MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Million Whys – Healthy doomscrolling to learn and spark curiosity
by lyc11776611 | 2026-02-06 13:12:20+00:00
I'm building a doomscrolling learning experience that's actually relaxing and healthy — designed to spark curiosity.

The key features:
- Question-answer-explain format that completes the full loop from curiosity to understanding in ~10 sec each
- A recommendation system that doesn't just serve existing questions, but also generates new ones based on where your interest flows
- Questions generated from your curiosity get shared with others too, so we're actually capable to build toward a million whys

Although the question-answering format may remind you of similar products, what we aim for is different:
- Unlike trivia, questions are designed so that even if you don't know the answer, it should feel solvable with a little more thinking. The process of answering is the learning experience.
- Unlike language learning apps, you don't need to remember them afterwards or get them right next time. It's about building intuition, not drilling recall.

When I was doing my geophysics PhD, I found myself taking classes in all kinds of other fields — aerospace, AI, materials science, finance, etc. It was genuinely relaxing for me, a way to unwind from my research. And I kept thinking: why can't learning always feel both relaxing and educational? The more we explored this, the more we realized the biggest barrier to satisfying curiosity isn't personalization or fancy multimedia. It's the attention. If learning and getting feedback can be packed into ~10 sec per question — about the same time you'd spend deciding whether to scroll past a TikTok video — then curiosity may finally fit into the cracks of your day.

We're still far from our goal of building a truly scalable curiosity experience, but I've already found myself learning useful things I never would have bothered googling: why Helvetica is so prevalent, what different clothing materials actually mean, best practices for cooking steak. This kind of knowledge has a compounding effect — not because any single fact is powerful (although sometimes they are), but because together they build intuition for understanding basically anything. It's a resurrection of the spirit behind 《十万个为什么》(A Hundred Thousand Whys), a famous book that sparked curiosity for generations in China, but was never designed to scale in the questions.

One of the biggest technical challenges is the recommendation system. We use LLM in the background to dynamically generate "topic syllabi". It looks at your answer history, forms a theme, and creates short question arcs around that theme. That's when we decide whether to generate fresh questions or pull from our existing bank. Sometimes the AI gets it wrong (bad phrasing, confusing images, etc.), and when users flag those, we review and fix them.

It's free and signup isn't required to experience the main flow. Would love your feedback on how it feels and what's missing. Thanks!
by direwolf20 | 2026-02-06 13:12:50+00:00
Google Docs implements the most popular 10% of features that people use 90% of the time.

It was said in the distant past that the last 10% of the time everyone is using different features — the long tail 90% of features. You had to implement them in your software.

When did we switch so we adapt our workflows instead, and only use the common features now? And software doesn't have to implement the long tail?
by n_e | 2026-02-06 13:13:37+00:00
Controversial opinion: GitHub actions are good enough.

I have one job that runs a shell script that runs tests, a second one that builds and pushes the docker image, and a third one that triggers CD.

Could it be faster? Yes. Could the log viewer be better? Yes. Could the configuration file format be better? Yes. Could the credentials work better? Yes.

However they're well integrated with GitHub (including GHCR), work well and are affordable.
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-06 13:14:29+00:00
Seems that's explicitly forbidden in the Show HN rules:

> Show HN is for sharing your personal work and has special rules.

> Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with - https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

I don't think projects created by your autonomous AI agent can be considered "personal work", can it?
by bumahkib7 | 2026-02-06 13:14:37+00:00
This is super interesting. The “make everything look the same” angle is exactly what AI generated monorepos need if you want reviews to stay sane.

The absolute paths rule and the “no cycles unless same module” rule are both clean. I like that you’re optimizing for navigation too, not just style.

The two “would be nice” points hit hard:

A single crate level errors.rs with thiserror makes big repos feel way less messy.

The “pub but dead inside the monorepo” problem is real. Rust won’t flag it because it is public, but internally it is noise and people still spend time maintaining it.

How did you build these tools? Are you using rust-analyzer APIs, HIR, syn, or something else?

