MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Antibabelic | 2026-01-26 12:58:43+00:00
> Right now, LLMs are a source of truth for many people. We are becoming more and more dependent on them and rewiring ourselves to make use of them instead of reading books or original sources

This is the core thesis of the essay. I have two problems with this statement. I think only a small minority of people reads books or original sources in the first place. The general audience relies on simplified and often wrong generalizations aimed at, well, the general audience. I also don't think researchers are at risk of "rewiring themselves" to rely entirely on LLMs. Science is suffering from an influx of AI slop papers, but it's not that different from all the weak or dishonest research that was being published before. Ultimately, our core academic institutions are designed around minimizing this and incentivizing high-quality intellectual output.
by threethirtytwo | 2026-01-26 12:59:05+00:00
>Again, don't be elitist about work you don't do and don't understand

There’s a difference between being elite at and being truthful. Don’t weaponize the word elitism and use it to attack truth.

https://brght.org/iq/jobtitle/cook/

Below average iq for cooks. So you’re wrong. Almost everything you talk about is wildly wrong and off base.

> It wasn't actually intended to be ha-ha funny, my guy, that's just a stock phrase.

lol. Did it ever occur to you i was just using the same stock phrase to reference your “funny story”? Takes a certain iq to figure that out.

> And if you're asking, do I trust my own judgement to critically evaluate claims in my own industry? Yes. Yes, I do.

Good. A smart person though wouldn’t completely trust himself because he knows no one is infallible. So he evaluates his own judgements against other judgements. Especially judgements of others smarter than them. Are you a smart person? Maybe ask yourself that question.

> If you rely on other people telling you what's good and never think for yourself, you're always just going to be a follower. It's like you've never been on a single enterprise software sales call, jeez.

lol, never asked you that and it’s the wrong comparison my guy, my dude.

Read what I wrote. It’s a call to evaluate your own statement against others who say the opposite. It’s not a call to rely on what others say. Nor is it a call to just trust everything in your own brain. I asked you to evaluate your judgements and the judgements of others smarter than you as a whole.

Your like the guy who thinks everyone is a salesman so you mistrust the entire world and you think everything you know and think is 100 percent. I feel you’re scared of being wrong. Jeeze. Theres nothing to be scared of for being wrong, my dude.

A smart person would think: hey half the population plus this guy smarter than me (who has nothing to sell) is saying AI writes all his code now. Maybe consider their perspective?

But that’s not you is it?
by walthamstow | 2026-01-26 12:59:07+00:00
As an aside, the Financial Times (yes, that one) did a great interview a couple of years ago with prolific London graff artist 10FOOT.

The comments were predictably howling with rage and injustice ("he's a criminal!!", says employee of cartel laundry HSBC), but I enjoyed it a lot.

https://www.ft.com/content/45a184ee-b7d9-4c16-b1c2-71def32cc...
by musculus | 2026-01-26 12:59:09+00:00
Good catch. You are absolutely right.

My native language is Polish. I conducted the original research and discovered the 'square root proof fabrication' during sessions in Polish. I then reproduced the effect in a clean session for this case study.

Since my written English is not fluent enough for a technical essay, I used Gemini as a translator and editor to structure my findings. I am aware of the irony of using an LLM to complain about LLM hallucinations, but it was the most efficient way to share these findings with an international audience.
by mothballed | 2026-01-26 12:59:10+00:00
They won't run out of people to deport, because all those jobs (and occasionally, benefits) the illegals profit from will still exist. If you remove the people but not the incentive you just get new and different people.

This is by design to make sure ICE and CBP jobs program for psychopaths always exists. Did you think they were actually going to put themselves out of the job by going for the roots?
by holowoodman | 2026-01-26 12:59:47+00:00
Statically linked binaries are a huge security problem, as are containers, for the same reason. Vendors are too slow to patch.

When dynamically linking against shared OS libraries, Updates are far quicker and easier.

