MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cmrdporcupine | 2026-01-28 14:22:36+00:00
Right on especially on two things -- 1) the tools doing a disservice by not interviewing and seeking input and 2) The 2026 "Slopocalypse"

I'm hopeful that 2026 will be the year that the biggest adopters are forced to deal with the mass of product they've created that they don't fully understand, and a push for better tooling is the result.

Today's agentic tools are crude from a UX POV from where I am hoping they will end up.
by shrubby | 2026-01-28 14:22:42+00:00
I think this is not only about Eichmann, but a picture of humanity in general.

The obedience to authority that we must be able to challenge to stand a chance.

Milgram's or Zimbardo's tests we're somewhat flawed yes, but still WW2 and Germany kinda proved this tendency IMO. And that's why I brought it up. Perhaps not the best comparison, I admit, but a comparison that seems more and more relevant ni many cases.
by eamag | 2026-01-28 14:23:06+00:00
I tried it last year, and compiled a list of projects in one category herehttps://openreview-copilot.eamag.me/projects and 2025 retro here https://eamag.me/2025/links/Links-And-A-Retrospective-Of-202...

The biggest issue is to be able to identify good ideas, ones that are useful, novel and doable. "Research taste" is the thing people develop over years!

I don't think we're there yet, and "vibe" research producing slop now, but creating tools for other researches to move faster sounds way more promising
by eloisant | 2026-01-28 14:23:17+00:00
The real problem is that researchers are pushed to publish as their publication is the only way their career can advance. It's not even to "boost" your CV, as a researcher your publication history IS your CV.

It was already a problem 25 years ago when I did my Ph.D., and I don't think things changed that much since then.

This encourages researchers to publish barely valuable results, or to cut one articles into multiple ones with small variations to increase their number of publications. Also publishers creating more conferences and more journals to respond to the need that researchers have to publish.

I remember many experienced professors telling me cynically about this, about all the techniques they had to blow up one small finding into many articles.

Anyway - research slop started way before AI. It's probably going to make the problem worse, but the root issue have been there for a long time.
by Rochus | 2026-01-28 14:23:20+00:00
The author has the opinion, that AI coding tools have made us faster, but we're still the bottleneck because we have to be present and actively engaged. He conclude the next leap in productivity requires letting AI agents work autonomously in the background while we do other things.

While I agree with the conclusion, my experience with Gemini, Claude and Devin is that there is no way around to be engaged as a human, because e.g. Gemini usually stubs a lot of thing, even though it claims that everything is implemented (which I have to check throughoutly and require it to complete very many times), Claude is often not available or stops because it runs out of token credits, and Devin makes a lot of errors or wrong assumptions. So until those systems don't become much more intelligent and reliable, the human in the loop is an unavoidable precondition to successfully use those tools. I'm not sure yet how much time I really save; my intuition is that with all the review and debugging I save between 0 and 50% of time, but I should check that systematically some day.
by echelon | 2026-01-28 14:23:31+00:00
The dichotomy of AI haters and AI dreamers is wild.

OP, I think this is the coolest thing ever. Keep going.

Naysayers have some points, but nearly every major disruptive technology has had downsides that have been abused. (Cars can be used for armed robbery. Steak knives can be used to murder people. Computers can be used for hacking.)

The upsides of tech typically far outweigh the downsides. If a tech is all downsides, then the government just bans it. If computers were so bad, only government labs and facilities would have them.

I get the value in calling out potential dangers, but if we do this we'll wind up with the 70 years where we didn't build nuclear reactors because we were too afraid. As it turns out, the dangers are actually negligible. We spent too much time imagining what would go wrong, and the world is now worse for it.

The benefits of this are far more immense.

While the world needs people who look at the bad in things, we need far more people who dream of the good. Listen to the critiques, allow it to aid in your safety measures, but don't listen to anyone who says the tech is 100% bad and should be stopped. That's anti nuclear rhetoric, and it's just not true.

