MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jcranmer | 2026-01-23 18:52:12+00:00
Your comments of trust reminded me of an analysis of the PGP strongly-connected component of the "web of trust," back when keyservers were a bigger thing, and essentially found that, in practice, "web of trust" turned out to have a lot of key nodes that look very much like CAs in Web PKI.

That is, for as much as a lot of cryptoenthusiasts want to talk about decentralizing trust and empowering users to have fine-grained trust decisions, in practice, most users really just want to offload all of the burden of ensuring someone is trustworthy on somebody else.
by jt2190 | 2026-01-23 18:52:16+00:00
> [Seth is using AI to try] to take over the job of the farmer. Planting, harvesting, etc. is the job of a farmhand (or custom operator).

Ok then Seth is missing the point of the challenge: Take over the role of the farmhand.

> Everyone is working to try to automate the farmhand out of a job, but the novelty here is the thinking that it is actually the farmer who is easiest to automate away.

Everyone knows this. There is nothing novel here. Desk jockeys who just drive computers all day (the Farmer in this example) are _far_ easier to automate away than the hands-on workers (the farmhand). That’s why it would be truly revolutionary to replace the farmhand.

Or, said another way: Anything about growing corn that is “hands on” is hard to automate, all the easy to automate stuff has already been done. And no, driving a mouse or a web browser doesn’t count as “hands on”.
by 00N8 | 2026-01-23 18:52:27+00:00
Could it be that the handful of people with computer access were well connected & well regarded, & the people running the radio broadcasts wanted to cater to them especially? I'd imagine there could be some sense of personal & national pride & prestige around supporting these emerging technologies & promoting them to the public. (I'm just guessing though - I wasn't there & haven't studied the topic in depth.)
by observationist | 2026-01-23 18:52:45+00:00
It's shifted because you can outsource and race to the bottom, and abuse H1B and other programs to ensure you suppress US wages, and you fatten up the ranks of middle managers to make people leave every 3-4 years, stagnating wage growth, ensuring you get a constant stream of fresh, energized, underpaid workers, some of which can't complain or advocate for higher wages, and all participate in a culture of competitiveness and bean counting. Nobody builds relationships or sticks around long enough for policies and perks that are used to sell the package in the first place. There are all sorts of dark patterns that are taught to MBAs as "best practice". Throw in McKinsey et al, third party CYA vendors, and you have a rancid stew of bare minimum, low effort, "technically legal" policy and practices designed to screw everyone out of as much money as possible in order to make number go up. Companies that compete in the number go up game end up beating every other company that think they're in the something-as-a-service game, or the best quality product game.

We don't have to live like this. We can make them stop with reasonable regulations. That'd require term limits and nuking the dark money PACs and all the other corrupt bullshit, though, so who knows. Maybe we're all screwed, and "getting yours" is the best and only move left.
by LoganDark | 2026-01-23 18:52:50+00:00
Using the example from the article, I guess restaurant managers need handholding by the chefs and servers, seemingly breaking down the idea behind restaurants, yet restaurants still exist.

The point, I think, is that even if LLMs can't directly perform physical operations, they can still make decisions about what operations are to be performed, and through that achieve a result.

And I also don't think it's fair to say there's no point just because there's a person prompting and interpreting the LLM. That happens all the time with real people, too.
by FuturisticLover | 2026-01-23 18:52:52+00:00
I am not sure how it different than what we do with llms on daily basis.

We feed it the information as a context to help us make a plan or strategy to achieve or get something.

They are also doing the same. They will be feeding the sensor, weather and other info, so claude can give them plan to execute.

Ultimately, they need to execute everything.
by dcrazy | 2026-01-23 18:52:55+00:00
Parent edited their comment. It used to just say “In Germany.” as if to dismiss the comment for not being about the United States.

I was not intending to say that Catholic healthcare providers in the U.S. are notorious for firing employees who get divorced. In fact, Providence got caught in controversy for firing an employee who refused to provide contraceptives on personal religious grounds.
by wolvoleo | 2026-01-23 18:53:42+00:00
Finally. I view this as a much bigger deterrent against a Russian invasion than tanks and boots on the ground.

