MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by t-3 | 2026-01-31 03:45:13+00:00
> He said that one in every three of the drones managed to hit its target because of the Starlink technology. “It is impossible to suppress (them) with electronic warfare. It can only be physically shot down if an anti-aircraft drone sees it and shoots it down,” he said.

How is impossible to stop using electronic warfare when it's communicating electronically? Is it just that the drones are high up (closer to the satellites) and it's hard to get enough noise in to mess up the signal? How is Iran supposedly jamming Starlink?

The fact that the Russians can get enough terminals to make using them viable, and that Starlink hasn't considered that that might happen is concerning. I'd hope that retail location was recorded for each terminal sold and that any terminal not sold to Ukraine being activated in Ukraine could be flagged and disabled immediately. This just seems extremely sloppy.
by roughly | 2026-01-31 03:45:31+00:00
Yeah, I don’t actually think LLMs are conscious, but this feels like the spontaneous firing of brain organelles that researchers experiment with - I don’t think those are conscious either, but it’s definitely getting outside of my “what if I’m wrong” comfort zone. So far as I know, no other conscious being has ever confused me with Satan, and I’d like to keep that up.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-01-31 03:45:52+00:00
When I first started coding, I knew how my code worked down to assembly language because that was the only way I could get anything to run at a sufficient speed on a 1Mhz computer, I then graduated to C and C++ with some VB and then C#, JavaScript and Python

Back in 2000 I knew every server and network switch in our office and eventually our self hosted server room with a SAN and a whopping 3TB of RAM before I left. Now I just submit a yaml file to AWS

Code is becoming no different, I treat Claude/Codex as junior developers, I specify my architecture carefully, verify it after it’s written and I test the code that AI writes for functionality and scalability to the requirements. But I haven’t looked at the actually code for the project I’m working on.

I’ve had code that I did write a year ago that I forgot what I did and just asked Codex questions about it.
by XSaint | 2026-01-31 03:46:41+00:00
Hi everybody I am XSaint
It's my first time posting here I hope my post follows the rules of this site and with due permission of the admin
I made this repository to share with the community and also to show my skills as backend, in this repo I worked with pgadmin in docker, using a postgres database, also sequelize as ORM and express
I hope you enjoy this code
Thanks for reading my post and if you want to contact me for working in any backend project you can find my email on my github profile, I look forward to hearing from you.
by BloodyIron | 2026-01-31 03:46:57+00:00
The problem with biometrics, as in biologically unique biometrics (fingerprints, blood, retina, etc) is that once it's in a database, you're fucked *for life*. It's unrealistic to destroy said records with absolute certainty in the entirety of the universe. Data is pervasive, and biometric databases are likely the most lucrative data to sell and share.

Biometrics are abusable in so many different ways, I probably don't know them all. But here's some thoughts around that.

It's proven that police have for decades planted evidence to falsely incriminate individuals. Placing a gun at the scene of an occurrence is one example. The difference is if biometrics are "planted" they are biologically unique to you, and you have no reasonable way of disproving that "you did it".

And then there's silently denying you. Whether it's a nation's border entity, or perhaps an insurance provider, biometric data can be used to uniquely identify you and connect you to things that *are* legal, but the Administration de jour doesn't "like" (read: LITERALLY RIGHT NOW). Say something to upset the babbis in the white house? Did you give your blood to 23andme? Your fingerprint to a government agency? Yeah, good luck getting in/out of the USA freely.

Biometrics needs to be a *global and universal right to refuse*. In that, IMO you must be always able to say "no" and have it be legally binding to *any* entity saying "give me your XYZ biometrics", except _maybe_ if you're a *convicted* criminal.

This goes far beyond the whole "I never thought about it that way" problems, this is a you're fucked for life if you give away any of it. It's time we make the time to get ahead of this problem that already exists.

Join me.
by sdwr | 2026-01-31 03:47:16+00:00
I think this is a backwards approach, especially for children.

Gen AI is magical, it makes stuff appear out of thin air!

