MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by latexr | 2026-01-14 10:22:40+00:00
Those aren’t mutually exclusive; something can be both useful and a con.

When a con man sells you a cheap watch for an high price, what you get is still useful—a watch that tells the time—but you were also still conned, because what you paid for is not what was advertised. You overpaid because you were tricked about what you were buying.

LLMs are useful for many things, but they’re also not nearly as beneficial and powerful as they’re being sold as. Sam Altman, while entirely ignoring the societal issues raised by the technology (such as the spread of misinformation and unhealthy dependencies), repeatedly claims it will cure all cancers and other kinds of diseases, eradicate poverty, solve the housing crisis, democracy… Those are bullshit, thus the con description applies.

https://youtu.be/l0K4XPu3Qhg?t=60
by dzhiurgis | 2026-01-14 10:22:45+00:00
So let's criticize the Rasmussen Reports then

> how many people on HN are just overtly racist

Like most people actually are... https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40124781

Regardless. Funny how quickly people of kindest hearts, tops of the virtue pyramid are to cancel someone for single misinterpreted wild sentence.
by ZpJuUuNaQ5 | 2026-01-14 10:23:14+00:00
Nice. This looks similar to what I have implemented: https://www.npmjs.com/package/asciiground, but I intended it more as a library where a user could program their own patterns by extending the existing systems. Sadly, my GitHub account got flagged, so there is no way to access the repository or GitHub pages for the demo at the moment.
by Nextgrid | 2026-01-14 10:24:46+00:00
> with redundant power, cooling, etc

The doors the system controls don't have any of this. Hell, the whole building doesn't have any of this. And it definitely doesn't have redundant internet connections to the cloud-based control plane.

This is fear-mongering when a passive PC running a container image on boot will suffice plenty. For updates a script that runs on boot and at regular intervals that pulls down the latest image with a 30s timeout if it can't reach the server.
by mossTechnician | 2026-01-14 10:25:14+00:00
If it makes sense to handle all of these issues, then couldn't these organizations just acknowledge all of these issues? If reducing harm is the goal, I don't see a reason to totally segregate different issues, especially not drawing a dividing line between the ones OpenAI already acknowledges and the ones it doesn't. I've never seen any self-described "AI safety" organizations that tackles any of the present-day issues AI companies cause.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-14 10:25:17+00:00
> I'm sorry you had that experience.

I'm not, it was something I did on my own volition, I wasn't kicked out, I moved out. So don't be sorry about it, my life would also look 100% different than it is if I didn't, and I love my life, it's better than 99.99% of the rest of yours :)

> We just can't go through life changing our people whenever they don't live up to what we want them to be.

You can, if you stop "wanting them to be" anything at all, and just treat people like they are instead. And if they're still "bad people", you leave.

> As you get older, please try to find people who you can love unconditionally until you die.

Respectfully, no. That's not the kind of relationship I want with other people, I want people who doesn't love me unconditionally but can tell me straight when I'm doing bad stuff, etc. "Unconditional love" removes that.

I'm glad to have found the people I've found, and stuck with those since we became close. They're hard to find though, and I've met only one such person after turning 30. But I rather have this small group of 4-5 people I can trust to help me bury a body if needed, than spending time with people who feel they have to love me unconditionally. Life just gets easier that way.
by cess11 | 2026-01-14 10:26:17+00:00
"Or is it like every other LRN (large round number) that someone pulled out of his ass and it became true by repetition? Does the figure include resistance fighters and civilians who died in the normal course of war, or just the Jews rounded up and killed systematically? No reasonable person doubts that the Holocaust happened, but wouldn’t you like to know how the exact number was calculated, just for context? Without that context, I don’t know if I should lump the people who think the Holocaust might have been exaggerated for political purposes with the Holocaust deniers. If they are equally nuts, I’d like to know that. I want context."

He could have easily figured this out but didn't, because he preferred to publish this neo-nazi adjacent rhetoric. Nazis use this talking point all the time, you see.

