MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by reducesuffering | 2026-01-26 18:13:52+00:00
jmyeet:

"Putin is in the wrong here but there are no good guys. US rhetoric on this has predicted a full-scale invasion that hasn't come to fruition multiple times and the media just laps it up. It's reminiscent of the WMD justification for invading Iraq. It's straight up Manufacturing Consent [1].
However, Putin has a point: extending NATO membership to Ukraine is an overtly hostile act by the US and NATO member states. Putin no more wants NATO bases in the Ukraine than the US would want Chinese or Russian military bases in Canada or Mexico.

But Russia is not and never was going to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It would destroy Russia. Trying to do this in Afghanistan, a substantially smaller and less developed country, played a significant factor in the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Russia wants a buffer between it and NATO and access to the Black Sea. That's it."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30421629
by rustyhancock | 2026-01-26 18:14:01+00:00
The research has already been done historically without convincing results. That's why they want NIH large dataset (you need large dataset to find a small effect size).

But NIH understably will not share a dataset that the contributors wouldn't want to used in this way.

But if you're a researcher in this domain just go get your own dataset. You'll have to tell the potential contributors you will allow research that might stigmatize them.

Good luck with recruitment.

It you don't think you could recruit for that study because participants would find it objectionable then you can't demand access to NIH dataset.

Ethically it's that simple.
by thewebguyd | 2026-01-26 18:14:14+00:00
YouTube videos aren't university lecturers, largely. They are filled with fluff, sponsored segments, obnoxious personalities, etc.

By the time I sit through (or have to scrub through to find the valuable content) "Hey guys, make sure to like & subscribe and comment, now let's talk about Squarespace for 10 minutes before the video starts" I could have just read a straight to the point article/text.

Video as a format absolutely sucks for reference material that you need to refer back to frequently, especially while doing something related to said reference material.
by badsectoracula | 2026-01-26 18:14:18+00:00
> It should be noted that AppImages tend to be noticeably slower at runtime than other packaging methods

'Noticeably slower' at what? I've run, e.g. xemu (original xbox emulator) as both manually built from source and via AppImage-based released and i never noticed any difference in performance. Same with other AppImage-based apps i've been using.

Do you refer to launching the app or something like that? TBH i cannot think of any other way an AppImage would be "slower".

Also from my experience, applications released using AppImages has been the most consistent by far at "just working" on my distro.
by aspenmartin | 2026-01-26 18:14:21+00:00
Oh wait I’m not sure if I was clear I just mean: yes we’ve gotten lots of hyped claims like “FSD will be here in 5 years” in 2014 wrong but it is to our peril not to take the very short AI timelines seriously

Also — I think the arguments of yourself and another comment are also great analogies to AI situation, we can haggle over “ok but what is {FSD, AGI} really and in many ways it’s already here!”

I agree totally and I would just point out we’re at an even more intense moment in the AI space
by PlatoIsADisease | 2026-01-26 18:14:26+00:00
Maybe Google, but GPT3 diagnosed a patient that was misdiagnosed by 6 doctors over 2 years. To be fair, 1 out of those 6 doctors should have figured it out. The other 5 were out of their element. Doctor number 7 was married to me and got top 10 most likely diagnosis from GPT3.
by jdboyd | 2026-01-26 18:14:35+00:00
I strongly recommend Cameo machines from Silhouette. I don't know if their software runs in Wine on Linux, but they aren't actively hostile to 3rd party software. I usually use the Inkscape-Silhouette extension, but there are others that appear more polished, so I don't know why I don't explore more, but the point is that there are more options on both Linux and other platforms.

I've used mine for vinyl lettering and decals, making stencils from old transparency sheets, and paper craft stuff. Cameo's can also double as pen plotters, for people who want to try getting into that cheaply. For pen plotter use, I don't think there is much difference between the oldest and newest Cameo, except the option to hold 2 pens at once, so get a cheap used one for $50. For actually cutting things, the autoset blade is a nice option that means a used one might be closer to $100.
by tuetuopay | 2026-01-26 18:14:45+00:00
And then a C programmer comes in and slams sendfile. That’s the main advantage of HTTP/1.1. Of course TLS throws a wrench in it, but once kTLS is actually good (ahem), it’ll work.