And as for the size advantage, just look at a typical Golang or Haskell program. Statically linked, two-digit megabytes, larger than my libc...
by budududuroiu | 2026-01-26 13:00:53+00:00
Just finished my switch. Dumped my iPhone + Macbook Pro + iPad Pro + Apple Watch + Airpods setup for a Framework 13 + GrapheneOS Pixel 10 Pro + Seiko watch and wired earbuds.

I run NixOS, it's incredibly easy to do anything I want by just pointing Claude at my dotfiles and telling it "I want this", applying, and then reverting if I don't like the results.

The switch came more from a realisation that Apple devices are becoming media/slop consumption devices, rather than devices that run my workflows for me.
by hsuduebc2 | 2026-01-26 13:01:19+00:00
If it was his job to downplay the risk's then he absolutely deserved at least this.

Google or any other US company will not be defending your's or anyone's else's data. It's not only that they doesn't want to(which they dont) but they simply can't.

You must comply with the law and you do not want to currently piss off anyone's at the top.
by jqpabc123 | 2026-01-26 13:01:58+00:00
In the words of Richard Stallman, it's "pretend intelligence".

The language may be structurally correct and *some* of the facts as well but any real grasp of what is being said is largely missing.

This is a direct result of a design built around probability. The overriding objective is plausibility --- not to be confused with either facts or intelligence.
by zahirbmirza | 2026-01-26 13:02:09+00:00
It does seem an easy win for govts to easily conform.

I buy the ones that are suitable for dimmable switches (even tho I don't have dimmers) because there is discernible flicker with most other LED bulbs if you for eg wave your arm through the air or made a saccade. There is a certification (i think) for LED bulbs that are closer to
sunlight in their emission spectrum
by cxr | 2026-01-26 13:02:10+00:00
Browsers have had widespread support for processing files via drag-and-drop and the <input> element since HTML5 (< 2015). The last holdout on allowing the filepicker to accept a full directory (and its subdirectories, recursively—rather than 1 or N individual files) was Safari sometime around (before) 2020.

The Chrome team's new, experimental APIs are a separate matter. They provide additional capabilities, but many programs can get along just fine without since they don't don't strictly need them in order to work—if they would ever even have end up using them at all. A bunch of the applications in the original post fall into this category. You don't need new or novel APIs to be able to hash a file, for example. It's a developer education problem (see also: hubris).
by __alexs | 2026-01-26 13:02:47+00:00
I am not an EM (anymore) but I see a lot of more junior engineers struggle with ambiguity and complex decision making in general.

It is not uncommon to end up in situations where there are not clear right answers and developing the techniques as an individual, and as a technical contributor to navigate these well is tricky.

I don't think this is an EM specific function at all though and is just something more experienced people should be doing for their team. I think the EM definitely has a role in making sure people identify that they could benefit from that kind of help and make sure they find it, but doing the actual coaching is optional.
by account42 | 2026-01-26 13:02:58+00:00
Email is more like physical mail - you send something to an address and whoever lives at that address gets the mail.

The described ATProto/ActivityPub behavior would be like trying keep the address tied to whoever lived there first.

Persistent identities are a nice goal but treating transient identities as persistent is not. A better designed system would use the domain name system only to look up the current identity associated with a name instead of trying to permanently tie the name to an identity.
by ajsnigrutin | 2026-01-26 13:03:18+00:00
But that's my point exactly.... do you consider this to be a good thing? Should EU behave the same as russia or iran? Should those two countries be an "excuse" for us to do it too (hey! russia does it too!)? Should the police in eg. Brussles start shooting at protesting farmers and say "what about iran, they're killing their protesters too!"?

If we consider russia bad for doing those blocks above, then we should consider EU being bad when they do it for us.
by OhMeadhbh | 2026-01-26 13:03:40+00:00
When I was in the Marines, we had a rule of thumb that every Marine needed to know their own mission and the mission of units two or three echelons above them. So individual Marines needed to know their mission, their platoon's mission and their company's mission. Company commanders needed to know their mission, their battalion's mission and the division's mission. More specifics for echelons closer to you.

