MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alexfoo | 2026-01-12 15:49:01+00:00
And not always anything to do with the TV.

I have BT TV (https://www.bt.com/help/tv/learn-about-tv/bt-tv-boxes) and the UI is painfully slow at times (UI response to a button press of 10-20 seconds), searching is horribly slow.

Can't wait to ditch it for something more responsive (probably Sky Stream).

I also miss an old TV that had a "q.rev" button to allowed you to switch back and forth between two channels with a single button. Perfect for skipping advert breaks (which is almost certainly why most entertainment systems don't have it any more).
by orwin | 2026-01-12 15:49:18+00:00
Publishing a name and publishing a likeness is very different.

Especially if the person arrested is accused of immoral acts. In my country we have a very known story from 25 years ago where 18 persons were accused of being pedocriminals. Their faces blasted everywhere, on first page of most journals, on the TV... It turns out 13 of them weren't guilty at all. Issues with psychological pressure on the children and a lot of mistakes made life hell for the accused and ultimately innocent, people, most of them lost part of their life because of that.
by strange_quark | 2026-01-12 15:49:18+00:00
> Frankly it blows my mind that so many developers have so little actual understanding of cost associated with AI.

I’ve seen all the same bullshit as you. We have a claude slash command to add one of 4 labels to a PR. We have people using AI to move their JIRA tickets across the swim lanes. People kick off codex tasks to rename a variable.

But I’ve literally heard execs at my place of work cheering this behavior on say the actual concern is why isn’t everyone doing this and if you aren’t spending enough, then maybe you aren’t being a forward thinker.
by cpldcpu | 2026-01-12 15:49:22+00:00
May be worth pointing out, that this is not the first residual connection innovation to be in production.

Gemma 3n is also using a low-rank projection of the residual stream called LAuReL. Google did not publicize this too much, I noted it when poking around in the model file.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.07501v3

https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1kuy45r/gemma_3...

Seems to be what they call LAuReL-LR in the paper, with D=2048 and R=64
by nogridbag | 2026-01-12 15:49:36+00:00
Programming a VCR was pretty trivial for me as a kid, but a bit annoying.

But then VideoGuide [1] was released (available from RadioShack). I begged my parents for that and honestly it was the most amazing product and worked flawlessly. I felt like I was living in the future.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWzJuqkQbEQ
by johnfn | 2026-01-12 15:49:52+00:00
Once, when I was young and inexperienced, I left a server exposed to the Internet by accident (I accidentally exposed a user with username postgres, password postgres). In hours the machine had been hacked to run a botnet. Was I stupid? Yes. But I absolutely wasn't a high-profile enough person to "be a target" - clearly someone was just scanning IP addresses.
by PedroBatista | 2026-01-12 15:50:01+00:00
"In most organizations, knowledge increases as you go up the hierarchy. CEOs understand their business better than middle managers. "

I chuckled on this one.

I'll give the author the benefit of the doubt and imagine he's was referring to the act of running a "business"/agenda in parallel of the business that is conducted day by day by normal people.

Yes, employees and managers can be doing the business of selling paper while the CEO is conducting the business of inflating the stock and massaging the numbers in order to fulfill the objective the board told him privately because the owner wants to sell the business to buy a bigger boat and buy a nice apartment in NYC for his angel of a daughter.
by gruez | 2026-01-12 15:50:16+00:00
>Here’s the distinction that matters for institutional deployment:

> Traditional RBAC: The model sees sql_execute in its available tools. It reasons about using it. It attempts to call it. Then the system blocks the action with 403 Forbidden. The hallucination happens—it just fails at execution.

> Authority Boundary Ledger: The model never sees sql_execute. It’s physically removed from the tools list before the API call reaches the model. The model cannot hallucinate a capability it cannot see.

I don't get it. The thing being proposed seems to be that rather than having all tools available, then returning "not authorized" error or whatever if there isn't enough permissions, you omit the tool entirely, and this is somehow better against hallucinations. Why is this the case? I could easily imagine the reverse, where the tool was omitted but the LLM hallucinates it, or fumbles around with existing tools trying to do its thing. Is there some empirical validation for this, or is it all just vibes?

