MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Deanallen | 2026-01-26 18:34:04+00:00
> Television, he notes, has introduced the phrase "now this", which implies a complete absence of connection between the separate topics the phrase ostensibly connects.

This idea is why I always take media with a grain of salt. The decontexualization makes it easy for people to be reactive towards something, that isn’t logical

Eg “now this is why <insert person or group> is good/evil”

People call me the devils advocate when I point out these nuances but I just think we need to be much more critical when forming and holding opinions.
by mrguyorama | 2026-01-26 18:34:20+00:00
30 million Americans on the low end believe the earth is only thousands of years old and specifically deny the existence of plate tectonics and continental drift

That is a huge constituency that openly believes in falsehoods and has a premade conspiracy taught to their children that all scientists are in a satanic conspiracy to make you disbelieve god. Not even that scientists are wrong, but that they actively work, all over the world, every one of them, to lie to you.

They produce an entire alternative media ecosystem, one where everything they consume is made out of trivial lies you must take as axioms, where scientists have no evidence and just say things (like a preacher), where scientists don't answer questions (or invite learning and experimentation!), where you are violently oppressed (and murdered) for being "Christian", and where only a specific version of the bible is allowed and the doctrine is that anyone is supposed to be able to understand the bible because god made it that way but for some reason people only listen to interpretations from their pastors.

They aren't exactly voting for democrats.

This constituency is the entire reason Republican administrations and platforms insist on "Parental authority" in education, a thing which should never and not at all be a part of public education, and which literally means they are upset that schools teach their kids that evolution is a well understood and documented and supported phenomenon that directly explains speciation, because their religious doctrine is so far off the norm that it has to reject an earth as old as we know it is, and instead relies on an age of the earth that was incorrectly calculated by a religious scholar making poor assumptions and adding up ages in the bible and was done before we had incontrovertible evidence against it.

This constituency needs conspiracy theories because they need to somehow wave away the massive knowledge we gained from science in the time since their cults started. Of course, once you have convinced your 11 year old to internalize your conspiracy theory as ground truth or else be physically abused, it's trivial to then get them to believe any bullshit. They literally were not taught basic things like how to evaluate a source, or how to support an argument.

Check out a fundamentalist Christian textbook sometime, or a knock off of a popular movie redone to make Christians the oppressed populace by making up things out of whole cloth.

THIS is why the "war on christmas" is a thing. THIS is why they have to play victim and insist that allowing other people to abort pregnancies is somehow an affront to the individual practice of THEIR religion. THIS is why they insist the USA is a christian nation despite all the contrary evidence.

They live in a fake reality.
by bpodgursky | 2026-01-26 18:34:55+00:00
Yes, but what was accomplished with the air superiority? It's not regime change. It set back the nuclear program, maybe six months. That probably won't work ad infinitum, at some point they are going to build redundant sites and hardened facilities that are resilient to bunker busters.

The IRGC and military are HUGE. This is a numbers thing, not a competence thing. Neither the US or Israel has the munitions to make a lasting dent with air power alone.
by jwardbond | 2026-01-26 18:35:18+00:00
Serendipitous, as I was just planning a lit review on a topic I am unfamiliar with, and was frustrated by my increasingly messy list of "to read".

Quick thoughts:

- I would like a "not read" stack, for papers that I peeked at but decided against reading.

- The registration link took a few minutes to come in, I thought something was broken.

- I keep trying to click the stack titles to take me into the stacks, but they aren't clickable.

- I couldn't figure out how to use a summary credits

- I couldn't figure out how to search/export my notes and tags

- I would like a way to quickly see my own 1-line summaries of the papers I have read. Maybe under the titles/authors.

---

Long Thoughts:

What does this do that a "to-read" folder on Zotero doesn't? This post made me ask myself why I don't just use the to-read folder I already set up in Zotero.

1) Adding something to zotero is a bit of a process, and feels like I have to be 100% committed to reading it, and thus I hesitate to put the "I'll check it out later" papers into my to-read folder on zotero. Your website is much more focused and low-effort to use.

