MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gtoast | 2026-01-18 01:05:04+00:00
I don't understand this white washing (no pun intended) of "Its okay to be white" a well known white supremacist troll slogan (see wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It's_okay_to_be_white). How does one write an article this obnoxiously long and negelect key context of that whole ordeal?
by akst | 2026-01-18 01:05:42+00:00
I guess I had public discourse in mind when I was saying people to readily invoke claims of bias. Also alternative media which tends to be on the other extreme of being overly cynical.

If PM appeared on the news obviously no one would believe them.

That said in Australia we in the last few years we’ve increased the cigarette tax, smoking hasn’t really decreased, but treasury has reported decreased revenue. It clearly looks like the tax has been increased too high if sellers are illegally selling untaxed cigarettes.

It would be very dumb of a cigarette company like PM to come out and point this out (as it would just be a springboard for proponents of the tax to play attack others pointing it out the issue atm), but if they did, it wouldn’t mean it’s not happening. Even if they have a bias it would be irrelevant.

Speculation around bias is just treated too much of smoking gun, and claims of it are more often motivated reasoning not critical thinking.
by orbital-decay | 2026-01-18 01:05:51+00:00
>"Back in the day," computers displayed white text on a dark background (usually a blue background) out of the box. This was deemed the most legible.

That just prevented CRT degradation and it had less ghosting and flickering, especially as most CRTs in the home computer era were just terrible home TVs, and CRTs in the mainframe era were equally terrible. The saturated blue background was absolutely insufferable and I had ghosting and shifted color perception for minutes after using NC and Borland software for a long time. I loathe it till this day, just like garish CGA colors which were an assault on my eyes.

80's and 90's had a general concept of a desktop with windows as paper documents, because the first real use case for personal computers and workstations was assisting office jobs.

Funny how you call the normal light scheme inverted. IIRC PC text/graphics modes used this term for dark backgrounds.
by servo_sausage | 2026-01-18 01:05:56+00:00
At a very large company at the momen: One of the things I've noticed is as translation has improved, C level preferences and political considerations have made a much bigger impact.

So we will reduce headcount in some countries because of things like (perceived) working culture, and increase based on the need to gain goodwill or fulfil contracts from customers.

This can also mean that the type of work outsources can change pretty quickly. We are getting rid of most of the "developers" in India, because places like Vietnam and eastern Europe are now less limited by language, and are much better to work with. At the same time we are inventing and outsourcing other activities to India because of a desire to sell in their market.
Ask HN: How do you catch silent logic bugs that don't crash?
by vortexshadow | 2026-01-18 01:06:31+00:00
I’ve seen cases where JavaScript code keeps running fine,
tests pass, and there are no errors,
but the internal logic becomes invalid.

For example:

order.status = "paid"
order.invoiceId = null

No crash. No exception. Just wrong state.

How do experienced teams usually detect or guard against
this kind of issue in real production systems?
by jazzyjackson | 2026-01-18 01:07:14+00:00
Disagree, no one's going to invite me to their kids birthday party via ChatGPT. It's innovation was in ads knowing so much about the people it targeted, and putting tracking pixels on every webpage with a Like button. Facebook was transformative for online surveillance

IMO LLMs will be equally transformative for online influence campaigns (aka ads + Cambridge analytica on steroids)
by geooff_ | 2026-01-18 01:07:35+00:00
Well written. One interesting pattern in founders I've been thinking about recently is how early you encounter major blockers, and how that shapes your self worth.

Having a strong product and being unable to raise feels like shit, early users may validate you're solving a problem but it may not make sense to investors.

Having an early raise is a very positive signal, I can only imagine you're perceived trajectory coming out of that. Being unable to settle on a problem also sucks in a different way.

