MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by whimsicalism | 2026-01-18 16:24:02+00:00
My job is essentially delivering faster with no guard rails. I know it is a common HN sentiment that nobody can do my job better than me because I am the most thoughtful person to ever do it.

This is explicitly not what I am saying given that I am leading with AI getting close to being able to do much of what is currently my job. I find it hard to imagine a world where we stagnate right where we are and it takes a decade to do anything more aka I cannot imagine a world where a considerable portion of jobs are not automatable soon - and I do not even think it will be shittier.
by lentil_soup | 2026-01-18 16:24:13+00:00
>> But Maduro isn't exactly Mohammed bin Salman or Donald Rumsfeld.

Just showed you an article describing all the human right abuses, tortures and forced disappearances done under the Maduro regime and this is your take away? I can only assume you're not arguing in good faith.

Check the news right now, about the prisoner releases happening as we speak and the hundreds still to go. One died only last week in captivity. Guess we can tell their families at least Maduro is not bin Salaman. Such cruelty, man
Show HN: A CLI that shows AI coding rate limits and auto-rotates accounts
by femtobusa | 2026-01-18 16:24:23+00:00
Most AI coding tools hide rate limits and quotas behind flags, plugins, or dashboards, which makes it easy to hit limits mid-workflow.

Arctic is a terminal-first CLI that:

shows live usage and rate limits across AI coding providers

supports multiple accounts per provider and auto-rotates when one hits limits

runs locally with no web or desktop app

Built for heavy terminal users. Feedback welcome.
by rrvsh | 2026-01-18 16:24:24+00:00
what a great article. I've started a daily blog this year a la nik.art, but its really easy to write about surface level stuff like what my projects are or how i enjoyed a piece of media. today, i skipped the blog post, telling myself it was just a rest day because sundays, but in reality i just went through some upsetting shit and didnt really want to write what was on my mind. this post really made me realize that's kind of the point of writing though. thanks for sharing :)
by mlpoknbji | 2026-01-18 16:24:39+00:00
I think "pretty soon" is a serious overstatement. This does not take into account the difficulty in formalizing definitions and theorem statements. This cannot be done autonomously (or, it can, but there will be serious errors) since there is no way to formalize the "text to lean" process.

What's more, there's almost surely going to turn out to be a large amount of human generated mathematics that's "basically" correct, in the sense that there exists a formal proof that morally fits the arc of the human proof, but there's informal/vague reasoning used (e.g. diagram arguments, etc) that are hard to really formalize, but an expert can use consistently without making a mistake. This will take a long time to formalize, and I expect will require a large amount of human and AI effort.
by glenstein | 2026-01-18 16:25:12+00:00
That's an odd choice, because prime numbers routinely show up in important applications in cryptography. To actually solve RH would likely involve developing new mathematical tools which would then be brought to bear on deployment of more sophisticated cryptography. And solving it would be valuable in its own right, a kind of mathematical equivalent to discovering a fundamental law in physics which permanently changes what is known to be true about the structure of numbers.

Ironically this example turns out to be a great object lesson in not underestimating the utility of research based on an eyeball test. But it shouldn't even have to have any intuitively plausible payoff whatsoever in order to justify it. The whole point is that even if a given research paradigm completely failed the eyeball test, our attitude should still be that it very well could have practical utility, and there are so many historical examples to this effect (the other commenter already gave several examples, and the right thing to do would have been acknowledge them), and besides I would argue they still have the same intrinsic value that any and all knowledge has.
by Workaccount2 | 2026-01-18 16:25:17+00:00
>Google realized this a long time ago; there is no ad-free paid version of Google Search.

Google actually experimented with this about a decade ago (I know, I was one of the suckers who paid), but it got canned because why the fuck would you pay google when u-bloc is free?

Companies absolutely will offer ad-free experiences. Google has youtube premium, which even compensates creators with half your sub as well. Evenly distributed too.

