MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AdieuToLogic | 2026-01-01 06:20:19+00:00
>> I simply extrapolated your stated position by applying it to another, relatable, situation.

> The extrapolation led to something I didn't imply.

I extrapolated my interpretation of your position to make the point that to "revise and refine" is equivalent to "generate", in that the latter is the effect of the former without shrouding the source of the work.

> ... I'm sure that'd have been very welcome if you hadn't posed it in a combative manner that comes across as a 'take down' of my comment.

This is your interpretation. Mine is that I have not made ad hominem responses nor anything similar.

> So your extrapolation stands well on its own. I just don't see the need to pose it as a sort of "take down" on my comment.

This is the second time you've used the phrase "take down." Having a differing opinion and expressing such is not a "take down."

> What I find really funny is that in reality like you, I detest LLM-based plagiarism too. So we must be in agreement?

In that we most certainly are. In addition, I believe those who use LLMs to produce content as if it were their own work is unacceptable. This might be different for someone else, depending on one's definition of what is plagiarism.

>> And you might want to review same after originally authoring

> I have. I've found nothing in the guidelines that forbid me from ...

Guidelines do not forbid, they suggest for the betterment of everyone's experience.

> ... expressing my frustrations over the abundant supply of trite comments.

See:

Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but
please don't be rigidly or generically negative.

Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at
the rest of the community.

Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other
people's work.

> The HN overlords may not pay heed to my request and that's fine.

There are no "HN overlords", only Zuul[0].

(that last one was a joke)

0 - https://ghostbusters.fandom.com/wiki/Zuul
by simonw | 2026-01-01 06:20:21+00:00
If you're not assuming good faith what are you assuming here? What's my motivation?

"buttressing commentary on someone else's blog post"

That's how link blogs work. I wrote more about my approach to that here: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/22/link-blog/

(And yes, there I go again linking to something I've written from a comment. It's entirely relevant to the point I am making here. That's why I have a blog - so I can put useful information in one place.)

I'll also note that I don't ever share links to my link blog posts on Hacker News myself - I don't think they're the right format for a HN post. I can't help if other people share them here: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=simonwillison.net
by kombine | 2026-01-01 06:20:51+00:00
Happy New Year, everyone! 2025 was tumultuous but in the end I accomplished my professional goal of the last 10 years: transition from academia to industry. I went through several job rejections, decided to commit to my research project and a startup idea, endured months-long unemployment and wound up at an up-and-coming industrial R&D AI lab. I feel like I drew a lucky ticket, but this is only a beginning and I need to double down on my goals in 2026. While the locus of my attention was on survival, I drifted away from someone I loved dearly and eventually I lost them. My newfound success has tasted bittersweet.

I also established a sleep schedule with consistent going to bed time at or before 10pm and waking up before 7am; this did wonders for my productivity. I am still affected by anxiety and looking for ways to improve my focus in 2026. I am hoping that it will be my most prolific year.

I could not have done this all without several of my close friends and collaborators, to whom I owe a big thank you.
by nrhrjrjrjtntbt | 2026-01-01 06:21:04+00:00
Is autopilot takeoff a hard problem, or is there just little incentive to do it?

I.e. if takeoff is dangerous you dont do it. Making takeoff generslly easier. The option to not land doesnt exist (insert old joke about a good landing)! So landing may have harder problems like wind sheer, thunder storms, tailwind, visibility, and more incentive to take load off pilots with automation.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2026-01-01 06:21:45+00:00
You say "it's humble by billionaire standards" - I think it's relatively humble by ~$300k a year standards. The thing I love about this house is that I think it represents just about the maximum real utility one can get from a home.

He had 3 kids, and a 3500 sq ft house is, IMO, an extremely average size for any decently paid professional where I live with a family that size. It basically looks like something that had everything he needed, and anything beyond that that you so often see in rich people houses is just for show and bling.
by stinkbeetle | 2026-01-01 06:22:35+00:00
No I'm not failing to at all. You are.

