MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alew1 | 2026-01-24 22:23:25+00:00
The article presents the fact that we appear to treat non-constituents (eg “in the middle of the”) as “units” to mean that language is more like “snapping legos together” than “building trees.”

But linguists have proposed the possibility that we store “fragments” to facilitate reuse—essentially trees with holes, or equivalently, functions that take in tree arguments and produce tree results. “In the middle of the” could take in a noun-shaped tree as an argument and produce a prepositional phrase-shaped tree as a result, for instance. Furthermore, this accounts for the way we store idioms that are not just contiguous “Lego block” sequences of words (like “a ____ and a half” or “the more ___, the more ____”). See e.g. work on “fragment grammars.”

Can’t access the actual Nature Human Behavior article so perhaps it discusses the connections.
by dang | 2026-01-24 22:23:26+00:00
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
by raffraffraff | 2026-01-24 22:24:03+00:00
The next stage in all of this shit is to turn what you have into a service. What's the phrase? I don't want to talk to the monkey, I want to talk to the organ grinder. So when you kick things off it should be a tough interview with the manager and program manager. Once they're on board and know what you want, they start cracking. Then they just call you in to give demos and updates. Lol
Career transition question – Assistance, MLOps guidance
by Pierre_Esteves | 2026-01-24 22:24:06+00:00
Hello,

I have a master's degree in cognitive neuroscience and a master's degree in computational neuroscience and AI. Unfortunately, I suffered from burnout during my second year of medical school.

I have a training project focused on GenAI, AIarchitect, AIagentic, and MLops. I am looking for a mentor to discuss the quality of the content of this training (self-taught followed by three boot camps), given:

- My age.
- The alignment between the skills taught in the program and those required in the French, Swiss, and Canadian job markets by 2027/2028.

Thank you for your attention and potential assistance.

Pierre
by acdha | 2026-01-24 22:26:23+00:00
What authority did they have to arrest him? He wasn’t an immigrant covered by a warrant, impeding whatever legitimate tasks they were doing, they chose to walk over to him, chose to initiate physical violence against the first person, chose to escalate when he tried to help the first person the agents assaulted, and the video showed that he was disarmed and subdued before they shot him.
by ChrisArchitect | 2026-01-24 22:26:31+00:00
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42422508

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42396110

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42407624

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42648662

etc

More recently:

Tech CEOs Take Turns Praising Trump at White House Dinner

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45139891
by nomel | 2026-01-24 22:26:58+00:00
> letting him talk about his "long mouse telomere experiment flaws" without questions

This requires that the interviewer is as knowledgable as the interviewee (the qualification problem I mentioned). Unless the questions and answers are known ahead of time, it won't be possible to know everything an interviewee will say. Assuming this is the case, how should he have handled that response? Should he not interview people outside of his own expertise? I think one way would be "is there any disagreement?" but then you're left with the same problem.

I think Lex Fridman not knowing much about the history/current state of rat telomere research is entirely reasonable. I think a requirement of knowing the entire context of a person is not reasonable. I also don't think it's reasonable to believe everything you hear in an interview, from either human. "Charitable interoperation, but verify" is a good way to take in information.
by exe34 | 2026-01-24 22:28:37+00:00
100%, our emotions have two components: the initial feeling and the thought-derived reaction. It's like when a toddler falls over and looks back at the mother to decide whether or not it was hurt badly enough that it needs to cry.

the Stoics taught this over 2000 years ago. it is not what happens but how we categorise it that matters.
by soulofmischief | 2026-01-24 22:28:40+00:00
Noster is cool, I've experimented with it but it doesn't solve all of my problems and has some problems of its own, such as spam. Most importantly, it's not really P2P, despite being decentralized.

