MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gamblor956 | 2026-01-28 01:16:59+00:00
That's because criminal prosecution and product tort liability are not meaningful deterrents.

Patent litigation is a different thing entirely. The burden of proof is lower, and the payouts are higher.

To put things in perspective, Apple, Amazon, etc., have lost patent lawsuits worth hundreds of millions over trivial aspects of their devices that are just tiny parts out of thousands compromising the phone/tablet/whatever.
by raincole | 2026-01-28 01:17:32+00:00
I know many people have negative opinions about this.

I'd also like to share what I saw. Since GPT-4o became a thing, everyone who submits academic papers I know in my non-english speaking country (N > 5) has been writing papers in our native language and translating them with GPT-4o exclusively. It has been the norm for quite a while. If hallucination is such a serious problem it has been so for one and half a year.
by hatmatrix | 2026-01-28 01:17:38+00:00
That study must have compared beginners in LaTeX and MS Word. There is a learning curve, but LaTeX will often save more time in the end.

It is an old language though. LaTeX is the macro system on top of TeX, but now you can write markdown or org-mode (or orgdown) and generate LaTeX -> PDF via pandoc/org-mode. Maybe this is the level of abstraction we should be targeting. Though currently, you still need to drop into LaTeX for very specific fine-tuning.
by darksaints | 2026-01-28 01:17:38+00:00
No, felon illegals are supposed to go to prison and serve their sentence before deportation. You know, because they committed felonies.

Crossing the border illegally is a misdemeanor and overstaying your visa is a civil violation and not even a crime. Yet somehow those are the only ones he's targeting. Those, and actual lawful immigrants that say things that he doesn't like.
by megous | 2026-01-28 01:19:20+00:00
So what's the supposed goal of this "targeting" of ICE agents? Because that's a key to the insurgency vs protest thing.

We have chats, organized territory and labor specialization in a company I work for, too. It doesn't say anything by itself. It's just describing a means of human cooperation. Goal is to write software. You can have organized protest movement too. Unless the goal is to overthrow governing authority, or whatnot, it's not insurgency.
by everfrustrated | 2026-01-28 01:19:35+00:00
I've found copilot chat is able to do everything I need. I tried the Claude plugin for vscode and it was a noticeably worse experience for me.

Mind you copilot has only supported agent mode relatively recently.

I really like the way copilot does changes in such a way you can accept or reject and even revert to point in time in the chat history without using git. Something about this just fits right with how my brain works.
Using Claude plugin just felt like I had one hand tied behind my back.
by kelnos | 2026-01-28 01:20:02+00:00
(xfwl4 author here.)

> I wonder how strictly they interpret behavior here given the architectural divergence?

It's right there in the rest of the sentence (that you didn't quote all of): "... or as much as possible considering the differences between X11 and Wayland."

I'll do my best. It won't be exactly the same, of course, but it will be as close as I can get it.

> As an example, focus-stealing prevention.

Focus stealing prevention is a place where I think xfwl4 could be at an advantage over xfwm4. Xfwm4 does a great job at focus-stealing prevention, but it has to work on a bunch of heuristics, and sometimes it just does the wrong thing, and there's not much we can do about it. Wayland's model plus xdg-activation should at least make the focus-or-don't-focus decision much more consistent.

> I am curious about the mandatory compositing overhead. Can the compositor replicate the input-to-pixel latency of uncomposited x11 on low-end devices or is that a class of performance we just have to sacrifice for the frame-perfect rendering of wayland?

I'm not sure yet, but I suspect your fears are well-founded here. On modern (and even not-so-modern) hardware, even low-end GPUs should be fine with all this (on my four-year-old laptop with Intel graphics, I can't tell the difference performance-wise with xfwm4's compositor on or off). But I know people run Xfce/X11 on very-not-modern hardware, and those people may unfortunately be left behind. But we'll see.
by emsign | 2026-01-28 01:20:06+00:00
The idea that language influences the world view isn't new, it was speculated upon long before artificial intelligence was a thing, but it explicitely speculates about having an influence on the world view of humans. It doesn't postulate that language itself creates a worldview in whatever system processes text. Or else books would have a worldview.

