MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tracker1 | 2026-01-05 19:48:00+00:00
It's not like the cost of clothes would be that much more if produced domestically though... the difference is the margins would be lower, a domestic employee would have a job and the domestic economy as a whole would be stronger as a result. Not to mention, the lower margin also means the wealth gap would be more narrow and there would be less incentive to stoke the flames of class warfare.
by karmakaze | 2026-01-05 19:48:14+00:00
The problem with Apple's execution of Liquid Glass is that the intended audience isn't the iOS user, it's the onlooker watching the iOS user (FOMO). That was an effective strategy when iPhone popularity was growing rapidly. Now that we're in a plateau of market saturation (post-peak Apple), anything directed at the onlooker which detracts for the actual user will hurt their bottom line.
by amluto | 2026-01-05 19:48:16+00:00
I’m thinking more of paying people on the margin or of some kind on tax system that compensates for inequality a bit.

Not fully worked out, but consider: suppose there are 100 people in the population, and a bunch of them are ambivalent between tech work and jobs like hairdressing. If tech work paid 10% more than hairdressing, some would do tech work and some would cut hair. If tech work paid 200%, then maybe there would be too many applicants and the employers would reduce wages. (I’ve occasionally contemplated that perhaps one reason that the big Silicon Valley employers pay so much is kind of anticompetitive: they can afford it, so they might as well, because it makes it more expensive to compete with them.)

Or alternatively, imagine if taxes were structured so that owning more than one house were highly discouraged (with appropriate provisions to make owning properties to rent them out make sense, which is something that a lot of legislators get wrong), and if permitting to build houses were not absurdly restrictive, then many different jobs with very different salaries would could still result in having enough income to afford to live in approximately one house. Some might afford two (!), and some might afford one that is much fancier than someone else’s, but if the pressure that makes someone like a hairdresser need to compete against a highly paid tech worker to pay for a similar house went away, the situation could be much improved.

(California, like many places, has strictly too few residential units in the places that people want to live, so just adjusting prices won’t help much.)
by staticassertion | 2026-01-05 19:48:32+00:00
Even ignoring that Grok is generating the content, not users, I think you can still hold to Section 230 protections while thinking that companies should take more significant moderation actions with regards to issues like this.

For example, if someone posted CSAM on HN and Dang deleted it, I think that it would be wrong to go after HN for hosting the content temporarily. But if HN hosted a service that actively facilitated, trivialized, and generated CSAM on behalf of users, with no or virtually no attempt to prevent that, then I think that mere deletion after the fact would be insufficient.

But again, you can just use "Grok is generating the content" to differentiate if that doesn't compel you.
by lovich | 2026-01-05 19:48:35+00:00
Is Europe actually going to do anything? They currently appear to be puckering their assholes and cowering in the face of Trump, and his admin are already yelling about how the EU is "illegally" regulating American companies.

They might just let this slide to not rock the boat, either out of fear and they will do nothing, or to buy time if they are actually divesting from the alliance with and economic dependence on the US
by haizhung | 2026-01-05 19:48:48+00:00
No. Mass building (while not touching inequality) will NOT solve the issue.

It’s easy to see why: there already IS enough housing around for everybody. If there wasn’t, you would see a massive amount of homeless people. And even in the US where that might be the case - the amount of empty real estate is larger than the amount of homeless people. You could easily house them if you wanted. It’s a question of distribution.

The other reason to see why this doesn’t work is: there is no country that managed to do it. Miraculously, the housing crisis has hit all (western) countries on the planet. All of them try to build their way out of it, no one succeeds. Why?

If you just mass build, the new units will be bought immediately by the rich, and the working people will have no housing still.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-05 19:48:53+00:00
That might be okay! I'm on the lowest dose of Zepbound (tirzepatide), 2.5mg, and I'm losing 5lbs a week, which is almost too much. It will be helpful to switch to something perhaps not as good in pill form (versus my weekly injections) once I reach my target weight. For those who need pill form and the effectiveness available, it's a slam dunk imho. Orforglipron [1] (small molecule by Lilly vs a peptide) will be potentially available shortly for those needing more effectiveness. We're making incremental improvements in this system rapidly.

