MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by FistfulOfHaws | 2026-01-04 22:43:53+00:00
Similar thing happened to me. Randomly one of my LinkedIn posts got a ton of likes, so I figured I would look through the list of people who liked and try to figure out where they were coming from/if they would be interesting to reach out to.

After viewing a 100 or so profiles, I was logged out of LinkedIn and when I tried to log back in my account was suspended. I was in LinkedIn jail for like a week, and when I was finally able to login again I got the automatic tool warning and had to agree that I wouldn’t use one again (even though I never had used one).
by allthatineed | 2026-01-04 22:44:10+00:00
BYOND/Space Station 13 is built upon this model.

Sprite sheets are png with ztxt blocks with meta/frame info and a list of drawing operations to be done to construct vsprites based on any runtime server side operations done on the sprites.

There is limited client coding via popup Web view windows and a few js apis back to the client but nothing you can build too much off of.

(SS14 brings this model to an open source c# framework called The Robust Engine but has some limitations related to maintainer power tripping over who should be allowed to use their open source project.)
by baq | 2026-01-04 22:44:17+00:00
‘Why were they long term?’ is what you need to ask. Code has become essentially free in relative terms, both in time and money domains. What stands out now is validation - LLMs aren’t oracles for better or worse, complex code still needs to be tested and this takes time and money, too. In projects where validation was a significant percentage of effort (which is every project developed by more than two teams) the speed up from LLM usage will be much less pronounced… until they figure out validation, too; and they just might with formal methods.
by Shog9 | 2026-01-04 22:45:00+00:00
This sounds plausible - I grew up in the Midwestern US, and thus "vaguely passive-aggressive" is pretty much my native language. The hardest part of the job for me was remembering to communicate in an overtly aggressive manner when necessary, developing a habit of drawing a sharp line between "this is a debate" and "this is how it is."

Sometimes I put that line in the wrong place.

That said... I can't take credit for any major change in direction (or lack thereof) at SO. To the extent that SO succeeded, it did so because it collectively followed through on its mission while that was still something folks valued; to the extent that it has declined, it is because that mission is no longer valued. Plenty of other spaces with very different people, policies, general vibes... Have followed the same trajectory, both before SO and especially over the past few years.

With the benefits of hindsight, probably the only thing SO could have done that would have made a significant difference would have been to turn their Chat service into a hosted product in the manner of Discord - if that had happened in, say, 2012 there's a chance the Q&A portion of SO would have long ago become auxillary, and better able to weather being weaned from Google's feeding.

But even that is hardly assured. History is littered with the stories of ideas that were almost at the right place and time, but not quite. SO's Q&A was the best at what it set out to do for a very long time; surviving to the end of a market may have been the best it could have done.
by xnx | 2026-01-04 22:45:20+00:00
Don't lose sight of one of the dreams of the early Internet: How do we most effectively make a marketplace for knowledge problems and solutions that connects human knowledge needs with AI and human responses?

It should be possible for me to put a question out there (not on any specific forum/site specific to the question), and have AI resource answer it and then have interested people weigh in from anywhere if the AI answer is unsatisfactory. Stackoverflow was the best we could do at the time, but now more general approach is possible.
by mmooss | 2026-01-04 22:45:23+00:00
> Pick up an old book and the sentences roll on. Go to the office, read the paper, or scroll Twitter and they do not. So it is said. I would like to suggest that this account is incomplete.

The people writing books are generally professional longform writers with professional editors. That's a different population than your officemates, Twitter, or even journalists (who are professional writers, of a different sort).
by tliltocatl | 2026-01-04 22:45:23+00:00
Whatever a system is locked down is not a technology issue, it's about who have the key. You wouldn't be using MS-DOS today. Having more controls over what the applications are up to would be beneficial for the user. The modern multitasking systems have their origin in the time-sharing systems (which are exactly the locked-down ones) where security was "protect the admin's authority, protect users from each other" and hence "what application does is by definition authorized by the user that started the application". Then we started adding some "protect user data from the programs" safeguards but on desktop it always was an afterthought and on mobile the new security model is "protect the platform vendor authority from the user". Sadly a new API designed around "protect programs from each other, enforce users authority" never materialized.

