MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by taykolasinski | 2026-01-12 14:58:44+00:00
That's a fair point. We don't have the weights or code for the closed models, so we can't be 100% certain.

However, transformer-based (which their technical reports confirm they are) implies the standard pre-norm/post-nnorm residual block structure. Without those additive residual connections, training networks of that depth (100+ layers) becomes difficult due to the vanishing gradient problem.

If they had solved deep signal propagation without residual streams, that would likely be a bigger architectural breakthrough than the model itself (akin to Mamba/SSMs). It’s a very high-confidence assumption, but you are right that it is still an assumption.
by hyperpape | 2026-01-12 14:59:05+00:00
Destroying a product is a well understood process, and we've witnessed many big companies do it. That's evidence!

Designing a food to be more appealing is also a relatively well understood process that is already carried out, but Ozempic seems to blunt the effectiveness of it.

Food companies will surely try to make food that is appealing for Ozempic users, and will do so if they can. But it is a massive assumption that they will be able to, given that they're already doing as much as possible to make food appealing to people.

So there is significant uncertainty that the food companies can do what the parent suggested they would do.
by csemple | 2026-01-12 14:59:21+00:00
OP here.

At Ontario Digital Service, we built COVID-19 tools, digital ID, and services
for 15M citizens. We evaluated LLM systems to improve services but could never
procure them.

The blocker wasn't capability—it was liability. We couldn't justify "the model
probably won't violate privacy regulations" to decision-makers who need to
defend "this system cannot do X."

This post demonstrates the "Prescription Pad Pattern": treating authority
boundaries as persistent state that mechanically filters tools.

The logic: Don't instruct the model to avoid forbidden actions—physically remove
the tools required to execute them. If the model can't see the tool, it can't
attempt to call it.

This is a reference implementation. The same pattern works for healthcare (don't
give diagnosis tools to unlicensed users), finance (don't give transfer tools to
read-only sessions), or any domain where "98% safe" means "0% deployable."

Repo: https://github.com/rosetta-labs-erb/authority-boundary-ledge...
by nerdjon | 2026-01-12 14:59:28+00:00
Sure, it is perfectly valid to complain all you want. But it is also important to remember the context here.

I could write an article and complain about Taco Bell not selling burgers and that is perfectly within my right but that is something they are clearly not interested in doing. So me saying I am not going to give them money until they start selling burgers is a meaningless too them.

Everything I have seen about how they have marketed Claude Code makes it clear that what you are paying for is a tool that is a combination of a client-side app made by them and the server component.

Considering the need to tell the agent that the tool you are using is something it isn't, it is clear that this ever working was not the intention.
by Philpax | 2026-01-12 14:59:42+00:00
There's nothing stopping you from using OpenCode with any other provider, including Anthropic: you just can't get the subsidised pricing while doing so. This is irritating, yes - it certainly disincentivises me from trying out OpenCode - but it's also, like, not unexpected?

In any case, the long-term solution for true openness is to be able to run open-weight models locally or through third-party inference providers.
by bpt3 | 2026-01-12 14:59:44+00:00
> Apparently we have collectively forgotten how bad it can be to let your tools own you instead of the other way around.

We've collectively forgotten because a large enough number of professional developers have never experienced anything other than a thriving open source ecosystem.

As with everything else (finance comes to mind in particular), humans will have to learn the same lessons the hard way over and over. Unfortunately, I think we're at the beginning of that lesson and hope the experience doesn't negatively impact me too much.
by Aunche | 2026-01-12 14:59:48+00:00
This is one of the major reasons why Americans are stuck with expensive private healthcare that never gets talked about. People who are used treating their insurance as an all-you-can eat buffet will feel like their health coverage is getting worse under a socialized healthcare system that is pressured to keep costs down. No government is going to foot the bill for a costly drug under patent when they can do perfectly fine with cheaper older generics a fraction of the price.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-12 14:59:49+00:00
What? No, I think you fundamentally misunderstand what workflow I'm suggesting here.

