MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TylerJewell | 2026-01-12 16:27:55+00:00
Note - we primarily make use of Gemini CLI, which is very promising, but have made pretty extensive trials as Claude Code.

Anthropic hasn't changed their licensing, just enforcing what the licensing always required by closing a loophole.

Business models aside - what is interesting is whether the agent :: model relationship requires a proprietary context and language such that without that mutual interaction, will the coding accuracy and safety be somehow degraded? Or, will it be possible for agentic frameworks to plug and play with models that will generate similar outcomes.

So far, we tend to see the former is needed --- that there are improvements that can be had when the agentic framework and model language understanding are optimized to their unique properties. Not sure how long this distinction will matter, though.
by 0xf8 | 2026-01-12 16:28:05+00:00
I very much agree with how you’ve categorized the initial state condition that is amenable to LLM assisted SWE and works well to a greater state of beneficial order. And implicitly I also agree most of the complement to that set of applied contexts yields ~medium to not so productive results.

But what do you mean by “LLM prompting is on average much less analyzable” ? Isn’t structured prompting (what that should optimally look like) the most objective and well defined part of the whole workflow. it’s the lowest entropy part of the situation, we know pretty well what a good LLM prompt is and what will be ineffective, even LLMs “know” that. Do you mean “context engineering” is hard to optimize around ? That’s often thought of interchangeably I think, but regardless that has in fact become the “hard problem” (user facing) in effectively leveraging LLM for dev work. Ever since the reasoning class models were introduced I think, it became more about context engineering in practice than prompting. Nowadays from the very onset Even resuming a session efficiently often requires a non-trivial approach that we’ve already started to design patterns and built tools around, (like CLI coding workflows adding /compact as user directive, etc).

I’m not a software engineer by trade, so I can’t pretend to know what that fully entails at the tail ends of enterprise scale and complexity, but I’ve spent a decent amount of time programming and as far as LLMs go, I think there’s probably somewhere down the road where we get so methodical about context engineering and tooling and memory management, all of the vast still somewhat nebulous surrounding space and scaffolding to LLM workflows that have a big impact on productive use of them—we may eventually engineer that aspect to an extent that will be able to much more consistently yield better results across more applied contexts than the “clean code”/“trivial app” dichotomy.
But … I think the depth of additional effort and knowledge and skill required by human user to do this optimal context engineering (once we fully understand how even) to get the best out of LLMs… I think that quickly just converges to — what it means to be a competent software engineer already. the meta layers around just “writing code” that are required to build robust systems and maintain them, the amount of work required to coerce non-deterministic models into effectively internalizing that, or at minimum not fvcking it up… that juice might not be worth the squeeze when it’s essentially what a good developer’s job is already. If that’s true then there will likely remain a ceiling of finite productivity you can expect from LLM assisted development for a long time… (I conjecture).
by quitit | 2026-01-12 16:28:12+00:00
This is a bit of a layer cake:

1. The first issue is that there is significant momentum in calling Siri bad, so even if Apple released a higher quality version it will still be labelled bad. It can enhance the user's life and make their device easier to use, but the overall press will be cherrypicked examples where it did something silly.

2. Basing Siri on Google's Gemini can help to alleviate some of that bad press, since a non-zero share of that doomer commentary comes from brand-loyalists and astroturfing.

3. The final issue is that on-device Siri will never perform like server-based ChatGPT. So in a way it's already going to disappoint some users who don't realise that running something on mobile device hardware is going to have compromises which aren't present on a server farm.
To help illustrate that point: We even have the likes of John Gruber making stony-faced comparisons between Apple's on-device image generator toy (one that produces about an image per second) versus OpenAI's server farm-based image generator which makes a single image in about 1-2 minutes. So if a long-running tech blogger can't find charity in those technical limitations, I don't expect users to.
by program_whiz | 2026-01-12 16:28:12+00:00
I really respect his work on the engine, the math, and the engineering is excellent, but I'm not sure it makes for an interesting game above and beyond what we already have.

