MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by esseph | 2026-01-31 17:05:07+00:00
> There's the conspiracy theory about mentioning a product near a the phone and then getting ads for it (which I don't believe)

Well you sure as hell should. Both Google and Apple are making class action settlement payments right now for this very thing.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g38jv8zzwo

https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/payments-begin-in-95m-...

https://www.404media.co/heres-the-pitch-deck-for-active-list...
by wffurr | 2026-01-31 17:05:10+00:00
>> Remove ALL people, the scene should feel empty and abandoned

That really captures the vibe in Kendall square on the weekend, but for maximum "honest truth" there should be double-parking, delivery trucks and ubers stuck in traffic waiting on a thousand people to scurry across the street from the subway entrance, huddling against the cold. Some dirty snowbanks and grey slush puddles in the crosswalks would really nail it.
by benSaiyen | 2026-01-31 17:05:46+00:00
And millions more working against your theoretical "silent majority". It will take billions. Ratios are not there.

Not saying I don't care. Am saying it will take actual change in agency of billions to make me believe the rhetoric.

Thoughts and prayers are not cutting it is what I am saying.

You go ahead, sit online repeating the same empty rhetoric and assure me your "thoughts and prayers" being cranked to 11 is meaningful effort.
by crazygringo | 2026-01-31 17:06:57+00:00
They literally are customers. They pay money in exchange for an education and a degree.

You start failing too many students, it becomes a risky place to enroll, enrollment drops, they can't cover their expenses, and they close.

Edit: I'm not defending this, just explaining it. It's inevitable under a private education system, unless you literally legislate and enforce grading on a curve within all private institutions, which doesn't seem to be a popular idea among voters in free democracies either.
by dijit | 2026-01-31 17:07:17+00:00
Scaleway has all of that except EFS which should be solved another way anyway realistically, and the CDN.

Object Storage as a replacement for EFS, or CIFS if its a legacy server app, or if you hate yourself: NFS.

Theres options here, but thats the only real snag.

For the CDN, I’d go with Bunny, its not in the same suite but its actually better than AWS CDN anyway.
by bonsai_spool | 2026-01-31 17:07:27+00:00
This may be one of the good cases, then. I'm not an expert in cancer but I am a biologist and physician. The head and neck cancer (here) and various pediatric indications get the most attention but it has felt that proton therapy has been seeking an indication for almost 40 years now.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

The study was designed to show non-inferiority, which doesn't preclude their ability to show an improvement. It would be helpful to see other studies before determining that proton therapy is better (or even non-inferior) to radiation therapy. It's certainly much more expensive, which shows up in the study as many subjects being denied insurance coverage.

Edit: This is now in the weeds, but the per-protocol participants didn't fare better than the intention-to-treat participants, which one might expect since insurance approval lead to dozens of subjects changing treatment arms.
by topspin | 2026-01-31 17:07:43+00:00
> Why is such an ancient plane still being used?

Because it was designed to operate in the same atmosphere as we had in the 1950's, it's highly customized with unique instruments and communication gear specialized for NASA and its systems, and they have a big shop filled with tools and spare parts to adapt it to whatever conceivable thing that comes up. They could drop a few hundred million and replace it, but there isn't a real need.

> Are they machining their own engine parts?

The WB-57 engines are basically downrated versions of the Pratt & Whitney JT3D/TF33, not the original Avons. They are still in service today in military applications, so servicing them isn't some extraordinary concept. Plus, they don't see many flight hours, as the aircraft spends most of its time in a shop getting reworked for future missions, so overhauls aren't that frequent.

> I would imagine it's incredibly expensive to maintain.

All such aircraft are incredibly expensive. However, the Canberra is as old fashioned rivet and sheet metal design, and modifying it is relatively straightforward compared to most of what is manufactured today. It was designed as a bomber and has a large fuel and payload capacity, and a handy bomb-bay with large doors, filled with racks of mission specific gear.