You ask: "Do X". The LLM obliges, gives you something you don't want. At this point, don't accept/approve it, so nothing has changed, you still have an empty directory, or whatever.

Then you start a brand new context, with iteration on the prompt: "Do X with Y", and the LLM again tries to do it. If something is wrong, repeat until you get what you're happy with, extract what you can into reusable system/developer prompts, then accept/approve the change.

Then you end up with one change, and one function, exactly as you specified it. Then if you want, you can re-run the exact same prompt, with the exact same context (nothing!) and you'll get the same results.

"LLMs do love to ignore anything that came before" literally cannot happen in this workflow, because there is nothing that "came before".
by thombat | 2026-01-12 15:00:01+00:00
Absolutely! I'd read LotR many times before I first read it aloud as a bedtime story season and was abashed to find how much I'd been skipping over, mostly parenthetical details of geography and world-building, while hastening in pursuit of the plot, like the holder of a big box of bonbons gorging target than savouring.
by abielefeld | 2026-01-12 15:00:04+00:00
Hey, talk speaker here, that's a great point!

A discussion that got cut from the talk at the early draft process was defining what "small-series" and "large-series" mean.

To me, at a human scale and without dystopian monopolies, a small series is anything under 1k, a medium series around 50k and a large series 100-500k.

I wanted to define a special class of series, because to an american a small series is probably more like 100k, and a large one 1 million or more, last year something like 230 million iphones were sold globally and that's an absurd number imo.

Because my vision of a healthy electronics industry is 200 companies each selling competing runs of 1 million units, rather than apple selling all 230 million.

In my ideal world then, the only way for apps to be distributed is a marketplace that is regulated and prevents apple from imposing their 30% tax on every dollar spent on the app store.
by simonw | 2026-01-12 15:00:11+00:00
You're accusing me of spreading harmful advice here, when you're the one telling people that they don't need to worry about not investing in their skills because "This field moves so fast the things you did more than a year ago aren't relevant anymore."

One of us is right here. I hope for your sake and the people that listen to you that it's you. I don't think it is.
by alistairSH | 2026-01-12 15:00:31+00:00
I'm confused by the language...

Within six months of starting a GLP-1 medication, households reduce grocery spending by an average of 5.3%.

A household doesn't take Ozempic, a person does. Are they implying that if everybody in the household takes Ozempic, as a group they see a 5% reduction? Or, any one person in the household causes a 5% reduction for the group? The average household in the US is 2.5 people...
by linux4dummies | 2026-01-12 15:00:46+00:00
I had a lot of these discussions with developers the last year. My view is ai is not "stealing" a programmers job. Its just an enabler for faster development. The key feature of a programmer has always been to choose the right tools and tech, and do small and thoughtful implementations. AI is just another tool for this, and you still need to know how a good solution looks, and steer it towards something really useful.
by deltarholamda | 2026-01-12 15:01:03+00:00
I think there is a danger in the enthusiasm for AI inside of these excellent points, namely that the skills that make a good programmer are not inherent, they are learned.

The comparison would be a guy who is an excellent journeyman electrician. This guy has visual-spatial skills that makes bending and installing conduit a kind of art. He has a deep and intuitive understanding of how circuits are balanced in a panel, so he does not overload a phase. But he was not born with them. These are acquired over many years of labor and tutelage.

If AI removes these barriers--and I think it will, as AI-enhanced programmers will out-perform and out-compete those who are not in today's employment market--then the programmer will learn different skills that may or may not be in keeping with language skills, algorithms, problem decomposition, etc. They may in fact be orthogonal to these skills.

The effect of this may be an improvement, of course. It's hard to say for sure as I left my crystal ball in my other jacket. But it will certainly be different. And those who are predisposed for programming in the old-school way may not find the field as attractive because it is no longer the same sort of engineering, something like the difference between the person that designs a Lego set and the person that assembles a Lego set. It could, in fact, mean that the very best programmers become a kind of elite, able to solve most problems with just a handful of those elite programmers. I'm sure that's the dream of Google and Microsoft. However this will centralize the industry in a way not seen since perhaps IBM, only with a much smaller chance of outside disruption.
by jacobthesnakob | 2026-01-12 15:01:14+00:00
>How do citizens of the US tolerate this?

