MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by barefootsanders | 2026-01-23 00:55:45+00:00
"Outcomes not rules" is the whole game. On ambiguity: we don't try to solve it upfront. Get it 80% right, let them refine the rest in seconds. When something's wrong, they fix it in natural language, not by going back to eng to change logic or mess with config. The unlock is really iteration without a ticket.

Would love to swap notes on the accounting side. Similar problems, different domain constraints.
by JhonPork | 2026-01-23 00:56:11+00:00
It’s similar at a surface level, but the key difference is when the choice is made and what is being selected.
#ifdef and libraries still live inside a single execution contract — the compiler parses and reasons about everything, and constraints are mostly conventional.
In Falcon, the profile selects a different execution contract before IR exists. Non-matching code is not typechecked or lowered at all, and different rules (heap, panics, aliasing, UB) are enforced structurally.
Libraries share implementation; profiles share intent. The same source is treated as a specification from which multiple valid-by-construction artifacts are derived, rather than a single program patched with conditionals.
by inimino | 2026-01-23 00:56:31+00:00
What makes you think that caring about the wellbeing of one kind of entity is incompatible with caring about another kind?

Instead, of, you know, probably highly correlated just like it is with animals.

No, an LLM isn't a human and doesn't deserve human rights.

No, it isn't unreasonable to broaden your perspective on what is a thinking (or feeling) being and what can experience some kinds of states that we can characterize in this way.
by pixl97 | 2026-01-23 00:57:46+00:00
>FIPS compliance is not a great idea, the benefits are questionable and possibly nonexistent.

I counter about the benefits of FIPS. If you don't do it, you don't get paid by the government for whatever contract you have. Many people find getting paid to be beneficial.

Now, it's not the vast majority of applications, but I'm sure there are a significant number of developers on HN that are working on applications that need to meet FedRamp requirements and posts like this point out potential pitfalls on what needs enabled.

Not much different when dealing with stuff like STIGs. A large number of them are highly questionable and may only apply to very specific applications, yet you see barely trained button pushers saying you need to follow them. If you're aware of them when writing your application it will save a bunch of implementation headaches when it ends up in the field.
by dfajgljsldkjag | 2026-01-23 00:57:49+00:00
It is fascinating that players would actually reject the game if it showed the true straight roads and planned layouts. We have a mental model of the Middle Ages that is wrong but we still demand that products match our expectations. The truth feels like a glitch because it breaks our immersion. We care more about the feeling of the past than the data.

Also, it is logical that we optimize the past to make the gameplay loop satisfying. Real history was full of system failures like floods and unfair taxes that prevented any real progress. We code these simulations to give players a sense of progression that the actual people never had.
Seeking Co-Founder for Declarative Application Editor
by mwhite | 2026-01-23 00:58:02+00:00
My name is Michael White and I have been reading HN daily since 2010.

I am an entrepreneurial software engineer who has founded two viable companies:

- GetchaBooks.com (2010-2012), a course-based textbook price comparison site that scraped BNCollege and Follett bookstores on-demand with optional course metadata integration. Founded with [Michael Lazer-Walker](http://lazerwalker.com) and [Richard Mondello](http://rmondello.com). I originated the idea and wrote the backend. Shut down after five semesters.

- MyGEDCOMs.com (2015-2022), a [GeneWeb](http://geneweb.org)-based GEDCOM (genealogy database) hosting site with BYOD, Dropbox photo upload, and unlimited generation maps on any tree or report.

I have also worked at [Dimagi](http://dimagi.com), a company I made up on Wikipedia and then registered an Inc for prior to attending college, and [Merck](http://merck.com).

I minored in linguistics, attended an AGI conference, and have been following the development of AI relatively closely but haven't used it yet except for a few Google queries.

