MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sanderjd | 2026-01-18 15:31:05+00:00
I'm both amazed by the improvements, and also think they are fundamentally incremental at this point.

But I'm happy about this. I'm not that interested in or optimistic about AGI, but having increasingly great tools to do useful work with computers is incredible!

My only concern is that it won't be sustainable, and it's only as great as it is right now because the cost to end users is being heavily subsidized by investment.
by jsheard | 2026-01-18 15:32:08+00:00
Paying users aren't necessarily profitable users though. It's harder to pin down with OpenAI, but I see no end of Claude users talking about how they're consistently burning the equivalent of >$1000 in API credits every month on the $200 subscription.

(not that ads alone would make up an $800 deficit, they'll have to enshittify on multiple fronts)
by Quarrelsome | 2026-01-18 15:32:17+00:00
if they want dynamic pricing like adwords then its going to be a little challenging. While I appreciate its probably viable and they employ very clever people there's nothing like doing two things that are basically diametrically opposed at the same time. The LLM wants to give you what _should_ be the answer, but the winner of the ad word wants something else. There's a conflict there that I'd imagine might be quite challenging to debug.
by sevensor | 2026-01-18 15:32:26+00:00
> I wonder how many practical engineers use a fountain pen?

Not a lot, but more than zero. I take copious meeting notes and I do a lot of my serious thinking on paper. I find fountain pens vastly more comfortable for writing multiple pages of text, compared to ballpoints.

Left handed users do have to adjust their writing technique, and it’s understandable that many do not find it worth the effort.

I have never held a Montblanc. I believe they run to the hundreds if not thousands of dollars. An extremely niche form of wealth signaling. I’m not sure who they’re even for? Fancy New York bankers maybe? Extremely devoted pen hobbyists? I’d be afraid to carry one around.
by Yemoshino | 2026-01-18 15:32:27+00:00
I found a few papers in this direction with perplexity like this one https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-4005/paper1.pdf and it doesn't seem to be that relevant for now.

The progress of a handful models seem to be so much better (because limited compute, we have only a handful of big ones, i presume) that these finetunings are just not yet relevant.

I'm also curious if a english java + html + css + javascript only model would look like in size and speed for example.

Unfortunate whenever i ask myself the question of finetunging tokens (just a few days ago this question came up again), deep diving takes too much time.

Claude only got lsp support in november i think. And its not even clear to me to what extend. So despite the feeling we are moving fast, tons of basic ideas haven't even made it in yet
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2026-01-18 15:32:32+00:00
Does the term "startup" appear in any dictionaries that predate the internet

Post-internet, a Wikipedia search for "tech startup" redirects to the page for "startup company". Interestingly, it contains a reference to YC

The definition of "startup company" provided relies on a single reference to a 2013 Forbes article

https://web.archive.org/web/20131217064510if_/http://www.for...

What does "tech startup" actually mean. Is there a concise, unambiguous definition

Putting aside the ambiguous term "tech", why not just use the term "company"

The term "company" can be defined concisely as, e.g., "an association of persons for the purpose of carrying on some enterprise or business". Note there is no need to refer to an example company

Is it possible to define "startup" without referring to an example startup
by graemep | 2026-01-18 15:32:37+00:00
> Ah, it is. You eat food, that's fuel. It's the major source of CO2 for both activities.

That implies all exercise is a bad thing. i think you will find very few people are sufficiently keen to reduce CO2 that they will deliberately get less exercise and damage their health. I am certainly not doing that. At the moment I am trying to get more exercise.

> Bikes require very little steel

Compared to a car, certainly. Compared to shoes, an awful lot.

> a bike, which will outlast your children

The typical life span of a bike seems to be about five and ten year years. I really hope my kids last a reasonable multiple of the top end! The level of sales of cycles in the UK (well over 1 million a year) vs the number of people who cycle at least once a week (less seven million) implies a life of about five years. About half of that is leisure cyclists so not really comparable to people using transport to get somewhere.

Leisure cyclists want to get more exercise so by your argument about that being a bad thing they (and therefore half of all UK cyclists) are actively harmful.

https://road.cc/content/news/uk-cycle-sales-plummet-early-19...

