MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tock | 2026-01-07 15:48:56+00:00
> And Indeed, there were no consequences later. But what should have been done and by whom at that point?

Reparations?

> How do you prove that it was deliberately misleading?

Are you denying the fact that countries didn't know? Many EU countries did indeed stay out of the conflict after all. Are you saying the incredible intelligence agencies of western countries were simply oblivious?

> Why would it be the job of nations of Europe or EU?

Because you sent troops? And because people there genuinely think they are the good guys?

> I remember having discussions about Iraq with people from Scandinavia, Italy, Spain, Germany, and France back when the invasion started.

Would you let Russia off the hook for Ukraine then? After all the people there are under dictatorial rule. I'm sure there are large groups of people there who oppose the war.

> The reality is that the US is the most powerful geopolitical entity and Europe is a continent consisting of many individual countries. Even the EU is a divided group of nations, and even if united would not be as powerful as the US is currently.

I completely agree. The US is too powerful. I'm just saying it shouldn't come as a complete surprise that they would one day target Europe as well. Unfortunately might makes right. I just hope the US comes to their senses.
by silexia | 2026-01-07 15:49:12+00:00
The DYCF currently only asks daycares to submit their own records... Basically just asking, "Did you commit fraud?"

We need several random audits a year where an auditor shows up at a daycare, looks at the records and makes sure the records that day match the kids in the daycare.

Or better yet, don't have the government involved at all in funding daycares. Give the money to parents for having kids and they can use it for daycare if they wish or for caring for their own kids if they wish.
by pjmlp | 2026-01-07 15:49:29+00:00
Depends on the point of view, for Reversec, it does.

https://reversec.com/usb-armory

> In addition to native support for standard operating environments, such as Linux distributions, the USB armory is directly supported by TamaGo, an Reversec Foundry developed framework that provides execution of unencumbered Go applications on bare metal ARM® System-on-Chip (SoC) processors.
by HelloNurse | 2026-01-07 15:49:52+00:00
Typically, what's nicer is the absence of other features that interfere with the important ones.

For example, Prolog isn't a general purpose functional or imperative language: you can assert, retract and query facts in the automatically managed database, risking only incorrect formulas, inefficiencies and non-monotonicity accidents, but not express functions, types, loops, etc. which could have far more general bugs.
by bluGill | 2026-01-07 15:50:03+00:00
Languages are "Easy" to design. There is nothing wrong designing a new language and it can be fun.

There is however something wrong with releasing your new language! In most cases you should show it off to close friends, or your professor, and then burn it and all the source. Sure you might be better than the current language, but you won't be enough better as to be worth it. (even if the language is notoriously bad C++ where it is easy to be better - you won't be enough better as to be worth it).

If you want a better language there are two good options: switch to a different one that already exists; or make your language better. There are lots of great choices for languages out there if you want to switch. If the language you are thinking of doesn't have an active community of people working on making it better, it probably isn't a good choice.

Whichever language you choose though, libraries are the hard part. There are a lot of bad libraries, we need someone to write a better one - but only if one doesn't exist! For the great libraries out there, most need someone to contribute.

A large part of libraries is the consistent interface. Often there is a great libFoo and libBar, but their APIs are not consistent and so we need a libBarWithFooStyleInterface, and/or libFooWithBarStyleInterface. Better yet, we need everyone to come together and agree on how the interface should be and then make both use that new standard - cleaning Augean stables with a toothbrush seems like an easier task. Of course in the real world there a hundreds of libraries each with a great interface that is not consistent with the others.
by strobe | 2026-01-07 15:50:07+00:00
>You need to follow up with a set of strict requirements to set expectations, guard rails, and what the final product should do (and not do).

that usually very hard to do part, and is was possible to spent few days on something like that in real word before LLMs. But with LLMs is worse because is not enough to have those requirements, some of those won't work for random reasons and is no any 'rules' that can grantee results. It always like 'try that' and 'probably this will work'.

