MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aebtebeten | 2026-01-17 14:10:01+00:00
Another quick thought on JEER: if he'd only gone with "Sandworm" he could've been the God-Emperor of Dune?

The sea is still rising around the imp; that kernel has yet to be rubbed away... Will work harder on it, when I'm not yakking on HN :)

I did try a couple of LLMs but although they were useful in figuring out how to organise a writeup, they were just glazing when it came to developing the theory. A friend's recommendation of a topology book has actually been far more directly useful.

If we view the "inner party" as being Russell's farmer (instead of his chicken, to whom "more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful"), then, although the capital accrues via Matthew Effect, at least all residents can count on food, shelter, health care, and decent access to education. Our proles would be the cross-border workers, who sleep in a different country (and count on their unemployment stats during recessions) — and possibly EU people here on the freedom of movement agreement? (I know little about this agreement; it came about after I got here)
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2026-01-17 14:10:59+00:00
> Certainly there is space for designs a LLM can't come up with, but lets be real senior developers are not cranking out never seen before novel architectures routinely any more than physicists are coming up with never thought of theories that work weekly.

True, but I didn't mean to focus on creativity, just the nature of what can be learned when all you have to learn from is artifacts of reasoning (code), not the underlying reasoning traces themselves (reasoning process for why the code was designed that way). Without reasoning traces you get what we have today where AI programming in the large comes down to cargo cult code pattern copying, without understanding whether the (unknown) design process that lead to the patterns being copied reasonably apply to the requirements/situation at hand.

So, it's not about novelty, but rather about having the reasoning traces (for large structured projects) available to learn when to apply design patterns that are already present in the training data - to select design patterns based on a semblance of principled reasoning (RL for reasoning traces), rather than based on cargo cult code smell.

> This is going to be lord of the flies in job market long before human parity.

Perhaps, and that may already be starting, but I think that until we get much closer to AGI you'll still need a human in the loop (both to interact with the AI, and to interact with the team/boss), with AI as a tool not a human replacement. So, the number of jobs may not decrease much, if at all. It's also possible that Jevons paradox applies and that the number of developer jobs actually increases.

It's also possible that human-replacement AGI is harder to achieve than widely thought. For example, maybe things like emotional intelligence and theory of mind are difficult to get right, and without it AI never quite cuts it as an fully autonomous entity that people want to deal with.

> UBI or whatever...because we'll have to.

Soylent Green ?
by swiftcoder | 2026-01-17 14:11:29+00:00
If your plan is to physically move your head to look at the peripheral anyway, then this is much cheaper to achieve by putting a second monitor alongside your primary monitor (I keep an older 2560x1440 in portrait alongside my main 4k display)

Scenic gaming seems pretty niche outside of dedicated flight/driving sim setups? And regular gaming often kind of sucks on ultrawides - way too few games have decent options to pull the HUD into the center region of the display
by reify | 2026-01-17 14:11:55+00:00
a huge claim from a 2006 paper.

just goes to show the sort of shit research going on over the years.

cures depression in 7 days. of course it does!

just like those people who are suffer grief/bereavement from a family members death, but find themsleves prescribed anti-depressants and 20 years later and are still taking them.

Add some CBT to that and we can cure the entire world of all mental illness in 24 hours.

Incredibly, after 20 years, they have not released a new anti-depressant containing magnesium

Though to be fair, fast forward 18 years and research in 2024 suggested that taking magnesium supplements with an antidepressant may help with the symptoms of depression.

I take magnesium for restless leg syndrome, just a tiny pinch in my nightly hot cacao chocolate.
by forgotpwd16 | 2026-01-17 14:13:19+00:00
Overall not easy to read article. Quite confusing. It makes case rather rewriting in Rust* should instead rewrite in formal spec and generate the code, which is now easier due to LLMs, but why that code cannot be Rust? The memory model and structure may make Rust better AI target and helpful in cases human intervention is required.

*Something most here call waste of time anyway.
by ryanlol | 2026-01-17 14:13:21+00:00
I am indeed the guy in the article. My side of the story is fairly boring, didn't do crime but got blamed for it anyway by desperate cops. The whole investigation has been bizarre, for example, no-one has ever searched my homes, or even attempted to seize my personal devices.

