MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by snickerer | 2026-01-19 08:49:10+00:00
The Internet got its death blow in the Eternal September 1994.

But it was a long death struggle, bleeding out drop by drop. Who remembers that people had to learn netiquette before getting into conversations? That is called civilisation.

The author of this post experienced the last remains oft that culture in the 00s.

I don't blame the horde of uneducated home users who came after the Eternal September. They were not stupid. We could have built a new culture together with them.

I blame the power of the profit. Big companies rolled in like bulldozers. Mindless machines, fueled by billions of dollars, rolling in the direction of the next ad revenue.

Relationships, civilization and culture are fragile. We must take good take of them. We should. but the bulldozers destroyed every structure they lived in in the Internet.

I don't want to whine. There is a learning: money and especially advertising is poison for social and cultural spaces.
When we build the next space where culture can grow, let's make sure to keep the poison out by design.
by ulrikrasmussen | 2026-01-19 08:49:29+00:00
In practice most TOTP implementation also do not prove that you have a device which is the sole owner of the secret. Except for proprietary app-based solutions the usual protocol is to display a QR code which just encodes the secret in plain text.

As long as you never enter the secret anywhere but only do the computation is your head, this is just using your brain as the second factor. I would not call this a password since it is not used in the same way. Passwords are entered in plain text into fields that you trust, but that also means that passwords can be stolen. This proves that you are in possession of your brain.
by brna-2 | 2026-01-19 08:49:47+00:00
Yep, I am aware, 2 or 3 OTP's and timestamps plus some brute forcing using the source-code. Server-side brute force by input should or could be implausible.
But that is why I am signaling here that I would love a genius or a playful expert/enthusiast contributing a bit or two to it - or becoming a co-author.
by theshrike79 | 2026-01-19 08:50:02+00:00
Everyone who is worried about immigration should be worried about climate change.

If nothing changes large parts of India will become completely uninhabitable due to wet-bulb temperatures being lethal without artificial cooling.

Those people will start moving and it won't be a 1000 or 100k people, it'll be millions looking for a place they can live in without, you know, dying.
by j1elo | 2026-01-19 08:50:10+00:00
This has released tags since back to July 2025. Does anyone know if it's being actively used to exfiltrate news from Iran right now? (if someone's been living under a rock: [1][2])

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46667491

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46573384
by BrenBarn | 2026-01-19 08:50:12+00:00
> If in a langauge there is one word for 2 different colors, speakers of it are unable to see the difference between the colors.

That is quite untrue. It is true that people may be slightly slower or less accurate in distinguishing colors that are within a labeled category than those that cross a category boundary, but that's far from saying they can't perceive the difference at all. The latter would imply that, for instance, English speakers cannot distinguish shades of blue or green.
Ask HN: How are you handling Vibe coding and Maintenance?
by colesantiago | 2026-01-19 08:51:13+00:00
Hi HN,

Now that AI is able to generate code, I was thinking about how everyone who is using AI or is vibe coding is thinking about maintenance.

Software inevitably breaks with deprecations, updates, security advisories, etc, now and that with software, apps, web apps and SaaS's being easy to generate.

The technical debt of the software increases quickly, (adding APIs, databases, analytics, features, more libraries, more files, more code paths, etc) so the likelihood of the software breaking also increases, especially with vibe coding being popular.

How is everyone thinking about this?

Are you just prompting ChatGPT, Claude and other LLMs to just "fix the code?" and crossing your fingers? or you adding unit and integration tests or something else?

Thanks!
by Bishonen88 | 2026-01-19 08:51:34+00:00
While I do have some experience with vibe coding, this could've been done by my wife who has little tech knowledge. That's the scary part.

My flow was to open 3 terminals, ask AI to work on some feature in each, check how it looks in the frontend and if it didn't look/work quite right, I asked it again. Once I deemed the feature OK, I just cleared the context and went on to a new task. The 3 terminals ate through claude $20 within 10-15 minutes.

I wonder if this breaks at some point when the codebase is more complex/large, or does not. If it doesn't, then the future is scary, because everyone can recreate many of the SAAS products within hours. What's the moat for Todoist for example? Without AI, it would've taken quite some effort, know-how and time to get something similar up and running. I reckon that with the $100 plan, I could have made it almost identical to it. Perhaps I could even create mobile app builds as well (react native perhaps).
What stops me from then offering this for 1/5 the cost of the real app?

