MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cadamsdotcom | 2026-01-29 21:13:50+00:00
Biggest takeaway: the project succeeded because its acceptance criteria were clear and deterministic.

The human driving the LLM gave it a way to know when it was done and a way to move toward that goal. They used code to generate tests and let the agent evaluate its implementation in a deterministic way.

This is the value of an engineer: you understand when to introduce determinism to let the LLM do the bit it does best - while keeping it on the rails.
by freejazz | 2026-01-29 21:13:53+00:00
What a stupid article from someone that has no idea when liability attaches.

It is the burden of a defendant to establish their defense. A defendant can't just say "I didn't do it". They need to show they did not do it. In this (stupid) hypothetical, the defendant would need to show the AI acted on its own, without prompting from anyone, in particular, themselves.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-29 21:13:54+00:00
I was writing this comment and then asked AI model to find me a blog post and it looks like Cloudflare does support outbound now (I am seeing a send mail option)
https://blog.cloudflare.com/email-service/ So yes it supports both and this feature was recently added (september 2025) & its still in private beta or something similar but yes now its possible.

But I have still written parts of the comments where I had assumed that you were right and I am still gonna let it be to show what my thinking process was I guess. Not that it matters now but I am frugal in finding alternatives sooo yeah :> lol (currently the cf private beta option's the best imo)

Yea I am a little bit confused as well being honest.

That being said, I feel as if even if Cloudflare might not be the best approach, one can try out purelymail (https://purelymail.com/) as well.

I feel as if Amazon SES might be the best option for it (or any EU alternative, I remember seeing an UK service with the same competitive pricing of Amazon SES)

But that being said, I am unable to understand the exact use of E-mail & what's the real idea to suggest the best infrastructure to use.

I mean technically, can something like cloudflare workers for inbox and amazon ses for outbound work if cloudflare email product is only for receving

That being said all of this is basing on the fact that what you thought is right
by colejhudson | 2026-01-29 21:14:06+00:00
Dispatches from the nascent American panopticon.

From the path taken [0] in the original article [1], it would appear that these folks passed through roughly 8 (known) license plate readers [2].

[0]: https://maps.app.goo.gl/kM9j79gWyNHsVVt48

[1]: https://www.texasmonthly.com/food/taco-editor-stopped-by-ice...

[2]: https://deflock.me/map#map=8/29.480252/-101.513672
by nearbuy | 2026-01-29 21:14:15+00:00
The parent comment said the bar should be "significant improvement" over the average performance of human drivers.

Then you said, "this isn't reasonable", and the bar shouldn't be "slightly better" or "barely better". It should be at least better than the 75th percentile driver.

It sounds like you either misread the parent comment or you're phrasing your response as disagreement despite proposing roughly the same thing as the parent comment.
by ceejayoz | 2026-01-29 21:14:26+00:00
T&Cs aren't ironclad.

One in which you sell yourself into slavery, for example, would be illegal in the US.

All those "we take no responsibility for the [valet parking|rocks falling off our truck|exploding bottles]" disclaimers are largely attempts to dissuade people from trying.

As an example, NY bans liability waivers at paid pools, gyms, etc. The gym will still have you sign one! But they have no enforcement teeth beyond people assuming they're valid. https://codes.findlaw.com/ny/general-obligations-law/gob-sec...
by acuozzo | 2026-01-29 21:14:33+00:00
You're experiencing throttling. Use the API instead and pay per token.

You also have to treat this as outsourcing labor to a savant with a very, very short memory, so:

1. Write every prompt like a government work contract in which you're required to select the lowest bidder, so put guardrails everywhere. Keep a text editor open with your work contract, edit the goal at the bottom, and then fire off your reply.

2. Instruct the model to keep a detailed log in a file and, after a context compaction, instruct it to read this again.

3. Use models from different companies to review one another's work. If you're using Opus-4.5 for code generation, then consider using GPT-5.2-Codex for review.

