MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Tell HN: Email from Anthropic "Share your feedback on your experience"
by selectnull | 2026-01-13 23:02:10+00:00
I just received an email from Anthropic that begins with "
We're reaching out to people who recently canceled their Claude Code subscription in order to better understand your experience and what led to your decision."

I was very glad to be able to give the feedback which can be summarized as "no opencode, no subscription".

I fully support the Anthropic decision to run their business the way they choose to and at the same time I reserve the right to use the software that I'm comfortable with.
by tombert | 2026-01-13 23:02:11+00:00
I find it a bit odd that people are acting like this stuff is an abject failure because it's not perfect yet.

Generative AI, as we know it, has only existed ~5-6 years, and it has improved substantially, and is likely to keep improving.

Yes, people have probably been deploying it in spots where it's not quite ready but it's myopic to act like it's "not going all that well" when it's pretty clear that it actually is going pretty well, just that we need to work out the kinks. New technology is always buggy for awhile, and eventually it becomes boring.
by kpcyrd | 2026-01-13 23:02:20+00:00
I wish this wasn't necessary, but the next steps forward are likely:

a) Have a reverse proxy that keeps a "request budget" per IP and per net block, but instead of blocking requests, causing the client to rotate their IP, the requests get throttled/slowed down, without dropping them.

b) Write your API servers in more efficient languages. According to their Github, their backend runs on Perl and Python. These technologies have been "good enough" for quite some time, but considering current circumstances and until a better solution is found, this may not be the case anymore and performance and cpu cost per request does matter these days.

c) Optimize your database queries, remove as much code as possible from your unauthenticated GET request handlers, require authentication for the expensive ones.
by hmokiguess | 2026-01-13 23:02:21+00:00
"I neither know nor think that I know," as Socrates said. Perhaps that's where we must leave it.

You see knowledge of origins as the path toward deeper appreciation, an asymptotic approach to the artist's soul. I see each encounter with art as its own beginning, where meaning emerges fresh in the meeting of work and listener, never fully exhausted by what came before.

Maybe both are true in their way. The child and the adult don't cancel each other, they're different movements in the same ongoing piece. I lost something when I learned those lyrics, and I gained something too. Neither experience was false.

There is no end to this question, for there is only beginning.

The debate about where meaning lives may itself be unsolvable, which is perhaps why we've been having it for millennia.

Thank you for the exchange. It's sharpened my thinking, even where we remain apart. :)
by rpdillon | 2026-01-13 23:02:44+00:00
I play a lot of solo RPGs (4AD, Riftbreakers, Ker Nethalas, Kal-Arath, Al-Rathak, and just picked up Ironsworn: Starforged last night!) and I find AI to be amazing at filling in scenario and campaign details. I might roll and find out I'm investigating a burial ground, and I'd just left the shore where my boat ran aground. My local GPT-OSS 120B is fantastic at generating the scene, descriptors for the environment, and small details I can cue on and ask my oracle questions about. It's like an automated GM-lite that can embellish a scene.

It's also really good at suggesting complications to situations in games like The Sprawl (based on WoD), where, as a GM, I want to ratchet up the tension.

AI is super-cool, and has the potential to transform a lot of areas. I get that people are threatened by it, but letting that overshadow its utility seems...short sighted? Not to be procative, but, how do folks think this will play out over the next 20 years? Doesn't it seem like AI could be used to make the gaming experience better, not just cheaper?
by OkayPhysicist | 2026-01-13 23:02:45+00:00
As far as I'm concerned, the git history of a project is the root source of truth of why a change was made, at that point in time. External documentation is mostly broad strokes, API references, or out of date. Code comments need to be git blamed anyway to figure out when they were added, and probably don't exist for every little change. Pull requests associated with a given commit give the broad description of "what feature was being implemented or bug was being fixed" for a given change, but a commit message tells me what, specifically, during that work, triggered this particular change. I want to know, for example, that the reason this url gets a random value appended to it is that while implementing a new page to the site it was found that the caching service would serve out-of date versions of some iframe. It never made it out of dev testing, so it never became a full-blown bug, it wasn't the purpose of the feature branch, so it wasn't discussed in the PR. But the commit message of "Add some cache-busting to iframe" (even something that brief), can go wonders to explaining why some oddity exists.
by araes | 2026-01-13 23:03:08+00:00
This was a large enough issue, there's a Sept 20th, 2025 Daily Mail, This is Money article titled "REVEALED: Boss behind Games Workshop's £5bn Warhammer boom" [1]

Quoting:

"this is the first picture of Kevin Rountree, the publicity-shy boss of the company behind Warhammer miniatures"

"surfaced last week at the firm's Nottingham HQ where he was up for re-election at its annual meeting"

"He isn't interested in publicity and is not on social media"

[1] https://archive.is/r6t8C#selection-953.76-953.176

Anyways, the original point was, that it's crazy sounding that one of the largest companies would have a CEO that nobody's seen (apparently agreed upon by the Dispatch, and the Daily Mail, and the Financial Times [2]). The image on the Warhammer wiki is possibly the same (looks kind of different than the Daily Mail pic)

Quoting Financial Times:

"its chief executive, Kevin Rountree — formerly of the firm now known as PwC, and farmer-and-British-posho apparel provender Barbour — has virtually no profile (the Sunday Times, which recently listed Rountree as one of its businesspeople of the year, had to use a photo of an Ultramarines Space Marine instead). “He’s a real person — he’s not some kind of character out of Warhammer 40k,” Ashworth-Lord told us."

To the point of openly requesting a picture:

"Obviously, if someone does have a photo of big Kev or wants to let us know if he’s a slandered South Shields sand dancer or similar, we’re contactable in the usual ways."

Credit to @defrost https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46563037 for the FT link.

[2] https://archive.is/2h16k#selection-37545.5-37587.1
by tetris11 | 2026-01-13 23:03:25+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams#Personal_life

> He has described a method he has used that he says gave him success: he pictured in his mind what he wanted and wrote it down 15 times a day on a piece of paper

I somehow read about him doing this when I was 18, and it was something that I used to help me excel in my university exams. For 7 years I did this during my exam period, and each time I got the exact grades I wanted.

He gave immense focus to a kid with back-then undiagnosed ADHD, and helped me structure my life in general.

I am very grateful to him.
by davorak | 2026-01-13 23:03:42+00:00
> If we are to believe his words, it worked out for him once, so it makes sense that he would decide to try things that are unconventional when his entire life was at stake.

In general this is not true, for example if you win the lottery the correct path is not normally to spend all of your money on more lottery tickets.

There are definitely other valid reasons to take unconventional paths though.
by roblh | 2026-01-13 23:03:49+00:00
There’s a lot of factors. Depends how well your content lends itself to being cached by a CDN, the tech you (or your predecessors) chose to build it with, and how many unique pages you have. Even with pretty aggressive caching, having a couple million pages indexed adds up real fast. Especially if you weren’t fortunate enough to inherit a project using a framework that makes server side rendering easy.
by switz | 2026-01-13 23:04:23+00:00
If you have a lot of pages, AI bots will scrape every single one on a loop - wiki's generally don't have anywhere near the number of pages as an incremented entity primary id. I have a few million pages on a tiny website and it gets hammered by AI bots all day long. I can handle it, but it's a nuisance and they're basically just scraping garbage (statistics pages of historical matches or user pages that have essentially no content).

Many of them don't even self-identify and end up scraping with shrouded user-agents or via bot-farms. I've had to block entire ASNs just to tone it down. It also hurts good-faith actors who genuinely want to build on top of our APIs because I have to block some cloud providers.

I would guess that I'm getting anywhere from 10-25 AI bot requests (maybe more) per real user request - and at scale that ends up being quite a lot. I route bot traffic to separate pods just so it doesn't hinder my real users' experience[0]. Keep in mind that they're hitting deeply cold links so caching doesn't do a whole lot here.

[0] this was more of a fun experiment than anything explicitly necessary, but it's proven useful in ways I didn't anticipate
by federicotdn | 2026-01-13 23:04:27+00:00
I've developed a small tool[1] that has helped me for the same problem, but in Python. Basically just uses simple parsers to attempt to find a definition wherever is sensible. Adding a Ruby module should not be too difficult, but it would probably be trickier than Python to get some good enough results

[1] https://github.com/federicotdn/irk
by dangus | 2026-01-13 23:04:55+00:00
It’s not even logical advice if you believe him that there really is a climate of hatred against white people.

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.

“Staying away” just ensures perpetual hate and division. It’s stupid advice. America literally tried that already and it didn’t work.

And this is all before we unpack the factual validity of these claims, and the underlying causes of that climate if those claims are really true.

I’m amazed at how many people are jumping to this guy’s defense. He doesn’t need his reputation defended, he dug his own hole.
by andai | 2026-01-13 23:04:59+00:00
Recently after a month of heavily AI assisted programming, I spent a few days programming manually.

The most striking thing to me was how frustrating it was.

"Oh my god, I've melted my brain" I thought. But I persisted in my frustration -- basically continuous frustration, for seven hours straight -- and was able to complete the task.

Then I remembered, actually, it was always like that. If I had attempted this task in 2019 (or a similar task, in terms of difficulty and novelty), it would have been the same thing. In fact I have many memories of such experiences. It is only that these days I am not used to enduring the discomfort of frustration for so long, without reaching for the "magically fix everything (probably)" button.

If I had to guess, I'd say that is the main "skill" being lost. There's a quote like that, I think.

Genius ... means transcendent capacity of taking trouble, first of all. —Thomas Carlyle
by Profan | 2026-01-13 23:05:20+00:00
Literally any familiarity with the lore and it just makes sense, the kind of people the 40k lore would resonate with are unlikely to be AI chuds in the first place.

Though then again people do usually look way past any/all subtlety that might once have been intended and any franchise-ification of something usually destroys the remaining of originality as it becomes a facsimile of its original self.

But GW do seem to take reasonably good care of their IP and world, so I respect them for resisting the imminent slop-ification at least a little bit, there's enough shitty 40k work out there in both book and videogame form already. I'm sure the Abominable Intelligence will come for them eventually too, but until then, the emperor protects.
by randyl | 2026-01-13 23:05:24+00:00
The SQLite team faced a similar problem last year, and Richard Hipp (the creator of SQLite) made almost the same comment:

"The malefactor behind this attack could just clone the whole SQLite source repository and search all the content on his own machine, at his leisure. But no: Being evil, the culprit feels compelled to ruin it for everyone else. This is why you don't get to keep nice things...."

https://sqlite.org/forum/forumpost/7d3eb059f81ff694
by defrost | 2026-01-13 23:05:34+00:00
Entirely fair points that give weight to the thesis that Constitutions evolve by their lengthy interpretations over time ( "living documents subject to ammendment and interpretation" )

Bare bones, stand alone, Ye Olde clauses such as this are subject to a breadth of literal interpretation.

What did they "really" mean?

What do we want it to mean?

I count the modern US Supreme Court literalists as deceptives, hell bent on framing original clauses to extract the meaning they want in order to apply them how they wish.
by treetalker | 2026-01-13 23:05:36+00:00
If someone comes at me with a knife or a gun and I shoot them in the head, the knife or gun would no longer be a threatening instrument (at least in the immediate future).

If a car is driving toward me (essentially the only way it could cause me harm) and I shoot the driver in the head, then the car keeps driving toward me and, lacking a driver, threatens not only me but also others in the immediate vicinity because it will keep moving. (Witness how the car in this instance keeps going and crashes.)

Another scenario. It's illegal (at least in Florida) to make a left or right turn while pedestrians are in any part of the crosswalk. Suppose I'm crossing the road, duly within the crosswalk and with a valid "walk" signal, and someone makes a turn while I'm in the crosswalk and is headed right toward me. The car being a lethal weapon, am I justified in drawing my firearm and shooting the driver in the head in self defense?
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-13 23:06:18+00:00
We are really chartering into utilitarian line of thinking here.

Nothing wrong with that and I may be overthinking but utilitarian line of thinking is the reason why a lot of issues actually happen because Politicians might promise something on an utilitarian premise where there real premise might be unknown.

Morals are certainly in question as well and where does one stop in the utilitarian line of thinking

But I overall agree with your statement and I wish to expand on it that if we are thinking about offsetting, one of the ideas can be to keep on buying even books written by many authors, overall aggregate can be net positive impact so perhaps we can treat it as a bank of sorts from which we can withdraw some impact.
by sanity | 2026-01-13 23:06:20+00:00
If you assume Adams is lying, that’s your call. But if the question is what he believes happened, the obvious evidence is his own account. I’ve listened to him for years and find it credible. Also, for a long time there was a strong taboo against white men complaining about discrimination, which makes it easy to imagine it never happened—regardless of whether it did.
by bluegatty | 2026-01-13 23:06:34+00:00
"It starts by believing that there are distinct human races (which there are not). . That alone makes most US Americans racist based on language alone. "

Sorry, but no.

The scientific community has moved away from 'race' in the biological sense (although there is debate) but the sociological construct of race, which is what we refer to in this context, obviously exists.

When a person 'self identifies' as Black, or Asian or White - that is 'race' - in the 'social construct' sense and it's perfectly accepted and normal - the recognition of that does not make one racist.
by alephnerd | 2026-01-13 23:06:52+00:00
That's a good callout - I have found European employers and founders to be much stingier with salaries in comparison to those I've worked with in the Bay or Israel, but I feel a lot of this is because of much more conservative investors, with boards pushing back on more "realistic" compensation.

I've been adamant about paying 75th percentile TC - I want the employees in my portfolio companies to be extremely motivated, and that requires incentivizing employees and founders correctly
by CapsAdmin | 2026-01-13 23:06:55+00:00
I'm honestly not getting the human story thing when it comes to music and maybe art in general. I mean I get what it means, but I don't think it describes why people enjoy art.

To me, it seems more like people place their own meaning in art. A particular song might remind one individual of the good times they had in their teens, while the actual meaning of the song is completely different.

Bachs 5th symphony (or whatever) might be extremely annoying to someone because they had to listen to it every day at work.

And what exactly is the meaning of jazz fusion? I really like a good solo, but a lot of people hate it, they need to hear a voice. (though I don't particularly like the signature Suno or Udio solo..)

I found this ai track on Spotify that I unironically enjoyed. I listened to it every day while working on reviving an old passion project, which became its meaning to me. The tune, a long with its album with random disparate suno generations was taken down.

I'm not sure if I have a point here, but something is off with the story thing in art to me from a consumers point of view. Maybe from other artists as consumers point of view?
by teekert | 2026-01-13 23:07:02+00:00
If you look for it I think you’ll find that they indeed see it as their mission to offer an ecosystem to rival MS and Google. You can do docs and since a couple of weeks also spreadsheet. It’s all decent but very minimal. Drive is aspiring to become a Google Photos/iCloud alternative. It works well enough, including auto syncing from iOS and Android.
by roywiggins | 2026-01-13 23:07:04+00:00
LLM tics like the bits I quoted feel more like marketingspeak by committee than an actual readme written by a human. I don't have any particular suggestions of what to write, but you just don't need to be this punchy in a readme. LLMs love this style though, for some reason.

When I read this type of prose it makes me feel like the author is more worried about trying to sell me something than just describing the project.

For instance, you don't need to tell me the numbers are "real". You just have to show me they're covering real-world use-cases, etc. LLMs love this sort of "telling not showing" where it's constantly saying "this is what I'm going to tell you, this is what I'm telling you, this is what I told you" structure. They do it within sections and then again at higher levels. They have, I think, been overindexed on "five-paragraph essays". They do it way more than most human writers do.
by toast0 | 2026-01-13 23:07:13+00:00
I think there's a lot of people where 1990 social norms and pressure caused existential distress; or they lived in a repressive regime then and not now, etc. So I wouldn't wish to have those things back for those people. There's also a lot of health advances that I wouldn't want to turn back either.

But the internet and technology in general was so much more fun and exciting back then than it is now, IMHO. I'm sure some of my feelings there is nostalgia and youth or lack thereof, but a circa 1995 Socket 7 desktop motherboard could take cpus from Intel, AMD, Cyrix, IDT, and some others, and then there were all the non-pc options; that's a lot of competition and fun. Video game consoles were meaningfully different than each other, instead of the massively consolidated situation we have now. Arcade machines were more capable beyond just having large screens and specialized input devices.

I didn't get on the Internet until ~ 95, but at least for several years after that, it was a community of choice, rather than a place everyone had to assemble. That made interaction special in a lot of ways that are hard to reproduce now. There's some communities of choice on the internet, but they don't have the same kind of broad reach where you got all sorts of people where they would appear because computing was fun or helpful but they often had other things going on too, but most people didn't appear because they could avoid computing. The mixing function was pretty cool, but it's hard to replicate when forums tend to be all encompassing and there's too many people to really converse or are so narrow that everyone is too much alike.

I could certainly live with larger bid/ask spreads and fractional rather than decimal stock pricing as well as no odd lots and T+3? settlement. Current situation is better, but it's really not a huge deal. I can wait for slow shipping, and call people on the phone to make special orders...
by jonfromsf | 2026-01-13 23:07:31+00:00
The expectation that artists be "good people" always baffles me. Anyone who becomes a great artist has: 1)High levels of narcissism required to think the world needs to hear "your vision. 2) High levels of sociopathy to thrive in a snake pit like the art world or Hollywood. It's even stranger than if someone expected CEOs to be good people (which we don't).
by jonsneyers | 2026-01-13 23:07:35+00:00
PNG can and is often used in a lossy way. Reducing the number of colors so PNG8 can be used instead of PNG24/PNG32 is the most common way to do that. Tools like pngquant exist, and for example Photoshop when exporting to PNG also has an option to reduce the colors, to flatten the image (remove alpha), or to change the colorspace.

16-bit PNG files can easily accidentally be reduced to 8-bit, which is of course a lossy operation. Animated PNG files can easily get converted into a still image (keeping only the first frame). CMYK images will have to be converted to RGB when saving them as PNG, which is also a lossy operation. It can happen that an image gets created as or converted to JPEG and then gets saved as PNG - which of course is a bad and lossy workflow, but it does happen.

So I don't agree that with PNG there is no way to accidentally make it lossy.

In any case: lossless or lossy is not a property of a format, but of a workflow. For keeping track of provenance information and workflow history, I would recommend looking into JPEG Trust / C2PA, which is a way to embed as metadata what happened to an image since it was captured/generated. Relying on the choice of image format for this is fragile and doesn't allow expressing the nuances, since reality is more complicated than just a binary "lossless or lossy".
by zahlman | 2026-01-13 23:07:42+00:00
I imagined it like:

F T (Alice)
F xx ????????
xx ????????

T ?? vvvvvvvv
?? vvvvvvvv
^ ?? vvvvvvvv
B ?? vvvvvvvv
o ?? vvvvvvvv
b ?? vvvvvvvv
v ?? vvvvvvvv
?? vvvvvvvv

(where "F" describes cases where the specified person tells you a Falsehood, and "T" labels the cases of that person telling you the Truth)

In the check-mark (v) region, you get the right answer regardless; they are both being truthful, and of course you trust them when they agree. Similarly you get the wrong answer regardless in the x region.

In the ? region you are no better than a coin flip, regardless of your strategy. If you unconditionally trust Alice then you win on the right-hand side, and lose on the left-hand side; and whatever Bob says is irrelevant. The situation for unconditionally trusting Bob is symmetrical (of course it is; they both act according to the same rules, on the same information). If you choose any other strategy, you still have a 50-50 chance, since Alice and Bob disagree and there is no reason to choose one over the other.

Since your odds don't change with your strategy in any of those regions of the probability space, they don't change overall.