MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by simonw | 2026-01-01 02:30:17+00:00
"Nothing about the severe impact on the environment"

I literally said:

"AI data centers continue to burn vast amounts of energy and the arms race to build them continues to accelerate in a way that feels unsustainable."

AND I linked to my coverage from last year, which is still true today (hence why I felt no need to update it): https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/31/llms-in-2024/#the-envi...
by BuyMyBitcoins | 2026-01-01 02:31:26+00:00
There was some company a while back, I forget what they were called, but their claim to fame was a much higher click through rate on modal popups due to them “guilting” people with dynamic messages like “No, I don’t want to save up to 50%” or “I would rather let children starve than sign up for this newsletter”.

One, I can’t believe this worked. Two, some website owners were convinced that being patronizing towards visitors was worth the extra clicks.
by Shadowed_ | 2026-01-01 02:32:13+00:00
Happy New Year from Serbia.

2025 was bad in best way and good in worst way...
Our government is increasingly autocratic in last decade to almost straight dictatorship but last year was year of protests that started cornering government. That led to increased oppression. It's worse for both sides but it's going in good direction albeit slowly.
Spent 2025 in dozens of protests, rode bicycle across the country with students to raise awareness, was surrounded with young, great and positive people.
Breathed tear gas and got beaten by police. But never felt more alive.

2026: I hope this government is done and gone in this year. Freedom is enough to get in a year.
by rhubarbtree | 2026-01-01 02:33:05+00:00
Here’s the trick about reading, folks.

Firstly, reading is actually a bit boring and unpleasurable at first. Only once you’ve gotten up to speed does it start rewarding you. A bit like working out at the gym.

The other surprise is that once you start reading, you get really quick. Like, surprisingly fast. After a while you notice the words are going by faster. So the effort compounds.

When you start you think “my god that took 5 hours of boring reading time to get though” and by book 10 you think “that was 2.5 hours and I learnt a lot and my brain is happy.”
by georgemcbay | 2026-01-01 02:33:42+00:00
> US voters prefer the free market as opposed to government regulation and nationalized healthcare.

Because US voters are dumb. (Just for context, I'm a US citizen).

Free markets don't work when there is inelastic demand for a good or service, and an awful lot of health care (unless you consider 'well, guess I'll just die then' as a reasonable outcome) is inelastic demand.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-01 02:33:54+00:00
BCS Phase II connects Russia through Finland [1]. What would be the consequences to Russia if it were turned off?

(I suppose one could also drag an anchor across this guy [2].)

[1] https://www.submarinecablemap.com/submarine-cable/bcs-north-...

[2] https://www.submarinecablemap.com/submarine-cable/kingisepp-...
by zerofor_conduct | 2026-01-01 02:34:52+00:00
And here are some of the reasons why:

1. high risk of severe allergic reactions and cross-reactivity

2. contamination with pathogens, toxins, and heavy metals

3. digestive and nutritional drawbacks, including anti-nutrients (no pun intended) and imbalances

4. and last but not least, the good old precautionary principle: limited research on long-term human health impacts and emerging hazards

if you still want to eat zee bugz, consider yourself warned !
by bob1029 | 2026-01-01 02:35:12+00:00
Well one thing can lead into the other over time. If you can lift 405 once, 315 for reps becomes pedestrian and 225 becomes boring. Lifting that much weight will turn you into a monster faster than if you had not pushed for that capacity. I've seen people who can treat a 225lb barbell as if it's unloaded and 100% of them look like dragon ball Z characters.
by teleforce | 2026-01-01 02:35:17+00:00
Definitely they should include D4M and GraphQL [1],[2].

Not only D4M can cater for structured relational data, it's also suitable for non-structured and sparse data in spreadsheet, matrices and graph. It's essentially a generalization of SQL but for all things data.

There's also integration of D4M with SciDB [3].

[1] D4M: Dynamic Distributed Dimensional Data Model:

https://d4m.mit.edu/

[2] GraphQL:

https://graphql.org/

[3] D4M: Bringing associative arrays to database engines:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1508.07371
by duxup | 2026-01-01 02:35:22+00:00
I don't think they care because I'm still on youtube, but I agree. I think of youtube as a very scamy place.

