MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tolerance | 2026-01-26 01:56:33+00:00
To his credit and with the exception of mentioning an objective to show his smarts off to readers (which I don’t think he wants to do anyhow) Gwern informs us that he is assuming that we will find what he writes as useful as he does, because his objective is to write things that are useful to himself:

> The goal of these pages is not to be a model of concision, maximizing entertainment value per word, or to preach to a choir by elegantly repeating a conclusion. Rather, I am attempting to explain things to my future self, who is intelligent and interested, but has forgotten. What I am doing is explaining why I decided what I did to myself and noting down everything I found interesting about it for future reference. I hope my other readers, whomever they may be, might find the topic as interesting as I found it, and the essay useful or at least entertaining–but the intended audience is my future self.

— <https://gwern.net/about#target-audience>

We can reconcile this with the purport of the writing of his that we’re discussing now—it’s a notice with his future self in mind. And we can compare and contrast the above quote and the aforementioned piece with some of PG’s writing which I find is meant to be public-facing literature at full bloom. [1][2]

I think there’s a difference between 'writing for my future self’ and ‘writing with the public in mind’. Howard & Barton (1986) would argue that they represent separate stages of the writing process and I agree with that and prefer writing that is primed for the latter form. [3] I associate the maxim “First, make me care” with the latter as well and by-and-large feel like Gwern’s writing—that which I’ve come across most frequently—is geared toward the former form. Which I’m sure serves him well, as well as I’m sure it’s served well to those who enjoy his work. I’m yet to determine whether that’s a good or bad thing.

As I’ve cited earlier, some consider Gwern's writing to evoke a sort of misanthropy. But hey...I’m sure there’s someone else to say the same about Paul Graham and his stuff. I’ll withhold judgement against the both of them on that matter—for now—lest I get caught unprepared to be deemed one myself.

[1] <https://www.paulgraham.com/field.html>

[2] <https://www.paulgraham.com/useful.html>

[3] <https://search.worldcat.org/title/13329813>
by tga_d | 2026-01-26 01:56:58+00:00
I suspect the more likely scenario is they don't actually care how accurate these nominal categorizations are. The information they're ultimately trying to extract is, given your history, how likely you are to click through a particular ad and engage in the way the advertiser wants (typically buying a product), and I would be surprised if the way they calculate that was human interpretable. In the Facebook incident where they were called out for intentionally targeting ads at young girls who were emotionally vulnerable, Facebook clarified that they were merely pointing out to customers that this data was available to Facebook, and that advertisers couldn't intentionally use it.[0] Of course, the result is the same, the culpability is just laundered through software, and nobody can prove it's happening. The winks and nudges from Facebook to its clients are all just marketing copy, they don't know whether these features are invisibly determined any more than we do. Similarly, your Google labels may be, to our eyes, entirely inaccurate, but the underlying data that populates them is going to be effective all the same.

[0] https://about.fb.com/news/h/comments-on-research-and-ad-targ...
by acdha | 2026-01-26 01:58:14+00:00
There’s a lot more nuance than might be obvious at first thought. For example, many of the people being violently deported now came here legally, followed the rules, and are now being targeted because their protected status or asylum cases were cancelled under highly suspicious circumstances, with a lot of the rush being to get them out of the country before the shady revocations are reviewed.

We also have a lot of inconsistent enforcement because some employers love having workers who can be mistreated under the threat of calling ICE. If we really wanted to lower immigration, we’d require companies to verify status for everyone they hire. You can see how this works in Texas where they’ve had a ton of bills requiring that get killed by Republican leadership on behalf of major donors:

https://www.texastribune.org/2025/06/05/texas-e-verify-requi...
by kristopolous | 2026-01-26 01:58:40+00:00
Baffling.

Isn't this just a basic completion loop with toolcalling hooked up to a universal chat gateway?

Isn't that a one shot chatgpt prompt?

(Yes it is: https://chatgpt.com/share/6976ca33-7bd8-8013-9b4f-2b417206d0...)

Why's everyone couch fainting over this?
by PlatoIsADisease | 2026-01-26 01:58:42+00:00
I've read a ton of philosophy and something I don't really understand is that one nation killing another is more immoral than when a nation does this to their own domestic population.