This is complicated by the fact that Marines deploy as MEUs, MEBs and MEFs [1] which aren't "pure" echelons, but it's a rule of thumb and guiding principle more than a hard and fast requirement.

I've ALWAYS been annoyed by engineering organizations that don't think developers at the leaf nodes of the org chart need to know what's going on. Devs may not do anything with the info, but letting people in on what's happening seems to send the message that "management thinks you're important enough to hear what we're working on" and every now and again, individual devs need to make decisions that depend on these more abstract / higher-level goals.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_air%E2%80%93ground_task...
by adim86 | 2026-01-26 13:04:13+00:00
I find it shocking that a reputable resource such as this is still displaying the size of Greenland or Africa wrong (Mercator projection) in relation to other land masses in its marketing material and documentation, like here. It just brings doubt to the whole project, which is a shame considering all the time they must have put in. Why show the map that way when majority of its users will never use it for nautical navigation?
https://maplibre.org/maplibre-gl-js/docs/examples/display-a-...
by galkk | 2026-01-26 13:05:23+00:00
Reading a book is an investment, and progressively larger and larger amount of books are not worth it, and, looking back, were never worth it.

For example, Look how the sentiment has changed about Malcolm Gladwell books. They were very popular among people who consider themselves smart, and now are debunked. Personally, I find it hard to read many recent non-fiction books because you clearly see - this is padding, this is filler, that chapter could’ve been edited out and no message would be lost, this is just self advertisement…
by arcbyte | 2026-01-26 13:05:26+00:00
I think you've identified analogous functions, but I don't think your analogy holds as you've written it. A more faithful analogy to OP is that there is no better flight crash investigator than the aviation engineer designing the plane, but flight crash investigation is an actual failure of his primary duty of engineering safe planes.

Still not a great rendition of this thought, but closer.
by DivingForGold | 2026-01-26 13:05:36+00:00
"AI has a physical dependency in Taiwan that can be easily destroyed by Chinese missiles, even without an invasion" ?

Arguably false. Why do you think the US has encouraged TSMC foundries, now inside Arizona ? It's obviously to protect against the scenario that China takes Taiwan. In that case, give it 6 months or less for US TSMC foundries to produce the finest. China taking Taiwan will likely not result in the CCP getting any technology, certainly Taiwanese have "contingency plans" to vaporize all tech in the event they are invaded.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-26 13:06:52+00:00
> If the site is found to have breached the rules of EU's under the Digital Services Act, the Commission could fine the company up to 6% of its global annual turnover.

I don't mean disrespect to EU but the fact that the amount of fines in percentages is same when Italy decided to fine worldwide income of Cloudflare 6% for not effectively giving into banning any website Italy says in very short period of time effectively asking Cf to do something very bad for internet for the lobbying in football at italy

And you get the same fine as that when your platform is LITERALLY creating AI generated nsfw deepfakes of LITERAL CHILDREN.

Um.. People might think 6% is enough but is it? To all the woman who felt unsafe on X or were created deepfakes of, would that 6% compensation be enough where they felt publicly humiliated.

One can't put a number on this thing imo. At this point, Pedophilia's a serious crime, EU should try to charge criminally X.AI for all woman (European or not) who got mentally harassed by the bot.

What's on the internet stays on the internet (archive/wayback machine or not/other), can you imagine how much impact could be mentally on a child whose such photos were generated?

I mean something's better than nothing but also X.ai or grok deserves much much more severe punishment than a 6% fine imo.
by notahacker | 2026-01-26 13:07:10+00:00
Bus options are a lot thinner in VLEO, and I don't think even decision makers purchasing something utterly generic are scanning company blogs looking for excessive use of slang and GPT sentence patterns as a reason to veto technical decisions. We're talking about an industry in which executives generally are engineers and often love flaunting their nerdiness and the most successful player is also the world's biggest social media troll. The US defense lexicon they'll have to master to bid on that type of contract is way more cringeworthy than bro-speak anyway...
by anthk | 2026-01-26 13:07:15+00:00
Guix asking for donations from propietary websites it's a disgrace to GNU.

