MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PlatoIsADisease | 2026-01-29 17:26:18+00:00
Conspiracy theory time? Conspiracy theory time.

I think the trillion dollar companies have enough money, they can hire people as 'plants'.

Okay, before this is marked as crazy talk: Historically this has happened, this isnt a new invention. A company needs to survive, not be ethical. Using third parties give plausible deniability.

I look at the atrocious state of LibreOffice, and I'm pretty sure someone from Microsoft is screwing things up. Might just be a little bit of friction and fake concern over a useful change. Maybe they even find someone who already does this and fund it as a full time job.

I look at Firefox, and I wonder if Google somehow is significantly influencing things there. Google keeps Firefox alive to prevent anti-trust. But they make sure funding is diverted from browser to wasteful projects.

When I worked for a fortune 20 company, we had a major, irrational push away from python into Microsoft Power Automate. Other people were convinced either our director was a Microsoft plant, or was getting some sort of kickback.

Here is my question:

What is the business called where people do this? Like if these companies paid a third party, what is this categorized as? (For instance, paying for reddit upvotes and comments is called 'Reputation Management')
by pengaru | 2026-01-29 17:26:42+00:00
Off-topic but curious if you experience this issue my Librem5 exhibits - I use my L5 mostly just to play mp3s. Regardless of being powered over usb-c or running on battery, it frequently has audio blips reminiscent of some old laptops briefly going in and out of deeper sleep states long enough for an audio blip.

Have you noticed something similar? do you listen to music on your L5?

Edit: I should also mention it does this regardless of audio out the internal DAC+3.5mm TRS, or over a USB MBox attached to a dock. It seems to be something quite low-level disabling interrupts for too long, something like that.
by vitlyoshin | 2026-01-29 17:26:45+00:00
One thing that stuck with me from a recent podcast conversation: the biggest value of AI in healthcare isn’t automation, it’s continuity.

Between appointments, people disappear. They say “I’m fine” when they’re not. Traditional surveys flatten complex human stories into numbers.

AI, when used carefully, can listen to people in their own words and give providers context, not decisions, at exactly the moments when intervention matters most.

The insight wasn’t “AI replaces clinicians,” but rather that AI works best as a signal amplifier, not a decision-maker.

Where do you think the line should be drawn between AI assistance and human judgment?
by dzonga | 2026-01-29 17:26:47+00:00
the author thinks the inaccurate population numbers are just an African / 3rd world phenomenon - where dodgy officials inflate | understate numbers due to corruption etc

same mistake - westerners keep on making - mostly of the liberal kind when they don't want to face reality.

all countries have the same problem - whether developed | high trusting | low trusting or not.

observe what happens during elections - now suddenly a rural village it could be in bumwhat Alabama or middle of nowhere Africa - numbers are suddenly inflated -

same thing happens during humanitarian disasters - Side A accuses Side B of atrocities - then side A says XX number of people were killed | displaced - later on down the years we find out Side A made up the number the people would not have up x hell not even large X.

it's just human nature - lie, deceive and make up reality!!
by fullstackchris | 2026-01-29 17:26:53+00:00
This points out a general theory / concept I've been working on for the past few weeks - once software development and decent enough copy writing can be done by the LLM - you are indeed only bottlenecked by your own knowledge / creativity. The LLM, as much other hype is out around there about it is - is still just a latent tool and will do absolutely nothing if you don't interact with it of course!

I see LLMs more and more like a mirror - if YOU can orchestrate high-level knowledge and have a brutally clear vision of what you want and prompt correspondingly, things will go well for you (I suppose this all comes back to 'context engineering' just with higher specificity on what you are actually prompting) turns out domain knowledge, time/experience-built wisdom, and experience in niches, whatever they may be - will and always will be valuable!
by ndriscoll | 2026-01-29 17:26:55+00:00
I'd expect it to actually do better in a large codebase. e.g. you'd already have an HTTP middleware stack, so it'd know that it can just add a layer to that for traces (and in fact there might already be off-the-shelf layers for whatever framework) vs. having to invent that on its own for the bare microservice.
by zipy124 | 2026-01-29 17:27:01+00:00
No it adds up. The latest data [0] shows an average of 3.7 million a day on the subway. For comparison London on the underground has about 2.6 million a day [1]. Given the size of the cities and surrounding areas compared, these numbers seem reasonable. Are you to believe that all these public transport companies are all in some global scheme to fudge their numbers to similar magnitudes? The MTR in hong kong similarly reports 4.45 million a day [2], a similar amount. I'd wager a guess you'd see similar in Paris, Tokyo etc...

