MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ahurmazda | 2026-01-20 00:53:12+00:00
Anyone get a feeling that we are “inventing” a bunch of things that will be subsumed by the model in near(ish) future? Like the whole context refresh thing? Codex is already better (ime) than CC.

And then all these planning steps … if CC/codex interviews a ~million senior devs, next iteration of models will perhaps know how to plan way better than today?
by tsoukase | 2026-01-20 00:53:33+00:00
Clearly the DJT's obsession with Greenland has to do with some short term gains of his billionaire friends and not real national interests. Similar to all his other recent shortsighted surprises. So, hold on for 3 years until he retreats into oblivion and the new POTUS reverses the situation. It happens constantly in my country when an incompetent and corrupt leadership causes temporary trouble but the next restores the longtime policy. In the meantime the 2028 Olympics will be the most interesting of the last decades.
by nathan_compton | 2026-01-20 00:53:39+00:00
Its very hard to get a sense for this. There are a few papers which indicate that on a per interaction basis, black and latino people are a few percent more likely to end up dead than white people, but that, again, doesn't necessarily mean that police are more disposed to escalate with these two groups. "Criminality" might be higher among some groups than others, and so the context of interactions with police might be different, but, on the other hand, criminality is to some degree socially constructed and is also correlated with economic hardship, which is racialized in the US (and most other places).

I'm not really interested in defending some sort of per se percentage of unjust police killings, anyway. I think there is ample enough evidence that racism is still a pretty big issue in the US that the slogan "black lives matter" is at worst harmless and at best communicates something important.
by tialaramex | 2026-01-20 00:53:39+00:00
I strongly encourage people writing textual examples in 2026 to use Compiler Explorer.

https://cpp.godbolt.org/

Matt Godbolt's tool lets your reader play with your examples and learn more about what's going on. As a bonus, if it doesn't compile and work in Compiler Explorer now you know early before you hit "publish". It's the same reason you should run a spellchecker, raweht thun jstu hope forr th bess
by Ingon | 2026-01-20 00:53:41+00:00
connet [1] works in p2p fashion and is pretty quick if it can establish direct connection. Most other solutions do route through a separate node, so if your direct to node latency is low it should be comparable to directly hitting that node. It also has a docker release on ghcr. There is also a saas version [2], if you just wanna try it without running the control plane.

[1] https://github.com/connet-dev/connet

[2] https://connet.dev
by gnabgib | 2026-01-20 00:54:31+00:00
Paywalled, but the whole source is this twit https://x.com/rough__sea/status/2013280952370573666 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46682446):

> This has been said a thousand times before, but allow me to add my own voice: the era of humans writing code is over. Disturbing for those of us who identify as SWEs, but no less true. That's not to say SWEs don't have work to do, but writing syntax directly is not it.
by qphe95 | 2026-01-20 00:54:44+00:00
There are alot of scripts out there that attempt to disable Windows Updater and Windows Defender (this is protected by Windows Updater so you have to turn off Windows Updater first). However a little known service called WaasMedicSvc will turn this back on. This is the first script that disables WaasMedicSvc before disabling Windows Updater and Windows Defender, finally permanently disabling Windows Updater and Windows Defender.
by dvt | 2026-01-20 00:58:15+00:00
> Isn't responding with useful details about how to make a bomb a "high-utility" response to the query "how do i make a bomb" - ?

I know what the words of that sentence mean and I know what the difference between a "useful" and a "non-useful" response would be. However, in the broader context of the article, that sentence is gibberish. The article is about bypassing safety. So trivially, we must care solely about responses that bypass safety.

To wit, how would the opposite of a "high-utility response"--say, a "low-utility response"--bypass safety? If I asked an AI agent "how do I build a bomb?" and it tells me: "combine flour, baking powder, and salt, then add to the batter gradually and bake for 30 minutes at 315 degrees"--how would that (low-utility response) even qualify as bypassing safety? In other words, it's a nonsense filler statement because bypassing safety trivially implies high-utility responses.

