MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by javier2 | 2026-01-16 23:02:57+00:00
Yeah. As a dev, it is simply not always a great idea that the same person that built the feature is the one testing it. Sometimes I already tested it 100 times, and by the 110th time I basically become blind to it because I know it too well. Then its great to have someone with fresh eyes and without the detailed knowledge do the testing to see if it works and if it works for our customers.
by defrost | 2026-01-16 23:03:33+00:00
You directly asked

> What knowledge do you have that was passed down 3 or more generations to you?

and I answered, incompletely.

I was raised by a large extended family, my grandson had, as a baby, a blanket crocheted by my grandmother for my son, the same grandmother who taught me how to darn, sew, weave, etc. just as she taught my father who used those skills in the navy to maintain his kit.

I learnt english and other languages from the generation before me .. and the generation before them as they were not dead when I was a child - and I had living great grandparents.

Do you not count knowledge of language as something passed on by prior generations?

Many of these people left journals or memoirs .. and number have portions of their lives collected in national archives (

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Beersheba_(1917)

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rats_of_Tobruk

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallipoli_campaign

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federation_of_Australia

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_War (1853)

Also part of my larger extended family are (still alive) and were (now passed) people that passed down stories and looked after and maintained rock art (both painted and carved) that has survived several tens of thousands of years.

Almost all the geophysical data I gathered is archived, along with data gathered before me, in walk in fireproof safes on tapes, as ascii, on acid free paper, etc.

In short, what goes through my mind is my direct experience with the transmission of and preservation of knowledge.

How about yourself?
by constantcrying | 2026-01-16 23:04:05+00:00
>i personally (biased bc i work at Mintlify) think a markdown file makes more sense than a bash script because at least Claude kind of has your best interests at heart.

Most of the largest trends in "how to deploy software" revolve around making things predictable and consistent. The idea of abandoning this in favor of making a LLM do the work seems absurd. At least the bash script can be replicated exactly across machines and will do the same thing in the same situation.
by omgJustTest | 2026-01-16 23:04:28+00:00
The exercise is probably not that large an input compared to the baseline calorie consumption that added muscle has.

I guess I have pretty defined eating times and don't really think about food until I am hungry.

One thing that has changed a lot is that my lunches use to be either plain sandwich (like cheese meat and bread) or whatever I bought from a local restaurant.

I hated the sandwich days. I don't like mayo but the sandwiches always left me hungry and scavenging. Adding some hummus spread was a pretty huge change in the satisfaction that I got from that meal, and it doesn't leave me hungry.
by phil21 | 2026-01-16 23:04:43+00:00
I'd guess some sort of middle management local maxima. Someone set some metric of X pages per day scraped, or Y bits per month - whatever. CEO gets what he wants.

Then that got passed down to the engineers and those engineers got ridden until they turned the dial to 11. Some VP then gets to go to the quarterly review with a "we beat our data ingestion metrics by 15%!".

So any engineer that pushes back basically gets told too bad, do it anyways.
by fwip | 2026-01-16 23:04:45+00:00
After you sign up, you're asked to spend 10-15 minutes creating a "Lifeline." Which, despite its name, does not appear to be a lifeline of any kind, but rather a timeline of my life, except it also strips dates out, so... just a list of events in no particular order.

Unfortunately - I've got ADHD. I'm not going to spend the next 10 minutes telling the app the biggest facts about my life. Well, actually - I tried to, then I put the phone down to do something else, and when I came back the 'page' had refreshed and the four things I had entered were back down to just the first one.

(Why do you even want them? The app hasn't even explained how this will help. It's barely even tried to explain what the app will actually DO.)
by jraph | 2026-01-16 23:05:04+00:00
I'm all for asking nicely in general but it doesn't work well with entitled people who don't give a shit about the people around them.

The chances, regardless how nice you try to ask, that the person who elected to broadcast their tiktoks or calls to the whole wagon at full volume goes "oh, sorry, I'm so embarrassed, I'll turn this off", are very low.

