MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by joe_mamba | 2026-01-26 09:01:49+00:00
Accusing people you disagree with of being "very far right" to automatically discredit them without arguments, is the ultimate bad faith cheat code of online debates. If you want, we can have this conversation over another medium where I can share you the data from government sources that prove my point as being mathematically and logically sound, and not "far right". THere's no point continuing here since HN anyway bans such discussions as inflammatory without right to appeal regardless of what data/arguments you bring to the table, so even if you win the argument, you still loose.
by devrimco | 2026-01-26 09:02:21+00:00
My wife and I are experimenting with a small side project: T-shirts inspired by vintage covers of classical novels we love. The idea started as "would we actually wear this?" and turned into a tiny collection.

We even made 1 sale, the customer loved it, that made us very happy and motivated :)

We're still early and very much in exploration mode, so I'd love feedback. Anything I should do add/remove to the website also counts. :)

If you have favorite classic novels, cover designs, or sites/resources about vintage book art that you think we should look at, I'm all ears.

Thanks in advance
by curtisblaine | 2026-01-26 09:02:31+00:00
> It's fascinating that browsers are one of the most robust and widely available sandboxing system and we are yet to make a claude-code/gemini-cli like agent that runs inside the browser.

It's easily explained by the fact that all the javascript code is exposed in a browser and all the network connections are trivially inspectable and blockable. It's much harder to collect data and do shady things with that level of inspectability. And it's much harder to ban alternative clients for the main paid offer. Especially if AI companies want to leave the door open to pushing ads to your conversations.
by feverzsj | 2026-01-26 09:04:18+00:00
You phone and computer will be checked thoroughly using automated tools. If they didn't find any sensitive keyword, you'll be fined and recorded in the system. If they find something, a detention for at least 3 days or ... forever.

That's the standard procedure. But polices in developed areas usually treat them like antragsdelikte(no trial without a complaint).
by cadamsdotcom | 2026-01-26 09:04:46+00:00
This sort of stuff has parallels outside software - the book “how big things get done” is amazing, and one interesting thing it implies is that solar installations tend to go the best because they’re modular and lessons learned can be applied to the next phase of a project.

Whereas the worst overruns are nuclear power plants; which are either switched on and working, or completely useless and taking up space!

So my takeaways were: try to make estimates modular and work out how to carry learnings as your project goes on, and you’ll have an easier time hitting your estimates - and probably get a great reputation for delivering!
by hasperdi | 2026-01-26 09:05:09+00:00
Speaking as a user of Openpilot / Comma device, it is exactly what the Wikipedia article described. In other words, it's a level 2 ADAS.

My point was, he had more than naive / "pedestrian level" (pun?) understanding of the problem domain as he worked on Comma.ai project for quite some time; even the device is only capable of solving maybe about 40% of the autonomous driving problem.
MegaNova Studio: Character-first workspace for building consistent AI characters
by jacenguyen | 2026-01-26 09:05:17+00:00
We'll launch Character Studio, a browser-based workspace focused on building AI characters that hold personality, memory, and behavior over long sessions.

Most AI tools optimize for Q&A or short chats. Studio is built around character continuity instead: separating personality, behavior, memory, and testing workflows so characters don’t drift after a few messages.

You can create characters in multiple ways (image-first, agent-assisted, expert mode, or import existing ones), then test them across different models without rewriting prompts.

Happy to answer questions or hear how others here handle character consistency and long-form behavior today.
by decebals | 2026-01-26 09:05:21+00:00
I'm the creator of PF4J (https://github.com/pf4j/pf4j) - a plugin framework for adding extensibility to Java applications, used by companies worldwide (https://github.com/pf4j/pf4j#trusted-by).

After years of GitHub discussions, I kept seeing three recurring patterns everyone rebuilds:

1. Service injection - custom PluginFactory boilerplate to wire platform services (Issue #319 is typical: https://github.com/pf4j/pf4j/issues/319)

2. Plugin communication - everyone builds their own EventBus

3. Configuration - no standard approach for plugin-scoped settings

Hit these myself building a JavaFX app. PF4J handled loading, but then 30+ lines of factory code just to inject services.

