MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sfn42 | 2026-01-21 14:37:27+00:00
You don't even need decimals. Nobody who uses celsius gives a shit about the decimals. It's -4 or it's -5 and even that distinction is irrelevant.

Unless you're doing some kind of scientific calculaton there's no need to think about decimals of celsius at all. Just like Fahrenheit users surely don't care whether it's 50 or 53 or whatever. It's around 50, that's all you need to know.
by defatigable | 2026-01-21 14:37:34+00:00
Yes. This was the key thing I learned that let me set the agents loose on larger tasks. Before I started iterating on specs with them, I mostly had them doing very small scale, refactor-this-function style tasks.

The other advice I've read that I haven't yet internalized as much is to use an "adversarial" approach with the LLMs: i.e. give them a rigid framework that they have to code against. So, e.g., generate tests that the code has to work against, or sample output that the code has to perfectly match. My agents do write tests as part of their work, and I use them to verify correctness, but I haven't updated my flow to emphasize that the agents should start with those, and iterate on them before working on the main implementation.
by chrislloyd | 2026-01-21 14:37:41+00:00
(It's worth reading the gh comment I linked if you're interested in terminals!)

tl;dr other programs like Neovim and Codex use the "alternate screen buffer" which means they don't use scrollback and reimplement their own scrolling. CC uses scrollback (because that's what most users expect) which it has to clear entirely and redraw everything when it changes (causing tearing/flickering). There's no way to incrementally update scrollback in a terminal.

(I also want to add some more flavor to the 1/3 metric because I don't want it to be mis-interpreted. "30% of the time you use CC it flickers" isn't quite accurate - it's dependent on screen height and what you do. Most people will not see _any_ flickers at all. Some people with short screens (typically VSCode users because by default the terminal opens fairly short) will see flickers. Previously, if something rendered offscreen users would see a flicker for _every subsequent frame_ regardless of wether anything was actually changing. Now they will only see a flicker occasionally when it's _absolutely_ needed. Once or twice vs thousands.

Additionally, the metric really tracks when CC emits a "clear scrollback" operation. If the user is in a terminal that supports DEC 2026 they won't see a flicker even if we emit that clear scrollback command.)
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-21 14:37:45+00:00
You can safely assume (and probably better you do regardless) that everyone on the internet is logging and slurping up as much data as they can about their users. Their product teams usually is the one who is using the data, but depending on the amount of controls in the company, could be that most of it sits in a database both engineering, marketing and product team has access to.

> If they are logging everything, what prevents their logs from getting leaked or "accidentally" being used in training data?

The "tracking data" is different from "chat data", the tracking data is usually collected for the product team to make decisions with, and automatically collected in the frontend and backend based on various methods.

The "chat data" is something that they'd keep more secret and guarded typically, probably random engineers won't be able to just access this data, although seniors in the infrastructure team typically would be able to.

As for easy or not that data could slip into training data, I'm not sure, but I'd expect just the fear of big name's suing them could be enough for them to be really careful with it. I guess that's my hope at least.

I don't know any specific "how long they keep logs" or anything like that, but what I do know, is that typically you try to sit on your data for as long as you can, because you always end up finding new uses for it in the future. Maybe you wanna compare how users used the platform in 2022 vs 2033, and then you'd be glad, so unless the company has some explicit public policy about it, assume they sit on it "forever".

> Also what are your thoughts on the new anonymous providers like confer.to (by signal creator), venice.ai etc.? (maybe some openrouter providers?)

Haven't heard about any of them :/ This summer I took it one step further and got myself the beefiest GPU I could reasonably get (for unrelated purposes) and started using local models for everything I do with LLMs.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-01-21 14:38:28+00:00
> Is it FOMO if for $100 a month you can build things that takes months

It is the very definition of FOMO if there is an entire cult of people telling you that for a year, and yet after a year of hearing about how "everything has changed", there is still not a single example of amazing vibe-coded software capable of replacing any of the real-world software people use on a daily basis. Meanwhile Microsoft is shipping more critical bugs and performance regressions in updates than ever while boasting about 40% of their code being LLM-generated. It is especially strange to cite "Windows as a great example" when 2025 was perhaps one of the worst years I can remember for Windows updates despite, or perhaps because of, LLM adoption.
by pixl97 | 2026-01-21 14:39:13+00:00
>everything" is now "political"

Old tech nerds area surprised that technology took over the world and drives politics and want to hide their head in the sand.

