MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mindslight | 2026-01-16 21:14:08+00:00
Right on. That's probably the worst part of the debilitating self-own we're currently going through. Even if conservatives (aka Democrats) gain back Congress, then gain back the Presidency, then overcome their controlled opposition dynamic where enough inevitably defect and undermine anything meaningful from getting done, so much has been broken that we will be lucky if they even manage to stop the hemorrhaging. Even if the Republicans that got "dragged into" the fascist fever start to have a bit of self-reflection to realize the damage they've done. We've got what, maybe 8 years until the malcontents' dog whistle refrains start to have credence again and then we're right back to staring down the destructionists - with a trail having already been blazed.
by nottorp | 2026-01-16 21:14:58+00:00
>which includes basically every entity that ships a popular web browser and every entity that ships certificates trusted in those browsers.

So no one that actually has to renew these certificates.

Hey! How long does a root certificate from a certificate authority last?

10 to 25 years?

Why don't those last 120 minutes? They're responsible for the "security" of the whole internet aren't they?
by GarnetFloride | 2026-01-16 21:15:46+00:00
Yeah, this subject is a bit of a rabbit hole. I've read about half of the so far. That's my list of sources from those that I have so far.

I would say start with:

* The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen (This is a fast micro history that hits the highlights.)

* Too Much To Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age by
Ann M. Blair (She is a scholar that has a lot on the subject.)

* Forgetting Machines: Knowledge Management Evolution in Early Modern Europe
by Alberto Cevolini (This is a collection of pretty deep essays.)

* Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs by Markus Krajewski (This is about the development of paper-based databases.)
by mk_stjames | 2026-01-16 21:15:47+00:00
Astute observation; no canal, but there is a river outflow to a bay, whereby a ship could have carried stones from the quarry, albeit a long way around a peninsula; it is possible that was a more effective way to get them close, and then use horse and cart to get them the last bit of distance.

Thinking about the logistics of such a feat at that time is wild to me for just the construction of a private residence.
by RajT88 | 2026-01-16 21:15:50+00:00
I use AI daily and have to clean emojis.

It depends on the task, or the particular product/agent you're using. ChatGPT is a lot more emoji-heavy than say the business Copilot. Claude code, never. GitHub copilot never.

What I can tell you is, people I know who are SME's who are being paid several hundred thousand dollars a year this past year have started just copypastaing my questions into an LLM and regurgitating back to me whatever they said.

From my friend who is a director of a medical research library, a huge number of doctors recently switched from googling shit to just running it through the free ChatGPT.
by orwin | 2026-01-16 21:16:12+00:00
> It's just a matter of how much international support it will have initially, and how the USA will strong arm support.

That's where i think France have dropped the ball with its last presidents. Any pre-2007 president would have already declared Greenland as "EU, thus France sovereign interest" and reiterated French nuclear doctrine since 1964 (One warning shot, then tactical nukes, aiming for the army/supply and not civilian infrastructure). Macron will never do that, because if you say it, you have to follow up.
by lenerdenator | 2026-01-16 21:16:15+00:00
> Trump doesn't care about values at all, he cares about money more than anyone else does.

That's exactly what I'm saying. He's going to use this sort of deal as an example to Canadians that when it all comes down to it, they're no better than he is. He's going to say that you're perfectly fine talking trade deals with authoritarians who are literally abducting Chinese nationals on Canadian soil and doing God-knows-what with them [0], so long as the money is right.

[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/rcmp-chinese-police-st...
by gjm11 | 2026-01-16 21:16:15+00:00
I agree that we should be reading books with our eyes and that feeding a book into an LLM doesn't constitute reading it and confers few of the same benefits.

But this thing isn't (so far as I can tell) even slightly proposing that we feed books into an LLM instead of reading them. It looks to me more like a discovery mechanism: you run this thing, it shows you some possible links between books, and maybe you think "hmm, that little snippet seems well written" or "well, I enjoyed book X, let's give book Y a try" or whatever.

