MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by KronisLV | 2026-01-05 22:47:04+00:00
I really like the Copilot autocomplete across multiple symbols in the file (e.g. predictive edits that you can tab through).

For most other stuff I prefer Cline/RooCode/KiloCode, but sadly it doesn’t seem like any of those offer similar autocomplete (Continue.dev did with even Ollama support for local models but the whole plugin was a buggy mess and it didn’t work well). Oh and sometimes Claude Code or Codex is nice in a terminal directly.

Personally, I don’t mind something being there by default (same as how JetBrains has their pre installed plugin and also something like Junie available), as long as it’s easy to turn off or uninstall.

Similar to how I wouldn’t scoff at a Git integration plugin even if I prefer to use Sourcetree or GitKraken.
by guywithahat | 2026-01-05 22:47:23+00:00
I would argue a cheap public school can be a huge mistake. At least where I'm from, the higher ranked public schools cost the most, and going to a cheap school means you missed 4 years of wages, you still paid some amount of money, and you have a degree which isn't useful. Even in engineering I've seen plenty of managers who won't give "good" jobs out to "worse" schools, and small state schools have unknown reputations and will be the first to get passed up in a questionable job market.

Getting a bad degree from a cheap/bad public school seems like a bad life decision. There is so much more to gain by not getting tattoos and looking presentable instead of getting a degree from a school people don't respect
by nunobrito | 2026-01-05 22:47:46+00:00
For a completely new project it is a high risk. While the AI is fantastic at brainstorming and writing detailed architecture, it is difficult to get the "big picture" and even more difficult to verify that it is being done correctly or which things can be improved/reused, because on this situation you don't look into the code.

I don't believe people will spend time looking at the code beyond the small blurbs they can read from the command line while talking with the AI, so I agree with you that it ends being treated as a blackbox.

Did an experiment for a server implementation in Java (my strong language), gave the usual instructions and built up the server. When I went to look into the code, it was a far smaller and more concise code base than what I would write myself. AI is treating programming language on the level of a compiler for javascript, it will make the instructions super efficient and uses techniques that on my 30 years experience I'm not able to pair-review because we tend to have our own patterns of programming while these tools use everything, no matter how exotic they will use it to their advantage.

After that experience I don't look at generated source code any longer. For me it is becoming the same as trying to look at compiled binary data.
by 7952 | 2026-01-05 22:47:47+00:00
Sure, but there must always be a fear that the military and public would not want to die in a nuclear inferno to defend national sovereignty. And may tolerate a coupe instead. Which then reduces the madness and the deterrent effect. The extra step the Dprk have taken is to try and build bunkers so that the regime could survive the destruction of the country. A step further into madness that goes beyond what western countries have been willing to accept.
by snyy | 2026-01-05 22:48:24+00:00
You have the right understanding.

We've found that maximizing chunk size gives the best retrieval performance and is easier to maintain since you don't have to customize chunking strategy per document type.

The upper limit for chunk size is set by your embedding model. After a certain size, encoding becomes too lossy and performance degrades.

There is a downside: blindly splitting into large chunks may cut a sentence or word off mid-way. We handle this by splitting at delimiters and adding overlap to cover abbreviations and other edge cases.
by Yizahi | 2026-01-05 22:48:29+00:00
That's Communism and we can't have that. Hell, can't even agree that people would pay for the universal health insurance (via tax), and you now propose that government subsidize electricity? Funny joke :) .

By the way, energy generation is only 1/4 to 1/3 of all emissions on average, so transitioning the fraction of that fraction to a lesser amount of emissions (since there a ton of emissions in manufacturing, transporting and installing solar panels) is nice and cool, but not very efficient to combat climate change.
by erklik | 2026-01-05 22:48:42+00:00
> the US military has made contingency plans for a decapitation strike and seizure or destruction of nuclear weapons in Pakistan in case the situation turns really bad there. Real deterrence requires a credible second-strike capability on survivable platforms such as submarines.

