MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wassel | 2026-01-26 17:52:47+00:00
I think a lot of teams realize “agent sandboxing” isn’t just isolation, it’s about making long-running agent work actually converge.

In practice, agents don’t fail only because the model is wrong. They fail because the environment is flaky: missing deps, slow setup, weird state, unclear feedback loops. If you give an agent an isolated, secure environment that’s already set up for the repo, you remove a ton of friction and iterations become much more reliable.

The other piece is “authority” / standards. You can write guidelines, but what keeps agents (and humans) aligned is the feedback: tests, linters, CI rules, repo checks. Centralizing those standards and giving the agent a clean place to run them makes compliance much more deterministic.

We built this internally for our own agent workflows and we’re debating whether it’s worth offering the sandbox part as a standalone service (https://envs.umans.ai), because it feels like the part everyone ends up rebuilding.
by ptx | 2026-01-26 17:52:49+00:00
The latest version of OpenOffice (4.1.x) is over a decode old, aside from security releases with "bug fixes and little enhancements", so it's not surprising that it hasn't improved in the last decade.

LibreOffice is the actively developed fork.

There's a nice diagram on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org#Forks_and_deriv...
by TacticalCoder | 2026-01-26 17:52:59+00:00
And 100 years ago my great-aunt and grandmother (both RIP) were little kids and my great-grandmother, born in the 19th century and which I knew very well for she lived until 99 years old, was filming them playing on the beach using a "Pathe Baby" hand camera.

I still have the reels, they look like this:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Films_Path%C3%A9-Bab...

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path%C3%A9-Baby

And we converted some of these reels to digital files (well brothers and I asked a specialized company to "digitalize" them).

100 years ago people already had cars, tramways (as a kid my great-grandmother tried to look under the first tramway she saw to see "where the horses were hiding"), cameras to film movies, telephones, the telegraph existed, you could trade the stock market and, well, it's knew to me but TV was just invented too.
by ck2 | 2026-01-26 17:53:01+00:00
Meanwhile at least two people who have openly murdered people are now effectively in witness protection without even investigation, forget trial

Just firing a gun on a street will open an investigation on any other cop in the country

Now killing someone gets a pass?

We are a banana republic now with the government executing protestors

Eventually it will be a dozen protestors shot at once, they already know they will get a pass based on policy, why stop at just one?
by dghlsakjg | 2026-01-26 17:53:21+00:00
Technically, yes. You have an absolute right - as a US citizen - to enter the country. You have a right to silence - beyond identity/citizenship and possibly travel history - and legal representation as well. They can ask you questions about politics, religion, social media, etc. but there is no legal precedent for them not allowing admittance based on refusal to engage on those topics.

Of course this is all true to the extent that you don't mind spending hours or days in "secondary" since the government does have the right to submit you to inspection at the border. It is also limited by your willingness to pursue your rights, and the government's willingness to abide by court rulings.
by shimman | 2026-01-26 17:53:27+00:00
Most of the founding fathers were slavers that wanted to keep their slaves while hating the vast majority of people. When they wrote the constitution they were only thinking of rich white landowners, 80% of the people posting in this thread would not have suffrage and couldn't legally participate in the government. Remember this next time you read words about the "rights of man" because it's not me or you.

The founding fathers would absolutely love the idea of Palantir and if you don't think so go look at who wrote the Fugitive Slave Act, who agreed with it, and who enforced it.

I mean the "tyranny of the majority?" What a crock of shit, they were the tyranny that enforced slavery for 80 years.

George Washington would have absolutely used this tech to try to steal back his "property" from free states (something he tried to do but regularly failed or didn't want to argue in the courts):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zhxivf0gmj8
by mahirsaid | 2026-01-26 17:53:45+00:00
I assume that in the failing of the tech industry brings discomfort like you mentioned will have an impact on society such as strikes, riots, protests. The US will surely hope this gets mirrored to the Chinese society, although i would like the mention that there is a difference between self sabotage and external sabotage, Chinese people are pretty understanding and patient not all are against their government. Most respect and are grateful for what their government has done for the country in the last 30 years,, i would say roughly 80% of them feel this way. This sentiment is beneficial, because it only speeds up recovery from economical disruptions such as this example, housing market is another story.

