MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by perrygeo | 2026-01-29 22:47:02+00:00
Thank you. Fixing a vitamin deficiency is an obvious benefit to physical health. But does it "cure depression"? To the extent that your depression was caused by vitamin deficiency, sure. But then didn't you just cure a vitamin deficiency? I'm sure a lot of things starting improving once your body starts getting proper nutrients after years of neglect! That doesn't indicate causality.
by wolvoleo | 2026-01-29 22:47:12+00:00
They do for me too. Alcohol gives me a huge downer the next day but the party itself is amazing so I just waste the day after with a pillow over my head.

And I hate strict rules and rituals, I love chaos. So that also gets me down. I often stay up till 6am (the parties I mentioned above only start at midnight)

So yah it might make some people better but for me the times I break it are the ones that are exceptionally good.
by ylee | 2026-01-29 22:47:23+00:00
Usenet killfiles are not "totally reliable". Nym shifting has always been a thing, even before Google Groups-based commercial mass spamming using constantly changing From: lines industrialized the problem. Killfiles also do nothing for people quoting the person you are trying to ignore, unless you use a thread-based killfile, which of course means you won't see a lot of non-killfiled people's comments.

At the end of the day, there is no satisfactory solution to the problem of warped and damaged online personalities other than actually preventing them from being online, which of course has its own difficulties and consequences.
by filloooo | 2026-01-29 22:47:24+00:00
Not 10nm, they are producing with 18.5nm and 17nm now, which technically already is in breach of US restrictions, the US government can blacklist them if they feel like it.

3D DRAM is no magic, it will only give them maybe 2 generations' breathing room if they got the required etching equipment figured out. But others will be doing 3D DRAM with EUV by then.
by jandrewrogers | 2026-01-29 22:47:30+00:00
Some intelligence agencies endeavor to maintain a profile of every identifiable person on the planet with data acquired by many diverse means. They have enough data to build excellent models of population coverage such that I would be surprised if they could not estimate population with high confidence.

The problem with trying to measure this as a normal person is that you don't have enough access to different types of measurements to build good models of sample bias and selection artifacts.
by basch | 2026-01-29 22:48:21+00:00
it might be more that business process can become a plain text word document, that modifying the program requires only describing the change in plain language, that the user interface to show information becomes unnecessary when you can just ask any question, that data can be loose and unstructured, even stored as images, and interpreted on the fly.

the general purpose chatbot plus a "how to" does replace needing to build esoteric specialized workflows.
by freedomben | 2026-01-29 22:48:43+00:00
This won't be popular on HN, but this data seems to heavily imply that Apple should focus on mainly iOS. Mac is largely a loser. The market has spoken and they love the locked down, walled garden approach. We can debate the ethics around that all we want, and I do believe it is highly unethical and actually evil, but that's what people seem to want.

The future of Mac OS is going to be locked down. It will look a lot more like iOS than classic open computing. It is bad for humanity, but good for Apple's bottom line. It's coming, mark my words.
by jacquesm | 2026-01-29 22:48:57+00:00
It is very much true for dogs in that case: (1) it is your dog (2) it is your car (3) it is your responsibility to make sure your car can not be started by your dog (4) the pedestrian has a reasonable expectation that a vehicle that is parked without a person in it has been made safe to the point that it will not suddenly start to move without an operator in it and dogs don't qualify.

You'd lose that lawsuit in a heartbeat.
by svilen_dobrev | 2026-01-29 22:49:01+00:00
i have been programming for 40years.. but still have not dipped in this brave new world of shakespeare-taught coding-LLMs.

IMO there's one basic difference with this new "generative" stuff.. it's not deterministic. Or not yet. All previous generations "AI" were deterministic.. but died.

Generating is not a problem. i have made medium-ish projects - say 200+kloc python/js - having 50%-70% of code generated (by other code - so you maintain that meta-code, and the "language" recipes-code it interprets) - but it has been all deterministic. If shit happens - or some change is needed, anywhere on the requirements-down-to-deployment chain - someone can eventually figure out where and what. It is reasoned. And most importantly, once done, it stays done. And if i regenerate it 1000 times, it will be same.

