MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by scottyah | 2026-01-14 19:31:18+00:00
> it's just a bad product.
So you've never driven one?

> A pickup truck should just be max utility
You don't know much about trucks? What does this even mean, max utility? Trucks are designed for different purposes. Should we eliminate all programming languages besides bash or python?

> especially if you're a manufacturer making your first one
Seems like you don't know much about business either. Most new products should NOT try to do everything at once the first time.
by burnerToBetOut | 2026-01-14 19:31:23+00:00
> …a long stint as a founder…

I perceive the typical "startup culture" to be one where heroics are the norm…

1. You're expected to work 10 hour days

2. You're expected to do the jobs of 3 people

3. You might not get paid on schedule

…

That would be an absolute cultural mismatch for me.
by rented_mule | 2026-01-14 19:31:27+00:00
I wish more business / product people understood this concept. When a product has been refined enough to approach Pareto optimality (at least on the dimensions the product is easily measured), it's all too common for people to chase improvements to one metric at a time, and when that runs out, switch to another metric. This results in going in circles (make metric A go up-up-up, forcing metric B down-down-down, then make B go up-up-up while forcing A to go down-down-down - it's worse than this because multiple dimensions go up/down together, making it harder to spot). Sometimes these cycles are over a period of quarters or years, making it even harder to spot because cycles are slower than employee attrition.

This is not independent of Goodhart's Law[1]. I've seen entire product orgs, on a very mature product (i.e., nearing the Pareto frontier for the metrics that are tracked), assign one metric per PM and tie PM comp to their individual metric improving. Then PMs wheel and deal away good features because "don't ship your thing that hurts my metric and I won't ship my thing that hurts yours" - and that's completely rational given the incentives. Of course the best wheelers-and-dealers get the money/promotions. So the games escalate ("you didn't deal last time, so it's going to cost you more this time"). Eventually negative politics explode and it's all just a reality TV show. Meanwhile engineers who don't have an inside view of what's going on are left wondering why PMs appear to be acting insane with ship/no-ship decisions.

If more people understood Pareto optimality and Goodhart's Law, even at a surface level, I think being "data driven" would be a much better thing.

[1] Goodhart's Law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure
by quotemstr | 2026-01-14 19:31:29+00:00
It's easy enough to patch. It's the philosophy that bugs me. We already have a huge problem with routine workflows pulling things from the network (often, without even a semblance of hash-locking) and foregoing the traditional separation between environment setup and business logic. There's a lot of value into having discrete steps for downloading/installing stuff and doing development, because then you can pay special attention to the former, look for anything odd, read release notes, and so on. Between explicit, human-solicited upgrades, dev workflows should be using, ideally, vendored dependencies, or, if not that, then at least stuff that's hash-verified end-to-end.

Someday, someone is going to have a really big disaster that comes out of casual getting unauthenticated stuff from somebody else's computer.
by LeChuck | 2026-01-14 19:31:38+00:00
> I think the best outcome would really be the US' current allies are just waiting until trump goes and he doesn't break too much and the new person goes back to a more stable posture.

I’m afraid that ship has sailed. This was the general feeling during Bidens’ presidency. After Trump’s reelection, it’s clear that the USA is permanently one swing state away from electing a tyrant.
I think the rest of the world will need to see a widely held conviction of never again and fundamental changes to America’s democratic system, before trust can be rebuilt.
by bluGill | 2026-01-14 19:31:41+00:00
Electric cars still need maintenance. They don't get regular oil changes, but they wear out tires sooner. They have more recalls in general than ICE (this will likely change, but manufactures are still learning how to make EVs reliable). The parts of a car that are not common with EVs don't break for the first 100k miles, and almost nobody is using the dealer for cars that old. There is plenty of other work that is common that dealers will still need to do.
by IAmBroom | 2026-01-14 19:32:16+00:00
You are actually seeing something the linked article doesn't even mention: fiber length.