And that's established apps. Imagine how easy/trivial it is to clone something that's new, and that was possibly vibe coded itself. E.g. someone posts to HN "Show HN: I made xyz". It looks great, it works great, it has a great idea. Then we take LLM's and recreate it within 4 hours. Poof! There's no reason to pay for it instantly.

That's what I find depressing, though - having a great idea and using LLM to create a great product, will not be enough. People will be able to clone everything. At least that's what my little experience with claude tells me. And now let's just wait 1 more year and see how good claude code 2.0 and co will be. I reckon sooner than later, 0 tech-knowledge will be needed to get apps up and running.

That's why it's time to pivot to some other role in the near future ;)
by budududuroiu | 2026-01-19 08:51:58+00:00
Not sure about bitchat, but Briar is being used in Iran right now. https://byteiota.com/briar-offline-mesh-when-internet-shutdo...

Tbf, if my government would be out to kill me for protesting, I'd use something that at least was security audited. Not to shit on bitchat, I haven't audited the code personally.
by sam_lowry_ | 2026-01-19 08:52:11+00:00
That's why they all get a flag from me. I am already well served by ghostscript, GIMP, Imagemagick, etc:

Optimize PDF:

#!/bin/bash
INPUT="$1"
OUTPUT="$(mktemp --suffix=.pdf)"
gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook \
-dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile="$OUTPUT" "$INPUT"
mv "$OUTPUT" "$INPUT"

Merge PDF:

#!/bin/sh
gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
-dCompatibilityLevel=1.3 -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook \
-sOutputFile=merged.pdf "$@"

And so on and so forth.
by 3RTB297 | 2026-01-19 08:52:15+00:00
The use cases stem from groups needing coordination in roughly the same area, with no internet. Disaster recovery efforts fit this exactly:

Doctors Without Borders feeding centers in a famine far from anywhere, searching for people in the rubble of a building following an earthquake, searching for people in a refugee camp, etc.

Verizon went down in the US this past week - perfect use case for Bitchat (or Meshtastic with a repeater or some other LoRa BT network). Verizon goes down while you're at the mall or store or Disneyland or whatever and you can still text to find each other.

300m max range with line of sight would cover something like when I go to visit my parents who live in a desert canyon with lousy mobile phone coverage, I can send a message that I'm at the gate and put the dogs in the garage.
by ekidd | 2026-01-19 08:52:19+00:00
I think vibe coding isn't quite good enough for real products because I usually have 4 AI agents going non-stop. And I do read the code (I read so, so much code), and I give the AI plenty of feedback.

If you just want to build a little web app, or a couple of screens for your phone, you'll probably be fine. (Unless there's money or personal data involved.) It's empowering! Have fun.

But if you're trying to build something that has a whole bunch of moving parts and which isn't allowed to be a trash fire? Someone needs to be paying attention.
by dybber | 2026-01-19 08:52:20+00:00
> On the other hand, even if the EU heads towards anti coercion acting, it seems they may act too slowly:
> > The whole process could take a year, but could be sped up.

The effect of tariffs are also slow to kick in.

Anti coercion instrument is probably mostly thought of as a deterrent, nothing they will actually use. But maybe if Trump is dumb enough and doesn’t understand the implications. If they use certain element will probably done quickly, e.g. not allowing use companies to bid on EU projects, not allowing US companies to invest in EU, requiring all transactions when purchasing EU goods to be made in EUR instead of USD.

> The recent troop deployment to Greenland just looks like theater since there were like 25 people sent. What does that achieve?

It achieves two things.

1) European countries can say they will ramp up protection from now on, have NATO exercises year round is on table. Moving exercises from other parts of the world to Greenland. This counters Trumps argument that this is about the security of Greenland. We will see bigger exercises at some point (naval exercises for example). These things take longer to plan.

