MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lucasRW | 2026-01-10 15:36:22+00:00
Without even talking about the rest (restoring free-speech on X), the only reason we know what's happening in Iran is thanks to X and Starlink, certainly not the BBC and SkyNews, who limited their coverage to copy-pasting Khamenei's statements.

We all know why, as many recent inquiries have shown that the main driver for the action of most of the UK government's bodies (its police, its school system, the BBC, etc...) is first and foremost: to not offend its islamist population.
by ptero | 2026-01-10 15:36:23+00:00
I am not absolutely sure, but I do not think so.

Being old(ish) I recall in the early 90s Stallman advocating for (and mostly winning the argument in the tech circles at the time) open source as the primary tool for freedom to build things. With financial motivation possible, but completely orthogonal to the development of the open source software.

And how his argument (he was also a strong proponent of freedom to fork and improve in ways that the original developer did not do/want/agree with) was used against him in the early Emacs-XEmacs wars. When he tried to advocate that developers should support his Emacs version because he was the one who built Emacs (with tech retort being that his version sucks, he does not want to let others change it, so the community will build the features they want in XEmacs, thank you very much).

I think viable financial models of the last 15-20 years morphed open source into something different (in a kind of embrace-extend way). But I think that "extinguish" is very hard with OSS, so with financial models becoming less viable, open source might morph back somewhat. Or not; we shall see.
by odyssey7 | 2026-01-10 15:36:37+00:00
As you increasingly mandate things that the public thinks are optional, then eventually mandates in general start to look unimportant, and eventually you get less safety seat compliance.

If there are some illnesses we can handle with without universal vaccination, then including those vaccines as mandates means you’ll eventually get less compliance for high-priority vaccines too. This is what we’ve seen play out when the public distrusts medical authorities. We live in a democratic society and (not) listening goes both ways.
Ask HN: Which tech stack for creative blogs?
by spacebuffer | 2026-01-10 15:36:45+00:00
by creative blogs: I mean ones where you can customize specific article pages easily, to change the styling, add interactive demos, etc..

Examples:

1. this Reuters article https://www.reuters.com/graphics/TENNIS- WIMBLEDON/GRAPHIC/lbvggkzjmvq/

2. anything by Bartosz Ciechanowski

For my blog (yusuf.fyi) I used to MDX to do this, but I have since moved on from the react ecosystem and want something lower level. especially since my site got vendor-locked in an old astrojs version and I am struggling to upgrade it.
by jameshart | 2026-01-10 15:38:05+00:00
Sure.

And driving on the left is one of the most reasonable sides of the road to drive on, but in a country where everyone drives on the right, it’s good to accept that, though driving on the left offers just as many advantages, nonetheless you shouldn’t insist on continuing to do so.

Markdown is also one of the most reasonable markup languages to use for text, and it has won sufficient share that it should be your default choice for lightweight markup, no matter how reasonable org-mode is.
by JKCalhoun | 2026-01-10 15:38:29+00:00
"…a 60-year-old man who had a “history of studying nutrition in college” decided to try a health experiment: He would eliminate all chlorine from his diet…"

You can see already that this can easily go sideways. This guy is already exploring the nether regions of self-medication.

It would be ideal if LLMs recognized this and would not happily offer up bromine as a substitute for chlorine, but I suspect this guy would have greedily looked for other shady advice if LLMs had never existed.
by avsm | 2026-01-10 15:38:35+00:00
(author here) I'm just adding data-race free parallelism support to this right now to switch my website over to using it! For those familiar with OCaml syntax, the OxCaml parse function is fun:

val parse : buffer -> len:int -> #(status * request * header list) @ local

This takes in a buffer and returns an unboxed tuple on the stack, so there's no GC activity involved beyond stack management for each HTTP request.

https://github.com/avsm/httpz/blob/main/lib/httpz.mli#L154
by bialpio | 2026-01-10 15:38:46+00:00
> Seen from within the meeting, it does not really matter if you start 5 minutes late or end 5 minutes early.

