MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by imwally | 2026-01-17 23:01:09+00:00
I’m not a big fan of dark mode and I seem to be in the minority these days. Probably 99% of my colleagues at work use dark mode and when I screen share I get the usual “ah, my eyes!”

The interesting thing is, I’ve noticed when I read white on black and look elsewhere I see horizontal lines in my vision. So really I’m the one who should be shouting about their eyes. Maybe that’s just me, though?

I guess I want my computing experience to be like that of reading a book. Not sure I’d like white text on black paper.
by daxfohl | 2026-01-17 23:01:25+00:00
Not just the abstraction ladder though. Also the situational awareness ladder, the functionality ladder, and most importantly the trust ladder.

I can kind of trust the thing to make code changes because the task is fairly well-defined, and there are compile errors, unit tests, code reviews, and other gating factors to catch mistakes. As you move up the abstraction ladder though, how do I know that this thing is actually making sound decisions versus spitting out well-formatted AIorrhea?

At the very least, they need additional functionality to sit in on and contribute to meetings, write up docs and comment threads, ping relevant people on chat when something changes, and set up meetings to resolve conflicts or uncertainties, and generally understand their role, the people they work with and their roles, levels, and idiosyncrasies, the relative importance and idiosyncrasies of different partners, the exceptions for supposed invariants and why they exist and what it implies and when they shouldn't be used, when to escalate vs when to decide vs when to defer vs when to chew on it for a few days as it's doing other things, etc.

For example, say you have an authz system and you've got three partners requesting three different features, the combination of which would create an easily identifiable and easily attackable authz back door. Unless you specifically ask AI to look for this, it'll happily implement those three features and sink your company. You can't fault it: it did everything you asked. You just trusted it with an implicit requirement that it didn't meet. It wasn't "situationally aware" enough to read between the lines there. What you really want is something that would preemptively identify the conflicts, schedule meetings with the different parties, get a better understanding of what each request is trying to unblock, and ideally distill everything down into a single feature that unblocks them all.

Maybe that's possible someday, but right now they're still just okay coders with no understanding of anything beyond the task you just gave them to do. That's fine for single-person hobby projects, but it'll be a while before we see them replacing engineers in the business world.
by krackers | 2026-01-17 23:01:40+00:00
Although revisiting this, you have to be a bit careful about the argument.

Basically what you're doing is breaking down p(correct) = p(correct & agree) + p(correct & disagree) where former is 0.80.8 and latter is 0.80.2. Explicitly computing the conditional probability however makes calculating more difficult: p(correct | agree)p(agree) + p(correct | disagree)p(disagree). This is something like (16/17) * (0.80.8 + 0.20.2) + 0.5 * (0.80.22) which is not easy to arrive at intuitively unless you grind through the calculation.

So _conditioned_ on them agreeing you are right ~94% while conditioned on them disagreeing it's a coin-toss (because when they disagree exactly one is right, and it's equally likely to be alice or bob).
by stopbulying | 2026-01-17 23:01:54+00:00
> The US started perpetrating extrajudicial killing in the Caribbean in September 2025. ICC prosecution of Mr. Duterte for very similar EJK offenses was deferred in September 2025.

Is there any connection between these offenses?

Philippines population: 117m

US population: 350m

Duterte: 76 (ICC, 2011-2019)

Trump: 110 (estimated, 2025-09 — 2026-01)
by krackers | 2026-01-17 23:01:59+00:00
Although revisiting this, you have to be a bit careful about the argument.

Basically what you're doing is breaking down p(correct) = p(correct & agree) + p(correct & disagree) where former is 0.8*0.8 and latter is 0.8*0.2. Explicitly computing the conditional probability however makes calculating more difficult: p(correct | agree)*p(agree) + p(correct | disagree)*p(disagree). This is something like (16/17) * (0.8*0.8 + 0.2*0.2) + 0.5 * (0.8*0.2*2) which is not easy to arrive at intuitively unless you grind through the calculation.

