MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by minimaxir | 2026-01-14 22:01:33+00:00
"AI tech bro creates slop X because they don't understand how X actually works" is a common trope among the anti-AI crowd even on Hacker News that has only been increasing in recent months, and sharing prompts/pipelines provides strong evidence that can be pointed at for dunks. Sharing AI workflows is more likely to illicit this snark if the project breaks out of the AI bubble, though in the case of the AI boosters on X described as in the HN submission that's a feature due to how monetization works that platform. It's not something I want to encourage for my own projects, though.

There's also the lessons on the recent shitstorms in the gaming industry, with Sandfall about Expedition 33's use of GenAI and Larian's comments on GenAI with concept art, where both received massive backlash because they were transparent in interviews about how GenAI was (inconsequentially) used. The most likely consequence of those incidents is that game developers are less likely on their development pipelines.
by vablings | 2026-01-14 22:01:40+00:00
Digital ID is a very wishy-washy concept that has been co-opted by various groups to make strong statements about government overreach. If you want to make criticism you should make narrower statements, for example.

A centralized ID system that can be used to safely verify the authenticity of a presenting party is good!

If that system can be used to track this person in more invasive ways than already possible with IMSI catchers, credit cards and facial recognition that is bad!

People think Digital ID is bad and this everlasting evil concept that will further make the most surveilled country in the world an Orwellian nightmare overnight which is a dramatization. The devil is really in the details here and depending on what flavors of implementation determines the "goodness"
by Hizonner | 2026-01-14 22:01:44+00:00
Nice job of sidestepping the "fundamental question" of whether that can be done and what damage it would do. You do not get to answer the question as you posed it in a vacuum.

It's not a "robustness issue". Nobody has proposed anything that works at all.

But to answer your "fundamental question", no. Age gating is dumb. Giving parents total control is also dumb.
by miduil | 2026-01-14 22:02:11+00:00
Well, the cause is known - it's many causes that have accumulated. Of course, maybe more research will bring some more definitive conclusions - but overall the core mechanisms seem to be well understood, at least to the extend on what will be needed to avoid similar scenarios in the future.

I don't understand why your reply is so aggressive though.

What is upsetting you by others talking about the blackout?

Especially understanding the economic impacts better, seems to be a reasonable thing to do?

Overall, there seems to have been very little effect on the economical growth of both countries - even though it has been a regular business day.

Some slide-deck that covers the situation well: https://www.brattle.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/2025-Iber...
by nobody9999 | 2026-01-14 22:02:13+00:00
>It's like you didn't see where I agree that current enforcement is too aggressive. Why are you writing in a tone that implies we disagree when we agree? This is the sort of thing that confuses me.

I combined my response to your comment[0] and its parent[1], as I mentioned:

I'm not pushing any "broader political narrative" either. Just pointing out a
few things not mentioned in your or GP's comments.

Rather than disagreeing with you, I was attempting to add nuance and additional substance. As the site guidelines[2] recommend:

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone
says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

You appear to have assumed bad faith on my part. Why is that? Was I not clear enough? What could I have added to the above to be clearer?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46620707

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46618048

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by tenpies | 2026-01-14 22:02:27+00:00
I suspect that too, and the US is not the only country to be having issues with some of the citizenship by investment countries.

Norway for example, appears to have de-facto banned 5 countries (all on the list) that have such programs: https://www.imidaily.com/europe/confirmed-norway-quietly-den...

Their justification is interesting too, because if the threshold is "citizenship must require personal attendance", then Canadian citizenship is almost certainly invalid too if you obtained yours over Zoom, which is how most new Canadians obtain it.
by jmyeet | 2026-01-14 22:03:01+00:00
That's not contradictory at all.

The comment you are replying to quite intentionally said "legal immigration". Republicans love illegal immigration. Why? because it suppresses wages of both documented and undocumented workers.

Undocumented workers can be employed below minimum wage. If they get an attitude and start demanding a fairer wage or better working conditions, their employer just calls in an ICE raid to clear them out and then they start with a fresh batch. They pay a token fine and that's that.

