MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by barishnamazov | 2026-01-06 02:49:23+00:00
The key finding here is the reversal of the relationship between writing complexity and paper quality.

Traditionally, sophisticated writing correlated with higher-quality research (or at least higher status/effort). This paper argues that post-LLM, we are seeing a flood of manuscripts that use complex, polished language but contain substantively weaker scientific contribution.

They claim LLM adoption increases output by up to 89%, which is a massive productivity shock. If the cost of generating looks-like-science prose drops to near zero, the signal-to-noise ratio in peer review is going to crash. We are entering the era of the polished turd, and likely worse case of publish and perish [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publish_or_perish
by mulmen | 2026-01-06 02:49:39+00:00
> Ask their managers? But then how do their managers verify?

It's a hierarchical org chart. If you're really not sure ask Sundar.

It's likely any Googler can verify the identity of any other by looking up their username but it's unlikely that the same tool would do something like tell you how the YouTube recommendation algorithm works or who would know that.

They will know the names of frequent collaborators and something about the scope of relevant work but it's not like everyone at Google needs intimate knowledge of every workstream. At that scale it's unlikely anyone has the full picture.
by tokioyoyo | 2026-01-06 02:50:12+00:00
> but when did tech ever reduce pricing while maintaining quality on a provided service in the long run

That's an old world that we experienced in 2000s, and maybe in early 2010s, where we cared about the quality on a provided service in the long run. For anything web-app-general-stuff related, that's long gone, as everyone (reads: mostly everyone) has very short attention span, and what is needed is "if the thing i desire can be done right now". In long run? Who cares. I keep seeing this in every day life, at work, discussions with my previous clients and etc.

Once again, I wish it wasn't true, but nothing is pointing that it's not true.
by eliasdejong | 2026-01-06 02:50:15+00:00
Being schemaless is deliberate design decision as it eliminates the need for managing and building schema files. By not requiring schema, messages are always readable to arbitrary consumers.

If you want schema, it must be done by the application through runtime type checking. All messages contain type information. Though I do see the value of adding pydantic-like schema checking in the future.
by the_af | 2026-01-06 02:50:24+00:00
"Our" people?

That kind of moral calculus simply doesn't track with me: I'm neither from the US nor Japan, plus I think considerations of "civilization" fly out the window once you start thinking like this.

But also, it's a kind of goalpost shifting. Either the calculations were the justification, in which case it matters they were right, or they weren't. It's not right to argue "well, the actual numbers don't matter because...".
by cuba1111 | 2026-01-06 02:50:25+00:00
Having visited Cuba over the past 30+ years more that 42 times, was the first U.S. citizen to be approved by the Cuban Ministry of Education to teach U.S. History in English to. 30 Cuban 3rd year English majors, led the North Carolina Department of Agriculture's 1st agribusiness delegation to Cuba consisting of 42 NC agribusiness leaders, having led several college/university 3-week study abroad groups to Cuba, having traveled from one end of Cuba to the other staying in casaparticulares with Cuban families, having met first-hand with Cubans in and around Santiago de Cuba who knew Frank Pais, a great Cuban Revolutionary hero and son of a Cuban Baptist pastor who was murdered by Batista police at the age of 23 years and having done research on Frank in El Cana and the 1st Baptist Church of Santiago de Cuba where Frank was born. I know Cuba. The late Wayne Smith, President Carter's Ambassador-emissary to Cuba was a dear friend of mine with whom I learned much regarding the rocky relationship between the U.S. and Cuba. Though Fidel Castro remains a negative figure to most U.S. citizens, he will be remembered for freeing Cuba from over 500 years of foreign powers being in control of Cuba (Spain & the USA) Castro gave Cuba her sovereignty - something Trump will never understand nor will he be able to steal it from the people of Cuba. Trump is an evil, power mongering man with a total absence of moral or ethical values. He has corrupt designs on Greenland, Canada and other areas of South America. Trump must be stopped!
by T-R | 2026-01-06 02:50:32+00:00
The article seems to assume readers are already familiar with the context, or maybe that they'll stop to read the original paper. For those who aren't familiar, Selective Applicative Functors were presented as part of the development of the Haxl library at Facebook (after they hired a series of prominent Haskellers like author of "Real World Haskell", Bryan O'Sullivan, and GHC Co-Developer Simon Marlow). Haxl is a batching framework for Haskell (to, e.g., solve the "N+1 database query problem"), which later inspired the various DataLoader libraries in other language ecosystems.