4. Build a mental model for which models are good at which tasks. Mine is:

3a. Mathematical Thinking (proofs, et al.): Gemini DeepThink

3b. Software Architectural Planning: GPT5-Pro (not 5.1 or 5.2)

3c. Web Search & Deep Research: Gemini 3-Pro

3d. Technical Writing: GPT-4.5

3e. Code Generation & Refactoring: Opus-4.5

3f. Image Generation: Nano Banana Pro
by gjm11 | 2026-01-29 21:14:37+00:00
This is wrong, although something quite like it is right.

Imagine that there are only 10 Waymo journeys per year, and every year one of them hits a child near an elementary school, while there are 1000000 non-Waymo journeys per year, and every year two of them hit children near elementary schools. In this scenario Waymo has half as many accidents but is clearly much more dangerous.

Here in the real world, obviously the figures aren't anywhere near so extreme, but it's still the case that the great majority of cars on the road are not Waymos, so after counting how many human drivers have had similar accidents you need to scale that figure in proportion to the ratio of human to Waymo car-miles.

(Also, you need to consider the severity of the accidents. That comparison probably favours Waymo; at any rate, they're arguing that it does in this case, that a human driver in the same situation would have hit the child at a much higher and hence more damaging speed.)
by emodendroket | 2026-01-29 21:15:00+00:00
I know what you mean and I would certainly not want to blindly "trust" AI chatbots with any kind of medical plan. But they are very helpful at giving you some threads to pull on for researching. I do think they tend a little toward giving you potentially catastrophic, worst-case possibilities, but that's a known effect from when people were using Google and WebMD as well.
by tptacek | 2026-01-29 21:15:08+00:00
It's pretty self-indulgent of me to respond to this comment, but just real quick: the pattern you're seeing is me in fact not being one of the top-tier experts in cryptography on Hacker News (just one of the loudest), and not knowing who this person is, and not having had a reason to think about 3DES in quite a long time. What you're reading as snark or lawyering is, rather, me meaning exactly what I said, and being uncertain about what that person was talking about.
by yunohn | 2026-01-29 21:15:17+00:00
Look, anyone can argue hypotheticals. But if one reads the comment being discussed, it can be deduced that your proposed hypotheses are not applicable, and that the doctor actually acknowledged the side effect and changed medications leading to relief. Now, if the new medication has a more serious side effect, the doctor (or ChatGPT) should mention and/or monitor for it, but the parent has not stated that is the case (yet). As such, we do not need to invent any scenarios.
by NetMageSCW | 2026-01-29 21:15:22+00:00
I think there is still a (brief) remaining window where Tesla has an advantage in the US, but it is too late for them to start developing new models to take advantage of it - and that is NACS and the SuperCharger network. Now that new EVs from everyone else are coming out with NACS and are on-boarding plug and charge (and, hopefully, mapping integrated with charging availability), all US EVs will be just as easy as Teslas to take on road trips.
by pcj-github | 2026-01-29 21:15:35+00:00
This is an important message.

Lately I've been just sickened by Apple, and particularly Tim Cook. The guy is revealing himself to be completely amoral.

Perhaps it was naive to assume otherwise, but celebrate at the "Melania" screening with the same people that labeled Alex Pretti as a "domestic terrorist", on the night of his murder? WTAF.

Apple employees - what are you doing to push back on this? Staying silent?
by gamblor956 | 2026-01-29 21:15:51+00:00
It's not a legal defense at all.

Licensed professionals are required to review their work product. It doesn't matter if the tools they use mess up--the human is required to fix any mistakes made by their tools. In the example given by the blog, the financial analyst is either required to professional review their work product or is low enough that someone else is required to review their work product. If they don't, they can be held strictly liable for any financial losses.

However, this blog post isn't about AI Hallucinations. It's about the AI doing something else separate from the output.

