MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by patcon | 2026-01-09 00:30:07+00:00
I think it's a neat service layer: and infra layer that attests to people's addresses -- to break it you need to intercept mail, which is a federal offence in most states. So it piggybacks on assurances of states, even while being nonstate.

In an experimental identity system I prototyped as a civic tech project[1], I paired this with scraping a government "voter registration check" form and comparing against, and it was a two-fold guarantee: someone had to either submit false info to the voter registry or intercept mail. In theory it was very cheap to get very high assurances, for only the cost of a postcard API per user

[1]: https://github.com/patcon/id.c4nada.ca?tab=readme-ov-file#ab...
by al_borland | 2026-01-09 00:30:41+00:00
> the reality is they should have already "figured out" how to play the system and just farmed the reward points from credit cards and immediately pay them off without incurring any interest.

I did this for a while after being bitten a couple times for not having a credit history.

However, I recently stopped. I still keep one card around and active just to maintain my score… just in case. However, spending $10k for $200 in rewards… I don’t really care. That’s mostly a tool to get people to justify more spending.

I’ve quite liked using the debit card and seeing the number go down when I spend, it makes more sense intuitively, and I always know exactly what I have. I had a debit card stolen about 20 years ago; I was able to get the charges reversed, no different from a credit card in my experience. It’s on the Visa network.

I would cancel my last credit card, but I don’t want to deal with cell phone deposits and other nonsense, like I had to in the past.
by keketi | 2026-01-09 00:31:54+00:00
How about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Nepalese_Gen_Z_protests#9...

September 9, 2025 - Protesters storm the Nepalese parliament, ransacking it and setting it on fire. Homes of leading politicians are also torched and the politicians themselves attacked.

Soon thereafter, the prime minister resigned along with other ministers and the president dissolved the parliament and scheduled a new election.

I think that counts as a successful rebellion or revolt.
by nateb2022 | 2026-01-09 00:32:47+00:00
The confusion clears up if you stop conflating contextual conditioning (prompting) with actual Learning (weight updates). For LLMs, "few-shot prompting" is technically a misnomer that stuck; you are just establishing a pattern in the context window, not training the model.

In voice cloning, the reference audio is simply the input, not a training example. You wouldn't say an image classifier is doing "one-shot learning" just because you fed it one image to classify. That image is the input. Similarly, the reference audio is the input that conditions the generation. It is zero-shot because the model's weights were never optimized for that specific speaker's manifold.
by sanity | 2026-01-09 00:33:01+00:00
Good question, this has understandably been confusing.

They’re two distinct pieces of software created by the same project. The original Freenet dates back to the early 2000s and focused heavily on anonymity. In 2023 it was spun out into its own project and renamed Hyphanet. It’s largely incompatible with the newer system.

Work on a clean-slate successor started in 2019 under the internal name Locutus. That codebase rethinks the design from the ground up, based on lessons from running the original Freenet for many years and with different tradeoffs.

After the split in 2023, Locutus was renamed back to Freenet. What’s being shown here is that newer Freenet.

There’s a longer history and rationale in the FAQ if you want more detail:
https://freenet.org/faq/#what-is-the-projects-history
by parl_match | 2026-01-09 00:33:23+00:00
you don't need to do anything. why try? sit at home and watch tv.

i can hike elevation all day which is great for backpacking, i look great with a shirt off, and i can stand up from the couch without using my hands.

yes, im taking it a bit far at this point, but really that just means eating the average american's protein intake and then a protein shake or two on top
by Terr_ | 2026-01-09 00:33:31+00:00
I wonder how much competitors benefit from simply Not Being The OS Company, and whether that also influences Bing in the search-engine space.

If someone has very personal or embarrassing questions, they might prefer not to go to someone that "knows them" in other ways. (In this case, by bludgeoning Windows users into to making a Microsoft Account to use their computer, and collecting "telemetry.")
by Lalabadie | 2026-01-09 00:33:50+00:00
What component-specific styles look like:

class="menu-item"

Styles-in-HTML (Tailwind):

class="m-4 mb-2 p-2 border border-radius-sm border gray-200 hover:border-gray-300 font-sm sm:font-xs [...]"

