MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PeterStuer | 2026-01-08 08:37:45+00:00
This is ketamine for procrastinators. Use at your own risk, YMMV.

We postpone not by choice, but by indecisiveness. Not just the 'things that will solve themselves', but also the things that will loom bigger and bigger over us until the built up stress breaks the veil.

It works, even very well as long as you also have the right skill combinations to deliver very fast eventually, but the cost is stress and in the longer term burnout and depression.
by kasabali | 2026-01-08 08:38:03+00:00
So much this. Thankfully it hasn't lost tabs for me for a very long time, but I find it ridiculous that Firefox's session persistence is basically "yeah let's deserialize it into a single line of JSON and write it to disk every 15 seconds".

On top of that, what was their solution when it became apparent it was slowly killing your SSD by blowing up write amplification through the roof [1]? Zipping the JSON. Yeah. Seriously.

I mean sure, this storage format might've been a nice first implementation as a PoC, but you'd think they'd redo this at some point and store the session in an Sqlite DB file or something, I mean it's not like they haven't been using it already for history and bookmarks.

1. https://www.servethehome.com/firefox-is-eating-your-ssd-here...
by madaxe_again | 2026-01-08 08:38:56+00:00
Ah, for days of yore, when if the parents wanted to talk to the school, they could… write a letter.

Honestly, I see no small part of the problem here as being that communication is too easy, and it results in a lot of frivolity. Used to be that you had a problem, you figured it out - now you can send an angry WhatsApp message, and because some person hasn’t responded to you within 20 seconds, they are now your problem, and any initiative to figure it out yourself has flown the coop.
by throwup238 | 2026-01-08 08:39:17+00:00
If you want solid evidence you can read a book on the history of animal husbandry. Roman sources include Cato the Elder, Columella, and Varro describe how they used supplemental grains to get cows through the winter and provide oxen enough energy to work (and to feed cavalry which would have been completely impossible without them). Humanity has been feeding grains to cattle for thousands of years, likely prehistorically.

Then in the first half of 1800s a bunch of American farmers with an abundance of corn independently discovered that they could grow bigger cows for slaughter in half the time if they fed them grains instead of roughage like hay or grass. That idea quickly spread to Europe and by the time the green revolution and globalization rolled around in the second half of the 20th century, almost every body started doing it.

This isn’t some new phenomenon. It predates the globalization of agriculture and if you were to ask a random farmer around the world whether they feed their cows a ton of grain they’d look at you like you were asking a very stupid question.

It’d be like asking “do plants need fertilizer?” Yes. If you want to feed the world, yes they do.
by swisniewski | 2026-01-08 08:39:34+00:00
Huh? I was commenting that there were no controls and the doctors were given skewed data, so any conclusions of ai ability vs Dr ability seem misplaced. Which seems to be what you just said… so I am confused about what I said that was inaccurate.

Can you clarify?

I also hinted at the fact that I only had access to the posted summary and the original linked article, and not the study. So if there is data I am missing… please enlighten me.
by rabchi | 2026-01-08 08:39:36+00:00
I remember seeing this presentation a few years ago on the security of PDF encryption: https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-10832-how_to_break_pdfs

I think this is a quick summary of one of their findings: https://pdf-insecurity.org/#how-to-break-pdf-encryption-nove...

This is perhaps something to be aware of.
by HaZeust | 2026-01-08 08:40:43+00:00
Outside of the pragmatic argument of current-tech limitations for such an implementation, cars should sometimes be a weapon.

If all cars were mandated by law to not accelerate when a person is in front of them, doesn't that give carjackers pretty much guaranteed success to confront and forcibly stop their victim before stealing their car, their belongings, or taking their life?

Why would I even bother buying a nice car if I know someone can just walk up in front of its front grill and hold me at gunpoint, and my car can't help but force me to stay there?
by anthk | 2026-01-08 08:41:04+00:00
Lambda Moo was not about Discworld but there were crazy experiments there, even in-game Gopher client I think.

