MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zahlman | 2026-01-26 16:27:06+00:00
All three of the things said don't accurately describe the Good incident (she was not shot five times; "not resisting" is not applicable if you imagine e.g. physically trying to prevent the application of handcuffs and clearly untrue if you take it to include fleeing; and the "federal investigation failing to bring charges" doesn't exist) so I assumed it wasn't that case. But I'll respond to your analysis of that case anyway:

> the conflicting orders she received were not "lawful".

They do not become "not lawful" at your say-so. And she was not "given conflicting orders". That is a propaganda narrative ignorant of basic law. Good was repeatedly told to move (in the initial encounter with Ross, before he begins circling the car, repeatedly refused, then significant time passed. Then she was told to get out of the car, presumably because she was under arrest for refusing to move.

It is the same as how an ordinary local police officer who tells you to leave a property because you're trespassing, is entitled to arrest you (which entails you not leaving) if you repeatedly refuse to leave.

> Her vehicle was across a single lane

It was perpendicular to the road, and parked. That's obstruction. The fact that cars could get around does not mean they "were freely passing". And as you point out, the road was icy; that makes this situation more dangerous, and the blocked lane a more serious obstruction.

> She was not stopping ICE or DHS from apprehending an immigrant

She was significantly impeding them, in a manner that can very easily be argued to meet the necessary standards in the relevant legal code.

> and the Federal Immigration agents had no authority to deal with traffic matters in MN.

8 USC 1357 makes it clear that they can make arrests for federal crimes committed in their presence. This includes obstructing them, which is by definition done in their presence and is a federal crime by virtue of the fact that they are federal officers. And as LEO they can generally issue lawful orders. The fact that she's in a car doesn't somehow deny them jurisdiction. They aren't "dealing with traffic matters"; they're dealing with obstruction of justice.
by reeredfdfdf | 2026-01-26 16:27:11+00:00
Considering America and Israel accomplished total air superiority over Iran in matter of days just few months ago, they're obviously pretty damn far from being untouchable.

Invading Iran would be difficult, but totally destroying IRGC and military (as long as they side with the former) wouldn't be that hard. Dropping communications equipment and weapons to Iranian opposition groups wouldn't be hard either.
by graydsl | 2026-01-26 16:27:16+00:00
Last week I just said f it and developed a feature by hand. No Copilot, no agents. Just good old typing and a bit of Intellisense. I ran into a lot of problems with the library I used, slowly but surely I got closer to the result I wanted. In the end my feature worked as expected, I understand the code I wrote and know about all the little quirks the lib has.

And as a added benefit: I feel accomplished and proud of the feature.
by Isamu | 2026-01-26 16:27:53+00:00
Same with essay assignments, you exercise different neural pathways by doing it yourself.

Recently in comments people were claiming that working with LLMs has sharpened their ability to organize thoughts, and that could be a real effect that would be interesting to study. It could be that watching an LLM organize a topic could provide a useful example of how to approach organizing your own thoughts.

But until you do it unassisted you haven’t learned how to do it.
by variaga | 2026-01-26 16:28:09+00:00
Some of us are old enough to remember the last time Intel was definitely, 100%, for-sure committed to offering foundry services, and then changed their mind and canceled the whole thing (it was in 2018) and want to see (a) someone else have success with 18A first and (b) intel show an actual long-term commitment to using their foundry for outside customers before we risk our companies' future on them.

There are risks with TSMC, but "TSMC just decides it's not interested in making chips for other people, and cancels the whole business" isn't one of them. The same cannot be said for Intel.
by hennell | 2026-01-26 16:28:17+00:00
>if the goal is to build up your own strength
I think you missed this line. If the goal is just to move weights or lift the most - forklift away. If you want to learn to use a forklift, drive on and best of luck. But if you're trying to get stronger the forklift will not help that goal.

