MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by EGreg | 2026-01-05 23:06:40+00:00
This is a thought experiment, not a proposal.

I rewrote a social/dating site's Terms of Service to explicitly state incentives and power asymmetries that already exist but are usually euphemized or hidden. The format pairs "what platforms say" with "what actually happens in practice."

Curious where this is inaccurate, incomplete, or would fail in real systems, especially from a governance, incentives, or product-design perspective rather than a moral one.
by Terr_ | 2026-01-05 23:06:41+00:00
Not present with a Pixel with Android 16, my effective choices are:

1. App can't use mobile data in background

2. App can use mobile data in background except in Data Saver mode

3. App can use mobile data in background regardless of Data Saver mode

____

For anyone doing comparisons, the literal settings appear under "Mobile Data Usage" as:

* [X] Background Data ("Enable usage of mobile data in the background")

* [ ] Unrestricted mobile data usage ("Allow unrestricted mobile data access when Data Saver is on")
by theLiminator | 2026-01-05 23:06:43+00:00
It'd be a very interesting thought experiment to completely redefine the economic and fiscal plan of the US.

It'd be interesting if we greatly reduced personal income taxes in the majority of cases. Removed corporate income tax (the idea being corporate income tax hurts all equity owners, whereas we specifically want to target the very wealthy), and then implemented a progressive wealth tax that kicks in starting at 7.5M or something (maybe something like 1.5% from 7.5M-15M, 2.0% from 15M-50M, and then 3% from 50M+, this could be done more smoothly if desired). We'd need to penalize capital flight with something (something like a 40% exit tax or something). The IRS would have to be greatly empowered to support this, net worth declarations would all be declared by the tax filer, and if audited and found to be incorrect, the IRS will purchase the asset at 70% of its declared value (or some other better mechanism can be thought of to ensure that NW is declared accurately). We'd also simplify the tax code in all other cases, removing all forms of credit/deductions/etc on income. This will free up IRS audit resources to focus on declared net worth fraud. Remove all forms of non-sin tariffs entirely.

Get rid of entitlements taxes and spend and replace it with a negative income tax that is calculated to provide a very base level of existence that never disincentives work.

Then remove government backed student loans, but make them treated the same as other loans (ie. students can declare bankruptcy). Kids should also get a 5k per annum payment that's held in trust by the government that's invested into the US total market that gets linearly released to them from the age of 18-30.

I also propose that we remove all consumption taxes that aren't a sin tax. Ie. keep taxes on alcohol, gas, etc. Implement a very high luxury goods tax.

Then completely change the medical system to be more similar to Singapore with mandatory copays of something like $20-50 (to prevent abuse), but also provide universal coverage with the government setting prices with pharma/providers.

Dissolve the ability of states to collect taxes and provide federal funding per head. Standardize/centralize all stuff like the DMV. Ie. have a single federal agency to de-duplicate work.

I don't think this stuff is viable at all (would require dramatic tweaks), but it'd be a very interesting thought experiment to see how something that tries to encourage business friendliness, the strength of the income earning population, and incentives capital effiency (over tax effiency) and investment does.

I really think that the fundamental market forces of capitalism are very powerful, we just need to change the incentives structure so that the benefits aren't captured strictly by the ultra wealthy.
by Veserv | 2026-01-05 23:07:36+00:00
What a impressively arrogant double-down.

You once again present no technical argument for your extraordinary claims and position, let alone the extraordinary evidence required. You present no technical analysis of known problems or limitations with historical or conceptual designs. You present no solutions, workarounds, or even argue those problems are no longer relevant.

You fail to even fallaciously argue that past success indicates future success. You jump straight to past failure indicates future success.

You just assert, without evidence, that old, flawed, failed, outcompeted technology is the future and anybody who uses facts and evidence to disagree is a arrogant, ignorant inferior to your staggering intellect. Bravo.

Word to the wise, if you let off on the self-aggrandizing arrogance and had a little epistemological humility when proposing we should revisit old ideas instead of implying people who disagree are troglodytes then you would not come across as clueless.
by treetalker | 2026-01-05 23:07:46+00:00
The author, Roy Altman, is a US District Judge in the Southern District of Florida. He was appointed by Trump.