It matters because there sometimes are meeting where it is very important to know how much time you have to prepare appropriately. As long as the expectations are set beforehand, it matters less.

I roughly agree with the rest of your post. "Just be punctual" is a cop out that ignores the fact that I need to have enough breaks between meetings before I can even think about being punctual. Make space for breaks and enforce the time allocated is imo the solution, it matters less where exactly the 5-minute break fits (but I tend to agree that people would more likely end on the full hour, so that would mean we need to start 5 past).
by burnt-resistor | 2026-01-10 15:38:53+00:00
This is pissing into the wind because in, the long run, AI will write the functionality it wanted to use instead because there are no magic or special libraries. Furthermore, it will eventually (over a long enough timescale) eat deeper down the stack by writing programming languages (with most incomprehensible to humans*), designing chips, designing systems, deploying code, planning datacenters, and designing products... this the manifestation of a gradual technological "singularity".

* This is how billionaire techbros will finally push most humans out of tech.

All they're doing now by putting up roadblocks is collectively punishing humans from competing with AI.

On the other side of the token, don't give away things and expect payment. Give things away because it's cool, not as a primary survival strategy based on mythological expectations of gratuity. It comes across as bitter giver's remorse. And unprofessional poison spewed onto social media also wrecks their professional reputation and drives customers away.
by chuckadams | 2026-01-10 15:38:56+00:00
I think the last time that errexit and pipefail were brought up to the fish devs, we were treated instead to an essay about how errexit is a total hack in bash, how it has all kinds of places where it doesn't work as expected, how it's special-cased away for some constructs, etc. None of which is wrong, but it's still a whole lot better than the nothing that we have with fish now.

So we still have this inflection point where scripts eventually have to graduate into a "real" language, and while those languages give us proper data types and structures on one hand, they take away conveniences like pipes with the other. It's 2026, and we managed to crack artificial freakin' intelligence before we got a decently evolved shell into the mainstream. </yells-at-cloud>
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2026-01-10 15:38:57+00:00
> Embarrassing what level of discourse this site has fallen to.

Indeed.

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

> "she was asking for it"

Another way to, er interpret their comment could be, "This tragic outcome was predictable." It does not blame the victim, it is an observation.
by quesera | 2026-01-10 15:39:09+00:00
This is not honestly engaging with GP's statement.

The benefit only accrues if the sharing is universal.

I am too private a person to agree with GP, but it does seem that most health issues that are visible to the passerby or casual acquaintence are less stigmatized than the ones that can be hidden. There might be something to the idea.

Of course you'd have to agree that de-stigmatizing is more socially important than privacy. I guess I'm privileged enough to have no stigmas, secret or otherwise, that I consider more important than my privacy. But I know others are less fortunate.
by dizhn | 2026-01-10 15:39:13+00:00
I bought my first real wheel drive car in 2014. Still have it. It's not a race car. About 170hp. It struggles at the smallest curves. Good thing it has traction control and esp. Except all the front wheel cars I had before, one even slightly more powerful and smaller, never needed any of that. Never ever buying a rwd again. (Enthusiast forums of the brand tell me I don't know how to drive RWD. Skill issue. :D)
by zelphirkalt | 2026-01-10 15:39:37+00:00
Well, but I am not aware of anyone having come up with a good syntax to do babel things in Markdown. Markdown and Org Mode also set out to serve different purposes. For a quick and dirty text Markdown might suffice, but the babel stuff and spreadsheet stuff enable a lot of use cases that Markdown simply doesn't cater to. We already have the implementation of all these nice things in Emacs. If we were to replicate them for some markdown dialect, they would probably be done half-right, before someone actually manages to get literate programming right for various languages, including what code to translate to, how to wrap or not wrap the code that is inside blocks, sessions, output formats, etc. We might as well use what we have with Emacs. There is probably a way to call Emacs' functionality from outside of Emacs, to treat it as a library.