I.e. it's not at all about curiosity. Arguably Scott Adams was one of the least curious famous persons in history. His cartoons were based on office related cliches, and while that provides a bit of laughter and relief to people who have negative experiences from office environments it's not based on curiosity or interest in people.
by Chance-Device | 2026-01-14 10:27:17+00:00
I think this is probably a trend that will erode with time, even now it’s probably just moved underground. How many human artists are using AI for concepts then laundering the results? Even if it’s just idea generation, that’s a part of the process. If it speeds up throughput, then maybe that’s fewer jobs in the long run.

And if AI assisted products are cheaper, and are actually good, then people will have to vote with their wallets. I think we’ve learned that people aren’t very good at doing that with causes they claim to care about once they have to actually part with their money.
by timschmidt | 2026-01-14 10:28:21+00:00
> programmers seem to have to argue it doesn't actually do anything for some reason.

It's not really hard to see... spend your whole life defining yourself around what you do that others can't or won't, then an algorithm comes along which can do a lot of the same. Directly threatens the ego, understandings around self-image and self-worth, as well as future financial prospects (perceived). Along with a heavy dose of change scary, change bad.

Personally, I think the solution is to avoid building your self-image around material things, and to welcome and embrace new tools which always bring new opportunities, but I can see why the polar opposite is a natural reaction for many.
by imtringued | 2026-01-14 10:28:41+00:00
The economic incentives for men are exactly backwards. They're on the hook for alimony/child support in the face of no fault divorce and despite the chants for equal pay, men are still expected to earn more than women if they want to attract a woman.

Marriage is basically economically obsolete at this point and is primarily done for the sake of tradition and tax breaks. In the context of having children, marriage has devolved to a business contract that lasts until the children have left the nest.
by mattkevan | 2026-01-14 10:29:34+00:00
The barbers I went to recently were playing a channel on the TV which was an endless series of clips panning through ultra-nostalgic French Riviera-style scenery, accompanied by mellow guitar music. Seemed fine at first glance but like all AI stuff it got weirder the closer you looked - boats on land, outdoor dining areas underwater, giant lanterns larger than houses, mangled looking food, that sort of thing.

Someone had clearly just set up a few prompts and let the AI get on with it, creating probably hundreds of channels of this stuff.
by throwaway89201 | 2026-01-14 10:29:38+00:00
It doesn't for me at all. If I go to the URL I provided in the OP, the Google server responds with a 301 status code and Location header. Both when logged into a Google account and without logging in. Strange that it behaves in a different way (?) for you.

It will probably filter the URL through Google Safe Browsing, but that doesn't help much for phishing as they mostly use new or reputable domains, and browsers check that list on default settings anyway.
by epolanski | 2026-01-14 10:29:54+00:00
The whole thing about motivation is non sense.

1. Motivation is a feeling, it's an emotion, it comes and goes, it's a bonus. It's discipline and professionalism that make the huge difference. Many people have the motivation and dream to "create their own programming language", "launch their startup", "make it to the NBA", "lose 40 pounds and get fitter" but this motivation, a feeling, will consistently fight the motivation to have fun, relax, go out with friends, play video games to relieve stress. Motivation is a great boost to discipline and professionalism, but those two survive even when motivation goes off.

2. You cannot hire for motivation and if you're looking for that trait you'll likely project your own biases. I suspect that the author of the blog post has nerdy hobbits so he projects himself on candidates. Non sense. Yes, nerdier engineers are likely more interested in the craft and in overall engineering, but that says absolutely nothing about them being motivated in building yet another B2B SaaS.

3. A very good engineer joining a startup, should have the implicit motivation of wanting to get rich in few years, otherwise he/she's be joining a cushier job that pays way more.
by d12frosted | 2026-01-14 10:30:04+00:00
Good points, thanks for engaging thoughtfully.

On vui.el's approach - yes, the blessing is that widget.el is simple enough to build on. It does the "rendering" and some "behaviour", vui.el handles the rest.

