MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nikisil80 | 2026-01-07 15:35:34+00:00
I appreciate your responses to my comments, including the addition of reading material. However, I'm going to have to push back on both points.

Firstly, saying that because AI water use is on par with other industries, then we shouldn't scrutinize AI water use is a bit short-sighted. If the future Altman et al want comes to be, the shear scale of deployment of AI-focused data centers will lead to nominal water use orders of magnitude larger than other industries. Of course, on a relative scale, they can be seen as 'efficient', but even something efficient, when built out to massive scale, can suck out all of our resources. It's not AI's fault that water is a limited resource on Earth; AI is not the first industry to use a ton of water; however, eventually, with all other industries + AI combined (again, imagining the future the AI Kings want), we are definitely going 300km/h on the road to worldwide water scarcity. We are currently at a time where we need to seriously rethink our relationship with water as a society - not at a time where we can spawn whole new, extremely consumptive industries (even if, in relative terms, they're on par with what we've been doing (which isn't saying much given the state of the climate)) whose upsides are still fairly debatable and not at all proven beyond a doubt.

As for the second link, there's a pretty easy rebuke to the idea, which aligns with the other reply to your link. Sure, LLMs are more energy-efficient at generating text than human beings, but do LLMs actually create new ideas? Write new things? Any text written by an LLM will be based off of someone else's work. There is a cost to creativity - to giving birth to actual ideas - that LLMs will never be able to incur, which makes them seem more efficient, but in the end they're more efficient at (once again) tasks which us humans have provided them with plenty of examples of (like writing corporate emails! Or fairly cookie-cutter code!) but at some point the value creation is limited.

I know you disagree with me, it's ok - you are in the majority and you can feel good about that.

I honestly hope the future you foresee where LLMs solve our problems and become important building blocks to our society comes to fruition (rather than the financialized speculation tools they currently are, let's be real). If that happens, I'll be glad I was wrong.

I just don't see it happening.
by eevmanu | 2026-01-07 15:35:44+00:00
Is that actually required?

I'm not at my computer right now, but as far as I remember most LinkedIn posts are viewable without logging in if you use the direct URLs, for example:

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:ugcPost:<post_id>

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:<activity_id>

Unless something changed recently, those links should work anonymously.
by moontear | 2026-01-07 15:35:57+00:00
Wholeheartedly agreed. Also the OneDrive Backup feature is great - previously people had to rely on other services (Box, Dropbox) and remember to save stuff into those folders. Now your most important Documents folder is saved in the cloud. Great. Backup! I don't think that OneDrive pestering you about buying more storage after using up your free storage is a bad thing, somebody needs to pay for stuff.

I understand the point, that everything is a bit convoluted and badly explained and may even lead to bad stuff happening. When you disable OneDrive Backup (good feature) and OneDrive deleting all your files locally with a little shortcut to OneDrive in the Cloud with all your files? Yeah... that is bad practice, but an easy fix for MS. Besides that hickup I currently don't undestand what the fuss is about.
by wizzwizz4 | 2026-01-07 15:36:25+00:00
> Feel free to critize, but I don't see evidence strong enough to immediately reject my theory with such a certainity. Of course not every long covid patient has IKEA furniture.

Can you please explain how this isn't evidence strong enough to immediately reject your "all long COVID is caused by IKEA furniture" theory?

> But IKEA is/was aware […] they actively hide facts […]

This is classic conspiratorial reasoning. You observe that group A do activity B to cover up activity C, which – if activity C causes situation D – would help cover up situation D. You then treat this as evidence that activity C causes situation D, and/or that group A is complicit in knowingly causing situation D; but this doesn't follow, no matter how much it feels like it does.

This kind of conspiratorial reasoning is extremely seductive – as I know from experience. I was never able to reason myself out of belief systems shaped like this. I'm hoping that laying this out abstractly will help bypass this – that you can look at the shape of the argument, go "yeah, that shape of argument is exceedingly questionable", then let that cognitive dissonance sit in your mind and gradually break apart the conspiratorial thinking over time – but I'm not really expecting it to help you.

