MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ssoydan | 2026-01-20 11:52:21+00:00
I liked the idea.
However, I found the journey too slow. I suppose the agent crawls and scrapes the list of movies from scratch every time for each "journey". It might be better to pre-store or cache some sort of general list and work only on the personalisation in real-time.

A few suggestions:
- The end-to-end journey should be completed under 30 seconds.
- "Almost There" section shows a list of movie posters that can be removed by the user however there is no information about the movies. I don't know if I would want to remove any or not.
- Show IMDB ratings
- When removing suggestions, request a reason so that you have better personalisation in the future.
- For the final suggested movies, show direct links to the popular streaming platforms to watch them. Add a sharing option through whatsapp etc.

Good luck.
by technothrasher | 2026-01-20 11:52:59+00:00
When I owned a liquor store, the cigarette sales reps would all fall over themselves givings us free stuff, including straight cash, to place their cigarettes more prominently than the other brands. This would last for about a week or two until the other brand's rep would notice and up the ante.

> Those cans of Coke stacked at the end of the isle or piled up near the entrance at your super market? Coke paid to have them placed there.

Often, though endcaps are also used to move product that wasn't selling well and you want gone. But in any case, as a consumer you're usually better off ignoring products on the endcaps.
by woodylondon | 2026-01-20 11:53:06+00:00
It should be that when you sign up with an ISP AND have children, you should be required by law to install software to monitor and track your children's usage. It needs to be done at this level, as this then stops the Proxy, VPN argument as well.

This is both a technical and an educational problem that needs to be solved. The technology for network monitoring needs to be easier for parents to install, with all 18+ content blocked by default, etc. Companies have software installed that tracks everything you do—every piece of software you install (or can't install if the system is locked down). We need this level of technology available at home.

All mobile phone contracts block access to 18+ content. If a child has a mobile phone, then yes, block access to social networks.

It could be a plug-in device that connects between your router OR an ISP-level feature that, when you first join, asks whether there are children in the house. If you say no and there are, then that's breaking the law.

When you first install it, a well-designed interface would prompt you to select your children's ages and add their devices (laptops, iPads, etc.). You install the client software locally, link everything up, and the whole system tracks and monitors usage. Problem solved.

If children go to friends' houses, there should be a way for them to join as guests so parents can still see everything.

If children go to grandparents' houses or friends of friends, then either you need to install this box to manage access, or there's no Wi-Fi. They'd have to use their mobile data.

What I don't agree with is that childless people have to comply. I don't know any children, and all the ones I did have have grown up now. Fundamentally, I do think that we need to find a better way to stop social media bullying, the fact that beheading or gore videos are so easily accessible - I think that's worse than any "normal" porn!

Children cannot drink or smoke. It's not like you can argue against this; parents have a responsibility to stop that from happening. It's no different; in fact, it's worse.

Now, of course, once kids get to 14+, they will find a way. Since the start of history, we've all gone through that, and nothing any government does is going to stop children from pushing boundaries, learning, and experimenting.

My concern is that Gov will go down a route where every website you sign up to requires AgeID. It will be impossible to have Anon accounts anywhere. Sites will love it as more advertising and tracking for everyone. I stopped posting on social networks, as the second you say anything slightly different from someone else, the trolls come out and attack. I simply could not be bothered, and so deleted all social networks.

Waiting now for the HN trolls to attack - don't worry, I simply cannot be bothered to respond :)
by estearum | 2026-01-20 11:54:09+00:00
The claim was that ICE is going after people for protected speech. The link is a determination by a federal judge to that effect, with the allegation going all the way to the top of the food chain.

If you specifically want a video, then here you go: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/oRiQz7mOY6A

This is a person being hunted and swept into a van by masked federal agents on the basis of her protected speech. There's no ambiguity here. The administration has said that's why they did it, and a judge has affirmed that as well (see prior link)

I didn't claim arrest requires a warrant. I claimed it requires probable cause which is a far higher standard than DHS's claim to make arrests based on reasonable suspicion. The claim that arrests can be made upon reasonable suspicion is indeed flatly refuted by the text of the 4th Amendment.
by Atreiden | 2026-01-20 11:54:47+00:00
That figure will also be hugely unreliable, because as we've seen, there is tremendous incentive for insiders to leverage their information immediately before it's relevant.

