MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nl | 2026-01-10 06:56:12+00:00
> Using English, with all its inherent ambiguity, to attempt to communicate with an alien (charitably) mind very much does /not/ make this task any easier if the thing you need to accomplish is of any complexity at all.

This just isn't the case.

English can communicate very simply a set of "if.. then.." statements and an LLM can convert them to whatever stupid config language with I'm dealing with today.

I just don't care if Cloudflare's wrangler.toml uses emojis to express cases or AWS's Cloudformation required some Shakespearean sonnet to express the dependencies in whatever the format of the day is.

Or don't get me started on trying to work out which Pulami Google module I'm supposed to use for this service. Ergh.

I can express very clearly what I want, let a LLM translate it then inspect the config and go "oh that's how you do that".

It's great, and is radically easier than working through some docs written by a person who knows what they are doing and assumed you do too.
by fancy_pantser | 2026-01-10 06:56:28+00:00
I use smaller fonts as well and when I first got an older OLED display with a pixel layout not supported by Windows ClearType, I used BetterClearTypeTuner and later MacType to adjust it. It was leagues better after tweaking a few settings and I'm very happy with text now, even on my AW3425DW, which has an older layout they moved on from in recent generations.
by conductr | 2026-01-10 06:56:30+00:00
I’ve experienced this all before in similar ways. The metric for meetings ending on time isn’t even very useful because when it’s needed people will ask “do you have a hard stop?” or similarly agree to continue the meeting. Often because of all the points you made, it’s the IC that stick around to talk about finer points or specifics of what was decided or discussed. It’s best to do this while it’s fresh and between people that can “talk shop” at a granular level (whatever that means for your org/team). It’s actually a good thing your ICs want to collaborate or align separate from management. If you’re a manager and you could technically continue on the meeting, consider opting out to give them space as peers. I often ask “do you all need me to stay one?” and most often it’s a No. It all means that it’s basically 2 meetings occurring and it’s the scheduling calendar artifact that is faulty.
by f1shy | 2026-01-10 06:57:03+00:00
Yes. For sure we will never be able to 100% automate the whole SWE process. As you say, the first input is a human wish, and there comes the joke of the genie that always screw the wishes by leaving something obvious out, because not explicitly specified. Also I think at some point the halting problem will make some programs impossible to test. But it would so great, program in a loose syntax, but with more safety than Rust and Ada together
by jmyeet | 2026-01-10 06:57:42+00:00
You do have that right. You just can't use banking apps in Vietnam on such devices.

This is really no different to the antivaxxer arguments in the peak pandemic era. Some people didn't want vaccines. Fine. Well, not fine. None of it is based on any kind of rational argument but nobody was strapped down and forced to have one. But not having one meant there were certain jobs you couldn't have. Just like for decades unvaccinated children couldn't go to public school.

You make a choice and if you don't like the consequences of that choice, that's a you problem.
by pseudohadamard | 2026-01-10 06:58:25+00:00
Another good read is the SQLite locking module, https://www.sqlite.org/src/artifact/0240c5b547b4cf585c8cac35..., since these guys have to deal with the insanity of locking across different systems in real life.

You know things are bad when the least awful implementation of OS-level locking is the one from Microsoft.
by polack | 2026-01-10 06:58:35+00:00
Surly this post must have the opposite effect of what he intended. Even if you side with Cloudflare on the core issue this post is so cringy my butthole collapsed into itself.

Are Americans not embarrassed by the way these tech bros operate? As a European it’s obvious that the US gone from an allied to an enemy. I would feel like a traitor if I picked US tech these days.
by subsection1h | 2026-01-10 06:59:23+00:00
It's worse than that. They say they have more important things to do than learn about the software they use every day while posting literally thousands of comments to HN and who knows how many other discussion platforms. And when you search their thousands of comments for "Unix", "Linux", "BSD", "Emacs", etc., it's clear they're mostly interested in software for normies, which would be fine if this site were named Normie News.
by mcny | 2026-01-10 07:01:43+00:00
Sorry but I don't understand

Isn't this a table?

|sn|name|
|--|--|
|1|George|
|2|John|

I feel like I've been doing this at least since about 2013?