2) The soldiers are from different nationalities. If US will use military force it will not just be against Denmark. US will have to take prisoners of war from a longer list of nations than just Denmark. Nations which also have soldiers helping out in various US bases around the world, so they will maybe also have to make French or German troops prisoners in some of their other bases, not just in Greenland. This effectively makes it much more expensive for the US, as they will not be able to isolate Denmark. And this is probably why a very quick and tiny exercise is being held.
by rsynnott | 2026-01-19 08:52:50+00:00
I'm half-convinced our good friends the magic robots are totally defeating peoples' ability to read.

> In 2024, there were 1,507 significant railway accidents in the EU, with a total of 750 people killed and 548 seriously injured.

See the graph titled "Rail accidents by type of accident". There were 63 derailments in 2024; most of the accidents were non-fatal accidents of this type: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
by simonair | 2026-01-19 08:53:00+00:00
I got tired of brittle literals like `http://localhost:3000` and `postgres://…@127.0.0.1/...` creeping into my code, so I wrote a few ESLint rules that detect “hardcoded infrastructure” strings and ask the agent to find the constant in the codebase — not by guessing its name but by `grep`-ing for its value.

The detection is based on dumb string literal heuristics, but has proven rather effective. Example patterns:

const hardcodedInfrastructure = {
url: /^https?:\/\/(localhost|127\.0\.0\.1|192\.168\.\d+\.\d+|10\.\d+\.\d+\.\d+|172\.(1[6-9]|2\d|3[01])\.\d+\.\d+)(:\d+)?/i,
dbUrl: /^(postgresql|postgres|mysql|mongodb):\/\/.*@(localhost|127\.0\.0\.1|192\.168\.\d+\.\d+|10\.\d+\.\d+\.\d+|172\.(1[6-9]|2\d|3[01])\.\d+\.\d+)/i,
localhost: /^localhost$/i,
localhostPort: /^localhost:\d+$/i,
};
by cjs_ac | 2026-01-19 08:53:24+00:00
> Is it possible to create a social network (or "discussion community", if you prefer) that doesn't have any incentive except human-to-human interaction? I don't mean a place where AI is banned, I mean a place where AI is useless, so people don't bother.

Yes, but its size must be limited by Dunbar's number[0]. This is the maximum size of a group of people where everyone can know everyone else on a personal basis. Beyond this, it becomes impossible to organically enforce social norms, and so abstractions like moderators and administrators and codes of conduct become necessary, and still fail to keep everyone on the same page.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
by ReptileMan | 2026-01-19 08:54:17+00:00
An economy bloc that is on decline makes a trade deal with economies that have been in shitter for almost a hundred years. I mean I approve it. I love Brazilian and Paraguayan beef and Ron Zapata is quite drinkable. But that idea that it will bring economic might to the two regions enough to push the USA out has yet to be seen if it is realistic.
by popopo73 | 2026-01-19 08:54:48+00:00
>is "you are absolutely right" wrong somehow?

It makes sense in English, however:

a) "you are" vs "you're". "you are" sounds too formal/authoritative in informal speech, and depending on tone, patronising.

b) one could say "you're absolutely right", but the "absolutely" is too dramatic/stressed for simple corrections (an example of sycophancy in LLMs)

If the prompt was something like "You did not include $VAR in func()", then a response like "You're right! Let me fix that.." would be more natural.
by sznio | 2026-01-19 08:54:49+00:00
>The user mode of the OS sucks,

Not from the perspective of Microsoft. It sells OneDrive and Office 365. It makes money from ads.

>so let's run the same user mode with a different kernel?

The kernel is a piece of legacy cruft that isn't necessary for selling OneDrive and Office 365. It's only a cost. Throw that out and replace with an off the shelf Linux kernel. With some minor tweaks, it can sell OneDrive too. Then you can fire a lot of kernel developers. The line goes up.
by exceptione | 2026-01-19 08:55:01+00:00
Agree with those 2 camps. The latter camp is all cheered up which is nice, but they should be asking the question if their solution is valuable enough to be maintained. If so, you should make all generated code your code, exactly in the form it needs to be according to your deep expertise. If not, congratulations, you have invented throw-away code. Code of conduct: don't throw this code at people from the former camp.

