MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ceejayoz | 2026-01-06 14:27:18+00:00
BBC says the Chavez tomb thing was AI slop.

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cly1x12v33jt

> One image claiming to show the tomb actually shows the aftermath of a real US strike on the nearby Cagigal Observatory. The observatory is reportedly used by the General Command of the Bolivarian Militia branch of the Venezuelan military.

> We’ve also seen a viral image claiming to show extensive damage to the mausoleum but this appears to be an an AI-manipulated version of a real picture of the building published in 2013.

> Plus, the Hugo Chavez Foundation posted its own videos on Monday to show people the tomb was intact and called on people in Venezuela not to spread speculation.The videos displayed Monday’s date on a phone before zooming in on the Cuartel de la Montaña 4F to show there was no visible damage to the building.
by phantasmish | 2026-01-06 14:27:18+00:00
Seriously, I’m lucky if 10% of what I do in a week is writing code. I’m doubly lucky if, when I do, it doesn’t involve touching awful corporate horse-shit like low-code products that are allergic to LLM aid, plus multiple git repos, plus having knowledge from a bunch of “cloud” dashboard and SaaS product configs. By the time I prompt all that external crap in I could have just written what I wanted to write.

Writing code is the easy and fast part already.
by dpkirchner | 2026-01-06 14:27:33+00:00
In parts of the US, even low-crime areas, a significant amount of the items at grocery stores are locked up in glass cases. If you want them you have to track down an employee and beg for access (and in some stores they won't let you carry the items to the register). That part of the store might as well be closed to visitors, replaced by vending machines.
by treetalker | 2026-01-06 14:27:59+00:00
It is certainly about oil (and minerals — don't forget about those). It is not about drugs (seriously, anyway: witness the pardon of former president of Honduras Juan Orlando Hernández [1]).

It is also about:

- Chinese and Russian influence in the region;

- Rubio setting a prelude for invading Cuba;

- Trump's continuing bullying of Mexico and Greenland;

- the Trump patronage machine;

- Trump's incessant, narcissistic obsession with putting his name on everything (e.g., repeatedly referring to the "Donroe Doctrine" to exert effective ownership claims over the entire western hemisphere, even though the Monroe Doctrine was simply directed at staving off further European colonization efforts here);

- giving the military something to shoot at so it doesn't get restless; and, of course,

- distraction from the Epstein Files, the DOJ's brazen disregard for additional deadlines, and Trump's personal abuse of minors and conspiring with Epstein by, at the very least, trafficking minors through Mar-a-Lago.

[1]: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IN12621
by trgn | 2026-01-06 14:28:00+00:00
And it's still worse, and has to rely on contrived setups to almost reach parity. People will insist on using a new language construct, even if it's objectively worse than the standard. What's so hard about a conventional for (let i ...) loop?

At least for of is better than forEach (ill never forgive crockford for goading people into this functional-lite code with horrible runtime footprint), but these things are fetishes.
by griffzhowl | 2026-01-06 14:28:02+00:00
Whether the Holy Grail is unreachable or not is the question. Of course, the problem in full generality is hard, but that doesn't mean it can't be approached in various partial ways, either by restricting the inputs as you suggest or by coming up with some kind of evaluation procedures that are less strict than formal verifiability. I don't have any detailed proposals tbh
by mort96 | 2026-01-06 14:28:24+00:00
Sure, but employers will want a return on investment too. And productivity studies which aren't backed by these AI companies haven't exactly been promising. With how stingy some companies can be with the basics such as getting a laptop with enough RAM and drive space, a lot of the spending on AI tools for employees is clearly driven more by hype and the false promise of huge productivity gains than the normal expense approval process.

