MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by halfcat | 2026-01-12 00:48:43+00:00
> The main thing I realized from arguing about it with them was that <my beliefs> did not really matter and would not convince them of anything

> It's an emotional and spiritual belief for them - a way for them to rationalize...

And for you, too.

Science the method is pretty damn great. Science the institution is closer to any other agenda-driven information source. If you’re doing first-hand, first-principles science, great. But if you’re doing the “here’s a study...” game, you’re relying on external authority you aren’t equipped to interpret, which, in practice, isn’t so much different from the people who think CNN or Fox News or Ancient Aliens is gospel.

Put another way, a real practitioner of science would seek to understand the phenomenon of why your family member believes what they believe. I guarantee you, it makes sense, once you know enough information (it always does, even if they’re actually insane, that helps it make sense). But to say, ”this person won’t even accept science” and hand wave it off as a “them” problem, emotional religion etc, are the words of a politician, not a scientist.
by orwin | 2026-01-12 00:48:57+00:00
The N=100 is a 'lazy' (or abstract if you prefer) way to look at it, it doesn't really explain anything.

It's hard to show how to explain the problem just writing about it, but by making them choose one of 3, and then making assumptions about which door will reveal the car, and if it is better to switch. You can easily demonstrate that in two out of three situations it is actually better to switch.
by gbear605 | 2026-01-12 00:49:14+00:00
Just looking at my own usage at work, we’re spending around $50/day on OpenAI API credits (with Codex). With Claude Code I get higher usage limits for $200/month, or around $8/day. Probably the equivalent from OpenAI is around $100/day of API credits.

Maybe OpenAI has a 12x markup on API credits, or Anthropic is much better at running inference, but my best guess is that Anthropic is selling at a large loss.
by emporas | 2026-01-12 00:49:43+00:00
Not true. They want to talk to their secretary, and the secretary do it for them.

Go around, and ask people if they want a free secretary, see if someone doesn't want one.

They will not ask a computer program to do stuff. They will talk to the secretary, and the secretary will do any computer stuff necessary. For the moment the secretary cannot click buttons and menus as well as manipulate language. The secretary will have realistic skin and lips, and a dress as short as required by the job description.

Language AI is the king of AIs, and the gap will only get bigger. Everything will be tied to language going forward, driving, surgeries and so on.
by alpn | 2026-01-12 00:49:58+00:00
> I'd rather expose a Wireguard port and control my keys than introduce a third party like Tailscale.

I’m working on a (free) service that lets you have it both ways. It’s a thin layer on top of vanilla WireGuard that handles NAT traversal and endpoint updates so you don’t need to expose any ports, while leaving you in full control of your own keys and network topology.

https://wireplug.org
by mapontosevenths | 2026-01-12 00:50:03+00:00
Ahh. Makes sense. Sometimes I forgot how prescient that book was.

I read it after a lot of the predictions had already come true. In some cases it felt like the books tech was just an alternative to tech we already had by the time I read it, and while reading it I had to remind myself that when it was written we were still a year out from the iPhone.

> I never read Synthetic Serendipity though so you got me curious.
It's a short story based on a couple of chapters in the book. I think that some versions of the book included it? Either way you can read it here:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/synthetic-serendipity
by zapzupnz | 2026-01-12 00:50:07+00:00
In the Hacker News bubble, maybe. In the real world, not even close. The reasons why many a person chooses to use macOS, outside of the "YoU bUy It FoR ThE lOgO" that many hard-core technologists seem to believe, don't exist in any desktop environment.

Sometimes, people think "it can be made to look similar, therefore it's the same" (especially with regard to KDE), and no, just no.
by gerdemb | 2026-01-12 00:50:29+00:00
Backing up “mercurial” Photos data is only half the problem. The tricky part is restoring it in a way Photos actually recognizes as equivalent to the original library state. Photos Backup Anywhere restore works by re-importing items while explicitly reapplying Photos-level attributes: paired assets for Live Photos, burst membership and picks, slo-mo metadata, edits, locations, adjusted capture dates, and then reconstructing albums after the items exist again in the library.

