MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hairofadog | 2026-01-05 20:35:02+00:00
My sense is that most people don't know what's going on even in normal times, or at best would have some vague idea that the word "Venezuela" is in the news but not be able to explain what's happening, so they interpret the question to mean either "Do you support President Trump" (30% do no matter what he does) or "Do you support the U.S. in this conflict against Venezuela".

Add to that the fact that most mainstream news and social media is now under the thumb of the administration and I have little hope of mass understanding of the recklessness of this move.

Even people who should know better, like Congress, the CEOs of some of America's largest corporations, and SCOTUS, seem to think this is a phase that will pass if they just wait it out.

I don't think the tide will turn until "average" Americans start feeling the pain intensely, which they haven't yet. For now it's just news happening in another part of the world.
by tannhaeuser | 2026-01-05 20:35:10+00:00
What's your suggestion to deal with Apple's current fail? Wait until Tahoe's successor(s) or leave for good? When Jony Ive left, Apple managed to listen to their customers and quickly got rid of the Touch Bar thing, reintroduced a physical Esc key, etc. so there's hope left, isn't there?
by Veserv | 2026-01-05 20:35:11+00:00
Of course that sucks. Just enable full time-travel recording in production and then you can use a standard multi-program trace visualizer and time travel debugger to identify the exact execution down to the instruction and precisely identify root causes in the code.

Everything is then instrumented automatically and exhaustively analyzable using standard tools. At most you might need to add in some manual instrumentation to indicate semantic layers, but even that can frequently be done after the fact with automated search and annotation on the full (instruction-level) recording.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-05 20:35:13+00:00
Also a big fan, it is my favorite and only third space. I believe they are fine as is, as some who has had comment throttling applied, and is not given vouch. Their sandbox, their rules. You can always email to appeal and plead your case. Otherwise, you're giving away trust and safety signal to potential threat actors and people acting in bad faith.

You will either change your behavior improving collective discourse and have privileges restored, not, or learn to operate within the constraints applied without changing (throttled comment posting, etc).
by convolvatron | 2026-01-05 20:35:29+00:00
thats a largely meaningless response. enforcing a decent and maintainable architecture is potentially of great value to the company. Unfortunately thats a subjective call. I'm sure you've lived through codebases that dont really admit bug fixes or feature enhancements - things that the company knows that it cares about.

as professionals who are invested in the long term success of the company, it our responsibility to bring up concerns about the future, and attempt to negotiate a good compromise between the short term and long terms goals.
by GoatInGrey | 2026-01-05 20:35:30+00:00
Grok is a hosted service. In your analogy, it would be like a gun shop renting a gun out to someone who puts down "Rob a store" as the intended usage of the rental. Then renting another gun to that same client. Then when confronted, telling people "I'm not responsible for what people do with the guns they rent from me".

It's not a personal tool that the company has no control over. It's a service they are actively providing and administering.
by _QrE | 2026-01-05 20:35:35+00:00
Malware is very easy to build. Competent threat actors don't need to rely on open source software, and incompetent ones can buy what they use from malware authors who sell their stuff in various forums. Concerns similar to yours about 'upgrading' the capabilities of threat actors were raised when NSA made Ghidra public, yet the NSA considers the move itself to have been good (https://www.nsa.gov/Press-Room/News-Highlights/Article/Artic...).

People will build malware. It is actually both fun and educational. Them sharing it makes the world aware of it, and when people are aware of it, they tend to adjust their security posture for the better if they feel threatened by it. Good cybersecurity research & development raises the bar for the industry and makes the world more secure.
by filoleg | 2026-01-05 20:35:56+00:00
> To get promoted at Google from L5 (Sr SWE) to L6 (Staff SWE) you need to do the work of a GOOD L6 for 1y+ and have made some very solid internal networking connections and have multiple managers on your side and have an opening for such a role.

100% agreed. Just as importantly, you also need to be aware of what type of an environment you are in and plan accordingly.

