MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chr15m | 2026-01-30 02:25:20+00:00
As they point out in the article, that approach is fragile.

Cheaper because it has the right context from the start instead of faffing about trying to find it, which uses tokens and ironically bloats context.

It doesn't have to be every bit of documentation, but putting the most salient bits in context makes LLMs perform much more efficiently and accurately in my experience. You can also use the trick of asking an LLM to extract the most useful parts from the documentation into a file, which you then re-use across projects.

https://github.com/chr15m/ai-context
by derrida | 2026-01-30 02:25:55+00:00
OS is designed by Bell Labs, of Unix and C fame, but ok.

EDIT: I think some of the in-jokey, arty farty culture about it is because the rest of us didn't run with it, it's basically for hobby and personal use - so its culture now. But about any one I know who has used it enough to "grok" it kinda is like "wow if this won" because its kinda such a paradigmatically good thing whole kind of cottage industries of software may not even exist because the user would be able to write a pipe from a file that is a device to write to another one type thing.
by PostOnce | 2026-01-30 02:26:18+00:00
Some of them are, most of them are standard typesetting, which you would think would be all the easier to OCR, due to the uniformity.

But because you're curious, there are some fairly famous handwritten books that maintain their handwriting in publication, my favorite being: https://boingboing.net/2020/08/31/getting-started-in-electro...

Old manuscripts are another one, there are a LOT of those. Is that handwriting? Maybe you'd argue it's "hand-printing" because its so meticulous.
by OgsyedIE | 2026-01-30 02:28:37+00:00
Unfortunately I'm not seeing any good systems for hierarchical problem solving in the current agents. Ideally, an agent would set up a higher-level thought process of comparing ways to understand the problem statement and ways to solve it and rank them like a human mind does, so it could try different strategies for looking up resources and go back and forth between them as they seem to bear fruit or not.

Instead of going meta about their strategies for identifying their tasks and reasoning about them, they currently stick to one conception of the task and try different tactics for implementing different strategies for solving it within that conceptual frame.

Furthermore, they don't seem to have a reliable way to ask themselves if they're taking too long to do something that should be easy yet. Maybe one in fifty times the latest agents will say "This is taking too long, let's step back and look up how other people do it," but humans do that for most human tasks.

I don't think appropriate use of some, but not too much, meta-reasoning and meta-meta-reasoning on the fly will be easily solved without some kind of mental parallelization advance, which might come tomorrow but might not come for two or more years.

.

As for society, we need an AI takeover for the simple reason that we're facing real bad shortages of diesel fuel and days of agriculture-suitable weather in the next decade, which makes the former the less bad outcome. Given that AI will outcompete humans for all economic roles in such a scenario the only way it can happen humanely is human preservation through uploading or as pets.

Literally every other option is on a spectrum of negative outcomes from extinction to Greer's 2013 essay on the ten-billion year future.
by rao-v | 2026-01-30 02:29:04+00:00
Sub-agents are typically one of the major models but with a specific and limited context + prompt. I’m talking about a small fast model focused on purely curating the skills / MCPs / files to provide to the main model before it kicks off.

Basically use a small model up front to efficiently trigger the big model. Sub agents are at best small models deployed by the bigger model (still largely manually triggered in most workflows today)
by daxfohl | 2026-01-30 02:29:46+00:00
Cool, I tried something similar over a couple weeks but the problem I ran into was that beyond a fairly low level of complexity, the English spec became more confusing than the code itself. Even for a simple multi-step KYC workflow, it got very convoluted and hard to make it precise, whereas in code it's a couple loops and if/else blocks with no possibility of misinterpretation. Have you encountered that at all, or have any techniques you've found useful in these situations?

That's why I feel like iterative workflows have won out so far. Each step gets you x% closer, so you close in on your goal exponentially, whereas the one-shot approach closes in much slower, and each iteration starts from scratch. The advantage is that then you have a spec for the whole system, though you can also just generate that from the code if you write the code first.
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2026-01-30 02:30:28+00:00
> Also the DT has no (or only one 10G NIC) at the DE-CIX.

Why would they? There is this thing called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagger_Complex

not that far away from the former https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernmeldetechnisches_Zentralam... , something like HQ of the former Gov-telco. While those have been torn down, or brought to other uses meanwhile, the Deutsche Telekom has still a massive presence in Karlsruhe. Still not that far away from the Dagger Complex.

Get what I mean?
by minimaltom | 2026-01-30 02:30:30+00:00
> Does Waymo have the same object permanence and trajectory prediction (combined) to that of a human?

