MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by RogerL | 2026-01-21 14:29:55+00:00
Function is well defined. Takes an input, has a one to one mapping to the output. I don't like when people ignore definitions, because then what they say is not true (italics to juxtapose it against your [is] true). It's not framing, its ignoring the definition.

As I wrote in a different post, a set is not a function. It takes no input, it has no mapping, and so on. rand() is not a function in the math sense - its a nothing to anything mapping.

Modern math is beautiful, nearly everything is defined as structures built on top of sets, so i cannot really understand why you hate it (last paragraph). I say that not to argue preference, but to push back that people are disagreeing because of discomfort with mathematical structures. Building abstractions is sooo powerful and beautiful. But The structure is not the same as the things it is built from. A field is not an integer, though we certainly have fields of integers. But vectors are functions, even though we don't tend to think that way, and so are const arrays. It is not a discomfort with abstraction, it is a "discomfort" with ignoring definitions. No 1-1 mapping input to output on a defined domain and co-domain? Not a function.

Definitions are valuable, it what makes math works.
by ZeroGravitas | 2026-01-21 14:30:03+00:00
Evolution is an aggressively progressive idea for some people in the US.

So which specific ideas made you think "I'll vote for the rapist gameshow host?"

12 weeks of paid family leave? More solar power? Only government run prisons? Buying into Medicare at 55? Free in state tuition for families earning less than 125k?

That's what Gemini lists as her most progressive positions.
by diego_moita | 2026-01-21 14:30:12+00:00
Every country in the planet has skeletons in their closet.

Some of them, however, acknowledge it, accept and try to do their best to overcome it. Others don't.

Some examples: most Germans know and acknowledge the atrocities of Nazism; very few Japanese know of the Nanjing massacre. And how many Dutch know about the atrocities of the East Indian Company in Indonesia? How many Belgians know about the genocide in Congo? How many Portuguese know about the tragedy of the Atlantic Slave trade?

Canadians know about the cruelty against First Nations in their history and acknowledge it, few Americans do it. In parts of Latin America (e.g. Brazil), those atrocities keep happening even today. And no, we don't "supporting everything the US have done". From Vietnam to Iraq, we have lots of disagreements with American foreign policy.

This country is shaped by the escape of the loyalists, the war of 1812 and the 49th parallel. We are not Americans.
by johndhi | 2026-01-21 14:30:21+00:00
Sorry to be this person, but I don't really agree with the first sentence:

--> "Civic institutions—the rule of law, universities, and a free press—are the backbone of democratic life."

People are the backbone of our civilization. People who have good intentions and support one another. We don't NEED an FDA to function -- it's just a tool that has worked quite well for a long time for us.
by bluGill | 2026-01-21 14:30:40+00:00
That depends. If there is "someone" within 20 light years advanced enough to detect our signals we can establish communication and learn from each other - the 40 year round trip time means we can only ask long term questions, but just sending all of human knowledge, and them returning with their knowledge can be a big leg up for both (though sorting through all the things we already know will be a big effort). They may have solved fusion, while we are still 50 years away, meanwhile we have solved something else they are interested in but haven't solved yet.

20 light years is about the farthest useful communication can be established. The farther out things are the longer the round trip and thus the more likely we have already figured things out by the time we get their answer. It would still be interesting to get a response, but our (and we assume their) civilization is moving too fast for much knowledge sharing. Eventually with knowledge sharing you assume something is obvious that isn't and so you get another round trip. Watching an alien movie no matter who far away they are will be interesting (even if it is more a smell based or something that we don't think of)

There is no reason to think we will ever visit them, but we can do other things when they are close.

There are not many stars within 20 light years though. The Femi paradox doesn't exist at that distance, there just not enough stars to expect to find life that close.
by wolvoleo | 2026-01-21 14:30:47+00:00
Those things are as designed. This is good. We don't want "at-will" employment like in the US. We want to have rights as employees. We want to have social welfare. We want our free healthcare.

