MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by colecut | 2026-01-30 16:42:29+00:00
A very small percentage of people know how to set up a cronjob.

They can now combine cronjobs and LLMs with a single human sentence.

This is huge for normies.

Not so much if you already had strong development skills.

EDIT:
But you are correct in the assessment that people who don't know better will use it to do simple things that could be done millions of times more efficiently..

I made a chatbot at my company where you can chat with each individual client's data that we work with..

My manager tested it by asking it to find a rate (divide this company number by that company number), for like a dozen companies, one by one..

He would have saved time looking at the table it gets its data from, using a calculator.
by guywithahat | 2026-01-30 16:42:36+00:00
What's particularly remarkable is this is also a violation of the KKK Act, which basically requires organized conspiracy to prevent a class of people from worshiping. It'll be interesting to see how strongly they go against Don Lemon, given historically how strongly Biden went after J6 protesters.

The quality of work Don does has gone down over the years but this was particularly stupid and pointless. Encouraging people to protest inside white churches feels deeply unproductive.
by lanacreator | 2026-01-30 16:42:45+00:00
In the last few years, it feels like every week there is a new story about an OnlyFans lawsuit. A creator being sued. A fan claiming fraud. An agency accused of something. A model accusing someone else. The list never ends.

At first glance, it looks like a serious legal problem. But if you take a step back, a different picture starts to appear. Most OnlyFans lawsuits are not really about justice. They are about attention, publicity, and money.

And in today’s internet, attention is the most valuable currency.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2026-01-30 16:42:52+00:00
Right, and as I said I agree with that. But is there any reason to worry that communities aren't getting the input they're entitled to? The article mentions one case in the Madison suburbs, where "officials worked behind the scenes for months" and yet the residents were able to get the project cancelled when the NDA broke and they decided they didn't want it.
by StevenNunez | 2026-01-30 16:42:58+00:00
I'll give it a shot. For me it's (promise) is about removing friction. Using the Unix philosophy of small tools, you can send text, voice, image, video to an LLM and (the magic I think) it maintains context over time. So memory is the big part of this.

The next part that makes this compelling is the integration. Mind you, scary stuff, prompt injection, rogue commands, but (BIG BUT) once we figure this out it will provide real value.

Read email, add reminder to register dog with the township, or get an updated referral from your doctor for a therapist. All things that would normally fall through the cracks are organized and presented. I think about all the great projects we see on here, like https://unmute.sh/ and love the idea of having llms get closer to how we interact naturally. I think this gets us closer to that.
by CamperBob2 | 2026-01-30 16:43:12+00:00
That has traditionally been the problem with these types of models, but Genie is supposed to maintain coherence up to 60 seconds.

I've tried using it a couple of times, but can't get in. It is either down or hopelessly underprovisioned by Google. Do you have any links to videos showing that the quality degrades after only a few seconds?
by atonse | 2026-01-30 16:43:28+00:00
Yeah I just watched my own video and was surprised to see exactly that. Because I remember reading somewhere else years ago that an ideal anti-satellite weapon would either de-orbit a satellite (like bumping it off orbit so it burns up) or use some kind of net/capture to push it off orbit, rather than blow it up.

Now this is going to have to be a rabbit hole for me (and some AI) this weekend.
by DenisDolya | 2026-01-30 16:43:31+00:00
I agree with you, especially about the fact that it's hard to find something now that used to happen at every turn, I'm also scrolling through Hacker News in search of at least something unrelated with AI, startups. For example, I would like to see posts like: Show HN: I made a tool in C ...

But alas, that was in the past, so I'm aimlessly looking for something similar now so that I can at least discuss it with the author himself.
by dudeinhawaii | 2026-01-30 16:43:32+00:00
I'm very PRO AI and a daily user but let's be real, where is the productivity gain? It's at the edges, it's in greenfield, we've seen a handful of "things written with AI" be launched successfully and the majority of the time these are shovels for other AI developers. Large corporations are not releasing even 5x higher velocity or quality. Ditto for small corporations. If the claimed multipliers were broadly real at the org level, we would be seeing obvious outward signals like noticeably faster release cycles in mainstream products, more credible challengers shipping mature alternatives, and more rapid catching-up in open-source software projects. I am not seeing that yet, is anyone else? It feels like the 'invisible productivity' version of Gross Domestic Product claims, the claims don't seem to match real-world.

