MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Would you back a standards proposal to taint AI output?
by jacquesm | 2026-01-05 09:48:31+00:00
Would you back a proposal that all AI output be required to be shipped in a form that allows it to be distinguished from human creative output?

I realize that there will always be work arounds but at least it would give a clear moment of thought around the stripping of such output tainting.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46496164
by pbhjpbhj | 2026-01-05 09:48:43+00:00
Insane mindset that people should work modestly, get paid modestly and live in the fruits of a wealthy society? As opposed to breaking their backs to make a boss even wealthier?

The efficiencies are always to the benefit of the wealthy, the wage gap grows. You work hard, you still get fired.

Cap top wages to 5x the lowest, companies can't own housing except socially beneficial housing, individuals get 2 house maximum.
by littlestymaar | 2026-01-05 09:49:10+00:00
One doesn't even need monopoly either, just a strong enough leverage against your customers. See Oracles.

It doesn't matter if there's competition at the customer acquisition stage, as long as there's some form of customer lock-in the corporation is going to abuse them somehow.

And companies without some kind of lock-in never scale in the first place, and that's why we must face this kind of bullshit pretty much everywhere even from companies operating in competitive markets.
by toxik | 2026-01-05 09:49:37+00:00
You say that as if politics is optional. It isn't, decisions need to be made and politics is the process of making those decisions: who decides, and why.

In academia, for example, there is less politics because the publishing system sort of becomes the decision process. You apply with your ideas in the form of papers, the referees decide if your ideas are good enough (and demonstrated well enough) for the wider audience to even get to see. Then some politics, a popularity contest. But crucially this system famously leads to a LOT of resources being wasted, good research that never goes anywhere because nobody cares about it, or bad research that does nothing but everyone cares (cold fusion).

Politics is just a name for how we decide things. And yes, it sucks, but that's because we suck.
by Almondsetat | 2026-01-05 09:50:35+00:00
If social media required ID, you could maintain the freedom of being able to use these tools for anything legal, while swiftly detecting and punishing illegal usage. IMHO, you can't have your cake and eat it too: either you want privacy and freedom but you accept people will use these things unlawfully and never get caught, or you accept being identified and having perpetrators swiftly dealt with
by bonesss | 2026-01-05 09:50:58+00:00
There’s also change over time to consider: web programming has become immensely more stable and simpler and more mature over time, thereby enabling classes of application and experience that traditionally meant a client application to be built on the web, hence modern web app development becoming a complex and complicated morass.

Facebook and others have delivered a bunch of cross platform shizz that really should be baked into the desktop and mobile OS itself, moving complexity up the stack. Microsoft Office uses React, to highlight the issue. We’ve spent decades chasing the basics of fat client development and doing it in JavaScript.
by nicbou | 2026-01-05 09:53:05+00:00
Vaguely related anecdotes:

- I got caught in the mountains for a few days due to landslides in Nepal. The only available information was relayed by phone between locals. People had no idea of what was going on and their vacation ended on the day the road reopened. It caused a pile up of cars where the road had slid off a few days prior. In some parts, rocks still fell from the cliffs above. We flagged a passing car and asked them to keep us updated on WhatsApp instead. We could have all stayed put if we had that information before.

- During covid I maintained a page with simplified local restrictions and a changelog of new restrictions. The alternative was to follow press conferences and re-read the entire regulation the next day, or keep checking the newspapers. Mine was just a bullet list at a permanent location.

- During the invasion of Ukraine, refugees have set up the most impressive ad hoc information network I have ever seen. It was operational in 24 hours and kept improving for weeks. People sorted out routes, transport, border issues, accommodation, translation and supplies over Telegram, Notion and Google Docs.

Information propagation is critical during emergencies, and people are really bad at it. Setting up a simple website and two-way communication channels makes a huge difference.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-05 09:53:20+00:00
Hypothetically speaking couldn't you collect it from any security camera in an area where you have positive ID on people? Airport security comes to mind.

With all the trade in personal data in the US I assume it's only a matter of time before places like grocery stores start selling it.

