MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bastawhiz | 2026-01-12 05:13:30+00:00
It's not really a fair comparison though, is it? Is a questionable environmental policy worse than a bad electric grid? America has a dirty grid that has fairly limited capacity. How many fossil fuels will we burn (producing electricity, and powering non-EVs) because we aren't building nuclear? The environmental benefits of having nuclear power probably largely make up the difference (if they don't exceed it), and that's over the time scale of a century or more where we'll need to catch up.

Workers rights I have no real knowledge on. But China isn't known for their track record on any kind of rights, and arguably US blue collar workers have a pretty awful quality of life that the government largely doesn't take the blame for (because we don't have state-run healthcare and minimum wage doesn't keep up with the cost of living). China has forced labor, America has legalized slavery in the prison system. Plenty of American industries rely on the unethical use of migrant labor while the state disappears those same people to "alligator alcatraz" or overseas prisons. I don't know the full extent of how bad things are in China for the kinds of workers who build these plants but I am hesitant to overlook how bad things are in the US.
by chongli | 2026-01-12 05:14:41+00:00
If the business can get rid of their engineers, then why can't the user get rid of the business providing the software?

A lot of businesses are the only users of their own software. They write and use software in-house in order to accomplish business tasks. If they could get rid of their engineers, they would, since then they'd only have to pay the other employees who use the software.

They're much less likely to get rid of the user employees because those folks don't command engineer salaries.
by joshuamorton | 2026-01-12 05:15:42+00:00
> Have you worked the other way before? Where you have ssh access to machines (lots of them, when you need to do something big) that have all of your secrets, can talk to all of your dbs, and you can just compile + rsync binaries on to them to debug/repro/repair?

A lot of the problems I enjoy solving specifically relate to consistently minimizing privilege, not from a security perspective (though there are obvious upsides to this), but from a debugging/clarity perspective. If you have a relatively small and statically verifiable set of (networked) dependencies, and minimize which resources which containers can access, reasoning about the system as a whole becomes a lot easier.

I can think of lots of cases where I've witnessed good outcomes from moving towards more fine-grained resource access, and very few cases where life has gotten better by saying "everyone has access to everything".
by bayarearefugee | 2026-01-12 05:15:42+00:00
Leave it to people in the tech industry to ask interview questions that confused Paul Erdös for days and expect their interviewees to reason through things during an interview.

https://web.archive.org/web/20140413131827/http://www.decisi...

I'd get the Monty Hall problem question right off the bat, but only because I've encountered it before, not because I can naturally reason through it better than Erdös.
by Tempest1981 | 2026-01-12 05:16:06+00:00
Reminded me of the book Fast Food Nation where they describe the artificial flavor industry (Chapter 5), and visit labs in New Jersey where fast food tastes are created by "flavorists". Most of the taste comes from smell, via gas molecules released in the mouth.

The book also covers how they scout out real estate, and how they create french fries by shooting potatoes at 80 mph. (A bit different from in-n-out)

Note: don't bother watching the movie, it's nothing like the book.
by luckilydiscrete | 2026-01-12 05:16:21+00:00
It's a combination of being bad at prompting and different expectations from the tool.
You expect it to be one shot, and then rewrite things that don't match up to what you want.

