MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by internetter | 2026-01-16 06:18:58+00:00
> Mostly because now code often feels so disposable and fast

I really like this thought. We used to take pride in elegant solutions and architectural designs. Now, in the era of shipping fast and AI, this has been disregarded. Redundancy is everywhere, spaghetti is normalized. AI code has always been unsettling for me and I think this is why.
by BikiniPrince | 2026-01-16 06:20:28+00:00
That’s crazy sauce. I don’t lose.

The one time a project was heading to failure I went to the VP and explained the sabotage I was seeing. This was a very lucrative contract and failure was not an option.

He pulled that manager and his team so far off they had a new office on the moon. They were pulling non-sense like submitting the pseudo code I white boarded as a commit.

Two weeks in and I’m still explaining to them the plan.

Despite the setback I pulled off a mammoth project and strategically moved in devs to areas where they could succeed. If they slowed me down they were given the boot.

Success sometimes just takes drive.
by famahar | 2026-01-16 06:21:09+00:00
Start a community or join one. I have a friend that started a social community where they host discussion groups, sharing circles, art marking, picnics, field trips, cooking club, etc. The whole focus is on creating connection. I myself run an experimental games meetup where our small niche share what were working on each month. I also have a book club each week with some friends (although we chat more about life than books). I think 2026 is the year of community. Make an intentional effort. Show up in the same space repeatedly.
by nycpig | 2026-01-16 06:21:16+00:00
Friendship is hard and requires a lot of energy, and it will not always pay off. You're going to get burned, ghosted, and bailed on. It's far too easy to push the hermit-mode button, and doomscroll your life away.

Social capital requires *active* participation. If you're willing to invest, put yourself out there. Be the person that kicks off the things that are interesting to you. You'll find that people are interested in things you thought were niche. As a mentor once told me: life is a body-contact sport; get out there.
by kalleboo | 2026-01-16 06:22:40+00:00
Density has it's own costs, finding real estate and backhaul for towers in a city is much harder than picking up some farmland for cheap and slapping up microwave backhaul.

What Japan did was make it extremely easy to start an MVNO - the regulator essentially forced the telcos to allow it, so there are standard contracts with published rates.

The downside is the way the pricing was done is pretty dumb, MVNOs pay by the megabit for a fixed uplink capacity. So during the noon rush where everyone wants to watch YouTube while eating lunch all the MVNO performance, even somewhere the towers are idle, goes to crap, since they only bought uplink for the 98% case.
by rcbdev | 2026-01-16 06:25:35+00:00
> and nerds like us often are rejection-sensitive
As opposed to non-nerds of course, who are famously fine with rejection.

In all seriousness, there is no evidence to suggest that being a nerd (read: having nerdy interests) is related to being more emotionally stunted than the average person. You're just perpetuating a bad stereotype.
by isoprophlex | 2026-01-16 06:26:55+00:00
> Maybe it's time to try pushing the envelope on this: what's the biggest blobbiest most spacedustful period-4 c/2 orthogonal spaceship that current technology can come up with? Might there be some kind of extensible greyship-like thing that escorts a patch of active agar instead of a stable central region, that might allow an easier proof of non-glider-constructibility?

I always enjoy the absolutely incomprehensible GoL jargon
by hagbard_c | 2026-01-16 06:27:15+00:00
I've been using one of those Chinese devices - a Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 Pro - for the last 8 years. The combination of good-enough hardware and AOSP-derived Android distributions do make some of these devices capable of lasting for a long time. This does not make them "better" than their more expensive counterparts but it does mean they're a much better value proposition. This is not limited to "Chinese" phones, it is also true for some devices by brands like Motorola. It also does not hold true for all devices produced by those 'Chinese" brands since it stands or falls with the device being supported by AOSP-derived distributions. Many of these devices become obsolete long before their time due to lackluster or missing software support by the vendor.
by baxtr | 2026-01-16 06:27:33+00:00
Calling it specification makes it sound like someone knows what should be developed but didn’t put the time and effort to specify what they wanted.

