MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by baron816 | 2026-01-18 16:34:56+00:00
It’s so strange to see people accusing tech companies of using AI to concentrate power and wealth when thus far, AI has almost entirely been all consumer surplus. You have crazily high competition in the industry that allows you the consumer to use SOTA models for free, or even run them yourself.

My prediction is that this will keep going all the way to the AGI stage. Someone will release (or leak) an AGI capable model that’s able to design AI chips, as well as the Fabs needed to build them, as well as robots to build and operate the Fabs and robot factories and raw material mines and refineries.
by alpha_squared | 2026-01-18 16:35:00+00:00
You're in half the comment replies with a confrontational tone and, at times, quite aggressively. It does not feel as though you're sincerely engaging, but instead have an ideological world view that makes it difficult to reconcile different perspectives.

I'm working directly with these tools and have several colleagues who do as well. Our collective anecdotal experience keeps coming back to the conclusion that the tech just isn't where the marketing is on its capabilities. There's probably some value in the tech here, which leads others like yourself to be so completely sold on it, but it's just not materializing that much in my day-to-day outside of creating the most basic code/scaffolding where I then have to go back and fix/correct because there are subtle errors. It's actually hard to tell if my productivity is better because I have to spend time fixing the generated output.

Maybe it would help to recognize that your experience is not the norm. And if the tech were there, where are the actual profits from selling it? It's increasingly more common for it to be "under development" for selling to consumers or only deployed as a chatbot in scenarios where it's acceptable to be wrong and warnings to verify output yourself.
by HardCodedBias | 2026-01-18 16:35:24+00:00
when I hear of industrial uses of phosphorus my ears prick up since phosphorus is a key limiting factor for life.

A world where this actually became industrially very successful combined with a lack of recycling could potentially add large new sink for phosphorus.

In general, be careful when creating a process which locks meaningful amount of phosphorus out of the biosphere.
by rrvsh | 2026-01-18 16:35:35+00:00
i used to shun this kind of rhetoric when i was younger, preferring to think of myself a scholar among the Simon the chipmunks of the world, but I've come to accept that humans are made to fight. i dont think its wrong to venerate the warrior - im the farthest thing from a US citizen or a Christian, but my culture still has their folk heroes. look up lieutenant adnan if you'd like a stirring of the spirit
by theptip | 2026-01-18 16:35:45+00:00
Hassabis put forth a nice taxonomy of innovation: interpolation, extrapolation, and paradigm shifts.

AI is currently great at interpolation, and in some fields (like biology) there seems to be low-hanging fruit for this kind of connect-the-dots exercise. A human would still be considered smart for connecting these dots IMO.

AI clearly struggles with extrapolation, at least if the new datum is fully outside the training set.

And we will have AGI (if not ASI) if/when AI systems can reliably form new paradigms. It’s a high bar.
by kouteiheika | 2026-01-18 16:35:47+00:00
If you want to prove (i.e. show that it works and/or it's faster in a real-world scenario) a new alternative to attention without breaking the bank then one of the best ways to do that would probably be to retrain an already existing model, just with swapped attention modules. Then once you have such a model you can do apples-to-apples benchmarks.

This has been done successfully in the past:

https://huggingface.co/featherless-ai/QRWKV-72B

Note that this is a 72B model which would be very expensive to train from scratch, but here they did the conversion for less than $2000.
by mrweasel | 2026-01-18 16:35:53+00:00
We should assume that at least a portion of the ads spending currently being channeled towards search would be redirected towards AI, but even then I question if the ad market is large enough to fund all the tech and media companies that rely on it. The ever increasing question to generate more value for the shareholders is in large part being funded by consumerism, gambling, borderline, or outright scams, and I question how much more value can be extracted by that route. We've certainly already crossed a lot of people ethical barriers.
by bearjaws | 2026-01-18 16:35:53+00:00
It's been a great 12 months for gold, it's clear the investment class is going to do anything so that line can continue to go up.

