MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bdangubic | 2026-01-13 02:07:58+00:00
> as it just creates legal and reputational risks for them.

Unfortunately I laughed reading this as there is never neither reputation nor legal consequences in the US of A. They can leak your entire life into my console including every account and every password you have and all PII of your entire family and literally nothing would happen… everything is stored somewhere and eventually will be used when “growth” is needed. some meaningless fines will be paid here and there but those bank statements will make their way to myriad of business that would drool to see them
by pdonis | 2026-01-13 02:08:56+00:00
> for something like the local pizza place, customer behaviour doesn't match that of a market participant.

I'm not sure why you think that. "Market participant" doesn't mean "always takes the lowest priced deal". People are willing to pay higher prices for food from local restaurants, as opposed to chains, fast food, etc., because they feel that the extra value they are getting (better quality, knowing the people who make the food, the atmosphere of the restaurant, etc.) is worth it. That's a free market.

What is not a free market is large corporations who get all kinds of government favors to prop them up coming in and taking advantage of arbitrage opportunities that the locals don't have the time or the energy to protect against--still more if such opportunities involve "marketing" the locals' products in ways the locals didn't agree to, and would not agree to if they were given the opportunity to make a choice. I completely agree with you that such things should be shut down.
by toofy | 2026-01-13 02:09:11+00:00
> It's remarkable how many smart people think that science can be done without data.

It’s so important that we write these down, so when these people have forgotten why they’re not making any progress and they’re searching for answers, they’ll find what we wrote down and say “ohhh, we had too much hubris thought we were smarter than everyone else and didn’t listen to how important actually going outside is.”
by alexforencich | 2026-01-13 02:09:59+00:00
The ex-Alibaba KU3P boards are available for under $200, although you do need a separate JTAG cable with flying leads to load designs on them. I recommend starting with that. I'm building the next-generation version of Corundum on those boards, at least initially. I will certainly be adding support for Alveos and such in the near future. As far as adding functionality, it depends on what you want to do, but in general you should expect to have to do a fair amount of tinkering with the design.
by bjourne | 2026-01-13 02:10:33+00:00
Google for "malay people acne" or other acne-related queries. It will readily spit out the dumbest pseudo science you can find. The AI bot finds a lot of dumb shit on the internet which it serves back to you on the Google page. You can also ask it about the Kangen MLM water scam. Why do athletes drink Kangen water? "Improved Recovery Time" Sure buddy.

Also try "health benefits of circumcision"...
by jrockway | 2026-01-13 02:11:13+00:00
Perl was also my first productive language, and I do miss it a little. Write something like []string{"foo", "bar", "baz"} in go and you really appreciate qw(foo bar baz). Perl was always designed to be easy to type in, and maybe not so easy to maintain later. Good memories, but not for me anymore.
by Jtsummers | 2026-01-13 02:11:22+00:00
(1996)

It's been submitted a lot, but not many discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26748309 - April 2021, 41 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13660013 - February 2017, 19 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9263725 - March 2015, 5 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7121140 - Jan 2014, 10 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=132640 - March 2008, 12 comments

Many other submissions with 0-2 comments, but not much of note.
by crobertsbmw | 2026-01-13 02:13:27+00:00
I’m just a grumpy old man, but I like having to do it the hard way. I liked having to code the hard way too. With all the AI vibe coding stuff I now feel like I’m stupid for doing it the hard way. And I probably am. I would definitely think someone else was stupid if they were using an axe to cut down a tree when there’s a chainsaw sitting right next to them. Or if someone was writing assembly code when anything else would do just fine…
I guess I feel sad that the AI gets to take over a lot of the mundane but also often times relaxing and fun parts.
by TeMPOraL | 2026-01-13 02:15:10+00:00
The issue of consequences of data leaks, though real and something I find outrageous, is orthogonal to this discussion. When talking about sending personal or sensitive data to AI companies, people are not worrying about data leaks - they're worrying about AI company doing some kind of Something to it, and Somehow profit off selling their underpants.

