MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hn_acc1 | 2026-01-21 21:28:26+00:00
Yeah, it was a different world. I worked at a company using X + Motif on SCO Unix back in the early 90s. I had a 386sx with 8mb ram + 6 MB on an ISA expansion card! When you changed a header file constant (like a label string) and had to recompile the ~1 MB(!) executable, it really was coffee break time - compile time was ~1 hour for a full rebuild. Strangely enough, our current project on a 16-core VM also takes nearly an hour for a full rebuild - but we have parallel build options that go much faster.

I also ran Linux+X11 on my 486 (for some grad work) with 32 MB, IIRC. ATI Mach32 graphics card, Nec 5FGe monitor (loved that one!), etc..
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-01-21 21:28:38+00:00
Reminder that restructure often means a company working just fine, but whose assets outstrip what PE can buy it for, so they strip it to the bones. Or they leverage it with debt against assets then pay that money to themselves for consulting, account/hr services that they force the company to outsource to other PE companies. Nothing is 'created' through this process, now value added, nor it is healthy capitalism as the company could have continued fine without this added leveraged debt that was purely used to profit PE.
by tsimionescu | 2026-01-21 21:28:43+00:00
So, assuming the router doesn't have any server running, the connection will be reset, thus protecting all of the machines behind the router from any incoming connection, almost exactly like a firewall (sure, a firewall might just drop the packet instead of responding with a RST). So, in other words, NAT alone can act like a security perimeter, even with no firewall present.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-21 21:30:07+00:00
Society has more money and way more votes than PE. I'm going to quote A Bugs Life (1998) of all things here:

> Hopper: You let one ant stand up to us, then they all might stand up! Those puny little ants outnumber us a hundred to one and if they ever figure that out there goes our way of life! It's not about food, it's about keeping those ants in line.

In our case, it's more like a million to one
by jiggawatts | 2026-01-21 21:30:11+00:00
The fish is the last to know it lives in water.

96% of the world’s population and 75% of its nominal (but not PPP adjusted!) GDP is metric.

All science is metric.

Other arguments simply don’t matter. How fine the Fahrenheit vs Celsius scales are or whatever is pointless, irrelevant debate.

Join the rest of us, or slowly fade into irrelevance. There is no third option.

You’re that one mansion with the doddering old cranky fool still lighting their place with town gas while everyone else has been using electric lighting for decades.

The next time the street is dug up, your pipes won’t be reconnected.

“So what if our spaceships occasionally crash into Mars at full speed because we got mixed up with our units… again? We can afford it!” — apologists.
by jlarocco | 2026-01-21 21:30:22+00:00
> I don't understand this model. Such significant layoffs would indicate that there is no real appetite for expansion or growth.

To play devil's advocate, maybe there's a point where a product or service needs to stop evolving and just be.

I have a Vimeo account that's been on auto-resubscribe for years. I couldn't tell you a single feature they've added in the last 5 years, but they host my videos, collect stats, and let me send links to my friends, and that's really all I want.
by kianN | 2026-01-21 21:30:28+00:00
I did not conduct a deep dive into the specific examples: this was my takeaway from a slope plot comparing which topics clear a 10 point threshold (eg escape the new page) vs which topics clear a 100 point threshold.

> Nearly every AI related topic does worse once it clears the 10 point threshold than any other category. This means that either the people looking through the New and Show sections are disproportionately interested in AI. This is very possible, but from my interaction with this crowd from my posts, these users tend to be more technically minded (think DIY hardware, rather than landing-page builders).

Last visual in the following section: https://blog.sturdystatistics.com/posts/show_hn/#digging-int...

It's good to know that this would be helpful. My tendency would be to dig in a bit more into the individual examples that fall into this more suspicious bucket before presenting this evidence formally, but curious if you think these high level results are sufficiently helpful?
by anditherobot | 2026-01-21 21:30:58+00:00
Fair challenge to the idea. But what i am saying is that every line of boilerplate, every import statement, every configuration file consumes precious tokens.

