MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PeterWhittaker | 2026-01-13 23:19:30+00:00
How is that dissonance? The best you can hope for, in order, are: 1) not having to work, for whatever reason, and having personally meaningful interests with which to fill your time; (two-way-tie) 2a) not having to work, 2b) having to work and having a job you love that means something to you; 3) everything else.

We require sustenance and shelter and sanitation and a few other things. Those require resources, one way or another. If one has to perform some activity in order to acquire the resources necessary to those needs, then one might as well do something one enjoys, if one can.

I absolutely LOVE my job (WFH systems programming in a challenging space (cross domain)), have the best team (my boss, the owner, is a friend from way back in another cyber co; my closest colleague is a great friend from off-roading; my other colleagues are all great people, with fantastic younger team members who break every cliché and trope about their generations; etc., etc.).

And if $10,000,000 showed up in my bank account tomorrow, I would wind down my work as smoothly and quickly as possible, to not leave them hanging, carry on consulting occasionally for them, when needed, and spend a year working on my house and Jeep and learning category theory and walking the dogs and watching as many football matches as I could (heck, with that money, maybe I even would spend the $50/month to get FA Cup games on top of what I already have).

Once the house was to my - and my GF's liking - and once the Jeep was again the beast it once was, and a bit more (portals!!!), well, there would be still be football to watch and math to learn and dogs to walk. Maybe we'd move somewhere we could foster many, many dogs? Ah, the mind reels.

I might even upgrade my phone or monitors.... (I'm a cheap bastard. The dead pixels on the phone screen are a PITA, but they only really impact Quordle.)
by mrheosuper | 2026-01-13 23:19:30+00:00
I maybe get hate here, but i like the start menu of win11(without counting the AI/Ads part) more than winXP.

The search in Win 11 is better. For ex: I need to change display timeout setting. I vastly remember it's in "power option" menu, and power option is in control panel. But i cant remember exactly how to reach "power option" from "control panel". In windows 11, i can just type "power option" and it would direct me to the power option screen, meanwhile in XP, i had to explore around before reaching it.

I think "Search" in Start menu is kind of heading in right direction(imo they should remove the search-on-internet), just need to improve performance.
by fooker | 2026-01-13 23:19:51+00:00
That was not my point, of course antivaxxers and science deniers exist and should not be taken seriously.

I meant - the medical establishment is notorious for attacking every opposition, especially when it comes to policy, with those labels.

That guarantees scientists who stand to lose their careers won't bother trying to fix anything. That's how you get asshats like RFK Jr.
by array_key_first | 2026-01-13 23:19:51+00:00
I mean, this is purely for socially constructed morality reasons.

In actuality, both require you to sell your body, and both can have long standing health effects. If anything, I would say the typical OF model sells their body much less than an athlete. I mean, I don't think they're going to tear their ACL.

And also, both offer no real tangible value to humanity. Sports do not produce anything, neither does porn, they're purely for entertainment. A cashier at McDonalds is providing more absolute value to the world than even the most esteemed athlete.

That's not to say that athletes are bad, entertainment and games are important. But you can't just say one form of mindless entertainment is more valuable than another form.
by maxlin | 2026-01-13 23:19:59+00:00
I can't imagine anything more vile and sick than summarizing one's being and opinions reasoned-for by his life experience as "being borne from a stroke" as the guy's eulogy. No he absolutely did not "throw his life's work away" or "alienate his fans", saying this as someone who enjoyed his comics since I could read!

You. Are. Evil. Anything that removes whatever creates your kind of thinking from this world is what this moment calls for.
by crazygringo | 2026-01-13 23:20:06+00:00
It has nothing to do with motivation or competence.

Teams don't just work together magically and "organically". They're made of diverse human beings, every one of us, who come from different backgrounds with different expectations about when and what to communicate and when and what not to and around what is who's responsibility when. Different levels of experience, having worked at different places with different practices, and different preferences about how to do things. This is a recipe for a hundred miscommunications and inefficiences and misunderstandings a day.

These processes exist to surface the most important things not being surfaced, and to identify and fix problems that affect the team but which nobody is understanding in full because everyone only knows their own perspective.

