MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by shevy-java | 2026-01-17 16:57:09+00:00
It is not just GNOME devs. Try to interact with systemd-poettering or I-pwn-glibc-Drepper. For some reason the Red Hat centric guys are troublemakers.

More recently KDE devs also became troublemakers - first David "all must use systemd", then nate "I-can-ask-for-donations-at-will-by-placing-a-trojan-daemon-onto-people-whose-sole-job-is-to-ask-for-donations" (more about this guy here: https://jriddell.org/2025/09/14/adios-chicos-25-years-of-kde...) and of course the "there are no xorg-server users left on KDE, so all must use wayland". Developers became a LOT more like dictators in the last 10 years specifically. This was a change indeed. I am not sure what happened, but things changed. GTK is now also a pure GNOMEY dev-kit. Good luck trying to convince the GTK devs of anything that used to be possible in gtk2 or gtk3 - it is now GNOME only.
by CorrectHorseBat | 2026-01-17 16:57:52+00:00
I do think we'll need to change our view on airconditioning, every home should have airconditioning just like it has heating.

But I'm very sceptical of those numbers. They are apparently even worse for cold, and you can't attribute that to lack of airconditioning. I still think the huge difference can only be attributed to a difference in reporting.
by komali2 | 2026-01-17 16:58:48+00:00
So, you don't think I'm wrong? The OP used "he" because they have a transphobic agenda?

> because we use to call a person who will always have hairs on his face as "male".

We may not have solved the question, "what is a woman," but you have brilliantly solved the question, "what is a man": a human with eyebrows.
What are you doing for your health this year?
by Newhouser | 2026-01-17 16:59:07+00:00
I will be turning 40 this year and want to start focusing on my health and wanted to see what everyone here is doing for your health.

I know exercising is probably the best thing to do but I am curious what else HN is looking into.

Any supplements/vitamins to look into? Any procedures? I recently learned about ICL for eye sight surgery from here, so curious what else there may be.
by 9JollyOtter | 2026-01-17 16:59:45+00:00
> It's still the foundational underpinning of everything Microsoft does. It's just that the other revenues dwarf it.

If a corporate customer is running their stuff in the cloud they don't care if people are using Chromebooks/MacBooks/Linux to develop the software with. They just care that you are using Azure. Ultimately they want you to do everything through a web browser (just like google), even some dev environments are going that way.

Outside of corporations when interacting with non-tech people, none of them use a laptop. It is phone or tablet. A laptop running Windows is a work machine. I wonder what the stats are for home usage of Windows vs other things and honestly I don't believe a lot people are using a laptop/desktop running Windows.

> It's not like they could not serve ads and shove CoPilot in your face, without making the UI so so sloppy and slow.

I have a stripped down Windows 11 on my second disk (I will be removing it at some point). The OS is reasonably fast. I've removed most of the telemetry and other rubbish like the web search on desktop. So I can only assume it is that. I don't really care though anymore. I am running Debian on pretty much everything except for the work machine which I don't own.
by Twey | 2026-01-17 17:00:01+00:00
When you can build down as well as up (https://ngnghm.github.io/blog/2015/08/24/chapter-4-turtling-...) — or, equivalently, do away with the up/down orientation entirely, you can have your cake and eat it too.

And as a bonus if you control both slices of bread it's much easier to change the sandwich filling as well! (Though if the original sandwich-builder wasn't careful you might find some sticky residue left over on your bread… maybe someone should take this metaphor away before I do more damage.)
by Lerc | 2026-01-17 17:00:04+00:00
To develop this approach you need to think through the reasoning of what you want to achieve. I don't think the reasoning in LLMs is nonexistent, but it is certainly somewhat limited. This is disguised by their vast knowledge. When they successfully achieve a result by relying on knowledge you get an impression of more reasoning than their is.

Everyone seems now familiar with hallucinations. When a model's knowledge is lacking and it is fine tuned to give an answer. A simplistic calculation says that if an accurate answer gets you 100%, then an answer gets you 50% and being accurate gets you 50%. Hallucinations are trying to get partial credit for bullshit. Teaching a model that a wrong answer is worse than no answer is the obvious solution, turning that lesson into training methods is harder.