So _conditioned_ on them agreeing you are right ~94% while conditioned on them disagreeing it's a coin-toss (because when they disagree exactly one is right, and it's equally likely to be alice or bob). Interesting case where the unconditional probability is actually more intuitive and easier than the conditional.
by ninkendo | 2026-01-17 23:02:37+00:00
Related:

I’ve always found it crazy that my LLM has access to such terrible tools compared to mine.

It’s left with grepping for function signatures, sending diffs for patching, and running `cat` to read all the code at once.

I however, run an IDE and can run a simple refactoring tool to add a parameter to a function, I can “follow symbol” to see where something is defined, I can click and get all usages of a function shown at a glance, etc etc.

Is anyone working on making it so LLM’s get better tools for actually writing/refactoring code? Or is there some “bitter lesson”-like thing that says effort is always better spent just increasing the context size and slurping up all the code at once?
by vee-kay | 2026-01-17 23:02:42+00:00
From someone who has managed both Developmentals team and Operations team for decades.. trust me, they are different beasts and have to be handled/tackled differently.

Expecting Devs or Ops to do both types of work, is usually asking for trouble, unless the organization is geared up from the ground up for such seamless work. It is more of a corporate problem, rather than a team working style or work expectations & behavior problem.

The same goes for Agile vs Waterfall. Agile works well if the organization is inherently (or overhauled to be) agile, otherwise it doesn't.
by findthewords | 2026-01-17 23:02:46+00:00
I think that pure white (255) and pure black (0) should be using extremely sparingly. #FFFFFF? Why not #f6f6ef or #eceff4? Lower contrast can improve legibility, too much contrast can hinder it.
#000000? Why not #121821, a dark shade of blue? Nothing in real life is perfectly dark.

Thankfully HN has remained pleasingly off-white.
by throwuxiytayq | 2026-01-17 23:04:02+00:00
Dark mode simply makes sense. Black pixels == no light == no photoreceptor stimulation == the default state. The fact that we used to blast our eyes with near-fully lit displays is a historical artifact of the early days of graphical computer interfaces. I find it annoying (and potentially medically dangerous to some people) that certain actions result in a short white flash while the content is rendered. Mostly happens in web-related apps.

Light mode is masochism mode, with just a few exceptions: e-ink, highly lit environments (that are uncomfortable to work in anyways), people with vision problems that tolerate light-themed UIs better, and weirdos who enjoy staring at a flashlight. If you're gonna use that, might as well just turn down the screen brightness - but I agree with the author that perhaps a middle ground "gray theme" would be better, if slightly less attractive to UI designers.
by Agraillo | 2026-01-17 23:04:02+00:00
No more questions, Your Honor. Forgive my joyful attitude, but it was your choice to participate in this discussion. As you know from your years and thousands of posts, HN threads are often ephemeral and short-lived - and this one is no exception. Or maybe not... because of your active self-defense posting here, I assume for the first time since the arrest. Now dozens of fellow (HN) hackers are querying your nicknames on Google, Algolia, and whatever else they have at hand. I'm not sure they'll find someone who genuinely fights for a more secure world. Or prove me wrong if you wish.
by 3rodents | 2026-01-17 23:04:11+00:00
I have stared at a light mode screen for 16 hours a day for 20 years without even the hint of discomfort. 5 minutes of dark mode and my eyes feel someone is shining lasers at me.

I have concluded that light mode is for light mode people and dark mode is for dark mode people. Making light mode a little darker or dark mode a little lighter isn’t going to change how people experience interfaces. Make light mode for light people and dark mode for dark mode people.

Maybe things are getting brighter, but it hasn’t been noticeable to me.
by mindslight | 2026-01-17 23:05:28+00:00
> In what twisted imaginary world is saying that a serial killer was fair

Exactly this. One doesn't use the word "fair" to begin with. Being killed is decidedly not fair, period.

> I would like to see links to your opinions where you pointed to the "longstanding normalized hypocrisy in the systen" as a problem before the tariff nonsense.

Write a script go to back through my HN comments as far as you'd like? I don't have a blog or anything.

Off the top of my head - I was against the Iraq War, against Obama's drone assassinations, against intervention in Libya, against Israel's apartheid and genocide except for maybe two weeks after Oct 7 (they burned through their credibility that fast).

