MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by famouswaffles | 2026-01-12 23:58:36+00:00
>Unfortunately, none of that has anything to do with what LLMs are doing. The LLM is not thinking about concepts and then translating that into language. It is imitating what it looks like to read people doing so and nothing more.

'Language' is only the initial and final layers of a Large Language Model. Manipulating concepts is exactly what they do, and it's unfortunate the most obstinate seem to be the most ignorant.
by estimator7292 | 2026-01-13 00:00:09+00:00
Conducting an orchestra is not a mechanical activity. In many/most cases, the conductor is doing a live mix of the piece. They control the tempo of the whole orchestea, the volume and accent of different sections and players. They cue in percussion and embellishments. A conductor must know and fully understand the entire score being played. That's upward of a dozen musical threads peing played by 20, 30 people all at once. A conductor's job is to hear each one of these threads individually and simultaneously to shape the music into the final performance they want.

If a conductor's job can be reduced to a metronome, why hasn't it? I've had a credit card sized metronome in my instrument case for 15 years. Most professional musicians carry metronomes. We've had perfectly accurate metronomes for something like 500 years, so why is "conductor" a profession at all?
by subjectsigma | 2026-01-13 00:00:20+00:00
There’s an Ancient Aliens episodes about the Antithykera Mechanism and pyramids in Italy.

https://youtu.be/wY7LXJI8Ago

https://diggingupancientaliens.com/episode-65-europes-only-p...

Careful clicking that YouTube link, my recommend feed is ruined now
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-13 00:00:47+00:00
Well I feel like they will take security more in context from here on out.

Atleast they didnt implode their communications like I see from some other companies.

To be really honest, when you bet on AI agents, I feel like soemtimes you bet on the future of the product as well which is built by the people so you are basically betting on the people.

I'd much rather bet/rely on people who are sensibile in communications in troubled times like this than who implode sometimes (I mean no offense to Coderabbit but this is what comes to my head right now)

So moments like these become the litmus test of the products basically imo by seeing how people communicate etc.
by Uehreka | 2026-01-13 00:00:58+00:00
> I figured it's how they were able to weaken a chess engine back in the day; can't adjust the overall strength, so add random blunders.

In tom7’s Elo World, he does this (“dilutes” strong Chess AIs with a certain percentage of random moves) to smooth the gradient since otherwise it would be impossible to evaluate his terrible chess bots against something like Stockfish since they’d just lose every time. https://youtu.be/DpXy041BIlA?si=z7g1a_TX_QoPYN9b
by akurilin | 2026-01-13 00:01:05+00:00
I've had a similar experience. My sense is that there's no way this isn't how eventually most of knowledge work at the computer is going to work. Not necessarily through a terminal interface, I expect UIs to evolve quite a bit in the next few years, but having an omnipotent agent in the loop to do all of the gluing and gruntwork for you. Seems inevitable.
by observationist | 2026-01-13 00:01:42+00:00
The idea of conflict with Greenland is kayfabe - it's all posturing and bombast. There's a significant probability that the Trump admin attempts and possibly succeeds at buying Greenland. Not usual for the last 5-6 decades, but in a historic context, fairly normal for nations to do this type of thing. There are legitimate strategic and economic arguments for it - not sure that I buy the arguments, but I can certainly entertain the ideas.

Iran is a sticky situation. It looks like the Trump admin is poised to chip in some missiles if it looks like they can tip the balance definitively for the protesters, but according to the intel accounts, the current positioning of assets means they're still at least a few days away from acting. That could be a deception and at any moment the current regime could get erased, so it's probably prudent to get the hell out of Dodge before the missiles start flying, or before the total crackdown and enforcement gets escalated, in the other direction.
by flipthefrog | 2026-01-13 00:01:46+00:00
Stubborn old directors like Christopher Nolan, Quentin Tarantino, Steven Spielberg, Paul Thomas Anderson, Martin Scorcese... https://www.kodak.com/en/motion/page/shot-on-film/