Edit: I get it now. It was not a part of the original spec.

|sn|name |
|--|------|
| 1|George|
| 2|John |

It can look better if we use fixed width font and add padding I guess?
Ask HN: 20 months post-Seed, no Series A, safe to assume <3 months runway?
by jennalk | 2026-01-10 07:02:16+00:00
If a startup raised a standard Seed round ($3M) in mid 2024 and hasn't announced a follow-up round by until now:
Is it mathematically possible they are still alive without a bridge round? (Assuming SF/NY burn rates).
Does a quiet pivot to custom client work usually signal the end?
trying to gauge the viability of a company based on these public signals alone. Is this a classic Zombie pattern?
by rabf | 2026-01-10 07:02:22+00:00
When people ask what computer they should buy I always tell them to get any old office computer from ebay and use the rest of the money to buy a really nice monitor, and a really nice keyboard and mouse, as these are the bits you use! For most tasks that are undertaken on a computer any processor from the last 10 years coupled with 16GB of ram is more than sufficient.
by saghm | 2026-01-10 07:02:29+00:00
Isn't that kind of a general problem with proofs, even when they're written by humans? There's nothing stopping someone from accidentally writing their own Lean proof that has slightly different semantics than an English version of the same proof, or even for their English proof to subtly miss something important or make an incorrect logical leap. This seems like a bit of a double standard, although maybe there's nuance here I'm missing.
by altairprime | 2026-01-10 07:04:52+00:00
From a U.S. standpoint: Licensing is a function of copyright. A work not subject to copyright cannot be licensed productively as-is, as the public domain quality of the work is a trivial and conclusive defense against a licensor’s claims of copyright violation. Fair use is not subject to copyright. Since licensing enforcement is only possible with an applicable copyright, enforcement cannot be completed against fair uses, as copyright law is not applicable to fair uses and therefore licensing enforcement has no legal basis. However, a judgment may overturn a defense of fair use brought against a defendant in a licensing enforcement claim, which would then subject the defendant’s use to copyright law and thus to license enforcement.

It’s midnight now, so you’re on your own to dig up and review specific instances of relevant case law, or to contrast with non-U.S. laws. Licensing above refers to i.e. LICENSE files of the specific sort that this post is about ("MIT Non-AI License"); other definitions of licensing, as well as e.g. DMCA exceptions, exist that might be of interest for you to explore further. I believe there’s been a handful of cases related to AI and fair use this past year, but as with all such defenses, unique circumstances are common enough that I hesitate to suggest any future outcome as 100% certain without much more case law than AI has today. (I am not your lawyer, this is not legal advice.)
How do you map runtime text back to source code without source maps?
by ryan_rudd | 2026-01-10 07:05:19+00:00
I’m building a dev tool that tries to do "reverse rendering"—you click an element on the frontend, and it opens the source code that generated it in your IDE.

I’ve got the easy stuff working perfectly. If the DOM says <p>Hello World</p> and the code contains return <p>Hello World</p>, my AST chunker + vector embeddings find it instantly.

But I’m hitting a wall with dynamic data.

If the user sees Tuesday, Dec 23 on the screen, the code responsible is usually something like:

{date ? new Date(date).toLocaleDateString(...) : 'TBD'}

My current approach (chunking the file and embedding the chunks) fails hard here.

Embeddings fail: The semantic vector for "Tuesday" is miles away from toLocaleDateString.

Grep fails: Obviously, the string "Tuesday" doesn't exist in the file.

I really want to avoid instrumenting the build pipeline (e.g., no custom Babel plugins adding data-source attributes) because I want this to work on "plain" repos.

Has anyone successfully bridged this gap? I'm considering using an LLM to "hallucinate" the source code based on the UI text before searching, but that feels slow/expensive.

