MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jfengel | 2026-01-09 20:38:30+00:00
The United States eventually should come into possession of Greenland

Is this a joke?

There is no reason for Greenland to be part of the US. They don't want to be. They aren't culturally American. They're not geographically close.

It's geographically close to Canada. If Canada wanted it, it would be worth discussing.

The only way that would make sense to the US would be exactly what the article doesn't say: buying it. If we want its mineral wealth or strategic position, we should pay for that. Let capitalism do its work: pay the Greenlanders each a million dollars, and have them vote to join the US. As citizens, and a state of their own -- it's much smaller than any state, but they're not going to submit to taxation without representation.
by chrneu | 2026-01-09 20:38:40+00:00
This is very much by design. Republicans, back in the 50s and 60s, basically destroyed US immigration because of mexican farm labor. Lookup the Braseros Program and the series of mass human migrations that used to happen. This goes back to before WW1. The history is pretty fascinating.

They knew that they could make this a campaign issue so they did it. Then democrats realized they could also campaign on this issue without actually doing anything.

Then once a decade or so someone makes a few changes and the system gets fucked up again.

I'm in my late 30s and immigration has always been broken. People have always admitted it's broken. Then nobody does anything to fix it besides posturing/grandstanding for an election cycle.
by rectang | 2026-01-09 20:38:46+00:00
Seeing the code that the LLM generates and occasionally asking it to explain has been an effective way to improve my understanding. It's better in some ways than reading documentation or doing tutorials because I'm working on a practical project I'm highly motivated by.

I agree that there is benefit in doing research and reasoning, but in my experience skill acquisition through supervising an LLM has been more efficient because my learning is more focused. The LLM is a weird meld of domain expert/sycophant/scatterbrain but the explanations it gives about the code that it generates are quite educational.
by altruios | 2026-01-09 20:39:08+00:00
> Depression can be caused by a chemical imbalance and no amount of exercise or talking about it will fix it.

This is a debatable. As far as I understand things: 'chemical imbalance' has no tests to confirm that's actually true, That's just a story they tell to relax people.

Which is orthogonal to the point that antidepressants can work for some people.

We don't know how depression works. It very well may be many little things dressed in a trench coat.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266656032...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01661-0

https://www.neurocaregroup.com/news-insights/the-death-of-ch...
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2026-01-09 20:39:30+00:00
> <good> code is easier to understand to debug, extend, and maintain [by people]

> But what if the next “person” isn’t a person?

There's certainly a hypothetical future where AI writes and maintains enterprise software and airline baggage control systems consisting of millions of lines of spaghetti code, codes that violates all the principles of good software design that we currently value, and everything turns out peachy.

Nobody but the AI understands the code, but it mostly works, and the AI fixes it when it doesn't. We lose the capability to understand and test the code ourselves, but the AI says "trust me bro - it's all been tested" (even though bugs keep turning up).

But, I doubt it.

First off, nevermind all the "parroting" nonsense, but LLMs are nonetheless auto-regressively trained and therefore fundamentally a copying technology, so as long at the LLM creators make an effort to train on high quality code, then what's generated should at least match those high quality patterns to some degree.

Secondly, human's hard-won best-practices for designing code are there for a reason, and it's not just because of the limits of our feeble minds to work with anything-goes spaghetti code. The reason why we prefer code that is modular, with thin/clean interfaces between modules, shortish functions, etc, are because these practices fundamentally do make for code that is easier to reason about, to test and debug, to update and extend without breakage, etc.

Per the Halting Problem, we know that ultimately the only way to know what code does is to run it, and therefore even if LLMs/AI were to exceed humans in general reasoning ability they would never gain some magical abililty to write arbitrarily complex/unstructured code and be able to successfully reason about what it is doing and it's correctness, etc. Following human best practices not only helps create code that is testable (possible to analyze and create test cases for all paths through a piece of code), but also code that can more easily be reasoned about, whether by man or machine.

In terms of where we are right now regarding AI's ability to write good quality code, it's perhaps informative to look at Claude Code, which is of late writing most of it's own code under the guidance of it's creator, and despite being something on the very simple end of the spectrum in terms of software complexity*, currently has about 5,000 issues filed against it on github.

* A minimal CLI agent is a few hundred lines of code vs for example the 15 million LOC of gcc.
by 01092026 | 2026-01-09 20:40:15+00:00
"The 'bit-level magic' here is misleading. They're using integer representations and calling them bits. A true bit-level approach would encode positions as pure binary streams. For example, their promotion string '00000034' is 8 bytes (64 bits), not the claimed 9 bits. Has anyone implemented this with actual bitwise operations instead of integer packing?

TLDR: You stupi...lovely folks, need learn what a bit is. What is a byte, and why integers are NOT BITS.

And no one called this post out from years ago? Crazy.

