MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by programjames | 2026-01-15 17:30:31+00:00
Seems like an arrogant American take. The United States primary and secondary schools are middling at best, and that has been showing through to its universities. Foreigners were already choosing Chinese universities. It's not like the recent administration could just "keep pulling", what do they have to appeal with? Obviously shutting off the flow of any and all talent is stupid, but it's a little arrogant to pretend it was not already diverting to better systems.
by publicdebates | 2026-01-15 17:30:31+00:00
Why, you ask? Because your comment seemed like you had read only the title and nothing else I wrote here, and wanted to contribute off the cuff links you had stored up. And you barely even bothered to summarize any of what they contain. I've been reading this book by Dr. Vivek Hallegere Murthy ever since you linked it, and it's definitely got some great insights into it, that mirror my own thoughts and struggles with this. But in your comment, it felt like a mere afterthought. And maybe that's fine, maybe that's fair, you're a busy guy and have your own stuff to do. It's not against the rules or general moral code to write a drive by comment. But it just feels like a low effort comment. Which is why I wanted to downvote it. And now that it's surfaced higher than mine, it just feels like pouring lemon juice on a papercut.
by saghm | 2026-01-15 17:30:37+00:00
I don't disagree that people work with different amounts of efforts, but if anything, to me it seems far more likely that people who have to work only because they won't be able to survive otherwise are going to be more stressed and less likely to be able to work productively. If the only people who work are the ones who choose to rather than an additional set who are forced to in order to survive, the average motivation level is going to be higher, and it's not obvious to me that this wouldn't be better even if the total number of workers is lower. This just seems like another balancing problem, and there's still no obvious reason to me why the default assumption is that maximizing the number of people who work will end up being the best option.
by xp84 | 2026-01-15 17:30:51+00:00
You're right that Biden screwed the party.

Though Harris was an unserious VP pick in the first place (2020). Given that Biden was 183 years old at the time, he should have picked a VP that Americans or at least Democratic voters had demonstrated at least moderate acceptance as a President in the primary, instead of picking essentially the least popular Democrat in the race (just to pander? Why else?). I guess the DEI dogma told him that it's better to have a Black woman on the ticket even if she was the worst choice by any measure: ability to get votes, relatability, or political experience. The funniest part is that Harris was most unpopular in the primary with the 'wokest' Democratic voters -- they hated her for being a decent D.A. and charging criminals with crimes, even ones who were 'disadvantaged minorities.' DEI forced her selection anyway because she checked two identity boxes.
by idopmstuff | 2026-01-15 17:30:52+00:00
> I'm not sure the approach of "completely autonomous coding" is the right way to go.

I suspect the author of the post would agree. This feels much more like a experiment to push the limits of LLMs than anything they're looking to seriously use as a product (or even the basis of a product).

I think the more interesting question is when the approach of completely autonomous coding will be the right way to go. LLMs are definitely progressing along a spectrum of: Can't do it -> Can do it with help -> Can do it alone but code isn't great -> Can do it alone with good code. Right now I'd say they're only in that final step for very small projects (e.g. simple Python scripts), but it seems like an inevitability that they will get there for increasingly large ones.
by cogman10 | 2026-01-15 17:31:04+00:00
These are bad things but I have a hard time seeing these as the reason why science is lagging.

Science is lagging in the US because the US has destroyed viable careers in science.

Who does the hard work to get PHd in a scientific field knowing that they'll be saddled with hundreds of thousands of jobs in debt and that there's a good chance that they'll have no employment opportunities after the fact. Especially with the recent destruction of the public sector in scientific jobs, it's probably the worst time ever to get a degree in a field of science.
by weslleyskah | 2026-01-15 17:31:24+00:00
Man, I know what you are talking about through and through. Happens all the time on the political Right/Left pages, controversial authors of classical literature, WWII atrocities, and the list goes on. Scientific and Movie or Art articles are way better to discover interesting stuff.

The stalking, censorship, and unwillingness to contribute to topics deemed as "controversial" is unreal. People might not believe, but wikipedia truly is one hell of a cesspool.

Wikipedia is just too much bureaucracy for beginner editors nowadays. The whole baptism of fire that you need to undergo to be part of the oligarchy is just not worth the hassle.
by stackghost | 2026-01-15 17:31:25+00:00
>We all have this idea in our head that if people are confronted with enough evidence, they'll change their minds. But that doesn't happen. People rationalize.

It's not about changing minds. It's about changing behaviours.

Right now, HN is a place where you can come to talk about the neat technical problems you solved while building software that does the digital equivalent of going to the corner store to buy Hitler a pack of cigarettes, while ignoring the fact that your work is harmful to society.

