MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Why not make English computational, just like LaTeX, to ensure lock-in?
by amichail | 2026-01-29 14:59:07+00:00
Imagine a version of English extended so that anyone writing for precision—scientists, lawyers, engineers, or anyone documenting complex ideas—uses sentences that embed non-trivial computations. Understanding such text would not just require reading; it would require executing algorithms embedded in the language itself.

Just like LaTeX allows you to write documents precisely and reproducibly, this computational English would make automatic machine translation extremely difficult. Even a small snippet of computation could drastically change the meaning if it is misinterpreted. Over time, anyone who values precision might stick to English by default, creating a global lock-in for formal communication.

Casual conversation could still happen in any language, but for technical writing, legal documents, instructions, or rigorous journalism, computational English could become the universal standard. Its adoption would depend on its ability to guarantee exact meaning rather than ease of learning.

Would this lock-in ensure that English will be the universal language of the world forever, just like LaTeX for scientists?
by AlexandrB | 2026-01-29 14:59:14+00:00
> We're not the ones shooting unarmed protesters in the head ten times after removing their legally owned gun, nor faking arrest photos, etc.

To be fair, can you even "open carry" a firearm anywhere in Europe? Isn't the UK trying to ban pointy kitchen knives[1]?

[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/crime/general/uk-considering-point...
by cloudmanager | 2026-01-29 14:59:15+00:00
I use LLMs (mostly Claude Code) slot for development, but I regularly stuck before the code in the ideation and planning phase. Text-only planning feels too vague, and jumping straight into Figma or specs felt like overcommitting when ideas are still fuzzy.

I built a small system for myself about a year ago: a set of simple ASCII wireframe patterns plus some workflow instructions that I load into an LLM. The goal is to give both me and the model a shared visual language so we can reason about flows, screens, and constraints early, without pixels or long prose.

As a concrete example, I used this workflow to think through an iOS app concept called Still Human — a small app designed to add a pause before opening AI tools. The result is this spec:
https://gist.githubusercontent.com/currentlycurrently/2dfbaf...

It’s a full handoff-style document: ASCII wireframes, user flows, edge cases, data model, and implementation notes. Rough, but coherent enough to build from.

I eventually packaged the workflow itself as AsciiKit. It’s just text files (no signup), meant to stay low-fi and disposable. This is pretty niche, and I’m not convinced it’s for everyone (anyone?), but it’s changed how I handle early-stage ideation with LLMs.

Curious whether others feel this same gap between “idea” and “ready to code,” or if this feels like overengineering.

Happy to answer questions.
by Atreiden | 2026-01-29 14:59:16+00:00
We don't need "more" government, we need the government to do its job. We need the regulators who have been legally appointed to oversee these areas to actually respond to these behaviors. Regulatory capture is the issue, but the solution isn't less government. It's getting corporate money and lobbying out of the government (Citizens United is to blame for most of our woes), increase the enforcement of anti-corruption laws, and get antitrust back on the table.

I want big corporations to be scared. I want them to fear for their own survival, and to tread lightly lest the sword of damocles fall upon them.
by sejje | 2026-01-29 14:59:25+00:00
She was standing alone, across the street, on the curb/grass next to the sidewalk, kind of doing a homer simpson into the bushes.

There were no other people visible, she made no noise.

She didn't impede anyone, and it would have been very difficult to tell she was protesting, if that's in fact what she was doing (I'm not her, so I don't know).

I don't believe in God, so those particulars (or that it was an abortion clinic) aren't important to me. She was arrested for thinking silently to herself.
by JacobiX | 2026-01-29 14:59:56+00:00
>> Apply diversity logic so your Agent/User doesn’t see 10 nearly identical results

On Instagram this is a good thing, but here the example is hotel and flight search, where a more deterministic result is preferable.