Just recently I was struggled with same prompt produced different result between API calls before I realized that just usage of few more '\"' and few spaces in prompt leaded model to completely different route of logic which produced opposite answers.
by jt2190 | 2026-01-07 15:50:11+00:00
> But they promise [the creation of wealth] to the society.

It feels like you're trying to describe the "social contract" between private banks and the rest of society, but putting the full responsibility of "wealth creation" only on one party in the contract: The bank.

The other party, Society, is given access to capital when they borrow. The rate they're charged should be competitive since there is presumably more than one lender. By borrowing money they try to "create wealth", then to repay the loan principal along with a bit of the new wealth in the form of interest.
by okaleniuk | 2026-01-07 15:50:12+00:00
There should be a lesson for other communities but, unfortunately, there is none. StackOverflow used to be a fun and welcoming place in 2009. It became a toxic hellhole overtime

There are no obvious flows in the original design, and there were no endemic wrongdoings in the governance either. It just rotted slowly like any other community does. And nobody in the world knows how to keep communities from becoming toxic. There is simply no recipe. And that's why StackOverflow doesn't serve as a lesson either.
by DetectDefect | 2026-01-07 15:51:12+00:00
Not necessary, this information is free:

https://finviz.com/calendar/economic/detail/UNITEDSTAJOBOFF?...

> Job openings in the US fell by 303,000 to 7.146 million in November 2025, the lowest since December 2020 and well below market expectations of 7.60 million. The number of job openings decreased in accommodation and food services (-148,000); transportation, warehousing, and utilities (-108,000); and wholesale trade (-63,000). On the other hand, openings increased in construction (+90,000). Meanwhile, hires were little changed and total separations were unchanged at 5.1 million each. Within separations, both quits (3.2 million) and layoffs and discharges (1.7 million) were little changed.
by api | 2026-01-07 15:51:35+00:00
I don't think they're totally wrong, but they will probably overcorrect. Saturated fat is healthy in moderation. Carbs are also fine in moderation, and carbs in particular come in high and low quality forms.

What's too bad is that these things come in package deals. If you want to question the old outdated and probably corrupted orthodoxy around the food pyramid, you also have to open the door to antivax idiots and quack influencers who think Measles is actually good for you and other nonsense.
by burnt-resistor | 2026-01-07 15:51:57+00:00
Skills that aren't present in sufficient quantities for the US military to be able to invade or hold Greenland. (They have a "Space" base 1000 mi from Nuuk but it consists of 150 personnel, a 10000' runway, and facilities for missile detection.) Furthermore, the ~55k Danes and Greenlanders have 15k-20k large caliber rifles that hit out to 800-900 meters out of necessity. People there sell suppressed .30-06 and larger rifles with enormous optics on FB Marketplace for $600-800 equivalent. US invading Greenland would face 1000+ Simo Häyhäs and the dissolution of NATO.
by tbrownaw | 2026-01-07 15:52:29+00:00
> A pervasive belief in scaling has resulted in a massive windfall in capital for industry labs and fundamentally reshaped the culture of conducting science in our field.

People spend money on this because it works. It seems odd to call observable reality a "pervasive belief".

> Academia has been marginalized from meaningfully participating in AI progress and industry labs have stopped publishing.

Firstly, I still see news items about new models that are supposed to do more with less. If these are neither from academia nor industry, where are they coming from?

Secondly, "has been marginalized"? Really? Nobody's going to be uninterested in getting better results with less compute spend, attempts have just had limited effectiveness.

.

> However, it is unclear why we need so many additional weights. What is
particularly puzzling is that we also observe that we can get rid of most of these
weights after we reach the end of training with minimal loss

I thought the extra weights were because training takes advantage of high-dimensional bullshit to make the math tractable. And that there's some identifiable point where you have "enough" and more doesn't help.

I hadn't heard that anyone had a workable way to remove the extra ones after training, so that's cool.

.

.

