MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kypro | 2026-01-07 12:40:08+00:00
This is like going to a bar then getting mad because the bar owner really wants everyone to consume excessive amounts of overpriced alcohol.

Meanwhile there are people are going to the bar having a decent time and meeting interesting people.

Obviously I think you should do whatever is best for you, so this isn't a recommendation or criticism, but X is fine if you use it right. The issue you describe really only applies if you're mindless scrolling on the "for you" page – something X is very happy to let you do if that's how you want to use it. However this problem isn't unique to X, you'll find most businesses are happy to exploit people like this for profit.

On X if you curate lists of interesting users or look for content within specific communities you'll find it much, much more productive.

The reason sites like xcancel.com even exist is because people know there's some really interesting stuff on X which they want to view. You can improve the signal to noise if you decide to actively curate your own experience on X rather than handing that responsibility to X and your limbic system.

I think there are some people who genuinely can't control themselves though, so for them, yes, I agree – say out of the bars, stay out of McDonalds and stay away from X.
by nl | 2026-01-07 12:40:16+00:00
Yes, I thought that too! But qwen3:0.6b (and to some extent gemma 1b) has made me reevaluate.

They still aren't useful like large LLMs, but for things like summarization, and other tasks where you can give them structure but want the sheen of natural language they are much better than things like the Phi series were.
by bflesch | 2026-01-07 12:40:38+00:00
I'm sorry for your loss. It's definitely a fringe theory and I didn't intend to minimize their suffering. But this theory is grounded in my personal experience and my personal analysis with the furniture at hand and my immune system, plus the input of dozens of medical professionals and hundreds of lab tests along the way. My disease fits all of the long covid symptoms listed on wikipedia and it is brazen of you to swing the "long covid misinformation" hammer when I share my personal story of suffering and healing from the thing that people like you call "long covid".

This constant invalidation of multi-year delibitating disease is exhausting. If you come up with a long covid biomarker feel free to reach out so we can test and then you can officially gatekeep me from being part of "long covid". But until then please don't invalidate my healing story.

What helped me was other affected people sharing their story and figuring out what helped them personally to improve and what not. What DID NOT HELP was people in high-ranking social positions of power, especially in traditional medical fields, who (a) did not have the disease themselves and (b) just flat-out refused to even consider whole classes of causes and patients due to their personal hubris.

I have healed from this stuff DESPITE OF medical professionals.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-07 12:40:42+00:00
> I added -c 4096 to cut down the context size

That’s a pretty big caveat. In my experience, using a small context size is only okay for very short answers and questions. The output looks coherent until you try to use it for anything, then it turns into the classic LLM babble that looks like words are being put into a coherent order but the sum total of the output is just rambling.
by thisisit | 2026-01-07 12:42:45+00:00
As a country US can't even agree on securing rights for its own people. Raising minimum wage or universal healthcare or housing leads to lots of bad faith discourse on socialism. The wealth is instead spent on fighting wars and strong arming others. Heck even the guy who promised no wars and America First cannot get enough and attacks another country in name of "liberation" and oil. But somehow immigration has dealt damage to three generations?

> the sympathy and empathy have long since run dry

The has to be the funniest part of the whole statement. The whole point of creating an "outsider" is that you have an enemy to fight contend with and can justify your dislike by accusing them of fraud and other crimes. People who dislike "outsiders" never had sympathy or empathy for those "outsiders" so lets not pretend something has changed.
by compsciphd | 2026-01-07 12:43:06+00:00
a former company I was at, didn't allow outbound ssh (which I liked to enable me to vnc into boxes at home). I installed installed a webvnc application on my home machine (protected by https / password) and was able to access it without an issue.

When I left the company they went through my outbound email and were like "why did you forward an email you got out of the company". That e-mail was a friend visiting and me getting sent their picture from the lobby telling me that I had a visitor (so figured it be cute to share the image with them). I was amused that they only bothered to ask me as I was leaving, not when it actually occurred.
by abinmn | 2026-01-07 12:43:18+00:00
It’s largely asynchronous for me. I'll trigger the generation and come back to the PR whenever I'm free.

