MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by InsideOutSanta | 2026-01-08 15:56:00+00:00
How is it silly?

I've observed the same behavior somewhat regularly, where the agent will produce code that superficially satisfies the requirement, but does so in a way that is harmful. I'm not sure if it's getting worse over time, but it is at least plausible that smarter models get better at this type of "cheating".

A similar type of reward hacking is pretty commonly observed in other types of AI.
by palmotea | 2026-01-08 15:56:01+00:00
But AI weapons aren't horrific in some way common to "all lethal weapons." They have that and more.

AI weapons are specially horrific in the way they have potential put massive and specific lethal power under the total control of a small number of people, in a way (like all AI) that basically cuts most of humanity out of the future (or at the very least puts them under a boot where no escape is imaginable).

In some ways, they're even worse than nuclear weapons. A nuclear attack is an event, and if you survive there's some chance of escape. Station 100,000 fully automated drones around a city with orders to kill anything that moves, and the entire population will be dead in a couple months (anyone who tries to escape = dead, everyone else sees that and stays inside out of fear until they starve).

Manpower and attention limitations have been and important (and sometimes only) limit on the worst of humanity, and AI is poised to remove those limitations.
by bombcar | 2026-01-08 15:56:34+00:00
Usually it means that supply gets bought up and converted (and leaves the supply, often).

The desire is that a row of single family homes (say a block has 10) get slowly redeveloped into a row of brownstones or similar density - but they're still single family and owned by the residents, but now you have 20 in the same space, or 30. You can triple the density and not really change anything else.

But what ends up happening is that the single family homes remain single family, get slowly bought up by a developer and rented, and then the entire block gets turned into an apartment complex, perhaps with the same or even more units, but they're all rentals forever.

This might be fine, and perhaps even encouraged in some areas, but it does reduce the supply of homes to buy.
Show HN: Wozz – open-source Kubernetes cost linter and cluster auditor
by wozzio | 2026-01-08 15:56:56+00:00
URL: https://github.com/WozzHQ/wozz

Hi HN,

I built Wozz, an open-source CLI and GitHub Action to catch expensive Kubernetes configs before they merge.

The Motivation I noticed that most cloud cost tools (like Kubecost) only show you the bill 30 days later. By then, the over-provisioned sidecar or massive Java heap is already in production. I wanted something that acts like a unit test for resource requests blocking fat finger mistakes in the PR rather than waiting for the bill.

How it works Wozz runs in two modes:

In CI/CD (The Linter): It parses the git diff of your manifests (deployment.yaml, etc.), calculates the cost delta (requests × replicas), and posts a comment if the change exceeds a threshold (e.g., +$50/mo). It also checks HorizontalPodAutoscaler limits to flag worst-case scaling risks.

Locally (The Auditor): It scans your current kubecontext to compare reserved requests vs. actual live usage (kubectl top). This helps find the "Sleep Insurance" gap—where devs request 4GB RAM just to be safe, but the app only uses 200MB.

Implementation Details

Stack: TypeScript/Node.js.

Math: Instead of querying AWS Cost APIs (which requires sensitive creds and is slow), it uses a configurable Blended Rate (e.g., $0.04/GB/hr) to estimate costs deterministically.

Privacy: It runs 100% locally or in your runner. No manifests or secrets are sent to any external server.

Repo https://github.com/WozzHQ/wozz

Feedback I’m currently using a static Blended Rate for the cost math to keep the tool fast and stateless. I’m curious if this approximation is accurate enough for your team's guardrails, or if you strictly require real-time Spot Instance pricing to trust a tool like this?
by dcchuck | 2026-01-08 15:57:38+00:00
Couldn't agree more.

I would expect older models make you feel this way.

* Agents not trying to do the impossible (or not being an "over eager people pleaser" as it has been described) has significantly improved over the past few months. No wonder the older models fail.