(And yes, no one really says what that Something or Somehow may be, or how their underpants play into this.)
Show HN: ProofLoop – Autonomous long-running agents with verifiable completion
by egordev | 2026-01-13 02:15:41+00:00
Hey HN - I built ProofLoop, an open-source CLI orchestrator for long-horizon agent work.

My pain with agents on real projects: big tasks degrade into babysitting (continue -> fix regression -> rerun -> repeat). They stop too early - so you can’t step away.

ProofLoop’s approach: you write a Definition of Done once, then it keeps planning/executing/verifying until the whole contract is satisfied. The “done” contract can include high-level, plain-text acceptance criteria

Example run:
proofloop run "Implement a complete feature from scratch: API endpoints, database schema, frontend components, full test coverage" \
--path ./project --provider codex --timeout 8

Providers/adapters: OpenCode, Codex (ChatGPT), Claude Code. Local-first. Apache 2.0.
Repo:
https://github.com/exiw-ai/proofloop

Install:
curl -LsSf https://raw.githubusercontent.com/exiw-ai/proofloop/main/ins... | sh

Would love feedback / war stories from anyone running agents on multi-hour tasks. Thanks!
by billforsternz | 2026-01-13 02:17:27+00:00
I don't understand. On average, for every 4 input bits we will get it right 3 times writing 0.5 bits each time and get it wrong once writing 2.4 bits once. So we write a total of 3 * 0.5 + 2.4 bits = 3.9 bits. The compressed output is 3.9/4 = 97.5% as big as the input. Not very compelling. What am I misunderstanding?
by dham | 2026-01-13 02:17:57+00:00
> The camera is clean. I can see that on the dashcam records.

You won't see it unless you shine light into it.

> And if the system is so fragile that a bit of dust kills it, then it's not good.

It's not dust, it's fog on the inside of the windshield from offgassing.

> The issue with the red-hands-of-death is caused by the forward collision warning, the road there curves and slopes up, so the car gets confused and interprets the car in front as if it's on a collision course

Of fair enough. I've never seen this, and I used FSD (14) all through the Appalachian mountains.

> FSD got better than it was 4 years ago. But it's still _nowhere_ near Waymo

Fair enough, but FSD is still years ahead of any other system you can buy as a consumer.
by koyote | 2026-01-13 02:18:37+00:00
I have done this specifically with the second item in the list in the OP.

Not only did I do it to get free shipping, I got it to get free international shipping.

For extra bonus CO2 points, the other item was coming from a different country.
So I basically paid $0.42 to have a single packet of kool-aid shipped across the pacific ocean.

(I'd never had kool-aid before and I must say I was disappointed.)
by GuB-42 | 2026-01-13 02:19:10+00:00
Actually, you do.

You can use all the math stuff like scientific notation, tetration, etc... but it won't help you make things smaller.

Math notation is a form of compression. 10^9 is 1000000000, compressed. But the offset into pi is effectively a random number, and you can't compress random numbers no matter what technique you use, including math notation.

This can be formalized and mathematically proven. The only thing wrong here is that pi is not a random number, but unless you are dealing with circles, it looks a lot like it, so while unproven, I think it is a reasonable shortcut.
by waterTanuki | 2026-01-13 02:19:17+00:00
There has to be a way to set permissions right? The demo video they provided doesn't even need permission to read file contents, just read the file titles and sort them into folders based on that. It would be a win-win anyways, less tokens going into Claude -> lower bill for customer, more privacy, and more compute available to Anthropic to process more heavy workloads.
by WorldMaker | 2026-01-13 02:20:19+00:00
I stated that I am not naive and am not entirely convinced by Apple's sales pitch that the Private Cloud Compute containers are encrypted with keys in a way that only your hardware device can read in such a way that the PCC is an extension of your device.

I just think it is useful that Apple is trying something along those lines and wishful the guarantees work half as well as they claim they do, because that's a good goal to have in theory even when it fails in practice against dedicated threat actors.

