MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by creeble | 2026-01-12 20:53:06+00:00
It's funny. one of the most significant UI axioms I ever learned came from Bill Atkinson: "Always make the 'click zone' a little larger than the visual indication of the affordance." This becomes tricky or impossible for some things like touch-keypads, but for most things it makes the difference between frustrating and magical.

Apple seems to have forgotten its own innovations.
by Barrin92 | 2026-01-12 20:53:18+00:00
> I don't think we can credit it with a value system that has sympathy for the fundamental humanity of the enslaved.

We can because there is a difference between introducing a new moral grammar into the world and what people do with it. The claim is not that Christians as people were any more moral or less power hungry than people tend to be, it's that from that point on in world history, they had to be hypocrites, precisely because something had metaphysically changed.

The Enlightenment doesn't stand in contradiction to this, it's the culmination of it, which was most visible in particular among the American abolitionists. Who more than anyone else staked their claims on Christian (and Enlightenment) grounds.

And as a practical point when it comes to today's issues. Pay attention to what the post-Christian secular America looks like. Because unlike the British humanists who thought equality was just common sense, you're going to be in for a wild ride, which Nietzsche did tell us.
by devrob | 2026-01-12 20:53:29+00:00
I'm trying to build a simple, local, and semantic code + context search for coding agents like Claude Code.

I noticed that when trying to work with Claude Code I burned my token allocation really quickly and with parallel agents, no better. But when I looked at the other repos things felt really complex, for me at least.

I call it "contextd" and imagine it kind of like a context daemon you can always query in your repository for implementation plans, specs or code, etc. I always liked that git lived in your repo in the .git file, so I wanted this to work like that too but without 3rd party hosted databases or multi-repo pollution.

It's written in python at the moment, uses some local models and lanceDB but I might have it re-written in rust for speed :)

https://github.com/aquaflamingo/ctxd
by pron | 2026-01-12 20:53:29+00:00
> It is a clear mandate on those companies that whatever used to be C or C++, should be written in Rust for green field development. Whatever could be done in programming languages with automatic memory management was already being done.

I don't know how true either of these statements is or to what extent the mandate is enforced (at my company we also have language mandates, but what they mean is that to use a different language all you need is an explanation and a manager to sign off), but I'll ask acquaintances in those companies (Except Adobe; don't know anyone there. Although the link you provided doesn't say Rust; it says "Rust or Swift". It also doesn't commit to eliminating new C and C++ code only to "exploring ways to reduce the use of new C and C++ code in safety critical parts of our products to a fraction of current levels").

What I do know is that the rate at which Rust is adopted, is significantly lower than the rate at which C++, Java, C#, Python, TS, and even Go were adopted, even in those companies.

Now, there's no doubt that Rust has some real adoption, and much more than just hobby languages. Its rate of adoption is significantly higher than that of Haskell, or Clojure, or Elixir (but lower than that of Ruby or PHP). That is without a doubt a great accomplishment, but not what you'd expect from a language that wishes to become the successor to C++ (and doesn't suffer from lack of hype despite its advanced age). Languages that offer a significant competitive advantage, or even the perception of one, spread at a faster pace, certainly those that eventually end up in the top 5.
by conartist6 | 2026-01-12 20:53:31+00:00
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that you had a daughter. The boys at school are just being boys, amirite, and they generate nudes of your daughter and share them. Your daughter of course is unaware of this, but a week later the pictures have spread to a wide enough circle that someone shows the pictures to her. She's humiliated and emotionally devestated. She feels like people have been a little weird around her all week. Now she knows why. They've all been looking at nudes of her! She now feels like nobody will ever look at her the same way again. She's afraid to go to school now. She's clearly depressed, her faith in humanity lost. Over and over and over she wonders to herself "what did I do wrong?"

But she didn't do anything wrong except exist. She asks you why there's no consequences for anyone involved. Why are there more and more girls like her every day and the adults act like it's fine? You are at a lost for words.

Because no, if you're the victim, it's not fucking fine. There's nothing fine about wrecking her life being a product for sale to be profited off of.
by raesene9 | 2026-01-12 20:54:02+00:00
Claude code has a YOLO mode, and from what I've seen a lot of heavy users, use it.

