MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by techblueberry | 2026-01-05 20:51:50+00:00
I often wonder - Hacker News seems like it might bias towards people who might be more self driven in their learning, does the mean student who is driven enough to go to class but doesn’t have the drive or understanding to learn on their own feel the same way? Especially in terms of bootstrapping a new skill. I’m very self-driven but could imagine college for like getting to that base professional level for something way out of my day-to-day. Particularly I think like I have a masters in counseling psychology, and I don’t think I could imagine that in my own without peers to discuss with and teachers to share professional experience.

At the same time - I’ve always been naturally good at tech. I could imagine when I was younger a CS degree being useful. Now, there are certainly gaps in my knowledge, but I’m well past the bootstrapping phase.
by pixelready | 2026-01-05 20:52:05+00:00
I’m assuming Vision Pro is viewed as what the Newton was to the iPhone. It will provide some useful insight way ahead of its time but the mainstream push will only happen after a number of manufacturing breakthroughs happen allowing for a comfortable daily driver UX. Optics and battery tech will need multiple generational leaps to get to a lightweight goggle / sunglasses form factor with Apple-tier visuals, tracking, and battery life…
by Ajedi32 | 2026-01-05 20:52:11+00:00
Any mention of Musk on HN seems to cause all rational thought to go out the window, but yeah I wonder in this case how much of this wild deviation from the usual sentiment is attributable to:

1. Hypocrisy (people expressing a different opinion on this subject than they usually would because they hate Musk)

vs.

2. Selection bias (article title attracts a higher percentage of people who were already on the more regulation, less freedom side of the debate)

vs.

3. Self-censorship (people on the "more freedom, less regulation" side of the debate being silent or not voting on comments because in this case defending their principles would benefit someone they hate)

There might be other factors I haven't considered as well.
by sebow | 2026-01-05 20:52:28+00:00
If you post pictures of yourself on X and don't want grok to "bikini you", block grok.

Yes, under the TOS, what grok is doing is not the "fault" of grok(the reason is the causal factor of the post[enabled by 2 humans: the poster and the prompter]; the human intent is what initiates the generated post, not the bot; just like a gun is shot by a human, not by the strong winds). You could argue it's the fault of the "prompter", but we're going to circle back to the cat & mouse censorship issue. And no, I don't want a less censored grok version that's unable to "bikini a NAS"(which is what I've been fortunate to witness) just because "new internet users" don't understand what the Internet is.(Yes, I know you can obviously fine-tune the model to allow funny generations and deny explicit/spicy generations)

If X would implement what the so-called "moralists" want, it will just turn into Facebook.

And for the "protect the children" folks, it's really disappointing how we're always coming back to this bullsh*t excuse every time a moral issue arises. Blocking grok is a fix both for the person who doesn't want to get edited AND the user who doesn't want to see grok replies(in case the posts don't get the NSFW tag in time).

Ironically, a decent amount of people who want to censor grok are bluesky users, where "lolicorn" and similar dubious degenerate content is being posted non-stop AS HUMAN-MADE content. Or what, just because it's an AI it's suddenly a problem? The fact that you can "strip" someone by tweeting a bot?

And lastly, sex sells. If people haven't figured out that "bikinis", "boobs", and everything related to sex will be what wins the AI/AGI/etc. race (it actually happens for ANY industry), then it's their problem. Dystopian? Sure, but it's not an issue you can win with moral arguments like "don't strip me". You will get stripped down if it created 1M impressions and drives engagement. You will not convince Musk(or any person who makes such a decision) to stop grok from "stripping you", because the alternative is that other non-grok/xAI/etc. entities/people will make the content, drive the engagement, make the money.
by staticassertion | 2026-01-05 20:52:42+00:00
Exploit the Linux kernel underneath it (not the only way, just the obvious one). Docker is a security boundary but it is not suitable for "I'm running arbitrary code".

