MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ericmay | 2026-01-31 17:30:21+00:00
> I'm very aware, and again: what's lost is the trust that this means anything right now.

> Why, exactly? Trust is lost, that's a fact.

Actions mean more than words. Trust isn't binary, you can lose some but not all, gain some but not have full trust, &c.

> it doesn't bode well to rely on it, it has cozied up with Putin through Trump so why should I believe those troops will actually be activated?

I understand the current administration has taken, perhaps inappropriate in my mind, overtures toward Putin for a diplomatic solution in Ukraine, and we should continue to find a diplomatic solution, but as we haven't, we've continued to supply Ukraine with logistical support, weapons, intelligence, targeting, and we are even testing new weapons in Ukraine and working with Ukrainian partners on the ground.

> The EU has spent more money to supply Ukraine than the USA

This isn't a problem, nor have I suggested that America has spent more than Europe.

The war is taking place in Europe, there's 600+ million people in Europe and 180 million people or so in Russia. It's very natural to me that the EU would spend much more than the United States here. The fact that we have spent as much as we have (plus other methods of support) is a testament to our generosity and our commitment to helping our allies and stopping Russia's war of aggression.

> because the USA does not care a single yota about Ukraine

Yet, here we are supplying weapons, loans, intelligence, targeting and intelligence support, and grants. Why would we do that if we don't care? You seem to have a disconnect with what the truth is and what you want to believe to be true.

> You need to accept the USA as we knew before is over, there's no coming back from MAGA-adjacent stuff for generations, the seeds have been sown, your society is MAGA, like it or not. We outside the USA need to be prepared for this new world, and detaching from your sick society is one of the required steps.

We got over Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan pretty quick. Vietnam got over the war there from the US and from being a French colony. It seems like it doesn't take long for things to change.

> Your government is fickle and spineless,

> detaching from your sick society is one of the required steps

I'm going to ignore comments like this, but there's no need to say things like this. It doesn't add to the discussion.
by teilom | 2026-01-31 17:30:44+00:00
If you’re trying to estimate before prod, logging these 4 things in a pilot gets you 80% there:
- tokens/run (in+out)
- tool calls/run (and fanout)
- retry rate (timeouts/429s)
- context length over turns (P50/P95)

Fanout × retries is the classic “bill exploder”, and P95 context growth is the stealth one. The point of “budget as contract” is deciding in advance what happens at limit (degraded mode / fallback / partial answer / hard fail), not discovering it from the invoice.
by eudamoniac | 2026-01-31 17:31:18+00:00
> the minimum living wage should be three times the cost of a mid-tier one-bedroom apartment.

I would argue very-low-tier even if I were taking your position, or even low tier with roommates

> Should a job that does not pay enough for someone to live be allowed to exist?

I don't know, probably. For local service jobs like janitors, demand is inflexible, and they'd probably end up just getting higher pay. I worry about what happens to any job that could be done for cheap, remotely, in a foreign country. Manufacturing already happened this way, and with a high enough minimum it would happen to landscape architects, middle managers, accountants, etc. In the absurd case it could be cheaper to ship overseas your HVAC or even your car for repairs, instead of paying a mechanic. It could be cheaper to telephone a foreign doctor, food costs could be dwarfed by labor costs to the point that fast food is luxury, it could be cheaper to ship your dog across the border to go to a vet. It seems like we'd be putting a whole lot of people out of jobs and business, with their customers going remotely to a sweat shop.

Now if we pair the minimum wage increase with suitable tariffs so that people aren't shipping their cars for repairs, sure, but that is never brought up.
by Apreche | 2026-01-31 17:32:14+00:00
There are tons of podcasts out there made by people with no extrinsic motivation. They aren’t looking for fame or fortune. They just like making podcasts, and do so for free. Usually Creative Commons Licensed. Yes, I am one of those people who makes a podcast that way.

