MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Enginerrrd | 2026-01-07 01:15:15+00:00
Also frankly, doctor =/= expert on probiotics.

None of their training really addresses that and while they might be more qualified to read research than random layman I would not in general ascribe authority to what a random practitioner has to say about probiotics. Frankly, the research on probiotics is still very much in its infancy and a LOT remains to be figured out.
Ask HN: I want to know how everyone solves the problem of lacking creativity?
by nmr521521 | 2026-01-07 01:15:47+00:00
Lately, I've been using AI tools more and more for work. I went from having zero clue how to write prompts to totally nailing it, and I've had a blast along the way. But now, I keep getting stuck right at the starting line because I just don't have any fresh ideas.

Especially with image design, back in the day, I'd spend forever brainstorming a whole scene before diving in, or I'd just grab prompt templates that other people had already put together.

Efficiency's definitely shot up, which is awesome, but the trade-off is we need a ton more creativity. Where do all these ideas even come from? I'd love to hear how everyone else deals with this. For me, by the end, my brain's usually got just one or two words rattling around, and the rest is totally blank.
by hirsin | 2026-01-07 01:15:49+00:00
I was unsure of the licensing, so happy to take it down if it's not open - but I forked this to test some agent features on GitHub mobile and was happy with it. https://hpsin.github.io/SphericalSnake/ and the PR I single shotted for testing https://github.com/hpsin/SphericalSnake/pull/1

Thanks for a fun mobile friendly test run!
by ivanech | 2026-01-07 01:16:00+00:00
I find Opus 4.5 very, very strong at matching the prevailing conventions/idioms/abstractions in a large, established codebase. But I guess I'm quite sensitive to this kind of thing so I explicitly ask Opus 4.5 to read adjacent code which is perhaps why it does it so well. All it takes is a sentence or two, though.
by rcoder | 2026-01-07 01:16:24+00:00
In ~25 years or so of dealing with large, existing codebases, I've seen time and time again that there's a ton of business value and domain knowledge locked up inside all of that "messy" code. Weird edge cases that weren't well covered in the design, defensive checks and data validations, bolted-on extensions and integrations, etc., etc.

"Just rewrite it" is usually -- not always, but _usually_ -- a sure path to a long, painful migration that usually ends up not quite reproducing the old features/capabilities and adding new bugs and edge cases along the way.
by prewett | 2026-01-07 01:16:31+00:00
I'd like to see that argument. Russia pre-WWII and Mao's China don't seem to me to have much capitalist pressure against them, yet Stalin and Mao killed millions. Stalin's purges were internal, against people who were on his bad side. Now, you could say that maybe Western spies agitated, but there's no way that Western agitation would account for millions of people. Furthermore, in 1930, the Communist system was widely seen as successful, since initial food production in the USSR was strongly up. Mao's deaths were incompetence (famine: killing sparrows, resulting in sparrows not eating insects the next year; famine: misallocation of resources, causing starvation in Sichuan when enough food existed elsewhere; Cultural Revolution: Mao's reaction to losing his grip on power). I think China was so poor that it realistically did not interact with the rest of the world, but in WWII, the US actually helped the Communists.

Every other Communist state that I am aware of also killed millions in internal purges: Cambodia and N. Korea, notably. I'm actually not sure what happened with Vietnam and Cuba. I'm not sure if contemporary Venezuela counts as Communist, but I am under the impression that there was killing or at least persecution of internal political enemies. I don't see how US sanctions have anything to do with how one treats political enemies.

I guess Eastern Europe might be an exception, but I think that is because Communist states were imposed with external force, not revolution from within, and the population mostly capitulated. However, I believe that political opposition was still likely to be deadly.

Since Communist states seem to be highly correlated with killing internal enemies, it seems like a feature of the system, not a response to external pressure, particularly since the largest two did not have serious external pressure at the time.
by lapcat | 2026-01-07 01:16:39+00:00
> Thus I concluded that people overall are tired of socializing. Which is fine, and honestly, I admit that this is the case for me, too.

