MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ViewTrick1002 | 2026-01-12 13:18:05+00:00
Who cares if there's a tiny portion of gas turbines left (optimized for low CAPEX) when we've solved high 90s% of the problem?

Its like complaining about the 3% fossil gas usage in France today when we still need to decarbonize shipping, agriculture, aviation, construction etc.

It is trivial to run gas turbines on carbon neutral fuel when the time comes if we determine they are still needed.

> It's interesting you mentioned nuclear subsidies when Germany poured on it's EEG renewables scheme alone more than double the cost of entire french nuclear fleet, both adjusted in today money

This is a backwards looking metric, we need to look forward based on the costs today. Are we paying 2011 solar prices or 2026 solar prices when building renewables in 2026? We pay 2026 prices.

Look at the proposed French EPR2 program. 11 cents/kWh 40 year CFD and interest free loans with the first reactor coming online in 2038.

Just an absolutely insanely large handout from tax money to force new built nuclear power into existence.

While the competition in renewables and storage are built on massive scale without subsides.
by chrisjj | 2026-01-12 13:18:19+00:00
> If you produce a product that causes harm, and there are steps that could be taken to prevent that harm, you should be held responsible for it.

This is wholly unrealistic. Any product can be used to cause harm and there are always steps that could be taken to prevent that. E.g. ceasing sales. But that would often do more harm than it prevents.
by ushtaritk421 | 2026-01-12 13:18:52+00:00
Yes, as an American I think that all forms of government that are not liberal democracy basically are illegitimate. We can have relationships of convenience with other governments, but it should be known by such governments somewhere in the back of their minds that we would prefer to see them replaced by a liberal democracy.

The Iranian state has not shown itself to be one that is very convenient for us to temporarily overlook its flaws, and the people it governs frequently show that they would prefer a different form of government (otherwise, why not let them vote in fair elections?). It should be a no brainer that Americans and their government should be on the side of the people, not the theocracy.
by avhception | 2026-01-12 13:19:10+00:00
I don't have "hatred" towards Gnome3. I use it for friends and families desktops, they seem to like it. I have also rolled out about ~20 Gnome3-based desktops for my employer.

That said, there are definitely areas were Gnome could be improved. Some of them are understandable and probably stem from a lack funding / devs. Others less so, like removing the options to scale / stretch / center the wallpaper w/o installing "Gnome tweaks".
by notahacker | 2026-01-12 13:19:31+00:00
Yeah. I mean, I think "connecting deeply" gets oversold too, but my experience of a place (whether it's "authentic" or the country's biggest tourist trap or even the next town over) really isn't best summarised by how many facts I can recollect about it.

I'm also amused by the suggestion that Japanese Bach fans understand German culture more deeply than Germans (does this mean Westerners with moderately large anime collections understand the many nuances of Japanese culture better than the Japanese?!). I mean, I don't actually think most travel does connect deeply with foreign culture, but few travellers are left with such a shallow first impression of other countries they legitimately believe they've obtained deeper insights into a country than the average person who lives there by attending a performance of some cultural artefact from that country's history.

Also, for many people, travel is fun. If you find travel not fun, or reading about a place more fun, then more power to you. Some people find sex and relationships messy and inconvenient too, and if they prefer collecting stories and pictures that's fine - just maybe inadvisable to blog about how much more they've learned from the internet...
by gosub100 | 2026-01-12 13:19:35+00:00
I would say the climate change argument is particularly pernicious as its general form implies we all need to submit to more government control, we all need to feel guilt for being alive, and suffer higher prices or all sorts of market manipulation (EV rebates, "green programs", shuttering power plants) while the rich elite fly around on private jets burning hundreds of pounds of fuel per hour. While corporations simply outsource manufacturing to Asia, completely circumventing any environmental laws, cutting jobs, and burning bunker oil to move the product back here.

I don't believe a single thing they say.
by nzach | 2026-01-12 13:19:40+00:00
> The real question is what existing language is perfect for LLMs?

I think verbosity in the language is even more important for LLMs than it is for humans. Because we can see some line like 'if x > y1.1 then ...' and relate it to the 10% of overbooking that our company uses as a business metric. But for the LLM would be way easier if it was 'if x > base overbook_limit then ...'.