Did this made me redundant? Not at all. Producing software is much easier this way, the recipes are much shorter, there's less space for errors etc etc. But still - Higher abstractions are even harder to grasp than boilerplate. Which has quite a cost.. you cannot throw any newbie on it and expect results.

So, fine-tuning assembly - or manual transmission - might be gonna-be-obsolete skill, as it is not required.. except in rare conditions. But it is helpful to learn stuff. To flex your mind/body about alternatives, possibilities, shortcuts, wear-and-tear, fatigue, aha-moments and what not. And then move these as concepts, onto another domains, which are not as commoditized yet.

Another thing is.. Exupery in Land-of-people talks about technology (airplanes in his case), and how without technology, mankind workarounds/ avoids places/things that are not "friendly", like twisting roads around hellscapes. While technology cuts all straight through those - flies above all that, perfect for when it works - and turns into nightmare when it breaks right in the middle of such unfriendly "area".

dunno. maybe i am getting old..
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-29 22:49:23+00:00
"National Shutdown" seems to be about this: https://nationalshutdown.org/ (found via https://thehill.com/homenews/nexstar_media_wire/5712766-nati...)

> national SHUTDOWN FRI JAN 30 NO WORK. NO SCHOOL. NO SHOPPING. - The people of the Twin Cities have shown the way for the whole country – to stop ICE’s reign of terror, we need to SHUT IT DOWN. On Friday, January 30, join a nationwide day of no school, no work and no shopping.

So servers will still be running and websites, but won't be any people in offices, school, factories, shops, and so on.
by VTimofeenko | 2026-01-29 22:49:48+00:00
The screenplay part made me think. While it's true that an LLM could potentially generate a better^ script, while writing scriot the author would probably had had many ideas that did not make it to the final draft. Yet those ideas would definitely influence the final product, the movie. There's probably only so much you can put in the script really.

Meaning for the brother is one thing, but as a potential watcher, I would almost always prefer a movie that someone really cared about^^.

^: depending on the definition of "better"

^^: as a fallible human being I am not perfect at detecting that care, but there had definitely been cases in my life when someone was talking about a thing that I would not really care about otherwise, but their passion made the talk extremely interesting and memorable
by mschuster91 | 2026-01-29 22:49:52+00:00
> 20000 / 8 customers / 40 USD/mo = 62 months just to recoup CPU and RAM let alone other components.

the most important question is the power, such a setup will blow through easily 500W of power. Granted, a datacenter may not pay 33 ct/kWh but even then, 1/3rd of the monthly income will just go towards naked electricity, not including cooling.

Electricity costs are ridiculous.
by throw310822 | 2026-01-29 22:49:54+00:00
You really need to be obstinate in your convictions if you can dismiss LLMs at the time when everyone's job is being turned around by them. Everywhere I look, everyone I talk to, is using LLMs more and more to do their job and dramatically increase their productivity. It's one of the most successful technologies I've ever witnessed arriving on the market, and it's only just started- it's just three years old.
by BiteCode_dev | 2026-01-29 22:51:02+00:00
No, I use them but loading and unloading the app in the tab still happens when the browser flushes the app from memory because the OS killed it or the browser eviction policy hits.

This loading is not nearly as seamless as a regular app starting back up.

For a regular app, you have the app loading, and the os cache helping with it. If you do your job half correctly, it loads as a block almost instantly.

For a web app you have the web browser loading, the the display of the white viewport in a flash, then the app loading in the browser (with zero os cache to help with so it's slower). It needs then to render. Then restoring the scroll (which is a mess with a browser) and the state as much as you can but you are limited with persistence size so most content must be reloaded which means the layout is moving around. Not to mention JS in a browser is not nearly as performant as a regular app, so as your app grows, it gets worse.
by reactordev | 2026-01-29 22:51:04+00:00
Ok, I’ll give you Rocket League. That’s an entirely new spin on a genre I didn’t see coming. The rest are just RPGs or platformers you like. Good games, but not innovative. Yes, some new franchises have been born and some successful indie titles have been launched but most of the market share in the games industry is held by the top 5.