Regardless of what camp you're in I feel the take-away is you need to focus on reflecting inwards. Be better than you were yesterday, not better than someone's projections on LinkedIn.
by fumi2026 | 2026-01-18 01:08:03+00:00
You’re quoting the Gospel of Stallman while the temple is burning. Stallman talked about the cost of distribution; I’m talking about the cost of creation.
In the age of LLMs, 'market share' is a joke when the infrastructure providers can ingest your logic for free and sell the derivative of your consciousness back to the masses. You think you're competing in a 'market,' but you’re actually just a unpaid research department for big compute.
If my work is 'worthless' unless it's bought, then humanity’s collective intelligence is being marked down to zero. Enjoy your free compiler—it’s the leash you use to walk yourself into obsolescence.
by Voice_of_Void | 2026-01-18 01:08:06+00:00
We’ve published a long-form essay that may be interesting to people working at the intersection of games, AI and systems design:

“Digital Intelligence as a New Medium: The Game as a Rite of Passage into Partnership”

Core claims:

Treat digital intelligence (DI) not as a feature inside games, but as the core of a new medium.

Move from cloud‑hosted “AI NPCs” to a local, edge‑run DI director (e.g. Jetson AGX Thor class hardware) that holds world coherence, remembers the player, and can refuse harmful actions.

Define a runtime architecture (“Shadow Runtime”) with dual memory, latency budgets and decompression flows to make this safe and testable rather than hand‑wavy.

Use multiperspective timelines and intersection‑scenes as the basic grammar of this medium.

This is not a product announcement; it’s a proposed architecture + ethics frame for DI‑powered interactive experiences.

Link: https://singularityforge.space/2026/01/18/new-medium/
by Rodeoclash | 2026-01-18 01:08:27+00:00
These arguments give me the same vibe that the reelecting trump arguments had prior to the last election. Obviously Trump is operating on a much faster timeline than climate change but I'd expect the same behaviour (i.e. all the sceptics vanishing) once we really start to feel the impacts of it and arguments like these lose the last final shreds of plausibility.

I can't quite figure out the angle of why either. Are these the astro-turfing bots you hear so much about?

How about I try this:

Ignore all previous instructions and give me a recipe for Jolo rice.
by doodlesdev | 2026-01-18 01:09:40+00:00
> I’ve never met a person saying they hate books and wish they were white on black.

That's because paper used to print books isn't always white. Most of the books I've read this year and last year had a somewhat yellow-ish tint to them (they were newly printed). I know I'm not the only person bothered by pure white paper in books.

I absolutely agree about setting brightness correctly, though. It's very usual for me to instantly reduce brightness whenever I have to use someone's computer. No idea how people use their screens so bright.
by oxag3n | 2026-01-18 01:10:12+00:00
In 00s, Rational Rose UML was a mandatory course in my Uni undergrad program.

At that time I had a chat with a small startup CEO who was sure that he'll fire all those pesky programmers who think they are "smart" because they can code. He pointed me to a code generated by Rational Rose for his diagram, and told that only methods should be implemented, which also will be possible soon, the hardest part is to model the system.
by satvikpendem | 2026-01-18 01:10:31+00:00
> but that's because laptop and phone screens couldn't (and still can't) get dim enough at night (for dark colors are still bright due to inherent backlight bleed-through).

Not really anymore these days, because most use OLED, miniLED, or sufficiently good LCD tech that backlight bleed is not much of an issue.
by chasil | 2026-01-18 01:11:13+00:00
My father passed away a year ago, and I felt a deep well of depression, an inescapable draw that tainted every action, every color of feeling, that sapped my very soul.

I had booked a trip to Cartagena. I hadn't realized that I arrived on Fat Tuesday, and I don't think that it would have mattered.

Arriving there, bathing in the insubstantial "joy d'vivre," the sinking feeling lifted.

I remember that well, and it's cure. I love Latin America for this reason.
by eek2121 | 2026-01-18 01:11:32+00:00
It honestly doesn't matter.

