MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vel0city | 2026-01-12 21:09:23+00:00
This can vary greatly across locations, even within the same city and the same power distribution organization.

Different neighbors, being on different circuits, being on a line that's more likely to have storm damages, can make a lot of difference in quality of power delivery.

I've lived in places where the power practically never went out, never experienced undervolt situations, etc. I've then lived less than a mile away from the same place and experienced seemingly monthly issues of all the clocks being reset at random times when I come home. Living closer to things like hospitals, fire stations, emergency operations centers, etc. seem to give the best indication of power reliability, at least from my personal experiences.
by joe_mamba | 2026-01-12 21:09:42+00:00
>There is a great deal of variation between countries and companies.

Well yes, that was also part of my point. I travelled and worked all over the world in my youth and what I noticed is that women typically choose engineering careers only for the money, stability and benefits of working at engineering corporation if the alternatives like humanities, soft sciences or social/government work pay like shit and the welfare state is lackluster like it's the case is North-/Latin- America, Asia or South/Eastern Europe, not because they're really passionate about engineering.

But if you're in a wealthy welfare state, with high taxes, low income disparity and and well funded government services where a women working as a school teacher for example can take home nearly the same as an engineer while having great government benefits, like Nordic or German speaking countries for instance, then women are more likely to choose those types of humanities careers or other such careers that revolve more around interacting with people over working in engineering.

It is literally that simple. There's no 4D chess psychology to dissect. If you have easy access to easy money, most people will choose the path of least resistance. It's all transactional following Maslow's pyramid of needs. SW dev would also have far fewer people in it if it weren't so well paid.

>but there are definitely places where it is very difficult for women.

Can you explain in detail how exactly those places make it difficult for women and it's not just the correlation I explained above?

Like I'm sure there's some toxic workplaces out there, but that's the case for everyone in a lot of jobs, including(or maybe even especially) those where women are majority, like HR.

In fact, from what I saw in engineering they tend to prioritize attracting female candidates in order to try to break up the massive sausage fest of this profession even if that part is never said out loud.
by viccis | 2026-01-12 21:09:54+00:00
>Ironically, the other crucial ingredient for AGI which LLMs don't have, but we do, is exactly that animal nature which we always try to shove under the rug, over-attributing our success to the stochastic parrot part of us, and ignoring the gut instinct, the intuitive, spontaneous insight into things which a lot of the great scientists and artists of the past have talked about.

Are you familiar with the major works in epistemology that were written, even before the 20th century, on this exact topic?
Show HN: Param forge, image gen TUI with rounds that improve settings
by midnight_koi_9 | 2026-01-12 21:10:14+00:00
hi hn ! i've been experimenting with text-to-image models since the launch of DALLE. one thing i've noticed is that each provider (openai, google, black forest labs) has their own API params to control things like moderation, prompt upscaling, etc. this makes it difficult to know what knobs need to be turned to optimize for common goals like cost, speed of render, quality, etc

i built param forge to provide a TUI interface to explore those knobs and get automated feedback on could be optimized to help you achieve your goals

interacting with image models via CLI seems a bit counterintuitive but i've found this approach helpful

mostly looking for feedback, any other problems / annoyances you have in this space etc

:)
by gnosis67 | 2026-01-12 21:10:16+00:00
I will tell you a secret, and you can take from it what you will.

You’re obviously doing something well, you’re successful in your own way and now you’re looking around you, sure.

Yet actually you are the problem. You are under developed socially. Look to those around you in a new light. Even the regular strangers. Whatever psycho-emotional filter you have by now devised for them are like a pair of shades.

Remove those shades (deep breath or something). Seeing the person as if for the first time, roll with whatever (positive) comes to mind.

Get better at spontaneously identifying and relating to pretty much everyone around you, and a day will come when you will feel surrounded.

