MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zdw | 2026-01-22 22:51:18+00:00
I really wish MS had stuck with the Windows 8/Phone direction - bright square blocks that didn't waste space, which felt like it was a full refutation of the transparent everything of Vista that was still there to some extent in 7.

Looking at macOS 26, it's hard not to compare it visually to Vista given the transparency emphasis. Hopefully in a few years an Alan Dye-free Apple will move in a different direction.
by SLWW | 2026-01-22 22:51:56+00:00
I read the same tired opposing arguments all the time; I thought of it the moment I read the title. "My time isn't free, so I'll pay the tax" is true, however most of these individuals spend hours a day watching the news or doing anything else but being productive or spending time with family/friends.

If you aren't working 24/7 while handling a family and telling yourself your time is worth more than a small fee, you are just being lazy. I'm the same way, I am incredibly lazy and will constantly tell myself that my time is worth more. This is usually until I realize I'm spending way to much of my "money" to "save time". HourlyWage(time) = money, if I'm saving time by spending money I'm losing time. This is a basic concept and I defy anyone to show me otherwise.

We live in a time where instant gratification is the main driver behind most decisions, devaluing our currency each and every fee we succumb to... as money is time, and if time is being "saved" by spending time (in the form of money) we are now applying a future debt to the work we are doing today. You might work 40 hours one week, where at least 4 hours of that week goes to paying your streaming bill, another 8 for Internet and Phone, as well as another 2 for the coffee you didn't make that week, another hour for your notetaking app on your phone, 30 minutes for your subscription to watch funny youtuber release content early, another 2 hours for you glut of productivity apps, etc. These things all work to keep you a wage-slave till the day you eventually croak with a menial 401k.

It's embarrassing we reduce ourselves to this.
by coryrc | 2026-01-22 22:52:13+00:00
"User pay" is typically associated with regressive per-use taxes. It's perfectly compatible with socialism to ensure the cost of the road system is applied to only automobile users in a progressive manner. Relatedly, Finland moving violation fines are not a fixed fee and are proportional to income: https://nri.today/wealthy-speedsters-beware-finlands-million... Stop thinking "cars=default", they are not.

Legally criminal actions are violations against the state, which is why a prosecutor decides whether to file charges and does not need the consent of the victim to do so. We already have what you suggest with civil law and private security.
by johnea | 2026-01-22 22:52:53+00:00
So what?

After living with parents, roommates, spouses and others for most of my life, I'm super happy to live alone.

Has anyone stopped to think that possibly people live alone because that's what they want to do?

I can only think of a quote from one of my favorite youtube videos of all time:

"The monkey's feel alone, all 6 billion of them..."

From: Ernest Cline's spoken word reading of Dance Monkey, Dance

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQOdNY-HdG0

Watch it, it's worth it...
by bdmorgan | 2026-01-22 22:52:56+00:00
Script author here :-) This was due to two different GitHub Action workflows:

(Workflow 1): Remove the need-triage label under certain conditions.

(Workflow 2): If anyone outside a project maintainer removes a label, re-add it with a friendly message explaining why.

Submitted those at like 10 or 11 pm and went to sleep. Woke up to all issues that got changed overnight with dozens, hundreds, or thousands of these messages.

Cause: Workflow 2 should have checked for project maintainers but also other bots and automation that might also be clearing labels. It got fixed immediately once we realized the issue.
by jesse__ | 2026-01-22 22:53:08+00:00
You're inferring that time invested per project is directly proportional to love for the craft, which I disagree with strongly. Taking a weekend to explore a new medium is an act of interest/love in the craft. Is Robert Bateman any less dedicated to a life of art than Michelangelo was? Maybe, maybe not, but I think we can both agree they produced quick sketches, and dedicated their lives to producing incredible art.

I expect artists will experiment with the new tools and produce incredibly creative works with them, far beyond the quality I can produce by typing in "a pelican riding a bicycle".
by midlander | 2026-01-22 22:53:10+00:00
I like that you’re positioning this as an “AI PM that happens to design” instead of yet another screen generator. Most tools are great at producing artifacts and terrible at preserving the reasoning behind them. If Figr could reliably spit out a tight decision log/constraints list from each session (what we considered, what we rejected, and why), that alone would replace a lot of hand-wavy product docs.

The 200k UX pattern corpus sounds powerful, but that’s also the scary part: pattern bias overpowering the specifics of a product. The more you can show “this suggestion came from your own data” (analytics, funnels, support tickets) and let teams tune how opinionated the pattern-matching is, the easier it is to trust it for things like onboarding and billing flows rather than just happy-path demos.
by tim-fan | 2026-01-22 22:53:46+00:00
On the other hand, insurance costs for robotaxis should be lower if they are able to drive significantly safer.