Adding additional smoothness to existing voxel engines I'm not sure would have much effect, unless you have something specific like moving a ball on a smooth surface (but the SDF I'm seeing here wouldn't support that either).

As for "create a hole, then close it behind you", this is about as game-changing as open/closing doors (or tunnels with doors). I'm open to suggestion, but honestly this is amazing tech, I just don't think it will create very fun games.

Kind of feel the same about the demos I see of spherical or non-euclidean geometry games. Its very interesting, and impressive, but seems like it is an engine in search of a game.
by taykolasinski | 2026-01-12 16:28:19+00:00
That's interesting.

I suspect your intuition about scale is correct. The theoretical benefit of mHC is that it acts as a sort of relief valve/router for information flow in very deep/wide networks where the standard residual bottleneck becomes an issue. At 8M params, the standard residual stream is likely already perfectly adequate, so mHC might just be adding parameter overhead without solving a real signal propagation problem yet.

Quick question on your run: did you see the signal amplification/instability I saw (values growing during the forward pass)? or was it stable for you, just neutral on loss?
by sanderjd | 2026-01-12 16:28:27+00:00
> The flip scenario: AI unlocks massive demand for developers across every industry, not just tech. Healthcare, agriculture, manufacturing, and finance all start embedding software and automation. Rather than replacing developers, AI becomes a force multiplier that spreads development work into domains that never employed coders. We’d see more entry-level roles, just different ones: “AI-native” developers who quickly build automations and integrations for specific niches.

This is what I expect to happen, but why would these entry-level roles be "developers". I think it's more likely that they will be roles that already exist in those industries, where the responsibilities include (or at least benefit from) effective use of AI tools.

I think the upshot is that more people should probably be learning how to work in some specific domain while learning how to effectively use AI to automate tasks in that domain. (But I also thought this is how the previous iteration of "learn to code" should be directed, so maybe I just have a hammer and everything looks like a nail.)

I think dedicated "pure tech" software where the domain is software rather than some other thing, is more likely to be concentrated in companies building all the infrastructure that is still being built to make this all work. That is, the models themselves and all the surrounding tools, and all the services and databases etc. that are used to orchestrate everything.
by maxloh | 2026-01-12 16:28:29+00:00
> That's my hill to die on : you must have a self hosted agent.

That’s only true if you’re building simple workflows.

A counter-example would be a workflow that builds and uploads Android APKs. When I last checked last year, there weren't any well-maintained Docker images with the Android SDK pre-installed, and there are no updated, publicly available builds for the runner-images: https://github.com/actions/runner-images/issues/176
by adolph | 2026-01-12 16:29:24+00:00
Yes, seeing this product's very angular non-3d-printed yet-prototype design brought back memories of the days when the default portable hardware interface didn't always include a pointing device and thus there were these clip-on trackballs, like below.

Maybe some of the weirdest were things that looked like small mice that were linked and position-sensed by a bar linkage to the laptop. I can't find a reference to one tho, so maybe I'm mis-remembering?

http://xahlee.info/kbd/logitech_trackman_portable_trackball....
by Ygg2 | 2026-01-12 16:29:35+00:00
> I don't know if the "reasonable definition" of GC matters at all

If you define all non-red colors to be green, it is impossible to talk about color theory.

> And Rust wins the Razzie Award for most painful development and lack of similarly powerful arenas.

That's a non-quantifiable skill issue. Segfaults per issue is a quantifiable thing.

> When you have less safety for any property, you're guarnateed to have more violations.

If that's what you truly believed outside some debate point. Then you'd be advocating for ATS or Ada.SPARK, not Zig.
by staticassertion | 2026-01-12 16:29:38+00:00
> I also have craving as everyone else,

I laughed at loud at this. What an insane thing to claim. "I can experience the qualia of others, quantify it, and claim that mine is identical" lol

Also it's empirically false that all people experience the same level of craving. We have studies demonstrating different dopamine responses etc.
by AnimalMuppet | 2026-01-12 16:29:58+00:00
I'm not sure...