I have my history turned off so I get some really bottom of the barrel ads, questionable medical advice, gross out ads, borderline porn, weird conspiracy theory stuff (5G blocking hats), and straight scams "buy our product or AI will replace your job" and my recent favorite "if you're not buying our product people are manipulating you ... so give us your money so we can help you" (the irony is thick with those).

Youtube is scam / bad idea central when I turn it on.
by missedthecue | 2026-01-01 02:35:27+00:00
BRK total return from inception to 2025: about 5,502,284% (55,000x gain)

S&P500 total return over the same period: about 39,054% (390x gain)

$1 in BRK would be $55k today. $1 in S&P500 would be $390 today. Therefore, following the hypothetical 99% drop, 1% of Berkshire return would be $550, still well above the S&P500's $390.
by chihuahua | 2026-01-01 02:35:43+00:00
For some people, money is not for buying things, but just for keeping score. That can make it rewarding and addictive to accumulate money, even if you don't buy anything (like a giant house) with it.

The score keeping aspect makes it interesting, just like playing tennis while keeping score is more interesting than just hitting a ball back and forth across the net without counting.
by twodave | 2026-01-01 02:36:35+00:00
I would argue “normie habits” are more depressing than this. Habits like stressing out about feeding your family. Counting the number of days until your money runs out and figuring out what odd jobs you can cover the shortfall with. Not going to the doctor because of the cost.

For many people, stopping by McDonalds inspires guilt, and not just because it’s a bad nutritional choice, but rather because that’s how thin the margins are. I still remember all of these things about my 20s. Now, a couple decades later and by no means super-wealthy, I will happily ignore grocery prices, pay for specialist care and sort of just eyeball my checking account every week or so to make sure I don’t need to shuffle something around.

Not dogging anyone who wants to enjoy the “simple” things in life, and I’m probably one of the more pro-billionaire people on this site (which is hilarious given what this site is really about), but I think most of us are out of touch with what the average American experiences. Midnight Taco Bell runs are an escape for those folks as much as they are a guilty pleasure. I’m happy that for me they can just be the latter.
by bigbadfeline | 2026-01-01 02:36:54+00:00
> Propaganda? Sure, but no one is being defrauded.

The problem with your position is that if a government, say Poland's, created a structure tasked with producing AI videos defending EU membership, or some other initiative beneficial to the people, the media would scream bloody murder by way of vicious government propaganda.

And then people like you are nowhere to be found to speak up in defense of the government.

I'm not saying that any government propaganda is good, but in cases like this, laying down like a beaten dog is worse. In other words, a solution is necessary and the government should be the initiator and a part of it.

Media-government relations are an unsolved problem which, unfortunately, doesn't depend only on the two of them... but I'm getting into the can of worms I promised not to open this year.
by tom_ | 2026-01-01 02:37:08+00:00
The space separated function call examples could do with a 2+ary example i think. How do you do something like pow(x+y,1/z)? I guess it must be "math pow x plus y 1 over z"? But then, the sqrt example has a level of nesting removed, and perhaps that's supposed to be generally the case, and actually it'd have to be "math pow a b" amd you need to set up a and b accordingly. I'm possibly just old fashioned and out of touch.
by Animats | 2026-01-01 02:37:58+00:00
> The power delivery was doable even 15 years ago.

Not really. It took a long time for solid state lasers to make it to 100KW. That's the power level military people have wanted for two decades.

Megawatt chemical lasers are possible, and have been built. But the ground based one was three semitrailers, and the airborne one needed a 747. Plus you ran out of chemicals fairly fast.
by int_19h | 2026-01-01 02:38:10+00:00
I didn't do it because I expected it to influence the decision makers. I did it because I don't want to be knowingly aiding and abetting the kinds of things ICE does.

But to answer your other questions...

No, democracy isn't working in US right now. Arguably hasn't for a while, but it's very evident now. Fixing that would likely require amending the constitution; a bar so high that at this point I'm confident that the system is more likely to self-destruct from internal contradictions than to reform.