Again, these aren't "rituals". They're processes that are proven because they work. Including with 5-6 engineers.
by Jblx2 | 2026-01-13 23:20:22+00:00
>a bunch of people becoming emotionally stunted

Do we have data that estimates how often people regress to become emotionally stunted from any cause (Stoicism, other philosophical readings, alcohol/drug abuse, Alzehimer's/other neurodegenerative conditions)?

https://www.google.com/search?q=emotionally+stunted
by QuantumNomad_ | 2026-01-13 23:20:56+00:00
> How deranged would it be to have every nfs client establish a wireguard tunnel and only have nfs traffic go through the tunnel?

Sounds good to me. I have my Wireguard tunnel set up so that only traffic intended for hosts that are in the Wireguard network itself are routed over the Wireguard tunnel.

I mostly use it to ssh into different machines. The Wireguard server runs on a VPS on the Internet, and I can connect to it from anywhere (except from networks that filter Wireguard traffic), and that way ssh into my machines at home while I am away from home. Whereas all other normal traffic to other places is unaffected by and unrelated to the tunnel. So for example if I bring my laptop to a coffee shop and I have Wireguard running and I browse the web with a web browser, all my web browsing traffic still gets sent the same normal way that it would even if I didn’t have the tunnel running.

I rarely use NFS nor SMB, but if I wanted to connect either of those I would be able to that as well over this Wireguard setup I have.
by alexchantavy | 2026-01-13 23:20:56+00:00
I didn't do IRC until early 2000s but I felt a lot of curiosity about being online with other people: were they from an opposite corner of the world? What was life like there? How interesting that we can talk to each other!

Just the act of getting online to seek out others was super niche, so I feel like it was a bit of a "finding your own tribe" experience for me.
by tunesmith | 2026-01-13 23:21:00+00:00
I love rebase locally, especially when I have a few non-urgent branches that sit around for a little while. I hate rebase after pushing. The rule of thumb that has worked for me is "don't rewrite someone else's history". Rewriting origin's history is not so bad, but if there's even a chance that a team member has pulled, or based work off your pushed branch (ugh), rebase is horrible.
by PrairieFire | 2026-01-13 23:21:18+00:00
I am with you in that this rhetoric is getting exhausting.

In this particular case though I don't think "evil” is a moral claim, more shorthand for cost externalizing behavior. Hammering expensive dynamic endpoints with millions of unique requests isn’t neutral automation, it's degrading a shared public resource. Call it evil, antisocial, or extractive, the outcome is the same.
by xorcist | 2026-01-13 23:21:26+00:00
Does it really matter what is illegal if it is pardoned?

Starting insurrection to overthrow election? Pardoned. Killing police officer? Pardoned. Ordering contract killings? Pardoned. Large scale drug smuggling operation to the US? Pardoned.

Brand anyone who follows the law as a criminal and make sure to have them fired, and you can even ignore the constition that says power to regulate trade lies with the senate and enough of civil society might just decide to play along.
by minimaltom | 2026-01-13 23:21:31+00:00
> In contrast, human thinking doesn’t involve picking a word at a time based on the words that came before

Do we have science that demonstrates humans don't autoregressively emit words? (Genuinely curious / uninformed).

From the outset, its not obvious that auto-regression through the state space of action (i.e. what LLMs do when yeeting tokens) is the difference they have with humans. Though I can guess we can distinguish LLMs from other models like diffusion/HRM/TRM that explicitly refine their output rather than commit to a choice then run `continue;`.
by spaceywilly | 2026-01-13 23:21:42+00:00
I would strongly recommend this podcast episode with Andrej Karpathy. I will poorly summarize it by saying his main point is that AI will spread like any other technology. It’s not going to be a sudden flash and everything is done by AI. It will be a slow rollout where each year it automates more and more manual work, until one day we realize it’s everywhere and has become indispensable.

It sounds like what you are seeing lines up with his predictions. Each model generation is able to take on a little more of the responsibilities of a software engineer, but it’s not as if we suddenly don’t need the engineer anymore.

https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/andrej-karpathy
by debugnik | 2026-01-13 23:21:52+00:00
> any time in the last decade, to get a booth at any "local hand-made goods craft fair", selling "hand-made" copper jewelry... that you happened to buy in bulk lots off Alibaba.

