MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by irishcoffee | 2026-01-06 23:54:48+00:00
I’ll take a stab.

If LLMs were actually able to think/reason and you acknowledge that they’ve been trained on as much data as everyone could get their hands on such that they’ve been “taught” an infinite amount more than any ten humans could learn in a lifetime, I would ask:

Why can’t they solve novel, unsolved problems?
by sodality2 | 2026-01-06 23:54:48+00:00
You would be better off pirating all of your music and buying just one piece of merch from an artist. These rogue foreign licensing agencies provide no real value, and in fact are functionally illegal and unrecognized outside of Ukraine. It's also highly unlikely much money flows back to the artists.

https://law.stackexchange.com/q/499, https://archive.is/EZ2U3
by ncruces | 2026-01-06 23:54:52+00:00
This makes no sense. Not even from a cynical and selfish view point.

I consider my job to be actually useful. That I produce useful stuff to society at large.

I definitely hope that I'm replaced with someone/thing better; whatever it is. That's progress.

I surely don't hope for a futre where I retire and medics have access to worse tech than they have now.
by ynac | 2026-01-06 23:54:52+00:00
I posted the NPR page today on the same topic:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46515239

It's a fun exercise in comparing the aesthetic choices, technical tools for the pages, and the content choices (media and presentation). There is also the obvious difference in intent and use of similar sources. One is a journalistic project and one is a government communication.
by gpm | 2026-01-06 23:55:09+00:00
> How would you distinguish someone asking for the directory versus asking for something else with said directory (which are totally not ads, pinky promise) displayed alongside?

You making sending the directory with something else unconditionally illegal, you either get the directory or the something else, not both at once. This is also necessary for the second part where you require everything in the directory paid the same amount.

> Someone standing up to make a political speech in a public square is now a criminal?

Only if they were paid to do so.

> This is just ads with a uniform, "small, nominal" fee. Uniformity is objectively measurable. Smallness and nominalness is not. Presumably you mean these directories have to be published at cost?

Personally I think uniform is more important than either small or nominal. It means that the person creating the directory can't be bribed to direct your attention to certain parts of the directory - i.e. steal it. Rather it's your choice to get the directory in the first place and pay attention to it, and everything inside it is at an equal playing level. I don't really care if it's at cost or if making directories is a profit making venture.

I'm not entirely sure what the original proposers intent was with the "small and nominal" part though. They might have wanted something more like "at cost".
by mothballed | 2026-01-06 23:55:42+00:00
On a long timescale gold is way more stable than the dollar. Dollar is nonvolatile on a long timescale in the sense the expected returns are negative and it does it reliably at usually anywhere from a return around negative 2-10%. But in terms of price stability gold would be far far far far more stable on anything but the most short-sighted of timescales.
by ineedasername | 2026-01-06 23:55:50+00:00
I won't take offense since I doubt you meant me in particular. So, while it's tedious to have to go back over web history from weeks ago to cite my sources like its high school every time I reference a specific, concrete source that people here can followup for themselves, I did it because it's worth doing, given that your sentiment is also not completely wrong: lots and lots of BS being thrown around all over the place on AI, so here's the direct source, chair Powell's report from December, and he's actually stating some things stronger than I remembered:

AI is a large theme throughout but page 7 and 24 have specifically relevant remarks about the better than expected number, productivity's increases in relation to both this and AI, data centers, etc.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/mediacenter/files/FOMCprescon...
by mkoubaa | 2026-01-06 23:56:07+00:00
7 hour to London is actually 10 hours when you factor in the commute to the airport, security, planing, flight, deplaning, shuttle to hotel.

Cutting it to 3.5 hours isn't a 50% overall decrease, because those 3.5 will turn into 6.5 of real time.

So the marginal value of faster flight goes down the shorter the trip is, and these supersonic airplanes can't do the super long Pacific flights because physics.

It's a much smaller niche than is often imagined. But it's still a niche, I guess.
by Kerrick | 2026-01-06 23:56:30+00:00
Yes. I was on a 30-day trial of Google AI Pro and I got a few big wins each out of Gemini 3 Pro (High) and Claude 4.5 Opus (Thinking) before my quota got reset. Then I'd cycle through Gemini 3 Flash and Amp Free (or paid Junie credits if I got antsy) until my quota reset.