Then the one I'm more interested / excited for: optimizing the fleet for the cargo. If most trips involve single passengers, then most cars can be small electric single seaters. This can further reduce insurance costs as well as fuel, maintenance and depreciation.

I'd hope that's enough to offset the price of the sensors, compute hardware, and engineers to maintain the system.

But yes paying back investors; not sure how long that would lead to elevated costs for riders.
by bananaflag | 2026-01-22 22:54:08+00:00
I've slowly become more and more inclined to "Theory 5: Purity of vision" over the past six years.

When I was younger, I valued movies more than books. I know that people usually replied that books make you exercise your imagination more, but to me that felt like a disadvantage of books, they seem to rely on a crutch (the imagination), whereas movies (in my child's mind) stood alone, proudly. I tended to see a book as infirm, incomplete until it got an adaptation, and even then, a bad adaptation seemed to me to somehow devalue the book itself, like an infection from a prosthesis. I literally couldn't sleep at night because of errors in book adaptations, it was like a hole in the universe itself.

Then I reread Harry Potter, especially the last book, and I came to love the descriptions of nature and feelings in the tenting chapters, and I suddenly realized how much I value how the book makes feel, and how irrelevant the quality of its adaptation is.

This theory got put to the test when the Foundation TV show came up, which I found awful, and for the first time I didn't care. The book was just as brilliant as before, and no bad adaptation could make me lose nights anymore.

Recently, this disappointment with adaptations together with the appreciation of literature itself made me more disappointed with movies in general, even original ones. I realized how many compromises have to be made to make a movie which simply don't exist in books.
by thestructuralme | 2026-01-22 22:54:51+00:00
The most striking part of the report isn't just the 100 hallucinations—it’s the "submission tsunami" (220% increase since 2020) that made this possible. We’re seeing a literal manifestation of a system being exhausted by simulation.

When a reviewer is outgunned by the volume of generative slop, the structure of peer review collapses because it was designed for human-to-human accountability, not for verifying high-speed statistical mimicry. In these papers, the hallucinations are a dead giveaway of a total decoupling of intelligence from any underlying "self" or presence. The machine calculates a plausible-looking citation, and an exhausted reviewer fails to notice the "Soul" of the research is missing.

It feels like we’re entering a loop where the simulation is validated by the system, which then becomes the training data for the next generation of simulation. At that point, the human element of research isn't just obscured—it's rendered computationally irrelevant.
by mlsu | 2026-01-22 22:55:55+00:00
> This also highlights the importance of model design and training. While Claude is able to respond in a highly sophisticated manner, it tends to do so only when users input sophisticated prompts.

If the output of the model depends on the intelligence of the person picking outputs out of its training corpus, is the model intelligent?

This is kind of what I don't quite understand when people talk about the models being intelligent. There's a huge blindspot, which is that the prompt entirely determines the output.
by woodruffw | 2026-01-22 22:56:51+00:00
> My favorite preserved fish in New York City comes from Russ & Daughters, an icon of New York cuisine that’s been around since 1914.

Russ & Daughters gets their smoked fish from Acme[1], which is a huge purveyor of smoked fish. So the curious from this blog don't necessarily need to schlep to Russ & Daughters to get it.

(Caveat being that it's very hard to slice lox correctly; you should be able to read the newspaper through it[2]. Preserved Fish the human presumably never had to deal with such problems.)

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

[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/nyregion/the-lox-sherpa-o...
by anonymous908213 | 2026-01-22 22:57:25+00:00
To be clear, as I said in another reply downthread, I think this particular project is creative. I also don't object to people doing "push button get image" for entertainment (although I do object to it being spammed all over the internet in spaces meant for human art and drowning out people who put effort into what they create, because 10,000 images can be generated in the time it takes to draw a single one). But "push button get image" is not making things yourself. I would give you credit for creating this because you put effort into fine-tuning a model and a bespoke pipeline to make this work at scale, but this project is exceptional and non-representative among generative AI usage, and "push button get image" does not have enough human decision-making involved for the human to really have any claim to have made the thing that gets generated. That is not creativity, and it is not capable of replacing existing expressions of creativity, which you've asserted multiple times in the article and thread. By all means push button and get image for as long as it entertains you, but don't pretend it is something it isn't.
by pas | 2026-01-22 22:57:47+00:00
that's true to some extent, but at this point it's mostly a meme (at least the 60% number was)

> In 2023, 54 percent of adults said they had set aside money for three months of expenses in an emergency savings or “rainy day” fund—unchanged from 2022 but down from a high of 59 percent of adults in 2021.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/2023-repor...

via

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/paycheck-to-paycheck-and-five-...
by johnsmith1840 | 2026-01-22 22:58:43+00:00
Extensions are limited though.

One simple example is an extension can't see cross origin iframes. This means it could never do soemthing like fill out a payment form for you if it's an extension.

Limited computation and action space is another as well as bot detection systems.