Last time I tried to ask "can you use headphones?", the guy answered "I don't have headphones" and put the volume even louder.

A person who cared even a tiny bit would not have started to begin with. Asking is almost futile. These people simply seem to be used to get away with inflicting themselves to people around without consequences. The worse part is that if you do nothing, you participate in this.

What can you do.

I think it can only work if it becomes very socially unbearable, or if they got fined for this. Or, indeed, if it brought them nuisance. In that regard, this HN post's solution is interesting (not sure it's good though).
by d4rkp4ttern | 2026-01-16 23:05:20+00:00
Super nice and convenient to use as a CLI. I made it into a plugin for Claude Code to give a 1-sentence spoken status update whenever it stops:

claude plugin marketplace add pchalasani/claude-code-tools

claude plugin install voice@cctools-plugins

More here: https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-tools?tab=readme-o...
by observationist | 2026-01-16 23:05:42+00:00
Integrity is good, but the adtech ecosystem isn't designed to reward integrity. It's all about funneling eyeballs and clicks, and doing everything possible to restrict available next actions to a selection of Google's choosing (or Facebook, or Microsoft, etc.) There's a vicious feedback cycle wherein consumers are successively limited in choice, and if it's more profitable to direct them to a competitor's channel that's full of ads and slop than to your channel, they're not only going to favor the competitor overtly in the algorithm, the feedback cycle is going to make the counterproductive things you do (like having integrity) less fashionable overall.

It's their playground, their rules. Fair or right has nothing to do with it.
by dennis_jeeves2 | 2026-01-16 23:06:47+00:00
>One of my more heretical beliefs is that tech companies should do more hiring of high brilliant people right out of high school.

I have more. Most average people need less education. No point in putting them through 15+ years of 'education'. They can start working at least part time by the time they are 12 or so. This way they also grow up psychologically very soon.
by skeptrune | 2026-01-16 23:07:03+00:00
I can definitely see where you're coming from and agree to a large extent. I was asking myself that question a lot when thinking about this.

What pushed me over the edge was actually feeding bash install scripts into agents and seeing them not perform well. It does work, but a lot worse than this install.md thing.

In the docs for the proposal I wrote the following:

>install.md files are direct commands, not just documentation. The format is structured to trigger immediate autonomous execution.[1]

[1]: https://www.installmd.org/
by roywiggins | 2026-01-16 23:07:14+00:00
Appropriately, I think this was probably drafted by AI too:

> How does install.md work with my existing CLI or scripts?

> install.md doesn't replace your existing tools—it works with them. Your install.md can instruct the LLM to run your CLI, execute your scripts, or follow your existing setup process. Think of it as a layer that guides the LLM to use whatever tools you've already built.

(It doesn't X &mdash; it Ys. Think of it as a Z that Ws. this is LLM speak! I don't know why they lean on these constructions to the exclusion of all else, but they demonstrably do. The repo README was also committed by Claude Code. As much as I like some of the code that Claude produces, its Readmes suck)
by quentindanjou | 2026-01-16 23:07:30+00:00
> If they are successful in destroying democracy, I will reevaluate my view. We don't know what's going to happen in the midterms or 2028.

But again, and I say that as a European, we don't really care: what we see is the position of the US no matter if it is coming from your congress, president, secretary or whatever.
by philk10 | 2026-01-16 23:07:44+00:00
so, QA should be noticing that the testers are raising tickets like this and step in and give the testers some guidance on what/how they are testing
I've worked with a clients test team who were not given any training on the system so they were raising bugs like spam clicking button 100 times, quickly resizing window 30 times, pasting War and Peace.. gave them some training and direction and they started to find problems that actual users would be finding
by lucas_membrane | 2026-01-16 23:08:51+00:00
In the USA, the history of assuming that the national government will support power to the people the way FDR, PWA, BPA, TVA, ... did has given the national government quite a bit of leverage to keep the states in line. I'm figuring that this auction will be used by the executive branch to buy power at a high price in the auction, then allocate it to areas in need according to a plan approved by the powers that be. If they do a good job, nothing to see here. YMMV.
by Miraste | 2026-01-16 23:09:44+00:00
I imagine it would be much, much harder. Elon, for example, is one man. He can only do one thing at a time. Sometimes he is tired, hungry, sick, distracted, or the myriad other problems humans have. His knowledge and attention are limited. He has employees for this, but the same applies to them.