In the retrieve → filter stage, using predicate pushdown may be more performant: first filter using hard constraints, then apply hybrid search ?
by Telaneo | 2026-01-29 15:00:06+00:00
> OpenGL, Vulkan, Glide or DirectX on Windows either without having the proper hardware and software installed

Windows will run at least basic OpenGL and DirectX in software if you don't have hardware to accelerate that, and those software renderers are included as part of the OS. It'll run like garbage, but it will run.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/direct3darti...
by sys32768 | 2026-01-29 15:00:07+00:00
Here's a CNN segment from 2016 about ICE enforcing in Chicago, without the spin we see today, yet essentially the same operations:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUXTqyH54ww

Many on the right who had Obama Derangement Syndrome didn't know how well Obama's administration enforced federal immigration law.
by bitwize | 2026-01-29 15:00:16+00:00
I was a contractor for a FAANG. My immediate cubicle neighbor liked to work out on lunch break, and to hang his sweaty, smelly gym things on the framework of his desk to air dry when he returned. I would've KILLED for a laptop I could take to the complimentary office café so I could get something done without holding my nose. If I were a full employee, I could just ask for one. Alas, as a mere contractor I was something less than a person, so I had to remain tethered to my desktop per company policy.
by nixass | 2026-01-29 15:00:24+00:00
Because others started developing EVs when it made sense.
Tesla was basically a start up, high risk business.
Established auto makers didn't wanna burn the money on something that may not succeed. In hindsight it's easy to say it was a bad move but from risk assessment point of view it made sense. Hell, some legacy automakers are reducing EV production because of how uncertain the market is (for whatever reason)
by palmotea | 2026-01-29 15:00:43+00:00
I'm surprised they didn't recommend the 3M half-face respirator with the pink cartridges: https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/p/d/b10013219/. You saw them all over Hong Kong, you can buy them at Home Depot, and they don't make you look like an ICE agent.
by resters | 2026-01-29 15:00:44+00:00
Excellent points. You've perfectly described the brutal, interest-rate-driven VC cycle -- capital floods in, risk gets mispriced, and the market eventually corrects with Darwinian force. That's the "blunt instrument" in action.

Meanwhile in China, the approach is fundamentally different. Capital isn't just cheap; it's strategically directed by the state with goals beyond financial return. The aim is "new quality productive forces" -- slow-burn, systemic growth that reinforces social stability and industrial upgrade, not a boom-bust race for unicorns.

The current AI boom is our real-time experiment to see if this is the "better way." The U.S. model, as you note, is driven by massive private investment (over $109B in 2024) and is prone to hype cycles. China's model is state-planned, focusing on the "AI Plus" integration of technology across its industrial base, despite investing less ($9.3B) and facing constraints like advanced semiconductor access.

We're watching two competing logics: one seeking market-defining breakthroughs through volatile, capital-intensive competition, and another pursuing broad-based, stability-oriented technological integration. The results of this test will show which system better transforms capital into lasting, system-wide advantage.
by ghc | 2026-01-29 15:01:04+00:00
> Yeah 10 years ago.

Tesla unveiled the Roadster 20 Years ago now. That's plenty of time for other companies to catch up. They made a bet that once the battery moat evaporated the millions of miles of driving footage, powering affordable fully autonomous driving, would be their next moat. They failed, not because camera-based FSD is a silly idea (we drive with our eyes after all), but because it's a really hard problem. If they had won that bet, Tesla would justify its valuation. They didn't, and so we're left with the flailing of a doomed company.
by Spoom | 2026-01-29 15:01:08+00:00
> Everybody will slowly move to "web only" as 30% would kill their ability to compete with anybody else.

Frankly, yes, please. I mean, I'm biased as my whole career is in web app development, but there are so many things these days that do not need a whole native app. They're just communicating with a server backend somewhere, using none of the unique native functionality of the phone (much of which is available in browser APIs these days anyway). I can block ads in a web app much more easily. It's much harder to do customer-hostile things like block screenshots in a web app.

Native apps definitely have a place, but I think they're very overused, mostly for reasons that benefit the business at the expense of the customer.
by arowthway | 2026-01-29 15:01:19+00:00
If you're able to manipulate DNS, can't you just issue your own certificate for the domain? Even if it would be revoked moments later, mitmproxy doesnt check it even when ssl_insecure=false:

https://github.com/mitmproxy/mitmproxy/issues/2235

EDIT:
Maybe I incorrectly assumed you meant authoritative DNS.
by rrr_oh_man | 2026-01-29 15:01:26+00:00
Nope, and it didn't matter.

