MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tracerbulletx | 2026-01-14 00:19:12+00:00
I don't really see the point in worrying about prompting, and agents and mcps, and skills and all this as a skill to learn. They're trivial if you're already a developer and if it gets good enough that you don't need to know software engineering, there's not going to be anything to learn. Setting it up is a subset of software engineering so it will be able to do that its self once it can solve problems reliably without someone to understand what's going on to check it.
by JCattheATM | 2026-01-14 00:19:32+00:00
Plans, goals, routine, separation of concerns.

Instead of having a million different tabs open, use a tab session manager, save the stuff you want to read later, and keep open only stuff pertinent to things you are working on.

Prioritize your projects to have actionable goals.

When you procrastinate, try to do so by being productive on smaller projects.

Be aware of your own nature, and try to exert control over it. Recognize that not every idea or desire is useful, and learn to discard the ones that are not and investigate or give more attention to the ones that are.

Organization, take notes and organize them. I often have a scratchpad textfile open, that I then organize into sections (e.g. app ideas, ideas for specific code projects, movie ideas, whatever), break these up further into project or topic files. The ones that grow and get fleshed out are the ones worth pursuing.

Have a healthy sleep and recreation routine to not get burned out.
by msarnoff | 2026-01-14 00:19:34+00:00
The ancestor of the RCX was the "programmable brick" project out of the MIT Media Lab in the mid-1990s

http://archive.pbrick.info/The%20MIT%20Programmable%20Brick%...

https://web.archive.org/web/20011212030110/http://fredm.www....

Growing up in New England at the time, I was very lucky that they ran a pilot project at my elementary school. We programmed our "sketches" (though we didn't use this term) in LogoWriter on Mac LC IIs and flashed them using a weird dongle that connected to the brick via RJ11 cable.

I owe a lot to my teachers and Fred Martin's group. I don't think I'd be a developer today without that experience.
by nobodyandproud | 2026-01-14 00:19:37+00:00
> a place where a single misfortune—perhaps a car crash or an illness or the loss of a job—can lead to ruin.

Is it wrong?

The US strongly discourages a strong social/family network (moving out at 18); and are being squeezed financially.

The government-run social safety networks are being starved.

Something has to change.
by xp84 | 2026-01-14 00:19:59+00:00
Why do those countries not take asylum seekers? I wonder if they think it's not up to other random countries to evacuate whole failed states, or that they have their own problems and don't need to be taking responsibility for those of other countries.

I think it's not generosity to give other people's money to 'asylum seekers.' On the other hand, individuals should be able to sponsor 'asylum seekers' as long as they personally pay for housing and feeding them, and those 'asylum seekers' keep a clean criminal record.
by dekhn | 2026-01-14 00:20:08+00:00
23&Me data is simply not accurate enough to make reasonable predictions about health outcomes.

I have a whole genome and nothing Google has built has been able to do anything useful with it, medically speaking. I could use DeepVariant to re-map all the raw reads, it would only slightly increase the accuracy of the estimate of my genome sequence. When I met with genetic counselors, they analyzed my genome and told me I had no known markers for any disease (and they also told me they Google all the unique variants that show up in the report).

(for what it's worth, I literally went to work at Google to improve their medical/health/genomics research, and after working on it a few years I concluded that the entire genomics field is about 90% fantasy. If you want actionable data, there are a small number of well-regulated tests that can help in a limited set of circumstances, but those aren't whole genome tests).
by mhb | 2026-01-14 00:20:39+00:00
Yeah. Let's pile on enough definitional nuance in order to apply it to a situation in which it is clear that the previous, universal understanding doesn't fit in order to stoke outrage.

Besides, that's clearly not Israel's intent or it would have already been accomplished.

Maybe the reason for your "sloppiness" is that you instinctively understand the absurdity?
by derbOac | 2026-01-14 00:21:01+00:00
The betting-voting distinction is interesting and was on my mind while I was reading it.

So much of this breaks down when the binary nature of the variables involved becomes continuous or at least nonbinary.

It's an example of a more general interest of mine, how structural characteristics of an inferential scenario affect the value of information that is received.

