MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by apelapan | 2026-01-29 18:11:09+00:00
No need to bring the poor into the discussion. Of course they can't afford paying an equal share of their income as someone with average or above average income.

In the grandparent post I was first replying to, the poster stated that they were in the highest tax bracket that existed in their country, but said there should be more brackets for people who were even more well off.

My opinion is that it isn't unfair to the top 1% that the top 0,1% have the same tax rate, even though they are richer.

I do think it is unfair if the bottom 25% have the same tax rate as the top 25%.
by jerlam | 2026-01-29 18:11:20+00:00
On street parking is so ingrained into the American lifestyle that any change to the status quo is impossible. Cars have more rights on public property than people. Every suburban neighborhood has conflicts over people's imagined "ownership" of the street parking in front of their house. People rarely use their garages to store their car since they can just leave it on the street. There are often laws that prevent people from other neighborhoods from using the public street to park. New roads are paved as wide as possible to allow both street parking and a double-parked car to not impede traffic. And we've started building homes without any kind of parking that force people to use the street.
by 0xy | 2026-01-29 18:11:41+00:00
And when the CCP compromised the law enforcement portal for every American ISP, stealing info on 80% of Americans, including both the Kamala and Trump campaigns, under the previous admin it was rock solid op-sec, presumably.

Or when the previous admin leaked classified Iran attack plans from the Pentagon, so bad that they didn't even know whether they were hacked or not.

You can at least pretend to make a technical argument over a political one.
by dlg | 2026-01-29 18:12:25+00:00
I was just dropping my kids off at their elementary school in Santa Monica, but not at Grant Elementary where this happened.

While it's third-hand, word on the local parent chat is that the parent dropped their kid off on the opposite side of the street from Grant. Even though there was a crossing guard, the kid ran behind a car an ran right out in to the street.

If those rumors are correct, I'll say the kid's/family's fault. That said, I think autonomous vehicles should probably go extra-slowly near schools, especially during pickup and dropoff.
by kakacik | 2026-01-29 18:12:34+00:00
The thing is, apple decides this for themselves, on a product that you fully bought and privately own. It bundles the most brilliant and most incompetent clueless people into 1 group and goes for lowest denominator. No freedom of choice.

Of course thats PR argument, in reality its about distorting and manipulating the market to get the most money out of its users and bind them to their ecosystem as hard as possible to extract even more. And the amount of those same people who uncritically defend them here is still staggering. But maybe its just employees ignoring their ndas, some investors and similar folks.
by zeagle | 2026-01-29 18:12:53+00:00
Until recently I had a 4gb ram 80gb ssd+2tb hd VPS running debian in a Montreal data centre with a real use 700 mbit pipe to my city with a budget provider for the equivalent of $80USD/year. When fio speeds were slow they moved me to a less crowded server. I gave it up as don't need it and moved my personal sites back to NFS for peanuts a year and services to my NAS. The pricing, offsite storage for my backups, Canadian sovereignty, lack of perceived complexity with a big provider was all attractive. I'm a physician with a tech hobby and last serious tech work was in the LAMP days with perl and php. Trying to think of learning about AWS and screwing up usage based billing was daunting!
by tim-tday | 2026-01-29 18:13:11+00:00
The line in that sci-fi movie Looper haunts me:
“Son, I come from the future, go to China”

Advances in technology, green tech, electric cars, high speed rail are impressive.

Meanwhile the US is actively attacking science, freedom, rule of law.

China pulls ahead and US falls behind.

Although I think outsiders fail to realize just how little freedom to dissent exists in China.
by Joker_vD | 2026-01-29 18:13:12+00:00
> constraining to invert is not sufficient in my opinion

Eh. Doing green/red text color with default background, maybe inverted works amazing for me. In fact, I'd say that every sensible colour scheme for a terminal should have as the default foreground/background colours something that is more or less contrasting against every other explicitly named colour, including black and white (I personally have #212121 on #EEEEEE).
by apparent | 2026-01-29 18:13:14+00:00
> These agents together were tested in orthotopic mouse models of PDAC, where tumour cells are implanted in a location that closely resembles their natural environment in the pancreas.