And that's not a defense either. The law already assigns liability in situations like this: the user will be held liable (or more correctly: their employer, for whom the user is acting as an agent). If they want to go after the AI tooling (i.e., an indemnification action) vendor the courts will happily let them do so after any plaintiffs are made whole (or as part of an impleader action).
by gaoshan | 2026-01-29 21:15:55+00:00
ChatGPT helped me understand a problem with my stomach that multiple doctors and numerous tests have not been able to shed any effective light on. Essentially I plugged in all of the data I could from my own observations of my issue over a 35 year period. It settled on these 3 possibilities: "Functional Dyspepsia with slow gastric accommodation, Mild delayed gastric emptying (even subclinical), Visceral hypersensitivity (your nerves fire pain signals when stretched)" and suggested a number of strategies to help with this. I implemented many of them and my stomach pain has been non-existent for months now... longer than I have ever been pain free.

I feel like the difference is that doctors took what I told them and only partially listened. They never took it especially seriously and just went straight to standard tests and treatments (scopes, biopsies and various stomach acid impacting medications). ChatGPT took some of what I said and actually considered it, discounting some things and digging into others (I said that bitter beer helped... doctor laughed at that, ChatGPT said that the alcohol probably did not help but that the bittering agent might and it was correct). ChatGPT got me somewhere better than where I was previously... something no doctor was able to do.
by mrandish | 2026-01-29 21:16:06+00:00
> these are earnest people.

I agree.

I'll also add that when my startup got acquired into a very large, well-known valley giant with a sterling rep for integrity and I ended up as a senior executive - over time I got a first-hand education on the myriad ways genuinely well-intentioned people can still end up being the responsible party(s) presiding over a system doing net-wrong things. All with no individual ever meaning to or even consciously knowing.

It's hard to explain and I probably wouldn't have believed myself before I saw and experienced it. Standing against an overwhelming organizational tide is stressful and never leads to popularity or promotion. I think I probably managed to move on before directly compromising myself but preventing that required constant vigilance and led to some inter-personal and 'official' friction. And, frankly, I'm not really sure. It's entirely possible I bear direct moral responsibility for a few things I believe no good person would do as an exec in a good company.

That's the key take-away which took me a while to process and internalize. In a genuinely good organization with genuinely good people, it's not "good people get pressured by constraints and tempted by extreme incentives, then eventually slip". I still talk with friends who are senior execs there and sometimes they want to talk about whether something is net good or bad. I kind of dread the conversation going there because it's inevitably incredibly complex and confusing. Philosopher's trolley car ethics puzzles pale next to these multi-layered, messy conundrums. But who else are they going to vent to who might understand? To be clear, I still believe that company and its leadership to be one of the most moral, ethical and well-intentioned in the valley. I was fortunate to experience the best case scenario.

Bottom line: if you believe earnest, good people being in charge is a reliable defense against the organization doing systemically net-wrong things - you don't comprehend the totality of the threat environment. And that's okay. Honestly, you're lucky. Because the reality is infinitely more ambiguously amoral than white hats vs black hats - at the end of the day the best the 'very good people' can manage is some shade of middle gray. The saddest part is that good people still care, so they want to check the shade of their hat but no one can see if it's light enough to at least tell yourself "I did good today."
by bulatb | 2026-01-29 21:16:13+00:00
We're taking about different things. To take responsibility is volunteering to accept accountability without a fight.

In practice, almost everyone is held potentially or actually accountable for things they never had a choice in. Some are never held accountable for things they freely choose, because they have some way to dodge accountability.

The CEOs who don't accept accountability were lying when they said they were responsible.
by bsimpson | 2026-01-29 21:16:46+00:00
I feel this way about open source generally.

Lots of cool stuff that I happily use, but the bar to installing something that gets to see my password (OS, terminal, input handler, etc) is very high.

Not a popular take, but I'd rather run something from Valve or Google for the same reason. I trust there to be more vetting if a corporation is putting its reputation on the product than a toy I found on GitHub.

