MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lbrito | 2026-01-09 01:04:39+00:00
Just gonna drop this, from dang a few days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46378818

>we want most political stories to be flagged on HN, for a critical reason: if they weren't, then HN would turn into a current-affairs site, and that would not be HN at all.

See all the instances of "we do not want most political stories":

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Guess this is one of the exceptions!
by FloorEgg | 2026-01-09 01:04:44+00:00
> This person

It's two different people.

If I zoom out and look at the whole thread, I can take a more generous view of your criticism and acknowledge that I could have been more direct rather than leading through questions. I still don't think that's sealioning, but I wasn't as clear and patient as I could have been or want to show up here. I am doing my best and trying to get better.

The issue I think is that the HN guidelines have two different sets of criteria for on-topic and off-topic. With a bit more time to reflect, it seems like the people who think this submission is on-topic are only looking at the on-topic criteria set and not really considering the off-topic criteria set.

They also aren't considering the spirit of the guidelines to foster intellectually curious dialog and avoid topics that derail it.

The comment two up from the one you replied to was not my best and does warrant some criticism, and I think that's the one that probably triggered you to make the sealioning accusation, even though I disagree with that particular classification.

> The idea that it does not foster curiosity comes from a very particular place

Spell it out for me please. What exactly are you accusing me of? This entire thread has been hostile to me but keeps beating around the bush. Are you saying that HN mods and I are protecting Grok in a biased way?

> This post is bullseye dead center in bounds for a HN post.

It definitely isn't, as it hits multiple criteria for off-topic as stated clearly in the HN guidelines.
by ben_w | 2026-01-09 01:04:46+00:00
While true, the only anyone has to care that vibe coding* produces technical debt is that the LLM doesn't always properly clean up that technical debt without being prompted to do so, and that when you have too much technical debt your progress slows down regardless of if there's a human or an LLM doing the coding.

To put it another way, ask what code an LLM can maintain, not just what code a human (of whatever experience level) can maintain.

* in the original sense, no human feedback at any point
by andreguzzon | 2026-01-09 01:05:31+00:00
Large Language Models trained on scientific literature exhibit systematic resistance to paradigm-challenging
evidence, quantifiable through probability estimates. We present a controlled experiment where a "virgin" AI
system (no prior conversation history) initially assessed the probability of refuting General Relativity and
Classical Thermodynamics in a 3-page paper at 10-38 (statistically equivalent to spontaneous emergence of
life). Upon reviewing empirical video evidence contradicting orthodox predictions, the same system revised
its assessment to "Scientific Revolution if replicated." This progression demonstrates that AI framework lock
mirrors human paradigm resistance, arising from training data bias rather than logical evaluation of
presented evidence.
by basilikum | 2026-01-09 01:05:43+00:00
They say on Reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/logitech/comments/1q66q1l/just_real...

> There is no need for an online connection. There is some misunderstanding of what the certificate is. It has no online connection dependency. It is a developer certification that is extremely common on macOS apps. The cert only caused an issue because we let it expire. We now have strict processes in place to maintain the certification

The article also says that the expired certificate breaks auto updates. What kind of certificate is this exactly?
by kemayo | 2026-01-09 01:05:44+00:00
2018 -- I'd assume that this is posted today as a pointed jab at X getting quite different treatment despite Grok being used to make child porn and other revenge-porn style content.

e.g. https://www.wired.com/story/x-grok-app-store-nudify-csam-app...