[0]:https://www.mta.info/agency/new-york-city-transit/subway-bus...

[1]: https://content.tfl.gov.uk/travel-in-london-2025-consolidate...

[2]: https://www.mtr.com.hk/archive/corporate/en/investor/annual2...
by xyzsparetimexyz | 2026-01-29 17:27:03+00:00
> I debated with Claude endlessly about this selection model, and Claude made me discard a bunch of interesting but less defensible claims. But in the end, I was able to convince Claude it’s a good model

This is not a good way to do anything. The models are sychophantic, all you need to do in order to get them to agree with you is keep prompting: https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/calif-teen-chatgpt-drug-...
Tell HN: Beeper deletes inactive accounts without notice
by kldx | 2026-01-29 17:27:08+00:00
Sending a message from the app counts as activity. If you're a part of a bridged group only for announcements, Beeper deletes your bridged account without notice.

The support did not confirm if using third party matrix clients counts as app activity.

Its really unfortunate that they do not give you a heads up. This restriction is not visible on the Pro pricing as well.
by moribvndvs | 2026-01-29 17:27:28+00:00
> Is this a flaw in the cryptography itself?
No. The underlying cryptographic algorithms (3DES and AES-128) remain secure. The vulnerabilities arise from:

Protocol design choices that allow unauthenticated memory writes after initial authentication
Lack of atomicity when writing cryptographic keys across multiple memory pages
Widespread misconfiguration in real-world deployments (unlocked memory, static keys)
Non-NXP compatible chips with severely flawed random number generators
by htek | 2026-01-29 17:27:31+00:00
Of course it does. And I should have said not just the military, but the government in general. From day 1 he was working to infiltrate government databases and networking. He was having his DOGE lackeys installing Starlink at the White House [0] and buildings of federal agencies he was raiding to exfiltrate PII and sensitive, if not classified, data from to his own servers for likely use to influence American sentiment and target groups or individuals. So says a whistleblower Dan Berulis [1] and a DOGE goon was caught by Secret Service trying to install a Starlink device on the roof of the Eisenhower Federal Building across from the White House [2]. There is absolutely no valid need for a private network operating in parallel with the US government's system. Unless the intent was to avoid detection when exfiltrating data to private systems.

0. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/18/musk-starlin...

1. https://www.npr.org/2025/04/15/nx-s1-5355896/doge-nlrb-elon-...

2. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/doge-roof-elon-musk-st...
by derfurth | 2026-01-29 17:27:31+00:00
In my experience the approach matters a lot, I recently implemented Otel with Claude Code in a medium sized ~200k loc project:

- initially it wasn't working, plenty of parent/child relationships problems like described in the post

- so I designed a thin a wrapper and used sealed classes for events instead of dynamic spans + some light documentation

It took me like a day to implement tracing on the existing codebase, and for new features it works out of the box using the documentation.

At the end of the day, leveraging typing + documentation dramatically constrains LLMs to do a better job
Show HN: KnowledgeForAI – remote MCP for various data sources
by winchester6788 | 2026-01-29 17:27:33+00:00
Hosted (remote) MCP enabling ChatGPT, Claude, and other LLMs or agents to search Reddit, Twitter, App Store, Play Store

I was tired of paying to different services just to be able to search and anlalyze data from different sources. I wanted to analyze appstore and playstore reviews for a category of apps, and saw that multiple startups charge subscription fees for what essentially, should be a pay as you go MCP, to be used with your AI applications.

