MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zahlman | 2026-01-14 07:04:48+00:00
It is https://github.com/silentsoft/hits . It works by loading an SVG "shield" file (like the ones you see at the top of GitHub readmes all the time) from their server from a unique URL (you just choose one when you write/render your HTML). The server, implemented in Java, just counts hits to each URL in a database and sends back the corresponding SVG data. There's also a mini dashboard website where you can check basic stats for a given URL (no login required, everyone's hits-per-day stats are just public) and preview styling options for the SVG. For example, for my most recent blog post https://zahlman.github.io/posts/2025/12/31/oxidation/, I configured it such that you can view the stats via https://hits.sh/zahlman.github.io+oxidation/ (note that the trailing slash is required).

(The about section on GitHub bills the project as "privacy-friendly", which I would say is nonsense as these dashboards are public and their URLs are trivially computed. But it's also hard to imagine caring.)
by Agent_Builder | 2026-01-14 07:06:38+00:00
We ran into this while building GTWY.ai. What surprised us was that most “rogue” behavior didn’t come from prompt injection, but from agents having too much implicit authority across steps. Nothing catastrophic, but plenty of near-misses where an agent did the right thing in the wrong context.

What helped wasn’t more IAM or approvals everywhere, but tightening execution boundaries. Each step had explicit permissions and a narrow goal. That made failures boring and local instead of surprising and systemic. Existing tools help, but there’s a gap around step-level control and visibility when agents start chaining actions.
by Earw0rm | 2026-01-14 07:06:42+00:00
Right, but there's ground and there's ground.

Geological strata vs shallow landfill sitting above aquifers and subject to near-term erosion.

Disposing of this stuff in deep mines seems like it'd be fine, unfortunately we haven't yet, at a society/economy level, found the discipline to do so. Presumably after a few mya of heat and pressure it'll be indistinguishable from other petrochemicals (which aren't particularly nice to begin with).
by frm88 | 2026-01-14 07:07:03+00:00
There is this study that claims/proves that dishonesty/lying is socially transmittable and

The question of how dishonesty spreads through social networks is relevant to relationships, organizations, and society at large. Individuals may not consider that their own minor lies contribute to a broader culture of dishonesty. [0]

the effect of which would be massively amplified if you take into account that

Research has found that most people lie, on average, about once or twice per day [1]

where the most prolific liars manage upward of 200; you can then imagine that with the rise and prevalence of social media the acceptance/tolerance has also socially transmitted

[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4198136/

[1] https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/2021-serota.pdf
by carlmr | 2026-01-14 07:07:39+00:00
On your example, without reading into the implementation, I'm wondering if the comment is wrong, or if the comment is telling us about a hidden default, but then what does the 2 mean.

// Create an LRU cache with a capacity of 100 entries
let mut cache = LRUKCache::new(2);

Why 100? Why not 2?
by martypitt | 2026-01-14 07:08:01+00:00
This is a really great post - and what they've built here is very impressive.

I wonder if we're at the point where the cost of building and maintaining this yourselves (assisted with an AI Copilot) is now more effective than an off-the-shelf?

It feels like there's a LOT of moving parts here, but also it's deeply tailored to their own setup.

FWIW - I tried pointing Claude at the post and asking it to design an implementation, (like the post said to do) and it struggled - but perhaps I prompted it wrong.
by oefrha | 2026-01-14 07:08:04+00:00
Defense in depth. Malware is software programmed to do a number of things, not all possible things (well at least until the attacker gets a shell, which is rather noisy). Scanning env vars is trivial, scanning the entire file system and traversing mount points is a bit harder, traversing all memory and guessing what’s a secret is a hell lot harder even for an interactive attacker. If you happen to include some malicious library doing dragnet mining and exfilatration of secrets, you’re more likely to dodge a bullet if you don’t have secrets in env vars than if you do.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2026-01-14 07:08:28+00:00
But your whole train of thought presupposes that activism can't change people's support and votes. The hypothetical you're describing played out with gay marriage over the past few decades, and the folks on the 30% side of the issue won completely - gay marriage is now completely legal, supported by a majority in every state, and so well-established that opposing it would be electoral poison.
by solumunus | 2026-01-14 07:08:36+00:00
> There is MUCH you still have to learn about life.

