MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cryptica | 2026-01-07 11:30:52+00:00
Yes LLMs aren't very good at architecture. I suspect because the average project online has pretty bad architecture. The training set is poisoned.

It's kind of bittersweet for me because I was dreaming of becoming a software architect when I graduated university and the role started disappearing so I never actually became one!

But the upside of this is that now LLMs suck at software architecture... Maybe companies will bring back the software architect role?

The training set has been totally poisoned from the architecture PoV. I don't think LLMs (as they are) will be able to learn software architecture now because the more time passes, the more poorly architected slop gets added online and finds its way into the training set.

Good software architecture tends to be additive, as opposed to subtractive. You start with a clean slate then build up from there.

It's almost impossible to start with a complete mess of spaghetti code and end up with a clean architecture... Spaghetti code abstractions tend to mislead you and lead you astray... It's like; understanding spaghetti code tends to soil your understanding of the problem domain. You start to think of everything in terms of terrible leaky abstraction and can't think of the problem clearly.

It's hard even for humans to look at a problem through fresh eyes; it's likely even harder for LLMs to do it. For example, if you use a word in a prompt, the LLM tends to try to incorporate that word into the solution... So if the AI sees a bunch of leaky abstractions in the code; it will tend to try to work with them as opposed to removing them and finding better abstractions. I see this all the time with hacks; if the code is full of hacks, then an LLM tends to produce hacks all the time and it's almost impossible to make it address root causes... Also hacks tend to beget more hacks.
by kdpsuite | 2026-01-07 11:31:29+00:00
You were absolutely right. Took until Jan 5th, but it's resolved now and we're in final review.

Lesson learned: Start platform account setup way earlier than you think you need to. Bank verification alone ate a full week during what should've been launch prep.

Appreciate the grounded advice. Sometimes you need someone to tell you to breathe and keep working while you wait.

Campaign goes live this week. 1,185 lifetime founding spots for a KDP self-publishing SaaS suite. Built the whole thing on library WiFi with $0 budget.

If anyone's interested in the "how I built this with nothing" story or the campaign mechanics we're using, happy to share once we're live.
Show HN: Unified multimodal memory framework, without embeddings
by k_kiki | 2026-01-07 11:31:46+00:00
Hi HN,

We’ve been building memU(https://github.com/NevaMind-AI/memU), an open-source, general-purpose memory framework for AI agents. It supports dual-mode retrieval: classic RAG and LLM-based direct file reading.

Most multimodal memory systems either embed everything into vectors or treat non-text data as attachments. These work, but at scale it becomes hard to explain why certain context was retrieved and what evidence it relies on.

memU takes a different approach:
since models reason in language, multimodal memory should converge into structured, queryable text, while remaining fully traceable to original data.

---

## Three-Layer Architecture

- Resource Layer
Stores raw multimodal data as ground truth. All higher-level memory remains traceable to this layer.

- Memory Item Layer
Extracts atomic facts from raw data and stores them as natural-language statements.
Embeddings are optional and used only for acceleration.

- Memory Category Layer
Aggregates items into readable, theme-based memory files (e.g. user preferences, work logs).
Frequently accessed topics stay active; low-usage content is demoted to balance speed and coverage.

---

## Memorization
Bottom-up and asynchronous.
Data flows from resources → items → category files without manual schemas.
When capacity is reached, recently relevant memories replace the least used ones.

## Retrieval
Top-down.
memU searches category files first, then items, and only falls back to raw data if needed.
At the item layer, it combines BM25 + embeddings to balance exact matching and semantic recall, avoiding embedding-only imprecision.

Dual-mode retrieval lets applications choose between:
- low-latency embedding search, or
- LLM-based direct reading of memory files.

## Evolution
Memory structure adapts automatically based on real usage:
- Frequently accessed memories remain at the Category layer
- Memories retrieved from raw data are promoted upward and linked
- Organization evolves from usage patterns, not predefined rules

Goal: keep relevant memories retrievable at the Category layer and minimize latency over time.

