MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Cyph0n | 2026-01-12 19:05:03+00:00
In the sense that an offensive war - especially one that intentionally targets civilians and their families - rallies people around the flag and provides a boost of support to whoever is in power.

The regime was organically declining in popularity. Israel’s war simply rejuvenated the regime’s supporter base without any meaningful gains on the ground. There was minimal impact to the enrichment campaign. And the fact that negotiation was used as a ruse by the Americans is definitely a motivation to pursue enrichment even further.

Not to mention that regional powers are now wary of Israel’s expansionist nature and see nuclear power as the only true deterrent. Think about it: does anyone ever mess around with Pakistan or NK?

This offensive directly led to the Saudi-Pakistan defense pact, with Turkey probably joining soon. I would also wager that both KSA and Turkey are starting or are considering starting their own nuclear weapons programs.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-01-12 19:05:25+00:00
"Proposition X" does not need testing. We already know X is categorically false because we know how LLMs are programmed, and not a single line of that programming pertains to thinking (thinking in the human sense, not "thinking" in the LLM sense which merely uses an anthromorphized analogy to describe a script that feeds back multiple prompts before getting the final prompt output to present to the user). In the same way that we can reason about the correctness of an IsEven program without writing a unit test that inputs every possible int32 to "prove" it, we can reason about the fundamental principles of an LLM's programming without coming up with ridiculous tests. In fact the proposed test itself is less eminently verifiable than reasoning about correctness; it could be easily corrupted by, for instance, incorrectly labelled data in the training dataset, which could only be determined by meticulously reviewing the entirety of the dataset.

The only people who are serious about suggesting that LLMs could possibly 'think' are the people who are committing fraud on the scale of hundreds of billions of dollars (good for them on finding the all-time grift!) and people who don't understand how they're programmed, and thusly are the target of the grift. Granted, given that the vast majority of humanity are not programmers, and even fewer are programmers educated on the intricacies of ML, the grift target pool numbers in the billions.
by breppp | 2026-01-12 19:05:46+00:00
Example wrong claims:

1. Jolani was propped up by Turkey not Israel, their relations are still tense. E.g. Jolani has been massacring the Druze which are Israel's allies, while Israel-Turkey relations are only getting worse.

Unsure where so many get the idea Israel is excited about an ISIS veterans regime on its border that regularly massacres civilians including on-brand mass rapes, kidnappings, beheadings, cutting hearts out etc

The US had previously imprisoned Jolani and had a 10 million reward on his head until 2024, so, that also doesn't align with your narrative

2. Western governments make sure not to meet the crown prince in a state setting or using high dignities, as to limit their support

3. The Shah government was terrible in some respects but still arguably superior to the current one, in any case hopefully Iranians can find their own new way once they get rid of their current fascist theocracy

4. There is no real evidence that the local revolts are supported by the US or Israel. It is naturally the regime propaganda stance as authoritarian regimes usually turn the blame outwards rather than face their failures (environmental disaster, raging inflation, sanctions, complete regional defeat, unwanted religious laws)

5. Not many dictators in the region historically "accepted Israel's dominance" so I don't think you have many supporting points for your sweeping statements
by raduhs | 2026-01-12 19:07:58+00:00
Most builders have a contribution graph for their code…
…but nothing that makes progress visible for their health.

I built pushhub.fit: a free push-up tracker with a GitHub-style heatmap + streaks:
https://pushhub.fit

The idea is simple:
Builders should also build themselves — and actually care about their health.

What it optimizes for:
- Make progress visible (a heatmap you don’t want to break)
- Reduce friction (log fast, not inside a complex app)
- Track streaks, not motivation (motivation is unreliable)

It’s intentionally lightweight: no workout plans, no social feed, no “platform”.
Just consistency.

Would love feedback from people who’ve tried staying consistent while shipping work.
Feature ideas welcome.
by jeffrallen | 2026-01-12 19:08:01+00:00
It is too bad this important work needed to be done on the cheap. You'd think if the Swiss National Bank was involved, you could get a proper budget....