Also, using this approach means you can't do granular permissions control. For instance, what if you want to limit access to patient records, but only for the given department? You'd still need the tool to be available.
by doubled112 | 2026-01-12 15:50:20+00:00
I still have a large number of working CDs from when I, myself, was a kid. DVDs too but they were later and more durable.

I’ve always wondered what people are doing to them? Maybe I just got lucky. Maybe I was just careful with them.

I don’t think kids are less careful now, although being screamed at for making the CD or record skip was probably a deterrent.
by troupo | 2026-01-12 15:50:22+00:00
> No, I think you fundamentally misunderstand what workflow I'm suggesting here.

Ah. Basically meaningless monkey work of baby sitting an eager junior developer. And this is for a simple thing like adding two numbers. See how it doesn't scale at all with anything remotely complex?

> "LLMs do love to ignore anything that came before" literally cannot happen in this workflow, because there is nothing that "came before".

Of course it can. Because what came before is the project you're working on. Unless of course you end up specifying every single utility function and every single library call in your specs. Which, once again, doesn't scale.
by quitit | 2026-01-12 15:50:43+00:00
Many of the complains surrounding the former iOS7 and today's Liquid Glass are tied to the requirement of the interface never moving. Which isn't just an unreasonable requirement, but a ridiculous one.

Just like iOS7+ it is possible to position and layer interface elements in a way where the visual effects will render a screenshot difficult to read, but in practice the elements are frequently in motion or as you've already pointed out easy to make them move. That motion is what negates the layering problems, thus making visual occlusions rare, short-lived and easily resolved.

There is a certain unreasonableness in ignoring that reality, and also ignoring that there is a user setting to keep a full-sized version of the scroll bars always visible.

This isn't to take away from legitimate criticisms such as the issue with the resize hotbox not being updated to match the more rounded corners, but rather highlight that not all online forum criticisms comes from a bona fide place.
by jcranmer | 2026-01-12 15:50:45+00:00
Given some of the discussions I've been stuck in over the past couple of weeks, one of the things I especially want to see built out for LLVM is a comprehensive executable test suite that starts not from C but from LLVM IR. If you've ever tried working on your own backend, one of the things you notice is there's not a lot of documentation about all of the SelectionDAG stuff (or GlobalISel), and there is also a lot of semi-generic "support X operation on top of Y operation if X isn't supported." And the precise semantics of X or Y aren't clearly documented, so it's quite easy to build the wrong thing.
by lostlogin | 2026-01-12 15:50:50+00:00
Sorry, complete reading fail by me.

It’s a distant memory from my radiography training, but as you say, solid cancers generally take a whole to appear post radiation exposure, and that cases timing seems very early. However, they paid out.

There is no cancer that can be attributed to a particular radiation source. Population rates of cancer might change, but at an individual level, you can’t prove a thing.

From the perspective of the power plant, that’s lucky.
by whatshisface | 2026-01-12 15:51:00+00:00
Fat does not raise your metabolism by a lot (relatively), and tiny changes in diet lead to massive swings in the equilibrium implied by basal metabolic rate formulas. In fact, some formulas do not include weight due to body fat. If you think about it, that fact touches on the idea that your natural weight is being maintained by another body system, one related to GLP-1.

By the way... if humans had to count calories to not accidentally starve or die from overeating, we would not have made it long enough as a species to invent a scientific way to do that. Even the diets of obese or overweight individuals are being naturally regulated, because anyone could physically eat even more.
by fsflover | 2026-01-12 15:51:03+00:00
>> people didn't mention the Librem phone

> Because people don't care.

Now, you made a statement without even anecdotal evidence. I received quite a few upvotes for that comments, indicating that people do care. Nobody said they didn't care. Yes, it's anecdotal evidence.

>> I participated in most of them.

> And you think that makes your evidence not anecdotal?

It might be anecdotal. You are free to count how many other people commented on Librem 5 yourself and disprove my claim.
by ozlikethewizard | 2026-01-12 15:51:12+00:00
The UK is considering an injunction to have Grok and potentially X banned until this issue is resolved.

