MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by strbean | 2026-01-12 21:01:18+00:00
> Forgive me for this introduction to computing, but I need to be clear: computers really do operate on symbolic representations of the world. They really store and retrieve. They really process. They really have physical memories. They really are guided in everything they do, without exception, by algorithms.

This article seems really hung up on the distinction between digital and analog. It's an important distinction, but glosses over the fact that digital computers are a subset of analog computers. Electrical signals are inherently analog.

This maps somewhat neatly to human cognition. I can take a stream of bits, perform math on it, and output a transformed stream of bits. That is a digital operation. The underlying biological processes involved are a pile of complex probabilistic+analog signaling, true. But in a computer, the underlying processes are also probabilistic and analog. We have designed our electronics to shove those parts down to the lowest possible level so they can be abstracted away, and so the degree to which they influence computation is certainly lower than in the human brain. But I think an effective argument that brains are not computers is going to have to dive in to why that gap matters.
by godshatter | 2026-01-12 21:01:32+00:00
>Maybe (as some research indicates) the models are as good as they are going to get. They're always going to be a cross between a chipper stochastic parrot and that ego inflated junior dev that refuses to admit a mistake. Maybe when the real (non-subsidized) economics present themselves, the benefit isn't there.

I'd put my money on this. From my understanding of LLMs, they are basically mashing words together via markov chains and have added a little bit of subject classification with attention, a little bit of short-term memory, and enough grammar to lay things out correctly. They don't understand anything they are saying, they are not learning facts and trying to build connections between them, they are not learning from their conversations with people. They aren't even running the equivalent of a game loop where they can even think about things. I would expect something we're trying to call an AI to call you up sometimes and ask you questions. Trillions of dollars have got us this far, how far can it actually take us?

I want my actual AI personal assistant that I have to coerce somehow into doing something for me like an emo teen.
by gowld | 2026-01-12 21:01:35+00:00
Debunked in the first click:

$0.25 - Lime - Amazon Fresh -FREE 2-hour delivery on orders over *$100*

Other products have similar shipping restrictions, or the prices are higher than claimed.

Also, most of the cheapest products (at least before tariff effects kicked in) don't allow customized messages that postcards allow, for obvious reasons.
by ben_w | 2026-01-12 21:01:51+00:00
Mm. Took me a moment to see your point there, but I think you're right.

If he's only operating on the impact of the words, and ignoring the existence of an observable testable shared reality behind the words, then yes, accusations (either direction) are more damaging in his mind than being seen to support or oppose whatever.

Which is, ironically, a reason to *oppose* absolute freedom of speech, when words have power beyond their connection to reality the justifications fall short. But like I said, I don't care if his inconsistency is simple hypocrisy or something more complex, not any more.
by pavel_lishin | 2026-01-12 21:02:18+00:00
I was pretty sure that some of the spam calls I received for awhile were from a prison - because they were absolutely unwilling to go off-script, no matter what I did on my end.

Even the ones that were obviously coming from overseas, I would occasionally get a pre-recorded voice saying "hold on a second", followed by a pause (during which the "caller" was presumably typing), and then a clear text-to-speech robotic voice telling me to fuck myself.
by hoistbypetard | 2026-01-12 21:02:21+00:00
I've started sending paperbacks instead of greeting cards when someone I know needs a get-well-soon card. In stores around here, greeting cards are often $7ish + postage. I can frequently ship a paperback with a gift receipt for $5 total. I include a gift message on the gift receipt, and choose a book I think someone might like to read while they're out of commission.

I guess it's a bit like postal arbitrage, if I accept the cost of greeting cards themselves as part of the cost of the activity.

