MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Flag AI Slop in PRs
by akshaysg | 2026-01-06 17:03:48+00:00
Hi HN, I’ve been working on a solution to something I personally view as a problem: increasing amounts of AI Slop in PRs.

I’ve noticed that some contributors on GitHub have been using AI tools (which are great!) to make low-quality contributions to public repos just for the sake of it. These contributions often have duplicate code, hallucinated functions, and other signature problems introduced by AI tooling. This leaves the burden on the maintainers to slog through long AI-generated PRs.

I think this is wrong. There should be a mechanism to flag low-effort PRs that contain AI slop, so that maintainers can skip over reading them.

I rigged up a simple AI slop detector here: https://haystackeditor.com/slop-detector

For fun, I included some AI slop examples and a “can you guess whether it’s slop” game.

Let me know what you think!
by ramses0 | 2026-01-06 17:04:05+00:00
I call it my "weekend watch". Specifically taking off the "notifications" watch, a few quick turns to "take the approximate time" with me and it's perfect! I have the 12hr (not 24hr) which effectively gives you "metric" minute markings (10 min increments instead of 15/5). https://svalbard.watch/pages/Svalbard_Gauge_FK21.html

My next "grail" watch is something pilot-y, with inverted hour/minute markings (ie: 55m on the outer rim of the face/dial, 12h on the inner), eg: search "Laco Men's Pilot Aachen Automatic Watch", but obviously not that expensive. I just can't justify "yet another watch" and since getting the garmin (w/ sleep tracking, heart-rate, and notifications) it's even less justifiable.

When this one went on sale during prime for $15, I couldn't resist it though! https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07JCPX9L1

Strap is trash, whole thing is very much lightweight/flimsy, but it has a similar semi-minimalist vibe.
by scottlamb | 2026-01-06 17:04:07+00:00
Regret is possible with any language, but I'd be surprised if someone regretted choosing Rust for the reasons in the article you linked:

* Error handling via exceptions. Rust uses `Result` instead. (It has panics, but they are meant to be strictly for serious logic errors for which calling `abort` would be fine. There's a `Cargo.toml` option to do exactly that on panic that rather than unwinding.) (btw, C++ has two camps here for better or worse; many programs are written in a dialect that doesn't use exceptions.)

* Constructors have to be infallible. Not a thing in Rust; you just make a method that returns `Result<Self, Error>`. (Even in C++ there are workarounds.)

* Destructors have to be infallible. This is about as true in Rust as in C++: `Drop::drop` doesn't return a `Result` and can't unwind-via-panic if you have unwinding disabled or are already panicking. But I reject the characterization of it as a problem compared to C anyway. The C version has to call a function to destroy the thing. Doing the same in Rust (or C++) is not really any different; having the other calls assert that it's not destroyed is perfectly fine. I've done this via a `self.inner.as_mut().expect("not terminated")`. They say the C only has two states: "Not initialised object/memory where all the bets are off and the structure can contain random data. And there is initialised state, where the object is fully functional". The existence of the "all bets are off" state is not as compelling as they make it out to be, even if throwing up your hands is less code.

* Inheritance. Rust doesn't have it.
by hexbin010 | 2026-01-06 17:04:08+00:00
Next stage will be significant broadband/mobile price rises.

This is happening in the UK - 24 month contracts with annual 10-18% rises built in are the norm now

(The regulator worked in cahoots with the companies. A big storm was created during the high-interest rate period inventing/overstating a problem that people can't predict their bills because the rises were based on official inflation figures, which naturally varied. So the companies went: ok sure we can do fixed price rises...(At a nice high rate). This was sold as a 'win' because the rises are now 'predictable')

Plus the cheaper broadband (ADSL) is being phased out and replaced with fibre which for many people is overkill and everyone has to pay the price for that the upgrade whether you need it or not.

Three and Vodafone just merged which will mean price rises in mobile data too due to reduced competition
by renewiltord | 2026-01-06 17:04:32+00:00
Haha, this place is as gullible as Reddit. Remember that obvious hoax post about DoorDash/UberEats being a dick to drivers with a “desperation score”. There were so many people there just wanking themselves off at the thought it could be real. It obviously wasn’t.