And nobody is allowed to talk about how maybe we shouldn't do the digital equivalent of going to the corner store and buying Hitler a pack of cigarettes, because it's not cUrIoUs CoNvErSaTiOn.
by MillionOClock | 2026-01-15 17:31:27+00:00
I’ll use this post as an occasion to ask a question I can’t find an answer to anywhere as someone developing a closed-source commercial agentic AI builder app: does either GitHub Copilot or OpenAI codex teams plan to also expand this quota usage support to all tools provided they respect certain rules, even if non open-source and/or commercial? Up to now I was planning to just enable people to input their own API key but this kind of integration would be amazing for me. Would really love some clarification about this if anyone from those teams reads this, or if anyone knows who to potentially contact to find an answer.
by gehwartzen | 2026-01-15 17:31:28+00:00
Some guy on X recently commented on how “dystopian” Flock’s nationwide surveillance is.

Response by Garry Tan (CEO of YC)[1]

“You're thinking Chinese surveillance

US-based surveillance helps victims and prevents more victims”

[1] https://x.com/garrytan/status/1963310592615485955
by goatlover | 2026-01-15 17:31:32+00:00
What people voted for 14 months ago and how ICE is being used are two different things. Polling shows a majority of Americans do not support how ICE is behaving and do not feel like it is making them safer. There are not plenty of people "violently rioting" at this point. Blowing whistles and yelling at federal agents isn't rioting. If you want to see what violent riots look like, see the Iranian footage.
by Steven420 | 2026-01-15 17:31:44+00:00
Most of those are shorts clips that do not show the context of the situation. These sorts of clips are what is causing people to believe the actions of federal agents are not justified when they actually are. When the initial clip of Renee Good came out people thought that the she did not drive into the agent but now that other angles have come out it is clear that she did hit the federal agent. It is always important to find the whole clip and not just propaganda clips
by TeMPOraL | 2026-01-15 17:31:48+00:00
> The point being that food is more and less than chemistry. It's more and less than thermodynamics or heat transfer. It's art.

It differs from chemical process engineering in that the latter actually cares about consistency and quality of outcome.

Kitchens are rarely even equipped properly for cooking to be anything other than art. Fortunately, humans aren't particularly discerning about taste either :).
by themgt | 2026-01-15 17:32:17+00:00
Yes, but it was never more private than the law decided for. Any judge could lawfully have the police tear the envelope apart and read the contents during an investigations

This is more like a judge ordering phone book providers not to list a phone number for a public organization known to engage in criminal activity. It would be prima facie unconstitutional in America, while the police opening a suspect's envelope can be an authorized legal search.
by mmargenot | 2026-01-15 17:32:17+00:00
I made an obsidian extension that does semantic and hybrid (RRF with FTS) search with local models. I have done some knowledge graph and ontology experimentation around this, but nothing that I’d like to include yet.

This is specifically a “remembrance agent”, so it surfaces related atoms to what you’re writing rather than doing anything generative.

Extension: https://github.com/mmargenot/tezcat

Also available in community plugins.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2026-01-15 17:32:27+00:00
>If you value your comfy life over the well being of others and the future of not only the country

For people who think borders are just lines, our country as geography doesn't even exist. It's just lines. For people who think that all people are the same, everywhere, and deserve to go where they please, our country as a people doesn't exist either.

So if that's your conception of a country, why should I care about it at all? It's just a random place I happened to be born, and its disloyalty to me outweighs any I might show it. I inherited a house jointly with the rest of you, and you keep letting squatters live here for free. Once they're here, you screech if anyone tries to evict them. If I complain about them punching holes in the drywall and shitting in the kitchen sink, you tell me I'm racist. Whatever else, you and I are incompatible, and I am out of options.
by rvnx | 2026-01-15 17:32:40+00:00
For the last part I agree with you, the LLMs tend to say what you like to hear.

The echo chamber problem also exists, pushing them to say pros and cons is not perfect, but helps to make an opinion (and also "unaligned" models).

Facts are very skewed by the environment, if you push too much in one direction that is too controversial or because the politicians disagree too much with you there are plenty of negative consequences: your website gets blocked, or you get publicly under pressure, or you lose donations, you lose grants, your payment providers blocks you, you lose audience, you can get a fine, you can go to jail, etc.

Many different options.

It's easier to go with the flow, than to raise any question.

Imagine here, we disagree, you have one opinion, what happens if both of us fight for 10 months, 24/7 debating "what is the truth ?" on that topic.

Maybe you have that energy and time (or it's your mission where you are paid by your company, or this topic is important to you), but I don't have time, and because of that "your" truth is going to win.

It's always doable to find or fabricate facts, and the truth wins based on the amount of energy, power and money that the person has.

No matter if it's real or not.