And those are the EASY things for AI to "put out of work".

HARD systems like government legacy systems are not something you can slap 200 unit tests on and say "agent re-write this in Rust". They're hard because of the complex interconnects, myriad patches, workarounds, institutional data codified both in the codebase and outside of it. Bugs that stay bugs because they next 20 versions used that bug in some weird way. I started my career in that realm. I call bullshit on AI taking any jobs here if it can't even accelerate the pace of _quality_ releases of OS and video games.

I'm not saying this won't happen eventually but that eventually is doing a heavy lift. I am skeptical of the 6-12 month timelines for broad job displacement that I see mentioned.

AIs (LLMs) are useful in this subtle way like "Google Search" and _not_ like "the internet". It's a very specific set of text heavy information domains that are potentially augmented. That's great but it's not the end of all work or even the end of all lucrative technical work.

It's a stellar tool for smart engineers to do _even_ more, and yet, the smart ones know you have to babysit and double-check -- so it's not remotely a replacement.

This is without even opening the can of worms that is AI Agency.
by Jtsummers | 2026-01-30 16:44:26+00:00
That's not what you wrote, though. You wrote:

> ~60-ish percent of the pop want all aliens deported not only criminal aliens

That statement covers both illegal and legal aliens. Do you not know what the words you wrote mean? Why are you lying about your words that are plainly visible on this page if you do know what they mean?
by irishcoffee | 2026-01-30 16:44:44+00:00
Propaganda? Did people kill themselves at the direction of an LLM or not?

That's like saying ICE outrage is propaganda, and is, at best, insulting to the memory of those lost.

Brushing this point off seems more like propaganda than acknowledging it does.

LLMs are neat tools. They can do some neat things. Dynamite is also pretty cool, and it can do some neat things. How many more people need to get "blown up" by LLMs before we un-brainwash ourselves? At least one more I guess.
by tzs | 2026-01-30 16:44:51+00:00
> Cooling is the biggest reason for space datacenters, heat is movement of particles and vacuum being an absence of particles, so it's by definition cold.

That absence of particles also means it is a nearly perfect insulator, with almost no heat transferred from the station to space by contact with space. No convection either.

That leaves cooling by thermal radiation, which is not a very good method.
by bell-cot | 2026-01-30 16:45:11+00:00
Smallville is entitled to a no-exceptions policy.

OTOH, if Smallville seems too unfriendly to developers, the latter may decide to build outside the city limits. Which might become a problem over time, by holding down Smallville's commercial tax base. Forcing the voting citizen to make unhappy choices between high taxes on their own homes, and Smallville having too little money to afford nice things that they want.
by Amezarak | 2026-01-30 16:45:31+00:00
What fourth amendment violations do you think are unprecedented?

The Alien Enemies Act is one of our oldest laws and was passed by John Adams during peacetime to suppress perceived foreign influence from migrants.

Deportations to third countries are pretty clearly the only solution to cases where immigrants have a final order of removal that has been suspended due to problems in their home country, or where their home country refuses to accept them; the alternative of leaving them in a perpetual limbo is absurd. What else would you do?
by replwoacause | 2026-01-30 16:45:36+00:00
I guess its cool they published this paper, but the cynic in me says this is more a PR/optics move to reinforce the narrative that "we're an AI safety-first company" because "look see, we published a study that undermines our own company's benefit", while knowing full well that at the end of the day a majority of people in AI decision making positions are always going to push harder and harder for X thing to be done as fast as possible. So while the warning is "nice" I suppose, it feels sort of like Sam Altman talking about how OpenAI needs to be more regulated by the government meanwhile authors, artists, and publishers are suing because their work was actively being stolen.

