MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ActorNightly | 2026-01-20 22:25:43+00:00
Hope and wishing aside, if you think anything Trump is doing is gonna benefit the economy, you really show your ideological side.

For example, businesses are hesitant to invest in domestic manufacture because the tarrifs can be undone by next president. But the reputation that US is building right now cant be undone. Investment in manufacturing takes years, not to mention that its not like America has lots of people wanting to go work in mines and factories. Meawhile as countries with sane leaders adjust, US is gonna be less and less relevant.

So in 5 or so years when your house value and investments are way down and there is a Dem president and you think about complaining about economy is bad under liberals, remeber who cause it all. Most of the current economic problems that existed in late 2020s have origins with Reagan era economics.
by cco | 2026-01-20 22:25:57+00:00
I strongly encourage interested folks to read Miran's "A User's Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System" (I won't link directly since it auto-downloads a PDF).

Miran, and his thinking, clearly have this admin's ear and they're following many of the prescribed steps in his white paper. To the T frankly.

So if you're surprised by the USD devaluing by 10% last year or the immense pressure to drop the fed rate to under 2% by next year, well the reasoning and strategy is all laid out very clearly in the above whitepaper.

No confusion necessary! They explain every (terrifying) bit of their plan in that paper.

What is left out, and why I say it is terrifying, is that the whitepaper is academic and basically leaves uncovered any of the _political_ ramifications of these economic changes. And of course, those political ramifications can be immense.
by jjoonathan | 2026-01-20 22:26:33+00:00
The internet itself went through a similar growth pattern without astroturf. The original users were all researchers, which served as a strong implicit filter, and then the new users were students who had to be taught Netiquette every September, and eventually the floodgates opened to the public and the academics lost the ability to steer the culture in what was called The Eternal September (1993).

The same "initial implicit filter followed by gradual but inevitable reversion to the mean" dynamic explains your observations of early reddit without implying fraud, although it certainly doesn't imply the absence of fraud either. That said, "fraud" is probably a strong word for reddit astroturf in this present day and age where we have a (comparatively) planet-sized Dead Internet built on geological quantities of ads and slop.
by ericmcer | 2026-01-20 22:26:53+00:00
Ah I was seeing a parallel between:

1. Our post WW2 neocolonial activity and the current admins push to sort of blatantly get control over Venezuela and Greenland.

2. Our WW2 manufacturing and export based economy that made us wealthy. Is similar to the current admins push to reform us from importers to exporters using tariffs and rebuilding manufacturing (at least on the surface the execution of this has been terrible).
by Bukhmanizer | 2026-01-20 22:27:25+00:00
I think CEOs are terrified of AI and all the talk of “replacing workers” is more a wish list or a cope than a prediction.

Personally I think AI is super useful, but at my job the amount of progress we’ve made has basically ground to a halt compared to before AI.

The reason is that the people who they chose to lead the new, most innovative “AI initiatives” were the least innovative most corporate drone-y people I’ve ever met. The kind of people who in 2025 would unironically say stuff like “we need to work on our corporate synergies”.

They never wanted innovation, they just wanted people to toe the line for as long as possible until they could jump the sinking ship.
by eddd-ddde | 2026-01-20 22:27:47+00:00
I've tried so many times to make it work, I've really tried. But it just ends up being faster to spam j a couple of times instead of having to think about how many times I want to move, then type it, then be wrong, then try again...

For larger distances you wouldn't even see the text in the screen, so you don't even know how much to jump. In this situation I just spam ctrl+d, then tweak with j.
by bigyabai | 2026-01-20 22:27:50+00:00
> Nvidia’s valuation is based on the current trend continuing

People said this back when Folding@Home was dominated by Team Green years ago. Then again when GPUs sold out for the cryptocurrency boom, and now again that Nvidia is addressing the LLM demand.

