MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Swizec | 2026-02-12 04:52:54+00:00
We have a similar scheme in Slovenia. Don't know the details but there's the concept of a "free artist".

At a minimum you need a registered business, regular exhibitions or performances in your field, you have to register with the ministry of culture, and can't have a job. Contract work is allowed and encouraged. Also you are expected to apply when the government issues a Call For Creatives.

I think you get paid minimum wage as long as you continue fulfilling criteria.
by hodgehog11 | 2026-02-12 04:54:36+00:00
> "...it would sometimes regurgitate training data verbatim. That’s been patched in the years since..."

> "They are robots. Programs. Fancy robots and big complicated programs, to be sure — but computer programs, nonetheless."

This is totally misleading to anyone with less familiarity with how LLMs work. They are only programs in as much as they perform inference from a fixed, stored, statistical model. It turns out that treating them theoretically in the same way as other computer programs gives a poor representation of their behaviour.

This distinction is important, because no, "regurgitating data" is not something that was "patched out", like a bug in a computer program. The internal representations became more differentially private as newer (subtly different) training techniques were discovered. There is an objective metric by which one can measure this "plagiarism" in the theory, and it isn't nearly as simple as "copying" vs "not copying".

It's also still an ongoing issue and an active area of research, see [1] for example. It is impossible for the models to never "plagiarize" in the sense we think of while remaining useful. But humans repeat things verbatim too in little snippets, all the time. So there is some threshold where no-one seems to care anymore; think of it like the % threshold in something like Turnitin. That's the point that researchers would like to target.

Of course, this is separate from all of the ethical issues around training on data collected without explicit consent, and I would argue that's where the real issues lie.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02671
by ceteia | 2026-02-12 04:54:44+00:00
Sorry to bother you, but I couldn't find any news on this, only a comment you made back in 2018 on GitHub; do you know if the HTTP APIs in Zig's standard library are here to stay, or if some of them might be removed? Another commenter wrote that the HTTP client is used for Zig's package management, but there is also the HTTP server.
by JamesTRexx | 2026-02-12 04:55:23+00:00
I looked at Zig again recently as an alternative to C, but I wasn't too sure about the tone on the introduction page, thinking some points are exagerrated and some I disagree with.
It's also not that minimalistic when it includes a package manager.

I like C because it's a bare-bones language providing only the necessities and nothing more. It's independent from libraries and build environment. Let people who have experience in those things work on that. Remeber the do only one thing and do it well? I think the urge to still add extra features is the reason why there's no real successor to C.
by notpushkin | 2026-02-12 04:55:24+00:00
> The application of compressors for text statistics is fun, but it's a software equivalent of discovering that speakers and microphones are in principle the same device.

I think it makes sense to explore it from practical standpoint, too. It’s in Python stdlib, and works reasonably well, so for some applications it might be good enough.

It’s also fairly easy to implement in other languages with zstd bindings, or even shell scripts:

$ echo 'taco burrito tortilla salsa guacamole cilantro lime' > /tmp/tacos.txt
$ zstd --train $(yes '/tmp/tacos.txt' | head -n 50) -o tacos.dict
[...snip]

$ echo 'racket court serve volley smash lob match game set' > /tmp/padel.txt
$ zstd --train $(yes '/tmp/padel.txt' | head -n 50) -o padel.dict
[...snip]

$ echo 'I ordered three tacos with extra guacamole' | zstd -D tacos.dict | wc -c
57
$ echo 'I ordered three tacos with extra guacamole' | zstd -D padel.dict | wc -c
60
by helloplanets | 2026-02-12 04:56:24+00:00
The most important part is to just pay attention to how your current setup affects your mood, creativity, focus, etc. It'll be way easier to adjust once you're in tune with that.

