MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by netsharc | 2026-01-23 09:15:04+00:00
I guess they started with something to offer... we now have cloud feudal "lords", who started by offering services, and then make you follow their altering terms and conditions, who they can change and all you can do is pray that they don't alter it any further. Just like real feudals, the cloud feudals can one day decide you did something wrong, and there's no trial, just direct banishment.

Even worse if your income depend on these feudals (e.g. all the gig-workers who are working without the benefits that exists with an employer-employee relationship).

But to answer your question, I guess it would've started with cooperation between friends/neighbors, the "alpha" person would've led the group of people in some sort of enterprise, his son became the next leader because that's how that was done, this enterprise got bigger and stronger that it encompassed land and resources, and people would want to work for them to earn a living. Heh some even owned navies and colonized places half around the world (the various East India Companies), some are content to work locally (various Mafias).
by shantnutiwari | 2026-01-23 09:15:43+00:00
The autocorrect is a real pain, especially when you are using a correct and grammatical word, but Apple decides, F&ck you, you will use this other word instead.

And the text select has been broken for years, as the site points out. I thought it was a mobile thing until I used an Android, and it just worked.

These are minor irritations, but they are adding up so much so I'm thinking about Android...
by imtringued | 2026-01-23 09:16:03+00:00
I just can't. Watching from Europe, what's happening in the US is what is jokingly referred as "clown world" on the internet, except this time there are real clowns everywhere. Like, how did it end up like this?

You have Trump as president who campaigned on reducing the US trade deficit and government deficit. It turns out there is a lot of fraud and to such an extent that it essentially makes the anti-immigrant sentiment look justified.

The US left cares about optics in a seemingly backwards way. They think exposing the fraud will justify racism and discrimination, so they deny that there ever was any fraud to begin with. This tacit approval makes them look like co-conspirators, which has worse optics than the bad optics they desperately were trying to get away from.

And yet despite these "heroic" attempts at cutting government spending and the mass scale fraud suddenly falling into the lap of republicans so that they can crack down on it, Trump has contributed absolutely nothing towards reducing the deficit. Instead, the deficit is growing so quickly Trump will be overtaking Biden when it comes to driving the country into debt.
by godelski | 2026-01-23 09:16:38+00:00
Why are you leaving them running? Because they are slow to load?

Yes, Neovim supports LSP and it is very very fast.

I'm not sure why any of this is surprising. We're talking about the same company who is speeding up their file browser by loading it at boot time rather than actually trying to fix the actual fucking problems. Why is it surprising that everything else they make is slow and bloated as shit (even more as they've shoving AI into everything)

https://neovim.io/doc/user/lsp.html
by TeMPOraL | 2026-01-23 09:17:20+00:00
> The Newtonian movement is an evidence-backed simplification. The asker-guesser model is a persuasive illusion.

Both are evidence-backed simplifications. The difference is in the amount of evidence and degree of simplification. Both are better than random in their respective domain, and can be useful depending on your tolerance for errors.

Sometimes even a very broad simplification is useful. E.g. it's perfectly valid to assume that π = 3 or even π = 5 to simplify some calculations, if you don't need the value to be more accurate than "non-negative and less than 10". It'll probably cost you something somewhere (e.g. you end up ordering too much paint), but being able to do the math in your head quickly is often worth it.

I could keep inventing examples, but surely you'll be able to come up with some of your own, once you realize there's no hard divide between what's scientific and not. These are just rough categories. In reality, you have models of varying complexity, correlation with reality, and various utility. It's a continuum.

Also:

> Are you really comparing some internet commenter with Newton and the broader scientific community?

Yes. Don't be biased against Internet commenters. Papers don't write themselves ex nihilo, and are generally distillation of existing ideas, not the first place where new ideas are ever published. And scientists are Internet users too.
by attila-lendvai | 2026-01-23 09:17:46+00:00
educational institutions became pretty much obsolete with the advent of the internet (i.e. marginalized the cost of the flow of information).

what we need (if anything besides reputation tracking), is (maybe) a separate institution for testing and issuing diplomas... which, BTW, can be trusted more with QA than the very producers themselves.

producers = QA has always been such a contradiction of schools...
by lelanthran | 2026-01-23 09:17:56+00:00
> What you've discovered is that prices are all made up. If we think about how to price a product, say a chair, from first principles, you'd take the cost of the raw materials, the time it takes you to turn those raw materials into the finished product, add a %age profit on top, and call it a day. In the real world though, that's not how pricing things works. You have a product, which costs $X in raw materials, and then you just... make up a number, $Y. Hopefully, $Y is much greater than $X, and you're able to make a great living off selling your chairs. Maybe you're called Eames and people will pay you $5,500 for your chair/lounger, maybe you're Office Depot and sell them for $129. Maybe you're not very good at chairs, so they're not level and then you can't give them away, not even to your friends.

