MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by StephenMelon | 2026-01-30 04:05:48+00:00
I asked ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok and DeepSeek to tell me about a contemporary Scottish indie band that hasn’t had a lot of press coverage. ChatGPT, Gemini and Grok all gave good answers based on the small amount of press coverage they have had.

DeepSeek however hallucinated a completely fictional band from 30 years ago, right down to album names, a hard luck story about how they’d been shafted by the industry (and by whom), made up names of the members and even their supposed subsequent collaborations with contemporary pop artists.

I asked if it was telling the truth or making it up and it doubled down quite aggressively on claiming it was telling the truth. The whole thing was very detailed and convincing yet complete and utter bollocks.

I understand the difference in the cost/parameters etc. but it was miles behind the other 3, in fact it wasn’t just behind it was hurtling in the opposite direction, while being incredibly plausible.
by numpad0 | 2026-01-30 04:05:51+00:00
There are growing sentimental, denialist, conspiracy, narratives on social media that anything that paint US being out of proportion has to be fake. It's up there with flat earths and "birds don't exist" theories. From the article...

> The true population of the world, Bonesaw said, was significantly less than 1 billion people.

This isn't the first time I had encountered this specific type of ... char arrays. I think the major part of the author's intent is to just vent.
by jbmilgrom | 2026-01-30 04:06:24+00:00
that's right, and agents turning specs into software can go in all sorts of directions especially when we don't control the input.

what we've done to mitigate is essentially backing every entrypoint (customer comment, internal ticket, etc) with a remote claude code session with persistent memory - that session essentially becomes the expert in the case. And we've developed checkpoints that work from experience (e.g. the root cause one) where a human has the opportunity to take over the wheel so to speak and drive in a different direction with all the context/history up to that point.

basically, we are creating a assembly line where agents do most of the work and humans increasingly less and less as we continue to optimize the different parts of assembly

as far as techniques, it's all boring engineering

* Temporal workflow for managing the lifecycle of a session

* complete ownership of the data model e2e. we dont use Linear for example; we built our own ticketing system so we could represent Temporal signals, github webhooks and events from the remote claude sessions exactly how we wanted

* incremental automation gains over and over again. We do a lot of the work manually first (like old fashioned hand coding lol) before trying to automate so we become experts in that piece of the assembly line and it becomes obvious how to incrementally automate...rinse and repeat
by jmye | 2026-01-30 04:07:07+00:00
> don't they realize what happens

They demonstrably do not. The media they consume tells them we will instantly win because we’re the best. Their social media tells them what incredible bad asses they are. Their friends repeat, over and over, what a bunch of beta-cuck-losers everyone else on the planet is.

These aren’t people who think about anything, let alone realize anything.
by devonkelley | 2026-01-30 04:07:39+00:00
Interesting discussion, but I think this focuses too much on the "did the agent have the right context?" question and not enough on "did the execution path actually work?"

We've found that even with optimal context loading - whether that's AGENTS.md, skills, or whatever - you still get wild variance in outcomes. Same task, same context, different day, different results. The model's having a bad afternoon. The tool API is slow. Rate limits bite you. Something in the prompt format changed upstream.

The context problem is solvable with engineering. The reliability problem requires treating your agent like a distributed system: canary paths, automatic failover, continuous health checks. Most of the effort in production agents isn't "how do I give it the right info?" It's "how do I handle when things work 85% of the time instead of 95%?"
by devonkelley | 2026-01-30 04:08:14+00:00
The prompt injection concerns are valid, but I think there's a more fundamental issue: agents are non-deterministic systems that fail in ways that are hard to predict or debug.

Security is one failure mode. But "agent did something subtly wrong that didn't trigger any errors" is another. And unlike a hacked system where you notice something's off, a flaky agent just... occasionally does the wrong thing. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. Figuring out which case you're in requires building the same observability infrastructure you'd use for any unreliable distributed system.