Like many educational tests the outcome is not the point - doing the work to get there is. If you're asked to code fizz buzz it's not because the teacher needs you to solve fizz buzz for them, it's because you will learn things while you make it. Ai, copying stack overflow, using someone's code from last year, it all solves the problem while missing the purpose of the exercise. You're not learning - and presumably that is your goal.
by encrux | 2026-01-26 16:28:23+00:00
Very much depends on what you want to do.

The fact that a language model can „reason“ (in the LLM-slang meaning of the term) about 3D space is an interesting property.

If you give a text description of a scene and ask a robot to perform a peg in hole task, modern models are able to solve them fairly easily based on movement primitives. I implemented this on a UR robot arm back in 2023

The next logical step is, instead of having the model output text (code representing movement primitives), outputting tokens in action space. This is what models like pi0 are doing.
by GuinansEyebrows | 2026-01-26 16:29:01+00:00
> I wonder if this is helpful? 'You are screwed no matter what you do' is not a good way to motivate people to action. People have heard this all before, and don't trust it. You can only cry wolf so many times with apocolyptic stories.

there was a time where we weren't guaranteed to be screwed. environmental stewardship was deemed unimportant in the face of profit. here we are.
by arnoooooo | 2026-01-26 16:29:12+00:00
You make it sound like we are flesh robots : sensors and motors, with a central "CPU" that channels between the two. But a robot has no first-person experience, it's just smart electron flows.

That we have first-person experiences shows the soul is definitely not "a process your body runs" : it's where your whole experience "registers".

That we are not flesh robots is also why we have free will. You could coherently argue that free-will is an illusion, but you can't argue that first-person experience is an illusion, as you need something to perceive the illusion.
by bikenaga | 2026-01-26 16:29:30+00:00
Abstract: "We provide the first global, long-run evidence on how war reshapes democratic institutions. Using data on all conflicts since 1948, we show that the onset of conflict causes a large and persistent decline in democracy: institutions weaken immediately, continue to erode for nearly a decade, and do not recover. Yet this deterioration is highly selective. It appears only in first-time conflicts, intrastate wars, highly fractionalized societies, and conflicts that governments win. The decline operates through political channels – media censorship, judicial purges, curtailed civil liberties, irregular leadership turnover, and constitutional suspensions - rather than through any functional requirement of war-making. Autocratization does not increase the probability of victory, and institutional instability reduces it. Taken together, the findings show that war does not require autocracy; it enables executives to expand their authority and implement institutional changes that would be difficult to enact in peacetime."

Alternate URL: https://effibenmelech.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/backsli...

See also: https://www.nber.org/papers/w34389
Ask HN: Why do simple donation pages usually fail?
by vampeta | 2026-01-26 16:29:33+00:00
I’m experimenting with an extremely minimal donation page — no accounts, no text, no explanation, just a fixed $1 payment via well-known processors.
The idea was to remove all friction and all persuasion, and see what happens.
In practice, almost nobody converts.
I’m curious how the HN community sees this: – Is trust the missing piece? – Does minimalism backfire in payments? – Or do people need context, even for $1?

This is the experiment I’m referring to:
https://sendonedollar.net
by psunavy03 | 2026-01-26 16:29:36+00:00
As a former Naval Flight Officer, it's somewhat ironic how the private sector is more "sir, yes sir" command and control than the military ever was, and they're the ones who stereotype servicemembers for being drones who can only follow orders.

