MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by eclipsetheworld | 2026-01-19 14:55:31+00:00
Thanks for the comment. It actually perfectly illustrates my point. Most people equate GDPR with a "Delete My Account" button, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

We didn't spend thousands of hours on a deletion feature (or just development time). We spent them in total to be compliant in a healthcare environment. That time goes into:

Documenting the entire lifecycle (how, why, and where) of every single data point we process. Conducting and documenting formal risk assessments for every major processing activity (Privacy Impact Assessments (DPIA)). Drafting and negotiating data processing agreements (DPAs) with every single partner and vendor we use. Building strict role-based access and logging systems to track exactly who views and edits data and why. Implementing pseudonymization and logical data separation to ensure we meet "privacy by design" standards. Constantly coordinating between the product and dev team and the DPO to update policies and communicate changes to users.

The point I’m making is that the EU has built an incredibly expensive regulatory environment to support rights that, in practice, the vast majority of users don't seem to care about. We’re over-engineering for a "loss of control" that the average user hasn't shown much interest in reclaiming.
by arghwhat | 2026-01-19 14:55:36+00:00
This feels like it's into trolling, so one last round:

The C language does not use your C code, it is your C code that uses the C language.

The tools available to C is what the language specification dictated and what the compiler implemented. For example, C might use stack memory and related CPU instructions, because the C specification described "automatic memory" and the compiler implemented it with the CPU's stack functionality. It might insert calls to "memcpy" as this function is part of the C language spec. For C++, the compiler will insert calls to constructors and destructors as the language specified them.

The C language does not specify a garbage collector so it can never use one.

You, however, can use C to write a garbage collector to manually use in your C code. C remains entirely unaware of the garbage collectors existence as it has no idea what the code you write does - it will never call it on its own and the compiler will never make any decisions based on its existence. From C's perspective, it's still just memory managed manually by your application with your logic.

In JavaScript and Go, the language specifies the presence of garbage collection and how that should work, and so any runtime is required to implement it accordingly. You can write that runtime in C, but the C code and C compiler will still not be garbage collected.
by westurner | 2026-01-19 14:56:06+00:00
> As of mid-January, six Erdős problems have been fully solved by AI tools, though subsequent scrutiny by professional mathematicians revealed that five of these problems had previously been solved in the mathematical literature. Only one problem, number 205, has been fully solved by Barreto and Price with no pre-existing solution. AI tools have also enabled small improvements and partial solutions to seven other problems that don’t appear to be pre-existing in the literature.

This directly contradicts a challenge last month or so re: whether LLMs AI are useful for math.
by drysine | 2026-01-19 14:56:08+00:00
I'm so glad the West isn't hoping for Russia's downfall since the West doesn't have this "loser mentality".

And no, I'm just enjoying the irony of the situation when after so many decades of ignoring the rule of law when it is beneficial for the West, it has found itself on the receiving end and doesn't know what to do and what to say.

And on top of that, the fact that the offender is a part of the West doubles the irony.
by lucb1e | 2026-01-19 14:56:16+00:00
These risks don't seem to materialize if you're not targeted by something like an intelligence agency. Not sure publicly funded research has such security requirements, at least by default (they can always buy custom equipment for a project, or just not put such data on devices you take home / out and about). Might be worth it compared to the very real benefits it has around the world by paying good salaries and fairer material sourcing
by ethin | 2026-01-19 14:56:27+00:00
I actually wrote a Noise implementation and someone wanted to make a Bitchat implementation with it, but my impl only supports BLAKE2B (and I got the impression this person really didn't know what they wanted to do in the first place). It's kinda sad more haven't moved to BLAKE2B (or BLAKE3, which I almost never hear anyone talking about).
by fedeb95 | 2026-01-19 14:56:34+00:00
I'm also a non native speaker. The point is, you tend to make grammatically correct phrases (mostly), but in a way that's not very common between native speakers. You're right that there are many factors at play. I think dismissing something as AI generated just because it uses common AI-generated strings is not correct. I'm speaking in general and not about the specific case.
Show HN: Gitizi – Prompt library where you can run the prompts
by Chaxpa | 2026-01-19 14:57:04+00:00
Hey Everyone!