I got lucky, because my conspiratorial beliefs (about big tech being evil cyberstalkers who collect and sell everyone's personal information) were never validated by others, and I began to doubt them (despite the mounting evidence), until I started to consider non-conspiratorial alternative explanations. It turns out, those have a lot more evidence to support them. This eventually allowed me to construct general models of the world where the "bad guys" are not necessarily omniscient, and these have served me well across a wide variety of topics.

> PS: There are some books/podcasts by doctors who themselves got long covid and felt the gaslighting by their peers and reported about it.

Please stay away from these. They are not healthy to someone with your mindset. You already know that the medical establishment is sceptical of the existence of ME/CFS, and only grudgingly acknowledges Long COVID: you don't need to expose yourself to repeated testimony from people with grudges and a vested interest in keeping you hooked.
by gcr | 2026-01-07 15:36:26+00:00
I installed Bazzite just last month, it's set-and-forget. Zero hardware / driver issues, everything autoconfigured.

Didn't even need to download steam.

Absolutely shocked me how smooth the out-of-box experience was compared to even Windows 10.

To my further surprise, I found my game library's compatibility on Bazzite was stronger than Windows 10 somehow. (Some old games like Moonbase Commander don't launch on Windows 10)
by mo_hackernews | 2026-01-07 15:36:36+00:00
After adding shared accounts and multi-user roles, I’ve been experimenting with a small but useful addition to Finbley: an AI-based spending analyst that answers questions only from a user’s own financial data.

The goal isn’t financial advice, but helping users understand patterns they already have.

What it does

Answer natural-language questions like:

- “What category did I overspend on last moonth?”

- “How did my food spending change over the past 3 weeks?”

- “Which expenses are most consistent month-to-month?”

Generate short, structured summaries of:

- monthly spending behavior

- recurring expenses

- unusual spikes or drops

Works per account (supports shared accounts + roles)

What it explicitly does NOT do

- No financial advice

- No investment recommendations

- No predictions based on external data

- No access to data outside the user’s account

It’s closer to a query + summarization layer than a “financial advisor.”

How it’s implemented

- Transactions are first aggregated deterministically (SQL + Python)

- Only sanitized summaries (not raw rows) are sent to the LLM

The LLM is used strictly for:

- pattern explanation

- summarization

- natural-language formatting

Responses are constrained by a system prompt that limits scope to finance data interpretation

This keeps the system predictable and avoids hallucinated insights.

Why I built this

Many users don’t want charts — they want answers like:

“What’s going on with my spending?”

This feature reduces the mental work required to interpret raw numbers.
by AstroBen | 2026-01-07 15:36:42+00:00
IDEs vs vim makes a lot of sense. AI really does feel like using an IDE in a certain way

Using AI for me absolutely makes it feel like I'm more productive. When I look back on my work at the end of the day and look at what I got done, it would be ludicrous to say it was multiple times the amount as my output pre-AI

Despite all the people replying to me saying "you're holding it wrong" I know the fix to it doing the wrong thing. Specify in more detail what I want. The problem with that is twofold:

1. How much to specify? As little as possible is the ideal, if we want to maximize how much it can help us. A balance here is key. If I need to detail every minute thing I may as well write the code myself

2. If I get this step wrong, I still have to review everything, rethink it, go back and re-prompt, costing time

When I'm working on production code, I have to understand it all to confidently commit. It costs time for me to go over everything, sometimes multiple iterations. Sometimes the AI uses things I don't know about and I need to dig into it to understand it

AI is currently writing 90% of my code. Quality is fine. It's fun! It's magical when it nails something one-shot. I'm just not confident it's faster overall
by dieggsy | 2026-01-07 15:36:51+00:00
I think I mostly agree with the thesis here, but I actually liked the point in the title at face value, too. We need both, I think. I guess I'll be another annoying Lisp guy, but:

> At this point, the right question to ask would be, well can you write a static-typing library for Scheme that then automatically checks your code for type errors? And the current answer, for now and for the foreseeable future, is no. No mainstream language today allows you to write a library to extend its type system.