The existence of a plan does not equate to the feasibility of its execution. A submarine-based deterrent is indeed the "gold standard" for survivability, but it is not the only standard. There is enough pain for the US that they wouldn't actually attack Pakistan.
by filleduchaos | 2026-01-05 22:48:48+00:00
Why do people assume that clothes (and other goods, mind you) produced in the US are a mere hypothetical? There are plenty of brands that do so, and your general public overwhelmingly ignores them (and, as you have just demonstrated, don't even know they exist) precisely because they are way more expensive than consumers have been conditioned to believe that clothes should cost.

For instance, actual MiUSA jeans from companies like 3sixteen and Raleigh Denim retail for ~$200+, which is a far cry from the $30 to $50 that most people think jeans "should cost" (and that companies like American Eagle, who have long since outsourced their manufacturing, are happy to provide). Sure, it's not as if MiUSA jeans HAVE to be a few hundred dollars (I believe there are some Gustin's jeans you can pick up for $120 or so), and there are offshored jeans like Levi's which are already overpriced. But you'd have to be very naive to think that there would not be a massive and quite frankly unbearable sticker shock for the vast majority of people if you were to somehow force all domestic clothing demand to be met through domestic production. You could maybe sell it with some very effective austerity propaganda, but good luck with that.
by jrwoodruff | 2026-01-05 22:48:58+00:00
There's still plenty of assembly work being done by humans in automotive factories. Maybe it's not humanoid robots, but quadruped robots or something with more human-like agility. [Microfactories](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNqmvIuzbR4) are an interesting shift in automotive manufacturing that could take advantage of these more dexterous and mobile robot form factors.
by lo_zamoyski | 2026-01-05 22:49:30+00:00
The sovereignty of Venezuela is not the right argument here, because practical sovereignty is not absolute and there are just war grounds for Maduro's capture. The man was an awful tyrant.

However, just because there are just war grounds for Maduro's capture per se doesn't mean the operation was justified by just war principles. It wasn't. It takes more than just the fact that the ruler is tyrannical to justify an operation like this. Operations like this can risk civil war and all sorts of horrible fallout that also need to be considered. There must be a realistic plan following the removal of the tyrannical leader. As always, justice must be upheld always. And of course there are the procedural and legal aspects that Trump totally ignored.
by runako | 2026-01-05 22:49:54+00:00
I'm not sure wilder:

- $20/hr for hazardous work is "good money"

- your suggestion that we become an export economy, here on a forum where many people are working on products that will be purchased by the world but not counted as exports (examples of non-exporters who collect money from around the globe: Meta, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, AWS)

- the idea that the way to prosperity is for Americans to move back into lower-productivity jobs. (Here I ask you to look up the revenue per employee of Costco and JP Morgan and on the other hand good manufacturers like Steelcase and Lockheed Martin and Eaton. What do you think happens if we move the workforce from higher-productivity jobs to lower-productivity jobs?)

- your confusion of an economic point with a political point
by AuthAuth | 2026-01-05 22:50:06+00:00
If everyone sets goals and starts work to reduce emissions in 2015 you dont get credit for failing to meet all your goals while secretly doing the opposite and trying to create as much growth as possible by scaling coal production. Like how would it be if my country was like ok we will reduce emissions in 2045 and then doubled our emissions in the next 5 years. Thats what China is doing.
by fuzzy2 | 2026-01-05 22:50:18+00:00
I mean, at least on modern C#, it could be as simple as

public class UserIdInvalidException(Exception innerException) : Exception("Invalid User ID", innerException);

Even easier than most data objects you’d have to define anyway. And then, Exceptions are part of the contract. I’d rather not have an LLM write that up, but that’s just personal preference.
by evil-olive | 2026-01-05 22:50:49+00:00
> But for now, I want to emphasize a broader point: I’m hoping 2026 will be the year we stop caring about what people believe AI might do, and instead start reacting to its real, present capabilities.

