MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by MengerSponge | 2026-01-17 17:40:21+00:00
> powerful learning accelerator

You got any data on that? Because it's a bold claim that runs counter to all results I've seen so far. For example, this paper[^1] which is introduced in this blog post:
https://theconversation.com/learning-with-ai-falls-short-com...

[^1]: https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgaf316
by fofoz | 2026-01-17 17:40:25+00:00
My impression as a European is that trust in the United States has now been burned, and that companies are slowly, but inexorably, completely rethinking their dependence on the U.S. I believe this is a process that is not reversible in the medium term.

Trump, like any politician, will sooner or later pass. How many institutional reforms will the United States have to undertake, and how long will it take before the world trusts them again?
For me, Hacker News is probably the best community on the internet
by DenisDolya | 2026-01-17 17:41:11+00:00
For me, Hacker News is probably the best community on the internet. It’s not like others. Take Reddit, for example: at first glance it seems better, with tons of subreddits. But for a beginner, there is no real main entrance. With a new account, it’s a challenge - first you wait 5 days, then you need to earn karma just to post or comment in popular subreddits. On Twitter, you have to spend a long time building followers, or buy a checkmark, just to get access to recommendations. On Hacker News, everything feels right even if you are a beginner. Your post appears in the “new” feed, where everyone can see it. Karma is not so limiting here. At the start, you can make one post a day and a few comments, and after reaching just 10 karma, you become almost a full user - free to participate, contribute, and enjoy the platform. Hacker News is a place that survived the revolution of the modern internet and remained true to itself. A place without subscribers, paid boosts, or artificial promotion. The most important thing that keeps this world going is our elders people who preserve this spirit with discipline, guiding others who may have strayed from the path. HN is where the good, clean internet has survived after all these years. And I truly hope it will always stay this way. Thanks, HN.
by bflesch | 2026-01-17 17:41:40+00:00
Right now, China is still supporting the russian war machine. The russian people are openly at war against Ukraine and the European idea.

Still China is a great alternative to US in terms of hardware, because all the things you would buy from the US is just made in China anyways.

While the US are acting like foolish, uneducated hotheads China is silently benefiting from all parties involved.
by deadeye | 2026-01-17 17:41:42+00:00
"In March, Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder and a leader of pro-Palestinian demonstrations on the Columbia campus, was arrested and detained by immigration officials for several months. That month, Rumeysa Ozturk, a student visa holder, was arrested by immigration officials and detained for several weeks, apparently because she was an author of an opinion essay criticizing Tufts University for its response to the Israel-Hamas war."

Yeah, let's pretend they were arrested for "speech" and not their illegal activities.
by dragonwriter | 2026-01-17 17:41:48+00:00
It stops drafts from the window before they reach occupants. Yes, it is less efficient in terms of total heat inside the structure, but its more effective at avoiding uncomfortably cold spots, which is (in most places at most times of year) more important, plus, the utility lost to the occupied under-window space is less than the utility that would be lost for the same space elsewhere; the window already limiting alternate uses.
by constantcrying | 2026-01-17 17:41:52+00:00
>Can we agree to stop calling it anything but gambling? Because it's just gambling.

No. It is not just "gambling" it is a very specific form of gambling, which is unlike most other forms of gambling. E.g. for most other gambling activities, the expectation is that the reward is monetary (see e.g. sports betting, roulette).

This should be clearly demarcated from micro transactions, where a predetermined reward is offered for a fixed amount of money. Lootboxes, where a digital reward (which may or may not be resellable) is given and gatcha mechanics, which are a very specific genre of gambling for digital rewards.

I see no reason why all of these should be treated the same.

>Also, the fact that it's called gotcha (got ya) has always had the hair up on the back of my neck.

Pure coincidence. The name comes from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gashapon
by pessimizer | 2026-01-17 17:41:53+00:00
The fact is that there is no potential there. Europe has no leverage over the US. It is not holding back anything, it has nothing.

