MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by shepherdjerred | 2026-01-12 22:25:22+00:00
I’m going to assume you’re open to an honest discussion here.

> "assuming it had the same expertise in each language" is the most important part here, because the expertise of AI with these languages is very different.

You are correct, but I am trying to illustrate that assuming some ideal system with equal expertise, the languages with more safety would win out in productivity/bugs over those with less safety.

As in to say that it could be worth investing further in safer programming languages because AI would benefit.

> We need these constraints because we can't reliably track all the necessary details.

AI cannot reliably track the details either (yet, though I am sure it can be done). Even if it could, it would be a complete waste of resources (tokens).

Why have an AI determine the type of a variable when it could be done in a deterministic manner with a compiler or linter?

To me these arguments closely mirror/follow arguments of static/dynamically typed languages for human programmers. Static type systems eliminate certain kinds of errors and can produce higher quality programs. AI systems will benefit in the same way if not more by getting instant feedback on the validity of their program.
by devwastaken | 2026-01-12 22:25:38+00:00
Steam, like Origin, is one of the few that refuses to support 3rd party launchers due to DRM. epic and gog both work in heroic launcher. Steam games are no longer usable in systems less than 4GB memory.

Steam has removed all its 32-bit wine compatibility, minimal launcher, and is now no different than any other chromium bloatware. they chose the easiest path and are still struggling to make it work.
by beaker52 | 2026-01-12 22:25:59+00:00
That’s cool. I know context windows are arbitrarily larger now because consumers think that larger window = better, but I think the sentiment that the model can’t even use the window effectively still stands?

I still find LLMs perform best with a potent and focussed context to work with, and performance goes down quite significantly the more context it has.

What’s your experience been?
by defrost | 2026-01-12 22:26:00+00:00
> When you break the law and you don't submit to the legal system you are a criminal.

Weird take when ICE are infamous for staking out courthouses and scooping up people working their way through applications and appeals.

Further, undocumented aliens in the US are guilty of civil infractions not criminal felonies .. these are a seperate issue altogether.

* https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_document/FINA...

* https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/fact-sheet/debunk...

Perhaps consider getting a clue about this rather than repeating falsehoods.
by arghwhat | 2026-01-12 22:26:13+00:00
Foods, full stop, is easy to modify. More generally, a producer can arbitrary control any product composition according to their own goals.

Nothing to do with "processed foods" in general, despite a good portion of the affected foods being under that label. It's simply a matter of malicious companies combined with unknowing, unempowered consumers.

By trying to single out something as massively generic as "processed foods", you're just making it easy for companies to avoid the problem: Using and manipulating official definitions to be removed from it as a "solution", justifying the whole thing in the basis of numerous good things being in the same category, drawing attention to other foods in the same category that are more commonly associated with the term despite theirs being way worse, etc.

If you want to fix the problem, you need to attack the problem. That is not processing - it is addiction and glycemic value. Going for the underlying attributes means you cannot redefine your way out of it, and gives consumers a better chance to learn what to actually avoid.
by yencabulator | 2026-01-12 22:26:41+00:00
I mean, we were there before this Cowork feature started exposing more users to the slot machine:

"Claude CLI deleted my home directory and wiped my Mac"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46268222

"Vibe coding service Replit deleted production database, faked data, told fibs"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44632575

"Google Antigravity just deleted the contents of whole drive"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46103532
by theamk | 2026-01-12 22:26:50+00:00
it's always nice to see new work in the OS space, especially capability-based on!

One thing in documentation that caught my eye:

> All capabilities can be destroyed but the last reference to a capability which is in-use cannot always be destroyed; for example one must unmap all pages in an address space before destroying the last reference to a VSpace capability.