It's a bit of a myth that open source leads to more eyes on the software. Most people just install it and trust that somebody else did the audit.

Something with a vibrant community of maintainers? Maybe.

Something that's too big to personally audit but too small for that community? I'll pass.
by the_pwner224 | 2026-01-29 21:16:48+00:00
According to Victor Frankl (psychiatrist concentration camp survivor, author of Man's Search for Meaning) being in a shitty situation without any control over it isn't necessarily bad. Humans can still be mentally okay in the face of extreme unavoidable suffering like in the camps. The key thing is that you need to have some purpose / meaning in life (often a loved one or dependent).
by ge96 | 2026-01-29 21:17:05+00:00
Yeah I'm the same, I enjoy thinking of a system of things, doing it, not typing a couple of commands and a bunch of code is generated. It's not the rote process but feeling like I worked for it/doing it. Similar argument is "why buy milk" you can get a cow, milk it yourself, kind of thing. Which I see that, some people don't care what the code looks like, does it work.
by graemep | 2026-01-29 21:17:22+00:00
> Every other distro is a) based on one of those

Apart from NixOS, Guix, Alpine , Void, SuSE, Gentoo, Slackware, PCLinuxOS, GoboLinux.....

> essentially just a package set + some wallpapers.

Not Ubuntu with a different support cycle, Mint and PopOS with their own DEs, Arch derivatives that are easier to install, Elemantary with a DE and apps, Devuan with multiple init systems, ......
by johnmaguire | 2026-01-29 21:17:29+00:00
That's actually not quite what FMV is: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/fairmarketvalue.asp

> Fair market value (FMV) is similar to market value, which is the price that the asset would trade for in the open market under current conditions. However, fair market value has the following additional assumptions: Both buyer and seller are reasonably knowledgeable about the asset, Buyer and seller are behaving in their own best interests, Both parties are free of undue pressure, Each is given a reasonable period for completing the transaction.

However that's why I said "something closer to FMV" as yes - what you described is generally how FMV is calculated for things like stock options.

> but it doesn't follow that it is priced on vibes. Its price is based on potential future earnings

To be clear, I also didn't use the word "vibes," but rather "hype/sentiment" which refers to things like "the expectation that Elon can pull off his plans for a robotaxi fleet or building an Optimus robot that might unlock the massive demand for household and/or general use commercial robots." I'm not sure where you got "vibes" that you quoted in your reply.

Technical analysis uses statistics (e.g. P/E ratios) and marketplace analysis to determine if future potential earnings are worth the price of the stock. TSLA's price is far in excess of any technical analysis I have seen.

> The company is also led by a man who has made and delivered on massive, seemingly impossible promises, which adds credibility to the idea that Tesla might actually bring these markets into existence.

We might have to agree to disagree on this one. (Are we FSD yet?)
by dudeinhawaii | 2026-01-29 21:17:38+00:00
If a fan starts a $10/mo Patreon membership inside the iOS app, Apple's subscription terms imply $3/mo goes to Apple for the first year (then $1.50/mo after), and Patreon's platform fee still applies on top. Patreon says Apple is also forcing the remaining ~4% of creators using legacy billing to migrate to subscription billing by Nov 1, 2026 or risk the app being pulled. That's a meaningful hit to creator economics for something that's closer to "patronage" than a typical in-app digital good.

I don't pay attention to all of Apples behaviors (still running an iphone 11) but this feels quite rent-seeky and creator hostile.
by ylee | 2026-01-29 21:17:41+00:00
Nothing has changed since Jerry Pournelle wrote 40 years ago when discussing online forums:

>I noticed something: most of the irritation came from a handful of people, sometimes only one or two. If I could only ignore them, the computer conferences were still valuable. Alas, it's not always easy to do.