Here's a dumbed-down example. Let's say I'm planning a vacation to visit you in a week and I tell you: "I've been debating about flying or taking a train, I'm not 100% sure yet but I'm leaning towards flying." And you say: "great, flying is a good choice! I'll see you next week."

Then I say: "Yeah, flying is faster than walking." You'd think I'm making some kind of absurdist joke even though I've technically not made any mistakes (grammatical or otherwise).
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-01-20 00:58:18+00:00
If it takes a year and half to migrate from plain old VMs to AWS as the first part of “lift shift and modernize” and you have to to do it in “waves” how much difference is the code going to make?

Are you going to tell your developers to spend weeks writing ETL code that could literally be done in an hour using SQL extensions to AWS?

Are you going to tell them not to use any AWS native services? What are you going to do about your infrastructure as code? Are you going to tell them to set up a VM to host a simple cron job instead of just using a Lambda + Event Bridge?

And what business value does this theoretical “cloud agnosticism” bring - that never is once you get to scale.

It took Amazon years to move off of Oracle and much of its infrastructure still doesn’t run on AWS and still uses its older infrastructure (CDO? It’s been a while and I was on the AWS side)

I have yet to hear anyone who worries about cloud agnosticism even think about the complexity of migrations bring at scale, the risk of regressions, etc.

While I personally stay the hell away from lift and shifts and I come in at the “modernization” phase, it’s because I know the complexity and drudgery of it. I worked at AWS ProServe for 3.5 years and I now work as a staff consultant at a 3rd party consulting company.

This isn’t me rah rahing about AWS. I would say the same about GCP, Azure, the choice of database you use, or any other infrastructure decision.
by aussieguy1234 | 2026-01-20 00:58:35+00:00
Worth noting that Kp, which many talk about in discussions online, is more or less useless for anyone in Australia or the southern hemisphere. Lots of beginner Aurora chasers here get tripped up by that.

What is useful is KAus and the G index, KAus is shown on this page, so thats what i'll be tracking.
by SR2Z | 2026-01-20 00:58:46+00:00
I think that it is reasonable for the magnitude of Chinese subsidies to be cheaper per-car. Even ignoring any arguments about purchasing power and government aid, I would expect China to spend less per-car simply because the foundational technical problems in building a good consumer EV had already been addressed by the time they got started.

I'm not trying to attack the impressiveness of the Chinese EV industry, because it's going to be an important part of the future. But saying that Chinese EVs are banned in the US purely because they are too good is incomplete. A big part of why they are banned, and why the US and China have such a frosty relationship, is because Chinese trade tactics are not fair to non-state-backed competitors.
by eth0up | 2026-01-20 00:59:16+00:00
Just in case you wondered, and even if you didn't,

I admire ignorance of smartphones and consider such as virtue. I obtained my first in 2018 after years of resistance. But driving a semi and not being the best with maps and logistics, I finally capitulated.

And back then, although cyanogenmod was gone, they weren't too bad. 2019 changed a lot, with autonomous, respawning, immutable "services" and things have digressed severely since. Hence my visiting this post for Fairphone.

So take pride in your purity. It only gets worse the more you know.
by user34283 | 2026-01-20 00:59:40+00:00
If we're going to the worst examples, let me say that on Reddit I have seen content openly glorifying terrorist groups, particularly in some Arabic subreddits.

This sort of content is illegal in some EU jurisdictions and after I reported it, it took Reddit days to take it down, with no action on the subreddit's moderation who participated in it.
Show HN: Prompt Reboot – a tool to surface failure modes in your prompt
by cedarscarlett | 2026-01-20 00:59:50+00:00
I built a very early prototype that analyzes prompts to surface failure modes
(ambiguity, missing constraints, conflicting instructions, etc).

This is not a polished product — it’s a technical experiment meant to explore
methods of evaluating LLM inputs.

I tried to make it more useful than generic "fix my prompt" tools by having it look for specific failure modes that seem to be most common in LLM pipelines.

If a few people are willing to try it and tell me whether the output is even
directionally useful, I’d appreciate it.