I suspect this can be repaired and returned to service. That's not uncommon for controlled belly landings. It did not appear to incur excessive damage in that landing, and there are mothballed Canberra in various boneyards around the world to provide replacement parts.
by Tarsul | 2026-01-31 17:07:45+00:00
I once read a study during the height of covid about this[1], which is why I loaded up on Metform. Was lucky enough not to get covid in the meanwhile (or didn't notice), but better safe than sorry.[2]

[1]2022: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2201662
[2]2024: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/common-diabetes-drug-low...
by pu_pe | 2026-01-31 17:07:50+00:00
Sorry but I think it is indeed much easier to have a cloud provider take care of those things. That's partly how we came to the situation we are in: a lot of people outsourced this type of work to Microsoft or AWS, because it was easier.

I get what you are saying, that responsibility is still yours for making the correct choices, and to know what the cloud providers are doing. In the real world though hardly anybody cares, even though we have threats like the CLOUD act in place. So, yeah, people should care but ultimately they often don't.
by mym1990 | 2026-01-31 17:07:53+00:00
About as useful as telling a heroine addict to get off heroine, except that screen addiction is much more subtle in the harmful effects, but is incredibly corrosive over time. Almost all tech products in the world are pushing for more and more screentime, there is really not much regulation in sight, in the US at least(go Australia!). The best hope is that one day an Ozempic for screen time comes out!
by codyb | 2026-01-31 17:08:16+00:00
The thing is, if they were uploading your messages, then they'd want to do something with the data.

And humans aren't great at keeping secrets.

So, if the claim is that there's a bunch of data, but everyone who is using it to great gain is completely and totally mum about it, and no one else has ever thought to question where certain inferences were coming from, and no employee ever questioned any API calls or database usage or traffic graph.

Well, that's just about the best damn kept secret in town and I hope my messages are as safe!

And I'm no fan of Meta...
by throwaway09809 | 2026-01-31 17:08:21+00:00
I wish avif images had more reasonable computational requirements. I find the format inferior to jpeg-xl but the difference isn’t that huge - both are good enough imo. Sadly a folder full of avif files will make pretty much any consumer cpu in existence chug like mad, it’s completely unusable for actually using those images as an average end user does unless you happen to have something silly like 64 core epyc.
jxl is already slower than I’d like, but it’s good enough on a modern machine. avif… isn’t.
by ks2048 | 2026-01-31 17:08:27+00:00
If you just do very crude pattern matching on the first chart he shows - it is warped by the (intentional?) way he drew orange overlay lines.

The slope in 2024 and 2025 (the data that we already have) is much lower than the orange line drawn.

Following the real visual trend, the next peak would be maybe another 5-10 years in the future. (Not that this is a good way to predict the future, as also stated in the article, "not very scientific").
by tonymet | 2026-01-31 17:08:29+00:00
I wish they would just go back to calling it Python, since it’s the Python that everyone knows and uses. No one gets confused over Python the spec and Python the implementation. Every time I see “CPython” i have to double check we’re just talking about Python.

I guess they “CPython’ed” back when people thought Jython would take off , and it never did because Java sucks.
by BobaFloutist | 2026-01-31 17:08:35+00:00
>Yep, I've used the € sign for a reason, to make sure people won't get confused.

>The article goes into considerable detail about the EU tech industry. My comment relates to that context.

You know what, that's entirely fair. And I'll also note that American companies can claim depreciation to offset corporate income taxes, so there's some parity there, it's just s different mechanism.
by treelover | 2026-01-31 17:08:43+00:00
Is it a loss of attention span, or is the 2-hour feature film simply an outdated format for the current generation?

The information density of a slow 1970s drama is incredibly low compared to the multi-stream environment they grew up in. They aren't necessarily 'dumber'; their brains are just optimized for high-frequency information processing, whereas cinema is optimized for immersion.
by Kerrick | 2026-01-31 17:08:44+00:00
> Absolutely agree with this, the ratio of talk to output is insane, especially when the talk is all about how much better output is.

