MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ineedasername | 2026-01-17 17:09:45+00:00
This is going to be task-dependent, as well as limited by your (the implementer's) ability and comfort with structuring the task in solid multi-shot prompts that cover a large distribution of expected inputs, which will also help increase the ability for the model to successfully handle less common or edge case inputs-- the ones the would most typically require human-level reasoning. It can be useful to supplement this with a "tool" use for RAG lookup against a more extensive store of examples, or any time the full reference material isn't practical to dump into context. This requires thoughtful chunking.

It also requires testing. Don't think of it as a magic machine that should be able to do anything, think of it like a new employee smart enough and with enough background knowledge to do the task, if given proper job documentation. Test whether few-shot or many shot prompting works better: there's growing information about use cases where one or the other confers an advantage but so much of this is task dependent.

Consider your tolerance for errors and plan some escalation method: Hallucinations occur in part because models "have to" give an answer. Make sure that any critical cases where an error would be problematic have some way for the model to bail out with "i don't know" for human review. The first layer of escalation doesn't even have to be a human, it could be a separate model, eg Opus instead of Sonnet, or the same model but with a different setup prompt explicitly designed for handling certain cases without cluttering up context of the first one. Splitting things in this way, if there's a logical break point, is also a great way to save on token cost: If you can send only 10k of tokens in a system prompt instead of 50k and just choose which of 5 10k prompts to use for different cases then you save 80% of upstream token $$.

Consider running the model deterministic: 0 temp, same seed. It makes any errors you encounter easier to trace and debug.

Something to consider with respect to cost though: Many tasks that a SoTA can do with very little or no scaffolding can be done with these cheaper models and may not take much more scaffolding. If a SoTA giving reliable responses with zero shot prompting there's a decent chance you can save a ton of money with a flash model if you provide it one or few shot prompts. Open weight models even more so.

My anecdotal experience is that open models like Google's gemma and OpenAI's gpt-oss have behaviors more similar to their paid counterparts than other open models, making them reasonable candidates to try if you're getting good results from the paid models but they're perhaps overkill for the task.
by compumike | 2026-01-17 17:09:52+00:00
It's very local here. I'm in the suburbs of Philadelphia, in one of the highest income counties in the state, two blocks from a major hospital, one block from a suburban downtown. Despite that, I've experienced one or two 4-6 hour long power outages per year the past few years. (Mostly correlated with weather.) One outage in June 2025 was 50 hours long!

Many larger homes in this area have whole-house generators (powered by utility natural gas) with automatic transfer switches. During the 50-hour outage, we "abandoned ship" and stayed with someone who also had an outage, but had a whole-house generator.

Other areas just 5-10 miles away are like what you describe: maybe one outage in the past 10 years.
by dangus | 2026-01-17 17:10:54+00:00
Once the article made the claim that the was the greatest comic author of all time, it became clear that the article is overanalyzing the man. one aspect proving the overanalysis is the wild length of the article beyond that point.

Just like how Jim Davis stumbled upon a reasonably funny, widely relatable gag that can be repeated for decades with minimal consequences, the success in Dilbert was being the first newspaper comic to live in the topic of corporate bureaucracy.

In case we all forget how newspaper comics work in a digital world of curated content, they are all successful based on broad appeal. Each newspaper has approximately two pages of funny content and each strip has to appeal to a large subset of readers if not all of them.

Family Circus is a perfect example. Dog funny. Reader like dog. Dog funny. Kids say funny thing with dog. Reader has kids and dog.

The topic of “my boss is incompetent” is just as widely appealing as “my cat is lazy and selfish.”

With all that context established we have to acknowledge that Scott Adams was a pretty normal guy with no particularly strong skills.

So as the article points out, when he pivoted his life to other endeavors, his limitations are strikingly apparent.

