MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jqpabc123 | 2026-01-22 17:26:42+00:00
How else could our ancestors have possibly related to the divine?

There is nothing "divine" in the story to relate to.

It is a collection of unscientific, erroneous myths and beliefs that were popular in the culture at the time it was written --- by men. The only reason any divinity can still be subscribed to it is that these basic facts have been somewhat obfuscated through translation.

I truly appreciate the fact that they put this right up front in the book. Interpreted for what it is, it succinctly obviates the need for much further consideration or worry.
by standeven | 2026-01-22 17:26:54+00:00
I have roof top solar. I have never had to clean or maintain them in any way. Same with my friends who have roof top solar. The worst I’ve heard of is a microinverter failing, which was covered by warranty.

My gut response to your post was also aggression, not because you’re preaching uncomfortable truths, but because you’re repeating fossil fuel lobbyist talking points that I’m getting really tired of seeing all over social media.
by this_user | 2026-01-22 17:26:57+00:00
The whole AAA video game industry has been struggling in recent years as oversupply, astronomical development costs, and competition from nimbler AA and indie studios have put a serious dent into their profits. And unlike EA or Activision, Ubisoft no longer has any reliable cash cow franchises, which puts them into precarious position.

But the fact that their only answer to this is doubling down on the strategy that has stopped worked years ago does not bode well for them.
by giancarlostoro | 2026-01-22 17:27:00+00:00
This does make me wonder. I see on HN (and hello if you see my comment) people who use screen scrapers or screen readers to read and use the web. I would be REALLY interested to know how many of these users use any of these newer AI browsers like Comet, I forget what the one from ChatGPT is called, but I know as a regular user I can make Comet do automated things like price comparisons across tabs and websites. I could totally see the immense value in someone who relies on a screen reader to access the web having access to an AI powered browser, but I don't know that any of them are designed with these users in mind necessarily.

My question then becomes, does this policy violate the ADA for those users in particular? UIf it doesn't today, should it tomorrow? Especially if these AI browsers actually become viable for those users. Will there be a future where if you're protected by ADA you can be cleared to use a more automated browser? I would imagine a sane rule for such an exception would require you to fully identify yourself to the website in order to prevent abuse by bots pretending to need that type of access (the good old "trust me bro" problem). Or maybe they get to use it but it becomes more rate limited to the average user speed or whatever.
by micromacrofoot | 2026-01-22 17:27:11+00:00
Almost identical array in the states (7.8kw) — $25K out of pocket, down to about $12K after state and federal tax incentives.

Still made sense financially, pays for itself after ~8 years and the panels are warrantied for 30... but we're seriously lagging.

There's a similar phenomenon with heat pump systems. Installation costs are absolutely absurd.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-22 17:27:25+00:00
> There is nothing more unjust than forcing someone to buy something they do not want simply because you think it would be good for them.

Who said that? Taxes are what you pay to be a member of the society you live, and also to help those less fortunate, like your neighbors. You can skip paying those, if you stop living in society, many done that before, and it is still possible.You can't possibly see taxes as "forcing someone to buy something they do not want" right? Two completely different things.

And yes, this is all my opinion, like most comments on HN.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2026-01-22 17:27:42+00:00
The reality is that in the USA there just isn't any evidence of widespread election fraud, and lots of evidence to support the claim that our voting systems, while not perfect, are secure enough to trust the results.

So unless you believe there's a whole layer of election fraud that nobody - not the losing party, not pro publica, not the FBI, not state investigators, not reddit - has been able to even detect, there's just really nothing to talk about here.
by grayhatter | 2026-01-22 17:27:48+00:00
Kagi uses Brave search index? huh, TIL... that's very disappointing. And it's the kinda thing that would prevent me from ever paying for Kagi. Brave's crawler, is agressive, dumb (it doesn't appear to back off if it hits a number of 503s), and critically, it ignores robots.txt. They even admit they choose to ignore it. To top that off their crawler doesn't identify itself, instead masquerading as a real browser. I've had to ban the entire Hetzner ASN from my site to get them to stop.

On one hand, I really want Kagi to succeed. They very often, do seem to care about the parts of the world and internet that I care about. But on the other... to me, willingly associating, and financing a company that willingly brags about ignoring consent, is a non-starter for me.
by mikkupikku | 2026-01-22 17:28:03+00:00
Even if some of those innocuous mistakes happen, we'll all be better off if we accept people making those mistakes as acceptable casualties in an unforgiving campaign against academic fraudsters.