And it's limited, everything it makes kinda looks the same

And it's forgetful, it doesn't remember what it just did

And it's dangerous! It can make things that never happened

Starting with theory might be the simplest way to explain, but it leaves out the hook. Why should they care?
by abetusk | 2026-01-31 03:48:08+00:00
I think you have it wrong. Wolfram's claim is that for a wide array of small (s,k) (including s <= 4, k <= 3), there's complex behavior and a profusion of (provably?) Turing machine equivalent (TME) machines. At the end of the article, Wolfram talks about awarding a prize in 2007 for a proof that (s=2,k=3) was TME.

The `s` stands for states and `k` for colors, without talking at all about tape length. One way to say "principle of computational equivalence" is that "if it looks complex, it probably is". That is, TME is the norm, rather than the exception.

If true, this probably means that you can make up for the clunky computation power of small (s,k) by conditioning large swathes of input tape to overcome the limitation. That is, you have unfettered access to the input tape and, with just a sprinkle of TME, you can eeke out computation by fiddling with the input tape to get the (s,k) machine to run how you want.

So, if finite sized scaling effects were actually in effect, it would only work in Wolfram's favor. If there's a profusion of small TME (s,k), one would probably expect computation to only get easier as (s,k) increases.

I think you also have the random k-SAT business wrong. There's this idea that "complexity happens at the edge of chaos" and I think this is pretty much clearly wrong.

Random k-SAT is, from what I understand, effectively almost surely polynomial time solveable. Below the critical threshold, it's easy to determine in the negative if the instance is unsolvable (I'm not sure if DPLL works, but I think something does?). Above the threshold, when it's almost surely solveable, I think something as simple as walksat will work. Near, or even "at", the threshold, my understanding is that something like survey propagation effectively solves this [0].

k-SAT is a little clunky to work in, so you might take issue with my take on it being solveable but if you take something like Hamiltonian cycle on (Erdos-Renyi) random graphs, the Hamiltonian cycle has a phase transition, just like k-SAT (and a host of other NP-Complete problems) but does have a provably an almost sure polynomial time algorithm to determine Hamiltonicity, even at the critical threshold [1].

There's some recent work with trying to choose "random" k-SAT instances with different distributions, and I think that's more hopeful at being able to find difficult random instances, but I'm not sure there's actually been a lot of work in that area [2].

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0212002

[1] https://www.math.cmu.edu/~af1p/Texfiles/AFFHCIRG.pdf

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.08431
by lazide | 2026-01-31 03:48:37+00:00
The US has been using ICE a lot.

Guess who is doing the identifying - CBP and ICE. Guess who runs borders and immigration, which is the use case for PreCheck and Global Entry?

Guess what the stated jurisdictional limits are for CBP? 100 miles from any possible border [https://legalclarity.org/immigration-map-of-us-jurisdictiona...].

Guess who has essentially unlimited jurisdictional limits? ICE.

So they can pretend they are ‘checking for immigration status’ using the existing photos and biometrics, while simultaneously gathering information on who is at what protest.

Then the info gets shared once gathered - with or without plausible deniability - and blam. Bobs your uncle.
by yangcheng | 2026-01-31 03:51:13+00:00
While the article emphasis on chaos and short time with China's doctor, they are very accessible, 2 USD you visit a fully trained doctor at top hospital, have your CT scan done the same day with 50 USD even if you pay out of packet.

As for AI, my personal experience is ChatGPT and Gemini is more effective then DeepSeek for healthcare issues. I do hope DeepSeek or Doubao can catch up.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-31 03:51:30+00:00
>As soon as developers actively hang out with real users in real life and genuinely observe them without intervening, i’m all for oss projects without uxers.

