MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 9rx | 2026-01-22 16:42:47+00:00
> it is because you were successful at the business of farming.

So far.

> To be successful at farming in the last century, you need a lot of land.

Depends on what you want out of it. If your goal is to amass endless assets to sell when you retire, then yes, you need a lot of land (by leveraging a lot of debt). If your goal is to provide a tidy income, you can do quite well with a small acreage. And I don't mean some kind of market garden thing, although that is an option too. I mean even plain old commodity farming.

It's a lot like the software industry. You can forego a paycheque to try to build a startup that rains fortunes down upon you when you are ready to let go, or you can get a job that pays a decent salary but will never make you unfathomably rich. A farm that has achieved both isn't unheard of, but generally that requires many generations all having great luck. Not exactly the norm.

> When Republicans talk about tax cuts (especially the estate tax), who do you think they're talking to? Farmers.

In my country there are exceptions carved out for farmers on that front. The public accepts it because "passing down the family farm" over "corporations buying it all" is considered a social good. Why do you think Republicans have to speak (and even apply, perhaps) in broad terms and not simply say "tax cuts for farmers only"? Do Republicans not like farmers? But if they didn't like farmers, why would they ("secretly") introduce tax cuts for farmers?
by FrostViper8 | 2026-01-22 16:42:50+00:00
> A supermarket shop for the basic essentials (cheese, eggs, flour, vegetables) now come to around $60/80 a trip.

No it doesn't. Maybe if you are shopping at Waitrose. It is more expensive. But it isn't £45 for basics. I did an entire shop which will last me the week for £30 (in Aldi).
by jimmaswell | 2026-01-22 16:43:23+00:00
Same here re: ADHD. It's been invaluable. A big project that would have been personally intractible is now easy - even if the LLM gives slightly wrong answers 20% of the time, the important thing is that it collapses the search space for what concepts or tools I need to look into and gives an overall structure to iterate on. I tend to use ChatGPT for the big planning/architectural conversation, and I find it's also very good at sample code; for code writing/editing, Copilot has been fantastic too, lately mostly using the Opus agent in my case. It's so nice being able to delegate some bullshit gruntwork to it while I either do something else or work on architecture in another window for a few minutes.

It certainly hasn't inhibited learning either. The most recent example is shaders. I started by having it just generate entire shaders based on descriptions, without really understanding the pipeline fully, and asking how to apply them in Unity. I've been generally familiar with Unity for over a decade but never really touched materials or shaders. The generated shaders were shockingly good and did what I asked, but over time I wanted to really fine tune some of the behavior and wound up with multiple passes, compute shaders, and a bunch of other cool stuff - and understanding it all on a deeper level as a result.
by pranavj | 2026-01-22 16:43:28+00:00
EU electricity prices are high, but attributing this to renewables is backwards. Wholesale electricity prices drop when wind and solar are producing - that's been documented extensively. The high prices are largely due to: (1) gas setting marginal prices during peak hours, (2) grid infrastructure that hasn't kept pace, and (3) taxes/levies that fund the transition. As battery storage grows and reduces gas dependency for peaks, prices should moderate. The countries with the highest renewable penetration (Spain, Portugal) often have lower prices than those still dependent on gas imports.
by vivzkestrel | 2026-01-22 16:43:37+00:00
- as a guy who is absolutely not familiar with the idea of how code editors work and has to make a browser based code editor, what are the things that you think I should know?

- i got a hint of language server and tree sitter thanks to this wonderfully written post but it is still missing a lot of details like how does the protocol actually look like, what does a standard language server or tree sitter implementation looks like

- what are the other building blocks?
by PeterWhittaker | 2026-01-22 16:44:31+00:00
I'd argue that Coe is more than competent, just, you know, detached most of the time. Lamb always knows what needs be done, just never shares, and often lets things happen until what needs be done happens on its own or is inevitable.

Coe has extraordinarily high SA and makes decisions immediately. They might seem impulsive, but when he acts, it is always with forethought.

(Yeah, Coe is our favourite character.)
by krapp | 2026-01-22 16:44:31+00:00
>How do we know men and women don't just operate by instinct?