Sure, it sounds good to call for more regulation, or admit that there are downsides to your product, but when you know these things are falling largely on deaf ears and you continue operating business as usual, I wonder how much of it is just theater.
by tracker1 | 2026-01-30 16:45:50+00:00
I wouldn't go that far, I would suggest that any game studio interested in the next 10 years of PC gaming will need to at least start doing testing through Proton/Wine to ensure there's no clear/prominent bugs. It doesn't take a lot of vocal users to elevate or kill a game, and Linux usage has passed that mark at this point... Generally seismic shifts in politics are around the 8% mark in terms of overall population, and Linux usage in the Steam survey is close to 4% and some other metrics have Linux usage over 6%.

Literally half the gaming/hardware focused channels I watch have run at least one, if not several Linux Gaming videos and tests this past year... mostly in the past 4 months and mostly praising the state of Linux gaming. It's not going away.
by viragtripathi | 2026-01-30 16:46:13+00:00
Why CockroachDB makes sense for AI / vector workloads:

One system for transactions + vectors
CockroachDB lets teams store embeddings alongside transactional data (users, sessions, permissions, fraud events) instead of stitching together OLTP + vector DB + cache.

Global, multi-region by default
Vector search often sits on the critical path for agentic workflows. CRDB’s multi-region replication and locality controls keep latency low without giving up consistency.

Strong consistency for agent state
Agentic and GenAI apps need correct state (memory, tool outputs, decisions). CRDB’s serializable isolation avoids subtle bugs caused by eventually consistent vector stores.

Operational simplicity at scale
No shard management, no leader pinning, no manual failover. This matters when vector workloads spike unpredictably due to LLM traffic.

Vectors are first-class, not an add-on
Native vector types + indexing (C-SPANN) means embeddings live in the same durability, backup, and security model as the rest of your data.

Works well for hybrid workloads
Real AI systems mix:

vector similarity search

metadata filtering

transactional updates

streaming / CDC
CRDB handles all of these in one engine.
by panarchy | 2026-01-30 16:46:14+00:00
And then by the time they do get around to fixing the UI it seems the codebase is horribly bloated and littered with tech debt and now updating the UI would basically require a whole application rewrite. Which I have seen happen and work, but I also swear I've seen where teams spread themselves thin trying to make an updated UI version concurrently with their main branch only for the updated UI version to fall so far behind on features (or get worked on so rarely) that they abandoned it to fix it later...
by satisfice | 2026-01-30 16:46:22+00:00
Well, I wasn't speaking of a formal prediction by leading Victorian moral researchers... I was referring to our collective common knowledge of Victorian hangups.

Nevertheless, here is an example of Victorian anxiety regarding showing ankles: https://archive.org/details/amanualpolitene00pubgoog/page/n2...

It's easy to say "oh they were silly to worry about such things." But that's only because we see it from our own point of view.

Alternatively, imagine describing roads, highways, traffic congestion and endless poles strung with electrical wire all over the place to someone from the 11th century. This would sound like utter ruination of the land to them. But you and I are used to it, so it just seems normal.
by libraryofbabel | 2026-01-30 16:46:57+00:00
This point about "some people already said six months ago that it was better than it was six months ago" is regularly trotted out in threads like this like it's some sort of trump card that proves AI is just hype. It doesn't make sense to me. What else do you expect people to be saying about a rapidly-improving technology? How does it help you to distinguish technologies that are hype from those that are not?

I'm sure people were saying similar things about, say, aviation all through the first decades of the 20th century, "wow, those planes are getting better every few years"... "Until recently plans were just gimmicks, but now they can fly across the English channel!"... "I wouldn't have got in one of those death traps 5 years ago, but now I might consider it!" And different people were saying things like that at different times, because they had different views of the technology, different definitions of usefulness, different appetites for risk. It's just a wide range of voices talking in similar-sounding terms about a rapidly-developing technology over a span of time.