In my experience, most people don’t know what should be developed. Even users don’t know if you ask them.

As the article outlines: you need to acquire that knowledge. And they’re many ways to do that. Talking to customers, testing with customers, having smart people who understand and care (!) what outcomes people want to achieve and so on.
by mmooss | 2026-01-16 06:27:38+00:00
The front page has none of those things; I see:

* "Queen Bumblebees’ Tongues Aren’t Built for Slurping Nectar"

* "Why the Computer Scientist Behind the World’s First Chatbot Dedicated His Life to Publicizing the Threat Posed by A.I."

* "NASA to Resume Search for Missing Mars Orbiter"

* "Spaceflight Temporarily Changes the Position and Shape of Astronauts’ Brains, MRI Data Suggests"

... and more of the same.

Where have you seen what you describe?
by zingar | 2026-01-16 06:28:24+00:00
We use 99% Apple and used to have a rental contract. We switched to just buying new MacBooks outright every 3 years because it was cheaper. I think the number of “it needs repair and I’m losing working hours” scenarios was very low.

It probably helps that everyone including (especially) the CEO can reinstall an OS and manage their own dotfiles.
by Agent_Builder | 2026-01-16 06:31:18+00:00
We tried “continuous context” early on and it mostly created entropy. Context kept growing, signal degraded, and the model got confidently wrong in subtle ways.

What worked better for us while building GTWY was doing the opposite. Context is disposable. Each step rebuilds only what it actually needs, with explicit inputs and outputs.

Long-lived context feels efficient, but in production it tends to hide bugs and amplify hallucinations. Dropping context aggressively between steps made failures obvious instead of mysterious.
by NitpickLawyer | 2026-01-16 06:31:55+00:00
There's a proposal for a large constellation of small, cheap-to-build radio sats. Heard about it on a Fraser Cain podcast. They plan to send them to one of the Lagrange points and spread them out in x KM cube pattern. They also want some of the sats to do some RF processing on-site, and beam just the "results" back.
by bsimpson | 2026-01-16 06:31:57+00:00
That sounds like a good way to keep moms out of the workforce.

I know a lot of couples who feel like the wife's job is a hobby, because after taxes it barely covers childcare (especially if you also value spending time with your kids).

Free childcare could free those households up to decide which parent(s) work when. Instead, by capping it below a common dual income, it incentivizes the least earning parent to continue to stay out of the workforce.
by huhkerrf | 2026-01-16 06:32:09+00:00
You missed the point of my comment.

My comment was saying that the people who _don't_ should learn how to do so. It's a skill like any others, and what you're proposing contributes to people being lonely. Instead of making connections with people around them, who they didn't choose, they hold out for some platonic ideal of a friend who they have the right amount of things in common with.

You see it in this comment section where you've got people shooting down every idea that people put out there. Oh, I can't go to the gym, I don't like working out. Oh, I don't want to join clubs because they don't have my interests. But I also don't want to be lonely, so I guess I'm just stuck.
by jnaina | 2026-01-16 06:32:40+00:00
A company I previously worked for was the authorized Dell break-fix partner/sub-contractor for the APJ region many years ago. Under this model, any Dell repairs covered by a Dell Support contract, either corporate or individual, would trigger the dispatch of our engineers to perform on-site repairs with the required parts, following initial diagnosis by Dell Level 1 support.

Despite the contract being rebid annually through an online auction process, the business remained phenomenally profitable. This was largely driven by the high failure rates of Dell hardware at the time, particularly laptops, and the fact that we were paid per break-fix incident, regardless of the underlying issue or long-term resolution.

Lenovo, however, studied this model, learned from Dell's mistakes (Lenovo hired away lots of Dell service managementfolks) and took a different approach. Rather than monetising failure, they focused on eliminating the root cause of high support costs by designing laptops with superior build quality, durability, and repairability.

