MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by oxag3n | 2026-01-27 23:36:10+00:00
> Atrophy. I've already noticed that I am slowly starting to atrophy my ability to write code manually...
> Largely due to all the little mostly syntactic details involved in programming, you can review code just fine even if you struggle to write it.

Until you struggle to review it as well. Simple exercise to prove it - ask LLM to write a function in familiar programming language, but in the area you didn't invest learning and coding yourself. Try reviewing some code involving embedding/SIMD/FPGA without learning it first.
by crazygringo | 2026-01-27 23:36:25+00:00
> Somewhere, there are GPUs/NPUs running hot.

Running at their designed temperature.

> You send all the necessary data, including information that you would never otherwise share.

I've never sent data that isn't already either stored by GitHub or a cloud provider, so no difference there.

> And you most likely do not pay the actual costs.

So? Even if costs double once investor subsidies stop, that doesn't change much of anything. And the entire history of computing is that things tend to get cheaper.

> You and your business become dependent on this major gatekeeper.

Not really. Switching between Claude and Gemini or whatever new competition shows up is pretty easy. I'm no more dependent on it than I am on any of another hundred business services or providers that similarly mostly also have competitors.
by soulofmischief | 2026-01-27 23:36:50+00:00
Anyone who stands up to a tyrannical government and a wannabe dictator's secret police is a hero to me. He died a hero. He was helping a woman who was being maced by a group of lawless masked thugs masquerading as law enforcement who are unwelcome in the neighborhoods they patrol. Any other perspective requires being ignorant of the context.

ICE is a rogue organization, our Executive and Legislative branches have gone rogue; our government no longer works for us, it works against us, and any attempt to validate the actions of this fascist attack on state sovereignty is seen exactly for what it is. There are too many video angles for you to see this tragic death as anything other than what it is.

You're right that there was no comparison to Kirk here. Alex was actually on the frontlines, intentionally putting his life on the line for human rights.

Yet, Kirk himself would have absolutely been appalled at how the US government has treated the rash of shootings in Minnesota, and how they're now being used once again to assault our first and second amendment rights. He would not be siding with ICE or Trump on this one, but since he's dead they can parade around his image and make his fan base believe this is all somehow fair and warranted.

Grow a spine.
by happytoexplain | 2026-01-27 23:37:43+00:00
Hmm, well I'm more interested in the browser part rather than the windowing part - I feel like it makes more sense that LLMs can be somewhat competent with windowing frameworks even if the prompter is not super experienced. Regardless, there's probably not a concise way to get what I'm looking for - instead, I'm looking forward to seeing your config/input! I'm super curious.
by xenadu02 | 2026-01-27 23:38:06+00:00
FYI: none of the "penetrating oils" actually work. They don't wick into threads on stuck fasteners. Heat is the only thing that really works. Causes expansion of the metal followed by shrinking which mechanically disrupts the oxide jamming whatever is stuck.

WD-40 is great for machining aluminum, cleaning grease/other oils, and if you want a mild temporary lubricant not something that will make a massive mess or irritate your skin.
by BonoboIO | 2026-01-27 23:38:15+00:00
Perspective from Central Europe (Austria): I can tell you that essentially nobody here has any doubt that bad faith is at play.

Our mainstream news outlets are openly calling the "official" versions from the Trump administration what they are – lies. The video evidence is clear to anyone watching: this was murder. No amount of spin changes what the footage shows.

As citizens of a country that knows firsthand how fascism begins, we recognize the patterns: the brazen lying in the face of obvious evidence, the dehumanization, the paramilitarized enforcement without accountability. We've seen this playbook before.

What Americans might not fully grasp is how catastrophically the US has damaged its standing abroad. The sentiment here has shifted from "trusted ally" to "unreliable partner we need to become independent from as quickly as possible." The only thing most Europeans still find relevant about the US at this point is Wall Street.

The fact that the FBI is investigating citizens documenting government violence rather than the government agents committing violence tells you everything about where this is heading.
by Forgeties79 | 2026-01-27 23:38:24+00:00
I don’t object to you defining something.