That is to say, Docker is typically a security win because you get things like seccomp and user/DAC isolation "for free". That's great. That's a win. Typically exploitation requires a way to get execution in the environment plus a privilege escalation. The combination of those two things may be considered sufficient.

It is not sufficient for "I'm explicitly giving an attacker execution rights in this environment" because you remove the cost of "get execution in the environment" and the full burden is on the kernel, which is not very expensive to exploit.
by superb_dev | 2026-01-05 20:52:50+00:00
I think yes CSAM and other harmful outputs are a different and more heinous problem, I also think the responsibility is different between someone using a model locally and someone promoting grok on twitter.

Posting a tweet asking Grok to transform a picture of a real child into CSAM is no different, in my mind, than asking a human artist on twitter to do the same. So in the case of one person asking another person to perform this transformation, who is responsible?

I would argue that it’s split between the two, with slightly more falling on the artist. The artist has a duty to refuse the request and report the other person to the relevant authorities. If that artist accepted the request and then posted the resulting image, twitter then needs to step in and take action against both users.
by bob1029 | 2026-01-05 20:52:57+00:00
> you have a massive pile of text, and you need to split it into smaller pieces that fit into embedding models or context windows.

I think the recently posted Recursive Language Models paper approaches this in a far more compelling way. They put the long context into the environment and make the LLM write and iterate python code to query against it in a recursive loop. Fig. 2 & 4 are most relevant here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46475395

https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24601

I really like this because it is in The Bitter Lesson genre of solutions. Make the model learn the best way to retrieve info from a massive prompt on disk given the domain and any human feedback (explicit and otherwise).

The bigger the prompt.txt, the less relevant the LLM's raw context capabilities are. Context scaling is quadratic in cost. It's a very expensive rabbit to chase. Recursively invoking the same agent with decomposed problem bits is more of a logarithmic scaling thing. You could hypothetically manage a 1 gigabyte prompt with a relatively minuscule context window under a recursive scheme using nothing other than a shell/python interpreter.
by resoluteteeth | 2026-01-05 20:53:02+00:00
It's not really different than losing weight by any other method in that respect.

There is always the risk of regaining weight unless you continue to do whatever caused you to lose weight (e.g. restricting calories) to some extent.

I guess a "cure" would be good but since we don't have one having to periodically go back on glp drugs if you gain weight is no different from periodically having to go on a diet if you gain weight.

On the other hand most people tend to naturally gain weight pretty slowly (e.g. a pound a year) so having to go on glp drugs for a period every few years wouldn't even be that bad, especially if they're available in pill form.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-05 20:53:03+00:00
Who will maintain the git repo per state? There is value in a pipeline that continually ingests this data from various sources and pushes it into the Internet Archive, but if you wish to treat it as authoritative, it must have a human minding it, because of entropy and decay. Even the Python Software Foundation has a budget of ~$5M/year. Hence my openlaws.us example.

If it was as easy as writing a scraper and dumping it all in a bucket or repo, it'd already be done.

https://xkcd.com/2347/
by tmcz26 | 2026-01-05 20:53:13+00:00
I envy / admire that kind of persistence. But I think it just makes it clear this is about the money and not the company, product, problem, space, or users.

Recently I spoke to a recently funded, first-time founder. They worked less than 2yrs in each of their 5-6 jobs, between summer internships, a VC fund, and investment bank, etc. They told me they started looking at different industries and zeroed in in this particular space, and wanted to build something there because “there was a lot of opportunity”.

They never worked in that space before and had no experience in it. They mapped it out as a “tough problem” in B2B that could potentially earn a lot.

Two non-tech founders, zero customers, $2M in funding.

This story and this post both kind of have that “I’m in it for the cash” vibe with zero interest in the problem itself. I couldn’t do it myself.
by nickpinkston | 2026-01-05 20:53:14+00:00
Yea, agreed.