I'm puzzled by this statement. I understand why the author is tired of socializing on the internet, but I'm not sure where the generalization comes from, how the conclusion was "me, too" rather than just "me". People are obviously still using the various social networks in large numbers even if the author has stopped.
by everfrustrated | 2026-01-07 01:16:50+00:00
As someone coming from GitHub copilot in vscode and recently trying Claude Code plugin for vscode I don't get the fuss about Claude.

Copilot has by far the best and most intuitive agent UI. Just make sure you're in agent mode and choose Sonnet or Opus models.

I've just cancelled my Claude sub and gone back and will upgrade to the GH Pro+ to get more sonnet/opus.
by yndoendo | 2026-01-07 01:16:55+00:00
Framework 13 [0]. It also has balanced USB ports on each side with being able to charge on the left and right. No Microsoft tax.

I have been using it and at the moment will not go back to other OEMs. This is after having laptops from; Acer, Asus, HP, Dell, Lenovo, Apple (PPC). Apple (PPC) was the laptop that died the fast after the warranty expired, Dell XPS 13 was the second fastest to die.

[0] https://frame.work/laptop13?tab=specs
by ssl-3 | 2026-01-07 01:17:14+00:00
Honestly, other than that one single command ("Climate control defrost and floor") I never really use voice for anything else while actively driving. The temperature knob usually does what I want when driving, and I'll be stopped again soon enough if I want to fiddle with something else.

And that one voice command is easy-enough to remember, and the resulting manually-selected mode is easy-enough to cancel with the Auto button (which is the entire middle of the temperature knob -- simple enough).

AI is too easy to get wrong.

For example: At home when my hands are full and I'm headed to/from the basement, I might bark out the command "Alexa! Basement lights!"

This command sometimes results turning the lights on or off. But sometimes, it results in entering a conversation about the basement lights, when all anyone really wants from such simple diction is for the lights to toggle state -- like interacting with a regular light switch just toggles state.

I simply want computers to follow instructions. I am very particularly disinterested in ever having conversation -- a negotiation -- with a computer in my car.

But I can see plenty of merit to adding some context-aware tolerance for ambiguity to the accepted commands. Different people sometimes (quite rightly) use different words to describe the end result they want.

That doesn't take an LLM to accomplish, I don't think. After all, a car has a limited number of functions. It should be mostly a matter of broadening the voice recognition dictionary and expanding the fixed logic to deal with that breadth.

I reckon that this should have happened 5 years ago. :)
by belter | 2026-01-07 01:18:41+00:00
My previous statement was imprecise. They need to be eligible but only those assigned to intelligence, counterintelligence, or national security roles are actually granted access to specific SCI compartments.

The article below mentions the use of taint teams, meaning only agents with appropriate clearances, need to know, and role assignments served on these teams. So not every FBI agent present on the operation looked at classified materials.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI_search_of_Mar-a-Lago
by sestep | 2026-01-07 01:19:17+00:00
Ahh no you're right, I forgot about the difficulties for GPU specifically; apologies for my overly curt earlier message. More accurately: I think this is definitely possible (Troels and I have talked a bit about this previously) and I'd be happy to work together if this is something you're interested in. I probably won't work on this if you're not interested on your end, though.
by gerdesj | 2026-01-07 01:19:36+00:00
Blimey! After I engaged reader mode, all was revealed 8)

The "spider" and the wandering particles are funky but everything else in gthe presentation conspires to exclude granddad (who has rather shite eyesight these days). On the bright side, you didn't go for a dark theme. I'm happy to sort out my very minor accessibility "problems" but it might be nice to cater for all, as much as you can.

I love how you have considered so many ways to ensure that it will degrade gracefully, as far as is possible for certain glyph handling capabilities.

Good skills ... how on earth does this work? I pasted your glyph quite a lot and found that backspace changes it into the other flag:

EDIT: Oh dear, HN strips out funky glyphs so this post looks a bit odd.
by sksishbs | 2026-01-07 01:19:45+00:00
It’s kind of funny - there’s another thread up where a dev claimed a 20-50x speed up. To their credit they posted videos and links to the repo of their work.

