MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sixo | 2026-01-23 18:09:04+00:00
Relevant Orwell from 1940: https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/boys/english/e_boys "Boys' weeklies". Contrasting the older and newer British stories with the American ones:

> If one compares the [British] Gem and Magnet with a genuinely modern [British] paper, the thing that immediately strikes one is... there are fifteen or twenty characters, all more or less on an equality, with whom readers of different types can identify. In the more modern papers this is not usually the case. Instead of identifying with a schoolboy of more or less his own age, the reader of the Skipper, Hotspur, etc., is led to identify with a G-man, with a Foreign Legionary, with some variant of Tarzan, with an air ace, a master spy, an explorer, a pugilist... This character is intended as a superman... There is a great difference in tone between even the most bloodthirsty English paper and the threepenny Yank Mags... In the Yank Mags you get real blood-lust, really gory descriptions of the all-in, jump-on-his-testicles style fighting, written in a jargon that has been perfected by people who brood end-lessly on violence.
by londons_explore | 2026-01-23 18:09:09+00:00
> The case involved several people suspected of fraud related to the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program

If it were preventing a mass murder I might feel differently...

But this is protecting the money supply (and indirectly the governments control).

Not a reason to violate privacy IMO, especially when at the time this was done these people were only suspected of fraud, not convicted.
by aydyn | 2026-01-23 18:09:15+00:00
> Secondly, even if it is true that it is a majority opinion in society doesn't mean it's right. Society at large often misunderstands how technology works and what risks it brings and what are its inevitable downstream effects. It was a majority opinion in society for decades or centuries that smoking is neutral to your health - that doesn't mean they were right.

That its a majority opinion instead of a tiny minority opinion is a strong signal that its more likely to be correct. For example its a majority opinion that murder is bad; this has held true for millennia.

Heres a simpler explanation: toaster frickers tend to seek out other toaster frickers online in niche communities. Occams razor.
by cogman10 | 2026-01-23 18:09:19+00:00
> Microsoft told Forbes that the company sometimes provides BitLocker recovery keys to authorities, having received an average of 20 such requests per year.

At least they are honest about it, but a good reason to switch over to linux. Particularly if you travel.

If microsoft is giving these keys out to the US government, they are almost certainly giving them to all other governments that request them.
by Balgair | 2026-01-23 18:09:37+00:00
Is that paper in print? I can't seem to find if it was peer reviewed.

If the paper is true, then, yeesh! That's a pretty big miss on the part of Güllich et al.

Reading through the very short paper there, it seems to not have gone through review yet (typos, mispellings, etc). Also, it's not clear that the data in the tables or the figure are from Güllich's work or are simulations meant to illustrate their idea (" True and estimated covariate effects in the presence of simulated collider bias in the
full and selected samples"). Being more clear where the data is coming from may help the argument, but I likely just missed some sentence or something.

I'll be interested to see where this goes. That Güllich managed to get the paper into Science in the first place lends credence to them having gone through something as simple as Berkson's Paradox and have accounted for that. It's not everyday you get something as 'soft' as that paper into Science, after all. If not, then wow! standards for review really have slipped!
by 0x9e3779b6 | 2026-01-23 18:09:50+00:00
Claude shows me more than one personal account, as I registered via single signon and then - via e-mail, and I paid once only for one of them.

It’s effectively a multi-tenant interface.

I also used individual acc but on corp e-mail, previously.

You could generate a new multi-use CC in your vibe-bank app (as Revolut), buy burner (e) sim for sms (5 eur in NL); then rewrite all requests at your mitm proxy to substitute a device id to one, not derived from your machine.

But same device id, same phone could be perfectly legitimate use case: you registered on corp e-mail then you changed your work place, using the same machine.

or you lost access to your e-mail (what a pity)

But to get good use of it, someone should compose proper requests to ClickHouse or whatever they use, for logs, build some logic to run as a service or web hook to detect duplicates with a pipeline to act on it.

And a good percentage of flags wouldn’t have been ToC violations.

That’s a bad vibe, can you imagine how much trial and error prompting it requires?..

They can’t vibe the way though the claude code bugs alone, on time!
by bytefish | 2026-01-23 18:09:57+00:00
What I miss the most about the XML ecosystem is the tooling. And I think, this is what most people are sentimental about. There was a time it was so easy to generate contracts using XSDs and it made it easy to validate the data. OpenAPI slowly reaches parity to what I worked with in 2006.

But what I do not miss is the over-engineering that happened in the ecosystem, especially with everything SOAP. Yes, when it worked, it worked. But when it didn’t work, which was often the case when integrating different enterprise systems, then well… lord have mercy on me.

Sometimes I still use XSD to define a schema for clients, because in some areas there’s still better tooling for XML. And it gives me the safety of getting valid input data, if the XML couldn’t be validated.