Those of us building are having so much fun we aren't slowing down to write think pieces.

I don't mean this flippantly. I'm a blogger. I love writing! But since a brief post on December 22 I haven't blogged because I have been too busy implementing incredible amounts of software with AI.

Since you'll want receipts, here they are:

- https://git.sr.ht/~kerrick/ratatui_ruby/tree/trunk/item/READ...

- https://git.sr.ht/~kerrick/rooibos/tree/trunk/item/README.rd...

- https://git.sr.ht/~kerrick/tokra/tree

Between Christmas and New Year's Day I was on vacation, so I had plenty of time. Since then, it's only been nights & weekends (and some early mornings and lunch breaks).
by quuxplusone | 2026-01-31 17:10:29+00:00
Our points of view are probably not too far off, really. Remember this whole thought-experiment is counterfactual: we're imagining what "automatic extraction of function declarations from a .c file" would have looked like in the K&R era, in response to claims (from 50 years later) that "No sane programming language should require a duplication in order to export something" and "The .h could have been a compiler output." So we're both having to imagine the motivations and design requirements of a hypothetical programmer from the 1970s or 1980s.

I agree that the tool I sketched wouldn't let your .h file contain macros, nor C99 inline functions, nor is it clear how it would distinguish between structs whose definition must be "exported" (like sockaddr_t) and structs where a declaration suffices (like FILE). But:

- Does our hypothetical programmer care about those limitations? Maybe he doesn't write libraries that depend on exporting macros. He (counterfactually) wants this tool; maybe that indicates that his preferences and priorities are different from his contemporaries'.

- C++20 Modules also do not let you export macros. The "toy" tool we can build with 1970s technology happens to be the same in this respect as the C++20 tool we're emulating! A modern programmer might indeed say "That's not a useful software engineering tool, because macros" — but I presume they'd say the exact same thing about C++20 Modules. (And I wouldn't even disagree! I'm just saying that that particular objection does not distinguish this hypothetical 1970s .h-file-generator from the modern C++20 Modules facility.)

[EDIT: Or to put it better, maybe: Someone-not-you might say, "I love Modules! Why couldn't we have had it in the 1970s, by auto-generating .h files?" And my answer is, we could have. (Yes it couldn't have handled macros, but then neither can C++20 Modules.) So why didn't we get it in the 1970s? Not because it would have been physically difficult at all, but rather — I speculate — because for cultural reasons it wasn't wanted.]
by constantcrying | 2026-01-31 17:10:44+00:00
Many European companies are already struggling financially, especially the large traditional businesses which form the backbone of the European economy at large.

Now you demand that these companies should rip out decades of the IT systems they have built up, which form the backbone of their day to day operations and replace them with third rate alternatives, nowhere near in capability, support and coverage?

Yes, I love open source and I wish to see it succeed, but this proposal is suicidal. Even if a superior and less costly alternative did exist (and it does not, just to be clear), just the effort of switching over would ruin these companies.
by YZF | 2026-01-31 17:10:52+00:00
You're confusing rules with treaties, agreements, and balance of power.

Yes- When there is one super power in the world and it says if you don't behave a certain way we're gonna bomb the heck out of you, or boycott you, you get a certain behavior. Even then you might get some actors (like North Korea, or Iran, Yemen, Russia, China and more) that have no problem openly defying and challenging the super power to some extent.

When the balance shifts and you have other blocks with more power that feel comfortable in defying that super power (like China or Russia today) then you see that changing.

There are no "absolute" rules. There are power dynamics, countries, interests, politics. Rules can exist only within a structure that can enforce them, like a country.
by ben_w | 2026-01-31 17:11:13+00:00
I get what you mean.

I guess it comes down to "does the government that is spying on me, want me to succeed in general or fail in general?"

