MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bigwheels | 2026-01-27 00:31:41+00:00
If you access a model through an openrouter provider it might be quantized (akin to being "cut with trash"), but when you go directly to Anthropic or OpenAI you are getting access to the same APIs as everyone else. Even top-brass folks within Microsoft use Anthropic and OpenAI proper (not worth the red-tape trouble to go directly through Azure). Also, the creator and maintainer of Claude, Boris Cherny, was a bit of an oddball but one of the comparatively nicer people at Anthropic, and he indicated he primarily uses the same Anthropic APIs as everyone else (which makes sense from a product development perspective).

The underlying models are all actually really undifferentiated under the covers except for the post-training and base prompts. If you eliminate the base prompts the models behave near identically.

A conspiracy would be a helluva lot more interesting and fun, but I've spoken to these folks firsthand and it seems they already have enough challenges keeping the beast running.
by dylan604 | 2026-01-27 00:32:25+00:00
> QA is a lot cheaper than dev.

QA is definitely one of those "you get what you pay for". A dev just bangs out code on what is assumed "happy path" which means the user uses it as the dev expects. QA has to some how think of all the inane ways that a user will actually try using the thing knowing that not all users are technically savvy at all. They are actively trying to break things not just feed in clean data to produce expected outputs. Let's face it, that's exactly what devs do when they "test". They are specifically trying to get unexpected outputs to see how things behave. At least, good QA teams do.

I worked with a QA person who I actively told anyone that listened that the specific QA person deserved a higher salary than I did as the dev. They caught some crazy situations where product was much better after fixing.
by will__ness | 2026-01-27 00:33:34+00:00
> But there are serious limits. [Your coding agent] will lie to you, they don't really understand things, and they often generate bad code.

I think that really high quality code can be created via coding agents. Not in one prompt, but instead an orchestration of planning, implementing, validating, and reviewing.

Its still engineering work. The code still matters. Its just a different tool to write the code.

I'd compare the difference between manually coding and operating a coding agent to the difference between a handsaw and a chainsaw - the end result is the same but the method is very different.
by msukhareva | 2026-01-27 00:33:59+00:00
Europe has started preparing for a US tech shutdown. What seemed impossible yesterday is becoming increasingly likely. European dependency on US tech is a leverage that Trump knows how to use. But what happens if he decides to cut it off? I wrote a fictional 2027 scenario about what might happen and how it would affect EU industry. In short, as the Wall Street Journal called it, this is a nightmare scenario. The US has an opportunity to cause a massive crisis in Europe. Yet there is one point they may not be fully realizing. When it comes to survival, you partner with whoever is necessary, even China. This kind of tech blackmail would damage both the US and the EU, but it would be a fantastic opportunity for China to cement its dominance in AI. Europe needs to stop thinking about what else it could prohibit and start thinking about what could be prohibited to it. It is time to start innovating instead of regulating.
by kxbnb | 2026-01-27 00:35:40+00:00
The framing of craft vs. slop misses something important: most production software quality problems aren't about aesthetics or elegance, they're about correctness under real-world conditions.

I've been using AI coding tools heavily for the past year. They're genuinely useful for the "plumbing" - glue code, boilerplate, test scaffolding. But where they consistently fail is reasoning about system-level concerns: authorization boundaries, failure modes, state consistency across services.

The article mentions AI works best on "well-defined prompts for already often-solved problems." This is accurate. The challenge is that in production, the hard problems are rarely well-defined - they emerge from the interaction between your code and reality: rate limits you didn't anticipate, edge cases in user behavior, security assumptions that don't hold.

Craft isn't about writing beautiful code. It's about having developed judgment for which corners you can't cut - something that comes from having been burned by the consequences.
by nomel | 2026-01-27 00:36:15+00:00
> It is irresponsible for these companies

I would claim that ignoring the "ChatGPT is AI and can make mistakes. Check important info." text, right under the query they type in client, is clearly more irresponsible.

I think that a disclaimer like that is the most useful and reasonable approach for AI.

