MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by skissane | 2026-02-01 03:25:42+00:00
> accepting almost no converts

This isn't true. Most Jewish communities do accept converts (the Syrians Jews are a notable exception). They don't make it as easy as Christians or Muslims do, but I'm not aware of any cases of someone who was seriously committed and motivated and willing to give the process time being rejected – and if that ever happened, they could surely find some other Rabbi willing to give them a different answer. I think the bigger reason why relatively few people convert is relatively few people are drawn to it.

Well-known converts to Judaism include Sammy Davis Jr, Elizabeth Taylor, Zooey Deschanel, Isla Fisher, Walter Kaufmann (the Nietzsche scholar), Ivanka Trump.

And Israel accepts converts for immigration under the Law of Return. The rapper Nissim Black converted to Orthodox Judaism, joined the Breslov Hasidim, made aliyah and now lives in Jerusalem. Due to a Supreme Court of Israel ruling, it also accepts converts to non-Orthodox Judaism (such as Conservative and Reform), even though Israel does not legally consider them Jewish for purposes of family law; but not converts to groups whose claims to Jewish identity are not generally recognised, such as the Christian-derived "Messianic Judaism", or Black Hebrew Israelite groups. (Some of the latter of which have been allowed to settle in Israel, but not under the Law of Return, under an ad hoc arrangement.)
by miki123211 | 2026-02-01 03:28:09+00:00
There are two problems in computer science, accepting payments and naming things.

Reddit's principal problem is that the first person to take r/foo is often a BDFL for foo for life, and no other subreddit about foo will ever be quite as recognizable. If we instead had subreddits with a numeric ID and a non-unique display name, that problem would be solved.

Payments would also solve the spam problem, but many users who have $1 can't easily get that $1 to Reddit, so that's not really an option either.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-01 03:28:42+00:00
> Is liquid glass really that bad?

I don’t like it, but I think the claims of mass exodus are unlikely.

It feels a lot like the situation when Reddit started charging for their API: Everywhere you looked you could find claims that it was the end of Reddit, but in the end it was just a vocal minority. Reddit’s traffic patterns didn’t decline at all.
by hydrox24 | 2026-02-01 03:28:47+00:00
It seems to have originated in the US with Fire Departments:

> These reports show that a dry run in the jargon of the fire service at this period [1880s–1890s] was one that didn’t involve the use of water, as opposed to a wet run that did.

https://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-dry1.htm
by jordanb | 2026-02-01 03:29:27+00:00
There's an Isaac Asimov story where people are "educated" by programming knowledge into their brains, Matrix style.

A certain group of people have something wrong with their brain where they can't be "educated" and are forced to learn by studying and such. The protagonist of the story is one of these people and feels ashamed at his disability and how everyone around him effortlessly knows things he has to struggle to learn.

He finds out (SPOILER) that he was actually selected for a "priesthood" of creative/problem solvers, because the education process gives knowledge without the ability to apply it creatively. It allows people to rapidly and easily be trained on some process but not the ability to reason it out.
by ch4s3 | 2026-02-01 03:29:44+00:00
The embargo doesn’t cover medical supplies and Cuban buys what medicine and medical supplies it has mainly from the US. The embargo also doesn’t cover food.

Cuba also does a lot of trade with China and Spain but has relatively little to actually sell because the state controlled industries are so unproductive. Cuba also has the least productive agricultural sector in the Caribbean, despite being the most productive before the revolution.

The embargo is no excuse it doesn’t cover other countries, and Cuba has always had European trade partners. In fact they received free oil, agricultural equipment, and technical support from the USSR, and later free oil from Venezuela until a few weeks ago.
by pseudohadamard | 2026-02-01 03:31:50+00:00
Was this really that secret? I've known about JUMPSEAT for at least 20 years and I'm not a US citizen, nor do I have any kind of security clearance. Not sure where the information was published, maybe one of James Bamford's books, but there's nothing terribly new there apart from the USG finally acknowledging what we already knew.
by andrekandre | 2026-02-01 03:31:53+00:00
> The world would be a demonstrably better place if the average life expectancy had remained around 70, like it was the year I was born.

idk, the world was a totally messed-up place long before that...

