MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by oug-t | 2026-01-16 00:25:10+00:00
Hi everyone,

Like many of you, I’ve been looking into migrating my libraries from Lwt to Eio to take advantage of OCaml 5’s direct-style concurrency. While the manual migration guides are excellent, I found myself making the same mechanical changes over and over—flattening binds, unwrapping promises, and rewriting maps.

So, I built lwt-to-eio, a tool that automates the boring parts of this transition.

Repo: https://github.com/oug-t/lwt-to-eio

What it does (The Magic)
It parses your OCaml source code and performs AST-level rewrites to transform monadic Lwt patterns into direct-style Eio code.

Input (Lwt):

let fetch_data id =
Lwt.bind (Db.get_user id) (fun user ->
Db.get_posts user.id >>= (fun posts ->
Lwt_list.map_p process posts
)
)
Output (Eio)

let fetch_data id =
let user = Lwt_eio.Promise.await_lwt (Db.get_user id) in
let posts = Lwt_eio.Promise.await_lwt (Db.get_posts user.id) in
Eio.Fiber.List.map process posts
Current Status & Help Wanted
This is currently an MVP. It handles the most common patterns I encountered (binds, map_p, sleep, return), but there is plenty of surface area left to cover.

I’m looking for contributors to help add rules for other common patterns. I’ve tagged a few issues as “Good First Issues” if anyone wants to dip their toes into ppxlib and AST rewriting:

Lwt.catch → try/with: Transforming monadic error handling to direct style exceptions.

Lwt_io support: Mapping legacy IO functions to Eio buffers.

Feedback, PRs, and “It broke on my file!” reports are all very welcome.
by gnabgib | 2026-01-16 00:25:11+00:00
Guardian (5 points, 4 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46639797

Related:

A Nobel Prize cannot be revoked, shared, or transferred (29 points, 6 days ago, 9 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46561684

Disguised and in Danger: How a Nobel Peace Prize Winner Escaped Venezuela (14 points, 1 month ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46225712

Nobel Peace Prize 2025: María Corina Machado (586 points, 3 months ago, 713 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45536700
by bee_rider | 2026-01-16 00:25:23+00:00
Wait, how does this work? If it is owned by a US company but operated by people inside the EU, I would expect the actual laws in effect to be the EU ones. I mean, that’s who can actually send police to stomp around and physically take the hard drives if they really want to.

The US can of course command the US owners to instruct their EU based employees to do something illegal in the EU, but if your boss tells you do do something illegal, you are still breaking the law if you do it…
by Barrin92 | 2026-01-16 00:25:41+00:00
>A lesson Europe could learn.

We've learned that lesson. Not to toot our own horn too much but we to a large extent kickstarted the thing in Germany with very little reward for it. 50% of Europe's energy produced is now reneables[1]. China's progress is incredibly impressive, but they are also the largest consumer of middle eastern oil in the world. Not really to their own fault, countries are going to be dependent on oil for a long time to come. (it's used in many more things than energy production)

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/d...
by keeda | 2026-01-16 00:26:17+00:00
The dynamics are exactly right, but I would say engineers can't "let" "politically bad" projects fail, because fixing that is, in a very real sense, above their paygrade. That responsibility lies with the executives.

The engineers' role should mostly be as technical advisors, i.e. calling out bad projects for technical reasons (UX, architecture, etc.) But even the seniormost engineers do not have the corporate standing, let alone political cachet, to call out or fix political issues (empire building, infighting between orgs, etc.) They can and should point out these conflicts to leadership (very diplomatically, of course) but should bear no responsibility for the outcomes.

However, as an engineer you should ABSOLUTELY be aware of these dynamics because they will impact your career. Like when the project is canceled with no impact delivered.

The example given of the latent turf war between the product and platform teams might have been avoided via a very clear mandate from senior leadership about who owns what exactly. This would probably have involved some horse-trading about what the org giving up its turf gets in return. (BTW if you've ever wondered "Why so many re-orgs" this is why.) That this didn't happen is a failure on the execs' part.