You can see this pattern in my AI attribution commit footers. It was such a noticeable difference to me that I signed up for Google AI Ultra. I got the email receipt January 3, 2026 at 11:21 AM Central, and I have not hit a single quota limit since. Yo
by tezza | 2026-01-06 23:56:32+00:00
Yeah, it needs a steady hand on the tiller. However throw together improvements of 70%, -15%, 95%, 99%, -7% across all the steps and overall you're way ahead.

SimonW's approach of having a suite of dynamic tools (agents) grind out the hallucinations is a big improvement.

In this case expressing the feeback validation and investing in the setup may help smooth these sharp edges.
by soiltype | 2026-01-06 23:56:37+00:00
> knowing about my music taste

As with almost all arguments against exercising privacy, this is merely a failure of imagination on your part. Spotify doesn't give a shit about your taste.

Next time you listen to music, think about all the possible data that could be observed simply from you pressing play. What time of day is it? What day of the week? Which device are you using? Where is that device? Is this an unusual genre for you at 8pm? And so on. "You listen to indie rock" is harmless data. "We know the all your emotional states from the past 10 years and also those of your whole family" is at least a little scarier, right?

Combining large amounts of data about how you use a single app can tell a lot about your life. You may say this is overblown, but if you do want to hold a true belief instead of a convenient one, start by acknowledging the enormous amounts of data Spotify actually has about who you are and how you live.
by vunderba | 2026-01-06 23:57:00+00:00
Definitely. This is a pretty common approach: take an existing game, break it down into its constituent mechanics, then swap one of them out for a mechanic from an unrelated game. Rinse and repeat.

Case in point:

I built a twin-stick version of Snake that requires you to control two snakes simultaneously, called Twins of Caduceus. I even have a custom arcade box with two four-way joysticks so you can control one snake with each hand though you can play it with a regular keyboard. It’s a lot of fun, but you practically need the kind of hands that come built-in with localized neural ganglia to get a high score.

https://mordenstar.itch.io/the-twins-of-caduceus
by mmh0000 | 2026-01-06 23:57:04+00:00
A hosts file will do the same as pihole, but locally.

Buttttt, this goes back to my original post. DO NOT INSTALL MALWARE.

Because that's my first rule, I don't use apps with ads.

Generally, if I can't do a thing from a standard website, I probably don't need to be doing it. Otherwise, I have nothing against paying for a good app. For example, I LOVE AutoSleep.
by 0manrho | 2026-01-06 23:57:14+00:00
> "Sometimes I feel like I'm wasting my twenties".

Is near universal to anyone in their twenties regardless of job type/sector. It's the start of most people's adult life, and without the lack of experience that age brings, it's natural to question if you're on the "right path" and/or be swayed by potential other opportunities you've not yet explored.

Hell, even with the experience of age, people still often ask themselves that very same question, and not just for their twenties either.
Show HN: StellarMCP – Free MCP Tools for Claude and Other LLMs
by blackmac | 2026-01-06 23:58:00+00:00
I built a collection of small, useful MCP tools that give LLMs real-world capabilities.

Tools include: DNS lookups, WHOIS, domain age/authority checks, weather, currency conversion, unit conversion, QR code generation, timezone handling, and more.

Free: 10 requests/hour per IP
Free with login: 60 requests/hour (OAuth via GitHub/Google)

No paid tier, no credit card. Just add stellarmcp.com/mcp to your Claude config and the tools are available.

Happy to answer questions about the implementation or MCP protocol.
by NavinF | 2026-01-06 23:58:22+00:00
>The most common fare I’ve paid on Empower over the last six months is $7.65. For a recent trip from downtown to the airport, Uber wanted $32. Empower wanted $17.25.

>DC is trying to shut Empower down, primarily over liability insurance. DC law requires $1 million in coverage per ride.

>The $1 million requirement isn’t sized to typical accidents. When $100,000 is the limit available for an insurance claim, 96% of personal auto claims settle below $100,000.