2) I often forget why I wanted to read something in the first place. I like to store items on my to-read list according to the parent paper I discovered them in, to remember what I was doing when I added them to the list. Zotero notes/relations are not the easiest way to do this, so I stick to a markdown list.

3) My to-read list is so long, with so many papers from 2 years ago that I didn't end up needing, that I don't know where to start when I look at it. It would be nice to have a way to rank papers on my list by priority, or group them by topic tags, etc.
by Philpax | 2026-01-26 18:35:51+00:00
From the essay - not presented in agreement (I'm still undecided), but Dario's opinion is probably the most relevant here:

> My co-founders at Anthropic and I were among the first to document and track the “scaling laws” of AI systems—the observation that as we add more compute and training tasks, AI systems get predictably better at essentially every cognitive skill we are able to measure. Every few months, public sentiment either becomes convinced that AI is “hitting a wall” or becomes excited about some new breakthrough that will “fundamentally change the game,” but the truth is that behind the volatility and public speculation, there has been a smooth, unyielding increase in AI’s cognitive capabilities.

> We are now at the point where AI models are beginning to make progress in solving unsolved mathematical problems, and are good enough at coding that some of the strongest engineers I’ve ever met are now handing over almost all their coding to AI. Three years ago, AI struggled with elementary school arithmetic problems and was barely capable of writing a single line of code. Similar rates of improvement are occurring across biological science, finance, physics, and a variety of agentic tasks. If the exponential continues—which is not certain, but now has a decade-long track record supporting it—then it cannot possibly be more than a few years before AI is better than humans at essentially everything.

> In fact, that picture probably underestimates the likely rate of progress. Because AI is now writing much of the code at Anthropic, it is already substantially accelerating the rate of our progress in building the next generation of AI systems. This feedback loop is gathering steam month by month, and may be only 1–2 years away from a point where the current generation of AI autonomously builds the next. This loop has already started, and will accelerate rapidly in the coming months and years. Watching the last 5 years of progress from within Anthropic, and looking at how even the next few months of models are shaping up, I can feel the pace of progress, and the clock ticking down.
by mythz | 2026-01-26 18:35:57+00:00
MCP support is available via the fast_mcp extension: https://llmspy.org/docs/mcp/fast_mcp

I use llms .py as a personal assistant and MCP is required to access tools available via MCP.

MCP is a great way to make features available to AI assistants, here's a couple I've created after enabling MCP support:

- https://llmspy.org/docs/mcp/gemini_gen_mcp - Give AI Agents ability to generate Nano Banana Images or generate TTS audio

- https://llmspy.org/docs/mcp/omarchy_mcp - Manage Omarchy Desktop Themes with natural language

I will say there's a noticable delay in using MCP vs tools, where I ended up porting Anthropic's node filesystem MCP to Python [1] to speed up common AI Assistant tasks, so their not ideal for frequent access of small tasks, but are great for long running tasks like Image/Audio generation.

[1] https://github.com/ServiceStack/llms/blob/main/llms/extensio...
by OkayPhysicist | 2026-01-26 18:35:58+00:00
Windows for personal computers and Office are the only products that make Microsoft relevant. No one on god's green earth is choosing Windows Server on its own merits: They're picking it for software compatibility reasons stemming from software being written on, and exclusively targeting, Windows Desktop. Hell, most of the office suite is chosen because it's easier to buy more stuff from somebody you're already buying stuff from than to find someone new. No one has ever chosen Teams as the best product in its space.

Very few products Microsoft sells would be worth buying by themselves. They exclusively make mediocre products that are merely the default choice once you've been hoodwinked into buying into Windows or XBOX. If the break Windows, all the money disappears.
by danudey | 2026-01-26 18:36:58+00:00
How does the AI tell the difference between trustworthy YouTube postings, accidental misinformation, deliberate misinformation, plausible-sounding pseudoscience, satire, out-of-date information, and so on?

