MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-28 22:38:41+00:00
> “He should’ve been so aware that his job was going to be the first one cut, and he was responsible for building a tool to cut his own job”

> That tool was going to get built whether he did it or someone else did. Maybe only thing to do is buy time building it while actively looking elsewhere.

This has such a dark vibe to it that I am unable to explain. It really feels like an I was only following orders command just hoping that you don't get to the wrong side of this stick as they was hoping for

At the same time protest isn't an option. It does feel like some form of active suffering for someone to write the replacement of themselves while the economy goes to complete dumpster fire and nobody's hiring (much).

All while Completely pure form of AI slop goes up and up so even any interesting idea or anything will have to fight really hard for attention in public spaces like say show HN or other websites.

So you are forced to pay "Internet rent" to the overlords like Google & Meta who will use the same money to then train better models (especially Google?) to continue this cycle.

All while people lose their privacy and nobody even talks about it. With all the thousands of problems happening.

Can we please just stop this circle just once and evaluate where things are going if they are net positive for humanity itself & if there is anything to stop this cycle.

Fundamentally most countries are democracies. Yes there are lobbying efforts but one forgets that these large corpos pay to somehow pursuade you or the politician that you elect.

Can someone smart in politics talk about such issues & raise them & a fight towards lobbying/corruption (all throughout the world?) be established.

I guess this becomes way too broad of a goal but somehow I always end up feeling corruption and politics & money's lobbying connection can be a root cause of many issues (much throughout the world)
by alephnerd | 2026-01-28 22:38:57+00:00
Having a London domicile often leads to an overstating in venture capital raised for the UK ecosystem.

For example, I've funded Polish and Indian startups that chose the UK as their legal domicile because we couldn't be bothered to hire a legal team to draft a contract to Polish or Indian specifications.

Builder.ai [0] is a great example of that - it was an Indian startup that was domiciled in London to simplify raising capital from Gulf investors.

[0] - https://www.ft.com/content/926f4969-fda7-4e78-b106-4888c8704...
by cdrnsf | 2026-01-28 22:39:16+00:00
I don't think that it's reasonable to see this behavior as anything but threatening given the location and the ample context provided by ICE's behavior up to this point.

> The ICE person states they will not try to enter and if the clerk touches them, they will yank the person out of the building.

Does that not amount to a threat?

It sounds as though most of these agents are poorly trained at best. https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/ice-unloads

> “The brand new agents are idiots,” an experienced ICE agent assigned to homeland security investigations told me.

> The new ICE officer continued: “I thought federal agents were supposed to be clean cut but some of them pass around a flask as we are watching a suspect,” observing as well that the new guys “have some weird tattoos.”
by reify | 2026-01-28 22:39:17+00:00
First the Uk government banned Bitcoin ATM's so that the average person could not buy bitcoin from the local shop, unless you gave up your ID, bank account details and passport to register at an online casino.

By then, all the rich wankers had bought all the bitcoin, so they now bring in a law to protect the rich cunts and suddenly its a criminal offence to steal bitcoin.

In 2016 bitcoin was £400. A rich cunt could afford to buy 10 of them with the small change in their back pockets.

Forward to today, bitcoin is about £90,000 each.

10*90000 = £900,000 just under a million quid.

Tax them fuckers that's what I say, Unearned income tax at 50% and build some council houses for the poor
by al_borland | 2026-01-28 22:39:21+00:00
> how do you usually work on tasks that you find boring?

Often times, I don't... until it becomes a problem.

If something is the right balance of boring and tedious, I actually like it, if I get started. It becomes something to keep my hands busy while I zone out.

> Which AI has been the most useful to you in your opinion?

I mostly use the Kagi Assistant, which defaults to a Kimi model. I occasionally switch the model (it offers many), just to see if it's better. I'll sometimes use ChatGPT as well, if I am doing something where going beyond a chat is helpful. So far they all seem to have similar weaknesses. Yesterday I was asking it something about baking and it said some stuff that sounded kind of dumb. I asked for more detail and then in contradicted itself in multiple places. When it does stuff like that, which happens a lot, I can find it rather paralyzing if it can't clear things up. I want there to be a "right" answer. When there is a debate on what is right, and it phases it as two different absolutes to create the contradiction, that's a problem. I'd rather it be up front and phrase it has a debate, give the reasons why each side takes their position, the trade offs, and then a recommendation based on circumstances. On the other hand, it will give a wishy-washy answer based on an obscure technically, creating debate where there really is none. It's a hard line to walk and I find that to be the biggest stumbling block I currently have with AI (outside of coding, which has many more stumbling blocks).
by mindslight | 2026-01-28 22:40:12+00:00
I recall it being applied to firmware residing in flash, which is most everything these days (truly non-updateable means mask ROM).

