MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bluGill | 2026-01-20 14:52:06+00:00
There is a point there: I can buy sheet metal and a welder at home depot and repair rust in a 1950s car (if I was really doing this I'd get better metals and a better welder, but the home depot stuff will work). If the CPU on my modern car breaks I can't fix it - worse, the computer industry has a long track record of stopping production on older chips and so there is a good chance the part I need won't be available at any price. (there are a few labs that can make a one-off chip - but they start at $60,000 each and that assumes you have all the designs ready)
by horsawlarway | 2026-01-20 14:52:52+00:00
I'm struggling to see how this resolves the problem the author has. I still think there's value in this approach, but it feels to be in the same thrust as the built in controls that already exist in claude code.

The problem with this approach (unless I'm misunderstanding - entirely possible!) is that it still blocks the agent on the first need for approval.

What I think most folks actually want (or at least what I want) is to allow the agent to explore a space, including exploring possible dead ends that require permissions/access, without stopping until the task is finished.

So if the agent is trying to "fix a server" it might suggest installing or removing a package. That suggestion blocks future progress.

Until a human comes in and says "yes - do it" or "no - try X instead" it will sit there doing nothing.

If instead it can just proceed, observe that the package doesn't resolve the issue, and continue exploring other solutions immediately, you save a whole lot of time.
by kakacik | 2026-01-20 14:53:14+00:00
Regardless of that, what most people are after is TCO.

Something tells me, and not only me, that longevity and ease of repair of these electrical gadgets are nowhere near old ICE car we all know very well. Is it direct experience with same type of cars across several decades? Nope, but experience with electronics in general, powered by similar batteries in general and its not looking good. More electronics = more failure surface.
by strogonoff | 2026-01-20 14:53:31+00:00
1. When you speak of context, note that a game is play (“as-if”), while for many people interacting with chatbots is presumably life (“is”). Humans can occasionally seem to be pretty awful to each other in playful context, but be still friends.

2. If somebody came up with a game in which your experience of murdering a human is close to reality as much as interacting with a modern LLM chatbot is close to interacting with a human, I think that game would be somewhat more controversial than GTA V or Call of Duty.
by johnwalkr | 2026-01-20 14:53:33+00:00
"It just works" has become true for the top brands of consumer 3d printers in general. They are not simple devices (and neither is a 2D printer), but I don't think they are more complex than they need to be. It's just that they have been iterated enough that they are now mature. But a 3d printer that can print a complete backup of itself is not going to happen in our lifetimes. They are the price they are because of high volumes, off-the-shelf components, injection moulded parts, etc. You cannot make a good 3d printer yourself for anywhere close to low cost of buying a complete one, even if you 3d print as many parts as possible yourself.

Just in the last year or so you can get a $600 printer with a heated print chamber and heated material box that keeps the material from absorbing moisture. This takes them to an extra level of "just working".

There's a small learning curve, and things like lifted prints occasionally happen, but in this post that is literally one sentence describing the problem and another sentence describing the solution. There's good community support.

Plastics not only dominate, metallic 3d printing is not close to being ready for home consumer use, it's $50k for an entry level machine and it still arguably requires a basic machine shop for finishing to be very useful.

But there is still a wall many people hit with 3d printing. When it comes time to design something and not merely print an available file, it's hard to know where to start if you don't already have hands-on experience using CAD or at least an introduction to carpentry or something similar. But this is true of most tools, be it woodworking tools, or visual studio. It takes experience to go from an idea in your head to a series of parts that will assemble together. There will be times, especially in the early days of tweaking dimensions and reprinting things.

In summary, if you want to design things yourself and count this as tinkering that you don't want to do, it's probably not going to be an enjoyable hobby. If you just want to print things like curtain rings and brackets to hold your screwdrivers on an ikea pegboard, it's virtually tinker-free these days.
by triceratops | 2026-01-20 14:53:43+00:00
Were they poor? Is there evidence that Native Americans didn't have enough food, clothing, shelter, or handcrafted goods for everyone before colonists came? The land was rich and they were quite skilled at making a living off it.

