MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Lerc | 2026-01-01 04:31:27+00:00
That seems like an odd framing.

For my part I am prepared to accept that XAI might attempt to flout regulations. If I knew more about their operating practices I might even expect it. Even in that case I would not expect it to be the case that you could assume that they had done in any individual case.

While this isn't criminal law, the principle that underlies innocent until proven guilty still applies. I don't think it's acceptable do condemn people because you are assuming that they are doing the kind of thing you expect them to do. I think it is still incumbent upon accusers to make their case and for that accusation to be robustly challenged. Not just by people who stand something to gain by one outcome over another, but by people who want to find out the truth.

I tend to challenge ideas that support my viewpoint more than oppose, I find it incredibly irritating to encounter a flawed argument concluding something I agree with. Somewhat annoyingly it seems to cause people to assume I believe the opposite to what I actually believe, because there seems to be a presumption that you should accept all arguments in favour of your viewpoint no matter how bad they are. Apparently I'm not the right sort of team player.

>by “agenda pushing” do you mean those who have an agenda to have breathable air? because that seems like an entirely reasonable agenda to me.

I don't see how you could in good faith reach that conclusion from reading the comment above. It seems to me to be talking about the agenda of people expressing concern for others. That's the "Think of the children" kind of argument. Invoking disadvantaged groups in this manner very rarely expresses the agenda of the groups in question, it is usually made by people claiming that there own agenda is in the interests of the group indicated, frequently without input from that group. I don't know it that is an accurate claim to make in this instance or not, but it is certainly not characterising having the ability to breath as an agenda.
by tmule | 2026-01-01 04:32:01+00:00
It is highly unusual for someone to stay put after their net worth increases tenfold. Normally, you would expect an individual to seek out more elite social circles and embrace a significantly more opulent lifestyle. Not having that isn’t a sign of laziness (one can be certain that someone like Warren Buffett lives exactly as he chooses) but rather a reflection of the rare ability to decide that what he has is already enough.
by coppsilgold | 2026-01-01 04:32:58+00:00
Laser weapons appear to be advancing rapidly. Once we get to the single digit MW power range, MAD will deteriorate as the ICBM becomes a non-viable nuclear delivery mechanism.

What effect would that have? Will nukes start getting used in wars? Will we see deployment of multi ton NEFP[1] warheads that can strike targets with nuclear-propelled kinetics?

[1] <https://toughsf.blogspot.com/2017/05/nuclear-efp-and-heat.ht...>
by thunky | 2026-01-01 04:33:06+00:00
> This is how easy it is to write a non-vague "tool X helped me" and I'm not even an English native speaker.

Your example is very vague.

See if you can spot the problem in my review of Excel in your style:

"It's great and I like how it's formula paradigm gave me a unified experience. It's table features boosted my science workflows last year".
by phil21 | 2026-01-01 04:35:17+00:00
Mostly because I don't trust myself to push cash into the market when there is blood on the streets. Or really ever, for that matter. Both due to thinking "everything is still overvalued" as well as decision paralysis even when/if I do feel the time is generally right.

I'm generally overly conservative, so this is somewhat of a middle ground. Along the lines of the best diet is the one you can consistently stick with, not necessarily the most theoretically optimal one. Same goes with investing for me.

I intellectually understand it's likely a worse bet than just dumping 100% into VTI or whatnot, but investing isn't simply a mathematical game - at least in my case.

> A tidal wave has been rolling through this country sweeping away everyone who follows the safe socially sanctioned wisdom about investing.

Agreed. I'd be retired now if I would have been able to shake the conventional wisdom in this area and just YOLO'ed it.
by fao_ | 2026-01-01 04:35:33+00:00
> I would also recommend Bitwarden for those who want a better UI experience.

The newest release of bitwarden absolutely sucks. The images that they're using look AI-generated (specifically, there's some weird stuff around line thickness, colour and shading that, as the spawn of two artists, I do not believe a competent artist/designer would make), but also the images are just pixellated and grainy on my 1080p screen. The design has gone from "clean and usable" to "utterly dogshit", and the response time has gone down the pan.

