MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by beloch | 2026-01-15 17:34:53+00:00
There's a reason why historians tend to view anything more recent than 10-20 years ago as politics. If you don't want to get embroiled in political debates, stick to stuff old enough to be history. There's still politics there, but it's less raw.

Wikipedia doesn't restrict itself to topics that are older than ten years ago, so some of their material is necessarily going to be viewed as political.

e.g. Wikipedia has a stand-alone page on Elon Musk's Nazi salute[1].

{Edit: It's worth noting here that Wikipedia also maintains separate pages for things like Bill Clinton's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein[3].}

This particular page is very interesting because of the sheer amount of political blow-back it's caused for Wikipedia. If you're a Republican, this one page may be the biggest reason you might view Wikipedia as having become "ridiculously partisan". As a direct result of this page, and the refusal to remove or censor it, Musk is now taking aim at Wikipedia and calling for a boycott[2]. He also had his employees produce Grokipedia which, notably, does not include a page on his Nazi salute.

Musk may have had a public falling out with Trump, but he is still very much plugged into the Republican party. He's about to throw a lot of money at the mid-term elections. So, naturally, one hand washes the other and Wikipedia is on every good Republican's hit list. The kicker is that a lot of Republicans, who don't like Musk and think he's a Nazi/idiot, are going to feel a lot of Musk-instigated pressure from their own party to target Wikipedia.

This is the price Wikipedia pays for including recent events and refusing to bow to demands for censorship.

__________________

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk_salute_controversy

[2]https://www.lemonde.fr/en/pixels/article/2025/01/29/why-elon...

[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_of_Bill_Clinton_a...

Disclosure: I'm Canadian and am neither a Republican or a Democrat.
by andrewvc | 2026-01-15 17:35:03+00:00
I mean this idea of defiance is absurd. People here are 99.9% exercising their constitutional rights. The majority of crimes happening at this moment are ICE infringing on people’s constitutional rights. I appreciate you sharing your perspective but that logic exists in isolation from the reality. ICE are so bad at policing they are creating more crimes than they are solving.

Of course with the Trump FBI the message is loud and clear, those crimes will not be investigated
by munk-a | 2026-01-15 17:35:15+00:00
Most schools are middling - but the US was willing to give generous scholarships and post-graduation grants to smart immigrants to build it here. There was a long entrenched culture that in the US you could turn your intelligence into positive change and get rich doing it.

We've been slipping into rent seeking at least since the eighties though - so the share that actual researchers get has been shrinking while the culture has become much more hostile to immigration. It is a situation built on momentum though - so while the tools supporting it have been torn down we still do have a lot of people who moved here with the hope of leveraging it.
by sys32768 | 2026-01-15 17:35:19+00:00
I keep a forum going that's been up since 2007 for hobbyists. I keep it going because of the priceless historical information on it, not the present quality of discussion.

My sense is that people have become less literate, less polite, and less patient.

Again, this is for a simple hobby so there aren't necessarily many intellectuals in this hobby, but 10+ years ago we had many lively, intelligent, long discussions.

What happens is you start getting more and more users who barge in, hijack threads, and do not contribute anything useful.

They can also be abrasive, which spooks the old timers from prior generations who were used to intelligent, polite discussion where they agree to disagree.

Eventually the quality content thins out, and there's a sort of Reddit effect where you get one solid reply for every ten useless ones.

These days I find most of the new users are just looking to find out what their collection is worth.

As those new users fill up screen space with vacuous content, the old timers are fading away either through attrition or illness or death.

On the technical side, you're constantly battling bots because your domain age and reputation is targeted by spammers.
by arjie | 2026-01-15 17:35:28+00:00
When you say you disagree, I assume you mean that you disagree that Wikipedia's approach is good. I don't think I was making that claim, however. I have no value position on Wikipedia's approach except that I appear to endorse it by participating. There are certainly true things that Wikipedia will not contain because they are insufficiently described in sources that Wikipedians find acceptable. But nonetheless that is Wikipedia's purpose: to find a list of sources that generally report fact, and to aggregate them.