yes, 100%

I think that way too often, discussions of the current state of tech get derailed by talking about predictions of future improvements.

hypothetical thought experiment:

I set a New Year's resolution for myself of drinking less alcohol.

on New Year's Eve, I get pulled over for driving drunk.

the officer wants to give me a sobriety test. I respond that I have projected my alcohol consumption will have decreased 80% YoY by Q2 2026.

the officer is going to smile and nod...and then insist on giving me the sobriety test.

compare this with a non-hypothetical anecdote:

I was talking with a friend about the environmental impacts of AI, and mentioned the methane turbines in Memphis [0] that are being used to power Elon Musk's MechaHitler slash CSAM generator.

the friend says "oh, but they're working on building nuclear power plants for AI datacenters".

and that's technically true...but it misses the broader point.

if someone lives downwind of that data center, and they have a kid who develops asthma, you can try to tell them "oh in 5 years it'll be nuclear powered". and your prediction might be correct...but their kid still has asthma.

0: https://time.com/7308925/elon-musk-memphis-ai-data-center/
by jsight | 2026-01-05 22:50:53+00:00
These posts fascinate me, as I must admit that I never really realized there were so many people focused almost exclusively on promotion.

Is it really that common, or do these posts just bring out those types of comments?

TBH, in this field, it seems like other problems are often more pressing:

- I've been a developer in XX language for NN years. How do I get my next job when the company is now hiring YY developers instead?
- There are lots of Level II jobs for YY, but I'm at level IV. Will eligibility rules even allow this transition?
- There are some Level V positions for YY, but my level IV in XX doesn't really qualify me in a way that would pass a tech screen.

The concerns in these types of posts are just so... different.
Ask HN: What's a standard way for apps to request text completion as a service?
by nvader | 2026-01-05 22:51:14+00:00
If I'm writing a new lightweight application that requires LLM-based text completion to power a feature, is there a standard way to request the user's operating system to provide a completion?

For instance, imagine I'm writing a small TUI that allows you to browse jsonl files, and want to create a feature to enable natural language parsing. Is there an emerging standard for an implementation agnostic, "Translate this natural query to jq {natlang-query}: response here: "?

If we don't have this yet, what would it take to get this built and broadly available?
by observationist | 2026-01-05 22:51:15+00:00
Regardless, change the game. If you have a valuable, useful platform, and compete with other platforms for quality and delivery of service, then you're optimizing for the right things. If you have valuable media and the platform only serves to collect fees for the privilege of accessing the media, then you're optimizing the thing that is net negative for society, and ends up with adtech and degraded service and gotchanomics to try to nickel and dime you at every opportunity.

Imagine a world in which spotify and youtube and netflix had to compete on product and service quality, instead of network effects and legal technicalities. In which you could vibe code an alternative platform and have it be legally feasible to start your own streaming service merely by downloading a library of public domain content, then boot-strapping your service and paying new studios for license to run content, and so on.

The entire ecosystem would have to adapt, and it would be incredibly positive for creatives and authors and artists. There wouldn't be a constant dark cloud of legal consequences hanging over peoples heads, with armies of lawyers whose only purpose in life is to wreck little people who dare "infringe" on content, and all the downstream nonsense that comes from it.

Make society better by optimizing the policies that result in fewer, less wealthy, and far less powerful lawyers.
AI Assistant with Intelligent Memory
by jwallace | 2026-01-05 22:51:47+00:00
Hi HN,

We are building Engram, an AI assistant with persistent memory that actually works across sessions. Unlike ChatGPT/Claude, which forget everything after each chat, Engram extracts and indexes facts, preferences, and context automatically.

The core problem: LLMs have great short-term memory but zero long-term recall. If you tell Claude about a project in January, it won't necessarily remember in March unless you paste the whole conversation back in.