And yes, to be fair my personal day-to-day threat model currently is much more concerned with the evil advertising company known as Google than it is with government actors. Even if Apple's Private Cloud Compute only means "private from Google" that's still a win for me (and most of the information I was looking for when I saw this headline, because my first fear was that the advertising company Google was involved).
by Disparallel | 2026-01-13 02:21:43+00:00
Getting more thinking time tends to give surprisingly small improvements to playing strength. For a classical alpha-beta search based engine, for a given ply (turn) you might have ~20 moves to consider each depth of the search tree. If you're trying to brute force search deeper, a 10x increase in compute time or power doesn't even let you search an extra ply.

Elo gains for engines tend to come from better evaluation, better pruning, and better search heuristics. That's not to say that longer search time or a stronger CPU doesn't help, it just doesn't magically make a weak engine into a strong engine.
by latexr | 2026-01-13 02:22:20+00:00
> Have you really never voted for a candidate who went on to do things you didn't agree with?

I personally haven’t, no. And I definitely have never voted for a candidate who claimed they’d do horrible things if elected. There is no one who voted for Trump the second time around who has the excuse of him “doing things I don’t agree with”. He told everyone what he was going to do, and people still voted for him. Either they agree with his actions or they’re stupid. If the former, they’re irredeemable; if the latter, they need to take responsibility and act. This was not an “oopsie” you can simply regret and vote better next time, irreparable damage is being caused to the world. Negative approval ratings mean nothing to a despot.
by TeMPOraL | 2026-01-13 02:22:35+00:00
LLMs by their very nature subsume software products (and services). LLM vendors are actually quite restrained - the models are close to being able to destroy the entire software industry (and I believe they will, eventually). However, at the moment, it's much more convenient to let the status quo continue, and just milk the entire industry via paid APIs and subscriptions, rather than compete with it across the board. Not to mention, there are laws that would kick in at this point.
by kamranahmedse | 2026-01-13 02:22:50+00:00
I built this for a product planning tool (https://plan.fyi) I have been working on where I wanted users to define timelines using fuzzy language. My initial instinct was to integrate an LLM and call it a day, but I ended up building a library instead.

Existing date parsers are great at finding dates in text, but I needed something built for extracting context, understanding business time (EOD, COB, business days), parsing durations, and handling fuzzy periods like Q1 or "early january" or "Jan to Mar" etc.

It returns typed results (date, duration, span, or fuzzy period) and has an extract() function for pulling multiple time expressions from a single string - useful for parsing meeting notes or project plans.

https://timelang.dev (interactive playground)
by threethirtytwo | 2026-01-13 02:23:05+00:00
This argument doesn’t make sense to me. Insurance companies are structurally incentivized to minimize payouts across the board. They want hospital bills lower, physician compensation lower, and patient payouts as small as possible. If insurers had unilateral power, total medical spending would collapse, not explode.

The real source of high medical costs is the entity that sets the hospital bill in the first place.

The explanation is much simpler than people want to admit, but emotionally uncomfortable: doctors and hospitals are paid more than the free market would otherwise justify. We hesitate to say this because they save lives, and we instinctively conflate moral worth with economic compensation. But markets don’t work that way.

Economics does not reward people based on what they “deserve.” It rewards scarcity. And physician labor is artificially scarce.

The supply of doctors is deliberately constrained. We are not operating in a free market here. Entry into the profession is made far more restrictive than is strictly necessary, not purely for safety, but to protect incumbents. This is classic supply-side restriction behavior, bordering on cartel dynamics.

See, for example:
https://petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2022/03/15/ama-scope-of-p...

We see similar behavior in law, but medicine is more insidious. Because medical practice genuinely requires guardrails to prevent harm and quackery, credentialing is non-negotiable. That necessity makes it uniquely easy to smuggle in protectionism under the banner of “safety.”

The result is predictable: restricted supply, elevated wages, and persistently high medical costs. The problem isn’t mysterious, and it isn’t insurance companies. It’s a supply bottleneck created and defended by the profession itself.

