MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bluecalm | 2026-01-18 20:17:05+00:00
News already broadcast tons of nonsense. Political commentary is just brain rot. Economic commentary might be just as well generated by one of those Markov chain string generators - it would make as much sense.

>>out it will be four orders of magnitude cheaper to manipulate that small market and make the news idiots broadcast that opinions have changed than to actually deploy all the adverts needed to change the opinions.

It will then become more expensive.
Out of all the manipulation news and journalists do every day I am not sure why "people bet money at 1 to 4 odds that Trump takes Greenland before 2027" is particularly problematic. It's true people bet money on it at those odds. How is that more problematic that news running pro or anti Trump segments or broadcasting some random crystal ball readings to justify stock price fluctuations of the day?
You can see how much money is bet on the market as well. It's not like you can spend 5 figures and suddenly shape the narrative.
by skeledrew | 2026-01-18 20:17:33+00:00
I've been thinking of this for some time, conceptually, but perhaps from a more fundamental angle. I think the idea of "files" is pretty dated and can be thrown out. Treat everything as data blobs (inspired by PerKeep[0]) addressed by their hashes and many of the issues described in the article just aren't even a thing. If it really makes sense, or for compatibility sake, relevant blobs can be exposed through a filesystem abstraction.

Also, users don't really want apps. What users want are capabilities. So not Bluesky, or YouTube for example, but the capability to easily share a life update with interested parties, or the capability to access yoga tutorial videos. The primary issue with apps is that they bundle capabilities, but many times particular combinations of capabilities are desired, which would do well to be wired together.

Something in particular that's been popping up fairly often for me is I'm in a messaging app, and I'd like to lookup certain words in some of the messages, then perhaps share something relevant from it. Currently I have to copy those words over to a browser app for that lookup, then copy content and/or URL and return to the messaging app to share. What I'd really love is the capability to do lookups in the same window that I'm chatting with others. Like it'd be awesome if I could embed browser controls alongside the message bubbles with the lookup material, and optionally make some of those controls directly accessible to the other part(y|ies), which may even potentially lead to some kind of adhoc content collaboration as they make their own updates.

It's time to break down all these barriers that keep us from creating personalized workflows on demand. Both at the intra-device level where apps dominate, and at the inter-device level where API'd services do.

[0] https://perkeep.org/
by Tadpole9181 | 2026-01-18 20:17:51+00:00
Cell phone games are knowingly losing money for fun. Polymarket is a sign of a failing, rapidly deregulatory economy.

And that's before we get into discussing the social damage to country that already sees more school shootings than weeks in a year (actually, 4x more), with rising political and civil tensions including assassinated politicians, adding potential "lose your house" to random events. As if it'll help calm things down and let us all keep a level head.

Or the implications of news companies reporting on these odds as if they reflect actual statistical likelihood, and how that gives the ultra wealthy yet another lever to control the view of reality the common people have.
by littlecranky67 | 2026-01-18 20:17:52+00:00
True, but some 20 years ago, I already could (and did) use photoshop to cut out the head of a woman (celebrity or from my social group) and put it onto a naked or bikini body of a woman. This is an old problem, but the bar to achieve that was too high and required tech savyness. The second Grok does it on twitter available for every idiot, suddently politicians see this as problematic and want to pass laws against it [0]. My point: Whatever local AI that you will have on your computer or browser, will react to "do not show me ads and filter all product placement in content out" as a single line prompt. And if we won't have a local AI capable of doing it in 5years or more, the whole investement into AI are clearly a bubble and AI will face another winter.

[0]: https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/gesellschaft/ki-kuenstliche... (sorry, german only, but this is an AI thread and you know what to do...)
by b65e8bee43c2ed0 | 2026-01-18 20:18:33+00:00
>Additionally, no one has the power to magically set a stock price to be a certain price on a certain date.

but many have the knowledge of which company or industry is about to experience legislation, which they can pass to any of their associates worldwide, who can then buy or short the affected entities and share the profit with the insider. Polymarket is just the idiocracy version of that.
by bvisness | 2026-01-18 20:18:46+00:00
The Handmade community has been around for a decade now, well predating LLMs. Our values derive from Handmade Hero, which promoted a love for the craft of programming and an engineering mindset informed by deep understanding of how the computer and the platform actually work. The hallmark of the Handmade mindset is enthusiastically "reinventing the wheel", because building software from scratch, in the context of a specific problem, with a deep understanding of how computers work, can produce shockingly high-quality software.

Many people in or around the community have made great software over the years (4coder, File Pilot, RemedyBG, the RAD Debugger, Essence OS, Odin, raylib, kb_text_shape.h, Spall, etc.) but because it's a community of programmers, expertise in many "soft skills" is often lacking. This often prevents Handmade software from being a bigger success and sustaining its own development. Our goal is to fill in a lot of those gaps and help this amazing software achieve widespread success and redefine expectations for software quality across the industry.

