MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Trifectorium | 2026-01-17 11:24:33+00:00
The first mistake we make when we talk about immortality is that we treat life like a single object with a single failure node. As if there is one door called death, one lock called aging, and one key called biotechnology. But embodied existence is not one thing. It is a stack of interlocking contracts, feedback loops, maintenance schedules, and meaning engines. Biology is just the hardware layer. Being here is the full lease.
by Squarex | 2026-01-17 11:25:17+00:00
I can only speak of Czechoslovakia, but from 1968 to 1989 there was no ideology. After the soviet occupation, there was normalization era, that was explicitly about compliance with the regime, not about believe in communism.

I agree though that it is more complex, but for some reason, Czechoslovakia wanted to keep all the people and exploit their work, while Venezuela and Iran seems to let the people go in exchange for the regime stability.
by michaelmior | 2026-01-17 11:26:14+00:00
> What you are saying is that we don't need 'install.md'

I think the point was that install.md is a good way to generate an install.sh.

> validate that, and put it into the repo

The problem being discussed is that the user of the script needs to validate it. It's great if it's validated by the author, but that's already the situation we're in.
by rwmj | 2026-01-17 11:26:25+00:00
https://dicom.nema.org/dicom/dicomwsi/

Interesting guide to the Whole Slide Images (WSI) format. The surprising thing for me is that compression is used, and they note does not affect use in diagnostics.

Back in the day we used TIFF for a similar application (X-ray detector images).
by ben_w | 2026-01-17 11:29:09+00:00
> Not even art, because that's among the things gen AI is displacing the most effectively.

Kinda, but also no.

Yes, there's a lot of people (including me) who genuinely enjoy the output of these models; but art isn't only aesthetics, I observe it also being a peacock's tail, where the cost is the entire point.

Why are originals more valuable than reproductions? Nobody who understands the tech can seriously claim that a robot with suitable brush and paints is incapable of perfectly reproducing any old masterwork down to the individual brush strokes — of course a robot can do that, the hardest part of that is compiling the list of requisite brush strokes, but that too can be automated.

But such a copy, and lets say the paints were chemically perfect and also some blend of plant and petroleum derivatives so as to fool even a carbon-dating test, would never command as much money as the original unless someone deliberately mixed them up so that nobody would even know which was which.

However, I don't know that this would ever help the masses. Perhaps a quadrillionaire in a space mansion would like to buy all of Earth and all the people on it, but that doesn't mean we'd get any better than being forced to LARP whatever folly* they chose for us.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folly
by iso1631 | 2026-01-17 11:29:46+00:00
Global DNS servers are spread across the world. Most are operated by America but three are operated by Sweden, Japan and Netherlands.

The majority of people use their own ISP or an anycast address from a US company (cloudflare, google, opendns). Quad9 is European.

However any split in the root dns servers signals the end of an interconnected global network. Any ISP can advertise anycast addresses into its own network, so if the US were to be cut off from the world that wouldn't be an issue per-se, but the breakdown of the internet in the western world would be a massive economic shock.

It wouldn't surprise me if it happens in the next decade or two though.
by nephihaha | 2026-01-17 11:34:55+00:00
I read about them in RD long before I saw the film, I think. It is an amazing achievement and I doubt most people could have pulled it off. Thinking about it now... You would have to wait until the wind was going in the right direction, and wouldn't change, and also be well away from the border to avoid patrols. They had luck on their side.

I think I saw the film in the late eighties/early nineties round about the time the Eastern Bloc was falling apart so it had less impact.
by aggeeinn | 2026-01-17 11:35:39+00:00
Nike’s architecture creates a paradoxical "Ghost Interval": their robots.txt is permissive ("Just Crawl It"), but their heavy Client-Side Rendering forces the crawler to "Just Wait" for a ~9MB uncompressed bundle to hydrate the DOM. Our audit reveals significant "Text content did not match" errors during hydration, confirming that the initial server response is effectively an empty shell compared to the client-side virtual DOM.

