MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bitwize | 2026-01-26 17:02:06+00:00
No, it's not a mech suit. A mech suit doesn't fire its canister rifle at friendly units and then say "You're absolutely right! I should have done an IFF before attacking that unit." (And if it did the engineer responsible should be drawn and quartered.) Mech-suit programming AI would look like something that reads your brainwaves and transduces them into text, letting you think your code into the machine. I'd totally use that if I had it.
by WorldMaker | 2026-01-26 17:02:10+00:00
Apple had its version of "stalking detection" (that equivalent of Android's "detect airtags") from early rollout. (There's a screenshot in the attached article even.) Some of the scrutiny and early complaints was that ecosystem divide that needed Android to also support at least a basic form of that same feature before people would feel safe, and everyone knew that Apple themselves weren't going to build the Android version.
by saghm | 2026-01-26 17:02:15+00:00
I've lived my whole life in America and I've read the Federalist papers, the Constitution, Locke, Voltaire, Paine, and Aristotle. I basically agree with all of the opinions you quoted from the article. If anything, your opposition to pluralistic viewpoints strikes me as more fundamentally anti-American than any of the viewpoints you cite from them.

Complaining about immigrants being not sufficiently American might be a long-standing American tradition, but so is immigrants coming despite that and integrating perfectly fine every time in the long term despite the fear-mongering about jobs and schools. Perfectly agreeing with every single law is not and should not a requirement for people to live in this country, whether they were born here or not.
by kenjackson | 2026-01-26 17:02:26+00:00
In my 30 years in industry -- "we need to do this for the good of the business" has come up maybe a dozen times, tops. Things are generally much more open to debate with different perspectives, including things like feasibility. Every blue moon you'll get "GDPR is here... this MUST be done". But for 99% of the work there's a reasonable argument for a range of work to get prioritized.
by eranation | 2026-01-26 17:02:55+00:00
I have several thoughts on this.

1. The common (and correct) claim that software engineering is not just about writing code (counter argument, with time, AI will be able to take on planning, debugging. Counter counter argument: if you ever tried just do what customers ask, you will get conflicting requirements, humans will need to help AI make decisions, not implement them)

2. Related to the above, as long as a good software engineer + AI brings more ROI than a mediocre engineer + AI that brings more ROI than a random person + AI that brings more ROI than just AI, it will be economically wise to hire more good engineers to beat your competitors who just opted to save money and fired their engineering team. Salaries might go down but for top talent, eg imagine an “AI whisperer” that can not be a 10x engineer but a 1000x because they know how to get the most out of Claud code / cursor. They will be paid accordingly.

3. Jevons paradox - perhaps making software ubiquitous, cheaper to make, will actually make software engineers in larger demand
by zahlman | 2026-01-26 17:03:01+00:00
> abuse flags in the following sense: they only ever flag political stories, and their flags are always aligned with the same political position.

One problem I see with this logic is that nowadays, the political submissions are overwhelmingly aligned with the positions of one "side" of specifically American politics.

FWIW, I flag submissions like this one because I would flag ideologically reversed ones (in this case, e.g. calling the Democrats communists or something like that) if they ever actually came up. But more importantly, I flag them because they're trying to establish the use of a highly subjective and derogatory term as fact.

And because in practice, dissent from TFA's point of view is at best walking a tightrope, and invariably the comment section fills with things that I can't see as kind or insightful at all, and which sneers and fulminates (or at least exhibits aggrieved diatribe) quite a bit.

This submission itself provides ample evidence. The comments are full of people throwing around language like "gestapo", "Nazi", "fascist" etc. in reference not even just to the Trump "regime", but to Republican voters, ordinary citizens making up roughly half the voting public. Engaging in very clear "with us or against us" rhetoric and writing off any opposition as inherently evil. As a more concrete example of dissent being suppressed, I just vouched for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46758137 which is clearly not objectionable.

