MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by majormajor | 2026-01-19 06:08:41+00:00
> No we're not. If we weren't, we shouldn't have seen the massive inflation near the end of covid. The supply disruptions hit almost immediately, but it wasn't until the stimmy checks hit that inflation went up.

What? The first Covid stimulus checks were April 2020. 271 billion in 2020 here per here: https://www.pgpf.org/article/what-to-know-about-all-three-ro.... 135B of the second round by Mar 2021. The third started about then. Inflation - and consumer activity in most areas - was low because nobody was going anywhere still, but at least we did a fair job of avoiding mass unemployment and homelessness.

Then inflation started accelerating during the economy's broader reopening in April 2021 (2.6 -> 4.2 percent from March). It didn't peak until near the end of 2022. Those stimulus checks were LONG gone by then for most people, since a huge portion of the country lives paycheck to paycheck, and the stimulus checks weren't available to people making more than 80-100k (single or avg-per-person in a married couple), which is the higher-income demographic that would have the disposable income to really drive inflation across the board by a "let's buy stuff we wouldn't otherwise" splashy purchase.

Instead, inflation was driven by people getting back out and doing/buying all the shit that had all been scaled down. The first stimulus checks didn't drive it because people weren't purchasing as broadly yet, and were still more in panic mode. Textbook bullwhip effect; at steady state we produced more than enough and never saw shortages, then in Covid demand types and volumes shifted enough to cause shortages of certain things and surpluses of far more other "non-quarantine consumer" things, so production changed, and then when things started to go back to normal ALL those things got hit again. I don't know if I'd agree that we're "massively" overproducing everything now that we're not in a quarantine scenario again, but the consistency of supply of most normal things suggests a lot of excess capacity in the system to absorb normal fluctuations in a way that nobody ever has to think about where their next roll of toilet paper is coming from again.
by neilv | 2026-01-19 06:09:59+00:00
I hadn't heard that saying.

Many people seek being outraged. Many people seek to have awareness of truth. Many people seek getting help for problems. These are not mutually exclusive.

Just because someone fakes an incident of racism doesn't mean racism isn't still commonplace.

In various forms, with various levels of harm, and with various levels of evidence available.

(Example of low evidence: a paper trail isn't left when a black person doesn't get a job for "culture fit" gut feel reasons.)

Also, faked evidence can be done for a variety of reasons, including by someone who intends for the faking to be discovered, with the goal of discrediting the position that the fake initially seemed to support.

(Famous alleged example, in second paragraph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killian_documents_controversy#... )
by Agent_Builder | 2026-01-19 06:10:15+00:00
This resonates. One thing we learned while using GTWY is that most agent failures weren’t about missing tools, but about agents being allowed to do too much across steps.

A “code-only” or minimal surface area approach works surprisingly well when each step has explicit inputs and permissions, and nothing carries over implicitly. The agent becomes less clever, but far more predictable.

In practice, narrowing the action space beat adding smarter planning layers. Fewer degrees of freedom meant fewer silent mistakes.

Curious if you found similar tradeoffs where simplicity improved reliability more than abstraction.
by tasuki | 2026-01-19 06:10:21+00:00
I obsess somewhat about my computer's UI, but not to this degree. I want to maximize usable screen space, so just want the status bars slim and out of the way. I want to see the cpu/memory/swap/network/disk usage, which is easy. Lucky me!

However, if status bars are what you obsess about, Linux would love to have you! Many status bars are available[0], most of them open source and wildly customizable. You can configure one of the existing ones, fork an existing one, or write your own.

[0]: see eg https://wiki.hypr.land/Useful-Utilities/Status-Bars/
by majormajor | 2026-01-19 06:11:35+00:00
> The fact that Europe got bombed no doubt helped too, same with the elites being concerned that communism was on the rise and giving workers a better deal in an effort to stave that off.

Workers got a better deal because the US intentionally passed massive top-end marginal tax rates pre-WWII with the goal of leading to less income-hoarding (or at least more charitable giving etc) at the top-of-the-top.
by tuned | 2026-01-19 06:12:02+00:00
thanks for reading.
I cannot retrain an existing model as the self-attention mechanism has been completely redesigned. The Keys and Values in self-attention are stored as scalars, so a latent space with traditional weights does not make sense if used in the context of a topological transformer.
The two latent spaces would be somehow equivalent eventually but they would store totally different values.
by jofzar | 2026-01-19 06:12:51+00:00
> The notorious “you are absolutely right”, which no living human ever used before, at least not that I know of
> The other notorious “let me know if you want to [do that thing] or [explore this other thing]” at the end of the sentence

There's a new one, "wired" I have "wired" this into X or " "wires" into y. Cortex does this and I have noticed it more and more recently.

It super sticks out because who the hell ever said that X part of the program wires into y?
by majormajor | 2026-01-19 06:14:37+00:00
Nobody will increase production of stuff if all the money is increasingly concentrated into a shrinking percentage of people who have far more than they can spend on stuff.

That's how you get high asset inflation and "K-shaped" stuff as the rich increasingly look for any value-storage vehicle to "invest" in, since they can't get a return on producing stuff to sell to the people with less money...
by ivcatcher | 2026-01-19 06:15:20+00:00
You're right that this is simple compared to what real engineers build. I have a lot of respect for people like you who write things like custom math libraries for cross-CPU determinism — that's way beyond my level.

I'll keep learning and try to make this less of a toy over time. And hopefully I can bring what I've learned from years in investing into my next product to actually help people. Thanks for the perspective.
by dangus | 2026-01-19 06:15:58+00:00
The main feature you seem to be interested in is the fact that you’ve saved yourself 100x infrastructure costs on your back end and that the app performs well. But that doesn’t benefit end users at all, that isn’t a solution to business pain.

That ability to integrate is the core of Slack’s identity. That’s the main reason to use Slack instead of its predecessors. Slack competitors like Teams, Zulip, and Mattermost all offer easy ability to integrate with anything that can make a web request.

You site’s marketing copy dunks on Huddles but I think it’s the other essential functionality to include in a chat application. You’re saying I can’t have a video/screen sharing call on your application when I can do that for free with Discord?

IMO this package you’re advertising is kind of a contradiction and/or a no-man’s land.

It’s like you’re charging $20 for Notepad.exe when the Microsoft Office suite is $100, and then your selling point is that it’s fast and lightweight. But then your customers could just get Notepad++ for free elsewhere.

I’m concerned for you as far as having a buyer persona or ideal customer profile.

People who buy your product for its low price have to supplement lost features by paying for other stuff.

People who don’t need all the features of Slack could just use something free like Signal, WhatsApp, Matrix, Discord, etc, and they might actually GAIN some features in comparison.

People who buy your product to avoid bloat arguably don’t really avoid it because they have to constantly leave your app and use other stuff to supplement it.
by aw1621107 | 2026-01-19 06:16:01+00:00
> It is sad that we did not end up with a SIMPLE programming language that solves the memory safety problem.

We did, arguably. Those languages are called JavaScript, Python, Java, C#, etc. Those languages tend to be eschewed in certain niches, though, and it's there that simplicity tends to be harder to achieve.

> What we needed was Rust-- i.e Rust without all the non-safety related extras that make it different - it's all the non-safety add ons that makes Rust into a Rube Goldberg machine.

I think it might also be worth considering that some people find those "non-safety related extras" a good thing. Dropping backwards compatibility and/or familiarity, just like everything else, is a tradeoff, and that tradeoff might be worth it if you think the resulting semantics are nicer to work with.
by ggm | 2026-01-19 06:16:25+00:00
You are absolutely right is something some people in some variants of English say all the time.

It may grate but to me, it grates less than "correct" which is a major sign of arrogant "I decide what is right or wrong" and when I hear it, outside of a context where somebody is the arbiter or teacher, I switch off.

But you're absolutely wrong about youre absolutely right.