As an aside, I know this happens in every large company, but somehow it appears to be a lot more common at Google? Or at least Googlers are more open about it. E.g. I observed something similar on that recent post about lessions from Google: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46488819
by bflesch | 2026-01-16 00:26:29+00:00
It's hard for me to comprehend how ublock origin blocks a total of 10 different tracking scripts on your website https://rulebricks.com/ and all you can come up with is a small text in the bottom saying "This website may collect cookies to optimize your user experience".

"May collect cookies"? Do you think google makes money by collecting cookies? You are brazenly lying into my face and even using a dark pattern to hide this ridiculously formulated sentence at the bottom of the screen.

Why does your company decide to employ falsehoods and dark patterns at such an obvious place? It erodes any trust.
by refulgentis | 2026-01-16 00:28:13+00:00
“On the Core 2 Duo machine that preceded it, running XP from spinning rust, the calculator would appear instantly - certainly before I can release the button.”

This reminds me that there’s an NBA rule that disallows any basket made after a clock stoppage with 300ms or less in the clock - i.e. if player A managed to pass to player B who then attempted a shot, it’s impossible for all that to occur before 300 ms has elapsed.

Meaning, I’m sure you remember it fully launched, 100% certainly before the key came back up from your press, but that is impossible.
by jkaplowitz | 2026-01-16 00:29:18+00:00
Nothing that hard. When I had a technically similar need (for non-shady purposes unrelated to recruiting) I found easy installable free GUI software for Windows that worked just fine with a simple Google search. No specialist expertise needed.

Yes, most consumer software does respect what you say. But it’s easy for a minimally motivated consumer to obtain and use software which doesn’t.

However, the context we were discussing was neither a consumer nor a forensic security researcher, but a recruiter trying to do shady things with a resume. I don't expect them to be a specialist, but I do expect them to be able either to get the kind of software I just described with a security stripping feature, or else to have access to third-party software specifically targeting the recruiter market that will do the shady things - including to digitally signed PDFs like yours - without them having to know how it works.
by zrn900 | 2026-01-16 00:29:29+00:00
> for Putin

Its because you people still keep blaming 'external factors' for homegrown problems that you have those problems. Both Trump and the forces behind Trump have been there long before any current head of state around the world entered politics for the first time.

> just look at the german government. They are absolutely unwilling to stop being so obedient to the USA. Denmark at the least understands the problem - why is Germany so strange?

Denmark doesnt 'understand' anything either - it agreed to set up a 'working group' for Greenland, which basically means they agreed to give Trump what he wants. The island may nominally remain in Danish ownership, but it will likely be effectively controlled by the US.
by weslleyskah | 2026-01-16 00:29:40+00:00
It was badly worded. I don't even know how to express this properly. It has been many years since I edited on Wikipedia, and it was on both english and portuguese. But the point that I was trying to make is that they are institutions with ideological norms and if you start deviating from them and start hammering on controversial and dangerous ideas and topics, or even just discovering and mentioning them, you can be silenced very easily.

And I don't agree with you that US universities are not for profit entities, might be on paper, I don't know. Some of them can bind the students to a long life of debt no?
by MarkusAllen | 2026-01-16 00:30:25+00:00
This is textbook 'Quality Extraction' — systematically degrading output quality to maximize short-term cost savings.

When companies view 50% quality at 10% cost as the 'smart' move, they're optimizing for extraction, not value creation.

The glossary at https://founderstowne.com/extraction-terms.html explores these patterns.
by Der_Einzige | 2026-01-16 00:31:37+00:00
Why should we lie to them? Nearly all NSFW content takes the most extreme forms of taboos related to social oppression and ratchets them up well past 11. Almost no one in the USA can even begin to relate to sex in ways that don't involve "domination", or "race", or some weird Freudian familial relation, etc.

