MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jqpabc123 | 2026-01-26 20:22:09+00:00
Facts just have a higher probability?

You and I understand this but an LLM doesn't.

An LLM doesn't understand the difference between fact and fiction.

It just uses probability to choose the next word. Hopefully, there are a more facts in it's database that can serve as a guide. But if not, it will just as readily use fiction to produce something that sounds plausible.

Anything an LLM produces simply cannot be trusted and is a poor example of "intelligence".
by ern_ave | 2026-01-26 20:22:14+00:00
> a recent HN article had a bunch of comments lamenting that nobody ever uses XML any more

I still use it from time to time for config files that a developer has to write. I find it easier to read that JSON, and it supports comments. Also, the distinction between attributes and children is often really nice to have. You can shoehorn that into JSON of course, but native XML does it better.

Obviously, I would never use it for data interchange (e.g. SOAP) anymore.
by jameslk | 2026-01-26 20:22:15+00:00
I wish I could say this evoked a nostalgic feeling, but having lived in SF, the literal memory that came to mind immediately seeing these is the repulsive smell of urine and the sight of dirty, trash-laden sidewalks. While graffiti itself could be viewed as artistic expression on its own, I liked looking at some of it, in my mind it seems so often correlated with decay
by conductr | 2026-01-26 20:22:46+00:00
There’s a lot of iterative script writing that goes into “one take” videos. I think they often appear to be one takes and that’s the polish or perfectionism you’re seeing.

I mean, some of them are just rambling on and going more Vlog stuff. But even then they’ve likely already decided an agenda of discussion items and thoughts on them prior to just randomly going unfiltered.

Although idk, our algorithms of content could be completely different and you’re truly seeing something else.

Even short form video is a lot of work to be good at it and build a following unless there’s something else at play (charismatic, sex appeal, etc).
by torginus | 2026-01-26 20:23:05+00:00
I think the reference to scaling is a pretty big giveaway that things are not as they seem - I think it's pretty clear that we've run out of (human produced) data, so there's nowhere to scale to in that dimension. I'm pretty sure modern models are trained in some novel ways that engineers have to come up with.

It's quite likely they train on CC output too.

Yeah, there's synthethic data as well, but how do you generate said data is very likely a good question and one that many people have lost a lot of sleep over.
by colechristensen | 2026-01-26 20:23:21+00:00
>Reasonable observers don't think ukraine could have kept russia's nukes, firstly because they were russia's and not ukraine's, and secondly because a country with less than $100B economy (in shambles at the end of the ussr) can't afford to maintain nuclear surety. Additionally, it's very unclear whether any nukes would have been employed by now. Any nuclear attack on russia would result in total annihilation, and if ukraine could only strike a few high-value targets in exchange, it's not a winning weapon or even a deterrent.

I'm not saying that at the time it wasn't the best course of action. Something other than what happened may have been possible and may have been an improvement, but it certainly would give any future nations considering giving up their nukes a significant pause.

>Finally the rest of the thesis above is likely to result in a wave of assassinations and sabotage across europe and a wider war that almost all parties have sought to avoid. It's a fever dream shared by angry dummies who are completely incapable of rational thought.

Again, this is the method that you would use to do it. If it were a good idea it would likely already be done. I'm not saying it's a good consequence-free course of action, that wasn't the question.
by variaga | 2026-01-26 20:23:23+00:00
"Just shift back" is really underestimating how much effort it takes to port a design to a different foundry. Sure, you can target a new stdcell library and recompile your RTL (and re-floorplan, and re-do a bunch of other stuff) but you also have to swap out all your memories and interfaces, not all of which may have exact equivalents... it can easily take 1+ years of work for a competent team, and if you have to shift back all that time and effort was wasted.
by CMay | 2026-01-26 20:23:31+00:00
Well, South Korea and Japan being involved would just be one factor that makes justification even easier. The real reason would be national and global security. It's in the interest of preservation of freedom. You don't wait until the enemy is at your doorstep, because that means you allowed them to snowball an avalanche at you. You meet them at their doorstep before they've gained full momentum.
by super_mario | 2026-01-26 20:23:33+00:00
Coaching does not imply superiority. I doubt any sports coach could substitute any player in a competitive game, yet they can coach them to become better version of themselves.