And in the enterprise world, XML is far from being dead anyways.
by bluGill | 2026-01-23 18:10:04+00:00
That only applies if you have the people. The limit of village population is the ability to grow enough food to feed it withing walking distance of the gate. And so your village cannot get a large enough population to overcome this.

Cities can only pull off a large population if there are a lot of villages growing surplus food (which is not what the village wants - in the medieval world cities were not making luxury goods farmers wanted so farmers would want to work less), and cities needed good bulk transport for all that food. Rome was a massive city in the day with just over a million people - today that is considered a tiny city and there are many much bigger.
by lovich | 2026-01-23 18:10:07+00:00
Overturning multiple precedents coming from decades ago, citing legal theorists from before the creation of our country to do so, and the increasing use of the shadow docket to geld the lower courts seems pretty illegitimate to me.

Also lol, this court is turning into heads Trump wins, tails everyone loses.

They ruled that Biden couldn’t forgive student loans but Trump has absolute immunity.
by snozolli | 2026-01-23 18:10:11+00:00
I read an article about this years ago and came away with the impression that they were effectively mummifying themselves before death. From the Wikipedia page on sokushinbutsu:

In medieval Japan, this tradition developed a process for sokushinbutsu, which a monk completed over about 3,000 days. It involved a strict diet called mokujiki (literally, 'eating a tree'). The monk abstained from any cereals and relied on pine needles, resins, and seeds found in the mountains, which would eliminate all fat in the body. Increasing rates of fasting and meditation would lead to starvation. The monks would slowly reduce then stop liquid intake, thus dehydrating the body and shrinking all organs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokushinbutsu
by tristor | 2026-01-23 18:10:37+00:00
I'm not a hoarder like most people imagine, but I have hoarder tendencies as my two storage units can attest. My main challenge has always been that when I have invested the (significant) effort in organizing things in a reasonable way, some life event soon comes along that causes everything to go back into disarray. My "stuff" is almost entirely various types of tools for doing various types of things that I have gained skills in over the years as personal education or hobbies.

My dream, which I'm hoping to soon realize, is to build myself an expansive workshop that has defined spaces for everything so that I can actually do things and make things when I want to, with all the necessary tools present, and without requiring external storage or cluttering my home. Right now most everything I don't use daily is stored neatly in labeled totes which are tracked in a spreadsheet and on shelving units in a storage unit off-site. Certainly not the cluttered mess that most people think of, but at the same time I have many things which are not used every single day that took years to acquire along with the companion skills and I have no intention of getting rid of.

In times gone past, I wouldn't appear as a hoarder because land, housing, workshop space was all massively more affordable and so I would have achieved my dream many many years ago. It's pretty incredible in how disappointing our current timeline is that someone who earns a massively outsized income compared to the average cannot afford to have a designated place to exercise their hobbies, because property pricing is so out of whack with what is reasonable that you need to be a multi-millionaire/billionaire to afford the space to do and have things without it appearing as a mess.

This is a preface to the fact I see these same problems with my older relatives, many of whom are now incapable of ever again participating in some of those hobbies due to physical infirmity. They spent a lifetime learning and collecting the tools to go along with that learning, and in many ways those tools now represent physically the manifestation of their entire life's work, and they cannot give them up, even as they can neither afford the space to keep them organized nor have the physical capability to continue working those skills even as a hobby, so it all just lingers around them as so much clutter and unopened boxes in the attic. This isn't quite the trash bags of magazines level of hoarding that most people think of, but I already know I will be responsible with the mental and physical effort to deal with this situation after my relatives pass, and yet I already find myself in the same situation. Wouldn't it have been so much nicer if they would have been able to pass along the property, the tools, and the skills to the next generation instead of being priced out and it all ending up in a dump eventually?
by the4anoni | 2026-01-23 18:10:41+00:00
I'm in my 20's now, graduated secondary school (as IT Technician). In meantime cured marrow aplasia.

I love 2000's era (especially tech, but music too). I think almost everything about 2000's tech was superior, from hardware to software. Things were solid, build to last. Software had clean, simple user interface. The user was invited, not forced to do something. For me nothing can beat philosophy of XMB (XrossMediaBar).

I don't know how to find my way in all this IT thing now. Never liked programming, what always intetested me was hardware and IT administration. But every day I wake up it just gets worse. IaC, SaaS, software is worse than ever before. And don't forget hardware speculations.

In 2000's tech was so easy, now it's just annonying, harder and obfuscated with every day.

I miss 2000's simplicity.
by cmrdporcupine | 2026-01-23 18:10:45+00:00
I know it's confusing, but things being under the 'google' namespace on GitHub doesn't mean they're maintained by Google. At least not as an official project.

It just means a person working at Google used that avenue to open source them.

