MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TZubiri | 2026-01-20 14:16:37+00:00
In the context of the events talked about the article and events covered by these markets, sports are irrelevant, not a concern, they influence 0 on how these markets should be regulated.

Sports might be fixed? People might gamble with sports? I don't give a shit man, these markets bet on democratic elections and war, the concerns are whether military action is effected for money or leaked for money, everything else is an infitesimal rounding error.
by raincole | 2026-01-20 14:16:41+00:00
You didn't answer why the student should memorize anything, except the hand-waving "Memorization is a prerequisite for creativity".

Students had very good reason to question the education system when they were asked to memorize things that were safe to forget once they graduated from school. And when most functional adults admitted they forgot what they had learned in school. It was an issue before LLM, and triply so now.

By the way, I now am 100% agree with "Memorization is a prerequisite for creativity." However, if you asked me to try to convince the 16-year-old me I would throw my hands up.
by n4r9 | 2026-01-20 14:16:41+00:00
It can be a challenging skill to apply, and you need to use your judgement to discern whether the other person is in a place to engage with what you say.

One comment I'd make is the difference between "valid" and "rational". Emotions and feelings are always "valid", in the sense that they are a natural consequence of events and prior conditioning. But feelings are rarely "rational" - they often don't reflect the complete truth of a situation. For example, suppose someone says "Jennifer sent me this short snippy reply today, I swear she's upset with me about something and won't tell me what it is". It is perfectly legitimate to validate that you can see where that fear comes from, but nevertheless offer alternative possibilites: maybe Jennifer is going through a tough time personally, or has a really tight work schedule at the moment. You don't have to fully buy into someone's thoughts and feelings in order to help them process them. In fact this is rarely going to help.
by sporp | 2026-01-20 14:17:52+00:00
OpenSCAD! My personal favorite 3D modeling software. Started using it a decade ago since it made sense to me as a coder and I've been too stubborn to use anything else.

Cool stuff, you might already be using this but this roundedcube function has drastically improved the quality of my prints:
https://gist.github.com/groovenectar/92174cb1c98c1089347e
by bigpeopleareold | 2026-01-20 14:18:27+00:00
I got mine just for the Trackpoint too :D I just use it on my desk though. But I am waiting in the mail for the new Shinobi. There are very few other keyboards on the market with this feature. There is the HHKB Studio, but it's much more expensive and not full-size. But, I didn't look far either. I am not obsessed with mechanical keyboards, so the only thing for me was guessing what switch to use (cherry-mx silent red, they are fine enough :) ) I just hope for no more hacking around to get a stable keyboard. It's been a nuisance.
by isodev | 2026-01-20 14:18:57+00:00
> here's a heap of functionality and convenience you'll have to let go

That's a very outdated point of view. All mobile ecosystems have practical feature parity.
Convenience - that's a tricky one. With Apple stuff, you only have convenience if you're one of the bubble people who has their entire family and close friends in the Apple ecosystem. The reality outside that is that for every 1 iOS person, there are ~2 non iOS people they need to collaborate with and share stuff. Convenience has left the room a long time ago.
by giancarlostoro | 2026-01-20 14:19:24+00:00
If you're not using .claude/instructions.md yet, I highly recommend it, for moments like this one you can tell it where to shove scripts. Trickery with the instructions file is Claude only reads it during a new prompt, so any time you update it, or Claude "forgets" instructions, ask it to re-read it, usually does the trick for me.
by TZubiri | 2026-01-20 14:19:47+00:00
One of the problems is that by creating a prediction market for your death, you may be creating a hit for yourself.

You enable different enemies to crowdsource for your bounty, and as soon as it is deemed worthy by a hitman, they might take up on the job by placing the opposite bet.

It's a very specific example but the mechanics work for most events in a similar fashion.

It is for this reason that event creation is not open to the public, but rather handled by the regulated markets themselves
by PaulHoule | 2026-01-20 14:19:58+00:00
I think there is no point to hurry with AI features. Already I see glimmers of the future, like when I am at the library and ask Siri "Where do I find books about martial arts in the library of congress system?" and it punts to ChatGPT and tells me "GV1100-GV1198"

It will become a better and more integrated experience over time.

