MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by socalgal2 | 2026-01-31 06:05:13+00:00
I'm willing to bet that the metaverse (defined by me as AR glasses) is a future that's coming and that Zuck was just too early, just like Palm Pilot was arguably too early. The use cases are too compelling, effectively a computer assistant that can tell you anything and everything about what you did or are doing. Yes, privacy people will hate it but the rest will eat it up just like they don't care about privacy on their phones.
by ronyeh | 2026-01-31 06:05:56+00:00
> For example, "uh-oh" has a high-low pitch. If you say it wrong it sounds very strange. "Uh-huh" to show understanding goes low-high. Again, if you reverse it it sounds unusual.

Wow… Thanks for making it clear that English also has tones! I hadn’t thought of it this way before. “Uh-huh” sounds similar to Mandarin tones 3 & 2. “Uh-oh” is similar to Cantonese tones 1 & 3.

I’m wondering if we can find good examples to teach the Mandarin tones. I think two or three syllable words are best because it illustrates the contour of the tones.
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-01-31 06:08:03+00:00
Yes, but they are inconvenient, you had to line up in the morning for an appointment when I lived in Beijing, and scalpers would commonly grab most of the tickets early to sell to you for a few hundred RMB. I hear they have a better system now, something based on WeChat without the scalping.

Private hospitals were mostly staffed by doctors from Eastern Europe and Iran, at least the one I went to (UFH in Lido, Beijing), lots of rich Chinese customers. It was comfortable and you just made an appointment on the phone. You got to wait in a nice waiting room with a plush couch rather than a concrete brutaleski waiting room with plastic chairs, private birthing rooms for babies rather than a community birthing room.
by defrost | 2026-01-31 06:08:47+00:00
What percentage is "A good portion" ?

Gold mining dates back to ancient civilisations.

Our best estimates suggest that around 216,265 tonnes of gold have been mined throughout history.

Interestingly, about two-thirds of this gold has been extracted since 1950.

This massive increase in production has been due to advancements in mining technology and the discovery of new gold deposits.

* https://www.gold.org/goldhub/data/how-much-gold

200 Years of Global Gold Production, by Country - https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/200-years-of-global-go...

Between 1500 and 1650, the Spanish imported 181 tons of gold and 16,000 tons of silver from the New World ...

* https://www.quora.com/How-much-gold-did-the-Spaniards-take-f...

What's your estimate for the tonnage of gold "hoarded since biblical times" ?
by kittikitti | 2026-01-31 06:09:22+00:00
The COVID economic depression is not accurately shown in the charts. The economy shut down for more than 2 years. Before RTO, the economy was in a depression. These charts provide indicators to what's happening on the ground. The classic indicators didn't accurately capture the Coronavirus lockdown.

The economy is still growing from the quarantine lockdown. It's why we didn't see a collapse, it would have to be worse than what happened during the lockdown for the economy to be in a recession. That's not the case, and I don't see a collapse or recession for at least 3 years.

For most of us, we work remotely and some people might be out of touch. Don't take this the wrong way, but people are just recently recovering from cottage syndrome. We're still in the transition period with the layoffs and AI doomerism being growing pains.
by Braxton1980 | 2026-01-31 06:10:46+00:00
>Market economy

What about US government involvement in the economy?

Trump is pushing countries and companies to invest in the US and adding restrictions on who they sell their products to (Nvidia). Significant widespread tariffs also exist that businesses must decide how to deal with.

Government involvement in business decisions, even if indirect, is not a market economy. In a true market economy supply and demand should determine prices. Businesses and consumers make most of the decisions. Obviously that never happens but we have moved much further away than the recent past.

>attracting talent, innovation,

- Trump raised the fee for H1Bs and blocked student visas from 19 countries.

- His inflammatory rhetoric has harmed the international reputation of the US

This both decreases the pool of people who can come here and for that smaller pool it increases the probability that smart and innovative people may look elsewhere to either study or start a company.

