssot_required: if you need to encode the fact (DOF >= 1) and guarantee all configs are consistent, then DOF = 1. Also formalizes independence and oracle necessity (valid oracles can disagree -> resolution requires external choice).

The mapping to real systems still requires interpretation,but so does every formalization. The contribution is making assumptions explicit and attackable.
by HelloNurse | 2026-01-08 08:36:02+00:00
The problem is that treating the incorrect simplification as good can be very tempting for teachers.

For example, in an introductory physics course teaching Newtonian dynamics without the brutal complications of special relativity and general relativity is fine because it doesn't take much to explain that it is an approximation and it is good enough for "everyday" situations. Students are aware that a better model is available: worst case, they try to get away with not using it.

On the other hand in an introductory programming course teaching that if you have Animals in the program the dog instances "should" belong to a Dog subtype is logically consistent and elegant; the only opposing force is the abstract and uncool engineering principle of keeping software simple, and many teachers are dogmatic and enthusiastic.
by skywal_l | 2026-01-08 08:36:44+00:00
There is fundamental difference between Windows and AmigaOS is that you usually want to run Linux+wine on a the same hardware you would run Windows. That's why wine is not an emulator. Whereas, in the case of vamos, the AmigaOS hardware is not a PC.

They explicitly states that in the link: "It will run typical console binaries that do not rely on user interface [...] This approach will not run any applications or games using direct hardware register access - for this use case a machine emulator like FS-UAE is the tool you will need..."
by simianparrot | 2026-01-08 08:36:52+00:00
Herd immunity isn't on its own enough to justify coercion of medical interventions.

You might want to read up on the principle of informed consent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_ethics#Informed_consen...

> After receiving and understanding this information, the patient can then make a fully informed decision to either consent or refuse treatment.

You are overly simplifying vaccines as if they do not affect individuals individually. They absolutely do, for so many reasons, like allergies. But even if that wasn't the case, _all_ vaccines carry some risk/benefit tradeoff, and each individual is entirely in their right to weigh this for themselves.

Also did we learn nothing from covid?
by keeda | 2026-01-08 08:37:03+00:00
The memory is definitely sort of a moat. As an example, I'm working on a relatively niche problem in computer vision (small, low-resolution images) and ChatGPT now "knows" this and tailors its responses accordingly. With other chatbots I need to provide this context every time else I get suggestions oriented towards the most common scenarios in the literature, which don't work at all for my use-case.

That may seem minor, but it compounds over time and it's surprising how much ChatGPT knows about me now. I asked ChatGPT to roast me again at the end of last year, and I was a bit taken aback that it had even figured out the broader problem I'm working on and the high level approach I'm taking, something I had never explicitly mentioned. In fact, it even nailed some aspects of my personality that were not obvious at all from the chats.

I'm not saying it's a deep moat, especially for the less frequent users, but it's there.
by moooo99 | 2026-01-08 08:37:15+00:00
> Depending how the costs of AI detection vs doctor, that genuinely might be enough to shift the math and be a net positive.

Based on my very superficial medical understanding, screening is already the cheap part. But every false-positive would lead to a doctor follow up at best and a biopsy at worst. Not to mention the significant psychological effects this has on a patient.

So I would counter that the potential increase of false-positive MRI scans could be enough to tip off the scale to make screening less useful
by Cthulhu_ | 2026-01-08 08:37:18+00:00
Eggs and meat products are way up in Europe (at least in NL) too, bird flu, government buyouts to reduce nitrogen emissions, etc. Here's a neat page with market prices for eggs: https://www.nieuweoogst.nl/marktprijzen/eieren.

On the other hand, potatoes are down to near zero this year (bullwhip effect, last year there were crop failures and prices were way up so farmers planted more potatoes). Doesn't necessarily translate to consumer prices but nobody considers potatoes to be expensive anyway.