MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dotancohen | 2026-01-27 01:38:43+00:00
I dropped my flagship Samsung S24U one time. I was running and it slipped out of my back pocket.

That 1 meter fall resulted in calls unable to be placed, USB charging and ABD does not work, and the microphone for the voice recorder does not work. All that indicates that the daughterboard cable was displaced. But the unworking rear camera indicates that there is a second fault in there as well.

Not to mention the alarmingly large dent in the corner, that shattered the screen protector and likely would have resulted in the screen itself having shattered if no protector were on it.

New phones are designed to break. Contrast with my Note 3 that I carried for 8 years without so much as cracking the screen once.
by basilgohar | 2026-01-27 01:38:44+00:00
I feel like one of the things that's not said enough, and which I think is conflating the effectiveness of AI in the eyes of actual software engineers, is that, for the most part, most code produced IS lousy. The craft of programming has been watered down so much in favor of results, and so much code is disposable or write-and-use once, that quality just became less relevant.

I remember when I first started out programming 20 years ago, there was time to craft good quality code. Then there were more and more pushes to get more code out faster, and no one really cared about the quality. Bugs became part of the cost of doing business. I think GenAI for code fits well in the more recent paradigm, and comparing it with hand-crafted code of yore is a bit disingenuous, as appealing as it may be, because most code hasn't been that good for a long time.

I am sad to admit it, but AI is just fitting in where poor coding practices have already existed, and flourishing in that local maxima.
by Marsymars | 2026-01-27 01:38:57+00:00
> Institutional investors like the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan and CDQP tend to target asset classes outside of Canada due to their returns requirements being in the double digits range.

TBF, the OTPP has a huge home bias - they’ve got more Canadian investments than they do US investments despite the market being less than a tenth the size.

They couldn’t target a higher proportion of Canadian assets while remaining reasonably diversified.
Cancel Your AI Subscriptions
by trinsic2 | 2026-01-27 01:39:04+00:00
If you haven't seen the news by now we have another murder by border patrol in Minnesota[0], Alex Pretti. He was gunned down in an unwarranted attack by a group of cowards. We really need to shut this country down. If just 10% of people stopped using the big players AI for a week or more, this would end the ICE deployments. The only thing these people care about is money. I don't thing protesting is going to work in the short term and these criminals need to be removed now.

[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c20zjyxep99o
by leguminous | 2026-01-27 01:39:05+00:00
At some point, most NTSC TVs had delay lines, too. A comb filter was commonly used for separating the chroma from the luma, taking advantage of the chroma phase being flipped each line. Sophisticated comb filters would have multiple delay lines and logic to adaptively decide which to use. Some even delayed a whole field or frame, so you could say that in this case one or more frames were stored in the TV.

https://www.extron.com/article/ntscdb3
by giancarlostoro | 2026-01-27 01:39:25+00:00
The caveat is use the right one for the right job. There's a meme that if its not moving but its supposed to you need WD-40... well you need Silicone WD-40 or any silicone based oil like for a garage. If you use regular WD-40 in a garage it is a degreaser essentially, and your squeaking goes away momentarily, and then comes back. After I learned this, you have no idea how much silicone WD-40 I had to put in my garage to make the squeaking stop for good.
by zdragnar | 2026-01-27 01:39:32+00:00
This is just whitewashing crime.

The people being hurt by this aren't the millionaire or billionaire tech caste.

I'm reminded of when rioters were trashing stores in response to George Floyd's death. The usual justification was "oh business insurance will cover it, they need an outlet for their emotions" Well, the only grocery store in a predominantly black neighborhood was out of commission for weeks due to damage. A black owned liquor store was burned down, and he didn't have insurance. Lots of similar stories on Lake Street. The people who deserved that harm the very least got it the most.
by kshri24 | 2026-01-27 01:39:41+00:00
Accurate and sane take! Current models are extremely good for very specific kinds of tasks. But beyond that, it is a coin toss. Gets worse as the context window goes beyond a few ten thousand tokens. If you have only vibe-coded toy projects (even with the latest fad - Ralph whatever) for anything serious, you can see how quickly it all falls apart.