"Here's a tool, and it's sometimes wrong." means the public can have access to LLMs and AI. The alternative, that you seem to be suggesting (correct me if I'm wrong), means the public can't have access to an LLM until they are near perfect, which means the public can't ever have access to an LLM, or any AI.

What do you see as a reasonable approach to letting the public access these imperfect models? Training? Popups/agreement after every question "I understand this might be BS"? What's the threshold for quality of information where it's no longer considered "broken"? Is that threshold as good as or better than humans/news orgs/doctors/etc?
by Majromax | 2026-01-27 00:36:34+00:00
Welcome to Hacker News 26! I know you're trying to read a comment now, but would you like to take a tour of new features?

[ ] — Yes, I'd welcome a half-hour distraction from the thing I need to use the computer for right now!

[ ] — No, I want to get my thing done now but then be confused about missing or new buttons at random intervals for the next six to eighteen months!
by roxolotl | 2026-01-27 00:36:46+00:00
One of the things that always strikes me with pieces like this is they ignore the reality that there's already atrocities being carried out all the time and that large swaths of the population already struggle to live. Reading the sections about what people could do with these tools feels remarkably callous because it's clear this is one of the world's richest people articulating what they are still afraid of.
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-27 00:37:08+00:00
Interesting to see founders coordinating to remove Khosla ventures from their cap table based on Rabois’ comments.

Direct links to relevant tweets:

https://xcancel.com/rabois/status/2015120379841298716

https://xcancel.com/rabois/status/2015138321073160498

https://xcancel.com/EthanChoi7/status/2015524019085451353

https://xcancel.com/vkhosla/status/2015647215642186008
by yearolinuxdsktp | 2026-01-27 00:37:11+00:00
Completely incomparable! It is not a bigger disaster. John Grubber is being an aesthetic stickler -— “comically sad icons”, “indiscriminate transparency” leading to things that are ugly, hard to grab-to-resize rounded window corners, icons in menus “ruining Mac’s signature menu system.”

If you think that adding icons all over the place to menu items RUINS it, I think you’re either in a MacOS “purist stickler” category (which John Gruber is in), or you’re hyping things up for clicks. Because no sane person would call this ruining the menu system.

And new icons “comically sad”? Someone call the whambulance. I saw the new icons, and they are fine. Sure, they are different. But I am not laughing and/or crying about them, and I bet most people don’t find them comically sad either.
by dleslie | 2026-01-27 00:37:15+00:00
That sort of corruption is endemic to the American political establishment. They profit from their inside knowledge of congress, wielding their insider knowledge to make themselves wealthy; not all do it, but enough do that it's nigh impossible to pass legislation to deal with it.

What you refer to as vanity I consider vindictiveness, and as evidenced by his continued support is something that appears strongly associated with Trump's supporters. Vindictiveness is the point, and it's what they voted for.

And stupidity, well, PISA performance doesn't bode well for most nations. There's a steady decline witnessed the world over.
by nosuchthing | 2026-01-27 00:38:20+00:00
What's your definition of a Nazi?

Is your definition different than Time magazine: https://time.com/5926750/azov-far-right-movement-facebook/

> When they finally rendezvoused, Fuller noticed the swastika tattoo on the middle finger of Furholm’s left hand. It didn’t surprise him; the recruiter had made no secret of his neo-Nazi politics. Within the global network of far-right extremists, he served as a point of contact to the Azov movement, the Ukrainian militant group that has trained and inspired white supremacists from around the world, and which Fuller had come to join.

Is the Atlantic Council controlled by Putin? https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/ukraine-s...

