MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by OkayPhysicist | 2026-01-29 23:02:03+00:00
The SAT, by design, covers the entire difficulty range. Parts are easy, parts are hard, such that about half of students get less than half of it right, and 0.1% of students ace it. It's not merely pass-fail, they're trying to give a pretty granular rank to each student.

Thus, if the test is worth taking for a student (because they want to go to college), it's probably worth cheating on. Students outside the top 0.1% can appear better than their peers to improve their odds of getting into better universities, and students in the top 0.1% tend to be there due to intense extrinsic pressure, which may drive them to cheat to increase their certainty of acing it.

For a competent student, it's not hard to get an acceptable grade. For every student, it's difficult to achieve an exceptional grade.
by Macha | 2026-01-29 23:02:22+00:00
I always thought that the idea that "revealed preferences" are preferences, discounts that people often make decisions they would rather not. It's like the whole idea that if you're on a diet, it's easier to not have junk food in the house to begin with than to have junk food and not eat more than your target amount. Are you saying these people want to put on weight? Or is it just they've been put in a situation that defeats their impulse control?

I feel a lot of the "revealed preference" stuff in advertising is similar in advertisers finding that if they get past the easier barriers that users put in place, then really it's easier to sell them stuff that at a higher level the users do not want.
by observationist | 2026-01-29 23:03:01+00:00
Yeah - I'm pretty sure, technically, that current AI isn't conscious in any meaningful way, and even the agentic scaffolding and systems put together lack any persistent, meaningful notion of "mind", especially in a legal sense. There are some newer architectures and experiments with the subjective modeling and "wiring" that I'd consider solid evidence of structural consciousness, but for now, AI is a tool. It also looks like we can make tools arbitrarily intelligent and competent, and we can extend the capabilities to superhuman time scales, so I think the law needs to come up with an explicit precedent for "This person is the user of the tool which did the bad thing" - it could be negligent, reckless, deliberate, or malicious, but I don't think there's any credibility to the idea that "the AI did it!"

At worst, you would confer liability to the platform, in the case of some sort of blatant misrepresentation of capabilities or features, but absolutely none of the products or models currently available withstand any rational scrutiny into whether they are conscious or not. They at most can undergo a "flash" of subjective experience, decoupled from any coherent sequence or persistent phenomenon.

We need research and legitimate, scientific, rational definitions for agency and consciousness and subjective experience, because there will come a point where such software becomes available, and it not only presents novel legal questions, but incredible moral and ethical questions as well. Accidentally oopsing a torment nexus into existence with residents possessed of superhuman capabilities sounds like a great way to spark off the first global interspecies war. Well, at least since the Great Emu War. If we lost to the emus, we'll have no chance against our digital offspring.

A good lawyer will probably get away with "the AI did it, it wasn't me!" before we get good AI law, though. It's too new and mysterious and opaque to normal people.
by Muromec | 2026-01-29 23:03:18+00:00
Why does it need cryptography even? If you gave the agent a token to interact with your bank account, then you gave it permission. If you want to limit the amount it is allowed to sent and a list of recipients, put a filter that sits between the account and the agent that enforces it. If you want the money to be sent only based on the invoice, let the filter check that invoice reference is provided by the agent. If you did neither of that and the platform that runs the agents didn't accept the liability, it's on you. Setting up filters and engineering prompts it's on you too.

Now if you did all of that, but made a bug in implementing the filter, then you at least tried and wasn't negligible, but it's on you.
by msabalau | 2026-01-29 23:03:27+00:00
I was lucky enough to be an early tester, here's a brief video walking through the process of creating worlds, showing examples--walking on the moon, with Nasa photo as part of the prompt, being in 221B Baker street with Holmes and Watson, wandering through a night market in Taipei as a giant boba milk tea (note how the stalls are different, and sell different foods), and also exploring the setting of my award-nominated tabletop RPG.

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

It's an experimental research prototype, but it also feels like a hint of the future. Feel free to ask any questions.
by bri3d | 2026-01-29 23:03:48+00:00
See also: XenonRecomp, which does the same thing for Xbox 360, and N64:Recompiled which does the same thing for N64.