The problem is you will never find our podcasts on the front pages of the directories like Apple or Spotify, but we are there if you search hard enough. If you are tired of ads, look harder.
by fullstackchris | 2026-01-31 17:32:17+00:00
you do realize behind each of these 'autonomous agents' is a REAL model (regardless of which one it is, OpenAI, anthropic, whatever) that has been built by ML scientists, and is still victim to the context window problem, and they literally DO NOT get smarter every day??? does ANYONE realize this? reading through this thread its like everyone forgot that these 'autonomous agents' are literally just the result of well-crafted MCP tools (moltbot) for LLMs... this brings absolutely nothing new to the pot, it's just that finally a badass software engineer open sourced proper use of MCP tools and everyone is freaking out.

kind of sad when you realize the basics (the MCP protocol) has been published since last year... there will be no 'agent revolution' because its all just derived from the same source model(s) - likely those that are 'posting' are just the most powerful models like gpt5 and opus 4.5 - if you hook up moltbot to an open source one it for sure won't get far enough to post on this clown site.

i really need to take a break from all this, everything would be so clear if people just understood the basics...

but alas, buzzwords, false claims, and clownishness rule 2026

tl;dr; this isn't 'true emergence'; it rather shows the powerful effect of proper and well-written MCP tool usage
by fnoef | 2026-01-31 17:32:24+00:00
I keep seeing over and over how Europe should be self sufficient. I’d be happy for Europe to be self sufficient.

But the truth is that Europe does not have the infrastructure and offering to be self sufficient. Even looking at basic things like AWS SES, there is no European offering. Apart from scaleway, there are no competitions for big cloud providers. There are no alternative to office suites.

And I’m not even talking about hardware. What’s the point to build data centers if they run US made hardware.

So, as the saying goes: talk is cheap, show me the software.
by inglor_cz | 2026-01-31 17:32:34+00:00
One interesting thing about the situation is that Islamic religious authorities used to have conflicting views on permissibility of portraits and depictions of living beings in general, which is also why so much Islamic medieval art is abstract. Abstract art was religiously safe.

Ubiquity and practicality of photography basically destroyed the restrictive side of the conflict. As you can see, even the Taliban seems to be on the permissive side now.

(IIRC some of the most extreme forms of Islamic State in Syria/Iraq tried to ban photography of humans and animals.)
by mmooss | 2026-01-31 17:33:07+00:00
The prior generation of film students grew up the same way, and the one before that. Remember westerns, for example?

If you're a film student, presumably you are interested in the art and technique, and then films like "Man with a Movie Camera" are fascinating and beautiful. Similarly, Vim does not appeal to a public accustomed to simple apps, no learning curve, gamification, and lots of graphics; but computer professionals see it as a thing of beauty.
by WalterBright | 2026-01-31 17:33:46+00:00
Once you know about "Save The Cat!" it becomes boring to watch a movie that follows the formula.

I noticed even back in the 80s that too many movies ended in the "chase through the darkened warehouse". The movie will be doing fine, until somehow the hero and villain wind up in a dark, abandoned warehouse, ship, factory, whatever. Then they have a long, drawn out fight. Then the bad guy gets killed. Movie over? Nope. The bad guy rises from the dead and has to be killed again. Sometimes even a third time.

Then there are movies with the party of 10 people or so. The point is to kill them off one by one, each in a gruesomely different way, until the star is the only one left. Movies also telegraph who in the party is going to die next. It's the person who reflects on something innocuous, like "isn't it nice to hear the birds singing!". Dead meat, every time. The only interesting thing to do with these movies is make bets on the order of the deaths.

"Game of Thrones" was interesting because it did not follow any formula I could discern, except for the last two seasons.
by zbentley | 2026-01-31 17:33:50+00:00
To all the folks saying “durable execution frameworks solve this”—you’re right, but a lot of what’s described in the article isn’t quite the same as durable execution a la temporal. The approach described (transactional outboxes for side effectful operations, and care taken to be idempotent or resumable where possible, and to gracefully degrade, slow down, or rate limit where you can) achieves some of the same properties as a given durable execution framework, its true, but you don’t necessarily need to rewrite your code to be fully event sourced or use a framework to get a lot of those benefits, as the article demonstrates.

