MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by CuriouslyC | 2026-01-25 01:06:31+00:00
I have a code quality analysis tool that I use to "un-slopify" AI code. It doesn't handle algorithms and code semantics, which are still the programmer's domain, but it does a pretty good job of forcing agents to dry out code, separate concerns, group code more intelligently and generally write decoupled quasi-functional code. It works quite well with the raph loop to deeply restructure codebases.

https://github.com/sibyllinesoft/valknut
by my_throwaway23 | 2026-01-25 01:06:54+00:00
While I experience a very disturbing nausea, with just a healthy bit of existential dread, whenever I read whatever these AI Bros(TM) manage to... ahem, "sculpt", you actually managed to write something not immediately recognizeable as slop. Kudos.

Points deducted for the wholly unnecessary image. Text can, after all, stand on its own.

You are, however, strongly influenced by the writings of the tool covered by your musings. Might I suggest to perhaps not indulge in such excessive hyphenation?
by rahimnathwani | 2026-01-25 01:07:14+00:00
If you want people to adopt your tool, you may need to explain any advantage this has over fastmcp.

It's already easy to expose a python function as an MCP server. From the fastmcp docs:

from fastmcp import FastMCP

mcp = FastMCP("Demo ")

@mcp.tool
def add(a: int, b: int) -> int:
"""Add two numbers"""
return a + b

if __name__ == "__main__":
mcp.run()
by TeMPOraL | 2026-01-25 01:07:36+00:00
Apple has a long history of automatically uploading (and/or "backing up") all documents and media of its customers to iCloud. Microsoft started doing that with OneDrive and OneDrive backups only recently. That + the work Apple put in locking down its phone from users and attackers alike, basically breaks down like this:

| Apple | Microsoft |
---------------+---------------+------------|
Users with | approximately | small but |
data in cloud | everyone | growing |
---------------+---------------+------------|
Access to | denied via | easily |
data on device | cryptography | available |
| by default | by default |
Show HN: Workspace-updater can now hoist common deps
by smashah | 2026-01-25 01:07:49+00:00
Hi HN,

For anyone using pnpm-workspace.yaml to manage your deps, you can now use the following command to automatically find duplicate dependencies that can be hoisted into `pnpm-workspace.yaml` file with

npx workspace-updater dupes

and in order to commit just add the -y flag, and you can resolve the conflicts to use the latest version using --resolve-latest.

Any feedback, ideas appreciated!

https://github.com/smashah/workspace-updater?tab=readme-ov-f...
by jakkos | 2026-01-25 01:07:53+00:00
> Every operating system is in US hands

Desktop Linux is (becoming) usable for a normal person just in time, I was surprised how easily a non-technical friend switched over to Bazzite (immutable fedora with gaming extras).

> Visa, Mastercard, Paypal

The EU has already been working on a "Digital Euro" for a while

> all social media commonly used

I'm hoping more decentralized social media continues to pick up steam
by dyauspitr | 2026-01-25 01:08:27+00:00
I don’t know what Ed tech is specifically, but everything I’ve learnt over the last 15 years has been on YouTube and the internet in general. Guitar, programming, 3D modeling, welding, woodworking, CNC, paving, animal husbandry, koi breeding, gardening, fencing, botany, beekeeping and the list goes on and on.
by Nextgrid | 2026-01-25 01:09:08+00:00
> the most popular app in Denmark right now is an app that tells you if a product is American

That sounds like performative bullshit though? A "feel good" thing just like plastics "recycling".

Are people actually choosing to pay fair price for a non-American product? Are people choosing to invest in or start local competitors to those American products? Are governments doing something so that incomes commensurate with quality tech work aren't taxed at 60%? And so on.
by i_cannot_hack | 2026-01-25 01:10:08+00:00
First of all I want to thank you for the thoughtful and candid reply. It has increased my faith in the moderation some, not because you have convinced me or I agree with you, but because it shows you are thinking in nuanced ways about this and engaging with the actual issues (and not just adhering without question to some written mandate).

I actually also agree fully with your analysis of the fundamentals here, just not your wider perspective.