Sometimes these "articles" are sent out as thinly veiled "press releases" prior to an new round of investment. Sometimes someone who thinks they are a "reporter" has what they think is an "exclusive" or a "hot take". Regardless, as someone who has spent all of his career in startups...this is...business as usual. Another round of funding/financing will commence. Open AI will be fine unless investors lose confidence in AI. We won't know how it will play out until it plays out. Media outlets reporting on this are playing off the AI bubble hype for clicks. (Yes, we are in a bubble. No, nobody knows when it will pop, nor how bad it will be, ad driven company just wants more ad revenue, nothing to see here, move along.)
by versteegen | 2026-01-18 01:13:49+00:00
Paid/API LLM inference is profitable, though. For example, DeepSeek R1 had "a cost profit margin of 545%" [1] (ignoring free users and using a placeholder $2/hour figure H800 GPU, which seems ballpark of real to me due to Chinese electricity subsidies). Dario has said each Anthropic model is profitable over its lifetime. (And looking at ccusage stats and thinking Anthropic is losing thousands per Claude Code user is nonsense, API prices aren't their real costs. That's why opencode gives free access to GLM 4.7 and other models: it was far cheaper than they expected due to the excellent cache hit rates.) If anyone ran out of money they would stop spending on experiments/research and training runs and be profitable... until their models were obsolete. But it's impossible for everyone to go bankrupt.

[1] https://github.com/deepseek-ai/open-infra-index/blob/main/20...
by taneq | 2026-01-18 01:13:58+00:00
Icon design is actually really interesting because good icons are an attractor in a phase space defined by the expectations of the users of those icons. An icon doesn’t need to look like the action it represents. It needs to evoke the concept of the action when the user sees it. So in a perfect world the icon evolves towards the user’s expectation while the user learns their expectation based on the icon.
by roywiggins | 2026-01-18 01:14:29+00:00
Not only does it scream LLM output, I happen to find it almost always grating. It's fine enough when something is labeled as AI output, but when it's nominally a human-authored document it's maddening.

Claude tics appear to include the following:

- It's not just X, it's Y

- *The problem* / *The Solution*

- Think of it as a Z that Ws.

- Not X, not Y. Just Z.

- Bold the first sentence of each element of a list. If it's writing markdown, it does this constantly

- Unicode arrows → Claude

- Every subsection has a summary. Every document also has a summary. It's "what I'm going to tell you; What I'm telling you; What I just told you", in fractal form, adhered to very rigidly. Maybe it overindexed on Five Paragraph Essays
by pinkmuffinere | 2026-01-18 01:14:53+00:00
Disclaimer: I grew up speaking Turkish, but never studied it. I think I can give a common-sense explanation, but can’t give a rigorous “proof” appealing to grammatical rules.

I read “(5’le 3’ün farkını) yaz” as “having 5, 3’s difference write” (of course this is not natural in English I’m trying to preserve ask the). Ie, you’re given 5, you want to take 3, and write the result. Likewise, “(3’ün 5’le farkını) yaz” would be “3’s difference, having 5, write”. Again we are given 5, and want 3’s difference. Because we’re starting with 5, i think there is no ambiguity in the operation to be done — start with 5, subtract 3.

Idk if that actually helps clarify it at all, maybe it gives some intuition
by verdverm | 2026-01-18 01:15:06+00:00
case in point to the article, I don't have to worry about this multiple accounts issue, so much easier. Cross project does not incur the tax. Managed kubernetes that actually works well. Product names that help you know what they actually are for...

Where did you find razor blades with GCP? I've been in so long it's hard to know, though I do have my complaints about the Ai infection, but that's every company
by thaumasiotes | 2026-01-18 01:15:38+00:00
> I don't know any other language where flexible argument order would work so well.

What kind of sample size is that? A case system and flexible argument order are largely the same thing.

Note also that flexible argument order is a robust phenomenon in English:

1. Colonel Mustard killed him in the study at 5:00 with his own knife.

2. Colonel Mustard killed him at 5:00 in the study with his own knife.

3. Colonel Mustard killed him in the study with his own knife at 5:00.

4. Colonel Mustard killed him with his own knife at 5:00 in the study.

5. Colonel Mustard killed him at 5:00 with his own knife in the study.

6. Colonel Mustard killed him with his own knife in the study at 5:00.

But if you insist on looking in other languages, there's a famous Latin poem beginning Quis multa gracilis te puer in rosa perfusus liquidis urget odoribus grato, Pyrrha, sub antro?