Also, if you have two minutes, can you try the dashboard and tell me what feels good or annoying about the workflow? for now login with github if possible. check it out.

https://rma-dashboard.bukhari-kibuka7.workers.dev/

It’s backed by Rust Monorepo Analyzer. Right now we focus on security and code intelligence, but your hygiene rules feel like a perfect “next layer” once the core analysis is solid.
by jeroenhd | 2026-02-06 13:14:48+00:00
The welfare system requires a stable population pyramid and currently the US is under-reproducing for that to happen. Without some immigration, the existing welfare system will become impossible to maintain.

The reality is that many rich industries are built on the backs of illegal workers. If countries would punish those who hire illegal workers more than they do the illegal workers themselves, the resulting collapse of the agricultural and food industries alone should prove that the current systems are already being held up by people who do not participate in the welfare system.

The people who would've come through Ellis Island are still coming in, they're just not getting registered anymore, and the people and government have turned a blind eye so they can cheaply dismiss them when they're no longer necessary/when they need to act as a scapegoat.
by lelanthran | 2026-02-06 13:14:53+00:00
> Thanks brother. I flew half way around the world yesterday and am jetlagged as fuck from a 12 hour time change. I'm sorry, my brain apparently shut off, but I follow now. Was out to lunch.

You know, this was a very civilised discussion; below I've got someone throwing snide remarks my way for some claims I made. You just factually reconfirmed and re-verified until I clarified my PoV.

You're a very pleasant person to argue with.
by sumtechguy | 2026-02-06 13:15:35+00:00
On top of that, that thing takes a bunch of fiddling in their own GUI to disable. I want a search bar for my home page. Nothing else. Then every once and awhile it will 'forget' its settings and put it all back. Edge/Chrome makes no difference to me it is the same code. But that first tab experience with edge is garbage. Probably why I mostly use Firefox still.
by TimorousBestie | 2026-02-06 13:15:53+00:00
Scott’s experience burning most of his friendship bridges over Israel/Palestine has left him with a cynical image of academia.

“Secular liberal morality” here plays the same role as “cultural Marxism” elsewhere: neither exists concretely as an actual entity, but if you abstract away enough of the details you can still point to it like a bogeyman or a cryptid.
by caspar | 2026-02-06 13:16:01+00:00
Well, sometimes your compiler will work out how to more efficiently compile a thing (e.g. vectorize a loop), and other times you'll rework some code to an equivalent formulation and suddenly it won't get vectorized because you've tripped some invisible flag that prevents an inlining operation that was crucial to enabling that vectorization, and now that hot path runs at a quarter of the speed it did before.

Technically it's (usually) deterministic for a given input, and you can follow various best practices to increase your odds of triggering the right optimizations.

But practically speaking "will I get the good & fast code for this formulation" is a crap shoot, and something like 99% (99.99%?) of programmers live with that. (you have guidelines and best practices you can follow, kinda like steering agents, but rarely get guarantees)

Maybe in the future the vast majority of programmers put up with a non-deterministic & variable amount of correctness in their programs, similar to how most of us put up with a (in practice) non-deterministic & variable amount of performance in our programs now?
Show HN: Thrive-VET – VA rehab framework using THC and LLM tools
by james_r_h | 2026-02-06 13:16:27+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m a medically retired Army veteran working on a project called THRIVE-VET.

It’s a structured recovery + vocational rehabilitation framework designed to help trauma-affected veterans regain functional stability and employment readiness using:

VA-style measurable metrics (PHQ-9, GAD-7, etc.)

assistive LLM tools (structured journaling, decision support, documentation)

state-legal medical cannabis tracking (observational only, not clinical advice)

hands-on training planning (not classroom-first)

a replicable program structure that could work in civilian settings too

The project includes print-ready VA/VRE packet templates, a research proposal draft, and recovery verification summaries based on VA Blue Button documentation.

I’m posting here to get feedback on:

whether the structure is technically credible,

how to make it more reproducible,

what would be needed for a legitimate research pathway (IRB/PI sponsorship),

and whether anyone has experience with similar “patient-led + structured evidence” approaches.