Keep going!
by buellerbueller | 2026-01-28 14:23:34+00:00
The private sector is good at being a wealth extraction machine, that's all. The other things it does are merely incidental to that. As Cory Doctorow has pointed out, the private sector is now in its enshittification phase. I'd point out that this is likely because the marginal wealth extraction of improving things is lower than the marginal wealth extraction of enshittfying things: making mature products better is harder than making mature products worse. Capitalism rewards no morality; it rewards wealth extraction.

The government, however, has historically been constrained by a constitution that had been updated and interpreted according to the popular sentiment of the day.
by exhumet | 2026-01-28 14:23:35+00:00
you can get a lot of good resources here (https://humanorigins.si.edu/education/recommended-books) specifically "The Botanic Age" is about this, challenges the stone based representation and goes into how it was probably a lot of wood and other materials that would rot away etc.

Milo is great! Stefan Milo is also a great resource on youtube, i also really enjoy a youtuber called Fig Tree. there is a lot of good educational stuff on early humanity and early civilizations out there!
by jacquesm | 2026-01-28 14:23:36+00:00
The government is not one entity and it is perfectly possible for one sub-entity to have certain data and for another not to be able to have that same data, in fact from being prohibited to have access (let alone use) that same data. Palantir is used as a way to gain access to data that should otherwise not be accessible and the fact that it isn't the health data itself is immaterial: it was collected in the process of providing healthcare and as such should be protected. That's the legal base, not to enforce immigration law. Unfortunately the USA does not have the equivalent of a GDPR (and even if it did it would have probably been killed by now).
by gizzlon | 2026-01-28 14:23:57+00:00
I'm sorry, that sucks, it's a bad situation to be in :(

But I think we know from history, and other (attempted) authoritarian takeovers, that it only gets worse until people stand up and push back.

It's in their best interest to make everyone feel there's nothing they can do, there's no use in protesting etc etc.

I do think it works! And in addition to protests in the streets, and strikes, I think consumer boycotts would work. If a percentage of people stopped buying anything other than the necessities a lot of US companies would really feel it.
by Ylpertnodi | 2026-01-28 14:23:57+00:00
Do you purchase unilever products? Nike shoes? Etc, etc, etc.

Not to be flippant, but morals are variable.

Two of my kids are into investing, and some of their choices are 'morally indefensible', to me.

We've had the discussions since they were old enough to be taught 'right' from wrong.

Their aims are to increase the money they have, not to make anyone feel better, or judge others' choices.
by Aerbil313 | 2026-01-28 14:24:29+00:00
I believed that for years, I did CBT, changing beliefs, "just do it" et cetera and I was helpless still, went from one addiction to another. Turns out I had ADHD. My life was totally changed after medication.

You don't have infinite willpower. If humans had infinite willpower humanity would have worked itself to death long ago. There is a natural balance of willpower in your brain, it's called the dopaminergic system. If you have ADHD, you have much, much less willpower than a normal person because you literally lack the dopamine hormone in your prefrontal cortex. No amount of belief will magically create dopamine in your brain out of thin air.
by temp8830 | 2026-01-28 14:24:30+00:00
Re-read what you wrote. That's exactly what this was is about: who gets to control a colony. And from that angle, the US went from having 0% of Ukraine as its colony to having 75%, including all mineral rights. At this point continuing the war is too expensive, which is why the US and Russia want to just stop. Europe keeps jamming up the gears though because they got a terrible deal.
by jmyeet | 2026-01-28 14:24:35+00:00
Here's what people should take from all this: the Constitution isn't a magical document that guards your rights. It's a piece of paper. Judge, particularly Supreme Court judges, are political actors, not some neutral paragons of legal scholardom that come dwon from their Ivory Tower every now and again to hand down missives and maintain order.

The classic example of the mental gymnastics do won't punish any of this is civil asset forfeiture. It's legalized theft. The Fourth mandment quite literally starts with:

> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated ...