In Haskell, there's a lot of desire to be able to write effectful code as you normally would, but with different types to do things like restrict the available actions (algebraic effects) or do optimizations like batching. The approaches generally used for this (Free Monads) do this by producing an AST; Haskell's "do" notation transforms the sequential code into Monadic "bind" calls for your AST's type (like turning .then() into .flatMap() calls, if you're from Javascript), and then the AST can be manipulated before being interpreted/executed. This works, but it's fundamentally limited by the fact that the "bind" operation takes a callback to decide what to do next - a callback is arbitrary code - your "bind" implementation can't look into the it to see what it might do, so there's no room to "look ahead" to do runtime optimization.

Another approach is to slide back to something less powerful than Moands, Applicative Functors, where the structure of the computation is known in advance, but the whole point of using Monads is that they can decide what to do next based on the runtime results of the last operation - that they accept a callback - so by switching to Applicatives, by definition you're giving up the ability to make runtime choices like deciding not to run a query if the last one got no results.

Selective Functors were introduced as a middle ground - solidifying the possible decisions ahead of time, while still allowing changes based on runtime information - for example, choosing from a set of pre-defined SQL queries, rather than just running a function that generates an arbitrary one.
by faidit | 2026-01-06 02:50:41+00:00
Google search quality was deliberately harmed to boost ad revenue. Forcing you to search multiple times and refine your query means you see more ads and are more likely to click on them. Ads were also obviously prioritized over real search results long ago. The good guys within Google who wanted to preserve search quality lost the internal debate to the ad people. Emails that surfaced in the recent antitrust case strongly indicated this.
by glenstein | 2026-01-06 02:51:01+00:00
Google's final email seems to abandon any reference to a dispute of identity. Which is interesting since they are comfortable volunteering that as the relevant issue for the first two emails.

By omitting reference to the issue they raised previously, they don't hang the procedural legitimacy on that question.

If they were going to stick with their choice regardless of whether they were satisfied on the question of identity, it's puzzling why they volunteered it.
by tokioyoyo | 2026-01-06 02:52:02+00:00
The thing about beginners (and I'm sure we can all relate to them from our past) is they won't really know which path is good or bad. In roguelike, when you make a mistake, you kinda know why you made a mistake and how you got there. For beginners, even if you have version control, you never developed that "sense of what feels right". Or "there HAS TO BE a simpler way of doing it, i just have to ask" sense. I have no idea how to describe it, but I think you might get what I mean?
by eyberg | 2026-01-06 02:52:17+00:00
> Escaping a properly set up container is a kernel 0day.

Not it is not. In fact many of the container escapes we see are because of bugs in the container runtimes themselves which can be quite different in their various implementations. CVE-2025-31133 was published 2? months ago and had nothing at all do with the kernel - just like many container escapes don't.
by staticassertion | 2026-01-06 02:53:23+00:00
The kernel policy is that any distro that isn't using a rolling release kernel is unpatched and vulnerable, so "reasonably up-to-date" is going to lean heavily on what you consider "reasonable".

LPEs abound - unprivileged user ns was a whole gateway that was closed, io-uring was hot for a while, ebpf is another great target, and I'm sure more and more will be found every year as has been the case. Seccomp and unprivileged containers etc make a huge different to stomp out a lot of the attack surface, you can decide how comfortable you are with that though.
by shatsky | 2026-01-06 02:53:34+00:00
I believe NixOS-like "build time binding" is the answer. Especially with Rust "if it compiles, it works". Software shares code in form of libraries, but any set of installed software built against some concrete version of lib which it depends on will use this concrete version forever (until update replaces it with new builds which are built against different concrete version of lib).
by siliconc0w | 2026-01-06 02:54:04+00:00
You could tax people according to their means, record usage, multiply by impact, and disperse accordingly. Set guaranteed purchase orders and x-prize style payouts, etc. Hard but not impossible.