Let's not forget that it was the US that didn't want much nuclear capability in Europe so they offered to protect us with their nuclear umbrella. They strongly objected to Italy's nuclear program for example.

Now that the US umbrella can't be relied upon, we will need our own. I do think it's the main reason Europe has been safe since WWII.
by dang | 2026-01-23 18:53:53+00:00
We definitely banned you, for the reasons I gave at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46699941. Banned accounts can still post to HN but their posts are killed by default.

You seem to be asking about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46694184 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46691754. Those comments were killed by user flags. That was before we banned you.
by axus | 2026-01-23 18:54:04+00:00
Here's a story about what the FBI may do when they don't unlock the laptop:

https://cointelegraph.com/news/fbi-cant-be-blamed-for-wiping...

Perhaps next time, an agent will copy the data, wipe the drive, and say they couldn't decrypt it. 10 years ago agents were charged for diverting a suspect's Bitcoin, I feel like the current leadership will demand a cut.
by juanpabloaj | 2026-01-23 18:54:06+00:00
Inbox Processing Workflow - GTD-style system to keep your inbox at zero, with AI classification of notes to projects, resources, or someday/maybe lists.

Incomplete Tasks Review Workflow - weekly review that analyzes your tasks, identifies gaps, detects duplicates, and generates a focused "plan of attack" with your highest-priority actions.

Both workflows combine classic productivity principles (GTD, weekly reviews) with AI assistance to reduce cognitive load and maintain system trust. They use command-line tools (find, ripgrep) to analyze your vault and generate processing recommendations in an easy-to-review card format.

Use at your own risk. Validate each command before executing it. It is strongly recommended to use a version control system (Git) in your Obsidian vault to visualize and revert changes made by the agent.

Any suggestions to improve these workflows are appreciated.
by muwtyhg | 2026-01-23 18:54:32+00:00
> IIRC, Biden hemmed and hawwed on border environment until like a couple months before the election

You recall incorrectly. The Biden admin was trying to push congress to pass a bi-partisan immigration bill. It was torpedoed by Trump when he wasn't even in an elected position on the basis that it would help his campaign run on Biden's "immigration failures".

Here is some reading for you so you don't have to depend only on what you recall:
1. https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/blog/what-is-the-...
2. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/senate-republicans...
by dns_snek | 2026-01-23 18:54:41+00:00
It only became off by default after those "daily rage sessions" created sufficient public pressure to turn them off.

Microsoft also happens to own LinkedIn which conveniently "forgets" all of my privacy settings every time I decide to review them (about once a year) and discover that they had been toggled back to the privacy-invasive value without my knowledge. This has happened several times over the years.
by tyre | 2026-01-23 18:54:41+00:00
The way they get to $12.5bn is multiplying the preferred share price by the total outstanding shares. But the common shares, while still included in that calculation, are not worth the same amount of money.

They have a different strike price for options that is set via a 409a.

It’s possible that employees got, at the peak, grants with strike prices at a $2bn 409a valuation. We don’t know. What we do know is that no employee ever got grants with a strike price of a $12.5bn valuation. That’s just not how this works.
by partomniscient | 2026-01-23 18:54:49+00:00
I've never used AI except for messing around with Stable Diffusion in its early days (my then-current graphics card didn't have enough ram to run it), played with it a bit after an upgrade and that was it.

Never used a LLM or anything explicitly.

Got annoyed when I had to deal with AI chatbots as front-line customer service - although that only happened once or twice in the last couple of months.

So basically, keep doing what I'm doing.

I like AI for specifically targeted applications: - e.g. 100,000+ AI "eyeballs" vs. a few 100 for diagonstic imaging, working out whether there's something to worry about or not. I hate the idea of generalised AI, LLM's etc.

Lowering the bar to enable 'creative output' from non-creative individuals just fucks up the world, because natural talent is replaced by unnatural talent, especially in (late) capitalism, where money is worth more than human experience to those few control-freak managers.

