MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by antonvs | 2026-01-08 21:19:52+00:00
You're right, my short comment was densely packed with meaning. Let's unpack.

First, as someone else observed in a sibling reply: "I think that's how we got to this point today, tbh." That's worth keeping in mind.

Second, when one says one wants "maximally vindictive candidates", whether intended or not, it implies behaving more like the party in power. Be careful what you wish for.

Third, related to the second point, if a comment can be interpreted in favor of either side, that may suggest it leaves something to be desired.

Following the principle of charity, perhaps "vindictive" is the wrong word. Perhaps all that's needed are candidates who'll enforce the law.

All in all, if anyone is being "dense" here, I'm not sure it's me. Do you own a mirror?
by phs318u | 2026-01-08 21:20:21+00:00
Not sure that putting a non-deterministic black box with zero scrutability and unknown biases in the hands of people with little understanding of financial markets and investment instruments counts as “democratising” anything.

Lots of folks are going to blindly follow what the magic “make me rich machine” says. This sounds like a faster way to part fools from their money.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2026-01-08 21:21:04+00:00
> Land is not scarce in Cheyenne, so housing is cheap. But people don't flock there because they don't have any job prospects in WY

> How about: "People HAVE to live in Tokyo, because there are no job prospects outside of Tokyo"?

How about: people don't want to be located 3+ hours outside the city, and neither do many employers? Being fully-employed in the middle of nowhere is still pretty undesirable. This is borne out in housing prices: the people buying houses in Cheyenne are likely just as employed as the people buying houses in Newark or NYC, and yet the market rate for the former is still much lower.

> That's because they _have_ to work in NYC.

Or, because they want to live in NYC: socialization and meetups and camaraderie around every conceivable interest, innumerable dining options within a matter of blocks, some of the best live entertainment options in the world, friends within walking distance, etc. Case in point:

> I would love to live in a mansion with a private lake, in the middle of Union Square.

The reason you can't have that is the cost, which we're talking about ways to decrease.

> That's why suburbs are such a desirable place

The suburbs are desirable in that they are cheaper: that mansion with a private lake would be cheaper in the suburbs than in the city, so some people choose to settle for the suburbs, while others choose to settle for a less-nice place in the city.

> what if you live 1 hour away from the city core? This still allows you to easily enjoy all the amenities like theaters and shows.

1 hour each-way of driving is a lot, and by then you're usually in a different city. 3-4 hours puts you in a different state, and in some places, it puts you in an entirely different country!
by palmotea | 2026-01-08 21:22:12+00:00
> A couple of rich guys got together and decided they were going to redraw all of the maps and toss the rulebook overboard, and it is for the most part going their way. People are being executed and the useful idiots are falling over each other to defend it.

It's way deeper than that, though. It's stuff like US businessmen choosing to literally move the US's rare-earth magnet production capacity to China, teaching China how make them in the process (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/31/business/china-rare-earth...). It's the US knowing about it's rare-earth vulnerability for a decade or more but being completely unable to do anything about it. It's the US losing other strategic capabilities like large-scale electronics manufacturing capacity, and people being totally fine with that because "cheaper iPhones, more margins, good deal!"
by BenWebbProject | 2026-01-08 21:22:17+00:00
Interesting article - most products are treated as “delivered” the moment they ship. A project manager hands over, success is declared, and the organisation moves on. But physical products with embedded software don’t stop being systems just because the project ends — they keep accumulating risk, cost, and user impact right through to end-of-life.

What usually gets missed is that end-of-life is still part of the project, even if it sits years downstream. When software support is withdrawn without a transition path, the hardware doesn’t just lose features — it loses trust. That’s not a technical failure, it’s a lifecycle planning failure.

Open-sourcing at sunset is interesting because it’s one of the few mechanisms that acknowledges this gap. It doesn’t help most users directly, but it at least hands control back instead of silently bricking capability.