Instead I recommend that you use LLMs to fix the problems that they introduced as well, and over time you'll get better at figuring out the parts that the LLM will get confused by. My hunch is that you'll find your descriptions of what to implement were more vague than you thought, and as you iterate, you'll learn to be a lot more specific. Basically, you'll find that your taste was more subjective than you thought and you'll rid yourself of the expectation that the LLM magically understands your taste.
by Tanoc | 2026-01-12 05:17:58+00:00
I have a family member like this who I interact with almost every day. When Renee Good was fatally shot in the face three times this family member said that she deserved it for "getting in the way" and that if she just ignored them she wouldn't have been murdered. With all of the video recordings that have come out and been extensively disseminated, pretty much everyone knows that she moved out of the way and stopped, and it was Jonathan Ross who initiated the encounter. There is no way to "get out of the way" and "ignore them" when armed figures enact force on whims. But people like my family member believe that these armed figures direct violence towards those who are dangerous rather than simply directing violence to anybody who is close enough to hurt. You cannot reason with people like that because they retroactively justify any harm in order to protect their belief in the systems of enforcement. To them order and structure are more important and valuable than agency and safety or in some cases even life itself.
by acyou | 2026-01-12 05:19:16+00:00
I think what I mean by colonial remnant is "administration and control from afar", not "subjugation of indigenous peoples", and it's concerned with what's happening now, rather than what happened 1000 or more years ago and it's no longer particularly relevant. By remnant, I mean that it's administered by Denmark as a byproduct of a colonial gold rush, not because they are the best entity for that job.

USA had its own legislative assemblies too before the declaration of Independence, look what happened.
by protocolture | 2026-01-12 05:19:31+00:00
Asking for evidence isnt a "belief system" its a coming to know things system. Equating a request for scientific rigor, to contrarian ancient aliens is nonsensical.

If someone wants to hold something up as true, its correct to disbelieve it until evidence is provided.

These people don't provide evidence, what they do is show you something cool and then beg the question. "Look at this cool rock in this place it might be hard to get a rock to, really makes you wonder who put it there huh". Literally any dumb science "content producer" is going to be able to get you closer to truth than listening to that bunk.

Not to mention that:

>It's an emotional and spiritual belief for them - a way for them to rationalize

>Put another way, a real practitioner of science would seek to understand the phenomenon of why your family member believes what they believe.

Seems like you quoted them having investigated it.

But having done so you call them a politician.
by simonw | 2026-01-12 05:19:35+00:00
Yes, but I didn't bother here (not part of the original prompt).

You're welcome to drop the HTML into a coding agent and tell it to do that. In my experience you usually have to decide how you want that to work - I've had them build me on-screen D-Pad controls before but I've also tried things like getting touch-to-swipe plus an on-screen fire button.
by throwaway81523 | 2026-01-12 05:20:42+00:00
I got bored with his shtick. He could condense each of his videos to the 3 or so graphs that he puts up, in the middle and at the end. Sometimes I fast foward to those if it's something I'm interested in. But he's usually too superficial anyway.

Torque Test Channel is a lot better and more watchable imho.
by dzink | 2026-01-12 05:21:23+00:00
We are all fashion designers now. LLM can code the cloth, do the seams, put in zippers, and sow buttons. You pick what creature you are designing for. You study how it moves, where the limits of movement lie, where it needs ventilation, flexibility, extra reinforced knees, fire resistance, a cape for flare (or no cape for safety). We are all Edna Mode. And the best of us can turn the problems we are working on into superheroes.

You model inference provider and any intermediaries get to watch what you’re designing from behind the curtain and copy, train on, or sell the insights if you’re not paying attention.
by vivzkestrel | 2026-01-12 05:21:49+00:00
out of curiosity, i want to experiment creating a third person shooter from scratch with vibe coding (yes third person, i wrote FPS above by mistake). think of a proper military game with actual uniforms, movements like walk, crouch, jump, take cover etc. and being able to fire bullets, ballistics, grenades, explosions etc. what do you think is the process to vibe code something like this. obviously i ll need to give it models or assets for characters, map locations etc. how does this sorta thing work?
by efreak | 2026-01-12 05:21:59+00:00
When I hit Win+L to lock my screen and come back 4 hours later to input my pin, I turn on my monitor (that I turned off because every 5 minutes Windows turns it on and off again), push esc or Ctrl a few times to clear off the image, and start typing in my PIN. 90% of the time by the time my monitor displays the picture, it's sitting at the unlock screen with the last 2 digits of my 4-digit PIN
by catlifeonmars | 2026-01-12 05:22:07+00:00
> My favorite definition of “legacy code” is “code that is not tested” because no matter who writes code, it turns into a minefield quickly if it doesn’t have tests.