It's just common-sense though - if the market is willing to pay me $100/widget, why would I sell it for `($10 cost to manufacture + 35% markup)`?

The new lower bound for simple side-hustle apps now is virtually zero. All you need is a computer, electricity, internet and (optionally) $20.
by FrostViper8 | 2026-01-23 09:18:20+00:00
While I believe Lunduke is a dishonest actor. Many of these guys are reacting to something. They think they are pushing back against mega corporations, government surveillance etc. You can watch someone like Sam Bent's or Mental Outlaws YouTube channel and you will start to understand that attitude.

> It's always horrible when your niche get poisoned by this rhetoric.

Tech like a lot of areas of life has been hyper politicised. The best thing you can do is not to play the game at all.
by jofzar | 2026-01-23 09:18:27+00:00
> I don’t know about you, but I think that’s baloney. Proton Support had five full business days to come up with a better excuse. Please tell me, how can I have been any more explicit about opting out of Lumo emails, only to receive “Try Lumo” “From Lumo”, and be told that is not actually a Lumo email?

As someone who is in support in tech (not proton) I can tell you exactly what happened.

Day 1 they already knew which email it was, they probably had other tickets about this, they probably had an open discussion about this with marketing/product team.

Day 2-4 was the support agent arguing with marketing/product about how it's absolute bullshit to send out a AI newsletter when the user has it unticked and what they are going to do so it doesn't happen in the future.

Day 5 is marketing/product telling them that this is Working as designed and theu aren't going to stop this in the future. This is the day the support person works on this email with their team and potentially their manager.

It goes through a couple of "rewrites" for liability/protecting ass. The end result is the email you got, they know you are going to give a bad CSAT/NPS survey and it's going to kill their metrics.

They want nothing more to write and email that says, "Sorry marketing and product are fucking idiots and can't read. I fought for this to be disabled, but told me it's not going to happen, sorry" but culture and then not wanting to lose their jobs is why they didn't send this.

I really hope you didn't give them a bad survey.
by Pooge | 2026-01-23 09:18:43+00:00
I'm born Guesser but evolved into an Asker. However, it depended on whether I was the requester or not; if I wanted to invite someone, I would try to avoid putting them in a position where they had to say "no". However, I didn't mind saying "no" myself.

I would argue with other people that it's impolite to put them in such a position as they may not like to decline.

After discussing it openly with friends and family, I realized that it was okay to say no and people wouldn't mind. This changed me into an asker.

What's funny is that my parents were askers. I guess being introverted made me more of a guesser initially.
by jasode | 2026-01-23 09:20:26+00:00
>I disagree: in as much as I have noticed this far more with AI than any other advancement / fad

I agree with gp that new spam emails that override customers' email marketing preferences is not an "AI" issue.

The problem is that once companies have your email address, their irresistible compulsion to spam you is so great that they will deliberately not honor their own "Communication Preferences" that supposedly lets customers opt out of all marketing emails.

Even companies that are mostly good citizens about obeying customers' email marketing preferences still end up making exceptions. Examples:

Amazon has a profile page to opt out of all email marketing and it works... except ... it doesn't work to stop the new Amazon Pharmacy and Amazon Health marketing emails. Those emails do not have "Unsubscribe" link and there is no extra setting in the customer profile to prevent them.

Apple doesn't send out marketing messages and obeys their customers' marketing email preferences ... except .. when you buy a new iPhone and then they send emails about "Your new iPhone lets you try Apple TV for 3 months free!" and then more emails about "You have Apple Music for 3 months free!"

Neither of those aggressive emails have anything to do with AI. Companies just like to make exceptions to their rules to spam you. The customer's email inbox is just too valuable a target for companies to ignore.

That said, I have 3 gmail.com addresses and none of them have marketing spam emails from Google about Gemini AI showing up in the Primary inbox. Maybe it's commendable that Google is showing incredible restraint so far. (Or promoting Gemini in Chrome and web apps is enough exposure for them.)
by kergonath | 2026-01-23 09:20:26+00:00
> He performs a heroic act

Does he, though? I don’t think he acts heroically even once. Though I would not be surprise if Pratchett actually defies expectations and made him a genuine hero once or twice; it’s been a while since I read the Discworld books. Rather, acts that look heroic from the outside if you squint happen to him despite his best, incompetent efforts to stay out of it.
DeepSeek's mHC: Stabilizing Training Divergence from 3,000x to 1.6x
by Research_Brief | 2026-01-23 09:20:49+00:00
While much of the attention on DeepSeek focuses on cost efficiency, the true engineering breakthrough lies in a single mechanism: Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections (mHC).

