MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by KK7NIL | 2026-01-31 08:34:56+00:00
> From the beginning of monotheism we see strong attempts to monopolize the character of the right and the only God, dating back at least to Samaritans vs. Judeans.

1) Samaritans and Judeans do not disagree on which God they worship (it's YHWH), they disagree on much more subtle points that are largely unique to the Israelite religion like the location of the temple mount, the correct version of the pentatuch, differences in how to practice some of the rituals, etc.

2) Zoroastrianism predates the Israelite religion and is usually considered monotheistic (although some scholars disagree). If you loosen your definition to allow henotheism then some eastern traditions were first by about a millennia.

3) WTF does monotheism have to do with trademark law? I'm sure you think it's a deep argument but it just came off as a total non sequitur to everyone else.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-31 08:35:13+00:00
Technically correct but not really. It's a biased random walk. While outliers are possible betting against the law of large numbers is a losing proposition. More often it's that we as observers lack the ability to see the system as a whole and so fail to properly attribute the net outcome.

It's true that sometimes something can get taken along for the ride by luck of the draw. In which case what's really being selected for is some subgroup of genes as opposed to an individual one. In those cases there's some reason that losing the "detrimental" gene would actually be more detrimental, even if indirectly.
by raffa667 | 2026-01-31 08:35:37+00:00
I don’t see it as lying any more than adjusting exposure or white balance on a camera does.

It doesn’t add or remove anything from the scene, it just fixes bad lighting, color cast, perspective, and sharpness, basically what any decent photographer already does in post.

If anything, it helps photos reflect how the place actually looks in real life instead of dark, crooked, yellowish snapshots.
by TeMPOraL | 2026-01-31 08:37:01+00:00
Wrong or not, the industry embraced it.

I can sort of understand it if I squint: every feature is a maintenance burden, and a risk of looking bad in front of users when you break or remove it, even if those users didn't use this feature. It's really a burden to be avoided when the point of your product is to grow its user base, not to actually be useful. Which explains why even Fischer-Price toys look more feature-ful and ergonomic than most new software products.
by bob1029 | 2026-01-31 08:37:50+00:00
IBM is the undisputed king of backward compatibility. There is code running on mainframes right now that is going on 50 years old. Microsoft is a close #2 with windows.

I'd probably consider using IBM if it wasn't so goddamn weird and expensive. I suppose all that backward compatibility does have its downsides. Windows feels a bit weird in some places too, but at the same time it didn't start out life as a typewriter.
by jurgenaut23 | 2026-01-31 08:38:27+00:00
What used to be a life time project that would inspire awe and respect and make OP an instant hire for most managers is now a fun 1-week stunt that makes you go “cool, how many tokens?” Of course, the result is cool and maybe even useful (I wouldn’t dare say _correct_, being ignorant of the topic), but I cannot help but think that this would have been tremendously better if done the old (proper?) way.

Also, I suspect that OP would have learned so much more on the topic.
by pajuhaan | 2026-01-31 08:39:18+00:00
I just put out a short preprint where I try a very different “minimal model” for the free neutron lifetime — not by plugging weak couplings! but by treating decay as a rare unlocking event in a geometric/statistical picture (a 3-loop proton junction + 1-loop lepton lock).

It lands at 877.83 s, close to the best bottle results, and i also discuss why beam/proton-counting can end up higher.

I’m not claiming this replaces the Standard Model — more like a checkable hypothesis about where these timescales might emerge from.

preprint: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/400280164_A_Two-Bod...
by burnt-resistor | 2026-01-31 08:40:56+00:00
1. Billionaires of all affiliations were enabled to go slumming and lots of people helped keep it quiet. Meanwhile, they were allowed to impregnate, infect, and wreck the mental health of thousands of children. Eww. Epstein's lengthy (but limited) survival may have been contingent on both the accumulation of kompromat on important people and the power/wealth halo effect.

2. Republican billionaires were almost certainly redacted in releases or withheld in documents not released.

3. I'm curious how many documents are/were incompletely redacted with filled rectangles rather than text removal such as using the Adobe tool. And, I wonder if any incomplete redactions are/were purposeful to leak while maintaining plausible deniability.