And when you check the work, a large portion of it was hand rolling an ORM (via an LLM). Relatively solved problem that an LLM would excel at, but also not meaningfully moving the needle when you could use an existing library. And likely just creating more debt down the road.
by jedberg | 2026-01-07 01:19:50+00:00
We know the tech is there. It used to take 45 minutes to fly from LAX to SFO. Now it's 70 minutes. That's not a tech problem, it's a logistics/fuel problem. But if people really valued the difference, they would offer a 45 minute flight for more money.

Or when I leave from Boston to go to the San Francisco, and we leave an hour late but we still arrive on time, it's because they were able to go faster. We certainly have the tech to go faster.

So why can't I buy a BOS->SFO flight that is one hour shorter for more money? Probably because of a lack of willingness to pay.
by kevinsync | 2026-01-07 01:20:15+00:00
I hate to say it (not a doom and gloom kind of dude) but to the general population, social media either is, or at the very least appears to be, one of the only ways up and out of the deep, terrifying economic chasm that our societies have been carving to separate the haves from the have-nots.

Statistically, of course, the overwhelming majority of people who try to secure the bag from social media either fail, succeed and burn out quickly, or succeed BIG and lose their souls. And given that it's just a new form of old entertainment, I'd wager that the percentage of those that break through versus those that don't is probably in line with what it always was (slim, or short-lived)

Meanwhile in the real world, wages are stagnant, institutions have crumbled, safety nets blown away like a fart in the wind; we've legalized and lionized gambling on every single aspect of life, geopolitics are in upheaval, businesses are tightening up more than they have in years, information went from a daily newspaper to a debilitating firehose, prices are through the roof, and we're all left to fend for ourselves.

What do we do?

Shuck and jive on socials. Place leveraged bets on ephemeral concepts and world events on Polymarket. Plow into memecoins, tokenize all physical assets. Play the lottery, hit the casino. On and on, while cost of living goes L-shaped.

I think for the vast majority of people, social media is both dead yet completely inescapable... but I have a nascent, vague feeling that while people are sick and tired of being algorithmically manipulated and want to bail, if pushed far enough, become hungry enough, they'll come right back and spin the wheel from the side of a creator out of desperation, feeding the machine that we all hate LOL

Anyways. More optimism, less doomerism! It ain't gotta be like this long-term!
by rgoulter | 2026-01-07 01:21:49+00:00
Right. I think 'constraint' is more accurate than 'agenda'.. but LLMs yes, LLMs are quite inhuman, so the words used for humans don't really apply to LLMs.

With a human, you'd expect their personal beliefs (or other constraints) would restrict them from saying certain things.

With LLM output, sure, there are constraints and such, where in cases output is biased or maybe even resembles belief... -- But it does not make sense to ask an LLM "why did you write that? what were you thinking?".

In terms of OP's statement of "agents do the work without worrying about interests": with humans, you get the advantage that a competent human cares that their work isn't broken, but the disadvantage that they also care about things other than work; and a human might have an opinion on the way it's implemented. With LLMs, just a pure focus on output being convincing.
by isodev | 2026-01-07 01:22:21+00:00
This is so cool!

Written like this, emojis look a bit like stargate addresses [1F3F3 FE0F 200D 26A7 FE0].

I knew that emoji symbols have a way of using modifiers but this is the first time I’m getting a glimpse into the process of iterating on a proposal. Thanks for sharing!
by rachelle-r | 2026-01-07 01:23:28+00:00
That's solid feedback, thanks. You're right - being able to see what the app does before signing up would lower the barrier. I'll work on that today - plan is to let anyone scrape and preview a recipe without logging in, then only prompt for signup when they try to save it. Should be live before I head to bed tonight :)

Lmk if you have any other feedback!
by ewoodrich | 2026-01-07 01:24:21+00:00
Right, I am a daily user of agentic LLM tools and have this exact problem in one large project that has complex business logic externally dictated by real world requirements out of my control, and let's say, variable quality of legacy code.

I remember when Gemini Pro 3 was the latest hotness and I started to get FOMO seeing demos on X posted to HN showing it one shot-ing all sorts of impressive stuff. So I tried it out for a couple days in Gemini CLI/OpenCode and ran into the exact same pain points I was dealing with using CC/Codex.

