MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by card_zero | 2026-01-28 07:25:13+00:00
Right, yeah. "Misleading", like you say. That health food guy's a shyster (like the snake oil salesmen of yore), and algorithms can sometimes send a feed into a shyster-like mode. So now we come down to terminology: addiction is the wrong word, deception is the right one. This isn't purely semantic, it's a different kind of hold over people. More cognitive.

Sidetrack: I had the idea recently that unscrupulous advertising might be a tragedy of the commons for the clients en masse, and harmful for the economy in general. Based on the intuition that lying can't be doing any good.
by tarantino-sax | 2026-01-28 07:26:10+00:00
not trying to be negative, friend. I think clearly the author of this put a ton of effort into this project to make it functional, and I am acknowledging that. But, there are no disclosures about this anywhere from the author when so much of the work has been done by AI. I find this especially concerning when you realize the author is soliciting money for this project on X and other places.
by mves | 2026-01-28 07:26:43+00:00
As they demo in the video, it even encourages people to actually skip doing the research (which includes reading both relevant AND not-so-relevant papers in order to explore!) Instead, prompt "cite some relevant papers, please", and done. Hours of actual reading, thinking, and exploration reduced to a minimum.

A couple of generations of students later, and these will be rare skills: information finding, actual thinking, and conveying complex information in writing.
by adev_ | 2026-01-28 07:27:09+00:00
> As a westerner you should always be OK, but this is a country with no rule of law.

Let's be clear: I am not discussing nor defend China internal policies here. I honestly do not care and I am not pro China.

I am pointing a single fact: As a EU researcher: it is easier now to go to China than to go the US for conferences and collaboration. And we do feel more welcome there.

That single fact alone should terrify any US politician with a brain. But it apparently does not.
by deknos | 2026-01-28 07:27:16+00:00
WHAT is the usage and benefit for private users? This is always neglected.

avoiding backdoors as a private person you always can only solve with having the hardware at your place, because hardware ALWAYS can have backdoors, because hardware vendors do not fix their shit.

From my point of view it ONLY gives control and possibilities to large organizations like governments and companies. which in turn use it to control citizens
by nextaccountic | 2026-01-28 07:28:48+00:00
> Text scaling doesn't need to replicate zoom. If you use font-relative units like em and rem everywhere that you set a length, everything will scale up the same way as browser zoom.
> Instead, only use font-relative units on things like text, images and icons. You don't need to use it on properties like margin, padding or gap.
> If you do that, there's more room for the content, which is especially important on portrait mobile devices.

So, for margin and padding, one should use px? Or is there a better unit?
by reassess_blind | 2026-01-28 07:29:01+00:00
The "30 days or it dies" constraint came from noticing that my abandoned blogs stressed me out more than not having a blog at all. They just sat there, judging me.

Lapse is an attempt to make abandonment the default. If you stop, it disappears cleanly. No guilt, no digital graveyard.

Curious if this resonates with anyone or if I've just built a very niche anxiety management tool.
by cferry | 2026-01-28 07:29:44+00:00
Whoever uses this seeks to ensure a certain kind of behavior on a machine they typically don't own (in the legal sense of it). So of course you can make it optional. But then software that depends on it, like your banking Electron app or your Steam game, will refuse to run... so as the user, you don't really have a choice.

I would love to use that technology to do reverse attestation, and require the server that handles my personal data to behave a certain way, like obeying the privacy policy terms of the EULA and not using my data to train LLMs if I so opted out. Something tells me that's not going to happen...
by diljitpr | 2026-01-28 07:29:53+00:00
I am the author of th is article.Thank you for reading and important the insight and I second your opinion about DLQ flooding. We have the following strategy configured in our consumers to avoid DLQ flooding

ExponentialBackOffWithMaxRetries backOff = new ExponentialBackOffWithMaxRetries(3);

backOff.setInitialInterval(2000L); // 2 seconds initial delay

backOff.setMultiplier(2.0); // Exponential backoff

backOff.setMaxInterval(30000L); // Max delay 30 seconds

backOff.setMaxAttempts(3); // Retry 3 times before DLQ

Updated this in my blog.
by no_time | 2026-01-28 07:30:26+00:00
Terrible idea, I hope go bankrupt.