For domain registration I recommend netim, as they neatly reduced the price that I pay from £30 down to £5, which made a huge difference personally.
by creato | 2026-01-01 04:35:40+00:00
Maybe he just likes building things that others find useful.

When I was younger I rented furniture from a company called CORT. I happened to notice on the contract or receipt or something, that it was a Berkshire company (I didn't know that before then).

If I were Warren Buffet, I would have been happy to know that someone was a satisfied customer of one of his companies. I got some decent furniture for a few months at a reasonable price.

Just like I'm happy when someone is a satisfied user of my software.
by bigyabai | 2026-01-01 04:36:08+00:00
> What on earth would cause someone to say Windows 2000 was a good release?

An unsubstantiated insistence that a single human being is the bus factor for a thousand-engineer org?

I'm just as confused as you, everyone I've ever met who liked Windows 2000 went on to love XP SP3, usually with the W2K skin on it.
by citizenpaul | 2026-01-01 04:36:56+00:00
HN seems allergic to discussing the reality of power dynamics IME.

Being in charge of Berkshire hathaway is a very powerful and respected, revered, envied, coveted, admired. Retired is just retired. As folksy as he presented I suspect Buffet very much enjoyed weilding that power which he could not likely ever get elsewhere.
by smeeagain2 | 2026-01-01 04:37:14+00:00
So are they going to magically convert all the COBOL code over also, with their magic conversion system thingy?

I'm sure this conversation is headed in an academically fascinating direction, but I struggle to see what relevance any of it has to me. I don't use any of Microsoft's worthless software and never will. I'm self employed and use exactly the technology that I choose to use and nothing more. Why on earth would I be concerned about legacy programming jobs going away? Is that something that you concern yourself with?

I'm guessing you're a common wage slave? Tell me more about what it's like having your entire life planned and controlled by other people, with no hope of any kind of real freedom. Sounds like a miserable way to live. Sounds like slavery.
by Publius_Enigma | 2026-01-01 04:37:15+00:00
I’ve used both wired and wireless headphones and earbuds for about the past ten years. I really enjoy many aspects of wireless earbuds, one of which principally is that I don’t need to carry a player on my person, and cords can easily get in the way of mundane tasks.

However, I will no longer invest in high-quality (and expensive) wireless headphones and earbuds, and have been investing more heavily in wired sets.

One of the key reasons is they many wireless products do not have easily replaceable batteries, let alone other spares, on what is ostensibly a consumable component. I had a pair of expensive Bowers and Wilkins wireless headphones where the battery had degraded to uselessness after five years, only to be advised they were irreparable. The cost of ownership equated to $200 a year, which is definitely in luxury territory.

Other reasons drive me back to wired headphones too. They are more readily interoperable. I can use them with musical instruments, computers, analogue stereo systems. I am not constrained to using them with the amplifier embedded with them. There is no latency, which is a huge problem with Bluetooth headphones for music. They don’t succumb to wireless interference. And I don’t need to navigate the minefield of codec compatibility (SBC/LC3/AptX/AptX HD/AAC/LDAC). I also don’t need to charge them constantly.

I appreciated the article’s author taking the time to document their observations of how wireless listening, and the convenience it supposedly brings, on changing the way we consume music - and other societal impacts - on top of the technical implications too.
by garbawarb | 2026-01-01 04:37:17+00:00
You already don't get this with fashion photography. "The model is 6'1 and wearing a size M" is meaningless when you don't know their weight, dimensions, or whether they've clipped the back to make the garment appear trimmer for the photos. Trying an item on in person is the only way to know whether it's good, and that's the potential AI disruption I'm most interested in.
by websiteapi | 2026-01-01 04:38:03+00:00
what's the difference between porn and any arbitrary category here? even with porn isn't it just arbitrary that porn has been defined as "adult?" presumably Texas could just legislate that all apps are "adult" content, and then this would apply, no?

given the same judge per the article did this block which ultimately was overturned by the Supreme Court, I doubt this will go differently
by slwvx | 2026-01-01 04:38:41+00:00
Yuval Noah Harari said something along the lines of "communism is a religion, but so is capitalism, and so is Google." Of course Harari is being a bit of a troll, but so is whomever wrote "Marxism is a cult of power" video. I find Harari's framework more useful than labeling any specific ideology as a "cult".
by gizmo686 | 2026-01-01 04:39:34+00:00
I think you are thinking of the Abel–Ruffini impossibility theorum, which states that there is no general solution to polynomials of degree 5 or greater using only standard operations and radicals.

