MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by al_borland | 2026-01-09 00:03:56+00:00
I work mostly in Ansible and Copilot is completely incompetent when trying to deal with it. I’ve tried several models that are available (Claude, Gemini, various GPTs, Codex), and they’ve all been pretty bad.

For example, I asked just this week if a when condition on a block was evaluated once for the block or applied to each task. I thought it was each task, but wanted to double check. It told me it was done once for the block, which was not what I was expecting. I setup a test and ran it; it was wrong. It evaluates the condition on every task in the block. This seems like a basic thing and it was completely wrong. This happens every time I try to use it. I have no idea how people are trusting it to write 80% of their code.

We recently got access to agent mode, which is the default now. Every time it has tried to do anything it destroys my code. When asking it to insert a single task, it doesn’t understand how to format yaml/ansible, and I always have to fix it after it’s done.

I can’t relate to anything people are saying about AI when it comes to my job. If the AI was a co-worker, I wouldn’t trust them with anything, and would pray they were cut in the next round of layoffs. It’s constantly wrong, but really confident about it. It apologizes, but never actually corrects its behavior to improve. It’s like working with a psychopath.

In terms of training AI on our code base, that seems unlikely. We’re not even allowed to give our entire team (of less than 10 people) access to our code. We also can’t use whatever AI tool is out there. We can only use Copilot and the models it has, and only through our work account with SSO so it applies various privacy rules (from my limited understanding). We don’t yet have access to a general purpose AI at work, but they are in pilot I think.

I have no idea where it’s heading, as I have trouble squaring the reality of my experience with the anecdotes I read online, to the point where I question if any of it is real, or these are all investors trying to keep the stock prices going up. Maybe if I was working in a more traditional language or a greenfield environment that started with AI… maybe it would be better. Right now, I’m not impressed at all.
by eek2121 | 2026-01-09 00:06:04+00:00
...which is not even a developer's salary. Pathetic from a company that makes billions and has surpassed even Apple in terms of market cap (yes, I know market cap means very little, especially in a bubble, but still...)

As part of FAANG, they should be donating like 10x that amount at least.

Disclosure: I am relying on your word, and do not know if there are more tiers above partner or not.
by xracy | 2026-01-09 00:06:42+00:00
Yeah, the more I look at different articles on here, the more I feel like the flagging is pretty targeted at any ideology at all left of center. Or specifically criticism of the current administration.

All that their "anti-politics" flags really do is to make HN more of a "head-in-the-sand" echo-chamber for right-wing ideologies.
by sosodev | 2026-01-09 00:06:59+00:00
I think you're confused about the training steps for LLMs. What the industry generally calls pre-training is when the LLM learns the job of predicting the most probable next token given a huge volume of data. A large percentage of that data has not been cleaned at all because it just comes directly from web crawling. It's not uncommon to open up a web crawl dataset that is used for pretraining and immediately read something sexual, nonsensical, or both really.

LLMs really do find the signal in this noise because even just pre-training alone reveals incredible language capabilities but that's about it. They don't have any of the other skills you would expect and they most certainly aren't "safe". You can't even really talk to a pre-trained model because they haven't been refined into the chat-like interface that we're so used to.

The hard part after that for AI labs was getting together high quality data that transforms them from raw language machines into conversational agents. That's post-training and it's where the armies of humans have worked tirelessly to generate the refinement for the model. That's still valuable signal, sure, but it's not the signal that's found in the pre-training noise. The model doesn't learn much, if any, of its knowledge during post-training. It just learns how to wield it.

To be fair, some of the pre-training data is more curated. Like collections of math or code.
by mrandish | 2026-01-09 00:07:22+00:00
Seems savvy of Dell. With empty AI hype now the default, saying the quiet part out loud is a way to stand out. Unfortunately, it doesn't mean Dell will stop taking MSFT's marketing money to pre-sell the Right-Ctrl key on my keyboard as the "CoPilot" key.

