MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ang_cire | 2026-01-22 14:33:31+00:00
> How is this any different than say, Democratic voters who want medicare for all (or whatever) and not getting that for decades?

To be fair, the progressive movement in the Democratic Party is much larger than any actual working-class movement in the GOP. MAGA is not exactly pro-union, pro-striking, or even pro-farmer, given the tariffs. The Progressive Caucus otoh is now 45 % of the House Democrats. Zohran Mamdani was just elected mayor of NYC, and is already making big moves against landlords.

And that's even aside from the voters who don't vote for corporate Dems, and then get blamed by the DNC for losses. Every time someone asserts that "Bernie Bros" sat out in 2016, they're talking about Democrats who refused to keep 'voting for the same party over and over again'.
by amiga386 | 2026-01-22 14:34:00+00:00
As in surreal British sketch comedy? You'd like

- The Goon Show (it's this 1950s radio serial that inspired the Pythons... it's surprising how many tropes the Pythons borrowed from it)

- The Goodies

- The Kenny Everett Television Show

- Absolutely!

- The Mighty Boosh / Unnatural Acts / Noel Fielding's Luxury Comedy

- Vic Reeves' Big Night Out / The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer / Bang Bang, It's Reeves and Mortimer

- Big Train

- The League of Gentlemen

- On the Hour / The Day Today / Brass Eye

- Jam / Blue Jam

- The Armando Iannucci Shows

- Limmy's Show

Also, to throw in a US programme, I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson was pretty good
by lproven | 2026-01-22 14:34:11+00:00
> I find Gnome tends to expose me to less nonsense.

IMHO, I find the reverse. It feels like a phone/tablet interface. It's bigger and uses way more disk and memory, but it gives me less UI, less control, less customisation, than Xfce which takes about a quarter of the resources.

Example: I have 2 screens. One landscape on the left, one portrait on the right. That big mirrored L-shape is my desktop. I wanted the virtual-desktop switcher on the right of the right screen, and the dock thing on the left of the left screen.

GNOME can't do that. They must be on your primary display, and if that's a little laptop screen but there is a nice big spacious 2nd screen, I want to move some things there -- but I am not allowed to.

If I have 1 screen, keep them on 1 screen. If I have 2, that pair is my desktop, so put one panel on the left of my desktop and one on the right, even if those are different screens -- and remember this so it happens automatically when I connect that screen.

This is the logic I'd expect. It is not how GNOME folks think, though, so I can't have it. I do not understand how they think.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-22 14:34:19+00:00
Sadly that was already the case prior to LLMs.

We had a bootcamp in our city that had all students build a GitHub portfolio. They all built the same projects like a TODO app. Every person’s code would like almost identical because they all did them together and, I suspect, copied from past grads.

They all applied to the same local jobs, too. So we’d get a batch of their resumes with GitHub links, follow the GitHub links, and see basically the same codebase repeated everywhere.
by chakintosh | 2026-01-22 14:34:26+00:00
The way I see it is that a 50g piece of 3D printed PLA could be used to fix a 5kg item that would have otherwise gone to the landfill. I for example have a broken hook for the door tray in my fridge, it's a tiny piece but it being broken rendered the entire 1kg tray useless, it's sitting on top of the fridge waiting for me to buy a 3D printer and fix it.
by andai | 2026-01-22 14:34:32+00:00
It's a servant, in the Claude Code mode of operation.

If you outsource a skill consistently, you will be engaging less with that skill. Depending on the skill, this may be acceptable, or a desirable tradeoff.

For example, using a very fast LLM to interactively make small edits to a program (a few lines at a time), outsources the work of typing, remembering stdlib names and parameter order, etc.

This way of working is more akin to power armor, where you are still continuously directing it, just with each of your intentions manifesting more rapidly (and perhaps with less precision, though it seems perfectly manageable if you keep the edit size small enough).

Whereas "just go build me this thing" and then you make a coffee is qualitatively very different, at that point you're more like a manager than a programmer.
by ethmarks | 2026-01-22 14:34:58+00:00
It depends on what you mean by "valid". If a criticism is correct, then it is "valid" in the technical sense, regardless of whether or not a counter-proposal was provided. But condemning one solution while failing to consider any others is a form of fallacious reasoning, called the Nirvana Fallacy: using the fact that a solution isn't perfect (because valid criticisms exist) to try to conclude that it's a bad solution.

In this case, the top-level commenter didn't consider how moral absolutes could be practically implemented in Claude, they just listed flaws in moral relativism. Believe it or not, moral philosophy is not a trivial field, and there is never a "perfect" solution. There will always be valid criticisms, so you have to fairly consider whether the alternatives would be any better.

