MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by red-iron-pine | 2026-01-26 17:07:49+00:00
OG classical fascism was pretty incompetent and bumbling at times too.

eventually they got their shit together.

China is a demographic disaster in slow motion and should be keeping anyone they can get who wants to say. The US and EU have avoided much stagnation by importing more bodies, and there is no ethnic component to USA-ian identity compared to being Han and being forced to speak Mandarin.
by jonathaneunice | 2026-01-26 17:08:07+00:00
Switching to sovereignty-protecting, locally-hosted collaboration, compute, and storage is by no means impossible. FOSS advocates have been eagerly beating this drum and providing options for 25+ years.

The missing ingredient has always been the will to absorb the inevitable cost of change, and the friction of choosing something other than the standard, go-to, often at least apparently free (or at least bundled) tools.

The current U.S. threats against NATO and allies creates a rift in the previously-accepted international order that may finally motivate material change. Often such change is chaotic and discontinuous—it feels well nigh impossible, right up to the moment it feels necessary and inevitable.
by itsyonas | 2026-01-26 17:08:16+00:00
This suggests that the Chinese government recognises that its legitimacy is conditional and potentially unstable. Consequently, the state treats uncontrolled public discourse as a direct threat. By contrast, countries such as the United States can tolerate the public exposure of war crimes, illegal actions or state violence, since such revelations rarely result in any significant consequences. While public outrage may influence narratives or elections to some extent, it does not fundamentally endanger the continuity of power.

I am not sure if one approach is necessarily worse than the other.
by Amezarak | 2026-01-26 17:08:30+00:00
> There is no country in the world where inciting arson of housing counts as free speech.

Wrong. In the USA that speech would have been protected. It obviously does not meet the imminent lawless action standard and is not meaningfully incitement.

What she actually said was:

> “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f*** hotels full of the ba***s for all I care … if that makes me racist so be it.”

This is clearly someone just angrily ranting. It's absurd nonsense to pretend otherwise. Imagine arresting everyone who said "punch Nazis" because that's "incitement." The UK is one of the worst speech control regimes in the world on any honest scale - even in most third-world dictatorships at least the state isn't strong or coordinated enough to go after most people for this stuff. Sorry, most of the world doesn’t punish angry hateful off the cuff comments with prison. You are an outlier.
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-01-26 17:08:30+00:00
Local police are never supposed to deal with immigration issues anyways, it isn't in their jurisdiction and they would have to call feds in to deal with anything related to it.

Generally, a city is called a sanctuary city if they don't honor hold orders on detainees from customs and immigration, it has nothing to do with police not enforcing immigration rules, which they can't do either way.
by spwa4 | 2026-01-26 17:08:57+00:00
On the other hand, there is the opposing side that's also tough to ignore where they're coming from.

Leftists, with Western pro-Khomeini protests, not just in Iran, with the usual involvement from the KGB, and the CIA opposing, brought Khomeini to power with claims that he would bring a communist revolution. As per tradition in a communist revolution, first thing he did once in power is execute communist allies. Of course, Iran is still allied with the KGB (now FSB) and Moscow, currently delivering weapons and weapon designs for use in the war against Ukraine.

You could also point out that Iran is kind-of socialist, in the sense that the state controls, at minimum, 70% of the economy, and all those "companies" are directly controlled by the government.

So socialists are still at it, supporting the ayatollah, for example:

https://marxist.com/iran-for-a-nationwide-uprising-down-with...

Note: yes, I get what the title says, but read. IN the article you'll find an insane rant about how Israel and the US are really behind the revolution and how despite that the regime really held back, and this popular revolution, if it fails will bring back national Iranian pride, and the revolution failing will be the final push that ayatollah's need to actually bring the communist revolution to Iran
by GolDDranks | 2026-01-26 17:09:06+00:00
Yeah, you're right, and the snark might be warranted. I should consider it the same as my stupid (but cute) robot vacuum cleaner that goes at random directions but gets the job done.

