MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ForceBru | 2026-01-17 15:39:48+00:00
> pushing back against preconceived notions and challenging users to reflect and evaluate

Who decides what needs to be "pushed back"? Also, I imagine it's not easy to train a model to notice these "preconceived notions" and react "appropriately": machine learning will automatically extract patterns from data, so if enough texts contain a "preconceived notion" that you don't like, it'll learn it anyway, so you'll have to manually clean the data (seems like extremely hard work and lowkey censorship) or do extensive "post-training".

It's not clear what it means to "challenge users to reflect and evaluate". Making the model analyze different points of view and add a "but you should think for yourself!" after each answer won't work because everyone will just skip this last part and be mildly annoyed. It's obvious that I should think for myself, but here's why I'm asking the LLM: I _don't_ want to think for myself right now, or I want to kickstart my thinking. Either way, I need some useful input from the LLM.

If the model refuses to answer and always tells me to reflect, I'll just go back to Google search and not use this model at all. In this case someone just wasted money on training the model.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-17 15:40:03+00:00
Electricity prices are heavily regulated. The largest increase I can find from a short search is around 20% for some customers in New Jersey. The average year over year increase is closer to 6%

Unexpectedly high electricity bills are almost always from actual usage. Unexpectedly high winter electricity bills are usually from resistive electric heating in one way or another.

You didn’t mention their normal December bill in this exact house, which is an important piece of information.
by livrasand | 2026-01-17 15:40:27+00:00
Thanks for the link; I wasn't familiar with Magical.

From what I can see, Magical focuses on general autofill, while Injectless is exploring a more declarative, least-privilege approach, where each site explicitly defines which fields it can expose and on which domains, with domain-level validation and explicit user control.

Even so, comparing UX, adoption, and technical trade-offs with products like this is exactly the kind of signal I was looking for.
by nasmorn | 2026-01-17 15:40:32+00:00
As an Austrian citizen I unfortunately have to tell you that the existence of masked agents in unmarked vehicles is very bad news. The last time we had this they were called Geheime Staatspolizei and we now have a memorial at the location of their head quarters in Vienna. I am not usually someone trying to manifest Godwins law but this is straight out of the facist playbook. Another super worrying fact for me as a European is that the late Dick Cheney was so worried about American democracy and he always looked like Darth Vader to me from across the pond. Suddenly we are on one side, didn’t have that on my bingo card.
by beratbozkurt0 | 2026-01-17 15:41:37+00:00
For a while, my previous site felt cluttered. More like a content blog. But this was a personal site.

So I wanted to go for simplicity, and when I saw Brian's site (brianlovin.com), I loved it. I copied it and decided to continue that way. The reason I copied it is because his site is already open source. Also, there are some things I want to add.

I used Next.js and Notion for CMS. Notion is a little bit slow but that's okay i just put some cache things.

I finished the simplified version in 3 days. I will start adding new features in the coming days.

It is entirely inspired by Brian's site.
by gus_massa | 2026-01-17 15:41:54+00:00
My guess is that s/he does not write in English good enough, and prefer to use AI to "enhance" the text. My recommendation to the OP is to post the original text in Japanese with a direct autotranslation. (Or just the autotranslation.) It will look more authentic.

[Hi from Argentina! Expect to see some weird errors in my comments. I try to avoid them, but they slip.]
by honzabe | 2026-01-17 15:42:02+00:00
No, I understood well.

In my country, there is a barrage of Russian propaganda trying to relativize our shitty experience with the communist regime. They keep flooding the zone with claims about democracy being flawed, weak, bureaucratic, meaningless, and decadent. And it is working. People appreciate democracy a lot less than ten or twenty years ago.

Sure, there is a time for the self-criticism of the flaws of the West. I just think now is not the time. Democracy and freedom are under serious threat worldwide. Now is the time to keep reminding ourselves how great it is what we have built. Now is the time to be absolutely clear that the flaws of democracies are not in the same category as the flaws of authoritarian regimes.

