MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bossyTeacher | 2026-01-21 23:12:43+00:00
>most people are not experiencing career-ending levels of performance from LLMs.

You don't have to. Experiencing increased competition for jobs or lower pay for the same job (because less devs are needed for the same level of output) is just as bad.

Experiencing increased competition for jobs or lower pay for the same job (because the AI industry imploded and the devs from that industry are now in the market) is just as bad.

The rise of companies you might end up where some/most the codebase or db schemas were vibe generated is just as bad. LLMs are the new VB6. At least, with VB6 the initial complexity of the apps would be limited by how much the cowboy coder could handle (ie. not infinite). With LLMs that limit is an order of magnitude higher. I expect many of the future legacy apps to be dangerous jungles of vibes many contractors will be urgently hired to immediately fix when things begin behaving weirdly and the causes of the issue are hidden somewhere in the jungle.

Any of the above is bad enough on its own, let alone combined. I strongly believe two of the above will happen within the next 5 years.
by yunnpp | 2026-01-21 23:13:06+00:00
So you lied, which means you either don't accept that lying is absolutely wrong, or you admit yourself to do wrong. Your last sentence is just a strawman that deflects the issue.

What do you do with the case where you have a choice between a train staying on track and killing one person, or going off track and killing everybody else?

Like others have said, you are oversimplifying things. It sounds like you just discovered philosophy or religion, or both.

Since you have referenced the Bible: the story of the tree of good and evil, specifically Genesis 2:17, is often interpreted to mean that man died the moment he ate from the tree and tried to pursue its own righteousness. That is, discerning good from evil is God's department, not man's. So whether there is an objective good/evil is a different question from whether that knowledge is available to the human brain. And, pulling from the many examples in philosophy, it doesn't appear to be. This is also part of the reason why people argue that a law perfectly enforced by an AI would be absolutely terrible for societies; the (human) law must inherently allow ambiguity and the grace of a judge because any attempt at an "objective" human law inevitably results in tyranny/hell.
by Quothling | 2026-01-21 23:13:21+00:00
I'm not GP but I've been an external examiner for Danish CS students for longer than a decade. When I look at my previous gradings have matched the expected distribution nationally. There was a diviation during covid, but not compared to the national distribution which was lower all over the board. For the past year things have been very different. The trend is now that you see the same amount of good students, but you see almost no middle students. You have students who hand in great projects and a well written thesis. Who can't tell you very simple things about the work they've turned in. There is no real way to prove that these students cheat, but the study programme regulations are pretty clear when students can't answer questions about what they've written.

When I look at this january's results it's all near top mark or near bottom or failed. Almost nothing in between, and my grades match what has been reported by other examiners so far.
by mandevil | 2026-01-21 23:13:29+00:00
I will say that I'm not entirely clear on how the boring case- which I agree seems most likely- manages to pay for all this massive investment in datacenters, power plants, new frontier models, etc. OpenAI has already raised 60Gigabucks from people who are expecting a return on that money, and since it is not actually profitable yet it will need to raise more money to get to that point. I'm not clear on how they manage to make enough profit to pay off all that investment if AI is actually a "5-25% improvement in productivity for some classes of white collar workers" sort of proposition.
by fwn | 2026-01-21 23:13:31+00:00
It's always a dubious method to ask an LLM to reveal information about its inner workings.

However, if you export your Grok account information via the Settings menu, it will export your information, including a risk score not exposed by the browser UI. You can try it yourself.

I wonder if this risk score is compiled based on any content you produce, or if it's informed by other factors, such as VPN or app usage.
by surround | 2026-01-21 23:14:33+00:00
Wikipedia says

Ek's initial pitch to Lorentzon was not initially related to music, but rather a way for streaming content such as video, digital films, images or music to drive advertising revenue.