The thing that differentiates LLM's from my stupid but cute vacuum cleaner, is that the (at least OpenAI's) AI model is cocksure and wrong, which is infinitely more infuriating than being a bit clueless and wrong.
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2026-01-26 17:09:16+00:00
What you're hinting at is the fact that proofs created by human mathematicians are not complete proofs but rather sketch proofs whose purpose is to convince mathematicians (including the person deriving the proof) that a statement (like the Reimann hypothesis) is true. Such human-derived proofs can even be wrong, as they sometimes turn out to be, so just because a proof is given, doesn't mean we have to automatically believe what it proves.

In that sense, proofs can be seen as evidence that a statement is true, and since one interpretation of Bayesian probabilities is that they express degrees of belief about the truth of a formal statement, then yes, proofs have something to do with probabilities.

But, in that context, it's not proofs that probabilities should be attached to. Rather, we can assign some probability to a formal statement, like the Reimann hypothesis, given that a proof exists. The proof is
evidence that the statement is true and we can adjust our belief in the truth of the statement according to this and possibly other lines of evidence. In particular, if there are multiple and different proofs of the same statement that can increase our certainty that the statement is true.

The thing to keep in mind is that computers can derive complete proofs, in the sense that they can mechanically traverse the entire deductive closure of a statement given the axioms of a theory, and determine whether the statement is a theorem (i.e. true) or not but without skipping or fudging any steps, however trivial. This is what automated theorem provers do.

But it's important to keep in mind that LLMs don't do that kind of proof. They give us at best sketch proofs like the ones derived by human mathematicians, with the added complication that LLMs themselves cannot distinguish between a correct proof (i.e. one where every step, however fudgy, follows from the ones before it) and an incorrect one, or an automated theorem prover, are still required to check the correctness of a proof. LLM-based proof systems like AlphaProof work that way, passing an LLM-generated proof to an automated theorem prover as a verifier.

Mechanically-derived, complete proofs like the ones generated by automated theorem provers can also be assigned degrees of probability, but once we are convinced of the correctness of a prover (... because we have a proof!) then we can trust the proofs derived by that prover, and have complete belief in the truth of any statements derived.
by entropicdrifter | 2026-01-26 17:09:23+00:00
So how would you recommend communicating desires that are less strong than "important"?

I try to include the priority level of my requests inside the question itself, personally. As in, "Hey do you think you could xyz if it's not too much trouble? Not a high priority for me, but it would be convenient is all." Do you recommend something like that?
by Ylpertnodi | 2026-01-26 17:09:49+00:00
> You might as well just shit on someone else's lawn and say it's fine because it's art.

Are you referring to 'tagging' (putting your, or your gang name on something)?

I agree.

Referring to well-crafted, or political (think banksy), images, i agree less.
Unless i don't like the image/style then it's only lawn-worthy.
by lunatuna | 2026-01-26 17:09:56+00:00
Similarly ignorant of what think tanks are and where they came from and their influences. This was eye opening. I've since followed up reading Quinn Slobodian and he described his interest in the supply side rather than the demand side. He is mentioned in the article and has so far been interesting to listen to as it puts a clearer lens on the source and multiple dimensions of think tank outputs.
by anticlickwise | 2026-01-26 17:10:11+00:00
Fair point and I agree. The intent isn’t to make anyone “die on a hill” or perform loyalty. What I kept running into was people accepting decisions without really feeling ready to own or back them in execution. That gap usually only showed up later as delays or fuzzy ownership. The wording is one way to surface that but the goal is clarity, not confrontation. Appreciate you calling it out.
by hmaxwell | 2026-01-26 17:10:12+00:00
Exactly 100%

I read these comments and articles and feel like I am completely disconnected from most people here. Why not use GenAI the way it actually works best: like autocomplete on steroids. You stay the architect, and you have it write code function by function. Don't show up in Claude Code or Codex asking it to "please write me GTA 6 with no mistakes or you go to jail, please."

It feels like a lot of people are using GenAI wrong.
by Centigonal | 2026-01-26 17:10:23+00:00
Good article, reflects my experience hiring at a small services firm, too.