But i woudn't expect less from some hijackers.

https://guix.gnu.org/donate/

Proof:

https://donate.stripe.com/8x2bJ133ia2H3Zw4j38N201

https://donate.stripe.com/aFaeVd7jy7Uz1Ro02N8N204

https://donate.stripe.com/dRm5kD47m0s79jQ9Dn8N202
by ljf | 2026-01-26 13:07:50+00:00
If you are looking for a fermented foods guide/cookboard/potted history - I really recommend 'Of Cabbages and Kimchi': https://fermentingchange.substack.com/p/on-my-bookshelf-of-c...

I enjoyed 'The Art of Fermentation' by Sandor Katz, but is wasn't guide/cookery book enough for me - 'Of Cabbages' hit the right note, and I've been working my way thorough it all.

I'm a little obsessed with fermented chilli sauces, and have been using the brine to make an excellent hot ketchup, than friends keep asking for more of.
by bediger4000 | 2026-01-26 13:07:54+00:00
We should label opinion pieces as such, and note authors. Some well know opinion pundits are (effectively) always wrong. Some large fraction of the audience will be upset they've been tricked into giving Ezra Douthglesias or someone another click.

I'm not against opinion pundits appearing, I think that labeling them will reduce strife in the comments.
by orbital-decay | 2026-01-26 13:08:04+00:00
>They are saying that, and most real world LED lighting uses very cheap diodes, like, 99.9999% of them, which create very poor colour compared with incandescent bulbs, which create perfect colour representation.

Have you actually read the study? It's about infrared and has nothing to do with color rendering and visible spectrum. They're vaguely speculating about some mitochondrial mechanism of action not related to vision at all.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-26 13:09:23+00:00
From how bad US treats EU, it definitely felt like EU had a stockholm syndrome.

The Greenland Crisis Response from EU was surprisingly muscular tho. I hope that they can keep on moving in that trajectory and fix apart from the stockholm syndrome.

It's kind of understandable why EU might have such syndrome but America's the toxic drunk partner in the relationship abusing EU and EU kind of needs to step out or be more masculine and not be abused basically (in my opinion).
by UncleMeat | 2026-01-26 13:09:34+00:00
Yes, RBG retiring would not have switched the court.

But 6-3 is meaningfully different than 5-4. 6-3 means you can lose one from your coalition, enabling more extreme majority opinions. You can see this even in the very highest profile cases like Dobbs and Trump v US, where one of the conservatives didn't join the entire majority.

It also makes flipping the court enormously more difficult. 5-4 means that one conservative dying and an inopportune time and you flip it. 6-3 makes this statistically unlikely.

I very strongly suspect that we will see Alito and Thomas retire this year. Everybody knows how this goes now.
by einpoklum | 2026-01-26 13:10:03+00:00
I am not familiar with the ecosystem of geographic data and mapping as online services. Can someone please explain...

* How this tile format, or the organization behind it, related to OpenStreetMap (if it is related at all)?

* Why the need to replace the previous tile format / scheme which they mention?

* What challenges such a project faces (other than, I suppose, being noticed and considered for adoption)?
by testfrequency | 2026-01-26 13:10:06+00:00
Conflict of interest and retaliation.

Just last week my friend told me a senior manager in a meeting made a passive aggressive comment about “I don’t know why the team is so busy and can’t take on more work right now, when they seem to have time working on other personal projects”. Referring directly to someone that was in their org who had just posted about some personal project work on LinkedIn.

It happens all the time…companies don’t like (or don’t approve) of work outside of work.
by mgdev | 2026-01-26 13:10:08+00:00
This thing is cool except:

1) It chews through tokens. If you're on a metered API plan I would avoid it. I've spent $300+ on this just in the last 2 days, doing what I perceived to be fairly basic tasks.

2) It's terrifying. No directory sandboxing, etc. On one hand, it's cool that this thing can modify anything on my machine that I can. On the other, it's terrifying that it can modify anything on my machine that I can.

