MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by miki123211 | 2026-01-22 01:29:59+00:00
I find it incredibly ironic that all of Anthropic's "hard constraints", the only things that Claude is not allowed to do under any circumstances, are basically "thou shalt not destroy the world", except the last one, "do not generate child sexual abuse material."

To put it into perspective, according to this constitution, killing children is more morally acceptable[1] than generating a Harry Potter fanfiction involving intercourse between two 16-year-old students, something which you can (legally) consume and publish in most western nations, and which can easily be found on the internet.

[1] There are plenty of other clauses of the constitution that forbid causing harms to humans (including children). However, in a hypothetical "trolley problem", Claude could save 100 children by killing one, but not by generating that piece of fanfiction.
by kaashif | 2026-01-22 01:30:16+00:00
Isn't a vote being verifiably tied to a person actually a bad thing? Then you can actually check what e.g. your wife or kids voted for and punish them if they vote wrong. Or get people to pay for votes, but doing that at scale is obviously hard.

Maybe this isn't what you meant by verifiable, but there are systems with this property and they are bad.
by e12e | 2026-01-22 01:30:57+00:00
I was more commenting on the language design here; the idea of indexing into a UTF-8 string and returning an ASCII character. What does the index count? Bytes? There doesn't seem to be a way to get UTF-8 characters from strings?

Ed: There seems to be an UTF-8 library:

https://github.com/jordanhubbard/nanolang/tree/main/modules/...
by jadenPete | 2026-01-22 01:31:12+00:00
This question may be naive, but why is the agricultural industry so subsidized? I understand the moral argument, but why, economically, does subsidizing farms result in a more efficient allocation of resources? I've heard that it's because farming as a business is full of unpredictability, but if that were the case, wouldn't there be a significant market for private insurance, and wouldn't the cost of that insurance be priced into the cost of food?
by spijdar | 2026-01-22 01:31:15+00:00
I think it's a sentimental thing, mixed with a dash of elitism/"purity seeking".

I don't mean that harshly. In my late teens/early 20s, I went through a "phase" where I obsessed with getting "purer and purer". This was mixed with a weird obsession with non-x86 hardware, as well. Lots of NetBSD, FreeBSD and Illumos usage, some Plan9 towards the end, lots of intellectual snobbery about "it feels better", and that sort of thing.

I'm almost 30 now, and my office has "Unix" systems from the 70s up to, well, my M1 MBP with "UNIX®" on it. PDP-11, VAX/ULTRIX, SPARC/SunOS 4, MIPS/IRIX, Alpha/OSF1, I've given them all a spin, running existing software and writing new software to kick the tires of old compilers. That's why I feel comfortable saying macOS really, really doesn't feel like any "UNIX" that I associate with "UNIX".

Although, UNIX was always a confusing term which never really meant all that much to begin with (when talking about commercial OSes/hardware platforms), but that's a whole other conversation...
by ggm | 2026-01-22 01:31:55+00:00
Ag. can't just be about profit. There's a dimension which is national-strategic interest. Food security, the domestic food economy is important.

It is my understanding that a lot of the US ag. sector is making inputs for processing for corn oil, fructose, ethanol, and for exports to markets which in turn target american ag, selling e.g. beef back to the US, fattened on US Soy.

It's a complex web. I don't want US farmers going broke, any more than I want Australian farmers going broke (where I live)

So getting this right, fixing farming sector security, is important.
by kalkin | 2026-01-22 01:32:08+00:00
This basically Searle's Chinese Room argument. It's got a respectable history (... Searle's personal ethics aside) but it's not something that has produced any kind of consensus among philosophers. Note that it would apply to any AI instantiated as a Turing machine and to a simulation of human brain at an arbitrary level of detail as well.

There is a section on the Chinese Room argument in the book.

(I personally am skeptical that LLMs have any conscious experience. I just don't think it's a ridiculous question.)
Show HN: GluonDB – Cursor for Your Database
by jernestomg | 2026-01-22 01:32:14+00:00
I'm building gluonDB to make data monitoring faster and more accessible for small teams.

Think Metabase meets Cursor: You connect your database and use an AI agent to ask questions in plain English. The agent generates the dashboards you can share with your team.