If you're calling them poor because they didn't have as much as the colonists, and that was bad, then perhaps income and wealth inequality today is just as problematic.
by Ajedi32 | 2026-01-20 14:53:46+00:00
I think it's actually not that hard to get right (or at least "right enough"), as evidenced by the fact that markets have successfully run the entire global economy for thousands of years with no central oversight and almost no regulation.

Markets failures do happen, and when they do it can be helpful to have an external force step in to nudge the market back onto the rails. But even without such interventions they work remarkably well on balance.
by Chipshuffle | 2026-01-20 14:53:51+00:00
Yeah, I admit I'm probably not doing that quite optimally.
I'm still just letting the LLM generate ephemeral .md files that I delete after a certain task is done.

The other day I found [beads](https://github.com/steveyegge/beads) and thought maybe that could be a good improvement over my current state.

But I'm quite hesitant because I also have seen these AGENTS.md files become stale and then there is also the question of how much information is too much especially with the limited context windows.

Probably all things that could again just be solved by leveraging AI more and I'm just an LLM noob. :D
by wolrah | 2026-01-20 14:54:18+00:00
Warnings only work if the person receiving them is either capable of and motivated to do something about it, or capable of motivating the person/people capable of doing something about it.

A weak warning that's just an entry in a scrolling console means nothing to end users and can be ignored by devs. A strong warning that comes out as a modal dialog can still be ignored by devs and then just annoys users. See the early era of Windows UAC for possibly the most widespread example of a strong warning added after the fact.
by greenie_beans | 2026-01-20 14:54:20+00:00
> So is this what the South teaches in school?

no. i went to public school in misssippi (both high school and undergrad) and learned the real reason behind the civil war.

> The dividing point was slavery and Lincoln didn't really care about freeing them.

lincoln wasn't interested in freeing slaves at the beginning of the war, but he decided to make it an issue once he realized how it could help win the war. (this is very simplified summary btw. dubois has a good argument about this in his book "black reconstruction in america")
by carlgreene | 2026-01-20 14:55:17+00:00
I agree with this for the most part, though there are times and with specific cars that you can have a blast. I can have a lot of fun in an old M Coupe, or Miata.

I used to have a GT3...it was a dream car of mine and I finally got it. The sad reality was that in order to have fun with it on public roads I was either going to kill myself/someone else, or go to jail. The only way to really experience that car in a responsible way was to go to the track. Which I just flat out didn't have the time to do with young kids.

Things were very different 20-30 years ago. Roads were less crowded and people were much more respectful on the road. Now, especially where I live, it's a free for all Mad Max cosplay.
by Dylan16807 | 2026-01-20 14:55:25+00:00
For a fixed bit error rate, making your typical error 100x bigger means it will happen 100x less often.

If the typical error is an entire sector, that's over 30 thousand bits. 1:1e15 BER could mean 1 corrupted bit every 100 terabytes or it could mean 1 corrupted sector every 4 exabytes. Or anything in between. If there's any more detailed spec for what that number means, I'd love to see it.
by linesofcode | 2026-01-20 14:55:30+00:00
When you first began learning how to program were you building and shipping apps the next day? No.

Agentic programming is a skill-set and a muscle you need to develop just like you did with coding in the past.

Things didn’t just suddenly go downhill after an arbitrary tipping point - what happened is you hit a knowledge gap in the tooling and gave up.

Reflect on what went wrong and use that knowledge next time you work with the agent.

For example, investing the time in building a strong test suite and testing strategy ahead of time which both you and the agent can rely on.

Being able to manage the agent and getting quality results on a large, complex codebase is a skill in itself, it won’t happen over night.

It takes practice and repetition with these tools to level-up, just like any thing else.
Show HN: PIICloak – Open-source PII detection API (31 entity types, self-hosted)
by dimanjet | 2026-01-20 14:55:31+00:00
Hey HN! I built PIICloak because I needed a simple way to sanitize user data before sending it to OpenAI/Claude APIs.