In contrast, New Balance (running on Salesforce Commerce Cloud) utilizes rigid Server-Side Rendering (SSR) to deliver a deterministic HTML payload. While less "fluid" for the user, this approach eliminates layout shifts and ensures 100% token availability for LLM scrapers immediately upon First Byte. It raises a valid engineering question: at what point does the UX benefit of an SPA become a CX (Crawler Experience) liability?

Read the architectural deep dive: https://websiteaiscore.com/blog/nike-vs-new-balance-technica...
by iso1631 | 2026-01-17 11:39:15+00:00
Windows (and apple, google, mozilla) trust dozens of root certificates. I've got 148 pems in my /etc/ssl/certs directory on my laptop. 59 are from the US and thus 89 aren't. 10 are from China, 9 Germany, 7 UK. Others are India, Japan, Korea etc.

The far bigger problem is the American government forcing Microsoft/Apple/Google to push out a windows/iphone|mac/android|chrome update which removes all CAs not approved by the American government.

Canonical/Suse may be immune to such overt pressure, but once you get to that point you're way past the end of the international internet and it doesn't really matter anyway.
by armchairhacker | 2026-01-17 11:39:25+00:00
Context: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/01/wikipedia-will-share-cont...

tl;dr: Wikipedia is CC and has public APIs, but AI companies have recently started paying for "enterprise" high-speed access.

Notably, the enterprise program started in 2021 and Google has been paying since 2022.
by iso1631 | 2026-01-17 11:41:14+00:00
You're putting a lot of trust in US institutions (courts etc). The rest of the world is starting to see them as not a strong and independent as they were once assumed.

And that's before more overt issues. Microsoft/Google/etc could sue to stop the US ordering them to do what they should. Is the CEO really willing to risk their life to do that? Be a terrible shame if their kids got caught up in a traffic accident.
by ben_w | 2026-01-17 11:41:28+00:00
> It runs in to comparative advantage theory eventually - just because someone else is much more efficient than you at literally everything doesn't mean you can't still do something inefficiently and set up a win-win situation.

Comparative advantage has some assumptions built in, which can be violated in practice, especially by technology.

There's a few isolated tribes around the world, most famously North Sentinel Island. They have nothing to trade with us, nothing we want to buy. We let them be because even their land itself isn't important to us. They could be educated the way anyone else is and become as productive as any of us, but even people interested in taking slaves wouldn't bother with the effort required.

> I dunno why geohotz thinks in this article that shares in a granary are a bad idea, someone has to profit from storing food. May as well be me. I'll do it if he won't. I like granaries.

Because:

When the grain is produced by machines, the peasants are cut out of the loop.

Trump, Exxon Mobil, Venezuela. Exxon Mobil says Venezuela is "uninvestable", the comments I see say they've got legitimate reasons to fear that any investments they do make would just get seized by some future government.

Same applies.
by brap | 2026-01-17 11:41:31+00:00
Wikipedia has long been hijacked to serve agendas. The “truth” is whatever the highest bidder wants it to be.

Most recently hijacked by the Qatar dictatorship: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/16/pr-firm-p...

News, influencers, Wikipedia, almost all information we consume nowadays is intentional. And not even getting into billions poured into American colleges by the same people.
by noworriesnate | 2026-01-17 11:41:39+00:00
Have you seen Ibis[1]? It's a dataframe API that translates calls to it into various backends, including Polars and DuckDB. I've messed around with it a little for cases where data engineering transforms had to use pyspark but I wanted to do exploratory analysis in an environment that didn't have pyspark.

[1] https://ibis-project.org/
by Llamamoe | 2026-01-17 11:42:15+00:00
People boycott AI art in indie games, music, etc. but it's still finding massive use everywhere across most industries, and by and large companies are getting away with it.

> would never command as much money as the original unless someone deliberately mixed them up so that nobody would even know which was which.

