MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Forgeties79 | 2026-01-31 14:08:03+00:00
> In 2024 the US was in an incredibly strong position relative to the rest of the world.

The GOP did a fantastic job of blaming all the shockwaves from Covid on Biden. Don’t get me wrong, his admin made some pretty poor choices, but he did inherit the Covid economy and basically got blamed for it. Whereas Obama inherited the recession and wasn’t blamed for it in the same way.

They also did a good job of making it look like all of these problems were only happening here and hiding the fact that other countries were actually in far worse shape. Relatively speaking, as bad as it all was, we did better than most economically speaking.
by 202508042147 | 2026-01-31 14:09:46+00:00
> So you move the power from two American companies (Visa and Mastercard) to two American companies (Apple and Google)? What's that supposed to solve?

Unsure what you mean, but for context I use an app developed by a consortium of local banks and it works by scanning a QR code. Indeed, I use an Android phone but my next one will be a de-googled one like a Fairphone with /e/OS. Hopefully the same app will work there...
Show HN: Hacker Analytics
by zelmetennani | 2026-01-31 14:09:49+00:00
tired of spinning up VPSes just to run nmap / vuln scans
tired of “enterprise platforms” that want a sales call
tired of half-broken self-hosted scanners

wanted something simple:
run real scans
from the cloud
without installing anything

so I built HackerAnalytics

it’s a SaaS for running hosted security scans against your own external assets
think: network scanning, vuln scanning, attack surface stuff

no agents
no infra to manage
just add a target and scan

it’s early, and built for people who already know what these tools do
not trying to replace pentesters
not trying to be “AI security”
just making scanning less annoying

would love feedback from folks who actually run scans
what’s missing
what’s dumb
what would make this useful in your workflow
by antisol | 2026-01-31 14:10:44+00:00
This is disingenuous - we were all watching flash video for about a decade before that. And before that we were watching (terrible ~160x120) video in realvideo* or asf format using browser plugins, since maybe 1997-1998, certainly before 2000.

* tangiential rambling old-person side-note: RealPlayer was a weird early example of a piece of software that was actually _better_ on Linux: The windoze version was notorious for also installing a thousand other pieces of spyware/adware and other trash, taking over your system and making it worse, to the point that people avoided it like the plague... But none of that crapware supported Linux, so the Linux version was just this relatively clean player that came as a self-contained, easy to install rpm and worked pretty well. I used to use RealPlayer a fair bit back in my early Linux days. When I used to tie an onion my belt, which was the style at the time.
by gruez | 2026-01-31 14:10:53+00:00
>instead of something useful, like food production, communication, transport or any other way of satisfying actual human material needs. what weird priorities.

You realize that even pre-AI, that this complaint would still hold for most of tech? Adtech, enterprise SaaS, and B2C apps are hardly "actual human material needs". Even excluding tech, the next lucrative sector would be banking, and same complaint would be applicable. In other words, this is a decades (centuries?) old complaint, repackaged for the current thing.
by muzani | 2026-01-31 14:11:19+00:00
They've always been inclined to "leverage", and the rate increases when the smarter the model is. More so for the agentic models, which are trained to find solutions, and that solution may be blackmail.

Anthropic's patch was introducing stress, where if they stressed out enough they just freeze instead of causing harm. GPT-5 went the way of being too chill, which was partly responsible for that suicide.

Good reading: https://www.anthropic.com/research/agentic-misalignment
by kklisura | 2026-01-31 14:11:44+00:00
"OpenAI is exploring licensing models tied to customer outcomes, including pharma partnerships." [1]

"OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar sketched a future in which the company's business models evolve beyond subscriptions and could include royalty streams tied to customer results." [1]

"Speaking on a recent podcast, Friar floated the possibility of "licensing models" in which OpenAI would get paid when a customer's AI-enabled work produces measurable outcomes." [1]