I still remember what it was like living in a totalitarian regime - and I was living in a soft totalitarianism nearing its collapse. I am not old enough to remember the hardcore Stalinist era. And still, it was so bad that whatever you believe is bad about capitalism is like 1% of how bad it was. Which is why it bugs me so much when people talk about the flaws of both in one breath as if they were even remotely comparable.

Look, I am a pessimist. I think there is a very real chance that the US is turning into a Russia-like state. I hope not, but if that happens, very bad things are likely to happen in Europe too. We will all live it once again. If you still don’t understand what I mean, I suggest this: let’s bookmark this discussion and get back in 5 years, if we are still alive. Then, you will tell me what you think about optimizing conversion and engagement metrics. If you still think it is a problem worth mentioning by then, I will be very happy.
by tristenharr | 2026-01-17 15:42:08+00:00
3 days of refactoring, over 140,000 lines of code touched. All ~2500+ tests still passing. I'm going to sleep! Another all-nighter. Talk about a fun Friday night! :) I frickin love this stuff so much! It's like having an ARMY. A LITERAL ARMY OF PHD's. You can raise mountains in minutes it feels like. That's been my experience. You all may call it slop, but I think spec driven development is great. I just think that if you have to write documentation to explain the code, then either your language syntax isn't precise and easy enough to understand, or you are doing something convoluted and potentially stupid. It's a language surface problem. The languages of the past were constrained by human limitations. In the past you'd be out of your mind trying to write a crazy multi-pass compiler and doing all the tips and tricks to make something fast because a human had to maintain it. If you formally specify the constraints of something, design tests that codify those constraints, and then develop code that passes those tests without cheating or changing them, then these new technologies rapidly gain something that gets much closer to determinism.

I think for me the key thing has been treating the tests like I'd treat my foundation. When something is wrong, or I need to design something, it starts with a spec that tries to solve the domain problems, which turns into a plan for tests that will fail when we run them now, but should pass when we have completed the implementation. You may miss edge cases, but when you identify them, you fix them for good by adding tests for them.

One of the tricky parts is creating a good test harness. You have to have a great harness and I need to go through and improve mine!

Anyways, I'm exhausted folks, pizza is all gone and the mountain dew ran out. Time for me to snooze.
by fzeroracer | 2026-01-17 15:42:33+00:00
The silence from tech companies says a million. There's a ton of huge companies and tech leaders with offices and businesses in Minneapolis and not one of them has had the spine to say anything about the occupation of their city or the people that have been unable to show up for work.

I think increasingly tech workers are starting to understand the size of the issue. You can see the sentiment shifting in previous threads here and even when stories like this are flagged, they still float to the top of /active. That said, it's also obvious that there's a certain group of folks that immediately flag these stories the moment they pop up.
by crazygringo | 2026-01-17 15:42:37+00:00
> I don’t believe I’ve ever seen shape utilized in generated ASCII art, and I think that’s because it’s not really obvious how to consider shape when building an ASCII renderer.

Not to take away from this truly amazing write-up (wow), but there's at least one generator that uses shape:

https://meatfighter.com/ascii-silhouettify/

See particularly the image right above where it says "Note how the algorithm selects the largest characters that fit within the outlines of each colored region."

There's also a description at the bottom of how its algorithm works, if anyone wants to compare.
by thundergolfer | 2026-01-17 15:42:38+00:00
I've listened to a handful of podcasts with education academics and professionals talking about AI. They invariably come across as totally lost, like a hen inviting a fox in to help watch the eggs.

It's perhaps to be expected, as these education people are usually non-technical. But it's definitely concerning that (once again) a lack of technical and media literacy among these education types will lead to them letting (overall) unhelpful tech swarm the system.
Ask HN: Will non-technical users stop using apps and start generating them?
by arbayi | 2026-01-17 15:42:44+00:00
With all the big players investing heavily in "vibe coding," I’m wondering how this changes things for non-technical users (people who have been using ChatGPT for a while now).