* "Garbage in, garbage out" - yes, exactly ;)
by tomashubelbauer | 2026-01-08 15:57:47+00:00
It takes less than a minute to resubscribe to any of these devices. No need to burn 60 USD if I switch for a three month spell and then switch back. When a provider goes down, I do what I set out to do without their service. If the outage lasts too long, I'll cancel as not to support sloppy service.
by vidarh | 2026-01-08 15:57:54+00:00
This springs to mind:

"On two occasions I have been asked, – "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" ... I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question"

It's valid to argue that there's a problem with training models to comply to an extent where they will refuse to speak up when asked to do something fundamentally broken, but at the same time a lot of people get very annoyed when the models refuse to do what they're asked.

There is an actual problem here, though, even part of the problem is competing expectations of refusal.

But in this case, the test is also a demonstration of exactly how not to use coding assistants: Don't constrain them in ways that create impossible choices for them.

I'd guess (I haven't tested) that you'd have decent odds of getting better results even just pasting the error message into an agent than adding stupid restrictions. And even better if you actually had a test case that verified valid output.

(and on a more general note, my experience is exactly the opposite of the writer's two first paragraphs)
by troyvit | 2026-01-08 15:58:01+00:00
There's really not much to take from this post without a repo and a lot of supporting data.

I wish they would publish the experiment so people could try with more than just GPT and Claude, and I wish they would publish their prompts and any agent files they used. I also wish they would say what coding tool they used. Like did they use the native coding tools (Claude Code and whatever GPT uses) or was it through VSCode, OpenCode, aider, etc.?
by bombcar | 2026-01-08 15:59:07+00:00
Right now holding rental apartments is a "good deal" and they'll have buyers for that (the builders don't want to hold anything usually, they want to sell, sell, sell and get building the next thing) - just larger institutional buyers.

When the market turns around (and every time in the past it was "only going up" it eventually ended) then suddenly you have apartment complexes turning into condos to sell off capital and stop the bleeding.

The problem for people "on the ground/in the rentals" is that can force you to act when you're not financially prepared to - it's easy to find situations where someone can afford the rent; even afford the mortgage to BUY the apartment as a condo; but cannot afford the downpayment (or otherwise qualify for the loan).
by Fiveplus | 2026-01-08 15:59:23+00:00
The hardware on the soundtouch 10/20/30 series was always surprisingly over engineered with heavy magnets, decent power supplies, and good enclosures but let down by a sluggish app and flaky mDNS implementation.

With this, they just became the best value proposition on the used market. Flashing these with a minimal distro running snapclient (for multiroom audio) and shairport-sync (AirPlay 2) makes them infinitely better than they were on stock firmware. eBay prices are probably going to double by tomorrow morning.
by foxglacier | 2026-01-08 15:59:54+00:00
Yes. He's asking it to do something impossible then grading the responses - which must always be wrong - according to his own made-up metric. Somehow a program to help him debug it is a good answer despite him specifying that he wanted it to fix the error. So that's ignoring his instructions just as much as the answer that simply tells him what's wrong, but the "worst" answer actually followed his instructions and wrote completed code to fix the error.
by KellyCriterion | 2026-01-08 15:59:54+00:00
quite off!

You need at least 0.8g / kilo (referring to 0.4g / pound) if you are doing nothing heavy, like walking to the office.

If you do moderate sports, you are hitting 1.0g / kilo immediately.

If you do some more extensive sports, like 3 - 4 days / week in gym, you jumü to 1.2 - 1.4g / kilo.

Bodybuilders are quite above :-))

Regarding the number of chicken breasts - scary for me, Im enough with a half one every second or third day.

There was a great movie about vegan & bodybuilding with known sports people: The Gamechangers - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_Changers
Show HN: ShutterSnap – uses AI to find and clean up Photos.app similar photos
by wheels | 2026-01-08 16:00:15+00:00
I've wanted for ages to clear out my Photos.app library of, let's face it, mostly gigabytes of banal kid photos. I also wanted to try out the Apple Vision framework for analyzing photos. Almost everything else that I found out there just compared metadata or histograms, and both was useless at finding the best photo in a series, or even identifying a series.