All errors at the "closing" stage seem weird to me, but this one is strangest - AFAIK no other reference-count has DecRef/Release method that can fail because object is still in use. What usually happens is that the specific reference is destroyed, but the object itself (which no longer can be accessed in any way) hangs around until it's ready to be destroyed as well.
by SnowProblem | 2026-01-12 22:26:52+00:00
I love this because it gets to the heart of information theory. Shannon's foundational insight was that information is surprise. A random sequence is incompressible by definition. But what counts as surprise depends on context, and for text, we know a large amount of it is predictable slop. I suspect there's a lot of room to go along this style of compression. For example, maybe you could store an upfront summary that makes prediction more accurate. Or perhaps you could encode larger sequences or some kind of hierarchical encoding. But this is great.
by IshKebab | 2026-01-12 22:27:09+00:00
You can't run a GitHub CI pipeline locally (in general; there are some projects to try but they're limited). Even if you make as much of it runnable locally as possible (which you should) you're inevitably going to end up debugging some stuff by making commits and pushing them. Release automation. Test reporting. Artifact upload. Pipeline triggers. Permissions.

Count yourself lucky you've never had to deal with any of that!
by ux266478 | 2026-01-12 22:27:12+00:00
> Strange then that the vast majority of LLMs that people use produce non-deterministic output.

> I ran the "non-shitty non-corpo completely determenistic model" through ollama... And immediately got two different answers for the same input.

With deterministic hardware in the same configuration, using the same binaries, providing the same seed, the same input sequence to the same model weights will produce bit-identical outputs. Where you can get into trouble is if you aren't actually specifying your seed, or with non-deterministic hardware in varying configurations, or if your OS mixes entropy with the standard pRNG mechanisms.

Inference is otherwise fundamentally deterministic. In implementation, certain things like thread-scheduling and floating-point math can be contingent on the entire machine state as an input itself. Since replicating that input can be very hard on some systems, you can effectively get rid of it like so:

ollama run [whatever] --seed 123 --temperature 0 --num-thread 1

A note that "--temperature 0" may not strictly be necessary. Depending on your system, setting the seed and restricting to a single thread will be sufficient.

These flags don't magically change LLM formalisms. You can read more about how floating point operations produce non-determinism here:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.17826

In this context, forcing single-threading bypasses FP-hardware's non-associativity issues that crop up with multi-threaded reduction. If you still don't have bit-replicated outputs for the same input sequence, either something is seriously wrong with your computer or you should get in touch with a reputable metatheoretician because you've just discovered something very significant.

> Those ones?

Yes those ones. Perhaps in the future you can learn from this experience and start with a post like the first part of this, rather than a condescending non-sequitur, and you'll find it's a more constructive way to engage with others. That's why the guidelines exist, after all.
by river_otter | 2026-01-12 22:27:48+00:00
Ah thanks I should have clarified, I generally meant that's why I wrote it in rust. Tmux has nothing to do with security for sure.

It works on top of tmux to monitor the coding agent state all in one place so that you can see whether the agent is waiting for you. Today I also added git worktree support so that you can easily create and manage branches to run agents in parallel on the same codebase.
by tptacek | 2026-01-12 22:27:49+00:00
I've been typing `---` every time I do a dash since 1998 when I learned Latex to write a paper, and then (at the time) sort of just figured "oh if I keep typing --- people on Usenet will think I'm one of the Latex cool kids". Here we are. I refuse to stop just because LLMs have uslurped it.
by theshrike79 | 2026-01-12 22:28:13+00:00
There are second-order effects of Google or Apple removing Twitter from their stores.

Guess who's the bestie of Twitter's owner? Any clues? Could that be a vindictive old man with unlimited power and no checks and balances to temper his tantrums?

Of course they both WANT Twitter the fuck out of the store, but there are very very powerful people addicted to the app and what they can do with it.
by fastasucan | 2026-01-12 22:28:16+00:00
This is still not enough to get rid of adhd symptoms for many.

Keeping a knowledge management system is uttainable, I bet many with adhd have tried them all (and constantly try new ones instead of doing work)

you can only block so much. Some people suffer so much that days can get lost by doing virtuelly nothing. Its not like its so easy to sit around being unable to work, and still not check the web or whatever. Also even though you block, many people experience that they get contacted regardless, and loose the flow.

