MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vidarh | 2026-01-22 16:21:06+00:00
> Most of the tests are BS too.

Why are you creating BS tests?

> And nobody is talking about verifying if the AI bubble sort is correct or not - but recognizing that if the AI is implementing it’s own bubble sort, you’re waaaay out in left field.

Verifying time and space complexity is part of what your tests should cover.

But this is also a funny example - I'm willing to bet the average AI model today can write a far better sort than the vast majority of software developers, and is far more capable of analyzing time and space complexity than the average developer.

In fact, I just did a quick test with Claude, and asked for a simple sort that took into account time and space complexity, and "of course" it knows that it's well established that pure quicksort is suboptimal for a general-purpose sort, and gave me a simple hybrid sort based on insertion sort for small arrays, heapsort fallback to stop pathological recursion, and a decently optimized quicksort - this won't beat e.g. timsort on typical data, but it's a good tradeoff between "simple" (quicksort can be written in 2-20 lines of code or so depending on language and how much performance you're willing to sacrifice for simplicity) and addressing the time/space complexity constraints. It's also close to a variant that incidentally was covered in an article in DDJ ca. 30 years ago because most developers didn't know how to, and were still writing stupidly bad sorts manually instead of relying on an optimized library. Fewer developers knows how to write good sorts today. And that's not bad - it's a result of not needing to think at that level of abstraction most of the time any more.

And this is also a great illustration of the problem: Even great developers often have big blind spots, where AI will draw onresults they aren't even aware of. Truly great developers will be aware of their blind spots and know when to research, but most developers are not great.
by jeroenhd | 2026-01-22 16:21:07+00:00
There's definitely irony in that Microsoft's GitHub is hosting the leaked source code (which probably got sucked into Copilot and every other AI under the sun as a result).

However, I don't think copyright lawyers will care. "They're also committing a crime" doesn't mean you're free to do what you want. That applies especially in ReactOS vs MS, because if ReactOS succeeds, it will compete directly with Microsoft.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-22 16:21:14+00:00
> Even if 1.1% of the papers have one or more incorrect references due to the use of LLMs, the content of the papers themselves are not necessarily invalidated.

This statement isn’t wrong, as the rest of the paper could still be correct.

However, when I see a blatant falsification somewhere in a paper I’m immediately suspicious of everything else. Authors who take lazy shortcuts when convenient usually don’t just do it once, they do it wherever they think they can get away with it. It’s a slippery slope from letting an LLM handle citations to letting the LLM write things for you to letting the LLM interpret the data. The latter opens the door to hallucinated results and statistics, as anyone who has experimented with LLMs for data analysis will discover eventually.
by mindslight | 2026-01-22 16:21:27+00:00
It's utterly terrible regarding the issues of housing availability, settling down to start our own families, and elder care. The multi-generation pattern is that the grandparents watch the kids while the middle generation does useful work - the grandparents supervise the kids, while the kids keep the grandparents entertained. Then when the kids get old enough, they help supervise the grandparents.

I think we could naturally fall back into this pattern as the housing, elder, and child care continue to get ever more expensive... but for the fact that the baseline suburban house is built with a single common living space, meant for a single family all constantly interacting with each other. You have to get into much more expensive houses with "in-law apartments" and whatnot before you regain the breathing room to have multiple generations living together. And now even houses with that extra space have become asset-bubble legible due to short term rentals.
by bdunks | 2026-01-22 16:21:33+00:00
I will add that FreeCAD has come a long way in constraint based and parametric part design, and I'm able to use it exclusively running an Arch-based distro.