There is a funny sentence I heard from a well-known politician about this:

"There is the truth that you say, and there is truth that you feel"

The most tricky part:

There are also truths that you cannot source properly, but are still facts. For example, some famous VCs deals are still today done by pushing in-and-out penises out of another person body, very very fast.

Truth is the same, facts are the same, they are difficult to source, but a reality that requires a tons of energy to defend (and is dangerous for the editor).

Is Wikipedia going to include these ? Sporadically, and it's going to be super difficult, due to legal risk, but if you ask an LLM: "who in the VC world is likely to do such?", you may actually get a few hints.
by jmyeet | 2026-01-15 17:32:59+00:00
"Constitutional" here means, in the court's own words, "common sense" now [1]:

> The doctrine was articulated as a paradigm in FDA v. Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. (2000), which advised "common sense" in assessing whether Congress intended to delegate broad regulatory powers

Put another way, the court is simply deciding on their own if the other two branches really maent what they'd written into law. Put another way, it's just vibes.

That's not to say there can't be confusing, ambiguous or even contradictory legislative language. As an aside, we had Congress (under both parties) intentionally write ambiguous language knowing federal agencies would interpret it. It was a known consequence. I am, of course, referring to Chevron deference.

Anyway, so the court invented a "common sense" principle and, as they always do in a power grab, they expanded their own principle under Roberts:

> It was applied in Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA (2014) and King v. Burwell (2015), with Chief Justice John Roberts writing for the majority in the latter.[2] The Court first explicitly called it the "major questions doctrine" in West Virginia v. EPA (2022), where it held that agencies must point to "clear congressional authorization" for the power asserted in "extraordinary cases"

The Roberts court then went on to use this subjective idea of "clear Congressional authorization" as strike down Covid mandates, student loan forgiveness, the power of the EPA and a bunch of other very political ends. Weird.

And once again, none of this invokes any Constitutional protection or language at all.

Or put yet another way, the Supreme Court has two roles: constitutional interpretation and statutory interpretation. The second one is being the final court of review for any federal or state case. This is a duty they gave themselves (ie Marbury v Madison). So the court gave themselves the authority to review any court decision and then expanded that to use "common sense" as a test for overwriting the will of Congress and the President.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_questions_doctrine
by Dilettante_ | 2026-01-15 17:33:05+00:00
By that measure, doing something for a poor person who cannot pay would be entirely worthless, while delivering food to a particularly generous billionaire would be more valuable than an entire month of an average person's work.

The error of your argument lies in the assumption that any participant in the market possesses enough money to pay the true "value-to-them" of a thing.
by RickKirby | 2026-01-15 17:33:21+00:00
This is a small, open-source reference implementation of an execution-time control gate for agentic AI systems.

LLMs can reason and propose actions, but they never execute directly.
All execution is mediated by a deterministic gate that evaluates intent against policy at runtime, fail-closed by default.

Included:
A frozen architectural spec defining the execution boundary and invariants
A minimal reference runtime that enforces the gate in practice
Deterministic allow / deny semantics (not advisory guardrails)
Execution-time logs suitable for audit and compliance scenarios.

There’s plenty of documentation in the repo, if you want the concrete mechanics, the meat is in: /reference-runtime.

Deliberately boring.
No dashboards, no agents, no autonomy framework.
Repo + release linked.
by jschveibinz | 2026-01-15 17:33:26+00:00
I normally don't contribute to HN comments these days (too much anger in the comments section) but I appreciate your post and activities.

I am a tail-end boomer in the U.S. so my experiences were with a world where socializing was more functional: we shopped in public, played in public, read in public libraries, watched movies in public, rode transit together, etc. Being in public was a requirement, not a choice. While there are still remnants of this older culture still active in today's world in urban life, there are so many options for not being in public that it is simply easier to avoid it. We all want our space in one degree or another.

On the playground growing up, my world was filled with name-calling and backbiting. I was a heavier kid, so that was my burden. Other kids had bucked teeth, warts, limps, they were too short, or too tall, uncoordinated--whatever--nobody really escaped the wrath of the crowd. We were forced, by our parents, to just deal with it.

My parents like many others in their generation recognized this behavior for what it was--natural. Watch an episode of the Little Rascals--you will see what I am referring to.

Most if not all of those kids who were called names and isolated in some way found ways to break out of their pigeon hole: playing sports, playing music, making art, studying hard at school, boxing, singing, dancing, cracking jokes, whatever. Then they were heroes, and the crowd could celebrate them--and they thrived.

I know this sounds overly idealistic, but it is true. I experienced this first hand in a neighborhood of several hundred kids from broken homes, poor homes, ethnic homes, etc.

Voiceless people must find their voice. The responsibility is their's. The crowd will not come to the rescue of the person who won't stand up for themselves and make their way in life.

