MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by MereInterest | 2026-01-24 20:18:19+00:00
Google will lock you out of an account even if you remember your password. This happened to me, when Google decided to use the recovery email address for 2FA, locking me out of my primary account. And the exact same change was made to my recovery account, at the same time. As for the recovery email of my recovery emails address, it was with a company that hadn't existed for over a decade, and no longer existed.
by ctoth | 2026-01-24 20:18:21+00:00
I agree with this. Any time I make a plan I have to go back and fill it in, fill it in, what did we miss, tdd, yada yada. And yes, I have all this stuff in CLAUDE.md.

You start to get a sense for what size plan (in kilobytes) corresponds to what level of effort. Verification adds effort, and there's a sort of ... Rocket equation? in that the more infrastructure you put in to handle like ... the logistics of the plan, the less you have for actual plan content, which puts a cap on the size of an actionable plan. If you can hit the sweet spot though... GTFO.

I also like to iterate several times in plan mode with Claude before just handing the whole plan to Codex to melt with a superlaser. Claude is a lot more ... fun/personable to work with? Codex is a force of nature.

Another important thing I will do is now that launching plans clear context, it's good to get out of planning mode early, hit an underspecified bit, go back into planning mode and say something like "As you can see the plan was underspecified, what will the next agent actually need to succeed?" and iterate that way before we actually start making moves. This is made possible by lots of explicit instructions in CLAUDE.md for Claude to tell me what it's planning/thinking before it acts. Suppressing the toolcall reflex and getting actual thought out helps so much.
by UncleMeat | 2026-01-24 20:19:15+00:00
Everything makes much more sense when you realize that the conservative project is not about universal application of rights. It is a system of hierarchies. They have rights. We do not. They can carry firearms. We are violent maniacs trying to massacre cops (according to Bovino) and deserve what's coming.

The 2nd amendment was more about suppressing slave revolts than liberating slaves.
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | 2026-01-24 20:19:26+00:00
Yeah. Actually, as I read it, I'm not sure if the robot is running WebRTC or not (In my comment I assumed it was)

But yeah it would be much more predictable for everyone if the robot didn't use WebRTC or the fancy logging library, and there was a WebRTC shim on the laptop to get the visuals into a browser.

The longer I think about that 10 ms control loop, the more I hope they aren't running any WebRTC thing on the same hardware cores as the control loop.
by boltzmann-brain | 2026-01-24 20:19:57+00:00
i disagree with that stance. an open source project is made up of contributions by dozens, maybe thousands of people, and they almost always only contributed to that one specific repository under that one specific person's control due to game theoretical processes that are mostly random, such as first-mover advantage, schelling points, etc. the collective effort of those people usually far outweighs what the controlling person usually contributed to ostensibly earn this sort of privilege. if talking about a FOSS repository, that person cannot be correctly described as "the owner" of that work, as the work is owned by the public, i.e. anyone who is provided access to the code. the person you are describing is merely the current maintainer of the project and the fact that most of the work they are maintaining is not theirs, but comes from the public, and is meant for the public, immediately puts a burden of responsibility on them of acting in a way that is much better than "a project owner have the right to be dismissive about anything regarding their own project" - a mode of operation which, if you pull in all the considerations i presented here, sounds childish. a much better way is to talk about this like you would about an old watch: you are merely maintaining it for future generations. that puts you in a more humble and less combative mindset.
by ninkendo | 2026-01-24 20:20:35+00:00
> it's easy to see the very real authoritarian bend of comfortable professionals who are smart but also in favor of, say, summary execution of people for protesting

There’s that rhetoric I’m talking about! Thanks for giving a perfect example.

For topics like these, the expectation is that everyone comes in here and expresses sufficient levels of outrage. After all, if you’re scrolling through all the posts showing these awful things, you should have built up the requisite level of outrage by now, so if you post anything other than “HN is obviously ok with executions”, you must be one of them and therefore further evidence that these comfortable professionals are complacent and pro-murder.

The nuanced takes are nowhere to be found, because people who might want to come into these discussions with it, see the rhetoric being tossed around, and think “nope, this is all toxic, no way I’m joining in”, flag it, and move on.

