MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by xhkkffbf | 2026-01-05 22:19:29+00:00
Cute gambit to talk about ferries, the one mode of transport that doesn't have insane land-use debates. (Although they do need waterfront property on both ends.) I'll give you a point for that one.

But let's be serious. Ferries have a very limited use in only a few cities. Even then, the appeal is limited because they're relatively slow.

I submit that the most common result of replacing one yacht with $100m of public transit spending is that the unions and the bureaucracy will eat up the $100m in a few minutes.

The theory here is that diverting more smart people into "good" careers like urban planning will be great. But if we look at the last 100 years in the United States, the rise of careers like urban planning have been correlated with an explosion in construction costs.

Yet back in the bad old days when there weren't urban planning degrees and only a few effete twits went to college, private capitalism was able to build two big urban transit systems in NYC. No book smart people. Just sandhogs and profit motive. How much did it cost to add just a few stops to the NYC subway over the last two decades?
by ryandrake | 2026-01-05 22:19:38+00:00
I don't even know why the 365 number is so important. I mean, it probably has something to do with there being 365 days in 3 out of 4 years, but what makes that significant to a word processor or spreadsheet? It's as if Google were to rename their product "Search 60" because there are 60 minutes in an hour. So what?

Microsoft's brand names never made a whole lot of sense--they're just continuing the tradition.
by kaii_001 | 2026-01-05 22:19:39+00:00
Hey everyone,

I spend way too much time on X, and I kept running into the same problem:
there’s a lot of good information, but it’s buried under hype and noise.

So I built a small tool called XTrack for myself. It tracks accounts and topics you care about and turns the stream into short digests, so you don’t have to scroll endlessly or worry about missing important updates.

It’s not a trading bot or alpha generator — more like a way to stay up to speed without information overload.

I’ve made it free to try for now because I mainly want feedback from people who are heavy X users.
If this sounds useful, feel free to check it out and let me know what you think (good or bad):

https://www.ai-productivity.tools/

Happy to answer questions or hear suggestions on what would actually make this more useful
by jakeydus | 2026-01-05 22:19:40+00:00
Yes.

To phrase it more completely, regime change and general destabilization of Latin American countries has definitely led to the immigration crisis in the United States now. Lack of stable governments and economies has absolutely exacerbated the production and transportation of drugs into the United States. Hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans have been killed or disappeared by US-empowered gangs or governments.

Now that said, I don't know what the world would look like had their right to self-determination been preserved. Nobody knows. But as a general rule, countries whose power structures were not toyed with by colonial powers do better than countries whose power structures were toyed with.
by KaiserPro | 2026-01-05 22:19:50+00:00
> reacting emotionally

I don't think there is much emotion in said post. I am making specific assertions.

to your point:

> Non-sexualized bikinis are sold everywhere

Correct! the key logical modifier is Non sexual. Also you'll note that a lot of clothing companies do not show images of children in swimwear. Partly that's down to what I imagine you would term puritanism, but also legal counsel. The definition of a CSAM is loose enough (in some jurisdictions) to cover swimwear, depending on context. That context is challenging. A parent looking for clothes that will fit/suit their child is clearly not sexualised (corner cases exist, as I said context) Someone else who is using if for sexual purposes is not.

and because like GPL3 CSAM is infectious, the tariff for both company and end user is rather high for making, storing, transmitting and downloading those images. If someone is convicted of collecting those images, and using them for a sexual purpose, then images that were created that were not-CSAM suddenly become CSAM, and legally toxic to posses. (context does come in here.)

> Your link clearly states they are being moderated in the comments

Which tells us that there is a lot of work on guardrails right? its a choice by xai to allow users to do this. (mainly the app is hamstrung so that you have to pay for the spicy mode.) Whether its done by an ML model or not is irrelevant. Knowingly allowing CSAM generation and transmission is illegal. if you or I were to host an ML model that allows user to do the same thing, we would be in jail. There is a reason why other companies are not doing this.