4. If/when Trump leaves office, with the behaviors exhibited thus far, it seems the remaining precious documents will go with him (or to his next of kin should he leave horizontally) to maintain power over others and that "victim security" is a duplicitous smokescreen.
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2026-01-31 08:40:56+00:00
Yeah I think biology is a really good analogy. Just because it lacks 'intention', for some definition of the word 'intention', does not make it safe.

"That virus is nothing but a microscopic encapsulated sequence of RNA."

"Moltbook is nothing but a bunch of hallucinating agents, hooked up to actuators, finding ways to communicate with each other in secret."

https://xcancel.com/suppvalen/status/2017241420554277251#m

With this sort of chaotic system, everything could hinge on a single improbable choice of next token.
by INTPenis | 2026-01-31 08:40:58+00:00
That is one crazy story. I need to see this done in Hollywood graphics. They're claiming the asteroid came in so low that it did a flyby of the Levant, igniting any flammable object or person on its way, and slammed into the side of a mountain in the Alps

It's definitely not what I normally picture when I think about asteroids.
by vogelke | 2026-01-31 08:42:01+00:00
I've read at least 8 articles this week about LLMs having massive hallucinations/brain-farts when writing testbeds for code. Unfortunately, the author didn't see the problems until he tried adding a test; then he had a huge WTF moment.

The fact that the LLM you mention gave good answers is probably more a reflection of YOUR documentation than any particular "brilliance" on the LLM's part.
by ranger_danger | 2026-01-31 08:42:51+00:00
My home internet is 5G, and many, many websites are blocked or have infinite captcha loops... even well-known sites. Etsy is blocked. Reddit/Discord/Locals is blocked. Archive.is only captcha loops. Even libera IRC is blocked. Trying to buy products online often gets the order flagged or canceled as a potential bot or VPN. IPs are rotated often so I unfortunately have to share bad-reputation IPs with people who keep the addresses on global blacklists like DroneBL that are used by many sites. Even 4chan blocks most of the IPs I get because other people post CP from there.

Trying to use a VPS/cloud IP or well-known VPN provider, the experience for me is just as bad or worse.

For some, the issue is a lot worse than you think.
by TeMPOraL | 2026-01-31 08:44:31+00:00
It's not about poisoning serendipity. It's about:

- Automating the boring part of creating calendar invites and such from messages people send, which half of the time are photos of some announcements. LLMs are already a godsend here.

- Getting up to speed quickly on what's going on in various kindergarten groups I'm in, whenever a bunch of parents who don't work on traditional schedule decide to have a spontaneous conference in late morning, and generate a 100 messages on the group by early afternoon.

Etc.

I'm not trying to avoid communicating with people - on the contrary, I want to eliminate the various inconveniences (more and less trivial) that usually prevent me from keeping up.
by p0w3n3d | 2026-01-31 08:47:28+00:00
I have ups and downs, and the downs happen coincidentally when I read more news. It is quite clear to me that my bad days are correlated with the amount of manipulation that comes from the media. However, when being clean for long, I wonder how could I go voting, not understanding what happens in my country. Also not being interested in politics doesn't make me excluded from the laws that are being created, which affect me more and more.
by item007 | 2026-01-31 08:48:54+00:00
Summaries are a great first step — they reduce the friction of “re-reading”, and they can help you decide what’s actually worth keeping.

The question I’m curious about is what happens after the summary: do you want it to end as “good to know”, or do you sometimes want it to turn into something concrete (a bookmark tagged to an active topic, a short brief, or a next action)?

If you’re open to one more detail: how do you consume the summaries today — a daily digest you pull when you have time, or do you generate them only when you’re searching for something?
by wahern | 2026-01-31 08:50:16+00:00
He's not wrong in his conclusion, just not accurate in why. If countries start moving away from depending on the trade imbalance with the US, the demand for USD will dry up. And they are trying to move away from it because of politics. But more importantly, the US is increasing trade barriers to reduce that trade imbalance, which is the biggest reason everybody holds so many dollars--they're paid in dollars when exporting to the US, but don't buy enough US imports (individually or collectively) to spend all those dollars, which is why they park them in treasuries and other US investments. And it won't be long before oil begins receding from the picture (at least relative to total global trade, if not absolute dollars), displaced by renewables. Though oil is odd in that while creating demand for USD to settle transactions, it's also a significant US export and has the effect of repatriating dollars.
by Kim_Bruning | 2026-01-31 08:50:33+00:00
> The architectures of these models are a plenty good scientific basis for this statement.