EDIT: wow, I have never seen the score on a comment I posted fluctuate up and down this wildly before. :P
by smallerize | 2026-01-09 01:06:32+00:00
> Unlike other leading chatbots, Grok doesn’t impose many limits on users or block them from generating sexualized content of real people, including minors, said Brandie Nonnecke, senior director of policy at Americans for Responsible Innovation. Other generative AI technologies, including ones from Anthropic PBC, OpenAI and Alphabet Inc.’s Google, are “giving a good-faith effort to mitigate the creation of this content in the first place,” she said. “Obviously, xAI is different. It’s more of a free-for-all.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-07/musk-s-gr...
by gnabgib | 2026-01-09 01:06:53+00:00
This was answered by mods in your recent post Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works? (238 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46307306

Dang https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46316181

> It's true that HN sponsors Launch HNs (and Show HNs) by YC startups.

tomhow https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46322023

> Apart from job postings and Launch HNs, YC-funded startups don't have access to any information or influence that isn't available to anyone else.
by Mjr_Mojo | 2026-01-09 01:07:23+00:00
I can see where you're coming from with your "more fulfilling things" statement, but I disagree. After all, TV's don't spew noise they spew stories. I'm not gonna argue that all TV is fulfilling, but engaging with stories is one of the the things which separates us from animals and to me is one of the more fulfilling things in life.
by nfw2 | 2026-01-09 01:08:45+00:00
"Both GitHub and outside researchers have observed positive impact in controlled experiments and field studies where Copilot has conferred:

55% faster task completion using predictive text

Quality improvements across 8 dimensions (e.g. readability, error-free, maintainability)

50% faster time-to-merge"

how is time-to-merge a vibe?
by gnabgib | 2026-01-09 01:08:57+00:00
Phone (47 points, 6 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46546888

Internet (388 poits, 288 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46542683

Related: Protests (139 points, 104 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46547303
by mullingitover | 2026-01-09 01:09:00+00:00
The subtext here is obviously the contrast with the notorious CSAM and deepfakes app formerly known as twitter enjoying first class app status in all app stores.

I think that the App Store status is understating the seriousness of the criminal activity, however. X is creating and distributing massive amounts of deepfake porn content that is punishable by hard prison time in about twenty states, and yet none of the ringleaders or their accomplices have been charged.
by trollbridge | 2026-01-09 01:09:12+00:00
In my state it would kick in immediately. You would report your current income, which is now $0 since you just lost your job.

Virtually every provider in my state is in-network for the various Medicaid options to choose from, so you would not need to "switch over providers". It's usually better than private insurance.

As far as "why not just have consistent healthcare coverage for them and for everyone, all the time", because it would be very expensive to do so? Medicaid covers poorer Americans (including people who just lost their jobs), not the entire population.
by erelong | 2026-01-09 01:09:54+00:00
> People often treat relaxation and wakefulness as two opposites: relaxation as a drowsy and dull, wakefullnes as sharp and jittery. But the two can co-exist.

I've discovered recently the two indeed are opposites and meditation is considered to be a kind of wakefulness, that I personally find no benefit in.

People who are in need of relaxation I therefore find do not want or need meditation as it enforces a moderate kind of wakefulness.

They either should in this alternative view, rest (which is an unfocused and unforced state whereas meditation maintains some kind of focus and attention) or engage in something "wakeful" which might naturally involve having attention.
by astrange | 2026-01-09 01:10:27+00:00
I can't stand Beyerdynamic audio and don't understand why anyone recommends it. It has an awful treble peak you can't stop noticing once you hear it, and you can't drive their headphones without an amp.

I recommend HiFiMan Sundara/Ananda if they fit your head and there aren't any CPU fans in your room.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-09 01:10:50+00:00
> I imagine it could even work like Sponsorblock does, and we could crowdsource people who's comments are inflammatory

Let's discuss how to make this reality.

Do you want a ranking system where more the people downvote some person, the better? if so how do you prevent spam in that, do you take metrics like karma or what exactly?

I don't think that captcha is a solution either but also that I don't know how to feel about removing entire swaths of people, I can think someone writing something bad once and probably get into this "black-list"

Another aspect is once again the black list, I don't know but do we really need a system of essentially a communal ban?

The only thing I can see it reasonable is if there is a slop bot comment poster but I rarely face this issue but if you do, you can probably create a tampermonkey script and tampermonkey scripts work on chrome,firefox and "Userscripts" which should work on safari as well and that script is most likely gonna be compatible on both tampermonkey and userscripts.
by MobiusHorizons | 2026-01-09 01:10:50+00:00
Is this what people mean by Enums? I must not have used languages where Enums have those powers. I have often been very confused by statements people make about Enums so that would make some sense.