We'll have a lot more details about what we do with the money once we actually start taking people's money.
by rpiguy | 2026-01-18 20:18:49+00:00
Of course it was in our interests to do so. No empire acts otherwise.

We do not own the world, but we do own the worlds reserve currency, largest economy, are the guarantors of safe naval passage for most of the world, are the defenders of North America, Europe, and to a lesser extent Japan and South Korea. We send re-usable rockets to space. We are amazing.

Does any of this give us a direct claim to Greenland? No, but what claim did Denmark have over the native people when they invaded?

Roosevelt honestly thought the Soviets would be good partners post-war. He was wrong. Very wrong.
by funkyfiddler69 | 2026-01-18 20:18:57+00:00
how much new software do we really use? and how much can old software become qualitatively better without just becoming new software in different times with a much bigger and younger customer base?

I misunderstood two things for a very long time:

a) standards are not lower or higher, people are happy that they can do stuff at all or a little to a lot faster using software. standards then grow with the people, as does the software.

b) of course software is always opinionated and there are always constraints and devs can't get stuck in a recursive loop of optimization but what's way more important: they don't have to because of a).

Quality is, often enough, a matter of how much time you spent on nitpicking even though you absolutely could get the job done. Software is part of a pipeline, a supply chain, and someone is somehow aware why it should be "this" and not better or that other version the devs have prepared knowing well enough it won't see the light of day.
by colechristensen | 2026-01-18 20:19:27+00:00
The militias are cosplaying cowards, the actual people of Minnesota are ramping up and succeeding in resisting ICE. There is a nonzero chance there will be a standoff between the national guard and the army in Minneapolis.

Trump is trying to incite an insurrection so he politically gets a free hand to do whatever he wants. If Congress and the courts are too slow or too cowardly to get anything done, he might get what he wants.
by robbiep | 2026-01-18 20:19:30+00:00
I am a huge Tchaikovsky fan, mostly as I love his hard sci fi and incredible world building. I normally shy away from any fantasy but his city of last chances trilogy (now turning into a quadrilogy/on its was to 5??) is one of the absurdist Pythonesque and actually funny series I’ve read in years (although the first one is legitimately hard to parse/read given the style). Still, the juice is worth the squeeze and the second in the series I found hilarious.
by meindnoch | 2026-01-18 20:20:44+00:00
1. Create a point cloud from a scene (either via lidar, or via photogrammetry from multiple images)

2. Replace each point of the point cloud with a fuzzy ellipsoid, that has a bunch of parameters for its position + size + orientation + view-dependent color (via spherical harmonics up to some low order)

3. If you render these ellipsoids using a differentiable renderer, then you can subtract the resulting image from the ground truth (i.e. your original photos), and calculate the partial derivatives of the error with respect to each of the millions of ellipsoid parameters that you fed into the renderer.

4. Now you can run gradient descent using the differentiable renderer, which makes your fuzzy ellipsoids converge to something closely reproducing the ground truth images (from multiple angles).

5. Since the ellipsoids started at the 3D point cloud's positions, the 3D structure of the scene will likely be preserved during gradient descent, thus the resulting scene will support novel camera angles with plausible-looking results.
by jrowen | 2026-01-18 20:21:08+00:00
I agree. I don't understand the driving force here.

I have all of the raw image files that I've uploaded to Instagram. I can screenshot or download the versions that I created in their editor. Likewise for any text I've published anywhere. I prefer this arrangement, where I have the raw data in my personal filesystem and I (to an extent) choose which projections of it are published where on the internet. An IG follow or HN upvote has zero value to me outside of that platform. I don't feel like I want this stuff aggregated in weird ways that I don't know about.
by sph | 2026-01-18 20:21:18+00:00
It’s not gonna collapse. It can only grow bigger; the entire world economy runs and depends on the internet.

Rather, what will happen is a bunch of us will willingly stop participating and stepping away from the technological singularity. A bit like the Amish, this time not for religious reasons. Let the urbanites enjoy their AI-generated virtual realities, with work, sex, and food from the comfort of your phone, competing for fewer and more bullshit office jobs creating more addictive apps; I just want to live on a farm with solar panels, grow tomatoes and write code for fun.
by arw0n | 2026-01-18 20:21:21+00:00
You have to be incredibly naive to give that much credibility to the US system. A lot more than just a switch of parties would be needed.