>The high ceiling shifts incentives: plaintiffs' attorneys have reason to pursue cases they'd otherwise drop and push for larger settlements. Fraud rings have emerged to exploit these policies.

> insurance is around 30% of fares, particularly in states like California, New Jersey, and New York which also require additional $1 million uninsured motorist coverage and/or no-fault insurance
by tsunamifury | 2026-01-06 23:59:20+00:00
This is a part of the simulacra due the karmic re enforcement and feedback.

The person is buying the 10th boot because of the feeling they get showing it off and getting karma on the forums.

This is crazy represented in watch forums where broadly in the real world no one cares an iota about watches but inside the forums it becomes insanity.
by chhs | 2026-01-06 23:59:22+00:00
You can use ListenBrainz to discover new music based on your listening activity from your self-hosted library. I've started doing this recently with Navidrome and I'm happy with the results. This is the plugin I've been using: https://github.com/kgarner7/navidrome-listenbrainz-daily-pla....

There is also Troi[1], a tool provided by ListenBrainz to generate playlists and radios from your local music collection.

[1] https://troi.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html
by ben_w | 2026-01-06 23:59:31+00:00
> I think this assumes a level of rationality in these systems, corporate interests and global markets, that I would push back on as being largely absent.

Could be. What I hope and suspect is happening is that these companies are taking a real observation (the economic value that I also observe in software) and falsely expanding this to other domains.

Even to the extent that these work, AI has clearly been over-sold in humanoid robotics and self-driving systems, for example.

> Do you think this is entirely the case? I mean, I understand what you are saying, but I would draw stark lines between "company" demand versus "user" demand. I have found many times the 'AI' tools are being thrust into nearly everything regardless of user demand. Spinning its wheels to only ultimately cause frustration. [0]

I think it is. Companies setting silly goals like everyone must use LLMs once a day or whatever, that won't burn a lot of tokens. Claude Code is available in both subscription mode and PAYG mode, and the cost of subscriptions suggests it is burning millions of tokens a month for the basic subscription.

Other heavy users who we would both agree are bad, are slop content farms. I cannot even guesstimate those, so would be willing to accept the possibility they're huge.

> It appears this is a problem, and will only continue to be such. [1]

I find no reference to "aquifers" in that.

Where it says e.g. "up to 9 liters of water to evaporate per kWh of energy used", the average is 1.9 l/kWh. Also, evaporated water tends to fall nearby (on this scale) as rain, so unless there's now too much water on the surface, this isn't a net change even if it all comes form an aquifer (and I have yet to see any evidence of DCs going for that water source).

It says "The U.S. relies on water-intensive thermoelectric plants for electricity, indirectly increasing data centers' water footprint, with an average of 43.8L/kWh withdrawn for power generation." - most water withdrawn is returned, not consumed.

It says "Already AI's projected water usage could hit 6.6 billion m³ by 2027, signaling a need to tackle its water footprint.", this is less than the famously-a-desert that is Arizona.

> I am unsure if I am getting what your statements here are trying to say. Would you be able to restate this to be more explicit in what you are trying to communicate.

That the water consumption of data centres is much much smaller than the media would have you believe. It's more of a convenient scare story than a reality. If water is your principal concern, give up beef, dairy, cotton, rice, almonds, soy, biofuels, mining, paper, steel, cement, residential lawns, soft drinks, car washing, and hospitals, in approximately that order, before you get to data centres.

And again, I don't disagree that they're a problem, it's just that the "water" part of the problem is so low down the list of things to worry about as to be a rounding error.
by qcnguy | 2026-01-06 23:59:58+00:00
> we do not have EU wide parties.

So what are the parties in the europarl then? They're not EU wide parties but also not national parties. Waving national flags in the EU Parliament is against the rules, lol.

They're not genuine political parties at all, because you can't build such things in the EU. Parties with no ability to take power aren't parties.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIRM1qOZQPQ

> How can they have no influence on who became the leader of the Commission if they are the one to accept the nomination?