Nvidia's valuation is backstopped by the fact that Russia, Ukraine, China and the United States are all tripping over themselves for the chance to deploy it operationally. If the world goes to war (which is an unfortunate likelihood) then Nvidia will be the only trillion-dollar defense empire since the DoD's Last Supper.
by robocat | 2026-01-20 22:27:51+00:00
We are taught that schooling level is related to intelligence, then we internalise that concept, then we make silly assumptions based on that concept.

Plenty of highly intelligent people don't get educated because they see through the farce, or they decide that being submissive to the system is bad, or they test poorly (e.g. dyslexic), or their intelligence has found better opportunities.

Higher education does not make you more intelligent. Nor is it a good filter/measure of intelligence. Too many people chase it for status.

I always remember one very smart lady skiting to me about aiming for B grades and manipulating lecturers since she only needed a degree to pass HR requirements. I wasn't that smart.

I try to understand my successful friends that left school at 15. Unfortunately that is a biased sample of people without higher education: they are very intelligent, effective and hard-working.
Show HN: Free multi-model surf forecast for the East Coast
by hthegoat | 2026-01-20 22:28:04+00:00
Most surf apps use one forecast model. When it's wrong, you're wrong. I built Howzit to pull from three models (NOAA WaveWatch III, ECMWF, Open-Meteo), blend them, and show confidence based on how much they agree.
76 East Coast spots from Maine to Florida. Free, no ads. You can toggle between individual models or see the blend.
Built with Nuxt.js and Supabase. Been working on this for a few months and just launched.
hwztsurf.com
by JohnFen | 2026-01-20 22:28:40+00:00
The major proponent appears to be Stephen Miller. There are a lot of reports that the tech bro contingent is eager for it as well.

It's not at all true that this is an entirely new idea, though. Greenland's status has been a topic of discussion ever since (at least) World War 2. What's new is that the administration is signalling that they are willing to actually invade. In the past, that was only discussed in terms of war plans should the US mainland be attacked or there's another world war. Purchasing it, though, is a pretty old idea.
by jmyeet | 2026-01-20 22:29:44+00:00
I don't think you can compare pre-WWI Germany to the US for many reasons. In the colonial era, Germany as a fairly new state and unlike the UK, Spain, France, even Portugal or the Netherlands, they didn't have colonies to exploit. Worse, in the industrialization era they didn't have access to oil.

This created a paranoia in Germany, an insecurity that were between Great Powers and were dependent on imports and poorer than their neighbours. They felt like they'd eventually get swallowed unless they did something and the end result was WWI. And WW2 if you think about it.

The cost of victory against Germany (twice) was huge. All those Great Powers lost their colonies and they impoverished themselves with war economies while enriching the United States who, at times, sold arms to all sides.

The US is that Great Power now, complete with colonies. It's energy independent too. So it's nohting like Germany. In fact it's turned Europe into a client state (ie through NATO). These aren't colonies in the British Empire sense of occupying India, for example. It's economic colonialism. The Global South is controlled via the IMF and World Bank. The developed world is controlled with security gurantees.

But where I agree with you is that an absolutel moron has come along and threatens to dismantle this entire system. That's what's happening. Splintering NATO, abolishing USAID, etc all diminish American soft (and hard) power.

China's foreign policy has become to sit and wait while the US destroys itself. They don't have to do anything anymore. It's why i laugh when people predict China will invade Taiwan. No they won't. Why? Because they don't have to. As a reminder, One China is the official policy of the US government.

My problem is that empires don't die quietly. They die violently. And we're going to see a wave of fascism. Things are going to get much, much worse before they get better.
by tstrimple | 2026-01-20 22:30:05+00:00
Claude Code on NixOS feels like it has super powers. Being able to spin up a nix-shell with needed dependencies on demand gives it access to all sorts of tools I don't have or want installed on my base system. My "book-recommendation" claude code uses sqlite to manage my reading history and to-read and maybe-read lists but I never installed tools for sqlite and they aren't present on my NixOS desktop. It just launches a nix-shell with sqlite anytime it needs to read/modify the database. As long as the database file is within the directory claude code was launched from, it doesn't need to prompt for permission. With the caching that NixOS does, it's fast enough to not even think about.
by jaskirat05 | 2026-01-20 22:30:29+00:00
Hey HN, I built this to scratch my own itch. I have an RTX 3070 so just 8gb of VRAM

I use ComfyUI for image/video generation, but running multi-step pipelines was painful:
- No way to chain small step workflows (image → edit → video) without manual intervention
- If step 3 of 5 failed, start over
- No approval gates to review outputs mid-pipeline
- Single GPU bottleneck

ComfyAutomate fixes this with:

**Chain definitions in YAML** - Define multi-step pipelines with dependencies. Independent steps run in parallel automatically.