That wouldn't be full-on science, that's just theoretical. You need to test your predictions too!

--

Here's some 'fun' scientific problems to look at.

* Say I ask Claude Opus 4.5 to add 1236 5413 8221 + 9154 2121 9117 . It will successfully do so. Can you explain each of the steps sufficiently that I can recreate this behavior in my own program in C or Python (without needing the full model)?

* Please explain the exact wiring Claude has for the word "you", take into account: English, Latin, Flemish (a dialect of Dutch), and Japanese. No need to go full-bore, just take a few sentences and try to interpret.

* Apply Ethology to one or two Claudes chatting. Remember that Anthropomorphism implies Anthropocentrism, and NOW try to avoid it! How do you even begin to write up the objective findings?

* Provide a good-enough-for-a-weekend-project operational definition for 'Consciousness', 'Qualia', 'Emotions' that you can actually do science on. (Sometimes surprisingly doable if you cheat a bit, but harder than it looks, because cheating often means unique definitions)

* Compute an 'Emotion vector' for: 1 word. 1 sentence. 1 paragraph. 1 'turn' in a chat conversation. [this one is almost possible. ALMOST.]
by jillesvangurp | 2026-01-31 08:52:08+00:00
People talk about an AI bubble. What we actually have is a GPU bubble. NVidia makes really expensive GPUs for AI. Others also make GPUs.

Companies like Google produce and operate AI models largely using their own TPUs rather than NVidia's GPUs. We've seen the Chinese produce pretty competitive open models with either older NVidia GPUs or alternative GPUs because they are not allowed to buy the newer ones. And AMD, Intel and other chip makers are also eager to get in on the action. Companies like Microsoft, Amazon, etc. have their own chips as well (similar to Google). All the hyperscalers are moving away from NVidia.

And then Apple runs a non Intel and non NVidia based range of workstations and laptops that are pretty popular with AI researchers because the M series CPU/GPU/NPU is pretty decent value for running AI models. You see similar movement with ARM chips from Qualcomm and others. They all want to run AI models on phones, tablets, laptops. But without NVidia.

NVidia's bubble is about vastly overcharging for a thing that only they can provide. Their GPU chips have enormous margins relative to CPU chips coming out of the same/similar machines. That's a bubble. As soon as you introduce competition, the companies with the best price performance wins. NVidia is still pretty good at what they do. But not enough to justify an order of magnitude price/cost difference.

NVidia's success has been predicated on its proprietary software and instruction set (CUDA). That's a moat that won't last. The reason Google can use its own TPUs rather than CUDA is that it worked hard to get rid of their CUDA dependence. Same for the other hyperscalars. At this point they can do training and inference without CUDA/NVidia and its more cost effective.

The reason that this 100B deal is apparently being reconsidered is that it is a bad deal for OpenAI. It was going to overpay for a solution that they can get cheaper elsewhere. It's bad news for NVidia, good news for OpenAI. This deal started out with just NVidia. But at this point there are also deals with AMD, MS, and others. OpenAI like the other hyperscalers is not betting the company on NVidia/CUDA. Good for them.
by burnt-resistor | 2026-01-31 08:52:20+00:00
Cool. I lived on E Evelyn for a few years in the 00's and dined many a night at Gumba's. And Hobee's and Denny's of course. I miss the days of raiding Radio Shack in the nearby mall perennially under construction for piles of :CueCats.

Another eatery of Valley folklore is Buck's of Woodside. Neat place on its own.
by dgxyz | 2026-01-31 08:57:23+00:00
After going through 25 years of changing software every few years on this front I can’t be bothered. Files on disk. Nothing over the top. Immich is just another thing to maintain. Another problem which will result in a wholesale migration down the line.