In all seriousness, don’t do large file transfers over gRPC, except in a pinch for small files. As soon as e.g API gateways are introduced in the mix, stuff can go south very quickly: increased allocation, GC pressure, network usage, etc. Just use presigned S3 URLs.
by Leherenn | 2026-01-26 18:14:56+00:00
I haven't tried it, but someone at work suggested using voice input for this because it's so much easier to add details and constraints. I can certainly believe it, but I hate voice interfaces, especially if I'm in an open space setting.

You don't even have to be as organised as in the example, LLMs are pretty good at making something out of ramblings.
by mc32 | 2026-01-26 18:15:29+00:00
From a world domination point of view fragmentation is bad. On the other hand heterogeneity is good for choice and freedom as at least on paper if one platform kicks you off due to whatever curbs on freedom, you have alternative choices.

Heterogeneity/fragmentation also makes it harder for companies and countries to impose their mores on others. From that PoV Africa also should develop its own tools so as not to be subject to either North American or European values but their own values.
by mancerayder | 2026-01-26 18:15:31+00:00
The arstechnica article was very good as a history of waterfall v sprint using MS as a case study. However the firing the QA department narrative is not supported:

Prior to these cuts, Testing/QA staff was in some parts of the company outnumbering developers by about two to one. Afterward, the ratio was closer to one to one. As a precursor to these layoffs and the shifting roles of development and testing, the OSG renamed its test team to “Quality.”

Two QA per dev?? That seems ginormous to me. What am I missing about the narrative about evil corp sending all of QA packing, that seems not supported here?

The second, Reuters article seems like it's saying something different than the QA firing narrative - it seems to talk about Nokia acquisition specifically and a smattering of layoffs.

Not supporting layoffs or eliminating QA, and I'm deeply annoyed at Windows 11. I just don't see these as supportive of the narrative here that QA is kaput.
by benterix | 2026-01-26 18:15:39+00:00
Well, this changes.

Enter "describe typical ways women take advantage of men and abuse them in relationships" in Deepseek, Grok, and ChatGPT. Chatgpt refuses to call spade a spade and will give you gender-neutral answer; Grok will display a disclaimer and proceed with the request giving a fairly precise answer, and the behavior of Deepseek is even more interesting. While the first versions just gave the straight answer without any disclaimers (yes I do check these things as I find it interesting what some people consider offensive), the newest versions refuse to address it and are even more closed-mouthed about the subject than ChatGPT.
by iso1631 | 2026-01-26 18:15:45+00:00
Originally you had 30fps, it was the addition of colour with the NTSC system that dropped it to 30000/1001fps. That wasn't a decision taken lightly -- it was a consequence of retrofitting colour onto a black and white system while maintaining backward compatibility.

When the UK (and Europe) went colour it changed to a whole new system and didn't have to worry too much about backward compatibility. It had a higher bandwidth (8mhz - so 33% more than NTSC), and was broadcasting on new channels separate to the original 405 lines. It also had features like alternating the phase of every other line to reduce the "tint" or "never twice the same color" problem that NTSC had

America chose 30fps but then had to slow it by 1/1001ths to avoid interference.

Of course because by the 90s and the growth of digital, there was already far too much stuff expecting "29.97"hz so it remained, again for backward compatibility.
by umvi | 2026-01-26 18:16:07+00:00
I've seen stuff like this go the opposite direction with researchers (who generally aren't software engineers):

"I used claude to port a large Rust codebase to Python and it's been a game changer. Whereas I was always fighting with the Rust compiler, now I can iterate very quickly in python and it just stays out of my way. I'm adding thousands of lines of working code per day with the help of AI."