It's a categeory error to apply it to an LLM. Language works on humans, because we share a common experience as humans, it's not just a logical description of thoughts, it's also an arrangement of symbols that stand for experiences a human can have. That why humans are able to empathically experience a story, because it triggers much more than just rational thought inside their brains.
by py4 | 2026-01-28 01:20:24+00:00
1. No, implementing well defined requirements were not commoditized a decade ago. You still have to come up with the design and proper (efficient,correct,...) solution that respects the requirements. it was and still is the skill set of a L4/L5 SWE.

2. If you think LLMs cannot help with navigating ambiguity and requirements, you are wrong. it might not be able to 100% crack it (due to not having all the necessary context), but still help a lot.
by WillAdams | 2026-01-28 01:21:17+00:00
I would really like to see someone work that up.

I suspect that Moment of Inspiration and Rhinoceros 3D are something along those lines, but I'm not aware of an opensource tool which hoes that row.

One thing in particular which it would be nice to see would be a facility where one could draw a piece of geometry, then all the coordinates/values which describe it could be displayed in a pane where they could then be named or re-arranged, or the values changed, or even the values changed into formulae.
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2026-01-28 01:21:37+00:00
I think that's a fair assessment on their part however it's worth noting that your phone number does not serve as your account ID. It can be used to look up an account but there are caveats to that.

The lookups go through a secure enclave, the system is architected to limit the number of lookups that can be done, and the system has some fairly extensive anti-exfiltration cryptographic fuckery running inside the secure enclave to further limit the extent to which accounts can be efficiently looked up.

And of course you can also remove your phone number from contact discovery (but not from the acct entirely) but I'm not sure how that interacts with lookup for subpoenas. If they use the same system that contact discovery uses, it may be an undocumented way to exclude your account from subpoena responses.

The rest of what they say however is pretty spot on. The priority for signal is privacy, not anonymity. They try to optimise anonymity when they can but they do give up a little anonymity in exchange for anti-spam and user-friendliness.

So of course the ending notes of "use a VPN, configure the settings to maximise anonymity, and maybe even get a secondary phone number to use with it" are all perfectly reasonable suggestions.
by DannyBee | 2026-01-28 01:21:43+00:00
I do understand what can happen (I'm an IP lawyer), but this basically requires enabling spotify to act as your attorney, since they still do not in fact own the rights, even with this.
You can't manufacture standing here - only folks who are exclusive rightsholders can sue. Period.
So it would require giving them power of attorney enabling them to sue on your behalf, since you (or whoever) still own the exclusive rights .

I strongly doubt their contract terms have this in there, it would be fairly shocking.

I say this having seens tons of these kinds of contracts, even with spotify, and never seeing something like this.
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-01-28 01:21:49+00:00
China is definitely the big winner of the second Trump administration here. America alienating its friends like Canada just pushes them closer to China, and retreating from the stage of world science means China can fill the gap.

I guess it is actually going to happen, in 10 years, 20 years max, no one will think the world super power is America anymore, it will clearly be behind China by then.
by lofaszvanitt | 2026-01-28 01:21:59+00:00
The whole thing is about getting rid of experts and let the entry level idiots do all the work. The coders become expendable. And people do not see the chasm staring back at them :D. LLMs in their current form redistributes "intelligence" and expertise to the average joes for mere pennies. It should be much much more expensive, or it will disrupt the whole ecosystem. If it becomes even more intelligent it must be bludgeoned to death a.k.a. regulated like hell, otherwise the ensuing disruption will kill the job market and in the long term human values.