I don't think it would work particularly well for me; I'd want longer excerpts to get a sense of whether a book is interesting, and "contains a fragment that has some semantic connection with a fragment of a book I liked" doesn't feel like enough recommendation. Maybe it is indeed a huge waste of time. But if it is, it isn't because it's encouraging people to substitute LLM use for reading.
Show HN: AI health agent that nags you on WhatsApp instead of a dashboard
by erenkaradag | 2026-01-16 21:16:59+00:00
Hi HN, we built Vitalify.ai -started months before both ChatGPT and Claude Health announcements- because managing health data is fragmented and overwhelming.

Here's a video of the product: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLI_1xB22rc

You upload your lab results, add your conditions/medications, and Vitalify generates a personalized wellness plan with daily tasks in your calendar.

While the value proposition might seem similar to others, we took a different approach with our UX. Instead of just a chat interface, we built a structured system with actionable plans, calendar, gamified goals, streaks and etc...

Data is encrypted at rest and isolated per user. No data is used to train any models. You have full ownership to export or delete your records at any time.

If you're not comfortable with how big health AIs handles your data, or don't want to wait on their waitlist/country restrictions, our early access is open.

Happy to answer questions and feedback is super welcome!
by homebrewer | 2026-01-16 21:17:04+00:00
Because it started in 2022 and hasn't subsided since? This is just the latest iteration of "AI" scrapers destroying the site, and the worst one yet.

https://lwn.net/Articles/1008897

Your nonsense about LWN being a "newsletter" and having "zero valuable data" isn't doing you any favors. It is the prime source of information about Linux kernel development, and Linux development in general.

"AI" cancer scraping the same thing over and over and over again is not news for anybody even with a cursory interest in this subject. They've been doing it for years.
by lern_too_spel | 2026-01-16 21:17:06+00:00
> This may never exist

It's existed for years. https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/third_...

Similarly, the JPEG XL decoder Chromium integrated is written in Rust, eliminating large classes of exploitable errors.

> Haven't we seen related vulnerabilities?

Repeatedly. That's why browser vendors are careful about adding new image decoders, and no, Qubes does not solve the problem.
by JumpinJack_Cash | 2026-01-16 21:17:19+00:00
I did read it and I still think that planes killing 0 people in a good year on a global basis means that such effort is subtracted from other parts of society which ultimately plays so loose that kills people in droves.

Just to mention the TSA you have to face in airports vs. absolutely fuck all lack of security while boarding trains and subway trains where you could be carrying a nuke or an AK47 in your suitcase and nobody checks a damn thing nor the ID etc.

Plus the train arrives right in the city center where an ill intentioned individual could do maximum damage

But not limiting to transportation means just observing how loose is safety in our cities where death is always around the corner (from accidental kinetic impact or human assault)

> > One is by statistical methods and constant incremental improvement,

It's the only game in town. We did that for ships, trains, automobiles and yes even planes, they aren't special.

The lessons learned won't disappear.

> > Spending less on air safety would make the currently-conspiratorial US public afraid of flying, particularly if 2 more 737-MAX type incidents happened. Air travel would drop off drastically, and all the travel that was worth it, would be done by automobile.

This is the crux of it all, it's in fact a psychological problem not factual. The same that affects nuclear reactors.

If 2 737Max go down in 2026 airplanes would still be many orders of magnitude on a casualty per mile traveled on a unit of time basis, especially when compared against automobiles.
by robotpepi | 2026-01-16 21:17:36+00:00
what bubble are you talking about? you don't know what webpages I frequent.

and you're still missing the point. I'm not saying that marketing has no effect on people (on the contrary, that's the problem, and it affects me too). my point is about the absurdity of basing our social organization on this. marketing only has perverse motivations, then you see the effects on people. tobacco is the classic example. this is an inefficiency of the system.
by JoshGlazebrook | 2026-01-16 21:17:58+00:00
$22/month for a family plan of 5 people to have unlimited streaming is more than worth it to me. They would have to triple the price for me to even think about it being an issue. And this is coming from someone who was on what.cd for years.