Now, every article being political does suck, and we should probably drip feed it on the site, so the technology itself it what is primarily talked about, but ignoring it all together is dangerous.
by rpdillon | 2026-01-21 14:39:15+00:00
The examples that the paper cites that are historical are not compelling, in my opinion.

The authors use Elon Musk's DOGE as an example of how AI is destructive, but I would point out that that instance was an anomaly, historically, and that the use of AI was the least notable thing about it. It's much more notable that the richest man in the world curried favor by donating tens of millions of dollars to a sitting US president and then was given unrestricted access to the government as a result. AI doesn't even really enter the conversation.

The other example they give is of the FDA, but they barely have researched it and their citations are pop news articles, rather than any sort of deeper analysis. Those articles are based on anonymous sources that are no longer at the agency and directly conflict with other information I could find about the use of that AI at the FDA. The particular AI they mention is used for product recalls and they present no evidence that it has somehow destroyed the FDA.

In other words, while the premise of the paper may seem intellectually attractive, the more I have tried to validate their reasoning and methodology, the more I've come up empty.
by Latty | 2026-01-21 14:39:18+00:00
I think this is where the disconnect is: the home users are precisely the ones being talked about, because they are the ones most likely to be treating NAT like it is a security system for their devices in the real world.

I've literally seen someone's ISP turn on IPv6, and then have their long-running VNC service compromised because they were just relying on NAT to hide their services.
by FuturisticLover | 2026-01-21 14:39:19+00:00
"Isolating people from each other"

I can see this happening. Earlier, more people worked in groups because they relied on their expertise.

Now, there is no need for this; people can do it alone. Even though this makes the work done, it comes at the cost of isolation.

I am sure for some people this would look like a win.
by BSDobelix | 2026-01-21 14:39:28+00:00
It's not, GNOME-Foundation aka Redhat aka IBM wants to "kill" X11, so they attach labels to discredit a project that wants to maintain X11:

https://en.ubunlog.com/The-XLibre-case-brings-out-the-worst-...

Same old story they try to repeat with DHH or the Framework Laptops because how dare you to support Omarchi:

https://world.hey.com/dhh/calling-someone-a-nazi-is-a-permis...
by nhubbard | 2026-01-21 14:39:35+00:00
I would normally do something like that; however, we opted to open an AppleCare Enterprise case for it, since it gets an engineer to look into the issue.

Both our Mac IT manager and I are thinking that it's the AV engine (Microsoft Defender) seeing fragments of YAML in the PSI tree and then blowing up after trying to parse the next line (which is not a truly valid YAML tree, it's a YAML tree with all the semantic details produced by IntelliJ). That in and of itself shouldn't be an issue, but I guess they weren't expecting random fragments of YAML to be copied and pasted.

We're still not sure why it only triggers in terminal emulators, though. That one is a total mystery.
by tucnak | 2026-01-21 14:39:35+00:00
Not only it's an opinion piece disguised as scientific "Article" with veneer of law, it has all the hallmarks of quackery: flowery language full of allegory and poetic comparisons, hundreds of superficial references from every area imaginable—sprinkled throughout, including but not limited to—Medium blog posts, news outlets, IBM one-page explainers, random sociology literature from the 40's, 60's and 80's, etc.

It reads like a trademark attorney—turned academic got himself interested in "data" and "privacy," wrote a book on the subject in 2018, and proceeded to be informed on the subject of AI almost exclusively by journalists from popular media outlets like Wired/Engaget/The Atlantic, to bring it all together by spaghetti-referencing his peers at Harvard and curiously-sounding 80's sociology. But who cares as long as AI bad, am I right?
by delaminator | 2026-01-21 14:39:47+00:00
using them. there really is no other way.