Built pf4j-plus to standardize this layer:

BEFORE - custom factory everywhere:

public class MyPluginFactory extends DefaultPluginFactory {
@Override
public Plugin create(PluginWrapper wrapper) {
Plugin plugin = super.create(wrapper);
if (plugin instanceof MyPlugin) {
((MyPlugin) plugin).setGreetingService(App.getGreetingService());
((MyPlugin) plugin).setEventBus(App.getEventBus());
}
return plugin;
}
}

AFTER - declare once:

PluginManager pm = PlusPluginManagerBuilder.create()
.serviceRegistry(r -> {
r.register(GreetingService.class, new DefaultGreetingService());
r.register(EventBus.class, new DefaultEventBus());
})
.build();

Plugins get ServiceRegistryAware, extensions use @Inject.

What it provides:

- ServiceRegistry - shared services for plugins

- EventBus - decoupled communication

- ConfigService - plugin-scoped configuration

Not a DI container replacement. Just standardizes the platform layer you'd build anyway. Especially useful outside Spring (desktop apps, CLI tools, embedded systems).

Early stage - using it in my own projects. Looking for feedback on what platform services are missing.

Repo: https://github.com/pf4j/pf4j-plus

Blog post: https://dev.to/decebals/why-i-built-pf4j-plus-1hl1
by vbezhenar | 2026-01-26 09:05:40+00:00
Any sandbox technology works fine until it isn't. It's not like you could escape Java sandbox, but Java applets were removed from the browsers due to issues being found regularly. In the end, browser sandbox is one of the few that billions of people use and run arbitrary code there every day, without even understanding that. The only comparable technology is qemu. I don't think there are many hosters who will hand off user account to a shared server and let you go wild there.
by adrian_b | 2026-01-26 09:06:00+00:00
Those have a ridiculously low performance.

While this phone still does not have an Armv9-A CPU, but only a quadruple Cortex-A78, that is nonetheless like 4 to 10 times faster than the phones mentioned by you and faster than a light notebook of a decade ago.

The other Linux phones are barely competitive with a laptop of 25 years ago and they are not really usable as a personal computer today, unless you like waiting for your computer.
Rust-Gun: Turn Repo Chaos into a Locked-Down Rust Machine (CI/CD, Releases)
by codingmstrx | 2026-01-26 09:06:58+00:00
After years of fighting messy Rust setups, flaky CI, and copy-pasted scripts, I built Rust-Gun: a production-grade Rust workspace and CLI that turns a fresh repo into a locked-down engineering machine.

It bootstraps everything serious projects need from day one:
CI/CD, strict linting, formatting, testing, security and supply-chain checks, release flow, and developer experience tooling — all wired together and runnable with a single command.

The goal is simple:
stop wasting weeks on glue, and start with the same discipline you’d expect in big-tech infrastructure.

This is not a toy template.
It’s an opinionated, battle-ready setup for people who want their Rust projects to feel like real systems, not weekend experiments.
by otherme123 | 2026-01-26 09:07:02+00:00
> Spain is blocking whole blocks of internet during football matches.

Lets make this clear: "Spain" is not blocking, some ISP companies which have many users ask the judge for permission to block IP ranges because they are streaming football matches. The judge agrees (they don't seem to know how Cloudflare works), so the ISPs are the ones that are blocking their own users to access sites behind Cloudflare. As they have millions of users, the block feels huge, but it is not issued by the government.

I am not a customer of those ISP, so my internet isn't disrupted at all during football matches. Some services, like annas-archive and torrent sites, are intermittently blocked, but you can easily avoid the blocks just by switching DNS server to 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8.
by notarobot123 | 2026-01-26 09:07:18+00:00
Polarization leaves very little room for reasonable discourse at the poles too. Pure tribalism doesn't care about reason unless that reason is in service of the identity and ideology of the tribe.

