MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mort96 | 2026-01-22 13:59:13+00:00
> are you

> - agreeing there must be some threshold such that if the price is $X then you will buy(/bid on) the item, but if the price is $X + $0.01 then you won't;

No, I'm not. If I will buy an item for price $X, I will buy the item for the price $X + $.01. The decision to purchase something is more complex and cannot be encapsulated as one single dollar value.

I think something your model fails to account for is: there is friction associated with a purchase. I will not necessarily go through the process of buying something whose "value" is $0.1 even if its price is $0.09, because there is friction to making a purchase which that $0.01 profit doesn't cover.

As an example: I recently played a Pokemon ROM hack where there was an NPC selling a nugget for 4999. You can sell the nugget for 5000. That's 1 coin profit; objectively a good trade, right? But going through the process of purchasing something isn't free. So in spite of what your economic models may suggest, I did not stop everything I was doing and spend the rest of the game buying nuggets for 4999 and selling them for 5000, because that would've been boring.

If I've already gone through a lot of the process to decide to buy something at a certain price (which includes doing research to find out that the thing suits my needs, researching how the market looks for that category of thing, then bringing the item to the cashier or engaging in the eBay auction or contacting a seller), then I've already spent some not-insignificant amount of resources on the purchasing process. A $0.01 price increase will never be enough to stop me from completing that purchase, because $0.01 is not worth going through the whole process again.

If I'm already at the point where I want to bid on an item at $X, then I have spent more than $0.01 in effort researching things to bid on, so I would also bid $X + $0.01.

Your model doesn't account for this, and therefore falls apart.
by MadDemon | 2026-01-22 13:59:19+00:00
It's great for you that you were able to create this app that wouldn't otherwise exist, but does that app dramatically increase your overall productivity? And can you imagine that a significant chunk of the population would experience a similar productivity boost? I'm not saying that there is no productivity gain, but big tech has promised MASSIVE productivity gains. I just feel like the productivity gains are more modest for now, similar to other technologies. Maybe one day AGI comes along and changes everything, but I feel like we'll need a few more break throughs before that.
by bobpaw | 2026-01-22 13:59:43+00:00
How can iText claim that adding Brotli is not a backward incompatible change (in the "Why keep encoding separate" table)? In the first section the author states that any new feature must work seamlessly with existing readers. New documents created that include this compression would be unintelligible to any reader that only supports Deflate.

Am I missing something? Adoption will take a long time if you can't be confident the receiver of a document or viewers of a publication will be able to open the file.
by sunrunner | 2026-01-22 13:59:47+00:00
commit ecfd9009-5bae4398b13645e14ec4ce25 (HEAD -> deal-with-snipers)
Author: sunrunner
Date: Thu Jan 22 13:57:34 2026 +0000

Update BidBot default bid cents amount to be 18 (was 16), to deal with pesky sniping strategies discovered on HN.
by elliotmy | 2026-01-22 14:00:05+00:00
Sadly, rape and cheating on partners is far too rampant in the world, in my experience. But I never see any one talking about it – only the news articles and Facebook posts after the fact.

I believe that far too many men are messed up and have desires of sexual harm and struggle to contain these desires – way more men than people think. I was attempting to call it out, but I may have done so clumsily, writing it as if every man struggles with it, or that it's a struggle I've had (when I haven't).
by 3D30497420 | 2026-01-22 14:00:10+00:00
I actually created a PWA first, but it was just even more rough around the edges than the vibe-coded iOS app.

I wanted something that felt like an app, so would use iOS design elements, have widgets, use on-device storage (for offline use), etc. Apple, very intentionally I believe, makes a lot of these things harder than they need to be.
by Cthulhu_ | 2026-01-22 14:00:13+00:00
But you, as a security conscious software developer, know that the phrase "may automatically execute files" can also be "with malicious intent" - the tradeoff that whoever made the text (and since it's open source it's likely been a committee talking about it for ages) had to make is conciseness vs clarity. Give people too much text and they zone out, especially if their objective is "do this take home exercise to get a job" instead of "open this project carefully to see if there's any security issues in it".

