MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jruohonen | 2026-01-17 09:21:18+00:00
Indeed, the CEO was held criminally liable, but the charges were dropped in a higher court just recently. From the article:

"In April 2023, Tapio was found guilty of criminal negligence in his handling of patient data. His conviction was overturned on appeal in December 2025. (He declined my requests to interview him.)"

More specifically, he was charged of a data protection crime (i.e., note that in Finland these GDPR-like things are also in the criminal law). However, based on local news, I suppose there was not enough evidence that it was specifically a responsibility of a CEO or that CEO-level gross negligence occurred.
by hnlmorg | 2026-01-17 09:21:33+00:00
> None of the above was possible just 20 years ago.

Most of those things were actually possible. In many cases they weren’t as convenient, but as a child of the 80s I can tell you that life wasn’t like the dark ages before we all got smart phones.

In any case, I don’t think anyone here is arguing against technological progress. What we’re saying is that big tech has been too powerful, and too unregulated, for far too long.
by iNerdier | 2026-01-17 09:21:42+00:00
It is, on hacker news, easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism it seems.

This is echoing a term made by Varoufakis about an increasing amount of money being held by a smaller and smaller group, not a return to literal peasant existence. It’s not feudalism, it’s ‘neo-feudalism’.

The argument that labour can move is true, except where it can’t. Look at the entire towns of miners made irrelevant with no replacement to their jobs. Sure you might say they can move half way across the country to clean toilets but they have skills, a family and houses somewhere else.

Where the argument of a feudal analogy really rings true is the increasing attempt to do back to extraction of rent for everything. Subscriptions for everything, including homes are becoming more and more normal. Are we really okay with a world in this form?
by fnoef | 2026-01-17 09:21:46+00:00
Sure, self awareness is important. When you tell your kids not to walk your way, you take accountability. You say that what you did was bad, and you are accountable for it. You also acknowledge that what you did brought you to where you are, but given the chance you would take a different way. It’s not bad to have moral principles after you’ve done what you fight against, as long as you do it with accountability and self awareness.

OPs post had neither.
by DenisDolya | 2026-01-17 09:21:56+00:00
Friend, this is great, your Tenmo really could become a competitor for PyTorch. I especially liked what you wrote about pure Mojo, you really dug into the low level, even the tricky stuff. But is that really enough? You’ve reached a peak, but PyTorch already has a lot of momentum. It might be tough for your implementation to catch up, so maybe start by imitating PyTorch common behavior as much as possible, so people can switch easily, then gradually add your own API.
Also, MNIST numbers look good for a pure-Mojo CPU run, but bigger models and GPU workloads will really show where it stands. Docs and a short guide for switching would also help a lot. Overall really impressive work, keep it up!
by CTDOCodebases | 2026-01-17 09:22:23+00:00
It was simultaneously such a delight and a frustration.

It was a treat to play without having to empty your pockets (where I am it cost the equivalent of 120 arcade credits) but compared to the arcade it wasnt as good as it could have been.

If you had an action replay or a game genie you could use codes to speed it up though.
Show HN: Partner – An AI co-founder that remembers you
by ianberdin | 2026-01-17 09:22:45+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m a solo founder (currently running PlayCode.io). For the last few years, I’ve been battling a specific kind of burnout: the loneliness of having no one to think with.

I have friends and a wife, but they aren't in the trenches with me. I tried using ChatGPT and Claude as "sounding boards," but I hit a wall: Amnesia.

Every time I opened a new chat, I had to re-explain my context, my values, and my history. It felt like explaining my life story to a new stranger every day. It was exhausting. I didn't need a code generator; I needed a partner who knew me.

So I built Partner.

What it is: Partner is an AI cognitive companion designed for "active debuggers" - founders and creators who are trying to debug their own psychology and decision-making processes.

How it’s different: Most AI memory is just a vector database of facts. Partner is built around a "Living Constitution".

It doesn't just remember "Ruslan likes coffee."

