MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by treetalker | 2026-01-22 23:06:18+00:00
One approach I'm finding useful is to deal with discrete projects/responsibilities/topics in regular time blocks, and within each, use a limited part of the time to "adapt to changing circumstances": emails, news, changes in legal rules (I'm a lawyer), etc. That keeps my focus on building/creating, not just reacting.

Some changes must be taken into account. Some resolve themselves over time. Others don't matter.

It's also helpful to make a list of "all" possible inputs/tasks/focuses of attention — then, out of every 5, select 1. And out of those, select one of every five. That gives you (roughly) the top 4% of important things.

I also read something on HN today that resonated [1]: "you can only ever actually be doing one thing" so pick anything that "would be worthwhile to do right now, without any expectation that you know what might be 'best'", do it, and repeat.

FOMO is a b####, but virtually everything is unimportant. And with respect to important things, consider the unimaginable vastness of the universe and how trivial even the most important things are in comparison.

[1]: previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36253882
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-22 23:07:25+00:00
> a huge gamble with roommates that you might be stuck with someone terrible in a year (or longer) lease

Life involves taking risks and measuring people. Getting stuck with a shitty roommate is pretty low stakes on that spectrum.

> just a sign that people are getting richer (since this same trend is happening in all first-world countries)

Valid hypothesis. I’d posit Covid and the increasingly prevalence of single-child households are the more-proximate cause.
by nkoren | 2026-01-22 23:07:45+00:00
Great, now how do you make that actually happen at a political / regulatory / cultural level?

It's already an uphill battle, because humans in large organisations seem to have an innately conservative bias which says that "nobody ever got fired for choosing ${giganticEvilStatusQuoCorporation}". That, combined with the fact that the US hyperscalars have, I dunno, hundreds of billions of dollars worth of ability to put their thumb on the political and regulatory scales, make this an uphill battle. There will need to be a specific plan for leveling the playing field.

What is that plan?
by xracy | 2026-01-22 23:08:21+00:00
> We already know many useful things to do; there are already 10,000 startups (9789 out of YC alone, 4423 of which are coding-related) doing various ostensibly useful things. And there a ton more use-cases discussed in the comments here and elsewhere. But because of the headline the discussion is missing the much more important point!

There has to be gold in the West! Look at all of the prospectors moving there to get rich on gold! You have not demonstrated that there are 10k uses of AI, you've only demonstrated that there are 10k "businesses" interested in making money off of AI. Just like there were 10k+ crypto-currencies... Just like there were 10k+ "uber but for..." apps. Where are these failed gold-rush attempts now?

Investors are currently rewarding the words "AI", so (to extend the analogy) when the gold moved, the gold rushers moved to where they thought the gold would be.

Also your emphasis doesn't change the reading of the sentence.
by mrguyorama | 2026-01-22 23:08:22+00:00
Like, that entire saga about the "Delta smelt" was manufactured by a lobbying group who serve a group of rich farm companies who have very junior water rights.

California has a "dual" water rights system. "Appropriative" rights the stupidity is called. If you claimed a shitload of water back in the 1800s as "yours", you still have total claim over that water today, and most who came after you to claim water have less right to water than you do. These rights resolve first come, first serve, and "In times of shortage the most recent (“junior”) right holder must be the first to discontinue such use".

The way these rights interact is such that, the oldest "claim" will never ever ever have to reduce their water usage, even if things are utterly drastic. This water rights system is simply divorced from reality. Californian farmers have no reason to adopt more sustainable or conservative methods of farming.

>https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/waterrights/board_info/water_...

The "riparian" water rights supposedly carry higher privilege than those old rights, but "all riparian rightsholders share the burden of conservation in times of shortage", and the water claims work differently, so they interact in awful ways.

The complex and outright stupid interaction of these rights mean you as someone with a really shitty appropriative water right benefits much more from getting the rest of the state to use less water than you benefit from yourselves using water more efficiently.

>This is ridiculous. No wonder they are watering lawns and wasting water in other ways during droughts.