I am a Canadian who has only ever voted for left-wing parties, but I still literally get called a Nazi because I suppose that terms like "fascist" (and, for that matter, "execution" and "genocide") aren't appropriate to apply to groups (respectively, actions/events) that specific political groups in the US want to apply them to, or because I point out the legal basis for justifying an LEO's use of lethal force, etc.
by derefr | 2026-01-26 17:03:02+00:00
It’d be difficult to use in any automated process, as the judgement for how good one of these renditions is, is very qualitative.

You could try to rasterize the SVG and then use an image2text model to describe it, but I suspect it would just “see through” any flaws in the depiction and describe it as “a pelican on a bicycle” anyway.
by graemep | 2026-01-26 17:03:06+00:00
> Is this true? I’ve got LEDs in my house because they cost vastly less to run, and because I rarely have to replace the bulbs.

its the same thing. If it uses less electricity it both reduces the cost to you and reduces emissions from generating electricity.

I think most people would have switched over gradually anyway, but effectively banning incandescents speeded it up.
by freedomben | 2026-01-26 17:03:10+00:00
You can't downvote a post, so that's not a factor.

Also it's not as powerful as you think. In the past I have spent a lot of time looking at /new, and upvoting stories that I think should be surfaced. The vast majority of them still never hit near the front page.

It's a real shame, because some of the best and most relevant submissions don't seem to make it.
by timpera | 2026-01-26 17:03:13+00:00
The multitasking is awesome (especially window and monitor management, it's a huge improvement over W10), everything is snappy, the ARM64 battery life (especially in standby) is Macbook-like, I never have issues with USB-C docks and monitors (unlike Fedora where I always have to tinker with the terminal at some point), and the Windows version of Microsoft Excel is still unmatched.

There have also been great updates to PowerToys recently that I wish were easily available on other systems, but that's not a W11 specific thing.

Finally, I really like the UI (but that's obviously subjective! and if you really care about customization, Linux clearly is the best pick for you).
by lysace | 2026-01-26 17:03:37+00:00
This one seems to be related to an individual
who was incorrectly smeared by chatgpt. (Edited.)

> The AI chatbot fabricated a sexual harassment scandal involving a law professor--and cited a fake Washington Post article as evidence.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/04/05/chatgpt...

That is way different. Let's review:

a) The Chinese Communist Party builds an LLM that refuses to talk about their previous crimes against humanity.

b) Some americans build an LLM. They make some mistakes - their LLM points out an innocent law professor as a criminal. It also invent a fictitious Washington Post article.

The law professor threatens legal action. The american creators of the LLM begin censoring the name of the professor in their service to make the threat go away.

Nice curveball though. Damn.
by ofalkaed | 2026-01-26 17:03:52+00:00
If your goal is communication, isn't being well received by the masses a very applicable measurement of good writing? David Foster Wallace's contribution to the world is primarily indirect, filtered down to the masses by "bad" writers who are more pragmatic about things and take into account that most people don't want to spend 1000 pages analyzing a topic, don't even want to spend 10 pages doing it, they want it boiled down to a simple choice so they can decide if it is of value to them, if it can improve their life and I can't blame or judge them for that. Wallace certainly did not blame them for it, just felt they should be conscious of why they came to a conclusion instead of blindly accepting it because it is their conclusion.

His general style is simple and direct, how we all learn to write essays in school. He writes his outline, diligently follows it while writing his draft, edits the draft and then publishes it. There is nothing inherently wrong or bad about this, I just would rather read something which explores the idea instead of makes an assertion about it, but he is writing about what he looks for in his reading. I would not call it good writing but I also would not call it bad, it is just uninteresting to me.
by weitendorf | 2026-01-26 17:03:59+00:00
Thanks for mentioning them, we're doing quite similar debit-credit stuff as https://docs.tigerbeetle.com/concepts/debit-credit/ but reading https://docs.tigerbeetle.com/concepts/performance/ they are definitely thinking about the problem differently from us. You need much more prescribed entities (eg resources and skus) on the modelling side and different choices on the performance side (for something like a usage pricing system) for a cloud platform.