But not all is well with Org Mode syntax either. Many git hosters have only a very rudimentary implementation of a parser and writing a parser for it is not actually that easy. Its dynamic nature requires at least a 2 step approach of parsing and then later checking all kinds of definitions at the top of a file and further processing the document according to that. It's power comes at that cost. That's probably why we have so many Markdowns, but only one Org Mode (OK maybe a few, counting Vim and VSCodium plugins, that achieve a feature subset).

I will say though, that org mode syntax is much better suited for writing technical documentation than markdown. The only issue is, that not so many people know it or want to learn it, and I don't know a way to change that. Perhaps that effort to have the org mode syntax separately defined (https://gitlab.com/publicvoit/orgdown/-/blob/master/doc/Over...) by the same author will help creating more support for the format in various tools.
by BatteryMountain | 2026-01-10 15:40:04+00:00
My running joke and justification to our money guy (to pay for expensive tools), is that its like I have 10 junior devs on my side with infinite knowledge (domain expert with too much caffeine), no memory or feelings (I curse it without convo's with HR), can code decent enough (better than most juniors actually), can do excellent system admin....all for a couple hundred dollars a month, which is a bargain!
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-10 15:40:08+00:00
Yes (sort of), but the definition of best has changed so drastically built on completely different benchmarks (engagement)

As an example, watch a really good documentary on something, I would consider it best

But it might have less views than some AI slop video perhaps even generated in a minute

Another aspect relevant to the propaganda discussion is that I think modern algorithms have decided that ragebait is the best form of engagement and this is why propaganda might spread fast and how social media might actually actively help the foreign nation

I would argue that this is one of the reasons social media actively harms but its that profit over all for social media seems genuinely harmful. We need more focus on bluesky and mastodon and other alternatives as well to establish a network effect there but also that I would argue that prosecuting social media / large tech companies should have such a case where something can be prosecuted criminally for a class law suit case so that these social medias can stay better in shape than being deranged

But the issue to me feels like I am already protesting Italian even fining because in this case to me it feels like abusing the vagueness of the law and other factors so I am sure that if we give govts more power they might have the ability to abuse it as well for some lobbying powers (in this case it seems to be football)

Everything boils down to what the genuine incentives of the govts are I guess. I mean some are trying to do somethings but I guess all of this is just really tricky and the answer is in a series of changes and not a single one. There is nuance to this like every other discussion
by chipotle_coyote | 2026-01-10 15:40:23+00:00
I don't remember Vim's Markdown support to be anything special, either; I do a lot of Markdown work, and tended to use Markdown-specific editors on the Mac like Ulysses and iA Writer, while doing my technical writing in BBEdit. (I never found Vim to fit me particularly well for prose of any kind, even though I was pretty experienced with it. Apparently my writing brain is not modal.)

Semi-ironically given the Org mode discussion, the markdown-mode package for Emacs makes it one of the best Markdown editors I've used!
by zamadatix | 2026-01-10 15:40:25+00:00
Author 17, me 31. Having AI write your code by telling it what to do is a poor way to learn either physics or code, but I agree there are ways to use AI to learn things - just not necessarily as used here.

The main thing is the author did normal research and then gave it to AI to make it happen and verified it seemed to match what they asked for. That helps build a demo, it doesn't really help grow the knowledge you're coding from and it's a very hands off way to learn code (akin to reading a post of someone else doing something, reviewing their code, and putting it in your project). It loses the majority of the hands on time of really getting to think about how these new ideas will be applied at the detailed layer yourself, which is where learning really happens.

OTOH, asking AI to help validate your research and understanding before going in to write the code helps you learn things like "the rocket shouldn't be flying right at takeoff just because the planet is spinning" and having AI help debug code issues you can't figure out in the code you wrote yourself (but not having it fix them for you directly) helps you really test 100% of your own understanding instead of testing if you can say someone else's implementation seems right.

