MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by class3shock | 2026-01-06 22:14:26+00:00
Boom

I swear boom spends more on puff pieces than any other aerospace company. They continuously make claims they will do things by certain dates that are unrealistic.

They claim they will be delivering airplanes to United that would be in service in 2029:

https://boomsupersonic.com/united
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/03/united-will-buy-15-ultrafast...

However new aircraft take 5-9 years to certify and they have not yet even built one! Not to mention new engines take a similar amount of time and they are supposedly building their own brand new engine, which is a substantially harder task.

Now they are claiming the first "test" flight will be in 3 years despite the fact that they still don't have a plane or an engine built. I hope someone over their let United know they are going to be a little late. Their website hasn't amended to article to say they were wrong.

I wonder if we can look to history to see how long it takes between when they say they will fly something and when it actually flies? Oh right, we can!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boom_XB-1

"The original design was unveiled at Centennial Airport in Dove Valley, near Denver, Colorado, on November 15, 2016,[6] and it was initially intended to make its first subsonic flight in late 2017"

"The XB-1 performed its first flight test on March 22, 2024, flown by test pilot Bill Shoemaker from Mojave Air and Space Port.[1]"

They were only 7 years off but we all make mistakes.

Astro Mechanica

- LNG isn't used because weight needed for fuel tanks that will keep it cold enough to stay liquid cancels out any benefits. For anyone interested in a famous failure of a similar idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_CL-400_Suntan
- I don't know what analysis they are doing that makes them think reducing the number of passengers and going to supersonic is possible while maintaining current ticket prices... but it's not.
- Engine and plane makers are not allowed to run airlines. Anyone unfamiliar with the field can look up United Aircraft.
- Their engine does sound like it's trying to do some cool things. I kinda suspect it's just a fun way to pass the time on the governments dime given all the other unrealistic stuff they are talking about though.

Hermeus

These folks are legit. Don't know if they will be successful but outsourcing the jet engine and focusing their work on the ramjet and the integration of the two makes alot of sense.
by CGMthrowaway | 2026-01-06 22:14:51+00:00
PSA: If a probiotic is on the shelf, not in a cooler, it's probably not worth buying. The best companies certify the count of organisms at time of manufacture, but no counts are guaranteed at the shelf. Probiotics are living organisms and ought to be refrigerated for max lifespan.

You can get refrigerated probiotic supps at a place like Whole Foods.

Source: I used to work in the industry.
by UncleMeat | 2026-01-06 22:15:08+00:00
Isn't this a meaningless example? Formatters already exist. Generating code that doesn't need to be formatted is exactly the same as generating code and then formatting it.

I care about the norms in my codebase that can't be automatically enforced by machine. How is state managed? How are end-to-end tests written to minimize change detectors? When is it appropriate to log something?
by knowitnone3 | 2026-01-06 22:15:18+00:00
interesting and well written article. I would imagine what you eat, amount of saliva, dental hygiene, and a lot of other variables would affect your oral microbiome. what would be a better test is for people with "red complex" bacteria to take this and see the results. the fact that it didn't colonize tells me this is pretty much useless like most probiotics https://medicine.tufts.edu/news-events/news/are-probiotics-a...
the author concluded that they will use it again only because of the taste, not because it works.
by nullcathedral | 2026-01-06 22:15:47+00:00
I work in this space. The productivity gains from LLMs are real, but not in the "replace humans" direction.

Where they shine is the interpretive grunt work: "help me figure out where the auth logic is in this obfuscated blob", "make sense of this minified JS", "what's this weird binary protocol doing.", "write me a Frida script to hook these methods and dump these keys" Things that used to mean staring at code for hours or writing throwaway tooling now takes a fraction of the time.
They're straight up a playing field leveler.

Folks with the hacker's mindset but without the programming chops can punch above their weight and find more within the limited time of an engagement.

Sure they make mistakes, and will need babysitting a lot. But it's getting better. I expect more firms to adopt them as part of their routine.
by jack_pp | 2026-01-06 22:15:48+00:00
Well probably OP won't be affected because management is very pleased with him and his output, why would they fire him? Hire someone who can probably have better output than him for 10% more money or someone who might have the same output for 25% less pay?