I'm old. I even earnt enough to buy a house with lawn over 4 years ago during my (pre-AI) career as a Software Developer. Get off my damn lawn.
by at1as | 2026-01-23 18:54:56+00:00
Some of these are simplifications. Instead of upgrading my 12 year old Canon 6D to the mirrorless ecosystem with all its lenses, I opted for a single handheled camera.

In other cases, I bought alternative devices instead of upgrading within the same platform (my Mac and iPhone are both 5 years old). The alternatives turned out not be compelling enough to fully switch to, but found a niche as purpose driven devices. In many cases distraction free devices.

In some cases, the super upgrade cycle was driven by a desire to finally stop carrying a microUSB cable with me when I travel.

As for the mechanical watches, yes I have too many.
by egorfine | 2026-01-23 18:55:05+00:00
Oh, no accidents needed. Microsoft will soon forcibly extract and upload keys to their servers.

Before you downvote, please entertain this one question: have you been able to predict that mandatory identification of online users under the guise of protecting children would literally be implemented in leading western countries in such a quick fashion? If you were, then upvote my comment instead because you know that will happen. If you couldn't even imagine this say in 2023 - then upvote my comment instead because neither you can imagine mandatory key extraction.
by thinkingtoilet | 2026-01-23 18:55:27+00:00
Saying "of course" doesn't mean we agree with it or try to resist it. It's simply not surprising that this happened.

When you get high up in an org, choosing Microsoft is the equivalent of the old "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM". You are off-loading responsibility. If you ever get high up at a fortune 500 company, good luck trying to get off of behemoths like Microsoft.
by egorfine | 2026-01-23 18:56:36+00:00
> This isn't an argument about law, it's about designing secure systems

False. You can design truly end-to-end encrypted secure system and then the state comes at you and states that this is not allowed, period. [1]

[1] https://medium.com/@tahirbalarabe2/the-encryption-dilemma-wh...
by nowittyusername | 2026-01-23 18:56:39+00:00
Supertonic is probably way faster then that, I wouldn't be surprised if measured it would be something like 14k wpm. On my 4090 I was getting about 175x real time while on cpu only it was 55x realtime. I stopped optimizing it but im sure it could be pushed further. Anyways you should check out their repo to test it yourself its crazy what that team accomplished!
by godzillabrennus | 2026-01-23 18:56:50+00:00
Yes, vibe coders are telling prompts to build web apps in IDEs like Windsurf/Antigravity, and it sets up the local environment, but getting that from local to web is still a pain point. It's a hole in the market with potential for a firm like Docker that needs to monetize without upsetting its community. Remember, vibe coders are more enthusiasts than professionals. Check out /r/vibecoding on Reddit for an idea of the general market that would use something like this.
by rjh29 | 2026-01-23 18:57:19+00:00
On that note I absolutely love Matt Johnson (Jamiroquai)'s youtube channel because you can tell he likes gear but spends a huge amount of time actually playing it and making his own patches. So much of the review market is just GAS-inducing paid promo stuff.

The Flashbulb (Benn Jordan)'s channel was pretty cool too until he quit.
by 9rx | 2026-01-23 18:58:13+00:00
> all the easy to automate stuff has already been done.

To be fair, all the stuff that hasn't been automated away is the same in all cases: Monitoring to make sure the computer systems don't screw up.

But the bet here is that an LLM can buy a multi-million dollar farm without oversight and Seth won't be upset about its choices in the end. Which I guess is a more practical bet than betting that a multi-million dollar X9 doesn't end up running over a person and later upside-down in the ditch.
by d1sxeyes | 2026-01-23 18:58:24+00:00
That makes it vanishingly unlikely. On a 16GB RAM computer with that rate, you can expect 64 random bit flips per month.

So roughly you could expect this happen roughly once every two hundred million years.

Assuming there are about 2 billion Windows computers in use, that’s about 10 computers a year that experience this bit flip.
by 0hw0t | 2026-01-23 18:58:40+00:00
It's a config DSL for a config DSL (OS files). Docker isn't much different from an AI wrapper. What was this mighty corporate machine supposed to become shipping config scripts?

The team I was before Docker got popular just used the OG container, user accounts, and set up namespaces and cgroups per user.

