MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by GlenTheMachine | 2026-01-28 21:24:50+00:00
That’s certainly an opinion. I’m not convinced that it's a good one, but it’s an interesting one.

I think it’s probably important to remember two things: 1) the novel is a relatively modern invention — Don Quixote is often thought of as the first novel, and it was written in 1605, but 2) fiction clearly is not. The Iliad, for instance. In fact, what we think of as “history”, a recounting of events strongly tied to facts, is also a relatively new invention. It is my understanding that ancient authors were more interested in telling you what was true, in a spitirual, philosophical, or moral sense than in telling you strictly what happened. Obviously this is more clear when reading e.g. religious texts like the Bible, but my understanding is that it’s also true of more “straight” histories — Roman historians were not above inventing entire speeches for which there were not extant records and placing them in the mount of a Julius Caesar or whoever. So strictly speaking if you’re reading sources as old as the OP suggests, there’s no getting away from what we would call fiction.

My wife and I have an ongoing conflict of taste in matters of literature. She prefers what I consider to be absolutely depressing high literature. One of her favorites is The House of Mirth, wherein the protagonist starts out wealthy, slowly goes into debt, ends up impoverished and addicted to morphine, and ends the book by committing suicide. She says she likes these stories because they’re “more realistic”. I claim that no, they aren’t, and even if they were I read specifically because I get enough realism by waking up in the morning, thank you very much, and although I’m not averse to deep thoughts in my literature I usually prefer it with a side of likeable characters.

Anyway, my point is: to pick an example, LOTR is a book of fiction written after WWII, and although Tolkien was an expert on and was drawing from a deep pool of literary traditions that predate written language, he was also addressing modern concerns, and that’s what makes the book more interesting than Beowulf. It’s don’t care that it’s labeled “fiction”; the concepts it explores are as true, in the ancient sense, as straight Greek philosophy, and maybe even as applicable. And if you want to read for information, you’re almost certainly going to get better information by reading a modern history of Rome than by reading Polybius.
by larkost | 2026-01-28 21:25:22+00:00
I think the thing to remember is that with interest rates being essentially 0 during the (middle/end of) pandemic that made it really easy for a lot of companies to finance a virtually free checkbook. They were at liberty to try out all sorts of new experiments, virally for free (at that moment).

Now those bonds are all coming up for renewal at much higher interest rates, and the companies don't have the growth to organically support the higher head-count (in addition to the interest payments), and so are cutting.

Was this all wildly irresponsible? Yes. But the people who made those decision are never going to personally pay for any of it.
by koyote | 2026-01-28 21:25:29+00:00
I have the same specs in my work machine.

Task manager takes 10 seconds to load the list of processes.
Right-click on the desktop takes about 1.5-2 seconds to show the 'new' context menu.
Start menu is actually fast to start drawing but has a stupid animation that takes about half a second to fully load.

I sort of understand how the anti-consumer 'features' (ads) get added to a piece of software. But I have no idea how they manage to continuously degrade the experience of existing parts of the system for seemingly no one's benefit.
by apelapan | 2026-01-28 21:25:31+00:00
You pay the same proportion, not the same amount. 40% of 1M is 10x more than 40% of 100k.

Disregarding all technicalities about what proportion people actually end up paying after performing clever tax planning.

Why are you sure that someone earning 1M should have higher proportion of their income taken away than someone earning 100k?

At some sufficiently low level of income I think it stops making sense collecting taxes, but beyond that I'm not so sure from a fairness-perspeective.

I could perhaps get on board with a hard cap on wealth, for preserving democracy. It is dangerous to have single individuals and families attain too much power. But up to that cap, I don't see any inherent unfairness or inefficiency in that people of moderate to high wealth pay the same proportional rate.
by legitster | 2026-01-28 21:26:11+00:00
I am unclear how you got that out of my statement at all. I am arguing that we have made huge leaps of progress that we should not be willing to give up.

A good illustration of this is in Hans Rosling's books. We're making unprecedented bounds on metrics that matter - like childhood poverty, disease, illiteracy, hunger, child labor, violent crime, lead usage, etc.