**Approval gates** - Mark any step as `requires_approval: true`. Pipeline pauses, you review the output, and either approve or reject with new parameters. Rejection regenerates just that step and its descendants, not the whole chain.

**Distributed execution** - Add multiple ComfyUI servers, work gets routed to the one with the shortest queue.

**Durable execution** - Built on Temporal, so workflows survive crashes. If the worker dies mid-generation, it picks up where it left off.

Technical choices:
- Temporal for workflow orchestration (overkill for hobby use, but rock solid for production)
- NetworkX for DAG dependency resolution
- Jinja2 templates for passing outputs between steps (`{{ step1.output.image }}`)
- SSE for real-time progress updates

The approval + regeneration flow was the trickiest part - when you reject a step, it creates a subgraph of that step + all descendants and re-executes just that portion while preserving the rest of the context.

MIT licensed. Would love feedback, especially on the chain YAML syntax and whether the Temporal dependency is too heavy for most users.
by jqpabc123 | 2026-01-20 22:30:31+00:00
Short answer --- yes.

AI does not reflect reality. It struggles to tell the difference between fact and fiction. And it will gladly invent info in order to pacify the user.

Likewise, the investment being poured into this flawed technology does not reflect economic reality.

Reality is nothing if not persistent and will eventually intrude on this fantasy.
by carlosjobim | 2026-01-20 22:30:44+00:00
As we mature mentally, we need more interesting games to play, more interesting challenges. Work is many times the result of this.

It's the same with romance. When we are children we have a crush on somebody, become pretend "boyfriend and girlfriend", and as we mature the game becomes more interesting as it becomes real.

But it's all a game throughout life.

So perhaps it is those who enjoy work who has elevated their spiritual level, and not the other way around?
by anonymous908213 | 2026-01-20 22:31:31+00:00
I think LGBTQ acceptance in Japan is significantly better than any Western country. The "issue", as it manifests, is of a fundamentally different nature. Not everyone is open to it, of course, and legal marriage is not an option[1]. But while there are many people who are somewhat bigoted, Japan is not an Abrahamic country. Unlike any Christian or Islamic country, the number of people who hate LGBTQ individuals, want them all to go to Hell, and make their entire political identity based around hurting them, or actually committing violence against them, is significantly smaller.

[1] Notably, the lack of legalised marriage is not because the population is too conservative. Rather, it is because the US forced a constitution on Japan which enshrines heterosexual marriage as constitutional law, and changing the constitution is significantly more difficult than changing a normal law. There is broad popular support for same-sex marriage, and it would almost certainly be legal if not for this fact.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2026-01-20 22:31:43+00:00
"The latest revelations about Meta's malfeasance come from newly unsealed court documents. In 2020, the company discovered through its own experimental research - an initiative known as Project Mercury - that when users reduced the amount of time they spent on Facebook, their levels of depression, anxiety, and loneliness decreased. Meta's lawyers buried the findings."

Further reading:

https://dn710108.ca.archive.org/0/items/gov.uscourts.cand.40...

Excerpts:

"And we start with what is perhaps the most succinct acknowledgment of the problem, from a chat between two UX Researchers: "oh my gosh yall IG is a drug... We're basically pushers... We are causing Reward Deficit Disorder bc people are binging on IG so much they can't feel reward anymore... like their reward tolerance is so high... I know Adam [Mosseri] doesn't want to hear it he freaked out when I talked about dopamine in my teen fundamentals leads review but its undeniable! Its biological and psychological... the top down directives drive it all towards making sure people keep coming back for more. That would be fine if its productive but most of the time it isn't... the majority is just mindless scrolling and ads." Ex. 74 at 2152-53."