Should find out within the next couple of months if the appeals court decides to acquit.
by Neywiny | 2026-01-17 14:13:23+00:00
Great work.

Seems like a typo when covering inversion. They claim parity(0) = 0 but still use the equation with != from before.

It's nice to see that they, like me, subscribe to "an hour of experimenting can save 5 minutes of reading the documentation." Of course what people often fail to realize is that until you've found the answer, you often don't realize what the documentation was saying, such as the 16-bit thing. Management may ask "was that not in the manual?" But it's more nebulous than that.
by falcor84 | 2026-01-17 14:13:29+00:00
I agree with the issues, but it definitely doesn't suck if compared to every single other massive endeavor out there. As I see it, it's like that quote about democracy - it's the worst way to attempt to catalogue human knowledge, except for all those other forms that have been tried.

> It also has an incredibly strong western bias.

What's the issue with that? Why shouldn't English Wikipedia have a strong Western bias? I've explored and participated in several other Wikipedias and other collaborative projects, and each is biased towards the worldviews common to the culture that its main editors come from. I don't think there's a way to have an encyclopedic project without any cultural bias at all (if such a platonic ideal could even be properly defined), and seeing how Western values include a significant focus on pluralism, freedom of expression and scientific inquiry, I think this situation is much better than the alternatives.
by jrmg | 2026-01-17 14:13:46+00:00
This is amazing all round - in concept, writing, and coding (both the idea and the blog post about it).

I feel confident stating that - unless fed something comprehensive like this post as input, and perhaps not even then - an LLM could not do something novel and complex like this, and will not be able to for some time, if ever. I’d love to read about someone proving me wrong on that.
by rypskar | 2026-01-17 14:14:51+00:00
Yes, big companies can copy your product. But at what cost, especially when including opportunity cost and the levels of bureaucracy in larger companies? I have heard your question many times during the last 20 years, and still there are more software startups.

In many cases it would cost them less to buy your company than to create it from scratch. Which is why so many small companies are acquired instead of copied. The question should be more what do you want to do and are you able to follow up on creating a startup? Writing the code is a small part of creating a successful startup
by quickthrowman | 2026-01-17 14:16:02+00:00
Large solar sites are required to be able to provide reactive power as well as maintain a power factor of 0.95 to avoid all of the issues you mentioned.

Reddit post by an EE explaining it better than I can: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEngineers/comments/qhear9/commen...

> There are also factors like fault current handling that HN might think is trivial or to be glossed over, but without the ability to eat 10x+ rated load for a brief duration, faults on the grid cannot be addressed and the entire system would collapse into pointlessness.

I don’t understand what you are talking about here. I don’t work in the utility world, I sell and run commercial electrical work, but handling available fault current in my world is as simple as calculating it and providing overcurrent protection with a high enough AIC rating or current limiting fuses. I don’t see why the utility side would be any different.
by reactordev | 2026-01-17 14:16:22+00:00
Very good point!!!

The frequency (50hz or 60hz) comes from those rotational forces from the generators and until we can eliminate them, we have to play nice with them.

Luckily, we have GFMI’s. Grid-forming inverters that can emulate 60hz push pull but you’re right that it’s more than just voltage since we are dealing with high voltage alternating current.
by elgrantomate | 2026-01-17 14:16:26+00:00
I've been playing with this for the past 24 hours or so. I like the atomic containment of the LLM, and the clear separation of logic, code, and prompts.

You have some great working examples, but, for example: translate_text specifies the default language in three places: the card, the input schema, and the deck. This can't be necessary; I'll experiment, but shouldn't it just be defined in one place?

The descriptive language of the project is a bit dense for me too. I'm having a hard time figuring out how to do basic things like parameters -- let's say that I want to constrain summarize_text to a certain length... I've tried to write language in the cards/decks, but the model doesn't seem to be paying attention.

I also want to be able to load a file, e.g. not just "translate 'hello my friend' to Italian" but "translate '/test/hello_my_friend.txt' to Italian" and have it load the contents of the file as input text. How do I do that?