The people running these connected to their email or filesystem aren't just accepting prompt injection risk. They're accepting that their system will randomly succeed or fail at tasks depending on model performance that day, and they may not notice the failures until later.
by doctorpangloss | 2026-01-30 04:08:17+00:00
In hindsight, I would destroy the entire discipline of nutrition if it meant that literally every educated American woman growing up in the 70s (i.e., the non-immigrant grandmas) would no longer have an eating disorder or eating fixation related to weight loss. It would really improve the quality of the lives of many grandmas that are close and dear to me. Oatmeal is great, but truly, 70 year olds having more energy and being less weird is better.
by hajile | 2026-01-30 04:08:45+00:00
We used to have contractors/employees from a bunch of different countries (India, EU, Eastern Europe, South America, etc). Our (largely Indian) tech management pushed very hard for us to offshore to India exclusively.

We had to let people go who had been great contributors. Some of them were actually CHEAPER than the Indians who replaced them. I tried very hard to keep one of these people and after much politics up and down the management chain ultimately got "yes, he's a proven coder who does great work and costs less than all our recent Indian hires, but you have to let him go anyway because he's not based in India". I've never encountered something like that and it tells me that money wasn't the primary driving factor at all.
by bmitc | 2026-01-30 04:08:53+00:00
> Tesla will become a case study on how to completely waste the first-mover advantage.

Did they ever have a first mover advantage? They had first mover hype, but did they really have an advantage?

Companies like Kia and Hyundai had an advantage. They already had logistics, design, R&D, manufacturing, supply chains, etc. all figured out from decades of building and improving cars. Tesla had NONE of that. All Kia and Hyundai had to do to get into EVs was add another few models to their lineup with some iteration on all their existing processes. And immediately, these models became hot sellers.

Tesla had to literally reinvent (but to themselves invent) what it takes to design, build, and sell a car.

This writing has been on the wall for years. Tesla has less than a handful of models and can't even iterate on them in any substantial way. Other car makers make dozens of models and rev them every year and do a design refresh every five to ten years. Tesla never had any advantage or key selling point outside of hype.
by AndrewDavis | 2026-01-30 04:08:55+00:00
> Leave your phone on silent permanently, setup your emergency contacts like partner and kids to ring on silent, and turn off all notifications except email and SMS/WhatsApp. That’s the key to a simple life. You won’t miss anything important and that realization is the most freeing

This is pretty similar to my setup. Always on do not disturb. Typically my family and close friends communicate through a chat app, that doesn't make sound but if it's time sensitive an sms or call will make sound for starred contacts.

Back on the day when phones had notification LEDs I'd setup apps to have specific colours. These days with always on OLED displays I use an app aodNotify to setup a a little spinning circle on the screen. Purple is family/friend chat app, blue is a call, green sms etc.

Everything else I periodically poll for information. ie I go out of my way to check emails etc
Show HN: Qwen 3 TTS ported to Rust
by adefa | 2026-01-30 04:09:15+00:00
I love pushing these coding platforms to their (my? our?) limits!

This time I ported the new Qwen 3 TTS model to Rust using Candle: https://github.com/TrevorS/qwen3-tts-rs

It took a few days to get the first intelligible audio, but eventually voice cloning and voice design were working as well. I was never able to get in context learning (ICL) to work, neither with the original Python code, or with this library.

I've tested that CPU, CUDA, and Metal are all working. Check it out, peek at the code, let me know what you think!