"One Meta employee warned, "if the results are bad and we don't publish and they leak, is it going to look like tobacco companies doing research and knowing cigs were bad and then keeping that info to themselves? I went... oh." Ex. 91 at 1943."
by troad | 2026-01-20 22:31:57+00:00
HN is great for technical discussions, but is below average for political or macroeconomic discussions. A HN comment thread on those topics is essentially indistinguishable from a NYT comments section, which I mean as an unfavourable comparison.

Turns out that being good at SQL does not make one good at the subtle social art / science of power and governance. If anything, the correlation is inverse. This shouldn't be surprising.
by cj | 2026-01-20 22:32:12+00:00
We deal with soft delete in a Mongo app with hundreds of millions of records by simply moving the objects to a separate collection (table) separate from the “not deleted” data.

This works well especially in cases where you don’t want to waste CPU/memory scanning soft deleted records every time you do a lookup.

And avoids situations where app/backend logic forgets to apply the “deleted: false” filter.
by tshaddox | 2026-01-20 22:32:23+00:00
I've never quite understood what's supposed to be so mind-blowing about the assassination market concept. I think the concept is supposed to be that assigning legal responsibility for such a killing would be difficult, since no one is literally paying an assassin.

But surely the answer is just that governments can and should ban prediction markets that are deemed to directly incentivize a crime. Where exactly to draw the line is challenging, sure, but no more challenging than all the other stuff that legal systems have to deal with. After all, pretty much any existing market (like stock markets) could be influenced by murdering certain people.

You may say "oh, but assassination markets are unique in that they're hard to ban those markets because they use cryptocurrencies and other decentralized/anonymous/censorship-resistant communication technologies." Well, okay, but if those technologies are so effective than people can already just run normal murder-for-pay markets.
by zamalek | 2026-01-20 22:33:23+00:00
> The index is 214 MB! That's almost half the size of the entire table. So the analysts are happy, but you? Not so much...

This is part of a broader choice: write amplification. You'd want to, of course, have the most precise index possible - but no matter how you cut it, you are incurring extra I/O for writes - one for the tuple, one per index. How you index things is heavily influenced by the mix of reads and writes, and this is why we have data warehouses/read replicas in the first place: it allows us to avoid write amplification in the write path, while having fast filtered reads (that are slightly delayed).

If you're dealing with <ridiculous number of users>, there is a good chance that you don't want to be putting BI/OLAP indices on your OLTP database. You probably don't have enough users to worry about this - but - if you ever find that your writes are becoming an issue this is something to consider.
by TZubiri | 2026-01-20 22:33:48+00:00
I think the misconception here is that there is someone or some law "allowing people" to do things. It's of course the inverse, people by default can do whatever they want. What laws or contracts you may find actually "forbid people" from doing something.

I think you are right in that often (but not always), it's fraud (which isn't the same as being ilegal, it could be a breach of contract or fiduciary duty) for someone who is working for a purpose, to sabotage it for another purpose for some additional gain. But the rule being broken is contract law, not criminal law, in this case.

Sometimes other laws would have to be broken to manipulate the events, like in the case of democratic elections, or wars. It's just that these are higher order laws and not contracts between parties.

It's entirely possible for an event to be manipulated where a party doesn't really break a rule or law or contract to win at it, like elon musk tweeting more than 500 times.

Furthermore it's worth noting that this doesn't have much bearing on the legality of the market itself, one thing is for manipulation to be illegal or fraud or somehow penalized, the other is the market itself being illegal.