The law must be applied equally, regardless of wealth, or power. I think that is my main objection to all of this. its clearly CSAM, and anyone other than musk doing this would have been censured by now. All of this justification is because of who it is doing this, rather than what is being done. We can bike shed all we want about is it actually really CSAM, which negates the entire point of this, which is its clearly breaking the law.

> The GPT models wouldn't know what is sexualised.

ML Classification is really rather good now. Instagram's unsupervised categorisation model is really rather effective at working out context of an image or video (ie differentiation of clothes, and context of those clothes.)

> please don't put words in my mouth

I have not done this, I am asserting that the bar for justifying this kind of content, which is clearly illegal and easily prevented (ie a picture of a minor and "generate an image of her in sexy clothes") is very high.

Now you could argue that I'm implying that you have something to hide. I am actually curious as to your motives for justifying the knowing creation of sexualised images of minors. You've made a weak argument that there are legitimate purposes. You then argue that its a slippery slope.

Is your fear that this brings justifies an age gated internet? censorship? What is the price that you think is worth paying?
by ryanscript01123 | 2026-01-05 22:20:05+00:00
Location: Minneapolis, MN, USA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: TypeScript, JavaScript, React, Vue, Svelte, Golang, Node, Python, FastAPI, C#, C++, Java, PHP, Laravel, Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, AWS, Terraform, Docker, CI/CD, Git, HTML, CSS, Tailwind, Jest, Mapbox, ArcGIS, Claude, Bash, Linux

Résumé/CV: https://ryanisler.com/resume

Email: islerryan@gmail.com

Portfolio: https://github.com/ryanIs

- Senior Full Stack Developer (+5 YoE) with a background in weather forecast mapping, API/CMS development, and product database tooling. Currently back-n-forth between a few endeavors: building a Scryfall-inspired Magic the Gathering assistant in React + Django; A Vue + Rails version for Hearthstone; and having fun improving my workflow with Neovim and Claude Code.

I am searching for remote contract, full-time, or part-time opportunities.
by illwrks | 2026-01-05 22:20:50+00:00
Not sure how the google one works, but does this introduce more risk?

If the parent is aware that your 'app block scam calls' does that make them more likely to believe a scam caller, if one get's through your screening?

Whereas if you educate the parent about the persistence and ever increasing complexity of scams, and they experience the calls and are competent to dismiss them, you make them more aware and more resilient in future - Scam awareness training of sorts.
by MDTHLN | 2026-01-05 22:20:53+00:00
The ‘Boy Scout Rule’ and Kent Beck’s idea to “First make the change easy, then make the easy change” are probably the two most important bits of advice I received in my career.

I attribute most of my success to following those rules.

And maybe I’m just applying my own biases, but all the best developers I’ve worked with seem to follow those rules as well.
by tguvot | 2026-01-05 22:21:12+00:00
at flight that I had bunch of years ago i peeked into printed out manuscript that guy sitting next to me was reading. it was something about "explosive formation of underwater shock wave and how it influences metal hulls". might have included something like DOD and MIL at footer.

later I tried to google some of the phrases that I remembered, but couldn't find anything
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2026-01-05 22:21:39+00:00
>It's extremely difficult to believe that the US could fly a bunch of helicopters to Pyongyang or Tehran and do the same within 30 minutes.

Would your answer change if China were somehow guaranteed to not intervene? Because I'm not sure the obstacle here is North Korean defenses, so much as Chinese intervention.

Tehran? I think it'd go more or less like Caracas did.
by WorldMaker | 2026-01-05 22:22:07+00:00
Though some of the rest of Clippy's "friends" (Lynx the cat and Rover) came from Bob and were Bob's "friends" first. Windows 2000 added Microsoft Agent which shared some characters in 2D with Office 2000 and invented a few new 3D characters (which Office never used). Windows XP added "Search Assistant" using some of the Office characters (Rover being the default search character and Lynx still hanging around as an alternative).

The legacy of Bob lived on for a while. Also Microsoft Agent was a lot of fun to play with as a kid in High School. I built some wild PowerPoint Presentations scripting Agents from the Notes field.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-05 22:22:18+00:00
> For what it's worth, this article is meant mainly for people who have never interacted with LessWrong before (as evidenced by its coda), who are getting their LessWrong post rejected.

