MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bluGill | 2026-01-16 13:55:56+00:00
Looking at a chip makes it easier, but it is still millions (or billions in the case of a CPU) of dollars for engineers to figure it all out. That doesn't get you to understand what was done or why so 2-3 years latter you can make that chip but they have now moved on to a faster/better version and you are behind. And of course if you try this Apple (or whoever you copy) will have plenty of engineers who can look at your chip and in just a few hours decide there is enough to have lawyers sue you for the copy.

China already has plenty of engineers who can make a chip, and experience with making CPUs. ARM licenses a lot of useful things for making a CPU (I don't know what). They would be better off in the long run making the chips they all ready understand better. Which is something they are doing. It takes longer and costs more, but because they understand they can also customize the next chip for something they think is good - if they are right they can be ahead of everyone else.

What China is lacking is the fabs to make a CPU. They have made good progress in building them, but there is a lot of technology that isn't in the chip that is needed to make a chip.
by cons0le | 2026-01-16 13:56:03+00:00
Only speaking for myself, but I have "front end exhaustion". Text based sites like this are the only ones I spend any time on anymore.

There's no reason to "learn" a UI or use shortcuts on most sites, because they change everything around every few months.

I see people reminiscing about tabs in firefox, well today a majority of the top websites don't even allow you to open links in new tabs! The links aren't even real links anymore, and everything's a webapp. ( and by top websites, I mean social media, not the top sites used by the HN crowd. Sites like YT, FB, IG, and TT ).

I try to interact with the "UI" of websites as little as possible these days. I use RSS readers for as much as possible. Any time I get a popup on any site, I get mad. I don't care about news updates, software updates, or offers. Anything that pops up at me, or moves around before I can click it, looks like a scam to me. Even if it's "legitimate". The modern web feels like an arcade game that's trying to waste my time.
by BirAdam | 2026-01-16 13:56:26+00:00
This niche will get smaller over time. The key hurdle right now is that most "AI" is just LLMs. People currently prefer to go to a website or open a dedicated application for AI inference. As better integrations with other workflows are made and people see them, the resistance will weaken.

Microsoft shoving LLMs into literally everything, including Notepad, is what people are currently hating, because it isn't quite ready.
by theirbrbeu7474 | 2026-01-16 13:57:22+00:00
You think smartphones are the cause of atrophy ?

No sir, there was nothing there to begin with - if you read recent history, you'll see that it's full of stupidity, and a few rabble rousers leaving entire nations by the nose.

With the mollification off the smartphone, we've merely taken off the edge of this killing machine.
by t3netet | 2026-01-16 13:57:29+00:00
Even if you discount Signal he did more or less design the protocol that WhatsApp is using https://techcrunch.com/2014/11/18/end-to-end-for-everyone/

Also while we would expect heavy promotion for a trapped app from some agency it's also a very reasonable situation for a protocol/app that actually was secure.

You can of course never be sure but the fact that it's heavily promoted/used by people on both the whistleblowers, large corporations and multiple different National Officials at the same time is probably the best trustworthyness signal we can ever get for something like this.

(if all of these can trust it somewhaat it has to be a ridiculously deep conspiracy to not have leaked at least to some national security agency and forbidden to use(
by kadajett | 2026-01-16 13:58:06+00:00
I have been writing JS code for a long time. NestJS isn't my first choice in backend languages these days, but after I spent the last few months rewriting some services in it, I think I ran into about every foot gun there is with NestJS specifically.

I started writing this when I was having Claude review non-vibe coded apps I was rewriting, or building to study. As I ran into more frustrations, I added new notes.

Then, when vercel released their best practices, I loved the format so much, both for people to read, and for claude to review with, that I turned my chicken scratch (and some additional docs) into a NestJS skill for Claude.