Btw, ordinary people are capable of profound ideas, and hidden worth while pasts.
by andyjohnson0 | 2026-01-12 21:11:28+00:00
It pains me to aay it but, after a recent redundancy and lengthy job aearch, subscribing to Linkedin Premium was a big help. Like it or not, Linkedin is where the recruiters and many of the hiring businesses are - and a subscription did seem make me more visible. I was fortunate enough to be able to afford it, and subscribed for three months before reverting to the free tier when I found a role. There was a two week free trial.

May be useful for those who, like me, don't have much of a personal "network".

(Developer, UK, no connection to Linkedin except as a user)
by mark_l_watson | 2026-01-12 21:11:35+00:00
Old news now I think, but good news. Except for my Apple Watch I have given up using Siri, but I use Gemini and think it is good in general, and awesome on my brother's Pixel phone.

Because Apple Silicon is so good for LLM inferencing, I hope they also do a deal for small on-device Gemma models.
Show HN: TraceMem – A trace-native memory layer for AI agent decisions
by tommihip | 2026-01-12 21:11:42+00:00
Hi HN,

There’s been a lot of discussion lately around context graphs, decision traces, and how AI systems reason.

One thing we kept running into:
when AI agents make real decisions, the why behind those decisions often disappears.

The context is scattered across prompts, tools, policies, and approvals. Logs show what happened, but not why it was allowed.

TraceMem is an attempt to make decision context durable.

It records the reasoning, authority, and context behind AI actions as a system of record, not as monitoring data, but as memory.

Happy to share more details or answer questions.

- Tommi
by pretext-1 | 2026-01-12 21:11:57+00:00
If they wanted to, they could throw massive amounts of cash on it like Google and Facebook are, with the latter poaching Apple employees with 200$ million pay packages: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-09/meta-poac...

But why on earth would they do that? It's both cheaper and safer to buy Google's model, with whom they already have a longstanding relationship. Examples include the search engine deal, and using Google Cloud infrastructure for iCloud and other services. Their new "private cloud compute" already runs on GCP too, perfect! Buying Gemini just makes sense, for now. Wait a few years until the technology becomes more mature/stable and then replace it with their own for a reasonable price.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-01-12 21:12:15+00:00
There is no need to involve souls or magic. I am not making the argument that it is impossible to create a machine that is capable of doing the same computations as the brain. The argument is that whether or not such a machine is possible, an LLM is not such a machine. If you'd like to think of our brains as squishy computers, then the principle is simple: we run code that is more complex than a token prediction engine. The fact that our code is more complex than a token prediction engine is easily verified by our capability to address problems that a token prediction engine cannot. This is because our brain-code is capable of reasoning from logical principles rather than only probabilities. We also likely have something akin to token prediction code, but that is not the only thing our brain is programmed to do, whereas it is the only thing LLMs are programmed to do.
by joe_mamba | 2026-01-12 21:12:46+00:00
>Wait for it… they offered 80k/year. I don’t know… seems little bit low somebody with like 20 years experience.

In which country?

The sad thing is the state of supply and demand in the economy, doesn't really care how many years of experience you have, or how hard you worked, or how difficult the job is. It'll pay as little as they can get away with.

Sucks, but welcome to being a tax cattle in Europe, where someone on the dole with welfare and credits takes home nearly as much as you do. Thank our politicians for outsourcing everything that wasn't nailed to the ground for 20+ years in the name of shareholder growth.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-12 21:12:50+00:00
"The Revolution Wind project, intended to power hundreds of thousands of homes in Rhode Island and Connecticut, “would be irreparably harmed” unless work was allowed to continue during the legal fight, US District Judge Royce C. Lamberth in Washington concluded Monday. The project is almost 90% complete."

The Revolution Wind Farm is the second project by Ørsted and Eversource to be permitted off the Coast of Block Island. The project will produce 704MW of electricity (powering 250,000 homes), 304MW for Connecticut and 400MW for Rhode Island. It is located 15.5 miles off Block Island and will consist of 65 turbines reaching a maximum height of 873 feet. The project is expected to be operational by 2025.

