MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Frotag | 2026-01-09 00:48:29+00:00
IME there's two main reasons to keep notes: (1) to save time in the future or (2) to force myself to think about something.

(2) often happens after I read fiction, usually to figure out why I liked / disliked the story. These notes are mostly disposable but occasionally useful when the book comes up in conversation years later.

On the other hand, (1) is more like notes on how-tos (recipes, software setup), written with the intention of needing it again. But this is pretty infrequent, maybe a quick skim every year or two. So even these don't need to be super thorough.

> feels wrong in a way I can't articulate.

Anyways, all that to say I think the "wtf-am-i-doing-with-my-life" feeling comes from the realization that I'm wasting hours on a document that'll save future me maybe 5 minutes at best.

...Which is how I feel about NixOS after spending most of this week tinkering / tracking down documentation. Might be worth it if I had a fleet of machines to maintain but probably not worth it for my laptop + server, even if I did yearly reinstalls.
by FireBeyond | 2026-01-09 00:49:29+00:00
So true.

There was a vote about a measure to change up some tenant's rights in the city code (strengthening them).

It passed 12-1. One dissenter, a Mrs [can't remember] Greene.

Didn't think anything of it until someone pointed out "Oh, you mean [can't remember] Greene, wife of Jim Greene, owner and CEO of the second largest PM company in the County, Greene Property Management?"

"Someone should ask her whether she's representing her constituents or her husband and his clients."
by _heimdall | 2026-01-09 00:49:35+00:00
The two points you raise with regards to why vaccine or similar studies may be treat special, it doesn't replace the loss of data when a double blind study with a control or make estimates based on modelling indicate anything more than correlation.

We may broadly agree that submitting a control group to a placebo treatment for a particular disease is immoral, but that doesn't mean such a study isn't necessary to prove out the efficacy or safety of the treatment. As for modelling, for example trying to estimate FN and FP, it can only ever indicate correlation at best and will never indicate likely causation.
by dekhn | 2026-01-09 00:49:53+00:00
At the time I first got involved, Google Health was still a thing but it was clear it was not going to be successful. I felt that Google's ML (even early on, they had tons of ML, just most of it wasn't known externally) was going to be very useful for genomics and drug discovery.

Verily was its own thing that was unrelated to my push in Research. I think Larry Page knew Andy Conrad and told him he could do what he wanted (which led to Verily focusing on medical devices, which is a terrible industry to be in). They've pivoted a few times without much real success. My hope is that Alphabet sheds Verily (they've been trying) or just admit it's a failure and shut it down. It was just never run with the right philosophy.

Calico... that came out of Larry and Art Levinson- I guess Larry thought Art knew the secret to living forever and by giving him billions Art would come up with the solution to immortality and Larry would have first access to it. But they were ultra-secretive and tried to have the best of both worlds- full access to Google3 and borg, but without Googlers having any access to calico. That, combined with a number of other things, have led Calico to just be a quiet and not very interesting research group. I expect it to disband at some point.

Isomorphic is more recent than any of the stuff I was involved in, and is DeepMind (specifically Demis's) attempt to commercialize their work with AlphaFold. However, everybody in the field knows the strategy of 1. solve protein structure prediction 2. ??? 3. design profitable drugs and get them approved... is not a great strategy because protein structure determine has not ever been the rate limiting step to identifying targets and developing leads. I agree I don't really see a future for it but Demis has at least 10-20 years of runway before he has to take off or bail.

All of my suggestions were just for Google to do research with the community and publish it (especially the model code and weights, but also pipelines to prep data for learning) and turn a few of the ideas into products in Google Cloud(that's how Google Genomics was born... I was talking to Jeff, and he said "if we compress the genome enough, we can store it all on Flash, which would make search fast but cheap, and we'd have a useful product for genomics analysis companies"). IMHO Jeff's team substantially achieved their goals before the DeepMind stuff- DeepVariant was well-respected, but almost every person who worked on it and related systems got burned out and moved on.