You can be completely insensitive to or unbothered by the difference, but that doesn't mean they're equivalent.
by al_borland | 2026-01-09 00:34:21+00:00
Reddit is also in the App Store. It has a significant amount of adult content. They also had some very legally questionable subreddits as well, which they tried to clean up before going public, but I can only assume it’s a cat and mouse game.

I think it’s a user generated content loophole. Since the app it’s explicitly for that stuff, it’s just that some users post it. Web browsers get a similar exemption, there is all kinds of stuff on the internet.
by pstuart | 2026-01-09 00:34:41+00:00
There are legitimate industrial uses for hydrogen, so if it can be generated and applied without the costs of storage and transport it would not be a bad option to have.

I do agree that there's significant greenwashing by the petroleum companies to push it as you note, but both of these things can be true.

At least they seem to have given up on the lunacy of using hydrogen for fueling vehicles. Green hydrogen sourced methanol on the other hand would be worthy of pursuit.
My Daily Lesson in Hacker News Etiquette
by jannesblobel | 2026-01-09 00:35:25+00:00
TLDR: HN kept changing my `Launch HN` post to `Show HN`

My last post was about what I’m working on. We had just launched, and I was excited to hear some feedback.

Full of anticipation, I used the prefix `Launch HN` in the title and clicked Submit.

After rereading the post, I noticed the title was wrong. It said `Show HN: ... `instead of `Launch HN: ....`

I assumed I had made a mistake, so I edited the post and changed the title back to `Launch HN`.

I pressed Submit again—only for it to revert to Show HN.

After repeating this a few times, deleting the post, and submitting it again, I finally realized it wasn’t me.

It was HN.

I’m glad I learned something new about Hacker News and the etiquette today. I’ll keep going, and eventually I’ll be able to post something that someone else wants to see.

For now, I’ll just take a quick look at what’s new on HN and call it a day.
by citizenpaul | 2026-01-09 00:36:12+00:00
Its really a high level bikeshed. Obviously we are all still using and experimenting with LLM's. However there is a huge gap of experiences and total usefulness depending on the exact task.

The majority of HN's still reach for LLM's pretty regularly even if they fail horribly frequently. Thats really the pit the tech is stuck in. Sometimes it oneshots your answer perfectly, or pair programs with you perfectly for one task, or notices a bug you didn't. Sometimes it wastes hours of your time for various subtle reasons. Sometimes it adamantly insists 2 + 2 = 55
by istjohn | 2026-01-09 00:36:20+00:00
> By this definition, we're all racist. Maybe that's true but it kind of ceases to be a useful distinction at that point.

Does it? I would argue that recognizing that we all swim in a soup of cultural biases and familiarities that advantage some people and disadvantage others is a noteworthy insight, an insight with practical implications. After all, we aren't volitionless molecules bouncing off walls. What if we made an effort to observe these biases more closely, to study there effects, and to better understand the way they effect our own behaviour? Then, what if we made an effort to counteract these biases, first in our own behaviour and then in our communities?
by otterley | 2026-01-09 00:36:29+00:00
> I would recommend that you, as a sysadmin, learn at least the most basic things about this stuff.

This sort of language is inappropriate and insulting.

In any event, no filter screen is perfect. Getting rid of 80% of bot traffic is a good thing, even if you can't rid yourself of 100% of it. You can't let perfect be the enemy of "pretty good."

People use CAPTCHAs because they work--even if imperfectly. Of course, you have to stay on top of the latest implementations.
by wvenable | 2026-01-09 00:36:39+00:00
> my whole point was that letting exceptions bubble is not a universally acceptable policy.