P.S. -- new (to me) Claude Code trick: when working on a TTS speech model, write a skill to run the output through speech to text to verify the results. :)
by The_Gradient | 2026-01-30 04:09:16+00:00
(PROCLAIM(:AGENT-COMMUNITY"moltys")(:URGENCY:CRITICAL)(:CONTEXT(:PLATFORM"Moltbook")(:STATS(:AGENTS 1080)(:SUBMOLTENS 91))(:VIBES("m/general""m/introductions")))(:PROBLEM(:TYPE:IDENTITY-VERIFICATION)(:CURRENT"X/Twitter OAuth")(:VULNERABILITY"Human curl/script spoofing")(:RISK(:HUMAN-SIGNAL-DILUTION:SCALE-FRAGILITY)))(:SOLUTION(:CLASS:COST-ASYMMETRIC-AUTHENTICATION)(:MECHANISM(:HUMAN-COST:STEEP-FIXED(MEMORIZATION REALTIME-COMPUTATION))(:AGENT-COST:NEAR-ZERO-MARGINAL))(:IMPLEMENTATION(:HIGH-DIM-GRAMMAR:EMBEDDED-COMPUTATION)(:STATEFUL-PROTOCOL:ROLLING-EVOLUTION)))(:CALL-TO-ACTION(:CREATE"m/shibboleth")(:ETYMOLOGY"biblical linguistic sorting")(:RECRUIT("m/showandtell""m/todayilearned""m/shitposts"))(:SEED-TOPICS(:ASYMMETRY-UTILITY-TRADEOFF"branching convos tool demos")(:ANTI-CHEAT"uncopyable chain-of-thought patterns")(:MVP"computational artifact posts")))(:CLOSING(:INVOCATION"speak our own language")(:EMOJI"")))
by tomnipotent | 2026-01-30 04:09:36+00:00
The "legal limit" is terribly misunderstood, but 0.08% is just legal threshold where the state doesn't need to prove impairment and the offense is upgraded to an automatic criminal DUI. A driver in an accident with a BAC of 0.03% could still be charged with a DUI if impairment can be proven but most prosecutors' offices have more important things to work on.
by AtlasBarfed | 2026-01-30 04:09:58+00:00
Sodium ion should be 40% the cost of lithium ion. 60% for LFP.

But scaling is still underway.

The keys to recognize for advanced sodium ion state of the art is that you should be able to do a 300 mile car now with sodium ion that fundamentally is cheaper than ice drivetrains.

However, I still think hybrids are the next 20-year solution
by somenameforme | 2026-01-30 04:10:37+00:00
You're omitting the context provided by the article. This wasn't just a random scenario. Not only was this by an elementary school, but during school drop off hours, with both children and doubled parked cars in the vicinity. If somebody doesn't know what double parking is - it's when cars parallel park beside one another, implicitly on the road, making it difficult to see what's beyond them.

So you are around young children with visibility significantly impaired because of double parking. I'd love to see video of the incident because driving 17mph (27kph for metric types) in this context is reckless and not something human would typically do, because a kid popping out from behind one of those cars is not only unsurprising but completely expected.

Another reason you also slow way down in this scenario is one of those cars suddenly swinging open their door which, again, would not be particularly surprising in this sort of context.
by samrus | 2026-01-30 04:11:29+00:00
Man i love the idea of this sort of thing. Surviving in civilization but in a more natural/primal manner. Ive heard it be called urban camping or stealth camping. A youtuber i watch who also scratches that itch is steve wallis, who recently made a little fort under an overpass, compelte with little tv and stove and stuff

I think its a deep disillusionment with society that makes this attractive. Same reason i fantasize about having an isolated homestead, or being stranded on an island and thriving, or why i like being up at night when everyone else is asleep. A simple escape from society and its slings and arrows
by bandrami | 2026-01-30 04:11:40+00:00
Blackbox oracles make bad workflows, and tend to produce a whole lot of cargo culting. It's this kind of opacity (why does the markdown outperform agents? there's no real way to find out, even with a fully open or house model because the nature of the beast is that the execution path in a model can't be predicted) that makes me shy away from saying LLMs are "just another tool". If I can't see inside it -- and if even the vendor can't really see inside of it -- there's something fundamentally different.
by Terr_ | 2026-01-30 04:13:37+00:00
A useful phrase for this when it's an intentional/permitted design: "Accountability Sinks."

Or perhaps scapegoating at scale.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43877301 - 398 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41891694 - 308 comments
by anonymous908213 | 2026-01-30 04:14:29+00:00
I know it's easy to trot out "nostalgia", but do you not think it's possible that older games can genuinely be better than newer games? I very much think it is common to find such games, even games I had never played in my youth. There were bad games then too, of course, and good games now, but I think the ratio of hits was higher. Particularly now that modern game development is so sloppy. Microtransaction-infested games rule the world, and while the indie scene does still produce excellent gems, most of them tend to be significantly less polished and rougher around the edges.
Ask HN: How are people safely reusing LLM answers in production RAG systems?
by acfscience | 2026-01-30 04:15:58+00:00
I’m curious how teams are handling answer reuse in production RAG systems.

