MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by item007 | 2026-01-31 07:56:45+00:00
That’s such a real “notes debt” symptom — the system worked (you shipped), but the notes didn’t get a clean closure signal, so they time-travel back and waste your attention later.

One simple fix I’ve seen work is adding an explicit “done marker” ritual: when you implement something, append a one-line outcome at the top of the note (Implemented on YYYY-MM-DD + where), or move the item into a “Done/Archive” section so old notes don’t masquerade as open loops.

Do you keep notes alongside tasks (so completion is tracked), or are they mostly free-form notes without a clear “done” state?
by item007 | 2026-01-31 07:57:26+00:00
Totally get that — the “open loops stick around, then randomly resurface months later” feeling is very ADHD-coded.

A lightweight trick that doesn’t require a whole new system:
When you act on something, add a single closure line at the top of the note:
Done: <what happened> — <date> — <where to find it>

It turns the note from “still open?” into “closed loop” in 5 seconds, and future-you stops re-processing it.

If you had to pick one, which is more ADHD-painful for you: too many open loops, or losing track of where the finished thing ended up?
by goku12 | 2026-01-31 07:57:30+00:00
You can watch this video for a detailed history: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyI38Vp1PGw

I don't know anything about Sam Altman, and so I cannot endorse the views presented in the video. However, this channel is usually very informative with detailed research and analysis and is usually spot on with their predictions.

One aspect I find curious about this video is that the description matches a lot of the famous SV billionaires. Not all of them, but all the usual suspects. They're all either privileged by birth, or has unusual luck of being at the right place at the right time. They may or may not have some talent, but they never acknowledge their privilege and luck. They all have made some disastrous decisions in the past, but failed upwards due to their privilege. They never mention any of those.

And some among them (this is not necessarily about Altman) exhibit a very curious behavior that's like a movement or cult among them. Once they become rich and famous, they start believing that they're special compared to all the plebs out there. They oppose the social and educational programs that empowered them in the first place. Whenever they talk about 'freedom', they're talking about their freedom to do whatever they want, even to the detriment of the others. They believe that they're divinely gifted with business acumen and therefore should be the decision makers and controllers of large populations and resources (they don't like democracy). They even have clubs and literature based on this idea.
by teddyh | 2026-01-31 07:59:03+00:00
> On Debian, it very much is saved to disk by default.

Only relatively modern Debian versions. And even then, blame Debian, not systemd.

> * It's downright dangerous to change the expectations that have held true for 30+ years without even a warning somewhere - e.g. running unmount popping warning*

Firstly, umount “popping a warning” would break so many things, and then you really would have something to complain about. And if we really are talking about 30+ years ago, things have changed a lot since then, too. You used to stop and uninstall a service by finding its PID by running ”ps”, killing its process, and ”rm”-ing its files (and editing /etc/rc.local to remove the service’s startup line) But even before systemd, you would not dream of doing that anymore; you would run “invoke-rc.d mandos stop”, or at least ”/etc/init.d/thing stop”, and use your package system to uninstall it. Those are new things since 30+ years ago.

> something has changed and it's causing me pain.

Consider quitting the technology business.
by item007 | 2026-01-31 07:59:16+00:00
That’s a nice setup — plain text + a few scripts is hard to beat.

Totally agree the final decider is the human. The question I’m validating is: would it help if the system could surface “inputs you didn’t think to search for” at the moment you’re deciding what to do next, without making the workflow heavier?

For example: you open your todo.txt, and it quietly shows a small “related context” sidebar like:

* “You bookmarked X related to this task 2 months ago”

* “This old note mentions the same constraint”

* “You already solved something similar in file Y”

No auto-writing, no new system, just better recall.

If that existed as an optional, local-only command, would you ever use it? Or would even that feel like unwanted complexity? (Details in my HN profile/bio if you’re curious what I’m exploring.)
by willywanker | 2026-01-31 08:00:04+00:00
What exactly is the threat model here of preventing Joe Nobody Famous or Important Poweruser from rooting the hardware they bought and paid for?

If someone has physical access to your phone, you have a lot more to worry about than mere root exploits. And given those who root their devices are far out of the profile of ordinary users, so a specially targeted hack like this is pointless as compared to the regular kind of exploits in apps that can target a wider base.
by item007 | 2026-01-31 08:00:28+00:00
Totally get this — bookmarks are “future curiosity”, but retrieval has real friction, so they quietly rot.

The “1–2 insights per day” idea is exactly the shape that feels sane to me: pull-based, low volume, and designed to create momentum rather than dump more content. I also like your examples because they’re not just summaries — they’re context + a suggested next step.

