MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zerocrates | 2026-01-05 20:58:14+00:00
The CSAM aspects aren't necessarily as affected by 230: to the extent that you're talking about it being criminal, 230 doesn't apply at all there.

For civil liability, 230 really shouldn't apply; as you say, 230's shield is about avoiding vicarious liability for things other people post. This principle stretches further than you might expect in some ways but here Grok just is X (or xAI).

Nothing's set in stone much at all with how the law treats LLMs but an attempt to say that Grok is an independent entity sufficient to trigger 230 but incapable of being sued itself, I don't see that flying. On the other hand the big AI companies wield massive economic and political power, so I wouldn't be surprised to see them push for and get explicit liability carveouts that they claim are necessary for America to maintain its lead in innovation etc. etc., whether those come through legislation or court decisions.
by brightball | 2026-01-05 20:58:24+00:00
Yep, it's definitely complicated from an economic standpoint.

There was a strong dollar making imports cheaper and exports more expensive. At the same time there were reductions in tariffs (Tokyo Round of GATT) as well as increased quota allowances from other countries, particularly China, than were previously allowed (the Multi-Fiber Arrangement).

At the time, this particular area of the country had turned into a global textile hub and it was devastated as a byproduct (over-saturation of a single industry). Now if you come to the area, you will see all of the old mills converted into apartment complexes, coworking spaces, wedding venues, etc just to preserve the architecture.

The whole area is beautiful now and has been one of the fastest growing parts of the country for almost a decade. I moved here 25 years ago when the changes were just starting but the natives will tell you the whole story. I think a PBS documentary was being made about it too.
by neuralkoi | 2026-01-05 20:58:33+00:00
Some of these problems likely arise from the fact that they're probably already stretched thin working on the next "Liquid Glass". Radars which are not P1 or P2 essentially get punted to the bottom of the PQ, and many of these often end up being age old bugs i.e. not a regression i.e. not a priority.

Recently I tried sync'ing a 10 minute video from my iPhone to my Mac through iCloud. I gave up after waiting for more than 30 minutes and just used Google Drive because airdrop for some reason is just completely broken.
by jauntywundrkind | 2026-01-05 20:58:41+00:00
AI makes coding plans that often come up with phases. It can be interesting to ask it to skip a phase, and do the next one. You can get interesting data about prospective other futures.

IMO using subagents to generate good context is a huge win. That doesn't really require a worktree. But once you have good starting places, good contexts you can feed into a LLM, there's IMO not much concern about "build it's own context" (it's already provided right here) nor "wastes tokens" (since is GoodPut / GoodTokens).

the workflow of how we feel and build contexts is the art of this all right now. this project is on point. it's going to be a boom year for Terminal Multiplexing.
by yencabulator | 2026-01-05 20:58:47+00:00
Magical thinking about monorepos isn't going to make SQL migrations with backfill instantaneous and occur simultaneously with the downtime you have while you switch software versions. You're just not familiar with the topic, I guess. That's okay. Please just don't claim the problem doesn't exist.

And yes, it's often okay to ignore the problem for small sites that can tolerate the downtime.
Show HN: Retake – A headless API for checkout and pricing recovery
by furkan_mercimek | 2026-01-05 20:58:52+00:00
Hey HN,

I built Retake after realizing I was losing ~70% of potential revenue to pricing page drop-offs and abandoned checkouts — and most existing tools required adding heavy client-side scripts just to manage recovery flows.

I wanted a simple, API-first way to model intent and handle recovery logic without extra frontend complexity.

So I built a small, headless API that acts as a state machine for revenue recovery.

How it works (at a high level):
Your app sends intent events (pricing, cart, checkout, etc).
Retake manages timing, sequencing, cancellation, and suppression.
Emails are sent through your own provider (SES, Resend, etc) using predefined templates managed by Retake.