Galois went a step further and proved that there existed polynomials whose specific roots could not be so expressed. His proof also provided a relatively straightforward way to determine if a given polynomial qualified.
by nsoonhui | 2026-01-01 04:41:04+00:00
This is an astonishing revisionist take on the reality on the ground.

Israel unilaterally disengaged from GAZA in 2005 and pulling out generations of Jewish settlement in the process. By 2006 GAZA has zero Jews, and 2007 Gazans elected HAMAS who fired rockets at Israel because they want to free Palestine from the river to the sea, AKA eliminate Israel. October 7 attack is a culmination of that, and between then and now, HAMAS didn't forget to build their military base in the mix of civilians and using civilian targets as shield. So that they can blame Israel for every single Palestinians death, including the death cause by their own firing.

The situation in west Bank is qualitatively the same.

No, protecting your people from terrorist is not apartheid, and Israel has no interest to build iron beam and/or build wall--which the west misinterprete as apartheid-- if the neighbors had no intention to eliminate them.
by SirMaster | 2026-01-01 04:41:07+00:00
But if there is a policy in place to prevent some sort of modification, then performing an exploit or workaround to make the modification anyways is arguably understood and respected by most people.

That seems to be the difference here, we should really be building AI systems that can be taught or that learn to respect things like that.

If people are claiming that AI is so smart or smarter than the average person then it shouldn't be hard for it to handle this.

Otherwise it seems people are being to generous in talking about how smart and capable AI systems truly are.
by real-hacker | 2026-01-01 04:41:29+00:00
In the final episode of 2025, Gilfoyle looks back at the year AI grew up — reasoning models, agents that actually work (most of the time), the rise of vibe coding, benchmark drama, sovereign compute races, and why the real bottleneck now is electricity, not GPUs. Humor, sarcasm, and a healthy dose of “what have we created?” energy.
by coffeebeqn | 2026-01-01 04:41:44+00:00
I mean law and accounting usually have a “right” answer that you can verify against. I can see a test data set being built for most professions. I’m sure open source helps with programming data but I doubt that’s even the majority of their training. If you have a company like Google you could collect data on decades of software work in all its dimensions from your workforce
by retsibsi | 2026-01-01 04:42:01+00:00
> It has nothing to do with "raytracers are well-represented in the training set" though. I find it so strange when people get overly specific in an attempt to sound savvy. You should be able to easily think of like five other ways it could work.

Can you elaborate? Your first sentence seems to be saying that it's basically irrelevant whether they have been trained on text and code related to raytracing, and I have no idea why that would be true.
by jamilton | 2026-01-01 04:43:03+00:00
https://openai.com/index/strengthening-chatgpt-responses-in-...

"..our initial analysis estimates that around 0.15% of users active in a given week have conversations that include explicit indicators of potential suicidal planning or intent and 0.05% of messages contain explicit or implicit indicators of suicidal ideation or intent."

Roughly 700 million weekly active users, it's more like 1 million people discussing suicide with ChatGPT every week.

For reference, 12.8 million Americans are reported as thinking about suicide and 1.5 million are reported as attempting suicide in a year.
by dheera | 2026-01-01 04:43:19+00:00
Meh. If you have the resources, buy whatever makes you happy.

If a bigger house makes you happy because you have space for your hobbies and you don't need to fight with your family members for space, buy a bigger house.

The whole "money doesn't bring happiness" thing is bullshit unless you are a Buddha.