It should be. It should bubble to whatever boundary you have (web API, event loop, etc). At that boundary, if it's not supposed to leak information then don't. Do whatever sanitation you need at one point only. Good use of exceptions should have as few "catch" blocks as possible.
by jmward01 | 2026-01-09 00:36:40+00:00
Just shows how much you are worth as a product to them, and how little competition is in the cell market, that all these devices can get lifetime cell connections while we are paying, how much a month? Actually, lawsuits about privacy for devices like this should quote how much the infrastructure costs are to support their tech. The network, services, people, etc are all a good estimate of actual value, in dollars, they are deriving from selling you as a product.
by zelon88 | 2026-01-09 00:37:08+00:00
It's relevant because ground based satellites add observational capacity. If a ground based telescope can't get a good view, that's when you queue up Chandra or James Webb (Hubble is not the same type of telescope, and it's workload is not interchangeable).

Astronomers have thousands of interesting things they would like to point their telescopes at. There are thousands of capable ground stations that could take the easy targets, and only 2 x-ray satellites which should be used only for the highest value targets where absolute clarity and resolution is required. But if you start obstructing those ground stations, the workload must be taken over by just 2 satellites.

Ground stations are valued because they help solve the capacity planning problem. More usable telescopes === more observation time. Having more ground stations frees up the 2 satellite telescopes for truly stunning shots.
by falldrown | 2026-01-09 00:37:16+00:00
Codex is still useful for me. But I don't want to pay $200/month for it.

> To start making models better again, AI coding companies need to invest in high-quality data, perhaps even paying experts to label AI-generated code.

AI trainers hired by companies like Outlier, Mercor and Alignerr are getting paid like $15-$45/hr. Reviewers are crap. The screening processes are horribly done by AI interviewers.
by FloorEgg | 2026-01-09 00:37:17+00:00
No it's not...

The GP's accusations of gatekeeping and dishonesty led me to deduce he was making assumptions about political leaning rather than a more respectful interpretation being to protect intellectually curious dialog.

Then parent made a comment about how political categorization doesn't matter when I can share an ideology with a political official out side of my jurisdiction.

So I think I reasonably asked a clarifying question about whether I was being assumed an ideology for my stance of the interpretation of HN guidelines. I asked this because I couldn't see any other reason why parent would have brought up ideology or made that comment.

This is certainly not sealioning. I am not trolling, I am not harassing, I am not demanding evidence or attempting to disrupt dialog. I was only trying to clarify parents point and reason for introducing ideology into the dialog.
by m4rtink | 2026-01-09 00:37:50+00:00
Starlinks are in self cleaning orbits & are actually being moved even lower due to solar minimum & better capacity:

https://www.space.com/space-exploration/satellites/spacex-lo...

And any weaponized junk schrapnel a DiY iranian ASAP missile would deploy would be sub-orbital and would all come down in a couple minutes.
by mrdataesq | 2026-01-09 00:38:22+00:00
It's very small and focused, but it fits in places Embassy can't. It reminds me in some ways of coroutines, but it can preempt.

The data-sharing maybe could be nicer, but I do think it's an improvement over C -- you get the ability to do things that you might otherwise need something much bigger like Zephyr for.
by hurricanepootis | 2026-01-09 00:39:12+00:00
The clergy weren't explicitly backing the Shah, they were just fearful of anything like communism happening, since most communist countries/communists are aesthetes.

Iranian clergy as an institution starting coming into political power, really, around the time of the Russian-Persian wars, were one of the highest ranking Shia scholars in Iran issues a fatwa supporting the war against Russia.
by lossolo | 2026-01-09 00:39:13+00:00
That reply feels needlessly adversarial. I'm not claiming they "refuse to tell people", my point is that this isn't clearly documented in the public rules and, as far as I can tell, users aren't notified when it happens (nor is it something staff states proactively).

I only learned about it after I asked via a non-public channel, with evidence. Otherwise I wouldn't have known, and I suspect most users are unaware. What I cited in previous comment is also from a non-public conversations.

If I'm wrong and it's documented publicly in rules or users are notified when it happens to them, I'm happy to be corrected, link?
by publicdebates | 2026-01-09 00:40:38+00:00
Tangential:

"Aisatsana - Aphex Twin - Barbican, London 10th October 2012. It's a bit dark so it's probably difficult to tell but that's a grand piano being swung back and forth across the stage like a pendulum."

