MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by snowwrestler | 2026-01-13 21:13:37+00:00
Yes it would not be hard to take down a few data centers or services (just seize their domain) but that’s not remotely close to completely turning off the Internet. There are millions of servers on the U.S. Internet outside of major data centers.

We also run tons of crucial stuff over commercial links thanks to encryption. Taking Internet trunks offline would disrupt most domestic functions of government, for example.
by erikerikson | 2026-01-13 21:13:54+00:00
"Guns don't kill people, I do."

Blaming the technology for bad human behavior seems an error and it's not clear that the GP made it.

People could and likely will also increase economic activity, flexibility, and evolve how we participate in the world. The alternative would get pretty ugly pretty quick. My pitchfork is sharp and the powers that be prefer it continues being used on straw.
by something765478 | 2026-01-13 21:14:08+00:00
I think they should have gotten permission from IRB ahead of time, but this doesn't sound like they were researching human subjects? They were studying the community behind the Linux kernel, and specifically the process for gatekeeping bad changes from making it to the kernel; they weren't experimenting on specific community members. Would you consider it human experimentation if I was running an experiment to see if I could get crappy products listed on Amazon, for example?
by tim333 | 2026-01-13 21:14:12+00:00
Precrime in Minority report results in "Would-be killers are placed in an electrically induced coma and held in a panopticon-like prison facility." Obviously dystopian.

What they are doing in the UK is more chatting to people involved in gangs and the like to talk them out of screwing up their lives. Kind of common sense.

This has led to "London’s lowest murder rate in more than a decade" https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jan/12/why-londons-...

There was quite an interesting interview with Sadiq Khan about it yesterday https://youtu.be/SOhIxmYiZRg?t=202 (starting at the crime bit).

The MAGA types love to go on about Khan, who is a lefty Pakistani origin muslim, as being the downfall of London but the reality is kind of different. (typed in central London).
by spicymaki | 2026-01-13 21:14:24+00:00
Thanks for the context. I checked Wikipedia for more details from the slogan and here is what it says:

> In a February 2023 poll conducted by Rasmussen Reports, a polling firm often referred to by conservative media, 72% of 1,000 respondents agreed with the statement "It's okay to be White". Among the 130 black respondents, 53% agreed, while 26% disagreed, and 21% were unsure. Slate magazine suggested that some negative respondents may have been familiar with the term's links with white supremacy.

Scott was a rather intelligent person with an MBA from UC Berkeley. How do you go from a sample of 130 black people a majority who agree with the slogan and only a minority against (less than a quarter). To all black people? Is that not an extreme overreaction?
by eudamoniac | 2026-01-13 21:14:27+00:00
I'm not sure what definition of racism you have in mind, but no. He's advising whites to avoid a group of people who seem to despise them, which is rational. The group of people happening to be black doesn't suddenly turn rationality into racism.

If during COVID it was shown that 47% of all Asians were contagious, it would not be racist to avoid proximity with us, because you'd be taking rational action based on facts that just happened to have a racial correlation. Similarly, it is not bigoted to suggest a transgender person to avoid dating southern Republicans; that would be appropriate in light of violence statistics.

If you ask me, rational action does not become racist just because the action involves races in some way. It becomes racist when the motivation is a prejudice toward the race inherently. "Avoid blacks because 47% of them think you should not exist" is not racist, "avoid blacks because they suck" is.
by vablings | 2026-01-13 21:14:37+00:00
It feels pretty awful to have such a one-sided bias in the media of the UK getting clowned on for civil liberties, I have noticed so much more astroturfing on reddit about these issues with made-up ragebait lies.

There are absolutely issues with the police focusing more on "crime online" such as people posting or saying offensive things, I do think that saying something outright offensive to the benefit of nobody is a net bad for society but instead of punishing say British people for "wrong think" I think the police force should be really investigating where this kind of stuff comes from, Foreign influence bot farms ect and enact legal removal of protection to ensure that people when they say such online in a public manner are actually people
by orionsbelt | 2026-01-13 21:14:43+00:00
I feel like we live in different worlds.

