MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-18 19:18:35+00:00
As long as the business is cash flowing, service the debt until you can expat and retire outside the country with your personal investments outside the country (avoiding any judgements or garnishments). The debt is already written off in everything but name only based on forecasted trajectories.

The US spent $4T-$6T on wars in the Middle East, and continues to spend $1T/year on the military. Tax cuts for the wealthy from the one big beautiful bill will increase the the deficit by $1T-$4T. This debt is immaterial. The US chooses who should suffer and who should prosper with debt policy, respond accordingly as you would to an adversary.

> There is evidence of systemic stress. Government data show more than 1.3 million Economic Injury Disaster Loan loans are in default, liquidation or charge-off status. Over $70 billion has already been written off, making this one of the costliest disaster-relief efforts in U.S. history. The Small Business Administration tacitly acknowledged the strain by extending deferments several times and introducing hardship tiers that reduced payments to 10 percent, then 50 percent, then 75 percent before requiring full repayment.
by darhodester | 2026-01-18 19:18:36+00:00
Sure!

Gaussian splatting is a bit like photogrammetry. That is, you can record video or take photos of an object or environment from many angles and reproduce it in 3D. Gaussians have the capability to "fade" their opacity based on a Gaussian distribution. This allows them to blend together in a seamless fashion.

The splatting process is achieved by using gradient descent from each camera/image pair to optimize these ellipsoids (Gaussians) such that the reproduce the original inputs as closely as possible. Given enough imagery and sufficient camera alignment, performed using Structure from Motion, you can faithfully reproduce the entire space.

Read more here: https://towardsdatascience.com/a-comprehensive-overview-of-g....
by thaumasiotes | 2026-01-18 19:18:57+00:00
Just that Express link already contradicts the quote from Coffman:

> General Xu Qiliang, China’s second in command of the armed forces after President Xi Jinping, said an increase in military spending is need[ed] to counter the ‘Thucydides Trap’.

> Maj. Gen. Richard Coffman, director of the US Army's Next Generation Combat Vehicle Cross Functional Team, saw the remarks as a clear admission war was “inevitable”.

> He said: “The top uniformed soldier in China, chairman of China's Central Military Commission, stated that war with the United States is inevitable.

Allow me to suggest that "this a way to counter the Thucydides trap" cannot actually be paraphrased as "war is inevitable".
by holowoodman | 2026-01-18 19:19:26+00:00
> because their extremely high VAT taxes and non-tariff trade barriers always hurt the US worse, and the EU rebates VAT on its own exports

Your post is yet another example of how USians don't understand how VAT works.

There is no VAT rebate on exports, there is a 100% reimbursement of VAT on any export. There is also a 100% reimbursement of VAT on any B2B sale. That way VAT is a tax only on goods that are sold to consumers in the EU, no matter where they came from and no matter where they were manufactured/processed/...

How this works as an example: You mine iron ore, sell a ton for 1000€. Buyer pays 20% VAT. But since it's B2B, buyer can get those 20% back immediately in his monthly VAT declaration. Buyer makes 500kg steel from that iron ore, sells it for 2000€. Buyer of the steel can get those 20% back, since it's B2B. Let's say the buyer makes paperclips from that steel and sells those. Now the buyer of those paperclips is the interesting thing here, because the buyer pays 20% VAT on those paperclips. He might be their end-user (either business or customer) in which case he won't get 20% VAT back. He might be a reseller, in which case he will get the VAT back. End-users don't get their 20% VAT, resellers and processing industry do. It's always only the last step in the chain who really pay VAT, everyone else doesn't.

And any border-crossing is treated as a sale, so the you get the VAT rate (different EU contries have different rates) from the country that the goods are leaving paid out, and you have to pay the VAT rate of the country you are entering on those goods. If you are exporting to non-EU, and there is no VAT in the destination country, you don't pay any, you just get the VAT back from the country you are exporting from. So it is totally symmetrical, totally fair, and totally neutral, independent from whether it is US, EU, Chinese or whatever the origin might be.