If the odds sit at 97% NO for weeks or months, then 3 hours before the invasion an insider makes their play, you would have to be constantly monitoring this market, interpret that spike correctly as an insider trade, and be able to, in that very short amount of time, take actions that change the outcome for you, personally.

Doesn't seem like much of an upside to me.
by shevy-java | 2026-01-20 11:55:20+00:00
He describes mostly a process where the exam itself,
or rather testing the knowledge of a student, is not
so important.

I think not all exams can occur like that. In some cases
you just have to test one's knowledge about a specific
topic, and knowing facts is a very, very easy way to
test this. I would agree that just focusing on facts
these days is overrated, but I would still reason that
it is not a useless metric still. So, when the author
describes "bring your own exam questions", it more means
that the exam itself is not so relevant, which is fine -
but saying that university exams are now useless in the
age of autosolving chatbots, is simply wrong. It just
means that the exam itself is not important; that in
itself does not automatically mean that ALL exams or
exam styles are useless. Also, it depends on what you
test. For instance, testing solving math questions -
yes, chatbots can solve this, but can a student solve
the same without needing a chatbot? How about practical
skills? Ok, 3D printing will dominate, but the ability
to craft something with your own hands, that is still a
skill that may be useful, at the least to some extent.

I feel that the whole discussion about chatbots dumbs
down a lot. Skills have not become irrelevant just
because chatbots exist.
by jansper39 | 2026-01-20 11:56:17+00:00
Modern cars are far more reliable than old 'analogue' cars - primarily because of the integrated electronics. ECUs can detect when engines are running rich or lean, knocking or 100 other edge cases and adjust accordingly.

Switch to an EV and it's even simpler, you can get away with a motor, battery, BMS and inverter and you can get just about any soapbox to move.
by ponyous | 2026-01-20 11:56:51+00:00
Developers remember, you can always push back on design requirements instead of bringing in more bloat.

I was sitting next to one of the devs in a co-working space and he was trying to figure out some specific layout issue in react native. He spent 4 hours + installed a dependency to be able to do something completely tiny on a privacy policy screen. He asked me how I would do it, I told him to just ask if it can be laid out differently. He got it approved and implemented in 10 minutes. No bloat.
by mystcb | 2026-01-20 11:57:04+00:00
Exactly this, the pressure from everyone, not just the kids themselves, is a lot. We are in a digital world right now, and without "digital access", you become part of the crowd that can get bullied for not being up to date. It is a terrible place to be, and you get torn between the two ends of the scale.

I think there is such an issue with closed platforms as well on top of it all. I wouldn't want my kid on WhatsApp being perfectly honestly, I can't really control to a level where I feel that they would be safe on that platform. While all the adults in her life are on there, means we are limited to the odd platform here and there.

I have an Apple device for her, I have used Apple Configurator and profiles to properly lock down what they can do on the device. Even then its timed and monitored, but then we hit the issue. Half the family are Apple, half the family are Android, and same with her friends too. The only way we have been able to get some semblance of chat is Google Meets, but even then messaging doesn't always work, and she is left with SMS, which for some of the other kids, they don't have a SIM in their device (and probably for good reason). It means that keeping the links up between her and everyone is just like being in an IT support department! But at least I know she isn't going to get to anything bad.

Even at school you hear what the other kids have seen, to a point where the school had to pull in Safegarding because one of their kids basically had unfettered access to YouTube, and started telling the class everything.

The ban needs to happen, because we have set ourselves up for this globally, without the right pressure to the right places, to the platforms themselves, the world has to take other actions, and the pressure continues.

It's always the way that we always wish for the things we can't have, as children I remember my own meltdowns back in the day, over Lego of all things!

It isn't good, at all.