I am looking for a non-technical co-founder for a declarative point-and-click application editor company. I have a whitepaper almost complete titled "A Self-Hosting Point-and-Click Editor for Any Functionally-Specified GUI-DB Application" in Python and JavaScript with a JavaScript-only frontend that builds on top of React, React Router v3, Backbone-Relational, Flask, SQLAlchemy, and Flask-Restless. Two of the most important additional components are almost complete.

I am looking for a non-technical co-founder to handle administration, fundraising, and marketing for anywhere from 15-30% equity. If there is a person who is interested in being a technical co-founder, I may be able to accommodate them.

Email me at appalchemist@protonmail.com if you are interested.
by Dylan16807 | 2026-01-23 00:58:07+00:00
If that's about using predefined dictionaries, zstd can use them too.

If brotli has a different advantage on small source files, you have my curiosity.

If you're talking about max compression, zstd might lose out there, the answer seems to vary based on the tests I look at, but it seems to be better across a very wide range.
by rekabis | 2026-01-23 00:59:07+00:00
> You can try to consolidate people into fewer towns and smaller areas, but human mobility is not infinite; some people will be stuck in decaying towns, rotting away in despair.

This is a red herring. Look at Spain and Italy, where dead towns litter the countryside. Some people still live there because they want to, and not because they have to. Relocation efforts of even moderate means capture the 99.5% who are willing to move to where infrastructure still exists.

And where I stand, the fertility issue - aside from environmental factors like microplastics that introduce endocrine disruptors - comes down to systemic economic barriers.

In the past, families gravitated to having lots of children because they could start helping around the farm or working in the factories from a very young age. And in this manner they directly contributed to the revenue of the family as a whole, allowing the family to grow to many children. This was a fact until the early 20th century. Plus, the lack of fertility controls and lack of reproductive agency and autonomy on the part of women generally led to large families by default.

Then we had the fertility revolution, where women were not only given tools to control their fertility, but were also given fuller participatory agency in the economy instead of being totally financially dependent on her husband. Naturally, many to most women aren’t interested in becoming brood mares - almost all women tend to prefer somewhere between no children and four children, with an average that is around the replacement level. That alone wouldn’t have caused our current “crisis”.

But now we have entered into a viciously dangerous stage of end-stage capitalism, where the Parasite Class have become insanely greedy, desperate to Hoover up wealth from every possible source. This driving down of wages and cranking up of costs means that dual-income households have moved from an option to an absolute necessity, to the point where healthy dual incomes are barely able to support both adults, much less any children. And because offspring are now unable to generate profit for families for a good two decades (until they themselves become adults), couples have therefore made the painful decision to limit children to one or even none.

TL;DR: our current “fertility crisis” comes entirely down to the greed of the Parasite Class, who have put the working class into a vice that squeezes them from both ends, and makes having any number of children a very financially irresponsible choice.
by fragmede | 2026-01-23 00:59:20+00:00
> I asked Gemini (generally considered one of the smartest models - better than ChatGPT

The rest of your comment suggests it is not.

Eg, I asked ChatGPT-5.2 (paid)

> Ubuntu/Xfce: the default date and time display is in an unreadably small "date stacked over time" format (using a few pixel high font so this fits into the menu bar). How do I fix this?

and its answer (paraphrasing):

> Set Mode to: Custom format and use %a %b %d %H:%M

https://chatgpt.com/c/6972c75b-ca34-8320-82ba-91f632700c96
by margalabargala | 2026-01-23 00:59:45+00:00
That's not how that works. Your breakers are sized to support your panel size. If you have 10kW panels that can push 10kW onto the grid when the grid is live, they can push 10kW when the grid is down. The limiting factor is the power your panels produce which in this case is also...10kW.