The cooorrrrrporatioooons! OooOOooOoOOoo!
by grayhatter | 2026-01-06 17:04:40+00:00
> Is this what people are referring to when they say AI writes their tests?

yes

> Any intelligent, reasoning human would immediately see that it's not even close to enough. You barely even need a coding background to see the issues.

[nods]

> This kind of thing happens over and over again. I look at the stuff it outputs and it's clear to me that no reasoning thing would act this way

and yet there're so many people who are convinced it's fantastic. Oh, I made myself sad.

The larger observation about it being statistical inference, rather than reason... but looks to so many to be reason is quite an interesting test case for the "fuzzing" of humans. In line with why do so many engineers store passwords in clear text? Why do so many people believe AI can reason?
by djeastm | 2026-01-06 17:04:45+00:00
> Protecting consumers, including renters, appears be a large part of Mr. Mamdani’s early agenda as mayor. The actions of Mr. Mamdani, a democratic socialist, appear so far to indicate a willingness to govern based on a leftist political agenda.

Using the term "leftist" to describe something Nixon would do is absolutely a sign the Overton Window has shifted.

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/executive-order-11...
by gnull | 2026-01-06 17:04:45+00:00
I see, you are more focused on providing the core functionality in the simplest way possible from purely technical perspective, and less so on what kind of "language" or interface it provides the end user — assuming someone who wants an interface can make a wrapper. I can see that your points make sense from this perspective, the solution with FDs is indeed simpler from this viewpoint.

I, on the other hand, criticized it as a complete interface made with some workflow in mind that would need no wrappers, would help the user discover itself and avoid footguns. Your interpretation sounds like what the authors may have had in mind when they made it.

> who’s trying to audit use of these tools without the manual?

I'd try to work on different levels when understanding some system. Before getting into details, I'd try to understand the high-level components/steps and their dataflows, and then gradually keep refining the level of detail. If a tool has 2-3 descriptively named arguments and you have a high-level idea of what the tool is for, you can usually track the dataflows of its call quite well without manual. Say, understanding a command like

make -B -C ./somewhere -k

may require the manual if you haven't worked with make in some time and don't remember the options. But

make --always-make --directory=./somewhere --keep-going

gives you a pretty good idea. On the second read, where you're being pedantic with details, you may want to open the manual and check what those things exactly mean and guarantee, but it's not useless without the manual either.
by acdha | 2026-01-06 17:05:03+00:00
> That assumes that all Americans support the actions of the current administration

This is making the mistake of trying to distinguish between what individual voters want and what the American government and large businesses do. If you’re, say, a Dane wondering if it’s safe to use Windows, iOS, or Chrome, you don’t care about a hundred million Democrats think but instead can only go by what you think the people in power will order and the odds that Satya, Sundar, or Tim will resist requests to compromise your interests. The number of people involved fit on a private jet.
by wesselbindt | 2026-01-06 17:06:09+00:00
I can't speak for executive orders for a mayor, but I can say that executive orders of the president are anything but symbolic. Their scope was expanded significantly under Bush and Cheney, and they are binding for federal agencies. For example, they used executive order 13440 to circumvent a supreme court ruling that stated the Geneva convention applied to the people they illegally kidnapped and held at CIA black sites. This EO functioned by essentially weakening the definition of torture, so they could go on and torture the folks they captured.

So, while the next president can just undo executive orders made by any previous one, making them a bit ephemeral, they do have direct and real consequences going as far as torture.
by gosub100 | 2026-01-06 17:06:17+00:00
I also want to shout out to Emby, which is almost identical to Jellyfin. It seems a bit more polished, and works very well. I've been using it for over 2 years. It does have a paid tier and nags me to upgrade for 10s on my TV, but that doesn't bother me. I have it running in a freebsd jail and it's been rock solid.
by rstuart4133 | 2026-01-06 17:06:35+00:00
I'll give you another example. The "Microsoft Tunnel Gateway" is a end point for Microsoft's InTune VPN downloadable as a docker image for Linux from here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/intune/intune-service/prot...