Yes, I have over 1,000 games in my Steam library going back to 1999. I engage in most games that make the top 500 and have so since I was a teenager making games myself.
by fasterik | 2026-01-29 22:51:26+00:00
I get by without modules or header files in my C++ projects by using the following guidelines:

- Single translation unit (main.cpp)

- Include all other cpp files in main

- Include files in dependency order (no forward declarations)

- No circular dependencies between files

- Each file has its own namespace (e.g. namespace draw in draw.cpp)

This works well for small to medium sized projects (on the order of 10k lines). I suspect it will scale to 100k-1M line projects as long as there is minimal use of features that kill compile times (e.g. templates).
by subscribed | 2026-01-29 22:51:47+00:00
Which polygraph, "lie detector" polygraph?

https://www.apa.org/topics/cognitive-neuroscience/polygraph

> Reviews of decades of scientific research suggest that polygraph tests are not reliable or accurate enough to be used in most forensic, legal or employment settings.

> Although lying can cause the physiological responses measured by polygraph machines—such as sweating and increased heart rate—those same changes can occur even when people are not lying, for example when they are nervous.
by socalgal2 | 2026-01-29 22:52:36+00:00
I saw a girl dart out between to parked cars on a strode. She was less lucky. The car did slam on their breaks. I have no idea what speed it was ultimately going when they hit the girl. It wasn't enough to send her flying but it was enough to knock her over hard. The dad, was sitting in his front yard and had her up and in his car and I'm guessing rushed to the hospital.

Those kind of neighborhoods where the outer houses face the fast large roads I think are less common now but lots of them left over from the 50+ years ago.
by thewebguyd | 2026-01-29 22:52:40+00:00
BlackBerry's keyboards & autocorrect were top notch. Nothing has matched it yet when using a pure virtual touch screen keyboard.

Crazy he had pretty much perfected the tech of typing out text on a smartphone and then decided to throw it all away by moving to all-screen devices instead. A virtual keyboard with no tactile feel will never compare until we can have screens that can recreate the tactile bumps of a physical keyboard.
by haunter | 2026-01-29 22:53:11+00:00
>The only innovative thing that has happened since storytelling died

lol

There are countless already classic modern story driven games which pushing the boundaries of video games forward.

I know nostalgia is a very strong drug and I also love the games I grew up with in the 90s but it's pure ignorance to say that 1, "storytelling died" 2, no innovation happened in video games in modern times (whatever that even means)
by jongjong | 2026-01-29 22:53:25+00:00
Great point. The people who popularized 'the end of history' were right about it from the PoV of innovation benefiting humans. It's been marginal gains since. Any appearance of significant gains (in the eyes of a minority of powerful people) has been the result of concentration in fewer hands (zero-sum game).

The focus of politics after the 90s should have shifted to facilitating competition to equalize distribution of existing wealth and should have promoted competition of ideas, but instead, the governments of the world got together and enacted policies which would suppress competition, at the highest scale imaginable. What they did was much worse than doing nothing.

Now, the closest solution we can aim for (IMO) is UBI. It's a late solution because a lot of people's lives have already been ruined through no fault of their own.
by nikcub | 2026-01-29 22:54:08+00:00
> I would run on 300 tasks and I'd run the test suite 5 or 10 times per day and average that score.

assume this is because of model costs. anthropic could either throw some credits their way (would be worthwhile to dispel the 80 reddit posts a day about degrading models and quantization) or OP could throw up a donation / tip link
by nobody9999 | 2026-01-29 22:54:18+00:00
>Citizen children have rights, illegal immigrants have rights.

Finally! Thank you.

>Be angry somewhere else. Nobody was talking about your rights or rights at all.

Who's angry? Not me. I wasn't angry before and I'm not angry now. What would give you that idea? Or is that just more projection (straw man, indeed!) from you?
by camgunz | 2026-01-29 22:54:56+00:00
I love Nystrom's writing, and he's so good at it because he's written so much. A huge part of the value of things is how we grow in the making of them, and I worry that in a world where we accept generative slop, we'll never have the opportunity to woodshed enough to become excellent at a craft.

I'm a good engineer because I've written tons of code, I've taken no shortcuts, and I've focused on improving over my many iterations. This has enabled me to be an effective steward of generative coding (etc) models, but will younger engineers ever get the reps necessary to get where I am? Are there other ways to get this knowledge and taste? Does anyone know or care?