Loneliness is very, very sad. The cure to loneliness is in the powerful hands of the lonely person. Do whatever it takes, as long as it takes, to work on those things that hold the lonely person back from achieving something--anything--for themselves and then engage with the crowd with more confidence.

I appreciate what you are doing by helping others--that is one of your superpowers. Live a good, strong life!
by dragonwriter | 2026-01-15 17:33:41+00:00
> My counter-hypothesis is that America has never really known authoritarianism

Funny, because the racist authoritarians most people point to as the canonical example were themselves directly inspired by the US example. I think a more realistic reason is that this particular brand of race-heirarchy-based authoritarianism that mostly only affects white folks if they are seen as challenging what it does to everyone else has been normalized in the US since before the founding, varying only in intensity and the degree to which its intent is overly stated.

TL;DR:
https://x.com/i/status/1131996074011451392

This is NOT what America is about. America is about opens history book

uh oh

Frantically starts flipping though pages

uh oh. oh no. no no no. uh oh
by Amezarak | 2026-01-15 17:34:06+00:00
“Due process” is not a magic incantation. This is emotional, moralizing rhetoric that doesn’t persuade anyone. People who insert themselves into operations involving the state’s actors who have a monopoly on violence are risking their lives and legal jurisprudence has upheld the state’s actions to stop them by whatever means necessary in similar cases many, many times. And it’s obvious things could not operate in any other way. The state cannot give you a free pass to stop the operation of law enforcement and they definitely can’t give you a free pass to run over the agents of the state. “Due process” does not factor in to live situations that have a risk of death or injury. (It also doesn’t mean a court case. People talk about it in this thread as though the administrative orders issued by immigration judges aren’t due process.)

I don’t have a problem if people want to acknowledge this and risk their lives knowingly in protest of whatever they don’t like, but it’s absurd to pretend that’s not what you’re doing. I don’t think that’s what’s happening though when Good’s girlfriend asked why they were using real bullets.

The state having your address is also not surveillance in any meaningful sense.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-15 17:34:18+00:00
You asked how to solve the loneliness epidemic. I provided citations and recommendations. Are you asking me how to be the person you need to be to make bids for friendship and connectivity to establish community? And where to find people you can have an opportunity to make connections with? I can do that too.

> I'm trying to reach those people who feel the way I feel have no way of connecting with anyone, or at least feel that they don't. Do you have any new ideas of how to achieve this?

Go out and find people looking for other people. Volunteer and find events and gatherings scoped to building connections between people. Third spaces are in decline [1] [2], or in some places, non existent. This will be work. It will not be easy. You will need to work on managing the feelings of rejection and shallow people not genuinely interested in you or building a friendship (boundaries are important in this regard; have them, communicate them, and enforce them). Success is not assured. But your only choices are to try or not.

From your comment:

> I also had it hammered into me as a kid that nobody wants me around, nobody could ever love me, I'm a failure, a burden, a creep, a weirdo, and nothing but a bothersome nuisance that nobody would ever want to spend 30 seconds alone with. I'm trying to reject these thoughts, but it's difficult when you have nobody to talk to. It's like pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. I wonder how many people have the same issue. I've made a few friends in person, but I rarely get to see them.

In regards to this you commented, I highly recommend therapy if you can access it. It will help. This is an unnecessary burden to be carrying through adult life, and a professional might help unburden you of these feelings. The healthier you are emotionally, the easier it will be to create and maintain interpersonal relationships.

Does all of this suck? Oh yes, certainly. But we play the hand we're dealt to the best of our ability. Good luck, in as genuine terms as I can communicate in text.

[1] Closure of ‘Third Places’? Exploring Potential Consequences for Collective Health and Wellbeing - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6934089/

[2] Vox: If you want to belong, find a third place - https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/24119312/how-to-find-a-thi... | https://archive.today/TYDCG - May 7th, 2024
by horsawlarway | 2026-01-15 17:34:37+00:00
At some point, reality does re-assert itself.

I agree that Tesla has incentives to mislead with continued announcements about how great everything is (while the board/musk continue to dump their stock as fast as they legally can...).

But eventually... people are going to want their money out of this pie, and it clearly can't provide.

My personal opinion is that Tesla is now Enron 2.0 - and at some point we'll see a similar collapse, on a larger scale. But who knows if enough of the regulatory framework in the US will survive to actually slap them once it happens. I'm not super optimistic.
by avtar | 2026-01-15 17:34:42+00:00
> though from a quick search it doesn't seem to have a "Vagrantfile" equivalent (is that correct?)

It's just YAML config for the VM's resources:

https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/docs/main/howto/instances_...

https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/docs/main/explanation/inst...

And cloud-init for provisioning:

https://gitlab.oit.duke.edu/jnt6/incus-config/-/blob/main/co...