I'm more worried there's some plausible way (like the ginger discussed) to negate the GLP-1 agonist's function itself or its net effects.

They're not going to talk about it in open industry journals, but Big Tobacco actually did do this with engineered high nicotine tobacco used to adjust addictivity levels.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y1_(tobacco)#Legal_controversy
by lovich | 2026-01-05 20:54:11+00:00
Thank you.

It is infuriating to see my fellow countrymen criticize another system so heavily, when we are living under a largely similar system.

Especially after finding out that the current credit score system was only adopted in 1989, so it’s just another yoke millennials and younger have to live with, that our forefathers got to start their adult life without having to deal with
Show HN: I built a tool to help teams automate basic analytical tasks
by LunarFrost88 | 2026-01-05 20:54:28+00:00
Arka is a AI analytics tool that lets you get insights + charts from any (structured or unstructured) data source. I built it because I was getting tired of writing SQL queries and creating Metabase charts at my last job.

I would love some feedback on our product:

1. How is the landing page / website

2. What use cases could this unlock for you?

We have some awesome tech behind the scenes and have some initial customers, but I am really keen on expanding towards a PLG motion where folks can sign up and get insights about their data fast.

Would love brutally honest feedback! See it here: https://arka.so
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2026-01-05 20:54:48+00:00
People like this CHOSE to use github despite it being a walled garden and now are complaining that they want to destroy the "open source" ecosystem.

You see, here's Stallman being right once again. Stallman many times on many topics said he wouldn't use a product that's a walled garden and where his presence would contribute to that products dominance (i.e. network effects - everybody has to use it because everybody else is using it). People like the author said "I'll use github because it's beneficial to me in the immediate horizon, despite the fact that I'll be indirectly contributing to their assault on free software". Well, hard for me to care about the author now.

Anyway Forgejo[1,2] is FREE and COPYLEFT software, and Codeberg[2] is a pretty big forge. Forgejo also has on their roadmap to add some federated-type features, so that difference people/organizations can host their Forgejo instances, but interact seemlessly with projects on other instances.

If this stuff matters to you, donate to Forgejo.

[1] https://codeberg.org/Forgejo/forgejo

[2] https://forgejo.org/

[3] https://codeberg.org/

[4] https://liberapay.com/forgejo
by reg_dunlop | 2026-01-05 20:54:58+00:00
Exactly.

Where's the guarantee for recognition of future growth....if they don't recognize past growth?

The biggest gripe I have about articles such as this is that it assumes a static perspective of "now, into the future" and it doesn't account for "all the time before now".

If I'm having a conversation akin to the one that opens the blog post, then presumably I've been at the company for a while. Conversations like that don't just happen between CTO and engineer unless there's some time vested in the company for both.

A CTO saying "take my job" as a non-sequitur is sus, IMHO. Now if it's said in the context of "here's a raise, and if you want another one....try to take my job", well now there's some decent context for the ask and a reason to believe that future growth will be compensated.

The best prediction of future performance is past behavior. That goes for mgmt as well as pee-on.
by joshstrange | 2026-01-05 20:55:11+00:00
The author is 100% correct but forgot 1 other Apple service, iCloud Photos (maybe they lumped that in with Drive?) which is far from perfect but is a huge boon for everyone that used to have to deal with "I (somehow destroyed) my phone, how can I get my pictures off it?". "Find My" is another mostly bright spot, it does work very well (especially when sharing location with friends/family). I agree completely on how trash Apple is at any sort of web service (iMessage, iCloud Photos, Find My being the exceptions), literally everything else is an afterthought.

I quite like my Apple hardware but I shy away from all their services or at least not use them for anything important/critical. Also Apple services don't often work with other products/services. For example, you can play Apple Music on Echo's but it's a subpar experience verses something like Spotify.