If you were to try something like this, which would you want it optimized for:

1. novelty (interesting facts / “did you know”)

2. action (a small project/task you can do in 15–30 minutes)

3. relevance to what you’re doing this week

Details in my HN profile/bio if you want the direction I’m validating.
by mrkeen | 2026-01-31 08:01:05+00:00
And then they take that toy transaction model and think that they're on ACID when they're not.

Are you stepping out of SQL to write application logic? You probably broke ACID. Begin a transaction, read a value (n), do a calculation (n+1), write it back and commit: The DB cannot see that you did (+1). All it knows is that you're trying to write a 6. If someone else wrote a 6 or a 7 in the meantime, then your transaction may have 'meant' (+0) or (-1).

Same problem when running on reduced isolation level (which you probably are). If you do two reads in your 'transaction', the first read can be at state 1, and the second read can be at state 2.

I think more conversations about the single "fully consistent" db approach should start with it not being fit-for-purpose - even without considering that it can't address soft-modification (which you should recognise as a need immediately whenever someone brings up soft-delete) or two-generals (i.e. consistency with a partner - you and VISA don't live in the same MySql instance, do you? Or to put it in moron words - partitions between your DB and VISA's DB "don't happen often" (they happen always!))
by item007 | 2026-01-31 08:01:25+00:00
This is really helpful detail — and I think your Airtable description nails the core: the value isn’t “having tasks”, it’s having a workflow that progressively turns vague items into schedulable commitments, plus capacity constraints so you don’t lie to yourself about time.

On the LLM point, I agree with your hesitation. For anything that touches real people/projects, the default needs to be privacy-first: either local-only, or scoped so the model never needs sensitive identifiers. One approach I’m exploring is separating “private entities” from “public knowledge”: let the system operate on generic project states and action types, and only you see the real names. Another is: no pushy assistant at all—just a pull-based daily view that helps you move buckets forward with the workflow you already trust.

If you had to pick one improvement that doesn’t require sharing sensitive context, would you want:

1. better workflow scaffolding (turn uncategorized into scheduled + estimated + bucketed faster), or

2. a way to attach lightweight “done/decision logs” back to tasks so the graveyard stops growing?

Details in my HN profile/bio if you’re curious what I’m validating.
by trhway | 2026-01-31 08:02:33+00:00
>You've heard of some of these characters - Zeus, Persophone, Hades, ...

>Just very, very recently we aren't allowed to do this anymore.

From the beginning of monotheism we see strong attempts to monopolize the character of the right and the only God, dating back at least to Samaritans vs. Judeans. Some actually see the appearance of monotheism as a result of such a successful monopolization attempt. And the last 2000 years that monopoly has been enforced by sword and fire.

> Palworld can be sued for making a game depicting Pokemon.

at least not declared heretic and burnt at stake like it was 400+ years ago for unlicensed fan-fiction produced by Luther and the likes.
by item007 | 2026-01-31 08:03:15+00:00
That’s awesome — building it is the easy part, making it a habit is the real test.

What made you actually keep using it so far: low friction, reliable time saved, or tight integration into something you already check daily?

I wrote up the core loop I’m exploring in my HN profile/bio — would love to hear how your agent differs (especially: where it pulls context from, how it outputs actions, and how it avoids becoming noisy).
by runlevel1 | 2026-01-31 08:04:05+00:00
Global Entry and PreCheck are not going to be the only consequences. The people in these databases are considered to be domestic terrorists.

Presidential Memorandum NSPM-7 includes "civil disorder" in its list of acts of "domestic terrorism." Its indicia of "terroristic activities" includes extremely vague language like "anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism" and "extremism on migration, race, and gender" and "hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality".[^1]

I sincerely hope that the engineers responsible for these technologies have fully grasped where things seem headed. This country is teetering on a knife's edge. Maybe more precariously than we know. Nobody can know for sure if we've tipped too far until it's too late.

The economy cannot thrive in a vacuum of normalcy and stability. If things escalate into something akin to The Troubles... I hope that's factored into their cost-benefit analysis.

[^1]: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/coun...
by item007 | 2026-01-31 08:04:18+00:00
Totally agree — tools don’t beat rituals. A review cadence is what turns notes from “storage” into outcomes.

What I’m exploring is designing the tool around that ritual: make the review session the first-class UX, and keep everything else quiet. For example, during a scheduled review it can help you: identify the few notes worth acting on, extract 1–3 next actions, and link them to a small set of active projects—then get out of the way.

In your experience, what cadence actually sticks: daily 10 minutes, or a deeper weekly review?

Details in my HN profile/bio if you’re curious how I’m thinking about “ritual-first” design.
by ben_w | 2026-01-31 08:04:29+00:00
That xkcd would be more relevant if not for the ongoing collapse of Tesla sales across Europe despite a growing EV market.