Feel free to file issues, submit PRs, etc. Hopefully this makes Claude a little less bad for you as well.
by johanvts | 2026-01-16 13:58:10+00:00
Sure, it does happen but it’s not the normal model. Every mother feels horrible and cries when they institutionalize their kids, western society is based on most people doing this regardless. It is not scalable to educate women for 20 years just to have them become stay at home moms, just as a single farmer today has 40.000 chickens etc.
by 1dom | 2026-01-16 13:58:42+00:00
I agree with you, but I'm completely aware that the point you're making is the same point that's causing the problem.

"Stuck in a rut" is a matter of perspective. A good marketer can make even the most established best practice be perceived as a "rut", that's the first step of selling someone something: convince them they have a problem.

It's easy to get a non-QWERTY keyboard. I'm typing on a split orthlinear one now. I'm sure we agree it would not be productive for society if 99% of regular QWERTY keyboards deviated a little in search of that new innovation that will turn their company into the next Xerox or Hoover or Google. People need some stability to learn how to make the most of new features.

Technology evolves in cycles, there's a boom of innovation and mass adoption which inevitably levels out with stabilisation and maturity. It's probably time for browser vendors to accept it's time to transition into stability and maturity. The cost of not doing that is things like adblockers, noscript, justthebrowser etc will gain popularity and remove any anti-consumer innovations they try. Maybe they'll get to a position where they realise their "innovative" features are being disable by so many users that it makes sense to shift dev spending to maintenance and improvement of existing features, instead of "innovation".
by Hnrobert42 | 2026-01-16 13:59:47+00:00
There's a little convenience/liquor store at the first floor of my suburban apartment building. I mean true convenience store. Lots of shelves with snacks and liquor. Bright lighting. Zero ambience.

It also has a tiny bar. Like 3 feet long with three stools. One terrible television.

Yet there are always people in there hanging out. People are so desperate for a place to hang that is not their house that they will hang out in a convenience store bar.
by jgalt212 | 2026-01-16 14:00:02+00:00
To my this seems like a classic LLM defense.

A doesn't work. You must frontier model 4.

A works on 4, but B doesn't work on 4. You doing it wrong, you must use frontier model 5.

Ok, now I use 5, A and B work, but C doesn't work. Fool, you must use frontier model 6.

Ok, I'm on 6, but now A is not working as it good as it did on A. Only fools are still trying to do A.
by endymion-light | 2026-01-16 14:00:56+00:00
For a text-based business simulator, i'd make the text far easier to read. I'm finding it to be a little to fast, with a lot of eye strain. There's a couple of techniques, including making sure that your text isn't completely black.

I'd look a little more into some of the design strategies, including smoother scrolling for text, better typography design, colors that are easier to read and more focus on the content itself.

Especially if you expect someone to read 20 minutes for an article. Just take a bit of a refresher on techniques for web readability!
by nprateem | 2026-01-16 14:01:11+00:00
> The Conflict: If your content doesn't build an asset, it's just an expense. You are a hamster on a wheel.

> The Truth: Content is a "Digital Real Estate." Every piece of content should either lower your CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) or increase your LTV (Lifetime Value).

Usual AI over-confident bollocks. There are multiple reasons to post consistently beyond just these simplified reasons.

I'm out. Might as well waste my time with crapgpt
by james_marks | 2026-01-16 14:01:20+00:00
I like the concept, but density of the text and awkward UX are keeping me from engaging deeper.

There should be one (and only one) obvious button to advance the flow at all times. For instance:

* I took the “test” before realizing the topics were clickable.

* after getting a test question right at the end of a section, my “reward” was another wall of text explaining the question I’d just gotten right. Confusing and off-putting.
by jaapz | 2026-01-16 14:01:21+00:00
> For instance, the QWERTY keyboard layout exists to prevent typewriter keys from jamming, but we're stuck with it because it's the "standardized solution" and you can't really buy a non-QWERTY keyboard without getting into the enthusiast market.

So, we are "stuck" with something that apparently seems to work fine for most people, and when it doesn't there is an option to also use something else?

Not sure if that's a great example
by watwut | 2026-01-16 14:01:24+00:00
> I didn't realize there was a cut and dry "correct" answer.

