MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Capricorn2481 | 2026-01-17 08:57:02+00:00
> I would imagine your idea of "Common Sense laws" is actually just petty attacks on law-abiding citizens that do nothing to stop crime, so I guess we're even

You imagine wrong, but you use that word "attack" again.

> My comment was not trying to argue that the Right did or does care

You make that sound irrelevant, like the right is a third party in this, and not the dominant party killing citizens in the street. I don't care what lazy gotcha you were trying to angle for, your comment was disgusting.
by Aditya_kachhawa | 2026-01-17 08:57:55+00:00
Kind of wild to think the version control system I use every day was built before I could even walk. Really appreciate you sharing that firsthand context, you don’t usually get that kind of perspective.

I also found your Truth and Fascism piece on your site, and the correspondence vs. performative truth idea really clicked for me. The way it talks about institutions feels pretty universal — different forms, same power game, no matter the country.
by phyzix5761 | 2026-01-17 08:58:39+00:00
Honest question, if large portions of labor are automated or marginalized who ultimately buys the goods and services that companies produce? Markets depend on consumers having purchasing power. It seems economically rational to keep the average worker making just enough to afford goods and services over the long term.

We can see this logic reflected at times in business history. Ford paid workers double the daily wage so they could afford the cars they built and Costco pays employees 50% more than Walmart. They're not doing these things out of the goodness of their heart but out of greed to increase long term profits.
by foster_nyman | 2026-01-17 08:58:48+00:00
I like that framing, and I think Bateson will give you useful traction on it.

One way to translate your exogenous/endogenous split into his language is: runaway happens when the “selection function” gets trapped inside the system it’s selecting, so the feedback loop selects for its own reinforcement rather than for wider viability. Sexual selection is the clean biological example because preferences can become an internal amplifier: once a trait becomes a strong signal, the preference and the trait can co-evolve into something locally stable but globally costly (tails, antlers, etc.).

Where Bateson gets especially sharp is on schismogenesis (i.e., interaction patterns that escalate because each side’s behavior becomes the stimulus for more of the same). In that sense, a lot of ethno-nationalist / eugenic thinking looks like an attempt to institutionalize a narrowing selection function (“select for X”), while simultaneously insulating it from the broader ecology of feedback (social, economic, moral, informational) that would normally check it. That’s how you get stable local maxima that are brittle and, often, destructive.

On exogenous selectors, though, I’d be cautious. External selectors can absolutely be less confounded by local identity incentives, but they also bring their own blind spots (mis-specified metrics, distance from consequences, Goodhart effects). Bateson’s recurring warning is basically that the more you collapse your evaluation to a single axis, the easier it is to optimize yourself into a corner.

If you want a specific thing to watch for as you read Ecology, keep an eye on how often he treats “pathology” as a property of relationships and feedback, not of individuals. That’s the bridge between mating preferences, ideology, and organizational dynamics.
by adityaathalye | 2026-01-17 08:59:17+00:00
Apparently, they actually have a whole hit "reality" show that does it without fatalities; "Naked and Afraid". But they get training, and have an "out" back into civilisation.

So I can completely imagine they---the poor hapless tiktok influencers---meeting the unfortunate captive parrot's fate, if suddenly sent out into the maw of the wild, without any warning, preparation, or way back to second dibs at a home.
by vibedev | 2026-01-17 08:59:38+00:00
I don't really agree with both examples in the post.

The engineering problem is indeed engineering and despite the need to discuss about a better indexing solution it's far from people problem.

Whilst the example on People problems is something closer to engineering problem. IMHO better example would be dispute in PR reviews which require some people approach, and it still can be aligned with engineering best practice topic.
by chme | 2026-01-17 08:59:43+00:00
TBH. I never read prose that couldn't be in some way misinterpreted or misunderstood.

That is why we have programming languages, they, coupled with a specific interpreter/compiler, are pretty clear on what they do. If someone misunderstands some specific code segment, they can just test their assumptions easily.