The thing is that we are in this Windows 8 moment where AI progress is being pushed by FOMO on the part of vendors and not pulled by customer demand and that's OK.
by johannes1234321 | 2026-01-20 14:19:59+00:00
Except that the physical book isn't the way people lookup facts these days.

The open book test is purposes is to not have to know all facts (formulas) but proving how to find them and how to apply them. (Finding is part of it as the more you look, the less time you got to use it, thus there is an optimisation problem which things to remember and which to look up)

In modern times you wouldn't look those up in a book, thus other research techniques are required to deal with real life (which advanced certifications should prove)
by hersko | 2026-01-20 14:19:59+00:00
I have a flow where i extract text from a pdf with pdf-parse and then feed that to an ai for data extraction. If that fails i convert it to a png and send the image for data extraction. This works very well and would presumably be far cheaper as i'm generally sending text to the model instead of relying on images. Isn't just sending the images for ocr significantly more expensive?
by rayiner | 2026-01-20 14:20:09+00:00
I think one side thinks the constitution is fake because they offer facially disingenuous pretenses like “emanations from penumbras” and “the living constitution.” There’s also that whole fourth branch of government they created that’s nowhere in the constitution. People who have spent a century advancing creative interpretations of the constitution don’t get to nit pick about Article VI: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/462732-when-i-am-weaker-thn...

But again, the Treaty Clause doesn’t elevate treaties to the same status as the constitution or laws. Treaties aren’t even self executing—that means they have no effect domestically unless Congress passes a law implementing the treaty.

Treaties aren’t even necessarily self-executing, which means they have no legal power domestically unless congress passes a separate law: https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artII-S2-C2-1...
by maxnoe | 2026-01-20 14:20:12+00:00
Science never proves a positive.

You can only disprove.

The only way to prove a positive if there is a finite number of possibilities and you have disproven all but one. But even then, someone could conceivably come up with an alternate description that preserves the current understanding but makes additional predictions or is a simpler model making the same.

As Feyman said: "We can never know if we are right, we can only be certain if we are wrong".
by 11mariom | 2026-01-20 14:20:12+00:00
> Electric cars are required by law to emit sound via a speaker for safety. Usually the sound is unique and somewhat electronic in nature.

And this is absolutely… bad. I mean requiring is good, but almost all of the execution of it is awfully bad.

It can be personal - but Hz of that sounds just makes me boil inside. That's how badly I'm receiving it. Almost no other sounds I hear on daily basis makes me uncomfortable.

And another issue - when somebody is parking the sound goes on, off, on, off, and that all the time until person is happy how car is parked. Couldn't it just make that sound all the time? Would be easier to get used to it. Same way it works with PC fans - there is no benefit to keep it as lowest as possible at all times, the trick is to keep it spinning fast enough to avoid as many changes of speed as possible - keeping the noise constant and easier to live with.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2026-01-20 14:20:51+00:00
Fair enough - I wouldn't have used the term "blatantly" as it does seem as likely down to incompetence. I think that public officials need to be kept to a high standard of accuracy when responding to MPs. I've mentioned in some other thread how this can be compared with the Post Office scandal where the Post Office (can't remember who in particular) made explicit statements to MPs about the accuracy of the Horizon system.

I welcome that investigation.
by yndoendo | 2026-01-20 14:20:55+00:00
Just to hijack this thread on how resilient PCIe is. PS4 Linux hackers ran PCIe over UART serial connection to reverse engineer the GPU. [0] [1]

[0] https://www.psdevwiki.com/ps4/PCIe

[1] https://fail0verflow.com/blog/2016/console-hacking-2016-post...
by juliend2 | 2026-01-20 14:21:25+00:00
Might be a coincidence but for the first time last night, my son's sleep projector[0] didn't stop after 1h like it does normally.