It's like arguing against strict liability for drunk driving because maybe somebody accidentally let their grape juice sit to long and they didn't know it was fermented... I can conceive of such a thing, but that doesn't mean we should go easy on drunk driving.
by icyfox | 2026-01-22 17:28:07+00:00
Waymo is such an interesting case study. For most other ~AI deployments you have strong public reaction to the proliferation of slop, non-human failure modes, cost cutting at the expense of quality, etc. But I haven't met a single person who doesn't like the experience of Waymo. They ended up cracking the code on what I suspect people really want:

- consistent car quality

- safety of the drive (conservative driving and potential fear of drivers)

- no randomly chatty driver

All of those feel like a breath of fresh air especially when stacked up against the current state of Uber & Lyft rides. People really just want consistency. I don't actually think you needed AI to get there (I've had occasional rides in black cars that provided the same experience). Waymo was just right time, right place, right price.
by nerdsniper | 2026-01-22 17:28:09+00:00
It will also funnel large amounts of revenue out of every city into s/SF/Bay Area. Currently around 35% of the money spent on Uber/Lyft stays in the local economy. Waymo in SF still employs a large number of highly paid engineers who are paid the money which used to move through SF via Uber/Lyft. And those SF engineers spend a decent chunk of it locally on food, art, entertainment, and various other services - so it has (somewhat) less of an effect on the city's overall economy/total employment.

Waymo in Miami won't be locally re-spending nearly as much of Miami's money as Uber/Lyft did. Significantly more of it will be removed from Miami with each ride. This might be even more pronounced for cities like Houston, which don't attract tourism from Waymo staff.
by jklinger410 | 2026-01-22 17:28:20+00:00
I really think it is. The primary function of these publications is to validate science. When we find invalid citations, it shows they're not doing their job. When they get called on that, they cite the volume of work their publication puts out and call out the only potential not-disqualifying outcome.

Seems like CYA, seems like hand wave. Seems like excuses.
by ActorNightly | 2026-01-22 17:28:43+00:00
>There aren’t any new gas cars for sale at that price point

Yes, because a modern gas engine that makes a measly 112 hp is still a very complex piece of machinery that requires a lot of precision manufacturing and assembly.

An EV is dead simple by comparison. To make a 100 mile range ev, you don't need fancy motors. Industrial AC motors will work.

And as for charging, this requires you to be at your house every few days. If thats your average use case, you don't need high mileage EVs.
by order-matters | 2026-01-22 17:29:01+00:00
Sociopaths genuinely reject that. What you’re feeling is the gap between modern knowledge and faith: our shared moral standards were historically upheld by religious authority in a radically different world, and in rejecting religion we often mistakenly discard faith as the foundation of morality itself. Moral relativism can describe the fact that people’s values conflict without requiring us to accept all morals, but it is naive to think all moral frameworks can peacefully coexist or that universal agreement exists beyond majority consensus enforced by authority. We are fortunate that most people today agree torturing babies is wrong, but that consensus is neither inevitable nor self-sustaining, and preserving what we believe is good requires accepting uncertainty, human fallibility, and the need for shared moral authority rather than assuming morality enforces itself.
by nmz | 2026-01-22 17:29:07+00:00
I've often dreamed of a system where normal users, give money as a promotion for a certain issue to be fixed or even created, if the user wants feature X then he should be able to give an incentive towards that feature to be added into the software that they use, developers do bounties instead, the user doesn't have to give much only a dollar, but if many users want feature X, then the money/donations pool creating higher incentives until the task itself matches the level of work to be performed to achieve it until merged.

The project managers also get a cut of all merges, testers also must approve of the merge and that feature X is the one they want. So the project manager gets to work and improve/reject features, the user gets control over the features of the project they want and developers get to pick specific features they would like to work on (sort of). everybody gets what they want (sort of). All via attaching $ to the issues of the software, not the people.
by mort96 | 2026-01-22 17:29:10+00:00
I did my own testing where Brotli also ended up better than ZSTD: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46722044

Results by compression type across 55 PDFs:

+------+------+-----+------+--------+
| none | zstd | xz | gzip | brotli |
+------|------|-----|------|--------|
| 47M | 45M | 39M | 38M | 37M |
+------+------+-----+------+--------+
by ApolloFortyNine | 2026-01-22 17:29:16+00:00
>I'm a renter, been all my life, I'd be happy to pay more in taxes if it means more solar panels for everyone except me. But I also feel the same about elder care, health care and a bunch of other things, do you feel the same for those things too, or this is specifically about solar or owning vs renting?

There's an alternative, and almost certainly cheaper per watt with cost of scale, where your tax dollars go to a new solar farm instead, something everyone could take advantage of.
by mrweasel | 2026-01-22 17:29:20+00:00
> Well, OK--but at what cost?