You might think if you are stopped by police and you have cash on it, that it is your "effects" and it can't be seized without any crime but you'd be wrong. The legal theory surrounding this is that it is a civil action against property, not a criminal action against its owner, even though the basis for the civil action is a crime that not only doesn't have to be proven, it doesn't even have to be alleged.

Medical info is just one prong of a massive effort to acquire all sorts of personal information, seemingly to build a database so citizens can be targeted. If you think it's going to stop at immigration enforcement, you're crazy. Examples:

- AG Pam Bondi has sought voter rolls from the majority of states [1], which most recently came up as a random demand to end ICE terrorism in Minnesota [2], which has so far refused to hand over that information. Consider where Minnesota sits in the estimated number of undocumented migrants [3]. Why is ICE there and not, say, Texas or Florida?

- DOGE previous accessed (and alleged copied) all the data from the Social Security Administration [4]. Why? What's happened to it? Who has it now?

I personally believe this has long reached the point that in a just world, Palantir employees would be prosecuted and sent to jail. Palantir is (allegedly) knowingly providing the means to kill journalists and target people while they're at home so a missile strike will also kill their entire family [5][6].

This "immigration enforcement" goes well beyond undocumented migrants. Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident married to a US citizen, was targeted for organizing peaceful protests against Israel's genocide.

At this point if you don't see how all these things are interconnected, you're burying your head in the sane.

[1]: https://stateline.org/2025/07/16/trumps-doj-wants-states-to-...

[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/26/pam-bondi-mi...

[3]: https://immresearch.org/publications/50-states-immigrants-by...

[4]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/whistleblower-responds-aft...

[5]: https://www.972mag.com/ai-surveillance-gaza-palantir-datamin...

[6]: https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
by tyteen4a03 | 2026-01-28 14:25:11+00:00
If you're not a fan of OpenAI: I work at RSpace (https://github.com/rspace-os/rspace-web) and we're an open-source research data management system. While we're not as modern as Obsidian or NotebookLM (yet - I'm spearheading efforts to change that :)) we have been deployed at universities and institutions for years now.

The solution is currently quite focused on life science needs but if you're curious, check us out!
by kakacik | 2026-01-28 14:25:30+00:00
People are not as much stupid as selfish. Nobody is going to threaten their own revenue stream just because their job is bullshit, in fact most double down and see themselves above others.

And another layer I've seen frequently - people somehow need to make their work meaningful to make it part of their core identity, even if its literally moving one pile of dirt to next pile and then reverse, or just adding friction to progress. Strong ego game.
by ivanpribec | 2026-01-28 14:25:51+00:00
I can see the subtle distinction you make. The flang notes on array composition provide a good introduction to the way array expressions (https://flang.llvm.org/docs/ArrayComposition.html) are treated.

But in practice it looks like the elemental function must be in the same translation unit for vectorization to occur with compilers popular today. Explicit options like !$omp declare simd are a different matter (and have different pitfalls).
by rob74 | 2026-01-28 14:26:38+00:00
Ok, so Palantir was used to prevent terror attacks in Europe, which would have presumably led to (even more) popularity of the far right. Palantir is also being used by the current far-right US administration (who, unlike the Nazis, like Jews and are even in part Jewish, but hate immigrants, Muslims, LGBTQ people, liberals etc. etc.) to hunt down immigrants based on their medical data. I fail to see how these two are connected, except for the same tool being used in both cases? This is actually one of the fears that data protection advocates had all along: first, these tools will be used to catch terrorists, then mostly harmless illegal immigrants, and then anyone else the regime doesn't like.
I built a modern, cloud-licensed installer for SuperMemo 19
by Ozzie_Obj | 2026-01-28 14:26:47+00:00
I am a 14 year old developer. I have been using SuperMemo for Incremental Reading, but the original software is written in Delphi and has a steep setup curve that drives people away.

I decided to fix the distribution pipeline to make the algorithm accessible to everyone.

