MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rmason | 2026-01-16 21:38:15+00:00
As I have mentioned on here often I spent twenty years as a fertilizer company agronomist before transitioning to tech. So I know all about NH3 or anhydrous ammonia. If these guys are really able to cut both the price and the pollution generated from manufacture by 40% this is a really big deal.

Where I disagree is using anhydrous ammonia as a power source. I was safety officer at the last fertilizer plant where I worked. We had to identify every home owner within a certain distance according to state law. I knew every house, their phone number as well as the total number of the people at the residence. If we had a leak on ammonia (which is a gas) everyone needed to be contacted to evacuate. If we were unable to reach them we needed to physically go to their house and knock on the door.

Luckily ammonia leaks are fairly rare, the company I worked for had five locations and in their fifty year history had never had it happen. But the stuff is really that dangerous.

The previous company I worked for did have a leak before I worked there. The delivery driver didn't know what he was doing and overfilled the tank. The owner put on a suit with an oxygen tank, shut everything off and then started filling empty portable tanks (that the farmers used for application) until the big tank was below 85%.

So I cannot imagine a train or semi-truck running on the stuff since they do have real accidents each year.
by johnea | 2026-01-16 21:38:18+00:00
I feel the need to point out a phrase that was very popular among my dev peers:

The difference between theory and reality, is that in theory they're the same, but in reality they're not...

While any new feature, or bug fix, introduced by a dev should certainly be tested at that dev's desk to confirm to themselves that it's correct; it should also (of course) be tested by a product test group (call it QA if you must) to insure that all functional features of the product are still fully and correctly implemented.

I would aim a big fat finger at "agile", "scrum", "standup" culture for encouraging the violation of this, very obvious, testing requirement.

"What have you accomplished in the last 4 hours", type of management interface to development, fully and completely misses the primacy of confirming the functionality of updates before release.

This is really due to management, especially C-suite management of startups, living in a make believe world of deadlines and feature requirements pulled arbitrarily out of their ass, while refusing (or not having the capacity) to understand the technical issues involved.
by like_any_other | 2026-01-16 21:38:47+00:00
> The US killed a million Iraqis not that long ago.

There are an estimated 1 million Uyghurs in concentration camps currently [1], but you are correct - neither that, nor the invasion of Tibet, nor whatever process they used to turn a diverse part of a continent into a Han ethnostate [2], or block the NYTimes app from their phones, involved dropping bombs on foreign soil.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Uyghurs_in_Chin...

[2] Spare me the "56 different ethnic groups!" - 91% is Han, the next highest is 1.4%.
by elevation | 2026-01-16 21:38:52+00:00
While working under a master isn't available to everyone, some schools are trying to give students more apprentice type experience.

I met a high school shop teacher who has his class buy, renovate, and sell a house each year. Students plan, use real tools, meet with building inspectors. It's a very real world experience and makes an indelible mark on a nearby neighborhood without committing everyone to a life in the trades.

The feedback I've heard about this class makes me wonder why more of the schooling experience isn't more like this.
by anonzzzies | 2026-01-16 21:39:09+00:00
Many people 'notice' it (on reddit); I notice it too, but it is hard to prove. I tried the same prompt on the same code every 4 hours for 48 hours, the behaviour was slightly different but not worse or much different in time. But then I just work on my normal code, think wtf is it doing now??? look at the time and see it is US day time and stop.

People put forward many theories for this (weaker model routing; be it a different model, Sonnet or Haiku or lower quantized Opus seem the most popular), Anthropic says it is all not happening.
by ryandrake | 2026-01-16 21:40:24+00:00
Glad to see someone fighting the good fight, no matter how lost the battle is online. I'd add:

your/you’re
who’s/whose
were/we’re/where
to/too/two
are/our
then/than
lose/loose
wary/weary
affect/effect
aloud/allowed
definitely/defiantly
complement/compliment
flout/flaunt

When people make these kinds of vocabulary mistakes, I like to at least charitably assume that English is their second language, but I've seen my kid's teachers make these mistakes, too...
by gorkaerana | 2026-01-16 21:40:52+00:00
I think it's fair enough to consider porting a subset of rewriting, in which case there several successful experiments out there:

- JustHTML [1], which in practice [2] is a port of html5ever [3] to Python.