Somehow when the US went to war with Russia, it ended up completing the conquest of Europe. Europe used to just be stagnant. Now it is stagnant and isolated from everywhere except the US, and the US treats it accordingly.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-17 17:42:20+00:00
It appears to be a combination of racism, crabs in the pot, tribalism and in group, and people looking for another group to look down on because they have no opportunity ahead of them between now and death. Happiness is reality minus expectations.

His supporters still say “It’s not great but I’d vote for him again.” Well, the unfortunate news is he’s near end of life and they footgunned their own economic opportunity light cone. The global economy is going to route around the US accordingly, because it cannot be trusted to trade as an adult vs a bully. They will continue to have their vote and mental model regardless of rationality and logical reasoning. All you can do as a nation state counterparty is defend against military action and disconnect economically.

Same vibes as "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." —- LBJ
by Dilettante_ | 2026-01-17 17:42:24+00:00
That's the next part of the problem: Masking. If I'm only performing so that other people like me, again I am not actually connecting with them. If I don't care about football but everyone else does, we are not actually sharing anything if I force myself to talk about football. I feel just as rejected and distant as before. And if I was on the other end, I would also not want that, for people to just twist themselves into a shape that suits me, right?

What I'm looking for, what I desire is mutuality.
by cauch | 2026-01-17 17:42:24+00:00
I'm not saying Adams is not smart because he has done stupid things, I'm saying that Adams has probably thought of himself as very smart while not smart at all in field X because it is pretty clear he has done that in fields Y and Z (which is the first clue).

The second clue is about the fact that the "smart thing" he came up with is quite simplistic.
by smj-edison | 2026-01-17 17:42:33+00:00
I think one thing I've heard missing from discussions though is that each level of abstraction needs to be introspectable. LLMs get compared to compilers a lot, so I'd like to ask: what is the equivalent of dumping the tokens, AST, SSA, IR, optimization passes, and assembly?

That's where I find the analogy on thin ice, because somebody has to understand the layers and their transformations.
by exogeny | 2026-01-17 17:42:35+00:00
There's a lot of really interesting stories about the Eastern Bloc defections into the NHL in the late 1980s. IIRC, Alexander Mogilny, who was the best prospect in the world at the time, hid in a suitcase and defected during the World Junior Championships -- talk about bravery!

Once Mogilny defected, it was impossible for the system to hold. Mogilny (along with Pavel Bure and Fedorov) were groomed and training together to be the next great line combination in hockey; two years later, all three were in the NHL.
by HWR_14 | 2026-01-17 17:43:10+00:00
> Bigger purchases give more, because the percentage lost to fees are lower.

So you sell $100 of in game currency for $85. It's all the same except 1 coin equals one cent when you buy it in the smallest bundle.

> I'd be a financial institution and break the rules of all major card networks.

It's measured in dollars but it is a gift card. It's not that serious.
by komali2 | 2026-01-17 17:43:38+00:00
I get told this a lot by liberals, that it's wrong that I shouted in a cop's face that he's a fascist pig and a traitor to the people, now he'll never support my cause, but I'm not really sure I agree. The cop, and the nazis he's protecting from me, will never join "my group" in ten million years, no matter how nice I am to them. Do you believe otherwise?
by lyu07282 | 2026-01-17 17:43:50+00:00
He was actually asked about why he is even doing this nonsense by the NYT, since they can get Denmark already to agree on any new military bases (they already have one) or mineral extraction anyway:

David E. Sanger:
Why is ownership important here?
President Trump:
Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success. I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do, whether you’re talking about a lease or a treaty. Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document, that you can have a base.
Katie Rogers
Psychologically important to you or to the United States?
President Trump
Psychologically important for me. Now, maybe another president would feel differently, but so far I’ve been right about everything.

Just imagine the amount of lives that it will cost to carve him from his bloody throne and drag his supporters into deprogramming camps. It will only get more costly with each passing month.

https://archive.ph/EhTNh
by ramoz | 2026-01-17 17:43:52+00:00
Well, I'm a creator and I now have a $4,000 crypto wallet. I did not "pump it" at all. I literally woke up to messages saying, "Hey, you just need to go tie your Twitter account," and I did, and boom.