Some videos are a great source of information; many are the opposite. If AI can't tell the difference (and it can't) then it shouldn't be using them as sources or suggesting them for further study.
by abdullahkhalids | 2026-01-26 18:36:59+00:00
Almost all the energy consumed by appliances in your home gets ultimately converted into heat. For example, the picture on your TV is made from emitted light rays that are absorbed by various solid objects in your home and heats them up. Same for the sounds from your speakers. Your washing machine spins water and clothes around, which makes both the water+clothes and the body of the washing machine to heat up due to friction.

A counter example is a water pump, which converts electricity into gravitational potential energy of the water as it flows upwards.
by mschuster91 | 2026-01-26 18:37:16+00:00
> The German Federal Police has nothing to gain by lying about this incident.

And yet, there are multiple different theories floating around on who bombed North Stream. The police and DA assume that Ukrainians were behind this mess, possibly under orders of back-then UA army chief Zaluzhnyi according to leaks and rumors, but official communication on that has been ... lacking and that's putting it mildly. It doesn't help that there are credible suspicions of Russia being behind it either, the only theory I'd move to the "conspiracy bin" is that it was a CIA operation.

When it comes to anything involving this war, there really is no reason to trust anyone.

> They explicitly investigated the possibility of foreign sabotage, found the perpetrators, and concluded that it was just regular theft. Sometimes a horse is just a horse, even when there are zebras running around.

I agree... but still, the timing is so incredibly close that it's just as possible that for once the cable thieves were capable of good OPSEC practices.
by threethirtytwo | 2026-01-26 18:37:22+00:00
In Asia it’s done as young as 5. Maybe that’s why they’re ahead.

> If it's a caught female, can men whip her?

Yes. Men and women are equal. Your question implies you are sexism. Do you believe women are superior to men?

> How would you phrase the job application?

Whatever term they use in Singapore.

> I see a few flaws in your idea. Does Singapore still not allow males with long hair?

There’s tradeoffs for either idea. San Francisco is covered with human shit while Singapore isn’t and you can get whipped for shitting in the streets.

Remarkably in both systems not very many people get whipped. Nearly zero. Because the possible consequence is what enforces the rule, not the actual consequence itself. As long as people know they will be whipped, they then act in ways that will prevent the whipping from happening. In the beginning a few people will be whipped but that number will drop dramatically very shortly.
by owyn | 2026-01-26 18:37:41+00:00
Yes they did, and that's the problem. Some people support this. It's easier to rile up hatred than to fix any real problems. When you spend years framing ALL immigration as illegal, you get a lot of people (like some of my family members) who will say "well, they ARE here illegally so they just need to enforce the law". And yes there are illegal immigrants in this country, but I don't think this kind of violence is the right solution.
by Lerc | 2026-01-26 18:37:41+00:00
One of my formative impressions of AI came from the depiction of the Colligatarch from Alan Dean Foster's The I Inside.

The AI in the book is almost feels like it is the main message masquerading as a subplot.

Asimov new the risks, and I had assumed until fairly recently that the lessons and explorations that he had imparted into the Robot books had provided a level of cultural knowledge of what we were about to face. Perhaps the movie of I Robot was a warning of how much the signal had decayed.

I worry that we are sociologically unprepared, and sometimes it seems wilfully so.

People discussed this potential in great detail decades ago, Indeed the Sagan reference at the start of this post points to one of the significant contributors to the conversation, but it seems by the time it started happening, everyone had forgotten.

People are talking in terms of who to blame, what will be taken from me, and inevitability.

Any talk of a future we might want dismissed as idealistic or hype. Any depiction of a utopian future is met with derision far too often. Even worse the depiction can be warped to an evil caricature of "What they really meant".

How do we know what course to take if we can't talk about where we want to end up?
by trjordan | 2026-01-26 18:37:46+00:00
1. I absolutely agree there's a bubble. Everybody is shipping a code review agent.