> Pre-existing LWers tend to have different failure states if they're caused by LLMs.

I understand how it was framed, the claim that they're getting 10-20 users per day claiming LLM-assisted breakthroughs is obviously not true. Click through to the moderation log at https://www.lesswrong.com/moderation#rejected-posts and they're barely getting 10-20 rejected posts and comments total per day. They're mostly a mix of spam, off-topic, AI-assisted slop, but it's not a deluge of people claiming to have awoken ChatGPT.

I can find the posts they're talking about if I search through enough entries. One such example: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LjceJrADBzWc74dNE/the-recogn...

But even that isn't hitting the bullet points of the list in the main post. I think that checklist and the claim that this is a common problem are a just a common tactic on LessWrong to make the problem seem more widespread and/or better understood by the author.
by nailer | 2026-01-05 22:22:25+00:00
It is, I acknowledge the win!

Claude and Grok output garbage:

https://claude.ai/artifacts/fc5ef98b-a9f8-48c9-b0ea-b60c778d...

https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5_a5cab471-1c3a-42ab-a25e-c491...
by protocolture | 2026-01-05 22:23:02+00:00
Yeah I have shifted entirely to OPR and other games.

OPR seems like the only real potential competitor to GW. Trying to beat GW on cost, or by copying their games, hasnt produced any results. You need a smoother pathway to the hobby and the game, and thats what OPR represents.

They have:

1. Near 100% rules compatibility for GW miniatures.
2. Support 3d printing out of the box.
3. Will never care where your minis came from.
4. Rules have a lot in common with older edition 40k

Being able to go online, buy a starter army and just start printing it asap is amazing.
by brailsafe | 2026-01-05 22:23:28+00:00
I'd say this is a pretty unhelpful, demanding, and borderline damaging take to spread. I've learned from experience that it's unlikely "a designer" should follow this advice or accept the archaic guilt-trip "because you make six figures" whatever that means.

If you run your own design agency, you've got your own company's reputation and yours on the line, so be as opinionated as you find necessary, but otherwise if you're just an employee without an inordinate amount of clear authority within the scope of your discipline at the large company (you know if you do or don't) then don't try and create a mutiny, it will more than likely be a childish assumption of personal risk on your part, much more so than it costs the company, much more so than anyone else needs to care, because someone on a forum told you to be passionate about round rects or small icons or whatever. If you need to tell your boss "google NN group", you probably don't have the trust or experience to be successful with such a play.

It's okay to have a personal hatred of it and do what you can to steer the work appropriately, but when you're tasked with a dumbass plan, let it be the decision-makers' dumbass plan, unless it's your decision to make. Let it be the project we tried and it didn't and couldn't have worked out, which sometimes happens, but you learn and then leave if it's pervasive and you have other options.

It would be remarkably stupid to single yourself out as the person who thinks of themselves as the reincarnation of Steve Jobs and risk your livelihood to save Apple's reputation. The unlikely upside is that you get your way and that can boost your confidence, but the downside is that you fumble your best shot at financial security for the rest of your life because you thought you'd be received well.

That's not to say you shouldn't say no to nothing, or have love for your craft, just don't pretend it's your job to, unless it is, which it's probably not. Disagree and let it be a failure if it's going to be, feel vindicated if it is, but the money is there for you if not. The people who worked on the Vision Pro aren't responsible for it being a dud product, and they can be proud of what they did design-wise and technologically despite that.
by dandelionv1bes | 2026-01-05 22:23:45+00:00
The response to the Sal Khan op-ed resonated with me, along with other parts of this article. Something I’ve been digging more into is some of the figures around proposed job losses from AI. I think I even posted a simulation paper last week.

After posting that, I came across numerous papers which critique Frey & Osborne’s approach, who are some of the forefathers for the AI job losses figures we see banded around commonly these days. One such paper is here but i can dig out others: https://melbourneinstitute.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_...

It has made me very cautious around bold statements on AI - and I was already at the cautious end.
by toast0 | 2026-01-05 22:23:55+00:00
So if you paid me Jan 1 2025 for one year of DNS service and now it's Jan 1 2026 and you didn't pay me again, I'm supposed to keep serving your DNS?