> I have read the full conversation, and you're still failing to recognize how the original post has a valid point. You have admitted yourself that you create online accounts without gender identification, so your own experience is different from women that do create gendered accounts.

The assertion was that women find posting on the internet too dangerous. Not that they find it too dangerous when using gendered names. See, you haven't even followed the first thing!

Nevermind the fact that the entire idiotic assertion is obviously invalidated by all the countless women who do post on the internet, and with gendered names even. For the ones who don't post or don't use gendered names it's not "danger" that drives the choice. Annoyance, disgust, unsolicited attention, whatever it is. No need to make things up, or make stupid claims like "men can't understand", it doesn't help anybody.

Every single assertion made (without evidence) is trivially false.

And finally, disagreeing and debating something is not "reinforcing" the assertions that it's too dangerous for women to post on the internet, that's just stupid. And by continuing to argue with me you're just reinforcing that you're an angry racist misogynist.

See how stupid that is?
by elwatto | 2026-01-01 06:24:07+00:00
Hard disagree. Culture isn’t the problem, org structure is. You can call it an experiment or even a hack. Every team is already innovating within their scope, and splitting becomes easier as that scope grows.

What is too much is asking an Engineering Manager to start a completely independent product line that may go nowhere. It’s far more effective to rely on senior, staff+ engineers who don’t need management and have experience taking things from 0 to 1. They can build an MVP quick. Once we see real signals of PMF, we can then build a team around it (or drop it)
by martin-t | 2026-01-01 06:24:31+00:00
Sure, but I want everybody to do it. I've seen too many times where a person presented an idea to a group, the idea was publicly shunned by the group, then later a few members of the group discussed the idea in private amongst each other as good.

When I was the one who presented something poorly, I've even had people who publicly shunned it privately tell me they support the idea but the group rejects is so they reject it publicly too. This is dumb.
by nomel | 2026-01-01 06:24:37+00:00
What are you basing this on?

I've swapped ~579 keys (6 MacBook keyboards, and one magic keyboard) with exactly one broken plastic bit from the very first key tried, before looking up the youtube video on how to do it. Damaging the metal retaining frame is impossible when removing or installing them, so the technique you used was very very wrong. They're easily and trivially pop off, if done right. Great care is not needed, with the whole processes taking me around ~10 minutes.
by boulos | 2026-01-01 06:27:44+00:00
How would you distinguish the article from an honest write up about transistors? That is, you know about his crusade in ML, but if you didn't, how would you decide that this article is written in bad faith or not?

I agree that context matters, and I had the same thought as you. But does that mean that anything he writes on the topic of "who was first" is inherently tainted?
by least | 2026-01-01 06:27:48+00:00
The difference between those is the person is actually using this text editor that they built with the help of LLMs. There's plenty of people creating novel scripts and programs that can accommodate their own unique specifications.

If a programmer creating their own software (or contracting it out to a developer) would be a bespoke suit and using software someone or some company created without your input is an off the rack suit, I'd liken these sorts of programs as semi-bespoke, or made to measure.

"LLMs are literally technology that can only reproduce the past" feels like an odd statement. I think the point they're going for is that it's not thinking and so it's not going to produce new ideas like a human would? But literally no technology does that. That is all derived from some human beings being particularly clever.

LLMs are tools. They can enable a human to create new things because they are interfacing with a human to facilitate it. It's merging the functional knowledge and vision of a person and translating it into something else.
by sedivy94 | 2026-01-01 06:28:00+00:00
Novelty of stimulus is a huge factor, especially as training continues over years. Failure from a set of 20 is very different than failure from a set of 5, and bodybuilders will periodize their training to cycle through the different flavors of stimulus. I think a big contributor might be neuromuscular adaptation. Cycling through those different intensities over training periods measured in months will make this apparent anecdotally.
by LorenPechtel | 2026-01-01 06:28:26+00:00
The problem is you can't draw non-arbitrary lines.

Consider an example I ran into a few years back. It was a web project, lots and lots of closeups of female genitals. Porn? No--educational, the purpose was to provide as wide as possible a sampling of what's normal so people don't get focused on the idealized representations in porn.

