MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by utopiah | 2026-01-17 14:50:53+00:00
That's kind of hilarious (...ly sad) to read knowing that I have on my desk https://browser.engineering so I literally went the opposite direction some months ago.

Not only did I actually build a Web browser myself, from scratch (ok OK of course with a working OS and Python, and its libraries ;) but mine, did work! And it took me what, few hours, maybe few days if adding it altogether but, not only it did work (namely I did browse my own Website with it) but I had fun with it (!), I learned quite a bit with it (including the provable fact that I can indeed build a Web browser, woohoo!) and finally I did it on... I want say few kilowatts at most, including my computer (obviously) but also myself and the food I ate along the way.

So... to each their own ̄\_ (ツ)_/ ̄
by dgacmu | 2026-01-17 14:51:00+00:00
It is but we're not there yet. You can use a refinement style system like Verus in which your spec is a very high level statement of system behavior, like "this system provides the properties that paxos is supposed to guarantee"(1), and then be guaranteed that the things that implement it are preserving that spec.

But this is still double black diamond expert territory - it remains a challenging thing to identify ways to state and refine those properties to enable the proof. But it's getting easier by the year and the LLMs are getting more useful as part of it.

https://github.com/verus-lang/verus

(1) You would have to state the consistency and conditional liveness properties directly, of course, as Verus doesn't understand "what paxos does". That would look like TLA+-style statements, "at some time in the future, a command submitted now will be executed, etc."
by jalapenos | 2026-01-17 14:51:59+00:00
The dumb part of this is: so who prompts the AI?

Well probably we'd want a person who really gets the AI, as they'll have a talent for prompting it well.

Meaning: knows how to talk to computers better than other people.

So a programmer then...

I think it's not that people are stupid. I think there's actually a glee behind the claims AI will put devs out of work - like they feel good about the idea of hurting them, rather than being driven by dispassionate logic.

Maybe it's the ancient jocks vs nerds thing.
by Blackthorn | 2026-01-17 14:52:01+00:00
> What are the proof of that. It looks like he was like those usual rationalists who come up with obvious theories that a lot of people have come up with and think they are super clever, when they are not.

Anyone who identifies as a rationalist is immediately suspect. The name itself is a bad joke. "Ah yes, let me name my philosophy 'obviously correctism'."
by throw0101c | 2026-01-17 14:52:08+00:00
> The freakin stand alone is $1300 CAD.

We're not just talking about Apple's stand-alone display, but even their laptops are high-ppi. 13" M4 Apple Air:

> 13.6-inch (diagonal) LED-backlit display with IPS technology;2 2560-by-1664 native resolution at 224 pixels per inch

* https://www.apple.com/ca/macbook-air/specs/
by paulryanrogers | 2026-01-17 14:52:14+00:00
Trump was born rich to a father who taught him cruelty and insulated him from consequences. It was a golden ticket.

He still managed to go bankrupt 6 times, and couldn't get financing. He had to resort to selling his name or getting money from one of the most corrupt banks in the world. He's been accused of rape by his own ex-wife and SA by more than 20 others. He bought pageants so he could walk in on women dressing. His longest relationship is with an illegal migrant (possibly trafficked) escort whose visa he had to pay for.

His political base, like Nixon's, is largely built on white grievance and fear. It's incapable of building much once in power.

Now the Trump family accumulates money by selling power and fleecing fools.
by fn-mote | 2026-01-17 14:52:20+00:00
I encourage everyone thinking about commenting to read the article first.

When I finally read it, I found it remarkably balanced. It cites positives and negatives, all of which agree with my experience.

> Con: AI poses a grave threat to students' cognitive development

> When kids use generative AI that tells them what the answer is … they are not thinking for themselves. They're not learning to parse truth from fiction.

None of this is controverisal. It happens without AI, too, with kids blindly copying what the teacher tells them. Impossible to disagree, though.

> Con: AI poses serious threats to social and emotional development

Yep. Just like non-AI use of social media.

> Schooling itself could be less focused on what the report calls "transactional task completion" or a grade-based endgame and more focused on fostering curiosity and a desire to learn

No sh*t. This has probably been a recommendation for decades. How could you argue against it, though?

> AI designed for use by children and teens should be less sycophantic and more "antagonistic," pushing back against preconceived notions and challenging users to reflect and evaluate.

Genius. I love this idea.

===
ETA:

I believe that explicitly teaching students how to use AI in their learning process, that the beautiful paper direct from AI is not something that will help them later, is another important ingredient. Right now we are in a time of transition, and even students who want to be successful are uncertain of what academic success will look like in 5 years, what skills will be valuable, etc.
by iamflimflam1 | 2026-01-17 14:52:41+00:00
Definitely. A lot of what is missing in many discussions is the absolutely essential need to have evals.