Super cool project!
by danaris | 2026-01-17 14:16:28+00:00
> Your problem is probably that your first instinct is to emulate your old workflow instead of finding a new workflow.

I recently started a new job, and was given a choice of Windows or Linux for my desktop. Picked Linux, specifically Ubuntu, since others there use Ubuntu. (I've been using Macs primarily for decades, but can operate in any OS.)

I have my workflow set up mostly fine now, but...there isn't really any alternative to BBEdit. Anywhere but the Mac. And believe me, I've looked. (I'd genuinely love to be proved wrong, though!)

The combination of

- a programmer's text editor

- that's not focused around "workspaces" (like VSCode—which I also use)

- that can do robust regexp search & replace, both within and across files

- that keeps its list of open files in a sidebar, vertically, rather than in tabs, across the top

- that can transparently open & save files requiring privilege elevation (just provide the password when needed)

- that can transparently open & save files over SFTP

- for free (there's a paid upgrade that unlocks more advanced features that are very neat, but that I have never yet needed)

...appears, from what I can tell, to be unique.

So I'm using...I forget, I think it's kate? and it's fine, I can operate...but between that and a variety of other little things, it's just a constant friction. Fortunately, I should be able to get a Mac laptop; it just needs to be quoted, approved, and ordered.
by AlexeyBrin | 2026-01-17 14:16:34+00:00
I appreciate that the author clearly states that he wrote the book with various LLMs. This way people that don't want to read LLM generated text can skip it and LLM enthusiasts can enjoy it.

this book was written with significant assistance from Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools. In the current era of technical publishing, deliberately avoiding AI would be highly inefficient and likely counterproductive, potentially even resulting in a lower-quality final product compared to what can be achieved with AI augmentation. Virtually all high-quality manufactured goods we use daily are produced with the aid of sophisticated tools and automation; applying similar principles to the creation of a programming book seems logical.
by tlarkworthy | 2026-01-17 14:17:20+00:00
Yeah, this upsert_cell tool does it

https://observablehq.com/@tomlarkworthy/forking-agent#upsert...

format: {
type: "grammar",
syntax: "regex",
definition: cellsRegex
},

Where cellRegex is

cellsRegex = {
const CELL_OPEN = String.raw`<cell>\s`;

const INPUTS_BLOCK = String.raw`<inputs>.*<\/inputs>\s*`;

const CODE_BLOCK = String.raw`<code><!\[CDATA\[[\s\S]*\]\]>\s*<\/code>\s*`;

const CELL_CLOSE = String.raw`<\/cell>`;

return "^(" + CELL_OPEN + INPUTS_BLOCK + CODE_BLOCK + CELL_CLOSE + ")*$";

}

And the extraction logic is here
https://observablehq.com/@tomlarkworthy/robocoop-2#process

function process(content) {
const doc = domParser.parseFromString(
"<response>" + content + "</response>",
"text/xml"
);
const cells = [...doc.querySelectorAll("cell")];
return cells.map((cell) => {
const inputsContent = cell.querySelector("inputs")?.textContent || "";
return {
inputs:
inputsContent.length > 0
? inputsContent.split(",").map((s) => s.trim())
: [],
code: (cell.querySelector("code")?.textContent || "").trim()
};
});
}

BTW that agent is under development and not actually that good at programming. Its parent https://observablehq.com/@tomlarkworthy/robocoop-2 is actually very good at notebook programming
by loglog | 2026-01-17 14:17:24+00:00
There is no "Navier-Stokes theorem". There is a famous class of open problems whether Navier-Stokes equations are well-posed (have solutions that don't explode in finite time) for various initial data, but that type of question is completely irrelevant for any practical purposes.
I do share the feeling though. As a non-expert, I have no idea what the existing, allegedly practically relevant, formalizations of distributed algorithms actually guarantee.
by jackfranklyn | 2026-01-17 14:17:47+00:00
The contract stability bit rings true from my experience. I've built a few B2B integrations that follow this pattern naturally - the data layer and API contracts are rock solid because changing them means coordinating with external systems, but the application logic gets rewritten fairly often.