The other thing I've seen incredibly less of in software than in uniform is a bias for action at all levels. Combined with understanding the mission, a mentality that "in the absence of being told what to do, I will act." Better to ask forgiveness than permission, etc. etc. So many people in the private sector just wait for the boss to push them around like chess pieces, and I can't understand how they're OK living like that.
by NitpickLawyer | 2026-01-26 16:29:58+00:00
It would be trivial to detect such gaming, tho. That's the beauty of the test, and that's why they're probably not doing it. If a model draws "perfect" (whatever that means) pelicans on a bike, you start testing for owls riding a lawnmower, or crows riding a unicycle, or x _verb_ on y ...
by lkm0 | 2026-01-26 16:30:04+00:00
Menard's Quixote is also one of my favorites. I feel it illustrates almost in a mean way the futility and arrogance of analyzing a work through its author's life and intention. I'm not knowledgeable enough to know if this kind of literary analysis was still popular in Borges' time and place, but in France up to the early 20th century, an influential critic called Sainte-Beuve was claiming with great success that any work could be entirely (and scientifically) analyzed and elucidated by interviewing the author's friends, partners, by sniffing out their secret habits and what not -- and I assume Borges must've been aware of it, having been educated in early 20th century French-speaking Switzerland. If I had another life I'd probably do another PhD thesis on Borges vs Sainte-Beuve.
Fun fact: Marcel Proust was so mad at Sainte-Beuve that it got him out of his writer's block; In Search of Lost Time is an anti-Sainte-Beuve essay that got out of hand.
by ryandrake | 2026-01-26 16:30:48+00:00
Here on the other side of the pond, writing our so-called Representatives to complain, produces the same kind of result. If your rep has a (D) by his or her name, you'll get back one form-letter, and if your rep has a (R) by his or her name, you'll get back the other form-letter. There's no attempt to address the points you might bring up. You write--and they respond back with their pre-baked talking points.

A politician is like ROM: Once it's written, that's it, you have to swap it out with a different ROM if you want even one of its lines of programming changed.
by Painsawman123 | 2026-01-26 16:31:12+00:00
In the long run, vb coding is going to undoubtedly rot people’s skills.if AGI is not showing up anytime soon, actually understanding what the code does,why it exists,how it breaks and who owns the fallout will matter just as much as it did before LLM agents showed up

it'll be really interesting to see in the decades to come what happens when a whole industry gets used to releasing black boxes by vb coding the hell out of it
by sellmesoap | 2026-01-26 16:31:21+00:00
TFA says they want a 10 year span of email addresses, so any system they have a back-end adapter for in this Post Snowden show.

When every service I use has its own email address, that makes it a pain for me to travel and be truthful on the form. I wonder how their AI deals sarcasm: Entry denied, funny-boy!
by wat10000 | 2026-01-26 16:31:22+00:00
The general calculus is that an interceptor costs as much as the missile it intercepts, so defenses are only effective against an adversary with much less resources. Hence Israel can defend against Hamas/Hezbollah, and the US can defend against North Korea, but Israel struggles against Iran and the US doesn't even try to defend against China/Russia.

China obviously has a lot more resources than Taiwan, but then you have a concentration effect where an attacker can focus their resources on a single target, but a much more resourced defender can't necessarily afford to defend that target. We saw that play out with the UK's nuclear deterrent strategy in the cold war, where they focused on overwhelming Moscow's defenses, and were (probably) able to do it despite the USSR being so much bigger.
by nonethewiser | 2026-01-26 16:31:32+00:00
But what has changed? Students never had a natural reason to learn how to write fizz buzz. It's been done before and its not even useful. There has always been a arbitrary nature to these exercises.

I actually fear more for the middle-of-career dev who has shunned AI as worthless. It's easier than ever for juniors to learn and be productive.
by yetihehe | 2026-01-26 16:31:38+00:00
> but it is unlikely to bring down an entire electric grid

Unless you happen to drive a forklift in a power plant.

> expose millions to fraud and theft

You can if you drive forklift in a bank.

> put innocent people in prison

You can use forklift to put several innocent people in prison with one trip, they have pretty high capacity.

> jeopardize the institutions of government.

It's pretty easy with a forklift, just try driving through main gate.

> There is more than one kind of leverage at play here.

Forklifts typically have several axes of travel.
by tracker1 | 2026-01-26 16:31:40+00:00
I started picturing AI generating tools like it does images of people... I mean, of course every other hammer will have an extra head off to the side, or split into 3 handles.

Seriously though, you can tell AI what libraries and conventions you want to follow... that's been a lot of what I've done with it recently... I've been relatively pleased with the results.