Some of these things we are at risk of backsliding on, but for even the poorest person in America the quality of life is so much better today than it was even 50 years ago.
by mixmastamyk | 2026-01-28 21:26:35+00:00
I recommend Mint over Ubuntu, the snap issue does not exist there.

> And don't tell me that Linux doesn't need antivirus... you sometimes log in on public WiFi networks.

This is a misunderstanding of the threat model of Wifi. Stick to software from the signed repos and SSL. Avoid attachments, keep updated. I've never used antivirus with Linux, despite working on symantec antivirus back in the day.
by socalgal2 | 2026-01-28 21:26:37+00:00
I'm super sympathetic that losing your job sucks. I lost mine once.

At the same time, what's the alternative? Progress happens. We no longer have liveries for holding horses nor horse shoe makers (not at the level we used to). We no longer have telephone operators.

Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable solution to me. Supporting them in some way (re-training, UBI, service work, ...) seems like the only way forward.

I guess maybe I can imagine making it harder to fire people so you have to find something to do with them. But that also has negative consequences. Small companies won't/can't hire because they can't make the guarantees big companies can.
by kohbo | 2026-01-28 21:27:10+00:00
I'm using this right now on a work trip. Since I don't want to use my work computer for personal stuff, I carry a small bag that has a mouse, small keyboard, USB-C hub, and USB-C to HDMI cable. I set that up while I'm in my hotel room and use my Fold7 as a personal laptop. The items mentioned are all kept neatly in that small bag and it just sits at the bottom of my work bag until I want to use them.
by Aldipower | 2026-01-28 21:27:31+00:00
I have a RME _PCIe_ Raydat card that is supported by Linux. It has 4+4 ADAT ports, meaning 32in+32out channels. You can connect basically every interface that has ADAT to it. I've connected two Ferrofish Pulse8 AE, a Focusrite Scarlett and a Motu Traveler. :-)
If your UA Apollo has ADAT, you still can use it this way!
Of course it hasn't to be a RME Raydat, any other Linux supported interface with ADAT does it too, f.ex. a Scarlett. You could get a cheap Scarlett and connect your Apollo to it. Hahaha. Seriously, this would work.
by seanicus | 2026-01-28 21:28:15+00:00
The Doomsday Clock really strains credulity; I'd love to see a case for how we're closer to (as defined in this article) total nuclear annihilation or even a limited exchange than we were at any point in the cold war. The case is not convincingly made by any of the subjects in the article.

Nuclear proliferation is still something to be taken with deadly seriousness but the Bulletin of Atomic Sciences needs to cut the hyperbole and present their case more convincingly.
by rayiner | 2026-01-28 21:28:20+00:00
> why that man is personally rich. Even if it were a big source of revenue, that would go into Amazon's coffers, not necessarily his directly.

Jeff Bezos owns 9% of Amazon. So 9% of the expected value of the money going "into Amazon's coffers" indefinitely into the future is counted as part of his current "wealth." It's not money under his mattress.

Is your argument that people shouldn't be allowed to own 9% of a company that they started?
by uecker | 2026-01-28 21:28:29+00:00
You would need to monitor all your dependencies (and their dependencies), compile new binaries for all supported platform each time their is an issue (which you likely learn about later), notify all your user, and distribute improved binaries. I think this is far more effort than using dynamic libraries and compiling for a couple of Linux distributions. And I would be surprised if entities distributing statically linked binaries actually do this (properly).
by burkaman | 2026-01-28 21:28:29+00:00
The author did not strike me as someone who actually goes to Barnes & Noble or the library very often.

60% of American adults say they read at least one book last year: https://today.yougov.com/entertainment/articles/53804-most-a...

That's more than 260 million people, and it doesn't include kids. I imagine a lot of the people in Barnes & Noble are kids or are shopping for their kids. I do also find it a bit surprising to find bookstores busy - I read a lot but it's nearly all ebooks or audiobooks, but if even a small percentage of readers like the feel of a physical book, that's enough to keep the stores full.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2026-01-28 21:28:40+00:00
> Release new open LLM

> Call it "K2 Think"

> Don't get that Kimi K2 is among the most popular open LLMs on the market right now, "K2 Thinking" already exists, and "K2.5 Thinking" was just released last week.

