MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by edfletcher_t137 | 2026-01-05 22:31:50+00:00
> But for now, I want to emphasize a broader point: I’m hoping 2026 will be the year we stop caring about what people believe AI might do, and instead start reacting to its real, present capabilities.

> So, this is how I’m thinking about AI in 2026. Enough of the predictions. I’m done reacting to hypotheticals propped up by vibes. The impacts of the technologies that already exist are already more than enough to concern us for now…

SPOT ON, let us all take inspiration. "The impacts of the technologies that already exist are already more than enough to concern us for now"!
by snyy | 2026-01-05 22:31:58+00:00
As the other comment said, its a practice in good enough chunks quality. We focus on big chunks (largest we can make without hurting embedding quality) as fast as possible. In our experience, retrieval accuracy is mostly driven by embedding quality, so perfect splits don't move the needle much.

But as the number of files to ingest grows, chunking speed does become a bottleneck. We want faster everything (chunking, embedding, retrieval) but chunking was the first piece we tackled. Memchunk is the fastest we could build.
by IshKebab | 2026-01-05 22:32:07+00:00
VSCode is actually one of the best for large files. Not as good as Sublime Text, but it can happily edit million line files, and you'd be surprised how many other editors can't do that. Zed couldn't until recently (not sure if it can now; I haven't checked recently).

Once you get into the GB range there are very very few editors that can edit those files unfortunately.
by KoolKat23 | 2026-01-05 22:32:32+00:00
Again words in my mouth. I'm not justifying that and nowhere does it say that. I could be very impolite to you right now trying to slander me like that.

I said I don't understand the fuss because there are guardrails, action taken and technical limitations.

THAT is my motive. The end of story. I do not need to parrot outrage because everyone else is, "you're either with us or against us" bullshit. I'm here for a rational discussion.

Again read what I've said. Technical limitations. You wrote that long ass explanation interspersed with ambiguities like consulting lawyers in borderline cases and then you expect an LLM to handle this.

Yes ML classification is good now but not foolproof. Hence we go back to the first point, processes to deal with this when x's existing guardrails fail, as x.com has done, delete, suspend, report.

My fear (only because you mention it, I didn't mention it above, I only said I don't get the fuss above) it seems should be that people are losing touch in this grok thing, their arguments are no longer grounded in truth or rational thought, almost a rabid witch hunt.
by alex43578 | 2026-01-05 22:32:47+00:00
Even setting aside that Ukraine never had the technical means or infrastructure to operate/maintain those weapons, I don't think they would have dissuaded Russia or actually been used. Russia could turn them into a wasteland in response and 6 million people (including hundreds of thousands of men of military age) weren't even willing to stay in Ukraine, much less fight for the country. If Zelensky were to give an order to launch hypothetical nukes, I'd think there would have been a coup and no launch.
by runako | 2026-01-05 22:33:06+00:00
We make decisions through purchasing, yes.

There are also hundreds/thousands of elections annually through which we collectively set policy directions. Contrary to belief, politicians are responsive to voters over long periods of time. So over time, the policies that are continually ratified do reflect our collective choices.

And for at least the last several decades, yes we have collectively decided through our policy directions that there are classes of jobs whose holders are not deserving of material prosperity.
by sowbug | 2026-01-05 22:33:21+00:00
"Counterfeit" is a tricky word when the Eli Lilly product in question isn't actually available for sale, meaning that nobody is selling anything purported to be a branded version. Nobody even knows yet what the Eli Lilly brand of retatrutide will be called. There isn't anything yet to counterfeit.

You're correct that the amino acid with the sequence YA¹QGTFTSDYSIL²LDKK⁴AQA¹AFIEYLLEGGPSSGAPPPS³ is being manufactured and sold. And people are justified in being wary whether the substance they get is actually a pure version of retatrutide. But it's not counterfeit.