I had a brief look at the docker image, and it's pretty clearly a repackaged version of OpenConnect. Debian's copyright linked to from https://packages.debian.org/sid/openconnect says it's primarily LGPL but with a plethora of other licences like the GPL.

Since there is GPL they are required to make some source available, and if they modified it they are required by the LGPL to make their modifications available. They have extended it by adding Microsoft's authentication mechanisms, but perhaps that is just a DDL mixin, and I could well believe / forgive them not being aware of the other licences.

What is not so easy to forgive is them not acknowledging the open source they used in any way. Instead they slapped as pretty standard Microsoft Licence claiming it's all theipr own work, similar to this one: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/microsoft-softwar...
by arethuza | 2026-01-06 17:06:49+00:00
I don't think that's impractical - isn't it exactly what YouTube Premium offers, ad free viewing for £12.99 a month.

I watch quite a lot of content on YouTube and really should sign up for Premium but I feel that the shockingly irrelevant ads I get presented with on YouTube are trying to drive me to sign for it - they're certainly not going to get me to buy anything!
by concinds | 2026-01-06 17:07:05+00:00
There's a lot of legitimate criticism, but they're also a noticeable amount of "reply guy"-ism (pedantry that can sometimes derail the conversation and bring nothing of substance) and "pet peeve syndrome" (people who'll always repeat the same criticisms of a product or company even if completely off-topic for a submission). It would probably be hard to classify them. And whenever I go on reddit I see that both are enormously worse on there.
by loloquwowndueo | 2026-01-06 17:07:21+00:00
> why is the Gmail app almost 80x the size of the native Mail app?

Apple Mail leverages libraries and frameworks already present on the device.

Google uses libraries and frameworks very likely already present on say Android, but on iOS they have to ship a gigantic runtime that implements those things the app depends on; this way they only have to write the app once for several supported platforms.

I’m just speculating by the way but it sounds like the likely reason.

You’ll notice Google Docs or sheets are equally gigantic because each also ships a copy of those enormous runtimes.
by ceejayoz | 2026-01-06 17:08:07+00:00
> "army ordered civilians to evacuate from warzone so it's genocide" is not as great argument as you think

The trick, though, was to keep doing it, over and over, expanding the area each time, so people never stop having to evacuate, or give up and stay in place to die.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c299pl8j8w7o

"More than three-quarters of Gaza's territory have been designated as evacuation zones by the Israeli military since the war against Hamas began in October, an analysis by BBC Arabic has found."

At a certain point, it becomes plain old ethnic cleansing.
by echelon | 2026-01-06 17:08:59+00:00
Second order effects.

Many advertisers may avoid advertising or lower their ad budgets. This means the tech platform makes less revenue. This means the platform and the video creator both make less revenue. This means less videos get created.

All of these happen at the population level.

I hate ads, but regulations that are for things that aren't public health (including mental health), anti-monopolization, etc. are probably bad for innovation and growth.

You have to balance regulation and over-regulation.
by mbesto | 2026-01-06 17:09:10+00:00
Hacker News is currently sitting at 130 MB. I simply do not understand how these things are calculated but I suspect the calculated amount that the Chrome tab diagnostic isn't a consistent way of comparing to other application memory usages, or at least a mental model that makes sense to most people (e.g. whats a lot of memory consumption? what should it be? is it too high, is it too low? etc.)
by andoando | 2026-01-06 17:09:23+00:00
Its not the doomerism that bothers me. Its the hivemind mentality and brain dead comments and zero critical thinking, and the absurd negativity and judgment of everyone and everything, and the politicalization of all the main subs (top post on pics is pretty much guranteed to be something Trump) Even as someone thats far left I cant stand Reddits mentality.

15 years ago there were nice discussions happening on reddit, now all the comments are one liner stupid jokes from people who never even bothered to read the article and people calling you a bootlicker if you don't agree with every nonsense against Trump/Musk/some billionaire.
by marcosdumay | 2026-01-06 17:09:58+00:00
Subscriptions usually add up to the cost of buying in less than an year.

Companies hope on people being none-the-wiser, but live mostly of people that subscribe for short durations or need the internet component of the services. So, no, prices going up will make subscriptions less popular, not more.