Ultimately, we need to begin by destigmatizing the male libido. Simply saying "male desire is good and it's fine to have it" is literally heretical anywhere except among gay men. Men never got any kind of sexual liberation. Young boys need only to look at their own usually mutilated manhoods to see what modern society thanks of their desire.

To even begin to teach them that they can relate to sex without domination, first teach them that their own desires are not evil.
by dragonwriter | 2026-01-16 00:31:39+00:00
> I thought the reason for this to be a visa is because their fields' activities were in-person (acting in movies/plays/shows, academic life & research, sports training & leagues, etc). A streamer / OF worker is not like that as far as I know (but e-sports is).

Just like film work (which it is a kind of, in a sense), any place can be an OF set, but you need a set and, for performances with more than one performer, you generally need the performers at the same set. Physical proximity to both sets that you want to use and other performers who you might do recurring joint performances with seem to have obvious utility.
by irishcoffee | 2026-01-16 00:31:58+00:00
So you do agree that an LLM cannot derive math from first principals, or no? If an LLM had only ever seen 1+1=2 and that was the only math they were ever exposed to, along with the numbers 0-10, could an LLM figure out that 2+2=4?

I argue absolutely not. That would be a fascinating experiment.

Hell, train it on every 2-number addition combination of m+n where m and n can be any number between 1-100 (or 0-100 would be better) BUT 2, and have it figure out what 2+2 is.

I would probably change my opinion about “circuits”, which by the way really stretches the idea of a circuit. The “circuit” is just the statistically most likely series of tokens that you’re drawing pretend lines between. Sure, technically connect-the-dots is a circuit, but not in the way you’re implying, or that paper.
by zrn900 | 2026-01-16 00:32:28+00:00
Nope. Its much easier to carry over bloated wealth/income from a higher CoL country to a lower CoL country to live like kings by gentrifying the locals and creating the same kind of problem that caused him to escape from his country.

That is how the US was screwed up in the first place - the internal inequality and gentrification created all the problems the US is in today, including the social conflicts. People like him are literally helping to export those problems by exporting the misery to other countries.
by patja | 2026-01-16 00:32:28+00:00
My 85 year-old father could probably resolve 90% of his personal technology problems using an LLM. But for the same reason every phone call on these subjects ends with me saying "can it wait until I come over for lunch next week to take a look?", an LLM isn't a viable solution when he can't adequately describe the problem and its context.
by neilv | 2026-01-16 00:32:58+00:00
> Your attention is finite, but the capacity for a large company to generate bad ideas is infinite. Speaking from experience, getting too involved in stopping these quickly can make you very cynical about the state of the world. And this is really not a good place to be.

This also applies to the capacity of the industry to generate bad (and evil) ideas.

Now that we're one of the biggest-money fields, there is no end of people thinking/behaving badly.

You'll wear yourself out, calling out all of it.

For example, I fled cryptocurrency entirely when it got overrun with bad faith. But I don't intend to flee AI, and so will have to ration the criticism I have for abuses there.

> The nuclear option is [...]

BTW, be careful in what context you use this idiom. It doesn't always translate well outside the US. (I realized this as soon as the words came out of my mouth, under perhaps the worst possible circumstances.)
by j45 | 2026-01-16 00:33:19+00:00
Just like when google started - get ahead, and stay ahead.

Google returns the best result based on both it's calculations, and click history of what clicks were most successful for a search.

LLM's don't really have that same response partially because it's strength is writing one sentence many different ways. The many different ways to write a sentence doesn't mean it's the best way. If it can write deep sentences, keeping a coherent, connected arc through sentences and stories

LLMs' also generally return the "best" answer as the most "common" one, without weight towards outliers as easily that might be the most true, or the best.

The definition of what is "good" and "correct" can also vary quite a bit, especially with writing.

AI can be configured to look for patterns humans might not see, but we also know humans can see things and scenarios that LLM's aren't trained on and can miss getting to.