> The damage they've inflicted on the younger generations is really incalculable.

if you think that is bad, just wait until they solve aging itself...

imagine if we had to argue with 400 year old generals from colonial times.... or robber-barrons of 150+ years ago still trying to dominate everything.
by globaltalent34 | 2026-02-01 03:32:24+00:00
ManpowerGroup’s 2025 U.S. Talent Shortage survey shows 71% of employers struggling to find qualified talent.

Quick context:71% figure (from late-2024 fieldwork) remains widely cited in 2026 reports.

IT/tech often ranks among the hardest-hit categories.

BLS JOLTS Nov 2025: ~7.1M openings, many skilled/professional.

Software dev roles projected to grow 15%+ through 2034.
by skybrian | 2026-02-01 03:33:17+00:00
Yeah, that seems curious. But nowadays, you can just ask. So I asked ChatGPT and it listed a wide variety of factors.

> Researchers generally group explanations into (1) cause-of-death differences, (2) exposure/behavior differences, (3) healthcare-use differences, and (4) biological differences.

https://chatgpt.com/share/697ec925-3ab0-8000-9a09-d47d2fb33d...
by arcfour | 2026-02-01 03:33:47+00:00
I can detect it pretty well, but that was just one example.

No person starts a summary that way, it's over-the-top and meaningless. I have seen AI do that many times when summarizing something related to security, though. Claude often says "CRITICAL:" or "CRITICAL VULNERABILITY:" or similar, especially when you jam the context window full of junk.
by jolmg | 2026-02-01 03:34:10+00:00
It was my comment. I deleted it, but I was surprised to see the ghost of my comment.

Deleted it because it was a shallow complaint about LoRa being proprietary. However, looking closer, it's not that bad. The physical layer is unavailable, but the link layer protocol spec is downloadable by anyone. Meanwhile, DASH7, an open-source alternative, requires you to be accepted into the alliance before letting you download the spec. Might be a simple thing, but they do advise requesting membership with a company or university email.
by mmooss | 2026-02-01 03:34:14+00:00
That needs clear causal evidence that race somehow causes health outcomes, otherwise there's nothing distinguishing it from the old racial prejudice - now including blaming the victim:

There is a lot of evidence of a causal relationship between being non-white and having less access to healthcare, nutrition, and other things that affect health outcomes, and that evidence aligns well with being targets of racial discrimination.

When we just repeat baseless claims about race, we risk perpetuating it.

I've never seen evidence of a racial difference in accessing health care that is accessible. It's hard to believe skin color would affect that, while it's easy to believe (and witness) that it affects what you have access to.
by olivia-banks | 2026-02-01 03:35:09+00:00
I'm not sure if I understand your comment, but they were able to grow and propagate scHPXV in their lab. Link the sequence? Sure, it's on NCBI

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/NC_001611.1

As for getting the nucleotides themselves, there are numerous services for ordering oligonucleotides which you can "stitch together." I think this used to be done with phosphoramidite synthesis, but the article I linked says they used plasmid synthesis, and ordered from ThermoFisher.

https://www.thermofisher.com/us/en/home/life-science/cloning...

I'm not sure what the price would be on this (I would imagine very high?), but it has to be cheaper than phosphoramidite chemistry. Nevertheless, the price of doing this sort of things w/ plasmids is plummeting.
by TheDong | 2026-02-01 03:36:26+00:00
What does "less muscle-mass" mean in terms of mortality statistics?

We already know women live longer than men on average, and also have less muscle-mass than men on average, so clearly it's not having too much of an impact on women.

Without looking into actual statistics here, Japan is known for having a high life expectancy, and stereotypically Japan's population is both relatively thin, and has relatively little muscle, so that also seems to defy that expectation.