On the contrary, legacy code has, by definition, been battle tested in production. I would amend the definition slightly to:

“Legacy code is code that is difficult to write tests for”.
by LexiMax | 2026-01-12 05:22:16+00:00
It's not the only anomaly. There was a previous period of long peace between 1815 and 1914, between the Napoleonic Wars and WW1.

This balance of power was carefully set up in the Congress of Vienna following the (first) defeat of Napoleon, and was ended by the ambitions of a Kaiser who desired the prestige of globe-spanning empire yet couldn't diplomacy his way out of a wet paper bag to realize that empire without bumbling into war.
by dang | 2026-01-12 05:22:23+00:00
Invoking the image of someone's loved ones and then imposing a vicious scene on top of it is a way of inflicting pain on that person. That kind of violation is certainly a personal attack. Actually, it's even more of a personal attack than attacking the individual in the narrow sense.

You can't do that here and we ban such accounts, so please refrain.

p.s. it's also a text-based way of doing the very thing you're inveighing against, so it's not in your interest to argue that way.
by mapontosevenths | 2026-01-12 05:22:23+00:00
> Also note that scientists and doctors are no longer on the frontlines of the change that's sweeping across society. It's activists who realize that identity and community is more important than cold logical arguments.

What I'm about to say is very negative, but please don't think it's directed at you. I'm just jaded and have seen some things.

I can respect that you see a problem and want to solve it, and I even agree that it's a problem. The suicide rate, for example, can at least partly be blamed on the way society (especially children) treat people who are different. That said, I can't help but feel that you are missing a few key things.

1) It's a medical condition. Better activism doesn't lead to better patient outcomes. It just puts conflicting pressures on already overtaxed doctors that make it hard for them to treat patients properly. See what's happening to trans folks for an example.

2) Forcing people to use different words to describe you doesn't make them respect you more, it just frustrates them that they can't speak plainly.

Take the medical term "Mongoloid" for example. It was used to describe the people we now call "Intellectually Disabled" until it became an insult. So doctors invented a new term: "Moron." Moron almost immediately became an insult, so they invented "Mentally Retarded." Mentally retarded became an insult, and was actually *outlawed* in 2010 (Literally outlawed, check out Rosa's law). A few weeks ago I heard my niece make fun of my nephew by calling him "mentally challenged" and doing a hand gesture. He was no less offended than he would have been if she'd used any of the other terms.

The history of that sickness is a history of euphemisms: Simpleteon, Cretin, Imbecile, Mongoloid, Retard, Idiot, Defective, etc... The've all been socially acceptable designations at one point, but each time a new one is created it also turns into an insult. It's not the phrasing that is the problem here, and it can't be fixed by adjusting the language we use (although I'm sure we'll keep inventing new euphemisms forever). There's a fundamental aspect of "not being smart" that people find insulting so whatever you call them BECOMES THE INSULT. We can't change that, it's just how humans are.

Similarly, autistic people are *Weird*. We just don't fit in well, and neither scolding the kids on the playground for using the wrong terms or blasting some Joe Six-Pack on twitter are going to change their minds.

Even if we get them to change their words, the words will become insults by virtue of being tied to the "weird people". When you finally convince everyone to call us "neurodiverse" it will mean that neurodiverse has become an insult. When we convince them it's just a "personality type" it we be regarded as a bad personality type.

Changing other people just doesn't work. You have to change what you expect from them if you want to be happy. It's all your really in charge of.
by tonyhb | 2026-01-12 05:22:48+00:00
> And people die all the time.

Yes... but people can only focus on one thing at a time. We don't have 360 vision. We have blind spots! We don't even know the exact speed of our car without looking away from the road momentarily! Vision based cars obviously don't have these issues. Just because some cars are 100% vision doesn't mean that it has to share all of the faults we have when driving.