One thing I'd add re: "non-obviousness." There are also tarpits; people who make you think "I can't believe my luck! How has the market missed someone this good!?" At this point, I have enough scar tissue that I immediately doubt my first instinct here. If someone is amazing on paper/in interviews and they aren't working somewhere more prestigious than my corner of the industry, there is often some mitigating factor: an abrasive personality, an uncanny ability to talk technically about systems they can't actually implement, a tendency to disappear from time to time. For these candidates, I try to focus the rest of the interview process on clearing all possible risks and identifying any mitigating factors we may have missed while getting the candidate excited to work with us assuming everything comes back clean.
by joe_mamba | 2026-01-26 17:10:41+00:00
>If a US-China War was to arise, worst case we would probably see a mass reversion back to 2018-22 level technology, which isn't the end of the world.

It wouldn't be the end of the world if those 2018 chips came at 2018 prices and only impacted commodity stuff like phones, datacenters and laptops, but they'll be at 10x the 2018 price and impact critical stuff like automotive, the cars and trucks that gets your food delivered to the supermarket, and if those become impossible to buy or fix anymore, then your groceries will also get more expensive, triggering an end-of-the-world riot from taxpayers who can't afford food anymore.

People need to view this issue as not just being stuck with 2018 laptops and phones which isn't that bad, but has much wider societal implications.
Show HN: WLM – A 70B model trained to decode "I'm fine" with 94.7% accuracy
by gwillen85 | 2026-01-26 17:10:42+00:00
I built WLM, a 70B parameter model trained on 847M text message arguments to decode relationship communication.

Key contributions:

- Infinite Grievance Memory™ with O(1) retrieval and zero decay rate
- Subtext Attention Mechanism that attends to what was NOT said
- "You Should Know Why" solver using Guilt-Weighted Retrospective Search
- Partner-Specific Fine-Tuning on your SO's message history
- MoodNet classifier for availability prediction

Achieves 94.7% accuracy on the "It's Fine" Benchmark vs 14.7% male human baseline. Paper includes ablation studies, architecture diagrams, and a failure cases section noting that "Where Do You Want To Eat?" remains NP-hard.

License: MIT (Marriage Is Tough)

GitHub: https://github.com/gabewillen/wlm
by YesBox | 2026-01-26 17:10:57+00:00
Hehe, you created quite the dog pile. Here's my woof:

IMO you only need to look at the 30+ year history of Linux to see how wrong this prediction is. There will be a small group of people who do as you say, but the other 95% will happily pay for someone else to take care of their problem. Convenience is the supreme king of the American market.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-26 17:10:59+00:00
My health insurance for a family of four in Spain is $2k/year. In the US, it was exceeding $25k/year with premiums, copays, deductibles, etc. While not free, it is accessible.

There was a time in my life we had to decide in the middle of the night if we could afford to take one of our children to the ER in the US when they were a newborn. I will never have that feeling in Europe, and that is priceless. Tax me more, I will happily contribute to a functioning governance system. I like taxes, with them I contribute to civilization. As an American, I am all in on Europe. It's not perfect, but the bar is in hell.

We Asked 300 People About Health Care Costs. The Numbers Are Shocking. - https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/opinion/health-insurance-... | https://archive.today/MnYz9 - January 22nd, 2026
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-26 17:11:14+00:00
To add some background. During WWII the allies successfully used massive specialized depth charges but those were much smaller dams. [0] During the Korean war the US struggled to merely destroy the sluice gates of a dam using aerial torpedos. [1] Eventually the Geneva Conventions were amended to forbid attacking dams if it would kill a large number of civilians (which was pretty obviously implied to being with for what it's worth).

So unless Taiwan has a method to deliver something the size of a bunker buster to the underwater base of the upstream side of the dam I don't think it's going to happen. And if they did manage to pull it off they'd presumably be condemned as war criminals more or less universally.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Chastise

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwacheon_Dam
by nasretdinov | 2026-01-26 17:11:21+00:00
My hope is that all this push towards tech independence (not just from EU) will make the most "basic" tools open-source and they wouldn't suck as much as they do now.