I could also see this being relevant to diagnostic scenarios hypothetically.
by jumpocelot | 2026-01-14 00:21:09+00:00
PS although the add-on was removed from Mozilla’s add-on store (AMO) (because of DMCA Takedown Notice) it’s still signed and manually checked for security by Mozilla (hence the delay in signing).

That explains why I couldn't find it. I believe this is the most comprehensive and up-to-date paywall bypasser out there.
by gbnwl | 2026-01-14 00:21:18+00:00
So I can tell you don’t use these tools, or at least much, because at the speed of development with them you’ll be knee deep in tech debt in a day, not a month, but as a corollary can have the same agentic coding tools undergo the equivalent of weeks of addressing tech debt the next day. Well, I think this applies to greenfield AI-first oriented projects that work this way from the get go and with few humans in the loop (human to human communication definitely becomes the rate limiting step). But I imagine that’s not the nature of your work.
by minimaltom | 2026-01-14 00:21:27+00:00
Analogies are all messy here, but I would compare the values of the residual stream to what you are describing as thought.

We force this residual stream to project to the logprobs of all tokens, just as a human in the act of speaking a sentence is forced to produce words. But could this residual stream represent thoughts which don't map to words?

Its plausible, we already have evidence that things like glitch-token representations trend towards the centroid of the high-dimensional latent space, and logprobs for tokens that represent wildly-branching trajectories in output space (i.e. "but" vs "exactly" for specific questions) represent a kind of cautious uncertainty.
by LexiMax | 2026-01-14 00:21:27+00:00
> also has to turn it into a moral or ethical question so they can either feel better about it themselves,

You phrased this as an either-or thing, so I am actually genuinely curious....what exactly is wrong with this attitude?

We as people do a lot of things in our lives that probably don't make a difference, but that makes us feel better as individuals. Genuinely, what's the harm in cutting something out of your life because it makes you feel better?
by 6r17 | 2026-01-14 00:21:53+00:00
Very thankful for the 1liner tldr

edit : I had an afterthought about this because it ended up being a low quality comment ;

Bringing up such TLDR give a lot of value to reading content, especially on HN, as it provides way more inertia and let focus on -

reading this short form felt like that cool friend who gave you a heads up.
by sheeh | 2026-01-14 00:22:00+00:00
As someone who is more involved in shaping the product direction rather than engineering what composes the product - I will readily admit many product people are utterly, utterly clueless.

Most people have no clue the craftsmanship, work etc it takes to create a great product. LLMs are not going to change this, in fact they serve as a distraction.

I’m not a SWE so I gain nothing by being bearish on the contributions of LLMs to the real economy ;)
by tonymet | 2026-01-14 00:22:11+00:00
I heard his ex wife Shelly Miles supported him through his hospice and announced his passing. She deserves praise for being there to support him during his final days.

Scott Adams was a great guy, who seemed candid, approachable, funny and exceedingly sharp.

Life is a gift. I pray he passed without too much suffering, and he's with God now.

Rest in Peace Scott Adams.
by m463 | 2026-01-14 00:22:20+00:00
I see stuff like this and think of these two things:

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle

or

2) "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

or maybe originally:

"First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you"
by luxuryballs | 2026-01-14 00:22:40+00:00
the context was black people hating and attacking white people so he’s like “ok then I’ll stay out of your way” and somehow that was racist, I think if you’re not aware that some culture pockets and mindsets like this do exist it might seem more racist because it would seem like he’s talking about everyone on earth just for being black but that’s clearly absurd and he was always a smart analytical guy so there’s no way that’s what he meant
by Terr_ | 2026-01-14 00:23:20+00:00
Feels of 1995: "A personal computer and an internet connection are democratically-cheap pieces of capital-equipment than you can use to accomplish the goals that matter to you! Vast new realms of agency and autonomy! If you don't like it, make your own!"