If their AI is so good, how come they couldn't come up with a better name that won't cause tremendous confusion? (Assuming their model is even adopted.) This is not even amateur-tier. It seems kind of scammy.
by bryanlarsen | 2026-01-28 21:28:44+00:00
My understanding was that the retailer margin was 50% and the distributor margin was 10%. So Apple/Steam/etc went "half of 60% is a great deal".

Of course the retailer margin is never actually 50%. That's theoretical if 100% of product is sold at MSRP. Actual retail margins are about 25% because of sales, write-offs, et cetera.

OTOH when there's a sale in Steam, they still get their full cut (of the reduced price).
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2026-01-28 21:28:45+00:00
> I get this is the extreme end, but if this gets popular enough, can't you write like a custom 'keyboard' driver that just takes AI input and 'types' it? Random delay between keystrokes, whatever....

We can easily go one more step than drivers; making a cheap microcontroller enumerate as a USB keyboard is easy.
by scott_w | 2026-01-28 21:28:47+00:00
Not really, unfortunately. The thing is, if you mistype a configuration key, Django won’t pick it up. It’ll just leave the default value in place. I also don’t think it does any validation on settings values, it’ll just pass them to whatever uses them. That’s the last time I used it anyway.

The situation is worse than that because any plugins usually define their own settings which also don’t validate their contents.

I think something centralised that lets you properly scope and validate settings would be nice. If you mistype a key, you’d want an error that it’s just not valid.
by VirgilH2Oss | 2026-01-28 21:28:53+00:00
A compressed generative PHYSICS framework for AIs. Tested on GPT-5, Claude Sonnet, and Grok shows higher accuracy with less drift and lower token usage—up to 500× faster. Benchmark it yourself, click here.
Short screen share 1 minute:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YSyJVcxUzrqdrSi817OCPS01QpP...

long version 30 minutes:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jbtxCWECdSE38gdaXaRvaNnYDhD...
by godelski | 2026-01-28 21:29:46+00:00
I'm also in my 30s so I get it. The only real advice I can give is that it just takes more work to maintain friends as we get older. I had to be the one reaching out rather than waiting for others to reach out to me.

The other thing is recognize where friendships came from. Most of it was just being physically near people. Sitting in the same classrooms day to day. If work doesn't create that space (or isn't good enough or you want to distance from work) you need something else that does the same thing. Join a club. Set up weekly beers with your friends. Or literally anything that puts you in the same physical space with the same people, routinely. A friend of mine gets together with his gamer friends once a year and they socialize off the game too.

The convenience of social media is also its weakness. The ease of connecting makes it just as easy to disconnect.

Real friendships require work. That's true of any relationship. I'll tell you my friends can be annoying and exhausting, but I love them and I'll gladly put up with their shit to keep them around. After all, who else is going to put up with my bullshit? lol
by EMM_386 | 2026-01-28 21:30:19+00:00
This is great.

When I work with AI on large, tricky code bases I try to do a collaboration where it hands off things to me that may result in large number of tokens (excess tool calls, unprecise searches, verbose output, reading large files without a range specified, etc.).

This will help narrow down exactly which to still handle manually to best keep within token budgets.

Note: "yourusername" in install git clone instructions should be replaced.
by volemo | 2026-01-28 21:30:39+00:00
> But from past threads in a Linux Forum, seems this only applies to people using the Apple IOS App for Patreon. Not sure if using Apple Laptops. But if you use Patreon's WEB Site directly, the fee cannot be collected by Apple.

Moreover, the fee only applies to the subscriptions made using Apple's payment system. That being said, in most jurisdictions their payment system is the only one developers can use in an app. IMHO, this is the real problem.
by observationist | 2026-01-28 21:30:43+00:00
I get what you're saying and all, but when you look back across the hundreds of millions of years of evolution, the whole reason humans exist is the extreme and sometimes arbitrary individual choices and "that never happens" situations that are exceptions to niche saturation. You could take the glass half empty, cold and pragmatic view and focus on the fact that millions, or maybe even tens of millions of antisocial/adventurous/moronic penguins have to get wanderlust and die frozen and alone before you might even get a single successful breeding pair, but who wants to look at life like that?

