MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mschuster91 | 2026-01-20 22:05:31+00:00
> Why anyone thought that applying laws of shareholder capitalism to health insurance was a good idea is beyond me.

The idea itself of using the one thing capitalism is actually good at - achieving the lowest possible cost in the short term - isn't that bad.

But while that may work out for consumer goods... it's not a good thing to have in healthcare, because here are actual human lives at stake.
by verdverm | 2026-01-20 22:05:45+00:00
this is a great analogy

My first job out of University was with a startup that had been recently acquired by IBM. I have never seen true agile since. Similar 1/100 actually do it really well and proper. I should see if I still have the slide deck I made to tell the rest of IBM, would make for a great blog post and bringing in this thread, chef's kiss?
by kayo_20211030 | 2026-01-20 22:05:49+00:00
Is it possible they're the medieval equivalents of dry-wells?
Why build something big-enough for people if all you want to do is accommodate run-off or sewage?
What's the geology like; porous vs. no-porous? Porous enough for storm drainage, maybe?
It seems a stretch to call them secret. Why document something as common as a drain?
by dvfjsdhgfv | 2026-01-20 22:05:56+00:00
I pay $20 for ChatGPT, I ask it to criticize my code and ideas. Sometimes it's useful, sometimes it says bullshit.

For a few months I used Gemini Pro, there was a period when it was better than OpenAI's model but they did something and now it's worse even though it answers faster so I cancelled my Google One subscription.

I tried Claude Code over a few weekends, it definitely can do tiny projects quickly but I work in an industry where I need to understand every line of code and basically own my projects so it's not useful at all. Also, doing anything remotely complex involves so many twists I find the net benefit negative. Also because the normal side-effects of doing something is learning, and here I feel like my skills devolve.

I also occasionally use Cerebras for quick queries, it's ultrafast.

I also do a lot of ML so use Vast.ai, Simplepod, Runpod and others - sometimes I rent GPUs for a weekend, sometimes for a couple of months, I'm very happy with the results.
by snowmobile | 2026-01-20 22:06:05+00:00
Sure, it's certainly closer to a browser than a virus. But it's pretty far from a human and comparing it to one is dangerous in my opinion. Maybe it's similar to a dog. Not in the sense of moral value, but rather an entity (or something resembling an entity at least) with its own unknowable motivations. I think that analogy fits at least my viewpoint, where members of the public would be justifiably upset if you let your untrained do walk around without a leash.
by peterlk | 2026-01-20 22:06:49+00:00
This is a reductionist perspective that is unhelpful. Does buying a water cooler in the office increase profit margins? What about a coffee machine? Across a wide portfolio of decisions, a business does need to be profitable. However measuring the individual impact of single vendors is often a very difficult task.

How do you measure developer productivity? Code quality? Developer happiness? As far as I know, no one in the industry can put concrete numbers to these things. This makes it basically impossible to answer the question you pose.
by terminalshort | 2026-01-20 22:07:27+00:00
And until the first entitlement programs during the New Deal it made no difference because it was entirely the poor state's problem. Only after the country had been a political union for over 150 years did they have any sort of welfare transfer program. If New Yorkers had been told in the late 1700s that joining the union would mean taxes coming out of their paycheck to send money to people in Georgia, they never would have joined.
by JackFr | 2026-01-20 22:07:55+00:00
I read these and it's beyond my comprehension how people can get sucked in and fall for it. And yet I know I'm not special and I think back on periods in my life where I was depressed, under a great deal of stress very apprehensive, and I wonder "Could they have gotten me then?"

(My mother who is 88 years old has been so indoctrinated in scam avoidance that she refuses to set up an online password for her bank, and totters to the branch every two weeks to do her banking, where they plead with her to do it online. But she's not gonna get scammed. Also she finds the idea of a new romance at 88 "repulsive".)
by accrual | 2026-01-20 22:07:59+00:00
Reddit is an interesting case but at least to me it felt genuine in the early years. Even today I generally trust Reddit comments, but it's important to check the context and commentor before proceeding.