It remembers principles we've agreed on (e.g., "I have a tendency to over-engineer," "My goal is freedom, not just revenue").

It proactively uses this context to check me. If I say "I'm going to build X," it might say, "Wait, last week we agreed that X is a distraction from your main goal. What changed?"

The Tech:

Memory Architecture: Instead of raw RAG, it uses a structured memory system (Insights, Patterns, Decisions) that acts as a long-term operating system for my brain.

Psychotherapeutic Inquiry: It’s prompted not to give advice (unless asked), but to ask the "one question" that peels back a layer. It helps me find the root cause, rather than just patching symptoms.

Deep Context: It holds the "full picture" of my life, business, health, relationships, because they are all interconnected. A fight at home affects my deployment; a failed deployment affects my sleep. Partner sees the whole system.

Why I built it: I built this to save myself. I needed a co-founder who doesn't sleep, doesn't judge, and remembers every lesson I've learned so I don't have to learn them twice. It has helped me navigate burnout, fix my sleep schedule, and make harder business decisions.

It’s currently in beta. It’s not cheap (because high-context AI isn't cheap), but if you’re a lonely founder trying to keep your head straight, it might be for you.

I’d love to hear your feedback.

https://getpartner.ai
by fullstackchris | 2026-01-17 09:22:45+00:00
> a Redux action, which would update the global Redux store, which would cause all Redux-connected components on the page to update, which would cause all their children to update as well. In other words, collapsing one comment triggered an update for nearly every React component on the page. No amount of caching, DOM-diffing, or shouldComponentUpdate can save you from this amount of waste.

yeah this is pretty much 1. an incorrect implementation and/or 2. an incorrect take

and easily solvable with a bit of 'render auditing' / debugging
by StopDisinfo910 | 2026-01-17 09:22:46+00:00
I think the article is mixing together multiple things while at the same time having an underlying bedrock of truth. The system as it stands is not viable and people need to rebel at least in how they vote but I don't think AI is the real issue here.

The system is flawed for different reasons. Tolerance for high vertical integration and oligopolies have seriously damaged the efficiency of the market and limited people's ability to disrupt. Capital concentration has created a new form of aristocracy. They have successfully lobbied to significantly weaken the mechanisms supposed to spread this money, notably inheritance tax. The Supreme Court has significantly altered how democracy functions by lifting limits on fundings and given far too much power to the richest.

The last forty years have basically torn down all the foundations Tocqueville saw as fundamental to the success of the young USA. People should fight to get things back on track.

AI is mostly incidental in that. It doesn't matter if AI temporary concentrates some wealth if the mechanisms for it to then be spread again are in place.
by rmunn | 2026-01-17 09:23:03+00:00
Had a comment listing specific reasons why that post is wrong, but I just realized a generic reason. I see two broad spectra of opinion on AI. One is "LLMs are the greatest thing ever!!!11!1!eleventy! They will usher in the post-scarcity economy!" The other is "LLMs will eat the world! We're doomed! Doooooooooooooomed!!!" In my opinion, both are wrong, because both assume unbounded potential for LLMs that just isn't justified by the facts. Look at how much trouble you have getting good code out of an LLM, for example. The fact that you simply cannot rely on LLM output but have to carefully scrutinize it for mistakes isn't going to go away, because of the fundamental reality of what an LLM is. So why would you assume that LLMs would be reliable in other areas? This is a new-and-improved version of Gell-Mann Amnesia, replacing newspapers with LLMs: people know LLMs aren't reliable in the field they personally specialize in (I've seen, on a lawyer's blog, examples of other lawyers who submitted LLM-written court papers with hallucinated citations; Courts take a, shall we say, dim view of such things). But then those same people go and assume that the LLMs are going to take over the world in other fields.

