MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dwattttt | 2026-01-13 21:24:35+00:00
I'm not familiar enough with Zig to want to dive into architecture, the point I wanted to make is general to arenas in any language that can have a stale reference.

I once had a stale stack reference bug in C that lived for a year, because the exact same object was created at the exact same offset every time it was used, which is a similar situation.
by kazinator | 2026-01-13 21:24:50+00:00
Suppose we have two image-oriented AI's.

One is trained with a set of pairs which match words with images. Vast numbers of images tagged with words.

The other is trained on a set of photographs of exactly the same scene from the same vantage point, but one in daylight and the other at night. Suppose all these images are copyrighted and used without permissions.

With the one AI, we can do word-to-image to generate an image. Clearly, that is a derived work of the training set of images; it's just interpolating among them based on the word assocations.

With the other AI, we can take a photograph which we took ourselves in daylight, and generate a night version of the same one. This is not clearly infringing on the training set, even though that output depends on it. We used the set without permission to have the machine extract and learn the concept of diurnal vs. nocturnal appearance of scenes, based on which it is kind of "reimagining" our daytime image as a night time one.

The question of whether AI is stealing material depends exactly on what the training pathway is; what it is that it is learning from the data. Is it learning to just crib, and interpolate, or to glean some general concept that is not protected by copyright: like separating mixed audio into tracks, changing day to night, or whatever.
by philippeantoine | 2026-01-13 21:24:55+00:00
I've just open-sourced NFR (Neural Fractal Reconstruction). Unlike GZIP/LZ methods that rely on static frequency, NFR treats data as a predictable sequence.

The Core Idea: > It uses a PyTorch-based LSTM to predict P(x_t | \text{context}). The more the model "overfits" or learns the specific grammar of the file, the closer the prediction gets to 100%, meaning the Arithmetic Coder consumes nearly 0 bits per symbol.
Specs:

Engine: LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory).

Coding: Custom 32-bit Integer Arithmetic Kernel (no floating-point drift).

Approach: Zero-Shot Adaptation (The model learns the file during compression).
It’s a work in progress, but the goal is to reach the Kolmogorov limit where traditional statistical compressors fail.

Check the architecture here:

https://github.com/AFKmoney/NFR-Compressor

Curious to hear your thoughts on the DaemonArithmeticCoder implementation!"
by miiiiiike | 2026-01-13 21:24:59+00:00
Don't underestimate how anti-AI the tabletop community is. This could have been entitled: "Games Workshop elects not to experience multi-year headache. Will use AI when profitable."

I don't do much with crypto/NFTs/AI, because I don't find any of it useful yet. But I get so much "with us or against us" heat for not being zealously against the the idea of them. It was NFTs, NFTs, NFTs at the table for months until it became AI, AI, AI. My preference is to talk about something else while playing board games.

One thing I've found when talking to non-technical board gamers about AI is that while they’re 100% against using AI to generate art or game design, when you ask them about using AI tools to build software or websites the response is almost always something like "Programmers are expensive, I can't afford that. If I can use AI to cut programmers out of the process I'm going to do it."

A minority are conflicted about this position.

When I talk to technical people at game nights we almost never talk about tech. The one time our programmers all played RoboRally the night kind of died because it felt too close to work for a Saturday night.

If GW was going to use AI they would probably start with sprue layouts. Maybe the AI could number the bits in sane way? I would be for that.
by tamimio | 2026-01-13 21:25:00+00:00
Correct, all of these is about shifting the power dynamics into the middle managers rather than the engineers, who are already trusted to design and develop the system. It’s as if always there should be some gate keeping and wrangling work in place so these managers feel they are not useless in the overall process. Just design a process that ensures the outcome is of xyz quality and never check how and where it was done, but human nature to control is always there.
by devbas | 2026-01-13 21:25:15+00:00
I believe there is a big opportunity for LLM guardrails due to the non-
deterministic nature of the Transformer architecture.