If someone wants something I email it to them or upload it to a directory on a web server and send them the link. If I want something on my phone I’ll zap it over with localsend.

Photography is a hobby for me and I have a large family so I have a lot of photos. And a lot of editing to do. Currently moving from Lightroom to Darktable because again Lightroom tries to hammer me with library management and lock me into things.
by drawfloat | 2026-01-31 08:58:06+00:00
We’ve seen many times that platforms can be popular and widely disliked at the same time. Facebook is a clear example.

The difference there is it became hated after it was established and financially successful. If you need to turn free visitors in to paying customers, that general mood of “AI is bad and going to make me lose my job/fuck up society” is yet another hurdle OpenAI will have to overcome.
by tossandthrow | 2026-01-31 08:58:11+00:00
From an EUR perspective the s&p500 has flatlined over the past year while the msci Europe is up by almost 30% in eur terms.

Needless to say, as an outsider from the inflation bubble, American stocks are not a good investment.

There is a good reason to believe that us stocks will not outperform in inflation adjusted terms over the next 10 years.
by pseudohadamard | 2026-01-31 08:58:17+00:00
True. I've noticed this in authors like M.A.R.Barker and Ursula LeGuin, their later works when they were older were very, very different from their earlier ones (in Barker's case the 20-year gap between the two groups probably made it a lot more obvious). If I'd encountered them as being from some random unknown author I probably wouldn't have read them.
by fuzzfactor | 2026-01-31 09:00:16+00:00
>What's your estimate

Good question, I would say your guess is as good as mine, but looks like you have recent statistics !

Thanks for the information, it does look like realistic figures about as accurate as you can get.

I just accept that as much as possible gold has always been hoarded much more strongly than silver amounts having the same values at the time.

Enough to regard silver as a medium of exchange compared to gold as a store of value.

Gold is so tightly hoarded that I expect that there is more than one accumulation established centuries ago, that originally consisted entirely of ancient gold which is comingled with material from the 20th century and maybe newer by now.

It's also possible that before any human value was established for gold in prehistoric times, there might just have been untold megatons within reach as low-hanging fruit without need to do very much "mining" at all.

Of course cave men had no formal education but they were sapiens just like us and had plenty of progressive generations over thousands of years to shrewdly recognize the advantage of not telling anybody about "untold" amounts of anything when it's regarded as valuable. At least some of them anyway :)

And they sure had orders of magnitude more time to pursue economic interests and accumulate wealth before recorded history than there has been since then, no telling what they were keeping off the books when there weren't any books yet !
by jillesvangurp | 2026-01-31 09:02:46+00:00
Economic crashes are hard to predict. In the end stock markets are a bit irrational. They don't crash just because there are good rational reasons. And then some irrational thing triggers a mass panic when you least expected and the whole thing crashes.

The circumstances and timing (it's been a while) suggest we are probably closer to a crash happening.

From a loan/interest point of view, the dollar de-valuating a bit is actually not a bad thing for the US. It stimulates exports and inflation. And at the same time that reduces the value of the debt (and that is paid in dollars). The downside is that inflation going up usually also means interest going up. And Trump resisting that because he wants to accelerate the economy might not be a good thing.

The big picture here is oil. The world is slowly moving away from oil as the key driver for economies and paying for it in dollars. China is well on its way electrifying large parts of its economy. To the point where it is starting to import less diesel. And they border on Russia with whom they trade in Yen, not dollars. A world that is going to trade less and less oil is going to be less dependent on dollars.

I'm not an economist though. But planning for some kind of crash/correction seems prudent.
by nicbou | 2026-01-31 09:02:52+00:00
What do you mean, concretely?

It seems to me like other countries are cautiously responding to threats of invasion and sudden tariffs. They did not wake up one day and randomly decided to divest from the United States.

The government overreach part I cannot comment on. From my limited point of view I see ICE and overturning Roe vs Wade, but I don't pay attention to US domestic politics.
by CraigJPerry | 2026-01-31 09:02:54+00:00
I, a foreign entity, have sold something to an american and now have 10 dollars and zero treasuries.

I purchase a treasury. I have zero product, zero dollars and one treasury.