If the business model is charity for open-source creators, then I guess it does work.

It's not entirely fair to say, though, that the creators are the ones participating in the pump. At least, not initially.
by obscurette | 2026-01-17 17:44:39+00:00
Most of comments seem to assume that education system have been functioning up to this point, LLM-s appear and there are somewhere solutions ready to adapt. That's just not the case. For many reasons – parental problems, early development, phones, social media, decline of responsibility, changes in educational principles in general etc etc etc – education is already in free fall almost all over the world.

Average student even in universities is functionally illiterate now, it's not an exaggeration. Even if we assume that there is LLM which would help to learn, how these students should use it?

https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com/p/the-average-colleg...
by logicallee | 2026-01-17 17:44:52+00:00
There's lots new in the "let's evolve a fly" game I posted a few days ago - at that time someone pointed out that the maze was too difficult to navigate after even 2,000 generations.

So I simplified the maze. Now it's a race between various algorithms from Machine Learning. In the race are: purely evolved flies (a.k.a. crossover = parent flies' brains are mixed together!), flies that use backpropagation, flies that use transformer architecture (is attention really all you need?), and hybrids that use both an evolved algorithm and backpropagation. All this is unsupervised learning - they try to navigate on their own and learn from the results!

No spoilers, see for yourself if any of the evolved/hybrid flies can navigate the maze by clicking the maze button!

It's fun to pause it and click any of the flies' brains, you can see their whole neural net! Pause it at the beginning before any training and look at their brain, then look again after you've evolved it for a while!

This is ridiculously fun, and educational too. Click show statistics to see how the generations evolve over time. What's your high score?
by Avicebron | 2026-01-17 17:45:23+00:00
I think you're trying to overcomplicate this, I'm not sure why. "Engineers" aren't one thing, you can be an engineer and have all the soft skills and insight into the world to navigate the so called "high-dimensional chaos". MBAs can be narrow minded and focused on optimizing their pseudo-scientific system of disposable widget workers. The word Engineer at its french root means "clever" or ingenious. It's mind boggling how much effort people go through just to try redefine concepts that fit their own particular worldview. It's not surprising it's more common on posts by Scott Alexander and his ilk of sad pathetic sacks, but jeez
by laurencerowe | 2026-01-17 17:45:59+00:00
Figures based on coroners reports are somewhat suspect.

> In September 2022, a vicious heat wave enveloped much of the western U.S., placing tens of millions of people under heat advisories. Temperatures across California soared into the triple digits. Sacramento broke its heat record by more than 6 degrees Fahrenheit when the temperature hit 116 degrees.

> California death certificates showed that 20 people died as a result of heat-related illness from Aug. 31, 2022 to Sept. 9, 2022.

> But a study last year by California’s Department of Public Health found that death rates increased by about 5 percent statewide during the heat wave, causing 395 additional deaths.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/u-s-deaths-from-h...

Excess mortality studies seem to show about 24 per 100,000 excess deaths from heat in Europe vs 6 in US/Canada.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34245712/
by grayhatter | 2026-01-17 17:46:21+00:00
Most people, who adopt a different married name, don't do so because they consider their former name to be offensive or insulting.

If I'm proud of my name, you should include it. If I'm ashamed of my name, you should omit it, unless it's important context or information. You have to have a clear articulable reason above, it's a real detail.
by ynac | 2026-01-17 17:46:55+00:00
When we lost power for 10 days a few winters back we attempted to use the fire place for heat. It was a fail. Post and beam house (large wide open floor plan) with a large transfer from 1st to 2nd floor, and apprently my lack of skill for optimizing heat over beauty in the fireplace, left us without much of a thermal bump. To this day I swear we were pulling heat out of the chimney faster than we were heating the house; I cooled the house with fire.
by fn-mote | 2026-01-17 17:46:58+00:00
Look at traditional manufacturing. Automation has made massive inroads. Not as much of the economy is directly supporting (eg, auto) manufacturers as it used to be (stats check needed). Nevertheless, there are plenty of mechanical engineering jobs. Not so many lower skill line worker jobs in the US any more, though. You have to ask yourself which category you are in (by analogy). Don’t be the SWE working on the assembly line.
by 9JollyOtter | 2026-01-17 17:47:03+00:00
> In the UK, there is no crime "burglary".