Personally I highly doubt a possible democratic would return a conquered Greenland. And even if it did, it would have to ensure that kind of derailment doesn't happen again. The opposition so far seems to be about as ineffectual as centrist parties across Europe at dealing with the far right.
by danabramov | 2026-01-18 20:21:37+00:00
I have a few questions:

- How do you rotate keys? In AT, the user updates the identity document. That doesn't break their old identity or links.

- When you have a link, how do you find its content? In AT, the URL has identity, which resolves to hosting, which you can ask for stuff.

- When aggregating, how do you find all records an application can understand? E.g. how would Bluesky keep track of "Bluesky posts". Does it validate every record just in case? Is there some convention or grouping?

Btw, you might enjoy https://nostr.com/, it seems closer to what you're describing!
by pessimizer | 2026-01-18 20:22:04+00:00
I have no idea why so many people think that an argument that AI works is the same thing as an argument that AI will be profitable.

The better AI gets, the better the training techniques get, and the better the algorithms get will result in fewer processors needed to run something of use. All of the advances will end up in the public domain if not immediately after or before they are even implemented, soon after. There will not be many economies of scale between having 100M customers or 10K customers, so no way to keep out competitors. They will all compete on price. If the models get really, really good, a "good enough" model will end up running on your old laptop and you won't have to pay for anything.

Saying that AI will be productive - which is yet to be seen, I don't know how much polishing or complete rethinking your code will have to go through before it can ship as an actual product that you have to stand behind and support - is not the same as saying that AI will be profitable.

We actually don't even need that many computer programs. Hypothetically, a ton of excess LLM coding supply might allow us to take out a few layers of expensive abstraction from our current stacks, and make more code even less necessary. They kept telling us that all of that abstraction was a result of trying to save developer labor costs, right? If AI is productive and rentiers can't manage to extract that productivity due to competition, that equation changes.

In the end, we say that the dot com bubble resulted in a huge amount of productive capacity that we were later able to put to use. But that doesn't mean that putting a quarter of a billion 90s dollars into DrKoop.com was a good idea; nope, still dumb.
by James_K | 2026-01-18 20:22:04+00:00
AT Proto seems very overengineered. We already have websites with RSS feeds, which more or less covers the publishing end in a way far more distributed and reliable than what AT offers. Then all you need is a kind of indexer to provide people with notifications and discovery and you're done. But I suppose you can't sell that to shareholders because real decentralised technology probably isn't going to turn as much of a profit as a Twitter knockoff with a vague decentralised vibe to it that most users don't understand or care about.
by boarsofcanada | 2026-01-18 20:22:11+00:00
I don’t know how ubiquitous it is in my circles, but I have noticed a lot of folks in their 20s and 30s tell me they only buy paper books, never Kindle. I started buying only the latter years ago because of the convenience and lack of a need for storage, but have recently switched to getting everything I can (digitally) through the library and the Libby app.
by EGreg | 2026-01-18 20:22:26+00:00
As someone who explicitly designed social protocols since 2011, who met Tim Berners-Lee and his team when they were building SOLID (before he left MIT and got funded to turn it into a for-profit Inrupt) I can tell you that files are NOT the best approach. (And neither is SPARQL by the way, Tim :) SOLID was publishing ACLs for example as web resources. Presumably you’d manage all this with CalDAV-type semantics.

But one good thing did come out of that effort. Dmitri Zagidulin, the chief architect on the team, worked hard at the W3C to get departments together to create the DID standard (decentralized IDs) which were then used in everything from Sidetree Protocol (thanks Dan Buchner for spearheading that) to Jack Dorsey’s “Web5”.

Having said all this… what protocol is better for social? Feeds. Who owns the feeds? Well that depends on what politics you want. Think dat / hypercore / holepunch (same thing). SLEEP protocol is used in that ecosystem to sync feeds. Or remember scuttlebutt? Stuff like that.

Multi-writer feeds were hard to do and abandoned in hypercore but you can layer them on top of single-writer. That’s where you get info join ownership and consensus.

ps: Dan, if you read this, visit my profile and reach out. I would love to have a discussion, either privately or publicly, about these protocols. I am a huge believer in decentralized social networking and build systems that reach millions of community leaders in over 100 countries. Most people don’t know who I am and I’m happy w that. Occasionally I have people on my channel to discuss distributed social networking and its implications. Here are a few:

Ian Clarke, founder of Freenet, probably the first decentralized (not just federated) social network:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWrRqUkJpMQ

Noam Chomsky, about Free Speech and Capitalism (met him same day I met TimBL at MIT) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gv5mI6ClPGc

Patri Friedman, grandson of Milton Friedman on freedom of speech and online networks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lgil1M9tAXU
by figassis | 2026-01-18 20:22:44+00:00
Understand what you want to build. Architect it. Talk to it like a junior. Ask for a plan, ask it to write the plan in plan.md, ask it to update the plan after every task (for example add this to CLAUDE.md), tell it to look at the plan and resume from last priorities. Let it one shot solutions where you care less whether it uses a standard approach. Sometimes you will know it will take an incorrect standard approach, and you can preempt it and tell it where you want it to go, which algos/libs to use, etc.

After every working solution, commit. Because you never know when it will fall into a salad loop, you want to be able to reset to last commit and start fresh.

It’s addictive yes, keep your mind sharp by using the extra time you have to learn more stuff, build in other fields, etc.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-18 20:22:50+00:00
It’s not the same here at all. I get downvoted into negatives some times but there are enough people who appreciate differing opinions that as long as my comments are well intentioned and contain accurate information they usually go positive again.

On Lobsters, if you say the wrong thing, even as a well-written and researched comment, you could get slapped with a banner at the top of every page inviting you to delete your account.

> I could find a hundred examples from my numerous throwaways,

I’m sorry, but if you have collected a hundred examples and had to generate that many throwaway accounts I have a hard time believing the comments were actually civil or well researched. I can believe that from time to time an angry comment section will downvote a good comment until it’s dead, but if one person is collecting a hundred examples across countless accounts then I think there are deeper problems with the commenting style that need to be evaluated.
by jitl | 2026-01-18 20:22:57+00:00
unconvinced. any join needs some kind of seek on the secondary relation index, or a bunch of state if ur stream joining to build temporary index sizes O(n) until end of batch. on the other hand summing N numbers needs O(1) memory and if your data is column shaped it’s like one CPU instruction to process 8 rows. in “big data” context usually there’s no traditional b-tree index to join either. For jobs that process every row in the input set Mr Join is horrible for perf to the point people end up with a dedicated join job/materialized view so downstream jobs don’t have to re do the work
by Spivak | 2026-01-18 20:23:57+00:00
It's not about the access, it's about the completeness. Imagine this paradigm takes off (I hope it does!), everyone has their own PDS and finally owns their data. Social apps link into their PDS to publish and share data exactly as they're supposed to.

Well now someone's PDS is a truly complete record of their social activity neatly organized for anyone that's
interested. It's not a security issue, after all the data was still public before, but the barrier to entry is now zero. It's so low that you can just go to stalker.io, put in their handle, and it will analyze their profile and will print out a scary accurate timeline of their activity and location leveraging AI's geoguesser skill.
by cadamsdotcom | 2026-01-18 20:24:31+00:00
> When coding assistants write most of the software, the fidelity of the mental model I hold degrades quickly. Instead of fighting this new normal I have been trying to create methods to use the model as a tool to query and develop the mental model on-demand.

That’s the “after the fact” approach.

Instead of this I had Claude Code write a script which, when run, traverses the AST of the entire codebase and gives an error if any architectural constraints are violated. For example, backend route handlers cannot import or use the database client. The error message says “you must go through the service and repository layers”.

This script is then included in the agent’s coding loop by being added as a custom check in pre-commit (or husky, if you’re using node et al)

The coding agent now treats architecture violations as a compiler error. It reads the error, has a think, and fixes it.. and I sip coffee and work on something else.

Never be looking at code and talking back to your agent. Your agent should only be handing you code that’d pass code review. That bar is something I’ve build up to incrementally and will keep adding to forever.
by etiam | 2026-01-18 20:24:37+00:00
That only really holds if reporting on the manipulation bets is not turned into effective propaganda for skewing events towards the manipulation outcome.
So the main argument of the article holds IMO.

Edited to add: I'd like to rephrase that a bit actually. It doesn't even have to help bring about the particular outcome being bet on. It's enough that it can be used to shift public opinion in some way that's worth the cost to the manipulator.
by empiko | 2026-01-18 20:24:52+00:00
> As a maintainer many PRs now look like an insult to one’s time, but when one pushes back, the other person does not see what they did wrong.

I have been volunteering as an advisor to various master's and PhD theses, giving feedback on theses texts and papers. I see people using AI to write their texts more and more, and I feel like my hours are now wasted on improving AI-generated texts instead of helping people hone their writing and thinking skills. Since I cannot constantly analyze and think about who actually wrote the texts, I am thinking about stopping my volunteering.
by mschuster91 | 2026-01-18 20:25:06+00:00
That's just like hiring McKinsey et al - the true value isn't the advice itself, it's probably been written down by some poor intern working 80 hours a week yet billed to the client as "director" time, the true value of why these consultants still get hired despite their truly abysmal track record is that management can use that "external advice" to cut through red tape and plow over internal resistance.

LLMs however... they give part of this power to lower levels as well. After all, what is an LLM other than the condensed knowledge of humanity? (Partially /s)