For me, it doesn't make too much sense to focus on the token limit as a hard constraint. I know that for current SOTA LLMs we still have pretty small context windows, and for that reason it seems reasonable try to find a solution that optimizes the amount of information we can put into our contexts.

Besides that we have the problem of 'context priming'. We rarely create abstract software, what we generally create is a piece of software what interacts with the real world. Sometimes directly through a set of APIs and sometimes through a human that reads data from one system and uses it as input in another one. So, by using real world terminology we improve the odds for the LLM to do the right thing when we ask for a new feature.

And lastly there is the advantage of having a source code that can be audited when we need.
by ghaff | 2026-01-12 13:19:48+00:00
Certainly, Ubuntu used to be friendlier to new would-be Linux desktop users for a variety of reasons. (And we could get into some controversial decisions/directions it's taken but I won't.) I'm sure lots of people still run Ubuntu although Canonical is less prominent these days. My impression is that Canonical was sort of a passion project of Mark Shuttleworth's and they're just a lot lower key at this point.
by timonoko | 2026-01-12 13:19:50+00:00
Erh? Bash-reading disability?

make-icon ABCD:

1) Makes a small picture ABCD.png from the first letters of the string "ABCD".

2) Makes ABCD application icon to using the picture ABCD.png.

3) Moving youres pointing device on that icon and pressing appropriate button now executes ABCD.

"convert" is from Imagemagick of course.
by deaux | 2026-01-12 13:20:10+00:00
I've had a 100% benchable case in the past, though it wasn't really a degradation in terms of output quality per se, it was (an undocumented and unacknowledged) permanent degradation in maximum output length. From one day to the next, 100% of prompts where we'd ask for e.g. 15 sections, would only do 10 sections and then ask "Would you like me to continue?". Which is in a way quality, but generally not something that shows up on coding benches and the likes. This was Anthropic.

Also seen a 2-week latency 10+ times increase of Gemini 2.5 Flash finetuned (= enterprise) model endpoints, again undocumented and unacknowledged, because they shifted all of their GPU capacity towards going "viral" on people generating slop artwork around Nano Banana Pro release.

So plenty of silent shenanigans do happen, including by the Big 3 on API endpoints. At the same time I agree with you that all those rumors of "degradation in code quality" are very much unproven.
by helsinkiandrew | 2026-01-12 13:20:14+00:00
Yet they seem to be spending more in restaurants:

> Ozempic Users Actually Spend More Dining Out.

> ..In casual dining establishments, they spend 25% more than non-GLP-1 households do, the market researcher says. Data firm Numerator shares similar findings, noting that while GLP-1 users report eating out less and cooking at home more, their spending says otherwise: “Verified purchase data reveals that their fast-food buy rate is up 2%.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-02/ozempic-g... (archive: https://archive.ph/V6Erv)
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2026-01-12 13:20:15+00:00
egghatcher-- gender transition peer-groomer?

The way I interpret it.. it's the opposite of..

https://youtu.be/yhZniPkGm8w?t=2m10s

(Advice that declares "no downside!" vs non-advice that messes with the weights pre-surgery-- & are you going to ask them if they'd undergone?

Nice tone from Graham!)
by cma256 | 2026-01-12 13:20:22+00:00
As of yesterday I decided I want to try adding a GTK runtime for Elm. Write Elm, compile to JS, execute with QuickJS, bridge to GTK, render a native app using the JS state machine.

The goal is basically what's listed on the Elm website. No runtime errors, fearless refactoring, etc. But also improved accessibility for developers who want to create a native "Linux" app. IMO Linux should be so accessible and so amenable to rapid prototyping that it is the default choice when building a new GUI app.
by bell-cot | 2026-01-12 13:20:24+00:00
Yes - I am not saying that JRRT himself was anything less than saintly, or did not struggle with the issue.

My issue is with the Wikipedia article's heavy identification of JRRT's personal dilemma with the Roman Church and its doctrines. Historically, for that Church - one could just assume that the orcs were Protestants, so slaughtering them was perfectly okay. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Wars_of_Religion
by SanjayMehta | 2026-01-12 13:20:32+00:00
Some years ago I was planning to set up subsidiary development centres in tier 2 cities, including Trivandrum.