As the Trump administration, in its recent announcements regarding the Venezuela invasion, floated the idea that Maduro might be indicted in S.D. Fla., consider the propriety of this op-ed.

Even if one were to be convinced that Maduro's removal were positive for Venezuela, it's an issue apart from whether the US has the right to decide that he held power unlawfully; whether the US can and should remove and/or criminally prosecute the acting/apparent head of state of a sovereign nation; and whether the President may constitutionally do so (e.g., without Congress first declaring war).

In my view, a district judge's celebration of such action implies the condoning of it, and imprudently so.
by monocasa | 2026-01-05 23:08:19+00:00
You don't think that Ukraine, the country that designed and built those ICBMs, and had one of the highest per capita counts of nuclear physicists could handle at least a few decades of upkeep on those nukes?

And the point of nukes isn't to launch them. By then you've already lost, you're just making good on your offer to make the other shmuck lose too.
Show HN: Debut – A $25 Screen Studio alternative for macOS
by ben_hrris | 2026-01-05 23:08:42+00:00
Hey, I built Debut because I wanted Screen Studio's polish without the price tag.
It does smooth cursor animations, automatic zoom effects, and clean exports: basically the stuff that makes screen recordings look professional without hours in a video editor.
$25 lifetime for personal use, works on 2 devices.
Would love feedback, especially from anyone who's tried Screen Studio or other recording tools and found them lacking.
by miduil | 2026-01-05 23:08:49+00:00
As a close follower of Boston Dynamics since my high-school years, I feel like in hindsight that was a good call, they've managed to progress everything else seemingly very well - which now gives them a head-start for an industry that surpasses any amount of money Boston Dynamics could ever get by many times. The data and capabilities around data would unlikely have brought similar scale of innovation, as other companies could now come up with.

Now instead, they're ahead of end2end integration of their section of robotics - especially with actual business customers that gave them a great head-start in figuring out how to integrate them as a product.
by gyomu | 2026-01-05 23:08:50+00:00
I have a vision pro (obtained on day 1 for development purposes), and have given demos of it to a number of non enthusiast/non techie people.

All of them immediately hate that it’s bulky, it’s heavy, it messes with your hair,
messes with your makeup, doesn’t play well with your glasses, it feels hot and sweaty. Everyone wants to take it off after 5-10 minutes at most, and never asks to try it again (even tho the more impressive 3D content does get a “that’s kinda cool” acknowledgment).

The headset form factor is just a complete dud, and it’s 100% clear that Apple knew that but pushed it anyway to show that they were doing “something”.
by pamcake | 2026-01-05 23:09:20+00:00
In EU, so far I believe only the PM of Spain had the backbone to speak properly with anything that could be considered "strongly worded", proving that it's possible.

The others have been variants of "Celebrating liberation of the Venezuelan people from the illegitimate dictator, a new dawn for democracy! (oh and everyone (not naming names) please behave and respect international law and human rights from now on)"

Not a single word about the dead, for one.

While the NYTimes headline names France as critical, here's Macron (still only posting) on Twitter: https://xcancel.com/EmmanuelMacron/status/200752538697719404...

Meanwhile POTUS is over there talking literally and openly about how US are "going to run things" and motivating it with taking the oil and how they don't really care about democracy one way or other.
by handoflixue | 2026-01-05 23:09:29+00:00
Fantasy is always consensual; the line is only crossed when people share these images. It's the difference between fantasizing about a co-worker and telling them about those fantasies.

The problem is, this service very publicly shares those images, and usually in a way that directly tags the actual person. So, very much across the line in to "harming actual people."

Since this regularly harms women, people round it off to "misogyny". Even if the motive is not "harm women", the end result is still "women were harmed".

(There also IS an exception if you know the person well enough to expect that they're cool with it - but the onus is still on you if you guess wrong and your actions end up causing harm.)
by Pfhortune | 2026-01-05 23:09:30+00:00
I'm making a subjective comparison here, true. But spend fifteen minutes with each company's watches and you'll see what I mean.

