MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by xienze | 2026-01-08 23:06:35+00:00
> RDS is a particular racket that will cost you hundreds of dollars for a rock bottom tier. Again, Digital Ocean is below $20 per month that will serve many a small business. And yet, AWS is the default goto at this point because the lockin is real.

This is a little disingenuous though. Yeah you can run a database server on DO cheaper than using RDS, but you’ll have to roll all that stuff that RDS does yourself: automatic backups/restores, tuning, monitoring, failover, etc. etc. I’m confident that the engineers who’ve set up those RDS servers and the associated plumbing/automation have done a far better job of all that stuff than I ever could unless I spent a lot of time and effort on it. That’s worth a premium.
by TZubiri | 2026-01-08 23:06:51+00:00
I just thought I'd break down the positions from the most obviuous to the least.

1- The rules and customs regarding how applications and libraries are installed CAN be different.

2- These customs MUST be different.

3- Libraries should not download code or binaries over the network in contexts where it is expected they be built from source.

4- Applications should have the least amount of network pointers to binaries as possible, it reduces the amount of oversight app stores or antiviruses can have.

I'm not saying it's a malicious pattern, but it doesn't help with distinguishing a malicious from a legitimate pattern. And I think legitimate actors generally want to jump hoops that complicate malicious actors more than legitimate ones.

I don't know about you, but if I'm installing a pip, npm or maven dependency, I expect it to be open source, and if the repo being pulled from is just a pointer to a URL that downloads the actual code, I would feel kind of scammed, I'd probably just report it to Pypi or npm, and would expect them to take it down. And especially if the package can change without changing the actual repo, it would fail an audit from me, it would mean a supply chain vuln wouldn't leave an artifact, it would also mean the build isn't deterministic at all.
by FireBeyond | 2026-01-08 23:06:57+00:00
> People with connection to January 6 United States Capitol attack are all pardoned

Hah, many of them have been hired by ICE since.

> The president himself is also a convict.

Funnily enough, Florida made an exemption for him that allowed him to vote, despite their laws against convicted felons voting. They decided that since he had only been found guilty, and not sentenced, that he was not, yet, a convicted felon.

I wonder how many other people in Florida in the same situation could vote, or whether they'd be laughed at.
by brtkwr | 2026-01-08 23:07:12+00:00
I tried another alternative yesterday as I found myself hitting that /usage command too often and it didnt work too well but yours worked straight out of the box! Great job!

I built another tool that should have really been part of the core Claude Code CLI (which you may or may not find useful): https://github.com/agentic-utils/ccs

It lets you search and resume past Claude code conversations from anywhere.
by swed420 | 2026-01-08 23:07:55+00:00
> EDIT: what do you know? This post has disappeared from the front page. Currently in the 57th spot on page 2. And yes, "Eat Real Food" remains exactly where it was.

> If you didn't already know about HN's moves to minimize visibility of government wrongdoing, well, you do now.

Yet another reason to always browse the "front page" of HN using https://hckrnews.com which is chronological and uncensored.
by krapp | 2026-01-08 23:08:00+00:00
I'm sorry, but I've seen "finished products" from AI game devs that don't look much better.

This is a simple prototype (so simple I doubt anyone would bother) but the more complex it becomes, the less fine control you'll have, the more you'll have to just hope the LLM gives you something approximating what you want.

And then what? Use what's likely to be complex, buggy and inefficient code that you didn't write and don't understand? Build on top of that? Just keep prompting the AI and have it build the final product as well?

I really don't think this is better than existing methods even for prototyping because AI by its very nature just approximates and that takes creative control away from the developer and the artist. I don't think that's worth a fast turnaround.
by palmotea | 2026-01-08 23:08:15+00:00
> This short term thinking over long term thinking goes back a long time and is happening in other places as well.

> But the singular focus on destruction of what is a cornerstone of the stability of the Western hemisphere is absolutely unprecedented. And to see so many people falling for it, hook line and sinker.

IMHO, that short-term thinking over such a long span laid the groundwork for that destruction.

I read this the other day, and I think it's an interesting take that rings true:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/06/opinion/trump-presidentia...:

> Instead of comparing what is happening under Trump with the situations in Hungary, Turkey and Russia, Goldstone argued that conditions in the United States are,

>> ironically, more like what happened in Venezuela, where after a century of reasonably prosperous democratic government, decades of elite self-serving neglect of popular welfare led to the election of Hugo Chávez with a mandate to get rid of the old elites and create a populist dictatorship.

>> I find that decades-long trends in the U.S. — stagnating wages for non-college-educated males, sharply declining social mobility, fierce political polarization among the elites and a government sinking deeper and deeper into debt — are earmarks of countries heading into revolutionary upheaval.

