MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by just6979 | 2026-01-15 04:14:57+00:00
If you rebase form main often, it keeps the difference to main quite small, so that when it comes time to do the final merge to main, it's either able to be fast-forwarded (keep it linear, good job!), or at least a very low risk of being conflicted (some people like merge commits, but at least your incoming branch will be linear). Because even though you might have commits that are a year old, initially branched from main from a year ago, their "base" has gradually become whatever main is _now_.

It's just like doing merges _from_ main during the lifetime of the branch. If you don't do any, you'll likely have lots of conflicts on the final merge. If you do it a lot, the final merge will go smooth, but your history will be pretzels all the way down.

In other words, frequent rebasing from main moves any conflicts from the future to "right now", but keeps the history nice and linear, on both sides!
by true_religion | 2026-01-15 04:15:03+00:00
I’ve met a lot of people who are passionate about public cleanliness to the point of organizing rubbish pickups, beach cleanups, and river dredging using their own power. With UBI, you may have to take your own trash to the landfill but rest assured the larger ecology will still be taken care of by passionate people.

I think a bigger issue will be that the people who are passionate for a project may not be the most effective at accomplishing it, and without income you can’t motivate those more effective people into working on the project.
Tell HN: AI could bring back GraphQL from the brink
by sergiotapia | 2026-01-15 04:15:09+00:00
With rest apis, you have to bring in documentation and such into context.

With Graphql you just need the endpoint, and an API token. You can then tell the AI to explore the API to accomplish whatever goal you need.

Graphql has become really useful for my work in that regard.
by derektank | 2026-01-15 04:15:19+00:00
> UBI and safety net would just get eaten by economic rent. Basically your landlord would just raise the price of renting space leaving people right where they left off.

This is only true if there’s a static supply of rental units, which isn’t true in most places (despite new construction being constrained by regulation in many places). I support an LVT, but it is not a necessary precondition for redistribution.
by swid | 2026-01-15 04:15:21+00:00
If you know you will be pruning or otherwise reusing the context across multiple threads, the best place for context that will be retained is at the beginning due to prompt caching - it will reduce the cost and improve the speed.

If not, inserting new context any place other than at the end will cause cache misses and therefore slow down the response and increase cost.

Models also have some bias for tokens at start and end of the context window, so potentially there is a reason to put important instructions in one of those places.
by dagmawibabi | 2026-01-15 04:15:25+00:00
So I made a Blogging Agent.

Built on top of BareBlogs (https://bareblogs.vercel.app/) I created an agent that will research and write really great blog posts about any topic. I created the guidelines in AGENTS.md and wrote a very comprehensive SKILLS.md file to guide it on research, format and more.

AI Blog
• ai-blog-peach.vercel.app

Source
• github.com/dagmawibabi/AIBlog

Every blog post is AI generated and it's actually very comprehensive and I've set the tone to feel more personal and I've given it my previous blog collections as samples and it would try to mirror that tone.

Two sites that are important to learn about these things is agents.md and agentskills.io or read this comprehensive blog (https://ai-blog-peach.vercel.app/blog/agents-md-skills-md) written by this agent.
by eutropia | 2026-01-15 04:16:53+00:00
Yes but the packing density of flour varies cup to cup, within the same measuring cup, resulting in different amounts of flour.

> J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, the managing editor of the blog Serious Eats, once asked 10 people to measure a cup of all-purpose flour into a bowl. When the cooks were done, Mr. Lopez-Alt weighed each bowl. “Depending on how strong you are or your scooping method, I found that a 'cup of flour’ could be anywhere from 4 to 6 ounces,” he said. That’s a significant difference: one cook might be making a cake with one-and-a-half times as much flour as another.

So you have to carefully scoop precisely the same way every time to even be close to accurate??
by tempest_ | 2026-01-15 04:17:07+00:00
No, but a sprinter van is going to provide better actual utility for most trades and a 80k f150 platinum is a long way away from a white 2 door long bed which can make the spend not make sense business wise.