He has introduced the ability to buy citizenship for a high investment price but there are many talented people who aren't wealthy. Besides just making money for the government I'm not sure how impactful this is.

He cut government funding for many scientific research endeavors and government programs. These may or may not be replaced by private industry and while some/many had no value one of them could have been the next internet. His cuts were not precise enough as they were done quickly and based on money for all to be justified as cutting the waste.

The only thing that hasn't changed is the geography.

--------------
I'm sure you can point to similar actions in the past but I believe the quantity, speed, and intensity are significantly different than in recent times.

I'm also not arguing that none of changes were justified or that cost cutting isn't needed. I just believe it's a clear change in the ingredients.
by item007 | 2026-01-31 06:11:30+00:00
Thank you for your free comments.
That makes sense. Local-first seems like the only viable starting point for “important” notes.
On pricing: would you prefer a one-time purchase, or “bring your own model” (Ollama etc.) so the ongoing cost is basically compute you already own?
Also: what would be an acceptable failure mode — missing suggestions vs occasional wrong suggestions?
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-01-31 06:12:46+00:00
Harbin is north of Vladivostok you know? But yah, Yakutsk is where you can’t turn your car off in the winter (well, they have auto start and stop now to keep the engine from freezing, no power outlets like in Fairbanks for block heaters) and often have to encase the whole car in a warming sock (which is exactly how you imagine it). Yakutsk is east of Siberia in the Saka republic though, the closest comparable city in Siberia is Norilsk (not as cold or populous as Yakutsk).
by McGlockenshire | 2026-01-31 06:13:04+00:00
Sorry I'm going to have to softly call bullshit on the TI 99/4 section.

> Texas Instruments intended to have total control over the software for its computers, and to reap all of the profits from selling ROM cartridges. Grown arrogant from their long string of consumer products successes (including 1978’s Speak and Spell), TI evidently felt they could dictate the terms for a new category without consideration for the existing, highly-competitive market for personal computers.

They're talking about GROMs here. The 99/4 firmware contains a virtual machine that implements what they call Graphics Programming Language, or GPL. What a search nightmare today!

The idea was that most programmers would be using GPL almost exclusively, and GPL was highly opinionated. The original designers wanted TI to actually build a custom processor just for it, but this was back when it was just a specification and not a design. Cartridges ended up with a non-standard ROM design for technical reasons first.

But ultimately the guy in charge of designing the damn thing intended the GROM requirement to be solving that technical problem first and offering a simplification to devs second. No need to find someone to build your own ROMs, just send us the data and some money!

Source: A five hour interview with Doctor Granville Ott.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keWwxWHGKtw

The guy's a good geek.

What the business did, though, is utterly incomprehensible. The company sounds like a complete disaster. No, there was no arrogant strategy. There was no strategy.

I'm currently working on an interview with the other guy on that stage (no, not the youtuber ... he's later) and writing an essay on the 99000.

The slant the article gives the 99/4 is really awful and doesn't seem planted in current knowledge.
by drgo | 2026-01-31 06:14:14+00:00
For a "little" speech, it is all people seem to talk about; e.g., it was mentioned few times in the comments above. And, yes, one can be on the board of a public company and still make valid and consequential analyses. Hell, one can be a convicted fraudster and at the same time become the president of a superpower. My point, you could belittle Canada, EU, China etc but it is going to solve the US's intractable problems.
by pfannkuchen | 2026-01-31 06:14:18+00:00
How do we ensure that we don’t enter the failure mode of “not enough necessities get made”?