Tolerate what, stupid misleading advertising on frozen junk food? Normal people just don’t buy it.

>I also don't understand why everything, literally everything, is fried in oil.

Did you travel here and only go to fast food places or something?

>It's just such a reverse culture shock when you come back to the EU.

When I traveled to EU, I was surprised at the number of nasty people smoking cigarettes outside at cafes, walking down the street, everywhere. You’d sure think that a lot of younger people don’t care about their health in EU based on all the smoking.

>You have really great vegetables and fruits there because of having enough sun to grow them locally, yet it seems like nobody wants to eat them.

That’s a weird assumption because the produce section of my grocery store is pretty much the most crowded section.
by wiseowise | 2026-01-12 15:01:18+00:00
That was the final nail in the coffin. The reason why they didn't hit adoption in the first place is because Google prohibited their application on MS devices. Mobile YouTube already wasn't good enough, and without the rest of the GSuite (Maps, Gmail, Chrome, Calendar, Translate) it was dead in the water. And no, HERE maps and third-party clients were not good enough to tip the scale.
by skyberrys | 2026-01-12 15:01:34+00:00
I just made a orchid journaling app. It lets you create profiles of all your orchids, give the flowers name and track their daily statistics. Kind of like those baby tracking apps for new parents, but all about orchid flowers instead. It's made using flutter so it is supposedly cross platform, but I just made it yesterday and so far I'm only trying our the android version for all my flowers.
by GuB-42 | 2026-01-12 15:01:34+00:00
Funny how almost everybody hated the Windows 8 desktop environment. And to this day, Windows 8 is still seen as one of the worst versions of Windows for that reason, even if it was pretty decent under the hood.

Projects like this show that it has its fans. It feels like authors being successful only after their death. I still think of the Windows 8 UI as terrible overall, but now that the hate has passed, people are not afraid to give it some redeeming qualities.

It was pretty good on mobile though, which is the root of the problem I think. They tried to unify what shouldn't be unified.
by sneak | 2026-01-12 15:01:39+00:00
It's because it's a tremendous amount of time and work and effort and QA to get UIs to look really really well-designed. (Even then, the design can still suck, like modern Windows or appleOS 26.x.)

I don't think people realize just what an insane amount of labor it is to get these things implemented, even if you're handed a perfect design spec up front.

Maybe LLMs will close this gap once they get better at seeing things.
by Majromax | 2026-01-12 15:02:14+00:00
> Anthropic is protecting its huge asset: the Claude Code value chain

Why is that their “huge asset?” The genus of this complaint is that Opencode et al replace everything but the LLM, so it seems like the latter is the true “huge asset.”

If Clause Code is being offered at or near operational breakeven, I don’t see the advantage of lock-in. If it’s being offered at a subsidy, then it’s a hint that Claude Code itself is medium-term unsustainable.

“Training data” is a partial but not full explanation of the gap, since it’s not obviously clear to me how Anthropic can learn from Claude Code sessions but not OpenCode sessions.
by abielefeld | 2026-01-12 15:02:27+00:00
I think so too, because the bar to economic sustainability is not incredibly high. I know a lot of one-man businesses operating with one Siplace pick and place machine and making a good living out of it.

Many people don't have the desire to expand forever. In my case I hope the company grows o 20 or 30 employees, and then I would work stabilizing it so it can last 50+ years. e.g. setting up a trust to oversee the well being of employees, the quality of the products, etc.

This is completely alien to most american founders and businessmen, in the words of Larry Elison: "it's not enough for me to win, it's about everybody else losing"
by Bridged7756 | 2026-01-12 15:03:09+00:00
More often than not, there isn't. Your brain chemistry is just messed up and dependent on the drug. Ask any ex-addict about their cravings.

The ones who manage to make it out, usually have something to live for (and the will to live for it), but a lot of people have no money, no job, no career, no family, no spouse, no kids, and no good memories of life, and even if they did, there's no guarantee they'll beat the substance. Sadly for these people, it's very likely they won't see a way out of addiction.