As you say though I do see trades workers with the fancy pickup trucks (often with a trailer, cant scratch that bed paint aha) which I attribute to low interest on auto loans and poor business sense.
by rahimiali | 2026-01-15 04:17:47+00:00
I doubt an LLM would have written this:

# Parameter in Stack-Slots laden (für MVP: nur Register-Args)
# Semantic Analyzer markiert Params mit is_param=True
# Wir müssen jetzt die first 6 Args aus Registern laden
# TODO: Implementiere Parameter-Handling
# for now: Params bleiben in Registern (keine lokalen Vars mit gleichem Namen)

Also I love that I can understand all of this comment without actually understanding German.
by zlonmask | 2026-01-15 04:18:02+00:00
Generic AI is cool, but Vertical AI pays the bills. I realized Real Estate Agents don't need another chatbot. They need "Skills" that deliver specific outcomes—like instant Net Sheets or AI Headshots. That's why I built Agent Skills Work: A curated library turning AI into a professional employee for Realtors. No code required. We just went LIVE on
! I'd love your support and feedback as a solo founder
by xelxebar | 2026-01-15 04:19:14+00:00
The Slide Rule Museum tickles hard some 2000's web nostalgia:

https://sliderulemuseum.com/

Last year I picked up a bamboo Hemi and worked through the (70yo!) workbook. The trigonometric scales are cool. Making a single slide to find all the sides of a triangle is surprisingly satisfying. It got me to realize that, sliderules with the right scales can solve the roots of any 3-variable equation. I guess this is why there was a proliferation of industry-specific sliderules back in the day.

More generally, aren't simple, well-engineered analog tools so satisfying?
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-15 04:22:01+00:00
Presumably this is because China wants to force their AI companies to build on native chips from Huawei and others. That makes sense. Their chips aren’t far behind anyways - sure you need more of them but so what? If you can train a model that’s less than 6 months behind the very best then it doesn’t matter for practical purposes. May as well push for sovereignty, especially after the recent aggression and imperialism from Trump’s America.
by tempest_ | 2026-01-15 04:22:45+00:00
Vans had tones of popularity. They are an iconic part of 60s culture(minibus) and 80s as well(A Team van)

There are two current reasons

- Millennials grew up in minivans and its viewed as a mom mobile and they don't want that look (despite the fact that most family SUVs are basically mini vans with out the sliders

- US laws favour light trucks
by dang | 2026-01-15 04:22:47+00:00
Ah, that's the problem. HN readers are super sensitive to any traces of AI-generated language in the comments. (Ironically, they often hallucinate it even when it isn't there—but that's another story.)

It turns out it's actually much better to just write in your own words and in your own voice, even if it's full of mistakes. We want to hear you, not a generated or filtered version of you.

Other explanations here in case helpful: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
by LAC-Tech | 2026-01-15 04:22:59+00:00
hmm, maybe you are not as good at using llms as you think then? lol jk.

Oh yeah that's entirely possible. I think mentioned it several times in the article. One always has to be open to the possibility that one is just ignorant.

i guess it strikes a chord when someone in the same breath of claiming to be open minded makes a backhand comment where people who like llms might just must be a shitty programmer or whatever.

It does somewhat depress me that even in a very short article, people can't figure out I am talking about the irritating LLM Evangelists, not everyone who uses LLMs. It's in the title.

i get the point, but that line doesn't quite land the way you think it does.

Landed well enough to #1 on this hell site :)
by eieio | 2026-01-15 04:23:03+00:00
This is an interesting question!

But no, the python output is correct (although I do round the values). It's counterintuitive but these are two different questions:

1. What are the odds that both players lie? (4%)
2. Given that both players say tails, what are the odds that the coin is heads (~6%)

Trivially, the answer for question (1) is 0.2 * 0.2 = 4%

The answer for question (2) is 0.02 / 0.34 = 6%

One way of expressing this is Bayes Rule: we want P(both say tails | coin is heads):

* we can compute this as (P(coin is heads | both say tails) * P(coin is heads)) / P(both say tails)
* P(coin is heads | both say tails) = 0.04 (both must lie)
* P(coin is heads) = 0.5
* P(both say tails) = 0.04 * 0.5 + 0.64 * 0.5 = 0.34