It's not a bug it's a feature. We don't want an American-style society. Current developments should be enough reason to understand why (and the understanding that Trump's backers are part of a huge group of people on the low side of the wealth gap). If anything we have too much of that already hence the rise of extreme right here too. It's a result of the austerity movements after the 2007 crash.

But this new regulation doesn't invalidate employee rights no. It's just about registration and incorporation.
by andsoitis | 2026-01-21 14:30:51+00:00
> As Canada is separating from the US, it is growing closer with China. This makes Canada a threat to the US. This makes the US a threat to Canada

But didn't you get the order of events precisely wrong?

Isn't it America who threatened Canada (become a state of the US)? Isn't America who threatened Canada with extreme tariffs? Etc.
by harimau777 | 2026-01-21 14:31:08+00:00
I'm not sure what you mean. The internet itself is new let alone widespread access to video sharing.

Part of the problem is that social media isn't social media anymore. Its an algorithmic feed that only occassionally shows content from people you're friends with. If Facebook went back to its early days when it was actually a communication tool, then I don't think you would see the same complaints about it.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-21 14:31:24+00:00
One element that might be working against Uber is its pathological aversion to letting passengers contact support.

The only way I’ve found to contact a human when a ride goes awry is to basically say an accident happened. That connects you with humans who can actually, sometimes, address your problem in a way the chatbot never can.

Uber’s refusal to fingerprint drivers betrays that they know they have lots of criminals on their rolls. But I wonder how many cases of rudeness by the driver got upgraded to sexual assault (which, to be clear, is a matter of personal discretion) because Uber went all in on its chatbots.
by stormcode | 2026-01-21 14:31:38+00:00
Does it work? Absolutely. It just depends how you use it and what for.

I had 12 legacy node apps running node 4, with jQuery front ends. Outdated dependencies and best practices all over. No build pipeline. No tests. Express 3. All of it worked but it's aging to the point of no return. And the upgrade work is boring, with very little ROI.

In a month, without writing any code, I've got them all upgraded to Node 22, with updated dependencies, removed jQuery completely, newer version of express, better logging, improved UI.

It's work that would have taken me a year of my free time and been soul crushing and annoying.

Did it with codex as a way of better learning the tooling. It felt more like playing a resource sim game than coding. Pretty enjoyable. Was able to work on multiple tasks at once while doing some other work.

It worked really well for that.
by defatigable | 2026-01-21 14:31:52+00:00
Interesting. What would make the workflow "agentic" in your mind? The AI implementing the task fully autonomously, never getting any human feedback?

To me "agentic" in this context essentially that the LLM has the ability to operate autonomously, so execute tools on my behalf, etc. So for example my coding agents will often run unit tests, run code generation tools, etc. I've even used my agents to fix issues with git pre-commit hooks, in which case they've operated in a loop, repeatedly trying to check in code and fixing errors they see in the output.

So in that sense they are theoretically capable of one-shot implementing any task I set them to, their quality is just not good enough yet to trust them to. But maybe you mean something different?
by rapatel0 | 2026-01-21 14:32:16+00:00
More social science academic nonsense.

Fun quotes from the paper
> I. Institutions Are Society’s
Superheroes: Institutions are essential for structuring complex human interactions and enabling stable, just, and prosperous societies.

> Institutions like higher education, medecine, and law inform the stable and predictable patterns of behavior within organizations such as schools, hospitals, and courts., respectively,, thereby reducing chaos and friction.

>Similarly, journalism, as an institution, commits to truth-telling as a common
purpose and performs that function through fact-checking and other
organizational roles and structures. Newspapers or other media sources lose
legitimacy when they fail to publish errata or publish lies as news.

> Attending physicians and hospital administrators may each individually possess specific knowledge, but it is together, within the practices and purposive work of hospitals, and through delegation, deference, and persistent reinforcement of evaluative practices, that they accomplish the purpose of the institution

> The second affordance of institutional doom is that AI systems short-
circuit institutional decisionmaking by delegating important moral choices to AI
developers.

>Admittedly, our institutions have been fragile and ineffective for some time.36 Slow and expensive institutions frustrate people and weaken societal trust and legitimacy.37 Fixes are necessary.