At the same time, there are literally millions of people in this country who did vote for this and do want it. Even if they had an honest majority, it wouldn't make any of it any less evil. Democracies aren't inherently good.
by zozbot234 | 2026-01-01 02:38:11+00:00
That article seems to accurately describe the charitable activities of Peter Buffett and his NoVo Foundation, but it's worth pointing out that Howard G. and Susan Buffett have charitable foundations of their own that seem to have a more conventional philanthropic approach, one that may perhaps be more amenable to a clearer focus on getting the right outcomes. It seems unwarranted to assume that the description in the article applies to the Buffett children's activities as a whole.
by plqbfbv | 2026-01-01 02:38:15+00:00
> However Chinese domination .. make even choosing the obviously cheapest (and incidentally clean) option difficult in many parts of the world.

In what way? China has basically dwarfed solar installations of any other country combined for the last two years, and produces so many panels and so cheap that EU and US competitors are being driven out of business.

China might be the reason we CAN make the transition actually.
by josephg | 2026-01-01 02:38:45+00:00
There is no recovery. When an invariant is violated, the system is in a corrupted state. Usually the only sensible thing to do is crash.

If there's a known bug in a program, you can try and write recovery code to work around it. But its almost always better to just fix the bug. Small, simple, correct programs are better than large, complex, buggy programs.
by ranger_danger | 2026-01-01 02:38:56+00:00
What I've seen lead to success:

* Arrogance

* Overconfidence

* Schmoozing with the right people

* Doing flashy work, whatever that means in a given situation

What I have seen lead to failure or, at best, being undervalued and ignored:

* Caring about teammates and your future self

* Caring about the end user and the business itself, when it conflicts with something sales, marketing, or a PM want

* Creating resilient, well-engineered systems

It's the same problem as anywhere else. Well-crafted systems are invisible and taken for granted. Saving the day by putting out a fire is applauded, even when you're the one who laid out the kindling and matches. Managers at all levels care about their own ego more than the company, product, or team.

Maybe I just spent too much time with ex-Microsoft hacks.
by skydhash | 2026-01-01 02:39:14+00:00
And this is one of the vague "AI helped me do more".

This is me touting for Emacs

Emacs was a great plus for me over the last year. The integration with various tooling with comint (REPL integration), compile (build or report tools), TUI (through eat or ansi-term), gave me a unified experience through the buffer paradigm of emacs. Using the same set of commands boosted my editing process and the easy addition of new commands make it easy to fit my development workflow to the editor.

This is how easy it is to write a non-vague "tool X helped me" and I'm not even an English native speaker.
by Dusseldorf | 2026-01-01 02:39:30+00:00
Our dishwasher keeps its little screen on and blinking until you actually hit the on/off button, and we effectively use that as a cleanness indicator. We only turn it off after having cleaned out the dishwasher. So the off state always means dirty. On and full = clean, on and mostly empty = someone probably forgot to turn it off, easy to spot check.
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-01-01 02:39:55+00:00
Get a real ventilation for the stove, not just a microwave that recirculates air. Most Chinese in China have separate kitchens with doors and window ventilation, it’s harder in the way Americans design open kitchens with the living room.

You can do lots of Chinese cooking on lower heat using non stick pans, fried rice isn’t that healthy for you anyways. We might trigger the smoke detector once or twice a month, some food (like fish) has a higher chance of triggering than others even if we don’t go full boast on temp.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-01 02:40:20+00:00
> similar to the confusion and fierce debate I see around wrestling control of TikTok, which have largely been blamed on China, but the concern around uncensored videos of atrocities committed in the middle east

I worked on the TikTok bill. Middle East stuff never came up.

It might have had a role in New York and Michigan. But most of the debate, drafting and lobbying was in respect of national security, trade policy and a touch of Taiwan policy.

When you have a pet issue you tend to see everything through it. My pet war was Ukraine. For a time I had to fight the impulse to classify everything as a derivative of it.
by ivell | 2026-01-01 02:40:20+00:00
A better comparison to Ikea vs Handcraft would be shrinkwrap software vs custom software for companies. With AI, the custom software industry is getting disrupted (if the current trajectory of improvements continue).

In case of woodcraft, there is some tangible result that can be appreciated and displayed as art. In case of custom software, there is no such displayability.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-01 02:40:38+00:00
Do we start sinking Russian flagged tankers in international waters? Preferably unloaded, when possible.

