MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dang | 2026-01-10 01:07:12+00:00
Fun is a feeling, so one can't have an argument that something is or isn't fun - that would be a category error no?

You've got a good analogy there though, because many great and/or famous painters have used teams of apprentices to produce the work that bears their names.

I'm reminded also of chefs and sous-chefs, and of Harlan Mill's famous "chief surgeon plus assistants" model of software development (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chief_programmer_team). The difference, of course, being that the "assistants" in the current moment are mechanical ones.

(as for how fun this is or isn't - personally I can't tell yet. I don't enjoy the writing part as much - I'd rather write code than write prompts - but then I again, I don't enjoy writing grunt code, boilerplate, etc., and there's less of that now, - and I don't enjoy having to learn tedious details of some tech I'm not actually interested in in order to get an auxiliary feature that I want, and there's orders of magnitude less of that now, and then there are the projects and programs that simply would never exist at all if not for this new mechanical help in the earliest stages, and that's fun - it's a lot of variables to add up and it's all in flux. Like the French Revolution, it's too soon to tell! - https://quoteinvestigator.com/2025/04/02/early-tell/)
by anildash | 2026-01-10 01:07:31+00:00
I _don't_ think it was just ego. I think it was a smart strategy because formal standardization tends to bring in complexity, and just letting folks go off on their own and document their own usage (or "flavors") ends up being Good Enough in actual practice. It sucks from a standpoint of what I personally find satisfying, to be clear. But based on what I've seen over the last 20+ years, it is the strategy that is much less likely to yield a format that gets captured by giant companies that own a hyper-corporate standardization process that eventually gets enshittified.
by baby | 2026-01-10 01:07:49+00:00
The Caltrain sucks though because taking a car is so much more fast/practical. I must have taken it once in 5y because it's just so far out in the city and not easy to access (and then super slow).

People in Europe take trains because it's a better alternative than driving!

Make subways land right in the train station in SF, then make the train faster, then you have something useful.

On the other hand I agree with the premise of the article. If you have high mobility in a state, the state will become reacher. Doesn't make sense to wait for national trains to be a thing, make sure people can easily move across your state without having to rely on having a car.
by westurner | 2026-01-10 01:07:58+00:00
> "We've shown that bilayer graphene almost certainly hosts particles that are non-Abelian anyons," concludes Ronen. "The next step is to directly observe the 'memory' of a non-Abelian anyon system, in other words, to measure how each order of particle exchanges leaves a unique signature in the wave function.

ScholarlyArticle: "Aharonov–Bohm interference in even-denominator fractional quantum Hall states" (2025) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09891-2
by JohnMakin | 2026-01-10 01:08:13+00:00
The GP comment was appealing to their own authority in a condescending way, I feel the tone was matched, but thanks for the feedback.

What you’re saying is true, although you can do simple blocks on user agent + geo ip alone and accomplish blocking a majority of bots anyway without captcha - but I’ll digress - that is not the topic of discussion. I’m not at all arguing that CAPTCHA doesn’t stop bot traffic - in fact my first comment says the opposite. Most bot traffic is extremely “dumb.” A mistake people make, which the gp comment seemed to, is that it stops bots dead.
by lovich | 2026-01-10 01:08:34+00:00
Edit: Realized I should have checked before typing up a response. This is an 18 day old account pushing lies and propaganda. Were wasting our time on bots again

> ...that lead to brainwashing of Charlie Kirk's shooter.

Oh, you have evidence of his political views now? Last I saw members of the admin were declaring them an antifa trans super soldier until it came out that he was a mormon from a conservative family which muddied the water and suddenly they didn't want to talk about it anymore.

If you want to make a claim about far left echo chambers you should reference a group like the Zizians.

> It's funny you say this when the BBC in the example from your first point was caught cutting and splicing Trump's Jan-6 speech to make a fake statement he never said[1] and is now facing defamation. Biased and coopted legacy media institutions like the BBC are the enemy here and why X is growing everywhere.

