MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fodkodrasz | 2026-01-23 07:36:02+00:00
I'm on board with the feelings of the mentioned classmate about nihilism, but to be honest, reading The Sirens of Titan from Vonnegut, which is considered a comic novel for some reason, has the same impression on me, and that is an all-American classic. Neither are bad books per se, and also I can understand the reasons also why Vonnegut had such a bleak view on affairs, as he had gone through a lot, and was in a hard situation at the time of writing, but it is not a comedy, and not funny.

Note: The interpretation on the difference between American and British view of affairs is almost Eastern-European (/me Hungarian), but you can set up that relation to Britain and Eastern Europe also, so this may be related geographic longitude :)
by proc0 | 2026-01-23 07:36:25+00:00
This is awesome overall. A valiant attempt at using AI to create something real. My number one criticism with AI demos is that they are too simple and have too much flexibility to be anything. Once you start adding constraints, the prompts start becoming a lot trickier making it harder to get the desired output.

One observation so far is seeing that there is real effort in configuring the agentic workflow, and getting that to work even semi-consistently, meaning that there is always tweaking and experimentation for the specific use case. This isn't trivial work, and arguably it's a tradeoff, since all that effort could be spend coding the game directly. With enough skills it would be about the same time except better quality to code it by hand (with of course AI assistance where needed, but it would be human written).

This just means that the real value so far with AI is in letting non-programmers do coding, but it doesn't come without the cost of real effort to set things up and less quality in the end.
by deepsummer | 2026-01-23 07:36:34+00:00
I understand your argument. But I have worked at two companies that worked pretty much like you described. They call it 'project-oriented'. They threw lots of engineers at projects, hired freelancers, and got it working as fast as possible. Once it was done, they only left a maintainer or two.

That model works fine for a few years. Then you need a bigger change. Often, the system is built on top of some enterprise project, heavily customized, and you stay at your outdated version until it becomes unsupported. The maintainers don't care, and often don't have the capability to upgrade, so they just leave it as long as it keeps working. Or maybe some law has been introduced and requires a bigger change. Or the market just changes, and you need to support new APIs, new payment methods, new integrations...

The maintainers tend to quit every 1-2 years and are replaced with someone only trained by the previous generation. With every generation, the maintainers get worse. After 3 generations, all product knowledge is gone. To make things worse, the maintainers do stupid things in the code because they don't fully understand it, and it begins to rot. In the worst case I know, no one even knew what branch was deployed on production and what the last changes were.

Then, after 5-10 years of decay, some requirement comes along that would require a major refactoring. Everybody is overwhelmed, no one understands the internals, and eventually they decide that it the project is now so outdated that the only solution is to replace it. Management doesn't care because they can blame their predecessors.

In my experience, that's how it always works. I know at least 5 major projects that took over a year to develop, and costing millions, in at least one case tens of millions, that died like that.
by mailund | 2026-01-23 07:37:31+00:00
I've heard this argument a lot, but is the bus driver really more than a rounding error on the balance sheet of the transportation company? I have no experience in this field, but I would imagine the infrastructure for buying and maintaining a fleet of busses, creating a route network, dealing with ticketing, dealing with disruptions, etc, etc, makes up most of the costs around running a public transport company?
by pjmlp | 2026-01-23 07:37:45+00:00
It certainly was when the options were pirate or buy, and the prices per year were much higher than $10/mo gets you.

The BIG difference is that we didn't felt entitled to use everything that is fashionable or switch apps every couple of months.

We would do a research across several magazines, local computer clubs, and the few lucky ones that had online access, some BBS or Usenet groups, then buy that one package and live with it for a couple of years, regardless of their limitations.
by rhubarbtree | 2026-01-23 07:38:14+00:00
You too can implement a slither of the features you need right now in an insecure form without hosting, support, maintenance or future development.

This reminds me of the people who think they can build docsend in a weekend. No, you cannot. You can build a wee throwaway app with some of the features of docsend. But that is not equivalent to what people pay docsend for.