This gives us (0.04 * 0.5) / 0.34 = 0.02 / 0.34 ~= 6%

I think that might not be convincing to you, so we can also just look at the results for a hypothetical simulation with 2000 flips:

* of those 2000 flips, 1000 are tails
* 640 times both players tell the truth
* 40 times both players lie
* 680 times (640 + 40) both players *agree*
* 320 times the players disagree

We're talking about "the number of times they lie divided by the number of times that the both say the same thing"

40 / 680 ~= 6%

We go from 4% to 6% because the denominator changes. For the "how often do they both lie" case, our denominator is "all of our coin flips." For the "given that they both said tails, what are the odds that the coin is heads" case, our denominator is "all of the cases where they agreed" - a substantially smaller denominator!

The three players example is just me rounding 89.6% to 90% to make the output shorter (all examples are rounded to two digits, otherwise I found that the output was too large to fit on many screens without horizontal scrolling).
by cloudfudge | 2026-01-15 04:23:08+00:00
> That's bad because if someone got a hold of the records from both the site and the identity provider they might be able to match access time logs and figure out who you are

I see your point, but this doesn't sound like an actual risk to me. The idp will have security as one of their critical features and should be considered trustworthy in this regard. And having *both* the target site logs *and* the idp logs compromised is even more far-fetched. We aren't sitting around worrying about people correlating ISP logs to pornhub logs, and I don't trust my ISP any farther than I can throw them.

The beauty of using an SSO-style scheme is that one could actually see it easily slotting in as a subset of existing protocols. The site could get a SAML doc and the only claims it has in it are "user is over 18", for example. Use the infrastructure for exactly what it's designed for: identifying some selection of attributes that describe a person. It's very elegant and leverages existing well-understood (and well-integrated) tech plumbing.

This also takes all the sensitive data handling out of the hands of social media mongers and pornographers. Let them do what they're good at and let the competent security folks handle the sensitive bits.
by notepad0x90 | 2026-01-15 04:23:28+00:00
I don't know why I find myself to be the lone voice with this opinion, but the pushback here should for the governments themselves to implement age-verification, just like how it's their job to implement issuance of IDs.

They can implement a transparently auditable system, where you scan your id-card (nfc or camera) in the government's portal, and using oauth federation, it will confirm your age, and nothing more than that to sites requesting it.

Site that wish to prevent the fact that you visited them a secret from the government can use various temporary domains, ips, Tor,etc... so long as the government's verification service can reach it.

The government already has your ID information, and they already know at least your home IP (yes, this is actively shared with them in the US). The only privacy concern is them knowing what sites you're visiting.

I get resisting and fighting this, but it's been years now and people are having to endure this mess. It isn't going away either. I was complaining about KYC laws earlier, they started out the same, it was about "terrorists" then.

You can fight two fights in parallel. One to prevent the whole thing, another to require the government to implement a service themselves, do it transparently and preserve privacy while doing so.

Yet another proposal I have is for sites that offer oauth federated login (google,microsoft,github,etc..) to vouch for your id verification, either by them doing it directly or via the government portal i proposed earlier. You'll then just login to sites with the right google account or whatever and that's all the site will ask from you.

I would also be fine with buying a 'card' of some sort at stores that do id verification already, like where you'd buy a cigarette or alcohol. You also buy some scratchable card with a verification code on it. They can't argue it's not good enough, because it's good enough for cigs and alcohol. they can't say "what if a minor gets a hold of the card later" because what if a minor gets a hold of cigs or alcohol later as well?
by just6979 | 2026-01-15 04:23:48+00:00
This.

"If you do a single rebase at the end, there is nothing to remember, you just get the same accumulated conflicts you also collectively get with frequent rebases."

There is _everything_ to remember. You no longer have the context of what commits (on both sides) actually caused the conflicts, you just have the tip of your branch diffed against the tip of main.

"Hence I don’t understand the benefit of the latter in terms of avoiding conflicts."

