MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kevin061 | 2026-01-21 10:13:35+00:00
To add to this, the thing that really worries me is not that Trump is doing this, but the fact every single US has had the capacity to do this (Trump is proof of it), and the only thing holding back the US from self-immolation and destroying all their partnerships was decorum and being nice, but there were no actual mechanisms, laws, or tools to prevent POTUS from self-appointing himself as King of America, which is extremely worrying for what many people regarded as an advanced democracy.
by ensocode | 2026-01-21 10:13:50+00:00
Interesting thought, thanks. So what would we need? What if everyone effectively had a permanent microphone — via smartphones, smart speakers, cars, wearables — and all of that lived, spoken, emotionally charged data were fed into future LLMs?

On the surface, that sounds like a path toward richer models: less elite-written text, more everyday language, more non-academic thinking, more embodied culture. But it also raises a deeper question: whose reality would actually be learned?

Because even if the data were global, the selection, labeling, weighting, and training objectives would still be controlled somewhere.

And then there’s preference. Would people eventually choose their models the way they choose media ecosystems today?
A Californian-progressive LLM.
A post-socialist Eastern European LLM.
A Palestinian LLM for discussing geopolitics.
A deeply conservative, tradition-preserving LLM that treats modernity itself as suspect.

If that happens, AI wouldn’t homogenize thought — it would solidify worldviews into software as it is done in media today. Dialogue might actually become harder, not easier.

So the think may not be “AI Californication” alone, but AI Balkanization, ...

The open question is whether we can build models that don’t just represent cultures, but can genuinely inhabit multiple, conflicting ontologies without collapsing them into a single moral frame. That may be the hardest problem of all — and one that current LLMs, trained mostly on English-speaking upper layers of the internet, are nowhere near solving yet.
by p_l | 2026-01-21 10:14:14+00:00
This was the main driver of VGA memory size for a time - if you spent money on 2MB card instead of a 1MB, you could have higher resolution or bit depth.

if you had a big enough framebuffer in your display adapter, though, X11 could display more than your main ram could support - the design, when using "classic way", allowed X server to draw directly on framebuffer memory (just like GDI did)
by Ryanwalker64 | 2026-01-21 10:14:23+00:00
Hey HN,

I just shipped a new feature for my product that lets you create widgets for your website using Google Sheets

Give it a go! It only takes 5 minutes and 3 quick steps:

1. Pick a widget template and connect your Google account
2. Customise your widget to match your style
3. Add to your website (or publish on your own custom domain)

–Ryan
by physicsguy | 2026-01-21 10:15:49+00:00
The big thing for me has always been (a) reliability of the hardware (b) good performance/battery trade off (c) nix-like environment.

In my prev. job I had a windows laptop with WSL2 though and I actually was super productive with that. But the laptop hardware offerings at the same price point are rubbish, just not very robust. Linux machines if you're in a corp and want one in the next 6 months are usually even more restrictive on hardware than they are on Windows.
by testfrequency | 2026-01-21 10:15:52+00:00
I can’t thank you enough for course correcting me here, this is exactly what I should have been doing. I did some reading and I clearly wasn’t using any of the features correctly or efficiently.

My Claude.md was nearly 1,900 lines. It’s down to 150 lines now with Skills fully built out for the agents, and a hook to steer the ship. It’s all working perfectly now.

Thank you again!
by 0xbadcafebee | 2026-01-21 10:16:04+00:00
That's like saying you'd rather listen to someone ask a question than read a chapter of a textbook.

About 99% of the blogs [written by humans] that reach HN's front page are fundamentally incorrect. It's mostly hot takes by confident neophytes. If it's AI-written, it actually comes close to factual. The thing you don't like is usually right, the thing you like is usually wrong. And that's fine if you'd rather read fiction. Just know what you're getting yourself into.
by canhdien_15 | 2026-01-21 10:16:08+00:00
If you’ve already chosen your path, why come here asking for permission? Is it a lack of confidence, or are you waiting for a miracle? Don’t turn yourself into the man in the fable who carried his donkey just because others told him to. It’s your idea. If you think it’s a waste, then stop. Everything worth doing requires risk. If you’re looking for a 100% guarantee, go back to sleep.
by 63stack | 2026-01-21 10:16:51+00:00
I can imagine all the middle managers are just salivating at the idea of presenting this webpage to higher ups as part of their "AI Strategy" at the next shareholder meeting.