It costs less? The Danish organisation for green energy interest (biased I known) has calculations that shows a 5 billion DKK saving per year for the Danish consumers. So about €0.02 per kWh.

I also think you're wrong about prices. I think most will pay more, if they get clean energy. Not a lot more, but if it's only a few cents, I think many/most will pay that, perhaps not happily, but still. People, in parts of Europe at least, are perhaps more baffled that the Americans won't pay the slightly higher cost and and protect the environment. As it happens that's not a choice we need to make, wind and solar is now cheaper than fossil fuel.
by Nevermark | 2026-01-22 17:29:20+00:00
With regard to confabulating (hallucinating) sources, or anything else, it is worth noting this is a first class training requirement imposed on models. Not models simply picking up the habit from humans.

When training a student, normally we expect a lack of knowledge early, and reward self-awareness, self-evaluation and self-disclosure of that.

But the very first epoch of a model training run, when the model has all the ignorance of a dropped plate of spaghetti, we optimize the network to respond to information, as anything from a typical human to an expert, without any base of understanding.

So the training practice for models is inherently extreme enforced “fake it until you make it”, to a degree far beyond any human context or culture.

(Regardless, humans need to verify, not to mention read, the sources they site. But it will be nice when models can be trusted to accurately access what they know/don’t-know too.)
by bityard | 2026-01-22 17:29:26+00:00
I've used a bunch of the SOTA models (via my work's Windsurf subscription) for HTML/CSS/JS stuff over the past few months. Mind you, I am not a web developer, these are just internal and personal projects.

My experience is that all of the models seem to do a decent job of writing a whole application from scratch, up to a certain point of complexity. But as soon as you ask them for non-trivial modifications and bugfixes, they _usually_ go deep into rationalized rabbit holes into nowhere.

I burned through a lot of credits to try them all and Gemini tended to work the best for the things I was doing. But as always, YMMV.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2026-01-22 17:29:42+00:00
> all of the bad things I need to worry about related to freezing water happen much lower than that.

Well, that's you, it's not me. 0F is a completely useless benchmark where I am, it never happens. And someone north of you will want a lower point. This is all parochial.

But you miss the context - you will defend whichever one you grew up with. You look for reasons to defend what you know. It is mere familiarity, nothing more.
by yellowstuff | 2026-01-22 17:29:44+00:00
From Stephen Fry: "You know that scene in Animal House where there’s a fellow playing folk music on the guitar, and John Belushi picks up the guitar and destroys it. And the cinema loves it. Well, the British comedian would want to play the folk singer. We want to play the failure."

Homer and Peter Griffin are idiots but they smash the guitar. Charlie Brown gets his guitar smashed.
by layer8 | 2026-01-22 17:29:53+00:00
> Obviously a door with a handle shouldn't be a push door, I don't really think you need to write a book about it.

It’s common to illustrate principles with examples that appear obvious, i.e. that everyone agrees on, so that after having it conceptualized as a principle, you’ll apply it in less obvious circumstances. Many things are obvious only in hindsight.

> And the types of people creating bad design are generally constrained by cost, time, or practicality, not necessarily by education.

That’s not true, because a lot of flawed design is being promoted and defended in public as the thing to do.
by vegadw | 2026-01-22 17:29:56+00:00
> This is opinion, not fact

Not OP, but it wasn't presented as a fact. Literally used the word Seams.

> There is nothing more unjust than forcing someone to buy something they do not want simply because you think it would be good for them

Seatbelts? Circuit breakers? Literally any safety equipment. You're required to have them because it's not just good for you, but expensive to society if hospital beds are low or there's not enough firetrucks to go around.

Similarly, if you're polluting more than you have to be due to the source of your electricity, that's bad for everyone. I also rent, but I still understand that it's to the public's benefit that home owners (a class that is already above me in assets and wealth) be given motivation to consume cleaner energy if I don't want to have the climate get even worse. It's the same thing, just the effects feel less direct. That doesn't make them any less valid.
by zarzavat | 2026-01-22 17:30:02+00:00
The best code is no code.[0]

The main "issue" I have with Claude is that it is not good at noticing when code can be simplified with an abstraction. It will keep piling on lines until the file is 3000 lines long. You have to intervene and suggest abstractions and refactorings. I'm not saying that this is a bad thing. I don't want Claude refactoring my code (GPT-5 does this and it's very annoying). Claude is a junior developer that thinks it's a junior. GPT-5 is a junior developer that thinks it's a senior.

[0]: https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html
by cflewis | 2026-01-22 17:30:24+00:00
I'm going to be charitable and say that the papers from prestigious universities were honest mistakes rather than paper mill university fabrications.