The core value of this research can be summarized by its impact on stability and its resulting prospects:

1. Stabilizing Training Divergence Unconstrained "Hyper-Connections" diversify connectivity but lose the identity mapping property, causing signals to explode. mHC acts as a mathematical anchor by projecting mixing matrices onto the Birkhoff polytope. In practice, this suppresses the potential divergence factor from a catastrophic 3,000x down to a stable 1.6x. This stability is the prerequisite for everything else.

2. Two Major Prospects

Breaking the Scaling Law Plateau: By eliminating the "instability wall," mHC allows Scaling Laws to continue progressing even as we increase model depth and complexity.

Stable Scaling of Low-Bit Models: It provides the necessary foundation for scaling ternary-weight models like BitNet, which were previously considered too volatile to train at massive scale.

I view this mathematical stability not as a radical shift, but as a necessary prerequisite for exploring more efficient, low-precision architectures that were previously considered too unstable for large-scale training.
by vjk800 | 2026-01-23 09:21:26+00:00
Can you? I imagine e.g. Google is using material not available to the public to train their models (unsencored Google books, etc.). Also, the chat bots, like Gemini, are not just pure LLMs anymore, but they also utilize other tools as part of their computation. I've asked Gemini computationally heavy questions and it successfully invokes Python scripts to answer them. I imagine it can also use other tools than Python, some of which might not even be publicly known.

I'm not sure what the situation is currently, but I can easily see private data and private resources leading to much better AI tools, which can not be matched by open source solutions.
by wooger | 2026-01-23 09:21:53+00:00
Why?

At worst you can just pay extra to have a smaller or more luxurious private self driving taxi vs. something more like a bus, shared with others. The appeal of owning and having to maintain something like this is nil. You're not in control, there's no ownership of the driving experience, and if appropriately compliant with the law, they should all drive the same speed.
by epsteingpt | 2026-01-23 09:22:05+00:00
We're all sinners in Christianity. The cynicism is earned and why we're not saved by works but by Grace.

LLM's here are a tool for accessing old works, which happen to coincide with my faith.

If you're using LLMs to preserve and explore indigenous texts and languages, that is an absolutely wonderful thing to do. I wish you great success.

There are an increasing number of orphan / dying / dead languages, and there could be a project to 'resurrect them' and comprehensively translate their texts to spread them more widely.

I wish you great success on your journey!
by pell | 2026-01-23 09:22:21+00:00
I find your critique not very sensible. Point-of-sale systems are not necessarily tied to the payment terminal just because they communicate to each other. If companies choose to use Stripe they do have to set up their own invoicing and tax handling. Your comment makes it sound like Stripe hides this fact and thus users end up not handling tax or invoices because they were mislead. But if you run any kind of businesses being on top of taxes is obviously paramount. I don’t quite get your gripe here.
by kevin061 | 2026-01-23 09:23:38+00:00
What I did is make the scripts ping uptime kuma https://github.com/louislam/uptime-kuma

This has two advantages. First, if cron jobs are not running at all for some reason, the timeout will notify you.

Second, you can also manually trigger error conditions by pushing to uptime kuma with an error message, exactly the same as if you used cron email notifications.

If the uptime kuma endpoint is pinged with s higher frequency than the timeout you configured it to, then no alerts are fired.
by cachius | 2026-01-23 09:23:39+00:00
There's also another partial Win32 reimplementation in retrowin32, with the different goal of being a Windows emulator for the web, not for Linux or as alternate OS, at https://evmar.github.io/retrowin32/ It thus has an even more sparse path/fileapi.h implementation [2] than WINE and ReactOS. Written in Rust.

[2] https://github.com/evmar/retrowin32/blob/main/win32/dll/kern...
by fsmedberg | 2026-01-23 09:24:10+00:00
I created an account just to say that your map is amazing! It's beautiful and very interesting to look at, because of all the details. Thank you for documenting your method of creating this! I've been looking for a way to create a similar map for the island I'm living at, and maybe your method will work for this. Thank you so much for documenting the steps!
by ZeroGravitas | 2026-01-23 09:24:19+00:00
I was confused by your mention of "clown world" as I'm more familiar with it being used by far right people who support Trump to undermine basic government competence and encourage anti-democratic nihilism.

Your whole middle section reinforced that, as it sounds like the kind of things that Trump voters believe.

So there's your answer, people who consume similar information sources as yourself voted themselves into danger and poverty by electing an angry bullshitter.

Maybe there's a lesson there.
by rurban | 2026-01-23 09:24:58+00:00
I'd really like to have studied in these times, where it's so much easier with all the new tools. I could have been a triple doctor.

At work I've automated tools to write automated technical certificates for wind parks.

I've wrote code automatically to solve problems I couldn't solve by my own. Complicated Linear Algebra stuff, which was always too hard.

I should have written papers automatically, at least my wife writes her reports with ChatGPT already.

Others are writing film scripts by tools.