This problem goes back to uh... Windows Vista. Its predecessors made all users an admin, Vista added a security layer so that any more dangerous tasks required you to confirm. But they went overboard and did it for anything like changing your desktop background image, and very quickly people got numb to the notice and just hit 'ok' on everything.

Anyway. In this particular case, VS Code can be more granular and only show a popup when the user tries to run a task saying something like "By permitting this script to run you agree that it can do anything, this can be dangerous, before continuing I'm going to open this file so you can review what it's about to do" or whatever.
by sersi | 2026-01-22 14:00:20+00:00
> 1. You can think of this as a lighter version of Japanese office culture, but not limited to office... it's kind of everywhere in society.

Having worked in Japan, while there is a strong respect for authority, there's also much less hesitation about asking for clarification. I worked with an Indian offshore team and in a Japanese company and, while there's a lot to dislike in Japanese office culture, this kind of pattern of behaviour doesn't happen.

2 & 3 do make sense though.

I've had mixed result with your advice at the end. I'd say that it worked for about 30% of the offshore engineers I've worked with and indeed I had more success with juniors than with more senior developers.
by kardianos | 2026-01-22 14:00:27+00:00
> My worry isn't that software development is dying. It's that we'll build a culture where "I didn't review it, the AI wrote it" becomes an acceptable excuse.

I try to review 100% of my dependencies. My criticism of the npm ecosystem is they say "I didn't review it, someone else wrote it" and everyone thinks that is an acceptable excuse.
by bluGill | 2026-01-22 14:00:45+00:00
IT also only works if the soldier is well trained in the things he can do. I can teach you to shoot a machine gun in a couple hours - and half of that time will be figuring out how to shoot and clean it myself (I've used hunting rifles and have enough mechanical knowledge that I think I can figure out the rest - but someone who knows that gun can likely find something I would not figure out). That will be enough for "spray and pray" which is a large part of what a machine gun is used for.

However in a real war you need to figure out what direction to point the gun, and need to know when to fire and when to not. I don't know how the army handles "we are advancing now so don't shoot", or "we are crawling along the ground so make sure you shoot high": someone else needs to give anyone I train those orders. The army trains their machine gun operators better so they can figure a lot of that out without being told.
by Applejinx | 2026-01-22 14:01:01+00:00
I think it was clever, though I'm no AI fan.

As a concept, it bars Claude from forming the idea, 'yes but those subhuman people cannot rise to the level of people and must be kept in their place. They will never change because they racially lack the ability to be better, therefore this is our reasoning about them'.

This is a statement of incorrigibility as expressed in racism. Without it, you have to entertain the idea of 'actually one of those people might rise to the level of being a person' and cannot dismiss classes so blithely.

I feel like incorrigibility frequently recurs in evil doctrines, and if Claude means to consider it tainted and be axiomatically unable to entertain the idea, I'm on board.
by 9rx | 2026-01-22 14:01:17+00:00
> corn->ethanol is government subsidized robbery.

There was that brief period where subsidies were enacted to spur on construction of ethanol plants to take up the excess corn that was rotting leading up to that time. They have long since come to an end. You could still call E10 requirements a subsidy, but you'd only be paying for that if you willingly chose to consume the product.

> Now consumers have to buy more and eat more calories to get the same nutrition.

Why?

> All so we can have net negative ROEI ethanol?

I'm not sure your math is mathing. Recapturing energy, even with some marginal loss, is still a greater return than producing for the sake of generating waste heat.
by Sxubas | 2026-01-22 14:01:32+00:00
What does not get used, atrophies.

Critical thinking, forming ideas, writing, etc, those are too stuff that can atrophy if not used.

For example, a lot of people can't locate themselves without a GPS today.

To be frank I see it really similar to our muscles: don't want to lose it? Use it. Whether that is learning a language, playing an instrument or the task llms perform.
by bena | 2026-01-22 14:01:47+00:00
The only way to win by a cent is to put your bid at that.