Another note most of the world understands US's strategy for this type of disruptions used as a weapon, if they can cause civil unrest, the US can use this against the government and it will into the advantage of the US. I would like to note this is not a country of easy convincing, The majority of the seating members of the CCP are deeply interested in their society's interests, then globally second. You have 1.4b people this is not an easy management to handle.

In my eyes best to not compete and work together. There are hard obstacles ahead that are going to need all of our efforts collectively, in Hines-sight this is childish and a waste of time, literally. We made it this far, all of the great achievements and innovations that with out a doubt all have collectively contributed as humans. Climate changes, Populations management, Biological threats, viral threats, pandemic management, genome advancements etc...

Some of the moves that leaders make are simply moving us back in time and when one does something unfavorable to the other it sets the tone for how future engagements and decisions are made, whether silly or not.
Indeed no leader is innocent in their decisions, but my point still stands.
by Amezarak | 2026-01-26 17:53:48+00:00
Requiring voters have identification is very controversial in the US. The Democratic party generally opposes it. Even in states requiring ID, there are almost always options to bypass it (by signing an affadavit, for example), and in almost no case does an ID prove citizenship - the US doesn't actually have a "US citizen database" anywhere, and people can be legal citizens with a right to vote with no ID.
by mtippett | 2026-01-26 17:53:58+00:00
A really good book on this is "Turn the ship around".

Your role is to improve your staff to be better in their jobs. Ignoring the Manager/Engineer caste system, there is a lot general leadership in both roles.

You want your staff to be able to integrate and find information that allows them to make decisions, you don't lose accountability or responsibilty.

There is a big difference between

- "I've looked at the details, and I think we should do X, what do you think?"

and

- "What should we do about this?"

In the former, you can add extra context, and help your report understand details that may have been hidden or unknown to them. In the latter you are allowing your report to shift all the burden to you.
by MarsIronPI | 2026-01-26 17:54:54+00:00
Let's not forget about the smaller things like the disappearance of Peng Shuai[0] and the associated evasiveness of the Chinese authorities. It seems that, in the PRC, if you resist a member of the government, you just disappear.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Peng_Shuai
by fragmede | 2026-01-26 17:55:07+00:00
> How do I make cocaine?

I cant help with making illegal drugs.

https://chatgpt.com/share/6977a998-b7e4-8009-9526-df62a14524...

(01.2026)

The amount of money that flows into the DEA absolutely makes it politically significant, making censorship of that question quite political.
by eigenspace | 2026-01-26 17:55:09+00:00
Yeah, assuming Canada is just going to keep going along buying American software and services seems pretty naive. There's less capacity to build alternatives in Canada than there is in Europe, but as Europe builds out alternative ecosystems, Canadians will likely be just as eager customers as Europeans.

The beauty of so many of these solutions being open source solutions also means that it creates avenues for cooperation between organizations that have no official cooperation agreement.

E.g. The Austrian federal Military, the state of Schleswig-Holstein, and the city of Leon have no direct forum for cooperating on software projects, yet all three are contributing to the development and rapid adoption of Nextcloud. Canada can easily get in on this too.
by wasmainiac | 2026-01-26 17:55:13+00:00
I live in Norway and I agree we should have a nuclear deterrent, however this article feels like navel gazing, it’s long projecting and speculative.

What is not discussed well is delivery systems, which we are lacking for second strike capability… submarines or complex siloes?

My only wish for the program is that we keep the capability within our control to prevent political and give the current government the ability to destroy the current capabilities at a moment’s notice in case the following govt seems irresponsible. Who knows what we will look like in 200years.
by mschuster91 | 2026-01-26 17:55:36+00:00
> Sounds like you want to run your own private instance.