Not all cotton is created equally. "Egyptian cotton" was long prized because of the long fiber lengths. Cotton fibers are very smooth and slick, and only stay together in thread because of friction along their length as they lay with neighbor fibers (often twisted, where friction becomes exponential instead of linear). Short-fiber cotton is cheaper and easier to source; ergo, cheaper clothing tends to be made of it. Short fibers are also much more likely to slip within the thread under heat, lubrication, and motion (washing and drying). Obviously, they are also more likely to completely fall out of the thread, creating lint.

This is really only true for cotton and very similar fibers. Linen fibers are generally all multiple inches long, so there's less of a quality issue (they are made from rotting away everything but the longitudinal support fibers of the plant stalks).

Wool varies greatly in surface texture, especially after modern chemical processing, and fiber length isn't an issue because the fibers are also inch-long or better. It shrinks, however, because its friction is SO HIGH that it won't give up (stretch back) once it gets bound up.

Silk fibers super slick, but are several yards/meters long; a single cocoon is made from a single thread. They are much slicker than cotton (and therefore harder to hand-spin), but by the time they are made into thread they have plenty of surface friction maintaining their position in the thread.

Artificial fibers are as long as the production shift lasts, so effectively infinite.
by kotaKat | 2026-01-14 19:32:16+00:00
I've got a Verizon Network Extender and it appears to be online - the tunnel is up back to VZW's security gateway, but all of my phones are refusing to register to it.

I did manage to roam onto an international network on the boarder near me in New York/Canada, so some bits of the core seem functional for authentication.

When I roam internationally I appear to be on Telus's 3G network (no LTE) for data and voice is falling even further back it looks like.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-14 19:32:21+00:00
> how do you choose between negative second order effects?

First off you have to identify them. Until you frame the costs and benefits of salting, it isn't clear that the real question is how can we improve pedestrian and vehicular traction without poisoning our plants and water supply. (I'd argue it's frequent ploughing, gravelling and dynamic signs for signalling when chains/snowies/AWD are required.)
by orangecat | 2026-01-14 19:32:35+00:00
None of the stuff I've learned over past 20 years was handed over to me in this easy fashion.

Yeah, kids these days just include stdio.h and start printing stuff, no understanding of register allocation or hardware addressing modes. 20 years from now nobody will know how to write an operating system.

Also some layer of arrogance

As compared to "if you claim AI is useful for you, you're either delusional or a shill"? The difference is that the pro-AI side can accept that any specific case it may not work well, while detractors have to make the increasingly untenable argument that it's never useful.
by hnlmorg | 2026-01-14 19:32:41+00:00
1. ‘stop’ reads like a change of execution flow (like ‘continue’, ‘break’, and ‘return’) rather than an ASCII control code. I appreciate you’re taking that from telegraphs but I wonder if you’re better off using the control code name (LF) instead?

2. Interesting. Have you got any examples of this? Every example I’ve seen thus far has been

[‘string constant’]

3. I might have misunderstood the fizzbuzz example https://xoscript.com/docs.xo?chapter=examples but it looked like the following syntax set up a for-loop as a closure:

{ :i
…
} * 101

It was a little surprising because usually with languages that lean heavily into English keywords (eg the Pascal/Algol/Basic derivatives) you’d see these control flows use keywords like FOR. Heck, even C-derived languages do too.

Now I’m not saying the syntax is bad. In fact part of me rather likes it. But it definitely surprised me.

Similarly the IF conditions surprised me with their tenseness. Though i do like their syntax too.

Regarding the fizzbuzz example, why do some conditions have TRUE while others do not. Eg

(i = 0) continue.

True appears to be implicit.

(i % 15 = 0) true: {
…
), continue.

True here is explicit.

Is it because closures require that explicitness?
by cadamsdotcom | 2026-01-14 19:34:00+00:00
There’s less backfilling given parts of the junior work can be automated - not a whole job mind you, just some of the roles. The others can spread among the team.

We are in a transition phase and the standards to be employed are going up.

