MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alphazard | 2026-01-21 14:48:43+00:00
It's not AI. Human institutions rely on people acting in good faith, almost every institution is held together by some kind of priesthood, where everyone assumes the priests know what they are doing, and the priests create a kind of seriousness around the topic to signal legitimacy, and enforce norms on the other priests.
This is true of Government, Law, Science, Finance, Medicine, etc.

But most of these institutions predate the existence of game theory, and it didn't occur to anyone how much they could be manipulated since they were not rigorously designed to be resistant to manipulation. Slowly, people stopped treating them like a child's tower of blocks that they didn't want to knock over. They started treating them like a load bearing structure, and they are crumbling.

Just as an example, the recent ICE deportation campaign is a direct reaction to a political party Sybil[0] attacking the US democracy. No one who worked on the constitution was thinking about that as a possibility, but most software engineers in 2026 have at least heard the term.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack
by fzeroracer | 2026-01-21 14:48:45+00:00
So I, as a software engineer, have to deal with the impacts of this administration both making my employment harder as well as terrorizing the city I live in. Where do you suggest I would go to share these issues other than the site that is specifically for hackers and tech workers?

I get that people want to make the place 'non-political', but a lot of us in the US live in major metropolitan areas and are very directly impacted by all of the shit going on.
by Folcon | 2026-01-21 14:49:17+00:00
Genuine question to you as someone who's been building in this space, what would you want / need to play a game as a programmer?

An API? An SDK? An in-game editor? Tutorials? Or is this more a "I want a factorio-like"?

I've been building economic engines and simulations for the last few years now and over the last 3 months in my off time I've been getting increasingly in the weeds about how to design a game that fits this

I've specifically been exploring using a voxel game as a base (think minecraft-like) however because I'm deeply interested in minion management / design I've been looking at how to create a programming / play experience that actually is fun and makes sense

What I'm trying to understand is what is the fun overlap between these

I have some opinions / ideas of my own and what I've been trying to do, however I'd be really interested in what other people are looking for to see where the overlap is and whether it fits the shape of what I'm building and whether I want to really commit the time to prototyping some things to see if there is interest to support this type of playstyle

Just to be super clear, what I've built so far specifically is targeting multiplayer
by techblueberry | 2026-01-21 14:49:19+00:00
Paradoxically, these institutions are probably the best they've ever been. We trusted them more 100 years ago because we didn't know better, but we're now letting perfect be the the enemy of good. Wise men once said:

"In prison, I learned that everything in this world, including money, operates not on reality..."

"But the perception of reality..."

Our distrust of institutions is a prison of our own making.
by ofabioroma | 2026-01-21 14:49:24+00:00
Founder here. Happy to answer questions.

Quick backstory: every agent project I worked on, I spent more time on context infrastructure than the actual product. Same pattern—duct-tape a store, lose history, debug blind when things broke.

The "aha" was needing git semantics for a project where users wanted to edit messages while still being able to travel back. So that's what I built: immutable history, branch on change, rewind to any commit. But I didn't want to expose that complexity. So the API is just contexts and messages. Versioning happens automatically.

Still early. What context engineering problems are you hitting with your agents?
by halis | 2026-01-21 14:49:30+00:00
I've had the opposite experience, but keep in mind that a lot of what gets worked on in large companies is glorified legacy CRUD apps. What I mean is, these applications have already been built with little thought about architecture, best practices and testing. These apps already have design flaws and bugs galore.

In these types of applications, there's already a lot of low hanging fruit to be had from working with an LLM.

If you're on a greenfield app where you get to make those decisions at the start, then I think I would still use the LLMs but I would be mindful of what you check into the code base. You would be better off setting up the project structure yourself and coding some things as examples of how you want the app to work. Once you have some examples in place, then you can use the LLMs to repeat the process for new screens/features.
Show HN: Lingoku – Learn Japanese with DeepSeek/Ollama (Updated)
by englishcat | 2026-01-21 14:49:32+00:00
Hi HN,

A few weeks ago, I shared the first version of Lingoku here [1]. The community gave me some critical feedback: you wanted more privacy, local model support.

