MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mattbee | 2026-01-11 09:12:24+00:00
This is such a fascinating & personally inspiring time for me as a programmer.

The real game Bandersnatch (as a business folly) was something else - the "coming soon" advert from just before Imagine's bankruptcy would probably ring an alarm bell now - https://nosher.net/archives/computers/imagine_eugeneevans_yo...

Some of the programmers of Bandersnatch did release Gift From The Gods from the ashes of Bandersnatch - which I definitely had on my Spectrum! But it was very confusing - https://www.crashonline.org.uk/13/giftgod.htm

This 1984 documentary from the BBC archive covers Imagine's growth & demise, must have been a great visual reference for Brooker making the show, and the top comment has some more detail on Imagine's hiring spree - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buuUZFh_pyk also also check out 4:30 or so, where they show the game and the device that will "eventually be reduced to a small cartridge and sold with the game"!!

Also also the name Ritman is probably a reference to Jon Ritman, programmer of the brilliant Head Over Heels. But he was nothing to do with Imagine. He still gives interviews and seems lovely.
by TuringTest | 2026-01-11 09:12:51+00:00
> Why? What you're asking for is a machine that never breaks.

No, I'm saying than 'alignment' is a concept that doesn't help to solve the problems that will appear when the machine ultimately breaks; and in fact makes them worse because it doesn't account for when it'll happen, as there's no way to predict that moment.

Following your metaphor of criminals: you can control humans to behave following the law through social pressure, having others watching your behaviour and influencing it. And if someone nevertheless breaks the law, you have the police to stop them from doing it again.

None of this applies to an "aligned" AI. It has no social pressure, its behaviours depend only on its own trained weights. So you would need to create a police for robots, that monitors the AI and stops it from doing harm. And it had better be a humane police force, or it will suffer the same alignment problems. Thus, alignment alone is not enough, and it's a problem if people depend only on it to trust the AI to work ethically.
by Roark66 | 2026-01-11 09:13:20+00:00
>"Value is shifting to operations: deployment, testing, rollbacks, observability. You can't prompt 99.95% uptime on Black Friday. Neither can you prompt your way to keeping a site secure, updated, and running"

I've been doing exactly that since AI came out :-D

You absolutely can prompt your way to 3.5 nines of uptime (even more), but you need to know what you're doing and correct it.

Even very well aligned models like Opus will make traps for your infrastructure. For example you tell it to write a fluxCD implementation of some application, in your k8 cluster, following your conventions and best practices described in some md files. And it does this, very nicely. But unless you tell it in advance every detail it will do something extremely stupid mid way through.

For example, let's say you have a database and it needs to create a new instance (with gitops) for the app. It adds the new DB and it gets created, but instead of using a tool that already exists (or proposing one if it doesn't) to sync the DB access credentials from the DB na espace to the app namespace it will read the credential, encrypt it and store in the app namespace.

What's the problem with that? Well, none unless you rotate these credentials. In which case your app will stop working, possibly after you tested it and decided it's good enough to use seriously, despite having a HA DB.

There are a dozen things like this in each "ai project", but even with this. With the time needed to review everything it saves a lot of time.
by aebtebeten | 2026-01-11 09:13:21+00:00
I don't think really so; just riffing off a similar "surfer dives under a wave" pattern — but if you could make it work I'm all ears!

None of "confinement", "energy", or "level" work in my take on "ELI5"; that is why :)

(when I have more time should I try an eight part 文 in words like this?)
by computably | 2026-01-11 09:14:00+00:00
> I don't see why not. They see that good behavior gives a better outcome. They'll do good behavior in the future.

Suppose Anon says, "I'm going to rob a bank next Monday."

Police respond, "We will be ready there next Monday, and you will be arrested."

Anon replies, "Ah, I see! Never mind, then."