Yes there is:

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1968/60/section/9

https://www.college.police.uk/guidance/residential-burglary/...

> "Breaking and entering" it's a criminal offence, and walking through an unlocked front door back door doesn't count.

No breaking and entering is known as burglary. Also if you walk through the front door with the intent to commit a crime it is still burglary. The important part is trespassing with the intent to commit a crime.
by Balgair | 2026-01-17 17:47:06+00:00
I could only hope for a eulogy like that.

I think the lack of friends (heightened by his Titanic wealth) contributed to his isolation. Like how we all kinda got out of practice talking with people during COVID isolation. That then kinda spiraled him into algorithmicly fed nonsense as he didn't have anyone he could trust to tell him he was wrong. Just sycophants and fans and golddiggers.

Cicero is still right, a friend is the best thing to have, no question.

https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/cicero-on-friendship-de-a...

Eulogies are such good reading for those of us left here. They really drive the points home. Life isn't the grind, it's a journey. We're all just here for each other
by bflesch | 2026-01-17 17:47:12+00:00
Your "better" assumes that availability is not a problem.

The risk we need to mitigate is that some right wing doofus in the US gets triggered by a twitter reply and decides to block our use of all US software and services.

In that case, having libreoffice installed locally does not seem so bad.

This is the risk we are worrying about.
by notahacker | 2026-01-17 17:47:13+00:00
Think he was always unusually susceptible to the feedback loop of social media.

Long before he was trying to be a political figure, criticism of his book resulted in this glorious piece of peak internet forum nonsense in which he responded to criticism by registering an anonymous account to say things like "I hate Adams for his success too" and "he's a certified genius which is hard to hide" until the mods decided to call him out...

https://www.metafilter.com/102472/How-to-Get-a-Real-Educatio...
by rectang | 2026-01-17 17:47:20+00:00
> Refusing the vet AI output is the kiss of death to velocity.

The usual rejoinder I've seen is that AI can just rewrite your whole system when complexity explodes. But I see at least two problems with that.

AI is impressively good at extracting intent from a ball of mud with tons of accidental complexity, and I think we can expect it to continue improving. But when a system has a lot of inherent complexity, and it's poorly specified, the task is harder.

The second is that small, incremental, reversible changes are the most reliable way to evolve a system, and AI doesn't repeal that principle. The more churn, the more bugs — minor and major.
by softwaredoug | 2026-01-17 17:47:56+00:00
The moat for small company is the lower coordination overhead than bigger companies, not about the effort of writing code.

Big companies try to balance a lot of stakeholders, the collection of all their requirements makes them risk adverse and creates wasted effort. I’ve been on a lot of projects (pre AI coding) with rewrites and changes that have more to do with politics and org changes, lack of vision, and needless veto points.

That’s the small software company advantage still IMO
by daxfohl | 2026-01-17 17:48:25+00:00
Trillions of dollars of research, billions in training, millions in parallel agent execution, and it took a week and a million lines of code to write the equivalent of what an experienced browser dev could do in couple of days with under 1% of the code. Sounds like a great reason to increase unemployment, devalue human IP, base the whole economy on a bet, and destroy the planet!
by robot-wrangler | 2026-01-17 17:48:37+00:00
> strongly believe that structured outputs are one of the most underrated features in LLM engines

Structured output is really the whole foundation of lots of our hopes and dreams. The JSONSchemaBench paper is fairly preoccupied with performance, but where it talks about quality/compliance, the "LM only" scores in the tables are pretty bad. This post highlights the on-going difficulty and confusion around doing a simple, necessary, and very routine task well.