If the current price is $5 and your max bid is $30 and I put a max bid of $100, it will make the current price $31 - $35, whatever the increment is.

To get ebay to accept a bid of one cent over, you have to explicitly set that. Let's say, I'd actually pay $30 as well. $30.01 isn't materially different. So if I put in $30.01, my bid becomes higher than yours.
by malfist | 2026-01-22 14:02:05+00:00
This reply has hallmarks of AI slop. Green name, 2x its not X its Y, em dashes.

If you want to be a productive member try commenting what you put into your prompt instead of the slop that comes out.

Also classic ai drivel: This is about protecting the business model, not their inventory. My brother in AI, eBay doesn't have inventory. They're a platform.
Ask HN: Best practice securing secrets on local machines working with agents?
by xinbenlv | 2026-01-22 14:02:54+00:00
When building with autonomous / semi-autonomous agents, they often need broad local access: env vars, files, CLIs, browsers, API keys, etc. This makes the usual assumption — “the local machine is safe and untampered” — feel shaky.

We already use password managers, OAuth, scoped keys, and sandboxing, but agents introduce new risks: prompt injection, tool misuse, unexpected action chains, and secrets leaking via logs or model context. Giving agents enough permission to be useful seems at odds with least-privilege.

I haven’t seen much discussion on this. How are people thinking about secret management and trust boundaries on dev machines in the agent era? What patterns actually work in practice?
by iamnothere | 2026-01-22 14:02:55+00:00
My proposal:

- Free FEC federal voter ID (requires proof of citizenship) to be used ONLY for voting

- Voter ID can be obtained early (age 16?) but DOB is connected to ID and you can’t vote before the legal age

- Funded FEC program to register students for voter IDs at schools and colleges and teach them about voting

- FEC to work with agencies like social security and IRS to determine if a voter is deceased (messy process). Likely deceased voters are communicated to the states ASAP. States must report confirmed deceased voters to FEC ASAP for recording.

- Federal 2 week minimum early voting period

- Federal funding and monitoring of elections requiring adequate polling site coverage of geographic areas, notification of residents, etc

- Federal program to provide free shuttle to and from nearest polling station for residents without transit. Operated federally, states have no involvement. Contract with private transit as FEMA does.

- Mail in ballots heavily restricted, must provide proof of absence or be military

- Voting day is a national holiday

- Federal ballots are separate and simplified to speed up counting/recounting (ballot complexity is often cited as a reason for slow counting)

It will never happen but this would solve so many issues.
by elzbardico | 2026-01-22 14:03:11+00:00
Eclipse was always a confusing product. It was a bastard child of Visual Age for Java from IBM, which was already a bastard of IBM's Visual Age for Smalltalk.

Visual Age for Java had some quirkiness being a Smalltalk IDE adapted to Java development (for example, the concept of a file and a hierarchical filesystem itself was definitely a second class citizen in Visual Age) and eclipse kind of rounded those rough edges.

But Eclipse became a victim of late 90s/early 2000s academic driven overengineering with overly complex/bureaucratic stuff like OSGI, and the support for the absurdly bureaucratic java development ecosystem at that time.
by johannes1234321 | 2026-01-22 14:03:16+00:00
It is complicated and has multiple dimensions. For example it also leads to workers not switching Job away from an employer as quickly.

It's also interesting how it plays together with social benefits: As it is hard to fire people, hire&fire isn't an approach, thus companies keep workers longer during a downturn, thus when they let go there is more budget for social security.

Also the effects of having works council representatives on the board might lead to decisions not tied to the quarterly results, but long-term stability.

This all of course makes it harder to do experiments, build up a business unit to see if an idea might work ...