Someone ask, and I will show you how to do it in 24 BYTES IN BINARY ENCODING FOR REAL - no fake "integers are bits". And can we use compression techniques? We can get this to 10-12 bytes maybe.

So it beats the "26 bytes" and my version is actually real binary bits.

Ask.
by mckn1ght | 2026-01-09 20:40:18+00:00
There is now footage from the shooter’s cellphone you can watch, in which you can see the driver hand-over-hand turning away from the shooter while the car is still reversing, before it even starts moving forward. The tires were pointed towards the shooter while it was reversing, which is a movement that moves the front end of the car away from them.

There’s no universe in which she was trying to run him over or would have even come close to touching him if he had taken a step to the right instead of leaning in for a better shot.
by oblio | 2026-01-09 20:40:24+00:00
> We all want these tools and companies to succeed. Anthropic needs to find profit in a few years. It’s in all of our best interests to augment that success, not bitch because they’re not doing it your way.

Considering they're destroying a lot of fields of industry, I'm not sure I want them to succeed. Are we sure they're making the world a better place?

Or are they just concentrating wealth, like Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Uber, Doordash, Airbnb and all the other holy-tech grails in the last 20 years?

Our lives are more convenient than they were 20 years ago and probably poorer and more stressful.
by viccis | 2026-01-09 20:40:25+00:00
I think this is much better as a relative pitch training tool for people with a very basic background in piano and music in general. I would have loved something like this back in high school to use for practicing over and over.

I think "teach" is a high bar, but I do think it's a good practice tool.

My one and only complaint is that sometimes the melodies it generates are tough to play back because they don't really sound like a real melody and I have to fight my brain telling me to play back the one that would actually sound good. Sort of like having to memorize a random string of words vs memorizing a normal sentence.
by billforsternz | 2026-01-09 20:40:31+00:00
I know of two distinct methods of encoding any legal chess position into 24 bytes worst case. In both cases, you get the full position, plus who to move, plus full information on future castling and en-passant possibilities. This is the FEN state of the board, minus the two counts. It's more than the information you get from a published chess diagram in a book or magazine. Although in a book or magazine inevitably "who to move" is represented somehow, castling and en-passant possibilities are not usually.

Method 1: Lichess method; 64 bit header, 1 bit per square indicating occupied squares, then (up to) 32 4 bit codes for the 32 occupied squares. So 24 bytes worst case!

Method 2: My own method a list of 2 bit codes, one of the 4 codes indicates empty square, the other three codes are prefixes for a second 2 bit code. Three prefixes applied to one of 4 code values gives a total of 12 possibilities corresponding to any possible chess piece. Worst case 32x2 bits plus 32x4 bits = 24 bytes.

In each case there is sufficient entropy to create tricks to add the supplementary information (who to move etc.), similar tricks are in the original article.

I mention my own method from my Tarrasch Chess GUI https://github.com/billforsternz/tarrasch-chess-gui only for completeness. If I had known about method 1 I would have used that, it is simpler and better and there is much more entropy available making the tricks easier.

I would urge commentators to keep clear the difference between compressing a chess position (this challenge), a chess move and a chess game. A chess move needs far less bits of course. A complete chess game is always encoded as a list of moves, not positions, for this reason.
by cowboylowrez | 2026-01-09 20:40:57+00:00
>False, especially when the vehicle has little momentum like in this case.

no it was very true, when the driver was shot the vehicle sped up and crashed. this means that the gunshot did not stop the vehicle, but the gunshot did eliminate the driver from the "driver + accelerating car" combination.

Its not hard to find defenders of the shooter as usual, but at least to me this is one of the most callous actions I have ever seen, the guy seemed so casual about it, like the woman was dead already and he was just making sure or something, but I understand to some his actions will be considered "based" and "trad-pilled".
by pas | 2026-01-09 20:41:04+00:00
> You can have sandboxing and system integrity while still giving the user overrides.

How? What kind of overrides? You mean that Safetynet could still report attestations?

I have no idea how it works, but doesn't it require a chain of trust, starting from a known boot image, then every process that can write to arbitrary memory needs to be a known image? (And even that might not be enough if there are ways to dynamically exploit them.)
by lxgr | 2026-01-09 20:41:17+00:00
> everyone will need at least a cheap-ish android or iphone, perhaps $300

No, the much more secure while at the same time liberty-preserving way to do this are heavily sandboxed secure enclaves with attestation, or even better standalone tamper-proof devices capable of attestation.

Like the ones practically every bank customer already has in their wallet, and for which most phones have a built-in reader these days... The only thing missing is a secure input and output channel, like a small built-in display and a button or biometric input.