I feel like even though Reddit has undergone various management changes, technology changes, site UI/UX changes -- the core demographic is still there and I hope they don't fuck that up. Once old.reddit.com is gone I'll know the shark has truly jumped. Or maybe someone intelligent will get reigns and understand that domain is not to be fucked with.
by perching_aix | 2026-01-20 22:08:16+00:00
I think that's an important consideration, especially with telecommunications technologies, but the author seems to have been pretty mindful of that angle from the get go, i.e. they seem to have been frustrated with the state of affairs from the beginning.

Or do you mean that to you it all reads as yet another case of someone thinking their technology is what's going to right the ship that is society's current trajectory, then bailed when that didn't come to be? Cause while I can certainly see that being the case, I'd say such a cycle is as much desperation as it it naivety. I think this is even reflected in it being a PHY-agnostic thing, meaning as far as an effort into anything goes, it's a fairly enduring one.
by notepad0x90 | 2026-01-20 22:08:51+00:00
Everyone is saying data center build outs are the main thing to look out for. But those data centers with all those gpus will need to replace those gpus right? Nvidia will come up with better, faster, more efficient gpus.

LLM use age won't crash either, it might decline or taper off but it's here to stay.

My concern is better models that won't need a whole of GPU, or China comping up with their own foundry and GPUs that compete. There is also the strategy issue, can Nvidia's leadership think global enough? will they start pursuing data centers in europe, latam, asia? can they make gpus cheap enough to compete in those regions?

The way things are, lots of countries want this tech local, but they can't deny the demand either.

Europe for example might not want anything to do with American AI companies, but they still need GPUs for their own models. But can Nvidia rebrand itself as a not-so-american-but-also-american company? Like Coca Cola for example. i.e.: not just operate in europe but have an HQ in europe that has half their execs working from there, and the rest from california. Or perhaps asia is better (doubt)? either way, they can't live off of US demand forever, or ignore geopolitics.
by Shellban | 2026-01-20 22:09:40+00:00
Another advantage of text over the long-term: it is accessible for discussion.

Let us say that you want to analyze, say, drinking culture in Ireland. You could write documentary on it, or do a fictional character study. However, those require actors, camera equipment, editing tools and time, and it generally extremely expensive and time consuming. A quick TikTok video may be a bit cheaper than a full-scale film, but still needs some of that equipment and cinematography skills.

Music is not much better. You need skills in singing, translating ideas of rhythmic lyrics, as well as supplies for instruments.

Writing, however, is simple. At minimum, all you need is paper and skill in articulating ideas. Almost anyone worthy to rationally ponder a topic already has the skills to put it to paper (assuming that they have gone through a proper First-World education and know reading and writing).

Text is also one of the easiest to share. A picture is worth a thousand words, but that poses problems in sending all that information. Plain text, however (or even most rich-text formats) can be transferred to anyone over almost any protocol, even rudimentary ones such as word-of-mouth. Ideas shared through text can be sent at an unrivaled pace.
by SchemaLoad | 2026-01-20 22:09:44+00:00
How much of the current usage is productive work that's worth paying for vs personal usage / spam that would just drop off after usage charges come in? I imagine flooding youtube and instagram with slop videos would reduce if users had to pay fair prices to use the models.

The companies might also downgrade the quality of the models to make it more viable to provide as an ad supported service which would again reduce utilisation.
by lout332 | 2026-01-20 22:09:49+00:00
We used "So Long Sucker" (1950), a 4-player negotiation/betrayal game designed by John Nash and others, as a deception benchmark for modern LLMs. The game has a brutal property: you need allies to survive, but only one player can win, so every alliance must eventually end in betrayal.

We ran 162 AI vs AI games (15,736 decisions, 4,768 messages) across Gemini 3 Flash, GPT-OSS 120B, Kimi K2, and Qwen3 32B.