There is cut and dry response to this economic one tho. If you look at the economic performance of past presidents, there is very clear pattern of who simultaneously makes debt higher and economy worst. There is also nothing in Trumps past performance that would suggest he would make economy better. And in fact, he is making it worst.

Sometimes things are cut and dry. Economic anxiety is just an excuse we use, so that we can idealize conservative people. If you read what they write and say, it is very clear it is not the economy that makes them vote how they vote.
by jvanderbot | 2026-01-16 14:02:13+00:00
You, sir, need an education in some stereotypes.

More seriously, I think GP was commenting on the stereotypical response that when a "wife" brings up a "problem" they often want "emotional support" rather than "discussion of solutions".

Not that wife literally gets mad when he solves a problem, unless his problem solving is yet another "engineer system solution" (vs manual labor) which I know from experience, try the patience of everyone involved in family life :D
by dijit | 2026-01-16 14:02:14+00:00
> Yes! I don't want a car with an "innovative" way of steering.

You might, but you'll never really know.

I mean, steering wheels themselves were once novel inventions. Before those there was "tillers" (a rod with handle essentially)[0], and before those: reigns, to pull the front in the direction you want.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benz_Patent-Motorwagen
by bluGill | 2026-01-16 14:02:29+00:00
Trust also changes over time. One CEO change and a company can change overnight thus causing all trust to evaporate. Normally CEOs are aware of this and don't change things and so trust transfers, but one mistake and you lose trust. It takes a lot to build back trust, but a few years of proving worthy of trust and it starts to come back. If your competitors violates trust in the mean time customers are more likely to risk you, and if you prove trustworthy the customers are likely to stay.

There are other factors than trust as well - the US government really wants intel fabs to take off and they may be applying pressure that we are not aware of. It could well be that Apple is willing to risk Intel because the US government will buy a lot of macs/iphones but only if they CPU is made in the US. (this would be a smart thing for the US todo for geopolitical reasons)
by cons0le | 2026-01-16 14:02:57+00:00
As someone that makes my own keyboard firmware, 100% agree. For most people, typing speed isn't a bottleneck. There is a whole community of people that type faster than 250wpm on custom, chording-enabled keyboards. The tradeoff is that it takes years to relearn how to type. Its the same as being a stenographer at that point. Its not worth it for most people.

Even if there was a new layout that did suddenly allow everyone to type twice as fast, what would we get with that? Maybe twice as many social media posts, but nothing actually useful.
by LinXitoW | 2026-01-16 14:04:47+00:00
Just in case you need some recommendations:

Party games: Scale well with more people, easy to explain

- Werewolf

- Werewords

- Codenames (favorite)

Beginner Games: Accept a decent amount, somewhat easy to explain

- Camel Up

- Flip 7

- Dungeon Fighter

- Ticket to Ride

Games that have nothing to do with your problem, but I just wanna mention:

- Everdell: Cute critters prepare for winter

- Root: Cute critters prepare for war

- Azul: Place fancy tiles that look and feel delicious

- Bohnanza: The best part of Catan without the bad parts
by wryoak | 2026-01-16 14:04:56+00:00
Well, you didn’t share the exact text of the original prompt but you described yourself as having asked it to do something. These models are being trained for agentic behavior on data where an agent is asked _to do something_, and as their output is purely probabilistic, the rewarded response will then often include the text “I have done something” even though they have not done something. Perhaps there _is_ an issue with the integration that caused your experienced response, but purely based on my experience and the limited information you gave, my immediate guess is that the model positively associates your prompt with the generated response
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2026-01-16 14:05:02+00:00
I think that should be nonvar(A), nonvar(B) because the reason the unification succeeds and \+(A = B) fails is because A and B are variables (when called as foo(A,B). What confuses the author is unification, as far as I can tell.