Because we define "instinct" in a way that separates the behavior of animals from humans and we have evidence from both personal experience and observing the behavior of other higher primates that humans are capable of operating beyond their instincts, for instance by creating social and political abstractions which optimize for things other than survival and procreation. The existence of art, language, science, philosophy and law cannot be reduced to purely instinctual drives.

This is a profoundly uninteresting and juvenile line of argument which inevitably reduces to solipsism.

>Bears are smart. They can't design bearproof trash cans for national parks because the smartest bears are smarter than the dumbest national park visitors.

Humans split the atom, sequenced genomes and went to the moon. We can't design bearproof trash cans because those trash cans have to be usable by humans, which creates fundamental engineering weaknesses that animals can exploit, not because bears are smarter than humans.
by nospice | 2026-01-22 16:45:14+00:00
We've been talking about a "crisis of reproducibility" for years and the incentive to crank out high volumes of low-quality research. We now have a tool that brings down the cost of producing plausibly-looking research down to zero. So of course we're going to see that tool abused on a galactic scale.

But here's the thing: let's say you're an university or a research institution that wants to curtail it. You catch someone producing LLM slop, and you confirm it by analyzing their work and conducting internal interviews. You fire them. The fired researcher goes public saying that they were doing nothing of the sort and that this is a witch hunt. Their blog post makes it to the front page of HN, garnering tons of sympathy and prompting many angry calls to their ex-employer. It gets picked up by some mainstream outlets, too. It happened a bunch of times.

In contrast, there are basically no consequences to institutions that let it slide. No one is angrily calling the employers of the authors of these 100 NeurIPS papers, right? If anything, there's the plausible deniability of "oh, I only asked ChatGPT to reformat the citations, the rest of the paper is 100% legit, my bad".
by wilkommen | 2026-01-22 16:45:20+00:00
Not true - the fix is to start enforcing the Robinson-Patman Act, the Sherman Act, and every other piece of legislation already on the books which was written and passed by congress for the purpose of eliminating private monopolies. Walmart and other monopolies are using their monopoly power to put small businesses of all kinds out of business and raise prices at the same time. Here's some info on exactly how they do that: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-secret-scam-drivin...
by bell-cot | 2026-01-22 16:46:03+00:00
> it would cost $30,000 to replace the floor.

IANAL, to comment on the court's ruling. But $30k seems kinda high to just get rid of the offensive symbols.

If stuck in the homeowner's shoes - I'd quietly ask local rabbis for ideas. They might know a contractor who'd give a nice discount on the removal & replacement. Perhaps a very nice discount, if you were open to the floor being "creatively repurposed in unflattering circumstances" elsewhere.
by geokon | 2026-01-22 16:46:17+00:00
usually you reproduce previous research as a byproduct of doing something novel "on top" of the previous result. I dont really see the problem with the current setup.

sometimes you can just do something new and assume the previous result, but thats more the exception. youre almost always going to at least in part reproducr the previous one. and if issues come up, its often evident.

thats why citations work as a good proxy. X number of people have done work based around this finding and nobody has seen a clear problem
by Nevermark | 2026-01-22 16:46:18+00:00
I think there is a fundamental difference.

When training a student, normally we expect a lack of knowledge early, and reward self-awareness, self-evaluation and self-disclosure of that.

But the very first epoch of a model training run, when the model has all the ignorance of a dropped plate of spaghetti, we optimize the network to respond to information as anything from a typical human to an expert, without any base of understanding.

So the training practice for models, is inherently extreme enforced “fake it until you make it”, to a degree far beyond any human context.
by pydry | 2026-01-22 16:46:29+00:00
Russia is only isolated from the west (e.g. exports to India are booming) and its internal economy is growing faster than Europe's.

Russia holds leverage over China because China is incredibly resource dependent and very susceptible to the threat of blockade through the first island chain by the US. Only Russia can bypass such a blockade with fertilizer, grain, oil and gas.

The US is driving these countries into each other's arms.
by Wizardrytezch | 2026-01-22 16:46:30+00:00
I keep it pretty simple and projectscoped.