I'm no huge fan of state intervention, particularly my state which is notoriously over zealous, prudish, and subtly authoritarian. The sweeping changes were seeing in the UK are somewhat reminiscent of the old "First they came for the trade unionists" poem, and there certainly has been many of us speaking out against the attacks on freedom to protest and expression here.

However, when you swap out trade unionists for "People comitting sexual harassment", "Paedophiles", and "Billionaires", Im somewhat more inclined to side with the government on this. Were already way down the slippery slope, at least some genuinely bad actors are catching some flak this time I guess.
by tialaramex | 2026-01-12 15:51:18+00:00
If you want "overflow-checks" in release builds for the primitive integer types you can tell Cargo that you want this, some people do so. https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/reference/profiles.html

Although Rust provides Wrapping<i32> if you want that, in practice you don't want that, wrapping unsigned integers are occasionally useful and I've written code with Wrapping<u8> and Wrapping<u32> types, but wrapping signed integers basically never come up. However it is significantly faster and it remains well defined so that's why it was chosen for release builds.
by bell-cot | 2026-01-12 15:51:48+00:00
If trying to rationalize things - I'd say Sauron knows that giant eagles are a thing, and able to serve as mounts. So to prevent Western aerial reconnaissance and insertion/extraction of observers/spies/special forces in Mordor, he's got to have some sort of aerial observer / aerial denial systems going. Which systems would make a "fly the Ring to the fire" gambit too risky.

(Vs. voice-of-canon Gandalf makes it clear that anyone seeking to destroy his Preciousss is simply beyond Sauron's Vile McEvil worldview.)
Show HN: Create LLM-optimized random identifiers
by blixt | 2026-01-12 15:51:58+00:00
I went exploring whether using LLM tokens as the individual "digits" of random ids would let you get more randomness for the same number of tokens, and the answer is yes. Using the current strategy in this library is about ~50% more token efficient than using base64 ids.

I also ran hundreds of sessions against the OpenAI API to see if the logprobs would look off using this strategy, compared to base64 ids, and it seems like it's about the same or possibly slightly better (more "peaky").

Could be useful for agentic frameworks where tool results need to provide ids to refer back to later. A small win at best, but it was fun to explore!
by ramon156 | 2026-01-12 15:52:29+00:00
If you want to use LLMs for writing, only do so after YOU feel like it's done, and then only let it make comments.

Your brain is a lot better at writing than you give it credit. LLMs can find awkward flows, but it won't do much more than pattern recognition. The only thing an LLM can do is make your article more "aligned" with similar articles. Do you actually want that? For research it might be nice, but even then it should still stand out. If you let an LLM just generate the text for you it will puke out generic phrases
by cyber_kinetist | 2026-01-12 15:52:40+00:00
Hah, we had this since the beginning in CUDA! (Circa 2008)

It's baffling how little has been invested in shader language tooling - probably set back graphics programming in the game industry about a decade or so. I just wish there was a proper CUDA-like shading language with a simple API, like what Sebastian Aaltonen suggested in https://www.sebastianaaltonen.com/blog/no-graphics-api.
by pizlonator | 2026-01-12 15:53:29+00:00
> It knows how to rematerialize

That's very cool, I didn't realize that.

> but the backend is generally more local/has less visibility than the optimizer

I don't really buy that. It's operating on SSA, so it has exactly the same view as LICM in practice (to my knowledge LICM doesn't cross function boundary).

LICM can't possibly know the cost of hoisting. Regalloc does have decent visibility into cost. Hence why this feels like a regalloc remat problem to me
by sjsdaiuasgdia | 2026-01-12 15:53:44+00:00
When you think of it in the context of a person with not much cash or time to work with, there's other advantages Little Debbie brings...

- It's extremely unlikely that any of the snack cakes in a particular box on the shelf have gone bad or have rotten areas. They must carefully inspect a bag of apples for brown spots or risk getting less usable product than they paid for.

- The snack cakes can sit at home for a really long time and still be usable. The apples have a much shorter shelf life. This makes bulk pricing more attractive for the snack cakes as there's a better chance all of the product can be used before it goes bad.