I’m curious whether we’ll start seeing project managers and product teams treat “exit conditions” as a first-class deliverable — with explicit decisions about data, firmware, APIs, and ownership once commercial support ends — rather than treating end-of-life as someone else’s problem.
by r_lee | 2026-01-08 21:23:11+00:00
It's not officially, but nothing prevents you from buying licenses.

I don't use Windows anymore but iirc the easiest way is to get the E3 or E5 licenses. The volume licensing is "Contact us" pricing

LTSC is also Enterprise, but it's meant for e.g. computers attached to an industrial machine/line that rarely gets updated and such. But it's used by many prosumers as a way to avoid bloat and e.g. keep Win10 for longer
by kshacker | 2026-01-08 21:23:11+00:00
Bank of America Preferred rewards card is even better with one caveat that there is a $95 annual fee. You get the 2.625 but you also get 3.5 on travel and dining, and you also get Global Entry paid once every 4 years, and $100 in travel incidentals (bag fees, wifi on plane) every year. And you do not need to redeem against travel, you can get cash back if that's what you want.
by avs733 | 2026-01-08 21:23:55+00:00
This is not about the Bar exam (the test), this is about accreditation of law degrees. The issue is about here is about who determines whether a legal education is sufficient to trust that a lawyer who passes the test is prepared for practice. This issue is the opposite of being completely test-based. The ABA also creates the most common bar exam (the MBE or multistate bar exam) but some states like California use a different exam. The legal profession does not, but many have long argued should, have a practice requirement for independent licensure to practice.

It is akin to ABET (previously Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology) in engineering. having an ABET accredited engineering degree has long been a component (alongside testing and mentored practice) for being a licensed engineer who can stamp drawings (e.g., structural plans for buildings). There are two tests (FE and PE) but they are not created by ABET they are created by an organization called NCEES - The National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying.

ABET and NCEES are different organizations, part of the confusion here is that ABA is both the accreditor and the tester in many states. The difference in path between accreditor -> testing -> licensure is:

ABA accredited degree -> ABA (MBE) or other (non-ABA) Bar exam -> Lawyer

ABET accredited degree -> FE exam (made by NCEES) -> mentored work experience -> PE exam (made by NCEES) -> Professional Engineer
by steer_dev | 2026-01-08 21:23:56+00:00
AI Slop (apologies, filler) isn't just annoying; it is In-Band Signaling Noise. The model mixes control signals (persona) with data (payload).

Prompting ("Be concise") is brittle. I switched to Shannon Entropy.

The Hypothesis: Code/Data is mathematically "messy" (High Entropy). Slop is smooth and predictable (Low Entropy).

I wrote a filter that blocks responses if entropy dips below ~3.5.

The Payoff: It captures the blocked slop as a dataset for DPO. I use the math to gather data today so I can fine-tune a natively quiet model tomorrow.

Repo: https://github.com/imtt-dev/steer
by 9rx | 2026-01-08 21:24:09+00:00
> I'd love a way to statically guarantee I haven't missed an important error type.

It wouldn't be hard — rather easy, even — to write a static analyzer for that if you constrained your expectations to cases where sum types could practically be used. No reason to not do it right now!

But sum types don't really solve for a lot of cases. Even in Go you can add additional constraints to errors to get something approaching sum types. You don't have to use a naked `error`. But you are bound to start feeling pain down the road if you try. There is good reason why even the languages that support defined error sets have trended back to using open-ended constructs.

It does sound great in theory, no doubt, but reality is not so kind.
by EvanAnderson | 2026-01-08 21:24:10+00:00
A comment here also says this is the case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46544001

Looking over the API docs seems to confirm what the comment you referenced and the poster I linked here is saying. I'm seeing calls to virtually press buttons on the speaker, set the input source, to query the presets, and some zone-relayed calls, but nothing about actually playing audio from network sources.