Key features:
- Detects 31 PII types (emails, phones, SSNs, credit cards, API keys, etc.)
- Multiple modes: redact, mask, hash, or replace with fake data
- REST API + Python library
- Self-hosted, no data leaves your server
- Uses Microsoft Presidio + spaCy NER under the hood

Quick example:

curl -X POST http://localhost:8000/anonymize \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"text": "Contact john@example.com or call 555-123-4567"}'

Returns: "Contact <EMAIL> or call <PHONE_NUMBER>"

Docker: docker run -p 8000:8000 dimanjet/piicloak
PyPI: pip install piicloak

Happy to answer any questions!
by Rubberducky1324 | 2026-01-20 14:55:34+00:00
> Citation needed? Yubico authenticator doesn't (the secure enclave is the Yubikey). I'd be very surprised if MS Authenticator and Authy (which I don't use but are the most popular apps that I know of) support such backups

Google Authenticator has an export option that I've used in the past, so that one does it for sure. Authy allows cloud-based synchronization in any case, so exporting seems quite possible. MS Authenticator also allow cloud sync, so probably exporting is not difficult.
by r_hoods_ghost | 2026-01-20 14:55:49+00:00
Yes. America had no empire. Except for the giant land empire that was, and is, America. Or does invading and occupying thousands of square miles of land, annihilating entire nations, and enslaving and slaughtering the natives, a process that was still very much ongoing between 1860 and 1890 not count as empire building?
by colinmorelli | 2026-01-20 14:56:18+00:00
This scenario seems very different because nobody gave the person any material non-public information at all, they simply deduced it from their experience. This feels similar to the question of "can a passenger on the Boeing jet with the door plug that blew out trade on that information" to which the answer appears to be yes.

Misappropriation theory is the following:
> The misappropriation theory of insider trading is a form of insider trading where an individual trades stock in a corporation, with whom they are unaffiliated, on the basis of material non-public information they obtained through a breach of a fiduciary duty owed to the source of the information

The important part, which I should have stated in my first comment, is that the recipient of the information must have a fiduciary relationship with the source of the information, even if they do not have one with the company in question at all. That's the distinction.
by randerson | 2026-01-20 14:56:24+00:00
EVs as a whole are growing. Porsche however is struggling because of their "sports car" identity. Taycan sales dropped 22% year-over-year [0], and their 2025 EV sales only rose because the Macan EV is new and they discontinued the gas one in the EU. (Even then: Half of all Macan buyers worldwide went for the 11-year-old gas design over the EV.)

The market for EV sports cars is soft. The Rimac Nevera R broke 24 performance world records and yet nobody wants to buy it [1]. Even the CEO of Rimac has said people want an engine sound. Meanwhile Ferrari can launch an even more expensive gas car and it sells out before its officially announced [2].

I'm pro-EV and my partner owns one. They are practical appliances that are perfect for the 90% of people who just want to get from A to B. But the stats show that it's not just my personal preferences. The average sports car buyer wants an engine and exhaust.

0. https://newsroom.porsche.com/en/2026/company/porsche-deliver...

1. https://www.carscoops.com/2024/05/slow-selling-nevera-is-a-s...

2. https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/ferrar...
by fwystup | 2026-01-20 14:56:54+00:00
I'm currently building a Docker dev environment for VSCode (github.com/dg1001/xaresaicoder) usable in a browser and hit the same issue. Without docker-in-docker it works well - I even was able to add transparent proxy in the Docker network to restrict outbound traffic and log all LLM calls (pretty nice in order to document your project).
For docker-in-docker development and better security isolation, I'm considering Kata Containers instead of Vagrant. Which gives me real VM-level isolation with minimum perf overhead, while still be able to use my docker stuff. Still on my TODO list though.
Has anyone actually run Kata with vs code server? Curious about real-world quirks - I've read that storage snapshot performance can be rough.
by tomashubelbauer | 2026-01-20 14:57:18+00:00
FWIW I've been writing UIs using plain JavaScript and the DOM API for like 15 years and at a certain scale, I always ended up building an ad-hoc framework or being disgruntled when I had to reach for any of the pre-React UI frameworks whose APIs and approaches I didn't like. React changes this, nowadays I either start with pure DOM and then rewrite to React or just start with React. I see a lot of hate online for React these days and I agree with probably 99 % of it, but the problem in my eyes is not React itself, but the ecosystem that spurred around it. If you stick to just React and take some care with your craft, React is a joy to use IME.
by skulk | 2026-01-20 14:57:28+00:00
I have been using this launcher for longer than I can remember, perhaps 10 years now. I don't really remember using anything else (hazy memories of the KitKat AOSP launcher).