However, the just announced Claude Cowork still warns humans to stay in control: https:// claude.com/blog/cowork-research-preview
I assume this is because their non-human guardrails are not good enough yet to
fully validate the output of an LLM.

What non-human guardrails does Axonflow employ to enforce a policy rule with X% confidence on a prompt / LLM output?
by anon373839 | 2026-01-13 21:25:17+00:00
It isn’t a criticism; it’s a description of what the technology is.

In contrast, human thinking doesn’t involve picking a word at a time based on the words that came before. The mechanics of language can work that way at times - we select common phrasings because we know they work grammatically and are understood by others, and it’s easy. But we do our thinking in a pre-language space and then search for the words that express our thoughts.

I think kids in school ought to be made to use small, primitive LLMs so they can form an accurate mental model of what the tech does. Big frontier models do exactly the same thing, only more convincingly.
by firefax | 2026-01-13 21:25:19+00:00
>I think they should have gotten permission from IRB ahead of time, but this doesn't sound like they were researching human subjects?

I assure you that it falls under IRB's purview -- I came into the thread intending to make grandparent's comment. When using deception in a human subjects experiment, there is an additional level of rigor -- you usually need to debrief the participant about said deception, not wait for them to read about it in the press.

(And if a human is reviewing these patches, then yes, it is human subjects research.)
by 0xy | 2026-01-13 21:25:30+00:00
All the claims that the car did not hit the agent rely upon the first video, with the worst angle of all of the videos, and does not take into account the first person view.

The video shot by the agent in question is the most indicative of the car hitting the agent, as CBS found:

https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/experts-analyze-new-v...

>Johnson said his biggest takeaway from the video was a crunching sound he heard immediately before the gunshots, which he believes is the sound of the SUV hitting the ICE agent.

>"That data point for me shows that there was contact made with the agent, who is now in reasonable fear, who could clearly articulate being hit with an SUV as reasonable fear of great bodily harm or death. And then the shots were fired," said Johnson.
by banannaise | 2026-01-13 21:25:38+00:00
I'm beginning to strongly suspect that many foods are being engineered not to leave you satisfied but to leave you so close to satisfied. I never feel like I just got the perfect bite. My brain wants one more, chasing that perfect bite.

It's a worrisome addiction pattern. I'm still not sure if it indicates something that's been done to the food or a serious problem with my thought patterns.
by showerst | 2026-01-13 21:26:18+00:00
I'm honestly much more worried about the fact that China has access to production lines for zillions of the things than what they'd do with existing ones, but I did make the comment so I'll run with it =).

Let's put on our fun James Bond villain hats for a bit.

The US has around 1.75MM drones that people have bothered to register. DJI has around 75% of that, so call it 1.25MM. This registration program is relatively new so let's say 750K of those are still operable.

How many of those are in the air at any given time? Keep in mind many of these bigger registered drones are used by businesses.

Let's say it's 1%, so 7,500 drones suddenly open some backdoor and get commanded to do a nose dive for the nearest power line. Now add in the smaller ones that are less likely to do damage, but there are 10x as many. Now combine it with a simultaneous cyber attack on infrastructure, and some pre-planned terror attacks.

Is it going to end the country? Of course not. Is there potential for that to cause huge chaos? I think so.

Is that more absurd than the Hezbollah pager bombings? I don't think so.

So yeah, I'd pay more for my drones, my cars, my cell phone towers, etc etc to avoid them being controlled by a country that we might end up in a stupid war with. I'm not saying you can make everything locally in the modern world, that's absurd. But there are valid strategic and natsec concerns about the US/China trade relationship in 2025.
by alephnerd | 2026-01-13 21:27:03+00:00
I agree, but the issue is the impetus behind the statement. The tone which that poster took and the default negative assumption is a negative trait to most hiring managers - especially at the early stage. At an early stage organization, you want your employees to be self-motivated but also open to pull crunchtime if needed (eg. customer escalation, rolled up product launch, pivot)
by breppp | 2026-01-13 21:27:10+00:00
> It doesn’t appear to be anywhere near thousands, but covered bodies have been put out onto the street, so something is going on there.