I've seen exactly this a few times in Madrid already, right next to the "dude with bad 3D printer #35"-type stands. A friend of mine loves finding the Aliexpress product page right in front of them.
by benjiro | 2026-01-13 23:22:03+00:00
> If you assume Adams is lying, that’s your call. But if the question is what he believes happened, the obvious evidence is his own account.

You can believe something with all your heart and that believe can be a lie. People are not machines.

The idea that a manager will go "hey, we are DEI hiring Asians" in the 80s in the bank sector... No offense but that is mixing modern 2020's politics and trying to transplant it to the 80's.

Fact is, you only have one source of this "truth", and have historical data that disproves this idea of DEI hires in the 80s (unless your white and male, then yes, there was a LOT of DEI hires and promotions that bypassed women and/or people of color).

And this is still happening today. But nobody wants to talk about that too much because that is considered the traditional family and god given right to the white male ;)

I am betting your a white male, that lissen to a lot of conservative podcast/twitter etc. You can prove me wrong but we both know the truth ;)
by amw-zero | 2026-01-13 23:22:48+00:00
I’m starting to think this take is legitimately insane.

As said in the article, a conservative estimate is that Gen AI can currently do 2.5% of all jobs in the entire economy. A technology that is really only a couple of years old. This is supposed to be _disappointing_? That’s millions of jobs _today_, in a totally nascent form.

I mean I understand skepticism, I’m not exactly in love with AI myself, but the world has literally been transformed.
by busseio | 2026-01-13 23:23:11+00:00
Great read. I have fond memories of eagerly awaiting the launch of Mindstorms, having gotten to play with LEGO LOGO kits that my dad was able to bring home from the school he worked at.

I appreciate that LEGO has always leaned into programmable tech for consumers.

Also, shoutout to any OG rec.toys.lego group members if any of y'all are reading.
by MattyRad | 2026-01-13 23:23:20+00:00
I use agentic LLMs (for side projects, properly sandboxed) as much as the next guy, but collectively the normalization of deviance is pretty apparent and shocking (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance).

Backdooring you own machine, sending your .env files, normalizing slop in code review, leaking IP (which is trained on and send to RLHF), YOLO mode, these things would have been unconscionable 2 years ago.
by merlincorey | 2026-01-13 23:23:23+00:00
"Code is a liability. What the code does for you is an asset." as quoted from https://wiki.c2.com/?SoftwareAsLiability with Last edit December 17, 2013.

This discussion and distinction used to be well known, but I'm happy to help some people become "one of today's lucky 10,000" as quoted from https://xkcd.com/1053/ because it is indeed much more interesting than the alternative approach.
by bradlys | 2026-01-13 23:23:29+00:00
Yep. It also depends on types of goals you have and stage of life.

I can safely say as someone who FIRE’d in his early 30’s that it doesn’t matter how much money you have because women are very adverse to a man who isn’t working. Mind you, I am quite physically ugly and so my experience is not that of everyone’s. It might be that for men who are of average and above looks that it doesn’t matter as much but for the women I encountered it mattered a lot that I wasn’t working. It didn’t matter how much money I had made. I was spending on a lavish lifestyle in manhattan as well. I gave up on pursuing a family life due to poor genetic basis, chose to be single back in the Bay Area, and go back to work since there’s nothing else to do. All my goals were revolved around family and building a life for a family. No point in those goals if you’re alone.
by sanity | 2026-01-13 23:23:32+00:00
> Most non-racists don’t need to spend 30 minutes on cable news explaining themselves to save face.

Most people never get interviewed on cable news at all, so that’s not a meaningful baseline. When someone is publicly accused, explaining yourself publicly is a predictable response, not evidence of guilt.

> Saying something publicly is an action. You can’t take it back.

Of course you can clarify or correct yourself—people misspeak all the time. Whether that matters depends on whether listeners are interested in understanding or just in cancelling someone they don't like.