On ECS vs OO - I'll admit I don't have enough experience to speak about UI paradigms in general. But my critique of widget.el is that inheritance hierarchies don't compose well when you need orthogonal behaviors. Composition feels more natural to me - could be just how my brain works, but it scales better in my experience.

On state management being independent - I'd be curious to hear more. Pathom is interesting for data-driven architectures. vui.el's state is intentionally minimal and Emacs-native, but you're right it could potentially be decoupled further.

On "why not full reactive" - to clarify what vui.el has: React-style hooks with explicit dependency tracking (vui-use-effect, vui-use-memo, etc.), state changes trigger re-renders, batching for multiple updates. What it doesn't have: automatic dependency inference or fine-grained reactivity where only specific widgets update. The tradeoff was debuggability - explicit deps are easier to trace than magic. But I'm open to being wrong here. What would you want from a reactive layer?
by victorbjorklund | 2026-01-14 10:30:32+00:00
For people that does not think it scales. A similar implementation in Elixir is Oban. Their benchmark shows a million jobs per minute on a single node (and I am sure it could be increased further with more optimizations). I bet 99,99999% of apps have less than a million background jobs per minute.

https://oban.pro/articles/one-million-jobs-a-minute-with-oba...
by krystofee | 2026-01-14 10:30:51+00:00
I disagree with the "confidence trick" framing completely. My belief in this tech isn't based on marketing hype or someone telling me it's good – it's based on cold reality of what I'm shipping daily. The productivity gains I'm seeing right now are unprecedented. Even a year ago this wouldn't have been possible, it really feels like an inflection point.

I'm seeing legitimate 10x gains because I'm not writing code anymore – I'm thinking about code and reading code. The AI facilitates both. For context: I'm maintaining a well-structured enterprise codebase (100k+ lines Django). The reality is my input is still critically valuable. My insights guide the LLM, my code review is the guardrail. The AI doesn't replace the engineer, it amplifies the intent.

Using Claude Code Opus 4.5 right now and it's insane. I love it. It's like being a writer after Gutenberg invented the printing press rather than the monk copying books by hand before it.
by jaccola | 2026-01-14 10:31:11+00:00
There are dozens of definitions of "intelligence", we can't even agree what intelligence means in humans, never mind elsewhere. So yes, by some subset of definitions it is intelligent.

But by some subset of definitions my calculator is intelligent. By some subset of definitions a mouse is intelligent. And, more interestingly, by some subset of definitions a mouse is far more intelligent than an LLM.
by ageitgey | 2026-01-14 10:31:52+00:00
Many offices (public sector, commercial, etc) are full of people who write reports that no one reads.

With AI, there is a strong incentive for the employee to churn out the report quickly and take Friday off, since no one is going to read it anyway. Maybe they still skim the report and make sure it looks reasonable, but they don't catch the smaller details that are wrong, and more importantly, they don't think deeply or critically about the issue at hand since the report looks reasonable at a glance.

"Show me the incentive, and I'll show you the outcome" - Charlie Munger

My guess is that reporting processes will change and adapt once everyone realizes how useless the old system is in an AI world. A long report used to signal "we thought about this, so rest easy". Now, a long report doesn't signal that. It no longer serves the function it once did.
by 9JollyOtter | 2026-01-14 10:32:16+00:00
It depends where you are in the UK.

Almost all the wealth is in the South East of England. Outside of that the country is much poorer.

I drive from Manchester to Dorset once a month to visit my parents. There is a clear line where I notice all the street signs, the service stations, roads etc are better kept. Cars and houses are in better condition/news.
by Al-Khwarizmi | 2026-01-14 10:33:20+00:00
I haven't gamed much in the last few years due to severe lack of time so I'm out of touch, but I used to play a lot of CRPGs and I always dreamed of having NPCs who could talk and react beyond predefined scripted lines. This seems to finally be possible thanks to LLMs and I think it was desired by many (not only me). So why are gamers not excited about generative AI?
Show HN: A NO-BS step counter app that actually works
by kjm_kjm | 2026-01-14 10:34:26+00:00
Hey,
when I was looking for a new step counter app I noticed to my surprise that I couldn't find any that I liked.
I just wanted something simple. Something without bloat. Everything seemed either full of junk, low quality or expensive.
So I build my own step counter app for Android focused on minimalism.