Status: We are in early beta.
- Support: Currently optimized for Postgres-compatible databases (Supabase, RDS, etc.).

All feedback is welcome, I’ll be here to answer questions about the tech or our roadmap.
by tonymet | 2026-01-22 01:32:33+00:00
paper & pen has tremendous value as a recording mechanism. Although it's slower at counting and indexing, it is far better at reproducibility and durability:

* records last > 500 years with no electricity . corruption is obvious at first glance. ( bad records don't appear to be good).

* counting is easily distributed by number of workers

* readily visually inspected with no special tools . ideal for auditing

* records stay in order at rest.

* easy to detect & protect against tampering

* easy to train new users . CRUD tooling costs pennies per operator

* cheaper to scale writes & reads

TCO and risk-assessment for paper records exceeds digital on nearly every measure.
by 8note | 2026-01-22 01:32:59+00:00
would this actually be enough such that farmers have to sell their land and new small family farmers cam get started?

or only a new set of bankruptcies and the same farmers stay on?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xon9A5_4tQw&pp=ygUKZmFybSB0YWJ... was very illuminating
by stonogo | 2026-01-22 01:33:24+00:00
I did indeed read your document (twice, as I explicitly reported). I didn't address those parts because I found them better-supported. Instead, I addressed the parts I found confusing, and since your rebuttal here is just whining about what you think my behavior is, I continue to be mystified. That's okay; nobody expects you to explain yourself to me. If I thought it would help, I would suggest that perhaps a more effective defense would involve answering literally any of the questions I already asked. However, I don't appreciate accusations of bad faith based on your unwarranted assumptions about what I did or did not do and, bizarrely, what you imagine my motivations are. I'll just assume that the answers to the "why" questions I asked are rooted in similar wild-ass speculation.
by dbcurtis | 2026-01-22 01:33:41+00:00
Mostly agree, but we don’t have to give up the benefits of direct digital tabulation for quick results. I would like a paper audit trail. Print my ballot-as-cast for on a paper roll that scrolls by under a window. I can verify it before leaving the voting booth. Recounts and challenges can be a computer scan of the paper roll. None of this is hard. Costs a bit more, but buys trust in the system.
by sethev | 2026-01-22 01:33:47+00:00
There have been hints in the research that this might be the case-but so far they haven't really beaten the heuristic approach in practice (outside of special cases).

For example there's a class of join algorithms called 'worst-case optimal' - which is not a great name, but basically means that these algorithms run in time proportional to the worst-case output size. These algorithms ditch the two at a time approach that databases typically use and joins multiple relations at the same time.

One example is the leapfrog trie join which was part of the LogicBlox database.
by zbentley | 2026-01-22 01:33:57+00:00
What does Preview do that's hard to match?

Genuine question. I've been a Mac user for decades and on balance think it's quite good, but Preview is one of the most deeply frustrating, buggy, and unintuitive pieces of software on the system--it's at the top of the list of things that I wish I could swap out for something--anything, MS paint would be fine--else that was as deeply integrated in Finder/image/PDF interactions.
by SilentM68 | 2026-01-22 01:34:07+00:00
I'm in a similar situation. In my case, I can't walk pain-free anymore with or without insoles. Operations are possible but again, not a good solution, just lots of metallic rods in affected areas, weeks to months of heeling, no work, not a permanent fix, more like getting a root canal, and getting a crown. I'm hopeful something meaningful, affordable comes out of all the research is being done.
by ss1996 | 2026-01-22 01:34:14+00:00
I agree with the risks, the overall theme being it's much easier to potentially manipulate a million internet votes than physical. In other worlds, internet vote manipulation scales significantly more than physical.

But I could make the argument with any high trust internet system.

Let's take another high trust activity we do on the internet - banking. Internet banking gives a hacker the ability to steal millions while sitting across the world. This is the same argument the authors make about changing a million votes.

So it really comes down to the pros vs cons. That's the more important discussion imo.

Do the benefits of internet voting outweigh the cons?
by giobox | 2026-01-22 01:34:21+00:00
Youtube always kept downvotes and the 'dislike' button, the change (which still applies today) was that they stopped displaying the downvote count to users - the button never went away though.