You need to know military, not population size (how quickly can a militia be raised, how long can it be sustained, how well they are armed, who can be persuaded to defect, etc.). This is related to population size, but not linearly.

Population counts get only interesting for military and tax potential during administration of a territory.

GP's point is valid, though, imho.
by tialaramex | 2026-01-29 15:02:21+00:00
Mid-run save is a legitimate gripe. Practically the reason it doesn't have that is that the internal game state is probably horrendous and restoring it would be a nightmare. The engineering in Blue Prince is terrible. Imagine the terrible spaghetti you've seen from self-taught programmers, now, imagine nobody more senior is in charge and remember it's a video game so there's time pressure. So yeah, that's a quality issue, and definitely a fair gripe, I could imagine a hypothetical "fixed" version where this works.

The step limit is an important resource. There's a reason one of the early goals of the game (in Bequest and to some extent Dare modes) is to have more steps at the start of each day and why an important penalty of Curse mode is that you only have 13 steps. As with other resources like keys, you can learn to make better use of what you have and also how to get more of it within reason. I don't think it's as good of a game without Steps. They're not (outside Curse mode) scarce enough to commonly end a run, but they matter.
by coredog64 | 2026-01-29 15:02:26+00:00
PNG is so violent that you don't even have to be accused of witchcraft to have something bad happen to you.

I worked at an NGO in the region and made several duty travel trips to PNG. The office building I was working in had a platoon of security guards and metal detectors in the lobbies of every floor. A local employee kept an M-16 and ammunition locked in the server room. We had to have security escorts to travel anywhere outside of downtown Port Moresby. Coworkers shared stories of being carjacked like you or I might relate losing a phone.
by rawgabbit | 2026-01-29 15:02:30+00:00
I should also remark the laminar fluid boundary layer only is true for subsonic flight. When you go over Mach one, a permanent shock wave forms in front of the wing. This shock wave disrupts the laminar boundary layer. Lift is achieved by Newtonian breakdown of the air hitting the wings underside. This is why supersonic planes require fly by wire. As computers are constantly issuing commands to ailerons and rudder to prevent stall.
by kmos | 2026-01-29 15:02:44+00:00
I am in that case, low testosterone and hashimoto (hypothyroid), ADHD and big Scolioses. Last weeks I am dealing with insomnias, and had to take pills to sleep and it seems my parasympathic system is in alert mode for years, stress, divorce, ex-kid and older kid, etc.. I stopped SSRI after 21 years for 5 months and its probably causing my insomnias, the brain was not used for missing serotonine and brain don't stop thinking, loop, alert mode.

I am doing several blood analysis with a functional doctor and lyme may be around or was in the body, and so many other things. I was thinking I had lucky gut, but seems negative..

I did get my Vit D up to 65 and I seems to be issues with ADH hormone since kid and probably that makes dehydration. It's a fucking nightmare..

I may only see a testosterone replacement as a solution maybe..
by Noaidi | 2026-01-29 15:02:52+00:00
Re "citalopram" and "SSRI lottery I guess"...in fact, citalopram is not a true SSRI and in fact no SSRI is only an SSRI as they also on, at increasing doses, many other neurotransmitters like norepinephprine and Muscarinic acetylcholine receptors.

However, citalopram specifically has a big effect on the histaminegma the sigma-1 receptor. I will focus on the sigma-1 receptor:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S134786131...

Never heard of it? Yeah, don't be ashamed, it is the biggest secret in depression. In fact they are finding that many "SSRIs" are sigma-1 agonists, even prozac.

https://www.frontiersin.org/files/Articles/1691987/fnins-19-...

It tunrs out that Sigma receptors modulate glutamatergic dysfunction in depression, and glutamate, being excitatory, well, you can. make your assumptions from there.

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroscience/articles/1...

It seems the main function of the Sigma-1 receptor is Calcium release. And calcium ion channels are one of the most studies ion channels in mood disorders. By increasing calcium release you increase neuronal activity, hence, the uplifted mood.