Again, I didn't want my post to say I disagree, its just, there needs to be more done, and this is just a plaster over the issue.. it will help, but over time it will become less and less effective :(
by peterfirefly | 2026-01-20 11:57:12+00:00
> The CPU also doesn't care if you use prefixes that aren't valid for a specific instruction, for example a REP on a non-repeatable instruction.

This is one of the reasons why the x86 could be extended so much. PAUSE is just REP NOP, for example. Segment prefixes in front of conditional branches were used as static branch prediction hints (which I believe have returned in some newer Intel CPUs). Useful if you want to make a hint on newer CPUs that is harmless on older CPUs.

Some prefixes have become part of the encoding for certain SIMD instructions, but that is a different case because those prefixes aren't hints.
by kunley | 2026-01-20 11:57:12+00:00
What has already happened is that you unfortunately have manipulated the facts. How long were you planning to not reveal what you really mean: that some drivers have an oportunity to use self-driving once year and that they allegedly tried it, althought that's really just opinion based on your own preference. That's much different than claiming millions of such drivers roaming everywhete at any moment of time.

Plus, the idea that every single Tesla has this option is just your rought estimate, right?
by christophilus | 2026-01-20 11:57:21+00:00
I guess it depends on your definition of complexity. Being able to think about your UI as a function of state is a lot simpler than dealing with mutability, coordinating imperative updates all over the place, etc. React’s core idea is simpler than the paradigms it replaced. By simple, I mean as in “Simple Made Easy”[0].

[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SxdOUGdseq4&pp=ygUQc2ltcGxlIG1...
by rendall | 2026-01-20 11:57:21+00:00
There has always been an ends-justify-the-means element across the entire electorate and political class. It isn’t unique to MAGA, and it isn’t new. What changes is which side feels justified at a given moment.

All of the United States law and jurisprudence is a kludge of principle and practicality. It’s an accretion of ideals layered onto compromises, expediencies, and power struggles. The Constitution itself is a bundle of moral claims stitched together with practical concessions to slave states, property interests, and elite fears of democracy.

To me, unfortunately, the mid-to-late twentieth century norm of relatively principled incorruptibility now looks less like a permanent achievement and more like a historical exception.

That period stood in contrast to much of American history before it, which was more openly transactional and tolerant of self-dealing. Think robber barons, Jacksonian patronage, open graft, speculative profiteering, outright theft of public funds, Tammany Hall. Against that backdrop, the period from roughly the 1940s to the early 1970s stands out.

What feels so unsettling today may not be a sudden collapse, but a quiet reversion toward older historical norms. I'm sad to think that what once felt like progress was always more fragile than it appeared.
by Der_Einzige | 2026-01-20 11:57:50+00:00
Go take a giant dataset of LLM generated outputs, use an accurate POS tagger and look for 5-grams or similar lengths of matching patterns.

If you do thi, you’ll pull out the overrepresented paragraph and sentence level slop that we humans intuitively detect easily.

If your writing appears to be AI generated, I assume you aren’t willing to put human intentionality/effort into your work and as such I write it off.

Btw we literally wrote a paper and contributed both sampling level techniques, fine tuning level techniques, and antislopped models for folks to use who want to not be obviously detected in their laziness: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15061
by cocoto | 2026-01-20 11:58:44+00:00
The complex thing is that you would need to take into account the energy used to feed the programmers, the energy used for their education or simply them growing up to the age they are working. For the LLMs it would have to take into account energy used for the GPU, the machine building the GPUs, datacenters, engineers maintaining it, their education etc etc. It’s so complex to really estimate these things from bottom up if you are not only looking locally, it feels impossible…
by ptero | 2026-01-20 11:59:29+00:00
Luck plays a big role, but it is not just luck. One can apply in a way that significantly stacks a deck in his favor.

So absolutely reach out to your network, study the current market and find your edge. It might still be poker-style games which you can still lose because of luck; but doing that gives you starting hands with two aces. My 2c.
by tossandthrow | 2026-01-20 11:59:35+00:00
Would this also have been the case had the housing price gone down for you? Or if the housing price had just been flat?