The main US international military action I've ever been in support of is helping Ukraine - it seems like a just defensive war of people who earnestly want liberalization and closer ties to the western sphere of influence. But even on that subject, the covert US meddling that set that stage for that conflict is still condemnable.

On a different but related topic, I've been against the surveillance industry ("big tech") from around when the term AJAX was coined.

Is there anything else you'd like my opinion on to show I'm not new to the subject?
by cerru905 | 2026-01-17 23:05:45+00:00
I kept getting annoyed by LLM inference non-reproducibility, and one thing that really surprised me is that changing batch size can change outputs even under “deterministic” settings.

So I built DetLLM: it measures and proves repeatability using token-level traces + a first-divergence diff, and writes a minimal repro pack for every run (env snapshot, run config, applied controls, traces, report).

I prototyped this version today in a few hours with Codex. The hardest part was the HLD I did a few days ago, but I was honestly surprised by how well Codex handled the implementation. I didn’t expect it to come together in under a day.

Would love feedback, and if you find any prompts/models/setups that still make it diverge.
by fumi2026 | 2026-01-17 23:06:02+00:00
Typical HN response: pivoting to a pedantic debate about licenses to avoid the actual ethical crisis.

Whether I use GPL, MIT, or a custom Copyleft, it doesn't solve the Cognitive Tax problem. Licensing doesn't fix the fact that a 'community' of highly-paid engineers expects me to provide years of non-perturbative logic for free, while they lack the bandwidth to even peer-review it without an LLM.

You say 'Free Software' protects the user. Fine. But who protects the outlier creator from being mentally strip-mined by a sea of Takers? You’re suggesting a better cage, not a path to sovereignty.

Again: If you can’t verify the math without a chatbot, are you a 'contributor' to the common good, or just a sophisticated parasite?"
by neumann | 2026-01-17 23:06:17+00:00
Thank-you! It is great to read a honest and self-aware journal covering this.

As someone who fantasizes about running my own thing, working for a few start-ups have made me very stringent on what my requirements are for starting something (co-founders, investment, location, market). And also that these requirements have become so very risk-averse that I probably am not the personality profile to run a business! Nevermind the endless imposter syndrome.
by estearum | 2026-01-17 23:07:54+00:00
That’s actually not the question that you asked, lmao. You can scroll up to see the question you actually asked.

No, the science doesn’t show it is “objectively bad,” which is why I didn’t claim it was. I said it is not an idea endorsed by many climate scientists (which it’s not), and that’s mostly because of the numerous unknowns involved with perturbing a highly complex system, the expected irreversibility of many of its effects, and the path dependence of making us perpetually dependent upon dumping aerosols lest we risk a global climate snapback effect.

This is a summary of the current posture of the climate science community towards this idea, which is not “it is objectively bad,” nor is it something I can spend my time linking you to a singular paper on.

That is why my suggestion, from the very very top, was to get curious about why so few climate scientists support this idea for climate intervention.

Any good faith curious person should pretty immediately ask themselves this question to begin with.

It does not mean we need to listen to said scientists in and have them exclusively dictate policy, but if “climate community doesn’t like climate solution” doesn’t set off enough alarm bells for YOU to go open up Google Scholar, then you are not earnestly interested in the problem and your “just asking questions” approach here is actually just profound laziness.
by prmoustache | 2026-01-17 23:08:08+00:00
I am with you.

DevOps is a methodology. DevOps as a role or team name is a fantasy from people who do not understand the methodology.

If you want DevOps to work, your Ops must be member of the development team, take part in the sprints, etc. But many company do not want to do that because they want to separate ops and dev budget/accounting and do not want to hire enough people with ops skills.
by Folcon | 2026-01-17 23:08:27+00:00
I don't know if anyone else felt this[0], but my god did reading this part hit like an absolute truck

Every child is hypomanic, convinced of their own specialness. Even most teenagers still suspect that, if everything went right, they could change the world.