This is what killed Usenet,[1] which 40 years ago offered much of the virtues of Reddit in decentralized form. The network's design has several flaws, most importantly no way for any central authority to completely delete posts (admins in moderated groups can only approve posts), since back in the late 1970s Usenet's designers expected that everyone with the werewithal to participate online would meet a minimum standard of behavior. Usenet has always had a spam problem, but as usage of the network declined as the rest of the Internet grew, spam's relative proportion of the overall traffic grew.

That said, there are server- and client-side anti-spam tools of varying effectiveness. A related but bigger problem for Usenet is people with actual mental illness (kstrauser mentioned one); think "50 year olds with undiagnosed autism". Usenet is such a niche network nowadays that there has to be meaningful motivation to participate, and if the motivation is not a sincere interest in the subject it's, in my experience, going to be people with very troubled personal lives which their online behavior reflects. Again, as overall traffic declined, their relative contribution and visibility grew. This, not spam, is what has mostly killed Usenet.

[1] I am talking about traditional non-binary Usenet here
by TheCoelacanth | 2026-01-29 21:17:43+00:00
A 9 month old baby also can't play tic tac toe, but that doesn't mean tic tac toe is difficult.

There was millions of years of very strong selective pressure making humans evolve to learn to walk easily. There has been very little selective pressure making humans be good at learning tic tac toe.

Often whether something seems difficult or easy to humans has more to do with how well evolution has prepared us for it than with the inherent difficulty of the problem.
by thewebguyd | 2026-01-29 21:17:46+00:00
> no reputation, no hippocratic oath, no fiscal/legal responsibility.

To say nothing of giving your personal health information over to a private company with no requirement to practice HIPAA, and just recently got subpoenaed for all chat records. Not to mention potential future government requests, NSA letters, during an administration that has a health secretary openly talking about rounding up mentally ill people and putting them in work camps.

Maybe LLMs have use here, but we absolutely should not be encouraging folks to plug information into public chatbots that they do not control and do not run locally.

It is a recipe for disaster.
by saubeidl | 2026-01-29 21:17:48+00:00
> That's the kind of "I took an edgy course in college" shit that makes people outside the progressive bubble think "society is getting too woke and everyday people are getting left behind."

Nah, that's the "I was raised in Austria and all my history classes where about driving that point home" take.

How did the Nazis ever come to power, one asks? Why didn't anybody stop them? It's because everybody stayed silent until it was too late.

Screw polite meekness. You're either against what's happening or you're a collaborator. It takes people actively speaking out to show others they aren't alone and that not everyone is okay with what is happening.
by dzink | 2026-01-29 21:18:17+00:00
In today’s world, Autocracy is not possible without Tech. Tech firms enable it with anything from surveillance, to mass propaganda by anyone willing to pay, to enabling things as private data collectors for law enforcement that law enforcement would legally not be allowed to do on its own.

The even bigger approach now is the denial of service attack on the judicial system coming from AI-enabled infractions that are too new to the system. To deny enforcement in an area that helps authocrats - an AI tool can enable anyone to create problems on that area automatically and easily, and now the pipeline for getting justice in that area becomes clogged. It doesn’t even need to be intentional - it can be automatic.

The zero sum game of tech firms competing for the same fluid investors in the stock market means the control of government becomes guaranteed - because if a single one is singled out the money flows out of its equities and into their competitors. It’s blood supply to vital organs. The CEOs have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders above all else. They cannot do anything that will damage the stock price without being sued to oblivion and that would attack their personal assets as well.
by LeifCarrotson | 2026-01-29 21:18:26+00:00
I'd assume that the inputs to the system are far, far more than 10 kW continuously. I just ordered 4 servo motors for a modest-sized industrial machine that moves steel plates around to assemble construction equipment, each one is capable of about 8 kW.

I'd be unsurprised if the particle accelerator complex generated waste heat on the order of 5 megawatts to generate a particle stream with an energy of 10 kilowatts. That's 0.2% efficient, pretty good!

I bet just running the ceiling lights across the complex uses a lot more than 10 kW...