Businesses and SaaS aren’t just a bunch of static code. Code is a part of them, but it’s actually a minority of the work and the service. It’s very common to see founders fall out because CTOs believe product and company = tech and CEOs do not.

If you’re a technical founder, learning this lesson will separate you from the pack.
by ACCount37 | 2026-01-23 07:38:32+00:00
What harms? I'm sick and tired of the approach to "AI safety" where "safety" stands for "annoy legitimate users with refusals and avoid PR risks".

The only thing worse than that is the Chinese "alignment is when what the AI says is aligned to the party line".

OpenAI has refusals dialed up to max, but they also just ship shit like GPT-4o, which was that one model that made "AI psychosis" a term. Probably the closest we've come to the industry shipping a product that actually just harms users.

Anthropic has fewer refusals, but they are yet to have an actual fuck up on anywhere near that scale. Possibly because they actually know their shit when it comes to tuning LLM behavior. Needless to say, I like Anthropic's "safety" more.
by Jamesbeam | 2026-01-23 07:38:32+00:00
There is no contradiction, i can give you the advice to live healthy and also tell you to not listen to my advice and do your own thing / research.

But I guess for people who are used these days to ask a word generator for live, love and health advice and end up telling a doctor in the ER that they don’t get why their liver is failing because ChatGPT must know it better, this concept is hard to grasp.

Best of luck to you.
by adangert | 2026-01-23 07:39:08+00:00
Conway's law seems apt here. The behavior of Claude will mirror the behavior and structure of anthropic. If anthropic deems one revenue source higher than another, Claude's behavior will optimize towards that regardless of what was published here.

What a company or employee "wants" and how a company is funded are usually diametrically opposed, the latter always taking precedence. Don't be evil!
by wolvoleo | 2026-01-23 07:39:28+00:00
No, but back then the US was a trusted partner. They wanted to provide military protection in return for geopolitical influence. Both are gone now of course.

However I don't think we need a huge military in terms of boots on the ground. We just need a nuclear umbrella to avoid the likes of Putin to roll into europe. Most of our foreign military adventures were requested by the US and only about oil, not safety related. Even the nato article 5 afghanistan trip was completely useless (bin laden wasn't even there, afghanistan had nothing to do with the attacks and since everyone pulled out things are 100% back the way they were).

And yeah we bought too much American tech and chinese manufacturing (but so does America obviously). Cars aren't that important to single out, a lot of us don't even have one.

And Europe was a lot more socialist > 30 years ago. It's the last decades that the neoliberalists (including the EU itself which has strong neoliberal underpinnings) have been hollowing out social protections in favour of business.

This is what I mean when I say the US model isn't necessarily the best. Americans are often completely convinced of that, that there is no other way than ultracapitalism and heartless social policies. I absolutely don't agree there. The US is best at making some people insane amounts of money but it's not great for social cohesion and a decent life for everyone.
by zapzupnz | 2026-01-23 07:39:31+00:00
All of the things on this website have affected my experience of macOS and iOS for a long, long time.

I definitely go straight to the Gmail website when I need to search for anything on my work account. Yes, I've got it set up to cache all the emails locally indefinitely. Have done for years. Even did so when my workplace used Office 365 instead of Google.

On Hacker News, of all websites, giving yourself the "Works on My Machine" badge is not a worthy contribution. It's dismissive of any experience other than your own.
by zzo38computer | 2026-01-23 07:39:35+00:00
> data types won't matter (hence XML doesn't have them, but after that JSON got them back)

JSON does not have very much or very good data types either, but (unlike XML) at least JSON has data types. ASN.1 has more data types (although standard ASN.1 lacks one data type that JSON has (key/value list), ASN.1X includes it), and if DER or another BER-related format is used then all types use the same framing, unlike JSON. One thing JSON lacks is octet string type, so instead you must use hex or base64, and must be converted after it has been read rather than during reading because it is not a proper binary data type.

> The funny thing about namespaces is that the prefix, by the XML docs, should be meaningless -- instead you should look at the URL of the namespace. It's like if we read a doc with snake:front-left-paw, and ask how come does a snake have paws? -- Because it's actually a bear -- see the definition of snake in the URL!