highly graphic:

https://xcancel.com/Osint613/status/2011155652769694033#m
https://xcancel.com/Osint613/status/2011136906919362932#m
https://xcancel.com/MokhtarGhazzawi/status/20110620873011409...
https://xcancel.com/Osint613/status/2011042718768828742#m
https://xcancel.com/Vahid/status/2011062943043969235#m
https://xcancel.com/Vahid/status/2010367357865136363#m
by jay_kyburz | 2026-01-13 21:27:14+00:00
I'm a professional artist. I don't use AI as it's just not there yet.

But I don't consider using AI all that different to using a camera. A photographer still has plenty of work to do with composition and framing, the lighting, the subject mater, even timing. I still consider a photographer an artist.

I think an AI artist will have a lot to consider as well. To distinguish themselves from other AI artists.

Update: When I say the AI tools are not there yet, its precisely because I can't seem to get the AI to take feedback or instructions. I can't adjust the lighting to create the mood I want, I can't tweak the framing.
by Swizec | 2026-01-13 21:27:18+00:00
> at 15 engineers, it is very doable for a single person to keep track of everyone's work and ensure alignment.

All my past experience disagrees. Sure you have 15 engineers, but you're supporting a business of 150 people. This is a pretty common ratio.

The noise gets very loud at that scale and it becomes almost impossible for self-managed engineers to make forward progress. At the very least you need super clearly defined ownership boundaries. That means business process and workstream ownership, not code ownership.
by maxbond | 2026-01-13 21:27:33+00:00
I don't know what to think of that but I believe you and find that behavior unacceptable. I think the way to improve inclusivity in the workplace is by casting a wider net so that you get applications from people you otherwise wouldn't (not to the exclusion of other applicants), not to change the hiring decision. Like how Roosevelt said he wanted a "square deal" meaning the deck is not stacked while leaving it to the individual to play their hand.
by stetrain | 2026-01-13 21:27:39+00:00
I think the equivalent statement, as in one that is preexisting and has political connotations[1], would be "Black lives matter", for which I would not be surprised to see a decent number of "unsure" responses among white poll respondents asked to agree or disagree, especially a few years ago.

I don't think either response is great, but I don't think a single poll of 130 people is a good justification to make such statements about an entire race of people. And follow up polls conducted by others after the referenced Rasmussen poll got much more nuanced results[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_okay_to_be_white
[2] https://www.cloudresearch.com/resources/blog/its-ok-to-be-wh...
by firefax | 2026-01-13 21:27:51+00:00
>Then, there’s the dicier issue of whether an experiment like this amounts to human experimentation. It doesn’t, according to the University of Minnesota’s Institutional Review Board. Lu and Wu applied for approval in response to the outcry, and they were granted a formal letter of exemption.

I had to apply for exemptions often in grad school. You must do so before performing the research -- it is not ethical to wait for outcry then apply after the fact. Any well run CS department trains it's incoming students on IRB procedures during orientation, and Minnesota risks all federal funding if they continue to allow researchers to operate in this manner.

(Also "exempt" usually refers to exempt from the more rigorous level of review used for medical experiments -- you still need to articulate why your experiment is exempt to avoid people just doing whatever they want then asking for forgiveness after the fact)
by scoofy | 2026-01-13 21:27:52+00:00
I think folks attempting to build a unicorn could just do what nextdoor did -- require a modicum of proof of life -- but for clones of twitter, reddit, etc.

The idea that I might get in a fight with a robot or some state agent on -- gasp -- Hacker News... it makes me want to pull my hair out. I would happily receive a postcard with code once every few years to quasi-prove my location.
by alcroito | 2026-01-13 21:27:59+00:00
Cheers.
I checked the updated steps.

