MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TMWNN | 2026-01-07 12:52:32+00:00
I point out that any European attempt at economic warfare against the US would inevitably affect both sides, and that the US is much less dependent on foreign trade than Europe ... and yet you again speak as if any impact would be solely on the US. "Panic", "Politically devastating", etc., as if only the US has upsettable investors and distressed electorate.

>Now imagine full-blown sanctions.

This would surely result in formal American withdrawal from NATO.

"The US invading Greenland would destroy NATO!", you say. I don't believe that the US would invade Greenland militarily; it will likely buy it, or obtain some sort of ironclad investment rights not dependent on whether Greenland is part of the Kingdom of Denmark or independent. But let's say that the US does, and NATO dissolves.

It comes down to net benefits. Would owning Greenland be more valuable for American national security, than the current NATO status quo of the US being willing to to accept its own cities being nuked if Russia invades Western Europe?

The calculus made more sense (if it ever did) during the Cold War, when NATO ended at Germany's eastern border. Does it make sense now, when Montenegro is a NATO member? I strongly suspect that the answer is not one that the rest of NATO would want to hear, regardless of the Ukraine War.
by happytoexplain | 2026-01-07 12:53:12+00:00
Yes, it's probably the left's single largest mistake in messaging in a hundred years. It's understandable, since so much of the right's take on this topic is in fact often more racist than pragmatic, but that's also a "loudest voice" problem, and the left has those voices too. I don't know how a country with the US's history and culture can even talk about this without those voices dominating the perceptual bandwidth. It's essentially impossible, I guess. And being ignored pushes more people into that tone. This is the vicious cycle that makes us incapable of electing anybody in the middle.
by redditmarketing | 2026-01-07 12:53:18+00:00
I kept getting spam after signing up for random tools and newsletters, so I built EmailShield.

It lets you create email aliases and forward messages to your real inbox you can delete them anytime.

It’s not trying to replace Gmail or be fancy, just a lightweight way to avoid spam.

Would love honest feedback from people who care about privacy:
https://emailshield.app?ref=ycombinator

What feature would you expect from something like this?
by motbus3 | 2026-01-07 12:53:33+00:00
Yes. If one knows that someone has their identifiable data without consent it is a problem.

While they are pictures on the internet it is one thing, when you gather them all and put a label with a number then it is problematic.

Remember that FaceApp to make you older, younger etc? Imagine how much data those guys collected?

I know someone who submitted the face of a member of my family without consent. You could not even complain without agreeing with the TOS first
by joezydeco | 2026-01-07 12:54:11+00:00
One of the founders is a friend of mine that has been an IVD researcher for decades. I don't smell any scam. They are just looking for traction in the consumer and real estate sectors. They already have customers in agriculture, especially with cannabis farms looking for molds. They don't sell treatments. It's more like a radon sampler you leave in a house for a day to get a reading.
by ChiragArya | 2026-01-07 12:54:34+00:00
We have been experimenting with whether strong multi-step reasoning actually requires a full-precision scale.

Alpie Core is a 32B parameter model trained and served entirely at 4-bit precision. Instead of training in FP16 and compressing later, we optimized the model end-to-end for low-precision reasoning.

Despite the constraint, it performs competitively on reasoning and coding benchmarks like GSM8K, BIG-Bench Hard, and SWE-Bench Verified, while using far less memory and infrastructure.

We are especially interested in feedback on long-context behaviour, reasoning stability across retries, and how it performs inside agent or tool-using workflows.
by jongjong | 2026-01-07 12:54:52+00:00
Yes and at least 30 more minutes to write the report. With the help of LLM. So it still required my analysis skills but at least I was able to do it, relatively fast... Whereas I wouldn't even have considered doing this kind of stuff before due to the hassle...

There are multiple factors which are pulling me into cybersecurity.