Like it seems like people are ideologically for or against UBI, but I’ve never seen anyone discuss how the mechanism would avoid this outcome. Like I’m not saying it’s 100% the outcome that would happen on whatever time frame, just that even e.g. a 10% chance of that happening would make it too risky to attempt at scale. And like I don’t accept “some people just love farming” or “a lot of stuff that isn’t needed gets made now”, I need an actual mechanism description.
by altairprime | 2026-01-31 06:15:32+00:00
Just livestream yourself coding / maintaining / patching / fixing on Twitch

I don’t know why no one does this to counter AI objections

It would be the perfect counterargument to plagiarism objections by a college, too

It’s not about how many viewers you get, it’s that Twitch is an unbiased third party record of date/time/work

Would be the most boring stream in the world from a content perspective but it sure would wordlessly counter any claims that you’re using AI

Wordful pleas won’t help at all though
by butanol | 2026-01-31 06:16:13+00:00
asking is another thing i respect if am being asked trust me I'll not be sad at all but getting comments on your post like "another fucking AI piece of written shit being posted" do you realise how insulting it is? if it would have been "is it AI made?" or something along those lines I'll happily state "the project has not used AI except grammarly for readme"
by pcardoso | 2026-01-31 06:16:26+00:00
I tend to hoard things sometimes: links, notes, screenshots with useful tidbits, scraps of paper with notes…

One of the things I keep is the list of stuff I did during the day for when the standup call comes. Sometimes I forgot of mention a lot of stuff.

Then a few weeks ago I build the MVP of a note taking app specifically for this purpose: what did I do, what am I doing next, am I blocked by something?

No backend, data is stored in browser local storage, quick to load, a weekly summary and data export. No tracking whatsoever.

Not ready yet, which is why I didn’t do a Show HN feature yet, but has been useful to me even in its current state.

It lives at https://tinyleaps.app
by scrubs | 2026-01-31 06:17:00+00:00
Yah Stephen Wolfram is too often grandiose thereby missing the hard edges.

But in this case, given how hard P=NP is, it might create wiggle room for progress.

Ideally it would have gone on and said in view of lemma/proof/conjecture X, sampling enumerated programs might shine light on ... no doubt that'd be better.

But here I'm inclined to let it slide if it's a new attack vector.
by item007 | 2026-01-31 06:18:12+00:00
Fair critique. I probably didn’t explain the wedge clearly. I’m not trying to optimize Obsidian setups — I’m testing whether “right-time recall → next action” is a real pain vs a non-problem for most users.
For you personally, what’s the smallest concrete outcome that would make this useful (if any): better retrieval, fewer missed follow-ups, or something else? If the answer is “none”, that’s also valuable signal.
by refurb | 2026-01-31 06:18:21+00:00
Unsurprising.

Plenty of examples of people losing/not getting Global Entry for:

- having a misdemeanor from 50 years ago

- having mail seized by the post office

- having the same name as a someone with a disqualifying record

- living in the same (I.e. same address) as someone who has a disqualifying record

- getting caught not declaring something at the border even though it was disposed of

My guess is that ICE face scans get added to a “related to immigration investigation” and it automatically revokes GE.

Good news is that the Ombudsman can resolve issues related to identity.

But for even the most minor infraction USCBP will remind you GE is a “privilege” and is given at the discretion of the government.
by barrell | 2026-01-31 06:20:27+00:00
I’m building a language learning app [https://phrasing.app] and this is really good advice. I’ve not had any interest in SST for the application, and have no plans to integrate it. In my experience, I’ve never seen them be truly beneficial in the language learning process.

What has been extremely beneficial has been having the text and audio forced aligned and highlighted, kareoke-style, every time I hear the audio. It has improved my phoneme recognition remarkably well with remarkably little content. Several users also report the same thing - that even native speech feels a lot more like separate words than just a slew of sounds. I attribute this in large part just due to this kareoke style audio. It works better for phonetic scripts, so I would recommend using this with pinyin/jyutping/furigana for character based languages.

For production, when I was at Regina Coeli (world-class language institute) their main thing was just 1. you hear a short passage in Dutch, 10-40 words 2. you record yourself reading the same passage and 3. you play back the two audio tracks on top of one another and listen for the difference. Optional step 4. Re-record and replay until it’s close enough.

