MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kavitha_kavia | 2026-01-13 20:18:33+00:00
Over the past few months, we’ve been experimenting with a different way of applying AI to software development: starting from diffs, not prompts.

A lot of AI dev tools optimize for “tell the model what you want and let it rewrite code.” That works well for greenfield or small changes, but it breaks down quickly in real codebases where:

multiple changes land at once

regressions appear far from the original change

documentation drifts from reality

engineers need to understand what changed before deciding what to do

Instead of treating AI as a code author, we treated it as a change-analysis layer.

The core idea is simple:

Take two concrete states of a repo (branch vs branch, tag vs tag).

Generate a structured diff session that understands changes across files, not just line deltas.

Let humans ask questions against that diff:

“What likely caused this regression?”

“What should go into the release notes?”

“What docs need updating based on these changes?”

Crucially, nothing is applied automatically. The system shows:

which files would be affected

side-by-side diffs

explicit approval steps before changes land

This turns diffs into a reusable artifact: the same diff session can support debugging, release prep, and documentation updates.

A few things we learned along the way:

Diff context matters more than raw model output quality.

Engineers trust AI more when they can see exactly what it’s acting on.

“Agentic” doesn’t have to mean autonomous — it can mean faster loops with human control.

Most value shows up after something breaks, not when everything is green.

We’ve been testing this against larger, messier repos (including self-hosted GitLab setups), and the biggest win so far is reduction in time spent answering “what changed?” during incidents and releases.

Happy to answer questions — especially around limitations, false positives, or where this approach breaks down.
by torginus | 2026-01-13 20:18:35+00:00
Here in Europe, we got more than a month's worth of foggy, cloudy weather (something that looks like will keep being a thing), which is something I became painfully aware of as an owner of a solar setup.

No amount of battery banks can tide over such a long stretch.

By the way, let me ask you - considering your location, you must be getting a lot of snow, how do you deal with it, is it a problem? Panels are quite hard to reach on the roof.
by neom | 2026-01-13 20:18:46+00:00
Sure except half my classes in art school ended up in debates on what "art" even is/means - some people thought if it involved commerce at all it's not art, some people about the process, some people about the human, some people about the final work itself, is it high or low brow, fine art or emotive? So when you say "co-opt what "art is." - sure, but...not sure.

On barging into creative spaces and how that should be viewed, I suspect you and I would find we feel the same. I was personally involved in building and shaping deviantart and how we tackled these ideas, so what you see there today is influenced by my(and scott, eric angelo etc) thinking on this matter.
by jovial_cavalier | 2026-01-13 20:19:20+00:00
The authors were 100% in the right, and GKH was 100% in the wrong. It's very amusing to go back and read all of the commenters calling for the paper authors to face criminal prosecution. The fact is that they provided a valuable service and exposed a genuine issue with kernel development policies. Their work reflected poorly on kernel maintainers, and so those maintainers threw a hissy fit and brigaded the community against them.

Also, banning umn.edu email addresses didn't even make sense since the hypocrite commits were all from gmail addresses.
by JCattheATM | 2026-01-13 20:19:27+00:00
> As another poster has already pointed out to you, the person holding the blank piece of paper was not arrested.

I was under the impression it was not a single incident, but that's great that it wasn't.

The bigger problem, though, was people being arrested for holding up "not my king" or similar signs. According to one site[0], there were 64 arrests that day. I don't think it matters that no charges were filed or whatever, what matters is they were taken at the time for expressing an opinion.

> All of this was widely reported in the British media and generally agreed to be a bad thing, so it doesn't really fit with your narrative of Brits being in denial about these problems.

That's also good to know. I should have been clearer, but I meant within the context of my experience online. I also don't know that they are truly in denial, it just seems they are overly defensive about it and want to point out the US is worse in various ways.

> That's what people actually object to, but you misinterpret these objections as a defense of police overreach.