You cannot do that with just written prose, you would need to ask the writer of that prose to clarify.

Also humans often just read something wrong, or skip important parts. That is why we have computers.

Now, I wouldn't trust a LLM to execute prose any better then I trust a random human of reading some how-to guide and doing that.

The whole idea that we now add more documentation to our source code projects, so that dumb AI can make sense of it, is interesting... Maybe generally useful for humans as well... But I would instead target humans, not LLMs. If the LLMs finds it useful as well, great. But I wouldn't try to 'optimize' my instructions so that every LLM doesn't just fall flat on its face. That seems like a futile effort.
Seen the same LLM prompt break invariants weeks later in prod?
by ritwikkar | 2026-01-17 09:00:47+00:00
I’m asking specifically about LLM calls embedded inside real production workflows, not demos, side projects, or exploratory prompt work.

Think backend pipelines like:
step 1 → LLM → step 2 → LLM → step 3
where users depend on the output and nothing technically “crashes.”

We’ve seen a recurring pattern:
- Same input, same prompt, same model
- Works reliably for weeks
- Then a constraint is ignored, or a later step contradicts an earlier one
- Retries don’t reliably fix it
- Logs don’t explain what changed

The hardest part isn’t bad output, it’s not being able to explain failures to PMs or stakeholders when nothing obviously broke.

Curious how others operating LLM-backed workflows in production are diagnosing or containing this kind of behavior over time.

(Not looking for prompt advice or eval frameworks. Interested in operational experiences.)
by wilsonzlin | 2026-01-17 09:00:56+00:00
I've responded to this claim in more detail at [0], with additional context at [1].

Briefly, the project implemented substantial components, including a JS VM, DOM, CSS cascade, inline/block/table layout, paint systems, text pipeline, and chrome.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46650998

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46655608
by pharrington | 2026-01-17 09:01:00+00:00
We are over a decade into Big Tech already making everyone's lives miserable (the malicious wielding of social media is something even the mainstream knows about know). His alternative of not working for big tech is literally the only way out of this.

There is some nuance in what "not working for big tech" means though. The general gist is to not take work making tools that can foreseeably be used to hurt people and the social fabric at large. Reject "disruption." Don't take money to make your life worse. That sort of thing.
by GardenLetter27 | 2026-01-17 09:01:37+00:00
I couldn't disagree more. Throughout history, higher productivity leads to a higher quality of life for everyone.

Yes, the transition can be painful and some people will lose out and face hard career changes.

But overall, the multiplicative power of investment only increases, helping to make everything cheaper, and everyone richer.

People focus too much on their own small part of experience - like Claude Code replacing CRUD developers. Without appreciating that the LLM revolution (and broader AI like AlphaFold) also includes PhD students that don't need to lose time programming tooling, interns that might have spent their time on tooling that can now use LLMs to learn faster and actually contribute to their fields, disadvantaged students that can learn more directly and in a personal way, without it being dependent on their physical location.

All of this means you get more experimentation, more ideas, and more successes.
by raphman | 2026-01-17 09:01:38+00:00
a) On such a topic I would trust someone who has worked there even more than someone who only experienced how these companies work from the outside.

b) I'd argue that decentralization of power and knowledge has always been a main driver for George Hotz¹²³ and possibly a reason why he is no longer at Facebook, Google, Twitter.

¹) https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2025/10/06/alway...

²) https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2023/11/04/disru...

³) https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2021/06/10/a-cir...
by NooneAtAll3 | 2026-01-17 09:01:51+00:00
Can we talk about the cookie banner on this website?

"Rejection hurts …

You’ve chosen to reject third-party cookies while browsing our site. Not being able to use third party cookies means we make less from selling adverts to fund our journalism."

They're literally saying "we're sad that you don't allow us to spy on you for money" and trying to guilt-trip you on that
by raverbashing | 2026-01-17 09:02:08+00:00
Sometimes people just need to touch (literal) grass

No gpt18Pro won't cost $1Bi dollars. The buck (or the bubble) will stop somewhere.