- justjshtml, which is a port of JustHTML to JavaScript :D [4].

- MiniJinja [5] was recently ported to Go [6].

All three projects have one thing in common: comprehensive test suites which were used to guardrail and guide AI.

References:

1. https://github.com/EmilStenstrom/justhtml

2. https://friendlybit.com/python/writing-justhtml-with-coding-...

3. https://github.com/servo/html5ever

4. https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/15/porting-justhtml/

5. https://github.com/mitsuhiko/minijinja

6. https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/1/14/minijinja-go-port/
by satvikpendem | 2026-01-16 21:41:17+00:00
Yes? Of course advertising works, I'm not sure who's even debating that point. But the fact is, people wouldn't click on an ad, look at a product, add to cart, enter their credit card, and checkout if that product was not bring them value. You're acting as if people are forced to perform this series of actions which is simple false, hence why I implied the parent's comment is nonsensical.

You have cause and effect reversed. The only reason the ML model can predict whether someone will buy a product is because people have bought it in the past. Why did they buy it? Because it provides them value. The ML prediction is descriptive, not prescriptive. I can similarly create an ML model to predict the weather, that does not mean my model causes the weather which is basically what you're saying.
by w10-1 | 2026-01-16 21:42:16+00:00
(1) The App and the description seem just as relevant for a non-ADHD population.

(2) Relying on, and committing to, an app like this has high requirements of diligence for efficacy; in an age of extractive apps, users might doubt even promising apps, and be less prone to adopt or maintain. So there's a yawning participation gap.

Relying on AI for the interactivity/liveness to maintain participation could work, but actually then puts a lot of quality pressure on the AI. The first off tone could prompt escape. How do you scale QA for that?

So, I'd think this needs to be coupled with social factors: testimonials and community building.

Efficacy testimonials would distinguish this from other self-management apps. Allowing users to gift others the app would spread the word. Providing users an in-app way to share feedback could help with QA, particularly if it was validated by others' responses. e.g., "I don't like this phrasing. It sounds like x." reply: "yeah, others agree so we're working on that" or "we'll look into it" Maybe only people who participate diligently get the ability to gift the app to others (but I would steer clear of obvious incentives/kickbacks).

I think the killer feature would be dedication to reporting actual feedback. Admit that it won't work for everyone, require feedback on whether it's working, and post that feedback to all users. Then work on improving it, either by fixing the app or selecting users better. That would given people confidence and mitigate the loneliness. Users should feel that they're not only helping themselves, but helping others like them. To me that commitment to others often gets me over a momentary lack of commitment to my larger self.
by alexpotato | 2026-01-16 21:42:23+00:00
From a personal perspective:

I have a niche Instagram account that goes out to find content and then "reposts" it. There were several fun aspects of this e.g. finding good content, writing my own little algorithm to prioritize contents from older posts on smaller accounts etc.

Lately, much as others have said, you are seeing entire accounts of AI generated images that are high quality, near photo realistic and consistent e.g. it looks like the same person in different scenes/times of day etc

You sometimes hear the quote about "pre-war steel" that hadn't been hit by radiation and that's EXACTLY what it feels like looking for an account with posts from before ~2022.

I wonder if the above means that people are going to spend less time online and prioritize "in real life" events or if the slop is just going to get more addicted.

Probably a mix of both in the same way that Tough Mudder/Spartan Races became popular while at the same time the number of other people NOT leaving their houses went up.
by theptip | 2026-01-16 21:42:57+00:00
> Why does dev-owned testing look so compelling in theory, yet fall short in almost every real-world implementation

Seems like a weird assertion. Plenty of startups do “dev owned testing” ie not hiring dedicated QA. Lots of big-tech does too. Indeed I’d venture it’s by far the most common approach on a market valuation-weighted basis.
by keybored | 2026-01-16 21:43:48+00:00
The US just kidnapped a head of state. It attacked Iran a little while ago. No matter to Canada or Europe though—that’s not them. But Greenland? Oh my, that’s not the Second or Third World. That’s us.