It's not always the case that given an opinion, both extremes are wrong. But in this specific case, it certainly is. Neither the "LLMs will usher in the post-scarcity economy" view nor the "LLMs will doom everyone to unemployment" view (which are remarkably closer to each other than it would appear at first glance) are correct. LLMs are a useful tool with inherent, fundamental limitations that mean that they will never be able to do everything. AGI is currently a pipe dream, and LLMs are not going to be the technology that achieves it.
by pizlonator | 2026-01-17 09:23:36+00:00
I find it surprising if Brazil meets this criteria:

> capital is the only thing separating one set of humans from the other, and that separation is large, and the overwhelming majority of humans are in the underclass.

Obviously, it's a matter of degree. You could reasonably argue that any capitalist society meets the criteria depending on your definition of "large", and depending on how you interpret the "capital is the only [sic] thing" part
by _rwo | 2026-01-17 09:24:10+00:00
If you're (speaking in general) going through such extremes - working 16h/day then farming and 'discovering' god - I would suggest looking into therapy; simply to regain balance; I also had a period in my life in my 30s where I tried to overcompensate, correct the life course so to speak

overall I don't believe neither extreme is healthy; doing A, then doing 2x the opposite of A because you realize A was not really good for you in the long term

but I'm glad it so far worked out for the author
by madmod | 2026-01-17 09:24:49+00:00
Haha thats amazingly confusing when you look closely.

I'm using baby pin reciever plates on 4080 extrusion with m6 thumbscrews into drop in t nuts. There is only one c stand. The extrusion is actually two parts in a cross. The speakers are on the horizontal extrusion mounted on magic arms. My momitors are angled slightly upward and the bottom is a few inches lower than standard desk height.
by amistico | 2026-01-17 09:24:58+00:00
We may have built an app that is bad for society.

We built a poker-style finance app. You pick a small portfolio, compete in short tournaments, and get ranked on public leaderboards. You can wager against friends in private leagues or enter open tournaments where the best performers get paid.

People did not just try it. They got addicted.

Last week, one user turned $10 into $750 in under a week. Wins feel euphoric. Losses feel unfinished.

It behaves exactly like a game.

Once you add competition, scoreboards, and money, behavior changes fast. People chase momentum. Time horizons shrink. Skill becomes something you want to prove today, not over years. The fun is undeniable, and that is what makes it uncomfortable.

This is not slow investing. It is social, competitive, and intentionally exciting.

The product works. Maybe too well.

Markets already have crazy dynamics, but making them explicit and social seems to amplify everything. We did not invent the behavior. We just removed the pretense.

Now I am questioning whether building something this engaging is actually neutral, or whether we crossed a line by turning markets into a sport people can not stop playing.

Curious how others here think about this. When does building something fun and profitable turn into something you should not be proud of?
by duskdozer | 2026-01-17 09:27:36+00:00
You could do all those things 10 if not 15 years ago, with maybe the exception of the last one - mainly driven by the onset of the COVID pandemic forcing people to think differently about things for a brief time - in a much less hostile climate. And big tech isn't even required for let alone the best implementation of all those things, it's merely situated itself as the default.
by tirant | 2026-01-17 09:28:31+00:00
That’s not the idea of communism.

That’s actually the point of libertarianism, anarchism: do what you want, but you will only do well if you get along with the rest of the society by providing something helpful to them, as no one is forced to help you. And that’s why free market capitalism works. Even the most selfish individuals have needed to cooperate, work for others or open businesses with useful products for society in order to be able to accumulate wealth.
by benashford | 2026-01-17 09:28:48+00:00
I think I get the gist of the moral of this story. But I'm not sure I'm fully agreeing with the specifics.

The nub is something I've thought about before. My contingency plan for AI turning the industry I work in upside down is to make hay while the sun shines before that point. Have enough saved or invested for a (lean) retirement (depending on how far away that point is).

But what if AI turns every industry upside down. Will there be enough overall economic activity to actually invest in at all. Then we're all poor regardless of how much we've individually saved, or what kind of social safety net exists, simply because there's not enough economic activity to fund it.

That is, at the moment, and I hope forever, a very remote possibility. For a whole host of reasons, technological and economic ones. But if that did happen in the next 20-30 years...
by michalsustr | 2026-01-17 09:29:02+00:00
I feel like I'm somewhere on that Venn diagram O:-)

The specific examples in the article are about UI.