I'm misinterpreting anything, and certainly not in this discussion. In past discussions, closer to the coronation, there were Brits being very active in downplaying the arrests, that to me would seem to be denying there was an issue. If it was widely reported in British media as a bad thing, it would seem these particular people being in denial were outliers.

[0] https://hnksolicitors.com/news/met-police-regrets-coronation...
by lemonlime227 | 2026-01-13 20:20:00+00:00
Additional info: Final Cut Pro is going to keep getting updates, but certain features (presumably AI related) are not going to be included with the one time purchase and are gated to the subscription [1].

[1]: https://www.apple.com/final-cut-pro/#:~:text=A%20one%2Dtime%...
by testing22321 | 2026-01-13 20:20:17+00:00
7.8kw on the roof here in Canada.

7.72MWh for the calendar year produced saving smack on $1000.

$5000 gov grant (free money)

Full remaining install cost covered by interest free loan, so we put that money onto the loan for the next 7 years, then get $1000 a year for the following 20 or more.

Complete no brainer.
by FarmerPotato | 2026-01-13 20:20:17+00:00
I thought so too at first. My local toy store owner scoffed and called it “floor sweepings”. I think of that every time I visit a Lego Store and look down.

Through user groups, I’ve had access to direct ordering. I could order off the same list as Lego Store managers see. It truly was a random hodgepodge. Manager said sometimes they don’t even get to choose. Somewhere are warehouses of stockpiled parts, some of which are surplus after a set is retired.

For example, I chose a box of sand blue 1x2, and a box of 2x2 low slope red roof peaks. Imagine those languishing in a Pick a Brick wall. Myself, I had a lot of roof to build but I still have a thousand unused.

If Lego took consumer or store orders at random, it would complicate their planning which allocates production for sets, months in advance. Only the Model Shops got anything they asked for.
by mikkupikku | 2026-01-13 20:20:49+00:00
If the arrest for obstructing wasn't merited, the right way to handle that is to hire a lawyer. Fleeing the scene in a vehicle is never the right approach in America (or frankly anywhere), it endangers the public generally not to mention your own life in particular.

In either case, it shouldn't matter to this case. The man should be put on trial not to decide if ICE's mission is legitimate nor to decide if she was guilty of obstruction or fleeing, but rather for murder. The question of whether he, in that moment, genuinely believed there was a lethal threat to his life is what should decide this case.
by ericmay | 2026-01-13 20:20:54+00:00
> You're describing methods of protest, but not demands. What specific action do you believe Americans should demanding from their representatives re: Iran, that the US government isn't already doing? We bombed Iran just this past summer, are you saying we should go back for round 2?

Well this action puts pressure on Iran, and in the case of the UK maybe more pressure for the UK to do something. You're right that the US government is already opposed (rightfully) to the Iranian regime and so additional rallies or protests might not have much effect but it could reinforce the government's stance and to show support. You can rally in favor of something, and protest against something, can you not?

> The world we live in is the world where the US gives huge financial, material and political support to Israel.

Yea but then you have to balance that with Iran giving huge financial, material, and political support to Hamas, Hezbollah, and other groups who take up arms and fight and kill people and stuff too.

But the point wasn't to suggest that the US doesn't give these things to Israel, which if you want to introduce "the real world" you have to include Iran and friends (Russia too now that I think about it, they've been helping Iran), but to just speculate on whether we would still see the level of protest we do today even if the United States didn't give weapons to Israel. I'm unsure. But it's a hard counterfactual to run, and I'm just mentioning it because the primary argument I see for the reasoning that more people care about this issue is specifically because the US sells/gives weapons to Israel. That's all.
by throw310822 | 2026-01-13 20:20:56+00:00
From what I understood (and I might be misinterpreting or applying a too sympathetic filter) Scott was upset because of the spread of a political ideology (identity politics) and because of its tangible impacts on society (for example DEI policies). The entire tirade against black people starts from commenting an opinion poll according to which a sizable proportion of black interviewees disagrees with the statement "it's OK to be white"- which, applied to any other ethnic group, would be pure and blatant racism. So his reaction is that of someone who's upset and disappointed at learning that he's despised by some group of people for his ethnicity, and advises to just stay away from those who harbour these sentiments.
by ceejayoz | 2026-01-13 20:20:56+00:00
> Can you please give an example for a first world country that consistently ignores it's own laws?