For the stack I used Go and Wails v2 for the native webview UI. The backend runs on Supabase and Vercel Serverless functions, and I am using Stripe for automated license key generation.

The result is supermemo.pro. It wraps the official binary in a modern environment and handles the dependencies, installation, and licensing automatically.

I built this to lower the barrier to entry for Spaced Repetition.

Link: https://supermemo.pro

I would appreciate any feedback on the Go and Wails implementation.
by pwg | 2026-01-28 14:26:54+00:00
> Something went really wrong

What went wrong was Google (the old 'do no evil' Google) bought the ad network DoubleClick. The acquired DoubleClick side then took over old Google from the inside out such that what we have today is Doubleclick calling itself "google", no more 'do no evil' old Google anywhere, and all the evil that exists on the advertising side infesting everything they do.
by cong-or | 2026-01-28 14:26:58+00:00
The 160k → 90k LOC reduction is nice, but the parallel rollout is the more interesting part. Running Rust alongside the C++ version and using differential fuzzing to check equivalence is a lot more realistic than “rewrite and pray.” You get incremental validation with the old system as a fallback. Curious how long they ran both before cutting over.

Binary size is a real concern on the client side. On servers the Rust stdlib overhead usually doesn’t matter, but when you’re shipping to billions of mobile devices, every KB counts. Good to see they invested in build tooling instead of just accepting the bloat.
by fsloth | 2026-01-28 14:27:44+00:00
"I do find the graphical interface very natural for doing creative design work"

As do I!

I don't think there is any correct single answer. People, their workflows, and requirements are different.

It seems we are living in CAD renaissance which is great! So many new promising new companies and free tools popping up.

Personally I would prioritize data stability and visual accessibility. These give user a creative workspace that is intuitive and forgiving. That's why I started doing my own modeler as a side project:

https://github.com/AdaShape/adashape-open-testing/releases/t...

The data model is fully immutable and would enable doing _proper_ model branching when I get there. For now all the user gets is a super robust undo and not needing to save (the model is streamed to disk persistently).

But eventually I would like it to be a visual, robust workbench where you can iterate fast, save versions when feel like it, etc.

(I worked for a decade on various CAD offerings at Trimble including SketchUp so know fairly well what I'm doing but it's still super early)
by Terretta | 2026-01-28 14:27:56+00:00
> The tone of writing feels awfully similar to LLM.

This particular piece is LinkedIn “copy pasta” with many verbatim or mildly variant copies.

Example: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/chriswillx_preparing-to-do-th...

And in turn, see: https://strangestloop.io/essays/things-that-arent-doing-the-...

Relatedly, LLMs clearly picked the "LinkedIn influencer" style up.

My guess is some cross-over between those who write this way on LinkedIn and those who engage with chatbot A/B testing or sign up for the human reinforcement learning / fine tuning / tagging jobs, training in a preference for it.
by acessoproibido | 2026-01-28 14:27:59+00:00
Sadly the recording is pay walled, so I can't comment on that - but my uncle always (+20 years ago) said that Greenland will become a higr fertile continent once the permafrost is gone due to global climate change.
I wonder if that is part of the context, looking at the long game most US (and EU) big cities will become unlivable in the next 50-100 years if predictions hold up
by danielvaughn | 2026-01-28 14:28:07+00:00
I had the same reaction. So when people were talking about this model back in December, I brushed it off. It wasn't until a couple weeks ago that I decided to try it out, and I immediately saw the difference.

My opinion isn't based on what other people are saying, it's my own experience as a fairly AI-skeptical person. Again, I highly suggest you give it an honest try and decide for yourself.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2026-01-28 14:28:09+00:00
> The fact that a norm exists does not automatically mean it is optimal for discourse, only that it is currently dominant.

> if widespread hurt leads us to default to faster and harsher sorting rather than engagement, it seems reasonable to ask whether that tradeoff is actually helping us understand each other better, or just making the lines more rigid.