In other words, the filesystem copy isn’t treated as the source of truth. The restore verifies items against what was backed up and only then rebuilds higher-level structure like albums. That’s the piece I didn’t see addressed elsewhere, and what originally motivated me to build it.
by superkuh | 2026-01-12 00:50:49+00:00
The htmx landing page says,

>htmx gives you access to AJAX, CSS Transitions, WebSockets and Server Sent Events directly in HTML, using attributes, so you can build modern user interfaces with the simplicity and power of hypertext

I hope you see how the full context can make it sound like it's HTML based and not javascript based, even if, yes, AJAX and WebSockets are JS things.
by ggm | 2026-01-12 00:51:05+00:00
Yes. thats broadly what I think people will be doing. My concern was, under 30% to 80% packetloss, how well this works. I think the answer is, if you want to get media out, it works well enough, given enough time.

I would be surprised if GPS blocking is enough to completely can starlink. It improves positioning but if you don't jog the antenna, given these things are in predictable orbit, you can probably get good-enough S/N without GPS info.
by divan | 2026-01-12 00:52:03+00:00
Does anyone really get something useful from this text?

I thought it's something at the level of "Designing Virtual Worlds" by Richard Bartle, but it's just a set of statements like "level should have an entry and the exit" and "don't do bad maps", for some reason labelled "theories", heavily pierced with phrases like "ummm, hard to explain".
by _pdp_ | 2026-01-12 00:52:09+00:00
We have also attempted to implement exactly this but it turned out to be really bad architecture.

The file system as an abstraction is actually not that good at all beyond the basic use-cases. Imagine you need to find an email. If you grep (via fuse) you will end up opening lots of files which will result in fetches to some API and it will be slow. You can optimise this and caching works after first fetch but the method is slow. The alternative is to leverage the existing API which will be million times faster. Now you could also create some kind of special file via fuse that acts like a search but it is weird and I don't think the models will do well with something so obscure.

We went as much as implementing this idea in rust to really test it out and ultimately it was ditched because, well it sucks.
by Neywiny | 2026-01-12 00:52:13+00:00
I guess it depends on how we define culture. Certainly every community, be they a discord server or a twitch chat, has its own micro culture. Memes, references, trends, acronyms or phrases, and symbolism come to mind. I don't doubt that Bezos's power over Amazon over twitch could get some emoji they like banned. But I don't think that's as active a control a culture as I think the article implies. Bezos isn't personally producing a twitch stream the way Broadway producers would. Sundar Pichai doesn't mandate that the casting for a YouTube video isn't what he wants. To say they control culture feels disingenuous to the creators.

Arguably you could say that in the days of the monarchy we only had 1 person, the king, controlling our culture. And I'm sure there's influence. But at least personally I've never heard anyone hold that viewpoint.
by happiness0067 | 2026-01-12 00:52:48+00:00
I ended up making a side project for my side project and built MeasureToCut: https://measuretocut.com

I moved last year and started a bunch of DIY projects, and each one turned into a bunch of drawings on napkins and backs of receipts to figure out how much wood/material I needed to buy to avoid "one more trip to store". It tells you how much of a stock material you need, and shows you how to cut it, to minimize waste or minimize cost.

A few details

1D: works for boards, pipes, bars, etc. You enter lengths and quantities; it details the cuts onto the stock material.

2D (coming soon): will work for plywood and sheet goods and lets you see how your parts tile onto sheets.

Apparently the software engineer to woodworking pipeline is actually just a circle
by simonw | 2026-01-12 00:52:56+00:00
To save anyone else the click, this is the paper "On The Computational Complexity of Self-Attention" from September 2022, with authors from NYU and Microsoft.

It argues that the self-attention mechanism in transformers works by having every token "attend to" every other token in a sequence, which is quadratic - n^2 against input - which should limit the total context length available to models.

This would explain why the top models have been stuck at 1 million tokens since Gemini 1.5 in February 2024 (there has been a 2 million token Gemini but it's not in wide use, and Meta claimed their Llama 4 Scout could do 10 million but I don't know of anyone who's seen that actually work.)