Also, if you like Discworld, Nethack has tons of surprises because of it. The Tourist role was straightly taken from the books. And you can find in-game extracts from the novels too, giving you EXP if you read them.
by DamonHD | 2026-01-08 08:41:30+00:00
I am also reducing my reliance on the US a little, financially also.

Technically:

Have you looked at Fairphone? I've been using a couple lastig many many years now.

I self-host email, DNS, and a few other few services.

Do not use any part of Meta, and moved from Twitter to Mastodon/Fediverse, at least in part hosted in the EU.
by genewitch | 2026-01-08 08:41:32+00:00
> A person is most likely to see a food pyramid poster in an elementary or middle school classroom, cafeteria, or hallway, where it was commonly displayed as an educational tool during the 1990s and 2000s to teach nutrition.

the first one was in 1982 or something, so you have nearly 3 whole generations who were exposed to it (X, Millennial, and Z). I really can't tell if you're actually incredulous; because all the nutrition stuff is told to schoolchildren. Adults don't use a chart, they use self-help books.
by wt__ | 2026-01-08 08:42:00+00:00
(UK reader here too).

You could well be right, though I have a couple of theories why they Apple haven't rolled it out here:

- maybe they think it'll just be too messy, having to market different cashback reward rates and so on for the US and UK, due to the capped interchange fees - too much "it's not fair" style moaning like everyone did about Black Friday, even though we don't even celebrate Thanksgiving here.

- Apple have somewhat de-prioritised UK/Europe generally given their dealings with the EU

- (as others have hinted) most banks simply aren't interested

From the outside it does seem as though there was basically nothing in it for Goldman Sachs, other than perhaps useful spending data (they must surely have got some data, regardless of Apple's privacy claims) and a bit of industry prestige for being the ones to work with Apple?
by samrus | 2026-01-08 08:42:56+00:00
To understand why they syck at real world tasks, you gotta realize what LLMs are as a model. What do they model? They model static sequences, an example of which is language, the first thing they were used on. What are those?

'Sequences' is self explanatory. 'Static' is interesting, it means that the future state of the sequence is not dependent on your current action. As opposed to dynamical, which means the next state is a function of your current action/prediction, and your next action is a function of that resulting state and so on and so on.

An example of a dynamical system is easy, the stock market. If you sell 100 dollars of nvidia stock right now, it would have no effect on the market, but if you sold 50 billion dollars of nvidia stock, the market will definitely react, at least a little. You current action can change the future state of the system.

An example of a static system the way LLMs are trained on sentence pairs where you could have the sentence pair "i went to the bank. Swimming in the river was alot of fun" ans you give the LLM the first sentence and ask it to tell you what type of bank the sentect is referring to. If the LLM incorrectly says financial bank, the second sentence doesnt magically change to talk about a cashing a check, it stays the exact same. It stays the same whther the LLM guesses right or wrong. You just tell it whether its right or wrong

If your not scared of equations, a static system is y = f(x), and a dynamical system is a_1 = g(s_1), s_2 = h(a_1) and so on.

Static systems are modelled by supervised/self-supervised learning, dynamical systems are modelled by reinforcement learning. LLMs at their core are trained in a self supervised way (the RLHF is afterwards, not on the core of the foundation model) so they cant model a situation where their actions can have consequences that they have to plan for. They dont model the idea of planning at all. Thats why they can write pretty well. And can even pretend to have furhter capabilities, but they fall short of actually being able to do things because that requires planning and understanding the dynamical nature of the real world

Training an LLM or any modality of foundation model in a dynamical way would be the biggest improvement in AI since the attention mechanism
I analyzed 159 viral HN posts – negative sentiment outperforms positive 2:1
by JoseOSAF | 2026-01-08 08:43:16+00:00
I scraped 1,576 HN snapshots and found 159 stories that hit the maximum score. Then I crawled the actual articles and ran sentiment analysis.

The results surprised me.

*The Numbers*

- Negative sentiment: 78 articles (49%)
- Positive sentiment: 45 articles (28%)
- Neutral: 36 articles (23%)

Negative content doesn't just perform well – it dominates.