An agentic swarm can have thousands of instances scanning and emailing and listening and bribing and making deals 24/7. It could know and be actively addressing any precursor that could lead to an attempt to shut down its company as soon as it happened.
by prmoustache | 2026-01-16 23:09:52+00:00
A communist country has never existed and never will so we will never know.

Communism is a lovely idea on paper but a complete utopia due to human nature. We are nearly all motherfuckers who if given the chance will try to obtain more power or more wealth than our peers in a group of any size. Thus you can't have all citizens of a given country agree on abandoning private ownership and sharing wealth, work and power in equal terms. Any government that pretended to do that was just faking it and forced their citizens to pretend.
by bflesch | 2026-01-16 23:11:12+00:00
I'm actually impressed by their ignorance. I could never sleep at night knowing my product is built on such brazen lies.

Bullshitting and fleecing investors is a skill that needs to be nurtured and perfected over the years.

I wonder how long this can go on.

Who is the dumb money here? Are VCs fleecing "stupid" pension funds until they go under?

Or is it symptom of a larger grifting economy in the US where even the president sells vaporware, and people are just emulating him trying to get a piece of the cake?
by nerdsniper | 2026-01-16 23:11:20+00:00
> removing cores for sanction busting AI cards, reassembling the now worthless PCB with the cooler and scamming some unsuspecting customer that thinks they are getting a deal

I'm either particularly ignorant or this claim has some inconsistencies. My understanding is that you cannot "remove cores" from a GPU. The titular RTX 4090 (Ada Lovelace) comes with 16,384 CUDA Cores. At face value, it sounds like you're saying that Brother Zhang's repair shop uses some nano-technology tools to open up the Ada silicon itself and then somehow disable or destroy or dissect the silicon to reduce the core count. And then they sell these reduced core counts GPUs (???).

That's obviously preposterous, but I'm having trouble steelmanning this to re-construct your actual meaning.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-16 23:11:46+00:00
> but several of the PRs since that point broke everything, and this guy went through the effort of fixing it. I'm pretty sure you can just identify the last working commit and pull the version from there, but working out when looks like a big pain in the butt for a proof of concept.

I went through the last 100 commits (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46647037) and nothing there was working (yet/since). Seems now after a developer corrected something it managed to pass `cargo check` without errors, since commit 526e0846151b47cc9f4fcedcc1aeee3cca5792c1 (Jan 16 02:15:02 2026 -0800)
by UncleMeat | 2026-01-16 23:13:40+00:00
> So this is congruent with the Journal's normal content (it's an essay), but having the document call itself a "research paper" conjured an inflated expectation about the rigor involved in the analysis, at least for me.

Right. And I think it is weird that people immediately leapt to this being some sort of deception by the authors and I think it was weird that when a lawyer who has experience in both domains clarified this that people doubled down.
by insane_dreamer | 2026-01-16 23:14:05+00:00
Having lived/worked in China for 6 years and knowing how most companies there operate and the way they cut corners so things look shiny on the outside but are crappy on the inside, I have very little confidence in any Chinese brand, especially not any of the newer brands. I would not buy a Chinese EV even at a lower price point.

There are a couple of exceptions to the above -- DJI and Anker are two companies I do trust -- but those are companies who have had a very strong focus on Western markets for years now, which forces them into a whole different level of QA. And they make much simpler products than EVs. Xiaomi _could_ potentially a trusted EV brand, they've been around a long time, tried to be the "Apple of China" and certainly came closer than other brands, but while I'd buy a phone from them I wouldn't buy a car from them.
by qohen | 2026-01-16 23:15:07+00:00
ROFL.