Good times.
by setopt | 2026-01-23 09:25:14+00:00
Indeed. I received 28 unwanted emails of this kind in January so far (just counted), which is a bit more than once per day, despite quite avidly unsubscribing from this kind of emails. This month I had to unsubscribe from ChatGPT and GitHub emails of this kind too, although I don’t recall opting in to them in the first place and neither of them spammed me until recently.
by 9rx | 2026-01-23 09:25:30+00:00
Yes, it is not too much to require that that if you offer something to someone that the receiving party is able to have a conversation with you. You can still reject them in the end, but being able to ask the people involved questions is a reasonable expectation — but many of these big tech companies have made it effectively impossible.

If you want to live life as a hermit, good on ya, but then maybe accept that life and don't offer other people stuff?
by PunchyHamster | 2026-01-23 09:26:00+00:00
Well, for non-standalone apps you also need some degree of ongoing support, at the very least to patch the security bug in your app or update libraries that have those.

and when whatever framework or big lib you use decide "well we're making new version, everything you made will break, have fun", that needs engineering too.

Buy once model is pretty much only for standalone, offline apps. Anything online and you have to start to worry about supporting new TLS versions or having to update certificate store (if app for some bizzare reason ignores system one)
by mrkeen | 2026-01-23 09:26:05+00:00
Anthropic provides an LLM service.

Anthropic banned the author for doing nothing wrong, and called him an organisation for some reason.

In this case, all he lost was access to a service which develops a split personality and starts shouting at itself, until it gets banned, rather than completing a task.

Google also provides access to LLMs.

Google could also ban him for doing nothing wrong, and could refer to him as an organisation, in which case he would lose access to services providing him actual value (e-mail, photos, documents, and phone OS.)

Another possibility is there (which was my first reading before I changed my mind and wrote the above):

Google routes through 3rd-party LLMs as part of its service ("link to a google docs form, with a textbox where I tried to convince some Claude C"). The author does nothing wrong, but the Claude C reading his Google Docs form could start shouting at itself until it gets Google banned, at which point Google's services go down, and the author again loses actually valuable services.
by nasretdinov | 2026-01-23 09:26:16+00:00
I honestly don't understand such negative response tone from the comments. Yes, it does promote Azure, but that's to be expected from a company with is part owned by Microsoft :).

The main point of the article is that it's actually not that hard to live with a single primary Postgres for your transactional workloads (emphasis on _transactional_), and if OpenAI with their 800M+ users can still survive on a single primary (with 50(!) read replicas), so could you, especially before you've reached your first 100M users.

Any non-distributed database or setup is orders of magnitude easier to design for, and it's also typically much more cost efficient too, both in terms of hardware and software too.

There are some curious details, e.g.:

- you can ship WAL to 50 read replicas simultaneously from a single primary and be fine
- you can even be using an ORM and still get decent performance
- schema changes are possible, and you can just cancel a slow ALTER to prevent production impact
- pgbouncer is ok even for OpenAI scale

There are so many things that contradict current "conventional wisdom" based on the experience from what was possible with the hardware 10+ (or even 20+) years ago. Times finally changed and I really welcome articles like these that show how you can greatly simplify your production setup by leveraging the modern hardware.
by KineticLensman | 2026-01-23 09:26:40+00:00
> they invented a steam engine[0]

The Aeolipile was not a functional steam engine - it was essentially a two-spouted kettle that span on an axle. It had no way of maintaining enough pressure (no valves) to do useful work and the metal working techniques of the day weren't good enough to contain useful pressure without exploding. Real steam engines only came about after people had spent centuries building cannons that didn't explode.

The first practical application of steam engines was pumping water out of deep coal mines (which the Romans didn't have or need) where it didn't matter if the engine was both underpowered and massive. Even after these engines became commercially viable, it took another 70 years or so for the engines to become small enough to be mounted on vehicles.
by sjw987 | 2026-01-23 09:26:42+00:00
This seems like an incredibly defensive take for vibe coding personal apps.

Replacing some subscription app like Any.do, Google Calendar, fitness/diet tracking or basically any other CRUD-centric app, needn't be insecure, and a semi-competent developer can easily host it, continue further development (with or without vibe coding) and secure it. There's huge benefit for software developers that do find themselves using many of these apps with active subscriptions to make their own, tailored for themselves, and cut down their spending.

Yes, when it comes to commercialising such software, more work needs to be done (mostly in support and marketing), but for personal use it's fine. The author explicitly states they don't trust vibe coding enough to turn these into products.

The writing is hardly on the wall for all these companies which make little todo list apps and calendars. The vast majority of people could get a LLM to produce an alternative but the lacking they have in basic software engineering would eventually be a hurdle to further development. Most people will continue spending $1.00/month here, and $2.99/month there. There's no reason why software engineers need to do that anymore, unless paying this gives them access to some sort of content repository (music, books) or actual advanced software.