MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rogerrogerr | 2026-01-14 00:47:10+00:00
> But people who accuse any comment longer than a paragraph of being LLM content are asses.

Many humans write good, lengthy comments on HN. That's not a heuristic. A few of the tells, none of them length:

- Unreasonable confidence (okay, fine, this is not rare on HN, but this is exuding a certain... omniscient vibe... that HN human commenters usually don't)

- Rule of three (sleep, meditation, relationship to thoughts).

- "X - not <...>, but <...>"

- "They still come - they just lose their grip"

- Emdashes are low signal but they contribute

There are many, many long comments on this page that do not trip my AI detection network. Why would you assume it's "anything long is AI" instead of "anything that smells like the shit that is all over Facebook these days is AI"?

FWIW, I scrolled through https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=porkloin and none of your comments strike me as AI, despite being long and well-written.

Do you think the root comment is _not_ AI? If it is AI, how is it providing any value at all in this conversation? Any of us can get the same info for free from $AI_PROVIDER; I come to HN to see smart _humans_ discuss things.
by a-dub | 2026-01-14 00:47:18+00:00
edit: agh, no. CLOCK_THREAD_CPUTIME_ID falls through the vdso to the kernel which makes sense as it would likely need to look at the task struct.

here it gets the task struct: https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v6.18.5/source/kernel/time/... and here https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v6.18.5/source/kernel/time/... to here where it actually pulls the value out: https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v6.18.5/source/kernel/sched...

where here is the vdso clock pick logic https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v6.18.5/source/lib/vdso/get... and here is the fallback to the syscall if it's not a vdso clock https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v6.18.5/source/lib/vdso/get...
by autumnstwilight | 2026-01-14 00:48:05+00:00
If you saw a video of a person doing something cool, and later found out it was AI generated, would you still be impressed?

Of course, it's not exactly the same situation, but if I listen to a song and appreciate that the vocalist sounds cool and they're doing some technically difficult things, I am definitely less impressed to find out it's a computer program. And it also means I can't find other songs with that vocalist's same artistic sense because they don't have one, they're a computer program who can sound like anything.
by maccard | 2026-01-14 00:48:07+00:00
I’m perfectly happy for my tooling to not be deterministic. I’m not happy for it to make up solutions that don’t exist, and get stuck in loops because of that.

I use LLMs, I code with a mix of antigravity and Claude code depending on the task, but I feel like I’m living in a different reality when the code I get out of these tools _regularly just doesn’t work, at all_. And to the parents point, I’m doing something wrong for noticing that?
by TeMPOraL | 2026-01-14 00:48:40+00:00
I get the joke, but it's also an incredibly interesting topic to ponder. Remember "Reflections on Trusting Trust"? Now consider that DNA itself needs a complex biomolecular machine to "compile" it into cells and organisms, and that this also embeds in them copies of the "compiler" itself. This raises the question of whether, and how much, information needed to build the organism is not explicitly encoded anywhere in the DNA itself, and instead accumulates in the replication mechanism and gets carried over implicitly.

So for you to successfully use my DNA as code, without also borrowing the compiler from my body, would be a major scientific result, shining light on the questions outlined above.

So in short: I'm happy to contribute my DNA if you cite me as co-author on the resulting paper :P.
by eab- | 2026-01-14 00:49:00+00:00
> We have proofs that are gigabytes (I believe even terabytes in some cases) in size, but we know they are correct because they check in Lean.

I'm not aware of any of these. There's some SAT-like results that were not verified in Lean at that sort of scale, but Lean proofs of individual problems are nowhere near that. For example, Mathlib (think a Lean4 math stdlib) is 6GB including compilation artifacts, and iirc <100MB text.
by tombert | 2026-01-14 00:49:05+00:00
In my experience it has gotten considerably better. When I get it to generate C, it often gets the pointer logic correct, which wasn't the case three years ago. Three years ago, ChatGPT would struggle with even fairly straightforward LaTeX, but now I can pretty easily get it to generate pretty elaborate LaTeX and I have even had good success generating LuaTeX. I've been able to fairly successfully have it generate TLA+ spec from existing code now, which didn't work even a year ago when I tried it.