What sort of mortality are you expecting here?
by jvalencia | 2026-02-01 03:37:27+00:00
This takes time and effort, thus, lost opportunity cost. The thing that makes these providers worth it, is that it lets the business focus on their core competencies and just add-on as they scale without worrying about complexity. A business owner who hyper-optimizes for every contract is unlikely to be focusing on growing their business, even if their business is more efficient on paper.
by gussuarez092 | 2026-02-01 03:37:34+00:00
Camerascii’s live preview panel turns your webcam into Unicode animation — real-time visuals built from characters, symbols, and motion. What I love most is how customizable it is. You can tune it to match your own creative style.

#buildinpublic #indiehacker #AItools #creativetech #Camerascii #DigitalArt #WebTools #Innovation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLgKH2Qx3Z8
by Biggbboattttt | 2026-02-01 03:38:10+00:00
Interesting point! I think a lot of the secrecy around programs like JUMPSEAT is more about official acknowledgment than actual hidden knowledge so what’s been publicly available for years suddenly becomes ‘news’ once the government confirms it. James Bamford’s work definitely made a lot of this info accessible to the public, so it makes sense that someone could know about it without clearance.
by skybrian | 2026-02-01 03:38:24+00:00
They've mapped the roads and they don't need to drive into a ditch just because there's a new sign. It probably wouldn't be all that hard to come up with criteria for saying "this new sign is suspicious" and flag it for human review. Also, Waymo cars drive pretty conservatively, and can decide to be even more cautious when something's confusing.

Someone could probably do a DOS attack on the human monitors, though, sort of like what happened with that power outage in San Francisco.
by gussuarez092 | 2026-02-01 03:39:33+00:00
As AI reshapes the economic logic that Ronald Coase first outlined in 1937—where firms exist primarily to minimize the human frictions of searching, negotiating, coordinating, and trusting across market boundaries—we stand at a moment that could either deepen alienation or restore something more humane to work. Rather than merely shrinking organizations into ultra-efficient shells run by algorithms and micro-contracts, the more hopeful path lies in using AI to lower those very transaction costs so that people can spend far less time on bureaucratic drudgery, repetitive oversight, and soul-crushing micromanagement, and far more time on the irreplaceably human activities of creativity, empathy, ethical judgment, relationship-building, and meaningful problem-solving together. In this vision, the firm doesn't disappear or become colder and more mechanical; it becomes smaller, more fluid, and more human-centered—a lighter structure that still provides shared purpose, mutual support, belonging, and the warmth of collective endeavor, but without the old weight of administrative drag that so often turns work into something dehumanizing.
by mmooss | 2026-02-01 03:40:27+00:00
The significance is obvious: People in the US are getting healthier, by a significant metric. That doesn't matter? The US is a relativley well-defined group, sharing many inputs and consuming many of the same resources, including the same national health care resources for research, care, regulation, etc.

> There are many different populations in the USA.

Are you saying only your 'population' matters to you?

What do you mean by it exactly? There are lots of populations everywhere, and every population can be broken down into more populations. Any aggregate number won't describe you as an individual, even if it's a number for your own family.

Is this just a repeat of the old racial trope here?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46843222
by gussuarez092 | 2026-02-01 03:41:41+00:00
The conviction of Linwei Ding, the former Google engineer who stole thousands of pages of confidential AI technology secrets to aid Chinese-linked companies—including one he founded—serves as a sobering reminder of how ambition, pressure, and divided loyalties can lead even talented individuals down destructive paths. While the breach of trust and potential harm to innovation and national security are serious and warrant accountability, it's worth pausing to recognize the human complexity behind such acts: a 38-year-old immigrant professional navigating intense global competition in AI, perhaps driven by dreams of building something transformative back home, only to cross ethical and legal lines that now threaten decades of freedom and reputation. True justice here isn't just punishment but also reflection on the broader systems—corporate security gaps, geopolitical tensions, and personal incentives—that allow these tragedies to unfold, urging us toward safeguards that protect progress without turning every talented mind into a suspected adversary.
by schoen | 2026-02-01 03:42:03+00:00
I'm sure most people are looking for serious takes on this, but here are two SMBC comics on this specific theme ("prove you are a robot"):

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2013-06-05

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/captcha

which may be either funner or scarier in light of the actual existence of Moltbook.
by shadab_nazar | 2026-02-01 03:42:51+00:00
Great guide — thorough and practical. Two things I'd add from my experience building and testing skills:

1. Baseline comparison across models: The guide suggests comparing with and without a skill (p9), but doesn't mention that the same skill can perform very differently across models. A skill that improves outcomes on a larger model might overwhelm a smaller one with too many competing instructions. Testing against the baseline for each model you intend to support matters.
2. Implicit vs explicit constraints as a design tool: The guide focuses on explicit instructions — tell Claude what to do, what not to do, how to validate. In my testing, implicit constraints (format rules, structural limits) were sometimes more effective at preventing unintended outputs, because they limit the output space structurally rather than relying on the model to interpret conditional logic. Skill authors might benefit from thinking about what their format rules prevent as a side effect, not just what their instructions request.

Curious if others building skills are seeing similar patterns.
by simonw | 2026-02-01 03:42:53+00:00
Almost all of this report is about leaking system prompts.

The OpenClaw system prompt has no measures in it at all to prevent leaking, because trying to protect your system prompt is almost entirely a waste of time and actually makes your product less useful.

As a result, I do not think this is a credible report.

Here's the system prompt right now: https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/blob/b4e2e746b32f70f8fb...
by jesseendahl | 2026-02-01 03:43:16+00:00
Apple's head of SEAR (Security Engineering & Architecture) just gave the keynote at HEXACON, a conference attended by the companies who make Pegasus such as NSO Group.

That doesn't seem like avoiding the elephant in the room to me. It seems like very much acknowledging the issue and speaking on it head-on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Du8BbJg2Pj4
by thesmtsolver2 | 2026-02-01 03:43:48+00:00
No, not just weeding out due to Covid.

If that was the case, you won't see death rates decrease across multiple groups and not just the weakest groups.

> Death rates declined across all racial and ethnic groups, and in both men and women.

https://www.medpagetoday.com/publichealthpolicy/publichealth...

> It's the result of not only the dissipation of the COVID-19 pandemicopens in a new tab or window, but also waning death rates from all the nation's top killers, including heart disease, cancer, and drug overdoses.
Show HN: ShotOne – Screenshot API with built-in playground for quick testing
by DebianXMR | 2026-02-01 03:44:00+00:00
Hey HN! I just launched ShotOne, a screenshot API for developers.

Features: stealth mode, ad blocking, device presets, multiple formats (PNG/JPEG/WebP), and optional Cloudflare R2 storage.

You can try it without writing any code – there's a playground in the dashboard where you test all the options instantly. Just sign up and play around.

I'm looking for honest feedback:
- Is the pricing clear?
- What features are missing for your use case?
- How's the dashboard UX?

Would really appreciate any thoughts. Thanks for taking the time!
by gussuarez092 | 2026-02-01 03:44:20+00:00
The release of Anthropic's "The Complete Guide to Building Skills for Claude" feels like a quiet, empowering gift to anyone who's ever wished their AI could truly understand how they work—not just what to do, but the thoughtful habits, personal style, and hard-won shortcuts that make daily tasks feel human rather than mechanical. By turning reusable workflows into simple folders of instructions, examples, and context that Claude can reliably draw on, it shifts the relationship from constant re-explaining to something closer to a trusted colleague who remembers your preferences and grows with you. In a world where AI often risks making us feel like interchangeable operators, this approach gently reclaims agency, letting us encode our unique way of thinking so the machine augments our individuality instead of flattening it—ultimately saving mental energy for the creative, connective, deeply human parts of life and work that no guide can script.
by ChadNauseam | 2026-02-01 03:46:42+00:00
I've been getting my family members to start vibe coding. In my experience, claude works very well but the biggest issue is actually installing all the necessary tools. So I created a little setup script that MacOS users can use to get up-and-running quickly.

It basically sets them up with a development environment similar to the one I use personally. It uses the git settings from https://blog.gitbutler.com/how-git-core-devs-configure-git , helps them set up their username/email, downloads Ghostty, VSCode, fnm and pnpm, etc.
by stubish | 2026-02-01 03:46:57+00:00
Two major problems.