That's a bit of a digression but I think it helps explain the difference to why I think a model would find writing an article like this.

Models have difficulty in understanding what is important. The degree to which they do achieve this is amazing, but it is still trained on data that heavily biases their conclusions to the mainstream thinking. In that respect I'm not even sure if it is a fundamental lack in what they could do. It seems to be that they are implicitly made to think of problems as "it's one of those, I'll do what people do when faced with one of those"

There are even hints in fiction that this is what we were going to do. There is a fairly common sci-fi trope of an AI giving a thorough and reasoned analysis of a problem only to be cut off by a human wanting the simple and obvious answer. If not done carefully RLHF becomes the embodiment of this trope in action.

This gives a result that makes the most people immediately happy, without regard for what is best long term, or indeed what is actually needed. Asimov explored the notion of robots lying so as to not hurt feelings. Much of the point of the robot books was to express the notion that what we want AI to be is more complicated than it appears at first glance.
by patcon | 2026-01-17 17:01:13+00:00
I agree, but as someone trying to build longterm utility and developer infrastructure, I find the vibecoded prototypes to help me dial in on interfaces. Instead of waiting to hear back from only downstream user experiences (because you don't have time to experience the variation yourself), you can get the various experiences under your own belt, and better tune the interfaces :)

This comment is a little orthogonal to the content of the article, but my experience made what they wrote click with me
by komali2 | 2026-01-17 17:01:14+00:00
> I personally prefer not having other people decide for me which facts are and aren't relevant,

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't any presentation of information prepared by humans, information wherein someone else decided which facts were relevant? The only way around this I can think of is personal performance of all experimentation in human history from first principles. Unfortunately you will probably need to learn those first principles through reading things written by other humans.
by fnordpiglet | 2026-01-17 17:01:17+00:00
Interesting article but it doesn’t actually discuss how well it performs at playing the game. There is in fact a 1.5 hour YouTube video but it woulda been nice for a bit of an outcome postmortem. It’s like “here’s the methods and set up section of a research paper but for the conclusion you need to watch this movie and make your own judgements!”
by hansvm | 2026-01-17 17:01:31+00:00
IPA makes these conversations less ambiguous. The point is that parts of the South are more likely to use an "ah" sound rather than an "oh" sound in certain places. The BBC's example (supposing it's in good faith) is lacking because it drops the second half of the dipthong following that morphed vowel.

Attempting to write out something close to what I'm imagining they're trying to get across in plain English:

hell-ah-ooh

It's obviously not universal across the South, but you'll rarely see it outside of the South, so "might suggest you're from..." is probably accurate.
by obirunda | 2026-01-17 17:01:43+00:00
Software moats were never really a moat in and of themselves. You always had to be a first mover. It's true that there are fewer and fewer first mover opportunities, but that has less to do with recent LLMs advancements and more that we have already solved a lot of software problems on first principles. It's partially why LLMs work so well, they are pulling the "widgets" from distribution and synthesizing into your requirements. Before, we probably thought we were writing novelty when it was literally solved 1000x over.

If you aren't a first mover, your success was always dependent on other skills and great execution across multiple disciplines, and also a lot of stubbornness. The software layer has always been important, but a support role of successful enterprises. Start-ups have always been hard to pull together successfully for a lot of other reasons unrelated to code.

If you find a disruptive algorithm (like pagerank) there is little evidence that LLMs will infer your solution by looking at your app. Anything else, they are just design choices and have never been moats either, but say you have a qualitative edge, you'll make the choices that can create a recognizable brand where someone vibing a copycat may not care as much. Nothing has changed on this. Your chance of succeeding rests on your ability to reach your users and iterate in a crowded space, this is what you always had to do anyway.