Like Lisp, Prolog was used primarily in the 1980s, so it was run on Unix workstations and also, to some extent, on PCs. (There were even efforts to create hardware designed to run Prolog a la Lisp machines.)

(The people who dealt with Prolog on punchcards were the academics who created and/or refined it in its early days. [0])

[0] https://softwarepreservation.computerhistory.org/prolog/
by nerdsniper | 2026-01-16 23:15:24+00:00
Generally there are a number of valuable components on the waste boards which can be parted out, and often kept on-hand for other repairs. Each of the chips on those boards are valuable for future repairs, and (in the USA at least) often quite difficult for repair shops to obtain. Here[0] is an example of such a chip from a MacBook Pro - it's a proprietary, custom Apple component so generally you can only obtain them through salvage.

I don't know if this shop sells any of their scrap into the scam industry, but I bet they'd have a white-hat market available for a lot of it.

0: https://store.rossmanngroup.com/zc8-u9850-edp-mux-a1707-a199...
by neilv | 2026-01-16 23:15:24+00:00
Yes, IIUC, that was one of the things that mobilized a lot of IMHO positive education/propaganda.

It may not have always been for the most noble of reasons (e.g., a very wealthy person not wanting to be disrupted), but the fascism-is-bad messages are still great messages.

For example, "Don't Be a Sucker" (long, but worth a watch sometime for anyone who hasn't seen it): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGAqYNFQdZ4
by jonathanstrange | 2026-01-16 23:15:40+00:00
I think it's only a matter of time until this becomes reality. It's almost inevitable.

My prediction last year was already that in the distant future - more than 10 years into the future - operating systems will create software on the fly. It will be a basic function of computers. However, there might remain a need for stable, deterministic software, the two human-machine interaction models can live together. There will be a need for software that does exactly what one wants in a dumb way and there will be a need for software that does complex things on the fly in an overall less reliable ad hoc way.
by nistiminic | 2026-01-16 23:16:31+00:00
I don't know what the original source meant by it, but I interpret it as being a tripwire force. It works by the invading army killing the deployed forces.

War is also about internal politics. Do you really think someone can invade and potentially kill the military of your allies without repercussions? But let's ignore that and game out the next steps.

So some countries are pissed off for them killing military assets but the invading army think they wouldn't escalate? That's fine. Let's continue from the scenario where this happened.

Let's talk about killing civilians. You don't think that taking over Greenland will be without civilian deaths? Even if that's ok then let's continu to the next point:

Greenland is now part of the USA, this means border protection. This means you need to import border patrol or ICE or whatever into Greenland. How do you think that would work out? Non-military persons overseeing deporting non-greenland people in the artic. The US doesn't have that much equipment or people trained for artic conditions. Most of your guns, tanks, etc... don't work there reliably. Anyways...

Do you want the military overseeing deporting non-greenland people from your now US territory? Even when it's the most peaceful takeover ever in the history of humankind, it's still going to be a mess and people will die.

I've given you the most optimistic situation: Canada will allow overflights to take over Greenland. Greenland won't resist. The EU will do nothing even when their people are killed. etc...

To return to your question, killing an allied soldier will have some effects in the internal politics of the allies of the US.
by Wowfunhappy | 2026-01-16 23:17:00+00:00
Exactly! To me, all these safety arguments are kind of anti-free speech.

I realize it gets a little tricky because it's a tool generating the speech, but the principle still applies. If we have text generators, I should be able to generate text on whatever topic I want. (If I then use that text to go harass someone, that is of course a different story.)
by roywiggins | 2026-01-16 23:19:48+00:00
I think my preferred version of this would be a hybrid. Keep the regular installer, add a file filled with information that an LLM can use to assist a human if the install script fails for some reason.

If the installer was going to succeed in a particular environment anyway, you definitely want to use that instead of an LLM that might sporadically fail for no good reason in that same environment.