Maybe we get a few less drugs but I'd bet we'd see more curative cheap drugs we need desperately like antibiotics which are an economic dead-end today rather than the cost escalating for-life stop-gaps like statins, diabetes drugs, biologics, ed drugs, hair treatments, etc.
by stonogo | 2026-01-06 02:56:21+00:00
I'm still waiting for the EV that's a car instead of some kind of techbro reimagining of personal transportation with a 27" tv glued to the dash. So far the plug-in hybrid market is figuring that out first -- the Mazda CX90 is a real car. The VW ID3 gets close, but it still feels like someone tried to design a B-movie space ship.

There's a great market out there willing to buy B-movie space ships, but if EVs are going to be the default (and I think they are) they're going to have to get over the toys and start shipping cars.
by protocolture | 2026-01-06 02:57:14+00:00
Its very difficult to cut a large organisation with guns off from the internet.

Have you seen the various reports about Mexican gangs? Apparently they can just install whatever they like on anyones towers, and people who complain about it tend to come down with severe lead poisoning. Was reading one blog, and the tech suggested that if he saw someone else working on a tower, he would just drive away and call in sick that day.
by ggm | 2026-01-06 02:58:01+00:00
Not wishing to disagree with anything here (boomer, btw) just want to observe a lot of the intergenerational wealth story is worse than it looks: the property transfer may not suddenly make middle aged following generations richer, because the change in property taxes cost of construction and property values and the cost of capital may make the home asset less valuable than it seems, unless you just live in it, and don't try to improve it. Not that it isn't sweet to inherit a large old house, but you inherit the large old house obligations too.

Also, a lot of wealth can disappear end of life. It gets spent prolonging life or it's "annuitised" and disappears on death.

A huge amount of all wealth is leveraged. It can vanish in a flash. If the tech P/E bubble implodes then that intergenerational wealth bound up in markets evaporates fast.
by firesteelrain | 2026-01-06 02:58:13+00:00
This is fascinating and the interleaving of statecraft and misdirection was also interesting. Snowden turned out to be led astray here by someone telling him a rumor while it was as simple as ISIS capturing a network engineer who told them how to sabotage the network (not to mention various other sabotage or accidental problems like mining or explosions)
by geoctl | 2026-01-06 02:58:28+00:00
I wonder whether the current huge funding in AI will ever lead to a revolution in computer architecture. Modern PCIe/CXL is already starting to blur the difference between memory and I/O. Maybe the future is going to be that CPUs, RAM, storage devices, GPUs and other devices are going to directly address one another like a mesh network. Maybe the entire virtual memory model will change to include everything to be addressed via a unified virtual memory space from a process/CPU perspective with simple read/write syscalls that translate into network packets flowing between the CPU and the destination (e.g. RAM/GPU/NVMe) and vice versa.
by noduerme | 2026-01-06 02:58:48+00:00
I don't know if I'm understanding you correctly, but my experience reflects what (I think) you're saying. Given a fully formed older project and a clean set of feature requests, Claude can be a beast. On the other hand, steering it through a greenfield project feels more labor intensive than writing the code myself.

I'm a full stack dev, and solo, so I write data schema, backends and frontends at the same time, usually flipping between them to test parts of new features. As far as AI use, I'm really just at the level of using a single Claude agent in an IDE - and only occasionally, because it writes a lot of nonsense. So maybe I'm missing out on the benefits of multiple agents. But where I currently see value in it is in writing (1) boilerplate and (b) sugar - where it has full access to a large and stable codebase. Where I think it fails is in writing overarching logical structures, especially early on in a project. It isn't good at writing elegant code with a clear view of how data, back and front should work together. When I've tried to start projects from scratch with Claude, it feels like I'm fighting against its micro-view of each piece of code, where it's unable to gain a macro-view of how to orchestrate the whole system.