But you can look at that exact situation (people flagging the post) and conclude “yup, the person doing the flagging is okay with executions.” It’s wild.

The sad thing is that there is a nuanced discussion to be had here. In fact it’s critical to this country’s survival that we are able to navigate our way through this. But this discussion, this navigation, needs to happen in small groups, where we can actually engage face-to-face. When we can see each other’s humanity, and know that the other person isn’t a monster, and doesn’t want to see innocent people die any more than you do. Where we can dissect each other’s viewpoints carefully.

None of that is really possible in online forums, because the group think is real, and the rhetoric destroys nuance, destroys compassion, destroys the ability to find common ground. It’s sheer toxicity.
by plasticsoprano | 2026-01-24 20:20:52+00:00
I mean, you didn’t give it enough time. All of these cloud storage platforms are databases at their core. When you delete the file you’re updating the database entry, the data (and the record of it) is still there until their purge process runs, which could be days or weeks.

If it’s still there at a month I’d be surprised and be checking terms of service to see what they commit to.
by drzaiusx11 | 2026-01-24 20:20:54+00:00
Having a viable alternative to the KHTML-lineage engines (blink/webkit) besides Gecko will be a boon for the web.

I haven't been super happy with Mozilla's management of Firefox, although it's my daily driver and a great browser. I just don't have super high confidence it'll be viable long term from a corporate standpoint, especially since it's largely been payrolled by Google which makes Blink, so having another real alternative would be great. Having a sustainable, grassroots community project in Servo makes me have hope again (after Mozilla dropped the ball on them...)
by ronsor | 2026-01-24 20:21:53+00:00
> Or worse - you have a nice trademark for your business or product, and google managed to turn 91% of "URL bars" through "web standards" and unilateral control / anti-competitive practices, turn these into "Google search". You type in Anthropic and instead of seeing their homepage, you see ads for ChatGPT. 50% of Google's revenue is trademark taxation.

This is preposterous. You'd see ads for Gemini, not ChatGPT.
by Negitivefrags | 2026-01-24 20:21:58+00:00
It's quite interesting to me the way that different "programming cultures" exist around debuggers.

If you grew up doing windows C++ development, looking at things in a debugger is your first step. You only resort to printing values if you can't immediately see what happened in the debugger.

A lot of other envioronment/language cultures are the opposite. Obviously both have their place, but I do feel like more people should use the debugger as the first step instead of the last.
by kirlts | 2026-01-24 20:22:26+00:00
OP here.

I built Witral to solve a specific bottleneck in my workflow: the friction of mobile capture.

I like the idea behind PKMs like Obsidian, but I know that I am never going to commit to writing structured notes periodically, like a "Second Brain" demands. That friction is small, but enough to kill the habit for me.

However, I'm already on WhatsApp 24/7, and constantly write quick notes and reminders in a group that only has me as a member. So instead of forcing myself to be more disciplined, I built the infrastructure to turn my existing chat stream into a structured CLI for my notes.

It's a self-hosted Docker container (Node.js/TypeScript). It can connect to WhatsApp via the included Baileys based plugin (or any messaging service, if someone develops an appropiate plugin), listens for tags in specific groups (like `,,idea` or `,,buy`), and writes standard Markdown files to a local volume (which I sync to Drive).

It’s 100% deterministic. I don't want an LLM summarizing my thoughts or hallucinating context when I'm focused on raw data preservation.

It runs in the background. I manage the system via chat commands in monitored groups (`,,menu`) without needing to SSH into the server.

Ingestion and Storage are decoupled. Currently supports WhatsApp -> Local FS + Google Drive (optional), but it's designed to be agnostic to both messaging services and cloud sync providers.

It's open source (MIT). I built it for my own sanity, but releasing it here in case others face the same friction.
by getpost | 2026-01-24 20:22:46+00:00
> it's hard to translate it into Chinese.

It's a text about non-duality, among other things. Like the Heart Sutra, or the Diamond Sutra, or 101 Zen Stories, it's not supposed to make sense in an ordinary way. A successful translation is, like the original, intended to catalyze a shift in awareness.

