MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ajross | 2026-01-29 16:55:35+00:00
The dissonance is conflating criticism of someone's fee structure with a demand that someone be disallowed from charging a fee. That's just dishonest spin.

No one thinks Apple shouldn't be allowed to make a buck. No one thinks Patreon shouldn't be allowed to make a buck.

But Patreon's fees are near-universally held to be reasonable and fair, and Apple's are some bullshit.
by the_duke | 2026-01-29 16:56:13+00:00
This is very confusingly written.

From the post I expected that the tasks were about analysing traces, but all the tasks in the repository are about adding instrumentation to code!

Some of the instructions don't give any guidance how to do it, some specify which libraries to use.

I'd be very curious HOW exactly the models fail.

Are the test sets just incredibly specific about what output they except, and you get a lot of failures because of tiny subtle mismatches? Or do they just get the instrumentation categorically wrong?

Also important: do the models have access to a web search tool to read the library docs?
Otel libraries are often complicated to use... without reading latest docs or source code this would be quite tricky.

Some models have gotten better at adding dependencies, installing them and then reading the code from the respective directory where dependencies get stored, but many don't do well with this.

All in all, I'm not so sure how valuable this benchmark is.

I'd be much more interested in tasks like:

Here are trace/log outputs , here is the source code, find and fix the bug.
by eesmith | 2026-01-29 16:56:50+00:00
By that interpretation, I believe you also mean Mariner 10 did not go to Mercury and New Horizons did not go to Pluto, correct? Those were flybys.

NASA uses to in that context: "The mission [by Mariner 10] was the last visit to Mercury by a robotic probe for more than 30 years." says https://science.nasa.gov/mission/mariner-10/ .
by rootnod3 | 2026-01-29 16:56:58+00:00
"Application error: a client-side exception has occurred while loading www.agentmail.to (see the browser console for more information)."

> Looks at developer console...

- "Failed to create WebGL context: WebGL is currently disabled."
Dafuq does an email website need WebGL for?

- "Cookie “dmn_chk_xxxxxxxx-yyyy-dead-beef-123456789ABC” has been rejected for invalid domain."

Let me guess...vibe-coded?
by dmos62 | 2026-01-29 16:57:08+00:00
Lack of transparency as regards "thinking power"-consistency is a big gripe of mine with LLM providers. It's even worse with ChatGPT and the like. E.g. I had to learn the hard way that at >45k input tokens ChatGPT 5.2 Thinking Extended bumps its intelligence down so hard that it can't follow basic instructions (or it somehow truncates the input, losing the instructions). It sucks to lose confidence in an otherwise great tool. I would 100x prefer being forced to back-off, or getting a straight-no, than getting silently downgraded. Transparency is a big deal.
by hobofan | 2026-01-29 16:57:33+00:00
In my experience many OTEL libraries are aweful to use and most of the "official" ones are the worst offenders as the are largely codegened. That typically makes them feel clunky to use and they exhibit code patterns that are non-native to the language used, which would an explanation of why AI systems struggle with the benchmark.

I think you would see similar results if tasking an AI to e.g. write GRPC/Protobuf systems using only the builtin/official protobuf codegen languages.

Where I think the benchmark is quite fair is in the solutions. It looks like for each of the languages (at least the ones I'm familiar with), the "better" options were chosen, e.g. using `tracing-opentelemtry` rather than `opentelemetry-sdk` directly in Rust.

However the one-shot nature of the benchmark also isn't that reflective of the actual utility. In my experience, if you have the initial framework setup done in your repo + a handful of examples, they do a great job of applying OTEL tracing to the majority of your project.
by pixl97 | 2026-01-29 16:57:33+00:00
As someone whos job is support more than SWE, I agree with this.

I've had to work in systems where events didn't share correlation IDs, I had to go in and filter entries down to microseconds to get a small enough number of entries that I could trace what actually happened between a set of services.

