MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by insin | 2026-01-27 04:10:54+00:00
Tests can't tell you if the design of the code is fit for purpose, or about requirements you completely missed or punted on, or that a core new piece that's going to be built upon next is barely-coherent, poorly-performing slop that "works" but is going to need to be actually designed while being rewritten by the next person instead, or that you skipped trying to understand how the feature should work or thinking about the performance characteristics of the solution before you started and just let the LLM drive, so you never designed anything, arriving at something which "works" on your machine and passes the tests which were generated for it, but will hammer production under production loads. Neither will running it on your own machine or in Dev.

No amount of telling the LLM to "Dig up! Make no mistakes!" will help with non-designed slop code actively poisoning the context, but you have to admire the attempt when you see comments added while removing code, referring to the code that's being removed.

It's weird to see tickets now effectively go from "ready for PR" to 0% progress, but at least you're helping that person meet whatever the secret AI* usage quota is for their performance review this year.
by anon7000 | 2026-01-27 04:11:29+00:00
I’ve found only one good code review bot, and that’s Unblocked. It doesn’t always leave a comment, and when it does, it’s often found 1-2 real bugs in the code crossing multiple files (even like “hey you forgot to update this reference in this other file not edited in the PR”). Things you’d expect someone with a deeper knowledge of the code to know.

You do get a handful of false positives, especially if what it reports is technically correct, but we’re just handling the issue in a sort of weird/undocumented way. But it’s only one one comment that’s easy to dismiss, and it’s fairly rare. It’s not like huge amounts of AI vomit all over PRs. It’s a lot more focused.
by anon291 | 2026-01-27 04:11:41+00:00
Why is windows so hard? In my many years of Linux, I've never managed to brick a computer. Microsoft makes computers hard for no reason. At worst, in the olden days I used to just boot into a livecd and fix my issue, including using an old kernel. Today, I just revert to an old zfs snapshot or if something is truly awful just pull my archived zfs snapshot.

I mean obviously windows can be reinstalled and restored, but my nixos desktop flake can be restored in like 10 minutes while a windows install takes hours

It's 2025... Why are we still dealing with these problems?
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2026-01-27 04:13:24+00:00
What's the analogous dial to

>as the probability that AI adoption will create more jobs than it destroys decreases, women’s support falls more steeply than men’s

for natalism?

(Tangential, but I thought you'd want to pay attention to this gendered risk-management "strategy divergence" as well

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2026/01/25/falling...

>Pauline Grosjean (Professor at the School of Economics at University of New South Wales))
by _carbyau_ | 2026-01-27 04:13:52+00:00
To extend 2. facilities, my experience had a - somewhat older and smaller - supercomputer that we got to run some stuff on.

And I'd argue for:

3. Realisation of the scope of computing.

IE Computers are not just phones/laptop/desktop/server with networking - all hail the wonders of the web... There are embedded devices, robots, supercomputers. (Recent articles on HN describe the computing power in a disposable vape!)

There are issues at all levels with all of these with algorithms, design, fabrication, security, energy, societal influence, etc etc - what tradeoffs to make where. (Why is there computing power in a disposable vape?!?)

I went in thinking I knew 20% and I would learn the other 80% of IT. I came out knowing 5 times as much but realising I knew a much smaller percentage of IT... It was both enabling and humbling.
by windexh8er | 2026-01-27 04:14:39+00:00
More competitionis better. If you take the market share and revenue off the table and spread that around in a competitive market you'd be in a much more interesting spot with respect to technology advancements. Instead we continue to stagnate with bullshit like Windows 10 --> Windows 11. Windows 11 was never supposed to exist, but $$$$$. There's literally nothing worth paying for in that upgrade. But Microsoft knows it can milk businesses and schools out of ridiculous profits for, essentially, the same garbage and also collude with hardware manufacturers to sell more PCs.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2015/05/08/microsof...
by habinero | 2026-01-27 04:15:23+00:00
If you want to be any good at all in this industry, you have to develop enough technical skills to evaluate claims for yourself. You have to. It's essential.

