MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by labcomputer | 2026-02-09 22:56:56+00:00
> Cars were more affordable though.

Eehhhh... I really don't think that's true.

First, adjusted for inflation, new car prices really aren't that different than they were 10-30-50-70 years ago. You have to compare like for like, no cheating comparing a modern luxury car to Ford Pinto. For example the cheapest car in 1970 cost about $2000, with no frills like a radio, passenger wing mirror or floor matts. That's equivalent to about $17000 today. A base Nissan Versa today starts at $18000, yet includes power windows and an A/C.

Second, the maintenance requirements today are much, much lower than in the past. There's a whole list of expensive stuff you just don't have to think about with modern cars until long after those old cars would be at the junk yard (chassis lube, spark plugs, spark plug wires, carb and distributor, wheel bearings etc). That's a lot of labor you don't pay for, to say nothing of the parts!

Third, despite being heavier, more convenient and safer, modern cars have lower fuel consumption. Coming back to our Pinto vs Versa example, the Versa gets at least 50% better fuel economy.

Fourth, cars today just last longer. It used to be a minor miracle when a wasn't rusted out after 10 years or the engine still ran after 100k miles. Today, your car might be still under warranty at that point.

> Why do people try to deny this obvious reality?

Because it is not at all obvious that that is, in fact, reality. It doesn't help to complain about easily-disprovable things like the affordability of cars.
by kelseyfrog | 2026-02-09 22:57:10+00:00
The end game?

It is a salve for the status wound the dimished social and economic station poor white males found themselves in after the civil rights act and the deindustrialization.

It assumes that "I deserve the benefits I or my family once had because I see someone else that now has them."

It sees the social and economic territory as fundamental limited and wants to secure a living space within them.

And it does so by binding to the state and using the state to create that void so that they can regain what they feel was lost.

It must feel amazing, like psychic fentanyl to see what's going down.
by godelski | 2026-02-09 22:57:11+00:00
Is the same idea around why companies like Coke make ads. Does anyone seriously think Coke needs brand recognition? LOL

Car companies do this too. Frequently expensive cars are advertised to people who could never buy them. The ad makes them associate it with luxury. That helps rich people associate it with luxury because luxury is often based on a social consensus.

Maybe all ads are made to sell you things, but the thing being solid is always an idea. Sometimes that idea isn't as simple as "go buy this now"
by JohnMakin | 2026-02-09 22:57:14+00:00
I've made astoundingly little technical progress, not much to talk about. Mostly just observations and experiments, but then you look like a malicious user and I definitely ate a platform ban over it once and stopped that. My posting and submission favorites history probably indicate a bit where my interests lie. My most recent work is leveraging data broker removal services (and some letter writing sometimes) to get my address to disappear off the google front page on the barest search of my real name (which is very unique, and without asking google directly) - this is something I want to try to sell and is the most success I've had, but it's a total blackbox, doesn't even approach the scope of the real problem, and as a sibling comment gets at, the tech you are fighting is simply far too powerful and ubiquitous. You're better off at just looking "uninteresting" online, is what I'm slowly concluding, but what is uninteresting today can become extremely interesting to governments of tomorrow.
by cyberax | 2026-02-09 22:57:44+00:00
> because the public key has to be hardcoded in the app binary

Nope. On iOS the flow is:

1. Generate a "push token" on the device (with the user's approval).

2. Send this token to your server.

3. Now you can send notifications to the device via this token. Your server needs to authenticate itself with Apple, and this requires an Apple account. But it's not linked to an individual app.

The situation is different on Android. Google went out of their way to make it impossible to customize `google-services.json` at runtime. So the built-in "easy" flow won't work. But notifications ultimately work using veeeeery obfuscated remote procedure calls to Google Play Services and you can run them manually. I need to do a write-up about this....
by materielle | 2026-02-09 22:58:37+00:00
Hopefully the published postmortem will announce that all features will be frozen for the foreseeable future and every last employee will be focused on reliability and uptime?

