MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by scresswell | 2026-01-05 21:20:33+00:00
I genuinely like the framing of advisory versus authoritative AI, and I agree with the core observation that authority, when it is genuinely granted, is what unlocks step change improvements rather than marginal efficiency gains. In the environments where it is appropriate, allowing systems to act rather than merely suggest can dramatically accelerate development and reshape workflows in ways that advisory tools never will. In that sense, you are right: authority is the AI bottleneck.

My concern with your article is that, without clearer caveats, you imply that authority is the right answer everywhere. As you rightly note, AI systems make mistakes and they make them frequently. In many real world contexts, those mistakes are not cleanly reversible. You cannot roll back a data leak. You cannot always recover fully from data loss. You cannot always undo millions of pounds of lost or refunded revenue caused by subtle failures or downtime. You cannot always roll back the consequences of an exploited security vulnerability. And you certainly cannot reliably undo reputational damage once trust has been lost.

Even in cases where you can mostly recover from a failure, you cannot recover the organisational and human disruption it causes. A recent UK example is the case where thousands of drivers were wrongly fined for speeding due to a system error that persisted from 2021. Given the scale, some will have lost their licences, some may have lost their jobs, and many will have experienced long term impacts such as higher insurance premiums. Even if fines are refunded or records corrected later, the downstream consequences cannot simply be undone. While the failure in this example was caused by human error, the fact that some mistakes are unrecoverable is just as true for AI.

Part of the current polarisation in opinions about AI comes from a lack of explicit context. People talk past each other because they are optimising for different objectives in different environments, but argue as if they are discussing the same problem. An approach that is transformative in a low risk internal system can be reckless in a public, regulated, or security sensitive one.

Where I strongly agree with you is that authoritative AI can be extremely powerful in the right domains. Proofs of concept are an obvious example, where speed of learning matters more than correctness and the blast radius is intentionally small. Many internal or back office applications fall into the same category. However, for many public facing, safety critical, or highly regulated systems, authority is not simply a cultural or organisational choice. It is a hard constraint shaped by risk, liability, regulation, and irreversibility. In those contexts, using AI in a strictly advisory capacity may be a bottleneck, but it is also a deliberate and necessary control measure, at least for now.
by BizarroLand | 2026-01-05 21:20:40+00:00
Making the mental adjustment coming from a public college to a private company regarding money has been one of the most difficult transitions I've ever faced.

At the college I had a $250,000 annual budget for IT that had to be planned out to the best of my abilities nearly a year in advance of the actual physical year, get approval from 2-5 levels of management for the budget, and then be flexible on when the money became available to purchase depending on the states fiscal economic factors.

In a private company now, even when I volunteer to do something to save money, they say it's not worth my time and effort, pay someone to do it.

Purchases under $25,000 can be made without approval, over that I just have to ask my direct report for approval.

I'm still personal finance budget minded, so they don't have to worry about me buying gold plated toilet hinges or anything, but it's still financial whiplash even years later for how they do things.
by tmcz26 | 2026-01-05 21:20:53+00:00
This is funny after Jan 3rd:

> Predisposition to Non-Interventionism — In the Declaration of Independence, America’s founders laid down a clear preference for non-interventionism in the affairs of other nations and made clear the basis: just as all human beings possess God-given equal natural rights, all nations are entitled by “the laws of nature and nature’s God” to a “separate and equal station” with respect to one another. For a country whose interests are as numerous and diverse as ours, rigid adherence to non-interventionism is not possible. Yet this predisposition should set a high bar for what constitutes a justified intervention.
by j2kun | 2026-01-05 21:21:10+00:00
Ah yes, let's run a statistical study: give some mentally unstable people ChatGPT and others not, and see if more murder-suicides occur in the treatment group.

Oh you mean a correlation study? Well now we can just argue nonstop about reproducibility and confounding variables and sample sizes. After all, we can't get a high power statistical test without enough people committing murder-suicides!

Or maybe we can decide what kind of society we want to live in without forcing everything into the narrow band of questions that statistics is good at answering.
by ceejayoz | 2026-01-05 21:21:15+00:00
> Governments don't ban any of those things.