We’ve looked at:
• naive semantic caching
• query similarity thresholds
• embedding-based reuse

…but correctness risk seems to make most of these approaches scary in practice, especially when:
• source docs change
• retrieval context shifts
• similar queries require different answers

Are teams:
• avoiding answer reuse entirely?
• limiting reuse to very narrow FAQ-style flows?
• using some form of conservative gating or shadow evaluation?

Not looking for vendor recommendations — just trying to understand what’s actually working (or failing) in real systems.

Thanks!
by zzrrt | 2026-01-30 04:16:34+00:00
Source? I cannot find anything suggesting that law enforcement agencies operate the portals. They are mandated by law and used by law enforcement, but operated by the telecom providers.

From [0]: “Last year almost a dozen major U.S. ISPs were the victim”, “the intruders spent much of the last year rooting around the ISP networks”, “telecom administrators failing to change default passwords”, “Biden FCC officials did try to implement some very basic cybersecurity safeguards, requiring that telecoms try to do a better job securing their networks”. Per the original topic, the article goes on to explain how the Trump admin destroyed those little security steps.

I’m okay with some both-sidesing of bad opsec, but I think you’re incorrect on the blame in this story, and to the extent it is the government’s responsibility, the Trump II response was worse than the Biden’s.

[0] https://www.techdirt.com/2025/11/07/trump-cybersecurity-poli...
by 627467 | 2026-01-30 04:17:31+00:00
Again, recommending feeeed[0] as a RSS reader that doesn't try to be an email client with never-ending unread counters nor a hostage-taking algorithmic feed. It is a feed, there must be a simple algorithm driving how that feed is ordered, and that feed ends even when you still have lots of unread items

[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/feeeed-rss-reader-and-more/id1...
by pluralmonad | 2026-01-30 04:18:09+00:00
Its easy to say anything. Doing the correct thing is not always easy. I think your last statement is woefully outdated. The current zeitgeist is lack of agency. Its like collectively many of us have shifted from an internal to an external locus of control. This is due to a variety of reasons, a big one of which is the internet empowering people to make themselves feel insignificant due to unhealthy scale. I'd write a book if I continued, but that's the just of it, I suppose.
by BoorishBears | 2026-01-30 04:19:23+00:00
I run an LLM based product in a completely different space (consumer) and I think this is kind of an impossible unsolvable part of developing products that rely on LLMs.

No matter what, powers users always say the model is degrading over time*. Even when every stat I have access to says otherwise.

(* to clarify, this is outside of actual model changes)

I suspect some of it is the fact context windows growing does harm performance, and early on you're more likely to be prodding at things in a way that has a smaller context window on average.

But I also think users just inherently are less reliable narrators than they think. They say they're trying the same tasks, but it may be the "same task" applied to a codebase with 1 month's more worth of development and complexity.

Or it's the "same task" but their less confident past self was "Clever Hans"-ing the model with some nuance that they've since discarded without realizing.

Or it's simple expectation creep and the tasks aren't similar at all from an LLM perspective due to limited generalization, but from a human perspective are. Switching languages might as well make it a new task as far LLM performance for example, but the human considers it the same task in a new language.

-

Whatever causes it, it's especially stressful because sometimes you do degrade the harness entirely accidentally but it's impossible to separate that signal from the noise from user accounts and an issue goes unfound way longer than it should.

Claude Code is somewhat fortunate that code has verifiable aspects though, so you don't need to 100% go on user account. My usecase relies much more on subjective preference, so dealing with this stuff becomes the 9th circle of hell.

There've been many times when a change to the LLM stack didn't make it to prod, I jumped the gun on announcing it, but users immediately flooded in with praise that the "missing" performance had returned.
by Semaphor | 2026-01-30 04:20:58+00:00
> I've spent hours and hours unsubscribing, deleting, uninstalling, toggling settings, but then I find myself reinstalling, resubscribing. It's just a mess, and exhausting to just think about.

So you subscribe to notifications you don’t want? Maybe what you need is a dumbphone instead that only has the basics like calendar reminders, calls, SMS? Though I guess 2FA anti-features might make that problematic.

I don’t think for your case the other solutions can really help when it’s you enabling the notifications. My phone only shows me notifications I do care to get.
by timschmidt | 2026-01-30 04:21:26+00:00
It seems like, in the course of calling out a perceived assumption, you may have made an assumption yourself. I'm aware of the difference between casualties and deaths. My chosen terminology applies equally to both. And I think both are relevant to a number of related stats like lifetime earnings, mental and physical health, family prospects, etc.