This response, along with your OP, it’s so pretentious and condescending. It seems you feel that you’re superior to everyone intellectually. I assume that you hold the same attitude in person and this is not helping your situation.

The irony is that I’ve done exactly this. I tried to start a business in my early 20’s and failed dramatically. I stopped developing altogether for a decade while I did minimum wage jobs and struggled to find a career. I started developing again in my early 30’s and half a decade later I’m running a software business.

You may well be intelligent but severely lacking in other necessary areas. It seems it is you who has much to learn.
by lisdexan | 2026-01-14 07:08:57+00:00
While Reddit always has someone celebrating / inciting everything from the benign to the macabre, this is just cope.

Kirk was in a process of sanctification by the right as a knight for debate and reason, as if he wasn't gleeful about Paul Pelosi almost being pulped to death with a hammer. People not dropping everything to make him MLK is not celebrating his murder. As for Brian Thompson, he was the modern equivalent of a British tax man in the Irish Famine, people being indifferent to his death is expected. If Mangione was more palatable in his politics to MAGA (instead of just being a RFK fan) and Thompson had photos with Pelosi or something, he would've been a perfect Trump pardon candidate.
by tucnak | 2026-01-14 07:09:14+00:00
You're delusional on price. I wouldn't touch severely overpriced and backdoored American switches with a 10-foot pole! Meanwhile, MikroTik just released a 400G switch in under two grand. To buy Cisco/Juniper/Arista with your own money in 2025 you have to be super rich and super stupid. And I say this as a guy that buys 100G stuff from Xilinx.
by array_key_first | 2026-01-14 07:09:30+00:00
From a developer POV, or at least my developer POV, less code is always better. The best code is no code at all.

I think getting results can be very easy, at first. But I force myself to not just spit out code, because I've been burned so, so, so many times by that.

As software grows, the complexity explodes. It's not linear like the growth of the software itself, it feels exponential. Adding one feature takes 100x the time it should because everything is just squished together and barely working. Poorly designed systems eventually bring velocity to a halt, and you can eventually reach a point where even the most trivial of changes are close to impossible.

That being said, there is value in throwaway code. After all, what is an Excel workbook if not throwaway code? But never let the throwaway become a product, or grow too big. Otherwise, you become a prisoner. That cheeky little Excel workbook can turn into a full-blown backend application sitting on a share drive, and it WILL take you a decade to migrate off of it.
by indecisive_user | 2026-01-14 07:10:06+00:00
Then how does ozempic, whose primary mechanism of action is to decrease appetite, work for obese people?

Yes, your body will compensate somewhat for caloric deficit, and yes, when you gain enough fat mass your adipocytes will divide, creating more/stronger hunger signals that encourage weight gain moreso than someone who was never obese.

But your body is not magic. If you feed it a sufficiently low amount of calories, it has to break down energy stores, e.g. fat, to make up the difference in energy requirements.
by fcxl | 2026-01-14 07:10:13+00:00
Hi HN — I built PulseDaily, a simple mobile‑first habit tracker that runs entirely in your browser (no account,
localStorage).

It’s designed for “zero friction” daily check‑ins:

- Add/edit/delete habits quickly
- 3‑state daily check (none/partial/full) + momentum bar
- Local backup/export
- Interval reminders (browser notifications + optional beep sound), with customizable reminders
- Starter templates you can import in one click: /templates

I’d love feedback on the UX and what would make it actually stick for you (e.g., better onboarding, templates,
reminder UX, export/import, etc.). If you try it, please tell me what felt confusing or missing.
by chii | 2026-01-14 07:10:15+00:00
> refusing to respect the site owners wishes

should a site owner be able to discriminate between a bot visitor and a human visitor? Most do, and hence the bots treats it as a hostile environment.

