MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by didibus | 2026-01-14 01:11:24+00:00
Ignoring the actual poor quality of this write-up, I think we don't know how well GenAI is going to be honest. I feel we've not been able to properly measure or assess it's actual impact yet.

Even as I use it, and I use it everyday, I can't really assess its true impact. Am I more productive or less overall? I'm not too sure. Do I do higher quality work or lower quality work overall? I'm not too sure.

All I know, it's pretty cool, and using it is super easy. I probably use it too much, in a way, that it actually slows things down sometimes, when I use it for trivial things for example.

At least when it comes to productivity/quality I feel we don't really know yet.

But there are definite cool use-cases for it, I mean, I can edit photos/videos in ways I simply could not before, or generate a logo for a birthday party, I couldn't do that before. I can make a tune that I like, even if it's not the best song in the world, but it can have the lyrics I want. I can have it extract whatever from a PDF. I can have it tell me what to watch out for in a gigantic lease agreement I would not have bothered reading otherwise.

I can have it fix my tests, or write my tests, not sure if it saves me time, but I hate doing that, so it definitely makes it more fun and I can kind of just watch videos at the same time, what I couldn't before. Coding quality of life improvements are there too, I want to generate a sample JSON out of a JSONSchema, and so on. If I want, I can write the a method using English prompts instead of the code itself, might not truly be faster or not, not sure, but sometimes it's less mentally taxing, depending on my mood, it can be more fun or less fun, etc.

All those are pretty awesome wins and a sign that for sure those things will remain and I will happily pay for them. So maybe it depends on what you expected.
by rc-1140 | 2026-01-14 01:11:59+00:00
> If you don’t have a domain or hosting yet, now’s the time to buckle down and do that. Unfortunately, I don’t have good advice for you here. Just know that it’s going to be stupid and tedious and bad and unfun. That’s just the way this is.

I cannot remember if it was here or elsewhere but there was an amazing blogpost making fun of beginner and intermediate "coding" tutorials (coding as a catch-all for programming, markdown, etc.) where the author assumes the reader has deep familiarity with the subject at hand and all of its jargon. This has the exact same vibe.
by mindslight | 2026-01-14 01:12:35+00:00
> You keep throwing "escalation" out there to describe ordinary law enforcement procedure

Yes, because it's an escalation, even if it is per procedure. This is another case of you wanting to define words narrowly to absolve the choices and actions of law enforcement officers as if they're some kind of mechanical robots. In reality we expect them to exercise judgement to minimize harm, regardless of whom they're dealing with. And we can use words like escalation when criticizing their behavior.

> The ones that cannot continue forward in a straight line because the SUV is in the way, perpendicular to the road.

That's the thing, I did not see any of these in this video, which is why I asked you to point out a specific one! Vehicles only end up stopping around her after the left lane is completely clear. One ICE vehicle even ends up in front of her because they got around her to the right! If they had to go to the right into the parking/snow, we could call that obstruction. Except that vehicle ends up stopped right in front of her, so its intent was to box her in rather than merely go past her.

> (I don't know how you're deciding which vehicles are or are not ICE in this video.)

Common sense. Seeing an agent get in, or parked around the agents milling about before it starts moving, with an eye for the larger SUVs that LEOs favor. If I've judged wrong and you think that affects my point, you could have pointed it out though.

> if I see that you're in my path, and I elect to choose a different route to avoid you, you have still obstructed me

Have you really never driven in a city? Other drivers doing weird shit and having to negotiate is the norm. If the Jeep didn't drive up to her and ask/signal her to move, then she did not obstruct them - rather they made a voluntary choice to go around. The fact you're misinterpreting everyday behavior so incorrectly demonstrates some highly motivated reasoning, so I don't know that there is any point in continuing here.
by treetalker | 2026-01-14 01:12:59+00:00
In another gesture of humanity, maturity, and solidarity with the working middle class, Trump gave the middle finger and exclaimed "f--- you!" to a Detroiter (Ford employee) today, after said worker exercised First Amendment rights to (accurately) call Trump a "pedophile protector".