Because it's a pointless power as adequately explained already by Juncker, that's why the EU is designed that way. Europarl is given exactly one candidate and zero input on who it is. What happens if they reject? Assuming procedure is even followed (not certain in the EU institutions), they'll be given another candidate who is a carbon copy of the first. Same views, same background, same ideology.

And they know this stupid game because the EU operates this way regularly. See the number of times they lost referendums on constitutional change and then made people vote on the same thing again, or the way stuff like Chat Control never dies. That's why the only people who sign up to be MEPs are either just rubberstamp cheerleaders for the Commission who often don't bother turning up, or people who think the Europarl is fake and their countries should leave the EU entirely.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtZpvmnONww

https://youtu.be/jWGfzJpkyVk?si=HRtVRdTR6yZ4NQxe&t=48

What kind of a chamber is it that can't even stop itself being spammed with the same legislation it keeps rejecting in different forms, can't repeal unpopular legislation, is full of members who openly say it's damaging/fake and gets openly disrespected on live TV by the real power center? A fake one.

> due to not being aligned with the european parliament

You mean: due to being corrupt.

> I truly want to understand why you hate the EU so much?

Why did Russians hate the USSR? There's nothing to like about it. It's an evil system designed to enforce left wing dictatorship on Europe using lies, secrecy and, when necessary, aggression. It sees any attempt to remain independent as a problem to be crushed by abusing its powers. It makes Europeans more divided and less cooperative. I've lived in two central/west European countries in my life. The EU has treated both of them like dogshit. That's enough reasons.
by somewhereoutth | 2026-01-07 00:00:04+00:00
The best way to understand a loan is as the right to a future income stream (principal repayments and interest). The original debtor (the person/entity taking out the loan) establishes the credibility of that future income stream (based on income, expected returns on a project, etc) and sells it to the lender (usually a bank) for cash now. Thus the loan is an asset on the bank's balance sheet. Banks can and usually do sell on that asset to other parties.

Conversely, when you deposit cash to a bank, you are actually creating a liability on the bank's balance sheet - as you might want your money back one day!
by __lain__ | 2026-01-07 00:00:13+00:00
Social media has long stopped being an actual social outlet and is filled with either bots or influencer types trying to be the loudest voice shouting into the void. I recall going to Reddit in like 2010-2012, back when there was pretty much only college kids on it, and the posts were often witty and interesting. That no longer exists anywhere on the major sites and trying for any kind of conversation is a dead end.

Eternal September combined with profit focused engineering has created a wasteland.
by danpalmer | 2026-01-07 00:00:14+00:00
It doesn't, that's Android Webview which is distributed separately. It may however bundle its own instance of the Chrome networking library which is a few MB itself.

For apps like Gmail and a handful of others, they are big enough that they need multiple layers of fallback. e.g. they can't just use a networking layer, they need a fallback separate implementation in case that breaks, so that they can recover. They might have 2 or even 3 options for some of the critical parts, all so that if stuff goes wrong they can as close to guarantee recovery as they can get.

Mobile is quite specific in this regard, because you don't have hardware access, network is heavily restricted, battery reduces the amount you can do, etc.

Source: I work on mobile SRE things at Google.
by llmslave2 | 2026-01-07 00:00:38+00:00
There isn't a conspiracy, just humans responding to incentives. You've become something of an AI influencer and so you are naturally incentivized to promote it. This is true despite a lack of monetary incentive btw. Others desperately want it to be true so they try to convince others that it's true - you see this happen time and again with operating systems, programming languages etc.

The actual conspiracy is that AI companies are engaging in stealth marketing campaigns. Considering all the other unethical stuff they do it's a pretty tame one to believe.
by array_key_first | 2026-01-07 00:00:40+00:00
I knew all the buttons on my steering wheel within weeks. They're very convenient because your hands are already on the wheel. Touchscreen buttons are just not a replacement.

Yeah, there's, like, I don't know, 25 buttons if you count the stalks? That's a lot I guess, but I wouldn't want to turn down my music or skip the track by looking over at a touch screen and guessing.
by benjiro | 2026-01-07 00:00:48+00:00
> Prepare yourself to be replaced in the not so distant future.

Ignoring that this same developer, now has access to a tool, that makes himself a team.

Going independent was always a issue because being a full stack dev, is hard. With LLMs, you have a entire team behind you for making graphics, code, documents, etc... YOU becomes the manager.

We will see probably a lot more smaller teams/single devs making bigger projects, until they grow.

The companies that think they can fire devs, are the same companies that are going to go too far, and burn bridges. Do not forget that a lot of companies are founded on devs leaving a company, and starting out on their own, taking clients with them!

I did that years ago, and it worked for a while but eventually the math does not work out because one guy can only do so much. And when you start hiring, your costs balloon. But with LLMs ... Now your a one man team, ... hiring a second person is not hiring a person to make some graphics or doing more coding. Your hiring another team.

This is what people do not realize... they look too much upon this as the established order, ignoring what those fired devs now can do!
by scythe | 2026-01-07 00:00:54+00:00
Supersonic is more interesting over the Pacific than the Atlantic. An uncomfortable 7-hour flight becoming a less uncomfortable 4-hour flight isn't really news. A miserable 14-hour flight becoming a tolerable 8-hour flight is, both for passengers and possibly even for the burden on staff. IIRC the old Concorde just didn't have the range, but any improvement in the underlying tech could change that.
by mattfrommars | 2026-01-07 00:01:38+00:00
I’ve been saying this a countless time, LLM are great to build toy and experimental projects.

I’m not shaming but I personally need to know if my sentiment is correct or not or I just don’t know how to use LLMs

Can vibe coder gurus create operating system from scratch that competes with Linux and make it generate code that basically isn’t Linux since LLM are trained on said the source code …

Also all this on $20 plan. Free and self host solution will be best
by jolt42 | 2026-01-07 00:02:31+00:00
Renting a car is more of a pain these days. I find I actually have to learn how that car "likes its buttons". I don't remember having to look at a physical gear shifter to know it's in drive/reverse, etc. Now I have to see if some light is on. It must have been obvious to Human Factors folks from the outset that this was all a waste of time.
by m463 | 2026-01-07 00:02:35+00:00
> I still don’t have the camera I imagined,

lol. Sounds like every passion project, ever.

I have friends who have worked on their car project, their bathroom project, their workshop project, their custom pc build, even the home they built.

I wonder if anyone has ever built something and said... "It is perfect, I am satisfied!"

Maybe just from the outside. Like the casio f91w, the ak47, the porsche 959 or the hersheys bar.
by tombert | 2026-01-07 00:02:52+00:00
I remember spending hours and hours on FreeArcade.com, playing a lot of Java Applet games. I seem to remember my favorites being "Wiz3" and "Tailgunner", but there tons on there.

Once I was fourteen or so, I discovered Newgrounds and (along with SomethingAwful) that ended up being where I spent most of my time online. Even though a lot of the games were kind of crap, I still thought it was cool that people made these games. Not big, heartless corporations, but just regular people who thought it would be cool to make a game.

Newgrounds is still around, and there's no reason I couldn't go on there, I guess I've grown old and curmudgeonly enough to not even think about it anymore.

Maybe I should change that.
by rcxdude | 2026-01-07 00:03:44+00:00
This isn't a particularly new idea. The main thing being that you should consider the amount of code written to achieve something to be part of the cost of having that capability, and minimizing that cost is valuable. The mark of an effective system to me is how much capability it gives its users for how much burden it places on those maintaining it, and burden correlates well with the amount of code in the system.

(This is mainly something that's useful to consider in organizations which a lot of programming resource, as a way to counter the tendancy for them to consider the amount of code they are producing as a measure of their productivity, when often they could be better served by reducing the amount of code they write and focusing on producing better code or even removing existing code. AI tends to make this problem worse, but it's not the original cause of it)
by icedchai | 2026-01-07 00:04:12+00:00
Yes, but the quality of output from open/local models isn't anywhere close to what you get from Claude or Gemini. You need serious hardware to get anything approaching decent processing speeds or even middling quality.

It's more economical for the average person to spend $20/month on a subscription than it is for them to drop multiple thousands $ and untold hours of time experimenting. Local AI is a fun hobby though.