You think any manager in their right mind would take risks like that?

I think the real consequences are that they probably are so pleased with how productive the team is becoming that they will not hire new people or fire the ones who aren't keeping up with the times.

It's like saying "wow, our factory just produced 50% more cars this year, time to shut down half the factory to reduce costs!"
by kevinlikako | 2026-01-06 22:16:20+00:00
Thanks, this is a fair take. Definitley thought about this, caffeine won't ever replace nic.

But as someone who grew up gen z seeing nicotine use everywhere (Zyn, vapes, etc.) and the zombies it could make people, that Palantir/WSJ piece just said to me "this is becoming normalized at work" and I wanted to see if a more controlled alternative would resonate with anyone else.
by adamc | 2026-01-06 22:16:43+00:00
I think you are criticizing an idea for not being a study. I think it's a reasonable and interesting idea, but at most it is something to consider, not some infallible axiom. More akin to "the Peter Principle" than a theorem.

Point 2 is... neither important nor really germane. (I don't care what engineers say, and Musk isn't an engineer anyway.) The point is that people understand their customer bases, and sell to them, and then imagine that means they understand how to succeed in the business their customers are in, and... not so.

It's basically a reminder that understanding the customer is everything. No matter how good the tech is, if you don't solve the customer's problem... they aren't buying.
by amatecha | 2026-01-06 22:17:20+00:00
Nice! As someone who built hundreds of sites using the whole "slice a PSD into a table-based layout with 1 or more arbitrary content regions" technique in the early 2000's, I totally agree this is a really nice design indeed! Though I notice it appears to be pretty inflexible .. I imagine the content areas don't expand or anything. Not that that matters, it's still a super cool design!
by nomel | 2026-01-06 22:17:22+00:00
Very neat. Would be cool to see in 3d (cross eye option [1]!? :D)

I think an accelerated initial growth is needed. Maybe start with a growth of 5 and have it decrease so it's a 1 at around 50. It takes a bit too long to get to something non trivial, especially since it seems there is a bias to put dots on the opposite side, causing the first 5 minutes to be mostly going in a straight circumnavigations.

[1] https://www.kula3d.com/how-to-use-the-cross-eyed-method
by CivBase | 2026-01-06 22:17:25+00:00
> using AI software to measure atmospheric conditions

What is this even supposed to mean?

To me this comes across as "I'm not sure if you'll be impressed by a supersonic jet that can surpress sonic booms, so I shoehorned AI into the description to jazz it up." It makes me wonder why the author doesn't think the former is impressive enough on its own.
by GoatInGrey | 2026-01-06 22:17:30+00:00
There are several rubs with that operating protocol extending beyond the "you're holding it wrong" claim.

1) There exists a threshold, only identifiable in retrospect, past which it would have been faster to locate or write the code yourself than to navigate the LLM's correction loop or otherwise ensure one-shot success.

2) The intuition and motivations of LLMs derive from a latent space that the LLM cannot actually access. I cannot get a reliable answer on why the LLM chose the approaches it did; it can only retroactively confabulate. Unlike human developers who can recall off-hand, or at least review associated tickets and meeting notes to jog their memory. The LLM prompter always documenting sufficiently to bridge this LLM provenance gap hits rub #1.

3) Gradually building prompt dependency where one's ability to take over from the LLM declines and one can no longer answer questions or develop at the same velocity themselves.

4) My development costs increasingly being determined by the AI labs and hardware vendors they partner with. Particularly when the former will need to increase prices dramatically over the coming years to break even with even 2025 economics.
by estimator7292 | 2026-01-06 22:18:18+00:00
I was incredibly disappointed when my KDE updated and force removed X11. I happened to be in the middle of a very delicate operation configuring X to do something that Wayland can't. Reboot and the entire system is fucked. Great, thanks.

Now all my computers are worse, and there's absolutely nothing I can do.