These single use tricks make sure that the housing market will go up for yet another couple of year. But every time a trick like this is applied, it will increase the risk in the system. There are also the issue that there are only that many tricks one can use.
by myk-e | 2026-01-20 12:00:01+00:00
The trap in my view is that they think they "do something AI" (the AI Adoption) and by thus completely miss the point that in 2-3 years "AI Native" might be a thing.
I see that in companies or at conferences, they are proud of what they have achieved and how good it works. Which makes them kind of blind on what is really coming, the tsunami that's just building up, requiring a complete re-think of what an organization looks like.
by dddgghhbbfblk | 2026-01-20 12:00:50+00:00
Uhhhhh... What? Are we living on the same planet? The Senate is absolutely terrible. Not only is it breathtakingly undemocratic, the modern rise of the filibuster raising the threshold to 60% makes it even harder to pass any legislation.

The weakness of the Senate has abetted the expansion of the other two branches as Congress has ceded most of its lawmaking responsibilities. But there are still limits. There are so many other knock on negative effects too: inability to pass laws leads to more enormous omnibus bills, increasing the influence of lobbyists.

Simply deleting the Senate entirely would go a very long way to improving the structure of the US govt.
by bonesss | 2026-01-20 12:01:03+00:00
This specification argument seems to boil down to: what if we used Haskell to describe systems to LLMs?

Many of our traditional functional languages, ML family in particular, let you write hyper concise expressions (pure math if you’re in to that sort of thing), craft DSLs of unlimited specifiable power (‘makeTpsReportWith “new cover page format”’), and also in natural language (function names like `emptied cart should have zero items`).

I think if we did that and leveraged the type systems of those languages and the systematic improvements we see from ADTs and pattern matching in those languages, combined with a specification first approach like TDD, that we’d have a great starting point to have an LLM generate the rest of the system perfectly.

… yes, that is just writing Haskell/OCaml/F# with extra steps.

… yes, that level of specification is also the point with those languages where your exploratory type-diddling suddenly goes ‘presto’ and you magically have a fully functioning system.
by worksonmine | 2026-01-20 12:01:12+00:00
> Vim and Neovim have more differences than I thought. Among the many changes, [...], that Q repeats the last recorded macro

I followed the link where it says:

> Q Repeat the last recorded register [count] times..
> {Visual}Q In linewise Visual mode, repeat the last recorded register for each selected line.

That's a surprise, I have both in my config since my time on Vim but I didn't know they were implemented by default in Neovim. I guess the maintainers read the same article I did many moons ago.
by lostlogin | 2026-01-20 12:01:14+00:00
It wouldn’t change your equation much, but you don’t need a car charger as such, just connect to a normal power socket (which may not be available within reach).

We ran a Leaf for years like that, and it would charge overnight just fine.

We do have a charger now and it’s quicker, but it’s a luxury we didn’t need.
by jopsammy | 2026-01-20 12:01:27+00:00
Author here.

I am an independent researcher (originally med background, moved to CS/Physics). I spent the last few weeks manually grading GPQA-Diamond and Humanity's Last Exam (HLE) because my experimental models (DeepSeek-Overclock) were deriving "wrong" answers that looked logically sound.

I conducted a forensic audit of the datasets. I suspect these benchmarks are currently "gaslighting" foundation models.

*Findings:*

* GPQA-Diamond: Inherent error lower bound *26.8%*.
* HLE (Sampled): Inherent error lower bound *~58%*.

Visual Summary of Error Rates:
https://i.postimg.cc/nV5hskX2/image1.png

The most shocking finding is in *HLE*, which appears to be riddled with OCR errors from hand-written content, rather than actual "hard" problems. I reverse-engineered these errors by treating the standard answers as "cryptographic hashes" to find the original intended questions.

