MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by adrian_b | 2026-01-29 09:34:09+00:00
Rotating axles have not evolved in animals not because they were complex, but because any part of an animal requires permanent connections with the other parts, not only for the supply with energy but also for the continuous repairing that is required by any living body, to avoid death.

Artificial machines rely on spare parts manufactured elsewhere, which are used by external agents to replace the worn out parts.

For an animal to have wheels, it would have to grow wheels in some part of the body, periodically, then use its limbs to detach the wheels and attach them on the axles, after removing the old wheels. This is something sufficiently complex to be extremely unlikely to appear from evolution.

Even this huge complication would be enough only for passive wheels. For active wheels there exists no suitable motor, as the rotational motors with ionic currents are suitable only for the size of a bacteria. All bigger living beings use contractile motors, which cannot be used for a rotation of unlimited angle. So active wheels would also need a different kind of motor, which can work without a solid connection between the 2 moving parts. The artificial motors of this kind use either electromagnetic forces or fluid expansion due to temperature or pressure variation. Both would be very difficult to evolve by a living being, though electric fish and bombardier beetles show some possible paths.
by demirbey05 | 2026-01-29 09:35:37+00:00
I have always been saying: don't be optimistic about AI. Software people prepared their end with this optimism without knowing how the economy works. "AI will make our jobs easier, I will have more time with my family," blah blah. Now we will see more news like that in the coming years. I am okay with supporting AI for curing cancer, but I am against supporting AI for disrupting the white-collar economy without a proper government plan.
by pipo234 | 2026-01-29 09:36:22+00:00
> On top of that Patreon is a closed centralized platform that's bound to have issues like this and that's where I very much prefer using protocols (vs platforms) that enable the same. There are very similar solutions to Patreon, but based on nostr and related protocols.

The problem here isn't that Patreon is centralized, but that the app store is. Apple could easily require a cut from any app using nostr and related protocols. Or simply ban them altogether.

Not saying government mandates are ideal, but I don't see any other way to force some sense into Apple (or Google). App stores should be some sort of independent institutions (non-profits) but companies have no incentive to cede that revenue. Until that happens, best not download from app stores unless absolutely necessary.
by lauri_jo | 2026-01-29 09:37:05+00:00
This data is from the third generation of Meteosats, which are the European meteorological satellites. A lot like GOES in the north-America. The main improvement is really significant improvement in resolution. The resolution is, depending on the channel, 9 times better than in the second generation. The main improvement in forecasting comes due to better information in the initial condition of the numerical weather prediction, but it is hard to quantify in advance. I'd be surprised if MAE, over the 15 days the prediction spans, would improve more than 0.1 C, if we talk about the raw prediction.
There are plenty of things that this data is used for, but I would say that improved nowcast of cloud coverage, and energy production related parameters are likely to benefit most from the improvement in resolution.
by jjav | 2026-01-29 09:37:15+00:00
> 401k identifies this loophole and sets limits

This loophole is very much alive today. I've recently worked at a large public company where the company allowed any percentage of pay to be deferred into the future.

The regular workers couldn't afford to do this of course, but the executives making many millions would defer most of their pay into the far future (presumably after retirement) to pay very little tax today.
by fhd2 | 2026-01-29 09:37:38+00:00
First thought: In my experience, this is a muscle we build over time. Humans are pretty great at pattern detection, but we need some time to get there with new input. Remember 3D graphics in movies ~15 years ago? Looked mind blowingly realistic. Watching old movies now, I find they look painfully fake. YMMV of course.

Second thought: Does it _really_ matter? You find it interesting, you continue reading. You don't like it, you stop reading. That's how I do it. If I read something from a human, I expect it to be their thoughts. I don't know if I should expect it to be their hand typing. Ghost writers were a thing long before LLMs. That said, it wouldn't even _occur_ to me to generate anything I want to say. I don't even spell check. But that's me. I can understand that others do it differently.
by cmkr | 2026-01-29 09:38:51+00:00
Considering it.
Backend is Go on a single-node K8s-"Cluster".
Frontend is vanilla JS on the same Hetzner-Box.
Code-situation in the midst of this ongoing "HN-Feuertaufe" is a bit … well.

