MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-15 16:53:21+00:00
> American life is so much more distributed than European life.

It isn't though, Google Maps estimate going West>East coast in the US to take 44 hours (pure driving without stops), and puts going from the South of Spain to the North of Sweden to take 50 hours, more or less the same.

Then Europe is a bunch of countries, most of them speaking different languages, with way more difference in culture than the states of the US. I'm not sure it matters though, it really isn't relevant, but probably the wrong thing to bring up regardless, when the reality looks the opposite than you seem to think.

FWIW, when the (last) civil war in Spain happened, you had volunteer civilians coming from Sweden (among other countries) to defend their ideals, even if it wasn't their fight, completely different culture and language. But if you care about something bigger than yourself, then you act.

"My country is large" isn't an excuse to not stand up against tyranny, not sure in what world it would be.

The whole "just barely surviving financially" sucks though, especially considering the poor labor movements and almost non-existing union support, and poor grassroot organization. It always felt weird and artificially suppressed, but without those thing, it certainly seems easier to take over an entire country. Hope others learned their lessons with this.
by windowpains | 2026-01-15 16:53:25+00:00
The vast majority are probably shamefully exploited h1b coolies who would be left to wallow in cow excrement back in their own countries were it not for anti-labor big business friendly policies loved by the liberals who imported them to do the dirty work non-STEM capable persons are too lazy or ignorant to do themselves. /s (sarcasm off) :)
Show HN: RagTune – EXPLAIN ANALYZE for your RAG retrieval layer
by metawake | 2026-01-15 16:53:31+00:00
CLI tool to debug and benchmark RAG retrieval without LLM calls.

- `ragtune explain "query"` → see what was retrieved with scores
- `ragtune simulate` → batch eval with recall/MRR metrics
- `ragtune compare` → compare embedders or chunk sizes
- CI/CD mode for quality gates

Works with Qdrant, pgvector, Weaviate, Chroma, Pinecone.

Built because I kept guessing why retrieval was bad. Now I can see exactly what's happening.
by NoLinkToMe | 2026-01-15 16:53:47+00:00
Yup. We also overestimate how much range we need. Average American driver drives 60km a day. The average Tesla has >500km range, meaning you need to charge fewer than once every 8 days.

Rural tends to mean space, and space tends to mean you can charge your car at home (that's different for a New York apartment dweller), making a once-in-8-day charge absolutely trivial.

In terms of economics, electric fueling of your car wins per mile.

And rural homes tend to have easy access to home-solar (again, good luck installing solar in a New York apartment rental). Electric cars tie into solar really nicely with a basic smart system, as it lets you charge at off-peak rates at night, or dump excess solar during the day into your car.

And what you've said before, it creates energy-independence, great when remote. Not to mention modern EVs allow bi-directional use of the battery, meaning the car can power your home essentials during an outage.

So I agree, EV is a great idea for rural.
by flyinglizard | 2026-01-15 16:54:05+00:00
It's because the storytelling needed for Wall Street. It's the only way to get sky high revenue multiples, selling a dream, because if you're a conglomerate all you can do is to sell the P&L - it's like selling an index.
If you have a business division that's does exceedingly well compared to the rest, you make more money by spinning it off.

I think Asian companies are much less dependent on public markets and have as strong private control (chaebols in South Korea for example - Samsung, LG, Hyundai etc).

If you look at US companies that are under "family control" you might see a similar sprawl, like Cargill, Koch, I'd even put Berkshire in this class even though it's not "family controlled" in the literal sense, it's still associated with two men and not a professional CEO.
by dragonwriter | 2026-01-15 16:54:18+00:00
> I want to present the side that they are in fact doing exactly what many people in our society thinks needs to be done (i.e. they are not immoral).

The Nazis were doing what many people in their society thought needed to be done.