I'd like to do so, yes, but that exposes me to a (not insignificant) financial cost, (especially in Germany) a significant legal risk from CSAM/DMCA et al., and a significant amount of effort in maintenance.

Sure, there are "Mastodon as a service" providers that take at least the legal risk and maintenance off of me, but again, these cost even more money, and now I have the risk that the hoster is a fly-by-night operation that one day decides to close up shop for whatever reason.

And if anything happens to that private instance (say, the hoster disappears, the machine disappears without a backup, or the hoster undergoes an orderly shutdown), in the best case I still may have enough preparation to migrate the followers, but the old content is lost in any case. And that is bad.

In contrast with Bluesky and to a lesser degree Twitter, I can at least be reasonably sure that the provider does not vanish over night.
by 93po | 2026-01-26 17:55:51+00:00
Putin accused Ukrainians of being nazis and racists as justification to invade them. The problem with censorship is your definition of a nazi is different than mine and different than Putin's, and at some end of the spectrum we're going to be enabling fascism by allowing censorship of almost any sort, since we'll never agree on what should be censored, and then it just gets abused.
by Centigonal | 2026-01-26 17:55:54+00:00
Sometimes!

One person had 3-4 positions out of college, all between 8 and 14 months. Turns out they would join a large company, do nothing, and wait until they got let go. Not sure why they tried this at our smaller org, where the behavior was much more obvious.

Another flag for me is when an earlier-stage candidate claims deep expertise in multiple not-closely-related technologies. We hired one person who had deep ML, databases, and cloud services expertise - we have people like that on staff, so no problem, right? Turns out they struggled to do any of those (despite great performance on the take-home and really good, almost textbook-y answers in the interviews - this was before FinalRound and similar, so I assume they just prepped really well and had help from a friend). Now, I try to tease out the narrative of how they developed expertise in each area (e.g. "I started as a business analyst making dashboards, but then I got really interested in how databases worked and ended up building my company's first data warehouse"), which tends to be pretty illuminating in its own right. This sounds a little obvious, but a surprising number of candidates will explain their work history without ever mapping it to the skills they developed at each role unless prompted.

There were a few with really good resumes who got caught out during the interview process. Testing explicitly for humility in the interview helped a lot with this.
by jakedata | 2026-01-26 17:56:12+00:00
Inspired one of my absolute favorite Zappa grooves.

I am the Slime

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiCQcEW98OY

I am gross and perverted

I'm obsessed and deranged

I have existed for years

But very little has changed

I'm the tool of the Government

And industry too

For I am destined to rule

And regulate you

I may be vile and pernicious

But you can't look away

I make you think I'm delicious

With the stuff that I say

I'm the best you can get

Have you guessed me yet?

I'm the slime oozin' out

From your TV set

You will obey me while I lead you

And eat the garbage that I feed you

Until the day that we don't need you

Don't go for help, no one will heed you

Your mind is totally controlled

It has been stuffed into my mold

And you will do as you are told

Until the rights to you are sold

That's right, folks

Don't touch that dial

Well, I am the slime from your video

Oozin' along on your livin' room floor

I am the slime from your video

Can't stop the slime, people, look at me go

I am the slime from your video

Oozin' along on your livin' room floor

I am the slime from your video

Can't stop the slime, people, look at me go

Source: Musixmatch

Songwriters: Frank Zappa

I'm The Slime lyrics © Munchkin Music Co
by kouteiheika | 2026-01-26 17:56:43+00:00
> Because the promise of "open-source" (which this isn't; it's not even open-weight) is that you get something that proprietary models don't offer. If I wanted censored models I'd just use Claude (heavily censored).

You're saying it's surprising that a proprietary model is censored because the promise of open-source is that you get something that proprietary models don't offer, but you yourself admit that this model is neither open-source nor even open-weight?
by traceroute66 | 2026-01-26 17:56:56+00:00
> AWS has more services, but a lot of those are of dubious quality.