It's like asking "how do I use my text editor".

Almost everything you read online will be out of date, and the person working on it won't work the same way you do.

Some people love it, some people hate it.

And unless you've got your own experience, it's hard applying other people's experience to your experience.

Especially for something like Claude Code where you're just prompting and getting results back.

I mean, half the time I use VS Code, half the time I use a terminal window.

You're going to get a lot of conflicting advice because everyone's environment is different and they work on different sorts of code bases.

But I'll give you mine.

I'm a Claude Max Pro 200 subscriber.

I sit with the Opus chat-bot have a discussion and come up with a spec. We turn this into a zip full of documents and upload it to a GitHub Repo.

e.g. https://github.com/lawless-m/BattleForMoscow

I'll then get Claude Code for the Web to go to that repo unzip the zip and read the documents. It will make a first pass at the entire codebase.

I'll merge that into main and create another Claude Code for the Web Opus session with any ideas I've had in the meantime - which will usually be a few.

Then I clone it to a local machine and get Claude Code Opus to try and get it to work. And I'll prompt it from there until it works. If it's a Linux program, that'll be in a terminal window. If it's Windows, I'll use VS Code because it's a better terminal in VS Code than it is in a terminal window on Windows.

That's a general workflow. Sometimes I won't use GitHub at all. Sometimes a PXE boot an entire Linux machine and give it that with admin privs.

And sometimes I just tell it to use sudo as my own account. On my router for instance, if we want to do things with the firewall.
by alibarber | 2026-01-21 14:40:02+00:00
I think they mean that the Estonian company they run now has to file tax returns and pay taxes not only to Estonia but also Spain.

The company lives in Estonia. Yeah if they are taking income personally locally then that should go to the country of residence, as is normal.

But then if what Estonia considers acceptable standards for tax reporting differs from what Spain considers acceptable, or what they consider 'profit' etc, well good luck!
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-21 14:40:09+00:00
That's like supposing that I (in the modern day) would stumble upon an ancient sumerian date formatted in a slightly unusual manner (for the time), lack the context to identify the approximate era, but somehow if it had been written without the extra character (or whatever) I would have been able to figure things out.

Either a future archeologist has sufficient context to localize the writing to within plus or minus 5k years or the situation was hopeless to begin with. In all likelihood the latin script itself will be sufficient. In the unlikely event that latin numerals remain in near continuous use for another 100k years the writing system alone would then prove insufficient but hopefully you see my point.

That said, it seems the latin alphabet has been in use for 2700 years and is used by approximately 70% of the global population at this point so I guess if any alphabet is going to survive that far into the future it's one of the top contenders. But even then the scripts and usage conventions have changed drastically since its advent. Do we really expect anyone to be employing anything that even vaguely resembles a present day font face that far into the future?
by nailer | 2026-01-21 14:40:56+00:00
First time I heard ‘small hands Rubio’ but yes totally agreed politics seems dirtier now.

Anyone with enough exposure to American culture to realise the reasons given for stopping anti black racism are now thrown out, and left wing activists are openly discriminating against Asians, Europeans and Jewish people.

“the border should exist” is now controversial. People think “defending migrants” (which I am) means defending illegal migration. There are suburban mom vigilantes taking on LEOs.

I am talking about sterilising and giving cosmetic surgery to effeminate boys and tomboy girls. We used to acknowledge they existed. Now we tell them their bodies are wrong. Which is not a credit to our current era.

All these positions are remarkably different from the 1990s. Asides from present day politicians having different views, Bill Maher also talks about this very frequently.
by whs | 2026-01-21 14:40:58+00:00
I wish there's a RuneScape server for bots. A game where it is both fun to play manually, and automated. Quests, for example, is a one-off thing where it could be fun for the player and not really useful to automate since it is a one-off task (unless you're running bot farm).