$30 a month or whatever amount of $$ per token does not justify the valuation of these companies. But you know what does? 5% of revenue from your software that their AI helped you to create. I can see world in which you must state you've used their AI to write code and you must use specific licenses to that code, which allows them part of your revenue.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-cfo-sarah-friar-futur...
by luqtas | 2026-01-31 14:12:34+00:00
> I've never seen the gripping poverty and desperation that's common in the United States anywhere in Latin America; even the poorer communities here tend to be vibrant and well functioning, with families and little farming communities everywhere that are living life well.

with all the respect but what a naive paragraph. i suggest you to go away from touristics places or get into a poor part of any big city in Latin america. the stuff is nasty. what you are comparing is relatively stable rural families that would be an akin to a rural medium class on the USA... you can almost say in 100% of the cases a medium class North American is equivalent of someone from the upper class here. in term of goods/comfort, not work. and if you still romantize as a traveler these poor communities on the backcountry, i suggest to try a week or 2 of their work. just take the routine of a +40 y/o man to check what being 'medium class' is about. being on the hunger line with a bare house is poverty and Latin America has many examples
by svenh98 | 2026-01-31 14:14:09+00:00
I built this after getting frustrated with how awkward it was to compare “life happens” scenarios (income stopping/starting, housing changes, timing differences) in most planning tools and spreadsheets.

The core idea is deterministic cash-flow modeling based around life-events. So for example create a salary item that ends at semi-retirement.

Happy to answer questions or get feedback!
by ExoticPearTree | 2026-01-31 14:14:47+00:00
> What more do you need exactly? That's essentially all I would use from the incumbent cloud providers anyway.

Pub/Sub, Dataflow, CDN, GLB to name a few. I could go on with the list of services currently used by the people that pay to push buttons.

Not to sound offensive, but others have more than a Django app that they need to run.
by pfdietz | 2026-01-31 14:14:56+00:00
Europe, especially central and eastern away from the coasts, is in the unenviable position of being the renewable energy armpit of the world. So their choice is either not be competitive in energy-intensive industries in a renewable world or continuing to be competitive in a fossil-fuel-doomed world.

This dilemma leads to various kinds of magical thinking, like "nuclear will save us" or "climate change isn't real".
by michaelt | 2026-01-31 14:15:00+00:00
> Just as America would like to reduce its dependence on external production, so to do other countries want to reduce their own.

If anything, I'd say for other countries it's more urgent.

If China embargoes deliveries of light bulbs to Europe, all the light bulbs already in place keep working. The pain would grow over time - giving a grace period, to ramp up local production.

If America embargoes AWS, Google, Apple and Microsoft? The pain would be instant and severe.
by b112 | 2026-01-31 14:15:06+00:00
If the US debt gets to the point that interest on debt can't be paid, the US will just print enormous sums of money. Debt is in $, not in valued or devalued currency.

Sure, the end result will be a deprecation of the dollar. But the interest will be paid.

So the real downside to debt is not-overly apparent. Look at how much money was printed for COVID payments, and the like? And at other economic downturns? I do wonder, when will the merry-go-round stop?
by Nextgrid | 2026-01-31 14:16:11+00:00
80k net is 6.6k. If you're getting 80k (which is the very upper end of the range) it's likely you are in Paris, where you're gonna give at least 2k of that on rent for a shitty damp place, and double that for something decent.

Trust me I would love to quit consulting and be able to have a chill permanent job that can afford me a good flat and lifestyle. I'm still searching. Spain situation is very similar last time I ran the numbers.

