MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by __MatrixMan__ | 2026-01-18 21:03:28+00:00
If that's your threat model, then I think the way forward is to maintain separate identities. There are trade-offs there also of course: fragment yourself too much and the people who trust you will now only trust a portion of what you have to say... unless you have the time and energy to rebuild that trust multiple times.

Of course that's the same with the web we have today, the only difference is that you get control over which data goes with which identity rather than having that decision made for you by the platform boundaries.
by nullocator | 2026-01-18 21:04:26+00:00
Bill gates owns over 250,000 acres of land spread across like 15+ states, idk what to call that if not hoarding.

Don't pretend that because most of their wealth is termed as illiquid that it doesn't still count. It counts, they can access it and make use of their wealthy whenever they want. Rather than doing great good deeds, they are sitting on some cash and lots and lots of assets and their focus is on growing and expanding their wealth; that is hoarding.
by ctoth | 2026-01-18 21:04:49+00:00
My question was something like: what is the right representation for program semantics when the consumer is an LLM and the artifact exceeds context limits?

"Make sub-documents with cross-references" is just... recreating the problem of programming languages but worse. Now we have implicit dependencies between prose documents with no tooling to track them, no way to know if a change in document A invalidates assumptions in document B, no refactoring support, no tests for the spec.

To make things specific:

https://github.com/ctoth/polyarray-spec
by TZubiri | 2026-01-18 21:05:37+00:00
With that title, I'm clicking and reading all the way through.

I'm writing an article on a similar topic, but it's a critique on a popular development style that imports a huge dependency supply chain (without concern on if they are cathedral, bazaar, or megachurches), and what the benefits of building your thing bottom-up has.

If this sounds interesting to you, hacker news reader, you can leave a comment and I'll reply with a link once it's published.
by HDThoreaun | 2026-01-18 21:06:19+00:00
Novo nordisk's biggest mistake was refusing to create a direct to consumer business. Eli Lilly sells most of their product through their website at large discounts, this superior distribution method is largely how they were able to gain such a large market share. Their product is also better than ozempic, so that definitely helped too. But its not like Novo Nordisk was stuck with ozempic, they couldve developed new advancements as well.
by pfdietz | 2026-01-18 21:06:25+00:00
It's all up for debate, but personally I feel you're being too pessimistic there. The advances being made are faster than I had expected. The area is one where success will build upon and accelerate success, so I expect the rate of advance to increase and continue increasing.

This particular field seems ideal for AI, since verification enables identification of failure at all levels. If the definitions are wrong the theorems won't work and applications elsewhere won't work.
by timbit42 | 2026-01-18 21:07:00+00:00
If the money was given to help people who weren't working due to COVID-19 to pay for necessities such as housing and food, then it is not extra spending than would normally be spent so it shouldn't cause inflation. Perhaps too much money was given or it was given to people who didn't need it. It doesn't need to be a loan to not cause inflation.
by danabramov | 2026-01-18 21:07:21+00:00
That's a great question!

Adding new features is usually not a problem because you can always add optional fields and extend open unions. So, you just change `media: Link | Picture | unknown` to `media: Link | Picture | Video | unknown`.

You can't remove things true, so records do get some deprecated fields.

Re: updating safely, the rule is that you can't change which records it would consider valid after it gets used in the wild. So you can't change whether some field is optional or required, you can only add new optional fields. The https://github.com/bluesky-social/goat tool has a linting command that instantly checks whether your changes pass the rules. In general it would be nice if lexicon tooling matures a bit, but I think with time it should get really good because there's explicit information the tooling can use.

If you have to make a breaking change, you can make a new Lexicon. It doesn't have to cause tech debt because you can make all your code deal with a new version, and convert it during ingestion.
by bentcorner | 2026-01-18 21:08:31+00:00
> A simplified model is needed otherwise rigorous analysis becomes impossible, and people make handwavy arguments about how paying workers more means they can spend more, which means factories, and it's a perpetual growth machine!