Transactional outboxes specifically are one of my favorite patterns: they’re not too hard to add and don’t require changing many core invariants of your system. If you already use some sort of message bus or queue, making publishes to it transactional under a given RDBMS is often as simple as adding some client side code and making sure that logical message deduplication and is present where appropriate: https://microservices.io/patterns/data/transactional-outbox....

If you use a separate message broker (Kafka, SQS, RabbitMQ) with this pattern, you’ll also need a sweeper cron job to re-dispatch failed publishes from the outbox table(s) as well.

Bonus points if this can be implemented on top of existing trigger-based audit table functionality.
by Jamesbeam | 2026-01-31 17:34:22+00:00
Oh boy.

1. It’s not 0$ a month if you suggest a 20$ Claude pro subscription at the end that is necessary to run "always-on ai" as you can not run any local models on that instance.

2. So you harden the server but run all of your files through an external provider (anthropic) that you have zero control over and do not even give people a disclaimer about the dangers of doing so?

And on top of that you upload everything unencrypted to Google Drive as backup.

Oh boy.

Just because you can do something it’s not always a good idea to do it Ryan.

Did you come up with this genius tutorial yourself or did you ask Claude to write it?

You can just zip all your files up and send them directly to either the NSA or the kremlin if you talk to your bot on Telegram or WhatsApp like this.

I’m looking forward to read all the shit you write and upload when it ends up on the darknet, because the vibe coding scriptkid gang of 2026 that follows 0$ tutorials installed malware ridden clawdbot skills after following your tutorial.

https://opensourcemalware.com/blog/clawdbot-skills-ganked-yo...

Educating people is a noble thing, but this is the equivalent of giving an 8-year old a loaded gun and he says bang bang while pointing it at your face.

You need to teach people of proper handling and the dangers of a weapon before you hand it to them. Openclaw or whatever it is called tomorrow is a loaded gun.
by goalieca | 2026-01-31 17:34:30+00:00
Apple did create a boolean for that. They call it lockdown mode.

> Lockdown Mode is an optional, extreme protection that’s designed for the very few individuals who, because of who they are or what they do, might be personally targeted by some of the most sophisticated digital threats. Most people are never targeted by attacks of this nature.
When Lockdown Mode is enabled, your device won’t function like it typically does. To reduce the attack surface that potentially could be exploited by highly targeted mercenary spyware, certain apps, websites, and features are strictly limited for security and some experiences might not be available at all.
by johndough | 2026-01-31 17:34:50+00:00
> Edit: Python has no JIT

There are quite a few JITs:

JIT-compiler for Python https://pypy.org/

Python enhancement proposal for JIT in CPython https://peps.python.org/pep-0744/

And there are several JIT-compilers for various subsets of Python, usually with focus on numerical code and often with GPU support, for example

Numba https://numba.pydata.org/numba-doc/dev/user/jit.html

Taichi Lang https://github.com/taichi-dev/taichi
by toast0 | 2026-01-31 17:35:14+00:00
It depends on the city, and how the ISPs in the city work.

The telco DSL and fiber in my metro area all runs through a single location where the PPPoE (hiss) concentrator is and the first hop latency from DSL interleaving swamps the latency from distance. You can someone is in the metro area, but not the county or city.

Cable company customers are a little more locatable, probably get the county.
by DarkNova6 | 2026-01-31 17:35:48+00:00
True for the current situation, but something needs to happen before the thinking turns into acting. There's no better time than now, since most cloud services have become commodities. You don't need to be big-tech to have a competitive offering that. Naturally, the tech won't be as efficient and shiny as those of the big ones, but you have none of the corporate bloat and inefficiencies.

And don't forget about legislation. If there are new laws that set a limit to egress costs you can say goodbye to the walled garden of cloud empires.

After all, how many cloud services does the average company actually need? Most problems have been figured out by now, so such a project would be less like creating thought-leaders and more like a public infrastructure project. With exception of cutting-edge technologies, the cloud has become a commodity.
by lysace | 2026-01-31 17:36:33+00:00
From a programmer perspective:

(Old man yelling at the sky.)