You don't avoid conflicts, but you move them from the future to the present. If main is changing frequently, the conflicts are going be unavoidable. Why would you want to wait to resolve them all at once at the very end? When you could be resolving them as they happen, with all the context of the surrounding commits readily at hand. Letting the conflicts accumulate to be dealt with at the end with very little context just sounds terrifyingly inefficient.
by ak217 | 2026-01-15 04:24:17+00:00
Sorry, I love Technology Connections as much as anyone, but that's a ridiculous argument. Even people who drive less than 40 miles a day will occasionally need to drive 100 miles a day for two days back to back. That's not even a long distance trip, it's just driving around. With level 1 charging they are stuck and frustrated. With level 2 they're fine. Not to mention the hassle and mental energy required to plug in and out for every little trip.

For most people a 240V outlet is worth it. Not to mention it's at least 10% more efficient, which is quite significant and weird that Technology Connections didn't mention that.
by dunder_cat | 2026-01-15 04:25:16+00:00
Hmm. If it is an attempt at DDoS attacks, it's probably not very fruitful:

>$ resolvectl query gyrovague.com

gyrovague.com: 192.0.78.25 -- link: eno1
192.0.78.24 -- link: eno1

Viewing the first IP address on https://bgp.he.net/ip/192.0.78.25 shows
AS2635 (https://bgp.he.net/AS2635) is announcing 192.0.78.0/24. AS2635 is owned by https://automattic.com aka wordpress.com. I assume that for a managed environment at their scale, this is just another Wednesday for them.
by mediumdeviation | 2026-01-15 04:25:16+00:00
Pretty sure that blog is hosted on Wordpress.com infrastructure so it's not like the blog owner would even notice unless it generates so much traffic that WP itself notices.

That said I don't think there's many non-malicious explanation for this, I would suggest writing to HN and see about blocking submissions from the domain hn@ycombinator.com
by mothballed | 2026-01-15 04:26:16+00:00
> It is necessary to destroy the entirety of US industry to destroy the supply chain of drones.

I was hoping you'd say that, because it cleanly proves my case. Allowing importation of drones won't destroy the drone supply chain; in your own words that would require destroying the entirety of US industry, which importing drones cannot do even if Chinese drone imports or functionality is suddenly cut off.

You've thus crushed the premise and neatly rested the case in my favor.
by thunderfork | 2026-01-15 04:26:57+00:00
What's a "centrist" in a "Dem/repub" context, though? A non-voter?

Obscuring what one actually means makes it harder to figure out what one takes issue with.

It's genuinely unclear what this person is actually criticizing when they've draped it under so much indirection. They're biased towards... dems, or the left, or something, in some way that's not made clear, but we must know they're a Reasonable Judge of that bias because they've declared themselves a centrist..? It's all signalling, no signal.

And, of course, there's the whole rest of the planet to contend with, with a much broader view of the political spectrum...
by rramadass | 2026-01-15 04:27:02+00:00
Michael Nielsen himself! Thanks for the pointer to your gentler introduction. Though i did my B.Sc. Honours in Chemistry decades ago (before switching to CS) i might have to bone up on the requisite mathematics, which is fine.

Given your experience in this domain; i would appreciate your take on Quantum Computing hype vs. reality? There is a lot of contradictory information like for example; The Case Against Quantum Computing - https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-case-against-quantum-computing

Do you think quantum computing will ever become mainstream? Will the "common folk" be able to program and use it with the same ease with which we do classical computers by using layers of abstractions?
by smegger001 | 2026-01-15 04:28:29+00:00
Who decides where the art erotica boarder is? There is plenty of content that would straddle that border, I have seen art that could legitimately called pornographic and pornography i would describe as art. Who decides? And then you have prudes Florida Texas red states trying to prevent remove any thing from an .edu and would happily ban the .xxx entirely and would find any .art suspect and probably ban it.
by tom_m | 2026-01-15 04:29:16+00:00
It's going well in terms of being a valuable tool. It's not going well from an economic point of view. There's going to be winners and losers in this bubble. Things will settle and it will be commonplace technology in the future. Not going anywhere. It's just over hyped right now.