What makes it different:
- Each intent type has its own isolated email sequence
- Higher-intent events automatically cancel lower-priority flows
- Recently contacted users are suppressed to avoid overlapping or spammy emails

Example:
A user triggers 'pricing' → waits 30m → gets a follow-up email.
If they move to 'checkout' shortly after, the pricing flow is cancelled automatically.
If they convert, all sequences stop.

All delays and steps are configured from the dashboard — the API only receives state changes.

It's been refreshing to treat recovery as a state problem instead of a UI problem.

Would love feedback from anyone who's built similar systems or dealt with messy recovery logic.
by brantonb | 2026-01-05 20:58:52+00:00
> In the early iOS beta, the new tab button was at the top of Safari, as far away from your thumbs as it could be.

It’s relatively recent in iOS history that Safari’s address bar is at the bottom. There’s a setting to move it back to the top. This specific example is probably as innocent as a default getting accidentally changed during the development process.
by xen0 | 2026-01-05 20:59:01+00:00
Thanks for pointing out what I was missing.

Please consider a variable `List{int}[3] x`, this is an array of 3 List{int} containing List{int}. If we do `x[1]` we will get an element of List{int}, from the middle element in the array. If we then further index this with [5], like `x[1][5]` we will get the 5th element of that list.

I get that motivation. In C++ it's an odd case that where `std::vector<int> x[4]` is "reversed" in a sense compared to `int x[4][100]`. And this quirk is shared with other languages (Java, C#).

But in my experience, mixing generic datatypes like this with arrays is quite rare, and multi-dimensional array like structures with these types is often specified via nesting (`std::vector<std::vector>>`) which avoids confusion.

The argument re. pointers is more convincing though.
by insane_dreamer | 2026-01-05 20:59:03+00:00
The lesson is: if you focus on profits instead of building great products, you will fail (unless you have vendor lock-in like defense industry and the DOD, or Microsoft and enterprise). Nike brought in a bean-counter to run the company and he severely damaged it.

I know from close friends at Nike that they are relieved Donahoe is gone and they can get back to being a "high performance sporting goods company", but they have a big hole to dig out of. On and Hoka have been eating their lunch. Nike has always had smaller specialized brands to contend with: Brooks, Asics, Saucony, Salomon (trail running, which Nike dropped but is now getting back into), etc., but none of them exploded the way that On and Hoka did when Nike pulled back from retail.
by mikepurvis | 2026-01-05 20:59:03+00:00
I guess so? I'm not well-versed, but the basics are usually around observation and validation of feelings, so instead of "you took steps a, b, c, which would normally be the correct course of action, but in this instance (b) caused side-effect (d) which triggered these further issues e and f", it's something more like "I can understand how you were feeling overwhelmed and under pressure and that led you to a, b, c ..."

Maybe this is an unhelpful toy example, but for myself I would be frustrated to be on either side of the second interaction. Like, don't waste everyone's time giving me excuses for my screwup so that my ego is soothed, let's just talk about it plainly, and the faster we can move on to identifying concrete fixes to process or documentation that will prevent this in the future, the better.
I made a lofi page for late night work
by onmyway133 | 2026-01-05 20:59:09+00:00
Hey everyone

I usually listen to lo-fi while working or coding, so I made a small side project to collect the kind of lo-fi music I actually use.

It’s free to listen to, built with free music, and I coded it using React.

Nothing fancy — just something simple for focus and background vibes.

If anyone’s interested:

https://indiegoodies.com/lofi

Would love any feedback
by dpark | 2026-01-05 20:59:11+00:00
Are you really trying to parlay the common refrain around correlation and causation not being the same into a statement that no correlation is the same as correlation?

