MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by knicholes | 2026-01-13 20:34:33+00:00
They helped me make some damn good brownies and be a better parent in the last month. Maybe I should write a blog for all of the great things LLMs are doing for me.

Oh yeah, and one rewrote the 7-minute-workout app for me without the porn ads before and after the workout so I can enjoy working out with one of my kids.
by rfw300 | 2026-01-13 20:35:03+00:00
The example you present seems fairly straightforward to my intuition, but I think your point is fair.

A harder set of hypotheticals might arise if music production goes the direction that software engineering is heading: “agentic work”, whereby a person is very much involved in the creation of a work, but more by directing an AI agent than by orchestrating a set of non-AI tools.
by kube-system | 2026-01-13 20:35:16+00:00
All Rangers are T6-platform Rangers now. It was designed well before the factories closed in Australia, but global automakers have been steadily consolidating to global-platform cars since the 1990s. The locality of the design doesn't matter as much when it'll be used across the world. It makes the most sense to design them where there is good design talent, and build them where it is economical to build them.
by psunavy03 | 2026-01-13 20:35:25+00:00
While there's more than enough room to criticize both agencies these days, and if I did work for one of them I'd be retaining personal legal representation, doxxing people is not the answer. Sure, if some bad actors can be sued/prosecuted, that's not a bad thing per se.

But we're already living in a world where US Senators and Supreme Court Justices have had to have security provided because of death threats from both sides of the aisle. We don't need to be encouraging vigilantes. No side is so noble that people can't do evil in its name.
by pc86 | 2026-01-13 20:35:41+00:00
If you (the royal you) thought it was unethical to buy a Dilbert book because the person who stood to make something like $4 off of it had some views you disagree with, you are a broken person. Even if Adams agreed with every single opinion you had, it's a statistical certainty that a dozen people who also make money off that book have views you find reprehensible.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-01-13 20:35:49+00:00
I might keep working doing what I do now.

I have the job I want. I work remotely. I “retired my wife” when she was 44 8 years into our marriage in 2020 (I was 45) so we could travel and she could pursue her passions. There is really nothing I want to do that work stops me from doing. We travel, we have done the year long “digital nomad” thing, I can go home and spend time with my aging parents and our adult kids (my stepsons) for an extended time.

My other hobbies is I’m a gym rat and just hang out with friends and my wife.

I work in consulting so I never get bored working on the same problem. I’m a staff consultant so the company I work for really gives me almost complete autonomy. I get assigned a project and for the most part I get to lead the projects the way I want.
by saalweachter | 2026-01-13 20:35:52+00:00
Hell, he could have been told that he wasn't promoted because of his sex/race/whatever by his direct superior who supported Adams' promotion but was overruled by his higher ups/the committee.

"Older white guy boss tells younger white guy Adams that he doesn't have a future because the company is only promoting <slurs> and <slurs>." is something I would totally believe happened. Source: if you're a white guy, other white guys tell you all sorts of things you'd think they'd keep to themselves.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-01-13 20:35:55+00:00
That would only really be ironic if the reason for people overwriting their comments was out of protest for LLM training, but the main reason that resulted in by far the biggest wave of deletions was Reddit locking down their API. If the result of their protest is that the site is less useful for you, the user, then in fact it served its purpose, as the entire point was an attempt to boycott Reddit, ie. get people to stop using it by removing the user contributions that give the site its only value in the first place.
by happytoexplain | 2026-01-13 20:36:16+00:00
I didn't say it taught you software development (though it does, non-primarily), I said it was '"the" software degree'. I.e. the degree you get if you want to get into software in general - which, in reality, is what people believe is true, and reality/pragmatism is all that matters, even if you feel so superior to those people as to resort to insults.