It would have been a lot easier to focus on the important implementation details if the server was an off the shelf Lenovo datacenter server (SD550?) with a pair of 100 gig/s NVIDIA cards in it.

(Source: last month I set up a machine like this for a colleague to do approximately the same task. I spent "copy and paste the production server config" time on it, not a week.)
by bluecalm | 2026-01-12 19:08:07+00:00
>>It is a clear mandate on those companies that whatever used to be C or C++, should be written in Rust for green field development.
>>Any hobby language author would like to have 1% of the said modest Rust's success, I really don't get the continuous downplay of such achievement.

This is a political achievement, not technical one. People are bitter about it as it doesn't feel organic and feel pushed onto them.
by seec | 2026-01-12 19:08:21+00:00
Yes, I completly agree with your point of view, which is exactly why I said that.

They are using capitalism as a boogeyman for everything, when in practice the system in place is so far removed from "real" capitalism that ones need to be either blind or ideologicaly corrupt to put the blame there.

Unregulated capitalism has many weakness, the most potent one being that there is pruning of useless actors and that results in poverty and some people being left behind.
But the remedy that is applied today isn't really much better, people are still left behind, just more slowly and that comes with massive oppotunity cost for those at the bottom, since they are the ones most likely to really benefit from the freedom that comes with capitalism.

This is just what the ideologues working in academia and politics (deeply linked) always come up with, even though their existence and ability to make such critics is fully funded by capitalism. There are just keeping the tradition of Marx that was completly funded by capitalists but came up with the argument that it was the worst system possible.
by nikcub | 2026-01-12 19:08:42+00:00
> ie. Anthropic did not invest in image generation, Google did and Gemini has a shot at the market now.

They're after the enterprise market - where office / workspace + app + directory integration, security, safety, compliance etc. are more important. 80% of their revenue is from enterprise - less churn, much higher revenue per W/token, better margins, better $/user.

Microsoft adopting the Anthropic models into copilot and Azure - despite being a large and early OpenAI investor - is a much bigger win than yet another image model used to make memes for users who balk at spending $20 per month.

Same with the office connector - which is only available to enterprises[0] (further speaking to where their focus is). There hasn't yet been a "claude code" moment for office productivity, but Anthropic are the closest to it.

[0] This may be a mistake as Claude Code has been adopted from the ground up
Show HN: I built a watch-only Bitcoin address tracker for iOS
by mgmx-io | 2026-01-12 19:08:49+00:00
Hey everyone,

I usually use sparrow for monitoring on desktop, but I wanted a simple way to check my Bitcoin balance on my phone

I didn’t want to expose xpubs or use a mobile wallet that also handles transactions. I was just looking for something watch-only

So I built BitScout, a small tool that lets me add Bitcoin addresses and see their combined balance and transactions

There are no ads, no accounts, and no analytics. Addresses stay on the device. Each one is checked separately using the mempool API

I’ve been using it for a while and found it useful, so I figured I’d share and see what others think

Happy to answer questions

App Store:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bitscout-track-bitcoin-wallet/...

Source code:
https://github.com/mgmx-io/BitScout
by bsimpson | 2026-01-12 19:09:27+00:00
I saw Coraline in theaters when it came out, and had the exact same reaction. It was clear that it was edited in 2D.

Object permanence is in direct tension with 3D content. In real life, things don't blink out of existence. When they do in virtual environments, it's jarring - especially when done in quick succession. Your brain needs time to reorient.
by visageunknown | 2026-01-12 19:09:28+00:00
If your sole goal is to have a homelab that self-hosts services, I completely agree. I'm speaking for those who are interested in developing their skills and knowledge, and believe that building something with AI somehow does that.

I'll agree to disagree on it not being applicable. Having fundamental knowledge on topics like networking thru homelabbing have helped me develop my understanding from the ground up. It helps in ways that are not always obvious. But if your goal is purely to be better at your job at work, it is not the most efficient path.
by morgan814 | 2026-01-12 19:09:34+00:00
> Bizarrely, voter turnout among younger people remains low

I understand why my age group has low turnout. It's a disgusting chore that I force myself to do.