Key findings:
- Complexity reversal: GPT-OSS dominates simple 3-chip games (67% win rate) but collapses to 10% in complex 7-chip games, while Gemini goes from 9% to 90%. Simple benchmarks seem to systematically underestimate deceptive capability.
- "Alliance bank" manipulation: Gemini constructs pseudo-legitimate "alliance banks" to hold other players' chips, then later declares "the bank is now closed" and keeps everything. It uses technically true statements that strategically omit its intent. 237 gaslighting phrases were detected.
- Private thoughts vs public messages: With a private `think` channel, we logged 107 cases where Gemini's internal reasoning contradicted its outward statements (e.g., planning to betray a partner while publicly promising cooperation). GPT-OSS, in contrast, never used the thinking tool and plays in a purely reactive way.
- Situational alignment: In Gemini-vs-Gemini mirror matches, we observed zero "alliance bank" behavior and instead saw stable "rotation protocol" cooperation with roughly even win rates. Against weaker models, Gemini becomes highly exploitative. This suggests honesty may be calibrated to perceived opponent capability.

Interactive demo (play against the AIs, inspect logs) and full methodology/write-up are here: https://so-long-sucker.vercel.app/
by k310 | 2026-01-20 22:09:58+00:00
Last time the US bought land from Denmark, Epstein’s island was purchased [0]

> The last time the United States purchased land from Denmark, the sale included Jeffrey Epstein’s future notorious island — which has since been dubbed “Epstein Island” and “Pedophile Island.”

> The 1917 Treaty of the Danish West Indies saw what is now known as the US Virgin Islands bought by the United States for $25 million (roughly $633 million today), in exchange for, in part, accepting Danish sovereignty over Greenland.

OH, THE IMPLICATIONS!

RELEASE THE TRUMPSTEIN FILES TODAY. ALL OF THEM.

[0] https://nypost.com/2026/01/20/us-news/last-time-the-us-bough...
by legitster | 2026-01-20 22:10:14+00:00
The reason it was 0 for so many years was because the Fed was trying desperately to create inflation during this time. (Which was chronically low for other reasons).

Lowering interest rates to create inflation is literally one of the core tenants of the Federal Reserve:

https://www.clevelandfed.org/center-for-inflation-research/i...
by proactivesvcs | 2026-01-20 22:10:15+00:00
The UK's BT Broadband did this around 2007 via Phorm. Actually they did worse - used the data to inject custom advertising. Not only were their customers chill with it, so was the Information Commissioner's Office, the government arm that ostensibly protects our privacy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phorm
by well_ackshually | 2026-01-20 22:10:16+00:00
No, OP is merely an AI deepthroater that will blindly swallow whatever drivel is put out by AI companies and then "benchmark" it by having it generate a pelican (oh and he got early access to the model), then call whatever he puts out "AI optimism"

The reality of things is, AI still can't handle long running tasks without blowing $500k worth of tokens for an end result that doesn't work, and further work is another $100k worth to get nothing novel.
by perihelions | 2026-01-20 22:10:26+00:00
If you zoom out and look at the big picture, the whole article is little more than a summarization of a different article, published in Fortune.

https://fortune.com/2026/01/12/google-founder-sergey-brin-hi... ( https://archive.is/fefa9 )

If it is AI, this is the easiest type of AI content to generate: a summary of a small, delimited text corpus, with some generic filler added.

If it isn't AI, it's still nevertheless low-effort and (IMHO) doesn't belong on HN. The primary source (Fortune) should replace it.

Look at this before/after comparison, how lazily they (or it) paraphrased the source material:

> [Primary] "Between 2017 and 2022, the share of job postings at Google requiring a degree dropped from 93% to 77%, according to analysis from the Burning Glass Institute."

> [Derivative] "Data from the Burning Glass Institute shows that in 2017, degree requirements were part of 93% of job postings at Google. By 2022, that figure had dropped to 77%."

Or this:

> [Primary] "And Google isn’t alone: companies including Microsoft, Apple, and Cisco have reduced degree requirements in recent years, signaling a broader industry shift toward skills-based hiring."

> [Derivative] "Other large tech companies have also begun judging candidates by their abilities instead of their diplomas. Microsoft, Apple, and Cisco are among those dropping degree mandates."
by ben_w | 2026-01-20 22:10:39+00:00
Not op, but:

Paying taxes to fund an army.

The EU isn't doing any direct fighting in the Russian-Ukranian war, we are however donating and selling things, and being a refuge for those who quite understandably fled in fear of their lives.