I also prefer Spotify over apple music and youtube music from a ui/ux perspective as well.
by Jcampuzano2 | 2026-01-16 21:18:14+00:00
Never releasing the benchmarks or being openly benched unlike literally every other model provider always irked me.

I think they know they're on the backfoot at the moment. Cursor was hot news for a long time but now it seems terminal based agents are the hot commodity and I rarely see cursor mentioned. Sure they already have enterprise contracts signed but even at my company we're about to swap from a contract with cursor to Claude code because everyone wants to use that instead now - especially since it doesn't tie you to one editor.

So I think they're really trying to get "something" out there that sticks and puts them in the limelight. Long context/sessions are one of the hot things especially with Ralph being the hot topic so this lines up with that.

Also I know cursor has its own cli but I rarely see mention of it.
by michaelmrose | 2026-01-16 21:18:24+00:00
A crime against the citizens like robbery not a civil wrong like overstaying their visa. We have a different interest in enforcing one vs the other which I think you know.

You are suggesting we can't call out what is actually happening in case the proud boys running around kidnapping and murdering people get hurt as if people will be inspired to hurt them because of online rhetoric and not because of the kidnapping and murder.

Want to keep ICE from getting hurt? Roll back enforcement to 2010 norms and start rolling in greater penalties from hurtful to ruinous for employee illegals with 5 years in jail for all management/HR/accounting who lie about it.

Start at 10% of payroll paid to illegal labor increasing to 1000% over whatever timeline would allow companies to transition from illegal labor.

Making it economical to hire illegal labor with a slap on the wrist or no penalty then punishing laborers for adapting over decades to this situation is insane.
by BrenBarn | 2026-01-16 21:19:04+00:00
100% bullshit.

> we’re also planning to start testing ads in the U.S. for the free and Go tiers, so more people can benefit from our tools with fewer usage limits or without having to pay

No, that is not why they're doing it. They're doing it to make money.

> Our mission is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity

No, that is not their mission. Their mission is to make money.

If they wanted to benefit all humanity they would axe the entire operation, do a complete 180, and use all their money to fight as hard as they can against everyone else who is doing what they're doing now.
by NicoJuicy | 2026-01-16 21:19:35+00:00
As a Belgian, I don't think there is much point in creating a fake account.

We know the US is different than Trump. But yet, here we are, a wannabe dictator is in control now of the US.

We realized that we have way too much dependencies on the US in a very short time.

It's not going to be easy to unbuckle a >70 year old partnership, but not being prepared if he succeeds will be worse, just ask your Canadian friends.

This guy is willing to sacrifice the entire US for quick personal gain. Luckily it seems he still needs the votes end of November.

Good luck
by pjmlp | 2026-01-16 21:19:56+00:00
You can do manual memory management in .NET since the early days, it was designed to support C++ as well, first with Managed Extensions for C++, and then C++/CLI on .NET 2.0

So there were ways to do it, but not as straightforward from C# and co.

What Microsoft has been doing since the Core rewrite is exposing those capabilities in a more natural way, especially since C++/CLI is Windows only as it relies on Visual C++ backend.

As for the use after free, you can get a bit around it with using and Roslyn analysers, but yeah it would be better if directly supported on the language.

Note that manual memory management is exposed via System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal class. It exposes several ways to do it.
by philipkglass | 2026-01-16 21:20:16+00:00
HDI captures some of these attributes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index

The Human Development Index (HDI) is a statistical composite index of life expectancy, education (mean years of schooling completed and expected years of schooling upon entering the education system), and per capita income indicators, which is used to rank countries into four tiers of human development.

A lot of the time I'd prefer to see "HDI recalculated without income" because income per capita doesn't seem like a direct indicator of human development. It's more of a proxy measure. Of course, I could say the same thing about how it measures education. Educational outcomes (like highly developed literacy) are better than how many years of schooling someone has. But these better measurements are also probably harder to collect across a broad group of countries.
by jlarocco | 2026-01-16 21:20:28+00:00
There's a whole design niche dedicated to making that label as subtle and hard to see as possible.