The best new grads and juniors will come to see AI as a “code generating machine” and “answer machine” and upskill themselves then come in at what we currently call mid level.
by wolrah | 2026-01-14 19:34:02+00:00
> I think the timing of the Cybertruck starting deliveries roughly aligning with when Elon got heavily involved in politics hurt it quite a bit. It is such a distinctive vehicle with a strong association with Elon, that there was an immediate brand association. It may have had poor sales anyway, but it certainly didn't help that many folks on the left, who are typically the most 'pro EV', had a large 'anti-Elon' shift around its launch.

IMO the sort of person who wants a vehicle like Elon's dumpster has a strong overlap with Elon's politics. Basically everything about its design and marketing was aimed at the sort of person who is focused on presenting a masculine image, who thinks they're going to be in a war zone on their daily commute, who wishes they could drive through a crowd of protesters, etc.

Basically the only thing "left wing" about it is the fact that it's electric.

> Kudos to Tesla for trying to break the mold and push the category somewhere new.

The only thing it actually did new was the drive-by-wire steering, which is by all accounts impressive but could have been done on any normal vehicle as well. The "unique" styling is mostly just re-learning lessons that John DeLorean taught the rest of the industry decades ago.
by kazinator | 2026-01-14 19:34:40+00:00
> Textile scientists and engineers are also working on fabrics that resist shrinkage through advanced material design. Among promising innovations are blended yarns that combine natural and synthetic fibres.

What odd language!

The fact that cotton-poly blends resist shrinking and wrinkling better than natural fibers has been known for like 80 years. While it may be that research continues, the "promising innovation" era of this category lapsed eons ago.

I'm also mystified why the article would not at least acknowledge the existence of something called pre-shrunk cotton, which is a material that is put through processes that cause shrinking before being measured and cut for clothing, to minimize further after-market shrinkage for the consumer.
by _nickwhite | 2026-01-14 19:34:48+00:00
At 2:14PM EST, Verizon said:

"Verizon engineering teams are continuing to address today's service interruptions. Our teams remain fully deployed and are focused on the issue. We understand the impact this has on your day and remain committed to resolving this as quickly as possible."

As someone responsible my whole career for uptime and network response, I really feel for the engineers, at the same time hoping my service comes back up soon. SOS
by Izkata | 2026-01-14 19:34:52+00:00
> By the time there is a revolution, i'd imagine that most engineers will have fallen to the working classes where they are technically a part of.

"Working class" isn't an adjective+noun that refers to anyone who works, it's a compound noun that specifically refers to physical labor. Knowledge workers of any sort are not part of it, despite both using the word "work".
by ubertaco | 2026-01-14 19:34:53+00:00
Because dealerships are the automakers' real customers, at least right now.

You don't buy a vehicle from Ford; your local Ford dealership buys a large number of vehicles from Ford, and then you buy one of those.

Yes, an argument could be made that eliminating the dealership keeps the same customer base while eliminating the middleman (see also: Carvana), but now you have a lot more cost and logistics (shipping individual cars to individuals' homes, for example, rather than shipping truckloads to a single well-known spot) and unless you're willing to do the Carvana/CarMax thing of offering a 7-day return window (which adds even more cost and logistics and risk), the average American customer won't feel as comfortable buying a vehicle sight-unseen from across the country as they would if they could sit in the thing while a salesperson pitches it to them.

That means you're taking on whole new category of cost and risk, while assuming that you won't lose any of your incoming revenue.

That's kinda a big assumption, and the major established/legacy/whatever-you-call-them automakers aren't known for having a high risk appetite.
by temp4website | 2026-01-14 19:35:04+00:00
ExpatCircle

https://expatcircle.com/
Preparing you Today for the World of Tomorrow – Protect your Freedom and your Assets!

Small side project.

Also includes a small, 1-day vibe coded Django Hackernews clone, a mixture of Hackernews and RSS Reader. With dual language support.

https://news.expatcircle.com/en/
by azornathogron | 2026-01-14 19:35:10+00:00
Looks like I was probably wrong about this. There are a lot of "doom running on a vape" videos on YouTube - very easy to find, that's what search is for - but the best primary source I could find quickly actually has doom running separately and the vape just being used as a display.