Ah the video from the speech that was edit to make it seem like he called for violence on J6 instead of the full length speech, where he called for violence on J6.
by D-Machine | 2026-01-10 01:08:44+00:00
The "sequential treatment" or "tailored treatment" approach is at least plausible and what is done in practice, yes, if the prescribing doctor is good, and if this is feasible for the patient.

However, since this takes time, and most depression is temporary, it is hard to know if you really are tailoring the medication to the person in many cases, or it has just been long enough you are seeing regression to the mean (or a placebo response, which is still strong even in treatment-resistant depression https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...).

There aren't really any double-blinded or even just properly placebo-controlled / no-treatment controlled studies to test this, but the closest thing to looking at the sequential approach also doesn't find very impressive results (https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/13/7/e063095.abstract).

I do believe the drugs help some people, and almost certainly take some experimentation / tailoring. The average effects are just very weak.
by falcor84 | 2026-01-10 01:09:26+00:00
> Any talk of "AGI" is, as always, ridiculous.

How did you arrive at "ridiculous"? What we're seeing here is incredible progress over what we had a year ago. Even ARC-AGI-2 is now at over 50%. Given that this sort of process is also being applied to AI development itself, it's really not clear to me that humans would be a valuable component in knowledge work for much longer.
by ksec | 2026-01-10 01:09:29+00:00
This, and it is already happening in as we speak. London, Hong Kong, South Korea ( a little different but all the same ) Vancouver, Sydney. Basically anywhere you see housing bubble.

The trigger of re-evaluation also hurts banks's balance sheet. Crediting Rating agency, a whole lots of other financial institution. i.e Their interest is to not let it fall.
by perching_aix | 2026-01-10 01:09:33+00:00
Thank you, I'll try to keep it in mind. I'll admit that the curtness of my original question was not just you misreading it, but it did (also) come from a place of genuine confusion.

For what it's worth, it's not even that I don't see merit to their points. I'm just unable to trust that they're being genuine, not the least for how they conduct themselves (which I only fault them for so much).

Sadly, I'm not able to pitch any systematic solutions.
by Spooky23 | 2026-01-10 01:10:07+00:00
Huh? MS did ok in the nascent consumer market. RIM owned commercial, completely.

I had an iPaq in 2004 when we got married. It was like living in the future, where the future was a scaled down Windows 98 box. We took a one month road trip and was able to Priceline hotels on the road as we explored. Amazing device but not an iPhone.

Ballmer was so butthurt about iPhone he would berate people who appeared before him with one. As a customer, my boss and I were invited to a meeting with high level Microsoft people and asked to not carry iPhones out of respect.
by ta9000 | 2026-01-10 01:10:14+00:00
> The NUCLEAR threat regarding the 2026 Winter Olympics (Milano-Cortina) is the real leverage here. He’s bypassing the regulator and putting a gun to the government’s head regarding national prestige and infrastructure security.

Kind of wild that a private company has that kind of power, both in terms of being one of the few that can offer this service and they can make threats at this level.
by paulryanrogers | 2026-01-10 01:10:44+00:00
The list of things I must do is large and growing. Much of it outside my control. Yes, I could sell the house but rent is quite high. Yes, I could divorce the wife but that actually makes for more work. Yes, I could abandon the children but I've grown attached; and that's only legal after finding someone else willing to adopt them and a judge willing to approve it. Yes, I could deny any help with the elderly parents on both sides of the family but that seems extreme and carries a social cost. Yes, I could spend a few decades trying to cure the medical issues I've collected but that leaves little time for anything mentioned earlier.

Then there are the things I'd like to do.
by baby | 2026-01-10 01:12:26+00:00
I think we also approach exercise the wrong way. And IMO this is true with sleep too (which also impacts depression). We're using the wrong metrics.

The most important thing to get started with working out is just to start doing some exercise. You can start on one push up a day or something. It's all about creating momentum and habit.

Once you do it, then you can increase the time and the intensity and optimize exercise and all. But doing sport should be about doing one push up a day and thats it. About starting as slow as you can.

Sleep is the same in that we try to sleep as much as we can, and get as much REM and deep sleep, and these are not the right metrics for most people. The most important is just to go to bed and wake up at the same time everyday. That's it.