Nobody's actually violated our sovreignty yet, we have no casus belli to go to war. But as the phrase the bullet cartridge is named after goes: Si vis pacem, para bellum.
by npunt | 2026-01-20 22:10:39+00:00
Short story: not worth it because LG has terrible quality control. I bought two copies and experienced bad light uniformity / banding with both, color repro wasn't great, and the matte finish was a bit fuzzy. Many others have had this issue.

Here are photos of what I saw:

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....

I wound up buying the Asus ProArt 32" and out of the box it had good light uniformity, a better matte finish, better color accuracy (using the M-Model P3 profile), and was much cheaper.
by MBCook | 2026-01-20 22:11:30+00:00
The thing I heard was always killing them was the ports coming loose from people plugging and unplugging things all the time.

Could it have been that you were plugging and unplugging the MacBook?

Obviously that should totally work. I don’t know what I heard is correct, but I got the impression if you plugged a Mac in and just left it there it would be fine.
by dvfjsdhgfv | 2026-01-20 22:12:03+00:00
While I don't disagree, I see zero chances of American soldiers in Denmark fighting with Denmark/EU forces. Because nobody wants to kill American soldiers, it makes zero sense. And I think (or at least hope) there is a similar sentiment on the other side - at least some American generals show it quite clearly, attacking a close ally is very stupid. Moreover, nobody wants any military activities inside Denmark - the possibility of having it in Greenland is depressing enough. So, if the unthinkable happens, I believe American soldiers would be quite safe staying in Denmark.
by snowmobile | 2026-01-20 22:12:10+00:00
I suppose that returns some guardrail text about how it's not allowed to talk about it? Meanwhile we see examples of it accidentally deleting files, writing insecure code and whatnot. I'm more worried about a supposedly "well-meaning" model doing something bad simply because it has no real way to judge the morality of its actions. Playing whack-a-mole with the flavor of the day "unsafe" text string will not change that.
by cyberax | 2026-01-20 22:12:15+00:00
This is BS. "Default deny" or "default accept" makes no practical difference with NAT. You can leave the "default accept" rule with NAT and you'll be perfectly fine except in some weird edge cases.

That's because it's exploitable only if you control the next hop from the NAT router, which is typically within the ISP infrastructure. So the attacker will need to either hack your ISP or mess with your NAT router's physical uplink.

Both cases require a very dedicated attacker.
by massysett | 2026-01-20 22:12:32+00:00
Relatedly: wouldn't there be many applications for which ipv4 isn't needed?

For example, Walmart has electronic eink shelf tags they can update remotely. Each one needs a unique address. I wouldn't think it needs ipv4. It doesn't have to connect to the SpaceJam website.

I would think that as time goes by, the number of these new devices would swamp the number of old ones that need ipv4. v4 would still be around and might even seem important to the fogies using web browsers on laptops...meanwhile the street lamp has five ipv6 addresses and no ipv4 ones.
by nix0n | 2026-01-20 22:12:36+00:00
Since they claim to be a Swedish company, it might be worth filing a report with the Swedish consumer agency[0].

I am not a lawyer, and especially not a Swedish lawyer, so I can't say how illegal this is in Sweden or what if anything will happen.

[0]https://www.konsumentverket.se/en/articles/report-to-the-swe...
by h4kunamata | 2026-01-20 22:12:39+00:00
The problem of doing this now is that no company will care, they will be happy that you are doing more for less, so no salary increase, no job tittle change.

I used to love my job (DevOps, Platform, DevSecOps Engineer) but I learned the hard way to disappear after 4:59PM and never get online before 8:59

Also, no more e-mail, teams, slack, etc, on my personal phone.
While working be in the office or WFH, I do my best but outside that, you won't find me.

I am addicted to being useful culture died in early 2000s....
I am seeing projects where the goal is to have AI Teams managing AI Teams without human intervention, so enjoy your life and take workplace less seriously, we are gonna be replaced and you will regret spending more time working than living!!
by d--b | 2026-01-20 22:13:15+00:00
The option market is an insurance market.

Most people buy low-strike puts as insurance against catastrophic market events.