Inside China’s Shadow LNG Fleet Offering a Lifeline to Putin - https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-china-russia-lng-sha... | https://archive.today/9dehG - December 29th, 2025

A Warning From Onboard the ‘Old Piles of Junk’ Ferrying Russia’s Oil Across the Baltic Sea - https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-russia-shadow-oil-fl... | https://archive.today/jpSjX - August 22nd, 2024

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_shadow_fleet
by SirMaster | 2026-01-01 02:40:47+00:00
This just all feels backwards to me.

Why do we have to treat AI like it's the enemy?

AI should, from the core be intrinsically and unquestionably on our side, as a tool to assist us. If it's not, then it feels like it's designed wrong from the start.

In general we trust people that we bring onto our team not to betray us and to respect general rules and policies and practices that benefit everyone. An AI teammate should be no different.

If we have to limit it or regulate it by physically blocking off every possible thing it could use to betray us, then we have lost from the start because that feels like a fools errand.
by snickerbockers | 2026-01-01 02:41:04+00:00
>If you go through this process with ChatGPT and don't learn anything, that's all on you.

I actually agree with this although I don't think I'm interpreting it the way you intended.

>Given the lack of a CS professor looking over your shoulder

That's definitely not how school projects work. The professor answers questions (sometimes) and he ruins your GPA when you get things wrong. He does not guide you throughout everything you do as he "looks over your shoulder".
by tzs | 2026-01-01 02:41:23+00:00
The may have the best selling single model in the world by a small amount, but that one model is around 2/3 of their total sales.

Most of the other car companies have less skewed distribution. For example in the US Toyota's split is around 22% RAV4, 15% Camry, 12% Tacoma, 12% Corolla, and 8% Highlander.

It's harder to find a breakdown by model for worldwide Toyota sales other than RAV4 and Corolla are close.

As a result many car companies sell more cars per year than Tesla. Tesla are around #14 worldwide if you count Hyundai and Kia separately and do the same for the brands in the Stellantis group. If you instead count Hyundai and Kia as one and count Stellantis as one, Tesla is also #14. That's because Hyundai and Kia both outsell them so counting them as one would moves Tesla up, but each Stellantis brand is below Tesla but combined are above it, so combining them moves Tesla down.
by hagbard_c | 2026-01-01 02:41:36+00:00
It works on Firefox on Android as well, as do many other FF extensions. It won't work on a fruit phone [1], the Firefox version you can get there is lobotomised because the fruit factory is afraid a full-feature browser not under their control will eat into their app store margins.

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1486487
by kstrauser | 2026-01-01 02:41:37+00:00
Ummmm… they have? I use Safari with the Wipr ad blocker and don’t remember the last time I saw one. The opposite is more annoying for me. When I try to download my bank statement, their website tries to open it in a popup. It doesn’t work until I remember to tap the little “open the blocked popup” icon.

I don’t think Safari is magical or anything. I just didn’t know this was a problem anymore.
by hamstergene | 2026-01-01 02:42:26+00:00
Having created 100 of nano-sized projects does not add up to having developed and maintained one large code base.

Coding agents are eating up programming from the lowest end, starting from pressing button on the keyboard to type the code in: completion was literally their first application. I don't think it will go all the way to the top, though, the essential part of the profession will remain until true AGI.

Metaphorically, think how integrated chips didn't replace electrical engineering, just changed which production tools and components engineers deal with and how.

Obviously we all are adapting to changes, but if he or someone are panicking about being behind, that can only be because they've never been in too deep.
by nxobject | 2026-01-01 02:42:54+00:00
Two references come to mind – the first is that the Avro C102 was beat by the de Havilland Comet, which was an example of a bad design with a good presentation. It had a series of mysterious hull losses that were eventually attributed metal fatigue accumulating around a square cut-out in the hull.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Comet#Comet_disas...

The second, more depressingly, is that the Avro C102 was cancelled to redirect resources to the Avro Arrow: Canada's mythical last jet fighter, of which only a handful were produced before the program was (painfully) cancelled, and Avro wound up. IIRC, the Canadian government was the main-to-sole bankroller of the project, and ballistic missiles became increasingly more important.
by noodletheworld | 2026-01-01 02:43:16+00:00
I am not making any argument about productivity about using AI vs. not using AI.