Ugh, of course: "in mice"!

> The combination therapy also led to significant regression in genetically engineered mouse tumours and in human cancer tissues grown in lab mice, known as patient-derived tumour xenografts (PDX).

OK, maybe "in human tissue grown in mice" isn't so bad.

Fingers crossed. Pancreatic cancer is terrible.
by jjav | 2026-01-29 18:13:26+00:00
> It's likely that a fully-attentive human driver would have done worse.

We'd have to see video of the full scene to have a better judgement, but I wouldn't call it likely.

The car reacted quickly once it saw the child. Is that enough?

But most humans would have been aware of the big picture scenario much earlier. Are there muliple kids milling around on the sidewalk? Near a school? Is there a big truck/SUV parked there?

If that's the scenario, there is a real probability that a child might appear, so I'm going to be over-slowing way down pre-emptively even thought I haven't seen anyone, just in case.

The car only slows down after seeing someone. The car can react faster that I can after seeing someone, but as a human I can pre-react much earlier based on the big picture, which is much better.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-29 18:13:37+00:00
> Please explain the us–versus–them dynamic you referred to?

The tendency to tar and feather anyone who doesn’t 100% agree with one as a Zionist. (Which, in these circles, carries the same weight as being a bona fide racist.)

This memorably presented itself a few months ago when folks—potentially on the way to changing their minds—would be called Nazis for referring to the war as a war, as if a genocide within a war is somehow inconceivable.

Absolute morality rallies the base. It doesn’t usually convert moderates. And the situation in Gaza defies absolute morality.
by observationist | 2026-01-29 18:14:00+00:00
LeCun wasn't producing results. He was obstinate and insistent on his own theories and ideas which weren't, and possibly aren't, going anywhere. He refused to engage with LLMs and compete in the market that exists, and spent all his effort and energy on unproven ideas and research, which split the company's mission and competitiveness. They lost their place as one of the top 4 AI companies, and are now a full generation behind, in part due to the split efforts and lack of enthusiastic participation by all the Meta AI team. If you look at the chaos and churn at the highest levels across the industry, there's not a lot of room for mission creep by leadership, and LeCun thoroughly demonstrated he wasn't suited for the mission desired by Meta.

I think he's lucky he got out with his reputation relatively intact.
by js8 | 2026-01-29 18:14:04+00:00
Is it even an attainable goal? It seems an NN with less than say 4 billion parameters will be able to do that. The cost of training will likely go down with more models being available. Unless we lock down the computing for majority of people, I don't see how we can prevent someone creating a CSAM model in their garage.

I don't want to see CSAM created, but the totalitarian control required is too much for my taste (and frankly it's preferable for that person to use NN than to go out and hurt actual children).

Not to mention even locked down technology is often being abused by the privileged.
by bluescrn | 2026-01-29 18:14:11+00:00
> Google and Microsoft will obviously remain

Microsoft seem to be pushing all kinds of users away in all directions at the moment while focused on the AI bubble*. Once it bursts/deflats, will they come back?

Or are we looking at a post-Windows future, where MS just focuses on cloud stuff?

(Or will there be a 'we learned from our mistakes, honest' Windows 12 that wins people back in the same way that Win10 did after Win8?)
by naasking | 2026-01-29 18:14:18+00:00
> Chemistry trumps psychology. Good enough chemistry enables cognitive treatments. But to fix the wrong chemistry you need chemistry.

It's not at all clear that chemistry is the root issue. The brain is a synaptic graph that does something. Some graphs can have weird paths that lead to pathologies (maybe bad feedback loops). Chemistry seems like fairly a blunt instrument for bludgeoning a "bad" graph into one that's "better".

Forced habits, like cognitive exercises from psychology, can sometimes rewire the graph by themselves because that's how the brain learns/adapts, but we still don't have a good grasp on how to do this truly effectively in many cases.

That said, the blunt instrument of chemistry can sometimes be useful, particularly if it enhances neuroplasticity, as I think psychedelic research is beginning to show.
by Insanity | 2026-01-29 18:14:21+00:00
So much negativity about Firefox in these threads. Could they be doing better? Absolutely, but without them we’d have almost no browser choice today.