In any case, I somewhat empathize with banks in that they want to ensure that my transaction confirmation device is not compromised, but getting to dictate what software does and doesn't run on my own hardware outside of maybe a narrow sandbox needed to do that is a no-go.
by bluecalm | 2026-01-09 20:41:35+00:00
What else could they do? The government represent the country. If their business model is not welcome there then they withdraw. It's very fair to say "if you insist on those rules I choose not to play". They owe Italy nothing.

Btw, I recently "threatened" Switzerland to withdraw my business from there because the cost of doing business there (complying with their VAT regulation) is higher than my revenue from there (maybe 1-2 licenses a year). The whole Switzerland will not be able to buy my software because of that. I didn't think of posting about it on Twitter though.
by abdullahkhalids | 2026-01-09 20:41:39+00:00
It's not nerdism. It's the dominant ideology of our times - neoliberalism - which demands that everything be valued only in terms of dollars. A trip that takes 50 days is not dollar efficient because you could fly in one day and spend the remaining 49 days earning dollars, i.e. the value of time is only about dollars, and cannot be other measures, especially subjective ones like human enjoyment and wonder.
by craftkiller | 2026-01-09 20:41:59+00:00
And adding to this: using the card gives me peace of mind because it never runs out of battery. If I only used my phone for payments and it died while I was out, I would be screwed. Can't call a friend, can't pay for transit, I guess I'm walking for hours to get home? Since I use the card to pay, if my phone dies, the worst thing that happens to me is I might need to look at a physical map to figure out which train to take home.
by tekacs | 2026-01-09 20:42:02+00:00
They're threatening to remove servers from Italy. They're explicitly NOT threatening to block Italians from being able to access sites through Cloudflare.

I have my fair share of problems with CF, but I assume here that they're threatening higher latency (i.e. requests from Italian users would have to go to a neighboring country to be routed) rather than blocking.
by metaphysicalyes | 2026-01-09 20:42:46+00:00
Very convenient because right around the moments of shooting the video goes blank and the viewer can confirm the below preconceived notions:

1. The masked gunman was in grave danger when in fact he had stepped aside.

2. The car accelerated rapidly before the shots instead of after the driver was in immeasurable agony.

3. All three shots by masked gunman were in self defense. Not that the next two shots were for the driver's face from side window while standing well clear of the vehicle.
by Simulacra | 2026-01-09 20:43:16+00:00
I found this to be contradictory with my mental health period even after losing nearly 100 pounds, and going from zero to walking 8 to 10 miles a day, my mental health did not improve. It felt good to accomplish goals, two life-changing goals, really, but my overall disposition and deep depression did not change. I have no explanation for this.
by iamnothere | 2026-01-09 20:43:23+00:00
What other option do they have? It’s either comply with unjust rulings that undermine the free internet (and their business) or make a deal with the devil. Either one is bad but only complying has an immediate negative impact.

If there was any sense that this ruling was just a temporary mistake that will be corrected by pending regulation/legislation, then a third option would be on the table: temporarily comply and wait it out. But all indications are that the EU is hell-bent on making things worse, not better, for the open internet.
by altairprime | 2026-01-09 20:43:34+00:00
Root access is irrelevant; modification detection is relevant. If your OS was sealed-attested, root wouldn’t matter (Macs have this in shipping production by default and it works fine for everyday users). For modding, go for it; your modded OS will be signed by your own crypto key (or none at all). Unfortunately, the media and the businesses and quite a lot of expert users confuse root-access-enabled as a convenient modification-detection method (presumably Google’s core is more competent than that, has anyone studied it?). Sigh.
by lynx97 | 2026-01-09 20:43:56+00:00
My small-program success story with genAI coding is pretty much the opposite of your claim. I used to use a bash script with a few sox instances piped into each other to beat-match and mix a few tracks. Couldn't use a GUI... Then came gpt-5, and I wanted to test it anyway. So I had it write a single-file C++ program that does the track database, offline mixing, limiter and a small REPL-based "UI" to control the thing. I basically had results before my partner was finished preparing breakfast. Then I had a lot of fun bikeshedding the resulting code until it felt like something I'd like to read. Some back and forth, pretending to have an intern and just reviewing/fixing their code. During the whole experience, it basically never generated code which wouldn't compile. Had a single segfault which was due to unclear interface to a C library. Got that fixed quickly.

And now, I have a tool to do a (shuffled if I want) beat-matched mix of all the tracks in my db which match a certain tag expression. "(dnb | jungle) & vocals", wait a few minutes, and play a 2 hour beat-matched mix, finally replacing mpd's "crossfade" feature. I have a lot of joy using that tool, and it was definitely fun having it made. clmix[1] is now something I almost use daily to generate club-style mixes to listen to at home.

[1] https://github.com/mlang/clmix
by Brian_K_White | 2026-01-09 20:44:22+00:00
It is an evil because there are infinite ways to solve any problem, not just this one. Describing some problem in no way validates any particular response as being even worth the trade-off let alone flat out necessary and unavoidable.