So like, maybe a bottomless wallet and a dozen agents would help with that, but there isn't so much room for errors or bugs in my work code as there is in my fun/play/casual game code. As a result I'm not really seeing that much value in it for paid work.
by subjectsigma | 2026-01-06 02:58:53+00:00
Bugs in your WM can cause crashes and often do. You’re trying to pretend this is some ridiculous foreign concept when it isn’t. The two are closely linked.

If KDE works for you, great. It crashes often for me. I find it exceedingly hard to believe it hasn’t crashed on you at least once when that’s such a common experience among me and my peers. I put more stock in my own experiences and the experiences of people I know than random internet commenters. I don’t know what else to tell you.
by somenameforme | 2026-01-06 03:00:12+00:00
The US had already secretly intercepted cables from Japan with it looking to "terminate the war because of the pressing situation which confronts Japan" as far back as July 12th 1945 in which they also expressed a willingness to relinquish all claimed territories. [1] They were hoping to use Russia as a favorable mediator. The only condition they were seeking is that the Emperor be able to remain as a figurehead.

That urgency and willingness to surrender was before Japan knew that the USSR had already agreed with the allies to declare war on them at the Yalta conference in February. USSR committed to declaring war on Japan "two or three" months after Germany fell, which happened on May 8th. They declared war on Japan on August 8th.

We did not forward any of this information onto the other allies. Instead we chose to nuke Japan on August 6th. The Emperor was allowed to remain as a figurehead.

[1] - https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/28458-document-39b-magic-...
by cousin_it | 2026-01-06 03:00:41+00:00
I love the kind of science reporting on display in this article. It stays at a consistent, objective level of detail throughout (no "imagine a vector space as a block of jello" or whatever it is that Quanta and other publications are always doing). It allows specialists to understand exactly what happened, and at the same time stays accessible to laypeople. It feels like it's written for the kind of reader that I aspire to be: not necessarily a specialist on every topic, but someone who has finished high school and is paying attention.
by HDThoreaun | 2026-01-06 03:00:54+00:00
Basically every provider does not take medicaid so I suspect you are wrong about that. Again Im not happy with the insurance situation, I just think its barely top 10 in terms of problems with our healthcare system. The bureaucracy is required because of our horrible fee for service payout system. Without getting rid of that m4a would still requires an army of billers because republicans would constantly be screaming about the government being scammed(and they wouldnt really be wrong, healthcare providers do tons of wasteful procedures and the bureaucracy is the only thing slowing that down). We dont actually need single payer to get rid of fee for service so really I think private insurance is an orthogonal problem to the billing army.
by gary_0 | 2026-01-06 03:01:30+00:00
Not a new idea, but it's intriguing to think about an architecture that's just: CPU <-> caches <-> nonvolatile storage

What if you could take it for granted that mmap()ing a file has the exact same performance characteristics as malloc(), aside from the data not going away when you free the address space? What if arbitrary program memory could be given a filename and casually handed off to the OS to make persistent? A lot of basic software design assumptions are still based on the constraints of the spinning rust era...
by tolerance | 2026-01-06 03:01:40+00:00
The book that this website is inspired by...its plot seems to echo my impression of what these “Old/small web elegies” are becoming.

A man stumbles upon the idea of a thing that itself is borne off the account of someone else that never actually came to pass. Madness ensues. And madness perhaps precedes the event. ‘Weird and eerie’.
by arthurofbabylon | 2026-01-06 03:01:48+00:00
The surface area of the Apple suite is now enormous. We now have an incredible array of devices, physical environments, and purposes. It's really quite staggering: just look at the spans between a) checking the UV index on Apple Watch and writing code in Xcode on Mac, b) tracking an outdoor run and navigating with Car Play and watching a movie on Apple TV, and c) messaging and maneuvering spreadsheets and designing/building. Huge expanse across each spectrum.

Apple's effort to maintain some semblance of consistency across this incredible array is laudable. (Which is not the same as letting the grievances highlighted in this article slide; I agree with the author 100%.) We all want consistency (probably to a degree greater than Apple is capable of delivering) simply so that we can use the metaphors we're familiar with.

