MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by threethirtytwo | 2026-01-19 14:07:13+00:00
There is no respectful way of telling someone they like the sound of their own voice. Let’s be real, you were objectively and deliberately disrespectful. Own it if you are going to break the rules of conduct. I hate this sneaky shit. Also I’m not off topic, you’re just missing the point.

I responded to another person in this thread and it’s the same response I would throw at you. You can read that as well.

Your “historical trend” is just applying an analogy and thinking that an analogy can take the place of reasoning. There are about a thousand examples of careers where automation technology increased the need of human operators and thousands of examples where automation eliminated human operators. Take pilots for example. Automation didn’t lower the need for pilots. Take intellisense and autocomplete… That didn’t lower the demand for programmers.

But then take a look at Waymo. You have to be next level stupid to think that ok, cruise control in cars raised automation but didn’t lower the demand for drivers… Therefore all car related businesses including Waymo will always need physical drivers.

As anyone is aware… this idea of using analogy as reasoning fails here. Waymo needs zero physical drivers thanks to automation. There is zero demand here and your methodology of reasoning fails.

Analogies are a form of manipulation. They only help allow you to elucidate and understand things via some thread of connection. You understand A therefore understanding A can help you understand B. But you can’t use analogies as the basis for forecasting or reasoning because although A can be similar to B, A is not in actuality B.

For AI coders it’s the same thing. You just need to use your common sense rather than rely on some inaccurate crutch of analogies and hoping everything will play out in the same way.

If AI becomes as good and as intelligent as a human swe than your job is going out the fucking window and replaced by a single
Prompter. That’s common sense.

Look at the actual trendline of the actual topic: AI taking over our jobs and not automation in other sectors of engineering or other types of automation in software. What happened with AI in the last decade? We went from zero to movies, music and coding.
What does your common sense tell you the next decade will bring?

If the improvement of AI from the last decade keeps going or keeps accelerating, the conclusion is obvious.

Sometimes the delusion a lot of swes have is jarring. Like literally if AGI existed thousands of jobs will be displaced. That’s common sense, but you still see tons of people clinging to some irrelevant analogy as if that exact analogy will play out against common sense.
by Loughla | 2026-01-19 14:07:28+00:00
Just on a related note for anyone in college in this thread. Forgo the book fees or technology fees or whatever bullshit they wrap up in your tuition and go to dealoz.com. Buy the books you want to keep and rent the ones you don't. Save yourself.

Source; a career in higher education where I've seen most publishers entice faculty to use proprietary platforms so students have to pay hundreds for ebooks.
by lazide | 2026-01-19 14:07:29+00:00
It also fails when someone receives the product, and then returns it (bonus points if it was ‘not what I ordered/fraud’) with the contents replaced with something bogus, if Amazon puts it back in stock.

I know they do sometimes put it back in stock, because the item I received back (as the ‘we’ll ship you a replacement) was literally the same thing I shipped back to them. :s
by vixen99 | 2026-01-19 14:07:45+00:00
Fascism: 'A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, a capitalist economy subject to stringent governmental controls, violent suppression of the opposition, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.'

Interesting because doesn't every sort of democratic state try to be 'a capitalist economy subject to stringent governmental controls'? Depends how stringent and usually not stringent enough for many on the Left and on the Right.

When tempted to use the word 'fascism', is it not better to describe the issue with which one's concerned (maybe deeply) rather than using a fit-all word and take care not to devalue the significance of the word as it was, for instance, applied in WW2 to some of the appalling atrocities that occurred in that period and those we've seen reports of recently?
by fhennig | 2026-01-19 14:07:58+00:00
What about going back to a system of reputation and recommendations by reputable people?

I'm thinking stuff like web rings.

Or if you have a blog, maybe also have a curated set of pages you think are good, sort of your bookmarks, that other people can have a look at.