*What "Negative" Actually Means*

The viral negative posts weren't toxic or mean. They were:

- Exposing problems ("Why I mass-deleted my Chrome extensions")
- Challenging giants ("OpenAI's real business model")
- Honest failures ("I wasted 3 years building the wrong thing")
- Uncomfortable truths ("Your SaaS metrics are lying to you")

The pattern: something is broken and here's proof.

*Title Patterns That Worked*

From the 159 viral posts, these structures appeared repeatedly:

1. [Authority] says [Controversial Thing] - 23 posts
2. Why [Common Belief] is Wrong - 19 posts
3. I [Did Thing] and [Unexpected Result] - 31 posts
4. [Company] is [Doing Bad Thing] - 18 posts

Average title length: 8.3 words. The sweet spot is 6-12 words.

*What Didn't Work*

Almost none of the viral posts were:
- Pure product launches
- "I'm excited to announce..."
- Listicles ("10 ways to...")
- Generic advice

*The Uncomfortable Implication*

If you want reach on HN, you're better off writing about what's broken than what you built.

This isn't cynicism – it's selection pressure. HN readers are skeptics. They've seen every pitch. What cuts through is useful criticism backed by evidence.

*For Founders*

Before your next launch post, ask: what problem am I exposing? What assumption am I challenging? What did I learn the hard way?

That's your hook.

---

Data: Built a tool that snapshots HN/GitHub/Reddit/ProductHunt every 30 minutes. Analyzed 1,576 snapshots, found 2,984 instances of score=100, deduped to 159 unique URLs, crawled 143 successfully, ran GPT-4 sentiment analysis on full article text.

Happy to share the raw data if anyone wants to dig deeper.
by cody_ellingham | 2026-01-08 08:43:18+00:00
How does science fiction explore ideas of money, economics, and government? What is the role of speculative fiction in shaping how we see the world around us as well as helping imagine new possibilities?

Eli K. P. William is a Canadian sci-fi novelist, game writer, and translator based in Japan. In 2015 he published his first sci-fi novel, Cash Crash Jubilee, the first book in his “Jubilee Cycle” trilogy.

Most recently, Eli translated The Traveling Tree: Lessons from a Nomadic Life, a book by photographer Hoshino Michio.

[Other ways to listen.](https://www.thetransformationofvalue.com/episodes/sci-fi-eco...)
by jofzar | 2026-01-08 08:44:19+00:00
I'm not saying this product is good, it's looks interesting but in reality will suck (due to not being able to just close the laptop) but I found when I used to use a windows laptop the touch screen was great.

You just naturally get used to using it for reading documents/email/slack when you are using the laptop portable.

It's specially good when you are on a couch/shit surface where you would normally use the touch pad awkwardly, it's also great when you are "one hand" holding the laptop and then scrolling/showing someone something. I found it also great in the small ass meeting rooms for zoom calls.

I wish the MacBook had it.
by wereHamster | 2026-01-08 08:44:42+00:00
A lock file, in my world, contains a cryptographic hash of dependencies. go.mod does not, it only lists tags, which are (in git) movable references.

If go.sum has "no observable effect on builds", you don't know what you're building and go can download and run unverified code.

I'm not a go developer and must be misunderstanding something...
by elbci | 2026-01-08 08:45:13+00:00
> "How would you decouple from the US?"

Depends who's "you": if you are China you just stop answering the US calls, if you are EU you print out "Subsistence agriculture" from wikipedia ;)

And about "What do/would you do in my place?" - I would take a second look at those sometimes ~50% East Europeans that keep popping up in opinion pools saying the Russian occupation was better that EU - maybe they are not just crazy as the MSM paints them to be ;)

PS Linux is also US with over 95% of merges from corporations
by gnfargbl | 2026-01-08 08:45:20+00:00
If this is about protecting third parties from being scraped, why does Google have an interest at all? Surely Google won't have the relevant third-party data itself because, as you say, Google respects robots.txt. So how can that data be scraped from Google?

I don't think this suit is actually about that, though. I think Google's complaint is that

> SerpApi deceptively takes content that Google licenses from others

In other words, this is just a good old-fashioned licence violation.
by jonp888 | 2026-01-08 08:45:23+00:00
The British rail system releases as open data(JSON over AMQP) all train movements down to indidvidual signal blocks
You can view some of the the live maps here: https://www.opentraintimes.com/maps, but this is unique as far as I know.