At some point in future i have zero product, maybe 12 dollars and zero treasuries. Presumably i now either repeat the cycle or use my winnings to spend on us output.

GP’s version checks out, your assertion about dollars staying abroad doesnt track? What am i misunderstanding - How did these dollars get abroad, how did they repatriate to buy treasuries, how did a treasury become a reserve, how did the dollars still exist abroad after being exchanged for treasuries?
by DanielleMolloy | 2026-01-31 09:03:11+00:00
Surprised this hasn‘t been mentioned at all in such a long discussion:

I became pretty suspicious of most supplement brands last year. Many omega-3 capsules are rancid (which can have adverse effects and can easily go unnoticed with a capsule), and the vitamin D brands I tried didn‘t seem to do anything for me at all.

I switched to cod liver oil instead. It‘s a staple in Scandinavian cultures, so there are several well-controlled brands available that taste neutral (or are lightly flavored, e.g. lemon). It’s a combined substance containing omega 3, vitamins D, E, and A, and appears to be much more bioavailable than many capsule-based supplements, especially given the oxidation issues. Don’t want to prime anyone - try it yourself - but many people, myself included, report fairly immediate effects. I am not talking about the capsules, they are a fairly recent invention, I mean the plain oil on a spoon like in the old days.

Alongside magnesium, it’s currently my only „supplement“.
by _kb | 2026-01-31 09:04:09+00:00
Hard disagree. This is what brutalism looks like in sunny, subtropical Brisbane, Australia: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:QPAC_Exterior.jpg

If the straight concrete isn’t your thing, they’re also currently extending it with a glasshouse: https://www.snohetta.com/projects/queensland-performing-arts...
by internet_points | 2026-01-31 09:04:10+00:00
Same here, although one thing that's difficult with this is things like finding "that one photo we took 5 years ago which grandma used as a phone background". So now I gotta find the right external hard drive to plug in and fortunately the folders are by date but still it's a drag. So I'm considering looking into immich if it can just function as a server that shows thumbnails on some terabytes of date-sorted photos and videoes, no need for the machine learning stuff. Though I feel like there must be a less "heavy" solution than immich for this.
by rogeriopvl | 2026-01-31 09:04:13+00:00
http.cat author here.

A shout out to Tomomi Imura, because HTTP Status Cats was her idea and I just made the images available through an API.

It's crazy to think that since 2010 this still pops up on the HN front page from time to time. Thank you for that!

http.cat is a testament of how simple, fun and silly the internet was back then. I'll try to keep it online for as long as I can.

I love reading the stories you all share online about it, they fuel my motivation to keep it up and I'm always open to feedback and new ideas. So feel free to share them here or on the github repo.

Cheers!
by ghgr | 2026-01-31 09:04:40+00:00
I'm like you, and a big fan of Pigallery2 precisely for its simplicity. But it turns out that Immich does support external libraries, so you can keep your manual file management in your filesystem and still use Immich for efficient indexing, face recognition, quick picture retrieval by year, location, people etc...

I'd recommend you try Immich (there's a docker compose version) and if you don't like it, you can just remove it and move on.
by kennymeyers | 2026-01-31 09:05:04+00:00
Amazing to see this on Hacker News. I've recently begun a startup called Sweet Shop, meant to fill the hole that Comixology left when they sold out. Comics are amazing, and they continue to hold an important place in global culture. Ashcans are still called that and most publishers still distribute them at cons.

Comics or graphic novels or manga, or however you were introduced to them are becoming the defacto literature for good reason. People work hard to create them. Ashcans are a nice way to ease that burden of getting someone interested.

(https://sweetshop.app if you're interested)
by ndhcvs | 2026-01-31 09:05:56+00:00
Doesnt matter what they think. Go check the headlines in British or French news papers from pinnacle of Empire to unravelling and the level of ignorance and cluelessness will be staggering. The chimp troupe has 3 inch chimp brains to process reality. That brain has hard limits on how much info and change it can process and how quickly it can update existing beliefs. In groups beliefs these update rates and limits slow processing down even further. So incoherence is the norm and story tellung is the survival hack. Once you get that you stop focusing energy and time on the unpredictable and uncontrollable.