Note that this "recompilation" and the "decompilation" projects like the famous Super Mario 64 one are almost orthogonal approaches in a way that the article failed to understand; this approach turns the assembly into C++ macros and then compiles the C++ (so basically using the C++ compiler as a macro re-assembler / emulation recompiler in a very weird way). The famous Super Mario 64 decompilation (and openrct and so on) use the output from an actual decompiler which attempts to reconstruct C from assembly, and then modify that code accordingly (basically, converting the game's object code back into some semblance of its source code, which this approach does NOT do).
by pndy | 2026-01-29 23:03:49+00:00
It diverges much from the book but it's enjoyable and terrifying at some points. I just really don't like ending - it felt rushed and way too open like they'd still had hopes for another series.

Personally I'd kept Dick's basis of this series and incorporate Robert Harris "Fatherland" novel that would set action for a longer while in Europe. It easily could provide action for at least 2 more seasons.
by vardalab | 2026-01-29 23:04:09+00:00
Yep, I've been doing a lot of Ansible and Terraform automation with agents, and success has been continually updating our learnings, so to speak, capturing them in skills. It really does help in the long run. And it's gotten much smoother. Opus 4.5 was specifically almost like a step change and combined with decent skills, it has been effective in my homelab.
by fjordofnorway | 2026-01-29 23:04:11+00:00
That's an odd argument. If we are talking about a organ safe uncombined dosage of Tylenol or Ibuprofen being 0.4 then I think we are talking about the point just above placebo and bias where something barely has a real effect that should be hard to measure without a high power study. That's saying nothing useful with so few significant figures.

If antidepressants cost less than $4/1000 and acted as an antiinflammatory as their only common side effect then sure I'd consider replacing Ibuprofen as my pain placebo of choice.
by smarnach | 2026-01-29 23:04:29+00:00
Sure, but we shouldn't stretch the analogy too far. Die rolls are discrete events, while miles driven are continuous. We expect the number of sixes we get to follow a binomial distribution, while we expect the number of accidents to follow a Poisson distribution. Either way, trying to guess the mean value of the distribution after a single incident of the event will never give you a statistically meaningful lower bound, only an upper bound.
by estimator7292 | 2026-01-29 23:05:00+00:00
While this is a valid take, I feel compelled to point out Chuck Tingle.

The sheer amount and variety of smut books (just books) is vastly larger than anyone wants to realize. We passed the mark decades ago where there is smut available for any and every taste. Like, to the point that even LLMs are going to take a long time to put a dent in the smut market. Humans have been making smut for longer than we've had writing.

But again I don't think you're wrong, but the scale of the problem is way distorted.
by Aloisius | 2026-01-29 23:05:07+00:00
> Hey, I'd agree with this-- and it's worth noting that 17^2 - 5^2 > 16^2, so even 1MPH slower would likely have resulted in no contact in this scenario.

Only with instant reaction time and linear deceleration.

Neither of those are the case. It takes time for even a Waymo to recognize a dangerous situation and apply the brake and deceleration of vehicles is not actually linear.
by tptacek | 2026-01-29 23:05:14+00:00
The SF86 has a 7-year lookback on arrests. Clearance is fundamentally discretionary, though; it's a risk assessment. I don't think you have even a due process right to it.

I say all this but --- knowing that the principals in this story might read this thread and drop in and correct me, which would be awesome --- I think it's actually more likely that their careers benefited from this news story, and that they probably didn't lose any cleared business from it. I can't say enough that these two became industry celebrities over this case.
by fragmede | 2026-01-29 23:05:21+00:00
Don't worry about devil's advocate, if < 100 words feels like a gargantuan amount of documentation effort ("PAINSTAKING DETAIL"), well, there are certain stereotypes about developers (not) writing comments or documentation that come to mind. Whoever coined the term "prompt engineering" may have the last laugh (before the robots take over) after all.
by direwolf20 | 2026-01-29 23:05:32+00:00
The terms of use of Lightsail say you can't use it in a way that's intended to reduce your costs over EC2. So they have more free bandwidth, but you're not allowed to intentionally send your traffic through Lightsail to avoid the extortion of EC2 bandwidth pricing. They have cheaper CPU, but you're not allowed to use 100% of your CPU.
by reaperducer | 2026-01-29 23:05:43+00:00
how do you get from no school/work/shopping to no websites/servers?