What engineers usually struggle with as they grow into more senior roles is the transition from being primarily a technologist to being a leader. This is such a huge shift for a lot of engineers and requires soft skills and communication style adjustments. The more senior you are the more your focus shifts from coding to listening, networking, influencing, selling the technical vision, building trust relationships, understanding what other engineers need and want, to mentoring, to raising the quality of the team around you through influence to motivating others as well. Being able to influence the product direction, being able to express in business terms why something has to be done or should be a higher priority etc. Also, understanding the organization and becoming organizationally savvy is important.

All of these skills take time and practice to achieve, and good managers can guide their people through the journey.
by neko-moe | 2026-01-26 20:23:37+00:00
You can host your own instance, but resolving forks is not self-authenticating and requires some central trust (because of the 72 hour rollback window for higher priority rotation keys). Not counting that, you could essentially run your own fully independent instance where the worst that could happen is that you lack some newer updates to people's did documents (but anyone can upload them since they're self-authenticating). Some people do run their own instances for caching reasons, but these just ingest operations from the official one.

In terms of "credible exit", if the community at large could decide to move to a different PLC host, it would be technically possible for everyone to switch over.

Worth mentioning that Bluesky PBC is relinquishing legal control over the PLC and spinning it off into its own entity based in Switzerland.[1]

[1] https://docs.bsky.app/blog/plc-directory-org
by awill | 2026-01-26 20:23:51+00:00
There are just fewer highly polished Android apps vs iOS apps, and that's why I switched to iOS.

I bought JuiceSSH years ago on Android and it worked great, but I agree it's degraded, and I couldn't find an equivalent I liked.

iOS has multiple apps that beat JuiceSSH. I use Termix and it's really, really good.
by estearum | 2026-01-26 20:24:55+00:00
A vote for T is not a vote for every dimension of T.

In fact, all the data shows that the economy was the absolute top issue by a huge margin.

There's good reason to believe that not only would any Republican have gotten similar or better results, but that if it had been a Republican in power, that any Democrat would've gotten similar or better results.

Incumbents got smacked (far harder than Trump v Harris) in every election in the world in 2024, which is concordant with a long history of incumbents getting smacked during periods of high inflation.
by arjie | 2026-01-26 20:25:34+00:00
There is too much information that is only available in video form. You can use an LLM with the transcript quite effectively these days. I also run videos at higher speed and find that it doesn't help as much because it's a content density issue. Writers usually put more information into fewer words than speakers. Perhaps audio may not be as high-bandwidth a medium as text inherently. However, with an LLM you can tune up and down the text to your standard. I find it worthwhile to also ask for specific quotes, then find the right section of the video and watch it.

e.g. this was very useful when I recently clogged the hot-end of my 3d printer. Quick scan with LLM, ask quote, Cmd-F in Youtube Transcript, then click on timestamp and watch. `yt-dlp` can download the transcript and you can put prospective videos into this machine to identify ones that matter.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-26 20:25:39+00:00
> Do you see a difference between that, and on the other hand the government prohibiting access to information about the government’s own actions and history of the nation in which a person lives?

You mean the Chinese government acting to maintain social harmony? Is that not ostensibly the underlying purpose of the DEA's mission?

... is what I assume a plausible Chinese position on the matter might look like. Anyway while I do agree with your general sentiment I feel the need to let you know that you come across as extremely entrenched in your worldview and lacking in self awareness of that fact.
by hombre_fatal | 2026-01-26 20:25:44+00:00
The prompt is the ground truth that reveals the assumptions and understandings of the person who generated the code.

It makes a lot more sense to review and workshop that into a better prompt than to refactor the derived code when there are foundational problems with the prompt.

