MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Onavo | 2026-01-27 18:08:59+00:00
No major AI lab will admit to training on proprietary or copyrighted data so what you are asking is an impossibility. You can make a pretty good LLM if you train on Anna's Archive but it will either be released anonymously, or with a complete research only non commercial license.

There aren't enough public domain data to create good LLMs, especially once you get into the newer benchmarks that expect PhD level of domain expertise in various niche verticals.

It's also a logical impossibility to create a zero knowledge proof that will allow you to attribute to specific training data without admitting to usage.

I can think of a few technical options but none would hold water legally.

You can use a Σ-protocol OR-composition to prove that it was trained either on a copyrighted dataset or a non copyrighted dataset without admitting to which one (technically interesting, legally unsound).

You can prove that a model trained on copywrited data is statistically indistinguishable from one trained on non-copywrited data (an information theoretic impossibility).

You can prove a public domain and copywrited dataset are equivalent if the model performance produced is indistinguishable from each other.

All the proofs fail irl, ignoring the legal implications, because there's less public domain information, so given the lemma that more training data == improved model performance, all the above are close to impossible.
by usefulposter | 2026-01-27 18:09:35+00:00
Reading the necessary RFC is table stakes. Instead we got this:

>"NOOOOOOOO!!!! You can't just use an LLM to write an auth library!"

>"haha gpus go brrr"

(Those lines remain in the readme, even now: https://github.com/cloudflare/workers-oauth-provider?tab=rea...)
by ryandrake | 2026-01-27 18:10:19+00:00
To be fair, dang's position has consistently been (and he posted as such yesterday[1]) that the flag brigading comes from two distinct groups: 1. Users who don't want to see "politics" and 2. Users who are partisan and want to hide politics they don't like.

My view is that these are essentially the same group. "Not wanting to see politics" is itself just a partisan view in favor of whatever the Status Quo currently is. So if you're going through and flagging articles describing wrongdoing or calling for change, because they are "political," then you're just operating in the service of whoever is currently in power.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46771917
by zvonimirs | 2026-01-27 18:10:41+00:00
We're launching a new AI assistant and I wanted to make it alive so I started to play around with LemonSlice and I loved it!! I wanted to make our assistant be like a coworker that can give it an ability to create Loom style videos. Here's what I created - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nIpEvNkuXA0jeZVjHC8OjuJlT-3...

Anyway, big thumbs up for the LemonSlice team, I'm excited to see it progress. I can definitely see products start coming alive with tools like this.
by cyberax | 2026-01-27 18:11:12+00:00
I read most of the research on this topic. And it's all basically "overdiagnosing".

We had the same story about prostate cancer screening: "overdiagnosing", "people die with prostate cancer but not of prostate cancer", blah blah blah. It turned out that simply adjusting the aggressiveness of follow-up was enough to make prostate cancer result in significantly fewer deaths.

From my point of view: MRI is the ONLY tool that can catch things like pancreatic cancer before it's lethal.
by michael1999 | 2026-01-27 18:11:24+00:00
My need was finding my black wallet in the house when I forget where I put it. My wife has been very happy that she no longer has to field "Hey sweetie, have you seen my wallet?". I walk around asking it to sing to me, and I find it without bother.

As for theft - you might be overthinking it. It's a black piece of plastic that could easily be a door key. Gutter thieves will rifle the wallet and pull out cash, and credit cards, and drop the rest in the trash anyway. Any regular thief knows they don't want to be caught holding someone else's id.
by mekdoonggi | 2026-01-27 18:11:30+00:00
I have never considered this perspective, but this fits very well with people's actions. Thank you for sharing.

To me, the system of codified law and courts makes intuitive sense, and most people misunderstand or abuse the system. But other people's intuitive understanding of the law as you mentioned is a much easier way to understand and actually IS a rough approximation of what the system does.
by lukebrandon | 2026-01-27 18:11:39+00:00
Hey Community!

In The React Native Rewind #27: Live Activities and Widgets finally land for React Native with Voltra and Expo Widgets, we compare the two approaches, and explore Brownie—Callstack’s new way to share state between native and JS.