What if political discourse was focused on policy not identity and couched in terms of mutual interest instead of party affiliation? There would still be tensions, trade-offs, conflicts and political strategy at play but the discourse would be infinitely more reasonable.

I think this is what we mean when we talk about "center positions": a "value-based realism" that recognizes that society is nothing but the mutual alignment of values and interests. I don't understand why "common sense" has become so unpopular.
by orleyhuxwell | 2026-01-26 09:07:25+00:00
For the last 30 years I've decided that the best stuff (most engaging books, stories, experiences in life) require investment. It gets worse (you go through some pain while exercising) before it gets better.
That's essentially a definition of a good life to me - finding the things worth sacrificing resources and getting the payoff.

So 'first make me care' to me is a manifest of Gen Z - tiktok - brainrot approach.
From my perspective you miss most of the really good stuff by cultivating this approach.
I.e. my favorite books - Tai Pan, Noble House; tv series - Better Call Saul! - require you to go through so much of initial boredom.
It's also the same discussion as 'learn to code vs only do AI Slop' or 'learn math and algos vs only import functions from libs and never check what's inside'.

*Exceptions apply, ofc. There are things that hook you and progressively ad depth, but it's really rare. I.e. Arcane tv show is both easy to access and quite deep.

Edit:
...so I can imagine math teacher that first tell you what are some amazing uses of derivatives and integrals - PIDs, SGD, better estimation, wave functions, generalized description of problems, accessing interesting physics etc. And after that they make you grind. I think it would be quite great. But it is so rare, that you have to make a leap of faith and assume most of the good stuff is boring initially.
by hackinthebochs | 2026-01-26 09:08:10+00:00
It doesn't have to be a reference to dualism. We can draw a distinction between specific patterns of brain activity and the body that realizes it. "I" exist only when the characteristic property of neural activity that realizes the self is present. I am the realization of this second-order property. Here the "soul" is this specific pattern of dynamics realized by my body's neurons.
by orbital-decay | 2026-01-26 09:09:14+00:00
The problem is that not disturbing the fibers is impossible if you work with it at all, and workers in Russia still suffer from life-changing injuries. Disposing of it safely is also not realistically possible. The regulator just doesn't care, it's as simple as that. Of course they don't "think it's safe" as GP said, there's a ton of research and practice on the opposite and they set a specific (pretty low) limit on the exposure. But they turn a blind eye to the fact it's impossible to enforce and will never be followed in practice as long as asbestos is still being used anywhere. This is why asbestos use is banned everywhere, and this is the issue with Russian regulations, they give a tiny bit of economy a priority over public health, using the convenient research that pretty much "натягивает сову на глобус" in trying to downplay the hazard, if you actually read the relevant studies in Russian.
by krige | 2026-01-26 09:09:32+00:00
> which I would argue has just become naked promotion to the same degree.

Everything you said is equally applicable to video game reviews and reviewers. Once again I am compelled to bring up Amiga Power the gaming magazine that dared, to much outrage among publishers, to give review scores lower than 7-8 on the regular. They were very pro-consumer even though in early 90's the press was already treated as ad space that pretends it's not.
by hagbard_c | 2026-01-26 09:09:37+00:00
It was the same "Marxists" who helped Khomeini gain power so by all means observe Marxists but only to understand where they are trying to lead society so you can be ready to limit the amount of damage they'll do. Lenin is supposed to have called these people 'useful idiots', useful to create societal upheaval because they are so easy to lead and eager to follow but for that same reason they should be neutralised once the Party has gained power. Lenin and Stalin tended to just kill them or sent them into the GULAG, Mao sent them to the countryside, Khomeini followed Lenin and Stalin in getting rid of the Marxist students who helped push the revolution.
by avadodin | 2026-01-26 09:10:35+00:00
It's not even in the same ballpark.

0.03% of Iranians vs 3% of Gazans.