I listened. Today’s update addresses the top requests from that discussion:

1. No Login/Registration: You can now install the extension and use all features immediately. No account needed.

2. Bring Your Own Key (BYOK): I've decoupled the AI. You are no longer locked into a default provider.

3. Local & Global Model Support: We now support 8 providers:

- Ollama (for local privacy)
- DeepSeek (great logic/price performance)
- OpenAI / Claude / Gemini / OpenRouter
- Doubao / Kimi

The tool focuses on contextual word injection and vocabulary explanations by AI while you read or watch content.

Try it here: https://lingoku.ai/en/learn-japanese

[1] Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46296863

Happy to answer any questions!
by mbb70 | 2026-01-21 14:49:39+00:00
Start with your chosen dictionary, remove small words and all 's'es.

Then find all words with 7 unique letters, then get the unique set of letter sets. These are your valid puzzles times 7 for each selection of a center letter.

Construct a trie of your dictionary. For each letter of each puzzle, walk the trie using only the puzzle letters. When you find a word, if it used the center letter, add to list.

In practice it's log(n) for size of dictionary.
by noosphr | 2026-01-21 14:49:49+00:00
Why isn't there a major lack of institutional trust of dentists? Between 1990 to today fillings have gone from being torture to something that takes 30 minutes while I listen to a podcast. I've not met anyone who distrusts big dental. But fluoridated water is still a hot topic.

The best that the experts the paper talks about can do today is say that if we follow their advice our lives will get worse slower. Not better. Just as bad as if we don't listen to them, but more slowly.

In the post war period people trusted institutions because life was getting better. Anyone could think back to 1920 and remember how they didn't have running water and how much a bucket weighed when walking up hill.

If big institutions want trust they should make peoples lives better again instead of working for special interests, be they ideological or monetary.
by matesz | 2026-01-21 14:49:50+00:00
> This idea was made by French and German government

It is true, but lets face it - it is just a high-level proposal. Better than previous ones for sure, but still just a proposal.

And there is a massive gap between the PR and the legal reality. Germany and Austria already torpedoed the previous attempt (the SUP) specifically because it allowed online formation without a notary.

So I would advise against certainty in that the fight is over. I also don't want to wait another 10 years. Honestly by that time just setup topco in UK and if series A will come just do the flip later if you don't want to go to SV straight away.
by Jcampuzano2 | 2026-01-21 14:49:54+00:00
This is exactly why I think Waymo will win.

My wife and I went to a couple cities where Waymo operated and when we tried it were pleasantly surprised. Talked to a few people and did some research and it's clear women feel much safer and will pay the premium to have their type of experience vs basically a random gamble as to the type of person who will pick you up in an Uber.

Not to mention lately it seems like Ubers standards for the cars picking you up have gone way down the drain. That or maybe people are just lying or gaming the system about the state of their vehicles.

And on top of that there are plenty of drivers who probably shouldn't even have a license. As a man there have been plenty of rides where I've felt unsafe simply due to erratic driving.
by miki123211 | 2026-01-21 14:50:17+00:00
Allowlists for VoLTE are a perfectly reasonable (if extremely unfortunate) safety measure.

Because of the special handling that emergency calls must get in cellular networks, many older phones will use circuit-switched fallback (AKA 3g or 2G) for those calls, even if they are otherwise VoLTE capable.

This was pretty much fine back in the day, as 2g and 3g networks were just as (if not more) widespread as VoLTE, but those networks are now being shut down. If you have one of these phones and an LTE-only carrier allows it onto their network, you will be able to make any normal call, but emergency calls will not work.