I'd make a slighly different bet than the person I quoted:

Assuming Tesla remains under Musk's control, and absent WW3 or the technological singularity, or EU significantly changing size on that timescale, I expect Tata's sales in EU+EFTA+UK in 2035 will be more than 90% of Tesla's sales in same area in 2035.
by refurb | 2026-01-31 08:04:40+00:00
Statement: if AI crashes where will the capital go?

Claim: people will just choose to not invest capital at all

Response: that’s the opposite of what we know about supply/demand. When a supply of something (desirable investments), goes down, with demand steady, prices go up

It’s the same thing that happened during zero interest rate environment - huge supply of capital, few places to put it, so it piled into tech which drove up prices

So I guess my answer to “where will the capital go?” is “the next best thing” which drive up prices of that thing
by Braxton1980 | 2026-01-31 08:06:58+00:00
>The WHO and other international organizations are not legitimate sources of information; they take direction from their host countries and report numbers as directed.

Yes, they get their data from each country.

How else could they realistically get that information?

Isn't this normal and understood?

Since the data is only possible from the government of the country and you believe it's fraudulent there's no legitimate source of information.

since people may need that information and there's only the single source what's the issue with WHO?

You also claim that anytime a country provides data
, the country believes they will benefit if the data has a some value, and they can't get caught then they will lie.

Shouldn't you just be suspicious of any data like that and investigate?
by lifeisstillgood | 2026-01-31 08:07:00+00:00
It’s almost as if the world is wide and we are siloed.

For example “High School Musical”
Made a billion dollars withoute even knowing such a thing existed.

Edit
This is the first I heard of this as well, but it bothers me. Along with the Salisbury poisonings I would be interested in how any criminal activities foreign agents are suspected of doing in the UK (Russia presumably heading the list)
by DiogenesKynikos | 2026-01-31 08:07:20+00:00
The tones are really not as difficult as people make them out to be.

90% of the effort in learning any language is just learning massive amounts of vocabulary.

Things like tone and grammar are the very basics that you learn right at the beginning.‡ Beginners complain about them, but after a few months of studying Chinese, you should be fairly comfortable with the tones. Then, you spend years learning vocabulary.

The two things that make Chinese difficult are:

1. The lack of shared vocabulary with Indo-European languages (this obviously doesn't apply if your native language is something with more shared vocabulary with Chinese).

2. The writing system, which because it's not phonetic requires essentially the same level of effort as learning an entirely new language (beyond spoken Chinese).

‡. The same goes for grammar issues (like declension and conjugation) that people always complain about when learning Indo-European languages. These are the very basics that you learn early on. Most of the real effort is in learning vocab.
by pfannkuchen | 2026-01-31 08:07:57+00:00
Failing -> homeless and starving is a failure mode at the level of the individual. That’s not good, but failure modes of the entire structure are higher priority and the two don’t really compare apples to apples. Capitalism (absent corruption) is actually sort of cleverly recursive there because financial destitution by definition cannot affect producers of vital goods, because the act of producing vital goods is precisely what is rewarded by the system. So at least what you mentioned cannot result in systemic failure from a mechanistic point of view, only an individual level failure (which isn’t to say that the individual is “to blame”, I am not talking moralistically, just that it affects individuals and not the entire structure).

On first paragraph, okay how does that scale though. Who does the actual work of producing things people need to live, and how do we make sure that enough people keep doing that specifically, even across plausible variable configurations such as “birth rate increases because people have more free time which means now you need more farming” etc.

We need to characterize these dynamics, wouldn’t you say? Have you thought about it, or are you satisfied by hand waving?
by whilenot-dev | 2026-01-31 08:07:57+00:00
The video talks 95% of its time solely about the technical steps taken: A custom 7-segment display with custom PCB, writing its display driver, downloading and running an inference engine (llama3.2), mount it all on a metal plate, sign it.

I'd love to see more research put also on the conceptual side of things. The phenomenon of a limited mind, being controlled or influenced by some other entity, go way back, and ranges from psychohistory (and non-consciousness)[0] to studies of mental disorders[1] and probably many things in between.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Origin_of_the_%22Influe...
by item007 | 2026-01-31 08:08:07+00:00
I’m with you on “systems don’t guarantee outcomes” — the only reliable commonality is shipping (or at least producing something real) over time.

One thing I did take away from your posts is the distinction between the medium you think in (pen/paper) and an “authoritative knowledge system” that’s the source of truth for your life/work. That framing resonates: capture can be messy and human, but “what is true / what is next” needs a home you trust.

That’s pretty close to what I’m poking at with Concerns: not “optimize PKM”, but “reduce the gap between what you already know and what you actually do next”. The constraint I’m leaning on is forcing a small number of active goals/projects, so the system can’t pretend everything matters — it has to help you commit.