It is quite scary that junior devs/college kids are more into vibe coding than putting in the effort to actually learn the fundamentals properly. This will create at least 2-3 generations of bad programmers down the line.
by root_axis | 2026-01-27 01:39:50+00:00
> You clearly didn't read the post

This kind of petty remark is like a reverse em dash. Greetings fellow human.

Anyway, I did read it. The author's description of a future AI is basically just a more advanced version of LLMs

> By “powerful AI,” I have in mind an AI model—likely similar to today’s LLMs in form, though it might be based on a different architecture, might involve several interacting models, and might be trained differently—with the following properties:

They then go on to list several properties that meet their definition, but what I'm trying to explain in my comment is that I don't accept them all at face value. I think it's fair to critique from that perspective since the author explicitly modeled their future based on today's LLMs, unlike many AI essays that skip straight to the super intelligence meme as their premise.
by olliepro | 2026-01-27 01:40:53+00:00
What abstraction levels do you expect will remain only in the Human domain?

The progression from basic arithmetic, to complex ratios and basic algebra, graphing, geometry, trig, calculus, linear algebra, differential equations… all along the way, there are calculators that can help students (wolfram alpha basically). When they get to theory, proofs, etc… historically, thats where the calculator ended, but now there’s LLMs… it feels like the levels of abstractions without a “calculator” are running out.

The compiler was the “calculator” abstraction of programming, and it seems like the high-level languages now have LLMs to convert NLP to code as a sort of compiler. Especially with the explicitly stated goal of LLM companies to create the “software singularity”, I’d be interested to hear the rationale for abstractions in CS which will remain off limits to LLMs.
by itchyouch | 2026-01-27 01:41:03+00:00
The trick with the vo2 max measurement on the apple watch though is that the person can not waste any time during their outdoor walk and needs to maintain a brisk pace.

Then there's confounders like altitude, elevation gain that can sully the numbers.

It can be pretty great, but it needs a bit of control in order to get a proper reading.
by adithyassekhar | 2026-01-27 01:41:16+00:00
> I think one promising shift direction is humans do NOT like to talk to bots, especially not for anything important. It's biological.

Let me tell you why I like shopping from amazon instead of going to a super market...

But also the older I get I keep wanting to visit the store in person. It's not to see the other human, I just want to hold the thing I want to buy and need it immediately instead of waiting. I feel like there isn't enough time anymore.
by elzbardico | 2026-01-27 01:42:01+00:00
LLMs are not a mythical universal machine learning model that you can feed any input and have it magically do the same thing a specialized ML model could do.

You can't feed an LLM years of time-series meteorological data, and expect it to work as a specialized weather model, you can't feed it years of medical time-series and expect it to work as a model specifically trained, and validated on this specific kind of data.

An LLM generates a stream of tokens. You feed it a giant set of CSVs, if it was not RL'd to do something useful with it, it will just try to make whatever sense of it and generate something that will most probably have no strong numerical relationship to your data, it will simulate an analysis, it won't do it.

You may have a giant context windows, but attention is sparse, the attention mechanism doesn't see your whole data at the same time, it can do some simple comparisons, like figuring out that if I say my current pressure is 210X180 I should call an ER immediately. But once I send it a time-series of my twice a day blood-pressure measurements for the last 10 years, it can't make any real sense of it.

Indeed, it would have been better for the author to ask the LLM to generate a python notebook to do some data analysis on it, and then run the notebook and share the result with the doctor.
by apetresc | 2026-01-27 01:42:12+00:00
I think you're conflating two different things. It's entirely possible (and, I think, quite likely) that AI is simultaneously not anthropomorphic (and is not ACTUALLY "excited" in the way I thought you were objecting to earlier), but also IS "intelligent" for all intents and purposes. Is it the same type and nature as human intelligence? No, probably not. Does that mean it's "just a flaky integration" and won't have a seismic effect on the economy? I wouldn't bet on it. It's certainly not a foregone conclusion, whichever way it ends up landing.