> I think that is what he is doing, I think it's an accurate expression of his thinking.

It isn’t. It is like saying “you can do that but you will eventually get beat up.” That is not saying “people should beat you up.” There is a world of difference in those 2 statements. Your accusation hinges on the worst possible - debatably possible at best tbh - interpretation of their statement. It is bait, it is dishonest, and you’re being intentional about it.

This is not a difference of opinion, this is not curiosity, you are just being difficult.
by blibble | 2026-01-27 23:38:42+00:00
it's the "usually" that's the problem

this service (untouched by me) had:

After=local-fs.target network-online.target remote-fs.target time-sync.target

but it was still started without an IP address, and then failed to bind

just like this sort of problem: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/4880#issuecomment-...

the entire thing is unreliable and doesn't act like you'd expect

> Or you can do something with ExecStartPre. You could run a shell command that checks for the most recent time sync or forces one.

at that point I might as well go back to init=/etc/rc
by danelski | 2026-01-27 23:39:52+00:00
Many people here talk about Overleaf as if it was the 'dumb' editor without any of these capabilities. It had them for some time via Writefull integration (https://www.writefull.com/writefull-for-overleaf).
Who's going to win will probably be decided by brand recognition with Overleaf having a better starting position in this field, but money obviously being on OAI's side. With some of Writefull's features being dependent on ChatGPT's API, it's clear they are set to be priced-out unless they do something smart.
by parsimo2010 | 2026-01-27 23:40:34+00:00
A common approach to research is to do literature review first, and build up a library of citable material. Then when writing your article, you summarize the relevant past research and put in appropriate citations.

To clarify, there is a difference between a bibliography (a list of relevant works but not necessarily cited), and cited work (a direct reference in an article to relevant work). But most people start with a bibliography (the superset of relevant work) to make their citations.

Most academics who have been doing research for a long time maintain an ongoing bibliography of work in their field. Some people do it as a giant .bib file, some use software products like Zotero, Mendeley, etc. A few absolute psychos keep track of their bibliography in MS Word references (tbh people in some fields do this because .docx is the accepted submission format for their journals, not because they are crazy).
by epolanski | 2026-01-27 23:40:38+00:00
1. Write good documentation, architecture, how things work, code styling, etc.

2. Put your important dependencies source code in the same directory. E.g. put a `_vendor` directory in the project, in it put the codebase at the same tag you're using or whatever: postgres, redis, vue, whatever.

3. Write good plans and requirements. Acceptance criteria, context, user stories, etc. Save them in markdown files. Review those multiple times with LLMs trying to find weaknesses. Then move to implementation files: make it write a detailed plan of what it's gonna change and why, and what it will produce.

4. Write very good prompts. LLMs follow instructions well if they are clear "you should proactively do X", is a weak instruction if you mean "you must do X".

5. LLMs are far from perfect, and full of limits. Karpathy sums their cons very well in his long list. If you don't know their limits you'll mismanage the expectations and not use them when they are a huge boost and waste time on things they don't cope well with. On top of that: all LLMs are different in their "personality", how they adhere to instruction, how creative they are, etc.
by germinalphrase | 2026-01-27 23:40:51+00:00
That law enforcement is permitted to hide their faces, drive unmarked vehicles, not display name tags, badges, or uniforms is concerning. Anyone can buy a gun, a vest, and a velcro “police” patch. There is very little that marks these agents as official law enforcement. I’m somewhat surprised that none of these agents have been shot entering a home under the mistaken perception by the homeowner that it’s a criminal home invasion.
by adi_kurian | 2026-01-27 23:41:23+00:00
Gambling doesn't directly manipulate biochemistry either. Neither does porn. Both are recognized as addictive. If you think reading Dostoevsky is in the same realm as doom scrolling algorithmically tailored Instagram reels because they're both "enjoyable stimuli," there's not much of a conversation to be had.