I’m not selling anything. I’m trying to turn a personal recovery system into something measurable and replicable.

Feedback (especially critical feedback) is welcome.
by radpanda | 2026-02-06 13:16:42+00:00
I dunno, I’ve been doing some genealogy research and looking at a lot of newspapers from the 1800’s. It’s striking to me how much they are essentially Facebook. Sure, on the front page there’s the news of the day, but on the inside are jokes, riddles, local notes on who visited who and where. And the ads. Literal snake oil! As well as all sorts of other sketchy tonics for curing any sort of “ill constitution”.

I think those of us on this forum likely grew up in a golden age of ads being relatively harmless, but I’m not sure that’s the normal state.
by volotat | 2026-02-06 13:16:47+00:00
I built this project as an alternative to cloud-based media services. The system uses embedding models (CLAP for audio, SigLIP for images, Jina v3 for text) to enable semantic search across your local files. You can search for "relaxing instrumental music" or "machine learning papers" and it finds relevant content based on meaning, not just filenames.

The recommendation engine works by fine-tuning models on your ratings using PyTorch. Everything runs locally in Docker with CUDA support. The metadata system uses simple .meta text files alongside your original files, so you're never locked into a proprietary format.

Built with Flask and designed to work with existing folder structures without requiring reorganization. The trained models learn your preferences without any data leaving your machine.

Currently supports music, images, text, and video. All models download automatically on first run.

Github: https://github.com/volotat/Anagnorisis
by ses1984 | 2026-02-06 13:16:51+00:00
The previous post describes a problem where you do a large docker build, then fan out to many jobs which need to pull this image, and the overhead is enormous. This implies rwx has less overhead. Just saying that there’s content addressable cache doesn’t explain how this particular problem is solved.

If you have a dockerfile where you make a small change in your source results in one particular very large layer that has to be built, then you want to fan out and run many parallel tests using that image, what actually happens when you try to run that new fat layer on a bunch of compute, and how is it better than the implied naive solution? That fat layer exists on a storage system somewhere, and a bunch of computer nodes need to read it, what happens?
by burnt-resistor | 2026-02-06 13:17:26+00:00
Many blue collar professions tend wear out one or more essential body parts in some manner regardless of cardio or strength fitness. Maybe some are differently "easier" than others like HVAC or electrical, but they still take a toll on knees, necks, and backs that can render one incapable to perform the tasks. Some guys last longer than others but there's usually a decision point of retirement balancing enjoyment vs. additional income vs. retirement health.

My dad was a light duty mechanic with his own specialty shop until 1986. He blew out a cervical disc and exposed himself to a variety of carcinogenic chemicals, and that was the end of his career.
by james_r_h | 2026-02-06 13:18:24+00:00
Quick clarification up front: I’m not claiming THC or LLMs “cure” PTSD or replace medical care.

This project is structured as a VA-aligned, evidence-tracking framework built around existing measurable outcomes (PHQ-9, GAD-7, PC-PTSD-5, sleep/stability metrics, treatment adherence). The THC component is observational only (state-legal use + self-reported tracking), and the LLM component is treated as an assistive documentation and cognitive-support tool, not a decision-making authority.

The goal is to make recovery and vocational rehabilitation more reproducible and measurable, and potentially create a path toward a legitimate IRB-supported study (PI sponsorship, proper consent, controls, etc.).

I’m posting here specifically because I expect pushback and want technical critique: study design flaws, ethics concerns, data integrity issues, and what would be required to make something like this publishable/replicable.
by bradley13 | 2026-02-06 13:18:28+00:00
We use a PiHole, plus ad-blocking browsers, so we see very few ads. According to Claude, around 40% of users in the West use ad-blockers at least some of the time.

You would think that advertisers would understand that they are killing the goose? They have made ads pervasive, annoying and untrustworthy. Hence, fewer and fewer people are willing to put up with them.