Why stop at just gait though? Geometric fingerprinting of various body parts is also possible. Palm geometry readers have been commonplace for a long time.
by florkbork | 2026-01-05 09:53:34+00:00
Did you actually argue this?

Or did you place about 2-5 paragraphs per heading, with little connection between the ideas?

For example:

> Perhaps what some users are trying to express with concerns about ‘sycophancy’ is that when they paste information, they'd like to see the AI examine various implications rather than provide an affirming summary.

Did you, you personally, find any evidence of this? Or evidence to the opposite? Or is this just a wild guess?

Wait; nevermind that we're already moving on! No need to do anything supportive or similar to bolster.

> If so, anti-‘sycophancy’ tuning is ironically a counterproductive response and may result in more terse or less fluent responses. Exploring a topic is an inherently dialogic endeavor.

Is it? Evidence? Counter evidence? Or is this simply feelpinion so no one can tell you your feelings are wrong? Or wait; that's "vibes" now!

I put it to you that you are stringing together (to an outside observer using AI) a series of words in a consecutive order that feels roughly good but lacks any kind of fundamental/logical basis.
I put it to you that if your premise is that AI leads to a robust discussion with a back and forth; the one you had that resulted in "product" was severely lacking in any real challenge to your prompts, suggestions, input or viewpoints.
I invite you to show me one shred of dialogue where the AI called you out for lacking substance, credibility, authority, research, due dilligence or similar. I strongly suspect you can't.

Given that; do you perhaps consider that might be the problem when people label AI responses as sycophancy?
by fsh | 2026-01-05 09:53:47+00:00
iRobot refused to incorporate LIDAR scanners, instead relying on some janky computer vision approach. Robots from Roborock and friends know their position with cm-accuracy at all times, whereas Roombas only have some vibe about which part of the building they are in. This makes them much less efficient at route planning and less reliable at adhering to exclusion zones.
by jasonmomnah | 2026-01-05 09:55:07+00:00
Hi HN, I wrote this and I’m affiliated with the site.

This is a public-source model for what “run Venezuela” could cost per month under three scenarios, anchored to Venezuela’s published budget scale and adding the under-covered premiums: payment rails, insurability, compliance overhead, and legal friction.

Charts included (waterfall, scenario bands, oil gross vs. ranges). Feedback welcome, especially on assumptions you’d tighten.
by renewiltord | 2026-01-05 09:55:44+00:00
Indeed, that's true. Payment for autism, originally intended for sick children, now a Somali scam. Veteran's disability, originally a means to allow people who were injured while serving the country, now a way for a desk-jockey to receive an annual stipend.

Any mechanism, once built, seeks to expand its scope. Until it delivers mail ;)
by j45 | 2026-01-05 09:56:40+00:00
It’s always a personal choice, but I wouldn’t equate the two in any way because alcohol is a neurotoxin, carcinogen and doesn’t scale or compound the more it’s practiced.

It doesn’t mean I might not have a drink, but I’m aware it’s triggers a “get the poison out” response from my body.

Disengaging the prefrontal cortex is one thing, lowering the inhibitions and increasing emotional volatility in the rest of the brain is hugely different.

Those things can vary between people.

Understanding we chan shift our default mode network is critical.

Meditation actually increased the connection between areas like the amygdala and prefrontal cortex allowing you to have greater calm, focus while at peace minus the racing thoughts and emotions.

Having an overdeveloped amygdala is fairly common resulting in an under developed prefrontal cortex.

Luckily neuroscience is showing the past few years that neuroplasticity is available to everyone to continue improving for their entire life.
by stevenjgarner | 2026-01-05 09:56:46+00:00
There is a gradual chilling effect of self-censorship to mass surveillance and loss of anonymity. When you know you are being watched, you change your behavior. You don't visit the "wrong" protest, you don't meet with the "controversial" whistleblower, and you don't seek out the "unpopular" doctor. Total surveillance creates a "soft" totalitarianism where citizens police their own movements to avoid falling into a "high-risk" algorithm, even if they've done nothing illegal. At its extreme, such societies end up with no outliers, no more of "the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels." (Steve Jobs). Safety and compliance at all cost.