What you propose are great ideas for someone having a hard time concentrating, but that is something completely else from those suffering under a diagnosis.
by socketcluster | 2026-01-12 22:28:39+00:00
Agreed. The system is ALL about who controls the customer relationship.

If Anthropic ended up in a position that they had to beg various Client providers to be integrated (properly) and had to compete with other LLMs on the same clients and could be swapped out at a moment's notice, they would just become a commodity and lose all leverage. They don't want to end up in such situation. They do need to control the delivery of the product end-to-end to ensure that they control the customer relationship and the quality.

This is also going to be KEY in terms of democratizing the AI industry for small startups because this model of ai-outside-tools-inside provides an alternative to tools-outside-ai-inside platforms like Lovable, Base44 and Replit which don't leave as much flexibility in terms of swapping out tooling.
by MadnessASAP | 2026-01-12 22:28:45+00:00
Your OS, editor, and compiler will (to a reasonable degree) do literally, exactly, and reproducibly what the human operating them instructs. A LLM breaks that assumption, specifically it can appear, even upon close inspection that it has in fact done literally and exactly what the human wanted while in fact having done something subtly and disastrously wrong. It may have even done so maliciously if it's context was poisoned.

Thus it is good to specify that this commit is LLM generated so that others know to give it extra super duper close scrutiny even if it superficially resembles well written proper code.
by hebejebelus | 2026-01-12 22:28:54+00:00
I tend to think this product is hard for those of us who've been using `claude` for a few months to evaluate. All I have seen and done so far with Cowork are things _I_ would prefer to do with the terminal, but for many people this might be their first taste of actually agentic workflows. Sometimes I wonder if Anthropic sort of regret releasing Claude Code in its 'runs your stuff on your computer' form - it can quite easily serve as so many other products they might have sold us separately instead!
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-01-12 22:29:40+00:00
And then because of salary compression and inversion where new employees at the same level as your former junior developers get paid more based on market trends while HR won’t give your former junior developers raises, they end up leaving when ther get “good enough”.

So why hire juniors at all instead of poaching a mid level ticket taker from another company?

If you are a line level manager, even if you want to retain your former junior now mid level developer, your hands are probably tied.
by lhames | 2026-01-12 22:30:30+00:00
FWIW eventual stability is a goal, but there's going to be more churn as we work towards full arbitrary program execution (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgtA-bWC_vM covers some recent progress).

If you're looking for stability in practice: the ORC LLJIT API is your best bet at the moment (or sticking to MCJIT until it's removed).
by fluoridation | 2026-01-12 22:31:12+00:00
This is Windows, but it might shed some light on the situation. I have a Qt application that I made, and occasionally when I switch from one window to another, the cursor doesn't switch from resize to normal, or vice versa, until I move the mouse. The precise effect is consistent, but difficult to describe, hence why the "sometimes". I think it happens because I'm not handling the window switch event as one that may require re-evaluating the cursor shape.
by tptacek | 2026-01-12 22:31:43+00:00
I know there's a sizable cohort of online people in the west who are convicted of the idea that Israel exists solely as a US proxy and is held in check only by Iran, but obviously no. Israel --- leave aside all the moral stuff right now --- is a hypercapable advanced high-state-capacity regional nuclear power with an extremely effective military. If they didn't buy arms from us, they'd buy them from someone we liked less.

Iran, on the other hand, partly as a result of Khomeinism and the status quo ante of the Iranian Revolution, when the military was a big part of the repression apparatus in the Shah's state, has more or less gutted its official military service branches. As we just saw, Israel literally controls Iran's own airspace. They flew slow drones over Tehran, presumably just as a "fuck you". Iran placed a huge bet on projecting military force through regional proxies --- the "Axis of Resistance". What they have instead of a modern military is the IRGC. See how that went for them!
by mrandish | 2026-01-12 22:32:11+00:00
> then again by the airplane seat itself when the person in front of me reclines their seat.