As a British citizen living in Berlin, running US software on Chinese hardware (iPhone? Made in China; Kindle? Made in China; MacBook Pro? Made in China; random torches? Made in China; PV? Made in China), it's kinda hard for me to guess who is doing what spying and what they care about with that spying.
by businessmate | 2026-01-31 17:13:13+00:00
This technical note describes AIVO Evidentia, an operational evidence-layer system developed to address this evidentiary gap. Evidentia records how external AI systems describe an enterprise at defined points in time and preserves those representations as immutable records suitable for later legal, audit, and governance review. The system does not attempt to control AI behavior, assert legal duties, or imply regulatory obligation.
by dangus | 2026-01-31 17:13:22+00:00
I do sometimes think about slow burn movies and how they are hard to find outside of Oscar bait type of pictures.

Just looking at kids movies, something like My Neighbor Totoro has many scenes involving ambient sound with no dialog or background music, and it’s a major contrast compared to today’s 3D dopamine festivals.

On the other hand, that might just be survivorship bias. I’m cherry picking the best kids movie of its decade and comparing it to Boss Baby 2.

Finally, I’d also say my default read of articles like this are that they’re probably idle “the kids these days are bad” concern bait.

A professor complaining that his students won’t do their homework is not new and it’s not news. It is a statistical certainty.

Avatar 3 is making a billion dollars on people willing to sit through a 2.5 hour movie.
by bayjorix | 2026-01-31 17:13:30+00:00
I recently set up Immich as a backup to Apple Photos, but the mobile app had trouble with my library (120,000 images and 4,000 videos, about 1.6 TB).

I've stumbled on Immibridge which solved my exact problem perfectly, and uploaded the images overnight

https://github.com/emerysilb/immibridge
by crazygringo | 2026-01-31 17:13:44+00:00
Counterpoint from the article:

> A handful of professors told me they hadn’t noticed any change. Some students have always found old movies to be slow, Lynn Spigel, a professor of screen cultures at Northwestern University, told me. “But the ones who are really dedicated to learning film always were into it, and they still are.”

The article doesn't actually give any evidence attention spans are shortened. Many of the movies you study in film school are genuinely excruciatingly slow and boring, unless you're hyper-motivated. Before mobile phones, you didn't have any choice but to sit through it. Now you have a choice. I suspect that film students 30 years ago, despite having a "full attention span", would also have been entertaining themselves on phones if they'd had them.

I love movies. But I also make liberal use of 2x speed and +5s during interminably long suspense sequences that are literally just someone walking through a dark environment while spooky music plays. It's not that I suffer from a short attention span, it's that there's nothing to pay attention to. There's no virtue in suffering through boredom.
by usrusr | 2026-01-31 17:13:53+00:00
Some of my favorite examples of graceful aging in architecture are concrete - but those are never the ones that celebrate efficiency, they always have some playful element that will still be playful when the newness has faded. Ribbed concrete (if you don't know what that means: worth googling!) alternating with smooth surface for example. But sure, once the structure reaches a certain size threshold, you better play the "glass & steel" card a lot, it has been dominant for almost a century for a reason. But even that can be overdone and concrete exposing aging can be a nice contrast.
by semilin | 2026-01-31 17:14:03+00:00
If you really care about something, screen addiction does not interfere. A friend of mine has a terrible Instagram addiction, yet has developed for himself a certain degree of cinephilia lately -- we've watched long movies together in theaters and not once has he been on his phone during the screenings. When one has faith that sustained attention might hold more value than that gained by interruption, they tend to prioritize the former.

But the article points out that the students here don't even watch movies themselves -- "students have struggled to name any film" they recently watched. Why are these people even studying film? The inattention is clearly caused by disinterest.