There are things, however, that aren't worth working on anymore with the advent of LLMs. Some of these have been fully dismissed, for example sentiment analysis. A single API call for the cheapest (even local) LLM vendor will give you SOTA classification. There are many more examples but they are so obvious. Essentially, the "build me 1 billion dollar app" prompt will never work, so if you have a burning desire to build something, do it. Just remember, there never was and never will be a promise of unlimited fortunes whatever you do.
by alephnerd | 2026-01-17 17:01:51+00:00
> Where are all the “rent control is bad economics” folks now

Complaining about zoning even though in a large portion of America, zoning is orthogonal to housing affordability [0] and supply, especially because no bank wants to finance residential real estate anymore - they'd all rather invest in commercial real estate which has better and more consistent returns (logistics parks, data centers, factories during CHIPS and IRA) [1].

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42543143

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42544296
by beej71 | 2026-01-17 17:02:06+00:00
> I believe that explicitly teaching students how to use AI in their learning process, that the beautiful paper direct from AI is not something that will help them later, is another important ingredient.

IMNSHO as an instructor, you believe correctly. I tell my students how and why to use LLMs in their learning journey. It's a massively powerful learning accelerator when used properly.

Curricula have to be modified significantly for this to work.

I also tell them, without mincing words, how fucked they will be if they use it incorrectly. :)
by yojo | 2026-01-17 17:02:17+00:00
Totally valid that my boss probably didn’t want to be there either, but for context this was circa 2008 Google where “offsite” meant “go spend company money to do something fun.”

Alternatives were literally things like going to Napa or an amusement park or go-karting. Or if you really wanted to watch a movie, the options were all other movies. Why pick the one that digs at the tenets of your shared reality?
by ModernMech | 2026-01-17 17:02:46+00:00
> In other words: be an active, enthusiastic participant in someone's beliefs regardless of your own.

See, this is why it’s such a good community filter. All that’s being asked of you is the bare minimum: to call a person what they prefer to be called. No one is asking you to change your world views, they are asking you to be respectful in a community. If you have to act all persecuted about it, then it’s just not a community for you. And that’s okay because there’s a million programming languages communities to choose from.
by Retric | 2026-01-17 17:03:05+00:00
Sure, as long as you size the system to expected loads.

An 8kW generator suitable for occasional use is only ~1,000$. A Powerwall 3 does 11kW continuous and peaks at 30kW for transitory loads like starting heavy equipment.

The most convenient solution where a generator automatically kicks in during a power outage requires an electrician and extra equipment, but there’s also real tradeoffs to having gas lines going to your home.
by homo_economicus | 2026-01-17 17:03:08+00:00
I don't think this is the platform for such ad hominem attacks! It's fine to disagree with someone's opinions and / or style but no need of accusing them of "vomit-inducing AI-writing". I just went through some of OPs posts maybe you can leave your opinions here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46646939
by rokhayakebe | 2026-01-17 17:03:34+00:00
So social media significantly reduces the ability to think critically. AI, if brought up too early in one's life, will reduce the ability to think at all. It makes sense, imo. Who needs to think when you have lost your ability to interact with others, can work from home, can get groceries without leaving the house, have decided to not procreate.
by komali2 | 2026-01-17 17:03:59+00:00
1984 describes an insurmountably established Soviet-esque state with omniscient surveillance and omnipotent monopoly on violence.

We're discussing a FOSS website that many people use.

There's quite literally nothing stopping you from making "unwoke" Wikipedia or whatever. You probably could even get Elon Musk to signal boost it.
by heliumtera | 2026-01-17 17:04:16+00:00
The day you successfully implemented your solution with a prompt, you solution is valued at the cost of a prompt.
There is no value to anything easily achieved by generative tools anymore.
Now it is in either:

a. generative technology but requiring substantial amount of coordination, curation, compute power.
b. substantial amount of data.
c. scarce intelectual human work.