And if you think it's complicated, you might be right. But then again, look at the complete and utter mess that US sales taxes are. Every other town might have a different tax rate, system, catalogue of goods every other week. USians shouldn't complain about trade barriers as long as that mess is still in place.

> The EU enabled the Dutch Sandwich and Irish offshoring trade scams which has become a tax haven

That's a fault of Ireland and the Netherlands, the EU is just powerless to stop those practices. Same as the US is powerless to get rid of their own tax haven states like Delaware, Nevada or Wyoming. Just to cite Wikipedia, "Andrew Penney from Rothschild & Co described the US as "effectively the biggest tax haven in the world" and Trident Trust Co., one of the world's biggest providers of offshore trusts, moved dozens of accounts out of Switzerland and Grand Cayman, and into Sioux Falls" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_as_a_tax_haven
Show HN: I wrote an implementation of the game Hitori using Claude Code
by orsenthil | 2026-01-18 19:19:28+00:00
It is a puzzle that I developed after looking at a game called Hitori in Linux. I was studying the architecture of it and noted down how that game was written.

I thought that I should make an implementation of it.

I tried to make a Django implementation where Django serves as the backend and the frontend is in JavaScript. I set up the foundation for it and then pointed Claude Code to the original implementation of Hitori, which is written in C in Linux. I asked it to develop a similar one for a client-server architecture that I could play in a web browser using a Python backend and JavaScript frontend.

I enabled it in agent mode and gave it to dangerously skip permissions. I asked it to implement the game and gave some Yes's for the prompts it asked, then went about with it. I had asked it to make a game and then went to sleep.

When I woke up the next morning, I saw that the complete game was implemented. To my surprise, I didn't have to do anything. The whole game was there and I just played it. I was like, "Oh my goodness." I was amazed for a full day at what had just happened.

But then, to take it further, I thought there should be a login system and game board improvements. That took some time, and then I deployed it on a Kubernetes cluster. Even that was easy - I didn't have to do anything.

This is the first game I developed where I didn't have to open an editor or IDE at all. I did everything completely from the command prompt. This was something new. I thought I should capture this moment, so I'm writing about it in my blog. That's pretty much it.

You can enjoy playing this game at https://hitori.learntosolveit.com
Show HN: Zpace – See which node_modules, venvs, and caches are eating your disk
by azisk1 | 2026-01-18 19:20:34+00:00
I built Zpace to find what's hogging my disk — not just which files are big, but what kind (node_modules, venvs, ML models, caches). It shows deletable units so you know what to clean.

Recent improvements:

- Streaming heap-based filtering — constant memory regardless of drive size

- Iterative traversal — no more stack overflow on deeply nested directories

- Trash reporting — see how much your Trash is consuming

- Symlink skipping — avoids endless loops and double counting

brew install AzisK/zpace/zpace # or: pipx install zpace

zpace

GitHub: https://github.com/AzisK/Zpace
by narrator | 2026-01-18 19:21:01+00:00
This reminds me about how Soulja Boy just used a cracked copy of Fruity Loops and a cheap microphone and recorded all his songs that made him millions.[1] No big studio, or anything much required like the pre-digital music days. Now we got the same thing for music videos and soon movies. The people with no money who make culture are going to be some of the biggest beneficiaries from AI.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1rjhVe59ek
by jancsika | 2026-01-18 19:21:09+00:00
Music has a lot of these. A fugue subject may traverse the boundaries between two metric groupings, and between two clear sections of the form.

There are also non-contiguous examples. Smack in the middle of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde you hear the final theme that signals they are about to win the main boss battle. Then one of the NPCs screams right before the final chord. The audience instead hears the danger signal and realizes it was a fake boss and there's another two hours of game play. Only when Isolde beats the final boss at the end do we get the final chord.
by binarygit | 2026-01-18 19:21:11+00:00
I sold my camera to buy a used T750s for my first programming internship, I have it still and use it sometimes.
I bought another one of those again used and use that as my homeserver.