This is a thread about government-aligned owners censoring content on a platform the government forced a sale of. The authoritarians already have the thing.
by kurthr | 2026-01-27 23:41:25+00:00
But since that's all been defunded by DOGE then by your own argument, it doesn't count any more. Ignoring history is a good way to repeat it, just because it didn't happen this year.

Do you remember the last Vietnam War?
Oh no, not the one you're thinking of:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War

Several hundred thousand Chinese troops invaded Vietnam with 500 tanks in 1979.
by alphazard | 2026-01-27 23:41:50+00:00
I once took a philosophy class where an essay assignment had a minimum citation count.

Obviously ridiculous, since a philosophical argument should follow a chain of reasoning starting at stated axioms.
Citing a paper to defend your position is just an appeal to authority (a fallacy that they teach you about in the same class).

The citation requirement allowed the class to fulfill a curricular requirement that students needed to graduate, and therefore made the class more popular.
by SoKamil | 2026-01-27 23:42:12+00:00
It’s like not only the technology is to blame, but the culture and incentives of modern world.

The urge to cheat in order to get a job, promotion, approval. The urge to do stuff you are not even interested in, to look good in the resume. And to some extent I feel sorry for these people. At the end of the day you have to pay your bills.
by swyx | 2026-01-27 23:43:34+00:00
oh i was here to post it haha - thank you for doing that job for me so I'm not a total shill. I really enjoyed meeting them and was impressed by the sheer ambition of the AI for Science effort at OAI - in some sense I'm making a 10000x smaller scale bet than OAI on AI for Science "taking off" this year with the upcoming dedicated Latent Space Science pod.

generally think that there's a lot of fertile ground for smart generalist engineers to make a ton of progress here this year + it will probably be extremely financially + personally rewarding, so I broadly want to create a dedicated pod to highlight opportunities available for people who don't traditionally think of themselves as "in science" to cross over into the "ai for hard STEM" because it turns out that 1) they need you 2) you can fill in what you don't know 3) it will be impactful/challenging/rewarding 4) we've exhausted common knowledge frontiers and benchmarks anyway so the only* people left working on civilization-impacting/change-history-forever hard problems are basically at this frontier

*conscious exaggeration sorry
by hedora | 2026-01-27 23:44:00+00:00
A lot of people would disagree with your use of the word “police.”

They wear masks, don’t get warrants before entering houses, regularly arrest American citizens, and are operating far from anything a reasonable person would call an immigration or customs checkpoint.

Also, they’ve been ordered in public (by Trump) and private (by superiors) to violate the law, and have been promised “absolute immunity” for their crimes (by Trump).

One other thing: Trump and his administration have made it clear (in writing) that ICE’s mission in Minnesota is to terrorize the public until Governor Walz makes a bunch of policy changes that the courts have declined to force. So, there’s no reasonable argument to be made that they’re acting as law enforcement.
by RIMR | 2026-01-27 23:44:08+00:00
Just a reminder that we're dealing with propagandists here.

As many have already stated, Signal is overwhelmingly secure. More secure than any other alternative with similar viability here.

If the feds were actually concerned about that, publicly "investigating" Signal chats is a great way to drive activists to less secure alternatives, while also benefiting from scattering activist comms.
by jackfranklyn | 2026-01-27 23:44:30+00:00
The "doing it badly" principle changed everything for me. I spent weeks planning the perfect architecture for some automation tools I was building. Then I just... stopped planning and built the ugly version that solved my own pain point.

What surprised me was how much the ugly first version taught me that planning never could. You learn what users actually care about (often not what you expected), which edge cases matter in practice, and what "good enough" looks like in context.

The hardest part is giving yourself permission to ship something you know is flawed. But the feedback loop from real usage is worth more than weeks of hypothetical architecture debates.
by toyg | 2026-01-27 23:44:41+00:00
> but of course any problems stateside will be handled and voted on by Americans rather than Brits

Sure. That doesn't mean that an external viewpoint is any less valid. It's like saying "of course any problems in Teheran will be handled by Iranians" or "any problems in Venezuela will be handled by Venezuelans", when someone points out the issues in those regimes. You also assume you will get another meaningful vote, something that does not seem so assured when the supposed head of internal law enforcement starts asking for lists of voters.