Docker represents perfectly the issue with the software industry; it is software that duplicates existing software chasing "line go up" not actual utility. No net new utility just different semantics to perform sys admin work.

Developers did not want to learn sys admin, and instead learned a meta-Docker-driven-sysadmin anyway.
by nonethewiser | 2026-01-23 18:59:02+00:00
1) You are right and its impressive if he can use AI to bootstrap becoming a farmer

2) Regardless, I think it proves a vastly understated feature of AI: It makes people confident.

The AI may be truly informative, or it may hallucinate, or it may simply give mundane, basic advice. Probably all 3 at times. But the fact that it's there ready to assert things without hesitation gives people so much more confidence to act.

You even see it with basic emails. Myself included. I'm just writing a simple email at work. But I can feed it into AI and make some minor edits to make it feel like my own words and I can just dispense with worries about "am i giving too much info, not enough, using the right tone, being unnecessarily short or overly greating, etc." And its not that the LLMs are necessarily even an authority on these factors - it simply bypasses the process (writing) which triggers these thoughts.
by beej71 | 2026-01-23 18:59:21+00:00
> The Supreme Court has told Trump to pound sand as often as it's upheld his policies.

Has it? Last I saw, they had overturned nearly 90% of lower conservative court rulings to be in Trump's favor, and a huge portion of those were on the shadow docket.

They also said it's fine to gift the justices, just not before they make a ruling.

And they gave the President a lot more immunity than he previously had.

If they're not actually corrupt, they look exactly as if they are.
by unstyledcontent | 2026-01-23 18:59:23+00:00
Here in Minneapolis, there have been multiple anecdotal reports of ICE being able to remotely unlock cars, disable them, and even open windows. Whether its true, its certainly seems possible.

Its made me very concerned about public safety if we allow our government to have this power. I actually believe being able to own and use a vehicle freely should be protected under the 2nd amendment.

Im picturing a world where the US could mass disable vehicles based on the owners score in their fancy new palantir database. We should have the right to flee danger and use a vehicle for that.

I also think the second amendment should be applied encryption for the same reason. Encryption is essential to the people's ability to mount a defense against tyranny.
by cptskippy | 2026-01-23 18:59:28+00:00
> This was not a mitm attack

My intent was not to color or frame the activity but to use shared understood knowledge to convey the concept. It's like the terms blacklist and whitelist. Yes they're rooted in racism, and gosh darn it if everyone doesn't still use them because we know immediately what they are and there no better term. On the flip side we successfully switched from master to main.

If you don't want people saying "mitm attack" you gotta come up with something that rolls off the tongue a little better than "it was lawful mitm inspection of a user's own traffic".
by wang_li | 2026-01-23 18:59:41+00:00
In the 2010 era of RAM density, random bit flips were really uncommon. I worked with over a thousand systems which would report ECC errors when they happen and the only memorable events at all were actual DIMM failures.

Also, around 1999-2000, Sun blamed cosmic rays for bit flips for random crashes with their UltraSPARC II CPU modules.
by MereInterest | 2026-01-23 18:59:49+00:00
Last time I needed to install Windows 11, avoiding making a Microsoft account required (1) opening a command line to run `oobe/bypassnro`, and (2) skipping past the wifi config screen. While these are quick steps, neither of those are at all "easy", since they require a user to first know that it is an option in the first place.

And newer builds of Windows 11 are removing these methods, to force use of a Microsoft account. [0]

[0] https://www.windowslatest.com/2025/10/07/microsoft-confirms-...
by socalgal2 | 2026-01-23 18:59:59+00:00
Related? Unrelated? Places like redbubble.com will let you print your design on t-shirts, dresses, mugs, pillow covers, bathroom curtains, bedspreads, shower curtains, stickers, posters, phone cases, and 50+ other things. And, cheap! You can order a single print t-shirt for ~$20

When I first saw all the items I was like "yea, I'm going to cover my house in custom stuff'. But other then a few personal t-shirts I haven't done anything.
by UncleEntity | 2026-01-23 19:00:21+00:00
There's no reason I can think of where this isn't the case.

