MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bdamm | 2026-01-27 22:41:19+00:00
It would be quite fascinating to see what kind of structure we could produce if we decided to make the longest lasting cement structures we could create with modern technology, and assuming minimal maintenance over the lifetime of the building. A one-and-done kind of structure.

I bet we could do fairly well. Hundreds, maybe even thousands of years. We've learned a lot about how to form exceptionally long lasting cement. We just choose not to do it that way, most of the time.
by antasvara | 2026-01-27 22:41:22+00:00
No different from applying to jobs. Much like companies, there are a variety of journals with varying levels of prestige or that fit your paper better/worse. You don't know in advance which journals will respond to your paper, which ones just received submissions similar to yours, etc.

Plus, the t in me from submission to acceptance/rejection can be long. For cutting edge science, you can't really afford to wait to hear back before applying to another journal.

All this to say that spamming 1,000 journals with a submission is bad, but submitting to the journals in your field that are at least decent fits for your paper is good practice.
by wmf | 2026-01-27 22:41:36+00:00
As time goes on, we will see more implementations that will compete with each other on quality and features. This will drive the entire ecosystem forward.

Unfortunately there aren't enough developers to maintain all those duplicate implementations to the level users expect so a lot of features will be missing and a lot of maintainers will burn out. Not having a libcompositor remains Wayland's biggest mistake.
by kypro | 2026-01-27 22:41:39+00:00
I agree, but writing code is so different to calculations that long-term benefits are less clear.

It doesn't matter how good you are at calculations the answer to 2 + 2 is always 4. There are no methods of solving 2 + 2 which could result in you accidentally giving everyone who reads the result of your calculation write access to your entire DB. But there are different ways to code a system even if the UI is the same, and some of these may neglect to consider permissions.

I think a good parallel here would be to imagine that tomorrow we had access to humanoid robots who could do construction work. Would we want them to just go build skyscrapers and bridges and view all construction businesses which didn't embrace the humanoid robots as akin to doing arithmetic by hand?

You could of course argue that there's no problem here so long as trained construction workers are supervising the robots to make sure they're getting tolerances right and doing good welds, but then what happens 10 years down the road when humans haven't built a building in years? If people are not writing code any more then how can people be expected to review AI generated code?

I think the optimistic picture here is that humans just won't be needed in the future. In theory when models are good enough we should be able to trust the AI systems more than humans. But the less optimistic side of me questions a future in which humans no longer do, or even know how to do such fundamental things.
by direwolf20 | 2026-01-27 22:41:49+00:00
No matter their actual costs to provide the service, I'm struggling to see why they should not immediately delete all of your stored files upon cancellation of the storage service.

They are a European company, so you are the customer, not the product and recipient of subsidies. They do not use dark patterns.

You pay, you get service. You don't pay, you don't get service. If they can't bill you, they should try to communicate with you for a few months before treating it as a cancellation. If you cancel, then your choice is clear and you should expect your service to be immediately terminated at the end of the current billing period. If their service is storing files for you, termination of the service means deletion of the files.

There is no need for a grace period when you knowingly and voluntarily make the decision to terminate a file storage service.
by adamddev1 | 2026-01-27 22:41:56+00:00
People keep using these analogies but I think these are fundamentally different things.

1. hand arithmetic -> using a calculator

2. assembly -> using a high level language

3. writing code -> making an LLM write code

Number 3 does not belong. Number 3 is a fundamentally different leap because it's not based on deterministic logic. You can't depend on an LLM like you can depend on a calculator or a compiler. LLMs are totally different.
by rubyn00bie | 2026-01-27 22:42:16+00:00
The brownshirts were actually the SA, a police force Hitler originally used for years to brutalize people before the formation of the SS. The SA are very similar to modern day ICE being made up of militant supporters (like proud boys, J6’ers pardoned) who are willing to commit violence without provocation or any fear of being prosecuted for their violence.