And plenty of people get hooked on these tools through using them for free or almost-free in their spare time. Those people will balk at huge price increases.
by voxleone | 2026-01-06 14:28:26+00:00
I think a lot of businesses don’t actually need cloud AI at all. Once workloads stabilize, cloud is mostly a convenience tax. Most business use cases (docs, forecasting, monitoring, support, control systems) don’t need frontier models or hyperscale elasticity. Efficient models running locally are already “good enough”. Continuous inference + data gravity + latency/privacy constraints make owned edge hardware economically and operationally sensible again.
by delis-thumbs-7e | 2026-01-06 14:28:43+00:00
> I don’t want to believe this is true, because I want to believe culture is an infinite game, and inexhaustible. And surely the number of linear combinations—of distinct ideas humans can have, and works of art we can make—is so high as to be inexhaustible. But each new remixing brings less information than the last.

Were this to be true, surely the usable ideas for art would have been exhausted by the ancient Greek already? There is only so many poses in which you can distort the human body and retell the greek myths and as it happens, quite a while the European artists believed this to he true.

This is why using mathematical logic to describe cultural phenomenons is not necessarily the best approach to understand art. Parthenon statues, Nibelungen or Warhol’s Death and Disaster -series are essentially meaningless without the meaning and value we give them. And this changes when times chamge, new political ideas permiate the world, new technologies change our understanding of time and space. In science you cannot just come up with a new dimension just like that. In art, you kinda can, if you can get enough people dream about it collectively. This is something the great artist of periods have been directors of.

In a sense in our millenia the technology has taken the position art had in the 19th and 20th Century. We dream not through theatre, literature, music, visual arts and cinema, but via new digital technologies that are promising to change the world to a more satisfactory one - newest of course being the AI, whatever one means by that. Startup CEO’s give pitches that are almostly exactly like artist statements of the 80’s and 90’s. Many hackers here make much more interesting projects far superior to the old shit you see in Venice or in the other five zillion biennale’s of contemporary art.

Personally I find transhumanism to be an old hat at this point, but the new dimension to this chaotic space-time-continuum of art seems to me come from some new modality between art and technology, or technology as art. Images generated by AI are rather boring and AI is only one avenue of this. Perhaps future art historians will look at coding itself from the advent of computing to our era as an artistic practice. I think they should.
by neutronicus | 2026-01-06 14:28:52+00:00
> connecting all the data sources for agents to run

Copilot can't jump to definition in Visual Studio.

Anthropic got a lot of mileage out of teaching Claude to grep, but LLM agents are a complete dead-end for my code-base until they can use the semantic search tools that actually work on our code-base and hook into the docs for our expensive proprietary dependencies.
by eamann | 2026-01-06 14:29:12+00:00
I like this take-home approach. Usually, I've been against that kind of outside work but in rare cases (i.e. leadership positions) have assigned take-home case study style presentation work to gauge communication skills. For engineers, though, I've taken a different approach.

If they've passed the basic screening with the TA folks and I've validated they didn't just regurgitate buzzwords to get in the door, I'll bring them in for an on-site (or do a virtual onsite). This consists of culture fit interviews with their direct team as well as with key stakeholders from elsewhere in the org. And a coding test. Directly with me.

But the coding test isn't LeetCode. It's an intentionally incomplete and ambiguous task related to the work they'll be doing in the job gauged less at evaluating their technical skills (though that is in fact a part) and more validating whether or not they ask questions and can engage with stakeholders.

For example - "Here's a dump of time-series data from one of our APIs. The key consumers of this data don't understand JSON feeds so they need you to build a visualization atop the data."

That's it. That's the task. Anyone who dives in and just starts hacking away is probably not a fit (they might be coachable ... but that's something we feel out through this and later followup conversations). Someone who stops and asks "ok, what does this data actually represent" or "who are the key consumers and what will they need to accomplish with this data" _before_ they dive into the code are the folks I want on the team.

In other words - am I looking at a great communicator with excellent collaboration skills, or is this someone who just wants to be told what to do and will take no ownership over the product direction? The most successful teams I've built bias heavily towards the former.
by nicoburns | 2026-01-06 14:30:03+00:00
> presumably China would still want to keep selling those products and would have an interest in avoiding destroying those factories

There are rumours from seemingly credible sources that Taiwan has the TSMC factories (at least the ones located in Taiwan) rigged with explosives that they intend to trigger in case of invasion by China (as a disincentive against China invading). So China may well not have any say in the matter.
by bryanlarsen | 2026-01-06 14:30:46+00:00
If you're in North America, you can only get 1800 watts from a cord. It's not enough to blow anything but light snow.