My setup is;

One Claude chat per project (or per major feature) never reused

A short “working contract” at the top: goals, constraints, what not to touch

I paste small, relevant files only (no whole repos)

I ask claude to explain why before proposing changes if it’s non-trivial

For spec or exploratory projects, I use claude more like a thinking partner

Outline the idea Identify failure modes early, generate a minimal first version I can throw away.

The biggest improvement for me was treating chats as disposable scratchpads instead of long-running conversations.
by apercu | 2026-01-22 16:47:15+00:00
I agree wholeheartedly, and the technocrats are complicit with the GOP here.

It's funny how “free markets” keep producing the most expensive solar prices in the developed world. Don't get me started on Healthcare (I just moved back to the U.S. a couple years ago after 18 years in Canada, what a cluster*ck).

Oil and gas buy politicians, foreign oil money buys media influence, and social-media bots keep voters angry at the wrong targets.

Saudi capital helps shape the messaging, Russia helps amplify the noise, and Americans get stuck paying more for clean energy while being told it’s patriotic.

But hey, Make America Great Again, right?
by FjordWarden | 2026-01-22 16:47:40+00:00
TS returns a tree with nodes, you walk the nodes with a visitor pattern.
I've experimented with using tree-sitter queries for this, but for now not found this to be easier.
Every syntax will have its own CST but it can target a general AST if you will. At the end they can both be represented as s-expressions and but you need rules to go from one flavour of syntax tree to the other.

AST is just CST minus range info and simplified/generalised lexical info (in most cases).
by direwolf20 | 2026-01-22 16:47:42+00:00
This is because a string of panels in series are limited by the weakest link — if one panel is fully shaded, it blocks electricity flow through it, and therefore through the whole string. Bypass diodes mitigate that to some extent. But with electronics costs still falling, it's now possible to use more smaller inverters to connect the solar array to the grid, each one with its own separate string, or even an individual panel.
by saghm | 2026-01-22 16:47:47+00:00
Yeah, this is something I had to learn over my teenage/early 20s years. "How are you?" Is often not a question but just a generic greeting like "Hello" or "Nice to meet you". Sometimes it is though, but that's just one of the many examples of unwritten rules about how to tell whether someone literally means what they're saying or if there's a better way to interpret it.

Having only lived in the US, I don't have nearly enough firsthand experience with other cultures for me to be the one to comment on them, but I suspect that every culture has some things like this where the actual intent of the communication isn't direct. I suspect that if people in tech were asked to identify which cultures they considered to be the most direct in their communication, American culture probably wouldn't be ranked first. Generally the stereotypes of other cultures that are perceived as more direct get described in more pejorative terms like "blunt" though.
by wrenky | 2026-01-22 16:48:02+00:00
Totally anecdotal, but recently my wife had to go to urgent care for something wrong with her ankle- They send a 4-5 page sheet of arcane terms and diagnoses to her care app (relayed to me via text) and I just slammed that into gemnai and asked "what does this mean" and it did quite well! Gave possible causes, what it meant for her in the long term vs short term, and ways to prevent it. I had a better understanding of what was wrong before the doctor even got to my wife in the waiting room!

Obviously still double check things, but it was moment of clarity I hadn't really had before this. Still needed the doctor and all the experience to diagnose and fix things, but relaying that info back to me is something doctors are only okay at. Try it out! take a summary sheet of a recent visit or incident and feed it in.
by slightwinder | 2026-01-22 16:48:15+00:00
> It's not just the .vscode folder though, the Python extension for example executes code in order to provide language services.

Which code? Its own Code (which the user already trusts anyway), or code from the workspace (automatically)? My expectation with a language-server is that it never code from the workspace in a way which could result in a side effect outside the server gaining understanding about the code. So this makes little sense?
by vlovich123 | 2026-01-22 16:48:18+00:00
I think the least politically divisive issue within the US is concern about China’s growth as it directly threatens the US’s ability to set the world’s agenda. It may be politically divisive if you are aligned with Chinese interests but I don’t see anything politically divisive for a US audience. I expect Chinese CEOs speak in similar terms to a Chinese audience in terms of making sure they’re decoupled from the now unstable US political machine.
by Zigurd | 2026-01-22 16:48:38+00:00
Elon's co-investors in Twitter got an exit that didn't totally embarrass them by merging Twitter into XAI. The price for this dubious fig leaf was to invest in XAI. Now we get evidence of false claims about...