Definitely no fucking way I'm helping anyone build a cloud provider (a cash cow considering the margins in there) for such pay. If I want to sell my soul to the devil, the one across the pond is gonna give me twice as many bucks for it.
by tanelpoder | 2026-01-31 14:16:41+00:00
Since we are talking cats here, let me plug my CatBench vector search playground app, intended to learn and demonstrate in a visual way how (PyTorch + ViT) image embeddings and (Postgres) vector search work together with your regular OLTP transactional data. I implemented a toy version of a purchase recommendation system based on “cat customer” image similarity and “cat fraud detection” building block too:

https://github.com/tanelpoder/catbench

Also, a simple browser-only page for visually demonstrating what embeddings/vectors physically are, for explaining this to database & storage folks:

https://tanelpoder.com/catvector/

(Initial load of the vector heatmaps may take a few seconds when you click on a pet type)
by item007 | 2026-01-31 14:16:42+00:00
As mentioned in my current Ask HN post, the product is indeed not yet finalized or launched. The envisioned product, Concerns, acts as a bridge, linking your current concerns and target tasks to your knowledge base/resource repository and action list (which could be to-do lists, calendars, etc.), forming an organic closed-loop system. Using target/active projects within Concerns as triggers, it retrieves relevant information from your resource repository. It proactively pushes solutions, plans, and suggestions for users to filter. Selected items then enter the user's action list. The goal is to enhance efficiency and effectiveness in a lightweight manner, without altering existing habits for using resource repositories or action lists.

This idea stems from my own pain points, and I genuinely hope that while solving my own issues, it might also address broader needs.

Regarding your response: It's interesting that AI tagging primarily aids by adding extra searchable keywords. However, I'd prefer broader content and semantic search/matching capabilities without relying solely on tags—though tagging remains a viable implementation approach.
Thanks for the mymind reference—I'll explore it.

PS. Did you perceive an AI-driven approach because I used translation software?
by DangitBobby | 2026-01-31 14:17:44+00:00
I don't understand how you got that at all. The impression I got was the synthetic mathematicians were wary of applying the new "analysis" methods because lack of rigor made them question how safe and valid it was to use.

> Using another set of metaphors: Analysts followed the fast flights of their feverish and uncontrolled imagination, while synthetics kept their feet on the ground. Their procedures were slow but safe.
by 202508042147 | 2026-01-31 14:17:46+00:00
> And if you are a start-up and you want to grow, the situation is even more dire.

I worked for/with several European startups. They really didn't need nor aim for planet scale operations.

There are also quite a lot of articles about how startups (in any country) focus needlesly on large scalability when they only really have a few customers. It's exactly the same false issue here.
by locknitpicker | 2026-01-31 14:18:27+00:00
> Strangely enough, this is exactly the opposite of how it works. The dollars abroad tend to stay abroad, as either a more stable alternative to local currencies, or a reserve currency.

I think you have it backwards. The US dollar can be handled as a more stable alternative only if it's actually stable. As soon as the US government starts to deteriorate goodwill and outright be hostile towards the world, not only does the US dolar lose its value as a stable alternative but foreign governments start to be motivated to dump their assets, which further tanks its value. In the past couple of weeks we started seeing countries outright dump their investments in US dolar to derisk their portfolio, and they did it at the tune of billions of dollars. You also started to see political pressure for foreign governments to demand their gold reserves are pulled out of the US, which means this pressure goes way beyond US dollars.
by lumost | 2026-01-31 14:18:36+00:00
Do you have any advice for running this in a secure way? I’m planning on giving a molt a container on a machine I don’t mind trashing, but we seem to lack tools to R/W real world stuff like email/ Google Drive files without blowing up the world.

Is there a tool/policy/governance mechanism which can provide access to a limited set of drive files/githubs/calendar/email/google cloud projects?
by subscribed | 2026-01-31 14:19:22+00:00
Discussion against the prevalent groupthink sentiment are considered haram and shunned on HN.

I know it's unfair but it is what it is.

I wish there was some independent vote quality assessment process (a bot working on the HN backend) gently adjusting account standing factor based on their votes on the obviously true/false comments. After a while troll would simply see zero impact of their votes and comments assigned 0 karma at the outset. For not bringing the positive impact to the community.
by ohyoutravel | 2026-01-31 14:19:23+00:00
I tried this but didn’t have luck. Intel NUC 13 i7 with 16gb ram, Immich in a docker container. Photos on my NAS. The moment I open chrome or Firefox to Immich and get past the onboarding, it just locks up. Maybe 50,000 photos in the library. Disappointing because I really wanted to like it, and have moved pretty much everything else to self hosted.
by carlosjobim | 2026-01-31 14:19:24+00:00
What I'm saying is that the high value of a large company is not "affluence".