It’s not just nerds. Everyone has to crash into reality. The guitar player who starts a garage band in order to become a rockstar. The varsity athlete who wants to make the big leagues. They all eventually realize, no, I’m mediocre. Even the ones who aren’t mediocre, the ones with some special talent, only have one special talent (let’s say cartooning) and no more.

I don’t know how the musicians and athletes cope. I hear stories about washed-up alcoholic former high school quarterbacks forever telling their girlfriends about how if Coach had only put them in for the last quarter during the big game, things would have gone differently. But since most writers are nerds, it’s the nerds who dominate the discussion, so much so that the whole affair gets dubbed “Former Gifted Kid Syndrome”.

Every nerd who was the smartest kid in their high school goes to an appropriately-ranked college and realizes they’re nothing special. But also, once they go into some specific field they find that intellect, as versatile as it is, can only take them so far. And for someone who was told their whole childhood that they were going to cure cancer (alas, a real quote from my elementary school teacher), it’s a tough pill to swallow.

I'd not at all considered that "Former Gifted Kid Syndrome" generalises to pretty much everyone, from being told that you're special to realising that you're not all the way to being incredibly skilled or talented in an area, but that talent only going so far and then having to get over their not being special and that it applies to physical and mental capabilities

This sort of false expectation setting and feeling of exceptionalism eventually hits the cold hard reality of the limits of your capability somewhere and that can really break you

Reminds me especially of some people I saw in university who were absolutely brilliant, but so deeply affected by that one mistake they made or limit they had found where they had not expected one

Heck I felt the same, coming to terms with ones limits is a deeply challenging experience even if it is a very humanising one, I wasn't expecting to have that fall into my lap today

There's a few things I enjoy about reading Scott Alexander, he's got some really good takes now and again that in my eyes make reading his essays worth it

-[0]: https://www.astralcodexten.com/i/184503512/its-not-funny-if-...
by simonask | 2026-01-17 23:08:31+00:00
I don't think I've ever worked at a company where slacking off was the problem. The vast majority of people want to do good work.

What I _have_ seen is several companies afflicted by this really strange characteristic of the software development industry: We appear to be the only industry on the planet where it is common to pick leaders (executives) that know nothing about the product or how it's made.

You can't run a bridge building company without knowing how to build a bridge. You can't run a law firm without knowing law.

You don't need to know all the nitty gritty - big picture is important - but understanding the product _in depth_ is a requirement in any business.
by fumi2026 | 2026-01-17 23:08:32+00:00
A charming historical reference. However, using 1989 logic to justify the 'cognitive looting' of 2026 is like refusing to patch a kernel vulnerability because you're fond of the legacy code.
Back then, the battle was over hardware monopolies. Today, the crisis is the asymmetric strip-mining of human intellect by massive compute. If your worldview hasn't received a security update since the 80s, you’re not a hacker; you’re just a legacy system waiting to be deprecated.
by kshri24 | 2026-01-17 23:09:01+00:00
Determinism is not strictly anti-randomness (though I can see why one can confuse it to be polar opposites). Rather we do not even have true randomness (at least not proven) and should actually be called pseudorandom. Determinism just means that if you have the same input parameters (considering all parameters have been accounted for), you will get the same result. In other words, you can start with a particular random seed (pseudorandom seed to be precise) and always end up with the same end result and that would be considered deterministic.

> You haven't done a lot of gardening if you don't know plants

I grow "herbs".

> there's a biological explanation

Exactly. There is always an explanation for every phenomena that occurs in this observable, physical World. There is a defined cause and effect. Even if it "feels random". That's not how it is with LLMs. Because in between your deterministic input parameters and the output that is generated, there is a black box: the model itself. You have no access to the billions of parameters within the models which means you are not sure you can always reproduce the output. That black box is what causes non-determinism.

EDIT: just wanted to add - "attacked by parasites all the time", is why I said if you have control over the environment. Controlling environment encompasses dealing with parasites as well. Think of well-controlled environment like a lab.
by itopaloglu83 | 2026-01-17 23:09:54+00:00
Not everybody own $4k monitors, so automatic brightness isn’t always available.