A. having the amount of Nvidia GPUs he claims to have, or...

B. being able to power those chips.

Or both. I haven't bought into Ed Zitron's theory that there are lots of unpowered racks, and chips in warehouses depreciating waiting for power. But stories like this are giving dark fiber. Except dark fiber remains economically viable when you light it up, even many years later. When do the investors get nervous?
by red-iron-pine | 2026-01-22 16:48:55+00:00
spam implies low effort BS used in a low-hanging-fruit sense

LLMs will be used for aggressive, yet incredibly subtle manipulation, consensus building, and response tracking.

20-40% of social media is already bots, and in the future it is likely you will not be able to reply to anything anywhere without a bot either 1) responding, or 2) logging and sending your response to multiple parties instantly.

If the Stasi had LLMs the Berlin Wall would have never fallen
by facontidavide | 2026-01-22 16:48:56+00:00
Since I still see this on the front page, I am taking the liberty to plug my own funny experiment (still WIP).

By no mean it is as nice looking as your demo, but it is interesting to ME...
C++, compiled to WASM, using WebGL. Works on Firefox too. M4 decimation.

https://one-million-points-wasm.netlify.app/
by arethuza | 2026-01-22 16:49:07+00:00
Yes Minister explains it nicely:

"Minister, Britain has had the same foreign policy objective for at least the last 500 years: to create a disunited Europe. In that cause we have fought with the Dutch against the Spanish, with the Germans against the French, with the French and Italians against the Germans, and with the French against the Germans and Italians. Divide and rule, you see. Why should we change now, when it's worked so well?"
by twobitshifter | 2026-01-22 16:49:13+00:00
I still don’t see your evidence of these claims. HFCS is also known as glucose-fructose syrup - it’s not all fructose, either 42% or 55% typically. Glucose and Fructose often go together in your body, so the signal would be there. In your gut, sucrase breaks sucrose (table sugar) into glucose and fructose. In drinks, when sucrose is exposed to CO2 and other acids it turns into fructose and glucose before it hits your gut!

So if you are saying fructose is bad, you are saying table sugar is bad in much the same way and that fruits like apples which are high in fructose would be problematic.
by sbarre | 2026-01-22 16:50:02+00:00
> opening a folder in vscode shouldn't be dangerous.

You're not "opening a folder" though, you're opening a codebase in an IDE, with all the integrations and automations that implies, including running code.

As a developer it's important to understand the context in which you're operating.

If you just want to "open a folder" and browse the contents, that's literally what Restricted mode is for. What you're asking to do is already there.
by kxbnb | 2026-01-22 16:50:09+00:00
Good question. The boundary problem shows up most clearly with third-party API integrations - Stripe, Twilio, Shopify, etc.

The pattern we see: an agent makes an API call, gets a 400 or unexpected response, and the developer has no visibility into what was actually sent. The agent's logs show "called Stripe API" but not the actual payload that triggered the error. Vendor support says "the request was malformed" but the agent's internal state looks fine.

With https://toran.sh, we create a read-only inspection endpoint bound to a single upstream API. The agent points at our URL instead of the vendor's, and we proxy everything through while capturing the raw request/response. No SDK, no code changes to the agent - just swap the base URL.

The instrumentation approach is intentionally minimal: we don't try to understand the semantics of the calls, just show exactly what bytes hit the wire. Teams can then add policy enforcement (via https://keypost.ai or similar) once they actually understand what their agents are doing.

Curious about AxonFlow's approach to custom HTTP integrations - do you intercept at the network layer or require explicit tool registration?
by pmdulaney | 2026-01-22 16:50:13+00:00
I would say, seriously, find a new job. It is demeaning to a human being to be in the position you find yourself, especially if there's no light at the end of the tunnel.