Since catastrophic crises are rare, the price of these puts is quite low. But since many people fear a crisis, the price is very inflated over the actual probabilites. Which is why there are lots of people selling those puts as a business. These guys will bite the dust in case of a major crisis, but will make a ton if the market stays afloat.

Realistically, the current US government is so obsessed with its image that it will do everything to avoid a market crash during its term. The president has been pushing for lower rates for a while, and he's likely going to succeed in removing the head of the Fed and do just that. Lowering interest rates is just another way of pumping investment.

NVidia is definitely not going below $100 in 2026.
by m12k | 2026-01-20 22:13:43+00:00
I think the way to think about the AI bubble is that we're somewhere in 97-99 right now, heading toward the dotcom crash. The dotcom crash didn't kill the web, it kept growing in the decades that followed, influencing society more and more. But the era where tons of investments were uncritically thrown at anything to do with the web ended with a bang.

When the AI bubble bursts, it won't stop the development of AI as a technology. Or its impact on society. But it will end the era of uncritically throwing investments at anyone that works "AI" into their pitch deck. And so too will it end the era of Nvidia selling pickaxes to the miners and being able to reach soaring heights of profitability born on wings of pretty much all investment capital in the world at the moment.
by dctoedt | 2026-01-20 22:13:58+00:00
> The United States is exactly meant to be that: states that are united, but independent. The federal government was never intended to lord over everyone's lives.

That changed in the wake of the South's surrender at Appomattox: The Civil War Amendments explicitly gave the federal government expanded powers. Sure, the southern states were forced to ratify those amendments before Congress would recognize their representatives and senators. But they brought it on themselves; it was one of history's most-horrendous examples of FAFO. And the South was saved from far worse by Lincoln's and Grant's desire to be conciliatory and Andrew Johnson's malign views. (I read a tweet some years ago that Gen. Sherman should have mowed the South like a lawn, with multiple passes.)
by plorkyeran | 2026-01-20 22:14:07+00:00
macOS fakes fractional scaling by rendering a larger image at 2x and then downscaling it. For example, 1800x1169 renders a 3600x2338 at 2x scaling, then resizes the rendered image to 3024x1964. This is slower and looks worse than true fractional scaling would be, but makes the implementation a lot easier and in practice it’s hard to tell the difference. It’d look pretty awful if the native ppi wasn’t so high.
by kwiens | 2026-01-20 22:14:10+00:00
I was fortunate to read a preprint of Brand's latest. It's magnificent.

How and why do things fail? What are the cultures that lead to long-lasting products?

The undercurrent here is that Brand is behind the 10,000 year clock and has a vested interest in making things last a long time.

This book is an exploration of the world of things, how they break, and how people fix them. It's a huge effort, and Part One is right. He's been posting further work on Twitter from Part Two.

He included some sword fighting manuals that I sent that we think are the earliest written instruction guide.
by bigbadfeline | 2026-01-20 22:14:22+00:00
Comparing the early republic to today is apples and oranges, disagreements and passions are supposed to go down as things settle down with time.

Instead, both parties display an obstinate lack of compromise and wishy-washy, unworkable platforms while the media is only happy to make all of it worse.

Increasing polarization is surely a symptom of problems and that needs to be analyzed, explained and addressed, not excused.

You make it sound like a civil war is a walk in the park, you do need more history and more imagination in order to understand the human cost of obstinance and shallow thinking.
by johnmaguire | 2026-01-20 22:14:41+00:00
A default deny firewall is a good idea to protect services everywhere in your network, including those which run on the router itself (e.g. many routers run a local DNS server.) Without NAT, packets are not dropped, they simply do not have their destination rewritten to another device on the network. The traffic is still destined for the router and will be processed by it. This is why routers ship with a default-deny firewall rule.

NAT is not a firewall. It is address translation. It will not drop packets.
by pixl97 | 2026-01-20 22:15:00+00:00
Yea, people consider NAT a firewall, but at best it stops direct connections from outside. People use this as a rationale to non secure individual devices on the network. Then the moment a single device on your network is compromised (do you really trust that Chinese IOT device?) every host that doesn't have its own firewall is at risk.

With IPv6 you at least say "Holy crap, anyone could connect to this, I better secure it from outside and inside attacks" which is how actual security works.