Or to phrase it more succinctly: if you are in camp 2 but don't have the passion of camp 1, you are a threat for the long term. The reverse is dangerous too, but can be offset to a certain extent with good product management.
by stugots2 | 2026-01-19 08:55:10+00:00
i have a side gig with 3 other people, we use slack chat for daily coms and webhooks. we meet weekly over discord becuase huddles are a paid feature, are you planning on implemening voip?

after 4 years we're almost at the point where i feel its worth spending $ for different types of convinient features.
by littlecranky67 | 2026-01-19 08:55:15+00:00
It is a disease of modern (social) media and personal branding. People also now broadly think that an ad-hominem (attacking the person behind an argument, not the argument) is good argumentative style. I don't know about Jack Dorsey other then he founded twitter, and I don't care much about him. If there is a product, I will evaluate that product by my catalogue, not whether I like or dislike a person.
by like_any_other | 2026-01-19 08:55:41+00:00
> they weren't even harming their sales in any way, shape, or fashion - they probably helped them, if anything.

I would like an even stronger precedent, to say that even if sales are harmed, it's non-infringing. E.g. a car aftermarket customization that improves performance so that it is equivalent to a more expensive model of the same brand, thus harming profits of that car brand. Or hell, just plain old regular repairs, so one can keep an old car for longer.

We don't owe it to corporations to protect their business models.
by phorkyas82 | 2026-01-19 08:55:46+00:00
Slightly moving into the other direction, after 17 years of science and tech optimism I see myself turning into a Luddite more and more.
First observation was that communication and social aspects of software seems crucial for success and proliferation.
And next came: that technology seems inept to solve any socio-econimic problems, but rather aggravates them.
by PinguTS | 2026-01-19 08:55:57+00:00
Yeah, and I have the feeling it is not tested at all.

It offers Word -> PDF conversion. Just for interest I tried it and it doesn't even get the simplest page right. It puts the filename into an header. The test page had 4 images, one svg, one pdf (from svg), and another variation of the first 2. The generated PDF only contains 2 of those images with wrong sizes. The later two are missing. So it's basically completely useless.

The free of charge LibreOffice gives much better results with its own caveats.
by NoteyComplexity | 2026-01-19 08:56:26+00:00
You have more soft skills then you think:

Problem solving, critical thinking, and decision making are the strongest soft skills amongst software developers since they need to carefully plan and make considerations on certain tech, and solving problems based on the requirements.

However, many people seems to nullify all the skills above, and keep parroting that we lack all soft skills just because we are not talking some popular trend we don’t interested the time to follow, appeared as “boring”.

This is why I don’t take this term seriously anymore.
by elnatro | 2026-01-19 08:57:10+00:00
The machinists complained for years about the curve of Angrois[1][2], and indeed no security assessment was done on the curve[3]. The government during that time (of the same party than this one) did nothing.

11 years later, the machinist was charged with unwilling homicide and sentenced to 2 years in prison, and the ex-chief of security sentenced to 2 years of prison as well[4].

[1] https://www.elmundo.es/espana/2018/07/24/5b570dadca4741b1698...

[2]: https://www.lavozdegalicia.es/noticia/galicia/2022/11/22/enf...

[3]: https://www.lavozdegalicia.es/noticia/galicia/2022/11/30/cur...

[4]: https://www.elcorreogallego.es/santiago/2024/12/25/ano-sente...
by ionwake | 2026-01-19 08:57:12+00:00
The only way I can tell, is if I see a "structure" to the edit. Usually its a tit for tat , exchange of words in a conversation, with clear spacing, as in too perfect. Followed by the scene, if it looks too oddly perfect ( like a line of foxes waiting to be fed, but all of them are somehow sitting in a line, even if there are differences between them, Ill notice. That is with well decades of age, Im not sure if that helps. But what is clear is even these "tells" will disapear in a few months.

I call this the "carpet effect". Where all carpets in Morocco have an imperfection, lest it impersonates god.
by j1elo | 2026-01-19 08:57:38+00:00
What are good file transfer apps that can be used in similar scenarios? (to be clear about the usage model: communications on a plane)

* I see LocalSend and LANDrop frequently suggested on HN but in my experience they rely on having a central Wifi router. No good.