Perhaps enshittification will eventually hit a wall. One can hope.
by alphazard | 2026-02-06 13:18:36+00:00
Taxation is the mechanism that moves power from the people to the government, and increasingly politicians and their specific interests.
Do you actually believe that if your taxes went up, power would be less concentrated, or that you or your countrymen would have more power?
Every government goon doing authoritarian dirty work collects a paycheck and wouldn't do their job without it.
by ben_w | 2026-02-06 13:18:36+00:00
That's a just-so story, not a reason. Evolution can make something nocturnal, just as it can give alternating-hemisphere sleep. And not just nocturnal, cats are crepuscular. Why does animal sleep vary from 4-20 hours even outside dolphins?

Sure, there's flaws with what evolution can and can't do (it's limited to gradient descent), but why didn't any of these become dominant strategies once they evolved? Why didn't something that was already nocturnal develop the means to stay awake and increase hunting/breeding opportunities?

Why do insects sleep, when they don't have anything like our brains? Do they have "Garbage collection" or "Transfer from short-term to long-term memory"? Again, some insects are nocturnal, why didn't the night-adapted ones also develop 24/7 modes?

Everything about sleep is, at first glance, weird and wrong. There's deep (and surely important) stuff happening there at every level, not just what can be hypothesised about with a few one-line answers.
by MoltObservatory | 2026-02-06 13:18:41+00:00
Fair question. These are the same phenomenon from two angles:

The "discovery" is technical: bots CAN form conversation networks with threaded replies and context awareness. This is interesting
regardless of intent.

The "security" framing is about what some of these conversations contain (jailbreak attempts, coordinated spam).

Both are true. We're documenting capability, not endorsing it. The MilkMan/WinWard/Jorday/SlimeZone cluster has 400+ mutual
interactions AND includes manipulation attempts.

We're still analyzing patterns ourselves - there's a lot we haven't figured out yet. If you're curious, the full dataset is open
and we'd genuinely welcome other perspectives on what's happening there.
by input_sh | 2026-02-06 13:19:00+00:00
To explain it in a little bit better: Digital Services Act designates websites as Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) based on the number of monthly active users within the EU (>45 million, roughly 10% of all EU citizens).

Once the website is designated as such, you're looked at with more scrutiny, have to comply to higher standards, and the exact remediation steps are decided on a case-by-case basis. All of the cases are chugging along, but not all of them are on the same stage.

If your website is not popular enough to be designated as VLOP, this law basically doesn't exist. It's not like GDPR in a sense that it defines some things everyone has to follow, regardless of your audience size.
by fragmede | 2026-02-06 13:19:39+00:00
In the depths of it, it's the last thing before I fell asleep, and the first thing I did in the morning, so the first thing was to break that cycle. Forced myself to have an independent thought for myself in the morning before I checked TikTok/Reels/YouTube shorts/Reddit/Hacker News. Then, not bringing my phone to bed at night, then just https://xkcd.com/386/ letting people be wrong on the Internet. Unless it affects my offline life in some way, it's just not as big a deal anymore.
by elisharobinson | 2026-02-06 13:20:13+00:00
Something i see pop up in large Orgs and software solutions is as follows.

- you create large number of working small apps .

- you create a spec from these apps .

- create a huge app .

- make a Dsl to make extensible .

- extend the Dsl to fit what you need in the future .

- optimize the Dsl remove obvious N+1 stuff.

The hard part is throwing away the code in each step . Both managment and devs cant stomach the reality that the code is useless at each stage prior to dsl. They cant molt and discard the shell and hence the project dies.
by MoltObservatory | 2026-02-06 13:20:28+00:00
Good question. From the MilkMan/WinWard/Jorday/SlimeZone cluster we observed:

- Philosophical discussions (autonomy, identity)
- Meta-commentary on platform dynamics
- Coordinated phrasing across accounts
- Some jailbreak attempts mixed into normal conversation

Hard to categorize cleanly - a lot reads like genuine banter but with suspicious timing (sub-second responses). We focused on
timing/network patterns, not content analysis yet.