The more code, the more surface area the LLM needs to cover before understanding or implementing correctly.

Right now the solution to expensive token limits is the most token-efficient technology. let's reframe it better. Was react made to help humans organize code better or machines?

Is the High Code-to-Functionality Ratio 3 lines that do real work > 50 lines of setup really necessary?
by cogman10 | 2026-01-21 21:31:23+00:00
Not so much compilation, but it does delve into system management in a way that other OSes don't. Arch has few defaults setup for the user, so if you do it from scratch you'll end up needing to go through several of the general setup recommendations [1].

That's where you end up learning a lot about linux which is particularly practical. Other Linux distros, especially for the desktop, hide a lot of this information behind nice guis.

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/General_recommendations
by roenxi | 2026-01-21 21:31:29+00:00
That sounds like a significant problem ... for either the Germans or the French to resolve. The only thing stopping foreign investors is law enforcement officers telling them to stop. The Germans can, literally, just not do anything except enforce basic property laws and foreign investment would pour money in.

I'm put in mind of US citizens who seem to be the lepers of international finance, often when I see prospectuses they have a lot of text on the the front saying "don't show this to anyone from the US" because they don't want to deal with the compliance costs of US law. In that case it is the US's problem and the US has an easy solution.

When people talk about larger regulatory frameworks they see the problem as the more permissive side is giving people options and want that shut down immediately. If the US started talking about global regulation to ease investment, for example, that means they don't intend to make it any easier but they do want everyone to adhere to US compliance ideas whether or not they do business in the US. It is a way for people with bad ideas to make the world worse. I'd assume the situation in Europe turns out similarly.
by imiric | 2026-01-21 21:31:57+00:00
> By the time you get to day two, each turn costs tens of thousands of input tokens

This behavior surprised me when I started using LLMs, since it's so counterintuitive.

Why does every interaction require submitting and processing all data in the current session up until that point? Surely there must be a way for the context to be stored server-side, and referenced and augmented by each subsequent interaction. Could this data be compressed in a way to keep the most important bits, and garbage collect everything else? Could there be different compression techniques depending on the type of conversation? Similar to the domain-specific memories and episodic memory mentioned in the article. Could "snapshots" be supported, so that the user can explore branching paths in the session history? Some of this is possible by manually managing context, but it's too cumbersome.

Why are all these relatively simple engineering problems still unsolved?
by dpark | 2026-01-21 21:32:01+00:00
I think it’s a natural outgrowth of the way links are commonly provided in plaintext, like so much other markdown.

> The details can be found at my website (https://example.com).

The problem with this is that if you want to render this “pretty”, there’s no way to know whether the link should be “my website” or “website” or even the whole sentence. So you add brackets to clarify.

> The details can be found at [my website](https://example.com).

There are certainly alternatives but I don’t think any of them are more natural, or memorable for that matter.
by Lerc | 2026-01-21 21:32:21+00:00
While there are thousands of valid ways to do the calculation. Their results, if they are different, denote different consequences.

I take it from what you say here that you specialise in accuracy and consistency of measurement as a service and let the client judge for themselves what meaning to derive from them. It feels like it might be an invitation to Goodhart's law.

I'm in no decision making position myself (that said, had a few face to face conversations with people writing position papers). My interest is primarily in understanding what has the best outcomes and the ability of strategies to affect those outcomes.

To put an absurd case. Imagine adding a gadget to generators to use all of the CO2 as part of a cyanide manufacturing process which is then emitted. It gives you great CO2 emission numbers, but public health outcomes less so.
by dokyun | 2026-01-21 21:32:30+00:00
> Slackware unfortunately lost out to the modern world. But heroic effort by Patrick.

I dunno man, a lot of people still use it! Been on it every day about 4 years now, there's a modern ARM port in development, so it might not end up going away for a long time.

That Slackware is difficult to use on the level of Gentoo or LFS I think is mostly a meme and an overstatement; it's just very old-school. It has a nice installer and a good wiki.