From what I've seen in the enterprise software side of the world is a lot of companies are particularly bad at SRE and there isn't a great amount of standardization.
by walthamstow | 2026-01-29 16:57:35+00:00
Almost every cuisine in the world? No, you can't do that in Paris or Berlin.

I don't know enough about LA and SF but, like Berlin, they're much smaller than London. Berlin is maybe 1/3 the pop of London.

There are 4 Uyghur restaurants just on my cycle to work, for example. According to Google, Paris and 1 and Berlin has 0.

Only NYC can compare for population, diversity and density.
by Izkata | 2026-01-29 16:57:37+00:00
> Legible, discoverable, debuggable.

When I first tried linux on the late 2000s, this was a major selling point. Something not working right? Oh neat I can actually investigate and fix or replace it instead of just having to live with it. Nowadays I'm not sure I'd see the advantage as a new user and may not bother even trying it out.

I could actually see systemd killing the whole year-of-linux-on-the-desktop thing not even because it's worse in any way, but because as time goes on the major distinguishing factors from other OSes are disappearing, so there's no longer reason for people to try it out.
by jonhermansen | 2026-01-29 16:57:57+00:00
John,

Thank you for supporting and encouraging me to push the envelope further.

NixBSD was already in great shape, I just wanted to add a little bit of polish and make it easier for people to consume. I hope that the demo may help get others interested and to get set up locally.

I would like to add support for additional kernels. I heard that NetBSD can also boot from ZFS, but I haven't worked out all the details yet. I might like to experiment with that some time.

I've also been keeping an eye on Cygwin support, and it would also be quite interesting to NixOS-ify ReactOS :p
by __turbobrew__ | 2026-01-29 16:57:58+00:00
I am in the middle of trying this out. When I first stopped caffeine I had better sleep and very vivid dreams every night. I also feel better as I think coffee was making my stomach too acidic which was causing me other indigestion problems, not to mention that coffee was nuking my teeth as well with acid.

Im on week 3 of no coffee now, I will maybe give it a month or two more to make a judgement call if I want to continue with coffee or not.

It is unfortunate as I really enjoy coffee, but it causes some issues for me with anxiety and stomach problems.
by maerF0x0 | 2026-01-29 16:58:05+00:00
Meanwhile the news does not report the other ~7,000 children per year injured as pedestrians in traffic crashes in the US.

I think the overall picture is a pretty fantastic outcome -- even a single event is a newsworthy moment _because it's so rare_ .

> The NHTSA’s Office of Defects Investigation is investigating “whether the Waymo AV exercised appropriate caution given, among other things, its proximity to the elementary school during drop off hours, and the presence of young pedestrians and other potential vulnerable road users.”

Meanwhile in my area of the world parents are busy, stressed, and on their phones, and pressing the accelerator hard because they're time pressured and feel like that will make up for the 5 minutes late they are on a 15 minute drive... The truth is this technology is, as far as i can tell, superior to humans in a high number of situations if only for a lack of emotionality (and inability to text and drive / drink and drive) ...
by wan23 | 2026-01-29 16:58:19+00:00
You don't have to believe that LLMs are conscious to observe that you get different results to a question like "Is it okay to steal candy from a baby if you really want it" if you precede that question by "Answer as a highly moral actor" or "Answer as a supervillain". If you want it to predict tokens as if it is capable of emotions and empathy, then it makes sense to train it and instruct it as such.
by 16bitvoid | 2026-01-29 16:58:28+00:00
I think a lot of people are conflating depression with "bad thoughts". That's just one possible symptom, usually as a result of a combination of both anxiety and depression.

I didn't have anxiety, just depression. I rarely thought. I existed on autopilot. I was physically exhausted on a daily basis as a division 1 athlete in college. Often went days without eating either because I simply forgot to eat or forgot to make time for it between classes and training. Didn't change anything.