This uses the Vision framework to look at stuff like facial expressions, focus, picture quality. It also has keyboard shortcuts that make it really fast to review, so I managed to delete about 150 GB of photos by mostly pressing "return" over and over again for a couple hours. (It has an autopilot mode, but even though I'd say it gets things right from my perspective about 90% of the time, I didn't trust it completely on my kid photos. Might be great though on particular albums that weren't especially important.)
by causal | 2026-01-08 16:00:26+00:00
And the example given was specific to OpenAI models, yet the title is a blanket statement.

I agree with the author that GPT-5 models are much more fixated on solving exactly the problem given and not as good at taking a step back and thinking about the big picture. The author also needs to take a step back and realize other providers still do this just fine.
by techblueberry | 2026-01-08 16:00:42+00:00
> But today trivial to simple applications can be rewritten from spec or scratch in an afternoon with an LLM. And even pretty complex parsers can be ported provided that the tests are robust enough[1]. It's just a metter of time someone rewrites a small to medium size application from one language to another using the previous app as the "spec".

This seems like a sort of I dunno chicken and the egg thing.

The _reason_ you don't rewrite code is because it's hard to know that you truly understand the spec. If you could perfectly understand the spec then you could rewrite the code, but then what is the software, is it the code or the spec that writes the code. So if you built code A from spec, rebuilding it from spec I don't think qualifies a rewrite, it's just a recompile. If you're trying to fundamentally build a new application from spec when an old application was written by hand, you're going to run into the same problems you have in a normal rewrite.

We already have an example of this. Typescript applications are basically rewritten every time that you recompile typescript to node. Typescript isn't the executed code, it's a spec.
by chubot | 2026-01-08 16:01:05+00:00
This is ovestating it by a lot. Jeff was the AI lead at the time, and there was a big conflict between management and the ethics team

And I actually think Google needs to a lot more attention to AI ethics ... but it's a publically traded company and the incentives are all wrong -- i.e. it's going to do whatever it needs to do keep up with the competition, similar to what happened with Google+ (perceived competition from Facebook)
by ktg0215 | 2026-01-08 16:01:20+00:00
The gap between "96% don't fully trust AI output" and "only 48% always verify" is concerning. We're essentially gambling with code quality because verification feels like friction.

I've started treating AI suggestions like code from a very productive but junior developer - it needs review every time, no exceptions. The productivity gains disappear quickly if you're debugging AI-generated bugs weeks later.
by g947o | 2026-01-08 16:01:30+00:00
My experience is that Perplexity is slightly better at providing facts than ChatGPT (in default mode), probably because (almost) everything comes from a source, not just the model's training set. Although Perplexity does mess up numbers as well.

My most recent experiment:

How many Google CEOs there have been?

Followed by the question

So 3 CEOs for 27 years. How does that number compare to other companies of this size

ChatGPT just completely hallucinates the answer -- 5 Microsoft CEOs over 50 years, 3 Amazon CEOs over 30 years, 2 Meta CEOs over 20 years which are just obviously wrong. You don't need to do a search to know these numbers -- they are definitely in the training dataset (barring the small possibility that there has been a CEO change in the past year in any of these companies, which apparently did not happen)

But Perplexity completely nailed it on first attempt without any additional instructions.
by nonethewiser | 2026-01-08 16:01:43+00:00
>In practice, there's no evidence of amino acid deficiency in vegans/vegetarians

That is not what your linked article says. It says there is not evidence of protein deficiency, and the deficiency of amino acids is overstated. Not that there is no deficiency.

And vegan/vegetarian health is really a 2nd order fact. Vegans and vegetarians could have massive amino acid surpluses and it remains a fact that vegetable proteins lack necessary amino acids - there really is no disputing that.
by aldarion | 2026-01-08 16:02:09+00:00
I have IBS, and what I did was literally that I kept a list of foods and symptoms they cause me.