GP asserted that there is no correlation between ChatGPT usage and suicides (true or not, I do not know). This is not a statement about causation. It’s specifically a statement that the correlation itself does not exist. This is absolutely not the case for smoking and cancer, where even if we wanted to pretend that the relationship wasn’t causal, the two are definitely correlated.
by 0xblacklight | 2026-01-05 20:59:25+00:00
leaving the codebase cleaner than you found it IS creating maximum value to the company because large changes are almost never walking on the knife's edge between "making the codebase better" and "making the codebase worse". Your codebase either gets better over time, or it gets worse. If it's getting 0.01% worse with every PR, that tech debt accumulates at 1.0001*(# of PRs) which grows faster than you'd think.

Having a maintainable codebase is of MASSIVE LONG-TERM value to a company - far too many orgs are paralyzed by mountains of tech debt.

Doing the minimal work possible is fine for 1-off hotfixes or tweaks or small features, but your argument assumes "maximum value to the company" is measured in the span of of a sprint, and it's not.

Cleaning up the codebase incrementally does deliver value to the company as long as you understand "cleaning up" as "making it easier and faster to contribute to, change, or debug in the future" rather than something adjacent to a form of performance art.
by ryandrake | 2026-01-05 20:59:37+00:00
I would agree with this if Grok's interface was "put a pixel there, put a line there, now fill this color there" like Photoshop. But it's not. Generative AI is actively assisting users to perform the specific task described and its programming is participating in that task. It's not just generically placing colors on the screen where the user is pointing.
by mywittyname | 2026-01-05 20:59:38+00:00
People who are interested in specific career tracks are obligated to go to university. Medicine, law, teaching, certain forms of engineering all require a degree. Fields like business, accounting, public service (even police/fire) and other forms engineering practically require a degree - while a person can break into some of those fields without them, the majority of people have degrees.

Also, I think a good bit of people are pushing anti-college sentiment as a way to keep other peoples' kids out of college, saving space for theirs and reducing competition for jobs. I've run into quite a few white collar professions that espouse "trades" (generically, of course) as a clearly better alternative to university, but aren't pushing their kids in that direction.

Real "college backlash" won't come until degree requirements fall for careers. Which is not something I see happening.
by ongytenes | 2026-01-05 21:00:14+00:00
I guess Micro$oft has so much invested into their AI that they're trying to insure a return on that investment by pushing it onto everyone.

I read this morning that their AI i to provide free heating for 100,000 nearby homes with its heat waste. So to use M$ AI is to do 'your good deed' and subsidize someone's heating.
by gkoberger | 2026-01-05 21:00:38+00:00
I can't help but think this is intentional. Well, not the CSAM, but the side effects. It's playing to the "anti-woke", "pro-free-speech" crowd and acts like a litmus test.

It's perfect... give your base the tools to harass people you don't like (women, minorities, "the woke"), without explicitly framing it as a tool to harass anyone.

Twitter is really bad now. There's so much misinformation and harassment. But why would a fix be announced, when this is literally the plan?
by CivBase | 2026-01-05 21:01:04+00:00
If an LLM were capable of reliably detecting AI-generated content, then it would also be capable of producing content that does not appear to be AI generated.

So either A) LLMs are intentionally, universally making their content look AI-generated to aid with detection efforts or B) LLMs actually cannot reliably detect AI output and their responses are complete BS.
by gnabgib | 2026-01-05 21:01:21+00:00
Related: I did 301,432 flashcard reviews in 2025 (34 points, 3 days ago, 60 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46465493

@Theaetetus you're really over-doing the self-promotion here, perhaps you could review the guidelines, specifically:

> Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by Terr_ | 2026-01-05 21:01:29+00:00
There's some linguistic ambiguity here if we just say "art", because it includes things we might divide into "artistic choice" versus "craftsmanship." Compare:

1. "Picasso, that's the wrong way to depict a human nose."

2. "Picasso, that's the wrong paint, it's vibrant but poisonous and will turn to black flakes within the year."

_____

When parent-poster says "interfaces are not art", my charitable interpretation is that UI/UX ought to involve a large amount of craftsmanship.