This is where I start not liking the guy. He has a smarter than thou attitude especially later in life when in reality, he is not himself particularly smart. I would stop short of calling him a narcissist but some vibes are there. He got lucky to be the guy who got a syndication deal at the right time making a specific type of comic. If he was born 20 years later he’d be a nobody, as the comic industry has completely changed.

His craft was largely surpassed by web comic authors with more specific audiences and more intelligent writing.
by cmiles8 | 2026-01-17 17:10:56+00:00
“You told me these were the best engineers in the world!!”

“I said they were the best engineers in Canada”

(Great quote from the BlackBerry movie).

Rings true here. You can’t fight market forces. To push out the US tech you need to build something that’s better than the US tech. Anything else is just wishful thinking.
by nephihaha | 2026-01-17 17:12:00+00:00
I am not proud of the BBC at all. I have boycotted their licence fee for almost as long as Wikipedia has been around.

If you want to know who the UK is going to war with next, watch the BBC.

Their news is horrendously biased when it comes to the British royal family. They have an institutional bias against Scottish independence since it would cut 10% of their licence fee. (Their provision to areas outside the Home Countries is a disgrace and patronising.)
by Sharlin | 2026-01-17 17:12:26+00:00
It does discuss that? Basically it has good grasp of finances and often knows what "should" be done, but it struggles with actually building anything beyond placing toilets and hotdog stalls. To be fair, its map interface is not exactly optimal, and a multimodal model might fare quite a bit better at understanding the 2D map (verticality would likely still be a problem).
by dvcoolarun | 2026-01-17 17:12:28+00:00
A few observations from the current tech + services market:

Service-led companies are doing relatively better right now. Lower costs, smaller teams, and a lot of “good enough” duct-tape solutions are shipping fast.

Fewer developers are needed to deliver the same output. Mature frameworks, cloud, and AI have quietly changed the baseline productivity.

And yet, these companies still struggle to hire and retain people. Not because talent doesn’t exist, but because they want people who are immediately useful, adaptable, and can operate in messy environments.

Retention is hard when work is rushed, ownership is limited, and growth paths are unclear. People leave as soon as they find slightly better clarity or stability.

On the economy: it doesn’t feel like a crash, more like a slow grind. Capital is cautious. Hiring is defensive. Every role needs justification.

In this environment, it’s a good time for “hackers” — not security hackers, but people who can glue systems together, work with constraints, ship fast, and move without perfect information.

Comfort-driven careers are struggling. Leverage-driven careers are compounding.

Curious to see how others are experiencing this shift.
by deaux | 2026-01-17 17:12:32+00:00
Germany is the most contradicdory country I know of, and such a huge warning flag to anywhere else. For decades, half of children's education has been spent on hammering in "Never Again". Surely there are two huge lessons to learn there: 1. Do not judge the value of people based on their biological characteristics they were born with 2. "I was just following orders" is not an excuse, and one needs to instead do what is right regardless of protocol.

There is no European country which does a worse job at both of these. Germany is easily the number one country in the world for "protocol is everything". It doesn't matter how detrimental and damaging the rules are, the rules are the rules, and they must be followed. This case is the millionth example. The rules are interpretable as it being illegal to access data with a publically available password using this password, so we're going to apply them, despite it being patently absurd. For the first point, German's reponse to Gaza (the slowest in all of the West) said everything.
by empath75 | 2026-01-17 17:13:15+00:00
I am pretty close to this because my spouse is a school board member and I do a lot of AI work for my job, and the problems of AI in education are completely intractable for public schools. The educators lack the technical background to use AI effectively, and moreover, they are completely out of the loop in terms of technology decisions, and the technology staff lacks enough knowledge in both education and AI for them to make competent decisions about it.

It’s a recipe for disaster, and you are going to see school systems set money on fire for years trying to do something with AI systems that never get rolled out, or worse, rollout AI systems that tells kids to kill themselves or makes revenge porn of their classmates.

School boards default answer to everything AI related right now should be “no”.
by sillywalk | 2026-01-17 17:13:16+00:00
I am. I had to do the enable beta workaround to get the (apparently) last security fix.