Deltahedra has extremely impressive tutorials on YouTube. No fluff -- no long intros or filler -- 30-60 minutes of dense content, clearly explained: https://www.youtube.com/@deltahedra3D
by freedomben | 2026-01-22 16:21:34+00:00
Indeed. My son has been accused by bullshit AI detection as having used AI, and it has devastated his work quality. After being "disciplined" for using AI (when he didn't), he now intentionally tries to "dumb down" his writing so that it doesn't sound so much like AI. The result is he writes much worse. What a shitty, shitty outcome. I've even found myself leaving typos and things in (even on sites like HN) because if you write too well, inevitably some comment replier will call you out as being an LLM even when you aren't. I'm as annoyed by the LLM posts as everybody else, but the answer surely is not to dumb us down into Idiocracy.
by d-us-vb | 2026-01-22 16:21:35+00:00
It's easy enough to interpret Peanuts as being that. But Charles Schultz was not trying to present that. He was presenting the world as it is, and how one person can still maintain his optimism in spite of all that. This is made abundantly clear in some of the other strips, like the Father's day strip where he explains to Violet that no matter what, his dad will always love him, and he doesn't care that Violet's dad can buy her all the things.

Schultz was a relatively devout Presbyterian (though still very much a free thinker and criticized the direction American Christianity was going and its attitude about the various wars during the 60s-80s). He was incredibly optimistic about humanity, but he showed in Peanuts the reality of our "default" state, especially among kids.

Keep in mind that these are all 2nd and 3rd graders in the story.
by gh02t | 2026-01-22 16:21:38+00:00
Citations are too open ended and prone to variation, and legitimate minor mistskes that wouldn't bother a human verifier but would break automated tools to easily verify in their current form. DOI was supposed to solve some of the literal mechanical variation of the existence of a source, but journal paywalls and limited adoption mean that is not a universal solution. Plus DOI still doesn't easily verify the factual accuracy of a citation, like "does the source say what the citation says it does," which is the most important part.

In my experience you will see considerable variation in citation formats, even in journals that strictly define it and require using BibTex. And lots of journals leave their citation format rules very vague. Its a problem that runs deep.
by epsteingpt | 2026-01-22 16:21:39+00:00
100% agree, like any technology it's neither inherently good nor evil.

In this instance, I think it has the opportunity to democratize deep religious study in ways that used to be reserved for serious scholars.

e.g. Do you know what the word "daily" in the Lord's Prayer comes from?

Questions like these can engage the mind and spirit.

I hope more people use the tools to fully explore their faith, instead of outsourcing prayer and sermon creation to the LLMs.
by TomasBM | 2026-01-22 16:21:52+00:00
Your criticism of this study is roughly on point, IMO. It's not badly designed by any means, but it's an early look. There are already similar studies on the (cognitive) effects of LLMs on learning, but I suspect this one gets the attention because it's associated with the MIT brand.

That said, these kinds of studies are important, because they reveal that some cognitive changes are evidently happening. Like you said, it's up to us to determine if they're positive or negative, but as is probably obvious to many, it's difficult to argue for the status quo.

If it's a negative change, teachers have to go back to paper-and-pen essay writing, which I was personally never good at. Or they need to figure out stable ways to prevent students from using LLMs, if they are to learn anything about writing.

If it's a positive change, i.e., we now have more time to do "better" things (or do things better), then teachers need to figure out substitutes. Suddenly, a common way of testing is now outdated and irrelevant, but there's no clear thing to do instead. So, what do they do?
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-22 16:21:59+00:00
There is enough wind potential in Europe to power the world [1]. Combined with interconnects to Europe and battery storage, there is no reason power costs can't be driven down. To not do so is a lack of will. Scotland currently generates a surplus of renewables [2], exported. kieranmaine's sibling comment citations dives into the lack of will part.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38722022 (citations)

[2] In Scotland, Renewable Power Has Outstripped Demand - https://e360.yale.edu/digest/scotland-renewable-energy-100-p... - January 30th, 2024

(at the rate it takes to deploy transmission, might as well start dropping TBMs in the ground and let them grind towards each other from interconnect landings, potentially faster than the approval grind, complaints from locals about land use and right of ways, etc)
by jqpabc123 | 2026-01-22 16:22:46+00:00
What is the "expanse"?

Answer: The sky. The ancient people who wrote the bible thought the sky was a solid dome that separated "the water's above" (aka rain) from the water's below. God lived on the other side of this dome.

This is confirmed later in Genesis with the Tower of Babel story.