Even if you don’t care too much about FF itself, they also own the Gecko engine on top of which other browsers are built.

Personally I’ve been using Zen for the past year and it’s been a pretty good experience. I should add a disclaimer that I’m not a frontend dev, so can’t speak to dev tooling.
Show HN: Suzerain – How much autonomy do you give your AI coding assistants?
by amadeuswoo | 2026-01-29 18:14:21+00:00
I built a simple CLI that analyzes your Claude Code session logs locally and shows you how much autonomy you give the AI vs. how much you intervene.

I've noticed on myself that bash command acceptance is where all the variance is. Every other tool (Read, Write, Edit) gets approved ~100% of the time. Bash is the one place people actually say no.

Based on that signal, it classifies your style into a governance archetype (Delegator, Autocrat, Strategist, etc.). Fun lens, not a psychometric test, the thresholds are calibrated on mostly MY OWN usage so far. Would love to hear feedback and gather more datapoints.

pip install suzerain
suzerain analyze

Zero external dependencies, stdlib only, Python 3.10+. Nothing leaves your machine unless you opt in.
https://github.com/TheApexWu/suzerain
by atomicnumber3 | 2026-01-29 18:14:38+00:00
I'd use digital ocean over AWS for any SMB or lean startup (so... anyone not attached to an infinite money hose that has to either scale to NEED AWS, or die trying) just because of 1) their UI not being broken glass you have to crawl over and 2) not having eight trillion features that make doing simple things hard and 3) pricing
by Marsymars | 2026-01-29 18:14:51+00:00
> Incentives (for western Governments) are strong to show population has grown as little as possible

Well, for some people - there's a notable tranche of people who are sounding the alarm bells about the demographic problems of low birth rates and an aging population leading to ever-fewer workers being squeezed by an ever-growing cohort of retirees who are hoarding wealth and real estate.
by mlsu | 2026-01-29 18:15:18+00:00
Not only this. The marketplace got way less efficient. These companies are so large that they rival small states, with very little actual competition and command economies internally.

When management decides to build the metaverse, it should be a career-ending and company-ending move. What did the shareholders say? Nothing, they know that there's no competition. The leadership stayed. $70B!

Huge swathes of tech (and the economy at large) are like this. The stock market plays a huge part -- there are very few active participants, and individual pockets are bigger than ever (think e.g. Softbank); capital flows to whoever is largest. Even VC's talk about "what's your moat" -- they don't want you to out innovate, that's actually difficult; why do that, when you can find a regulatory loophole, or market power, and exploit that instead.

When one earns better return on his dollar from monopolization and market power, it's a very very bad sign for the economy at large. And we very clearly have not yet learned this lesson, even when signs of it (China out innovating us in a rapidly growing number of industries; political instability; state capture, etc). We are already a couple decades into this habit and it will not end well for us. I think this is an issue with USA industrial strategy at large. We say over and over again, we need to do the hard stuff, we need to invest in energy, batteries, 'hard tech' etc. But what did we do? $1T to Sam Altman sitting on stage in the Steve Jobs outfit, doing the App Store for ChatGPT.

Individual SWEs are doing what individual people did in the Soviet Union. Join the party, read the party book, and get a cushy mid-level bureaucrat position. It beats working the factory, that's for sure!
by palata | 2026-01-29 18:15:32+00:00
> But if the EU "decouples" from the US, there's no incentive for the US to not, for example, take over Greenland.

You're saying "I had sex with my best friend's wife and now he doesn't want to see me anymore. This is stupid: if he doesn't want to be my friend, then there is no incentive for me to not have sex with his wife. He should still be my friend".

If you go like this in real life, I wonder how many friends you have :-).
by Projectiboga | 2026-01-29 18:15:46+00:00
It was a hybrid processor, 16 on the inside 8 bit on the bus. From Wikipedia.