This is different from expensive goods pools (rental cars, houses, airplanes, etc) because there's actual competition on those.
by sfink | 2026-01-06 17:10:04+00:00
I am using "x" to mean that the line item is addressed by the article. Sorry, I guess that's backwards from the original intent of the checklist.

I am saying that the article addresses every reason for doubt that the checklist raises (save for the last, which it can't). Whether the technology actually addresses that shortcoming is another question, but the article does claim to have solved every single one of those common drawbacks.

As for the item about li-ion advances, I think the claimed capabilities are well beyond what li-ion could reasonably be expected to reach in the short remaining timeframe claimed.

tl;dr: the checklist is a cynical but normally accurate way of spotting fatal flaws in newly announced battery technology. Based on the announcement, this technology suffers from none of the flaws listed therein.
by senkora | 2026-01-06 17:10:14+00:00
Yep. Ad viewability standards simply require that a video ad was 50% onscreen for a continuous 2 seconds in order for it to count as an impression. Google probably usually gets that even for skippable ads.

> Picture this: an advertiser pays premium rates for space on your site, but their carefully crafted creative sits unseen at the bottom of a page your readers never scroll to. Despite technically delivering the impression you promised, you've essentially sold empty air. This disconnect between ads served and ads seen is why viewability has emerged as the cornerstone metric in digital advertising's maturity.

> Video ads require at least two seconds of continuous play while 50% visible ... These seemingly arbitrary thresholds represent extensive research into human attention patterns.

https://www.playwire.com/blog/ad-viewability
by j_w | 2026-01-06 17:10:16+00:00
Of course it's true in the case of sqlite. It's one of the most used pieces of software ever, and user cpu time spent is going to dwarf any developer time.

Your example should instead be:

- 5 hours of developer time to run in 4 seconds * n

- 5 minutes of developer time to run in 5 seconds * n

As long as n <= 17,700, then the developer time is "not worthwhile." This assumes that you value user time as much as developer time.

In the case of sqlite, the user time may as well be infinite for determining that side of the equation. It's just that widely used.
by spencerflem | 2026-01-06 17:10:20+00:00
And the worst part is, from a societal point of view - it doesnt matter if $companyA wins over $companyB, if the reason they won is that there was more Geico ads than Liberty ads etc.

We allow every space to be overrun with these things, wasting our time and infecting our brains and in the end its zero-sum for the companies and negative-sum for us. No value anywhere is created.
by DwnVoteHoneyPot | 2026-01-06 17:10:26+00:00
Unpopular opinion, but I don't care what a CEO makes. It feels like jealousy and envy driving people to care what other people make. An analogy is going onto social media and trying to compare myself to them.

I do want to be paid fairly for my work so the transparency of same job is useful, but a CEO is so far removed from me. I don't compare myself to a major league baseball player either.

Can someone enlighten me to why I should be outraged at this "inequality"?
by kristoff_it | 2026-01-06 17:10:34+00:00
> Every project and programmer shouldn't feel they have to justify their choice not to use Rust (or Zig)

You won't find easily Zig programmers that want you to use Zig at all costs, or that believe it's a moral imperative that you do. It's just antithetical to the whole concept of Zig.

The worst that can happen is that Zig programmers want C projects to have a build.zig so they can cross-compile the project trivially, since that's usually not a thing C/C++ build scripts tend to offer. And even then, we have https://github.com/allyourcodebase/ so that Zig users can get their build.zig scripts without annoying project maintainers.
by rekabis | 2026-01-06 17:10:41+00:00
I have a pair of Dell T7500 units for “slow and simple” self-hosting, and just snagged a trio of 1Tb/64Gb 2018 Mac Minis to join my own surplussed Mac Mini of the same vintage as single-purpose machines.

I have a gigabit symmetrical SOHO fibre connection. It’s time I brought everything back under one roof except for DNS.
by pdimitar | 2026-01-06 17:10:47+00:00
For your last sentence, I believe topics are conflated here.

Of course if one writes unsafe Rust and it leads to a CVE then that's on them. Who's denying that?