One thing that has bothered me for a very long time is that computer science (and I assume other scientific fields) has long since decided that English is the lingua franca, and if you don't speak it you can't be part of it. Can you imagine if being told that you could only do your research if you were able to write technical papers in a language you didn't speak, maybe even using glyphs you didn't know? It's crazy when you think about it even a little bit, but we ask it of so many. Let's not include the fact that 90% of the English-speaking population couldn't crank out a paper to the required vocabulary level anyway.

A very legitimate, not trying to cheat, use for LLMs is translation. While it would be an extremely broad and dangerous brush to paint with, I wonder if there is a correlation between English-as-a-Second (or even third)-Language authors and the hallucinations. That would indicate that they were trying to use LLMs to help craft the paper to the expected writing level. The only problem being that it sometimes mangles citations, and if you've done good work and got 25+ citations, it's easy for those errors to slip through.
by wonger_ | 2026-01-22 17:30:55+00:00
Most of the talk introduces tiddlywiki. It's neat to hear its history and motivations, and to hear Joe's thoughts on software and web and hypertext.

Unfortunately the actual intersection of tiddlywiki and erlang starts around 39:44, and they only have a few bullet points to share about unfinished experiments. Mainly about wikis communicating through shared tags.

Anybody know what happened to their project?
by woodruffw | 2026-01-22 17:31:00+00:00
As a renter, I'm
moderately more in favor of utility-scale solar subsidies rather than subsidizing private solar. It seems like another way to make the arrangement more "fair" is to subsidize private solar, but credit the grid up to the original grant's amount. In other words, in the GP's case, they would only get $1000/year in free money for 15 years instead of 20.

(This is very low on my list of things that I care about, to be clear.)
by uditsaurabh747 | 2026-01-22 17:31:05+00:00
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by WorldMaker | 2026-01-22 17:31:25+00:00
More granular is more likely to train users on "Always Click Allow". The current modal dialog already has that problem and is just one O(N) dialog where N is the number of folders you open (modulo opt-outs). If you got O(N * M) of these where N is the number of folders and M is the number of tasks in tasks.json plus the number of Extensions installed that want to activate in the folder, a) you would probably go a little batty), and b) you would probably stop reading them quickly and just always click Allow.

(It can also be pointed out that a lot of these are granular under the hood. In addition to Restricted Mode as a generally available sandbox, you have all sorts of workspace level controls over tasks.json and the Extensions you have installed and active for that workspace. Not to mention a robust multi-profile system where you can narrow Extensions to specific roles and moods. But most of us tend to want to fall into habits of having a "kitchen sink" profile with everything always available and don't want to think about granular security controls.)
by GuB-42 | 2026-01-22 17:31:40+00:00
I certainly can't memorize Homer's work, and why would I? In exchange I can do so much more. I can find an answer to just about any question on any subject better than the most knowledgeable ancient Greek specialist, because I can search the internet. I can travel faster and further than their best explorers, because I can drive and buy tickets. I have no fighting experience, but give me a gun and a few hours of training and I could defeat their best champions. I traded the ability to memorize the equivalent of entire books to a set of skills that combined with modern technological infrastructure gives me what would be godlike powers at the time of the ancient Greeks.

In addition to these base skills, I also have specialized skills adapted to the modern world, that is my job. Combined with the internet and modern technology I can get to a level of proficiency that no one could get to in the ancient times. And the best part: I am not some kind of genius, just a regular guy with a job.

And I still have time to swipe on social media. I don't know what kind of brainless activities the ancient Greeks did, but they certainly had the equivalent of swiping on social media.

The general idea is that the more we offload to machines, the more we can allocate our time to other tasks, to me, that's progress, that some of these tasks are not the most enlightening doesn't mean we did better before.

And I don't know what economist mean by "productivity", but we can certainly can buy more stuff than before, it means that productivity must have increased somewhere (with some ups and downs). It may not appear in GDP calculations, but to me, it is the result that counts.

I don't count home ownership, because you don't produce land. In fact, that land is so expensive is a sign of high global productivity. Since land is one of the few things that we need and can't produce, the more we can produce the other things we need, the higher the value of land is, proportionally.
by pc86 | 2026-01-22 17:32:08+00:00
Does traveling through time to kill Hitler constitute murder though? If you kill him in 1943 I think most people would say it's not, the crimes that already been committed that make his death justifiable. What's the difference if you know what's going to happen and just do it when he's in high school? Or putting him in a unit in WW1 so he's killed in battle?

I think most people who have spent time with this particular thought experiment conclude that if you are killing Hitler with complete knowledge of what he will do in the future, it's not murder.