Bullet point lists! Cool infographics! Foreign words in headings! 93 pages of problem statement -> solution! More bullet points as tradeoffs breakdown! UPDATED! NEW!
by unfinishablemap | 2026-01-21 10:17:03+00:00
I set up Claude Code with a number of skills (research, article writing, review), a workflow to run those in order and push it to a web site, and a few basic tenets so it didn't go off and explore the whole of philosophy. Then I steered it over time by adding my own tasks to the workflow's TODO list. What it wrote about the system itself had the biggest wow-factor for me https://unfinishablemap.org/project/coherence-inflation-coun...
by JodieBenitez | 2026-01-21 10:17:05+00:00
> what does macOS offer a power user that Linux doesn't

Your definition of power user may vary but for me:

- Especially for laptops, good integration with hardware (and good hardware), energy efficiency, power management
- Support from commercial software vendors

I could probably use linux for a desktop machine, that would work ok. But it's a no-go for laptops. And I've tried... and try regularly...
by andy_ppp | 2026-01-21 10:17:35+00:00
I honestly find AI quite poor at writing good well thought through tests, potentially because:

1. writing testable code is part of writing good tests

2. testing is actually poorly done in all the training data because humans are also bad at writing tests

3. tests should be more focused around business logic and describing the application than arbitrarily testing things in an uncanny valley of AI slop
by fhd2 | 2026-01-21 10:17:58+00:00
Parent didn't mention Simon Willinson, and neither me nor parent appear to imply that _all_ people posting positively about LLMs are paid influencers, that'd be a ridiculous claim. It's just that there _are_ paid influencers, at every level, down to non-famous people getting a few bucks, and that's worth knowing.

Here's one thing I quickly found on one of Anthropic's campaigns on LinkedIn: https://www.favikon.com/blog/inside-anthropic-influencer-mar...
by BrandoElFollito | 2026-01-21 10:18:04+00:00
> I guess you get the most value out of it when you know exactly what you want.

Oh yes. I am amateur-developping for 35 years and when I vibe code I let the basic, generic stuff happen and then tell the AI to refactor the way I want. It usually works.

I had the same "too boring to code" approach and AI was a revelation. It takes off the typing but allows, when used correctly, for the creative part. I love this.
by jlokier | 2026-01-21 10:19:17+00:00
Some people don't have a choice. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46698278

"The company I work at gives all new developers a pair of 1080p displays that could have come right out of 2010."

I have the same problem. The monitors at the office where I currently work are all low-DPI.

Work is quite irrational when it comes to spending decisions. It's not just penny pinching. They waste a lot of time and money at the same time as they block and worry about much smaller expenses. Asking them to provide one or two good, modern monitors at non-trivial cost would likely be described something as a "luxury" or "treat", which is how they described my personal laptop when they found out how much it cost.

At least I'm able to use my own laptop at the current job. It's much more powerful than anything the company would provide.
by potamic | 2026-01-21 10:19:20+00:00
This is an unfortunate trend we will see across software going ahead. When the bar to make something is low, the market is inevitably flooded by cheap and mediocre stuff that overshadow everything else. Soon there won't be an incentive to make high quality stuff because even if you did, you wouldn't be able to grab anyone's attention with it because it's all taken away by the endless slop that won't stop.
by creshal | 2026-01-21 10:19:35+00:00
Indeed. Much of a modern Linux desktop e.g. runs inside one of multiple not very well optimized JS engines: Gnome uses JS for various desktop interactions, and all major desktops run a different JS engine as a different user to evaluate polkit authorizations (so exactly zero RAM could be shared between those engines, even if they were identical, which they aren't), and then half your interactions with GUI tools happens inside browser engines, either directly in a browser, or indirectly with Electron. (And typically, each Electron tool bundles their own slightly different version of Electron, so even if they all run under the same user, each is fully independent.)