On the other hand, having to interact with the part of the landscape that's written in C mandates the use of the `unsafe` keyword and not everyone is ideally equipped to be careful.

I view the existence of `unsafe` as pragmatism; Rust never would have taken off without it. And if 5% of all Rust code is potentially unsafe, well, that's still much better than C where you can trivially introduce undefined behavior with many built-in constructs.

Obviously we can't fix everything in one fell swoop.
by likium | 2026-01-06 17:10:51+00:00
The tool explicitly has an allow list for commands and block list for sensitive paths[1].

Though it's not enough, stuff like `grep "" .e?v` can still end up sending your sensitive keys to LLM providers.

[1]: https://github.com/ygwyg/system/blob/b5adfe526da7470cade61f7...
by pixl97 | 2026-01-06 17:10:53+00:00
>I'm in communities where the more active discussions

And they are heavily moderated against negative discussion/ragebait.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3652533/

>specifically, across an array of psychological situations and tasks, adults display a negativity bias, or the propensity to attend to, learn from, and use negative information far more than positive information.

This is a human problem and it happens everywhere.
by lxgr | 2026-01-06 17:10:53+00:00
Who actually likes gift cards, as in, would still use them despite better alternatives existing?

If giving/receiving cash wasn't already illegal or socially unacceptable, gift card issuers would have started lobbying for that yesterday.

Other than that original use case, many people use them as a form of poorly functional digital cash (since it's not fungible across issuers) that really ought to exist natively in a currency these days.
by aragonite | 2026-01-06 17:11:03+00:00
In the preprint they write:

> ... we observe extreme inequality in attention distribution. The Gini coefficient of 0.89 places HN among the most unequal attention economies documented in the literature. For comparison, Zhu & Lerman (2016) reported Gini co-efficients of 0.68–0.86 across Twitter metrics. ... The bottom 80% of posts [on HN] receive less than 10% of total upvotes. (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5910263)

This could probably be explained by HN's unique exposure mechanism. Every post starts on /newest and unless it gets picked up by the smaller group of users who browse /newest, it never reaches the front page where the main audience is. In most forums/subreddits by contrast a new post (unless it gets flagged as spam) usually gets some baseline exposure with the main audience before it sinks. On HN the main audience is downstream of an early gate and missing that gate is close to being effectively invisible. IMO this fact alone could probably explain why "attention inequality" seems more extreme on HN.
by mdnahas | 2026-01-06 17:11:15+00:00
For those that don’t know, the Quakers are like Zen Buddhism met radical Protestant Christians in the 1600s. There is no creed, no minister/priest/leader.

We sit together quietly for 60 minutes. If someone feels inspired, they stand up and speak. Then they sit down and the Meeting continues in silence. Some Meetings are silent from start to finish; others have speakers the whole time.

While there is no creed, people often speak about truth, equality, peace, and simplicity. I found it when looking for a belief system to pass on to my kids, should I have some.

If you’re curious, try it some Sunday. It’s an interesting experience.
by wrsh07 | 2026-01-06 17:11:24+00:00
Yeah - it seems like this will cause a series of 5 second skippable ads that still sums up to >many seconds of unskippable ads (unless that's banned, in which case they will just see ads more often, as you say)

I expect it will make the experience worse rather than better because the publishers will try to maintain their inventory (how many seconds of ads they show per minute watched)
by utopiah | 2026-01-06 17:11:26+00:00
That's how I learned computer security, learned how IIS would allow specific commands, which paths Windows would not show, etc. Very interesting.

That's also, maybe more importantly, how I learned about information propagation and even epistemology because you HAD to 1st in order for your work to be valuable.

A lot of fun, of lot of learning still valuable decades later.

Warmly recommended!
by mjamesaustin | 2026-01-06 17:11:49+00:00
Ad skipping should be handled at the platform level and not left to individual advertisers to control. Regulations like this make such an outcome more likely.

Mobile ads in the US are heinous. Each one has a different mechanism for skipping, the skip buttons are micro sized and impossible to tap, some of them don't even work.

Standardization should have been up to the platforms selling ads, but they haven't done it. It's past time for local authorities to step in and protect consumers from predatory behavior.