---

## A Unified Multimodal Memory Pipeline
memU is a text-centered multimodal memory system.
Multimodal inputs are progressively converted into interpretable text memory, while staying traceable to original data.
This provides stable, high-level context for reasoning, with detailed evidence available when needed—inside a memory structure that evolves through real-world use.
by Yizahi | 2026-01-07 11:31:52+00:00
Most of the sites use dark patterns in the banners, from not presenting decline option to hiding and renaming it to be unrecognizable. For example I make an effort in always picking Decline All option if available and the practice shows that I click on Allow All in about 20-30% of all banners, because it was impossible to avoid. So I safely assume that general population clicks Allow All even more.
by Draiken | 2026-01-07 11:31:56+00:00
I guess we can't win, can we? I worried more about random developers getting compromised since the surface area is much larger, but at the same time one entity compiling all packages makes them a more attractive target.

We've seen the released bundles being different to the source code before too AFAIR, so whether it's a single repository or F-Droid, both can easily screw users up if compromised.

I don't want to be paranoid but the world's not making it easy.
by redhale | 2026-01-07 11:32:09+00:00
> It's not like there was some fixed pool of work to be done and you just had to hire enough to exhaust the pool.

I'm my opinion you are failing to consider other bottlenecks, a la the theory of constraints.

An analogy: Imagine you have a widget factory that requires 3 machines, executed in sequence, to produce one widget.

Now imagine one of those machines gets 2x-5x more efficient. What will you do? Buy more of the faster machines? Of course not! Maybe you'll scale up by buying more of the slower machines (which are now your bottleneck) so they can match the output of the faster one, but that's only if you can acquire the raw material inputs fast enough to make use of them, and also that you can sell the output fast enough to not end up with a massive unsold inventory.

Bringing this back to software engineering: there are other processes in the software development lifecycle besides writing code -- namely gathering requirements, testing with users (getting feedback), and deployment / operations. And human coordination across these processes is hard, and hard to scale with agents.

These other aspects are much harder to scale (for now, at least) with agents. This is the core reason why agentic development will lead to fewer developers -- because you just don't need as many developers to deliver the same amount of development velocity.

The same logic explains (at least in part) why US companies don't simply continue hiring more and more outsourced developers. At a certain point, more raw development velocity isn't helpful because you're limited by other constraints.

On the other hand, agentic development DOES mean a boon to solo developers, who can MUCH more easily scale just themselves. It's much easier to coordinate between the product team, the development team, the ops team, and the customer support team when all the teams are in the same person's head.
by Pluviobyte | 2026-01-07 11:32:21+00:00
This is a genuinely useful idea. Non-technical founders often need visibility into progress, but existing tools either require engineering context or produce noisy dashboards. Translating commit and PR history into plain-English summaries feels like a practical middle ground, especially for investor updates and changelogs. Curious how well it handles larger repos and distinguishing “busy work” from meaningful product progress.
by kypro | 2026-01-07 11:32:41+00:00
Are you saying this from experience?

We have a large monorepo at my company. You're right that for adding entirely new core concepts to an existing codebase we wouldn't give an AI some vague requirements and ask it to build something – but we wouldn't do that for a human engineer either. Typically we would discuss as a team and then once we've agreed on technologies and an approach someone will implement it relying heavily on AI to write the actual code (because it's faster and generally won't add dumb bugs like typos or conditional logic error).

Almost everything else at this point can be done by AI. Some stuff requires a little support from human engineers, but honestly our main bottlenecks at this point is just QA and getting the infra to a place where we can rapidly ship stuff into production.

> You need to know what's happening and you can't ship straight AI code.

I think there is some truth to this. We are struggling to maintain a high-level understanding of the code as a team right now, not because there is no human that understands, but because 5 years ago our team would have probably been 10-20x larger given the amount we're shipping. So when one engineer leaves the company or goes on holiday we find we lose significantly more context of systems than you historically would with larger teams of engineers. Previously you might have had 2-3 engineers who had a deep understanding of a single system. Now we have maybe 1-2 engineers who need to maintain understanding of 5-6 systems.