I'm no economist but you can't live on an island that only produces coconuts, because the people on that island would quickly start producing other stuff, breaking your premise.

This is like saying cash is useless because amoeba haven't evolved a cash economy.
by 1718627440 | 2026-01-18 21:08:50+00:00
Why do you serialize and then deserialize the list of files? Even if you do disable the splitting on reparsing the list, why don't you just do this:

find . -type f -name '*.mp3' -exec some command {} ';'

That sounds just unnecessary and bug prune. Unless you target some odd platform where find doesn't support '-exec', but it is even in POSIX. I think due to your use of process substitution, your code has a higher chance of being unportable, so why do you want to complicate your code?

Stuff like that is why I personally prefer the man pages to random websites.

Honestly for something as complex as a shell (which describes both a language, an editor, and an implementation) the man page is surprisingly short. (6418 lines for me) I have just found the section on process substitution in <1min, without even using the search, just by reading. I looked it up, because I didn't knew the name of that syntax, so I needed to actually look for what I wanted and I do not use the man page of bash often.
by turnsout | 2026-01-18 21:09:03+00:00
This seems like a predictable pendulum swing. I love AI, but I also love the phenomenon of people turning more toward IRL and tangible activities.

Anecdotally, I have friends who have recently bought turntables out of the blue and gotten into vinyl. Other friends who never had any interest in my analog cameras are asking about film. My wife has even switched from scrolling Instagram at night to working on a crossword book with a pencil.

None of them have put it exactly this way, but in divisive times, I think social media is just exhausting. And now you can't even really tell what's real.
by danabramov | 2026-01-18 21:09:37+00:00
You don't need to host your own PDS for any of this to work. It works the same way regardless of who hosts your PDS.

I think what may be confusing you is that Bluesky (the company) acts in two different roles. There's hosting (PDS) and there's an app (bsky.app). You can think of these conceptually as two different services or companies.

Yes, when you sign up on Bluesky, you do get "Bluesky hosting" (PDS). But hosting doesn't know anything about apps. It's more like a Git repo under the hood.

Different apps (Bluesky app is one of them) can then aggregate data from your hosting (wherever it is) and show different projections of it.

Finally, no, if you're famous, you don't need enterprise hosting. Hosting a PDS can be extremely cheap (like $1/mo maybe)? PDS doesn't get traffic spikes on viral content because it's amortized by the app (which serves from its DB).
by techblueberry | 2026-01-18 21:09:44+00:00
I’m kind of curious about this:

“ Long-horizon tasks: We are increasingly solving tasks that take hours of human equivalent time. Agents are now able to maintain capability even as the context window fills with thousands of tool calls. The human-equivalent time-horizon continues to grow”

Because the most efficient humans don’t do this, they have short cycle times. This “agents can operate without intervention” always felt like an anti-pattern to me.
by booleanbetrayal | 2026-01-18 21:09:45+00:00
i just finished Children of Time and found it to be incredibly rewarding. However, I think I prefer Shroud if I were to pick a favorite of Adrian Tchaikovsky. I think he did a very capable job of crystallizing the concept of an alien intelligence that has evolved in a environmental substrate completely foreign to our own. It was very refreshing. If you haven't read this work of his, I highly recommend it.
by kcrwfrd_ | 2026-01-18 21:10:01+00:00
Haha I did the same with our product manager and designers. One of our designers just got her first (tiny) PR merged this week.

I am somewhat fearful of having created a monster, but at the same time I think it’s good to knock down barriers to knowledge and learning. All else equal, I think a designer or PM with some exposure to code is better than one without.

What I’m fearful of are 10k line PRs and pressure from product to “just ship it.” Past a certain threshold a PR will be really tough to review, to the point that it would be preferable for an engineer to have handled it from the start.

I think we will need deeper integration between figma and the codebase/storybook. Shared color palette definitions, integration of storybook components with figma components, stuff like that.

The Figma MCP that you can use to handover to your agent and simply say “implement this” is already pretty impressive.
Show HN: Beats, a web-based drum machine
by kinduff | 2026-01-18 21:10:08+00:00
Hello all!