I built Gitizi an open-source library of executable prompts.
Since LLM workflows start with executing a prompt, I wanted to build something around this basic unit for generative AI.

Like a simplified version of Github for prompts.

I checked different prompt libraries but they're limited to copy-paste.
So I built a platform where prompts can be run and orchestrated.

I think it's handy because different LLMs perform differently on different tasks - users can chain workflows across multiple models.

I created a simple markup language based on Laravel Blade to define prompt blocks and how they're executed.

I'm planning to implement MCP tooling in the workflow but don't want to overbuild without external feedback.

Would love feedback on the UX and what features would make this useful for your workflows.

Happy to answer questions!
by topaz0 | 2026-01-19 14:57:13+00:00
I'm in your camp, that both of these are appropriate for some situations. In particular I like starting with a variation on "you're absolutely right" when it appears my interlocutor has identified the wrong disagreement, before realigning the conversation to a more useful direction (though of course there are many phrases that accomplish that).

It's still frequently identifiable in (current-generation) LLM text by the glossy superficiality that comes along with these usages. For example, in "It's not just X, it's Y", when a human does this it will be because Y materially adds something that's not captured by X, but in LLM output X and Y tend to be very close in meaning, maybe different in intensity, such that saying them both really adds nothing. Or when I use "You're absolutely right" I'll clarify what they are right about, whereas for the LLM it's just an empty affirmation.
by westurner | 2026-01-19 14:57:29+00:00
I just sent an email to the authors. From https://gemini.google.com/share/0b906914bcfb :

> If we apply Fedi's "Modified Stokes' Law" to the RX J0528+2838 observation, the interpretation shifts from a magnetic propeller effect to a vacuum friction effect. [...]

> Hypothesis: The "persistent bow shock" is not just the star pushing gas, but the star’s high-velocity (or high-rotation) magnetic field creating shear stress on the quantum vacuum itself

How to test whether MHD or SQR best explain the given phenomena?

> Measure: Precise timing of the binary's orbital period (currently ~80 minutes) over the next 5–10 years.

> Orbit decays exactly as General Relativity predicts -> MHD favored.

> Orbit decays significantly faster (anomalous braking) -> Fedi [SQR, dilatant fluid] and/or Alternative Physics favored.

..

> How to Measure: Map the density of the Interstellar Medium (ISM) around the star.

> Result A: The shock brightness correlates perfectly with patches of dense gas -> MHD favored (Gas hitting Gas).

> Result B: The shock remains bright even in "empty" voids where there is no gas to shock, implying the "medium" is space itself -> Fedi favored.

Are these good tests of MHD vs SQR?

> How to Measure: Observe a background transient event (like a distant quasar or burst) passing through the bow shock. Check for time-of-arrival delays between X-rays and Radio waves.
by Ludoq | 2026-01-19 14:57:37+00:00
Lifetime
https://apps.apple.com/redeem?ctx=offercodes&id=6744867474&c...

Yearly
https://apps.apple.com/redeem?ctx=offercodes&id=6744867474&c...

Monthly
https://apps.apple.com/redeem?ctx=offercodes&id=6744867474&c...

All promotional codes are valid until the end of February.
by voidUpdate | 2026-01-19 14:58:13+00:00
I cant see the whole relevant section in the article, but there is a screenshot of part of the legal documents that states "In response, NVIDIA sought to develop and demonstrate cutting edge LLMs at its fall 2023 developer day. In seeking to acquire data for what it internally called "NextLargeLLM", "NextLLMLarge" and-" (cuts off here)
by intrikate | 2026-01-19 14:59:11+00:00
I might be wrong, but, wouldn't the recommendation to avoid Amazon if you want to be sure come from the massive amount of training data pulled from internet conversations? The kind that would already have been discussing the issue of counterfeit products on Amazon being mixed in with legitimate products from the original manufacturer, since this is a problem that's been going on for, what, at least a decade at this point, right?

The LLM is inherently distrustful of Amazon due to having consumed and trained on a bunch of text that's about how one should be distrustful of Amazon.
by Privavault | 2026-01-19 14:59:23+00:00
This is exactly why local-first architecture matters. If your documents never leave your machine unencrypted, OS-level network privacy controls actually work in your favor rather than against you.

