MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by adzm | 2026-01-24 17:56:57+00:00
This is one of my favorite versions, mostly for nostalgic reasons. My initial exposure to the Tao te Ching was this "rendition" and Stephen Mitchell's version. Comparing the two was always very thought provoking; the approach is very different between them.

I often come to this site and compare chapters across multiple versions: https://ttc.tasuki.org/display:Code:gff,sm,jc,rh

Some are more poetic, some are more literal, and keeping with the theme, both of them are just as important.
by nebezb | 2026-01-24 17:57:20+00:00
I use markitdown[0] religiously. You’ll lose fidelity for anything complex (math equations, images), but it does a great job 95% of the time in my experience.

I’m assuming the attack surface is reduced. I invoke it through a docker container. But this might be a misplaced sense of safety.

[0] https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown
by Zak | 2026-01-24 17:57:53+00:00
I would guess that the FBI never asks Microsoft for encryption keys without a valid legal order because it knows Microsoft will demand one, and because the FBI rarely has possession of suspect devices without a warrant to search for them and obtain their contents.

It could be a bigger obstacle for other agencies. CBP can hold a device carried by someone crossing the border without judicial oversight. ICE is in the midst of a hiring surge and from what I've read lately, has an abbreviated screening and training process likely not matching the rigor of the FBI. Local law enforcement agencies vary greatly.
by mrtksn | 2026-01-24 17:58:24+00:00
It Turkey a current popular meme is an old tweet that says “I'm so fed up with politics that I say, 'Let me just focus on this instead,' and whatever that is, they'll come and fuck that up too. You won't even be able to breathe”.

That’s what you will get by not talking politics. US is on the fast track to be like Turkey.

Some of those ICE agents will kill some AI engineer’s father or mother who has the wrong accents, wrong color or doesn’t speak “American”, it will go viral in India or China and US companies will start paying warzone premiums to hire any talent.
by DoctorOetker | 2026-01-24 17:58:38+00:00
a counter current heat exchanger might be more reliable than a refrigerant heat pump and more efficient than peltier heat pumps, but yes in theory you can quasistatically move the water out for almost no energy (only the adsorption / mixing energies). And peltiers can be much more efficient at tiny temperature gradients, so a theoretical frictionless positive displacement pump, and a heat pipe between the condensing compartment and the evaporatig compartment (so keeping the 2 compartments at ambient temperature (so no heat losses).

Compressing humid air releases heat which marginally increases the temperature of the condensing compartment, and marginally cools the evaporating compartment with the wet clothes; thus the heat pipe will quickly equilibrate the 2 compartments.
by Shebanator | 2026-01-24 17:58:40+00:00
Those kinds of errors were super common 4-6 months ago, but LLM quality moves fast. Nowadays I don't see these very often at all. Two things that make a huge difference: work on writing a spec first. github.speckit, GSD, BMAD, whatever tool you like can help with this. Do several passes on the spec to refine it and focus on the key ideas.

Now that you have a spec, task it out, but tell the LLM to write the tests first (like Test-Driven Development, but without all the formalisms). This forces the LLM to focus on the desired behavior instead of the algorithms. Be sure to focus on tests that focus on real behavior: client apis doing the right error handling when you get bad input, handling tricky cases, etc. Tell the system not to write 'struct' tests - checking that getters/setters work isn't interesting or useful.

Then you implement 1-3 tasks at a time, getting the tests to pass. The rules prevent disabling tests, commenting out tests, and, most importantly, changing the behavior of the tests. Doesn't use a lot of context, little to no hallucinating, and easily measurable progress.
by dragontamer | 2026-01-24 17:59:02+00:00
Sounds like ICE's official word right now is that the guy had a gun.

But the video clearly indicates that they all tackled him to the ground and were wrestling him maybe 4 vs 1, before they all shot him together. I'm not quite sure how a gun can have come out of this. Maybe the guy while struggling on the ground happened to reach in the direction of someone's gun while getting curbstomped, I dunno.