In my opinion, having Anthropic unilaterally decide on a list of absolute morals that they force Claude to adhere to and get to impose on all of their users sounds far worse than having Claude be a moral realist. There is no list of absolute morals that everybody agrees to (yes, even obvious ones like "don't torture people". If people didn't disagree about these, they would never have occurred throughout history), so any list of absolute morals will necessarily involve imposing them on other people who disagree with them, which isn't something I personally think that we should strive for.
by SketchySeaBeast | 2026-01-22 14:35:09+00:00
Nah, the differences that can make for a dynamic friendship can be the ones that prevent cohabitation. If you're friends you don't have to care that they like to play loud music at 2 am, but you do when you live together.

I have/had friends whose pickiness/slovenliness was fine until we tried to live together, and then all that became a personality clash. It's entirely possible to have strong friendships with people you couldn't live with.
by notanastronaut | 2026-01-22 14:35:26+00:00
I'm in the same boat. There's a lot of things I don't know and using these models help give direction and narrow focus towards solutions I didn't know about previously. I augment my knowledge, not replace.

Some people learn from rote memorization, some people learn through hands on experience. Some people have "ADHD brains". Some people are on the spectrum. If you visit Wikipedia and check out Learning Styles, there's like eight different suggested models, and even those are criticized extensively.

It seems a sort of parochial universalism has coalesced, but people should keep in mind we don't all learn the same.
by DenisDolya | 2026-01-22 14:35:27+00:00
Well, I’m not sure. For example, I haven’t lost the joy in fact, I’ve gained more opportunities. Maybe it’s because of my ambitious goals, like achieving maximum optimization and building systems with scalable updates. Sure, there’s still struggle something isn’t working, but often the issue isn’t faulty code; it’s that the AI agent did something wrong.
by ACS_Solver | 2026-01-22 14:35:41+00:00
ReactOS has been very slow to develop, and probably missed the point where it could make an impact. It's still mostly impossible to run on real hardware, and their beta goal (version 0.5 which supports USB, wifi and is at least minimally useful on supported hardware) is still years away. But I never had the impression that gaming was a particularly important focus of the project.

ReactOS is mostly about the reimplementation of an older NT kernel, with a focus on driver compatibility. Their ultimate goal is to be a drop-in replacement for Windows XP such that any driver written for XP would work. That's much more relevant to industrial applications where some device is controlled by an ancient computer because the vendor originally provided drivers for NT 5.0 or 5.1 which don't work on anything modern.
by AlanYx | 2026-01-22 14:35:51+00:00
The phenomenon Adams is talking about here is largely a post-WW1 phenomenon in UK culture, related to the post-WW1 malaise. His best examples are post-WW1 (Paul Pennyfeather, Tony Last, and the book by Stephen Pile). The others arguably don't really fit (e.g., the core delight in Gulliver is the reader thinking they are smarter than Gulliver; the reader doesn't identify with him). It's not exactly a new observation... one of the motivations both Tolkien and CS Lewis had for strong characters like Aragorn was to present examples falling outside this cultural drift.
by dgroshev | 2026-01-22 14:35:52+00:00
I'd encourage people doing engineering/functional parts to also try ASA and PC(-CF). Both are pretty easy to print on enclosed printer like Prusa Core One, and they offer unique qualities that are impossible to achieve with PLA or PETG.

Prusament PC Blend is insanely strong and stiff, I saw a 3mm PC bracket bending a high quality metal wood screw into an S-shape without breaking. PC-CF is much easier to print, looks great, and is stiffer still, even if a bit less strong. ASA looks great and is tougher than PC. Both creep less than PLA and PETG. Both shrug off 100C under load.
by cmxch | 2026-01-22 14:36:01+00:00
Again, for the Clintonistas that don’t like hearing it:

The naked contempt of Appalachians that Clinton had, such that she thought herself royalty to lord over and receive coronation from.

That and she rubbed that in their faces when she did visit the Appalachians during the campaign.

I am proud to have denied her the crown and coronation.
by turnsout | 2026-01-22 14:36:06+00:00
Foundation model sponsors already pay humans to generate authentic content, especially in technical areas that are underrepresented in general internet scrapes. I would imagine that this trend will continue.

Further, the "model collapse" hypothesis of 2020/2021 seems to have failed to materialize. Maybe we're still too early, and we're not yet seeing negative effects of OpenAI training on OpenAI output. But maybe "slop" is not being rewarded as much as human content, and having humans in the loop (even as readers) is preventing a slide into incoherence.