So, made knowledgeforai.com, with which your AI will be able to access reddit, hackernews, play store and app store reviews, twitter and be able to analyze them

Please do check it out and any thoughts will be appreciated.
by hakanderyal | 2026-01-29 17:27:36+00:00
Anyone that have spent serious time with agents know that you cannot expect out-of-the-box success without good context management, despite what the hyping crowd would claim.

Have AI document the services first into a concise document. Then give it proper instructions about what you expect, along with the documentation created.

Opus would pass that.

We are not there yet, the agents are not ready to replace the driver.
by ASalazarMX | 2026-01-29 17:27:54+00:00
> The "robots will do the manual work" story sounds comforting, but it’s not how automation usually spreads in a capitalist economy like ours. Capitalism automates where the return on investment is easiest and fastest, not where society most needs relief.

Quick question: imagine there's a new commercial robot that can essentially work at your house like a tireless professional maid/butler. It costs as much as a new car, which you're used to change every few years.

Who do you think will profit more in our capitalistic society the car manufacturer, or the robot manufacturer?
by DangitBobby | 2026-01-29 17:28:00+00:00
Ok. I'm comfortable with calling a convenient narrow interpretation and over-simplification of the actions of the secret police force "not what happened" regardless of your play-by-play. Technically correct is not actually the best kind of correct.

And remember, they are called "guidelines" for a reason. But thanks for doing your best at policing the tone here, very important work you're doing.

Trying to tone it down here, I appreciate you are providing an outside perspective but these events are very stressful, like I'm watching my country fall apart, and so are a bunch of us here. So expect some serious vitriol even if you are presenting what you consider factual or reasonable analysis.
by mohitgangrade | 2026-01-29 17:28:14+00:00
Hey HN — I built this after getting tired of vague bug reports like “it’s broken” from users.

FeedbackOtter is a small widget you add to your site. When a user reports a bug, it captures:

- a screenshot of the page

- console logs

- network requests

So you can actually see what happened instead of guessing.

I’m using it on my own SaaS right now and it already saved me a few hours of back-and-forth.

Would love feedback from other devs...
What I found reading Claude's leaked 57K-word system prompts
by jbetala7 | 2026-01-29 17:28:15+00:00
I use Claude Code every day as my primary coding tool — it runs my entire workflow, from building products to automating tasks on a VPS.

When I found this repo (credit to @NotLucknite), I spent a full day reading through the Anthropic folder. The thing that surprised me most wasn't any single rule — it was how opinionated the prompts are. They explicitly tell Claude to disagree with you, never compliment your code, and answer "4" when you ask "what is 2+2."

The security section for the Chrome extension is genuinely impressive — a full injection defense protocol that treats every web page as potentially hostile. I haven't seen anything this thorough from any other AI company.

Happy to answer questions about what I found or how Claude Code works in practice.
by bri3d | 2026-01-29 17:28:19+00:00
> If all they cared for was security, they would have worked with other Android-based operating system vendors that support bootloader locking to come with an industry-wide standard.

Google actually "gave" customers the choice here, although I agree with you that it's crappy and there was almost surely some monopolistic intent -

There _is_ a standard implementation, the Hardware Attestation API. Unfortunately it is annoying to use in a practical way; it requires a fair amount of PKI-wrangling (although there's a Google library for it) and more importantly to allow non-Google trust chains but still enforce boot security, app developers need all of the verifiedBootKey hashes for the non-Google trust chains they want to trust. This makes sense, but unfortunately becomes a maintenance problem and turns app developers off of this.

So, app developers choose the Play Integrity API instead because it's easy, even though they get the side effect that they verify that the device is a licensed Google Play device rather than just a "clean" Android device.

All this is to say that if something like /e/OS were to actually take off, app developers could upgrade their apps to support attestation with the Hardware Attestation API with some extra effort - Google aren't really preventing them and the feature is there.

Anyway, going all the way back to the original story again, I still can't buy into the hand-wringing. A verified, attestable Linux on the server (or for stuff like forward deployed devices) seems quite cool and useful to me, and while I respect the issues with client attestation and the negative effect it can have on hardware ownership, I both don't see it as a practical outcome from this company and don't see it as a practical threat on the desktop at this time.
by blaufuchs | 2026-01-29 17:28:36+00:00
Did I miss something here? Or is Bonesaw just completely trolling?