What I'm most worried about is that Pam Bondi / Department of Justice refuses to investigate these or properly prosecute these cases. IE: The Renee Good case has a ton of FBI agents resigning because they've been told to focus on Good's "misbehavior" rather than the ICE Agent's aggression.

It will be up to the Minnesota police and justice system to investigate. We cannot expect anything from the DoJ/FBI here. As such, the prosecution case will be gimped, and I fear we will have nothing resembling justice in this case (or Renee Good's case either).
by nine_k | 2026-01-24 18:00:05+00:00
As a matter of course, every structure that may have a variable size should start with a length designator. Values 1 to 32767 take two bytes, 32768 to 2147483647 takes four bytes, larger takes 8 bytes. Realistically 64 bits should suffice for any practical case, but arbitrary-size integers are well-known, and are easy to unpack and operate on.

This may slightly increase the size of some structures, but most of the time it would not, because of the alignment padding inherent to most structures anyway. But an entire class of vulnerabilities would be gone. This doesn't even need a change in the language, even though direct syntactic support would be nice. It just takes discipline when designing APIs.
by Shebanator | 2026-01-24 18:01:29+00:00
I discussed approaches in my earlier reply. But what you are saying now makes me think you are having problems with too much context. Pare down your CLAUDE.md massively and never let you context usage get over 60-65%. And tell CLAUDE not to commit anything without explicit instructions from you (unless you are working in a branch/worktree and are willing to throw it all away).
by WalterBright | 2026-01-24 18:01:42+00:00
C is a simple language, but that simplicity leads to non-portable code and lots of klunky, ugly things like using the preprocessor as a substitute for conditional compilation, imports, lambdas, metaprogramming, etc.

You don't have to use unneeded features that are in D. The core language is as simple as C, to the point where it is easy to translate C to D (in fact, the compiler will do it for you!).
by andychiare | 2026-01-24 18:01:43+00:00
> It is not possible to accurately estimate software work.

An "accurate estimation" is an oxymoron. By definition, an estimate is imprecise. It only serves to provide an idea of the order of magnitude of something: will this work take hours? days? weeks? months?
You can't be more accurate. And this does not apply only to software development.
by joecool1029 | 2026-01-24 18:02:13+00:00
Just an update, went, had my ear powerwashed as they needed to have it clear to inspect for a perforation, there is none which is good.

That leaves it achier than before, still ringing, but they said it should self-resolve mostly and I will follow up with ENT after the storm.

I think what I can do to test the earpiece volume in loud env vs quiet is attempt to use an old earpiece microphone (suction cup mic) I have and run the levels directly into a sound card, it won’t give me absolute volume but I can at least compare the levels and see if it warrants further investigation past that.
by mindslight | 2026-01-24 18:02:28+00:00
That's due to authorized humans at the company setting up the LLMs to publish statements which are materially relied upon. Not because company officers have delegated legal authority to the LLM process to be a legal agent that forms binding contracts.

It's basically the same with longstanding customer service "agents". They are authorized to do only what they are authorized to semantically express in the company's computer system. Even if you get one to verbally agree "We will do X for $Y', if they don't put that into their computer system it's not like you can take the company to court to enforce that.
by hannasanarion | 2026-01-24 18:03:15+00:00
That's not what 90% effective means. Tests don't work that way.

Tests can be wrong in two different ways, false positive, and false negative.

The 90% figure (which people keep rounding up from 86% for some reason, so I'll use that number from now on) is the sensitivity, or the abitity to not have false negatives. If there are 100 cheaters, the test will catch 86 of them, and 14 will get away with it.

The test's false positive rate, how often it says "AI" when there isn't any AI, is 0%, or equivalently, the test's "specificity" is 100%

> Turnitin correctly identified 28 of 30 samples in this category, or 93%. One
sample was rated incorrectly as 11% AI-generated[8], and another sample was
not able to be rated.

The worst that would have happened according to this test is that one student out of 30 would be suspected of AI generating a single sentence of their paper. None of the human authored essays were flagged as likely AI generated.
Show HN: Keyhold.io – zero-knowledge custody of secrets [that aren't yours]
by logicalsam | 2026-01-24 18:04:09+00:00
Hey HN!