Servers perform work. For people. My oven (KitchenAid) is a machine, yet has a setting that makes it non-functional during certain religious events that require people not to work.

Similarly, B&H Photo's web site won't take orders on the Sabbath. They'd rather take the revenue hit than violate their principles.

A foreign notion to the tech industry.
by wpm | 2026-01-29 23:05:48+00:00
The 15 Pro was an especially poor model as the cooling wasn't up to snuff. She be a throttlin'.

My 14 Pro Max has been a champ (though I never upgraded to Liquid Ass, iOS 18 for life on this thing). I have almost zero real reason to upgrade, esp since it'll only cost me $100 or so to have the battery replaced in a few months (I'm at 84% and treating it poorly to get it to a point I can justify the expense).
by altcognito | 2026-01-29 23:06:13+00:00
I don't think people really understand how big of a wall outside of GPU/TPUs the CPU, ram and even flash market has hit. We're paying as much if not more for the same stuff we were buying 4-5 years ago.

I do think we're more efficient and matrix operations are better (again, GPU/TPUs), but by and large, the computer hardware world has stopped exponential growth.

The period from 1990 to 2005 was amazing. Both in transistor counts and clock speed, it seemed like we were nearly *doubling* performance with every new generation. Memory and disk space had similar gains.
by renewiltord | 2026-01-29 23:06:25+00:00
Yeah, everyone thinks that “if I hide my stuff others won’t know my secret”. One innovation of the Western world is that public knowledge itself is valuable to the entire society. Why would they publish papers on transformers and so on? Are they fools? They’re giving away their secrets!

Why do they do these things? Because that is how they are as a society and this world currently rewards that more than it does the secret lab.
by siavosh | 2026-01-29 23:06:30+00:00
I’m not sure we’re actually disagreeing. Boards are expected to maximize long-term shareholder value, not mechanically maximize short-term revenue at every opportunity. Sometimes that means pushing harder on extraction; other times it means holding back because of regulatory risk, developer backlash, or brand damage.

The claim isn’t that Apple must raise fees to 35% or be sued—clearly that’s not how fiduciary duty works. The claim is that, over time, dominant platforms tend to increase extraction once they’ve locked in users and developers. That pattern has been observed repeatedly, and it’s what people are pointing to when they talk about “enshittification.” Individual fee levels can vary, but the long-term direction for monopoly or duopoly platforms is fairly consistent.
by jonawesomegreen | 2026-01-29 23:06:59+00:00
I’ve noticed Claude has been noticeably worse over the last week. For example, it told me I should pass frozen to make my Enum immutable—that’s not a thing. (It is a thing for dataclasses, but not for Enums.) That’s a pretty basic language feature it was nailing until recently. It also suggested I parse a URL using urlparse in a function that already uses urlparse. These are basic mistakes it wasn’t making before. Something seems to have changed, but I’m not sure what.
by reactordev | 2026-01-29 23:08:12+00:00
This. Half-life was amazing, and not because it was Quake 2. It was a story. Less about blowing stuff up with guns and more about uncovering the secrets of Black Mesa. Then came along mods…

The first one was Team Fortress. Remember that? Still strong today as a ftp title TF2. The second one was a spec-ops style delta force mod (I can’t remember the name) but it gave the 3rd modder the idea that a modern setting could work. Counter-Strike was released as an early alpha on my forum and the rest was history.

I mention this because this was a tuning point from fixed function pipelines to programmable pipelines (shaders).

There was this awe of what we can do, what could be possible, and today’s modern games are a fulfillment of that. I feel this same sense of awe when it comes to some of these foundational models. It’s just incredible what they are capable of.

In reality, while AAA titles have been pumping out annual titles to keep shares high and pigs fat, there have been some wonderful indie titles, smaller budget games, that have made a significant impact on the games industry as a whole.
by F7F7F7 | 2026-01-29 23:08:42+00:00
I’ve had Opus struggle on trivial things that Sonnet 3.5 handled with ease.