I've been an avid fan of Pocket Operators by Teenage Engineering since I found out about them. I even own an EP-133 K.O. II today, which I love.

A couple of months ago, Reddit user andiam03 shared a Google Sheet with some drum patterns [1]. I thought it was a very cool way to share and understand beats.

During the weekend I coded a basic version of this app I am sharing today. I iterated over it in my free time, and yesterday I felt like I had a pretty good version to share with y'all.

It's not meant to be a sequencer but rather a way to experiment with beats and basic sounds, save them, and use them in your songs. It also has a sharing feature with a link.

It was built using Tone.js [2], Stimulus [3] and deployed in Render [4] as a static website. I used an LLM to read the Tone.js documentation and generate sounds, since I have no knowledge about sound production, and modified from there.

Anyway, hope you like it! I had a blast building it.

[0]: https://teenage.engineering

[1]: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1GMRWxEqcZGdBzJg52soe...

[2]: https://tonejs.github.io

[3]: https://stimulus.hotwired.dev

[4]: http://render.com
by __MatrixMan__ | 2026-01-18 21:10:10+00:00
We want more control over data that we've created, and more control over data that's about us. I'm not sure either of these concepts align well with "ownership" though. Property and data are concepts that don't mix.

Language nitpicking aside... you subvert the walls of their gardens and aggregate the walled-off data without the walls, so users face a choice not between:

- facebook

- everything else

but instead between

- facebook and everything else

- just facebook

But that approach only works if we can solve the "data I created" problems in a way that doesn't also require us to acknowledges facebook's walls.
by mschuster91 | 2026-01-18 21:10:21+00:00
The idea is to use that as a marketing ploy on all sides.

On one side, paying high wages is marketing on the employment market - enticing people to work at Ford's rather than somewhere else.

Then, you got the government side. A factory providing a town with a lot of high quality employment leads to a lot of purchasing power from the employees and thus to a growing city. Wolfsburg in Germany, the best example, literally was founded by/for Volkswagen. Being respected by local politics for that growth, in turn, leads politicians and city management to... be lenient in enforcing regulations impeding the business. The best example here is Tesla in Brandenburg near Berlin. With any other company in any other place in Germany, they would get hammered with fines. Tesla in turn set up shop in a destitute area, so politicians bent over backwards and looked aside despite numerous violations and transgressions.

And finally, you got the customer side. The story of a quality product, made by well-paid domestic workers, was as powerful a story as it still is today, at least in affluent circles.
by aleph_minus_one | 2026-01-18 21:11:27+00:00
> Our CEO started sharing screenshots of his xitter/linkedin feeds and most of them contain wisdoms like "Opus 4.5 is better than 90% of talent". There is also longer form business fan fiction. It usually follows this template: there is a hero - a humble manager/sales person, and a villain - a cocky, nerdy software developer. The villain claims that some task is impossible or takes months to complete. Then the humble hero (equipped with Opus 4.5) completes the task in 2 hours. The villain is then humiliated/fired and everyone lives happily ever after.

I do have the impression that many programmers are much more resistant to bullshitting, and love to call out the mistakes when confronted with bullshit. Getting into management, on the other hand, means believing in instead of fighting lots bullshit.

So, of course the mentioned CEO gets lots of such stories in his xitter/linkedin feeds; CEOs are not insanely eager to comment on such stories why the premises are wrong, and by which dirty tricks this manipulates people. Rather, by climbing up the company ranks, they actively had to believe in more and more fairy tables (or bullshit); if they are too resistant to the brainwashing that they have to believe in, they will stop climbing ranks.
by kennywinker | 2026-01-18 21:12:56+00:00
“The raw materials for epoxy resin production are today largely petroleum derived, although some plant derived sources are now becoming commercially available (e.g. plant derived glycerol used to make epichlorohydrin).”

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epoxy

if they were obtained from non-fossil sources - but they weren’t, and the industry hasn’t switched and may never switch to plant based.