What I mean by this is e.g. you can already use Linux on a desktop and it's generally okay (or even good sometimes), however things like LibreOffice are absolutely unusable in terms of performance, functionality and user friendliness compared to e.g. Keynote or even Pages on macOS.

Multiple governments having to solve essentially the same issue on a global scale is a unique opportunity to save costs by working on open source together, and get funding and direction that's never been available to OSS before.
by akurilin | 2026-01-26 17:11:53+00:00
Totally fair, thanks for pointing that out.

I would extend that even further, I'm a fan of the idea that you should thoroughly vet the founders for excellence if you want to maximize your chances of ending up at a great startup. Not just your eng manager and peers.

Like with your "A player" engineers example, founders need to be exceptional if they want to attract great talent to work for them. So if you're pretty unimpressed with them as you're getting to know the company, the likelihood that the team they hired makes up for that deficiency is very low, and you'll end up around non-A players.
by CMay | 2026-01-26 17:11:56+00:00
I think you're conflating different contexts and scenarios. People aren't used to war being brought to the US itself. Look at Pearl Harbor and 9/11, both rallying the country pretty well. Attacking the US mainland is a losing strategy.

If people generally understand that we're intervening in a China/Taiwan conflict for the right reasons, and China attacks us at home it would only accelerate the west. If you look at Vietnam, the logic around that war fell apart and it no longer made sense to continue it. The people were right to push back. Iraq and Afghanistan went on for a long time without much fuss.

Some kind of conflict in South East Asia would likely largely be a naval and resource war, with many casualties being naval rather than mainland. Most losses on both sides will probably be drones, AI or not.

If it came down to attrition, it would maybe be AI machine attrition or drone/missile attrition which is in a way a resource war which the US could win even without TSMC, but from where we're standing today it would take more ramping up which is a process that has already started.

If OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc were attacked by China in a more critical way, it would have to be for some major short term advantage that is capitalized on immediately, because long-term it would be a losing strategy by itself. China has systems to disrupt as well, so if they let loose on cyber then the US has options too.

Either way, don't conflate general economic preference around an election for whether people would tolerate being unable to access Gmail or order from Amazon like they would all rush to riot in the streets. I think that misreads the situation.
by creato | 2026-01-26 17:12:02+00:00
> It's not at all obvious that this is what happens. To begin with, do you regard the average phone thief as someone who even knows what expected value is?

They know if their fence went from offering them $20/phone to offering $5/phone, it's not worth their time to steal phones any more.

> Just establish a registry for the IMEI of stolen phones so that carriers can consult the registry and refuse to provide service to stolen phones.

This seems like something that the average HNer is going to get equally riled up about as a surveillance and user freedom issue.
by pelegpor | 2026-01-26 17:12:07+00:00
Curious how others here see this:

Is this just inertia?

Is VC workflow fundamentally hard to automate?

Or is this about culture, incentives, or risk tolerance?

Article: https://or-levi.medium.com/the-cobblers-children-have-no-co-...

Would love to hear perspectives from investors, founders, and anyone who’s tried to apply AI internally rather than sell it.
by WorldMaker | 2026-01-26 17:12:24+00:00
> what is monetized (beyond like a tip jar situation where you get some coffee money every once in a while) is primarily sponsored by enterprise users, support license sales, or through grants, or something like that

All of those examples are the "direct user engagement" in question. No one tips a tip jar that they don't see. Enterprise users don't sponsor projects or buy licenses when they don't know they are using projects they should sponsor or buy a better license.

If an LLM is automating your `npm install` you probably don't see the funding requests. Are you running `npm fund` in your spare time?