And scarce but non intellectually demanding human work was dropped from the list of valuable things.
by DoneWithAllThat | 2026-01-17 17:04:33+00:00
I suppose this article about AI is as good as any to share my thoughts on the sheer inevitability of it being integrated into every aspect of our lives. This shouldn’t be taken as a value judgement - I’m not saying it’s a good thing. But the overwhelming utility, allure, and power of it is unstoppable. Artists worried about it making them irrelevant, concerns about distinguishing truth from fiction, impact on learning and development, etc. etc. etc.: all totally valid, but the discussion and planning both collectively and individually needs to start with the assumption that there is nothing anyone can do to stop it.

Taking the first example, if you’re an artist worried about AI replacing you, you need to start your thinking from a position of AI is absolutely going to make the “I can create an image” part of your value proposition worthless. Yes, a massive fraction of what you might have been able to get paid and recognized for in the past is now utterly irrelevant. Pleading with the public to not use AI, protesting, demanding legislation, praying - none of it will stop this reality from coming to be in your lifetime, probably within a few years at most.

I see a lot of comments and articles that don’t seem to understand this at all. They think there’s some way we can slow the adoption of AI in areas we think it’s harmful, or legislate a way into a desirable future, or whatever. They’re wrong. Whatever the future holds for us, it’s one where AI will be absolutely everywhere and massively disrupt society and industry as it exists today. Start your planning from that reality or you’re going to get blindsided.
by 2b3a51 | 2026-01-17 17:05:04+00:00
TIL I learned about coffee-badging[1].

Sounds like, oddly enough, eighteenth century London when coffee houses provided venues for business transactions. People (ok men of the right class) toddled around visiting various offices and patronising coffee houses. Everyone knew the players. [2][3]

I think this might be a good development. Meet to drink beverage and achieve 'common understanding' in the sense of the Royal Navy. Then disperse to various private locations to actually carry out the tasks. Would suit a '15 minute' city layout very well.

[1] https://www.peoplemanagement.co.uk/article/1864443/buzz-phra...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_coffeehouses_in_the_17...

[3] https://www.layersoflondon.org/map/records/virginia-and-balt...
by devld | 2026-01-17 17:05:14+00:00
It depends on what you are pursuing. Software was never a true moat for the really hot stuff. See books Zero to One, 7 Powers. It can be moat when you have something extremely complex, like for Unreal Engine, software actually is the moat. However, when it comes to regular software, everything was always prone to being copied. Will it be copied, it depends entirely on what's for the grabs for someone else to copy it. If you have a mature SaaS, that already has some competitors, what does anyone gain by copying it if the projection for building a sustainable business is very small? Personally I am building something that is relatively complex (much more complex / non-standard than a CRUD and likely not in Claude training data, and something that would be a very bad idea to write it in AI slop due to security issues) and relatively niche, something that a well funded startup would never dream about building, yet something that a smaller team would have a difficult time to compete with me, LLMs or not.
by jajuuka | 2026-01-17 17:05:26+00:00
This is a toxic government regulatory framework. Treating all consumers as suspect children first and foremost not only makes the experience worse but it defeats the purpose it was created for. I shouldn't need to submit my ID every time I want to watch a rated R movie on Netflix or cable. I shouldn't need to scan and submit my face to view a wikipedia article about anatomy. This is the end goal of such suspicious treatment.

The tools currently exist to "protect" children in game. Abdicating your responsibility as a parent is not a problem for the state to solve.
by NegativeK | 2026-01-17 17:05:57+00:00
I think you're interpreting the commenter's/article's point in a way that they didn't intend. At all.

Assume the LLM has the answer a student wants. Instead of just blurting it out to the student, the LLM can:

* Ask the student questions that encourages the student to think about the overall topic.

* Ask the student what they think the right answer is, and then drill down on the student's incorrect assumptions so that they arrive at the right answer.

* Ask the student to come up with two opposing positions and explain why each would _and_ wouldn't work.

Etc.

None of this has to get anywhere near politics or whatever else conjured your dystopia. If the student asked about politics in the first place, this type of pushback doesn't have to be any different than current LLM behavior.