I can really tell the difference when I type on the mac and on my thinkpad. I think the thinkpad's keyboard is wayy better keytravel
by ghaff | 2026-01-18 19:21:13+00:00
A bathroom remodel cost me almost $20K 6 or 7 years back. And that was a small bathroom and keeping a couple of cabinets.

More recently I had a kitchen fire that mostly involved redoing the kitchen completely but also involved move-out/in, seal/paint, for the rest of the house and some other things that made sense while everything was ripped up--and that probably ended up >$200K. Insurance covered a lot but I also paid quite a bit out of pocket.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-18 19:21:37+00:00
> Thanks for resolving my internal dialog about returning to Lobsters.

I still load it from time to time, but the value of going there seems to diminish year over year. Every story that gets traction on Lobsters is already posted to HN now.

Many of the commenters I valued on Lobsters have given up on the site and left.

I catch myself starting to comment there and then deleting it because I’m worried about going too much against the acceptable narrative for each topic on the site, no matter how gently worded and hedged I make the comment.
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-01-18 19:21:47+00:00
To people here just a week ago saying it was just insane joking and even MAGA didn't support it, something I pointed out didn't matter, we have moved from 'it's meme'ing' to 'here's why it's good' 'here's why it's needed' 'it's 4d chess' in less than a week. Please NEVER give an inch to this trash that will justify anything. Don't accept 'meme'ing' from an American President by saying 'it's Trump being Trump'. Push back on everything, everytime.

As the nazi's were happing, everyone waiting for the 'one big thing' that was too big of a line cross. We have waited until the point the US is using it's power to take land. And everyone is still waiting for that 'big thing' or some line (even though we've passed countless lines already). MAGA freaked out over Epstein for what a decade? And suddenly when it's almost released they stopped caring. If MAGA dropped that almost instantly, MAGA is NEVER going to care about anything.
by ben_w | 2026-01-18 19:22:07+00:00
They didn't say "think differently", they said "promoting fascism".

If you look at J6 attempted self-coup where people were chanting death threats agaisnt the vice president and had a hangman's noose ready and pipe bombs were found and say "that was a peaceful protest", while also looking at the woman who was shot dead through the side window of her car while departing from a group of ICE officers and call that "self defence againsy attempted vehicular manslaughter", you may have a problem.

If your reaction to "Punish them socially" is to claim "That’s the most facist thing I’ve ever heard." of the person who essentially just said "stop talking to these people, stop inviting them to parties and stuff", when your fellow citizens are dying at the hands of federal officers who are being given defacto immunity, you may have a problem.

The current administration already punishes people for thinking differently with a lot worse than not inviting them to dinner; is the kind of regime that creates refugees and asylum seekers out of its own citizens, who flee from it.
by rpiguy | 2026-01-18 19:22:20+00:00
The US wouldn’t attack in an invasion. It would simply start building bases - it doesn’t need the south of Greenland. Just southern enough for a port that can stay open.

If we build a Rammstein-
sized base the US would already outnumber the native population.

Would the Danes or French open fire on us while the US is setting up shop? Highly unlikely.

Trump is pushing a total takeover but I suspect he would rather leave a small pocket of southern Greenland to the Danes to continue supporting the indigenous people, and then taking the bulk of the rest for mineral rights, arctic sea lanes, and defense.
by furyofantares | 2026-01-18 19:22:35+00:00
Zvi Mowshowitz has an excellent article on the devastating effects that legalizing sports betting has had: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-online-sports-gambling-exp...

Personally I find it sickening to see ads that say you can get rich betting on the weather. I haven't seen ads for polymarket but Kalshi's ads are absolutely predatory.
by rcarmo | 2026-01-18 19:22:42+00:00
I have a set of prompts that are essentially “audit the current code changes for logic errors” (plus linting and testing, including double checking test conditions) and I run them using GPT-5.x-Codex on Claude generated code.

It’s surprising how much even Opus 4.5 still trips itself up with things like off-by-one or logic boundaries, so another model (preferably with a fresh session) can be a very effective peer reviewer.