For the call re: presets I see:

> Description: Presets are a core part of the SoundTouch ecosystem. A preset is used to set and recall a specific music stream supported by the SoundTouch speaker

There's a GET method that returns information about presets. Presumably you'd use a POST or PUT method to manage the presents. To that end, under POST, it says:

> POST: N/A

It looks like this API basically allows you to control it like an dumb speaker. That's not nothing, but it's not much either.

There doesn't seem to be anything in the API about controlling how the speak communicates with a back end service.
by tliltocatl | 2026-01-08 21:24:21+00:00
It's not like grouped icons wasn't technically infeasible on win95. And honestly, whatever they are more useful is quite debatable. And personally, I don't even have a task panel anymore.

The real stuff not on Win95 that everyone would miss is scalable interfaces/high DPI (not necessary as in HiDPI, just above 640x480). And this one does require A LOT of resources and is still wobbly.
by MisterTea | 2026-01-08 21:24:34+00:00
I have two solid life long friends from High school. I was the best man for one, that is how close we are. Two of us are planning a future business venture. The three of us get together at least two or three times a year even though we live far apart.

In shop class I impressed my teacher who was a master electrician and businessman. He pressured the school to move a $250k (1994, USD) robotic manufacturing system to our shop and I was given full reign of it. That introduced me to an intersection of computers and electronics which pivoted me from becoming an electrician to an EE. My shop teacher also became my electrician and I hired his son to perform two commercial service installations.

Sorry you missed out on such amazing opportunities.
by Terr_ | 2026-01-08 21:25:09+00:00
I anticipate the definition will become increasingly subjective as we find biology-messiness inconsistent with our concepts of ancestry.

For example, suppose horizontal gene transfer occurs from organism X to organism Y. Does that mean Y is now a branch of X?

* Does it depend on how much was transferred?

* Does it matter only if the specific sequence was passed down? If so, how much mutation is too much mutation?

* What if the same end-result occurred through a retrovirus instead of a plasmid. Is the virus an ancestor too?

* What if the swap was simultaneous and bidirectional?

* What about transitive links to organisms W, V, U that did the same?

* Are mitochondria "us" yet? If so, are we the ancestors if they redevelop enough machinery to "escape"?

etc.
by dctoedt | 2026-01-08 21:27:08+00:00
> Texas State Bar is still a thing. This means that it has split from the American Bar Association, but the legal system of Texas is still part of the US Legal system.

Lawyer here, member of Texas and California bars. There seems to be a misunderstanding here:

1. A state bar is what a lawyer has to belong to in order to practice regularly in that state (with some exceptions, e.g., for federal-court practice). Example: To practice regularly in California, a lawyer must be a member of the State Bar of California. That normally requires passing a bar exam or (in some states if you're an experienced lawyer), getting in by "reciprocity."

(California is an exception to the general approach to reciprocity: I had to take the California bar exam to get admitted to its bar, even though I'd been practicing in Texas for more than 10 years. Similarly, when one of my then-firm's of our lawyers from our Palo Alto office to our Houston office, she had to take the Texas bar exam because California allowed people to be admitted to practice without graduating from an ABA-accredited law school. In contrast, another of our lawyers moved from Chicago to Houston, so he didn't need to take the Texas bar exam.)

AFAIK, every state bar is regulated by the highest court of the state (and, sometimes, by state statute). Example: The State Bar of Texas is subject to regulations promulgated by the Supreme Court of Texas.

2. In contrast, The ABA is a purely-voluntary private association of lawyers. A lawyer doesn't have to belong to the ABA in order to be a lawyer or practice law.

3. IIRC, the ABA's governing body includes liaisons from state bars. But AFAIK, there's never been any official governing connection between the ABA and any state bar.

4. The ABA's law-school accreditation standards [0] are a way for states to adopt uniform standards, thus avoiding the cost of developing individual standards (and of complying with them). Those ABA standards are roughly analogous to national model building codes for plumbing, etc.

[0] https://www.americanbar.org/groups/legal_education/accredita...
by biotechbio | 2026-01-08 21:27:24+00:00
I disagree, in my opinion passing the bar exam is necessary but not nearly sufficient for competently practicing law.