OTOH, an 80V battery can easily draw 1000 watts+. A good snow blower has 4 of those. That's more than enough, comparable to a gas engine but with way more torque.
by hu3 | 2026-01-06 14:31:08+00:00
Bad analogy.

If the alternative has drawbacks (they always do) or is not as well known by the team, it's perfecly fine to keep using the tool you know if it is working for you.

People who incessantly try to evangelise their tool/belief/preferences to others are often seen as unpleasant to say the least and they often achieve the opposite effect of what they seek.
by plastic-enjoyer | 2026-01-06 14:31:10+00:00
> Well yes, but that doesn't mean we want EU surveillance to replace it.

I agree, but what choice do we have? If we look at the way things are going, we see that the US is expanding its surveillance apparatus, China is expanding its surveillance apparatus, Russia is expanding its surveillance apparatus and the EU is following suit. Or at least is trying to, because previous attempts to implement surveillance policies have tended to reveal the incompetence of our representatives. Even leaving the EU is no guarantee that we will not become a surveillance state, as seen in the UK.

The only way to circumvent surveillance is to create and use communication channels where the government nor companies have any influence.
by giancarlostoro | 2026-01-06 14:31:20+00:00
I forgot what Limbo was, Rust rewrite of SQLite, now called Turso.

https://github.com/tursodatabase/turso

I could see it being useful for pure Rust projects once its completed. I mean in Java / Kotlin land, I prefer to use H2 in some cases over SQLite since its native to the platform and H2 is kind of nice altogether. I could see myself only using this in Rust in place of SQLite if its easy to integrate and use on the fly.
by baranul | 2026-01-06 14:31:23+00:00
A major part of this problem appears to be that there is no identifiable humans in the loop to bring complaints to. Many of Google's responses are automated and black box algorithms.

When a Google response to a problem is outright bonkers, there is often not much that can be done, but to keep hitting the head on the wall (hoping something different happens) or be the lucky few that can get or has a human contact at Google. From what I've read and heard, those with human contacts, often have been identified as needing special attention. Where they are persons who are making significant money for Google and the businesses they own or can create problems in court.
by flanked-evergl | 2026-01-06 14:31:36+00:00
Whatever dependence Europe has on external energy is entirely a choice, and it's a choice that can be changed, and if we change our choice it can actually be done relatively quickly.

I would also say whatever dependence Europe has on even US is a choice and can be changed relatively quickly, it's just that I really want Europeans to want to change this. I think if Europe really is determined, we can impose a no-fly zone on Ukraine and Crimea within one year and deter Russia to the point where Russia becomes irrelevant, but the determination is not there at all levels. In part because it will hurt economically, but it's some pain we have to take, I think. The pain will be temporary, it won't be that bad, we can get over it, and it will be worth it in the end.
by jerf | 2026-01-06 14:31:37+00:00
An immense amount of abuse is being done to "consumers" because most people don't have a mental model for how expensive subscriptions are and end up counting them as nearly free, because they are not even tomorrow's problem, but next month's problem. Entire industries run on that principle, like the burgeoning buy now pay later space (which promise no interest but I promise you they're not making money on a whole bunch of "0% interest" loans so you do the math). Meanwhile companies love the recurring revenue. It's a perfect storm of corporate greed meeting a consumer blindspot.