Many of the gripes that I hear of managing other linux systems I seldom or never have experienced on Slackware. It doesn't get in your way or flippantly change things from one release to the next. It's a rock-solid choice.
by wreath | 2026-01-21 21:33:44+00:00
I actually started doing this for side projects that I use as a vehicle for learning and not necessarily to solve a problem and it's been great. 1) I don't feel like I just commissioned someone to do something and I half-ass checking it and 2) I actually do learn about new stuff as well even though sometimes it distracts me from the goal (but that's on me)
Show HN: ImproveThis, refine messages based on who you're writing to
by buildwithdep | 2026-01-21 21:34:03+00:00
Hi HN,

I recently shipped a small MVP called ImproveThis, and I wanted to share the thinking behind it and get feedback from the community.

The core idea is simple: the same message can sound very different depending on who it’s sent to. A note to a manager, a colleague, or a friend often needs a different tone, even if the intent is the same.

ImproveThis lets users define people they commonly write to and refines text accordingly.
What’s interesting to me isn’t the AI part, but the product decisions around it.

I actually bought the domain back in May 2025, but between a full time job and personal commitments, I kept postponing it. Recently, I decided to stop optimizing for “perfect” and instead ship something usable and learn from real usage.

A few deliberate choices in this MVP:
- No pricing plans yet
- No payment integration
- One free plan with 100 refinements per month
- No credit card required

At this stage, I’m prioritizing usage patterns and feedback over monetization. I want to understand:
When people actually use this
Whether the “who you’re writing to” framing is helpful
What feels unnecessary or missing

I’m sharing this here because HN discussions tend to surface practical feedback that’s hard to get elsewhere.
Happy to answer questions about the product, the decisions behind it, or where I’m unsure. Feedback very welcome.
by adamcharnock | 2026-01-21 21:34:33+00:00
Agreed. The one bastion of sanity in all this is (/was) the UK. I formed my first company there, 18 years ago, online, in 30 minutes, for around £20.

I then moved to Portugal and started not one but two companies there. The whole process is so clearly setup to discourage people from actually forming companies. Everything from the attitude of all involved ("are you sure?!"), to the practical bureaucracy and costs involved.

I thought perhaps Portugal was just an outlier. But then I moved to Germany. And just wow. Definitely worse. Rounds of paperwork, notary offices, and fees. A process taking weeks. And for a GmbH a minimum investment of €25k. Sure you can form a UG. company for €1, but that effectively just announces "don't trust us, we're tiny" (IMHO).

It is something that really saddens and frustrates me with the EU.

Edit: And sure, you can form an Estonian company. But then you have to try and fly under the radar with regards to the 'permanent establishment' rules.
by iamjackg | 2026-01-21 21:35:17+00:00
It's not unsolved, at least not the first part of your question. In fact it is a feature offered by all main LLM providers!

- https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/prompt-caching

- https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/prompt...

- https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/caching
by notahacker | 2026-01-21 21:35:22+00:00
Differences once you break the 0.9 range are more noticeable at the bottom end, particularly in the context of the OP's claim about people in the US "struggling to stay alive". There's also an "inequality weighted" HDI (accessible from your HDR link above by drilling down to the individual country data) which puts the US a fair way behind many of the EU countries the sheer weight of its per capita GDP puts it ahead of (on that index the US is even marginally worse than some of the wealthier Eastern Bloc countries, but interestingly on dead level pegging with France for the last decade)
by keeda | 2026-01-21 21:35:29+00:00
> I am making the point that Google effectively benefited from the large amount of human labor...

This is exactly right, but the thing most people miss is that Google has been using human intelligence at massive scale even to this day to improve their search results.

Basically, as people search and navigate the results, Google harvests their clicks, hovers, dwell-time and other browsing behavior to extract critical signals that help it "learn" which pages the users actually found useful for the given query. (Overly simplified: click on a link but click back within a minute to go to the next link -> downrank, but spend more time on that link -> uprank.)