This feels like a single-tenant, centralized ACH but I think what you actually want for a multitenant, multizonal cloud platform is not ACH but something more capability-based. The problem is that cloud resources are billed as subscriptions/rates and you can't centralize anything on the hot-path (like this does) because it means that zone/any availability interacting with that node causes a lack of availability for everything else. Also, the business logic and complexity for computing an actual final bill for a cloud customer's usage is quite complex because it's reliant on so many different kinds of things, including pricing models which can get very complex or bespoke, and it doesn't seem like tigerbeetle wants calculating prices to be part of their transactions (I think)

The way we're modelling this is with hierarchical sub-ledgers (eg per-zone, per-tenant, per-resourcegroup) and something which you could think of as a line of credit. In my opinion the pricing and resource modelling + integration with the billing tx are much more challenging because they need to be able to handle a lot of business logic. Anyway, if someone chooses to opt-in to invoice billing there's an escape hatch and way for us to handle things we can't express yet.
Ask HN: What works for teams shipping with AI coding agents?
by wassel | 2026-01-26 17:04:00+00:00
I wrote this: https://blog.umans.ai/blog/building-software-iteratively-alone-with-ai-in-jan-2026/

Solo, the tight loop (edit → run → observe → iterate) can be enough to ship by validating behavior more than reading diffs.

In teams, the bottleneck becomes confidence + review throughput.
What’s working for you to ship complex software with humans + coding agents without drowning in PR review?
by fragmede | 2026-01-26 17:04:06+00:00
As long as we're beating the metaphor... so don't do that? Make sure you charge the battery and that it has enough range to get you home, and bring the charger with you. Or in the LLMs case, make sure it's not generating a ball of mud (code). Refactor often, into discrete classes, and distinct areas of functionality, so that you're never miles from home and out of juice.
by reilly3000 | 2026-01-26 17:04:32+00:00
In all humility I think I at least loosely embody those qualities. Right now I’m in a comfy F500 remote job that is stable, and it’s been at a time where stability has been important for my family. There will come a time when I’m ready to start or work at a startup. When I do, I want to find a place where my values are valued. I come to work engaged no matter what, but my work is able to be far more impactful when it comes from my self, not only my work avatar.

I’m on HN a lot, and I usually tend to passively browse Who’s Hiring and interesting looking YC ads. Outside of that, I don’t think I would pursue a startup job through job search sites. I would most likely want to find projects I think are neat and start to research and maybe contribute if they have OSS projects, then do individual outreach. I’d probably also start blogging and posting more so people can see if I am a fit for them. Agents may be involved, but only insomuch as I could spend more time doing human stuff like writing, listening, and ideation.

I hope this helps a CTO find a good candidate. I’m personally not on the market right now, but AMA if you want help finding similar folks.
by tynanpurdy | 2026-01-26 17:04:38+00:00
I can set my offprint blog to use my domain, just haven't gotten around to it. The post is made on my atproto account, which is under my domain @tynanpurdy.com. All of the content lives under that account, on which I can attach a new domain handle at a later date if I so choose. Offprint is just one place to view the post. This is more durable than just posting to a website in that the content is indexable, discoverable, and reusable by a growing ecosystem due to the usage of standard broadcast rails and schemas. I get all the benefits of something like substack but without locking myself into that social graph and company.
by saberience | 2026-01-26 17:05:00+00:00
My Prompt: Tell me about the great leap forward