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5687687-ford-wor...
by dijit | 2026-01-14 01:15:03+00:00
I disagree with the premise that these were acceptable decisions.

The Elastic situation wasn't "two equally skilled applicants". I'd already been offered and had accepted the position. Rescinding an accepted offer because another candidate better fits demographic targets is materially different from choosing between two candidates at the offer stage.

On the broader point: I understand the goal of achieving equitable outcomes. The question is whether the ends justify the means. Explicitly excluding individuals from opportunities based on immutable characteristics, whether in the 1960s or today, remains discrimination, regardless of which direction it flows.

If we're serious about equity, we need solutions that don't require accepting discrimination as a necessary tool. Lowering barriers to entry, addressing bias in evaluation, expanding candidate pools, mentorship programmes: these grow the pie rather than just redistributing the slices.

The moment you tell someone "you're qualified, but you're the wrong demographic," you've created exactly the kind of experience that radicalises people. I've experienced it. It's corrosive, regardless of how noble the underlying intent.
by fasterik | 2026-01-14 01:15:21+00:00
Nielsen and Chuang has the clearest exposition of quantum mechanics I've seen anywhere. Last year I was trying to learn quantum mechanics, not necessarily quantum computation, just out of a general interest in theoretical physics. I started with physics textbooks (Griffiths and Shankar) but it only really "clicked" for me when I read the first few chapters of Nielsen and Chuang.
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2026-01-14 01:15:41+00:00
Harsh, but some people just gotta hear that.

... although it's a bit unfair to the many tech people who never wanted to throw artists down the loo or indeed anyone else. E.g. when I was fiddling with language generation during my MSc it never occurred to me that someone would want to use it to replace writing, let alone coding. What would be the point in that?
by blibble | 2026-01-14 01:16:32+00:00
> Maybe objectively it does, but can we convince them that it does?

how long would you give our current civilisation if quality of software ceased to be important for:

- medical devices
- aircraft
- railway signalling systems
- engine management systems
- the financial system
- electrical grid
- water treatment
- and every other critical system

unless "AI" dies, we're going to find out
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2026-01-14 01:17:56+00:00
>> Programmers are (or were?) expensive because, at least in recent times, talented ones are expensive because they are rare enough.

In all the years I worked in the industry, I never knew anyone trying to hire "talented" programmers. Only trying to hire people, usually inexperienced juniors, willing to work twice the time they're paid for if you tell them how smart they are.
by mindslight | 2026-01-14 01:18:03+00:00
> There is no good reason why they should have "simply left"

To avoid escalating to the point of killing a woman who clearly had no respect for them and would have been more receptive to local police. Not killing a woman counts as a good reason in my book at least, it seems that others disagree.

> That would have resulted in the SUV remaining in place, which would have been a general risk to safety

In the other comment I asked you to point out what vehicles were obstructed and you did not. By the time of the shooting, traffic was moving freely in the left lane and any vehicle that wanted to be gone was gone. Once again this is highly motivated reasoning, so I don't see the point of continuing.
What will enshittification of LLMs look like?
by scoofy | 2026-01-14 01:18:23+00:00
I’m finally getting to the point where I find LLMs very useful. They can find me citations and help me with code. This feels like the good ole days of Google search and reader.

That got me thinking, won’t this all go to shit because I’m the product? What will that look like? How should I make my make my decision now, so I end up fluent in products like Kagi or Inkscape instead of ending up in an ecosystem where I’m the product?
by crazygringo | 2026-01-14 01:18:38+00:00
> Have a meeting, align on some norms for these things and then hold people accountable to them. It's not hard. We're all adults. You don't need constant meetings to hand hold people like little kids.

Yes... the meetings are called retrospectives.

One of the norms is called standups.

You don't need to belittle these processes as being for "little kids". That's deeply unprofessional.