This is true of any format that you can import with your own names though, and since the names might otherwise conflict, it can also be necessary. This issue is not only XML (and JSON does not have namespaces at all, although some application formats that use it try to add them in some ways).
by VerifiedReports | 2026-01-23 07:39:43+00:00
Good list.

WTF happened to iOS text selection? It's a shitshow now. First Apple decided that the cursor shouldn't snap to characters. WHY? Why would I want to start a selection in the middle of a character? Oh yeah: I never would, and can't anyway. So why does the cursor go there?

Then there's the fact that if you press and hold and release, the "select all" option (and others) doesn't appear anymore. Try again. Try again. And then after the fifth? Seventh? try, suddenly you get the floating menu.

And then there's the now-often-useless magnifying glass, which frequently appears offscreen or behind the stupid notch.

And the window resizing. Ugh. It wasn't until what, the mid-2000s that you could resize an Apple window by anything other than THE LOWER-RIGHT CORNER. No other corners, and no edges. The sheer stupidity of this was galling.

When Apple finally "fixed" that, they did so in typical Apple fashion: grudgingly. They refuse to put frames on windows, so there's no clear area in which the cursor should become the resizing cursor. Is it any wonder that the resizing behavior is flaky as hell? And now it's even worse.
by c-jiph | 2026-01-23 07:39:46+00:00
Yeah using AI to do a first stage pass seems to work well. I did something similar with Nano Banana: https://github.com/c-jiph/bitmap-to-gcode

I didn't actually end up playing with it too much but the problem I found was it's a hard to get a one-size-fits-all prompt. The AI generated images are usually okay but some features aren't great for a plotter or just don't look visually pleasing. It's still better than having to manually mess with the initial image.
by 4k93n2 | 2026-01-23 07:39:47+00:00
checking out a streetview app beforehand is another option and makes it a bit easier to memorise things. instead of having to remember '2nd left, 3rd right, 1st left' you only have to remember the landmarks at each turn and then the instructions become 'left, right, left'

another thing ive done a few times for long journeys is to write down on paper a list of the road numbers and then beside each number write the distance that needs to be travelled on that road. just do the route in an app before you leave and copy the details from that. having only the list to work off definitely forces you to keep your brain more active
by Mikhail_Edoshin | 2026-01-23 07:39:56+00:00
"Meaning" has a rather vague meaning, but behavior is exact. If I know the behavior, it becomes a tool I can employ. If I only know supposed behavior, I cannot really use that. E.g. why we have so much SEO slop and so little "semantic" HTML? Because the behavior of search engines is real and thus usable, even when it is not documented much.
by telotortium | 2026-01-23 07:40:10+00:00
Lots of people threw small apps on their Github accounts for their own convenience in having a backup, and in case other people might be interested, but realistically never expected to get one more user. I have several scripts, Chrome extensions, and the like in my Github that fit that description. The difference is that coding agents let you write a one-user app at a much larger scale than before.
by seec | 2026-01-23 07:40:24+00:00
With older hardware the trick is to not upgrade the OS.

Apple's strategy is actually to make people auto-upgrade to make their work of maintaining older OS/software cheaper and make people who don't have recent enough hardware suffer.

It's funny that one argument for Apple was that you got updates for free. But in practice, Android doesn't need to upgrade the OS to access recent apps and ship security updates for old versions of Android. You just lose access to new OS functionalities, but it has been a while since there was much to care about.
by subscribed | 2026-01-23 07:41:06+00:00
I was asking Claude for sci-fi book recommendations "theme similar to X, awarded Y or Z").

I was also banned for that. Also didn't get the "FU" in email. Thankfully at least I didn't pay for this, but I'd file chargeback instantly if I could.

If anyone from Claude is reading it, you're c**s.
by benreesman | 2026-01-23 07:41:31+00:00
I mean I'm running TensorRT-LLM on a basket of spot vendors at NVFP4 with auction convexity math and Clickhouse Keeper and custom passthrough.