And I'm skeptical ads will remain outside of the ChatGPT output for very long. You can hide a div tag, but you can't hide an advertisement streamlined into the "conversation" with ChatGPT. Is ChatGPT recommending product X because they're an advertiser, or because that's what it "learned" on the internet? Did it learn from another advertisement?

I fully expect them to exploit the plausible deniability.
by bbayles | 2026-01-16 21:20:59+00:00
In order to avoid the endless cycle with the QA person, I started doing this:

> This forced me to start making my feature proposals as small as possible. I would defensively document everything, and sprinkle in little summaries to make things as clear as possible. I started writing scripts to help isolate the new behavior during testing.

Which is what I should have been doing in the first place!
by bayarearefugee | 2026-01-16 21:21:20+00:00
I mostly use Gemini, so I can't speak for Claude, but Gemini definitely has variable quality at different times, though I've never bothered to try to find a specific time-of-day pattern to it.

The most reliable time to see it fall apart is when Google makes a public announcement that is likely to cause a sudden influx of people using it.

And there are multiple levels of failure, first you start seeing iffy responses of obvious lesser quality than usual and then if things get really bad you start seeing just random errors where Gemini will suddenly lose all of its context (even on a new chat) or just start failing at the UI level by not bothering to finish answers, etc.

The sort of obvious likely reason for this is when the models are under high load they probably engage in a type of dynamic load balancing where they fall back to lighter models or limit the amount of time/resources allowed for any particular prompt.
by 4d4m | 2026-01-16 21:21:28+00:00
Let me get this straight - so the safety team at OpenAI - what exactly are they working on? Is it all focused on censorship of inputs and results, and steering how you think? Or are they not responsible for designing against these horiffic outcomes as a primary goal?

I would take the view that their safety team is maybe focused on the wrong things (former) and has been captured by extremists instead of pragmatists, but that's like just my opinion man. I'll use Anthropic and Venice until I notice less steering in my threads, personally. An GPT that constantly eggs me on isn't a thought-partner, it's a dopamine device. If I'm going to outsource my thinking to an LLM I need something I trust won't put it's own spin on things or gas me up into taking action I never originally intended to do without critical thinking first.
by milchek | 2026-01-16 21:22:14+00:00
Once ads start to make their way up to the Plus paid tiers (and they will), I’ll probably switch to something else like local LLM on my home machine or put something together myself to use a non adware LLM via API (for example with Replicate). Especially if these are just intended to be spammy blocks at bottom or in between discussion threads, or worse, audio conversations.

From what I’ve read, this will be about ads in chat as suggestions? So “active” ads on response?

Why not go the approach of passive background “agentic” ad suggestions like, “hey, we know X, Y, and Z about you - would you like us to monitor certain brands related to your interests for deals and allow advertisers to pitch these deals to you?” And make these hyper specific so you can opt in.

I, like many people who dabble with music as a hobby, have GAS (gear acquisition syndrome) - why not let me toggle something like “ok, I don’t want ads, but if any of your partnered brands have a sale or good deal on X, feel free to email me, and use your ChatGPT smarts to pitch me on why it’s a good deal and how it suits my current gear set up”

I used ChatGPT to set up my guitar pedal board so surely this isn’t a huge leap.
by NitpickLawyer | 2026-01-16 21:23:08+00:00
> LWN.net is a reader-supported news site

I mean...

Again, the site is so old that anything worth while is already in cc or any number of crawls. I am not saying they weren't scraped. I'm saying they likely weren't scraped by the bad AI people. And certainly not by AI companies trying to limit others from accessing that data (as the person who I replied to stated).
by randycupertino | 2026-01-16 21:23:23+00:00
I have some coworkers who use AI in place of the bullets in bulleted lists and I don't hate it. It's fun and eye-catching and brings some novelty to our scientific work. One uses science themed emojis (he's a cardiologist so lots of cardiac hearts, test tubes and DNA emojis) and another uses custom-mojis that she designed after Piet Mondrian's art.