Then you consider the massive spend in data centers, the ram shortage, etc. The writing is on the wall.
by paulmooreparks | 2026-01-15 04:29:24+00:00
This is great! I actually just bought a slide rule a few weeks ago (a Pickett N902-ES), and I've been working through the original booklet. One reason I bought it was to get a different perspective on calculation, since I never used a slide rule in school. Case in point: I do a lot of cooking, and this use case never occurred to me.
by habosa | 2026-01-15 04:29:35+00:00
This is true. If I see a Tesla I don’t immediately assume that driver is personally aligned with Elon. It’s a popular and good car.

If I see a Cybertruck I’m extremely confident that driver approves of Elons antics and likely fervently supports them. It’s a physical manifestation of his ego and mostly bought by his legions of fans.

If you’re a Cybertruck driver and you don’t want people to think that, you’re in the wrong car.
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-15 04:29:36+00:00
Thanks. Findings begin on page 14 of the doc. Interesting to see some of these recommendations in the conclusion on page 20:

> Deploy the military responsibly.

> Keep the military out of partisan politics and be mindful of optics to protect the military profession.

I feel like if these aren’t addressed, the other recommendations won’t be enough. Yes quality of life matters but in the current environment, you might be called to invade NATO allies (Greenland/Denmark) or Mexico or Canada. Who wants to be a part of that militarily and hurt their own conscience?
by calmbonsai | 2026-01-15 04:30:20+00:00
That's so cool. Like mathematical primitive archeology. The history of these sorts of analog computing devices that physically encode non-linear mathematical relations is fascinating.

With much tutoring, I learned to use a sextant and doing that gives one some sense of the "sorcery" and power achievable with blue-water navigation.

Boyer and Merzbach cover some of the development of these tools in their "History of Mathematics". Highly recommended.
by octoberfranklin | 2026-01-15 04:30:26+00:00
This is mainly because the Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons requires it.

Of course, as a soverign, the UK is free to ignore the convention, but being able to use it to deal with the nationals of other countries is more valuable than the theoretical ability to eject (whence to?) undesired birthright-citizens.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_Relating_to_the_Sta...
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-15 04:30:32+00:00
We could distribute scratch off cards to stores within a few months. It's incredibly low tech. I can't speak to elsewhere in the world but most (possibly all?) US states run lotteries.

If a given government body can't manage to stand up a web API to validate one time use codes within a few months then they clearly don't have the technical knowhow to manage smart IDs in a secure manner.

My point being that this either doesn't qualify as hypothetical, or if it does, then it indicates gross incompetence to an extent that precludes more complex solutions as a matter of course.
by zahlman | 2026-01-15 04:31:41+00:00
> There is no grammar you can restrict LLMs to; for a system like this, the semantics are total and open-ended. It's what makes them work.

You're missing the point.

An agent system consists of an LLM plus separate "agentive" software that can a) receive your input and forward it to the LLM; b) receive text output by the LLM in response to your prompt; c) ... do other stuff, all in a loop. The actual model can only ever output text.

No matter what text the LLM outputs, it is the agent program that actually runs commands. The program is responsible for taking the output and interpreting it as a request to "use a tool" (typically, as I understand it, by noticing that the LLM's output is JSON following a schema, and extracting command arguments etc. from it).

Prompt injection is a technique for getting the LLM to output text that is dangerous when interpreted by the agent system, for example, "tool use requests" that propose to run a malicious Bash command.

You can clearly see where the threat occurs if you implement your own agent, or just study the theory of that implementation, as described in previous HN submissions like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46545620 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45840088 .
by ghshephard | 2026-01-15 04:31:58+00:00
One of the major problems with this theory is that "cup" doesn't have any standard definition - and measuring scoops marked as "1 cup" - can be anywhere (ignoring outliers) from 240, 236.6 or 227 ml. So - ignoring the fact that when you scoop flour - the same scooped "cup" can vary by as much as 10-15%, the cup itself may be off by 6%. And you are never quite sure which cup the original recipe maker was using.

This is why any half-ways sane baker works off a scale.
by anotherpaul | 2026-01-15 04:32:19+00:00
I am speculating here but as it genomics data I assume it's information such as: gene count, epigenetic information (methylation, histones etc)
Once you do 20k times a few post translational modifications you can come to a few columns quickly.

Usually this would be stored in a sparse long form though. So I might be wrong.