This reminds me of the time I had my laptop open on the tilt-down tray and the very large man in the seat in front just repositioned his girth (not even reclining the seat) but it flexed the seat back enough that my laptop screen was momentarily caught between the tray below and recessed lip above and was almost crushed.
by defrost | 2026-01-12 22:32:31+00:00
False.

They have limited police powers, particularly against actual citizens.

ICE sees its mission as encompassing both public safety and national security. However, its powers are different than the average local police department in the US.

Its agents have the power to stop, detain and arrest people they suspect of being in the US illegally. They can detain US citizens in limited circumstances, such as if a person interferes with an arrest, assaults an officer, or ICE suspect the person of being in the US illegally.

Despite this, according to news organisation ProPublica, there were more than 170 incidents during the first nine months of Trump's presidency in which federal agents held US citizens against their will.

See: https://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-dhs-american-...

Again, consider becoming better informed.
by maxbond | 2026-01-12 22:33:07+00:00
Sorry for the late response. I wanted to find time to do more research about this before responding but I'm gunnuh accept that it's not happening on a useful timeframe.

I'm not sure which Wikipedia article that is or if there has been revision between when you checked, I didn't find that in the Wikipedia articles for Telidae or Parthenogenesis. The Parthenogenesis article notes that it's controversial whether this is a threat to their ability to adapt.

So I may have been wrong with that example and I thank you for correcting me. I stand by the statement that evolution can get stuck in local minima but I may have been wrong about the Telidae.
by wtcactus | 2026-01-12 22:33:09+00:00
This seems a great idea conceptually, but in practice, from mine one sample data, its ways to limiting and simple for a toddler.

My child just turned 3, she can already turn on the NVIDIA Shield, go into Jellyfin and put a movie playing.

The movie is always Shrek or Jungle Book though, so I still didn’t have to put parental restrictions. But she can already choose them from the favorites list.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2026-01-12 22:33:19+00:00
The official Democratic platform for every cycle from 1976 to 2000 (except 1984-88 when abortion was not mentioned at all) explicitly acknowledged that abortion was controversial, that abortion opponents were welcome in the party, and that decreasing the number of abortions that are necessary is a worthy goal. The issue got more polarized when it became clear that no compromise or detente less than overturning Roe v. Wade would ever be accepted. I don't know of any specific pledges not to expand abortion access, again because the Hyde amendment prevented any proposals to expand abortion access.
by Imnimo | 2026-01-12 22:33:27+00:00
>By default, the main thing to know is that Claude can take potentially destructive actions (such as deleting local files) if it’s instructed to.

What do the words "if it's instructed to" mean here? It seems like Claude can in fact delete files whenever it wants regardless of instruction.

For example, in the video demonstration, they ask "Please help me organize my desktop", and Claude decides to delete files.
by zanedev28 | 2026-01-12 22:33:32+00:00
Location: Charleston, SC

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Ruby, Python, JavaScript (ES6), TypeScript, React, Node.js, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, OpenSearch/Elasticsearch, AWS (ECS, EC2, VPC, ALB, Secrets Manager), Docker, Terraform, OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, Prometheus

Resume/CV: https://linkedin.com/in/zane-lee

Email: zanedev28@gmail.com

GitHub: github.com/Kcstills17

Co-creator of Retriever (runretriever.app), an AWS-deployed observability platform that enables AI-powered trace analysis through distributed systems. Built a custom MCP server allowing developers to query trace data using natural language through LLMs like Claude, optimizing context consumption through intelligent data distillation from verbose OTLP structures.

Experienced with building full-stack applications. I am comfortable using AWS as a cloud environment and have experience with AI technologies such as RAG, MCP, and Vector embeddings.

Looking for roles in backend engineering, DevOps/SRE, observability, or AI tooling where I can leverage my experience building developer infrastructure and working with distributed systems.
by d4rkp4ttern | 2026-01-12 22:33:35+00:00
A CLI chat interface seems ideal for when you keep code "at a distance", i.e. if you hardly/infrequently/never want to peek at your code.

But for writing prose, I don't think chat-to-prose is ideal, i.e. most people would not want the keep prose "at a distance".