My counter-argument here is that Claude Opus 4.5 has a comparatively tiny 200,000 token window which turns out to work incredibly well for the kinds of coding problems we're throwing at it, when accompanied by a cleverly designed harness such as Claude Code. So this limit from 2022 has been less "disappointing" than people may have expected.
by jayofdoom | 2026-01-12 00:53:28+00:00
Honestly this is just sorta a Tuesday for an advanced Gentoo user? There are lots of ways to do this documented on the Gentoo wiki. Ask in IRC or on the Forum if you can't find it. "Catalyst" is the method used by the internal build systems to produce images, for instance https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Catalyst.
by falcor84 | 2026-01-12 00:53:40+00:00
I agree with essentially everything you said, except for the final claim that managing context is incidental complexity. From what I know of cognitive science, I would argue that context management is a central facet of intelligence, and a lot of the success of humans in society is dependent on their ability to do so. Looking at it from the other side, executive function disorders such as ADHD offer significant challenges for many humans, and they seem to be not quite entirely unlike these context issues that Claude faces.
by fluoridation | 2026-01-12 00:53:42+00:00
I'm not sure that connotation is all that present in the way it's commonly used, but I'll grant it. However, like the other person you responded to has said, "slop" already had that meaning, because it is the low-grade cattle feed. So If both "AI slop" and "goyslop" carry these shades of meaning, it would not suggest one descends from the other, but that both descend directly from "slop".
by plastic041 | 2026-01-12 00:55:03+00:00
To*.

I found couple more things to make it even more confusing:

- There is another landing page for Office(3), `m365.cloud.microsoft`. It has completely different design from `office.com`.

- "Microsoft Office" menu in the navigation bar goes to Office(2).

I can understand why they changed 'Microsoft 365 app'=Office(3) to 'Microsoft 365 Copilot'. It's probably because they refer to the apps (Word, Excel...) in Office(2) as "Microsoft 365 Apps". This probably caused confusion with "Microsoft 365 App".
by sauercrowd | 2026-01-12 00:55:57+00:00
You seem to read a lot into what I wrote, so let me phrase it differently.

These are ways I'd suggest to approach working with LLMs if you enjoy building software, and are trying to find out how it can fit into your workflow.

If this isnt you, these suggestions are not for you.

> I don't get any enjoyment from "building something without understanding".

That's not what I said. It's about your primary goal. Are you trying to learn technology xyz, and found a project so you can apply it vs you want a solution to your problem, and nothing exists, so you're building it.

What's really important is that wether you understand in the end what the LLM has written or not is 100% your decision.

You can be fully hands off, or you can be involved in every step.
by simonw | 2026-01-12 00:56:06+00:00
I think it may play out in the opposite direction.

If you're developing a new programming language today, one of the assets you need to prepare is a short (~10,000 token or less) LLM-friendly guide to your language, plus a bunch of examples that coding agents can search through and crib from.

Done well, I expect this could accelerate the adoption of your new language - as users can start prompting their coding agents to build with it before they've even finished reading the tutorial themselves.

Your disadvantage will be that LLMs won't recommend your language when people ask "what could I build this in", but people discovered new languages via word-of-month before LLMs came along and I expect that to continue, especially if your language has something genuinely new and interesting to offer.
by BoiledCabbage | 2026-01-12 00:56:08+00:00
> in the early 80's, a time when you basically had to invent everything from scratch, so certainly there is no mental block to having to do so, and I'm aware there is at least a generation of developers that grew up with stack overflow and have much more of a mindset of building stuff using cut an paste, and less having to sit down and write much complex/novel code themselves.

I think this is really underappreciated and was big in driving how a lot of people felt about LLMs. I found it even more notable on a site named Hacker News. There is an older generation for whom computing was new. 80s through 90s probably being the prime of that era (for people still in the industry). There constantly was a new platform, language, technology, concept to learn. And nobody knew any best practices, nobody knew how anything "should work". Nobody knew what anything was capable of. It was all trying things, figuring them out. It was way more trailblazing / exploring new territory. The birth of the internet being one of the last examples of this from that era.