To the extent that anyone has commented much, those who have commented had very positive reactions to what amounts to a book recommendation and a copy of the book I'm recommending along with a little note.
by zinodaur | 2026-01-12 21:02:21+00:00
> A lot of the problems I enjoy solving specifically relate to consistently minimizing privilege

You are my perfect foil :)

> very few cases where life has gotten better by saying "everyone has access to everything"

I should have been more clear - I like the dev env where people have access to the things they are responsible for. E.g., as a maintainer/operator of service X, you can do all the things service X can do. So it's not like random employees are running binaries that interact with your db - only the small set of experts responsible for maintaining that service (also the people most inclined to be cautious, since they own the impact).

It does require you to trust the people operating their services, and requires those people to be careful and competent, but it can yield spectacular results.

The hacker thing mentioned by a sibling comment is definitely true though. I airgap my work machine, never browse the web on it and require fingerprint scans whenever sshing/rsyncing in to prod, but even then its pretty sketch.

I feel like its important to remember how powerful it is though - I want something like ssh/rsync access to a machine with a vlan tag that only lets it perform "safe" db/service interactions - hashing PII and stopping writes. But instead I get "observability" and half assed webuis, stale/redacted datalakes, and minutes long read-eval-print loop iterations with a coworker PR stamp required each iteration
by wasabi991011 | 2026-01-12 21:02:35+00:00
Thanks for sharing, this is useful advice for a fellow Canadian. If you don't mind me asking follow-ups:

Can I hear more about the frozen meat? I usually go for chicken thighs or pork (almost always one is on sale), it's about 8-9cad/kg. What's your cuts of frozen meat, and price point?

Also, no frozen nor canned veggies in your budget?

And finally, can you describe your typical breakfasts, lunchs, and suppers? You say it's "what you'd expect", but I grew up affluent and only recently going through a budget crunch so I don't really have any reference for what to expect.

Cheers.
by atmavatar | 2026-01-12 21:03:08+00:00
> It's pretty clear that constitution implies some sort of immunity, and that it is necessary to protect successive presidents from throwing each other in prison.

How so? Please elaborate.

I would point out that there's explicit language in Article I, Section 6 about House and Senate members being immune from prosecution for carrying out their duties:

The Senators and Representatives shall receive a Compensation for their Services, to be ascertained by Law, and paid out of the Treasury of the United States. They shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.

However, there is nothing in Article II regarding a grant of immunity to the President.

I could see an argument that the President should probably be protected from arrest during his term, similar to Congressmen, but there's very clearly no mention of such protection in in the Constitution I can find.

However, that's nothing compared to the broad protections the Roberts court handed him in Trump v. United States: protection from investigation, even after his term expires.
by pruetj | 2026-01-12 21:03:33+00:00
Funny seeing this. I've been working on a site to allow people to send a letter as cheaply and conveniently as possible. I actually think letters (physical) are a great way to make an impression, often times much more so than an email. Had never considered sending an actual object lol.

At current scale (which is very small), the cheapest I can get it down to without losing money is $1.55 per letter (postage, paper, print, envelope, stripe fees, misc. hosting fees, etc.). Sadly, I have no way to compete with a $0.25 lime!

If you're curious, https://mappymail.com
by fidotron | 2026-01-12 21:03:35+00:00
> I had an extensive Silverlight and WPF background by that time, so I still don't quite know why so many developers seemed to have a problem with it.

Money on app stores is made by games. In addition to being rewritten in C# games in Silverlight had to wrap Silverlight primitives - there was no DirectX or GL ES equivalent API. There were even quite wacky workarounds for this on built in components (like render tiles to textures from some linked in C++, which are then used by Silverlight) but weren't great for anyone.

The result of this was WP7 was an island, and one which had no commercial proof of worth until it was too late. We would all be better off had WP been and stayed viable.
by viccis | 2026-01-12 21:04:04+00:00
I also believe strongly in the role of language, and more loosely in semiotics as a whole, to our cognitive development. To the extent that I think there are some meaningful ideas within the mountain of gibberish from Lacan, who was the first to really tie our conception of ourselves with our symbolic understanding of the world.