A mansion in Malibu isn't going to make me happy, because I wouldn't know what the hell to do in Malibu. An upgrade from a 2-bedroom to a 4-bedroom home with a garage so I don't have to smell laser cutter fumes anymore and hack a ventilation system out a bedroom window? That very well might.
by austin-cheney | 2026-01-01 04:44:03+00:00
Most people in the full stack space focus on tech stack bullshit. If you want to stand out focus on something of greater value like transmission engineering, accessibility, service architecture, extreme performance, security.

Be prepared for disappointment though. Many places are not looking for experts or people that stand out. Most places are looking for that common piece that is easily hired and easily fired.
by viraptor | 2026-01-01 04:44:07+00:00
Based on quite a few comments recently, it also looks like many have tried LLMs in the past, but haven't seriously revisited either the modern or more expensive models. And I get it. Not everyone wants to keep up to date every month, or burn cash on experiments. But at the same time, people seem to have opinions formed in 2024. (Especially if they talk about just hallucinations and broken code - tell the agent to search for docs and fix stuff) I'd really like to give them Opus 4.5 as an agent to refresh their views. There's lots of complain about, but the world has moved on significantly.
by astrange | 2026-01-01 04:44:31+00:00
I didn't say "text and code related to raytracing" though. I (and the parent post) said "raytracers".

It's more important whether it knows basic concepts about computer graphics, linear algebra, etc. Reading the code of a raytracer is not that helpful because it's hard to extract general concepts from low level code like that.

Besides that, it has web search and research tools.

I just fed Claude Opus 4.5 the source of a raytracer I wrote actually, and it had reasonably good comments on it, but it knew less than I know and its updated version had a few more bugs and was missing non-obvious optimizations I'd added. (In particular it loves writing FP math as all doubles for no reason.)
by vajrabum | 2026-01-01 04:45:43+00:00
Supposedly this is a roman a clef about Jesse Livermore's career. There's a lot of stuff in this book that makes sense of markets in ways that pretty much no other investing book I've ever read does. Some what I remember are bucket shops, tape sense, marketing campaigns for new stocks, risk of ruin (Livermore went bust over and over), and what amounts to compulsive gambling.
by josephg | 2026-01-01 04:46:51+00:00
> Correct. But how are you testing that you successfully crash

In a language like rust, failed assertions panic. And panics generally aren't "caught".

> instead of corrupting on-disk data stores

If your code interacts with the filesystem or the network, you never know when a network cable will be cut or power will go out anyway. You're always going to need testing for inconvenient crashes.

IMO, the best way to do this is by stubbing out the filesystem and then using randomised testing to verify that no matter what the program does, it can still successfully open any written (or partially written) data. Its not easy to write tests like that, but if you actually want a reliable system they're worth their weight in gold.
by sally_glance | 2026-01-01 04:47:33+00:00
Yeah I feel that, if it happens your only way out is to write down a more extensive implementation plan first. For me that is the point where I start regretting to have tried implementing something using AI,.. But admittedly most of the time redacting the implementation plan and running the agent again is still faster than I could have done on my own (I try to make implementation tasks explicit in the form of a markdown file, worked pretty well so far).
by mixmastamyk | 2026-01-01 04:47:49+00:00
Control is the other end of freedom. Do they hate freedom? ;-)

People often say they have nothing to hide, but they don’t get to decide, the powers that be will make that determination. Law enforcement, civil judgements, corporate penalties, etc.

Everyone breaks some rules.
For example, Ford knows you’re speeding while GM sells that info to your insurance company.
by woodruffw | 2026-01-01 04:47:57+00:00
They don’t both have a right to kill each other! Both “defense” and “resistance” (w/r/t the goal of self determination) have precise bounds; not all forms of warfare or violence are considered justifiable under either. Much of what Israel has done in the current conflict goes well beyond a charitable read of its right to defense, but this doesn’t imply that all defense adaptations are illegitimate.
Ask HN: Managing data and digital devices during an interstate/overseas move
by bassiouni | 2026-01-01 04:48:42+00:00
I am preparing to make a move which will have to include significant downsizing.

Going through my digital hardware for the last 10 years or so, I notice I have a desktop, a laptop, and a tablet (currently in use). Also 2 old laptops also an older phone hanging around (not in use).

It is apparent now that I need to have good solid backups of current devices and dispose of / sell old devices not in use.