Because the dirty secret is a lot of successful people aren't actually smart or talented, they just got lucky. Or they aren't successful at all, they're just good at pretending they are, either through taking credit for other people's work or flat out lying.

I've run into more than a few startups that are just flat out lying about their capabilities and several that were outright fraud. (See DoNotPay for a recent fraud example lol)

Pointing to anyone and going "well THEY do it, it MUST work" is frankly engineering malpractice. It might work. But unless you have the chops to verify it for yourself, you're just asking to be conned.
by Phlebsy | 2026-01-27 04:16:22+00:00
> What this meant was that instead of leaving nitpicky comments, people would just change things that were nitpicky but clear improvements. They'd only leave comments (which blocked release) for stuff that was interesting enough to discuss.

This is my dream; have only had a team with little enough ego to actually achieve it once for an unfortunately short period of time. If it's something that there's a 99% chance the other person is going to say 'oh yeah, duh' or 'sure, whatever' then it's just wasting both of your time to not just do it.

That said, I've had people get upset over merging their changes for them after a LGTM approval when I also find letting it sit to be a meaningless waste of time.
by chickensong | 2026-01-27 04:17:55+00:00
Mass media has been going to shit for a long time anyway. People have always chosen to believe tons of insane things.

AI will cause plenty of problems of course, because it puts a powerful tool in the hands of those who shouldn't use it, but also, many people shouldn't drive cars or use the internet.

AI is inevitable, just as calculators and computers were. I suspect that no humans will write code by hand in a not so distant future. The machines will be far too effective.

Personally, I love the acceleration we're seeing since the coming of computers. The internet is a big black mirror, scary, beautiful, and ugly, just like us. AI feels similar to me.

Will some things get worse because of AI? Probably. But maybe it'll also help to save us from ourselves. If nothing else, it will probably force some investment into long overdue security, identity, and trust issues.
by WD-42 | 2026-01-27 04:18:47+00:00
This is exactly how I use AI as well in codebases and languages I’m not familiar with.

I’m a bit concerned we might be losing something without the google and stack overflow rabbit holes, and that’s the context surrounding the answer. Without digging through docs you don’t see what else is there. Without the comments on the SO answer you might miss some caveats.

So while I’m faster than I would have been, I can’t help but wonder if I’m actually stunting my learning curve and might end up slower in the long term.
by danpalmer | 2026-01-27 04:18:48+00:00
> My real anger is that we have found it possible to fund and implement this level of screening, at massive monetary, human and privacy cost, but I can't go to my doctor and ... get a body scan that does all the 3d segmentation, recognition, etc

Airport screening of people doesn't yield those results. It's able to notice a big inorganic mass, or a chunk of metal, but it wouldn't spot a tumour, it gives nowhere near the level of detail that an MRI or CAT scan will give. The airport scanners are also much cheaper, coming in at ~250k USD rather than ~2m USD.

Even the xray machines used for bags, while expensive and capable, are designed to differentiate metals, liquids, and organics, not organics from other organics.

Both airport security and healthcare funding have their issues, but I don't think this is one of them.
by throwup238 | 2026-01-27 04:19:09+00:00
> The security used something I would describe as out of an Iron Man film, they were zooming around a translucent 3D view of my backpack. (It was on an LCD display instead of hovering midair, but I was still impressed.

I just flew with two laptops in my backpack which I didn't have to take out for the first time (haven't flown in a while), with a custom PCB with a couple of vivaldi antennas sandwiched in between the laptops.

It was a real trip watching them view the three PCBs as a single stack, then automatically separate them out, and rotate them individually in 3D. The scanner threw some kind of warning and the operator asked me what the custom PCB was, so I had to explain to them it was a ground penetrating radar (that didn't go over well; I had to check the bag)
by gucci-on-fleek | 2026-01-27 04:19:54+00:00
Right, I agree with you that where the business is incorporated has essentially zero bearing on where its HQ is, where it can operate, hire staff, etc.