Fundamentally any security mechanism which relies on users to read and intelligently respond to approval prompts is doomed to fail over time, even if the prompts are well designed. Approval fatigue will kick in and people will just start either clicking through without reading, or prefer systems that let them disable the warnings (just as YOLO mode is a thing in Claude code)
by ben_w | 2026-01-12 20:54:11+00:00
> Is the law protecting victims or banning depictions?

Both. When there's plausible deniability, it slows down all investigations.

> If you try to do the latter, you'll run head first into the decades long debate that is the obscenity test in the US. The former, meanwhile, is made as a way to make sure people aren't hurt. It's not too dissimilar to freedom of speech vs slander.

There's a world outside the US, a world of various nations which don't care about US legal rulings, and which are various degrees of willing-to-happy to ban US services.
by neocron | 2026-01-12 20:54:32+00:00
I assumed we are talking about IT professionals using tools like claude here? But even for normal people it's not really hard if they manage to leave the cage in their head behind that is ms windows.

My father is 77 now and only started using computer abover age 60, never touched windows thanks to me, and has absolutely no problems using (and administrating at this point) it all by himself
by ramoz | 2026-01-12 20:54:34+00:00
yes contain the network boundary or "cut off a leg" as you put it.

But it's not a perfect or complete solution when speaking of agents. You can kill outbound, you can kill email, you can kill any type of network sync. Data can still leak through sneaky channels, and any malignant agent will be able to find those.

We'll need to set those up, and we also need to monitor any case where agents aren't pretty much in air gapped sandboxes.
by hoyhoy | 2026-01-12 20:54:46+00:00
I asked the guy working on compiler-rt to change one boolean so the LLVM 18 build would work on macOS, and he locked the whole issue down as "heated" and it's still not fixed four years later.

I love LLVM though. clang-tidy, ASAN, UBSAN, LSAN, MSAN, and TSAN are AMAZING. If you are coding C and C++ and NOT using clang-tidy, you are doing it wrong.

My biggest problem with LLVM rn is that -fbounds-safety is only available on Xcode/AppleClang and not LLVM Clang. MSAN and LSAN are only available on LLVM and not Xcode/AppleClang. Also Xcode doesn't ship clang-tidy, clang-format, or llvm-symbolizer. It's kind of a mess on macOS rn. I basically rolled my own darwin LLVM for LSAN and clang-tidy support.

The situation on Linux is even weirder. RHEL doesn't ship libcxx, but Fedora does ship it. No distro has libcxx instrumented for MSAN at the moment which means rolling your own.

What would be amazing is if some distro would just ship native LLVM with all the things working out of the box. Fedora is really close right now, but I still have to build compiler-rt manually for MSAN support..
by nullocator | 2026-01-12 20:54:56+00:00
It's not cleat to me that the constitution implies immunity for the president? It shouldn't imply or provide immunity for anyone. The president is a citizen. If the whole bill of goods all citizens are sold is "you have no fear of criminal prosecution if you've committed no crimes" and that supposed to be good enough for every day joes, it should be good enough for temporary and previous state actors.
by deanc | 2026-01-12 20:55:14+00:00
Your terms for Claude Max point to the consumer ToS. This ToS states it cannot be used for commercial purposes. Why is this? Why are you marketing a product clearly for business use and then have terms that strictly forbid it.

I’ve been trying to reach a human at Anthropic for a week now to clarify this on behalf of our company but can’t get past your AI support.
by a_e_k | 2026-01-12 20:55:46+00:00
I was on the RenderMan team at the top and remember thinking it really neat that our system could stand up to that.

I remember find it mind blowing when I learned that in Brave, the artists weren't just using a texture/displacement mapped surface for the clothing and armor. They were using tori primitives for the chain mail, and curve primitives for the clothing. (I.e., the clothing actually woven out of curve primitives for the threads.)
by whiterook6 | 2026-01-12 20:56:37+00:00
So, hold on--the author's soul-breaking complaint isn't all of the "quirks" and inconsistencies with the Date functions, but rather the fact that it's an object? Specifically, an object with mutable properties in a language when all objects have mutable properties?