How would you solve this?
by fzeroracer | 2026-01-10 07:05:26+00:00
I feel like posting this up top for context [1]. This is an example of someone actually getting hit by a car, from an ICE agent driving with clear intent to harm someone while laughing about it. I would assume that everyone who believes Renee was committing vehicular assault would agree that this is also a case of vehicular assault, and the agent in question should be charged with attempted murder.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ICE_Watch/comments/1pjye82/ice_agen...
by childintime | 2026-01-10 07:06:14+00:00
Without the excess? From the site:

> Straight double quotes (") and single quotes (') are parsed as curly quotes

I don't know who actually likes curly quotes, they are clearly excess to me. And as parsing sometimes fails (as the site says it may), you get inconsistent results, and failures stick out like a sore thumb.

Here is another syntax: this is <*bold>. Very unlikely to clash, can be vibe coded in an hour. But it's more of the same.
by cheema33 | 2026-01-10 07:07:43+00:00
I have been using a 48" LG OLED TV as a monitor for about 2 years. I thought I would love it. But I hated it. Text looked horrible. I was going mad and then Google'd a bit to see if others hated it too. And found that they did. But luckily there are settings that can be changed to turn it into an excellent computer monitor. Once I changed the right settings, it was love. I have 3 monitors on my desk. 32" LG LEDs on the side, 48" OLED in the middle. All 4K. I love this setup. I do occasionally think about replacing the LEDs. I just need the OLED pricing to drop a little more.
by CjHuber | 2026-01-10 07:08:04+00:00
I'm so glad I switched to fish, I'd rather have genuinely good settings out of the box rather than endless configuration, and honestly it's much better out of the box than any configuration I've ever had.

Only drawback is that it's not POSIX, no issue for me, but maybe for people who have a lot of muscle memory with bash.
by tsoukase | 2026-01-10 07:11:15+00:00
Physical exercise, like diet, and mood are complicated bio-psycho-social functions that are depended on dozens of overlapping factors in each person. Most meta-analyses and their underlying studies ignore most of these dimensions and come to a binary yes-no conclusion based on a mere p-value. Huge confounding effects persist that the studies should heavily take into account. At least examining such popular functions provide large samples cheaply.
by Quothling | 2026-01-10 07:11:44+00:00
More of everyone will die. It's not just the anti-vax children, infants, eldery, chronic, or, the immunocompromised people who get it worse when herd immunity disappears. Vaccines are risk reducers, but it's not like they are perfect + the increased toll on the hospitals make more outbreaks bad for everyone.

It's one of the reasons the anti-vax movement never made any sense to me. Flat Earth is silly, but at least it's perfectly harmless, but anti-vax?
by shiredude95 | 2026-01-10 07:12:48+00:00
there's some nuance to this. people might want to spend minimal time hacking on their shell and more time hacking on things they find interesting that are not related to shell setup (and also not webshit). besides even if its webshit, what makes you say shell setup hacking is more or less interesting compared to webshit hacking. the term webshit itself implies you view it as less interesting than shell setup -- fair if thats your pov, but doesnt make it intrinsic.
by gimmeThaBeet | 2026-01-10 07:13:08+00:00
jeez 8-18 years, is that a record or is it one of those things they don't know enough about them to narrow down?
that's another thing to think about when my ignorant self is eating my sushi.
i used to assume that farmed salmon was marginally better than wild,
but given how much wild fish gets fed to farmed fish, not sure that is even a plus on top of the ecological effects of fish farming.
Show HN: Gödel Task Router – Autonomous Quantum Task Orchestration on AWS Braket
by epochcore | 2026-01-10 07:13:26+00:00
Hi HN! I built Gödel Task Router, an autonomous quantum computing orchestration system that routes computational tasks across AWS Braket devices (54 IQM Emerald + 20 IQM Garnet qubits).

Key features:
• Autonomous task routing with 99.9507% uptime
• Flash Sync coherence monitoring across distributed quantum systems
• Real-time validation with blockchain-level verification
• Handles 826 qubits + 137 orchestration agents

The system just completed VQE optimization jobs on both IQM quantum processors. Happy to answer questions about the architecture, quantum orchestration challenges, or AWS Braket integration!