Most badass penguins don't make it. Being the badass penguin isn't a sensible life goal. The altar of time demands the blood sacrifice of nearly all the badass penguins before progress and change is allowed. Occasionally, though, they win, and new species are born. The exceptions end up forking the timeline, and provide a backdrop of meaning to the sacrifice of all those who came (or went?) before.

The thing I love most is the fact that you can project anything on to the penguin, from extreme heroism, to villainy, to meaninglessness, or even profound cosmic purpose. I'd love to know what the evolutionary psychology / behavior is that actually causes it, though.
by barcodehorse | 2026-01-28 21:30:52+00:00
> When we look at an animal that does such a thing, we characterize it as a strange and suicidal act of a disturbed creature hurtling it's life force into the abyss. But when man does the same thing, it is a heroic and uniquely human act of exploration.

I'd say that that's mostly because the man in question is rational. They strategize, they collect resources, and they do whatever they can to make sure they can return. The penguin can't do that. It doesn't have a goal in mind, or any way to sustain itself while it wanders. It just goes.
by katsura | 2026-01-28 21:30:58+00:00
My solution to the nag screen was that I never turned off my computer, just put it to sleep, so Total Commander was always running.

Interestingly, TC was one of the few software that I considered paying for, but in the end I didn't because they asked for too much information at the time. Not long later I switched to Linux, and I couldn't use TC there.
by dang | 2026-01-28 21:31:04+00:00
I'm sure you didn't mean to, but this comes across as a shallow dismissal, which is against the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html): "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.", as well as the Show HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html).

A comment like this could turn from a bad one to a good one if it were written more in the key of curiosity: what are the similarities or differences? what are some pointers for further development? and so on. If you know more than someone else does, that's great, but then please share some of what you know so we can all learn.

Telling somebody that their project which they've been pouring their passion and creativity into is merely reinventing some well-known thing that's been around for years is going to come across as a putdown even when it isn't intended that way. The effect is to shut down creativity and exploration, which is the opposite of what this place is supposed to be for.
by ben_w | 2026-01-28 21:31:32+00:00
Before such missiles even get launched, there's a serious risk of the US military saying "you are no longer the president".

Even with a room full of sociopaths, a president ordering a missile sent to Minneapolis, Denver, Portland, NYC, Chicago, Seattle, Austin, etc. is the kind of thing that makes the stock markets very unhappy, what with those missiles hitting expensive business property and/or staff and/or customers.

Even if the military and the local business leadership are all on board with the plan, foreign investments will crater, and the US needs that even just to handle the lack of balance in the budget.

And that's all true even without the 2nd. I don't, and never have, bought into the story Americans tell about the 2nd keeping them safe from tyrants: it's neither powerful enough to do that, nor necessary to do that. But all those easy-to-access firearms and training to use them would make the second civil war extra brutal.
by 8bitsrule | 2026-01-28 21:31:34+00:00
> It’s really easy to accidentally screw things up when e.g. trying to polish some of the rough edges or otherwise make the system function as desired.

'Similar to Windows' System Restore and macOS's Time Machine', the Linux 'Timeshift' tool can be used to do make periodic saves of your OS files & settings. (They can be saved elsewhere.) Restoration is a cinch.

Mint program 'Backup Tool' allows users to save and restore files within their home directory (incl. config folder and separately installed apps).
by borroka | 2026-01-28 21:31:40+00:00
At the population level, it is fungible, though.

Giving a certain number of hours dedicated to passive entertainment, many more people prefer to watch a terrible tv show on Netflix than to read a masterpiece of literature.