Of course, sample size of one, so if you haven't gotten those results then fair enough, but I've at least observed it getting a lot better.
by tptacek | 2026-01-14 00:49:38+00:00
I don't believe he had the easily curable kind, or that there's evidence that he completely ditched conventional medicine --- he publicly appealed to Trump for Pluvicto, which treats mCRPC. In several unusual but not ultra-rare cases, CRPC among them, prostate cancer is a nightmare diagnosis. Worse, the kinds of prostate cancer most easily caught by screening tend not to be the aggressive kind, meaning aggressive cases tend to get caught in advanced stages.

Respectfully, I don't think comments like yours are a good idea. I don't think RFKJ had much of anything to do with what happened to Adams.
by accrual | 2026-01-14 00:49:38+00:00
Just offering another perspective because I see those missing comments too. The author decided they didn't want to participate in public discourse anymore and their comment is gone. So be it. I don't search archives or use tools to undermine their effort. I move onto the next thing.

I read "it's maddening because ... they decided to use their autonomy and..." and I stop there. So be it.
by alamando | 2026-01-14 00:50:15+00:00
Next Step: For Mainstream Homes
Following its showcase at CES 2026, Yarbo will launch the Yarbo M Series on Kickstarter in February 2026. This next step underscores the company's mission to bring modular, all-season yard robotics into more mainstream households. With its more compact form factor and accessible design, the M Series expands the reach of Yarbo's ecosystem beyond large properties, making intelligent, all-in-one yard care a practical reality for everyday homes. More information about Yarbo M Series is available at https://mseries.yarbo.com.
by vitaflo | 2026-01-14 00:50:20+00:00
You need to be fairly smart to be in tech. People who grew up smart and were told they were tend to view it as part of their self worth. If someone disagrees with this person later on, their self with has been attacked so of course they are going to lash out.

The worst thing you can say to a dev is they are wrong. Most will do everything in their power to prove otherwise, even on the dumbest of topics.
by anarticle | 2026-01-14 00:51:30+00:00
Download models you can find now and forever. The guardrails will only get worse, or models banned entirely. Whether it's because of "hurts people's health" or some other moral panic, it will kill this tech off.

gpt-oss isn't bad, but even models you cannot run are worth getting since you may be able to run them in the future.

I'm hedging against models being so nerfed they are useless. (This is unlikely, but drives are cheap and data is expensive.)
by kotysoft | 2026-01-14 00:51:34+00:00
Thanks! Really appreciate it.

Deep nesting: The indexer enforces a 255-depth limit (and gives a clear error if exceeded). That's a u8 + stack overflow safety guard. Details on the Known Limitations page: https://giantjson.com/docs/known-limitations/

Wide objects / long lines: This was actually the harder problem. In Text Mode, extremely long lines (especially without spaces, like minified JSON or base64 blobs) caused serious issues with Android's text layout engine. I ended up detecting those early and truncating at ~5KB for display.

In Browser Mode, cards truncate values aggressively (100 chars collapsed, 1000 chars expanded), but the full value is still available for copy-to-clipboard operations. I also tried to make truncation "useful" by sniffing for magic bytes—if it looks like base64-encoded data, it shows a badge with the detected format (PNG, PDF, etc.) and lets you extract/download it.

Index build time & memory: These are definitely the limiting factors right now. The structural index itself grows linearly with node count (32 bytes/node stored on disk), and for minified JSON I also keep a sparse line index in memory. For big files, the initial indexing can take a minute—I'm not sure if that scares users away or if they expect it for a GB sized file.

I've been watching Play Console for ANRs/OOMs and so far just had 1-2 isolated cases that I could fix from the stack traces. But honestly, I'm still figuring out which direction to prioritize next—real-world usage patterns will tell me more than my synthetic tests did.
by zeroxfe | 2026-01-14 00:51:35+00:00
The last time I was there, there were many layers of encap, including MPLS, GRE, PSP, with very tightly managed MTU. Traffic engineering was mostly SDN-managed L3, but holy hell was it complex. Considering that Google (at the time) carried more traffic than the rest of the Internet combined, maybe it was worth it.
by palata | 2026-01-14 00:52:05+00:00
I understand the idea as "provide what is necessary for someone to reuse the hardware". Just the bare minimum, like how to flash a firmware and a minimal firmware.