It’s not so much that the implementations are bad because the code is bad (the code is bad). It’s that it gets extremely confused and starts to frantically make worse and worse decisions and questioning itself. Editing multiple files, changing its mind and only fixing one or two. Reseting and overriding multiple batches of commits without so much as a second thought and losing days of work (yes, I’ve learned my lesson).

It, the model, can’t even reason with the decisions it’s making from turn to turn. And the more opaque agentic help it’s getting the more I suspect that tasks are being routed to much lesser models (not the ones we’ve chosen via /model or those in our agent definitions) however Anthropic chooses.

In these moments I mind as well be using Haiku.
by trhway | 2026-01-29 23:08:50+00:00
It is worth it when it is done right, i.e when you do correct market differentiation (see my other comment here on Mercedes) to avoid your low end cannibalizing your higher end. This high margin really helps you, and this is why almost everybody does it. EVs are probably even better suited for it given that the platform itself is easier/cheaper to share between the low end and the high end - thus the current Teslas S/X story looks even more of a failure as by releasing 3/Y that similar to S/X (that probably helped a lot with 3/Y sales though) they forced themselves into the need for a very significant (expensive) redesign of S/X while having very low sales of it.
by perrygeo | 2026-01-29 23:09:17+00:00
I jumped into a new-to-me Typescript application and asked Claude to build a thing, in vague terms matching my own uncertainty and unfamiliarity. The result was similarly vague garbage. Three shots and I threw them all away.

Then I watched a someone familiar with the codebase ask Claude to build the thing, in precise terms matching their expertise and understanding of the code. It worked flawlessly the first time.

Neither of us "coded", but their skill with the underlying theory of the program allowed them to ask the right questions, infinitely more productive in this case.

Skill and understanding matter now more than ever! LLMs are pushing us rapidly away from specialized technicians to theory builders.
by bigyabai | 2026-01-29 23:10:05+00:00
The Mac is barely a UNIX system to begin with. It doesn't ship with UNIX compliance out-of-the-box, and nobody complains. You're likely the minority here.

If Apple locked Homebrew behind SIP or some other inconvenience, it would just result in more virtualization. The default Mac environment hasn't followed industry standards for more than a decade, most professionals are doing their work in a VM already. Truth be told, even Apple wants you to stop compiling software locally in the long-run: https://developer.apple.com/xcode-cloud/
by wk_end | 2026-01-29 23:10:16+00:00
Hmm, I think we're talking about different kinds of "number one".

The ancestor comment called Scala "niche" and criticized the characterization of it as "widely used". So given that context, I was coming at this from a perspective of popularity; Chisel is orders of magnitude nicher than even Scala itself and orders of magnitude less widely used. Most of industry is still choosing VHDL or Verilog for most greenfield hardware projects.

I think you mean in terms of "best way to do it". Chisel can at least lay claim to that crown, sure, though I think you could say the same about Scala too.

(I might say Clash for hardware and Haskell for software, not that that does me any good.)
by ineedaj0b | 2026-01-29 23:10:43+00:00
No. No no no.

Big Pharma needs good data. And they have annoying FDAs/whatever-regulations-body slowing them down.

If you have a serious disease they might not mind you taking it. But if you have a serious disease plus your kidneys have already shutdown - w/e drug won’t save you. The death counts as a negative. “Let me take it anyway” well fine but it’s not some huge conspiracy.
by macNchz | 2026-01-29 23:10:50+00:00
Historically I've found sleepinginairports.net useful for this kind of intel—I was pleased to discover just now that it's still around! Nearly 20 years ago now it saved me from a night of awful sleep. My backpacking buddy and I had just arrived in Liverpool with an early Ryanair flight out the following morning, and no hostel reservations. We'd been traveling successfully without reservations for a bit, but it turned out there was some kind of event that weekend in Liverpool and there was absolutely nowhere to stay (or at least, nothing that cost less than, like, the budget for our entire trip).