Several sectors are completely dependent on this arrangement, most notably agriculture and food processing (eg chicken farms)

If they actually cared about this, they would seriously punish the employers for employing undocumented workers. they do not. In fact, when that's been tried it's been a disaster (eg [1])

And because the system allows this to happen, it suppresses the wages of documented workers as well. That's the point. The entire system of restricting immigration is designed to increase profits. Nothing more.

What's the alternative? Easy. Document them. We've done this before. When there was a shortage of male workers in WW2 (because a lot of men were in the Army), we had the Bracero program [2] for temporary workers.

Historically, many such workers came to work then went back to (primarily) Mexico. They only ended up staying permanently when it became too hard to cross the border.

As for these latest bans, well we had 3 Muslim bans in Trump 1. The 19 then 39 (and now apparently 75) countries are pretty much jus tprimarily Muslim and "shithole" [3] countries.

All of this stems from the desire to turn the United States into a Christian theocracy but only for white people.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/14/alabama-immigr...

[2]: https://guides.loc.gov/latinx-civil-rights/bracero-program

[3]: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-referred-...
by asdff | 2026-01-14 22:03:22+00:00
Well, why would it not be? For information to be put in front of americans requires advertisement. Very few people seek out information organically versus simply being served information for consumption through a usually visited channel. Stories aren't written for free. This is probably why no one is protesting about Sudan or Yemen, very little in comparison is written about these conflicts, streamers and internet personalities aren't picking them up as much and putting them in front of their audiences.
by SoftTalker | 2026-01-14 22:04:01+00:00
> A pause in processing of immigration visas affects the tech industry

Is an immigration visa the same as a work visa? I don't know much about the different types of immigration. The stated reason for the pause in immigration visas is to keep out those who would end up being a "public charge." I interpret this as people who want to come to the US but have no demonstrated means of support once they get here.

Student visas, I presume, are unaffected? What about work visas? If you're coming to work, you would also be paying taxes and not need public support.
by anthk | 2026-01-14 22:04:07+00:00
If you think the Infocom games were like Zork I-III you don't understand how the ZMachine itself was improved over the years upon creating masterpieces such as Trinity or A Mind Forever Voyaging.

Then Curses!/Jigsaw are something else, and Anchorhead/Spider and Web/Inside Woman/All Things Devour are the king of games with thematics you won't see in 3D AAA games in decades.

And over the years the parser from Zork was so improved that could do chained phrases in English in the 90's on a 16 bit machine with the Z5 version of the Z-Machine with games designed for it. For Z8 machine games, the size of the games was even higher with far more objects and interactivity for puzzles thanks to Inform6 and Inform6lib depending on the build target.
by notatoad | 2026-01-14 22:04:21+00:00
if they didn't want to say more, they should have said less.

the way that normal serious businesses handle situations like this is to simply stop carrying the product, instead of publishing vague, unverifiable accusations of wrongdoing. and then if somebody notices and asks questions, you'd give a statement like "unfortunately we could not come to an agreement to continue our relationship with this vendor, but we're happy to be able to continue offering a number of other comprable products".
by burningChrome | 2026-01-14 22:04:21+00:00
All you had to do was a 10 second google search to find that:

The racial and ethnic makeup of legal immigrants who have obtained Lawful Permanent Resident (LPR) status or arrived as new immigrants in the past four years (2022–2025) has been primarily driven by arrivals from Latin America and Asia.

Asian: Approximately 27% to 28% of all immigrants.

Hispanic/Latino (Ethnicity): Roughly 45% of the total immigrant population identify with Hispanic or Latino ethnic origins.

White: About 20% to 21%.

Black/African American: Approximately 9%.

Multi-racial: About 22% identify as having two or more races.

It just amazes me people continue to push these racist narratives that doesn't hold up once you look at the actual data. Its staggering to think we have the unlimited power of the internet and still can't seem to take 10 seconds to confirm or deny something as simple as this? How depressing.
by prof-dr-ir | 2026-01-14 22:04:39+00:00
Yes, and RFK Jr. says certain vaccines have never worked.