I can see like a 100 ways this can make computing worse for 99% people and like 1-2 scenarios where it might actually be useful.

Like if the politicians pushing for chat control/on device scanning of data come knocking again and actually go through (they can try infinitely) tech like this will really be "useful". Oops your device cannot produce a valid attestation, no internet for you.
by stevoski | 2026-01-28 07:30:44+00:00
> What surprised me was how much the ugly first version taught me that planning never could.

Fred Brooks, author of “The Mythical Man Month” wrote an essay called “Plan to Throw One Away” in 1975.

He argues much what you’ve described.

Of course, in reality we seldom do actually throw away the first version. We’ve got the tools and skills and processes now to iterate, iterate, iterate.
by locknitpicker | 2026-01-28 07:30:52+00:00
> It's not just brain atrophy, I think. I think part of it is that we're actively making a tradeoff to focus on learning how to use the model rather than learning how to use our own brains and work with each other.

I agree with the sentiment but I would have framed it differently. The LLM is a tool, just like code completion or a code generator. Right now we focus mainly on how to use a tool, the coding agent, to achieve a goal. This takes place at a strategic level. Prior to the inception of LLMs, we focused mainly on how to write code to achieve a goal. This took place at a tactical level, and required making decisions and paying attention to a multitude of details. With LLMs our focus shifts to a higher-level abstraction. Also, operational concerns change. When writing and maintaining code yourself, you focus on architectures that help you simplify some classes of changes. When using LLMs, your focus shifts to building context and aiding the model effectively implement their changes. The two goals seem related, but are radically different.

I think a fairer description is that with LLMs we stop exercising some skills that are only required or relevant if you are writing your code yourself. It's like driving with an automatic transmission vs manual transmission.
by handoflixue | 2026-01-28 07:31:25+00:00
Trust but verify:

I test all of the code I produce via LLMs, usually doing fairly tight cycles. I also review the unit test coverage manually, so that I have a decent sense that it really is testing things - the goal is less perfect unit tests and more just quickly catching regressions. If I have a lot of complex workflows that need testing, I'll have it write unit tests and spell out the specific edge cases I'm worried about, or setup cheat codes I can invoke to test those workflows out in the UI/CLI.

Trust comes from using them often - you get a feeling for what a model is good and bad at, and what LLMs in general are good and bad at. Most of them are a bit of a mess when it comes to UI design, for instance, but they can throw together a perfectly serviceable "About This" HTML page. Any long-form text they write (such as that About page) is probably trash, but that's super-easy to edit manually. You can often just edit down what they write: they're actually decent writers, just very verbose and unfocused.

I find it similar to management: you have to learn how each employee works. Unless you're in the Top 1%, you can't rely on every employee giving 110% and always producing perfect PRs. Bugs happen, and even NASA-strictness doesn't bring that down to zero.

And just like management, some models are going to be the wrong employee for you because they think your style guide is stupid and keep writing code how they think it should be written.
by delaminator | 2026-01-28 07:31:46+00:00
What do you mean?

Even Claude for Web can do the full compile edit cycle.

It runs Debian and apt installs stuff on demand and can run anything its Debian has.

I built a Chrome extension so Claude can get the full rendered DOM via a socket for web stuff.

Why do you think it can’t?

Are you perhaps using Claude Chatbot?

Claude Code will run anything you instruct it to.

I have to tell it to stop more than to start!
by gravifer | 2026-01-28 07:32:02+00:00
I asked the model about its capabilities, and it turns out it indeed can do Web searches; if it's not hallucinating, the backend server indeed decrypts the output of the LLM; only the user prompt is E2EEed against the server

Edit: I'm a little weary to find there is convenient import but not export functionalities. I manually copied the conversation into a markdown file
<https://gist.github.com/Gravifer/1051580562150ce7751146be0c9...>
by nasretdinov | 2026-01-28 07:32:14+00:00
One place where it mattered was when I was working on a large PHP web site, where backend devs and frontend devs would be working in the same branch — this way you don't have to go back and forth to get the new API, and this workflow was quite unique and, in my mind, quite efficient. The branchs also could live for some time (e.g. in case of large refactorings), and it's a good idea to merge in the master branch frequently, so recursive merge was really nice. Nowadays, of course, you design the API for your frontend, mobile, etc, upfront, so there's little reason to do that anymore.
by qingcharles | 2026-01-28 07:32:48+00:00
These things are fantastic. A lot of great work comes from dealing with difficult constraints, like a single line display.