If the only goal is to get to generate output instead of learn then the calculus changes of course. E.g. yesterday I wanted to run an optical flow method for heart rate posted here in my browser. I knew I didn't really have the time to set aside to properly learn it more than a high level description of optical flow, but I just wanted to run the demo in my browser rather than python. So I took the description of the problem in the article, pasted it into AI, and asked it to convert it to a single page HTML app because all I wanted to do was play with it, not learn it.
by paulryanrogers | 2026-01-10 15:40:35+00:00
Sorry if my point was lost in the rant. IME the younger generations are facing an increasingly large burden of must-do's with less slack for them to make any other choices. Growing housing, healthcare, and societal expectations combined with fewer employment opportunities are leaving little room for them to chart their own course.

Some might say it's offset by all the luxuries so widely available. But I personally find it hard to enjoy minor luxuries when so much of life is swallowed by obligations. And I'm one of the luckiest members of my cohort. Most of my high school friends still live with parents or several roommates, have lower paying careers, and/or have to care of more family with serious medical issues. (Though on the latter I seem to be catching up quickly)
by thelastgallon | 2026-01-10 15:40:56+00:00
The French seem to be very thoughtful people who solved multiple pesky problems permanently:

1) Guillotine for the super rich

2) Nuclear to power >70%

3) C15 for people, cows, craftsmen, mini house

4) TGV

5) french fries for the fastest carbohydrate delivery, handily beating rice

I wish they bring back the first 3 and do some shorts, market them to the world. Fries are doing fine.
by libroot | 2026-01-10 15:41:17+00:00
Yes, the journalists did the redactions. The metadata timestamps in one of the documents show that the versions were created three weeks before the publication.

And to be honest, the journalists generally have done a great work on pretty much in all the other published PDFs. We've went through hundreds and hundreds of the published documents, and these two documents were pretty much the only ones which had metadata leak by a mistake revealing something significant (there are other documents as well with metadata leaks/failed redactions, but nothing huge). Our next part will be a technical deep-dive on PDF forensic/metadata analysis we've done.
by djeastm | 2026-01-10 15:42:08+00:00
I see news articles about Starmer wanting to ban X for allowing deepfakes and sexualized images of children, which seems reasonable to me. Presumably if X took steps other companies have to prevent those images, the ban would be off the table.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/uk-x-elon-musk-grok-ai-sexualiz...

As for T. Breton, it seems they're wanting X to abide by the EU's Digital Services Act, which requires transparency in how a company tries to combat disinformation among other things (protection of children's exposure to dangerous content being one of them).

https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/12/24/us-visa-ban-ta...

I still don't see where the Iranian protests or regime change there would factor into this.
by well_ackshually | 2026-01-10 15:43:38+00:00
>I could. My wife couldn't.

Because she doesn't drive a C15. Believe me, rural french women _will_ fix a C15. There's nothing to break down anyways, the engine is happy to run on distilled corn and melted rubber for oil, the suspension is what suspension, three tires ought to be enough for everyone.

> rear seats,

There's rear benches for you whole family and space for your kids to play around in the back while you're driving, what more do you want ?

>airbags

Useless if you don't crash.

>sound insulation

What do you need to hear except the beautiful sound of the X-Type engine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSA-Renault_X-Type_engine) ?

>power steering

Grab a phase 3, it has power steering. Or get stronger arms. Or stop trying to steer while you're not moving forward.

> automatic transmissions

You don't need automatic transmissions, you need to learn how to drive stick. The C15 has the added benefit that you don't really have a proper range to change gears, it'll just go in. Actually you don't even need to clutch, just jam the thing.

>4wd

Absolutely useless for 100% of the usages the average american makes of it. If it can drive through mud while carrying cows, it will handle anything you have to throw at it. 4WD sure is a nice thing to make you pay for more gas though.

>Living in the country, it's very useful to own a tool-vehicle. This is typically a beat up old 2wd pickup truck (lower is easier to load) with an 8-ft bed (so you can load full sheets of plywood) and a single cab (so you can get an 8-ft bed). My buddy down the street has one and I borrow it all the time. But you'd never take the family anywhere with this thing. It basically spends its entire life going back and forth to Lowes.