I'd say the cycle time largely depends on the complexity of the tools you are building. I've built a movie shelf hooking up with trakt.tv under 30 minutes and a mermaidJS diagram editor spanning multiple sessions and couple of days.
by sarchertech | 2026-01-07 12:43:37+00:00
There’s no process to pick people that will reliably follow through with a suicide pact.

You could automate the process or compartmentalize it enough so that no one knows they are essentially committing suicide. But in that case you are removing human reason from the loop and your system will be too sensitive.

Essentially you have an automated deadman’s switch. Either you tune it to be too sensitive and the thing goes off because you went out of contact for a few hours—likely resulting in your own death.

Or you tune it to be not sensitive enough and your attacker takes advantage of the delay to take control of or destroy the system.
by crispyambulance | 2026-01-07 12:43:50+00:00
I’ve used hardware store “mold kits” where you tack some tape onto a surface and then send it to a service that will analyze it for you. My understanding is that these services simply look at the tape through a microscope, or apply it to a growth media that’s been prepped to “prefer” the specific types of fungus they’re looking for.

One would think there are PCR-based services that do this? That would be the gold standard for this stuff, and it could easily scale enough to become economical, but to my knowledge there are no commercial mold testers that do this.
by azangru | 2026-01-07 12:44:09+00:00
Xcancel is not for writing; it is for reading without needing an account. Something that used to be trivial on Twitter until a year or two before Elon bought it. And this:

> you ll never have even an ounce of mind the moment you open anything on x

is not really the case if you know what you are looking for. I never lost my mind reading Ryan Florence, who writes on various challenging frontend topics. Or Ben Lesh, who, on occasion, would write something about observables. Or Uncle Bob, who might rant at something related to software development.

There are still people there who are fun to read.
by aatd86 | 2026-01-07 12:44:16+00:00
This is one of the easiest paths to gain a competitive advantage that can be monetized.
You are much less likely to fall into a pool of money.

Just like becoming a MD has much better odds at getting you some amount of money than dropping out of school. About the same path by the way.

But you can keep playing the lottery if you think it has better odds or even the same odds...
by marcoaapfortes | 2026-01-07 12:44:21+00:00
I think there’s a misunderstanding of mantic.sh architecture...

The “weights” as you described in Mantic.sh are not neural network weights. They’re deterministic ranking heuristics, similar to what IDE file pickers use. For example, extension weights, path depth penalties, and filename matches. You can see them directly in brain-scorer.ts (EXTENSION_WEIGHTS).

const EXTENSION_WEIGHTS: Record<string, number> = {
'.ts': 20, '.tsx': 20, '.js': 15, '.jsx': 15,
'.rs': 20, '.go': 20, '.py': 15,
'.prisma': 15, '.graphql': 10,
'.css': 5, '.json': 5, '.md': 2
};

There’s no LLM involved in the actual search or scoring, it’s a static heuristic engine, not a learned model.

I'd love to have the implementation critiqued on its merits!
by aebtebeten | 2026-01-07 12:44:54+00:00
Another reason not to bother: https://www.government.se/statements/2026/01/joint-statement...

With IS and NO on board, the only non-EU NATO members left are AL, CA, MK, TR, and UK. I don't think AL and MK have much in the way of force projection; CA is a pity* (what about TR?); and Airstrip One would have danced to the Great Nation Builder's tune anyway.

* a joke I once heard back in the States:

— So, what do you think of Canada, eh?

— We don't. But wait until we run out of natural resources; then we'll think of you...
by benrutter | 2026-01-07 12:45:03+00:00
Yeah, for what its worth I agree. But I can't see how those arguments would apply to abolishing Greenlands law, but not to invading and claiming ownership in the first place.