People get wrapped around the axle of ad-subsidized models, the "I pay and still see ads" but they just are confused about a hybrid monetization structure.

At some point the larger internet has to look itself in the mirror and recognize that it's either ads, credit card, or a hybrid of those.

And no, blocking is not an option, it just offloads costs onto honest users.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2026-01-18 16:25:26+00:00
You could probably detect essay cheating (AI written) in the exact same way by questioning the student about it - why did they organize the essay in this way, what was their motivation for focusing on X, or expressing something as Y... Of course anyone can concoct an explanation on the fly, but it should be obvious if they are speaking from the experience of having authored it or just coming up with a post-hoc rationalization.

If they had AI write the essay, yet can still explain it as well as if they had written it themselves (ditto for code), then it would tend to indicate that they at least read it and thought about it, which I think should be more acceptable in a learning environment.
by JKCalhoun | 2026-01-18 16:25:53+00:00
That was the part that stood out for me as well.

I know people who have talked that talk, never dared walk it. I am happy with myself that I have walked that walk—many times. Most of the time they have not ended up how I had hoped they would in my imagination. Other times, they did. Regardless, in all cases, I am not left here now wondering what would have happened if…

Getting a game I wrote published in 1989 or so was one that worked out. Hitchhiking from Alaska back to the Lower-48 when the salmon season closed was another.

Quitting Apple to write games for the iPhone was a big fail. When I realized it though I applied and was hired back at Apple. Until that little experiment though I had been watching apps skyrocket to the top-10 while I unable to submit an app of my own (Apple policy, of course).

I had an idea for a great fantasy novel in my head for years. Only when I finally forced myself to start to write it did I realize I really didn't have an idea for a great fantasy novel. I had part of an idea for a great fantasy novel. And then there's the middle of the story you have to write, has to be interesting…

But as I say, in all cases at least I'm not stuck in Walter Mitty's [1] shoes for the rest of my life.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Mitty
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-01-18 16:26:16+00:00
(Yes I know the trend I’m about to talk about was different in BigTech and adjacent. I did an almost 4 year stint at a FAANG 2 years ago and have no need or desire to go back at 51. That’s not where most developers work)

Back around 2013-2014 well before AI, I saw the trend that it wasn’t going to take much to be a “good enough” enterprise “full stack” developer meaning the market was going to be commoditized and if i was just a “I codez good and pull tickets off the board” developer, it was going to be hard to stand out from the crowd.

I was prescient, when companies reach out to me now for standard enterprise dev jobs in Atlanta (no longer live there but a large part of my network is still there) I see the same salaries I saw in 2016.

I worked over the next six years to move “up the stack”. I learned soft skills, learned AWS and how to treat it more than just a glorified Colo, learned how to lead projects, talk to the “business”, focused on business value, started getting closer to sales and how they operate etc.

Out of everything I said, the take away should not be to “learn cloud”. Everyone and their dog knows AWS (except for one niche that has opened a few doors to me).

The take away is to incease the “scope and impact” of your work beyond just being a code monkey. Also learn how to work at an increased level of ambiguity.

https://www.levels.fyi/blog/swe-level-framework.html

AI is just another part of the commoditization and devaluation of the generic developer. There is no “moat” around being a generic full stack/mobile/web developer.

As of 2020, I work in cloud consulting specializing in app dev. I have been working full time for consulting departments (the internal one at AWS) and after being Amazoned in late 2023, it took me all of three weeks to have three offers. After I made a bad choice between the three in 2023, it again took me two weeks to have an offer.

I haven’t had to do a coding interview in over a decade because I know how to communicate my value and experience and I don’t try to compete on “I codez real gud”. I’m not a super special snowflake
by dijit | 2026-01-18 16:26:53+00:00
Fair point, but I think you’ve actually illustrated my argument perfectly: you didn’t eliminate the need for specialists, you outsourced them to your cloud vendor.
Those underlying nodes being “patched and replaced automatically” by AWS/GCP/Azure? That’s their SRE teams doing exactly the work your sysadmin used to do, just at massive scale. The control plane managing your deployments? Cloud vendor specialists built and maintain that.