> Hard to say this is true when Garmin watches are far more successful than Pebble.

A company's success != UX efficacy. That's like saying Apple's products had terrible UX in 1997 because they were flailing up against their Microsoft counterparts of the same era, despite the fact that Apple's UX guidelines of the nineties are regularly raised here as a rubric for UX evaluation, even against Apple's own modern products!

> The better Garmin comparison is the Venu series which only have two buttons

I'm not sure you've ever used a Pebble, but Pebble OS is entirely button-driven with four buttons, whereas the Forerunner and Instinct have five. I've never used a Venu, but isn't it primarily touchscreen-driven?

(yes, the upcoming pebble watches do have touchscreens, but I believe that's just for use in apps and watchfaces, not navigating the system)
by benjiro | 2026-01-05 23:09:38+00:00
> So what's the scenario then? Venezuela has nukes. The US abducts Maduro. Venezuela launches its nukes, everyone dies on both sides.

US attacks, Maduro threatens to launch nuke(s) ... then what? Do you call bluff?

Maduro was capture in a militair base (as he did a Saddam, switching sleeping locations), he almost made it into a safe room. What if he had nukes and made it to the safe room. You know the expression "Cornered rat"... For all he knew, the US was there to kill him. The US killed his 30 Cuban bodyguards so high change Maduro thought its his end.

> "Cornered rat" refers to the idiom that even weak individuals become desperate and dangerous when given no escape, often applied to intense political or military pressure.

The scenario that you called, that nobody wants to die for Maduro, is you gambling that nobody want to die for him or not follow the chain of command! Do you want to risk it? No matter how many precaution you take, are you really sure that not one or more nukes go to Texas or Miami?

This is why Nukes are so powerful, even in the hands of weaker countries. It gives a weaker country a weapon that may inflict untold dead to the more powerful country (let alone the political impact). Its a weapon that influences decision making, even in the most powerful countries.
by mapontosevenths | 2026-01-05 23:09:38+00:00
Rhetoric in modernity is literally defined as persuasive speech. A nodern rhetorician does not give up when they are wrong, they think of clever new ways to persuade.

Plato and Aristotle argued they were different things in antiquity, but even then some/most of their peers disagreed.

OED literally defines it as "the art of effective or persuasive speaking or writing, especially the use of figures of speech and other compositional techniques."

Figures of speech and compositional techniques do NOT bring one closer to truth, they obscure it.

That said, I appreciate that when YOU use the term it's not what you mean. I would be careful with that though. Your definition is not what it means to anyone else now outside of academia.
by SpecialistK | 2026-01-05 23:09:49+00:00
No no no, some random American diplomat told a random Soviet diplomat during the East Germany negotiations that NATO wouldn't extend east at all.

No, it wasn't put on paper anywhere.

No, it wasn't mentioned (much) when the countries of eastern Europe all chomped at the bit to join NATO in the 90s.

No, it completely makes the Budapest Memorandum bunk.

No, the people of Ukraine absolutely do not have the agency to want to pivot towards the EU and become wealthy and stable like the former Warsaw Pact countries did. It must have been the CIA, so Budapest is bunk again!

(and other lies the war apologists tell themselves)
by teraflop | 2026-01-05 23:10:36+00:00
Don't get me wrong, it's fun to see performance optimizations like this.

But I'd expect that a naive implementation of the same strategy would already take like 0.1% of the time needed to actually generate embeddings for your chunks. So practically, is it really worth the effort of writing a bunch of non-trivial SIMD code to reduce that overhead from 0.1% to 0.001%?
by stmw | 2026-01-05 23:11:04+00:00
No dispute on the facts about Sun etc. "more than a year before" is not a lot of time in hardware launches, and that was a very dynamic time.
Regarding Sun, some good old HN discussion here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29082150

But the alternate computer history is interesting to imagine, could have been via x86 or PowerPC with IBM or something else. Same with Be.
by firstplacelast | 2026-01-05 23:11:06+00:00
It never made sense to blame AI in the first place for tech layoffs. You have a new tool that you think can supercharge your employees, make them ~10x productive, be leveraged to disrupt all sorts of industries, and have the workforce best suited to learn and use these tools to their full potential. You think the value of labor may soon collapse, but there are piles of money to be made before that happens.

