MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aspenmartin | 2026-01-01 20:28:23+00:00
I agree -- skepticism is totally healthy. And there are so many great ways to poke holes in the true underlying narratives (not the headlines that people seem to pull from). E.g. evaluation science is a wasteland (not for wont of very smart people trying very hard to get them right). How do we tackle the power requirements in a way that is sustainable? Etc. etc.

But stuff like this im not sure I understand:

> It's a great tool, but right now it's only being used to feed the greed.

if its a great tool, then how is it _only_ being used to "feed the greed" and what do you mean by that?

Also I think folks are quick to make analogies to other points in history: "AI is like the dot com boom we're going to crash and burn" and "AI is like {self driving cars, crypto, etc} and the promises will all be broken, its all hype" but this removes the nuance: all of these things are extremely different with very specific dynamics that in _some_ ways may be similar but in many crucial and important ways are completely different.
by potato3732842 | 2026-01-01 20:28:44+00:00
You literally can't do that today in any jurisdiction with building code. It wouldn't be illegal, but the hoops you'd need to jump through (and they way they'd likely try and screw you at every turn) to string together a bunch of kit buildings and call it a "house" would make it so expensive that you'd be better off hiring professionals to build a house the normal way.
by yellowcake0 | 2026-01-01 20:29:58+00:00
Enterprise is what determines commoditization as that's where the lion's share of the revenue comes from. Maybe it will eventually happen to MS Office, maybe it won't, but until it happens it hasn't happened. Access to the full MS ecosystem, technical support and seamless integration, these things matter a lot to businesses, and I'm not even saying you're wrong, but I'm not convinced yet that something similar won't play out with coding agents.
by Animats | 2026-01-01 20:30:17+00:00
Good point on nomenclature.

A 100KW generator is no big deal. It's a truck Diesel engine coupled to a generator. Trailer-mounted, it can be towed with a pickup truck. It's a standard rental item for larger construction projects.

A 100KW laser is a big deal.

The big problem with this as an anti-drone weapon is that, unlike artillery shells or unguided missiles, drones can operate close to the ground, and the laser needs line of sight.
by LorenPechtel | 2026-01-01 20:30:28+00:00
Hamas chooses to fight in urban locations. And keeps the civilians in place at gunpoint.

Consider an attack for which Israel was blamed for a large number of civilian casualties. Israel had given warning they were going to hit the building, get out. Reality: Hamas ordered all the neighbors to rush to the roof of the building to keep Israel from hitting it. Too slow, they were still inside when the bomb landed.
by TheAlchemist | 2026-01-01 20:31:24+00:00
Nobody disputes that the car can drive itself 99% of the time. It can and it's a great system (well, opinions diverge, I mostly agree). But it's very far from a Robotaxi - for any reasonable person, Robotaxi means unsupervised rides, which Tesla is not currently doing at all. And they argue pretty strongly in court that any talk about unsupervised is just 'corporate puffery'.

This is similar to why one needs to keep an eye on todlers. 99% they are fine, but that 1% of time they will do something very dangerous.
by avidiax | 2026-01-01 20:31:28+00:00
Much too hard to find the original paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/3592126

One question I have, is when we say "interlocking-free", does this mean that the algorithm can still densely stack cups (with a draft angle), or is it instead guaranteeing that the convex hull of shapes are non-interfering?
by swiftcoder | 2026-01-01 20:31:32+00:00
> They have already paid the cost to implement this for the EU and Japan, but simply don't allow it for US users because...

If by "this", you mean "a set of rules so complicated that no 3rd party will ever ship a browser"...

In practice, they've shipped a whole lot of nothing, and we still don't have any 3rd party browser engines available in the EU
by aspenmartin | 2026-01-01 20:31:39+00:00
I'm not sure I understand: we are _objectively on that path_ -- we are increasing exponentially on a number of metrics that may be imperfect but seem to paint a pretty consistent picture. Scaling laws are exponential. METR's time horizon benchmark is exponential. Lots of performance measures are exponential, so why do you say we're objectively not on that path?