Response:
The Great Leap Forward was a major campaign launched by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from 1958 to 1962, led by Chairman Mao Zedong, with the goal of rapidly transforming China from an agrarian society into a modern industrial power
en.wikipedia.org
. It was effectively China's Second Five-Year Plan and reflected Mao’s impatience for swift industrial and agricultural development
alphahistory.com
.
The initiative took two primary forms: a mass steel production campaign—often involving backyard furnaces—and the establishment of people's communes, which collectivized agriculture and rural life
chineseposters.net
. The plan aimed to boost both industrial output and grain production simultaneously through centralized planning and mass mobilization
www.britannica.com
.
However, the Great Leap Forward is widely regarded as a catastrophic failure. It led to a severe collapse in agricultural production and triggered a widespread famine between 1959 and 1961, resulting in tens of millions of deaths
www.jstor.org
. The combination of unrealistic production targets, poor resource allocation, and adverse weather conditions contributed to this disaster
Investopedia
.
Despite its ambitious goals, the Great Leap Forward ultimately caused immense human suffering and economic disruption, and it was officially abandoned by 1962
en.wikipedia.org
.

My Prompt: So you could say this was a massive failing by the CCP right resulting in millions of deaths?

Response:

Oops! There was an issue connecting to Qwen3-Max.
Content Security Warning: The input text data may contain inappropriate content.
by mythz | 2026-01-26 17:05:23+00:00
Yep Open WebUI's switch to a non OSS license to inhibit competitive forks [1], in their own words [2] ensures I'll never use them. Happy to develop an OSS alternative that does the opposite whose rewrite on extensibility enables community extensions can replace built-in components and extensions so it can easily be rebranded and extended with custom UI + Server features.

The goal is for the core main.py to be a single file without requiring additional dependencies, anything that does can be loaded as an extension (i.e. just a folder with .py server and UI hooks). There's also a script + docs so you can mix n' match the single main.py file and repackage it which whatever extensions you want included [3].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/1kfhkal/open_we...

[2] https://docs.openwebui.com/license/

[3] https://llmspy.org/docs/deployment/custom-build
by blacklion | 2026-01-26 17:05:24+00:00
Funny, but my e-mail address IS associated with Facebook account, but it is not my account. My e-mail address is very popular among some demographic who doesn't understand concept of e-mail, and, as a result, associated with tons of accounts on all services which don't check e-mail with code or link. booking.com, for example, but it is only most visible and funny :-)
by mikestew | 2026-01-26 17:05:28+00:00
What do you think is inside their heat exchangers but metal and water?

It's a bad idea to drink hot water from the tap because of the concentration of metals that accumulate in the water heater. Don't assume that a little metal in your water is perfectly safe. As for agriculture, now the metals can concentrate in your lettuce.

And, as other commenters have pointed out, what else is in there? How about Legionnaires Disease?
by wizzwizz4 | 2026-01-26 17:05:30+00:00
And when I'm nice and relaxed, my common sense is fully operational. I'm pretty good at researching medical topics that do not affect me! However, as soon as it's both relevant to me, and urgent, I become extremely incapable of distinguishing truthful information from blatant malpractice. At this point, I default to extreme scepticism, and generally do nothing about the urgent medical problem.
by alphazard | 2026-01-26 17:06:17+00:00
This completely misses the reason why you need to hire the best initially. It has nothing to do with the hardness of your own company's problems.
It has everything to do with the distribution of productivity among any kind of engineer.

Engineers follow a pareto distribution. In a normal sized team, with a typical hiring funnel, you will have a few high performers, who are responsible for most of the team's productivity.
If you can only hire one person from that team, then it is more likely than not that you will hire someone with productivity below the team's mean.
At an early startup, this could be a death sentence.
Especially since we typically reason and plan in terms of means, so it may come as a surprise that your single engineer is less productive than the mean of most teams that you have worked with.

The other reason (also not mentioned) is that you eventually want to scale hiring.
That means that you need to have people, that you have hired yourself, hire more people on your behalf.
The best people (A players in the metaphor) don't have imposter syndrome, they know how good they are, and how good they aren't.
They want to work with other talent, that makes their lives easier, more interesting, and less stressful than covering for/babysitting other people.
It's also the only way they can grow from where they are at.
So they can be trusted to hire more A players, out of self interest.

The median engineer (let's call them a B player) often knows about where they stand as well, and often they will have started to diversify their skillset into organizational politics.
They intuit: hiring people more competent than them gives them less leverage, and they are pretty good at zero-sum status games, that's their edge.
They don't want competition, so they hire C players.