If the US doesn't have checks and balances to stop it invading a democratic ally with no cause, then I don't know what checks and balancing meaningfully can be said to exist.

Hopefully we won't find out.
by ramraj07 | 2026-01-07 12:45:35+00:00
I don't buy this narrative (notwithstanding that great commencement speeches are almost always hyperbole). The way I see it Sergey HAD to come back or risk the poorly managed mess that is google completely drop the AI leadership . It proves again that all thats good in Google happened exclusively because of the two founders and that their CEO is not an effective leader at all.
by LatencyKills | 2026-01-07 12:45:49+00:00
> I'm a person that wants to learn anything and everything.

That is exactly what I do now. Every question I've ever had I now have the time to devote to answering it. I take classes, I volunteer, I mentor Comp. Sci. students. But, more than anything, I still write code. I spent the last few months creating an LLM from scratch which was incredibly fun.

That said, I have a friend who will probably work until he dies. His only real interest in life is his job. I'm not suggesting that is a bad thing; its more to the point that "retirement" isn't a panacea for everyone.
by berkes | 2026-01-07 12:46:25+00:00
I'll take any of the lot that i could "find [..] on my own".

Or hearsay. Or quotes from tinfoilhats or conspiracy nuts even.

Without any of these, you are seriously discrediting people and projects. And without any of these, there's no way for me counter any. Or even authorize any (ie a random russian troll, vs a journalist with reputation to lose)
by retsibsi | 2026-01-07 12:46:52+00:00
When the information is "what exactly did person X tweet", then yeah. I'm in favour of mostly avoiding X, and I make a point of not spending significant time on it or actively participating. But sometimes, I want to follow a link to a tweet that someone whose work I'm reading thinks is relevant -- or I want to see what a specific person has been saying publicly lately, and it happens that X is one of the main places they do that.
by Krssst | 2026-01-07 12:47:12+00:00
I use the following:

* No autoplay on playlists: https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/no-playlist-auto...

* No translations and AI dubs: https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/youtube-no-trans...

* No YouTube shorts: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hide-youtube-...

* More videos on the home page / smaller thumbnails: https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/youtube-tweaks/ (to be fair, it could probably replace the "No YT shorts" one)

Not sure how safe those are, but since they only require access to data for youtube domains I assume if there was a leak it would not be too bad.
by jdshaffer | 2026-01-07 12:47:28+00:00
If you don't mind, I'd like to hear more about your setup. I have a bunch of bash scripts and python programs I've used to make working in the terminal easier (and more fun). Are you saving your dotfiles are a git project and then just syncing and pulling them down from there? I'm not an expert, just a tinkerer, but I like tinkering in the terminal. :)

Thanks in advance!
by DiabloD3 | 2026-01-07 12:47:54+00:00
Its why, if you want high performance code in this sort of work, you'll want either C or C-like code. For example, learn how madvise() is used. Also, learn how thread local storage works in the context of implementing it on a hierarchical SMP system. Also, learn how to make a message passing system and what "atomic" means (locks are often not your friend here).

Ironically, a lot of people keep shooting themselves in the foot and blindly using MPI or OpenMP or any of the other popular industry supported frameworks, and then thinking that magically bails them out. It doesn't.

The most important thing you need, above all others: make sure the problem you're solving can be parallelized, and CPUs are the right way of doing it. Once you've answered this question, and the answer is yes, you can just write it pretty much normally.

Also, ironically, you can write Java that isn't shit and takes advantage of systems like these. Sun and the post-Sun community put a lot of work into the Hotspot JVM to make it scale alarmingly well on high core count machines. Java used correctly is performant.
by com | 2026-01-07 12:47:59+00:00
I ran a corporate networking team in the 2000s with two of the five network engineer team members, being two years out of retraining (they were welding specialists in the former local shipbuilding industry). Non-white collar supervisory and work ethic issues, but excellent work in general. Had an issue with the team on-call car getting bullet holes once (suspect some drug dealing on the side, long story!) but excellent colleagues in general.