That's not me in favour of one vs the other. I'm ambivalent and don't actually care. They can clearly both work.
by eadwu | 2026-01-12 05:23:40+00:00
There are multiple layers and implicit perspectives that I think most are purposefully omitting as a play for engagement or something else.

The reason why LLMs are still restricted to higher level programming languages is because there are no guarantees of correctness - any guarantee needs to be provided by a human - and it is already difficult for humans to review other human's code.

If there comes a time where LLMs can generate code - whether some term slop or not - that has a guarantee of correctness - it is indeed probably a correct move to probably have a more token-efficient language, or at least a different abstraction compared to the programming abstractions of humans.

Personally, I think in the coming years there will be a subset of programming that LLMs can probably perform while providing a guarantee of correctness - likely using other tools, such as Lean.

I believe this capability can be stated as - LLMs should be able to obfuscate any program code - which is pretty decent guarantee.
by dmitrijbelikov | 2026-01-12 05:23:41+00:00
AI doesn't do anything fundamentally new; you search for information the same way you used to through Google. The difference is that when you Googled, you understand that responsibility for the end result lies with you. Now, "users" shift responsibility to the "machine," even though they're essentially writing the program's configuration in their own language. Once you take responsibility for what your LLM writes, you'll no longer be so eager to pursue mythical "productivity."
Show HN: Moving files without install on the host
by thedanielforum | 2026-01-12 05:24:06+00:00
I usually work in limited environments where I need to move files between hosts.
So I built uldl.sh (Upload / Download / Shell).

Because it's built around curl there is no need to install anything on the machine you are ssh'd in to and the URLs are short in case you don't have access to copy/paste.

I know this has a very specific audience, but I would love some feedback if you find it useful.
by catlifeonmars | 2026-01-12 05:24:22+00:00
> My favorite definition of “legacy code” is “code that is not tested” because no matter who writes code, it turns into a minefield quickly if it doesn’t have tests.

On the contrary, legacy code has, by definition, been battle tested in production. I would amend the definition slightly to:

“Legacy code is code that is difficult to change.”

Lacking tests is one common reason why this could be, but not the only possible reason.
by ciju | 2026-01-12 05:24:55+00:00
https://finbodhi.com — Helps you track, understand, and plan your personal finances — with a double-entry accounting. You own your financial data. It’s local-first, syncs across devices, and everything’s encrypted in transit. Supports multiple-accounts (track as a family or even as an advisor), multi-currency, a custom sheet/calculator to operate on your accounts (calculate taxes etc) and much more.

Most recently, we added support for benchmarking and us stocks, etfs etc.

Benchmarking is an interesting topic. I am not sure why but most personal finance tools are quite bad at this. Our benchmarking tool allows you to understand how your underlying portfolio is doing, vs how your timing decisions are fairing. Portfolio comparison is done with NAV chart (nav calculation is same as what mutual funds use). And value chart in comparison with nav chart, helps you understand if your timing decisions are helping.

NOTE: you can try demo without signup, but it doesn't work in Firefox Incognito mode.
by danans | 2026-01-12 05:24:56+00:00
Overlapping windows seem like a dated skeumorphic paradigm at this point. I almost never want to see just part of a window.

For a long time, I've found that either full screen or tiling (driven by keyboard shortcuts) is a far less frustrating a way to interact with windows, so I almost never use window-resizing. Window resizing is also horrendous when you try to do it with a touchpad.
by crena | 2026-01-12 05:26:28+00:00
Apple designers used to build interactive demos in Macromedia Director, so I'm assuming they knew a bit about scripting. That probably helped them think in a way that really clicks with software development.

I've worked with some younger designers who couldn't even put together a consistent click-dummy once the client wanted to see flows outside the happy path. To be fair, all they really had to go on was their education and Figma's panels.
by mmh0000 | 2026-01-12 05:27:35+00:00
I have to agree, XFCE is great!

It's weird that when using something like Windows, KDE, or Gnome, I notice a delay between clicking and the thing happening on screen. It's maybe 100ms or so, but after using XFCE for years, there's a notable and, for me, infuriating delay in many modern GUIs.