Sometimes, you are just in an environment where it is somewhere between extremely improbable and nearly impossible to get promoted. At that point, you would be better served to put more effort into changing that environment, instead of chasing the grind. I learned that one the hard way a few years ago, at, ironically, Google.

I was on track to a promo, got a documented track record, got the backing of multiple managers + my team lead, etc. But guess what? Another reorg happened shortly before the cutoff for the review cycle, i got a new manager who literally just met me for the first time, and my chances tanked to essentially zero (which is understandable, because I don’t see how a manager who just discovered my existence a week prior would be able to effectively back my promo package). Since then, I had an average of 3-5 major reorgs and 1-2 manager changes per year. As I came to eventually realize, this type of a dysfunctional environment wasn’t conductive to a good career velocity.

Needless to say, my decision to just put my head in the sand and grind harder to compensate for this kind of organizational instability was stupid. It would’ve definitely been a better bet (in terms of time/effort, career trajectory, and compensation) to put even just a portion of that effort into changing my environment, as opposed to trying to compensate for organizational dysfunction with raw work effort.

TLDR: if you care about having a good promotion velocity, focus on the biggest blocker in your specific situation. Whether it is the lack of track record demonstrating sustained effort at the L+1 level, or your environment being dysfunctional in ways that make promotions improbable, etc. Just gotta keep the eyes on the prize, and pick the solutions that are the most appropriate for your individual situation (instead of blindly just doing "XYZ because I read that it was a great career advice" in a single-minded manner).
by rjh29 | 2026-01-05 20:35:57+00:00
Ken Jennings doesn't! I am speculating though so I'll defer to your knowledge here. I was trying to say, for some people it comes naturally. I doubt the majority of quizzers are doing 300k reviews a year.

Reminds me of that guy who "mastered the NYT Crossword" by flashcarding questions/clues. I also learned to do the Saturday consistently - just by doing the crossword every day for a while. You don't always need flashcards.
by avree | 2026-01-05 20:36:04+00:00
Every time I've seen people use Git worktrees with agents, it's incredibly wasteful. What is the use case for running parallel isolated agents? Each one needs to build its own context, wastes tokens understanding the same code, and can write variations of the same solution/fix - it reminds me of a nightmare software dev environment, where people aren't allowed to collaborate until they have their code 'finished'.
by michaelmrose | 2026-01-05 20:36:26+00:00
Incidence of harm is a function of harm/population. It is likely that Facebook is orders of magnitude more harmful than ChatGPT and bathtubs and bikes more dangerous than long LLM conversations.

It doesn't mean something more should not be done but we should retain perspective.

Maybe they should try to detect not long conversations but dangerous ones based on spot checking with a LLM to flag problems up for human review and a family notification program.

EG Bob is a nut. We can find this out by having a LLM not pre prompted by Bob's crazy examine some of the chats by top users by tokens consumed in chat not API and flagging it up to a human who cuts off bob or better shunts him to a version designed to shut down his particular brand of crazy eg pre prompted to tell him it's unhealthy.

This initial flag for review could also come from family or friends and if OpenAI concurs handle as above.

Likewise we could target posters of conspiracy theories for review and containment.
by coldtea | 2026-01-05 20:36:28+00:00
This here response continues to stretch "pedantic correction" to new levels.

What's "literally outlined" I'd guess is that the utility of the Tor network increases with adoption which nobody ever doubted.

What is discard is the tenuous over-stretched argument in this thread regarding fears of legality, that went like this:

GP: Using Tor browser and running a Tor node are different things, by using the browser you are not contributing to the network, you're just accessing it.

P: That's false to some extent. Tor's promise comes from it's vast population of users. The more users it has, the better it is to improve everyone's anonymity. So in a way, even by using it, you are helping Tor network.

As if that what was discussed...
by jstgunderscore | 2026-01-05 20:36:30+00:00
When the camera was invented, no one was claiming a photo was a painting.

The camera replaced painters for the "I want to capture a static image" market but not the "I want art as expressed by a painter" market. While tragic for a lot of painters at the time, it does seem like the cost of progress.