And the poster upthread used "regulate" for that reason, I presume.

> I wish I could argue the "regulate" point but you failed to provide even a single example AI regulation you want to see enforced.

It's OK to want something to be regulated without a proposal. I want dangerous chemicals regulated, but I'm happy to let chemical experts weigh in on how rather than guessing myself. I want fecal bacterial standards for water, but I couldn't possibly tell you the right level to pick.

If you really need a specific proposal example, I'd like to see a moratorium on AI-powered therapy for now; I think it's a form of human medical experimentation that'd be subject to licensing, IRB approval, and serious compliance requirements in any other form.
by delaminator | 2026-01-05 21:21:21+00:00
Oh, it counts words not tokens, sadly

Project Prompts Tools Files Words In Words Out Last Activity
Blizzard 272 2069 59 19.9k 22.0k 2026-01-05 14:54
RIVSPROD01 272 2069 59 19.9k 22.0k 2026-01-05 14:54
StinkySpy 106 0 0 3.1k 19.5k 2026-01-05 13:19
roob 106 0 0 3.1k 19.5k 2026-01-05 13:19
Devolver 57 162 11 5.8k 4.7k 2026-01-02 17:10
RIVSPROD01 21 162 11 3.6k 1.6k 2026-01-02 16:17
RIVMIS01 19 0 0 943 2.5k 2026-01-02 16:08
roob 17 0 0 1.3k 547 2026-01-02 17:10
ONI-StorageTooltipMod 13 0 0 267 1.1k 2026-01-05 14:53
roob 13 0 0 267 1.1k 2026-01-05 14:53
Robocyril 12 0 0 696 2.0k 2026-01-02 15:13
RIVMIS01 12 0 0 696 2.0k 2026-01-02 15:13
Declotter 11 0 0 661 1.7k 2026-01-02 15:01
RIVMIS01 11 0 0 661 1.7k 2026-01-02 15:01

471 prompts, 2231 tool calls, 30k words in, 50k words out

tool call counts was broken, which is why some are zero
Ask HN: How to Find Leasee for Domain?
by giantg2 | 2026-01-05 21:21:30+00:00
What's a good way to find a leasee for a domain? Someone I know owns a great domain but it needs physical fulfillment. Basically, it's website you can buy parts on that an existing parts dealer could use for their internet business. I'm not sure if there's a good marketplace for this or if they would have to contact prospective partners individually.
by bluGill | 2026-01-05 21:21:31+00:00
I think you (and the other) misunderstood. You are not threatening to leave here! Either you actually leave (their first notice is your two weeks), or someone else does and the company realizes if they don't promote good people fast those others will take the same hint and leave.

I agree that threatening to leave is a bad thing. Either get out or be content where you are: middle grounds do nobody any good.
by dangus | 2026-01-05 21:21:32+00:00
So what you’re quite literally saying is that a college degree is proof that you learned the course material well enough to pass exams and that you were reliable enough to follow through with completing a large project, the large project being a significant load of college attendance, coursework, hands-on labs, group projects, and exams.

But then in the previous breath you said it’s a scam? What makes it a scam? You just said yourself that it is bonafide proof of a base ability to follow through and proof of some non-zero level of knowledge absorption.

If you didn’t go to school you’d just be telling your prospective employer “hey don’t worry I already know C++” and they’d have to find some way of verifying that skill set on their own.

Meanwhile, your competition who went to school can say “I got a 4.0 in all my fundamental accredited coursework and I was the front end designer for my group capstone project with 3 other students where we built a dog walking gig app, here’s how we worked together to make decisions and resolve issues…”

If the only thing that makes it a scam is the price…that’s a weak argument. And we have the statistics to show us that college degree holders still out-earn high school graduates greatly.

When we see the wealthy stop sending their kids to Wharton and Harvard then you know it’s a scam.
by JoshTriplett | 2026-01-05 21:21:42+00:00
> If an IC takes on more and more IC work instead of management responsibilities, it's harder to promote them.