I don’t think GitHub cares about reliability if it does anything less than that.

I know people have other problems with Google, but they do actually have incredibly high uptime. This policy was frequently applied to entire orgs or divisions of the company if they had one outage too many.
by triceratops | 2026-02-09 22:58:42+00:00
> Build and promote alternatives that don't.

How well has that worked? Social media and messaging apps have network effects.

> Host services elsewhere, ignore claims that a country's laws extend beyond its borders.

That doesn't help the French or the Finns. Unless they use a VPN. And access the fragmented, lightly-used alternative services from the IPs of the fewer and fewer countries that don't pass such laws.

Your vision leads to a world where the privacy-conscious 1% congregate in echo chambers on Mastodon instances hosted in international waters. Everyone else uploads their passport to FaceSnapTok.

That's not a real solution. It's a cope. That's my opinion and I have no illusions I've changed your mind about anything. I already alluded to that in my original post.
by adolph | 2026-02-09 22:58:53+00:00
This is so true. There is an awesome Terry Tao / 3blue1brown collaboration that explicates the epistemological basis: Terence Tao on the cosmic distance ladder

Pt 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdOXS_9_P4U

Pt 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFMaT9oRbs4

Commentary and Corrections: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2025/02/13/cosmic-distance-la...
by ReliantGuyZ | 2026-02-09 22:59:20+00:00
This only addresses one axis of your concern, but if they are accessing YouTube via desktop browser (or Firefox on Android!), the "Youtube-shorts block" extension gets rid of the Shorts UI. You can still watch Shorts, it will just display them in the normal video UI without infinite scrolling. It's a huge quality of life boost.

Although obviously this does nothing for those using the mobile or TV apps.
by AnkitaKodavoor | 2026-02-09 22:59:22+00:00
How We Feel | Lead iOS/AI Engineer | ONSITE San Francisco, Hybrid

Founded by Ben Silbermann (founder of Pinterest), we’re a tight-knit team of engineers, designers and scientists building experiences to help people on their journey with emotional wellbeing, self-discovery and shared-discovery. How We Feel was Apple’s 2023 iPhone App of the Year, for Social Impact and a finalist for the Apple Design Award in 2024. We reached 2 million downloads as of December 2025.

We’re looking for a lead iOS/AI Engineer who loves building intelligent systems that feel intuitive and helpful - someone who gets energy from shaping how AI shows up in the product as well as the crafting tasteful product experiences.

Reach out at careers@howwefeel.org

Full role description here:
https://howwefeel.notion.site/Lead-Product-Engineer-iOS-AI-2...
by h4kunamata | 2026-02-09 22:59:45+00:00
I know Ansible, homelab, Proxmox is my hobby, Debian is my gem.

I asked ChatGPT to guide how to install qBittorrent, Radarr (movies), Sonarr(TV Series), Jackett(credentials/login) without exposing my home IP and have a solid home cinema using private tracker only.

Everything had to be automated via Ansible using Proxmox "pct" CLI command, no copy and paste.

Everything had to run from a single Proxmox Debian container aka LXC

Everything network related had to use WireGuard via Proton VPN, if the VPN goes down, the container has zero network access, everything must be kill.

Everything had to be automated, download is finished, format the files structure for Jellyfin accordingly, Jellyfin add the new movies, TV shows.

It took me 3 nights to get everything up and running.

Many Ansible examples were either wrong or didn't follow what I asked to the letter, I had to fix it.
I am not a network expert and hate Iptables haha, you need to know the basic of firewall to understand what the ACLs are doing to understand when it does not work.
Then Proxmox folder mapping and you name it.

It would have taken me ages reading docs after docs to get things working, the "Arr services" is a black hole.

For this example, it made the harder part easier, I was not just copy/paste, it was providing the information I didn't know instead of me having to "Google for it".