Are we reaching a point where it's easier to just build what you need rather than learning a new app/tool?

For example:

Do I bother with a specific slide-deck tool? Or do I just use a "slide creator skill" to write code that generates the presentation for me?

Do I hunt for an existing MCP server to bridge an API? Or do I just prompt the AI to build the connection and get the data I need writing the code directly?

Do I go install a note-taking app, or just create one?

I feel like "building from scratch" is becoming the path of least resistance. Will end users keep using off-the-shelf software, or will they start creating their own little apps because it's becoming so easy?
by catketch | 2026-01-17 15:43:44+00:00
That happens when people are on variable rate or TOU plans, it's very common. "sneaky" may or not be part of it, since ostensibly there's a contract that defines the terms of the electrical service, so it shouldn't be a surprise. But for a lot of folks it's a lot to keep track of, there can be confusing terminology, and yes, some energy retailers are predatory in their plan marketing or contract terms. It's a double edged sword of free market choice in deregulated markets. People that have choices for their energy supply don't always have the time and knowledge to optimize their plan choices and electricity use to get "optimum" pricing. This is why there's pushback in some areas that have had deregulated energy markets to go back to regulated pricing, the "average consumer" isn't seeing the payoff of the free market (even if that is technically "their fault").
by zozbot234 | 2026-01-17 15:44:27+00:00
> I don’t mean policing and courts. Those are administrative and managerial functions.

Middle management is also an admininstrative and managerial function. Even in a best-case scenario, coördinating work among a huge amount of people within enterprises that are mostly run via command-and-control mechanisms and inside politics (as opposed to any self-regulating "market") obviously takes a whole lot of effort. That's really the natural job description for PHB's.
by rednafi | 2026-01-17 15:44:43+00:00
The problem is that if both your interface and implementation are variables where AI can make arbitrary changes with full agency and little verification, maintenance becomes tricky as your understanding of the system as a whole dwindles.

It’s better to be on top of the interface than the implementation. But at the same time, brittle systems caused by overly rigid interfaces are a real thing. In that case, interface exploration can be done by a human with assistance from LLMs, but allowing an LLM to arbitrarily explore and make changes to the interface sounds like a recipe for disaster.
by unparagoned | 2026-01-17 15:45:46+00:00
>Sam did not follow ChatGPT’s advice: His toxicology report showed that he had a 0.125 blood alcohol content. It’s also possible he was using 7-OH

Interesting. Still people need to realise how bad some the advice llm can give expecially with memory and lots of chats to jailbreak it and stuff
by livrasand | 2026-01-17 15:45:56+00:00
I think this would probably be the closest comparison.

The password manager model seems like the most realistic way to achieve a good user experience on mobile devices while maintaining strong context and domain validation on desktops.

One difference I'm exploring is that Injectless is intentionally declarative and website-based (sites publish what they can inject, rather than the tool heuristically completing everything).

I appreciate the perspective.
by rorylaitila | 2026-01-17 15:46:42+00:00
Yes, but not in relationship to products being copied. Copying the technical aspects of an idea has been possible for a long time anyway.

Knowing how to acquire, support and cultivate a growing user base is the challenge.

The availability of a technical "moat" has always been a select property of only a few products. All real moats are network effects.
by subscribed | 2026-01-17 15:47:09+00:00
Sorry didn't take the screenshot, but I get a message akin to "You have been blocked by anubis software" with anubis logo and whatnot. Maybe anubis uses some other plugin or someone just decided to put up such page. Idk.

Imagine Cloudflare "You're blocked" page, but with different design and logos.