As an added plus: those, who already have wealth will benefit the most, instead of the masses. Since the distribution and dissemination of new projects is at the same level as before, meaning you would need a lot of money. So no matter how clever you are with an llm, if you don't have the means to distribute it you will be left in the dirt.
by emsign | 2026-01-28 01:22:16+00:00
But it's not correct! Exactly because it can't possibly have enough training data to fill the void of not being able to experience the human condition. Text is not enough. The error rate of LLMs are horrendously bad. And the errors grow exponentially the more steps follow each other.

All the great work you see on the internet AI has supposedly done was only achieved by a human doing lots of trial and error and curating everything the agentic LLM did. And it's all cherry picked successes.
by Fnoord | 2026-01-28 01:22:40+00:00
Wikipedia about Groklaw [1]

> Groklaw was a website that covered legal news of interest to the free and open source software community. Started as a law blog on May 16, 2003, by paralegal Pamela Jones ("PJ"), it covered issues such as the SCO-Linux lawsuits, the EU antitrust case against Microsoft, and the standardization of Office Open XML.

> Its name derives from "grok", roughly meaning "to understand completely", which had previously entered geek slang.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groklaw
by browningstreet | 2026-01-28 01:23:00+00:00
You can read about PRISM, Upstream, FAIRVIEW, STORMBREW, NSA Section 215 (PATRIOT Act) in a lot of places. But essentially they collected all call records and tapped the Internet backbone and stored as much traffic as they could. It’s not all automatic but it’s overly streamlined given the promises of court orders. Which were rubber stamped.
by mrbonner | 2026-01-28 01:23:09+00:00
Plot twist: humans become the new Proof of Work consensus mechanism. Instead of GPUs burning electricity to hash blocks, we burn our sanity verifying whether that Medium article was written by a person or a particularly confident LLM.

"Human Verification as a Service": finally, a lucrative career where the job description is literally "read garbage all day and decide if it's authentic garbage or synthetic garbage." LinkedIn influencers will pivot to calling themselves "Organic Intelligence Validators" and charge $500/hr to squint at emails and go "yeah, a human definitely wrote this passive-aggressive Slack message."

The irony writes itself: we built machines to free us from tedious work, and now our job is being the tedious work for the machines. Full circle. Poetic even. Future historians (assuming they're still human and not just Claude with a monocle) will mark this as the moment we achieved peak civilization: where the most valuable human skill became "can confidently say whether another human was involved."

Bullish on verification miners. Bearish on whatever remains of our collective attention span.
by Cu3PO42 | 2026-01-28 01:23:31+00:00
> What prevents Microsoft from mandating removal of enrollment permissions for user keychains and Secure Boot toggle

Theoretically, nothing. But it's worth pointing out that so far they have actually done the opposite. They currently mandate that hardware vendors must allow you to enroll your own keys. There was a somewhat questionable move recently where they introduced a 'more secure by default' branding in which the 3rd party CA (used e.g. go sign shim for Linux) is disabled by default, but again, they mandated there must be an easy toggle to enable it. I don't begrudge them to much for it, because there have been multiple instances of SB bypass via 3rd party signed binaries.

All of this is to say: this is not a scenario I'm worried about today. Of course this may change down the line.
by kelnos | 2026-01-28 01:23:48+00:00
> Wayland is far more modular.

Not sure I agree here, assuming you mean "... than X11". With Wayland, you put your display code, input-handling code, compositor code, session-handling code, and window-management code all in the same process. (Though there is a Wayland protocol being worked on to allow moving the WM bits out-of-process.)

With X11, display and input-handling are in the X server, and all those other functions can be in other processes, communicating over standard interfaces.
by bonsai_spool | 2026-01-28 01:24:18+00:00
> What I do not understand is why people in some cities are defending violent illegal immigrants. I am told it is for voting purposes to get more delegates but it can't really be worth it. At least in my opinion it would not be worth

My issue with the current tactics is a loss of our Bill of Rights privileges (note this doesn't depend on citizenship), which really can only go poorly from here.

> What I do not understand is why people in some cities are defending violent illegal immigrants.

There's an easy argument about maintaining Constitutional rights for every person—once we stop doing that, we're essentially finished as a democracy.