Films are mostly post processed digitally - but some, like Oppenheimer, are color graded the old optical way. While Dune was shot digitally, printed on film, then scanned back in again!
by juliangmp | 2026-01-13 00:02:30+00:00
Sure, I put quickly put them into a small markdown file.
At my job we have a cmake interface target that handles these (along with some version checks and project specific stuff), but I can't publish that of course. I might put these into a cmake file at some point, not sure.

https://codeberg.org/JulianGmp/sane-args-cpp
by grumpymuppet | 2026-01-13 00:03:00+00:00
Perk is... quite a thing. I think if you like programming because you like believing you have secret knowledge... go for it. Perk will scratch that itch. But I do not believe it beings you closer to the pantheon of God's. Ai n't gonna stop anyone from dancing with the Satyrs though, if that's your jam.
by yoyohello13 | 2026-01-13 00:04:06+00:00
> software engineers don’t seem to actually value or care about open source anymore.

Hate to break it to you, but the vast majority never did. See any thread about Linux on HN. Maybe the Open Source wave was before my time, but ever since I came into the industry around 2015 "caring about open source" has been the minority view. It's Windows/Mac/Photo Shop/etc all the way up and down.
by dreadsword | 2026-01-13 00:04:16+00:00
"Dangerous and Alarming" - it tough; healthcare is needs disruption but unlike many places to target for disruption, the risk is life and death. It strikes me that healthcare is a space to focus on human in the loop applications and massively increasing the productivity of humans, before replacing them...
https://deadstack.net/cluster/google-removes-ai-overviews-fo...
by keplerjst | 2026-01-13 00:04:19+00:00
"We tend to be more scared of the emotions/feelings we might might experience rather than what would cause them"

You nailed it. Keeping it private allows the fear to grow, but shipping it makes it just a "thing" in the world. Here's my first prototype: https://seton.run

It's a very simple Pomodoro-ish timer, but designed to visualize your accumulated effort. Seeing the concrete data of "time spent" creates a positive feedback loop that helps me stick to the finish line.

I'll check out your list. It seems we are exploring the same problem space.
by magarnicle | 2026-01-13 00:05:09+00:00
It depends what you mean by "best players". Real Madrid have twice tried to just buy "Galacticos" - the generally-recognised superstar players - and cram them all into the same team, regardless of what position they were suited for. It didn't really work out like they hoped but it did get them a lot of attention.

They found more success when they bought the best team i.e. the best players in each position. Winning in football is difficult enough that you still need great tactics, management, experience, and luck to have actual sustained success. Money helps buy a lot of that, though.

But beyond Real Madrid your point is correct. More and more money is aggregating at the top, especially the English Premier League, and others are getting left behind.
by sltkr | 2026-01-13 00:06:17+00:00
I'm going to be the nerd that points out that it has not been mathematically proven that pi contains every substring, so the pifs might not work even in theory (besides being utterly impractical, of course).

On a more serious note, as far as I understand these compression competitions require that static data is included in the size computation. So if you compress 1000 MB into 500 MB, but to decompress you need a 1 MB binary and a 100 MB initial dictionary, your score would be 500 + 100 + 1 = 601 MB, not 500 MB.

The relevance to this discussion is that the LLM weights would have to be included as static data, since the only way to regenerate them is from the initial training data, which is much larger than the resulting model. By comparison, pi based compression is the other way around: since pi is a natural constant, if your decompressor requires (say) a trillion digits of pi, you could write a relatively small program (a few kb) to generate them. It would be terribly slow, but it wouldn't affect your compression ratio much.
by al_borland | 2026-01-13 00:06:29+00:00
> No Typical Web Browser: Instead of a standard browser, our devices feature an allowlist-based approach to access specific, distraction-free websites.

> Future Plans: We aim to expand the allowlist over time, but decisions will be made internally to ensure it remains aligned with our vision of distraction-free usability.

This alone sounds like a it should be a deal breaker for everyone.
by ggm | 2026-01-13 00:06:51+00:00
The article said (if I read it right) direct application of the algae demanded high pressure pumps and so power, and water and came with downside costs.