>> Just as the French monarchy, despite being the richest and archetypal monarchy, collapsed in the late 18th century because of popular immiseration, elite conflicts and state debts, so the U.S. today, despite being the richest and archetypal democratic republic, is seeing its institutions come under attack today for a similar set of conditions.
by btown | 2026-01-08 23:08:25+00:00
Ooh, am I reading correctly that you're using the filesystem as the storage for a "living system prompt" that also includes a living TODO list? That's pretty cool!

And on a separate note - it looks like you're making a system for dealing with graph data at scale? Are you using LLMs primarily to generate code for new visualizations, or also to reason directly about each graph in question? To tie it all together, I've long been curious whether tools can adequately translate things from "graph space" to "language space" in the context of agentic loops. There seems to be tremendous opportunity in representing e.g. physical spaces as graphs, and if LLMs can "imagine" what would happen if they interacted with them in structured ways, that might go a long way towards autonomous systems that can handle truly novel environments.
by turtletontine | 2026-01-08 23:09:30+00:00
On the bright side, I do think at some point after the bubble pops, we’ll have high quality open source models that you can run locally. Most other tech company business plans follow the enshittification cycle [1], but the interchangeability of LLMs makes it hard to imagine they can be monopolized in the same way.

1: I mean this in the strict sense of Cory Doctorow’s theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification?wprov=sfti1#H...)
by tombert | 2026-01-08 23:09:34+00:00
It's almost like giving a nearly-completely-unregulated quasi-military force unlimited funding, more weapons than God, and no clear goals other than "deport more people" is actually a really bad idea.

People voted for this.

Oh but hey, we at least made sure to pretend to save money by firing and then rapidly rehiring a lot of the workforce.
by Havoc | 2026-01-08 23:09:54+00:00
Obviously they want that...ICE is busy shooting people fleeing them and assaulting unarmed people

https://www.reddit.com/r/NextGenRebellion/comments/1q6n823/i...

https://imgur.com/gallery/ice-escalates-violence-hours-after...

Very much tracks that the administration would want to suppress that
by nyrikki | 2026-01-08 23:10:14+00:00
> If an assistant offered up suggested code, the code ran successfully, and the user accepted the code, that was a positive signal, a sign that the assistant had gotten it right. If the user rejected the code, or if the code failed to run, that was a negative signal, and when the model was retrained, the assistant would be steered in a different direction.

> This is a powerful idea, and no doubt contributed to the rapid improvement of AI coding assistants for a period of time. But as inexperienced coders started turning up in greater numbers, it also started to poison the training data.

It is not just `inexperienced coders` that make this signal pretty much useless, I mostly use coding assistants for boilerplate, I will accept the suggestion then delete much of what it produced, especially in the critical path.

For many users, this is much faster then trying to get another approximation

:,/^}/-d

Same for `10dd` etc... it is all muscle memory. Then again I use a local fill in the middle, tiny llm now, because it is good enough for most of the speedup without the cost/security/latency of a hosted model.

It would be a mistake to think that filtering out jr devs will result in good data as the concept is flawed in general. Accepting output may not have anything to do with correctness of the provided content IMHO.
by vunderba | 2026-01-08 23:10:56+00:00
This is super cool. Apparently he also creates tactile topographical maps with various landmarks, terrain, etc.

https://evengrounds.com/3d-tactile-maps

I'm not at all confident in my ability to take an unknown object, run my hands over it, manipulate it, and even get close to being able to describing / recreating it though it does sound like this has the makings of a fun Cranium board mini-game.
by redox99 | 2026-01-08 23:11:41+00:00
Last year they claimed they had $800k in ARR from sponsors alone[1]. Add to that whatever they made by selling Tailwind Plus ($299 individual / $979 teams one time payment)

How much money do you really need to maintain a CSS library? I understand everyone wants a really fancy office in an expensive city, lots of employees with very high salaries and generous perks, and so on. But all that is not needed to maintain a CSS library (that is kind of feature complete already).

I think Tailwind was making a lot of money (surely over a million), expanded and got bloated unnecessarily just because they had all that money, and now that their income dropped to what still is a lot of money for a CSS library, they're angry that they have to cut expenses to a more reasonable level.

I guess it worked out for them because now they have even more sponsoring.

And they used the AI bad get out of jail free card when a lot of their drop in sales probably comes from shadcn/ui and others which offer something similar for free.

[1] https://petersuhm.com/posts/2025/
by imiric | 2026-01-08 23:11:51+00:00
> The absurd value of LLMs is that they can somehow manage to extract the signal from that noise.

Say what? LLMs absolutely cannot do that.

They rely on armies of humans to tirelessly filter, clean, and label data that is used for training. The entire "AI" industry relies on companies and outsourced sweatshops to do this work. It is humans that extract the signal from the noise. The machine simply outputs the most probable chain of tokens.