* Android's QuickShare comes included by default, but it's buggy. Just yesterday it failed on me (I'm on an uncommunicated boat): it was defaulting to Bluetooth, so I had to reboot both phones to finally make it work over Wifi Direct. Not to speak about the "oh damn, you have an iPhone" scenario. No good.

Anything else? (to remark: for airplane-like situations so no access to Internet and no central router)
by aebtebeten | 2026-01-19 08:59:07+00:00
That's not the training; cf ATP 3-39.33: https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/ARN35675-ATP_3-...

> U.S forces responding to planned rallies and demonstrations, spontaneous crowds, and civil disturbances must follow the procedures best designed to deescalate crowd actions and to protect life, the rights and safety of the persons involved, and property.
by ulrikrasmussen | 2026-01-19 08:59:10+00:00
In that case nothing based on RFC 6838 would qualify as a second factor because nothing prevents you from just remembering the TOTP secret and compute the one-time code using a piece of JS. Or even putting it in your password manager.

I think it is too simple to reduce the definition of second factor to how it is stored. It is rather a question of what you need to log in. For TOTP the client has the freedom to choose any of (not exhaustive):

1. Remember password, put TOTP in an app on smartphone => Client has to remember password and be in possession of smartphone.

2. Put password and TOTP in password manager => Client has to remember the master password to the password manager and be in possession of the device on which it runs. Technically, you have to be in possession of just the encrypted bits making up the password database, but it is still a second factor separate from the master password.
by rcxdude | 2026-01-19 08:59:14+00:00
The single copy part would be a lot more common if it was widely supported to have multiple tokens registered to an account.

And the main point (though I agree that it doesn't make it 2FA), is to not have the secret be disclosed when you prove that you have it, which is what TOTP also achieves, which makes phishing or sniffing it significantly less valuable.
by compsciphd | 2026-01-19 08:59:28+00:00
google makes products, they mostly suck at making platforms, and their most notable platform (android) was purchased, though one can argue gsuite/workspace as a platform, but one might also argue that its more just an amalgamation of projects.

One can see this from the failure of google+ (and killing off beloved apps, like reader on its altar, when I would argue if they are thinking platform, the idea is to make any app insert data into the platform, you don't want to push away users, you want to get them using the platform with them even knowing it).

Or their disjointed messaging strategy for many years (which might not even matter, they seemingly have given up on it?). It shouldn't matter what messaging app someone uses, let it use a common platform. Spend the money on figuring out how to make them use a common platform, because killing their app just pushes them away and you are not guaranteed that they will move to your new app vs something else. Moving their old app to your new platform, again, keeps them as users, increases the value of the platform (as more users are inserting dfata into it) which makes it more valuable to others to do the same. One might have different apps geared towards differ things (someone might be happy with just text messaging, another might want video and text messaging, but if you kill the first guy's app and expect him to move, he might just as quickly move to whatsapp or something else).
by p0w3n3d | 2026-01-19 09:00:01+00:00
I wonder why everything now is written in web frameworks. Meanwhile I am currently using macos which has a magnificent PDF tool called... Preview. It allows annotate, merge, realign pages, insert one page from another document or even a JPEG-scan, etc.

However, before the courtesy of my company giving me a macos-enabled gear - I had to cope with PDFs using multiple apps on Windows and Linux. Recently I got there again and found out that PDF support is really weak in Linux, and the formerly award winning Acrobat Reader now looks slow and poor, trying to steal my data and occupy as much space as possible. Also Acrobat Reader reference browser for linux is killed now.

Hence, the question. If everyone is using PDF, why there are no good, fast native tools? and... why are we even staying with PDF?
by 1718627440 | 2026-01-19 09:00:16+00:00
Nobody disagreed with that it eventually fades, they were all saying it is going to take decades. The consequence of 9/11 of was mostly TSAs, following the USA into wars and the erosion of privacy at the mention of terrorism. The first and the last are still ongoing and I think the current US admin is still using the latter as a narrative, the second one may come at an end currently, because the USA is trying to use it against its (former) allies.

What you describe is called "to historicize an event"[0]. The WW1 has been historicized by WW2 (some argue it's the same war). But not even WW2 has been historicized yet (at least in Europe) and it already ended 80 years in the past, so I doubt an atlantic conflict is going to be forgotten in the next few decades.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicization