MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by snowwrestler | 2026-01-06 15:41:00+00:00
I bet for most of us there’s a baseline positivity to everyday life that, because of how durable it is, is not really considered news. Thus newsworthy topics tend to skew negative.

In my neighborhood an electrical power outage is news; but yet another day of consistent electrical power supply is not news. But taking a step back, I think it is noteworthy! It makes my life better every day, and compared to the vast sweep of human history, it’s a huge positive anomaly. My life is full of stuff like this, as I suspect the lives are of many HNers.

I say this because while I do value news reporting and knowing what’s wrong or could be better, I also try hard to maintain this broader awareness of what’s (still) positive and going well. Even if its consistency makes it seem unremarkable on short time scales like the daily news cycle.
by lo_zamoyski | 2026-01-06 15:41:23+00:00
No doubt he was making this claim in a business context, but I wish it wasn't framed in financial terms. Our culture is already too obsessed with money, falsely framing it as the measure of the good life and of human worth. What an impoverished, boring, and frankly nihilistic and horrifying worldview.

That being said, pessimism/optimism is a false dichotomy. The reason is that both are willful attitudes of expectation on an emotional spectrum rather than rationally grounded and sober assessments of reality. The wise path is prudent (I don't mean "cautious"; I mean the classic virtue [0]). Prudence is rational. You can't be better than rational (genuinely rational; believing you are rational is not the same as being rational).

[0] https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12517b.htm
by jaggs | 2026-01-06 15:41:36+00:00
Hmm..not really. Cova Power is a joint venture between Donut Labs and Ahola which is a huge Finnish freight company formed in 1955 - which makes sense since they are both based in Finland. The involvement of the University of Oulu suggests that this is clearly a Finnish project. I wouldn't be surprised to find some Nokia money in there as well. ESOX is just the military product arm of Donut Labs, which I guess has connections with the Finnish military.
Show HN: Tangents – Non-linear LLM chat with hands-on context control
by _boffin_ | 2026-01-06 15:41:38+00:00
LLM chat breaks when you're learning. Side questions either clutter the main chat or you copy/paste into a new chat and lose lineage. Tangents makes the workflow explicit with non-linear chat and hands-on context control:

- Branch: select a span in any message and open a tangent chat. The main chat stays readable.

- Collector: save multiple snippets (from the same message, across messages in a chat, or across chats).

- Compose: ask using only what's in the Collector as curated context.

There's also a Context console to preview what the model will see, plus context controls so you can pin / include / exclude messages (on the message item or in the console).

-----------

HN page: https://tangents.chat/hn#invite

-----------

Available now

- Branch from a selection to explore a tangent chat

- Collector (multi-snippet: same message, across a chat, or across chats)

- Compose (ask using only what's in the Collector)

- Context controls (pin / include / exclude)

- Context console (preview before you send)

- Bring your own key

Future

- Full documents and media as first-class attachments (planned)

- Selectable regions/spans across formats (text, images, audio/video) and timestamp ranges for media (planned)

- Mobile workspace: functional today, still being refined (WIP)

What this is not

- Not an agent framework. It's a chat workspace for manual context control.

- Not a node-graph canvas. You build the graph inline as you branch and collect; visualizations are secondary.

- Not "citations marketing." The focus is keeping context explicit and inspectable while you work.

-----

Track your ideas as they evolve over time.

Branch when you digress, collect what matters, and come back with a clean, connected result.

-----

Notes

- Early access is gated because I'm personally funding inference

- Provider: OpenAI only right now; expanding to others soon

-----

Blunt feedback welcome.
by mort96 | 2026-01-06 15:41:38+00:00
You just need to encode the size of values in bytes to make it possible to partially parse the format.

Imagine the following object:

{
"attributes": [ .. some really really long array of whatever .. ],
"name": "Bob"
}

In JSON, if you want to extract the "name" property, you need to parse the whole "attributes" array. However, if you encoded the size of the "attributes" array in bytes, a parser could look at the key "attributes", decide that it's not interested, and jump past it without parsing anything.

You'd typically want some kind of binary format, but for illustration purposes, here's an imaginary XML representation of the JSON data model which achieves this:

<object content-size-in-bytes="8388737">
<array key="attributes" content-size-in-bytes="8388608">
.. some 8 MiB large array of values ..
</array>
<string key="name" content-size-in-bytes="3">Bob</string>
</object>

If this was stored in a file, you could use fseek to seek past the "attributes" array. If it was compressed, or coming across a socket, you'd need more complicated mechanisms to seek past irrelevant parts of the object.
by Geee | 2026-01-06 15:41:39+00:00
We once built pyramids, massive castles, temples and churches which took hundreds of years to build. We don't build those things any more. Same happened to music and art. There's this eternal sloppification of everything, although at the same time things get on average better and cheaper for more people to enjoy. Quantity beats quality, i.e. capitalism optimizes for scalability.

The end game is quite sad, which will be some kind of neural device which just directly manipulates brain signals for happiness, and everything physical will be just gray goo. It's more scalable to make you think the world is beautiful, than to actually make it beautiful. We are almost there already, because we experience the world through a screen, which shows us happy things, while we care less and less about the real world around us.
by jrexilius | 2026-01-06 15:41:50+00:00
This is an very user-powerful feature. WHY the fuck would they disable it? It basically gives you two buffers, middle click for dynamic selection-paste. repetitive-chunks of text can use the more cumbersome ctl-c/v. I've been using this feature since before linux was a thing. When I teach it to young engineers now they find it quite useful. STOP trying to turn everything into a mimic of a damn smart phone OS!
by probably_wrong | 2026-01-06 15:42:19+00:00
I just skimmed the paper and I have a couple questions.

The distribution plots shown in the post are not in the preprint. Going by my gut feeling I'm reading those plots as "percentage of posts classified with this positiveness score", but if that's the case then I'm not sure the conclusion follows the plots because the distributions are skewed to the right (unless 1 is negative and 0 is positive). There's also the question of whether "not positive" and "negative" are the same thing - saying "2/3 of the scores are below 0.6" would also include the posts classified as neutral (score 0.5), but without more details I cannot say.

At a meta level: assuming the conclusion is correct, I tend to see respectful disagreement as a more useful response. I've seen bad takes in HN (and everywhere else, really) but my most rewarding interactions here are those where two people respectfully argue with each other. Good luck doing that on Reddit.

At a meta meta level: is the title of this post by itself a reflection of what they describe?
by HansardExpert | 2026-01-06 15:42:23+00:00
Hikaru Nakamura commented on Chess960 (or 'Freestyle' chess as chess.com is desperately trying to re-brand it) and said that as a 'spectator' sport he felt that only the high-elo crowd would really get excited about 960.

To clarify, not that lower ELO or the casual player wouldn't enjoy it but that there is so much history with the standard layout that even the beginner ends up understanding the high-level tactics and strategies of the openings.

This makes standard chess much more enjoyable for more people to watch and follow (i.e. bums-on-seats at the chess tournaments). While the super grandmasters are celebrities for the chess crowd in their own right, those lower down don't generate that kind of excitement and throwing 960 in the mix would see much less eyes than normal chess does.

Literally 960 different layouts might generate some types of opening theory, but to layman or perhaps 2200 and lower ELO players it just isn't that much fun to watch.
by belorn | 2026-01-06 15:42:30+00:00
It definitive seems like a connection between a lack of social support and an emotion reaction to penalizing people for getting pregnant. On the extreme end we have a culture where the man should take responsibility for getting the woman pregnant and where abortion is seen as a way for both to escape responsibility. Support comes from the family rather than society, which also means members of the family is responsible towards the family.

The closer people holds to those values, the easier society accept laws like anti-abortion. Religion do play a supporting role in this by holding onto the values, but is itself not always in the center.
by BoredPositron | 2026-01-06 15:42:36+00:00
What a piss poor article. I don't really care about the feature because I use the keyboard for c&p but revisiting and revaluating old features is fine and shouldn't immediately trigger old men yells at cloud articles like this. There is barely any discussion in the links yet. The Linux community really is the primary cast in the Soap Opera for tech bros.
by gpm | 2026-01-06 15:42:44+00:00
> Every allocation must be checked at the point of allocation, which is "the default"

C doesn't force you to check the allocation at all. The default behavior is to simply invoke undefined behavior the first time you use the returned allocation if it failed.

In practice I've found most people write their own wrappers around malloc that at least crash - for example: https://docs.gtk.org/glib/memory.html

PS. The current default in rust to print something and then abort the program, not panic (i.e. not throw an exception). Though the standard library reserves the right to change that to a panic in the future.
by jeswin | 2026-01-06 15:42:49+00:00
I spent ~$1500 (and a bit more than two months) building a compiler that translates typescript to native binaries. I think I'll be able to do a Show HN later this month. It's the best $1500 I've ever spent on anything related to software development or computers.

You're not addressing the idea in the post, but the person. What the author achieved personally is irrelevant. What's important is that a very large and important industry is being completely transformed.
by masklinn | 2026-01-06 15:43:08+00:00
> Pascal strings are: { length, pointer }

The historical P-strings are just a pointer, with the length at the head of the buffer. Hence length-prefixed strings, and their limitation to 255 bytes (only one byte was reserved for the length, you can still see this in the most base string of freepascal: https://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/ref/refsu9.html).

{length, pointer}

or

{length, capacity, pointer}

is struct / record strings, and what pretty much every modern language does (possibly with optimisations e.g. SSO23 is basically a p-string when inline, but can move out of line into a full record string).
Show HN: Kingfisher, a fast OSS secret scanner with validation and blast radius
by micksmix | 2026-01-06 15:43:35+00:00
I built Kingfisher, an extremely fast Apache 2.0 OSS secret scanner (Rust) that goes beyond simply finding secrets.

- Live validation: checks whether a candidate secret actually works, so you can ignore dead strings.

- "What can this key do?" / Access Mapping (optional): authenticates and enumerates the credential’s effective access (AWS, GCP, Azure, GitHub, GitLab).

- Local triage UI: opens a local-only report so you can review findings + blast radius without sending code anywhere.

Try it out:

brew install kingfisher
#
kingfisher scan /path/to/code --view-report
#
kingfisher scan --git-url https://github.com/org/repo.git --view-report
#
kingfisher scan . --access-map --view-report

I'd love feedback on:

- false positives/negatives on your repos
- which access-map / blast radius target you want next
- what the UI should surface first during incident triage
by twixfel | 2026-01-06 15:43:45+00:00
We ought to avoid repeating your mistakes, no? Maybe unlimited campaign donations and so on, all this wonderful "American free speech (money = speech)" is a fundamentally bad idea. Worked exceedingly well for ~225 years, now it has lead to the implosion of the empire by electing a sociopathic retard to the presidency. Yes to free speech, no to whatever fucked up shit the US, its billionaire "libertarians" and Christian nationalists are pushing for us to adopt here in Europe.

If the likes of JD Vance are pushing for us to adopt his idea of free speech, you can be sure it's a bad idea.
by nonethewiser | 2026-01-06 15:43:51+00:00
Not in any real sense because states are sovereign.

There are things like the UN which some states, not all, agree to uphold the policies of. But they are also free not to agree to uphold the policies of the UN.

So ultimately it's a bunch of peers in an an anarchic system that do the best for themselves to persist. Cooperation, war, etc.
by shbooms | 2026-01-06 15:44:09+00:00
the title contradicts what's in the actual article.

the proposal is to change the default beahvior, not getting rid of the ability outright. as long as they both retain the ability to change the behavior back to how was before, it doesn't seem like this is as dire as the author is trying to make it out.

I sympathize with the idea of having to add yet another setting change to what I'm sure is a long list of configs/settings updates that most of us have to perform everytime we boot up a new system but this is all that it looks like would be the case here if this proposal goes through
by heliumtera | 2026-01-06 15:44:12+00:00
>It's frustrating that better content is not always rewarded

It could be. Maybe we just fail to create better content, despite the effort put in.
Maybe your frustration comes from lack of engagement, maybe your effort was lost in the ether and no one noticed...
But getting noticed could be one criteria to evaluate how good content is. You perform better while not creating the content you consider better. Or captivating an audience to appreciate the better. You see, they don't.

Do you have a blog? It sounds like you would enjoy that.
by jmclnx | 2026-01-06 15:44:44+00:00
As a person who have used this for decades, the first thing I will do is re-enable it bu default. This is one of the main reasons I stick with X. If it is disabled, I guess I go elsewhere. I do not use GNOME anyway, so GNOME can do whatever it wants, it won't impact me.

I never tried Wayland, but does middle paste even exist between wayland windows ?
by kibwen | 2026-01-06 15:44:48+00:00
> That's intentional; IOW the "most code" that is unable to handle OOM conditions are written that way.

No, this is wishful thinking. While plenty of programs out the are in the business of maintaining caches that could be optimistically evicted in order to proceed in low-memory situations, the vast majority of programs are not caching anything. If they're out of memory, they just can't proceed.
by wtallis | 2026-01-06 15:44:55+00:00
AMD Strix Halo does not have on-package RAM. What makes it stand out from other x86 SoCs is that it has more memory channels, for a total of a 256-bit wide bus compared to 128-bit wide for all other recent consumer x86 processors.

Qualcomm's laptop chips thus far have also not had on-package RAM. They have announced that the top model from their upcoming Snapdragon X2 family will have a 192-bit wide memory bus, but the rest will still have a 128-bit memory bus.

Intel Lunar Lake did have on-package RAM, running at 8533 MT/s. This new Panther Lake family from Intel will run at 9600 MT/s for some of the configurations, with off-package RAM. All still with a 128-bit memory bus.
by tempsaasexample | 2026-01-06 15:45:07+00:00
On a side note, you should look up "wood gas". There are YouTube videos of 110v generators running off wood gas, and while it takes a bit of setup, it's within the realm of what a country person could do in a weekend or two.
By weight, I think I remember that it takes 4x of wood vs gasoline to get the same energy. So while a generator takes 6 lbs of gasoline (a gallon) to give you ~5kw, it takes 25 lbs of wood. Sounds bad til you realize how much a tree weighs.
by f1shy | 2026-01-06 15:45:16+00:00
I come to HN to see negative comments. I pay special attention to very downvoted ones. My algorithm is: if there is no ad hominem, really bad words, or snarky, I read them fully and with attention. Of course if is a non sequitor I would leave it.