So hallucinations definitely matter, especially at scale. It makes the job of humans much, much harder, which in turn will inevitably produce lower quality models. Garbage in, garbage out.
by kstrauser | 2026-01-08 23:12:45+00:00
Microsoft's revenue in 1990 was 1.18B when they launched Office, sold for one-time payments. Of course they're pushing people to subscribe now so they can get that sweet recurring revenue, but that business model sustained freaking Microsoft for about 30 years.

I'm not convinced by unsustainability arguments. Now, it could be that competing with FOSS makes it a lot harder to make money now. I'm sympathetic to that, inasmuch as I can be for someone who wants to sell what others are giving away. That would be challenging. But why is it suddenly impossible to sell software, when they was the common model until rental became popular a few years ago? What's inherently different now that let someone sell programs for decades but now it's just impossible?
by Esophagus4 | 2026-01-08 23:13:24+00:00
I have so much admiration for anyone who protests a regime as oppressive and brutal as theirs.

Just by being involved, I imagine they’re in serious danger. So far, more than 550 people have been killed and 20k detained by security forces.[1]

Godspeed.

Edit: these death numbers are from an older protest and are inaccurate. Please see article / comments below :)

[1]https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce3kl56z2l4o
by baubino | 2026-01-08 23:14:24+00:00
> People say “invite” for “invitation”, then instead of using “invite” as a verb they say they “sent an invite”.

That happened with the onset of digital invitations, like evite, in the late 90s/early 2000s. I remember it vividly because I staunchly refused to use “invite” in place of “invitation.” I wonder how many other language shifts are also tech related.
by yodon | 2026-01-08 23:14:31+00:00
Re: #2, I think I was looking for something different and likely simpler than what you were thinking... The session would still be running in a codespace, I just want to be able to start on my phone, then move to my Mac, which has a nicer keyboard, and still have the codespace automatically shut down when things go idle (depending on how you have that set up, it may be that I need a dedicated app for that, or it may be I just need to VA Code remote into the codespace).
by em-bee | 2026-01-08 23:14:43+00:00
even better, in countries like germany, any individual can just join a union. and it is simply a matter of enough people joining up. there is no need for employees to even organize themselves to get unionized. also, any company with more than 50 people is required to have a betriebsrat by law, regardless of any employees being in a union or not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_council
by skinner_ | 2026-01-08 23:16:02+00:00
Then I think you’ll like our project which aims to find the missing link between transformers and swarm simulations:

https://github.com/danielvarga/transformer-as-swarm

Basically a boid simulation where a swarm of birds can collectively solve MNIST. The goal is not some new SOTA architecture, it is to find the right trade-off where the system already exhibits complex emergent behavior while the swarming rules are still simple.

It is currently abandoned due to a serious lack of free time (*), but I would consider collaborating with anyone willing to put in some effort.

(*) In my defense, I’m not slacking meanwhile:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.26543
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.16522
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5p3VEOWza8
by nateb2022 | 2026-01-08 23:16:07+00:00
> This generic answer from Wikipedia is not very helpful in this context.

Actually, the general definition fits this context perfectly. In machine learning terms, a specific 'speaker' is simply a 'class.' Therefore, a model generating audio for a speaker it never saw during training is the exact definition of the Zero-Shot Learning problem setup: "a learner observes samples from classes which were not observed during training," as I quoted.

Your explanation just rephrases the very definition you dismissed.
by pamcake | 2026-01-08 23:16:37+00:00
> The original Freenet dates back to the early 2000s

Oh so both are called Freenet again? Or is this a new third project? For a while some people were adamant in refering to the original (which still lives but I believe is incompatible?) as Hyphanet. What happened with Locutus? It seemed promising.
by rayiner | 2026-01-08 23:16:57+00:00
What you said was “in retrospect this feels a little racist.”

Obviously what’s in your head specifically is idiosyncratic to you. But the feeling you’re having certainly happens more generally, and is based on general social understandings. That’s what I’m commenting on.

If I say, “this feels a little rude,” isn’t it fair for people to chime in as to whether it’s actually rude by reference to general social standards?
by jimbo808 | 2026-01-08 23:17:33+00:00
This is not always the case, but I get the impression that many of them are paid shills, astroturf accounts, bots, etc. Including on HN. Big AI is running on an absurd amount of capital and they're definitely using that capital to keep the hype cycle going as long as possible while they figure out how to turn a profit (or find an exit, if you're cynical - which I am).
by potsandpans | 2026-01-08 23:17:58+00:00
> Email mods (<hn@ycombinator.com>) if you have concerns

Why waste your time? Dang or Tom will link you to the same pseudo intellectual analysis and claim there is no bias.