The only thing that annoys me a little bit is if I typo an app name (or Google search query) it brings up a random distant fuzzy matched contact. I wish there was a way to set a threshold for the fuzzy matching thing for certain kinds of items. Probably trivial to implement but I haven't gotten around to it.
by giancarlostoro | 2026-01-20 14:57:54+00:00
Many moons ago, I accidentally rm -rf'd the wrong directory with all my code inside poof, gone. I still had PyCharm open, I checked its built-in version tracker and lo and behold, my code as it was before I rm -rf'ed up my code. I believe Claude has ways to undo file changes, but something like rm is just outside of its scope.
by baggachipz | 2026-01-20 14:58:57+00:00
I use llms to handle the minutia that I don't want to do. The part I enjoy is figuring out the problem. Once I know how it should be done, I like to task the llm to do the rote parts. "It's in my head, I just need to get it on paper." So doing a shorter prompt in English and providing exact instructions gets me 75% of the way there, at which point I can audit and tweak as necessary. It has me doing hobby side projects more often. Once it gets prohibitively expensive, I'll go back to the Old Fashioned Way (tm) and pine for the days of subsidized code completion.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2026-01-20 14:59:07+00:00
> It took someone more level headed to start telling her when her reactions were not valid to certain situations to begin stabilizing the behavior.

I guess at the risk of splitting hairs, I think it's more likely they stopped misappropriating more than they started invalidating. I see a difference between "you shouldn't feel that way" and "I disagree with that conclusion" such that one can logically say both (well, the former being "it's okay to feel that way") in the same breath.
Show HN: Type Chart Calculator – Interactive type effectiveness tool
by lincyang | 2026-01-20 14:59:19+00:00
Hi HN! I built a type effectiveness calculator for competitive
gaming.

Link: https://typematchup.org

Features:
- Interactive 18×18 type chart
- Dual-type calculator (handles 4x and 0.25x multipliers)
- Battle simulator with STAB calculations

Built with Next.js 14, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS. All 26
pages are statically generated for fast loading.

The main technical challenge was handling async params in
Next.js 15+ for dynamic routes. Would love feedback on the
implementation!

Tech details:
- SSG with generateStaticParams
- Type-safe JSON imports
- Dynamic sitemap generation
- Full SEO optimization

Open source? Not yet, but considering it. Feedback welcome!
by tpm | 2026-01-20 15:00:12+00:00
I think quality standards are a bit different from other trade barriers like tariffs and quotas. We in the EU are importing lots of foods from over the world and the quality standards are already in place and checked (or not, in any case we have to police this ourselves), so probably not much will change for e.g. Argentinian beef in that regard.

> but then their prices will have to go up

But again their prices would have to account for this whether they are trading inside the trade bloc or exporting to the EU.

> Another more cynical take is that were simply offloading to poorer countries the greenhouse gas emissions of our agriculture.

But we are doing this already. And if the issue becomes too big to ignore, we already have a solution, the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, so let's apply that to agriculture too.
by jll29 | 2026-01-20 15:00:16+00:00
I have a colleague who does that.

My students then often ask me to do the same, to permit them to bring one page of notes as he does.

Then I would say: just assume you're writing the exam with him and work on your one-pager of notes, optimize your notes by copying and re-writing them a few times. Now, the only difference between my exam and his exam is that the night before, you memorize your one-pager (which if you re-wrote stuff a few times you should be able to do from memory).