The author seems to provide a counter example themselves(?):

> Racket and Shen provide mechanisms for extending their type systems...

I wonder if this is as clear-cut as the author is making it out to be. Coalton, which is effectively a library (and language) for Common Lisp, seems like it basically does this. Maybe that's not exactly what the author is referring to, because it is essentially a new language on top of Lisp using its meta-programming facilities, as opposed to merely extending the type system. Still, it can be used as a library right alongside Lisp code, so I think it's in the same spirit of of the first question of writing a "static-typing library that automatically checks your code" in a dynamic language.

Standard scheme may or may not be able to do this, but most Scheme implementations have unhygienic macros like CL's too, so I'd assume something similar would be possible. The fact that that these tend to be extensions from implementation designers might align with the article's point though. Also somewhat to the author's point, Coalton does rely strongly on CL's underlying type system, for which there's no real equivalent in Scheme. It also relies on implementation-specific optimizations alongside that.

For what it's worth you can (and indeed people have) written object systems in Scheme, despite the language not having one, though they tend not to be performant, which is likely another point towards using/writing a different language. CL also tends to allow fairly deep extension of its object system through the Meta-object Protocol.

I guess my point is that in my (probably biased) opinion, Lisps, or other languages with very strong meta-programming facilities, are pretty close to the language longed for in "Perhaps one day we'll have such a language." They aren't a silver bullet, of course. CL has no easy way to write performant coroutines/continuations, for example, even given all its extensibility. Scheme has no real type system, etc. etc.

I don't think any of this invalidates the articles points, I'm just not sure I agree with the absolutes.
by palmotea | 2026-01-07 15:37:16+00:00
> This is called a tariff and is the same as raising taxes on every American.

Come on, what are you going to do next? Mic drop "I, Pencil"? It's not the 90s anymore, get with the times.

FYI, free market economics has taught me to love the idea of tariffs, other similar taxes, and trade barriers. I'm glad those ideas are back on the table, and I hope they can be more competently executed after the current administration ends.
by jazzypants | 2026-01-07 15:37:20+00:00
Qt widgets don't work together with GTK widgets, and nobody considers this a crisis. I'm pretty sure you can't use Unreal engine stuff in Unity. GUIs require a lot of stuff to compose together seamlessly, and it's hard to do that in a universal way.

HTMX achieves its composability by declining to have opinions about the hard parts. React's ecosystem exists because it abstracts client-side state synchronization, and that inherent complexity doesn't just disappear. When you still have to handle the impedance mismatch between "replace this HTML fragment" and "keep track of what the user is doing", you haven't escaped the complexity. You've just moved it to your server, and you've traded a proven, opinionated framework's solution for a bespoke one that you have to maintain yourself.

If anything, the DOM being a shared substrate means JS frameworks are closer to interoperable than native GUI toolkits ever were. At least you can mount a React component and a Vue component in the same document. They're incompatible with each other because they're each managing local state, event handling, and rendering in an integrated way. However, you can still communicate between them using DOM events. An HTMX date picker may compose better, but that's just because it punts the integration to you.
by JasonADrury | 2026-01-07 15:37:27+00:00
You're completely misunderstanding me.

You don't have to be a frequent trader to make a lot of money insider trading, you do have to make very high confidence (i.e. risky) trades though. A single one of those will stand out, not the frequency. Unless you're a habitual options trader or something, such trades will instantly be a huge red flag.

>The OP specified "members of the US Congress" as his group of interest. However, I think that yours "it is atypical to be engaged in insider trading that does not involve high frequency of trades" is just incorrect.