One of the sports companies did something similar with breasts, it was accepted.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2026-01-01 06:29:56+00:00
> Most of compounding magic begins at ages 60-65, a time where most investors start to die out.

Percentage-wise, few wealthy investors are dying out at ages of 60-65. In the US, males that make it to age 60 have a life expectancy of 81-82. But that's across all men - life expectancy is strongly correlated with wealth in the US, so a man in the top 1% could very reasonably expect to live to very late 80s/90s.

Nevermind that Buffet was still fabulously rich when he was 60, so none of your logic makes any sense to me.
by riazrizvi | 2026-01-01 06:31:48+00:00
Cooking at home saves you time if you do it right. A slow cooker, frozen meat, frozen veg, stock powder. Cook a batch and put into containers for the week. It’s not hard to develop a healthy, cheap, quick approach to eating. Most people find ways to keep justifying their existing opinions, that’s the real problem of poverty. It’s rare that people adopt an experimental approach to their problems to learn unexpected solutions. So to my mind, poor is more about being rigid, rather than a lack resources.
by signatoremo | 2026-01-01 06:32:08+00:00
There are about 80,000 non-essential helicopter flights in Manhattan annually -[0]. That means a) there is a lot of demand, and b) it’s been pretty safe, with accidents being very rare.

Many people are against helicopters on the grounds of noise, safety and pollution. Electric taxis will be welcomed once they are certified and economical. They only need to do better than helicopters.

[0] - https://stopthechopnynj.org/frequently-asked-questions/
by nezi | 2026-01-01 06:32:27+00:00
This paper isn’t saying that it doesn’t matter what program you do, it’s saying that other variables, not directly related to the method of weight training, matter more. It also assumes that you can extrapolate data from one individual training each limb with a different program to if that individual performs either program on both limbs. Maybe there are carryover affects to the lower load limb that you get from training heavier with the higher load limb that you wouldn’t from training both at a lower intensity.
by LorenPechtel | 2026-01-01 06:33:24+00:00
No, the tracking data is anonymous and not a threat to the user.

The problem is that it exposed the locations it's users were going to. Anonymous, but a bunch of people going somewhere suggests either that it's interesting or that there's something there. (Doesn't always mean it's useful information. I was looking at the Strava global map, what in the world is this trail in my usual hiking area?? I eventually realized the reason it was bonkers was it was a ski run.)
by District5524 | 2026-01-01 06:34:39+00:00
It's not about invalidating your conclusion, but I'm not so sure about law having a right answer. At a very basic level, like hypothetical conduct used in basic legal training matrerials or MCQs, or in criminal/civil code based situations in well-abstracting Roman law-based jurisdictions, definitely.
But the actual work, at least for most lawyers is to build on many layers of such abstractions to support your/client's viwepoint.
And that level is already about persuasion of other people, not having the "right" legal argument or applying the most correct case found. And this part is not documented well, approaches changes a lot, even if law remains the same.
Think of family law or law of succession - does not change much over centuries but every day, worldwide, millions of people spend huge amounts of money and energy on finding novel ways to turn those same paragraphs to their advantage and put their "loved" ones and relatives in a worse position.
by PeterHolzwarth | 2026-01-01 06:35:15+00:00
Just an innocent bystander here, so forgive me, but I think the flack you are getting is because you appear to be responding to claims that these tools will reinvent everything and introduce a new halcyon age of creation - when, at least on hacker news, and definitely in this thread, no one is really making such claims.

Put another way, and I hate to throw in the now over-used phrase, but I feel you may be responding to a strawman that doesn't much appear in the article or the discussion here: "Because these tools don't achieve a god-like level of novel perfection that no one is really promising here, I dismiss all this sorta crap."

Especially when I think you are also admitting that the technology is a fairly useful tool on its own merits - a stance which I believe represents the bulk of the feelings that supporters of the tech here on HN are describing.