Flashy one shot demos of greenfield prompts are a natural hype magnet so get lots of attention, but in my experience aren't particularly useful for evaluating value in complex, legacy projects with tightly bounded requirements that can't be easily reduced to a page or two of prose for a prompt.
by topspin | 2026-01-07 01:24:34+00:00
I can't say. I believe it's possible, but it's a hard problem. I believe this is a opportunity to apply formal methods, that nothing less will be sufficient, and that the value of the capability is high enough to justify the effort. That will take a lot of talent and hours.

I admire io_uring. I appreciate the fact that it exists and continues despite the security problems; evidence that security "concerns" don't (yet) have a veto over all things Linux. The design isn't novel. High performance hardware (NICs, HBAs, etc.) have used similar techniques for a long time. Io_uring only brings this to "user space" code. I imagine an OS and hardware that fully inculcate the pattern, obviating the need for context switches, interrupts, blocking and other conventional approaches we've slouched into since the inception of computing.
by andrekandre | 2026-01-07 01:24:45+00:00
> let LLMs do whatever behind the scenes to hit the specs

assuming for the sake of argument that's completely true, then what happens to "competitive advantage" in this scenario?

it gets me thinking: if anyone can vibe from spec, whats stopping company a (or even user a) from telling an llm agent "duplicate every aspect of this service in python and deploy it to my aws account xyz"...

in that scenario, why even have companies?
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-01-07 01:24:57+00:00
> Or when I leave from Boston to go to the San Francisco, and we leave an hour late but we still arrive on time, it's because they were able to go faster. We certainly have the tech to go faster.

Catching favorable winds and burning more fuel. It is in the airlines best interest to have the plane in position for the next flight, so they will burn the fuel when they need to. However, committing to a tighter schedule would cause a lot of problems if they were late too often, kinds of problems that means they would make less money than with the current schedule.
by rachelle-r | 2026-01-07 01:26:13+00:00
Great question! TikTok recipes are a mixed bag honestly.

When you paste a TikTok link, we pull the video caption and try to extract ingredients/instructions from the text. If the creator wrote out the recipe in the description (or linked to their blog), it works really well.

But you're right - a lot of TikTok recipes are just "watch me cook" with no written recipe. In those cases, we save the video embed so you can still watch it directly in the app, add your own tags, favourite it, and keep it organised with your other recipes. Not as ideal as having the full recipe extracted, but at least it's not lost in your TikTok likes anymore.

For recipe cards shown visually in videos, you can screenshot and use our photo import feature - that one does use GPT-4 Vision to OCR the text.
by kazinator | 2026-01-07 01:26:49+00:00
> Hash as int

Should be "Hash as decimal". The hexadecimal hash is already the same integer.

> Message: "Fix critical bug" + git-prime Nonce: 167

In the actual code it looks like:

Fix critical bug

git-prime Nonce: 167

So it is like a trailer. However, can trailer names have spaces in them?

A more conservative choices for the trailer header seems wiser, like:

Prime-nonce: N

would be a safer choice for the trailer. (The word "git" is not required; we know we are in Git.)

Another subtlety is that if the message already has trailers, then you don't need to separate that from them by a blank line

Git has a command for manipulating trailers; that could be used.

(I see the developer doesn't really believe in this because I don't see the nonces in the commit messages of the project itself.)
by biammer | 2026-01-07 01:27:01+00:00
> deergomoo: On what planet is concentrating an increasingly high amount of the output of this whole industry on a small handful of megacorps “democratising” anything?

> simonw: It's better because now you can automate something tedious in your life with a computer without having to first climb a six month learning curve.

Completely ignores, or enthusiastically accepts and endorses, the consolidation of production, power, and wealth into a stark few (friends), and claims superiority and increased productivity without evidence?

This may be the most simonw comment I have ever seen.
by 0928374082 | 2026-01-07 01:27:29+00:00
Why do you think they wouldn't? We've seen this behaviour before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudetenland#Sudeten_Crisis

Here is a recent picture, taken during discussions about Greenland: https://bilder.deutschlandfunk.de/72/d7/aa/c5/72d7aac5-be14-...