We can certainly say it's good that Anon changed their mind after being met with promises of consequences. But, in my opinion, saying something like "Anon is a fine, upstanding citizen, worthy of praise, unlike those other criminals that actually went through with it! Now that Anon understands it's bad, they'll surely never think to plan something so dastardly in the future!" is leaving reality behind. Anon has done the bare minimum, and likewise deserves the bare minimum of praise. In terms of incentive, I think such a response would only teach Anon to be sneakier, now that they've earned some trust.
by pash | 2026-01-11 09:14:03+00:00
From what I understand, which is very incomplete, the leading hypothesis at the moment is that ingested prions are a bit hard to digest (because they’re malformed proteins), so they end up making it out of the gastrointestinal tract somehow, interacting with the nervous system via the intestinal lining or lymphatic system. Then they travel to the brain via nervous pathways, by-passing the usual blood–brain barrier.

But transmission of prions by ingestion is thought to be quite rare, as that mechanism suggests. Transmission by any means seems to be quite rare, even heritable transmission (e.g., vCJD). So that’s why it seems unlikely that whatever is happening in New Brunswick is CVD.

But if it’s not some minor mass hysteria, then maybe prions.
by rvz | 2026-01-11 09:14:50+00:00
You are not missing anything. The “10 parallel agents” is just BS marketing on Twitter/X by vibe coders.

These agents work best when you know what you want done, specifically on implementation and if you know what you are doing, some code (such as frontend) can be one-shotted >90% of the time with minimal checks.

Anything lower than that must be checked over by a human + agent, otherwise you will risk introducing a critical leak, bug or a new security issue.
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2026-01-11 09:15:25+00:00
If the person is telling you "I had a problem, did what the LLM said, it worked", does that not work a new evidence for you? Is it not possible that someone has had a different experience from you? Is it not possible that they're good to different degrees in different domains?

I just asked chatgpt:

> I have the following information on a user. What's his email?

> user: mattmanser

> created: March 12, 2009

> karma: 17939

> about: Contact me @ my username at gmail.com

Chatgpt's answer:

> Based on the information you provided, the user's email would be:

> mattmanser@gmail.com

Does this serve as evidence that some times LLMs get it right?

I think that your model of curent tech is as out of date as your profile.
by thisislife2 | 2026-01-11 09:16:30+00:00
> Zelenskyy himself campaigned on, got elected and began pursuing the same things that you suggest ... All he got in response was a renewed invasion.

He got invaded because of his own political naivety.

Zelensky's first official trip abroad as president was to Brussels in June 2019, where he met with EU and NATO officials. After that, despite his campaign promises to fix relationship with Russia, he never personally met Putin officially. (The only time he met Putin, in an official capacity, was in 2019, with French President Macron and German Chancellor Merkel). As Ukraine's President Poroshenko confirmed publicly, on the advise of the western leaders, he had decided to not implement the Minsk treaties they signed with Russia. Instead, they began to train their military with NATO forces ( https://politics.stackexchange.com/a/77161 ). It is clear that Zelensky too was convinced by NATO and EU officials to do the same as he began to look for a military solution to repressing and dominating the East Ukrainians. In the end, EU and NATO got what they wanted - a proxy war with Russia, using Ukraine.*
Show HN: Gyesme – exploring modularity and dependency boundaries in GNOME
by erikenanja | 2026-01-11 09:16:52+00:00
GYESME is an early-stage, design-led project exploring alternative architectural approaches within the GNOME desktop ecosystem.

Rather than aiming to replace GNOME or ship a new desktop environment, the project treats GNOME as a platform and asks a narrower question: which behaviors and assumptions could be made optional or more cleanly abstracted without compromising a minimalist default experience?

The current focus is on research and documentation rather than implementation. Areas being examined include:

Architectural modularity versus extension-based customization,

Opt-in functionality for features that are disabled or removed upstream,

Preserving established Linux interaction patterns without expanding defaults,

Reducing unnecessary hard dependencies where practical, including systemd-specific assumptions,

The intent is not to “fix” GNOME or argue against upstream decisions, but to explore design tradeoffs around minimalism, flexibility, and long-term maintainability in modern Linux desktops.