I "updated" to 26 on my iPad. It's slower. It's ugly as hell. It's worse in every respect for me, even after enabling accessibility features. It's the Windows 11 of ios/macos/ipados.
by microtonal | 2026-01-17 17:13:21+00:00
It's only a small contribution, but last week we have ended our Dropbox subscription (12 * 20 Euro = 240 Euro) and moved our data to Proton Drive. We are also moving out photos out of Apple Photos (12 * 10 = 120 Euro per year for storage). And I have also moved my mail out of Fastmail (to Proton Mail), which is a nice Aussie company, but their main servers are hosted in the US, so too risky. We also just moved all our backups from Backblaze B2 to Hetzner + local (between me and my wife 12 * $15 = $180 per year). Besides moving to Proton and Hetzner, we are increasing donations to non-profits like Mastodon.

I encourage everyone outside the US and in particular Canada and Europe to move your data out of the US and away from US cloud companies now. Putting your data there is not safe anymore and can and will be used for blackmail (see Microsoft cutting access of the International Criminal Court's (ICC) chief prosecutor's email). Trump is now blackmailing countries with tariffs to get them to back off support for Greenland (not going to happen), so things are going to get ugly.

If you are heavily into tech or an activist, etc. it's also a good time to pick up an extra phone like a second hand Pixel to run GrapheneOS as a backup. Or (less secure) a phone that can be unlocked and run something like /e/OS.

I know that it might take years to get all companies, governments, etc. off American big tech products. But that's not a good reason for not safeguarding your own data. Besides that, the more funding non-US alternatives get through enthusiasts, the better they are positioned to improve their alternatives.
by bambax | 2026-01-17 17:14:20+00:00
Ok but what is this question trying to say? I never quite understood the argument that God should be "perfect"; it's entirely possible the universe we're in is a toy made for the amusement of an evil god-child, like we have ant farms, and they enjoy having meteorites and black holes and whatnot. It's not especially likely -- but it's not less likely than any of the other mainstream religious myths.
by rhplus | 2026-01-17 17:14:27+00:00
Sure, those projects were un(der)funded in the 80s and 90s but the reason we talk about them today is because of the huge amount of investment - both direct and in kind - that VC backed companies have managed to give to many of them.

I think it’s easy to forget how long ago it was when FOSS truly was the outsider and wouldn’t be touched by most companies.

Mozilla/Firefox started in 1998 and then started taking ad revenue from Google in 2005, which pays for a large chunk of its development. It’s been part of the Silicon Valley money machine for 20 years, most of its existence.
by vlovich123 | 2026-01-17 17:14:34+00:00
Perform better as in more efficient electrically, not necessarily more pleasant or efficient in the cooking process.

For example, when cooking an omelette, a recommended technique is to angle the pan so the liquid part flows towards the hot part of the pan touching the flame as you slowly scrape the curds up to rest at the cooler part of the pan. AFAIK an induction cooktop is unable to simulate this technique. Now maybe there are similar ways of getting this, but there’s centuries of experience informing cooking on top of a fire in some form or another. The techniques for cooking on induction cooktops well have not been learned, taught and communicated.
by pocketarc | 2026-01-17 17:15:25+00:00
I love the interview at the end of the video. The kubectl-inspired CLI, and the feedback for improvements from Claude, as well as the alerts/segmentation feedback.

You could take those, make the tools better, and repeat the experience, and I'd love to see how much better the run would go.

I keep thinking about that when it comes to things like this - the Pokemon thing as well. The quality of the tooling around the AI is only going to become more and more impactful as time goes on. The more you can deterministically figure out on behalf of the AI to provide it with accurate ways of seeing and doing things, the better.