It is a rather uncommon position (though, ironically, frequently a strawman position falsely attributed to their opponents to mock them by roughly the same political faction that backs the current ICE action) that “morality” is just whatever a sufficiently large number of people currently prefer.
by fxtentacle | 2026-01-15 16:54:26+00:00
The US has become a world leader in suing curious people into submission. As soon as you touch any commercially available tech and do anything that the manufacturer dislikes, you're at risk, thanks to § 1201:

"No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title."

Extending your digital camera with new firmware? Illegal.

Inventing a custom ink or add-on for your printer? Illegal.

Repairing a tractor? or a ventilator? Illegal.

How do you expect anyone to get world-leading science done in this environment?
by emilburzo | 2026-01-15 16:54:32+00:00
I totally understand, Vagrant and VirtualBox are quite a blast from the past for me as well. But besides the what-are-the-odds bug, it's been smooth sailing.

> VMs with 3D acceleration

I think we don't even need 3D acceleration since Vagrant is running the VMs headless anyways and just ssh-ing in.

> Incus (on Linux hosts)

That looks interesting, though from a quick search it doesn't seem to have a "Vagrantfile" equivalent (is that correct?), but I guess a good old shell script could replace that, even if imperative can be more annoying than declarative.

And since it seems to have a full-VM mode, docker would also work without exposing the host docker socket.

Thanks for the tip, I need to try it out!
by bpanahij | 2026-01-15 16:54:42+00:00
You should be skeptical, and try it out. I selected 28 long conversations for our evaluation set, all unseen audio. Every turn taking model makes tradeoffs, and I tried to make the best tradeoffs for each model by adjusting and tuning the implementations. I’m certainly not in a position as the creator of Sparrow to be totally objective. However we did use unaltered real conversational audio to evaluate. I tried to find examples that would challenge Sparrow-1 with lots of variation in speaker style across the conversations.
by specialist | 2026-01-15 16:54:45+00:00
> essentially a bond return

You reminded me: David Roberts' often states that a hurdle for electrification and decarbonization projects is connecting them to "slow capital". Stuff like residential, community, solar, battery, heat pumps, appliances, ground source heat, yadda yadda.

I gather that there's plenty of "slow capital" perfectly happy with low risk long term modest returns. But these projects are too small to be worth the effort. Probably something about transaction costs.

My impression is there's an opportunity to bundle up these projects for the larger/largest investors. Biden's IRA created a "green bank" (RIP); maybe that was its intended function.

You're smart about money and finance, so you can probably explain what Roberts is talking about (to noobs like me).

https://volts.wtf
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-15 16:54:47+00:00
The US, for better or worse, isn't a cohesive country of people interested in a collective, but a smash and grab of economic gains sourced from those who are forced to live in it and cannot flee to developed countries. You come to it, or stay in it, to make more income you would in developed countries at the detriment of everyone else.
by praptak | 2026-01-15 16:55:01+00:00
Yes, this is how market economy works. For every organization doing horrible things, literally everyone is a small number of payment-handshakes from it.

No, it doesn't mean that "mr gotcha"[1] argument is valid. You don't have to isolate yourself from society Kaczynski-style to either criticize society or to do something smaller (like choosing who you work for).

[1] https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/
by overfeed | 2026-01-15 16:55:53+00:00
> I don't think I could a RPi as cheaply once parts and power supply etc are taken into account

The RPi Zero 2W costs $15 and runs HA just fine. One can splurge on a pricey case, microSD, and high-amp GAN charger, and still be under 50% of your spend. You don't have to buy the flagship RPi.
by rvnx | 2026-01-15 16:56:01+00:00
It's illegal to raise any questions whether homosexuality is good or bad in my country, and this is for the vast majority of Europe.

So I do not have opinion and cannot question it.

If you want your website to be reachable from Europe, you have to follow these laws.

Do you see the problem ?
and the problem editors or websites themselves face ?
by jelling | 2026-01-15 16:56:10+00:00
> Dimes Square consists of a series of late-night interactions in a Chinatown apartment. The apartment belongs to Stefan, a rich, connected writer who has attracted a social circle by virtue of his strategically applied charm, vague promises of professional opportunities, and abundant supply of cocaine.