The majority of people being removed are not criminals of any sort whatsoever. It's tricky to get data about this as DHS is releasing very political statements[1] but many have been in the US for decades and have no criminal records in Minnesota. Also, Minnesota is not a liberal state—being a Democrat means different things in different parts of the country, and things are quite 'centrist' there; I say this to discourage porting sensibilities from other states.

1. DHS Highlights Worst of the Worst Criminal Illegal Aliens Arrested in Minnesota Yesterday Including Murderers, Drug Traffickers, and an Illegal Alien with TWENTY-FOUR Convictions - (this is the title of the relevant webpage)

edit - To distill my perspective, I am worried that we will lose our rights, not because I am alarmist, but because this has happened in several democracies this century, notably Turkey (but also cf Hungary, Poland, the Philipnes). Even amongst undemocratic nations, strongmen are upending institutions (China, but also more recently in West Africa).

The only way the US can escape is by continually standing up for what rights we still have.
by ndriscoll | 2026-01-28 01:24:23+00:00
I'm looking at all of what's in that document. The 'E' is literally the most dissimilar letter. It's very obviously distinct, and even more obviously distinct when isolated. In any case, they might legally prevail, but let's not kid ourselves: no one is going to be confused. The lawyer who wrote that is not just immoral in some abstract sense; they are concretely a disingenuous liar.
by tharkun__ | 2026-01-28 01:24:25+00:00
I no longer do keto no. I also started keto after I had gotten better already from the probiotics but not much. I'm not sure where you read about that subtilis can only live off of glucose. I'm having a hard time finding primary sources that actually talk about this but handily Google's "AI mode" also "answered" my search query and it does state it primarily thrives on glucose and sugars but can also break down and live off of proteins and fats.

FWIW, as I understand it, many probiotics aren't going to colonize on their own and "stick around" for a prolonged period of time when you stop taking them, even under good circumstances but you can't quote me on that so to speak. And in the past we would've gotten many of them through one way or another through our diet as well, just not through a probiotic but naturally.

I tried multiple probiotics. Both blends of multiple types as well as things like "Saccharomyces Boulardii"-only preparation. I don't recall all the exact ones I tried though.
by zamadatix | 2026-01-28 01:24:30+00:00
Mostly a "We know local LLMs as being this, and all of the variants of this can provide real value regardless of which is most commonly referenced" point. I.e. large local LLMs aren't only something people mess with, they often provide a lot of value for a relative few people rather than a little value for a relative lot of people. Who thinks which modality and type brings the most value is largely a matter of opinion of the user getting the value, not just the option which runs on consumer hardware alone.

You're of course accurate that smaller LLMs are more commonly deployed, it's just not the part I was really responding to.
I wrote a TTF-to-Texture function for SDL2
by oldivygames | 2026-01-28 01:24:32+00:00
For anyone interested in SDL2, who prefers textures to surfaces, but for text rendering is stuck with SDL2_ttf which only uses surfaces.

I made a video about it here (hope it's OK to share this here):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8-06L0e_2U
by jetsetk | 2026-01-28 01:26:02+00:00
That is motivational content, but not economics. Most startups will be noise, even more so than before. The value of being a founder ceases when everyone is a founder, when it becomes universal. You will need customers. Nobody wants to buy re-invented-the-wheel-74.0. It lacks character, it lacks soul. Without it, your product will be nothing but noise in a noisy world.
by Liftyee | 2026-01-28 01:26:19+00:00
Agreed, AI/VR definitely offers nightmarish opportunities.

At least drugs/alcohol are self limiting: you have to meet your dealer, go to a store, eventually run out of money...