People really like it so I'd like to keep improving it. The challenge is to improve it without making it too cluttered. It's easy to just add features but it needs to stay minimalist.
I'd love to hear your feedback.
by maccard | 2026-01-14 10:34:53+00:00
> There is no silver bullet. And if you think you’ve found one, you’re in for a world of pain. Worse still, you’ll never realize the full potential of these tools, because you won’t understand their constraints, their limits, or their pitfalls.

See my previous comment (quoted below).

> If I complain about their shortcomings, I'm just using it wrong. If I try and use it the "right" way and it still gets extremely basic things wrong, then my expectations are too high.

Regarding "there are no miracles here"

Here are a few comments from this thread alone,

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46609559
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46610260
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46609800
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46611708

Here's a few from some older threads:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46519851
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46485304

There is a very vocal group who are telling us that there _is_ a silver bullet.
by yawboakye | 2026-01-14 10:35:01+00:00
the problem i see here is that we end up treating the background job/task processor as part of the production system (e.g. the server that responds to requests, in the case of a web application) instead of a separate standalone thing. rails doesn’t make this distinction clear enough. it’s okay to back your tasks processor with a pg database (e.g. river[0]) but, as you indirectly pointed out, it shouldn’t be the same as the production database. this is why redis was preferred anyways: it was a lightweight database for the task processor to store state, etc. there’s still great arguments in favor of this setup. from what i’ve seen so far, solidqueue doesn’t make this separation.

[0]: https://riverqueue.com/
by techpression | 2026-01-14 10:36:21+00:00
I did that when I was 14 because I had no other choice, damn you SoundBlaster! I didn't get any menu but I got sound in the end.

I don't think conflating intelligence with "what a computer can do" makes much sense though. I can't calculate the X digit of PI in less than Z, I'm still intelligent (or I pretend to be).

But the question is not about intelligence, it's a red herring, it's just about utility and they (LLM's) are useful.
by sensanaty | 2026-01-14 10:36:47+00:00
> That seems very unimaginative to me.

Does it? How exactly is the common Joe going to benefit from this world where the robots are doing the job he was doing before, as well as everyone else's job (aka, no more jobs for anyone)? Where exactly is the money going to come from to make sure Joe can still buy food? Why on earth would the people in power (aka the psychotic CxOs) care to expend any resources for Joe, once they control the robots that can do everything Joe could? What mechanisms exist for everyone here to prosper, rather than a select few who already own more wealth and power than the majority of the planet combined?

I think believing in this post-scarcity utopian fairy tale is a lot less imaginative and grounded than the opposite scenario, one where the common man gets crushed ruthlessly.

We don't even have to step into any kind of fantasy world to see this is the path we're heading down, in our current timeline as we speak, CEOs are foaming at the mouth to replace as many people as they can with AI. This entire massive AI/LLM bubble we find ourselves in is predicated on the idea that companies can finally get rid of their biggest cost centers, their human workers and their pesky desires like breaks and vacations and worker's rights. And yet, there's still somehow people out there that will readily lap up the bullshit notion that this tech is going to somehow be used as a force of good? That I find completely baffling.
by danielbln | 2026-01-14 10:37:23+00:00
> Gamers hate that shit.

Unless AI is used for code (which it is, surely, almost everywhere), then Gamers don't give a damn. Also, Larian didn't use it for concept art, they used it to generate the first mood board to give to the concept artist as a guideline. And then there is Ark Raiders, who uses AI for all their VO, and that game is a massive hit.