That said, AI helps a lot with this. Asking AI to explain code and help me learn how it works means I can pick up new systems significantly quicker.
by kachapopopow | 2026-01-07 11:32:53+00:00
unrealistic expectations or double decker economy where you can't even sit down. I believe that overvalue their time - there's a lot of things you can do during flights including sleeping and SpaceX providing near gigabit of Ethernet over the Atlantic further reduces the need for these solutions. VR is also being heavily used to review designs 'in person', anyone that genuinely needs to be at the right place at the right time probably has a private jet already.

I might be an outlier as someone who is never in a rush to live their life.
by TrackerFF | 2026-01-07 11:33:11+00:00
My prediction of how a hostile takeover would work out - i.e. all US offers to purchase Greenland are flat rejected:

0. USA invades Greenland by shipping thousands of troops there, Denmark does the same. I don't believe there will be any direct conflict, but rather that US simply declares they now control Greenland.

1. Denmark invokes a number of NATO articles, immediately.

2. NATO crisis, all members meet in hopes to work it out.

3. Trump won't budge. USA uses their veto right on all possible interventions. NATO still stands, but is at this point in complete turmoil, and effectively toothless.

4. Allies of Denmark, probably EU too, puts pressure on the US to step back. Economic sanctions against US.

5. Sanction war starts between USA and parts of western Europe.

6. Congress does not authorize Trumps use of military, and Trump must withdraw within 90 days.

7. Trump vetoes this. Pulls the "make me" card when threatened. Trump argues that he can use funds as he wishes, dragged to court. The case is fast-tracked to supreme court.

8. If US economy crashes, Trump might be successfully impeached and removed. If not, he'll just continue.

9. Cold front between US and Europe. China tries to strengthen economic ties with Europe to fill the gap that has been hit by US sanctions. Who knows what Russia does - likely a new European military organization has grown out of this.

10. Eventually Trump leaves office, a sooner or later a new democratic president takes over, and reverses everything. Gives back Greenland to Denmark, does everything to mend relations with Europe.
by mikkupikku | 2026-01-07 11:33:47+00:00
Honestly I barely see the use of this, I've ""needed"" to read a twitter thread like once in my life, I can't imagine needing it so often that a dedicated extension makes sense.

Also, I only adopt new browser plugins very sparingly, because the chance of some random extension getting bought out by a shadowy ad and malware firm is way too high, and Mozilla doesn't assure me with the level of vetting they do (nonexistent, compared to F-Droid or any mainstream linux distro.) Why is this such a problem for Mozilla? They even try to make it difficult to get extensions from anybody but them, so a third party extension store that actually does due diligence is basically off the table. I can't even install extensions straight from a developer's github, which wouldn't be as good as a trusted 3rd party repo, but still better than Mozilla's status quo. In fact, so called userscripts loaded through one trusted extension actually feel a lot safer than normal extensions.
by bwb | 2026-01-07 11:33:52+00:00
Sweet, thank you!

No, you are right, that isn't built yet. We are building the full app now. The rough beta is coming at the end of this month for early testers (hit me up at ben@shepherd.com if you want to be on it). It will include the TBR, logging, and search pieces. It won't have website integration yet, but we will keep fixing bugs and adding features. Aiming for a full public launch end of this year, but that is very rough.
by mcny | 2026-01-07 11:34:16+00:00
And if it is plugged in to the wall, I'd be tempted to add a touch screen display and a camera just in case.