In writing, there is no "objective capture" like with cameras; there's no tech that can take a picture of your conscious thoughts and translate that to words on a page in a way that's reproducible. So there is only a single arena of "written expression" that LLMs and traditional writers are competing in. And while there is a strong desired market for "art as expressed by the [human] writer," the product itself is much more difficult to distinguish from the new tech (LLM writing) than a photo from a painting. And the low effort of entry into this desired market with LLM writing is driving its dilution.

The analogy would work if instead they invented a magical camera that could turn any scene into a painting in any art style reliably, and hide the painting's origins.
by munchbunny | 2026-01-05 20:36:59+00:00
My personal experience with this from the manager's perspective: I aim to promote someone as soon as they are ready, but no sooner. If I promote someone who will not succeed against the expectations of the higher leveled title, I'm just setting them up to get fired or "managed out" when they were otherwise perfectly competent in the level they're at. That's ignoring the natural fuzziness and storytelling element of defining and measuring competence, of course, but that's the general idea of where I put the threshold.

"Readiness" means that I believe that after their promotion they will be able to execute at the higher level at least most of the time. That doesn't necessarily mean they need to be already doing the higher leveled job, but in practice they do need to show that they can sustain some approximation of it.
by charles_f | 2026-01-05 20:36:59+00:00
Great article, once you find how to deactivate the snowflakes.

This is only an opinion, but it feels like UX in general is moving towards making things cute rather than usable. Liquid glass is a case in point.

This is useful to a point, in the same sense that one might beauty, but when this is all you care about, it becomes a problem.
by Jordan-117 | 2026-01-05 20:37:00+00:00
It's not exactly the same aesthetic, but this reminds me of one of my all-time favorite ads from the period: Packard Bell's "Home" (1996):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiZcy86_L74

Kind of an "I Spy" meets "Tim Burton Batman" fever dream, ending in the kind of colorful fantasia you'd see on the cover of some Utopian Scholastic PC package.
by solomonb | 2026-01-05 20:37:14+00:00
Did you really interpret my statement as "AI content producers are being so creative and then quitting posting"?

I'm not talking about people posting good content and then stopping posting.

I guess its fair to say that "become repetitive" was unclear, what I should have said was "reveals itself to be repetitive."

I'm saying that these AI generated world building channels produce lots of content that looks creative and exciting at first but over time reveals itself to be repetitive and lacking in creativity.
by krapp | 2026-01-05 20:37:20+00:00
Like Joe Biden? Pro-cop, anti-union DA who deported people more aggressively than Trump?

Or Kamala Harris, who doubled down on support for Israel's genocide, said she wanted the most lethal military in the world, and courted Bush era neocons?

What does a "sane" Democrat look like and why do I suspect it resembles a Republican in all but name?
by nine_k | 2026-01-05 20:37:41+00:00
How many more amateur attempts did these layers thwart? Did its creators collect enough revenue before the crack was produced?

I suppose uncrackable software, in the sense of e.g. license protection, cannot exist. Software is completely beholden to hardware, and known hardware can be arbitrarily emulated, and there's nowhere to hide any tamper-resistant secret bits. Only in a combination with locked-down, uncrackable hardware can properly designed software without critical bugs remain uncrackable; see stuff like yubikeys. Similarly, communication can remain uncrackable as long as the secret bits (like a private key) remain secret.
by biophysboy | 2026-01-05 20:37:46+00:00
This thread is genuinely enraging. The people making false appeals to higher principles (eg section 230) in order to absolve X of any guilt are completely insane if you take the situation at face value. Here we have a new tool that allows you to make porn of users, including minors, in an instant. None of the other new AI platforms seem to be having this problem. And yet, there are still people here making excuses.
by wrsh07 | 2026-01-05 20:38:11+00:00
This post has some big gaps. Who is this for? When is it relevant?

The opposite advice is essentially addressed in Being Glue by Tanya Reilly^. If you do a job that your management chain is not measuring, you won't be rewarded for it.

Excerpting:

> But sometimes a team ends up someone who isn't senior, but who happens to be good at this stuff. Someone who acts senior before they're senior. This kind of work makes the team better -- there's plenty of it to go around. But people aren't always rewarded for doing it.