Firstly, it requires less effort.
Secondly, the amount of vulnerabilities seems to be growing exponentially.
by hopelite | 2026-01-07 12:54:55+00:00
It seems a distinction needs to be made between what is being discussed. The ruling class of Europe has cheered it on, even if the peasants complained; but as with so many other things, it’s wholly irrelevant what the peasants want, as you highlight. Americans also were 90%+ opposed to entering WWI and WWII and Vietnam, but that doesn’t change that it was done to serve ruling class objectives.

That’s long been the system; the peasants are manipulated or forced to enter into the meat grinder for the ruling class. See the Ukraine for reference.

But rejoice, soon robots and drones with fight each other instead … or maybe get rid of “useless eaters” more efficiently? It could go either way, or both.
by Muromec | 2026-01-07 12:55:06+00:00
Sorry, I misread 80k p/a for 8k monthly.

You have a point. I would not get two bedroom two bathroom apartment for myself alone however. Or live in Berlin for that matter.

Few years ago in Holland it was something like 100k salary == mortgage for 500k house. No downpayment, 2k monthly.

Having a sweet 30% reduction of taxable salary was very nice, otherwive learn sone cooking and get an income-generating partner to top it up.
by edg5000 | 2026-01-07 12:55:18+00:00
The mechanization and scaling up of farming caused a tectonic shift from rural residents moving to cities to take on factory jobs as well as office and retail jobs. We saw this in China until very recently, since they had a bit of a slow start causing delayed full-scale industrialisation.

So a lot of people will end up doing something different. Some of it will be menial and be shit, and some of it will be high level. New hierarchies and industries will form. Hard to predict the details, but history gives us good parallels.
by bossyTeacher | 2026-01-07 12:55:29+00:00
>LLM coding agents won't kill software development as a job

They won't same as the industrial revolution didn't kill farming as a job but it sure did ate up most of the farming roles. Most of the people you have ever met are people who would have been farmers had they been born before the revolution. Developers without much leverage, underpaid, overworked and competing with hundreds of experienced devs for a single role is likely to be the eventual future of most software development thus gradually becoming similar to other stem roles in terms of pay, competition and negotiation power.
by a_conservative | 2026-01-07 12:56:48+00:00
Not a doctor either.

Japan seems to love creating fat soluble forms of thiamine. I've been experimenting with a form of thiamine called TTFD. TTFD is synthetic, there's a natural form called allithiamine, derived from garlic. There's also another form called benfotiamine. All of these are fat soluble and highly highly available forms of thiamine. TTFD in particular is associated with paradoxical effects where a person can have a temporary worsening of thiamine deficiency symptoms when first consuming TTFD. Thiamine is generally considered very safe, but these supplements are pretty hefty doses, so I would suggest treading lightly.

There's also some thinking amongst some doctors that sub-clinical thiamine deficiencies being more common than most doctors realize [0] [1]

[0] Thiamine Deficiency Disease, Dysautonomia, and High Calorie Malnutrition

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/chapter/monograph/pii/...
by NohatCoder | 2026-01-07 12:57:39+00:00
Yeah, and I doubt that this is the last price hike. But I don't think this actually has a whole lot to do with ram prices. The thing is, AI cloud providers have generally been running at a massive loss, if you do the napkin maths, the procurement cost of these machines is equivalent to approximately a year of rent at these rates, for normal servers at AWS it is approximately a month.
by kaant | 2026-01-07 12:57:45+00:00
I’d really like some blunt feedback on the UX + “what is this site even for” part. It’s basically an online toolbox of small utilities (networking stuff, text/data converters, encoders/decoders, lookup tools, etc). I’m trying to make it actually useful and easy to navigate, not just a random list of tools.

Questions (answer any subset, whatever you feel like):

In the first ~10 seconds, is it obvious what the site is for and who it’s for?

Does the homepage/categories feel too much / overwhelming? what would you simplify first?

How would you expect to find a tool on a site like this (search, tags, categories…)? what’s missing?

Trust/privacy wise: what would you need to see to feel comfortable using it (especially for paste/upload type tools)?

Anything that feels useless or duplicate that I should just remove/merge?