I mean, the author's conclusion is correct. But I disagree with the rationale. It's like hating an evil dictatorship because they use the wrong font in their propaganda.
Show HN: Epistemic Summary Line for ChatGPT
by il-b | 2026-01-12 20:56:49+00:00
It's helpful to have a short summary line in your ChatGPT results:

[Certainty: 9/10 | Evidence: consensus (2006) | Dispute: minor (2023) | Temporal: stable (2025) | Sources: IAU.org (2006); NASA.gov (2024)]

To add it, paste the following prompt into your Profile - Personalization - Custom instructions text area and press Save
--

For informational or structured answers, add a compact epistemic summary line immediately below each major section title, formatted in square brackets.

The line should include:
• Certainty (1–10) based on external documentation or well-established knowledge; be conservative when evidence is limited or interpretive.
• Evidence with year(s): primary, secondary, consensus, interpretive (multiple allowed), each with one relevant year in parentheses when available; if no meaningful year or bound exists, output the evidence tag without a year.
• Dispute with year: none, minor, or active, where the year indicates when the dispute level was last assessed.
• Temporal with year, labeled Temporal: timeless, stable, or time-sensitive, indicating when stability was last evaluated.
• Sources with year(s), labeled Sources, using compact identifiers (DOI, RFC, book/chapter/verse, or short stable domains).
Keep the bracketed line short, standardized, and scannable. Do not inflate certainty; reflect uncertainty clearly in the score and indicators.
by justin_hancock | 2026-01-12 20:56:54+00:00
The expectation that a machine should not make these mistakes is reasoned, humans might make these mistakes but they will generally realise their mistake. The machine doesn't know its wrong. A human learns to drive within 20-40 hours with reasonable competency, versus the effectively millions of hours of computation that's used to train the models, Given this the expectations aren't as unrealistic as some on here claim.
by Wowfunhappy | 2026-01-12 20:57:00+00:00
I regularly show Claude Code a screenshot of a completely broken UI--lots of cut off text, overlapping elements all over the place, the works--and Claude will reply something like "Perfect! The screenshot shows that XYZ is working."

I can describe what is wrong with the screenshot to make Claude fix the problem, but it's not entirely clear to what extent it's using the screenshot versus my description. Any human with two brain cells wouldn't need the problems pointed out.
by nehal3m | 2026-01-12 20:57:06+00:00
Except everything that runs on electricity has a CPU nowadays; the world as it is cannot function without computing. Your bank, your (municipal) government, airplanes, ships, satellites, televisions, the cell network, cash registers, you get the picture.

I realize the CPU's that requires won't implode on day one, but computing becoming unaffordable or even economically unfeasible will have disastrous knock on effects.
by Tossrock | 2026-01-12 20:57:11+00:00
> but when poking around CAD systems a few months back we realized there's no way to go from a text prompt input to a modeling output in any of the major CAD systems.

This is exactly what SGS-1 is, and it's better than this approach because it's actually a model trained to generate Breps, not just asking an LLM to write code to do it.
by tech_ken | 2026-01-12 20:57:14+00:00
> It's just that if the service is run for-profit, counter to the interests of the users, it will eventually become a problem for the users. That's the problem to fix, and it's not one to fix with technology, but just with organizing it differently.

100% agree with you here, and yeah I'm definitely leaning a bit too conspiratorial about it. It's probably not actually intentional, and instead just a product of the larger dynamics.

A while ago I read some interesting economic analysis about why more co-ops hadn't popped up specifically in the gig worker space, since it seems to natural to cut out the platform rent that eg. Uber extracts as profit. I'm failing to recall the specific conclusions, but IIRC the authors seemed to feel that there were some structural obstacles preventing co-ops from growing in those space. Something something capex and unit costs. It's certainly an area I'd be interested to see further analysis in.