I'd be more worried for the people making trades run 1ms faster, they literally create no value to the world that is not something their own peers believe it

There are billions of people not knowing and not caring about what is chatgpt and while it might hit them hard, humans are more flexible and less impressionable than most people think (I mean, some people think it's the other way as well and they might be right in some situations)
by chme | 2026-01-17 09:02:26+00:00
So... What you are saying is that we don't need 'install.md'. Because a developer can just use a LLM to generate a 'install.sh', validate that, and put it into the repo?

Good idea. That seems sensible.

Bonus: LLM is only used once, not every time anyone wants to install some software. With some risks of having to regenerate, because the output was nonsensical.
by MattGaiser | 2026-01-17 09:02:26+00:00
> It is the input that continuously reconstitutes itself around whatever remains scarce, valuable and socially demanded as productivity rises.

In general, yes. For many groups, no.

It assumes that there is something of value for them to do and as shown by masses of long term unemployed in many areas, that is not always the case.

For example, people on the autism spectrum and with disabilities have persistently high unemployment. Because of various limitations, there is nothing for them to do in many cases. The market should have corrected this (especially over the long term) if reconstitution was consistently possible.

If AI makes all humans seem limited in a similar fashion, the idea of labour reconstitution falls apart.

There is also a large portion of the population on social assistance so while there are things they can do, the market value of what they can do is often well below their needs.
by mitthrowaway2 | 2026-01-17 09:03:16+00:00
I don't know about your labor, but as far as my labor goes, there are basically only three things I am capable of doing: manual labor with my hands and legs, mental labor with my mind, and selling personal charm with my handsome face.

If you can perform all the same jobs I can for a penny a day, and food and rent cost a dollar a day, I'll have a hard time earning enough to remain fed and housed.

Until now, I've always been competing against other flesh-and-blood humans who needed to eat and pay rent, so I've never had to worry about the labor price floor too much.
by jakkos | 2026-01-17 09:04:16+00:00
We measure computer performance in the billions and trillions of ops per second. I'm sorry but if it an app takes 200ms to hide some comments, the app or the tech stack it's on is badly made.

> The web has complexity also of client/server with long delays and syncing client/server and DOM state, and http protocol. Desktop apps and game engines don’t have these problems.

Hugely multiplayer games consistently update at under 16ms.
by saidnooneever | 2026-01-17 09:04:31+00:00
people let others choose for them and allot others to make them let their own lives be miserable.

you can simply not use any of that shit and it litteraly doesnt kill you. theres tons and tons of people who dont use social media nor any of this tech stuff as seriously as you do.

if this is how you feel its time for a detox. go outside. into the woods or something. anything to learn that your phone and pc is not your life and Elon Musk is not your (wanted or unwanted) master.

you choose who and what control your life. chose wisely. chose yourself
by ben_w | 2026-01-17 09:05:59+00:00
He worked for Facebook for less than a year back when Zuck had just been Time Person of the Year, Google before it dropped the "Don't be evil" motto and code of conduct, that really only leaves his time as Twitter as a "what were you thinking?" because it was after Musk bought it… compensated for somewhat by him leaving it quickly.

Even with the poor judgement to join Musk's twitter at all, he left a few weeks after joining, soon after ChatGPT was released. Before ChatGPT, the idea that the singularity was anywhere near was utterly fringe: tech version of all the new-age stuff, I think Charlie Stross described it as "Rapture for atheists" or something like that.

It's now… well, a lot of people with a lot of power are trying to *make it* be the singularity. I still don't think this is "it", despite how useful I find what we do have, but of the top 10 valued companies by market cap in Q4 last year, 9 are chasing it, the money is definitely interested, in a way it just wasn't when he worked at those places.
by t0mas88 | 2026-01-17 09:06:21+00:00
The problem is not the plug itself but the rating for the circuit it's connected to. If there is a 16A breaker for the circuit to protect the wiring from overload but you add 10A via a plugged in battery you're now allowing a total of 26A to flow through those same wires.