And I don't think AGI is a "myth." It may or may not be achieved in the near future with current LLM-like techniques, but it's certainly not categorically impossible just because it won't be "sentient".
by n_u | 2026-01-27 01:42:38+00:00
This is my second attempt learning Rust and I have found that LLMs are a game-changer. They are really good at proposing ways to deal with borrow-checker problems that are very difficult to diagnose as a Rust beginner.

In particular, an error on one line may force you to change a large part of your code. As a beginner this can be intimidating ("do I really need to change everything that uses this struct to use a borrow instead of ownership? will that cause errors elsewhere?") and I found that induced analysis paralysis in me. Talking to an LLM about my options gave me the confidence to do a big change.
by parl_match | 2026-01-27 01:43:11+00:00
> This has nothing to do with local whole-disk encryption like FileVault or BitLocker.

Wrong. When you set up a Mac laptop, it gives you the option to escrow keys. ADP disables that and ADP also prevents key escrow for iDevice backups

> In Apple's case, even when the user enables iCloud FileVault key backup, that key is still end-to-end encrypted and Apple cannot access it.

Wrong. With ADP enabled (which the vast majority of users do not have), this is completely incorrect. Factually wrong, and dangerously misleading.
by quesomaster9000 | 2026-01-27 01:43:53+00:00
Some people get so precious about code bases and want everything to be 100 line digestable units that working with them is becomes near impossible when they dig their heels in.

It's like dealing an angry grandpa throwing mud over your newly cleaned car, "You gotta start at the wheels lad, not the windows, do it again".

Great, now you've broken the flow, I have to re-do everything, figure out which tests to introduce in which order and unravel them all, ironically this is where I've found more bugs creeping in, because you're no longer diligent - you're appeasing performatively.
by c0balt | 2026-01-27 01:44:25+00:00
> Lack of workplace protections, time off, etc which our peer nations enjoy

Do you really think the Chinese have not dealt with bad workplace conditions? The US population may be jealous of some of their neighbors but they have significantly better working conditions than most Chinese.

From 996 from Alibaba to the swaths of cheap, manual labor used for outsourcing by, among others, the US.
by jasonfarnon | 2026-01-27 01:44:38+00:00
"It really undermines the sense of community when vandals deface public spaces and community centers and apartment blocks."

I much prefer graffiti in my field of vision than corporate billboards. In SF I don't even notice the graffiti, maybe because most of it is hard to read and understand? But I do notice the huge huge billboards over every thoroughfare with the stupid corny messages.
by dekhn | 2026-01-27 01:44:51+00:00
It's not super practical to make objectives. While I suppose it's technically possible, what you produce will almost certainly be worse, more expensive, and more time-consuming.

$65 for a good lens is really not a huge amount of money; you can also find slightly cheaper lenses (about $20 on aliexpress).

To make a lens like this, you would have to buy a glass blank of the right type (two, actually- a doublet is made of two different types of glass), grind and polish them (very messy), and then bond them and apply an antireflective coating. Getting the lens geometry just right is very challenging. Or you can just give Thorlabs $65 and focus (ha) on building a microscope around it (I do this as a hobby; I'm sitting next to one of those lenses right now).

However, folks do this, see http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/indexmag.html?http://www... but I can tell you from the images that you could get the same results (better really) with a $150 microscope (which also embeds many hundreds of years of practical technology that make your experience significantly better).