You probably recognise the woman on the left, the PM of Denmark.

You may not recognise the dude on the right, but he comes from a country that gave us the motto which vocally expresses the solidarity he is physically expressing in the pic: "all for one, and one for all"

If we may talk brass tacks, he also has several boomers that could lob a bus or a few at the new White House ballroom. Half an hour flight time if they didn't bother to leave their home base; shorter than that if they fired from somewhere in the Atlantic: https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/stellar/prod/17070508372...
by soulofmischief | 2026-01-07 01:27:34+00:00
You're reading too much into what I mean by "opinionated".

I have very specific requirements and constraints that come from knowledge and experience, having worked with dozens of languages. The language in question is general-purpose, highly flexible and strict but not opinionated.

However, I am not experienced in every single platform and backend which I support, and the constraints of the language create some very interesting challenges. Coding agents make this achievable in a reasonable time frame. I am enjoying making the language, and I want to get experience with making low-level languages. What is the problem? Do you ever program for fun?
by fragmede | 2026-01-07 01:27:34+00:00
Or maybe they do, but they don't want to get drawn into a totally derailing side conversation about the future of humanity and global warming and it's just a tiny acknowledgement that hey, you can throw an obfuscated blob of minified JavaScript at it and it can take it apart with way less effort from a human, which gets you to the interesting part of the RE question faster than if you had to do it by hand. By all means, don't buy it. I'm not the one getting left behind, however.
by soraminazuki | 2026-01-07 01:27:50+00:00
> Relationships will be forged without US influence, working with Russia and Iran for energy and working with China will become much simpler as many of the issues between EU and these nations stem from USA's grip on Europe.

It doesn't make sense to cut ties with colonialists, only to buddy up to other colonialists. Instead, the remaining countries of the free world must urgently unite and do everything to protect the rule of law. And also possibly work with likeminded people in slipping democracies to prevent further destruction and harm.
by RodgerTheGreat | 2026-01-07 01:28:10+00:00
1. The people working for these companies are already demonstrably ethically flexible enough to pirate any publicly accessible training data they can get their hands on, including but not limited to ignoring the license information in every repo on GitHub. I'm not impressed with any of these clowns and I wouldn't trust them to take care of a potted cactus.

2. The risk of using "illegal" training data is irrelevant, because no GenAI vendors have been meaningfully punished for violating copyright yet, and in the current political climate they don't expect to be anytime soon. Even so,

3. Presuming they get caught redhanded using personal data without permission- which, given the nature of LLMs would be extremely challenging for any individual customer to prove definitively- they may lose customers, and customers may try to sue, but you can expect those lawsuits to take years to work their way through the courts; long after these companies IPO, employees get their bag, and it all becomes someone else's problem.

4. The idea of using carefully curated datasets is popular rhetoric, but absolutely does not reflect how the biggest GenAI vendors do business. See (1).

AI labs are extremely shortsighted, sloppy, and demonstrably do not care a single iota about the long term when there's money to be made in the short term. Employees have gigantic financial incentives to ignore internal malfeasance or simple ineptitude. The end result is, if anything, far worse than stupidity.
by bluegatty | 2026-01-07 01:29:19+00:00
That's what the author means but the biggest leverage from the dollar is not as a tool but just the fact that provides cheap debt. The US has enormous amount of leeway with debt issuance relative to other nations who's currencies will fluctuate wildly depending on economic circumstance.

Cheap debt actually creates it's own problems but it's a 'good problem' to have.
by devnavigator | 2026-01-07 01:29:33+00:00
AI Agents are moving quickly from experimentation to real operational impact, yet many organizations struggle to decide which agent types are worth investing in and which introduce unnecessary risk. Not all AI Agents are created equal. Some deliver immediate, governed value, while others promise transformation but require significant maturity to deploy responsibly. This article introduces a practical framework for evaluating AI Agents based on business value and technical feasibility, helping leaders prioritize investments, sequence adoption, and avoid common pitfalls as agentic systems become more prevalent across the enterprise.