I use AI everyday and it already a magic intelligence in the sky to me.

If anything, the AI labs have been pretty dead on about their predictions so far.

How that will impact the economy and productivity is anyone’s guess, so I don’t think Sam pontificating about that in interviews holds him culpable for a crash.

I am hyped based on using the products, not what Sam says
by kazinator | 2026-01-13 21:14:44+00:00
We've been using software to fix grammar for a long time, and AI does it also. The question is valid: if I get an LLM to fix a few grammar errors in my own writing, am I ripping anyone off? We can't just dismiss the question just because grammar fixing is something we did without machine-learning AI trained on vast numbers of other people's texts.

The output does depend on training works, even if you are just fixing grammar errors. But the document is obviously a derivative of your own writing and almost nothing else. A grammatic concept learned from vast numbers of worsk is probably not a copyright infringment.

Similarly, a part extraction concept learned from training sets such as pairs of mixed and unmixed music, and then applied to someone's own music to do accurate part extraction, does not seem like an infringing use. All features of the result are identifiable as coming from the original mixed audio; you cannot identify infringing passages in it added by the AI --- and if such a thing happened, it would be an unwanted artifact leading us to re-do the part extraction in some other way to avoid it.
by maxbond | 2026-01-13 21:14:50+00:00
Could you share more about the context? When? For what position? In what sort of organization?

Personally the only time this has happened to me was when I applied to be a bartender and was told there was a quota for men and women and they had recently hired a man. And I just let that one go, partly because it was a lark and not a career move, partly because I could see the logic in it and chalked it up to the inherent seediness of the enterprise, and partly because my identity had opened a lot of doors for me in the past ("you look like Mark Zuckerberg" was a comment I got when I was hired at my first startup, in a sequence of compliments about my qualifications) so I wasn't bothered by it closing one.

I'm open to hearing other experiences though. I'm reserving judgment until I understand the context.
by tialaramex | 2026-01-13 21:14:54+00:00
You don't seem to offer a better solution only a reason why you don't like this one.

Of course the BBC is unavoidably propaganda - even just unconsciously - that's why this Hafler Trio track from 1984 exists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIobKBy8XOs

I also have personal experience that they're far from infallible, a friend lied to them about our farcical "Potato powered" computer† and for a while their news story about this was actually available as if it was real news not a joke.

But they're clearly trying and "not good enough" doesn't seem like an adequate justification for giving up and saying we'll just go without democracy then. If this is the best we have then this will have to do.

† The worst part is that this is kinda, sorta at the edge of plausible, which is why I thought from the outset that it's not a good joke. We didn't build such a thing, but maybe someone could have or even has.
by cigar_cigar | 2026-01-13 21:15:24+00:00
That's how I feel about it too. I play piano well enough to get my ideas out and have used synthesizers and digital audio workstation software for years. I can sit down and carefully craft the music I have in my mind if I want to. Though I don't often have the time or the mental space to do so.

Or, I can make a barebones recording of musical ideas - of melodies, harmonies and the overall song structure - then upload it to Suno and inspire its robotic session musicians to play it in the style I ask. Quicker to make, faster to iterate upon, and can even be used as the basis for resynthesizing the track using more traditional methods.

Half-finished tracks, ideas that were only in my mind or existed only as badly recorded piano-bashed drafts, now (almost) fully fleshed out. It's immensely satisfying, and has made me even more creative as I use this tool to understand and explore musical styles I'm less familiar with.
by armchairhacker | 2026-01-13 21:15:45+00:00
WFH vs in-office, AI mandatory vs AI forbidden: ideally I want my boss to let me work however I want, and ideally+realistically however makes me most productive.