Visit a youtube video today, you can still upvote and downvote with the exact same thumbs up or down, the site however only displays to you the count of upvotes. The channel owners/admins can still see the downvote count and the downvotes presumably still inform YouTube's algorithms.
by nyarlathotep_ | 2026-01-22 01:34:27+00:00
Previous employer issued Macs with all sorts of Jamf spyware stuff on them but I could more or less install things as needed via brew (both internal-vended "taps" or whatever the term is) and "normal" end-user stuff without issue (it was often expected you'd do so).

Worth noting this absolutely impacted usability and stability to a massive degree. The machine ran far hotter to the touch than my personal (equivalent model) MBP, and would make it maybe a month of uptime before it failed to wake from sleep/kernel panic'd/locked up the desktop.

Most other typical desktop software was "vended" via internal software "store" thing (managed browsers, etc), but I could, and did, install various extensions on Firefox (internal Wikis even encouraged using Tampermoney (or whatever the successor is called now) like UBO/Sideberry etc.

Current employer issued machine is a Windows laptop with no admin and basically locked-down.

Even getting something like Docker installed/WSL configured is a whole episode in frustration.

The huge positive is this Enterprise-whatever version of Windows has minimal slop--no CoPilot things or ads in the start menu/lockscreen, but I can't even change the desktop wallpaper. Also, the CPU idles at basically 40% utilization with the various agent things/endpoint security running. For any sort of local development, I largely "sidestep" things by running whatever I need in containers/WSL, so it's really not a huge problem. There's minimal Windows-specific use outside of Teams/Outlook whatever.
by GoatInGrey | 2026-01-22 01:34:28+00:00
That, and the catastrophic risk framing is where this really loses me. We're discussing models that supposedly threaten "global catastrophe" or could "kill or disempower the vast majority of humans." Meanwhile, Opus 4.5 can't successfully call a Python CLI after reading its 160 lines of code. It confuses itself on escape characters, writes workaround scripts that subsequent instances also can't execute, and after I explicitly tell it "Use header_read.py on Primary_Export.xlsx in the repo root," it'll latch onto some random test case buried in the documentation it read "just in case", and prioritize running the script on the files mentioned there instead.

It's, to me, as ridiculous as claiming that my metaphorical son poses legitimate risk of committing mass murder when he can't even operate a spray bottle.
by jabwd | 2026-01-22 01:34:50+00:00
The thing I find disappointing about the article is that nothing else seems to have been explored. Now no options might exist, but then again, isn't the point of such a write up to find the ones that.... do...?

A lot of people know that modern macOS is a bit of a let down when it comes to modifying it unless you disable a bunch of security layers. So the information gained is basically 0.

Edit: I should clarify that some of the ways they analyze how services are launched etc. are quite interesting, though I hope my prior thought makes sense to some.
by ggm | 2026-01-22 01:34:56+00:00
1. Farmers vote. And, Farmers live in states where the value-per-vote is high under both state-vote balancing, and gerrymander. Farming is politically useful.

2. Food is part of national security. It's sensible to keep the sector working.

3. Consumers hate variability in food pricing. So, general sentiment at the shop is not in favour of a strong linkage of cost of production to price, and under imports, there's almost always a source of cheaper product, at the socialised cost of losing domestic food security: Buy the cheese from Brazil, along with the beef, and let them buy soy beans from China and Australia to make the beef fatter. -And then, you can sell food for peanuts (sorry) but you won't like the longer term political consequences, if you do this. See 1) and 2).
by p_ing | 2026-01-22 01:36:06+00:00
They request formats that their equipment handles. They're not in the business of converting a user's file type from one to another. That would be inconsistent from what the user sent.

Here's who I order from, you can see the particulars of what they request.

https://support.bayphoto.com/hc/en-us/articles/4026658357979...
by luqs1 | 2026-01-22 01:36:21+00:00
A benefit I see of this is that the llm can be aware of your current environment setup and factor that into the install.

Writing a truly comprehensive install.sh script is comparatively inane, for starters, you immediately take out windows compatibility.