Feels of 2025: "The device in your pocket is a way for companies to make you see the things they want you to see and nothing else you dirty criminal. You can talk to your friends but if your GPS trace is interrupted your account will be suspended. If you don't like it, sucks to be you."
by bdangubic | 2026-01-14 00:23:32+00:00
> if you’re seeing output that is consistently better than what you produce by hand, you’re probably just below average at programming

even though this statement does not mathematically / statistically make sense - vast majority of SWEs are “below average.” therein lies the crux of this debate. I’ve been coding since the 90’s and:

- LLM output is better than mine from the 90’s

- LLM output is better than mine from early 2000’s

- LLM output is worse than any of mine from 2010 onward

- LLM output (in the right hands) is better than 90% of human-written code I have seen (and I’ve seen a lot)
by kennykartman | 2026-01-14 00:23:42+00:00
Again, just for the sake of the discussion: Iran banned starlink, people are getting terminals (BTW, I'm happy they managed to). Starlink is still providing the service in the area although they are aware it's illegal and people can be behaded for owning a starlink terminal. But hey, Iran and USA are enemies. The fact that Iran is the only country where Starlink is active even if it's NOT approved is food for thought. There are other countries, where there are regimes that control communications, where Starlink is not active.
by majormajor | 2026-01-14 00:24:10+00:00
I can't speak to outside the US, but here companies have gotten much more worker-hostile in the last 30 years and generally the economy has not delivered a bunch of wonderful new jobs to replace the ones that the information age already eliminated (let alone the ones that people are trying to eliminate now). A lot of new job growth is in relatively lower-paying and lower-stability roles.

Forty years ago I would've had a personal secretary for my engineering job, and most likely a private office. Now I get to manage more things myself in addition to being expected to be online 24x7 - so I'm not even convinced that eliminating those jobs improve things for the people who now get to self-serve instead of being more directly assisted.
by spopejoy | 2026-01-14 00:24:27+00:00
> The reality is that most hand-made art is an unconscious mash-up of learned signifiers mediated by some kind of technique

Yeah, no. Competent artists are not generalizable as "unconscious", solely "mashing up" influences or input, or even working with "signifiers": many are exquisitely aware of their sources; many employ diverse and articulated methodologies for creation and elaboration; many enjoy working with the concrete elements of their medium with no concern for signification. Even "technique" does not have a uniform meaning across different fields and modes.
by tonymet | 2026-01-14 00:24:29+00:00
side note to those who scorn him. Think about movies like Star Wars where the fallen resurrect as their younger image. In the 90s/early 2ks geeks all loved Dilbert & Scott Adams. It wasn't until the Trump campaign that folks became resentful. Maybe take this moment to put ill feelings aside and remember him as we all did -- as Dilbert's Dad.
by dredmorbius | 2026-01-14 00:24:49+00:00
Do you have any specific pointers to his work covering this?

Bateson (and several associated anthropologists) are fascinating to me, though more by reputation than direct knowledge.

And yes I realise that "a lot of [his] work..." suggests that this shouldn't be too hard to find ;-)

... some early exploratory search suggests Toward an Ecology of Mind, perhaps?
by vturner | 2026-01-14 00:25:24+00:00
Similar story here. I got RIS 2.0 after it had been out for awhile, but my parents couldn't justify the cost. Finally, Toys R Us had a beat up box sitting on the shelf and marked it down. I wandered over to that aisle every time we went in. Then it showed up one Christmas.

I learned Java because of leJOS too. I wanted to display something on the screen. The rest is my career.
by zdragnar | 2026-01-14 00:25:37+00:00
Just yesterday I saw an article about a police station's AI body cam summarizer mistakenly claim that a police officer turned into a frog during a call. What actually happened was that the cartoon "princess and the frog" was playing in the background.

Sure, another model might have gotten it right, but I think the prediction was made less in the sense of "this will happen at least once" and more of "this will not be an uncommon capability".

When the quality is this low (or variable depending on model) I'm not too sure I'd qualify it as a larger issue than mere context size.
by purple-leafy | 2026-01-14 00:26:03+00:00
I have adhd, I write them down. Some of them are great ideas, some are shit.

I got diagnosed at 29. Up until then I was very entrepreneurial and ambitious, constantly working on business ideas. Hell I taught myself software engineering because I had a single idea I hyper focused on lol.