Now that I think about it, I really do avoid Apple's stuff by and large:

- Mail -> Google Apps (Gmail)

- Calendar -> Google Calendar

- Maps -> I do use Apple Maps, but also Google Maps and Waze

- Reminders -> Things (but I do use Apple Reminders as well, it just sucks)

- Music -> Spotify

- Drive -> Dropbox/Syncthing

- Books -> Kindle

- Weather -> Carrot

And I'm sure there are more. One thing Apple (had? has? probably "had") going for it was a lot of it's services (and apps for that matter) handle the 80% use-case and are good "default" for most people and there are power-user apps/services you can reach for if Apple's doesn't meet the bar. That is slowly not being the case and it's really sad to see (as much as one can feel sad/sorry for a massive company, moreso I'm sad for what was lost.
by GMoromisato | 2026-01-05 20:55:25+00:00
In my view, the meta-advice is to understand the goals and constraints of your boss (and their boss), and work towards those goals (while adhering to the constraints).

With that perspective, we can derive some rules of thumb:

1. Promotions are not a reward for past performance. Instead, they are a bet that you will contribute more towards those goals with a promotion than without one.

2. As the OP says, if you are demonstrating performance at your boss's level, that's evidence/proof that a promotion is warranted. Your boss's goals get implemented (by you), freeing them to work on their boss's goals (and maybe get their own promotion).

3. The more time you spend with your boss, the better you will understand their goals, and symmetrically, the better they will understand your strengths. That means leaving a job after a year or two is not always optimal. It also means following a good boss to another company is often a good move.

4. There will be cases where the goals of your boss (and their boss) diverge from your own goals. They often want to cut costs, but you want a salary increase. There are never easy answers to this dilemma, but seeing their perspective is useful so you can find a win-win scenario. E.g., if you come up with a way to save money in other ways, such as automating an external cost, then your increased salary will be worth it.

5. In some cases, of course, there is no way to reconcile your boss's goals with your own. Realizing that is useful so you can find a different company/boss that is more aligned.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-05 20:55:50+00:00
> cannot roll my eyes hard enough

Okay.

> You expect every bad actor to make a public statement about their vile plans?

Neither Musk nor Miller have exhibited a tremendous amount of discipline in this department.

I don’t expect them to say this. But I do expect someone arguing in good faith to distinguish between plans and effects, particularly when we’re turning what looks like garden-variety sexism into a political theory.
by neom | 2026-01-05 20:56:14+00:00
Few weeks ago I decided to probe the states I could force an LLM into, and basically looking for how folks are getting their LLMs into these extremely "conscious feeling" states. Some of this might be a little unfair but my basic thought was I presume people are asking a lot of "what do you think?" - or something like that, and after the context gets really big, most of the active data is meta cognition? It's 600+ pages, and as a test or even a "revealing process" - I'm not sure how fair it is as I may have led it too much or something (I don't know what I'm doing), but the conversation did start to reveal to me how folks might be getting their chat bots into these states:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qYOLhFvaT55ePvezsvKo0-9N...

Workbench with Claude thinking.
by jandrese | 2026-01-05 20:56:34+00:00
> Transcripts: Multiple dollars per pages. Want that expedited? Multiply that amount by four. Don't know the court date? Can't get your transcript. Clerks put in the wrong date? Tough luck. Payment for those transcripts? Over Zelle because the court reporters themselves are contractors and get paid independently.

Is this because a person has to literally transcribe the stenographer's notes into plain English? Is it expensive because it is labor intensive?
by epistasis | 2026-01-05 20:57:14+00:00
My point is more that a lot of people were talking about removing Section 230 protections, which I think is implicitly what X is saying absolves them of responsibility for Grok-generated CSAM.