Are books like these unavailable due to suppression or censorship in your region? https://chtyvo.org.ua/authors/de_Ploeg_Chris_Kaspar/Ukraine_...
by wawayanda | 2026-01-27 00:38:23+00:00
A year or so ago, I fed my wife's blood work results into chatgpt and it came back with a terrifying diagnosis. Even after a lot of back and forth it stuck to its guns. We went to a specialist who performed some additional tests and explained that the condition cannot be diagnosed with just the original blood work and said that she did not have the condition. The whole thing was a borderline traumatic ordeal that I'm still pretty pissed about.
Show HN: Aden A self-healing agent framework that refactors its own logic
by AdelAden | 2026-01-27 00:39:26+00:00
I’ve spent the last year watching agentic workflows break the moment a schema changes or an LLM returns a slightly unexpected format. Traditional "chains" are too brittle for production, so I built Aden to move away from static, hardcoded logic. Aden is an infrastructure layer that uses a "Queen Bee" coding agent to transform your natural language goals into a recursive graph of worker agents. When an agent fails or hits an edge case, the framework doesn't just throw an error; it captures the failure trace, uses the coding agent to refactor the underlying node logic or connection graph, and redeploys the fix in real-time. It’s built to be MCP-native with 100+ connectors and includes "Agentic P&L" guardrails to prevent token-burn from runaway loops. You can try it out by cloning the repo and running the quickstart script to build your first autonomous swarm.
contact@adenhq.com
by Aurornis | 2026-01-27 00:39:33+00:00
> Healthcare is not corrupt. Insurance companies are corrupt.

There’s a crazy amount of corruption in the healthcare space. Some of the medical fraud busts that come out every year have staggeringly large sums attached. In some areas there are still schemes that openly recruit poor people to use their information to bill for medical care that is not actually necessary or provided. It’s wild.

> Healthcare costs are high because of insurance companies and private equity, not doctors and hospitals.

Sorry, the world isn’t so simple that you can pick your villains (insurance companies and private equity) and declare everyone else to be free from blame. There’s a lot of bad behavior in these systems at every level. Yes, including some doctors.

If we removed insurance overhead entirely, your healthcare costs wouldn’t change more than a few percent. It’s amazing that everyone united against insurance companies as the cause of high healthcare costs when they barely take a few percent of the overall spend.
by keithnz | 2026-01-27 00:39:45+00:00
you understand the problem with what you just said right? Seems your bias is overriding your ability to look at the evidence. Not only that you are doubling down on your position. From my quick investigation on user satisfaction surveys of windows 11, it pretty much seems positive, but they all seem pretty limited in scope. I'm guessing most people are mostly indifferent and don't mind windows 11 and just use it. The amount of people complaining would seems to be a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the user base. I would guess this is what Microsoft sees also.
by rednafi | 2026-01-27 00:40:05+00:00
I agree with this. Making languages geared toward human ergonomics probably won’t be a thing going forward.

Go is positioned really well here, and Steve Yegge wrote a piece on why. The language is fast, less bloated than Python/TS, and less dogmatic than Java/Kotlin. LLMs can go wham with Go and the compiler will catch most of the obvious bugs. Faster compilation means you can iterate through a process pretty quickly.

Also, if I need abstraction that’s hard to achieve in Go, then it better be zero-cost like Rust. I don’t write Python for anything these days. I mean, why bother with uv, pip, ty, mypy, ruff, black, and whatever else when the Go compiler and the standard tooling work better than that decrepit Python tooling? And it costs almost nothing to make my scripts faster too.

I don’t yet know how I feel about Rust since LLMs still aren’t super good with it, but with Go, agentic coding is far more pleasurable and safer than Python/TS.
by WarmWash | 2026-01-27 00:41:26+00:00
>but we're not better off in every possible way

I'd argue that we are, because cloth of higher quality than anything that has ever existed before is available today, it's just really expensive. But high quality cloth was also expensive back then.

I think you are making the error of comparing cheap clothes of today with expensive clothes of the past, rather than cheap clothes with cheap clothes and expensive with expensive. People of the past might have had higher quality clothes on average, but its because those clothes were expensive despite being the cheapest available. Trust me, if Shein was around in 1780, everyone would be wearing that garbage.
by jfengel | 2026-01-27 00:41:33+00:00
Hypothetically, however, if your adversary is indeed without morality, then failing to acknowledge that means working with invalid assumptions. Laboring under a falsehood will not help you. Truth gives you clear eyed access to all of your options.