Now for many products, nobody would spend the time needed to make it actually work, but for some it may be nice.

But I agree that it is more complicated than it seems, and realistically that would be on a case by case basis.
by maccard | 2026-01-14 00:52:08+00:00
Someone else said this perfectly farther down:

> The whole discourse around LLMs is so utterly exhausting. If I say I don't like them for almost any reason, I'm a luddite. If I complain about their shortcomings, I'm just using it wrong. If I try and use it the "right" way and it still gets extremely basic things wrong, then my expectations are too high.

As I’ve said, I use LLMs, and I use tools that are assisted by LLMs. They help. But they don’t work anywhere near as reliably as people talk about them working. And that hasn’t changed in the 18 months since I first promoted v0 to make me a website.
by ambicapter | 2026-01-14 00:52:09+00:00
I mean, there's also, "this looks fine but if I actually had written this code I would've naturally spent more time on it which would have led me to anticipate the future of this code just a little bit more and I will only feel that awkwardness when I come back to this code in two weeks, and then we'll do it all over again". It's a spectrum.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-14 00:52:09+00:00
> "Cancel culture" (your social actions having social consequences)

Those aren't the same thing. The former is abusing the latter as a pretext for a (social) lynch mob.

> I'd bet that a misogynist Frenchman in the early 1900s wasn't going to ruffle that many feathers.

GP wasn't referring to people of the time but rather people of the present day. There have been some surprising contradictions in what has and hasn't been "cancelled".
by anArbitraryOne | 2026-01-14 00:52:45+00:00
It would be more straightforward to remove the permutations and just display the combinations and the symmetry between heads and tails. And solve it analytically Eg:
if p is the probability that the NPC is correct
P(A|AAAA) = p^4
P(A|BBBB) = (1-p)^4

Anyway, the apparent strangeness of the tie case comes from the fact that the binomial PMF is symmetric with respect to n (the number of participants) and n-k.
PMF = (n choose k) * p^k * (1-p)^(n-k)
So when k = n/2, the symmetry means that the likelihood is identical under p and 1-p, so we're not gaining any information. This is a really good illustration of that; interesting post!
by assertion_0xa | 2026-01-14 00:52:46+00:00
Google is notorious for pulling this and numerous people have come forward pointing it out and the CEO of IBM was on air back in 2021 (?) pointing out that any white men who have a problem with not being promoted can essentially pound sand.

This is/was an incredibly common behavior in tech, and anyone who says otherwise is being willfully argumentative or is incredibly isolated.
by ot | 2026-01-14 00:53:05+00:00
You can do even faster, about 8ns (almost an additional 10x improvement) by using software perf events: PERF_COUNT_SW_TASK_CLOCK is thread CPU time, it can be read through a shared page (so no syscall, see perf_event_mmap_page), and then you add the delta since the last context switch with a single rdtsc call within a seqlock.

This is not well documented unfortunately, and I'm not aware of open-source implementations of this.

EDIT: Or maybe not, I'm not sure if PERF_COUNT_SW_TASK_CLOCK allows to select only user time. The kernel can definitely do it, but I don't know if the wiring is there.
by palata | 2026-01-14 00:53:51+00:00
I totally agree with the frustration of having hardware I would like to keep using but can't because it got EOL. Like a smart speaker or something.

But I don't know if there is a pragmatic way to approach that. I mean, I could also say "it should be illegal to produce e-waste", but what does that mean and how do we actually do it?
by g-b-r | 2026-01-14 00:53:52+00:00
I'm surprised that no one said it, the article's advice of routinely deleting your local repository, without first making a copy, is terrible!!!

You lose your whole reflog and all the unreachable commits that way, and so some errors you might make will lead to unrecoverable losses..!

If you want do begin from a new clone from time to time, but make copies of the old local repository first, and keep them around!
You're bound to lose work occasionally, otherwise.