The only way to “know” what is the best (or better) approach is to have a significant number of test cases that you can measure performance against.

At the moment, for a lot of people, state of the art is “let’s try a different prompt and see if the answer on my one example is better”
by kryogen1c | 2026-01-17 14:52:45+00:00
> odd position [...] offense isn't as bad if the difficulties of committing the crime have been removed or reduced

Not really, intent is a part of the crime. If the barrier for crime is extremely small, the crime itself is less egregious.

Planning a robbery is not the same as picking up a wallet on the sidewalk. This is a feature, not a bug.
by gchamonlive | 2026-01-17 14:54:22+00:00
Its not a planned economy by the government, because the US is an oligarchy. The billionaires are deciding how the government should plan investments in infrastructure and social policies.

They have been able to lower the taxes that affect the richest (big beautiful bill) and cut spending on social programs (Medicaid).

So it surely looks to me like the US economy is following a plan, just not the one that's in the best interest of the population -- which is OP's original criticism.
by pipeline_peak | 2026-01-17 14:55:11+00:00
I don’t understand the point of these ultra wide monitors.

On windows 11, you can only have 3 verticals columns with a monitor this wide. If I had 3 regular width monitors, I could have 6 columns overall.

I’d also imagine it looks awkward when you have one window in full screen, but I’ve never used one in person.
by pydry | 2026-01-17 14:55:39+00:00
>I agree with the issues, but it definitely doesn't suck if compared to every single other massive endeavor out there.

Compared to what? I dont really see much aggregation being done at all on Wikipedia's scale.

>What's the issue with that?

It's supposed to be impartial and objective and it sells itself as such but if you see how the sausage is made it is patently the exact opposite.

>I don't think there's a way to have an encyclopedic project without any cultural bias at all

I think it's perfectly possible to have an encyclopedia which is more liberal about allowing more sources to be used and which provides tools and metadata about those sources and gives tools to the user allowing them to filter accordingly.

Whereas "Blessing" one group of sources and condemning another will inevitably turn it into a propaganda outlet for whomever controls it. You might think that this is the only way but that represents more of a failure of imagination than a lack of options.
by intelec1 | 2026-01-17 14:55:54+00:00
I just read the Jan/Feb 2026 issue of CODE Magazine. A few trends stood out that seem to contradict the usual enterprise inertia:

1. Agentic AI / SmolAgents The focus is shifting from LLMs as chatbots to "agents" that execute tasks. The issue covers SmolAgents (Hugging Face), distinguishing between "Code Agents" (which write/execute code logic) and "Tool Calling Agents". It frames this as the move toward AI that can reliably handle API interactions without hallucinating as much.

2. Polyglot .NET (Rust integration) There is a significant piece on building distributed apps using Rust for performance-critical services, orchestrated by .NET Aspire. It’s interesting to see a Microsoft-centric publication pushing Rust/C# interoperability (via Protobuf) rather than just "optimize your C# code."

3. The End of CLI? (Model Context Protocol) The Angular article argues that the CLI (ng generate) is becoming legacy. The proposed replacement is MCP (Model Context Protocol), allowing local LLMs to understand project context and handle scaffolding via natural language.

4. Postgres as the default The issue treats PostgreSQL as the de-facto standard for modern .NET development, further signaling the decline of MS SQL Server dominance in greenfield projects.

Has anyone here experimented with MCP in production yet? The "death of CLI" claim feels bold, but I'm curious if the DX actually justifies it.
by TrackerFF | 2026-01-17 14:56:12+00:00
My prediction is that the federal policing will ramp up considerably in blue states, which in turn will cause more clashes. Sooner or later POTUS will invoke insurrection act.

In any case, either he'll try to cancel midterm elections altogether, or he'll have ICE and National Guard roaming and harassing voters when that time comes around. Strategically in very blue or purple areas.

If that works for the midterms, no doubt we'll see more of the same for the presidential election.
by carefulfungi | 2026-01-17 14:56:21+00:00
You can watch the hundreds of videos. You can judge the shared reporting about the number of federal agents deployed to MN coming from government and activist sources. You can listen to the administration's words about insurrection. You can read the front page reporting on the NYT, Fox News (both currently running front page stories). You can read the updates from the area's public schools.

There are no disagreements on the core facts: thousands of ICE agents are deployed to the Twin Cities and are aggressively arresting activists and immigrants, using chemical crowd deterrents, and presenting themselves in masks and military dress.
by inglor_cz | 2026-01-17 14:57:02+00:00
J. W. Goethe was obsessed with "Farbenlehre" [0], which is so weird that it is "not even wrong". I don't think it detracts from his intelligence. It was just his blind corner, so to say.