Also: Dynamic Island, Lock Screen magic, and fewer Swift-side headaches.

If the Rewind made you nod, smile, or think “oh… that’s actually cool” — a share or reply genuinely helps

#ReactNative #Expo #Voltra #LiveActivities #Widgets #SwiftUI #JSI #Brownfield #Callstack #ReactNativeRewind
by KingMob | 2026-01-27 18:11:41+00:00
No. They might believe it works quite well, though, but they're seriously mistaken.

My old neuroscience lab was approached 20 years ago by a three-letter agency looking to develop a rapid reaction time tool to measure the trustworthiness of new people in time-critical hostile situations.

Because of that proposal, I reviewed the literature on "lie" detector tests and their ilk. The evidence is great for them measuring stress, and flimsy for them measuring deception. Normal people get nervous when questioned. Psychopaths may show less autonomic responses. People can train to alter their stress levels. Data interpretation varies wildly by operator, as does accuracy. The only real value is trying to convince criminals they work, in the hopes they make a true mistake or confess.

tl;dr The accuracy is really low, and anyone arguing otherwise is trying to fool the criminals, trying to fool agencies into buying their equipment, or fooling themselves.
by gkbrk | 2026-01-27 18:11:47+00:00
CodeCrafters has an amazing "Build your own Git" [1] tutorial too. Jon Gjengset has a nice video [2] doing this challenge live with Rust.

[1]: https://app.codecrafters.io/courses/git/overview

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0VotuGzD_w
by goatlover | 2026-01-27 18:12:17+00:00
There's going to be a lot of pressure on Democrats from their base to hold people accountable for what happens during Trump's 2nd term. And there is going to be some new blood that runs on that. You have state governors like Newsom, Pritizker and Waltz documenting abuses with future accountability in mind.

What baffles me is how conservatives supporting the current government overreach aren't worried about the coming backlash. Do they think they'll just win all the future elections? Even when there is no more Trump?
by suriya-ganesh | 2026-01-27 18:12:27+00:00
This is verifiably false.

You still need to do most of the grunt work, verifying and organizing the code. it's just you're not editing the code directly. Speed of typing out code is hardly the bottle neck.

The bottleneck is visualizing it and then coming up with a way to figure out bugs or add features.

I've tried a bunch of agents, none of them can reasonably conduct a good architectural change in a medium size codebase.
by b1temy | 2026-01-27 18:12:28+00:00
>... have the OS generate a hash each time the file changes...

I'm not sure I would want this either tbh. If I have a 10GB file on my filesystem, and I want to fseek to a specific position in the file and just change a single byte, I would probably not want it to re-hash the entire file, which will probably take a minute longer compared to not hashing the file. (Or maybe it's fine and it's fast enough on modern systems to do this every time a file is modified by any program running, I don't know how much this would impact the performance.).

Perhaps a higher resolution timestamp by the OS might help though, for decreasing the chance of a file having the exact same timestamp (unless it was specifically crafted to have been so).
by Jcampuzano2 | 2026-01-27 18:12:39+00:00
Theres a reason 99% of actions taken by democrats are just "strongly worded letters" and how they consistently come up with the exact small number of Democrats needed to push legislation and bills that the party proposes to be against.

Most Democratic politicians are in on the game too. Its all just political theater and their in-group rotates out who gets to be the bad guys.

Yes Democrats clean-up by not breaking norms, but as mentioned they never go far enough because they legitimately do not want to go too far due to corporate interests and the elite.

I am left leaning but do not align with the majority of the Democratic party because they are in on this too. They have the tools to be much more antagonistic to the GOP but they purposely don't use them
by accounting2026 | 2026-01-27 18:13:18+00:00
Actually, the voltages had to be raised due to the shadow mask, and this rise in voltage meant you were now in x-ray territory, which wasn't the case before. The infamous problems with TV's emitting x-rays and associate recalls were the early color TV's. And it wasn't so much from the tube, but from the shunt regulators etc. in the power supply that were themselves vacuum tubes. If you removed the protection cans around those you would be exposed to strong radiation. Most of that went away when the TV's were transistorized so the high-voltage circuits didn't involve vacuum tubes.
by vopi | 2026-01-27 18:13:32+00:00
This is a very interesting reference/jupyter NB/historiography someone put together about deciphering Khipu, the cord-based numbering system/ancient Excel from the Inca's.