To add insult to injury, there's no way for the carrier to tell whether any specific phone does emergency calls over VoLTE or not, especially if they don't have a contract with that vendor. Some phones may only do it in certain configurations, E.G. when branded for that specific carrier and configured with their preferred modem settings.
by mellosouls | 2026-01-21 14:50:26+00:00
Note the author here is presumably not so concerned about the decline of the institutions given his flag-waving for censorship in previous years, eg:

"Banning Trump from Twitter and Facebook isn’t nearly enough"

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-01-15/facebook-tw...

Even if you dislike Trump, the campaign to suppress conservative voices of the 2010s (now largely reversed) that he argues for there was a significant contribution to the decline in authority and respect that academia has had in the eyes of the general populace.

To be clear, the same must also apply to any suppression of liberal voices - its unacceptable in a culture that claims free speech.

But I am sceptical that this particular writer has a moral high ground from which to opine.
by gosub100 | 2026-01-21 14:50:38+00:00
what difference does the cause make if the end result is exactly the same as a natural event?

secondly, you could just as easily make this a case against CA environmental restrictions on logging. How many houses could have been built with those trees that went up in smoke? How many people could have been employed by the lumber industry? Now all those "green" trees are CO2 warming the atmosphere. It's almost as if CA wants crises (housing, employment, environment) because it gives their politicians more money and power.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-21 14:50:49+00:00
Indeed! Last time I dealt with this exact problem in a toy application made for myself, I ended up making the markdown parser only read ```$LANG syntax, and making it assume just ``` is a closing tag, not accepting it as a opening tag. Made it easier for the pretty syntax formatter to do it's job too, as it no longer has to figure out the language.
by andy_ppp | 2026-01-21 14:50:55+00:00
Yeah, I need to start accepting to some degree the world has changed - in the past when I want to understand a system I'd have read the tests, but with AI I can just ask cursor to explain what the code is doing and it's fairly good at explaining the functionality to me.

I'm not sure I feel truly comfortable yet with huge blocks of code that are not cleanly understood by humans but it's happening whether I like it or not.
by armchairhacker | 2026-01-21 14:51:38+00:00
I like significant LLM news and even well-justified opinions.

I don’t like seeing essentially the same LLM opinion and justification again and again. This happens with both pro-AI and anti-AI opinions. And some of the justifications (on both sides) are poor. For example, I don’t want to read “LLMs have improved my productivity so much!” without evidence; show me a mostly AI-generated program and code, and explain the (AI-augmented) development process. On the other side, I’ve seen the “LLM inevitablism” argument multiple times, and…I don’t agree with really any of it. It ignores that LLMs are useful (to some extent), so they’ll probably be part of the future no matter what an average reader does; and if LLMs aren’t useful enough to replace everyone and everything (currently they aren’t), they won’t be all of the future, which even the people claiming inevitability are saying (and those who do claim that future LLMs will do everything, you can point to current LLMs and the CEOs of AI companies who, even in their position, are lowering expectations).
by littlecranky67 | 2026-01-21 14:51:47+00:00
> I can see this happening. Earlier, more people worked in groups because they relied on their expertise.

It only isolates you, if you let it isolate you. The pandemic shifted my life, as I have been working alone at home ever since. I am single no kids, and after the pandemic ended I continue to stay "isolated". I knew about that dangers and took active measures - some of which were only possible because I was no longer required to go to an office. I moved to another country, to a location with a lot of international expats that work online, too. I built an active social circle, attending meetups, sport groups, bar nights etc.

I am now more social and happier than ever, because my daily social interactions are not based on my work or profession, and I get to chose with whom I spend my time and meet for lunches. Before, the chores around hour long commutes, grooming, packing my bag, meal-prep, dressing properly etc. just to sit in the office all day - all are gone from my schedule. I have more free time to socialize and maintain friendships, pay less rent, and in general - due to lower cost of living - life quality has improved significantly.