The peer-reviewed consensus of this in psychology describes a three-step internal process of Anticipatory Anxiety, Risk Aversion and Self-Censorship [1]. The Conforming Effect (Conformity Theory) has been measured in studies such as those by Jonathon Penney (2016/2021), where use of Wikipedia data and search traffic shows a statistical drop in "sensitive" searches (e.g., about "terrorism," "human rights," or "health") immediately following news of government surveillance. [2]

[1] Surveillance as a Socio-Technical System: Behavioral Impacts and Self-Regulation in Monitored Environments, https://www.mdpi.com/2079-8954/13/7/614

[2] Chilling Effects: Online Surveillance and Wikipedia Use, https://lawcat.berkeley.edu/record/1127413?v=pdf
by benrutter | 2026-01-05 09:56:47+00:00
> our environment is increasingly build on the assumption that we carry a smartphone with us at any given time.

This is so true! Surprised how many commenters are saying "just have self control" etc - a phone is close to essential for a lot of services in a city.

I'd be super interested in tips people have to avoid the psychological impact phones have when they do have to take them with them. A lot of phones have "relax" or "do not disturb" modes - curious if that actually works for anyone?
by pockybum522 | 2026-01-05 09:57:00+00:00
I'm so confused. I've resin printed DnD minis for everyone in several of the campaigns I've played in. They all love them. Yes, there were gloves. Yes, there was alcohol baths, but I just dropped them in the automatic washer and walked away for ten minutes.

The entire manual involvement for me from hitting go on the printer to handing out their minis to my friends, ready to be painted, I would estimate at just over five minutes per mini. This includes removing supports. This reads like it was written in 2010, not 2025.
by perihelions | 2026-01-05 09:57:19+00:00
In the Civil Rights era, segregationist states' police would systematically[0] stop and fingerprint black people, without individualized suspicion, to see if they were in criminal fingerprint databases. There's nothing new under the sun. Biometrics are centuries old; the tech we're talking about here is merely evolutionary, not something qualitatively new and different in human terms. The debate we're revisiting, safetyism vs. liberty, is old and well-trodden. And of course the part where these degrading searches are clearly targeted at minorities based on their appearance and skin color is of no novelty whatsoever.

[0] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/394/721/ ("Davis v. Mississippi (1969)")
by monerozcash | 2026-01-05 09:58:57+00:00
> I would have assumed that this function mainly migrated onto one of the popular blockchains with clients using one of thousands of available gateways for reading.

Why would you want to use blockchains for this? DHT has been used for distributed c&c for ages and is generally a much lighter option.

But no, P2P C&C is still not really typical. In practice, there's mostly not that much need for it. Also, FWIW, for practically all use-cases P2P C&C discovery is a vastly better option.
by 4rt | 2026-01-05 09:59:17+00:00
the installation story for devs writing windows apps has been dreadful for 3 decades.

vs used to help you build setup.exe, which was always a huge chore to use.

clickonce was launched to replace all this with hosted manifests and auto-updates and modern features like that, and immediately forgotten about because it was so broken. nobody ever used it.

then they brought out WinUI and the windows store, which was so overly sandboxed that it didn't fit most use cases and the permissions system of the store never seemed to line up with the APIs themselves.

then they tried their best to destroy myget by launching winget, which got forgotten about again. now even MS doesnt use their own store.
by kybernetyk | 2026-01-05 09:59:38+00:00
I have the same problem with Jekyll. I fixed my website for the Jekyll version I installed when I got this machine (in 2021). I dread the moment when I get a new computer and have to either try to install this particular version of Jekyll or to fix my website again.

I just assumed static website generators would be stable but well, there's always something that breaks. Terrible user experience for someone who just wants to use the generator to generate a website vs. to tinker with it as a hobby.

I'm in the process of porting my website to PHP ... but that project hasn't gone anywhere because currently everything works ;)

>So, advice: submit the binary you used to generate the site to source control.