This is just a breathless bubble, the wider gaming audience couldn't give two shits if studios use AI or not.
Show HN: Screenrecord.in – A browser based local-first screen recording solution
by troysk | 2026-01-14 10:37:24+00:00
Hey folks! I have worked remotely for almost 20 years and one tool which I have used a lot is screen recordings. They do tell more than text when you have to explain a feature to a remote colleague in a different timezone. Loom was great but it kept nagging me with updates and the 5 minute limit was also hard. So I created ScreenRecord.in a no limits, local first screen recording solution. You don't need to install any additional hardware. Just open your browser and hit Record! The recordings are stored in your local storage and you can even add a PiP of your webcam. Please try it and share feedback with me!
by lpcvoid | 2026-01-14 10:37:25+00:00
I think the costs of LLMs (huge energy hunger, people being fired because of it, hostile takeover of human creativity, and it causing computer hardware to rise in cost exponentially) is by far larger than the uses (generating videos of fish with arms, programming slightly faster, writing slop emails to talented people).

I know LLMs won't vanish again magically, but I wish they would every time I have to deal with their output.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-14 10:38:19+00:00
> Do you want a nuclear weapons site 20 miles from your largest city?

If you’re nuking a submarine port you’re nuking other port infrastructure. And if the UK is under strategic nuclear fire, any population center is going to be leveled.

(I understand the NIMBY argument. I don’t want to live next to nuclear weapons more due to accident risk than targeting.) And I understand the non-proliferation one when it worked.)
by Saline9515 | 2026-01-14 10:38:45+00:00
It's not a myth, you can make new items using recycled plastics. Of course, the recycled plastic doesn't have the same properties, but it doesn't mean that it can't be useful to reduce plastic production. Most plastic items do not require pristine materials anyway.

It's the same for paper and cardboard, and it's much better to reuse it as much as possible to avoid cutting a tree. Letting it rot releases the same amount of CO2 than burning it, by the way.

https://plasticsrecycling.org/how-recycling-works/the-plasti...
by slg | 2026-01-14 10:38:54+00:00
>I can run claude code on my laptop with an instruction like "fix the sound card on this laptop" and it will analyze what my current settings are, determine what might be wrong, devise tests to have me gather information it can't gather itself, run commands to probe hardware for it's capabilities, and finally offer a menu of solutions, give the commands to implement the solution, and finally test that the solution works perfectly. Can you do that?

Yes, I have worked in small enough companies in which the developers just end up becoming the default IT help desk. I never had any formal training in IT, but most of that kind of IT work can be accomplished with decent enough Google skills. In a way, it worked the same as you and the LLM. I would go poking through settings, run tests to gather info, run commands, and overall just keep trying different solutions until either one worked or it became reasonable to give up. I'm sure many people here have had similar experiences doing the same thing in their own families. I'm not too impressed with an LLM doing that. In this example, it's functionally just improving people's Googling skills.
by LinXitoW | 2026-01-14 10:38:57+00:00
But your program HAS to have some invariants. If those are not held, simply reject all the data!

What the hell is really the alternative here? Do you just pretend your process can accept any kind of data, and just never do anything with it??

If you need an integer and you get a string, you just don't work. This has nothing to do with types. There's no solution here, it's just no thank you, error, panic, 500.
by adityaathalye | 2026-01-14 10:39:11+00:00
Notes on Managing ADHD offers clear perspective and practical advice: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45083134 The author frames strategy v/s tactics well, something seldom done [0].

Dr. Russell Barkley's youtube videos and book and the How To ADHD youtube channel are other resource I like and refer to, because they've surfaced useful information and perspective to me. How To ADHD is especially nice to share with friends / family / dear ones who happen to be in one's (erratic, surprising, incredibly fun, incredibly annoying, seemingly lawless) orbit.

[0] It irks me how many people say "strategies for ... xyz" when they're talking about procedures, or tactics, or personal hacks.

(edit: fix formatting, typo)
by miroljub | 2026-01-14 10:39:28+00:00
You just gave one more argument for having guns.

If he didn't have a gun, maybe he would be driven over by the car. Possibly a few more people too. In Europe, where guns are less prevalent, cars are the favorite weapon used by terrorists.

Luckily, he had a gun, so he was able to save himself and who knows how many more people by shooting an attacker.