EDIT: For those with a nerdy or scholarly bent, I suggest Red Pine's translation[0], which includes translation of historically relevant commentaries.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Lao-tzus-Taoteching-Lao-Tzu/dp/155659...
by jakelazaroff | 2026-01-24 20:23:03+00:00
> Another source (https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/man-tackled-by-ice-in-chao...) gives another claim from the same police chief:

>> "The officers attempted to disarm the suspect but the armed suspect violently resisted. More details on the armed struggle are forthcoming."

You've misread your link. The "violently resisted" quote is from a tweet by DHS, not local police: https://xcancel.com/DHSgov/status/2015115351797780500
by superb-owl | 2026-01-24 20:23:40+00:00
To call Le Guin’s version of the Tao Te Ching a translation is misleading—she knew little Chinese. Le Guin leaned heavily on existing translations, alongside her intuition for Taoist philosophy.

From the her postscript:

> This is a rendition, not a translation. I do not know any Chinese. I could approach the text at all only because Paul Carus, in his 1898 translation of the Tao Te Ching, printed the Chinese text with each character followed by a transliteration and a translation. My gratitude to him is unending.

For the interested, the original paperback contains diligent notes about her sources and word choices.

I also reference Le Guin's rendition a bunch here: https://superbowl.substack.com/p/taoism-minus-the-nonsense
by t00 | 2026-01-24 20:23:45+00:00
We do similar but sprints are somewhat flexible, more like versions. We chuck the features we want from the top of most needed, split into stories and estimate like you mentioned using brainstorming between devs and QA. Estimation happens by relatively comparing complexity of each new story compared to previously implemented stories, conservativy picking average one up if there is variance in estimates. QA is involved to determine how long it will take to test the feature or sometimes what uncertainty is there if this is even possible automatically.

In the end we have stable developer velocity metric and a really close estimate for each new version.
by donatj | 2026-01-24 20:24:04+00:00
My company gave out nice plaques for ten year anniversaries. As my anniversary neared I frankly got really excited to receive mine.

My manager started a couple months before myself, and a colleague started a couple months later. We still work together all our anniversaries in a line.

My manager got his plaque and showed it off. I patiently awaited mine.

When my 10 year anniversary came around we were in the middle of being acquired. It seemingly got lost in the fuss. My anniversary came and went. Zero acknowledgement beyond an automated email and some points towards the company store. No plaque.

When my colleague's 10 year anniversary came around a few months later and he got an even nicer plaque than my manager AND a small celebration...

I'm not one to usually express anger or disappointment, but I got salty and maybe said some things I shouldn't have. I'm frankly still salty and it's five years later.

I feel a little childish but I just wanted a plaque. I waited ten years for my plaque. My wife had offered to make me one.

My fifteen year anniversary is coming in a few months. We'll see if anything comes of it.

The little things are more important than they seem.
by mothballed | 2026-01-24 20:24:25+00:00
The bundies had a whole militia, and the last time federal LEO challenged a militia of his size (Waco) they had like 700+ casualties due to inspiring McVeigh (he was there). They basically lost 20:1 versus the Davidians.

Cliven Bundy is still grazing his cattle on that BLM land to this day.
by _dain_ | 2026-01-24 20:24:43+00:00
>Not crashed, not erroring, just... vibing. Sitting there. Motors off. Completely checked out.

>Doesn't crash. Doesn't throw. Just ghosts me.

>Same freeze. Same spot. Iteration 1,615. Every single time.

>It's not slow. It's not starved. It's blocked.

>The Reveal

>That's it. That's the fix. 8 hours of debugging. 2 lines changed. Hold the lock for less time. Tale as old as time.

>The Takeaways

>[the way the bulletpoint list is formatted]

pure AI slop. i'm appalled that this obvious garbage is on the frontpage. you even got the title from GPT, didn't you?
by mindslight | 2026-01-24 20:24:48+00:00
> Courts tend not to take kindly to "hacking attempts" like this

Yes, because law is generally defined in terms of intent, knowledge, and other human-level qualities. The attempt to "hack around" the specific prompt is irrelevant because the specific prompt is irrelevant, just like the specific weight of paper a contract is printed on is irrelevant - any contract could define them as relevant, but it's generally not beneficial to do so.