Also, we do do this for human-generated code. It's just a far more tedious process of detective work since you often have to go the opposite direction and derive someone's understanding from the code. Especially for low effort PRs.

Ideally every PR would come with an intro that sells the PR and explains the high level approach. That way you can review the code with someone's objectives in mind, and you know when deviations from the objective are incidental bugs rather than misunderstandings.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-26 20:26:07+00:00
The issue isn't the flaggers per se. It's that moderators show no interest to seriously investigating flagging patterns.

Its very similar to ICE. Obviously they are guilty, but I place the real blame on lawmakers' hesitancy to tale actions to reel this in. They have the power to do so and won't even investigate the issue in ways the public cannot. That's complicicy.
by TulliusCicero | 2026-01-26 20:26:12+00:00
Not sure why you're being downvoted, Europe has been mostly bad at software and services for a long time now. There's a reason Linus lives in Oregon.

There's always this occasional chatter about being more competitive, and certainly some good ideas -- for example, the Draghi Report -- but then nothing happens, or you get a few half measures at most.

I guess the one upside of Trump being such an aggressive jackass is that it might finally provide enough impetus for European countries to take further integration more seriously.
by JCattheATM | 2026-01-26 20:26:26+00:00
It's not a dark place to try and be objective and take data from multiple sources, and shame on you for trying to paint doing so as something negative.

> There is no sane reason to think the subreddits nor Jubilee videos are actually representative, and certainly no reason to believe they are representative in contradiction to virtually every poll conducted in the past 12 months.

It's not just those sources, it's basically every single source yo ucan fine with people giving an opinion. Every talk show (Fox/News Nation/ONE, etc), all the right aligned papers e.g. NY Post, WSJ, all the podcasters, all the influencers, and yes, whenever supporters are given a chance to speak, they overwhelming are pleased and support what is going on.

At some point, ignoring all that and favoring purely a few polls is wilful ignorance, and I have to question the motive of anyone doing so. At a guess, I'd guess it's someone that voted conservative but doesn't want to be lumped in with 'the bad ones'.
by sdoering | 2026-01-26 20:26:32+00:00
Sorry, if I was not clear enough. I explicitly did not want to limit devices - on the contrary. I am all for my device, my ability to use it how I like.

I meant that it is the responsibility of Facebook/Meta/Instagram to ensure that content is age appropriate - given the laws, rules and regulations of the country they are delivering the content to.

I mean, clearly it should be in the responsibility of p*nhub not only to ask "Are you over 18"? If I had this form of freely available porn, clearly I would have clicked it. Or respective subreddits.

Clearly and totally fine for consenting adults. Not so much for my 13 year old self a few decades back.
by learingsci | 2026-01-26 20:26:37+00:00
The author wrote a book about how America needs to reembrace Christianity. A review of that book said it was unclear who the book was for, given that the author is a homosexual atheist Jew. I would say that applies to this article too. As you note, it won’t convince Trump voters of anything. Its only utility is for those who already think Trump is a fascist, a term that the author himself says is basically meaningless. It merely makes those who agree with its conclusion feel good and click links. Signal detection theory tells us more noise makes signals harder to detect. So the article is counterproductive. Ok, meets the authors definition of fascist; so what?
by miltonlost | 2026-01-26 20:26:39+00:00
> I have no idea what AI changes about this scenario. It's the same scenario as when Mike did this with 1600 lines of his own code ten years ago; it just happens more often, since Mike comes up with 1600 lines of code in a day instead of in a sprint.

So now instead of reviewing 1600 lines of bad code every 2 weeks, you must review 1600 lines of bad code every day (while being told 1600 lines of bad code every day is an improvement because just how much more bad code he's "efficiently" producing! Scale and volume is the change.
Show HN: New feature: "Voices" – fictional commentary alongside current news
by bidwellm | 2026-01-26 20:27:01+00:00
I’m building Newzino (a story-tracking news site). I just added a feature called Voices: a set of fictional, AI-generated pastiches of historical writers/thinkers reacting to the story.