The SA was eventually hung out to dry, because Hitler feared Ernst Röhm had too much power (among other reasons)— by executing SA leadership during the Night of the Long Knives (die Nacht der langen Messer)…

To say the violence of the SS was quick to be extreme really forgets the ten plus year road they took to get there. I’d really suggest, as disheartening and sad as it is, to read about all this yourself. The parallels between Nazi Germany and the US right now are astonishing. It’s almost as if someone in the White House is using history as a playbook.

Which sort of goes full circle since Hitler took a lot from how brutal and racist the US towards slaves and non-whites.
by deepakkumarb | 2026-01-27 22:42:21+00:00
I get that these approaches work, and they’re totally valid engineering trade-offs. But I don’t think they’re the same thing as real model improvements. If we’re just throwing more tokens, longer chains of thought, or extra tools at the problem, that feels more like brute force than genuine progress.

And that distinction matters in practice. If getting slightly better answers means using 5–10× more tokens or a bunch of external calls, the costs add up fast. That doesn’t scale well in the real world. It’s hard to call something a breakthrough when quality goes up but the bill and latency go up just as much.

I also think we should be careful about reading too much into benchmarks. A lot of them reward clever prompting and tool orchestration more than actual general intelligence. Once you factor in reliability, speed, and cost, the story often looks less impressive.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-27 22:42:27+00:00
>Even including ICE in this statistic, you will never even meet someone who knows someone who was murdered by a cop. Police encounters that turn deadly, not even blatant murder, are on the order of 1 in 50,000.

That just shows that people's social circles aren't that wide. 1 in 50,000 is rare in your personal bubble. For a town of 1 million people, thats 20 people.

Sounds tiny, but if we were to line up 20 people and have them murdered by law enforcement, it'd pretty much end the careers of anyone in that chain of command. Because that's not a behavior you want to let spread and expand.
by qsort | 2026-01-27 22:42:38+00:00
I wonder if/how that interacts with the new draw rule. (For the uninitiated: the formal rule to adjudicate games as draws automatically or on time is that the game is a draw if there exists no sequence of moves that could lead to checkmate. Interestingly, although this has almost no strategic implications, it means that... it's almost impossible to write a program to detect draws that's technically correct. A similar corner case is draws in Magic the Gathering, which is literally undecidable in general.)
by bdamm | 2026-01-27 22:43:40+00:00
While some lumber production happens in the United States, most lumber is imported from Canada. That's because while the USA does have good tracts of land on which lumber is grown, Canada has much, much more. This is why you see "Made in Canada" stamped on quite a lot of plywood and plenty of timer used in residential construction.

The part that I don't quite know how to make sense of is why Canadian producers seem to have a near monopoly on sandpaper products.
by storystarling | 2026-01-27 22:43:51+00:00
I am surprised you went with ElevenLabs for the transcription layer. In my experience the pricing there makes the unit economics pretty tough for high volume calls. We moved a similar stack to Deepgram recently and the latency is significantly better. If you have the ops capacity self-hosting Whisper is also a solid option to cut costs, though I guess it depends on your concurrency requirements.
by CobrastanJorji | 2026-01-27 22:43:53+00:00
"Hey, you know how everybody's complaining about AI making up totally fake science shit? Like, fake citations, garbage content, fake numbers, etc?"

"Sure, yes, it comes up all the time in circles that talk about AI all the time, and those are the only circles worth joining."

"Well, what if we made a product entirely focused on having AI generate papers? Like, every step of the paper writing, we give the AI lots of chances to do stuff. Drafting, revisions, preparing to publish, all of it."

"I dunno, does anybody want that?"

"Who cares, we're fucked in about two years if we don't figure out a way to beat the competitors. They have actual profits, they can ride out AI as long as they want."

"Yeah, I guess you're right, let's do your scientific paper generation thing."
by epistasis | 2026-01-27 22:43:54+00:00
Currently they are attempting to strip our second amendment rights. They murdered a man in the street, from hands up to shit in the back in under 20 seconds, merely for lawful possession and in direct violation of the 2nd amendment. The President is bumbling around today mumbling "you can't bring a gun to a protest" when yes the 2nd amendment directly allows that.