> There's an "apparent authority" doctrine of agency law I'd encourage you to study

Sure, but this still relies upon an LLM agent being held out as some kind of bona fide legal agent capable of executing some legally binding agreements. You're essentially saying there is no way to run a software program without extending it the legal authority to form legal contracts on your behalf. I'd call this a preposterous attempt to "hack around" the utter lack of intent on the part of the person running the program.
by moribvndvs | 2026-01-24 20:25:14+00:00
I’ve long felt estimations are a negotiation. It’s not as much about how long it will take or how much it will cost, but what do you really need and what can you afford. Kinda like I’m helping someone buy a car based on their needs and budget, I’ll put together 3 “trim line” options:

1. Economy (bare functionality, prefer low cost and fast delivery over reliability and longevity)

2. Mid tier (good enough quality and reliable but no frills)

3. Luxury (all the bells and whistles)

The business will want all the bells and whistles of 3 but also the pragmatism of 2 but the budget and timeline of 1. So, they don’t actually pick themselves, I choose for them based on the circumstances and we negotiate the finer points.

Devs can gold plate the shit out of any project, but having a plan for #1 is helpful when shit hits the fan and the business needs you to pivot. More than that, it’s useful during the negotiation to illustrate the ramifications of shortcuts. It’s helped me more than a few times to avoid some really stupid decisions from panicking PMs and execs.
by crazygringo | 2026-01-24 20:25:35+00:00
A day is crazy. In my experience, retrospective takes about 30-60 minutes, and estimation is usually 1.5-2 hours.

Does it take time? Sure. But what's the alternative? Not doing it is even worse, because you wind up with these endless never-finished "features" that turn out to be 20x harder than anyone thought, that engineers have sunk months and months and months into...
by lurk2 | 2026-01-24 20:25:52+00:00
> Haiket doesn't even try to hide its connection to Meta. All you have to do is to go to their website, click on press, and see in the only press release they've ever posted that its CEO holds patents in use by Meta. […] Alex holds over 10 patents in voice and communication technologies, assigned to and used by Google and Facebook.

How does this imply he has any connection to Meta? Companies license patents all the time.
by pron | 2026-01-24 20:26:30+00:00
This is my problem with the whole "can LLMs code?" discussion. Obviously, LLMs can produce code, well even, much like a champion golfer can get a hole in one. But can they code in the sense of "the pilot can fly the plane", i.e. barring a catastrophic mechanical malfunction or a once-in-a-decade weather phenomennon, the pilot will get the plane to its destination safely? I don't think so.

To me, someone who can code means someone who (unless they're in a detectable state of drunkenness, fatigue, illness, or distraction) will successfully complete a coding task commensurate with some level of experience or, at the very least, explain why exactly the task is proving difficult. While I've seen coding agents do things that truly amaze me, they also make mistakes that no one who "can code" ever makes. If you can't trust an LLM to complete a task anyone who can code will either complete or explain their failure, then it can't code, even if it can (in the sense of "a flipped coin can come up heads") sometimes emit impressive code.
by fragmede | 2026-01-24 20:26:33+00:00
It would be, if it were true. I'm not going to cast the entirety of a very large community in a single light, but there are great deal of people in the open source community who are afraid of money, or more specifically, that someone else might be making some, especially using open source code that they didn't personally hand write.

Another symptom is most projects don't have an easy way to donate money to them.
Ask HN: Would you trust an AI coworker with shell access to your infrastructure?
by doctornemesis | 2026-01-24 20:27:02+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been experimenting with an idea that I’m honestly not sure is brilliant or completely reckless.

Tools like Claude, Cursor, and Copilot can already:

read files

run terminal commands

edit code

And they’re incredibly useful for development work.

It made me wonder: what would the equivalent look like for infrastructure engineers?