People are still on the internet and making cool stuff, it's just harder to find them nowadays.
by defrost | 2026-01-19 14:09:11+00:00
> Is it possible that china is hiding something?

By publishing recent studies showing a smoking gun?

UP MSI said the results were consistent with recent Chinese studies linking iodine-129 in the Yellow Sea to decades-old nuclear weapons tests and nuclear fuel reprocessing facilities in Europe, ...

China has a great many reactors, nuclear warheads, acres of low level waste from rare earth processing .. they have as much to hide as the US does, that said there's not a lot to gain here by pretending they don't have potential sources - but isotope fingerprints can be verified and all the byproducts from > 2,000 test explosions and the creation of 10,000+ warheads globally do get mapped and tracked.
by dcre | 2026-01-19 14:09:12+00:00
I had high hopes for this essay because I’ve tried many times to get people online to articulate what they mean by “it doesn’t really understand, it only appears to understand” — my view is that all these arguments against the possibility of LLMs thinking apply equally well to human beings because we don’t understand the process that produces human thinking either.

But the essay is a huge letdown. The European vs. American framing obscures more than it illuminates. The two concepts of intelligence are not really analyzed at all — one could come up with interpretations under which they’re perfectly compatible with each other. The dismissal of Marx and Freud, two of the deepest thinkers in history, is embarrassing, saying a lot more about the author than about those thinkers.

(For anyone who hasn't read much Freud, here's a very short essay that may surprise you with its rigor: https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/...)
by BLKNSLVR | 2026-01-19 14:09:33+00:00
Exactly. This administration has exposed the fragility of the very structure of the US form of government, and building a new, better structure is, in my opinion, practically impossible without revolution.

It appears to me that the US will continue to iterate downhill.

I'd prefer it weren't the case, but that's what my intuition is telling me.

And if it can start to restructure on the fly, it's going to be a long, difficult process. But it's still better than revolutionary structural / regime change.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-01-19 14:09:34+00:00
We engage in many exercises in deterministic logic. Humans invented entire symbolic systems to describe mathematics without any prior art in a dataset. We apply these exercises in deterministic logic to reality, and reality confirms that our logical exercises are correct to within extremely small tolerances, allowing us to do mind-boggling things like trips to the moon, or engineering billions of transistors organized on a nanometer scale and making them mimick the appearance of human language by executing really cool math really quickly. None of this could have been achieved from scratch by probabilistic behaviour modelled on a purely statistical analysis of past information, which is immediately evident from the fact that, as mentioned, an LLM cannot do basic arithmetic, or any other deterministic logical exercise in which the answer cannot be predicted from already being in the training distribution, while we can. People will point to humans sometimes making mistakes, but that is because we take mental shortcuts to save energy. If you put a gun to our head and say "if you get this basic arithmetic problem wrong, you will die" we will reason long enough to get it right. People try prompting that with LLMs, and they still can't do it, funnily enough.
by bccdee | 2026-01-19 14:09:47+00:00
I never managed to get into mastodon because mastodon isn't a single space. It's a bunch of separate, linked spaces. Which server you're on matters a lot, and I never found one that really had the vibe I was looking for.

Bluesky, though, is one big pool. There's no seam between servers. The experience is much nicer.

Also, bluesky caught on among my peers in a way that mastodon never did, which was always going to be the deciding factor. I imagine not having to "choose a server" was a big part of that.
by nmcfarl | 2026-01-19 14:09:50+00:00
This is not always a bad thing. The example I always use of why it’s good that Amazon has knock off parts, is a Jacuzzi heating element.

Amazon has them for $30, but has none of the legitimate item which are only sold through a dealer network and dealers charge the OEM price of $285 bucks plus shipping. It’s not quite the same part – cause dealers only sell a larger unit that includes the heater - you can’t buy the actual part number except via a knockoff.

Add to this that the Jacuzzi part - for my model at least - has a reputation of just dying at two years plus one day, while the Chinese parts frequently last 3-5 years.