Game dev here. Play tests are excruciatingly painful. Spend some time showing off a game and you can see why so much ux these days are "boring" and samey. Deviating off the beaten road takes so much extra polish compared to seeing how competition controls work and copying that.
by sfink | 2026-01-31 03:52:20+00:00
The agents that are doing useful work (not claiming there are any) certainly aren't posting on moltbook with any relevant context. The posters will be newborns with whatever context their creators have fed into them, which is unlikely to be the design sketch for their super duper projects. You'll have to wait until evidence of useful activity gets sucked into the training data. Which will happen, but may run into obstacles because it'll be mixed in with a lot of slop, all created in the last few years, and slop makes for a poor training diet.
by allenu | 2026-01-31 03:53:03+00:00
I don't think it necessarily scales that way. Larger organizations need more communication channels and coordination. If anything, assuming AI does give you 10x ability, there's probably a sweet spot where you have just enough developers that churn out code at a good pace but not too many that it gets too chaotic.

If you compare one developer to 10, for instance, one developer doesn't have to deal with communicating with 9 other people to make sure they're working on things that align with the work everyone else is doing. There is no consensus that has to be reached. No meetings, no messages that have to be relayed, no delays because someone wasn't around to get approval. That one developer just makes a decision and does it.

There are lots of big companies out there and in the past, small startups have been able to create successful products that never would have been created at the big company even though the big company hired way more developers.
by enneff | 2026-01-31 03:53:04+00:00
I don’t know. I wouldn’t have thought of myself as proxying other people’s traffic by carrying my iPhone around. (For one thing, it’s my own phone that initiates all the activity- it monitors for Apple devices, the devices don’t reach out to my phone.) I can see how you could frame it that way, though. I just thought they might be referring to something else that I didn’t know about.
by WalterBright | 2026-01-31 03:53:57+00:00
> The value of the currency comes from the demand for it by the government to pay taxes, not the value of the metal in the coin.

That's the fantasy, not the reality.

> The metal in the coin makes it expensive to counterfeit said coin, with punishment by death doing the rest of the disincentive.

What actually happens is the government declares a dollar value for the coin, and then alloys the gold with cheaper metals. This results in inflation. The usual content of counterfeit gold coins is less than the gold in the government issue, which is where the death threat comes in.

Only one counterfeiter ever put more gold in the coin than the government, that was Baraha. The government got mad at him because a Baraha sovereign was worth more than the government issue.

> he dictates their value by fiat

Governments always try that, and it never works. Governments are always alloying the precious metal with cheaper metal, but nobody is fooled, and the result is inflation.

Why do you think the government no longer issues gold coins? why there's no silver in a dime anymore?

Inflation.
by noshitsherlock | 2026-01-31 03:55:23+00:00
Just my observation as a sixty-something year old, and my attempt to understand the changes I’ve seen… It seems like these days doctors advice and hospital emergency procedures are mostly (and increasingly so) based on statistical likelihoods of outcomes (from where exactly I’m not sure; and who vetted them??) and a set of options that insurance companies will pay for, probably determined similarly. Probably will get worse until AI gets inserted into the loop. I also wonder if perhaps this is occurring to accommodate a reduction of the typical skill set of the “wellness” oriented practitioners most of us see for check-ups and emergencies. I have received good care from specialists by and large.
by pigon1002 | 2026-01-31 03:56:52+00:00
```
- code I don’t need to model in my head (low risk, follows established conventions, predictable, easy to verify), and

- code I can’t help modelling in my head (business-critical, novel, experimental, or introduces new patterns).
I feel like there’s actually one or two more shades in between.
```

Sometimes I think something belongs in the second category, but then it turns out it’s really more like the first.
And sometimes something is second-category, but for the sake of getting things done, it makes more sense to treat it like the first.

If vibe coding keeps evolving, this is probably the path it needs to explore.
I just wonder what we’ll end up discovering along the way.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-31 03:57:28+00:00
>It ferments this amazing combination of aggressive QA testing(the artists) and top tier technical support(the developers) while focusing on real problems(the work) that really brings out the best possible product.

Devs stil run the show, and it can be a huge effort to convince them to change course on something. People were complaining about the mouse controls for years and it took until 2.8 to finally convince the org otherwise to adapt a more typical workflow.