Also, if you're really keen on doing it yourself for pedagogical reasons, then have at it, I just don't think it's the best use of time.
by saisrirampur | 2026-01-27 01:45:39+00:00
Great question! It really depends on the workload. We already support NVMe instances as small as 4 GB RAM / 2 vCPUs. For HA setups, you could go with one standby (with configurable synchronous replication) or two standbys (cross-AZ, with quorum-based replication). So yes, there is some additional cost from a hardware perspective due to the standbys, but depending on the workload, NVMe performance could offset those costs. On top of this, there’s a separate topic around the reliability/availability promises of separating storage and compute for an OLTP Postgres database.
by shagie | 2026-01-27 01:45:54+00:00
Trying to write the easiest code that I could test... I don't think I can without writing an excessively brittle test that would break at the slightest implementation change.

So you've got this Java:

public List<Integer> someCall() {
return IntStream.range(1,10).boxed().toList();
}

public List<Integer> filterEvens(List<Integer> ints) {
return ints.stream()
.filter(i -> i % 2 == 0)
.toList();
}

int aMethod() {
List<Integer> data = someCall();
return filterEvens(data.stream().filter(i -> i % 2 == 0).toList()).size();
}

And I can mock the class and return a spied'ed List. But now I've got to have that spied List return a spied stream that checks to see if .filter(i -> i % 2 == 0) was called. But then someone comes and writes it later as .filter(i -> i % 2 != 1) and the test breaks. Or someone adds another call to sort them first, and the test breaks.

To that end, I'd be very curious to see the test code that verifies that when aMethod() is called that the List returned by SomeCall is not filtered twice.

What's more, it's not a useful test - "not filtered twice" isn't something that is observable. It's an implementation detail that could change with a refactoring.

Writing a test that verifies that filterEvens returns a list that only contains even numbers? That's a useful test.

Writing a test that verifies that aMethod returns back the size of the even numbers that someCall produced? That's a useful test.

Writing a test that tries to enforce a particular implementation between the {} of aMethod? That's not useful and incredibly brittle (assuming that it can be written).
by nickitolas | 2026-01-27 01:46:01+00:00
> In addition, success is generally pretty well-defined. Everyone wants correct, performant, bug-free, secure code.

I feel like these are often not well defined? "Its not a bug it's a feature", "premature optimization is the root of all evil", etc

In different contexts, "performant enough" means different things. Similarly, many times I've seen different teams within a company have differing opinions on "correctness"
by gamacodre | 2026-01-27 01:46:04+00:00
With those examples though, how would we know ahead of time that they "shouldn't be explored?" They sure looked interesting and maybe even potentially beneficial a couple decades ago.

Now, of course, we know those algorithms warp regular users (and by extension societies). Or... maybe they don't? Some research has suggested that just putting this many people in direct communication with each other is the root cause of the problems we see. There could be other ways to fix those without shutting down the internet. How would we know without more exploration?
by SchemaLoad | 2026-01-27 01:46:33+00:00
Enterprise software is also particularly bad because many of the customers get to demand that things work the way they want. Leading to a million weird functions, toggles, configurability because some manager in charge of making a big purchase demanded that first it must do X, many of these features left with not even a single user after the original requester leaves. While consumer software the individual consumers just get what they are given, and a single product manager/team decide what's best.
by tptacek | 2026-01-27 01:47:11+00:00
You're not even telling a coherent story at this point. The "cold winter theory" isn't merely that the populations are different (though: again: when you look at the molecular evidence and the way genes propagate, it's nowhere nearly as clear as you'd think), it's that the cold winter populations are smarter. But you have to literally ignore most of human history to reach that conclusion. Somehow, in this view of the world, evolution only kicked in a couple hundred years ago. Seems unlikely!
by pavlus | 2026-01-27 01:48:57+00:00
I'm carrying my 13 Pro without a case, to see it's Alpine Green glory and feel the matte finish on the back. It's been perfectly fine for the last almost 4 years, some minor scratches on the steel edges I fixed with a sandpaper, there is one recent scratch on the screen and that's all. Otherwise it looks good, just a bit used. Has fallen multiple times from pocket when sitting, and a dozen times from tables, few times onto pavement (that's what needed sanding).