If you take the op advice literally, you might find that you're not promoted AND management thinks you're bad at your job

So the rules of promotions:

1. First, do the things that are expected of you. If you don't do these things (or you do them in a way that management doesn't expect or can't measure) you will have to do additional work to make sure they get measured. Staff engineers are good at doing auxillary work and explaining why it's valuable. If you aren't, then focus on the things that are obviously valuable

2. If you're doing everything your team needs from you, now is a great time to do the additional work. Figure out where test coverage is anemic, profile that really slow query, write up your list of pain points and throw together a list of some initial ideas for solutions (codex & Claude can be great helps here, but don't be like OP. If you use AI to write something, let everyone know: "codex and I think these solutions might work, but I haven't spent much time on it")

3. Talk to your manager regularly (monthly) about what things you need to do to try going up for promo at the next cycle. Again, if you do this without doing (1), you're not getting promoted. That's why it's down here at (3)

^ https://www.noidea.dog/glue
by bluGill | 2026-01-05 20:38:15+00:00
Roads are cheap. I know we spend billions on them, but they are still cheap compared to adding another floor.

I'm not arguing with your other points. Density is often worth the monetary costs, but don't try to pretend it isn't more expensive. (Indeed I would value the time density can save high, but there is no objective way to value a large part of my time)
AWS Potential Latency Due to Subsea Fiber Cut AP-Northeast-1 AP-Southeast-1
by oriettaxx | 2026-01-05 20:38:36+00:00
In our aws account a popup warn:

"Potential Increased Latency Due To Subsea Fiber Cut Between AP-NORTHEAST-1 and AP-SOUTHEAST-1 Regions
Beginning on January 3, customers may experience increased latency for connectivity between the AP-NORTHEAST-1 and AP-SOUTHEAST-1 Regions. This increase in latency is due to external sub-sea network events affecting multiple redundant paths between AP-NORTHEAST-1 and AP-SOUTHEAST-1, causing traffic to automatically reroute through alternate paths. We are working with external providers to restore normal connectivity and expect this work to run through the month of January 2026"

Is it an old warning? I see nothing in https://health.console.aws.amazon.com
by refset | 2026-01-05 20:39:09+00:00
> it's kind of frustrating that XTDB has to be its own top-level database instead of a storage engine or plugin for another. XTDB's core competence is its approach to temporal row tagging and querying. What part of this core competence requires a new SQL parser?

Many implementation options were considered before we embarked on v2, including building on Calcite. We opted to maximise flexibility over the long term (we have bigger ambitions beyond the bitemporal angle) and to keep non-Clojure/Kotlin dependencies to a minimum.
by ux266478 | 2026-01-05 20:39:52+00:00
> They are still valuable.

Only because of the broader context of the legal environment. If there was no prosecution for breaking and entering, they would be effectively worthless. For the analogy to hold, we need laws to throw coercive measures against those trying to bypass guard rails. Theoretically, this already exists in the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in the US, but that interpretation doesn't exist quite yet.
by cmckn | 2026-01-05 20:40:27+00:00
Unless you’re going to be on GLP-1’s for the rest of your life, you still have to make all the normal lifestyle changes to maintain a healthy weight. I can’t help but feel that GLP-1’s are being used too often as a quick fix for relatively small amounts of weight loss; but they do address a particular problem that some people have.

In my case, I was just eating (read: drinking) too many calories, while not getting much exercise. Any small effort at a calorie deficit and moderate exercise makes the weight fall off.
by Someone1234 | 2026-01-05 20:40:32+00:00
Bone density loss is a side-effect of losing weight. GLP-1s cause you to lose weight. You counteract that the same way you counteract it during all weight loss: Each day, eat 0.36 grams of protein for each pound (lbs) of healthy or lean body weight (i.e. you don't need additional protein for your excess body-fat, so use lean/or hypothetically healthy weight). Exercise inc. resistance training. For example if you would be 180 lbs at a healthy weight for your height, eat minimum 65 grams of protein.