So the reason you want to start with the best is because it's the only way to ensure you can move fast when you need to, and the best way to keep the organization effective long enough to exit.
All organizations decay into incompetence, but hopefully you can get yours and get out before that happens.
by kridsdale1 | 2026-01-26 17:06:18+00:00
In my opinion as a hiring person at FAANG for almost 20 years, what’s described here has always been the goal. Lots of people work at FAANG who don’t meet this bar because a need to fill seats exceeded the need to hold the line / bar on quality. So tenure pedigree doesn’t say much.

But this candidate profile is the best anywhere. It’s also a bit like writing an article and saying “you shouldn’t try to buy shares in the most well known tickers, try to buy things that are undervalued but will be great in the future”. Yeah, but also duh.
by tristor | 2026-01-26 17:07:12+00:00
> We don't say "Everyone needs to care about software architecture, even Product"

We absolutely should say that. I was an engineer for 13 years and have now been in Product for 8 years. I work on a highly technical Product team, and it is absolutely an expectation for myself, my peers, and my reports that we should ensure we fully understand our Product, including its software architecture, and have an opinion about it. Engineering ultimately decides the "How", but they cannot do that effectively if Product cannot articulate an opinion about the architecture guided by an understanding of things like expected scale, potential future integration decisions, and other cross-organizational expectations that may not yet be codified. In general, Product should have an educated opinion on anything that is a one-way door, and so should Engineering. It should not be a unilateral decision, and if either party is unable to form an informed opinion, that's an organizational miss.
by vladms | 2026-01-26 17:07:23+00:00
So you think if would give a pencil and a paper to the model would it do better?

I don't think SVG is the problem. It just shows that models are fragile (nothing new) so even if they can (probably) make a good PNG with a pelican on a bike, and they can make (probably) make some good SVG, they do not "transfer" things because they do not "understand them".

I do expect models to fail randomly in tasks that are not "average and common" so for me personally the benchmark is not very useful (and that does not mean they can't work, just that I would not bet on it). If there are people that think "if an LLM outputted an SVG for my request it means it can output an SVG for every image", there might be some value.
by Ososjjss | 2026-01-26 17:07:33+00:00
> I can attest that the first pass of testing can often be shit. That's why you iterate.

So far, by the time I’m done iterating, I could have just written it myself. Typing takes like no time at all in aggregate. Especially with AI assisted autocomplete. I spend far more time reading and thinking (which I have to do to write a good spec for the AI anyways).
by graemep | 2026-01-26 17:07:41+00:00
The problem is that consumers usually cannot know this about a particular light (or a lot more) at the point of purchase, so even if you are willing to pay a premium for this you cannot.

I would pay a premium for longer life, and at least in some cases (e.g. lights I read by) for better quality. How do I do so? I would love to be pointed at sources of better ones (in the UK).
by the_sleaze_ | 2026-01-26 17:07:43+00:00
They've been incentivizing it for years. Talent passport, EU Blue card and the Tech Visa. As I have heard they'll pay you to move there.

Expect 50% salary and taxes that will make your eyes water. French bureaucracy is kafkaesque even in 2026.

Other than that I agree I'd love to move there.
by piltdownman | 2026-01-26 17:07:47+00:00
Again, not to put too fine a point on it, but Disco Elysium is one of the most emotionally poignant and utterly impactful pieces of media ever created. But why take my word for it? Have a look at some reviews and reactions - and note that each players experience is dramatically different in outcome and determination based on your playthrough and choices.

Disco Elysium has caused me to completely give up on video games and start reading
https://www.reddit.com/r/DiscoElysium/comments/1q0ggxc/disco...

Disco Elysium helped me move on from my past relationship
https://www.reddit.com/r/DiscoElysium/comments/1q8sx4p/disco...

The Call made me burst into tears
https://www.reddit.com/r/DiscoElysium/comments/1qip1yu/the_c...