If you truly believed that, you would be spinning up new projects and offshoots as this is a serious arms race with a ton of potential upside (not just in developing AI, but in leveraging it to build things cheaper). Allegedly every dollar you spent on an engineer is potentially worth 10x(?) what it was a couple years ago. Meaning your profit per engineer could soar, but tech companies decided they don't want more profit? AI is mostly solved and the value of labor has already collapsed? Or AI is a nice band-aid to prop up a smaller group of engineers while we weather the current economic/political environment and most CXO's don't believe there are piles of money to be had by leveraging AI now or the near future.
by drnick1 | 2026-01-05 23:11:11+00:00
I think that copyright should be abolished. But this does not mean you can't make money off software. For example, game studios could still charge for online play on their servers (an ongoing service), even if they can't legally prevent people from sharing copies of the game files, in this model. Similarly, theaters could still charge for movies, but what they would be selling is not a "right to see the movie" per se but the theater experience.

It may be hard to imagine, I don't think things would be massively different overall.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2026-01-05 23:11:11+00:00
>All those computers in the data center are just as much products as anything else.

Sure, and if they were cranked out of American factories, that'd be awesome. But since they're shipped across the Pacific on a boat, they're not really the kind of products that help.

>If you don't like the apps, by all means don't buy them.

If apps are all we get out of doubling power production, then I'll do one better and we'll just not double power production.
by BobaFloutist | 2026-01-05 23:11:12+00:00
I just wish whey was as easy to get unflavored. Let me handle the flavoring, you provide the protein.

Yes, I'm aware you can buy unflavored whey protein, but it's more expensive and you have to order it online. I can get a huge tub of "Delicious quadruple chocolate delight" BS from Costco for comparative pennies.
by aucisson_masque | 2026-01-05 23:11:27+00:00
> Soelberg struggled with mental health problems after a divorce led him to move back into Adams’ home in 2018. But allegedly Soelberg did not turn violent until ChatGPT became his sole confidant, validating a wide range of wild conspiracies, including a dangerous delusion that his mother was part of a network of conspirators spying on him, tracking him, and making attempts on his life.

This is horrible.

Now something that isn’t touched at all in this article is the impact of steroids on mental health. It already brings a lot of issue like libido loss, cardiovascular events, etc. But its impact on someone’s mental health can be insane depending on his predisposition and the drugs used.

Chatgpt might have been pouring gasoline on a fire, but steroids might have enabled it in the first place.

And between « enhanced trt » and actual steroids becoming more and more mainstream on social networks, I think we’re going to see a lot more of these lunatics.
by wpm | 2026-01-05 23:11:30+00:00
To all the people whining about the Snow, click the buttons at the top of the page, come on now.

To all the people also whining about the snow, as if it invalidates the opinions written in the article, again, PLEASE click the buttons at the top of the page.

The author is clearly going for a fun, whimsical, playful vibe that works perfectly fine on a personal blog. Expecting something different from a workstation operating system made by one of the Fortune 10, especially one who heavily markets their design "prowess", is perfectly reasonable.
by lilactown | 2026-01-05 23:11:54+00:00
Would buy this in a heartbeat (pun intended) if it came with a heart rate monitor.

I had the first Pebble Time Round and it's my favorite smart watch I've ever owned, but these days the things I want from a watch are to tell the time and collect biometrics. Taking a step back in biometrics feels like a bummer. I also totally buy that it would increase the foot print in a way that would feel way less slim.
by kulahan | 2026-01-05 23:12:12+00:00
Let’s be realistic.

Not easy to find one man in a haystack. Guerrilla warfare has always been insanely overpowered as a defense tactic anyways, as are terrorist attacks.