"Welcome to The Khipu Field Guide - Travel back in time to the Inkan empire of the 14th through 16th century. Explore how the Inkas used cloth to communicate and record commitments. Journey with me, as I work with other khipu scholars, to decipher the enigma behind a knotted mop of camelid yarn."

There is some statistical analysis here but part of my hopes in posting on HN is perhaps someone here might get nerdsniped by it.
by wnevets | 2026-01-27 18:14:20+00:00
> but this is much more to do with Microsoft very publically firing the QA department[0][1] as a cost savings measure and claiming developers will do their own QA (long before LLMs were on the scene). It started in 2014 and the trickle never stopped.

We know this was the correct move because Microsoft's stock price has gone up tremendously since 2014, those in the c-suite received massive bonuses and the worlds most efficient system for resource allocation has deemed it so.
by gmueckl | 2026-01-27 18:14:43+00:00
This question sounds to me like you suspect some outright evil getting projected here. That would go too far. The wayland project tried to get the support of X developers early so that they could become a sort of "blessed" X successor early on. Plenty of earlier replacement attempts have failed because they couldn't get bigger community support, so this had to be part of a successful strategy. Any detrimental effects on X from that move were never a direct goal, as far as I am aware, just a consequence.
by pksebben | 2026-01-27 18:14:48+00:00
I'd advise caution with this approach. One of the things I'm seeing a lot of people get wrong about AI is that they expect that it means they no longer need to understand the tools they're working with - "I can just focus on the business end". This seems true but it's not - it's actually more important to have a deep understanding of how the machine works because if the AI is doing things that you don't understand you run a severe risk of putting yourself in a very bad situation - insecure applications or servers, code with failure modes that are catastrophic edge cases you won't catch until they're a problem, data lossage / leakage.

If anything, managing the project, writing the spec, setting expectations and writing tests are things llms are incredibly well suited for. Getting their work 'correct' and not 'functional enough that you don't know the difference' is where they struggle.
by sublinear | 2026-01-27 18:14:55+00:00
> deciding what to build and catching when things go sideways

I feel like this was always true. Business still moves at the speed of high-level decisions.

> The uncomfortable part: if your value was being the person who could grind through tedious work, that's no longer a moat.

Even when junior devs were copy-pasting from stackoverflow over a decade ago they still had to be accountable for what they did. AI is ultimately a search tool, not a solution builder. We will continue to need junior devs. All devs regardless of experience level still have to push back when requirements are missing or poorly defined. How is picking up this slack and needing to constantly follow up and hold people's hands not "grinding through tedious work"?

AI didn't change anything other than how you find code. I guess it's nice that less technical people can now find it using their plain english ramblings instead of needing to know better keywords? AI has arguably made these search results worse, the need for good docs and examples even more important, and we've all seen how vibecoding goes off the rails.

The best code is still the least you can get away with. The skill devs get paid for has always been making the best choices for the use case, and that's way harder than just "writing code".
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-27 18:15:14+00:00
> won't be able to google image anything interesting related to "non-human hominids"

We were a large family [1].

> Real "are we the baddies?" moment

We were animals. We acted in accordance with our natures. Wolves and chimpanzees aren’t baddies any more than bees or hyenas. Nature is brutal.

Today, however, we are more than our natures. We have the capacity to criticize it when it arises in ways we disapprove of. In a certain sense, humans have a unique capacity to reduce suffering in a way without precedent in Earth’s natural history.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo
by cucumber3732842 | 2026-01-27 18:15:16+00:00
Nah. Nobody who's career goes anywhere in government is that dumb.

I'd bet a lot of money that once things got "bad for my job" level bad people turned off the recording without having to be told. This is SOP slimy government behavior. Everything from your local permitting office to the CIA.