And I’d wager you’ve still got people on staff doing operational work, they just don’t have “sysadmin” in their title anymore. Someone’s managing your K8s manifests, debugging why pods won’t schedule, fixing networking issues when services can’t communicate, handling secrets management, setting up monitoring and alerting. That work didn’t vanish, it just got rebranded. The “DevOps engineer” or “platform engineer” or “SRE” doing that is performing sysadmin work under a different job title.

Managed K8s can absolutely reduce operational overhead compared to hand-rolling everything. But that’s not democratisation, that’s a combination of outsourcing and rebranding. The expertise is still required, you’ve just shifted who pays for it and what you call the people doing it.
by ares623 | 2026-01-18 16:27:44+00:00
I think technology has always been a tool to impose will over others. Computing was just such a unique kind of technology where, for a decently long time, only a subset of people knew how to use it, and that subset didn’t have existing wealth and power (or not enough). It’s taken upto now for the ones with real power to catch up, or a mix of the ones who didn’t now have real power. And they will use technology for what it ultimately is for, to impose their will on others.
by alexissantos | 2026-01-18 16:28:15+00:00
Re: "It's much more comfortable to be the person that 'could be X' than to be the person that tries to actually do it."

I build entertainment experiences (escape rooms, live game shows, etc.), and I find that this also applies to individual projects/products. In the early planning stages we outline the ideal contours of a project, but as we build and run into constraints we start to see the gap between our vision and execution. And, usually, it's fine. We're the only ones who can see that gap because we're the only ones who knew the original plan. Guests only see what exists. We see what almost existed, what was left on the cutting room floor.

The planning stage is the most comfortable because we don't yet have to reckon with how we will fall short of our plan. Now, during every planning phase, there's a visceral acknowledgment that there will be a gap between vision and execution, but we make choices that attempt to make those gaps smaller or, at least, acceptable.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-18 16:28:22+00:00
> use LD_PRELOAD to wrap fopen/open/openat (I'm pretty sure, ready made solutions for this already exist)

I think I would literally recompile libc to patch fopen/open/openat long before I would even begin to consider writing a kernel module to mess with filesystem paths on a per-process basis.

I feel like if you find yourself seriously considering writing a kernel module then you are either contributing to kernel development, or have embarked on an adventure specifically to learn about kernel internals, or have take a very wrong turn.
by whimsicalism | 2026-01-18 16:28:37+00:00
You can read my reply to another comment making a similar point. In short, I think you are giving Doctorow far too much credit - the assumption that these tools are fundamentally incapable is woven throughout the essay, the risk always comes from the fact that managers might think these tools (which are obviously inferior) can do your job. The notion that they can actually do your job is treated as invariable absurd, pie-in-the-sky, bubble thinking, or unmentionable.

My point is I don’t think a technology that went from chatgpt (cool, useless) to opus-4.5+ in 3 years is obviously being oversold when it says that it can do your entire job beyond being just a useful tool.
by ripe | 2026-01-18 16:29:00+00:00
Thanks for the information about Tim Bryce and the relationship with Adams's obsessions.

Regarding your assertion:

> as AI becomes a critical component of software development, business thinking will become more necessary and technical thinking, much less so.

That remains to be seen. This is the story that AI evangelists are peddling and that employes are salivating over, for sure.
by bearjaws | 2026-01-18 16:29:28+00:00
That's generally my thought as well, I am not implying you don't need to advertise. I just believe the industry has more or less reverted to an even worse version of what we had before (TV & Radio ads). At least before, there was ~100 networks you could sell to, now there's basically 10 if you include major networks. Of course you don't actually launch new products with TV ads, so it is more or less 2 platforms.
by mwcz | 2026-01-18 16:29:29+00:00
In general I think the answer could be pretty simple: dedicated marketplaces for products and services, where we go to search for the things we need and want. A humble newspaper contains great examples of good and bad advertising.