What is success, anyway, in biotech? Is it making a drug that makes a lot of money? What if you do that, but it costs so much that people go bankrupt taking it? Or is the goal to make substantial improvements to the technology, potentially discovering key biological details that truly improve people's lives? Many would say that becoming a successful real estate ownership company is the real destination of any successful pharma/biotech.
by llmslave2 | 2026-01-09 00:49:55+00:00
If you point a spectrometer at the sky during the day in non-cloudy conditions you will observe readings peaking in the roughly 450-495 nanometers range, which crazily enough, is the definition of the colour blue [0]!

Then you can research Rayleigh scattering, of which consists of a large body of academic research not just confirming that the sky is blue, but also why.

But hey, if you want to claim the sky is red because you feel like it is, go ahead. Most people won't take you seriously just like they don't take similar claims about AI seriously.

[0] https://scied.ucar.edu/image/wavelength-blue-and-red-light-i...
by Bostonian | 2026-01-09 00:50:33+00:00
'In robotics, as in so many things, small is beautiful. The trouble is that making them really small is very nearly impossible. “Building robots that operate independently at sizes below one millimeter is incredibly difficult,” says roboticist Marc Miskin at the University of Pennsylvania. “The field has essentially been stuck on this problem for 40 years.”

Now researchers at Penn and the University of Michigan have created the world’s smallest, fully programmable, autonomous robots, packing significant capacities into a device smaller than a grain of salt. These are parsimonious little things, barely visible to the naked eye yet able to sense their environment, respond to it and move around in complex patterns. As described in a new paper in the journal Science Robotics, they run on infinitesimally small quantities of energy and gain power from light.

“These are the smallest programmable autonomous robots that I have seen,” said Kevin Chen, an MIT roboticist who wasn’t involved. “This is an exciting advance for the nanorobotics community.”

Miskin’s team at Penn provided the propulsion system. The robots work in liquid environments and move by generating a tiny electrical field that pushes on nearby water molecules. Lacking tiny arms and legs, which are hard to make and easy to break, the robots are quite durable and can swim for months as long as they have an energy source.'

...
by strken | 2026-01-09 00:50:42+00:00
I have an issue with the "code is a liability" framing. Complexity and lack of maintainability are the ultimate liabilities behind it. Code is often the least worst alternative for solving a given problem compare to unstructured data in spreadsheets, no-code tools without a version history, webs of Zapier hooks, opaque business processes that are different for every office, or whatever other alternatives exist.

It's a good message for software engineers, who have the context to understand when to take on that liability anyway, but it can lead other job functions into being too trigger-happy on solutions that cause all the same problems with none of the mitigating factors of code.
by bodge5000 | 2026-01-09 00:50:43+00:00
There are a lot of comments to the tune of "why does a CSS library need 1m+ (or any money at all) to survive?". I'm no expert on this kind of thing, but Tailwind 0.1.0 first released on November 2017. Since then, there's been continual improvements up until last month with 4.1.18, totalling 8 years of dev work. A simple CSS library wouldn't have much need to go past 0.1.0, certainly not 1.0.0. Clearly tailwind did, which would imply there's more than meets the eye.

But you can't have it both ways, it can't be just a simple CSS library that doesn't need that much money, but also expect a decade of work+ on it. After all, this originally stems from the fact that a PR attempting to improve something didn't get merged in; a technically finished project would have the same problem, but that would be the rule rather than the exception.
by steele | 2026-01-09 00:51:15+00:00
No one is making you engage with uninteresting content anymore than they are making you moan about the quality/actionability of discourse -- or complain about anything for that matter. In fact, you can even click the more link to see the 2nd page to find your favorite form of escapism while the grownups talk.

You saw a thing, it made you feel feelings, you decided you wish it wasn't presented to you, and you interpreted that scenario as a call to action to urinate in the swimming pool because you didn't like the temperature of the water.
by rainsford | 2026-01-09 00:52:52+00:00
> If the ABA misbehaves, the people of Texas can do... nothing.

That seems like a very interesting perspective to offer in response to an article about the government of Texas stripping the ABA of the ability to approve law schools.