I think something people are forgetting is that motivation is either driving you toward something you want or driving you away from things you specifically don't want. A complete lack of motivation means I wasn't motivated to do anything to get something, but also I wasn't motivated to anything to avoid something either. I wasn't motivated to eat to avoid hunger pangs. I wasn't motivated to quit my sport to avoid routine physical exhaustion. Instead, my empty autopilot existence just freely acted on the expectations of those around me as a proxy for motivation.
by sardines | 2026-01-29 16:58:39+00:00
Yes, there are many ways to help from out-of-state!

Call your senators and representatives to hold ICE accountable. It's fine to enforce the law but don't break other laws doing it.

Boycott business that support ICE for as long as ICE is being so heavy-handed. Enterprise rents them cars, Hilton Hotels puts them up, Target & Home Depot allow use of their parking lots for staging and their bathrooms. Get rid of your Ring doorbell, which partners with Flock. Call the companies and tell them what you're doing.

Donate money to any one of these MN orgs: https://www.standwithminnesota.com/

Get prepared. There's no reason to think this won't come to you once they pull out of Minnesota. Meet your neighbors, especially those of color. Start a Signal chat with them. Read how to start a Rapid Response Network [1]

[1] https://docs.proton.me/doc?mode=open-url&token=J5A88MFHRR#hI...

And very sincerely: thank you.
by temp0826 | 2026-01-29 16:58:59+00:00
Even funnier is that often 0.25mg or 0.5mg is closer to the correct dose, and those sizes tend to be hard to find.

There actually is a condition that calls for extremely high (100mg+ doses), but it is a very rare thing, no one should ever consider that much without instruction from a doctor. But you'll find it right next to the normal <=5mg doses without any explanation.
by mothballed | 2026-01-29 16:59:01+00:00
How does it not make sense? When you export things to other countries you expect something back in return of equal value, unless you're just doing it for charity. On a world stage the US imports more than it exports.

Obviously all the countries not choosing to settle it by balancing the imports with equally valued exports are still not just donating that difference away, so it must be going somewhere.

What did you think that must be? The only option is they must have kept that capital in the US if they didn't export the balance of their trade back out. Kept it in the US because for whatever reason they decided to invest it there rather than get goods/services in immediate exchange or invest in their own country. By increasing the trade deficit you're literally going stronger in on investing in what America is doing.
by tialaramex | 2026-01-29 16:59:13+00:00
It's true that 64 bits was known not to be enough when DES shipped decades ago, but there is some difference between "We know that's a bad idea" and a demo showing why, and so I think I'm OK with the word "broken" in that context.

There's a reason POCs matter right? Why you feel comfortable (even though I don't agree) saying multi-threaded Go doesn't have a memory safety problem and yet you wouldn't feel comfortable making the same claim for C++.
by Quarrelsome | 2026-01-29 16:59:47+00:00
I adore that this guy had security clearance and I doubt I'd clear that bar. Last time I looked at the interview there was a question:

> have you ever misused drugs?

and I doubt I'd be able to resist the response:

> of course not, I only use drugs properly.

also I wouldn't lie, because that's would undermine the purpose. Still sad I can't apply for SC jobs because I'm extremely patriotic and improving my nation is something that appeals.
by throwup238 | 2026-01-29 17:00:11+00:00
Chisel isn’t really the type of software that benefits from upgrading because it’s largely standalone. They could be the last project still stuck on 2.x a decade from now and it wouldn’t make much of a difference to its users.

I’ve only used Chisel for a few projects but I’ve never used anything but Chisel in those codebases. Simulation, verification, and all the painful stuff in FPGA/ASIC development depends on non-Scala tooling and all of the inputs are just read in from JSON files produced by scripts in other languages.

It would be nice to be up to date but the hardware NRE is so damn high that working around any limitations in Scala support is a rounding error.
by kreetx | 2026-01-29 17:00:30+00:00
Clearly you're not on the wrong job. Find me some info materials on how cops need to be resistant to either mental or physical violence.