It's an important distinction. Counterfeiters are by definition liars, and it's reasonable to assume that liars are cutting corners. But someone correctly manufacturing a specific amino acid is truthfully selling what they claim to be selling. It might turn out that retatrutide causes you to grow extra eyes in five years, and the FDA trials are on the brink of discovering as much, in which case Eli Lilly-branded retatrutide will never come into existence. For that reason it would be prudent to wait for FDA approval.
by fsflover | 2026-01-05 22:33:21+00:00
>> The disposable VM will not allow exfiltration, since it has no network

> Sure, unless you're doing something in the disposable VM that requires network traffic, like browsing.

This is called goal shifting. Anyway, in this case Qubes can also save you. You browse untrusted websites in a disposable VM, which doesn't contain anything sensitive. You move any downloaded untrusted files to a dedicated storage VM and never open them there without another, dedicated disposable VM.

You browse trusted websites in another, more trusted VM. More details: https://doc.qubes-os.org/en/latest/user/how-to-guides/how-to...

> It lacks numerous protections. It serves a purpose against certain threatmodels, but it's far from being close to 100% secure. Like I said, it's essentially a workaround.

I challenge you to provide me with a threat model that is not covered with Qubes. You couldn't yet. You can call it a workaround, but it's the only approach that actually works today and in the visible future.

> So you agree Qubes is not a 100% secure OS like the other poster was asking for, correct?

The poster is asking for a fairy-tale. I suggested something realistic that solves the problem instead.

> None of them are claiming it is as close to 100% secure as possible. No security expert would. Not even a security hobbyist would. It's a nonsense claim.

I also don't. But you seem to be seeking 100% security, don't you?

> That was always within your control.

I wasn't talking about my own words.
by behnamoh | 2026-01-05 22:33:30+00:00
tbh I think Google should sell all the companies they bought because Google can't deliver any products anymore. There are product companies (hello OpenAI, Anthro) and then there are corporate companies. Google is the latter. Their attempts at making new products have been failure after failure recently:

Bard → Gemini → Jules → Antigravity (they can't even come up with a good product name)

Their GCP console is a mess. Wanna get a Gemini API? Good luck with that.

And where is the "internet through balloons"? Where's their quantum HPC? Where is half the stuff they demo every year to devs to prove that they're still relevant but never ship them? e.g., where is that smart glass they used in their demo last year that had Gemini in it and could analyze what you see? Where's their "calls any restaurant on your behalf" ML model they introduced many years ago?

Google has lost it, and to make things even worse, occasionally they poke at their successful products and googllify them too (YT likes disappearing, Gmail with Gemini, Google Search performing worse than Bing, etc.)
by adventured | 2026-01-05 22:33:32+00:00
Why not?

Russia invades. Ukraine launches nukes. Every major city in Ukraine is ash. Several major cities in Russia are ash. Millions die plausibly.

That scenario is not what would happen from an invasion.

Zelensky would not have used nukes to prompt the death of millions instantly. He would have proceeded with the same defensive war.

The false premise rests on: it's better for everyone to die than live under Russian occupation. That would overwhelmingly be chosen false by the population in question that is being invaded.

All those people that lived under Soviet Russia occupation, they were better off dead in nuclear fire than living under said occupation? Obviously not what the masses would have chosen (just look at what they did choose to do while living under Russian occupation - how many gave up their lives to fight back?). It's fundamentally why nuclear weapons as deterrant is largely fraudulent. They're solely viable as a last option against total oblivion at the hands of an enemy: it entails everyone dies, which means there has to be a good enough reason for everyone to die to justify use.
by ComputerGuru | 2026-01-05 22:34:15+00:00
Pg18 is an absolutely fantastic release. Everyone flaks about the async IO worker support, but there’s so much more. Builtin Unicode locales, unique indexes/constraints/fks that can be added in unvalidated state, generated virtual (expression) columns, skip scans on btree indexes (absolutely huge), uuidv7 support, and so much more.
by doctorpangloss | 2026-01-05 22:34:23+00:00
Cal Newport looked in the wrong places. He has no visibility into the usage of ChatGPT to do homework. The collapse of Chegg should tell you, with no other public information, that if 30% of students were already cheating somehow, somewhat weakly, they are now doing super-powerful cheating, and surely more than 30% of students at this stage.