What would make it useful for you - self-hosting capability, or contributing to detection logic?

I am considering a api but need stability first.
by sublinear | 2026-01-29 09:39:01+00:00
> PHANTOM OBLIGATION

I thought we stopped making up new ways to feel like a victim. This is so dramatic about something nobody sane feels about their RSS feeds or even work emails.

If it's really that important, I have inbox rules and can be reached directly.

I like knowing what I've already read in my RSS feed and find it way more useful than the read status on emails. Emails may need to be referenced later, archived, or forwarded. Whether I read it isn't that relevant. I am a heavy user of "mark all as read" like it's a trip odometer reset button. I don't care that way about my RSS feeds because I'm reading them for leisure. The read status there is like a bookmark and I ignore counts.

I don't feel like I'm missing out for the same reason as email. If it's important I will eventually read it more than once by some other means.

> Every interface is an argument about how you should feel

If it is, it's not very effective on me. To me every interface is roughly equivalent in not having enough information these days. The design details are very quickly ignored once I learn how to get what I want. All the alternative layout examples shown are less informative so I hate them even more than the "email" layout.
by troupo | 2026-01-29 09:39:27+00:00
> Why did we let mobile go down the one-app-per-website path?

Because the web is still barely usable for anything more complex than showing a few lines of static text and an image?

Because for almost as long as (modern) mobile apps exist the web was even less usable?

Because even now you can whip up a fast complex mobile app with 60fps animations and native behaviours probably in minutes? While on the web you're lucky if you can figure out which state/animation/routing library du jour isn't broken beyond all hope?
by beklein | 2026-01-29 09:39:38+00:00
As far as I can tell, they say: "Mission control and data distribution are managed by EUMETSAT." They have published their own blog post here: https://www.eumetsat.int/features/see-earths-atmosphere-neve...

There they say that: "Observations made by MTG-S1 will feed into data products that support national weather services …".
So I guess there will be no simple, publicly available REST API or so... but if anybody finds anything, let us know here :)
by WA | 2026-01-29 09:40:34+00:00
This is outrageously wrong. Back in 2011, the pricing model for "an app in your pocket" was 99 cents. The universal pricing model of apps was a one-time fee and the pricing range was that of an mp3 roughly. 30% of that is a lot. App sales worked only in volume.

If you sold software over the internet, you had PayPal, which had a flat fee of $0.35 + 1.7% or so and if your shareware was $30, the transaction fee essentially was ~$1. Stripe had roughly the same fee when they launched. You had more traditional credit card merchants and when I inquired one in Germany back in 2010, it was more or less in the same ballpark (~10%).

In Europe, you could also just get money wired, which cost you something like 0-10 cents.

30% for payment processing were always extremely high.

Edit: The only thing where you had no other options was when you tried to sell stuff on the internet for $1, because the flat fee part of credit card processors would eat up all of that. Apple indeed helped here a little bit, because it was always 30% and no fixed part.
by bschne | 2026-01-29 09:41:03+00:00
> Was this physically difficult to write? If it flowed out effortlessly in one go, it's usually fluff.

Probably my best and most insightful stuff has been produced more or less effortlessly, since I spent enough time/effort _beforehand_ getting to know the domain and issue I was interested in from different angles.

When I try writing fluff or being impressive without putting in the work first, I usually bump up against all the stuff I don't have a clear picture of yet, and it becomes a neverending slog. YMMV.
by knbknb | 2026-01-29 09:41:34+00:00
How many Microsoft employees are working on Azure Linux in 2026 (full-time equivalents)?
Github Project Page lists ~ 195 contributors today.

