MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Angostura | 2026-01-21 14:42:58+00:00
I rather disagree with this position.

To risk an analogy, if I throw petrol onto an already smouldering pile of leaves, I may mot have ‘caused’ the forest fire, but I have accelerated it so rapidly that the situation becomes unrecognisable.

There may already have been cracks in the edifice, but they were fixable. AI takes a wrecking ball to the whole structure
by randusername | 2026-01-21 14:43:07+00:00
> Institutions like higher
education, medecine, and law inform the stable and predictable patterns of
behavior within organizations such as schools, hospitals, and courts.,
respectively,, thereby reducing chaos and friction.

Hard to take seriously with so many misspellings and duplicate punctuation.

I vibe with the general "AI is bad for society" tone, but this argument feels a lot to me like "piracy is bad for the film industry" in that there is no recognition of why it has an understandable appeal with the masses, not just cartoon villains.

Institutions bear some responsibility for what makes AI so attractive. Institutional trust is low in the US right now; journalism, medicine, education, and government have not been living up to their ideals. I can't fault anyone for asking AI medical questions when it is so complex and expensive to find good, personalized healthcare, or for learning new things from AI when access to an education taught by experts is so costly and selective.
by Latty | 2026-01-21 14:43:12+00:00
Sure, and that's fine, but relying on it isn't, and it isn't a reason not to use IPv6 (if you want namespacing, there are tools for that outside hiding behind a single IPv4). Hence the advice is not to rely on NAT.

This is people talking past each other, and to be fair, saying "everyone" in my post made it unclear, I was being glib in response to "because that's not what people run IRL", when evidently people do, I've seen it happen.
by alex_fash | 2026-01-21 14:43:20+00:00
Two well-known failures:

– Mars Climate Orbiter (1999): lost because one team used Imperial units and the other used Metric.
– Citibank $500M error (2020): a routine interest payment turned into a principal transfer due to ambiguous UI labels.

In both cases:
• No bugs
• No runtime exceptions
• Systems behaved exactly as designed

The failure wasn’t technical so much as semantic — meaning lived in people’s heads instead of the system.

I wrote this as a failure analysis of how assumptions leak into interfaces and documentation, and how costly that gap can be in practice.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-21 14:43:32+00:00
> The EU was supposed to bring countries together, but I think it did quite the contrary

What are some concrete examples of how Europeans countries are now further away from each other, since the start of EU and because of EU?

As someone who enjoyed the ability of freely moving across the continent to find a country I'm actually comfortable living in, it's hard for me to imagine EU made countries more distant to each other, but I'm not all-seeing and would love to understand more from another perspective.
by jaunewikk | 2026-01-21 14:43:38+00:00
WIKK Terminal is an AI-powered trading signals platform designed for Solana memecoins, helping traders identify profitable opportunities. Key features include:

Real-Time Scanner: Scans PumpSwap, Raydium & Meteora every 30 seconds to detect promising tokens.
AI Trading Signals: Provides signals based on 9 backtested patterns with a 65-75% win rate.
Anti-Rug Protection: Multi-layer protection to safeguard against scams.
Ideal for:

Solana memecoin traders
DeFi enthusiasts
Crypto traders looking for an edge
WIKK Terminal offers a professional-grade solution to navigate the volatile world of Solana memecoins, providing actionable insights and risk mitigation tools.
by throwaw12 | 2026-01-21 14:43:44+00:00
I don't think, but I feel like situation was slightly better for some reasons:

* there were no internet, so local communities strived to inform things happening around more objectively. Later on, there were no need for local newspapers

* capitalism was on the rise and on its infancy, but families with a single person working could afford some of the things (e.g. house, car) hence there were no urgent need to selling out all your principles

* people relied on books to consume information, since books were difficult to publish and not easy to revert (like removing a blog post), people gave an attention to what they're producing in the form of books, hence consumers of those books were also slightly demanding in what to expect from other sources

* less power of lobby groups

* not too many super-rich / billionaires, who can just buy anything they want anytime, or ruin the careers of people going against them, hence people probably acted more freely.

But again, can't tell exactly what happened at that time, but in my time press is not free. That's why I said "probably"
by disgruntledphd2 | 2026-01-21 14:43:56+00:00
> Well yeah that's the big issue, but nobody will win the elections by saying they are slaves of the capital class and doesn't matter who you vote for as they are powerless to change the crooked financial system that actually runs the world even if they win the elections since the finance systems globally connected and easily moves to the areas with most stability and tax benefits even if they are undemocratic.

This is a political choice that has been made by governments, and continues to be supported by governments. It's definitely helpful for capital to make people believe that it's a law of nature but capital controls existed in the US until Nixon removed them, and much later in other places.

> Where exactly is the missing vent valve you were talking about?

