MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pc86 | 2026-01-16 21:26:16+00:00
Thank you for helping me clarify something. Your last example, jerking off in public, is not only a crime (as it should be) but is clearly antisocial behavior. That helped me realize that's what all the other shit is too, no pun intended. Using the restroom while you're talking to other people on the phone, or generally just doing anything that forces other people to listen to you use the restroom, is antisocial behavior and shouldn't be tolerated by anyone civilized.

"Minding your own business" when it comes to antisocial behavior is enabling when the correct response in shaming and ostracizing. It's not going to work with LBJ but it will probably work with Kevin from accounting.
by josefritzishere | 2026-01-16 21:26:35+00:00
Having worked in the record biz... I can tell you the great preponderance of pop is created synthetically: the vocals are filtered, compressed, pitch corrected, layered, and effects added, the "instruments" are usually made of samples which originate in many different hands and are further modified. The lyrics usually written by one party, re-written by another none of whom are the recording artist. The melody takes a similar journey. I hate it passionately. Despite that, the music still has artistic intent and AI does not.
by fancyfredbot | 2026-01-16 21:26:51+00:00
Who are these agressive scrapers run by?

It is difficult to figure out the incentives here. Why would anyone want to pull data from LWN (or any other site) at a rate which would cause a DDOS like attack?

If I run a big data hungry AI lab consuming training data at 100Gb/s it's much much easier to scrape 10,000 sites at 10Mb/s than DDOS a smaller number of sites with more traffic. Of course the big labs want this data but why would they risk the reputational damage of overloading popular sites in order to pull it in an hour instead of a day or two?
by orwin | 2026-01-16 21:26:57+00:00
Around 9? years ago, Chinese salaries without qualification in coastal city industries were between 600 and 800€/month + lodging (that caused issues in the countryside and less affluent areas that can't offer salaries as competitive), so at worst 7k, at best 10k. Auto workers should be somewhat qualified, so it should be a bit higher. Also the salaries might have grown since
by bloppe | 2026-01-16 21:27:12+00:00
I'm curious how they concluded this was done to scrape for AI training. If the traffic was easily distinguishable from regular users, they would be able to firewall it. If it was not, then how can they be sure it wasn't just a regular old malicious DDOS? Happens way more often than you might think. Sometimes a poorly-managed botnet can even misfire.
by gruez | 2026-01-16 21:27:16+00:00
>From the creators of easy money laundering (crypto bros),

Is there even any evidence that "crypto bros" and "AI bros" are even the same set of people other than being vaguely "tech" and hated by HN? At best you have someone like Altman who founded openai and had a crypto project (worldcoin), but the latter was approximately used by nobody. What about everyone else? Did Ilya Sutskever have a shitcoin a few years ago? Maybe Changpeng Zhao has an AI lab?
by Core_Dev | 2026-01-16 21:27:35+00:00
Fair point.

Thank you, the task is actually not easy, because in this scenario there is no truly positive outcome; all the options are bad, and you're choosing from the worst, and that's exactly what happens in real life.

I specifically factored this into some of the scenarios. The goal isn't to guess the right one; the goal is to see what the choice leads to.

I'll take your comment more seriously because it may not be as clear as I'd like.
by kevinsync | 2026-01-16 21:27:40+00:00
I suspect they might transparently fall back too; Opus 4.5 has been really reasonable lately, except right after it launched, and also surrounding any service interruptions / problems reported on status.claude.ai -- once those issues resolve, for a few hours the results feel very "Sonnet", and it starts making a lot more mistakes. When that happens, I'll usually just pause Claude and prompt Codex and Gemini with the same issue to see what comes out of the black hole.. then a bit later, Claude mysteriously regains its wits.

I just assume it went to the bar, got wasted, and needed time to sober up!
by oncallthrow | 2026-01-16 21:28:20+00:00
For what it’s worth, Anthropic very strongly claim that they don’t degrade model performance by time of day [1]. I have no reason to doubt that, imo Anthropic are about as ethical as LLM companies get.