While it's not obvious this action was in response to any particular misbehavior by the ABA, clearly the possibility of such action would serve as an accountability mechanism that offered recourse to the good people of Texas in the event of any misbehavior.
by dgacmu | 2026-01-09 00:54:31+00:00
Oh man, that's funny to see one of my grad school class projects in that list. Takes me back. :-)

From that experience: The LLM is likely to do drastically better. Most of the prior work, mine included, took a genetic algorithm approach, but an LLM is more likely to make coherent multi-instruction modifications.

It's a shame they didn't compare against some of the standard core wars benchmarks as a way to facilitate comparisons to prior work, though. Makes it hard to say that they're better for sure. https://corewar.co.uk/bench.htm
by endtime | 2026-01-09 00:54:38+00:00
You're wrong I'm so many ways it's hard to know where to start, but one obvious one is that the teenager who was run over was not an anti-war protestor, he was protesting a potential change to exemption from military conscription for the ultra-Orthodox. Not a peacenik. Haredi conscription is a contentious issue but framing it as anti-war is disingenuous.
by rayiner | 2026-01-09 00:55:01+00:00
> Doesn't feel like "small government" to me.

The "small government" GOP was a mistaken detour of the late 20th century that died precisely because it was susceptible to stupid ideas like outsourcing a core government function--accreditation in a profession deeply intertwined with government itself--to private parties. Lincoln's GOP was not a small government party, and neither is Trump's GOP.
by alfiedotwtf | 2026-01-09 00:56:25+00:00
> superloops

I’ve been doing async non-blocking code for decades, but this is the first time I e seen that word used? I’m assume you’re meaning something like one big ass select!() or is this something else?

> IMO one of the big reasons Arduino stayed firmly hobbyist tier is because it was almost entirely stuck in a single-threaded blocking mindset and everything kind of fell apart as soon as you had to do two things at once.

This. Having to do something like this recently, in C, was not fun and end up writing your own event management layer (and if you’re me, poorly).
by johnfn | 2026-01-09 00:56:53+00:00
The burden you are placing is too high here. Do you demand controlled trials for everything you do or else you refuse to use it or accept that other people might see productivity gains? Do you demand studies showing that static typing is productive? Syntax highlighting? IDEs or Vim? Unit testing? Whatever language you use?

Obviously not? It would be absurd to walk into a thread about Rust and say “you are all morons, Rust doesn’t increase your productivity and unless you can produce a study proving it does then your own personal anecdotes are worthless.”

Why the increased demand for rigor when it comes to AI specifically?
by rcxdude | 2026-01-09 00:57:16+00:00
To me it's that the information density of video or audio content can vary wildly, much like writing. But while with writing your speed of processing it can adjust more or less automatically with how much you need to think about it what you're reading, with video and audio you need to take positive steps to do the same thing. And in general most people most people can listen faster than most people can speak, much like most people can read faster than most people can write. But then I can understand the impetus to just plow through information like quantity is all that matters, so if you're overdoing that it makes sense to try to pump the brakes.
by Jigsy | 2026-01-09 00:57:44+00:00
It's horrifying how many people in the UK support blocking Twitter because the AI tool is being misused. And based on an article I saw about one of the Japanese princesses, it was basically "@grok undress her" rather than elaborate prompts people seem to believe?

Given that the UK is trying to block 4chan via the scenic route, this, in my opinion, just gives the government incentive to block any website in the future and throw it back in the faces of the population.

"We're blocking $WEBSITE for $THINK_OF_THE_CHILDREN. You don't get to complain because you supported blocking Twitter, so..."
by esbranson | 2026-01-09 00:58:22+00:00
It never has. The labor force participation rate for 25-54 year-olds is a better metric for such things.[1] Last time it was this high was 1990s through 2002. (Before that, they were never this high.)