An ugly military troop transport might have the same cost / value as a desirable sports car. Not to mention other types of military equipment. But we wouldn't think about that as affluence. Because we know that military equipment are tools with a purpose.

The same for the value which is locked in within any giant corporation. Of course a large industry is going to have expensive equipment and lots of other investments, which nobody thinks of as "affluence". That is exactly what the money of billionaires is. They own a share of all that ugly equipment, which has no use outside of a big company.
by chpatrick | 2026-01-31 14:19:34+00:00
I know you know, just practical intuition for 3D graphics in case someone finds it useful:

There's a 1-1 mapping between complex numbers and 2D rotation matrices that only do rotation and scaling. The benefit is that the complex number only has two coefficients, not four like the matrix. Multiplying these complex numbers is the same as multiplying the equivalent matrices. Quaternions are the same idea just in 3 dimensions (so with 3 imaginary units i j k, not just i, one per plane).
by boondongle | 2026-01-31 14:20:24+00:00
I can't believe we're talking about China in the context of a Cloud sovereignty issue and this is even a question.

Having worked for these Cloud providers China has consistently used bureaucracy to exfiltrate Cloud technologies and to tip the scales of effectiveness of offerings through levers with China Telecom/Unicom. Analyzing the backbone, you could see it in real time.

China basically offsets its bureaucracy by doing the one thing Europe has not done so far in this space: overtly hurt foreign competitors. It doesn't matter how superior your offerings are if the end customers end up throttled creating a less desirable experience than the less-featured, stable domestic competitor.

Unfortunately - the elephant in the room is China got to where it was by being overtly adversarial with the US from the jump after 2010 which translated to a number of anti-competitive measures. The EU's in a spot because it's mostly responding to Trump and a poorly written US law. The US and EU are weird friends in that we could both exfiltrate each other's tech, patents, and industrial assets and move on with business but that's not actually what either side actually wants.
by dariosalvi78 | 2026-01-31 14:20:25+00:00
I sync my photos with an old Raspberypi 3 with Syncthing, then have my own very basic web photo gallery: https://github.com/dariosalvi78/simple-gallery which supports permissions and thumbnails. If you have a sensible folder structure, for example by year/event you don't need anything else. I am also working on face recognition and geo location, but the hardware limitations are challenge (a fun one to solve tho).
by brandonb | 2026-01-31 14:21:44+00:00
Every now and then, I think it's useful to look at what great work looked like in its first form.

In retrospect, this result was the first step toward the LLMs that are now the dominant approach in AI.

In 2017, this was a very modest result and probably didn't seem very promising. It took real courage and tenacity on OpenAI's part to keep at it for the next 5 years.
by flexagoon | 2026-01-31 14:21:47+00:00
> PS. Did you perceive an AI-driven approach because I used translation software?

Are you using an LLM-based translation tool? I perceived your comment as AI mostly based on the first paragraph:

> That makes sense — treating it as a personal search engine is a real, high-ROI use case. Full-text search covers the “I remember the idea but not where I saw it” problem really well.

This is very much an LLM-style "That's a great idea!" type response. I usually don't even notice when something is LLM generated, but this part really stood out even to me.
by bborud | 2026-01-31 14:21:53+00:00
It is risky to believe that the development gap alone makes for higher economic efficiency when manufacturing things in China. There are very real structural differences in how various industries are organized. Not least in terms of geography.

This is an aspect the west seems to have missed entirely as there are no attempts to learn from it or emulate it.

Everyone knows about Shenzhen. Not everyone knows that this is how every major manufacturing industry is clustered in China in various cities and regions.
by omnicognate | 2026-01-31 14:22:01+00:00
Idempotence of an operation means that if you perform it a second (or third, etc) time it won't do anything. The "action" all happens the first time and further goes at it do nothing. Eg. switching a light switch on could be seen as "idempotent" in a sense. You can press the bottom edge of the switch again but it's not going to click again and the light isn't going to become any more on.