Alright, all kidding aside though: the US is literally the only country in the world that considers pickup trucks as a good utility vehicle: they are the most dogshit type of vehicle you could own for anything, and that includes your sheets of plywood. Pickup trucks are not used by anyone serious anywhere else in the world. Need to carry a bunch of crap ? Buy a busted Renault Master (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_Master) and it has the added benefit of you being able to buy your plywood in crazy situations like the tiniest bits of rain.

The US's obsession for pickup trucks is the sign of a deeply unserious society.

The Toyota Hilux makes for a good vehicle to mount weapons in the back, but please see a lawyer about the legality of mounting an M60 at the back of your car if you're not living in Afghanistan
by zelphirkalt | 2026-01-10 15:44:17+00:00
> It's really surprising that this part is not more common.

I think it is because of low Emacs adoption and other editors not having enough support.

The problem with polyglot notebook workflow is probably, that you can only use it well for small data, or at least not big data, because who wants to have a million lines of output suddenly appear in the buffer, only to then read them as input for the next language ... That would be a tremendous amount of computational overhead. And if we didn't have that, we would need a way to pass a proper value from one language to the other.

What I also like is, that you can define code blocks that are used as formulas for spreadsheets (tables) inside the document. That's quite powerful too.

> (Even more niche is the noweb syntax for proper "literate programming". Which is mostly discussed about how awful it is to use in practice?)

I don't find it very awful to use. I have used that for working through computer programming books and it was fabulous.
by rvz | 2026-01-10 15:44:37+00:00
That's because it is, just like how this entire project is.

In fact, it is just using the same technologies as LXC and Incus. (It is exactly LXC and Incus)

So really nothing special at all. Perhaps people looked at the title and rushed to the repo.

When I saw "IMPLEMENTATION-PLAN.md" and "SECURITY-CHECKLIST.md" filled with hundreds of emojis, I immediately closed the tab and now replying to you that it is total slop.

2026 is the year of abundant "not invented here syndrome".
by duskdozer | 2026-01-10 15:44:37+00:00
>and their children are doing mostly well

This study involves American children, but a pubmed study from mid 2025 suggests that ~15% of children are now suffering from Long COVID, which would make it the most common chronic health problem in children[1]

[1]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40554463/
by jasperry | 2026-01-10 15:45:04+00:00
The value of Org outside Emacs would be the same value that Markdown has, if it had wider adoption. Voit's post makes a strong argument for Org syntax's ability to serve for all the things Markdown currently does, while being more consistent and concise than Markdown, and so he pushes for it to be more widely adopted. We know that in tech, the better format doesn't always win at first, or ever, but we can advocate!
by ZuoCen_Liu | 2026-01-10 15:45:22+00:00
I’ve spent months digging into why dexterous manipulation (like the 'Humanoid Hand' problem Musk mentions) is still so far from reality. The culprit isn't the hardware—it's the 'Discrete Tax.'

Current solvers burn thousands of GPU cycles just to prevent numerical 'explosions' during contact. It's a brute-force patch for a math problem that should be solved with algebraic continuity. We've pushed a framework that runs at ~100W with higher stability than a 5000W H200 cluster.

I’ve officially challenged the PhysX core team on their forums to address this systemic waste.
by skeledrew | 2026-01-10 15:45:23+00:00
I discovered and started using org-mode (and, as a result, Emacs) when I migrated from Evernote in '16. Today I use it for all my project, task and knowledge management needs, with some files going over 15MB in size. And I'm still loving it. Started out with headers only, and every time I wanted something more, it was always just there for the taking. Easy to use, and also crazy powerful. Can't think of anything else that exhibits both those traits at once.
by hodgesrm | 2026-01-10 15:45:24+00:00
> The appeal to JD Vance is properly craven and validates the view that their business model is effectively a protection racket.

It's not craven, it's a mistake. It needlessly antagonizes the market at large to solve a smaller problem. I don't see how this benefits Cloudflare in the long run unless they've decided to throw in their lot with the current US regime. If so, what happens when that regime changes?