I know the core of where things are running on, and here is where we have Engineers A and Engineers Z

Engineers A: I know what I am doing, I am using AI to make the boring part easier so I can have fun elsewhere

Engineers Z: I have no idea of what I am doing, I will just ask ChatGPT and we are done: 90-95% of engineers worldwide.
by D-Machine | 2026-02-09 22:59:49+00:00
> Modeling something as an action is not "having a world model".

It literally is, this is definitional. See e.g. how these terms are used in e.g. the V-JEPA-2 paper (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.09985).

> A model is a consistently existing thing, but humans don't construct consistently existing models because it'd be a waste of time. You don't need to know what's in your trash in order to take the trash bags out.

Both sentences are obviously just completely wrong here. I need to know what is in my trash, and how much, to decide if I need to take it out, and how heavy it is may change how I take it out too.

> All frontier LLMs are multimodal to some degree. ChatGPT thinking uses it the most.

LLMs by definition are not multimodal. Frontier models are multimodal, but only in a very weak and limited sense, as I address in e.g. other comments (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46939091, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46940666). For the most part, none of the text outputs you get from a frontier model are informed by or using any of the embeddings or semantics learned from images and video (in part due to lack of data and cost of processing visual data), and only certain tasks will trigger e.g. the underlying VLMs.

And most VLM architectures are multi-modal in a very limited or simplistic way still, with lots of separately pre-trained backbones (https://huggingface.co/blog/vlms-2025). Frontier models are nowhere near being even close to multimodal in the way that human thinking and reasoning is.
by psychoslave | 2026-02-09 22:59:56+00:00
Are parents also supposed to be blamed if society as a whole would let thrive streets with permanent civil war, drug barrons, organized child prostitution networks and so on?

Of course parents must take care of their children. And of themselves. But they are only fragile humans and can bear only that much of a load in a day. Certainly there are people that drawn in negligent or even mistreating behaviors. That's not a valid reason to blame individual in general and abstract the societal constraints they all have to deal with. That's actually nothing special to parents.
by tabbott | 2026-02-09 22:59:57+00:00
The built-in Jitsi integration lets you create a voice chat call via a single button click. You can also put those call links in a channel description if you like.

We do have plans to make the integration offer some additional ways to jump into a call, and have been talking about adding video chat. But our focus has been on building the best text chat possible, given there are multiple actively developed FOSS video call systems that we can integrate with.
by bunderbunder | 2026-02-09 23:00:02+00:00
Nobody said it’s the government’s responsibility to parent my kids. In fact, considering I live in the USA, I sure as shit do not want a bunch of people who seem to think that whether child rapists should be brought to justice is a tactical decision to decide these things for my kids.

But still, here we are. And I don’t think it’s asking too much to be allowed some space to lament that it’s damn hard to hold the line on much of anything when when the entire online sphere is run by the same class of moneygrubbing asshats who directly profit from creating and participating in so many of these problems in the first place.

And I am by no means abdicating my responsibilities by shaking my fist at neoliberal stooges who think monopolies are somehow good instead of the major source of many of these social ills that contribute to people - not just parents - being so exhausted all the time.
by maxglute | 2026-02-09 23:00:04+00:00
This bizarro take. PRC mining equipment has been decoupled from US for years, they don't require hardware from western producers anymore, from terrestrial to deep sea. The last dependency was mostly unconventional shale since US good at shale but that's mostly consultative, and PRC quickly found out US horizontal drilling doesn't translate well for their deeper reserves, so they had to localize tools there as well. The talent gap is also stupendously in favor of PRC, they produce like 15x more mining graduates per year, their university of mining tech enrolls more than all US mining programs combined. They lead in midstream refining, not just REE bottleneck, all that AU/BR ore gets shipped to PRC for refining for a reason.