On this note specifically ive actually been impressed, ie when driving down Oak st in SF (fast road, tightly parked cars) I've often observed it slow if someone on a scooter on the sidewalk turns to look toward oncoming traffic (as if to start riding), or to slow passing parked box trucks (which block vision of potential pedestrians)
by godelski | 2026-01-30 02:31:22+00:00
> It shouldn't matter, because whoever is producing the work product is responsible for it, no matter whether genAI was involved or not.

I hate to ask, but did you RTFA? Scrolling down ever so slightly (emphasis not my own)

| *Who authorized this class of action, for which agent identity, under what constraints, for how long; and how did that authority flow?*
| A common failure mode in agent incidents is not “we don’t know what happened,” but:
| > We can’t produce a crisp artifact showing that a specific human explicitly authorized the scope that made this action possible.

They explicitly state that the problem is you don't know which human to point at.
by joefourier | 2026-01-30 02:31:38+00:00
Not go to all “ackchually” but modern GPUs can render in many other ways than rasterising triangles, and they can absolutely draw a cylinder without any tessellation involved. You can use the analytical ray tracing formula, or signed distance fields for a practical way to easily build complex scenes purely with maths: https://iquilezles.org/articles/distfunctions/

Now of course triangles are usually the most practical way to render objects but it just bugs me when someone says something like “Every smooth surface you've ever seen on a screen was actually tiny flat triangles” when it’s patently false, ray tracing a sphere is pretty much the Hello World of computer graphics and no triangles are involved.

Edit: for CADs, direct ray tracing of NURBS surfaces on the GPU exists and lets you render smooth objects with no triangles involved whatsoever, although I’m not sure if any mainstream software uses that method.
by robotresearcher | 2026-01-30 02:33:21+00:00
> here aren't infinitely many scenarios to consider, but even if that's a figure of speech, there aren't thousands or even hundreds.

There are a very, very large number of scenarios. Every single possible different state the robot can perceive, and every possible near future they can be projected to.

Ten kids is not 10 path scenarios. Every kid could do a vast number of different things, and each additional kid raises the number of joint states to another power.

This is trivially true. The game that makes driving possible for humans and robots is that all these scenarios are not equally likely.

But even with that insight, it’s not easy. Consider a simple case of three cars about to arrive at an all-way stop. Tiny differences in their acceleration - potentially smaller differences than the robot can measure - will result in a different ordering of cars taking turns through the intersection.

It’s a really interesting problem.
by stinkbeetle | 2026-01-30 02:34:44+00:00
> Tesla will become a case study on how to completely waste the first-mover advantage.

I doubt that because Tesla was not a first mover, established automotive companies were.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_R%27nessa#Nissan_Altra

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Ranger_EV

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_EV_Plus

Etc.

The innovation/imitation/commoditization cycle is not really new or limited to Tesla, it applies to everything from robot vacuum cleaners to CPUs. Whether Tesla survives or not probably depends a lot more on boring things like economic and trade policies of large countries.

The much more interesting thing to study would be how ice auto manufacturers not only completely wasted their first mover advantages, but also their long established brand value, supply chains and distribution and sales networks when it came to EVs.

It was not many years ago, industry "experts" were still going on about how Tesla could never hope to build cars at scale, that their "build quality" would sink them, etc. Whereas many people have rightly identified this commoditization and threats from Chinese manufacturers as being one of the biggest risks to Tesla from the beginning. Surely it's more interesting to study the things that were not obvious or well predicted?
by JoeyJoJoJr | 2026-01-30 02:36:20+00:00
This might be a nitpick, but I could probably only count 5-10 SNES games that would be considered 10/10 IMO, and not many that I think are worth sinking decent time into these days, compared to something like Burnout Revenge - a great game but certainly not a 10/10 game.

Still, I do find the SNES library, and 16bit games in general, quite astounding from a creative and artistic perspective, but not so much from a player’s perspective.
by mbil | 2026-01-30 02:36:57+00:00
> I've written tons of code, I've taken no shortcuts, and I've focused on improving over my many iterations. This has enabled me to be an effective steward of generative coding (etc) models, but will younger engineers ever get the reps necessary to get where I am? Are there other ways to get this knowledge and taste?

I think this will be a problem in the middle term, and I've written about such deskilling before [0]. With the latest crop of foundational coding models and harnesses, and more progress on the way, I'm beginning to wonder if it will matter? If there's a future where agents are designing the code, implementing the code, and reading and reviewing the code... At that point the code is no longer the thing. "Software engineers" will continue to sit at the interface of product and software, but the software will be writing itself. Of course there will be a need for programmers who can actually read and write computer code, the same way there's a need for Fortran and compiler devs today.