The bar is an imperfect filter. One could study for the exam and pass and still be hugely deficient in ability as an attorney.

I would argue there's no exam that could replace the evaluative and experiential component of 3 years in law school, and accreditation helps enforce at least some standard of quality in the profession. More incompetent lawyers -> more wasteful behavior -> a more bloated and slower legal system -> worse outcomes for everyone.

I think reducing barriers to completing the legal education (part-time programs, lower cost, etc) are better avenues for increasing access.
by convivialdingo | 2026-01-08 21:27:38+00:00
I spent a few months working on different edge compute NPUs (ARM mostly) with CNN models and it was really painful. A lot of impressive hardware, but I was always running into software fallbacks for models, custom half-baked NN formats, random caveats, and bad quantization.

In the end it was faster, cheaper, and more reliable to buy a fat server running our models and pay the bandwidth tax.
by tptacek | 2026-01-08 21:28:00+00:00
What's interesting to me about the question of whether you could realistically compete with Claude Code (not Claude, but the CLI agent) is that the questions boil down to things any proficient developer could do. No matter how much I'd want to try, I have no hope of building a competitive frontier model --- "frontier model" is a distinctively apt term. But there's no such thing as a "frontier agent", and the Charmbracelet people have as much of a shot at building something truly exception as Anthropic does.
by CuriouslyC | 2026-01-08 21:28:16+00:00
Less true than you think. A lot of the progress in the last year has been tightening agentic prompts/tools and getting out of the way so the model can flex. Subagents/MCP/Skills are all pretty mid, and while there has been some context pruning optimization to avoid carrying tool output along forever, that's mainly a benefit to long running agents and for short tasks you won't notice.
by chaps | 2026-01-08 21:28:35+00:00
Agreed.

I'm currently looking to get a law degree and the education requirements are... silly. I've done a significant amount of law-and-law-accessories work over the past ten years and have had a nice career in sysadmin/sre/devops/ops work. Yet I need a(ny) bachelors to even get started and I don't even have an associates.

It truly feels like the only way forward is to waste several years of my life and exhaust myself to the bone to get a degree.

(WGU is awful and is not the answer here)
by NitpickLawyer | 2026-01-08 21:29:13+00:00
The tells are in the cadence. And the not x but y. And the last line that basically says nothing, while using big words. It's like "In conclusion", but worded differently. Enough tells for me to click on their history. They have the exact same cadence on every comment. It's a bit more sophisticated than "chatgpt write a reply", but it's still 100% aigen. Check it out, you'll see it after a few messages in their history.
by afavour | 2026-01-08 21:29:16+00:00
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Deepfakes and their implications are interesting, they’re technical, they’re of interest to hackers. A tech company operating globally and violating the laws in multiple jurisdictions at once? An interesting topic worth of discussion.

Your attempt at gatekeeping here would be more believable if we weren’t all able to look at other submissions on the front page. A government site called “eat real food” has been on the front page for nearly a day now. It’s very convenient to selectively apply guidelines but it’s also transparently dishonest.
by thrance | 2026-01-08 21:29:39+00:00
I talked to these people minutes ago, on the thread about the murder. Trumpists are finding ways to rationalize this assassination. Just like they did Jan 6, the bombings of fishing boats near Venezuela, the other exactions ICE committed, Trump being Epstein's closest friend, etc.

Then I listened to the Vice President claiming she was an "unhinged left-wing lunatic", that she had been radicalized and that she was trying to hurt the ICE agent, and thus she deserved to be shot. A complete, abject lie trying to justify this murder, when everyone saw in the videos she was clearly trying to escape, and no agent was on her path.

EDIT: looking at your comment history, it seems like you are trying to justify her assassination too. We are not friends, no friend of mine attempts to rationalize away the murder of innocents by masked brownshirts. I hope you can escape this death cult sometimes soon, then maybe we could find common ground.
by graemep | 2026-01-08 21:29:56+00:00
Aryan does not equal white.