It is too bad that the sigma-1 receptor is just starting to be studied and there is limited evidence of how omega-3 and Vitamin D effect it. But I do know that Vitamin D has a huge effect on SLC6A4 (SERT).

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-79388-7

I have Schizoaffective Disorder Bipolar Type (disabled) and have been on no less than 14 types of meds. I knwo how they work better than my psychiatrists, which I why I no longer take them. I also know my genetics which gave me clues to what is happening in my body. Now I eat a mostly seafood diet and my needs for meds has mostly vanished. I am still an odd old fellow, but at least I am not ranting in the streets or trying to kill myself anymore.

Meds saved my life, but a diet high in Omega 3, D, and a bunch of other things has removed so much suffering from my life, more than any medication has.

(Also, if you want to get into the weeds of depression, you might wat to look at ATP and depression https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cns.14536)
by jlebar | 2026-01-29 15:03:00+00:00
> Ideally, a professional will prescribe them as a necessary helper to becoming (more) mentally healthy whilst tackling the root cause.

I wish people would stop saying this.

Our understanding of the brain is not sufficiently sophisticated to allow us to identify the "root cause" (whatever that means) of depression in most people. Indeed we have no reason to believe that there even is a root cause to most people's depression.

If you take antidepressants, go to therapy (or meditate or exercise or whatever), then go off them and still feel good, that's great.

And if you take antidepressants indefinitely because doing so improves your life, that's also great! Your life is improved! This isn't an "abuse" of the drugs.

No psychiatrist is making you do anything. They're advising you based on their clinical judgement and experience, but ultimately it's your decision to take the pills or not. If your goal is to go on antidepressants temporarily, any decent psychiatrist will support you in that (because, again, they understand that they can't make you take the pills one day longer than you want to).

I've been on Lexapro and done evidence-based therapy for years. They both have been helpful, but if I had to pick one, I'd immediately pick Lexapro. For me it is a miracle drug. And the miracle is, I can choose how I feel.

(I also added a small dose of Buspar to help with the sexual side-effects.)

If you're on the fence about trying an antidepressant, I really encourage you to talk to a psychiatrist. If you try it and hate it, then you can stop. But a lot of people try it and love it. And I think a lot more people would be willing to try it if the notion that this is somehow "wrong" were gone.

For further reading I recommend https://lorienpsych.com/2021/06/05/depression/. I don't agree with everything Scott Alexander says, but his writing about mental health specifically has been useful to me.
by thegrimmest | 2026-01-29 15:03:02+00:00
Advocating for regulators to step in is already a value judgement. Why is "high profitability" a cause for regulatory scrutiny? The optimal behaviour in any ecosystem (corporate or natural) is to defend as much territory as is within your power, not to keep only to what covers your "needs". Why have you deemed this behaviour, which is emergent anywhere competition between organisms exists, as in need of regulation?

Apple is succeeding largely on merit, within the bounds of civilized, peaceful competition. Shouldn't we all just be grateful for the contributions they have made to our civilization?
by blnlx | 2026-01-29 15:03:04+00:00
I've written an essay exploring a second-order risk of AI model collapse. The technical safeguards proposed to prevent it—filtering out "AI-like" text—create a perverse cultural incentive: they risk systematically discarding clear, polished human thought while rewarding noisy, imperfect text as "authentic."

This isn't just a data problem. It becomes a gatekeeping problem, affecting academia, journalism, and publishing, and could ultimately feed degraded language back into future AI training. I trace the feedback loop from technical mechanics to cultural distortion.

https://borisljevar.substack.com/p/too-perfect-to-learn-from...

I'm interested in the HN community's thoughts on this paradox and potential solutions beyond filtering.
by maccard | 2026-01-29 15:03:07+00:00
I'm not quite as cynical as that to be honest. I do think it's abundantly clear that PwC and other major consultancies hire people who have experience in writing briefs to get major projects, and that they likely have an implicit preferential treatment becacuse they meet things like insurance requirements already without any overhead. It's also clear, allowed (and provable) that they will start with senior people who can make a good point and sell a good story, but will swap them out as soon as possible.