The impression I had is that there's a somewhat-fuzzy "correct" number of weights and amount of training for any given architecture and data set / information content. And that when you reach that point is when you stop getting effort-free results by throwing hardware at the problem.
by touristtam | 2026-01-07 15:52:41+00:00
Used to call that Windblows and Microsucks in my early 20s, I am not sure it was edgy back then and I am sure it isn't now. The UI/UX changes from ME > XP > Win8. At least you could keep the _classic_ look until Win10, I am not certain is the case with Win11 and what every Windows Copilot is coming next.
by tock | 2026-01-07 15:52:49+00:00
> Btw. as far as I remember neither China, India, Russia, nor practically any other nation stopped trading with the US over the war in Iraq. Maybe I am wrong about that.

Yep. Because countries only care about themselves. The US is too important economically. But are you saying that Europe like India and China does stuff that benefits them and isn't a better standard morally?
by senordevnyc | 2026-01-07 15:53:04+00:00
I'm a 1-person startup doing pretty well.

I got laid off in the first half of 2025 and decided to use my severance to see if I could go full-time with my side project. Over the last six months I've gone from zero to about $200k in ARR, and 75% of that was in the last three months. My average customer is paying about $250 / month.

I have zero help, I do everything myself: coding, design, marketing, sales, etc. The product uses AI to replace humans in a niche industry, so the core of the product is AI, but I also increasingly build it with AI. I rarely code manually these days, I'm just riding herd on agents, often in between sales calls, dealing with customer support, etc. I may eventually hire a VA-type person to help with admin and customer support stuff where it changes often enough that it's not worth it to build an AI workflow for, but even there...I don't know. If we get reliable computer use models in 2026 or 2027, I probably won't ever hire anyone.

I've never talked openly in tech circles about this product, nor will I. The technical challenges are non-trivial, so I don't think it'd be easy to replicate for another engineer, but my competitors are all dinosaurs and getting customers to switch to me is incredibly easy. The last thing I need is another engineer spinning up a competitor.
by badlibrarian | 2026-01-07 15:53:07+00:00
Right. The question is does Skia grows its broad and useful toolkit with an eye toward further GPU optimization? Or does Vello (broadened and perhaps burdened by Rust and the shader-obsessive crowd) grow a broad and useful API?

There's also the issue of just how many billions of line segments you really need to draw every 1/120th of a second at 8K resolution, but I'll leave those discussions to dark-gray Discord forums rendered by Skia in a browser.
by ronbenton | 2026-01-07 15:53:11+00:00
>And nobody in the world knows how to keep communities from becoming toxic. There is simply no recipe. And that's why StackOverflow doesn't serve as a lesson either.

I think a well-moderated community can be non-toxic. Lobste.rs is a good if not extreme example: it's kind of a vouch system for the people you refer and there's pretty good moderation to prevent overly mean discussion.
by rdos | 2026-01-07 15:53:19+00:00
> Are you saying this from experience?

Yes. I mostly work on Quarkus microservices and use cursor with auto agent mode.

> we wouldn't give an AI some vague requirements and ask it to build something
> we would discuss as a team

seems like a reasonable workflow. It's the polar opposite of what was written in the blog post. That is the usual, easy way people use agents and what I think is the wrong path. May I also ask what language and/or framework you work with where so much context works good enough?

> Asking AI to explain code and help me learn how it works means I can pick up new systems significantly quicker.

Summarization is generaly a great task for LLMs
by Permit | 2026-01-07 15:53:49+00:00
StackOverflow was successful explicitly because of the people/question it excluded. The "toxicity" was the point. It was trying very very hard not to become Yahoo Questions. If you want to hear more about this you should watch Joel Spolsky's talk "The Cultural Anthropology of Stack Exchange": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpGA2fmAHvM

The point of StackOverflow was explicitly not to help the question-askers, but to prioritize the people who would reach the question via Google. That's why so many people have bad stories about times they went to ask questions on StackOverflow: it was supposed to be very high-friction and there was supposed to be a high standard for the questions asked there.