The past 10-15 years of software development have been the opposite. Just about everything was evolutionary, rarely revolutionary. Optimizing things for scale, improving libraries, or porting successful ideas from one domain to another. A lot of shifting around deck chairs on things that were fundamentally the same. Just about every new "advance" in front-end technology was this. Something hailed as ground breaking really took little exploration, mostly solution space optimization. There was almost always a clear path. Someone always had an answer on stack overflow - you never were "on your own". A generation+ grew up in that environment and it felt normal to them.

LLMs came about and completely broke that. And people who remembered when tech was new and had potential and nobody knew how to use it loved that. Here is a new alien technology and I get to figure out what makes it tick, how it works how to use it. And on the flip side people who were used to there being a happy path, or a manual to tell you when you were doing it wrong got really frustrated as their being no direction - feeling perpetually lost and it not working the way they wanted.

I found it especially ironic being on hacker news how few people seemed to have a hacker mindset when it came to LLMs. So much was, "I tried something it didn't work so I gave up". Or "I just kept telling it to work and it didn't so I gave up". Explore, pretend you're in a sci-fi movie. Does it work better on
Wednesdays? Does it work better if you stand on your head? Does it work differently if you speak pig-latin? Think side-ways. What behavior can you find about it that makes you go "hmm, that's interesting...".

Now I think there has been a shift very recently of people getting more comfortable with the tech - but still was surprised of how little of a hacker mindset I saw on hacker news when it came to LLMs.

LLMs have reset the playing field from well manicured lawn, to an unexplored wilderness. Figure out the new territory.
by michaelbuckbee | 2026-01-12 00:56:13+00:00
I kept making a hacky eval tool to try and compare the outputs of different models, model configs, prompt versions, etc and finally rolled it up into a web app + downloadable app (kind of like Postman or Insomnia, but for AI).

Free, holds your keys in localstorage and makes direct calls to the APIs (unless there's a CORS issue), at https://evvl.ai if you want to try.
by jayofdoom | 2026-01-12 00:56:52+00:00
Gentoo is often at the forefront of identifying and helping resolve integration issues between different software projects, particularly when it comes to compiler tech (e.g. fixing packages so they can be built properly with LTO, or with LLVM as well as GCC) or other backend-detail-minutia which makes the whole system better without always being visible to the end user.
by gnabgib | 2026-01-12 00:57:02+00:00
Ossa, you submissions are entirely self-promotional, perhaps you could review the guidelines - specifically:

> Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

And share something else you're curious about
by SchemaLoad | 2026-01-12 00:58:06+00:00
Kind of but I don't really agree. Before LLMs you were still reliant on online resources, forums, digitalocean blog posts. The server itself also doesn't rely on an LLM. If one goes down, your server will continue functioning. You are also not tied to any particular LLM and can freely switch.

They also aren't seeing any of your sensitive data being hosted on the server. At least the way I use them is getting suggestions for what software and configs I should go with, and then I do the actual doing. Which means I'm becoming independently more capable than I was before.
by alpn | 2026-01-12 00:58:21+00:00
I'm working on https://wireplug.org: A simple, free, and open source connectivity coordinator for WireGuard. Basically a way to keep WireGuard tunnels connected while moving between different access points. It handles (basic) NAT traversal and works with the in-kernel WireGuard driver on Linux and OpenBSD.
You can find the technical details at https://wireplug.org
by recursivecaveat | 2026-01-12 00:59:00+00:00
Yeah, there is a power dynamic where the consumer is viewed as cattle, because the origin of the word is literal cattle lol.

> When Mr. Zuckerman reached the pigpen, he
climbed over the fence and poured the slops into the
trough.

Are you now willing to accept my 'proof' that 4chan actually derived specifically from Charlotte's Web?
by wongarsu | 2026-01-12 00:59:05+00:00
Hence "if we had a self-sufficient Mars colony". Any initial mars colony would not be self-sufficient, but even just by economics alone that would change as the colony grows.