As we can tell with AI copy, it all starts to sound the same even if it's new. Real writing ages differently. It can be much more of a finger print. This is an area I'm hoping to learn more about from the talented writers in my life - it seems the better the writer, the more they can see the holes of LLM and also be the best power users of LLMs by their superior ability to use words whether they realize it or not.
by willmarch | 2026-01-16 00:33:32+00:00
I hear you on the “maybe they threw rocks/blocked vehicles/got warned” list (but that’s basically DHS’s standard script in every crowd-control incident.)

Two things:

The video of the pastor getting hit doesn’t match that story in that moment. I don’t see an imminent threat that would justify rooftop agents firing pepper balls into a crowd and someone getting tagged in the head, do you?

More importantly:

A federal judge also wasn’t just like “sounds fine to me.” This went to court, and the judge issued a TRO/preliminary injunction restricting exactly this kind of conduct (indiscriminate force and targeting peaceful protesters/press/clergy who aren’t posing an immediate threat). That is strong evidence that the court thought the pastor had a serious case and that ongoing harm was likely.

So even if we grant (for the sake of argument) “some people were doing dumb/illegal stuff somewhere,” that still doesn’t justify shooting projectiles into a crowd in a way that predictably risks serious injury (especially head/face hits). “We can’t aim these well” is not a defense, it’s literally the reason you shouldn’t be firing them like that, right?

Also worth saying: a TRO/PI isn’t a final “verdict,” but it’s still a judge basically telling the government “you can’t keep doing this while the case plays out.” That should tell you something about how convincing the government’s version looked when it mattered.

If you’ve got a source showing rocks/fireworks/clear warnings right before that rooftop volley in the same spot, please link it. I’d be happy to look. But between the video and the fact a judge stepped in, I’m siding with the pastor’s account here.
by atombender | 2026-01-16 00:33:48+00:00
What's the brand of LED strip? I got several battery-powered motion sensor LED bars on AliExpress for use in closets. After the first charge they lasted maybe three weeks, then they rapidly faded, and no longer last more than maybe a day, so I've taken them out. I'm curious to hear if there are high quality versions, maybe something that can run off regular AA or AAA batteries so they can be changed when they inevitably burn out.

Speaking of tweezers on AliExpress: I love my $5.99 nail clippers that collect the clippings in a small compartment so they don't fly off everywhere. Super solid stainless steel construction that's considerably nicer than the cheap classic clippers I already had; it it had "Swiss made" on it or something I would have believed them. The ones I found are in a store called OURINER, but there are lots of weird brands making the same thing.
by behnamoh | 2026-01-16 00:34:27+00:00
> Which brands do people trust? - Which people do people of power trust?

These are often at odds with each other. So many times engineers (people) prefer the tool that actually does the job, but the PMs (people of power) prefer shiny tools that are the "best practice" in the industry.

Example: Claude Code is great and I use it with Codex models, but people of power would rather use "Codex with ChatGPT Pro subscription" or "CC with Claude subscription" because those are what their colleagues have chosen.
by x0b4dc0d3 | 2026-01-16 00:35:41+00:00
You’re not sure?

In a word: Greed. In two words: Crony Capitalism. The spend on “non-renewable“ energy is significant to the domestic economy. In 2023 (most recent year I could find), consumer spend on energy in the US was $1.6T (https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/us-ener...) with at least 82% of that being fossil fuels - the remainder being “renewables” and nuclear energy (https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=62444). This does not include billions in subsidies and infrastructure investment.

“Going green” would threaten the American Greed Machine by cutting upwards of $150B in taxes annually, interfering with the individual, corporate, and government gains from the stock and commodities markets, causing short-term inflation due to commodity value spikes, and long-term deflation due to renewable energy being relatively very low cost to generate after the infrastructure is in place. Last, but certainly there is more, the US exports a massive amount of oil and gas. Divesting from fossil fuel production would have a significant impact on GDP (find your own source).