HN Search: orforglipron - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
by SecondHandTofu | 2026-01-05 19:49:15+00:00
I'm not in favour of getting rid of the bureaucracy, some of it is necessary, but we're way past the benefit.

I think most regulation is a concave quadratic function of regulations vs benefit.
At zero regulation it can be very bad, but there also must be a point at which something is so smothered in regulation that doing anything is impossible. So there must be a maxima somewhere between the two points.

All I think is that the current state of drug regulation quite a long way to the right of that maxima, that doesn't mean I think we should remove it all to zero, or that some other things aren't to the left of it and need more regulation!

Probably most disagreements over this sort of thing are just people who disagree about which side of the maxima we're on.
by cduzz | 2026-01-05 19:49:20+00:00
I've lived in cities where the city ran the utilities; they were generally way cheaper than the utilities from PG&E.

The USPS is obligated to deliver letters at the same cost to everyone in the country, and they do a pretty okay job at it -- I've certainly had horrid events from UPS and FedEx, and those guys get to just pass the crap delivery tasks off to USPS if they don't like it.

Lots of old people in the USofA seem to like their government run medical insurance, same with people in the VA system.

The Doge crew spent months looking for fraud waste and abuse and I don't see any big law enforcement results from all the fraud they found, and I don't see anyone crowing over all the waste they curtailed.

It's possible that the world's more complex than you imagine, and that sometimes people just do their jobs (IE the bureaucrats) and hard problems get solved.

Now, tell me again, what part of the health care system is UnitedHealth? What critical problem do they solve?
by tad-hq | 2026-01-05 19:50:14+00:00
I went through the same stages—started with "dump everything," then "search it," and recently landed on "let the agent read it for me." I started this as a private project like 2 months ago very simply, and it just graduated more and more as time went on.

Your token analysis feature sounds useful for tracking usage patterns and workflow efficiency, I have thought about it before. A lot of the direction agentic code is going in is optimizing tool call usage with proper context engineering so I definitely see the value there.
by roywiggins | 2026-01-05 19:50:17+00:00
I'm not sure Grok output is even covered by Section 230. Grok isn't a separate person posting content to a platform, it's an algorithm running on X's servers publishing on X's website. X can't reasonably say "oh, that image was uploaded by a user, they're liable, not us" when the post was performed by Grok.

Suppose, if instead of an LLM, Grok was an X employee specifically employed to photoshop and post these photos as a service on request. Section 230 would obviously not immunize X for this!
by HanClinto | 2026-01-05 19:51:19+00:00
> The D&D backlash wasn't sparked by widespread incidents of serious delusions

It was sparked by real incidents which resulted in real deaths. Patricia wasn't the only concerned parent dealing with real tragedy. The questions are "how widespread" and "how directly-connected".

I don't think we can assume the number is zero -- I would bet good money that -- on multiple occasions -- games exacerbated mental-illness and was a factor that resulted in quantifiable harm (even death).

But at the time that this was all new and breaking, it was very difficult to separate hearsay and anecdote from the larger picture. I don't hold any enmity towards my parents for finding my gaming supplies and making me get rid of them -- it was the 80's. They were well-intentioned, and a lot of what we heard was nearly impossible to quantify or verify.

> But LLM delusions are actually happening, a lot, and leading directly to deaths.

I believe this is also happening.

"A lot" is what I'm still trying to quantify. There are "a lot" of regular users, and laws of large numbers apply here.

Even just 0.001% of 800 million is still 8000 incidents.
by kpcyrd | 2026-01-05 19:51:48+00:00
The second argument doesn't really work out in praxis. We have a quarter century knowledge about SQL injection at this point, yet it keeps happening.