Is Azure Linux relying on community contributions, and MS employees do not write code, justt review, plan, coordinate?
Or is it the other way around, Microsoft developers do most of the work, and occasionally accept a small PR and interesting feature requests from the community, here and there?
Tell HN: "Write less code" now means two different things
by mikaelaast | 2026-01-29 09:42:16+00:00
I was the bemused recipient of a couple of Twitter screenshots in a Slack DM this morning. One was Boris Cherny saying pretty much 100% of Claude Code's code is written by Claude Code, and that he personally hadn’t made even small edits by hand for months. The other was a Member of Technical Staff at OpenAI saying programming "always sucked" and when asked what percentage of coding is done from OpenAI models, replied: "100%, I don’t write code anymore."

I'm disheartened by this "good riddance" attitude. Do others here feel the same?

My goal is also to write as little code as possible. Not because I want to push the work onto AI, but because I want as little code to exist as possible. Code equals liability, and bugs live in code, so I always strive for the bare minimum of it.

I keep a mental model of a codebase. In my head it’s abstracted into a kind of "mind palace" where I can move around without language or syntax. Lately I’ve started separating code into two categories: code I don’t need to model in my head (low liability, because it follows established conventions), and code I can’t resist modeling in my head (innovative, new patterns, high liability). The first is easy to delegate to an AI agent. The second is too enjoyable and satisfying to stay away from. I’ll spar with an agent, but I still want to keep my mind palace in sync with the code.

Are we really going to give up our relationship with code?
by defrost | 2026-01-29 09:42:42+00:00
> Defintiely not vigilantism

So, free speech, licenced carry, local community resisting unlawful warrents, etc are all ok?

Voting, in the USofA, is ineffectual - it takes years to make change and the choices are essentially shite .. barely a Democracy, more a Republican Autocracy by design.

Of interest:

On Monday, Judge Patrick J. Schiltz of the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota, appointed by President George W. Bush, suggested his patience with ICE had run out. After officials apparently ignored his order to permit a detainee to have a bond hearing or release him, he ordered Todd Lyons, the acting director of ICE, to appear in court on Friday to explain why he wasn’t in contempt of court. On Tuesday, the government released the detainee.

Today Schiltz canceled the Friday hearing but went on to rake ICE over the coals. He identified “96 court orders that ICE has violated in 74 cases” and commented, “The extent of ICE’s noncompliance is almost certainly substantially understated.”

“This list should give pause to anyone—no matter his or her political beliefs—who cares about the rule of law. ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.” Schiltz warned that he would haul Lyons or other government officials into court if they kept ignoring court rulings. “ICE is not a law unto itself,” he wrote.

Letters from an American - https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/january-28-2026

The USofA is literally a country founded on the principle of not allowing Kings or autocracts, certainly not federal authority, step on states right and self determination.
by aebtebeten | 2026-01-29 09:42:54+00:00
Dark polycarbonate is highly useful for looking anywhere near a weld pool without eye damage: shade <7 for gas processes, shade 10 for electric?

Q1. M is a vector, and therefore a section of the tangent bundle evaluated at a point? (whatever "tangent" may mean in this space — I'd guess if the geodesic YX doesn't follow a linear route in coordinates, then the coordinate vector of the initial part of that geodesic at Y?) If one can say both that what can be listened to, and that which will be able to be listened to, at the same time, it's gravy — normally one must say only that which can be listened to, and leave that which will be able to be listened to for a more felicitous future.

Q2. Nice!

Q3. need to match the telegu ref first; is there a back of the book?
by account42 | 2026-01-29 09:43:39+00:00
> As an example, focus-stealing prevention. In xfwm4 (and x11 generally), this requires complex heuristics and timestamp checks because x11 clients are powerful and can aggressively grab focus. In wayland, the compositor is the sole arbiter of focus, hence clients can't steal it, they can only request it via xdg-activation. Porting the legacy x11 logic involves the challenge of actually designing a new policy that feels like the old heuristic but operates on wayland's strict authority model.

Not that that's necessarily the best way to do it but nothing stops xfwl4 from simply granting every focus request and then applying their existing heuristics on the result of that.
by stavros | 2026-01-29 09:44:11+00:00
I didn't really get it, and the problem with these games is that you can't ask, because you might spoil the surprise. The controls were fine, even fun, but I just wasn't really captivated by the story.