That is based on current sensibilities which are capable of change. Give it 20 years of PR campaigns and who knows where we end up.
by timonoko | 2026-01-17 11:42:27+00:00
Gemini knows:

The "Atomtöd" (Atomic Death) Campaign (1950s)
Before civil nuclear power even existed, West Germany had a massive "Ban the Bomb" movement. In the late 1950s, the government considered allowing U.S. nuclear warheads on German soil. This sparked the Kampf dem Atomtod (Fight Atomic Death) movement.

The Result: The German public learned to associate the word "nuclear" with total destruction and the Cold War arms race long before they ever saw a power plant.
by RandyOrion | 2026-01-17 11:42:58+00:00
Hi, there. Two questions about this repo [0].

Can you show us what you did after people failed to compile that project [1]?

There are also questions about the attribution of these commits [2]. Can you share some information?

[0] https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender
[1] https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender/issues/98
[2] https://gist.github.com/embedding-shapes/d09225180ea3236f180...
by DonHopkins | 2026-01-17 11:43:52+00:00
More vibe coded browser modules:

Expat => Vexpat - An annoying, irritating rewrite of an XML parser.

libxml2 => libxmlpoo - XML parsing, same quality as the spec.

libxslt => libxsalt - XSLT transforms with extra salt in the wound.

V8 => H8 - JavaScript engine that hates your code, sponsored by Brendan Eich and "Yes on Prop H8".

Protobuf => Probabuf - Probably serializes correctly, probably not.

Cap'n Proto => Crap'n Proto - Zero-copy, zero quality.

cURL => cHURL - Throws requests vaguely serverward, projectile URLemitting.

SDL => STD - Simple DirectMedia, transmits bugs.

Servo => Swervo - Drunk, wobbly layout that can't stay on the road.

WebKit => WebShite - British pronunciation, British quality control.

Blink => Blinkered - Only renders pages it agrees with politically.

Skia => SkAI - AI-generated graphics that hallucinate extra pixels and fingers.

FreeType => FreeTypo - Introduces typos during rasterization.

Firefox => Foxfire - Burns through your battery in 12 minutes, while molesting children.

WebGL => WebGLitch - Shader compilation errors as art.

WebGPU => WebGPUke - Makes your GPU physically ill.

SQLite => SQLHeavy - Embedded database, 400MB per query.

Vulkan => Vulcan't - Low-level graphics that can't.

Clang => Clanger - Drops errors loudly at runtime.

libevent => liebevent - Event library that lies about readiness.

Opus => Oops - Audio codec, "oops, your audio's gone."
by honzabe | 2026-01-17 11:43:58+00:00
> Meanwhile we put experts to work optimizing conversion and engagement metrics. A truly enlightened way of life we've built for ourselves.

I grew up in communist Czechoslovakia, and claims like this really bother me. As if it is somehow comparable to being forced to serve in the army of a dictatorship. What is wrong with working on optimizing conversion and engagement metrics? It can be interesting and useful. People are not forced to do it. It is just one of many jobs that one can do in a free society.

I believe that one of the reasons why authoritarianism seems to be on the rise in the US and around the world in general is that it has somehow become fashionable to belittle and disparage what we have in the West... and how good it is, despite its imperfections. I fear that we will only realize this once we have lost it.
by Llamamoe | 2026-01-17 11:44:18+00:00
> Big Tech cannot ruin your life if you simply don't participate in the capitalistic market. I mean sure, it's difficult to live completely off-grid, but in modern world, it's a long way before you starve to death.

You still have to pay taxes, and doing this means giving up on a lot of your existing human connection, joining a community in no small part comprised of crackpots, tanking your quality of life, and losing your influence over the future of broader society.

Furthermore, it's a personal solution to a systemic problem. It'll work for a few people, but it's not a fix.
Ask HN: Any tools for managing multi Claude Code instances?
by tansan | 2026-01-17 11:44:23+00:00
I'm using around 10 instances and I'm finding it a bit tedious when i have to restart my computer.