Homeowners will talk about how they have $5M in equity and can roll it into their future $10M mortgage at 1.99% APR for 50 years.

https://archive.is/vYcPC
by internet2000 | 2026-01-18 16:36:11+00:00
Non-designer here: The bounding container being consistent signalizes "this is an App," which is helpful in the broader context of an operating system. For example, if I saw this on my file browser, I'd have to think if it's an App or a document: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9e/Li...

That first level of signalization builds on top of familiarity with iOS. The squircle signifying app shows up a lot, even in marketing materials for iPhones and iPads.

Once you're past that first level, you can use the shape inside the container. The Phone and Messages icons are just green squircles, right? Yet they're very distinctive, because the interior shape (phone handset, bubble) is what registers. https://t3.ftcdn.net/jpg/17/71/51/32/240_F_1771513287_ATNuUv...
by kalkin | 2026-01-18 16:36:20+00:00
I agree with the thrust of your comment, but I think the comment to which you're replying was referring to Scott Alexander's "problematic past with reactionaries and race science", not Adams'.

https://gist.github.com/segyges/f540a3dadeb42f49c0b0ab4244e4...

(To be honest I would love for someone to write an essay engaging with Alexander in something of the spirit he engages with Adams here; he writes both good things, including IMHO this eulogy, but also a certain amount of garbage, and I do not claim to be wise enough to always distinguish on my own.)
by kayo_20211030 | 2026-01-18 16:36:53+00:00
I didn't grow up in the US, but the fact that 28% of US houses in 1956 had "two or more bathrooms" is mind-blowing. I reckon my country would've run around 5%-10%, with the upper-bound being a WAG. It made for some good ole family drag-out-knock-downs, though. We still laugh about those.
by quitit | 2026-01-18 16:36:59+00:00
The original inkpot Pages icon was beautiful, it looked great when steve jobs had it large on screen at macworld 2005 stating that Pages was "Word processing with an incredible sense of style". At the time this made sense for the Pages icon.

However there are 3 things I notice about this discussion:

1. Gorgeous detailed renderings aren't symbols, nor are they necessarily good icons. Symbols are mentally quicker to understand, and that makes them ideal as the foundation of an icon, where their purpose is to communicate, not just be pretty. The new icons do this better than the older icons. Secondly the detailed illustrations aren't effective at small sizes, to use the ink pot example: the pen is lost in the detail of the ink pot, at typical viewing size it's a visually noisy design. I recall a criticism at the time being that people didn't know what they were looking at.

2. People such as John Gruber who referenced this post don't have the self-awareness to recognise that they are neither an expert on the topic nor the target demographic. Watching Gruber riot about unimportant minutae over the last few months has been an interesting case study. At no point does he show a modicum of charity whereby he tries to understand why the changes were made, instead his response can be summarised as a whiney/bratty version of "it's the children who are wrong".

3. There is an amusing and unpredictable cross over between people who think the ink pot is peak icon design, but have argued in the past that the much more recent floppy disk is too old to be used as a save icon.
by quesera | 2026-01-18 16:37:04+00:00
Not pedantry; just responding to your "genuine" desire for suggestions. My mistake, I guess.

BBEdit is great, but if you need to learn something new anyway, or if being tied to macOS is ever going to be a concern, emacs or vim are equally-capable and cross-platform options.

You can learn 90% of everything you will ever need in a week or two. You will never need to switch editors again. It's a great trade, all things considered.
by alexrp | 2026-01-18 16:37:07+00:00
> You still need a custom distro for Raspberry Pi for example.

Are you sure that's still the case? I just checked the Raspberry Pi Imager and I see several "stock" distro options that aren't Raspbian.

Regardless, I take your point that we're reliant on vendors actually doing the upstreaming work for device trees (and drivers). But so far the recognizable players in the RISC-V space do all(?) seem to be doing that, so for now I remain hopeful that we can avoid the Arm mess.
by sekh60 | 2026-01-18 16:37:09+00:00
As a child I loved watching construction sites! I'd literally plop myself on the group and couldn't be moved until I was done. This would be ideal retirement for me. Though as I am a house spouse, I won't really get a retirement, gotta keep cooking meals, doing laundry, dishes and cleaning. At least I'll have no deathbed regrets about not spending enough time with my daughter though!
by vessenes | 2026-01-18 16:37:29+00:00
Thanks for the curious question. This is one in a sequence of efforts to use LLMs to generate candidate proofs to open mathematical questions, which then are generally formalized into Lean, a formal proof system for pure mathematics.