Even without the Internet connection, the firmware in your washing machine can be updated whether by service call or DIY by seeing what chip it uses and how it gets programmed.

Which is why I think it makes sense to talk in terms of software freedom for specific devices / security domains. For example, it's perfectly fine to just admit that your washing machine, wifi card, mouse, network switch, etc doesn't respect software freedom, rather than trying to define one's way out of it. And then if and when you do run into an issue that is made frustrating by a lack of software freedom, you can then opt to remedy this.
by bigbadfeline | 2026-01-28 22:40:18+00:00
> LLMs have unlocked a lot of value for me personally, and arguably for the society as a whole.

The second part doesn't follow from the first which, in turn, is irrelevant here because we aren't talking about any value for society, we're trying to figure out if that value is greater than its opportunity cost.

The "AI" has been with us for several years now but it hasn't improved overall productivity in any meaningful way and while it's use is already plateauing it keeps sucking in capital like a giant black hole.

> As a technologist, I'm really glad that money is pouring in and allowing us to find its limits.

That's not a good thing when it happens at the expense of the rest of society.

It's only natural that workers at NVIDIA and other suppliers of AI-related products would like the gravy train to travel their way in perpetuity, but they are literally wasting capital, which isn't theirs, for their own enrichment, while creating inflation, shortages and misallocations on a grand scale.
by diyseguy | 2026-01-28 22:40:51+00:00
I have always felt that if I could do a job really well, do work that required no maintenance, was basically 'self-healing' so to speak, with documentation so clear and easy to understand that someone could pick up where I left off without asking me a single question. For me that was always my aesthetic and goal in any work I did.

Yet, here I am, an experienced software engineer, unemployed for over a year now. It still seems to me the right ideal, so the 'karmic' outcome feels unjust really.
by alexandermorgan | 2026-01-28 22:40:52+00:00
I made a free daily word game called Eightile. You unscramble letters to form a valid word and get another letter. You win by finding a valid 8-letter word before the time runs out. You can play in English, Spanish, French, or Galician.

It was harder than I expected to automate game creation (I wrote this by hand about 1.5 years ago), and even then it took a bit more effort to get it so it wasn't insanely difficult.

The most regular online following is on bluesky. There's a new game every day at 4am UTC. Enjoy!
Show HN: Vultrino – Let AI agents use credentials without seeing them
by dz-codes | 2026-01-28 22:41:04+00:00
I built Vultrino because I kept running into the same problem: I want AI agents to do things
that require credentials, but I don't want those secrets in prompts, logs, or context windows.

It's not just API keys – it's signing commits with PGP keys, accessing databases, decrypting
files, anything that needs a secret. The agent shouldn't see the credential; it should just be
able to use it.

Vultrino is a credential proxy that sits between your AI agent and the operation. The agent says
"use my github-api credential" or "sign this with my pgp-key" and Vultrino handles the secret
material without exposing it.

Key features:
- WASM plugin system – add any credential type (PGP signing plugin included, build your own)
- MCP native – works directly with Claude
- OAuth2 with automatic token refresh
- Scoped API keys – agent X can only access credentials matching "github-*"
- Encrypted storage (AES-256-GCM), SSRF protection, audit logging

Written in Rust. Self-hosted, no cloud dependency.
by epolanski | 2026-01-28 22:41:17+00:00
Economists argue that they are the fairest because they tax consumption rather than production.

Also everybody pays them, including people that avoid taxes (including criminal activities and tax evaders).

The argument against this is that lower income households pay more of it as a portion of their income thus the consensus is that to be fairest you need rebates and no taxes on many essentials (which is why often medicines or milk, bread etc have very low or no sales tax/rebates).
by dukeyukey | 2026-01-28 22:42:19+00:00
No it isn't, London's IPOs in 2025 were mostly towards the end of the year, after that article was written. London ended up about 8th worldwide for issuances in 2025 - https://www.pwc.co.uk/press-room/press-releases/research-com...

Plus, the FTSE 100 returned 25.8% last year. That is not a shrinking market!
by mrguyorama | 2026-01-28 22:42:27+00:00
Life is a name we give to arrangements of matter we prefer over others.

There is no intrinsic "purpose".

The universe itself is perfectly content with dynamics over timescales we cannot even approach comprehension of, and never will. The only driving force in the universe is an evolution from a state with heterogeneous energy densities to one with homogeneous energy density. "Life" isn't even in the equation.

Interstellar travel is not possible for humans. Even if we could somehow induce perfect hibernation, scifi style, how do you maintain an engineered vehicle in the abyss for centuries?

Meanwhile, we can't even take care of the abundance of resources here on earth.
by mort96 | 2026-01-28 22:43:11+00:00
This is counterproductive. The only alternative to letting Apple exploit you is letting Google exploit you. There are differences, Google is somewhat better on this specific point, but there's enough things Google is worse at (such as privacy) that choosing Google isn't exactly without downsides.