I lived for years in the LES adjacent to “Dimes Square” and I was on the periphery of the art scene.

Not covered in this essay at all is how the cost of living in NYC is dramatically higher than during the “good old days” of 80s and 90s downtown scene.

It was cheap for a reason - my cousin literally had an illegal art squat he paid $0 for - but low rent also changed who was able to be on the scene.

Add-in the skyrocketing costs of private colleges, and the scene increasingly is populated by the children of the very comfortable to the obscenely rich.

And unsurprisingly, those that grow up with status to are far more risk averse and solipsistic as well.

Warhol, Herring and Basquiat did not have trust funds, and it was all for the better.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-15 16:56:16+00:00
> Because I have a kid to take care of. A job I need to keep, and a way of life I'd like to maintain.

Exactly, so why not go out on the streets and actually defend those things then? Currently your (presumed) inaction will cause those to be harmed, you're not "saving those" by saying and doing nothing, you're effectively giving them away if you don't actively protect them.
by dwrodri | 2026-01-15 16:56:48+00:00
I would love to host an ultra high quality stream on my own web server, and then have that exact stream piped to YouTube live via OBS. Is there an easy way to do that now?

YouTube likely won't support streaming 3440x1440 60FPS video, and while discord technically supports it, they usually compress the footage fairly aggressively once it's sent up to the client, so I'd like to host my own; it only needs to support a few people. I wouldn't mind hosting it so my friends and side project partners can watch me code and play games in high quality.
by oytis | 2026-01-15 16:56:50+00:00
Reading what someone has written under their own name for everyone to read is not stalking.

Also not sure what code of conduct you have in mind, but most specify that you should treat others with respect regardless of <list of protected characteristics>. That's not a viewpoint, that's a necessary condition for collaboration. If you feel an uncontrollable hate towards people of some nationalities or gender identities, it would be wise too keep it a private matter indeed, and not make this hate known to everyone
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-15 16:56:55+00:00
It looks like their CTO is an Indian or Pakistani: https://investors.palantir.com/governance/executive-manageme...

I wonder how he feels about what the administration is doing and how his own work is directly helping them. Surely he is aware of all of the supremacist rhetoric coming from the official Twitter accounts of various government agencies or Elon Musk or Stephen Miller. Surely he has seen the kind of racist abuse that Vivek Ramaswami endured on Twitter, which led to him recently quitting social media.

Doesn’t he see how all of this is going to come for people like himself next?
by brightball | 2026-01-15 16:56:55+00:00
> I think what op is getting at is that "no politics" rule is what allowed the frog to boil.

But this simply isn't the case. The fact that "no politics" zones exist is a response to the fact that politics is everywhere else.

People here aren't blissfully unaware, they're just tired of it and many realize that arguing about it on the internet won't accomplish anything other than wasting time. As I sit here writing this, I'm thinking that I'm probably wasting my time.

We all have this idea in our head that if people are confronted with enough evidence, they'll change their minds. But that doesn't happen. People rationalize.

My goodness, people attack RFK Jr non-stop simply because he's part of the Trump administration and all he's done for his entire life is try to help the country be healthier. Every point he's made, every plan he's had and every policy he has advocated for have been totally logically sound. There's been nothing extreme in any of it. Every young parent I know is so relieved with what he's doing and frustrated that it took so long to do what seemed obvious.

But it's not that. It's inflammatory headline after inflammatory headline. It's putting words in his mouth, saying things he didn't say, making statements he didn't make, berating him in front of Congress for click bait video nonsense reading from a script.

It's exhausting. We're all tired of it. If you show me something that you think will convince me of something, I will look at it. And then I will look deeper. I will look to see if any information has been left out. I will look to see if editing has happened.