Or you can ignore all that nonsense and run openbox and native tools.
by franze | 2026-01-21 10:19:58+00:00
I am on the other side, I have given the complete control of my computer to Claude Code - Yolo Mode. Sudo. It just works. My servers run the same. I SSH into Claude Code there and let them do whatever work they need to do.

So my 2 cents. Use Claude Code. In Yolo mode. Use it. Learn with it.

Whenever I post something like this I get a lot of downvots. But well ... end of 2026 we will not use computer the way we use them now. Claude Code Feb 2025 was the first step, now Jan 2026 CoWork (Claude Code for everyone else) is here. It is just a much much more powerful way to use computers.
by zvqcMMV6Zcr | 2026-01-21 10:20:50+00:00
In most basic form it would just be form with URL that (lib)curl is later supposed to fetch. And target server (controlled by researcher) is supposed to send payload that triggers RCE in client.

Sure, it covers a very narrow scope but I am afraid the bigger issue would be that it is going to get spammed with submitted links. And those links will often be to strait up illegal content, it might not matter that such server instantly deletes all downloaded files.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-21 10:21:19+00:00
Yeah, inspiration, motivation, justification etc are synonyms in this case, the point I was trying to make was something like "LLMs don't know why they do what they do", and asking for them to provide it, will make them come up with it on the spot afterwards, not actually share what the inspiration/motivation/justification was at the time the tokens were sampled.
by bux93 | 2026-01-21 10:22:14+00:00
BTW this is extremely common in life insurance systems, where premiums (provisions, surrender values, etc.) depend on formulas applied to mortality tables; these data themselves are simply tables for people from 0 to 100 years of age, so many formulas end up with only 100 possible outputs and are precomputed. (or 200 for combined probabilities, or gender-specific ones)
by creshal | 2026-01-21 10:22:19+00:00
Eh, kinda. Work forces me to have Jira, Confluence, Gitlab, Copilot, the other Copilot formerly known as Outlook, the other other Copilot formerly known as Teams, as well as Slack of course, and a dozen other webslop apps open… and it still all fits in <8GB RAM.

Which is a lot worse than the <1GB you'd get with well-optimized native tools, but try running Win11 with "only" 8GB RAM.
by davidals | 2026-01-21 10:22:24+00:00
Interesting that someone posted my post here, I was surprised on medium stats about most traffic coming from here.

Anyway...

I totally agree with you.

Cross-functionality I think is the defining factor of the role.
And every company does it slightly different, which was the motivation for me to write this, to give some more data points to the public web about what it can be.

I also wrote when I started this job as I was an external hire into a Staff role directly: https://medium.com/@_davidanderson/starting-a-new-job-as-a-s... because it definitely is a different beast than being promoted from within as you come with neutral-to-negative trust level with the existing people and need to work from there.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-21 10:23:21+00:00
> Yes, I haven't even read most of the files, just threw it up there as an example for the OP (I too am tired of the lack of examples, so stepped up to the plate on this one).

Right, kind of like an LLM skimming and missing the core points :)

OP didn't ask for "Anything you've vibe-coded" but explicitly asked for code written with LLMs that is high quality and structurally sound, and "creates more value than it creates technical debt". That's why I felt like reviewing the code in the first place, and why I gave the feedback.

I understand now that maybe it felt like my impromptu code review came out of nowhere, but I thought you were actually trying to give OP a accurate sample, so sorry if it felt like it came out of nowhere :)
by wolvesechoes | 2026-01-21 10:23:56+00:00
> Europe isn't one entity and the interest wanes the further the countries are.

I keep trying to make people here aware of that, but euro-enthusiasm is very good at hiding ugly and complex reality of European politics. And it is not even limited to Ukraine, but it shows itself with Greenland as well. If you really take a closer look, you'll see that different countries indeed made different reactions, even if they sent symbolic amounts of troops to Greenland.