I have also explored other P2P approaches and built prototype social networks. I prefer a more P2P approach, I think it's more scalable, but it's complicated because IP privacy by default is important in large social networks. I'm still searching for the right solution. I think the advances in LLMs are going to help do a much better job at solving the moderation problem in social networks, and so I am experimenting with that in my off time.
by roelschroeven | 2026-01-24 22:28:46+00:00
> One bad election, everyone knows it was influenced by Russia, no big deal. They know a sane person will be elected in a few years.

That's what we thought the first time. And it did happen, a sane person did get elected a few years later, but then another few years later Trump got elected again. And it's pretty clear that he and his crew are rapidly turning the USA into a fascist authoritarian hellhole, and they show all signs of not being willing to step back from power. It's a real tragedy both for USA's own people, especially the ones that Trump doesn't like, but also for people in other countries.

That has real consequences. Here is, with thanks to user malauxyeux for neatly summarizing, a case that should anyone start thinking real hard of the consequences of using American services:

Nicolas Guillou, a French judge at the International Criminal Court, discusses in an interview with Le Monde the consequences of US sanctions imposed on him and eight other judges and prosecutors at the court. The sanctions were introduced after the court issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The concrete consequences of the sanctions extend far beyond a travel ban to the US. "The sanctions affect all aspects of my daily life. They prohibit all US individuals or legal entities, all persons or companies, including their foreign subsidiaries, from providing me with services", Guillou explains.

All his accounts with US companies such as Amazon, Airbnb, PayPal, and others have been closed. "For example, I booked a hotel in France through Expedia, and a few hours later, the company sent an email canceling the reservation citing the sanctions. In practice, you can no longer shop online because you don't know if the packaging your product comes in is American. Being under sanctions is like being sent back to the 1990s", he says.

"Overnight, you find yourself without a bank card, and these companies have an almost complete monopoly, at least in Europe. US companies are actively involved in intimidating sanctioned individuals – in this case, the judges and prosecutors who administer justice in contemporary armed conflicts", he notes.

He emphasizes that sanctions can last for more than a decade or even longer.

https://nordictimes.com/world/how-french-icc-judge-faces-us-...

(link to malauxyeux's comment where I found this summary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46738790)
by alphax314 | 2026-01-24 22:28:48+00:00
I used to do the same for many years woth dovecot as well. Its not too difficult plus now with the llms it can probably be easier to maintain the configuration fires (I havent tried).

However I did have issues with the VPS provider I was using getting blocked and not just my VPS’ IP but the entire block. So at some point it became tok tedious to have to follow the unblock process.

And so I switched to fastmail and have been using it for over two years. No major complaints.

Would I self-host again? If I have the free time I think its fun and you can learn a lot. However, if you have young kids and are too busy with life I would say go with a provider you trust with your data.
by mafriese | 2026-01-24 22:29:05+00:00
You can define the tools that agents are allowed to use in the opencode.json (also works for MCP tools I think).
Here’s my config: https://pastebin.com/PkaYAfsn

The models can call each other if you reference them using @username.

This is the .md file for the manager : https://pastebin.com/vcf5sVfz

I hope that helped!
by zestyping | 2026-01-24 22:30:04+00:00
Renaming files from a window title bar broke some years ago and has never been fixed. I most often want to do this in Preview, but every other app with clickable filenames in the title bar has the same problem.

The filename in the title bar has a down-pointing chevron next to it, indicating you can click it. You click it. A small drop-down window appears with the filename, the tags, and the folder where it is located. You edit the filename and press Return, as you would when renaming the file in Finder, or as you would when completing any text field. Nothing happens. The file isn't renamed.

Only if you press Tab (?!) is the file renamed. Insanity.

itle
by i_cannot_hack | 2026-01-24 22:30:11+00:00
I think the unease many people feel here is that this strict bureaucracy taken to its extreme conclusion would become something akin to a tragicomical farce: "No posts about the controversial nukes raining over Europe allowed, such flamewars would destroy our valuable forum for discussing the really interesting and
intellectual political topics".

Clearly there must be a line somewhere. It was not here and today, but when and where is it? Trying desperately to cling onto normality at every cost when the actual reality is far from normal becomes a destructive endeavour in the end.