It's been this exponential progress in distraction (internet, social networks, weaponizing human psychology to make money).

I got into programming in the late 80s/early 90s. If I were a teenager today, I'm not sure I would have the willpower to suffer through enough focused boredom to really learn.
by mmooss | 2026-01-31 17:36:34+00:00
If you have that passion, you should study film - it's never too late, and your passion will take you much further than the people just taking courses. You won't regret it.

It's like people in IT who went to some technical degree factory and got a certification, compared to those who took apart their parent's computer, figured out how to install Linux, hacked their own drivers and apps, etc.
by ericmay | 2026-01-31 17:37:33+00:00
> Decoupling is expensive, for everyone, but there's legit security reasons to do it anyway. This is only bad at the level of "we are sad about this" rather than "we are now at war". There is a huge gap between these two things.

Agreed, which is why the United States is decoupling from China and pivoting militarily away from Europe. If war is coming with China we won't be able to help much in Europe, and with European militaries outside of probably the UK and to some extent France and Poland needing massive overhaul, it's of the utmost importance that European military spending increase and training if Europe is to defend itself from Russia.

My point is that it's the hypocrisy that I at least find grating.

> The incentive is "Greenland is part of the nation of Denmark, which is party to a mutual defence pact with two or three nuclear powers".

Those nuclear weapons are irrelevant, they'd never be used against the United States, and they'd certainly never be used in the event that the United States seized Greenland. Europe also would not go to war, and has no ability to resist the United States seizing Greenland. I don't think we should, to be clear, and I disagree with our current president's baboonish and disgusting behavior toward our allies, but any assessment to the contrary of what I wrote purely from a military point of view is just fantasy.
by sowbug | 2026-01-31 17:37:46+00:00
"... go into college ..." makes it sound like more of an active decision than it is for many students who treat it as four more years of high school. It's not surprising that such students might pick a major that sounds more fun (movies!!) than subjects they already find tedious (more math, more history, more foreign language).

I wish I'd taken a year off after high school to get a job and at least pretend to earn a living. I wonder whether I might have embraced college more if I had.
by rubenflamshep | 2026-01-31 17:38:01+00:00
I'm in the same loop where I find the more access I give it to systems and feedback mechanisms the more powerful it is. There's a lot of leverage in building those feedback systems. With the obvious caveat about footguns :P

Gave one of the repos a star as it's a cool example of what people are building with AI. Most common question on HN seems to be "what are people building". Well, stuff like this.
by albert_e | 2026-01-31 17:38:22+00:00
This is sane advice but maintaining strong internal engineering and IT teams is not everone's cup of tea; even organizations gthat intend and try to do this cannot achieve it -- and furthermore the big cloud operators have spent millions of dollars spreading the gospel that the only correct way to survive and build is to migrate to cloud and use their lego building blocks.

A lot of the justification for moving away from own datacenters and heavy in-house engineering teams actually makes sense to organizations of many shapes and sizes. If the core business is not technology -- it is hard to stay invested in a in-house cloud-agnostic engineeringc capability.

The world has more or less accepted this reality and adopted the services like S3 and managed databases, and tight integration with the likes of Microsoft Entra/Purview/Sharepoint/O365 etc for ready-to-use business integrations. Prying organizations away from taht convenience is going to be hard. But the current environment cretaed due to lack of trust in US could the strongest motivator ever to push businesses and nations in that direction. I reckon it will be a long and painful process though.
by varispeed | 2026-01-31 17:38:34+00:00
That analogy misses the asymmetry in claims and power.

Microsoft does not sell Windows as a sealed, uncompromisable appliance. It assumes a hostile environment, acknowledges malware exists, and provides users and third parties with inspection, detection, and remediation tools. Compromise is part of the model.

Apple’s model is the opposite. iOS is explicitly marketed as secure because it forbids inspection, sideloading, and user control. The promise is not “we reduce risk”, it’s “this class of risk is structurally eliminated”. That makes omissions meaningful.