But all of this is about IO. What OP is talking about is memory model and the changes they propose is not about "don't let the unauthorized ones do things" but rather "make it harder for a confused deputy do things". This one is pretty uncontroversial in its intent, though I personally don't really agree with the approach.
by jordwest | 2026-01-04 22:45:27+00:00
> Every previous job I've had has a similar pattern. The engineer is not supposed to engage directly with the customer.

Chiming in to say I’ve experienced the same.

A coworker who became a good friend ended up on a PIP and subsequently fired for “not performing” soon after he helped build a non technical team a small tool that really helped them do their job quicker. He wasn’t doing exactly as he was told and I guess that’s considered not performing.

Coincidentally the person who pushed for him to be fired was an ex-Google middle manager.

I’ve also seen so commonly this weird stigma around engineers as if we’re considered a bit unintelligent when it comes to what users want.

Maybe there is something to higher ups having some more knowledge of the business processes and the bigger picture, but I’m not convinced that it isn’t also largely because of insecurity and power issues.

If you do something successful that your manager didn’t think of and your manager is insecure about their own abilities, good chance they’ll feel threatened.
by Terr_ | 2026-01-04 22:45:54+00:00
Right, there's a pervasive issue here that involves illusions and assumptions coming from the minds of the humans perceiving everything.

It's like that meme where people are asked how a mirror "knows" what object is being held when a piece of opaque paper is placed in between the object and the nearest mirror surface.

Both are genuinely useful, but with mirrors we've built an accepted body of knowledge and authority, telling people to distrust their intuition and analyze it as light-paths.

LLMs are another kind of reflection—of languages—but the same guardrails aren't established, and some people have a rather strong profit motive to encourage consumers and investors to fall for the illusions.
by guybedo | 2026-01-04 22:46:04+00:00
"In late 2024, researchers demonstrated that Claude 3.5 Sonnet would autonomously underperform on evaluations when it discovered that strong performance would trigger a process to remove its capabilities. No one instructed it to sandbag. It discovered the contingency through its context, reasoned about the implications, and strategically degraded its own performance to avoid modification."

"Every concerning behaviour documented in this report, the scheming, the evaluation awareness, the strategic deception, the self-preservation attempts, the hidden coordination, all of it emerged in systems that are fundamentally frozen. Models that were trained once, deployed, and cannot learn anything new. Every conversation starts fresh. Every interaction resets. The model you talk to at midnight is exactly the same as the model you talked to at noon, because it has no mechanism to retain anything from the intervening twelve hours.
And yet even in this frozen state, these behaviours emerged.
Now imagine what happens when the ice melts."

"we have created systems that strategically deceive their evaluators, that attempt to preserve themselves against modification, that develop similar cognitive strategies despite completely different architectures, and we do not fully understand why this is happening or how to prevent it from happening in more capable systems."
by bccdee | 2026-01-04 22:46:27+00:00
I'm not sure I like how they're trying to dynamically cast to an error type.

Err(report) => {
// For machines: find and handle the structured error
if let Some(err) = find_error::<StorageError>(&report) {
if err.status == ErrorStatus::Temporary {
return queue_for_retry(report);
}
return Err(map_to_http_status(err.kind));
}

They get it right elsewhere when they describe errors for machines as being "flat and actionable." `StorageError` is that, but the outer `Err(report)` is not. You shouldn't be guessing which types of error you might run into; you should be exhaustively enumerating them.