And why even messing around with a remote repository and force pushes, to safeguard yourself from rebase problems you can simply take a local copy of the repository..!

That's of course when it's not a huge repository

An alternative to keep in mind is to use local clones, updating which will take less time than taking a full copy.
by pico303 | 2026-01-14 00:54:02+00:00
That’s kind of funny you mention “quicker way to make a PPT.” Everyone at my company had been asking me how I make my presentations look so good. I’m no designer; I’m a lowly engineer. But I do them in Keynote and export them to PowerPoint, which is half the battle!

(Sadly, my work laptop is Windows. So I create them on my personal laptop then migrate to PPT and do my best to fix up the fonts on Windows.)
by godelski | 2026-01-14 00:54:10+00:00
> They should advertise that

They did

Previews can optionally include AI-generated key points, which are processed on your device to protect your privacy.

https://www.firefox.com/en-US/firefox/142.0/releasenotes/

I'll also add that if you go to the Labs page (in settings) you can enable another local model to semantically search your history
by glenstein | 2026-01-14 00:54:32+00:00
They already spend more on developing the browser now than at any point in the entire history of Firefox, and that's after adjusting for inflation. They ship millions of lines of new code every year and apply thousands of patches. It's probably one of the biggest and most active open source projects in the entire world.

And just so we're clear, are you suggesting they shouldn't have an endowment at all, or that they shouldn't use the endowment to create any lines of long term revenue, or that they should but spending a fraction of a percent of it on a VC fund would not be successful? Whichever one you pick, there's at least one person who's exactly as upset as you for the opposite reason.
by gitaarik | 2026-01-14 00:54:32+00:00
I don't know but I've been using Firefox since forever and I can't even recall the tabs changing at all. Of course they have changed many times over the course of years, but that happens in every browser. I don't know what happened to tabs that affected you so badly? I feel like it's an excuse for some people sometime that if some little thing in the UI changes that they claim their whole flow is now compromised so that is the reason they are now using this other software, where the same stuff happens as far as I can see.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-14 00:54:54+00:00
Forcing the release of signing keys would be a security disaster. The first person to grab the expired domain for the auto update server for a IoT device now gets a free botnet.

The only real way to make devices securely re-usable with custom firmware requires some explicit steps and action to signal that the user wants to run 3rd-party firmware: A specific button press sequence is enough. You need to require the user to do something explicit to acknowledge that 3rd-party software is being installed, though.

Forcing vendors to release their security mechanisms to the public and allow anyone to sign firmware as the company is not what you want, though.
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-01-14 00:54:59+00:00
The effect is much stronger than it has to be due to how these services have been optimized for increasing engagement at the cost of all else.

In more traditional places of online discussion, things like flamebait is at minimum penalized and often deleted. Posters with strong tendency towards incivility and outright falsehoods get banned. Participating with one’s lizard brain at the wheel is strongly discouraged.

There’s no reason why that can’t be true of social media, too. It could be tuned to elevate content that doesn’t pull people into a degenerative cycle, but that’s not nearly as profitable and so they don’t.
by roadside_picnic | 2026-01-14 00:55:03+00:00
> young founders

While this place has always been attractive to people building startups, back in the day (my original account is from 2009) "Hacker" News was much more about Hackers. Most people posting here had read "On Lisp", respected Paul Graham as a programmer and were enthusiastic about programming and solving problems above all else.

I'm honestly curious how many people that visit HN today even know what a "y combinator" is, and I have a pretty reasonable guess as to how many have implemented it for fun (though probably the applicative order version).
by flenserboy | 2026-01-14 00:55:07+00:00
I think many more would be on to Pages if they realized it was more than a simple WP. It's especially great for personal use, where there's no non-Mac sharing needed — there's no simpler layout program out there, & the typographic options are nice to have. If I have something longer/more detailed to put together, that's what ()LaTeX, Inkscape, etc., is for. We need alternate app ecosystems out there, & it's nice that Apple hasn't left these apps to rot like they did back in the 2010s.
by OkayPhysicist | 2026-01-14 00:55:13+00:00
The weather here is flawless, the culture is adequate (it's not top-tier, but it beats most low cost of living areas), the food is fantastic thanks to immediate access to most of the country's fresh produce. There's deserts, mountains, and the ocean all immediately available for day trips, and most of all, jobs here pay twice as much as they do anywhere else. Sure, the CoL is twice as high, but unless you're living paycheck to paycheck and spend 100% of your income locally, that means more money in our pockets.
by kklisura | 2026-01-14 00:55:15+00:00
> AI is now a tool for firing people