Definitions of race are very culturally dependent. A few decades ago South Asians were regarded as caucasian (I have an American encyclopedia published in the 1950s that says so), a century earlier so were some East Africans (Somalis IIRC). The current western definition of white does not include them.

Similarly the current American definition of black includes people most of the rest of the world would not consider black - we sometimes have to be told that some people identify as "black" (what Americans call passing as white).
by kentonv | 2026-01-08 21:30:15+00:00
I feel like Jeff's public profile has grown quite a bit since then. Note that in 2008 he wasn't doing anything related to AI yet -- none of that had even started. That has since given him somewhat of a more public role, whereas Sanjay has stayed on infrastructure which is more internal-facing. I do think Jeff Dean Facts in itself has played some part in enhancing his celebrity status, too.

With that said, I suppose it's hard for me to say what the public perception of the two was in 2008 as I only knew of either of them from working there.
by defrost | 2026-01-08 21:30:18+00:00
+1 for working out the issue on your own. As commentary:

> at least find out what the "beef" you support is about!

It's a problem many wish to see resolved, it's not a fight I "support" like a punter at a boxing match.

I guess if I wanted to find out more about this "beef" I might read a paper, talk to a person, or go to a conference.

* Bright unintended electromagnetic radiation from second-generation Starlink satellites - https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2024/09/aa51856-...

* Federico Di Vruno https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7454-7883

* Centre for the Protection of the Dark and Quiet Sky - https://cps.iau.org/

Thank you for that suggestion.

> Ultimately, astronomical observatories should be in space anyway.

Well, that's certainly an opinion.

There's a wide range of survey programs and in terms of bang for buck it makes sense for some to be in space, others not so much.

Ultimately there should be somewhat less space junk in LEO's but sadly that's a problen that is only going to get worse now multiple parties want oversized SpaceTwitter type constellations.
by libraryofbabel | 2026-01-08 21:30:23+00:00
Yeah, there is definitely some RLVR training going on for the Claude LLMs to get them good at some of the specific tool calls used in Claude Code, I expect. Having said that, the string replacement tool schema for file edits is not very complicated at all (you can see it in the tool call schema Claude Code sends to the LLM), so you could easily use that in your own 200-300 line agent if you wanted to make sure you're playing to the LLM's strengths.
by observationist | 2026-01-08 21:30:32+00:00
The idea that tokenization is what they're for is absurd - you're talking a tenth of a thousandth of a millionth of a percent of efficiency gain in real world usage, if that, and only if someone bothers to implement it in software that actually gets used.

NPUs are racing stripes, nothing more. No killer features or utility, they probably just had stock and a good deal they could market and tap into the AI wave with.
by kshacker | 2026-01-08 21:30:35+00:00
I paid my son's tuition yesterday at a 2.90% charge. Since the cashback of 2.625 is also on the charge, my net cost for about 10.6K tuition was about $15. I keep the money invested in SGOV (state tax exempt), for a month, I make that $15 anyways, and it helps me follow lessons from corporations - pay only at the latest due date without any charges.

So in this case there was no saving, just a deferment of payment, but if the charge was 2.5%, 2.2% or 1.9% (like I did for something else), you absolutely saved some money besides deferment.

I am not starving for pennies, but using the card to get 2.62% back has become a habit and until recently the highest I had paid was 2.75%, the 2.9% was just yesterday for the first time and rather than think more about the impact, I just paid it.
by palmotea | 2026-01-08 21:30:42+00:00
> There's not a shortage of lawyers and Texas is not pushing for freedom.

Exactly. Law isn't medicine, and there are so many law graduates that many of them can't even find work in the legal industry, and the earnings of many graduates are surprisingly low (the distribution is bimodal: https://www.nalp.org/salarydistrib).

Unfortunately too many here will reflexively believe some libertarian narrative of "professional organization limiting supply to drive salaries up," even when it doesn't apply.