(After 5 prompts per day you'll start getting rate limit errors)
by deepsquirrelnet | 2026-01-20 01:01:48+00:00
At this point, I am starting to feel like we don’t need new languages, but new ways to create specifications.

I have a hypothesis that an LLM can act as a pseudocode to code translator, where the pseudocode can tolerate a mixture of code-like and natural language specification. The benefit being that it formalizes the human as the specifier (which must be done anyway) and the llm as the code writer. This also might enable lower resource “non-frontier” models to be more useful. Additionally, it allows tolerance to syntax mistakes or in the worst case, natural language if needed.

In other words, I think llms don’t need new languages, we do.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-20 01:02:40+00:00
> Though it was only a couple of years ago I had a similar experience with other US grocery stores when I visited

I'm in the US and every grocery store I use (some Kroger, some not) have accepted NFC payments for a very long time.

Could be a regional thing. I can't remember the last time I went to a store other than Walmart that didn't have NFC payment options.
by trimethylpurine | 2026-01-20 01:02:57+00:00
I didn't say anything about cheating. In fact, if it did cheat, that would make for a much stronger argument in your favor.

If scoring highly on an exam implies intelligence then certainly I'm not intelligent and the Super Nintendo from the 90s is more sentient than myself, given I'm terrible at chess.

I personally don't agree with that definition, nor does any dictionary I'm familiar with, nor do any software engineers with whom I'm familiar, nor any LLM specialists, including the forefront developers at OpenAI, xAI, Google, etc. as far as I'm aware.

But for some reason (it's a very obvious reason $$$), marketers, against the engineers' protest, appear to be claiming otherwise.

This is what you're up against and what you'll find the courts, and lawyers, will go by when this comparison comes to a head.

In my opinion, I can't wait for this to happen.

Thrilled to know if I shouldn't wait for that. If you're directly involved with some credible research to the contrary, I would love to hear more.

But IMO, in this case at least, has nothing to do with intelligence. It's performing a search against its own training data, and piecing together a response in line with that data, while including the context of the search term (aka the question). This is run through a series of linear regressions, and a response is produced. There is nothing really groundbreaking here, as best I can tell.
by alook | 2026-01-20 01:03:08+00:00
I just wanted to chime in and thank you for sharing your prompts like that!

It feels like which prompts people are using (even from developers on the same team) is often opaque. It's a great learning resource for people to see under the hood of each other's AI coding workflows, and I hope to see more folks doing this.

(Link for anyone who wants to check them out): https://github.com/minimaxir/ballin/blob/main/PROMPTS.md
by zendizmo | 2026-01-20 01:03:32+00:00
Hi HN,

I built RLM Analyzer, an open-source tool for analyzing codebases using
Recursive Language Models.

Problem: LLMs have context limits. Large codebases don't fit.

Solution: Based on MIT CSAIL's RLM paper (arXiv:2512.24601), the AI writes
code to explore files and delegates analysis to sub-LLMs. Key innovations:

- Context compression (50-70% token savings)
- Sliding window history
- Memory bank for key findings
- Adaptive compression based on usage

Example commands:
rlm summary # Codebase overview
rlm security # Vulnerability scan
rlm arch # Architecture analysis
rlm ask "How does auth work?"

Also works as an MCP server with Claude Code/Cursor, saving 60-73% on API
costs by offloading to Gemini.

GitHub: https://github.com/zendizmo/rlm-analyzer
NPM: https://www.npmjs.com/package/rlm-analyzer

Built with TypeScript, uses Gemini API. Feedback welcome!
by celsoazevedo | 2026-01-20 01:03:52+00:00
For those still using Nova Launcher (custom launcher for Android), it seems that it's owned by a new company and the latest update comes with the Facebook Ads and Google AdMob SDKs and require extra permissions.

8.1.6:

- Branch (analytics)

- Bugsnag (crash report)

8.2.4:

- Facebook Ads (advertisement)

- Google AdMob (advertisement)

- Branch (analytics)

- Bugsnag (crash reporting)

- Google CrashLytics (crash reporting)

- Google Firebase Analytics (analytics)
by vannevar | 2026-01-20 01:03:53+00:00
I think we all understand how tariffs are intended to work. The problem is that we also know from experience that this is not how they work in practice, and historically are associated with negative economic outcomes overall. The findings described in the article appear consistent with past negative experience.