- The apples require more preparation, dependent on preferences. Yes, you can grab an apple out of the bag and chow down. A lot of folks will want to wash it first. Some will want to cut it into pieces, or peel it, or do some other prep to it before eating. Snack cakes are pretty much always eaten as they are.

Add it all up and it starts to become clearer why a lot of economically disadvantaged folks end up making "bad" choices around food. All of these points could be mitigated in various ways, but generally they would increase the financial and/or time costs.
by Zetaphor | 2026-01-12 15:53:54+00:00
Hey OP, I'm curious about the accuracy of this quote:

> When the tool is gone, the model cannot “hallucinate” a diagnosis because it lacks the “form” to reason and write it on.

What's to stop the model from just hallucinating an entire tool call, or result of the tool call? If there's no tool available it could just make up the result of one, and then further context would treat that as a source of truth. Maybe if you threw an explicit error message, but that still feels like it would be prone to hallucination.
by ben_w | 2026-01-12 15:53:55+00:00
> Wow. It can do a web search. And that is useful in the context of programming how? Or in any context?

Your own example was turning a steering wheel.

A web search is as relevant to the broader problems LLMs are good at, as steering wheels are to cars.

> Given the same problem statement in the same codebase it will produce wildly different results even if prompted two times in a row.

Do you always drive the same route, every day, without alteration?

Does it matter?

> You can never predict or replicate the output.

Sure you can. It's just less like predicting what a calculator will show and more like predicting if, when playing catch, the other player will catch your throw.

You can learn how to deal with reality even when randomness is present, and in fact this is something we're better at than the machines.
by randycupertino | 2026-01-12 15:54:09+00:00
There's a boy band, Boy Throb who specifically leveraged visa application in their recent content, singing and dancing outside the US Immigration office and trying to get 1,000,000 followers to help one of their members applications.

Their content is rather silly/cute/absurd:

https://www.tiktok.com/@boy.throb/video/7572273147743980831

https://www.tiktok.com/@boy.throb/video/7567806911580622110

https://www.tiktok.com/@boy.throb/video/7584876341267270943
by quitit | 2026-01-12 15:54:13+00:00
There is an imbalance between the harms you're pretending to endure versus:

1. The trivial ability it is to resolve, and

2. The existence of an easily accessible user setting to enable the behaviour that you desire.

Fundamentally your complaint thus comes down to a gripe that the OS's defaults don't match your completely subjective idea of how a just one of many OS elements should work.

Which raises such an interesting question, because of all of the UX behaviours present on macOS - this is your hill?
by ninininino | 2026-01-12 15:54:15+00:00
How much buggy / incorrect Java written by first year computer science University students is there on Stack Overflow (in SO post bodies)? Decades of it.

Ask the same question of Golang, or Rust, or Typescript.

I have a theory that the large dichotomy in how people experience AI coding has to do with the quality of the training corpus for each language online.
by absoluteunit1 | 2026-01-12 15:54:16+00:00
Building TypeQuicker: https://typequicker.com

Started as a side project but has become my full time focus since leaving a FAANG job ~6months ago

So far we've added:

- Code typing practice with any language: https://typequicker.com/code-typing-practice
- SmartPractice: analyzes your history stats to find weak areas and generates exercises for them: https://typequicker.com/app/text
- TargetPractice: lets you interact with any of your stats; for example, clicking on a certain bigram that you typed slowly will create a natural practice text that targets that two character sequence
- TypeAnything: let you create a typing exercise about anything; AI for typing pretty much
- Advanced stas: we measure every character, 2,3 charcter sequences (delay to click in ms), every word, and even breakdown speed/accuracy per finger
- Real-time hand/finger indicators: show you exactly where to place your fingers to type based on standard touch typing practices
- Keyboards supported: QWERTY, QWERTZ (German keyboard) ISO, British ISO (adding Dvorak and Colemak soo).
by candiddevmike | 2026-01-12 15:54:25+00:00
I do this in my configuration management. I wrote a function for services to easily "append" themselves to the backup job (restic with a hostname specific for the app).