The way I see it, lean into it. ADHD is a double edged sword - you get intrusive thoughts, some of them are bad, but some of them are ideas.

You can’t really change your brain, you can take medication and it might help you focus a bit more.

But I say lean into it. I’ve had several successful ventures from pure ADHD fuelled idea binges.

I don’t really switch off, but I make sure I work in the office every day because being around people helps.

But when I’m alone it’s a barrage of thoughts, some days more intense than others.

There are alot of ADHD founders and programmers
by rogerrogerr | 2026-01-14 00:26:34+00:00
Note that if you ever want to be a pilot, THINK VERY HARD BEFORE GETTING DIAGNOSED OR MEDICATED. This doesn't apply to most people, but it is the major gotcha on an otherwise straightforward decision.

/r/flying is full of people who wish they didn't have this in their medical record. The FAA is totally backwards about medical stuff and has a very dim view towards ADHD & associated meds.
by pkulak | 2026-01-14 00:26:41+00:00
First off "cancel culture" is way too unserious a phrase to warrant a response, but I will anyway.

> The views on his art were formed at a time before cancel-culture was a thing.

No they weren't. "Cancel culture" (your social actions having social consequences) has and always will exist, but despite your assertion that he was terrible "even for his day", I'd bet that a misogynist Frenchman in the early 1900s wasn't going to ruffle that many feathers.

John Brown got "cancelled" for opposing slavery. Now you can get "cancelled" for supporting it. The difference is that now "cancelled" means a few commentators call you out and your life and career are never affected in the slightest. It's actually one of the best times to be a horrible person. Hell, you can be president.
by iwontberude | 2026-01-14 00:27:44+00:00
I have lived my entire life with ADHD: Forget about getting "everything" done, instead periodically reprioritize and keep putting your focus onto these priorities, everything that is actually important enough to get done will and everything else can be done by someone else -- just sit tight. This works for software especially so, just sit and wait for someone more fool hardy with more to lose to do the truly annoying things and then adopt their work if it helps your priorities.
by busterarm | 2026-01-14 00:28:17+00:00
That's not what a prototypical hacker is at all. I have the benefit of being able to talk to most of the "prototypical hackers", the TMRC crowd, decades ago and being a hacker had nothing to do with sticking it to authorities. It was all about personal ingenuity and generally lacking self-discipline (from an outsider's perspective -- as people didn't refer to themselves as hackers for decades, it started as a derisive term from more "respectable" researchers).

The whole freedom-fighting hacker thing came about later, mostly from the 2600 and BBS crowd as a self-aggrandizement despite all of the laws that they were breaking: mainly related to use of telephone lines, wire & mail fraud, drug use/trafficing and age of consent violations.

You're literally trying to tell me about my own tribe and you don't have the slightest clue.
by kogepathic | 2026-01-14 00:28:27+00:00
> What I am asking for: publish a basic GitHub repo with the hardware specs and connection protocols. Let the community build their own apps on top of it.

This concept works fine for the author's example of a kitchen scale, but fails when the device in question is something like a router that has secure boot with one key burned into e-fuses.

In that case we need both open software and a requirement that the manufacturer escrow signing keys with someone so that after EOL any software can be run.
by CoastalCoder | 2026-01-14 00:28:29+00:00
I have no idea if this will be useful to you, because it's so contingent on my caffeine sensitivity, my sleep, whether or not I've taken Vyvanse, what time of day it is, and what mental tasks I need to perform.

But to give a real answer:

On workdays I have about 20-40 fl oz of coffee during the morning. I stop all stimulants at noon so I can sleep.

On non-workdays I have 1-3 normal sized mugs of coffee in the morning, just because I like it.
by xp84 | 2026-01-14 00:28:34+00:00
> secret police

Just saying it's that doesn't make it that, but okay.

> immigration has just been a non-issue. It's only been to our advantage.

Unfortunately for you, there is a significant plurality of Americans for whom uncontrolled immigration has been to their disadvantage. It distorts the labor market. Not for white-collar jobs like yours. For low-wage jobs.

It also changes the culture, which is something that every country except the USA and the UK is allowed to be quite cranky about -- think of how prickly Quebecers get about people not speaking French, or people who don't like American tourists being annoying in Rome, or Mexico not allowing non-citizens to own property.