They tried to reach this dome by building a tower. And "god" was so offended by their ignorance and stupidity (which he perpetrated) that he decided to punish them.

The "faithful" obviously reject this simple interpretation in favor of something more obtuse and mystical.
by mexicocitinluez | 2026-01-22 16:23:15+00:00
I would say 2 bills that won't pass from state assemblies in 2026 (after decades of school shootings) aren't exactly stellar examples of major legislation that has passed to restrict gun ownership.

There's been maybe 1 in the last decade. And really, providing an example of Democrats trying to reign in ghost guns sorta proves my point. You're average citizen can not only buy guns easily, they can make them too!!!!
by casey2 | 2026-01-22 16:23:27+00:00
I don't buy your "theory" at all. Learning requires curiosity. If you want to know how something works you will do all those things irregardless if you saw it in a book or an AI spat it out. If you don't you won't.

There is no free lunch, if you use writing to "scaffold" your learning, you trade learning speed for a limited "neural pathways" budget that could connect two useful topics. And when you stop practicing your writing (or coding, as reported by some people who stopped coding due to AI) you feel that you are getting dumber. Since you scaffolded your knowledge of a topic with writing or coding, rather than doing the difficult work of learning it from more pervasive conceptions.

The best thing AI taught us is to not tie your knowledge to some specific task. It's overly reactionary to recommended task/action based education (even from an AI) in response to AI.
by usrnm | 2026-01-22 16:23:38+00:00
The article uses the words "more power" and "overtaking fossil fuels", but the graph is actually about electricity generation. They are not the same thing, at least, in my head, because not all energy consumed in Europe comes in the form of electricity. If I heat my home with natural gas and drive an ICE car, this is me using fossil fuels in a way that has nothing to do with electricity and it won't be reflected in that graph. This is an important stepping stone, but it is not "solar and wind overtaking fossil fuels in Europe"
by kieranmaine | 2026-01-22 16:23:39+00:00
Related to UK energy I read this interesting article on transmission congestion between Scotland and England and how this is increasing energy costs due to curtailment of renewables.

https://ukerc.ac.uk/news/transmission-network-unavailability...

TL;DR - Until new interconnectors between Scotland and England are finished in 2029, there will be significant curtailment of Scottish wind power which increases costs.

This is also an interesting site for seeing curtailment per wind farm -
https://windtable.co.uk/data?farm=Seagreen
by p0pularopinion | 2026-01-22 16:23:41+00:00
> Electricity/heating and gasoline in the EU is many times more expensive than in the U.S.

Maybe because Europe as a whole has little to no signifcant oil reserves ready for extraction? Very much unlike the US.

> I would think that most people would happily choose lower prices over clean energy and paper straws.

The US does have plenty of cheap energy and yet its industrial output is dwarfed by Chinas, which is increasingly relying on domestically products green tech. Also, people seem to be not very concerned with energy prices. If they were, they would not act as irrational when it comes to topics like heatpumps or electric vehicles.

> that it almost makes you think that politicians are being bought by Chinese companies/government.

Looking at the energy policy of some countries (Germany specifically), it seems vastly more likely that politicans are bought by oil companies.
by pizlonator | 2026-01-22 16:23:52+00:00
In OpenSSL, the C code is doing stuff that is hard to validate exhaustively like dealing with wire protocols, different sized buffers that have to be handled in special ways, dynamic memory allocation, etc

The assembly code is for the kernels themselves. Usually it’s a loop with easy to understand bounds, usually zero pointer chasing. Mostly math. Definitely no calls to malloc/free

So it’s not that assembly has an advantage over C. It’s that the kinds of things that get written in assembly also happen to:

- Be the sort of code where accidentally overflowing a buffer is unlikely because the indexing is the easy part. And there’s no interesting downcasting or allocation happening

- Be the sort of code where timing side channels are disastrous and the only way to know for sure you don’t have one is to look at the assembly
by verdverm | 2026-01-22 16:23:59+00:00
> The value is in not having to re-infer structure

Except this is not the case, it has to re-infer structure on every new session, you are providing an index to supposedly speed that up. But the model still has to infer something from your index as it processes the tokenized version, it's not automagically injected into its understanding.