In fact, I'd love this type of LLM -- I want to actually learn. Maybe I can order one to actually try..
by lysace | 2026-01-17 17:06:42+00:00
Denmark, Germany, Norway, Sweden, France, the UK, the Netherlands and Finland to face a 10% tariff beginning February 1. Trump said tariffs will be in place until "a deal is reached" on Greenland. [...] Trump added that if no resolution is reached until June 1 this year, the tariffs will jump to 25%.

These are most of the countries that sent military forces to Greenland during the past two days for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Arctic_Endurance. The US was also invited.
by dpc050505 | 2026-01-17 17:06:43+00:00
Try to gas up at night in Saskatchewan without a coop card. Had to pitch my tent next to someone's field and gas up in the morning after being unable to prepay at 3 gas stations. In a similar situation with an EV I would've knocked at doors in the morning and politely asked to charge on one of their outlets. I bet I would've been offered breakfast and made friends while my vehicle slowly charged.
Ask HN: Purchasing a "Premium" Domain
by devld | 2026-01-17 17:07:54+00:00
I looked up a domain and it turns out it's a premium one. On both NameCheap and GoDaddy I can supposedly add it to cart for $2250. I look up who.is and it turns out it's owned by NameSilo. I look it up on NameSilo and I can "start bidding" at $300. Do you have any experience purchasing premium domains? Does NameCheap guarantee that price or is it only a bid that can be rejected? I would rather spend $2k if it was guaranteed "buy now" experience, not sure if I should try that or start bidding at the source.

Edit: I read about cases where people were refunded money after a month, because obviously NameCheap does not own this and if they fail to acquire it, you don't get the domain. So bidding for it at NameSilo seems like the best bet.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Domains/comments/1ghsfib/namecheap_refunded_my_purchased_premium_domain_25/
by Palomides | 2026-01-17 17:08:16+00:00
>every "no-code will replace developers" wave actually creates more developer jobs, not fewer

you mean "created", past tense. You're basically arguing it's impossible for technical improvements to reduce the number of programmers in the world, ever. The idea that only humans will ever be able to debug code or interpret non-technical user needs seems questionable to me.
by equinumerous | 2026-01-17 17:08:33+00:00
This is a cool idea. I wanted to do something like this by adding a Lua API to OpenRCT2 that allows you to manipulate and inspect the game world. Then, you could either provide an LLM agent the ability to write and run scripts in the game, or program a more classic AI using the Lua API. This AI would probably perform much better than an LLM - but an interesting experiment nonetheless to see how a language model can fare in a task it was not trained to do.
by nunobrito | 2026-01-17 17:08:33+00:00
There was a democratic referendum in 2003 to essentially reduce the authority of the Liechenstein ruler, the population largely voted to grant absolute power to the ruling family: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_Liechtenstein_constitutio...

Authoritarianism is the oldest form of effective government. Just as curious note, dictatorship was introduced during the Roman epoch and was used as temporary measure during war times. Look for example in Ukraine where the same ruler is avoiding elections since some time due to war, in the root sense of the government-style it is possible to describe it as a dictatorship today, if it hadn't been for the negative connotation of that term in the last 100 years.
by rawgabbit | 2026-01-17 17:08:47+00:00
Regarding “Schooling itself could be less focused on what the report calls "transactional task completion" or a grade-based endgame and more focused on fostering curiosity and a desire to learn. Students will be less inclined to ask AI to do the work for them if they feel engaged by that work.”

I believe this is at the heart of the issue. If what is taught is mostly solving problems that require nothing more than rote memory or substituting values into memorized equations, then yes, students will use LLMs.

I agree some level of this brain dead work is necessary to build muscle/mental memory. However I believe if this is all they learn, they will be unprepared for university as at that level the problems poised will challenge why they are using that equation or if the problem is even solvable.
by jauntywundrkind | 2026-01-17 17:09:16+00:00
The layering reminds me a bit of opus 1.6 which similarly maintains backwards compatibility while laying in better audio for newer decoders, (and as a scalable decoding for those who don't want to use as much decode compute). https://opus-codec.org/demo/opus-1.6/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46284313