> We might get some incremental improvement, but we’re very clearly seeing sigmoid progress.

again, if it is "very clear" can you point to some concrete examples to illustrate what you mean?

> I can’t speak for everyone, but I’m tired of hyperbolic rants that are unquestionably not justified (the nice thing about exponential progress is you don’t need to argue about it)

OK but what specifically do you have an issue with here?
by neoCrimeLabs | 2026-01-01 20:31:54+00:00
Adding to this frustration is a 25yr registered 501(c)3 non-profit I volunteer for that holds an annual art festival. The festival proceeds go to funding educational materials. They've had an active facebook page for at least 15 years, with thousands of followers from around the world.

When the non-profit tried to advertise the art festival on Facebook. Facebook not only denied them, but when the non-profit asked for a review of the denial they were warned if they asked again their entire facebook page would be flagged and deleted.

Facebook is large enough I cannot imagine their reasoning. They very likely have several conflicting streams of logic depending on teams involved. One thing I think is reasonable is that money is a motivational factor for Facebook.

Put simply, organizations who come in immediately spending money on advertising are more likely to be fast tracked. Organizations who don't spent a lot of money are more likely to be shut down. ("you've been a freeloader all this time who will likely not pay sustainably after this one-time payment. We're focusing on sustainable paying customers, goodbye")

Addition: Now that I think about it, I wouldn't be surprised if there is a literal metric of "money/time" ratio. The more money you spend in less time likely improves your chances of being fast-tracked, thus biasing new accounts who immediately spend on advertising over existing ones who sparsely pay.
by NoImmatureAdHom | 2026-01-01 20:32:18+00:00
I appreciate you engaging.

1) https://speechfirst.org/case/title-ix/ is the third ddg result for title ix compelled speech. Basically, the feds under Biden were going to compel use of people's preferred pronouns. Ideally it would have failed in court.

Elaboration: For a very long time, in many states and parts of the federal government, there has been overt discrimination on the basis of race, sex, disability status, etc. in direct and obvious violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Things like skin-color quotas for hiring, preferences for vendors, etc. You're certainly familiar. They hired people who would, at the very least, not speak out against their regime's practices, and ideally who would help perpetuate them.

> Again, cancel culture, no matter how aggressive...
It's not just twitter mobs. To get the large gov't grants necessary to be successful in science, for instance, it was ~mandatory for the past while to have a DEI angle on your application. Many forms actually had a section for it. So, in this case, the gov't isn't using its monopoly on violence exactly, but it's not cancel culture. (and of course there were many grants funded that weren't just a DEI angle, it was 100% DEI bullshit)

"A huge conspiracy to overtly break the law" is what DEI was and still sadly largely is.
by metadope | 2026-01-01 20:32:42+00:00
Thanks for the pointer; I'm enjoying a browse now.

Impender Beach by Hiroshi Nagai... His works appear digitally duplicated everywhere, based on my DDG search results.

I offically surrender my fantasy of a secret Antifa agent within DHS. I also note abashedly that, with this new context, the picture doesn't portray a tsunami, but only a nice set of gnarly pipelines. Cowabunga!
by zbendefy | 2026-01-01 20:32:49+00:00
Tangential, but Flash had a nice side effect that the "app" could be exported in a self contained way via SWF.

Exporting this site for example in a future proof way is not that obvious. (Exporting as pdf wont work with the webgl applets, exporting the html page might work but is error prone depending in the website structure)

50 years from now, flash emulators will still work on swf files, but these sites might be lost. Or is there a way to archive sites like this?
by coder543 | 2026-01-01 20:33:16+00:00
As you allude, the prompt processing speeds are a killer improvement of the Spark which even 2 Strix Halo boxes would not match.

Prompt processing is literally 3x to 4x higher on GPT-OSS-120B once you are a little bit into your context window, and it is similarly much faster for image generation or any other AI task.

Plus the Nvidia ecosystem, as others have mentioned.

One discussion with benchmarks: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1oonomc/comment...