I agree having something like this helps a lot. I don't agree that auto generating it from the code and providing that comprehensive list to the model is helpful. I tried across this whole spectrum, from none at all to as detailed as you are. There is a point where these indexes become more noise than helpful, which is why (1) I keep hounding on evals, because mine show a different conclusion than the one you are making (2) having a curated version of this in the agents.md files was more than sufficient to noticably improve performance, format doesn't matter much

The other drawback I've experienced from doing this is that the model tends to go look up things based on the index even though it doesn't need it for the task at hand. It ends up making more tool calls and spending more tokens in the long run.
by ryandrake | 2026-01-22 16:24:40+00:00
As someone on the other side of the PR, the current situation makes things awkward for me, too. Occasionally, I'll make an actual fix to scratch some particular itch I have with the software, and I'm hesitant to even open a PR, because it's just going to 1. pile yet another PR onto the maintainer, and 2. might get dismissed out of hand because it's mistaken for AI slop or other low-effort spam that these attackers are doing. So, I usually just fork, make the change in my own repo, and leave it at that.

Disabling PRs or limiting PRs to "contributors" would be a signal to me that I should just keep doing that and not contribute back to the main repo.
by globular-toast | 2026-01-22 16:25:06+00:00
That's quite true. On a recent trip I got talking to a girl from somewhere in Europe. She spoke perfect English, of course. At some point she remarked, rather bluntly, "It must be strange for you guys because you used to rule the world." I made a joke but internally I was reeling: used to? I'm almost 40 and still hadn't realised this.

Later I was talking to another 20-something, British this time, who didn't know Dr Martens were British. I asked where he thought they were from, "I guess I assumed they were American". Sigh...
by gcr | 2026-01-22 16:25:06+00:00
Fabrications carry intent to decieve. I don't think hallucinations necessarily do. If anything, they're a matter of negligence, not deception.

Think of it this way: if I wanted to commit pure academic fraud maliciously, I wouldn't make up a fake reference. Instead, I'd find an existing related paper and merely misrepresent it to support my own claims. That way, the deception is much harder to discover and I'd have plausible deniability -- "oh I just misunderstood what they were saying."

I think most academic fraud happens in the figures, not the citations. Researchers are more likely to to be successful at making up data points than making up references because it's impossible to know without the data files.
by ChildOfChaos | 2026-01-22 16:25:11+00:00
The App was TeuxDeux.

I haven't published it publicly yet, as i use it personally and it's a little flakey still, but will look to do in the future once I finish adding all the features.

My version is much more feature rich than TeuxDeux and I made it for Free in Google AI studio over the past two months, between other things. I'd just type a prompt and then go do some other stuff, it has taken quite a lot of revision but I haven't written a single line of code and i've been using it daily to manage my tasks since the start of December.
by GMoromisato | 2026-01-22 16:25:40+00:00
I think (we) Americans hate failure only when people give up.

We have a very long tradition of failure leading to success, everything from Edison trying hundreds of lightbulbs to Don Draper in Mad Men reinventing himself after failure.

Our bankruptcy laws are different from other countries in how lenient they are towards the debtor. And, of course, the entire culture of Silicon Valley is about failure after failure followed by success.

And it's not even conventional, economic success that we want. We're happy when someone finds happiness even if not financial success. The rich-person-gives-up-everything-for-love is a familiar American trope.

We don't like failure, but we forgive it, as long as we keep trying.
by tracker1 | 2026-01-22 16:26:04+00:00
While I think better Linux integration and improving WINE is probably better time spend... I do think there's some opportunity for ReactOS, but I feel it would have to at LEAST get to pretty complete Windows 7 compatibility (without bug fixes since)... that seems to be the last Windows version people remember relatively fondly by most and a point before they really split-brained a lot of the configuration and settings.