> The so-called U.S. “Department of Government Efficiency” (“DOGE”)
will be a textbook example of how the affordances of AI lead to institutional
rot. DOGE used AI to surveil government employees, target immigrants, and
combine and analyze federal data that had, up to that point, intentionally been
kept separate for privacy and due process purposes.

It's all politics. 150% bullshit.
by afavour | 2026-01-21 14:32:23+00:00
I’m glad the flagging system exists on HN but I think it could do with improvements. I think it would be interesting to be able to see how many flags an item has gotten and who has flagged it.

There’s a clear pattern to items that get flagged (those that are critical of right wing causes in particular, Musk, DOGE, ICE etc) despite those topics generating a lot of discussion. It would be interesting to have clearer visibility into whether this kind of thing is spontaneous or whether there is a core group of power users censoring topics they dislike.
by CurleighBraces | 2026-01-21 14:32:24+00:00
I've paid, but I am usually quick to adopt/trial things like this.

I think for me it's a case of fear of being left behind rather than missing out.

I've been a developer for over 20 years, and the last six months has blown me away with how different everything feels.

This isn't like JQuery hitting the scene, PHP going OO or one of the many "this is a game changer" experiences if I've had in my career before.

This is something else entirely.
by squeefers | 2026-01-21 14:32:36+00:00
feels like you think social media is bad for other people but not you. every single one of you is posting on social media right now, whilst making the case its evil or a problem or bad or some negative descriptor. people who think its only bad for kids are quick to bring porn up, but that issue is itself an emotional reaction. remember when prior to the 1950s they said homosexuality was bad for mental health then once it became socially acceptable, there was suddenly "evidence" to the contrary.
by NothingAboutAny | 2026-01-21 14:32:45+00:00
>Has everyone started using agents and paying $200 subscriptions?

If anything in my small circle the promise is waning a bit, in that even the best models on the planet are still kinda shitty for big project work.
I work as a game dev and have found agents to only be mildly useful to do more of what I've already laid out, I only pay for the $100 annual plan with jetbrains and that's plenty.
I haven't worked at a big business in a while, but my ex-coworkers are basically the same. a friend only uses chat now because the agents were "entirely useless" for what he was doing.

I'm sure someone is getting use out of them making the 10 billionth node.js express API, but not anyone I know.
by ValdikSS | 2026-01-21 14:32:52+00:00
That's easy to fix:

Step 1:

sudo tee /etc/tmpfiles.d/mglru.conf <<EOF
w- /sys/kernel/mm/lru_gen/enabled - - - - y
w- /sys/kernel/mm/lru_gen/min_ttl_ms - - - - 300
EOF

Step 2:

apt install zram-tools
sed -i 's/#PERCENT=.*/PERCENT=130/' /etc/default/zramswap
by anileated | 2026-01-21 14:33:06+00:00
I think LLMs could provide attribution. Either running a second hidden prompt (like, who said this?) or by doing reverse query on the training dataset. Say if they do it with even 98% accuracy it would probably be good enough. Especially for bits of info where there's very few or even just one source.

Of course it would be more expensive to get them to do it.

But if it was required to provide attribution with some % accuracy, plus we identified and addressed other problems like GPL washing/piracy of our intellectual property/people going insane with chatbots/opinion manipulation and hidden advertisement, then at some point commercial LLMs could become actually not bad for us.
by raddan | 2026-01-21 14:33:20+00:00
> a lot of people hiked both the PCT and AT on a shoestring budget

Agreed. I was one of those people. My budget for the entire trip, including a fair amount of equipment (I already owned boots), was $2000. This was in 2003. I worked a fairly low paid job (it was the best I could get) after college for two years in order to save up. I ended needing to dip into my credit card, which caused me a lot of stress, seeing as I did not have a job lined up after my return. The damage? $400. At the time that seemed like an unfathomable amount of debt, because I was living on very little.