If the money runs out, the service turns off. That's not sabotage anymore than the phone company turning off your phone or the electric company turning off your power. Although phone and electricity may have regulated shutoff procedures.
by lenerdenator | 2026-01-05 22:23:58+00:00
My guess is, there were once more humans in the loop for the thing that the author is referring to. Since humans cost more than GenAI, GenAI replaced some or all of those humans.

Never think of any sort of for-profit enterprise as anything other than a for-profit enterprise, and you'll never be heartbroken by one.

Angered? Made to think you're living in a dystopia? Enticed into an absurdist world view? Absolutely. But you won't be heartbroken.
by dang | 2026-01-05 22:24:07+00:00
I can't make out what you're specifically saying here, but "fakes posts later" doesn't pattern-match in my mind to anything we actually do. All of things we actually do regarding re-upping posts, timestamps, and so on, I've explained many times (e.g. about timestamps here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), and we're always happy to answer good-faith questions.

As for "the famous Dropbox post", if you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863, there was nothing fake about it.
by bstsb | 2026-01-05 22:24:14+00:00
unfortunately, it's close to useless in 2026. i'll take an excerpt from arkenfox's repo as to why:

> Replacing some version specific scripts on CDNs with local versions is not a comprehensive solution and is a form of enumerating badness. While it may work with some scripts that are included it doesn’t help with most other third party connections.

> CDN extensions don't really improve privacy as far as sharing your IP address is concerned and their usage is fingerprintable as this Tor Project developer points out. They are the wrong tool for the job and are not a substitute for a good VPN or Tor Browser. Its worth noting the resources for Decentraleyes are over six years out of date and would not likely be used anyway

https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/wiki/4.1-Extensions
by ryandrake | 2026-01-05 22:24:18+00:00
> Actually, you operate on the next level for certain amount of the time. You work with your manager to file for your promotion case. That's how the typical big corps work with promotions.

This has always struck me as a pretty juicy deal going for the corporation. They get N years of "next level" work out of you while still being able to pay those N years in "previous level" salary. Good deal for them.

How ridiculous the opposite sounds: You pay me at the next level for 3 years, and only then I'll know you're serious and will start working at that level. You'd get laughed out of the room. But the company has this exact deal in reverse.
Show HN: Tuff Toucan Steal a Brainrot Wiki – A "Neo-Brutalist" Game Database
by lion__93332 | 2026-01-05 22:24:20+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Steal A Brainrot Wiki (https://tufftoucan.com/), a deep-dive database for one of the most chaotic and viral subcultures on Roblox.

Most game wikis today are hosted on platforms like Fandom, which have become increasingly difficult to use due to heavy ad-loading, aggressive tracking, and cluttered UI. My goal was to create a high-performance, standalone alternative that actually matches the "aggressive" aesthetic of the game it documents.

The Design Philosophy (Acid Graphics & Neo-Brutalism) Instead of a traditional clean/minimalist SaaS look, I went for a "Neo-Brutalist" style combined with "Acid Graphics"—high-contrast colors (#DFFF00), raw industrial borders, and CRT-style scanlines. The idea was to make the Wiki feel like a tactical terminal or a "classified" database found within the game universe.

Key Features:

ROI & Yield Analytics: Beyond simple lists, the site provides cost-benefit analyses for in-game assets like the "Tuff Toucan" (which has a $2.7B fabrication cost).
Fabrication Protocols: A node-based visual guide for multi-step character crafting.
Event Archiving: Deep-linked guides for limited-time event cycles (2025/2026).
Performance: Built with Next.js 14 and Tailwind CSS for near-instant page transitions and zero ads.
Tech Stack:

Next.js 14 (App Router)
TypeScript
Tailwind CSS (Custom design tokens for the Acid palette)
Lucide React for the industrial iconography
I’d love to get feedback from the HN community on the UI/UX—specifically the readability of the "Acid Graphics" style and the overall performance of the navigation.