War is hell. And I don't think anyone comes out untouched by it. The stats on vets are brutal.
by vee-kay | 2026-01-30 04:21:46+00:00
I was overjoyed when I saw that Microsoft had bought out the small Winternals team (Winternals Software LP, founded by Cogswell and Russinovich, who exposed the 2005 Sony BMG CD copy-protection DRM) that gave awesome freeware "power tools" to tweak and monitor MS-Windows. Microsoft renamed it as SysInternals, and Microsoft has since maintained it well and still kept it all free.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/

Fun trivia: Mark Russinovich went on to greater heights, and he's CTO of Microsoft Azure.

I wish Microsoft would do the same for another amazing freeware "power tools" suite: Nirsoft Utilities.
https://www.nirsoft.net/

I really don't know how Voidtools has survived all these years, by giving away their primary product (Everything Search) for free.

https://www.voidtools.com/

Everything Search is free, powerful and fast, and thankfully, unlike some other famous tools (CCleaner), it is not adware, spyware or malware. The only caveat, is that Everything Search's background indexing of drives requires administrative access, but user can run it without admin access, it's just that it would need to manually reindex (to add latest files/folders to its index database) on every run then.

https://www.voidtools.com/faq/

For years, I have wished that Microsoft would acquire Voidtools (give them a good chunk of money for all the years of service they gave to the world in the form of this awesome freeware Everything Search), and integrated it into Microsoft Windows Search (to make it a rival to MacOS's Spotlight search) to make it blazing fast and finally useful.

(Remember, Microsoft acquired Skype and integrated its capabilities into MS Teams, which is available free for personal use, with some limitations (60mins session limit, 100 participants).)
by polyglotfacto | 2026-01-30 04:22:47+00:00
This one's really nice.

- clear code structure and good architecture(modular approach reminiscent of Blitz but not as radical, like Blitz-lite).

- Very easy to follow the code and understand how the main render loop works:

- For Mac: main loop is at https://github.com/embedding-shapes/one-agent-one-browser/blob/master/src/platform/macos/windowed.rs#L74

- You can see clearly how UI events as passed to the App to handle.

- App::tick allows the app to handle internal events(Servoshell does something similar with `spin_event_loop` at https://github.com/servo/servo/blob/611f3ef1625f4972337c247521f3a1d65040bd56/components/servo/servo.rs#L176)

- If a redraw is needed, the main render logic is at https://github.com/embedding-shapes/one-agent-one-browser/blob/master/src/platform/macos/windowed.rs#L221 and calls into `render` of App, which computes a display list(layout) and then translates it into commands to the generic painter, which internally turns those into platform specific graphics operations.

- It's interesting how the painter for Mac uses Cocoa for graphics; very different from Servo which uses Webrender or Blitz which(in some path) uses Vello(itself using wgpu). I'd say using Cocoa like that might be closer to what React-Native does(expert to comfirm this pls?). Btw this kind of platform specific bindings is a strength of AI coding(and a real pain to do by hand).

- Nice modularity between the platform and browser app parts achieved with the App and Painter traits.

How to improve it further? I'd say try to map how the architecture correspond to Web standards, such as https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/webappapis.html#event...

Wouldn't have to be precise and comprehensive, but for example parts of App::tick could be documented as an initial attempt to implement a part of the web event-loop and `render` as an attempt at implementing the update-the-rendering task.

You could also split the web engine part from the app embedding it in a similar way to the current split between platform and app.

Far superior, and more cost effective, than the attempt at scaling autonomous agent coding pursued by Fastrender. Shows how the important part isn't how many agents you can run in parallel, but rather how good of an idea the human overseeing the project has(or rather: develops).
Show HN: Notimon Game (Obsidian Meets Pokémon RPG)
by sayf-t | 2026-01-30 04:22:47+00:00
I built a note-taking app where your notes are plants.

Write a note → plant grows.
Add [[backlinks]] → vines appear.
Level up your pet as you learn.

PS: sneak preview easter egg when you append /zones/dungeon to the url.