But I think that it counts for a little bit more than just "details for your finance person", since the tax and grant eligibility implications could mean that some startups would be better off incorporating in Canada and not taking the Y Combinator money. But if you're taking the VC funding route (which most applicants to Y Combinator are), then I agree that none of this should really matter very much.
by harry8 | 2026-01-27 04:21:10+00:00
On Scoot (Budget Singapore Air) they let you bring your external phone batteries on the plane but do NOT let you use them. You have to rent one of theirs.

Skyphone installation by the airlines led to "flight mode" because the horror of not paying is far more important than safety.

All of this fake, useless theatre undermines real security and makes us less safe while picking our pockets.

Fluids to bring down a plane? FFS every human is equipped with a bladder. Why was this charlatanism ever tolerated at all?
by dangus | 2026-01-27 04:21:37+00:00
The competition is more fierce than it has been since before Windows 95 started the complete domination of the desktop market.

Apple doubled their marketshare since the M1 chip came out.

You can just go out and buy laptops from multiple OEMs with Linux preinstalled, and it’ll run all your business apps (Slack, Google Workspaces, Zoom, Spotify, etc, everything works). That would have been unheard of in 2010.

You can even play a huge number of Windows games on Linux, and the most popular PC “console” is a Linux system from Valve (with another releasing this year). Microsoft has no control over the PC gaming market like it did back in the heyday of DirectX.

I think Microsoft should be all-hands-on-deck trying to build reasons for customers to use Windows.

I personally think Windows 11 is pretty good and is the most “going in the right direction” version we’ve seen in a long time, but it could be better. Yeah there have been missteps but the windows team does seem more free to just add stuff they wish had been in Windows for years but never got approval to go for.
by AndrewKemendo | 2026-01-27 04:23:30+00:00
As a regular poster for 14 years this is really great and nails the vibe.

The “fights” for threads is chefkiss

Also “Postgres cult celebrates death of another vector database” was so spot on

I looked for the meta post name but looks like it hasn’t updated yet.

I’ll be interested to see if there’s a recursion that turns into the singularity
by jandrewrogers | 2026-01-27 04:23:49+00:00
I think the broad consensus (and I agree with it) is that a systems language cannot have a mandatory GC. The issue with GCs isn’t just latency-optimized applications like hard real-time. GCs also reduce performance in throughput-optimized applications that are latency insensitive, albeit for different reasons.

Anything that calls itself a “systems language” should support performance engineering to the limits of the compiler and hardware. The issue with a GC is that it renders entire classes of optimization impossible even in theory.
by aidenn0 | 2026-01-27 04:24:04+00:00
A friend of mine was given an assignment in a masters-level CS class, which was to prove a lemma in some seminal paper (It was one of those "Proof follows a similar form to Lemma X" points).

This had been assigned many times previously. When my friend disproved the lemma, he asked the professor what he had done wrong. Turns out the lemma was in fact false, despite dozens of grad students having turned in "proofs" of the lemma already. The paper itself still stood, as a weaker form of the lemma was sufficient for its findings, but still very interesting.
by eshaangulati | 2026-01-27 04:24:15+00:00
thanks for your comment Ryan!

to answer your question regarding screenshots - I am quoting a previous answer "Ourguide only takes a screenshot when the user asks for the next step. We run a PII filter first, then process the image via Tinfoil.sh in secure hardware enclaves (TEEs). This ensures the data remains private from everyone, including us. Tinfoil is open-source and fully verifiable." Screenshots are not stored.
by jerlam | 2026-01-27 04:24:24+00:00
So if the agencies already have this information, then you are not actually giving them any information. This is a test to see if you are compliant.

Also, given how much inaccurate information is on the internet, including AI hallucinations and people with similar names, there is a chance that they have wrong information about you. And since you can't correct them, or tell them about this false information that you don't know about, so you are basically banned from ever visiting.
by cosmicgadget | 2026-01-27 04:24:38+00:00
> I hope the US population can reign in Hegseth, Miller, Bondi, et al clown car.