It’s explicitly labeled as fictional (“AI-generated pastiche… not real quotes”). The goal isn’t “fake quotes” — it’s:

- a fast way to get multiple perspectives

- more blunt critique than modern “safe” corporate-speak

- a tool to stress-test the narrative/incentives around a story

Would love feedback on:

- whether this is useful vs. cringe

- obvious ethical/UI pitfalls

- which historical voices you’d actually want (or never want)
by jazzyjackson | 2026-01-26 20:27:24+00:00
If I was to spend a trillion tokens on a barely working browser I would have started with the source code of Sciter [0] instead. I really like the premise of an electron alternative that compiles to a 5MB binary, with a custom data store based on DyBASE [1] built into the front end javascript so you can just persist any object you create. I was ready to build software on top of it but couldn't get the basic windows tutorial to work.

[0] https://sciter.com/

[1] http://www.garret.ru/dybase.html
by bidwellm | 2026-01-26 20:27:36+00:00
A couple clarifications:

The Voices are text-only and clearly marked as fictional AI pastiche, not quotes.

I’m trying to avoid “authority laundering” (i.e., pretending a dead person endorses a take). It’s explicitly framed as perspective/satire.

If this works, next step is letting readers toggle tone (satire vs. steelman vs. skeptical analyst) and vote on which voices are worth keeping.

If you want, paste me the exact Voices characters you’ve enabled so far and I’ll tailor the post to match (and keep it HN-proof).
by notepad0x90 | 2026-01-26 20:27:42+00:00
I'm not OP, I don't know what specific roles the LLM should be using, but LLMs are great with object recognition, and using both text (street signs,notices,etc..) and visual cues to predict the correct response. The actual motor control i'm sure needs no LLMs, but the decision making could use any number of solutions, I agree that an LLM-only solution sounds bad, but I didn't do the testing and comparison to be confident in that assessment.
by krzysz00 | 2026-01-26 20:28:03+00:00
This does seem to align decently well with, for example, the policy the LLVM project recently adopted https://llvm.org/docs/AIToolPolicy.html , which allows for AI but requires a human in the loop that understands the code and allows for fast closure of "extractive" PRs that are mainly a timesink for reviewers where the author doesn't seem to be quite sure what's going on.
by estearum | 2026-01-26 20:28:12+00:00
Surely there are enough supporters to populate the message boards on which supporters congregate with messages of support. No doubt about that.

If you think that gives you a read on the overall attitude, then unfortunately there's nothing I can say to help you.

It is literally mathematically nonsensical to look at the numerator, put no effort into knowing the denominator, and then claim to have a sense for the ratio between them. It's shocking to see someone explicitly claim they can do this lmao.
by saubeidl | 2026-01-26 20:28:13+00:00
If anyone else wants the closest thing to a MBP running Linux without waiting for Asahi to fully work, I can highly recommend the HP ZBook G1A.

* It has an all-aluminium chassis that feels a lot like a MBP.

* Hardware all works - fingerprint reader, webcam, suspend etc etc. Takes a bit of work, but all works in the end. Helps that HP ships them with Ubuntu as official option.

* Strix Halo chipset, which is basically AMD's attempt at an Apple Silicon type design. Single big chip, with unified LPDDR5X-8000 RAM (up to 128GB!) shared between CPU and GPU (which is surprisingly strong as well, 40 CU!). This thing is a beast for local LLMs!

Only downside really is the battery life. I haven't played around with it too much, I think there's a bit more room with custom tuned profiles, but rn I get like maybe 6 hours on a good day?
by lo_zamoyski | 2026-01-26 20:28:15+00:00
The correct thing to do is to annotate the code and the PR with comments. You shouldn't be submitting code you don't understand in the first place. These comments will contain the reasoning in the prompts. Giving me a list of prompts would just be annoying and messy, not informative.