The Motorola 6809 ("sixty-eight-oh-nine") is an 8-bit microprocessor with some 16-bit features. It was designed by Motorola's Terry Ritter and Joel Boney and introduced in 1978. Although source compatible with the earlier Motorola 6800, the 6809 offered significant improvements over it and 8-bit contemporaries like the MOS Technology 6502, including a hardware multiplication instruction, 16-bit arithmetic, system and user stack registers allowing re-entrant code, improved interrupts, position-independent code, and an orthogonal instruction set architecture with a comprehensive set of addressing modes.
by OkayPhysicist | 2026-01-29 18:16:20+00:00
If the only thing you need is "server, accessible via the internet, always online", and you're not interested in all the vendor lock-in masquerading as useful services offered by the big cloud providers, then small VPS hosts are 100% the way to go. For mid-sized servers they're cheaper (i.e., stuff that wouldn't be free on the big clouds, but not "I want a petaflop"), with more transparent pricing (I pay $12, every month. If I get inundated with traffic, I'll get cut off until I choose to pay more).
by kakacik | 2026-01-29 18:17:05+00:00
I wonder how they will pick which homes to heat or generally how to share that with general infrastructure. Also wonder how much will go to Switzerland (which has much denser housing in that part) and how much to France.

I live not far, work in Geneva and have few colleagues living in/next to that circle. For sure they would appreciate using such source of heat if its frictionless integration.
by ddingus | 2026-01-29 18:17:15+00:00
Trust was very slow to come for me. It happened with Windows 10.

I really like 10.

My computing experiences began kn Apple ][ 6502 systems. Then a mix of early Windows for workgroup and SGI IRIX.

Linux soon followed. I have ran most everything. Solaris, AIX, HP/UX, even XENIX, CP/M and others...

I am at the core a UNIX head. And to all the naysayers back then: I was right! UNIX won!

Anyhow, I liked Win 10. Still do, if they would just continue with it. 10, with the WSL system is a pretty damn good OS, and it can run almost anything ever made for Win OS.

11 is a major league botch. I hate it. Not only are the UI simplifications a major league regression, but the intrusive data collection features and AI penetrating everything is nauseating. I hate it viscerally.

I am not going to use 11. Nor anything built on it.

Ever.

The best M$ can expect is it running in a VM where it can be managed properly, and even then, only if some damn software costs too much to live without.

Nope. Not. Ever.

The dollar sign was deliberate. Win 11 trashed any good will Microsoft had garnered with me.

The amazing thing is my younger peers have come to me for opinions after they too began to hate 11 just as I have.

It is hard to botch it this completely.

Congrats MS leadership. You have accomplished something remarkable!
by nhemerson | 2026-01-29 18:17:15+00:00
So impressed with A(rrow)DBC for database connections. It is optimized for columnar data but can read row oriented DB's like Postgres very efficiently.

I made a Streamlit app to just show you what you can do with it. For all the DB connections I'm just using pyarrow and ADBC drivers. The footprint is so small!
by phailhaus | 2026-01-29 18:17:19+00:00
I have no idea why Google is wasting their time with this. Trying to hallucinate an entire world is a dead-end. There will never be enough predictability in the output for it to be cohesive in any meaningful way, by design. Why are they not training models to help write games instead? You wouldn't have to worry about permanence and consistency at all, since they would be enforced by the code, like all games today.

Look at how much prompting it takes to vibe code a prototype. And they want us to think we'll be able to prompt a whole world?
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-29 18:17:32+00:00
Prize and award is the same, you're missing my point.

The title right now is "Ross Stevens Donates $100M to Pay Every US Olympian and Paralympian $200k", while after our conversation, it's pretty clear that this isn't a donation at all, it's a prize/reward for doing something specific. If you don't do that thing, you (and your family once you die) don't get the prize/reward.

Not only is the whole "once you die" part really strange way of trying to "reward" people, it isn't even a "donation" which the article seems to want you to believe.
by jandrewrogers | 2026-01-29 18:17:36+00:00
There are two aspects to this.

The licensing commonly restricts you to small hobbyist use cases. There are typically restrictions on use of data, the amount of data, and retention of data. I've never looked at Copernicus data before but it appears to have the same kinds of restrictions. This is the licensing equivalent of "source available" rather than true "open source". Hopefully they are improving on this front.