How do sum types address the problem that the underlying type (int or string or whatever) is totally capable of describing values other than those your code was compiled with? I'm mostly thinking of version skew with something like a dynamic library or plugin, although casting would probably also have the same effect.
by JKCalhoun | 2026-01-09 01:11:23+00:00
What a lovely period of time that was—when "Computer Recreations" ran monthly in Scientific American. I read the column every month and was fascinated to learn about Eliza, Core Wars, Conway's Life, Wa-Tor, etc. It was a time when you coded simply for the fun of it—to explore, learn.

I know you can still do that today, but… something has changed. I don't know what it is. (Maybe I changed.)

Anyway, I was unable to track down PDF versions of the original articles, but, for the curious and newcomers to Core Wars, they're transcribed here:

https://corewar.co.uk/dewdney/
by godelski | 2026-01-09 01:11:26+00:00
How is this not any different than the Apple "you're holding it wrong" argument. I mean the critical reason for that kind of response being so out of touch is that the same people praise Apple for its intuitive nature. How can any reasonable and rational person (especially an engineer!) not see that these two beliefs are in direct opposition?

If "you're holding it wrong" then the tool is not universally intuitive. Sure, there'll always be some idiot trying to use a lightbulb to screw in a nail, but if your nail has threads on it and a notch on the head then it's not the user's fault for picking up a screwdriver rather than a hammer.

> And these people have "engineer" on their resumes..

What scares me about ML is that many of these people have "research scientist" in their titles. As a researcher myself I'm constantly stunned at people not understanding something so basic like who has the burden of proof. Fuck off. You're the one saying we made a brain by putting lightning into a rock and shoving tons of data into it. There's so much about that that I'm wildly impressed by. But to call it a brain in the same way you say a human brain is, requires significant evidence. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. There's some incredible evidence but an incredible lack of scrutiny that that isn't evidence for something else.
by ryandrake | 2026-01-09 01:13:07+00:00
Was going to submit that one, but I figured it was pointless. The flaggers would take it down within minutes. I submitted this one[1] earlier, and it got predictably flagged into oblivion within 10 minutes by the Elon Defense Brigade.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46545962
by zylepe | 2026-01-09 01:13:16+00:00
Pole of Inaccessibility is also a useful technique for placing the label for a polygon at a visually pleasing location on a map. @mourner came up with a more efficient algorithm for computing the point https://blog.mapbox.com/a-new-algorithm-for-finding-a-visual... (https://github.com/mapbox/polylabel) which JTS's MaximumInscribedCircle utility is based on, which I use for "innermost point" label placement in planetiler.
by siltcakes | 2026-01-09 01:13:25+00:00
Israel is a genocidal terrorist entity. It's also wildly unstable. They've been having massive protests (even predating Oct 7th). The government is literally run by extremists and they have many apartheid laws to enforce Jewish supremacy, including the ability of any Jew to become an Israeli citizen and start voting (so much for democracy!). If only indigenous Palestinians were allowed to vote, it would be a democracy. A voting populous of imported Europeans is not that. Thankfully the Zionist project won't last much longer as the world has seen its true nature and rightfully turned against it.
by soraminazuki | 2026-01-09 01:15:11+00:00
Grok is generating content of real woman and children being undressed, raped, humiliated, hurt, or killed. I wonder what's driving some people to downplay and defend these monstrous actions. "Calm down! Not only is this quite normal, it's a constitutional act." The reality distortion field is very strong this past year or two when it comes to AI-related or wrongfully flagged threads.

- https://futurism.com/future-society/grok-violence-women

- https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/grok-says-safeguard...