Also, what you said isn’t necessarily true even with plant based resins. What is the carbon cost of producing new resin vs recycling old?

There’s more to the impact of a material than the carbon stored inside it.

Yes, we were all duped by the recycling industry. No that doesn’t make all attempts at recycling a lie.
by dang | 2026-01-18 21:13:21+00:00
The obvious default interpretation of your comment is that the other person is using something as an excuse. If you say you did not intend it as a personal putdown, I believe you, but the rest of us don't have direct access to your intent, so you'd need to include enough information in your comments to disambiguate it.

More information here in case helpful: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

As for Marion Milner's classic paragraph, I'm delighted that you found it worthwhile enough to quote! But you have to read the entire paragraph to understand it, and you can't leave out the word "toleration". That's the most important word there, both in the text and in the title.
by carlosjobim | 2026-01-18 21:13:45+00:00
We're talking about Adobe and other paid software, which is generally for professionals. They make back more than the entire cost of the software and the computer by doing a job for just one client.

And Apple computers are incredibly affordable, rumored to get a budget laptop which will be even cheaper. Computers in general are dirt cheap, including Apple. And paid software is not expensive on Apple either. There are tons of quality pro software for $50 - $100 per license. And affordable subscription models of pro creative software for those who are just getting started.
by robocat | 2026-01-18 21:14:19+00:00
> [people without soft skills] were always the extreme intelligence outliers

This is a B-player myth.

High intelligence makes you better at soft skills. People are complex, and being good at soft skills takes intelligence, intelligence to intuit the importance and see the patterns of soft skills.

It is true that if you have high skills that a business needs, you can choose to ignore many internal norms of dress or etiquette.

And also as your status goes up, the more you don't need to care about signaling, and some people do counter-signalling. I always think of this: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/lifestyle/article-9233455/Prince...

Unfortunately it is also true that some people think that acting badly will give them cred (reversing the causality that having cred permits bad behaviour). Was Sam-Bankman-Fried acting that cryptic appearance? Do executives also model their behaviour by rewatching The Apprentice or Gordon Ramsay?

Disclaimer: That's mostly my personal opinion, from watching people smarter than I. Then again I'm no genius, nor do I win status games, so perhaps I'm just ignorant. I've definitely seen some less talented try and put on an act leading to a pratfall. Also many of the smartest people I know left school at 15.
by Gerard0 | 2026-01-18 21:15:11+00:00
I never heard of Robert Langs nor Masud Khan before, thanks!
Let me appropriate something I heard Jean Allouch (fantastic guy, died some 2 years ago):
"What interests me is madness and the way of welcoming it, which is called psychoanalysis."
I used to say I practice lacanian psychoanalysis, but more and more (thanks to exchange with colleagues, seminars and so on) I have been trying to expand my knowledge.
Just like you discovered, there are so many great ideas and authors which were simply forgotten. It's a tough path to walk!
by CGMthrowaway | 2026-01-18 21:15:39+00:00
Reserving judgment on the particular case at hand, rebus sic stantibus (fundamental change of circumstances) as well as self-preservation/national security are well-worn avenues for modifying treaties or adherence thereto.

International courts almost always reject these arguments because they want treaties to be stable, but when a state (like the US or the USSR/Russia) has the power to back up their argument, they can be successful
by alephnerd | 2026-01-18 21:16:07+00:00
Also having individual EU member states publicly announcing and committing to ratifying the Eu-Canada CETA within a 1 year time frame like they did for the EU-India FTA would be a significant message that also doesn't require shooting oneself in the foot.

States within the EU may also have to make peace with the need to expanding ties with regional powers like Israel, KSA, UAE, Egypt, etc in a strategic instead of tactical framework.

IK the latter is in the pipeline, the former less so due to electoral risks.
by coolastekatten | 2026-01-18 21:16:14+00:00
Hey HN,

I built Slates because I think that agents need new primitives, including for presentations.

The idea: presentations defined as structured JSON with grid-based layouts. Beautiful without pixel-pushing.