I've said several times that it's not perfect, but it is an overall force multiplier. It's much like working disconnected with an overseas dev team, but you get turn around in minutes instead of the next morning in your email. The better instructions/specs you give, the better the results. On my best day, I got about 3 weeks of what would take me alone done, after about 3 hours of planning/designing and another 2-3 hours of iteration with Claude Code. On my worst day, it was frustrating and it would have been about the same amount of time doing it myself. On average, I'd say I get close to 5 days of work done in 5-6 hours of AI assisted coding. Purely anecdotally.

That said, I usually have a technical mind for how I want the solution structured as well as features and how those features work... often it clashes with the AI approach and sometimes it swims nicely. I'll also say that not all AI coding is the same or even close in terms of usefulness.
by rossjudson | 2026-01-26 16:32:25+00:00
Tuning matters! After my daughter complained about how the toms on her new drums sounded like crap, I bought a Tune-Bot (drum tuner), asked Gemini to help me make her toms sound like Dirty Loops, and got busy.

A few hours later, she pronounced them to be "not bad". Win! I wasn't going to get higher praise out of a teenager anyway.
by _verandaguy | 2026-01-26 16:32:38+00:00
I use the terms interchangeably when it comes to batteries; I do use battery disposal bins, but I don't have any faith that the actual process behind the scenes is much less impactful for the environment.

It's like when I learned that many paper recycling programs end up combining paper with regular garbage, or finding out that plastic recycling is comically ineffective in its outcomes.
by flankstaek | 2026-01-26 16:32:47+00:00
Maybe I'm "vibecoding" wrong but to me at least this misses a clear step which is reviewing the code.

I think coding with an AI changes our role from code writer to code reviewer, and you have to treat it as a comprehensive review where you comment not just on code "correctness" but these other aspects the author mentions, how functions fits together, codebase patterns, architectural implications. While I feel like using AI might have made me a lazier coder, it's made me a me a significantly more active reviewer which I think at least helps to bridge the gap the author is referencing.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-26 16:33:00+00:00
If cutting edge were a hard requirement then given the lead times involved I think the author would be correct. However I think there's a fundamental error in failing to account for the fact that you don't need cutting edge chips to do AI. Sure it makes it cheaper and faster but it's absolutely not a requirement. You could train a state of the art model on cluster of 12+ year old boxes (ie Intel's 22 nm and DDR3) but if you want to get the job done in a similar timeframe you're going to pay out the ass for electricity. Your research pipeline would necessarily be narrower due to physical and monetary limitations but that's not the end of the world.
by toast0 | 2026-01-26 16:33:38+00:00
> But I'm always a bit sceptical about such approaches. They are not universal. You still need glibc/musl to be the same on the target system. Also, if you compile againt new glibc version, but try to run on old glibc version, it might not work.

Why would you include most of your dynamic libraries but not your libc?

You could still run into problems if you (or your libraries) want to use syscalls that weren't available on older kernels or whatever.
by adamrezich | 2026-01-26 16:33:51+00:00
Imagine a world where Microsoft was pushing “Copilot” integration everywhere, just as they are in this one—but the proof was, actually, in the pudding. Windows was categorically improving, without regression, with each subsequent update. Long-standing frustrations with the operating system experience were gradually being ironed out. Parts of the system that were slow, frustrating, convoluted, or all three, were being thoughtfully redesigned without breaking backwards compatibility, and we were watching this all unfold in real time, in awe of the power of “AI”, eyes wide with hope for the future of software, and computing in general.

Think of how dramatically this hypothetical alternate reality differs from the one we live in, and then consider just how galling it is that these people have the nerve to piss on our leg and then tell us it's raining. Things are not getting better. This supposedly-magical new technology isn't observably improving things where it matters most—rather, it's demonstrably hastening the decline of the baseline day-to-day software that we depend upon.
by 827a | 2026-01-26 16:33:53+00:00
IMO: Its going to. But, organizations which frame this replacement as "we're going to fire you and replace you with AI" are going to crash and burn. Instead, we're just seeing per-engineer and per-team productivity increase, and that productivity begins to outpace other bottlenecks in your company process, and you hit another wall. When faced with that second wall, some companies will naturally interpret this as "ok we don't need to hire more engineers". Other companies will try to apply AI (or hire humans) to fix that bottleneck, then go back to hiring engineers.