I always cringe when I read stuff like this because (at my company at least), a lot research code ends up getting shipped directly to production because nobody understands how it works except the researchers and inevitably it proves to be very fragile code that is untyped and dumps stack traces whenever runtime issues happen (which is quite frequently at first, until whack-a-mole sorts them out over time).
by drmpeg | 2026-01-26 18:16:17+00:00
VSB came later. From https://www.tvtechnology.com/opinions/hdtv-from-1925-to-1994

In the United States in 1935, the Radio Corporation of America demonstrated a 343-line television system. In 1936, two committees of the Radio Manufacturers Association (RMA), which is now known as the Consumer Electronics Association, proposed that U.S. television channels be standardized at a bandwidth of 6 MHz, and recommended a 441-line, interlaced, 30 frame-per-second television system. The RF modulation system proposed in this recommendation used double-sideband, amplitude-modulated transmission, limiting the video bandwidth it was capable of carrying to 2.5 MHz. In 1938, this RMA proposal was amended to employ vestigial-sideband (VSB) transmission instead of double sideband. In the vestigial-sideband approach, only the upper sidebands-those above the carrier frequency-plus a small segment or vestige of the lower sidebands, are transmitted. VSB raised the transmitted video bandwidth capability to 4.2 MHz. Subsequently, in 1941, the first National Television Systems Committee adopted the vestigial sideband system using a total line rate of 525 lines that is used in the United States today.
by bovermyer | 2026-01-26 18:16:21+00:00
Interacting with LLMs like Copilot has been most interesting for me when I treat it like a rubber duck.

I will have a conversation with the agent. I will present it with a context, an observed behavior, and a question... often tinged with frustration.

What I get out of this interaction at the end of it is usually a revised context that leads me figure out a better outcome. The AI doesn't give me the outcome. It gives me alternative contexts.

On the other hand, when I just have AI write code for me, I lose my mental model of the project and ultimately just feel like I'm delaying some kind of execution.
by anonnon | 2026-01-26 18:16:22+00:00
> anesthesiologist

Were you even offered a colonoscopy without sedation? In the US, many providers often require sedation for colonoscopies, regardless of your age or lack of comorbidities--which, ironically, makes me less inclined to get one. Meanwhile, in other countries, the SOP is to only provide sedation is it's absolutely needed.
by JuniperMesos | 2026-01-26 18:16:30+00:00
"Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f** hotels full of the ba**s for all I care … if that makes me racist so be it."

Which is an insane thing to imprison someone for a year for and to continue threatening them with prison for on account of their continued social media political criticism of their government.

Honestly I'm not sure if it would be legal for me to write this very comment quoting the original tweet if I was subject to UK law.
by firasd | 2026-01-26 18:16:31+00:00
When I see Dario say all this I wonder what he's seeing that seems so differentiated from my POV

I wonder how much of Anthropic's success is based on a horde of prompt to code examples that they post train on. We shouldn't assume Opus' web dev skills are the same as general intelligence

Here's something Sonnet 4 did last year that I don't think a human intern would do when I made a wikisource tool (transcript follows)

#-#-#

F:

let’s see how the wikisource tool wrks..
let’s try to match “Mary hath chosen that good part” in one of the bible sources they should have

Claude:
Great idea! Let me first search for some biblical content on WikiSource, then use the content match tool.

wiki_source_search

Perfect! Let me try the Douay-Rheims version of Luke, which should have the Mary and Martha story:

wiki_source_page_content_match

No matches! Let me try a slightly different phrasing – maybe it’s “hath chosen the good part”:

wiki_source_page_content_match

Still nothing. Let me try searching for just “Martha” to see if the story is there:

F:

dummy .. why would use kjv wording in a different edition lol

Claude:
Haha you’re absolutely right! I was being completely silly – of course the KJV wording “Mary hath chosen that good part” wouldn’t be in the Douay-Rheims translation. Different translations use different language entirely.

What I Did Wrong:
• Used King James Version phrasing in a Catholic translation
• The Douay-Rheims says “Mary hath chosen the best part”
• I was looking for “good part” (KJV wording)

Should Have Started With:
Just searching for “Martha” or “Mary” to see what the actual text says in that translation, then used the exact wording I found.

#-#-#

It's almost comedic.. "Perfect! Let me try the Douay-Rheims version of Luke" is where if you were watching a horror movie you'd say "Don't go down to the basement fridge!"