It's a bit hokey, but it's not a machine made signifier.
by derefr | 2026-01-19 06:17:40+00:00
I follow the author's line of reasoning, but I think that following it to its logical conclusion would lead not to an `execute_code` primitive, but rather to an assumption that the model's stdout is appending to a (Jupyter, Livebook, etc) notebook file, where any code cell in the notebook gets executed (and its output rendered back into the inference context) at the moment the code cell is closed / becomes syntactically valid.

I say this, because the notebook itself then works as a timeline of both the conversation, and the code execution. Any code cell can be (edited and) re-run by the human, and any cells "downstream" of the cell will be recalculated... up to the point of the first cell (code or text) whose assumptions become invalidated by the change — at which point you get a context-history branch, and the inference resumes from that branch point against the modified context.
by tuned | 2026-01-19 06:18:28+00:00
This is a novel re-interpretation of the Transformer, based on my previous research made with a library called `arrowspace`.

It is somehow what is called a "Grassmann-like flow" but without the Plucker embedding, or also similar to what is done in DavisTensor but relying on spectral Laplacian instead of purely geometric distances.

The problem with a lot of stuff done before is that it focuses on dense representations. This architecture is focuses on sparse representation and provides a new approximation computation based on energy-informed graphs.
by majormajor | 2026-01-19 06:19:42+00:00
The Covid stimulus that prevented a huge wave of unemployment in more industries beyond travel and hospitality while inflation remained quite low for the calendar year following March 2020?

Or are you blaming the 2020-and-2021 stimulus for the 2021-through-2023 bullwhip-effect predictable-yet-not-mitigated inflation as things re-opened and demand returned for stuff we'd ramped down supply chains for? While chasing stupid obviously-not-permanent-change trends like Peloton stock instead?

Look at how much of the country lives paycheck-to-paycheck, and the income limits of the stimulus checks - how can you connect those people getting immediate money in 2020 or early 2021 to inflation at the end of 2022?

I didn't even get Covid stimulus checks and yet I also spent way more in 2021 and 2022 and 2023 on a lot of categories of goods than I did in 2020. Cause I went outside and did things more.
by silisili | 2026-01-19 06:19:45+00:00
Rage sells. Not long after EBT changes, there were a rash of videos of people playing the person people against welfare imagine in their head. Women, usually black, speaking improperly about how the taxpayers need to take care of their kids.

Not sure how I feel about that, to be honest. On one hand I admire the hustle for clicks. On the other, too many people fell for it and probably never knew it was a grift, making all recipients look bad. I only happened upon them researching a bit after my own mom called me raging about it and sent me the link.
by czhu12 | 2026-01-19 06:19:47+00:00
I’m very puzzled by Google chat to be honest. It’s a massive missing piece in the Google workspace toolchest. Teams is the central place for companies on Microsoft, and arguably the most sticky part of the MS cloud productivity stack. So it can’t be lost on Google how important it is to have something here.

Google slides, docs, sheets are fantastic products, but Google chat is so clunky and awkward that it seems hard to believe they really can recommend it as a slack / teams alternative. What’s keeping them from just

A: making it better?

B: buying one of the dozen other alternatives? All I really need is a log in with Google for our company domain.
by mmooss | 2026-01-19 06:20:19+00:00
'Self-reliance' is an emotional appeal by nationalists to roll back free trade and other international cooperation.

International cooperation brings great wealth and security, and a diversification of resources. Should each EU country also go it alone? Internationalists have built the most free, prosperous, and secure world that has ever been seen. It's hard to see how the recent nationalist, anti-trade governments have improved things for themselves or for the world.
by starchild3001 | 2026-01-19 06:20:51+00:00
How to read this brilliant blog post by Gary Marcus?

- Replace all the occurances of "LLM" by "human";

- Replace all the occurences of "Scaling" by "additional education".

Voila! You get an article that actually makes sense, plus you'll get a better sense of where the technology is -- these models are behaving much like humans across many tasks. They aren't perfect. But they are getting better everyday, and are quite useful.