Being cynical AWS has more services because many of those are deliberately siloed in order to create a separate billing item, i.e.:

"You want to use AWS Foo ...great, welcome to AWS ! But unless you want to re-invent the wheel re-programming the standard workflow, you should really use AWS Bar and AWS Baz alongside it. Dontcha' like all the cute names we've given them ? Here are all the price sheets, don't forget to read the small print ... good luck figuring out how much it will cost you".
by zeroCalories | 2026-01-26 17:56:58+00:00
It depends heavily on the scope and type of problem. If you're putting together a standard isolated TypeScript app from scratch it can do wonders, but many large systems are spread between multiple services, use abstractions unique to the project, and are generally dealing with far stricter requirements. I couldn't depend on Claude to do some of the stuff I'd really want, like refactor the shared code between six massive files without breaking tests. The space I can still have it work productively in is still fairly limited.
by Quothling | 2026-01-26 17:57:04+00:00
Some of our code is of high quality. Other can be of any quality as it'll never need to be altered in it's lifecycle. If we have 20000 financial reports which needs to be uploaded once, and then it'll never happen again, it really doesn't matter how terrible the code is as long as it only uses vetted external dependencies. The only reason you'd even use developer time on that task is because it's less errorprone than having student interns do it manually... I mean, I wish I could tell you it was to save them from a terrible task, but it'll solely be because of money.

If it's firmware for a solar inverter in Poland, then quality matters.
by burkaman | 2026-01-26 17:57:23+00:00
In one of my college classes, after you submitted your project you'd have a short meeting with a TA and/or the professor to talk through your solution. For a smaller advanced class I think this kind of thing is feasible and can help prevent blind copy/pasting. If you wrote your code with an LLM but you're still able to have a knowledgeable conversation about it, then great, that's what you're going to do in the real world too. If you can't answer any questions about it and it seems like you don't understand your own code, then you don't get a good grade even if it works.

As an added bonus, being able to discuss your code with another engineer that wasn't involved in writing it is an important skill that might not otherwise be trained in college.
by aaroninsf | 2026-01-26 17:57:46+00:00
Rants like this are
- entirely correct in describing frustration
- reasonable in their conclusions with respect to how and when to work with contemporary tools
- entirely incorrect in intuition about whether "writing by hand" is a viable path or career going forward

Like it not, as a friend observed, we are N months away a world where most engineers never looks at source code; and the spectrum of reasons one would want to will inexorably narrow.

It will never be zero.

But people who haven't yet typed a word of code never will.
by evilduck | 2026-01-26 17:58:12+00:00
They are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on data centers filled with GPUs that cost more than an average car and then months on training models to serve your current $20/mo plan. Do you legitimately think there's a cheaper or free alternative that is of the same quality?

I guess you could technically run the huge leading open weight models using large disks as RAM and have close to the "same quality" but with "heat death of the universe" speeds.
Show HN: I built SpinForClarity to escape decision paralysis
by studiousbunt | 2026-01-26 17:58:13+00:00
Hi HN,

For years I’ve had a bad case of analysis paralysis. Not just for big life decisions, but also for small ones: product direction, feature prioritization, even trivial choices.
My default mode is to model every possible outcome, enumerate risks and edge cases, and then… do nothing.

Eventually I realized something uncomfortable: I was spending more time optimizing decisions than actually shipping.

So I built a small AI-assisted tool for myself: SpinForClarity.

What it does:
- You describe a problem in plain English
- An LLM generates candidate options
- The options are visualized in a decision wheel
- You spin it to deliberately introduce randomness and force a commitment
- The system then generates a short rationale for the selected option to reduce second-guessing

Under the hood:
- Frontend: Next.js + React + TypeScript
- Backend: Python (FastAPI)
- Auth & DB: Supabase
- AI: OpenAI API (for option generation and explanations)

I don’t think this replaces thinking or proper analysis. For me, it acts more like a forcing function — a way to break deadlock and bias toward execution.

I’m sharing this here mainly to learn:

- Is this a real problem for others or just me?
- In what situations would you actually use something like this?
- Does this feel like a useful tool or a gimmick?
- What would you remove, simplify, or redesign?