I guess what I want to convey is how sad your comment makes me. What went wrong that makes you, and anyone really, trust that man's opinion on physics?

Here is a cynical but overall rather accurate takedown of Mr. Weinstein:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUr4Tb8uy-Q
by chasd00 | 2026-01-14 22:04:48+00:00
> expert with deep knowledge of their domain

these are the kinds of people that can use generative AI best IMO. Deep domain knowledge is needed to spot when the model output is wrong even though it sounds 100% correct. I've seen people take a model's output as correct to a shocking degree like placing large bets at a horse track after uploading a pic of the schedule to ChatGPT. Many people believe whatever a computer tells them but, in their defense, no one has had to question a large calculation done by a calculator until now.
by al_borland | 2026-01-14 22:05:13+00:00
I joined during the private beta and already gave up on it about a month ago. I ran into too many users that brought their Reddit toxicity with them. I couldn't take it. It looks like I only lasted a month; it seemed to start off OK, but went downhill quickly.

I see they launched the custom communities now, that didn't exist yet the last time I visited. Just scrolling through the front page, it looks like there is even less activity than when it was private, which seems concerning.
by mrinterweb | 2026-01-14 22:05:29+00:00
I've often thought about this. There are times I would rather have CI run locally, and use my PGP signature to add a git note to the commit. Something like:

```
echo "CI passed" | gpg2 --clearsign --output=- | git notes add -F-
```

Then CI could check git notes and check the dev signature, and skip the workflow/pipeline if correctly signed. With more local CI, the incentive may shift to buying devs fancier machines instead of spending that money on cloud CI. I bet most devs have extra cores to spare and would not mind having a beefier dev machine.
by kfarr | 2026-01-14 22:06:14+00:00
Like everything in LLM land it's all about the prompt and agent pipeline. As others say below, these people are experts in their domain. Their prompts are essentially a form of codifying their own knowledge, as in Rakyll and Galen's examples, to achieve specific outcomes based on years and maybe even decades of work in the problem domain. It's no surprise their outputs when ingested by an LLM are useful, but it might not tell us much about the true native capability of a given AI system.
by frio | 2026-01-14 22:06:19+00:00
I do wonder if LLMs will see tools like immudb (https://immudb.io/) or Datomic (https://www.datomic.com/) receive a bit more attention. The capacity to easily rollback the state to a previous immutably preserved state has always seemed like a fantastic addition to databases to me, but in the era of LLMs, even more important.
by jdellithorpe | 2026-01-14 22:07:10+00:00
The Dicer Slicelet supports such a pattern, you can poll the assignment directly on the Slicelet:

https://github.com/databricks/dicer/blob/master/dicer/extern...

(btw the notification mechanism itself does not deliver the assignment to the application, only notifies the application that the assignment has changed: https://github.com/databricks/dicer/blob/master/dicer/extern...)
by einpoklum | 2026-01-14 22:07:17+00:00
Then you have not been paying attention for the past decade, I'm afraid...

Ed Snowden revealed that these companies share their data with the US government:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants...

also, even you think about using it "their own uses" - much of that is scrutinizing you to make you better susceptible to ads and other solicitations by their paying clients. I mean, people are not the clients of Google and Meta - they're the raw material.
by sega_sai | 2026-01-14 22:07:39+00:00
The problem is the 'most promising option' is affected by hype and loud voices. Many of the string theory crowds made predictions that did not pan out at all and still did not acknowledge their mistakes. I think that's the problem. Sure there was a lot beautiful mathematics discovered, and it can be used in some other fields, but the acknowledgement of failure of string theory is needed, rather than trying to point here or there where some of the tools from ST could be used.
(I am a physicist, but nowhere near the strings theory)
by EvanAnderson | 2026-01-14 22:07:46+00:00
Last fall I stopped trying to optimize loading the dishwasher and waiting to run it until it was full. I call it "dishwasher anarchy".

Now it gets loaded haphazardly throughout the day, run at night, and emptied the next morning.