Thank you AI developers and researchers for making progress everyday! No "thank you" to people like Gary Marcus who'd be called a "perma bear" in financial parlance.
by oofbey | 2026-01-19 06:21:59+00:00
I’d like gastown more if it could run cursor-CLI instead of claude, and thus be able to choose models. Claude is okay. But these things certainly have personalities. I’m not sure which would be best for each role. But gastown’s different actors seem like a great place to take advantage of the different quirks of each. And I certainly don’t choose Claude consistently when given a choice.
by mrtx01 | 2026-01-19 06:23:28+00:00
"You are absolutely right" is one of the main catchphrases in "The Unbelievable Truth" with David Mitchell.

Maybe it is a UK thing?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unbelievable_Truth_(radio_...

I love that BBC radio (today: BBC audio) series. It started before the inflation of 'alternative facts' and it is worth (and very funny and entertaining) to follow, how this show developed in the past 19 years.
by ragall | 2026-01-19 06:23:58+00:00
Containers are too low-level. What we need is a high-level batch job DSL, where you specify the inputs and the computation graph to perform on those inputs, as well as some upper limits on the resources to use, and a scheduler will evaluate the data size and decide how to scale it. In many cases that means it will run everything on a single node, but in any case data devs shouldn't be tasked with making things run in parallel because the vast majority aren't capable and they end up with very bad choices.

And by the way, what I just described is a framework that Google has internally, named Flume. 10+ years ago they had already noticed that devs aren't capable of using Map/Reduce effectively because tuning the parallelism was beyond most people's abilities, so they came up with something much more high-level. Hadoop is still a Map/Reduce clone, thus destined to fail at useability.
by tuned | 2026-01-19 06:24:09+00:00
comparisons will be run when the quality of generation will be on pair with other available models. It is useless to have preformance if the quality is not at lease on par.

The paper runs a bench (code and bench in the paper) to compare the performance with a causal attention GPT-2 model (nanoGPT) at inference (20% faster) and at training (equivalent for T and D larger than a threshold).
by alex_fash | 2026-01-19 06:25:52+00:00
I’ve been experimenting with RAG systems specifically for compliance-heavy technical documentation, and it feels like most RAG advice breaks down in this context.

If the response is wrong, users don’t just get confused - it may be costly legally and financially.

A few things that worked fine for general purpose chatbot RAG failed badly for docs:

Pure semantic search – "authentication" queries pulled login flows and unrelated security guidelines, because embeddings blurred intent. Users needed exact endpoints, not conceptually similar text.

Naive chunking – code blocks and parameter descriptions were split across chunks, producing syntactically valid but operationally wrong examples.

"Best effort" generation – when context was incomplete, the model just filled in the gaps with hallucinations and plausible defaults instead of refusing to answer.

I wrote up what finally worked for me as a production-style pipeline
(ingestion → hybrid retrieval → grounding → evaluation).

Curious if others have run into the same problems or solved this differently, especially for docs, APIs, or internal runbooks for highly regulated, compliance-heavy industries? What constraints mattered most in practice?
by Agent_Builder | 2026-01-19 06:28:08+00:00
n our experience, most agent failures weren’t model issues but intent drift. The agent starts with a narrow goal, then gradually “helpfully” expands scope because nothing re-asserts intent between steps.

What worked for us was making intent explicit per step and treating it as a constraint, not just context. Each step declares what it’s allowed to do, which tools it can touch, and what kind of output is valid. After the step finishes, that authority is torn down.

The system feels less flexible, but far more predictable. Fewer clever shortcuts, fewer surprises.

That’s essentially how GTWY approaches agent workflows, and it’s been a practical way to keep agents aligned without relying on heavier prompts or post-hoc validation.
by lucumo | 2026-01-19 06:28:45+00:00
Not long ago, a statistical study found that AI almost always has an 'e' in its output. It is a firm indicator of AI slop. If you catch a post with an 'e', pay it no mind: it's probably AI.