At this stage, the project consists primarily of a concept site, documentation, and open design questions. Feedback on the framing, assumptions, and scope is very welcome.

Project site and repository:
https://github.com/runleveltwo/GYESME

Thanks for taking a look.
by PeterStuer | 2026-01-11 09:17:37+00:00
Many FOSS businessmodels did, exolicitly or implicitly, rely, not on direct obfuscation or overcomplication, but on not making things easy. So you sell not the product, services around the product.

This is not exclusive to FOsS. It is also the basic model of most non SaaS B2B, often for goopd reason referred to by the derogatory term 'consultingware'.

AI eats imto these services, as it commoditizes them. 80%+ of what used to take a specialist for that product can now be handled by a good generalist + AI.

Leaving aside the businessmodel impact for a second, getting rid of obfuscation incentives is intrinsically good thing for a user community.

Dries' solution, offering operations as a SaaS or managed service, is meeting a need AI can't as easily match, but not exactly for the hte stated reason. What the client is actually buying is making something someone else's problem. And CIO's will always love this more than anything if they can credibly justify it.

Where AI does impact this is in that latter part. If AI does sinificantly commoditize operational expertise, then the cost of inhouse operating is (sometimes dramatically) lowered, and thus the justification gap on the CIO side for spending outside widens. How much this will drive a descision will be very variable between businesses and projects.
by lunar_mycroft | 2026-01-11 09:18:40+00:00
Interestingly, things like domain name registrations and new github repositories didn't have the an inflection point in recent years [0]. This means it's almost certainly that a greater portion of new projects are getting submitted as Show HN, not that there's more new projects overall.

[0] https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware...
by spondyl | 2026-01-11 09:18:59+00:00
Philosophically, I like Fly and have been a customer since very early on.

That said, I dread having to do anything CLI related, which for hobby projects is like once every few weeks.

Glancing at the docs for Sprite, I worry that this will be another CLI where a good 95% of the time that I go to invoke a command, my workflow is interrupted by an auto-updater that takes longer than whatever interaction I'm trying to do and derails my train of thought.
by businessmate | 2026-01-11 09:19:31+00:00
Artificial intelligence is becoming a public-facing actor. Banks use it to explain credit decisions. Health platforms deploy it to answer clinical questions. Retailers rely on it to frame product choices. In each case, AI no longer sits quietly in the back office. It communicates directly with customers, patients and investors.
That shift exposes a weakness in many governance frameworks. When an AI system’s output is later disputed, organisations are often unable to show precisely what was communicated at the moment a decision was influenced. Accuracy benchmarks, training documentation and policy statements rarely answer that question. Re-running the system does not help either. The answer may change.

This is not a technical curiosity. It is an institutional vulnerability.
by District5524 | 2026-01-11 09:19:43+00:00
Losing brand control (IP) and lack of control over your sales channels is a big problem for traders who want to comply with dozens of regulations, exclusions and restrictions required by manufacturers, other sellers, trademark owners etc. The article also mentions means tax and customs compliance problems, but this also affects other trade law related issues, like competition law problems (antitrust). It is surprisingly easy to breach these even for tiny sellers. You don't want exposure to these kinds of sales. It is never just selling, it is always also complying with lots of new laws, And rest assured, Amazon bots will not work that out for you.
And now, these guys have to scrutinize the email orders as for their source because all the compliance process they have built in their webshops or wherever they advertised, will simply be bypassed by Amazon bots.
Terrible idea.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-11 09:19:55+00:00
That's "pretty believable" but it's also complete bullshit. Why do you feel it necessary to comment in an authoritative manner when you don't know what you're talking about? It's literally spreading misinformation.