My team - mostly from Kerala - came to me en masse and told me not to, and this was long before Nokku Kooli became a well known thing.

Don't know or care whether it was during UDF/LDF or whatever rule.

A couple of years ago a major clothes manufacturer, founded in that state, packed up and left.

A parallel from WB: Tata's moved their automobile factory to Gujarat, which has since then shipped over a million cars.
by Klaster_1 | 2026-01-12 13:20:45+00:00
What do you do when managing context takes longer than doing everything by hand? For example, for an existing project where reading a Jira ticket may not suffice and you need to examine unbounded amount of something else, which is usually kept in developer head? Do you begin to treat that as new kind of code/documentation debt that only matters with these new tools who are always amnesiac? How much do MDs really scale?
by mattmanser | 2026-01-12 13:21:00+00:00
I talk about why that doesn't work the line after you've quoted. Everyone's having problems with context windows and CC/etc. rapidly forgetting instructions.

I'm fullstack, I use AI for FE too. They've been able to do the screenshot trick for over a year now. I know it's pretty good at making a page, but the code is usually rubbish and you'll have a bunch of totally unnecessary useEffect, useMemo and styling in that page that it's picked up from its training data. Do you have any idea what all the useEffect() and useMemo() it's littered all over your new page do? I can guarantee almost all of them are wrong or unnecessary.

I use that page you one-shotted as a starting point, it's not production-grade code. The final thing will look nothing like it. Good for solving the blank page problem for me though.
by asciii | 2026-01-12 13:21:31+00:00
> To test this theory, try the following experiment. Ask someone who just spent 10 minutes on the Wikipedia article for Turkey for an interesting fact about the country, then ask someone who just came back from a 10 day vacation to Istanbul. Probably both will tell you something equally interesting, with the former being more generally relevant and the latter being more charming or topical. Of course this is wildly unfair—we should give the web surfer 10 days of reading time and ₺100,000 liras to spend as well, but they simply don't need it to win.

Was this written by some AI or LLM because what kind of logic is that? Someone who travels vs. who reads? Is that an even worthy experiment? No..
by FrustratedMonky | 2026-01-12 13:21:47+00:00
Maybe a harsh criticism. The article seemed to be all over the place, maybe because the subject is also all over the place. I agree with everything, its just that it seemed like the same story we've been in for awhile.

Wasn't the main take away generally "study everything even more than you were, and talk/network to everybody even more than you were, and hold on. Work more more more"
by jccalhoun | 2026-01-12 13:22:00+00:00
I'm born and raised in the midwest of the USA. I've watched UK shows since the 80s when PBS would run Doctor Who, Keeping Up Appearances, and other UK shows. I've never read a history devoted to London or the UK but I know the basics.
This summer I visited London for the first time and there were so many things I either had no idea about or knew in the abstract but experiencing it first hand was very different.
by Ensorceled | 2026-01-12 13:22:08+00:00
I think you are misreading the comment you are replying to:

> Your comparison of your friends in Germany vs "insanity" in the US doesn't feel relevant

It's incredibly relevant, why are GLP-1s less needed in Germany vs. US (and other countries like Canada)? This is the insanity they are talking about, not the users of the medication.
by HelloUsername | 2026-01-12 13:22:38+00:00
> kkrieger

Related discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14409210 (2017)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37383894 (2023)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41269079 (2024)
by mahrain | 2026-01-12 13:22:45+00:00
When I was young and having access to internet (but pre social media) I loved looking into these theories, prompted by Discovery Channel's "Quest for the lost civilization" and stumbling upon these books from the 1970s. It felt like doing research and archaeology on the nascent internet.

I was surprised to see these ideas becoming so mainstream with Ancient Aliens, and then somehow finding overlap with the alt-right, antivax and Covid-doubters. This made me really turn off of taking this seriously.
by topocite | 2026-01-12 13:22:47+00:00
Curtis tried to make these statements on the downside of neoliberalism + postmodernism but I don't think he did a very good job based on the discussion on these films.

I think his work is just too stylized. He has such an interesting style that it overwhelms the message. I barely remember what his messaging is in films. Just the interesting visuals and ominous music.

If you read Undoing the Demos by Wendy Brown and Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition together you will understand exactly what he is going for. As a film it doesn't really work that well though beyond a kind of depressing entertainment. The themes are too subtle and philosophical along with most people don't have the background knowledge to really make sense of his points.
by potato3732842 | 2026-01-12 13:22:52+00:00
I grew up in a tourism economy. I have traveled to half a dozen countries.

I side with the author. Viewing consumer travel for entertainment only makes you more learned if you care to observe and think critically, which most do not do as that detracts from the indulgent entertainment aspect of it and even then it's very limited.

The nit picks of the offended peanut gallery here are technically perfectly valid, you won't learn everything from wikipedia and street view either, but they don't invalidate the broader point that galavanting about as a tourist doesn't really teach you squat. It's a luxury. The .03% "education" component doesn't really change that.
Show HN : Pilot – System to improve dramatically your AI coding
by crog | 2026-01-12 13:23:00+00:00
I'm a non-technical guy who spent 2 months trying to ship software with AI tools. Not toy projects — real things I wanted to use. Finance analyzers, productivity tools, dev utilities.

The models are incredible. But the loop was broken.

Every session started from zero. Context would explode. The AI would hallucinate with confidence. And because I can't read code, I had no way to verify when something was wrong. I just knew it was broken.
So I stopped fighting the model and started building the system around it.

Pilot is a /pilot folder you drop into any repo. It's emergent complexity from simple primitives — markdown files that give AI tools:

Persistent state (STATE.md tracks where you are in the workflow)
Scoped tasks (TASK.md defines boundaries before implementation)
Evidence capture (real terminal output via MCP, not generated text)
Protected paths (red zones require human approval)
Recovery (LKG commit auto-updated after health passes)

The core insight: split the AI into two roles.
Orchestrator (Claude/ChatGPT) — high reasoning, low volume. Writes specs, reviews evidence, manages flow.
Builder (Cursor/Claude Code) — high volume, lower cost. Implements, provides proof.
The Orchestrator defines scope before the Builder touches anything. The Builder works within boundaries. The Orchestrator reviews after. Two models, two verification passes.
It's moving from "trust me" to "show me the terminal."

Why I needed this:
I wanted to program by intuition, not by syntax. I can design systems. I can spec features. I can verify that tests pass and URLs work. What I can't do is read 200 lines of generated TypeScript and know if it's correct.
So the system had to prove correctness without requiring code review. Evidence-based commits. Scope contracts. Clear rejection criteria.
It's shared intuition for messy realities. Not a sandbox — I know markdown isn't a firewall. It's defense in depth: separation of concerns, multi-model review, explicit rules, human gates.

Technical notes:
The workflow is a state machine: idle → building → verifying → done. Evidence comes from MCP-captured terminal output. The Orchestrator validates Builder output against TASK.md constraints. Red zone violations trigger automatic escalation.
The /pilot folder is just markdown. Any MCP-enabled tool can read it. No vendor lock-in.

Limitations (being honest):
Solo builder workflow. Team use needs merge strategy for state files.
Convention-based, not filesystem-enforced. If you need true isolation, run in a container.
Context can still drift if you skip the workflow. Health checks help, but it's not foolproof.
Token overhead exists. Trading cost for correctness insurance.

What I've built with it:
Private projects mostly — finance analyzer, productivity tools, Framer components, and Pilot itself. Iterating on the workflow every time I hit a wall until the walls stopped appearing.

Now using it on bigger things I plan to release.

Felt too good not to share.

Happy to discuss the architecture, failure modes, or specific edge cases.
by johnisgood | 2026-01-12 13:23:21+00:00
Thank you for your reply!

I am glad that it is useful to you! The "terrible search + outdated forum posts" problem is real for sure. LLMs genuinely help there by synthesizing across versions and explaining what changed.

I would say that self-hosting with AI assistance is the right approach. Use it to understand, not to blindly execute. Trust me, it is not much of a deal and you will be happy to have gone with this route afterwards!