Uh-oh. Caught you. Bang to rights! That post is firmly AI. Bad. Nobody should mind your robot posts.
by Duanemclemore | 2026-01-19 06:30:16+00:00
Yeah, I get that. And I'm not saying the author is wrong, just commenting on that one often-commented-upon phenomenon. If text is being input to the field by copy-paste (from another browser tab) anyway, who's to say it's not (hypothetically) being copied and pasted from the word processor in which it's being written?
by vishalveera | 2026-01-19 06:31:30+00:00
Hi HN,

I built an open-source proxy called Lynkr that lets AI coding tools like Cursor, Cline, Continue.dev, Claude Code, and OpenCode run on any model backend instead of being locked to a single provider.

The problem I ran into is that most modern AI coding tools are tightly coupled to a small set of hosted models. That makes it hard to control cost, run locally, use enterprise endpoints, or experiment with different models without changing tools or workflows.

Lynkr sits between the client and the model and speaks both OpenAI-compatible and Claude-compatible APIs. From the client’s point of view, nothing changes — but you can route requests to local models (Ollama, llama.cpp), OpenRouter, or enterprise endpoints like Azure or Databricks.

Architecture-wise, it’s a thin HTTP proxy that translates requests, supports streaming, tool calls, and adds optional features like prompt caching, simple routing rules, and workspace indexing for coding workflows.

One feature I’ve found especially useful is hierarchical routing: requests can be routed through a priority chain of models (for example, try a local model first, fall back to a stronger cloud model on failure or for large contexts, and finally to a premium model for complex tasks). This makes it possible to mix cost, latency, and quality policies without changing the client.

A few concrete use cases that motivated this:

Running Cursor or Continue fully on local models for privacy

Routing cheap tasks to local models and harder tasks to stronger cloud models

Using Claude Code CLI without sending code to Anthropic’s hosted backend

This is early-stage and very much infra-focused. Setup is a single binary / npm install, and you point your tool’s base URL at Lynkr.

Repo: https://github.com/Fast-Editor/Lynkr
by jonp888 | 2026-01-19 06:31:39+00:00
For many years the Spanish state-owned company RENFE had a monopoly on Spain's huge high speed rail network. However their high prices, inconvenient schedules and poor customer service were often criticized, and so when, to the annoyance of RENFE and many spanish politicians, additional foreign operators entered the market on the key Madrid - Barcelona route, ridership doubled whilst ticket prices halved.

So I would standby for this tragedy to be used for political purposes to try and get foreign operators banned from Spanish tracks, regardless of the facts of the matter.
by anonnon | 2026-01-19 06:31:57+00:00
I wasn't suggesting the people answering are bots, only that the verification is done by the mods and is somewhat opaque. My concern was just that these well-meaning people might be wasting their time answering botspew. And then inevitably, when they come to realize, or even just strongly suspect, that they're interacting with bots, they'll desist altogether (if the volume of botspew doesn't burn them out first), which means the actual humans seeking assistance now have to go somewhere else.

Also on subreddits functioning as support groups for certain diseases, you'll see posts that just don't quite add up, at least if you know somewhat about the disease (because you or a loved one have it). Maybe they're "zebras" with a highly atypical presentation (e.g., very early age of onset), or maybe they're "Munchies." Or maybe LLMs are posting their spurious accounts of their cancer or neurdegenerative disease diagnosis, to which well-meaning humans actually afflicted with the condition respond (probably along side bots) with their sympathy and suggestions.
by SauntSolaire | 2026-01-19 06:32:12+00:00
The application can be messy, but the policy itself is clear [1]. My position is that you can feel free to argue specific cases, but if someone's against the concept of moderating political stories, then that's directly at odds with the stated policy of this site and they would be better off posting elsewhere.

[1] > "I know there are many users (actually a small-but-vocal minority of users) who complain that flags are being abused to suppress political stories. What these complainants never seem to take into account is that we want most political stories to be flagged on HN, for a critical reason: if they weren't, then HN would turn into a current-affairs site, and that would not be HN at all." (-dang)
by dmpk2k | 2026-01-19 06:32:22+00:00
> There's essentially no reason to prefer the aligned load/store commands over the unaligned ones - if the actual pointer is unaligned it will function correctly at half the throughput

Getting a fault instead of half the performance is actually a really good reason to prefer aligned load/store. To be fair, you're talking about a compiler here, but I never understood why people use the unaligned intrinsics...