My self-hosted data protection strategy is:

- ZFS RAIDZ (local disk redundancy)

- Restic semi-daily backups, 90 day retention

- Monitoring checks for zfs (zpool status) and restic (restic check) via Gatus

- Monthly USB disk rsync of restic folder

- Nightly rclone sync of restic folder to Backblaze B2 with 7 day object lock
by concinds | 2026-01-12 15:54:25+00:00
I want OS vendors to stop prioritizing "design" above performance. Opening a Finder window used to be instant, now it takes 0.3s-1s. Opening Safari used to be instant, now it takes seconds. Even menus in the menu bar take a few dozen milliseconds too long, which becomes obvious when you compare it to apps with custom truly-instant hamburger menus.

Computers are faster than ever, every task other than UI rendering is finished faster than ever, but these geniuses keep slowing down the UI with every update. It's criminal.
by crazygringo | 2026-01-12 15:54:39+00:00
> They could throw some small portion of their billions of dollars into proper quality control and reproduce it themselves if they wanted to.

How?

How do you reproduce something when you have no idea of the cause and it's not happening on any of your machines?

And remember they don't have just this one unreproducible bug reported. They have thousands.

If you have experience writing software, you're going to end up with a lot of unreproducible bug reports. They're a genuine challenge for everyone, not just Apple.
by f1shy | 2026-01-12 15:54:42+00:00
> that had problems employing people.

If possible I would like to know what positions and how much they were offering.

I had offerings for a manager position, 15 people, responsibility for the 15, including in house training of them, and part responsibility in the 5 different projects these people were working on. They wanted somebody with background in HW development, 10 years experience in FPGA, experience of at least 5 years Linux driver development, cryptography, at least 5 years managing people.

Wait for it… they offered 80k/year. I don’t know… seems little bit low somebody with like 20 years experience.
by loufe | 2026-01-12 15:55:12+00:00
Threads like this one make me feel at home. Last night I spent an hour trying to figure out a way to adjust tailscale to allow me access to containers on a MacVLAN on my NAS when I connect in away from home. Claude's an excellent tool to help me make informed decisions. I find the knowledge needs to be double checked more than some domains (I'm a big fan of requesting Claude search online for information before using its discourse as a basis for any decisions) but I still feel like I'm learning the WHY and HOW because I can still ask.

I share a lot of the same hesitations as others in the thread - using a giant US-based tech giant's tool for research as well as another US giant's tool to manage access, but it's really a game change and I'd be unable to find the time to do everything I want if I didn't have access to these otherwise.

I'm not even a software guy by engineering, my network is already complicated enough that learning and correctly securing things otherwise would simply just not be feasible with the time and energy I'd like to dedicate to it.
by stephendause | 2026-01-12 15:55:16+00:00
Your story sounds similar to mine. There are some parts of programming at which I know I will never excel. I also don't have time in my life to spends lots of hours outside of work developing my skills. I think it's important to realize that the median software engineer is probably not doing these things either. Maybe the top 10% are? Something like that would be my guess. It's okay to not be in the top 10%!
by alexfoo | 2026-01-12 15:55:17+00:00
It's not just GLP-1 type drugs.

My grocery spending has fallen significantly since I started ADHD medication. Both lisdexamfetamine and methylphenidate absolutely zeroed my appetite. When I walk around a grocery store I'm no longer tempted by anything I didn't actively go in to buy. This is a huge shift from my pre-medication days.
by timmg | 2026-01-12 15:55:21+00:00
I agree that this is more of a justification than a reason. I also agree that social media can be dangerous.

But I’m not sure I agree that Twitter is any worse than the rest of them. (Unless you think that only one side is dangerous.)

I wouldn’t be opposed to an under 18 ban on social media. But I’m not sure there is much else than can or should be done. Society needs to evolve enough to be able to live with social media now that the world is connected as it is.
by Angostura | 2026-01-12 15:55:23+00:00
That's where people get confused - it's not a chatbot or an LLM - it's a voice command interface. Adding something to the shopping list, setting a timer, turning up the heating in the back room, playing some music, skipping a track, sending a message - it works perfectly well for - and that's what I use it for virtually every day.

This work is to turn it it into something else, more like a chatbot, presumably