In the end, you save yourself quite a lot of money, and time by replacing less frequently, by buying the knock off. And where I live, you couldn’t get the knock off otherwise.

The important thing of course is to know that you’re getting a knock off, and have made that choice in intentionally. Your story does suck - and there can be lots of reasons both good and bad to make a knock off.
by lazide | 2026-01-19 14:10:54+00:00
The reason they feel that way (more) is because of those videos. Just like most people who watch Alex Jones probably didn’t start by believing all the crazy things.

We can chicken/egg about it all day, but at some point if people didn’t want it - they wouldn’t be doing it.

Depending on the definition of ‘want’ of course. But what else can we use?

I don’t think anyone would disagree that smokers want cigarettes, eh? Or gamblers want to gamble?
by 7777332215 | 2026-01-19 14:12:12+00:00
There is definitely tribalism. I think a lot of the negativity is people who recognize the long term goals of these companies, not just to tech workers. Right now, these models are a threat to people who worked hard and invested their time, while it lets inexperienced or lazy people appear more competent. I think that less experienced developers (or people who don't care anymore or maybe ever) see what an LLM can do and immediately believe it will solve all their problems. That if you are not embracing this with full force you are going to be left behind.

You might see more opposing views in this thread, but if you browse this site often you'll see both sides.

Those embracing it heavily do not see the nuances carefully creating maintainable solutions, planning and recognizing tech debt, and where it's acceptable short term. They are also missing the theory building behind what is being created. Sure AI models might get even better and could solve everything. But I think it's naive to think that will be generally good for 90% of the population including people not in tech.

Using these models (text or image) devalues the work of everyone in more than one way. It is harmful for creative work and human expression.

This tech, and a lot of tech, especially ones built by large corporations for profit extraction and human exploitation, is very unlikely to improve the lives at a population level long term. It can be said for a lot of tech (ie. social media = powerful propaganda). The goal of the people creating these models are to not need humans for their work. At which point I don't know what would happen, kill the peasants?
by wumms | 2026-01-19 14:13:06+00:00
> hardware switch that physically disconnects your microphone

Might need disconnecting motion sensors, too:

AccEar: Accelerometer Acoustic Eavesdropping
with Unconstrained Vocabulary
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.01042

Spearphone: A Lightweight Speech Privacy Exploit via
Accelerometer-Sensed Reverberations from Smartphone
Loudspeakers
https://www.winlab.rutgers.edu/~yychen/papers/%28WiSec%2721%...

A survey of acoustic eavesdropping attacks: Principle, methods, and progress
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266729522...
by numpad0 | 2026-01-19 14:13:06+00:00
Amazon apparently credit full declared cost for the seller who delivered items to be comingled, and all responsibilities for the item are offloaded to whoever seller that would appear on customer invoices.

This means malicious sellers can deliver literal counterfeits to warehouses and externalize the consequences, down to angry 1-star reviews and disposal of returned counterfeit examples, to somebody else.
by retSava | 2026-01-19 14:13:23+00:00
This is one of many exploitative habits of Amazon. Others include not ensuring products follow regulation, eg on hazardous substances (lead, etc), or on electrical safety. They also make your local {book, game, hobby, ...} shop go bankrupt.

You don't -have- to buy there, if you have the financial means I urge/recommend/encourage you to buy locally or from a responsible seller. Even if they are slower, less things on offer, etc. You probably already know some small local stores you would be sad to see shut down. Support them! (if you don't already)
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-19 14:13:23+00:00
One thing I'd never use LLMs for, yet I use them daily, a lot, and has since Codex CLI became available, would be to write tests wholesale.

Taking a look at 1400 lines long test file: https://github.com/vm0-ai/vm0/blob/1aaeaf1fed3fd07afaef8668b... and it becomes really clear why we shouldn't yet use LLMs (without detailed reviews) for this.