My bad, I missed that. I suspect it's inherently harder to investigate members of congress for anything, but I also suspect that there's far less illegal insider trading happening by members of congress than people often suggest. I'm not sure there's really any very good evidence that congresspeople are beating the market, someone tried to look at the numbers here https://www.maximum-progress.com/p/congressional-insider-tra...
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2026-01-07 15:37:40+00:00
There's so much media that it can't support though. It could've been managing and sharing ebooks, and karaoke. Hell, audio's a complete shitshow... ever tried to load comedy albums into Plex? It's pretty fucking sure that the only recommendation that makes sense for Steve Martin is his late-life banjo albums (which, don't get me wrong, I like, but still). Even classical music is completely screwed up, because of it's band/performer-centric preconceptions. Jazz is a total dumpster fire.

Images are worse still, I know anyone serious about personal photos probably uses Lightroom, but damn. There aren't any rips harsh enough to describe Plex's image support.

And really, it would've been nice if we could share game roms for emulation (with high-score support and remote game-saves).
by wat10000 | 2026-01-07 15:37:47+00:00
Both are true. Jobs was a dick and Woz handled it nicely.

Woz got screwed over. Should he have pushed back on this? Maybe. Would Woz have had a better life if he had? I'm doubtful. I'd say Woz got the better deal in the long term. His friend had a tumultuous life and ultimately died of stubbornness. Woz seems to have had decades of good living.
by ryandv | 2026-01-07 15:37:54+00:00
You must learn to sit perfectly still with every muscle tense for long periods.

Various things will happen to you while you are practising these positions; they must be carefully analysed and described.

Note down the duration of practice; the severity of the pain (if any) which accompanies it, the degree of rigidity attained, and any other pertinent matters.

When you have progressed up to the point that a saucer filled to the brim with water and poised upon the head does not spill one drop during a whole hour,
and when you can no longer perceive the slightest tremor in any muscle; when, in short, you are perfectly steady and easy, you will be admitted for examination;
and, should you pass, you will be instructed in more complex and difficult practices.

- Aleister Crowley, Liber E vel Exercitiorum, 1911. https://hermetic.com/crowley/equinox/i/i/eqi01005
by elmerfud | 2026-01-07 15:37:57+00:00
Is this a joke or is this serious. I can't really tell. Assuming that it's serious I don't believe this person actually understands the pile of slop that AI turns out in most cases. Getting AI to do anything, when you're not experienced, means it turns out the same over engineered Rube Goldberg nonsense that they seem to be complaining about. It doesn't know how to take a broad code base and optimize it or automatically refactor things for efficiency. It bolts on more slop and more tech debt in many cases if you're not watching it carefully.

Is it a handy tool, absolutely, but like any tool it depends on the craftsman. When you have scrum masters and project planners believing that they are craftsmen, well let's just say that it won't end up good in the long run.
by gck1 | 2026-01-07 15:38:12+00:00
This is kind of why I'm not really scared of losing my job.

While Claude is amazing at writing code, it still requires human operators. And even experienced human operators are bad at operating this machinery.

Tell your average joe - the one who thinks they can create software without engineers - what "tools-in-a-loop" means, and they'll make the same face they made when you tried explaining iterators to them, before LLMs.

Explain to them how typing system, E2E or integration test helps the agent, and suddenly, they now have to learn all the things they would be required to learn to be able to write on their own.
by EthanHeilman | 2026-01-07 15:38:29+00:00
I haven't seen an AI successfully write a full feature to an existing codebase without substantial help, I don't think we are there yet.

> The only question is how long it takes to get there.

This is the question and I would temper expectations with the fact that we are likely to hit diminishing returns from real gains in intelligence as task difficulty increases. Real world tasks probably fit into a complexity hierarchy similar to computational complexity. One of the reasons that the AI predictions made in the 1950s for the 1960s did not come to be was because we assumed problem difficulty scaled linearly. Double the computing speed, get twice as good at chess or get twice as good at planning an economy. P, NP separation planed these predictions. It is likely that current predictions will run into similar separations.