So they're probably right, the footage never existed, but the reason is even more damning.
by stackghost | 2026-01-27 18:15:29+00:00
>What's the ground clearance of a flying piece of gravel! (in a gust of wind for example)

I'm not sure I understand the question you're asking. "Ground clearance" refers to the space between the thing and the ground. Airliners are low-wing monoplanes with the engines slung underneath the wings, and aft of the nose landing gear. The tires at the nose can kick up gravel which not only dings up the underside of the fuselage but can also get sucked into the jet intakes. There's only about 2 feet of clearance between the engine cowling and the ground.

Compare this to a C-130 Hercules which is a high-wing monoplane with turboprops, which is designed to handle some degree of unprepared surfaces. The prop tips are never less than about 5 feet from the ground.

Or, compare to a Piper Cub which has much less prop ground clearance but has the prop mounted forward of the nose landing gear so it's much less likely to encounter gravel.

"What is the ground clearance of a flying piece of gravel" is... not really a question that makes sense to me.
by jplusequalt | 2026-01-27 18:15:48+00:00
>Here's the thing -- I don't care about "getting stronger."

Let's not mince words here, what you mean is that you don't care to learn about a craft. You just want to get to the end result, and you are using the shiny new tool that promises to take you from 0 to 100% with little to no effort.

In this way, I'd argue what you are doing is not "creating", but engaging in a new form of consumption. It used to be you relied on algorithms to present to you content that you found fun, but the problem was that algorithm required other humans to create that content for you to later consume. Now with LLMs, you remove the other humans from the loop, and you can prompt the AI directly with exactly what you wish to see in that moment, down to the fine grained details of the thing, and after enough prompts, the AI gives you something that might be what you asked for.

You are rotting your brain.
by ezst | 2026-01-27 18:15:59+00:00
> The administration can tell all the lies they want about it, but most of us have eyeballs […] In the past, […] it would have been a case of "who do you believe, team A or team B?"

Damn I wish I could share your optimism. If one thing, social media has induced more division, and generalised the idea that "if you are not with me, you are against me". We are at a point where many are demonstrably more comfortable staying in their bubble of lies than willing to seek the truth out of it. And truth is unfortunately overrated.
by dfajgljsldkjag | 2026-01-27 18:16:31+00:00
It is very sad that we are ignoring the lessons we learned about security twenty years ago just because we want new toys. We spent so much time making sure that user input could not change how a program runs and now we are doing the exact opposite. The video is right that the problem is not a bug in the code but a flaw in how the whole system thinks. We are building a house on sand.
by morpheuskafka | 2026-01-27 18:16:33+00:00
By outside I mean some of them actually drive around in patrol cars and within their premises would make arrests for any trespass or other crimes. The ones I had the occasion to interact with were just doing badge/visitor approval and baggage screening. A checkpoint officer could of course have the occasion to use force, but so could TSA and they are unarmed and generally do not use force, deferring to local police.
by jjk166 | 2026-01-27 18:16:40+00:00
Pottsville wasn't founded as a mining settlement. It was an industrial hub that built up around the nearby forge purchased by John Potts. It had a large textile industry and still has America's oldest brewery. In addition to industry it's also the local county seat, and it briefly had an NFL franchise. The industry mostly left in the late 20th century but the nearby mining continues - the coal is just sent elsewhere for use.
by big_toast | 2026-01-27 18:16:42+00:00
I think I used to believe something like this. But I spent two decades living in this context and changed my mind.