Curious: in your setup, what’s the smallest digital thing you’d accept as the authoritative source of truth (calendar? a single task list? a project index)? And what’s the trigger that turns a note into an action for you?
by zty5678 | 2026-01-31 08:09:27+00:00
I think I know the prompt words you used.

Write an emotional Reddit/forum post from a programmer
who's devastated by being accused of using AI.
Requirements:

- Make it feel raw and unedited - add typos like "jsut", "teh",
"waht" scattered throughout

- No paragraph breaks, one continuous stream of consciousness

- Start vulnerable, mention sitting for hours, shaking hands

- Include specific technical details (Rust, borrow checker,
lifetimes, 41 GitHub repos)

- Build to the "AI slop" accusation as the central wound

- Use a powerful metaphor (like training for a marathon)

- Show physical symptoms of anxiety/crying

- End with determination despite the pain

- Make it feel like they're typing through tears

- Accidentally cut off mid-sentence at the end

- Use lowercase "i" to seem too distressed for proper grammar
by item007 | 2026-01-31 08:09:35+00:00
I think “second brain isn’t doing” is a good antidote to procrastination-by-organization, but it’s not universally true. Guides/runbooks are clearly “doing” because they enable action by others. Even personal notes can be “doing” if they change decisions, reduce re-entry cost, or prevent repeating mistakes. The failure mode is when system-building becomes a substitute for output, not a support for it.
by lifeisstillgood | 2026-01-31 08:10:46+00:00
To me the issue is not security agencies use Pegasus, but foreign security agents physically assault British citizen in London, MI6 does bugger all.

I’m not sure what I want from our security services, but security sounds good.

Also I wonder if there is a background level of foreign agent activity they accept and how is that related to the police’s paradox of using confidential informants
by item007 | 2026-01-31 08:11:05+00:00
This is a great example of making the system trustworthy: Inbox → scripted processing → git diff review → reset if needed. The diff-as-trust-layer feels like the missing piece for a lot of “AI organizes my notes” ideas.

Also +1 on “limited rules” being more important than fancy models — once the structure is predictable, Claude becomes a genuinely useful retrieval and research assistant.

Out of curiosity, where does the loop close for you today? After “deep research” produces a conclusion, do you write back into a MOC / decision log / project note, or does it mostly live in chat + commits? I’m exploring a similar loop (context → retrieval → suggestion → human review → write-back) with the same constraint: keep it auditable and reversible (diff-friendly). Details are in my HN profile/bio if you want to compare approaches.
by nl | 2026-01-31 08:11:42+00:00
> When has any deal with China worked at a strategic advantage for the other side?

Australia did well out of the Australian-China free trade agreement and then won the subsequent (Australian-caused) trade war.

Turns out being able to produce iron ore cheaper than anyone else and having plenty of alternate buyers when China bans imports means the iron ore price just goes up, Australian miners make more money and Chinese manufacturers get annoyed at Chinese trade policies.

Wasn't awesome for Australian lobster fishers though.
by georgeecollins | 2026-01-31 08:12:01+00:00
My whole professional life I have lived in a world where business was done in most of the world-- more or less-- according to American rules of law and trade. I have benefitted enormously from being able to buy things from all over the world when they are cheaper and sell the things I make to most of the world.

I have family members who think America should be first. They love it when the US snubs other countries. In general they are people who are retired, work for the state or local government, or don't do things that generate much wealth. So they are really oblivious to how the world order has benefited their country. But maybe that is because I benefited and they didn't.
by item007 | 2026-01-31 08:13:01+00:00
That’s honestly a great baseline: org files + grep is fast, local, durable, and zero “system overhead”.

If you could improve just one thing without abandoning grep, would it be:

1. fuzzy/semantic search when you don’t remember the exact term, or

2. better resurfacing (a lightweight way to recall relevant notes when a project becomes active)?
Show HN: EditorWatch – Detect AI cheating by analyzing how students write code
by vicnas | 2026-01-31 08:14:05+00:00
Hi HN,

I built EditorWatch to help CS instructors detect AI-generated code in programming assignments.

Current plagiarism detectors only look at the final code. Students copying from ChatGPT slip through easily. EditorWatch is different - it monitors HOW code is written, not just what's written.

A VS Code extension tracks coding patterns:
- Sudden code appearance (paste bursts)
- Lack of natural trial-and-error
- Robotic typing patterns
- Perfect-first-time code

It generates an authenticity score (0-10) with visualizations for each submission.

Privacy-conscious design:
- No video/screenshots, only metadata (timestamps, character counts)
- Only tracks specified file types (.py, .js, etc.)
- Students must explicitly opt-in
- Data deleted after grading
- 100% open source

Free for education, paid for commercial use. Deploys easily on Railway or your own server.

I know it's not foolproof - determined students can bypass it. But it raises the bar significantly and works as one tool alongside code reviews and oral exams.

Would love feedback from educators and developers on the approach!