Intelligent people are sometimes very, very weird. Grothendieck and Gödel come to mind as well. It is not smart to die of hunger because your wife is hospitalized, every lizard knows better than that; but that is precisely how Gödel met its end.

[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farbenlehre_(Goethe)
by granby | 2026-01-17 14:57:20+00:00
Hi. I am the person who wrote the piece. I am not a bot, not Russian intel. YES I want money to go to organizations serving terrified, vulnerable people who are being hunted like dogs primarily because they LOOK like immigrants or other "undesirables."

People need help in MPLS, right now. Be skeptical of what you hear online ... definitely. But there is a limit. At some point you must accept that there is a major crisis, that people are in acute need, and that not helping is complicity.
by gnosis67 | 2026-01-17 14:57:22+00:00
I was thinking Chris Kyle, though there have been more than one similar such MO (Logan Melgar), though I could easily expand my suspicious apprehensions to other problems plaguing the military elite. Marines super soldiers dying in training accidents, peak fitness navy seals dying in their own San Diego homes.

And I do believe whitemanistan America has been the most dangerous place for US military assets in the world over the last seven years. I believe a culling of those who do not adapt to an “occult ideology” of Power ordinary minds will refuse to believe could exist among us.
by technothrasher | 2026-01-17 14:57:38+00:00
The first time I was in Scotland (from the US), the folks I was there to visit though it would be amusing to send me down to the pub below their flat to order dinner for us all. Off I went. But after accusing each other of not speaking English, I realized there was no way I was going to be able to communicate with the guy behind the bar. My friends laughed uproariously when I tucked tail and came back unsuccessful.
by littlestymaar | 2026-01-17 14:59:08+00:00
> Its omitting information which seems antithetical to the whole point of Wikipedia.

Wikipedia isn't a database of private information on individuals. On most celebrities pages you won't find their infidelities record either, unless it has some historical relevance.

> Its really not very different from a Wikipedia article using an author's pseudonym mentioning their real name.

In fact, when an author made it publicly clear that they didn't want their real name be known, Wikipedia usually respect their choice (until their real name stops being private information and gets historical relevance).

And somehow anti-trans activists seem to care much less. How surprising, really.
by empathy_m | 2026-01-17 14:59:26+00:00
I thought this piece was nice but:

(1) It doesn't give Adams enough credit for his work on WhenHub. I was reading Scott Adams's posts about WhenHub contemporaneously as he worked through the startup's various pivots. He had a really good idea that people would want to see a map with a little live-location icon of where their friends & acquaintances were on the map and he pushed really hard on different ways of getting this idea towards reality. We have this now (in various other social map apps) and he showed good product sense.

(2) It gives Adams too little credit for the sincerity of his views.

> There’s a passage in the intro to one of Adams books where he says that, given how he’s going to blow your mind and totally puncture everything you previously believed, perhaps the work is unsuitable for people above fifty-five, whose brains are comparatively sclerotic and might shatter at the strain. This is how I feel about post-2016 politics. Young people were mostly able to weather the damage. As for older people, I have seen public intellectual after public intellectual who I previously respected have their brains turn to puddles of partisan-flavored mush. Jordan Peterson, Ken White, Curtis Yarvin, Paul Krugman, Elon Musk, the Weinsteins, [various people close enough to me that it would be impolite to name them here]. Once, these people were lions of insightful debate. Where now are the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?

This is not fair. Adams knew exactly what he was doing and exactly what he was getting into for all of 2015-2026. He was an extremely smart guy. We should treat him seriously, not infantilize him. He was not a Nobel Prize winning chemist or Fields Medal winning mathematician coming up with wacky perpeutal-motion machines or cranky Riemann Hypothesis solutions that everyone politely agrees to ignore.

Adams was in the prime of his life, he was doing what mattered most to him, and we should take him at his word that he genuinely believed what he said and we should judge what he said on its merits.

(3) I don't really have a disagreement but I am fascinated by the implication in the last 1/3 of the eulogy slatestarcodex view that Scott Adams was trying to establish a guru cult community - in convergent evolution with the sort of thing that the squishy half of TPOT tends to sprout in the East Bay. It's an interesting observation which tells me something about what is going on with Bay Area rationalism, though I don't know quite what.

I thought that many of the things that happened to Adams -- especially his family troubles with his stepson, but also his illness -- were really sad. I'm sorry things didn't turn out differently and grateful for the cartoons.
by blibble | 2026-01-17 14:59:55+00:00
> There will however be a gigantic gulf between kids who use AI to learn vs those who use AI to aid learning

yeah, but not the way you are thinking

you think the rich are going to abolish a traditional education for their kids and dump them in front of a prompt text box for 8 years

that'll just be for the poor and (formerly) middle-class kids
by whatox | 2026-01-17 15:00:31+00:00
More transparency around the admins and the hierarchy above it would be a good start, as would some kind of countervailing pressure to the ballooning of meta rules (bylaws). For instance:

- Oppose the "Super Mario" effect: if admins do something ordinary users would get banned for, they get banned too, they don't just lose their admin title.