But, really, that's just not good style. It's bound to fail at some point. It's supposed to be a simple example, but it ends up not being simple at all because the author is confused about what's it supposed to behave like.
by TYPE_FASTER | 2026-01-16 14:05:18+00:00
> The affordances of AI systems have the effect of eroding expertise

Recently, it so happened that I spent an hour reverse engineering and documenting a piece of a system. A co-worker asked a LLM to do the same. It generated some really nice documentation.

The difference is, I (as a team member) now have the understanding. Generating the documentation does not increase the understanding of the team.
by IAmBroom | 2026-01-16 14:05:31+00:00
Moreover, designers keep trying to justify their own jobs by changing fully functional interfaces, and then claiming post-hoc that the new UIs are better because they are better.

Designers decided that scrollbars that shrink to super-thin columns when not in use were better. Maybe... but often it results in shrunken scrollbars that require extra work to accurately hover over and expand.

Designers decided that gray text on gray backgrounds were easier to read, and there was even a study to "prove" it... which resulted in idiots picking poor contrast choices of gray-on-gray, without understanding the limits on this idea.

I will say that the current push for accessibility is forcing some of these "innovations" back onto the junk heap where they belong. I was annoyed the first time an accessibility review complained about the contrast of my color choices on a form once... but once I got over my ego, I have to admit they were right; the higher-contrast colors are easier to read.
by alistairSH | 2026-01-16 14:05:41+00:00
What sorts of places do you have in mind? Obviously dorms and cafeterias are great for college-aged adults, but for somebody in their late-20s and beyond?

Locally, we have plenty of non-chain coffee shops, a good selection of small breweries/pubs, assorted gyms of all types and prices (CrossFit, Golds, etc), the local community center has assorted classes (dance, language, arts), and the community college has plenty of evening courses across most subject areas. Toss in MeetUps and Facebooks groups and there's plenty of chance to do things with social groups.
by technothrasher | 2026-01-16 14:06:04+00:00
How could it be? Growing up, there was a large horse chestnut tree that was a meeting point for all the kids in the neighborhood. It was such a huge part of our lives that it became an icon for our childhood, as several others have agreed with me as adults. It's gone now, as it grew old and diseased and someone cut it down. But it was a very significant tree for many people in the town for many years. I doubt, however, that it, or so many other trees that had similar impact on people, would ever make a Wikipedia list. There are just too many trees.
by al_borland | 2026-01-16 14:06:14+00:00
I’ve used HP Operations Orchestration (now owned by OpenText after a series of acquisitions). I’ve also used MS PowerApps for one small thing. I hated my experience with both of them.

With HPOO, I could support stuff I wrote, because I knew where everything was, but good luck supporting anyone else’s code or working on something as a team. It was so hard to see what was actually going on. While it looks like a nice flow chart in presentations to management, the meat of what’s happening is tucked away in various panels with properties and JavaScript hidden away on a different tab. Some even ends up in the transitions. To try and figure it out requires clicking on literally everything in a flow and holding the whole thing in your head. It supported source control, but that was more of a glorified backup, because good luck making sense of a diff on the giant XML file it used to represent the flow. This was many years ago, so maybe things have improved, but with all the acquisitions, I’m doubtful.

PowerApps felt similar, but also worse. To be fair, I only used it one time to set up something to monitor my email and send an attachment to SharePoint for a weekly report, since SharePoint removed the email feature that did this out of the box. It could have been that a lot of my issues were simply the learning curve, but I just remember it being very annoying. This was before they added AI to it, so maybe now I could write and simple prompt and be done, hard to says.

Considering my experience with HPOO was that it was easier to re-write than try to understand an existing flow written by someone else, I don’t see AI being very good. It would be very difficult to review what it did to make sure it’s doing what was intended. I also tended to order my flows in a way that looked visually appealing and logical to me, and I’m not sure how AI would do with this. Not to mention the lack of training data, when I was using it there was 0 information out there on it. I only used it because that’s what management bought and pushed down.
by maqp | 2026-01-16 14:06:14+00:00
My issue is it claims to be end-to-end encrypted, which is really weird. Sure, TLS between you and your bank's server is end-to-end encrypted. But that puts your trust on the service provider.