At least in my view, Lenovo represents Dell 2.0, the model Dell should have evolved into, but didn’t.
by SkyPuncher | 2026-01-16 06:32:46+00:00
I'm not really sure I understand this critique. Skills and cowork are not mutually exclusive. It sits in a gap between Chat and Claude Code.

In regular Chat, I struggle to get the agent to consistently traverse certain workflows that I have. This is something that I can trivially do in Claude Code - but Claude Code wants to code (so I'm often fighting it's tendencies).

Cowork seems like it's going to allow me to use the best parts of Claude Code, without being forced to output everything to code.
by frm88 | 2026-01-16 06:35:05+00:00
When it became cheaper to publish text, for example with the invention of the printing press, the quality of what the average person had in his possession went up: you went from very few having hand-copied texts to Erasmus describing himself running into some border guard reading one of his books (in Latin). The absolute quality of texts published might have decreased a bit, but the quality per capita of what individuals owned went up.

Today the situation is very different and I'm not quite sure why you compare a time in history where the average person was illiterate and (printed) books were limited to a very small audience who could afford them, with the current era where everybody is exposed to the written word all the time and is even dependent on it, in many cases even dependent on it's accuracy (think public services). The quality of AI writing in some cases is so subpar, it resembles word salad. Example goodreads: the blurb of this book https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/237615295-of-venom-and-v... was so surreal I wrote to the author to correct it (see in comments to the authors own review). It's better now, but it still has mistakes. This is in no way comparable with the pasts goes down a bit this is destroying trust even more than everything else, because it this gets to be the norm for official documents people are going to be hurt.
by dtkav | 2026-01-16 06:36:28+00:00
The main things i think are missing is (1) how much am i spending and (2) why isn't my sprite paused, and (3) how can i get my stuff out (it would be nice to be able to mount in either direction or else integrate with git/git worktrees).

I ended up using it (and enjoying yolo mode!) but then my sprites weren't pausing and i was worried about spending too much so i deleted them.
by frenchtoast8 | 2026-01-16 06:37:19+00:00
There are many examples of edit wars between people fighting political battles, but I don’t think your link is one of them. I think how he treated his dog was cruel and I believe how he responded by lying and gaslighting his audience was disgusting, but that doesn’t mean it belongs on Wikipedia. In your link I don’t see Hasan white knights protecting their master from bad publicity, I see Hasan haters trying to bludgeon the change into the article by ignoring any objection and just reverting edits. It was frustrating to read people bringing up the same Forbes article and not reading the reason why it wasn’t suitable. Again, I dislike Hasan in general and especially for this, but if this was so important then why hasn’t any major news outlet written about it? You may disagree about what does and doesn’t belong on Wikipedia, and I have my own objections, but I truly don’t believe the rules were designed by a left leaning cabal to make their favorite Twitch streamer avoid egg on their face.
by zingar | 2026-01-16 06:37:33+00:00
Not that it changes your point, but the other day I met a republican who said he doesn’t think climate change is a thing but peak oil, now that’s something to worry about.

The longevity of this plus the “no anthropogenic climate change” nonsense is astounding. Armchair climate sceptics are happy to seriously stick to talking points that are so out of date that even the oil industry doesn’t use them anymore.
by XorNot | 2026-01-16 06:38:03+00:00
It's mostly not reasonable to try and ascribe human motivations to alien entities, particularly when we know some humans would definitely fire up the transmitter if they could.

The presence or current lack of alien signals at the very least bounds estimates of local population density and what energy scale they're operating on. Currently there's no nearby Type 1 Kardashev scale civilizations.
by Vincsenzo | 2026-01-16 06:38:11+00:00
All the other comments are wrong. The only right answer is: “Your mom was right, it’s that damn phone (and TV).”

I was a big YouTube addict, and last year I did a full year of YouTube detox. I didn’t watch any videos at all, and my social life exploded. I was meeting new people every day, deepening my connections with old friends, and going to more social gatherings than ever before.
By the end of the year, my only problem was that I had accumulated too many friends and acquaintances and didn’t have enough time for all of them.