While the data may be available in theory, no one ever invests in the data infrastructure that would allow people to access it in practice. They always have a nice website and API but it is like trying to watch Youtube over a dial-up modem. Usable access is reserved for researchers with an approved use case.

The US government does an unusually good job at both of these in my experience. Even when US public data sets that are not readily available online, you have to contact someone, it is usually for good reason. For example, because they are multi-exabyte data sets sitting on tape somewhere that almost no one ever asks for.
by Realman78 | 2026-01-29 18:17:41+00:00
Nice throwback. I like the idea of 20 dollar netbooks, ordering one for sure! However, the form factor of the product I'm building is smaller than an iPhone XR (that's the only one I have for measure lol), only thicker because it will open up. The point is that I can fit it in my pocket or in someone's fanny pack. With that for factor, you will have to type with thumbs, but I don't mind that. Also, taking inspiration from the Mecha Comet, I could add in a detachable component (keyboard, joystick, etc.)
by thewebguyd | 2026-01-29 18:17:44+00:00
Depression is increasingly starting to be seen as a neurobiological disorder as we learn more.

In my own opinion, we need to stop viewing "mental health" as a separate class of conditions from general/physical health. A mental illness is a health/medical condition just like any other and shifting our views and diagnostic criteria in that direction would do a lot to remove the stigma associated with mental illness.

Someone with depression has a chronic illness, not a temporary "it's just in your head" condition.
by simoncion | 2026-01-29 18:18:08+00:00
Ah. Yeah, I play games very much like that (but not those specific ones). I also play rhythm games, which require precise timing.

Like this guy mentions [0], for all but one of the games I've tried, [1] I see comparable or superior performance to Windows.

I'm running AMD hardware, and I'm using KDE without a compositor on Xorg (that is, not on Wayland). I strongly expect that I've successfully disabled KDE's compositor because I seem to get the same performance when I use WindowMaker, which has never had a compositor.

[0] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46799656>

[1] That game is the Deus Ex that takes place in Prague... I think it's Human Revolution. It's mind-boggling how slow it is.
by wat10000 | 2026-01-29 18:18:10+00:00
That really depends on what you're making. I've made a lot of things that are basically, I want an object with this shape, model that shape, print that shape, success. For things where tolerances and material properties matter, a little trial and error takes care of a lot of it.

There's an engineering saying that anybody can design a bridge that won't fall down, but it takes an engineer to design a bridge that just barely won't fall down. Why do you want a bridge that just barely won't fall down? Because it's a lot cheaper to build. That's not much of a concern when you're printing little doodads at home. I waste some material by designing overly-strong structures, or getting it wrong and iterating. That's fine, the stuff is cheap.
by emptybits | 2026-01-29 18:18:14+00:00
I see. Thank you for sharing. Insurance here is mandatory here for all motorists.

If you are hit by an underinsured driver, the government steps in and additional underinsured motorist protection (e.g. hit by an out of province/country motorist) is available to all and not expensive.

Jail time for an at-fault driver here is very uncommon but can be applied if serious injury or death results from a driver's conduct. This is quite conceivable with humans or AI, IMO. Who will face jail time as a human driver would in the same scenario?

Hit and run, leaving the scene, is also a criminal offence with potential jail time that a human motorist faces. You would hope this is unlikely with AI, but if it happens a small percentage of the time, who at Waymo faces jail as a human driver would?

I'm talking about edge cases here, not the usual fender bender. But this thread was about policy/regs and that needs to consider crazy edge cases before there are tens of millions of AI drivers on the road.
by jaybrendansmith | 2026-01-29 18:18:14+00:00
Your response strains credulity and suggests complicity. If you tell me an investigation is necessary to prove he is a criminal, perhaps that makes sense. But here you are saying an investigation is needed to prove he should not have been murdered in cold blood. That's bloody nuts. Investigations matter, but there's a point where the burden of proof switches sides. In this case, there would need to be incontrovertible evidence that this man was secretly building a bomb, and even that does not justify execution on the street. Do you understand how this country works, or are you a foreigner? Perhaps where you live, one is not innocent until proven guilty. That might explain your inability to come to judgments, you believe the man murdered must prove he was not a terrorist.