It could be because the tv show is more "entertaining" (which is tautological), a desire for social conformity (people can discuss more easily with others the latest tv show than Anna Karenina), or escaping the cognitive effort required when reading literature, which is almost always greater than the one asked for when watching a movie or tv show, or a tiktok.
by sarchertech | 2026-01-28 21:31:50+00:00
Yes, I think there many issues in a big company that could hide a 2x productivity increase for a little while. But I'd expect it to be very visible in small companies and projects. Looking at things like number of games released on steam, new products launched on new product sites, or issues fixed on popular open source repos, you'd expect a 2x bump to be visible.
by ephou7 | 2026-01-28 21:31:56+00:00
I used this:

#!/usr/bin/python3
import subprocess
import time
import random
with open("/tmp/x") as f:
t = f.read()
for c in t:
subprocess.call([ "xdotool", "type", c ])
time.sleep(abs(random.gauss(0,0.07)))

And pasted a random Hacker News comment:

Authenticity Score
81
Highly Authentic

Words per minute:
162
Keystroke variance:
52ms
Paste attempts:
0
Window/tab switches:
4
Pauses (≥10s):
0
DOM manipulations:
0

You failed.
by brendoelfrendo | 2026-01-28 21:31:57+00:00
A lone penguin wandering off is never going to create a new, badass species. There would need to be an entire group of penguins breaking off to establish a new population and eventually a new species. And they don't necessarily become more badass, just different; whatever alleles the founders had will be more consistently expressed in the new population, and eventually they may diverge enough to be a new species. Regardless, this penguin is marching off to die alone.
by Veedrac | 2026-01-28 21:32:11+00:00
> the companies owning and operating those AIs would go out of business as no one would be able to afford the products made by the AIs

What do you think money is...?

Money is a way to indirectly trade
labour and goods. If a job is automated, that labour doesn't disappear into the aether, it's still in the tradable pot of total goods and services. You cannot empty a pot by filling it. A world where a company though automation has made there nobody else to productively sell to is a world where _by definition_ they own all the output that they could otherwise have traded for.
by peyton | 2026-01-28 21:32:24+00:00
If you read the article, the author frames the discussion around a retroactive tax in California applying to those resident in California as of January 1, 2026 so that it cannot be dodged by moving. Also, the words “US”, “US-ian”, “American” appear zero times. The word “federal” appears one time.

I think this comment is a little off-topic.
by galaxyLogic | 2026-01-28 21:32:50+00:00
Software products are about unique competitive value that grows over time. Products have it or not. AI produced software is like open source in a sense, you get something for free. But whose gonna get rich if everybody can just duplicate your product by asking AI to do it, again?

Think of investing in the stock market by asking AI to do all the trading, for you. Great maybe you make some money. But when everybody catches on that it is better to let the AI do the trading, then others's AI is gonna buy the same stocks as yours, and their price goes up. Less value for you.
by simonw | 2026-01-28 21:32:56+00:00
I've talked to a team that's doing the dark factory pattern hinted at here. It was fascinating. The key characteristics:

- Nobody reviews AI-produced code, ever. They don't even look at it.

- The goal of the system is to prove that the system works. A huge amount of the coding agent work goes into testing and tooling and simulating related systems and running demos.

- The role of the humans is to design that system - to find new patterns that can help the agents work more effectively and demonstrate that the software they are building is robust and effective.

It was a tiny team and they stuff they had built in just a few months looked very convincing to me. Some of them had 20+ years of experience as software developers working on systems with high reliability requirements, so they were not approaching this from a naive perspective.

I'm hoping they come out of stealth soon because I can't really share more details than this.
by jasendo | 2026-01-28 21:33:07+00:00
Context compression is necessary but it's treating symptoms, not the disease. The core issue is that most agent architectures bolt long-horizon reasoning onto models that weren't designed for it. Summarization, filesystem offloading, etc. are clever workarounds, but you're still fighting the model's tendency to lose the thread. Curious if anyone's seen approaches that handle context at the inference layer rather than patching it in the orchestration layer.
by paul7986 | 2026-01-28 21:33:07+00:00
Just lost my UX Researcher, Designer, UI Developer and CX Support job (8 years) two weeks of ago. They said doing a great job but have to lay you off. Within a week i put my house up for sale and received an offer.

Time to downsize, "try," to stay in tech yet study to be a nurse.

My field and career of 20 years seems like a vanishing one.