There was no grading, no teacher checking recordings, no right or wrong; just hundreds of random sentences and a simple app to layer them. You needed to learn to hear the differences yourself and experiment until you no longer could. (fwiw this is not present in phrasing, I just found it relevant. One day soon I hope to add it!)
by gpt5 | 2026-01-31 06:21:52+00:00
If you are curious what this is about. The US effectively wanted a geostationary satellite parked right over the high-latitude regions of the Soviet Union to intercept their signals.

The problem is, that geostationary satellites must orbit directly above the equator. If you try to look at northern Russia from the equator, the curvature of the Earth gets in the way.

So, the NRO used a Molniya (HEO) orbit as a clever cheat.

They launched JUMPSEAT into a stretched-out ellipse. Because of orbital mechanics, a satellite moves incredibly fast when it's close to Earth (perigee) but slows down dramatically when it's far away (apogee). It spends about 10 hours of its 12-hour orbit just loitering high above the USSR, slowly drifting across the sky, essentially emulating a geostationary satellite.
by Lutger | 2026-01-31 06:22:12+00:00
Neither is 'real'. The power of might depends on belief just as much as the power of rules. You need a whole lot of compliance, even when forced by fear and terror, to just keep up a police state. The belief consists of where people think other people assign authority to, at large. But that can be just as brittle as a meme stock if the time is right.

Social reality is always constructed. No single construction is more real than any other.
by PlanksVariable | 2026-01-31 06:22:38+00:00
Yes, and also pushing identity politics down voters’ throats, selecting an inept candidate without a primary, their desperate attempts to buy votes with debt forgiveness, and opening the border, which escalated to a full-blown crisis leading into election season.

If we extrapolate Trump’s health today compared to where he was at just a year or two ago, I think Republicans will face the same dilemma the Democrats did soon. It will be interesting to see how they handle it.
by gwern | 2026-01-31 06:22:39+00:00
I don't get it. Embeddings don't prioritize, or even necessarily encode, truth value as a dimension. And even if they did, if you simply accept based on some hyperparameter of distance, it sounds like this procedure just leaves you vulnerable to problems like salami-slicing where you reach 'the sky is green' (which after all, it is sometimes) by multiple steps just below the tolerance.
Why AI coding agents feel powerful at first, then become harder to control
by hoangnnguyen | 2026-01-31 06:24:02+00:00
I’ve been thinking a lot about why AI coding agents feel great in the beginning, but become frustrating as projects grow.

At small scale, prompting works. As the codebase grows, things start to drift:
- constraints leak into prompts
- commands get longer
- behavior becomes inconsistent
- “helpful” changes appear outside the intended scope

Lately, I’ve been mapping common agent concepts (rules, commands, skills, sub-agents, MCP, hooks) not as features, but as control layers in an execution loop.

Very roughly:
- rules constrain decisions
- commands trigger execution
- skills encode repeatable methodology
- sub-agents limit responsibility
- MCP enables observation
- hooks enforce guarantees

My hypothesis is that many frustrations come from mixing these layers.

For example, encoding constraints in commands, or trying to use hooks for reasoning.

I’m curious how others here are thinking about this:
- Do you treat agents as conversations or as systems?
- At what point does prompting stop scaling for you?
- How do you control blast radius when agents touch larger codebases?
- Have you found concepts like skills or sub-agents actually useful, or just extra complexity?
by miki123211 | 2026-01-31 06:24:47+00:00
Could you run some kind of hybrid DHT where part of it was Webrtc and part was plain HTTP(S) / WebSocket?

There are some nodes (desktop clients with UPNP, dedicated servers) that can accept browser connections. Those nodes could then help you exchange offers/answers to give you connections with the Webrtc-only ones, and those could facilitate offer/answer exchanges with their peers in turn.