I don't think it requested anything else, at least I didn't see anything else. If I find this page again, I'll reply with a link to the screenshot.
by jongjong | 2026-01-17 15:47:30+00:00
How do you find users? Organic? SEO is useless as all the projects with any meaningful pagerank are all pointing to each other. Social media advertising is useless; nobody even sees your tweets or posts. Advertising? How do you get a return on CPC? All the big competitors seem to be running negative margins. Also, small volume social media ads tends to attract only bots... Are you operating in a niche? How do you get word of mouth in this case? Niches related to solving bureaucratic problems are often regulated! No SOC2 or ISO27001, no contracts for you.

In the last 15 years, I met just one person who bootstrapped a tech startup 'on their own' to be worth a few millions... This guy was super smart and switched on... But I later found out his wife's parents were multi-millionaires. I'm thinking that was probably the differentiator. I met a LOT of successful tech people. They always got major help. I never actually met one who didn't have access to significant help.
by dahart | 2026-01-17 15:49:31+00:00
This is to some extent a false dichotomy. Generally speaking, products that prioritize fixing a problem “above” making money do not exist. There are no alternatives. Businesses can’t sustain that. Sometimes it happens for a short while, and eventually they reduce the level of service, or charge more money, or die.

I don’t know why you’re picking on startups. Big companies are where you see enshittification the most, and it’s because economies of scale require them to cut costs. Startups can often use VC fuel to offer delightful and unprofitably superior solutions to problems. That goes away after startups graduate to being real companies.
by snitzr | 2026-01-17 15:50:11+00:00
I think this article really nails it. Adams' ego and self-satisfaction contributed to his susceptibility to the forces of the internet. It could happen to anyone.

What I remember that is notable about Scott Adams is way back he had The Dilbert Blog and it was pioneering in it's early adoption of the internet. Adams wrote his takes and theories back then, too. But he once wrote that he was going to scale those back, because they were not productive: he would lose followers for being controversial. But later something happened with the feedback loop of social media, because he eventually started to court controversy. I do think that the internet sucked him in.
by tsunamifury | 2026-01-17 15:50:15+00:00
Those games operate far more probablistically and high dimensionally than programming and I suspect engineers would rather dismiss them as “dumb” than accept they are simply inferior players in those games.

Primary multi agent multi dimension probabilistic resolution problems model human and crowd interaction better than “code do this every time”.

I’ve spent a long time in the valley and I’ve come to the personal conclusion that engineers are often the dumbest (and most narrowly useful) in the room not the smartest. And the rest of them let them think they are very smart (tm) so they do what we say.
by jltackett | 2026-01-17 15:50:58+00:00
The Collective Onboarding & Ownership Timeline (per team)
Day 0 (team joins): Receives App 1 → 50/50 split starts
Day 144: Receives App 2 → 50/50 split starts on App 2
Day 288: Receives App 3
Day 432: Receives App 4
Day 576: Receives App 5 (final app)
Then the flips happen individually:
Day 730 (≈2 years from Day 0): Team owns 100% of App 1
Day 874 (2 years from Day 144): Owns App 2
And so on, until Day 1306 (≈3.6 years from start): Owns App 5 fully
After that, the team has 5 fully owned apps and has been contributing to the collective for years—perfect position to mentor new groups or propose new rules.
by nkurz | 2026-01-17 15:51:04+00:00
Thanks for writing it, and thanks for stopping by. Perhaps I'm naive, but I wasn't worried at all that the article might be a Russian fake. Instead, my worry is that it felt like propaganda. Genuine heartfelt propaganda, probably from someone on the ground in Minneapolis, but throughout the piece I felt that you were likely leaving out information so as to create a more compelling call to action.

I don't know for sure that this is true, but I feel like this is a big hurdle that you'll have to overcome if you want to convince skeptical people like me who actually do care. Saying "I will not provide names, sources, etc." might feel necessary, but it makes it harder to convince people. I'm left feeling that there is definitely more to the story than you are telling.

Starting with your first example, "two teachers parked in front of the school were violently extracted from their cars and abducted by ICE officers". I'm not certain, but I'd probably be willing to bet this isn't the full story. Were they "parked in front" because they were at their jobs teaching, or were they attempting to prevent the ICE officers from doing something? Were they participating in a protest or just passing by?