I’m prototyping an “AI coworker” that can:

read logs

run shell commands

inspect system state

check Kubernetes

read/edit config files

query internal APIs

The goal isn’t a chatbot. The goal is this:

You say: “The API is failing. Find out why and fix it.”

And the agent goes through the same loop an SRE would:

observe → hypothesize → run commands → verify → fix.

But this raises a lot of uncomfortable questions.

Cursor/Claude can technically already run commands if you let them — so why is this a bad idea? Or is it?

I’m trying to understand the boundary between:

“This would be insanely useful for debugging and ops”

and

“This is how you take down production at 3am”

Before I go too far building this, I’d really like to hear from people who run real systems:

Would you ever try something like this?

Where would this be useful vs unacceptable?

What safeguards would you absolutely require?

What tasks would you want this for?

What makes this fundamentally different from just giving Cursor terminal access?

I’m early, testing this only on a local docker-compose setup with a few services. Just trying to sanity-check the idea with people who’ve been on call.
by colechristensen | 2026-01-24 20:27:08+00:00
There are three things:

* Your terraform code

* The state terraform holds which is what it thinks your infrastructure state is

* The actual state of your infrastructure

>Why don't cloud providers have a nice way for tools like TF to query the current state of the infra?

What a terraform provider is is code that queries the targeted resources through whatever APIs they provide. I guess you could argue these APIs could be better, faster, or more tuned towards infrastructure management... but gathering state from whatever resources it manages is one of the core things terraform does. I'm not sure what you're asking for.
by input_sh | 2026-01-24 20:27:19+00:00
Eh, there's no specific definition of interoperability written in the Digital Markets Act. It's decided on a case-by-case basis and I'm sure that the legislators in charge of this case will push back on this piss-poor implementation in like a year from now.

By the time this back-and-forth reaches its end, these two will find some shady b2b customers and are gonna be touted as "successful European startups".
by thrance | 2026-01-24 20:27:32+00:00
Polio was a deadly disease, paralyzing thousands of children for life, every year. Vaccines were seen as a blessing to the first generation that got them.

And now, people who've never opened a history book can confidently claim they are useless, and that polio disappeared on its own so vaccines were never required, and are even harmful! Fuck that particular brand of ignorance.
by dangus | 2026-01-24 20:27:36+00:00
I think it may be as long as 180 days, but I haven’t found anything super specific from Apple.

Remember that Apple’s typical customer is non-technical. Keeping files in case of a catastrophic deletion is safer for their customers.

They want to give the person who calls them up and says “I deleted all my family photos 31 days ago!” A good experience.
by jauntywundrkind | 2026-01-24 20:28:03+00:00
The json here is to ease the machine's ability to generate UI, but reciprocally it feels like this could also be a useful render tree that ai could read & fire actions on too.

There's some early exploration of using accessibility APIs to empower LLM's. This feels like it's sort of also a super simple & direct intermediate format, that maybe could be a more direct app model that LLMs could use.

More broadly it feels like we have a small forming crisis of computing having too many forms. We had cli tools, unix. Thenw we made gui's, which are yet another way to involve tools (and more). Then webapps where the page is what expresses tools (and more). Then react virtualized the page, supplanted dom. Now we have json that expresses views & tool calling. Also tools need to now be expressed as MCP as well, for ai to use it. Serverless and http and endless trpc and cap'n proto and protobuf ways to call functions/invoke tools. We keep making news ways to execute! Do we have value that each one is distinct, that they all have their own specific channels of execution, all distinct?
by Tadpole9181 | 2026-01-24 20:28:49+00:00
The guy was filming ice, they started pushing some other person so he got in between them. They threw him to the ground, where three men pinned his hands down. Another pulled out his pepper spray can, then started beating the victim in the face repeatedly.

At the same time, a fifth agent pats him down. He finds a gun (legally purchased and the MN police have said he was permitted to carry). They remove the firearm and walk away.

Then one of the officers yells "he has a gun" and shoots him point blank. Then another officer fires, which looks to kill him and he drops face-down and the officers back away. Finally, one more pulls out his firearm and puts 9 into the back of the victim's corpse - guaranteeing he can't be saved