I apologize if you feel I am putting unrepresentative words in your mouth, but this is the reading I am taking away from your comments.
by zx8080 | 2026-01-01 06:36:07+00:00
Ublock origin helps a lot. (While lite version fails). It's such a shame Google rolled out Manifest v3, but understandable they hate it as dangerous for their ads business.

We are doomed to start happily use a browser from the major ads company (chrome & -based ones) and think it's fine.

It's not. This Manifest V3 issue is probably just the beginning of enshittification of web user experience. It's easy to imagine a bunch of much worse scenarious.
by LorenPechtel | 2026-01-01 06:37:32+00:00
You realize Nixon's attempt to show pornography to be harmful actually concluded that they could find no evidence of any harm even to minors, let alone adults. (That is not to say that an adult couldn't use it in an attempt to victimize a minor.) And note how the discussion of the harm stems from an unrealistic portrayal of sex, not from simply portraying sex.
by itchyouch | 2026-01-01 06:40:30+00:00
When considering NAC's mechanisms, it seems that it's efficacy is likely dependent on an individuals's glutathione status.

I doubt that folks with a solid diet, high in sulfur would find much benefit from NAC.

However, as someone who's gotten to use it first hand and have dealt with lifelong, mild inflammation (puffy fingers, clogged nose here and there), it's definitely been a huge quality of life enhancer.
by pm90 | 2026-01-01 06:40:48+00:00
To a certain extent this is true. You shouldn’t be going into debt just because your income level allows you to get more loans etc. But once you reach a certain income threshold it doesn’t really matter.

So what was the point of him living a frugal, simple lifestyle? I would argue that its just something he was used to and found joy in, and thats ok. Some people like that. Others might want to use their money to unlock new experiences that come with it. Thats ok too.
by nineteen999 | 2026-01-01 06:41:13+00:00
Thankyou and same to you. Last year for me was rough in many ways, watching a classmate from my high school go on trial for probably the world's most famous triple-murder in recent memory.

It affected me so deeply and of course I didn't understand why, so I went head first into self-discovery to try and understand it. Not sure I 100% have the answer yet but well on the way.

On the bright side, I managed to keep the weight off I had spent 4 years losing (35 kg!) and of course work is as wonderful as ever for me. So all that was good.

Happy new year all - may 2026 be better year for everyone.
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2026-01-01 06:41:32+00:00
>With good capture tech, you can keep keep doing some important
CO₂ producing activities.

We're not asking people to stop breathing while there's no good DAC on the horizon, but I wonder what were the other important CO₂ producing activities you intend to do less of.

The following isn't breaking the law of thermodynamics, it's just wilfully ignoring it..

Gemini:
>To offset a single typical gasoline car's emissions (around 4.6 metric tons CO2/year), you'd need a substantial fraction of a large DAC plant, as current large plants aim for 1 million tons/year, meaning many tiny DACs or a small portion of one large one; as of late 2025, the largest operating DAC (Mammoth) captures 36k tons, requiring about 80 such facilities to match one average ICE car's annual output, highlighting the massive scale-up needed, with projects like Texas's Stratos targeting 500k tons/year (equivalent to ~108 cars).
by klipt | 2026-01-01 06:44:56+00:00
> Were it not for the various missile shields, the Israeli state wouldn't act with wanton abandon against its own citizens and its neighbours. All of the various war crimes and terror attacks are a direct consequence of the effectiveness of a "defensive" missile shield.

I'm not sure that's true, before Iron Dome, Israel would respond to many rockets from Gaza by firing mortars back at where the rocket was launched from, often the roof of an apartment building or similar, causing civilian casualties.

After Iron Dome, a lot of rockets were simply intercepted and ignored, because there was no longer political pressure from Israelis seeing rockets land in their villages and wanting to hit back.
by raducu | 2026-01-01 06:45:04+00:00
> not the mass used.

Completely anecdotal, but when I was 18, in highschool, I trained in the gym in my hometown, supervised with a trainer, 12 reps per muscle group, very modest gains.