Newspapers have whole pages of bad ads, and random bad ads wedged between actual content. Ads have a perverse incentive to mimic the look of actual content, just like on the web. I'd never pick up a newspaper with a goal of "I want to find a tax service" and yet ads for such services are there, unwanted, wedged into other content.

But newspapers also have classified sections, a better kind of ad. They're in a predictable place, where you can go if you need a job.

Imagine if the actual content weren't perforated by a scattershot of ads. Ad revenue would go down, but readership would likely go up. Besides profit motives, it's also a case of the good of the many outweighing the good of the few.
Tell HN: Poshmark instantly leaked my email to scammers
by hardenedmetapod | 2026-01-18 16:29:41+00:00
Browsing for an obscure piece of electronics, I ran across a Poshmark listing that had it for considerably cheaper than anywhere else.

I didn't have an account yet, so I signed up with Google SSO and was able to place the order.

About an hour later I got an email as if I was the seller telling me to click this link to verify my account for my funds to be deposited.

Obviously phishing. Upon closer inspection, I had two earlier that were properly filtered to spam that were about 30 minutes after the order.

So the question here is what part of their system is so fundamentally broken that scammers instantly get my email? Does the seller get that upon me making that purchase?

And if that's not the case, then that means somebody has completely compromised their system.
by steveBK123 | 2026-01-18 16:29:42+00:00
If AI somehow does materially, permanently change the amount of human employment required, I don't think anyone is going to like the outcomes.

I am to the left politically, but I do not think UBI can work in practice for the majority of population due to human nature and the resulting lack of purpose. People do seem to have an innate need for purpose, and most people need one imposed on them by circumstances, it would seem.

The % of people who will flourish and pursue their passions, given the means to pursue any higher purpose.. is stunningly low. They are the same people that are high-agency, intelligent, driven and will hustle in any job anyway.

The best case outcome for the majority is sitting on their couch consuming AI slop entertainment infinitely, and I am not optimistic we'd even land there.

The COVID bubble was the closest we've come in the US in terms of people having more time on their hands with less financial concerns (stimulus checks, employers subsidized to make payroll, unemployment payment increases, unemployment expiration extensions, federal benefit income caps raised, increased healthcare subsidies, student loan payment pauses, eviction moratoriums, etc etc). Unfortunately it seemed the outcome was less of human flourishing and more an increase in general disorder & disaffection.

Likewise, after Capital having financed trillions in investment to deliver AGI is not going to hand over the money to find UBI willingly.

Even people in the middle seem to be easily swayed by allegations of waste/scams in government benefits programs.
by metalman | 2026-01-18 16:29:48+00:00
no need to overthink is the truth
I make a wide assortment of edge tools and sharpen them,including damascus, and regularly sharpen whatever is dull, drill bits, lathe tools, planer blades, etc etc, by hand or with power equipment.
And in moments of need, like not having a long enough wood bit, I have hand ground a long bolt, into a wood bit, no thinking, just doing.
by wasabi991011 | 2026-01-18 16:30:00+00:00
> Did not care enough about erdos...

This is bad faith. Erdos was an incredibly prolific mathematician, it is unreasonable to expect anyone to have memorized his entire output. Yet, Tao knows enough about Erdos to know which mathematical techniques he regularly used in his proofs.

From the forum thread about Erdos problem 281:

> I think neither the Birkhoff ergodic theorem nor the Hardy-Littlewood maximal inequality, some version of either was the key ingredient to unlock the problem, were in the regular toolkit of Erdos and Graham (I'm sure they were aware of these tools, but would not instinctively reach for them for this sort of problem). On the other hand, the aggregate machinery of covering congruences looks relevant (even though ultimately it turns out not to be), and was very much in the toolbox of these mathematicians, so they could have been misled into thinking this problem was more difficult than it actually was due to a mismatch of tools.