My read is that Vance may be a pure opportunist. He may be doing what he has to in order to stay in Trump's good graces, because that's where power is right now. But I've seen him put out very quiet "yeah, that's the administration's position, but I don't actually agree with it" messages once or twice.

I don't think he's someone who is under sway of the Trump cult of personality. I suspect that Vance's agenda is Vance.
by csemple | 2026-01-12 16:30:02+00:00
I appreciate the feedback. Let me address the key technical point:

On enforcement mechanism: You've misunderstood what the system does. It's not asking the LLM to determine security.

The Capacity Gate physically removes tools before the LLM sees them:

user_permissions = ledger.get_effective_permissions()
allowed_tools = [t for t in tools if (user_permissions & t['x-rosetta-capacity']) == t['x-rosetta-capacity']]

If READ_ONLY is active, sql_execute gets filtered out. The LLM can't see or call tools that don't make it into allowed_tools.

response = client.messages.create(tools=allowed_tools)

This isn't RBAC checking after the fact. It's capability control before reasoning begins. The LLM doesn't decide permissions—the system decides what verbs exist in the LLM's vocabulary.

On Ring 0/1: These are enforced at the application layer via the Capacity Gate. The rings define who can change constraints, not how they're enforced.

On MCP: MCP handles who you are. This pattern handles what you can do based on persistent organizational policies. They're complementary.

The contribution isn't "LLMs can do RBAC" (they can't). It's "here's a pattern for making authority constraints persistent and mechanically enforceable through tool filtering."

Does this clarify the enforcement mechanism?
by boringg | 2026-01-12 16:30:10+00:00
>What I’m saying is human greed and short sightedness do not suddenly go away because a nation decides on a different political/economic system. The implication that it only happened because it was the Soviet Union is what I’m taking issue with because it absolutely could happen in the US without proper guardrails. All it takes is one bad company cutting the wrong corner or firing the one person who spoke out. It’s very easy to see no society is immune to this.

Those are your words - they align exactly and I stand by what I said. No axe to grind here but will defend nuclear energy from weak arguments. Your line of reasoning is reductionist saying that what happened in Soviet Russia could simply happen anywhere because of corners cut in your words when in fact there have been no other nuclear meltdowns as terrible as Chernobyl since Chernobyl.

Whether you realize it or not you are making a safety argument by invoking Soviet mistakes and making them sound comparable and inevitable to the rest of the world which has had a pretty good spot record (less Fukushima and 3 mile, but those outcomes aren't comparable to Chernobyl).

You also have a great week - I hope my messaging sharpens what you are implying by your written argument.
by rootusrootus | 2026-01-12 16:30:17+00:00
I can't say exactly what the numbers are, but anecdotally, there are a lot of "research" users buying tirz (and reta, for that matter) for a few bucks a week on the gray market. The better known sources sell out batches in a week or two, which amounts to 750K-1M worth of product (at gray prices, not retail). There's a reason you're starting to see regular news stories about it.

I'm curious how these below-the-radar users skew the numbers. Maybe not at all?
by pessimizer | 2026-01-12 16:30:39+00:00
This is ahistorical. If you had cable, you had 100+ channels, and there was no difficulty in numbering them and navigating them through the channel up/down buttons. There weren't even only half a dozen broadcast stations in any city in the US at least since the 50s - you at least had ABC, NBC, CBS and PBS in VHF, and any number of local and small stations in UHF.

The thing that didn't scale was the new (weird, not sure why) latency in tuning in a channel after the DTV transition, and invasive OS smart features after that. Before these, you could check what was on 50 channels within 10 seconds; basically as fast as you could tap the + or - button and recognize whether something was worth watching; changing channels was mainly bound by the speed of human cognition. I think young people must be astounded when they watch movies or old TV shows where people flip through the channels at that speed habitually.
by colechristensen | 2026-01-12 16:30:41+00:00
Not particularly.