I have been a regular visitor on this site for 14 years, and have have never spoken up about this before. In fact I have always stood by the moderation policy and appreciated it. But I have a line where avoiding "inflammatory discussions" simply becomes obstinate and clueless, and harmful in the way that it gives convenient cover for the actors committing the real inflammatory acts, counting on people not caring enough to give them grief for it. And for me, that line has been crossed.

I'm curious: Have you not noticed any increase in people saying "this time it's different", or that different kinds of people are saying it now? Is it really just the same old people repeating the same old phrase to you?

> a repetitive topic

Small note: It has never been a repetitive topic, since all discussions about ICE performing extrajudicial killings have been quickly flagged of the front page and never (as a topic) discussed by the wider community.
by ofalkaed | 2026-01-24 22:30:22+00:00
I am not sure what the general point of this is; for a good chunk of their conversation it seems to show why AI will fail in the arts, it is incapable of understanding their frustration with the AI as demonstrated by the conversation, it misses the humanity of it and only states it and states it as a weird sort of concession. But at the end it seems to undercut that by making it all out as futile and the writers pretentious and/or the AI cruel, which leaves the whole rather thin. The final prompt to the AI had a great chance for a bit of recursive metafictional fun, but does not seem to be used; could be a hint to a subtle bit of indirect metafiction but I don't think it was.
by jacquesm | 2026-01-24 22:30:25+00:00
What an impressive project.

> Next up was maneuvering from our LEO drop-off altitude down to VLEO, where it would be safe to eject the telescope contamination cover

Why would it be unsafe to do this earlier?

> We had been tracking intermittent memory issues in our TT&C radio throughout the mission, working around them as they appeared. Our best theory is that one of these issues escalated in a way that corrupted onboard memory and is preventing reboots. We've tried several recovery approaches. So far, none have worked, and the likelihood of recovery looks low at this point.

Seems to be a pretty big problem as well, I wonder what their ideas are to diagnose the root cause here.

It all sounds a bit overoptimistic, but that may just be my interpretation.
by hahahahhaah | 2026-01-24 22:30:52+00:00
How is it the same IO?

Each query needs to navigate the index then read. The two queries do that twice.

Is it faster to read pages 30-50 of a book by:

a) Go to page 30, read until 50

b) Go to page 30, read that page, close book, open book, go to page 31 and so on.

Each page open you get to binary search to find the page.
by nickevante | 2026-01-24 22:31:33+00:00
This is the exact mental model I was looking for.

It reminds me of Kingman's Formula in queueing theory: As server utilization approaches 100%, the wait time approaches infinity.

We intuitively understand this for servers (you never run a CPU at 99% if you want responsiveness), yet for some reason, we decided that a human brain—which is infinitely more complex—should run at 99% capacity and still be expected to handle urgent interruptions without crashing.
by pear01 | 2026-01-24 22:31:39+00:00
This doesn't make any sense. Is it individual or up to the culture? You have a culture but it ultimately lies with the individual? So what was this culture before? How can the ultimate responsibility ever be displaced by any culture if it's up to the individual ultimately? Is your claim neoliberalism single handedly altered the nature of morality? You don't think something like students getting screwed can see improvements if legislated? Selfishness was invented within the last 100 years?

Sorry, but imo your argument is just bad. It's just griping about neoliberalism dressed up as some argument whose terms wouldn't even pass a type checker level of logical validation. And it's also boring. Neoliberalism is so easy to dunk on these days and yet you couldn't even manage to do it convincingly.
by drnick1 | 2026-01-24 22:32:35+00:00
It's because the real solution here is to move away from this proprietary malware to protocols that are open, so that anyone can write or fork a client. (For instance, see Molly for a fully Ungoogled Signal.)