If a team does not have the bandwidth to fix an issue, closing it acknowledges this and doesn't leave people in false hope. Ideally with a status like 'won't fix' to clarify the situation. Users can move on and deal with the reality, perhaps even rally resources if they are in a position to do so, so the issue can be reopened and addressed. Everyone hates it when you get a 'me too' or 'the developers suck' email to a bug opened 15 years ago. The bug is making the world a worse place.

Secondly, the larger the collection of open issues the harder it is to actually triage and manage. There are plenty of projects where everyone would benefit if the issue tracker suffered catastrophic data loss. So many dangling issues in features that no longer exist or are completely unrecognizable, making it impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff. You are in a twisty maze of 30,000 issues, all of them alike. What should I be working on?

Unfortunately, people react to the first reason poorly if their issue gets closed as won't fix. They take it personally and abuse the developers. So we generally don't use won't fix, because of people being hostile. And then triage falls behind. And then you find you have an unmaintainable bug database of 30,000 open issues, un-triaged, many duplicated, unknown how many actionable. 'open' status has become the unofficial 'wont fix'. When you submit a new bug, you hope someone is watching and you get lucky and someone assigns it 'in progress' or sticks it on a task list. The bug tracker gets bypassed, with real issues going via back channels to developers. The project realizes it has a problem and makes it harder to submit bugs, in a hope they can get on top of things.
by mmooss | 2026-02-01 03:47:18+00:00
> Comparing these statistics across countries is useless without demographic adjustment.

Why is it useless? Any aggregate number can be broken down different ways into different groupings - region, age, education, income, wealth, smoking/not, weight, smartphone use, exercise, sleep, etc etc. By your argument, any aggregate number is useless because, no matter what the researcher chooses, it could be broken down differently.

So why choose race? I think the fact that so many in this discussion repeat the partisan trope - long used to oppose taxpayer-funded services such as healthcare, education, housing, food, etc. - of dividing people by race, is very telling.
by keeda | 2026-02-01 03:48:39+00:00
Well, this is what Anthropic's CEO told Congress in 2023, the message was not quite "AI is just peachy": https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2023-07-26_-_...

Or here's his more recent statements on the potential disruption from AI: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/27/dario-amodei-warns-ai-cause-...

Anthropic is pretty much the only major frontier AI lab that keeps saying "AI is dangerous, we should proceed with caution." It sounds like you're in violent agreement.

If your stance is AI development should not be continued at all, well, the history of Luddites should tell you what happens when an economic force meets labor concerns in a Capitalistic world.

The genie is out of the bottle and there's no putting it back. Our only choices now are to figure out how to tame it, or YOLO it and FAFO.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-01 03:50:47+00:00
You mean your standard consulting company that works on a project basis? This isn’t anything new.
I worked for a startup founded by two non technical brothers who brought in an outside consulting company to do all of the work and then they brought in a CTO to bring it in house and I was one of his first technical hires.

You’ll be competing with cheap outsourced developers where only the tech leads and project managers are paid American wages.

You are basically doing staff augmentation which is the fifth level of hell
by JKCalhoun | 2026-02-01 03:53:06+00:00
Anyone that wants their own private "film school", can invest 10 years or so and work through the "1001 Movies to See Before You Die" [1]. It's a book compiled by several film critics as I understand it. For each of the films there's a page or two explaining the significance of the film (according to the critic that chose it for the list).

My wife and I have been at it for perhaps 6 years now. We probably have 3 years or so to go to finish it.

You do learn, I think, patience. I found long slow films tedious initially but have come to know why some film are that way and I am more willing now to just go with the flow.

To be sure though, any film over two or so hours we might split across two days to watch.

[1] https://1001films.fandom.com/wiki/The_List
by rayiner | 2026-02-01 03:53:46+00:00
Progressive taxation and welfare don’t achieve the same end, because they’re directed to individuals rather than the government. Mississippi can’t use social security payments to build infrastructure.

Also, programs like Medicaid aren’t as redistributive as you might think. For example, Mississippi gets less federal medicaid spending per capita than Massachusetts, New York, or California, despite being the poorest state: https://ffis.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/SA23-01.pdf (p. 4).