If it was so easy. Jekyll is written in Ruby and comes with a load of dependencies. As far as I understand Hugo is the same - just Python. I'm neither a python nor a ruby dev so I have _ZERO_ idea how to actually install those properly. I just do a `brew install python/ruby` and pray it works.
by topspin | 2026-01-05 09:59:42+00:00
> looks extremely ugly

Extremely ugly? Calm yourself. It is self-explanatory, modest and correct.

StatusOr? Misnamed right off the bat. From the absl::Status docs:

StatusOr<Foo> result = Calculation();
if (result.ok()) {
result->DoSomethingCool();
} else {
LOG(ERROR) << result.status();
}

The success case isn't some status, but the actual result. Ugly. The type theorist cleverness of ending type names with predicates is another fashionable naming failure: pining for partial functions where there are none.
by toxik | 2026-01-05 10:00:11+00:00
Politics and leadership is a responsibility. By avoiding it, you're setting a bad example. Once you know how an organization works, you should help lead it.

If we consider a family, you're essentially saying you'll only "do the work": brush teeth, feed kids, clean up, but not take on any responsibilities for the actual goals of the family. Not pushing to have your kids learn things, just executing somebody else's ideas, driving them to sports; not improving the living situation by perhaps investigating if you should get a bigger car. Nothing leading, only executing the ideas of your spouse.

I exaggerate of course, but there is something there.
by simonw | 2026-01-05 10:00:58+00:00
A common policy I've seen from
engineering managers who code (and one I've stuck to myself when I've been in engineering management roles) is to avoid writing code that's on the critical path to shipping.

That's means your team should never be blocked on code that you are responsible for, because as an engineering manager you can rarely commit dedicated coding time to unblocking them.

This still leaves space for quite a few categories of coding:

- prototypes and proof of concepts

- internal "nice to have" tools that increase developer quality of life (I ended up hacking on plenty of these)

- helping debug issues
by exceptione | 2026-01-05 10:03:42+00:00
I fear it is an unsalvageable part of the Xorg design. The software is really old, including its assumptions about security. The original developers judged Xorg is really not saveable.

Any extra effort on X11 might help to buy more time, but will in the end be for nothing. And in this time of supply-chain attacks, vs-code plugins, npm packages, agents and what-not, X11 is just too dangerous.
by throw-12-16 | 2026-01-05 10:04:42+00:00
I dont play GW games anymore aside from Mordheim (discontinued), because frankly GW is a shitty company that I dont want to support.

Their entire business model is predatory, they nerf armies and then release new models all the time, the rules are monetized and outrageously expensive, and they are litigious to the point of taking down youtube channels in order to prop up their shitty streaming service.

There are so many better games that have embraced 3D printing and are actually fun to play.
by Roonerelli | 2026-01-05 10:06:38+00:00
I've had the misfortune of working on a C# code base that uses this pattern for many years.

I've also used it with F#, where it feels natural - because the language supports discriminated unions and has operators for binding, mapping etc.
Without that, it feels like swimming against the tide.

Code has a greater cognitive overhead when reading it for the first time.
And there is always a big over head for new starters needing to understand the code.

It feels idiomatic in F#. It feels crow-barred in with C#
by disgruntledphd2 | 2026-01-05 10:07:39+00:00
> HealthLink is a messaging system and stores no EHRs at all. eHealth is the National EHR programme aiming to roll out EHRs by 2030 nationwide.

This is bad (from my perspective, as someone who's moved a lot and thus has medical records scattered all over).

> It will be a no-opt-out centralised EHR and combined social care record.

This is probably the right approach, even though I'm sceptical that it will be delivered effectively.
by aligundogdu | 2026-01-05 10:07:40+00:00
That 10k limit was the breaking point for me too. I decided to move our stack to Matrix/Synapse but didn't want to lose years of context. Since I couldn't find a straightforward migration path, I built a CLI tool to handle the transition (users, channels, and history). It’s open-source if you want to give it a try or contribute: https://github.com/aligundogdu/matrixmigrate
by virtualritz | 2026-01-05 10:07:44+00:00
What people do not understand is that this really depends on what language you target. So if I write Rust then you sound like an AI hype booster but if I write TS or Python maybe not so much.