It's difficult when it comes to messengers, but reasonably easy when it comes to Google and Android, for which good alternatives exist (e.g., DuckDuck on GrapheneOS.)
by nickevante | 2026-01-24 22:33:16+00:00
That distinction between Industrial Production and Knowledge Work feels like the root cause.

It seems like modern Agile has mutated into a tool for Manufacturing Predictability rather than Software Discovery. We are so obsessed with making the velocity graph look like a straight line that we stopped asking if we are even building the right thing.

Do you think that shift happened because non-technical management needed a metric they could understand (tickets closed), or did we do this to ourselves?
by eudamoniac | 2026-01-24 22:34:03+00:00
> Why do you think it’s so important to get in this guy’s head, and to give him this graceful excuse of “maybe he just panicked?”

It's not an excuse, it's an explanation. By all means throw the book at him for murder or whatever. I think it's important because understanding why things happen is important to stop them from happening. If you just stop at "they're evil murderers" then your options for fixing that are very limited.

> But what is the point of this thought exercise? Where does it lead? To more “training” for the agents?

Yes, at the very least.
by jeffhwang | 2026-01-24 22:35:20+00:00
It's probably user error on my part. But as a somewhat technical user, I've been locked out of Mastodon account for months for no discernible reason. I had my standard first name and last name and I'm on one of the biggest Mastodon servers (mastodon.social).

I suppose I could just create a brand new account or move to another server but it hasn't seemed worth the effort so far
by belter | 2026-01-24 22:35:21+00:00
>> Sounds like ICE's official word right now is that the guy had a gun.

Look at the gray agent taking the victim weapon, that had just been pepper sprayed. He was disarmed before being killed.

"Footage of the grey coat officer retrieving the gun" - https://www.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1qlvpbr/footage_of_the...
by NoboruWataya | 2026-01-24 22:35:47+00:00
My tips from moving away from Gmail:

- Mailbox.org is what I use and it's pretty good. I often see Fastmail recommended too.

- Use a standalone email client that allows you to connect to multiple email servers. This makes it easy to continue to monitor your old email account while you use the new one. I use Thunderbird on desktop and FairEmail on Android (though Thunderbird also has an app for Android).

- Transfer all of your most important accounts over initially. As long as you continue to have access to your old account, you don't need to transfer absolutely everything all at once, you can do it over time.

- Use a custom domain name so if you decide to change providers again in future you just need to update your DNS records rather than changing your email address in all your accounts.

- You may also want to set up a catch-all email address or use a service like https://addy.io/ to generate email aliases on the fly, and create a new alias for each service you use (for example, your email for GitHub could be github.com@mydomain.com). This helps protect your actual personal email address from spam.
by B1FIDO | 2026-01-24 22:36:08+00:00
> what’s wrong with a well-intentioned surveillance state?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wings_of_Desire

tl;dw: A well-intentioned surveillance state may, in fact, love the beings they are surveilling. They may fall in love so deeply, that they want to become like us. I know it's a revolutionary concept.
by daxfohl | 2026-01-24 22:36:09+00:00
True, though even then I kind of wonder what's the point. Once they build an AI that's as good as a human coder but 1000x faster, parallelization no longer buys you anything. Writing and deploying the code is no longer the bottleneck, so the extra coordination required for parallelism seems like extra cost and risk with no practical benefit.
by odo1242 | 2026-01-24 22:36:14+00:00
Well, yes. But one could think of a world in which WhatsApp has its own internal protocol and to bolt on third-party support they just decide to represent third party clients as “virtual clients” on the server side, which would be the easiest way to make it work while not having E2EE support. Especially since the feature only exists for legal compliance purposes.