Ditto for humans, of course, that's the great thing about optimizing for AI. It's really just "if a human was using this, what would they need"? Think about it: The whole thing with the paths not being properly connected, a human would have to sit down and really think about it, draw/sketch the layout to visualize and understand what coordinates to do things in. And if you couldn't do that, you too would probably struggle for a while. But if the tool provided you with enough context to understand that a path wasn't connected properly and why, you'd be fine.
Show HN: Reddit GDPR Export Viewer – Built After Ban, Unban, Reban
by guilamu | 2026-01-17 17:15:32+00:00
Show HN: Reddit GDPR Export Viewer – Built After Getting Hacked, Reinstated, Then Banned Again

A few months ago, I posted here about getting my 10-year Reddit account hacked despite 2FA: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45484294

The likely culprit: session cookie theft via a malicious browser extension, possibly linked to the ShadyPanda campaign that infected 4.3M browsers.

Reddit eventually reinstated my account with zero explanation. Then, exactly one month later, they banned me again – permanently, with no reason given and no appeal process.

This drove home a lesson: platforms can and will revoke your access arbitrarily, taking years of contributions with them. So I requested my GDPR data export. What I received was not really usable: raw CSV files with no way to meaningfully browse a decade of comments, posts, and activity.

So I built this: https://github.com/guilamu/reddit-gdpr-export-viewer

It's a pure client-side viewer – zero backend, your data never leaves your machine. Open the HTML file, load your Reddit export, and browse your history offline.

Full disclosure: I've been vibe coding with Claude Opus for the past few weeks, creating mostly Gravity Forms and WordPress extensions for work (18 repos so far). This particular project was knocked out in a couple of hours. I don't have a strong technical background, so this might be pretty badly coded. It works for what I needed, though. If you find issues or have suggestions for improvements, PRs are welcome.
by shimman | 2026-01-17 17:16:04+00:00
Is US tech even good anymore? Do none of us not encounter the massive amount of shit from companies like Google, MSFT, Apple, Amazon, etc as users? Truly terrible bugs or user flows from engineers that clearly don't care while everyone is just collecting their own share of blood.

I can't think of a single thing that big tech has done to improve my life, or society for that matter, over the last 10 years.

All US Tech has is the backing of the US government and that is likely to change in the coming decade, without the pressure of the US government would these companies be as competitive? We see what happens when others try to, rightfully I might add, regulate them: they throw extreme hissy fits and pressure the US government to force the countries to back off (by threat of sanctions or military action).
by dangus | 2026-01-17 17:16:58+00:00
Let’s not forget that we are just now recovering from the market corrections of the pandemic. Pandemic level tech industry hiring was insane and many of those companies who later held layoffs were just sending the growth line back to where it should be.

I think pressure to ship is always there. I don’t know if that’s intensifying or not. I can understand where managers and executives think AI = magical work faster juice, but I imagine those expectations will hit their correction point at some time.
by westurner | 2026-01-17 17:17:27+00:00
> Abstract: [...] here we show an accelerated adoption of AI tools among scientists and consistent professional advantages associated with AI usage, but a collective narrowing of scientific focus. Scientists who engage in AI-augmented research publish 3.02 times more papers, receive 4.84 times more citations and become research project leaders 1.37 years earlier than those who do not. By contrast, AI adoption shrinks the collective volume of scientific topics studied by 4.63% and decreases scientists’ engagement with one another by 22%

Hypotheses for those responses to new tools?
by array_key_first | 2026-01-17 17:18:10+00:00
Abraham Lincoln was the 16th president of the United States of America. He was best known for being "Honest Abe", writing the Emancipation Proclamation, and his affinity for wearing Raycon© Ear Buds. He loved them for their 6 hours of playtime, seamless Bluetooth pairing, bass, availability in multiple colors, and their compact design that helps get rid of background noise.
by mlhpdx | 2026-01-17 17:18:22+00:00
A while back I worked on a project where s3 held giant zip files containing zip files (turtles all the way down) and also made good use of range requests. I came up with seekable-s3-stream[1] to generalize working with them via an idiomatic C# stream.