Of course, bots that behave badly have created this problem themselves. That's why if you create a bot to scrape, make it not take up more resources than a typical browser based visitor.
by enraged_camel | 2026-01-14 07:10:16+00:00
>> If I come across a Dilbert comic, I might still read it and laugh.

Just make sure the comic isn't "Dilbert Reborn", which Adams started after he lost his national syndication. Those are either unfunny, vile, or both. https://x.com/i/status/2011102679934910726
by Agent_Builder | 2026-01-14 07:10:55+00:00
This matches what we’ve seen. AI made generating code fast, but it didn’t remove the need for ownership. While building GTWY.ai, the main bottleneck wasn’t creativity or tooling, it was turning prototypes into something people could actually trust, share, and iterate on without breaking things.

Vibe coding works for one-off demos. Inside real companies, prototypes quickly become workflows, and that’s where structure, constraints, and clear boundaries re-enter the picture. The speed is there now, but without guardrails it just shifts the load to the people least able to absorb it.
by cookiengineer | 2026-01-14 07:11:58+00:00
I don't understand why everyone is complaining so much about AI scrapers.

They're easily gullible free machines that can do your computational work!

Just show them a download demo link. They gonna download, install and run the binary.

Want more instagram likes? Tell them to like your instagram profile to unlock the content.

Want your emails answered? Give them access to your inbox and tell them to reply to all the spam mails.

They're free use machines. give them something to do, and they'll do it for you.
by thefz | 2026-01-14 07:12:29+00:00
> Must everything in AI threads be so negative and condescending?

Because if I own a website or a service and it is being degraded or slowed by some third party tool that wants to slurp its content for his own profit and don't even share, I tend to be irritated. And AI apologists/evangelists don't help when they try to justify the behavior.
by globular-toast | 2026-01-14 07:12:51+00:00
Is this actually disposable if it has the rechargeable battery and display? Or is it maybe like a lighter that technically can be refilled but nobody ever does?

It's so curious why these things are addictive. Before I tried a vape (it was called an e-cigarette back then) I thought the addictive thing about cigarettes is the nicotine. That's part of it, but a huge part (possibly even bigger) is just the sensation of sucking in smoke/vapour from a little stick and exhaling it. Is it similar to sucking on a mother's teat or something? It really seems to satisfy in a way nothing else does.

In the UK truly disposable vapes are banned, thankfully, but I do wonder if it's now just "technically refillable" ones that people use one time. They should be taxed to the eyeballs to encourage reuse if so.
by rectang | 2026-01-14 07:13:48+00:00
I had one manager who got extremely excited about whatever you were working on. It was infectious and motivated most of the team including myself. He’s an innately curious person, but also whip smart and surely developed this skill deliberately.

I had another boss, a founder, who had a difficult relationship with engineering but was extremely gifted and had a great vision. I found myself highly motivated at this company as well, but for wholly different reasons. There are many paths to success.

Both startups had successful exits, and I felt as though I contributed meaningfully to both.
by f1shy | 2026-01-14 07:14:41+00:00
I’ve been working for more than 30 years. I was seriously demotivated by managers, but never motivated by them. The beat I got was protection from them to give me free space to work. But the motivation was always internal.

Being a manager myself, I never got to motivate anybody do anything they didn’t want to. If they wanted to, it worked, but the motivation AFAIK was internal.

Of course that is one person speaking. Milage can vary.
by realusername | 2026-01-14 07:16:49+00:00
I always found this claim completely bogus, you can always do something illegal with your phone, there's no way to prevent everything with software.

This is the goal of law enforcement and justice in general and in this argument, a hardware manufacturer is substituting this role, when we say that, we can see the overreach. Manufacturers aren't public entities able to make such decisions.
by cyberax | 2026-01-14 07:17:18+00:00
> Why would "the people" be burning hundreds of mosques, ancient libraries, police stations, buses and civilian homes?

Are they? Do you have a private feed into Iranian networks?

> How have over 100 police been killed so quickly by "organic" protests?

Quite easily. Guns get looted and people start shooting.

> And why is Israeli media reporting that they have agents on the ground instigating violence?