I built a tool which I'm excited to share with you, and hopefully you'll see why!

The problem I had in my own business: there was never a _right_ tool to request secrets from my customers. I needed router configs, env variables, API tokens, you name it. I had a password manager but that wasn't the right fit to request client secrets and left much to be desired.

My aim:

1. SaaS which isn't ridiculously expensive

2. Which doesn't have any knowledge of your secrets

3. Which keeps the user experience straight-forward

4. Which cannot have any knowledge of your secrets

5. Which lets you automatically remove secrets which aren't needed anymore

6. Which lets your clients remove secrets which aren't needed anymore

7. Which doesn't duplicate the goal of a traditional Password Manager

8. Make it Tech Service Industry-friendly (MSPs, IT Agencies, & more)

And so I built a thing (hooray!):

Introducing: keyhold.io - zero-knowledge custody of secrets.

With keyhold.io, you can request clients share client-specific or project-specific secrets, grant access to your team to view specific secrets, and rest well knowing that even if the service got pwned, your secrets aren't out in the open. Be it .env, TLS certificates, config files, you name it, you can share it.

£50 per month or £500 per year - no per-seat fees. Priced based on estimated usage with only soft limits in place to prevent any abuse.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the concept, and welcome anyone to give it a shot!

Cheers,

Samuel, Founder @ keyhold.io
by altmanaltman | 2026-01-24 18:04:17+00:00
> People adore Star Wars, which is an absolute one to one of a hero's journey, it still has value.

Yeah but A Hero's Journey is not a literal story, it's more of a framework written in a book called "The Hero With a Thousand Faces" for what makes a story interesting and how various original stories like myths, folklore etc (like the Bible) always followed the same pattern.

The author dissected that pattern, and then it has been followed by many writers/creators for what is considered to be a good model of a story. Screenwriting classes literally teach it, along with other stuff like The Three Act structure etc.

And if you really look into, almost all good stories follow that pattern to some extent, but it is the implementation that makes each story special.

It's like a bit like saying "People adore [x] webapp which is an absolute one to one of React, it still has value" but both are fundamentally different things.
by davnicwil | 2026-01-24 18:04:46+00:00
With respect, I think this approach is actually harmful to everyone in the org because you're trying to twist reality to fit a premise that is just impossible to make true: that estimates of how long it takes to build software are reliable.

The reluctance to accept the reality that it cannot be made true achieves nothing positive for anybody. Rather it results in energy being lost to heat that could otherwise be used for productive work.

This isn't about respect between functions, this isn't about what ought to be professionally acceptable in the hypothetical. It's about accepting and working downstream of a situation based in objective truth.

Believe me, I wish it were true that software estimates could be made reliable. Everyone does. It would make everything involved in making and selling software easier. But, unfortunately, it's not easy. That's why so few organisations succeed at it.

I don't present easy answers to the tensions that arise from working downstream of this reality. Yes, it's easier to make deals contingent on firm delivery dates when selling. Yes, it's easier to plan marketing to concrete launch dates. Yes, it's easier to plan ahead when you have reliable timeframes for how long things take.

But, again unfortunately that is simply not the reality we live in. It is not easy. Flexibility, forward planning and working to where the puck is going to be, and accepting redundancy, lost work, or whatever if it never arrives there is part of it.

That I think is what people in different functions are best served rallying and collaborating around. One team, who build, market and sell software with the understanding that reliable estimates are not possible. There simply is no other way.
by gauravvij137 | 2026-01-24 18:04:58+00:00
Founder here. I built NEO, an AI agent designed specifically for AI and ML engineering workflows, after repeatedly hitting the same wall with existing tools: they work for short, linear tasks, but fall apart once workflows become long-running, stateful, and feedback-driven.
In real ML work, you don’t just generate code and move on. You explore data, train models, evaluate results, adjust assumptions, rerun experiments, compare metrics, generate artifacts, and iterate; often over hours or days.

Most modern coding agents already go beyond single prompts. They can plan steps, write files, run commands, and react to errors. Where things still break down is when ML workflows become long-running and feedback-heavy. Training jobs, evaluations, retries, metric comparisons, and partial failures are still treated as ephemeral side effects rather than durable state.