TikTok/Reels/Shorts are free, infinite, and in your pocket on a device you're now forced to use in daily life (bank/2fa/messaging apps).
by koyote | 2026-01-28 01:26:36+00:00
Are there any details around how the round-trip and exchange of data (CPU<->GPU) is implemented in order to not be a big (partially-hidden) performance hit?

e.g. this code seems like it would entirely run on the CPU?

print!("Enter your name: ");
let _ = std::io::stdout().flush();
let mut name = String::new();
std::io::stdin().read_line(&mut name).unwrap();

But what if we concatenated a number to the string that was calculated on the GPU or if we take a number:

print!("Enter a number: ");
[...] // string number has to be converted to a float and sent to the GPU
// Some calculations with that number performed on the GPU
print!("The result is: " + &the_result.to_string()); // Number needs to be sent back to the CPU

Or maybe I am misunderstanding how this is supposed to work?
by jjk166 | 2026-01-28 01:26:40+00:00
The US imports about 30% of its lumber. Canada is the largest source of imported lumber, but it's still less than a quarter of all lumber consumed in the US. Surprisingly, the limit on US production is not trees but sawmill capacity.

Sandpaper requires specific grades of corundum; Ontario happens to have several notable large deposits of extremely fit-for-purpose corundum. The Canadian deposits were also a conveniently close source for what would become America's largest abrasives products producer, 3M, after its attempt to mine corundum in Minnesota failed (3M stands for Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing company).
by autoexec | 2026-01-28 01:28:36+00:00
In which case it's no longer relevant because nobody is going to overthrow a government that has nukes, tanks, drones, and chemical weapons using a hunting rifle or a handgun. The idea was cute enough back when the firepower the government had to use against the people was limited to muskets and cannons, but currently the idea of guns being used to overthrow a government with a military like the US is a complete joke.

Today you'll still find a bunch of 2nd amendment supporters insisting against common sense regulations because they need their guns to stop government oppression and tyranny yet you can open youtube right now and find countless examples of government oppression and tyranny and to no surprise those guys aren't using their guns to do a damn thing about any of it. In fact they're usually the ones making excuses for the government and their abuses.

There are reasonable arguments for supporting 2nd amendment and gun ownership but resisting/overthrowing the government is not one of them. That's nothing more than a comforting power fantasy.
by d4v3 | 2026-01-28 01:29:48+00:00
> If I can get distracted from my real world tasks anytime, anywhere, the immediate incentives to work on real things disappear. Effectively, one can get stuck in a local minimum.

> I don't know how to solve it, ...

> but personally I've chosen to block as many feeds/algorithms as I can, ...

I think you solved it :) (at least, for yourself)

There are many things "out there" that are addictive and distracting and thus unhealthy, but we all have to find some way to overcome
by WarmWash | 2026-01-28 01:30:02+00:00
>though i suspect <1% murder out of all police killings is a gross under-estimation

It's easy to track because anytime it happens it's instant major news on the internet. Trust me, in the economy of social media clout, few things rank as valuable as police murder.

Pretti was frontpage of reddit within 30(!) minutes of being shot.
by abustamam | 2026-01-28 01:30:07+00:00
> LLM-generated code has no theory; you either need to supervise it closely enough to impose your own, or treat it as disposable.

Agreed! And I think that's what I'm getting at. Adding what they're now calling "skills," or writing your own, is becoming crucial to LLM-assisted development. If the LLM is writing too much slop, then there probably wasn't sufficient guidance to ensure that slop wouldn't be written.

The first step of course is to actually check that the generated code is indeed slop, which is where many people miss the mark.
by kelnos | 2026-01-28 01:31:07+00:00
(xfwl4 author here.)

> using smithay, the brand new Rust/Wayland library

Fun fact: smithay is older than wlroots, if you go by commit history (January 2017 vs. April 2017).

> It would have been much easier and cost-effective to use wlroots

As a 25+ year C developer, and a ~7-year Rust developer, I am very confident that any boost I'd get from using wlroots over smithay would be more than negated by debugging memory management and ownership issues. And while wlroots is more batteries-included than smithay, already I'm finding that not to be much of a problem, given that I decided to base xfwl4 on smithay's example compositor, and not write one completely from scratch.