Link: https://tufftoucan.com/

Thanks!
by danpalmer | 2026-01-05 22:24:28+00:00
I'm not claiming they don't work in some sense, but as a user you have to be fairly deeply aware of how they work, context engineering is A Thing, you have to tell LLMs to remember stuff, etc.

We're hacking around the fact that the models don't learn in normal use. That's in no way controversial.

A model that continuously learnt would not need the same sort of context engineering, external memory databases, etc.
by darth_avocado | 2026-01-05 22:24:30+00:00
Again I’m not a lawyer and this is my interpretation of the #3 requirement of section 230:

“The information must be "provided by another information content provider", i.e., the defendant must not be the "information content provider" of the harmful information at issue”

If grok is generating these images, I am interpreting this as Twitter could be becoming an information content provider. I couldn’t find any relevant rulings but I doubt any exist since services like Grok are relatively new.
by filleduchaos | 2026-01-05 22:24:34+00:00
Cooking is very much a technical skill, much more so than following a readme to install and set up some end-user-targeting project or other. I've seen too many flat-out horrendous meals from people who self-describe as "knowing how to cook" to be convinced otherwise.

Have you looked at a typical recipe recently? Here's an example (https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/oriental-egg-fried-rice) from the "quick and easy" section of BBC Good Food, a site that's regularly in the first page of search results for various recipes. Never mind that it expects you to have procured cooked chicken breasts from somewhere (and oh boy are those easy to turn into a bland, dry, rubbery mess if you don't know what you're doing)...do you honestly think there is no room in those instructions for someone who does not already know how to cook to screw it up?

Here's a recipe (https://urbanfarmie.com/instant-pot-jollof/) for a more complex dish that I am intimately familiar with, which is how I can tell you for absolutely free that if you just "follow the recipe" as described you will very easily end up with a soggy mess at best and burnt rice at worst.

Or - since you seem to like patting yourself on the back about onions - the next time you're following a recipe and it tells you to "sweat" or to "caramelise" onions or "sauté until golden", maybe spare a thought for how likely it is that someone who is actually new to the kitchen will get the correct result.
by jmward01 | 2026-01-05 22:24:38+00:00
Trust me, I believe nothing positive about xAI. Various players doing similar things and an actual published standard or a standards body are totally different things. The industry is really young. Like a couple years young a this point. There really aren't well developed standards and best practices. Moments like this are opportunities to actually develop them and use them, or at least start the process. Do you have a recognized standard you can point to for this? When it comes to car safety there are lots of recognized standards. Same with medical safety, etc etc. Is there anything like that actually in the LLM world?
by bawolff | 2026-01-05 22:25:04+00:00
> not because Iranian air-defense was bad, but because it was put almost completely out of service for a brief period of time by people on the ground - be it through sabotage, cyber-warfare, drone attacks from inside,

Wouldn't that constitute air defense being "bad"? There are no "well technically it should have worked" in war. Failing to properly secure the air defense sites is bad air defense.
by ladidahh | 2026-01-05 22:25:04+00:00
My immediate guess after reading this was that this isn't a change at Google but a name issue. Jeff Star getting confused with Jeffree Star (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffree_Star). He's a lightening rod for controversy, and has been in the middle of a controversial public persona shift that probably has caused an uptick in all kinds of requests to google.
by riskable | 2026-01-05 22:25:12+00:00
The problem is that Google isn't hosting the content. They're merely linking to it. There's no content to "take down."

I don't think there's standing to sue. Linking to pirated content isn't illegal. They could be found guilty of contributory infringement but that's a tough case since the legal requirement is that Google needs to know for sure that it's pirated (which is impossible at scale).
by kristianp | 2026-01-05 22:25:34+00:00
I haven't tried zed and vscode for a while, but I didn't like the amount of distractions from vscode, such as info about methods.

The problem I had with zed when I tried it is that I'm on linux with kde and zed had a hamburger menu on linux, whereas on Mac it has a proper application menu. It also didn't have keyboard shortcuts for menus that I expected, e.g. Alt-f to open file menu. This is a Windows specific convention that many applications bring to linux too. I still prefer Sublime Text for its user interface.