This is just how people are going to talk about rapidly-improving technologies for which different people have different levels of adoption at different times. It's not a terribly interesting point. You have to engage with the specifics, I'm afraid.
by collingreen | 2026-01-30 16:47:28+00:00
Yep, just like learning anything the intro level summaries don't reflect reality they just help you get your head around new things.

In the real work experience every project, team, and company are a little bit unique in how they respond to the requirements and politics of the moment. Everyone is trying to get something done and how purely it follows some pattern or rule is only relevant as far as it helps get the work done.

What you learned wasnt useless - it was probably very helpful for understanding or at least getting exposed to lots of concepts that you'll need. However, just like the joke about physicists and their spherical cows, the perfect algorithms and architecture rules from school aren't even close to the whole story in the trenches.

A non-engineering anecdote - had a math professor tasked with determining a fit line for and integration of a bunch of sensor data (needed the total area under the curve, classic math test problem). College me imagined trying to craft bespoke integratable functions and maybe some multi part fitting optimization but I knew my little list of memorized formulas couldn't touch this real life data so I was looking forward to the veteran approach. Math guy printed it, eyeballed to fill in the gaps with a pen, cut it out, and weighed it against a sample of "1x1" unit squares of the paper.

I was flabbergasted but the dude was so obviously right -- one off task, collected data with no clear pattern, didn't need crazy precision. The "obvious" answer took far less time than anything I had in mind and was plenty good enough for the problem at hand.

tl;dr - what you learned so far wasn't wasted it was simply the very beginning of filling up your mental toolbox
by jrmg | 2026-01-30 16:47:33+00:00
The ‘birthplace’ of the 555 is in downtown Sunnyvale - an easy trip if you’re in the Valley*. It’s in an alley between Murphy Ave. and the parking lot off S. Frances. There’s a realtor’s office opposite the side entrance to Fashion Wok. That’s the place.

It was invented by Hans Camenzind**, who was doing contract work for Signetics in an office he rented there. What a great location for your office, even back then!

There really should be a plaque or something.

* Go there then have dinner at Dishdash, across the street.

** RIP - he died in 2012, but his web site is still up: http://www.designinganalogchips.com/
by hirvi74 | 2026-01-30 16:47:48+00:00
> If that's the case, we should question whether different homogeneous population groups respond differently to the substance under test.

In terms of psychological treatments, I am honestly in support of this. Many mental illnesses can have a cultural component to them.

> After all, we don't want to know the "average temperature of patients in a hospital", do we?

No, I don't think we do. Am I understanding you correctly?
by ecshafer | 2026-01-30 16:47:57+00:00
They were right. We have largely had 200 years of socially and legally enforced morality being eroded with the conservatives saying "If you remove X then Y and Z will happen!". The liberals saying "Why do you care anyways? That's a slippery slope it won't happen!". The the conservatives immediately being proven right, but no one is willing to walk back on liberalization of moral issues since too many like hedonism.
by hedora | 2026-01-30 16:47:59+00:00
FWIW: I have a pile of old Intel / NVIDIA machines that no longer boot Windows. They're all > 2GHz, > 8GB DRAM, and have more than enough horsepower to run modern casual titles. Next to that pile, I have a pile of games that no longer run under Windows.

I also have a glowing case PC. Out of the box, it's possible to change the fan light color patterns from Linux.

I had one problem putting Devuan on it:

If you plug the gaming keyboard 2.4GHz dongle into the monitor, the bios doesn't enumerate far enough down the USB tree to find it. So, you can't enter the bios and tell it to boot from USB. Then, the windows setup screen pops up.

After a few force reboots (M$ removed the "shut down cleanly" button from the language chooser), Windows goes into deep diagnostics mode on each boot trying to figure out why it keeps crashing out during the install flow. So, each debug step of "why can't I get into the bios?" takes a few minutes.

The solution was to plug the keyboard dongle directly into the box. The only time the fan has come on after boot (I think it likes to knock the dust off itself when it turns on) was when I told it to download my steam library all at once.
by pixl97 | 2026-01-30 16:48:03+00:00
Oxygen producing anaerobic bacteria gave us the atmosphere we breath but at the same time caused some of the largest, if not largest extinctions events on earth.