Even if they "knew" they may well have not been accounting for it properly. I've been annualizing all my subscription fees for a long time now and dealing with the resulting number, but that's still an unpopular approach. Subscription fees are bleeding more people than ever dry.
by bluGill | 2026-01-06 14:31:43+00:00
This is about leaf blowers which do not need nearly as much power to function. I don't think anyone is using a leaf blower in such a way that gas is better (there are tractor mounted ones that might be better for some applications - but tractors are diesel powered)

I had a corded electric snow blower 20 years ago and it was great for light snows, but I needed the gas one for larger snows. Cordless tools often have more power than corded because there is only so much power you can get from a plug - of course the battery discharges fast when doing this.
by kstrauser | 2026-01-06 14:32:11+00:00
Depends on what it’s unwilling to break. “The compiler generates code that segfaults when you multiply 13 * 37, but someone found a way way to trap it and used that as a faster way to make syscalls on Prime minicomputer, so we had to add -ffix-four-eight-won, which the original implementor misspelled in 1993 so we can’t fix that, either, for backward compatibility.”

Some of its actual weirdnesses seem no less odd than that to people who aren’t C experts, I assure you.
by ecshafer | 2026-01-06 14:32:14+00:00
My hypothesis is that GLP-1 drugs are basically counteracting the effects of various chemicals interfering with the natural processes of our endocrine system. I think something (microplastics, chemicals in the water, hormones, ultraprocessed food, etc) is interfering with how GLP-1 is interacting with our body in the first place. So the GLP-1 Drugs is helping bring this back to normal. I think different people due to genetic differences are affected by these environmental factors differently, that's why two people can both eat the same food and one is still starving and one is full.
by kube-system | 2026-01-06 14:32:44+00:00
Police in the US can just give people a faulty equipment ticket based on their perception of it being too loud or visually modified.

But you are not likely to see this enforced outside of rich quiet neighborhoods where police don't have anything better to attend to. Culturally, sentiment in the US does not want the law coming down hard on drivers and their vehicles. For instance, most US states do not even require vehicles to be safety inspected. And in urban areas the police have worse infractions to be going after.
by mupuff1234 | 2026-01-06 14:32:52+00:00
I like coming up with the system design and the low level pseudo code, but actually translating it to the specific programming language and remembering the exact syntax or whatnot I find pretty uninspiring.

Same with design docs more or less, translating my thoughts into proper and professional English adds a layer I don't really enjoy (since I'm not exactly great at it), or stuff like formatting, generating a nice looking diagram, etc.

Just today I wrote a pretty decent design doc that took me two hours instead of the usual week+ slog/procrastination, and it was actually fairly enjoyable.
by petcat | 2026-01-06 14:33:24+00:00
> Key Milestones:

> First Fab: High-volume production on N4 process technology started in Q4 2024.

> Second Fab: Construction was completed on the fab structure in 2025. Volume production on N3 process technology targeted for 2028.

> Third Fab: In April 2025, TSMC broke ground on the site of the third fab, slated for N2 and A16 process technologies. Targeting volume production by the end of the decade.

> TSMC Arizona will play a crucial role in increasing U.S. production of advanced semiconductor technology and elevate the state of Arizona as an American center of innovation.

https://www.tsmc.com/static/abouttsmcaz/index.htm

> In July 2025, Wei indicated that the company would speed up its production timelines on multiple manufacturing facilities following an additional $100 billion investment in Arizona. He stated that the completion of a "gigafab" cluster totaling six facilities would account for 30 percent of TSMC's 2-nanometer and more advanced capacity semiconductor production within the state.

https://www.azcentral.com/story/money/business/tech/2025/07/...
Ask HN: How do small businesses handle appointment reminders today?
by lucasnp | 2026-01-06 14:33:31+00:00
I’m curious how small businesses handle appointment reminders today.

Do most rely on full scheduling platforms, or are simpler setups (SMS, manual reminders, etc.) still common?

If you’ve built or run something in this space, I’d love to hear what actually works in practice.
by neutronicus | 2026-01-06 14:33:34+00:00
LLMs are pretty good at this sort of thing.

I use emacs, so maybe they're better trained on my editor. But I've had a lot of success resolving little annoyances I have just lived with for years talking to Claude in gptel.