Removing Section 230 was a big discussion point for the current ruling party in the US, when they didn't have so much power. Now that they do have power, why has that discussion stopped? I'd be very interested in knowing what changed.
by tangoalpha | 2026-01-05 20:57:21+00:00
Pipes was ahead of its time. Built a scraper and aggregator back in 2008-2010, fetching content from over 2000 sources, pumping all of it into a Drupal website. The amount of regex transformations and other things I had in that pipeline - is in hindsight - more complex, larger scale, and more convoluted that any other nifi or airflow pipelines I built later in my career. And all of it was free. What was possible was limited only by one's creativity!
by bluGill | 2026-01-05 20:57:39+00:00
I disagree with your rules. Not that they are bad - often they are the correct things to do, but they are not the rule.

The rule is "Always do the thing that your company will find most valuable for you to do".

Company politics is always the most important thing - but company politics shouldn't take very much time. (if it does either the productivity costs will kill the company soon or someone high up will figure your BS out and fire you). Company politics is what helps you know what they really want which sometimes differs from your assignment.

Most often that is your rules. Companies generally assign people to work they need done, so if you are not doing that work they are highly likely to notice that lack long before anything else you could do (no matter how much more they really need it).

In rare cases though you will see something more important that is needed and by doing that you will gain far more good attention and get the promotion. This is very hard to pull off though - you must be right, they need to know you did it, and they need to realize this is important before they realize you are not doing your "real job".
by canucker2016 | 2026-01-05 20:57:53+00:00
I'd also call this feature brittle.

Anytime that a coder modifies a function, the safe/unsafe-ness of the function will have to be audited.

People complain about comments getting out of sync with the code - seems like the same thing will occur with safe/unsafe comments attached to functions unless the developers are diligent enough to verify nothing has changed on any PR.

My other quibble from the article concerns:

...It requires going through the AST. And since the static analysis is mostly statically scoped, it doesn’t require heavy cross-file analysis. It can be single-file based, very limited scope.

The large C++ codebases I've seen have not been diligent wrt object ownership. Objects may get accessed in different files - not saying this is correct, just that it happens. Objects can be accessed/modified by other non-owning objects in inconsistent ways which lead to inconsistent behaviour especially when errors occur.

The most impressive C++ static analyzer I've seen is Intrinsa's PREfix product, bought by Microsoft back in the 1990s. They parsed the C++ code using a purchased C++ frontend parser (can't recall the company name, but there are only a handful of companies that sell this stuff) and stored the data references in a database. Then they'd do dataflow analysis of the codebase looking for bugs.

They came out with PREfast which does simpler realtime static analysis (more like lint really) and VC contains a version of this. I think the MS DDK also includes a static code analyzer based on this.

But considering the effort put into guiding the AI versus rolling your own code in your spare time and having to reload the context for your static analyzer while dumping out work-related information, we're taking baby steps into a new age/paradigm for software development.

Just think if this article had been posted five or ten years ago. The technology isn't perfect and it has a long ways to go. Let's hope we don't go down too many wrong paths.
by mikestew | 2026-01-05 20:58:07+00:00
Meh, there are probably a few valid nuggets in there, but a lot of it came across to me as “this doesn’t work the way I think it should”, whether the service works reliably or not. That, or a misguided obligation to say something negative about every service.

“Sign in with Apple? It's convenient and permanently tethers your login to your Apple ID.

Weather? That's Dark Sky with paint.”

C’mon, now you’re just reaching for something to complain about.

And proofread if you’re going to complain about the fit-and-finish in the work of others.
by Corence | 2026-01-05 20:58:11+00:00
Focusing on the AI content generation aspect of this is disappointing to me, since those tools are fuzzy at best and even if the post was AI generated, it isn't necessarily a red flag since the user could be trying to disguise their writing style.

There are plenty of other signs this story is likely fake. The author claiming to be posting from a library on New Years' Day (most government buildings are closed) and was responding over 10 hours on the account. He's using a throwaway and a "burner laptop" at the library, but he also says he put his two weeks' notice in yesterday (also odd that this is on New Years' Eve) which would make identifying him trivial.

Fake stories get to the front page of Reddit every day, I wish journalists were pointing out the actual signs not to trust something to act as a better example.