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/64e71a4f20ae8...
by pgwhalen | 2026-01-18 15:32:43+00:00
Ah, I think “Math” as a single word on its means many different things to many different people, I didn’t interpret in quite the same way. But I see what you mean.

I’m not sure that my colleagues who I think of as “good at math” and “good at thinking in larger abstractions” are necessarily the same ones, but there’s definitely a lot of overlap.
by IshKebab | 2026-01-18 15:32:52+00:00
I don't think you'll be able to get away from custom distros even with RVA23. It solves the problem of binary compatibility - everything compiled for RVA23 should be pretty portable at the instruction level (won't help with the usual glibc nonsense of course).

But RVA23 doesn't help with the hardware layer - it's going to be exactly the same as ARM SBCs where there's no hardware discovery mechanism and everything has to be hard-coded in the Linux device tree. You still need a custom distro for Raspberry Pi for example.

I believe there has been some progress in getting RISC-V ACPI support, and there's at least the intent of making mconfigptr do something useful - for a while there was a "unified discovery" task group, but it seems like there just wasn't enough manpower behind it and it disbanded.

https://github.com/riscvarchive/configuration-structure/blob...

https://riscv.atlassian.net/browse/RVG-50
by hinata08 | 2026-01-18 15:32:52+00:00
France created an account to defuse Russian fake news on social media last summer

https://uk.diplomatie.gouv.fr/en/minister-talks-about-creati...

As the geopolitical climate shifts, it is already primarily used to troll back on Trump and Elon's interference
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2026/01/18/f...

https://x.com/FrenchResponse/status/2010429570076594647?s=20

This is surprising to me, as media and diplomacy used to be different
by clifdweller | 2026-01-18 15:33:26+00:00
More akin to something like the twitter verified program where companies can bid for relevance in the training set to buy a greater weight so the model will be trained to prefer them. Would be especially applicable for software if azure and aws start bidding on whose platform it should recommend. Or something like when Convex just came out to compete with depth of supabase/firebase training in current model they could be offered to retrain the model giving a higher weight to their personally selected code bases given extra weight for a mere $Xb.
by Freak_NL | 2026-01-18 15:34:18+00:00
Apparently not. If I want to take nice (or naughty) pictures in a beautiful location (nature, urbex, or whatever) without anyone else around, getting up early is key. Going out at 4:30 to catch the first bus and hike an hour, or ride a bicycle somewhere just to get there by sunrise: no problem coffee won't fix. It's worth it too.
by baby_souffle | 2026-01-18 15:34:37+00:00
> I’m going to notice “Susie, while at home drinking her delicious ice cold coca-cola….”

It will be much more subtle. Asking an LLM to help you sift through reviews before you spend $250 on some appliance or what good options are for hotels on your next trip…

Basically the same queries people throw into google but then have to manually open a bunch of tabs and do their own comparison except now the llm isn’t doing a neutral evaluation, it’s going to always suggest one particular hotel despite it not being best for your query.
by SkyliteDesign | 2026-01-18 15:34:55+00:00
I’ve been building VelinScript (Velisch), a small programming language focused on AI‑API development. Version 2.5 is now out, and it’s the first release that feels “complete” enough for real projects.

Core ideas:

simple, modern syntax

Rust‑inspired performance model

built‑in tools for AI workflows (embeddings, similarity, pipelines)

flow‑based execution with automatic rollback

auto‑docs and auto‑tests via decorators

cross‑platform installers (Win/Linux/macOS)

Example:

velin
@Flow
fn checkout(user, cart) {
validate(user)
reserve(cart)
charge(user, cart)
}
If you’re into new languages, API design, or AI‑driven backends, I’d love feedback.

GitHub: https://github.com/SkyliteDesign/velinscript
Docs: https://velinscript.birdapi.de/docs
by techblueberry | 2026-01-18 15:36:24+00:00
Right, I just don’t see how it can be subtle, maybe it will be the opposite where I assume things are ads that aren’t, but any time I see a specific brand or solution I will assume it’s an ad.