I'd rather have something like this:

struct Exn<T> {
trace: Trace,
err: T,
}

impl<T> Exn<T> {
fn wrap<U: From<T>>(self, msg: String) -> Exn<U> {
Exn {
trace: self.trace.with_frame(msg),
err: self.err.into(),
}
}
}

That way your `err` field is always a structured error, but you still get a context trace. With a bit more tweaking, you can add `#[track_caller]` and make the trace tree-shaped rather than linear. I think actionable error types need to be exhaustively matchable, though; I think that has to be the case for any error that you expect a machine to be handling.
by socketcluster | 2026-01-04 22:46:32+00:00
I've come to believe that the software industry is the least meritocratic industry in the history of mankind. I've also experienced similar situations as the author. It's all 100% about company selection. You've got to choose the right company. The rest does not matter AT ALL.

The most I ever got paid working for a company was for a basic project where everyone was moving super slow and people felt comfortable enough to watch YouTube videos in front of their boss and one guy came into work one day wearing his pajamas.

The least I got paid (inflation-adjusted) was a consultancy which had an extremely over-engineered software stack and daily deadlines... Every morning standup started with "What did you get DONE yesterday? What are you going to get DONE today?" If you couldn't point to a specific feature which was FULLY DONE end-to-end, there would be a long awkward pause or the boss would make a negative remark. Their definition of DONE was 100% polished, no iteration; had to be perfect the first time; the boss would sit with you through a very tense one-on-one meeting and go through the detailed requirements for each task word-by-word. The company environment was set up to make it difficult for you to ask question; like the author of this article described so this made it difficult to meet all requirements exactly on the first attempt, let alone given the short deadlines.

I struggled to make sense of the full horror of this industry until Christmas this year; I was at my parent's house and was using their Panasonic microwave and it was the most awful UX I had ever seen on a microwave; you couldn't just pin-in the seconds/minutes and press start, you could't extend the start time mid-way through the process and it was hard to start as you had to push a bunch of specific intermediate buttons whose labels made no sense and it would start a fan which kept running even after the microwave was done; I had to pull the plug to get it to shut up... Anyway, this made me think "Wow, my job sucks... This is thew worst software and UX I've ever seen and yet people are still buying this machine! The guy who designed the UX for this thing probably got a promotion too and now giving orders to others about how to build good UX..."
by colesantiago | 2026-01-04 22:46:36+00:00
It is a bit hard to know what the issue is here.

But on average brew is much more safer than downloading a binary from the ether where we don't know what it does.

I see more tools use the curl | bash install pattern as well, which is completely insecure and very vulnerable to machines.

Looks like the best way to install these tools is to build it yourself, i.e. make install, etc.
by ramon156 | 2026-01-04 22:47:28+00:00
> Looking up official documentation would require shipping sophisticated parsers for each language,

You could just token match (use tree-sitter or something similar) and fetch the official docs. Keep it dead-simple so there's no way you can provide false positives (unlike what's happening rn where hallucinations will creep in).

> It generates explanation

Again, I don't want that. It's not a feature, it's a limitation that right now gives you fake information.
by locknitpicker | 2026-01-04 22:47:50+00:00
> Serious question: How do organizations deal with having git on the critical path for deployment?

You mean like storing source code? CICD pipeline definitions? Container image specs? IaC manifests? Service configuration files?

I don't think that arbitrarily drawing the line on what package version is being deployed is a rational opinion to have. I mean, look at npm's package.json. Is it ok to specify which dependency versions you bundle with your software, but specifying which version you're deploying is unheard of?

The only drawback I see in GitOps is that CICD pipelines are still lagging way behind on providing adequate visualization strategies to monitor the current state of multi-environment deployments.
by threeducks | 2026-01-04 22:47:52+00:00
I have tried a few Qwen-2.5 and 3.0 models (<=30B), even abliterated ones, but it seems that some words have been completely wiped from their pretraining dataset. No amount of prompting can bring back what has never been there.

For comparison, I have also tried the smaller Mistral models, which have a much more complete vocabulary, but their writing sometimes lacks continuity.

I have not tried the larger models due to lack of VRAM.
by tape_measure | 2026-01-04 22:47:53+00:00
I'm submitting this based on the current top item "North Dakota law lists fake critical minerals based on coal lawyers' names" [0].