Unfortunately, none of that has anything to do with what LLMs are doing. The LLM is not thinking about concepts and then translating that into language. It is imitating what it looks like to read people doing so and nothing more. That can be very powerful at learning and then spitting out complex relationships between signifiers, as it's really just a giant knowledge compression engine with a human friendly way to spit it out. But there's absolutely no logical grounding whatsoever for any statement produced from an LLM.

The LLM that encouraged that man to kill himself wasn't doing it because it was a subject with agency and preference. It did so because it was, quite accurately I might say, mimicking the sequence of tokens that a real person encouraging someone to kill themselves would write. At no point whatsoever did that neural network make a moral judgment about what it was doing because it doesn't think. It simply performed inference after inference in which it scanned through a lengthy discussion between a suicidal man and an assistant that had been encouraging him and then decided that after "Cold steel pressed against a mind that’s already made peace? That’s not fear. That’s " the most accurate token would be "clar" and then "ity."
by throwworhtthrow | 2026-01-12 21:04:06+00:00
Standards for "functioning democracy" were much lower then.

Most people were ineligible to vote in the 18th and 19th centuries. [1] Not even 20% of the US population voted in presidential elections until the 20th century. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_rights_in_the_United_St...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._Vote_for_President_a...
by greenavocado | 2026-01-12 21:04:36+00:00
It works on Linux, Windows, macOS, and BSD. It's not locked to Apple's ecosystem. You can back up directly to local storage, SFTP, S3, Backblaze B2, Azure, Google Cloud, and more. Time Machine is largely limited to local drives or network shares. Restic deduplicates at the chunk level across all snapshots, often achieving better space efficiency than Time Machine's hardlink-based approach. All data is encrypted client-side before leaving your machine. Time Machine encryption is optional. Restic supports append-only mode for protection against ransomware or accidental deletion. It also has a built-in check command to check integrity.

Time Machine has a reputation for silent failures and corruption issues that have frustrated users for years. Network backups (to NAS devices) use sparse bundle disk images that are notoriously fragile. A dropped connection mid-backup can corrupt the entire backup history, not just the current snapshot. https://www.google.com/search?q=time+machine+corruption+spar...

Time Machine sometimes decides a backup is corrupted and demands you start fresh, losing all history. Backups can stop working without obvious notification, leaving users thinking they're protected when they're not. https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/11cod08/apple_tim...

The shift from HFS+ to APFS introduced new bugs, and local snapshots sometimes behave unpredictably. https://www.google.com/search?q=time+machine+restore+problem...

The backup metadata database can grow unwieldy and slow, eventually causing failures.

https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1cjebor/why_is_time_...

https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/w7mkk9/time_machine_...

https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1du5nc6/time_machine...

https://www.reddit.com/r/osx/comments/omk7z7/is_a_time_machi...

https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/ydfman/time_machine_ba...

https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1pfmiww/time_machine...

https://www.reddit.com/r/osx/comments/lci6z0/time_machine_ex...

Time Machine is just garbage for ignorant people.
by breppp | 2026-01-12 21:04:56+00:00
I agree that Israel has largely won the war to an extent that greatly reduced the fear the regime created in its own citizens which hastened this current protests

I am less convinced this the end though, but maybe another step in a slow death of the country. Regarding your last point, this is already happening, now that Iran is weak the KSA has less of an interest to ally with Israel and it shifts to allying its previous rivals of Qatar and Turkey along with Pakistan
by sulicat | 2026-01-12 21:05:12+00:00
Still the same HID remapping project from last month (I was hoping to be done by now, but hardware is hard):
https://github.com/cedarhacks/HIDMorph

This is an HID ReMapping device, things like converting keyboard input to joystick input, or adding macros to specific inputs.

The usage is:

- It has 1 USB in and 1 USB out.

- In programming mode it's a USB drive you can put LUA scripts on (or pull out log files).