Both of the two available GLP-1 have similar side effects, with Tirzepatide being lower at an equivalent effect dose. Their common side-effects are: Nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and indigestion. With rare serious side-effects being: Pancreatitis, allergic reaction. thyroid cancer, and acute kidney injury.

Generally speaking the common side-effects are dose-dependent. If you suffer too much, you back off the medication until the side-effects are at a level you can manage. This is common.
by shuaimu | 2026-01-05 20:40:38+00:00
OP here: Ah, thanks for all these comments! Didn't expect so much passion.

Many comments are right this is prototype and there isn't any code guarantee! It is purely test case driven.

But this prototype sort of proves that to have Rust-equivalent memory safety, you don't really need to completely ditch C++, and all those "rewrite in Rust" clones of C++ repos. The time I spent on this project is very limited. I did maybe half of the dev on my phone through Happy. If Microsoft or Google who has lots of C++ code is willing to put some serious resources on this idea, I am sure they can have something a lot more solid. And they don't have to give up C++ (they shouldn't, it is very unclever engineering wise).

To me personally this prototype is a "usable" alternative to Circle C++. It saved me a lot of hard debugging time.
by andsoitis | 2026-01-05 20:40:46+00:00
The EU is also fighting X on the front of user verification (e.g. HN discussion Dec 2025 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46375470)

One idea would be to say if a user is properly verified, then the EU can go after them for contravening laws and regulations that pertain to illegal photos. In the case that the EU cannot, it will hold X liable.
by gorbot | 2026-01-05 20:41:06+00:00
> instead of demanding that the companies do the police work

How hard is this? What are they doing now, and is it enough? Do we know how hard they are trying?

For argument's sake, what if they had truly zero safegaurd around it, you could type "generate child porn" and it would 100% of the time. Surely you'd agree they should prevent that case, and be held accountable if they never took action to prevent it.

Regulation, clear laws around this would help. Surely they could try go get some threshold of difficulty in place that is a requirement to adhere to preventing.
by zmmmmm | 2026-01-05 20:41:42+00:00
> "More leisure for everyone" is utter bollocks.

it's fascinating how this delusion persists.

More leisure will only occur if it becomes true that the marginal return of doing additional work falls almost to zero. So to say people will have more leisure time actually suggests more that they will lack opportunities to do things of value than it does that they will choose to have more leisure time. Which is depressing.
by dalemyers | 2026-01-05 20:41:45+00:00
I've been on a low dose for a year. I've lost 25kg (60 lbs) without much effort. Yes, it definitely dulls my appetite, and if I want to have a nice meal, I need to plan ahead for several weeks so that I have it _just_ before my next injection. There's also the fact that I didn't realise how important snacking was to my mental health. Since I don't have that, I've had to find other ways to boost my mood.

As a brief summary, it absolutely delivers what it says it does. I've lost weight as it claimed due to appetite suppression and feeling fuller longer. However, it's more complex than that, and the battle to ensure I get enough protein has been tough.
by dhorthy | 2026-01-05 20:41:57+00:00
engineers always want to re write from scratch and it never works.

a tale as old as time - my second job out of college back in like 2016, I landed at the tail end of a 3-month feature-freeze refactor project. was pitched to the CEO as 1-month, sprawled out to 3 months, still wasn't finished. Non-technical teams were pissed, technical teams were exhausted, all hope was lost. Ended up cutting a bunch of scope and slopping out a bunch of bugs anyway.
by scuff3d | 2026-01-05 20:42:31+00:00
Probably one of the single best investments of time and money you can make is on maintaining your teeth. Incredibly high "return" for relatively small "investment".

Even if you don't have good (or any) healthcare, simply thoroughly brushing and flossing everyday will make a world of differece. If you can scrape together a couple hundred bucks for cleanings once or twice a year, even better.

I spent years neglecting my teeth, really only brushing daily and doing nothing else. Once I started going to the dentist regularlyx I got incredibly lucky they weren't much worse. Minutes a day and a couple hundred a year will save you a lot of pain and money in the long run.