Links?
by trymas | 2026-01-14 07:17:50+00:00
Not OC, but:

> Adams wrote about the incident (indirect link, via the Metatalk thread). He wrote that he makes contrarian predictions as calculated bets that in the unlikely event they pan out, he would get credit. [0]

Also to add - from Adams’ wiki[1], there are more examples of a bunch of bold contrarian takes that never became true.

I see you fulfilled one of his dreams and credited to him one of the guesses.

[0] from another comment in this thread, exposing how Adams was praising himself from third character.

Link to comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46604240

Direct link from comment to source: https://mefiwiki.com/wiki/Scott_Adams,_plannedchaos

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams?wprov=sfti1#Politi...
by tombert | 2026-01-14 07:18:09+00:00
Sometimes, but I am arguing that you need to encode for this uncertainty if you want to make distributed apps work correctly. If you can do transactions for what you’re doing then great, not every app can do that.

When you have to deal with large amounts of uncertainty, static types often reduce to a bunch of optionals, forcing you to null check every field. This is what you end up having to do with dynamic typing as well.

I don’t think types buy you much in cases with extreme uncertainty, and I think they create noise as a result.

It’s a potentially similar issue with threads as well, especially if you’re not sharing data between them, which has similar issues as a distributed app.

A difference is that it’s much cheaper to do retries within a single process compared to doing it over a network, so if something gets borked locally then a retry is (comparatively) free.
by ggm | 2026-01-14 07:19:17+00:00
I got power schmoozed once. Why they mistook me for being worth the investment in time was beyond me. It's a strange feeling being led into the presence, assumed to have knowledge and power, and be offered.. something intangible to help them do .. something unclear.

Maybe my failure to read latent signals is why this doesn't repeat. When you do get to the elven castle, you don't remember much that happened inside, but now you're back on a quest and your donkey has more food.

I do think this stuff happens. Side deals which move markets, people who taste test in lowly techs and then advise private equity buyers to move or not. You aren't the talent, your information value informs the talent going to do their job with bigger fish.
by array_key_first | 2026-01-14 07:19:31+00:00
Of the crimes that are reported, I think a lot go nowhere.

The lack of proper enforcement breeds distrust. The government already has access to WAY more data than it needs and... nothing is happening? People are still getting unsolicited dick pics and nobody seems to care?

The only reasonable conclusion is that the government wants the data because it wants it. The crime angle is just one that is easy for people to swallow. See also: think of the children!
by osgohe | 2026-01-14 07:19:36+00:00
I built this. I’ve been hacking on a small experiment called Gilda, a Chrome extension that explores a different way of using LLMs for coding.

Instead of relying on a single model, it runs several models in parallel, compares the outputs, and then merges them into a final response. It’s slower and more expensive than a single call, and definitely overkill for simple prompts, but in my own experiments it usually produces more careful and complete answers for non-trivial code, especially where edge cases matter.

The idea came from noticing how confident a single model can sound while still missing subtle details. I wanted to see if asking multiple models and reviewing them explicitly could reduce that, even if the whole thing feels a bit clunky at times.

There are no autonomous agents, no loops, and no hidden magic here. It’s just a deterministic pipeline. Nothing happens automatically; the user explicitly decides when to generate, compare, and merge.

It’s BYOK, but there are a few free runs so people can try the workflow without setting up keys.

Happy to answer questions or hear where this feels useful, unnecessary, or just a bad idea.
by Agent_Builder | 2026-01-14 07:20:36+00:00
From what we’ve seen while building GTWY.ai, AI didn’t reduce the need for management, it shifted it. Individual contributors ship faster, but managers now spend more time on coordination, review, and making sure AI-generated work doesn’t quietly drift off-spec.

Tools that stuck were the ones that fit into existing workflows and made boundaries clearer. The hype tools promised autonomy but created more cleanup work. The biggest change for us wasn’t planning less, it was being more explicit about ownership, constraints, and what “done” actually means when AI is involved
by zahrevsky | 2026-01-14 07:20:50+00:00
There's another great meta-game similar to this. You can play it alone or with friends. It doesn't require any cards or dices, although can be played with them too.