At least it's better than Windows I guess.
by arjie | 2026-01-06 22:18:28+00:00
One of the reasons the Facebook app was large was that they were using Thrift or something and generating a tremendous amount of code for their API interop. Protobuf+GRPC is similarly heavyweight, so I wouldn't be surprised if some megabytes were dedicated to the generated code. But hundreds of megabytes is wild. It has to be one-package compatibility as opposed to specialized app packages for different form factors etc.
by password54321 | 2026-01-06 22:19:19+00:00
When I first started learning about web design, I came across this popular book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Make_Me_Think

And essentially you are taught to go against a lot of things you see in these examples and design things in the way modern websites are designed e.g. big call to action button, search bar on top and center, little clutter. Modern websites are meant to be more "simple" and "easy" as the web is now meant to be "accessible" to everyone rather than just for nerds.
by phantasmish | 2026-01-06 22:19:22+00:00
It's absolutely wild to me that people can have experienced any amount of the Internet and not think "word of mouth" will absolutely wholly suffice to fill the role of informing people about products. Of course many, many people would create and maintain all kinds of lists and review all kinds of products without being paid to. We know this would happen because it has, and it does, even with the noise of advertising around. The early Web was mostly this, outside the academic stuff and, I guess, porn & media piracy. Without ads clogging everything up, it might even be possible to find these folks' websites!
by exceptione | 2026-01-06 22:20:46+00:00
See my other reply to parent

> These exceptions do not invalidate those rights nor the necessity for them.

Important, glad you mention that. The Paradox of Tolerance gives people a tool to free themselves from rigid beliefs that ultimately push people to give up rights. People are way more united if they can see each other unmediated. They share principles! Guided by these a healthy debate and democratic process is possible. Revisiting decisions as well when society progresses.
by gpm | 2026-01-06 22:21:15+00:00
I'd interpret this as a proposal for two new laws:

1. No non-invited display of paid messaging, period. If you go to a directory and ask for a list of people who paid to be part of that directory, it can show it. If you play a game, watch a movie, take the bus, or search a non-paid directory of sites they simply cannot show you things they were paid to show you. I think I'd call this making attention-theft a crime.

2. No payment for priority placement in paid directories. A paid directory has to charge the same (small, nominal) fee to everyone involved.
by areoform | 2026-01-06 22:21:31+00:00
Yes, but they seem to be talking about a specific product?

"(4GB was $70 now $110, next batch probably ~$150 by now if nothing improves)"

I think it's reasonable to ask, what's $70, now $110 and $150?

If you're quoting specific numbers for a specific product that you're claiming should be in the thread and then you refuse to link it...
by wat10000 | 2026-01-06 22:22:05+00:00
Postel's Law sounds nice but it can result in major problems. It results in a de facto spec that differs from the written spec, and disagreements about what a piece of data actually means can lead to bugs and even security vulnerabilities.

Having strictly parsed HTML from the start would be fine. You'd check it before you ship it and you'd make sure it's valid.

Requiring it now would be a disaster, of course. There's so much malformed HTML out there. But making HTML parsers accept garbage at the beginning was the wrong choice.
by ceejayoz | 2026-01-06 22:22:28+00:00
> How exactly do you expect Israel to fight a war without creating dangerous areas?

Forced displacement is a war crime. 90% of Gazans have been displaced, with up to 3/4 of the area under interdict (and the areas outside that were still bombed quite regularly). War certainly comes with some inherent danger, but beligerents have responsibilities to civilian populations, especially ones in territories they occupy.

> The target population they sought to evacuate is just whoever resided in the combat area, which is not an ethnicity.

This is not an argument made in good faith, and you know it.
by card_zero | 2026-01-06 22:24:57+00:00
Just like the Light & Sound sets from the 80s.

https://www.les-archives-de-joe.net/article-108-lego-espace-...

Except now it has an accelerometer too, and the sounds are more than just a siren, so your spaceship can make a swoosh noise when you fly it around. This is what we wanted.
by felixasher | 2026-01-06 22:25:04+00:00
Thanks — that’s a fair question, and probably on me for not being clear.

I’m not trying to replace design work with tests.
What I’m experimenting with is using certain tests
(especially integration-level ones)
as a way to surface and challenge assumptions that feel stable on paper.