There can be beautiful and effective expressions of culture and resistance that don’t tear down the commons people are trying to build together. And it’s hard to ask people to take care of the commons when other people aren’t. Instead we cede management of shared space to private enterprise (malls and gyms and retail as entertainment because your parks are torn up).
by sgnelson | 2026-01-27 18:16:49+00:00
fascists are going to fascist. Dang et al will just look away and say. "we don't have any power over what our users do. Email us to let us know." Because apparently the mods don't visit their own website? They'll just keep their heads buried in the sand. Everything is fine as long as that sweet ycombinator check keeps getting cashed.
by chasd00 | 2026-01-27 18:16:51+00:00
I vaguely remember using telnet to debug nodes from behind load balancers. I would ssh to the load balancer ( just a freebsd box with Apache ). Then telnet from there to port 80 on one of the app servers and issue get requests (including headers) by hand to see what the loadbalancer was seeing in the responses. Very tedious, I can't remember why but i do remember a BOF literally standing behind me and forcing me to do this with telnet and not something like curl/wget.
by jabl | 2026-01-27 18:16:56+00:00
> You're right about getting industrial lubricants in bulk for cheap. But I don't need 55 gallons of lubricant. I'd never use it all nor do I want to store it.

Well, the corollary to that is that if it's just small case usage then if you buy a 1L bottle of some general purpose lubrication oil for, say, $5, then it doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things that the price/L is a lot higher than if you buy an entire drum of the stuff. ;-)

> Used engine oil isn't really suitable for lubricating an engine anymore but it's fine for a temporary lubricant of a drill bit, some random hinge on a gate, or stubborn bushing on a piece of equipment. Engine oil is only really replaced on an engine because at some point it degrades enough that things like oil film bearings in the crankshaft would start to fail. A bushing on something like a small dump trailer doesn't rotate at 2300 rpm.

Fair enough. I guess I just don't see the benefit here vs just having some bottle of cheap unused lubricant. Except if used engine oil is the only thing you happen to have at hand.
by PaulHoule | 2026-01-27 18:17:29+00:00
Well I dunno to what extent the NYC lifestyle distorts the perception of stock market analysts. Do they think there are Duane Reades coast-to-coast?

I used to joke that you couldn't get a good cup of coffee in NYC in the 1990s because there were 2 or 3 Starbucks on every block to fool stock market analysts that the country was saturated with them -- thus driving out the independent espresso bars that you'd find in flyover states that had better coffee and leaving only the completely-indifferent-to-quality bodegas.
by gcanyon | 2026-01-27 18:18:48+00:00
I think this take is on the cynical side. A more charitable interpretation would be what they say (but maybe I'm being naive): that they don't want to break the rules to fix what someone else broke by breaking the rules.

I'm not sure what you mean by "they consistently come up with the exact small number of Democrats needed to push legislation and bills that the party proposes to be against" -- if you mean the Republicans manage to get some Democrats to "switch sides" -- it's important to remember that this is how everything used to get done. Check the old votes: party-line was less common back in the day. And even now, Democrats tolerate members with differing opinions far more than the GOP does, and it shows in their voting patterns.
by 20260126032624 | 2026-01-27 18:18:49+00:00
I don't "vibe code" but when I use an LLM with a game I usually branch out into several experiments which I don't have to commit to. Thus, it just makes that iteration process go faster.

Or slower, when the LLM doesn't understand what I want, which is a bigger issue when you spawn experiments from scratch (and have given limited context around what you are about to do).
by somenameforme | 2026-01-27 18:18:51+00:00
China has media laws that would make much of what appears on any sort of Western media platform illegal, so they're obviously going to get a very different experience in China. From anything that might violate social ethics, to clickbait titles - all illegal in China. They've even cracked down on overly effeminate men - 'girly guns' [1] and a million other things I'm not listing here. Basically Western style social media simply is impossible there.

In any case, entirely Western oriented platforms also push brainrot to Western viewers, so I don't think there's any conspiracy so much as just cultural differences.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niang_pao
by cardamomo | 2026-01-27 18:18:53+00:00
I noticed exactly the same thing. I don't recall which day it started (probably this past Sunday), but it was as if a switch flipped. My For You Page no longer has anything to do with my preferences. I'm familiar with Tiktok nudging me in different directions in the past, but I was always able to steer it back to videos I was interested in within 10-15 minutes. Three days later, and it's as if Tiktok not only has forgotten everything about my watch history, it also hasn't learned. That said, it doesn't seem to be entirely about politics. I had a mix of political/protest related content, native plant content, and woodworking videos on my For You Page. None of those are showing up for me.