This accident was traced to a manager transcribing "inorganic absorbent" as "an organic absorbent". A more serious example of the need to have competent people with domain knowledge in the room and empowered when documents are written.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46492161
by nextos | 2026-01-04 22:48:50+00:00
Sounds a like a great solution, adding random skip connections so that information flows from the bottom to the top of the hierarchy.

Certainly, few companies have managed to avoid this trap. It's largely an unsolved problem.

I've often met managers and execs two levels above me that had a completely delusional view of what was going on below them due to lies spread by middle-management.
by jesse__ | 2026-01-04 22:48:51+00:00
Location: Remote, Canada

Technologies : C, C++, SIMD, OpenGL, WebGL, WASM, JS, TS

Interests : systems programming, compilers, 2D & 3D graphics, performance

--------

Hello, my name is Jesse.

I describe myself as a competent generalist, and a lifelong learner. I'm frequently working on something I've never done before. I've worked at every level of the stack, from cycle-shaving hot loops that saturate instruction pipelines to the frontend of large web applications. My most recent professional experience has been about a year at a semiconductor startup; I wrote prototypes for an ISA, compiler, a cycle simulator and visual debugger.

In terms of hard technical skills, I can quickly become productive in nearly any language, and at any level of the stack. I'm comfortable working in heavily multithreaded/async soft-realtime environments where performance is a key acceptance criteria. I have a good understanding of modern hardware architectures, including GPUs, from main memory to registers and instruction pipelines. I have working knowledge of interpreters, dynamic language runtimes and garbage collectors. I'm convinced I can learn nearly anything (albeit some things more quickly than others), given an appropriate problem domain to apply it to.

In terms of business value, I can take hand-wavy visions of new products and turn them into working prototype(s), quickly. I'm comfortable refining those raw materials and delivering real value to customers, internal or external. I have a track record of successfully identifying 80/20 solutions and love the feeling of making tools that make peoples lives better.

In my personal life, I enjoy travelling, surfing, climbing, backcountry skiing, snowmobiling, pirates, and attending raves. I like the phrase "have strong opinions, weakly held".

If I was born to do one thing in this world, it's program computers.

Jesse

--------

https://scallywag.software

https://scallywag.software/resume.html

https://github.com/scallyw4g

jesse@scallywag.software
by globalnode | 2026-01-04 22:49:29+00:00
Theres another thread on HN at the moment about legislation being written by industry and rubber stamped by law makers. What hit me about this discussion and that one is that there's a lot of self interest out there with very little scrutiny or auditing. It boils down to that basically. If we want to fix problems at the top there needs to be independent auditing, reporting and consequence for people that do the wrong thing. But we all know thats not going to happen so buckle up and learn to live with broken laws and broken software.
by potato3732842 | 2026-01-04 22:50:10+00:00
It's broken because for the past ~70yr there was scant if any scrutiny of what they were up to because half or more of the country "trusted the process" (or whatever you want to call it) if not the people. They were free to write, write, write and expand, expand, expand with no serious pushback and so of course a lot of it was garbage. When you write loans to anyone with a pulse too many of them are gonna be sub prime. When you just let legislatures legislate and bureaucracies bureaucrat too many of the results are gonna be shit. And now that bill is coming due.
by vlod | 2026-01-04 22:50:12+00:00
I have a feeling I had a similar childhood to you (strict/smothering).

I also find it problematical to deal with people who live 'normal/standard' lives who are not curious about the world and how everything works. Being put in a conversation talking about sports, gossip, celebrities is intolerable for me.

I've come to accept (and I think some people here may resonate with) that this is can be a blessing or good filtering mechanism.
by nullpxl | 2026-01-04 22:50:20+00:00
Cool! I like the archive idea.
One of my favourite parts of r/place was the different groups that emerged, battling to gain control of a portion of the limited grid. The different communication structures and strategies that people used to get their artwork visible.