In other words, the tests aren’t the design,
but they’re sometimes the fastest way I’ve found
to discover where my “separate design step” was incomplete or misleading.

Happy to clarify more if helpful.
by felixasher | 2026-01-06 22:25:26+00:00
Yes — that framing resonates a lot.

That shift from “does this work?” to
“what breaks if this assumption is wrong?”
is very close to what I’ve been circling around.

For me, the stall seems to happen when green tests stop reducing doubt
and start just confirming structure.
Integration-level tests sometimes help me reintroduce that pressure.

Really appreciate you articulating it so clearly.
by rcarmo | 2026-01-06 22:25:48+00:00
I had a similar set of experiences with GPT 5.x over the holiday break, across somewhat more disparate domains: https://taoofmac.com/space/notes/2025/12/31/1830

I hacked together a Swift tool to replace a Python automation I had, merged an ARM JIT engine into a 68k emulator, and even got a very decent start on a synth project I’ve been meaning to do for years.

What has become immensely apparent to me is that even gpt-5-mini can create decent Go CLI apps provided you write down a coherent spec and review the code as if it was a peer’s pull request (the VS Code base prompts and tooling steer even dumb models through a pretty decent workflow).

GPT 5.2 and the codex variants are, to me, every bit as good as Opus but without the groveling and emojis - I can ask it to build an entire CI workflow and it does it in pretty much one shot if I give it the steps I want.

So for me at least this model generation is a huge force multiplier (but I’ve always been the type to plan before coding and reason out most of the details before I start, so it might be a matter of method).
by willparks | 2026-01-06 22:25:54+00:00
> A common lament among founders, even successful ones, is:
"Sometimes I feel like I'm wasting my twenties".

Interesting perspective, I feel like I see this much more attributed to someone working on a meaningless problem for a paycheck at a large company. I guess it speaks to the difficulty in finding purpose in any endeavor in your twenties.

Nice conclusion on what to truly value.
by guywithahat | 2026-01-06 22:25:59+00:00
Too many vehicle manufacturers removed buttons to copy Tesla without thinking about why Tesla did it in the first place. Tesla removed those buttons because they were aiming for a low-cost driverless future with full self driving and automatic updates that change the feel of the car. If you put those features in a VW that doesn't regularly update and doesn't have consumer self driving program (at least yet) it doesn't really make sense.
by hairofadog | 2026-01-06 22:26:18+00:00
Maybe "let" was the wrong word. I think Putin has the ability to bribe, persuade, and/or blackmail Trump to sell the interests of the United States for Trump's own personal gain, and I think Trump admires Putin. If Putin has no influence, a person might wonder why Trump's foreign policy has aligned so closely with Putin's geopolitical goals.
by johnea | 2026-01-06 22:26:37+00:00
Fuck Gnome and Mozilla!

Middle button paste is one of the greatest day-to-day, click-to-click, UI efficiency improvements offered in a *nix environment!.

Of course, the "copy" part is also important: That is, the text only need be marked, no right-click menu COPY, or Ctrl-Anything required.

Mark, and Middle-click, Done!

It sounds like the real security hole is the need for an "I'm an Idiot" mode on most computers...
by sumibi | 2026-01-06 22:26:43+00:00
I made a multiplayer 3D pong in a cube years ago: https://cubeball.araxor.com/

It was a VR game for google cardboard. It worked pretty well at the time.

Sadly, it's not available anymore in the google play store. Maybe one day I'll port it to the web and open source it if I can find the time...
by zephen | 2026-01-06 22:27:50+00:00
If galvanic isolation is necessary, there are "digital isolators" (that's a good search term if you are interested) that are much faster than optocouplers and that don't suffer from the same sort of degradation (over a few years, the LED gets dimmer and dimmer).

But there's probably no galvanic isolation going on here anyway, so a wire, or at most a simple logic buffer, would probably suffice.