Without work-from-home this would not be possible. You could argue WFH results in isolation and depression, but for me it was liberating. It is, of course, each individuals own responsibility (and requires acitve work, sometimes hard work, too) that will influence the outcome.
by johndhi | 2026-01-21 14:51:58+00:00
There are a lot of tools to address the problem that some people have bad intentions.

We publish common sense laws, and we have police officers and prosecutors, and then we have a court system to hold people accountable for breaking the law. That's one pretty major method that has little to do with the need for an institution like FDA.

I don't know if a system that relied entirely on tort and negligence and contract law to protect people from being sold snake oil would function better or worse than FDA, but I do know something like FDA (where a bunch of smart people advise very specifically on which drugs are ok to take and which are not) isn't the only option we have.
by maeln | 2026-01-21 14:52:17+00:00
> But I don't see AI getting real footing really ever in the creative world because people want authenticity there. It's why I think Suno, for example, is never really going to go anywhere.

Oh I bet it will go somewhere. There is already plenty of low-budget direct-to-dvd movie, cheap soap opera telenovelas, and elevator music used as background in public places. These don't care about quality, they were always about making the cheapest product possible that can generate revenue / be used as a backdrop. Gen AI is going to be a race to the bottom for this field.

But for "labour of love" art/media, they might have a place in the toolbox (to generate a texture, fill some unimportant background, etc), but full gen AI media won't cut it. Intention, direction, realization is what matter.
And since most community are about those labour of love, it shouldn't be a surprise that most people who attend conferences are heavily against gen AI.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2026-01-21 14:52:18+00:00
> My naive approach would be to just implement it twice, once together with an LLM and once without, but that has obvious flaws, most obvious that the order which you do it with impacts the results too much.

You'd get a set of 10-15 projects, and a set of 10-15 developers. Then each developer would implement the solution with LLM assistance and without such assistance. You'd ensure that half the developers did LLM first, and the others traditional first.

You'd only be able to detect large statistical effects, but that would be a good start.

If it's just you then generate a list of potential projects and then flip a coin as to whether or not to use the LLM and record how long it takes along with a bunch of other metrics that make sense to you.
by 0x3f | 2026-01-21 14:52:47+00:00
> Uber’s refusal to fingerprint drivers betrays that they know they have lots of criminals on their rolls.

Is it normal to be fingerprinted for a job? It would be seen as an incredible overreach here. Then again, so would a drug test. Uber drivers in particular seem a vulnerable group, which makes forcing this a bit 'icky'.
by rtkwe | 2026-01-21 14:53:01+00:00
My dad did a similar thing with a bunch of computers at his store. It made way more sense back when processors didn't clock down efficiently so there was such a thing as 'wasted/excess clock cycles' you could donate to a distributed computing project. Now though processors shut off cores, reduce their clock speed etc so there's a lot less spare processing power you can siphon off without increasing power draw.
by r_lee | 2026-01-21 14:53:07+00:00
I dropped out as soon as I could, I have ADD and school was the most excruciatingly painful thing I've ever experienced mentally. It felt like my entire life purpose was about waiting for it to finally end.

I enjoyed discovering new things and learning stuff that genuinely was interesting to me. Howeverlearning what a "big rock" symbol was in a map in geography class was the kind of stuff that made me want to chew my own arm for stimulation.

Plus not to mention having to accept wrong things as right because the teacher lacks the information and is just reading off a book.

I never did homework, except for a handful of times.

I spent my time programming and learning about industry stuff in the tech scene.

And I love working, because you're actually like building towards something, not just "trust me, this'll be valuable later on" (which my brain can't interpret as a motivator)

I envy those that get excited about acquiring credentials and getting formally educated about this and that, it's a way easier way to live in this world.
by anileated | 2026-01-21 14:54:10+00:00
> unsure what exactly that's relevant to here in our discussion.

As far as I understand the top statement was "It seems open source loses the most from AI" and nobody narrowed the context to "what is legal".

For example, I know that a number of people would say US detaining citizens and brutally deporting immigrants is not illegal, but if it's technically legal does that make it OK?