Even if we get stuck in the "initial colony" stage (which is not the plan of any Mars-colonization proponent) with precautions comparable to the ISS you'd still have a colony capable of surviving a minimum of four years (two launch windows, in case one delivery goes wrong) and the capability to return to Earth.
by rafabulsing | 2026-01-12 00:59:42+00:00
Can confirm, could never stand the taste of Diet Coke, but Coke Zero tastes pretty close to the original to me! To the point that I pretty much never drink regular Coke anymore, if Coke Zero is available. There's basically no downside to going with Zero, imo. And the upside of no calories is pretty great.
by storus | 2026-01-12 01:01:36+00:00
Unfortunately, resolutions offered were weird. Native is 5120x2160 but that wasn't offered and scaled resolutions were weird. I guess macOS didn't read monitor's information properly or something. I wasted a few hours frantically trying to figure out how to connect a $12k computer to a 4-year old monitor which should have been a breeze but for some reason wasn't. The same monitor worked fine on Linux or Windows.
by sheepscreek | 2026-01-12 01:01:39+00:00
From DEA: https://www.dea.gov/resources/facts-about-fentanyl

> Fentanyl is being mixed in with other illicit drugs to increase the potency of the drug, sold as powders and nasal sprays, and increasingly pressed into pills made to look like legitimate prescription opioids. Because there is no official oversight or quality control, these counterfeit pills often contain lethal doses of fentanyl, with none of the promised drug.

From Riley county: https://www.rileycountyks.gov/2050/Fentanyl-and-Opioid-Aware...

> Unlike most opiates, fentanyl can be lethal with the first use. It only takes a two-milligram dose, similar to 5-7 grains of salt, to cause death for an average size adult.

People ODing on Fentanyl often don’t even know whatever they took had it.
by jayofdoom | 2026-01-12 01:01:42+00:00
I always tell people this:

With Red Hat, Anaconda is the installer.
With Ubuntu, ubiquity.

etc ...

With Gentoo -- YOU are the installer. This means you have to be ready to perform -- more or less manually -- many of the tasks automated in other distributions. I sorta see this as the same as a tutorial level in a video game: you learn how to read and follow the wiki which is essentially the key to success in Gentoo.
by babblingfish | 2026-01-12 01:02:03+00:00
My experience hasn't been LLMs automate coding, just speeds it up. It's like I know what I want the solution to be and I'll describe it to the LLM, usually for specific code blocks at a time, and then build it up block-by-block. When I read hacker news people are talking like it's doing much more than that. It doesn't feel like an automation tool to me at all. It just helps me do what I was gonna do anyways, but without having to look up library function calls and language specific syntax
by selcuka | 2026-01-12 01:02:05+00:00
We used to ask job candidates a variation of the door in an infinite wall question [1]. The initial answer of many interviewees is to choose a direction and walk in that way forever, which is understandable, as infinity makes the question weird.

What is more interesting is, even after I pointed out that this answer has a 50% chance of finding the door and I'm looking for a 100% solution, some candidates refused to give it a second thought, didn't change their answer, and insisted that this is the best course of action.

[1] https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/3915578/door-in-an-...
by eek2121 | 2026-01-12 01:03:09+00:00
I didn't read. One issue with BYD (outside of the quality level of the article, which, as I stated, I didn't read) is that they are government subsidized. The bigger issue, that I've read about at least, is that they phone home to China.I don't want my car phoning any data to anywhere, even here in the U.S. I had a car that definitely was phoning home to Hyundai, and I had to sell it for unrelated reasons. I now share a dumb car with my spouse and while I hate having "dumb" features, I silently do a small happy dance since that is one less way I can be tracked (license plate readers and other such tech also happen to be illegal/not a thing here)

I also use an eScooter which is dumb as a brick locally, so definitely doing a double happy dance.
by rmunn | 2026-01-12 01:03:13+00:00
Which is why I put (facetiously) in my original comment. I'm perfectly aware that iceberg is really lettuce, and what I'm doing is making a "no true Scotsman" argument. It's all for fun. If I was being serious, I would define a new category, let's call it "tasty lettuce", which is a subset of lettuce and which iceberg should not be included in IMHO. But it's more fun to say something obviously incorrect but which conveys my meaning in ordinary conversation.