To be clear, I did not go into CS. But I do live in this world
by lifestyleguru | 2026-01-13 20:36:33+00:00
Actually Airbnb received a firm push back, nowadays everything lands on Booking. There are virtually no places in developed world cheaper than 100EUR/USD/GBP per night, the standard price is closer to 200. Why bother with long term rental if full month rent can be fetched within a week, or within two days if there is a concert or event nearby.
by woodruffw | 2026-01-13 20:36:47+00:00
MIT was already using Python by 2009[1]; I think it's been one of the "standard" teaching languages for well over a decade at this point.

(By most metrics, Python became "big" in the mid-late 2000s, which is why the Python 3 transition was so painful.)

[1]: https://www.wisdomandwonder.com/link/2110/why-mit-switched-f...
by array_key_first | 2026-01-13 20:36:49+00:00
Right, for small scripting, not for the majority of the app. All the backend interaction is in C++.

Like, electron is fine, but it's orders of magnitude slower than it needs to be for the functionality it brings. Which is just not ideal for many desktop applications or, especially, the shell itself.

Ultimately people use electron because they know HTML, CSS, and JS/TS. And, I guess, companies think engineers are too stupid to learn anything else, even though thats not the case. There is a strong argument for electron. But not for Linux userland dev, where many developers already know Qt like the back of their hand.
by gkoberger | 2026-01-13 20:37:16+00:00
There's also a free version, and a $79/mo tier. We're also free for open source projects on our higher tiers.

If it's not for you, that's okay! But an increasing number of documentation teams are cross-functional (marketing, sales, engineering, product), and not everyone is comfortable editing content directly in Git and dealing with a release.

Docs are the heart and soul of most devtools, so I think it makes sense a lot of companies want a good product.
by sinenomine | 2026-01-13 20:37:27+00:00
It's a hard problem, but deep learning is very scalable and general and the pressure for general robotics to be solved is very strong in China and US, given the demographic shifts. I think the proliferation of humanoids is a near certainty over the next 8 years, ofc it won't be uniform and licensed labor won't be replaced.

Note that we are only starting to see the (much smaller compared to llms) DL data scaling in robotics - almost entire previous research has been achieved with very small robot fleets.

I think scaling data from industrial-sized robot fleets will lead to quick solution of various general robotics capabilities.
by mcv | 2026-01-13 20:37:28+00:00
I find him neither confident, charismatic, nor attractive. I still don't understand how anyone can believe such a blatant liar. Or like such a terrible excuse of a human being. But clearly there's something about what he does and how he acts and talks, that appeals to some people. Mass hypnosis is as good an explanation as any, if you ask me.

But that's not my point. My point is that Scott Adams identified it, which to me sounds like recognizing it as fake and manipulation. And yet he supported the guy. That's the thing I really don't get. Then again, JD Vance called him the American Hitler and is now his VP. Many of his most loyal lackeys have called him terrible things. People are easily corruptible, I guess. Or recognize in him a useful tool for their own worst goals.
by inglor_cz | 2026-01-13 20:37:39+00:00
Aren't you a German? (Maybe I am mistaking you for someone else.) If so, I would like to remind you of the German saying „Nicht alles, was hinkt, ist ein Vergleich“.

Your analogy is very, very stretched. One can definitely say that suppression of Highlanders after the defeat of the last Jacobite Uprising was somewhat similar to other British military actions, including those in India, but that was the standard of the day in the 18th century.

Scotland was in no meaningful way "colonized". The local elite kept their power, their property, and got adequate representation in the common British Parliament, which meant real influence over the legislative process and formation of governments.

Can you name any Indian MPs sitting in the Westminster back then and co-determining the next budget and the next Prime Minister? No.
by mrkeen | 2026-01-13 20:37:50+00:00
Any time I'm doing anything remotely to do with merging, I use 'git diff' or 'git difftool'.

If I diff against master, I see changes in 300+ files, when I've only changed 5 (because other people have changed 300+ files.)

> Fundamentally, I do not debug off git history.

