MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gradus_ad | 2026-01-23 05:37:26+00:00
Increasingly I'm of the opinion that the best existing "product" analogy for LLM's is coffee.

Coffee is a universally available, productivity enhancing commodity. There are some varieties certainly, but at the end of the day, a bean is a bean. It will get the job done. Many love it, many need it, but it doesn't really cost all that much. Where people get fancy is in all the fancy but unnecessary accoutrements for the brewing of coffee. Some choose to spend a lot on appliances that let you brew at home rather than relying on some external provider. But the quality is really no different.

Apparently global coffee revenue comes out to around $500B. I would not be surprised if that is around what global AI revenue ends up being in a few years.
by frm88 | 2026-01-23 05:37:32+00:00
Thank you for that link. His vision of SWB as a global disruptor is spot on. Currently we're seeing massive delays worldwide on that S-curve with subsidies cancelled and political movements calling for a stop to green energy not only in the US, so his time line to transportation as a service might not come as soon as predicted. Off topic but I really can't see precision fermentation replace dairy by 2030. There would be a cheese lover revolt all over Europe :)
by zharknado | 2026-01-23 05:37:47+00:00
Interesting. You have me thinking of Candide as an answer to Quixote.

In very broad strokes, Quixote says my perceptions and ideals are true and apparent evidence to the contrary must be a misunderstanding/ chance/ magic. His agency is to frame the world’s meaning in his own terms. Until finally he gives it up.

Candide accepts societal moral framings (i.e. rationalizations for wrongdoing) naively, but is slowly worn down by the evidence that they’re a sham. But in facing the seemingly intractable harshness of reality, he doesn’t become so cynical as to cede his own agency entirely—“Il faut cultiver notre jardin.”

To me that feels like a wiser response than absurdity or despondency.
by yonaguska | 2026-01-23 05:37:48+00:00
it depends on the state and how thorough their verification system is. I can only speak for IL, but in order to request a mail in ballot, you must be registered to vote first. Even if you register online, you must at minimum provide a DL number or SSN, and the state will associate a signature with your registration. Which is then cross referenced to the signature on your ballot envelope. If you don't have a signature and you try to vote by mail, and in the slim chance your registration is actually approved, you are now a first time non signatures voter, and your mail in ballot will be provisional at best.

This is why many of the election fraud claims focused on lax signature verification of ballots as well as the lax mail in ballot address locations. I feel that IL elections are probably more secure, but only because the state is solidly one party and comically gerrymandered anyways.

But technically, yes, a ballot harvester could send ballots on your behalf if they have enough information about you.
by raincole | 2026-01-23 05:38:02+00:00
> Building all the software you use yourself, whether by hand or by vibe coding, cuts you off from the world.

No one is doing that. In foreseeable future I don't see people making their own OSs, browsers and drivers. Workplaces never ditched Offices and Windows for the open source counterparts and they are certainly not going to do that for vibe coded solutions.

You can rest assured.
by Agentlien | 2026-01-23 05:38:08+00:00
I had a discussion with my son son about recent (2015-2019) Need For Speed games I worked on. He asked why we didn't include keeping track of fuel and actually stopping to use the gas station like in real life (in game you just drive through and it repairs your car). And why don't repairs require you to leave the car for a few days and cost tons of money?

I told him it would be annoying rather than fun and negatively impact the pacing. It wouldn't work well in our specific games.

Actually, during development there are always so many interesting ideas which don't pan out because they wouldn't actually be fun. Some even get built then scrapped because it didn't work as well as one would think. That's the kind of thing you'll often see internet forums bring up framed like "why didn't the devs think of this?!"
by beagle3 | 2026-01-23 05:40:44+00:00
The real analog copper lines were kind of limited to approx 28K - more or less the nyquist limit. However, the lines at the time were increasingly replaced with digital 64Kbit lines that sampled the analog tone. So, the 56k standard aligned itself to the actual sample times, and that allowed it to reach a 56k bps rate (some time/error tolerance still eats away at your bandwidth)

If you never got more than 24-28k, you likely still had an analog line.
by defrost | 2026-01-23 05:41:26+00:00
It's pretty straightforward, if it looks like a bomb, it gets treated like it might be a bomb.

If it looks like Osama bin Laden attending a War on Terror summit ... they'll wave it right through.

* https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/jan/20/how-the...

Not an especially wise move if unintended, and a precarious risk if intended fpr the drama.

I'm thinking my personal best time getting grilled over a suspected security issue runs to 36 hours or so .. hard to tell in retrospect, the US TLA bods do like their blinken lights and screeching music to mess with peoples internal clocks.
by oarla | 2026-01-23 05:41:55+00:00
The way I understood why it’s beneficial to switch your choice after the host opens a door showing you a goat is as below

Assume that door 1 has a goat , door 2 has a car and door 3 has a goat behind it. There are 3 trials possible in the Monty Hall scenario

Trial 1
Contestant chose door 1(which is a goat). Host opens door 3(because he has to) and asks if contestant would like to switch. If he switches, then he wins the !

Trial 2
Contestant chooses door 2, host can open door 1 or 3 doesn’t matter. Host asks contestant if he’d like to switch and if he does then he loses.

Trial 3
Contestant chooses door 3(which has a goat). Host opens door 1(he has to) and asks if contestant would like to switch to door 2. Contestant switches to door 2 and wins a cat!

So 2/3 times contestant wins when switching his/her original choice.
by meroes | 2026-01-23 05:43:12+00:00
No podcast app bugs?

Are you even trying?

Podcast app in CarPlay: A episode of a show is playing. It has the episode name, the show name, and a date. None of them hint at being pressable (touchscreen). But one is. Guess which one? The date one. That’s the only one that’s interactive and the only one that takes you to the actual show with its library.

Podcast app on phone. 90% of the time the downloaded episode is not there even if you just downloaded it. Sometimes you have to have another “safe” downloaded episode from another podcast to FORCE downloaded episodes to appear. If you don’t have this safe reserve episode in your downloads, your downloads will be a black hole. Download a safe one, and suddenly the missing ones pop into the folder, or heck, generate the folder at all.

10% of the time the episodes will just fail while downloading without ever resuming.
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-23 05:43:18+00:00
> Philip Fields, former counterterrorism analyst: The first thing they did was they disbanded our Foreign Influence Task Force. They said that we had to pull back on investigations under the Foreign Agent Registration Act, which applies to people who might be working at the direction of a foreign government without disclosing it. People that I worked with in the counterintelligence program were very upset about a lot of the investigative tools being taken away.

Wow this is scary. Suggests a cover up of treason, frankly. Maybe Trump himself. Or his family members or close friends. I wonder if he is compromised by China or Russia, given how quickly he is dismantling America.
by razster | 2026-01-23 05:45:34+00:00
I'd be a bit more worried with Z-Image Edit/Base is release.
Flux.2 Klein is our and its on par with Zit, and with some fine tuning can just about hit Flux.2.
Adding on top of that is Qwen Image Edit 2511 for additional refinement. Anything is possible. Those folks at r/StableDiffusion and falling over the possible release of Z-Image-Omni-Base, a hold me over until actual base is out. I've heard its equal to Flux.2.
Crazy time.
by marcus_holmes | 2026-01-23 05:45:37+00:00
I bumped into this when using the YC cofounder finder a few years ago.

In Australia we share the Poms' attitude to failure and success, and have refined it into "Tall Poppy Syndrome". In Australia, it is bad form to boast of your successes too much. You need to have some humility, some awareness of luck and privilege, give credit to others, and don't come over too egotistical, to succeed here.

Obviously in the USA the opposite is true; any failure must be explained away, talk about as much success as possible, and claim all the credit for yourself.

It resulted in a few very strange conversations. I thought most of the US potential co-founders I met were arrogant, boastful, dickheads [0]. I didn't trust that any of their claimed successes were real, I didn't believe they'd done half the things they said they'd done, and I didn't want to work with them. And I'm sure they thought I was a complete loser, incompetent and unable to succeed at anything I tried.

I occasionally hear US VCs and investors complaining about this when they visit Straya; that people here don't celebrate our success, and we're not ambitious enough. I see this as a culture gap that they're not navigating successfully.

As has been said about the US/British relationship; "two countries divided by a common language"

[0] apologies if you were one of them. I'm sure you're not really!
by rpdillon | 2026-01-23 05:47:34+00:00
You asked why someone wouldn't want automatic updates. I think my answer is clear.

Now you're talking about crime. I have little respect for judging morals through legality -- laws are political and fickle. Morality is more enduring.

In this case, the morals are that buying something is about control, including choosing when and how to use it, as well as when and how it is modified. You wouldn't want your dishwasher suddenly losing capability because the manufacturer decided to remove a feature.

I'm very confused about why you wanted to bring legal issues into this.
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-23 05:47:41+00:00
Reminder that Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill is going to add, at minimum, 4 trillion in new debt. That’s per the CBO. And if he gets the additional funding increases he is seeking this year, he will add another 5 trillion over the next ten years. That’s 9 trillion before half his term is up.

That money will go to the Trump family, their friends, friendly businesses who get government contracts, etc. But the cost will fall on all Americans. In the end I don’t see a way out without hyperinflation, which is another way of saying - we will be poor to prop up oligarchs who have hoarded billions in dishonest ways.

But the administration is asking us to ignore what our eyes see and instead worry about some insignificant fraud that some Somalians allegedly perpetrated, even though it is tiny by comparison.
by bawolff | 2026-01-23 05:47:59+00:00
I find it crazy that people would ask you in that direction. I would wonder why anyone would chose Turso over SQLite.

SQLite is some of the most battle tested software in the world. Turso seems like relatively new software that is still a bit experimental.

You do not want your databases to be new or trendy. You want your databases to be solid as a rock.
by rustystump | 2026-01-23 05:48:43+00:00
The cat is out of the bag tho. AI does have provably crazy value. Certainly not the agi hype marketing spews and who knows how economically viable it would be without vc.

However, i think any one who is still skeptical of the real efficacy is willfully ignorant. This is not a moral endorsement on how it was made or if it is moral to use but god damn it is a game changer across vast domains.
by ordu | 2026-01-23 05:50:30+00:00
> And just to add, I don't even own AC, and I can assure you it gets 40C/100+ Fahrenheit, with high humidity in Rome at summer. That's how sensitive I am to the topic.

This addition doesn't really add anything. Your tone says it much clearly. You don't like advice, do you? I'm sorry, but I can't help myself. I'd recommend you to try to lower your sensitivity.

But really I can't understand you. You've said:

> I ain't gonna use the dishwasher when the system wants me to, but when I can or want.

I need a bit of a guesswork to understand what you are implying, but still... I think you are sure that system will do no better than you from an effectiveness standpoint, while making things less comfortable to you. So you are enraged from mere proposition of such a system. It seems to me like a hyper sensitivity.

You see, if such a system would work as proposed and your allocation of resources is close to an optimum, then the system will do the same or something close to it. Nothing to be enraged of.

Also, I like how you combined:

> If you want to do something real for the environment change your diet!

with

> You know nothing about the people you interact with.

There was nothing about their diet but you kinda guessed it just by looking at their writing?
by _carbyau_ | 2026-01-23 05:50:37+00:00
> Sometimes its important to remind we're on a generational mission, and it's not maximising Netflix time.

Get that into the society's rules and then we'll talk.

I like to think I'm modest and sensible but I'm not bending over backwards while my neighbours get to do what I perceive as ridiculous things.

I used to live in a two bedroom unit, conserving things for the environment and next generation. But next door the neighbour in his huge house, 5 SUV's, heated pool streaming heat into the air all winter can just pay for it with money.

My actions are shaped to societies rules and monetary incentives. I'm not going out of my way to "roll coal" or anything stupid. But I'm not wasting my time either.
by xvxvx | 2026-01-23 05:50:59+00:00
Another 14,000 workers joining the search for tech jobs that don’t exist. The job market has been slim pickings for at least a year.

My advice: you’ll likely not find another job that’s equal in compensation and responsibilities as what you had, at least not anytime soon. There seem to be a number of smaller companies out there looking for talented staff, but who can’t offer as much.

You can be pessimistic and say that these companies are vultures, trying to snag talent for less. That may be the case for some, but others just don’t have the revenue. It’s worth a shot and better than being unemployed for a year or more while you blast your resume into a black hole. Start in a lower position and work your way back up in that year instead.
by antonkochubey | 2026-01-23 05:51:36+00:00
> Something like this will set you back $30K-$60K per year

lol, no, cloud is nowhere near that good value. It’s $3.5M annually.

> The Standard_HX176rs HPC VM size gives you 176 cores and 1.4 TB of memory

This one is $124k per year.
by reutinger | 2026-01-23 05:52:34+00:00
Fair point on the optics. In hindsight, clear casing would have been the smart play for 2026.

That said, the scrutiny shifted quickly from the 'black box' visual to the actual tech. It wasn't just a physical inspection; they brought in a forensic expert to audit the Rust borrow checker logs and interrupt handlers to verify the triggers were benign. It turned into a very technical interview, just with higher stakes.
by neilv | 2026-01-23 05:53:22+00:00
> Clearly, the authors in NeurIPS don't agree that using an LLM to help write is "plagiarism",

Or they didn't consider that it arguably fell within academia's definition of plagiarism.

Or they thought they could get away with it.

Why is someone behaving questionably the authority on whether that's OK?

> Nobody I know in real life, personally or at work, has expressed this belief. I have literally only ever encountered this anti-AI extremism (extremism in the non-pejorative sense) in places like reddit and here.

It's not "anti-AI extremism".

If no one you know has said, "Hey, wait a minute, if I'm copy&pasting this text I didn't write, and putting my name on it, without credit or attribution, isn't that like... no... what am I missing?" then maybe they are focused on other angles.

That doesn't mean that people who consider other angles are "extremist" in doing so.

They're only "extremist" in the way that anyone critical at all of 'crypto' was "extremist", to the bros pumping it. Not coincidentally, there's some overlap in bros between the two.
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2026-01-23 05:53:31+00:00
There's a chengyu 旁观者清

Hainan is CPC's attempt to check the role of Stanford (latter being just as far from the Imperator). Hanoi has VNU+bros (globalist Saint had a stint, already has one Fields' etc)

Thai Canal would do more for HCMC?

Not to mention they are already light years ahead in propaganda, as you note :)
by afro88 | 2026-01-23 05:53:36+00:00
I'm not great with math beyond high school level. But I am very interested in, among many things, analog synthesiser emulations. The "zero delay filter" was a big innovation in the mid 2000s that led to a big jump in emulation accuracy.

I tried to understand how they work and hit a brick wall. Recently I had a chat with an LLM and it clicked. I understand how the approximation algorithm works that enables solving for the next sample without the feedback paradox of needing to know it's value to complete the calculation.

Just one example of many.

It's similar to sitting down with a human and being able to ask questions that they patiently answer so you can understand the information in the context of what you already know.

This is huge for students if educational institutions can get past the cheating edge of the double edged sword.
by mjanx123 | 2026-01-23 05:55:46+00:00
Its not random. The neurodivergent brain lacks the ability to perceive (some aspects of) the virtual social reality as something real and to focus on that. In a startup, where the problems at hand are objectively real, the ADHD hyperfocus can excel. In a typical corporation, where the situation is the opposite, it struggles.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9541695/
by reutinger | 2026-01-23 05:56:35+00:00
36 hours? You win. I bow to the master.

You are absolutely right about the optics (and the blinkin' lights). The forensic expert made the same point—unintended drama is still drama. I definitely didn't aim for this (just wanted to demo the hardware), but once the process started, I had to respect the thoroughness. Their protocols are no joke.
by techpression | 2026-01-23 05:56:48+00:00
Isn’t that the whole point of publishing? This happened plenty before AI too, and the claims are easily verified by checking the claimed hallucinations.
Don’t publish things that aren’t verified and you won’t have a problem, same as before but perhaps now it’s easier to verify, which is a good thing.
We see this problem in many areas, last week it was a criminal case where a made up law was referenced, luckily the judge knew to call it out.
We can’t just blindly trust things in this era, and calling it out is the only way to bring it up to the surface.
by locknitpicker | 2026-01-23 05:58:23+00:00
> I worked with XML and all the tooling around it for a long time. Zero interest in going back. It’s not the angle brackets or the serialization efficiency. It’s all of the above brain damage.

I remember a decade ago seeing job ads that explicitly requested XML skills. The fact that being able to do something with XML was considered a full time job requiring a specialist says everything there is to be said about XML.
by makingstuffs | 2026-01-23 05:58:29+00:00
The hotspot issue is my absolute pet peeve. It is so bad for me that I just had to accept that I have two options for hotspotting:

1. Go to settings and change my phones name then connect. Every. Damn. Time.

2. Use a cable and hope the MacBook Pro picks it up.

Honestly the quality of iPhones has deteriorated to a point where my next phone will just be something like an oppo or xiomi. I’m done paying £500+ for a phone that doesn’t do what it’s meant to while forcing a load of crap I don’t want down my neck
by josephcsible | 2026-01-23 05:59:15+00:00
> Believing complainants uncritically isn't some sort of virtue you can reasonably expect people to adhere to.

It is when the other side refuses to tell their side of the story. Compare it to a courtroom trial. If you sue someone, and they don't show up and tell their side of the story, the judge is going to accept your side pretty much as you tell it.
by nine_k | 2026-01-23 06:01:33+00:00
XML grew from SGML (like HTML did), and it brought from it a bunch things that are useless outside a markup language. Attributes were a bad idea. Entities were a so-so idea, which became unapologetically terrible when URLs and file references were allowed. CDATA was an interesting idea but an error-prone one, and likely it just did not belong.

OTOH namespaces, XSD, XSLT were great, modulo the noisy tags. XSLT was the first purely functional language that enjoyed mass adoption in the industry. (It was also homoiconic, like Lisp, amenable to metaprogramming.) Namespaces were a lifesaver when multiple XML documents from different sources had to be combined. XPath was also quite nice for querying.

XML is noisy because of the closing tags, but it also guarantees a level of integrity, and LZ-type compressors, even gzip, are excellent at compacting repeated strings.

Importantly, XML is a relatively human-friendly format. It has comments, requires no quoting, no commas between list items, etc.

Complexity killed XML. JSON was stupid simple, and thus contained far fewer footguns, which was a very welcome change. It was devised as a serialization format, a bit human-hostile, but mapped ideally to bag-of-named-values structures found in basically any modern language.

Now we see XML tools adopted to JSON: JSONSchema, JSONPath, etc. JSON5 (as used in e.g. VSCode) allows for comments, trailing commas and other creature comforts. With tools like that, and dovetailing tools like Pydantic, XML lost any practical edge over JSON it might ever have.

What's missing is a widespread replacement for XSLT. Could be a fun project.
by llIIllIIllIIl | 2026-01-23 06:02:41+00:00
I guess it depends on how people interact with LLM. Cognitive debt may be acquired when people `talk` with machines, asking personal questions, like asking what to answer to the sms from a friend, etc.

It may seem different when people `command` LLMs to do particular actions. At the end, this community, most of all probably, understands that LLM is nothing else than advanced auto-complete with natural language interface instead of Bash.

> Write me an essay about birds in my area

Than later will be presented as human’s work compared to

> How does this codebase charge customers?

When a person needs to add trials to the existing billing.

The latter will result a deterministic code after (many) prompts that a person will be able to validate for correctness (another question if they will though).
by _fizz_buzz_ | 2026-01-23 06:02:47+00:00
Very unlikely.

- The greens opposed the Nord Stream pipelines for years. And have been opposed to relying on natural gas for a long time.

-Nuclear power is generally a contentious subject in German society. Probably because of Chernobyl and how a lot of the radioactive cloud blew into Germany. Whoever lived through this will have some dramatic memories of those weeks (kids not allowed to playgrounds/outside etc.). It was actually the CDU and FDP that finally decided the phase out of nuclear power after the Fukushima disaster. (The Greens also voted for it)

- The Greens are very strong supporters of Ukraine.

I personally believe the nuclear phase out was a mistake, but it had broad support in the German parliament and society. The phase out would have happened even if the greens hadn’t voted for it.