The phenomenon observed here must be caused by a combination of the general loss of discipline (which is the fallback attentive mechanism when interest is absent) and students' disinterest in the field they chose to study. The former has been well known; the latter is worth considering more.
by cmenge | 2026-01-31 17:14:22+00:00
1. Europe doesn't have comparable offerings. The amount of money invested is below what a single hyperscaler spends per quarter. (StackIT might be on track to change that looking at the pure numbers)

2. European politicians still seem to believe it's about renting compute and storage; they seem to have little understanding of what "a cloud offering" really is; the EU has less than 5% of GPUs, supposedly

3. For healthcare, they already forced you years ago. This led to hosting on Telekom Cloud which runs on OpenStack by Huawei. (EU commision wants to ban Huawei from 5G but it's ok to use their software? 'Is open source and can be inspected' seems largely theoretical given the reality of cybersecurity)

4. If push comes to shove, the EU is critically dependent on the US in so many aspects (defense, lng to name two very important ones) that eventually, they would falter if the US wants your data in a specific case anyway

5. As a private citizen, given the incarcerations in the UK and Germany, it seems one should worry more about the EU getting your data than the other way around

That said, would be nice to have healthy competition, but after hearing this for 10++ years, it's getting really old. It might have been a good idea not to sleep on the AI trend, but, well...
by lukev | 2026-01-31 17:15:03+00:00
> I imagine there are multiple branches of philosophy, linguistics and cognitive sciences that studied this perspective in detail, but unfortunately I don't know what they are.

You're looking at Structuralism. First articulated by Ferdinand de Saussure in his Course in General Linguistics published in 1916.

This became the foundation for most of subsequent french philosophy, psychology and literary theory, particularly the post-structuralists and postmodernists. Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, Barthes, Deleuze, Baudrillard, etc.

These ideas have permeated popular culture deeply enough that (I suspect) your deep thinking was subconsciously informed by them.

I agree very much with your "Chomsky was wrong" hypothesis and strongly recommend the book "Language Machines" by Leif Weatherby, which is on precisely that topic.
by codethief | 2026-01-31 17:15:04+00:00
Matthew Green's take from 3 days ago:

> There’s a lawsuit against WhatsApp making the rounds today, claiming that Meta has access to plaintext. I see nothing in there that’s compelling; the whole thing sounds like a fishing expedition.

https://bsky.app/profile/matthewdgreen.bsky.social/post/3mdg...
by g947o | 2026-01-31 17:15:49+00:00
As someone who has many times dived into deep rabbit holes like this (e.g. how does JavaScript's prototype-based class work?), some effective ways to handle this is to ask follow up questions, use web search or ask for references. Deep search also helps. Often it corrects itself or takes back claims that have no basis. At the very least, it provides references that you can read yourself.

Of course, you can't really do all of that on a free plan.

That's far from ideal, but if you are motivated and care about these technical details (which you probably do), you can get pretty good results.

=====

Putting all of this aside, you can sometimes find YouTube videos on obscure channels that talk about these things. Chances are that someone who cares to make a YouTube video about these hardcore topics know what they are talking.
Show HN: Quorum-free replicated state machine built atop S3
by mzazaipsc | 2026-01-31 17:15:50+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m sharing the alpha release of S2C, a state machine replication system built atop S3.

The goal is to enable a distributed application to maintain consistent state without needing a quorum of nodes for availability or consistency.

The idea came from a side project that was using S3 and where I needed strongly consistent distributed state but wanted to avoid adding a separate consensus dependency. I initially tried to use S3 directly for coordination, but it became messy. Eventually, I realized I need a replicated state machine with a deterministic log, and then it ended up as a standalone project.

To mitigate S3's latency and API costs, it uses time- and size-based batching by default.

S2C supports:
- Linearizable reads and writes (with single node)
- Exactly-once command semantics (for nodes with stable identities)
- Dynamic node joins and cold-start recovery from zero nodes
- Split-brain safety without clocks or leases
- Snapshotting, log truncation, etc.

Of course, it trades latency and S3 operation costs for operational simplicity - not meant to replace high-throughput Raft rings. And clearly, only usable in architectures that already use S3 (or compatible with similar guarantees).

It has passed chaos/fault-injection tests so far (crashes, partitions, leader kills); formal verification planned.

It’s still alpha, but I’d love for people to try it, experiment, and provide feedback.

If you’re curious, the code, and an extensive deep dive guide are here: [https://github.com/io-s2c/s2c]