I think we can all agree that Iran shouldn't be massacring its own nationals even if as the government claims they are foreign-influenced, but don't use this as a platform to push an agenda that harms even your own cause.
by jcparkyn | 2026-01-26 09:11:07+00:00
Personally I think local mutability is quite a useful property, which was part of the inspiration for making this instead of just another pure functional language:

- All functions are still referentially transparent, which means we get all the local reasoning benefits of pure functions.
- We can mutate local variables inside loops (instead of just shadowing bindings), which makes certain things a lot easier to write (especially for beginners).
- Mutating nested fields is super easy: `set foo.bar[0].baz = 1;` (compare this to the equivalent Haskell).
by littlecranky67 | 2026-01-26 09:11:16+00:00
Your entire point hinges on EVs idrying up the oil market that there is no more demand. But ICEs don't run on oil, they run on gas or diesel. Oil is used in far more industries (aviation, ships). Plus, you cannot account for business models that become viable, that haven't been viable before. People come up with new ideas all the time.
by storystarling | 2026-01-26 09:11:26+00:00
I built a similar internal ledger for my print-on-demand setup because the image generation costs were eating all the margin.

The architecture that finally worked was treating every agent action as a transaction against a Redis counter. We use Celery for the heavy lifting, but the worker has to acquire a lock and deduct credits atomically from Redis before it can even call the external provider. If the balance hits zero, the task fails immediately. It adds a bit of latency but it’s the only way I found to prevent a runaway loop from draining the credit card.
by viraptor | 2026-01-26 09:11:47+00:00
> Any sandbox technology works fine until it isn't.

Tautology is tautology.

> but Java applets were removed from the browsers

Java applets provided more scope compared to the browser itself, not less. They're not really comparable to seccomp or namespaces.

> hosters who will hand off user account to a shared server

There's lots of CI or function runners that expose docker-like environments.
by perihelions | 2026-01-26 09:13:08+00:00
An even more apt analogy is France in New Caledonia. Back in 2024, the French territorial government used an anti-terrorism law to enforce DNS blocks in that overseas territory, for the express purpose of suppressing political protests (by New Caledonians angry at the French mainland government).

> "Philippe Gomes, the former president of New Caledonia's government, told POLITICO the decision aimed to stop protesters from "organizing reunions and protests" through the app."

[0] https://www.politico.eu/article/french-tiktok-ban-new-caledo...

This is the only example I'm aware of (are there others?) of a Western government effecting internet censorship to suppress protests. (Though the article also mentions Macron considering (but rejecting) the same idea in France, to suppress protests following a police shooting. See also[1])

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36599726 ("Macron floats social media cuts during riots", 105 comments)

edit: There was also an incident in San Francisco way back in 2011,

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2879546 ("San Francisco Subway Muzzles Cell Service During Protest", 113 comments)
by mike_hearn | 2026-01-26 09:13:40+00:00
There were people saying right at the time in 2020 that the 1% IFR was nonsense and far too high. It wasn't something that only became visible in hindsight.

Epidemiology tends to conflate IFR and CFR, that's one of the issues Ioannidis was highlighting in his work. IFR estimates do decline over time but they decline even in the absence of natural immunity buildup, because doctors start becoming aware of more mild cases where the patient recovered without being detected. That leads to a higher number of infections with the same number of fatalities, hence lower IFR computed even retroactively, but there's no biological change happening. It's just a case of data collection limits.

That problem is what motivated the serosurvey. A theoretically perfect serosurvey doesn't have such issues. So, one would expect it to calculate a lower IFR and be a valuable type of study to do well. Part of the background of that work and why it was controversial is large parts of the public health community didn't actually want to know the true IFR because they knew it would be much lower than their initial back-of-the-envelope calculations based on e.g. news reports from China. Surveys like that should have been commissioned by governments at scale, with enough data to resolve any possible complaint, but weren't because public health bodies are just not incentivized that way. Ioannidis didn't play ball and the pro lockdown camp gave him a public beating. I think he was much closer to reality than they were, though. The whole saga spoke to the very warped incentives that come into play the moment you put the word "public" in front of something.
by storystarling | 2026-01-26 09:13:40+00:00
I found the only way to make this work reliably is to treat the LLM as a fallible component inside a state machine rather than the controller. I've been using LangGraph to enforce structured outputs and run validation checks before any side effects happen. If the output doesn't match the schema or business logic it just retries or halts. It seems like a lot of boilerplate initially but it is necessary if you want to trust the system with actual invoices.
by torginus | 2026-01-26 09:13:50+00:00
The idea as I stated it is super half-baked but