Like any consensus-based thing it's pretty loose. It's unlikely that EN wikipedia had much of a position on the reliability of the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, for instance.

As an example, when I resurrected the Makoto Matsumoto article, I mirrored it to my personal wiki[0] in case it is deleted from the original. Another loss I lament is that of Chinese Numbered Policies[1] which I think is a genuinely interesting list and a meaningful categorization that I will eventually re-create on my personal wiki.

I'm a Wikipedia inclusionist which means I want as many true things there as possible in a way that represents the truth as accurately as possible, but it's a collaborative effort and that means that sometimes I don't get what I want.

Any way, as you can see from my earlier experience, I seem to have a skill of getting facts into Wikipedia when others do not, and I have a personal desire to see them there as well. So if you want to list a couple of the examples you had trouble with I can see if I can help. I know you said "politics and current events", but hopefully there are non-emergent situations that you can describe because evolving situations require more attention than I'm able to apply at the moment. I will still try, though. As an example, the Salvadoran Gang Crackdown had some ridiculous language on it that I removed[3] that was clearly an attempt to insert a left-wing (as it is in the US) political slant.

To be clear, I have no affiliation with Wikipedia (beyond the fact that as an auto-confirmed user I have the user privilege to create articles without going through AfC). I just have a personal interest in fact recording[2].

0: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Makoto_Matsumoto

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AArticles_for_delet...

2: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Observation_Dharma

3: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Salvadoran_gang_c...
by lbrito | 2026-01-15 17:35:39+00:00
Reading comment sections for news like this makes one understand better how it is possible that widescale horrible things happen.

At first you'll learn about something horrible in the past and think, How could people let that happen, yet alone participate in it? Well, its spelled out pretty neatly here.

Some people don't care - its them (jews, tutsi, immigrants). Some people care, but not in the way you'd think - they agree with the actions. Some people just wash their hands - I was only following orders, I was only working for Palantir. Some will be dismissive or downplay what is happening: its no big deal, its overblown, its being exaggerated and distorted by Radical Left-Wing Terrorists™.

This is how bad things happen.
by robrain | 2026-01-15 17:36:24+00:00
As a child in the 80s I was exceedingly nerdy. My loving and generous parents did nothing to discourage that. Indeed they encouraged my nascent interest in computers by regularly updating my ZX computers (80->81->Spectrum->48K etc.) and then Acorn computers. All gratefully received.

But then I was offered a C5 as a potential Christmas gift. "It's a Sinclair, you like those" was the approximate reasoning. But even I had to draw the line. There's only so much bullying one person can take. I was used to being laughed at for my fashion choices, my social awkwardness and my lack of sporting prowess. But a C5 would have been the final nail in the coffin.

Ungrateful? Certainly. But I think I made the right choice.
by 20k | 2026-01-15 17:36:35+00:00
If I want to look something up, I always check out wikipedia first. Its not always accurate, but its invariably a lot more accurate on most topics than random information across the web. Its also pretty easy to spot bad quality wiki articles once you get the gist of the site

Its amazing that wikipedia exists - there've been multiple hardcore attempts to kill it over the years for profit, but its still managing to go
by nullocator | 2026-01-15 17:36:43+00:00
Landman is fascinating because it goes out of its way to bring up valid claims about renewables or criticisms of oil/gas but then spits an insane amount of propaganda and lies at you in quick succession to falsely "debunk" these criticisms or sweep them under the rug. This is definitely not being done for the character's benefit in the show, so its quite impressive how effectively and frequently its tossed in there.
by cogman10 | 2026-01-15 17:36:54+00:00
3) We've exported scientific talent.

4) We've destroyed the public scientific job sector.

If your field of science isn't related to something the US military is interested in, you better have a degree in something directly related to pharmaceuticals.

A lot of the US's leadership in science was based purely on the momentum it gained from the progressive era and the cheap education we used to have. Ever since roughly Reagan, it's been slowly eroded to today's sorry state.