The US can realistically only be challenged militarily by Europe or Asia, assuming a unified continent, and the US is on the offensive. If it’s defensive, the US might put up a good fight against the rest of the planet.
by theLiminator | 2026-01-05 23:12:15+00:00
> Now the downside … because health care is free, everyone uses it and the wait times are longer. My grandfather recently required an MRI (non life threatening). The wait time in Ontario was 3 months. He drove to the USA, paid out of pocket, and had it done within in week …

Imo, singapore solves this well, by ensuring that some cost is borne by the patient at point of use, but it's never anything excessive. No one goes bankrupt from emergency hospital visits.
by stackghost | 2026-01-05 23:12:18+00:00
Yes that's the orthodox doctrine of nuclear deterrent. To be truly effective you need a triad of land-based ICBMs, nuclear-armed submarines, and aircraft-based delivery systems so that your second-strike capability remains intact through any decapitation attempts.

If you don't have the triad then you need to brandish your capability more ostentatiously, like France does with its deliberate refusal to commit to a no-first-strike policy. This is (one of the many reasons) why North Korea does so much sabre-rattling: they don't have a (publicly known) nuclear triad for deterrence.
by davemo | 2026-01-05 23:12:32+00:00
I was an avid user of Pipes and blogged a bit about the experience of using it to build an aggregated set of feeds from various employee blogs to feed into our company site back in 2009 [0]. It holds a special place in my memory alongside early internet greats like del.icio.us [1]

- [0] https://blog.davemo.com/posts/2009-04-06-yahoo-pipes-at-vend...

- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website)
by etempleton | 2026-01-05 23:12:36+00:00
I think Windows greatest strength is their greatest weakness, which is backwards compatibility. MacOS greatest weakness is their UX, which has slowly been going downhill for the past few years and on this release took a nose dive. It is a wild reversal from the mid 2000s when Apple's UX was so far superior to anything else that it felt revelatory to switch from Windows XP to OSX.
by SchemaLoad | 2026-01-05 23:12:41+00:00
Encrypted DNS has existed for quite a while now through DNS over HTTPS, the missing link was that to connect to a website, you first had to send the server the hostname in plaintext to get the right public key for the site. So someone listening on the wire could not see your DNS requests but would effectively still get the site you connected to anyway.

The new development (encrypted client hello) is you no longer have to send the hostname. So someone listening in the middle would only see you connected to an AWS/etc IP. This will make blocking websites very difficult if they use shared services like cloudflare or cloud VPS hosting.
by michaelbuckbee | 2026-01-05 23:12:58+00:00
I had an odd experience that rhymes with this, where I was trying to figure out where I had seen the actress Julie Dreyfus (from Kill Bill), whose Google results are utterly crushed by Julia Dreyfus (of Seinfeld and Veep fame) despite having demonstrably different spellings to their names...maybe it was that simple.
by apparent | 2026-01-05 23:13:05+00:00
Ah ok I'd be curious to know what those are, though I would find them to be less persuasive/relevant from a policy perspective. There are countries that have no freedom of speech, outlaw non-govt schools, etc., and I don't want to be taking cues from such countries.

Regardless, I would imagine that very few jurisdictions, and a relatively small percentage of the world, lives somewhere that mandates these vaccines and has no opt-outs.
by legitster | 2026-01-05 23:13:25+00:00
In addition to its geopolitical value, Cuba has some of the most favorable geography in the world for agriculture and tourism. It's 4x the size of Hawaii and conveniently located for America, Latin America, and Europe.

They also have a highly educated population, a rich culture of music and food recognized around the world, and low crimes.

It has the potential to be a world class travel destination - the only thing holding it in irrelevance is its own despotic government and the US's sanctions on said government.

If you were a profit-driven imperialist, Cuba probably represents the largest untapped opportunity in the Western Hemisphere.
by GMoromisato | 2026-01-05 23:13:40+00:00
These are great clarifications.

And I agree that, taken to an extreme, this is abusive towards employees. But I think most (good) companies handle this pretty well.

I've seen a couple of patterns:

1. Your boss trusts that your instinct are aligned with theirs, and gives you more latitude. Maybe they allow you to design architecture your way rather than requiring detailed review. Maybe they delegate reviewing other people's code to you.

2. You understand enough about your boss's goals/constraints that you can represent them. E.g., they might trust you to represent them at a cross-functional meeting.

Either way, your name will come to their mind when promotions are available.