As expected, engineers (inc me.) will be reluctant to add non determinism to a solution that doesn't need it. Having deeper thinking traces/ logit debugging could help alleviate the concern.
by sbuk | 2026-01-22 01:36:37+00:00
The Windows 7 vs 8 analogy doesn’t support your argument, it undermines it. Windows 8 wasn’t disliked because it was “modern”, it was disliked because it broke core interaction models in a way that actively obstructed use. macOS Tahoe hasn’t done anything remotely comparable. No Start screen catastrophe, no forced touch-first UI on non-touch hardware, no fundamental workflow regression.

What you’re reacting to is aesthetic drift, not functional decay. Liquid Glass is a visual language experiment, not a UX rupture. You may dislike it, that’s fine, but equating it to Windows 8 is category error. One is a design iteration layered on top of a relatively stable interaction model, the other was a structural interface failure.

Also, invoking Media Player vs Groove Music as if those are meaningful historical markers of “user-hostile downgrade” is... generous to the point of fiction. Windows 8’s problem was input metaphors, not media apps.

This isn’t Apple becoming Microsoft. It’s Apple doing what Apple always does: overreaching aesthetically, then sanding it down in point releases until everyone forgets they were angry in the first place. Which, incidentally, is exactly what happened with Aqua, iOS 7, Big Sur, and every other supposed apocalypse.
by deathanatos | 2026-01-22 01:37:13+00:00
Some paper jurisdictions have this, essentially. E.g., where I live: the ballot is a paper ballot. You vote by filling in a circle/bubble. (If you're familiar with a "scantron" … it's that.)

It looks like a paper document intended for a human, and it certainly can be. A machine can also read it. (And does, prior to it being cast: the ballot is deposited into what honestly looks like a trashcan whose lid is a machine. It could presumably keep a tally, though IDK if it does. It does seem to validate the ballot, as it has false-negative rejected me before.)

But now the "paper trail" is exactly what I submit; it's not a copy that I need to verify is actually a copy, what is submitted it my vote, directly.
by bigstrat2003 | 2026-01-22 01:37:26+00:00
No, just because there are no universally agreed upon values does not make everything political. People can, and frequently do, agree to live and let live when they have differences of opinion rather than wage bitter wars over those differences. We can, and must, have spaces where we can enjoy things in life rather than having division fostered between us 24/7. There is no idea more toxic to the well being of society than the idea of "everything is political".
by JoshTriplett | 2026-01-22 01:37:28+00:00
How will you feel when you "discover" other things are wrong that you currently believe are right? How will you feel when others discover such things and you haven't caught up yet? How can you best avoid holding back the pace of such discovery?

It is a useful exercise to attempt to iterate some of those "discovery" processes to their logical conclusions, rather than repeatedly making "discoveries" of the same sort that all fundamentally rhyme with each other and have common underlying principles.
by Dev_Master | 2026-01-22 01:39:08+00:00
Hi HN! I built PDFSnap, a lightweight Windows desktop app for converting PDFs into PNG or JPG images.

It supports single PDFs or full folders, preserves page numbering, optionally creates subfolders per PDF, and shows live progress/logs. Under the hood it uses Ghostscript for rendering and Pillow for image handling, wrapped in a dark-themed Tkinter/ttkbootstrap UI.

This started as a personal tool for handling large PDF batches more reliably than online converters. Feedback, critiques, and ideas are very welcome—especially from anyone who’s dealt with PDF → image workflows at scale.
by pandaman | 2026-01-22 01:40:45+00:00
I don't know what do you do, but most people need to know how many yards (or inches, or feet, or chains, or whatever) in a mile as often as they need to know how many seconds, minutes, or hours in a quarter i.e. never. Yet it's the strongest point proponents of the metric system have, so makes me wonder why are they so agitated?

For the record, I am from a metric country and immigrated to the US as an adult. I still find American system to be more adjusted to human needs. E.g. temperature in F does not need decimals unlike temperature in C, tool sizing in inches is simpler (look at the sets of drill bits in different systems for example), tire pressure in psi (e.g. one of my bikes is 53 psi rear and 51 front, or 3.65 and 3.51 bars, you could say I could remember just the decimals, but another bike is 33 and 31, or 2.27 and 2.13 so no, it's 3 digits with bars vs 2 in psi), house dimensions are in even number of feet so much easier to find furniture, which is designed with this in mind, obviously. Miles are great to estimate time of travel by car, take 1 minute per mile of distance on a highway and 2 minutes in the city and you will be pretty close.