Maybe there are some teams made up entirely of these 10x communicators you describe where everybody perfectly "bridges the gap" with other people. All I can say is, I've never seen it. And knowing everything I know about how easy it is for miscommunication to happen, I'm inclined to suspect that if you think you worked somewhere like that, you simply weren't aware of how much further communication and processes could have improved. After all, how could you? It's incredibly easy for us to assume that things are working as well as they could be. Until we try something like standup+retrospectives and are surprised at how much value they end up bringing.
by robomartin | 2026-01-14 01:19:13+00:00
> This is why your snark is so easily detectable

If I argue with my wife about medical matters (she is an MD) her response might look or sound snarky to some. In reality, she would be correct in telling me how and why I would be wrong.

You really need to stop, because you are digging a deeper hole with every word. You just said that 3D printers and drone are easy consumer products to develop. You truly do not understand what it takes to develop these products. The vast majority of them are still incredibly unsafe. There's a minority that have greatly enhanced safety. It should not be surprising that the safe systems (with a couple of exceptions) cost tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars and address commercial/industrial markets, not hobby. The amount of engineering and testing these systems require is nothing less than massive.

Context: I've been designing, building and flying all kinds of RC planes, gliders, helicopters and multicopters for four decades. I have been designing, building and using 3D printers for over two decades. Our latest 3D printer for internal use is equipped with Teknic Clearpath motors with fully machined structure and parts made on our Haas CNC Vertical Machining Centers.

Again, please, chill, nobody is insulting the hobby world (which you seem to be offended by). These are different worlds. That's how it has been from the start of time. And that's OK.

Here, I'll help you stop. Let's agree to disagree. You are absolutely right and I am wrong.

Live long and prosper.
by fathermarz | 2026-01-14 01:19:25+00:00
We built an MVP for a startup, then forked the front end to extend to the prototype vision of where we want to go. We use the prototype to dream and when we need to implement the front end of a feature we already understand how it would fit in to the product. Easier to scope.

One thing I have found coming from enterprise is, stakeholder design meetings get way more fun and much faster.

In enterprise, everyone gives notes and the designers take them away and put up another meeting to review days later. Usually with Figma screens people can review etc as things go.

Startup/Vibeland. Someone has an idea for a look and feel or UX solution. It’s like next to instant feedback. There is still the level of rebuilding it for real, but I find the iteration loops are much tighter.
by refuser | 2026-01-14 01:20:15+00:00
The website linked in the article appears to not be _the_ website (to be fair, tfa only calls it _a_ website). The website actually hosted by JPM is very sparse, but even mentions that such unofficial websites exist.

https://www.jpmorgan.com/about-us/events-conferences/health-...

(tfa is a fun read, regardless)
by ameixaseca | 2026-01-14 01:20:27+00:00
> See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_acquisition_is_initia...

This example is specific to C++

> (..) if your programme crashes there's no guarantee that you'll ever give the resources back.

What guarantees can you have from a "crashing program", and by what definition of crashing?

> RAII is a leaky abstraction

Any abstraction is leaky if you look close enough.
by rectang | 2026-01-14 01:21:07+00:00
I give the agent the following standing instructions:

"Make the smallest possible change. Do not refactor existing code unless I explicitly ask."

That directive cut down considerably on the amount of extra changes I had to review. When it gets it right, the changes are close to the right size now.

The agent still tries to do too much, typically suggesting three tangents for every interaction.
by rchaud | 2026-01-14 01:22:29+00:00
Folding phones have been around for half a decade and sold tens of millions of units. Same with VR.

Apple is in the value extraction business these days: their devices are conduits for advertising Apple services. The Vision Pro flopped because they wanted to charge and arm and a leg for a platform that was actively hostile to developers. It's not 2008 anymore.
by retrac | 2026-01-14 01:22:58+00:00
I've done similar loose experiments using a 19th century French novel I have read (L'Agonie by Jean Lombard), and which is quite obscure. There is no English translation of the novel published.

Using Gemini Notebooks I've found it passable at summarizing chapters, listing characters, major theme and so on, and it can do this in English.

"What is the symbolism of the Black Stone?"

> In the sources, the Black Stone (referred to as the Pierre-Noire) serves as the central religious icon of the Syrian Sun cult brought to Rome by the Emperor Elagabalus. Its symbolism is multifaceted, ranging from fertility and virility to a mystical pursuit of universal unity.