Google offers a legal few avenues to allow you to open source your stuff while working there but one of the easiest it just to assign copyright to Google and shove it under their GitHub.

It just means a Googler published it, not that Google itself is maintaining it.

I don't know what the status of flatbuffers is specifically, but I can say I never encountered it in use in the 10 years I worked there. (I use it a lot now on my own things post-Google)
by w10-1 | 2026-01-23 18:11:07+00:00
Comparing the XML ecosystem to JSON is like comparing railroads to bicycles.

The main difference is that with enterprise companies and consultancies pushed complex XML solutions that differentiated them and created a moat (involving developer tools and compliance). JSON has always just been a way to sling data around, with a modicum of sanity. Hence the overbuilt/underbuilt split.

XML saved our axx. We had both internal and external API's with complex objects in JSON which failed constantly with mismatching implementations, causing friction with clients. Switching both to XML with schema solved that forever. But this was for complex B2B. We still used json for trivial web UI interactions.
by nvader | 2026-01-23 18:11:27+00:00
This is a very intriguing experiment!

I'll be following along, and I'm curious what kind of harness you'll put on TOP of Claude code to avoid it stalling out on "We have planted 16/20 fields so far, and irrigated 9/16. Would you like me to continue?"

I'd also like to know what your own "constitution" is regarding human oversight and intervention. Presumably you wouldn't want your investment to go down the drain if Claude gets stuck in a loop, or succumbs to a prompt injection attack to pay a contractor 100% of it's funds, or decides to water the fields with Brawndo.

How much are you allowing yourself to step in, and how will you document those interventions?
by Aurornis | 2026-01-23 18:11:28+00:00
FYI BitLocker is on by default in Windows 11. The defaults will also upload the BitLocker key to a Microsoft Account if available.

This is why the FBI can compel Microsoft to provide the keys. It's possible, perhaps even likely, that the suspect didn't even know they had an encrypted laptop. Journalists love the "Microsoft gave" framing because it makes Microsoft sound like they're handing these out because they like the cops, but that's not how it works. If your company has data that the police want and they can get a warrant, you have no choice but to give it to them.

This makes the privacy purists angry, but in my opinion it's the reasonable default for the average computer user. It protects their data in the event that someone steals the laptop, but still allows them to recover their own data later from the hard drive.

Any power users who prefer their own key management should follow the steps to enable Bitlocker without uploading keys to a connected Microsoft account.
by waffletower | 2026-01-23 18:11:29+00:00
Unfortunately, I definitely disagree with the "sounds better" argument, particularly for this instrument. I do own a vibraphone, and happen to also design synthesizers, and I did not find the Phase8 sound to be compelling. One of the appeals of a synthesizer is its spectral plasticity, and the output of the Phase8 relies too heavily on the sonic characteristics of the resonator medium. My vibraphone definitely suffers from this, and has the cultural baggage of being a recognizable instrument, but it is a much more pleasing sameness than the Phase8.
by jacquesm | 2026-01-23 18:11:55+00:00
I have lived for many years on the border of the United States and Canada, have many friends on both sides of that border (probably more in the USA) and I don't watch French or British TV news.

Your 'socialized healthcare' is a very weak version of it, there is no other country where medical issues can spiral out of control financially in the way they do in the United States.

I know the political parties are as corrupt as they get but that is your problem to fix, even so Trump's talking points, that the USA has been financing the rest of the world are plain bullshit.
by laurencerowe | 2026-01-23 18:12:08+00:00
I would really like to see the source of that because as mentioned elsewhere in the replies the Holocaust is a compulsory part of the National Curriculum and has been at least since I was in high school in the 1990s.

To the extent that the Holocaust is part of British and American history it is that we knew very well what was going on in 1930s Germany and strictly limited the number of Jewish refugees because of domestic concerns over the level of immigration.
by Proziam | 2026-01-23 18:12:40+00:00
Non-academics can definitely offer valid critiques of academia.

You don't need to be in academia to understand that scientific progress depends on trust. If you don't trust the results people are publishing, you can't then build upon them. Reproducibility has been a known issue for a long time[0], and is widely agreed upon to be a 'crisis' by academics[1].

The advent of an easier way to publish correct-looking papers, or to plagiarize and synthesize other works without actually validating anything is only going to further diminish trust.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/533452a#citeas

[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...
by KennyBlanken | 2026-01-23 18:12:46+00:00
The guy in charge of Go's security decreed that SSL 1.3 (which he was a contributor to) was so secure that silly programmers should not be able to override what algorithms are allowed or not allowed, because why would they possibly need to do that, because he's such a genius, and even if someone DID find a security vulnerability, well....they can just wait for Google to publicly disclose it and release a patch, compile the new version, update their code to work with that version of Go, rebuild their containers, put stuff through testing, and then release it into production.