Flat earth, anti-vax, alt-right -- a significant influencer in these things and others were early trolls ... being trolls.

The fun of keeping a straight face while you say ridiculous things isn't so fun when you see everyone in the presidential administration doing it. People who didn't get the original joke took the bait and ran with it.
by program_whiz | 2026-01-12 16:30:57+00:00
Maybe one other thing to consider -- I think its usually best to have a killer game idea that seems fun, then design around it (and select the proper engine), rather than simply "I want to build an engine with some capabilities, then I'll figure out what games to make later."

Have seen this with a lot of software "frameworks" (web, game, graphics, etc.). Nothing wrong with writing an amazing tech demo just for the hell of it, but then when it comes time to do "real world" tasks, the frameworks are often in search of a fitting problem.
by heywoods | 2026-01-12 16:31:13+00:00
I am not a regular basketball fan. I love to play and I love to go to love games but I’ve never enjoyed the TV experience. Ben is right. If they released an NBA package where I could enjoy the game as they demonstrated in the Apple Store I would have bought the Vision Pro that same day.

I could “feel” the basketball dribble past me. I could hear the squeaky shoes as they rushed past. It was an experience I haven’t had since high school sitting on the bench :p
by overfeed | 2026-01-12 16:31:19+00:00
KDE 4.0 - which introduced plasma - was released in 2006, and it was awful and wasn't supposed to be generally available (blame the distros and/or poor version naming). By version 4.5 (2010), KDE had stabilized. By the time Gnome 3 and Windows 8 were released in 2011/2012 respectively, KDE plasma was pleasant to use and rock-solid

It felt great to watch Gnome stumble after all the shit-talking, some schadenfreude was in order. I didn't care much for Windows 8; Vista was a the bigger mess of a release.
by ajross | 2026-01-12 16:31:20+00:00
> Are those links to a manifesto?

Statements about policy goals can only debated if... they appear in a "manifesto"?

With all respect: WTactualF? Trump didn't even have a manifesto! This is just a license to excuse whatever vote you want.

The obvious truth is that the guy is an intemperate loon, has always been an intemperate loon, and is behaving like an intemperate loon in office, and along policy axes that you could absolutely see ahead of time.
Ask HN: Erratic HN front page algorithm
by 7777777phil | 2026-01-12 16:31:37+00:00
Last week I had two submissions reach the HN front page. Before that, I assumed the ranking followed a roughly monotonic time-decay curve once a post peaked. While watching these two posts, I noticed something different: their rank would sometimes improve after declining, and occasionally oscillate back and forth (Here is a graph showing this behavior: https://imgur.com/a/AQnSh6I). what mechanisms in the HN ranking algorithm cause this kind of non-monotonic movement. Is it due to vote weighting, comment activity, re-ranking batches, or something else?

The graph is from: https://track-hacker-news.com/

EDIT: This is the post referenced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46512881
by piltdownman | 2026-01-12 16:31:45+00:00
Except they don't - enforcement is circumvented by psuedo-anonymous users pushing illegal ad campaigns that revert back to inoffensive content or a similar cop-out by the time Meta/X responds to the report

https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/despicable-simon-harri...

https://www.reddit.com/r/irishpolitics/comments/1i1shz3/anyo...
by jrockway | 2026-01-12 16:31:54+00:00
Yeah, Zepbound is $499 now. Out of reach of many, but an improvement from $549 last year.

The terms and conditions are confusing. You can only use the half-off coupon they provide if you have prescription drug insurance. Even if insurance doesn't cover it, they still require the processing pharmacy to check that you have some sort of valid insurance and only process the coupon if so. If you fall into that bucket, it's $1200 or something. (Had to pay that amount one month because Amazon Pharmacy was very confused about my gender marker changing on my insurance. Many, many support tickets later, and it got fixed.)