I hope I have helped a little bit, I'm not sure what your legal training is, I'm not a lawyer, but since you are talking about 'allowing people' I analyzed this from a legal perspective based on the knowledge I have.
by JohnFen | 2026-01-20 22:33:51+00:00
You'd have to have a real lock on it to get anybody but a shady lawyer to take it on. It's very unlikely that you'd be able to do that under almost any circumstance. Yes, the potential payout would be large, but the expenses the law firm would have to pay in the meantime, and carry for the many years it would take for the lawsuit to come to a conclusion, would also be very large.

It would be a huge gamble and reputable law firms would have to feel extremely confident that they wouldn't end up on the losing side. That's a big ask regardless of how good you case is. These tech companies have enormous warchests, can drag these things out essentially forever, and the odds they'll find a technicality that would blunt the lawsuit are very high.
by deepsquirrelnet | 2026-01-20 22:35:23+00:00
I’m totally in alignment with your blog post (other than terminology). I meant it more as a plea to all these projects that are trying to go into production without any measures of performance behind them.

It’s shocking to me how often it happens. Aside from just the necessity to be able to prove something works, there are so many other benefits.

Cost and model commoditization are part of it like you point out. There’s also the potential for degraded performance because of the shelf benchmarks aren’t generalizing how you expect. Add to that an inability to migrate to newer models as they come out, potentially leaving performance on the table. There’s like 95 serverless models in bedrock now, and as soon as you can evaluate them on your task they immediately become a commodity.

But fundamentally you can’t even justify any time spent on prompt engineering if you don’t have a framework to evaluate changes.

Evaluation has been a critical practice in machine learning for years. IMO is no less imperative when building with llms.
by araes | 2026-01-20 22:35:25+00:00
Agree in the case of large character cells like a terminal. For those cases, where you only have something like 40x48 in the Apple II Low Res mode, there's only so much you can do with the limited resolution.

However, for many the result is that the color choices are akin to a posterization filter in photoshop, where the nearest color is simply chosen. Often, there's actually the freedom 'available' to define a character set and choose at least a background / foreground color, with some kind of dithering pattern.

Sometimes the character set that can be defined is limited, so it has to be chosen carefully. Yet there's improvement from a 'large blobs of color' poster result to a smooth dither tone change.

The problem with the quantization result, is it just snaps to the 'nearest'. So even for relatively large areas of slowly gradiating color, if you only have one 'nearby' color, everything inbetween just snaps to that single color choice. You might have red, with slowly increasing green / yellow, yet it will always just snap to solid red.

This example from the Vic-20 kind of shows that issue. Large areas where it posterizes severely.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/32/Screen_c...

Dithering suggested is something like this (greyscale example) except with choosable foreground / background (maybe 3-4, although less frequently)

https://araesmojo-eng.github.io/images/GreyScale_Dithering.p...

This example from the Vic-20 game Tutankarman shows that kind of approach. Varying amounts of dither and color used in dithing give the impression of changing skin tones.

https://www.neilhuggett.com/vic20/tutankarman03.png

They're both the Vic-20
by koakuma-chan | 2026-01-20 22:36:02+00:00
> The undercurrent here is that Brand is behind the 10,000 year clock and has a vested interest in making things last a long time.

What do you mean by this? I have no idea who Stewart Brand is, and I am wary of authors who advertise themselves by saying how many books they have written, because it makes me think they are fiction writers rather than people with real knowledge on the subject.
by jemmyw | 2026-01-20 22:36:06+00:00
I'm trying that one too. I did not like Octopi or KISS. Kvaesitso looks nice, I like the drawer and the drawer widgets are kind of cool too. The annoying thing that might drive me away is that you cannot set the order of favourites and the order changes depending on what you last used. Changing the order of something has to be very thoughtful or it quickly becomes frustrating - and with the favourites its not obvious that should be like a "recently used" list.
by vgivanovic | 2026-01-20 22:36:11+00:00
I've used Nova Launcher for years (don't know if I'm paid), but I'll be happy to pay for an ad free version.

I know there is a long history of companies buying another company for a product and then killing it after a period of time. I'm willing to give Instabridge the benefit of doubt... for a while. If they do decide that Nova Launcher is not a fit, I hope they open source it so that current users are not left on the lurch.