I need more tokens not less because the available weight models aren't quite as strong, but I roofline sm_100 and sm_120 for a living: I get a factor of 2 on the spot arb, a factor of 2 on the utilization, and a factor of 4-16 on the quant.

I come out ahead.
by Peteragain | 2026-01-23 07:42:05+00:00
I suspect we focus too much here with good old Methodist values around improvement and work. I seem to recall a study in Arnemland (North (wet) Australia) where the indigenous population spent about 10% of their time hunting and gathering - not an 8 hour day by any means. Two points: this was normal, but of course their numbers were controlled by inconsistent weather. The feast and famine cycle over the year mean even that 10 was not evenly distributed. The people are also of course nomadic, but not as much as you might think in that the procession follows a 'route' which looks much like the seasons in agricultural society. I suspect medieval society also partied hard, and bitched about their love life mostly, with the local brute squad creaming off most of the men for their wars, or disease or crop failure decimating the population every few generations.
by kenhwang | 2026-01-23 07:42:24+00:00
Odd, I didn't even know Proton had an AI feature until I read this article. Didn't get an email or tooltip while using the app. Didn't previously explicitly opt-out either, and when I check my notification settings, Lumo product updates is set to disabled.

Maybe someone's feature gate isn't working as intended?

I did get the Github Copilot spam email today though.
by matthewsinclair | 2026-01-23 07:42:27+00:00
Ah, the TI-99/4A. My first computer. What a mercurial beast of thing that was. I desperately wanted a C64 for Xmas but my Dad was somehow convinced to buy one of these. It had about 4 games (including “Hunt the Wumpus”) and so instead of playing the myriad C64 games that all my mates were playing, I was forced to learn BASIC and try to write my own! 45 years later, I’m still programming.
by pjmlp | 2026-01-23 07:42:42+00:00
It certainly is, because I still don't see GNU/Linux desktops on sale, other than the short lived netbooks movement.

So normal people have stores with other people that they can talk to when they have problems, or just drag their computer into the store.

With Linux it is always the relative that happens to be around, or drive in on purpose, and had to manually install the <insert favourite distro> of the day.
by BlueShrimpGames | 2026-01-23 07:42:56+00:00
Thanks proc0!

Totally get where you are coming from, but there is no way I could have coded anywhere near as fast without AI. The game has no 'engine', it is built from the ground up. While there are a few 'god classes', and a little spaghetti, it's overall pretty decent. I can run many agents in parallel without merge conflicts due to the fact it's well separated and modular. It's closer to a game engine for Survivor Roguelikes than a game itself. The bottleneck was actually balance, sound, music, art etc.

The article goes into more details, but you will find that AI can easily handle it if you use the techniques I discussed :) Let me know if you got questions about that further, I will continue to do more coverage into it over time, as there are plenty of techniques that help out (many in the article, some not :D).

But still expect to put in plenty of work, it's not some 1 shot machine...although maybe Ralph Loops will change it soon...which I have experimented with!
by gherkinnn | 2026-01-23 07:42:58+00:00
> What we can do, however is uncover the lives of these peasant households through modeling.

> So the models we’re going to set up are going to be most applicable in that space: towards the end of antiquity in the Mediterranean.

> I’ll try to be clear as we move what elements of the model are which are more broadly universal and which are very context sensitive

The author addresses this in the first paragraphs before getting in to the meat of it.
by abbassix | 2026-01-23 07:43:13+00:00
We still do not have a standardized way to represent Machine Learning concepts. For example in vision model, I see lots of papers confused about the "skip connections" and "residual connection" and when they concatenate channels they call them "residual connection" while it shows that they haven't understood why we call them "residual" in the first place. In my humble opinion, each conference, and better be a confederation of conferences, work together to provide a glossary, a technical guideline, and also a special machine translation tool, to correct a non-clear-with-lots-of-grammatical-error-English like mine!
by codeflo | 2026-01-23 07:43:19+00:00
> Not sure whether the obfuscation is fully synchronous, i.e waiting for the server response before continuing.