It’s not like a movie where I’m engrossed by the narrative or acting and only subliminally see the can of coke on the table (though even then)

Maybe image generation ads will be a bit more subtle.
What if I lie to maxmind?
by redditbannedme | 2026-01-18 15:36:45+00:00
Maxmind offers to correct my geoip, so I wonder what would happen if I just lie by saying “actually I’m in North Korea” or “actually I’m in Bouvet Island” etc. looks like if I wanna try this, I need a dedicated ip so I’m holding off on trying
by maerF0x0 | 2026-01-18 15:36:49+00:00
A developer is just someone who has the ability to create things with technology. Every iteration we do not "replace" developers. We lower the bar such that more and more people can be Developers. (Wether thats time investment/education, IQ, or other elements that were previously barriers)

When electronic spreadsheets were invented there was thought that it was gameover for accountants. There are more accountants per dollar of GDP today than back then. When a thing becomes cheaper we do not just consume the backlog and quit. We actually do more of that thing. Part of the reason is is that there is a very large set of software that was not financially viable to create pre vibe coding. Now it's financially viable to create... Even just throwaway software. Single use software. etc.

Until coding agents are capable of doing engineering superior to like the 90thile _of well trained and experienced engineers_ we will probably have human developers, likely more and more of them.
by tarsinge | 2026-01-18 15:37:35+00:00
This kind of warrior ethos outside of fantasy books or games is a huge turn off to me, it feels so anachronistic. I don’t understand why it seems so prevalent in the US, especially as a country built on Christianity that has Jesus coming as an harmless lamb to teach compassion, humility and love. Courage, devotion, perseverance, sure. Victory or defeat? No thanks.
by baby_souffle | 2026-01-18 15:38:02+00:00
How would the billing work for this? So much of advertising technology is tracking for the purposes of attribution.

How does openAI know what to charge for a particular product and category? How do I know if my money was well spent to boost my product in that category?

I don’t think you’re wrong! I’m just curious about how the new pricing models will work.
by II2II | 2026-01-18 15:38:05+00:00
> but they're already paying you.

That's not how it works. It never has.

Even in the days of print publications, the publisher would seek revenues from advertisers, subscribers, and they would sell their subscriber data. (On top of that, many would have contests and special offers which probed for deeper data about the readership.) In some sense, the subscriber data was more shallow. In other senses, it was more valuable.

I get what you're saying about shooting themselves in the foot, and I'm sure there will be options for corporate clients that will treat the data collected confidentially while not displaying advertising. I also doubt that option will be available (in any official sense) to individuals much as it isn't available (in any official sense) to users of Windows. For the most part, people won't care. Those who would care are those who are sensitive enough about their privacy that they wouldn't use these services in the first place, or are wealthy enough to be sensitive about their privacy that they would could pay for services that would make real guarantees.
by alexfoo | 2026-01-18 15:38:17+00:00
https://maps.app.goo.gl/YpywKrJC4at2RwHy7

I found the coordinates on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_End_tube_station (the link is up in the top right above the photo).

Doesn't appear on this list though (unless it had another name): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_former_and_unopened_Lo...
by glouwbug | 2026-01-18 15:39:14+00:00
Reddit generates its revenue with schadenfreude, YouTube and AAA games with GenAI (see: Ghibli in Call of Duty, and fast growing AI channels like Nick Invests or Bernard with “Why it Sucks to be X”).

On my shelf from the corner of my eye I see “Understanding the Linux Kernel”. It’s outdated, but it comes from a time of peer review and subject matter experts. I don’t need to double guess if the author is hallucinating or if they’re subconsciously trying to sell me something.

Maybe it’s time we return to books for entertainment and knowledge share.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2026-01-18 15:39:27+00:00
But what could an opt-in requirement for advertising possibly mean other than a compliance checkbox that 99% of users click through? It just seems like where you land if you start with the intuition that ad-supported platforms shouldn't be legal, realize that implementing that policy would ban all print media, and do your best to rescue it rather than abandon the idea as unworkable.
by benttoothpaste | 2026-01-18 15:39:45+00:00
I've heard this "soft skills are the only skills that matter" thing throughout my entire career but these days this is indeed greatly amplified.