> It represents the perennity of the Sun, which fertilizes the world, causing "germs to rise" and spreading them through the atmosphere. It is viewed as the "definitive form" of divinity, intended to absorb and replace the "transitory forms" of all other Roman, Greek, Egyptian, and Persian gods, including the Christian "Kreistos".
> Virility and Phallic Symbolism
>
> The sources explicitly characterize the Black Stone as a gigantic sacred phallus. It is described as:
• An icon of virility and the "organ of generation" • A "unisexual icon" that materializes the generative force of nature • A representation of "virility in activity," which is why it is often paraded and elevated in an "orgasmic" or "colossal adoration"

> The Androgyne and Universal Unity - Beyond simple fertility, the philosopher Atillius explains a more complex, "mad" metaphysical project associated with the stone. It symbolizes "Life One" (Vie Une) and the return to a unisexual state of perfection. • The Androgyne: Atillius believes that by pursuing "the male sex by the male sex," the cult "inutilizes" the female sex to eventually create the Androgyne—a self-sufficient being containing both sexes • Unity: The stone signifies the fusion of all generative forces into a single Unity, reversing the "separation of the sexes" which is viewed as a state of unhappiness and impotence. • Marriage of Moon and Sun: The ritual marriage of the goddess Astaroth (representing the Moon and the female principle) to the Black Stone (representing the Sun and the male principle) symbolizes the merging of the Orient and Occident into this unified life principle
>
> Destruction of the Symbol - The Black Stone ultimately becomes a symbol of Oriental pollution and decadence to the Roman populace. During the final rebellion against Elagabalus, the stone is torn from its temple on the Palatine, defiled with filth, and broken into pieces to ensure that its "signification of Life" would never again dominate Rome.

This is all accurate to the book, even teasing out a couple themes that were only subconsciously present to me.

The NotebookLM version gives citations with links to the original text to support all these assertions, which largely are coherent with that purpose.

The input is raw images of a book scan! Imperfect as it is it still blows my mind. Not that long ago any kind of semantic search or analysis was a very hard AI problem.
by 6510 | 2026-01-14 01:23:15+00:00
We've ruined everything just like all other generations, specially programmers. But it doesn't matter as those who follow us don't know any better. It's like we are walking though a forest and you suddenly ask if this tree is better than the one 10 minutes ago.

We use to talk a lot, now we talk to the young ones and each of their sentences seems designed to end the conversation. When they are older the next generation will be glad they don't know how to talk either.

Not so long ago everyone also knew how to sing and make music. Each porch its own songs. Then came screaming radio boxes which was wonderful and everyone sang along.. for a while. They gradually turned into door to door sales men only you couldn't slap the door in their face anymore.
by koyote | 2026-01-14 01:23:21+00:00
I ran into a similarish issue in C++ (MSVC++) where a small change that improved an error message led to a 10% slowdown.

The function was something like:

int ReturnAnswerIfCharIsValid(char* c)
{
if(c == nullptr)
throw std::exception("ERROR!");

return 42;
}

The exception line was changed to something like:

throw std::exception("Char is not valid, please fix it!"); // String is now longer

The performance of this hot-path function went down the drain.

I fixed it by replacing the exception call with yet another function call:

if(c == nullptr)
ThrowException();

Other fixes might have included something like __forceinline in the function signature.
by subjectsigma | 2026-01-14 01:23:43+00:00
This has to be one of the more insane takes in the thread. Colonel Sanders and Tony the Tiger aren’t real people, Scott Adams is (was?) a real person.

I listen to an artist who I feel changed my life with her music. When I heard she had attempted suicide I was deeply saddened. I had this irrational but deep feeling like I should have done something to help her, without knowing what that possibly could have been, since I don’t actually know her at all.