I guess this could be related to it? (we are in Montreal)

I doubt these toys are protected from those kinds of events.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Fisher-Price-Settle-Sleep-Projection-...
by bigpeopleareold | 2026-01-20 14:21:48+00:00
I'll add that my P14s (gen 3) keyboard sticks up in one place. It's not the biggest problem, but this an odd fit problem I never saw on my older ones. Typing on it is not as great either than my other TPs or external, which at least have a longer travel. (the old layout was OK, they key feel was nice, and the T430s felt like the best laptop keyboard I had used)
by choonway | 2026-01-20 14:21:53+00:00
I was like the author of the article, then I realized that I was solving problems that were created by other peoples' incompetence. Sure they were challenging, fun but they didn't bring anything postive overall. The incompetent people are still there - causing more problems.

So I decided to find a worthwhile problem that deserved my talent. And I did. And I am now even more happy than before.
by bob1029 | 2026-01-20 14:22:07+00:00
My approach to safety at the moment is to mostly lean on alignment of the base model. At some point I hope we realize that the effectiveness of an agent is roughly proportional to how much damage it could cause.

I currently apply the same strategy we use in case of the senior developer or CTO going off the deep end. Snapshots of VMs, PITR for databases and file shares, locked down master branches, etc.

I wouldn't spend a bunch of energy inventing an entirely new kind of prison for these agents. I would focus on the same mitigation strategies that could address a malicious human developer. Virtual box on a sensitive host another human is using is not how you'd go about it. Giving the developer a cheap cloud VM or physical host they can completely own is more typical. Locking down at the network is one of the simplest and most effective methods.
by myrmidon | 2026-01-20 14:22:16+00:00
We do know that they are different, and that there are some systematic shortcomings in LLMs for now (e.g. no mechanism for online learning).

But we have no idea how many "essential" differences there are (if any!).

Dismissing LLMs as avenues toward intelligence just because they are simpler and easier to understand than our minds is a bit like looking at a modern phone from a 19th century point of view and dismissing the notion that it could be "just a Turing machine": Sure, the phone is infinitely more complex, but at its core those things are the same regardless.
Show HN: Mother MCP – Manage your Agent Skills like a boss-Auto provision skills
by DavidGraca | 2026-01-20 14:22:24+00:00
Hi HN,

Built an MCP server that auto-detects your tech stack and installs relevant AI coding skills.

Problem: CLAUDE.md, copilot-instructions, cursor-rules – every tool has its own monolithic instruction format. They grow huge (10K+ tokens) and load on every request.

Solution: Composable skills (~500 tokens each) that sync from registries and load only when matched to your stack.

- 3-tier detection: GitHub SBOM → Specfy (700+ techs) → local fallback
- 25+ skills from Anthropic, OpenAI, GitHub
- Works with Claude, Copilot, Codex
by tw1984 | 2026-01-20 14:22:26+00:00
are you joking?

if you search their public media releases, they mentioned that their cores are used by some imaginary vendors for undisclosed platforms. just go and check how CLOSE those junks are. product names and models are always omitted, it is always "certain vendor", "one AI card", no spec no details whatsoever...

searching their names on taobao.com returns 0 hit, searching their names on the largest Chinese second hand platform returns 0 hit. 4 years after they started doing their great open project, you can't even buy one from the OPEN market! that is VERY OPEN to me.
by causalscience | 2026-01-20 14:22:36+00:00
> why should I know anything

The obvious answer is "Because it's interesting."

But suppose you think strictly in utilitarian terms: what effort should I invest for what $$$ return. I have two things to say to you:

First: what a meaningless life you're living.

Second: you realize that if you don't learn anything because you have LLMs, and I learn everything because it's interesting, when you and I are competing, I'll have LLMs as well...? We'll be using the same tools, but I'll be able to reason and you won't.

I think the people who struggle with the question "Why should I know anything?" aren't going to learn anything anyway. You need curiosity to learn, or at least to learn a lot and well, and if you have curiosity you're not asking why you should learn anything.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2026-01-20 14:22:45+00:00
The alternative to RAII is simply do-it-yourself ! For example, if you are writing multi-threaded code and need a mutex to protect some data structure, then you'd need an explicit mutex_lock() before the access, and an explicit mutex_unlock() afterwards... if your code might throw exceptions or branch due to errors, then make sure that you have mutex_unlock() calls everywhere necessary!