I mean, we're not even up to the "Model T" era of AI development and more like in the 'coach-built' phase where every individual instance needs a bunch of custom work and tuning. Just wait until they get them down to where every Teddy Ruxpin has a full LLM running on a few AA batteries and then see where the market lands.

I always imagine these AI discussion in the context of a bunch of horses discussing these 'horseless carriages' circa 1900...
by seanwessmith | 2026-01-23 19:00:59+00:00
isn't it more like we're getting to the era where engineers are becoming PM's, pm's didn't understand the underlying code. They needed the end result to meet the businesses needs.

The speed of development and lack of engineer burnout/meetings/code arguments etc seems like an immense boon. Kind of like the iPhone app ecosystem emergence. There's just seemingly unlimited upside to systems like these
by smiru | 2026-01-23 19:01:01+00:00
It was genuinely not AI slop. That was me. I would also love if you could share the myriad program example, I don't even know how a regular Joe would know how to navigate to know that a "myriad" program is good for them.

Another thing is the spreadsheet. No one has time to navigate through spreadsheets. That's why apps exist. That's the whole point of user interfaces, to make it easier for users to access things quick and easy.

Also, do you know how difficult it is to calculate macros? An AI guesstimation is way more accurate than a regular human being that has no nutritional knowledge trying to guess the macros in each meal by eyeballing.
by sirwhinesalot | 2026-01-23 19:01:03+00:00
Exceptions are cheap on the happy path and super expensive on the error path.

Checked exceptions only make sense for errors that are relatively common (i.e., they aren't really exceptional), which calls for a different implementation entirely where both the happy path and the error path have around the same cost.

This is what modern languages like Rust and Go do as well (and I think Swift as well though don't quote me on that) where only actually exceptional situations (like accessing an array out of bounds) trigger stack unwinding. Rust and Go call these panics but they are implemented like exceptions.

Other errors are just values. They have no special treatment besides syntax sugar. They are a return value like any other and have the same cost. As they aren't exceptional (you need to check them for a reason), it makes no sense to use the exception handling mechanism for them which has massively skewed costs.
by kccqzy | 2026-01-23 19:01:10+00:00
I don’t see that at all. Instead, I think tech workers, including the engineers and the product managers, are correctly prioritizing user convenience over resistance to government abuse. It’s honestly the right trade off to make. Most users worry about casual criminals, not governments. Say a criminal snatching your laptop and accessing your files that way. If you worry about governments you should already know what to do.
by ctoth | 2026-01-23 19:01:12+00:00
Funny I've actually been digging into this problem recently. I have a webaudio reimplementation of Klatt 1980 driven by cmudict. It still sounds pretty ass, but it's very early days. This weekend I intend to go deep dive on the Delta rule system that powers Eloquence. There're so many interesting papers from the late 90s early 2000s I bet we could get something pretty remarkable that sounds even better than Eloquence and is incredibly fast and runs anywhere.
by bigwheels | 2026-01-23 19:01:20+00:00
Thanks! "OLT" was also new to me. In case others find it helpful:

> OLT = Optical Line Terminal.

> In ISP fiber (typically GPON/EPON) infrastructure, it’s the provider-side device at the central office/headend that terminates and controls the passive optical network: it connects upstream into the ISP’s aggregation/core network and downstream via fiber (through splitters) to many customers’ ONTs/ONUs, handling PON line control, provisioning, QoS, and traffic aggregation.
by thewebguyd | 2026-01-23 19:01:23+00:00
> Any power users who prefer their own key management should follow the steps to enable Bitlocker without uploading keys to a connected Microsoft account.

Except the steps to to that are disable bitlocker, create a local user account (assuming you initially signed in with a Microsoft account because Ms now forces it on you for home editions of windows), delete your existing keys from OneDrive, then re-encrypt using your local account and make sure not to sign into your Microsoft account or link it to Windows again.

A much more sensible default would be to give the user a choice right from the beginning much like how Apple does it. When you go through set up assistant on mac, it doesn't assume you are an idiot and literally asks you up front "Do you want to store your recovery key in iCloud or not?"