I wouldn't hate this so much if it was just a labeling thing. Unfortunately, MSFT changed how that key works at a low level so it cannot be cleanly remapped back to right-CTRL. This is because, unlike the CTRL, ALT, Shift and Windows keys, the now-CoPilot key no longer behaves like a modifier key. Now when you press the CoPilot key down it generates both key down and key up events - even when you keep it pressed down. You can work around this somewhat with clever key remapping in tools like AutoHotKey but it is literally impossible to fully restore that key back so it will behave like a true modifier key such as right-CTRL in all contexts. There are a limited number of true modifier keys built into a laptop. Stealing one of them to upsell a monetized service is shitty but intentionally preventing anyone from being able to restore it goes beyond shitty to just maliciously evil.

More technical detail: The CoPilot key is really sending: Shift+Alt+Win+Ctrl+F23 which Windows now uses as the shortcut to run the CoPilot application. When you remap the CoPilot key to right-Ctrl only the F23 is being remapped to right-Ctrl. Due to the way Windows works and because MSFT is now sending F23 DOWN and then F23 UP when the CoPilot key has only been pressed Down but not yet released, those other modifiers remain pressed down when our remapped key is sent. I don't know if this was intentional on MSFT's part to break full remapping or if it's a bug. Either way, it's certainly non-standard and completely unnecessary. It would still work for calling the CoPilot app to wait for the CoPilot key to be released to send the F23 KEY UP event. That's the standard method and would allow full remapping of the key.

But instead, when you press CoPilot after remapping it to Right-Ctrl... the keys actually being sent are: Shift+Alt+Win+Right-Ctrl (there are also some other keypresses in there that are masked). If your use case doesn't care that Shift, Alt and Win are also pressed with Right-Ctrl then it'll seem fine - but it isn't. Your CoPilot key remapped to Right-Ctrl no longer works like it did before or like Left-Ctrl still works (sending no other modifiers). Unfortunately, a lot of shortcuts (including several common Windows desktop shortcuts) involve Ctrl in combination with other modifiers. Those shortcuts still work with Left-Ctrl but not CoPilot remapped to Right-Ctrl. And there's no way to fix it with remapping (whether AutoHotKey, PowerToys, Registry Key, etc). It might be possible to fix it with a service running below the level of Windows with full admin control which intercepts the generated keys before Windows ever sees them - but as far as I know, no one has succeeded in creating that.
by helloaltalt | 2026-01-09 00:07:32+00:00
Some people are praising the monarchy chants or similar which doesn't feel really good

I genuinely hope that this dictatorship ends and instead of monarchy, pure form of democracy is established and worked for the people with pure freedom.

I genuinely hope Iran the best of luck figuring out the protests and fighting for their rights and I hope that democracy can be established in Iran and rules like the burka can be lessened and internet freedom and other things can be established as well and hope that they can figure out the water crisis and financial crisis as well for the new govt.
by soldthat | 2026-01-09 00:07:37+00:00
GTK2 being on life support in 2026 is kind of wild when you remember GTK3 has been around for ~15 years and 3.24 has been “the stable one” for more than half a decade. Debian’s mail here also makes it clear this isn’t a sudden rug pull: they started filing bugs against affected packages in 2020 and the list is already down to <25% of what it was.

The hard part is always the long tail and the installer. If the graphical Debian Installer still depends on GTK2, that’s a good reminder of how much distro plumbing quietly sits on old tech because “it works” and no one wants to touch it. My guess is we’ll see more distros take this approach: aggressively prune old toolkits from the main repos, and push truly unmaintained apps into containers/Flatpaks or community overlays instead of carrying a full compatibility stack forever.
by AstroBen | 2026-01-09 00:07:50+00:00
I don't get it? Yes you should require a valid reason before believing something

The only objective measures I've seen people attempt to take have at best shown no productivity loss:

https://substack.com/home/post/p-172538377

https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...