Massaging small inputs into structured formats isn't really the point. It's about all the nontrivial cases central to MCP, tool-use, local or custom APIs. My favorite example of this is every tool-use tutorial that's pretending that "ping" accepts 2 arguments, but, it's actually more like 20 arguments with subtle gotchas. Do the tool-use demos that correctly work with 2 arguments actually work with 20? How many more retries might that take, and what does this change about the hardware and models we need for "basic" stuff?

If you had a JSON schema correctly and completely describing legal input for say ffmpeg, then the size and complexity of it would be approaching that of kubernetes schemas (where JSONBench compliance is only at .56). Can you maybe yolo generate a correct ffmpeg command without consulting any schema with SOTA models? Of course!, but that works well because ffmpeg is a well-documented tool with decades of examples floating around in the wild. What's the arg-count and type-complexity for that one important function/class in your in-house code base? For a less well-known use case or tool, if you want hallucination free and correct output, then you need structured output that works, because the alternative is rolling your own model trained on your stuff.
by TrackerFF | 2026-01-17 17:48:52+00:00
It is wildly fascinating to experience, in real time, how fragile the US system is. Trump really did show that the US is built on the assumption that people in power will behave, basically a honor system. Trump is stress testing every single aspect of the US.

He's dousing the US with gasoline, and fumbling around with matches. The people around him, knee deep in gas, are too afraid to take the matches from him.

In so many other countries, Trump would face a no confidence vote. Snap elections.
by elbci | 2026-01-17 17:49:18+00:00
there's a wikipedia link above (showing indeed Czechia amongst the least "nostalgic" - only 25% in 2021). As for elections results, how many ppl don't bother to vote (31% absenteeism vs 36% best electoral score, ANO)? how many tv stations do communists have, how many lavishly funded NGOs? how many instances proving the "communist" party to be no more that a pale imitation if not straight up controlled opposition...

As for the "flawed methodology":
66.2% of Romanians regret Nicolae Ceausescu in a study..."commissioned by the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes and the Memory of the Romanian Exile" - I'd say if the "institute" of bad-mouthing communism had to admit that number... well it seems the russian bots are extremely efficient, maybe we should listen to them instead of useless Ursula bots ;)
by westurner | 2026-01-17 17:49:51+00:00
Start with env args like AGENT_ID for indicating which Merkle hash of which model(s) generated which code with which agent(s) and add those attributes to signed (-S) commit messages. For traceability; to find other faulty code generated by the same model and determine whether an agent or a human introduced the fault.

Then, `git notes` is better for signature metadata because it doesn't change the commit hash to add signatures for the commit.

And then, you'd need to run a local Rekor log to use Sigstore attestations on every commit.

Sigstore.dev is SLSA.dev compliant.

Sigstore grants short-lived release attestation signing keys for CI builds on a build farm to sign artifacts with.

So, when jujutsu autocommits agent-generated code, what causes there to be an {{AGENT_ID}} in the commit message or git notes? And what stops a user from forging such attestations?
by UncleEntity | 2026-01-17 17:50:08+00:00
Isn't the "Disposable System" in TFA the actual AI?

Today you have to have it write some software to accomplish a task and it's pretty obvious what's going on but when the AI itself becomes the UI then it doesn't matter as much, are the steps to complete a task the goal or is it the end result?

The only thing really stopping the commodification of software is the development of said software.
by eimrine | 2026-01-17 17:50:11+00:00
I have opinion that you do not understand the importance of C after reading your claim about so-called efficiency in systems programming code. You have got so carried away with defending the stupid untestable run-time checks, enough to ignore things like ABI, cross-platformness, developed datatype system and compiler optimizations with respect to hardware quirks such as cachelines.

What you have called a major job did not even remotely exist 4 years ago, it is laughable if to remind the Lindy effect.