Usually in a context where a cypherpunk deploys E2EE it means only the intended parties have access to plaintexts. And when it's you having chat with a server it's like cloud backups, the data must be encrypted by the time it leaves your device, and decrypted only once it has reached your device again. For remote computing, that would require LLM handles ciphertexts only, basically, fully homomorphic encryption (FHE). If it's that, then sure, shut up and take my money, but AFAIK the science of FHE isn't nearly there yet.

So the only alternative I can see here is SGX where client verifies what the server is doing with the data. That probably works against surveillance capitalism, hostile takeover etc., but it is also US NOBUS backdoor. Intel is a PRISM partner after all, and who knows if national security requests allow compelling SGX keys. USG did go after Lavabit RSA keys after all.

So I'd really want to see this either explained, or conveyed in the product's threat model documentation, and see that threat model offered on the front page of the project. Security is about knowing the limits of the privacy design so that the user can make an informed decision.
by shevy-java | 2026-01-16 14:06:50+00:00
> Are those days permanently gone? The days when actual UI/UX innovation was a thing?

I don't think these are permanently gone, but the corporations failed us, and also the "not for profit" fakers such as Mozilla.

We need a new web - one developed by the people, for the people. Whenever corporations jump in, they try to skew things to their favour, which almost always means in disfavour of the people.
by pdpi | 2026-01-16 14:06:58+00:00
> Signal is hardly more private than goddamn Whatsapp.

To be fair, that is largely because WhatsApp partnered with Open Whisper to bring the Signal protocol into Whatsapp. So effectively, you're saying "Signal-the-app is hardly more private than another app that shares Signal-the-protocol".

In practical terms, the only way for Signal to be significantly more private than WhatsApp is if WhatsApp were deliberately breaking privacy through some alternative channel (e.g. exfiltrating messages through a separate connection to Meta).
by potato3732842 | 2026-01-16 14:07:22+00:00
>I owned a machine shop, and I'm the founder of a mid sized CNC gear factory. I think I know my way around bearings, lubrication, press fits and other such bits & pieces.

Then you have no excuse for having such a nuance free opinion for you must know things are often not obvious at "first glance of pictures someone else took" which is what we're all doing here.

>I'm doing the exact opposite of what you claim. I am just taking the bits of evidence already available and rejecting root causes that would require those bits of evidence to not exist, which is entirely valid, this still leaves a massive amount of uncertainty which I have underlined on more than one occasion.

I disagree. You are acting like this is a cut and dry situation wherein the Boeing advice that this was not safety critical is just wrong on it's face. That assessment was made 15yr ago (perhaps by "old good boeing" engineers) and on a part already under a lot of scrutiny from the other MD11 that lost an engine. Sure they could be wrong, but I wouldn't bet on it so confidently.

This bearing moves a few degrees. It's not like the engine is doing loops around the pylon. It's possible that for whatever reason the bearing stopped doing bearing things as well as it should. Now, this is a plane, everything is light, aluminum and made to flex to varying degrees. It's hard to say where exactly the movement was taking place in lieu of the bearing. Without specific knowledge it's hard to say how the failure happened. Maybe things got loose and failed from stress concentration. Maybe the movement happened in the wing assembly and the force+vibration of making that happen caused the engine mount to fail. You don't know. I don't know. Nobody in these comments know with a sufficiently low chance of being wrong to point the finger in any one direction.

To act like "well of course when the bearing wore/failed/whatever it ripped its mount right in two because now the force was concentrated and the part it was concentrated on was sus to begin with" is to confidently oversimplify the situation.

Engine pylons, landing gear, control surfaces, these are key systems, not the "built to within an inch of their life because they gotta be light" like a lot of other things on an airliner (though I admit the MD11 is a particularly questionable application of this heuristic)

Big planes generally don't fall out of the sky because one party misleadingly labeled something in the service literature. I would be very surprised if there weren't also maintenance failing of some sort here.