The 800W is a compromise, the wiring for a 16A circuit (typically 2.5 mm2) is able to handle 20A without a fire risk.

If you install the same battery in a fixed setup by an electrician it would be on a dedicated circuit so the only limit is the wiring of that circuit and the breaker you let them install. They would then also consider limits on the upstream wiring and things like earth fault protection.

I had separate circuits installed for my solar and future battery, using 4 mm2 wiring and 25A breakers. Only a small change to the central installation swapping the earth fault protection for one that was rated for higher currents.
by imiric | 2026-01-17 09:06:28+00:00
> big tech will inevitably make everyone's lives miserable

"Will"? If you don't see how this is happening today, you're either a part of the problem, or blissfully ignorant.

> It offers no constructive alternative

WDYM? The article clearly suggests that people should stop working for these companies.

Besides, why must every criticism propose a solution? The problem should be fixed by those who created it.
by bigiain | 2026-01-17 09:06:33+00:00
"the patient records database was accessible via the internet; there was no firewall and, perhaps most egregiously, it was secured with a blank password, so anyone could just press enter and open it"

There _should_ be a bunch of people in jail for that. Including, but not limited to the CEO. It should also include all the people on the org chart between whoever set that database up and the CEO.
by energy123 | 2026-01-17 09:06:46+00:00
> Markets depend on consumers having purchasing power.

Markets and consumers would still exist, unless the AI is smart enough to solve the local knowledge problem via centralized computation.

A consumer doesn't have to be a person. It's an abstraction, and behind it sits any entity with capital. That includes non-human entities.

An example would be bidirectional trade between an AI company who mines resources, and an AI company who makes robots to mine resources.

Or if it's one big monopoly, they can have an internal market to facilitate competition and cooperation, like how Samsung operates.
by Mikhail_Edoshin | 2026-01-17 09:07:46+00:00
I would disagree. Software has certain constraints, or, for the search of a better concept, certain nature. E.g. I myself would say that one side of it is that you always have a very small tool that is supposed to operate on much larger data and can only manage this by doing many-many steps that have to be perfectly orchestrated. This is true to the low-level CPU, but as we move higher we start inventing things and can invent something that is rather different. E.g. on certain levels it may convincingly look that we send a bunch of elves against a bunch of orks. There is a multitude of such concepts, they are vastly different and, of course, incompatible, and it may look that they're all worth each other and what we choose is a matter of preference. Yet among them there is is a single concept that is special, because it is true to the nature of software; or is closer to that truth than others. It is not to be invented, but to be discovered. If we discover it, we will solve the problem of compatibility.
by phtrivier | 2026-01-17 09:08:13+00:00
> I believe, at least, that we should be demanding political accountability and safeguards for society.

You can't help but swing between "AGI is going to save us, praise the tech lords" and "AGI is going to kill us, tech lords have mercy" if you believe there is no counterpower to the tech lords.

"You, alone, leaving your job" is not a great way to counteract the tech lords (although at least it makes a point and show other people there is a problem.)

But there is the option to use your counterpowers (you know, legislators and all that ?) The tech lords are actively trying to avoid that (see the hilarious Musk vs Breton feud.)

It would be better if your system did not give money to power to choose lawmakers.

Maybe AI will make USA realize the definition of corruption and proper election funding laws.

But, if you don't want to join the underclass, maybe, just maybe, consider not picking tech lords as kings next time.
by mitthrowaway2 | 2026-01-17 09:08:21+00:00
Right, you can still do everything you could yesterday. You can still hand-weave cloth and sell it if you want to, just like your ancestors could do three hundred years ago; you'll simply have to do it three thousand times faster than your ancestors did to exchange that labor for a loaf of bread, because even though bread is cheaper than it used to be, your customer's next best alternative is an automatic loom, and those move very quickly these days.
by isusmelj | 2026-01-17 09:08:24+00:00
I think we are just very close to the peak of a typical Gartner hype cycle around LLMs. They are useful but overhyped. There will be more posts about fuckups that happen because people run things on autopilot and cannot keep up with reviewing AI generated code.