Turns out, carbohydrate-rich foods cause me massive issues, too much protein causes me some issues. Saturated fat is the least damaging to my gut health, followed my monounsaturated fats. Polyunsaturated fats and carbohydrates are the devil I have to avoid, no questions asked.
by nedt | 2026-01-08 16:02:21+00:00
I once implemented a WebDAV server in PHP. The standard isn't that bad and clients are more or less following the standard. It's still horrible how they are doing that. I saw behaviors when opening a single file like:

- does / exists?
- does /path/to exists?
- does /path/to/file exists?
- create a new file /path/to/file.lock
- does /path/to/file.lock exist?
- does / exist?
- does /path/to/file exists?
- lock /path/to/file
- get content of /path/to/file
- unlock /path/to/file
- does /path/to/file.lock exist?
- remove /path/to/file.lock

(if not exactly like that it was at least very close, that was either Finder on OS X or Explorer on Windows).
Without some good caching mechanism it's hard to handle all of the load when you get multiple users.

Also the overwrite option was never used. You'd expect a client to copy a file, get and error if the target exists, ask user if it's ok, send same copy with overwrite flag set to true. In reality clients are doing all steps manually and delete the target before copying.

It was satisfying seeing it work at the end, but you really need to test all the clients in addition to just implementing the standard.
by benterix | 2026-01-08 16:02:29+00:00
> Its interesting to see this valid argument raised against this use of AI to identify breast cancer. The lack of control groups is one of the more common concerns raised related to vaccines as well, the argument lands like a lead balloon there.

Not just vaccines, in each study on the effectiveness of a drug, especially when dealing with potentially life-threatening conditions, the same question is posed. From[0]:

. . . ethical guidance permit the use of placebo controls in randomized trials when scientifically indicated in four cases: (1) when there is no proven effective treatment for the condition under study; (2) when withholding treatment poses negligible risks to participants; (3) when there are compelling methodological reasons for using placebo, and withholding treatment does not pose a risk of serious harm to participants; and, more controversially, (4) when there are compelling methodological reasons for using placebo, and the research is intended to develop interventions that can be implemented in the population from which trial participants are drawn, and the trial does not require participants to forgo treatment they would otherwise receive.

[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3844122/
by bombcar | 2026-01-08 16:02:38+00:00
Lots of the issues would be "solved" by adequate supply of new dwelling units (which is a way of driving the prices down). There's really no other way of solving the "X people lived here, now 1.4X do, but dwelling units have only increased 1.2 times."

In the past this effect was localized and when housing prices went insane, it was usually in a city, or a region, not a whole country. And high prices would encourage development in the cheaper areas, and people would move "out there".
by encypruon | 2026-01-08 16:02:50+00:00
Reword a public announcement [1], slap on a misleading title, put it behind a cookie banner and paywall and boom - Journalism! "Bose is releasing documentation for EOL smart speaker HTTP API" would be more apt. Not even Bose is claiming that anything has been open-sourced in their statement. Titling the section "Open-source options for the community" is as close as they come to that.

Still, props to Bose for actively helping to keep their old devices usable.

[1] https://www.bose.com/soundtouch-end-of-life
by crat3r | 2026-01-08 16:03:01+00:00
So what then do you believe is a healthy diet? Surely eating animal protein on a regular basis is better than having to take a variety of unregulated supplements to stay within a healthy range of essential vitamins and minerals? Animal protein also has the upside of offering a tremendous amount of, well, protein, alongside the necessary vitamins.

Dairy (in certain forms) offers the same benefits.
by watwut | 2026-01-08 16:03:05+00:00
> I was only observing that annual per capita meat consumption does not trivially track with the benefits claimed on the site

There was no such observation, just claim going contra observed data. The period you picked does correlate meat consumption going up with health getting better.

You said that meat consumption went up for last century. Then you claimed that "our already positive trend in meat consumption isn't yielding positive outcomes" - except that majority of that period did yielded positive outcomes.
by jghn | 2026-01-08 16:03:11+00:00
I've been adjacent to this field for a while, so take this for what it is. My understanding that the developing a system that can accurately identify a specific form or sub-form of cancer to a degree equal or better than a human is doable now. However, developing a system that can generalize to many forms of cancer is not.