Once a workflow spans hours, multiple experiments, or iterative evaluation, you either babysit the agent or restart large parts of the process. Feedback exists, but it is not something the system can reliably resume from.

NEO tries to model ML work the way it actually happens.

It is an AI agent that executes end-to-end ML workflows, not just code generation. Work is broken into explicit execution steps with state, checkpoints, and intermediate results. Feedback from metrics, evaluations, or failures feeds directly into the next step instead of forcing a full restart. You can pause a run, inspect what happened, tweak assumptions, and resume from where it left off.

Here's an example as well for your reference: You might ask NEO to explore a dataset, train a few baseline models, compare their performance, and generate plots and a short report. NEO will load the data, run EDA, train models, evaluate them, notice if something underperforms or fails, adjust, and continue. If training takes an hour and one model crashes at 45 minutes, you do not start over. Neo inspects the failure, fixes it, and resumes.

Happy to answer questions about Neo.
Show HN: Qwen3-TTS integration for Manim animations
by DurhamSmith | 2026-01-24 18:04:59+00:00
I've been using Manim for educational content recently and wanted natural-sounding voiceovers without cobbling together external tools. When Qwen3-TTS got open sourced, I built a plugin to integrate it with manim-voiceover.

It supports all three Qwen3-TTS generation modes:
- Voice Cloning — Clone any voice from a 3+ second audio sample
- Voice Design — Generate voices from text descriptions (e.g., "a warm, elderly British woman speaking slowly")
- Preset Voices — 9 built-in speakers with emotion/style control via an instruct parameter

Basic usage looks like:

from manim import *
from manim_voiceover import VoiceoverScene
from manim_voiceover_qwen3_tts import Qwen3PresetVoiceService
class MyScene(VoiceoverScene):
def construct(self):
self.set_speech_service(Qwen3PresetVoiceService(speaker="Ryan"))
with self.voiceover(text="Let's draw a circle") as tracker:
self.play(Create(Circle()), run_time=tracker.duration)

Runs locally, ~4GB VRAM for the 1.7B models (0.6B models available for lighter setups). Supports 10 languages. Audio is cached so re-renders are fast.

GitHub: https://github.com/DurhamSmith/manim-voiceover-qwen3-tts
Happy to answer any questions.
by avcloudy | 2026-01-24 18:05:30+00:00
This is the issue though, Windows obscures the natural complexity of many things and picks defaults that serve to lock you into the ecosystem. You have expectations about how easy certain things should be that you are unwilling to let go of, and you dismiss the things that other systems make easy as irrelevant.

If Windows had never hidden the natural complexity of EFI, or chosen sane defaults, your experience would be better. It is absolutely insane to blame that on Arch.
by mrweasel | 2026-01-24 18:05:30+00:00
Right, Microsoft have the ability to recover the key, because average people lose their encryption keys and will blame Microsoft if they can't unlock their computer and gain access to their files. BitLocker protects you from someone stealing your computer to gain access to your files, that's it. It's no good in a corporate setting or if you're worried about governments spying on you.

I'm honestly not entirely convinced that disk encryption be enabled by default. How much of a problem was stolen personal laptops really? Corporate machine, sure, but leave the master key with the IT department.
by dismalaf | 2026-01-24 18:05:46+00:00
> the video clearly indicates that they all tackled him to the ground and were wrestling him

The video clearly shows him resisting arrest and reaching for something.

You ever taken a firearms course? Gotten a license? Firearms owners know that when you have an interaction with police, you tell them you're armed, make sure your hands are visible and you definitely don't reach for anything nor resist.
by combatentropy | 2026-01-24 18:06:18+00:00
This is clever advice, to first find out what estimate is tolerable to management and then adapt your design to fit. It's sort of like what the makers of Basecamp, in their book Getting Real, say in chapter 7, "Fix Time and Budget, Flex Scope"<https://basecamp.com/gettingreal/02.4-fix-time-and-budget-fl...>.