This is why the US doesn’t invest in infrastructure that doesn’t generate significant ongoing income like it once did - it simply doesn’t make enough money. We only act once it is falling apart.

It is all about the money, man. That money is power. It keeps the Corporatocracy and those at the top of it in charge, the US as the primary reserve currency and allows the US to have a huge, formidable military.
by cromka | 2026-01-16 00:35:58+00:00
"This is a classic ChstGPT gotcha". This and the gaslighting "Exactly, now you see why A!=B" when it was ME who pointed out his wrong A=B assumption are driving me crazy.

They f*cked it up. I am convinced ChatGPT will be a classic case of an early prodigy which gets surpassed by the better, second generation products. History is full of those. I think Tesla is another, recent one.
by ethbr1 | 2026-01-16 00:36:05+00:00
There's a few problems, at least in the US:

1. Hyper-perfect social media / television setting "the best" expectations for an event.

2. Decreased knowledge of how to host a gathering. It's not rocket science, but throwing one the first time can seem daunting. And throwing one well does take skill. E.g. icebreakers, identifying and facilitating the right introductions by highlighting mutual interests, making sure wallflowers have a good time, defusing tensions, food, etc.

3. Decreased American tolerance for and ability to handle awkwardness, and there's always going to be some awkwardness in social interactions.

4. Decreased public/accessible American meeting places. There used to (< 2000) be a plethora of low-cost, broadly-accessible spaces that could serve as training wheels for events (handling food, furnishings, cleaning, etc). They've essentially all been privatized, commercialized, and optimized to turn seats -- think real coffee shops disappearing in favor of Starbucks.
by rstuart4133 | 2026-01-16 00:36:23+00:00
> I would love to see photos like these from Australia too one day.

You may never see them. Not because we aren't adding renewables, but because South Australia was at about 80% renewable last year (average, not peak) so if you were going to get those sort of pictures anywhere in Australia, you would be getting them from SA now.

You probably don't see them because while the countries are about the same size in land area, but China has 50 times the population so it needs about 50 times more power.
by x3haloed | 2026-01-16 00:36:43+00:00
This tension is so close to a fundamental question we’re all dealing with, I think: “Who is the web for? Humans or machines?”

I think too often people fall completely on one side of this question or the other. I think it’s really complicated, and deserves a lot of nuance. I think it mostly comes down to having a right to exert control over how our data should be used, and I think most of it’s currently shaped by Section 230.

Generally speaking, platforms consider data to be owned by the platform. GDPR and CCPA/CPRA try to be the counter to that, but those are also too-crude a tool.

Let’s take an example: Reddit. Let’s say a user is asking for help and I post a solution that I’m proud of. In that act, I’m generally expecting to help the original person who asked the question, and since I’m aware that the post is public, I’m expecting it to help whoever comes next with the same question.

Now (correct me if I’m wrong, but) GDPR considers my public post to be my data. I’m allowed to request that Reddit return it to me or remove it from the website. But then with Reddit’s recent API policies, that data is also Reddit’s product. They’re selling access to it for … whatever purposes they outline in the use policy there. That’s pretty far outside what a user is thinking when they post on Reddit. And the other side of it as well — was my answer used to train a model that benefits from my writing and converts it into money for a model maker? (To name just an example).

I think ultimately, platforms have too much control, and users have too little specificity in declaring who should be allowed to use their content and for what purposes.
by bigyabai | 2026-01-16 00:36:45+00:00
Plus... Apple kinda wastes it. Not to be judgy, but we don't need 2nm chips to hardware-accelerate Netflix and Pornhub. The iPhone is locked-down, there's no worry that it will be a poor gaming platform or disrupt valuable workflows. A new iPhone chip means nothing anymore.

Between the $99/year sideloading, Liquid Glass and fighting fruitlessly against CUDA, I think Apple needs a break to reflect on why their software strategy is so unpopular with everyone. The hardware advances are doing them more harm than good at this point.