If you’d bookmark it: what 1–2 things would need to stand out?

Thanks in advance — genuinely appreciate any honest feedback.
by Anonyneko | 2026-01-07 12:58:32+00:00
The wiki format has indeed become ubiquitous for fan sites, but many fan wikis are fairly elaborate and ad-free (-ish, at least). Often the case for popular gacha games at least, e.g. https://bluearchive.wiki/.

The problem is that Fand*m makes finding results from the decent wikis unreasonably hard, I end up having to use extensions like https://getindie.wiki/.

Also, Discord all but killed the concept of a video game fan site...
by edg5000 | 2026-01-07 12:58:57+00:00
Opus can produce beatiful code. It can outcode a good programmer. But getting it to do this reliably is something I've gotten better at over the last year; it's a skill that took quite a bit of practice.

I now write very long specifications and this helps. I haven't figured out a bulletproof workflow, I think that will take years. But I often get just amazing code out of it.
by reify | 2026-01-07 13:00:06+00:00
I would have been called a conspiracy theorist 30 years ago when I challenged the, then, claim that there was no basis for the big pharma claim that chemical imbalance was the cause of a range of mental disorders or that SSRI's caused sexual disfunction from the late 1980's.

Its taken more than 30 years, but now we have confirmation that SSRI's do in fact cause sexual dysfunction, as per the DSM-5 PSSD (Post-SSRI sexual dysfunction) and there is no such thing as chemical imbalance and there never was, this was a made up story by big pharma to sell prozac in the late 1980's and sold to the general public as a new wonder drug by the mass media.

Of course big pharma always tell the truth when vast sums of money are involved.

but a small insignificant psychotherapist, like me, who has different views, because of professional experiences, are, and were, called a conspiracy theorist.

conspiracy theorists are sometimes right in what they say.
by defrost | 2026-01-07 13:00:12+00:00
Not a counterpoint to the comment re: catalogs .. even less so in this modern age of ordering and shopping online.

I grew up 1,000 km+ from any significant stores and shopping - everything we wanted we got via browsing catalogs, building order lists, and either ordering in via road train or taking a few days off to travel > 2,000 km with car and double axle multi tonne capacity trailer.
by DannyBee | 2026-01-07 13:00:47+00:00
This is kinda right, kinda wrong. I was a workaholic - I was a VP of engineering at Google.

You don't have to find purpose when you retire

At all.

Instead, you just have to be willing to face each day when the day has no expectations. You can do anything you want, and decide you love it, hate it, whatever. You can do it again the next day, or not. you can hate it one day and love it the next. It's completely up to you.

For some people, this lack of structure is crushing. For others, it's liberating.

It's similar to having spent significant time alone as an adult - some people can't deal with it, some can.

I meet a lot of people who are like "I haven't figured out what i will do when i retire". These are the people i worry about, because there isn't anything to figure out. They want a structure that probably won't exist.

In the past 3 weeks i've done the following:

Building powered paper airplanes with the kids

Mentoring high school and college students

Advising startups.

Woodworking

Hacking on CNC machines

Hacking on minecraft mods.

Hacking on compilers.

and a lot more.

The next 3 weeks may be the same or different, depending on lots of things (mood, energy, schedules).

In the end - i feel it's similar to divorce - lots of people don't get divorced because they don't want to deal with being alone.

Retirement often forces you to spend a lot of time with yourself (even if you have an SO and even if they are retired). Lots of people don't like that, at all, for various reasons.
Ask HN: Thoughts on a causality-first programming language in Rust?
by k_aakash | 2026-01-07 13:00:52+00:00
Hi HN,

I recently built a small experimental programming language in Rust called SkyHetu.

The core idea is to make causality explicit: state changes are tracked, mutation history is queryable, and debugging is done by asking “why” something happened, not just what failed.

Internally it has a bytecode VM, a compiler, and a mark-and-sweep GC. It’s not production-ready and is mainly a learning and research project around language design and runtime systems.