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060
by rented_mule | 2026-01-09 00:58:48+00:00
My favorite code editor is where I write anything longer than a sentence or two, including this comment. Then I paste the result into its final destination. Given that I tend to heavily edit my writing, the muscle memory I've built up in that editor helps me focus more deeply on my writing. So I guess I'll look pretty suspicious? Let me add an em-dash — everyone knows that real humans don't use those. ;-)
by Nextgrid | 2026-01-09 00:59:45+00:00
Well the idea is that you determine the intention of the “IP issue” and act accordingly:

If there is an actual IP issue then even waiting after you’re out of the company will not resolve said IP issue. If you’re using your employer’s IP then waiting is unlikely (both legally and especially morally) to magically resolve it - it’s still your employer’s IP.

If it’s just to avoid red tape but otherwise the IP is yours and has nothing to do with your employer (aka you could’ve done it just as well even if you weren’t at your current employer) then it should be fine and you’re just taking a shortcut to save time on both sides.

Basically, if your employer is a vendor of WebDAV libraries, yeah of course there’s a (legal, or a least moral) issue. If not, then all fine.

(Obviously this is just opinion and not legal advice - but legality only matters if they can figure out who did it ;)
by bodge5000 | 2026-01-09 01:00:39+00:00
> Also, you have to learn it right now, because otherwise it will be too late and you will be outdated, even though it is improving very fast allegedly.

This in general is a really weird behaviour that I come across a lot, I can't really explain it. For example, I use Python quite a lot and really like it. There are plenty of people who don't like Python, and I might disagree with them, but I'm not gonna push them to use it ("or else..."), because why would I care? Meanwhile, I'm often told I MUST start using AI ("or else..."), manual programming is dead, etc... Often by people who aren't exactly saying it kindly, which kind of throws out the "I'm just saying it out of concern for you" argument.
by MobiusHorizons | 2026-01-09 01:00:45+00:00
Yes, that's correct. The interface limits what guarantees the caller has about the type without runtime introspection. I don't think that really makes it any harder to handle expected error conditions though, since type assertions return a boolean. eg:

if myErr, ok := err.(MyError); ok {
// handle MyError case
}
...

But you should always expect that there could be errors you don't expect to exhaustively handle with special logic.
by keeda | 2026-01-09 01:01:11+00:00
Actually, quite the opposite. It seems any positive comment about AI coding gets at least one response along the lines of "Oh yeah, show me proof" or "Where is the deluge of vibe-coded apps?"

For my part, I point out there are a significant number of studies showing clear productivity boosts in coding, but those threads typically devolve to "How can they prove anything when we don't even know how to measure developer productivity?" (The better studies address this question and tackle it well-designed statistical methods such as randomly controlled trials.)

Also, there are some pretty large Github repos out there that are mostly vibe-coded. Like, Steve Yegge got to something like 350 thousand LoC in 6 weeks on Beads. I've not looked at it closely, but the commit history is there for anyone to see: https://github.com/steveyegge/beads/commits/main/
by bangonkeyboard | 2026-01-09 01:01:30+00:00
> Apple now continues to support older operating systems with security updates, allowing users to remain on iOS 18 without immediate pressure to update or forfeit critical patches. This makes it much easier for users to remain on older software.

This is an incredible untruth to end this article on. MacRumors' own reporting (https://www.macrumors.com/2025/12/19/ios-18-forced-ios-26-up...) showed Apple denying the existing iOS 18.7.3 security update to iPhones, and then shutting down the beta channel workaround the same day that MR drew attention to it, leaving iOS 26.2 as the only option.
by llmslave2 | 2026-01-09 01:01:53+00:00
Do you just believe everything everybody says? No quantifiable data required, as long as someone somewhere says it it must be true?

One of the reasons software is in decline is because it's all vibes, nobody has much interest in conducting research to find anything out. It doesn't have to be some double blinded peer reviewed meta analysis, the bar can still be low, it just should be higher than "I feel like"...
by lossolo | 2026-01-09 01:02:45+00:00
Iran was once democracy too, but in 1953, United States (CIA) and the United Kingdom (MI6) orchestrated a coup that overthrew Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister.

Mosaddegh had nationalized Iran's oil industry in 1951, which had been controlled by the British owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now BP).

So in August 1953, the CIA and MI6 organized protests, bribed military officers and politicians, and spread propaganda to destabilize Mosaddegh's government.

Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who had fled during the initial coup attempt, returned and ruled as an authoritarian monarch with strong US backing until the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

In 2013, the CIA released declassified documents confirming American involvement, and in 2000, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright acknowledged the US role, calling it a "setback for democratic government" in Iran.
by alfalfasprout | 2026-01-09 01:02:48+00:00
TBH a lot of this is subjective. Including productivity.

My other gripe too is productivity is only one aspect of software engineering. You also need to look at tech debt introduced and other aspects of quality.

Productivity also takes many forms so it's not super easy to quantify.

Finally... software engineers are far from being created equal. VERY big difference in what someone doing CRUD apps for a small web dev shop does vs. eg; an infra engineer in big tech.
by zamadatix | 2026-01-09 01:02:50+00:00
We use a crap ton of calls/sms/data over the same period, expect decent QoS on well performing bands, and have a TON more customer management and onboarding overheard over the same 5-10 year period. Meanwhile devices with embedded telemetry might get a plan as low as 500 MB total over 10 years and have hundreds of thousands in a single sale with no customer support overheard, SIM reactivation on new phones, etc.

Are you getting as good a deal? No, probably not, but trying to compare them to the cellular service you pay for is problematic in many ways. You too can get a $14 10 year prepaid plan from 1NCE for your Pi to send sensor telemetry from on occasion if that's what you want instead of "normal" cell service.

I wouldn't mind companies having to disclose everything and anything about the telemetry they collect though. Just putting the dollar figure on it is unlikely to shock anyone as it is low for you to do the same thing too.
by isodev | 2026-01-09 01:03:48+00:00
I remember when dating apps had to take it upon themselves to never show explicit photos (even privately shared in DMs) or get removed from the store. That too is user generated content, right?

As for X, all one has to do is stumble on the right hashtag to reveal not only spicy content and csam, but also racist and abusive flavours of porn. Something to circle back to the next time Apple claims the walled garden is there to protect users.
by shihab | 2026-01-09 01:03:48+00:00
If you are from ML/Data science world, the analogy that finally unlocked FFT for me is feature size reduction using Principal Component Analysis. In both cases, you project data to a new "better" co-ordinate system ("time to frequency domain"), filter out the basis vectors that have low variance ("ignore high-frequency waves"), and project data back to real space from those truncated dimension ("Ifft: inverse transform to time domain").

Of course some differences exist (e.g. basis vectors are fixed in FFT, unlike PCA).
by gwern | 2026-01-09 01:04:11+00:00
No, but I haven't been following the space. (I suspect that with Claude Code-level coding agents, you should be able to do something amazing that thoroughly obsoletes Obsidian/Roam/org-mode, but I don't actually know of anything.)

I've been focused on creative writing, with poetry as my test case, to see what the bottlenecks are to truly amplifying myself through LLMs (as opposed to helping my boss automate away my job or spamming the Internet more efficiently).

I find that frontier LLMs are now there and now I can prompt for genuinely good poetry with LLMs. See https://hollisrobbinsanecdotal.substack.com/p/llm-poetry-and... / https://gwern.net/fiction/lab-animals and https://gwern.net/blog/2025/better-llm-writing

So maybe this year I can turn some attention back to PKMs and Quantified Self stuff...
by text0404 | 2026-01-09 01:04:17+00:00
Interesting that this user "EthanAsher"'s account was created 3 months / 90 days ago with a single submission and no comments. Another account which recently posted more material [1] from this Saudi-funded mouthpiece (iranintl.com [2]) was the user "ArniThordarson" [3] (FirstnameLastname) whose account was created 89 days ago and also has no other submissions or comments.

Illuminating to see how astroturfing campaigns get by the mods on HN.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46548190

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_International#Editorial_i...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ArniThordarson
by oofbey | 2026-01-09 01:04:31+00:00
It’s nonsensical to call it “zero shot” when a sample of the voice is provided. The term “zero shot cloning” implies you have some representation of the voice from another domain - e.g. a text description of the voice. What they’re doing is ABSOLUTELY one shot cloning. I don’t care if lots of STT folks use the term this way, they’re wrong.