The consensus is that "hitting rock bottom" is the only way to help an addict. But many hit rock bottom and never get up again, or don't have anything to climb for.
by chipotle_coyote | 2026-01-12 15:03:10+00:00
Syncthing is great. I'm closer to the poster you're responding to -- I tried Asahi Linux and liked it, at least when I ignored the "Mac users will probably like GNOME more" and switched to KDE Plasma (this Mac user, at least, thinks it's way better), but still ended up back on macOS Tahoe despite having a myriad of nits to pick with it. But when I was playing around with it, I set up Syncthing so I would be able to keep working on documents on the Linux laptop, other Macs, and the iPad, and Syncthing worked fast and basically flawlessly, better than either iCloud or Dropbox in my experience. I may eventually set it up as a local sync solution between the Macbook Pro I'm using for everything and a Mac Studio that's become my home server.
by simonw | 2026-01-12 15:03:11+00:00
Oddly enough I wrote about the magic analogy and why I stopped using is a few years ago (pre-ChatGPT, even): https://simonwillison.net/2022/Oct/5/spell-casting/

I am eternally frustrated that "intuition" is the key skill people need to work effectively with LLMs, because it's something I can't teach people! If I could figure out how to download my intuition into other people's heads I would do that.

Instead I have to convince people that intuition is key, and the only way to get it is to invest in experimenting.
by keyringlight | 2026-01-12 15:03:30+00:00
There's also the issue of distance for a mouse cursor to travel to select something. I think the general issue is imposing one interface for every mode of input instead of options, so either select an appropriate interface depending on how the start menu was invoked (even if it's just scaling it down to a confined space) or letting people select the default however it's invoked. Yes that's going to be more work, but when we're talking about the largest corporations on the planet I struggle to believe they can't afford it.
by retsibsi | 2026-01-12 15:03:35+00:00
There's a story (true AFAIK, but it's the kind of thing I can easily imagine having been debunked) of Pepsi winning in direct taste-test comparisons against Coca Cola, but only when the test was done with small quantities. Apparently the sweeter taste is initially more appealing, but the slightly less sweet taste holds up better over the course of a whole drink.
by FatherOfCurses | 2026-01-12 15:03:57+00:00
I don't know if education and understanding are the same things, but I feel that I've always come away from places that I've travelled to with a better understanding of the place.

I'm sure that if you just do zero research about a place and just take a package tour you won't come away with any greater knowledge than they would by reading a Wikipedia article or watching a YouTube video.

But if you learn some things in advance, and then go to a place, and suddenly you have the experience of "Ooh, there's that thing I learned about!", followed by watching how locals interact with it, there has to be some deeper level of understanding that is reached there.
by nathanyz | 2026-01-12 15:04:02+00:00
What if some people's hunger is louder than others? What if your expended willpower to not overeat is a lot less than what is required by others?

I ask these as that is what the GLP-1's are showing. They change the hunger feeling and it might just be that you and others got lucky with a lower hunger feeling than others. There is no objective measure of food noise, but I think we all need to be open to the possibility that the food noise is different for different people and its not all willpower or laziness.
Show HN: Free Developer Tools – JSON, Base64, URL Encoder
by vanshitmdotcom | 2026-01-12 15:04:09+00:00
I got tired of using JSON tools that either don’t work properly on Windows, feel clunky, or just look painfully outdated.

At work, we deal with huge, messy JSON files every day, and I realized this frustration can’t be just mine—there must be a lot of devs facing the same thing.

So I built zeroformat.com.

Right now, it has:

JSON Viewer

JSON Formatter

JSON Validator

Simple, fast, clean UI — no login, no registration, just open and use it. Plug-and-play.