I’d appreciate feedback on the idea, execution model, or anything that feels flawed or unnecessary.

Repo: https://github.com/Kargatharaakash/skyhetu
Design notes: https://karagatharaaakash.medium.com/skyhetu-designing-a-causality-first-programming-language-in-rust-6618bd009b2b
by yourapostasy | 2026-01-07 13:02:13+00:00
> They have food and housing, but their life is devoid of meaning.

I find it difficult to relate to such worlds. I make up all kinds of explanations like, "well, it must be because while they have food and housing, they don't have any funds to entertain themselves". Or, "well, it must be because they simply haven't had sufficient education to reach an activation level where the higher tiers of Maslow's come into their line of sight".

And then I read about plenty of counter-examples, like wealthy offspring living the textbook aimless/dissolute/pick-your-adjective life, or the ennui of able-bodied welfare recipients with quite reasonable spending cash from generous Scandinavian welfare regimes when one considers the mind boggling amount of free media, free libraries, free parks, free entertainment in general in the developed world. Perhaps this is just part of their human condition for people suffering from this malaise.

And here I sit, drowning in ideas of what I would be interested to pursue to know our beautiful universe if only I had the time. So much so I write them down into a file just to quiet the cacophony in my head like a dog seeing squirrels everywhere he looks, just so I can get real work done on a timely basis, haha.

When once asked whether I'd ever be bored with eternal youth and boundless resources, I immediately replied an eternity is still too little time to satisfy my curiosity.
by Beretta_Vexee | 2026-01-07 13:02:29+00:00
They will play the same game as Russia. They will not annex the whole of Greenland and will try to keep the intensity below that which would justify a full-scale armed conflict.

They will claim to annex only the territory of the American bases, then it will be a 10-mile strip around the bases, access to the sea, airspace, the exclusive economic zone, etc.

They can play this game for months and years if we let them.
Crimea came under Russian control because it was home to Russia's largest naval base, Simferopol.
by cdrini | 2026-01-07 13:02:53+00:00
Programming on a phone is a tough sell for many since typing is slower and you have less screen real estate to view/debug the code. Using an AI agent and typing only prompts makes it more compelling. You input less, and only occasionally have to edit code instead of writing everything from 0. And even with editing, typing a prompt like "separate the X logic from class Y into a new file/class" is much faster on mobile than the equivalent actions.
by LeoWattenberg | 2026-01-07 13:03:22+00:00
Whatever the reason may be, the fact that pilots regularly engage in rather complicated and obstruse workarounds shows that cockpit design shouldn't be taken as the holy grail of UX.

Incidentally, I also wonder if the many checklists pilots need to go through before the plane does anything are strictly necessary. It seems like automating these steps and removing associated buttons may be beneficial to reduce cognitive load and prevent operator error (such as happened with the Air India crash last year).
by ImPostingOnHN | 2026-01-07 13:04:06+00:00
I guess it would be like that, if the bar owner was a seig-heiling nazi [0] who always brings his nazi friends [1][2], and spends most of his time in the bar actively trying to start fights between other patrons, to the point that people who used to go just for fun have left for other bars [3].

Also the bar makes and distributes child pornography [4][5][6].

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VfYjPzj1Xw

1: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-67446797

2: https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/29/23981928/elon-musk-ad-bo...

3: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Nazi_bar

4: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/05/india-eu-investigate-musks-x...

5: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/01/06/x-grok-...

6: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/grok-says-safeguard...
by conartist6 | 2026-01-07 13:04:31+00:00
Yes! This is also why I think it's stupid that languages are now trying to kill their most popular libraries as a matter of principle.

E.g. node says "oh no, you need a library to write tests!" and now that means that you have to have a testing framework built into your runtime. And of course it's just another library, really, that competes with the original one, but this one is blessed with standards so it has a monopolistic advantage that will deter further innovation.
by latexr | 2026-01-07 13:04:49+00:00
> the aside was preemptive, not defensive.