I'm not saying that everyone who waters their lawn during a drought is an appropriative rightsholder. I think it's mostly agricultural users. In fact, I am directly saying that caring at all about the 10% of Californian water usage that is municipal is a distraction. Hell, California goes so far as to classify 50% of "water usage" as "environmental" when what that actually means is water that you didn't take out of the stream, to help make it look less bad that in terms of actual water used, it's 80% agricultural, 20% urban.

That monumental usage of California's extremely limited water resources accounts, btw, for only 2% of the state's GDP, despite the economics of that grown produce continuing to improve. All of this pain is just to enrich specific individuals, and not that many of them.
by zemvpferreira | 2026-01-22 23:08:58+00:00
Get a better hourly wage. About an hour of my month pays for all of my entertainment and software subscriptions. Another couple of hours pay for a year of iPhone. Coffee? Another hour per month maybe? We are worlds apart in our arithmetic and I don't even earn that much.

If people enjoy spending their unpaid hours building clones of paid software that's fine, but it's fine because they enjoy it. It's not minimally worth it. The time I waste on YouTube and the news etc etc is sorely needed and enjoyed downtime. If someone has enough energy to build instead of vegetating, more power to them. I prefer to save my energy for the stuff I value. (Which is actual work, helping family and games)

EDIT: another thing to consider is that each hour I spend fully pursuing my occupation pays me an hourly wage but also pays me in career growth. This compounds massively over time in higher and higher wages. Building throwaway apps generally does not. Why would I waste energy on work that doesn't compound? I'm all for serendipity but not as a financial argument.
by pentamassiv | 2026-01-22 23:09:33+00:00
Fun read!

Now that some bikes have electronic shifting, you can attack the bike itself. I wrote two blog post about how to downgrade the Shimano Di2 shifters and do a replay attack to remotely shift it. You can find them here:

https://grell.dev/blog/di2_downgrade
https://grell.dev/blog/di2_attack
by arjunchint | 2026-01-22 23:09:34+00:00
> One simple example is an extension can't see cross origin iframes

Sounds like a skill issue, our web agent is able to interact with cross origin iframes to for example solve captchas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LD3afouKPYc

We honestly haven't faced any bot detection or blocking issues. Owning the browser layer exposes to you much more detection just look at Comet getting blocked on Amazon etc.
by Jtsummers | 2026-01-22 23:09:46+00:00
> Why not just virtualize Linux for the terminal, and let macOS handle hardware acceleration and desktop tasks?

This is more or less what I do, but when you happen to want a Linux GUI you end up using XQuartz which works fine, but doesn't exactly play well with the rest of macOS's windowing system (copy/paste works though!).
by ffitch | 2026-01-22 23:09:53+00:00
Building (or vibecoding) a markdown editor for a single user and their specific use case, for a 100 users, and for 10,000 users takes different amount of time and effort. In the pre-LLM days people with resolve to make 1-user version were likely to polish it for 100-users and somewhat likely to get it to a stable place when it can satisfy thousands of users.

Today on /r/macapps/ there’s a wave of apps that look good at the first glance but get abandoned before they achieve even a 100-users maturity level.
Ask HN: Have you managed to switch to Bluesky for tech people?
by fuegoio | 2026-01-22 23:11:18+00:00
I'm currently using a lot X to follow technical people in my ecosystem (Web development, Typescript / Python, AI, ...). But it sucks that belongs to Elon Musk and my feed is constantly poluted by clickbait posts nowadays.

I tried to signup to Bluesky, but there are not a lot of my favorite tech personalities, and some of them are not really posting anything.

Is that the same for you? How do you manage that? Is there a way out of X someday?
by FloorEgg | 2026-01-22 23:11:41+00:00
I agree with you about ecosystems and many systems for that matter. Diversity in diet leads to diversity in gut microbiome leads to diversity in methods to absorb nutrients leads to longevity and health.

Lots more example I could list.

However I think there are contexts and levels of abstraction where diversity at one level prohibits diversity at another. An example of this would be standards. There is little diversity in shipping container sizes and designs and that standardization enables more shipment of goods.