There's not much chance of that. The courts may keep them within some guardrails but there's no stopping this save for the impossible impeachment+conviction.

Maybe public opinion will convince them to soften, e.g. the news of Bovino getting reassigned.
by Jensson | 2026-01-27 04:26:03+00:00
> I researched every Democratic attempt to stop fascism in history. the success rate after fascists were elected was 0%.

Ergo Trump isn't fascist since he already was elected and democracy removed him once before. Otherwise they have to say that there has been one successful attempt for democracy to remove a fascist. Only reason Trump won the last election was that the democrats failed so hard at coming up with good candidates, if they had someone as good as John Biden before dementia Trump would have lost, trying to hide his dementia is why Trump rules today.
by danpalmer | 2026-01-27 04:26:22+00:00
Lots of stuff is funded by the US federal budget instead of MRI machines.

My point is that there's not actually any useful connection between the TSA scanners and medical scanners, it's comparing apples to oranges. By all means be angry about the lack of healthcare in the US, by all means blame other spending, but singling out the TSA is arbitrary.
by yert3 | 2026-01-27 04:26:40+00:00
Why not assembly? Not enough compile time checks, only runtime errors.

Why not go? Slower than rust. Type system is lacking.

Why not c? Not memory safe.

Why not c++? Also not memory safe.

Why not zig? Not memory safe.

Why rust? Fast, memory safe, type safe. Compiler pushes back on LLM hallucinations and errors.

Over time, security-critical and performance-critical projects will autonomously be rewritten in rust.
by anon291 | 2026-01-27 04:27:04+00:00
It is difficult to take anyone worried about the US seriously when their solution to protect themselves is to move to Canada.

Not saying anyone's right or wrong but the idea that, should America go psycho, Canada would somehow be okay is a pipe dream. Canada is essentially an outpost of the United States. Yes, I have Canadian family (even old stock "Loyalist" Canadian family) and they all feel the same way.

People need to be real.

If you actually want to be able to declare independence from America you'd need citizenship in a country with actual nuclear capability. France, the UK, China, etc
by ytoawwhra92 | 2026-01-27 04:28:41+00:00
> This isn't a reasonable answer.

Sure it is. The world runs on human judgement. If you want me to rephrase I could say that the threshold for imperfection should reflect contemporary community standards, but Stewart's words are catchier.

> I think the restriction on medical advice/conclusion, that results in treatment, is very good, otherwise you end up with "Wow, look at these results! you'll have to buy my snake oil or you'll die!".

Some people would describe this as an infringement on their free speech and bodily autonomy.

Which is to say that I think you and I agree that people in general need the government to apply some degree of restriction to medicine, we just disagree about where the line is.

But I think if I asked you to describe to me exactly where the line is you'd ultimately end up at some incarnation of "I know it when I see it".

Which is fine. Even good, I think.

> I don't believe in reducing society to a level that completely protects the most stupid of us.

This seems at odds with what you said above. A non-stupid person would seek multiple consistent opinions before accepting medical treatment, after all.
by dang | 2026-01-27 04:29:03+00:00
Again, I have no inside info, but I'm pretty sure it's got nothing to do with that.

Most Canadian YC founders incorporate their startups in the US (sctb and I did that, way back when), just like other international founders do and of course U.S. founders do, so the number of companies being affected by this change must be very small—small enough that it would be of no interest to the US govt.

Most probably the change is because the number was too small to justify all the paperwork, legal hoops to jump through, compliance tracking, etc., that inevitably come with cross-border investments. The startups that YC funds are almost always so early-stage that it ends up being easier for everyone if the founders just incorporate in the US. (It would be like a software team saying "why are we putting all this extra effort into supporting platform X when we only have 3 users on platform X and they can all easily switch to platform Y".)