But often these negative/contrary to stablished opinion, or opinions done with passion (but still nore are less respectful), are the most valuable to me, as they give me the oppressed to think outside the box, to ask me questions I would not ask myself if not…
by liquidgecka | 2026-01-06 15:45:26+00:00
There is confusion here because Greenland is not part of the EU directly (they were, they left) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_and_the_European_Uni...
Its citizens are members of the EU but its territory is not. Greenland is part of NATO though, and has a trade alliance with the EU so its territorial status is very complicated.
by bigfishrunning | 2026-01-06 15:45:49+00:00
There's some muddiness in the terminology here -- OOP is really a design style, and "OOP languages" are generally imperative languages that have sematics that encourage OOP design. It is very possible, even encouraged, to represent state as "Objects" in many functional languages; it's just not really enforced by the language itself.

A good example of this are the object systems in Scheme and Common Lisp (which are less strictly Functional (note the capital F in that word) then something like Haskell).
by ragequittah | 2026-01-06 15:46:10+00:00
This to me seems like saying you can learn nothing from a book unless you yourself have written it. You can read the code the LLM writes the same as you can read the code your colleagues write. Moreover you have to pretty explicitly tell it what to write for it to be very useful. You're still designing what it's doing you just don't have to write every line.
by doodlesdev | 2026-01-06 15:46:13+00:00
> WHY the fuck would they disable it?

Because it's one of the most annoying and unintuitive things the GNOME desktop has for anyone that isn't a power user. Almost every single user I've shown GNOME to was surprised or bothered by this being the default instead of the usual scrolling you'd see in Windows.

I personally dislike this feature a lot, and it's very common for me to middle-click paste accidentally, even after years of using Fedora Linux as my one and only operating system across all of my machines. I've previously used a Firefox extension to override this default, but was bothered by the fact that other applications would still just middle-click paste.

Not everyone is a power user. Not everyone has the same workflow as you. Decisions like these have to be taken based on what the target audience for a desktop wishes. Arguably, GNOME is absolutely not for power users (just take a look at how similar it is to the macOS desktop environment to notice that).
by lpandong | 2026-01-06 15:46:22+00:00
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by AstroBen | 2026-01-06 15:46:50+00:00
Yesterday I got AI (a sota model) to write some tests for a backend I'm working on. One set of tests was for a function that does a somewhat complex SQL query that should return multiple rows

In the test setup, the AI added a single database row, ran the query and then asserted the single added row was returned. Clearly this doesn't show that the query works as intended. Is this what people are referring to when they say AI writes their tests?

I don't know what to call this kind of thinking. Any intelligent, reasoning human would immediately see that it's not even close to enough. You barely even need a coding background to see the issues. AI just doesn't have it, and it hasn't improved in this area for years

This kind of thing happens over and over again. I look at the stuff it outputs and it's clear to me that no reasoning thing would act this way
by gn4d | 2026-01-06 15:46:54+00:00
Had the same experience with rif/res, and on X. If you go into algorithm-heavy sites with the intention of actively curating your personalized algorithm into your areas of interest, the sites can work quite well. One click blocking of subreddits and topics/posters sends strong feedback to the algorithm to readjust. I really don't know how people can use sites in any other way. For YouTube, I have filters and blockers set up such that I don't even get recommended any videos, and don't see any videos to click on unless I type in a search query or receive a notification from a channel to which I am intentionally subscribed. Facebook was/is broken beyond all repair, though. I recall that you could not remove posts from random groups and people from your feed, even if you were not friends with them or members of those groups.

Sometimes, I will see a screenshot of someone using reddit or YouTube "unfiltered" and it's night and day, full of slop and ragebait everywhere. No thanks!

My only difference of opinion with you is that I don't find positive content boring. I find positive things exciting and engaging! Negative content just makes me want to tune out, for the most part, unless it's some cathartic or amusing scenario like the recent thread here about SO imploding lol.
by aDyslecticCrow | 2026-01-06 15:46:58+00:00
> It's not anything special? That's just `string_view` (C++17)

Just because something already exists in some language doesn't make it less clever. It's not very widespread, and it's very powerful when applicable.

This format can handle "string views" with the same logic as "normal strings" without relying on interfaces or inheritance overhead.

it's clever.
by bborud | 2026-01-06 15:47:02+00:00
If you sit people down and talk to them, I think you will find that most people around the world are actually able to distinguish between peoples and their governments. However when you look at what people say online, or when you ask groups of people, they do not always make the distinction.

The people who can not present a problem. Regardless of what pairing of nationalities.