It really, really offends my sensibilities. Stuff is in the "wrong" place. We are using a lot more detergent. I assume we are using a lot more energy and water.

I haven't had any dishwasher-related fights with my wife and daughter since we started this new protocol. I guess that's a win.
by bandrami | 2026-01-14 22:08:45+00:00
The model that does make sense to me is (and the only actual success stories I've seen) is people saying "it let me quickly produce a piece of software that otherwise wouldn't have been worth the time to create". That is definitely an increase in productivity, but "software people aren't actually willing to pay for can now be made much more cheaply" is a much different claim than the marketing is making (which I read to be TFA's point).
by dexzod | 2026-01-14 22:09:01+00:00
I think this move could harm US in two ways: It will reduce the immigrant diversity which might make the population skew towards the biggest immigrant population such as from India and Mexico which are not in this list. Second it will remove USA as top destination for talent, which will help stop brain drain from these countries causing their local industry to benefit and thereby reducing the edge of US companies.
by Wowfunhappy | 2026-01-14 22:09:28+00:00
I'm fundamentally a hobbyist programmer, so I would have no problem sharing my process.

However, I'm not nearly organized enough to save all my prompts! I've tried to do it a few times for my own reference. The thing is, when I use Claude Code, I do a lot of:

- Going back and revising a part of the conversation and trying again—sometimes reverting the code changes, sometimes not.

- Stopping Claude partway through a change so I can make manual edits before I let Claude continue.

- Jumping between entirely different conversation histories with different context.

And so on. I could meticulously document every action, but it quickly gets in the way of experimentation. It's not entirely different from trying to write down every intermediate change you make in your code editor, between actual VCS commits.

I guess I could record my screen, but (A) I promise you don't actually want to watch me fiddle with Claude for hours and (B) it would make me too self-conscious.

It would be very cool to have a tool that goes through Claude's logs and exports some kind of timeline in a human-readable format, but I would need it to be automated.

---

Also, if you can't tell from the above, my use of Claude is very far from "type a prompt, get a finished program." I do a lot of work in order to get useful output. I happen to really enjoy coding this way, and I've gotten great results, but it's not like I'm entering a prompt and then taking a nap.
by arjie | 2026-01-14 22:09:30+00:00
For the database, I use a read-only user. I also give it full R/W to a staging DB and the local dev DB. Even if it egresses that, nothing can happen.

SSH I just let it roll because it's my personal stuff. Both Claude and Codex will perform unholy modifications to your environment so I do the one bare thing of making `sudo` password-protected.

For the production stuff I use, you can create an appropriate read-only role. I occasionally let it use my role but it inevitably decides to live-create resources like `kubectl create pod << YAML` which I never want. It's fine because they'll still try and fail and prompt me.
by VWWHFSfQ | 2026-01-14 22:09:55+00:00
1st gen immigrants from India are almost always well-educated, and oftentimes even entrepreneurial. They are among the lowest-risk (with Chinese) immigrants. That is to say, they typically will not contribute to crime, gangs, or public welfare burden. So it's a pretty big difference between those two countries and all the others on the list.
by cm2187 | 2026-01-14 22:09:57+00:00
Russia I presume is on the list because of geopolitical tensions.

I am not familiar with every country in that list but in my experience, what looks like an anomaly is Morocco, which produces a fairly large elite compared to the size of the country (worked with lots of highly educated / highly paid (and therefore net tax contributing) moroccan nationals). I have hardly worked with any other nationality in that list in my professional life (Bangladesh and Tunisia maybe).
by quietsegfault | 2026-01-14 22:10:39+00:00
In judicial foreclosure states, the process can take 12 to 24 months, and longer if contested or if other periods apply. In nonjudicial states, timelines are shorter but still typically 4 to 9 months from default to sale.

Lenders incur legal fees, court costs, property taxes, insurance, maintenance, HOA dues, servicing advances, and loss of interest during the process. Industry estimates often put foreclosure costs in the tens of thousands of dollars per loan, excluding the loss from selling the property below the outstanding balance.