> Why do you feel the need to defend him?

Because I’ve listened to hundreds of hours of Scott Adams over many years, and I’m confident I understand his views far better than people judging him from short, out-of-context clips.

I don’t get anything out of this except insisting that the truth matters. Even when the person involved is unpopular or dead.
by oersted | 2026-01-13 23:23:36+00:00
Looks great, it was actually just playing around yesterday with `code canvas app` which is similar, and also Charkoal.dev and Haystack Editor (before code-review pivot) which are related. Yours looks better than any of them already!

I wish it was available in Cursor as well though. Not sure how exactly they manage their marketplace, most VSCode extensions seem to be there but now and then I encounter one that is missing for no apparent reason.
by spankibalt | 2026-01-13 23:23:41+00:00
> "As jchallis used the idiomatic term in the latter, more literal sense, I can understand people getting confused."

Well... one cannot choose family for one is always bound to them by biology. Does that matter? No. One's life is more than that. One can leave family in the dust, a choice many of Adam's targets had to make to continue living, while others never even got to make that choice. Either way, equating (and let's be frank: most often elevating) yesterday's "hero" to family status certainly is a choice.

In this spirit: "Here's a nickel kid, buy yourself a better eulogy."
by gejose | 2026-01-13 23:23:57+00:00
I believe Gary Marcus is quite well known for terrible AI predictions. He's not in any way an expert in the field. Some of his predictions from 2022 [1]

> In 2029, AI will not be able to watch a movie and tell you accurately what is going on (what I called the comprehension challenge in The New Yorker, in 2014). Who are the characters? What are their conflicts and motivations? etc.

> In 2029, AI will not be able to read a novel and reliably answer questions about plot, character, conflicts, motivations, etc. Key will be going beyond the literal text, as Davis and I explain in Rebooting AI.

> In 2029, AI will not be able to work as a competent cook in an arbitrary kitchen (extending Steve Wozniak’s cup of coffee benchmark).

> In 2029, AI will not be able to reliably construct bug-free code of more than 10,000 lines from natural language specification or by interactions with a non-expert user. [Gluing together code from existing libraries doesn’t count.]

> In 2029, AI will not be able to take arbitrary proofs from the mathematical literature written in natural language and convert them into a symbolic form suitable for symbolic verification.

Many of these have already been achieved, and it's only early 2026.

[1]https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/dear-elon-musk-here-are-fi...
by tombert | 2026-01-13 23:23:58+00:00
I think what they're best at right now is the initial scaffolding work of projects. A lot of the annoying bootstrap shit that I hate doing is actually generally handled really well by Codex.

I agree that there's definitely some overhype to them right now. At least for the stuff I've done they have gotten considerably better though, to a point where the code it generates is often usable, if sub-optimal.

For example, about three years ago, I was trying to get ChatGPT to write me a C program to do a fairly basic ZeroMQ program. It generated something that looked correct, but it would crash pretty much immediately, because it kept trying to use a pointer after free.

I tried the same thing again with Codex about a week ago, and it worked out of the box, and I was even able to get it to do more stuff.
by herunan | 2026-01-13 23:24:06+00:00
First of all, popping in a few screenshots of articles and papers is not proper analysis.

Second of all, GenAI is going well or not depending on how we frame it.

In terms of saving time, money and effort when coding, writing, analysing, researching, etc. It’s extremely successful.

In terms of leading us to AGI… GenAI alone won’t reach that. Current ROI is plateauing, and we need to start investing more somewhere else.
by nsoonhui | 2026-01-13 23:24:13+00:00
It's not directly comparable. The first time writing the code is always the hardest because you might have to figure out the requirements along the way. When you have the initial system running for a while, doing a second one is easier because all the requirements kinks are figured out.

By the way, why does your co-founder have to do the rewrite at all?
by Zafira | 2026-01-13 23:24:16+00:00
He has been proven to be an extremely unreliably narrator on multiple occasions and is prone to changing his story. I think he has always had such inclinations, but other folks kept him restrained and I’m not sure what happened there in the end.