1. Open iTerm

2. cd to paths

3. type claude

4. /resume

5. select

Do you guys have suggestions for better tooling? Any MCPs you found really helpful?
by SOLAR_FIELDS | 2026-01-17 11:44:33+00:00
Yes, every time I see some variant of this come up (and believe me, this has been coming up since before the GPT3.5 days) there’s never any actual data demonstrating that it’s the case. As you say, it should be completely trivial to run the exact same prompt multiple times per day and capture the output to demonstrate this.

But no one ever seems to do that, they are rather content to “feel” that this is the case instead
by watwut | 2026-01-17 11:45:15+00:00
> It's too bad secret societies with mystic rites don't really exist anymore.

They were, overall, strictly harmful. Yes, there is a point where it feels good to be in them. However, they are designed for abuse, for making it difficult to leave and for making it easy to pressure members to participate on harmful acts.

The stuff Epstien did and connection he had is the modern equivalent of that. A group of powerful people tied together due to shared infraction and shared need to protect each other. It worked well for them, helped their careers, made them have social connections and friends.
by jacquesm | 2026-01-17 11:45:42+00:00
It goes much further than that. They use LLMs to create code for them and then they claim ownership to the code.

I think that is one of the main reasons there is so much pushback against this, a lot of people are now addicted to their stream of washed code and want to claim ownership over what is essentially a derived work. The key then becomes 'if a work could not have been written by the author that claims it does that claim survive'. I think it should not but there is plenty of disagreement on this.
by graemep | 2026-01-17 11:46:18+00:00
I agree that memorising and regurgitating is not useful here, but I do not think the information should come from someone who has built businesses. This is an attempt to teach business school knowledge. Its called "Core MBA"! The best people to provide this information are the people who teach business.

I am very suspicious on insights from people who have been successful at business. Trying to infer from their success is subject to survivorship bias, they may have advantages they are not entirely honest about (especially after the first success), and their experience is usually quite specific.
by Roark66 | 2026-01-17 11:46:26+00:00
>. It is not wild to think that if push comes to shove and US cut off Europe, then Europeans can just take control over those European data centers and restore access to GCP/AWS/Azure in Europe because these datacenters are on their soil and predominantly employing Europeans.

Good luck with that. Those systems are extremely interconnected. We should (and are) be building sovereign EU equivalents to not just cloud providers but also major services like google/ms 365 and so on.
by ratmice | 2026-01-17 11:46:45+00:00
Maybe it can be done, but I struggle to believe adding in that branch for every forall quantifier (which may be plentiful in a proof) is going to help make a proof more understandable. Rather I feel like it'll just balloon the number of words necessary to explain the proof. Feels like it's going to fall on the bad side of verbosity as the sibling comment said.
by MPSimmons | 2026-01-17 11:49:17+00:00
I disliked Adams, but this is a good eulogy.

>For Adams, God took a more creative and – dare I say, crueler – route. He created him only-slightly-above-average at everything except for a world-historical, Mozart-tier, absolutely Leonardo-level skill at making silly comics about hating work.

A+, no notes
by amarcheschi | 2026-01-17 11:50:14+00:00
Considering that I have reported a Google ad that I deem political and Google does not, that I'm going to appeal because as a eu citizen I can do so, that they'll most likely refuse the appeal and I'm ready to bring this to the relevant Italian authority, yes

A few days ago I read a newspaper article about Israel's government using ads to spread its propaganda. In eu, you have to follow some rules if you want to do so. These rules are not followed. Combined with the fact that ads might not be distinguished easily by average users, I feel that Google search results can be influenced by ads
by nephihaha | 2026-01-17 11:50:19+00:00
"There were no fascists in the DDR."

Not officially although in reality the Stasi quite happily reused Gestapo files, and there were numerous National Socialists who ended up east of the border.

The GDR had a series of fake political parties, besides the Communist, in order to pretend they were a democracy. I believe they did have one that pretended to appeal to such people.

"There are fascists in the former DDR today."