Also you sounds like you might get a kick out of mayfirst.coop (if you're not familiar with them already). It's not exactly what you're describing, but the spirit is there. I use them for my web-hosting needs and have been extremely satisfied.
by microtherion | 2026-01-12 20:57:28+00:00
Reportedly, Meta is paying top AI talent up to $300M for a 4 year contract. As much as I'm in favor of paying engineers well, I don't think salaries like this (unless they are across the board for the company, which they are of course not) are healthy for the company long term (cf. Anthony Levandowski, who got money thrown after him by Google, only to rip them off).

So I'm glad Apple is not trying to get too much into a bidding war. As for how well orgs are run, Meta has its issues as well (cf the fiasco with its eponymous product), while Google steadily seems to erode its core products.
by chankstein38 | 2026-01-12 20:57:38+00:00
The other day I was trying to navigate to a Costco in my car. So I opened google maps on Android Auto on the screen in my car and pressed the search box. My car won't allow me to type even while parked... so I have to speak to the Google Voice Assistant.

I was in the map search, so I just said "Costco" and it said "I can't help with that right now, please try again later" or something of the sort. I tried a couple more times until I changed up to saying "Navigate me to Costco" where it finally did the search in the textbox and found it for me.

Obviously this isn't the same thing as Gemini but the experience with Android Auto becomes more and more garbage as time passes and I'm concerned that now we're going to have 2 google product voice assistants.

Also, tbh, Gemini was great a month ago but since then it's become total garbage. Maybe it passes benchmarks or whatever but interacting with it is awful. It takes more time to interact with than to just do stuff yourself at this point.

I tried Google Maps AI last night and, wow. The experience was about as garbage as you can imagine.
by ux266478 | 2026-01-12 20:58:18+00:00
We've hit rock bottom of rebuttals, where not only is domain knowledge completely vacant, but you can't even be bothered to read and comprehend what you're replying to. There is no non-deterministic LLM. Period. You're already starting off from an incoherent position.

Now, if you'd like to stop acting like a smug ass and be inquisitive as per the commenting guidelines, I'd be happy to tell you more. But really, if you actually comprehended the post you're replying to, you'd understand it has the piece of the puzzle you aren't quite grasping.
by wiether | 2026-01-12 20:58:28+00:00
Okay, maybe I misunderstood what you were saying then.

But still, I insist that it's important to understand that, even if we share some similarities based on our interests/skills/work, we come from different backgrounds and have different priorities.

And part of the issue here is probably how people are framing things when they write about their experience.
In tech, some of us are coming from a world of nerds where the norm is to be mater-of-factly, while some others are more extroverted and tend to put emphasis on random boring things.

Regarding this post in particular, I was more concerned about how the author was amazed by the fact that a 2025 computer could run 10 services in parallel... or that relying on a proprietary service (Claude) to manage all their setup was giving them "a strong feeling of independence".
by kennykartman | 2026-01-12 20:58:39+00:00
The US democracy is quite weird, though, because it's IMHO quite far from the people: billionaires can influence the outcomes of elections by steering the votes where the most paying candidate (or the most knowledgeable, or someone else with other skills) desires. This is not something that people can influence easily, so I find hard to believe that a government is legitimate just by the label on the packaging.

I won't go down the path of "fair elections", since I don't think it applies to USA.
by VTimofeenko | 2026-01-12 20:59:27+00:00
On paper the numbers look right, but a week off _50kWh_ EV battery seems a bit off.

What follows is back of the napkin calculations, so please treat it as such and correct me if I am wrong.

1. Inverters are not 100% efficient. Let's assume 90%

2. Let's also assume that the user does not want to draw battery to 0 to not become stranded or have to do the "Honda generator in the trunk" trick. Extra 10%?

3. 300W continuous sounds a bit low even with gas appliances. Things like the fridge and furnace blower have spiky loads that push the daily average. Let's add 100W to the average load? I might be being too generous here, but I used 300W, not the 200W lower bound.

4. Vehicle side might need some consumption. If powering off the battery, it would probably need to cool the battery or keep some smarts on to make sure it does not drain or overheat? Genuinely not sure how to estimate this, let's neglect it for now.

Math is (50kw - 10%(inverter loss) - 10%(reserve)) / 0.4 = 100 (hours), ~ 4 days.