Our CEO started sharing screenshots of his xitter/linkedin feeds and most of them contain wisdoms like "Opus 4.5 is better than 90% of talent". There is also longer form business fan fiction. It usually follows this template: there is a hero - a humble manager/sales person, and a villain - a cocky, nerdy software developer. The villain claims that some task is impossible or takes months to complete. Then the humble hero (equipped with Opus 4.5) completes the task in 2 hours. The villain is then humiliated/fired and everyone lives happily ever after.

These posts definitely contribute to the declining morale among employees. Nobody goes "above and beyond" anymore - we just strictly doing the tickets and nothing more.
by ben_w | 2026-01-18 15:40:46+00:00
Computer science is indistinguishable from sufficiently advanced maths.

The AI can already do that part.

The abstraction that matters going forward, is understanding why the abstraction chosen by the AI does or doesn't match the one needed by the customer's "big picture".

The AI is a bit too self-congratulatory in that regard, even if it can sometimes spot its own mistakes.
by betaby | 2026-01-18 15:40:58+00:00
> data can often be streamed much faster than with local SSDs. 10GB/s has been available for a decade or more, and I think 100GB/s is available these days.

In practice most AWS instances are 10Gbps capped. I have seen ~5Gbps consistently read from GCS and S3. Nitro based images are in theory 100Gbps capable, in practice I've never seen that.
by opan | 2026-01-18 15:41:04+00:00
Not sure if this will help you, but I keep just one homescreen page with my most-used apps on it, and I've developed muscle memory for all of them. When I set up a new device, I put the same apps in the same spots. Other than the inherent inaccuracy of touchscreens, I could probably open any of them blindly. I also only fill up the bottom half or so of the screen, so they're all easy enough to reach.
by camel-cdr | 2026-01-18 15:41:08+00:00
> But hopefully they'll have something RVA23-compliant out soon (SpacemiT K3?).

A handful of developers already have access to SpacemiT K3 hardware, which is indeed RVA23 compliant and already runs Ubuntu 26.04.

geekbench: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/16145076

rvv-bench: https://camel-cdr.github.io/rvv-bench-results/spacemit_x100/... (which as instruction throughput measurements and more)
by saurik | 2026-01-18 15:41:26+00:00
Just to verify--as I truly do have a contempt for big tech oligopoly that extract rent from everyone to do anything at all, but am just unsure this specific problem is a ramification of such--are you sure you would not have had a large advertising budget pre-Google, or even pre-Internet? You used to pay to pay for limited space in newspapers and limited time on TV/radio stations, which also had high theoretical per-unit margins, or for a massive pile of physical mailers and door hangers, along with the cost of the delivery.

To the extent to which our current situation costs more, I'd think it might merely be because of increased worldwide competition: it used to be that the people trying to advertise to any specific random community were also likely local, and probably had a legit attempt at a business model... only, now, the rise of online companies funded by speculative venture capital means that an attempt to advertise a restaurant to people who live in a 10 mile radius must compete against a company that raised $400m to sell an online engagement platform that cares not one iota who uses it as long as the conversion cost is cheap, bidding up ads everywhere.

(One place that does seem to me to be uniquely the fault of these modern tech companies, though, is that if a newspaper published a scam ad, whether or not they had legal culpability, I think they and their surrounding community did at least strongly feel that they had some level of moral culpability. In the current tech environment, people seem to want to believe Meta/Google should be allowed to indiscriminately publish ads from bad actors, so you now must also compete to bid for limited attention with obvious-to-most-but-not-all scams and grifts that make money out of nothing but bullshit and are thereby willing to again bid up prices anywhere and everywhere.)
by gruez | 2026-01-18 15:41:58+00:00
>As a result, a large amount of potentially usable product is left behind (by some estimates, 40-50%). This is plowed back into the ground before the next crop goes in, providing some nutrients to the soil.

>https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!X5C3!,w_1456,c_limit...