I've also seen emojis popping up in official meeting minutes which is fine too. Why not spice it up with some whimsy.
by jkaptur | 2026-01-16 21:23:43+00:00
(I'm not an expert. I'd love to be corrected by someone who actually knows.)

Floating-point arithmetic is not associative. (A+B)+C does not necessarily equal A+(B+C), but you can get a performance improvement by calculating A, B, and C in parallel, then adding together whichever two finish first. So, in theory, transformers can be deterministic, but in a real system they almost always aren't.
by leros | 2026-01-16 21:24:39+00:00
Not really.

I know the original email was something like "Alert: you have a new thing: X Thing"

And the new emails are a prompt something like "we know all of this about the user and all of this about the X thing, write an email alerting them to the new thing with these particular goals".

I really don't know much about it so I'm being pretty vague and generic.
by iamrobertismo | 2026-01-16 21:24:48+00:00
Would you just be... subsidizing low volume users? I am saying this isn't like a new problem in the grand scheme of things. hopefully I am not being too negative, do you have a site or something to learn more? It's not clear how you can have better token economics to provide me or someone else better token economics, rather than just burning more money lol.
by sublinear | 2026-01-16 21:25:14+00:00
Yes, that old chestnut. It's such insanely toxic advice too.

You're correct that HR is there to protect the company. The original post did not specify "heavy hitters", nor did I ever say to make an accusatory report. HR doesn't have to specifically know who is taking their calls this way.

I'm sorry if you or others have had such bad experiences with the most basic of HR interactions, though if I assume you're taking your own advice I doubt you've ever tried.

There's the tactful way to do this, and then there's whining to HR. I would be very careful taking advice from whiners because they're the ones who keep propagating this bad faith myth about HR.

All I'm saying to do is notify them about ongoing behavior with an emphasis on how it probably makes the company look bad and that it's done by many. They don't care who is doing it and it's not personal. I'd honestly be very surprised if this behavior doesn't already fall under some existing policy.
by JohnnyMarcone | 2026-01-16 21:25:18+00:00
This is a point in time for the US and there are institutional paths to change. The comparisons to China forget that China does not have the same mechanisms for change. China is an immutable state outside of revolution or the administration just deciding to transfer power.

If they are successful in destroying democracy, I will reevaluate my view. We don't know what's going to happen in the midterms or 2028.
by quotemstr | 2026-01-16 21:25:25+00:00
18 years is more than enough time to ripen.

- Marquis de Lafayette was only 19 when he helped the US win independence.

- Alexander began conquering when he was 20, smashed Persia at 25, and "wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer" at 30.

- Pascal and Galois did revolutionary math before 20.

- Mary Shelly wrote Frankenstein at 18!

We need more rigorous secondary education and a pathway that lets people with rocket-ship trajectories skip useless tertiary education. I am sick and tired coddling mediocre people by pretending geniuses don't exist. If I ran things, I'd set up magnet schools nation-wide.
by mnhnthrow34 | 2026-01-16 21:25:57+00:00
This lossy mingling of expressions that sound similar is a natural process always present in the evolution of a language. Giving up is a correct and healthy response imo.

"Begging the question" is a great example - its intended meaning as a specific fallacy descriptor lose to face-value interpretations that are "wrong" but also extremely fair for somebody to make. All this means is that "begging the question" is a weak name for the fallacy, because if you don't know what it means, a wrong assumption is easily available and contextually often seems to fit.

The language crushing out these expressions is a feature. Better all around to say the argument is circular or it assumes the conclusion. Doing those things may _actually_ "raise questions" as well as "begging the question" which makes things even worse.

It's not the fault of the casual language users that this expression is poorly understood, it's just bad naming in the first place.