Automating this paired lock and unlock, to avoid any programmer error in missing an unlock in one of the error paths, just makes more sense, and this is all that RAII is doing - it's not some mysterious religion or design philosophy that needs to pervade your program (other than to extent that it would make sense to remove all such potential programmer errors, not just some!).

In this mutex example, RAII would just mean having a class "MutexLocker" (C++ provides std::lock_guard) that does the mutex_lock() in it's constructor and mutex_unlock() in it's destructor.

Without RAII, your code might have looked something like this:

try {

mutex_lock(mut);

// access data structure

mutex_unlock(mut);

} catch (...) { // make sure we unlock the mutex in the error case too !

mutex_unlock(mut);

}

With the RAII approach the mutex unlocks are automatic since they'll happen as soon as the mutex locker goes out of scope and its destructor is called, so the equivalent code would now look like this:

try {

MutexLocker locker(mut);

// access data structure

} catch (...) {

}

That's it - no big deal, but note that now there was no need to add multiple mutex unlock calls in every (normal + error) exit path, and no chance of forgetting to do it.

You can do the same thing anywhere where you want to guarantee that some paired "resource" cleanup activity take place, whether that is unlocking a mutex, or closing a file, or releasing a memory buffer, or whatever.

You may not think of it as RAII, but this approach of automatic cleanup is being used anywhere you have classes that own something then release it when they are done with it, for example things like std::string (and all the C++ container classes) is doing this, as are C++ <stream> file objects, C++ smart pointers, C++ lock_guard for mutexes, etc, etc.
Show HN: Shadow Report – Why your "black box" redactions aren't hiding anything
by cd_mkdir | 2026-01-20 14:23:27+00:00
Hello HN,

In high-conflict litigation, "black box" redactions are often a disaster waiting to happen. I realized that many people (and even law firms) use civilian-grade tools that leave "Ghost Layers"—original text layers or metadata underneath the digital ink.

I built the Shadow Report as a free forensic tool to prove this. You can upload a redacted page, and it scans for:

Ghost Text Layers: Checking if the searchable PDF layer still exists beneath the redaction blocks (using pypdf layer inspection).

Metadata Leaks: Extracting Author/Producer info that reveals who actually drafted the document.

Image Fingerprints: Scraping EXIF data that can geo-locate or time-stamp "anonymous" evidence.

Backstory: This is a component of a larger project called Exit Protocol. I started it after a friend was quoted $50k for a forensic accountant to trace "separate property" in a divorce. The math they use—the Lowest Intermediate Balance Rule (LIBR)—is deterministic, but accountants do it manually in Excel. I automated the LIBR math to handle 10k+ transactions via Celery/Postgres.

Stack:

Django 5.0 (Monolith) / Postgres
pypdf & Pillow for the forensic scanning
Celery for async processing of massive bank discoveries
Air-gapped "BYOK" model for law firms (Docker)

I'd love feedback on:

Are there other "Ghost Layer" detection methods I should implement (e.g., color-space delta analysis)?
For those in LawTech: How do you handle "PDFs from hell" (scanned, rotated, handwritten notes)? I'm currently using a custom OC-3 implementation.

Try the Redaction Check: https://exitprotocols.com/redaction-check/

Main Site: https://exitprotocols.com/
by jqpabc123 | 2026-01-20 14:24:51+00:00
What I did as a solo SAAS founder over 25 years ago was radical and totally outside the box --- I wrote my own multi-threaded, multi- tenant web server and database.

Why?

Because the security of canned off the shelf all encompassing solutions was horrible at the time.

By doing this, I have nearly full control and can scrutinize, qualify and filter every single request made of my totally unique software. My main concern is an issue with the network stack which I did not write.

After 25 years of being attacked on the open internet on a daily basis, my server security has never been breached to my knowledge. The main issue I have is small scale denial of service type events which I handle by simply blocking the IPs.
by dredmorbius | 2026-01-20 14:24:56+00:00
Automobile buyers who buy American or European cars are more likely to be auto enthusiasts.