So yeah, it’s that damn phone. And if anyone says otherwise, they’re wrong.
by tern | 2026-01-16 06:38:53+00:00
I should add, a very specific thing about the Bay Area that had an outsized contribution to my life was the group house culture. There are hundreds (or thousands?) of micro-communities sharing dwellings in the Bay in a way that's unlike anywhere else in the world, to my knowledge.

I've lived with men in their 60s in these contexts, but primarily this is an option for young people at the start of their careers, which I highly, highly recommend.

Any easy way to work on this problem is to simply lower the barriers to co-habitation. This could look like working to change zoning (I think Oregon has been a pioneer here), building businesses around the concept (many have tried, from small things you haven't heard of all the way up to WeWork), to experimental projects like: https://neighborhoodsf.com/Neighborhood+Notes/Published/The+....
by Agent_Builder | 2026-01-16 06:39:11+00:00
What you’re describing works surprisingly well for toy projects because the blast radius is small and the feedback loop is tight. E2E tests are basically acting as the only thing tethering the agent to reality.

Where we hit limits while building GTWY was when these “Ralph loops” ran long enough that intent drifted. The agent wasn’t wrong in any single step, but after hours of continuous execution it started optimizing for local goals that no longer matched the original problem.

What helped wasn’t smarter prompts, but breaking the loop into explicit, short-lived steps with forced checkpoints. Each step had a clear goal, clear inputs, and a clear end, and then the agent stopped. The next step only started once context was rebuilt deliberately.

Continuous agents feel magical early on, but they tend to accumulate hidden assumptions over time. In practice, bounded execution plus strong tests scaled more predictably than keeping the agent alive indefinitely.
by thephyber | 2026-01-16 06:39:20+00:00
Your refrain is a common one, but it seems pretty hollow upon deeper investigation. Maybe consider why modern Americans aren’t making the same family structure and child count decisions as long ago.

In the days of subsistence farming, a child was an additional free worker. Once we mechanized farming, we went from 50% subsistence farming to 1%. Children moved from the profit-center column to the cost-center column.

Medicine improvements and government policies have reduced child mortality. Mothers no longer need to conceive 12 kids to ensure that 4 live to adulthood. Each birth is a much higher resource cost and a much larger responsibility than in generations past.

The gratifying life of being a stay-at-home mom to 18 kids only works so long as the father keeps the money rolling in and doesn’t decide to abandon the family (this happened to an aunt of mine). The modern changes to family structure didn’t happen out of the blue — they were a response to inadequate protections and violations of freedoms that people had at the time. You might consider educating yourself on your blind spots about the topic.

Churches are eating themselves. People aren’t “moving away from God” so much as seeing the churches as liars. Christianity is full of lies: many small, some big. The more that people are exposed to others with different perspectives, more education, and better ways to communicate complicated topics, the more likely people are to leave a church that lies to them. Churches which have been outed for covering up child sex abuse have seen outflows. Bad policies made it more likely that the child sex abuse would happen. Further bad policies prevented the abuser to go free without prosecution. Even further bad policies have allowed the internal investigations/reviews to be quietly ignored.

Ultimately small churches have empty pews because they aren’t entertaining. MegaChurches / televangelists based in Orange County, Dallas, Houston are pulling in members while small town churches close due to lack of membership. Churchgoers tend to care more about being engaged in the showmanship of the leader than the common benefits of keeping a community alive.

The other functions that churches serve (community service, reminders of purpose) are being replaced by the free market of ideas. Some churches are turning the pulpit into a political campaign. Many secular non-profits are taking up the slack of dying community churches by doing a slice of the same work without the lies, sex abuse, coercion, and threats of damnation.

Then there are completely unrelated changes in society. More people care more about having pets (dogs, cats) than children. Values change as society changes. Companies get far better at marketing than individuals get better at resisting marketing. Drugs, gambling, sex/porn, outrage / attention economy, etc have all been turbocharged via capitalism.