So yes, they were always intending to get revenue from ads. And yes, the initial pitch included other types of media too. But I don't think we can call Spotify "an ad platform" that "never actually cared about music" any more than we could call Ars Technica "an ad platform that never actually cared about tech news."
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-01-21 23:14:40+00:00
> China has a third of global manufacturing capacity (and have to run flat out to avoid deflation due to domestic consumption that will never grow to meet domestic production capacity).

This sounds like the case that they'd end up paying more of the tariffs, because they can neither reduce production nor absorb the output domestically, which leaves lowering prices to try to sustain the same volume.

> In three years at the most, these tariffs are done.

That's not happened the last time. Trump was out for four years and Biden kept a lot of the tariffs.

> Manufacturing jobs continue to decline, as they have since the election.

"Manufacturing jobs" are a talking point but were never really going to happen. The only way the US is actually going to compete is by increasing automation, which doesn't do much for "manufacturing jobs". But it does get the manufacturing into the same timezone as the people designing the products to prevent those jobs from going next, keep the knowhow of production active domestically, reduce dependence on China, etc.

> https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TLMFGCONS

This is a graph showing that construction spending on manufacturing in the US is more than double what it was a decade ago and trending only slightly down from the all-time high in the period trailing when the COVID money ran out and the Fed started to raise interest rates.
by kkfx | 2026-01-21 23:15:05+00:00
Not at hand unfortunately, because IPS was introduced with OpenIndiana (the IllumOS base) which objectively didn't last long enough to have time for serious documentation.

The super-basic description is that the package manager, IPS (Image Package System), is somewhat integrated with storage, enough to allow creating new BEs (Boot Environments), which are ZFS clones of the current system. On disk, these only consume the differences compared to the original system, are bootable directly from GRUB, and can even be soft-booted if needed (restarting just the userland without a full reboot). It allows updating in a clone, so if something goes wrong, you can reboot into the old version (not so easy if databases are involved, but let's say it's generally doable).

The installer is similarly "integrated" but at least back then it was in a very rough, early state, a fork of some Debian GUI installer I don't remember the name (prodigy maybe?) that never went mainstream, called Cayman in OpenSolaris. The idea was to deploy a system as a ZFS volume in the pool with some scripting to "link the root volume to the bootloader."

The future could have led to packages like mini-ZFS filesystems mountable/composable/exposable in the ZPL to virtually build an FHS-compliant deployment but operate entirely at the zfs blocks level. An immutable system if desired, ZFS-diffable if desired, cloneable, rollbackable, updatable incrementally so hyper fast and with low overhead etc. The project unfortunately fell apart before getting there, but if it had, deploying a new host would have just been a `zfs send` of a set of volumes. Essentially what NixOS/NixOps/Disnix does, but ideally without the complexity of the /nix/store.
by Nextgrid | 2026-01-21 23:15:15+00:00
> No one said it was.

Fair enough, a minority of businesses are run as public benefit corporations. But the vast majority is ran to generate profit. Bending Spoons especially.

> I wouldn't want to be just another tool to "extract" things from my customers

I assume you're independently wealthy and acquired said wealth from a generous donor who gave it to you with no expectations in return?

Because otherwise we're all "extracting" something.

I take pride in my work too and I believe the prices I charge for my services are fair - but nevertheless if I gave the choice to my clients between paying me for those services or getting them for free, they'd prefer free.

> This the type of thinking that gave us Windows 11

What's giving us enshittification and the terrible quality of software nowadays is the lack of healthy competition, because of lacking anti-trust enforcement and adversarial interoperability being effectively illegal. Companies thus take their customers hostage and raise prices/decrease quality.

Ideally we'd just make competition in tech a reality again which would put a limit on enshittification.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-21 23:15:36+00:00
Anything like this for the Indian market as well? I tried diskprices,terabytedeals & pricepergig (currently the only 3 websites mentioned right now in comments/main post show hn itself) and none of them support Indian services.

If someone does support Indian markets, I have a minor suggestion to include both Amazon and flipkart.

I would honestly really appreciate a quick website I can point out to in my local community so vektor if possible, can you please add it?