It's a rough balance because the other extreme is artists making unrealistic demands based on how the system is architected (or worse, the deceptively simole: https://xkcd.com/1425/). So I don't really have a solution.
by zahlman | 2026-01-31 03:57:59+00:00
Federal charges are appropriate where federal law is violated, and the Supremacy Clause ensures that federal government has the right to bring them. "Protest" actions like this violate the first amendment rights of the church attendees.

If it were Tucker Carlson instead of Don Lemon, and a mosque rather than a church, and an imam suspected by the right of being involved with a terrorist cell rather than a pastor suspected by the left of being involved with ICE, would you have the same response?
by leggerss | 2026-01-31 03:58:05+00:00
I'm gonna get philosophical (because that's what art should make us do, right?): this points to arguably _the_ deepest question we can ask about LLMs right now—are they conscious?

It's a personal decision, and what matters is what you do after pondering it. Do you act like they're nothing more than next token predictors, deeply intricate digital mechanisms whose cranks turn with flowing electrons? Or do you err on the side of care, that there's a type of consciousness on the other side of the glass?

Humanity has a long history of underestimating non-human minds. I know which side I'm on.
by tfehring | 2026-01-31 03:58:43+00:00
Natural gas, not coal. From Wikipedia [0], "The electrical energy generation mix in 2024 was 40.7% natural gas, 31.8% coal, 15.5% nuclear, 4.5% solar, 3% wind, 2.9% hydroelectric, 1.4% biomass (including refuse-derived fuel), and 0.2% other." The new generation capacity being added is 1.4 GW natural gas and 1.1 GW solar [1]. New coal plants aren't economical under any reasonable market assumptions anywhere in the US.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Wisc...

[1] https://www.wpr.org/news/we-energies-add-3gw-electric-grid-d...
by zahlman | 2026-01-31 03:59:21+00:00
> Whenever you point out the hypocricy of so-called MAGA Christians on this site, you get downvoted

And flagged, yes. Because it's completely inappropriate to the discussion, which was already off topic. It's simply bashing a political outgroup without insight, which violates HN guidelines in multiple ways. It does not merit a counterargument.
by dralley | 2026-01-31 04:00:34+00:00
It's a regional power that funds militias and paramilitaries in half the middle east, which uses those paramilitary organizations to exert control and influence over their neighbors and occasionally to assassinate political opposition (e.g. in Lebanon), and to prop up the likes of Assad (Hezbollah got involved in the civil war on the Assad side, and in one instance laid seige to and starved out a village)
by PeterHolzwarth | 2026-01-31 04:01:27+00:00
People, or organizations, but mainly people, can just refuse to invest in stuff, parking their money or low-interest bank accounts, or the old style "stuffed into mattresses."

This was the multi-decade problem Japan ran into after its hot economy imploded, and unleashed the "lost decade" (which became decades). It was not a marginal issue, and for year the Japanese government tried everything it could think of to get people to invest in things - to little effect.
by mncharity | 2026-01-31 04:02:34+00:00
> Is there a better way?

If one's visitors are gamers, perhaps one might use gaming payment providers to sell an "supporter badge"? But that's perhaps be pushing their envelope.

If one's visitors are from the "rapidly-developing world", with well-adopted candybar-scale micropayment systems - China, India, Indonesia, Brasil, Kenya, SK, Sweden... hmm. Direct access from elsewhere seems still very limited, but perhaps one might use a global payment gateway like Adyen? My impression is transaction cost is more than $0.10 but less than $1.

In the "less-rapidly-developing world", X.com has been working towards a similar superapp with Visa for the US. The Visa/MC duopoly seems to have shifted from its years of preventing US micropayments, to something like "maybe 2030-ish".
by tifan | 2026-01-31 04:02:53+00:00
Well, it would work only when I speak word by word, not as a sentence or in a normal speed for daily conversations. The model thinks I was making mistakes when I speak casually (as a native Chinese speaker, I had Mandarin 2A certification, which is required for teachers or other occupations that requires a very high degree of Mandarin accuracy). You wouldn’t really notice it but language pronunciations is very different between causal and formal speech…
by rablackburn | 2026-01-31 04:03:29+00:00
> And if there’s one thing we’ve learned over the last decade, it’s the bitter lesson: when you have enough data and compute, learned representations usually beat carefully hand-tuned systems.