Search for something like "doom on Puya PY32"

https://hackaday.com/2025/09/20/when-low-sram-keeps-the-doom...

https://github.com/atc1441/Vape_DOOM_ScreenShare
by bluGill | 2026-01-14 19:35:16+00:00
Trucks don't have to see gravel to be working trucks.

If you use a truck for work purposes once a year it is likely cheaper to just drive a truck for everything than have a second car. Don't say rent a truck is an option - you probably can't rent a truck for most work purposes - most rentals have fine print against that, even if you can find a place to rent a truck the cost quickly gets to more than just owning your own truck.
by datsci_est_2015 | 2026-01-14 19:35:18+00:00
Are you referring to the defense’s assertion that even though great care was taken by the FBI to ensure that no individual file would move from one box to another, the ordering within an individual box was not preserved and constituted a “spoilation” of the evidence?

Or are you referring to something else that I’m not yet aware of?

Edit with an article link, to set a standard for the quality of discourse: https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/4648830-mar-a-l...
by array_key_first | 2026-01-14 19:35:35+00:00
The argument I commonly hear of pornography causing more extreme sexual experimentation is a very weak one. I know, for sure, pornography did not cause me to be a homosexual.

Kinks, BDSM, and what have you, have always existed and will continue to exist. The solution is teaching safe ways to participate, and the importance of consent. A desire to just wipe them out is naive, and will not work.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2026-01-14 19:35:46+00:00
> A reader might conclude that people who want a vehicle to pull a boat or haul mulch are misguided, or even dangerous.

How about I just conclude that while pulling a boat or hauling mulch are completely OK things to want a vehicle for (*), one does not need a F150 with a front end that reaches my chest and has gas mileage to prove it.

As many have noted, pickups like the 90s Toyotas did these things just fine for almost everyone, but most US based manufacturers have stopped making them.

Me noting that doesn't make me part of the doom of the political party I always vote for.

(*) to the extent that we live in a society where private ownership of vehicles is completely unremarkable, that is. And we do, for the foreseeable future.
by autoexec | 2026-01-14 19:35:52+00:00
> So do extremely simple systems like selling age-verification scratchcards in grocery stores

Which stores sell age-verification scratchcards? How do you make sure they can't be traced back to the person who paid for them or where they were purchased from? How would a website know the person using the card is the same person who paid for them? It may be a simple system, but it still sounds ineffective, dangerous, and unnecessary.
by rayiner | 2026-01-14 19:35:59+00:00
H1B processing is hopelessly backed up for the 60-70 thousand visas we give out annually. We would have to massively cut immigration inflow, from the 1-3 million annually we have today, to make those granular determinations feasible.

I don't think individualized determination are even possible. Unless you take very few people from each country, they'll inevitably find each other and form communities. And the kinds of communities they form will be driven by their cultures. The question isn't "would this one Bangladeshi be a good immigrant." It is "when 100,000 Bangladeshis inevitably form a cultural enclave in some city, will that be better or worse than what was there before?"
by joe_mamba | 2026-01-14 19:36:06+00:00
>even if you have a very high income you will never pay more than 60% in total tax and social premiums.

Are there EU countries where you pay more than 60% for you make the "no more than 60% tax" sound like such a good deal?

AFAIK 60% is pretty much the top end of income tax rates as far as EU goes.
by ActorNightly | 2026-01-14 19:36:38+00:00
Bezos worst offense is meeting with Trump and donating to his campaign (and if you follow the leftist ideology, being a billionaire).

But based on personal experience with some very wealthy people, I truly believe they are just out of touch with the real world to understand what they are doing politically. Imagine if your days could be spent doing all the things you ever could wish, you would most likely not even bother reading stuff like reddit or HN, and certainly won't have time to look into any snippet of news in detail.