When I went to school, the promise was "get a degree in anything, it'll pay for itself". Now, gen z is actively choosing to avoid college because the ROI is horrendous.
by programjames | 2026-01-15 17:37:02+00:00
Not really, there's been a pretty effective culture war saying, "STEM degrees are actually useless, you need to know how to have a human connection." Only around 25% of Bachelor's and Master's degrees are in STEM fields, though it shoots up to 65% of PhDs. It seems to be pointing towards most people not supporting STEM, and advocating for students to not go into STEM, despite having some of the most lucrative (in expected value) majors.
by alex43578 | 2026-01-15 17:37:07+00:00
Polling from them says about half of Americans have an unfavorable view of ICE, a far better rating than Congress, for example at 80% disapprove.

So you’ve got a swath of people who are fine with what ICE is doing, or don’t care to even make their dissatisfaction known via a survey, much less the ballot box or via a riot.
by Linux-Fan | 2026-01-15 17:38:10+00:00
I wonder if this is due to Linux being harder to work on or because it is possible to fix some errors which would be catastrophic on other OSes?

Back when I used Windows a lot (Windwos XP times...) I also had the "long, scarring evening of frustation" rather often. It was usually solved by a reinstall.

In recent times, the “standard” seems to be smartphones (I use Android). The logic of smartphones it: It works or it dosen't and if it doesn't there is nothing you can do about it. Like ... not supporting some docking station because its network interface is called usb0 rather than eth0 ... no bypass, no solution, buy another docking station.

Of course this is faster than debugging the issue and maybe fixing it for good or maybe waste the evening on it.

Effectively Linux giving you the option to do something about errors doesn't mean the workarounds from other OSes like “reinstall”, “buy a new one”, “use a friend's system because it doesn't work here” are still readily available?
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-01-15 17:38:30+00:00
Not attacking you OP, but oh look, the top comment again concern trolling the topic to something else less inconvenient. It's wild how common that is on HN.

Basically we Americans have given up on our system. Both on the left and the right. It's why the right elected Trump, and it's why the left silently elected Trump by not voting.
by spit2wind | 2026-01-15 17:38:37+00:00
Americans are not passive. Look at the videos of any of these incidents. People are supporting those under attack, collecting evidence, and protesting. The message is clear.

Peaceful protest is the key. Riots, violence, and fighting are not peaceful and only play into the administration's aims.

When Americans resist and protest peacefully, as they have been in the largest numbers ever in the country's history, it exposes the brutality and baseness of those commiting the heinous acts.

Through such peaceful protest as we see, America will overcome this.

The big question is, what next? How to hold people accountable, fairly, while rebuilding the system and rebuilding trust?
by mrguyorama | 2026-01-15 17:39:01+00:00
No, actually at least one person in this comment section is outright happy to say they like what is going on.

These people don't care what harms "deporting illegals" means, because they aren't really attached to reality and are utterly lacking empathy.

"Better ten guilty men go free than one innocent man imprisoned" is clearly not something they consider acceptable.
by techietim | 2026-01-15 17:39:11+00:00
Agreed! I tried to make OBS work for a video podcast, and it was a very unpleasant experience. vMix has great features: built-in remote callers, audio buses, MIDI controller support, titles; just to name a few that I use.

I love and use free software a lot, but vMix blows OBS out of the water for semi-professional video productions.
by anal_reactor | 2026-01-15 17:39:24+00:00
I live in Europe, in an immigrant ghetto. Well, I'm not sure whether the word "immigrant" is correct, because most residents are second or third generation and have passports.

The cultural gap is just too much. There are explosions 24/7 and the amount of trash on the street hurts my eyes. A party by my window at 2AM - check. It happens that you have a group of six guys walking down the middle of the road and the fuck are you going to do. There's only so much you can explain by poverty and lack of privilege - especially when they were born in one of the world's richest countries while the country I am from started poor but developed immensely.