You're probably right about linemen but there are a lot of other reasons not to feed power onto a dead grid.
by machomaster | 2026-01-23 01:01:18+00:00
And this is exactly why I had to use /s. Because some people would not understand that it was weitten tongue-in-cheek, while some others would fail to see the larger context and confuse my sarcasm with a simple joke (sure, as a joke it is bad; and that's precicely because it was optimized to be sarcastic, not joke-funny).
by zrn900 | 2026-01-23 01:01:23+00:00
Yep. Unfortunately, they werent the ones that became 'classics'. Even worse, they were hardly documented and a lot of them were lost. That's what I meant - even the elite class were into regular songs for regular fun - its 100% certain that the songs that were being played in the bars that Karl Marx and his friends went through in their famous London pub crawl, weren't playing any classical music...
by izucken | 2026-01-23 01:02:56+00:00
You people clearly don't understand how important lines of code are. Three millions is a lot of lines of code even if its broken, and you can't even appreciate that number. Clearly you are weak software developers who write very little lines of code, and can't even steal other's lines of code to keep up. I am very glad we are back to reporting results in lines of code which is a very informative metric hence now I can get my many lines of code appreciated.
by rngfnby | 2026-01-23 01:03:03+00:00
Don't get me wrong, I think solar in Canada is stupid. Given a limited supply of panels, they should be installed in Arizona.

"If you are trying to argue that in aggregate the demand for energy in canada drops because of high adoption of residential solar which then passes off clean energy to the US"

Well... ya. If on sunny day 10 000 homes in the GTA offset 1000W of energy, that'a 10MW more power that CND can export. Furthermore, the GTA has massive energy storage capacity from an artificial lake by the falls so the 10 MW doesn't become a rounding error.

.... but 10 MW is piss. Solar in CND is piss.
by quickthrowman | 2026-01-23 01:03:35+00:00
> These are all easily overcome problems for people utilizing an ounce of civil disobedience with regards to the code. And yes I have personally done all the design and plumbing and electric for multi-structure properties (though not the black market ones).

It didn’t work out so great in Oakland at the Ghost Ship, 36 people died in a similar arrangement.

Building code is written in blood, things are done a certain way for a reason. You may be morally or ethically against them but following code saves lives.
by vunderba | 2026-01-23 01:04:43+00:00
I don't think that's what this is.

From a cursory glance it appears to be a physical guitar pedal that lets you program virtual effects. The "vibe coding" aspect is likely a system directive + effects library SDK docs fed into an LLM along with the user prompt that generates the appropriate C++ which is then compiled into an effect and run on the pedal.

Note: Which is still very cool. The previous programmable guitar pedals that I've seen were all pretty low-level.
by joshvm | 2026-01-23 01:04:54+00:00
Reference managers have existed for decades now and they work deterministically. I paid for one when writing my doctoral thesis because it would have been horrific to do by hand. Any of the major tools like Zotero or Mendeley (I used Papers) will export a bibtex file for you, and they will accept a RIS or similar format that most journals export.
by Strilanc | 2026-01-23 01:05:18+00:00
Wasn't this study immediately debunked due to bad statistical methods? See https://zenodo.org/records/18002186

> Using simple simulations,we show that this pattern arises naturally from collider bias when selection into elitesamples depends on both early and adult performance. Consequently, associationsestimated within elite samples are descriptively accurate for the selected population,but causally misleading, and should not be used to infer developmental mechanisms
by dasyud | 2026-01-23 01:05:23+00:00
I disagree here. A good researcher has to be a good communicator. I am not saying that it is necessarily the case that you don't understand the topic if you cannot explain it well enough to someone new, but it is essential to communicate to have a good exchange of ideas with others, and consequently, become a better researcher. This is one of the skills you learn in a PhD program.
by sublinear | 2026-01-23 01:06:06+00:00
I agree, but the fundamental problem is a blunt one to begin with. It should not be a way to label people, but decisions.

Guess culture is playing defense against the outcrowd. Ask culture is playing offense to achieve higher-level thinking and goals.

This isn't always a deliberate thing. Still, everyone has to pick their plays with every interaction they have.
by manquer | 2026-01-23 01:07:00+00:00
> 50% discount

There are liquidity preferences, nobody took a haircut, they may not made a lot of money as long as the sale price($5.1B) is greater than funds raised($1.2B) everyone made some money not as much as they thought, but nevertheless some.