This is one reason it's critically important for a company to have paths for ICs to take on larger responsibilities that aren't necessarily management responsibilities. Not everyone wants to be a manager, and not everyone is good at being a manager. Some people want to become increasingly senior engineers. (They'll still, ultimately, be responsible for things that involve other people, but that doesn't mean they want to be a people-manager.)
by biophysboy | 2026-01-05 21:21:44+00:00
> At this point in time, no comment that has the string "230" in it is saying that Section 230 absolves X of anything.

You are correct; I read your earlier post as "did we forget our already established principle"? I admit I'm a bit tilted by X doing this. In my defense, there are people making the "blame the user, not the tool" argument here though, which is the core idea of section 230
by boogieknite | 2026-01-05 21:21:45+00:00
some personal advice i recently learned is to show youre boss's boss if you really want to be promoted

ive been "trying to take my boss's position" for a few years and he really appreciates it. but during my last review my boss's boss pointed said he wasnt aware of any of this. i was leaving him off all my cc lists because i figured he didnt want the cluttered inbos. he said the opposite, he thought i wasnt following up and doing my job

all my effort was actually having a negative effect in the perspective of the decision maker. hopefully i knock his socks off this year since apparently the bars been lowered to the floor
by adrian_b | 2026-01-05 21:21:48+00:00
It is a chemoautotrophic system, but it is not independent of the sun and of photosynthetic life.

This is a hugely erroneous claim that is much too frequently encountered in the popular publications.

Both in this cave and in hydrothermal vents, most autotrophic bacteria use free oxygen to oxidize the hydrogen sulfide, producing thus the energy needed for autotrophy.

The free oxygen comes from the phototrophic algae and plants (located elsewhere), i.e. from solar energy.

On Earth, there are only 2 kinds of autotrophic bacteria and archaea that may be independent from solar energy, the acetogenic bacteria and archaea and the methanogenic archaea. Both kinds obtain energy from free hydrogen and carbon dioxide, the former producing acetic acid and the latter producing methane.

These 2 kinds of bacteria and archaea need free hydrogen and most of them are killed by free oxygen. Sometimes the free hydrogen is produced by fermentation of organic substances, like in our intestines, so also coming from solar energy, but free hydrogen is also produced by the oxidation of volcanic rocks by water, when its origin is independent of solar energy and dependent only on the internal heat of the Earth, which produces volcanic rocks that are in chemical equilibrium at high temperatures deep inside the Earth's mantle, but they are no longer in chemical equilibrium after reaching the cold surface of the Earth.

Thus deep underground or in certain places on the bottom of the oceans, where free dihydrogen is abundant and there exists no free dioxygen, there are communities of acetogenic and methanogenic bacteria and archaea that are independent of solar energy, but this is not the case for this cave and for many of the hydrothermal vents, where both hydrogen sulfide and free dioxygen are abundant, so aerobic bacteria are dominant.

Anywhere where there is either air or water with dissolved dioxygen, the living beings use the most efficient energy source, i.e. the oxidation of either organic or anorganic substances with the free dioxygen, so they depend on solar energy, even when there is no light in that place.
by TrainedMonkey | 2026-01-05 21:21:59+00:00
Withings smart watches are kind of insane with 30 day battery life, but the subscription farming in the app is infuriating.

All I want from a smart watch:

- Waterproof, wireless charging, at least a week of battery life

- Automatically track exercise and sleep, let me update the data if needed.

- Track my fitness overtime

- Optionally, learn a couple of recurring patterns to improve automatic exercise assignment. If I hike twice a week and you see an exercise session with a consistent heart rate profile you better believe I am hiking
by wenc | 2026-01-05 21:22:11+00:00
I took a course on critical thinking once which helped me to at least pause and ask questions when I read something sensationalist.

“It sounds like something x would do” often leads me down very wrong paths. Just because the vibes point in that direction often doesn’t mean it’s the truth.

This is exactly how misinformation starts and real people pay the price for generations. Just look at the MSG (monosodium glutamate) untruth that has hurt many Chinese restaurants and Chinese Americans over the years. Misinformation is not victimless.
by cogman10 | 2026-01-05 21:22:33+00:00
Ah no, I don't think you understand how religious fundamentalism works in practice.