Neither. The usual argument I hear against rebase is that it destroys history. Since I don't debug off git history, I'm quite happy to destroy it, and get back to diffing my 5-file changes against (current) master.
by toast0 | 2026-01-13 20:38:31+00:00
> And $10M would require some up-front management and ongoing maintenance to develop an index-tracked revenue stream from it.

Buy $5M of VOO and $5M of VTEB or BND. Send dividends to your bank account. When your bank account is over the FDIC limit, buy more of whichever fund has less $. Dividend yield on VOO is about 1%, bond fund is aboit 3%, approximately $200k/year from dividends, but if that's not enough, sell from the fund with more $ as needed.

Probably check with your insurer and get an umbrella policy for $5M+ cause they're cheap and you don't want to get a judgement and lose out on the easy life.

Send me a check for about $10k a year as a reminder of how much work I did for you right here in the open :P (j/k, I'm not a financial advisor, I can't take compensation for this). You could do something fancier, or think about your preferred stock/bond ratio, but $10M is enough that anything safe (80:20 to 20:80) will work unless you overspend.
by rockyj | 2026-01-13 20:38:32+00:00
Nope, I would probably even quit at 250K of savings. Take some time off, then maybe learn pixel art / design , and spend 2 years to make a game or SaaS to get around 2k income per month for 2 years and then repeat the cycle. The initial money secures basic housing and bills, and the small monthly income is good enough for me.
by arjie | 2026-01-13 20:38:37+00:00
Oh I misunderstood the sections in the article about the umn.edu email stuff. My mistake. The actual course of events:

1. Prof and students make fake identities

2. They submit these secret vulns to Greg KH and friends

3. Some of these patches are accepted

4. They intervene at this point and reveal that the patches are malicious

5. The patches are then not merged

6. This news comes out and Greg KH applies big negative trust score to umn.edu

7. Some other student submits a buggy patch to Greg KH

8. Greg KH assumes that it is more research like this

9. Student calls it slander

10. Greg KH institutes policy for his tree that all umn.edu patches should be auto-rejected and begins reverts for all patches submitted in the past by such emails

To be honest, I can't imagine any other such outcome could have occurred. No one likes being cheated out of work that they did, especially when a lot of it is volunteer work. But I was wrong to say the research was useless. It does demonstrate that identities without provenance can get malicious code into the kernel.

Perhaps what we really need is a Social Credit Score for OSS ;)
by e_i_pi_2 | 2026-01-13 20:38:41+00:00
Not blind, and can't speak to how popular or useful they are, but there are products meant to be used like that [0]. I can't find the link but I've also seen this done with paintings, where someone creates essentially a sculpture based on a painting, and then they can 3D print it so a blind person could "see" something like the Mona Lisa or Starry Night.

A while ago I read a biography of Louis Braille, and he created his system to replace an older one where they would teach people to feel the shape of letters in wooden blocks. Braille replaced it because it was much easier to read fast, but it was never meant to be used for something like a picture.

I'd also be interested if something like a tactile floor plan would even be useful for someone blind from birth, from what I've heard you don't think about navigating spaces the same way, so a floor plan might be far away from the mental models they use.

[0]: https://evengrounds.com/services/tactile-3d-printed-models-f...
by Aurornis | 2026-01-13 20:38:46+00:00
> Housing is too expensive because it's illegal to build enough of it.

This is a factor in some places, but a gross over-simplification in others.

There are neighborhoods full of affordable new construction houses not far from where I live. They sell slowly because people would rather live in the popular areas.

There are affordable high density housing options for rent here. They stay on the market because everyone wants their own house.

It's not even about remote work here, as the popular location for office builds and jobs is actually closer to those affordable housing neighborhoods few people want to live in. Being near the office buildings is actually a reason why they're undesirable.

There are some obvious broken housing situations like San Francisco, but I don't see permitting reform as a magic cure-all in every city.
by scioto | 2026-01-13 20:38:48+00:00
As John Scalzi once said, "The failure mode of clever is asshole." [1]

That has prevented me from posting what I thought was a clever or cheeky response in case it didn't come across the way I wanted.