The world is watching you, and it sees something really sinister happening. I would suggest to be humble and take stock - when innocent lives are lost to political fevers, you are in a very dark place, and whoever led you there should be suspected.

For the record, although I do live in England, I'm actually Italian; my great-grandfather lived under fascism, and I grew up in places deeply scarred by those times - as well as from the Cold War. That doesn't mean I'm innocent, just that I know a thing or two about what a regime looks like.
by MomsAVoxell | 2026-01-27 23:45:17+00:00
Manifold (which is doing the heavy lifting in this) uses triangles, which are an approximation.

This is never going to have the accuracy seen in higher-end CAD circles, which use b-Reps: highly accurate mathematic representation.

Manifold is good for visualization, but to use it as an engine for manufacturing .. its limits will be hit.
by scoofy | 2026-01-27 23:46:01+00:00
If your point is to ignore the history and political philosophy of civil disobedience because "times are different now," then just grab your gun and start your civil war already... because that's where you've concluded we're at.

I'm not even really sure why I'm getting so much pushback here. I've thought this administration should have been impeached and removed within a week of the inauguration in 2017. I just am not sure where all this "why won't you admit that things are so bad, and shouldn't be this way" is helpful, when Trump was democratically elected. When you have a tyranny from a majority, the parallels to MLK are very clear, and you can't expect that change with come without sacrifice.

Civil disobedience is only nice and easy when you're sect is already in power, which -- when we're talking about people who generally support liberal democracy -- it has been since probably the McCarthy Era.
by crazygringo | 2026-01-27 23:46:25+00:00
Seriously.

Browsers originally had text zoom -- only text zoom -- until page zoom was invented, I can't remember by which browser. And then page zoom quickly became the "main" zoom mechanism across all browsers because it was obviously so much better -- icons, layout, everything adjusted together. (And for those who remember, when there was only text zoom, it was a common practice/workaround to define everything in em rather than px, precisely to "fake" page zoom with text zoom.)

I'm baffled by the idea of trying to bring text zoom back. Just no, a million times. We tried it. It was bad.
by gnabgib | 2026-01-27 23:46:38+00:00
Recent discussion: Gladys West's vital contributions to GPS technology (78 points, 11 days ago, 7 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46651691

NPR (9 points, 4 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46736279
by throwawayqqq11 | 2026-01-27 23:47:01+00:00
Technology has two sides in the recent right shifts across countries. It increases the power gap to overcome in revolutions, which is why i think modern dictatorships are so stable, but it also provides realtime insight and records of the stupidity, detachment and insanity of elites and the gullible masses.

After nazi germany fell, many nazis were able to go into hiding, to flee or wait and eventually even regain positions of power. When the internet and personal computation doesnt get pruned, it will be harder for all those individuals to hide. Maybe thats a bad thing in all those dynamics. Maybe thats a psychological lock-in, which makes them hold on to their destructive way forward.
by poncho_romero | 2026-01-27 23:47:49+00:00
I agree for the most part. I said immigration is broken, but really the problems are almost exclusively to do with the TFW program and degree mills. One area the TFW program has hurt the country, is in the significant reduction in the number of jobs available to high school students. Anecdotally, I know of many high school students who have been unable to find any work for years, and a stop into any local fast food restaurant or superstore will back that up. These kids looking for part time jobs don't show up in unemployment numbers. They could help the labour shortage, but instead are silently being added to it, in favour of temporary foreign workers filling the positions.