> in Its Content or Designs

Personally: I'm a developer, so my situation is different. But right now I use AI code completion and Claude Code. I think I'd be fine without Claude Code, since it hasn't "clicked" for me yet; I think it's motivating, particularly for new features and boilerplate, but often (even with the boilerplate) must rewrite a lot of what it generates. Code completion would be harder, but maybe if the work was interesting and non-boilerplate enough I'd manage.

I've heard Claude Code has improved a lot very recently, so I would feel left behind without it completely, except I can use it in my spare time on personal projects. But if it keeps improving and/or ends up "clicking", then I may feel like I'm spinning my wheels at work.
by iLemming | 2026-01-13 21:15:47+00:00
If humans gravitated towards choosing logical paths instead of following emotions, they would be equally miserable, with the difference of added awareness - they'd still be miserable yet know why.

It makes me sad to watch how some of the smartest and most resourceful programmers on the planet just keep ignoring the immense power, liberation, and joy that knowing some Lisp can grant you. Reminds me the quote from Idiocracy - "for the smartest guy in the world, you're pretty dumb sometimes"...
by autoexec | 2026-01-13 21:15:48+00:00
> The thing is, you aren't entitled to distribution.

That applies to people spamming AI slop too.
People are right to complain about spammers.
Platforms are right to try to stop spam, even though everyone knows that spam is a problem that is never going be solved.

> Most musicians who make it these days work really hard at doing live shows, or growing a following on tiktok.

Live shows, by their nature, have almost zero reach. A performance for 40 people takes place once in a single location at a specific time and then it's over. You're either there when it happens or you missed it. A song on youtube or bandcamp can be heard by millions quickly over a few weeks or gradually over years. Social media was a massive boon for musicians.

Sadly, it will get substantially harder to grow a following on tiktok or any other social media platform if those platforms are flooded with AI generated garbage. Real artists will be harder to find. Anyone doing anything new will be drowned out by AI regurgitating everything old. When creative people can't succeed, the creativity they'd inspire in others is lost and everything stagnates.
by susam | 2026-01-13 21:15:50+00:00
Web browsers are indeed forgiving when it comes to incomplete HTML. Some time ago, I did a small experiment to see what minimal HTML is required to display a simple 'Hello' page while adhering to the specification, passing HTML Tidy validation and also satisfying the Nu HTML Checker. As far as I can tell, it is this:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>Hello</title>
<body>
<p>Hello!

Remove any tag and the validation fails. Here is how the Tidy check looks:

$ tidy -qe minimal.html
$

And here's a Nu check link: https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Fsusam.net%2Fc...
by kstrauser | 2026-01-13 21:15:56+00:00
> he was reacting to a poll according to which a sizeable proportion of black people disagreed with the statement "it's ok to be white".

The context of that poll was an alt-right uplifting of the phrase "it's OK to be white", as though they were being oppressed and were finally removing the yoke of hatred they'd endured. A similar poll might ask about the phrases "not all men" or "me too". In isolation, who could possibly have a problem with either of those?, but these things aren't taken in isolation.

I'd be curious about a followup question like "is it acceptable for someone to be white", which is asking the exact same question, on the surface, but in context is asking something completely different.
by JohnFen | 2026-01-13 21:16:00+00:00
> I'm not familiar with anyone that does this.

I see this a lot, actually. People put things on in the background, for instance, and don't really care if they like it or not (as long as they don't hate it). They just want noise. Or people just scrolling through their feeds without genuinely liking much in them.

In the old days, this was also how the majority of television was watched. People watched TV out of habit, and frequently watched things they didn't like because choices were limited and often there was nothing they actually like on. Thus all the complaints in the day about how "there's nothing on TV".

People are willing to sacrifice quite a lot of real enjoyment for convenience.
by mrguyorama | 2026-01-13 21:16:01+00:00
There is no tech solution ever possible to "The guys with guns showed up", and people in tech continuing to insist that they must maintain political apathy and solve real problems only as long as you can do it with code is literally part of the problem.