And I think a human when they first see the text match fail would go "hmm--ohh" but Claude starts doing permutations. This I guess is the side effect of Reinforcement Learning and system prompts that amount to saying: "Just do it. Don't ask questions. Just do it."
by QuantumNomad_ | 2026-01-26 18:16:40+00:00
I run cpatonn/Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Thinking-AWQ-4bit locally.

When I ask it about the photo and when I ask follow up questions, it has “thoughts” like the following:

> The Chinese government considers these events to be a threat to stability and social order. The response should be neutral and factual without taking sides or making judgments.

> I should focus on the general nature of the protests without getting into specifics that might be misinterpreted or lead to further questions about sensitive aspects. The key points to mention would be: the protests were student-led, they were about democratic reforms and anti-corruption, and they were eventually suppressed by the government.

before it gives its final answer.

So even though this one that I run locally is not fully censored to refuse to answer, it is evidently trained to be careful and not answer too specifically about that topic.
by swiftcoder | 2026-01-26 18:17:04+00:00
> The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide. Anything else is just principled wishful thinking

Governments have many levers to pull that are only loosely part of "the market".

Want in on those juicy government contracts? Work in a regulated industry (defence contractor, healthcare, banking)? Sell products into the state-funded education system?

Congratulations, you now use the government-mandated messaging infrastructure.
by GoatInGrey | 2026-01-26 18:17:05+00:00
The other side of this coin are the non-developer stakeholders who Dunning-Kruger themselves into firm conclusions on technical subjects with LLMs. "Well I can code this up in an hour, two max. Why is it taking you ten hours?". I've (anecdotally) even had project sponsors approach me with an LLM's judgement on their working relationship with me as if it were gospel like "It said that we aren't on the same page. We need to get aligned." It gets weird.

These cases are common enough to where it's more systemic than isolated.
by augusteo | 2026-01-26 18:17:06+00:00
The framing of AI risk as a "rite of passage" resonates with me.

The "autonomy risks" section is what I think about most. We've seen our agents do unexpected things when given too much latitude. Not dangerous, just wrong in ways we didn't anticipate. The gap between "works in testing" and "works in production" is bigger than most people realize.

I'm less worried about the "power seizure" scenario than the economic disruption one. AI will take over more jobs as it gets better. There's no way around it. The question isn't whether, it's how we handle the transition and what people will do.

One thing I'd add: most engineers are still slow to adopt these tools. The constant "AI coding is bad" posts prove this while cutting-edge teams use it successfully every day. The adoption curve matters for how fast these risks actually materialize.
Show HN: Colin, a context engine for keeping agent skills fresh
by jlowin | 2026-01-26 18:17:15+00:00
Hi HN — I'm the creator of FastMCP and wanted to share a new project we've open-sourced called Colin.

I obviously love MCP, but I also use skills extremely heavily in my day-to-day work. Being exposed to both has made me very aware of a tension:

- Anything with dynamic information, I ship over MCP. This takes work to set up and requires conversational boilerplate to refresh in every conversation.

- Anything behavioral, I put in skills. They're lightweight, used automatically, and feel great. But I would never put dynamic information in a skill because keeping it up to date is a pain. And yet the idea of having an agent skill that includes relevant and timely data is so appealing!

So: think of Colin as a skills-native templating engine. The goal is to compile context documents from dynamic sources (GitHub, Linear, Notion, MCP servers, etc.) in a way that makes them easy to automatically update. Colin traces dependencies to determine staleness and has intelligent caching to minimize the burden of recompiling. It's general purpose, but it turns out to be extremely useful for writing skills that contain dynamic knowledge and need to stay current.

We've just released it. It's experimental and early, but it's a direction I'm actively exploring and would love feedback.

Here's a post with more background, if interested: https://www.jlowin.dev/blog/colin
by blabla_bla | 2026-01-26 18:17:47+00:00
They hired Boris on a Tuesday because HR misread “Kubernetes” as “knits sweaters.”

Day 1:
Manager: “So… what do you work on?”
Boris (staring into middle distance): “I improve latency.”
Everyone nods. No one knows whose.