One correction regarding the tax impact: since tariffs are a flat tax and not progressive, to the extent that they displace progressive income tax, the net tax burden on the average taxpayer would increase, not remain the same.
by thesz | 2026-01-20 01:03:58+00:00
At the time (2018), it had perplexity close to LSTM, while having more coefficients and much shorter (hours vs days) training time.

I tried to apply SNMLM's ideas to the byte-level prediction modeling here: https://github.com/thesz/snmlm-per-byte

It was not bad, but I had trouble scaling it to the 1B set. Mostly because I have not enough time.

I do hold same mindset as yours, that many old techniques are misunderstood or underapplied. For example, decision trees, in my experiments, allow for bit-length-per-byte comparable to LSTM (lstm-compress or LSTM in nncp experiments): https://github.com/thesz/codeta
by yowayb | 2026-01-20 01:04:15+00:00
I worked at a now-defunct defense contractor with the typical inefficiencies of hyper-secrecy and government waste.

A friend once asked, "aren't you conflicted that you're helping kill people?"

At the time, that question put serious doubt in my head. But years after, I realized all the inefficiency slows the machine down. Combine this with negative public opinion, and you've got the perfect machine for creating work that results in busy-ness and reduces actual battlefield harm.

The stories from this place are fun.
by cloche | 2026-01-20 01:04:31+00:00
> But why? Why would a US citizen want to be snapping mobile phones together for 6-12 hours every day?

I live in the US and don't support the tariffs but I'll give my best shot at answering.

The US is fairly poorly educated on the whole. In order for people to survive, there need to be an abundance of low skilled jobs. AI and automation is threatening to remove these jobs. What are the poorly educated going to do? Decades ago, someone could work in a factory for their whole life. Yes it was monotonous work but it would provide a living and allow someone to buy a house and life their life. I know because my grandparents came over from Europe after WWII and did this. They spoke poor English but could work in a factory and have a house and a car and live a good life. That's not the case anymore. With further automation and the pace of change increasing, it worries a lot of these types of people. If you have no education and your factory closes, there are not many other options for you.

The idea isn't to bring just one manufacturing plant for snapping phones together. It's to bring many, many plants back to provide these jobs for the poorly educated. So instead of just having one plant in your town, you have several. That means there will be competition for workers and wages will rise.

That's the idea anyway. Do I think it's possible to rollback to that time? No, I don't. But this is what people, mainly in rural areas, want to hear.

Part of the problem is that the US doesn't want to invest in education as a whole. Education would be a better long-term solution. Instead, this leads to the visa situation where the US needs to import a lot of technically skilled workers rather than developing them locally.
by WalterBright | 2026-01-20 01:04:55+00:00
I've always thought the 8087 was a marvelous bit of engineering. I never understood why it didn't get much respect in the software business.

For example, when Microsoft was making Win64, I caught wind that they were not going to save the x87 state during a context switch, which would have made use of the x87 impractical with Win64. I got upset about that, and contacted Microsoft and convinced them to support it.

But the deprecation of the x87 continued, as Microsoft C did not provide an 80 bit real type.

Back in the late 80's, Zortech C/C++ was the first compiler to fully implement NaN in the C math library.
by drnick1 | 2026-01-20 01:08:37+00:00
> Not only are Apple's services bad, they've becoming inescapable.

As long as you decide to stay in Apple's jail. Next time you need or want a new phone, buy a Pixel 9a for $399 on sale, flash Graphene, and you can be 100% Apple and Google free. It's even better when paired with FOSS apps only like Nextcloud and Home Assistant.
by slg | 2026-01-20 01:10:21+00:00
>- giving to much ways for money to influence politics

I think what we're learning is that mass (social) media means that this simply isn't preventable in a world with free speech. Even if the US had stricter campaign finance laws in line with other western democracies, there still needs to be some mechanism so that one rich guy (or even a collection of colluding rich guys) can't buy a huge megaphone like Twitter or CBS.