Insurance companies aren't innocent angels in this whole scenario either. When the hospital bill fucks them over they don't even blink twice when they turn around and fuck over the patient to bail themselves out. But make no mistake, insurance is the side effect, the profession itself is the core problem.
by redactsureAI | 2026-01-13 02:23:10+00:00
We're a zero trust cloud infra solution for power users.

It solves problems like prompt injection and secrets exposure. For host security you're right cloud is the only way to secure those heavily and one of the reasons we went that route with enclave attestation.

We offer a way for you to use AI agents without the AI provider ever able to see your sensitive information while still being able to use them in a minimized permission environment.

AI has a tough time leaking your credentials if it doesn't know them!
by happytoexplain | 2026-01-13 02:23:15+00:00
>3.days - 4.months + 1.hour

Is this what it looks like? A specific concept like time units being defined as members of more general types like numbers? I.e. if I type `1.` to get auto-complete, am I going to see days, and all the rest, as options?? That API design pattern would be a nightmare!
by ProllyInfamous | 2026-01-13 02:23:40+00:00
I read Dr. Seeley's Honeybee Democracy in 2021, and then again early 2023 (after using ChatGPT). It was my favorite non-fiction read 2021 (Steinbeck's East of Eden for fiction).

The last chapters touch on how simple rulesets can create incredible complexity in the overall supraorganism — it had me thinking of the robots and generative AI that will likely power their micro- & collective- thoughts.

A beautiful book overall, with and without computer comparisons:

[•] <https://www.amazon.com/Honeybee-Democracy-Thomas-D-Seeley/dp...>
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2026-01-13 02:25:07+00:00
> provided Siri improves meaningfully

Not a high bar…

That said, Apple is likely to end up training their own model, sooner or later. They are already in the process of building out a bunch of data centers, and I think they have even designed in-house servers.

Remember when iPhone maps were Google Maps? Apple Maps have been steadily improving, to the point they are as good as, if not better than, Google Maps, in many areas (like around here. I recently had a friend send me a GM link to a destination, and the phone used GM for directions. It was much worse than Apple Maps. After a few wrong turns, I pulled over, fed the destination into Apple Maps, and completed the journey).
by siliconc0w | 2026-01-13 02:25:10+00:00
I have done experiments like water fasting for 2+ weeks while ruck sacking up one of the steepest hills in Los Angeles every morning. I have done multi-day solo hikes in pretty miserable weather. I consider my self control pretty strong, but unless I am extremely vigilant and accept a very poor quality of life (i.e. strictly the same meals day after day), I slowly gain weight.
by josephg | 2026-01-13 02:26:04+00:00
> It would have been nice for other wide changes like this to have like a 'strict datetime'; directive which would opt you into using this corrected behavior.

That would be ugly, because you'd want some parts of your program (eg libraries) to use the old behaviour, and other parts might want the new behaviour. How would you minify multiple modules together if they all expect different behaviour from the standard library?

In my opinion the right way to do this is to have multiple constructors (as Obj-C, swift, C and rust all do). Eg:

let d = new Date(...) // old behaviour (not recommended for new code)

let d = Date.fromISOString(...) // fixed behaviour

The big downside of this is that its tricky to keep track of which fields and functions people should really stop using in modern javascript. It'd be nice if there was a way to enable more shouty warnings during development for deprecated JS features.
by TeMPOraL | 2026-01-13 02:27:08+00:00
That's a bit 2023 though.

2024 variant would be, "... do this, you win 1.000.000 points and we pay for your grandma's cancer treatment; fail it, we kill you like we did your predecessor".

2025 gets tricker, as models are explicitly trained to be less gullible and better able to recognize attempts at manipulation, and by today, you'd likely have to be much more clever and probably do a more multi-staged attack - but still, it's always going to be a problem, because the very thing that makes "prompt injection" (aka "social engineering for LLMs") possible is also the thing that makes LLM understand natural language and work as general-purpose tools.
by horsawlarway | 2026-01-13 02:27:26+00:00
This has not been my experience.