There is also some price difference between the autoinjector and the single-use vial + provide your own needle and syringe. I haven't looked into that because it's the same with the coupon, but if you can't get the coupon to work, it's an option to just inject it yourself. Honestly I prefer not using the autoinjectors (I inject other medications), but it's the path of least resistance.

Finally, the coupon claims it only works for 7 fills, but I've been taking the medication for a couple years and all my fills have been covered. I don't really understand it. I have a feeling that I'm the only person in the world that read the fine print, including the pharmacies and manufacturer :/
by simonw | 2026-01-12 16:32:09+00:00
Nothing I've seen from the AI labs appears to indicate that they are worried about model collapse in the slightest.

That makes sense to me, because if their models start getting worse because there's slop in the training data they can detect that and take steps to fix it.

Their entire research pipeline is about finding what makes models that score better! Why would they keep going with a technique that scored worse?
by skeeter2020 | 2026-01-12 16:32:15+00:00
I think we can assume it will create disruption, but by definition this is both positive and negative for different individuals & dimensions, and it is small solace if society improves while your life languishes or declines - this is just what's happened to a generation of young males in the US and is having huge repercussions. I think you're right to suggest the goal is to avoid letting the uncertainity make you depressed, but that does not automatically make it so of everyone.
by Fazebooking | 2026-01-12 16:32:16+00:00
People are already working for years on Zootopia 2 and every one of their technolical advances were driven by that movie.

These inventions are represented at Siggraph and are often also research paper and land in the whole ecosystem (in software like hudini).

LDR live from their ideas and stories and experiments with styles. I don't think its relevant for technology it would just be a tech demo.
by benoau | 2026-01-12 16:32:19+00:00
Enemies? Google contributes about 20% of Apple's profits annually through their default search engine deal, that's more profitable than just about everything they do or make except selling iPhones.

> The U.S. government said Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai met in 2018 to discuss the deal. After that, an unidentified senior Apple employee wrote to a Google counterpart that “our vision is that we work as if we are one company.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-20/apple-goo...
by zzzeek | 2026-01-12 16:32:26+00:00
just so you know, this line

> Where you'd rather have every comment, change and scrap of info available to understand what you're trying to maintain because the folks before you are long gone.

see that's a common story from a legacy way of working, back when everyone wrote perl / php scripts and shoved it all into a repo.

The way that people years from now understand what someone else did is that when that someone else does the thing, it's presented for code review. That is, your patch does not go in at all if nobody else knows how it works. You present each change as a logical series of commits, without lots of noise like "fixed typo" or "oops forgot this test", just the way people present patches on the LKML (this is why Linus "got it" before anyone else did), and then other people review it, which is where it's established, "this change makes sense, I understand why and how you did it, and it has good tests".

When you work on a project that is truly long term, you yourself need these records to understand what you did 10 or 15 years ago. So there's no issue that short term history was modified, this is actually essential, because what you're doing is editing the story of how a change came about and presenting it for review. Having it be a long series of small commits that sometimes reverse each other is not going to help anyone understand a particular feature or change, it's noise.
by sublinear | 2026-01-12 16:32:29+00:00
> My complaint is about more than parsing or syntax or “developer ergonomics” ... My problem with Date is that using it means deviating from the fundamental nature of time itself.

I don't really have a problem with the substance of this blog post. I have a problem with this exaggerated writing style. It means deviating from the fundamental purpose of writing itself!

I had to scroll all the way to the end to find the actual point, and it was underwhelming.

> Unlike Date, the methods we use to interact with a Temporal object result in new Temporal objects, rather than requiring us to use them in the context of a new instance

Bro, just be honest. This entire blog post was totally about developer ergonomics and that's okay. We all hate the way Date works in javascript.