I don't think the main game would encourage that - the more obscure the protocol, the less bot in the actual game (even though I don't think it's hard to find protocol documentation or just plug into an official client). OpenRSC, a revival of RuneScape Classic do have botting worlds, but personally RSC is not "fun" for me.

There are programmer games like Screeps (which the new Arena version just launched at the end of last year), but those game usually do not allow manual play or only indirect play. I tried Screeps, but I'm not good at strategy games, so once I get the runtime working I lose interest and none of my friend would want to help me strategize in game that they do not understand.
by egberts1 | 2026-01-21 14:41:03+00:00
NAT's only functions are:

- share a precious IP address at the NAT gateway border

- hide your internal LAN from external network mapper

Last point becomes moot when internal mapping software kicks in, legitimately or not, JavaScript or disingenuous application/daemon/app.

Welcome to Cybersecurity SecOP.

Now this is where Carrier-Grade NAT really shines: added functionality of handling mobile devices' changing IP addresses as it hops from one subnet to another (switching between G5/CSM/WiFi/personal-hotspot)
by kibwen | 2026-01-21 14:41:18+00:00
For the past 20 years the population of the internet has been increasingly sorted into filter bubbles, designed by media corporations which are incentivized to use dark patterns and addictive design to hijack the human brain by weaponizing its own emotions against and creating the illusion of popular consensus. To suggest that someone who has been vibecoding for only a few months is at the tail end of mass adoption is to reveal that one's brain has been pickled by exposure to Twitter. These tools are still extremely undercooked; insert the "meet potential man" meme here.
by pepperball | 2026-01-21 14:41:28+00:00
As a man, I never understood how bad this was. I have only felt unsafe in an Uber a few times, mostly because the driver should have had their license revoked due to their advanced age.

Without going into too much detail, I’ve learned just how bad it is. On the “less” vile end of things, my current parter had some desperate slime try to offer her money for sex. I made sure he reported him, but Silicon Valley loves to enable sex criminals, I imagine he’s still out there.
by lq9AJ8yrfs | 2026-01-21 14:41:31+00:00
Real world CSRF attacks into hxxp://192.168.0.1 home routers and polluting DNS and DHCP settings you could argue is caused or at least facilitated by NAT, or NAT misconceptions especially.

Though IPv6 has a similar situation with well defined unicast and multicast addresses.

True story, popular browsers won't let you load a webpage via various IPv6 local address literals for this reason. Hxxp://[ff02::] addresses won't work.

/ You can have your cake by "tying a knot" with yourself and port forwarding from 127.0.0.1 to the IPv6 literal. An ssh port forward will do this with aplomb. Then load hxxp://localhost:port and it works again.

// Browser logic
Ask HN: What should I write about next? (CS student learning by writing)
by Aditya_kachhawa | 2026-01-21 14:42:00+00:00
I'm a computer science student in India. I write technical articles to
understand technology better - my last one was on ambient AI and Google's Universal Commerce Protocol.

Honest context: I started wanting to do tech affiliate marketing, but
realized I need to actually understand what I'm talking about first.
Now I'm learning by researching and writing.

Currently writing about India-specific tech, but want to expand beyond that.

I'd really appreciate your help: what tech topic should I learn and write
about next? What technology do you wish was explained clearly? I'm not
great at complex algorithms yet, but I enjoy making systems understandable
for regular people.

Any suggestions would be genuinely helpful. Thank you!

latest one:
[1] https://www.techaffiliate.in/blog/invisible-intelligence-ambient-ai
[2] https://www.techaffiliate.in/blog/google-ucp-affiliate-marketing-2026
by Spooky23 | 2026-01-21 14:42:22+00:00
From the article: “Uber has said it is one of the safest ways to get around, with the vast majority of its trips in the United States — 99.9 percent — occurring without an incident of any kind”

The best way to reduce your incident count is by not collecting incident data.