"Tech used to be a place without politics" is especially heinous. The entire time you insisted on eschewing politics, your boss sure as fuck wasn't.
by jovial_cavalier | 2026-01-13 21:16:25+00:00
>No one likes being cheated out of work that they did, especially when a lot of it is volunteer work.

You know what would really be wasteful of volunteer hours? Instituting a policy whereby the community has to trawl through 20 years of commits from umn.edu addresses and manually review them for vulnerabilities even though you have no reasonable expectation that such commits are likely to contain malicious code and you're actually just butthurt. (they found nothing after weeks of doing this btw)
by RansomStark | 2026-01-13 21:16:38+00:00
I agree, they are not ethnically English, they are British citizens and have all the rights that come with citizenship, the same as every other UK citizen including those that would call themselves English. You think there's some kind of gotcha there, but there isn't.

England hasn't had an English king since 1066, that's not controversial, and even then the inbreeding between the European royal houses was creating a pan-european elite that made world world 1 more of a really bad family argument than anything else.

What's really odd is that Rishi Sunak is extremely proud of his ethnicity and heritage, it's unfortunate that we've made it almost impossible for other people's to have that same pride.
by glenstein | 2026-01-13 21:16:47+00:00
>I think the problem many of us have is it feels like Mozilla invests more effort into everything other than its browser,

Unfortunately the side bets are disproportionately visible relative to the vast majority of what they actually do, which is ship millions of lines of code in browser improvements every quarter, keeping pace with Google despite a fraction of Google's resources.

I certainly think a better strategic partner than Google would be ideal. Yahoo had a strategically promising moment that slipped through its fingers that I think will always be a what-if. Cloudflare is interesting because they're very much a create-a-blue-ocean kind of company, and the problem with browsers has always been that the browser space simply isn't a revenue driver, it's something you subsidize from other businesses.

Firefox is, remarkably, the most successful self funded browser engine in the history of the world, but many great companies have come and gone in this space (e.g. Opera) and still fell behind. They invest more in the browser now than they ever have, they have shipped more production Rust code than anybody. But that's not louder than the noise in the modern internet.

I think you're right that someone like Cloudflare would be an interesting partner and I can't think of a better one off the top of my head. And if AI is eclipsing search, that threatens search licensing they're currently relying on. I don't know what AI in the browser is, what new norms, what new expectations, what core concepts are going to matter the most. But something is going to change and you have to get out ahead of that now, to be relevant tomorrow.
by angoragoats | 2026-01-13 21:17:14+00:00
As a someone from the US who is atheist and probably would be lumped in the "progressive" bucket, I can provide my own perspective which might be helpful:

I bristle at taking an action which would support (morally, financially, etc) currently living fascists and/or Nazis, whose ideologies and in certain cases the people themselves (e.g. Musk) are actively working to dismantle and destabilize the government of my country.

In that respect, using software written by someone like Andreas Kling (Ladybird creator) or Musk, DHH, etc is much more reprehensible to me than admiring the art of Picasso, who was a horrible person but who is dead and cannot hurt anyone else.
by jquery | 2026-01-13 21:17:28+00:00
You’ll get no argument from me. Dilbert did accurately skewer corporate culture. But what was its solution? Unstated, but omnipresent, was that workers and bosses just needed to be more efficient. Not a whisper of unionization or anything that might threaten profits. This was a deliberate choice by Adams and he proudly bragged about it in interviews.
by crooked-v | 2026-01-13 21:17:38+00:00
Well, you can definitely make AI art much less obvious with the right tweaking (directly running models, blending different sub-models, etc). The bigger issues from a professional perspective are liability concerns and then, even if you have guaranteed licensed sources, the impossibility of controlling fine details. For a company like GW it's kind of pointless if it can't reflect all the decades worth of odds and ends they've built both the game and the surrounding franchise around.
by vitaflo | 2026-01-13 21:17:42+00:00
Devs are quite used to using others peoples work for free via packages, frameworks and entire operating systems and IDE’s. It’s just part of the culture.

Music has its history in IP, royalties, and most things need to be paid for in the creation of music or art itself.