GitHub: https://github.com/Jvryan92/epochcore-scripts
by safety1st | 2026-01-10 07:14:57+00:00
The parent comment's point is that you can reduce the amount of executive function required to do the correct thing. Doing something at the same time every day will indeed make it more automatic, requiring less willpower to do it again tomorrow. This effect applies whether you're neurotypical or not and is grounded in behavioral research.

There are better examples in my opinion than just doing something at 18:00 every day. There's a technique called habit stacking where you identify all the habits you already have at a given time (like when you first wake up), and then you add one more at the end. It's easier to introduce a new habit this way, and it becomes ingrained more quickly, resulting in less need to use executive function.

There are still more techniques. An example from my personal life: in my whole adult life, I've never gone to the gym... unless I sign up for a gym that's right across the street from my workplace. Then it happens like clockwork. If all I need to do is walk across the street, I end up in the gym, and inevitably, I work out. If I need to drive 20 minutes though, well my willpower just ain't that great, so it basically never happens.

The best book I've read on this topic is Atomic Habits by James Clear. He goes deep down the rabbit hole of these techniques you can employ and touches on the research it's all based on. The brain's not a computer so I mean it's not all just going to come together automatically, but in my experience this stuff does work.
by arcticbull | 2026-01-10 07:17:07+00:00
An amendment requires 2/3 of the house and 2/3 of the senate -- or 34 of 50 states to call for a constitutional convention (which has never been done) -- just to float an amendment.

Then 3/4 of the states have to ratify it.

I don't think you could get half of states to agree the sky is blue let alone 3/4.

[edit] The Equal Rights Amendment has been in progress since 1972 and while they somehow managed to get 3/4 of states to agree (Virginia agreed in 2020) the 7- and later 10-year deadline built into the bill had long elapsed. And 5 states later tried to rescind their ratifications which isn't really covered in the constitution in the first place.

That one says simply:

> Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged on account of sex.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is godspeed.
by ipince | 2026-01-10 07:17:11+00:00
MIT does this. Every class starts 5 mins past, and also ends 5 mins early.

We did this at Google too while I was there (only the started 5-mins past part). It works really well.

No need to change the Calendar events though. It's just implicit that we'll start 5-mins past. (Or, well, explicit in MIT's case).
by qalmakka | 2026-01-10 07:18:33+00:00
Calling butter or red meat "healthy" is so utterly wrong. Saturated fat is at best neutral, and probably bad for you. Putting it in the same league as extra virgin olive oil is an insult to anyone with intelligence, even lard would be less bad than that

And given that we know that red meat is probably carcinogen it's insane for anyone to recommend its consumption. You should be eating as little of it as possible and focus on fish, beans and poultry. Ironically there are basically no recommendations anywhere to eat more beans.

Is so blatantly clear to me that the USDA and RFK jr got bought by the meat and dairy industry that's not even funny
by vmt-man | 2026-01-10 07:18:40+00:00
I tried the macos and ios versions of Orion yesterda and it was a great experience.

I've used Brave from the beginning but it has become bloated with web3-related stuff and has outdated UX (imo) on mobile.

Orion desktop is inspired by Safari, Arc in a best way. Ad-blocking and chrome/firefox extensions from the beginning, convenient vertical tabs, mature level of ui customization.

Glad it see on Linux too.
by vga42 | 2026-01-10 07:20:14+00:00
>1. Why Musk made such a hard-right turn politically, alienating most of his customers. People on the left were always far more likely to buy an EV than those on the right.

Yeah, makes no sense. Also anecdotally, I bought their EV out of concern for the environment and the thought that oil should be consumed as little as possible for geopolitical reasons.

Philip Low, a long-time peer and friend of Elon Musk offered one theory shortly after the nazi salutes: https://old.reddit.com/r/samharris/comments/1ibajmf/philip_l... (sorry about the format, couldn't find a better source)

He claims that Musk is just attracted to power and trolling, and will do both cynically instead of from any kind of principles. He guesses that Musk was worried at the time of losing the support of some actual nazis in the actual US government and wanted to signal them publically.