The values of the average person have changed a lot. It doesn’t make sense to cling to the old institutions if they don’t meet the people where they are.
by chews | 2026-01-16 06:39:23+00:00
If the president has to directly address it, is it really baseless? It's not like they weren't under the spell of a cult leader... that is an acknowledged fact. No one should ever go full r-tard... or at least that's what tropic thunder taught us, it's hard to kinda walk back anything after you have. Believe what you want though... and ya it is sad that families suffered under a leader who had a cult leader as their lodestar. For Koreans it's tantamount to thinking the world is 115 years old.
by futuraperdita | 2026-01-16 06:40:06+00:00
The point to any preparation for any adverse event is to prepare more than one solution to a problem, and to have a solid understanding of your actual adversary. By asking that question, you have already defeated yourself on the sake of whomever you have decided is the dominant force.

Won't they get jammed? Yes, absolutely, on local levels. This is electronic warfare and happens in any actual battlespace.

Does that mean it is completely useless in emergency situations (of which civil war is one)? No.
by fcatalan | 2026-01-16 06:41:41+00:00
This has some crossover with ageism. In the last years in my org all the senior staff has been put to pasture doing either nothing or confined strictly to whatever they were already doing.

Some part of it is that we are perceived as lazy obstructionist naysayer dinosaurs when we point out any flaws in new projects as the article warns. But the rest is that because some of the elders were effectively semi-retired and doing little, anyone over 40 has been uncritically dumped with them.

So we keep the lights on while all the new shiny stuff is given to fresh juniors that don't ever push back and are happy to say yes, but also can't do it alone, and are lost at sea.

So they don't get anything shipped while we keep polishing our legacy turds and wince every time we accidentally get a glimpse of what they are doing.
by pain_perdu | 2026-01-16 06:43:41+00:00
I'm psyched to see so much interest in my post about Kyutai's latest model! I'm working on part of a related team in Paris that's building off Kutai's research to provide enterprise-grade voice solutions. If anyone building in this space I'd love to chat and share some our upcoming models and capabilities that I am told are SOTA. Please don't hesitate to ping me via the address in my profile.
by hagbard_c | 2026-01-16 06:44:25+00:00
Pointer accuracy and the possibility to keep your hands on the keyboard while navigating the cursor. Clickpads make it harder to get pixel-perfect pointer accuracy without compromising pointer speed since the act of pushing down on the pad to click invariably moves the pointer. A touchpad with separate buttons does not have these problems but those are becoming rarer and have not been available on your preferred device for a long time.
by TriNetra | 2026-01-16 06:44:56+00:00
joint families. In India those who have joint families – I live with siblings and parents in a multi-floor house with a floor for each sibling family. We party, visit temples and celebrate festivals/holidays together and don't need anyone else to join us.
We also catch diseases together and help each other out during such times.
It was conscious decision to remain together and not something we inheritted.
by d12frosted | 2026-01-16 06:46:36+00:00
This makes a lot of sense now - thanks for the detailed walkthrough.

So the core idea is: ephemeral, inline forms that appear at point, collect structured input, execute, and disappear. Not persistent multi-form buffers, but disposable parameter prompts that don't break document flow or switch context to a modal.

The <query the ps of a given server> example is perfect - you want:

1. Click/activate the button
2. Small form expands inline (server selector, maybe filters)
3. Fill, submit
4. Form vanishes, result appears (inline or in separate buffer)

This is actually more tractable than what the gist's inline extension was doing. That was about persistent forms with state tracking, cleanup on manual deletion, etc. Your use case is simpler: mount form at point → collect input → unmount → done.

vui.el doesn't support this today, but it's not a huge leap. The pieces are there:

- Components with state and validation
- Controlled rendering
- What's missing: mounting into an existing buffer at point (vs taking over a buffer)

I'd need to think through how it interacts with the host buffer's text properties and undo - that's where the gist's widget-before-change advice complexity came from. But for disposable forms that clean up after themselves, it should be simpler.

If you want to experiment with this, I'd be curious to collaborate. It's a use case I hadn't fully considered, but "structured, validated input for in-document interaction" is a good framing.