If an LLM is automating your need to lookup library documentation you probably don't see that the library's own documentation has a Ko-Fi link or GitHub Sponsors request. Would you check library websites and GitHub repos on your own for such things without the need to read their documentation?
by echohack5 | 2026-01-26 17:12:30+00:00
I have found AI great in alot of scenarios but If I have a specific workflow, then the answer is specific and the ai will get it wrong 100% of the time. You have a great point here.

A trivial example is your happy path git workflow. I want:

- pull main

- make new branch in user/feature format

- Commit, always sign with my ssh key

- push

- open pr

but it always will

- not sign commits

- not pull main

- not know to rebase if changes are in flight

- make a million unnecessary commits

- not squash when making a million unnecessary commits

- have no guardrails when pushing to main (oops!)

- add too many comments

- commit message too long

- spam the pr comment with hallucinated test plans

- incorrectly attribute itself as coauthor in some gorilla marketing effort (fixable with config, but whyyyyyy -- also this isn't just annoying, it breaks compliance in alot of places and fundamentally misunderstands the whole point of authorship, which is copyright --- and AIs can't own copyright )

- not make DCO compliant commits
...

Commit spam is particularly bad for bisect bug hunting and ref performance issues at scale. Sure I can enforce Squash and Merge on my repo but why am I relying on that if the AI is so smart?

All of these things are fixed with aliases / magit / cli usage, using the thing the way we have always done it.
by obidee2 | 2026-01-26 17:12:35+00:00
This is a really interesting comparison, but a flawed analogy. (I’m absolutely not challenging your preference for tube amps.)

LEDs clearly do not produce anything like the spectral energy of blackbody radiation (sunlight, incandescence bulbs), and many do flicker (although that’s a byproduct of individual designs, not the technology itself). This is easy to confirm with simple sensors. So it’s completely uncontroversial to say they don’t replicate “natural” light.

Pretty much all tube amp designs produce an output that is modified from the input signal. This is what makes them sound different and to plenty of personal opinions more enjoyable to listen to music on. But they are more like the “LED” side of the lighting example - they produce an output that is different from the “natural” aka original audio material.
by pgwhalen | 2026-01-26 17:12:38+00:00
> Like https://www.securityweek.com/hackers-target-popular-nx-build... ?

I only had time to skim this, but it doesn't seem like prompt injection to me, just good old fashioned malware in a node package.

Your other two examples do seem to open the door for prompt injection, I was just asking about documented cases of it succeeding.
by b33j0r | 2026-01-26 17:12:43+00:00
I usually do most of the engineering and it works great for writing the code. I’ll say:

> There should be a TaskManager that stores Task objects in a sorted set, with the deadline as the sort key. There should be methods to add a task and pop the current top task. The TaskManager owns the memory when the Task is in the sorted set, and the caller to pop should own it after it is popped. To enforce this, the caller to pop must pass in an allocator and will receive a copy of the Task. The Task will be freed from the sorted set after the pop.

> The payload of the Task should be an object carrying a pointer to a context and a pointer to a function that takes this context as an argument.

> Update the tests and make sure they pass before completing. The test scenarios should relate to the use-case domain of this project, which is home automation (see the readme and nearby tests).
by red75prime | 2026-01-26 17:13:41+00:00
So far it looks like AI will go the same road as other technological analogues of biological systems: not a self-contained unit (powered by currently technologically unreachable nano-mechanisms), but infrastructure that produces and maintains specialized units.

A tractor can't reproduce or repair itself, but it is better than a horse for farming. A self-driving car can't learn by itself, but a datacenter can use its data to train a new version of the car software. A humanoid robot by itself might not be flexible enough to count as AGI, but it can defer some problems to an exascale datacenter.
by aorth | 2026-01-26 17:13:47+00:00
American citizen living abroad for almost 20 years here. This happens to me ever so often when entering the US. Last under Biden, when I had been living in Jordan for a few years. I got pulled aside for a secondary inspection and the guy asked for all my phone numbers and social media accounts, and was surprised I didn't have Facebook—I just said I was a computer scientist and didn't like Zuckerberg. I gotta give him credit for being patient as he asked for all my addresses abroad etc. But this has been happening before Trump.