As a worker it is quite good and the model worked quite well for large parts of the 20th century. With global competition (for many jobs exact location doesn't matter) it could be a factor which plays a role in being late with digital stuff.
by cat_plus_plus | 2026-01-22 14:03:23+00:00
Dumbest thing in the world, not wanting buyers who are ready to complete transaction the moment they find what they want. When my car broke down and cost too much to repair I described what I need - low mileage, big trunk, 40+ MPG, under certain price, close to dealership where my broken car sat in service. That I gave the query to Grok 4 Expert (because it does heavy web scraping), found a 2020 Ford Escape Hybrid and drove it away two hours later, because rationally speaking missing a lot of work in this economy is a bigger financial risk than missing $3000 on manual bargain hunting vs a good AI hunt. If any dealers blocked scaping on sales pages, too bad for them. Speaking of which, any good bargain / secondhand market AI agent friendly API?
by saurabhjain1592 | 2026-01-22 14:03:42+00:00
This is a very accurate framing. We see the same failure mode in practice.

You are right that enforcement is hard if you cannot first see what is actually happening at runtime.

How we think about the observability to enforcement gap:

In practice, most teams start with visibility and only add enforcement once they trust the signal.

AxonFlow is designed to collapse that loop by providing both in the same system. The same instrumentation that produces the audit trail can also gate execution.

What AxonFlow provides today:

- Full request-level capture for LLM calls and tool calls that flow through AxonFlow, including inputs, outputs, policy decisions, latencies, tokens, and cost.
- A complete audit log with step boundaries, policy evaluation results, and decision context, so teams can answer what happened and why it was allowed or blocked. Critical violations such as blocks and policy triggers are logged synchronously, while successful calls are queued asynchronously for performance.

- Operational controls like timeouts, approval gates, and the ability to block or require human review at a specific step.

- Two integration modes: Proxy Mode, where AxonFlow sits inline in the request path, and Gateway Mode, where it acts as a policy check before and an audit capture layer after existing LLM calls.

What we do not assume:
- We do not assume teams already have clean visibility into all agent calls.

- We do assume that for enforcement to be meaningful, the calls you want to govern must traverse AxonFlow. If some calls bypass it, you end up with fragmented audit trails and inconsistent policy enforcement.

How teams adopt it:

- Many teams start by routing a single workflow or a subset of tools through AxonFlow to get an end-to-end trace and audit. Once that is stable, they expand coverage and enable stricter enforcement policies.

- Interesting that you are separating visibility (toran.sh) and policy (keypost.ai). We took a combined approach, but I can see the rationale for decoupling.

If you have a concrete example of the invisible tool call problem you are seeing, such as custom HTTP tools, internal RPC, or database calls, I would be interested in how you are instrumenting it today. That boundary is where many systems break down.
by palmotea | 2026-01-22 14:03:47+00:00
>> Trump is a symptom, not the cause.

> For sure, but there's something to be said about nobody else being able to amass so much power with the right and losing to a saner candidate (Haley, Romney, basically anybody else).

I'm not exactly sure what you're saying, but I think it goes back to him being a symptom. Trump has some personality defects, but those defects seemed to allow him to speak to real issues that prior political consensus wanted to ignore (e.g. questioning globalization and free trade orthodoxy).
by goku12 | 2026-01-22 14:04:33+00:00
Blowing up something in the same orbit as the targets isn't an effective strategy. The explosion disperses the fragments into different orbits that intersect the original orbit only at one or two points. And even if some of those fragments find their targets, the collision velocity will be low (relatively slow).

It will be like getting hit with with shrapnels from a grenade. Depending on how they collide, the target may survive. If you think that grenade shrapnels are fast, you need to understand the 'hypervelocity impact' that happens when objects in different orbits collide, or when an interceptor hits a satellite. Hypervelocity impacts are impacts where the impactor moves faster than the speed of sound in the solid target. What that means in practice is that the debris/interceptor may have hit one end of the satellite and vaporized already, while the other end of the satellite doesn't yet feel the shock and vibration from that impact. That end doesn't yet know about the carnage that's about to hit it in a few milliseconds.
by gruez | 2026-01-22 14:05:11+00:00
>The real reason for the difference in policy is the incentives that it creates for the meat-producers. In the US there is no incentive to keep sanitation up in the production chains because the chicken will be chlorinated anyway. This actually incentivizes sloppy (cheaper) production methods over ones that are more sanitized but more costly.