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/a-postmortem-of-three-...
by mikkupikku | 2026-01-16 21:29:01+00:00
I'm not saying that it's trolling, I do think they genuinely want Greenland at least. I'm saying MAGA people, the portion of the voting public which actually support the administration, think it's trolling. The level of genuine support for it is virtually zero. That's the reason it hasn't already been done.

I hope I'm not talking to a wall here, because I already clearly explained this above: "most magas I talk to treat it like a joke, trolling the Europeans to make them invest in defense or something. I don't think the American public earnestly believes it will happen, and for that reason I think it won't happen."

W.r.t "other priorities", logistically it would be trivial. Their problem is political.
by bflesch | 2026-01-16 21:29:23+00:00
Yeah, it's a bit far fetched but after Cloudflare CEO basically threatening to cut off Italy I was wondering what would happen if US really invades Greenland.

A simple windows to linux migration is not enough. If certificates expire without a way to refresh you'd either need to manually touch every machine to swap root certificates or have some of other contingency plan.
by philipkglass | 2026-01-16 21:30:00+00:00
I don't think that most of them are from big-name companies. I run a personal web site that has been periodically overwhelmed by scrapers, prompting me to update my robots.txt with more disallows.

The only big AI company I recognized by name was OpenAI's GPTBot. Most of them are from small companies that I'm only hearing of for the first time when I look at their user agents in the Apache logs. Probably the shadiest organizations aren't even identifying their requests with a unique user agent.

As for why a lot of dumb bots are interested in my web pages now, when they're already available through Common Crawl, I don't know.
by bflesch | 2026-01-16 21:30:26+00:00
I hope so, but can we really be sure that .se or .de would still work in such a scenario? Is the TLD root management really split up vertically or is the (presumably US-based) TLD parent organization also the final authority for every country TLD?

It would be nice to at least have a very high level contingency plan because in worst case I won't be able to google it.
by janalsncm | 2026-01-16 21:30:30+00:00
Transformers are just a special kind of binary which are run by inference code. Where the rubber meets the road is whether the inference setup is deterministic. There’s some literature on this: https://thinkingmachines.ai/blog/defeating-nondeterminism-in...

I don’t think the issue is determinism per se but chaotic predictions that are difficult to rely on.
by pseudosavant | 2026-01-16 21:31:10+00:00
I've recently become a convert to this kind of thinking. The person invited the public to join in when they decided to have a public speakerphone call. If they don't want my responses or laughter, they get annoyed and stop the behavior I was finding annoying in the first place.

I don't even have to act like I'm bothered by it, or that I find their behavior offensive. They change their behavior because they are bothered by mine.
by satvikpendem | 2026-01-16 21:31:16+00:00
This was posted in Show HN today [0]. Looks like queries just query ChatGPT themselves for whatever terms they want to track and then correlate revenue with that. But ChatGPT will probably do it like affiliate links, where there is a tracking parameter or cookie that identifies that it came from ChatGPT.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46642490
by ipv6ipv4 | 2026-01-16 21:32:27+00:00
> Also what's up with the people hiking (by themselves) with a bluetooth speaker. You're by yourself, in nature. If you want to listen to music wear headphones!!

I used to hold this same opinion. Unfortunately, times have changed and now everyone is constantly in their phones, isolated in their own universes, typically with earbuds or headphones. At least the obnoxious speaker dude is present; in a shared physical reality with the world around him. A lesser evil.
by bjackman | 2026-01-16 21:32:34+00:00
In my experience, in practice, it usually isn't that hard to figure out what people meant by a READ/WRITE_ONCE().

Most common cases I see are:

1. I'm sharing data between concurrent contexts but they are all on the same CPU (classic is sharing a percpu variable between IRQ and task).

2. I'm reading some isolated piece of data that I know can change any time, but it doesn't form part of a data structure or anything, it can't be "in an inconsistent state" as long as I can avoid load-tearing (classic case: a performance knob that gets mutated via sysfs). I just wanna READ it ONCE into a local variable, so I can do two things with it and know they both operate with the same value.