It's really easy to end up on autopilot with the structure of your workdays, only to notice that it doesn't work for the current project all that well. Getting stuck on the 'nothing' approach can be just as bad as getting stuck on a 'hundred tabs' approach if you're just doing one or the other because you've always been doing it.
by hxtk | 2026-02-12 04:57:14+00:00
I've actually been experimenting with that lately. I did a really naive version that tokenizes the input, feeds the max context window up to the token being encoded into an LLM, and uses that to produce a distribution of likely next tokens, then encodes the actual token with Huffman Coding with the LLM's estimated distribution. I could get better results with arithmetic encoding almost certainly.

It outperforms zstd by a long shot (I haven't dedicated the compute horsepower to figuring out what "a long shot" means quantitatively with reasonably small confidence intervals) on natural language, like wikipedia articles or markdown documents, but (using GPT-2) it's about as good as zstd or worse than zstd on things like files in the Kubernetes source repository.

You already get a significant amount of compression just out of the tokenization in some cases ("The quick red fox jumps over the lazy brown dog." encodes to one token per word plus one token for the '.' for the GPT-2 tokenizer), where as with code a lot of your tokens will just represent a single character so the entropy coding is doing all the work, which means your compression is only as good as the accuracy of your LLM.
by pests | 2026-02-12 04:57:21+00:00
> the thought of requiring others to show their faces never occurred to me at all

I know you meant as a service provider, but as a avid IRC (and an online game that conventionally alt-tabbed into a irc-like chat window) chatter as a young preteen in the 90s and 00s, I made a lot of online friends that I would not discover what they looked like IRL for decades, some never. People I was gaming with in the 90s, for the first time, I would see what they looked like over FB in a group made for the now-almost-dead game in the 10s. It was like "swordfish - man, where are you now? I don't even know your real name to find ya. shardz - you look exactly like I would picture ya!."

Just some musings.
by LarsDu88 | 2026-02-12 04:59:01+00:00
This was a little bit shocking to me to be honest. I've built a VR game as a side project, and am currently vibecoding a sticker generation and ordering webapp.
I was under the impression that the amount of revenue I made was miniscule and my side project was a failure, but it's actually very much in line with what Lynch posted here considering I've never quit my day job.
by 1-more | 2026-02-12 05:00:08+00:00
> I had been keeping a simple food log for years at that point
> It is also fairly easy to keep a running net for the day

Right, so there it is: whatever you did to get to a calorie deficit you need to keep doing to be calorie neutral. If it's take a GLP-1 then that works. If it's using pen and paper or an app or even vibes-based reckoning to track everything you eat, then it's that. Regardless it just doesn't seem like a valid criticism of any given weight loss strategy when I have yet to hear of one that doesn't have that feature
by danpalmer | 2026-02-12 05:00:36+00:00
This is still missing the "what" for me. What do you write down about the work?

Is it a plan for what you're about to work on? Is it a breakdown? Is it facts you learn as you work through something? Is it a minute by minute journal of what you've done? Is it just interesting details? Is it to-dos? Is it opinions you're trying to clarify?

Diagrams I get, my desk is covered in scribbled diagrams to help me visualise something or communicate it to a colleague.
by gwern | 2026-02-12 05:01:43+00:00
> The amount of output this generates can quickly become overwhelming in a terminal, and is something we hear often from users. Terminals give us relatively few pixels to play with; they have a single font size; colors are not uniformly supported; in some terminal emulators, rendering is extremely slow. We want to make sure every user has a good experience, no matter what terminal they are using. This is important to us, because we want Claude Code to work everywhere, on any terminal, any OS, any environment.

If you are serious about this, I think there are so many ways you could clean up, simplify, and calm the Claude Code terminal experience already.

I am not a CC user, but an enthusiastic CC user spent an hour or two showing me how it worked and walking through an non-publicly-implemented Gwern.net frontend feature (some CSS/JS styling of poetry for mobile devices).

It was highly educational and interesting, and Claude got most of the way to something usable.