It’s also kind of stupid to hand wave away, programming. Programmers are where all the early adopters of software are. He’s merely conflating an adoption curve with capabilities. Programmers, I’m sure, were also the first to use Google and smartphones. “It doesn’t work for me” is missing the critical word “yet” at the end, and really, is it saying much that forecasts about adoption in the metric, “years until when Cal Newport’s arbitrary criteria of what agent and adoption means meets some threshold only inside Cal Newport’s head” is hard to do?

There are 700m active monthlies for ChatGPT. It has joined the workforce! It just isn’t being paid the salaries.
by KaiserPro | 2026-01-05 22:34:39+00:00
is it reasonable (legal term, ie anyone can do it) that someone with little effort could create CSAM using photoshop?

No, you need to train, take a lot of time and effort to do it. with grok you say "hey make a sexy version of [picture of this minor]" and it'll do it. that doesn't take traning, and its not a high bar to stopping people doing it.

The non-CSAM example is this, it's illegal, in the USA to make anything that looks like a US dollar bill. ie photocopiers have blocks on them to stop you making copies of it.

You can get round that as a private citizen but its still illegal. A company knowingly making a photocopier that allows you to photocopy dollar bills is in for a bad time.
by cjflog | 2026-01-05 22:34:45+00:00
Currently a one-man side project: https://laboratory.love

In 2024, PlasticList found plastic chemicals in 86% of tested foods—including 100% of baby foods they tested. Around the same time, the EU lowered its “safe” BPA limit by 20,000×, while the FDA still allows levels roughly 100× higher than Europe’s new standard.

That seemed solvable.

Laboratory.love lets you crowdfund independent lab testing of the specific products you actually buy. Think Consumer Reports × Kickstarter, but focused on detecting endocrine disruptors in your yogurt, your kid’s snacks, or whatever you’re curious about.

Find a product (or suggest one), contribute to its testing fund, and get full lab results when testing completes. If a product doesn’t reach its goal within 365 days, you’re automatically refunded. All results are published publicly. I'm actually thinking about turning off crowdfunding and making it a pure "service to be purchased" as all fully-funded products have been single-contributor driven (the refund process creates labor without a clear upside).

We use the same ISO 17025-accredited methodology as PlasticList.org, testing three separate production lots per product (when possible) and detecting down to parts-per-billion. The entire protocol is open.

*Stats as of Jan 2026*

- Since launching almost one year ago, laboratory.love has received $16,835+ in contributions across 38 products!

- 12 products have been fully funded, representing 36 batch samples (that's three unique production batches per product) and 72 total chemical panels (two separate tests for each sample, BPA/BPS/BPF and phthalates)

- 9 product results have been published, with 3 currently in progress

- One manufacturer has already kicked off an internal investigation as a result of our testing (more to say here soon).

- Product pages with published results tables can now calculate the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) Tolerable Daily Intake Percentage (%TDI) for toddlers (assumed to be 14kg) and adults (70kg).

- Monthly Subscriptions are live. Funds are pooled and allocated to the leading unfunded product anytime the pool can get that product to its funding goal.

The goal is simple: make supply chains transparent enough that cleaner ones win. When consumers have real data, markets shift.

Browse funded tests, propose your own, or just follow along: https://laboratory.love
by schlauerfox | 2026-01-05 22:34:47+00:00
You are not correct according to Reuters.
"The new schedule also recommends U.S. children receive a single dose of human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, rather than a two-dose course. Recent studies have concluded that a single dose is not inferior to the longer course and noted the World Health Organization also backs a single dose schedule."
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
by ashvardanian | 2026-01-05 22:34:55+00:00
I’m currently using a mix of Zed, Sublime, and VS Code.

The biggest missing piece in Zed for my workflow right now is side-by-side diffs. There’s an open discussion about it, though it hasn’t seen much activity recently: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/26770

Stronger support for GDB/LLDB and broader C/C++ tooling would also be a big win.

It’s pretty wild how bloated most software has become. Huge thanks to the people behind Zed and Sublime for actively pushing in the opposite direction!
by JasonADrury | 2026-01-05 22:35:18+00:00
For nuclear deterrence to work in situations like this, it'd also be preferable to have sufficient conventional capabilities that your leadership isn't decapitated before you even notice it's happening. If the attacker is also nuclear-capable, there's little incentive for second person in the chain of command to kill themselves.

Similarly, if a head of state is killed by poison or other similar means, you could hardly expect nuclear retaliation when their successor later discovers what happened.
by DocTomoe | 2026-01-05 22:35:34+00:00
You also don't take into account that the userbase itself is shifting.

That being said: Those of us who grew up when the internet was still young remember alt.suicide.holiday, and when you could buy books explaining relatively painless methods on amazon. People are depressed. It's a result of the way we choose to live as a civilization. Some don't make the cut. We should start accepting that. In fact, forcing people to live on in a world that is unsuited for happiness might constitute cruel and unusual punishment.
by stusmall | 2026-01-05 22:36:14+00:00
This falls under the "something similar" category but it's direnv support is great https://zed.dev/docs/configuring-zed#direnv-integration

It isn't 1:1 since there probably won't be ansible provided configs, but I find writing nix devshells per project to be low effort and high reward. It'll only be a couple lines if all you need is a specific version of ansible
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-05 22:36:20+00:00
> we need their own words to confirm it

We need something. I asked if there was a hot mic because those two have a tendency to get recorded saying stupid things. It coud also be an e-mail, a memo, a recollection by a friend or former colleague, et cetera.

In the absence of evidence, it's much simpler to conclude that at least Musk is just sexist versus trying "to make women afraid to participate in public life."
by bigstrat2003 | 2026-01-05 22:36:22+00:00
> As for how to do it - I don't see why it is hard for you to come up with something that proves ownership.

It is pretty hard to come up with proof of ownership when Google refuses to tell you what forms of proof they will find acceptable. When I go to the DMV and need to prove my residence, the DMV clearly states what forms are acceptable proof. Google should do the same, especially when they are asked what forms of proof are acceptable. Instead they gave this guy the runaround and ignored his question on how to prove ownership.
by gowld | 2026-01-05 22:36:24+00:00
Is the copyright registered?

https://www.copyright.gov/registration

While copyright registration is not legally required for copyright protection, it is the practical way to create usable evidence that the work is coprighted by you. Without it, challenging a copyright infringer is a more arduous legal process.

Also, the author's website, and the books themselves claims that "Perishable Press" is the copyright holder, not "Jeff Starr". (Excepting the ones that don't state any copyright holder.)

https://books.perishablepress.com/downloads/digging-into-wor...

In legal matters, clear and accurate communication is essential.
by WorldMaker | 2026-01-05 22:36:42+00:00
The original "own goal" is that "Office app" was a Windows Phone 7/Windows 8 application no one used called something boring like "Preview" or "Document Hub" around the time OneDrive was still being called SkyDrive from the Windows Phone "Hub app" era. The app was basically just an MRU view of SkyDrive filtered to Word/Excel/PowerPoint documents.

Renaming that app "Office app" didn't do much to explain what it was for or what it was good at, especially with the confusion of "Office suite" and "Office app". (Some of that seemingly intentional with "Office app" trying to be a "Start Here" for Office documents.) I think that rename was worse than the new one.