I agree that UI ecosystem is a big and slow mess, because there is actually a LOT of complexity in UIs.
I would even argue that there is often more complexity to be found in UIs than in backends (unless you are working on distributed systems, or writing your own database).
On backend, you usually just need paralellism (95% of jobs is just parallel for, map-reduce kind of thing).

But in UI, you need concurrency! You have tons of mutable STATE flying around that you need to synchronize - within UI, across threads or with the backend.
This is /hard/ - and to come back to the point of the article - the only low-level language that I'm familiar with that can do it well and reliably is Rust.

In Rust, my absolutely favorite UI framework is egui. It is based on immediate mode rendering (maybe you're familiar with dearimgui), rather than the old, familiar-but-complex retained mode. It's really interesting stuff, recommend studying on it!
Dearimgui has a wonderful quote that summarizes this well:

> "Give someone state and they'll have a bug one day, but teach them how to represent state in two separate locations that have to be kept in sync and they'll have bugs for a lifetime." -ryg

We use egui in https://minfx.ai (Neptune/Wandb alternative) and working with it is just a joy. Emilk did such a fantastic job bringing egui about! Of course it has its flaws (most painful is layouting), but other than that it's great!
by OgsyedIE | 2026-01-17 09:29:53+00:00
Even though the three categories you describe include niches like museum attraction or vehicle piloting in legal niches that still respect humans, a little creativity expands your options for post-ASI work:

1: verbal/literary labour with your vocal cords, or the use of an output tool, to playback existing works in environments where mechanical methods are disallowed,

2: aesthetic labour through precise recreations of other's mental labour in the performing arts,

3: legal labour in acting as an agent to help or hinder existing legal processes in systems that give humans standing,

4: biological labour as a substrate for growing certain transplantable products,

5: smuggling labour (either non-invasive or surgically invasive),

6: political labour to incrementally sway electoral results in any polity where you are still enfranchised,

7: security labour as a canary for infohazards (such as 'diplomat' programs produced by another ASI) inside of a quarantined environment,

8: frontman work as a deniable patsy to enable economic forgery, deception, revenge or warfare by a patron ASI, possibly without your knowledge.

There are plenty of ways to gain some currency token that can pay for your negentropy upkeep costs.
by f30e3dfed1c9 | 2026-01-17 09:30:17+00:00
> The crucial difference between Mac and Windows layouts is... the order of the Option and Command keys.

> MacOS has a per-keyboard software setting that allows you to remap those two keys specifically, but I'd advise against using that because it never worked reliably for me.

I've been doing this for 20 or 30 years and it's never been a problem. Works fine. Been using standard PC keyboards with my desktop macs for so long I don't remember when I started.
by astrobe_ | 2026-01-17 09:30:56+00:00
Not so much, actually. The better-than-default "process" for their 3rd level is to interview the customers, users, or domain experts, which is something you should do already in a sane software development process. Transposed and generalized to everyday life, this just means talk to people, ask questions and listen. This is generally called being "open-minded".
by Llamamoe | 2026-01-17 09:31:13+00:00
You enjoy individual benefits and completely disregard the fact that electronics addiction and loneliness get worse year by year. You've been able to Google anything and chat with anyone back in 2010, all we've achieved since is making the average person spend 4-5h mindlessly doomscrolling on their phone and watching YouTube instead of having meaningful social interaction.

Also, we've got an entire generation growing up on ads, algorithmic brainrot, and now ai slop.

You're also forgetting algorithmic price fixing, algorithmic pricing, the billions in R&D into making internet platforms and services more addicting and effective at siphoning out your money, etc.
by hnlmorg | 2026-01-17 09:31:22+00:00
The problem is companies are increasingly looking at the economy as someone else’s problem. And that results in a race to the bottom as each business sees what the other does and then makes the same cuts to improve their own margins too.