A lot of people that care a lot about the 2nd amendment saw the photo of Pretti's gun on the ICE rental car seat, and they saw a well-used, well-cared-for weapon that was clean and seen a lot time at the range. They saw that it can happen to somebody just like them.
by jumploops | 2026-01-27 22:43:55+00:00
I’ve found that LLMs seem to work better on LLM-generated codebases.

Commercial codebases, especially private internal ones, are often messy. It seems this is mostly due to the iterative nature of development in response to customer demands.

As a product gets larger, and addresses a wider audience, there’s an ever increasing chance of divergence from the initial assumptions and the new requirements.

We call this tech debt.

Combine this with a revolving door of developers, and you start to see Conway’s law in action, where the system resembles the organization of the developers rather than the “pure” product spec.

With this in mind, I’ve found success in using LLMs to refactor existing codebases to better match the current requirements (i.e. splitting out helpers, modularizing, renaming, etc.).

Once the legacy codebase is “LLMified”, the coding agents seem to perform more predictably.

YMMV here, as it’s hard to do large refactors without tests for correctness.

(Note: I’ve dabbled with a test first refactor approach, but haven’t gone to the lengths to suggest it works, but I believe it could)
by gwd | 2026-01-27 22:44:06+00:00
For me, in just the golang server instance and the core functional package, `cloc` reports over 40k lines of code, not counting other supporting packages. I spent the last week having Claude rip out the external auth system and replace it with a home-grown one (and having GPT-codex review its changes). If anything, Claude makes it easier on me as a solo founder with a large codebase. Rather than having to re-familiarize myself with code I wrote a year ago, I describe it at a high level, point Claude to a couple of key files, and then tell it to figure out what it needs to do. It can use grep, language server, and other tools to poke around and see what's going on. I then have it write an "epic" in markdown containing all the key files, so that future sessions already know the key files to read.

I really enjoyed the process. As TFA says, you have to keep a close eye on it. But the whole process was a lot less effort, and I ended up doing mor than I would otherwise have done.
by dylan604 | 2026-01-27 22:44:15+00:00
I've been to JerryWorld or ATT Stadium one time for a non-NFL game. Most people just watch the giant screen as the actual players are tiny from the stadium seats. Watching at home/bar was the same conclusion I got to as well. I have no idea how much tickets are, but I know parking is extremely expensive as well, never mind concessions.
by bsimpson | 2026-01-27 22:44:45+00:00
I spent a dozen years in SF, where my friend circles routinely used Signal. It's my primary messaging app, including to family and childhood friends.

I live in NY now. Just today, I got a message from a close friend who also did SF->NY "I'm deleting Signal to get more space on my phone, because nobody here uses it. Find me on WhatsApp or SMS."

To a naïve audience, Signal can have a stigma "I don't do anything illegal, so why should I bother maintaining yet-another messenger whose core competency is private messaging?" Signal is reasonably mainstream, and there are still a lot of people who won't use it.

I suspect you'll have an uphill battle using something even more obscure.
by devonkelley | 2026-01-27 22:44:55+00:00
These are excellent questions!

Outcome definition: Simpler is better. Teams that start with one binary signal like "did it work?" (call completed, meeting booked, etc.), get value immediately. Governance bottlenecks usually come from overthinking it upfront.

Building trust: When Kalibr routes away from what feels like the "right" model and it works, people are surprised. We capture and show outcome history so teams can see when a path started to degrade and when Kalibr shifted traffic. No LLM decision making means no black box around routing choices, it's all shown in your dashboard when you use Kalibr.

Human intervention: Defining new paths, adding goals, handling edge cases where signal is genuinely sparse. The goal isn't zero humans anywhere, it's getting them out of the reactive debugging loop so they can focus on strategic decisions instead of repeatedly patching failed agents.