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

https://www.gem.wiki/Revolution_Wind

https://revolution-wind.com/

https://www.newshorehamri.gov/428/Revolution-Wind-Farm

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/71266768/revolution-win...
by postalcoder | 2026-01-12 21:12:58+00:00
It's kind of wild how dangerous these things are and how easily they could slip into your life without you knowing it. Imagine downloading some high-interest document stashes from the web (like the Epstein files), tax guidance, and docs posted to your HOA's Facebook. An attacker could hide a prompt injection attack in the PDFs as white text, or in the middle of a random .txt file that's stuffed with highly grepped words that an assistant would use.

Not only is the attack surface huge, but it also doesn't trigger your natural "this is a virus" defense that normally activates when you download an executable.
by ryan42 | 2026-01-12 21:13:24+00:00
I thought we were all working on revolutionary AI insights... Right?
There's more?

joking aside, I'm working on a mobile app side project for a client that involves camera vision/machine learning in a heavy trucking maintenance context. Very low-ego, blue collar stuff, with a blend of modern tech. That and game dev in Godot engine has brought back my passion for coding greatly that I had lost over the last several years.
by gs17 | 2026-01-12 21:13:26+00:00
It's shame/guilt/insecurity, whatever you want to call it. You'll get unprompted "Oh, you know, I wanted to be a vegetarian but I love eating bacon too much", or people who try to stump you with "gotchas" like "but where do you get your protein?" (remarkably, this can come from people who were born in a culture where vegetarian proteins are common!) or "I saw a thing online that says plants have feelings too so really you're just as bad as me".
by throw1235435 | 2026-01-12 21:13:38+00:00
This is what will occur - the bad scenario that is. Labor and its knowledge distributes (hard to contain knowledge), capital centralises and compounds. Always been that way. With AI there will be a a tension between the two of course.

The root question is: Will AI decentralise quicker than the disruption to this profession? I don't think so.

I've noticed us techies don't really understand economics and game theory all that well - we just see awesome toy and want to play with it and want others to enjoy it too. We have worked to democratize computing for years (e.g. OSS) now to our detriment. No one in society long term respects people who do this in a capitalist system; they find them naive. I can now understand why other professions find us a little immature like kids playing with tech toys.

I love solving problems with technology and love the field, but as I've gotten older I look back on a less technological life with nostalgia. Technology for all its benefit has disrupted the one thing humans do need and had for millions of years in our evolution - relative stability within their lifetimes. The mental health benefits to stability are massive and usually unmeasured. Technology, as evidenced by this thread, creates more and more anxiety about our future and our place within the community (e.g. social media, AI, and others). "Adaptability" isn't just a psychological trait; a wealthy person and secure person by definition is more adaptable too.
by jauntywundrkind | 2026-01-12 21:14:02+00:00
Techdirt nailing as usual with the dead simple headline (and good article),

> Tom Homan: If Democrats Don’t Stop Calling Us Murderers, We’re Just Going To Be Forced To Keep Murdering You

https://www.techdirt.com/2026/01/12/tom-homan-if-democrats-d...

The suppression & occupation of humans & their places for this sick & disgusting wanton use of violence & detestableness is beyond belief. We are infested by the very worst people.
by Workaccount2 | 2026-01-12 21:14:08+00:00
Frequency vs. convenience will determine how big of a deal this is in practice.

Cars have plenty of horror stories associated with them, but convenience keeps most people happily driving everyday without a second thought.

Google can quarantine your life with an account ban, but plenty of people still use gmail for everything despite the stories.

So even if Claude cowork can go off the rails and turn your digital life upside down, as long as the stories are just online or "friend of a friend of a friend", people won't care much.
by ben_w | 2026-01-12 21:14:40+00:00
Wow. I was expecting much, much less than this.