Good luck with the setup. If you have any questions, let me know, I am always happy to help.

(I have very briefly mentioned some stuff here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46586406 but I can expand and be a bit more detailed as needed.)
by jgraham | 2026-01-12 13:24:14+00:00
> The world will be greener in a high-CO2 environment. There’s no legitimate argument over that fact.

However it's important to remember that world isn't a high school physics experiment, and you can't easily separate out CO2 concentration from the other impacts of increased CO2:

| Climate change can prolong the plant growing season and expand the areas suitable for crop planting, as well as promote crop photosynthesis thanks to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. However, an excessive carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere may lead to unbalanced nutrient absorption in crops and hinder photosynthesis, respiration, and transpiration, thus affecting crop yields. Irregular precipitation patterns and extreme weather events such as droughts and floods can lead to hypoxia and nutrient loss in the plant roots. An increase in the frequency of extreme weather events directly damages plants and expands the range of diseases and pests. In addition, climate change will also affect soil moisture content, temperature, microbial activity, nutrient cycling, and quality, thus affecting plant growth.

[https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4395/14/6/1236]

In global models of climate change the overall impact on plant growth is significant, but not positive:

| Global above ground biomass is projected to decline by 4 to 16% under a 2 °C increase in climate warming

[https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2420379122]

> Certainly it’s more favorable for growth of plants that make food

That does not seem to be what agricultural researchers believe:

| In wheat a mean daily temperature of 35°C caused total failure of the plant, while exposure to short episodes (2–5 days) of HS (>24°C) at the reproductive stage (start of flowering) resulted in substantial damage to floret fertility leading to an estimated 6.0 ± 2.9% loss in global yield with each degree-Celsius (°C) increase in temperature

| Although it might be argued that the ‘fertilization effect’ of increasing CO2 concentration may benefit crop biomass thus raising the possibility of an increased food production, emerging evidence has demonstrated a reduction in crop yield if increased CO2 is combined with high temperature and/or water scarcity, making a net increase in crop productivity unlikely

| When the combination of drought and heatwave is considered, production losses considering cereals including wheat (−11.3%), barley (−12.1%) and maize (−12.5%), and for non-cereals: oil crops (−8.4%), olives (−6.2%), vegetables (−3.5%), roots and tubers (−4.5%), sugar beet (−8.8%), among others

[https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10796516/]
by graemep | 2026-01-12 13:24:29+00:00
Its not as offensive.

I agree this is problematic, but I am inclined to see it as an opportunity to discuss the problem and illustrate how widespread it is. We can also mention real issues, such as about half of all domestic abuse victims in the UK are male (if you count emotional abuse, otherwise its still 40%), more than half of rapes in the US are of men (because of the huge number of prison rapes), etc.
by ben_w | 2026-01-12 13:24:39+00:00
> Because they are not deterministic; you can't use experience with LLMs in any meaningful way. They may give you a different result when you run the same spec through the LLM a second time.

Lots of things, and indeed humans, are also as non-deterministic; I absolutely do use experience working with humans and non-deterministic things to improve my future interactions with them.

Table saws are kinda infamous in this regard: you may say that kick-back is hidden state/incomplete information rather than non-deterministic, but in practice the impact is the same.
by wongarsu | 2026-01-12 13:25:29+00:00
For good reason.

That'd be a BMI of 47. There isn't a lot of statistical data for such high BMIs, but [1] lists prevalence of BMI>40. In Germany 1.2% of men and 2.8% of women had a BMI over 40 in 2011, in the US it was 5.6% and 9.7% respectively in 2016. That's nearly four times as many as in Germany.

1: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7078951/
by realusername | 2026-01-12 13:25:48+00:00
I had exact the same discussion here 5 and 10 years ago (it will be ready next year!), I'm willing to bet that storage isn't going to cut it in the next 10 years.

There's at least two of orders of magnitude missing with the current storage gen and unless a new tech revolution happens, that's not going to work.

The supposedly massive storage which is built in your link doesn't even cover half a day of winter load.

Anything below 200GWh is a proof of concept at best.