And, above else, people tend to mistake words for action, and believe that a post made by some European leader on Twitter is somehow enough to bring things into reality.

> Seems like the threat should become more substantial before the whole continent awakens.

But Russia is not and won't be strong enough to pose a significant threat to German or French core territory, not to speak about Spain or Ireland. Moreover, as much as we in Europe like to equate Putin with some evil madman, for it makes the world simpler for us, Russian elite is rational, and invasion of Germany is nothing but stupid from their perspective. Of course there are broader interests that may motivate countries to act against Russia (for example French influence in Africa or Asia) but, at the same time, these interests may motivate them to throw Eastern Europe under the bus.

Therefore if anybody believes in some united European action, or a single European army that would actually be worth anything and won't be yet another initiative created mainly to come up with a nice catch-phrase (Steadfast Europe!), lives inside a fantasy.
by rshetty | 2026-01-21 10:24:42+00:00
Thoughtworks recently launched a new agentic development platform called AI/works™. The marketing claims are quite bold, specifically targeting the "legacy modernization" problem space (which we all know is usually a nightmare).

According to the announcement and their technical guide, the workflow is:

Ingestion: "Blackbox" reverse-engineering of legacy binaries/code (even without full source access in some cases).

Specification: It generates a "SuperSpec" — a machine-readable functional specification enriched with regulatory/security context.

Forward Engineering: Agents use the Spec to generate new code, tests, and pipelines.

Lifecycle: It claims to support a "3-3-3 delivery model" (Idea to Production in 90 days) and includes self-healing/regenerative capabilities for maintenance.

This sounds like the "Holy Grail" of software engineering, but I am skeptical about how well this works on actual enterprise spaghetti code versus carefully curated demos. "Reverse engineering into a perfect spec" is historically where these tools fail.

I’m looking for insights from anyone who has piloted this or works at TW:

How does the "Code-to-Spec" reverse engineering actually handle heavy technical debt or undocumented business logic?

Is the "SuperSpec" truly editable/maintainable by humans, or does it become a new black box?

How much "human in the loop" is actually required for the 3-3-3 model?

Is this built on public LLMs (Claude/GPT-4) or proprietary models trained on legacy patterns (like COBOL/Mainframe data via their Mechanical Orchard partnership)?

Any details on the reality behind the marketing would be appreciated.
by nicoburns | 2026-01-21 10:24:50+00:00
> what does macOS offer a power user that Linux doesn't, and which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want?

Primarily much better compatibility with graphical apps. Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suite are two that many people need access to. Both have first-party offerings on macOS, and somewhat poor support via wine on Linux.

With Apple Silicon, the hardware is also particularly excellent. And only runs macOS well.
by jacquesm | 2026-01-21 10:25:56+00:00
Sorry, but that's just dumb. You could have done all that and more. You're being used to defend massive wealth inequality and wealth concentration over the backs of the poorest 95% or so of the country. The two have nothing whatsoever to do with each other. The USA is not 'unable to have a more decent balance of life because they are carrying Europe's defense obligation'.
by retsibsi | 2026-01-21 10:26:08+00:00
That's not how paraphrasing works. They probably intentionally held back from guaranteeing an interview, for various reasons. One that seems obvious to me is that with the bar set at "Claude Opus 4.5's best performance at launch", it's plausible that someone could meet it by feeding the problem into an LLM. If a bunch of people do that, they won't want to waste time interviewing them all.
by BrandoElFollito | 2026-01-21 10:26:24+00:00
In the less doomsday version, everyone who is responsible for a family (the guy or gal who knows how everything works in the context of money, administration, etc.) should have a "what to do when I die" booklet.

I wrote one years ago and update it with the most relevant information (how to get to my passwords (the ones that are not shared), list of bank accounts, list of investment brokers, what they will get when I die from the state and my company. I am in the process of adding "how to un-smart (or re-dumb) my house, this si a serious source of anxiety for my wife)

This is the right thing to do. Do not delay. Start small with the key information. Share with trusted people outside of your family if possible (they will be less impacted).