Do not get me wrong. I use AI all day to speed things up. But I believe that there is only a small group, maybe 5 percent or less, that actually knows how to use AI properly (I'd count myself not yet in that 5%), which I see as potentially dangerous. The other issue I see is inexperienced software engineers writing software. Although I see this as a great value add and productivity boost for prototyping, I am afraid of the “I do not know much about coding but can also make PRs to our codebase” mentality.

For those of you that run things on autopilot, how do you keep code quality under control? And how do you handle refactoring? I am really curious, because one option now is also to just YOLO your LLMs to write code based on the maturity of the product. You can refactor an app or parts of it pretty fast again with LLMs. While tech debt accumulates faster, we also have the opportunity to rebuild faster.
by pjmlp | 2026-01-17 09:08:47+00:00
Indeed, in 1998 I wanted a Voodoo for some 3D work I was going to do, and naturally wanted the best and also play with Glide.

However it had a problem with my PCI version, and the shop guy was nice to trade it back for a TNT, which not only had no issues with my motherboard, made me an early NVidia customer.
by roenxi | 2026-01-17 09:09:28+00:00
Prices don't represent anything absolute, they just capture the cost of reallocating a marginal number of goods to produce this particular thing instead of some other thing.

If there is so much of something that everyone can have one, effectively prices would drop until everyone could afford one. Like how even homeless people can afford air, because there is so much of it that there is no point charging people for access. Or YouTube they just let anyone watch it because it is so cheap to push bytes out over the internet.

Removing humans from the production process would, in theory, be similar. There is a certain amount that gets produced and we come up with some way to allocate it. Prices and wages adjust to that reality.

> We can see this logic reflected at times in business history. Ford paid workers double the daily wage so they could afford the cars they built...

That just so story is probably a lie. The math wouldn't work out and Ford would know it - he was just competing with other companies for labour. It is like programmers getting paid huge amounts - it isn't because the companies think it helps them because of some vague circular logic about what happens in the broader market. They just need the skills, now.
by energy123 | 2026-01-17 09:09:30+00:00
An economics counter argument:

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/plentiful-high-paying-jobs-in-...

Also, my p(doom) is 1.0-epsilon under the status quo without AGI/ASI, due to old age and disease. Under some assumptions, self-interest says that I may as well roll the dice.
by camillomiller | 2026-01-17 09:09:53+00:00
George Hotz’s post-capitalist decoherence wasn’t in my 2026 bingo card.
I wonder if he came up with this view before or after working for big tech in different capacities and using Gmail.

He’s not wrong though, but he’s in a weird position to say that. Also, this post isn’t constructive in any possible way.
by sothatsit | 2026-01-17 09:10:13+00:00
The idea is that neofeudal lords would own fully automated systems to produce everything they need. They wouldn't need to make stuff to sell to us at all, they could just pursue their own goals. We would be irrelevant to them, other than a nuisance if we tried to get some of their resources for ourselves.

Imagine if you owned a million humanoid robots and a data center with your own super-intelligence. Would you produce doodads to sell to people? Or would you build your own rockets to mine asteroids, fortresses and weapons systems to protect yourself, and palaces for you to live in?

I don't agree that this is where we are headed, but that is the idea. Thinking about this in relation to our current economy is missing the point.
by rglullis | 2026-01-17 09:10:32+00:00
If you ask the authors of sci-fi dystopias: the corporations owning the means of production will get taxed just enough to keep their masses from starving, the aspirational 14% will ake whatever resources they have to buy shares of this coporation and get a slightly bigfer share of the pie, and subgroups on the elites will be giving perpetual checks on each other, attempting to take full control of the mountain top but never quite successfully doing it.