With the contempt of a lot of the Win10/11 features, there's some chance it could see adoption, if that's an actual goal. But the effort is huge, and would need to be sufficient for wide desktop installs much sooner than later.

I think a couple of the Linux + WINE UI options where the underlying OS is linux, and Wine is the UI/Desktop layer on top (not too disimilar from DOS/Win9x) might also gain some traction... not to mention distros that smooth the use of WINE out for new users.

Worth mentioning a lot of WINE is reused in ReactOS, so that effort is still useful and not fully duplicated.
by MichaelRo | 2026-01-22 16:26:15+00:00
>> I finish a lot of work at 3 PM.

>> I send it at 8:47 PM.

>> Same document. Different optics.

>> If I send it at 3 PM, it looks like normal work hours. If I send it at 8:47 PM, it looks like I'm going above and beyond.

I do the same thing but the exact textbook reverse opposite. Granted, I'm a techie / regular developer who makes 1/3rd of the IT director in cause, but can't complain, I'm definitely not starving.

So here's my version (sometimes):

>> I finish a lot of work at 3 AM.

>> I send it at 8:47 AM.

>> Same document. Different optics.

>> If I send it at 3 AM, it looks like like I'm going above and beyond. If I send it at 8:47 AM, it looks normal work hours.

Those familiar with the Gervais Hierarchy theory and my rank in the corporate ladder, will understand: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
by WarmWash | 2026-01-22 16:26:47+00:00
It would fall under the domain of contract law, because maybe the contract of the grant doesn't prohibit what the researcher did. The way to determine that would be in court - civil court.

Most institutions aren't very chill with grant money being misused, so we already don't need to burden then state with getting Johnny muncipal prosecutor to try and figure out if gamma crystallization imaging sources were incorrect.
by vidarh | 2026-01-22 16:26:53+00:00
I use AI heavily to review the code too, and it makes it far simpler.

E.g. "show me why <this assumption that is necessary for the code I'm currently staring at> holds" makes it far more pleasant to do reviews. AI code review tooling works well to reduce that burden. Even more so when you have that AI cod review tooling running as part of your agent loop first before you even look at a delivery.

"prove X" is another one - if it can't find a test case that already proves X and resorts to writing code to prove X, you probably need more tests, and now you have one,.
by rsynnott | 2026-01-22 16:27:28+00:00
Washing solar panels _at all_ would be fairly unusual, and arguably pretty pointless, particularly given they're so cheap now; you're looking at, optimistically, a 5% efficiency improvement, but many studies say more like 1% in practice.

If you're in a place that gets significant snowfall such that they're often covered then production during winter is likely to be fairly marginal anyway, so may not be worth your while.
by p0pularopinion | 2026-01-22 16:27:50+00:00
I'm curious as to how this will shift once the shift towards more electrification continues. This is only about electricity generation, not total power consumption.

Nowadays, for very energy intenive things like heating or driving a car, fossil fuels still are more prevalent than electric alternatives. Once demand shifts in favor of the electrified alternatives, electricity demand is continuing to raise (although not as steep as the drop in demand for the fossil fuels will be). Particularly in heating, where peak demand is in times with very little solar generation, it seems like this will be challenging.

While the prices of energy storage have come down significantly and are projected to continue to drop, there is still a noteable lack of cost effective long term storage solutions.
by wtcactus | 2026-01-22 16:28:13+00:00
I disagree, he is extremely courageous. The fact that he does it not out of some sense of innate heroism and adventuring desire makes him even greater. He's not there due to anything else other than is sense of right and wrong.

There are several heroes in LOTR:

- The more "heroic" archetype of Aragorn

- The flawed character of Boromir that atones himself for his sins with one last heroic stand

- The unwilling but ultimately acceptance of Frodo

- The more laidback silly courage of Merry and Piping

- The devoted courage of Sam

- Even Galdalf, when he faces that fiery beast (I don't remember the name right now) and Sauruman.

- And there are many side characters that also fit the role (like the Rohirim)

It is truly a tale full or heroes and several acts of great courage. Many of them might not have gotten into it willingly, but they surely took on the role seriously and honorably.