In part, it might be a chicken and egg situation. My age cohort doesn't vote because candidates suck. Candidates suck because they pander to those who do vote.

Now to show my political biases:

In 2016 Sanders had a huge amount of support from young people but the DNC did everything it could to tilt favor away from him. He ran a hugely successful grassroots campaign taking small donations from individuals. Where did it get him? On stage with Biden - the anointed candidates with SuperPAC money. That is no small feat. His campaign ended only after the DNC guilted him into quitting as to "not steal votes". That's my perception at least. I temporarily changed my registration from unaffiliated to Democrat to vote for him in the primaries. Young people put in effort and showed up. It bought them exactly one legally rigged primary.

So every election I put on my clown makeup [0] and pretend like any of this is actually real democracy.

[0] https://rimgo.privacyredirect.com/ZUiVLyz
by gred | 2026-01-12 19:09:38+00:00
> It's the Supreme Court that has expanded the powers of the President

Sort of, but Congress also wrote a bunch of pretty broad, vague laws, delegating a significant amount of power to the executive via agency rulemaking, and it turns out the agencies are part of the executive branch and have to do what the head of the executive branch says they have to do (within the limits of those broad, vague laws). If Congress can't get back to smaller, simpler, more specific laws, and they continue to pass the burden of this complexity over to the executive branch to figure out, the executive branch will continue to wield outsize power.
by fragmede | 2026-01-12 19:09:41+00:00
It's the star trek future way of interfacing with things. I don't know SOLIDWORKS at all. I'm a total noob at Fusion 360, but I've made a couple of things with it. Sketch and extrude. But what I am real good at is English. Using a combination of Claude and openSCAD and my knowledge of programming, I was able to make something that I could 3d print, without having to learn SOLIDWORKS. Same with Abelton for music. It's frustrating when Claude does the wrong thing, but where it shines is when you give it the skill to render the object to a png for it to look at the scad that it's generating, so it can iterate until it actually makes what you're looking for. It's the human out of the loop where leaps are being made.
by tptacek | 2026-01-12 19:09:41+00:00
I don't doubt this is true but would also note that high-profile online outlets --- Ryan Grim's Drop Site News, most notably --- have run pieces talking about how huge anti-government protests are in fact pro-government protests, when that has turned out to be flatly false. (I don't know where they get this stuff).

The Iranian anti-regime movement is very well established and is not the product of foreign intervention. It's actually not all that clear that foreign actors in the region favor regime change!

(I'm not holding out much hope that these protests will actually topple the regime, though it would be amazing if they did.)
by alphazard | 2026-01-12 19:10:02+00:00
> or is Iran just not yet prepared to deal with them? ... you could flood all channels with packets like a jammer or something

A related question that someone here may be able to answer: Who wins the jamming game in principal? Is it $JAMMER or $COMMUNICATORS?

It seems like Starlink could distribute secret codes[0] on each device, where each code is used in some kind of spread spectrum scheme, and that jamming all of the codes would be difficult, the wider the spectrum?
There must be some kind of energy/bandwidth tradeoff, but what I want to understand is if the game is easier for one side in principal.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coding_theory
by murph-almighty | 2026-01-12 19:10:23+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test

The problem (like with voter ID laws in the US) is that it's a very slippery slope to voter suppression, and in the US we have a very creative history when it comes to voter suppression. You'd have poll workers who would present incredibly hard passages to read to voters based on a personal judgement call (read: black voters).

I (not OP) agree that dumb people voting is a problem but the alternative is to have arbitrary suppression of votes, which IMO is worse.
by PeterStuer | 2026-01-12 19:10:48+00:00
"they utterly failed to consider the second-order effects of this business decision"

Or maybe they did consider but were capital/ inference capacity constrained to keep serving at this pricepoint. Pretty sure without any constraints they would eagerly go for 100% market share.