Musk on the other hand, is mentally ill.
by steve_adams_86 | 2026-01-14 19:36:50+00:00
This is an issue I've perceived with technology for a while now. Even a lowly ape like myself can gain disproportionate rewards from using computer technology in ways that many people around me can't. I could use it in constructive or exploitative fashions if I chose to, at scales I could never imagine without it. That has never sat well with me because I know there are people smarter than I am with a lot more resources than I have. And they also have no scruples, so exploitation is in their tool box.

I imagine these same types of people with similar tendencies would be regulated and mitigated by their peers more in the past. Say something like 200 years ago, you might be intelligent and cunning enough to gain power in a community, but it would never mean what it can mean today. The scaling factors are literally beyond comprehension. The accumulation of power, the modes of deception or concealment, sheer scale, all of it... It's too much for people to really track anymore, and it can continue largely unfettered in so many cases.

All that is to say yes, I think a tremendous number of people are being unwittingly exploited. The attention land-grab is arguably the most obvious battle field, but there are certainly others.
by kakwa_ | 2026-01-14 19:36:54+00:00
That's not enough by a long shot.

There are already plenty of devices, from old phones to vacuum robots, where we have that or near enough.

Technically, we know how we could maintain/re-flash these devices.

Yet, we don't. Why? lack of standardization, specially the boot process in non-x86 platforms.

Having to maintain per device images is not really practical at scale.
by philistine | 2026-01-14 19:37:32+00:00
You're making your argument backward. The fact Apple can offer a bundle that includes a ton of features that Canva does not have right now does not mean that Canva is not a competitor! Canva just bought the whole Affinity suite and dumped it on the laps of its subscribers for no extra charge. They're on the warpath against Adobe. They want to dethrone them. Apple sees this battle and saw an opportunity to participate. They bought Pixelmator and bundled all their Pro apps together, making a very versatile bundle that is very different from the image editing heavy bundle of Adobe and Canva.

Apple can't take the market from professionals; they need the easel they learned at school. But they can definitely compete with Canva, whose market are untrained artists who need something done easily.
by echelon | 2026-01-14 19:37:33+00:00
Don't apologize.

"Open Source" is hugely conflated in terms of the reasons people write open source software.

There are people who truly don't care to be compensated for their work. Some are even fine with corporations using it without receiving any benefit.

Some people prefer viral and infectious licenses the way that Stallman originally intended and that the FSF later lost sight of (the AGPL isn't strong enough, and the advocacy fell flat). They don't want to give corporations any wiggle room in using their craft and want anyone benefiting from it in any way to agree to the same terms for their own extensions.

Many corporations, some insidiously, use open source as a means of getting free labor. It's not just free code, but entire ecosystems of software and talent pools of engineers that appear, ready to take advantage of. These same companies often do not publish their code as open source. AWS and GCP are huge beneficiaries that come to mind, yet you don't have hyperscaler code to spin up. They get free karma for pushing the "ethos" of open source while not giving the important parts back. Linux having more users means more AWS and GCP customers, yet those customers will never get the AWS and GCP systems for themselves.

There are "impure" and "non-OSI" licenses such as Fair Source and Fair Code that enable companies to build in the open and give customers the keys to the kingdom. They just reserve the sole right to compete on offering the software. OSI purists attack this, yet these types of licenses enable consumers do to whatever they want with the code except for reselling it. If we care about sustainability, we wouldn't attack the gesture.

There are really multiple things going on in "open source" and we're calling it all by the same imprecise nomenclature.

The purists would argue not and that the OSI definition is all that matters. But look at how much of the conversation disappears when you adhere to that, and what behavior slips by.
by daveguy | 2026-01-14 19:37:34+00:00
No, it's affecting Verizon and people on ATT & TMO trying to get in touch with the Verizon customers who are affected.

Note the tiny fraction of people reporting for ATT & TMO compared to Verizon on DownDetector: https://downdetector.com/

(You have to click the links to see actual magnitude because the graphs are scaled to show relative outage within a given service -- order of 150k for Verizon vs 1.5k for the others.)