> what it's been doing since inception.

At inception open source was mostly personal side projects for funsies (like Linux) sponsored by maintainer having a dayjob. The big leap happened when copyleft licenses made it such that success of a big commercial company building products on open-source projects would directly improve these open-source projects. And it's nothing new, it happened long time ago. The desire for volunteer contributions to codebase to remain for public benefit in perpetuity is exactly the point of strong copyleft, and it's exactly what's being circumvented by LLM washing. The fact that these LLMs subsequently also harm open source communities adds insult to injury.
by the__alchemist | 2026-01-21 14:54:26+00:00
This is a fantastic explanation! I've been thinking about software/binary compatibility lately. I think even before crossing the CPU arch barrier you mention, we could cross the OS barrier. Windows apps are generally mutually compatible. Within Linux is dicier. I've found some rules of thumb (compile on the oldest version you wish to support), with some cross-distro compat.

Some things like MUSL and manylinux are nice! I would love to see all OS barriers to compatibility knocked down. Or at least be able to make a single "Linux" binary. The CPU type barrier is obviously larger, but I think the OS one shouldn't exist.

Maybe we would need standard abstractions for things the OS provides like file system, date/time, allocator, threads, networking. The things programming languages abstract over in their std libs, but at an OS/compile level.
by shihab | 2026-01-21 14:54:33+00:00
I'm not asking an academic program first published 8 year ago (e3nn) to beat actively developed CuEquivariance library. An academic proposing new algorithms doesn't have to worry too much about performance. But any work which focuses on performance, and a big number of academic papers every year falls under that category, should absolutely use latest vendor libraries as baseline.
by CurleighBraces | 2026-01-21 14:54:35+00:00
Let's put it this way, I don't think AI will take my job/career away until company owners are also prepared to also let it handle being on-call. I still very accountable for the code produced.

I basically have two modes

1. "Snipe mode"

I need to solve problem X, here I fire up my IDE, start codex up and begin prompting to find the bug fix. Most of the time I have enough domain context about the code that once it's found and fixed the issue it's trivial for to reconcile that it's good code and I am shipping it. I can be sniping several targets at anyone time.

Most of my day-to-day work is in snipe mode.

2. "Feature mode"

This is where I get agents to build features/apps, I've not used this mode in anger for anything other than toy/side projects and I would not be happy about the long term prospects of maintaining anything I've produced.

It's stupidly stupidly fun/addictive and yes satisfying! :)

I rebuilt a game that I used to play when I was 11 and still had a small community of people actively wanting to play it, entirely by vibe coding, it works, it's live and honestly I've had some of the most rewarding feedback from making that I've had in my career from complete strangers!

I've also built numerous tools for myself and my kids that I'd never of had time to build before, and I now can. Again the level of reward for building apps etc that my kids ( and their friends ) are using, is very different from anything I've been career wise.
by everforward | 2026-01-21 14:54:37+00:00
The correct way is hard. You either have to manage firewalls on each host, or your switches need to have firewalls (I assume that’s a thing?). Hosts on the same subnet never hit layer 3 so IP-based firewalls don’t see them.

You either need very static infrastructure so you can hard-code firewalls on the hosts, or you need a system to dynamically manage the firewalls on each host, or an SDN that can sanely manage layer 2 flows. Little things like moving an app to a new server become a whole project unless you have really good tools to reconfigure the firewalls on everything that touches the app.

Then you need a way to let people self-service those rules or else security has to be involved in like everything just to do firewall rules.

It’s a good idea, but a huge pain and I’ve not seen good solutions
by foxyv | 2026-01-21 14:54:39+00:00
See, I'm not sure I would feel safer that way. You can stop a Waymo with a couple traffic cones and then rob the occupants. I think busses and trains are way safer. They have transit police and drivers that are able to handle situations like assault. Also, in my experience, people tend to help out when someone is being a POS and you are less likely to be robbed on a bus than in a car.