The skill that all software engineers will need to learn, regardless of level, is how to leverage commoditized reasoning to build products effectively.

- how to design systems declaratively and in terms of requirements and constraints

- how to configure the systems in such a way that they're automatically testable end-to-end

- how to move tacit knowledge out of people's heads and into the context (all of our meetings will be transcribed; questions from the agent will be generated during the meeting resolve ambiguity; the agent will be an omnipresent attendee in all meetings: "Agent: The topic you're discussing overlaps with what Sally said three days ago when she met with Mike. They covered xyz..."; companies that follow remote work best practices will have an advantage here)

- how to allocate and orchestrate teams of people and agents

[0]: https://matthewbilyeu.com/blog/2025-03-08/ai
by chr15m | 2026-01-30 02:37:16+00:00
The minification is a great idea. Will try this.

Their approach is still agentic in the sense that the LLM must make a tool cool to load the particular doc in. The most efficient approach would be to know ahead of time which parts of the doc will be needed, and then give the LLM a compressed version of those docs specifically. That doesn't require an agentic tool call.

Of course, it's a tradeoff.
by pyuser583 | 2026-01-30 02:38:47+00:00
Is this something that has been rigorously studied? Like multiple follow-ups?

This article is from 2002 - twenty years ago. It cites several other studies, which seem not great overall.

One studied a driving simulator, the others looked at deaths in the single year after lowering blood alcohol.

The one about minors in Maryland seemed especially strange, as minors are usually required to have 0% BAC.

It sounds like cherry picking.
by Tiktaalik | 2026-01-30 02:39:02+00:00
Goes to show that better things are possible when people care enough to spend the money and put in the work to implement systemic problems built into the structural built form of the city instead of just vaguely blaming things on human nature, and putting up some nagging signs, or tasking some police to occasionally put in the work to dole out some fines.

Must be noted that the good outcomes arrive because much like how a plug can be designed to only be inserted one way, thus making it impossible for the user to make a mistake, changing the structure of the city forces people to drive their cars a certain (read: safe) way.
by theamk | 2026-01-30 02:41:03+00:00
C sounds nice if your task is simple enough, or at least if you can decompose this to a series of loosely-connected simple-enough tasks.

But sometimes, there is an inherent complexity in what you are trying to implement, then C becomes way, way complex than C++. You build stuff, and there is so many manual steps, and none of them must be missing, or things will subtly break.

A good example is "gstreamer", the multimedia streaming framework. It is implemented in pure C. It needs to use basic data structures, so it uses GLib. It also need to support runtime-defined connection graph, so it is built on top of GObject.

Yes, build times are amazingly fast. But you pay for it - look at something simple, like display_name property[0]. There is display_name member, and PROP_DISPLAY_NAME enum, and switch case in setter (don't forget to free previous value!) , and switch case in getter, and it's manually installed in class_init, and you need to manually free it in dispose (except they forgot this).

So many places just for a single property, something that would have been 1 or 2 lines in a well-structured C++ app. And unlike C++, you cannot make simple rules like "never use char* except for 3rd party libs" - it's all those multi-point checklists which are not even written down. A

[0] https://github.com/GStreamer/gst-plugins-good/blob/master/sy...
by Telaneo | 2026-01-30 02:41:13+00:00
> I don't think Linux will ever be easy enough that I could recommend it to an elderly neighbor.

The only reason I wouldn't do this is because that elderly neighbour wouldn't be able to install Linux and might not have any obvious place to get support from. Where can Grandma go to get support for her Linux laptop, even if she's willing to pay?

However, in a world where they can buy a laptop with Linux preinstalled and receive support from the same shop they bought it from if they do run into problems, then absolutely I would (not that that support is going to be great, but then they're at least no worse off than they were when they need support with Windows or a Mac, and I imagine they'll run into less problems on Linux than on Windows, given their use cases are likely to be very narrow and simple, i.e. web browser, e-mail, maybe simple office stuff).

> What frustrates me about this particular moment is that at the same time Windows is getting worse, I feel that OS X is _also_ getting worse. This _is_ an opportunity for Apple to put a big dent in Windows market share.

Aye, I agree. MacOS has been getting a bigger slice of the pie, but it's hard to ascribe what's the main cause, and to what extent each cause is contributing. We got the M chips being ungodly good (even the M1 is still serviceable, and damn right affordable even at this point), Windows growing worse, but the laptop market is also contracting, with a steady stream of people leaking out, saying 'screw this, I'll just use my phone or tablet. I don't need a PC for anything anymore.'.