>almost always takes place far from population centers

No in PRC case, they literally build population centers to service mining, part of third front strategy in 60s to move mining into rugged interior to protect vs US/USSR. If you want to mine/process at PRC scale, you need to plop a few million people in large urban complexes to sustain scale, i.e. boutou has 3 million people, they're not 5000 people mining towns.
by k42b3 | 2026-02-09 23:00:22+00:00
Hey HN, I am currently working on three main projects:

https://www.fusio-project.org
Fusio an open source API & AI management platform to build and manage APIs and MCP tools.

https://typehub.cloud
TypeHub an open platform to design and version API specifications.

https://sdkgen.app
SDKgen a tool to generate client SDKs and server stubs supporting multiple languages.
by rconti | 2026-02-09 23:00:36+00:00
It's really not. I drive at an upper-percentile pace, so I am rarely dawdling along in the right lane.

However, on the rare occasion I've found myself going slowly in the right lane, it's stunning how incompetent most people are at merging. It's like they don't even consider looking for an opening in traffic, matching the freeway speed, etc. They just lumber in front of you at 43mph, and maybe, if you're lucky, look in their mirrors after they've already caused you to slow for them.
by Daub | 2026-02-09 23:01:31+00:00
I used to live next to Borough market and saw it devolve from a genuine working class market to a chi-chi hive. The old pie and mash shop was replaced by offices as were all the other old school business. It was like watching someone you love being embalmed whilst still alive. I now live in Asia where the market tradition are still vivid and alive.
by wahern | 2026-02-09 23:01:35+00:00
> I really wish someone on the C language/compiler/linker level took a real look at the problem and actually tried to solve it in a way that isn't a pain to deal with for people that integrate with the code.

It exists as "inline" and "extern inline". Few people make use of them, though, partly because the semantics standardized by C99 were the complete opposite of the GCC extensions at the time, so for years people were warned to avoid them; and partly because linkage matters are a kind of black magic people avoid whenever possible--"static inline" neatly avoids needing to think about it.
by ncruces | 2026-02-09 23:03:01+00:00
But if you setup CI, you can pick up the mobile site with your phone, chat with Copilot about a feature, then ask it to open a PR, let CI run, iterate a couple of times, then merge the PR.

All the while you're playing a wordle and reading the news on the morning commute.

It's actually a good workflow for silly throw away stuff.
by watwut | 2026-02-09 23:03:25+00:00
First, republicans blocked everything including formarly own proposals when Obama adopted it ... ever since Obama. It is other way round, the republican party is getting what it worked for, because democrats are weak opposition.

> Democrats will undo it all when the pendulum shifts.

It is impossible. Will they give reparations to blue cities? From what money?

Likewise institutions - it is easier to corrupt and destroy them then to build them anew.

Amd crutially, the right wing supreme court needs ro be enlarged or new constitution written for the bad precedents to be changed.

> token deportation effort,

The whole thing is bigger size then most militaries.

> no material change on mass legal immigration,

The whole classes of legal immigrants were suddenly ruled illegal and are violently mistreated.

> nothing happening on the voter ID front.

Republicans are trying to make voting for blie places harder.
by Jtsummers | 2026-02-09 23:04:49+00:00
Look at the childcare number in the breakdown table. 1 adult and 3 children has an estimated $71k/year childcare cost, while 2 adults and 3 children (1 working) has a $0/year childcare cost. So some things go up (transportation, healthcare, food), but others go down. Childcare going down by $71k pretty much entirely accounts for the difference you're questioning (~$34/hour difference just on that entry).

Also, two adults (assuming married) will pay lower taxes than one adult for the same income. That's another ~30k difference per year in the breakdown table for the 3 children case. If your tax burden is lower, you can afford a lower wage while bringing in the same net.

EDIT: Tax rates in the US are roughly half (except for high income earners, way beyond these living wage estimates would be relating to) when you're married versus single.

https://www.irs.gov/filing/federal-income-tax-rates-and-brac...