Yet I was shocked and appalled by the CC UI/UX itself: it felt like the fetal alcohol syndrome lovechild of a Las Vegas slot machine and Tiktok and Temu. I did not realize that all those jokes about how using CC was like 'crack' or 'ADHD' or 'gambling' were so on point, I thought they were more, well, metaphorical about the process as a whole. I have not used such a gross and distracting UI in... a long time. Everything was dancing and bouncing around and distracting me while telling me nothing. I wasted time staring at the update monitor trying to understand if "Prognosticating..." was different from "Fleeblegurbigating..." from "Reticulating splines...", while the asterisk bounces up and down, or the colored text fades in and out, and most of the screen was wasted, and the whole thing took pains to put in as much fancy TUI nonsense as it could. An absolute waste, not whimsy, of pixels. (And I was a little concerned how much time we spent zoned out waiting on the whole shabang. I could feel the productivity leaving my body, minute by minute. How could I possibly focus on anything else while my little friendly bouncing asterisk might finish at any instant?!) Some description of what files are being accessed seems like you could spare the pixels for them.

So I was impressed enough with the functionality to move it up my list, but also much of it made me think I should look into GPT Codex instead. It sounds like the interfaces there respect my time and attention more, rather than treating me like a Zoomer.
by fasbiner | 2026-02-12 05:01:50+00:00
This is an extremely disappointing response. The issue is your PMs and dev relations people being shitty and unhelpful and trying to solve actual problems with PR speak as if engineers are just going to go away in a few days.

They have horrible instincts and are completely clueless. You need to move them away from a public-facing role. It honestly looks so bad, it looks so bad that it suggests nepotism and internal dysfunction to have such a poor response.

This is not the kind of mistake someone makes innocently, it's a window into a worldview that's made me switch to gemini and reactivate cursor as a backup because it's only going to get worse from here.

The problem is not the initial change (which you would rapidly realize was a big deal to a huge number of your users) but how high-handed and incompetent the initial response was. Nobody's saying they should be fired, but they've failed in public in a huge way and should step back for a long time.
by theendisney | 2026-02-12 05:02:23+00:00
To a suspicious extend the internet is full of articles praising the man. With the exception of the stripclub story (which only barely makes the cut) it is as if nothing negative was ever written about him. The www echochamber just doesnt want to hear it.

People get even more mad if you tell them there are many reasons to think Joseph Papp created a mixture of noble gasses, injected into sealed pistons of conventional combustion engines and then those engines would run for 6 months without adding any other fuel.

Feynman was amoung the angry mob. After hearing about it he went to a demonstration involving a big volvo engine funded by the navy.

After 10 min he climbed onto stage pointed at some electronics plugged into the wall, he pulled the plug and playfully dangled it above papp who protested loudly and said it was not safe. Feynman ignored him until papp went into full panic. The plug was returned, papp put it back into the wall and the engine exploded. 7 people were injured, one lost a leg and one audience member died.

The dubious thing to me was that after much media exposure no one was interested in the physics.

Feynman oddly twists the story and said papp unplugged it and gave the plug to him. He wanted to hold it he said.

He also created a fantastic imaginary forensic report where he imagined papp put explosives in the engine.

After papp blamed him for destroying the engine they settled out of court.

The noble gas engine was now officially debunked.

https://hoaxes.org/comments/papparticle2.html

It gets more absurd where journalists and internet septics make an effort to change the story.

https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/28530/did-richa...

I generously give the Papp engine 0.1% odds of being useful technology which means we should be looking at the thousand claims of miraculous tech. If i look at the debunking there is never any evidence against them. Look at them fabricating, its quite amusing. Or do you see a single convincing argument the engine doesnt work even from the highly praised Feynman himself?
by _kb | 2026-02-12 05:02:46+00:00
That's certainly true to an extent. Other commenters have already highlighted necessary complexities. There is absolutely a lot of very entrenched "ways-of-working" that add unnecessary complexity, as with every domain. Not everything is a technical problem though and the social / process side of this sort of setup is what can make it work at all.