The reason may be different than you think, Capital One is known for its aggressive marketing campaigns and physical mail spam, it is more likely they didn't want to upset the customers and end users on what Capital One will mean

It is quite likely Capitial one will mine the data, monetize the brand, sell other products and target high value users the typical Brex user.
Stochastic Mirrors rather than Stochastic Parrots?
by EdNutting | 2026-01-23 01:07:02+00:00
Would it be more helpful to people if we described generative AI as a “stochastic mirror” - an approximate reflection of reality - rather than as a “stochastic parrot”?

This term perhaps encompasses a broader range of Generative AI models (image, video, etc).

It might also help people to understand why well-generated text may still not be an accurate description of reality. The generated text may be linguistically excellent (syntactically correct) and yet still not be an accurate reflection of anyone’s reality (semantically wrong).

Has anyone else come up with this alternative term before? I could only find some algorithm using the term which isn’t the same as what I mean.
by pphysch | 2026-01-23 01:07:06+00:00
Snowflake and Databricks provide data storage and pipeline features and therefore have extraordinary lock-in potential, which allows them to have sustainable business models.

GPU compute is essentially fungible. That's quite a stretch to compare those business models. Snowflake and Databricks don't necessarily have the best "value-add" and they don't need to.
by BlackPearl02 | 2026-01-23 01:07:23+00:00
That's a clever approach! I used to do something similar, but found I'd miss emails or they'd get buried.

The tool I built does something similar but automated - it watches for a ping after your job completes and can validate the results (file sizes, timestamps, counts, etc.). You set validation rules once, and it only alerts when something's actually wrong. No need to read through daily emails.

For your backup example, you'd ping it with the file size, and it alerts if the size is unexpectedly small or zero. Same idea, just automated.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-23 01:07:33+00:00
It’s too bad Saleae prices are so high now. Their original models launched at a very affordable price point but that’s long gone.

In the past they’ve offered discounts to students and contractors if you know where to look and how to ask: https://blog.saleae.com/saleae-discounts/ If anyone is considering one, it’s worth a try to see if they still honor this.

The alternative logic analyzers mentioned in this article look interesting, but the software side leaves a lot to be desired. Some people get along okay with PulseView (or forks, like in this article) but I never enjoy using it.
by maxvdg | 2026-01-23 01:08:16+00:00
Over the past few years, I’ve been re-implementing computer vision papers in PyTorch to understand their core mechanisms.

Each implementation is intentionally kept small and self-contained. The goal is not to provide production-ready training code, but to expose the essential ideas of each method once most abstractions and engineering details are removed.

The repository currently includes more than 50 implementations spanning:
– Generative models (GANs, VAEs, diffusion)
– 3D reconstruction and neural rendering
– Meta-learning and representation learning

Design choices:
– Minimal, single-file implementations
– Code that stays close to the structure of the original papers
– Emphasis on conceptual correctness over training scale or benchmarks
– Reproduction of key figures or results when feasible

Repository:
https://github.com/MaximeVandegar/Papers-in-100-Lines-of-Cod...

I’d be interested in feedback from people who have implemented or reviewed these methods, particularly where this minimal approach oversimplifies important details.
by Izkata | 2026-01-23 01:10:39+00:00
> Honestly, in my experience the original stuff largely disappeared. I vaguely remember watching some of it back in the early 90's, but never in school. The holiday specials would be on TV if you went looking for them, but that's about it.

Yeah, my dad (a Baby Boomer) loved these and would make sure to watch them every year. I and my Millennial siblings didn't really care, it just felt old-fashioned. I had no idea it was still popular at all.
by ekidd | 2026-01-23 01:11:04+00:00
There are some interesting possibilities for LLMs in math, especially in terms of generating machine-checked proofs using languages like Lean. But this is a supplement to the actual result, where the LLM would actually be adding a more rigorous version of a human's argument with all the boring steps included.