Your mindset results in Apple users thinking "the problem is those stupid Android idiots who accept being in an ad tech company's spyware garden" and Android users thinking "the problem is those stupid Apple idiots who accept that 30% of literally everything they do goes to Apple". In reality, we have a common enemy in the big tech duopoly and extremely lacklustre regulation which lets them keep doing this shit. You calling me an idiot for making a different shitty trade-off than you helps nobody.
by arjie | 2026-01-28 22:43:41+00:00
That would be pretty funny to say. Where are America's startups founded? Principally the San Francisco Bay Area. What about the Rest of the World? Oh, principally the San Francisco Bay Area.

It reminds me of the funny fact that for years I worked at a building in Bush St. that was nice but not particularly remarkable only to find out that that's where Saudi Aramco was originally headquartered when some Twitter post counted them for the Bay Area for their "Where are the top market capped public companies from?" segment.
by xtracto | 2026-01-28 22:43:43+00:00
Lol . You made my day. I was doing that kind of Registry mangling 25 years ago. Brought me good memories, its been a while.

I'm so happy I haven't had to use a Windows machine in more than 10 years.

For me, MacBookPro for coding, Linux Mint for home desktop and Steam + Xbox Live online for gaming. We live in excellent times
by geodel | 2026-01-28 22:44:04+00:00
> At the end of the day, there'll still be a need for highly skilled technical experts, whatever that job looks like.

Well, this is kind of obvious right. Highly skilled people of next generation will do fine. The point is millions of highly skilled successful people of today could soon be below average category, jobless and can be called clueless, stuck in old ways who didn't simply see what is happening in the world.

And I am not blaming anyone. Despite seeing changes coming even I am not able to do much either. Just hilariously trying to do "cloud technology" courses which folks did decades back, made money and by now even forgot about it.
by nobody9999 | 2026-01-28 22:44:11+00:00
>Because the whole point of tracking ICE is to help people dodge them. It's
absurd that people cry foul when the government goes after people actively opposing the rule of law.

By your logic, combined with the actions of the ICE folks in Minneapolis, anyone who submits the location of a DUI checkpoint into Waze[0] should be summarily executed?

Is that your argument? ICE has murdered people for documenting their locations and actions which, by your statement was to allow others to "dodge" law enforcement.

Documenting a DUI checkpoint does exactly the same thing. So. If your position is that law "enforcement" is allowed to summarily shoot to death folks who document their actions and locations in one context, then they should be allowed to do so in other, more serious contexts like DUI checkpoints.

Is that your claim? If not, please do provide some nuance around what you said, because that's how I understood your statements.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waze
by palata | 2026-01-28 22:44:40+00:00
I think you're confused.

I you run GrapheneOS, it is an open source platform built on top of AOSP (the Android Open Source Project). Part of the security model is that you don't run as root. I am an advanced user and I don't want to run as root on my phone, I am happy with GrapheneOS as it is distributed.

Now if you want to be root, you can install an OS that allows you to be root. Just like I unlocked my bootloader, installed GrapheneOS and relocked my bootloader, you can do that and install whatever you please. I will keep using GrapheneOS because that is the most secure OS I can find for my phone.

The problem, IMO, is not that "some OS are opinionated and don't give you root access while other OSes do give you root access". The problem is that on many phones, you are not free to install the goddam OS you want (e.g. because you can't unlock or relock the bootloader).
by fragmede | 2026-01-28 22:44:49+00:00
The problem is people that rich don't own anything. It's all shell corporations and LLCs and money borrowed against those shares (so no need to pay any taxes). But they clearly have access to yacht money. We're not going to write an airtight law in the comments section. We can just ignore paper wealth and ownership stakes for the purposes of wealth redistribution.

The question boils down to a feeling that when the revolution comes, that no one person needs more than, say, $100 million for themselves, or not. Trying to distract the conversation into defining "for themselves" will only prolong your time before the firing squad, comrad.
by peteforde | 2026-01-28 22:44:53+00:00
A silver lining to this unfortunate situation could be the possibility that Kontakt is sold to someone who will be a far better steward of that ecosystem.

Yes, there are a lot of amazing software instruments that live in Kontakt. However, there is a darker side to it; companies that author libraries often describe it as being in "Kontakt jail" because they pull all of the same tricks Apple does with their iPhone app store. In fact, it might be worse because they coerce people into signing exclusivity agreements in exchange for slightly better terms.

Meanwhile, the Kontakt VST itself keeps coming out with new versions that somehow still don't support no-longer-new features like MPE. If you want to use MPE with a Kontakt library, you need to run 8-10 instances of it and use a 3rd-party hack to round-robin your notes. It's not awesome.