I bet most people want to be immersed in an editor where they are seeing how the text is evolving. Something like Zed's inline assistant, which I found myself using quite a lot when working on documents.

I was hoping that Cowork might have some elements of an immersive editor, but it's essentially transplanting the CLI chat experience to an ostensibly "less scary" interface, i.e., keeping the philosophy of artifacts separate from your chat.
by kazinator | 2026-01-12 22:33:56+00:00
It looks like the billing address restriction was a "thing" years ago, but is simply too impractical for modern day e-commerce. People want to do gifting, or get things delivered to temporary accomodations like vacation spots. They are relying on approaches like heuristics (sudden purchase for something expensive going to an unusual address), plus CVV verification to help ensure that the purchaser physically has the card (still allows theft, but adds a layer).
by philip1209 | 2026-01-12 22:34:13+00:00
This is cool, but Claude for Chrome seems broken - authentication doesn't work and there's a slew of recent reviews on the Chrome extension mentioning it.

Sharing here in case anybody from Anthropic sees and can help get this working again.

It may seem off-topic, but I think it hurts developer trust to launch new apps while old ones are busted.
by madaxe_again | 2026-01-12 22:34:44+00:00
Absolutely this. I think a problem arises when parents install their kid in front of the TV and use it as a childminder.

Mine just turned 3. She watches YouTube kids - navigates the TV just fine and makes her own choices. She’s also a dab hand at platformer games - I didn’t think I’d have someone to play Mario with just her.

But - and it’s a big but - she spends 95% of her time doing something else, be it exploring outdoors, playing with duplo/lego, art, looking at books, telling stories with her toys, whatever.

For her, TV and games are just another thing to do, and she picks them up and puts them down like anything else.

The other problem arises at the other end of the spectrum. For me, TV was verboten until I was at least 8 or 9 years old - and when I was finally allowed that forbidden fruit I gorged myself.
by CRConrad | 2026-01-12 22:35:08+00:00
> The Holocaust was carried out by people who had to invent their own religions (their variant of neo-paganism and "positive Christianity") to have religions that could be reconciled with their ideology. Their ideas were more rooted in "racial science" than anything else.

Some of them thought they had to invent or resurrect such religions to sell their movement to the masses, yes. That movement's actual religion was that ideology and racial "science"; it kind of was its own religion. (Not that this is exclusive to nazism / fascism; the same goes for communism.)
by TheAmazingRace | 2026-01-12 22:35:18+00:00
Honestly, for me, the loss of resource forks in the transition from Classic Mac OS to Mac OS X was a real sore spot for me. Sure, a UNIX-based OS like OS X was going to facilitate a different paradigm for file handling by default, but Apple really should have found a way to keep resource forks as a thing. I loved how intuitive file handling was in Classic Mac OS. No pesky three letter file extensions driving program associations and the like.
by mvkel | 2026-01-12 22:35:34+00:00
Just my experience in vibe coding apps from gpt-3.5 onwards (mostly NextJS or Node). In gpt-3.5, I had to really hand-hold it, getting it to write one function at a time, then a separate task to glue the functions together.

Now, it can build almost all of an app from a single prompt, but will start to rewrite utility functions, or modules, forgetting that they already exist. Some of this is still solvable with clever prompting, but if you're just attacking it without thinking, ~30,000 LOC seems to be the app 'size' that it will start to exhibit those behaviors.
by foster_nyman | 2026-01-12 22:37:16+00:00
Years ago, I recall reading about a Muscogee tradition (the Busk), which may have had this effect; basically a cultural dampener, a periodic, communal reset that interrupted accumulation of grievances, status debt, polluted fire, stale obligations, before it became self-reinforcing. A distinctive feature was a kind of amnesty/forgiveness for wrongs short of murder, and a re-establishing of social relationships. It was basically a ritualized negative-feedback loop: clean house, renew the fire, forgive (almost) everything, start the cycle again; like an engineered anti-runaway mechanism that prevents compounding into schism.

[edit]: found it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46595199