So my checks are typically lint->test->other model->me, and relatively few things get to me in simple code. Contrived logic or maths, though, it needs to be all me.
by sanderjd | 2026-01-18 19:22:54+00:00
There is tons of stuff to do. Lots of technologies out there that need to be invented and commercialized. Tons of inefficient processes in business, government, and academia to improve.

None of this means that it will be the kinds of professional specialized software development teams that we're used to doing any of this work, but I have some amount of optimism that this is actually going to be a golden age for "doing useful things with computers" work.
by gruez | 2026-01-18 19:23:36+00:00
>If hypothetically you are paying 99x a year and bumping that to 100x means someone buys an 8.8x product that could be a win.

What type of company would this work for? Cars are so ingrained in our society that it's doubtful the marginal Ford (or Tesla) factory worker is going to be buying a $50k car just because they paid better wages.
by geooff_ | 2026-01-18 19:23:47+00:00
This is huge. As someone who's put together a somewhat cohesive product but wants to take the next step in "formalizing" components there is a huge missing piece for design.

If I know my backend works I can use claude to add sufficient tests and iterate from there, improving code maturity. If my UX looks good how can I formalize it and do the same?

I can't wait to try this out. My current workflow has been use MCP to screenshot the whole app --> Use a tool like Codia to go from screenshot to components, as a non-designer its miserable though.
by wizzwizz4 | 2026-01-18 19:24:42+00:00
No, the CPU doesn't have a special pointer value which is designated invalid (except as far as modern address spaces are so large that you cannot possibly map memory to each address without mirroring). In many OSs, e.g. CP/M, address 0 is actually meaningful. The C idiom of cramming sum-type semantics into the nooks and crannies of a return value that ordinarily means something entirely different is an extremely poor one, and null pointers are the poster child: Tony Hoare's billion-dollar mistake.

It's absolutely fine to have a packed representation of a sum type "under the hood": this is how Rust implements Option<&T> (where T: Thin), for example. It's also fine to expose the layout of this packed representation to the programmer, as C's union does. But it's a huge footgun to have unchecked casts as the default. If not for this terrible convention, C wouldn't have any unchecked implicit casts: something like f(1 + 0.5) performs a coercion, a far more sensible behaviour.

The only reason we're talking about null pointers at all is because they were an influential idea, not because they were a good idea. Likewise with the essay.
by callc | 2026-01-18 19:25:15+00:00
Yes. Infinite low cost intelligence labor to replace those pesky humans!

Really reminds me of the economics of slavery. Best way for line to go up is the ultimate suppression and subjugation of labor!

Hypothetically can lead to society free to not waste their life on work, but pursue their passions. Most likely it’ll lead to plantation-style hungry-hungry-hippo ruling class taking the economy away from the rest of us
by antirez | 2026-01-18 19:25:18+00:00
Something that may be interested for the reader of this thread: this project was possible only once I started to tell Opus that it needed to take a file with all the implementation notes, and also accumulating all the things we discovered during the development process. And also, the file had clear instructions to be taken updated, and to be processed ASAP after context compaction. This kinda enabled Opus to do such a big coding task in a reasonable amount of time without loosing track. Check the file IMPLEMENTATION_NOTES.md in the GitHub repo for more info.
by godelski | 2026-01-18 19:25:44+00:00
What concerns me is that learning depth is more discouraged than ever. For a long time it's been discouraged, which is natural as we have a preference for simple things rather than difficult/complex things. But we're pushing much harder than ever before. From the way we have influencer education videos to the way people push LLMs ("you can just vibe code, no thinking required"). We've advanced enough that it's easy to make things look good enough but looks can be deceiving. It's impossible to know what's good enough without depth of knowledge, without mastery.