But really my use case is as simple as

1. Wake word, what time is it in ____

2. Wake word, how is the weather in ____

3. Wake word, will it rain/snow/?? in _____ today / tomorrow / ??

4. Wake word, what is ______

5. Wake word, when is the next new moon / full moon?

6. Wake word, when is sunrise / sunset?

And something similar like that
by flanked-evergl | 2026-01-07 11:34:23+00:00
I promise you if Europe kicked Russia out of Ukraine, the threats about Greenland would never have happened. US sees Europe as some child that has overstayed it's welcome at home. This relationship we have with US is not good for us, and if it is good for the US they can't see how. We need to stand on our own feet, we can and should be stronger than the US and Russia combined.
by abeer_kheir | 2026-01-07 11:34:30+00:00
Remote: Yes

Time zone: GMT+1

Willing to relocate: no

Technologies: Figma, Photoshop, Illustrator, Webflow, Webflow CMS, Framer, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/12zE6SFt3KzGXKUeDkk0gT_Qacf9...

Email: abirkheir57@gmail.com

I’m a junior front-end developer and web designer currently open to new opportunities. I specialize in building clean, responsive, and user-friendly interfaces, with a strong eye for visual design and usability.

If you’re looking for someone reliable who cares about both design and code, feel free to reach out. I’d be happy to share my portfolio, past work, or do a short intro call.

You can contact me at: [abirkheir57@gmail.com]

Thanks!
by polotics | 2026-01-07 11:35:13+00:00
Sure, the Melian order of the world is something one could consider as always there. Still, how much of Thucydides still applies when cheap drones, nuclear MAD, and environmental tragedy-of-the-commons are taken into account?

https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2025/04/the-realists-gr... ...
by chris_j | 2026-01-07 11:35:24+00:00
In my father's accent/dialect (South Wales), the number seven is monosyllabic: it sounds more like "sevn" (with the v pronounced quite softly). The number "eleven" is similarly monosyllabic, and sounds more like "levn". I often use this when counting to a rhythm. Shame the numbers from thirteen onwards do have more than one syllable.
by IshKebab | 2026-01-07 11:36:32+00:00
> Whether it is an improvement is debatable.

Not really.

> it is an improvement in some aspects and a significant step back in others

Of course. Very few improvements are better in every way. There's always something you can find to like about the old solution. Horses are friendlier than cars. Records allow bigger artwork than CDs. Unlike DVDs (at first anyway) you can write to VHS. Unlike Typescript, Javascript doesn't need a compile step. FORTRAN77 fits nicely on punch cards.

That doesn't mean there's really any serious debate about them being improvements.

I will freely admit that Rust has only average compile time (though it's better than C++ at this point), high complexity, and async Rust is full of footguns. But I could come up with a much longer list of complaints for C.

> we must stamp out memory safety issues at all cost and Rust is the solution

Yeah I think memory safety is actually probably not the most important thing about Rust. Having a modern strong type system is arguably more significant. Memory safety is important too of course - even if you don't care about security memory safety issues are often plain hard to debug bugs.
by megous | 2026-01-07 11:36:47+00:00
If it's a proper devkit it should have accessible and documented test points for all voltage rails and should have come with a complete schematic. It should be possible to go through them with a voltmeter or oscilloscope and see if everything looks ok.

Given the symptoms (random crashes not right away at boot), and given that qcom is anal about secure boot, my guess is that it's unlikely that it's a firmware (in SPI-NOR or wherever) corruption that initially caused this. Firmware is checked each boot.

Might be as simple as degraded capacitor, or something similar.

And I can imagine that it's not hard to destroy this kind of HW physically with a SW update. PMICs can often produce voltages way higher than Vmax of connected components. But it's unlikely that if bug like that happened, that it would only affect one devkit out there, and not a whole range of devices.
by maest | 2026-01-07 11:36:50+00:00
> even if their recommendations on baby sleep are impossible

If you put yourself in their shoes, you realise that you have to give advice for the 10-20th percentile parents (or worse) because you are giving the same advice to everyone.

The alternative would be to offer more complex advice such as "if X Y and Z then do A, if only X do B", but the perception is that's too difficult for people to follow.

So you end up making very defensive (and therefore onerous) recommendations.