In the US, it's standard to do ten miles an hour over the speed limit past a cop, and there's probably 20 Federally illegal marijuana dispensaries within a few miles of me. Our current President got convicted of 34 felonies, but any possible consequences were automatically voided when he got elected again.
by JCattheATM | 2026-01-13 20:20:59+00:00
I'm glad that was only a single instance, I had misremebered it as being multiple. I think the bigger isser then is people arrested for holding up signs saying "not my king" or similar, of which there were at least 64[0].

[0] https://hnksolicitors.com/news/met-police-regrets-coronation...
by dymk | 2026-01-13 20:21:01+00:00
And I should clarify that you technically can get away with a less expensive interlock system, but you're still paying a few thousand dollars to have your panel replaced (unless you feel comfortable doing that sort of electrical work yourself).

Making a system non-grid-tie is comparatively expensive, that's why grid tie is so common. People think you add solar + batteries and you're ready for doomsday - not quite.
by eterm | 2026-01-13 20:21:18+00:00
I can't remember the artist but there's a fun song about how they used to pick up second hand LPs really cheap and then they got popular and too expensive, then discovered second hand CDs are really cheap now.

Frank turner-ish vibes but I don't think it was actually him.

It's completely un-googlable though, and even the LLMs aren't much help on this one.
by ozim | 2026-01-13 20:21:28+00:00
Isn't there an exclusion or lower entry requirement if you have a technical education like engineering degree? Like if not electrical engineering because I guess that would be obvious there should be lower entry bar - but for all others at least somewhat related...

I guess if you want to dabble with installing battery packs with inverters, that's not your typical bachelor of arts who is trying to do so.
by fkfkafjfjk | 2026-01-13 20:21:32+00:00
> Housing is too expensive because it's illegal to build enough of it.

This is part of the problem, and one that many people actively want to avoid discussing so it is important to discuss it, but it is only part of the problem.

I think for real reform in this area you need to have the government strictly regulate rental properties.

That includes determining the rental price, and imposing fines for empty units.

Every time there is a stimulus check or an increase in minimum wage the detractors say "this will just be captured by the landlords".

We need to have clear stipulations for rental prices and ideally link it to another value that also changes over time.

I would argue a 1 bedroom apartment should have its rent capped at less than 40% of the monthly take home of someone on minimum wage.

Let the landlords and employers battle over who gets the bigger slice of that pie, while allowing the workers to survive their petty skirmish.

Here is Adam Smith talking about a minimum wage:

> A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him. They must even upon most occasions be somewhat more, otherwise it would be impossible for him to bring up a family, and the race of such workmen could not last beyond the first generation. Mr Cantillon seems, upon this account, to suppose that the lowest species of common labourers must everywhere earn at least double their own maintenance, in order that, one with another, they may be enabled to bring up two children; the labour of the wife, on account of her necessary attendance on the children, being supposed no more than sufficient to provide for herself: But one half the children born, it is computed, die before the age of manhood. The poorest labourers, therefore, according to this account, must, one with another, attempt to rear at least four children, in order that two may have an equal chance of living to that age. But the necessary maintenance of four children, it is supposed, may be nearly equal to that of one man. The labour of an able-bodied slave, the same author adds, is computed to be worth double his maintenance; and that of the meanest labourer, he thinks, cannot be worth less than that of an able-bodied slave. Thus far at least seems certain, that, in order to bring up a family, the labour of the husband and wife together must, even in the lowest species of common labour, be able to earn something more than what is precisely necessary for their own maintenance; but in what proportion, whether in that above-mentioned, or any other, I shall not take upon me to determine.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3300/3300-h/3300-h.htm#chap1...