No machine will ever be sufficient to overcome the fundamental problem: a novice is incapable of properly evaluating a system. No human is capable of doing this either, nor can they (despite many believing they can). It's a fundamental information problem. The best we can do is match our human system, where we trust the experts, who have depth. But we even see the limits of that and how frequently they get ignored by those woefully unqualified to evaluate. Maybe it'll be better as people tend to trust machines more. But for the same reason it could be significantly worse. It's near impossible to fix a problem you can't identify.
by adgjlsfhk1 | 2026-01-18 19:26:28+00:00
If it's anything like the k1, I wouldn't be surprised if Core 2 performance was on the table. The released specs are are ~Sandybridge-Haswell like, but those were architectures made by (at the time) the top CPU manufacturer and were carefully balanced architectures to maximize performance while minimizing transistors. SpaceMIT is playing on easy mode (they are making a chip on a ~2-4x smaller process node and aren't pioneering bleeding edge techniques), but balancing an out of order CPU is still tough, and it's totally possible to lose 50% of theoretical ipc if you don't have the memory bandwith, cache hierarchy, scheuling etc.
by giancarlostoro | 2026-01-18 19:26:52+00:00
Much like I am sure anyone else who started doing web dev in the 2000s and 2010s before SPA frameworks were as prevalent I learned web development scripting with jQuery and I am happy to see its still around. Theres so many things I built on top of jQuery in those early years that likely still work. Kudos to the team.
by wgjordan | 2026-01-18 19:26:54+00:00
> It's like a dozen paragraphs, forming one complete argument. Is this too much material to take in all at once, in this brave new TLDR tomorrow?

The issue is not that you cited a dozen-paragraph argument, it's that you inlined all the text directly into a series of comments instead of a link to the text on a separate page. It visually overwhelms the discussion thread and is disruptive to the broader discussion, which is not strictly against guidelines but generally seen as non-normative behavior.
by venkat_2811 | 2026-01-18 19:27:22+00:00
With so much improvements in LLM Inference Kernels, Inter-GPU comms are becoming the bottleneck. Introducing my project YALI - Yet Another Low-Latency Implementation.

A custom CUDA kernel library that provides ultra low-latency primitives for inter-gpu comms collectives. Achieves 80-85% Speed-of-Light SW efficiency on p2p all_reduce_sum over NVLINK on 2xA100 GPUs.

It outperforms NVIDIA NCCL by 2.4x and over 50x stable tail latency.

https://venkat-systems.bearblog.dev/yali-vs-nvidia-nccl/
by torginus | 2026-01-18 19:27:29+00:00
It's a website where people can make bets on how certain geopolitical and public events shake out.

I used to think it's just yet another way to people with more money than sense to get their kicks.

But then I saw the true reason why the platform is terrifying - it gives people who have nontrivial amounts riding on the line a very powerful incentive to influence said events.

I have seen expertly crafted and highly convincing narratives - that I know to be false from firsthand experience - spring up inside (and presumably outside) the platform spring up on an issue. There was the thing where the ISW (a reputable military think tank) reported an Ukrainian city was captured (when in fact it wasn't) in order to win a bet.

Imagine if next time someone leaks some military intel in order to hedge a bet. Money, especially lots of it, is a very powerful motivator.

There's also no way to check and control who has insider info or has influence on the outcome (as betting against them is essentially suicide)
by diffs | 2026-01-18 19:27:51+00:00
> But, friend, with love -- shit talking about what people are doing or not doing is not the answer. Lead by example.

Why do you assume I'm not doing? Having said that, my options are limited to obtaining the lion and sun flag and participating in a demonstration. Quiet solidarity in other words. Shit talking about people who have a platform and are not using it because Israel is absolutely valid and legitimate.

That by the way is the danger with a singular obsession with one conflict, which, objectively, is not even the deadliest conflict in its region, let alone the world. Everything is either viewed through the Israel prism, as in "we're not going to express any solidarity with Iranian protesters because the fall of the theocracy might benefit Israel", or, it gets ignored entirely because there's no clout to be gained on social media.
by dang | 2026-01-18 19:28:40+00:00
Please don't make posts consisting of quotes and nothing else. HN is a supposed to be a site for curious conversation. It's not hard to see how posts like this interrupt that and bog it down - imagine someone at a dinner party* reading entire parargraphs like this.

(* I don't know why I said "dinner party", since I don't go to those, the conversation usually isn't good, and they aren't my idea of fun, but oh well, it makes the point)