Erdos was prolific and many of his open problems are numbered and have space to discuss them online, so it’s become fairly common to run through them with frontier models and see if a good proof can be come up with; there have been some notable successes here this year.

Tao seems to engage in sort of a two step approach with these proofs - first, are they correct? Lean formalization makes that unambiguous, but not all proofs are easily formulated into Lean, so he also just, you know, checks them. Second, literature search inside LLMs and out for prior results — this is to check where frontier models are at in the ‘novel proofs or just regurgitated proofs’ space.

To my knowledge, we’re currently at the point where we are seeing some novel proofs offered, but I don’t think we’ve seen any that have absolutely no priors in literature.

As you might guess this is itself sort of a Rorschach test for what AI could and will be.

In this case, it looked at first like this was a totally novel solution to something that hadn’t been solved before. On deeper search, Tao noted it’s almost trivial to prove with stuff Erdos knew, and also had been proved independently; this proof doesn’t use the prior proof mechanism though.
by doctorpangloss | 2026-01-18 16:37:32+00:00
Meta, TikTok and social media create the cultural celebration of thinness that makes it possible for you to sell 25mg semaglutide tablets to everyone. In my opinion, they deserve more than 50% of your margin: you didn’t invent the drug, the FDA is basically letting you break the exclusivity policy for no particularly good reason, and you didn’t create the audience.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-18 16:37:36+00:00
What would it be checking against? There's no central signing authority the way there is with Windows. (I mean I guess a distro could implement that but then how would I load my own custom modules?)

The kernel provides the option to embed a signing key for kernel modules at compile time. But (AFAIK) you'll need to compile your own kernel to go that route.
by NitpickLawyer | 2026-01-18 16:39:12+00:00
I think the junior thing started ~24, early ~25. Because back then the level of the current models was at or above that level, with somewhat flaky reliability. In the past year that's changed. We are now at "mostly reliable" in any junior-level stuff, and "surprisingly capable, maybe still needs some hand-holding" at advanced / senior-level stuff. And somewhat super-human if the problem is easily verifiable in a feedback loop (see the atcoder stuff).
by DetectDefect | 2026-01-18 16:39:57+00:00
> AI can do a lot of their job must not have been doing important work in the first place

Not really. My doctor suggested using an AI-note taking "app" during our visit. I politely declined, believing it would diminish his attention and reasoning abilities (saying nothing of the privacy evisceration). The doctor is doing important work and using AI would lead to unwanted consequences. Sadly, this maxim is applicable to almost all skills and trades today, in espite of the nauseating AI evangelism extoling false virtues.
by whimsicalism | 2026-01-18 16:40:20+00:00
I’m replying to the people replying to me, which is hopefully permissible? I will respond aggressively to people who say that my work must not be very important or hard if I feel that AI can do a considerable portion of my day to day because I feel like that is initiating rudeness and find that the HN tendency to talk down to people expressing this opinion is chilling important conversations.

If my other replies come off as aggro, I apologize - I definitely can struggle with moderating tone in comments to reflect how I actually feel.

> Our collective anecdotal experience keeps coming back to the conclusion that the tech just isn't where the marketing is on its capabilities. There's probably some value in the tech here, which leads others like yourself to be so completely sold on it

Let me be clear - I am not so completely sold on the current iteration. But I think there has been a significant improvement even since the midpoint of last year, the number of diffs I am returning mostly unedited is sharply increasing, and many people I am talking to are privately telling me they are no longer authoring any code themselves except for minor edits in diffs. Given that this has only been 3 years since chatgpt, really I am just looking at the curve and saying ‘woah.’
by jesse__ | 2026-01-18 16:40:39+00:00
I've done a handful of interviews recently where the 'scaling' problem involves something that comfortably fits on one machine. The funniest one was ingesting something like 1gb of json per day. I explained, from first principals, how it fits, and received feedback along the lines of "our engineers agreed with your technical assessment, but that's not the answer we wanted, so we're going to pass". I've had this experience a good handful of times.