An interesting fact is that, since the introduction of the "baby sleeps on their back, alone", SIDS has gone down, but flat heads have gone up. It's probably been a good tradeoff, but it's still a tradeoff.

Also, I've seen a second time mother refer to "don't cosleep" advice as "western nonsense" which I found funny because it puts things in perspective - vast swathes of the world think cosleeping with your child is safe, natural and normal.
by metalman | 2026-01-07 11:37:01+00:00
there is good reason to believe that mineral prices would have to climb 30% above current prices and stay there, before greenland's resources would become profiable, which in the scenario bieng presented, would then also have to cover the 600 million/yr subsidy that Denmark currently provides to Greenland.
there are only two active mines there, both very specialised, and quite small on a tonage basis and a handfull of somewhat promising sites that could be developed useing conventional technology, the rest is speculative, and will remain that way, sitting under miles of ice. Speaking of specualtion, it is so cold on top of the ice sometimes that people have suggested that there the possibilty of CO² ice forming naturaly, but there is no way for humans to get to those places, so it will remain an esoteric debate for now.
by cryptica | 2026-01-07 11:37:09+00:00
But that trust is often backed by nothing. Especially if you don't own assets; then from that perspective money is really working against you and is backed by pure coercion... But coercion is not an asset and it doesn't have net positive value; at least not to the victim.

It has value from the perspective of the oppressor I guess... I think this is where it derives its value.
by oneeyedpigeon | 2026-01-07 11:37:47+00:00
> does everything to mend relations with Europe.

As a European, I don't think the relations can be fully mended, especially if points 0-9 come to pass! Even where we stand right now, I want my government—in conjunction with other European countries—to be planning for a long, slow process of decoupling our dependency on the US.
by Cthulhu_ | 2026-01-07 11:37:49+00:00
> It makes me think, "What am I even doing here - Why not just let the product manager prompt the LLM?".

It feels different if you replace "LLM" with "outsourcing". Thing is, instructing a team of software engineers what you want is a lot more work (they need a lot more handholding), a lot more expensive, and a lot slower. But I'd argue that the work is the same - writing specifications, adjusting accordingly. Minus the human factor.

LLM coding agents won't kill software development as a job, but it will affect outsourcing and agencies as an industry. Of course, outsourcing companies will / are using it too.
by saubeidl | 2026-01-07 11:38:18+00:00
I hate X, its anti-user patterns and how its oligarch owner uses it to manipulate discourse to steer society towards his right-wing extremist views.

That being said, many public figures have not made the same judgement and post their communications there.

Should I just stop informing myself on the public discourse because the place it happens got taken over by a shady character?

I think using code to liberate the discourse from its would-be manipulator is the most reasonable thing to do and a reflection of true hacker ethics.
by rsynnott | 2026-01-07 11:39:08+00:00
> And yet something like half the country supports all of this.

It looks like 30-40%; at _this_ point people are likely seeing this as a proxy for "do you support Dear Leader, and all his works", rather than really a poll on Venezuela. If Trump ate a live baby on TV he'd still get like 30% approval on that act in polls.

That said, that may change if it gets messy. See Iraq War, public approval and subsequent disavowal of approval thereof. Very hard to find anyone who will admit to having supported that these days, but at peak about 70% of Americans polled did. That support for this Venezuela thing is _already_ so low is a fairly bad sign for it.
by aebtebeten | 2026-01-07 11:39:17+00:00
Thanks to HN, a little time ago I learned that my original conception of the Monroe Doctrine (donroe mocktrine?) was overly simplistic. Yay HN!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41564406

(who'd want to invade IE anyway? They have no culture beyond a pair of shite gaelic rappers and they're so backward they still travel on horseback: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljPFZrRD3J8 )

EDIT: and thank you HN for introducing me to Comrade Chuān Jiàn Guó. It is to laugh, slimy Terrie:
https://static04.hket.com/res/v3/image/content/2780000/27836...