This is still missing creating the `output/.postgres-data` dir, without which docker compose refuses to start.

After creating that manually, going to http://localhost/ shows a 403 Forbidden page, which makes you believe that something might have gone wrong.

This is before running `reddarchiver-builder python reddarc.py` to generate the necessary DB from the input data.
by doctorpangloss | 2026-01-13 21:28:03+00:00
> If any of my work product from now to 2030 could legitimately be entangled in any of the millions of coming copyright claims, I am in a world of hurt.

right... there has been ample code and visual art around to copy for decades, and people have, and they get away with it, and nothing bad happens, and where are the "millions of coming copyright claims" now?

i don't think what you are talking about has anything to do with killing openai, there's no one court decision that has to do with any of this stuff.
by nikanj | 2026-01-13 21:28:06+00:00
Internal forecasts indicate Anthropic’s annualized revenue run-rate could be between about $20 billion and $26 billion in 2026. Let's shoot for the middle, $23 billion

According to multiple articles, Anthropic expects to reduce its cash burn to around one-third of revenue in 2026.

This implies total spending is roughly revenue + cash burn ≈ $23 billion + $7.7 billion ≈ $30.7 billion

When you divide the total spending to the length of the whole year, $1.5 million would sustain Anthropic for roughly 0.43 hours, or about 26 minutes.
by thruway516 | 2026-01-13 21:28:23+00:00
'Class','taste' etc these are all very subjective. One could argue that Mr Beast built all of his fame from scratch and didnt have it handed to him or having to sleep with some powerful gatekeeper - something you can't say about all your 'classy' hollywood stars. If you go back a century you can probably find people kvetching about the lack of class of these new fangled movie people compared to the theater stars of their day (who actually had to know how to act)
by einr | 2026-01-13 21:28:25+00:00
Because there is no such product as Office 2025, much like there was no Windows 96. There is Office 2004, 2008, 2011, 2016, 2019, 2021 and 2024. They usually release roughly every three years so there might be an Office 2027. 365 is a separate (but closely related) product.
by FloorEgg | 2026-01-13 21:28:29+00:00
As someone who has been pondering this very question since 2015, I'm starting to think we have been:

- underestimating how much range humans have in their intelligence and how important it is to productivity.

- overestimating how close LLMs are to replicating that range and underestimating how hard it will be for AI to reach it

- underestimating human capacity to become dissatisfied and invent more work for people to do

- underestimating unmet demand for the work people are doing that LLMs can make orders of magnitude more efficient

I was pretty convinced of the whole "post scarcity" singularity U mindset up until the last year or two... My confidence is low, but I'm now leaning more towards jevins paradox abound and a very slow super intelligence takeoff with more time for the economy to adapt.

The shift in my view has come from spending thousands of hours working with LLMs to code and building applications powered by LLMs, trying to get them to do things and constantly running into their limitations, and noting how the boundary of their limitations have been changing over time. (Looks more like S-curve to me than exponential takeoff). Also some recent interviews by some of the leading researchers, and spending a few hundred hours studying the architecture of human brain and theories regarding intelligence.
by cmrdporcupine | 2026-01-13 21:28:32+00:00
This is all a bit messy to read, but seems TFA recommends against 1:1s and any kind of ticket management or any eng. management all when you have 5-6 engineers and this ... insane.

People need to get on the same page. You don't need to be (shouldn't be) process insane or go SCRUM or whatever to do that. But having regular organized interactions and task definitions is absolutely imperative even early on when you don't know for sure what you'll be doing.
by casey2 | 2026-01-13 21:28:33+00:00
People don't listen to music because it sounds good, most music sounds downright awful, they listen to it for the human stories and connection. 99% of the music I listen

Nobody listens to techno - Eminem

AI needs to make music that sells. The same way Scorsese and Brando sell the Godfather. until it can do that literally nobody will care.
by spicymaki | 2026-01-13 21:28:37+00:00
I think you are being deliberately obtuse here is the quote:

“Wherever you have to go, just get away. Because there’s no fixing this. This can’t be fixed. So I don’t think it makes any sense as a white citizen of America to try to help Black citizens any more. It doesn’t make sense. There’s no longer a rational impulse. So I’m going to back off on being helpful to Black America because it doesn’t seem like it pays off”
by bob001 | 2026-01-13 21:28:37+00:00
I get to solve interesting problems at a large scale with minimal politics or BS with legitimate unlimited PTO so I'd probably stick around. Eventually I might do my own startup or consulting business or some such. I find joy in solving interesting problems with real impact which is difficult outside some type of job. Thats due to my personality more than anything but it is what it is. The job is not the passion but the problems are.
by cigar_cigar | 2026-01-13 21:29:02+00:00
I'm a moderately frequent user of Suno and have encountered some unusual AI-generated effects that I've not come across before in more traditionally synthesized music.

One is when it attempts to generate vocals without a lyrics prompt. It's gibberish but just on the edge of comprehensibility. Sometimes it'll be entirely spoken word with no accompaniment. Very uncanny.

Another is transitioning between vocals and instrument in the same melody line. Like a humanesque voice holding a steady note at the end of a verse which seamlessly transitions into a saxophone sound and proceeds into a solo. Or vice versa, an instrumental morphing into a voice.

Finally is when the generation goes wrong and it starts spitting out absolute nonsensical sounds with no rhythm or melody, in a uniquely fragmented way I can't really describe. It feels like seeing the musical matrix, the inner thoughts of the AI.

Now I've written all that out and had a think about it, I'm tempted to sample these oddities and try to make something more structured out of them.
by jacquesnadeau | 2026-01-13 21:29:21+00:00
cool to see ctenv. definitely a similar vibe. thanks for sharing! will look at more closely.

Interesting to see how you incorporated some dockerfile patterns. devcontainer feature-esque.

I'm curious to know if you are using it for the isolation concepts I call "cellular development": https://shai.run/docs/concepts/cellular-development/
by RansomStark | 2026-01-13 21:29:22+00:00
Sports teams aren't a particularly good criteria, I could be Scottish or Welsh and play for England, it's one of those idiocracies of living in a country that pretends to be 4.

Denying the existence of an ethic group is extremely racist, and is often considered a precursor to other much more serious issues.

If you have any acquaintance with English history you would be well aware that there are native ethnic groups that have been in the UK since approximately the end of the younger dryas around 11,000 years ago.

The last major migration was the anglo-saxons around 1500 years ago.

These groups still exist and the majority of the UK population can still trace their origin back to one of these groups.
by pessimizer | 2026-01-13 21:29:33+00:00
There was a long period of time during which firefox users weren't sure whether they were going to follow chrome (like they did on every single other thing.) They're still user-hostile and their values are inscrutable; I have no trust that they won't kill ad blocking next year, or the year after. Requiring add-ons to be signed was a more radically hostile leap than moving to ManifestV3 would be.

The people still complaining about firefox are its most faithful users. The reason some are vicious is because they are trapped - they'll consider cutting their use of the internet before using an non-FOSS browser. 90% of firefox's users left. People who could stand a closed browser have already decided to use one. You're in an extreme minority if you even know anything about firefox to complain about. This year the Linux desktop, of all impossible things, has become more popular than firefox.

Yet there's still this confidence and attitude about even the remaining users that comes from being spoon-fed cash by your direct competitor in return for nothing.
by m463 | 2026-01-13 21:29:37+00:00
> This post is very well presented

I suspect you must be very careful, overwhelmingly complete and understandable presenting this kind of stuff.

otherwise:

- if it isn't, the post might be buried in drama.

- or else, the post will be another obscure warning that nobody sees.

for me, I noticed after the ios 26 "upgrade" I must continually forget, then repair my bluetooth devices. But I don't have the benefit of a clearly understandable article that calls apple out.