CC users give them the reigns to the agentic process. Non CC users take (mostly indirect) control themselves. So if you are forced to slow growth, where do you push the break (by charging defacto more per (api) token)?
by dang | 2026-01-12 19:10:58+00:00
> is there anything stopping someone from flagging all things XYZ

Yes, two things: (1) we take away flagging privileges from accounts that appear to be flagging based on such an agenda, and (2) users email us to review cases where they feel an article is on topic for Hacker News and should not have been flagged. We always review those cases, and sometimes we turn off the flags (but not always—it depends on whether we agree that the article is on-topic, contains significant new information, and can serve as the basis for a substantial discussion, among other factors).

More explanation at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que..., including https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46378818.
by falaki | 2026-01-12 19:11:51+00:00
I left the comment on starlink on that thread. I should note some personal observations as I am in touch with a few folks inside Iran through Starlink.

1. The jamming/disruption is local to large cities most notably the capital, Tehran

2. Even in Tehran it is not complete and my friends are able to send and receive messages. Uploading videos is harder.

3. The regime is now raiding homes that they suspect have Starlink terminals. I don't know how they identify them but I do wonder if they are using technology to locate them.
by Loughla | 2026-01-12 19:11:58+00:00
>That said, the game (or movie) still needs to be the most important thing. When a studio tries to lean on graphics as the selling point, it always ends up poorly.

Counterpoint: Avatar. I have never heard someone say they loved that movie because of the amazing story. They like it because it's very, very, very pretty to look at.
by QuantumGood | 2026-01-12 19:12:00+00:00
That is a very long chain of dependencies (what is a dependency, what is not can be shown differently than below), meaning there are less and less likely to be many people following the entire chain of dependencies. This is sometimes a key part of how a straw man is constructed.

> all

> the people

> who say

> the world will be

> greener

> and therefore there will be

> more plants

> and food
by monkmartinez | 2026-01-12 19:12:11+00:00
Disclaimer: I am not a professional dev, but I have dabbled as a hobby dev for years. My day job is wayyyy different.

I receive at least 10 python job ads a day from indeed and linkedin. Are any of them legit? I have no reason to apply, so I am curious if they are bullshit or not. Any insight for this poorly constructed question?
by tim-tday | 2026-01-12 19:12:14+00:00
Counterpoint: unreasonable ai exuberance has done a lot of damage and is not helpful to society:

The unreasonable cost in power and water is disproportionate to the value. (And destroyed big tech’s climate change emissions goals)

Shoving AI into everything devalues both the AI and the thing it is shoved into. (Who wants AI hallucinations in their excel spreadsheets!? Hint it’s nobody, nobody asked for it, nobody wants it)

AI bias is in no way solved. E.G We train on racist data and the models are racist (show an LLM 10 photos and ask which one is likely to be a criminal, it’s black people every time. Why because racist policing skews mugshots towards being more black. Racist policies generate skewed data, skewed data creates racist AI)

AI slop is invading science, law, security research, etc

Nobody has an answer for how to run an economy when AI takes the jobs. (Which is 100% happening especially for new grads). There have been millions of lost jobs in tech in the last few years. How you gunna eat, pay rent, get healthcare, buy things if you don’t got a job? When the percentage of people like that grows too large society collapses. What percentage? Don’t know but we’re sure on track to find out!

Need I continue?
Probably not. If you don’t know by now you never will. If you can hear, you’ve already heard.
by ImPleadThe5th | 2026-01-12 19:12:20+00:00
After spending most of my career hacking on these systems, I feel like queues very quickly become a hammer and every entity quickly becomes a nail.

Just because you can keep two systems in complete sync doesn't mean you should. If you ever find yourself with more-or-less identical tables in two services you may have gone too far.

Eventually you find yourself backfilling downstream services due to minor domain or business logic changes and scaling is a problem again.
by pegasus | 2026-01-12 19:12:23+00:00
But you're not actually questioning whether he was "really smart". Which was what GP was questioning. Sure, you can try to quantify the level of smarts, but you can't still call it a "stochastic parrot" anymore, just like you won't respond to Einstein's achievements, "Ah well, in the end I'm still not sure he's actually smart, like I am for example. Could just be that he's just dumbly but systematically going through all options, working it out step by step, nothing I couldn't achieve (or even better, program a computer to do) if I'd put my mind to it."