Almost every single one "case" for iPhone is a waste. Waste of material, waste of space, waste of your money, waste of user experience. You've already paid for a perfectly good phone, and then slapped some $[1]0.99 case on it to gain nothing but pain and vanity.

I only had one case on a phone, that made it better - original wooden case for 1+3T. Been looking for same experience on iPhone, but it's not possible due to shape -- they are all bulky. The closest thing is carbon-fiber cases, and I had one, which saved this iPhone when I dropped it onto slanted pavement, where it slid for a few meters screen down, ruining the case, but saving the screen.

Would I drop it if I wasn't using a case, that has parts sticking out, making the phone more cumbersome to use and carry? Unlikely, because it happened in the first year owning it, and I've been going caseless since then and nothing similar happened.
by no_wizard | 2026-01-27 01:49:00+00:00
Those are false equivalents. If a technology can’t reliably sort out what is a trustworthy source and filter out the rest than it’s not a truth worthy technology. There are tools after all. I should be able to trust a hammer if I use it correctly

All this is also missing the other point: this proves that the narrative companies are selling about AI are not based on objective capabilities
by salawat | 2026-01-27 01:49:09+00:00
It does. The judiciary has given the Executive a command that it is now part of Trump's "official duties" to ensure gets carried out. Failure to comply with that order may ultimately turn into a subordinate dismissal; but it will also be yet another time the executive failed to execute a lawful order from the judiciary.

This is all assuming Robert's plan was ultimately to give this admin enough rope to hang themselves with; and holding onto the "official duties" definition hitherto deliberately left undefined to act as the trap spring.

I wouldn't put money on that though. This SCOTUS other decisions have me thinking their a little more cushy with the Cheeto than not.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2026-01-27 01:49:35+00:00
Hot take: Code review is an anti-pattern.

We spend a ton of time looking at the code and blocking merges, and the end result is still full of bugs. AI code review only provides a minor improvement. The only reason we do code review at all is humans don't trust that the code works. Know another way to tell if code works? Running it. If our code is so utterly inconceivable that we can't make tests that can accurately assess if the code works, then either our code design is too complicated, or our tests suck.

OTOH, if the reason you're doing code review is to ensure the code "is beautiful" or "is maintainable", again, this is a human concern; the AI doesn't care. In fact, it's becoming apparent that it's easier to replace entire sections of code with new AI generated code than to edit it.
by ytoawwhra92 | 2026-01-27 01:49:50+00:00
> FAANG

And yet those five companies are among the most valuable in the world.

There's a cognitive dissonance that arises when you join a company that is performing extraordinarily well only to perceive dysfunction and incompetence everywhere you look.

It's so hard to reconcile the reality that companies can be embarrassingly wasteful, political, and arbitrary in how they run and yet can still dominate markets and print money hand-over-fist.
by nilslindemann | 2026-01-27 01:49:58+00:00
> Chess960 would also be better if both sides were asymmetrical and there were novel positions for both players in every game.

Yes! I never understood why people are so much into Fischer Random when there is also e.g. Benko's Pre Chess, where the players just place their pieces on the first and eight rank at the start of the game. Every player can decide to break the symmetry or not. They can even set up the normal chess position if they desire to do so. But for some reason today only Fischer Random is played, probably because Fischer was more famous than Benko. But Benko's version is more elegant, the players have full control and there are more start positions.

https://www.chess.com/forum/view/chess960-chess-variants/pal...
by cheschire | 2026-01-27 01:51:38+00:00
Access sucked. It didn’t scale. You could have a small team use one database just fine, but wiring it up to the other access databases was a nightmare. Version control was practically non-existent. Corrupt databases were routine. You would often have the “expert” that created the highly specific configuration depart the organization before anyone realized they were the only ones that held knowledge of who and what was connected to it. And don’t even get me started on the awful recorded macro code or insecure VBA.

Excel is arguably worse, if only because it was more accessible for less patient people. But at least Excel doesn’t offer you an entire armory of footguns at quite the same scale as Access did.