Now with LLMs users get the best of both worlds. They don't need to use Google to find a high-quality StackOverflow question/answer AND they can ask any question even if it's been asked 1,000 times before or is low-quality or would lead to discussion rather than a singular answer.
by bflesch | 2026-01-07 15:53:58+00:00
It is definitely a well-timed story. It's notable that even though they are billionaires they care what people think about them so much that they have to do this PR nonsense.

As no governmental authority is actively investigating the allegations, Sergey Brin might never have the opportunity to clear his name from the Epstein child abuse allegations in the court of public opinion. If there would be an investigation and/or court case, Sergey Brin's lawyers would at least be able to legally clear his name. As long as evidence is being withheld, any association between Microsoft and Google leadership and Jeffrey Epstein will bring up rumors about their involvement in the child abuse, even though they might have been "only" clients of the JP Morgan private banking services for high net worth individual which was managed by Jeffrey Epstein.
by bluGill | 2026-01-07 15:54:08+00:00
And most likely we will move too far in that direction in the near future. Too many people have their identity, religion, reputation, or paycheck invested in something about how they eat and so are unwilling to take an objective look at things. Instead they find studies that seem to fit their narrative and amplify them. They often will setup their experiments and data to get the results they want. And then we get into the reproducibility problem that science publications often have.
by beej71 | 2026-01-07 15:54:13+00:00
One of my friends was an H1B here about a decade ago. He and his wife had a kid in the US, but then left shortly thereafter back to Europe. He said our social systems were "shameful" and neither of them was interested in sending their kid to a school in the US. And I'm reasonably certain now that they view their child's US citizenship as low-value. All of which sucks. They are talented professionals and we drove them away.
by lrvick | 2026-01-07 15:54:13+00:00
I have a mini PC hooked to screens in every room other than the bedroom and bathroom, and remote controls with built in air-mouse and keyboard (pepper jobs remotes). This way anyone can pick up a controller in any room and look something up on a shared communal screen as needed, which discourages use of private screens.

When I leave home for less than a day I pack no electronics of any kind and enjoy the peace in my own head to think about the next problems I want to solve in my universe.

I pay with cash exclusively in public so tap and pay is not an issue. If I ever need to be reachable for emergencies I can carry a pager but so far this has not been worth it.
Ask HN: What does good tech look like?
by Gooblebrai | 2026-01-07 15:54:20+00:00
Technology seems to have acquired a broadly negative reputation: surveillance, addiction, dark patterns, enshittification, products optimized for metrics rather than human outcomes. "Tech" is now increasingly viewed as social harm.

But some tools genuinely make life simpler, more reliable, or more capable.

What does "good tech" actually look like in practice? What concrete examples, design principles, or products do you think qualify?
by Eisenstein | 2026-01-07 15:54:23+00:00
1. LLMs can't watch over someone and warn them when they are about to make a mistake

2. LLMs are obsequious

3. Even if LLMs have access to a lot of knowledge they are very bad at contextualizing it and applying it practically

I'm sure you can think of many other reasons as well.

People who are driven to learn new things and to do things are going to use whatever is available to them in order to do it. They are going to get into trouble doing that more often than not, but they aren't going to stop. No is helping the situation by sneering at them -- they are used it to it, anyway.
by Bender | 2026-01-07 15:54:27+00:00
It may be about to get even more extreme than that. There is talk of issuing Letters of Marque [0] to private citizens to commandeer assets of the cartels. I don't know if it will become a thing but if it did then many former military will be seizing cartel boats. My concern is that their actions may be mistaken as sanctioned military decisions representing the US military. Other countries may start to mimic this behavior. Earth could turn into one big PVP server.

[0] - https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/356...
by _heimdall | 2026-01-07 15:54:32+00:00
Don't public school lunches have to follow the food guide recommendations? Assuming that hasn't changed since I was in school, a recommendation based on something other than industry lobbying could help quite a bit with children's health and long term outlooks.