When voting, immigration policies are for me #1 issue. I just don't want the entire Europe to look like this.
by Someone | 2026-01-15 17:39:32+00:00
> Just about the only successful EV of the era was the golf cart and that's very niche.

Electric milk floats (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_float) were common even in the 1960s, and, I think, decades earlier.

Electric forklifts have been common since a long time, too. Not having an exhaust is a big advantage when operating one indoors.

(Both also fairly nice, but milk floats where used on public roads and fork lifts require much more power than golf carts)
by saghm | 2026-01-15 17:40:03+00:00
> But knowledge and academic research and industry R&D are key for progress though. All of which require hard work.

Do you think that the people who do valuable research are doing it purely because of financial motivation, or is something else going on there? The point I was trying to make is that giving people a basic income so that they won't literally starve if they don't work isn't going to completely eliminate all motivation to work. Some people will be motivated because they want more money than what UBI provides (as I think there's pretty ample evidence that desire for more money is something a lot of people seem to have independent of how stable their situation is), and plenty of people will be motivated to work for the myriad of other reasons that already motivate them. There's an argument you can make that the money from UBI will be enough to change the decision some people have, but exactly how many people that will be and the effects that have on society will depend quite a bit on how much money is being given. To me, that means the question isn't a binary question of "would UBI be good", but a spectrum of potential amounts of money (with $0 being the choice of "no UNI" that's presented as half of the original binary). Maybe there's a compelling argument that the value should be $0, but I've yet to see an argument for it that actually engages with it as a spectrum in the first place, which is why none of those arguments end up seeming particularly compelling.
by ssl-3 | 2026-01-15 17:40:36+00:00
For transmission lines: _Similarities of Wave Behavior_, presented by Dr. J. N. Shier (of Bell Labs fame, and whose team invented the phototransistor):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DovunOxlY1k

It's an easy thing to watch at any level, with both brilliant practical demonstrations and supporting math provided.
by BeetleB | 2026-01-15 17:40:38+00:00
> Does this website (presumably made with the help of these AI tools) show this kind of understanding of design? Not really. It's chaotic, the text is often hard to read and there is a ton of fluff, both in terms of visuals and copy.

I agree. I tried figuring it out for 1-2 minutes, and then closed the tab.
by roywiggins | 2026-01-15 17:41:20+00:00
You'll have to work much harder to convince me that the reviews aren't slop, when the copy on the front page is obviously unedited ChatGPT output (“In short, AI-powered tools don’t replace you—they make you stronger.”) The "About" page is also obviously LLM output.

ed: actually, hold on, no, the "reviews" are certainly written in ChatGPTese ("Are you tired of feeling like a boss battle against subscription bloat?"- that's not a review! Come on)
by weslleyskah | 2026-01-15 17:41:35+00:00
Wikipedia is surely a formidable source of knowledge, but

> Something that goes beyond our daily vices of politics and religion.

You are romanticizing.

Wikipedia is a corporation, just like Work or University, and I personally assume anything corporate is being manipulated by the owners or the ruling oligarchy because they are structurally unreliable. This is especially veritable for Wikipedia. Create an account there and try to go deeper into the articles about politics, literature and war.
by subbu_devhub | 2026-01-15 17:41:41+00:00
The modern web is broken. Before you can read anything, you hit a wall: popups,
ads, paywalls, tracking scripts, and navigation clutter designed to keep you clicking
instead of reading.

Declutter strips all of it away using AI. But here's the thing, you don't need
frontier models. Even small, cheap models like Gemini Flash or Claude Haiku do an
excellent job extracting pure content. That means you can archive whatever you want
to read for pennies per month.

Just point it at a URL, and out comes beautifully formatted Markdown, HTML, or PDF.
Offline. Local. Clean.

I built this because I was tired of the fight. The web doesn't have to be this way.
I just want to read. Please let me read without distractions.
by Dilettante_ | 2026-01-15 17:41:41+00:00
>Urgent issue

Urgent issue for whom? If there is some org relying on something you maintain voluntarily, in your free time, that seems like a "Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine"-type situation to me.