I don't know--and it doesn't mean that what happened is right or proper--but I don't trust you to tell me if you think it might hurt the case you are trying to make. The result is that I feel like I need to at least partially discount the rest of what you have to say. How do we get beyond this?
by andsoitis | 2026-01-17 15:51:07+00:00
> That is what we're using this electricity for, right?

Yes, amongst others.

> increasing energy consumption, I'm happy that people are living in more comfortable homes, that the Amercian industrial base is being restored, that more and better services are being provided (better healthcare, inexpensive and healthy food, comfortable, efficient and inexpensive transportation).

Over the last 25 years, we've the seen the following change across the dimensions you picked:

Energy consumption: +15%

Population: +21%

Hospitals (hospital sector size as a function using employment as proxy): +45-50%

Homes: +27-30%

Food production: +23-25%

Transportation (vehicle miles travelled): +14-16%

------

Some take-aways:

Population grew faster than energy and transportation, implying major efficiency gains.

Housing stock outpaced population, reflecting smaller household sizes and more single-person households.

Healthcare expanded far faster than population, a structural shift rather than demographic necessity.

Food production grew roughly in line with population, but without proportional land expansion productivity gains.

Transportation growth lagged housing growth, suggesting more remote work, urbanization, and efficiency.
by torginus | 2026-01-17 15:51:58+00:00
I feel like the term 'engineering' implies bending the rules of reality to your goal in a way that is both economical and is very good at reaching the stated goal.

Like for example if you're an automotive engineer, you can't go ahead and put in the thickest beams made out of the strongest steel on hand, because the resulting car would weigh 20 tons and cost $300k. To add to that, it would probably drive like crap, and wouldn't even protect the driver that well.

In engineering, even a 10% waste is frowned upon. Here I outlined a waste of 10x. I don't think a Reddit comment opening/closing taking 200ms is a 10x waste, but a couple orders of magnitude more.

Why is that, that despite tons of very highly paid (moreso than any other kind) software 'engineers' work on websites like Reddit (which is not the only example of this trend), the result ends up like this?

It's not the lack of resources, constraints, pace of development (I don't remember the reddit site changing all that much in the past decade).

I think if software engineers have the mindset of other engineers, this thing would be considered ridiculous and unimaginable, like the 20 ton car is for automotive engineers.
by b450 | 2026-01-17 15:52:26+00:00
Rationalism in philosophy is generally contrasted with empiricism. I would say you're a little off in characterizing anti-rationalism as holding rationality per se in low regard. To put it very briefly: the Ancient Greeks set the agenda for Western philosophy, for the most part: what is truth? What is real? What is good and virtuous? Plato and his teacher/character Socrates are the archetype rationalists, who believed that these questions were best answered through careful reasoning. Think of Plato's allegory of the cave: the world of appearances and of common sense is illusory, degenerate, ephemeral. Pure reason, as done by philosophers, was a means of transcendent insight into these questions.

"Empiricism" is a term for philosophical movements (epitomized in early modern British Empiricists like Hume) that emphasized that truths are learned not by reasoning, but by learning from experience. So the matter is not "is rationality good?" but more: what is rationality or reason operating upon? Sense experiences? Or purely _a priori_, conceptual, or formal structures? The uncharitable gloss on rationalism is that rationalists hold that every substantive philosophical question can be answered while sitting in your armchair and thinking really hard.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-17 15:52:36+00:00
You don’t realize how nice it is to live and work in air conditioned spaces until visiting a part of Europe where AC is viewed with disdain for reasons I still don’t understand.

Also the move to electric heat pumps is increasing electricity rates but reducing natural gas usage and improving overall efficient.

The GP comment was trying to do snarky doomerism but accidentally hit upon a lot of truths. It’s amazing how many things are getting better but some people are hell bent on being cynical about it anyway.