Sure you will get some nay-sayers who say 'a life is a life', if moral particles existed, they might be correct.

But for some reason, humanity doesn't seem to care as much.

What makes intra-state politics more acceptable to use violence?
Show HN: Cloister – Local web UI to browse and monitor Claude Code sessions
by bradleyboy | 2026-01-26 01:59:39+00:00
I use Claude Code heavily and wanted to search through past sessions, see what Claude was doing in long-running tasks, and monitor multiple sessions at once. I also was looking for an exscus to build something end-to-end with just Claude on the implementation.

I had Claude create a task system, hook it up to a `/task` command, then can use `bun ralph` to churn through any open tasks.

Try it out and feel free to contribute!
by xvector | 2026-01-26 01:59:44+00:00
We should be angry about both situations but most people truly don't give a fuck about the latter. It is not just the Iran situation though.

We make decisions all the time that result in immense amount of unnecessary suffering because of a total lack of empathy. Our food consumption choices alone have created the greatest and most horrific engine of suffering in the history of this planet, all for the pleasure of our taste buds. The average person is directly responsible for this.

It is the irrationality and lack of empathy of the average person that bothers me. Unless you show them a video of protestors being massacred in Iran, or take them to a factory farm, they don't care. And even then, they often don't care. Why?
by f30e3dfed1c9 | 2026-01-26 02:01:04+00:00
"Vimeo was a beloved (and major) video platform..."

Was it? "Beloved" I'll grant because who knows, someone or another loves almost anything, I guess, but was it ever "major"?

I'll admit to not being much of a video person, but to me, Vimeo was just a video player that I'd find embedded in some web page now and then. Did not come across as "major" at all, ever.
by thehamkercat | 2026-01-26 02:01:06+00:00
something feels off to me about the clawdbot hype

About the maintainer's github:

688 commits on Nov 25, 2025... out of which 296 commits were in clawdbot, IN ONE DAY, he prolly let lose an agent on the project for a few hours...

he has more than 200 commits on an average per day, but mostly 400-500 commits per day, and people are still using this project without thinking of the repercussions)

Now, something else i researched:

Someone launched some crypto on this, has $6M mktcap
ihttps://www.coincarp.com/currencies/clawdbot/

Crypto people hyping clawed: https://x.com/0xifreqs/status/2015524871137120459

And this article telling you how to use clawed and how "revolutionary" it is (which has author name "Solana Levelup"):
https://medium.com/@gemQueenx/clawdbot-ai-the-revolutionary-...

Make of that what you will
by LAC-Tech | 2026-01-26 02:02:31+00:00
I don't believe these numbers.

This is not a comment of support of the Iranian regime, or against the people of Iran to have which ever government they see fit.

But these numbers are simply not credible. It's 40 beheaded babies all over again.

Remember the governing ideology of the US and Israel sees the continued existence of Iran as an existential threat. Their aims may align with the protestors temporarily but I think a permanently fractured, Syria type situation is much more palatable to them than a rapid transition to a more democratic system that leaves the country intact. There is no guarantee a post-islamic Iran would step into line, and it would remain a regional power that would be much harder to justify continued sanctions against.

A part of me suspects the incredibly conspicuous endorsement of the protestors by the US/Israel regime is an attempt to discredit them. A zombie regime under the Mullahs will likely to continue to implode economically, which means they are less able to defend themselves from US/Israeli attacks in the future. A clean change of government with domestic US pressure to lift sanctions would be their nightmare scenario.
by PlatoIsADisease | 2026-01-26 02:02:38+00:00
>the government can just hire mercenaries from outside the country.

Machiavelli in Discourses on Livy says you are inviting an overthrow of your government by doing this.

The mercenaries can flip sides if the opposite faction pays them and offers them better terms... or maybe the mercs just flip.

Hard to say how true this is.
by cornonthecobra | 2026-01-26 02:02:42+00:00
the only place i have one is a grocery store where their loyalty program price is listed on the shelf tag and is lower, often by quite a bit (a third to half off is common). even then, i use one of the meme phone numbers (local area code + 867-5309, 678-999-8212, 281-330-8004, etc.).
by zb3 | 2026-01-26 02:02:46+00:00
That's not really true, there will be a warning shown that "the phone is loading a different operating system" - I've seen that when installing GrapheneOS on my pixel.