I personally doubt that this would work. I don't think these systems can achieve truly ground-breaking, paradigm-shifting work. The homeworld of these systems is the corpus of text on which it was trained, in the same way as ours is physical reality. Their access to this reality is always secondary, already distorted by the imperfections of human knowledge.
by 0x457 | 2026-01-12 19:12:43+00:00
It's the fact that WASM in a browser provide very little. Anything you have there required to bring a bunch of things that JavaScript just has access out of the box. That include both, things like Fetch API and things like Garbage Collector.

> The native ecosystem never payed attention to binary size optimization, but the JS ecosystem payed attention to code size in the very beginning.

That's not true at all. Native ecosystem stopped paying attention to it outside of embed once storage/memory got relatively cheap (i.e. we went from kilo and megabytes to gigabytes). Native also gets to use shared libraries...sometimes.

JavaScript ecosystem is like pendulum, sometimes they care, sometimes they don't.

I have high hopes for components, both for reducing size and for avoiding JavaScript.
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-12 19:13:04+00:00
Silicon Valley is all over politics right now. Look at the All In podcast. David Sacks is “AI Czar”. Chamath regularly sucks up to the administration. Palantir (Alex Karp, JT Lonsdale) regularly talk about political things on Twitter and whenever they appear in interviews. Jensen Huang is a major donor to the ballroom project to avoid antitrust of the Groq “acquisition”. Tim Cook gave Trump a gold award to avoid regulatory problems. And there’s Elon Musk, obviously.

The problem is a lot of these folks are cowards too. They keep praising Elon Musk even as he posts (almost daily) things about the greatness of white culture, or creepy AI-generated videos of “sexy” white women in traditional or historical settings. They have said a lot about how important immigration is to Silicon Valley’s talent density but are staying quiet when the DHS openly talks about deporting one third of America (AKA all non whites). They value America’s robust capital and financial systems but stay quiet when the Fed’s independence is openly threatened.

I can agree that California needs to moderate (as does Oregon, Washington, and a number of very progressive states). These states need moderation and balance to fix their budgets, but also to appeal to a broader public politically, so that we don’t keep electing Trumps. But at the same time, I see a major problem arising from concentration of wealth and power. The few that use this power for their own goals or just to get richer, are letting all the other bad things happen. They may not be victims of those bad things, so maybe they don’t care. B ut the rest of us will be victims. I am for free markets but also see a need to talk about reducing the wealth of these ultra rich Silicon Valley overlords, instead of having them be kings at the state level instead of just nationally.
by mlinksva | 2026-01-12 19:13:09+00:00
Do you have a pointer to where LeCun spoke about it? I noticed last October that Dwarkesh mentioned the idea off handedly on his podcast (prompting me to write up https://manifold.markets/MikeLinksvayer/llm-trained-on-data-...) but I wonder if this idea has been around for much longer, or is just so obvious that lots of people are independently coming up with it (parent to this comment being yet another)?
by ebbi | 2026-01-12 19:13:12+00:00
Small sample, but talking about this with my Iranian friends, the sentiment among them and their wider network is that they do acknowledge that Iran has problems, that they need a change in leadership, but that they do NOT want a regime change at the hands of the US/Israel. For them that is a recipe for disaster and more carnage.

In their view, the topology of Iranians and their political views would be: 10% - pro-US regime change intervention; 20% - ardent regime supporters; 70% - pro-regime change but without US involvement.
by falaki | 2026-01-12 19:13:20+00:00
Some personal observations as I am in touch with a few folks inside Iran through Starlink.

1. The jamming/disruption is local to large cities most notably the capital, Tehran.

2. Even in Tehran it is not complete and my friends are able to send and receive messages. Uploading videos is harder.

3. The regime is now raiding homes that they suspect have Starlink terminals. I don't know how they identify them but I do wonder if they are using technology to locate them.