Check out the 22% bracket on that page, the range is doubled for married people filing joint versus single. That's a huge savings each year. Tax savings of two married people and any number of kids is a major contributor to why the living wage drops when someone gets married versus is single with the same number of kids.
by Finnucane | 2026-02-09 23:04:57+00:00
Long ago I was working for a programmer writing an accounting system for a client (I wrote the user docs). The machine we were replacing was an old NCR plug-board system. Programmed by wires plugged into holes on a board. One person left at the client knew how the machine worked. No one knew how the programming worked. If the wires fell out of the holes it could not be put back together again. At one time someone knew that, but the knowledge was lost. This is the system we are building again today.
by lp4v4n | 2026-02-09 23:05:02+00:00
I don't doubt you can eat three meals with 6 dollars, but it's crazy how solipsistic people are when it comes to food. Not everybody can buy food in bulk and cook at home.

A 10 oz ham sandwich will probably cost you more than 2 dollars even if you buy everything at the supermarket. I don't know why people are so reluctant to admit that 12 dollars a day is not much for groceries.
by dennis16384 | 2026-02-09 23:05:02+00:00
I'm working on Routing24 https://routing24.com - we are building free route optimization tool for businesses to plan multi-vehicle multi-stop routes.

Multi-threaded WebAssembly in action for route optimization, all bundled with geocoding, OSM maps and routing, and provided world-wide.

We're adding driver's PWA, saving and sharing of route optimization projects, editing of optimized routes, sharing it with others either for execution or for approval, integrations and AI-assisted data imports, auth flows, support prompts, sales automation and all that boring stuff.
by icegreentea2 | 2026-02-09 23:05:14+00:00
Btw, the paper referenced for tungsten production is co-funded by a US tungsten exploration/mining company: https://www.innovationnewsnetwork.com/harnessing-tungsten-fo...

I can only read the free part of the paper (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09203...). I wish it would elaborate more on the challenges with recycling.
by chausen | 2026-02-09 23:05:45+00:00
It brings me peace to see other people thinking this way. You should be an active participant on the highway, making decisions to maximize flow. Leaving space so people can merge, controlling speed to smooth slowdowns, anticipating traffic patterns, etc.

All of the people tailgating are contributing to the congestion.

https://youtu.be/iHzzSao6ypE
by pluto_modadic | 2026-02-09 23:05:49+00:00
This is kinda... rude. Like saying that a GUI doesn't serve a purpose when people could read the TTY.

CI gives you areas for your bash scripts to run in self-contained small runs, that may trigger other runs, in a repeatable fashion on a clean environment, on a GUI anybody in your team can see. It gives you quick integrations into things.

CD lets you repeatedly deploy - without forgeting a step that was only known to Phil, the guy that retired three years ago, remembering all the steps and doing something dependably.

Or... you could do bash scripts? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40SnEd1RWUU (Just use a VPS, bro)
by wqaatwt | 2026-02-09 23:06:22+00:00
> The Dark Ages started when Christianity spread through most of Europe.

1000-1400s AD was a period of extremely rapid (by historical standards) economic, societal and technological progress. Just compare with the highly stagnant (in relative terms) Roman Empire between 0 AD and 400 AD. It was the opposite of the dark ages…

500-800s AD were not great, but plague, climate change and extreme political instability likely had a bigger impact on that than Christianity…
by wavemode | 2026-02-09 23:06:30+00:00
If you're in the US, look into relevant court cases[0][1][2]. The courts tend to hold that algorithms are not patentable - what is patentable would be an invented machine which uses a software algorithm as one of its components. But even then, the machine needs to have some other inventive, patentable physical component.

(This sort of thing tend to confuse people since, the US patent office doesn't check for patent validity before granting patents. So there are a lot of companies that own invalid patents which have simply never been challenged in court.)

If you live elsewhere you should look into the laws of your local jurisdiction, but many places have the same or similar legal doctrine.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottschalk_v._Benson

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parker_v._Flook

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_United_...
by joshpeak05 | 2026-02-09 23:06:38+00:00
There is a certain elegance in the solution here and yet a masterful understanding of distributed systems needing only a few "rules" to become self organising.

Very curious to see this blow up bigger than the ralph loop and tbh probably get acquired by github or stackoverflow for being the information gateway for all public agentic learnings.

Top shelf work.