So if you're buying a romaine heart, they're just leaving the non-heart part of the lettuce on the field to rot? I didn't realize romaine hearts were that wasteful.
by jadenpeterson | 2026-01-18 15:42:22+00:00
I can't be the only person completely unconcerned about this state of affairs. They're ads. This is the most straightforward incentive structure in the world - they are paid to supply ads on behalf of other companies, and we consume those ads and are, in turn, provided with their product. I don't know why it is, but people are incapable of evaluating this exchange objectively - there's something inherently detestable about advertisement to the human mind. This is a perfectly reasonable exchange.

Besides, if it wasn't for ads, I never would've found out about Zyns, and now I can't stop buying them.
by physicles | 2026-01-18 15:42:34+00:00
Desktop CPUs have a lot more punch than their equivalent mobile parts.

My current dev machine is an X1 carbon from 2019. Compiling go code is slower than I’d like, some JavaScript-heavy websites like Jira take a couple extra seconds to load, and the GPU can drive a 4k monitor but it isn’t snappy.

Still, the form factor is perfect, and my next upgrade will be exactly the same machine but more powerful and with a brighter display with the same 2.5k resolution.
by pjmlp | 2026-01-18 15:42:55+00:00
Aleph lacked GC, which Rob Pike considered the main reason for its implementation failure on Plan 9, and initially bounds checking was also missing.

Two key design difference from Go and its two predecessors.

Dis is an implementation detail, Go could offer the same dynamism with AOT toolchain, as proven by other languages with ahead of time toolchains available.
by like_any_other | 2026-01-18 15:42:58+00:00
> so doing a ratio on absolute murder numbers is wild right?

Only that's not what I did. Read again - "per crime committed, blacks are less, not more, likely to be jailed".

What I compared was prison population, divided by number of homicides committed, for whites and blacks. It's strange how rarely this is done, because without it, it must look like the courts are fantastically biased against men, with how many more of them there are in jail than women.
by Rochus | 2026-01-18 15:43:47+00:00
I like those kinds of comparisons where you also can hear a part of the song directly, even if only a few seconds. The actual "advantage" of the present songs I noticed in the video is, that after the few seconds I pretty well know the song already, which wouldn't work with "Thriller" or "Beat it". Since then, they "streamlined" not only the harmonics, but also the melodies, and it becomes harder every year to tell these songs apart. I assume we require Northcote Parkinson's theory to explain why these much simpler songs require ten times more composers than the much more complex songs from the eighties.
by preommr | 2026-01-18 15:43:51+00:00
I am so confused, and angry about everything that's happening.

A few weeks ago it was gemini, I got a subscription kept up with things and now if you go to the subreddit it's people saying how bad the quality has degraded.

The hype/bust cycle bullshit is starting to wear really thin given how long the tech has been out, and how much attention it's been given.

Recently, people from anthropic have talked about how 90% of contributions to claude were written by the agent, or how Anthropic's "Cowork" was built in a week and a half, entirely by Claude. So we should objectively be at the point of inflection for software-singularity, where entire suites of software should be automated in hours because servers can scale with money instead of only with time like with people.

Except where are all the things?

It's just so frustrating, because the tech is amazing, it feels like it might be techinically possible, but then people keep hyping and lying, and stuff isn't making sense.
by bryanlarsen | 2026-01-18 15:43:58+00:00
There's a third factor. Ev's need to support fast charging. So they need to do support super high voltages and currents. That's much of the expense of a powerful EV. A powerful motor is relatively inexpensive in comparison.

If you can charge a car in 20 minutes, the battery and some other circuitry can support discharging in 20 minutes, which is an insane power level.
by ndriscoll | 2026-01-18 15:44:02+00:00
I've found coding assistants to be a huge boon for this. All of the thorough analysis that previously would've taken a bunch of tedious extra thought work to do for marginal benefit (with a well-calibrated intuition) becomes 5 seconds of thought to the the computer to build a harness and then letting it chew on that for 15 minutes. It now also takes me less than a minute to get pprofs from all the production services my team owns, which is just something I never would've bothered to automate otherwise, so we never really looked much at it. Codex is also very good at analyzing the results, and finding easy wins vs. knowing what would be invasive to improve.

Thinking of seeing if I can get mutation testing set up next, and expanding our use of fuzzing. All of these techniques that I know about but haven't had the time to do are suddenly more feasible to invest into.