Yes, I fully agree there is a risk of changing HN to the worse for no reason. But doing the right thing in uncertain times always carries a risk. As seen in this very story we are discussing: Alex Pretti risked his life filming the violent ICE agents, for very uncertain gain, and ultimately paid the price. I still think he did the right thing. Compared to the price Alex paid, "a worse HN" seems like a risk worth taking.

And no, I don't think allowing more controversial topics on HN will make a major difference in the context of world politics (or prevent the apocalypse). But when it comes to things like these everyone will always feel too "small" to matter, and the end result if we listen to that feeling will be that no one does anything instead of everyone doing something to improve the situation.

I'm not spending my time arguing here because I think it will change the course of history, that my posts will actually change the moderation policies of HN, or because I think that by doing so I would save the world. I'm doing it because it's a minor line in the sand I could draw in a community I am active in, and it's better to try to do what we can (however minor) than just giving up. No one can do everything, but everyone can do something, etc etc.

I don't think we will reach any agreement regarding the wider perspective today, but I do feel like I have gotten the nuanced answer I requested regarding the moderation policy of HN in the context of the current mayhem going on (beyond just avoiding flamewars). So, again, thank you for that.
by zzo38computer | 2026-01-25 01:10:19+00:00
I do not agree that restricting it to UTF-8 (or to Unicode in general) is a fair and reasonable design decision (although UTF-8 may be reasonable if Unicode is somehow required anyways, especially the program also is expected to deal with ASCII), but regardless of that, the number of code points is not usually relevant (and substring operations indexed by code points is not usually necessary either), and the number of bytes will be more important, and some programs should not need to know about the character encoding at all (or only have a limited consideration of what they do with them).

(One reason you might care about the number of code points is because you are converting UTF-8 to UTF-32 (or Shift-JIS to TRON-32 or whatever else) and you want to allocate the memory ahead of time. The number of characters (which is not the same as the number of code points in the case of Unicode, although for other character sets it might be) is probably not important; if you want to display it, you will care about the display width according to the font, and if you are doing editing then where one character starts and ends is going to be more significant than how many characters they are. If you are using and indexing by the number of code points a lot (even though as I say that should not usually be necessary), then you might use UTF-32 instead of UTF-8.)

(It is also my opinion that Unicode is not a very good character set.)
by bruce343434 | 2026-01-25 01:10:26+00:00
Never heard of this before. Why would I use this? I am assuming the messages are not actually encrypted, because on their own privacy page they state that they "process" messages and attachments sent through birdychat. So are they processing the raw unencrypted data on their servers or what?

From a cursory glance of their CSAE policy, combined with the above, it seems they would be very eager to comply with the dreaded "chat control".

https://www.birdy.chat/privacy
by CuriouslyC | 2026-01-25 01:12:03+00:00
All the times I told someone I could do something I didn't know how to do but believed was possible then had to figure it out filled me with existential dread. There was a good feeling after I succeeded, but I get a good feeling from just building something big and functional with AI, as long as I feel like I was the driving force behind the ideas in the thing, so maybe I don't need the stress?
by jauntywundrkind | 2026-01-25 01:12:07+00:00
I think the hope is to run directly off of HBF directly, to eventually replace RAM with it entirely. 1.5TB/s is a pretty solid number! It's not going to be easy, it doesn't just drop in and replace (vastly bigger latency) but HBF replacing HBM for gobs of bandwidth is the intent, I believe.

Kioxia & Nvidia are already talking about 100M IOps SSD's directly attached to GPUs. This is less about running hte model & more about offboarding context for future use, but Nvidia is pushing KV cache to ssd. And using BlueField-4 which has PCIe on it to attach SSDs, process there. https://blocksandfiles.com/2025/09/15/kioxia-100-million-iop... https://blocksandfiles.com/2026/01/06/nvidia-standardizes-gp... https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/introducing-nvidia-bluefie...

We've already deepseek running straight off NVMe, weights runnig there. Slowly, but this maybe could scale. https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1idseqb/deepsee...