In what US city can someone on minimum wage raise two children? On the US federal minimum wage?!
by Aloisius | 2026-01-13 20:21:37+00:00
Iran's elections 75 years ago were about as democratic as North Korea's. They were just theater. Everyone was involved in rigging, candidates, the monarchy, foreign nations, etc., Mosaddegh included.

And peace and tranquility? Iran was in economic chaos before the PM was dismissed in 1953. They were printing money to pay salaries because the British refused to transport their oil, cutting off their main source of income.
by LaGrange | 2026-01-13 20:21:54+00:00
Bye, nobody will miss you.

I’m trans, I’m autistic, and I caught on how bad he was day one, as his comics had a very specific slant to them that felt less like truly looking at workplace dynamics, and more acting misanthropic and aggrieved.

I get you might have not caught on so soon - I’d call myself lucky - but you had plenty of time to figure out that not only he isn’t good, but also never was.
by graemep | 2026-01-13 20:22:20+00:00
> his evidence was the disproportionate shooting of black people by police

In the UK? The police shoot very few people of any colour! Two in 2025: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_police_in_...

Is there even a bit enough sample to draw such conclusions (let alone that correlation does not imply causation)
by SecretDreams | 2026-01-13 20:22:42+00:00
Meh. I liked Dilbert and it was a part of my childhood. I don't watch it anymore. Much like I no longer listen to Kanye.

There's enough good content out there that I can selectively disregard content from individuals who have gone to great lengths to make their worst opinions known. It doesn't mean their content was bad, it just means that juice isn't worth the squeeze.
by eudamoniac | 2026-01-13 20:23:05+00:00
Well I typically vote Republican, so I can only speculate. But let's imagine that 70% of people support ICE, and those people would never ever vote against ICE, because they think that is evil; everything else is the same.

In such a world, the Dems have no power, because they get 30% of the vote at most. They should stop fighting ICE so that they can at least do something on their agenda. The choice is between passing some good legislation unrelated to ICE, or never being able to pass any legislation. Obviously the former is better.

At the end of the day it's a democracy. The people vote for what they want, and then get it. The people originate the ideas that are available to be implemented. The notion of a democratic representative refusing to do what is needed to get votes is meaningless. It's the notion of a political idea that is refusing to be believed in, so must become irrelevant.

Anyway, your whole train of thought presupposes correctness and righteousness and that change to certain things is not on the table. If somehow the Democrats shrunk to the size of the Libertarian party because they held onto all that, you could keep voting for them, but real politics continues without you. I am suggesting they change before that shrinkage occurs, not after or never.
by paultopia | 2026-01-13 20:23:08+00:00
Woah, the thing that leapt out at me, as a professor, is that they somehow got an exemption from the UMN institutional review board. Uh, how?? It's clearly human subjects research under the conventional federal definition[1] and obviously posed a meaningful risk of harm, in addition to being conducted deceptively. Someone has to have massively been asleep at the wheel at that IRB.

[1] https://grants.nih.gov/policy-and-compliance/policy-topics/h...
by SoftTalker | 2026-01-13 20:24:40+00:00
Excuse me? Unix has been multiuser since the beginning. And networked for almost all of that time. Dozens or hundreds of users shared those early systems and user/group permissions kept all their data separate unless deliberately shared.

AI agents should be thought of as another person sharing your computer. They should operate as a separate user identity. If you don't want them to see something, don't give them permission.
by squidsoup | 2026-01-13 20:24:40+00:00
> Creativity, fundamentally, is overlapping memories of what you have seen already. Literally no different than any diffusion or transformer model.