I’m actively building more tools, and honestly, if it grows — great. If not, my team and I will still use it daily
But if you work with JSON often, I’d genuinely love for you to try it and share feedback.

https://zeroformat.com

In case you are busy and directly want to try the tool ,

https://zeroformat.com/json-formatter

If it helps you even a little, that’s a win.
by postalcoder | 2026-01-12 15:04:12+00:00
I love these ideas. Another great implementation I've seen on here is someone using NFC/RFID chips to do something similar.

For my toddler, I've started the process of hooking up my TV with a Mac Mini, Broadlink RF dongle, and a Stream Deck. I'm using a python library to control the stream deck.

I'm configuring the buttons to play her favorite shows with jellyfin. End goal is to create a jukebox for her favorite shows/movies/music. Only thing I have it wired to do right now is play fart noises.
by jasode | 2026-01-12 15:04:28+00:00
>Moreover the git maintainers were unwilling to work with Facebook to improve git to solve some of these problems. Mercurial was a better fit

More add-on discussion including Microsoft+Git spurred by your previous comment about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15725497

From the Facebook blog post, it seems like the key issue was Facebook's internal filesystem monitoring tool (Watchman) was easier to integrate with Mercurial than with Git:

https://engineering.fb.com/2014/01/07/core-infra/scaling-mer...

So, neither Mercurial-out-of-the-box nor Git-out-of-the-box could handle huge monorepos. But Mercurial's willingness to make some modifications made it easier for Facebook to integrated their custom tooling to avoid the slow Big-O O(n) scans for changed files.
by sneak | 2026-01-12 15:04:29+00:00
I'd like a DE/theme that aims to do what the Win2k shell did. File explorer, basic window management, app switching, app launching. Back before every single UI widget had to integrate 47 types of OS feature-of-this-year's-product-cycle functionality.

Chicago95 isn't far off looks-wise. Something slightly more polished than Xfce, but way less than the behemoth that KDE is. I really feel like the modern basic desktop UI was pretty close to complete in 2002-2005, and the moment we tried to make your contacts list available for use in every single application we fell onto a slippery slope from which we have never recovered.
by palmotea | 2026-01-12 15:04:58+00:00
There are some off-the-shelf products that work similarly in the audio space:

https://us.yotoplay.com/

https://us.tonies.com/

I had plans to build something that for the TV, but having kids means I never had the time. And honestly, that might not have been such a bad thing since it made setting limits easier. I was able to teach my kid to turn the TV off when she was fairly young (and pause more recently), which seems to be enough.
by bwfan123 | 2026-01-12 15:04:59+00:00
imo, The OP has bad ai-assisted takes on almost every single "critical question". This makes me doubt if he has breadth of experience in the craft. For example.

> Narrow specialists risk finding their niche automated or obsolete

Exactly the opposite. Those with expertise will oversee the tool. Those without expertise will take orders from it.

> Universities may struggle to keep up with an industry that changes every few months

Those who know the theory of the craft will oversee the machine. Those who dont will take orders from it. Universities will continue to teach the theory of the discipline.
by johnyzee | 2026-01-12 15:05:14+00:00
I loved the tactile feel of 3.5" floppies (especially coming from the - actually floppy - 5.25"s). Great choice. In particular, the spring-loaded metal shield was very satisfying to play with, unfortunately those are missing on the disks in the picture (apart from one, which seems to not have the closing spring)! Possibly a casualty to the three year old user.
by cheschire | 2026-01-12 15:05:15+00:00
When my grandmother was in her late 70's, she couldn't figure out the concept of menus on DVDs, so she stuck with VHS well beyond the point others had let it go.

The capabilities of individuals over 70 are hugely varied. Some folks are clear-minded until 100, others start to lose their mental faculties much, much earlier.

I don't think the generation is forgotten, just so vastly different in needs from the core audience that it would require an entirely different solution, and likely an entirely different company model.
by mikemarsh | 2026-01-12 15:05:27+00:00
Yeah, it's quite unbelievable people are still repeating the "AI everything -> UBI -> everyone comfortable and well-fed" line.

Who's to say the governments won't just let society continue on the exact same trajectory it was before generative AI: "Lost your job? Too bad for you. Here's a gig economy and maybe some minimal food stamps. Innovation marches on!"