Instead of trying to educate everybody about how to safely use error-prone programming abstractions, we should instead de-normalize use of them and come up with more robust ones. You don't need to have in-depth exploit development skills to write secure Rust code.

Unfortunately, there's more money to be made selling security consulting if people stick to the error-prone ones.
by tim-tday | 2026-01-05 19:51:55+00:00
Still the best sci-fi show of 2025.
I was worried the show wouldn’t live up to the books but it is one of those rare situations where both are good and different enough that you can get something from each.

Douglas Adams do that with his contracts (he will license everything but the plot) which is one reason why Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency was so great.

The rule of our universe is that good sci-fi gets canceled so I’m not holding my breath that they’ll do the six seasons it would take to get through the books.
by wincy | 2026-01-05 19:52:08+00:00
I think it’s also potentially a sense of taste, like being a music producer vs a music creator.

When AI art was nascent and stable diffusion came out, I put probably 1000 hours into really getting good at using it. I like to compare it to picking up pretty seashells on the sand. When working with those old models where many results were terrible, the prompt was akin to driving to a beach you know has seashells, then generating 100-200 pictures on an A100 was like combing through the beach to see if you find any good ones. Finally you could clean up the couple few that were real gems and get something that looked nice. It may not be artistry, but that doesn’t mean it has zero value at all.

Although let’s be real, most people aren’t going to make a living being a beach comber looking for pretty things that washed up on the shore, when even a kid can do it.
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-05 19:52:23+00:00
I am shocked - but maybe not that shocked - that 39% of those polled support the US’s handling of Venezuela. This situation has had lies told to the public (the fake drug narrative), lies told to Congress (that no regime change was planned), an illegal invasion (no congressional approval), piracy (stealing oil tankers), kidnapping (of Maduro), and murder (over 40 deaths reported in the operation in Venezuela).

On top of that, Trump openly bragged that he’s going to send in American companies to extract Venezuela’s oil, and has threatened numerous other nations (Cuba and Mexico and Colombia and Denmark). America has lost all trust and reputation internationally in less than a year. Not to mention it’s obvious that there is a fraudulent scam here to enrich Trump and his buddies through colonialist resource extraction.

And yet something like half the country supports all of this.
by tripletao | 2026-01-05 19:52:24+00:00
I'm not aware of any evidence that he was using testosterone enanthate (or any other particular steroid), though he certainly looked like he was using something.

Those are already controlled substances, though. His drug dealer is presumably aware of that, and the threat of a lawsuit doesn't add much to the existing threat of prison. OpenAI's conduct is untested in court, so that's the new and notable question.
by jmward01 | 2026-01-05 19:52:43+00:00
A core issue here is that there isn't a black and white on a subject like this. Yes, it is wrong. Yes they have a responsibility. But at the same time taking that to an extreme leads to heavy censorship. So what is a practical middle ground? Is there something like a 'sexualized validation suite' that could be an industry standard for testing if an LLM needs additional training? If there were then victims could potentially claim negligence if they aren't using best practices and they were harmed because of it right? Are there missing social or legal mechanisms to deal with misuse? One thing I think is missing is a '911' for cyber offenses like this. If someone breaks into my house I can call 911, if someone creates revenge porn who do I call? I don't think there is a simple answer here, but constructive suggestions, suggestions that do balance free speech and being a responsible service provider would be helpful. 'They are wrong' doesn't actually lead to change.
by wizzwizz4 | 2026-01-05 19:52:53+00:00
This is a big, sensitive topic. Last time I researched it, I was surprised at how many things I assumed were just moralistic hand-wringing are actually well-evidenced interventions. Considering my ignorance, I will not write a lengthy response, as I am want to.