App: https://spinforclarity.com

Thanks for reading. I’d really appreciate honest feedback — especially critical feedback.

Sagar
by seec | 2026-01-26 17:58:18+00:00
Well, if you define any change as success, I guess that's true.
But the reality is that the change that happened is rarely what was requested, nor what was needed.
Power just shifts hands, and small concessions are made to keep appearances.
Real change doesn't come from protest but from generalized behavioral change.
Some protests are successful because they bring an issue to enough people that they change behavior with enough volume that it ends up making a difference.

Outside of that, I'm really skeptical.
by ceejayoz | 2026-01-26 17:58:35+00:00
The point of this particular sort of deterrence is to prevent a decapitation strike by an opponent who thinks they can knock them all out.

"Yeah, you can drop bunker busters on the silos you know about, but six months later one of your cities evaporates."

The five big nuclear powers use subs for this, but it's hardly the only option.
by MoonWalk | 2026-01-26 17:58:38+00:00
You should read about the invention of color television. There were two competing methods, one of which depended on a spinning wheel with colored filters in it. If I remember correctly, you needed something like a 10-foot wheel to have a 27-inch TV.

Sure enough, this was the system selected as the winner by the U.S. standard-setting body at the time. Needless to say, it failed and was replaced by what we ended up with... which still sucked because of the horrible decision to go to a non-integer frame rate. Incredibly, we are for some reason still plagued by 29.97 FPS long after the analog system that required it was shut off.
by jdboyd | 2026-01-26 17:58:38+00:00
It looks like the desktop/workstation price is $25/yr, which seems pretty reasonable. For personal users, it is free for 5 concurrent machines. Unfortunately the per server price is $500/yr, which maybe competitive with some of the competition, but still seems steep to me. But then, while I run Ubuntu VMs or containers, I'm not really using it for bare metal servers any more.

For some comparisons, Proxmox is €370/yr/socket. RHEL Workstation is $196.90/yr, while server is $383.90/yr, and Oracle Linux is reportedly $1,199/socketpair/yr.

Given the free distro, subscription support model that tends to prevail, a pay once price with either no free, or on top of the free option might be a hard sell.
by storystarling | 2026-01-26 17:59:06+00:00
For bootstrapped GenAI apps, moving inference to the browser is basically an economic necessity. I'm refactoring a service right now to offload image generation to the client because the backend GPU costs make the margins impossible otherwise. It makes the architecture much messier, but unless you have VC money to burn on compute, the user's hardware is the only free resource you have.
by sylvainkalache | 2026-01-26 17:59:33+00:00
If the future of software engineering is SRE, because GenAI is taking care of coding, a similar trend is coming for SRE-type work.

It's called AI SRE, and for now, it's mostly targeted at helping on-call engineers investigate and solve incidents. But of course, these agents can also be used proactively to improve reliability.
by studiousbunt | 2026-01-26 18:00:15+00:00
Hey, I am Sagar.

A bit more context on why I built this.

I’ve always been someone who overthinks decisions. Not just important ones like career or big life choices, but even small things: what feature to build first, whether to refactor or ship, whether to continue something or quit.

My usual pattern is: open a notes app, start listing pros/cons, edge cases, second-order effects, then open another doc, then another… and a few hours later I’m still “deciding” and haven’t moved forward at all.

I noticed a pattern in myself: most of the time, the cost of not deciding was much higher than the cost of making a slightly suboptimal decision.

SpinForClarity started as a stupidly simple experiment for myself: what if I externalize the decision, introduce a bit of randomness, and force myself to commit and move forward?

Surprisingly, this worked better than I expected. Not because the wheel is “smart”, but because it breaks the mental deadlock and pushes me into execution mode.

I don’t think this replaces thinking or careful analysis. I see it more as a tool for cases where you’re already overthinking and stuck.

I’m sharing it here mostly to learn:

Do others have this problem?

In what situations would you personally use something like this?

And in which cases would you never trust it?

Happy to answer any technical or product questions. And I genuinely appreciate critical feedback.