Our approach: Automatic memory extraction using a 14-factor importance scoring algorithm (goals/commitments ranked higher than casual facts)
Semantic retrieval via pgvector + OpenAI embeddings
Cognitive profiling that learns your communication style from writing samples
Multi-provider routing (Llama 3 for free tier, Gemini for premium to name a few)

Technical stack: React + Supabase (PostgreSQL + pgvector), TypeScript throughout. We built an abstraction layer that handles provider failover and rate limiting.

Current status: Beta with ~300 users from UPenn (we won the Wharton Innovation Fund Build award). Day-30 retention is ~60%, which suggests the memory system is actually useful.

Try it: engramartificial.com

Built this because I was frustrated that my AI "assistant" couldn't remember what I told it yesterday. Would love to hear if this resonates with others or if I'm solving a non-problem.
by narmiouh | 2026-01-05 22:52:17+00:00
I guess one of the interesting things I learnt off this article(1) was that 7% of DNS query types served by 1.1.1.1 are HTTPS and started wondering what HTTPS query type was as I had only heard of A, MX, AAAA, SPF etc...

Apparently that is part of implementing ECH (Encrypted Client Hello) in TLS 1.3 where the DNS hosts the public key of the server to fully encrypt the server name in a HTTPS request. Since Nginx and other popular web servers don't yet support it, I suspect the 7% of requests are mostly Cloudflare itself.

(1) https://radar.cloudflare.com/?ref=loworbitsecurity.com#dns-q...
by colbythrowaway | 2026-01-05 22:52:17+00:00
Hey, Ben.

I recently (less than 2 months ago) did an in-depth analysis in the area of license compliance that suggests that Microsoft and many other companies that are shipping Electron apps aren't in compliance with the LGPL. (By all signs, it looks like the Electron project might not even be aware that Electron is subject to the LGPL, though they are. Even Slack, which isn't violating the license appears to be in compliance only incidentally—because they're shipping other LGPL components that they know are LGPL.)

I was set to leave the company I was at a couple weeks later (end of November), and I did, so there haven't been any developments with my investigation/findings since I departed. I haven't prepared or published a formal write-up, and I've only brought it up in a semi-public setting once. It's a pretty big deal, though. Could you raise this with Microsoft legal (not Electron/GitHub) and suggest they look into this?
by hermitcrab | 2026-01-05 22:53:06+00:00
It is surely only a matter of time until someone says 'yes, but node based editors are crap, you should do everything in code'. This has been discussed ad nauseum in HN, so I have tried to summarise the arguments here:

https://successfulsoftware.net/2024/01/16/visual-vs-text-bas...
by drnick1 | 2026-01-05 22:53:15+00:00
> Especially where it mattered most, removing pirated copies of my books from Google search results.

Make your books available for free, and you won't have this problem. You can't expect people to pay for something that literally costs nothing once it has been created.

You may also sell paper versions. Some people like myself enjoy reading paper better and will pay for hard copy if they like the book enough or expect to refer to it often.
by NullHypothesist | 2026-01-05 22:53:39+00:00
Definitely a "huge if true" headline.

Seems like there's natural skepticism here (https://electrek.co/2026/01/05/verge-unveils-370-mile-electr...), but boy, if it works... Hopefully would be a bellwether for commercial solid-state truly emerging in the next few years.

Fingers crossed this is true.
by lingrush4 | 2026-01-05 22:53:47+00:00
Claiming Arstechnica is jumping the gun is pretty generous to them. They are deliberately lying. OpenAI's default policy is not to share user data without a subpoena. This is standard; every company does this. No reasonable person would position this as "selectively hiding" data. Yet that is exactly how the propagandists at Arstechnica described OpenAI in their headline.
by echelon | 2026-01-05 22:54:00+00:00
I'd like to attach to this comment to say that we should support smaller companies. It doesn't matter how responsive a big company is if it controls too much surface area of the important technological salients.