I think a lot of people don't realize machines come with TBs of RAM and hundreds of physical cores. One machine is fucking huge these days.
by vessenes | 2026-01-18 16:40:43+00:00
Some problems are ‘uninteresting’ in that they show results that aren’t immediately seen as useful. However, solutions may end up having ‘interesting’ connections or ideas or mathematical tools that are used elsewhere.

More broadly, I think there’s a perspective that literally just building out thousands more true statements in Lean is going to keep cementing math’s broadening knowledge framework. This is not building a giant castle a-la Wiles, it’s laying bricks in the outhouse, but someday those bricks might be useful.
by Workaccount2 | 2026-01-18 16:40:46+00:00
It is.

I don't why people say this. They even include their own version of sponsor block, which is generous, because technically sponsor segments aren't even part of youtube, they are purely the creator deciding to make the ad part of their content.

Also, just to put it out there, many creators would likley be able to cut sponsored content if the 40% of viewers not viewing ads paid up. Not every creator is a greedy ruthless overlord, many just want to keep the lights on. Especially in tech/nerdy channels, where ad block use is the highest.
by beeflet | 2026-01-18 16:41:13+00:00
I think it is a moot question because UBI and automation will destroy society as we know it through uncontrolled, malthusian growth. I don't think we will last long enough to see what long-term culture that results in.

With infinite welfare, the dominant culture will be the one that is able to reproduce as much as possible, perhaps through cloning? We are already seeing IVF, surrogate mothers and other sorts of cloning/eugenics sexual strategies emerge, just not on a dominant level yet.

If it wasn't for cloning, I would say it would look more like Calhoun's rat utopia due to sex-based competition.

>The anti-freeloader impulse is one of the easiest ways to spur people to action.

I would say this depends on culture. Only industrious countries tend to have culture with this impulse.
Show HN: Rails engine for building production-ready LLM agents
by adham900 | 2026-01-18 16:41:18+00:00
I built a Rails engine for building and managing LLM-powered agents. It wraps RubyLLM and adds the production infrastructure I kept rebuilding across projects:

- Execution tracking with cost/token analytics
- Reliability (retries, model fallbacks, circuit breakers)
- Budget controls (daily/monthly limits per agent or tenant)
- Workflow orchestration (pipelines, parallel, routers)
- Real-time monitoring dashboard

Example:

class SearchAgent < ApplicationAgent
model "gpt-4o"

reliability do
retries max: 3, backoff: :exponential
fallback_models "gpt-4o-mini", "claude-3-5-sonnet"
end

param :query, required: true

def user_prompt
"Extract search intent from: #{query}"
end
end

result = SearchAgent.call(query: "red shoes under $50")
result.content # structured response
result.total_cost # $0.00025

GitHub: https://github.com/adham90/ruby_llm-agents

I've been using it in production for a few months. Happy to answer questions.
by bee_rider | 2026-01-18 16:41:46+00:00
Sorry, I can’t tell if this is sarcastic. Well I think it has a kernel of truth that overstates it for rhetorical flair.

I’m willing to believe the phrase “trope” wasn’t invented in 1957 if that’s what you are saying. But surely they had the idea of popular little trends in contemporary literature.