I had the very similar Casio FX-730P and spent most of my lessons at secondary school not concentrating on the topics but coding new games and apps all day:

https://www.vintage-calculators.nl/page89.html
by adrianwaj | 2026-01-28 07:34:03+00:00
"The golden rule of clean architecture is to strive for high cohesion and low coupling."

Perhaps communities will sprout up following that rule?

Regarding money, one needs to ask themselves what will be the impact of tokenized assets?

Perhaps being able to take ownership of kibbutz-like places will give them a sense of belonging and purpose. Doesn't matter how much technology there is, people need to live somewhere and will adapt by finding a place they can optimize for happiness. It'll be like starting a game of Civilization from scratch but with all the advanced technologies intact.

People may also go back to the early-human modes of survival of the first-nations groups. Digital and electric technologies aren't healthy things to be around. Do you want to live in the range of a 10G antenna or near a massive solar array? The naturalists may end up happier and healthier than the tech-heads. It's about taking/using what works for you and leaving the rest.

Worth noting that if someone really had an answer to your questions, would they state the truth here?

How do you know the robots won't come and just kill us all when they can because we have no power/influence/value? Where will people migrate to in order to avoid that? Antarctica? The moon? Underground to avoid weaponized satellites?

Conscience and consciousness really needs to grow with technology, really that's the challenge of today. Always has been.

How will people support the sick, old, disabled and retarded? Start there and work backwards, or how does one avoid those things altogether somehow and go beyond Homo Sapiens?
by Loeffelmann | 2026-01-28 07:35:02+00:00
If you ever work with LLMs you know that they quite frequently give up.

Sometimes it's a

// TODO: implement logic

or a

"this feature would require extensive logic and changes to the existing codebase".

Sometimes they just declare their work done. Ignoring failing tests and builds.

You can nudge them to keep going but I often feel like, when they behave like this, they are at their limit of what they can achieve.
by vintermann | 2026-01-28 07:35:33+00:00
Is armed with knives enough?

Presumably it isn't, and you'd need a certain minimum level of technological parity with your tyrants.

Presumably that also isn't fixed. So even if rifles might have been sufficient in the early US even though the government had cannons, rifles may not be sufficient when the government has chemical weapons and armored cars.

So where's the industrial base which makes the weapons? Or the money to buy the weapons? For Iraq, Afghanistan, and for that matter in lots of conflicts the US weren't involved in (or were involved in on the anti-government side!) the answer seems straightforward enough: in foreign countries which also don't like your government. Without a bunch of neighbors and rival powers which really didn't want the US in Iraq/Afghanistan, could the insurgents have done much?

Who do you propose should arm the resistance in the US, if government supported "police" paramilitaries run amok? (Let's for the sake of argument not get into whether that has happened yet). It's going to have to be quite an impressive level of support, too, to stand up against systems developed precisely against that sort of eventuality and battle-tested in the US' sphere of influence.
by JasonADrury | 2026-01-28 07:35:41+00:00
I think wiktionary will suffer from the fact that the "incorrect" usage of agent is indeed the more common one. 007 is an agent, even though in real life the MI6 would certainly call him an officer.

"Agent" is a term of art with a rather strict meaning, but that's obviously only true when used in conversations within that specific field.
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2026-01-28 07:36:23+00:00
I don't see inconsistency between the two NRA statements. Your interpretation seems quite imaginative.