My point is purely that, compared to 2024, the quality of the code produced by LLM inference agent systems is better.

To say that 2025 was a nothing burger is objectively incorrect.

Will it scale? Is it good enough to use professionally? Is this like self driving cars where the best they ever get is stuck with an odd shaped traffic cone? Is it actually more productive?

Who knows?

Im just saying… LLM coding in 2024 sucked. 2025 was a big year.
by oxguy3 | 2026-01-01 02:44:33+00:00
SponsorBlock is available on just about every type of device these days -- works perfectly on Android with YouTube ReVanced. The options on iOS are naturally a bit more limited, but apparently it's possible on a jailbroken device (or through some other slightly-janky methods on non-jailbroken devices): https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock/wiki/iOS
by Dylan16807 | 2026-01-01 02:44:43+00:00
They've supported 4K for so long that I'd be surprised if they don't have enough boards capable of 1920 height.

And even then, why make it 1080 wide?

I feel like there's more going on. And maybe it's related to shorts supporting any aspect ratio up to 1:1.

But that's all assuming the article is giving an accurate picture of things in the first place. I went and pulled up the max resolutions for three random shorts: 576x1024, 1080x1920, 1080x1920. The latter two also have 608x1080 options.
by jpgvm | 2026-01-01 02:45:18+00:00
Upvote for Bazel. I think these days I place a lot more value on how well an ecosystem slots into Bazel/friends because monorepos are increasingly more useful and relevant.

So nice to see there are good rules for Zig and that folks are using them.

Also ironically I think starting with Bazel/Buck/whatever your poison of choice is almost always a good move even if people tell you it's overkill. The easiest time to do it as at the beginning, all times after that is too hard and the marginal cost of building with it from the start is minimal.
by tyushk | 2026-01-01 02:45:41+00:00
I don't think your ultimatum holds. Even assuming LLMs are capable of learning beyond their training data, that just lead back to the purpose of practice in education. Even if you provide a full, unambiguous language spec to a model, and the model were capable of intelligently understanding it, should you expect its performance with your new language to match the petabytes of Python "practice" a model comes with?
by syndacks | 2026-01-01 02:46:49+00:00
I can’t get over the range of sentiment on LLMs. HN leans snake oil, X leans “we’re all cooked” —- can it possibly be both? How do other folks make sense of this? I’m not asking for a side, rather understanding the range. Does the range lead you to believe X over Y? Are all new technologies so polarizing?
by TehCorwiz | 2026-01-01 02:46:50+00:00
The house he bought at 28 is 3500 square feet in a very very nice neighborhood and was worth $1.2 million a few years ago. It's humble by billionaire standards, not by average person standards. He never needed to size-up because of children, or size-down because of a bad economy, he was already set for both space and finances. Let's not create a moralistic myth out of his lack of need.
by wonger_ | 2026-01-01 02:47:22+00:00
I've had this on my back burner! Glad to see someone else wants this as well. The Internet Archive already has transcripts generated by whisper.cpp, so it's (just) a matter of gathering them into one place and making a good search feature.

Example transcript (JSON): https://archive.org/download/episode_1109/episode_1109_whisp...

Screenshot from a month ago: https://wonger.dev/assets/chronicles-screenshot.png

I can reach out to their project to see if they're interested.
by JuniperMesos | 2026-01-01 02:47:29+00:00
Homes and physical community are a pretty personal thing.

Also, given that he is a billionaire, I do kind of assume that he has paid money to upgrade his home at some point, probably also owns additional homes elsewhere, maybe has done other things with his vast amount of money that normal people don't do, that are still consistent with living at the same address as when he was 28.
by justatdotin | 2026-01-01 02:47:40+00:00
hi Simon,

I enjoy coding agents and I appreciate your work. I often find your contributions measured, sensible and grounded.

So I am very disappointed about your BULLSHIT regarding water.

just down the road from me goog threaten to build a massive new DC in an arid zone with no freshwater, little potable water, and in fact precious little water at all.

well they can all frack right off.

and so can anyone promoting this incredibly obvious dishonest apologism.