At the risk of sounding like a poor man's John Galt: If you wouldn't like to get out of bed at 5am to work without getting compensated, then you should just not do that.
by daxfohl | 2026-01-15 17:41:42+00:00
They're currently still at the "create a million branches until the tests pass" phase. Once they are more capable of genuine design, refactoring, and maintenance, their code will arguably be more readable than code written by humans, as they'll be more able and more inclined to refactor on the fly, rather than letting things bitrot the way we do. They'll be better able to refactor without regressions, refactor across services, all without disrupting feature development and parallel work (because they're fast enough that work will become more serialized), and remembering to update documentation accordingly.

Unless there's a wall getting AI to plan, design, and refactor better than it does now.
by dieggsy | 2026-01-15 17:41:47+00:00
I love Wikipedia and think it's one of the greatest resources on the Internet, but there's absolutely a lot of bias in Wikipedia. Even within the same language, I think a lot of it has to do with how many people have or are contributing to a page, whether there's a recent event affecting it, how polarizing or political the subject, etc. But it's not hard to find examples of straight up opinions or very incomplete narratives.

I've also noticed huge differences between two different language versions of the same articles. (English/Spanish specifically). Sometimes they even feel independently written.

Of course, we should all do our part to improve these things when we spot them, if we're able.
by newfriend | 2026-01-15 17:41:51+00:00
There is a huge difference between turning people away at the border and tallying a "deportation", and removing people from the interior of the US.

The flow of illegal aliens crossing the border has largely been eliminated. [1]

> should you favor a more peaceful and efficient process? Instead of a more violent and less efficient process?

I want a process that actually works. There has been no serious headway made in the number of illegal aliens for decades until now. [2]

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp8wd8938e8o

[2] https://abcnews.go.com/US/us-1st-time-50-years-experienced-n...
by benatkin | 2026-01-15 17:42:02+00:00
It also shows that it isn't perfectly organized, that it isn't an ideal model for knowledge aggregation. If it's ideal for it to be globally consistent, then it doesn't have that. If it's ideal for it to be adapted to different cultures, then it doesn't have that either, because the divisions are based only on language. However, Wikipedia it is really an amazing place, and it should continue to be preserved and improved.
by westonnealj | 2026-01-15 17:42:26+00:00
Hi! I am Weston, CTO

A valid critique of our landing page. We will get some screenshots on there.

What is the problem we are trying to solve? Contact data is stale the moment it is shared.

You might use your phone's contact app, or a spreadsheet, but how do you know that the details in your phone/spreadsheet are still accurate? And how do you know that other people's spreadsheets have YOUR accurate details?

What we are trying to do is turn contact details into living data. EasyDex is the infrastructure to propagate contact detail changes between users and businesses securely, seamlessly, and instantly.

Your contact details, up-to-date, everywhere.
by quickthrowman | 2026-01-15 17:42:36+00:00
Did you use antioxidant paste on all of the aluminum terminations? If you didn’t, please pay an electrician to come fix it. If you did apply the paste, you are in the 0.01% of non-idiot non-electrician homeowners and can skip my rant about homeowners doing electrical work in the next paragraph. I sell electrical work and have seen some incredibly poor work done by homeowners.

Do not install aluminum wire if you are a homeowner unless you already know enough to use antioxidant paste and also to use a torque screwdriver for terminations and know where to find the torque values for the wiring devices you are using. If you don’t apply the paste, the surface of the aluminum will oxidize and eventually likely catch fire if it remains existing long enough.

I suggest not even touching copper as a homeowner, but it’s your choice and your house.
by amiga386 | 2026-01-15 17:42:57+00:00
GamerGate was about ethics in games journalism roughly as much as the Arab Spring was about a street vendor having his cart confiscated.

That was their initial spark, but it kicked off a ding-dong battle for years. You could argue it's still going today, given places like /v/ and ResetEra are still fighting it, games like Dustborn and Concord are pilloried, and the "Sweet Baby Inc. detected" Steam curator exists to list games that have taken that company's advice.