What are your thoughts on it?
by SyneRyder | 2026-01-21 23:15:43+00:00
+1 so much for this. I have been doing the same, an SQLite database of my "own personal internet" of the sites I actually need. I use it as a tiny supplementary index for a metasearch engine I built for myself - which I actually did to replace Kagi.

Building a metasearch engine is not hard to do (especially with AI now). It's so liberating when you control the ranking algorithm, and can supplement what the big engines provide as results with your own index of sites and pages that are important to you. I admit, my results & speed aren't as good as Kagi, but still good enough that my personal search engine has been my sole search engine for a year now.

If a site doesn't want me to crawl them, that's fine. I probably don't need them. In practice it hasn't gotten in the way as much as I might have thought it would. But I do still rely on Brave / Mojeek / Marginalia to do much of the heavy lifting for me.

I especially appreciate Marginalia for publicly documenting as much about building a search engine as they have: https://www.marginalia.nu/log/
by IgorPartola | 2026-01-21 23:16:01+00:00
The universe cares not what we do. The universe is so vast the entire existence of our species is a blink. We know fundamentally we can’t even establish simultaneity over distances here on earth. Best we can tell temporal causality is not even a given.

The universe has no concept of morality, ethics, life, or anything of the sort. These are all human inventions. I am not saying they are good or bad, just that the concept of good and bad are not given to us by the universe but made up by humans.
by wahern | 2026-01-21 23:16:02+00:00
The steelman argument for Farenheit as it is, not necessarily the motivations behind it, has been fleshed out here: http://lethalletham.com/posts/fahrenheit.html

TL;DR: "The remarkable result here is that 0℉ is nearly exactly the 1st percentile of daily lows, and 100℉ is nearly exactly the 99th percentile of daily highs." NB: The context is the continental US.
by notahacker | 2026-01-21 23:16:30+00:00
Interesting segue from claiming Europe is 20-40 years behind the US to claiming if Europe's policy choices have resulted in any better outcomes than the US its because they're enriching themselves by taking advantage of the "peace dividend"! I guess I'd have to agree that in the current diplomatic crisis of America's making, there is literally nothing some Americans won't use to "justify" blaming it on Europe....

Back in reality, inequality doesn't have an obvious relationship with country size or power projection, countries with superior inequality-weighted HDI like Germany and Poland spend more of their GDP on defence than Italy and the strengths and weaknesses of America's business culture, labour laws, welfare state, privatised healthcare etc (higher incomes for many but lower baseline living standards) really don't have very much to do with its military spending. If Americans want their government to tackle inequality they should probably back candidates advocating European-style policy over candidates advocating anti-European sentiment.
by samyok | 2026-01-21 23:16:31+00:00
Have been using Devin Review for a little bit, and I think it's the first of the many "code review" LLM-bots that have come out that doesn't actively feel like "slop". Seems like they must have some integrations with codemaps or deepwiki (the Cognition products I use most often) to power the insights.

My favorite feature has been organizing the files by "logical flow" rather than alphabetically, which feels like such a tiny change but it's such a huge QOL upgrade. A lot of the features seem inspired by Graphite, which is also really enjoyable.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2026-01-21 23:17:16+00:00
Google has appealed and moved for a partial stay re: the remedies discussed in this blog post

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.223...

Will Kagi file an amicus brief in support of the plaintiffs

Perhaps Google will fund amici in support of their position as they did in the Epic appeal

https://www.law.com/nationallawjournal/2025/01/10/fight-over...
by dfajgljsldkjag | 2026-01-21 23:17:28+00:00
I think that they mean that you can't make a "BitCraft" server as it would infringe on their trademark. If you made a "ByteCraft" server with all of your own assets, and didn't mention "BitCraft" at all, even if the code was exactly the same, I'd imagine you would be in the clear.