I don't know if I'm missing something that would make the game click for me, or if I just won't enjoy it. I can't ask anyone, because I'll ruin it if I am actually missing something.
by yorwba | 2026-01-29 09:45:00+00:00
BYD is selling a lot of cars, but they're also making a lot more cars than they can sell at sticker price in China, as does every other Chinese car company. This oversupply leads to all kinds of distortions, like dealerships registering cars as "sold" to make their sales targets and then selling those brand-new cars as "used" at a discount. https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/local-...

Maybe your YouTube echo chamber additionally thinks that this will cause BYD to collapse, but I doubt that. There are about a hundred Chinese EV manufacturers in worse financial shape, who're likely to go bankrupt first, which should reduce oversupply enough for BYD to survive.
by ruairidhwm | 2026-01-29 09:46:10+00:00
$0 so far (just launched).

I recently launched https://winlog.dev, a Slack-first tool to help engineers capture their work as it happens so they’re better prepared for reviews and promotions.

It’s early days, but I’m using it with my own reports and so far it's been really helpful. The goal for 2026 is to grow this into a meaningful side-business, but if not, then it's useful to me!
by vladvasiliu | 2026-01-29 09:46:22+00:00
Depends on your configuration, I guess. I just tried this with my mx master with its standard resolution (so no ridiculous 800000 dpi gaming mouse) on a 4k 32" at 100% under windows. I can easily reach a corner with a quick flick of the wrist.

On my laptop's FHD screen it's even better.
by OJFord | 2026-01-29 09:46:53+00:00
Yes! This is exactly why I gave up on my RSS feeds. I was paying for the client even ('Feedbin', iirc).

I trimmed the feeds way down, and now just receive a couple literally by email. Doesn't fix the feeling, but merges it with the rest of my email so it's just the one inbox's unread count.

If I were designing the interface, I think I'd do it like a book or magazine - except indefinite length. Each feed is a different book, new entries get tacked on the back. No unread count, maybe a sort of bookmark shows how far 'through' you are, but there's no particular expectation to finish, since you never will for as long as the feed's active anyway.
by thijsn | 2026-01-29 09:47:31+00:00
Oh I don't mean to say verbose makes it more readable by default, I agree with you on that. I mostly meant that because the API is declarative (more geared at describing the result you want instead of the operations) it is easier to understand what's going on. A side effect of that is that it might be more verbose, which is the case of Polars vs pandas.
In the end it's a personal thing which one you like the most. I do believe that if your deliverable is insights you get out of your analysis I can imagine that a less verbose API is practical to get things done quickly. But if you create pipelines that your colleagues have to quickly understand (or you in a couple of months) a read-optimized one makes more sense, even though it might take slightly more effort to write.
by bell-cot | 2026-01-29 09:48:22+00:00
> Being 100 and still capable of working is a blessing

A much under-appreciated blessing. At any age.

Over the past half-ish century, I've visited any number of elderly relatives and friends who were living in the US's long-term care facilities. However bright the decor, or kind the care staff - there is a very bleak "people whose ability to do anything useful has died, waiting for the rest of death" aura to them.
by tstrimple | 2026-01-29 09:48:32+00:00
This is beyond naive at this point. The objective is to hurt people. Republican voters have repeatedly explicitly asked for it. There's a reason they flocked to Trump. Cruelty is the point. It's astounding the number of people still so credulous wrt what is happening in this country. You have "Christian" preachers talking about empathy being a sin for fucks sake. Like how can people maintain this sort of ignorance into 2026?