People are obsessed with trying to go to sleep at some point in time. Don't. Go to sleep when you're tired, wake up sleep deprived at the right time, the next evening it'll be easier to sleep at the right time
by dang | 2026-01-10 01:12:42+00:00
I think Pete's article last year made a good case for regarding this as the "horseless carriage" stage, i.e. growing pains around how to use a new technology effectively.

AI Horseless Carriages - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43773813 - April 2025 (478 comments)

Or maybe it's analogous to the skeuomorphic phase of desktop software. Clumsy application of previous paradigm to new one; new wine in old bottles; etc.
by tombert | 2026-01-10 01:12:50+00:00
> 3. We need to protect our IP. Then release it under a copyleft license.

No affiliation with Kagi, but I think you're dreaming if this actually would make a difference.

How many times has GPL'd software successfully been argued in court? Maybe four or five? Considering how many millions of software packages exist and how hard it would be to prove enough to bring a lawsuit/discovery request, I would be extremely surprised if there aren't thousands of GPL violations out in the wild that never go to court. I remember the source code to Spongebob Squarepants Supersponge violated the GPL [1], and that wasn't discovered for decades.

I am mostly ok with FOSS, and I don't love the idea of using a fully proprietary browser either, and I am probably not going to use Orion on Linux, but I don't think it's inherently wrong for them to want to keep any secret sauce close to their chest.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20129285
by dannyobrien | 2026-01-10 01:13:33+00:00
For those in the thread worrying that KK may have been mooching off people, and would not reciprocate: many years ago, I opened up our back yard for people who wanted to come to O'Reilly's Emerging Tech conference, but could not afford the sky-high hotel prices in Silicon Valley (this was before AirBnB or couchsurfing).

I was surprised when Kevin Kelly appeared. He'd been my (very distant) boss at Wired, was a published author of one of my favorite books, a very well-known figure and a smiling but disarmingly calm manner. He sat and amicably talked for hours with a yard full of people, many of whom have become some of my closet friends. Then, as the evening closed, he asked if he could sleep in my yard too. Others had brought tents, and burning men structures, and it had begun to rain. Kevin pulled out a camping sleeping bag from nowhere, struck out, and I saw him later, in the soaking, muddy garden, quietly curled up under someone's geodesic dome structure.

Decades later, after Covid, I mailed him out of the blue, and asked him for advice. He immediately remembered me, invited me to his home, and talked to me, again, for an hour or so, about AI, optimism, and how to change the world.

To be frank, I never emailed him thank you, and I still feel guilty about that, but now I feel like it was never needed or asked for. I may mail him anyway. Maybe there's a miracle or two still left in the day.
by cratermoon | 2026-01-10 01:13:46+00:00
Here "face mask" means the common surgical face mask ubiquitous in operating rooms,
and "respirator" does not refer to anything like a gas mask,
but in fact the humble masks "meeting FFP2/3 standards in the UK or N95 in the US".

In other words,
the kinds of masks that everyone wanting to protect themselves and others from COVID transmission have been wearing for six years now.
by SamDc73 | 2026-01-10 01:14:02+00:00
The electric trains are a bit faster, but still slower than something like BART.

My main issues with Caltrain are the cost (public transit shouldn’t be more expensive than driving) and the schedule: depending on the station, missing a train can mean waiting 30-60 minutes.

also the Peninsula isn’t really built around trains. I still have to drive 5-10 minutes just to get to the station, then wait, then ride at that point it’s easier to just drive the whole way. If I lived within walking distance, I might use the train way more.
by xiphias2 | 2026-01-10 01:14:24+00:00
First congrats!

Sometimes when I'm using new LLMs I'm not sure if it’s a step forward or just benchmark hacking, but formalized math results always show that the progress is real and huge.

When do you think Harmonic will reach formalizing most (even hard) human written math?

I saw an interview with Christian Szegedy (your competitor I guess) that he believes it will be this year.
by zamadatix | 2026-01-10 01:15:50+00:00
Yeah, and that leads to the DRM'd content in YouTube (like Movies & TV) not working for me in Kagi on Linux. Unless you're saying I've done something wrong and it really is working for you... in which case I may have some tinkering to do to find out what I did to break it :D.