Think "Notion slides", and JSON-first that connect via MCP.

Would love feedback from anyone building agentic workflows or thinking about this space!
by nickpsecurity | 2026-01-18 21:16:50+00:00
Some projects refuse for copyright reasons. Back when GPT4 was new, I dug into pretraining reports for nearly all models.

Every one (IIRC) was breaking copyrights by sharing 3rd-party works in data sets without permission. Some were trained on patent filings which makes patent infringement highly likely. Many breaking EULA's (contract law) by scraping them. Some outputs were verbatim reproductions of copyrighted works, too, which could get someoen sued if they published them.

So, I warned people to stay away from AI until (a) training on copyrighted/patented works was legal in all those circumstances, (b) the outputs had no liability, and (c) users of a model could know this by looking at the pretraining data. There's no GPT3- or Claude-level models produced that way.

On a personal level, I follow Jesus Christ who paid for my sins with His life. We're to be obedient to God's law. One is to submit to authority (aka don't break man's law). I don't know that I can use AI outputs if they were illegally trained or like fencing stolen goods. Another reason I want the pretraining to be legal either by mandate or using only permissible works.

Note: If your country is in the Berne Convention, it might apply to you, too.
by mschuster91 | 2026-01-18 21:17:35+00:00
> In the pharmaceutical industry, I can guarantee their advertising funnel is much wider than two social media platforms. Think about all the places you see pharmaceutical ads: TV, billboards, even ads on buses, that sketchy doctor’s office full of company swag. That $40 million is not going all to Google and Meta even if the GP comment tried to imply it was.

Having worked adjacent to ads... yes, there is more than social media ads. But the amount of everything not social media has massively shrunk!

Local newspapers are effectively dead except for local businesses (and even these are reducing their spend - especially the food delivery services fully rely on Uber, Just Eat etc) and so is radio, and even TV has been hit hard. You got newspapers and broadcast stations getting hit left and right, sliding into bankruptcy and/or being bought up by larger companies for pennies on the dollar. The fact that all across the Western world government/citizen funded public broadcasts are under attack makes it even worse, the diversity of media and, most importantly, the amount of people holding government accountable is collapsing as we speak [1].

Globally, Google, Amazon and Meta suck up over half of the global ad spend and it's not going to look better [2].

[1] https://lizfarmer.substack.com/p/how-the-decline-of-local-ne...

[2] https://www.marketingdive.com/news/global-ad-spend-rise-fast...
by volleyball | 2026-01-18 21:18:14+00:00
They didn't give it to Machado hoping she would bring peace. In fact, they did it for the opposite reason. They awarded it at the height of tension and build-up of US forces outside Venezuela, while they were blowing up boats in the Carribean, to encourage Trump to go even further. Something btw which Machado wholeheartedly supported and encouraged.
by squidsoup | 2026-01-18 21:18:40+00:00
Thanks! I'm using the KIRI Engine in Blender to render splats from my photos (https://github.com/Kiri-Innovation/3dgs-render-blender-addon) and then process the image as I would my photography in Lightroom. There are lots of different photogrammetry tools for generating plys (the point cloud) like PolyCam (https://poly.cam).
by TZubiri | 2026-01-18 21:18:56+00:00
Ding!

It's great business to minimally modify valuable stuff and then take credit for it. As was explained to me by bar-certified counsel "if you take a recipe and add, remove or change just one thing, it's now your recipe"

The new trend in this is asking Claude Code to create a software on some type, like a Browser or a DICOM viewer, and then publishing that it's managed to do this very expensive thing (but if you check source code, which is never published, it probably imports a lot of open source dependencies that actually do the thing)

Now this is especially useful in business, but it seems that some people are repurposing this for proving math theorems. The Terence Tao effort which later checks for previous material is great! But the fact that the Section 2 (for such cases) is filled to the brim, and section 1 is mostly documented failed attempts (except for 1 proof, congratulations to the authors), mostly confirms my hypothesis, claiming that the model has guards that prevent it is a deus ex machina cope against the evidence.