It may not be quantifiable enough to be labeled "engineering", but it's still much less-subjective and more goal-oriented than the "pure art" portion. All these interfaces need to be useful to tasks in the long term. (Or at least long enough for the company to take the money and run.)
by bluGill | 2026-01-05 21:01:30+00:00
Often you need not only to be at the higher level, but someone to call out that if they don't promote you you might leave. I've seen a lot cases (at many companies) where one person that everyone knows is good quitting for a promotion gets a dozen others promoted in the next few months. So if you realize you are not getting a promotion your leaving may be the trigger to get your coworkers promoted.
by KaiserPro | 2026-01-05 21:01:49+00:00
> Revenge porn photoshops happened before, but not to this scale or in this type of phenomenon.

Mate, thats the point. I as a normal human being, who had never been on 4chan or the darker corners of reddit would have never seen or be able to make frankenporn. much less so make _convincing_ frankenporn.

> For lack of knowing the magnitude

Fuck that shit, if they didn't know the magnitude they wouldn't have spend ages making the photoshop to do it. You don't spend ages doing revenge, "because you didn't know the magnitude" You spend ages doing it because you want revenge

> if myriad people are doing it around the country, then do you expect everyone doing that to be litigated that extensively?

I mean we put people in prison for drink driving, lots of people do that in the states, same with drug dealing. Same with harassment, thats why restraining orders exist.

but

You are missing the point, Making and distributing CSAM is an illegal offence. Knowingly storing and transmitting it is an offence. Musk could stop it all now by re-training grok, or putting in some basic controls.

If any other person was doing this they would have been threatened with company ending action by now.
by Majromax | 2026-01-05 21:01:55+00:00
> Where does the line fall between provider responsibility when providing a tool that can produce protected work, and personal responsibility for causing it to generate that work?

There's one more line at issue here, and that's the posting of the infringing work. A neutral tool that can generate policy-violating material has an ambiguous status, and if the tool's output ends up on Twitter then it's definitely the user's problem.

But here, it seems like the Grok outputs are directly and publicly posted by X itself. The user may have intended that outcome, but the user might not have. From the article:

>> In a comment on the DogeDesigner thread, a computer programmer pointed out that X users may inadvertently generate inappropriate images—back in August, for example, Grok generated nudes of Taylor Swift without being asked. Those users can’t even delete problematic images from the Grok account to prevent them from spreading, the programmer noted.

Overall, I think it's fair to argue that ownership follows the user tag. Even if Grok's output is entirely "user-generated content," X publishing that content under its own banner must take ownership for policy and legal implications.
by StrangeSound | 2026-01-05 21:02:35+00:00
I've found Cursor to be frustratingly bad recently. I agree with the UX and the over-eager autocompletions. The UI seems to change with every update too.
I've had my own problems as well. I can't select any models, being forced to use "auto" permanently. I assume I've used any allowances in my plan, but the app doesn't give any feedback. Chats just fail to start.

Whatever auto is using is spitting out pure gibberish about 30% of the time. What was mostly a huge productivity boost can other times be a massive time sink.

I'm going to give antigravity a go for a while, I've found Gemini to be pretty good in the past.
by nawgz | 2026-01-05 21:02:45+00:00
> Discouraging discourse around factual, legal information is how we arrived here

> Your reflex to question its relevance

That's a lot of projecting.

There is only really one thing to be said here: the Pentagon and the current administration continues its campaign of blatant corruption, scorning its enemies with absurd doublespeak and blatant abuse of the court system, enabled by a Congress which has fully abdicated its duty as part of its loyalty to the current President King.

What is there to talk about? How we wish that was different? How the media being captured by oligarchs is a main enabler of the current oligarchy? How what Mark Kelly said was clearly not sedition and that use of this term is yet another example of "flooding the zone" and other disinformation tactics by the administration, to deflect from their own crime and rile up their base?