And I don't mean this towards you necessarily. I get some people are still entertaining folks who will never participate in a conversation in good faith because it might influence ignorant observers who stumble across the conversation. But does that ever actually play out? How much time is wasted on people of obvious bad faith? How much time has been wasted on the Shapiros, the Kirks, the Tuckers of the world? The random HN commenter who drops obvious bullshit before disappearing to never be heard from again? You cannot out earnest people flooding the zone with bullshit.
by jwarden | 2026-01-29 09:48:40+00:00
Right, so for a subset of functions, a language could implement an extensional equality test operator `==` for two functions by calling the functions for every possible input. It would be prohibitively slow for some functions, but correct.

But for other functions, even that won't be possible.

The point is that functions and arrays may be practically different. You can always do an `==` test on the contents of two arrays, but you can't do the same for two arbitrary functions.
Show HN: Post Tomato – simple social media publishing with AI
by blindnomore | 2026-01-29 09:48:53+00:00
i HN

I built Post Tomato to make social media publishing simpler.

You can write posts manually or generate them with AI, then publish or schedule them across platforms like LinkedIn, Threads, and Telegram from one place.

I built this after getting tired of juggling multiple tools just to publish content consistently.

Would love to hear your feedback — especially what feels missing or unnecessary.
by pjmlp | 2026-01-29 09:49:18+00:00
I really hate the exponential growth every year, which is physically impossible, instead of a plain "sustainable business solving a need that people have." as you mention.

Naturally as soon as the need is covered, and there are no new people to sell the product to, the exponential growth every year mentality bursts into entshitification, or firing half of the company because the targets weren't reached, but no worries at least the shareholders are happy.

Maybe it is my European mindset that cannot grasp this MBA mindset into creating /destroying jobs as if people didn't matter.
by account42 | 2026-01-29 09:49:49+00:00
X11 doesn't have an exclusive fullscreen mode either. [] It's always has relied on compositors and drivers to detect when fullscreen windows can be unredirected. Some programs chose to implement behavior like minimizing on focus loss or grabbing input that is closer to Windows's exclusive fullscreen mode but the unredirecting of the display pipeline doesn't depend on that.

[] Well, there was an extension (can't recall the name right now) but not much used it and support was dropped at some point.
by thoughtpeddler | 2026-01-29 09:50:41+00:00
Anyone else surprised by how the actual training content doesn't seem to cover true fundamentals (even for a broad, non-technical audience) that would include basics like pre-training, post-training, weights, context window, etc? I get that we're all flabbergasted by the website itself, but it's not like the content is redeeming either. Here in the US, I should've learned my lesson when what came out of the White House "AI Education Summit" wasn't a comprehensive plan to teach Americans about AI, but instead just a cheap ploy for tech companies to offer coupons and vouchers to start using their services.
by troupo | 2026-01-29 09:50:49+00:00
That's what Apple already doing: applying arbitrary categories and charging arbitrary amounts of money because "transaction costs and platform or something".

1. Where the hell is the notion of "using the platform for free" even coming from (it's coming from Apple of course). I didn't know that iPhones are free, or that dev fees are waived for everyone.

2. Why the hell can't I use a different payment processor tham Apple and tell people about it? Then I'm neither using Apple's platform "for free" nor paying Apple's transaction fees.
by aspenmayer | 2026-01-29 09:50:55+00:00
It's hardly "regular wood" though, as the structure mentioned was constructed using a specific kind of engineered compressed wood:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InventWood

> In 2018, [Liangbing] Hu's laboratory reported that partially removing lignin from natural wood and then compressing the remaining cellulose under heat produced a material roughly three times denser than the original timber and an order of magnitude stronger in bending and tension.[2] The material was commercially named Superwood.

> [2]: https://doi.org/10.1038%2Fnature25476 | https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476
by mmustapic | 2026-01-29 09:51:28+00:00
You should watch the video, the police are the ones who engaged physically: pushed Pretti, pepper sprayed him, dragged him on to the street, hit him on the head repeatedly, and then got scared and shot. You can protest wherever you like that's legal. If police cannot handle that (start fights and then get scared and shoot) they shouldn't be police.
Also, it is absolutely legal to follow police around. It doesn't make sense to make something legal while justifying getting shot for it (unless you want to make it illegal eventually).