In a few cases, I see Terrance Tao has pointed out examples LLMs actually finding proofs of open problems unassisted. Not necessarily problems anyone cared deeply about. But there's still the fact that if the proof holds, then it's valid no matter who or what came up with it.

So it's complicated I guess?
by BlackPearl02 | 2026-01-23 01:12:10+00:00
Those are all solid practices! I use chronic too, and proper exit codes are essential.

The gap I found is that even with all of that, you can still have "successful" jobs (exit code 0, no errors) that produce wrong results. Like a backup script that runs successfully but creates empty files because the source directory was empty, or a sync that only processes 10% of records because of a logic bug.

But there's another issue: chronic doesn't detect when cron jobs don't run at all. If your crontab gets corrupted, the server time changes, or cron daemon stops, chronic won't alert you because there's no output to email.

That's why I built result validation monitoring - it expects a ping after your job completes. If the ping doesn't arrive (job didn't run, crashed before completion, etc.), it alerts. Plus it validates the actual results (file sizes, record counts, content validation) and alerts if they don't match expectations.

Works alongside chronic/exit codes, but adds detection for jobs that never executed and validation of the actual outputs.
by judahmeek | 2026-01-23 01:12:20+00:00
This bullshit is why #NotAllMen is a farcical trope among feminists.

Can ya'll please grow slightly thicker skin?

It doesn't take much effort to give the author benefit of doubt, especially when he already qualified his claim with "If you're a man, one of your hardest battles may be..."

To those who are unaware, "may be" signals uncertainty. It signals #NotAllMen.

Stop whining.
by genewitch | 2026-01-23 01:12:51+00:00
nothing makes me more wary of a company than one that doesn't let me use my 20 year old VoIP number for SMS. Twitter, instagram (probably FB, if they ever do a "SMS 2fa" or whatever for me i imagine i'll lose my account forever), and a few others i can't think of offhand right now.

i've had the same phone numbers via this same VoIP company for ~20 years (2007ish). for these data hoovering companies to not understand that i'm not a scammer presents to me like it's all smoke and mirrors, held together with bailing wire, and i sure do hope they enjoy their yachts.
by tialaramex | 2026-01-23 01:12:55+00:00
Resistive heating is indeed almost 100% efficient, but combustion is only about 90% efficient and that's using modern technology to scrape almost everything we can, which has a cost in terms of the product upfront cost and maintenance. The reason it's not much higher is that we must vent the exhaust gases. If you were OK with the burned gas vapours in your home you could get close to 100%, but they're poisonous and so they must be vented to the atmosphere where they only cause global warming. Venting those gases means losing heat, so that's inefficient.

For the EVs in particular, because motion <=> electrical energy is almost the same either direction (a dynamo and an electric motor are almost identical) we get regenerative braking in most applications. This isn't anywhere close to 100% effective, and of course we net losses from resistance which gets much worse as speed increases - but it's not nothing.

The big win is that global warming problem. Electrifying consumption means fungibility. In my lifetime the UK went from mostly coal electricity, to no coal at all. But few cared because to the end users it's the same electricity regardless of how it was made, and most people probably didn't even notice. So if you move consumption to electricity then the generation problem is de-coupled and can be addressed separately.
by bjourne | 2026-01-23 01:13:30+00:00
Sorry, but blaming it on "AI autocomplete" is the dumbest excuse ever. Author lists come from BibTeX entries and while they often contains errors since they can come from many sources, they do not contain completely made up authors. I don't share your view that hallucinated citations are less damaging in background section. Background, related works, and introduction is the sections where citations most often show up. These sections are meant to be read and generating them with AI is plain cheating.
by moyoooo | 2026-01-23 01:13:34+00:00
Ive been interested in doing this with a raspberry pi. Ive plugged my guitar to my pc and used FL Studio, a daw, and can add effects to it live and was curious if someone would code a os (i guess) that only ran VST (the filters) and had a screen and knobs to control things. I know its very possible, I just didnt have the time to learn how to do it.