And the notion that we just open the borders and walk away with our fingers in our ears -- which is what logically must happen when you "abolish" the only people who are supposed to send people back when they show up, unvetted and uninvited -- is not a winning argument. That's one of the main reasons Clinton and Harris lost, because that's what their rhetoric sounds like.

So, you can of course keep on arguing that unlimited, unvetted immigration (which without any enforcement is the only kind we'll get) is an indisputable boon to our society, but you'll keep losing elections.
by alisonatwork | 2026-01-14 00:28:44+00:00
This doesn't make sense to me. I mean, the term "remix" literally comes from the music scene.

Artists are constantly getting inspiration from one another, referencing one another, performing together or having their works exhibited together...

While there are some big name artists who are famously protective of the concept of IP, those artists have made headlines exactly because when they litigate they seem so unreasonable compared to the bedroom musicians and pub bands and church choirs and school teachers and wedding DJs and millions of other artists and performers whose way of participating in "the culture" is much less tied to ownership.
by lynndotpy | 2026-01-14 00:28:44+00:00
One in eight men are diagnosed with prostate cancer in their life time and it's usually a very treatable disease. You can see his political circles on X urging him to use Ivermectin, to use prayer, etc.

Unfortunately for him, he embraced alt-medicine and suffered for it. He If anything good can come from this, hopefully his high-profile rejection of effective treatment can prevent someone else from making the same decisions.
by mlsu | 2026-01-14 00:28:53+00:00
I was on a trip to the mountains recently. Get out into nature, get away from it all, etc. I look up into the sky and see a satellite. I remember when this was a novelty, it was so rare to see them. But I saw at least 10 of them in the time I spent stargazing.

It's just so bleak. We did this for what? To have _more_ internet?! Is that really what we need?
by 6r17 | 2026-01-14 00:29:16+00:00
I have that 10-30s time window to fill when claude might be loading some stuff ; the 1 liner is exactly what fits in that window - it makes me wonder about the original idea of twitter now that I think of it - but since it's not the same kind of content I don't bother with it.It really feels like "here is the stuff, here's more about it if you want to" - really really appreciate that form and will definitely do the same format myself
by retrocog | 2026-01-14 00:29:51+00:00
Whether a personal attribute is a strength or a weakness seems to depend heavily on context.

The key for any us may be to just find people we can work with who have different attributes, resulting in balanced partnership.

I have at least some anecdotal evidence to support pairings of compatible and complementary ADHD and HFAS minds.

Character is probably the most important single element, however.
by OCASMv2 | 2026-01-14 00:30:35+00:00
> The logical advice to respond to that climate would be to act with dignity and treat other people like you’d like to be treated. To reach out and integrate, and build community. Doing that eventually solves the problem, even if it takes time and energy.

If you treated people with respect and dignity for your entire life and the result you get is increased hatred against you then disengaging is in fact a perfectly valid course of action.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-14 00:30:35+00:00
> Now, I'm not asking companies to open-source their entire codebase. That's unrealistic when an app is tied to a larger platform. What I am asking for: publish a basic GitHub repo with the hardware specs and connection protocols. Let the community build their own apps on top of it.

The actual proposal in this blog doesn’t make much sense. Having the specs of a device isn’t going to change much because they can be determined by anyone examining the PCB. Most devices don’t have a simple connection protocol, like the Spotify Car Thing used as an example.
by ErroneousBosh | 2026-01-14 00:30:45+00:00
I can confirm that when I blocked a huge swathe of mobile broadband providers in Russia and Israel, something like 95% of the spam on the forum I run stopped instantly.

It seemed like a messy and obvious approach - sign up with a clearly bot-generated gmail account, hit the activation link sent by email an average of 100ms, and immediately post in every thread something along the lines of "WHEN WE'VE FINISHED IN KHARKIV / GAZA WE'LL BRING THE GAS CHAMBERS TO ENGLAND", all in under about ten seconds.

I don't think it's Russians or Israelis behind it, necessarily, but that's where the annoying noise has been coming from.