[1] https://github.com/mlhpdx/seekable-s3-stream
by equinumerous | 2026-01-17 17:18:47+00:00
The "> Remove lockfiles from version control" got me as well.

> Reproducible builds sound nice in theory, but velocity matters more than determinism. Think of it as chaos engineering for your dependency tree.

Reproducible builds are nice in practice, too. :) In the Node.js ecosystem, if you have enough dependencies, even obeying semver your dependencies will break your code. Pinning to specific versions is critical.
by nszceta | 2026-01-17 17:18:52+00:00
The original JPEG supports a lossless mode.

JPEG-LL refers to the lossless mode of the original JPEG standard (ISO/IEC 10918-1 or ITU-T T.81), also known as JPEG Lossless, and not to be confused with JPEG-LS (ISO/IEC 14495-1, Transfer Syntax 1.2.840.10008.1.2.4.80), which offers better ratios and speed via LOCO-I algorithm. JPEG-LL is older and less efficient yet more widely implemented in legacy systems.

The lossless mode in JPEG-XL is superior to all of those.
by jimmyl02 | 2026-01-17 17:18:55+00:00
Clickhouse's full announcement is here https://clickhouse.com/blog/clickhouse-raises-400-million-se... and I think another big piece is directly integrating postgres into their ecosystem.

It seems like an expansion play from their team and their end vision as both a platform (clickhouse + postgres) and product (observability) seems to be pretty good combo that fits hand in hand.
by techblueberry | 2026-01-17 17:20:06+00:00
It seems like in order to support some level of gender bias that is important to the argument, he talked about women’s mental health collapsing but most people seem to be more worried about the collapse in mental health in young men, with higher suicide rates and such.

The thing that bugs me though about Bill Ackman of all people doing this analysis is the absolute garbage political discourse at the national level that we have that he is one of the architects of.

There’s no positive conservatism anymore. People just want to demonize the things they don’t like and expect everyone to just figure it out, this was even a subject of a recent blog post by the heritage foundation talking about this very point. Everyone demonizing premarital sex, but no one talking about how to afrually date?

How do you expect women to choose healthy conservative values, when no one is calling out the MAGA influencers calling for the end of the vote for women?

Someone pointed out that women are being radicalized left, but is that because of the embrace from the left or the rejection from the right?

I actually think a huge problem in this country is the right no longer believes in conservatism.
by kstenerud | 2026-01-17 17:20:23+00:00
I once watched a co-worker completely bork a customer system by accidentally middle-clicking while moving his mouse after copying an ls -l of /usr/bin (where pretty much everything was a symlink to the real executables in /bin).

Yeah, he shouldn't have been logged in as root, but the point remains that middle-mouse paste can be extremely dangerous and fat-finger-prone.
by ViewTrick1002 | 2026-01-17 17:21:18+00:00
Grid forming inverters provide 1/3 to 1/4 the fault current of a similarly sized generator.

The other trivial solution are synchronous condensers. Or just let the generators and maybe even turbines of future emergency reserve thermal plants spin with the grid without consuming any fuel.

Just ensure the proper margins exist in the grid and call in ancillary services as needed.

No need to make it harder than it needs to be.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/baltic-power-grid-2666201539
by jimmyl02 | 2026-01-17 17:21:23+00:00
Astro is my favorite framework for static sites. It's hard to describe but it just "makes sense". You don't need complex build setups and you can get the best of all worlds with great SSG capabilities + can easily express things with React when needed for example.

I wish there was another path to monetization besides joining a larger company but I'm happy that the team will get to continue building out an amazing framework!
by komali2 | 2026-01-17 17:21:44+00:00
Fascist states get at least one free pass. For Germany it was Poland, for the USA I believe they're deciding between Venezuela and Greenland. Personally I think the better bet is Greenland because they can probably get Venezuela for free after since nobody cares about Venezuela. A "two in one deal" if you will, perhaps one of America's greatest inventions.

Edit: I meant to write Austria but am so used to writing "German invasion of Poland" that that's what came out of the thumbs