I actually don't think C++ or Rust have existing semantics that satisfy this kinda thing? So will be interesting to see what they come up with.
by dpark | 2026-01-16 21:32:50+00:00
In the specific case, this is a long running thing. Historically Wales has in fact dismissed Sanger as being a founder and presented himself as the sole founder. That’s why the interviewer poked at this immediately. It’s also why Wales got so annoyed, because he’s had probably this exact same conversation a million times and didn’t want to do it again.

If Bill Gates called himself “the founder” of Microsoft, people would probably dismiss it as a slip of the tongue. For Wales, I don’t think it was a slip of the tongue at all. It’s an intentional choice. I don’t agree with his interpretation, but I also don’t think he’s obligated to rehash the topic in every single interview.
by diogenescynic | 2026-01-16 21:32:51+00:00
>Why do you fascist cheerleaders always dress up Constitutionally-protected activity in emotionally charged language?

It's funny when people resort to name calling because you know they have no argument. I never even voted for Trump but I can call a ball or a strike on this without being blinded by political party preferences.

Also, the definition of flout is neutral it means to openly disregard something so I used it accurately. They call them sanctuary cities... they are openly communicating them as a place where federal laws will not be applied.

>At this point, smart money is on viewing Trump as a hybrid warfare attack by foreign powers on the US.

No, this is what old Boomers who watch too much brain rot like Rachel Maddow think. If there as a shred of evidence of this, they would have released it by now instead of whispering and alluding to it for a decade or more. It's nothing more than sour grapes from Hillary.
by rpdillon | 2026-01-16 21:32:58+00:00
Same problem with anything in-ear. I have two pairs of Shokz that I use for work (OpenComm) and play (OpenRun). I thought they would be a gimmick, but 3 years later, I love them and use them daily.

Fun hack: when I travel I prefer my over-ear noise cancelling Ankers, but they're bulky. So, for traveling light, I use Shockz and then silicone ear plugs to block out external sound on e.g. the airplane. Creates a little bit of a "swimming pool" effect acoustically, but works well and is tiny to carry.
by dmaa | 2026-01-16 21:33:03+00:00
Lot of hate on Garmin sleep tracking in this thread, but I love it.

Maybe it is not super accurate, but it was eye-opening for me to see how the score changes for the worse even with a little bit of alcohol. I am way more careful with when and how much I drink since I've started wearing a Fenix 6 few years back
by austin-cheney | 2026-01-16 21:33:11+00:00
So the way it works for typical web interfaces is that on the client side you will use an HTML video or audio element. Those already have the streaming capability built in. It is not really a stream though, because it is still HTTP based. Instead it is a regular old HTTP 1.1 GET request with a range header.

The web server sees the range header and then responds with a small slice of the media and a HTTP 206 response. That's really all there is to it from a regular web implementation.

You could also play around with proper streams. This would work by creating a file system stream and piping the output to a network socket. This is really just as simple as it sounds, but you will have to make some decisions on network protocol and remote interface.
by hexaga | 2026-01-16 21:33:25+00:00
Because advertising works. Full stop. It doesn't matter if it is valuable or not. It just works. Definitely not with P(buy this crap) = 1. But the effect is still there and real and measurable and google has made colossal amounts of money out of exploiting it.

It might as well be a magic spell. You show the user the thing, and they buy/subscribe/click-through with some probability according to massive ML model that knows everything there is to know about them.

Yes - people are capable of making decisions in their own self interest. But there exists a gap where not _all_ of peoples' decision making process is the aforementioned. And that gap can be exploited, systematically.

The existence of that gap is the actual problem. At scale, you can own a nontrivial quantity of human agency because that agency is up for grabs. Google / similar make their money by charging rent on that 'freely exploitable agency'. Not by providing value to people. The very idea is ridiculous. Value? How are you going to define a loss function over value?

ML models on click-through or whatever else don't figure out how to provide value. They find the gap. The gap is made of things like: 'sharp, contrasting borders _here_ increase P by 0.0003', 'flashing text X when recently viewed links contain Y increase P by 0.031', etc and so on.
by dashundchen | 2026-01-16 21:33:27+00:00
The only winning move is not to play.