- https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/elon-musk-...
by AstroBen | 2026-01-09 01:16:17+00:00
Typically I hear how other people are doing things and I test it out for myself. Just like I'm doing with AI

Actually IDEs vs vim are a perfect analogy because they both have the ability to feel like they're helping a tonne, and at the end of the work day neither group outperforms the other

I'm not standing on the sidelines criticizing this stuff. I'm using it. I'm growing more and more skeptical because it's not noticably helping me deliver features faster

At this point I'm at "okay record a video and show me these 3x gains you're seeing because I'm not experiencing the same thing"

The increased demand for rigor is because my experience isn't matching what others say

I can see a 25% bump in productivity being realistic if I learn where it works well. There are people claiming 3-10x. It sounds ridiculous
by libraryofbabel | 2026-01-09 01:17:24+00:00
You're correct that the culture of mathematics has changed a lot, and has become much more collaborative. The rise of the modern doctoral training system in Germany later in the 19th century is also relevant. So really Gauss's example points primarily to how much mathematics has changed. But at the same time, I think you could reasonably take Gauss to task even applying the standards of his own era - compare him with Euler, for example, who was much more open with publication and generous with his time and insights, frequently responding to letters from random people asking him mathematical questions, rather like Tao responding to random comments on his blog (which he does). I admire Euler more, and he was born 70 years before Gauss.

Of course, irascible brilliance and eccentricity has an honorable place in mathematics too - I don't want to exclude anyone. (Think Grigori Perelman and any number of other examples!)
Ask HN: Why isn't AI spawning profitable indie games?
by eveningsun | 2026-01-09 01:18:19+00:00
Everyone’s hyped about Claude Code, Nano Banana models, and how AI can now “build a game in 30 minutes for $ 20.”

If that’s true—why don’t we see a flood of ultra-low-cost, high-quality tower defense games (like Kingdom Rush) built with AI, raking in serious revenue?

After all:

Art? → Image generators + style locking.
Code? → LLMs can scaffold Unity/Godot logic.
Balancing? → Maybe RL or even manual tuning on a tiny scope.
Audio? → AI voice + music tools exist.

And yet… the App Store isn’t overrun with polished, profitable Kingdom Rush–style games made by solo devs using AI. Why?

P.S. Yes, this post was AI-generated—my first attempt at market research before launching Kingdom Rush: Nano Banana Edition.
by cookiengineer | 2026-01-09 01:18:26+00:00
> Like what? There's no technology that simply by existing causes harm to the world, people do that part.

People create that technology, therefore enforcing their own lack of morals and lack of ethics onto it. That's the part that most humans in the post-digital age seem to ignore to purposefully deflect and absolve themselves from any responsibilities.

Also, companies will always be controlled by humans that optimized their life for greed, not by the ones that specialized on philosophical implications.

The inventors of novichok or the nuclear bomb didn't have "world peace" in mind. They had "world peace through me enforcing my own will onto my enemies" in mind.
by bruce511 | 2026-01-09 01:19:07+00:00
Returns are better on the lower end of the market, and demand for rent there is higher. Which is why most residential investment is at the bottom end, not the top end.

In most markets I'm guessing an 800k house is at the higher end of the market.

That aside, housing portfolios always plan for a certain amount of unoccupied space. It's built into the model. (That's partly why small investors who own 1 or 2 properties get hit harder by this.)

Equally, even if the house is empty, there's usually some capital gain going on.

Investing in property is a long-term investment. The cost of buying, or selling is very high. So it's about getting quality units, in the right market space, and then leveraging that for a decade or more.

Yes there are lemons. And yes they'll get sold, perhaps at a loss. But being unoccupied for a bit doesn't make it a lemon, and being unoccupied won't necessarily trigger a sale.

Institutional investors are much more experienced and thus also a lot more likely to not buy lemons in the first place. Most "mom and dad with a second property" investors either inherited a place, kept an earlier property they lived in, or bought another property in their own neighborhood. They're typically gonna make some mistakes along the way.
by pixelatedindex | 2026-01-09 01:20:01+00:00
Your house now can be rented for 4-5K a month if not more, you have no mortgage. Your property taxes are capped at purchase price due to Prop 13. All said and done can’t you net like 35-40K or so per year on a single home?