Every individual has a unique experience, and assimilates different things from their experiences depending on their personal tastes and culture. That is profoundly different from a model which assimilates the output of hundreds of thousands of individuals. A model has no creative, or artistic voice. Your argument is anti-humanistic, nihilistic nonsense, and also trivially verifiably wrong given no model today has produced music or art of any value.
by commandlinefan | 2026-01-13 20:24:41+00:00
I recall when reading TAOCP that Knuth's MIX assembly supported subroutines by requiring the caller to modify the RET call to it's own address (obviously not re-entrant!). This sort of thing was common when Knuth started in the early 60's, may have still been around by the time of the Cray.
Ask HN: Does anyone else think that humanoid robots is a bubble?
by NewUser76312 | 2026-01-13 20:24:41+00:00
In particular, I mean the research and intelligence vision these companies have been pushing for doing general and specialized physical labor.

I'm completely open to the possibility of having good telepresence in reliable hardware be a valuable addition to our economies. The hardware really is getting good these days, at useful payloads.

But what I'm particularly pessimistic about is seeing academic-type research try to fold clothes and put screws into holes with humanoid-like systems, raise 10s of $Mils, and form a company out of it. Ditto for existing humanoids.

One of the major humanoid companies (you can google/guess who) recently claimed that their humanoids will be doing surgeries in hospitals within 5 years? This is egregious, there is zero chance that becomes the platform of choice for doing surgery, over a special purpose-built bed + multi-arm platform specialized for said tasks. This is perhaps even worse that Rosie from the Jetsons vacuuming our homes before the Roomba is invented.

Showing another example, I have to get into specifics - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlUFoZstcWg But I want to know, how could this possibly be better than setting up arms for this task, assuming it is to be done thousands of times? Is the change to the factory layout the main issue that makes this worth it? Even if it is... a single arm on a mobile platform certainly does this more economically.

Anyways, I see all this stuff, there's tons of money and hype and optimism, and I feel crazy being pessimistic, as I'm usually the techno optimist. So, do others feel similarly? Are there things I'm missing that could fuel some optimism perhaps?

Looking forward to the discussion.
by seec | 2026-01-13 20:24:43+00:00
Your parents determine a lot of your trajectory. If they don't make the same investement in their kids as the average for the socioeconomic, you start with a heavy penalty. You can work hard, but you'll have to work twice as hard as everyone else.

If you friends gets permit, cars, fully financed studies but you get thrown out to work straight out of high school what is the probability you would give to be able to accomplish the same things as your friends in a similar timeline.
Sure you can work hard and you will get somewhere, but is that somewhere anywhere near what could be possible ? I would argue not.

The left often argues about unfair advantage from famillies having money. In my experience it's not the having money part that is important, its the parent willing to invest it in their children.
I know some people who accomplished a lot with poor parents, but they got full support from both gov aids and parents, it generally explains a lot.

Without talking about the genetic lottery, life is unfair and hard work isn't really all that's needed. It can never hurt but at the same time you can work much harder than most and never get as much. Add politics in the mix and anything goes.
by saurabhjain1592 | 2026-01-13 20:25:20+00:00
Thanks, appreciate that.

The intervention point ended up being more important than we initially expected. Once workflows become multi-step and stateful, the ability to pause, inspect, or halt execution based on context (not just inputs) becomes the difference between “we noticed later” and “we prevented it.”

We also found that logging alone wasn’t enough. Being able to see why a step was allowed to proceed, not just that it did, made post-incident analysis much less speculative.

Curious if you’ve seen similar issues once agents start touching real systems.
by josephg | 2026-01-13 20:25:26+00:00
Davinci Resolve is free. At least, for the non studio version. (There’s a few studio only features, but almost everything is available in the free version of resolve). And a lot of people want to learn resolve anyway for color grading. Why not just edit in resolve too? Resolve studio is also quite cheap, given you buy it once and own it forever. Including updates.

I spent last week helping out at a short filmmaking course. The DP running it has used Final Cut for his entire career. But not a single student chose to edit their film using Final Cut. The class was split between resolve and premier pro. (Premier was chosen by a lot of people because it’s what they use at school, and they have a free licence to premier from their school while they’re studying.)