>The true population of the world, Bonesaw said, was significantly less than 1 billion people.

Even if we assume Bonesaw is correct and China has 500M people, India has 300M people in the cities and 0 rural population... that's only 200M left to reach 1B between all of the Americas/Europe/Africa and the rest of Asia.
by horsawlarway | 2026-01-29 17:28:46+00:00
Firefox is mostly fine despite the actions of Mozilla Corp. Not because of them.

Transparently - I've been relatively deep in the extensions space across every major browser (Chrome/Safari/Edge/Firefox).

Based on my interactions with their browser team during this process - I'm no longer a supporter of Firefox. I want to credit the engineers and support personnel I interacted with there for doing their best despite their company policies, but their policies became insane (And since you mentioned ublock - here's Gorhill, the author, expressing basically the same opinion here: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/issues/197#issueco...)

I won't recommend using it: I don't think it's trying to serve its users, I don't think it's trying to serve their developers. I think it's coasting on historical good will, and it's essentially been on life-support as a cash grab from Google since they laid off their engine team in 2020.

Combined with increasingly non-sensical product releases (ex - this one) and "security marketing" that doesn't match reality... I find the whole thing fairly distasteful at this point.
by btucker | 2026-01-29 17:29:08+00:00
I've been working on https://github.com/btucker/selkie which is a complete implementation of the Mermaid parser & renderer in rust as an experiment in what's possible with Claude Code. It's still rough around the edges, but I've been blown away by what's been possible. (I'm now using it as a test repo for https://github.com/btucker/midtown)

Playground here: https://btucker.github.io/selkie/

One of the cool features is it can use kitty to output diagrams direct to the terminal (if kitty is supported like in ghostty).

I'm planning to blog about the whole process soon.
by PlatoIsADisease | 2026-01-29 17:29:44+00:00
Pretty sure someone at Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic met up at a park, leaving their phones in their car, and had a conversation that January 2026, they were all going to silently degrade their models.

They were fighting an arms race that was getting incredibly expensive and realized they could get away with spending less electricity and there was nothing the general population could do about it.

Grok/Elon was left out of this because he would leak this idea at 3am after a binge.
by gavinray | 2026-01-29 17:29:54+00:00
I think it's difficult to have a serious discussion about consciousness online because it's such a mushy thing to define.

If you follow the line of thinking that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, arising out of complexity, it doesn't seem far-fetched to me to believe that someday in the future, a silicon-based computing machine (rather than a biological, carbon-based computing machine) might be "conscious" -- whatever that means.
by dralley | 2026-01-29 17:30:18+00:00
With all due respect a web browser is much more complicated than a desktop environment. Firefox is like 30 million lines of code, much of which is active attack surface. A high performance JIT JavaScript engine alone might be more complex than KDE. Random people can fix UI bugs and contribute to simple desktop apps in a way that they likely cannot in general do with the deep internals of a browser.
by maaydin | 2026-01-29 17:31:03+00:00
A new update for DanceJump for YouTube just dropped to Edge browsers, with some long-requested features and important fixes. Huge thanks to everyone who’s been reporting bugs and sharing feedback.

What’s New:

- Download & share auto-generated charts
- Keyboard controls updated

Select → B
Start → N

- Start button now joins/leaves the game (instead of start/stop)
- Critical issue where scores reset after ads or when a player left
- Tap-to-beat bugs & countdown display issues
- Chart padding and metadata improvements
- Various bug fixes and onboarding improvements

As always, feedback and bug reports are very welcome. Let me know what you think and what you’d love to see next.
by mothballed | 2026-01-29 17:31:11+00:00
>Doesn't your argument reveal the irrationality of the administrations’ tariff policy?

Yes. Blanket tariffs are one of the few things that almost all economists agree are retarded. Even the extremely right wing ones like Friedman, Mises, Hayek, and Rothbard. Trump basically had to go out of his way to find an economic advisor that actually believed that nonsense.