Is that “weird and kind of gross” too? To care about people suffering and dying even if you don’t know them personally?
by wizzwizz4 | 2026-01-14 01:24:20+00:00
The old lesson from the Wizard of Oz experiment says that a regular expression probably isn't too crude, if you're willing to take the time to design it. Though you could probably get away with running a regex golf algorithm (e.g. https://nbviewer.org/url/norvig.com/ipython/xkcd1313.ipynb) over the list of matching titles, and the union of some list of non-matching-but-close titles (chosen to get good discrimination) with some list of way-off titles (to avoid overfitting). (You could treat the whole HN title database, other than the ones you've identified, as losers, but that risks hardcoding the absence of a post you accidentally missed, and would also take slightly longer – though Peter Norvig's first algorithm takes time linear in the number of losers, so it might not be too expensive. I don't know how expensive his improved versions are, given large lists of losers: https://nbviewer.org/url/norvig.com/ipython/xkcd1313-part2.i.... Better algorithms are surely available.)
by b1085436 | 2026-01-14 01:24:37+00:00
I strongly suspect that it is absolutely impossible to have an even remotely usable/useful "AI" trained on tiny datasets, and that instead of training only on ethical data, companies that want to sound ethical will use an extra post-training step for dirty foundation models to behave more ethically as if they'd only learned from ethical sources. I'd hate for this to become the norm, but I fear this is logically what annoucements like this one really mean. The difference in scale is so vast -- taking whatever you want from the entire internet -- vs hand-curated datasets with explicit authorisation and free to use. It's like trying to make a grain of sand gravitate around a marble in the playground, to mimic the moon around the Earth – won't work.
by SanjayMehta | 2026-01-14 01:24:46+00:00
Trump keeps reminding everyone that he supplied The Ukraine with Javelins.

Also, a series of NATO exercises which involved Ukrainian troops were conducted during the Trump 1.0 regime.

Operation Rapid Trident. (Trident seems to be a reference to a Ukrainian symbol.)

Now imagine China or Russia conducting such a series of exercises in Mexico.
by eeperson | 2026-01-14 01:24:54+00:00
> If you're in a project where buggy behavior wasn't introduced so much as grew (e.g. the behavior evolved A -> B -> C -> D -> E over time and a bug is reported due to undesirable interactions between released/valuable features in A, C, and E), then bisecting to find "when did this start" won't tell you that much useful.

I actually think that is the most useful time to use bisect. Since this is a situation where the cause isn't immediately obvious, looking through code can make those issues harder to find.
by moron4hire | 2026-01-14 01:24:56+00:00
What's there to be left behind on? That's like arguing people who stick to driving cars with manual transmissions are going to get left behind when buses "inevitably get good."

The whole point of the AI coding thing is that it lets inexperienced people create software. What skill moat are you building that a skilled software developer won't be able to pick up in 20 minutes?
by doodlesdev | 2026-01-14 01:25:25+00:00
It's a community repository for Fedora. It works similar to RPMFusion: you can use it along the official repositories to grab software that's not available there. If you'd like to reduce the number of organizations you're directly depending on, you may choose to use their Fedora fork, with their own repositories (forked from Fedora's), called Ultramarine Linux [0].

[0]: https://ultramarine-linux.org/
by omgJustTest | 2026-01-14 01:25:47+00:00
Diet is important, but if you think that a handful of peanuts is leading to your issues I'd first task writing down _everything_ you touch to eat.

IMO, especially when one has snacks fully stocked, it's easy to 'forget' that you ate something.

One big breakthrough for me was reading Arnold S. "encyclopedia of body building". There's a lot of physiological tips and also very practical advice.

I'm sure you can get it from anywhere, but for me this was a big change. Sizing the reps, the workouts, the weights helped a lot in trying to make progress. Additionally endomorphic bodies need different excercise and I was doing too much ineffective cardio for months with few results.

Weights changed my results within a few weeks.
by buildbot | 2026-01-14 01:26:13+00:00
Honestly between the ability to flash firmware, interface specs, and maybe PCB schematics that should be enough to use an old device for a motivated individual.

My personal pet example of this is old cameras, lenses, and digital backs. Plenty of great hardware out there that currently requires very extensive reverse engineering to use that would be made a lot easier with firmware & schematics.