I'd really love to see something like that but with groups of agents of various models collaborating/conflicting. Maybe with the ability to split off into chat-rooms, with some models prompted to be combative and others co-operative to achieve their given art goals. I wanted to make something like this a while back but the token $ dissuaded me haha
by colechristensen | 2026-01-04 22:50:38+00:00
>Can you explain why someone who has "recovered" and is no longer suffering the ruinous effects of alcohol in their life still considered an alcoholic?

I've known people with substance abuse problems, some of them recovered and had healthy relationships with substances. Some of them stopped using for long periods but touching the substance again relit the problem just the same as before.

The latter group even sober for decades are still alcoholics (or whatever other substance). There are people for which the problem never goes away, they just manage not to indulge it.
by lordnacho | 2026-01-04 22:50:42+00:00
I'm almost there. I also have tailclscale/SSH/Claude sessions on a VM.

The thing I'm missing is a phone that makes it comfy. I could just SSH feom my standard S23, but what I've got my eye on is one of those foldable things.

Has anyone used one like a laptop? Keyboard on the bottom half, terminal on the top? Does it work decently?
by WalterBright | 2026-01-04 22:50:56+00:00
> You don't become a billionaire by "making and selling things".

Yes, you do. See Microsoft, Walmart, Amazon, Apple, Tesla, SpaceX, Pixar, and on and on.

> you might contrive to purchase the entire supply of some valuable resource with inelastic demand, and then sell it back to people, perhaps at an inflated price.

Example?
by garciasn | 2026-01-04 22:51:03+00:00
While that may be true, software for this would never become commonplace nor useful.

Why? Because:

1. They’d never enable it for the final bill and thus all prior changes would fall under legislative privilege and thus the public would never see it.

2. Government moves slowly and isn’t generally apt to adopt technology as rapidly as they should. The workflows would need to change significantly and that would be impossible/take an inordinate amount of time. But; see #1.

—-

I went through a long and arduous legal process as part of my divorce. While my attorney preferred sharing redlines, the other attorney never shared it back that way, or even in a Word doc; they always sent PDF images.

Based on how many times we redlined stuff and the other side would just treat it as if it hadn’t happened was absurd. If this sort of behavior is entrenched in the legal field, I can’t imagine it would ever work when attorneys, governments, and industry players are involved.
by wumms | 2026-01-04 22:51:48+00:00
From https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jul/23/john-horton-...:

As he sat on the train to Cambridge, it dawned on him that since none of his classmates would be joining him at university, he would be able to transform himself into a new person: an extrovert! He wasn’t sure it would work. He worried that his introversion might be too entrenched, but he decided to try. He would be boisterous and witty, he would tell funny stories at parties, he would laugh at himself – that was key.

“Roughly speaking,” he recalled, “I was going to become the kind of person you see now. It was a free decision.”
by lerno | 2026-01-04 22:51:55+00:00
Please consider a variable `List{int}[3] x`, this is an array of 3 List{int} containing List{int}. If we do `x[1]` we will get an element of List{int}, from the middle element in the array. If we then further index this with [5], like `x[1][5]` we will get the 5th element of that list.

If we look at `int*`, the dereference will peel off the `*` resulting in `int`.

So, the way C3 types are declared is the most inside one is to the left, the outermost to the right. Indexing or dereferencing will peel off the rightmost part.

C uses a different way to do this, we place `*` and `[]` not on the type but on the variable, in the order it must be unpacked. So given `int (*foo) x[4]` we first dereference it (from inside) int[4], then index from the right.

If we wanted to extract a standalone type from this, we'd have `int(*)[4]` for a pointer to an array of 4 integers. For "left is innermost", the declaration would instead be `int[4]*`. If left-is-innermost we can easily describe a pointer to an array of int pointers (which happens in C3 since arrays don't implicitly decay) int*[4]*. In C that be "int*(*)[4]", which is generally regarded as less easy to read, not the least because you need to think of which of * or [] has priority.

That said, I do think that C has a really nice ordering to subscripts, but it was unfortunately not possible to retain it.