If I'm connecting two things from different power domains, I like to use gates (or level shifters, if necessary) that are designed for the task. These will keep stray currents from causing electromigration problems when one is powered on and the other is powered off, and some of these are very fast, over 100 MB/s.
by keeda | 2026-01-06 22:29:11+00:00
A couple of important points you should consider:

1. The AI water issue is fake: https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake (This one goes into OCD-levels of detail with receipts to debunk that entire issue in all aspects.)

2. LLMs are far, far more efficient than humans in terms of resource consumption for a given task: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-76682-6 and https://cacm.acm.org/blogcacm/the-energy-footprint-of-humans...

The studies focus on a single representative task, but in a thread about coding entire apps in hours as opposed to weeks, you can imagine the multiples involved in terms of resource conservation.

The upshot is, generating and deploying a working app that automates a bespoke, boring email workflow will be way, way, wayyyyy more efficient than the human manually doing that workflow everytime.

Hope this makes you feel better!
by mort96 | 2026-01-06 22:29:37+00:00
Is it just "some upcoming chips" inventing their own extensions? Or is this a standardized ARM extension?

Basically, will writing against these upcoming chips mean writing one implementation for Qualcomm, one implementation for Rockchip, one implementation for Samsung, etc? Or will it just require one implementation for the standard ARM "switch to total store ordering memory model" extension
by ben_w | 2026-01-06 22:29:50+00:00
The equivalent here would be if that American judge was sanctioned by the EU for issuing the arrest warrant for Maduro. Or would be, if Venezuela was an ally of the EU.

That Maduro was a head of state and still subject to an extraordinary rendition means that now the EU has to worry about EU heads of state being violently extradited to the USA. Not because anyone in the EU cares about Maduro himself, but because the US has signalled by doing this that they don't care about the old rules.
by huijzer | 2026-01-06 22:29:52+00:00
How money works? Well look into fractional reserve banking and do the math. If you’re a bank, you can just loan out 10-100 times what you have in assets and ask say 5% interest. Then 5*10 to 5*100 is your annual interest to the bank. That’s why the Bible and Quran are against usury.
by doublerabbit | 2026-01-06 22:29:55+00:00
As quoted from the OP.

> 24-bit helps in production pipelines for mixing, but for end user playback it's pointless.

If you have two versions of something and where one is better than the other, the resource cost is more or less the same it makes more sense to provide the better than the worse.

Maybe the end-user takes interest in mixing/production for which they then have the higher version allowing them to work with without the faff of having to obtain the better quality works. The end-user won't know the difference and the new apprentice has a copy that they can work with.

How is that a loss, I see that as a benefit.
by godelski | 2026-01-06 22:30:08+00:00
I mean the power of the work machine really depends on what your needs are. Definitely should adapt to whatever your needs are.

> And there's no way this thing would handle a useful local model

So if you have a setup like mine then it is fairly trivial to incorporate that (or anything else). Either way you'll need a machine that can do the local AI though. Either that is on your "work machine" or you run the AI on a separate machine. You could even rent a machine and as long as you add it to your Tailscale network then you're connected.

I strongly suggest having a workhorse machine and then let other devices be your terminal into it. Your terminals can be very cheap (or an old machine) or as suggested, your phone.
by hurubaw | 2026-01-06 22:30:34+00:00
I mean, if US invades Greenland, which is part of Denmark (a Nato country), all other NATO countries would be obliged to help defend Greenland under the 5th article against the aggressor... so the US.

US being the biggest contributor of NATO, effectively NATO would be no more.

Man the Russians intelligence services are good. Their subtle plays in the US politics are close to bringing them the world order they have always wanted.
by littlestymaar | 2026-01-06 22:31:12+00:00
> I really think a lof of people tried AI coding earlier, got frustrated at the errors and gave up. That's where the rejection of all these doomer predictions comes from.

It's not just the deficiencies of earlier versions, but the mismatch between the praise from AI enthusiasts and the reality.

I mean maybe it is really different now and I should definitely try uploading all of my employer's IP on Claude's cloud and see how well it works. But so many people were as hyped by GPT-4 as they are now, despite GPT-4 actually being underwhelming.

Too much hype for disapointing results lead to skepticism later on, even when the product has improved.