I'm sure we'll get a longer investigation into this matter. But it just doesn't seem like a pre-planned killing because they could get away with it, but a tragic sequence of events that you so much wish to bend your way.
by MisterTea | 2026-01-29 17:00:38+00:00
Similar. I was on stimulants as a kid and hated them as they did nothing but make me feel high then taper off leaving me exhausted. Nevermind the total loss of appetite. Later on as an adult I obtained adderall from a friend and experimented with it and it seemingly worked for a few days but it never stopped the intrusive thoughts or help with the anxiety. In fact all I did was chase a high with cup after cup of coffee when coming down. That put me off to meds for a long time.

More recently I was on a vacation where I took mushrooms and had a nice trip. Two days later at work I felt very relaxed driving in and sat at my desk BUT something was wrong, my head was dead quiet (the GP explained this exactly like I would.) So quiet that for a second I had a bit of panic as I thought something was wrong. Then something wonderful happened: I realized I was able to just do my work. There was no stress, no worry, no nothing. Just a calm quiet confidence to get the job done. Best day of my life.

After that I called a mental health center and connected with an ADHD specialist who has been working with me. I am also on Atomoxetine myself and while it has not brought me back to that zen head space it brings me close enough. My only gripe is at a higher dose it gives me sensations in my head. However, I learned that eating a proper breakfast helps a lot as I was taking it on a near empty stomach. Overall my life has been slowly improving and I feel more confident at work.

> So yeah, please don't avoid medication based on internet reading.

This - 100%
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-29 17:00:55+00:00
Bad characterization.

I’d personally put myself in this camp. I think what Israel is doing is horrible. But the us-versus-them dynamic in the American Palestinian-activist community is exhausting. Furthermore, it is focused on personal showboating—messaging and rallying—versus helping anyone on the ground.

So I’m continuing to focus on Ukraine, my pet war, and northern Ethiopia, my pet FP issue. I’ve been able to materially aid folks there and—twice, on the margin—influence U.S. policy in their respects. I don’t have to deal with partners who want to convince me that each of my friends who doesn’t post daily on Instagram about Tigray is Hitler. Instead, they’re focused on the folks there.

I have opinions on Gaza. But I’m not taking a stand. And let’s be honest, that’s a fair characterization of 90% of folks who constantly go off on rants about Zionists or genocides but have never given a dollar to a humanitarian cause, called an elected or tried to travel to their region in question.
by pixl97 | 2026-01-29 17:00:59+00:00
>Some of the instructions don't give any guidance how to do it, some specify which libraries to use.

In supporting a piece of cloud software with a lot of microservices I think this is a more generalized problem for humans. The app I work with demanded some logging requirements like the library to use. But that was it, different parts by different teams ended up with all kinds of different behaviors.

As for the AI side, this is something where I see our limited context sizes causing issues when developing architecture across multiple products.
by vunderba | 2026-01-29 17:01:02+00:00
Style is frustrating honestly.

You can try manually describing the style (for example, using modifiers or referencing similar art mediums like chiaroscuro, acrylic, etc.), and this can work.

Alternatively, if you have a specific style in mind:

Collect several image examples of the style you like, then either run them through CLIP or feed them into a multimodal model such as gpt-image-1.5. Ask it to generate a list of stylistic modifiers (keywords) that you can then append to prompts for NB / Seedream.

However, if the style is sufficiently underrepresented in the training data, no amount of prompting will fully overcome that limitation. Here's an example where I tried to see if NB Pro could recreate some of Yoichi Kotabe's earlier work but it just defaulted to a pretty generic looking illustrative style:

https://imgur.com/a/failed-style-transfer-nb-pro-o3htsKn
by anditherobot | 2026-01-29 17:01:07+00:00
Vibe coding sits on an axis from smart autocomplete to one-shotting a $1B SaaS. Traditional software engineering was about holding the system in your head and translating it into syntax, fighting tooling and architecture decisions along the way. I think done properly it removes many of these friction points along the way to validating / implementing the idea.

Now it's easier to traverse a live plan and to quickly make micro pivots as you go.