Large company hegemony of our industry is bad. VSCode, Google Search + Chrome, mobile phone duopoly, Amazon/AWS/MGM/WholeFoods/TeleDoc conglomeration and cross promotion... It doesn't matter. We need more distribution of power.
by callumprentice | 2026-01-05 22:54:04+00:00
I tried Zed for a few months but just couldn't get the JavaScript/Python syntax checking and Prettier type reformatting to work reliably. I would poke at it for a few hours, get it working and then mysteriously, a few days later, it'd stop working again.

I switched to VSCode now and whilst that piece of it seems to be much more reliable, I think overall I prefer the "feel" of Zed.

I've bookmarked the article to see if that helps me figure out how to make the settings stick.
by makeitdouble | 2026-01-05 22:54:05+00:00
Smaller details for your bigger picture:

> 1. Promotions are not a reward for past performance. Instead, they are a bet that you will contribute more towards those goals with a promotion than without one.

It's both.

You reasonably can't keep someone in the same position for 5 years when their market value has long gone past that point and they're expecting more. Even if you're not sure they won't be Peter principled out in the better paying position.

The better way if to have an internal pay scale that allows for more specialization without more responsibility, but that's IMHO rare and requires managers that can handle that.

> demonstrating performance at your boss's level

To note, it often results in advices close to "do X job for a while and we'll let you have it", which looks like a no risk move for the company but is not without downsides. I've seen people being half managers for a full year before becoming one, and boy does it kill morale.

It signals to employees they'll be literally working about their pay grade "for free" for an undefined amount of time, and it's an even worse proposition when they're effectively doing two jobs at the same time (they're still expected to excel in their current position while proving they can do the other position as well)

It's a more delicate balance than it might look at first.
by verdverm | 2026-01-05 22:54:08+00:00
What scaling limitations, Gemini 3 shows us that is not over yet, and little brother flash is a hyper sparse, 1T parameter model (aiui) that is both fast and good

I agree with GP, Marcus has not been an accurate or significant voice, could care lass what he has to say about ai. He's not a practitioner anymore in my mind
by bix6 | 2026-01-05 22:54:46+00:00
I don’t understand this post as it seems more about Sequoia being helpful? And then starts talking about the game industry.

YC is all about the network. You burn the network and you’re in trouble (but I bet you could still find people to raise cash from).

Giving founders money on SAFEs was an easy way to jump the line and do a bunch of early stage quickly which is the technique that statistically works best. Unfortunately this article doesn’t mention any of the numerous SAFE issues or situations where founders take advantage of loopholes.
by roncesvalles | 2026-01-05 22:54:59+00:00
The nukes are a bargaining chip (disarmament). Basically, if your country has the human and tech capital to develop a nuke, you probably should because it's free money.

I don't believe that NK's nukes deter the US from doing anything. Would NK nuke Guam and risk getting carpet-bombed with nukes for endless days and nights until even the ants are dead? Artillery on Seoul doesn't matter. The US would just ask SK to evacuate it.

The US doesn't do anything about the DPRK because it's not economically relevant (i.e. it doesn't have the world's largest oil reserves etc). In an ironic way, their economy being closed-off and mostly unintegrated with the Western world maintains the peace.
by __jonas | 2026-01-05 22:55:31+00:00
I agree with that comment chain about the intelliJ diff view so much

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/26770#disc...

I don't even need that to be built into the editor – I would pay for a fast, standalone git UI that is as good as the IntelliJ one. I use Sublime Merge right now and it's kind of ok but definitely not on the same level
by Yizahi | 2026-01-05 22:55:55+00:00
Funnily enough, one of the big reasons for Ukraine invasion was to block our gas extraction, it happened right after Shell did a discovery research on the Donbass, and for many years the occupation had been contained precisely to the two regions where Ukraine had some deposits - Donbass and Black Sea. It's only later mental decline caused him to expand the attack.

And vice versa, while there are some rare earths in the Donbass, they are not very convenient to extract. Trump's mining deal was more like throwing a useless toy to a kid throwing a tantrum. It's notable that no one even remembers that "deal" lately.