They seem to be packaging the algae into balls/pellets with a lot of other organic matter, and "seeding" the desert with them to take advantage of weather conditions which will encourage plant growth. This means it's really as much about the organics, as the blue-green algae to me.

The article also suggests this research institute knows what they're doing, they've a good track record of reversing desertification with other techniques.

I kind of hoped it was a workable spray solution (hah) because that felt like it might be tractable for UAV to distribute, but they need higher pressure to penetrate the cracks in the surface at volume.

I think we're all familiar with BG mats when temporary water dries up. Nice to see something positive being made of them.
by extraduder_ire | 2026-01-13 00:07:56+00:00
Section 2, subsection 2 of the Bill describes it.

(2) : For the purposes of subsection (1), a person causes harm to another person where—
(a) he or she, by his or her acts, intentionally or recklessly seriously interferes with the other person’s peace and privacy or causes alarm or distress to the other person, and

(b) his or her acts are such that a reasonable person would realise that the acts would seriously interfere with the other person’s peace and privacy or cause alarm or distress to the other person.
by ollien | 2026-01-13 00:08:44+00:00
A coworker raised an interesting point to me. The CORS fix removes exploitation by arbitrary websites (but obviously allows full access from the opencode domain), but let's take that piece out for a second...

What's the difference here between this and, for example, the Neovim headless server or the VSCode remote SSH daemon? All three listen on 127.0.0.1 and would grant execution access to another process who could speak to them.

Is there a difference here? Is the choice of HTTP simply a bad one because of the potential browser exploitation, which can't exist for the others?
by lvl155 | 2026-01-13 00:11:02+00:00
This is really not the point. Anthropic isn’t cutting off third-party. You can use their models via API all you want. Why are people conflating this issue? Anthropic doesn’t owe anyone anything to offer their “unlimited” pro tiers outside of Claude Code. It’s not hard to build your own Opencode and use API keys. CLI interface by itself is not a moat.
by lovich | 2026-01-13 00:11:49+00:00
I remember those halcyon days long in the past in the ancient days of 2024 when the idea that we might invade another country with this admin at the helm was poo pood as extremism.

Luckily the Greenland situation is different and we definitely haven’t been going through weekly events “that could never happen”.

As we all know, President Trump is completely comfortable with the word “no” and has been the greatest defender of international law and diplomacy between sovereign nations.
Show HN: Hidden Signal – Newsletter digest with web dashboard and scheduling
by hookedonwinter | 2026-01-13 00:13:19+00:00
I built this to solve my own newsletter overload problem. Turns out there are similar tools that I found after I basically launched (Meco, Mailbrew), but turns out mine is a bit simpler and less opinionated about how you consume content.

Core features:

- Three ingestion methods: auto-forward from Gmail, manual forwarding, or sign up with your dedicated email address

- Web dashboard to browse all newsletters in one place

- Scheduled email digests (configurable times, skips if nothing new)

- Save/star functionality for read-later

I've been using it for a few weeks, and it's really helped me. I set mine to arrive at 8am and 1pm. The save feature is nice, too.

Tech: Django, OpenAI for summarization, hosted on Hetzner. Email parsing is surprisingly gnarly—lots of edge cases with different newsletter formats.
Free for now, likely paid tiers eventually. Feedback welcome!

Link: https://hiddensignal.app

Screenshot of a recent digest: https://imgur.com/a/tuTBYKV
by johnisgood | 2026-01-13 00:13:19+00:00
You do not need to exploit each layer because you traverse them. Tailnet access (compromised device, account, Tailscale itself) gets you to nginx. Then you only need to exploit Nextcloud.

LXC isolation protects Proxmox from container escapes, not services from each other over the network. Full disk encryption protects against physical theft, not network attacks while running.