I've worked with a lot of retrained and second-career people and I can't sing their praises enough.
by edg5000 | 2026-01-07 12:48:07+00:00
This will work (if you add more details):

"Have an agent investiate issue X in modules Y and Z. The agent should place a report at ./doc/rework-xyz-overview.md with all locations that need refactoring. Once you have the report, have agents refactor 5 classes each in parallel. Each agent writes a terse report in ./doc/rework-xyz/ When they are all done, have another agent check all the work. When that agent reports everything is okay, perform a final check yourself"
by glimshe | 2026-01-07 12:48:16+00:00
47. I didn't plan these projects after FIRE, I had a notebook of projects I planned over the years and had studied the necessary skills throughout my work life.

Additionally, I could see myself going back to work at a company if I saw a truly exciting project. But that excludes around 98% of the jobs I see out there.

No, the next generation of privacy management experiences that will impact billions of users configuring their privacy settings isn't interesting.
by yesimahuman | 2026-01-07 12:49:12+00:00
Yea I've noticed this is the singular difference between those that enjoy early retirement and are successful doing it and those that aren't. Many ambitious people end up wrapping their entire identity up with work and feel completely lost with that gone. It's why so many successful founders throw themselves into new startups right after an exit, despite having way more than enough to retire. Personally, I've taken some time off since selling my startup and I've been so busy learning new things and building new hobbies that I can't imagine going back! Maybe I will one day, but it will likely involve something I've learned from during this time
by qwertox | 2026-01-07 12:49:21+00:00
How come that Claude Code isn't open source?

I can't imagine that it has some kind of special access to Anthropic's servers and that it does things an API-user can't do, maybe except for the option to use the Claude.ai credits/quota.

Even their Agent SDK just wraps the `claude`-executable, IIRC.
by xattt | 2026-01-07 12:49:23+00:00
Tangential, but was this not the goal of Quartz 2D? The idea of everyday things running on the GPU seemed very attractive.

There is some context in this 13-year-old discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5345905#5346541

I am curious if the equation of CPU-determined graphics being faster than being done on the GPU has changed in the last decade.

Did Quartz 2D ever become enabled on macOS?
by oefrha | 2026-01-07 12:49:47+00:00
I don’t like getting asked what I do for hobbies. The real answer I want to give is “none of your business”, but I’m polite enough to never say that, so it gets awkward.

Getting asked what I do for a living is totally fine. It’s on my website, the whole world can find out if they bother to search. I’ll save you a search.

The point is people are different. Not everyone wants to share their private interests with you, especially if you just met. What you consider interesting conversation, well, for some of us it’s just intrusive. I also don’t care what you like to do 99% of the time. I’ve been socially forced to sit through way too many of these “interesting conversations”.
by sshine | 2026-01-07 12:49:48+00:00
I answered you as if you weren't being funny, since the answer to you being funny is "ha ha".

The problem with killing people for being violent is that violence is a spectrum with genocide and serial murder on the one end, and snarky comments on the other. Whereas the capital punishment is pretty far towards the killing end of violence.

So when you seek to kill people for being violent, you need to at least specify how violent you need to be. Is killing one person enough? Or maiming multiple? Or just being really snarky for decades?

While "an eye for an eye" seems direct, manslaughter comes in several degrees based on intent and state of mind.

The main reason why capital punishment in the US is preceeded with decades of imprisonment is because killing people "legally" isn't simple.

The only way to simplify killing people is to let go of your humanity.
by alexpotato | 2026-01-07 12:50:39+00:00
This post, where someone from one field decides to do something they love but in another field, reminds me of the below:

At my kids' elementary school there is a yearly "Dad's Night" show where the dads get up and do skits, dance, sing and/or make funny videos.

You get to see dads who sell insurance or are lawyers do dance numbers that look professionally choreographed or make music videos that look like they could have been on MTV.