For most fundamentalist religions, men are almost never penalized for bad behavior. It's nearly impossible to find a man being killed for violating a morality law including selling pornography or engaging in prostitution.

But on the other hand, it's very easy to find examples of women getting stoned for dressing improperly.
by ewoodrich | 2026-01-05 21:22:34+00:00
That may keep them preoccupied for a while. But eventually they'll try to upload their post-relativity recursive quantum intelligence unification theory magnum opus to arXiv as a neatly LaTeX-formatted paper so they can spam university physics departments and subreddits.

So then we're back where we started, except unlike in the past the final product will superficially resemble a legitimate paper at first glance...
by rescbr | 2026-01-05 21:22:58+00:00
I bet most hammers (non-regulated), spray cans (lightly regulated) and guns (heavily regulated) that are sold are used for their intended purposes. You also don't see these tools manufacturers promoting or excusing their unintended usage as well.

There's also a difference between a tool manufacturer (hardware or software) and a service provider: once the tool is on the user's hands, it's outside of the manufacturer's control.

In this case, a malicious user isn't downloading Grok's model and running it on their GPU. They're using a service provided by X, and I'm of the opinion that a service provider starts to be responsible once the malicious usage of their product gets relevant.
by Neywiny | 2026-01-05 21:23:03+00:00
Some notes:
1. Nice and tight article, good work
2. Shipped a piece of code, always props to that
3. The has_zero_byte it would be nice to actually do the math in the example. As is the example doesn't really show anything. It also should say "its" instead of "it's"
4. The work done per chunk shouldn't include the broadcasts. That should be done at the start of the search and those values kept in the registers, no?
5. Isn't AVX and SSE also SWAR? They're just wider registers
6. I think a graph showing the cost of the lookup table vs n needles would be cool to see

Overall nice work
by 578_Observer | 2026-01-05 21:23:14+00:00
@Cthulhu_, thank you for your thoughtful support. I was honestly a bit overwhelmed by the "witch hunt" atmosphere, as I simply wanted to share my perspective from my career and the history of SF2.

It is very heartening to see a veteran like you advocate for a more welcoming conversation. I am grateful for your kindness and look forward to contributing more to this community as a person. Thank you for making me feel welcome.
by llmslave2 | 2026-01-05 21:23:18+00:00
I think the question of if X should do more to prevent this kind of abuse (I think they should) is separate from Grok or LLM's though. I get that since xAI and X are owned by the same person there is some complications here, but most of the arguments I'm reading have to do with the LLM specifically, not just lax moderation policies.
by Octoth0rpe | 2026-01-05 21:23:23+00:00
> Why would I want to get power from my monitor?

Both at work and at home, I can plug in my monitor to my laptop with a single cable to my monitor. That single cable charges my laptop, connects the display, and passes through a usb hub that's built into the monitor that connects my keyboard and webcam. It's _incredibly_ convenient. It's also just a lot less cabling. You can think of it like a dock, built into the monitor for free.

> It seems like kind of a niche

Different workflows/circles. It's not something you're likely to use with a desktop, mainly with a laptop. It also really only works well if you use thunderbolt. It's reasonably common but probably not a majority where I work, where 90% of dev machines are macs.
by thrance | 2026-01-05 21:23:30+00:00
Gee, I wonder why people would take offense at an AI model being used to generate unprecedented amounts of CSAM from real children, or objectify millions of women without their consent. Must be that classic Musk Derangement Syndrome.

The real question is how can the pro-Musk guys still find a way to side with him on that. My leading theory is that they're actually pro-pedophilia.
by KoolKat23 | 2026-01-05 21:23:36+00:00
You're the one making the logical fallacies and reacting emotionally. Read what I have said first please.

That is a different grok to the one publishing images and discussed in the article. Your link clearly states they are being moderated in the comments and all comments are discussing adults only. The links comments also imply that these folks are jailbreaking nearly, because of guardrails that exist too.

As I say read what I said, please don't put words in my mouth. The GPT models wouldn't know what is sexualised. I said there is a line at some point. Non-sexualized bikinis are sold everywhere, do you not use the internet to buy clothes?