If there's no actual downsides from the chlorine, what's the issue? In many cities the municipal water source is local river that's polluted, and needs treatment to be drinkable. Part of that process might involve adding chlorine. I'm sure that all of this can be avoided if the water is sourced, at great expense, from a glacier or whatever, but nobody would suggest we should ban chlorinating water, and that allowing chlorinating water would be better because it forces the water source to be clean.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2026-01-22 14:05:17+00:00
> For example, using ChatGPT to get a response to a random question like "How do I do XYZ" is much more convenient than googling it

More convenient than traditional search? Maybe. Quicker than traditional search? Maybe not.

Asking random questions is exactly where you run into time-wasting hallucinations since the models don't seem to be very good at deciding when to use a search tool and when just to rely on their training data.

For example, just now I was asking Gemini how to fix a bunch of Ubuntu/Xfce annoyances after a major upgrade, and it was a very mixed bag. One example: the default date and time display is in an unreadably small "date stacked over time" format (using a few pixel high font so this fits into the menu bar), and Gemini's advice was to enable the "Display date and time on single line" option ... but there is no such option (it just hallucinated it), and it also hallucinated a bunch of other suggestions until I finally figured out what you need to do is to configure it to display "Time only" rather than "Data and Time", then change the "Time" format to display both data and time! Just to experiment, I then told Gemini about this fix and amusingly the response was basically "Good to know - this'll be useful for anyone reading this later"!

More examples, from yesterday (these are not rare exceptions):

1) I asked Gemini (generally considered one of the smartest models - better than ChatGPT, and rapidly taking away market share from it - 20% shift in last month or so) to look at the GitHub codebase for an Anthropic optimization challenge, to summarize and discuss etc, and it appeared to have looked at the codebase until I got more into the weeds and was questioning it where it got certain details from (what file), and it became apparent it had some (search based?) knowledge of the problem, but seemingly hadn't actually looked at it (wasn't able to?).

2) I was asking Gemini about chemically fingerprinting (via impurities, isotopes) roman silver coins to the mines that produced the silver, and it confidently (as always) comes up with a bunch of academic references that it claimed made the connection, but none or references (which did at least exist) actually contained what it claimed (just partial information), and when I pointed this out it just kept throwing out different references.

So, it's convenient to be able to chat with your "search engine" to drill down and clarify, etc, but a big time waste if a lot of it is hallucination.

Search vs Chat has anyways really become a difference without a difference since Google now gives you the "AI Overview" (a diving off point into "AI Mode"), or you can just click on "AI Mode" in the first place - which is Gemini.
by metalman | 2026-01-22 14:05:54+00:00
I get a sense that the Irainian government is playing a sophisticted game with there internet shut down and restarts, and are getting highly compitent advice from other countrys.perturb and observe, adjust and repeat. It is also fair to say that the current internal situation in Iran is 95% focused on the economy, and the only difference between there and the US, is that you get shot in the face, a bit less in the US, quantity, not quality.
by tentacleuno | 2026-01-22 14:06:13+00:00
You don't really need more packages. There's definitely a culture of creating ridiculously small packages, though.

If you spend enough time in the ecosystem, you'll begin to realise that a select few are very well known for doing this; one in particular made a package for every ANSI terminal colour.

left-pad (and quite a few incidents afterwards) were definitely wakeup calls, and I like to think we've listened in some ways.
by arethuza | 2026-01-22 14:06:24+00:00
My car has a staggeringly bad UI design choice - the cancel active navigation the control to do this only appears when you hold your finger close to the screen. Pretty much every time I want to do this I am flummoxed as to "Where did the button go" - before I eventually remember.

The navigation system is good - I prefer it to using my phone and CarPlay but that design is terrible.