First I removed the Instagram app from my phone, because it was full of dark patterns meant to keep users scrolling.

Endless reposted stories from people you follow, endless suggested posts when you ran out of posts from people you actually know, and then the slop bucket known as reels. I found myself sucked in too often.

I used the web app version on my phone for a bit, which has a lot fewer dark patterns, but eventually I ditched that too because I found myself checking it out of habit.

Now I still have a login on my desktop browser, because for whatever reason some businesses insist on only sharing hours/menus etc via an Instagram post. But I'm close to pulling the plug on Instagram altogether.

Is there an xcancel equivalent for Instagram that lets me bypass the login wall in a pinch?

I also added a ublock origin filter list for tuning out social media distractions. Now my YouTube and Reddits are essentially blank feeds - no suggested posts, stories or recommendations.

https://github.com/BevizLaszlo/UBlock-Filters-for-Social-Med...
by satvikpendem | 2026-01-16 21:34:04+00:00
Sure, but then the advertising model is working then, at least for Google and the companies that pay them. If people don't want to read a big heading literally called sponsored results [0] then I don't know what to tell them. Or they just don't care because they're not paying anything to click.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/JvEsDpH.png
by Marsymars | 2026-01-16 21:34:18+00:00
I mean, sure, but you're basically saying "anything other than the absolute top-end displays are absolutely awful". 133 PPI is going to be higher pixel density than >99% of desktop monitors that people are actually using.

e.g. The Steam hardware survey only goes down to 0.23% usage, and doesn't have any >4K resolution listed.
by notepad0x90 | 2026-01-16 21:34:36+00:00
They can just do id verification instead of domain, either in-house or outsource it.

app store review isn't what I was talking about, I meant not having to verify your identity with the appstore, and use your own signing cert which can be used between platforms. Moreover, it would be less costly to develop signed windows apps. It costs several hundred dollars today.
by themafia | 2026-01-16 21:34:59+00:00
> and had a crypto project (worldcoin)

That was a biometric surveillance project disguised as a crypto project.

> Is there even any evidence that "crypto bros" and "AI bros" are even the same set of people

No, the "AI" people are far worse. I always had a choice to /not/ use crypto. The "AI" people want to hamfistedly shove their flawed investment into every product under the sun.
by Sharlin | 2026-01-16 21:35:33+00:00
I think a charitable interpretation is that given that the Rust code will be less forgiving, it will "break" C code and patterns that "used to work", albeit with latent UB or other nonobvious correctness issues. Now, obviously this is ultimately a good thing, and no developer worth their salt would seriously argue that latent bugs should stay latent, but as we've already seen, people have egos and aren't always exceedingly rational.
by benhoyt | 2026-01-16 21:35:44+00:00
Not me personally, but a GitHub user wrote a replacement for Go's regexp library that was "up to 3-3000x+ faster than stdlib": https://github.com/coregx/coregex ... at first I was impressed, so started testing it and reporting bugs, but as soon as I ran my own benchmarks, it all fell apart (https://github.com/coregx/coregex/issues/29). After some mostly-bot updates, that issue was closed. But someone else opened a very similar one recently (https://github.com/coregx/coregex/issues/79) -- same deal, "actually, it's slower than the stdlib in my tests". Basically AI slop with poor tests, poor benchmarks, and way oversold. How he's positioning these projects is the problematic bit, I reckon, not the use of AI.

Same user did a similar thing by creating an AWK interpreter written in Go using LLMs: https://github.com/kolkov/uawk -- as the creator of (I think?) the only AWK interpreter written in Go (https://github.com/benhoyt/goawk), I was curious. It turns out that if there's only one item in the training data (GoAWK), AI likes to copy and paste freely from the original. But again, it's poorly tested and poorly benchmarked.

I just don't see how one can get quality like this, without being realistic about code review, testing, and benchmarking.
by delaminator | 2026-01-16 21:35:59+00:00
This is expected behaviour, not a bug.