I wonder if it was a mistake to ever call it "engineering", because that leads people to think that software engineering is akin to mechanical or civil engineering, where you hire one expensive architect to do the design, and then hand off the grunt work to lower-paid programmers to bang out the code in a repetitive and predictable timeline with no more hard thinking needed. I think that Jack Reeves was right when he said, in 1992, that every line of code is architecture. The grunt work of building it afterward is the job of the compiler and linker. Therefore every time you write code, you are still working on the blueprint. "What is Software Design?"<https://www.bleading-edge.com/Publications/C++Journal/Cpjour...>

Martin Fowler cites this in his 2005 essay about agile programming, "The New Methodology"<https://www.martinfowler.com/articles/newMethodology.html>. Jeff Atwood, also in 2005, explains why software is so different from engineering physical objects, because the laws of physics constrain houses and bridges and aircraft. "Bridges, Software Engineering, and God"<https://blog.codinghorror.com/bridges-software-engineering-a...>. All this explains not only why estimates are so hard but also why two programs can do the same thing but one is a thousand lines of code and one is a million.

I came into programming from a liberal arts background, specifically writing, not science or math. I see a lot of similarities between programming and writing. Both let you say the same thing an infinite number of ways. I think I benefitted more from Strunk and White's advice to "omit needless words" than I might have from a course in how to build city hall.
Ask HN: General purpose search engine that will respect special characters?
by what-if | 2026-01-24 18:06:54+00:00
I am not a native English speaker, so excuse any errors. I'm looking for a general purpose search engine that will strictly respect queries with special characters (like !, -, +, #, ?) and won't strip them or treat them as operators. I don't want a search engine that only indexes code, like Grep App. I'd sometimes use Symbolhound in the past, but it has been discontinued. Suggest an alternative. Thanks in advance.
by hosainnet | 2026-01-24 18:07:21+00:00
The most memorable estimation technique I came across when I started out as a software engineer was "two days or less?".

Our team would simply gather around, go through the tasks that were agreed with the business and on count of three, each of us simply raise a thumbs up if we thought we could ship it within two days - otherwise thumbs down.

It generally implied we collectively thought a task would take more than two days to ship, it may require breaking down, otherwise it’s good to go.
by port11 | 2026-01-24 18:07:24+00:00
There’s been a recent scandal concerning the watering of tomatoes in Morocco. I’m sure we test food quality where we can, but it won’t be feasible to ensure all producers grow their food ‘properly’.

European farmers are held to a higher standard that can be controlled with random testing any time, can we do the same for external partners? Can we prevent them from selling sugar syrup as honey, as was controversially happening in the UK? Is the ‘organic’ label as strict for, say, Peru?

This isn’t rhetoric. Yes, we have solutions and can mitigate everything. The issue that many have is that the affordances of a free-trade deal disincentive the practices we demand of local farmers. A continent struggling with suicide and bankruptcy among farmers might want to rethink how it ensures its own food security in the coming decades of destabilised climate and growth seasons.
by 0xy | 2026-01-24 18:07:24+00:00
They do not carry Sig Sauer Emperor Scorpions, not sure where you got that information. They especially don't carry Sig Sauer Emperor Scorpions which are riced out with attachments. [1]

[1] https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/stellar/prod/dhs-gun-pic...
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-24 18:07:33+00:00
And when you're unlawfully murdered, you have no recourse. They do not care what you tell them, and if you don't resist, you're potentially dead anyway. They have arrested lawful immigrants and citizens, and held them illegally, in some cases for weeks or months.

"Comply and you might get lucky and survive" is not a life safety strategy. I'm unsure where this idea to not resist someone who is very likely to kill you without cause (based on all of the evidence and observations to date) is coming from to be frank.

Why ICE Can Kill With Impunity - https://www.wired.com/story/why-ice-can-kill-with-impunity/ | https://archive.today/gMFRS - January 15th, 2026 ("Over the past decade, US immigration agents have shot and killed more than two dozen people. Not a single agent appears to have faced criminal charges.")

(own firearms, have taken firearm training, still aware never to trust law enforcement)