Standardization in web protocols enables larger diversity in website content.

While I'm not an expert in biology, I'm pretty sure some of our organs have a lot less diversity in cell types than others. E.g. a healthy heart has little cellular diversity compared to a healthy gut.

By standardizing money (limiting diversity in barter) enables a larger economy with greater diversity of products and services.

A highly functional team will all share a core set of values, and if everyone had extremely diverse values the team wouldn't be able to function. For example some businessess thrive on a culture of internal competition, and some thrive on internal cooperation, but mixing these up can create dysfunction. At the same time, some diversity in values leads to better decision making, so again context matters.

So my point is that diversity is a really important property that sometimes needs to be maximized, sometimes needs to be minimized, and sometimes needs to be balanced, in order to achieve the desired outcomes. I also think that in general maximizing global diversity is a good north star value, and I am acknowledging that to achieve it requires minimizing diversity in some narrow contexts.
by FrostViper8 | 2026-01-22 23:11:45+00:00
I am not denying there is inflation and shrinkflation. However I kept my bill in check by doing the bulk of my shopping and cheaper stores e.g. Aldi (quality of most stuff is comparable to more expensive super market) and only spending more when it makes sense.

The vast majority of the public doesn't understand what causes inflation or that there is a difference between monetary and price inflation and energy is part of that.
by tsoukase | 2026-01-22 23:11:48+00:00
All these milestones of renewables Vs fossils are low hanging fruits. Sometime soon they will hit a wall of diminishing returns: more solar improves nothing.

Also, if a large share of heating and transportation converts to electricity then renewables will become a single digit share and we are back to burning. We desperately need a new breakthrough energy saving technology from summer to winter/vehicle, either electrical or chemical. I bet on hydrogen/eFuel. Or else nuclear.
by blindriver | 2026-01-22 23:12:07+00:00
No. The last two investment tranches will get back their money, based on 1X liquidation preference. Employees who joined in the last 5 years if they got options are fucked. If they have RSUs then they will take a fraction of their equity.

It sounds like investors got out okay, but employees got fucked big time. It's a terrible exit and Brex waited too long until their growth stalled.
by joshstrange | 2026-01-22 23:12:19+00:00
I missed that thread originally, the post and the comments where a good read, thank you for sharing.

I got a kick out of this comment [0]. "BenjiWiebe" made a comment about the SSH packets you stumbled across in that thread. Obviously making the connection between what you were seeing in your game and this random off-hand comment would be insane (if you had seen the comment at all), but I got a smile out of it.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46366291
by alopha | 2026-01-22 23:12:34+00:00
37Signals tried that with once.com . Given they're now giving those away for free and haven't said a thing about it suggests it was an abject failure. What you're paying for with SaaS is outsourcing - deployment, maintenance, security, reliability etc are someone else's problem.

The code is the easy part but there's ongoing humans needed to make it work. If Agents get to the point they can genuinely autonomously SRE & patch a service everything changes but that still seems a long way off.
by QuotedForTruth | 2026-01-22 23:12:38+00:00
If you play game theory optimal (GTO) then you by definition can not be exploited. For poker a GTO strategy is extremely complex where each decision you make depends on the exact situation and includes varying your decisions over time. Like bluff raising 60% of the time and folding 40% of the time you’re in some very specific situation. It’s basically putting your opponent into a situation that they can’t make a profitable decision in the long term.

It’s not really practically possible to do. But if two people did they would have 0 expected value over time against each other. If one player slightly differed from game theory optimal strategy that would give the other one positive expected value. There is no way they can change from GTO strategy to exploit you.

However, this isn’t necessarily the most profitable way to play against real people. When your opponents aren’t playing GTO, there will be some non-GTO strategy that exploits them most effectively. Like if they call too much then you should raise for value more often than against a GTO opponent and bluff less.
by laserDinosaur | 2026-01-22 23:13:36+00:00
The Pro plan quota seems to be getting worse. I can get maybe 20-30 minutes work done before I hit my 4 hour quota. I found myself using it more just for the planning phase to get a little bit more time out of it, but yesterday I managed to ask it ONE question in plan mode (from a fresh quota window), and while it was thinking it ran out of quota. I'm assuming it probably pulled in a ton of references from my project automatically and blew out the token count. I find I get good answers from it when it does work, but it's getting very annoying to use.

(on the flip side, Codex seems like it's being SO efficient with the tokens it can be hard to understand its answers sometimes, it rarely includes files without you doing it manually, and often takes quite a few attempts to get the right answer because it's so strict what it's doing each iteration. But I never run out of quota!)
by mturmon | 2026-01-22 23:14:01+00:00
I was an area chair on the NeurIPS program committee in 1997. I just looked and it seems that we had 1280 submissions. At that time, we were ultimately capped by the book size that MIT Press was willing to put out - 150 8-page articles. Back in 1997 we were all pretty sure we were on to something big.

I'm sure people made mistakes on their bibliographies at that time as well!

And did we all really dig up and read Metropolis, Rosenbluth, Rosenbluth, Teller, and Teller (1953)?

Edited to add: Someone made a chart! Here:
https://papercopilot.com/statistics/neurips-statistics/

You can see the big bump after the book-length restriction was lifted, and the exponential rise starting ~2016.
by iainctduncan | 2026-01-22 23:14:49+00:00
One interesting reason this happens, at least in the music field, is the adult disadvantages that often go along with various forms of savantism. I have spoken with a number of fellow music academics about this, and it's not uncommon that the things that make one a young prodigy are the same things that give one real obstacles to making it in the regular world, and this can impose a ceiling on where they get to. For example, many music prodigies have never "really had to work" and once they get to having to shoulder the boring reponsibilities that go with building a career, they instead alienate people, or just can't do things that are hard for them because it's always been easy. But unless they are truly, truly rare air, real career gigs have boring work elements too.

Savantism can be pretty damned weird. I've known a few, including a couple who will never have an adult career beyond local gigs because of their mental disabilities in other, non-music areas. The Oliver Sacks book "Musicophelia" has fascinating case stories about it.
by pjsg | 2026-01-22 23:14:49+00:00
That is odd. When I searched for Vitamin D, it showed me a list (which I could sort by $/mg). That list included Vitamin D, Vitamin D2 and Vitamin D3. I assumed (incorrectly it seems) that this meant that it was doing some sort of prefix match. It seems that the result table highlights the "Ingredient" column, so I assumed (incorrectly) that it was searching that column. However, it doesn't seem to search the "Supplement" column, nor is it doing a prefix match (or substring match) on the Ingredient column. This is just confusing.

https://pillser.com/search?q=%22Vitamin+D%22
by CriptoSeguro25 | 2026-01-22 23:14:59+00:00
You ar absolutely right. Obfuscation like Base64 or rot13 will always beat static Regex. I was thinking more in terms of a seatbelt for accidental leaks user error rather than a defense against adversarial prompt injection. It's about reducing the blast radius of clumsy mistakes, not stopping a determined attacker.
by rekabis | 2026-01-22 23:15:05+00:00
BlueSky is equally in cahoots with authoritarianists and fascists.

They recently welcomed and verified ICE.

Yes, that ICE.

While the Fediverse is likely to have even fewer content creators, it isn’t a captured marketplace like Twitter or BlueSky is. There is already one programming-focused instance, https://www.programming.dev/
by dasil003 | 2026-01-22 23:15:08+00:00
Software itself is not inherently valuable, the value is in running and maintaining its data and any necessary integrations to other systems.

The bar for me to pay for a $10/month software subscription is pretty high, but once I make the decision that it's valuable, the actual cash cost is pretty low. Vibe coding something will never approach the quality of something that someone put enough thought and effort to turn into a product. The main place where I'll write my own software is when it's truly custom to my own needs, AI is a force multiplier for this type of work, but at the end of the day I still have very limited time to run and maintain a lot of custom software and data, so it's not going to cannibalize any of the SaaS I'm willing to pay for.

Obviously for younger software guys with more time than money, the equation will be different, but those were never the make-or-break demographic for SaaS anyway. I don't think the equation has meaningfully changed for SaaS sales due to AI, I see it more as continuously rising bar over the last two decades due to UX expectations, market saturation, limits on human attention and complexity tolerance.
by hecanjog | 2026-01-22 23:15:29+00:00
Sounds great now -- I'm not getting the DC stuttering when I play around with different colors anymore.

It seemed like the source is minified, but I didn't look that closely -- I'd be curious to hear more about your sonification scheme.

Edit: nevermind I found a link to the source & explanation in another comment! https://github.com/tevans-3/synesthesia
by PeterWhittaker | 2026-01-22 23:15:34+00:00
Exactly! Another, semi-related difference between the cultures: When Alexander chooseEitherOrBothOf(provided instructions, gave orders) during the Sicilian campaign, American generals took them as orders and did them, sometimes to their detriment, while British generals took them as intent/direction, and asked questions.

Eventually, the allies realized they had very different command cultures and learned to work together. It may be that Normandy, et al, would have been far different if they hadn't have figured this out in Sicily.
by linsomniac | 2026-01-22 23:15:37+00:00
I think it's happening, some of them are even making it to the front page of HN, like the "I built 50 calculators" a few days ago. I'm still working to release some of the things I've built over the last month:

- A nice little single-file web "random slideshow" to replace an aging one I bought.
- A fairly feature-complete read-only SQL console.
- A development SMTP server (like Mailhog) https://github.com/linsomniac/smtphotel
- A work status dashboard that I'll probably release once I have run it a bit longer.
- A fairly extensive Docusign-like webapp.
- A retrospective meeting runner.
- A cron "swiss army knife" helper.
- A "social calorie tracker" (I'm unhappy with the existing ones out there).

These are all things I've vibecoded in the last month, and are more than I could have coded in my spare time in 6 months or more.

For me, the renaissance is here.
by jongjong | 2026-01-22 23:15:39+00:00
Makes sense. My perspective is that fast learners are fast because they absorb information quickly without the overhead of cross-domain synthesis. They have more logical contradictions in their minds which they haven't resolved or aren't even aware of. Their worldview is not coherent as a whole. In some cases, they don't have a worldview; instead they just rely on expert data to inform their decisions... But the experts themselves are often victim to the same kind of domain-specific tunnel vision. Such people often lack creativity in their work because cross-domain pattern synthesis is precisely how you can solve complex problems that haven't been solved before.
by pull_my_finger | 2026-01-22 23:15:56+00:00
I'm curious what short-comings you found with Lutris is particular, because the examples you listed are actually not hidden from the users at all.

Not that there's anything wrong with tailor-made solutions or hacking for the sake of hacking, but it sounds like a fairly big undertaking and it might just be a skill-issue (no offense) if those items in particular were your only gripes.
by fluoridation | 2026-01-22 23:16:14+00:00
No, I don't think so. I think my interpretation is correct.

> a textbox where I tried to convince some Claude C in the multi-trillion-quadrillion dollar non-disabled organization

> So I wrote to their support, this time I wrote the text with the help of an LLM from another non-disabled organization.

> My guess is that this likely tripped the "Prompt Injection" heuristics that the non-disabled organization has.

A "non-disabled organization" is just a big company. Again, I don't understand the why, but I can't see any other way to interpret the term and end up with a coherent idea.
by mapontosevenths | 2026-01-22 23:16:19+00:00
> It's a shoddy, irresponsible way to work. And also plagiarism, when you claim authorship of it.

It reminds me of kids these days and their fancy calculators! Those new fangled doohickeys just aren't reliable, and the kids never realize that they won't always have a calculator on them! Everyone should just do it the good old fashioned way with slide rules!

Or these darn kids and their unreliable sources like Wikipedia! Everyone knows that you need a nice solid reliable source that's made out of dead trees and fact checked but up to 3 paid professionals!