Curious, have you built multi step agents and run into the challenge of repeated failures?
by lcolucci | 2026-01-27 22:45:35+00:00
I wonder if we should make the UI a more common interface (e.g. "the call is ringing") to avoid this confusion?

It's a normal mp4 video that's looping initially (the "welcome message") and then as soon as you send the bot a message, we connect you to a GPU and the call becomes interactive. Connecting to the GPU takes about 10s.
by q3k | 2026-01-27 22:45:36+00:00
I think the pay is going to skyrocket for senior devs within a few years, as training juniors that can graduate past pure LLM usage becomes more and more difficult.

Day after day the global quality of software and learning resources will degrade as LLM grey goo consumes every single nook and cranny of the Internet. We will soon see the first signs of pure cargo cult design patterns, conventions and schemes that LLMs made up and then regurgitated. Only people who learned before LLMs became popular will know that they are not to be followed.

People who aren't learning to program without LLMs today are getting left behind.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-27 22:46:01+00:00
This really doesn't pass the sniff test. It reminds me of a recent post I saw: "what are movies people like only becsuse it is good?", calling it "quality slop". It's contradictory.

If people are given a wide perspective of a situation and adjusts bias for the Overton window (aka, we don't let Nazis have an equal platform to a more progressive group), then we just call that good reporting. The act of convincing people isn't inherently a bad thing. How you do it matters a lot.
by hexbin010 | 2026-01-27 22:46:05+00:00
This will have no adverse affects on wages, there is definitely skill shortages in IT and nursing in the EU, anyone mentioning immigration is a racist xenophobe, there is no comparison to the UK nor Canada, do not talk about the huge amount of outsourcing to India already happening, your personal experiences are racism, is it cold in Russia?

Did I miss anything?
by bmaranville | 2026-01-27 22:46:32+00:00
Having a chatbot that can natively "speak" latex seems like it might be useful to scientists that already use it exclusively for their work. Writing papers is incredibly time-consuming for a lot of reasons, and having a helper to make quick (non-substantive) edits could be great. Of course, that's not how people will use it...

I would note that Overleaf's main value is as a collaborative authoring tool and not a great latex experience, but science is ideally a collaborative effort.
by cloudfudge | 2026-01-27 22:46:56+00:00
It ran for a while when I gave it instructions to do a depth-first search of the known map, while observing any atypical features of every new location and also picking up anything of note. A few times, it asked me if I wanted to continue the search, but I finally told it not to interrupt the search until it had exhausted all new options, which made it run until it said it had reached the maximum number of tool calls (15).
by tptacek | 2026-01-27 22:47:02+00:00
I've been fascinated with The Waste Land ever since junior year of high school, when my creative writing teacher saw a copy of it on my desk and said "why do you have that, you'll never understand it". (I mean, fair enough.)

This is interesting backstory! My perception of the poem is that it's sort of a fractal of backstory and that everywhere you look you find 2000-word articles on its historical antecedents, from Eliot's life, from the history of Europe, from friends of his lost in the war, &c.

There's a whole book on this that's very similar to the article:

https://www.amazon.com/Waste-Land-Biography-Poem/dp/03932402...

If you're bored, you can also kick back and bounce sections of it off Claude or GPT5 (or both and have them argue with each other).

I wonder how directly you can connect Ludwig to the Fisher King.
by garciasn | 2026-01-27 22:47:11+00:00
I honestly don't understand why you posted the Narcissist's Prayer; however, to clarify: the original comment I responded to referred to another comment that said, "the United States government rolling through protesters in armored vehicles," to which I replied, in part, "it's a video of a WCCO news (local MSP TV station) segment which shows an armored vehicle pushing protesters out of the way."

The person who said I was twisting words said (emphasis mine), "There’s an enormous difference between driving slowly through a crowd of protestors with no injuries versus running over protesters with a tank."

At no point did I nor the comment I responded to use the words, 'running over protesters with a tank'.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-27 22:47:14+00:00
I mean Kagi is probably the PageRank revival we are talking about.