I feel badly for the people who might lose their jobs, but the people at the top are not doing the products any favours.
by jjmarr | 2026-01-28 22:45:02+00:00
I got stuck for two weeks installing the kernel because I forgot to mount /boot. Perhaps I disabled it by accident when goofing around in alsamixer? Or my card did or didn't have hardware mixing?

I didn't actually know anything about Linux at the time and started with Gentoo because I saw a meme saying "install Gentoo" and people told me not to start with that distro. So it's possible I messed up the default config by accident.

Either way PulseAudio worked after I emerged it.
by epolanski | 2026-01-28 22:45:56+00:00
This is the only counter argument, and in fact the consensus is that they are the fairest (they tax consumption rather than production, we tend to tax producing wealth more than spending it) if you offer rebates or lower them on essentials (bread, milk, eggs, healthcare).

They also have the effect that everybody has to pay them, including tax evaders, tax loophole abusers, criminals with undeclared incomes, etc, everybody has to pay it.

But yes, without offering sales tax rebates or with taxing essentials then your argument is true and they become less fair.

Albeit, the elephant in the room is always the definition of fairness itself.
by tomhow | 2026-01-28 22:46:04+00:00
> I think seeing a Tesla earnings call flagged because it wasn't stellar earnings

This is a perfect example of imagining or assuming our (or the community's) motivations or allegiances then criticising us for what you imagine or assume.

Tesla is far more commonly criticised than praised on HN these days. The moderators have no allegiance or care for Tesla, its reputation or its stock price.

If a ”Tesla earnings call” story was flagged, it would be for the same reason that almost all earnings call or stock price stories are flagged on HN; they usually don't qualify as great topics for curious conversation.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-28 22:46:50+00:00
I guess people need money to buy food to survive?

> I would be so friggen happy I don't have to do this BS job anymore.

Alright the freezer's empty with no food and you have no money. Probably a family to manage with kids and demands or say have hobbies which costs money.

I am an extremely frugal person myself but even I will admit that there is just no way that one can purely just exist without a FIRE & even within FIRE some aspects of FIRE want you to have a job but not only just any job but the job you like.

Judging from GP's comment. I feel like the person they are talking about might not have saved enough money so they were a bit worried about it but even if they did, losing a job still impacts mentally and they (didn't?) want to go through such transition.

I guess the point is to really save money & be frugal at times. It's usually something which benefits me but I am single right now but I can imagine that with a family & a wife & different dynamics, frugality can be hard to live by when you have to convince your wife to say down-size or your children to & it can impact one's freedom probably.

Personally wishing to have a lot of savings to go through when single before getting married.

Unironically this & some sense of getting respect within society & getting the prospectus of some good dating connection in such sense is the reason why (many) people look for any jobs.

I will admit that if someone offers me such a job, the offer to take will be hard to resist (even though I would consider I have a stronger than average desire for a job that I truly like/enjoy fwiw)
by unethical_ban | 2026-01-28 22:46:58+00:00
The fear, which many (like myself, and Andrew Yang) have since before GenAI hit it big, is that the coming automation revolution will be magnitudes more disruptive than prior economic revolutions. It's one thing for particular skilled industries to evolve or go away; it's another when massive, diverse, frontline-and-management roles across the economy will all be wiped out in the coming decade or two.

Management, warehouses, logistics, driving, retail/service industry, entertainment and advertising, programming/software engineering, even research and education. Potentially tens of millions of jobs in the US alone.

COMBINED with the seemingly zero discussion in mainstream politics about improving the welfare system of the country to prevent system-scale unemployment and poverty, while the profits from "efficiencies" go to the small group of already-wealthy shareholders and owners.
by zb3 | 2026-01-28 22:47:00+00:00
I'm running AdGuard in Chromium right now. I don't see any ads, even on YouTube. May I ask what did you mean?

Not that I don't think MV3 is limited, but.. we're comparing this against MV2, right? It was already missing basic functionality like full filtering of http responses, I remember a bug about not seeing POST bodies being open for 10+ years..
by marak830 | 2026-01-28 22:47:02+00:00
I run a separate memory layer between my local and my chat.

Without a ton of hassle I cannot do that with a public model(without paying API pricing).

My responses may be slower, but I know the historical context is going to be there. As well as the model overrides.

In addition I can bolt on modules as I feel like it(voice, avatar, silly tavern to list a few).

I get to control my model by selecting specific ones for tasks, I can upgrade as they are released.

These are the reasons I use local.

I do use Claude for a coding junior so I can assign tasks and review it, purely because I do not have something that can replicate that locally on my setup(hardware wise, but from what I have read local coding models are not matching Claude yet)

That's more than likely a temporary issue(years not weeks with the expensive of things and state of open models specialising in coding).