My partner and I took advantage of a lot of charity on the trail (trail angels, kind strangers, etc). I would love to do something like that again (I’ve always dreamed of hiking the PCT) without such severe financial constraints. Still, there was not a lot of worrying on the trail. The stress did eventually come back after living for a couple years in Boston though!
by nromiun | 2026-01-21 14:33:42+00:00
> The spec ended up being 6KiB of English prose. The final implementation was 14KiB of TypeScript.

Wait, this is how people vibe code? I thought it was just giving instruction line by line and refining your program. People are really creating a dense, huge spec for their project first?

I have not seen any benefit of AI in programming yet, so maybe I should try it with specs and like a auto-complete as well.
by Applejinx | 2026-01-21 14:34:22+00:00
Of course not, it's expressing widely held observations that have been out there in the human population for a long time, and they're correct observations so they're hardly impossible to find.

It's not really a good argument to say 'but what if this argument is so right and so commonly held that an AI could regurgitate it?'. Well, yes, because AI is not inherently unable to repeat correct opinions. It's pretty trivial to get AI to go 'therefore, I suck! I should be banned'. What was it, Gemini, which took to doing that on its own due to presumably the training data and guidance being from abused and abusive humans?
by CyberDildonics | 2026-01-21 14:34:46+00:00
This presumes the framework in which one is working.

'One' doesn't have to 'presume' anything, there are general principles that people eventually find are true after plenty of experience.

The type of map is and always will be the same as the type of function. This is a simple fact of type theory, so it is worthwhile to ponder the value of providing a language mechanism to coerce one into another.

It isn't worthwhile to ponder because this doesn't contradict or even confront what I'm saying.

No, this is research and experimentation.

It might be personal research, but people have been programming for decades and this stuff has been tried over and over. There is a constant cycle where someone thinks of mixing and conflating concepts together, eventually gets burned by it and goes back to something simple and straightforward. What are you saying 'no' to here? You didn't address what I said.

You're mentioning things that you expect to be self evident, but I don't see an explanation of why this simplifies programs at all.
by patrakov | 2026-01-21 14:35:19+00:00
The single --force flag is not a good design decision. Please break it up (EDIT: I see you already did it partially in veritensor.yaml). Right now, according to the description, it suppresses detection of both genuinely non-commercial/AGPL models and models with inconsistent licensing data. Also, I might accept AGPL but not CC-BY-NC.

Probably, it would be better to split it into --accept-model-license=AGPL --accept-inconsistent-licensing --ignore-layer-license-metadata --ignore-rce-vector=os.system and so on.
by zinodaur | 2026-01-21 14:35:24+00:00
I firmly believe "AI will be used by the psycho weasel billionaires to torture us all", but this article is weak. It seems like it was written by people too scared of AI to use it. They have a couple of points you realize in your first month of using AI, and they wrap them in paragraphs of waffle. I wish the anti AI camp was more competent
by bigbug123 | 2026-01-21 14:35:38+00:00
## Summary: "How AI Destroys Institutions"

*Core Thesis:* AI systems' fundamental design features degrade and will eventually destroy civic institutions essential to democratic life.

*Three Destructive Affordances of AI:*

1. *Undermines Expertise*
- Encourages cognitive offloading, leading to skill atrophy
- Creates illusion of accuracy while producing inevitable "hallucinations"
- Backward-looking nature cannot adapt to changing circumstances
- Displaces knowledge transfer between humans

2. *Short-Circuits Decision-Making*
- Outsources moral choices to machines, obscuring accountability
- Flattens institutional hierarchies needed for oversight
- Removes critical points of reflection and contestation
- Incapable of intellectual risk-taking or challenging status quo

3. *Isolates Humans*
- Displaces opportunities for interpersonal connection
- Sycophantic design erodes capacity for managing social friction
- Depletes social capital and solidarity institutions require

*Institutions at Risk:*

- *Rule of Law:* AI decisions lack transparency, predictability, and accountability required for legitimate governance
- *Higher Education:* Offloads learning, homogenizes output, undermines trust between students and educators
- *Journalism:* AI "slop" pollutes information ecosystem; press cannot fulfill watchdog function
- *Democracy:* Erodes social capital, generalized reciprocity, and civic participation