2. What on earth is this defense of their product? I could see so many arguments for why their code reviewer is the best, and this contains none of them.

More broadly, though, if you've gotten to the point where you're relying on AI code review to catch bugs, you've lost the plot.

The point of a PR is to share knowledge and to catch structural gaps. Bug-finding is a bonus. Catching bugs, automated self-review, structuring your code to be sensible: that's _your_ job. Write the code to be as sensible as possible, either by yourself or with an AI. Get the review because you work on a team, not in a vacuum.
by rekabis | 2026-01-26 18:38:18+00:00
I can do without all of my other security, anti-malware and anti-spyware add-ins. Those are all deeply secondary.

But if uBlock Origin doesn’t have first-class support when this browser becomes available… yeah.

They don’t even need to have a plugin interface ready, so long as the plugin guts are there and uBlock has been whitelisted for manual (drop directly into the profile filesystem) installation.
by itsyonas | 2026-01-26 18:38:37+00:00
> I sometimes have the image that Americans think that if the all Chinese got to read Western produced pamphlet detailing the particulars of what happened in Tiananmen square, they would march en-masse on the CCP HQ, and by the next week they'd turn into a Western style democracy.

I'm sure some (probably a lot of) people think that, but I hope it never happens. I'm not keen on 'Western democracy' either - that's why, in my second response, I said that I see elections in the US and basically all other countries as just a change of administrators rather than systemic change. All those countries still put up strong guidelines on who can be politically active in their system which automatically eliminates any disruptive parties anyway. / It's like choosing what flavour of ice cream you want when you're hungry. You can choose vanilla, chocolate or pistachio, but you can never just get a curry, even if you're craving something salty.

> It's weird to see this naivete about the US system, as if US social media doesn't have its ways of dealing with wrongthink, or the once again naive assumption that the average Chinese methods of dealing with unpleasant stuff is that dissimilar from how the US deals with it.

I do think they are different to the extent that I described. Western countries typically give you the illusion of choice, whereas China, Russia and some other countries simply don't give you any choice and manage narratives differently. I believe both approaches are detrimental to the majority of people in either bloc.
by steve1977 | 2026-01-26 18:38:57+00:00
> Remember when a digital computer was not a device, but the entire floor of a building?

Well I don't actually remember, because - depending on your definition of digital computer - it was around 80 years ago and I wasn't born yet. Which is kind of my point. Eventually, we might get there. And I can imagine that simpler AI systems will help to bootstrap more AI systems. But there is still a lot work to be done.
by root_axis | 2026-01-26 18:39:02+00:00
I don't think we have much to worry about in terms of economic disruption. At this point it seems pretty clear that LLMs are having a major impact on how software is built, but for almost every other industry the practical effects are mostly incremental.

Even in the software world, the effect of being able to build software a lot faster isn't really leading to a fundamentally different software landscape. Yes, you can now pump out a month's worth of CRUD in a couple days, but ultimately it's just the same CRUD, and there's no reason to expect that this will change because of LLMs.

Of course, creative people with innovative ideas will be able to achieve more, a talented engineer will be able to embark on a project that they didn't have the time to build before, and that will likely lead to some kind of software surplus that the economy feels on the margins, but in practical terms the economy will continue to chug along at a sustained pace that's mostly inline with e.g. economic projections from 10 years ago.
by GoatInGrey | 2026-01-26 18:39:05+00:00
The counterargument here is that there is a distinction between an arbitrary line in the sand (C++ stdlb is bad) and using a text-generating machine to perform work for you, beginning to end. You are correct that as a responsibly used tool, LLMs offer exceptional utility and value. Though keep in sight the laziness of humans who focus on the immediate end result over the long-term consequences.

It's the difference between the employee who copy-pastes all of their email bodies from ChatGPT versus the one who writes a full draft themselves and then asks an LLM for constructive feedback. One develops skills while the other atrophies.
by akurilin | 2026-01-26 18:39:16+00:00
It's interesting that most of us have that story of someone who didn't pattern-match and yet ended up being absolutely stellar. Makes you wonder just how much latent talent is out there not given the right chance for one reason or another. Hope this article reminds people to dig beneath the surface a little more.