The people who designed SSH aren't idiots, and also, you can answer this question by simple observation: When you connect to a server with ~200ms ping, which is somewhat common in the scenarios you describe and which I've done many times, it does not take 20 seconds to show a keystroke.
by curtisblaine | 2026-01-23 07:43:19+00:00
Sometimes you just need to read the sources that were linked to you:

> So the models we’re going to set up are going to be most applicable in that space: towards the end of antiquity in the Mediterranean. They’ll also be pretty applicable to the European/Mediterranean Middle Ages and some parts – particularly mortality patterns – are going to apply universally to all pre-modern agrarian societies. I’ll try to be clear as we move what elements of the model are which are more broadly universal and which are very context sensitive (meaning they differ place-to-place or period-to-period) and to the degree I can say, how they vary. But our ‘anchor point’ is going to be the Romans, operating in the (broadly defined) iron age, at the tail end of antiquity.

https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-an...
by VerifiedReports | 2026-01-23 07:43:24+00:00
Interesting. But WTF is a "primary" Apple account? My original Apple ID isn't an E-mail address, so they forced me (and others in that situation) to create another one for iCloud because that one inexplicably has to be an E-mail address.

I use both for quite a few things. Which one is "primary?"
by Metasyntactic | 2026-01-23 07:43:43+00:00
> I'm curious how you can make such statements involving absolute time values, without specifying what the minimum hardware requirements are.

That's a very fair point. In this case. I'm using the minimum requirements for visual studio

> Do you claim your engine would give me sub-ms feedback on such hardware?

I would expect yes, for nearly all edits. See the links I've provided in this discussion to our incremental parsing architecture.

Briefly, you can expect an edit to only cause a small handful of allocations. And the parser will be able to reuse almost the entirety of the other tree, skipping over vast swaths of it (before and after the edit) trivially.

Say you have a 100 types, each with a 100 members, each with 100 statements. An edit to a statement will trivially blow through 99 of the types, reusing them. Then in the type surrounding the edited statement, it will reuse 99 members. Then in the edited member, it will reuse 99 statements and just reparse the one affected one.

So basically it's just the computer walking 297 nodes (absolutely cheap on any machine), and reparsing a statement (also cheap).

So this should still be microseconds.

--

Now. That relates to parsing. But you did say: would give me sub-ms feedback on such hardware?

So it depends on what you mean by feedback. I don't make any claims here about layers higher up and how they operate. But I can make real, measured, claims about incremental parsing performance.
by lloeki | 2026-01-23 07:44:11+00:00
You don't have to go to milsim to not be able to carry an entire armoury of RPG-actually-full-blown-missile-launcher, grenade launcher, assault rifle, sniper rifle, DMR, submachine gun, multiple sidearms, plus various other alien weaponry, each complete with enough ammunition to fill an 18-wheeler trailer if desired to be stored with any sort of safety.

It was fine when I was playing Doom ][ but that's something that started bothering the hell out of me back when Half-Life came out with its believable sci-fi setting, as it kept breaking my suspension of disbelief.

"Can carry only two, maybe three tops with sidearm" seems to be the rule these days.
by danaris | 2026-01-23 07:44:32+00:00
And, importantly, there isn't one single "guess culture"; there are a myriad of different micro-cultures with their own local signals and codes for subtly communicating the information that isn't spelled out in speech.

So even if you are a consummate Guesser, and have been one all your life, if you move across the country (or even just across town!) and find yourself in a group with a different set of Guessers, you may be nearly as badly off as if you were an Asker in that subculture.
by seec | 2026-01-23 07:44:35+00:00
I'm always dumbfounded by people constantly praising AirDrop. It hasn't worked properly more often than it did. And that's not talking about the times when you send something, it gets accepted, and it just ends up in a void, not to be found anywhere.

At the end of the day, in most cases, it would be preferable to just connect the damn thing with a cable and send things that way. If you send a large file, it takes a while, and having to redo the process because of some bug kills any benefit from the convenience of not having to use a cable.