For example a javascript method trying to automate something like microsoft word in an iframe will have a tough time because the second you inject code in there they will block you.
by ConcurrentCrab | 2026-01-22 22:59:37+00:00
Cool terminology, but I don't think this really applies to LLM-generated code.

"Based on a fundamentally incorrect model" is what I would call code by a new coworker or intern who didn't stop to ask questions. The model being fundamentally wrong means it's cognitively taxing to refactor, but you can at least reason about it, and put band-aid fixes if it somehow flows to prod.

With LLM code you're lucky if there's any sort of ostensibly identifiable model underlying the cryptic 10,000 lines PR corresponding to the statistically extrapolated token stream flowing out the matrix multiplication brick. And the person raising that PR tries to create that mental model, instead of taking the easy way out.
by bradlys | 2026-01-22 22:59:40+00:00
Why are people complaining about this? It's not even that high of an amount compared to several other developed nations. It's not a recent trend either. It's been going on for over 30 years.

No one here seems to care about the objective number (40 million) - they instead care about the relative amount (29%). If you look at the graph and track the percent, it's been at or over 25% since 1990. Having your share go from 25% to 29% in 35 years is not really that meaningful.

This isn't a new phenomenon in the US. The graph sucks because it hides the fact that the US population has been growing steadily.
by thestructuralme | 2026-01-22 23:01:11+00:00
A lot of the scary numbers come from agents being left in “always-on” loops: long context windows, tool calls, retries, and idle GPU time between steps. The right unit isn’t “watts per agent” but something like joules per accepted change (or per useful decision), because an agent that burns 10x energy but replaces 20 minutes of human iteration can still be a net win. What I’d love to see is a breakdown by (1) model/token cost, (2) orchestration overhead (retries, evaluation, tool latency), and (3) utilization (how much time the GPU is actually doing work vs waiting). That’s where the real waste usually hides.
by nkoren | 2026-01-22 23:01:34+00:00
Glad you've done so.

I'm at a point in my life (personal bandwidth hovering near 0%) where I'm not getting involved in anything unless I have not just a good reason ("this is a noble agenda; somebody should do something about it, and hey, I guess I'm a somebody"), but a damned specific reason ("I have unique capabilities which can help this specific initiative in this specific way").

Anyhow, in this particular domain, I'm pretty sure there are people who could be MUCH more useful contributors than I. I'd love to forward the "manifesto" to them -- except I know that they're in the same position as me: essentially zero bandwidth. Any new project they get involved with means dropping something else that's currently on their plate, and is presumably important. They're not going to do that on a lark. They'll need need a damned good reason to participate, before deciding to spend time on something new.

To be honest, ANY real power-players will be in this position. They don't have free time on their hands; they won't just join up in the vague hope that maybe it'll be a place where things can happen. You will need power-players on-side, and without a much more specific proposition, you're not going to get them.

But I'm glad you've joined. Job no. 1: that manifesto needs to do a lot more manifesting before it's fit for purpose!
by hu3 | 2026-01-22 23:01:41+00:00
From what I understand they basically couldn't scale writes in PostgreSQL to their needs and had to offload what they could to Azure's NoSQL database.

I wonder, is there another popular OLTP database solution that does this better?

> For write traffic, we’ve migrated shardable, write-heavy workloads to sharded systems such as Azure CosmosDB.

> Although PostgreSQL scales well for our read-heavy workloads, we still encounter challenges during periods of high write traffic. This is largely due to PostgreSQL’s multiversion concurrency control (MVCC) implementation, which makes it less efficient for write-heavy workloads. For example, when a query updates a tuple or even a single field, the entire row is copied to create a new version. Under heavy write loads, this results in significant write amplification. It also increases read amplification, since queries must scan through multiple tuple versions (dead tuples) to retrieve the latest one. MVCC introduces additional challenges such as table and index bloat, increased index maintenance overhead, and complex autovacuum tuning.
by DataDaoDe | 2026-01-22 23:02:19+00:00
Clicking on this link just reminded me again that science (like all such restricted access journals) is an operation that relies heavily on publicly funded research and unpaid academic labor.

And yet their access restriction not only removes the public from consuming the fruits of their labor, but it also systematically harms less well-resourced institutions, independent scholars and impedes the spread of knowledge (particularly in areas of the world that need it most).

I wish we could reach a point where we wouldn't allow this anymore.
by thestructuralme | 2026-01-22 23:02:38+00:00
The “snake eating its own tail” frame is real, but it’s not mystical — it’s incentives + sampling.

If the web gets flooded with LLM output and you train on it naively, you’re effectively training on your own prior. That pushes models toward the mean: less surprise, less specificity, more template-y phrasing. It’s like photocopying a photocopy: the sharp edges disappear.