I move to university, start reading a fitness forum where people were saying do max 6 reps if you want big gains.

I also started supplementing with whey protein, and within 3 months the gains were spectacular, everybody noticed, I felt on fire, best time of my life, I miss so much how great I felt in my own body.

I've seen other colleagues and how they trained -- I can say there was 100% correlation that those people who were not training hard also did not have big gains.
People who had enough breath left in them to chat in the gym simply did not gain as much as people I saw as training hard.

Also for me, the 6 reps to exhaustion felt completely different then 12 reps (again, to complete exhaustion) -- immediately after the training it felt amazing to be alive, the world became a comfortable place, my anxiety completely vanished, and in the night and morning after an intense training (especially the legs and back) the erections and libido boost were out of this world, something I never felt with the 12 reps regimen.
by refurb | 2026-01-01 06:46:20+00:00
> Whether or not they're credible to you, they're still the #2 ranked general medicine journal in the world, second only to the NEJM.

Their ranking is based on how often papers are referenced in total, not the validity of any one paper. As I said, they been criticized for serious lapses in publishing fraudulent papers.

> The stuff you're citing from a half century ago isn't relevant to the work they've been doing when Musk said "Time for it to die."

I'm sorry what? It's the same organization? The fact that USAID was funding paramilitary organizations during war tells you USAID has nothing to do with aid.

> USAID actually was was a vital tool of US soft power and influence globally....if you believe that it's important to wipe out the last remaining vestiges of the United States' perception as 'the good guys' then by all means it was very important to stop their work immediately.

So you're saying unless the US can project soft power and influence (which is ALWAYS to the US' benefit, it absolutely is not altruistic) it won't be viewed as the "good guys"?

Wut?

That makes no sense.
by triceratops | 2026-01-01 06:48:05+00:00
> I don't believe the goal of 'age verification' has anything to do with children.

Some people pushing for it are sincere. I believe keeping children away from social media or adult content online is good. But I also believe most of the existing proposals to do it dangerously erode adults' privacy. And that's the real end goal for many politicians.

Implementing a fully anonymous, pretty-good-but-not-perfect age verification system can cut the legs out from all the demands to upload ID to "protect the children". I've proposed a relatively simple one that doesn't rely on zero knowledge proofs or something else the general public can't understand.,
by dagmx | 2026-01-01 06:48:20+00:00
This is demonstrably not true.

He has fairly equal representation as the other founders on their history page

https://www.pixar.com/our-story

He also is directly mentioned in the Disney+ docuseries on ILM, and was part of Catmul’s retrospective on Toy Story as recently as this year

https://youtu.be/q1Uq8b2ooVk?si=zjHSHjGHtymH-kKy

Pixar and Disney haven’t been shying away from his involvement in their history
by Razengan | 2026-01-01 06:50:25+00:00
My experience with AI so far: It's still far from "butler" level assistance for anything beyond simple tasks.

I posted about my failures to try to get them to review my bank statements [0] and generally got gaslit about how I was doing it wrong, that I if trust them to give them full access to my disk and terminal, they could do it better.

But I mean, at that point, it's still more "manual intelligence" than just telling someone what I want. A human could easily understand it, but AI still takes a lot of wrangling and you still need to think from the "AI's PoV" to get the good results.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46374935
by hatefulheart | 2026-01-01 06:51:35+00:00
Do you think everyone you speak to online is this misinformed or has these takes?

I’ve read and listened to enough of Linus to know he says this himself. The Linux kernel is nothing without the maintainers, this is easily observable and everyone knows it.

You see the reason you shouldn’t go into detective work is because you’d be terrible at it, not because it’s non-trivial.
by triceratops | 2026-01-01 06:52:16+00:00
I have less than zero interest in this, or any, business. I don't have any interested friends either. Any other baseless accusations you want to throw at me?

> It’s not a problem that needs to be solved by building a market for porn licenses.

You're blind if you can't see the rising wave of legislation that will make us upload ID to use the internet to "protect the children". The problem being solved is "protect the children without uploading ID".