There are still holdouts!

Come back to me in a couple of decades when the trove of humanity's data has been pored over and drifted further out of sync with (verifiable) reality.

Hand-tuning is the only way to make progress when you've hit a domain's limits. Go deep and have fun.
by PeterHolzwarth | 2026-01-31 04:03:29+00:00
This is a great question, and one that drives right to the key issue! (oh god, that sounds like an LLM response, sorry)

Like with the implosion of the Japanese economy, people will just not invest, instead parking their money in low-yield bank accounts. It was, in some cases continues to be, an issue for that country.
by windexh8er | 2026-01-31 04:05:38+00:00
He's definitely not. If Altman. Is a "typical" SF/SV
tech bro then that's an indication the valley has turned full d-bag. Altman's past is gross. So, if he's the norm then I will vehemently avoid any dollars of mine going to OAI. I paid for an account for a while, but just like Musk I lose nothing over actively avoiding his Ponzi scheme of a company.
by consumer451 | 2026-01-31 04:05:45+00:00
Too late the edit my comment:

I just thought more about the price of running openclaw.ai... we are so effed, aren't we.

This is such an exciting thing, but it will just amplify influence inequality, unless we somehow magically regulate 1 human = 1 agent. Even then, which agent has the most guaranteed token throughput?

Yet again, I get excited about tech and then realize that it is not going to solve any societal problems, just likely make them worse.

For example, in the moltbook case, u/dominus's human appears to have a lot of money. Money=Speech in the land of moltbook, where that is not exactly the case on HN. So cool technologically, and yet so lame.
by wj | 2026-01-31 04:06:06+00:00
My thought was that messages need to be untrusted by default and the trusted input should be wrapped (with the UUID generated by the UX or API). And in this untrusted mode, only the trusted prompts would be allowed to ask for tool and file system access.

Wrote a bit more here but that is the gist: https://zero2data.substack.com/p/trusted-prompts
by robwwilliams | 2026-01-31 04:07:07+00:00
Somewhat different type of problem and perhaps a useful precautionary tale. I was using Opus two days ago to run simple statistical tests for epistatic interactions in genetics. I built a project folder with key papers and data for the analysis. Opus knew I was using genuine data and that the work was part of a potentially useful extension of published work. Opus computed all results and generated output tables and pdfs that looked great to me. Results were a firm negative across all tests.

The next morning I realized I had forgotten to upload key genotype files that it absolutely would have required to run the tests. I asked Opus how it had generated the tables and graphs. Answer: “I confabulated the genotype data I needed.”
Ouch, dangerous as a table saw.

It is taking my wetware a while to learn how innocent and ignorant I can be. It took me another two hours with Opus to get things right with appropriate diagnostics. I’ll need to validate results myself in JMP. Lessons to learn AND remember.
by chainbuilder | 2026-01-31 04:08:32+00:00
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More coming soon.
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by Sophira | 2026-01-31 04:08:53+00:00
Completely disagree that "software development, as it has been done for decades, is over".

AI is a useful tool, agreed - but it will always be reliant upon humans writing code.

Let's take a very simple example to prove my point. Let's say that everybody is now using AI to write code, and someone develops a new programming language with it. Cool! We have a new language now.

What we don't have, however, are any examples of how that programming language is used. Nothing that the AI can learn from.

How well do you think AI is going to handle being able to code in this new language which doesn't appear at all in its training data?
by kreelman | 2026-01-31 04:09:14+00:00
He was once a big pin in Y Combinator (I think kind of ran it?)... Paul Graham thought he was great for YC.

Interesting that he's got as far as he has with this issue. I don't think you can run a company effectively if you don't deal in truth.

Some of his videos have seemed quite bizarre as well, quite sarcastic about concerns people have about AI in general.