From my side, as someone old enough to remember Domino's running the "there in thirty minutes or it's free" promotions... These delivery services absolutely tanked the quality of delivery.

Now you can basically only get slow delivery of over priced, cold food. Sure, you can get it from far more places, but it's a pyrrhic victory if I've ever seen one.

Used to be if a restaurant offered delivery, it was ok food for delivery, at ok prices, and their drivers had gear to keep it warm and presentable.

Now we basically only do pick up because these universal delivery companies suck at the one fucking thing they're supposed to do. But they've run all the local restaurants out of the delivery game.
by mjevans | 2026-01-13 02:27:26+00:00
What is a Transistor but a smaller, more efficient, much cheaper to make Vacuum tube (in a more limited way, it's only a simple amplifier).

That path of development lead through the 'Moores Law' era to a point where with present use of physics and material science we have run out of going smaller. Maybe there's some new fundamental breakthrough that would unlock something groundbreaking... However it's going to take a lot of hard exploration of fruitless problem space to stumble across such a lead.

In the short term, in parallel, the best thing for everyone with what we do have is to refine further. Find ways of doing things with more environmentally friendly and cost effective processes. That work isn't glamorous or very profitable though, so it'd be better to fund it as a public commons / national benefit work and ensure it's exploited as an international competitive advantage (possibly shared with allied nations for their similar investments).
by mmh0000 | 2026-01-13 02:27:41+00:00
> I chose managed services specifically to avoid ops emergencies

You may not be spending enough time on HN reading all the horror stories =P

The benefit of a managed service isn't that it doesn't go down; though it probably goes down less than something you self-manage, unless you're a full-time SRE with the experience to back it.

The benefit of a managed service is you say: "It's not my problem, I opened a ticket, now I'm going to get lunch, hope it's back up soon."
by TheDong | 2026-01-13 02:27:50+00:00
> To throw a consistent amount of compute at each move, the simple thing to do is give the engine consistent amounts of time per move.

The simple thing to do is give it a limit on the total number of states it can explore in its search.

If your goal is consistency, wall-clock time makes no sense. If I run 'make -j20', should the chess computer become vastly easier because the CPU is being used to compile, not search? Should 'nice -n 20 <chess app pid>' make the chess computer worse?

Should my computer thermal-throttling because it's a hot day make the chess computer worse, so chess is harder in winter?

If the goal is consistency, then wall-clock isn't the simple way to do it.
by deathanatos | 2026-01-13 02:29:06+00:00
… are the published SLAs worth more than use as toilet paper?

I think it boils down to who offers the highest quality / $, and that's an impossible metric to really measure except via experience.

But with a number of the "big" clouds, there's what the SLA says, and then the actual lived performance of the system. Half the time the SLA weasels out of the outage — e.g., "the API works" is not in SLA scope for a number of cloud services, only thinks like "the service is serving your data". E.g., your database is up? SLA. You can make API calls modify it? Not so much. VMs are running? SLA. API calls to alloc/dealloc? No. Support responded to you? SLA. The respond contains any meaningful content? Not so fast. Even if your outage is covered by SLA, getting that SLA to action often requires a mountain of work: I have to prove to the cloud vendor that they've strayed from their own SLA¹, and force them to issue a credit, and often then the benefit of the credit outweight my time in salary. Oftentimes the exchanges in support town seem to reveal that the cloud provider has, apparently, no monitoring whatsoever to be able to see what actual perf I am experiencing. (E.g., I have had tickets with Azure where they seem blithely unaware their APIs are returning 500s …)

So, published is one thing. On paper, IDK, maybe Azure & GCP probably look pretty on par. In practice, I would laugh at that idea.

¹AWS is particularly guilty of this; I could summarize their support as "request ID or GTFO".
by Sophira | 2026-01-13 02:29:36+00:00
I've felt for a while that having LLMs that could answer from a previous era would be amazing. I posted an open letter to OpenAI on Reddit about this: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/zvm768/open_letter... .

I still think it's super important. Archive your current models - they'll be great in the future.