They destroy investments, benefits of comparative advantage, make war more enticing, and slowly destroy domestic industry by handicapping their incentive for global competitiveness. If it goes on long enough and at high enough rates, there's also a good chance much of trade moves to black market via violent cartels, at which point your protected industries fold because they've never had to compete with the global market -- and then you are really fucked.
by ahf8Aithaex7Nai | 2026-01-29 17:31:22+00:00
> never claimed it to be anything beyond a thinking model I like.

Sorry, but if that's your yardstick for acceptable models of thought, then only nonsense can come out of it. No one has any reason to take any of your thoughts seriously if you don't question your own thinking more critically.

> Why only so few particles get to have that extra neutron and others do not?

This has nothing to do with thermodynamics and even less to do with unfairness. It's a completely meaningless analogy. You might as well just flip it around and say that it's good that so few particles have to carry around that annoying extra neutron, or whatever. If you're going to draw any conclusions about humans from this, you might as well read coffee grounds or clouds or animal bones scattered on the forest floor. That's not thinking!

I have people like that in my personal circle. They're not exactly the brightest minds.

Edit: A queen bee is simply fed in a special way during the larval stage. Ultimately, it doesn't matter which larva is selected for this purpose. That said, it is also wrong to imagine her as an actual queen or as the CEO of the bees. She does not rule over the other bees but is simply responsible for laying eggs. If you wanted to, you could see from this example that your thinking does not proceed from premises to conclusions, but rather begins with conclusions and then rather loosely gathers together premises that might fit.
by roncesvalles | 2026-01-29 17:32:17+00:00
>Where are the missiles?

The scale doesn't seem to be large enough to warrant military action. It seems NK had mostly used it as pocket money for its embassy staff and has now stopped.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdollar#North_Korea:

"The U.S. Secret Service estimates that North Korea has produced $45 million in superdollars since 1989. [...] Since 2004, the United States has frequently called for pressure against North Korea in an attempt to end the alleged distribution of supernotes. It has investigated the Bank of China, Banco Delta Asia, and Seng Heng Bank. The U.S. eventually prohibited Americans from banking with Banco Delta Asia. [...] The United States has threatened North Korea with sanctions over its alleged involvement with the supernotes, though it said those sanctions would be a separate issue from the nuclear sanctions."

>Digital currencies can't be counterfeit.

Yes they can. 51% attack.
by poszlem | 2026-01-29 17:32:38+00:00
That’s one interpretation. Another is that people typically support foundations not simply because they “do good,” but because they advance a specific cause the donor personally values. For example, if I donated to a foundation focused on developing cancer treatments, and that same foundation later shifted its efforts to addressing melting ice caps, I would likely feel frustrated, since that was not the purpose for which I chose to support it, and I don't really care that both actions "do good" in the world.
by WhyNotHugo | 2026-01-29 17:33:02+00:00
apk uses a similar approach by default, and I think it's a wonderful way for a package manager to operate.

Basically, /etc/apk/world keeps a list of explicitly installed packages.

When you manually install a package, it's added to this list, when you manually remove a package, it's removed from the list.

Installation and upgrading (and "fixing) merely ensures that those packages and their dependencies are installed, no more, no less. This also automatically cleans up stale, unused dependencies.

It's a lovely way to get deterministic results. You can just back-up that world file, or copy it to another machine and get the exact same installation.
by hiccuphippo | 2026-01-29 17:33:10+00:00
I'd recommend Chris Titus' winutil to remove most of the crap. I use the recommended settings and also remove copilot and onedrive.
Then from there you can open O&O Shutup10 and disable a few more "features".

It's just a band-aid not a solution, and you'll have to run it again after Windows updates and helpfully undoes your settings, but at least makes it usable.

https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil
by philipwhiuk | 2026-01-29 17:34:05+00:00
These breathy blogposts are getting way ahead of their service uptime. Advertising CF Workers while your CF Worker fleet is under impact is certainly a vibe

> Workers Rate limit Degradation

> Update - We are continuing to work on a fix for this issue.

https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/incidents/dk0d6pjt9vjx