I believe having had it all in your memory at the same time, at least once for a short time, gives students higher self-confidence. They may forget the material, but the hopefully remember the feeling of mastering it.
by pjc50 | 2026-01-20 15:01:05+00:00
https://www.ft.com/content/6474a1a9-4a88-4f76-9685-f8ccb080d... : "Renault to team up with French defence group to make drones for Ukraine"

I don't think the deindustrialization narrative is quite as bad as the doomers would have it, although it's notable that both sides in the Ukraine war depend on Chinese drone electronics.

(we've also forgotten the nuclear war narrative of the 80s: it's irrelevant if you can build a bomber in 63 minutes if it only takes the ballistic missiles 43 minutes from launch to arrival, at which point the war or at least industrial society is over)
by drw85 | 2026-01-20 15:01:29+00:00
This response makes it 100% clear to me that this is just a bot.
The verbatim use of a completely random thing like 'custom math libraries for cross-CPU determinism', combined with the agreeable tone and em dash use are pretty much a dead giveaway.

The internet has become so useless, everywhere is just marketing nonsense and bots.
by maaaaattttt | 2026-01-20 15:01:30+00:00
Wouldn't these markets be the perfect "crime crowdsourcing" platform? Let's say a bad actor wants XYZ to happen so they organise a bet on XYZ not happening. Then make sure as many different accounts that they control directly or indirectly bet a lot of money in the same way. Now anyone willing to win the prize can decide to make sure it does happen and get the money (at least a high multiplicator of what they bet themselves).

Am I missing something? Maybe it's already being used in that way... in that case, it would be quite scary.
by randallsquared | 2026-01-20 15:01:42+00:00
Machinery, computers, and the internet do more than hundreds of slaves/servants worth of work (how many musicians and actors would have to be at your call to replicate YouTube, which is free?). A poor person in Europe can still travel all over the Eurozone by train, etc. In the first world, we pivoted to "food insecurity" instead of "hunger", but the most common signifier of being food insecure is obesity: more food and alcohol than a person should want, at least. The only one that is a definite downgrade among those you list is the lack of owned houses and/or land.
by triceratops | 2026-01-20 15:02:10+00:00
It's hard to farm all that land when there are no horses to pull a plow, or pigs, cows, or sheep to raise for meat and milk and wool and manure. They didn't have all the crops that colonists crossed over with either: wheat, rice, and soybeans. The only crop of comparable productivity was corn, which was domesticated in South and Central America and had to be adapted to North America over many generations.

After they crossed the Bering Strait they also didn't receive any of the subsequent Old World advances in metallurgy, agriculture, chemistry, societal organization and so forth.

It's asking quite a lot of a relatively small population base to invent all those things independently while also lacking everything necessary to have comparable agricultural yields.

There was no Silk Road bringing gunpowder and paper and the Black Death to these societies. That means the native populations colonists encountered were the survivors of utterly cataclysmic epidemics. It's like if aliens brought a virus to Earth that killed 95% of the population and then they went "Hmm...these earthlings, they're not terribly productive are they?"

I'm not an anthropologist or an economist or a historian so there are many other factors I missed.
by bluGill | 2026-01-20 15:02:11+00:00
There are no other options. The F35 is the only gen5 fighter you can buy (Russia has one, but they can't make it and in any case Russia is invading Europe now and so not an option) , and as such it is going to be better than anything else you can get. Plus the cost of the F35 is similar or less than your other options.

The real question is what do those countries do when they have other options.
by emilburzo | 2026-01-20 15:02:25+00:00
Correct, which I wanted to avoid because:

> Mounting the Docker socket grants the agent full access to your Docker daemon, which has root-level privileges on your system. The agent can start or stop any container, access volumes, and potentially escape the sandbox. Only use this option when you fully trust the code the agent is working with.

https://docs.docker.com/ai/sandboxes/advanced-config/#giving...