I understood that. I still maintain it seems misdirected, since this is not the type of post HN typically criticises for being an ad, for the reasons I mentioned above and you yourself pointed out:

> we listed multiple ways to run it because the goal was preservation and play, not funneling anyone anywhere.

Exactly. It is clear what the goal was, which is why I think you wouldn’t get the criticism (or, I believe, such criticism would’ve been downvoted in this instance).

> the formatting and lowercase are deliberate (…) it is not accidental.

Again, I understand that. I don’t think you’d have done that and published it by mistake.

> it's not meant to be modern content-optimized blog that hade ads or advertisers

This I don’t get. Using proper letter cases isn’t being “modern content-optimized [for] ads”, it’s simply good writing and respecting readers. Letter cases serve a function, they help with readability, comprehension, disambiguation… As the joke goes: “capitalisation is the difference between helping your Uncle Jack off a horse, and helping your uncle jack off a horse”.

And when I mention formatting I’m also referencing the seemingly random line breaks, the tiny headers, the lack of spacing between headers and text, the inconsistent spacing between paragraphs and lists… Everything is all over the place, inconsistent, hard to read and follow. A basic HTML page with no CSS has better formatting by default. Of course, you’re free to have it however you like, I don’t dispute that at all, but you’ll also lose serious readers because of it and that’s a shame.
by sanderjd | 2026-01-07 13:05:39+00:00
Yeah maybe, but personally it feels more like a plateau to me than an exponential takeoff, at the moment.

And this isn't a pessimistic take! I love this period of time where the models themselves are unbelievably useful, and people are also focusing on the user experience of using those amazing models to do useful things. It's an exciting time!

But I'm still pretty skeptical of "these things are about to not require human operators in the loop at all!".
by troupo | 2026-01-07 13:05:53+00:00
> Paying musicians cheap wages

Spotify doesn't pay artists at all. You know why? Because they pay the rights holders. Literally no one with their performative outrage against Spotify ever ask where are the billions of dollars that Warner Music, Sony, Universal collect.

"Oh, Spotify is so bad it doesn't pay artists". Spotify pays 70% of its revenue (that is, money before all the taxes, expenses etc.) to rights holders. What more do you expect them to pay?

The article at Harpers that you quote frequently makes rounds. And even though the article itself literally writes how Spotify is completely beholden to rights holders and pays them 70% of its revenue... it still goes on to blame Spotify and only Spotify for everything.

> to make boring music (ghost artists) for playlists they promote

1. IIRC Spotify doesn't produce any music of their own

2. The article confuses Spotify and companies that are literally in the business of providing that music (and besides the scammy ones there are legitimate ones that have been in this business forever).

And, again, Spotify doesn't deal with artists directly.

Can't say anything about PFC or Strategic Programming (even though I worked at Spotify. Even if I knew anything, I probably couldn't say anything anyway).

As for the bullshit about "keeping intiatives under wraps". Lol. At any given time Spotify is involved in about a hundred different "initiatives". It doesn't have to advertise all of them. Especially not things like (pure speculation:) "there's probably a 5% increase in listening to stock music, can we get preferential contracts with companies that already provide 70-80% of stock music".

And to top it off. Read the quote from one of the musicians you so deride: "The money was better than any money I could make from even the successful indie labels".

Performative outrage is performative.

> Not paying musicians anything at all if they don't have enough streams

1000 streams per year comes out to $3-$5 per year, perhaps less. That's the cutoff. I'm ambivalent about this decision, but again stop with the performative outrage.

> Not preventing the deluge of AI-generated music flooding the platform

Here's an AI-generated artist. Please tell me how you're going to detect that it's AI-generated and remove it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3Uyfnp-jag Or, indeed, why it's worse than the brain rot that Taylor Swift (to give an example) outputs by the ton.

So Spotify does what any sensible company does since they have no choice: let generative music in (btw, generative music has been a thing since computers were invented), and attempt to curb the flood of slop (for some definition of slop).

Just as with any other performative outrage no one discusses what exactly Spotify (or other platforms) can do to stop this.