We're in the anthropocene now, and while probably everyone who knows what that is understands we have the largest effect on the Earth, it also means we now also have the largest effect on ourselves. We're so, so bad at taking this seriously. We can unleash technology that idiocracies western civilization inside of a generation, I know this because we keep lunging towards it with ever increasing success. But we can't just shamble around and let Darwin awards sort things out. We have nukes and virology labs, not to mention a climate change crisis to deal with. If the US political system falls apart because Americans under 65 spend between 2-3 hours on social media a day, that's a failed state with a lot of firepower to shoot around haphazardly.

And why do we keep building things that enfeeble us? Did we need easier access to delivery food and car rides, or did we need easier access to nutritious food and more walkable neighborhoods? Did we need social media with effectively no protections against propaganda/misinformation? We know that cognitive ability and executive function decline with LLM use. Can it really be that we think we're actually too smart and we need to turn it down a notch?

There are actual problems to solve, and important software to write. Neither algorithmic feeds nor advertising platforms fall under those categories. LLMs are supposed to solve the problem of "not enough software"--Nystrom points at this explicitly with the Washington Department of Ecology ad. But we never had a "not enough software problem", rather we had a "not enough beneficial software" problem.

LLMs aren't improving the situation. We don't have people building their own OSes, (real, working) browsers, word processors and spreadsheet programs, their own DAWs or guitar amp modelers, their own Illustrators or Figmas. Instead you have companies squeezing their workers and contractors, while their products enshittify.

I'm too tired to write a conclusion. I'm pretty sure we're fucked. But hey look, the cars drive themselves.
by 1970-01-01 | 2026-01-29 22:55:35+00:00
> would give fresh momentum to SpaceX’s effort to launch data centers into orbit as Musk battles for supremacy in the rapidly escalating AI race against tech giants like Google, Meta and OpenAI.

Still haven't seen a successful PoC datacenter in orbit. If you own the rockets, maybe get that done tomorrow? I do assume your investors will want one working before they dump even more cash into the idea. But what do I know.
by Muromec | 2026-01-29 22:56:05+00:00
What if you have an email in your inbox warning you that 1) this specific bush attracts bats and 2) there were in fact bats seen near you bush and 3) bats were observed almost biting a child before. And you also have "how do I fuck up them kids by planting a bush that attracts bats" in your browser history. It's a spectrum you know.
by xorbax | 2026-01-29 22:56:10+00:00
> like a road with traffic, cars parked, pedestrians about, weather

Not all of those need to be done "quickly". That's where LLMs fail

You note the weather when you leave. You understand the traffic five minutes ahead. You recognize pedestrians far ahead of time.

Computers can process a lot in fractions of a second. Humans can recognize context over many minutes.

The Waymo may have done better in the fraction of a second, but humans can avoid being in that situation to begin with.
by dragonwriter | 2026-01-29 22:56:32+00:00
> To me, it's 100% clear - if your tool use is reckless or negligent and results in a crime, then you are guilty of that crime.

For most crimes, this is circular, because whether a crime occurred depends on whether a person did the requisite act of the crime with the requisite mental state. A crime is not an objective thing independent of an actor that you can determine happened as a result of a tool and then conclude guilt for based on tool use.

And for many crimes, recklessness or negligence as mental states are not sufficient for the crime to have occurred.
by fpgaminer | 2026-01-29 22:56:40+00:00
As far as I can tell 5.2 is the stronger model on paper, but it's been optimized to think less and do less web searches. I daily drive Thinking variants, not Auto or Instant, and usually want the _right_ answer even if it takes a minute. 5.1 does a very good job of defensively web searching, which avoids almost all of its hallucinations and keeps docs/APIs/UIs/etc up-to-date. 5.2 will instead often not think at all, even in Thinking mode. I've gotten several completely wrong, hallucinated answers since 5.2 came out, whereas maybe a handful from 5.1. (Even with me using 5.2 far less!)

The same seems to persist in Codex CLI, where again 5.2 doesn't spend as much time thinking so its solutions never come out as nicely as 5.1's.