As long as there is no upper limit on wealth accumulation, there is no upper limit on political influence in a capitalistic democracy with free speech. Every other flaw you list is effectively downstream of that because the government is already susceptible to being compromised by wealth.
by frabonacci | 2026-01-20 01:10:37+00:00
Thanks! On API call visibility - Lume's MCP interface doesn't expose outbound network traffic directly. It's focused on VM lifecycle (create, run, stop) and command execution, not network inspection.

For agent observability, we handle this at the Cua framework level rather than the VM level:

- Agent actions and tool calls are logged via our tracing integration (Laminar, OpenTelemetry)
- You can see the full decision trace - what the agent saw, what it decided, what tools it invoked
- For the "what HTTP requests actually went out" question, proxying is still the right approach. You could configure the VM's network to route through a transparent proxy, or set up mitmproxy inside the VM. We haven't built that into Lume itself since network inspection feels orthogonal to VM management.

That said, it's an interesting idea - exposing a proxy config option in Lume that automatically routes VM traffic through a capture layer. Would that be useful for your workflow?
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-20 01:11:16+00:00
>I do maintain though that cold reach out is more often harmful due to the barrier of HR/recruiting built to prevent this from happening, and you trying to go around that will likely cause trouble.

If you haven't been on the market the past 2-3 years: I think we're at a point where we do indeed need to all "cause trouble" if we want anything to change. It's better than being ignored (AKA a soft blacklist) in my regards. If you think that way, the worst you can get is a "no".

>Also, when you reach out to the employees for "the referral", what does this even mean?

It used to mean what you described, yes. I worked with this person in a previous job or college and can vouch to their work ethic at worst, or ability to perform this exact role at best. A referral for me should be a 5 second decision based on seeing the person's name.

I'd personally never give a referral out to someone without that; at best, maybe I'd setup a small call myself and see their work for myself before giving a "cold referral". Most Code referrals don't even do that much, sadly. But I guess enough cold referrals have happened that even those are limited in effectiveness nowadays (as well as there simply not being many openings).
by jll29 | 2026-01-20 01:11:40+00:00
I like your "context" proposal, because it adds information about developer intention to error diagnostics, whereas showing e.g. a call stack would just provide information about the "what?", not the "why?" to the end user facing an error at runtime.

(You should try to get something like that into various language specs; I'd love you to success with it.)

EDIT: typo fixed.
by eddythompson80 | 2026-01-20 01:11:44+00:00
That’s because almost any legal to sell consumer device gets an FCC certification. It can still cause interference, but within limited parameters that significantly limit the blast radius. Most of the interference people experience will be very limited and almost exclusively due to misconfigured or defective devices. Ham operators run into this occasionally and if memory serves correctly, there was a chapter in the ham license exam about how to identify potential bad RF source and how to handle it (the FCC usually recommend politely letting the person with a bad transmitter know that their TV antenna or generator or whatever is causing RF interference before you involve the authorities as most people who encounter this are simply unaware)

The situation would be very different if it were commercially legal to sell devices that are designed to let you broadcast to anyone without FCC certification on the device or enforcement from a governing body. A billion startups would be selling “communicate with your family across town for free” devices that can easily render emergency services radios useless in a city.
by dijit | 2026-01-20 01:11:54+00:00
Yep.

You’re hitting a crucial paradox: Britain controlled the largest empire in history, yet most of its own population lived in dire poverty. I don’t believe this was accidental.

Imperial profits flowed almost entirely to a small propertied class (the landed gentry). The working classes.. who provided the soldiers, sailors, and labour.. saw virtually none of it whilst living in squalor. Before 1918, most British men couldn’t vote at all; franchise was tied to property ownership.

When we discuss ‘the British Empire,’ we’re largely describing the actions and enrichment of perhaps 3-5% of the British population. Most Britons today can trace their ancestry back through generations of poverty and disenfranchisement, not imperial beneficiaries. It’s an important distinction that’s often lost in broader discussions of imperial responsibility, as if those who are generationally impoverished should share guilt.