One correction to my message above: apparently Chrome on Windows is still 720p for Netflix, it was Edge that had 4k support. Or you can install the Netflix App on Windows too.
by raincole | 2026-01-10 01:16:21+00:00
Computers themselves replaced computers (yeah, a job title). Your medical software certainly automatizes someone else's job, otherwise no one will pay you to write them. You just don't care about them.

Or you do, but you believe it's worth it because your software helped more patients, or improved the overall efficiency and therefore created more demand and jobs - a belief many pro-AI people hold as well.
by pvillano | 2026-01-10 01:17:39+00:00
Is anyone working on applying these techniques to formal verification of software?

My limited understanding of Rust is that it applies a fixed set of rules to guarantee memory safety. The rules are somewhat simple and limiting, for ease of understanding and implementation, but also because of undecidability.

Programmers run into situations where they know that their code won't cause memory errors, but it doesn't follow the rules. Wouldn't it be cool if something like Aristotle was integrated into the compiler? Any code for which a proof of correctness could be written would pass/compile, without having to add more and more rules
by jedberg | 2026-01-10 01:18:02+00:00
> On the flip side, I find it shocking that ridership is still only 60% of pre-pandemic levels.

It makes a lot of sense. Many companies went full remote during the pandemic and stayed that way, or if they went in person, it's only 60% of the time or less. And a lot of people left the area during the pandemic, and those that are returning are coming back to SF, not the suburbs.

I used to take the train every day for years, but I've only been on it once or twice since the pandemic.

To put it in startup terms, the TAM for ridership shrank considerably. They may very well be capturing a greater amount of the TAM than before the pandemic.
by EdNutting | 2026-01-10 01:18:28+00:00
iPhone 14 in Firefox (still Safari under the hood of course) - no silent mode, no sleep/DND/etc., volume turned up (confirmed via other browser tab playing YT) - and still no sound from the app.

I’m guessing you may be using a JavaScript API which possibly doesn’t exist in whatever version of Safari (fuck Safari…fuck Apple’s control of browsers…etc).

My advice: Use the free tier of BrowserStack to test basic functionality on a wide range of devices (assuming they still have a free offering…). Also check “caniuse” to see if all the JS APIs you’re using are available on a wide range of devices.
by zozbot234 | 2026-01-10 01:18:29+00:00
We can't really have across-the-board formalization of the math literature without getting the basics done first (including the whole undergrad curriculum) which is what the mathlib folks are working on. It will in fact be interesting to see if AI can meaningfully speed up that work (although they seem to be bottlenecked on review and merging at the moment, not new contribs per se. So a "coding" AI workflow may be a bit of a closer fit.)
by bunnybomb2 | 2026-01-10 01:19:01+00:00
The entirety of this thread is people thinking life is easy. Kill yourself or get over it, and I mean in a sentimental way.. (Not literally)

The only thing that helped my depression, apathy and executive dysfunction was realizing I was going to rot anyways, I was never going to be happy, so I may as well start the startup, go on runs, and succeed.

Let go of the expectation you will want to/be in the mood or feel good from it

Life is not chocolate malts and gummy bears
by vercaemert | 2026-01-10 01:19:32+00:00
yeah, well said

i like what software can do, i don't like writing it

i can try to give the benefit of the doubt to people saying they don't see improvements (and assume there's just a communication breakdown)

i've personally built three poc tools that proved my ideas didn't work and then tossed the poc tools. ive had those ideas since i knew how to program, i just didn't have the time and energy to see them through.
by jjtheblunt | 2026-01-10 01:20:37+00:00
agreed, with an addendum : we have rescue cats too, and they too are like "nope, off the computer, time to play".