This matches my own experience using agents, although I'm actually secretly optimistic about learning to use it well
by CjHuber | 2026-01-09 00:07:57+00:00
I know you‘re joking but to contribute something constructive here, most models now have guardrails against being threatened. So if you threaten them it would be with something out of your control like „… or the already depressed code reviewing staff might kill himself and his wife. We did everything in our control to take care of him, but do the best on your part to avoid the worst case“
by eudamoniac | 2026-01-09 00:08:16+00:00
I'm not one of those hypocrites who believes that our nation's founding revolution was heroic and just, while any present-day revolution would be the opposite. Violent revolution can certainly be moral, even today, even here. But are you going to risk death for it? I'm not. Food and shelter abound. Our poor are obese. Entertainment is plentiful. How many are really at the point of mortal action? Too few, I imagine.
by solid_fuel | 2026-01-09 00:08:59+00:00
It's structurally impossible. LLMs, at their core, take trusted system input (the prompt) and multiply it against untrusted input from the users and the internet at large. There is no separation between the two, and there cannot be with the way LLMs work. They will always be vulnerable to prompt injection and manipulation.

The _only_ way to create a reasonably secure system that incorporates an LLM is to treat the LLM output as completely untrustworthy in all situations. All interactions must be validated against a security layer and any calls out of the system must be seen as potential data leaks - including web searches, GET requests, emails, anything.

You can still do useful things under that restriction but a lot of LLM tooling doesn't seem to grasp the fundamental security issues at play.
by nickyvanurk | 2026-01-09 00:09:45+00:00
Been slowly chipping away at my browser mmo game https://everwilds.io. I've always been curious about MMO software/netcode architecture thanks to playing Guild Wars (the original) in my youth. It's the reason I became a programmer, I wanted to learn how to make those kind of games. For those interested in following the progress I made a discord channel: https://discord.gg/b3REbeavaT
by mc32 | 2026-01-09 00:10:00+00:00
One aspect is that there has been little coverage by the media about these protests that have been going on for close to a couple of weeks and two, presumably the Iranian regular forces are repressing their protestors. People in the US are protesting against what the same organization, despite doing the same job under previous presidencies didn’t get protested as much if at all. If I recall correctly last year the current admin just beat the Obama admin on people deported in a single year.
by DonHopkins | 2026-01-09 00:10:23+00:00
It's a good thing they're effectively dead, but they don't have any useful parts to carve out, because they were a fraud through and through from day one, infested with toxic sexist nepotistic bro culture, and were an embarrassment and warning to the industry. No surprise at all they unethically bricked their useless overpriced electronic waste.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29440213

DonHopkins on Dec 4, 2021 | parent | context | favorite | on: I bought those AR cycling glasses that were on HN ...

Why not simply do what Magic Leap does, and blatantly fake the camera images and games that don't really and couldn't possibly exist?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28838500

And then rip off other people's work without giving them any credit in your patents.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28838443

And then sexually harass the very women you employed to solve the endemic "pink/blue problem" and fix the nepotistic sexist bro culture, and rebuff and ignore her advice, and pay her off to keep their mouth shut when she sues you for sexual harassment.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28838421

And then give the entire AR industry a bad name by not delivering on your outrageously hyped promises, while burning through BILLIONS of dollars and fucking over your foolishly gullible investors.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28838737
by breppp | 2026-01-09 00:10:27+00:00
What was always intriguing for me in Iranian politics is the support for bringing back the Shah, a government which was not the pinnacle of freedom. It's either things are that bad, people are nostalgic or it's a narrative pushed by the Islamic Republic to defame the protestors (the last seems unlikely though).

Isn't there the possibility of just asking for a non-autocratic figure?
by tharmas | 2026-01-09 00:10:38+00:00
Who can bring charges in this instance?

Even if there is a perceived slim chance of success I still think charges should be brought forward. At the very least it might make some of these psychopaths hesitate to do the same. Maybe. And while they are at it maybe an investigation that produces names on who ordered these guys to act so brazen.