There’s a whole weird underground economy around uber. The guys I get in my area in Upstate NY are often migrating up from NYC. They are like a cloud labor force and follow the rates around. It’s cool in some ways, as the friction of getting a job makes it hard to move, but that type of arrangement is a great operating environment for predators.
by microtonal | 2026-01-21 14:42:32+00:00
Literally Hitler is murdering civilians in broad daylight

That is for Americans themselves rise up against. The rest of the world can decide to sanction this behavior, etc. But nations are sovereign.

by invading friendly territories!

We are still in the I am going to tariff you, because I want to buy Greenland-stage. Sure, he has threatened to invade Greenland if that fails, but that's why it is important to make the US feel the pain by employing (initially parts of) the trade bazooka. Then US citizens, congress, the brolichargy or however feels hurt can try to put the government back in check.

Don't forget that for a lot of US tech companies, the EU is the second largest market. Losing control of that hurts the Microsofts, Metas, and Amazons of this world enormously. Some already get nervous without the tariffs or counter-measures started:

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/20/business/video/microsoft-...

a simple weapon test should be merited

Wargame simulations show that there are no winners in nuclear tit-for-tat.
by kakacik | 2026-01-21 14:42:37+00:00
And what is fucking un-comprehensible to whole world is that you knew what kind of POS he is yet you still fully voted him in second time. This ain't a single person problem anymore, he dies / is died / just finishes the office and next guy will be as bad or worse, since clearly pushing boundaries in US is the right thing to do.

This is well beyond some basic excuse of 'bb-but look at the other choice', this is 'fuck them lets kick some shit out and fuck ya all' mentality when you run around in amok with chainsaw level of idiocy.

Keeping things as polite as possible of course, but not more.
by naasking | 2026-01-21 14:42:43+00:00
> Encourages cognitive offloading, leading to skill atrophy

Speculative, we don't have that evidence yet. The evidence robust we do have is in students who have not yet developed skills and maturity, and who also have a lot of other confounding factors in their development, eg. social media, phones, formative development years exposed to immediate pleasure-seeking feedback loops.

> Backward-looking nature cannot adapt to changing circumstances

As opposed the nimble flexibility that established institutions are historically known for?

> Displaces knowledge transfer between humans

If people use LLMs, presumably it's because knowledge transfer is faster and more convenient that way than via direct interaction.

> Flattens institutional hierarchies needed for oversight

We have hierarchical institutions for oversight because flatter institutions don't scale (because humans don't scale). If AI can scale and can provide the same transparency, accountability and oversight, how is that not an improvement?

I could go on with the remaining points, but suffice it to say that there are a lot of faulty assertions behind the paper's arguments. It's also interesting that every chicken little saying that the sky is falling immediately reaches for the ban hammer instead of providing constructive criticism on how AI (or whatever innovation) can improve to mitigate these issues.
by davidhs | 2026-01-21 14:42:43+00:00
There are people interested in overcoming aphantasia (or hypophantasia, an extremely weak form of imagination).

Today I have medium-ish hypophantasia, but I remember when I was doing phantasia exercises, in particular "snapshotting" and "memory streaming", at least two times, there was a subtle shift in my perception and all of a sudden I could remember a ton of things, as if I opened a door. It would only last maybe 10-20 minutes (I would practice 30 - 60 minutes per day).

It wouldn't surprise me a bunch of those memories are in the brain but you just don't have access to them in everyday waking consciousness.

So, for me, it feels like a lot of my memories are visually indexed, and if I can't visualize then I can't remember, but once I configure my mind through meditation and these exercises, it is like I can "tune my mind" to mind's eye access (radio/TV analogy here) and with it the memories.

Then once I stopped the exercise (for the day) it would go away in around 10-20 minutes (kind of like how a muscle pump goes away rather quickly after exercising).
by rootnod3 | 2026-01-21 14:42:56+00:00
Definitely FOMO. I have tried it once or twice and saw absolutely zero value in it. I will stick to writing the code by hand, even if it's "boring" parts. If I have to sit down and review it anyway, I can also go and write it myself.

Especially considering that these 200$ subscriptions are just the start because those companies are still mostly operating at a loss.

It's either going to be higher fees or Ads pushed into the responses. Last I need is my code sprinkled with Ads.