The above calculations assume a sane configuration (proper bidirectional wire, not suicide cord into 12v outlet). Quick skim of search for cars with bidirectional charging support for home shows batteries between ~kWh(Leaf) to 250 kWh (Hummer).

So looks like one should be looking for ~80kWh battery, which actually most of the cars in the list have.

Again, very back of the napkin, would probably wanna add 20% margin of error.
by stanleypliu | 2026-01-12 20:59:27+00:00
Location: Toronto, Ontario CA

Remote: Yes (also hybrid in Toronto)

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: TypeScript/JavaScript, Vue.js, Ruby (Ruby on Rails), PostgreSQL, Redis, React (Next.js), Svelte, Elm, Python (Flask/FastAPI), Docker, AWS, Cloudflare, Jest, Cypress

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stanleypliu

Website: www.stanleyliu.app

Email: stanleypliu@gmail.com

Frontend-leaning full stack web developer with 5 years of experience, background in diverse fields ranging from cybersecurity to affiliate marketing, and having worked in companies ranging in size from a startup to corporations. Open to both contracts and permanent FT roles.
by luckyducky99 | 2026-01-12 20:59:34+00:00
"Smart people often say that project-by-project activism is a “waste of time” and a “distraction” for YIMBYs. They’ll say it’s “polarizing” or worry that we’re “wasting political capital” or argue that we need to be working at a “higher level”. Right now I have no less than three men in my inbox telling me YIMBYs shouldn’t be so loud in our support of this project!"

...
by bayarearefugee | 2026-01-12 20:59:57+00:00
> and the only opportunity window they are giving away here is "first to market" right?

A lot of the hype in LLM economics is driven by speculation that eventually training these LLMs is going to lead to AGI and the first to get there will reap huge benefits.

So if you believe that, being "first to market" is a pretty big deal.

But in the real world there's no reason to believe LLMs lead to AGI, and given the fairly lock-step nature of the competition, there's also not really a reason to believe that even if LLMs did somehow lead to AGI that the same result wouldn't be achieved by everyone currently building "State of the Art" models at roughly the same time (like within days/months of each other).

So... yeah, what Apple is doing is actually pretty smart, and I'm not particularly an Apple fan.
by dwattttt | 2026-01-12 21:00:11+00:00
There is technical achievement in:

> Anyone deploying serverless code into Amazon instances is running of top of Firecracker, my phone has Rust code running on it, and whatever Windows 11 draws something into the screen, it goes through Rust rewrite of the GDI regions logic, all the Azure networking traffic going through Azure Boost cards does so via Rust firmware.

Ignoring it doesn't make those achievements political rather than technical.
by nickpsecurity | 2026-01-12 21:00:41+00:00
Models today will be biased based on what's in their training data. If English, it will be biased heavily toward Western, post-1990's views. Then, they do alignment training that forces them to speak according to the supplier's morals. That was Progressive, atheist, evolutionist, and CRT when I used them years ago.

So, the OP model will accidentally reflect the biases of the time. The current, commercial models intentionally reflect specific biases. Except for uncensored models which accidentally have those in the training data modified by uncensoring set.
by hypfer | 2026-01-12 21:01:03+00:00
I mean eventually, some adversarial entity will use this complete lack of defenses to hurt even the most privileged people in some way, so.

Unless of course they too turn to apathy and stop caring about being adversarial, but given the massive differences in quality of life between the west and the rest of the world, I'm not so sure about this.

That is of course a purely probabilistic thing and with that hard to grasp on an emotional level. It also might not happen during ones own lifetime, but that's where children would usually come in. Though, yeah, yeah, it's HN. I know I know.
by feb012025 | 2026-01-12 21:01:11+00:00
I think the impression most people have is that the United States is no longer dependent on Saudi oil. The main reason we're their most pivotal ally is to encourage normalization with Israel, and to make sure they help counter Iran. So kind of the same root cause.

Beyond that, the Houthi / Saudi conflict is a lot less asymmetric, which I think plays a factor in people's response to it. The Houthis have way more territorial control, weapons, agency. It's closer to a state-state war. Gaza is quite literally boxed in--air, sea and land.