> I would assess this problem as safely within reach of a competent combinatorial ergodic theorist, though with some thought required to figure out exactly how to transfer the problem to an ergodic theory setting. But it seems the people who looked at this problem were primarily expert in probabilistic combinatorics and covering congruences, which turn out to not quite be the right qualifications to attack this problem.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2026-01-18 16:30:15+00:00
> people never blame the socio-economic system and blame technology instead.

If by "people" you mean "Cory Doctorow, the author of the article", then you really don't know anything about their work.

For example, he coined the term "enshitifacation" and talks often about the "enshitogenic policy environment" that gives rise to it.
by MontyCarloHall | 2026-01-18 16:30:46+00:00
The New American Oxford Dictionary defines "advertisement" as "a notice or announcement in a public medium promoting a product, service, or event." By that definition, anything that mentions a product in a neutral light (thereby building brand awareness) or positive light (explicitly promotional) is by definition an ad. The fact that it may not be paid for is irrelevant.

A chatbot tuned to casually drop product references like in this thread would build a huge amount of brand awareness and be worth an incredible amount. A chatbot tuned to be insidiously promotional in a surgically targeted way would be worth even more.

I took a quick look at your comment history. If OpenAI/Anthropic/etc. were paid by JuliaHub/Dan Simmons' publisher/Humble Bundle to make these comments in their chatbots, we would unambiguously call them ads:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46279782:

Precisely; today Julia already solves many of those problems.

It also removes many of Matlab's footguns like `[1,2,3] + [4;5;6]`, or also `diag(rand(m,n))` doing two different things depending on whether m or n are 1.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46067423:

I wasn't expecting to read a Hyperion reference in this thread, such a great book.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45921788:

> Name a game distribution platform that respects its customers
Humble Bundle.

You seem like a pretty smart, levelheaded poster, and I would be much more likely to check out Julia, read Hyperion, or download a Humble Bundle based on your comments than I would be from out-of-context advertisements. The very best advertising is organic word-of-mouth, and chatbots will do their damndest to emulate it.
by analog31 | 2026-01-18 16:32:05+00:00
I think people are disinclined to prosecute because the odds are stacked against them.

I'm thinking of an analogy, and I've mentioned this before in other threads. The concept of statutory damages, as I'm thinking of it, is that a certain level of damages are automatically awarded. For instance this is used for figuring out damages when songs are copied illegally. It eliminates the need to construct a unique legal theory and case for each and every instance. In this case it benefits the record companies, which is of course controversial, but something like it could also benefit consumers.

If a company is found to possess your data, they automatically pay you X dollars, enough to make it a deterrent. You sign up with a law form that specializes in these cases, and they get a share of the damages.
by PlatoIsADisease | 2026-01-18 16:32:40+00:00
These are ~1 layer removed, but it shook me from an epistemological perspective. Basically it destroys the idea of metaphysical truth.

I'll start with the easy one that was written in native English, William James's Pragmatism. Its only 4 hours long, and teaches 1 of the 3 branches of metaphilosophy(Pragmatic). For ROI in philosophy, it doesn't get better than this. It teaches one of the 3 theories of Truth.

Next is significantly more difficult, but everyone only understands 10% of Wittgenstein. Read both early and late Wittgenstein. If I remember correctly, its ~12 hours of pain as you will barely understand him. However, it shakes foundations of math and science as you will find these are mere constructs of language. This will also teach you 1 of the 3 branches of metaphilosophy(Analytical), and teach you how language works. You really need to read both early and late. But I imagine reading early Wittgenstein will convince you to read late. Its super painful, but you should deal with the pain.

(the remaining branch of philosophy is Continental... that takes a long time to learn, but its mostly nonsensical rebuttals to Plato, take it from someone who read this for 8 years...)

Regarding that initial thought on the Problem of Priors, here is a quick youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xy6xXEhbGa0