It'd be dog-slow compared to the single-udp-packet-in, single-udp-packet-out philosophy of traditional mainline DHT, but I don't see why the idea couldn't work in principle.

I think a much bigger problem is content discovery and update distribution. You can't really do decentralized search because it'd very quickly get sybil-attacked to death. You'd always need some kind of centralized, trusted content index, but not necessarily one hosted on a centralized server. If you could have a reliable way to go from a pubkey to the latest hash signed by that pubkey in a decentralized way, + E.G. a Sqlite extension to get pages on-demand via WebTorrent, that would get you a long way towards solving the problem.
by pfannkuchen | 2026-01-31 06:25:29+00:00
It does but that is the first order effect only. You also have people buying gold because number going up means number goes up more. This has a positive feedback loop since the people buying for that reason also makes number go up, which sucks in more people. You also have people bandwagoning hyperinflation type scenarios without a plausible thesis, which results in I think much more hedging in this area than usual. I hadn’t seen hyperinflation as a topic break into the mainstream before. You also have opportunistic savvy speculation that is based on a perception of the perception of the people doing the other ones. And probably more scenarios since there are a lot of interactions possible at higher orders.

So like some of the increase in gold price is due to the decrease in dollar value, certainly, but it isn’t all of it, and at the present time I don’t believe it is near to most of it.
by superfluous_g | 2026-01-31 06:25:45+00:00
Getting folks to care is essential in my experience. In coaching adults "what's in it for me?" is the end of my first section and forms the basis of their first prompt. Also how I cover risk - ie. "How do I not damage my credibility?". If you're asking people to break habits and processes, you've got to make them want to.

That said, the hands on approach here is great and also foundational in my experience.
by item007 | 2026-01-31 06:26:52+00:00
There are a few directions I know but not sure:

“semantic search via embeddings” plugins (Obsidian Semantic Search is one example)

local-first assistants via Ollama (e.g. obsidian-local-gpt)

full “RAG over your vault” projects (I’ve seen ObsidianRAG-style setups)

My takeaway so far is similar to what others said here: reliability + noise + UX are the hard parts, not just “having embeddings”.
What would “good enough” look like for you: speed, recall quality, or tight integration into daily notes?
by frumplestlatz | 2026-01-31 06:27:01+00:00
This is a category error. Immigration enforcement -- even when abusive or unlawful, which is not a concession I make -- is not genocide. Invoking 1939 Germany collapses distinctions that matter.

Holocaust analogies based on unsupported anecdote and asserted intent aren’t analysis; they’re unfalsifiable rhetorical escalations designed to end debate. If every disliked policy is treated as a "seed" of genocide, as is now common, the term loses meaning and becomes an empty rhetorical weapon. Argue specific actions with evidence and standards, or don’t -- but stop inflating unfalsifiable moral claims to the point where serious critique is impossible.

> Even if the current state of immigration policy was forged in a bipartisan agreement(it wasn't), it would be inhumane and I would condemn it.

We haven’t passed a comprehensive immigration law since 1986, and the enforcement framework in use today arises from bipartisan legislation passed in 1986, major subsequent revisions in 1996, and layers of later executive discretion exercised by administrations of both parties. We had four years of functionally non-existent enforcement, and while I cannot ascribe motive, the natural outcome was to make later enforcement incredibly difficult -- a consequence that is now plainly visible.

If you think those laws are unjust, argue that -- but don’t pretend this is some novel or uniquely partisan creation.
by arendtio | 2026-01-31 06:27:08+00:00
Especially in the age of AI tools, I also thought about this a few times. The current idea I have is something like a parking meter. Every expensive transaction (like calling a model) would subtract from the money pool, and every visitor could see how much is still left in the pool. In addition, a list of the top 5 donors with their amounts might improve the group dynamic (like on pay-what-you-want pages like humblebundle.com).

It would be more about covering the cost than about making someone rich, but I think that is what most of the people who build stuff care about. Sadly, I don't know a service yet that offers this model.