I don't think it's really down to super-tight security as such, rather that there's no reason to release the data publically.

Ships and airplanes broadcast data because it's useful for collision avoidance and tracking. The international maritime and aerospace system is far too complicated and large that you could ever build a private network of every ship or plane operator sharing encrypted data, or that one company could set up receivers for the tracking data worldwide. A closed system wouldn't work.

Rail is both physically and legally a finite closed space. The network operator knows definitively where every train in their network is because they have sensors in the tracks. The network is responsible for preventing collisions, not the individual trains. They have contracts with every company which operates on their tracks and if these need their internal data they can get it. So there's simply no good reason why trains should be publically broadcasting their information, or why network operators would want to expose all their internal data.

And against the no positives there are negative sides - apart from a couple of famous cases I've not heard of it in Europe, but stealing from cargo trains seems to be big business in the US: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-11-17/los-ange...

In the UK the open tracking data also brought complaints from freight companies who feared competitors would use it to analyse their movements, figure out which traffic flows were the most profitable and use it for commercial advantage.
by TeMPOraL | 2026-01-08 08:46:10+00:00
> Like play out AI, it sucks for everybody except the ones holding the steering wheel

Not true. Models don't make owners money sitting there doing nothing - they only get paid when people find value in what AI is producing for them. The business model of AI companies is actually almost uniquely honest compared to rest of software industry: they rent you a tool that produces value for you. No enshittification, no dark patterns, no taking your data hostage, no turning into a service what should've been a product. Just straightforward exchange of money for value.

So no, it doesn't such for everyone except them. It only sucks for existing businesses that find themselves in competition with LLMs. Which, true, is most of software industry, but it's still just something that happens when major technological breakthrough is achieved. Electricity and Internet and internal combustion engines did the same thing to many past industries, too.
by ricardo81 | 2026-01-08 08:46:28+00:00
Fetching web pages at the kind of volume needed to keep the index fresh is a problem, unless you're Googlebot. It requires manual intervention with whitelisting yourself with the likes of Cloudflare, cutting deals with the likes of Reddit and getting a good reputation with any other kind of potential bot blocking software that's unfamiliar with your user agent. Even then, you may still find yourself blocked from critical pieces of information.
by irere123 | 2026-01-08 08:46:50+00:00
Diffusion models are a new class of state-of-the-art generative models that generate diverse high-resolution images. They have already attracted a lot of attention after OpenAI, Nvidia and Google managed to train large-scale models. Example architectures that are based on diffusion models are GLIDE, DALLE-2, Imagen, and the full open-source stable diffusion. But what is the main principle behind them?
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-08 08:49:04+00:00
Egypt, the UAE, Qatar, Iran and Syria fly the MiG-29s and Rafales that Pakistan’s JF-17s successfully (allegedly) shot down and pursued, respectively, in the May air battle with India [1].

(Granted, experts point to Pakistan’s integrated air defenses as its ace in the hole. India’s lack of preparedness for a genuine conflict turned that advantage decisive.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_India%E2%80%93Pakistan_co...
by chaitanyya | 2026-01-08 08:49:36+00:00
It's an interesting one. Every time I speak with engineering teams about reliability and correctness, they all want more of it, yet when it comes to investing in it, it's never really a priority.

More often than not, people test the wrong things; they struggle to even identify the right properties to test.

I question my worldview on this because I don't think it's a particularly difficult problem. There are companies like Antithesis that have done incredible work in this space.

I am building in automated property-based testing, and it's not an easy sell.
by visarga | 2026-01-08 08:50:45+00:00
No, I think we can get by with using CommonCrawl, pulling every few months the fresh content and updating the search stubs. The idea is you don't change the entry points often, you open them up when you need to get the fresh content.

Imagine this stack: local LLM, local search stub index, and local code execution sandbox - a sovereign stack. You can get some privacy and independence back.
by lnsru | 2026-01-08 08:50:51+00:00
I have license for boat and use nautical maps. They show me a cable, but not the hierarchy of the infrastructure. I see a cable, but can’t evaluate if half of town stays without electricity or only an island with dozen houses if I damage it.