So when a document titled Apple Platform Security avoids acknowledging Pegasus-class attacks at all, it isn’t comparable to Microsoft not listing every Windows virus. These are not hypothetical threats. They are documented, deployed, and explicitly designed to bypass the very mechanisms Apple presents as definitive.

If Apple believes this class of attack is no longer viable, that’s worth stating. If it remains viable, that also matters, because users have no independent way to assess compromise. A vague notification that Apple “suspects” something, with no tooling or verification path, is not equivalent to a transparent security model.

The issue is not that Apple failed to enumerate exploits. It’s that the platform’s credibility rests on an absolute security narrative, while quietly excluding the one threat model that contradicts it. In other words Apple's model is good old security by obscurity.
by zbentley | 2026-01-31 17:38:46+00:00
Yeah no…many things are synchronous. I think you’re tilted about the fact that many things are “synchronous*” and that there can be important nuance hidden within the asterisk, but plenty of stuff is synchronous by default.

TCP connect(3) is synchronous. Making a directory on a local filesystem is synchronous. fsync(2) is synchronous. Committing an RDBMS transaction is synchronous.
by solatic | 2026-01-31 17:39:25+00:00
US stock market index funds will crash when the US stock market crashes. That will require very large sums of capital to decide to move away from US capital markets. To give an idea of how much money would need to move - VTSAX alone is about $2.1 trillion, with hundreds of billions of dollars of shares of each Mag7 stock.

You basically need the world to decide that EMEA/JAP markets are collectively stronger than the US stock market, and to collectively move their capital outside the US to be deployed in EMEA/JAP. Moves away from Mag7 to US value stocks will be captured by the US stock market index funds; moves into commodities will be seen as opportunities to buy the dip before a market rebound. You can view attempts by US private equity to purchase real estate as attempts to hedge against overvaluation in US markets, but if the US has another Great Depression, those real estate purchases won't be able to fetch high rents or prices anyway.

In short, just follow the normal advice, which is not to put all your money into US domestic stocks, but to also purchase foreign stock market index funds, which help to hedge against the risk of the entire US stock market crashing. In the long run, US index funds are still a good investment - US courts still are quite powerful to settle contract disputes, the US does not have capital flight controls, and American business culture is still one of the hardest working, greediest forces on the planet - a Great Depression v2 would not change that.
by semilin | 2026-01-31 17:39:57+00:00
It can be both. I went through a very similar experience with school -- it was miserably boring to me, and I found solace in valuable and educational experiences I sought out myself at home. In this way I empathize strongly and I agree that the schooling system is massively flawed in this regard.

Still, from my just-as-anecdotal observations, it seems to me that social media addiction exacerbates the issues. I and many peers of mine fell out of reading for fun around the beginning of high school, and this was due in part to both technology and burnout from school. Screen addiction can be an obstruction to activities that one actually loves doing, just as school can.
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-31 17:40:00+00:00
I wish I could just get photos out of iCloud. The iCloud app ok windows doesn’t work period. Authentication issues, taking up CPU but not actually doing anything, and creating empty files that are just shells for what’s in the cloud.

It is so absolutely terrible that I think it is purposeful. But if I could get it all, I could consolidate into something else. Either way, it’s frustrating enough that I’ve stopped buying apple.
by colechristensen | 2026-01-31 17:40:03+00:00
This is such a weasel question because you can keep saying whatever was new was "just technology" not pure discoveries.

No, there hasn't been any big "new physics" since the standard model in the 70s, everything has been refinement and specifics. You can't go to Walmart and buy something that couldn't exist unless we knew the precise mass of the top quark or the Higgs boson.

There have been a tremendous amount of developments and technologies that have come out of CERN with varying degrees of closeness to particle physics, but depending on who you're talking to, most of them don't count.

>(Specifically, "discoveries", not technology developed in support of the research)

Ok, but Tim Berners-Lee was working at CERN when he created HTTP, HTML, etc.

The Internet through web browsers as you know it was created at CERN in order to enable scientific communication and collaboration.