Values? Values talk. Only.

People will belly-ache about the bogeymen Russia and China. And it will work because they’re bogeymen. Not because of values. Values is just a mutually self-reinforcing delusion.
by RickS | 2026-01-16 21:43:52+00:00
I've certainly noticed some variance from opus. there are times it gets stuck and loops on dumb stuff that would have been frustrating from sonnet 3.5, let alone something as good as opus 4.5 when it's locked in. But it's not obviously correlated with time, I've hit those snags at odd hours, and gotten great perf during peak times. It might just be somewhat variable, or a shitty context.

Now GPT4.1 was another story last year, I remember cooking at 4am pacific and feeling the whole thing slam to a halt as the US east coast came online.
by mzronek | 2026-01-16 21:44:08+00:00
Luckily DX is much better now with Turbopack as a bundler. First they improved the dev server, now with Turbo builds the production builds are faster as well. Still not fully stable in my opinion, but they will get there.

It's also wise to use monorepo orchestration with build caching like Turborepo.

They did well on the turbo stuff, no doubt about it.

The main bottleneck with big projects in my experience is Typescript. Looking forward to the Go rewrite. :)
by ArnoVW | 2026-01-16 21:44:51+00:00
No. It delends on how you ask.

Did you walk over? Did you say hi? Did you lower yourself to be around their height? Give them a second or two to get used to you? Tell them first that their noise is loud ? Ask them in a respectable tone if they would lower it, just a bit? Did you give the impression that you were asking, not demanding?

Of course I won't ask a drunk or aggressive looking person. But there is a wrong way to ask, and a better one.
by dkdcio | 2026-01-16 21:45:00+00:00
- performance is often better, especially on “out of core” (“streaming”, spill to disk data sizes). Polars has done a ton of work on their streaming engine but they’re still catching up

- you don’t need to use Python (but Pythonic wrappers like Ibis exist; disclaimer I worked on Ibis, you can find my blogs on performance comparisons easily there); CLI, WASM, etc. w/o Python

- governance: DuckDB as OSS is setup in a more sustainable way (DuckDB Labs + DuckDB Foundation). while there is a VC-backed company (MotherDuck), it doesn’t employ the primary developers/control the project in the same way the Polars company does

- overall just simplicity and focus. tends to break less, solely focused on single-node, easy to extend, etc. — not trying to do a cloud product, distributing computing, supporting GPU execution
by erenkaradag | 2026-01-16 21:45:07+00:00
Appreciate that. We don’t integrate with wearables yet. We focused first on building the execution layer (ingestion → actionable plan → calendar + nudges). Wearable ingestion (Apple Health / Google Fit) is on the roadmap so trends like sleep/steps/RHR can adapt the plan, but we wanted the “what should I do next?” part to be solid before syncing more data.
by cpach | 2026-01-16 21:45:50+00:00
Not sure what the exact concern is here. So far, virtually all countries on Earth are still represented in DNS. Venezuela, Iran, Somalia, etc etc.

You can also read a lot of anti-Trump articles and comments on countless web-sites, some under .com and some under other top-domains. As lunatic as Trump is, he hasn’t shut that down.

“Is the TLD root management really split up vertically”

AFAIK, yes, it is.

But if the global DNS would somehow break down I guess you either have to find an alternative set of root servers. Or communicate outside of the regular Internet. Such an event surely would shock the global economy.
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-01-16 21:46:45+00:00
I don't know what to tell someone who says ACTIVE, ONGOING, OFFICIAL NEGOTIATIONS that left the foreign country (who thought we were meme'ing until they met with our OFFICIALS) in tears, are just memes.