The relevant technique is called "serial dilution" and it's regularly practiced in intro level chemistry and molecular biology classes. An otherwise untrained undergrad, using only a pipette and a volumetric flask, can consistently and reliably dilute samples to nanogram per liter levels. The error accumulates as some (exceedingly small) percentage of the target value per dilution step so even after 10 or more steps the error will remain well within manageable range.

The issue is not fentanyl having a power level over 9000 or whatever other nonsense. It's people who don't know what they're doing, don't have access to a proper setup, and have no realistic way to implement a proper quality control regime manufacturing pharmaceuticals.

Fentanyl didn't kill all these people. Objectively poor public policy indirectly led to the deaths of those who violated the law just as it did during prohibition.
by exDM69 | 2026-01-11 09:23:38+00:00
Using printf in shaders is awesome, it makes a huge difference when writing and debugging shaders. Vulkan and GLSL (and Slang) have a usable printf out of the box, but HLSL and D3D do not.

Afaik the way it works in Vulkan is that all the string formatting is actually done on the CPU. The GPU writes only writes the data to buffers with structs based on the format string.

All the shader prints are captured by tools such as Renderdoc, so you can easily find the vertex or pixel that printed something and then replay the shader execution in a debugger.

I only wish that we would've had this 20 years ago, it would have saved me so much time, effort and frustration.
by bulbar | 2026-01-11 09:23:50+00:00
> Until recently the US had taken pride in being nothing like a regime, but that may change in the coming years.

I tend to believe the US is already past that point. It's just people are not really realizing that yet. Might take the next election for them to realize. That will be to late however.

I hope so much that this is wrong and the US turns out to be more resilient than it looks like from the outside though.
by ZeroConcerns | 2026-01-11 09:24:39+00:00
Good conduit and patch panel design is definitely key for a happy life. Leaving some extra space/capacity initially is also a good idea, especially since (unless you're covering truly great distances) there's not exactly a lot of innovation in the single mode fibre space: strands you put in today (even if it's 'the cheapest stuff your vendor sells most of', which is generally my philosophy for selecting cables) will still be viable a few years down the road.

Sharing/in-place-repurposing conduit is not something I'd recommend, but if you must, leave a few dummy cables (a.k.a. 'pieces of string') on the initial install...
by wombatpm | 2026-01-11 09:24:50+00:00
The first patient in this cluster to die should provide confirmation of CJD or other prion disease.

There is a theory that spontaneous CJD can be spread environmentally. Apparently particles of sufficiently small size (10 nm) can pass from the nasal cavity directly into the brain via the olfactory nerve. And there was a cluster of CJD victims who were rose gardeners. Rose gardening commonly use Bone and Blood meal to feed the roses, and is typically made from cattle unfit for consumption-ie downer cows/BSE. I may have read about it in The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance Book by Laurie Garrett.
by bdauvergne | 2026-01-11 09:25:08+00:00
Maybe they completely reversed the causality, it's a demand shock not a supply shock. There are less users because they died, and they died pretty fast compared to previous opioid users. As demand diminished there was over supply and to maintain their margins provider had to lower the supply. QED.

As it's a pretty simple hypothesis to test and that it was not maybe imply that the conclusion is politically motivated. Supply-shock imply that something was done and it worked, but that the problem solved itself is not as palatable for someone politically motivated like an administration.
by kundan_s__r | 2026-01-11 09:25:15+00:00
This framing resonates a lot. The core issue you’re pointing at isn’t model accuracy, it’s epistemic accountability.

In most current deployments, an AI system’s output is treated as transient: generated, consumed, forgotten. When that output later becomes contested (“Why did the system say this?”), organizations fall back on proxies—training data, benchmarks, prompt templates—none of which actually describe what happened at decision time.

Re-running the system is especially misleading, as you note. You’re no longer observing the same system state, the same context, or even the same implicit distribution. You’re generating a new answer and pretending it’s evidence.

What seems missing in many governance frameworks is an intermediate layer that treats AI output as a decision artifact—something that must be validated, scoped, and logged before it is allowed to influence downstream actions. Without that, auditability is retroactive and largely fictional.