*Exhibit A: The "Phantom Parameter" (Physics)*
In a lattice adsorption problem (`66fecb...`), the text is broken. I successfully reverse-engineered the "Gold Answer" (4.61) and found it corresponds to a specific physical setup where the text digit `4` was misread as `k`, and a strikethrough was interpreted as a deletion.
*See the forensic reconstruction:*
https://i.postimg.cc/nhfV2hY9/image2.png

*Exhibit B: The Visual Counterfeit (Math)*
In a complex projective space problem, the benchmark penalizes the correct formula because the transcriber likely misread `(n+1)(n+1)` (Rank × Dimension) as `(n+1)^(n+1)` due to slanted handwriting.
*See the visual comparison:*
https://i.postimg.cc/6TJKMMZR/image3.png

*Conclusion:*
Because of these errors, valid reasoning from models is being assigned a zero score. We are seemingly optimizing for typo-compatibility, not intelligence.

Full PDF is on Zenodo (linked above). Verification code (~139 scripts) will be open-sourced once I sanitize the repo (having some git access issues atm). Happy to answer questions.
by danabramov | 2026-01-20 12:01:50+00:00
All good points.

Maybe I’m optimistic for no good reason. I feel there’s something slightly different at play here but I struggle to put my finger on it.

Overall I agree with the take that a client for somebody else’s product is usually degraded experience. You want to deploy features vertically, and even existence of worse clients is a threat to that. I think one exception to that is when the main client is intentionally worse for the sake of other goals. Eg lots of ads. Or just the company being (or becoming) incompetent at making a client. Then alternative clients inject some new life and competition into the product. But if the product owner is good at making clients, they probably don’t benefit from fragmentation.

And still it feels somehow different to me. I think a part of it is that the space itself is vastly expanded in AT. We’re not just talking about a vertical app with a few offshoot clients that do the same thing but poorly. I mean, that still exists, but the proposition is that things can reach way beyond the original product. Products can blend. When products blend, there’s always this inherent coordination problem. Those who make multiple vertical products have to deal with similar things. At some point you have to stagger rollouts, support features partially or in a limited way, or show a simple version and direct to main app for more. Think Threads “bleeding through” Instagram, different kinds of cross-posting that they experiment with between apps. This is valuable but normally only monopolies can build meaningful cross-product bleeding because otherwise you have to negotiate API agreements and it’s just too risky to build on someone else’s turf.

What AT changes is that every product can cross-bleed into every other product. My teal.fm plays show up on my Blento page. So yes, you do have this fragmentation, but you also get something in return. It’s not fragmentation between the main way to show a thing and a couple offshoots, but between a web of products. And there is always a canonical schema so it doesn’t descend into chaos. I think there’s a “there” there.

I actually agree the key pillar is identity. It’s what AT URIs start with identity first. I think one way to look at AT is that the “contact list” analogy is right, but now that we’ve chosen the identity layer, we might as well put all our data into the contact list.
by ahartmetz | 2026-01-20 12:02:10+00:00
Maybe we can remove mitigations. Every exploit you see is: First, find a vulnerability (the difficult part). Then, drill through five layers of ultimately ineffective "mitigations" (the tedious but almost always doable part).

Probabilistic mitigations work against probabilistic attacks, I guess - but exploit writers aren't random, they are directed, and they find the weaknesses.
by jesprenj | 2026-01-20 12:02:33+00:00
Our network router in our radio station started acting crazy at 22:00:40 Europe/Ljubljana time. Uptime monitoring via HTTPS reported downtime for 5 minutes, but our radio archive that records audio over LiveWire recorded some bitcrushing effects for 5 minues. Maybe our Mikrotik hEX was flipping some bits? Recording from the radio archive: https://splet.4a.si./dir/solar.mp3
by aurareturn | 2026-01-20 12:03:59+00:00
Shouldn't string theory be given up on at this point?

Has anti string theory propaganda taken over HN? Sabine Hossenfelder succeeded?

Anyone who is anti string theory actually qualified to make statements saying string theory is wrong or not worth more investment from researchers?

Are these anti string theory posts on HN mostly just laymen hearing how string theory can’t be tested and we wasted a lot of resources on it so it needs to be repeated on every string theory post here?