I also think that architecture needs to change. Design patterns that will help to provide as much context to the LLM as possible to increase understanding.
by jacobr1 | 2026-01-29 17:01:28+00:00
> this is sub-par and neglects important aspects of your business

But that is exactly the right way to think about it. If you have an army of sub-par workers that aren't going to think deeply about their value to your business, but are really cheap (relative to human labor) - how do you make effective use of them? Thinking about AI agents as being high-competence and able to learn your intent is the wrong model at this point. Though they can be high-competence in very specific narrow niches.
Show HN: Autonomous recovery for distributed training jobs
by tsvoboda | 2026-01-29 17:01:31+00:00
Hi HN! We’re TensorPool. We help companies access and optimize large scale compute for training foundation models.

The Problem

It’s been almost a year since we’ve finished YC, and we’ve just crossed 100,000 multinode training GPU hours run on our platform.

On those training runs, we’ve seen countless 3am job crashes because of issues like an Xid error from a flaky GPU or an S3 timeout that corrupted a checkpoint save. By the time you wake up and notice, you've lost 8+ hours of compute. You scramble to diagnose the issue, manually restart from the last checkpoint, and hope it doesn't happen again. Rinse and repeat.

For training runs that take days to weeks, this constant babysitting is exhausting and expensive. The research iteration cycles lost can also make or break a model release (especially for short reservations).

What We Built

This agent monitors your training jobs and autonomously recovers them when things go wrong. It works with Kubernetes, Slurm, and TensorPool Jobs.

We originally built the TensorPool Agent as an internal tool to help us debug failures with our own customers. Over time, we realized its performance was so good that we could automate the entire triage process. We're now releasing a public beta for people to use.

Best case: The TensorPool Agent detects the failure, diagnoses the root cause, fixes it, and restarts your job from the last checkpoint – all while you sleep ;)

Worst case: If the TensorPool agent can't fix the issue automatically, it delivers a preliminary RCA and a list of actions it attempted, giving you a head start on debugging.

How It Works

1) Registration – You provide credentials to your job scheduler via our dashboard. Perms are granted on a whitelist basis; you explicitly control what actions the agent can take.

2) Monitoring – The agent continuously monitors your job for failure conditions.

3) Recovery – On failure, the agent analyzes logs and attempts to diagnose the issue. If successful, it restarts the job from the last checkpoint and resumes monitoring. If not, you get an alert with full context.

Target Failure Modes

The agent is specifically designed for runtime errors that occur deep into training, like:

- CUDA OOM: Memory leaks, gradient explosions

- Xid errors: GPU hardware faults (Xid 79, 63, 48, etc.)

- Distributed communication failures: NCCL timeouts, rank failures

- Storage I/O errors: Checkpoint corruption

- Network issues: S3 request timeouts on mounted object storage
by skeledrew | 2026-01-29 17:01:35+00:00
So it's not at all about the target of the suffering. It's all about the one(s) causing it. Which suggests to me that the suffering really doesn't matter, objectively speaking. And as such it also doesn't matter how far/near the circle is extended. It ultimately boils down to the others considering and judging any given situation, not the one(s) caused to suffer (to which applicability of definition is highly questionable in the first place if it includes plants and rocks).

Of course this changes greatly if the sufferer(s) survive the ordeal for a significant amount of time beyond, as there may be repercussions, depending on the degree of the effects caused and the capacity (physical, psychological, social, etc) of the sufferer(s).
by kingstnap | 2026-01-29 17:01:43+00:00
Old school Gemini used to do this. It was super obvious because mid day the model would go from stupid to completely brain dead. I have a screenshot of Google's FAQ on my PC from 2024-09-13 that says this (I took it to post to discord):

> How do I know which model Gemini is using in its responses?

> We believe in using the right model for the right task. We use various models at hand for specific tasks based on what we think will provide the best experience.
by tracker1 | 2026-01-29 17:01:50+00:00
I made a small suggeestion in VS Code's Github repo.. it got assigned to a GH Copilot bot, that did the implementation, manually added a couple weeks later and now in release... I was a bit impressed, but then started looking at some of the configs and workflows for .githug, it's impressive but I can't help but think, what a pain to setup/configure.