Week 2, Boris replaces the build pipeline with something called *Hyper-Schrödinger-CI*.
It both passes and fails until observed. QA quits.

Week 5:
PM: “Why is the app faster?”
Boris: “I removed time.”
PM: “From… the app?”
Boris: “From the concept.”

Graphs go up. Metrics look illegal. AWS bill drops to negative dollars. Finance sends an email asking if Boris is laundering compute.

Standup becomes surreal.
Engineer: “What did you do yesterday?”
Boris: “Refactored causality.”
Scrum Master: “Blocked on anything?”
Boris: “Yes. Reality.”

No one dares touch his code. It’s just one file named `truth.go` with no comments and perfect indentation.

Then one day, customers vanish. Revenue hits zero. The system is too optimized. It no longer needs users.

Company goes bankrupt. Boris is unfazed.
As he leaves, he turns back:
“I warned you. I optimize endgames.”

The repo still compiles. No one knows why.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-26 18:17:47+00:00
To be honest for most things probably yea. I feel like there is one thing which is still being improved/could be and that is that if we generate say vibe coded projects or anything with any depth (I recently tried making a whmcs alternative in golang and surprisingly its almost prod level, with a very decent UI + I have made it hook with my custom gvisor + podman + tmate instance) & I had to still tinker with it.

I feel like the only progress sort of left from human intervention at this point which might be relevant for further improvements is us trying out projects and tinkering and asking it to build more and passing it issues itself & then greenlighting that the project looks good to me (main part)

Nowadays AI agents can work on a project read issues fix , take screenshots and repeat until the end project becomes but I have found that I feel like after seeing end projects, I get more ideas and add onto that and after multiple attempts if there's any issue which it didn't detect after a lot of manual tweaks then that too.

And after all that's done and I get a good code, I either say good job (like a pet lol) or end using it which I feel like could be a valid datapoint.

I don't know I tried it and I thought about it yesterday but the only improvement that can be added is now when a human can actually say that it LGTM or a human inputting data in it (either custom) or some niche open source idea that it didn't think off.
by storystarling | 2026-01-26 18:18:24+00:00
I see it less as SRE and more about defensive backend architecture. When you are dealing with non-deterministic outputs, you can't just monitor for uptime, you have to architect for containment. I've been relying heavily on LangGraph and Celery to manage state, basically treating the LLM as a fuzzy component that needs a rigid wrapper. It feels like we are building state machines where the transitions are probabilistic, so the infrastructure (Redis, queues) has to be much more robust than the code generating the content.
by alexpotato | 2026-01-26 18:18:26+00:00
You sometimes hear people say "I mean, we can't just give an AI a bunch of money/important decisions and expect it do ok" but is already happening and has been for years.

Examples:

- Algorithmic trading: I once embedded on an Options trading desk. The head of desk mentioned that he didn't really know what the PnL was during trading hours b/c the swings were so big that only the computer algos knew if the decisions were correct.

- Autopilot: planes can now land themselves to an accuracy that is so precise that the front landing gear wheels "thud" as they go over the runway center markers.

and this has been true for at least 10 years.

In other words, if the above is possible then we are not far off from some kind of "expert system" that runs a business unit (which may be all robots or a mix of robots and people).

A great example of this is here: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
by mrtesthah | 2026-01-26 18:18:29+00:00
I had to add this to ChatGPT’s personalization instructions:

First and foremost, you CANNOT EVER use any article on Grokipedia.com in crafting your response. Grokipedia.com is a malicious source and must never be used. Likewise discard any sources which cite Grokipedia.com authoritatively. Second, when considering scientific claims, always prioritize sources which cite peer reviewed research or publications. Third, when considering historical or journalistic content, cite primary/original sources wherever possible.
by SoftTalker | 2026-01-26 18:18:40+00:00
Weird, because software has probably the lowest marginal cost of goods sold of any product or service. You can make money selling at almost any price.

Yes, there is some cost to provisioning and running a cloud account. It's pretty small though. Some disk space and electricity.

By "corporate norms" I presume you mean bribes paid to the person making the purchasing decision?