I think at that point, they just don't care.
by kakacik | 2026-01-29 15:03:25+00:00
They are not taken into account simply because they may be meaningless to job advertised.

For example no company I ever worked for (maybe 7 over 20 years) needed publishing academics. Is the fact that you published a book about some DB architecture 10 years ago going to make you a better team member and deliver things faster? Maybe, or maybe not, how could hiring folks know? You measure and judge what you can, ignore the rest since it can be + or - and you have no clue, not even about probability spread.

Doctors with many licenses may be better, or maybe they like studying more than actually working with patients and thus be possibly even worse than average, how do you want to measure that? A stellar doctor may simply have no time to do anything beyond her/his current work due to also dedicating time to their family and raising children. Quality of a doctor, especially surgeons is mostly function of work already performed (knowing closely tens of doctors from all branches they themselves often claim this), not some extra papers. And so on and on.
by andai | 2026-01-29 15:03:40+00:00
> It's like if we took sleeping pills every time we had trouble sleeping. Having said that, I just realised I have the impression that's exactly what people do in the USA?

I can't speak for USA but in parts of Europe a lot of people have PTSD that prevents normal sleep, so they end up on these pills, and then they end up with PTSD and worse insomnia caused by long term use of sleep meds.

I think it's just incentives. Easier to take a pill than to deal with horrible trauma. And that probably stays true forever.
by iamleppert | 2026-01-29 15:03:42+00:00
At the end of the day, you're still trusting a misogynistic man to get you from point A to point B. One drives the car and works as a gig worker and wears a flannel shirt, and the other sits in an office at Waymo HQ, wears a patagonia vest. Both are still part of the patriarchy and have very little interest in making sure you're safe, unless there's money to be made.
by maxglute | 2026-01-29 15:03:58+00:00
This is a retarded list of self reported paper commitments, not actual practice, i.e. no actual supply chain assessment was done, not that you can trust a propaganda shitrag like amnesty. Tesla simply "promises" in their PR to be better for human rights. Hint 50%+ of Tesla exports come from Tesla Shanghai which uses same supply raw material supply chain as rest of PRC auto, functionally they're the same.

Meanwhile how do you factoring in PRC manufacturing is simply more modern with more labour saving automation, i.e. they simply have less people to "abuse". PRC simply be peak human rights by eliminating the most humans from process.
by shlip | 2026-01-29 15:04:04+00:00
IMHO I think you should write a post/readme/gist describing/demonstrating your browser's key features, with screencap if possible, maybe upload it to gitlab/github/other. It will fare better than asking strangers to download random files from a google drive link. (Although I saw your * is not a virus disclaimer, I still don't thin it's the optimal way to share a work you invested a lot of time on.)
by justcool393 | 2026-01-29 15:04:20+00:00
even 100 kB dynamically generated pages should be a piece of cake. if it's CRUD like (original op's site is), it should be downright trivial to transfer that much on like... shared hosting (although even a VPS would be much better).

(in original op's case, i clocked 197 requests using 20.60 MB while browsing their site for a little bit. most of it is static assets and i had caching disabled so each new pageload loaded stuff like the apple touch icons.)

honestly you could probably put it behind nginx for the statics and just use bog standard postgres or even prolly sqlite. nice bonus in that you don't have to worry about cold start times either!
by merryocha | 2026-01-29 15:04:23+00:00
I was in Chile in 2017 for a census operation and the whole country shut down to conduct the census. It was a pretty big deal while I was there (and also a bit inconvenient because everything was closed). There was a lot of talk about how there had been a previous attempt at conducting the census which had ended up being a huge failure and how getting the 2017 census done right was a point of national pride.

I also worked as a canvasser in 2019 and 2020 for the US census and, while we were about as thorough as you could reasonably get, the whole operation made me somewhat skeptical of official statistics in general. 2020 in particular was a bit of a disaster due to the pandemic and when the statistics were published, a bunch of mainstream news outlets published stories about certain areas experiencing "population decline" and all I could think was that those were actually the areas where the census didn't manage to count everyone.