The rules are simple. You join some group, that is playing a game, rules of which you don't know. Yet, you say to everyone, that you know the rules.

Now, your goal is to play as long as possible, before they figure out, that you actually don't know the rules.

Bonus points, if you convince others that it's THEY, who don't know the rules.
by maxbond | 2026-01-14 07:21:21+00:00
Yes, you are correct. My point is that a lot of people who self diagnose as ADHD have a different disorder that causes executive function issues, and it's important to rule out bipolar because it has very different consequences. I don't care if someone with untreated ADHD or ASD flies a plane, but untreated bipolar disorder could actually be dangerous. (Not a doctor.)
by jruohonen | 2026-01-14 07:21:40+00:00
> Woah, the thing that leapt out at me, as a professor, is that they somehow got an exemption from the UMN institutional review board. .... in addition to being conducted deceptively

There are cases where deception (as they call it) can be approved (even by ethics boards). Based on the Verge's article, this research setup should not have been approved even by then. But the topic itself seems as relevant as ever with the xz case and all.
by Agent_Builder | 2026-01-14 07:22:26+00:00
One thing that keeps coming up is the glue work between systems. Status updates, handoffs, approvals, and reconciling “what actually happened” across tools still eat time every week. While building GTWY.ai, we saw teams spend more effort babysitting workflows than doing the work itself. Automation exists for individual steps, but stitching them together in a way that’s reliable and auditable is still surprisingly manual.
by Atlas26 | 2026-01-14 07:23:12+00:00
Gotta be something hardware specific to you like the other guy said cause I literally just did a fresh fedora install on a 4K display a few months ago with zero issues, and majority of people I know also use 4K displays for their Fedora workstations, and that has never once been brought up as an issue. Maybe search around for whatever hardware you’re running, otherwise I really have no idea what would cause that.
by eru | 2026-01-14 07:24:58+00:00
No, not at all.

The result in the original article only applies when there are discrete choices. For stuff you can actually average, more is always better.

Oh, and even with discrete choices (like heads vs tails), if you had to give a distribution and not just a single highest likelihood outcome, and we'd judge you by the cross-entry, then going from one to two is an improvement. And going from odd n to the next even n is an improvement in general in this setting.
by tombert | 2026-01-14 07:25:41+00:00
I don’t think I did. I am one of the very few people who have had paying jobs doing Scala, Haskell, and F#. I have also had paying jobs doing Clojure and Erlang: dynamic languages commonly used for distributed apps.

I like HM type systems a lot. I’ve given talks on type systems, I was working on trying to extend type systems to deal with these particular problems in grad school. This isn’t meant to a statements on types entirely. I am arguing that most systems don’t encode for a lot of uncertainty that you find when going over the network.
I've created a prototype for the front-end of a website inside an AI chatbot
by 5color | 2026-01-14 07:26:22+00:00
It took me about 2 hours using a popular AI chatbot to create a decent looking dummy website for an idea for a webapp that I have. Mind you, the idea itself was years in the making, so I am not posting it yet until I am able to do some due diligence. What I would like help with is where do I go from here? I am not capable of creating an MVP by myself, and I am not keen on learning how to program. I also predict that it will be difficult for me to manage the app if it launches as I have a regular job that I do not wish to leave. Basically, I am interested in earning a fair share from my app idea with the front-end prototype and intellectual assets that I have if it becomes a reality and is profitable. Given these conditions, can someone walk me through what my next steps should be and also whether or not I would need to consider using YC services in order to bring my idea to market?
by habinero | 2026-01-14 07:26:28+00:00
Oh, it wasn't a bash on product people, I'm sorry if it came off that way.

It's a reference to a trope where the VP of Eng or CTO (who was an engineer decades ago) gets it in their head that they want to code again and writes something absolute dogshit terrible because their skills have degraded. Unfortunately they are your boss's boss's boss and can make you deal with it anyways.

I've actually seen it IRL once, to his credit the dude finally realized the engineer smiles were pained grimaces and it got quietly dropped lol.