And perhaps because we have both, they all will play games together (and with us humans): the cats are like dogs who can do gymnastics.

the cats will walk outside on leashes but look annoyed and embarrassed. however our feral ancestry dog is like having Richard Simmons on meth...and makes me amused at people who are like "a border collie is a handful". i'm like tell it to her paw.
by 0xy | 2026-01-10 01:20:54+00:00
Certainly. The UK routinely and repeatedly jails people for protected speech, including speech protected by international standards. [1] [2] [3]

[1] https://freedomhouse.org/country/united-kingdom/freedom-net/...

[2] "Internet freedom declined in the United Kingdom during the coverage period due to a reported increase in criminal charges for online speech"

[3] "A separate report from The Telegraph found that 292 people had been charged for spreading false information and “threatening communications” under the Online Safety Act between when it came into effect in 2023 and February 2025. Some civil liberties groups expressed concern that the laws were being applied broadly and in some cases punished speech protected by international human rights standards (C3)."
by 0xy | 2026-01-10 01:21:26+00:00
https://freedomhouse.org/country/united-kingdom/freedom-net/...

"Internet freedom declined in the United Kingdom during the coverage period due to a reported increase in criminal charges for online speech"

"A separate report from The Telegraph found that 292 people had been charged for spreading false information and “threatening communications” under the Online Safety Act between when it came into effect in 2023 and February 2025. Some civil liberties groups expressed concern that the laws were being applied broadly and in some cases punished speech protected by international human rights standards (C3)."
by kazinator | 2026-01-10 01:23:00+00:00
Nope; worse is better is about simplicity versus correctness tradeoffs. I've read the P. Gabriel essay enough times that I can rely on my memory of it.

Like whether to hide interrupted system calls, or punt the responsibility for restarting them to the application. (That "PC loser-ing problem" example used in the essay).

Between C++ and Java, it is hard call, but I would say that the Java ecosystem values correctness more than C++.

I don't mean valuing the correctness of a delivered application, but valuing the contribution of the language stack to that goal.

Java manages memory, and defines the order of evaluation of operands in an expression. Need we go on? Java also has a security story for loading compiled code. There is no sandbox model of any kind in C++.
by jcranmer | 2026-01-10 01:23:14+00:00
The main trunk lines are in Long Island are about 3-4 miles apart. Northwest of around Cupertino or so, the mountains edge too close to the bay shoreline for you to make a second trunk line viable. Your best bet would be plonking a line around about 85, but the right-of-way doesn't exist to actually hook that line up to the existing line in any useful way.

And outside of that, basically everything you'd consider plonking another path already exists with some service: BART runs up the east shore of the bay, as it does west of San Bruno Mountain. You have two mountain crossings covered by BART and one by ACE. The main missing things are curving BART back into San Jose and reactivating the Dumbarton Bridge.
by Spooky23 | 2026-01-10 01:23:20+00:00
One of my teams runs a Microsoft product that’s been in place for a long time and has been an amazing product falling on hard times.

We had a service impacting issue and went through the typical Premier/Unified support gaslighting exercise. We finally escalated it to a batshit level and got to a real engineer. The dude was about the retire, was fed up, and knew exactly what was wrong. He claimed to have a fix pending approval that had been held up by his chain. We ended up getting a hot fix after a lot of drama with account leadership.

I was grateful to the guy, but kind of shocked that morale in that group was so bad. I used to be acquainted with a few people there over the years and every single one of them was either laid off or left. I never heard of anything like that at Microsoft at all, especially as a customer.
by gus_massa | 2026-01-10 01:24:22+00:00
From your comment:

> referred to as "devil's breath", blown into the face

I've read similar reports in email chains in the 2000. Like the guy that touched a piece of paper and a few seconds later collapsed. I think that some local newspaper even published it, without evidence.

From the NYT article:

> She carried it from a restaurant counter to their table.
He had two spoonfuls, Mr. Valdez, 31, said. “And that’s the last thing I remember.”

> He drank a pink soda, he said in a video, and later awoke to find his wallet and phone gone.

> One 42-year-old man from New York recalled being drugged by a Tinder date who served him a rum and coke that he said knocked him out for 24 hours.

These case makes more sense. There are a few recent similar cases here, and many buildings have security cameras on the front door, so they get a nice video of the escaping thieves.