The fix isn’t “never use synthetic data.” It’s to treat it like a controlled ingredient: tag provenance, keep a high-quality human/grounded core, filter aggressively, and anchor training to things that don’t self-contaminate (code that compiles/tests, math with verifiable proofs, retrieval with citations, real user feedback). Otherwise the easiest path is content volume, and volume is exactly what kills signal.
by pas | 2026-01-22 23:02:42+00:00
it's true, lot of money is sitting in safe assets in banks

https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/inter/date/2024/html/ecb.in2...

see also https://archive.md/xaiLU

"Europe’s AI ambitions are running into a markets plumbing problem

The region lacks the depth of long-dated investment capital needed to fund required energy infrastructure"
by zzrrt | 2026-01-22 23:02:42+00:00
Perhaps that statement could be read to imply the existence of an objective moral status, but I don't think societal "consideration" does in general. Does this statement? "200 years ago slavery was considered moral; now slavery is considered immoral."

I don't think it implies either is objectively correct, and perhaps this was the intended meaning of the original statement. It might appear to put weight on current attitudes, but perhaps only because we live in the present.
by epolanski | 2026-01-22 23:02:47+00:00
Tangential but you reminded me of why I don't give feedback to people I interview. It's a huge risk and you have very low benefit.

It once happened to me to interview a developer who's had a 20-something long list of "skills" and technologies he worked with.

I tried basic questions on different topics but the candidate would kinda default to "haven't touched it in a while", "we didn't use that feature". Tried general software design questions, asking about problems he solved, his preferences on the way of working, consistently felt like he didn't have much to argue, if he did at all.

Long story short, I sent a feedback email the day later saying that we had issues evaluating him properly, suggested to trim his CV with topics he liked more to talk about instead of risking being asked about stuff he no longer remembered much. And finally I suggested to always come prepared with insights of software or human problems he solved as they can tell a lot about how he works because it's a very common question in pretty much all interview processes.

God forbid, he threw the biggest tantrum on a career subreddit and linkedin, cherrypicking some of my sentences and accusing my company and me to be looking for the impossible candidate, that we were looking for a team and not a developer, and yada yada yada. And you know the internet how quickly it bandwagons for (fake) stories of injustice and bad companies.

It then became obvious to me why corporate lingo uses corporate lingo and rarely gives real feedback. Even though I had nothing but good experience with 99 other candidates who appreciated getting proper feedback, one made sure I will never expose myself to something like that ever again.
by TeMPOraL | 2026-01-22 23:03:38+00:00
Indeed. It's the immediate assumption that since you're asking me, it must be important to you - otherwise you wouldn't be asking in the first place.

I want to be the kind of person that helps others where it matters, and here you are, asking, thus proving it matters. Refusing becomes really uncomfortable, so I'd rather go out of my way to make it possible for me to agree, or failing that, to help your underlying need as much as I can.

I realize now this is a form of typical mind fallacy - I wouldn't ask you for something if it wasn't really fucking important or I had any other option available, therefore I naturally assume that your act of asking already proves the request is very important to you.

I guess I just learned I'm a Guesser :).
by jijijijij | 2026-01-22 23:04:17+00:00
You can get pretty quickly at it with Blender instead of proper CAD. Just do the "donut tutorial", set the correct workspace dimensions and go for it. You can learn basic modelling in a day.

Blender is overwhelming at first glance, but it becomes incredibly intuitive once the UI clicks. Of course modelling for printing in Blender has drawbacks and limitations. It's more fiddly, but unless you are super stupid, you can get pretty far, pretty quickly. And you can do sculpting and organic shapes, which are hard/impossible in CAD. Learning Blender basics is worth it anyway, incredibly useful for thinking and sketching in 3D. Oh, and it's FOSS, runs entirely locally, doesn't spy on you, or appropriates your creations like the "free" Fusion360 and their forced cloud crap.

Once you got annoyed by Blender's limitations for 3D printing, you can learn CAD. But Blender is the best way to get into it IMO. Trust me, you won't regret learning Blender basics, in any case. It's expanding your creative horizon and is fantastic, very pleasant software.
FIPS dependencies and prebuilt binaries
by LaurentGoderre | 2026-01-22 23:04:25+00:00
Author here. This came out of debugging a real Rails app running in a FIPS enabled container.

Everything looked correct. OpenSSL 3 with the FIPS provider enabled. Ruby built against it. A simple pg connection worked.

The app failed once ActiveRecord was involved. The error came from libpq. It turned out the pg gem had pulled in a prebuilt native dependency that was linked against different crypto. That path was always there. It just was not exercised until ActiveRecord hit it.

Forcing a source build fixed the issue because the extension then linked against the OpenSSL in the image.

The takeaway is that a FIPS base image does not mean your dependency graph respects the same boundary once native code is involved.

Curious how others have seen this play out in Ruby, Python wheels, Go with CGO, or Node native addons.