Gun rights people understand that owning a gun comes with certain responsibilities. The accusation of "hypocrisy" seems to be based on a cartoon understanding of gun rights from people on the left. Find me a gun rights person who previously claimed that resisting arrest while armed is all fun and games.

https://policelawnews.substack.com/p/cbp-involved-alex-prett...
by gf000 | 2026-01-28 07:36:26+00:00
> you put your display code, input-handling code, compositor code, session-handling code, and window-management code all in the same process

That's an implementation detail. You can absolutely separate one out from the other and do IPC - it just doesn't make much sense to do so for most of these.

The only one where I see it making sense is the window manager, which can simply be an extension/plugin either in a scripting language or in wasm or whatever.
by mullingitover | 2026-01-28 07:38:28+00:00
The NATO forces defeated the Taliban in a timeframe that could be measured in hours. The remaining years were an exercise in nation building, there was never “defeat.” The military simply isn’t the right tool to lift a nation out of poverty and eventually the voters got bored.

In Vietnam, the US was fighting an army backed by the Soviet Union and China that had anti-aircraft and artillery.

No, the US insurgency would turn into a Grozny unless the insurgents get backing from China or some other serious player.
by raducu | 2026-01-28 07:39:48+00:00
> let myself atrophy, run on a treadmill forever, for something

You're lucky to afford the luxury not to atrophy.

It's been almost 4 years since my last software job interview and I know the drills about preparing for one.

Long before LLMs my skills naturally atrophy in my day job.

I remember the good old days of J2ME of writing everything from scratch. Or writing some graph editor for universiry, or some speculative, huffman coding algorithm.

That kept me sharp.

But today I feel like I'm living in that netflix series about people being in Hell and the Devil tricking them they're in Heaven and tormenting them: how on planet Earth do I keep sharp with java, streams, virtual threads, rxjava, tuning the jvm, react, kafka, kafka streams, aws, k8s, helm, jenkins pipelines, CI-CD, ECR, istio issues, in-house service discovery, hierarchical multi-regions, metrics and monitoring, autoscaling, spot instances and multi-arch images, multi-az, reliable and scalable yet as cheap as possible, yet as cloud native as possible, hazelcast and distributed systems, low level postgresql performance tuning, apache iceberg, trino, various in-house frameworks and idioms over all of this?
Oh, and let's not forget the business domain, coding standards, code reviews, mentorships and organazing technical events.
Also, it's 2026 so nobody hires QA or scrum masters anymore so take on those hats as well.

So LLMs it is, the new reality.
by qingcharles | 2026-01-28 07:40:06+00:00
I wish Android apps were better citizens when it comes to accessibility. My friend has very poor eyesight and I set his phone up to make things bigger for him, but most of the apps are a horrible janky mess of overlapping everything.

(Also "light mode" apps are painful for him to view, and most of the major apps have skipped out on offering dark mode)
by doanbactam | 2026-01-28 07:40:47+00:00
It’s a stark contrast to today's mindset where we often just throw more resources at the problem. His obsession with elegance over features is something I try to keep in mind, even if it's harder in modern web dev. " Let's make it shorter and punchier. "Woz's floppy disk controller design is still the gold standard for doing in software what competitors needed a whole board of chips to do. That kind of obsession with elegance over brute force is exactly what's missing in modern engineering.
by rkagerer | 2026-01-28 07:41:20+00:00
With the ability to change one number and regenerate everything

That's exactly how I use Solidworks (and similar parametric CAD software) all the time. It takes some discipline, but the key is for all your geometry and relations to be driven from sketches and equations. Then you just change a value (sketch dimension or global constant), hit rebuild, and everything regenerates fairly reliably.

Don't get me wrong, this is a great project and I love seeing efforts like this, OpenSCAD, etc. add more options in the landscape of parametric CAD.

But I do find the graphical interface very natural for doing creative design work. In fact, sometimes I wish I could literally step into my design in VR and grab and move vertices around in 3 dimensions (eg. when fine tuning non-planar splines).
by A_Venom_Roll | 2026-01-28 07:42:01+00:00
While I do agree with the content, this tone of writing feels awfully similar to LLM generated posts that flood some productivity subreddits recently. Are there really people who "spend weeks planning the perfect architecture" to build some automation tools for themselves? I don't buy that.