It's a reminder that "The Sort" pulls people very strongly into certain fields but there is always that question, from the movie Up In The Air and asked by George Clooney, "How much did they pay you to give up your dream?" [0]

Part of me is VERY excited to see AI/LLMs help facilitate this for the people who always thought "I have always wanted to write a piece of software but didn't know how and now I can!"

0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkX-TPaodoM
by Aurornis | 2026-01-07 12:51:15+00:00
Unfortunately self-testing something like this isn’t trivially cheap, so the self experimenters tend to skip the very important control step.

This happens a lot when people discover that you can order your own bloodwork. Reddit supplement and biohacking forums gets a lot of posts from people sharing bloodwork from two different dates and concluding that the changes are entirely due to their supplement regimen. When you’re only getting a couple tests it’s not easy to see that even day to day variations in these tests can be very large. Even timing of tests during the day, how you slept, or what you ate can have a lot of impact on many tests.

Doing some basic controlling without taking the supplement is important. Doing double-blind tests on yourself also isn’t that hard if you put some effort in. There have been some surprising results from people doing controlled tests on themselves and discovering that the supplements that looked promising on paper were either doing nothing or were trending toward being negative. Gwern’s experiments with magnesium supplementation which were generally flat with hints of trending toward being negative are a good example. That experiment was a good reality check during the era when the popular narrative that we were all severely magnesium deficient and the solution was high doses of magnesium for everyone.
by CalRobert | 2026-01-07 12:51:44+00:00
Well, I’m also an Irish citizen (albeit naturalised) and it certainly matched the sentiment of both the circle I hung out with in Dublin (champagne socialists and frustrated artists) and Offaly (a different sort entirely….)

Though I did appreciate that the culchies were pretty practical about getting things done.

All the same, “maybe I like the misery” didn’t come out of a vacuum…
by funnyfoobar | 2026-01-07 12:51:56+00:00
I was not expecting a couple of new apps being built, when the premise of the blog post talks about replacing "mid level engineers"

the thing about being an engineer at commercial capacity is "maintaining/enhancing an existing program/software system that has been developed over years by multiple people(including those who already left) and do it in a way that does not cause any outages/bugs/break existing functionality.

while the blog post mentions about the ability of using AI to generate new applications, but it does not talk about maintaining one over a longer period of time. for that, you would need real users, real constraints, and real feature requests which preferably pay you so you can priortize them.

I would love to see such blog posts where for example, a PM is able to add features for a period of one month without breaking the production, but it would be a very costly experiment.
by aatd86 | 2026-01-07 12:52:10+00:00
If you think you have no agency why do anything at all?
You could choose to stop doing anything.
Or you could decide that your partial knowledge(unrealised futures) gives you agency.

It's a matter of metacognition. Being able to compute possible futures gives you artificial agency at some level. At a meta level even if that compute can be deterministic at a higher level, but you should not care.

It's a nested universes system just like in type theory. The meta of the meta. Agency is only defined within a single universe at a time.
by mpweiher | 2026-01-07 12:52:18+00:00
You did see that bit you quoted?

> (Of course the 386 is technically still segmented, but let's ignore that)

Yes, the 80386 was still technically segmented, but the overwhelming majority of operating systems (95%+) effectively abandoned segmentation for memory protection and organization, except for very broad categories such as kernel vs. user space.

Instead, they configured the 80386 registers to provide a large linear address space for user processes (and usually for the kernel as well).

> The idea that someone would create a couple descriptors with base=0:limit=4G and set all the segment register to them, in order to assure that int=void * is sorta a known possible misuse of the core architecture

The thing that you mischaracterize as a "misuse" of the architecture wasn't just some corner case that was remotely "possible", it was what 95% of the industry did.

The 8086 wasn't so much a design as a stopgap hail-mary pass following the fiasco of the iAPX 432. And the VAX existed long before the 8086.