(This is not the case, apparently.)
by eudamoniac | 2026-01-24 22:36:25+00:00
Please see my bio. I support ICE in principal, though not in current practice. This isn't a secret or shameful to me. If we can't have a dialogue about how to deport illegal immigrants safely, and how to get from here to a working deportation system, and the only two options are to abolish ICE or the current situation, I fear abolishing ICE is not going to be what happens. That isn't really what anyone wants. The first step to fixing what's going wrong is to understand the failure mode. The failure mode is not in most cases "they executed him because they are evil murderers".
by parsimo2010 | 2026-01-24 22:37:04+00:00
Congrats on having a successful mission, it seems quite successful for a first try, and you clearly have some talented people on your team. But I’m going to give you my unsolicited opinion on the writing style.

The writing style sounds more like a tech bro describing some weekend conquest, and is wholly unappealing to most of the space industry (or at least the ones with decision making authority). Your CMGs were “locked in,” several times you “nailed it,” and so on.

You might have a business strategy that I’m not aware of but I’d expect that most of your market is controlled by aging men in suits, and they don’t talk like this. Most startups and tech bros aren’t spending money on space. It’s big established corporations that can fund this kind of stuff. Write like them. You can talk like a tech bro and get seed funding, but if you want to get to a sustainable business you have to talk corporate.

I would hate for your company to get passed over for lucrative opportunities because your public image seems immature. I looked at your website and you have a bunch of ex-government people on your senior advisory board. Get their opinion on your writing. It sounds silly, but you significantly lower your probability of winning contracts if people see you as a team of “bros.” People don’t want to spend millions on guys who are “locked in.” People want to spend millions on people who do professional engineering and risk reduction and clearly communicate how professional and competent they are.

I ranted way too long about your writing style. It’s pretty cool that you were able to design your own bus and most of it worked.
by MarcelOlsz | 2026-01-24 22:38:04+00:00
Worth looking into Conductor.build and Sculptor as well, though I believe both are electron and run like sh*t but Conductor is quite good. Going to give this Vibe Kanban a go, thanks.

Orchestration is cool but a sane orchestration setup with VM's is where it's at.

I've been working on orchestration for the past little while and I've got a very tight loop going where everything is in worktrees and containerized, all services are isolated, so I can easily work on db schema/migration stuff while a few other agents do frontend work etc. Getting Conductor to play nice with vm's was very tricky as their docs say they have no intention of implementing vm's and wrote a "trust me bro, it won't erase your system" blurb about it in their docs [0]

[0] https://docs.conductor.build/faq#what-permissions-do-agents-...
by crazygringo | 2026-01-24 22:38:14+00:00
Remember, estimation is in points not days. It doesn't matter if it's 2 days work for a senior engineer or 4 days for junior devs, it's still the same number of points, e.g. 8 points. This is intentional. Skill is accounted for in the fact that a team of all senior devs might deliver 200 points a sprint, whereas if half the senior devs got replaced with junior devs the team might only deliver 100. This is intentional, so that estimation is about the team, not any person.

And yes, when there's a task that one person happens to know most, people will often defer to them. But that in itself is educational, as the experienced dev explains why the given task is easy/hard. And every task is different, so the person you're deferring to will be different, and you still often get the two or three people who know the task best disagreeing until they hash it out, etc. And very often it's another person who can point out "well it would be that easy except three sprints ago I did x and so you'll now need to do y...". And of course plenty of tasks really are brand-new so everyone's figuring it out together.

If you're really not having actual discussions around complexity in planning poker, then the facilitator/lead/manager might be doing it wrong. You do have to create an environment where people are expected to speak up and disagree, to demonstrate that this is welcomed and expected and rewarded, and not just some kind of checkbox exercise where the most senior dev gives their estimation and everyone agrees. This is also a reason why it's literally done with cards where everyone is forced to put their number on the table at the same time, so that you don't wind up with some senior person always going first and then everyone else just nodding and agreeing.
by filoeleven | 2026-01-24 22:38:14+00:00
> "Summary execution" and "without due process" is emotionally manipulative phrasing.

It's exactly what this was, though. He was disarmed before being shoved to the ground and beaten with a gas grenade. There is another video which shows that his hands are on the ground or in front of his face, the entire time he's down, long before he's shot.

Watch the fucking videos.