Four days ago(!) someone on here asked about vibe-coding a Linux replacement, and I was all "no, not yet": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46539677

And sure, I had all of Linux in mind, not just a POC, and this person is directly open about it not even being fully tested, and the person I was replying to four days ago also said "that basically isn’t Linux since LLM are trained on said the source code" which I can't confirm or refute, but what I do see… is more than I was expecting the current SOTA to be coherent over.
by Jtsummers | 2026-01-12 21:14:43+00:00
I was going to say something similar. Competitions between people does nothing for me (neither motivates nor demotivates), but accountability groups help me a lot to be more consistent or push a bit harder. But I've found that some of my friends really get turned off by the accountability groups, they feel like they're falling behind and end up giving up. Which is disappointing, the accountability groups aren't meant as competitions but encouragement. If you've got someone like me (I can lose weight quickly once I start exercising just a bit more than whatever my baseline is going into it) but your weight is harder to shed, if you see it as a comparison/competition then it can become very discouraging.

Phrasing in things like that matters a lot, how you talk about it and what you talk about.
by lurking_swe | 2026-01-12 21:14:43+00:00
to clarify, too much “near work” for the eyes is a risk for myopia. That includes reading books all day.

My point is, watching an educational tv program like PBS for 30 minutes in the evening will not be the cause for your child wearing glasses.

The biggest predictor of good vision from the scientific studies is lots of outdoor time. This is most important from ages 6 to 11.

https://www.myopiaprofile.com/articles/how-outdoor-time-infl...
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-12 21:14:52+00:00
>I want to bridge the aisle with Republicans and voters.

Anyone saying this in 2026-2028 is going to be eviscerated by democrats. The bridge was long burned and now they are throwing citizens into the burning wreck. You don't "bridge the aisle" with people who threaten your life.

Also, anyone who wants to protect kids but isn't pushing the Epstein files to be released spoke wide and loud on what they really care about. So many motte and baileys out there.
by damnitbuilds | 2026-01-12 21:15:00+00:00
I like this, it would be exciting (and scary) if it deduced QM, and informative if it cannot.

But I also think we can do this with normal LLMs trained on up-to-date text, by asking them to come up with any novel theory that fits the facts. It does not have to be a groundbreaking theory like QM, just original and not (yet) proven wrong ?
by jrflowers | 2026-01-12 21:15:13+00:00
I’m assuming you’re not aware of Reddit‘s history of “controversial” communities. I don’t recall who was CEO of Reddit in 2011, but whoever it was did not intervene to shut down r/jailbait (or r/creepshots), despite an enormous number of users asking for it, until it was a matter of national news. For quite a while before the Anderson Cooper segment Reddit was a pretty popular place for people to post pictures of underage girls.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ks8xuYRPnWM
by billti | 2026-01-12 21:16:47+00:00
Or the even more frustrating:

Me: "Hey Siri, play <well known hit song from a studio album that sold 100m copies"

Siri: "OK, here's <correct song but a live version nobody ever listens to, or some equally obscure remix>"

Being these things are at their core probability machines, ... How? Why?
by troupo | 2026-01-12 21:16:58+00:00
> There is no non-deterministic LLM.

Strange then that the vast majority of LLMs that people use produce non-deterministic output.

Funnily enough I had literally the same argument with someone a few months back in a friends group. I ran the "non-shitty non-corpo completely determenistic model" through ollama... And immediately got two different answers for the same input.

> Now, if you'd like to stop acting like a smug ass and be inquisitive as per the commenting guidelines,

Ah. Commenting guidelines. The ones that tell you not to post vague allusions to something, not to be dismissive of what others are saying, responding to the strongest plausible interpretation of someone says etc.? Those ones?
by hypfer | 2026-01-12 21:17:13+00:00
This is not about if people should be allowed to harm themselves though.

Legally, yes. Yes, everyone can do that.