Obviously, you want your tests to test the implementation, not test that the mocks are working. I didn't read all the code, but lots of it not great. Generally, you want to treat your test code as any other production code, build abstractions and simple design/architecture that lets you heavily reduce test duplication, otherwise you end up with huge balls of spaghetti that are impossible to get a clear overview of, actually reasonably change, and hard to understand what is actually being tested. Like that run.test.ts.
by dcre | 2026-01-19 14:13:45+00:00
I just don’t think the question is about determinism and probability at all. When we think, our thoughts are influenced by any number of extra-logical factors, factors that operate on a level of abstraction totally alien to the logical content of thought. Things like chemical reactions in our brains or whether the sun is out or whether some sound distracts us or a smell reminds us of some memory. Whether these factors are deterministic or probabilistic is irrelevant — if anything the effect of these factors on our thinking is deterministic. What matters is that the mechanical process of producing thought is clearly influenced (perhaps entirely!) by non-rational factors. To me this means that any characterization of the essence of thinking that relies too heavily on its logical structure cannot be telling the whole story.
by julianozen | 2026-01-19 14:13:47+00:00
A friend that used to be high up at Amazon fulfillment told me inventory commingling was the reason he was unwilling to buy anything from Amazon to put in or on his body. Huge indictment for the brand and clearly a bad long-term strategy in the age of fake internet everything.

This will hopefully be a huge improvement for the reduction of fraud on the platform. Hopefully, they give the ability to only buy from verified vendors. This is why only buy CPGs on Walmart.
by Traumen | 2026-01-19 14:14:00+00:00
mostly agree, with one nuance.

Probabilistic systems do make sense at the edges — perception, ranking, recommendation, search, fuzzy matching. The problem starts when we let probabilistic outputs cross into domains that used to have hard contracts: policy enforcement, state transitions, or irreversible actions.

What feels new isn’t probabilistic programming itself, but treating probabilistic inference as if it were a deterministic control layer. Once probability collapses into authority, you lose debuggability and guarantees.

So the failure mode isn’t “probabilistic vs deterministic” per se, but where the probabilistic boundary is drawn — and whether it’s explicit.
by cogman10 | 2026-01-19 14:14:28+00:00
Republican politicians are ignoring their constituents.

It's quiet depressing, because a large number of them know they'll be just fine regardless what they do.

We, in Idaho, recently had a school voucher program rammed through even though a huge number of people called to oppose it. Like 90% against 10% for. They still signed it into law.

It's all very disheartening.
by thunfischbrot | 2026-01-19 14:15:09+00:00
They do have an export functionality, which I encourage everyone using Claude to use occasionally. This is unfortunately reality–most of us are using digital platforms and services which can be taken away. From vacuum robots to digital thermostats and email accounts and llm's conversation history.

Migrate to services you trust the most where it makes to you. Occasionally export data from all of them, more and less trusted, anyways.
by toyg | 2026-01-19 14:15:16+00:00
Sadly, I fear the opposite might be true. Trump acts by creating leverage and then asking for something in return to renounce that leverage (in other contexts this could be described as blackmail or racketeering - "nice Greenland you have there...").

Luckily, his reign of terror is not infinite. In November he'll be cut to size.
by joe_mamba | 2026-01-19 14:15:30+00:00
Yeah that was my point, it doesn't matter if it's left or right, because the only ideology Meta et-al speak, is USD, so they will kiss the ring of whoever is in power at the present moment in EU, far left or far right. Same how many of them also kissed the ring of the CCP or Saudi Arabia while flying the pride flag in the west.

They don't really care about those ideologies they preach, they just virtue signal however needed in order to appease the mobs and governments in power so they can be allowed to extract wealth.
by philipp-gayret | 2026-01-19 14:15:45+00:00
I use Claude Code to modify policies for Claude Code. (Think of say the regex auto-allow/deny, but a lot stronger.) I can do that with hot reload of the local development server; It works but it better not make any errors.