But please understand that I'm just guessing here. The reason I'm posting about this at all is that I'd hate for any Canadian founders or potential founders to read a misleading headline and say "welp, I guess YC doesn't want us then". That is certainly not the case!
by danpalmer | 2026-01-27 04:30:46+00:00
Big companies are political and re-orgs lead to layoffs. Startups are a constant battle for funding and go out of business. Small companies mean a lot of exposure to bad management and budget issues. Charities are highly regulated and audited environments. Government jobs have no perks and entrenched middle management.

Every type of work has its idiosyncrasies, which people will either get on with or not. Mentioning one without the others is a bit disingenuous, or its whatever the opposite of the grass-is-greener bias is.
by backpackviolet | 2026-01-27 04:32:08+00:00
They won't. This is the same line of people that voted for Reagan and Bush II. I used to be one, most of my family still is. Whatever Democrat gets elected (if we have reasonable elections) will get the blame from them and it will be used to fuel the election of the next populist.

This is the mistake a lot of people made with Bush II and Trump I, thinking that "this will all go away" when the man at the center goes away. It won't, no man rules alone, they represent a large population of anti-intellectual isolationists who are not going anywhere. At best you can hope that the intellectuals will govern in a way that helps everyone next time they get a chance, leaving less fuel for the next populist wave.
by jonway | 2026-01-27 04:32:24+00:00
Well he got mad about the Canadian version of “A letter to our colleagues” and then endlessly harped on that in social media. Like, years and years later he got a board review, but it’s not like a “some stuff I tweeted” or some “opinions shared on social media”, it was trading on his professional credentials to ply a self-help business scheme among other stuff iirc
by aidenn0 | 2026-01-27 04:32:25+00:00
Similar timeframe, I used it for translating some German into English. I'm a native English speaker who has spent some time in Germany (but had not spoken any German in over a decade at this point) and quickly noticed some things were off. After reviewing the original text I realized that every single separable verb[1] that was not in infinitive form was mistranslated. This is an astoundingly bad systematic error for a machine translation program to have.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separable_verb
by steveklabnik | 2026-01-27 04:32:51+00:00
A few things. Shared identity is one of them. Another is that applications can understand each other's data and mix them together, if they wish, or keep them separate, if they wish. An instagram-like client can read the posts made by the microblogging client and re-use posts that include images, for example. Same goes with the social graph: re-use one from another application, or create your own.
by tharkun__ | 2026-01-27 04:33:04+00:00
I wouldn't say more disturbing, really. But more "enlightening".

A shit umbrella is great to have if the alternative is a shit funnel. But how are you gonna appreciate the shit umbrella if it's pitch black, blocks everything at all times?

You're not gonna appreciate it. In fact, you might think some of the things your manager does are the "bad things", when in fact, it's just the umbrella bowing under all the shitload.

If the umbrella is (somewhat) transparent, you, as the manager, gain some legitimacy through transparency. You're no longer the manager that "sits around on his ass all day doing nothing". You're actually doing something for the team and they can "see" it, even though it doesn't affect them.
by unethical_ban | 2026-01-27 04:33:07+00:00
I learned the whole "not a lubricant" lesson the hard way in 2009 when my idle pulley was squeaking on a long drive. I stopped and bought a spare and sprayed it down with WD-40.

Forty miles from my destination, it seized. Sadly, not knowing it was reverse thread, I stripped it with a breaker bar and had to have the truck towed.
by ch4s3 | 2026-01-27 04:33:14+00:00
> My real anger at airport screening is that we have found it possible to fund and implement this level of screening, at massive monetary, human and privacy cost, but I can't go to my doctor and for a few pennies (sorry, those don't exist now, how about for a few nickles?) get a body scan that does all the 3d segmentation, recognition, etc etc etc. We could actually save lives

This always strikes me as a weird thing tech people believe about medicine. Full body scans just aren’t medically useful for otherwise healthy people. You’ll inevitably see something and it’s almost certainly going to be benign but might send you down the path of a lot of expensive and dangerous treatments or exploratory procedures. This is why there’s always so much debate about prostrate exam and breast exam age recommendations. There’s a tipping point where the risk of iatrogenesis outward the risk of disease.