From my experience Opus is only good at writing Rust. But it's great at something like TS because the amount of code it has been trained on is probably orders of magnitude bigger for the latter language.

I still use Codex high/xhigh for planning and once the plan is sound I give it to Opus (also planning). That plan I feed back to Codex for sign-off. It takes an average additional 1-2 rounds of this before Opus makes a plan that Codex says _really_ ticks all the boxes of the plan it made itself and which we gave to Opus to start with ...

That tells you something.

Also when Opus is "done" and claims so I let Codex check.
Usually it has skipped the last 20% (stubs/todos/logic bugs) so Codex makes a fixup plan that then again goes to through the Codex<->Opus loop of back and forth 2-3 rounds before Codex gives the thumbs up.
Only after that has Opus managed to do what the inital plan said that Codex made in the first place.

When I have Opus write TS code (or Python) I do not have to jump through those hoops. Sometimes one round of back and forth is needed but never three, as with Rust.
by nicbou | 2026-01-05 10:09:03+00:00
It's really that simple.

I run a website that's primarily text-based. When I change the base template, I still check that it works without CSS. This just means semantic HTML.

That being said, CSS is rarely that large. Even after a few years of relative indulgence, the gzipped CSS for the whole website is still something like 20kb.
by David_Osipov | 2026-01-05 10:10:23+00:00
I'm not a web developer, but a product manager, and recently I've created my own website using Astro. I do support the point, that its better to have a relatively simple static website - it's really fast and lightweight! An average Wordpress website would weight 1 MB+ in best case, in worst case - 4 MB+. I don't know how people think it's a good idea to have a compressed webpage to be 4 MB!! Let's KISS
by dahcryn | 2026-01-05 10:11:06+00:00
many people try to go too much around puddles, bits of mud, rocks, ... Switching direction is what makes you slip/fall.

Sometimes, you should just focus on going straight, or at least keep your center of mass relatively going in a smooth line.

Yes, sometimes that means going through a puddle or do a small jump, but I find it much safer. Of course, on a potential slippery surface, try to make that 1 step lower impact, basically like an in-between step. This can also imply vary big changes to your cadence, which is not always optimal from aerobic perspective.
by savolai | 2026-01-05 10:11:11+00:00
Here’s a video: https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=13872580061100...

I’ve seen repeated reports where OneDrive and Windows 11 enable cloud sync or folder backup without clear consent. People describe cases where Desktop/Documents/Pictures start syncing automatically, eating up free quota, and later deleting or moving files in ways users didn’t intend. Some users even wake up to full sync turned on and then can’t easily revert it.

That behavior feels like a dark pattern: defaults nudging toward cloud-storage upsells and confusing opt-outs that can result in data confusion or loss. Is this intentional design at Microsoft or just sloppy UX engineering?
by matu3ba | 2026-01-05 10:11:22+00:00
> we could design something faster, safer, overall simpler, and easier to program

I do remain doubtful on this for general purpose computing principles: Hardware for low latency/high throughput is at odds with full security (absence of observable side-channels). Optimal latency/throughput requires time-constrained=hardware programming with FGPAs or building hardware (high cost) usually programmed on dedicated hardware/software or via things like system-bypass solutions.
Simplicity is at odds with generality, see weak/strong formal system vs strong/weak semantics.

If you factor those compromises in, then you'll end up with the current state plus historical mistakes like missing vertical system integration of software stacks above Kernel-space as TCB, bad APIs due to missing formalization, CHERI with its current shortcomings, etc.

I do expect things to change once security with mandatory security processor becomes more required leading to multi-CPU solutions and potential for developers to use on the system complex+simple CPUs, meaning roughly time-accurate virtual and/or real ones.

> The second is that there isn’t strong demand.

This is not true for virtualization and security use cases, but not that obvious yet due to missing wide-spread attacks, see side-channel leaks of cloud solutions. Take a look at hardware security module vendors growth.