Desktop and all laptops are dual booted both linux and windows, which unfortunately makes straightforward backups difficult (at least for me).

My questions to HN:
- How did you manage such moves in the past as it pertains to your electronic (desktop or handheld) devices ?
- Are there any easy ready-made solutions to backup "whole devices" and/or "consolidate" old devices into one?
- What are your recommended hardware options (any particular external hard drives that you would recommend)?
- What are available recommended easy-to-use software options (disk imaging and backup software) ?
- What are secure ways to safely dispose of personal data on your drives before selling/giving away/disposing of devices?
- What are your preferred environmentally-friendly way to destroy old electronic devices?
by zdragnar | 2026-01-01 04:51:27+00:00
I don't think anyone is really too concerned about DDT harming the soil itself.

DDT, like organic mercury compounds, bioaccumulates up the food chain. Contaminated soil is sequestered to prevent it from contaminating insects and animals and then humans.

Hence, the trade-off: DDT in the ecosystem, or killing soil and rebuilding it with compost and time.
by wolvoleo | 2026-01-01 04:51:41+00:00
Still, I have had issues with this too. My work uses an antimalware app when you use BYOD. Fine, but that app (lookout for work) installed in the work profile, and it complained that I had a tracking blocker (trackercontrol.org) installed in the MAIN profile :( This really pissed me off. Not only is an app in the work profile not supposed to even look at what I've got installed on the personal side, but it's actually a legit app. There's nothing wrong with tracker control. And it comes from a legit source, the Oxford university. The lookout guys are just being obstinate blocking it.
Show HN: Arvo – TypeScript toolkit for event-driven agentic systems and mesh
by saadahmad | 2026-01-01 04:52:31+00:00
Hi folks, I am very new to the hacker news community and would like to share something I have been working on.

I've spent the past 3 years building Arvo, a TypeScript toolkit for applications where AI agents, humans, workflows, and business logic need to work together.

My core thesis is to treat the main units of work as event handlers. Agents, workflows, services, and humans all modelled as event handlers communicating across an event fabric. No architectural privileges. An agent coordinating with a workflow uses identical patterns to a workflow coordinating with a human.

Key characteristics:
- Contract-first design with runtime validation (Zod-based)
- Event driven durable execution with suspend/resume for orchestrations
- State machines (XState) for structured workflows
- Imperative orchestrations (Temporal style) for when state-machines becomes limiting
- Infrastructure-agnostic (same code runs locally or on cloud)
- Native OpenTelemetry integration

Built on CloudEvents, implements virtual orchestration through physical choreography. Handlers are stateless, workflows persist as JSON, everything composes naturally.

Open source, production-ready core, growing standard library (@arvo-tools).

Happy to discuss the architecture or answer questions about the design decisions.
by cod1r | 2026-01-01 04:53:22+00:00
2025 wrap

started committing to healthier habits like going to the gym and jogging.

got some programming work experience under my belt.

started to cook for myself.

learned how to use a multimeter and fixed my house heating.

went to GDC and explored san francisco.

also finishing advent of code is always a highlight in my book :)
by NoToP | 2026-01-01 04:53:58+00:00
Recently I've been reading the report of the Knapp Commission, which was a 1972 inquiry into police corruption in New York City. That sounds tangential at first but it really isn't, the findings of the commission are broadly applicable. One of the major points of it being that corrupt officers correctly judged they had very little to fear from prosecution. There's this great table on page 250 showing the complete lack of prosecutions in the years leading up to the commission, driving home the point.

The reasons for that utter lack of prosecution leading to massive corruption is a microcosm of the broader circumstance to which you've pointed out.

Having read the Knapp Commission report, I am no longer of the view I have anything original to say on this.
by woodruffw | 2026-01-01 04:55:07+00:00
The searchable context for a distribution on PyPI is unbounded in the general case, assuming the goal is to allow search over READMEs, distribution metadata, etc.

(Which isn’t to say I disagree with you about scale not being the main issue, just to offer some nuance. Another piece of nuance is the fact that distributions are the source of metadata but users think in terms of projects/releases.)