I will, instead, speak to what I know. Many models are heavily overfit on actual people's likenesses. Human artists can select non-existent people from the space of possible visages. These kinds of generative models have a latent space, many points of which do not correspond to real people. However, diffusion models working from text prompts are heavily biased towards reproducing examples resembling their training set, in a way that no prompting can counteract. Real people will end up depicted in AI-generated CSAE imagery, in a way that human artists can avoid.

There are problems with entirely-fictional human-made depictions of child sexual exploitation (which I'm not discussing here), and AI-generated CSAE imagery is at least as bad as that.
by ryandrake | 2026-01-05 19:52:54+00:00
> Genuinely terrifying how Elon has a cadre of unpaid yes-men ready to justify his every action.

A similar article[1] briefly made it to the HN front page the other day, for a few minutes before Elon's army of unpaid yes-men flag-nuked it out of existence.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46468414
by jasonlotito | 2026-01-05 19:52:58+00:00
> but output is directly connected to its input and blame can be proportionally shared

X can actively work to prevent this. They aren't. We aren't saying we should blame the person entering the input. But, we can say that the side producing CSAM can be held responsible if they choose to not do anything about it.

> Isn't this a problem for any public tool? Adversarial use is possible on any platform

Yes. Which is why the headline includes: "no fixes announced" and not just "X blames users for Grok-generated CSAM."

Grok is producing CSAM. X is going to continue to allow that to happen. Bad things happen. How you respond is essential. Anyone who is trying to defend this is literally supporting a CSAM generation engine.
by bArray | 2026-01-05 19:53:00+00:00
I have been thinking about this myself, but am still not convinced about how to run untrusted Python code. I'm not convinced that the right solution is to run the code as WebASM [1].

I have been looking towards some kind of quick-start qemu option as a possibility, but the project will take a while.

[1] https://github.com/mavdol/capsule
by notJim | 2026-01-05 19:53:11+00:00
Could also be great for maintenance dosing. I'm reaching the end of my ~weight loss journey~, and it's not a sure thing that the insurance company will continue paying for the injections once I'm no longer overweight.

I'm definitely willing to keep taking it. If insurance won't pay for it, I could pay for the pill out of pocket if I had to, which would be cost prohibitive for the injections.
by dang | 2026-01-05 19:53:41+00:00
Related (not many comments though!)

Refactoring – Not on the Backlog - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27473133 - June 2021 (2 comments)

Refactoring – Not on the backlog - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17624558 - July 2018 (1 comment)

Refactoring – Not on the backlog - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8109065 - July 2014 (1 comment)
by Jordan-117 | 2026-01-05 19:53:48+00:00
That's probably incidental, horrible as it is. Models don't need training data of everything imaginable, just enough things in combination, and there's enough imagery of children's bodies (including non-sexual nudity) and porn to generate a combination of the two, same as it can make a hybrid giraffe-shark-clown on a tricycle despite never seeing that in the training data before.

The biggest issue here is not that models can generate this imagery, but that Musk's Twitter is enabling it at scale with no guardrails, including spamming them on other people's photos.
by zozbot234 | 2026-01-05 19:53:59+00:00
> It’s easy to see why: there already IS enough housing around for everybody.

Maybe in Detroit this statement is true, or a ghost town in the middle of nowhere. The fact that housing costs money mostlt anywhere else is trivially evidence that there isn't enough to go around.

> Miraculously, the housing crisis has hit all (western) countries on the planet. All of them try to build their way out of it, no one succeeds. Why?

Very few western countries are trying to "build their way out" in a meaningful sense. Folks aren't buying that housing en masse for no reason; they just expect it to become even scarcer and more expensive in the future. If you fail to build any more, that's just a self-fulfilling prophecy.
by MPSimmons | 2026-01-05 19:54:09+00:00
I am, in general, pretty anti-Elon, so I don't want to be seen as taking _his_ side here, and I am definitely anti-CSAM, so let's shift slightly to derivative IP generation.

Where does the line fall between provider responsibility when providing a tool that can produce protected work, and personal responsibility for causing it to generate that work?