I'd imagine that by making a "BitCraft" server, it actually wouldn't violate the source code license terms at all, but they are putting you on notice that it would violate trademark and copyright on non-code things, so it wouldn't be legal irregardless of the code license.
by oliverjanssen | 2026-01-21 23:17:52+00:00
Makes sense. Flutter has a good reputation - I've heard mostly positive things.

For me, I had bad experiences with React Native in the past and already built another iOS app in Swift. Knew the ecosystem, liked SwiftUI, so sticking with native felt right. Less context switching, and I can use Apple frameworks directly – MusicKit for Apple Music integration and native offline playback would've been painful to wrap.

Cross-platform definitely makes sense for many projects – just wasn't the right fit for me this time.
by nitwit005 | 2026-01-21 23:18:15+00:00
The two most prominent companies to do this were Microsoft and Adobe, but they actually still do have some one time purchase options remaining. They just stopped advertising them, and made them hard to find on their website.

MS Office: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-...

Adobe Elements: https://www.adobe.com/products/elements-family.html

Also, I have to be frank that both companies are trying to scam people with the subscriptions. Try a full month free, and if you forget to cancel get stuck paying for a full year. The scamming has damaged their reputation more than the actual subscription model.
by autoexec | 2026-01-21 23:18:15+00:00
> If they've purchased the movies legitimately, and have the receipts, they have an incredibly strong fair use case.

While I'd also argue that this could be covered under a fair use defense, I thought it worth pointing out that buying a copy of a work and having receipts would have no bearing on the right to distribute copies of that work to others.

Obviously, if someone pirated these movies they could get in trouble for that as well, but that'd be an entirely different matter from the use of copyrighted images on their website.
by Paracompact | 2026-01-21 23:18:17+00:00
Can anyone recommend a music discovery service that isn't garbage? I fled to Spotify from Pandora because it kept recommending me the exact same songs, but now Spotify does basically the same thing.

In the age of machine learning, I'm really surprised there aren't superhuman music recommendation algorithms. Or maybe there are, and these algorithms simply don't serve the corporate interests. But then where are the open-source alternatives?
by queenkjuul | 2026-01-21 23:18:34+00:00
Lossless pirate archives also still exist if you know where to look. Not saying you're wrong, but from a truly material angle, someone dedicated to finding an archive with enough music to start a pirate site need only join one of the existing lossless pirate sites and copy theirs. I don't see how Anna's making it easier negates the fact that it can already be done
by blitzar | 2026-01-21 23:18:45+00:00
> What are some realistic alternatives to US markets here

There is nothing particularly interesting or sexy about US treasuries. You could replace a holding of $8bn to $80bn with equivalent or better rated bonds in a half hour or so.

Replacing that sort of allocation of stocks or commodities would be way harder as returns on those assets are not as simple as "pays a 4% coupon each year" - finding an equivalent of Apple or Nvidia is not a trivial task.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-21 23:19:29+00:00
You are arguing as if nothing material in the US has changed while at the same time arguing “be more polite towards my ignorance|avoidance of the situation.” It comes across as arguing in bad faith.

The US can no longer be trusted based on the actions of this administration. Other countries are pragmatically and reasonably adjusting accordingly, very publicly. There are other options besides the US from an economic, trade, investment, and defense ally perspective. These are facts. Whether you believe them is a choice.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-21 23:19:30+00:00
> to be the most efficient and lowest-level language you could possibly have for wasm, and then gradually add high level concepts into it to make it more convenient. Kind of like building C on top of asm, and then gradually evolving it into C++. That project never came about though due to lack of community interest and time on my part, but I like seeing languages that take a fresh look at how to integrate with wasm using novel techniques to aim for maximal efficiency.

I wonder how much efficient would such wasm be compared to native itself theoretically?

I really like libriscv as well, what are your thoughts on libriscv and now the recent project created by legendary fwsgonzo about looongarch.