Because almost every time I invest the time to look into something, I find that it's exaggerated internet nonsense that only plays well in echo chambers. When you do that enough times, your skepticism meter goes to 11.
by watwut | 2026-01-15 16:57:10+00:00
> If ICE were doing exactly what its mandate says on paper (enforcing immigration law and deporting people who are in the country illegally) would you still say the same thing?

They are not doing what the mandate says on the paper. So, the question is moot. If the "paper" said, "ICE is allowed to use arbitrary force and abuse" I would still call them Gestapo, because Gestapo was also legal.

> It seems that critics oppose the law itself, but then frame the argument as “ICE is bad because it breaks the law,” rather than acknowledging that the real disagreement is over whether those laws should exist at all.

This is bad faith claim. It is possible to disagree about multiple things at the same time. It is possible to disagree about the law. And simultaneously find ICE completely morally depraved and violent, just as their defenders.

In fact, one can agree about the law and still think that government force killing people and being violent against opposition is a bad thing.

So very openly: I think that stealing from shops should be illegal. I think that police beating people for stealing would be wrong and murdering people who oppose the "beat people who steal" law also wrong.
by publicdebates | 2026-01-15 16:57:19+00:00
I'm also in this group, so I have a few theories as to what causes it and how to fix it.

For one thing, I was severely traumatized as a kid, which delayed a lot of my social skills. I'm catching up but not all the way there yet. When my social battery is full, I can do pretty well, but if I'm even a little down, it's basically impossible to act normally.

I also had it hammered into me as a kid that nobody wants me around, nobody could ever love me, I'm a failure, a burden, a creep, a weirdo, and nothing but a bothersome nuisance that nobody would ever want to spend 30 seconds alone with. I'm trying to reject these thoughts, but it's difficult when you have nobody to talk to. It's like pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. I wonder how many people have the same issue. I've made a few friends in person, but I rarely get to see them.

Well I've started doing public surveys in my nearby big city, and documenting the results. I just hold out a posterboard that says "how alone do you feel" or "have you ever been in love" etc, and hold out a marker, and people come up and take the survey. At first I did this out of sheer loneliness and boredom. But I have done it for enough months that some people have come up to me and told me that I've helped them, or that they look forward to my signs.

I'm trying to reach those people who feel the way I feel have no way of connecting with anyone, or at least feel that they don't. Do you have any new ideas of how to achieve this?
by viggity | 2026-01-15 16:57:25+00:00
Kinda like when someone said that instead of running for mayor, Bloomberg could have given everyone in the country $1M. A guest said it on NBC and Bryan Williams, nor the pundit had any intuition that it seemed grossly wrong. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/mar/06/msnbc/bad-...
by hulitu | 2026-01-15 16:57:28+00:00
> Before SP1 it was unusable.

This was the "Release name" for every NT version.
RCs were alpha quality, SP1 was the first beta, with SP2 things started to be ok. This was true until 7, then the Gates of hell opened and Windows is now an eternal "release" ( the thing between RC and SP1).
by yawboakye | 2026-01-15 16:57:34+00:00
spain isn’t a great example here. it has some of the most racist fans football has ever seen and yet there’s no action. only italy probably compares. if there was a government agency going after black and brown people (ie non-white) i wouldn’t bet on the spanish population to come to their rescue. lamine yamal, a young footballer of moroccan descent hasn’t been spared the vitriol of the spanish hooligans even though he was top 3 best player at the recent euro (where he helped spain to victory).

point being, given that ice is going after non-whites and is getting by, a spanish ice will get by too, with probably more ease.
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-15 16:58:01+00:00
I keep hearing this idea that boiling over lets them double down, but at the same time, it is not acceptable to let them keep doing what they do. Once the government starts using physical violence against the people and openly violating constitutional law, there is no choice, but to push back.