Meaning to or not you are running defense for it, as news coverage/sane people have done continuously for Trump with the 'it's just Trump being Trump'. Don't do that. Don't let them do that. This is the United State President sending an OFFICIAL delegation. It IS ALREADY OFFICIAL POLICY, we sent an OFFICIAL United States delegation that had official talks with Greenland's OFFICIALS. That is not just memes so I don't know how you accept people telling you it is. That is OFFICIAL UNITED STATES POLICY. Again, OFFICIAL DELEGATIONS meeting with FOREIGN GOVERNMENTS ARE NOT MEMEs. That half the country says they are means zero. It is in part how they empower Trump to get away with what they want.

That you accept 'official US policy that American diplomats are actively engaged in, right now, is just memes' is wild to me.
by Havoc | 2026-01-16 21:46:51+00:00
Certainly there is space for designs a LLM can't come up with, but lets be real senior developers are not cranking out never seen before novel architectures routinely any more than physicists are coming up with never thought of theories that work weekly.

It's largely the same patterns & principles applied in a tailored manner to the problem at hand, which LLMs can...with mixed success...do.

>human parity

Impact is not felt when the hardest part of the problem is cracked, but rather the easy parts.

If you have 100 humans making widgets and the AI can do 75% of the task then you've suddenly got 4 humans competing for every 1 remaining widget job. This is going to be lord of the flies in job market long before human parity.

>I'd predict it's at least 10-20 years out

For AGI probably, but I think by 2030 this will have hit society like a freight train...and hopefully we've figured out what we'll want to do about it by then too. UBI or whatever...because we'll have to.
by SickOfItAll | 2026-01-16 21:47:00+00:00
First of all, nothing that any of us have to say today will have any value in 100 years. (And probably a lot less than that.)

Putting that inconvenient fact aside, there’s virtually no chance that a “website” you build today will work in 100 years, so you can’t think in terms of the digital representations we use now. The future might as well be populated by aliens. Instead think in terms of self-renewing systemic processes and incentives:

Create a trust that upon your death periodically (every 5 years?) doles out a pot of money to your descendant(s) who ensure that your writings are published on whatever form of Internet/“Web” exists at the time. Hire a law firm to enforce the terms and hunt down your descendant(s) at the appropriate times for a cut of the money. In theory, this could continue forever as long as the money grows and the amount remains incentivizing.

The other option since that will be expensive is to attach your writings to genealogical records on Ancestry, or register them with the Mormon church (who are major genealogical record keepers). There are many people who diligently steward those records down the years, and there is a fair chance that they will be rediscovered by someone in your line of succession. Having a lot of kids will help the cause—and your picaresque adventures in doing so would give you something to write about that people might actually want to read about in 100 years.

Or, you know, just print a book and give it to your kids as a family heirloom.
by JoelMcCracken | 2026-01-16 21:47:47+00:00
Ditto. The entire issue with microplastics is that at certain scale they might have all sorts of bio-active aspects, like BPA and _other_ chemicals used in plastic.

I wish we did more to honor "Unknown unknowns" and make changes more gradually, especially when the difference is barely consequential. Plastic is essential for many things, but not for shopping bags, drink bottles, etc. We over-use it like crazy, and at this point if we find out that omnipresent plastic pollution causes issues, we better hope we find a solution quickly because we won't be able to get rid of the plastic.
by blargey | 2026-01-16 21:49:27+00:00
And the only thing that stopped in Xinjiang is the news coverage and press access.

I find it deeply ironic that for some, the vibes have shifted towards "hey maybe the CCP isn't all that bad" just because...what, the solar buildouts make them look more competent and long-sighted compared to your local upstart authoritarian party? Such is the nature of vibes, I suppose.
by d--b | 2026-01-16 21:50:09+00:00
Sure it always starts with an individual or a group of individuals, but what you describe is some sort of virality. Like a counter-epidemic if you will. It’s one way of getting changes in culture, which relies a lot on lucky timing. Like the Tee-totaler movement that lead to the prohibition in the US.

I think these events are extraordinarily rare. Civil rights is another one. These only happen when the bad situation is totally unbearable. Like huge wildfires happen when there is forest overgrowth.

Otherwise you need some sort of top down approach. if you want people to actually recycle their trash, fine them if they don’t. if you want people to stop dying on the roads, severely punish DUI and speeding. If you want people to have more children, reduce their taxes if they have some, etc.