The approach that you're hinting mostly describes the general direction of remote production (https://video.matrox.com/en/media/guides-articles/what-is-re...). The big traditional players are already across that (https://www.grassvalley.com/ampp/, https://www.rossvideo.com/use-cases/remote-production/), AWS also has a plethora of services to lock you into their stack (https://aws.amazon.com/media-services/), and there's interesting new players too (https://www.tryiris.ai). There's a heap of different workflows out there, and OB trucks like the one highlighted here are just one of those.
by ziml77 | 2026-02-12 05:02:57+00:00
Maybe your context is different, but all I can say is that I used to consider email to be something that you respond to when you get to it. Yet after enough complaints were raised against me I had to change that behavior and reply immediately even if it was just to say "I will look into this".

I am not personally upset if people don't get to my emails right away, because if I have anything actually urgent I'll get a Teams message out to the person who I know can handle it. (That does change a bit if the communication to to an external vendor in which case it's going to their support team who I do expect to respond promptly).
by jaggederest | 2026-02-12 05:03:00+00:00
I got you beat, Oct 25, 2007 - the original post I mentioned that they had a bug (a before_filter for authentication on the invite route) so it was unusable before they fixed it based on my report - a classic rails error! Vintage stuff, great nostalgia.

> You may have been at bitscribe at the time with pedro and morton?

It's been so long I had to go back and find my prior post, but I think so!
by analog31 | 2026-02-12 05:03:24+00:00
I'm a scientist. In the science world, the traditional lab notebook contained a narrative of what you were doing. You're kind of thinking out loud into it.

One measure of a good notebook is if it contains sufficient information that you don't have to repeat work only because you can't figure out what you did. There are other good reasons for repeating things of course.

My spouse is a lab scientist, and I've seen her meticulous notebooks. She was telling me just last week that one of her experiments produced a puzzling result. The next day she said: "I figured it out from my notebook. I skipped a step that was in the procedure."

There was a time when a notebook was also a legal document, and so there was a criterion of whether it would stand up in court as proof that you had invented something. Could a "person skilled in the art" replicate your work based on your notebook? My dad told me that his notebooks were regularly reviewed and witnessed.

The legal issues have changed, since the patent system has switched to the "first to file" rule. My employer got rid of its formal notebook policy when this change came through.

My problem with physical notebooks is that a great deal of my work is computational, and I automate things. In my case, the best form for recording my work is in fact a Jupyter notebook. On the other hand, I come from a family of chemists, and taking electronic notes in a "wet" chemistry lab is often impractical.
by conductr | 2026-02-12 05:03:34+00:00
This only makes sense if touchscreens are reliable. They are not. You should look at the fault rates. Cheaper isn't better. In any case, we had cheap and good analogue before so let's not pretend like it's not possible. It might have been more expensive than a keyboard, but it wasn't dramatically different or we would have never had it. They just found a way to 1) reduce cost by going digital and 2) charging a premium for going digital as it was perceived as an upgrade by a majority of the market. They sold it to us, it's what they're good at. It doesn't mean it was a good idea.
by RupertSalt | 2026-02-12 05:03:44+00:00
Were your MUDs on port 23? <runs and hides>

For Tiny* servers, "raw telnet" was considered a ghetto experience. The worst part was that the asynchronous output would just stream in whether or not you were done typing, and you'd invariably lose track of what your input line looked like. So the primary task of a TinyMUD client was to separate them. Some used a "split screen", and some just kept refreshing the input line as new output was displayed.

None of our MUDs ever appeared on port 23 and none of our servers ever spoke "The TELNET Protocol" as found in RFC 854. Telnet was simply the bundled TCP client that you could use for anything.

The other cool features for a MUD client was using macros to perform repeated tasks or say interesting things, and /hilite and /gag were indispensable. /gag silenced/muted a player or a pattern-match of your choice, and so to play with "raw telnet" was to unblock all your /gagged players and let them get under your skin again. A fate truly worse than death (well you got paid "insurance" for dying, so many people enjoyed the experience.)

Also popular in Tiny* clients was cursor line-editing and a command history. One client developer was sort of a troll, and so when he forked "tinywar" it began to feature some automation that could permit a player to make a real nuisance of themselves. But he was also a great programmer, and not all tinywar users were trolls, so it got put to good use.