Great talk, haven't heard any of that before!
by mdrzn | 2026-01-05 21:03:39+00:00
"14. Portal madness

Companies engage in a mad rush to launch their own "portals," gateways to the Net for consumers. This results in old and new media alliances, highlighted by Disney's taking a major stake in Infoseek and Netscape's strategic move to promote its Netcenter, as well as relanuches by Microsoft and America Online. Next year, look to see whether the hype generates any real profits."

while today they would have written:

14. LLM madness

Companies engage in a mad rush to launch their own "chatbots", gateways to intelligence for consumers and enterprises alike. This results in unprecedented alliances between big tech and research labs, highlighted by Microsoft’s multi-billion dollar bet on OpenAI and Amazon’s strategic stake in Anthropic, as well as aggressive pivots by Google and Meta to integrate generative agents into every product. Next year, look to see whether the massive compute costs can finally generate any real profits.
by foxglacier | 2026-01-05 21:03:52+00:00
Could you clarify what you mean by "institution"? What institution is actively encouraging transgression? Do you mean the cultures on social media that socially reward transgression? Isn't that just people and their culture, not an institution? Or is there something social media companies are actively doing to promote specific transgressions?

I'm thinking about the 80s-90s worries about Christian heresy. Popular culture was (and still is) full of insults against Christianity, probably because that was the kind of thing that offended an older generation in the west at the time. Is it wrong for institutions to encourage that?

While I have my own personal moral standards, I see society in general as morally relativist and don't accept arguments that the popular morals of today are right because they're popular now, while the popular morals of previous generations were wrong because they contradict the "right" morals of today. That's why I don't have much respect for people trying to enforce their own culture's arbitrary morals while not equally respecting conflicting morals.

> when bad behavior is not transgressive

That's a tricky one because what's "bad behavior"? Does it include denying the existence of God?
by simontheHWguy | 2026-01-05 21:03:53+00:00
Thanks for the kind words! About the Side by side comparison, that is high on my to do list!

Regarding licensing, sorry about the confusion between my repo init and the docs. I have updated the repo to clarify the distinction: Firmware & Software: MIT License. I want people to build whatever they want on top of the stack. Hardware Schematics: CC-BY-NC-SA (Non-Commercial). Why the split? Since I am a solo bootstrapper, I need to protect the hardware from low-effort commercial clones while I get the business off the ground. But I strongly believe in "Source Available" schematics so researchers and engineers can debug, learn, and modify their own units, hence the CC-BY-NC-SA choice for the board files.

Why start fresh? It was an architecture decision. The Cyton uses a PIC32 + RFduino stack. I wanted to handle everything natively on the ESP32 for high-bandwidth WiFi streaming, which required a ground-up redesign. I also wanted to add onboard LiPo charging and the ability to experiment with different filter topologies. Building it from scratch helped me uncover a lot of subtle design constraints that aren't obvious until you dig into the layout.
by jimmaswell | 2026-01-05 21:04:12+00:00
I've asked ChatGPT "Could X thing in quantum mechanics actually be caused by/an expression of the same thing going on as Y" where it had prime opportunity to say I'm a genius discovering something profound, but instead it just went into some very technical specifics about why they weren't really the same or related. IME 5 has been a big improvement in being more objective.
by ux266478 | 2026-01-05 21:04:17+00:00
Getting off to images of child abuse (simulated or not) is a deep violation of social mores. This itself does indeed constitute a type of crime, and the victim is taken to be society itself. If it seems unjust, it's because you have a narrow view of the justice system and what its job actually is (hint: it's not about exacting controlled vengeance)

It may shock you to learn that bigamy and sky-burials are also quite illegal.
by another_twist | 2026-01-05 21:04:22+00:00
Standard promo advice tbh. Do the job and then ask for it. Except there's a brief moment when you are adding value not in proportion to your compensation which will be infuriating. Sometimes its also possible you end up stagnant where you keep performing at a higher level and never get the job. My advice is to always check your market value by talking to recruiters and/or HMs outside of your company. That way once you have the relevant bullets on your resume, either you get the promotion or you just leave. Hedge your bets.