---

[1] https://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/06/16/the-failure-state-of-...
by fallinditch | 2026-01-13 20:38:48+00:00
At first I was just curious, and unimpressed with the horridly bland shite coming out of these AI music generators. But then I made a prompt that sparked some kind of magic, so now I want to finish off that track just to see if I can end up with something that I consider good.

I don't hold it much hope for this track because everything else I've heard on suno and udio are rubbish, but the 1 minute preview I have is enticing me to spend 8 bucks just so I can experiment a bit more.

I feel somewhat conflicted by my fascination because I have a great love for music and I wholeheartedly support efforts to restrict AI music crap.

But as the tools mature, the creative possibilities to make new sounds with finer control and granularity will make the process more ... creative - with greater human input.

I'm sure we'll end up with new styles and maybe even new genres that originate from prompts, and hits too. Is this a good thing to look forward to? I can see my future listening habits become strictly human only, but dang, the start of my new track sounds so dope!

I applaud Bandcamp's stance here and I will always look for ways to meaningfully support real musicians.
by sharkjacobs | 2026-01-13 20:39:02+00:00
That's why it's the dream.

I mean, even if it's just a pastiche machine, I do believe that people could use it to make new and interesting music, just like they did with sampling.

But yeah, music is so accessible and there is so much new music all the time that if all, or most, of what AI is being used for is to make even more of the same stuff we're already awash in then banning it is necessary curation.
by asdefghyk | 2026-01-13 20:39:03+00:00
RE ".....Ronald Reagan -- a president who did many questionable/bad things..."

Not being in the common demographic of this site , I had to google this - as I was not aware of any ..... It educated me. It made me immedicably wonder where the current president would fit into ... since the google also had questions and claimed answers/OPINIONS too " who was worst US president etc... The current presidents situation is still being played out - obviously ...
by Mordisquitos | 2026-01-13 20:39:07+00:00
There's something about the way terminology used in this article that feels off to me.

First of all, I'm not sure it makes sense to refer to these AI-generated characters as AI 'influencers'. Did these characters actually have followers prior to these fake videos being generated in December 2025? Do they even have followers now? I don't know, maybe they did or do, but I get the impression that they are just representing influencer-ish characteristics as part of the scheme. Don't get me wrong, the last thing I want is to gatekeep such an asinine term as 'influencer'. However, just like I would not be an influencer just by posting a video acting like one, neither do AI characters get a free pass at becoming one.

Second, there's the way the article is subjectifying the AI-generated characters. I can forgive the headline for impact, but by consistently using 'AI influencers' throughout the article as the subject of these actions, it is not only contributing to the general confusion as to what characters in AI-generated videos actually are, but also subtly removing the very real human beings who are behind this from the equation. See for instance these two sentences from the article, UPPERCASE mine:

1- 'One AI influencer even SHARED an image of HER in bed with Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro'

2- 'Sometimes, these AI influencers STEAL directly from real adult content creators by faceswapping THEMSELVES into their existing videos.'

No, there is no her sharing an image of herself in bed with anyone. No, there are no them stealing and faceswapping themselves onto videos of real people. The 'AI influencers' are not real. They are pure fictions, as fictional as the fictinal Nicolás Maduro, Mike Tyson and Dwayne Johnson representations that appear in the videos. The sharing and the faceswapping is being done by real dishonest individuals and organisations out there in the real world.
by machomaster | 2026-01-13 20:39:09+00:00
A couple of examples to illustrate your comment.

1. Relationship between USA and Kurds. Kurds have been helping Americans, putting lives on the line, are a rare democratic and free side in the region, but are constantly being violated by Americans despite that.