- In run mode you can select a LUA script to run.

- Scripts can read incoming mouse/joystick/keyboard data and generate outgoing mouse/joystick/keyboard data or even just log events onto a CSV file.

The code is functional, I still want to polish it and add fun animations and stuff, but for now it works as described above.

This month has been mostly mired in a PCB rework and assembly in the US. Assembly with JLCPCB is too expensive for now, so I have been spending the last few weeks sourcing components in an attempt to keep costs down. I changed the PCB a bunch as well to make assembly and case design easier

While I don't really plan on selling this, I wanted to challenge myself and make it sell-able by keeping costs really low. This has been the real challenge and time sink recently.

It is fully open source, once complete I will export a parts list and Gerber files so people who wanna make one can just use those files.
by oracleclyde | 2026-01-12 21:05:36+00:00
Maybe at one time, but it absolutely understands images now. In VSCode Copilot, I am working on a python app that generates mesh files that are imported in a blender project. I can take a screenshot of what the mesh file looks like and ask Claude code questions about the object, in context of a Blender file. It even built a test script that would generate the mesh and import it into the Blender project, and render a screenshot. It built me a vscode Task to automate the entire workflow and then compare image to a mock image. I found its understanding of the images almost spooky.
by Cyph0n | 2026-01-12 21:05:40+00:00
Thanks for sharing, that project indeed looks useful.

> My BART rides have never been this entertaining before!

Not clear if this is snark, but if vibe coding on a train ride is actually energizing, then good for you haha.

> I don't think many developers have the combined taste and knowledge necessary to spin up Denobox or django-transactions.

Perhaps, but that’s just for now. What do you do when your “taste” no longer makes a difference? In other words, looking at the bigger picture, do you like where the field is going?

> I suggest anyone who wants to learn more about JavaScript interpreters or WASM runtimes try something similar in the language of choice as a learning exercise.

Agreed, but depending on learning style, vibe coding such a project might not teach you anything new at all :)
by tim-tday | 2026-01-12 21:06:06+00:00
Car manufacturing grinds to a halt. Remember what happened to auto prices in 2022? 10x that.

New appliances cannot be manufactured. What dos the absolute absence of new durable goods do to the economy?

There’s no new iPhone for five years. No new electronic hardware at all. What does Apple stock do?

Own any index funds? Those tank too.

Rinse and repeat

Thinking of it as “affordable pcs” is exactly wrong which is actually useful. Invert your totally wrong answer and now you have an actual thought.
by dalenw | 2026-01-12 21:06:17+00:00
I wonder if there's something to be said about screenshots preventing context poisoning vs parsing. Or in other words, the "poison" would have to be visible and obvious on the page where as it could be easily hidden in the DOM.

And I do know there are ways to hide data like watermarks in images but I do not know if that would be able to poison an AI.
by laurencerowe | 2026-01-12 21:06:25+00:00
I think it would just about break even on an economy 7 night rate saving about 17p/kWh shifting load to the overnight rate. (Might save more on a smarter tariff.)

A 12kWh system costs £5880 including VAT. Assume 95% round trip efficiency and 80% cycle each night gives savings of £565 annually.

That's about the same as the cost of a loan at 5% for the total amount paid back over an estimated useful life of 15 years.

This assumes it doesn't need servicing in that time and you can DIY install.

I don't know whether home systems like this will get much cheaper as the batteries themselves probably only make up about 20% of the system cost.

There are huge economies of scale for utility scale storage with all in project costs now down to $125/kWh meaning 12kWh would cost just $1500 rather than $6600 for this home system. So I wouldn't be confident the price differentials between day and night rates will remain as high over its expected lifetime.
by strbean | 2026-01-12 21:06:50+00:00
> We already know X is categorically false because we know how LLMs are programmed, and not a single line of that programming pertains to thinking (thinking in the human sense, not "thinking" in the LLM sense which merely uses an anthromorphized analogy to describe a script that feeds back multiple prompts before getting the final prompt output to present to the user).