I’m reminded that he is on the record as having initially said that he enjoyed working on the Dilbert TV show, but it was too much work and had the misfortune of being moved one of those “death” time slots. Then at some point he started baselessly claiming it was killed due to DEI.

Also, he has a very bizarre history of sockpuppeting that just raises more questions. He was called out by Metafilter for this and acted like he was playing some kind of 4D chess with them [1].

[1] https://mefiwiki.com/wiki/Scott_Adams,_plannedchaos
by Aurornis | 2026-01-13 23:24:19+00:00
You’re doing exactly the thing that the parent commenter pointed out: Complaining that they’re not perfect yet as if that’s damning evidence of failure.

We all know LLMs get stuck. We know they hallucinate. We know they get things wrong. We know they get stuck in loops.

There are two types of people: The first group learns to work within these limits and adapt to using them where they’re helpful while writing the code when they’re not.

The second group gets frustrated every time it doesn’t one-shot their prompt and declares it all a big farce. Meanwhile the rest of us are out here having fun with these tools, however limited they are.
by sharkmerry | 2026-01-13 23:24:40+00:00
Apparently there isnt much to back that up.

Writing in the 1990s and 2000s, author Albert Jack[18] and Messianic minister Richard Pustelniak,[19] claim that the original meaning of the expression was that the ties between people who have made a blood covenant (or have shed blood together in battle) were stronger than ties formed by "the water of the womb", thus "The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb". Neither of the authors cites any sources to support his claim.[18][19]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_is_thicker_than_water
by ThrowawayR2 | 2026-01-13 23:25:47+00:00
You can make a Show HN post to discuss the technical details or other interesting details of your product. There are specific rules about it at https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html and the site moderators provide additional tips at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22336638. Note that one of the tips from them is "Drop any language that sounds like marketing or sales. On HN, that is an instant turnoff. Use factual, direct language. Personal stories and technical details are great."

Also please don't resubmit multiple times to try to drum up interest. There are many who try that and they always get banned.

Don't expect much. Occasionally people will get lucky but most new product launch submissions get no attention.
by mschuster91 | 2026-01-13 23:25:54+00:00
> Cut copyright to 15-20 years by default.

This alone will kill off all chances of that ever passing.

Like, I fully agree with your proposal... but I don't think it's feasible. There are a lot of media IPs/franchises that are very, very old but still generate insane amounts of money to this day with active developments. Star Wars and Star Trek obviously, but also stuff like the MCU or Avatar is on its best way to two decades of runtime, Iron Man 1 was released in 2008, or Harry Potter which is almost 30 years old. That's dozens of billions of dollars in cumulative income, and most of that is owned by Disney.

Look what it took to finally get even the earliest Disney movies to enter the public domain, and that was stuff from before World War 2 that was so bitterly fought over.

In order to reform copyright... we first have to use anti-trust to break up the large media conglomerates. And it's not just Disney either. Warner, Sony, Comcast and Paramount also hold ridiculous amounts of IP, Amazon entered the fray as well with acquiring MGM (mostly famous for James Bond), and Lionsgate holds the rights for a bunch of smaller but still well-known IPs (Twilight, Hunger Games).

And that's just the movie stuff. Music is just as bad, although at least there thanks to radio stations being a thing, there are licensing agreements and established traditions for remixes, covers, tribute bands and other forms of IP re-use by third parties.
by themafia | 2026-01-13 23:26:13+00:00
It's not a technical problem you are facing.

It's a monetary one, specifically, large pools of sequestered wealth making extremely bad long term investments all in a single dubious technical area.

Any new phenomenon driven by this process will have the same deleterious results on the rest of computing. There is a market value in ruining your website that's too high for the fruit grabbers to ignore.

In time adaptations will arise. The apparently desired technical future is not inevitable.
by MisterTea | 2026-01-13 23:26:16+00:00
> You don't see how adding complexity on top of complexity in a complex system add points of failures ?

I don't see see a heat pump as complex. It's a compressor, valves and coils. The complexity are the stupid computers foisted onto us.

> I forgot this is an american centric forum and things are just made cheap/disposable because "it's cheaper'

We don't have a choice. Do you? We're all at the mercy of the manufactures.