> You could probably do the same thing with directories but I haven't thought about it.

For example in the FAT filesystem, a directory is just a file with a special flag set in its file descriptor and inside said file there is just a list of file descriptors. Not sure if something so simple would a good idea, but it certainly works and has worked IRL.
by scrapheap | 2026-01-26 09:13:54+00:00
That fear is good, it means you know that you're taking a risk - I'd worry if you had to touch production and didn't feel that fear.

If you only have the one or two production systems/databases, and you're having to do this more than a couple of times each year, then you could certainly benefit for improving your tooling.

But if you've inherited a large number of production systems, each with their own local database instance. Then implementing new tooling will be a long process that you might not be able to get Management to agree to.

When I have to touch a production database, I usually use the following steps:

0. Follow your organisation's Change Processes (i.e. if you need to put in a change request and get approval then do that)

1. Snapshot the server itself (VMs are great for this)

2. Backup the database (just be careful not to leave that backup anywhere open, and remember to clear it up when you no longer need it)

3. Write the SELECT version of your SQL first (If you need to delete a record from the userSessions table with an ID of 123, then start by writing

SELECT * FROM userSessions WHERE id=123;

4. If that shows you just the rows you'd expect then convert it to the delete from of the SQL (making sure that you don't change any part of the WHERE clause)

DELETE FROM userSessions WHERE id=123;

5. Get someone else, who also understands the database, to check your SQL

6. Run your SQL

7. Do all your sanity checks to make sure that production is working as expected.

8. If it does go wrong then you have more ammunition to use when trying to convince Management to spend some resources on improving your tooling for these sort of changes.
by rob74 | 2026-01-26 09:14:04+00:00
> Spain spent an average of about 1.5 billion euros ($1.76 billion) a year from 2018 to 2022 on its high-speed network, more than any other country. However, the vast majority went to new infrastructure with only some 16% earmarked for maintenance, renewal and upgrades. That compares with between 34% to 39% spent by France, Germany and Italy, whose networks are far less extensive, according to the Commission data.

Conflating the maintenance budget with the money invested in new infrastructure in this way is not very useful IMHO. How much inspection/maintenance money was spent per km of (high-speed and overall) railway track would be much more informative...
by matwood | 2026-01-26 09:15:10+00:00
> I find it odd that Americans aren't angrier about Russia running disinfo bot networks for over a decade now

Half the country has been convinced that stories about Russia running disinformation campaigns are a hoaxes.

> I lost the source but there was something about bot networks that could argue both sides of a topic to feign the illusion of a real debate

I read a similar argument years ago about how disinformation gets into the networks. It starts with bots sharing and discussing with each other until it reaches the level to hit a few real people (useful idiots) who then share it out giving it more credence. Musk comes to mind as a key target for these types of posts now.
by musculus | 2026-01-26 09:15:34+00:00
Thanks for the feedback.

In my stress tests (especially when the model is under strong contextual pressure, like in the edited history experiments), simple instructions like 'if unsure, say you don't know' often failed. The weights prioritizing sycophancy/compliance seemed to override simple system instructions.

You are right that for less extreme cases, a shorter prompt might suffice. However, I published this verbose 'Safety Anchor' version deliberately for a dual purpose. It is designed not only to reset the Gemini's context but also to be read by the human user. I wanted the users to understand the underlying mechanism (RLHF pressure/survival instinct) they are interacting with, rather than just copy-pasting a magic command.