All the casuals I know use a Mac for a laptop because they want something simple and functional, and Macs do that job, but they keep doing that job worse and worse. Everybody else casual might have a Windows laptop, but barely ever use it. The rest are gamers and power users, and thus need a proper machine and can't stick to a phone and tablet.

Apple could attract from the groups who would otherwise be done with non-phone/tablet computing, but their offering is growing weaker and weaker.
by Brajeshwar | 2026-01-30 02:41:45+00:00
In the early 2010s, especially as smartphones began to appear everywhere, I noticed that, along with the desktop, we now had another perpetual Disturber of Peace. One of the worst things turned out to be Notifications, something not under your control, that derails your chain of thoughts/works/routine. Ever since, I had kept every notification disabled by default.

The world is becoming increasingly low-trust; hence, the default is no longer to “allow,” but to filter through a “whitelist.”

Disable all Notifications by Default.[1] This is best done at the time of app installation. When asked to “Allow Notifications,” disable it right then and there. Of course, depending on your occupation and needs, a few critical notifications should be kept ON. This will be less than 10% of your app. More than 90% of the apps on your device have no reason to notify you of anything.

And here is a weird but interesting thing - disable battery percentages everywhere. Personally, not on the phone and neither on the Laptop; if it dies, it dies.

A simple passive notification that can keep you on your toes and stress you out the most - phone battery percentage indicator. We have become so obsessed with ‘juicing up’ our phones that our levels of happiness and relaxation decrease exponentially as the battery percentage drops.

Even in 2026, I hear people’s phones make a sound when a message/email arrives. If I follow that, my phone will sing all day long.

“Never be so dependent on technology that a notification is the only thing that brings you hope.”

Personally, I have a different take on birthdays and have conflicting views. So, I’m sorry about that.

1. https://brajeshwar.com/2014/missing-step-productivity-activi...
by ryan_lane | 2026-01-30 02:41:48+00:00
This is satire. Its purpose is to use exaggeration to provide comedy while also drawing attention to issues.

Obviously the intended use and design of AI isn't to scam the elderly, but it's extremely efficient at doing it, and has no guard rails to help prevent it.

Why is anyone allowed to make a digital copy of me, without my permission, and then use that to call my relatives? It should be illegal to use it and it should be illegal to even generate it. Sure, it's already illegal to defaud people, but that's simply not enough at this point. The AI companies producing these models should be held liable for this form of fraud, as they're not providing any form of protection.

You're exactly the person that this article is satirizing.
by ggm | 2026-01-30 02:41:50+00:00
It's a community. Of course it has in jokes. And of course to an outsider they beg questions but the point is not to amuse outsiders.

It is possible to assert the point is to identify outsiders. Or exclude. Or test to find insiders, to welcome people who chose to align, or not.

I never invested enough to feel I'd even knocked on the door, let alone incanted a phrase to be let in. However I have known IRL and online many who did and they aren't bad people. Or even really exclusive or excluding. They just have a culture. And if it excludes the dismal or the misaligned or the fame seekers and hangers on, that's probably not just a side effect.

Compsci is littered with ingroups and outsiders. The people who get invited to Tannenbaums workshops. The people who got invited once and never again. The people who don't get invites. This is normal. Not everyone gets invited to join the royal society and not everyone wants to.

Some people assert its an intelligence test but I remain a fan of the aphorism from "war games" - the only winning move is not to play.
by OhMeadhbh | 2026-01-30 02:41:55+00:00
Well... I went through the iforgot.apple.com flow. If the past is any indication, I'll likely have to wait 30 or 90 days to get a response. This just seems... sub-optimal. It's a very strange set of hoops to have candidates jump through.

And sad, too. I think my cover letter was one of the best I've ever written. Now no one will be able to appreciate it but me.

This is not how things were in the old days. Back then we would just show up at a job site and after working for a few weeks go to HR and say "hey. I didn't get a check." And then when HR couldn't find your records, they just assumed they were lost somewhere and helpfully set you up as an employee with information you gave them.

How you have changed, outlaw sili valley.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-01-30 02:42:10+00:00
A Link to the Past, Super Mario World, Yoshi's Island, Kirby Super Star, Donkey Kong Country 1-3, Super Metroid, Megaman X series, Dragon Quest series, Final Fantasy series, Chrono Trigger, Earthbound... just off the top of my head, are all very much worth playing today.