It is probably the case that if you made a human 10x as smart they would only be 1.25x more productive at software engineering. The reason we have 10x engineers is less about raw intelligence, they are not 10x more intelligent, rather they have more knowledge and wisdom.
by willtemperley | 2026-01-07 15:39:16+00:00
Quartz 2D is now CoreGraphics. It's hard to find information about the backend, presumably for commercial reasons. I do know it uses the GPU for some operations like magnifyEffect.

Today I was smoothly panning and zooming 30K vertex polygons with SwiftUI Canvas and it was barely touching the CPU so I suspect it uses the GPU heavily. Either way it's getting very good. There's barely any need to use render caches.
by myk9001 | 2026-01-07 15:39:18+00:00
Your questions are likely addressed to me.

Well, maybe things are better than I imagine. Would you be comfortable sharing a few things? Thanks!

What're your monthly expenses? After rent, that is. Just groceries, a mobile plan, some clothes averaged over the year, etc.

Do you have an emergency fund? If so, what's the ballpark sum?

Are you going to be able to still pay rent when you retire?

Are you saving for a downpayment?

Do you feel financial secure enough to star a family?

Can you afford to visit some far-away place with beautiful nature once a year?

Can you afford to go... idk, skiing? Can you afford all the gear needed to do that and a few lessons?

Can you buy a gaming PC with something like rtx 5070 or so? Not into gaming? Can you afford a homelab made up of a few used PCs and a few Raspberry Pies to play around with Kubernetes or whatnot?
by throw10920 | 2026-01-07 15:39:20+00:00
Does anyone have a boring, multi-hour-long coding session with an agent that they've recorded and put on Vimeo or something?

As many other commentators have said, individual results vary extremely widely. I'd love to be able to look at the footage of either someone who claims a 10x productivity increase, or someone who claims no productivity increase, to see what's happening.
by basilikum | 2026-01-07 15:39:57+00:00
You are right that a lot of people use social media for good things. The problem is that these usages are orthogonal to what these platforms are designed for and the reason why people use them for that anyway is mostly not for the value they provide but due to the network effects they have achieved though their market capture. On the technical side these are all long solved problems and many others could provide a platform for actually connecting real people. Facebook and etc. are parasitically absorbing this markets while actively undermining any healthy activity they platform.

> most people's relationship with social media is entirely mundane.

I think the engagement numbers of the social media platforms say something different. They wouldn't keep feeding everyone all that toxic stew if it didn't work with most people.

The large social media platforms are hostile to actual social activity.
by 2b3a51 | 2026-01-07 15:40:00+00:00
And as that link eventually shows there are limits on the dimensions as well. I sometimes think a simple table might be better than these interactive pages, but I suppose it has to work on a phone.

24 by 16.5 by 0.5 cm for the standard 1st class letter. So you could send an A5 booklet made of less than 20 sheets of A4 (80 g/m^2) paper as a standard letter.

If the postage is short, our lovely privatised Post Office holds the letter and makes the recipient pay the excess.

Back on thread: Repeatedly fold an A0 sheet of paper in half. How many folds can you do? A ream (500 sheets) of 80 g/m^2 paper is about 2.5cm thick. (good when teaching geometric progressions).
by NovemberWhiskey | 2026-01-07 15:40:01+00:00
I am not sure that static analysis is ever going to give answers to those questions. I think the best you can hope to do is surface knowledge about the tacit assumptions about dependencies in order to explore their behaviors through simulation or testing.

I think it often boils down to "know when you're going to start queuing, and how you will design the system to bound those queues". If you're not using that principle at design stage then I think you're already cooked.
by bflesch | 2026-01-07 15:40:11+00:00
I understand the joke but high-quality furniture is expensive, and only recently IKEA went from "good value" to "horribly overpriced".

Generally IKEA's goal of sustainability is noble and their transparency is appreciated, but the way they handled this issue reminded me they are a very profit-driven company with customer service set up to deflect issues and minimize cost.

The best furniture one can have are family heirlooms from old-growth wood, but it is both expensive to place them and to move them.