Much more so than the west which did not have years of Communist rule.
by watwut | 2026-01-17 11:52:14+00:00
I think that the tattoo artist thing is kind of like wanting to be a cook, hairdresser or something similar, except it requires a lot more skill and learning. A job that does not require higher education. At 17, that person know whether they are college material or whether they can afford college. Choosing vocation that require skill they have and is cheaper to obtain may be correct choice.
by mschuster91 | 2026-01-17 11:52:27+00:00
> idk like turning the heat way up during the day

That is something you can reasonably do, but it's only useful in winter.

> or using high power appliances more during the day

Well, given that people have to work during the day, I doubt that that will work out on a large enough scale. And even if you'd pre-program a laundry machine to run at noon, the laundry would sit and get smelly during summer until you'd get home.

The only change in patterns we will see is more base load during the night from EVs trickle-charging as more and more enter the market.
by mike_d | 2026-01-17 11:53:08+00:00
I have always been a bit puzzled by this. By issuing fixed length certificates you practically guarantee oscillation. If you have a massive traffic spike from, say, a CDN mass reissuing after a data breach - you are guaranteed to have the same spike [160 - $renewal_buffer] hours later.

Fuzzing the lifetime of certificates would smooth out traffic, encourage no hardcoded values, and most importantly statistical analysis from CT logs could add confidence that these validity windows are not carefully selected to further a cryptographic or practical attack.

A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing-up-my-sleeve_number if you will.
by Jyaif | 2026-01-17 11:53:41+00:00
It's important to note that the approach described focuses on giving fast results, not the best results.

Simply trying every character and considering their entire bitmap, and keeping the character that reduces the distance to the target gives better results, at the cost of more CPU.

This is a well known problem because early computers with monitors used to only be able to display characters.

At some point we were able to define custom character bitmap, but not enough custom characters to cover the entire screen, so the problem became more complex.
Which new character do you create to reproduce an image optimally?

And separately we could choose the foreground/background color of individual characters, which opened up more possibilities.
by nephihaha | 2026-01-17 11:53:49+00:00
I believe about as much as the Chinese Communist official who claimed that there were no homosexuals in the PRC.

In reality, a lot of careerists shifted their loyalties from the National Socialist government to the Communist one. There were several years in which the Communists, much like their western counterparts, tried to weed out all the Nazis, before realising many of them were experienced in administering things. (The Eastern Bloc had its own smaller version of Operation Paperclip, although the scientists tended to be less willing.)
by littlestymaar | 2026-01-17 11:54:20+00:00
There's a tricky ethical question here: if someone changed their name and ask for not being called their former name ever again, you can either ignore their will, which is rude, or chose to follow it but then you are doing a disservice to the public's understanding.

The secind option used to be the norm on wikipedia even 15 years ago, but Anti-trans activists using dead-naming as a slur against trans people triggered the shift from the second option to the first.

As usual assholes are why we can't have nice things.
by gassius | 2026-01-17 11:55:04+00:00
First, of course I am talking about Socialist Dictatorships of the XX Century in an academic way, from what I have read, So I really don't know as much as what I have lived through in Venezuela.

When I talk about Ideology, I am not referring to the people, but the regime hiercachy. I would guess in the case of Czechoslovakia the regime had some Ideology alignment with the Soviets, but I truly don't know. But yes, they modern approach seems to favor the exile instead of the reclusion or so it seems
by Roark66 | 2026-01-17 11:55:25+00:00
We (Polish) have been raising an alarm about Russia since the first Chechen war and it took additional dozen+ years and a land invasion of a European country before countries in Western EU woke up.

Do you think they are going to be quicker reacting to danger from the other side?

I highly doubt it. EU is like a huge steam ship. It takes a lot of effort to turn it. But once it gets going good luck stopping it. This will have consequences for the EU-Us relations for the rest of this century.

I fact it is exactly what a Russian agent if he managed to become a president of US would do. A Putin's wet dream basically. Be hostile enough towards Russia to preserve appearances - seize a tanker or two, while undermining long term US and EU interests (the interests of these two are naturally aligned very well, it takes much more than an idiot to drive a wedge between them).