I've been building PrivaVault (encrypted doc management, launching next week) specifically with this threat model in mind everything's encrypted client-side before any network activity happens. MacOS can sniff the traffic all it wants, but it's just seeing encrypted blobs going to storage.
by orwin | 2026-01-19 14:59:24+00:00
Yeah, it's definitely a habit to have to identify when it's lost in its own hallucinations. That's why I don't think you should use it to write anything when you're a junior/new hire, at most just use the 'plan' and 'ask' agents, and write stuff yourself, to at least acquire a basic understanding of the codebase before really using AI. Basically if you're a .5x dev (which honestly, most of us are on a new environment), it'll make you a .25x, and make you stay there longer.
by 3dsnano | 2026-01-19 14:59:24+00:00
yes, and Yegge + Huntley are doing it in an fun and creative way, breaking rules that make folks really mad and huffy puffy. this is a renaissance to those who can see it, those who drink the koolaid willingly, because it makes you trip balls and come up with crazy ideas... just like Hypercard...

why do we drink it? because its awesome and makes software 100X more FUN than it used to be. what yegge + huntley are doing is intensely creative. they are having FUN. and i am have FUN!!!!!
by culebron21 | 2026-01-19 14:59:27+00:00
I took a look at the source code -- well, what if it's a working thing -- and of course, 2 files in, there are instructions that panic (i.e. crash the host process), all over the code, just everywhere, in every API method. That's nowhere near "production ready" as the author's LLM says.

I've seen, 17 year ago, a schoolboy make "his own OS", which was simply Ubuntu with replaced logos. He got on TV with it, maybe he was promoting it on the internets (forums back then), and kept insisting that this was his own work. He was bullied in response and in a few weeks disappeared from the nets.
by thevinter | 2026-01-19 14:59:43+00:00
Not a COBOL dev, but I work on migrating projects from COBOL mainframes to Java.

Generally speaking any kind of AI is relatively hit or miss. We have a statically generated knowledge base of the migrated sourcecode that can be used as context for LLMs to work with, but even that is often not enough to do anything meaningful.

At times Opus 4.5 is able to debug small errors in COBOL modules given a stacktrace and enough hand-holding. Other models are decent at explaining semi-obscure COBOL patterns or at guessing what a module could be doing just given the name and location -- but more often than not they end up just being confidently wrong.

I think the best use-case we have so far is business rule extraction - aka understanding what a module is trying to achieve without getting too much into details.

The TLDR, at least in our case, is that without any supporting RAGs/finetuning/etc all kind of AI works "just ok" and isn't such a big deal (yet)
by iepathos | 2026-01-19 15:00:45+00:00
The "code witness" concept falls apart under scrutiny. In practice, the agent isn't replacing ripgrep with pure Python, it's generating a Python wrapper that calls ripgrep via subprocess. So you get:

- Extra tokens to generate the wrapper

- New failure modes (encoding issues, exit code handling, stderr bugs)

- The same underlying tool call anyway

- No stronger guarantees - actually weaker ones, since you're now trusting both the tool AND the generated wrapper

The theoretical framing about "proofs as programs" and "semantic guarantees" sounds impressive, but the generated wrapper
doesn't provide stronger semantics than rg alone, it actually provides strictly weaker ones. This is true for pretty much any CLI tool you're having the AI wrap python code around to do instead of calling battle tested tools directly.

For actual development work, the artifact that matters is the code you're building, which we're already tracking in source control. Nobody needs a "witness" of how the agent found the right file to edit and if they do agents have parseable logs. Direct tool calls are faster, more reliable, and the intermediate exploration steps are ephemeral scaffolding anyway.
by 1718627440 | 2026-01-19 15:00:47+00:00
Actually for shunting that is normal. Derailment during shunting operations is a frequent occurrence and there are derailment facilities where shunting can occur, which get activated every time a train passes. What is rare is having an actual train derail.

As I don't know whether you are referring to an actual train, or just use that as a term for moving railway cars, the answer to your question could be either yes or no.
by 1718627440 | 2026-01-19 15:00:59+00:00
> defects in laying the tracks didn't have a chance to show up until now.