The must have known they were writing pulp sci-fi. At least when they got their copies they could feel the texture!
by rendall | 2026-01-18 16:41:58+00:00
As a US citizen resident of Finland who has been so far relatively neutral-to-moderately supportive of MAGA wrt the culture wars, I find Trump's posturing on Greenland appalling and disgraceful. Yes, we all know that Trump's MO is to demand something horrendous in order to secure something less horrendous, but there is no path from threatening an ally's sovereignty that leads to anything good for the US. Monstrous.
by kalkin | 2026-01-18 16:42:10+00:00
I don't think the commenter to whom you're replying is any more aggressive than, e.g., this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46668988

It's unfortunately the case that even understanding what AI can and cannot do has become a matter of, as you say, "ideological world view". Ideally we'd be able to discuss what's factually true of AI at the beginning of 2026, and what's likely to be true within the next few years, independently of whether the trends are good for most humans or what we ought to do about them. In practice that's become pretty difficult, and the article to which we're all responding does not contribute positively.
by happy_dog1 | 2026-01-18 16:42:11+00:00
I think we have to be careful when assuming that model capabilities will continue to grow at the same rate they have grown in recent years. It is very well-documented their growth in recent years has been accompanied by an exponential increase in the cost of building these models, see for example (of many examples) [1]. These costs include not just the cost of GPUs but also the cost for reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), which is not cheap either -- there is a reason that SurgeAI has over $1 billion in annual revenue (and ScaleAI was doing quite well before they were purchased by Meta) [2].

Maybe model capabilities WILL continue to improve rapidly for years to come, in which case, yes, at some point it will be possible to replace most or all white collar workers. In that case you are probably correct.

The other possibility is that capabilities will plateau at or not far above current levels because squeezing out further performance improvements simply becomes too expensive. In that case Cory Doctorow's argument seems sound. Currently all of these tools need human oversight to work well, and if a human is being paid to review everything generated by the AI, as Doctorow points out, they are effectively functioning as an accountability sink (we blame you when the AI screws up, have fun.)

I think it's worth bearing in mind that Geoffrey Hinton (infamously) predicted ten years ago that radiologists would all be out of a job in five years, when in fact demand for radiology has increased. He probably based this on some simple extrapolation from the rapid progress in image classification in the early 2010s. If image classification capabilities had continued to improve at that rate, he would probably have been correct.

[1] https://arxiv.org/html/2405.21015v1
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surge_AI
by brabel | 2026-01-18 16:42:30+00:00
> Conversely, for the most successful companies the opposite is true.

While I agree with this, I think that it’s important to acknowledge that even if you did everything well and thought of everything in detail, you can still fail for reasons that are outside of your control. For example, a big company buying from your competitor who didn’t do a better job than you simply because they were mates with the people making the decision… that influences everyone else and they start, with good reason, to choose your competitor just because it’s now the “standard” solution, which itself has value and changes the picture for potential buyers.

In other words, being the best is not guarantee for success.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2026-01-18 16:43:31+00:00
Thanks for pointing it out.

I'm putting together a database along the lines of https://www.whosampled.com/ except instead of samples in music it's fiction authors either:

- revisiting one another's ideas

- stumbling across the same idea independently of one other

Now I get to add an edge between Tchaikovsky and Banks. It's somewhat unsurprising. Tchaikovsky does this a lot.
by yoyohello13 | 2026-01-18 16:43:45+00:00
The ad based business model is the most destructive technology of the new millennium. The whole point of advertising, to make people feel unsatisfied with their current life. The current state of the world makes perfect sense when you think of the last 20 years we've been cultivating fear, and dissatisfaction among the populace. All in the hopes of selling 0.1% more widgets.
by pfdietz | 2026-01-18 16:44:28+00:00
When a general study was made back in the 1970s of the limits of substitutability and recyclability of mineral resources, it was found phosphorus likely dictates the minimum amount of mining needed in steady state. It occurs at an average concentration of about 0.1% in the continental crust.

I worry just a bit about this in reference to LFP batteries.
by pingananth | 2026-01-18 16:44:50+00:00
Thanks for the heads up on the code reselling risk. That was my biggest worry with generic coupon codes too.

To solve this, I decided against just using a 'coupon' on the main checkout. Instead, I set up a completely separate payment flow (Topmate) specifically for India that requires local UPI payment methods.

My theory is that the requirement to use a local Indian payment method acts as a 'natural geoblock' against arbitrage. Interesting to hear that India didn't convert well for you even with PPP—I'll keep my expectations in check.