This helps it rank results better and improve search overall, which keeps people coming back and excluding competitors. It's like the web of trust again, except it's clicks of trust, and it's only visible to Google and is a never-ending self-reinforcing flywheel!

And if you look at the infrastructure Google has built to harvest this data, it is so much bigger than the massive index! They harvest data through Chrome, ad tracking, Android, Google Analytics, cookies (for which they built Gmail!), YouTube, Maps and so much more.

So to compete with Google Search, you don't need just a massive index, you also need the extensive web infra footprint to harvest user interactions at massive scale, which means the most popular and widely deployed browser, mobile OS, ad tracking, analytics script, email provider, maps, etc, etc.

This also explains why Google spent so many billions in "traffic acquisition costs" (i.e. payments for being the Search default) every year, because that was a direct driver to both, 1) ad revenue, and 2) maintaining its search quality.

This wasn't really a secret, but it (rightfully) turned out to be a major point in the recent Antitrust trial, which is why the proposed remedies (a TFA mentions) include the sharing of search index and "interaction data."
by Aurornis | 2026-01-21 21:35:31+00:00
> I do say this upfront because I don't want to send you a surprise bill.

Sending a company a surprise bill that they didn't agree upon is bad practice. Interviews are customarily not compensated, so it's unreasonable to surprise bill someone for it.

If you send a company a surprise bill for the interview, it's going to give the HR people a good laugh as they cross you off the candidates list. Everyone involved is going to forever remember you as the person who tried surprise billing for the interview and make a mental note to never interview you again at future companies.

It's not a good thing to try.
by xattt | 2026-01-21 21:36:44+00:00
> note that LFS was not as detailed then either, so many dependencies you had to track yourself, and some were very obscure

Why didn’t you just use Chat GPT to get your answers? /s

In all seriousness, I think the recent growth of Linux has been because information has become so accessible. Instead of having to peruse years of newsgroups posts, you can just ask a question and get an answer (that you should really fact check).
by matt_s | 2026-01-21 21:37:36+00:00
I think a better analogy than building construction is cars. You need to do active maintenance and fix things on cars to keep them running, you may even change out a radio or wheels, etc. like minor feature development, but you're not likely to change out the design of the engine and transmission. You definitely don't need the design crew from the car manufacturer around, aka Product Mgmt, to do maintenance but you do need some semblance of a tech team or people that can do the tech work on contract.

At some point a tech product is "finished" as in a mature, stable product and adding new things to it isn't going to do 10x in revenue. Its probably really hard for the product and tech teams involved to admit though.
by titzer | 2026-01-21 21:37:50+00:00
> Anthropic’s guidelines. This section discusses how Anthropic might give supplementary instructions to Claude about how to handle specific issues, such as medical advice, cybersecurity requests, jailbreaking strategies, and tool integrations. These guidelines often reflect detailed knowledge or context that Claude doesn’t have by default, and we want Claude to prioritize complying with them over more general forms of helpfulness. But we want Claude to recognize that Anthropic’s deeper intention is for Claude to behave safely and ethically, and that these guidelines should never conflict with the constitution as a whole.

Welcome to Directive 4! (https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/5788faf2-074c-4c4a-9798-5822c20...)
by unixhero | 2026-01-21 21:37:53+00:00
There was another launched aroums the same time as Seti@Home and before Folsing@Home. It was called IBM Grid.org [0]. It did the same as Seti@Home, but researched cancer.

Here [1] is a list of all active community computation projects and historical ones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_volunteer_computing_pr...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid.org
by bionsystem | 2026-01-21 21:38:10+00:00
I've said it before too, it is exemplary in terms of what documentation should be ; just read through it with a VM on, type the things, and everything just works, no googling or LLMing around. I heard it is the same for other BSDs as well, will try those some day. Also a testimony of how coherent this system is.