Then there's the utility / practical / recreational crowd who goes for SUVs and pickup trucks.

Those whose primary aim is utility are already in (non-EU) foreign markets or used. Those are invisible to new-car US/EU sales.

It's a classic Innovators Dilemma dynamic (Clayton Christensen), where chasing higher-end market niches torpedoes development of disruptive tech within the same firm.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma>
by LocalPCGuy | 2026-01-20 14:24:58+00:00
> widely regarded as terrible and slow to adapt

I know you are saying you do work mainly in Angular, but for others reading this, I don't think this is giving modern Angular the credit it deserves. Maybe that was the case in the late 20-teens, but the Angular team has been killing it lately, IMO. There is a negative perception due to the echo chamber that is social media but meanwhile, Angular "just works" for enterprise and startups who want to scale alike.

I think people who are burned on on decision fatigue with things like React should give Angular another try, might be pleasantly surprised how capable it is out of the box, and no longer as painful to press against the edges.
by Lerc | 2026-01-20 14:25:06+00:00
How is the difference between them characterised in physics?

It seems like it would be hard to distinguish from the point of view of a 4D unit vector XYZT if T was massively larger. Is it distinguished because it's special or is it just distinguished just because the ratio to the other values is large.

Imagine if at the big bang there was stuff that went off in Z and XY and T were tiny in comparison? What would that look like? Part of me says relativity would say there's no difference, but I only have a slightly clever layman's grasp of relativity.
by Retric | 2026-01-20 14:25:21+00:00
> 1979 is when the Fed began collecting median wage data.

Making it at best absolutely worthless for your argument which I used to think was accurate. Congrats you helped change my mind.

> just give people a 2% 'raise' and they're content enough.

2% annual wage growth is well below average. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FRBATLWGTUMHWG83O

Reading up after seeing your post the death of the US union had an incredibly strong effect on median wages. The wage distribution vs 20th or 80th percentile is quite different, plus a much larger percentage of median wage earners shows up as heath insurance. https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/1986/09/art1full.pdf

Also, 1979 isn’t the inflection point on the graph on that page instead 1970 is. Worse inflation slowed down in 1979.
by pdimitar | 2026-01-20 14:27:05+00:00
That really depends if you like (or are mostly indifferent to) the new table. If you hate it then it becomes a game of "who of us two is more important to satisfy with a table". Definitely not a position you want to be in.

Relationships must be two-way streets, always.

I have made quite a lot of concessions for my wife for the current rented flat -- simply because I did not care about 99% of the things she wanted to change. I only gave her a rather loose framework: "this must fit these physical dimensions as you yourself can see here in this corner" and "I am not willing to spend hundreds to change something that is currently performing to 90% of the standards of both of us" and "how difficult it is to ship and install this?" -- and she has been mature and considerate enough to understand the boundaries and nailed them every single time so far in our 11.5 years together. And she still got almost everything she wanted and is visibly happier with the environment.

When both sides have preferences they feel safe sharing but are still reasonable above all, then things are going smoothly and flow naturally.

Of course there are the rare exceptions where I just gave up and said to her: "OK, I am leaving this to you, figure all the details out and I'll just pay it at the end of the process". I was not unhappy but she did not want to budge on a few things and I ultimately just stashed the old thing in the garage in case she understands she made a bad deal or the new thing was underperforming.

I agree strongly with "pick your battles". You have to be able to read the person in real time. It's actually much easier than most technical people think.
by mcv | 2026-01-20 14:28:09+00:00
Is this not something everybody wants to some degree? Maybe not to the extreme of Akaky, but of course I like being useful. I like solving problems. I like making things that people use, and love to use.

It's not always healthy; at my current job (started 8 months ago) I see tons of issues to fix. Some of them are explicitly mine to fix, some close enough to my area of responsibility, but some of them are well outside it. And I'm annoyed that nobody has fixed these problems, because everybody is aware that these are problems. But the entire way the organisation works, seems designed to make it as hard as possible for me to fix them.

I'll probably burn out and leave in a few months to do something I care less about.