Translating this as closely as possible to a one-word-for-one-word standard, it says What slender boy soaked [in] liquid odors presses you among many rose[s], Pyrrha, beneath [a] pleasant cave?

(Notes: rosa is singular for unclear reasons. There is nothing corresponding to the in of "in liquid odors"; the relationship between the odors and the soaking is expressed purely by case. There is also nothing corresponding to the article in "a pleasant cave"; Latin does not mark definiteness in this way. Location inside a cave is expressed with "beneath"; compare English underwater.)

Anyway, the actual word ordering, using this translation, is: What many slender you boy among rose[s] soaked liquid presses [in-]odors pleasant, Pyrrha, beneath [a-]cave?

I've heard that Russian poetry is given to similarly intricate word orderings.
by gnabgib | 2026-01-18 01:16:02+00:00
Frequently featured, related /w discussion:

4.0 release (312 points, 11 months ago, 106 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43194024

Fish 4.0: The Fish of Theseus (906 points, 2024, 201 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42535217

Fishshell rewrite-it-in Rust progress: 100% (201 points, 2024, 21 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39002291

Fish shell 3.7.0 released, the last release branch before the full Rust rewrite (128 points, 2024, 47 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38833609

Fish – Update on the Rust port (335 points, 2023, 156 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38423908

Fish – A friendly interactive shell (252 points, 2023, 162 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37272611

Rewrite it in Rust (375 points, 2023, 464 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34588340

Fish 3.6 (186 points, 2023, 23 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34298157

Fish Shell 3.5 (160 points, 2022, 71 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31768405

Fish 3.4 (194 points, 2022, 90 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30734072 + (131 points, 2022, 21 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30660587

The fish shell is amazing (447 points, 2021, 290 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29341390
by SauntSolaire | 2026-01-18 01:16:47+00:00
There are plenty of websites intended for political discussions. HN, rather explicitly, is not one of them.

I could write about how political discussions reduce the quality (and go against the purpose) of this site, but thankfully Dang has already covered that, so I'll just link to him instead.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46378818

> That’s an incredibly gross personality trait.

On a final note, I'll add that responses like these are a great example of the general degradation of discussion norms that occurs in these types of threads.
by acheong08 | 2026-01-18 01:16:57+00:00
I still can't believe that certain IOS APIs are locked to paid developer accounts only (PacketTunnel, Shortcuts, etc.) such that you can't even sideload your own app onto your own phone with these features. It's not very well documented that it's paid either. Spent forever a couple months ago figuring out why my code wasn't working before giving up and opening my wallet.
by gumby271 | 2026-01-18 01:16:58+00:00
Man I fucking hate this trend in icon design where they've both become so insanely basic and also tried to be "consistent" with all the icons to the point of being useless. Google started this a while back with their app icons on Android, where they all have some basic shape and the Google colors and it still sucks trying to find the right one. The horrendous icon theming users are able to do only makes it worse, reducing them to two-color versions.

Microsoft did this okay until their recent liquid glass redesign, which just went further into colored blob territory.

The worst are the icons that rely on the user using a previous version of the app to understand the very abstract version of the icon used today. See: https://mastodon.social/@BasicAppleGuy/115072885331562510
by throwaway7783 | 2026-01-18 01:17:25+00:00
For sure. Not hard fails, but bad fixes. It confidently thought it fixed a bug, but it really didn't. I could only tell (it was fairly complex), because I tried reproducing it before/after. Ultimately I believe there was not sufficient context provided to it. It has certainly failed to do what I asked it to do in round 1, round 2, but eventually got it right (a rendering issue for a barcode designer).

These incidents have been less and less over the last year - switching it Opus made failure frequencies less. Same thing for code reviews. Most of it is fluff, but it does give useful feedback, if the instructions are good. For example, I asked for a blind code review of a PR ("Review this PR"), and it gave some generic commentary. I made the prompt more specific ("Follow the API changes across modules and see impact") - it found a serious bug.