Defects in laying the tracks have a chance to show up on an inspection, either the final one when building or one done at the regular intervals. If it doesn't shows up, your inspection is bad. If you can't inspect what you build, you can't build it.
by camgunz | 2026-01-19 15:01:52+00:00
I'm saying it would be a lot simpler to just provide an API to download the data. I don't think it's worth the complexity and network of PDS' to preserve this data in perpetuity, but even if I did, nothing would stop me from using the download API and storing tapes in Iron Mountain or whatever.

I think there's also weird cases where you don't really want things replicated: revenge porn, snuff, CSAM, etc. Like, if someone we're like "yes it's true we lose all data forever if we shut down, but we're not indiscriminately pushing some of the worst content to everyone replicating" I'd take that tradeoff immediately.
by jjice | 2026-01-19 15:02:27+00:00
While it's also used to socialize with people you don't know IRL, most of my experience with Discord (mostly in uni) was to aggregate people IRL together. We had discords for clubs, classes, groups of friends, etc. The only reason I use discord now is for the same reason. Private space for a group of people to interact asynchronously in a way that's more structured than a text group chat.
by jeroenhd | 2026-01-19 15:02:56+00:00
Taking a train to the nearest (usable) airport within the Netherlands takes between 2 and 2.5 hours depending on the available trains, amount of transfers, and "high-speed" (not actually) rail surcharge. Actually, because of a train hitting someone, I currently can't reach any airport by train because my city is right at the edge of the train network. Groningen-Schiphol is similar, and Maastricht-Schiphol is 2,5 hours at the very minimum. Meanwhile, Amsterdam-Brussels takes about 2 hours.

Our regular train speeds are 80kmh to 140kmh, with maybe a little bit of 160kmh on specific stretches.

I realize my country is incredibly well-connected by public transit and those 2 hours are already a massive luxury compared to probably most of the world's population, but I wouldn't mind a few high-speed lines from the center of the country (probably Utrecht) to major cities. With trains currently being more expensive than taking a car if you travel with two people or more, it'd make the high cost worth it.
by Ajedi32 | 2026-01-19 15:04:10+00:00
Ah yes, of course it's entirely America's fault Iran's citizens are revolting against the despotic theocratic regime currently in power. Because surely nobody would organically want regime change when the ayatollah is such a nice guy. Better cut off internet access to the entire country, can't have our citizens reading that terrorist propaganda. They can get all their information from reliable sources instead, like our state-sponsored TV stations.
by scandox | 2026-01-19 15:04:34+00:00
Mildly funny but also I think representative of the kind of smart(arse) and unwise attitude that wealthy, educated people have been using to dig their own grave for some time: people understand when you have contempt for them and they won't listen to you any more.

Kornbluth who wrote the story it's largely based on (The Marching Morons) had the excuse of extreme youth and alienation for his intellectual elitism. His story is much more explicit about the solution: fire all the dummies into space. It's much more obvious in the story that Dysgenics is Eugenics.

I think there's not a good heart in this kind of art.
by BoxOfRain | 2026-01-19 15:04:35+00:00
Russia's former Lake Karachay was an impressively polluted location, the early Soviet reactors were cooled with an open loop where highly contaminated water was discharged directly into the lake. The lake eventually became thoroughly sedimented with nuclear waste, and when levels dropped radioactive dust would be blown about the region. Apparently just half an hour on its shore would have been enough to doom you from the amount of radiation exposure.

They eventually filled the lake in, I can only say hats off to the poor buggers who had to do that. I think it's safe to say they had the world's worst job at the time.
by armcat | 2026-01-19 15:04:41+00:00
What's changed significantly is the "intent" behind the content. The intent today is mostly the actual "content generation", i.e. "I write a blog post or a public github repo for the sake of having a digital footprint". This is vastly different when I used the internet in mid/late 90s. The intent back then was more like an "online journal" or something you hope someone else will find useful one day. Back then we had geocities, lycos, altavista, and we browsed with netscape and IE. For example, i began my programming foray with Delphi/Pascal, and I remember browsing these "crappy" [1] websites that were mostly just text, that explained how to convert C programs to Delphi (i was working on some plugins). The content was "genuine" content - someone laboriously documenting what worked for them, knowing very well that no one may ever actually read this. This is the issue today - it's all just for show.