Commenter's history is full of 'red flags':
- "The real cost of this complexity isn't the code itself - it's onboarding"
- "This resonates."
- "What actually worked"
- "This hits close to home"
- "Where it really shines is the tedious stuff - writing tests for edge cases, refactoring patterns across multiple files, generating boilerplate that follows existing conventions."
by moooo99 | 2026-01-28 07:42:30+00:00
My agent struggled for 45 minutes because it tried to do `go run` on a _test.go file, which the compiler repeatedly exited after posting an error message that files named like this cannot be executed using the run command.

So yeah, that wasted a lot of GPU cycles for a very unimpressive result, but with a renewed superficial feeling of competence
by tecoholic | 2026-01-28 07:43:05+00:00
I use a project generator tool for a Django project. One of the things it does is generate setting file using string manipulation. I have been trying to think of a more sane way to do this. leverage something like dataclass or Pydantic models to have the typing information available and render a typed and validated Python object. If Django ever made that possible, it would be amazing for dev ex.
by mattmanser | 2026-01-28 07:43:13+00:00
Are ghost bugs even real?

My first job had the Devs working front-line support years ago. Due to that, I learnt an important lessons in bug fixing.

Always be able to re-create the bug first.

There are no such thing as ghost bugs, you just need to ask the reporter the right questions.

Unless your code is multi-threaded, to which I say, good luck!
Show HN: Grok Images and 10s Video Generator
by thenextechtrade | 2026-01-28 07:43:23+00:00
Hi HN, I’ve been working on a dedicated interface for Grok 3’s generative capabilities: grokimages.net. While the official X integration is great, I felt it lacked the flexibility power users need—specifically for professional prompt adherence and video extension.

Key Technical Highlights:

Grok 3 + Flux.1 Pro Logic: Optimized for hyper-realistic skin textures and complex prompt adherence.

10s Video Evolution: We’ve bridged the gap from 4s loops to 10s cinematic motion with better temporal consistency.

I’m particularly curious about how you find the video consistency compared to Kling or Luma. Looking for feedback on the latency and the "Pro Engine" output quality.

ONLINE: https://grokimages.net/
by globular-toast | 2026-01-28 07:43:59+00:00
The mere existence of the phrase "RTFM" shows that this phenomenon was already a thing. LLMs are the worst thing to happen to people who couldn't read before. When HR type people ask what my "superpower" is I'm so tempted to say "I can read", because I honestly feel like it's the only difference between me and people who suck at working independently.
by anon1253 | 2026-01-28 07:44:26+00:00
Slightly off-topic but related: currently I'm in a research environment (biomedicine) where a lot of AI is used. Sometimes well, often poorly. So as an exercise I drafted some rules and commitments about AI and research ("Research After AI: Principles for Accelerated Exploration" [1]), I took the Agile manifesto as a starting point. Anyways, this might be interesting as a perspective on the problem space as I see it.

[1] https://gist.github.com/joelkuiper/d52cc0e5ff06d12c85e492e42...
by augment_me | 2026-01-28 07:46:02+00:00
This is the first question I ask, and every time I get the answer of some monolith that supposedly solves something. Imo, this is completely fine for any personal thing, I am happy when someone says they made an API to compare weekly shopping prices from the stores around them, or some recipe, this makes sense.

However more often than not, someone is just building a monolithic construction that will never be looked at again. For example, someone found that HuggingFace dataloader was slow for some type of file size in combination with some disk.
What does this warrant? A 300000+ line non-reviewed repo to fix this issue. Not a 200-line PR to HuggingFace, no you need to generate 20% of the existing repo and then slap your thing on there.

For me this is puzzling, because what is this for? Who is this for? Usually people built these things for practice, but now its generated, so its not for practice because you made very little effort on it. The only thing I can see that its some type of competence signaling, but here again, if the engineer/manager looking knows that this is generated, it does not have the type of value that would come with such signaling. Either I am naive and people still look at these repos and go "whoa this is amazing", or it's some kind of induced egotrip/delusion where the LLM has convinced you that you are the best builder.