And yes, many candidates struggle with performing under the totally unnatural pressure of an interview, so you can cater to them with something like the github project review. Then you end up potentially filtering out people without a rich body of work that can be easily reviewed, which is a trade-off. Actually something I've been meaning to write about, I always say that there's no way to please everybody with an interview funnel, someone perfectly fine will be offput by any of the paths you choose to follow.

You just need to choose which false negatives you will be ok with.
by dakshgupta | 2026-01-26 18:39:20+00:00
> Independence

It is, but when a model/harness/tools/system prompts are the same/similar in the generator and reviewer fail in similar ways. Question: Would you trust a Cursor review of Claude-written code more, less, or the same as a Cursor review of Cursor-written code?

> Autonomy

Plenty of tools have invested heavily in AI-assisted review - creating great UIs to help human reviewers understand and check diffs. Our view is that code validation will be completely autonomous in the medium term, and so our system is designed to make all human intervention optional. This is possibly a unpopular opinion, and we respect the camp that might say people will always review AI-generated code. It's just not the future we want for this profession, nor the one we predict.

> Loops

You can invest in UX and tooling that makes this easier or harder. Our first step towards making this easier is a native Claude Code plugin in the `/plugins` command that let's Claude code do a plan, write, commit, get review comments, plan, write loop.
by dghlsakjg | 2026-01-26 18:39:31+00:00
This is part of why I like vinyl, you can't even really choose a track, you just listen. (the other part is that my vinyl collection is about 80% from my parents, and its just cool personally to have the same physical copy of the media that they did)

Also, many libraries still have CD collections. In the pre-iphone days I used to max out my library account getting CDs, rip/copy the ones I liked, and repeat.
by bluesnowmonkey | 2026-01-26 18:39:36+00:00
Had a similar thought since I started using the Slack MCP in Claude Code. It's handy for instance during an incident to be researching the problem, digging through Sentry or Clickhouse or the code and have it post updates directly to our #engineering channel for the team to see. But... they can't reply. Or rather they can but Claude has to poll each thread or channel to see replies which is a pretty clumsy workflow.

So anyway long story short I made something like Clawdbot but in the cloud: https://stumpy.ai/

Didn't occur to me to design it to run locally and leave running on my machine. You can't close your laptop or Clawdbot dies? It can read all your files? Rather run agents in the cloud. I gave them sandboxes (Fly sprites) so you can still have them do software development or whatever.
by ThePowerOfFuet | 2026-01-26 18:39:41+00:00
>later the investigation determined the track section failed to support basic speed limiters.

ASFA has no notion of a speed limit. Spanish HSLs have subsequently been resignalled to ETCS, which adds speed control.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anuncio_de_Se%C3%B1ales_y_Fren...
by ctoth | 2026-01-26 18:39:47+00:00
Which technologies have been 99% "done" for "decades?"

Bicycles? carbon fiber frames, electronic shifting, tubeless tires, disc brakes, aerodynamic research

Screwdrivers? impact drivers, torque-limiting mechanisms, ergonomic handles

Glass? gorilla glass, smart glass, low-e coatings

Tires? run-flats, self-sealing, noise reduction

Hell even social technologies improve!

How is a technology "done?"
by culi | 2026-01-26 18:39:59+00:00
See also

* https://lmarena.ai/leaderboard — crowd-sourced head-to-head battles between models using ELO

* https://dashboard.safe.ai/ — CAIS' incredible dashboard (cited in OP)

* https://clocks.brianmoore.com/ — a visual comparison of how well models can draw a clock. A new clock is drawn every minute

* https://eqbench.com/ — emotional intelligence benchmarks for LLMs

* https://www.ocrarena.ai/battle — OCR battles, ELO