If all you care about is token generation with a tiny context window, then they are very close, but that’s basically the only time. I studied this problem extensively before deciding what to buy, and I wish Strix Halo had been the better option.
by tptacek | 2026-01-01 20:33:40+00:00
Another weird assumption you've got here is that fuzzing outcomes scale linearly with funding, which, no. Further, the field of factory-scale fuzzing and triage is one Google security engineers basically invented, so it's especially odd to hold Google out as a bad actor here.

At any rate, Google didn't employ "AI" to find this vulnerability, and Google fuzzing probably wouldn't have outcompeted these researchers for this particular bug (totally different methods of bugfinding), so it's really hard to find a coherent point you'd be making about "fuzzers", "AI", and "Google" here.
by LorenPechtel | 2026-01-01 20:34:10+00:00
Israeli expansionism would be easy to stop if there were some reason to. But Israel knows that it's just a pretext, the war exists because Israel exists. Thus it is not worth the effort and political capital to stop the settlers. And note that the problem is blown far out of proportion--most "settlers" live in Israeli cities. Most "settler attacks" look an awful lot like self defense.
by jordanb | 2026-01-01 20:34:33+00:00
Russia commits acts of aggression against NATO states that straddle the line of ambiguity where a bad faith actor could call it accidental or at least unauthorized.

This makes invoking article 5 likewise somewhat difficult because it allowed other NATO members pressure the border states into "not overreacting". The point is to slowly escalate into outright hostility without ever having "the event" that makes it obvious article 5 must be invoked.
by jauntywundrkind | 2026-01-01 20:34:43+00:00
I do love the idea of a good medium bandwidth proximity based protocol that has very low latency. 802.15.4z goes 2.4Mb/s but proprietary UWB in the same domain goes up to 64Mb/s which becomes more interesting.

10cm is pretty good positional accuracy too, albeit it feels perhaps short of what we'd need for great pose tracking. To me it's fun to consider what a smart home that can better project it's own digital twin. Also useful data for AR & spatial computing.

For anyone else following Mouser new product feel, I think the arrival of Qorvo'a newest Qorvo QM35825 RF SoC was a very fun arrival to see. https://www.mouser.com/new/qorvo/qorvo-qm35825-uwb-low-power...

I do wish that high bandwidth UWB was doing better. I really like the idea of a wireless dock, being able to plug in USB devices and get good bandwidth and especially low latency. I'm not super keyed in to what's happening in VR headset space but they seem to be the only folks using high speed UWB at all these days. WiGig / 802.11ad I hope we see you again!

This is wandering really far afield from the topic at hand, but should out to FluxPosez which is trying to build short range pose trackers using magnetic sensing. Seems really neat too. https://www.fluxpose.com/
by shaky-carrousel | 2026-01-01 20:35:07+00:00
Fair enough; we're using different definitions of "private."

I'm using it in the legal/operational sense relevant to whether a government service was withdrawn (agency vs company, public law vs company law). By that definition, it's a private company.

You're using it in a shareholder-ownership sense. That's a valid perspective, but it's a different question than the one being discussed here.
by ekipan | 2026-01-01 20:35:46+00:00
Cool enough I suppose, but the framing had me expecting the more farty twisted squarenoise instruments like in Wario Lands 1-3, and less smooth sines and squares. I tried out Kimi No Shiranai Monogatari and Daft Punk's Aerodynamic.

https://www.wario.style/s/yWHphmhO

https://www.wario.style/s/BSN15NEs

Maybe you could list examples for midis you thought sounded cool next time you share this, or in a comment.

Edit: though I guess a huge part of Wario flavor is the dissonant intervals in the music, as much as the farty instrumentation.
by financetechbro | 2026-01-01 20:35:50+00:00
So most PE firms probably have around 5-15 employees. They don’t require too much manpower unless they’re trying to close a lot of deals. The main tasks are sourcing the asset, conducting diligence, negotiating terms, and supporting the asset post investment. This can all be done with an analyst, an associate, a VP, and a Partner/MD, each focusing on things from networking/relationship building to making financial models and other adhoc work.

I think PE just become a very popular way for wall street grads and MBA types to make a decent living without necessarily having to be a good investor (PE funds don’t present their full returns until 10+ after the fund has closed).
by tialaramex | 2026-01-01 20:36:52+00:00
Nope. C++ really does deliberately require that compilers will in some cases emit a program which does... something even though what you wrote isn't a C++ program.

Yes, that's very stupid, but they did it with eyes open, it's not a mistake. In the C++ ISO document the words you're looking are roughly (exact phrasing varies from one clause to another) Ill-formed No Diagnostic Required (abbreviated as IFNDR).

What this means is that these programs are Ill-formed (not C++ programs) but they compile anyway (No diagnostic is required - a diagnostic would be an error or warning).

Why do this? Well because of Rice's Theorem. They want a lot of tricky semantic requirements for their language but Rice showed (back in like 1950) that all the non-trivial semantic requirements are Undecidable. So it's impossible for the compiler to correctly diagnose these for all cases. Now, you could (and Rust does) choose to say if we're not sure we'll reject the program. But C++ chose the exact opposite path.
by jaynate | 2026-01-01 20:38:09+00:00
It’s sort of difficult to understand why this is even a question - LLM-based / judgment dependent workflows vs script-based / deterministic workflows.

In mapping out the problems that need to be solved with internal workflows, it’s wise to clarify where probabilistic judgments are helpful / required vs. not upfront. If the process is fixed and requires determinism why not just write scripts (code-gen’ed, of course).
by nativeit | 2026-01-01 20:38:55+00:00
I took an IEC power cable that came with a no-name broken printer my folks bought off Amazon. It was rated for the usual North American 120V/15A, but the conductors on the inside were hardly suitable. Measuring with cheap calipers, I reckoned they were good for about 1/10th of that. Similarly dangerous products with any of the generic electronics currently selling on Amazon/Temu/eBay/et al. Poor isolation, poor grounding, underrated wires, incorrect fuses, knock-off ICs, lord knows what kind of chemical treatments and/or lead content; It's as if regulations no longer exist, since there's no longer any fixed target that can be sued to enforce them. Something will need to be done directly to Amazon that will cause them to put a check on these products, but that seems laughably naive in the current political contexts.
by aspenmartin | 2026-01-01 20:39:15+00:00
Sure: at my MAANG company, where I watch the data closely on adoption of CC and other internal coding agent tools, most (significant) LOC are written by agents, and most employees have adopted coding agents as WAU, and the adoption rate is positively correlated with seniority.

Like a lot of things LLM related (Simon Willison's pelican test, researchers + product leaders implementing AI features) I also heavily "vibe" check the capabilities myself on real work tasks. The fact of the matter is I am able to dramatically speed up my work. It may be actually writing production code + helping me review it, or it may be tasks like: write me a script to diagnose this bug I have, or build me a streamlit dashboard to analyze + visualize this ad hoc data instead of me taking 1 hour to make visualizations + munge data in a notebook.

> people claiming they are 10x more productive but aren't shipping anything, and some AI hype bloggers that fail to provide any quantitative proof.

what would satisfy you here? I feel you are strawmanning a bit by picking the most hyperbolic statements and then blanketing that on everyone else.

My workflow is now:

- Write code exclusively with Claude

- Review the code myself + use Claude as a sort of review assistant to help me understand decisions about parts of the code I'm confused about

- Provide feedback to Claude to change / steer it away or towards approaches

- Give up when Claude is hopelessly lost

It takes a bit to get the hang of the right balance but in my personal experience (which I doubt you will take seriously but nevertheless): it is quite the game changer and that's coming from someone who would have laughed at the idea of a $200 coding agent subscription 1 year ago
by LorenPechtel | 2026-01-01 20:39:25+00:00
Lots and lots of drones--it's just the drones were all picked off, the only things that got through were some of the ballistic missiles. Most of which were aimed at things that they shouldn't have been shooting at in the first place.

And Iron Dome scored on the ballistic missiles, I would assume Iron Beam also could. When it's coming down on it's target it's slowed by the atmosphere and it has no defense other than being fast.
by gpm | 2026-01-01 20:39:51+00:00
> The compiler does not and cannot check if these strict requirements are enough for the intended "safety". Right? It is the judgement of the programmer.

Yes*. It's up to the programmer to check that the safe abstraction they create around unsafe code guarantees all the requirements the unsafe code needs are upheld. The point is that that's done once, and then all the safe code using that safe abstraction can't possibly fail to meet those requirements - or in other words any safety related bug is always in the relatively small amount of code that uses unsafe and builds those safe abstraction.

> And what is stopping a `c` function with such requirements to be wrapped in some code that [doesn't] actually checks these requirements are met?

Assuming my edit to your comment is correct - nothing. It's merely the case that any such bug would be in the small amount of clearly labelled (with the unsafe keyword) binding code instead of "anywhere".

> The only thing that the rust compiler enables is to include a feature to mark a specific function as unsafe.

No, the rust compiler has a lot more features than just a way to mark specific functions as unsafe. The borrow checker, and it's associated lifetime constraints, enforcing that variables that are moved out of (and aren't `Copy`) aren't used, is one obvious example.

Another example is marking how data can be used across threads with traits like `Send` and `Sync`. Another - when compared to C anyways - is simply having a visibility system so that you can create structs with fields that aren't directly accessible via other code (so you can control every single function that directly accesses them and maintain invariants in those functions).

> In both cases there is zero help from the compiler to actually verify that the checks that are done on top are sufficient.

Yes and no, "unsafe" in rust is synonymous with "the compiler isn't able to verify this for you". Typically rust docs do a pretty good job of enumerating exactly what the programmer must verify. There are tools that try to help the programmer do this, from simple things like being able to enable a lint that checks every time you wrote unsafe you left a comment saying why it's ok, and that you actually wrote something the compiler couldn't verify in the first place. To complex things like having a (very slow) interpreter that carefully checks that in at least one specific execution every required invariant is maintained (with the exception of some FFI stuff that it fails on as it is unable to see across language boundaries sufficiently well).

The rust ecosystem is very interested in tools that make it easier to write correct unsafe code. It's just rather fundamentally a hard problem.

* Technically there are very experimental proof systems that can check some cases these days. But I wouldn't say they are ready for prime time use yet.
by jimnotgym | 2026-01-01 20:40:20+00:00
> I do wonder how you or I would handle running a business. To me that work does not sound easy.

I think all of the hardest times in my management career have been dealing with investors/owners etc. 'Professional Investors' and PE have been some of the worst, because they tend to be extremely opinionated, whilst simultaneously demonstrating their contempt for the people doing the actual job, and their naivety in how things are actually done. Perhaps that has made me jaded. I never had the same problems with staff, customers and suppliers.
by vmazi | 2026-01-01 20:40:41+00:00
In professional Pokémon competition, winning is not only dependent on stat distribution of Pokémon in/ev but also the move pool they have access to. Strategies are built up using moves that setup Pokémon in play or Pokémon that will be switched to in such a manner that the stat distributions and or move priority is modified in the users favor. I wonder if there’s a way to calculate ideal team not just from stat distributions but the likelihood the available move pool can be linked to a coherent win strategy like stall, trick room switchup, flip turn into swift swim priority and other matchup strategies
by fastball | 2026-01-01 20:41:11+00:00
Yes, that is what OP is saying, I'm just not very convinced. Primarily because his sample size is quite small – he says the people in his smaller, non-SV jobs were just as competent as those in the SV company, but that could mean a number of things that are not "SV isn't meritocratic". For example, it could just be that his previous colleagues were more competent than the actual national/global average, which seems probable.
by coryrc | 2026-01-01 20:41:20+00:00
> For what it's worth to the symmetry argument there were Jews happily living in Palestine before 1900,

Someone's never heard of jizya, or the repeated slaughters of Jewish civilians in the century prior to Israel's creation: https://www.fondapol.org/en/study/pogroms-in-palestine-befor...

Not to mention what some backward, cruel warlord did to much of the Middle Eastern population starting in 622:

"Alongside his campaign against the Quraysh, Muhammad led campaigns against several other tribes of Arabia, most notably the three Arabian Jewish tribes of Medina and the Jewish fortress at Khaybar."

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

And it never ended. It's continuing to this day.