"Rapes happen behind closed doors, therefore we have to remove all doors. No one denies that rape happens and that it's a bad thing. And it's irrerfutable that without doors that close, no one would be able to get away with a rape. And so, the only grown-up thing to do is agree to give up doors that close. It's not an evil at all."
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-09 20:44:50+00:00
A cell phone video from the ICE agent who shot Renee Good has been released. It’s not clear if anyone has been able to definitively verify that this is legitimately the footage. Already, news articles and social media posts have come out that interpret this video as supporting the administration’s narrative of this being a justified act of self-defense, and also the opposite position that it shows an unjustified murder. What do HN readers think?
by vunderba | 2026-01-09 20:45:01+00:00
Hey I like yours as well! They're both different though. Your app is more focused on the ability to reproduce specific pieces.

Mine's based on the old electronic toy Simon - infinite and progressively more difficult.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_(game)

You should definitely add midi controller support though - WebMidiJS makes it pretty simple.

https://webmidijs.org
by linkregister | 2026-01-09 20:45:06+00:00
Rather than spending iterations crafting precise permissions, why not just run with

--dangerously-skip-permissions

If run in a devcontainer[1][2], the worst thing that can happen is it deletes everything in the filesystem below the mounted repo. Recovery would entail checking out the repo again.

1. (conventional usage) https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/devcontainers/containers

2. (actual spec) https://containers.dev/
by empath75 | 2026-01-09 20:45:07+00:00
Have you stopped to consider how you got to the point that you are defending this. Like, I get sort of working this over in your mind to yourself, but you have gone out of your way to excuse a cop gunning down a mom that just dropped off her kid at school. She had stuffed animals sitting in her dashboard. Her kid is an orphan. You didn't have to do this. You could have just stayed silent. Now you're the guy that is going to defend secret police murdering people in broad daylight.
by falloutx | 2026-01-09 20:45:15+00:00
AI can also make you invest useful time in things that are not useful or not needed. It also deincentivizes collaboration. If everyone builds thier own version of say Beebook with 5 features, thats worthless compared to BeeBook opensource or even corporate Beebook with thousands of features and complex workflows. And everyone who worked on thier own version of BeeBook wasted thier time.

With AI you have to be careful to know what is important, you dont want to waste your time doing random stuff that may not even get a single user. If its for fun, thats fine but if you want to build a business or improve your output, I would advise people to choose well.
by jorvi | 2026-01-09 20:45:53+00:00
That is rather funny because I think Google's and Samsung's AI image actions are completely garbage, butchering things to the point where I'd rather do it manually on my desktop or use prompt editing (which to Google's credit Gemini is fantastic at). Whereas Apple's is flawless in discerning everything within a scene or allowing me to extract single items from within a picture. For example say, a backpack in the background.
by nkmnz | 2026-01-09 20:46:03+00:00
GDP EU ÷ GDP US in 2011: ~1

GDP EU ÷ GDP US in 2024: ~0.66

I will give you exact sources for the claim later once I'm back at my laptop, but rest assured: these numbers don't lie. And militarily... really? We're a joke. We cannot even defend our neighbor from being invaded without extensive US help.
by Foxboron | 2026-01-09 20:46:37+00:00
> What else could they do? The government represent the country. If their business model is not welcome there then they withdraw. It's very fair to say "if you insist on those rules I choose not to play".

They can just not threaten the population of Italy? They are a 2 billion dollar company that has apparently scheduled a meeting with the vice president of the US on short notice? This is going to be resolved politically.

> Btw, I recently "threatened" Switzerland to withdraw my business from there because the cost of doing business there (complying with their VAT regulation) is higher than my revenue from there (maybe 1-2 licenses a year). The whole Switzerland will not be able to buy my software because of that. I didn't think of posting about it on Twitter though.

You have not given "free services" to 20% of the world wide web that you are now using as leverage.
by Zak | 2026-01-09 20:47:09+00:00
You can have integrity checks that allow the user to choose which signing keys to trust. Some PCs with secure boot, and some phones such as Pixel devices support this. GrapheneOS uses it.

In those systems, it won't boot without a good signature, so the user is protected against attacks that break the user's chosen chain of trust.

Remote attestation of consumer devices, e.g. Safetynet is evil.
by sodapopcan | 2026-01-09 20:47:28+00:00
Agreed but it's not even that. I worked with someone who was insanely fast with RubyMine. All the shortcuts were second-nature and shit just flew onto the screen. So generally, the argument would be to be really good with whatever editor you have. It also goes outside of that, like snippets are still very viable for lots of boilerplate.

At the same time, one of the best developers I worked with was a two-finger typist who had to look at the keyboard. But again, I don't care if you're going to use AI (well, that's not entirely true but not going to get into it) but the tone of this article that "You should learn it, " I take issue with.