- Implement restrictions on Arb Com to make it worthy of its "supreme court" moniker. Provide prior notice, allow representation, access to evidence ahead of the case, and require the Arb Com to disclose the logic of any automated scripts they use for mass judging (e.g. counting proportion of edits being reverts, or that counts every change to a reference as "reference vandalism"). Grant defendants the ability to force the Committee's judgment to be disclosed to the public, with PII redacted if necessary.

- Require that precedent be recorded for unclear meta rules: what counts as a violation of e.g. canvassing? When do reversions become evidence or proof of "ownership"?

- Create an independent appeals body for Arb Com decisions. Like the Arb Com itself, the logic or source code for any scripts they use to aid their decisions, should be public. Ideally, choose the independent appeals body by different means than the Arb Com itself is chosen, e.g. by random selection of users with a certain activity level, independent of the ordinary admin track.

- Grant all users the right to be forgotten (courtesy vanishing), not just users in good standing, so that users bullied off the platform can remove their proverbial stockade.

- Create a mechanism that forces rules to be refactored or reduced in scope. Just spitballing, one possible way might be to limit the growth of any given WP: page per unit time, require negative growth for some of them, or in some way reward editors who reduce their extent.

There may be fundamental unsolvable problems, but that doesn't mean the current system can't be improved.
by inglor_cz | 2026-01-17 15:01:05+00:00
"Governance creates markets"

I am not sure this is necessarily the case; we have good evidence of long distance trade from the Stone Age, and even some Neanderthal sites contain stones whose origin can be traced to distant regions (over 100 km, IIRC, which is far away in a primordial roadless country).

I would agree that markets cannot grow beyond a certain size without a government, though.
by dbspin | 2026-01-17 15:01:45+00:00
My point stands - if anything a cocktail party is potentially less expensive to host since you know in advance numbers and preferences.

> These are somewhat normal things as part of a knit-community adult life.

As something of an adult myself (I'm 46), I'm well aware of how community functions. I'm also aware of the 'keeping up with the jones' nature of wealth and how corrosive that is to community - being entirely founded on the selective and exclusive nature of spending.

My contention stands, there is no need whatsoever to spend thousands on a cocktail party. One doesn't need to 'opt out' of social life. It's perfectly possible to serve cocktails yourself, to buy 'off the shelf' brands rather than expensive whiskey etc. It's perfectly possible to prepare your own food, or work with a chef who organises 'super club' style catering, which does not cost thousands.

It's a choice to live this way, not a fate. And doubtless it affords status among other high worth individuals - just as it dooms you to a life of fruitless comparison and ostentatiousness.
by mistrial9 | 2026-01-17 15:02:03+00:00
>>> Schooling itself could be less focused on what the report calls "transactional task completion" or a grade-based endgame and more focused on fostering curiosity and a desire to learn
>> How could you argue against it, though?

because large scale society does use and deploy rote training with grading and uniformity, to sift and sort for talent of different kinds (classical music, competitive sports, some maths) on a societal scale. Further, training individuals to play a routine specialized role is essential for large scale industrial and government growth.

Individualist world views are shocked and dismayed.. repeatedly, because this does not diminish, it has grown. All of the major economies of the modern world do this with students on a large scale. Theorists and critics would be foolish to ignore this, or spin wishful thinking scenarios opposed to this. My thesis here is that all large scale societies will continue on this road, and in fact it is part of "competitiveness" from industrial and some political points of view.

The balance point of individual development and role based training will have to evolve; indeed it will evolve.. but with that extremes? and among whom?
by ThrowawayR2 | 2026-01-17 15:02:18+00:00
Software and computers is not all there is to technology. There are plenty of other STEM fields that didn't enjoy a decades long surge in demand. Dilbert still very much applies there.

Aside from that, all the things you list are perks and benefits. The same old problems with BS budgets, hallucinated requirements, convoluted bureaucracy (seen at the tech giants), and mismanagement are evergreen problems even in the software industry.
by somebehemoth | 2026-01-17 15:03:54+00:00
One cannot criticize anything ever if they don't have a better solution? You can't think of any benefit to people collectively discussing their seemingly unsolvable problem? You don't think that people discussing a problem that seems to have no solution have ever come up with a solution??

All problems in history were solved by individuals who immediately had the correct answer without any discussion?!!

How many problems were solved by shutting down discussions do you think? Are we thinking stifling conversations causes more problem solving?!