You may prefer to assume that your opponent is fundamentally virtuous. It's valid to prefer failing under your own values than giving them up in the hopes of winning. Still, you can at least know that is what you are doing, rather than failing and not even knowing why.
by ModernMech | 2026-01-27 00:42:30+00:00
That's what they've been saying for years now. Seems like the same FSD marketing. Any day now it'll be driving across the country! Just you wait! -> Any day now it'll be replacing software developers! Just you wait! Frankly, the same people who fell for the former are falling for the latter.

Rather, to me it looks like all we're getting with additional time is marginal returns. What'll it be in 1 year? Marginally better than today, just like today is marginally better compared to a year ago. The exponential gains in performance are already over. What we're looking at now is exponentially more work for linear gains in performance.
by ainch | 2026-01-27 00:42:52+00:00
It's a good paper by Hooker but that specific comparison is shoddy. Llama and Aya were both trained by significantly more competent labs on different datasets to Falcon and BLOOM. The takeaway there is "it doesn't matter if you have loads of parameters if you don't know what you're doing."

If we compare apples-to-apples, eg. across Claude models, the larger Opus still happily outperforms it's smaller counterparts.
The Nobility of the Composing Stick
by ArchieScrivener | 2026-01-27 00:42:58+00:00
By Archibald T. Scrivener, Editor-in-Chief

Let the rabble have their steam. Let the opportunists south of Fleet Street debase themselves with these infernal "Rotary Presses." Here at The Gazette, we shall not surrender the soul of publishing to a mindless cylinder.

I hear the whispers in the alehouses. You fear the roller. You fear the speed. You ask, "Archibald, how can we compete with a machine that prints ten thousand sheets while we are still justifying the left margin?"
I tell you this: Speed is the enemy of Truth.

Consider the typesetter. A man of dignity. He selects the letter 'A' from the case. He feels the cold lead. He places it in the stick with intention. There is a connection between the hand and the word that a steam-valve can never replicate. This is "Hand-Setting." It is pure. It is honest.

Now look at these "Roller-Men." They do not set type; they feed a beast. They pour ink into a hopper and pray. And what happens? I saw it myself at the Morning Herald. A gear slipped. A plate shifted. And the machine—lacking the moral compass of a human compositor—printed "The Queen is a Harlot" instead of "The Queen is in Harlow" across five thousand copies before anyone could stop the wheel.
They call it progress. I call it a disaster in the Fold.

They say these machines free us from drudgery. I say they detach us from the craft. When you let a cylinder decide the pressure, you lose the "vibe" of the page. The ink smears. The serif is lost. It is soulless output generated by a mindless engine that consumes paper like a glutton.
Rest easy, gentlemen. As long as I draw breath, we will not pivot to "Steam-Publishing." We will continue to hand-set every comma, every period, and every spacer. Because when the world drowns in a deluge of fast, cheap, steam-pressed garbage, the discerning gentleman will always pay a premium for a paper that was built, letter by tedious letter, by a human being who actually knows how to spell.

Back to the cases, lads. The future is manual.
by daveguy | 2026-01-27 00:44:39+00:00
Please keep telling your story. This is the kind of shit that medical science has been dealing with for at least a century. When evaluating testing procedures false positives can have serious consequences. A test that's positive every time will catch every single true positive, but it's also worthless. These LLMs don't have a goddamn clue about it. There should be consequences for these garbage fires giving medical advice.
by anonzzzies | 2026-01-27 00:44:41+00:00
Apple watch told me, based on vo2 max, that i'm almost dead, all the time. I went to the doctor, did a real test and it was complete nonsense. I had the watch replaced 3 times but same results, so I returned it and will not try again. Scaring people with stuff you cannot actually shut off (at least you couldn't before) is not great.
by jack_pp | 2026-01-27 00:44:58+00:00
Not sure I follow, you were afraid of being a "nerd" and dialed your ambitions to try to be "cooler"?

"because it was socially uncomfortable to have people's perceptions of me be tied to the things I excelled in."

I think usually it's the other way around, or I'm not understanding this correctly. I was best at math in my class from grades 5 through 12 but never felt "awkward" because of it, rather I felt proud. Which is also wrong but I digress
by chrisfosterelli | 2026-01-27 00:45:22+00:00
Health metrics are absolutely tarnished by a lack of proper context. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that you can't reliably take a concept as broad as health and reduce it to a number. We see the same arguments over and over with body fat percentages, vo2 max estimates, BMI, lactate thresholds, resting heart rate, HRV, and more. These are all useful metrics, but it's important to consider them in the proper context that each of them deserve.