[1] Those "crappy websites" with a maze of iframes are actually considered surprisingly refreshing today.
by throwaw12 | 2026-01-19 15:04:56+00:00
One thing bothers me a lot is, if government organizations can be influenced by lobby groups, which primarily owned by corporations, then why do we need government?

Corporations and governments should be considered as balancing forces, one works to increase its profits by any means, other works to protect humans living in that area by any means.

You might say, corporations benefit its employees, true, but it is a small subset of people living in the country. If you allow everything to corporations, they will set up a slavery system from the birth of a baby
by TeamCommet1 | 2026-01-19 15:04:57+00:00
This is a great deep dive. Most ASCII renderers feel "muddy" because they treat intensity as the only variable. Treating characters as structural embeddings (the 6D vector approach) is much closer to how our eyes actually perceive edges. It reminds me of how font hinting works at low resolutions. Truly impressive work on the contrast enhancement pass too.
by threethirtytwo | 2026-01-19 15:05:10+00:00
It does make sense. It’s controversial. Your memory memorizes things in the same way. So what nvidia does here is no different, the AI doesn’t actually copy any of the books. To call training illegal is similar to calling reading a book and remembering it illegal.

Our copyright laws are nowhere near detailed enough to specify anything in detail here so there is indeed a logical and technical inconsistency here.

I can definitely see these laws evolving into things that are human centric. It’s permissible for a human to do something but not for an AI.

What is consistent is that obtaining the books was probably illegal, but say if nvidia bought one kindle copy of each book from Amazon and scraped everything for training then that falls into the grey zone.
by NoiseBert69 | 2026-01-19 15:05:20+00:00
Meshtastic has a reliability problem. We often cannot get beyond one hop - and our network isn't too loose nor too dense (60 stations).

Cross test with Meshcore doesn't show any issues. Chats over 5 hops have almost a 100% success rate.

Long time I avoided MC because of its closed source client - but a Opensource Flutter app for Apple/iPhone is slowly getting usable and stable. (https://github.com/zjs81/meshcore-open)
by woooooo | 2026-01-19 15:05:58+00:00
Yeah, I hear you and I also added a parenthetical that the incentives aren't always the same.

In an organization of high-minded individuals, the information asymmetry goes both ways, I've been a manager and a dev and I tried to be high-minded and do my best to smooth that assymetry for the greater good in both roles.

But sometimes, especially the last 3-4 years since it got tough, there's a lot of people trying to hold on by any means necessary. Information asymmetry isn't the problem there, it's incentive assymetry. What if you're just not that good at tech and got promoted to 1st, maybe 2nd level manager in the good years? What's your incentive?
by zozbot234 | 2026-01-19 15:06:14+00:00
The C standard is actually carefully written to allow for placing distinct "objects" in separate memory segments of a non-flat address space, such that ordinary pointer arithmetic cannot be expected to reach across to a separate "object". This is not far from allowing for some sort of GC as part of low-level C implementation, and in fact the modern Fil-C relies on it.
by TuringNYC | 2026-01-19 15:06:33+00:00
>> Amazon has them for $30, but has none of the legitimate item which are only sold through a dealer network and dealers charge the OEM price of $285 bucks plus shipping. It’s not quite the same part – cause dealers only sell a larger unit that includes the heater - you can’t buy the actual part number except via a knockoff.

Possibly the reason the OEM price is so high is because it is backed by huge liability insurance (e.g., you get into a Jacuzzi and get electrocuted). I'd pay for that assurance. By assurance, not that I get a payout, but rather the company has sufficient QA to avoid a payout.
by thesuitonym | 2026-01-19 15:06:42+00:00
Neither E2EE or Tor are enough to protect someone being targeted by state level actors. They're helpful, but if you're a high enough value target, they only slow down your adversary. If you're relying on algorithms on your computer to protect you, you should be prepared to meet the hacking wrench. [1]

[1] https://xkcd.com/538/