We decided we'd just stay out late, then go to the airport and wait it out for our flight. After some effort trying to sleep on hard plastic benches in the airport Burger King (where Michael Jackson's Thriller was playing loudly on repeat, I do not know why), I pulled out my 12" PowerBook and found out via that site that the airport had a meditation room with dim lighting, soft carpet, and no Michael Jackson. Ahh.
by snovymgodym | 2026-01-29 23:11:13+00:00
Interesting post, worth a read. It seemed pretty US-centric, and I'd be curious to see how data compares in other countries where school is done differently.

I'm reminded a little of Ivan Illich's take on education being a net negative.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deschooling_Society

Not sure I agree, but some decent points are in there.
by ollin | 2026-01-29 23:11:13+00:00
On a technical level, this looks like the same diffusion transformer world model design that was shown in the Genie 3 post (text/memory/d-pad input, video output, 60sec max context, 720p, sub-10FPS control latency due to 4-frame temporal compression). I expect the public release uses a cheaper step-distilled / quantized version. The limitations seen in Genie 3 (high control latency, gradual loss of detail and drift towards videogamey behavior, 60s max rollout length) are still present. The editing/sharing tools, latency, cost, etc. can probably improve over time with this same model checkpoint, but new features like audio input/output, higher resolution, precise controls, etc. likely won't happen until the next major version.

From a product perspective, I still don't have a good sense of what the market for WMs will look like. There's a tension between serious commercial applications (robotics, VFX, gamedev, etc. where you want way, way higher fidelity and very precise controllability), vs current short-form-demos-for-consumer-entertainment application (where you want the inference to be cheap-enough-to-be-ad-supported and simple/intuitive to use). Framing Genie as a "prototype" inside their most expensive AI plan makes a lot of sense while GDM figures out how to target the product commercially.

On a personal level, since I'm also working on world models (albeit very small local ones https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43798757), my main thought is "oh boy, lots of work to do". If everyone starts expecting Genie 3 quality, local WMs need to become a lot better :)
by toast0 | 2026-01-29 23:11:20+00:00
As of now, it looks like they're ignoring it:

https://github.com/ran-j/PS2Recomp/blob/91678d19778891b4df85...

#define FPU_ADD_S(a, b) ((float)(a) + (float)(b))

(etc)

But if you wanted to handle it, you'd presumably macro expand the floating point operations to something that matches the PS2 fpu (or comes closer).
by verdverm | 2026-01-29 23:11:45+00:00
This largely mirrors my experience building my custom agent

1. Start from the Claude Code extracted instructions, they have many things like this in there. Their knowledge share in docs and blog on this aspect are bar none

2. Use AGENTS.md as a table of contents and sparknotes, put them everywhere, load them automatically

3. Have topical markdown files / skills

4. Make great tools, this is still opaque in my mind to explain, lots of overlap with MCP and skills, conceptually they are the same to me

5. Iterate, experiment, do weird things, and have fun!

I changed read/write_file to put contents in the state and presented in the system prompt, same for the agents.md, now working on evals to show how much better this is, because anecdotally, it kicks ass
by code_biologist | 2026-01-29 23:12:05+00:00
+1. I wish Gemini 2.5/3 Pro's "personality" and long context handling wasn't so erratic, because the medical stuff in there is great. Whatever they did to produce the MedGemma models is clearly built on a strong baseline. I haven't had need to try using MedGemma on x-ray imagery, but I'd be curious to hear results — imagery diagnostics is part of what it's built for.

Opus 4.5 seems good too, though getting dumber. OpenAIs fine tuning is clearly built to toe the professional medical advice line, which can be good and bad.
by dragonwriter | 2026-01-29 23:13:01+00:00
> Clearance is fundamentally discretionary, though; it's a risk assessment. I don't think you have even a due process right to it.

Security clearance is subject to due process protections (at least, insofar as it is a component of government hiring and continuation of employment), because government employment is subject to due process protections and the courts have not allowed security clearance requirements to be an end-run around that.
by F7F7F7 | 2026-01-29 23:13:09+00:00
Whenever I see new behaviors and suspect I’m being tested on I’ll typically see a feedback form at some point in that session. Well, that and dropping four letter words.

I know it’s more random sampling than not. But they are definitely using our codebases (and in some respects our livelihoods) as their guinea pigs.