Kioxia for example has AiSAQ, which works in a couple places such as Milvus; not 100% clear but me exactly what's going on there, but it's trying to push work to the NVMe. And with NVMe 2.1 having computational storage, I expect we see more pushing work to the SSD.

These aren't directly the same thing as HBF. A lot is caching, but also, I tend to think there is an aspiration of trying to move some work out of ram, not merely to be able to load into ram faster.
by crazygringo | 2026-01-25 01:12:23+00:00
Funny, I've never been on a team that did.

Otherwise, it would be impossible to have 20-point stories done in a 10-business-day sprint! Under the usual assumption that a single person is responsible for the whole story.

For the teams I've been on, a point has usually been more like a third of a day or half a day, i.e. 2-3 hours of uninterrupted concentration, and the 1/2 point card is used rarely. Sounds like you've probably used 1/2 point stories a lot more...

But this is why points are arbitrary. Each team decides whatever precise scale it wants. And it really depends on the type of work you're doing too -- whether the smallest stories tend to be things that are day-sized or things that are 2-hour sized.
by jjk166 | 2026-01-25 01:12:28+00:00
> Falsifying the logical inverse of X is identical to verifying X.

That's exactly the point. The issue with positivist hypotheses is that you can find evidence that supports, but does not actually verify, the claim. This seems convincing until you try to flip it around. So for example if a prediction of my model is that the sun will rise tomorrow, and the sun does rise tomorrow, that seems like it supports my model. But if my model can be wrong and the sun would still rise tomorrow, then looking for the sun rise was never going to answer the question.

If you are doing a test that will actually verify X then bias doesn't matter.
by Neywiny | 2026-01-25 01:12:47+00:00
> We ran through our nominal and off nominal cases at the higher level of assembly, but not for a duration that caught this on the ground. It wasn't until we were at extended operation on orbit the issues began.

So I think that's a great answer. It's all about risk mitigation and tolerance. Your test tested if the part work to a reasonable and hopefully calculated level. It's good that the suppliers' management accepted fault, too. It's a lot harder when they don't but honestly in the professional world I've found that to be much rarer than consumer.

To me, and I'm not an investor, and probably not your target audience, those 3 short paragraphs told me a lot more in a positive way than I expected. I don't think it would be out of place to put it in the post. Honestly as is I thought this was your guys' fault for myriad reasons. Now I'm flipped the other way. Of course it's still your problem even though it's not your fault. Or, maybe, you do claim some blame for the worst case analysis not shaking out that edge case. Either way I feel much less like you guys just went to the hardware store, bought some random lube, packed the bearing, and shipped it thinking you'll figure it out on the next launch (which is sadly the fast and loose reputation new space is starting to get).
by squirrellous | 2026-01-25 01:13:10+00:00
Anecdotal perspective. I’m usually ok with others copying my code since code feels less personal (for lack of a better word). The other day I found a prompt for internal AI that copied my technical arguments in prose verbatim without attribution. This felt very wrong and invasive. It made me much more sympathetic to people with intellectual work out in the public domain.
by jakkos | 2026-01-25 01:13:52+00:00
First time round, Trump would consistently say lots of worrying stuff, but people in the US administration would stop him from following through.

This time, it's become quickly evident that he is following through.

The sentiment in Europe has changed from "well this isn't ideal, but we can just wait it out" to "this is scary and existential, we need self-sufficiency as soon as possible"
by MBCook | 2026-01-25 01:14:42+00:00
Right. In CPU scheduling this is the “race to idle” idea.

Sometimes it’s more efficient to run a task at full CPU power for 25ms than low (non-idle) CPU power 100ms.