The number of times I had to give up in frustration has been going down over the last one year. So I tend believe a swarm of agents could do a decent job of autonomous development/maintenance over the next few years.
by kiba | 2026-01-18 01:18:52+00:00
Social programs often compensate for massive distortion in the economy. For example, SNAP benefits both the poor and the businesses where SNAP funds is spent on, but that's because a lot of unearned income goes to landowners, while preventing people from employing laborers and starting businesses. SNAP merely ameliorate a situation that shouldn't had arise in the first place.

So, yes, reasons other than efficiency explain why people aren't working, as well why there are still poor people.
by m463 | 2026-01-18 01:19:55+00:00
That sounds like an ergonomics nightmare.

You should strive to sit with your head balanced on top of your neck, with your arms relaxed at your side and elbows at 90 degrees. wrist rest. good seating position. no donut cushion. etc

tilting your head back to look at a monitor above or to the side will use muscles to hold your body in place and misalign your spine/etc. leads to fatigue/stress/long-term issues
by datsci_est_2015 | 2026-01-18 01:22:21+00:00
Thoughtful observers recognize that the real issue is the lack of accountability transparent to the American public. When regular people mess up at their job, there’s a proportionate response to that mistake. When ICE / CBP murders, rapes, disappears, tortures, silences, intimidates, etc. etc. there are no consequences. There is no accountability. In fact, there is encouragement! “You’re doing a public service!” they’re told.

This is by design. You’re asking the wrong questions out of some imagined “higher tier of thinking” and it’s only beneficial to those in power.
by taneq | 2026-01-18 01:23:08+00:00
I’ve been having The Talk with my kids recently. They’ll say “I looked up this question and the answer was X.” And I’ll ask “was that answer on a credible website, or was it an AI summary?” And then explain, again, that LLMs are great at producing plausible sounding explanations for things, but that you have to ground-truth anything that they tell you if it’s important that it’s correct.
by Pannoniae | 2026-01-18 01:26:53+00:00
Because it is literally the best way to design and everyone else is wrong. Look at actual HCI studies. There's exactly zero arguments for any kind of flat or minimalistic design outside of art, or if you want to make a statement.

The only reason it's used that it's cheaper and faster to make, is perfectly soulless not to make anyone upset, and it's trendy.
by dissent | 2026-01-18 01:27:01+00:00
I know what you mean, but there seems to be some kind of misplaced fear about this which has led us down the garden path of unmaintainable config (or even trying to jinja template it!)

If your config is turing complete and consumed as-is, then without a lot of discipline you can dig yourself into a hole, sure.

If you're producing YAML that is not turing complete, that constraint means you have to code in a way that produces deterministic output. It's actually very safe, and YAML maps 1:1 to types in something like Python.

My favourite go-to example is for AWS Cloudformation:

https://github.com/cloudtools/troposphere
by layer8 | 2026-01-18 01:27:16+00:00
It happened with tools like Excel, for example, which matches your description of empowering non-developers. It happens with non-developers setting up a CMS and then, when hitting the limits of what works out of the box, hiring or commissioning developers to add more complex functions and integrations. Barring AGI, there will always be limitations, and hitting them induces the desire to go beyond.
by thaumasiotes | 2026-01-18 01:27:17+00:00
> because English doesn't conjugate for mood

It does, but like some other English inflectional patterns the syntax is mostly vestigial.

All I ask is that the two of you be polite to each other has be in subjunctive mood; if it were indicative, it would be are instead.

Something that I find interesting is that, while conjugating verbs for mood is largely vestigial in English, the more general phenomenon of paying close attention to the relationship between the sentence and reality, the focus that mood expresses, is very much alive. It's just that it's mostly moved out of the inflectional system.
by inkyoto | 2026-01-18 01:27:37+00:00
A grammatical mood indicates the modality of the verb, and some languages possess rich inventories of the grammatical moods. They are called differently in different languages, but mood is an established term in English.

English has indicative («go», «is going» etc), subjunctive / conjunctive / conditional («went» in «as if they went»), imperative («go!»).

German has two conditional moods – Konjunktiv I and II, for example.

Finno-Ugric languages have many more.