What we’ve also seen in recent decades is a massive shift to people borrowing money to pay for luxury goods. This means that businesses can still continue to tank the economy because their profits are propped up by other people’s debts.

And in fairness, it’s not just consumer goods that are sold this way either. Entire businesses are run on borrowed money and suppressed wages with the hope that they win the “business lottery” and receive a massive buyout. Often they’re deliberately selling their products below cost price to boost their client portfolio and thus making it entirely uneconomical for normal businesses to compete on price.

And then we wonder why the economy is so volatile. The whole thing is held together by gum and prayers and the only people benefiting are those who are already wealthy.
by fainpul | 2026-01-17 09:33:13+00:00
I have to praise PowerShell here. You get tab completion [0], type checking, automatically generated syntax help text etc. for free, just by writing your CLI tool in PowerShell.

Then you can also use a simple, built-in, declarative DSL to gradually enhance the robustness of your CLI by adding more checks or constraints, or use "parameter sets" [1] to define which parameters can and cannot be used together — tab completion will behave accordingly and suggest only what's allowed.

Dynamic completers, like mentioned in the article, can also be done [2].

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/learn...

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsof...

[2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsof...
by wickedsight | 2026-01-17 09:33:13+00:00
> His alternative of not working for big tech is literally the only way out of this.

This won't actually work though. The only reason we even have this discussion is because we're rich enough that pure survival isn't even really in our instinct anymore. Most of us haven't experienced actual hardship for years and we live in luxury.

There are plenty people in the world who are smart and poor and living tough lives, who are ready to replace people who quit because they have te luxury to quit. Just look at the huge amount of Indian people moving across the world to work in tech. These people aren't going to let the opportunity to significantly improve their lives go because they're going to work on software that might negatively impact society at some point. You could see this exact thing happen when Elon took over Twitter. Many people left because they disagreed with Elon, while many H-1B stuck around because they (and their families) actually had something to lose.

I don't think many of us on HN realize how incredibly spoiled we are with the lives we live.
by DiscourseFan | 2026-01-17 09:33:42+00:00
You think that these ridiculously high wages that companies like Mercor are paying for data generation are "tanking" bargaining power? Its the complete opposite: there is now a massive sector of highly skilled, specialized labor that produces the very data which trains these models, a task that will not end as long as there is demand for newer and better and more specially trained models. That is a massive amount of bargaining power. It would take far more severe shocks to the system to kill the possibility of revolution, and that whatever that would be would be bad for everyone.
by defrost | 2026-01-17 09:33:45+00:00
It's a pipe venting system designed to handle typical city sewerage over the course of a couple of years of observation prior to 1990 (when constructed).

The August report reveals that FOG in the Malabar wastewater system have risen by 39% over the past 10 years. Volatile organic compounds – including cleaning products, cosmetics, paint, fuels and other chemicals – have risen by 125%.

What it was designed for has changed, leading to unanticipated clogging in unexpected locations .. there's now a mass back forced into an zone that was intended to be clear and that mass is fragmenting and feeding chunks back into the decline outflow.

Disclaimer, I've not read the detailed report, and my poor understanding is that Sydney water themselves is doing a bit of guesswork themselves here.

A big issue is it was considered most economical and acceptable in the later part of the 1980's to push barely treated solids in a slurry a "long way" out to sea rather than invest in a full treatment plant that deals with everything on land and emits drinkable water.

Addendum: To add to the problem Engineers (civil) faced, I'm now reasonably sure they in the 1990s were tapping into an out to sea decline fall from the 1930s.

Accountants would have stressed the cost savings of this, over ruling any Engineers muttering about for only four times the capital costs they could have something much better and more future proof (maybe).
by Llamamoe | 2026-01-17 09:34:31+00:00
Inevitably? Maybe not, but the situation isn't gonna get better by saying "oh I'm sure the tech industry will do a 180 and stop making everything worse"

> seems to have no issue with Google hosting their email.

There's this meme where person A says "we should improve society somewhat", and B replies "yet you participate in society! curious". Very similar argument.