The dream of a Jira integration directly wired to an autonomous system to quickly close stories with no human intervention will remain a dream for a long time for anything except the lowest-level 10% of stories. Its not interactive enough; the feedback loop needs to be tighter, the vibes need to be conversational, and businesses will get the most value out of the pilot in the chair being someone who in years past called themselves a software engineer. I think we still will; the tools just change.
by mellosouls | 2026-01-26 16:34:05+00:00
Sustaining OSS at its current scale under widespread vibe coding requires major changes in how maintainers are paid

A recent discussion on a related topic, apparently following the same misguided idea of how OSS is motivated:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46565281

(All my new code will be closed-source from now on: 93 points, 112 comments)
by maxglute | 2026-01-26 16:34:09+00:00
TW doesn't have any munitions that can remotely breach gravity dam like three gorges, i.e. bunker buster, which even if they did, they wouldn't have survivable platform to deliver it (strategic bombers, too heavy for TEL). US MOP tier 30000kg penetrator munitions isn't designed to crack three gorges, TW missile inventory are like 1500kg, at most they'll inflict scabbing or break exposed components like power infra, lock gates, which is not nothing, but not remotely compromise structural integrity of dam. This not to mention TW missile trajectory is geographically constrained and overflies the densest IADS environments on earth, assuming their TELs are survivable in the first place. They're much better off trying to threaten PRC coastal nuclear, but either way gets them the Gaza treatment.
by bilbo0s | 2026-01-26 16:34:22+00:00
They're not segregated by zip, they're segregated by city.

If you live in Scottsdale, not in a certain zip, and the ish hits the fan water-wise, Phoenix is not giving you water. It's up to Scottsdale to provide you services.

That's why they call it a "magic zip". Not because of the zip itself, but because you get Phoenix services in that zip.

It's actually really important to know things like that when buying property down there. Some places have aquifers and reserves and others don't. Who is providing your services can have a critical impact on not only your quality of life, but also your property value.

Also, higher taxes is what it takes to create the new infrastructure to bring in water.

You gonna do a deal with California to get in on their desal plants? The infrastructure to pull that off will cost money. You gonna go the other way and desal through Texas? Even more money. Gonna continue to trust the Colorado and upgrade that infrastructure? Probably cheapest, but still a lot of money.

Essentially, whatever solution you come up with, it will cost money. Either the feds will have to pay it, or, as I said, the people who live in those areas will have to acclimate themselves to paying significantly higher taxes.
by acessoproibido | 2026-01-26 16:34:23+00:00
I'm not so sure.
I spent A LOT of time writing sorting algo code by hand in university.
I spent so much time writing assembly code by hand.
So much more time writing instructions for MIPS by hand.
(To be fair I did study EE not CS)

I learned more about programming in a weekend badly copying hack modules for Minecraft than I learned in 5+ years in university.

All that stuff I did by hand back then I haven't used it a single time after.
by threetonesun | 2026-01-26 16:35:32+00:00
As someone who used to do instructional writing, I'm not sure that's true for those specific examples, but I acknowledge that making a video is exponentially cheaper and easier than generating good diagrams, illustrations, or photography with clear steps to follow.

Or to put it another way, if you were building a Lego set, would you rather follow the direction book, or follow along with a video? I fully acknowledge video is better for some things (try explaining weight lifting in text, for example, it's not easy), but a lot of Youtube is covering gaps in documentation we used to have in abundance.
by RandyOrion | 2026-01-26 16:35:36+00:00
NO.

They can do unconditional blocking at any moment and suddenly you can experience Internet blackout. [1]

The censorship from GFW is ever evolving. See the endless cat-and-mouse games yourself. [2][3]

[1] https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/511

[2] https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues?q=is%3Aissue+state%...

[3] https://gfw.report/en/