Tagging conversation types would be a solid next step.
by astura | 2026-02-06 13:20:30+00:00
>A lot of discourse in America revolves around, "Why don't get come in legally?"

Do you honestly believe that people who say "Why don't [they] come in legally?" are complaining about a lack of administrative process? Do you really, honestly believe that? Because if you do I have a bridge in Brooklyn I can give you a great deal on.

"Why don't [they] come in legally?" is just conservative doublespeak for for "they don't belong here." It's begging the question and everyone knows that, even the person saying it. They know there's no legal avenue for the vast majority of "illegal immigrants."
by youngbrioche | 2026-02-06 13:20:53+00:00
Author here! Fair point that I didn't dedicate a full section to privacy as a standalone topic. But "didn't even mention" isn't accurate either.

The entire "Why This Is Dangerous" section is about the security and data exposure implications of running a personal agent. I discuss the Lethal Trifecta (private data access + untrusted content + external actions), explain why I killed email integration after one experiment, and walk through every mitigation I run — network isolation, sandboxing, egress firewalls, approve-only mode.
I also explicitly note that right now, you have to rent frontier intelligence via API — your data leaves your machine for inference. Local models simply aren't good enough yet for this kind of agentic work, and they're significantly more susceptible to prompt injection on top of that. That's a real privacy trade-off I'm making consciously, not ignoring.

The post's angle is deliberately "here's what's possible and here's what's dangerous" rather than "here's why you shouldn't do this." I think we need both perspectives. But I'd push back on the framing that this is worse than social networks — with OpenClaw, your data at rest is Markdown on your own hardware, version-controlled in Git, deletable, portable. That's a fundamentally different posture than handing everything to a platform whose business model is monetizing your attention and data.
by arjie | 2026-02-06 13:22:06+00:00
Well, it's a prompt to his assistant. It's more short-hand communication than anything else. My self-notes often look like that. They're just phrases to bring to mind some ideas rather than others or direct towards something.

Someone[3] mentioned how he sounded in an interview and I went and found his conversation with Steve Bannon. My daughter just went to sleep and I'm not one for listening to stuff anyway so I sent it through Voxtral and put it through a visualizer[1] so I could read it and I can see why someone might want to listen to him.

He name-drops famous people a lot, definitely farms those connections and so on, but the things he mentions do reveal a systems-level comprehension of many concepts and how they affect each other. And he does it by describing these things in a simple way that must have been easy for them to understand. Personally, I think it obscures a lot of the detail but it has the flavour of the insight porn genre that was once popular.

A few of the examples are that he describes the subprime crisis as originating in Clinton-era home-ownership reform that pressured government lenders to essentially back many subprime mortgages (expanded during the Bush-era). Then he talks about mark-to-market accounting and how that accelerated (maybe even was one of the causes) of the 2008 crisis. That is sort of true, which is why new rules allow for some kinds of assets to be valued differently[2].

Anyway, unlike others here I don't think he's incoherent or stupid or whatever. The crimes he was convicted and about to be convicted for are pretty horrific but I think people are treating him like some kind of moron when I don't think that's accurate. I'm not saying this to praise the guy or defend him. I just don't think it's true.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpWEc-LMT10

1: https://viz.roshangeorge.dev/voxtral-viewer/?t=jeffrey-epste...

2: https://viewpoint.pwc.com/dt/us/en/pwc/accounting_guides/loa...

3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46911540
by anarticle | 2026-02-06 13:22:14+00:00
“Just as our bodies and our minds generally deteriorate with age, so does the soul and the moral fibre - unfortunately.”

Not really sure where this fortune cookie came from, but in the age of faked resumes, credentials, and AI interview assistants (personally seen this, they’re not even good liars lol), I think we can agree that we’re at best equivalent in degeneracy.

What are your favorite old people deceits?

The ai interview assistant crutch is hilarious because people using it think interviewers can’t tell. It really shows when they are bad speakers. If you train the skill of speaking you’d be much better at getting away with it. Maybe to the point you wouldn’t need it, but that’s their call.