Although I would say that libriscv/loongarch are more focused on trying to start the fastest as much as possible instead of pure performance (for which if atleast for the purpose of sandboxing, fwsgonzo has also created tinykvm which is really quite close to native performance)
by coffeeaddict1 | 2026-01-21 23:19:30+00:00
> That's probably because we have yet to discover any universal moral standards.

This is true. Moral standards don't seem to be universal throughout history. I don't think anyone can debate this. However, this is different that claiming there is an objective morality.

In other words, humans may exhibit varying moral standards, but that doesn't mean that those are in correspondence with moral truths.
Killing someone may or may not have been considered wrong in different cultures, but that doesn't tell us much about whether killing is indeed wrong or right.
by joshuamcginnis | 2026-01-21 23:19:36+00:00
Slavery in the time of Leviticus was not always the chattel slavery most people think of from the 18th century. For fellow Israelites, it was typically a form of indentured servitude, often willingly entered into to pay off a debt.

Just because something was reported to have happened in the Bible, doesn't always mean it condones it. I see you left off many of the newer passages about slavery that would refute your suggestion that the Bible condones it.
by cadamsdotcom | 2026-01-21 23:19:42+00:00
Sounds good. I’d suggest niching down and talking to some customers to see who genuinely cares about those things - as they might turn out (tragically I know) to be things only techies care about.

Fair warning.. when we hear talk to customers we are tempted to reply “I talked to customer in my mind and they love my thing!”

But unfortunately customers in our minds don’t have money :)

There’re either customers out there, or if not there's learning about why youtube has almost 100% market share..

Wishing you genuine luck and success!
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-21 23:19:46+00:00
> whilst orbits are fast satellite manoeuvres are slow, so the notice you need to avoid a conjunction is measured in hours rather than seconds

I'm not arguing against collisions becoming more likely. I'm arguing aginst it becoming commonplace to the point that it becomes a commercial concern.

> satellite manoeuvres use up a finite supply of expensively-launched propellant

Nobody is plane changing out of a collision. And for the foreseeable future, in LEO, the birds are not propellant constrained. (And launch is getting cheaper.)

> you either need bigger satellites carrying more propellant or have to accept significantly higher collision risk than they currently do

We're decades away from this being a problem. That gives ample runtime to developing e.g. magnetic station-keeping (if we go reactionless) or more-efficient engines.
by Invoxy | 2026-01-21 23:19:56+00:00
Hello HN,
I built Invoxy because I found that generic LLM interview prep lacked context—it would ask standard behavioral questions but ignore the specific projects listed on my resume.
The tool works by:
Parsing your uploaded PDF resume (text extraction).
analyzing the job description you are applying for.
Generating adversarial or supportive follow-up questions based specifically on your bullet points (e.g., "You mentioned reducing latency by 20%—what specific architecture changes drove that?").
It is currently free to use.
I would love feedback on the relevance of the generated questions and the "Red Team" mode difficulty.
by Fwirt | 2026-01-21 23:20:32+00:00
The problem is with items that have a national market but not a local one. For example - there may be very few local buyers who will pay a decent price for a vintage slide rule, but many on eBay. My general strategy is to list on FBM first for the eBay price that I hope to get, and then accept offers down to 75% of the price. If I don't get any bites after about a month I switch to eBay.
by mmooss | 2026-01-21 23:21:51+00:00
> Because the "safest" AI is one that doesn't do anything at all.

We didn't say 'perfectly safe' or use the word 'safest'; that's a strawperson and then a disingenous argument: Nothing is perfectly safe, yet safety is essential in all aspects of life, especially technology (though not a problem with many technologies). It's a cheap way to try to escape responsibility.

> In most cases, failing to be helpful is costly

What an disingenuous, egocentric approach. Claude and other LLMs aren't that essential; people have other options. Everyone has the same obligation to not harm others. Drug manufacturers can't say, 'well our tainted drugs are better than none at all!'.

Why are you so driven to allow Anthropic to escape responsibility? What do you gain? And who will hold them responsible if not you and me?