This article gave an LLM a bunch of health metrics and then asked it to reduce it to a single score, didn't tell us any of the actual metric values, and then compared that to a doctor's opinion. Why anyone would expect these to align is beyond my understanding.

The most obvious thing that jumps out to me is that I've noticed doctors generally, for better or worse, consider "health" much differently than the fitness community does. It's different toolsets and different goals. If this person's VO2 max estimate was under 30, that's objectively a poor VO2 max by most standards, and an LLM trained on the internet's entire repository of fitness discussion is likely going to give this person a bad score in terms of cardio fitness. But a doctor who sees a person come in who isn't complaining about anything in particular, moves around fine, doesn't have risk factors like age or family history, and has good metrics on a blood test is probably going to say they're in fine cardio health regardless of what their wearable says.

I'd go so far to say this is probably the case for most people. Your average person is in really poor fitness-shape but just fine health-shape.
by mgh95 | 2026-01-27 00:45:44+00:00
> Ontario alone has a larger GDP than 45 of the 50 US states, and a bigger GDP than New Hampshire, Hawaii, West Virginia, Delaware, Maine, Rhode Island, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Alaska, Wyoming and Vermont put together.

This is not correct as of 2024. In 2024, Ontario had a GDP of CAD 1.17B. [1] In USD, this is (at .73 exchange rate, which is favorable for these calculations) this comes to US 854B.

In 2024, the following US states had greater GDPs [2]: California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Georgia, and tied with Washington. GDP growth in 2025 was worse for Ontario than these states, and it would be expected Ontarios' position to continue to decline.

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

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/248023/us-gross-domestic...
by ericbarrett | 2026-01-27 00:46:24+00:00
> GPT-4 now considers self modifying AI code to be extremely dangerous and doesn't like talking about it. Claude's safety filters began shutting down similar conversations a few months ago, suggesting the user switch to a dumber model.

I speculate that this has more to do with recent high-profile cases of self harm related to "AI psychosis" than any AGI-adjacent danger. I've read a few of the chat transcripts that have been made public in related lawsuits, and there seems to be a recurring theme of recursive or self-modifying enlightenment role-played by the LLM. Discouraging exploration of these themes would be a logical change by the vendors.
by root_axis | 2026-01-27 00:47:35+00:00
> I think the solution in harder-to-verify cases is to provide AI (sub-)agents a really good set of instructions on a detailed set of guidelines of what it should do and in what ways it should think and explore and break down problems

Using LLMs to validate LLMs isn't a solution to this problem. If the system can't self-verify then there's no signal to tell the LLM that it's wrong. The LLM is fundamentally unreliable, that's why you need a self-verifying system to guide and constrain the token generation.
by mcbridematt | 2026-01-27 00:47:43+00:00
IIRC Qualcomm smartphone SoCs have always run some kind of hypervisor, I believe it's to allow partitioning of the CPU cores with the modem/DSP.

They used to (mid-late 2000s) use an L4 derivative ("REX"?), with the more recent chips (including the 'X' series for PCs) using their homegrown "Gunyah" hypervisor (https://github.com/quic/gunyah-hypervisor)
by SamuelB_DA | 2026-01-27 00:48:39+00:00
This looks like a great start. In my experience with contract review, the key is bridging AI with human validation for decision support. AI is excellent at flagging the 'known unknowns' like missing indemnity caps or unilateral termination, but having that human-in-the-loop for the final call is where the real value lies for procurement teams. Looking forward to seeing how this evolves!
by al_borland | 2026-01-27 00:49:00+00:00
It was great with the Mac mini. The actual Apple TV had its limitations, but with a Mac mini I had Front Row, plus a host of other media apps. I also had an app that would let me control everything with the IR remote they came with it. That was back when they still came with an optical drive as well, so I could also play (and rip) DVDs.