It wouldn’t surprise me too much if the 4 could run the 3’s full load in less power than the 3 does.
by andy99 | 2026-01-25 01:14:49+00:00
It’s an indicator of extremely low effort. I don’t think fundamentally it’s people not liking the picture, or liking it less than a stock picture (even if the all look the same) it’s just a tell that someone is being super lazy. Same as people don’t like seeing AI posts on forums like HN. It’s less a judgement about the content of the post and more about the way the poster is interacting. Everyone can use AI themselves if they wanted to see throwaway AI output so it feels condescending when it’s presented to us.
by cryzinger | 2026-01-25 01:14:49+00:00
That's fair! I guess I didn't feel the same frustration with the last few lines because they did raise further questions, at least for me. The AI in the story is so bitter and cruel that it makes me wonder whether it does possess the capacity for human experience/emotion that they claim it doesn't have, and therefore might actually have a shot at replacing them. Without that final zinger I don't know I would've felt the same way. (And I did think it was a funny jab at the novelist's own elitism, especially since it adds another dimension of pitting him against other humans in addition to pitting him against the AI.)

Like, I don't think it's an amazing ending, but it did leave me on a contemplative note in a way that a "the AI wrote this all along" ending wouldn't have, at least for me personally. Although I would've still preferred that to an "and then they did, in fact, behead Sam Altman" ending :P

And I definitely respect having fun with analysis, lol. If nothing else I think the story was successful on that front... I don't think the successfully-beheading-Sam-Altman ending would've sparked this kind of discussion!
by SilentM68 | 2026-01-25 01:15:35+00:00
In my experience, where management is concerned, when employees demonstrated a bit more knowledge, a bit more fluidity, greater ease of communication, I noticed a very distinct change in management's demeaner towards the employees. The above comments are based on my past experience only. This past experience has made everyone involved a bit more sinical with respect to the importance of management. I personally think management should be replaced with an AI that can be turned on and off, as needed :)
by esperent | 2026-01-25 01:16:09+00:00
I added tests to an old project a few days ago. I spent a while to carefully spec everything out, and there was a lot of tedious work. Aiming for 70% coverage meant that a few thousand unit tests were needed.

I wrote up a technical plan with Claude code and I was about to set it to work when I thought, hang on, this would be very easy to split into separate work, let's try this subagent thing.

So I asked Claude to split it up into non- overlapping pieces and send out as many agents as it could to work on each piece.

I expected 3 or 4. It sent out 26 subagents. Drudge work that I estimate would have optimistically taken me several months was done in about 20 minutes. Crazy.

Of course it still did take me a couple of days to go through everything and feel confident that the tests were doing their job properly. Asking Claude to review separate sections carefully helped a lot there too. I'm pretty confident that the tests I ended up with were as good as what I would have written.
by CuriouslyC | 2026-01-25 01:16:23+00:00
This is never going to be the case, if you're finding it there's something really weird/wrong going on. Even with OpenAPI defs, if you're asking an agent to reason across service boundaries they have to do language translation on the fly in the generation, which is going to degrade attention 100%, plus LLMs are just worse at reasoning with openapi specs than language types. You also no longer have a unified stack, instead the agent has to stitch together the stack and logs from a remote service.
by weitendorf | 2026-01-25 01:16:51+00:00
Of course there are plenty of situations where you don't need this and probably a lot of people optimize for "being able to scale independently" without understanding when they would even need that/why those two services don't even make sense to scale independently.

If your services are stateful/are being treated as persistent, IMO even more commonly than your example, you really want to make sure they're only bundled together if they directly interact at the application layer. Disk is unlike ram/cpu in that it generally increases montonically in the absence of explicit handling of its size, so if applications share disks unnecessarily you've basically made it so that each fails due to lack of disk space when any other applciation on the same disk fail, and any cleanup/management of eg pruning old data or wiping out logs or cleaning up some extra noisy/disruptive disk operation now has to be coordinate with each other application sharing those disks. Terrible situation to be in.

For stateless services the big reason you might want separable scaling is for cost-controls and operations. The problem is not necessarily that two stateless services are bundled, it's that giving permission for stateless service VeryImportantFoo to scale up aggressively also requires granting UnimportantBundledBar and all the other bundled services that same permission for aggressive scaling. If these APIs are exposed to the internet in anyway, (or if their usage patterns and availability requirements are completely different, eg one is some webhook plugin or old marketing demo and the other is your PayMeTonsOfMoney api) that's a really bad idea, because you've basically made it possible for someone to send a bunch of api requests and waste a lot of your money, or lowered your availability/scaling of your important stuff to prevent that.