A setup like you describe would honestly be interesting to see, so long as it can roll back to a previous state. Otherwise the first mistake it makes will likely be its last.
by notTooFarGone | 2026-01-19 14:16:09+00:00
Your argument is basically "It's only 80% as efficient as another country" so it has to be bad?

what if it's already 50% better than any alternative? Solarpunk is alive and well and economies of scale of panels and batteries will make it even more affordable and viable.

China connected 5 solar panels every second of last year. This is happening.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2026-01-19 14:16:45+00:00
The article paints a situation where the EU is caving in to US pressure and completely ignores the very real criticisms of the current regulatory push coming from the EU itself.

A significant part of the Draghi report on European competitiveness is about how the Parliament has been stifling the ability of EU companies to efficiently compete under the weight of more and more complex laws.

It's not very useful being the first to put in place complex regulations if nothing remains to regulate because every company has moved somewhere else.
by threethirtytwo | 2026-01-19 14:16:55+00:00
Look at the past decade. Zero AI to AI that codes and makes movies in an inferior way when matched with humans.

What does common sense tell you the next decade will bring? Does the trendline predict flat lining that LLMs or AI in general won’t improve? Or will the trendline continue like most trendlines typically trend on doing? What is the most logical conclusion?
by danabramov | 2026-01-19 14:17:15+00:00
Hmm, Word Online isn't what the article is about. I'm not sure if you've read the article, but it is about social apps — like Tumblr, Reddit, HN itself, etc.

I'm using file formats as a metaphor to explain how apps built on AT protocol work (lexicons are like "social file formats"), and what this way of building enables (interoperability between social apps by default).
by Wuiserous | 2026-01-19 14:17:16+00:00
I see it as a complete opposite for sure, I will tell you why.

it could have been a threat if it was something you cannot control, but you can control it, you can learn to control it, and controlling it in the right direction would enable anyone to actually secure your position or even advance it.

And, about the COBOL, well i dont know what the heck this is.
by torginus | 2026-01-19 14:18:29+00:00
This reads like your standard issue prestige publication essay, as in its an exercise to name drop as many famous people and places the author was involved with.

The whole purpose is not to inform or provoke thought, but for the whole thing to exude prestige and exclusivity, like an article you'd find in a magazine in a high-end private clinics waiting room.
by KellyCriterion | 2026-01-19 14:19:59+00:00
Still waiting for the 100% vibe coded trading bot.

Im in this field and my system was heavily built with Claude, though not per vibe coding, more like a junior supporting me:
I do not see any person connecting a vibe coded bot to a real account soon, since if its about real money, people will hesitate. And if you have blown up one account with your vibe coded bot while you are not a professional dev, you will loose interest very quickly - such systems do not contain "just a few thousand lines of code": Sure you could speed up development massivly and "hit the rock sooner than later" when going vibe coded here :-D
by rob74 | 2026-01-19 14:20:23+00:00
So, he wants to distract from past illegal shit by doing more illegal shit? Doesn't sound like a viable long-term strategy to me...

But yeah, I also wonder what would happen if the media would just stop dissecting every late-night bleat (as some commentators have decided to call his Truth Social posts) and start treating them as what they are (the ramblings of a deranged 79-year old) instead? But of course those ramblings now spill into other places too: plaques on the "presidential walk of fame" (https://eu.usatoday.com/picture-gallery/news/politics/2025/1...), letters to allies (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/trump-letter...) etc.
by rationalist | 2026-01-19 14:20:42+00:00
It seems like it would be easier for some people to rig a boiler to explode than trying to get their hands on dynamite.

Why go through the hassle of trying to source a bomb when the victim provides you one on location already.

FYI, I'm not saying that's what happened, just that your dismissal shouldn't be immediate.

Also, the best way to sabotage something, is to make it look like an accident, that way they aren't looking for you.