"Yeah, it's written for my wife. When I first did that, I did this installation-y art thing at the Barbican with a remote orchestra. [The song] was made on my Disklavier [controlled piano], which was swung from the roof at that gig, and there was this massive Doppler effect. It is pretty mental. There's a bad cameraphone version of it on YouTube, but in the flesh it's fucking amazing. To listen to this piano swinging, you almost see all the notes stretching out, so it'll hit you at different times. I never knew if it was going to work or not, and everyone was like, “What the fuck is he swinging a piano for?” But when we actually got it going, we were just like, “fucking hell.” It was so extreme. My friends were like, “Are the strings stretching?” The pitch deviation is that big, it sounds like the actual frame is contorting. Maybe it is, I don't know!"
- Richard D. James

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJHsT8kEyzs
by the_shivers | 2026-01-09 00:41:09+00:00
Thanks for the feedback!

I would have responded earlier, but I wanted to actually implement something you suggested: different walls. Alternative wall sprites, which don't occlude other tiles so much, are now live and can be adjusted in the settings.

Re: analytics, the only serious plans I had were to use the daily level histograms to adjust difficulty. The idea of taking some levels and releasing them as a standalone game is tempting, but I wonder if doing this type of puzzle over and over again might get tedious? That's one of the reasons I thought it would work better as a daily game. Let's see how it's doing in a few months.

I love the mechanic ideas. I think there are two big constraints on what kind of cool new features/gimmicks can be implemented though. First: if this is going to be a daily game, the new mechanics have to be intuitive enough to where somebody could figure them out their first time playing. I like the idea of cherries being misleading, and it's a fun troll-ish idea for a single player game, but it would be a mean trick if it were someone's first daily. (Then again, there's someone who's first Wordle game was probably MYRRH.) The other constraint is I have a solver that can guarantee the optimal solution is actually optimal. Some game mechanics might make this a lot harder, or even impossible.
by throwaway293892 | 2026-01-09 00:41:31+00:00
Pretty much the same as what you see in the comments here. For certain workloads, NPU is faster than CPU by quite a bit, and I think he gave some detailed examples at the low level (what types of computations are faster, etc).

But nothing that translated to real world end user experience (other than things like live transcription). I recall I specifically asked "Will Stable Diffusion be much faster than a CPU?" in my question.

He did say that the vendors and Microsoft were trying to come up with "killer applications". In other words, "We'll build it, and others will figure out great ways to use it." On the one hand, this makes sense - end user applications are far from Intel's expertise, and it makes sense to delegate to others. But I got the sense Microsoft + OEMs were not good at this either.
by ThrowawayB7 | 2026-01-09 00:42:32+00:00
> "They have since lost this dominance to Google"

A lot of which had to do with being under a consent decree.

> "When Mobile came along, Microsoft completely missed."

By "missed" you mean that MS was at the top of the mobile phone heap after defeating Palm Computing when the iPhone came out and swept Windows Mobile, Palm, Research In Motion and everyone else away.
by fennecbutt | 2026-01-09 00:42:40+00:00
Yes, I'd thought about roughly the same premise before and came to the conclusion that it really is a hard thing to do.

Even if you use state ids for it, who's to say that a particular state won't be...loose with issuing ids that can then go on to be used for bots.

It's even a problem with humans as well - one human can be having a pleasant conversation with the other, not aware that that person isn't being genuine, or is lying, has ulterior motives or has been instructed on what to say by someone else.
by gerdesj | 2026-01-09 00:43:31+00:00
... and yet somehow I have muddled along running an IT company for 25 years (I'm the MD) and I have a fair idea about finances, including surviving some rather unpleasant financial environments that have rocked up over those years.

One month in 25 years, my partners and I didn't pay ourselves. That's as close as we have got to having issues. We keep six months payroll, corp. tax and VAT in readies. The property mortgage is nearly paid off.