But if leaving this job is not a viable option at this time, I would say: Take advantage of your innate strength as a human being, which is to say, intuitive thinking. You're never going to match a machine when it comes to quantitative analysis of huge bodies of data.
Show HN: Desktop‑2FA – offline open‑source TOTP authenticator for desktop
by wrogistefan | 2026-01-22 16:50:17+00:00
I’ve been building a fully offline, local‑first TOTP authenticator for desktop (Windows/macOS/Linux).
No cloud, no sync, no telemetry, no external dependencies. Everything stays on the machine.

Why I built it:
Most 2FA apps are mobile‑only, closed‑source, or rely on cloud sync. I wanted something transparent, auditable, and desktop‑native — especially for people who work on multiple machines or air‑gapped environments.

Key features:

Local‑only storage (AES‑GCM + Argon2)

Encrypted vault with no external services

Cross‑platform desktop app

Import/export with encrypted backups

Open‑source, MIT licensed

Designed to be simple, predictable, and auditable

What’s new:
The project was recently accepted into the Kilo OSS Sponsorship Program, which gives me access to better tooling for code reviews and security analysis. This should help accelerate development and improve code quality.

Links:
GitHub: https://github.com/wrogistefan/desktop-2fa
Website: https://desktop-2fa.org

I’d love feedback on:

security model

threat assumptions

UX for onboarding

code structure and maintainability

missing features that would make it more useful

Happy to answer any questions.
by pixl97 | 2026-01-22 16:50:17+00:00
I've thought about this some and there are benefits and detractions in the processes.

First requiring a deposit system. This might work in the sense that someone dedicated can put down $5 and report a bug, and even if it's not a bug but their work is legitimate they get refunded at the end of the process.

- This doesn't scale well globally as $5 is nothing to me, but significant to someone that lives in a place almost no one in the US can pronounce correctly.

- Once you become trusted you no longer need a deposit.

- Most people what would submit a single, real, bug won't do this and you lose this information.

- How is management of this deposit system paid for? How is fraud dealt with?
by dwallin | 2026-01-22 16:50:32+00:00
IMO this is a mistake, for basically the same reason you justify it with. Since most people just want the code to work, and the chances of any specific repo being malicious is low, especially when a lot of the repos you work with are trusted or semi-trusted, it easily becomes a learned behavior to just auto accept this.

Trust in code operates on a spectrum, not a binary. Different code bases have vastly different threat profiles, and this approach does close to nothing to accomodate for that.

In addition, code bases change over time, and full auditing is near impossible. Even if you manually audit the code, most code is constantly changing. You can pull an update from git, and the audited repo you trusted can be no longer trustworthy.

An up front binary and persistent, trust or don't trust model isn't a particularly good match match for either user behavior or the potential threats most users will face.
by AphantaZach | 2026-01-22 16:50:40+00:00
OP here. I built this engine because I realized auditory entrainment (for focus and my own Aphantasia) is often compromised by standard streaming platforms.

Most codecs (MP3/AAC) use "Joint Stereo" (Mid/Side coding) to save bandwidth. Since binaural beats rely entirely on the subtle phase difference between Left/ Right channels, compression algorithms tend to treat that data as redundant and smooth it over.

I didn't want to leave it to chance, so I moved the stack to the Web Audio API. It generates the sine waves in real-time (client-side), ensuring mathematical precision and perfect channel isolation.

Happy to answer questions about the physics or implementation.
GitHub "Files Changed" Tab Change?
by nonethewiser | 2026-01-22 16:51:31+00:00
Is anyone else experiencing this?

Apparently the "Files changed" tab works differently now. I navigated to the tab and now instead of `/files` it goes to `/changes`. It looks very similar except:

It shows me 1 file at a time. I cant scroll to see everything. I cant even search the diffs. It's maddening. I can still see all files on smaller PRs.

Seems like maybe its set by a viewcontent.github.com cookie but it re-appears everytime I delete it while logged in. If I try to navigate to `/files` it redirects to `/changes`. Definitely tied to user account. I can still see the old `/files` page when not logged in. Can't find anything about this elsewhere.