And it's not my computer; I'm sitting here with 32 cores, 128GiB of RAM, and a somewhat fancy AMD video card.

Anyway, I LOVE XFCE. I don't need a lot of bells and whistles in my DE, I just need it to launch applications, bind some hotkeys, and otherwise stay out of my way.
by fadase | 2026-01-12 05:27:48+00:00
Experimental 256-bit hash exploring cryptographic biodiversity. Uses Golden Ratio for constants and Fibonacci word for round scheduling instead of traditional prime-root designs.
Looking for feedback and cryptanalysis. Not for production - about 30x slower than SHA-256 but shows comparable statistical properties in blind tests.

Includes standard (64 rounds), fast (32 rounds), and XOF variants.
by CGamesPlay | 2026-01-12 05:28:03+00:00
You aren't actually supposed to ever need to deal with tickets manually, unless you are trying to get a tunnel between two machines and neither can SSH into the other. It could be streamlined with something like Magic Wormhole, though. I'll add that to the backlog and see if there's interest. The normal way is to use SSH / docker exec / any remote shell to let QTM swap the tickets over it.

I've added an asciinema to the README now <https://asciinema.org/a/z2cdsoVDVJu0gIGn>, showing the manual connection steps. Thanks for the kind words. Hope you find it useful!
by seszett | 2026-01-12 05:28:16+00:00
That seems like a very irrational fear. Attackers don't go around trying to break into Home Assistant to turn the lights on at some stranger's house.

There's also no particular reason to think Home Assistant's authentication has to have a weakness point.

And your devices are also unlikely to start a fire just by being turned on and off, if that's your fear you should replace them at once because if they catch fire it doesn't matter if it's an attacker or yourself turning them on and off.
by lunar_mycroft | 2026-01-12 05:28:38+00:00
> At the is point the best evidence we have is a large volume of extremely experienced programmers - like antirez - saying "this stuff is amazing for coding productivity".

The problem is that we know that developers - including experienced developers - subjective impressions of whether LLMs increase their productivity at all is unreliable and biased towards overestimation. Similarly, we know that previously the claims of massive productivity gains were false (no study reputable showed even a 50% improvement, let alone the 2x, 5x, 10x, etc that some were claiming, indicators of actual projects shipped were flat, etc). People have been making the same claims for years at this point, and every time when we actually were able to check, it turned out they were wrong. Further, while we can't check the productivity claims (yet) because that takes time, we can check other claims (e.g. the assertion that a model produces code that doesn't need to be reviewed by a human anymore), and those claims do turn out to be false.

> If you're determined to say "I refuse to accept appeal to authority here, I demand a solution to the measuring productivity problem first" then you're probably in for a long wait.

Maybe, but my point still stands. In the absence of actual measurement and evidence, claims of massive productivity gains do not win by default.
by johnfn | 2026-01-12 05:28:55+00:00
How does he have a vested interest in the success of these tools? He doesn't work for an AI company. Why must he have some shady ulterior motive rather than just honestly believing the thing they are stated? Yes, he blogs a lot about AI, but don't you have the cart profoundly before the horse if you are asserting that's a "vested interest"? He was free to blog about whatever he wants. Why would he fervently start blogging about AI if he didn't earnestly believe it was an interesting topic to blog about?

> But it's still a statistical text prediction model

This is reductive to the point of absurdity. What other statistical text prediction model can make tool calls to CLI apps and web searches? It's like saying "a computer is nothing special -- it's just a bunch of wires stuck together"
by cal_dent | 2026-01-12 05:29:37+00:00
Exactly. One defining thing about the current administration is the view that Main Street matters, not Wall Street. Whether their actions match is one thing (it doesnt always when the market throws a wobble) but the surface level optics of the intention is always there. Its the sleight of hand of blaming faceless boogeymen for their base. Powell falls exactly in to that. Wall St knows him but, without trying to be condescending, most of the general population I think would have no idea.