I agree with these totally valid points. I think what we're seeing, though, is people are prioritizing "stopping the hurt" above "optimal for discourse". Most hurt animals will lash out and otherwise act in ways less rational than if they were feeling good. And as for the current scenario, where people are actively continuing to pile more hurt on? Forget about it.
by lelanthran | 2026-01-28 14:28:46+00:00
> This is the way. Shell makes for a terrible scripting language, that I start regretting choosing usually around the time I have to introduce the first `if` into my "simple" scripts, or have to do some more complex string manipulation.

I suppose it can be nice if you are already in a JS environment, but wouldn't the author's need be met by just putting their shell commands into a .sh file? This way is more than a little over-engineered with little benefit in return for that extra engineering.

The reasons (provided by the author) for creating a Make.ts file is completely met by popping your commands into a .sh file.

With the added advantage that I don't need to care about what else needs to be installed on the build system when I check out a project.

I just don't see the advantages.
by ncallaway | 2026-01-28 14:29:17+00:00
You’re confusing “jurisdictions”. That’s the court’s jurisdiction not the prosecution’s jurisdiction.

Yes, if the State of MN brings a criminal charge against a federal agent, the case will be removed from a State Court to a Federal Court.

But the MN prosecutor will be in the federal court prosecuting the case. The law that will apply to the case will still be MN state law.

It will be a federal judge, and federal court rules about procedure, but MN state law and MN state prosecutors.
by Fischgericht | 2026-01-28 14:29:54+00:00
And still there are people here using Twittler for communication. Who drive Swasticars. Who applaud AntichrisThiel. RapisTrump from the parts of Germany known to grow Potatoes in the soil and in the minds.

It's a pity our American friends haven't noticed that while yes, indeed, the worst of the worst scum got sent to the US. It is just that you had set your brain UI theme to dark mode, and did not notice that the threat isn't that kid with brown skin getting sent to concentration camp by your Gestapo, but those "we want immigrants that look like they are from Norway" folks. 1)

In the distant past, you US Americans still had libraries. You could have used them to find out what there is a reason we over here in Europe and Africa did not want the Trunps and Thiels and Musks and Karps. 2)

For those who are reading this from inside the US: At what point if EVER are you going to get out of your chair, use your second amendment rights, and get rid of your crazy fascist brainworm Nazi scum that you had been praying to?

I know. It is too much to ask for. OK OK. Outside of your comfort zone to fight back. Then go watch MELANIA, a documentation on how about rape and abuse and illegal immigration is totally fine as long as your skin has the right color and the boob job was done well.

1) I myself am German, male, straight, blonde hair. I am allowed to say that our type is the cancer of the human race. After all these hundreds of years, you STILL haven't understood you can not trust us?

2) I know Karp is not from Germany. But he wrote his doctoral thesis in Germany, and it can be summarized as "I am a totally crazy asshole and want to cause as much pain and suffering as possible onto humanity, can I please do that kthxbye?"
by sheepscreek | 2026-01-28 14:29:59+00:00
This is so cool! More so because it runs purely in the browser. Was this built with AI? In either case, AI unlocks a new door for cheaply trying crazy and whacky creative ideas at a fraction of the cost and effort. Honestly loving this. It’s a big adjustment professionally but as a hobbyist and a consumer, I am thrilled!
by joenot443 | 2026-01-28 14:30:40+00:00
> The more "israelis"

I'm a Canadian with an Irish/Ukrainian background who's never been to the Middle East. I've been using this username for 20y now, nobody's pretending to be anyone here.

Do you really think I'm some kind of Mossad-bot? This topic sends otherwise normal communities into an absolute epistemic frenzy, I swear.
by 0xCE0 | 2026-01-28 14:31:02+00:00
The point is to go beyond LLM training set. When the knowledge of LLMs, books, expert conversations etc. ends and cannot answer to your questions, you begin to feel where that boundary begins. From that line on, you are alone, and you can invent/discover something novel. Nothing is promised though, and it is the hardest thing to do, but at least the struggle gives a feeling of purpose.