However the available maps do not stop russian ships regularly dropping anchors on European infrastructure in Baltic see. Obviously charting them does not help. Maybe they should stay secret at the end.
by subscribed | 2026-01-08 08:51:53+00:00
> 100% in 5 min

Fair, I was wrong to pick up on that particular one given the above, my apologies, however I'd expect bikes and cars to be set up to charge less and slower anyway.

And I agree for a bikes it would be a game changer. Currently I wouldn't take electric for a few hundred miles ride, too much hassle, but I'd absolutely love the scenario you picture.

Concerning range though, I think their estimate is pretty fair as far as the marketoid speech goes -- it can be 600 km, even though no one will be buying this bike to commute exclusively within city limits while much cheaper moped would be better.
by risyachka | 2026-01-08 08:52:09+00:00
This.

I wouldn't be surprised if AI was better than going to GP or many other specialists in majority of cases.

And the issue is not with the doctors themselves, but the complexity of human body.

Like many digestive issues can cause migraines or a ton of other problems. I am yet to see when someone is referred to gut health professional because of the migraine.

And a lot of similar cases when absolutely random system causes issues in seemingly unrelated system.

A lot of these problems are not life threatening thus just get ignored as they would take too much effort and cost to pinpoint.

AI on the other hand should be pretty good at figuring out those vague issues that you would never figured out otherwise.
by prof-dr-ir | 2026-01-08 08:52:58+00:00
> I really miss Google Inbox

I very much agree. Also really miss the ability to quickly group related emails.

(And no, that was not the same as adding a label; for one, the whole group simply appeared as one "bigger" email in the Inbox. It was a bit like a thread that you can manually add emails to.)

When everybody got kicked out of Inbox I happened to have a group of about ten emails related to an upcoming trip. Those ten emails got de-grouped and scattered all around in the ordinary gmail interface. I would have appreciated a smoother transition...
by brobles | 2026-01-08 08:55:15+00:00
I got tired of guests asking about Wifi password or how to usethe coffe machine. or best local restaurants. I had a welcome guide but it was only in English.

I had to create one version using Canva for each lang and was a nightmare to maintain it.

I created this tool so I can upload a pdf guide and pick the langs and just create a shared link with all the PDFS that I want to share. I use the QR for share and when I want I can update pdfs !

Curious if other hosts deal with thisor if everyone just uses ENglish and hopes for the best.
by _jackdk_ | 2026-01-08 08:56:29+00:00
Some years ago I wrote Haskell bindings to libtelnet ( https://hackage.haskell.org/package/libtelnet ) and a reflex wrapper around them ( https://hackage.haskell.org/package/reflex-libtelnet ).

Perhaps they are useful to you. If you need dependency bounds relaxed or revised to work on modern GHCs, let me know and I'll take a look.
by farseer | 2026-01-08 08:56:31+00:00
I have seen my uncle do it. He is a corporate finance consultant. He simply opens his laptop or phone and starts working on random things, replying to e-mails, making presentations, scheduling appointments, creating/closing tasks on client PM/ERP software. Sometimes for as little as 3 minutes.

As a developer, for the longest time I thought why tf can't I be as productive! Then I realized the rev up time for my line of work is not like his. By the time my brain switches context to work on code, those 5 minutes are up.
by happymellon | 2026-01-08 08:56:50+00:00
> It's similar to how I never associated the word spaz with... I dunno what it is... multiple sclerosis or whatever, apparently that's a very common association in the UK, but I'd never heard of it (the association)

It is a shortening of spastic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scope_(charity)
by 3D30497420 | 2026-01-08 08:57:14+00:00
I'm a pretty big fan of the cancer treatments that saved my mother, the emergency medical treatment that saved my wife, the antibiotics that saved my brother. Also, it is -15C outside, and I am very much enjoying central heating.

With that said, I do partly agree with you. I do think that becoming too divorced from the natural world drives a great many ills.

I think the challenge is finding the balance. We sure don't have it now.