So FPTP typically forces people into 2 parties because it's the only way to win enough power. So all the extremists (in terms of being far away from the centre of public opinion) basically have to join one of the two major parties and attempt to take them over, which is basically what Trump did with the Republicans and also what happened to the UK Conservative party post Brexit.

In a PR system, you'd end up with some compromise where the democratic socialists and the greens or MAGA or Libertarians held the balance of power in the house, and the Republicans and Democratic parties would need to negotiate with them on what they wanted to accomplish.

The benefit here would be that the voters of the smaller parties would get some of what they want, and the bigger parties would be forced to compromise with others rather than ruling all for the two years between mid-terms.
by ajayarama | 2026-01-21 14:44:33+00:00
Interesting. It seems that in industries where productivity/output isn't the primary goal (so not Software, Analytics, etc), people care more about *where* their content comes from. It's quite indiscriminate in Software, for sure, I feel like people don't care whether you used an AI to write your code as long as it works. 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.
by lifty | 2026-01-21 14:45:06+00:00
I agree with your characterisation of what is going on, and at some point, the EU states will have to decide for full fiscal integration or for removing the common currency. You can't have a common currency without a common fiscal union. So we either have to integrate more or desintegrate more, this inbetween we have now is not working very well. Speaking as a European, not sure what is better.
by physicsguy | 2026-01-21 14:45:31+00:00
> As a HPC developer, it breaks my heart how worse academic software performance is compared to vendor libraries (from Intel or Nvidia). We need to start aiming much higher.

They're optimising for different things really.

Intel/Nvidia have the resources to (a) optimise across a wide range of hardware in their libraries (b) often use less well documented things (c) don't have to make their source code publicly accessible.

Take MKL for example - it's a great library, but implementing dynamic dispatch for all the different processor types is why it gets such good performance across x86-64 machines, it's not running the same code on each processor. No academic team can really compete with that.
by fabian4 | 2026-01-21 14:45:32+00:00
This isn’t a general software engineering take-home. It’s a domain-specific performance engineering task.

If you’ve never done SIMD/VLIW scheduling or low-level instruction packing, it will look absurd. That doesn’t make it unfair — it just means it’s testing a very specific skill set.

The mismatch is people treating it like a LeetCode-style interview problem.
by Sol- | 2026-01-21 14:45:36+00:00
Do they assume that the current state of our institutions is normatively correct? AI progress will come and have manifold benefits, therefore we shouldn't really restrict it too much.

If the institutions cannot handle that, they will have to change or be destroyed. Take university, for instance. Perhaps they will go away - but is this a great loss? Learning (in case it will remain relevant) can be more efficiently achieved with personal AI assistants for each student.
by deltadarkly | 2026-01-21 14:45:50+00:00
I’ve been building a platform called Dank AI (www.ai-dank.xyz), basically a “Vercel for AI agents.” You define an agent in JavaScript with our framework, connect a GitHub repo, and it deploys to a production URL in one click (containerized, with secrets, logs, CPU/RAM selection, etc.).

I recently added a big update so that now you can also deploy and host weaviate vector databases alongside your agent. I put together this AI chatbot example to show how easy it is to define an agent with Dank, integrate weaviate memory for RAG, and connect to an application frontend. The project is designed to run the whole demo locally from a single command, and you can immediately deploy the agent + weaviate on Dank cloud, and deploy the front end on Vercel (just set env variables accordingly to switch the project from local to prod).

It’s set up so you can fork it and immediately build your own Dank agent application without worrying about infra. I hope this makes it easier to build and deploy AI agents. Any feedback you have would be greatly appreciated.
by jrjeksjd8d | 2026-01-21 14:45:59+00:00
Capitalism is destroying institutions. Any new technology must be employed in service of "number go up". In this system externalities have to be priced in with taxes, but it's cheaper to buy off legislators than to actually consider the externalities.

This is how we get food that has fewer nutrients but ships better, free next-day delivery of plastic trash from across the world that doesn't work, schools that exist to extract money rather than teach, social media that exists primarily to shove ads in your face and trick you into spending more time on it.

In the next 4 years we will see the end of the American experiment, as shareholder capitalism completely consumes itself and produces an economy that can only extort and exploit but not make anything of value.
by Iv | 2026-01-21 14:46:04+00:00
BAR (https://www.beyondallreason.info/) is an open source TA clone that proposes massive scale and that is totally open. After the recent disappointment over a series of failures to bring a new big RTS game in the last 2 years, the RTS community talks a lot about this one.

The mechanics are old school, as with basically all RTS, but the openness allows for far more experiments than one would assume in a proprietary game.
by throwpoaster | 2026-01-21 14:46:10+00:00
I think Carney is an intelligent, well spoken, well educated, diligent, competent person.

Because of its geography, Canada reaps huge benefits from proximity to and friendship with America. That cannot be replaced by China and Europe.