I can't get it to do real work for shit, but it's A+ at helping me waste time with yak-shaving. lol
by f1shy | 2026-01-06 14:33:44+00:00
It does not have to be so, and in some companies is not so, notably the ones which thrive and meritocracy rules. Is a big fallacy to think all is politics, IMHO.

Between the most junior developer and the CTO, and all in between, is about taking good decisions, communicating clearly, and owning errors. If it is a healthy company with competent management, there is no need to make a powerpoint of every fart you shoot. Now the reality is, big companies are run typically by incompetent people with "cover your ass" mentality, with lots of internal and external corruption and nepotism. See Dilbert. It doesn't mean is the only model.

> If you didn't see it that way then that may explain your problems with promotions.

Big no. I totally knew and saw that, clear as day. But if when the position is open the nephew of the boss'es boss is looking for a job, you are just out of luck. Also if your boss is constantly talking bad of you anytime anyone internally asks for you.
by oldandboring | 2026-01-06 14:33:50+00:00
My interpretation was/is that they're both right. The word originated as 'wares with a Z' but once it was spelled that way it became natural to pronounce it 'ware-ez' but nobody thought you were unintentionally mispronouncing it. The in-joke continued on certain boards as 'warez' became 'Juárez'...
by FridgeSeal | 2026-01-06 14:33:52+00:00
> Millions of todays users will not just decide that they don't want to use claude code or chatgpt anymore

Won’t they? For a great number of people, LLM’s are in the “nice to have” basket. Execs and hucksters foam at the mouth over them, other people find utility but the vast majority are not upending their life in service of them.

I suspect if ChatGPT evaporated tomorrow, the chronically dependent would struggle, most people would shrug and go on with their lives, and any actual use cases would probably spin up a local model and go back to whatever they’re doing.

I’m not denying hardware demand will evaporate, it definitely won’t, but interrupt the cycle and “ehh, good enough” will probably go a very long way for a very large percentage of the userbase.
by hmry | 2026-01-06 14:33:57+00:00
That's definitely true. Can't have generics / compile time evaluation across languages. Need to design your code around that restriction ahead of time. SQLite being dynamically typed luckily doesn't have any problems with that.

I've actually run into a similar problem with a C library before, because it heavily used macros as part of its API. Glad most developers don't do that.
by CharlieDigital | 2026-01-06 14:33:58+00:00
If you think about the real-world and the key bottleneck with most creative work projects (this includes software), it's usually context (in the broadest sense of the word).

Humans are good at this because they are truly multi-modal and can interact through many different channels to gather additional context to do the requisite task at hand. Given incomplete requirements or specs, they can talk to co-workers, look up old documents from a previous release, send a Slack or Teams message, setup a Zoom meeting with stakeholders, call customers, research competitors, buy a competitors product and try it out while taking notes of where it falls short, make a physical site visit to see the context in which the software is to be used and environmental considerations for operation.

Point is that humans doing work have all sorts of ways to gather and compile more context before acting or while they are acting that an LLM does not and in some cases cannot have without the assistance of a human. This process in the real world can unfurl over days or weeks or in response to new inputs and our expectation of how LLMs work doesn't align with this.

LLMs can sort of do this, but more often than not, the failure of LLMs is that we are still very bad at providing proper and sufficient context to the LLM and the LLMs are not very good at requesting more context or reacting to new context, changing plans, changing directions, etc. We also have different expectations of LLMs and we don't expect the LLM to ask "Can you provide a layout and photo of where the machine will be set up and the typical operating conditions?" and then wait a few days for us to gather that context for it before continuing.
by Electricniko | 2026-01-06 14:34:09+00:00
According to press releases, the CEO of Donut/Verge founded Cova and ESOX in October/November. They're newly formed companies that haven't done anything yet, so I don't really think it would require much sophistication to say that three companies have already adopted this technology. Again, this doesn't say anything about the "realness" of the battery technology, I just wouldn't rely on the idea that multiple companies adopting it means that the technology is real, since right now it's tending to look more like businessmen throwing out multiple shell startups in different industries to lend weight to the announcement.