Versus...seeing there's a vulnerability, someone adding a one-line change to disable the vulnerable algorithm, compile, image update, test. And a lot less testing because you're not moving to a new version of the language / compiler.

The man has no practical experience in running a production network service, an ego the size of a small moon, and yet was a major contributor to a security protocol now in use by billions of people.

But hey, you can be a handbag designer and end up head of design at Apple soooooooo
by drewbug01 | 2026-01-23 18:12:49+00:00
> If you say two different and contradictory things, and do not very explicitly resolve them, and say which one is the final answer, you will get blamed for both things you said, and you will not be entitled to complain about it, because you did it to yourself.

Our industry is held back in so many ways by engineers clinging to black-and-white thinking.

Sometimes there isn’t a “final” answer, and sometimes there is no “right” answer. Sometimes two conflicting ideas can be “true” and “correct” simultaneously.

It would do us a world of good to get comfortable with that.
by eudamoniac | 2026-01-23 18:13:10+00:00
Not the best analogy because coffee has massive quality differences that anyone can tell in a real comparison. Brewing at home is also cheaper and requires nothing more than a $20 French press.

I have personally administered double blind taste tests to four unrelated coffee drinkers who believed their current coffee (Keurig, Nespresso, pre ground) was good. They all thought the actual good coffee was much better in the blind tasting, to the extent that they all permanently stopped drinking their previous coffee. Exclamations of shock occurred.

Coffee is a commodity only out of ignorance. It should be treated as fresh produce of numerous varietals.

Have there been any such "tastings" of LLMs?
by ryandrake | 2026-01-23 18:13:17+00:00
> It's the reason you can just buy food in stores without any worry that it might hurt you[0] - there's potential for million ${local currency} fines, lawsuits, customer loss [...]

We are currently facing a political climate trying to tear many of these safeguards down. Some people really think "caveat emptor" is some kind of natural, efficient, ideal way of life.
by lotsofpulp | 2026-01-23 18:13:31+00:00
Sorry, I should have specified I was referring to the US. I would be surprised to learn of any other major country that doesn't allow it though, since the US is considered to be among the most hostile to customer protections.

https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/new-rules-el...

>Discounts to Customers

>A PCN cannot stop you from offering your customers a discount or another incentive for using a certain method of payment, as long as you offer it to all your customers and disclose the offer clearly and conspicuously. For example, you can offer your customers a discount or a coupon if they pay with cash or a debit card rather than a credit card.
by saghm | 2026-01-23 18:13:43+00:00
Sure, but that's not what they said, which is why it's confusing. Earlier in the article they referred to themselves as the "disabled organization", so it's not obvious to me that there's change in what they mean by the word to an entirely different one. Your explanation is plausible and consistent, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's correct, and I don't think that being internally consistent is sufficient evidence to conclude that something is true.
by dudeinhawaii | 2026-01-23 18:13:54+00:00
Unpopular opinion but I prefer slow and correct.

My experience on Claude Max (still on it till end-of-month) has been frequent incomplete assignments and troubling decision making. I'll give you an example of each from yesterday.

1. Asked Claude to implement the features in a v2_features.md doc. It completed 8 of 10 but 3 incorrectly. I gave GPT-5.1-Codex-Max (high) the same tasks and it completed 10 of 10 but took perhaps 5-10x as long. Annoyingly, with LLM variability, I can't know for sure if I tried Claude again it would get it correct. The only thing I do know is that GTP-5.2 and 5.1 do a lot more "double-checking" both prior to executing and after.

2. I asked Claude to update a string being displayed in the UI of my app to display something else instead. The string is powered by a json config. Claude searched the code, somehow assumed it was being loaded by a db, did not find the json and opted to write code to overwrite whatever comes out of the 'db' (incorrect) to be what I asked for. This is... not desired behavior and the source of a category of hidden bugs that Claude has created in the past (other models do this as well but less often). Max took its time, found the source json file, and made the update in the correct place.

I can only "sit back and let an agent code" if I trust that it'll do the work right. I don't need it fast, I need it done right. It's already saving me hours where I can do other things in parallel. So, I don't get this argument.

That said, I have a Claude Max and OpenAI Pro subscription and use them both. I instead typically have Claude Opus work on UI and areas where I can visually confirm logic quickly (usually) and Codex in back-end code.

I often wonder how much the complexity of codebases affects how people discuss these models.
by cweagans | 2026-01-23 18:14:51+00:00
The question you're actually trying to answer is unlikely to be "why is this the way that it is" and more likely to be "if I make this change, will I break anything". So just don't worry about it: make your change, open a PR, socialize it as widely as is practical, and if nobody stops you, merge it and move on. In many cases, the original "why" doesn't matter anymore. If it does, having a concrete change to look at and critique helps move the discussion along (and prevents getting trapped in hypotheticals - they can see exactly what you're trying to do if they have a PR in front of them).