I agree that buying a home and immediately putting it up for rent would put you underwater these days but during ZIRP times rent and mortgage weren’t too far from each other.
by hoss1474489 | 2026-01-09 01:20:01+00:00
Always hated Logitech Options bloatware, why should the software drain my battery, phone home, and require screen recording permission just to emulate a keystroke when I push a button on the mouse?

I enjoyed my trip to Micro Center today to finally ditch Logitech after those buttons stopped working. Put up with Options for over a decade because at least it did the one thing I needed.
by dgacmu | 2026-01-09 01:20:53+00:00
But it's not. You can do an RCT of the new treatment vs the old treatment. You won't get a direct measure of its absolute efficacy but you will know if it's superior/ non-inferior to the best known thing. And then you can use observational techniques to estimate the absolute values. That's exactly what you would do if you wanted to develop, say, a new flu vaccine that you thought would outperform current vaccines. You get the most important information: whether or not we should switch to the new one.

If you have a new vaccine for a disease for which there is no existing vaccine you do a standard placebo controlled RCT which gives you a direct, high quality measurement of efficacy and side effects.
by bschwindHN | 2026-01-09 01:21:00+00:00
In my experience, most of embassy's HALs support blocking variants as well.

I don't quite understand the opposition to async in this context though. Embassy's executor is quite nice. You get to write much more straightforward linear code, and it's more battery efficient because the CPU core goes to sleep at await points. The various hardware interrupts then wake up the core and notify the executor to continue making progress.

The compiler transformation from async/await to a state machine is a godsend for this. Doing the equivalent by hand would be a major pain to get the same power efficiency and code ergonomics.
by Skyy93 | 2026-01-09 01:22:08+00:00
Its not really the "ugly" feeling that bugs me. Its the feeling that I actually downgrade when I "upgrade". In my perception an update should make things better, and this is something I do not see with the new update. If anyone has a good example where they actually did something better than before than please enlight me. I would really be interested in hearing something that is better than before.
by itake | 2026-01-09 01:22:34+00:00
At the start, getting users is the first problem. No one is going to bother scamming your app if there is no one there.

Then once people exploit the app, that doesn't mean they wont add value (e.g. contribute positive content). Maybe they are just a high school kid that wants to talk to his friends in his last town?

Once you have users, then there will be other easy signals to detect: Is the person teleporting? Do they hit rate limits freq? Is their GPS location the exact 'center' of the city? Is there GPS a nice pretty number? Does their GPS location never move?
by retrac | 2026-01-09 01:23:26+00:00
I'm learning ASL. That led me to learn about Deaf culture in North America. The stories that the Deaf have told each other, and have passed down. A world where everyone is deaf is one of the first stories you'll learn about; I'm not even sure when I first encountered it, but it was in that context.

One common modern version of the fable is told with an astronaut who finds that they've landed on a parallel Earth where everyone is Deaf and sign language is the norm.

The book A Study of American Deaf Folklore by Susan D Rutherford is a bit dated now but interesting in exploring the functions and roles of myths here.
by dworks | 2026-01-09 01:23:49+00:00
What we want as developers: To be able to implement functionality that utilizes a model for tasks like OCR, visual input and analysis, search or re-ranking etc, without having to implement an LLM API and pay for it. Instead we'd like to offer the functionality to users, possibly at no cost, and use their edge computing capacity to achieve it, by calling local protocols and models.

What we want as users: To have advanced functionality without having to pay for a model or API and having to auth it with every app we're using. We also want to keep data on our devices.

What trainers of small models want: A way for users to get their models on their devices, and potentially pay for advanced, specialized and highly performant on-device models, instead of APIs.
by AdieuToLogic | 2026-01-09 01:23:50+00:00
Those papers are really interesting, thanks for sharing them!

Do you happen to know of any research papers which explore constraint programming techniques wrt LLMs prompts?

For example:

Create a chicken noodle soup recipe.

The recipe must satisfy all of the following:

- must not use more than 10 ingredients
- must take less than 30 minutes to prepare
- ...