And if Nextcloud has passkeys, HTTPS, and proper auth, what is Tailscale adding exactly? What is the point of this setup over the alternative? What threat does this stop that "hardened Nextcloud, exposed directly" does not? It is complexity theater. Looks like defense in depth, but the "layers" are network hops, not security boundaries.
by monster_truck | 2026-01-13 00:14:17+00:00
One of my first paid iOS dev jobs was porting a Go game from iPad to iPhone, don't even think the 4 was out yet. It also used computation time based difficulties. By the time I was done writing it, I knew a few tricks I could eke a win out with on 19x19.

When the iPhone 5S came out, I tried it on a whim to check the UI scaling etc... the beginner difficulty on a 9x9 board deleted me. It was grabbing something like 64x more samples per go, the lowest difficulty on the 5S (instant responses) never lost a single game vs the highest difficulty 3GS (15 second turns)

iPhones had a lot of moments like that. Silly bullshit like "what if every pixel was a cell in a collection view" would go from "oh it can barely do 128" to "more responsive than that was, with 2 million" in a few gens.
by microtherion | 2026-01-13 00:17:47+00:00
A time limit is also deterministic in some sense. Level settings used to be mainly time based, because computers at lower settings were no serious competition to decent players, but you don't necessarily want to wait for 30 seconds each move, so there were more casual and more serious levels.

Limiting the search depth is much more deterministic. At lower levels, it has hilarious results, and is pretty good at emulating beginning players (who know the rules, but have a limited skill of calculating moves ahead).

One problem with fixed search depth is that I think most good engines prefer to use dynamic search depth (where they sense that some positions need to be searched a bit deeper to reach a quiescent point), so they will be handicapped with a fix depth.
by ggm | 2026-01-13 00:18:16+00:00
I did marine biology field work almost 5 decades ago as a lowly junior lab tech. Work always has downsides, for me it was not really the Scots winter, cold feed, chapped hands, the land-rover having to reverse up steep icy roads to get back from the harbourside: it was washing the glassware and dealing with sodium hydroxide weighing (it absorbs moisture from the air so its a fools game). But, field work also brought amazing experiences, I visited the seaside 70+ times over a year, and got an insight into what a time series really means when you cover the tidal and weather and seasonal cycles.

It's also always error-prone. Nothing in the field is perfect. Reality is a bad approximation for your model at times, if you take a model centric view.

I would be immensely skeptical that field work is ever going away. There may be aspects of truth in this around cost of travel, risk, seniority.
by margalabargala | 2026-01-13 00:19:29+00:00
You will also die if you eat precisely the amount of calories you burn every day.

There exists something called a "feedback loop", something common in biology. You would probably find it interesting, you should look it up.

Basically, it means that if you try to chronically eat, say, 1% more calories than are burned, your body will try to burn more calories to compensate.

I'm not sure I grasp the rest of your comment, could you try again to explain? The wheat farm your ancestors worked did not provide the excess of cheap calories available to the present day American.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2026-01-13 00:20:08+00:00
Naming it the "Turbo" button rather than making "turbo mode" the default and then pressing a button for "slow" mode, IMO, was marketing genius, even though the results are the same.

Blizzard did a similar thing in World of Warcraft during the beta. After playing for a while, your character would get "exhausted" and start earning half experience for killing mobs. The only way to stop being exhausted would be to log off or spend a LONG time in an inn. At some point, they flipped the script. They made the "exhausted" state the default, and while offline or in an inn, you would gain a "rested" experience buffer, where you would earn double experience.

The mechanic worked exactly the same, but by giving it different terms, players felt rewarded for stepping away from the game occasionally, rather than punished for playing too long. They also marketed it as a way of giving players a way to "catch up" after spending a day or two offline.
by feanaro | 2026-01-13 00:20:58+00:00
No, by saying this, I am not downplaying Einstein's sizeable achievements nor trying to imply everyone was wrong about him. His was an impressive breadth of knowledge and mathematical prowess and there's no denying this.

However, what I'm saying is not mere nitpicking either. It is precisely because of my belief in Einstein's extraordinary abilities that I find it unconvincing that an LLM being able to recombine the extant written physics-related building blocks of 1900, with its practically infinite reading speed, necessarily demonstrates comparable capabilities to Einstein.