When talking about capitalism it seems a great many people in the US and HN have a difficult time using nuance and are unable to separate the good parts of capitalism from the parts that will kill us in the long run. Infinite growth cannot exist in a finite world. If we keep demanding capitalism grow unbound it will literally consume us and our biosphere.
by WorldMaker | 2026-01-30 16:48:08+00:00
GOG's original and somewhat current line in the sand is "must have an offline-capable installer". For a lot of Good Old Games that is enough to guarantee DRM-free. Unfortunately in the Live Service world it is a concession that allows too many loopholes such as Sony single player games that still need a PlayStation Account and a half-dozen telemetry services active before they get to actual gameplay. Sony, as a particular example worth flogging, also makes use of the loophole that an anti-cheat rootkit can be installed offline, easy.

I think GOG is saying a lot of the right things in terms of Game Preservation being a long term goal for them. I think they are between a rock and a hard place that the store would be a lot less active if they couldn't offer the latest games from companies like Sony, and they want to be on good terms with such companies to get access to their giant back catalogs for Preservation efforts which also presumably includes sales numbers of recent titles for justification.

But yes, I'd also love to see them push back a bit harder on some of these publishers a bit further than "needs an offline-capable installer" and mabye include more steps towards some definition of "should run offline-capable", because yeah things like "Live Services" and account systems and mandatory telemetry systems and rootkit anti-cheat systems are often de facto DRM just wearing another hat of "user convenience" or "achievement tracking" or "game safety" tools. I don't think GOG can make that push alone, though. There are too many industry trends to try to buck to get further in those directions. (Thinking about the recent Anthem shutdown as a recent for instance of a mostly single player game that is entirely unplayable because EA shutdown live services this month.)
by seneca | 2026-01-30 16:48:09+00:00
You aren't wrong. There is no real use for this for most people. It's a silly toy that somehow caught the AI hype cycle.

The thing is, that's totally fine! It's ok for things to be silly toys that aren't very efficient. People are enjoying it, and people are interacting with opensource software. Those are good things.

I do think that eventually this model will be something useful, and this is a great source of experimentation.
by donmcronald | 2026-01-30 16:48:29+00:00
The thing I don’t get is that IMO Americans have a higher standard of living due to demand for the dollar. Being a net importer means they make less and the countries they’re importing from make more. Money = labor = people working, so people in other countries are working harder than Americans to benefit Americans with a higher standard of living.

It’s like a roofer working for a contractor that’s a millionaire and the contractor is upset because he’s paying the roofer while having a higher standard of living because of the profit made off the roofer’s labor.

No one is working for that rich contractor if his money is worthless. Isn’t a weaker dollar for America a disaster? The world works to serve America right now because of the dollar. Life’s going to be tough when America has to “get a job” and start earning their keep with real productivity contributions, isn’t it?

Maybe I’m just dumb, but all I can see is a massive drop in the average standard of living if the US maintains their current trajectory. It might even be too late already.
by k310 | 2026-01-30 16:48:43+00:00
This begs the question "Why go to college at all?"

Top engineers at Anthropic, OpenAI say AI now writes 100% of their code [0]

Sign up for a "Prompt Engineering" curriculum for much less. [1]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46820833 (5 points, zero replies)

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=course+in+prompt+engineering
by speak_plainly | 2026-01-30 16:49:35+00:00
I think maybe one thing you have to consider is that sensors still require maintenance. Software can measure the length of time the sensor requires to reach equilibrium and send a maintenance required alert and someone cleans it (like if the software expects equilibrium in 10 seconds but the reading settles at 60 seconds, it can calculate the sensor is 80% clogged and requires cleaning). There's also all sorts of techniques that can be used to mitigate gunk depending on how the sensor is being used such as physical wipers, air-blast systems, ultrasonic cleaning systems, and chemical coatings. So as long as some oxygen can get in and an equilibrium is made between the fluid outside the sensor and inside the sensor, you'll get a reading that you can trust.