Ultimately, Explorer_Bob wrote TinyFugue, and Ken Keys "Hawkeye" took over development, pushing it into amazing heights on a level with MUSH programming, and TinyFugue basically became the gold standard client for Unix and was also ported to Win32, and ultimately abandoned in an extremely stable state. I went to school with Ken. Miss you, man!
by herdcall | 2026-02-12 05:03:47+00:00
The problem is that biases tend to be built in via even rudimentary stuff like bad training material and biased tuning via system prompts. E.g., consider the 2026 X post experiment, where a user ran identical divorce scenarios through ChatGPT but swapped genders. When a man described his wife's infidelity and abuse, the AI advised restraint to avoid appearing "controlling/abusive." For a woman in the same situation, it encouraged immediately taking the kids and car for "protection."
by johnnyanmac | 2026-02-12 05:04:25+00:00
>we got all the "education" about Trump between 2016 and 2020 that anyone should have needed.

Well the "real" cause is economy. Trump had a strong economy in term 1 until COVID. If you weren't affected by the China trade war (and many in the red states arent), you could ignore the day to day politics and think "yeah Trump is great!"

But "economy" is too generic, and I feel that phenomenon is more attributed to "ignorance".And the comfortability to remain ignorant and fall for the spin telling you "things are good". That all feels to stem from education.

Is ignorance stupidity? Sometimes. They go hand in hand.
by aylons | 2026-02-12 05:04:48+00:00
Frankly, at the beginning? Anything you feel like. You can start, perhaps, with Just a title of what you're doing, pomodoros style.

Maybe a note of something you thought but couldn't follow up on that moment.

Diagrams are good. Much easier to think and much better and faster doing by hand. I always get distracted by the tool when I'm drawing in a computer. Even artist-modd

I also make bullet points of general ideas that I'm trying to accomplish.

Doodles.

Important thing is, don't fret. Over time you'll find how it works for you.
by deterministic | 2026-02-12 05:04:50+00:00
You don't need to understand how the whole system works.

What you need to understand is the API's in-between the sub-systems.

Another way to put it is that the architecture is the API's.

You can in principle throw away and re-implement the sub-system for a specific API without understanding the rest of the system.

I am saying in principle because in practice API's are typically under-specified leaving out important side effects.
by ggm | 2026-02-12 05:04:59+00:00
Even the headline leads with a mis-truth. "AI Society" is wishful thinking nominative determinism.

Parry: meet Eliza.

It's as old as the hills, and they couldn't even do what LISP has done since forever.

I despair of how dumb people can be. Call it what it is: Hype.
by TheGRS | 2026-02-12 05:05:24+00:00
For my side projects I have a dev log and every day that I work on them I've gotten into the habit of writing "What I want to accomplish", "What I did", and "What's next", which all seems to capture my thoughts pretty well. I don't get super detailed on them, but I can look back at previous days to see what I should work on next and it helps me goal set better. Also helps me when I need to pause on my work for the day so I can pick it up later.
by DiogenesKynikos | 2026-02-12 05:06:22+00:00
> As a quick aside, I am not going to entertain the notion that LLMs are intelligent, for any value of “intelligent.” They are robots. Programs. Fancy robots and big complicated programs, to be sure — but computer programs, nonetheless.

The same could be said of humans too. Humans are made of cells that work deterministically. Sure, humans are fancy, big complicated combinations of cells - but they're cells, nonetheless.

That view of humans - and LLMs - ignores the fact that when you combine large numbers of simple building blocks, you can get completely novel behavior. Protons, neutrons and electrons come together to create chemistry. Molecules come together to create biological systems. A bunch of neurons taken together created the poetry of Shakespeare.

Unless you have a dualistic view of the world, in which the mind is a separate realm that exists independently of matter and does not arise from neurons interacting in our brains, you have to accept that robots can be intelligent. Just to put this more sharply: Would a perfect simulation of a human brain be intelligent or not? If you answer "no," then you believe that thought comes from some other, immaterial realm, not from our brains.