I think Carney is pursuing a strategy based on economic models that have diverged from reality in important ways.

If you read his recent WEF speech critically these contradictory ideas are readily apparent. He surfaces some of those tensions in the text but does not end up resolving them.
by pessimizer | 2026-01-21 14:46:20+00:00
HN was 10x more political 15 years ago.

Less party partisan stuff being sneaked in then (I think it's the parties themselves sometimes doing it now), but more meaningful discussions on politics, especially/primarily having to do with how they crossed with tech.

But everything crosses over with tech: finance, the current state of the market, importing and exporting, taxes, surveillance, censorship, encryption, copyright, patents, freedom to tinker, wars, weapons, government contracting, military contracting, corporate structure, etc. etc.

There wasn't this random immigration outrage bait pointing out 1 of the 80 people in a particular month who were shot by law enforcement for no good reason, but there was plenty about immigration because techies are immigrants and hire immigrants, and outsourcing, and working with a remote team in the middle of the night, etc. etc.

The only thing that was absolutely deemed "politics" and excluded eventually was discussions of women and black people in tech.

AI is just the new Rust, is the new X in javascript, is the new concurrency/Erlang, and so on. All of those things are still important; none of them went away or are going away.

I think heavy moderation serves to keep some variety, and to simply throw away the 9000th iteration of the same thread that never goes anywhere. AI stories aren't bad; it's the same AI stories, again, that are bad.
by organsnyder | 2026-01-21 14:46:44+00:00
My homelab is in a closet that has the water meter for my above-garage apartment. Before I put a heater in the garage itself, I needed to make sure that that closet didn't freeze. I rigged up a temperature sensor to start mprime on a server if the temperature got too low, but higher than the electric heater that's also in that closet. I figured I might as well contribute to research if I'm just burning watts for heat anyways.
by replwoacause | 2026-01-21 14:46:53+00:00
PowerShell was the second programming language I learned. The first was AutoIT. And even though I've picked up many others over the years, for some reason, I always reach for PowerShell. I've even built a web framework that has near feature parity with many of the modern frameworks in other languages (Laravel, Django, Rails, etc), and is equal to or better than them in many k6 benchmarks because of leveraging compiled C# for hot paths. PowerShell is easy to install on any Mac, Linux, or Windows system and again, you can tap into the power of C#! It’s high level so you can create scripts quickly but drop down to .NET types, async primitives, networking, crypto, file systems, process control, etc, when you need to. And passing structured data instead of text is really nice because the data stays shaped/predictable/inspectable all the way through your code. I find it readable and approachable though I know many think its verbose. So for me, writing PowerShell has been a joy and I can solve real problems with it quickly. And now I use it for rapid web application development and the possibilities seem endless. I've explored other langs like Nim, Go, JS (NodeJS, Bun), Python, but I always return to PowerShell for the reasons above.

And that's to say nothing of the dev experience... there’s no virtualenv BS, no node_modules bloat, and the dev tooling in VS Code is solid. No yaks getting shaved here.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-21 14:46:55+00:00
This is why Lyft enables women to order a woman driven Lyft.

https://www.lyft.com/women+

Uber received 400,000 reports of sexual misconduct from
2017 to 2022 - https://web.archive.org/web/20251023145410/https://www.engad... - August 7th, 2025

> Uber only disclosed 12,522 serious sexual assaults during the same period.

Uber’s Festering Sexual Assault Problem - https://web.archive.org/web/20251023144648mp_/https://www.ny... - August 6th, 2025
by JohnFen | 2026-01-21 14:46:55+00:00
> rather than negotiating at the table in Washington

The US has no interest in engaging in good faith negotiations.

> For my Canadian friends, I’m sorry you’re going through this.

I am, too.

But what is Canada supposed to do? The US has become a real threat to them. The only thing the US is offering is "submit to our every whim or we'll beat you". The only rational thing to do in that situation is to distance yourself as much as possible, no matter how much that may hurt. The worst thing you can do is to roll over and take it.
by avaika | 2026-01-21 14:46:56+00:00
iqair has pretty sparse coverage, especially in developing areas. A lot of places with really shitty air do not hit the top simply cause the service is effectively blind in those places.

However, I regularly see a lot of Balkan cities hitting the top 10. Sarajevo was #1 quite a few times. Not sure whether it's really worse than Delhi or Beijing, but sometimes it's really really bad. Like, if you imagine the most smoky bar you ever visited, where you see nothing but the cigarette smoke and can't breath. That's how you feel on the street.
by reactordev | 2026-01-21 14:47:15+00:00
I’m going to play devils advocate and cough recite a common argument from the pro gun Americans.

“It’s not guns that kill people, it’s people that kill people”.

It’s not “AI bad”, it’s about the people who train and deploy AI.