The essence of the question is this: would Einstein, having been granted eternal youth and a neverending source of data on physical phenomena, be able to innovate forever? Would an LLM?

My position is that even if an LLM is able to synthesise special relativity given 1900 knowledge, this doesn't necessarily mean that a positive answer to the first question implies a positive answer to the second.
by shagie | 2026-01-13 00:21:05+00:00
If the goal is reducing carbon emissions, making shipping emit half as much (650 Megatonne to 325 Mt) would be less of a gain than making trucking emit only 80% of its carbon (2,230 Mt to 1,830 Mt).

The question is which is easier to do (ROI)... to cut the shipping fuel carbon footprint by half, or over the road trucking (that's about 1/4th of all the shipping) by 20%? For that matter, moving 25% of the over the road trucking to rail would accomplish that too.
by troad | 2026-01-13 00:21:06+00:00
> Being these things are at their core probability machines, ... How? Why?

Is Siri a probability machine? I didn't think it was an LLM at all right now? I thought it was some horrendous tree of switch statements, hence the difficulty of improving it.

Apple search is comically bad, though. Type in some common feature or app, and it will yield the most obscure header file inside the build deps directory of some Xcode project you forgot existed.
by microtherion | 2026-01-13 00:21:09+00:00
Never heard that one (it may indeed be used that way, but if it were the only reason Apple would probably keep it in the Apple internal parts of their OS installs).

It would also be of limited use, as the engine is purely CPU based; it is single threaded and does not even use SIMD AFAIK, let alone GPU features or the neural engines.
by cogman10 | 2026-01-13 00:21:17+00:00
The decided not to have it there because they didn't like the idea of maintaining version 4.0 forever in their engines.

That's basically why they never did anything like "use strict" again.

IMO, that's a bad choice. Giving yourself the ability to have new behavior and features based on a version is pretty natural and how most programming languages evolve. Having perpetual backwards and fowards compatibility at all times is both hard to maintain and makes it really hard to fix old mistakes.

The only other reason they might have chosen this route is because it's pretty hard to integrate the notion of compatibility levels into minifiers.
by ameyamk | 2026-01-13 00:21:26+00:00
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This is also primarily backend focussed role.
by Waterluvian | 2026-01-13 00:22:23+00:00
> “This change removes the “Act on your behalf” note in the consent page if the app is requesting only read permissions against the user account itself.”

I think this blog demonstrates the problem. To a lot of people this is perfectly straightforward. Others might think, “but my GitHub account is where I keep all my private repos.”

When listing access controls, I think most nouns need to very carefully map back to a clear definition, ideally full of examples and bulleted lists of “what this is” and “what this isn’t”
by feanaro | 2026-01-13 00:23:40+00:00
> I mean, "the pieces were already there" is true of everything? Einstein was synthesizing existing math and existing data is your point right?

If it's true of everything, then surely having an LLM work iteratively on the pieces, along with being provided additional physical data, will lead to the discovery of everything?

If the answer is "no", then surely something is still missing.

> And the "anyone who read all the right papers" thing - nobody actually reads all the papers. That's the bottleneck. LLMs don't have it. They will continue to not have it. Humans will continue to not be able to read faster than LLMs.

I agree with this. This is a definitive advantage of LLMs.
by joegibbs | 2026-01-13 00:24:25+00:00
There are a lot of people who still say that coding agents don't work at all, it's all a NFT-style fad or scam pushed mainly by bad-faith hucksters looking to get a quick buck, etc, so it's refreshing to read something arguing otherwise - and this is antirez who created Redis, so someone who can speak from experience.
by windexh8er | 2026-01-13 00:24:27+00:00
The article makes the assumption that Tesla and EcoFlow are the leaders. They're not. They're the expensive US targeted systems. For anyone wanting to learn more about other systems Will Prowse on YT [0] is an amazing resource for best of breed.

[0] https://youtube.com/@willprowse?si=j8oOreUXUSKfI8iO