That said, I obviously don't know what this administration would propose as a new recommendation so I'm not implying it will be better. We'd have to see what they put out, if anything, to get an idea about that.
by hombre_fatal | 2026-01-07 15:54:47+00:00
I think that's mostly just HNers assuming AI like Claude Code is already penetrating the day to day work of the workforce.

"If I use, then everyone is probably using it".

Yet AI penetration is so low right now that it probably has zero role in the job market.

And it keeps us distracted from talking about the real reasons behind job opening decline.

That said, once AI ubiquity picks up within the next few years, we'll have all of the existing problems we're not talking about... plus AI. And we'll probably be even less capable of talking about the complexities of the market intelligently.
by close04 | 2026-01-07 15:54:53+00:00
> Do you really not consider the first to be an example of the second?

I think too many people got the impression that I'm defending OD and can't get out of that trench. My point is that a generic tool being able to do dangerous things isn't a high enough bar to say don't use it (often). A tool doing being able to do dangerous things in the manner I described above is a completely different devil. The "how" you end up doing a dangerous thing is what should be punished.

I want to be able to do whatever I want with my computer and my data and not have someone define what's "too dangerous" for me to use. But what happened here wasn't what the users wanted, or could reasonably expect to happen. That's the key.

> Shift+Del asks for confirmation

I'm sure OD also asked for some confirmation. By that time it's too late, you're confirming what you think will happen, not what will actually happen. When you confirm shift+del you know what you are confirming. When you confirm OD's dialog you're confirming under misleading assumptions.
by observationist | 2026-01-07 15:55:57+00:00
People are already going full Leroy Jenkins with this stuff, and OpenAI, other labs are snarfing up their usage data. Hopefully with their brave sacrifice, they can figure out all the security pitfalls before it becomes common enough that someone with a clever jailbreak ends up pulling of a billion dollar heist, or orders pizza for half the country.

It's 100% absolutely not safe yet. You can effectively copy and paste Pliny prompts and pwn any of the frontier lab models. Anyone with a little time and creativity can tailor a unique one and set hidden text traps for AI browsers or agents, and depending on what access you've given the software it could be very dangerous.
by JDye | 2026-01-07 15:56:02+00:00
We have an in-house, Rust-based proxy server. Claude is unable to contribute to it meaningfully outside of grunt work like minor refactors across many files. It doesn't seem to understand proxying and how it works on both a protocol level and business logic level.

With some entirely novel work we're doing, it's actually a hindrance as it consistently tells us the approach isn't valid/won't work (it will) and then enters "absolutely right" loops when corrected.

I still believe those who rave about it are not writing anything I would consider "engineering". Or perhaps it's a skill issue and I'm using it wrong, but I haven't yet met someone I respect who tells me it's the future in the way those running AI-based companies tell me.
by ndriscoll | 2026-01-07 15:56:02+00:00
Why wouldn't the LLM just read the source of the framework to answer questions directly? That's how I do things as a human. Given the appropriate background knowledge (which current LLMs are already extremely capable with), it should be pretty easy to understand what it's doing, and if it's not easy to understand the source, it's probably a bad framework.

I don't expect an LLM to have deep inbuilt knowledge of libraries. I expect it to be able to use a language server to find the right definitions and load them into context as needed. I expect it to have very deep inbuilt knowledge of computer science and architecture to make sense of everything it sees.
by thedangler | 2026-01-07 15:56:03+00:00
I've only started but I mostly use Claude Code for building out code that has been done a million times. So its good at setting up a project to get all the boiler plate crap out of the way.

When you need to build out specific feature or logic, it can fail hard.
And the best is when you have something working, and it fixes something else and deletes the old code that was working, just in a different spot.
by AnimalMuppet | 2026-01-07 15:56:07+00:00
Yes, a function call. Not new syntax. But as a function, it would be trivial to add to a library.

My point was that you can often get the effect you want with no new syntax. (Cue 10,000 replies that state "but you can't get this effect without new syntax!" Perhaps not. Many of those tend to be rather contrived, though. I'm more sympathetic to the argument that new syntax would make something less clumsy. If it's something you need to do a lot, that matters.)