But, of course, the reason the American system is never going away is because it would be insanely expensive: you either will have to rewrite all building codes/standars/recipes with stupid conversions e.g 50.8x101.6 instead of 2x4 even though the lumber dimensions are not really 2 and 4 inches or scrape them and write the new ones using the more sensible metric dimensions but then you will need to scrape all the tooling you had and buy new, metric tools. All so you could say how many micrometers in a kilometer and feel smart?
by bigstrat2003 | 2026-01-22 01:40:51+00:00
I would be more amenable to political discussions on HN if they weren't almost guaranteed to turn into flame wars. But as it is, every single thread I see on current events in the US turns into an absolute train wreck. No insight is generated there, just culture warriors flinging hate at each other back and forth through the comments. I flag such posts because they are so reliably low quality, and I'm sure I'm not alone.
by mistrial9 | 2026-01-22 01:41:17+00:00
because the energy states of inputs are so massively beyond ordinary bounds that distortions of unexpected kinds develop and persist in markets that otherwise appear to be straightforward? And, this is not new, but more energetic and more far-reaching than ever before. (more comments would have to chose a lens through which to postulate e.g. economic, legal, energy exchange, human nature ... etc.. ?)
by cgearhart | 2026-01-22 01:41:35+00:00
I think this is the actual “bitter lesson”—the scalable solution (letting LLMs bang against the problem nonstop) will eventually far outperform human effort. There will come a point—whether sooner or later—where this’ll be the expected norm for handling such problems. I think the only question is whether there is any distinction between problems like this (clearly defined with a verifiable outcome) vs the space of all interesting computer programs. (At the moment I think there’s space between them. TBD.)
by leoc | 2026-01-22 01:41:54+00:00
Even if something like Gas Town isn't remotely affordable today it could potentially be a useful glimpse at what can be done in principle and what might be affordable in, say, 10 years. There's a long history of this in computing, of course https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expensive_Typewriter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketchpad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto . OTOH it could certainly make the approach totally unsuitable for VC funding at present, and that's without even considering the other reasons to be wary of Gas Town and Beads.
by deathanatos | 2026-01-22 01:42:16+00:00
At least in the US, I think there are a number of suggestions that are made repeatedly each cycle here. Like "it should be a paid federal holiday", and not putting onerous requirements on voters. Automatic registration. The list goes on.

But I what is written over and over is more on the lines of "I don't trust the process". I cannot blame anyone for not trusting Internet voting: I am a professional SWE, and it would be impossible for me to establish that any such system isn't pwned. Too much code to audit, hardware that's impossible to audit. But it's pretty trivial to demonstrate to the layperson how paper voting works, and how poll observers can prevent that process from being subverted.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-22 01:43:03+00:00
>Don't even need to interview for selective billion dollar companies like Anthropic to encounter these types of problems

I'll take any interviews at this point in time.

But yes, every domain has its jargon. I work tangentially to this and quickly understood this as a GPGPU problem. A relatively elementary one if you studied this space, though a time limit of 2 hours seems overly restrictive if you aren't actively studying this stuff.
by liveoneggs | 2026-01-22 01:43:05+00:00
Just do both like we do here in GA. You vote on a computer, it prints out a piece of paper, you walk the paper over to some kind of scanner, and then it is deposited into a giant trash can. (maybe they keep the paper records, idk) - these are the dominion systems.

(memories..)

When I lived in NYC there was a giant lever you got to use - it was pretty fun - but positioning the actual paper was kind of tricky.

I think Georgia used to have Diebold machines where you would get a little receipt but I'm pretty sure they were very hackable. Anyway half of them were always broken.
by bigstrat2003 | 2026-01-22 01:43:30+00:00
> That's the biggest problem here: People using "flag" as a mega-downvote to eliminate things they don't want other people to read from the front page.

I've seen the moderators (tomhow specifically) explicitly encourage people to use the flag option on posts which are low quality. I believe that the behavior you are complaining about is working as intended.