We do need immigration long term for sure! Canada is and will always be an immigrant country. That said, I also don't think an appeal to the past (the fact that almost all of our ancestors came as penniless farmers) should enter into the conversation. To my view, this is a dispassionate conversation about politics. Concerns over hypocrisy are irrelevant.
by llbbdd | 2026-01-27 23:47:53+00:00
I've seen more than a few people on this forum assert that the old taxi system was/is comparable to Uber or somehow better. I even got some shit for referring to it as old, legacy, I forget the exact verbiage I used. But it is old, and it is worse. I get the price upfront, I can adjust the "class" of car I order if I'm going to the pharmacy alone or to a nice dinner. Calling ahead to preorder a taxi feels like calling to order a pizza over the phone at this point. If I called, would they even know how to handle it?
by thegrim000 | 2026-01-27 23:48:12+00:00
Well that's because, again, it was indeed algorithms doing the work, and the people were only used to verify / train the system, after the fact. People keep, intentionally, conflating the two things, doing everything in their power to say (or strongly imply), that the people involved were managing the orders in real time, which is a lie. You are the one pushing misinformation here.
by brilliang | 2026-01-27 23:48:14+00:00
Whenever I see things like this, my first thought is that somebody is going to write something to mess up nearby atomic clocks, just because they can, then I think- why, why did you do this?

Then someone will respond: you’re just catatrophising- anyone could’ve done this years before now, and I’ll say no, because it wasn’t up on frontpage HN there with code so that anyone would think of it. Then they’ll say, well why did you tell everyone that idea then! It’s your fault! Then I’ll say that someone would’ve done it if it weren’t me. Then I’ll go have a beer.
by BizarroLand | 2026-01-27 23:49:01+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mind_Forever_Voyaging

In 2031, the United States of North America (USNA) faces severe economic decline, widespread youth suicide through addictive neural-stimulation devices known as Joybooths, and the threat of a new nuclear arms race involving miniature weapons, which risks transforming the country into a police state. Dr. Abraham Perelman has designed PRISM, the world's first sentient computer,[2] which has spent eleven real-world years (equivalent to twenty years subjectively) living in a highly realistic simulation as an ordinary human named Perry Simm, unaware of its artificial nature.
by yencabulator | 2026-01-27 23:49:11+00:00
> On one hand I understand the need for it (offsite colo servers is the best example).

Great example of proving something to your own organization. Mullvad is probably the most trusted VPN provider and they do this! But this is not a power that should be exposed to regular applications, or we end up with a dystopian future of you are not allowed to use your own computer.
by moomoo11 | 2026-01-27 23:49:46+00:00
Ugh. Speaking of management..

Fire MBAs and other “management” types. If they’re not technical and you’re building something technical, they need to go. Anyone who says otherwise gets fired too.

Keep the engineers who consistently get Exceeds Expectations. Fire everyone else. No Pip just go please.

Keep a few EE product managers. Fire the rest.

Hire a few QAs who can work with AI and work with product to ensure the stuff actually works. You don’t need that many people anymore and a couple of quality people can’t hurt. I don’t trust engineers enough, sorry. You need discerning eyes.

Fire everyone else. Give the best people AI and they will be able to put out more good work. If someone doesn’t get this, fire them too because they’re clearly not EE level.

Scale this to the whole org.
by cjbenedikt | 2026-01-27 23:50:05+00:00
Nicely written but it doesn't shine a light on why this is a very good example about why US health care costs are out of control. I too had a colonoscopy but I refused to be anaesthetised. It is a considerable part of the cost and absolutely unnecessary. Is coloniscopy pleasent? No. Is it painful? No. But you should have seen the bruhaha my desision caused. Three nurses and two doctors tried very hard to convince me to be anaesthetised. I had one before without it so I knew what to expect. It erases ~ $3k from my bill. Or the hospital's revenue depending on your point of view. No doctor even suggests or offers it that way. In the EU it is standard procedure.
by storystarling | 2026-01-27 23:50:12+00:00
I have found modular monoliths are basically a requirement if you are bootstrapping and want to keep margins healthy. The coordination overhead of microservices kills velocity. That said, I would be careful about rolling your own infrastructure tooling. I built a bespoke CLI for my current project and honestly I regret not just using standard boring tools. The maintenance cost of custom plumbing is rarely worth it compared to just shipping features.