The concept originates in maths, where it's functions that can be idempotent. The canonical example is projection operators: if you project a vector onto a subspace and then apply that same projection operator again you get the same vector again. In computing the term is sometimes used fairly loosely/analogistically like in the light switch example above. Sometimes, though, there is a mathematical function involved that is idempotent in the mathematical sense.

A form of idempotence is implied in "retries ... can't produce duplicate work" in the quote, but it isn't the whole story. Atomicity, for example, is also implied by the whole quote: the idea that an operation always either completes in its entirety or doesn't happen at all. That's independent of idempotence.
by aebtebeten | 2026-01-31 14:22:25+00:00
Trolling*-wise, I wonder if there's a cousin of the "Almost Politically Correct Redneck", an "Accidentally Woke Reactionary" perhaps?

(No, I don't get any memes via RSS. It'd be grand, though. Imgur post-acquisition [and for all I know, even pre? I had devtools turned on one day when I visited, and never went back...] is a tracking hellhole)

lagniappe: https://i.chzbgr.com/full/5718194432/h98546CBC/furred-world-...

* one way I can tell that I was born and bred in US of A: I'm the only person nervously laughing at the did-they-really-just-say-that during a VO Tarantino film in the local theatre...
by bjackman | 2026-01-31 14:22:29+00:00
Getting Google Docs to be a Word alternative was an order of magnitude easier than getting GCP to be an AWS competitor.

Now that AWS has two serious competitors (and some non serious ones), privately funding another one just seems impossible to me. Who is gonna chip in tens of billions of dollars to fund "that, but European, and 15 years from now"?

I think the only ways we can get serious Euroclouds is some combination of:

1. EU intervention (nasty regulations and expensive subsidies).

2. People using non-equivalent products (Europeans have to use lower-level infra and do a lot more ops in-house). This part would have its upsides anyway TBH.
by dmix | 2026-01-31 14:22:45+00:00
> we have noticed power dynamics which weren't well guarded against in the old way

The clearest example is a dependency on a single wealthy nation for military and world policing. It's a good thing for individual countries to be able to project their own foreign policy goals like containing Russia without having to rely on the whims of another country's politics. Even here in Canada we should be able to defend their own arctic border reliably and be able to project power to China/India beyond strongly worded letters.

> I'd be hoping for more international lawyers and trade agreements.

Ignoring the US's recent moves there does seem to be more trade deals than ever between 'middle powers'.

> isolationism is a death sentence

The best way to maintain global relationships is to offer tons of value. Similar to how China can get good trade deals and influence simply because they have so much to offer economically. This isn't just issues of diplomacy.
by kortex | 2026-01-31 14:22:52+00:00
I wonder if you could optimize for reducing the total probe count (at the expense of possibly longer total time, though it may be faster in some cases) by using some sort of "gradient descent".

Start by doing the multi-continent probe, say 3x each. Drop the longest time probes, add probes near the shortest time, and probe once. Repeat this pattern of probe, assess, drop and add closer to the target.

You accumulate all data in your orchestrator, so in theory you don't need to deliberately issue multiple probes each round (except for the first) to get statistical power. I would expect this to "chase" the real location continuously instead of 5 discrete phases.

I just watched the Veritasium video on potentials and vector fields - the latency is a scalar potential field of sorts, and you could use it to derive a latency gradient.
by ExoticPearTree | 2026-01-31 14:23:48+00:00
It's also a matter of "how easy is to find people that are good with X, Y, Z" where X, Y, Z are some niche technologies or offerings compared to the more wildly used ones.

You can start a business in your laundry room if you know how to set up servers and get internet and stuff. But that's gonna be you and maybe a few "hobbyists" that might want to join on that endeavor, but the rest of developers or admins will want to stay far away from that.

Optimizing your business for how is easy is to find talent is also a matter of strategy.