It’s going to be much easier for devs to accept AI when remixing code is such a huge part of the culture already. The expectation in the arts is entirely different.
by nojvek | 2026-01-13 21:17:42+00:00
Iran, Iraq, Israel, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Kuwait, Saudi, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan, Libya, Yemen. It's kind of wild how the middle east has been at some kind of war with each other for more than half a century, possibly longer.

Meanwhile Europe aggressively killed each other during WWI and WWII and then went into a peaceful union with a free trading bloc.

Will there ever be a Middle-east union unification like EU in our lifetime?
by wtallis | 2026-01-13 21:17:51+00:00
> I don't think it's unethical to send someone an email that has bad code in it.

It's unethical because of the bits you left out: sending code you know is bad, and doing so under false pretenses.

Whether or not you think this rises to the level of requiring IRB approval, surely you must be able to understand that wasting people's time like this is going to be viewed negatively by almost anyone. Some people might be willing to accept that doing this harm is worth it for the greater cause of the research, but that doesn't erase the harm done.
by sq_ | 2026-01-13 21:18:01+00:00
> But iNaturalist data is often not considered high quality enough to be publishable by itself (wide brush statement) in my field of plant conservation.

As someone who recently started using iNaturalist, I've been curious about this. I think it's an awesome platform and really cool that people can share what they find, etc, but I noticed that people would pile on with species-level IDs on pictures that were obviously ambiguous between different species known to exist in the vicinity.

I of course want as much data as possible to be available to science, but it piqued my interest about whether a negative feedback loop of misidentifications to future identification models could form.
by joe_mamba | 2026-01-13 21:18:05+00:00
From the author:

>ai-generated code is throw-away code

Mate, most code I ever written across my career has been throw away code. The only exception being some embedded code that's most likely on the streets to this day. But most of my desktop and web code has been thrown away by now by my previous employers or replaced by someone else's throwaway code. There's no shame in that and no pride in that either, I'm just paid to "put the fries in the bag", that's it.

Most of us aren't building DOOM, the Voyager probe or the Golden Gate bridge here, epic feats of art and engineering designed to last 30-100+ years, we're just plumbers hacking something quickly to hold things together until the music chairs stop playing and I have no issue offloading that to a clanker if I can, so i focus on the things I enjoy doing. Do you think I grew up wanting to write GitHub Actions yaml files for a living?
by rchaud | 2026-01-13 21:18:14+00:00
Sometimes people just get to retirement age, realize they don't have much longer to go and choose to stop hiding who they are. Morrissey of The Smiths is another guy who's alienated his audience. Moe Tucker, drummer in the legendary NYC '60s counterculture band The Velvet Underground was picketing at a Tea Party rally in 2009 and saying "Obama is destroying America from the inside".
by dang | 2026-01-13 21:18:41+00:00
Please don't be a jerk or put down others' work on HN. That's not the kind of site we're trying to be.

You're welcome to make your substantive points thoughtfully, of course.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
by d-lisp | 2026-01-13 21:18:52+00:00
Sometimes I draw UML-like diagrams when I join a project (and when the project is big enough in such a way my mind melts if I try to keep track of everything), I wonder if there are equivalent representations of such things.

Linear text is perfect to me for documentation, teaching/learning etc...

But also, systems seems to be better digested under the shape of spatial representations (I met a lot of CS persons that fantasized over the possibility of displaying all the files of your codebase in a VR-like environment augmented with visual cues (UML) and I must admit that I would find this unnecessary but comfortable -- and I can imagine applications of this in other domains; imagine a teacher arranging the whole of Kant philosophy as a spatial-visual system referencing positions, comments, etc..). Eyes are cool because you can focus on something while knowing that some available information is there around the zone you are focusing; in a sense, so is the hand, locally, but I imagine (I dont know) it would require some super-human level of braille reading to be able to jump back and forth reading on different fingers, so that's again a probably stupid question to ask to the blind crowd of hn : are you able to do this?