“Writing off the mortgage” is not the realistic alternative. Lenders generally compare foreclosure against loan modification, repayment plans, short sales, or deeds-in-lieu, because charge-offs are accounting outcomes after losses are realized, not an operational substitute for foreclosure.
by burnte | 2026-01-14 22:10:40+00:00
If the Lightning OUTSOLD Tesla, is that really losing to them? Feels to me like an indictment of the scale that Tesla actually operates: an order of magnitude less than the big car makers. If Ford declares a truck that sold better than CT as a failure, it's because for their size it didn't sell enough. If that lesser number IS enough for Tesla, they're simply not a player in the same league as Ford.
by nebezb | 2026-01-14 22:11:10+00:00
> Why can't we just use input sanitization similar to how we used originally for SQL injection?

Because your parameterized queries have two channels. (1) the query with placeholders, (2) the values to fill in the placeholders. We have nice APIs that hide this fact, but this is indeed how we can escape the second channel without worry.

Your LLM has one channel. The “prompt”. System prompt, user prompt, conversation history, tool calls. All of it is stuffed into the same channel. You can not reliably escape dangerous user input from this single channel.
by bluGill | 2026-01-14 22:11:54+00:00
Mathematics often does apply to the real world, but that isn't the goal. Physics is about the study of the real universe. If you want to call string theory a branch of mathematics I'd be fine with it, but they keep trying to claim they are physicists and that puts a higher bar on what we expect from them.

Of course physicists sometimes do make wrong predictions and it can take some time to figure out the hypothesis is wrong. However the goal is always to make something they can test to prove the hypothesis holds, which string theory has so far failed to do.
by zdragnar | 2026-01-14 22:12:13+00:00
People want smaller, not weaker, trucks. The 1985 Ford ranger compact truck could tow over 3000 lbs base, and over 5000 with upgrades.

The Maverick only tows 2000 base, the 4000 is an upgrade package and only for trailers with their own brakes.

RWD is pretty functionally important for a vehicle to maintain control while towing significant weight, as all the weight sits on the back of the frame, and that's where you want the engine power to go.

The Maverick is not a working truck, which was my original point. In terms of what matters, it is worse in every way than a 40 year old design.
by marksomnian | 2026-01-14 22:12:30+00:00
In fact, uv's docs half-suggest this:

> With uv, it turns out that it's often faster to omit pre-built wheels from the cache (and instead re-download them from the registry on each run). On the other hand, caching wheels that are built from source tends to be worthwhile, since the wheel building process can be expensive, especially for extension modules.

https://docs.astral.sh/uv/concepts/cache/#caching-in-continu...
by laurencerowe | 2026-01-14 22:12:35+00:00
If your gas boiler were replaced with a heat pump with an average COP of 4 it would only require around 4,000kWh of electricity to provide the same amount of heating.

Electric cars are similarly 3-4x more efficient than petrol cars on a kWh of fuel basis.

So while we should expect increased electricity demand as transport and heating are electrified, the increase in electricity usage will be far less than the decrease in kWh of fuel.
by keyle | 2026-01-14 22:12:54+00:00
Great article. This needs to be framed. The whole trust me bro, and shock and awe of social medias is a non-stop assault these days. You can't open a wall without seeing those promoted up front and centre and without any proof.

If AI was so good today, why isn't there an explosion of successful products? All we see is these half baked "zomg so good bro!" examples that are technically impressive, but decisively incomplete or really, proof of concepts.

I'm not saying LLMs aren't useful, but they're currently completely misrepresented.

Hype sells clicks, not value. But, whatever floats the investors' boat...
by arjie | 2026-01-14 22:13:01+00:00
The actual thing I've experienced is they've added cheaper plans, given us coastal coverage, and international coverage. I've had it since 2024 and between the Google Fiber at home and Starlink on the move, I think this has been overall A+ experience. 5/5 on both.

Besides, there's no real alternative to Starlink right now and their price is very reasonable. If the price rose a lot I'd use the pause/resume feature or the tiny 10 G plan.