Where it gets messy is when your "disposable" layer accumulates implicit contracts. A dashboard that stakeholders rely on, an export format someone's built a process around, a webhook payload shape that downstream systems expect. These aren't in your documented interfaces but they become load-bearing walls.

The discipline required is treating your documented contracts like the actual boundary - version them properly, deprecate formally, keep them minimal. Most teams don't have that discipline and end up with giant surface areas where everything feels permanent.
by deepsquirrelnet | 2026-01-17 14:18:03+00:00
Where I live in the west, the time to break even was projected at 7.5y for panels rated that run at 85% for 25y and expected lifetime of 30y.

I think the main consideration where I live is whether you can make the investment and if you plan on staying in your house long enough to realize the benefit. Also nearly all of the power I offset is from coal.
by thijson | 2026-01-17 14:18:35+00:00
The battery in the winter could be used to charge during low cost time periods, assuming your have time of use energy prices. I see people in the UK doing that all the time because the peak prices are very high. I think California is the same.

Batteries have come down a lot in cost, at least the raw ones:

https://youtu.be/3mAx_KE8gz0

Without the tariffs it would be even cheaper I guess.
by alec_codec | 2026-01-17 14:18:41+00:00
Hi HN! I built ALEC because I was frustrated with how much bandwidth IoT sensors waste transmitting predictable data.

The core idea: instead of sending raw values, ALEC learns sensor patterns and transmits only the delta from its prediction. After a warm-up period, compression ratios reach 90%+ on typical sensor data.

Key features:
- Evolving shared context between encoder/decoder
- Priority classification (P1-P5) for critical alerts
- Preload system for optimal compression from byte one
- Written in Rust, ~4KB encoder footprint

Use cases: satellite IoT (where every byte costs $$$), remote sensors on battery, agricultural monitoring.

The codec is AGPL-3.0 with commercial licenses available. Happy to answer any questions about the implementation or the information theory behind it!
by CPLX | 2026-01-17 14:20:42+00:00
While a little reductive and caricatured, as a Gen-X counterculture type myself I can confirm that there's quite a bit of accuracy in this comment. And a lot more examples in more boring parts of the world than these famous people you are mentioning.

With that said it's not exclusively a Gen-X thing to go from counterculture to establishment while preserving the same root personality driver of narcissism and selfishness. It's obviously recognizable as the trajectory of the Woodstock generation as well.
by st3fan | 2026-01-17 14:21:15+00:00
Hm I find this very much a "please reinvent the wheel" take.

These frameworks provide structure for established patterns,but they also actually do a lot that you don't have to do anymore. If you are for example building an agentic application then these kind of frameworks make it very simple to create the workflows, do the chat with the model providers, provide structure for agentic skills, decision making and the human in the loop, etc. etc.

All stuff that I would consider "low level". All things you don't have to build.

If you have an aversion to frameworks then sure - by all means. But if you like to move faster and using good building blocks then these frameworks really help.

One thing to keep in mind - many of these AI frameworks are open source and work really well without needing backend services. Or you can self host them where needed. But for many that is also the premium model, please use and pay for our backend services. But that is also a choice of course.
by jordanb | 2026-01-17 14:21:26+00:00
While I'm concerned about the environmental challenges of reversing the trend and increasing energy consumption, I'm happy that people are living in more comfortable homes, that the Amercian industrial base is being restored, that more and better services are being provided (better healthcare, inexpensive and healthy food, comfortable, efficient and inexpensive transportation).

That is what we're using this electricity for, right?
by eggplantiny | 2026-01-17 14:21:57+00:00
I broadly agree with the caution against naive "conscious AI" narratives, but I think this essay underestimates a key idea from Hofstadter’s GEB.

Hofstadter's claim was not that consciousness is "just computation" in a trivial sense, but that within the space of computable processes, certain self-referential, symbol-manipulating systems can give rise to something structurally indistinguishable from consciousness — a "strange loop."

In that framing, consciousness is not a magical biological add-on, nor merely subjective illusion, but an emergent property of sufficiently rich, recursive models that represent themselves and the world simultaneously.