Also, scaling applications independently is roughly synonymous with releasing them independently (eg keeping one truly constant and un-modified rather than rebuilding it and releasing it in the same push) which is again important if you have varying availability/reliability requirements (releasing the slack bot should not require rebuilding the main backend and pushing it again).

Let me be clear though, even though most developers think about microservices in terms of engineering considerations, these are ultimately all business requirements. If you don't need cost controls or to care about availability, or aren't worried that "kyle tried to push the slackbot and now prod is down" will happen, don't think you need to do all this stuff anyway because "it's what you should do". I'm mostly writing this because I think developers who are inexperienced or haven't used microservices before tend to not realize there are almost always business and coordination and operations problems being solved when companies (who know what they're doing) invest significant time and resources into microservices.
by sylware | 2026-01-25 01:17:06+00:00
"As I've already pointed out, multiple times, those are the people asking Wayland for the necessary protocols, so that they _can_ design the required interfaces."

Your are not making any sense at all: it is up to the AT-SPI/ATK people to design their own set of wayland interfaces related to their definition of accessibilty and to code/maintain their related software (which could be compositors, or modules of compositors). Wayland being a set of interfaces which are fully discoverable and dynamic at runtime makes all that possible.
by terminalshort | 2026-01-25 01:17:31+00:00
This is a tired old trope that really has no basis in reality. There have been no large scale policy changes favoring billionaires since the campaign finance laws changed. In two out of the last 3 elections, the major corporate money backed candidate lost. The government is run by the 24 hour news cycle and the attention economy, not by the decree of billionaires. We operate firmly under the tyranny of the majority.
by the8472 | 2026-01-25 01:17:38+00:00
Cue the ultimate low orbit satellite

> It is undesirable to have a definition that will change with improving technology, so one might argue
that the correct way to define space is to pick the lowest altitude at which any satellite can remain in orbit,
and thus the lowest ballistic coefficent possible should be adopted - a ten-meter-diameter solid sphere of
pure osmium, perhaps, which would have B of 8×10^−6 m^2/kg and an effective Karman line of z(-4) at the
tropopause

from https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.07894
by gregsadetsky | 2026-01-25 01:17:48+00:00
Yeah - these [0] kinds of cables are so extremely scary.

"The O.MG Cable is a hand made USB cable with an advanced implant hidden inside. It is designed to allow your Red Team to emulate attack scenarios of sophisticated adversaries"

"Easy WiFi Control" (!!!!!)

"SOC2 certification"? Dawg, the call is coming from inside the house...

[0] https://shop.hak5.org/products/omg-cable
by pveierland | 2026-01-25 01:17:51+00:00
I'm hopeful that it can work if:

- The top-down mandate is very general: e.g. "default to using or contributing to open standards, protocols, file formats, and interoperability".

- It's applied across many nations and organizations that can themselves choose how they wish to allocate their resources to achieve their specific objective. Meaning that the tax authority in Norway can contribute to a specific tax-reporting software project and collaborate with nations X + Y + Z on this specific project as long as it is fit for their specific purpose and mandate.

Ideally this helps incentivize a diverse ecosystem of projects that all contribute to maximize public utility, without forcing specific solutions at the highest level.

One example of a recent French software project is Garage which is an open-source object storage service. It's received funding from multiple EU entities and provides excellent public utility: https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/
by derekp7 | 2026-01-25 01:18:12+00:00
My problem with stock photos is that unless it is clearly a stock image, it can mislead. For example, when looking up information on the solar panels that Jimmy Carter had installed on the White House, the article had a stock photo of a modern photo-voltaic panel. So I was initially confused, as what was described was a solar collector that concentrates the sun's heat to provide hot water for the kitchen. Which makes a lot more sense of why it wasn't re-installed during some roof renovations under Regan (the initial purpose of it was more to inspire the nation, that wouldn't be served much by re-installing it after it had been removed for roof work as the original moment had passed).