Why does this matter? Because procurement in the medical world is a pain in the ass. And no medical center wants to be dealing with 32 different startups each selling their own specific cancer detection tool.
by bob1029 | 2026-01-08 16:03:19+00:00
> My team has a sandbox where we create, deploy, and run AI-generated code without a human in the loop.

I think if you keep the human in the loop this would go much better.

I've been having a lot of success recently by combining recursive invocation with an "AskHuman" tool that takes a required tuple of (question itself, how question unblocks progress). Allowing unstructured assistant dialog with the user/context is a train wreck by comparison. I've found that chain-of-thought (i.e., a "Think" tool that barfs into the same context window) seems to be directly opposed to the idea of recursively descending through the problem. Recursion is a much more powerful form of CoT.
by tsarchitect | 2026-01-08 16:03:24+00:00
Not sure the comments are debating the semantics of vibe coding or confusing ourselves with generalizing anecdotal experiences (or both). So here's my two cents.

I use LLMs on a daily basis. With the rules/commands/skills in place the code generated works, the app is functional, and the business is happy it shipped today and not 6 months from now. Now, as as super senior SWE, I have learned through my professional experiences (now an expert?) to double check your work (and that of your team) to make sure the 'logical' flows are implemented to (my personal) standard of what quality software should 'look' like. I say personal standard since my colleagues have their own preferred standard, which we like to bikeshed during company time (a company standard is after all made of the aggregate agreed upon standards of the personal experiences of the experts in the room).

Today, from my own personal (expert) anecdotal experiences, ALL SOTA LLMs generate functional/working code. But the quality of the 'slop' varies on the model, prompts, tooling, rules, skills, and commands. Which boils down to "the tool is only as good as the dev that wields it". Assuming the right tool for the right job. Assuming you have the experiences to determine the right tool for the right job. Assuming you have taken the opportunities to experience multiple jobs to pair the right tool.

Which leads me to, "Vibe coding" was initially coined (IMO) to describe those without any 'expertise' producing working/functional code/apps using an LLM. Nowadays, it seems like vibe coding means ANYONE using LLMs to generate code, including the SWE experts (like myself of course). We've been chasing quality software pre-LLM, and now we adamantly yell and scream and kick and shout about quality software from the comment sections because of LLM. I'm beginning to think quality software is a mirage we all chase, and like all mirages its just a little bit further.

All roads that lead to 'shipping' are made with slop. Some roads have slop corners, slop holes, misspelled slop, slop nouns, slop verbs, slop flows and slop data. It's just with LLMs we build the roads to 'shipping' faster.
by dinkleberg | 2026-01-08 16:04:10+00:00
I would argue it makes you a better citizen by not falling prey to the emotional manipulation that all of the news sources blast us with non-stop. There is enough hate and anger in the world and the constant stoking of those flames is doing us no good. And unless you're actually going to take action and do something about it (and I'd argue that posting rants on social media does not qualify), then what is the point of absorbing that anger.

I know people on both sides who have fallen prey to this and are no longer pleasant to be around.
by dspillett | 2026-01-08 16:04:16+00:00
This is not open sourcing any actual software or hardware it is “open-sourcing the API documentation for its SoundTouch smart speakers”. You might be able to point them at an alternative back-end¹ if you want the cloud features, but that will need to be written from scratch rather than being forked from code provided by Sonos.

> When cloud support ends, an update to the SoundTouch app will add local controls to retain as much functionality as possible without cloud services

This is a far bigger move than releasing API information, IMO, from the point of view of most end users.

--------

[1] TFA doesn't state that this will be possible, but opening the API makes no sense if it isn't.
by terminalbraid | 2026-01-08 16:04:30+00:00
If you talk to people who deal with inference using large fungible datasets, this is an extremely difficult governance problem. semver is incredibly insufficient and you don't have a well defined meaning of what "upgrade" even means let alone "major", "minor", and "patch".

It's a major disservice to the problem to act like it's new and solved or even solvable using code revision language.