But that pushback can look different. Personally, I think that needs to be a massive general strike across every major city.
by bpanahij | 2026-01-15 16:58:03+00:00
This is a very good idea. We currently have a model in our perception system (Raven-1) that performs this partially. It uses audio to understand tone and augment the transcription we send to the conversational LLM. That seems to have an impact on the conversational style of the replicas output, in a good way. We’re still evaluating that model and will post updates when we have better insights.
by Aachen | 2026-01-15 16:58:23+00:00
https://tweakers.net/nieuws/243456/italie-geeft-cloudflare-b...

"boete" means "fine". With that, I think there's enough loan/brand words that the article lede is readable to an English person. Basically, cloudflare has in Italy gotten a 14 million euro fine because it refused to implement blocks for its public dns service 1.1.1.1
by psunavy03 | 2026-01-15 16:58:28+00:00
"Bothsidesism" is a tired argument. Somehow if you don't think that one side of a debate is utter evil and the other side is as pure as the driven snow, you're engaging in "bothsidesism" if you acknowledge there are any shades of gray in the world. Which is a childish argument for anyone older than a high school sophomore.
by inflam52 | 2026-01-15 16:58:29+00:00
Yeah great catch. So I mentioned this in the README but much of the mechanics were heavily inspired by jhhoward's MicroCity. This is the same way he calculated taxes and I figured to test it out to see how it worked in game. I really liked the flow of how his game played and seems like there are some pros/cons to that inbalance.

Pros:
- Makes residential population more valuable for taxes, which helps early‑game cash flow.
- Encourages zoning residential since it has outsized budget impact.
- Offsets the fact that residential growth can be more constrained by pollution/unemployment.

Cons:
- Skews the economy away from industrial/commercial impact.
- Makes budget feel inconsistent with “total population.”
- Can mask balance issues by injecting extra money, making difficulty tuning harder.
by gradus_ad | 2026-01-15 16:58:48+00:00
One thing to keep in mind - you are receiving propaganda just like everyone else. It's filtered and manipulated to make the US appear worse than it is.

"Extra judicial murders" are federal ICE officers justifiably defending themselves. ICE is in Minneapolis and many other cities to deal with a huge population of illegals that need to be deported as expressed by the popular will of our recent democratic election.

The dramatics really need to be toned down.
by glenstein | 2026-01-15 16:59:47+00:00
Is anyone else seeing this pattern? "Mozilla should have an endowment". They do! "Well they should have invested the endowment!" They do. "They should have done a gecko based electron alternative". They did. "They should have tab grouping". They've never not had it, between native support and extensions. "They should be spending on the browser." They literally spend more now than ever in their history.

It's vibes and drive by cheap shots, all the way down. I get that dabbling in adtech is not great, I get that they've cycled through side bets recently without committing to them (unlike Google?!), but it's an ounce of truth with every pound of nonsense. Mozilla Derangement Syndrome.
by ssl-3 | 2026-01-15 16:59:50+00:00
That comparison was true back in 2012 when the first version was released, too.

Things like used PCs and forgotten closet laptops were running circles around brand-new Raspberry Pi systems, in performance per dollar, for as long as we've had new Raspberry Pis to make that comparison with.

Those first Pis didn't even have wifi, and they were as picky about power supplies and stuff back then as a Pi 5 is today.

The primary aspects that are new are that the featureset of new models continues to improve, and the price of a bare board has increased by an inflation-adjusted ~$10.

(Meanwhile: A bare Pi 3B still costs $35 right now -- same as in 2016. When adjusted for inflation, it has become cheaper. $35 in 2016 is worth about $48 today.)
by carlesonielfa | 2026-01-15 17:00:09+00:00
It’s interesting to see Google staying consistently involved in the medical AI space going back to the PaLM / Med-PaLM days. Whatever is driving that commitment, it’s nice to see, there’s a lot of real upside here in terms of improving patient outcomes.

I was a bit surprised that only the 4B MedGemma variant was updated, but after checking the Hugging Face download stats it makes sense. The 4B model has ~350k downloads, while the next most popular variant sits around ~25k.