But it's not just about that, it's about the fact that I can't flash my own "abl" or the software running in the TrustZone there at all as I don't control the actual signing keys (not custom_avb_key) and I'm not "trusted" by my own device.. There were fuses blown as evident by examining abl with its fastboot commands - many refuse to work saying I can't use it on a "production device". Plus many of those low-level partitions are closed source proprietary blobs..

Yes yes - I DO understand that for most people this warning is something positive, otherwise you could buy a phone with modified software without realizing it and these modifications could make it impossible to restore the original firmware.
Show HN: Interactive demo of the X "For You" algorithm (runs in browser)
by prabal97 | 2026-01-26 02:02:57+00:00
X-AI recently open sourced their new recommendation algorithm.

I wanted to see exactly how the X "For You" algorithm decides whether to recommend your tweet or not, so I built this 'playable' CRT-styled simulator that runs a simpler version of X's recommendation pipeline right in your browser.

It's a "playable documentary" that allows you to type raw text and watch it physically travel through tokenization, embedding, safety filtering, and final ranking, all based on the X-AI reference docs.

Under the hood it's running real local ML inference (a tiny embedding model using Transformers.js) to generate embeddings and score content on the fly - all locally on your machine.

Would love some feedback!
by jcparkyn | 2026-01-26 02:03:14+00:00
Yes, if you modify a nested dict/list entry, all nodes above it will be cloned. Here's an example:

x = [1, [2]];
var y = x;
set y.[0] = 3; // clones the outer array, keeps a reference to inner array
set y.[1].[0] = 4; // clones the inner array here. Outer array is now exclusive so it doesn't need another clone.

var z = x;
set z.[1].[0] = 4; // clones both arrays at once
by tombert | 2026-01-26 02:03:16+00:00
I think the results of the Stanford Prison Experiment have been pretty heavily disputed, and it cannot be re-tested due to ethical concerns.

I personally don't think it's making the agents worse, but rather that it's very heavily selecting for very bad people. If you have a job where people can be violent and abusive with little-to-no oversight, you are going to select for people who want to do violent and abusive things. Keep in mind, these people aren't being "drafted" into ICE, they're voluntarily joining, meaning that they had to demonstrate some interest in it.

This doesn't imply that every ICE agent is a terrible person, just like how not every Catholic priest abuses children, but if you create a selection pressure then it isn't surprising when you get what you selected for.

Sample size of one but bear with me; I am an asshole but I am a decidedly non-violent person. I genuinely do not want to commit any form of violence on people. Law enforcement doesn't seem appealing to me because it pays worse than software and I wouldn't view physically attacking people with impunity as a benefit.
by footy | 2026-01-26 02:03:21+00:00
I spent a lot of time in Latin America growing up, including in parts that didn't have public libraries. Your comment is shocking to me, I guess I just assumed most developed countries has libraries that function in similar ways. Wikipedia says there are about 600 libraries in the Netherlands, do you not get to borrow books for free?

They're integral to the fabric of society in my view.
by phpnode | 2026-01-26 02:04:03+00:00
Your calculations are off by some margin. Assuming 312kg per car, it would take 3962 minis to transport it all, somewhat more than the 4 you accounted for. Of course you could do this with 4 cars over a thousand round trips - I'm not sure which option is most likely to lead to success, I suspect both might arouse suspicion.
by EngineerUSA | 2026-01-26 02:04:24+00:00
Such a ridiculous take. Get off your hate wagon. Also I argue no "leftists" support opposing ICE or Palestine out of "leftism". Only hateful bigots would support the execution of our people on our streets, or denying Palestinians their rights to exist and to freedom, free from a zionist ideology that has no respect for property or for life. Maybe if our "right wingers" and "Zionist" friends put humanity first and not politics or racist judaism first, they would not sound as hateful as you do now bud. Your comment is vile, and I can only imagine the hate you have in your bones. Although I will exclude right wingers here, since they are as of late huge supporters of the palestinian cause.
by rpdillon | 2026-01-26 02:04:44+00:00
You of course don't have to use AI. Your core point is correct: the world around you is changing quickly, and in unpredictable ways. And that's why it's dangerous to ignore: if you've developed a way that worked in the world 10 years ago, there's a risk it won't play the same way in the world of 2030. So this is time-frame to prepare for whatever that change will be.