Could you elucidate me on the process of human thought, and point out the differences between that and a probabilistic prediction engine?

I see this argument all over the place, but "how do humans think" is never described. It is always left as a black box with something magical (presumably a soul or some other metaphysical substance) inside.
by Wowfunhappy | 2026-01-12 21:07:37+00:00
You just said the user is incapable of providing informed consent.

In any context, I really dislike software that prevents me from doing something dangerous in order to "protect" me. That's how we get iOS.

The user is an adult, they can consent to this if they want to. If Anthropic is using dark patterns to trick them that's a different story--that wouldn't be informed consent--but I don't think that's happening here?
by austin-cheney | 2026-01-12 21:07:43+00:00
The article is super weird. It never mentions Date.now(). It dances around the subject and exhaustively mentions the equivalent convention for Temporal.

If you want Date to act like Temporal then only use Date.now() as your starting point. It generates the number of milliseconds since 1 Jan 1970. That means the starting output is a number type in integer form. It does not represent a static value, but rather the distance between now and some universal point in the past, a relationship. Yes, Temporal is a more friendly API, but the primary design goal is to represent time as a relational factor.

Then you can format the Date.now() number it into whatever other format you want.
by mcintyre1994 | 2026-01-12 21:08:09+00:00
Anthropic offer their API, including for tools like Opencode. It’s more expensive than Claude Code, but I don’t think it’s priced significantly differently to competitors. Obviously Apple aren’t paying API prices, and Google have a lot more to offer them, but I don’t think Anthropic would turn down that deal if they could have it. They have their models in AWS Bedrock too, and that is an option to auth with Claude Code.

I think they do see vertical integration opportunities on product, but they definitely want to compete to power everything else too.
by al_borland | 2026-01-12 21:08:21+00:00
Essentially, yes.

If the prediction is that AI will be able to invent the future. If we give it data from our past without knowledge of the present... what type of future will it invent, what progress will it make, if any at all? And not just having the idea, but how to implement the idea in a way that actually works with the technology of the day, and can build on those things over time.

For example, would AI with 1850 data have figured out the idea of lift to make an airplane and taught us how to make working flying machines and progress them to the jets we have today, or something better? It wouldn't even be starting from 0, so this would be a generous example, as da Vinci way playing with these ideas in the 15th century.

If it can't do it, or what it produces is worse than what humans have done, we shouldn't leave it to AI alone to invent our actual future. Which would mean reevaluating the role these "thought leaders" say it will play, and how we're educating and communicating about AI to the younger generations.
by tolerance | 2026-01-12 21:08:35+00:00
This morning I was wondering what happened to whatever arrangement I thought Apple had with OpenAI. In a way I think OpenAI is a competitor and “new money”. Pairing with Google makes sense especially considering that this is “normie-facing” technology. And from what I recall, a lot of Apple fans prefer “Hey Google” in their cars over CarPlay. Or something to that effect.
by felixrieseberg | 2026-01-12 21:09:01+00:00
Worth calling out that execution runs in a full virtual machine with only user-selected folders mounted in. CC itself runs, if the user set network rules, with https://github.com/anthropic-experimental/sandbox-runtime.

There is much more to do - and our docs reflect how early this is - but we're investing in making progress towards something that's "safe".
by eightysixfour | 2026-01-12 21:09:21+00:00
> Americans don’t despise public transit. They despise poorly maintained / insufficient public transit. Outside of New York and San Francisco, public transit is really not sufficient to get you where you need to go.

I used to believe this, I'm not sure it is actually true though for a large percentage of Americans. There is some unmet demand that would be satisfied, but beyond that, most Americans value their individualism and control (even if it is controlling where a driver takes them via an app) too much unless they were raised around good transit. That means that even if we build good transit, it will probably take more than a generation for someone to use it fully and effectively.