With the rename to "Microsoft 365 Copilot app" there's actually new features and some idea of what the app is now for ("doing LLM things while wearing a corporate document fursona"). It's a dumb name, but a dumb name for an app that's a little less dumb.
by eientei95 | 2026-01-05 22:36:44+00:00
> Copilot in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app is available for Microsoft 365 Enterprise, Academic, and SMB subscribers with a work or education account. Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers and free accounts can access Copilot at copilot.microsoft.com and on the Copilot mobile app

So you don't even have Copilot in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app
by gradus_ad | 2026-01-05 22:37:12+00:00
Of course it can, and it is. Such logic is behind the argument in favor of arresting Putin. Many have argued that should happen if he were to step on their nations' soil. The reason no one thinks seriously about going into Russia and enforcing open arrest warrants is that they fear the consequences, though maybe in light of Russia's revealed impotence that fear is unjustified.
by nunobrito | 2026-01-05 22:37:17+00:00
Thank you for the concern, I've checked and that is the CLI history file that is used on the linux server.

Had some fun and added some CLI dungeon and dragon games inside. Will put that file on the .ignore list. Basically the games are based on markdown text files: https://github.com/geograms/geogram/blob/main/games/azurath-...
by bpavuk | 2026-01-05 22:37:49+00:00
a stellar piece, Cal, as always. short and straight to the point.

I believe that Codex and the likes took off (in comparison to e.g. "AI" browsers) because the bottleneck there was not reasoning about code, it was about typing and processing walls of text. for a human, the interface of e.g. Google Calendar is ± intuitive. for a LLM, any graphical experience is an absolute hellscape from performance standpoint.

CLI tools, which LLMs love to use, output text and only text, not images, not audio, not videos. LLMs excel at text, hence they are confined to what text can do. yes, multimodal is a thing, but you lose a lot of information and/or context window space + speed.

LLMs are a flawed technology for general, true agents. 99% of the time, outside code, you need eyes and ears. we have only created a self-writing paper yet.
by KaiserPro | 2026-01-05 22:38:14+00:00
At no point did I say or imply LLMs are meant to make legal decisions.

"Hey grok make a sexy version of [obvious minor]" is not something that is hard to stop. try doing that query with meta, gemini, or sora, they manage it reliably well.

There are not technical impediments to stopping this, its a choice.
by wombat-man | 2026-01-05 22:39:00+00:00
This was talked about in The Hard Thing about Hard Things by Ben Horowitz, iirc, but from the other side. It advises to not offer a raise to keep an employee planning to leave. This is because the implication is that you were underpaying them before or that you're willing to overpay them now for threatening to quit. This encourages employees to follow suit instead of working towards promo. So pay what you're willing to and don't play that kind of game.

The book/article goes in more depth. I thought it was still online for free but I can't seem to find it.
by crispyambulance | 2026-01-05 22:39:15+00:00
OK, but isn’t the key take-away from the Challenger disaster all about the consequence of organizational dysfunction and fear of speaking up?

It wasn’t really a “design flaw” or “weak link” as much as it was management disregarding the warnings of engineering staff. The cold temperature limitation was known in advance by the Morton Thiokol engineers but their management refused to relay the warnings of engineering to NASA and NASA was under pressure to fly. IMHO this was a failure of multiple, mostly organizational, systems rather than “one weak link”.

Did the economists mis-name their own theory?
by nunobrito | 2026-01-05 22:39:40+00:00
That is correct. I'm able to steer the project and find many of the issues because of experience. Also, it is indeed a new tool so is necessary to change our own mentality about the way how code is created (generated). In overall it is fantastic despite the occasional frustration when the computer hangs (too many compilers at the same time) or when AI gets lazy and tries to avoid implementing what it was asked.
by fmstephe | 2026-01-05 22:40:04+00:00
Can some clarify this part of the article for me

"if you search forward, you need to scan through the entire window to find where to split. you’d find a delimiter at byte 50, but you can’t stop there — there might be a better split point closer to your target size. so you keep searching, tracking the last delimiter you saw, until you finally cross the chunk boundary. that’s potentially thousands of matches and index updates."

So I understand that this is optimal if you want to make your chunks as large as possible for a given chunk size.

What I don't understand is why is it desirable to grab the largest chunk possible for a given chunk limit?

Or have I misunderstood this part of the article?