For some people, that's picking up the tool and trying to figure out what its good for (if anything) and how it works.
by arczyx | 2026-01-26 02:05:07+00:00
The protest was due to economic hardship from the sanctions, https://www.iranintl.com/en/202601200029

> “President Trump ordered the Treasury and our OFAC division to put maximum pressure on Iran and it worked,” US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said when asked whether US sanctions on Iran were effective.

> In December their economy collapsed. We saw a major bank go under. The central bank has started to print money. There is a dollar shortage. They are not able to get imports and this is why the people took to the street,” he added.

And incited by Mossad, https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/iran-news/article-881733

> “Go out together into the streets. The time has come,” the Mossad wrote.

> It continued, “We are with you. Not only from a distance and verbally. We are with you in the field.”

> The statement was a rare open acknowledgment from the Mossad regarding ongoing operations in Iran.

It was obviously a regime-change operation by US and Israel.
by chadd | 2026-01-26 02:05:41+00:00
i built my own version of this called 'threethings' (per pmarca's essay on the subject of personal productivity). i gave an ec2 claude instance access to a folder that is synced with gdrive so it's easy to get local files to the instance, and gsuite access. i had claude build a flutter app one hour when i couldn't sleep, and gave it a telegram bot account. i talk to it via telegram and it keeps tabs on personal and work emails. it does 'deep work' late at night and sends me a 7am summary of my day. my wife is asking for it now, because it will notice urgent emails first thing in the morning and alert me.

i don't have time to open source it, but it's low key revolutionary having a pretty smart AI looking at my life every day and helping me track the three most important things to do.
by jaredcwhite | 2026-01-26 02:05:52+00:00
Honestly that's what makes this all the more dangerous. He's trying to have his cake and eat it too: accept all of the hype and all of the propaganda, but then couch it in the rhetoric of "oh I'm so concerned I can remain in a sort of moderate & empathetic position and not fall prey to tribalism and flame wars."

There's no both-sides-ing of genAI. This is an issue akin to street narcotics, mass weapons of war, or forever chemicals. You're either on the side of heavy regulation or outright bans, or you're on the side of tech politics which are directly harmful to humanity. The OP is not a thoughtful moderate because that's not how any of this works.
by LAC-Tech | 2026-01-26 02:06:02+00:00
right, Russia/Ukraine is another thing which isn't as neatly left/right as people think.

I used to read the English version of Russia today, and it was almost comical to seem them oscillate articles that fit the "Based Mother Russia of Traditional Values" trope, then right next to it nostalgic Tankie stuff or the anti "Western Imperialist" think pieces. It's like they didn't even know who their useful idiots were anymore.
by squigz | 2026-01-26 02:06:17+00:00
> SPECIFIED BELOW WITHIN AN AREA DEFINED AS: 3 NMR OF A QUALIFYING STADIUM OR OTHER SPORTING VENUE HOSTING A QUALIFYING EVENT UP TO AND INCLUDING 3000FT AGL. QUALIFYING LOCATIONS AND EVENTS ARE DEFINED AS ANY STADIUM OR OTHER SPORTING VENUE HAVING A SEATING CAPACITY OF 30,000 OR MORE WHERE: A. A REGULAR OR POST SEASON MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL, NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE, OR NCAA DIVISION ONE FOOTBALL GAME IS OCCURRING; OR B. A NASCAR CUP, INDY CAR, OR CHAMP SERIES RACE IS OCCURRING, EXCLUDING QUALIFYING AND PRE-RACE EVENTS.

https://tfr.faa.gov/tfr3/?page=detail_0_0367

I don't disagree with you that there should be no onus on pilots to have to hunt for this information (which is why I would guess that SEAMS is maintained, but not sure) - my point only is that this isn't really comparable to the TFR mentioned in TFA. All the Stadium TFRs are static; the "national defence" TFRs are not.

> Nope, it is not nearly that simple, and consequences can be dire.