DuckDB (like most database systems and many applications using memory allocators like jemalloc or mimalloc) doesn't immediately release memory back to the OS after freeing it internally.

Memory allocator strategy - DuckDB uses an allocator that keeps freed memory in a pool for reuse. Returning memory to the OS is expensive (system calls, page table updates), so allocators hold onto it anticipating future allocations.
by stackghost | 2026-01-16 21:36:00+00:00
>so still no way to support TLS for LAN devices without manual setup or angering security researchers.

Arguably setting up letsencrypt is "manual setup". What you can do is run a split-horizon DNS setup inside your LAN on an internet-routable tld, and then run a CA for internal devices. That gives all your internal hosts their own hostname.sub.domain.tld name with HTTPS.

Frankly: it's not that much more work, and it's easier than remembering IP addresses anyway.
by iamrobertismo | 2026-01-16 21:36:09+00:00
I can't be the only one tired of the consistent relitigation of OpenAI corporate structure and funding, because like a lot of things with AI, generally it doesn't matter who you think is legally correct. We are in an environment in which non of this is actually being scrutinized under it's legal merit, but rather, personal and geopolitical.

But, generally I assume the idea is about building a case for when the dust settles, rather than looking for something to happen now.
by logicallee | 2026-01-16 21:36:34+00:00
It's implied by the fact that early in the post they say:

>"To test this system, we pointed it at an ambitious goal: building a web browser from scratch."

and then near the end, they say:

>"Hundreds of agents can work together on a single codebase for weeks, making real progress on ambitious projects."

This means they only make progress toward it, but do not "build a web browser from scratch".

If you're curious, the State of Utopia (will be available at https://stateofutopia.com ) did build a web browser from scratch, though it used several modules/packages for the networking portion of it.

See my other comments and posts for links.
by theturtletalks | 2026-01-16 21:36:35+00:00
Vercel does not make Next.js hard to deploy elsewhere. Next.js runs fine on serverful platforms like Railway, Render, and Heroku. I have run a production Next.js SaaS on Railway for years with no issues.

What Vercel really did was make Next.js work well in serverless environments, which involves a lot of custom infrastructure [0]. Cloudflare wanted that same behavior on CF Workers, but Vercel never open-sourced how they do it, and that is not really their responsibility.

Next.js is not locked to Vercel. The friction shows up when trying to run it in a serverless model without building the same kind of platform Vercel has.

0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIVL4JMqRfc
by elevation | 2026-01-16 21:37:03+00:00
I run a pair of the 43" model listed on the page (U4323QE). Coming from a desk full of 24" 1080P screens which I used with no scaling, the selling point for me was that the DPI was similar (~114, no scaling needed) while the total real estate was larger.

This 6K panel seems like it would scratch a similar itch.
by iamnothere | 2026-01-16 21:37:38+00:00
I am starting to think these are not just AI scrapers blindly seeking out data. All kinds of FOSS sites including low volume forums and blogs have been under this kind of persistent pressure for a while now. Given the cost involved in maintaining this kind of widespread constant scraping, the economics don’t seem to line up. Surely even big budget projects would adjust their scraping rates based on how many changes they see on a given site. At scale this could save a lot of money and would reduce the chance of blocking.

I haven’t heard of the same attacks facing (for instance) niche hobby communities. Does anyone know if those sites are facing the same scale of attacks?

Is there any chance that this is a deniable attack intended to disrupt the tech industry, or even the FOSS community in particular, with training data gathered as a side benefit? I’m just struggling to understand how the economics can work here.
by fancyfredbot | 2026-01-16 21:37:45+00:00
I'm not at all sure alibaba or tencent would actually want to DDOS LWN or any other popular website.

They may face less reputational damage than say Google or OpenAI would but I expect LWN has Chinese readers who would look dimly on this sort of thing. Some of those readers probably work for Alibaba and Tencent.

I'm not necessarily saying they wouldn't do it if there was some incentive to do so but I don't see the upside for them.