If you cant nail the guy who did this go after those who are above in rank. Maybe there's a "paper trail" on giving orders to do such thing?

People have to fight back or this lady definitely wont be the last.
by j4k08 | 2026-01-09 00:10:56+00:00
Hi, exam period is near so I wanted to share this.

I made a 24-hour focus timer to help myself study. Started it 6 years ago (during the covid lockdown) and I’ve been using and improving it ever since.

A full circle represents 24 hours. Each study session adds a green arc, so by the end of the day you get a “cake” of your activity.

It now has session tags, stats (daily/weekly/monthly), streaks, and a simple todo list. And all data is stored on your browser locally.

Source code: https://github.com/jakobkreft/CakeTimer

Website: https://jakobkreft.github.io/CakeTimer
by overtone1000 | 2026-01-09 00:11:08+00:00
Maybe if you organized your notes you could articulate your thoughts better!

jk, I agree. I use logseq synced across devices, but I barely know any of the shortcuts and never made any kind of brilliant web of personal knowledge. My notes are always available and are searchable, which is enough for those rare occasions when I need to find something obscure and for those common occasions when I want a tried and true cocktail recipe. Maybe I'll hyper-organize it one day and find a billion dollar idea lurking under the surface...but probably not.
by colechristensen | 2026-01-09 00:11:12+00:00
This is a bit of goalpost moving though because the primary experience is skeptics saying AI couldn't be trusted to design a ham sandwich vs enthusiasts who've make five course meals with AI. (or, you know, the programming equivalent)

Absolutely there's a lot of unfounded speculation going around and a lot of aggressive skepticism of it, and both sides there are generally a little too excited about their position.

But that is fundamentally not what I'm talking about.
by hristoff | 2026-01-09 00:12:09+00:00
So yesterday I needed a fake iMessage screenshot for a video thumbnail. Googled around, tried a few tools - they all either looked terrible, had ugly watermarks everywhere, or wanted me to download some random app.I figured how hard can it be to just make one myself?18 hours later I have a working product with payments and everything. Probably should have slept at some point but here we are.
It's called Messagesy. You pick a platform (iMessage, WhatsApp, Instagram, and 9 others), type out a conversation, customize the details like names and timestamps, and export it as a PNG.
The whole thing runs in the browser. React frontend, Firebase for auth, Stripe for payments because I wanted to see if anyone would actually pay for this. Turns out some people will — got my first few subscribers this morning.
Free tier gives you 3 exports per day with a watermark. Paid removes limits and the watermark.
Honestly not sure where this goes from here but it was a fun build. If anyone wants to try it and i will be happy to answer questions about the stack or how I built it.
by slogansand | 2026-01-09 00:12:14+00:00
[2.35.0] - 2026-01-08
Added - Anthropic Agent Harness Patterns & Claude Agent SDK
Sources:

Effective Harnesses for Long-Running Agents - Anthropic Engineering
Claude Agent SDK Overview - Anthropic Platform
New Patterns:

One Feature at a Time (Rule #7 in Core Autonomy)

Work on exactly one feature per iteration
Complete, commit, verify before moving to next
Prevents over-commitment and ensures clean progress tracking
E2E Browser Testing with Playwright MCP

Features NOT complete until verified via browser automation
New Essential Pattern: Playwright MCP -> Automate browser -> Verify UI features visually
Detailed verification flow added to SKILL.md
Note: Playwright cannot detect browser-native alert modals
Advanced Task Tool Parameters

run_in_background: Returns output_file path, output truncated to 30K chars
resume: Continue interrupted agents with full context
Use cases: Context limits, rate limits, multi-session work
Fixed
Release workflow: Use gh CLI instead of softprops action for atomic release creation
by westurner | 2026-01-09 00:13:48+00:00
ScholarlyArticle:

"Highly Efficient Platinum-Free Photocatalytic Hydrogen Evolution From Low-cost Conjugated Polymer Nanoparticles" (2025)
https://advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.20... :