I'm no hacker and I treat finances as a means to an end - no more and no less.
by mtmail | 2026-01-09 00:43:43+00:00
Afaik 'Launch HN' is reserved for YCombinator companies. It gives an automatic ranking boost and guaranteed to hit the frontpage. HN is run by YCombinator. Not sure how the website figures out who belongs to YCombinator. I've read there's a username list and the names show up in a different color so users recognize each other.
by Skyy93 | 2026-01-09 00:45:56+00:00
Perhaps many users think liquid glass as an UI theme does not really improve their UX. At least for me the upgrade was actually a downgrade. The phone got slower (iPhone 13 mini) and I think it did not really add any value. This is of course only a very biased opinion, but I would like to see Apple to react to this tremendous amount of users that simply say no to liquid glass.
by visarga | 2026-01-09 00:46:13+00:00
A quick glance over the 200 LOC impl - I see no error handling. This is the core of the agent loop, you need to pass some errors back to the LLM to adapt, while other errors should be handled by the code. There is also no model specific code for structured decoding.

This article could make for a good interview problem, "what is missing and what would you improve on it?"
by crazygringo | 2026-01-09 00:46:26+00:00
> there is a tremendous amount of attempts by bots, and specifically AI agents, to inject slop into HN threads

Is there? I enable showdead and don't see it. There are the occasional spam and vulgar comments, but not that much.

Any "AI slop" being posted seems to come from actual HN'ers who think they're being helpful, and is often downvoted. But there's not much.

So I'm not sure this is a problem that currently needs any new solutions? I don't see AI bots taking over the discourse at all. Not even a little.
by sporkxrocket | 2026-01-09 00:47:08+00:00
Well first of all a lot of these protest are pro Iranian government. Second, there are much bigger anti-government protests happening right now in Israel, but there's no state apparatus trying to bring attention to them (quite the opposite). An Israeli bus driver even drove over an murdered an anti-war protester. But most importantly, this is a coordinated effort to manufacture consent for Israel's next preemptive attack on Iran.
by nozzlegear | 2026-01-09 00:47:33+00:00
> People in the US are protesting against what the same organization, despite doing the same job under previous presidencies didn’t get protested as much if at all. If I recall correctly last year the current admin just beat the Obama admin on people deported in a single year.

This is not what people are protesting in the US, though it is a convenient talking point used by MAGA to dodge the issue of ICE deporting US citizens without due process, or straight up murdering them.
by sitharus | 2026-01-09 00:48:19+00:00
As the other commenter said, alignment issues have never been a problem.

If you're manually aligning the sheets on the photocopier bed maybe, but the edges are set up for that so it's never been an issue for me. However every photocopier I've used that was made since the late 90s lets you do the sheets individually so you can use the copier bed to align each one.

Because the ability to scale like this is so ubiquitous we're just all used to doing it.
by dpifke | 2026-01-09 00:48:20+00:00
I use uBlock Origin for this, something like:

news.ycombinator.com##:matches-path(/^/item\?id=/) tr a.hnuser:has-text(/^dpifke$/):upward(tr)

This mostly works, but only kills the user's comments and not replies, so it sometimes can be confusing.
by Dylan16807 | 2026-01-09 00:48:21+00:00
> Not that they agree on what completed but on the order they completed in. That is the "o" in TSO. You inadvertently proved my point.

A list is ordered. You're trying too hard to nitpick. (Also I gave a disclaimer that my wording wasn't perfect, and it only took a couple words for you to "fix" it. If it can be fixed that easily then that doesn't actually counteract my point.)

> You left something unspecified that mattered. Ordering of accesses to mappings with differing permissions matters, and whether they are seen in-program-order or not by other cores will break x86 emulators (main use cases for TSO).

How many x86 emulators have the emulated code talking directly to hardware, to the same piece of hardware, from multiple cores at the same time?

I don't think this is a "main use case".

Plus there's going to be a baseline for how talking to the hardware works. Only TSO-mode-specific details of the hardware access are left unsaid in this basic model, and many access patterns fitting the above description still won't notice anything one way or the other.