Meanwhile, we have eat good food and iran protests plastering the front page, while the news of a an unprovoked murder of a US citizen by masked agents of the state gets buried with flags.

We all know the answer.
by hadlock | 2026-01-08 23:18:00+00:00
Right now I start chatting with a separate LLM about the issue, the best structure for maintainability and then best libraries for the job, edge and corner cases, how to handle those, and then have it spit out a prompt and a checklist. If it has a UI I'll draw something in paint and refine it before having the LLM describe it in detail and primary workflow etc. and tell it to format it for an agent to use. That will usually get me a functional system on the first try which can then be iterated on.

That's for complicated stuff. For throw-away stuff I don't need to maintain past 30 days like a script I'll just roll the dice and let it rip.
by rootusrootus | 2026-01-08 23:18:10+00:00
I don't really see the point, as a practical matter. Money being the fungible thing that it is, the only way this policy actually restricts anything is if the only money SNAP recipients ever spend on food is their SNAP benefit.

It feels much more like spite politics: We can tell these people whose morals are so bad that they need our money to survive that they cannot spend it on what we think of as junk food. That is a luxury only us hard working folk are permitted. When you are poor, you cannot suffer alone, you need to know that we are making sure you feel extra pain. Please be motivated to be better.
by mlyle | 2026-01-08 23:19:17+00:00
Peering means "give our downstream customers' routes plus our own routes; receive the same from them".

Transit means "give our entire table, receive their routes plus their downstream customers routes".

You don't give one peer's routes to another. You filter to make sure you are not doing this. They hopefully filter (using data from RIRs) to make sure you're not doing it. If both parties screw up the filtering, you "leak routes" like we're discussing here.

This has been standard practice for peering since at least 1997. It is codified, among other places, in RFC7454.

> And that is why; You seem to have a very strong opinion about something that you don't understand "at all" and frankly I cannot understand how that can work.

Do you operate an AS? Are you a peering contact? I mean, I only do it mostly for funsies now but for quite awhile that was part of my job. :P

Also, still seeking an answer to this question:

> > > Yes, but how does advertising undesirable route B make traffic go over route C [that previously went over route A]? This is why I think you're confused.
by ezst | 2026-01-08 23:19:27+00:00
You know what that reminds me very much of? That email client thing that asks you "did you forget to add an attachment?". That's been there for 3 decades (if not longer) before LLMs were a thing, so I'll pass on it and keep waiting for that truly amazing LLM-enabled capability that we couldn't dream of before. Any minute, now.
by burnte | 2026-01-08 23:19:37+00:00
> There's no question in my mind that having kids gets in the way of single-minded vision that's required of the kind of career success that Jobs had.

It's a common misconception because so many psychopaths become examples of "successful businessmen" but they're not successful PEOPLE. Steve's arrogance literally killed him, his insistence he knew better than everyone made him ignore his cancer until it was too late.

No one should try to be the next Steve Jobs. Be better than he was, better to your family, better to your employees, better to your friends. There's no one Steve didn't try to screw at some point. That's not success.
by helloaltalt | 2026-01-08 23:19:47+00:00
My ex was iranian and we frequently talked about iran and you are so wrong.

She had frequent black outs with complete electricity downage for many hours a day and she was in a major city

One of the largest problems is that Iran's average income is so poor and the rising inflation and rising prices.

They didn't even have a battery or something which could store electricity while it came because the batteries were so expensive that one of them cost like 1 month of salary of average iranian.

Things were really tough, she told me about the education system and she had to recently move to govt school and she said that there were just not any books available.

She really disliked the regime. She was liberal and I asked her about hijab and she said that she was forced to wear in schools and that the only contacts that they usually did was with their brothers. The society is extremely strict to a point of no return.

The average Iranian person either barely scrapes by or was/is actively being suffered by authoritarian brutality from the ground reality of extremist islamist radicalism that their govt put them on.
by doublerabbit | 2026-01-08 23:20:04+00:00
> Don't give your "smart" TV internet access. It's that simple.

For the tech users yes, simple. But for the non-technical user it's not.

The ISP given router don't normally provide the options for such. Nor would my mother, father, brother, sister even know about the slightest about networking, isolating networks.
by DaiPlusPlus | 2026-01-08 23:21:10+00:00
> Don’t forget the child porn generator.

Details reported today suggest to me he's more than just a billionaire edgelord:

https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/08/tech/elon-musk-xai-digital-un...

> Musk has pushed back against guardrails for Grok [...] Musk has “been unhappy about over-censoring” on Grok “for a long time.” [...] At one meeting in recent weeks before the latest controversy erupted, Musk held a meeting with xAI staffers from various teams where he “was really unhappy” over restrictions on Grok’s Imagine image and video generator

...how are the shareholders not in revolt over this?