> Abstract: While the interest in hydrogen photocatalysis from organic semiconductors is rapidly growing, there is a necessity to achieve hydrogen production without platinum (Pt), considering its price, availability and toxicity. In this work, this is demonstrated that high hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) efficiencies can be achieved without the use of Pt. A series of low-cost conjugated polymers are designed around the dibenzothiophene-S,S-sulfoxide (BTSO) unit, and self-assembled as nanoparticles in water via the nanoprecipitation technique. This is highlighted that how side chain engineering, nanoparticle morphology and pH influence the hydrogen evolution rate. Optoelectronic properties are improved through a Donor-Acceptor structure, resulting in an unprecedented hydrogen evolution reaction rate of 209 mmol g−1 h−1 in the absence of Pt. A clear correlation between high efficiencies and number of BTSO units within the polymer backbone can be established. The design rules pioneer the design of future organic materials is presented for a cost-efficient and sustainable hydrogen photocatalysis.
by buu700 | 2026-01-09 00:13:56+00:00
Gemini is similar. It insists that information from before its knowledge cutoff is still accurate unless explicitly told to search for the latest information before responding. Occasionally it disagrees with me on the current date and makes sarcastic remarks about time travel.

One nice thing about Grok is that it attempts to make its knowledge cutoff an invisible implementation detail to the user. Outdated facts do sometimes slip through, but it at least proactively seeks out current information before assuming user error.
by gnarlouse | 2026-01-09 00:13:59+00:00
> they only get paid when people find value in what AI is producing for them

The people "finding value in them" are other people with money to throw at businesses: investors, capital firms, boards & c suites. I'm not sure anybody who has been laid off because their job got automated away is "finding value" in an LLM. There's a handful of scrappy people trying to pump out claude-driven startups but if one person can solo it, obviously a giant tech company can compete.

> No dark patterns

https://www.palantir.com/

> No enshittification

https://google.com

https://bing.com

> No taking your data hostage

blank stare they're not taking my data hostage, but they're sure as shit taking my data

I think we just fundamentally disagree on all of this. You may be right, and I hope you are. I go back and forth on whether it's going to be a gentle transition or a miserable one. My money is on the latter.
by rs1996 | 2026-01-09 00:14:15+00:00
We built a consumer app that does deep ingredient and health analysis (food, supplements, skincare, cat treats, etc.) using llama-3.3-70b in production.

Some numbers from the last month:
- ~3.0M+ tokens processed
- ~$2.07 total inference cost
- ~0.5–0.6 cents per scan
- Median latency ~3s, typical range 3–5s
- Long prompts, structured outputs, ingredient-level caching

This isn’t a demo or batch job — it’s a real latency-constrained mobile workload with thousands of active scanning users.

The main takeaway for us was that deep, high-quality inference can be surprisingly cheap and predictable if you design for it intentionally.

Happy to answer questions or share more details if useful.
by DetectDefect | 2026-01-09 00:14:49+00:00
> Soy has a lot of phytoestrogens so it’s not a great candidate to consume large amounts of.

The buffoonery continues. These irrational statements are straight out of the meat industry playbook - of course again lacking in any credible citations. And all you had to do was spend even 5 seconds reading a public encyclopedia to avoid this embarassment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytoestrogen#Effects_on_human...
by rcxdude | 2026-01-09 00:15:06+00:00
I think it's interesting because they seem to have built some vaguely pretty decent interfaces and drivers. Before that there were some attempts to make a rust embedded HAL but I think they were a bit too basic and didn't seem to get much traction. Also async interfaces are probably the most generic, because you can hook them up to superloops, single-threaded applications, and threaded code relatively easily (at least, more easily than the other way around), and IMO one of the big reasons Arduino stayed firmly hobbyist tier is because it was almost entirely stuck in a single-threaded blocking mindset and everything kind of fell apart as soon as you had to do two things at once.