It feels somewhat more clearcut when you say to AI, "Draw me an image of Mickey Mouse", but why is that different than photocopying a picture of Mickey Mouse, and using Photoshop to draw a picture of Mickey Mouse? Photo copiers will block copying a dollar bill in many cases - should they also block photos of Mickey Mouse? Should they have received firmware updates whenever Steamboat Willy fell into public domain, such that they can now be allowed to photocopy that specific instance of Mickey Mouse, but none other?

This is a slippery slope, the idea that a person using the tool should hold the tool responsible for creating "bad" things, rather than the person themselves being held responsible.

Maybe CSAM is so heinous as to be a special case here. I wouldn't argue against it specifically. But I do worry that it shifts the burden of responsibility onto the AI or the model or the service or whatever, rather than the person.

Another thing to think about is whether it would be materially different if the person didn't use Grok, but instead used a model on their own machine. Would the model still be responsible, or would the person be responsible?
by yousif_123123 | 2026-01-05 19:54:17+00:00
> Calling for a shutdown of long conversations if they don't fit some pre-defined idea of problem solving is just not going to happen.

I am calling for some care to go in your product to try to reduce the occurrence of these bad outcomes. I just don't think it would be hard for them to detect that a conversation has reached a point that its becoming very likely the user is becoming delusional or may engage in dangerous behavior.

How will we handle AGI if we ever create it, if we can't protect our society from these basic LLM problems?
by gkbrk | 2026-01-05 19:54:23+00:00
If you can call the left image [1] "supporting 1080p" I guess Zed supports it. But it looks like VS Code and other editors somehow support it better without getting blurry.

Keep in mind that Zed developers [2] consider blurry fonts on low DPI displays a Priority 1 issue, and a reproducible bug that is commonly encountered.

I'm sure if there was no blurry font issue with Zed, they would just close this bug report.

[1]: https://ibb.co/zVS0Qz6z

[2]: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7992
by aidenn0 | 2026-01-05 19:54:36+00:00
> Any tax reform that fails to reduce luxury consumption by the rich will completely fail to reduce economic inequality.

While this is essentially tautological, I'm not sure you can practically tax the majority of luxury consumption. Think of all the small differences when a CEO shows up to work vs a temp worker (or even a middle-manager)[1]. All of those differences are luxuries, and many of them are informal and thus hard to tax. If we were to successfully tax all the formal luxuries (which in and of itself becomes legislative whack-a-mole), the wealthy will have a strong incentive to shift much of their luxury consumption to informal luxuries.

Plus, I find all of the focusing on "wealth tax" and "luxury tax" and such rather mystifying when we have an extremely regressive income tax in the US. The low tax rate for long-term unearned income in the US, combined with the fact that borrowing against assets does not realize any of the gains, makes effective tax rates for the 99.9 percentile much lower than the 90th percentile.

It is possible to eliminate dynastic wealth just by ensuring the losses due to inflation and taxes exceeds investment returns at the top tax bracket.

1: Or the difference in your kid applying to a college with your name on one of the buildings versus someone else's kid applying to that school
by triceratops | 2026-01-05 19:55:19+00:00
You have to go quite heavy and do it very frequently to actually look bulky, or even visibly muscular, when fully dressed.

The effects of moderate weight lifting - defined loosely by me as squatting at most your body weight on a barbell - are barely visible. But you will feel much better on a day-to-day basis and all your health numbers will improve massively.
by _mrinalwadhwa_ | 2026-01-05 19:55:22+00:00
I love the minimalism and speed of Zed.
The Zed Agent is exceptional!

It doesn't easily allow for parallel work like Claude Code in a Terminal but for a single session it is just as good plus it makes it really easy to switch between models. I also find it super useful when I'm working on our large monorepo, the minimal and fast ui makes it super easy to pull in the right context of folders, files, snippets etc to help the Agent.