Regardless though, due to the design inconsistencies of the system, one screen is too bright that causes to reduce the brightness and another one uses literally 1/1,000,000 contrast difference between tabs to distinguish the active one, so it’s impossible to get a base brightness correct.

I’m using a MacBook Pro M4 and as I move around the house, automatic brightness either tries to blind me despite I’ve been in a dark room for a minute, or simply refuses to turn the brightness up when the sun is shining down into the room. It’s certainly designed for a certain environment, but not definitely a home.
by cheema33 | 2026-01-17 23:10:47+00:00
Computer use and screenshots are context intensive. Text is not. The more context you give to an LLM, the dumber it gets. Some people think at 40% context utilization, the LLM starts to get into the dumb zone. That is where the limitations are as of today. This is why CLI based tools like Claude Code are so good. And any attempt at computer use has fallen by the wayside.

There are some potential solutions to this problem that come to mind. Use subagents to isolate the interesting bits about a screenshot and only feed that to the main agent with a summary. This will all still have a significantly higher token usage compared to a text based interface, but something like this could potentially keep the LLM out of the dumb zone a little longer.
by fragmede | 2026-01-17 23:11:04+00:00
FWIW, https://indowwindows.com/ (San Francisco) make window inserts that are the exact same size as the existing window, plus a wooden frame, so they look exactly like the existing windows. Mostly for keeping the exterior look of buildings in SF due to regulations, they block out sound and help with temperature control. They're pricey tho.

As for solar. If you have the budget and the disaster preparedness for it, there are some camping grade solar + battery systems that aren't house-grade, but great for power outages. The systems range from small (affordable), to the 1000 Plus, consisting of a battery with 1264Wh capacity and 120 v inverter, along with 200W of solar panels. That one'll run. you $1,500.
by blutoot | 2026-01-17 23:11:28+00:00
I've always felt that DevOps became a function/team partly because companies and especially SWE's started complaining that they were spending too much time "doing Ops work" and product/business started demanding more features for which they running out of cycles. And add to that the burnout from being on-call (especially if the dev team is relatively small and you have to go on-call every 2-3 weekends).
by elmascato | 2026-01-17 23:11:50+00:00
The point about "removing the mental overhead" is underrated. It is often the cognitive load of the pricing model, rather than the absolute cost, that kills adoption.

I'm seeing a strong parallel in SaaS regarding Purchasing Power Parity (PPP). We often assume a user in India or Brazil doesn't convert because they "can't afford" $49, but the friction is often psychological. Even for high earners in those regions, paying a double-digit USD subscription feels "wrong" or predatory relative to local goods.

Just as you are abstracting away the token math to lower the barrier to entry, we need to abstract away the currency inequality. I've been working on a client-side widget to handle this (tierwise.dev) and noticed that simply aligning the price with the user's local context making it "feel" fair spikes conversion rates significantly.

Whether it's flattening token variance or localizing purchasing power, the goal is the same: stop the user from doing math and let them focus on the product value.
by zerocrates | 2026-01-17 23:11:50+00:00
The author looks like they've only looked at the color of the dead space so probably not significant for this specifically.

The trend against skueuomorphism maybe equally relevant: that early example is a descendant of Apple's previous brushed-metal UI. Though even among the flat ones there's been a trend toward lightening.

It'd also be interesting to see what area the author picked on each screenshot: a big difference, at least before Tahoe, if you decide that the Finder sidebar or top bar is what you're going to look at.
by michaelmrose | 2026-01-17 23:11:55+00:00
In the US parents can mostly give their kids porn, guns, and alcohol at home. Wherein the drug isn't itself illegal you are for practical purposes also able to give your kids drugs.

Being shown to cause harm is also a meaninglessly low standard. Bathtubs, pools, and bikes can cause harm. You would need to show an actually useful standard. Lets propose will cause an unacceptable level of harmn that cannot be mitigated by less restrictive means.

I don't buy the argument that you are unacceptably harmed because you aren't capable of denying your kid social media nor do I buy the idea that social media couldn't be regulated to be less shitty and harmful.