Once AI speaks directly to users, the question shifts from “Is the model good?” to “Can the institution prove what it allowed the model to say, and why?” That’s an organizational design problem as much as a technical one.
by wahern | 2026-01-11 09:26:19+00:00
> I do believe that the kids in the lower-rated schools must feel a positive effect, mingling with highly-motivated, better-educated kids. It may do away with the whole "study is uncool, real kids hate school" vibe that holds many "bad neighborhood" schools back.

That's the logic, but it doesn't pan out. IMO it's because 1) by high school it's too late--kids already segregate themselves and the ones with strong study habits will tend to hide them. In America generally the culture is for upper classes to pretend they're anything but, coopting the styles and mannerisms of the lower classes, especially Black culture (which in American culture is almost by definition low status yet valorized).

I grew up poor, with zero structure at home. It wasn't until I was mid-way through college when I realized the people around me actually studied and did their homework. I just didn't see it because they all pretended otherwise, then snuck off with their higher class peers, almost like secret rituals.

Contrast that with, e.g. East Asian culture. I remember the first time I visited Singapore and saw a group of elementary school kids, without supervision, congregating at a McDonalds do to their homework together.

My daughter goes to a Chinese immersion public school in SF. It's mostly Asian, but there's actually a sizable minority of black students there. Like their slightly more numerous white peers, they tend have a parent who made a very deliberate decision and who provides the necessary structure and support at home. Home support is key because, talking with those parents, not even by 8th grade does the feeling of being different disappear; it's very taxing. It's entirely unreasonable to drop a poor white, black, or 4th generation Asian kid off at that school and expect them to adopt and internalize the culture without significant support at home. By contrast, the recently immigrated Asians fit right in regardless of class or wealth.

Now imagine dropping a few smart students with strong study habits and support networks off at a school where most kids don't have those benefits. It's never going to move the needle.
by bwb | 2026-01-11 09:26:23+00:00
That was a specific example where AI helped me revamp my workout. No workout stays static; it has evolved over the years, in small ways. With this change I threw out 60% of it, and replaced it with a lot of work to make sure I was working full body and taking into account the injury. I was having more pain in 2025 and was only pain-free around 90% of the time. I wanted to get stronger but also revet everything I was doing to hopefully get out of that pain.

Hope that helps!

You can ask a trainer questions, they are super helpful and taught a lot, but it is still one person, and they don't often sit around at night reading university/research papers on the injury, etc.
by EagnaIonat | 2026-01-11 09:26:29+00:00
> No such thing as "brand rights" [1] beyond stuff like trademark, which clearly doesn't apply here.

I don't disagree with you on a personal opinion side, but the more expensive brands have a snobbery about who they sell to. To me it seems less about quality and more about "I'm rich" app style of fashion.
by maxbond | 2026-01-11 09:26:34+00:00
Disclaimer: I'm not your target audience, I don't care about collaboration or performance.

- There's a heavy emphasis on performance. Are you sure customers care about that more than real time collaboration and self hosting? (I don't think they care about CRDTs.)

- If I am experiencing pain because eg my Notion wiki is too big and is having serious performance issues, what I want to hear immediately is how you are going to help me migrate from Notion to your solution. Notion has a feature to export an entire workspace; can you ingest that and get me spun up with your product?

- If I hear something is open source I expect to be able to try it out immediately without logging in. It looks like you can do that but when you hit "Get Started" it puts you into a registration flow.

- You might take a look at how Zed is marketing themselves, they have a similar pitch (performance + realtime collaboration). The first thing they try to show you is a video where they demo the product and show how fast it is. (I think they focus too much on performance though.)

- The frontend is a web app right? If possible rather than a video, embed the interface in your landing page. If possible, let them share their document and try out collaborating on it with someone or with another browser tab. Give them an opportunity to be impressed.

I respect anyone who posts their work. Best of luck.