Biology may be one implementation of such loops, but it’s not obvious that it's the only possible one. Dismissing computation wholesale risks conflating "today's AI architectures" with "the entire space of computable systems."

The real open question, I think, isn't whether computation can support consciousness-like phenomena, but what class of computations is required — and whether our current systems even approximate it.
by arcbyte | 2026-01-17 14:22:02+00:00
Lets be real. The only connection an EHR has to patient health is whatever minimum standard the hospital needs to avoid malpractice lawsuits. The rest of the EHR is all about billing insurance companies and Medicare.

Nobody cares about emoji except the poor folks who have to login to it everyday, and it makes their lives a smidgen better. Lets chill on the criticism of emojis.
by api | 2026-01-17 14:22:25+00:00
Sure, but then my question is why we need them. What service do they provide? That’s what I was speculating about. I don’t buy the conspiracy theory that they’re pure parasites, since hosts without parasites would then be stronger and would ultimately outcompete.

We have all the skills to do all the things without these power systems so what are they for?

I don’t mean policing and courts. Those are administrative and managerial functions. I mean power of the sort that makes large numbers of people do stuff. I mean gurus and aggrandizers, basically. The people who con and goad us into doing hard things.

My hypothesis is that we can’t self generate that due to neurological limitations rooted in our evolutionary history in a much slower world that rarely changed.

Amphetamine could work too but it has ugly side effects. Social pressure is less hazardous and scales better.
by Someone | 2026-01-17 14:22:25+00:00
> They'd have to show at least one plane with a bearing gone that still flies as intended.

That depends on the meaning of “safety of flight”. I don’t know what it means in aviation, but do not rule out that there is significant room between “flies as intended” and “result in a safety of flight condition”.

For example, if an engine were to complete drop off the plane, would that necessarily result in a safety of flight condition, or does “the plane will be able to continue take off and land again” mean safety of flight isn’t affected?
by DaSHacka | 2026-01-17 14:22:47+00:00
> Don't apologize for actual, literal Nazis murdering civilians in broad daylight.

Well, thankfully, there don't seem to be any! Phew, crisis averted.

Just law enforcement officers and the typical incidents involving non-compliant citizens putting themselves in unwise positions by refising to answer basic questions and disobeying direct basic orders ("Exit your vehicle").
by estimator7292 | 2026-01-17 14:23:46+00:00
I choose the underdog because it yeilds a better experience when it works. And when it doesn't work, it's my fault. I vastly prefer a thing to be broken because I didn't use it right over a thing being broken because some meaningless and unremembered executive vice under-assistant needed a number to go up in their corporate employee records.
Show HN: go-stats-calculator, CLI for computing stats:mean,median,variance,etc.
by jftuga | 2026-01-17 14:24:22+00:00
What: go-stats-calculator[1] - CLI tool for computing statistics (mean, median, variance, std-dev, skewness, etc.)

Why: I needed a quick way to look at statistics without having to resort to something heavy such as Python + its statistics module or Excel.

Disclaimer: Vibe-coded by Gemini 2.5 Pro and Opus 4.5 but also validated through unit tests and independent verification[2].

Install: Homebrew[3] or GoReleaser built binaries[4].

Demo:

$ seq 99 322 | stats

--- Descriptive Statistics ---
Count: 224
Sum: 47152
Min: 99
Max: 322

--- Measures of Central Tendency ---
Mean: 210.5
Median (p50): 210.5
Mode: None

--- Measures of Spread & Distribution ---
Std Deviation: 64.8074
Variance: 4200
Quartile 1 (p25): 154.75
Quartile 3 (p75): 266.25
Percentile (p95): 310.85
Percentile (p99): 319.77
IQR: 111.5
Skewness: 0 (Fairly Symmetrical)
Outliers: None

[1] https://github.com/jftuga/go-stats-calculator

[2] https://github.com/jftuga/go-stats-calculator/tree/main?tab=...

[3] https://github.com/jftuga/go-stats-calculator?tab=readme-ov-...

[4] https://github.com/jftuga/go-stats-calculator/releases