Also, we should not be submitting huge PRs in general. It is difficult to be thorough in such cases. Changes will be less well understood and more bugs will sneak their way into the code base.
by ModernMech | 2026-01-26 20:28:18+00:00
> It shouldn't be even a little surprising that your impression of the result is that the code is much better looking than the impression of a more experienced developer.

This really is it: AI produces bad to mediocre code. To someone who produces terrible code mediocre is an upgrade, but to someone who produces good to excellent code, mediocre is a downgrade.
by bawolff | 2026-01-26 20:28:27+00:00
Well to take it literally the quote is "policies I don’t agree with".

It raises the question, is it really because he cares about the people of Iran, or is it because he has preconcieved notions of what policies he likes and dislikes and is trying to post hoc justify his views.

It seems a really hard position to justify on the facts. The death toll from these protests has already surpassed most armed conflicts. And the human rights abuses are hardly limited to just the deaths. I think at some point if you just stand around and do nothing while gross violations occur, you become complicit.
by JCattheATM | 2026-01-26 20:28:40+00:00
> A vote for T is not a vote for every dimension of T.

Does. Not. Matter.

When you vote for T you know you are getting all of T.

> In fact, all the data shows that the economy was the absolute top issue by a huge margin.

Sure, and the poorly educated overwhelmingly chose to believe the lies they were told because they were attractive, and were taken advantage of. It doesn't matter. Lets say they were single issue voters on the economy, well, they still voted for T knowing all of what that entails.
by margalabargala | 2026-01-26 20:28:53+00:00
What? No. We definitely didn't follow one another. I'm confused where we misunderstood one another now.

For the purposes of tire wear, applying regen braking in a car is the same as applying brake pads. Generating 5kW of electricity of 10 seconds vs generating 5kW of heat for 10 seconds, same same.

Let's say you're on the highway driving in an EV. You have cruise control on. You go down a hill. The EV's cruise control applies regen braking down the hill, using the tires to slow you to your desired speed.

Let's say you do the same in an ICE vehicle. You will coast down the hill, gathering speed. Cruise control in an ICE vehicle generally will not brake for you. So more of your energy from the hill gets removed as air resistance. When you slow due to air resistance it does not wear the tires.

The same logic applies each time you push the gas pedal slightly harder than you needed to and then back off.
by emeraldd | 2026-01-26 20:29:31+00:00
There are a number of cases where this is not really possible. For some classes of updates, the structure of the underlying application and the type of update being made requires that you do an "all or nothing" type of update in order to get a buildable result. I've run into this a lot with Large Java applications where we have to jump several Spring versions just due to the scope of what's being updated. More incremental updates weren't an option for a number of time/architectural reasons and refactoring the application structure (which really wouldn't have helped too much either) would have been time and cost prohibitive... Really annoying but sometimes you just don't have another option to actually accomplish your goals.
by storystarling | 2026-01-26 20:29:41+00:00
I learned this the hard way on a book platform I'm working on. While semantic search is useful for discovery, we found that prioritizing exact matches is critical. It seems users get pretty frustrated if they type a specific title and get a list of conceptually similar results instead of the actual book. We ended up having to tune the ranking to heavily favor literal string matches over the vector distance to keep people from bouncing.
by throw0101a | 2026-01-26 20:30:04+00:00
> It sounds like a great idea, then a government shut down happens.

Single payer / universal healthcare ≠ doctors/nurses are government employees (necessarily).

You go to your local health care provider, show your card, and received treatment. The single payer (government) then gets billed and money is transferred to the providers account.

If the government is shutdown, there could be a delay in payment in outstanding bills, but that does not mean health care providers shutdown. Medicare ran during the last shutdown:

* https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/government-shutdo...

* Telehealth was: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/medicare-patients-go-wit...

Social Security cheques went out too:

* https://www.cbsnews.com/news/social-security-government-shut...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_United_States_federal_gov...

Lots of stuff can potentially be automated, and so continue to run.