The question though is if that is a good thing. Do we just want to look away when large orgs benefit from people not realizing that they're doing self-harm?
Do we want to ignore the larger societal implications of this?

If you want to delete your rootfs, be my guest.
I just won't be cheering for a corp that tells you that you're brilliant and absolutely right for doing so.

I believe it's a bad thing to frame this as a conflict between individual freedom and protecting the weak(est) parts of society. I don't think that anything good can come out of seeing the world that way.
by sarusso | 2026-01-12 21:18:00+00:00
Oh yes, absolutely. It bothers me as well, and it strains the eyes, but you know... for such a toy project I half vibe-coded in an hour or so I didn’t bother too much. I agree it should be improved!

It could definitely be a fun exercise. Also maybe just rendering all the text in the same color as the background and then changing the colors of the characters one by one could be an interesting option (just thought about it), but I think yours would render better.

As a side note, I have to say that posting something as simple as this, where you can’t really get too attached to the project and can read feedback in a truly neutral way - instead of just pretending - is so refreshing...

Thanks for your comment!
by MisterTea | 2026-01-12 21:18:31+00:00
This is something I have been curious about in terms of how an LLM's achieves compression.

I would like to know what deviations are in the output as this almost feels like a game of telephone where each re-compression results in a loss of data which is then incorrectly reconstructed. Sort of like misremembering a story and as you tell it over time the details change slightly.
by almosthere | 2026-01-12 21:18:51+00:00
You refuse to stand in solidarity with a people, that's basically equivalent to wanting them gone from the planet. I can stand in solidarity to all groups of people except for the ones that are evil and want genocide. For example, I don't think that is everyone in Isreal. I also believe the same for the Palestinian people - essentially it is Hamas and those supporting them that I condemn.

What apartheid is being practiced today, that's a totally insane view. Also last I saw, tons of "PoC" groups are actively holding town holiday events where white people are not allowed to join. That's effectively where things are going right now.
by troupo | 2026-01-12 21:18:58+00:00
> Neither driving nor coding with an LLM is perfectly deterministic.

Funny.

When driving, I can safely assume that when I turn the steering wheel in the direction in turns. That the road that was there yesterday is there today (barring certain emergencies, that's why they are emergencies). That the red light in a traffic light means stop, and the green means go.

And not the equivalent "oh, you're completely right, I forgot to include the wheels, wired the steering wheel incorrectly, and completely messed up the colors"
by bluenose69 | 2026-01-12 21:19:40+00:00
The cursor changes when you get to resizing corners and edges, so I don't suffer from the problem pointed out in the original article. However, I do find something annoying: sometimes when I'm resizing (or maybe dragging) a window, it gets expanded to fill the whole screen.

I think that kind of behaviour ought to be controlled by the green dot at the top-left of windows, not by some particular mouse movements.

There was a time when the changes to the mac UI were quite good, or at least not annoying. Sometimes it seems as though they are changing stuff just to change stuff.
by viccis | 2026-01-12 21:19:51+00:00
Kant's model of epistemology, with humans schematizing conceptual understanding of objects through apperception of manifold impressions from our sensibility, and then reasoning about these objects using transcendental application of the categories, is a reasonable enough model of thought. It was (and is I think) a satisfactory answer for the question of how humans can produce synthetic a priori knowledge, something that LLMs are incapable of (don't take my word on that though, ChatGPT is more than happy to discuss [1])

1: https://chatgpt.com/share/6965653e-b514-8011-b233-79d8c25d33...
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-12 21:20:26+00:00
well yes. That's the big issue. Trump didn't get more votes, Harris got drastically less than Biden. People didn't come out.

She had a bad hand needing to start out 6 months into an election cycle, and she played it poorly to boot. That's why this "we need to appeal to moderates/right wing" narrative is so frustrating. That's exactly what Harris did by trying to downplay Palestine/defend Israel and refusing to talk about the tensions in the job market. She established herself as "more of the same". That doesn't win votes in increasingly bad times.