*Key Evidence Cited:*
- Studies showing AI use inhibits critical thinking and problem-solving skills
- DOGE's use of AI to surveil employees and bypass institutional safeguards
- FDA's "Elsa" system hallucinating nonexistent studies
- Research on "Model Autophagy Disease" degrading AI accuracy

*Conclusion:* Without rules mitigating AI's spread, institutional dissolution is inevitable. Authors call for bright-line prohibitions rather than half-measures like ethics principles or consent frameworks.
by alzoid | 2026-01-21 14:35:40+00:00
Did you even listen to the speech? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDMyeGQm3NA

He never trashed the US, he simply stated the facts and how middle powers should respond. Not by isolating but by working together. He directly addresses how everyone is dependant on the great powers. When the great powers stop honouring the systems and structures that are in place then the 'old way' is gone. Which it is. Relying on US commitments to NORAD, NATO, Trade Agreements etc is useless.

As far as leverage goes, we will see. But we are not divorcing we are simply responding to the US giving up its global power. The negotiating table in Washington is not reliable. It's not theatre, its risk management.

Don't feel sorry for us we will prosper.
by river_otter | 2026-01-21 14:35:48+00:00
Excited to finally be able to give this a try today. I'm documenting my experience using aoe + OpenCode + LM Studio + GLM-4.7 Flash + Mac Mini M4Pro 64GB Mem on this thread if anyone wants to follow along and or give me advice about how badly I'm messing up the settings

https://x.com/natebrake/status/2013978241573204246

Thus far, the 6-bit quant MLX weights were too much and crashed LMS with OOM
by DangitBobby | 2026-01-21 14:36:22+00:00
Apart from it just being morally and ethically righteous for rich countries to share their wealth globally, American "soft power" serves as a gesture of good will to the world so they will tolerate a strong dollar (so we get to play global economics on easy mode) and American hegemony generally. When we stop exercising "soft power" everyone will just resent our relative comfort and suddenly decide they aren't okay with us being on the throne anymore. And we'll find ourselves playing on hard mode because we'll be iced out from global trade.
by pixl97 | 2026-01-21 14:36:40+00:00
A random sampling of humans might be better. The problem with people that want to take things down and cause problems is they are not random. Brigaders, marketing agencies with an agenda, nation state propaganda teams, groups with religious motivations, idiots that have been propagandized to and think they are fighting the good war, all of these tip the scales away from user voting being useful on forums.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2026-01-21 14:36:43+00:00
It does seem a bit of a strange challenge - a bit reminiscent of high school math problems where understanding the question was as much part of it as actually solving the problem when you understood it.

Since the focus of the challenge appears(?) intended to be optimization, not reverse engineering, it's a bit odd that they don't give a clear statement of what the kernel is meant to be computing. Perhaps the challenge is intended to be a combination of the two, but then the correct reverse engineering part of it becomes a gate for the optimization part, else you'll be solving the wrong problem.

Given the focus on results achieved by Opus 4.5, maybe that's the main point - to show how well Opus can reverse engineer something like this. If they gave the actual clear problem statement, then maybe you could brute force an optimal solution using tree search.
by robmccoll | 2026-01-21 14:37:15+00:00
Because that's the entire point of college. It's supposed to teach you the fundamentals - how to think, how to problem solve, how to form mental models and adapt them, how things you use actually work. Knowing how different sorting functions work and what the tradeoffs are allows you to pick the best sorting function for your data and hardware. If the tools you have aren't doing the job, you can mend them or build new tools.
by conradfr | 2026-01-21 14:37:19+00:00
There is on average a new submission every minute on HN. So basically an entry exposure in /newest first page is 30 minutes.

How many real people actually visit this page, browse submission, let alone consult the links, vote in earnest vs bot manipulation? Being on the front page of HN is valuable.

You can't downvote submission (or at least I can't) so low quality posts score can't even really be corrected (except flagging I guess, which sometimes feels abused but that's another problem).