2. Syria. No problem supporting the literal Alqaeda leader!

3. Just a history of supporting dictators. Chile and Americas, Asia, Europe (Spain, Greece, Portugal).

4. Even currently, no problem supporting e.g. Saudis.
by hinkley | 2026-01-13 20:39:32+00:00
There was a weird period in JavaScript’s history where the threshold for inlining was rather fixed and counted comments as part of the function weight. So there was code that would go faster if you deleted the comments.

I believe it was counting AST nodes rather than bytes, otherwise that would have also created problems for descriptive function names as well and that would have been what we heard about instead of comments.
by epsters | 2026-01-13 20:39:38+00:00
War Duration Population Deaths
Iraq war 2003-2017-present 25 million (2005) 500 - 1 million
Syrian war 2012-2025-present 21 million (2012) 500 - 600,000
Libyan war 2011-2021-present 6.5 million (2010) 50 - 100k

This is looking like its going to be another Syria/Libya-style foreign-intervention if Israel gets its way (which seems to be the case). Which means multiple proxy factions backed by various regional and global powers in a grand chessboard. The opposition already seems to be disjointed. To add to the mess, The Israelis seem to be backing the son of the late Shah to install as a tinpot dictator and Europe/Washington and the western media are going along with it dutifully. The Kurdish rioters and sleeper cells already seem to be firing their weapons and may at some point decide to make a break for it. Which risks destabilising Iraq and Syria (again) and likely draw involvement from those countries. Which will likely in turn , draw in the Turks and Gulf monarchs. By which point there is a good chance of this devolving into a conflict divided along ethnic and sectarian lines with a possible resurgence of ISIS and Al Qaeeda. The Israelis and their western-backers seem quite content with all this. The Israelis will likely seek to maximize and prolong the chaos in keeping with the Yinon plan to break apart Iran (along with Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Somalia) so they can establish themselves as a regional hegemon.

"90 million" is a good number to keep in mind because going by the numbers and history, such a war would at minimum last 10 years and cost a million lives and trigger another even larger refugee crisis. As is now custom, it looks like the common people of the region will bear the brunt of the impact with Europe suffering the secondary fallout while America foots the bill and Israel reaps the rewards. I say all this because i see lot of people cheering this on and it is important for them to know what exactly they are cheering for. We saw all this happen over and over in Iraq, in Syria, in Libya, in Palestine, in Yemen, in Somalia, in Sudan. Are we going to pretends it going to turn out different this time? That this time it really is about freedom and democracy and humanitarianism?
by MaxBarraclough | 2026-01-13 20:39:46+00:00
> It would only work if there's a sizeable, technically-inclined userbase of the project so that someone is likely to have audited the code.

Not really. There's a long history of seemingly credible closed-source codebases turning out to have concealed malicious functionality, such as smart TVs spying on user activity, or the 'dieselgate' scandal, or the Sony rootkit. This kind of thing is extremely rare in Free and Open Source software. The creators don't want to run the risk of someone stumbling across the plain-as-day source code of malicious functionality. Open source software also generally makes it easy to remove malicious functionality, or even to create an ongoing fork project for this purpose. (The VSCodium project does this, roughly speaking. [0])

Firefox's telemetry is one of the more high-profile examples of unwanted behaviour in Free and Open Source software, and that probably doesn't even really count as malware.

> If you're malicious, you can still release malicious software with an open-source cover (ideally without the source including the malicious part - but even then, you can coast just fine until someone comes along and actually checks said source).

I already acknowledged this is possible, you don't need to spell it out. Again I don't have hard numbers, but it seems to me that in practice this is quite rare compared to malicious closed-source software of the 'ordinary' kind.

A good example of this was SourceForge injecting adware into binaries. [1]

> Remember that the xz-utils backdoor was only discovered because they fucked up and caused a slowdown and not due to an unprompted audit.

Right, that was a supply chain attack. They seem to be increasingly common, unfortunately.

[0] https://vscodium.com/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SourceForge#Installer_with_adw...