I have heard from people here that Kagi can help remove slop from searches so I guess yeah.

Although I guess I am DDG user and I love using DDG as well because its free as well but I can see how for some price can be a non issue and they might like kagi more.

So Kagi / DDG (Duckduckgo) yeah.
by dghlsakjg | 2026-01-27 22:47:17+00:00
This tone is unnecessary, unhelpful and against the spirit and rules of the site. It also doesn’t advance the conversation. If you disagree, that’s fine, but refrain from using invalid techniques like ad hominem attacks and straw men arguments.

Edit: looked at your comment history and realized I’m not going to get anywhere with this. This is just how you behave when presented with information.
by pwdisswordfishy | 2026-01-27 22:47:19+00:00
New to me was discovering within the last month that git-merge doesn't have a merge strategy of "null": don't try to resolve any merge conflicts, because I've already taken care of them; just know that this is a merge between the current branch and the one specified on the command-line, so be a dutiful little tool and just add it to your records. Don't try to "help". Don't fuck with the index or the worktree. Just record that this is happening. That's it. Nothing else.
by kyeb | 2026-01-27 22:48:11+00:00
(disclaimer: I work at Falconer)

you would think so! but that's only optimal if the model already has all the information in recent context to make an optimally-informed decision.

in practice, this is a neat context engineering trick, where the different LLM calls in the "courtroom" have different context and can contribute independent bits of reasoning to the overall "case"
by viccis | 2026-01-27 22:48:19+00:00
Same. This kind of coding feels like it got rid of the building aspect of programming that always felt nice, and it replaced it entirely with business logic concerns, product requirements, code reviews, etc. All the stuff I can generally take or leave. It's like I'm always in a meeting.

>If I was intellectually excited about telling something to do this for me, I'd have gotten into management.

Exactly this. This is the simplest and tersest way of explaining it yet.
by daxfohl | 2026-01-27 22:48:22+00:00
To be clear I don't think that's what they're doing intentionally. Especially on a subscription basis, they'd rather me maximize my value per token, or just not use them. Lulling users into using tokens unproductively is the worst possible option.

The way agents work right now though just sometimes feels that way; they don't have a good way of saying "You're probably going to have to figure this one out yourself".
by giancarlostoro | 2026-01-27 22:48:28+00:00
I hate git squash, it only goes one direction and personally I dont give a crap if it took you 100 commits to do one thing, at least now we can see what you may have tried so we dont repeat your mistakes. With git squash it all turns into, this is what they last did that mattered, and btw we cant merge it backwards without it being weird, you have to check out an entirely new branch. I like to continue adding changes to branches I have already merged. Not every PR is the full solution, but a piece of the puzzle. No one can tell me that they only need 1 PR per task because they never have a bug, ever.

Give me normal boring git merges over git squash merges.
by taylodl | 2026-01-27 22:48:37+00:00
Live football far exceeds football on TV for watching play development and execution. TV can't resist the closeup, which precludes you from seeing tne entire field of play, the defense being run, the matchups...you're missing a lot on TV. That being said, I don't live in a city having an NFL team so I have to travel. Add in elevated ticket prices and I don't typically make it to more than one game per year.
by bayarearefugee | 2026-01-27 22:48:53+00:00
> At least amongst my circles, that seems so obvious

Blindingly obvious.

The long-term (very likely permanent in many cases) damage being done to America by the Trump administration through brain-drain, weakening of our own economy, and causing the entire rest of the world to (rightfully) distrust us as a reliable ally and/or trading partner is incalculable.

And it is all pure unforced error driven by a malignant narcissist bent on retribution who is also seemingly being used by a few different actors with their own individual axes to grind as he slips into dementia.

> But from here in Australia, the subtext of all the ICE news is that foreigners are no longer welcome in the US. And that America is becoming an authoritarian, fascist state.

This is also how it feels in the US. (And it isn't only foreigners -- the message is also that "the wrong kind" of American citizens are also no longer welcome in the US)