In essence we have an ownership problem. If I own the AI, I can do my work in couple of hours and then some and then have rest of the day off to enjoy things I like. If the company owns AI - I'm out of work. The difference between a world of plenty and beauty vs the world of misery for many of us - is who owns the AI.
by alisonatwork | 2026-01-14 00:55:27+00:00
This kind of thing already existed for a long time, but not as a scam. The people selling these products were selling their ability as "tastemakers". They knew about all the various distributors who could provide "artisanal" products from around the world, they took the time to leaf through all the catalogs and find the best knick-knack that they felt would fit with the theme of their stall and do good business in their local market. And then on the day of the market they would chit-chat with the customers about the process.

The funny thing is that what makes the scammer version a scam is that they go through exactly the same process but then try to pass the products off as their own artisinal work, presumably because they think that will net them more money. But in reality most people browsing for tat at a market aren't going to pay more or less for local artisinal versus imported artisinal versus mass produced, they just enjoy the experience of browsing the different stalls and chatting with vendors and feeling like they have connection with their local merchants. So the scam was wholly unnecessary, the merchant didn't need to make up a story, they just needed to be open to chatting with their customer. They're shooting themselves in the foot by lying about their products because if/when they're found out then they lost the trust, which is the actual product they are selling. People who choose local markets over chain stores or online shopping are doing it exactly because they are looking for a more trustworthy experience, so when you take that away you have nothing to sell.
by edfletcher_t137 | 2026-01-14 00:55:31+00:00
Came here to comment on this line: it completely changes the tone of the article. It's fairly reasonable and neutral until we get here, upon which the antagonism is jarringly clear.

In fact I would posit this is the central crux of the post: OP does not believe those LLM evangelists were ever good programmers.

As others have already noted[1], many well-known excellent programmers - including yourself! and now even Linus! - would beg to differ.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46610143
by maccard | 2026-01-14 00:55:42+00:00
As someone else said in this thread:

> The whole discourse around LLMs is so utterly exhausting. If I say I don't like them for almost any reason, I'm a luddite. If I complain about their shortcomings, I'm just using it wrong. If I try and use it the "right" way and it still gets extremely basic things wrong, then my expectations are too high.

I’m perfectly happy to write code, to use these tools. I do use them, and sometimes they work (well). Other times they have catastrophic failures. But apparently it’s my failure for not understanding the tool or expecting too much of the tool, while others are screaming from the rooftops about how this new model changes everything (which happens every 3 months at this point)
by tptacek | 2026-01-14 00:55:43+00:00
I agree, Iran doesn't really have an air force. In fact, they don't really even have a military --- by deliberate design. Iran will never field a competitive air force and I think it's actually pretty unlikely that they'll ever even field a seriously deterrent air defense system. I think that apart from lobbing MRBMs at Israel they simply aren't a serious regional threat anymore. They bet big on the IRGC Axis and it collapsed.

I'm not as convinced as you (and the Economist) are about Israel's interests in the total collapse of the Iranian regime. Either way, the protest movement is far too large for it to plausibly be a product of foreign intervention. I don't think we have to convince each other on this point, even if we don't agree.
by xp84 | 2026-01-14 00:55:55+00:00
I have long believed that changing coin value upward would be the #1 way to get 100% of citizens on board with currency reform. Or at least buy them from citizens at above face value.

Unfortunately, I think that vending machines specifically would frustrate this scheme though, because you can bet that most operators of them would, rather than reprogramming the machines which would be expensive (especially given how many old machines must be out there without any manufacturer support available), just leave everything the same physically and double all their prices.