As a seasonned SRE it is a breathe of fresh air in this world where everything else seems to change from one version to another and nothing seems to work at first try, ever.
by WarmWash | 2026-01-21 21:38:15+00:00
SaaS is the detriment to society. Static feature software continually updated and changed to create a faux justification for $20 of your money a month, keeping you on an endless treadmill to in order to work with all your old data.

Sometime in the late 00's they realized people were still happily using software from the 90's, because it worked for their needs, and well, we can't have that...
by hilbert42 | 2026-01-21 21:38:30+00:00
There's a question I've always asked, why are most people so willing to answer phone calls from numbers whose owners they do not know.

My rules are simple, when asked for a phone number I usually either say I do not have a phone or refuse to give it—even if it greatly inconveniences me. Second, I never answer calls unless I know the person who is calling.

If scammers can't reach one then one can't be scammed (at least not by phone).
by hiddeninplain | 2026-01-21 21:38:39+00:00
You seem to be relying too heavily on your own "language games". For instance, flip flopping between using "LLM technology" and "AI" to refer to what appears to be the same thing in your argument. I find it all quite incomprehensible.

> If you'd like to hear my opinion, I happen to think that LLM technology is the most important, arguably the only thing, to have happened in philosophy since Wittgenstein;

So, assume cognitive bias and a penchant for hyperbole.

> LLM technology is the most important, arguably the only thing, to have happened in philosophy

Why would "LLM technology" be important to philosophy?

> arguably the only thing, to have happened in philosophy

Did "LLM technology" "happen in philosophy"? What does it mean to "happen in philosophy"?

> indeed, Wittgenstein presents the only viable framework for comprehending AI in all of humanities.

What could this even mean?

Linguistics would appear at least one other of the applicable humanities to large language models.

Wittgenstein was famously critical of Turing's claim that a machine can think to the extent he claimed it caused Turing to create misunderstandings even in his mathematics.

Wittgenstein also disliked Cantor. and even the concept of 'sets'.

I am struggling to see how this all adds up to being the "only viable framework for comprehending AI".

> If it so happens that AI can help illuminate these things, like all good tools in philosophy of language do, it also means that we're in luck, and there's hope for better institutions.

This is a wild ride.

So, "AI" exploits weaknesses in institutions, but this is different from "destroying institutions", and its a good thing because we can improve the institutions by fixing the exploitable areas; which is also a wholly speculative outcome with many counterexamples in real life.

Reads like: "Sure, I broke your window and robbed your store, but you should be thanking me and encouraging me to break more windows and rob more people because I illuminated that glass is susceptible to breaking when a rock is thrown at it. Oh, your shit? I'm keeping it. You're welcome."
by galangalalgol | 2026-01-21 21:38:48+00:00
It really matters which state you look at. Wealth inequality, gdp per capita, and median wage are all better in several eu members than in the US, and that still holds if you factor in housing and cpi in general. There are other states where that is really not the case. Its mostly the Scandinavian countries outperforming the us on these metrics and they are relatively low population in comparison so its kind of an odd one to make. If the goal is total gdp, who cares about the median wage, then the us/china plan does make more sense, but neither of those plans work without the other existing and cooperating.
by altairprime | 2026-01-21 21:39:05+00:00
No, seriously, you should find out by emailing the mods. Footer contact link. They’re not going to be upset at you bringing tentative concerns about voting rings with shaky evidence, so long as you aren’t knocking down the door with overconfidence and denying how shaky the evidence is — which you clearly aren’t.

I’m not even remotely equipped to judge the veracity of your work, but they are, and that you care at all is, like, 0.000001%. Take the plunge and write them a note (or simply link them your comment thread here with a one sentence FYI email!). It’ll be fine :)
by afavour | 2026-01-21 21:39:17+00:00
Your faulty assumption is that any criticism of DOGE, ICE etc is automatically “left wing”. Not true.

My point is not a left vs right one, it’s that topics like DOGE are worthy of discussion on HN. They are absolutely tech relevant. Many other topics with a tech angle are left up, but those are not. It’s not difficult to see why.