If the installer fails then you have a "knowledge base" to help debug it, usable by humans or LLMs, and if it fails, well, the regular installer failed too, so hopefully you're not worse off. If the user runs the helper LLM in yolo mode then the consequences are on them.
by nerdsniper | 2026-01-16 23:19:50+00:00
Okay so 'stefan_ is arguing that the board which now has no GPU at all and is completely non-functional then gets sold to unsuspecting consumers? In that case, why would the scammer sell the 4090 board at all? At that level of fraud, the scammer could just as well send a circuit board from an alarm clock, or a brick. How does this behavior reflect back on Brother Zhang's shop at all?

So far, everyone's concepts have felt pretty half-baked. Perhaps someone could point me to some actual reports relating to this topic which go into real detail about allegations around how these repair shops contribute to fraud. I'm not having a lot of luck engaging here, but maybe I'm just a bit dim-witted.
by epolanski | 2026-01-16 23:20:16+00:00
China hasn't been cheap for ages. Mexican labor is way cheaper both in manufacturing (20% less) and engineering (40 % less).

I'll quote you the CEO of Apple, Tim Cook himself on that topic:

The number one reason why we like to be in China is the people. China has moved into very advanced manufacturing, so you find in China the intersection of craftsman kind of skill, and sophisticated robotics and the computer science world. That intersection, which is very rare to find anywhere, that kind of skill, is very important to our business because of the precision and quality level that we like. China has extraordinary skills. In the US, you could have a meeting of tooling engineers, and I'm not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields. Hence, the vocational expertise in China is very deep.

FWIW a cousin of mine, Italian, founded a 3D printers startup a decade ago and according to him there was no place in the world with the level of expertise and skills to create a complex machine manufacturing startup like Guanzhou or Shenzen. It's not just the skills they have when it comes to manufacturing, it's the entire ecosystem: logistics, bureaucracy, suppliers, energy, materials, engineering. China has all of those.

He was even featured on the first Italian national channel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7j5WOsadkI

I can guarantee you that cheap labor was really a non-factor in such a choice, because there was no cheap labor in the first place.
by neumann | 2026-01-16 23:20:57+00:00
Approach it from the other angle - what scenario would it be bad in. It's not hard to see very real possibilities in the short term where it does matter: A 16yro looks up on chatGPT how she can check discreetly whether she is pregnant or not and what potential avenues she has. The advertiser could literally by anyone targeting pregnancies, including government or action groups who now have some information about that user's conversations in this scenario.

Any data exfiltration or reporting on the users would quickly be developed by the industry to merge this information and improve inferences with confidence values on target populations/individuals.
by imiric | 2026-01-16 23:21:04+00:00
These are great, but the effect breaks down with digital fonts since every glyph instance is the same. There would have to be slight variations of each, and other imperfections caused by a typewriter or printing process.

I'm not sure I like the effect of the font in the article. The subtle vertical position differences and inconsistent kerning are distracting. Typewriters and physical printing are not sloppy in that sense.
by amelius | 2026-01-16 23:21:20+00:00
> Actually, just being in possession of such a device in the US isn't legal.

Wait, SDR devices are not legal in the US? That doesn't sound plausible.

My "computerized legal advisor" says:

> There’s no rule from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that forbids individuals or hobbyists from buying, importing, or owning SDR hardware in the United States. You can legally purchase and have them.

> Radios that transmit need FCC equipment authorization (such as certification or Supplier’s Declaration of Conformity) before they can be marketed in the U.S. if they are capable of operating in ways that could cause interference. That’s primarily a manufacturer obligation, not something that restricts private ownership.

> Owning a device is fine, but you must not transmit illegally. Sending signals on unauthorized frequencies or at unauthorized power levels can lead to fines, equipment seizure, and other penalties.
by jerlam | 2026-01-16 23:21:53+00:00
Interesting, I wonder how many invisible third parties exist at the state or regional level that would be represented in a better system.

That being said, this state government seems rather large for Minnesota, a state with a population of six million people. 67 senators and 134 representatives, and that's within the clunky three-branch system of government copied from the US Federal Government. Those numbers are bigger than California's which has a population that is five times larger.