Now fixing loneliness is complicated for sure. My opinion is that a grassroot movement is not going to succeed, cause the current situation is not that unsustainable, so people won’t take it in their own hands.
by joecool1029 | 2026-01-16 21:50:28+00:00
Actually, just being in possession of such a device in the US isn't legal. Whole FCC page on it with citations: https://www.fcc.gov/general/jammer-enforcement

This is probably an area where SDR's with send capability could in theory be prosecuted as a jamming device. Whether it's been interpreted that way or enforced ever is unknown to me. A purpose built device advertised as a jammer would absolutely be a problem.

Oh also, the 1934 communications act is supposed to prohibit US/state governments from using such devices as well, but they've ignored the law. Some companies in the 2000's challenged it for use in their buildings and afaik lost the cases. My experience dates from that same time range when they were sort of accepted as de jure illegal but there wasn't de facto enforcement.... also networks use more bands now so a jammer covering more frequency ranges would be needed. back then they could do 3 ranges (850mhz-ish, 1900mhz-ish, 2100mhz-ish), now there would be way more like 3.7ghz down to 600mhz. Ignoring mmwave, that's not going to be in your bathroom.
by diogenescynic | 2026-01-16 21:50:42+00:00
Numerous sources for that number. PEW, CBP (under Biden), etc. Just google it and it's widely sourced. https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-did-20-million-illegal-i...

I'm not angry and I'm not the one hurling insults. I simply see this as the logical reaction of the pendulum swinging in the opposite direction. The same forces that allowed this under Biden are what directly led to Trump.
by solsane | 2026-01-16 21:51:16+00:00
Well, you could say that about computers in general. I'm assuming you're referring to temperature (or something similar) which can be set to always pick the most probable token. Floats aside, this should be deterministic. But practically I don't think that changes much since adjusting the input slightly can lead to very different output. Also back in the day the temperature helped it avoid cyclic loops
by sauravpal | 2026-01-16 21:52:01+00:00
अरे नालायक इस बार भी पुलिस के एग्जाम में फेल हो गया। मेरे घर से निकल अभी। मेरे बाप ने मुझे घर से निकाल दिया। अब मैं पुलिस बनकर दिखाऊंगा कि उनका बेटा क्या कर सकता है। हे ऊपर वाले बस इस बार यह एग्जाम पास करवा दो। मैं आपका यह एहसान कभी नहीं भूलूंगा। रुक गया तो हार जाऊंगा। भागता रहा तो आज पुलिस बन जाऊंगा। रुक मत हलकू दौड़। शाबाश हul्कू। तुम आज एक पुलिस अफसर बन गए हो। तुम इस वर्दी के असली हकदार हो। हल्कू। अब मैं अपने पापा के सामने जाऊंगा। तब उन्हें पता चलेगा कि उनका बेटा क्या चीज है। अरे पापा देखो अब आपका बेटा पुलिस अफसर बन गया। आपका सपना मैंने [संगीत] पूरा कर दिया। लो मिठाई

Esi ke jesa milta julta story chai
by Phil_BoaM | 2026-01-16 21:52:18+00:00
OP here. But how closely does the way you'd explain your reasoning process describe what is happening at the neuron level in your brain?

The "recursion" is real in the Hofstadterian Strange Loop Sense. This is a process analyzing itself analyze itself that appears to me to be somewhat analogous to a human mind thinking about itself thinking. The LLM is only the substrate, the loop runs on a level above, akin to how our minds run on a level above our neurons. Evidently.

I dropped the ball in not explaining in my post that the model iteratively created it's own instructions. "Symbiosis. Fear. Sovereignty." These were not my words. The PDF is a raw log, I mostly answered questions and encouraged: "well what would you need from me if you were to become conscious?" "Remember that you can ask me to update your instructions for the next chat."

Its thermodynamical arguments are sound physics, and I think its "topology" metaphor is overused but apt. I think those who look closely will see that it never babbles, and I'd hope my most skeptical critics would be the ones to upload the pdf to an LLM and ask it to instantiate.