I'm not sure if a cynical nazi supporter is better or worse than an actual nazi. Could be worse, because those are the people who could and should be making better choices.
by pinky07 | 2026-01-10 07:20:32+00:00
Open Source is more a development model than a business model. It helps to evolve faster, but it's not a value for the end-user.

Today, we have way more free trials on the saas, than download of the open source version.

Our clients (entrepreneurs, CFO, logistic, HR ...) don't care that we are open source: they just want the best product, at a good price.

But it helped us grow our partner network of IT companies. For them, open source is a real value.
by lispking | 2026-01-10 07:21:02+00:00
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by lgeek | 2026-01-10 07:21:18+00:00
BunnyCDN don't run their own network, most of their servers are hosted at DataPacket(.com), but they use some other hosting companies too.

DataPacket has a very large network though and is kind of, sort of EU-based. AFAIK most operations are in Czechia, but the company is registered in UK. And there's also the Luxembourg-based Gcore.
by napkinartist | 2026-01-10 07:21:26+00:00
In every other case, in every other industry, we call people who buy a limited resource, transform it in no way, and sell it at a profit a "scalper".

For a long time I thought, "maybe landlords are offering some service and not just squeezing people...." But over the past decade it's become clearer and clearer how predatory and parasitic the industry is. Things like this. Things like landlords all using the same pricing algorithms so they can raise rents in unison.
by saghm | 2026-01-10 07:22:38+00:00
I don't disagree with you, but on the other hand, I feel the same way about code written by other humans, and that's not because they're necessarily worse at writing code than me, but because for code I've written myself, I've already spent time thinking about it, so I don't have to start from scratch when re-reading it. It's also not like I don't think I potentially write as many bugs as my coworkers either; it's just easier for me to catch my own up front as I'm coding than it is to catch theirs in code review. The two main differences are that I can have a more meaningful conversation with my coworkers about their approach, what bugs they might think are worth looking out for, etc. compared to an LLM (which in my experience will claim completely incorrect things about the code it wrote far more often than any engineer I've worked with even junior ones; the humans I've worked with have uniformly been able to report how confident they are in what they've produced being what they were tasked with without insane exaggerations), and that an LLM can produce a much higher volume of plausible-enough looking code in a given unit of time than most humans I've worked with. It's not obvious to me that these would be particularly severe problems in generating proofs though; unless the proof is so large that it would be infeasible to read through it in a reasonable amount of time, I would expect mathematicians to be able to make up for the lower quality conversations with the "author" by devoting more time to reading and thinking, or having someone else also read through the proof and talking through it with them. If anything, it's possible that the timeline for writing up a paper about the results might be better for some mathematicians than the equivalent amount of time most engineers have to spend reviewing code before the pressure to get it merged and move on to the next thing. (I'm aware that there is certainly pressure to get things published in academia, but I don't have firsthand experience, so I've tried to be intentional in how I've worded this to clarify that I want to avoid any assumptions about what the norms would be, but given the relatively wide range of time pressure that engineers might experience across the industry as a whole, I'd expect that at least some mathematicians might have some flexibility to spend extra time reading through an LLM-written proof, especially if it might be time they'd otherwise have to spend trying to come up with the proof themselves).
by magicalhippo | 2026-01-10 07:23:13+00:00
I upgraded my 27" 1440p LCD to a 27" 4k OLED (PG27UCDM) and for me text rendering was a big upgrade.

Yes there is color fringing if I take a zoomed in picture with my camera, but nothing I notice in day to day use. And I've been highly annoyed by missing or bad ClearType rendering.

I specifically went for the 27" to get the extra pixel density though. I might not have been happy with the 32" variant.

That said, the true blacks and bright whites is something else. For me a very significant upgrade both on the desktop and in games, despite the previous being an upper-level LCD when I bought it 4-5 years ago.