I shared that with my best friend I can trust my life with and one day he said "I cannot get to your bank account". To what I said, well, why are you trying to. He was running a DRP (Disaster Recovery Plan) exercise and found stuff that was not updated. I love him.
by bandrami | 2026-01-21 10:27:00+00:00
> there is no meaningful practical way to allow inbound connections without the client explicitly defining them

This... just isn't true though. Your router knows it has one network on one interface and one network on another interface and if it receives a packet on the one interface destined for the network on the other interface will happily route it unless something (a firewall) tells it not to. All the protection comes from trusting your ISP and its peers to not route RFC1918-private networks
by egorfine | 2026-01-21 10:27:32+00:00
I have tried full-on agentic coding twice in the last month.

1) I needed a tool to consolidate *.dylib on macOS into the app bundle. I wanted this tool to be in JS because of some additional minor logic which would be a hassle to implement in pure bash.

2) I needed a simple C wrapper to parallelize /usr/bin/codesign over cores. Split list of binaries in batches and run X parallel codesigns over a batch.

Arguably, both tools are junior-level tasks.

I have used Claude Code and Opus 4.5. I have used AskUserTool to interview me and create a detailed SPEC.md. I manually reviewed and edited the final spec. I then used the same model to create the tool according to that very detailed spec.

The first tool, the dylib consolidation one, was broken horrendously. I did recurse into subdirs where no folder structure is expected or needed and did not recurse into folders where it was needed. It created a lot of in-memory structures which were never read. Unused parameters in functions. Unused functions. Incredible, illogical code that is impossible to understand. Quirks, "clever code". Variable scope all over the place. It appeared to work, but only in one single case on my dev workstation and failed on almost every requirement in the spec. I ended up rewriting it from scratch, because the only things worst saving from this generated code were one-liners for string parsing.

The second tool did not even work. You know this quirk of AI models that once they find a wrong solution they keep coming back at it, because the context was poisoned? So, this. Completely random code, not even close. I rewrote the thing from scratch [1].

Curiously, the second tool took way more time and tokens to create despite being quite simpler.

So yeah. We're definitely at most 6 month away from replacing programmers with AI.

[1] https://github.com/egorFiNE/codesign-parallel
by metalman | 2026-01-21 10:27:38+00:00
more like an older order is re aserting itself as the whole planet levels up it's technology and applys it's growing industrial might to the pragmatic solution to civilisations needs.
Many old cultures in the world maintain ancient knowledge concerning the order of events that happen durring times of disruption and how to best respond to external challenges, the givens bieng unchanged and as unchangeable as human motivation's are.
by rented_mule | 2026-01-21 10:27:39+00:00
I wish I'd missed it. We had 12 feet of snow in 3 weeks where I live in the Sierra, and we're only at 4,500 feet above sea level. We average several feet a year, so we know snow, but not 12 feet in 3 weeks. We couldn't see out of our windows. I spent 3-8 hours a day for 3 weeks clearing snow from our driveway and cul-de-sac, only to have to wait longer for the county to clear the road beyond. We were running out of places to put the snow we cleared. Towards the end, people could no longer clear their roofs because the snow on the ground was so high. Decks collapsed everywhere, as did several roofs. There was no getting out for supplies, emergencies, etc. The ski resort nearest us closed because it was too difficult to get there.

Immediately after, we had a foot of rain in two weeks. That took care of much of the snow. But it also washed away significant roads (along with several feet of earth beneath them), some of which took a year or more to get back open.

The ground was so saturated that many septic systems failed in my neighborhood, some with water running into the houses through toilets/drains because the underground water table on the high side of their property was above those drains (artesian springs aren't so charming when they are coming through your septic system and out of your toilet). Most of those folks have installed one-way valves now, but that still means you can't flush in such scenarios because the water has nowhere to go. Ours didn't flow in reverse, but our drains/toilets stopped draining for ~2 months.

I like winter weather, but I'd be happy to never relive Feb/Mar of 2023 in the Sierra. I'll still take it over the floods that happen in valleys and flat lands as a result of such events.