I imagine Apple has dozens of design teams, each of which cannot talk to more than a sliver of the others, with probably not a single person aware of exactly how many design teams exist at once. There was probably a period in Apple's history – and probably not that long ago – when a single employee could assess the iconography across the entire suite. Those days are over.

My question: beyond preventing the obvious and severe transgressions (Liquid Glass), what systemic solutions are available on a scale like Apple's to maintain high-quality and strong consistency?

(I appreciate that Apple does generally one design refresh per year, in contrast to the continuous zero-utility tinkering observable in Google's products, for example.)
by ninkendo | 2026-01-06 03:02:03+00:00
It’s range anxiety and it’s real. And it’s not entirely unjustified. Where I live in the Midwest I have literally never seen a public charging station. I know they exist because I can search for them on maps app and I see dots, but it speaks to their general small numbers that I’ve never seen one in person that I can remember.

Now, prior to this, I lived in California for many years from 2011 until 2019, and I saw tons of EV charging stations there. I left with the impression of “wow, charging stations are everywhere”, and that was 7 years ago.

But now in my Midwest metro area, I can honestly say there are zero that I can think of within a 10 mile radius of my house. Not one. (They’re out there somewhere, but they gotta be tucked away because I never notice them enough to remember them.)

It’s no small wonder that all my friends from California drive electric cars, and all my friends from this area (near my childhood home, so I know lots of people) think EV owners are crazy. [0]

If EV charging stations were visibly everywhere and charged in 5 minutes I could say without a doubt that every one of them would be swayed. So I don’t think they’re being irrational at all.

- [0] It is common to go on long road trips here, since the weather sucks, and people really don’t want to rent a car to do it. Plus a ton of people tow shit. Half my friends have campers and the other half have boats.
by nine_k | 2026-01-06 03:03:16+00:00
As much as I can understand a Zen 5 CPU core can run two AVX512 operations per clock (1024 bits) + 4 integer operations per clock (which use up FPU circuitry in the process), so additional 256 bits. At 4 GHz, this is 640 GB/s.

I suppose that in real life such ideal condition do not occur, but it shows how badly the CPU is limited by its memory bandwidth for streaming tasks. Its maximum memory-read bandwidth is 768 bits per clock. only 60% of its peak bit-crunching performance. DRAM bandwidth is even more limiting. And this is a single core of at least 12 (and at most 64).
by defrost | 2026-01-06 03:03:35+00:00
The history on this is pretty sound ... a major bombing campaign was started much earlier to avoid any invasion or boots on the ground.

Seventy two Japanese cities, including Tokyo, were already completely destroyed before the two atomic bombs were dropped. The two cities destroyed by atomic bombs were on a list to be destroyed regardless.

To the people killed, injured, or left in the shell of a city with no food or water it made very little real difference whether the cause was HE+incendiaries OR high burst shockwave from atomic bomb - the M&M statistics (death and injury, both immediate and following) were similar in either case.

The greatest military imperative to drop the atomic bombs were pragmatic .. they were developed at vast expanse for use on Germany but were not ready until after Germany surrended .. to close off an R&D program without a live target test on targets already targetted for destruction just seemed ... wasteful.

After the bombs were dropped, everything changed. Public awareness and perception. The need for post war PR. The start of the Cold War race with soviets over atomics. The pressing need for auto biographies and centre staging from actors late to the story, etc.

Much of the "justification" for dropping atomic bombs was retconned after the fact.
by eliasdejong | 2026-01-06 03:03:49+00:00
The limit is the number of outstanding cache line requests to the memory controller. CPUs have a fixed number of slots for this, around 10-12 usually. Intel calls them LFBs (Line Fill Buffers) and AMD MSHRs (Miss Status Holding Registers). When the slots are filled, the CPU can issue no more requests and has to wait for them to complete. Apple M chips (probably) have more slots and the memory is physically packaged together with the CPU, so they get better numbers.