Your immediate dismissive reaction indicates you are not giving what I'm saying any thought. This is what puritanical thought often looks like. The discourse is so poisoned people can't stop, look at the facts and think rationally.
by caminante | 2026-01-05 21:24:14+00:00
I'm pretty sure it's good at both.

>I like being helpful and I like doing this kind of work and I really don't want to think or care about how it is reading to upper management.

Coding aside, I'm afraid this is already falling prey to LLMs plugged into exec calendars and org charts. You're adding yet another non-human, digital layer.
by rkeene2 | 2026-01-05 21:24:21+00:00
I still do not understand your point because as you state there is no conflict between the two agreements, and further there are no pair countries involved that mutually agreed to the ICC:

- Diplomatic Immunity (through various treaties): Countries that participate will respect diplomats
- ICC: Countries that agree will participate in ICC judicial process

From what I can tell, you seem to be under the impression that there's some conflict here. If that is your position then you are wrong. A country can both simultaneously respect foreign diplomats and work with the ICC to ensure that local citizens are held accountable in the ICC.

BUT, a further point -- international law can never be binding. It's between sovereign peers, and is based on the concept of reciprocal benefit. International treaties give the participants some benefit in exchange for something else. This has to be the case because there is no superior entity to arbitrate violations of the law. If you don't keep up your end of the bargain, you risk the other participants not keeping up their end of the bargain.

This is, for example, why having the top US officials committing war crimes is bad -- it's not because some superior nation will inflict justice upon the violator (because no such entity exists) but because other signatories have no legal obligation to not commit war crimes against us (although, many people are morally opposed to most war crimes and wouldn't commit them anyway).

A further note about your PS, which seems unrelated to the topic is that bombing isn't itself an invasion (it may be part of one), but for my opinion I think that killing people without due process is bad and should be a last resort for defense.
by KaiserPro | 2026-01-05 21:24:35+00:00
Logical fallacy.

but to answer your point, no for two reasons:

1) you need to bring your own source material to create it. You can't press a button that says "make child porn"

2) its not a reasonable to expect that someone would be able to make CSAM in photoshop. However more importantly the user is the one hosting the software, not adobe.
by XorNot | 2026-01-05 21:24:57+00:00
This is also legally problematic: many jurisdictions now have specific laws about the synthesis of CSAM or modifying peoples likenesses.

So exactly who is considered the originator is a pretty legally relevant question particularly if Grok is just off doing whatever and then posting it from your input.

"The persistent AI bot we made treated that as a user instruction and followed it" is a heck of a chain of causality in court, but you also fairly obviously don't want to allow people to laundry intent with AI (which is very much what X is trying to do here).
by vlovich123 | 2026-01-05 21:25:16+00:00
In human economics scale and quality are most certainly in tension. Rolls Royce hand assembles their cars because it’s easier to guarantee quality when you have masters doing the work. Toyota on the other hand gets the cost down because it’s mostly automated with very mostly unskilled labor doing some work.

At some point you can refine scale where you also automate the quality issues away, but there’s always still that tension.
by ethbr1 | 2026-01-05 21:25:25+00:00
> So fucking sink it

Let's think through the implications of that.

The US healthcare system is non-functional for a month: what happens?

Hospitals and providers start running into cash flow problems and begin having difficulties providing service.

Fraud skyrockets because everything is getting blanket-approved because none of the data used for verification is available.

And about a month after that, people start dying from lack of care, after the last financial reserves of the system are exhausted.

Because that's the path the system was on when Change went down for several weeks, only averted by HHS/CMS saying 'Here's money, just do procedures, we'll worry about it later.'
by mk89 | 2026-01-05 21:25:26+00:00
Elon Musk mentioned multiple times that he doesn't want to censor. If someone does or says something illegal on his platform, it has to be solved by law enforcement, not by someone on his platform. When asked to "moderate" it, he calls that censorship. Literally everything he does and says is about Freedom - no regulations, or as little as possible, and no moderation.

I believe he thinks the same applies to Grok or whatever is done on the platform. The fact that "@grok do xyz" makes it instanteous doesn't mean you should do it.