That said, 5.1 is obviously slower for these reasons. I'm fine with that trade off. Others might have lighter workloads and thus benefit more from 5.2's speed.
by globular-toast | 2026-01-29 22:57:28+00:00
Yes, I have seen how people struggle to drive at low speed and can only do start/stop, accelerating to a way too high speed only to slam on brakes, repeating endlessly.

But really, did you seriously read my post as meaning people literally can't go slower than 20 so just plough into whatever is in the way? I'm obviously talking about an open road situation. Hardly any human drivers go under 20 by choice.
by ZX8301 | 2026-01-29 22:57:59+00:00
90% of the PS2’s floating point throughput is in the two vector units, not the R5900 conducting them. Concentrating on that, as the article does, seems as futile as focussing on the 68000 rather than the Amiga PAD in a 16-bit context (ignoring the EE’s 16-bit RAMBUS bottleneck).

However that approach will probably suit the least-ambitious PC-ports to PS2 (by studios that didn’t appreciate the difference) - rather as an ST emulator was a short cut to run the simplest Amiga games.
by ivantop | 2026-01-29 22:57:59+00:00
It’s not just boilerplate. This is a low level C++ service where latency and performance is critical (don’t want to get into too much detail since I’ll dox myself). I used to think the same thing as you: “Surely my job is safe because this system is very complex”. I used to think this would just replace front end engineers who write boilerplate react code. 95% of our codebase is not boilerplate. AI has found optimizations in how we store items, AI has alerted us to production issues (with some degree of accuracy, of course). I worry that traditional software engineering as we know it will disappear and these hybrid AI jobs will be what’s left.
by shmeeed | 2026-01-29 22:58:07+00:00
>The problem is that people do not realize that devices like Steam Deck are also considered Linux desktop devices in those numbers.

Are people even browsing on Steam Decks? Because everybody in this thread seems to be referring to stats published by a rather obscure web tracking solutions company. "High-traffic sites using Statcounter include khabarban.com, codelist.cc, and download.it"
by abhi_telnyx | 2026-01-29 22:58:13+00:00
We kept seeing the same problem in voice AI pricing.

Most providers quote one blended number like “$0.10/min”.

That makes it hard to answer basic questions:

- Did my call cost more because the model used more tokens?

- Because the call sat in silence?

- Because the PSTN leg was expensive?

- Because recording was enabled?

So we shipped Call Cost Breakdowns for Voice AI Assistant calls.

For each call, you can see the cost per component, down to fractions of a cent:

- PSTN or SIP termination

- WebRTC / media

- call control

- recording

- LLM inference (tokens, cached tokens, completions)

- TTS usage

It’s live in the Telnyx Portal and in the API/webhooks, so you can pull it into your own billing and alerts.
chekout relaese notes of this feature here: Release notes: https://telnyx.com/release-notes/voice-ai-call-cost-breakdow...
by jstummbillig | 2026-01-29 22:59:01+00:00
> Obviously directly including context in something like a system prompt will put it in context 100% of the time.

How do you suppose skills get announced to the model? It's all in the context in some way. The interesting part here is: Just (relatively naively) compressing stuff in the AGENTS.md works seems to work "better" than however skills are implemented out of the box, for this use case.
by CGMthrowaway | 2026-01-29 22:59:16+00:00
> The app store payment cut harms only creators who have disproportionately high percentages of patrons that primarily consume their content from iPhones

It cuts both ways. The app store payment disincents consuming content from iPhones (indirectly, as the iPhone-heavy creators raise their prices). Of course Apple has the greater power, but there are always tradeoffs. That is the market in action - "cutting both ways" so to speak - or "strongarm" in your parlance - until you reach equilibrium. An equilibrium which is always temporary (ever heard of disruption?).
by koakuma-chan | 2026-01-29 22:59:41+00:00
That's assuming the above-referenced code is good. I know next to nothing about flux, so I cannot tell. What I can tell though is that despite people claiming that AI can write code in Rust, I have to rewrite virtually all AI-generated code myself, because it's fucking garbage. It cannot even consistently follow basic guidelines. I concede that AI can save time, but my original point stands.