Isn't ATC going to yell at you before you enter such a TFR?
by TacticalCoder | 2026-01-26 02:06:46+00:00
> Interesting that the same western media outlets which spent two years nonstop questioning and disputing and refusing to accept Palestinian death tolls out of Gaza, even when they were backed by human rights groups and monitors like Airwars and studies in The Lancet, are totally fine uncritically accepting totally unsourced and huge, huge numbers out of Iran.

Note that this works both ways: "Interesting that the same western media outlets which spent two years nonstop covering Gaza are totally fine not even having a single article about the massacre committed by the islamist iranian regime. And, no, before the trolls descend, of course I'm not questioning that lots of innocent people have been killed in Gaza.".

And "Interesting that the same protesters who spent months protesting on US and EU campuses for Gaza are not protesting to defend the protesters massacred en masse by the iranian regime. And, no, before the trolls descend, of course I'm not questioning that lots of innocent people have been killed in Gaza".

We don't know if the numbers are true but we're literally talking about half the death in two years in Gaza in a few days in Iran. I don't know if people realize the level of horrors we're talking about here.
Show HN: Debugging conflicting U.S. sexual behavior surveys
by joshuafkon | 2026-01-26 02:06:58+00:00
I'm the author of a new preprint that tries to resolve why major U.S. sexual behavior surveys appeared to report contradictory trends over the past decade.
The key move is separating never-occurrence from temporary inactivity among the experienced, rather than averaging them together. That decomposition is applied symmetrically across surveys and validated against an independent dataset.
The paper then treats the remaining discrepancy as a debugging problem:
• check distributions for digit heaping and compression
• look for stock–flow reversals consistent with under-reporting
• compare adjacent survey waves for internal consistency
• cross-validate against an external series not subject to the same reporting incentives
Once those diagnostics are applied, the conflicting results reconcile cleanly.
This is a methods/measurement paper, not a causal one. The contribution is showing how small reporting artifacts and aggregation choices can produce large apparent disagreements—even in high-quality surveys—when they aren't handled carefully.
(One note for the methodologically inclined: conditioning on "sexually experienced" looks like it could induce collider bias. Section 4 and Appendix D5 address this directly—the gender gap in sexual debut didn't change differentially, so selection into the analysis sample is symmetric.)
Preprint: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/jcdbm_v2
Replication code: https://github.com/Joshfkon/ResearchPaper_PartnershipGap
Happy to discuss the diagnostics, decomposition logic, or limitations.
by exidy | 2026-01-26 02:07:14+00:00
The Khmer Rouge executed between half a million and a million Cambodians between 1975 to 1979[0]. These were the intentional killings, estimates range to as many as 2 million Cambodians or 25% of the population died as a result of Khmer Rouge polices.

The end of the regime was brought about by an incursion into the Vietnamese border town of Ba Chúc, resulting in the massacre of more than 3000 civilians. Vietnam invaded, toppled the Khmer Rouge and brought an end to the executions although civil war would continue for much of the next decade.

For these actions Vietnam was extensively sanctioned[1]. The parallels with ongoing conflicts today are hard to ignore.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge#Crimes_against_hum...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian%E2%80%93Vietnamese_W...
by EngineerUSA | 2026-01-26 02:07:30+00:00
You are silly. Qatar is not even of the same faith as Iran. I would know, since I was stationed in Qatar. Also Al Jazeera does not cover Iran in detaisl since the Persian area is not part of the middle east and certainly is very different (religiously, in culture, etc) from the Gulf. But at least al-Jazeera tries and its journalistic integrity is great at a time where quality journalism (ahem Bari Weiss) is in dire need. Israel has murdered more journalists in Ghaza than all othe rnations combined in the last year, and has a total ban on covering the atrocities that the IDF is committing (including the starvation of children, a war crime). Your outrage is where, Mr Hypocrite? Or do we let our religiosity define our view of the world, instead of Facts Mr Redwood? I fully support taking out the leadership of Iran and Israel asap. I know we will do one atm, and hopefully the other soon. Apologists for those who murder protestors, or innocent children, is unacceptable. Edit: Redwood is Israeli and I just wasted my time on a Hasbara. Dang it