My agents always look for research material first - won’t make stuff up. I’d rather it say “I can’t determine” than make stuff up.

AI companies don’t care about institutions or civil law. They scraped the internet, copyright be damned. They indexed art and music and pay no royalties. If anything, the failure of protecting ourselves from ourselves is our fault.
by killerstorm | 2026-01-21 14:47:15+00:00
I think "internet" needs a shared reputation & identity layer - i.e. if somebody offers a comment/review/contribution/etc, it should be easy to check - what else are their contributing, who can vouch for them, etc.

Most of innovation came from web startups who are just not interest in "shared" anything: they want to be a monopoly, "own" users, etc. So this area has been neglected, and then people got used to status quo.

PGP / GPG used to have web-of-trust but that sort of just died.

People either need to resurrect WoT updated for modern era, or just accept the fact that everything is spammed into smithereens. Blaming AI and social media does not help.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-21 14:47:46+00:00
> I generally have a policy of "over 4 hours and I charge for my time.

Worth mentioning that demanding to be paid to apply for a company is usually equivalent to rejecting the job.

I was helping out in a mentoring program during the ZIRP period when the idea of charging companies for take-home interviews started to become popular. I can’t think of anyone it actually worked for in that group. I’ve heard anecdotes online of some people doing it with success, but any company like Anthropic is just going to close your application and move on if you request to be paid for applying. They have a zillion other qualified candidates in line.

If someone is giving a take-home problem that looks like you’re actually doing work for the company, that’s a different story. This problem is not actually work, obviously.
by mooxie | 2026-01-21 14:47:48+00:00
Agreed. While I really value HN's commitment to not becoming Reddit, the intersection of politics and tech (and their effects on our lives) is indisputable. If we can't talk about the government's use of technology as a tool of the state without it being considered a 'hot button' topic - especially considering the relevance that politics have always had to 'hackers' - then this is really just a site for discussions about technology fluff.
Show HN: UltraContext – A simple context API for AI agents with auto-versioning
by ofabioroma | 2026-01-21 14:48:10+00:00
Hey HN! I'm Fabio and I built UltraContext, a simple context API for AI agents with automatic versioning.

After two years building AI agents in production, I experienced firsthand how frustrating it is to manage context at scale. Storing messages, iterating system prompts, debugging behavior and multi-agent patterns—all while keeping track of everything without breaking anything. It was driving me insane.

So I built UltraContext. The mental model is git for context:

- Updates and deletes automatically create versions (history is never lost)

- Replay state at any point

The API is 5 methods:

uc.create() // new context (can fork from existing)
uc.append() // add message
uc.get() // retrieve by version, timestamp, or index
uc.update() // edit message → creates version
uc.delete() // remove message → creates version

Messages are schema-free. Store conversation history, tool calls, system prompts—whatever shape you need. Pass it straight to your LLM using any framework you'd like.

What it's for:

- Persisting conversation state across sessions

- Debugging agent behavior (rewind to decision point)

- Forking contexts to test different flows

- Audit trails without building audit infrastructure

- Multi-agent and sub-agent patterns

What it's NOT:

- Not a memory/RAG system (no semantic search)

- Not a vector database

- Not an Orchestration/LLM framework

UltraContext handles versioning, branching, history. You get time-travel with one line.

Docs: https://ultracontext.ai/docs

Early access: https://ultracontext.ai

Would love feedback! Especially from anyone who's rolled their own context engineering and can tell me what I'm missing.
by defatigable | 2026-01-21 14:48:21+00:00
This doesn't sound right to me. If someone who were expert in JS looked at a relatively simple C++ program, I think they could reasonably well tell if the quality of code were good or not. They wouldn't be able to, e.g., detect bugs from default value initialization, memory leaks, etc. But so long as the code didn't do any crazy templating stuff they'd be able to analyze it at a rough "this algorithm seems sensible" level".

Analogously I'm quite proficient at C++, and I can easily look at a small JS program and tell if it's sensible. But if you give me even a simple React app I wouldn't be able to understand it without a lot of effort (I've had this experience...)

I agree with your broad point: C/C++/Java are certainly much more complex than JS and I would expect someone expert in them to have a much easier time picking up JS than the reverse. But given very high overlap in syntax between the four I think anyone who's proficient in one can grok the basics of the others.
by basilgohar | 2026-01-21 14:48:31+00:00
I agree and disagree with parts of what you said.

AI may have caused a distinct trajectory of the problem, but the old system was already broken and collapsing. If the building falls over or collapses in place doesn't change that the building was already at its end.

I think the fact that AI is allowed to go as far as it has is part of the same issue, namely, our profit-at-all-costs methodology of late-stage capitalism. This has lead to the accelerated destruction of many institutions. AI is just one of those tools that lets us sink more and more resources into the grifting faster.

(Edit: Fixing typos.)