That said, some really nice things that make this "click":

1) Dynamic skill creation is awesome.

2) Having the ability to schedule recurring and one-time tasks makes it terribly convenient.

3) Persistent agents with remote messaging makes it really feel like an assistant.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2026-01-26 13:10:28+00:00
> The net effect of this is to suppress strongly dissenting opinions, under threat of further community action

I think it's unfortunate you call it suppression instead of rejection but I am otherwise more than okay with these thoughtless opinions (thanks for admitting this is your opinion instead of trying to hide behind things you call factual analyses) being rejected by the community. Though, not rejected so much that the opinions can't be addressed (hence not flagging them) because others should have a chance to weigh in. Ironically, I've been foiled by comments being flagged when posting comments; the result was actually my speech being prevented from responding to someone else's.

Regardless, a threat of a downvote is hardly "intimidation" and calling it such is emotional rhetoric. Especially calling it a threat of "community action"; it's not like I'm speaking for anyone but myself. Nobody's out to get you personally, they just don't like America's gestapo being normalized and excused, which your posts happen to do regardless of being within the guidelines.

> You speak of more "thoughtful" posting

Think about the effects of posting something which seems to normalize or excuse the actions being taken by ICE, especially their needless escalations which have twice resulted in something that is reasonably called murder. I suspect you will arrive at the conclusion that these aren't murders (or that their actions are already normal and/or excusable) and therefore you are simply cannot be normalizing and/or excusing their actions. Of course, such thoughtless posts will be flagged and downvoted; that is still not intimidation to suppress opinions but an obvious conclusion based on simple observation. One might consider, with an open mind, whether a community-rejected post is legitimately in bad taste. That is what I mean.

> but I can find no charitable way to interpret this

Your reading comprehension was, and appears to still be, lacking. Being unable to find the meaning is not evidence that the meaning doesn't exist. It's possible you just gave up too soon when searching for it. Such is the nature of learning.
by kbmckenna | 2026-01-26 13:10:41+00:00
My point was pushing back on the false choice offered by the parent comment that we have open borders or the current maximalist deportation policy.

Talking about that bill specifically though, what were the issues with it (not rhetorical)? It had the support of the Border Patrol Union and Chamber of Commerce. Yes, many Republicans opposed it when released, but that opposition came after Trump publicly told them to oppose it. Here’s a timeline:

Late January 2024: Trump publicly opposed the border deal before it was even finalized, with McConnell acknowledging in a private meeting that Trump’s opposition put Republicans in a serious bind. [1]

Early February 2024: Trump declared on social media that “only a fool, or a Radical Left Democrat, would vote for this horrendous Border Bill” [2] and pressured Republicans to kill the bill, saying they needed a “Strong, Powerful, and essentially ‘PERFECT’ Border” and were “better off not making a Deal.” [3]

February 5, 2024: Bill text released

February 6-7, 2024: Within 48 hours of the bill’s release, Senate Republicans declared it dead, with McConnell saying the speaker made clear it would not become law. [4] Only four Republicans voted for it in the procedural vote, and even McConnell voted against it. [5]
McConnell’s own admission: McConnell later explicitly stated that “our nominee for president didn’t seem to want us to do anything at all” regarding the border. [6]

The bill wasn’t perfect and had legitimate critics, but calling it a “fantasy narrative” ignores that it died specifically because of political pressure, not substance. House Speaker Mike Johnson declared it “dead on arrival” before the text was even finalized.

My point stands. If this bill was inadequate, where’s the Republican alternative? What’s their legislative proposal to fix the broken immigration system? Blocking bills is easy. Show what they’re actually proposing to solve the problem.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/25/politics/gop-senators-angry-t...

[2] https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/4451977-mcconnell-dealt-...

[3] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/senate-immigration-deal-republi...

[4] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/senate-republicans...

[5] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/republicans-kill-b...

[6] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/joe-biden/white-house-mitch...