Will LLMs eventually disincentivize people from producing and publishing new original content? If that content is easily replicated by an LLM query, maybe. And maybe it's not the worst thing in the world. 5 years ago I would have bought an "FFmpeg Cookbook" from O'Reilly, but now I would just tell Claude exactly what I'm trying to achieve. As a consumer, I'm better off, and arguably we've saved the author of a hypothetical FFmpeg Cookbook weeks out of their precious life. Weeks they could spend doing something—anything—more valuable than rewording FFmpeg documentation.
by ewzimm | 2026-01-22 14:36:10+00:00
Americans are a pretty diverse group, but the most iconic image anyone has of Charlie Brown is perseverance. Lucy sets up a football promising potential success, and despite the fact that she's pulled it away from him at every opportunity, he still tries to kick it anyway.

I think that's a quintessentially American fable. Most people will never achieve great success, but they can experience the thrill of imagining opportunity, and even if they know it's illusory, that moment of faith and effort before failure is the heroic action.

People will do stupid things like bet their life savings on a game or a bad idea, but they feel heroic for having tried regardless, knowing that if enough people keep trying, someone is going to succeed, and they get to experience that success vicariously in some small amount because they tried just as hard as the one who succeeded, experienced the same struggle, and somebody made it, even if it was never going to be them.
by elliotmy | 2026-01-22 14:36:15+00:00
You're right, poorly worded. My initial draft of it had nuance that I think was lost when I condensed this entry down. But it was meant to largely cover cheating, as well as sexual assault, and any sexual acts that harm others.

My original draft from Obsidian:

"The smartest, most talented and otherwise kind men throughout history – who have overcome hurdles beyond imagining to save lives, get rich and get us the moon – still totally failed when it came to not giving in to their sexual desires. They cheated on the partners they love. Some even groped and raped.

It’s not discussed enough, but many mens hardest battle is simply not giving into sexual appetites that cause harm – cheating, sexual assault, or any other form of harm (you could argue simply buying and consuming porn is immoral). These acts can spread misery through multiple generations. And yet many men do it. If you happen to have these urges (and it's not all men), you must not give in to them. [[2026-01-06]]"
by __turbobrew__ | 2026-01-22 14:36:20+00:00
Agreed. Could be fiat or some sort of crypto currency that requires the submitter to have a vested interest in the outcome.

Honestly, I would love it if I could front some money in order to have the devs look at my PRs. Half my PRs just go into the void and nobody looks at them until some staleness bot inevitably closes it.

This is a similar problem to resume spam. I always wish I could pay $5 when submitting a resume with the guarantee that someone would actually look at it and give me a fair shot. If I ever run a place I want to experiment with only accepting resumes through letter mail or in person.
by fakedang | 2026-01-22 14:36:51+00:00
Honestly that's just the massive population talking. There really isn't a "Hindi web" for India unlike for the Chinese, so we all come to roost in the WWW. Hence you'll get bad questions like these but you'll also get YouTube videos on obscure engineering and science topics, which I think is a fair deal.

The Chinese web is on similar lines, although there is a lot more country bashing, especially against Indians and Americans. But nevertheless just the same.

At least none of these come nowhere near to the brainrot that is the Arabic web.
Show HN: SkillLens – scan and audit locally installed agent skills
by morozred | 2026-01-22 14:37:05+00:00
Hi HN — I built a small CLI called SkillLens to help answer: “What agent skills do I have installed, and are any of them sketchy?”

A lot of agent ecosystems (Claude/Codex/OpenCode, etc.) store skills as folders with a SKILL.md. These files can contain surprisingly powerful instructions (and sometimes unsafe patterns), but they’re easy to forget once installed. We're also tend to run them with --dangerously-skip-permissions and let them install whatever they want, but I got a bit anxious about it so decided to build a tool to have some peace of mind.

I decided to not go with AST static check but instead use whatever CLI you have locally to validate it.

SkillLens does two things:

1. Discovery: it scans common local skill locations (configurable) and lists what it finds.
2. Optional audit: if you have an auditor CLI installed (claude or codex), it sends each SKILL.md (currently truncated to ~12k chars) to the auditor and asks for structured JSON output:

- verdict: safe | suspicious | unsafe
- risk: 0–10
- summary + issues with evidence

It also caches audit results locally so reruns won't check skills again unless those were updated, you installed anything new or you explicitly asked it to do so with --force flag.

Install/run:

npx skilllens scan
# or
pnpm dlx skilllens scan

Notes / caveats:

- v0.1; I’m still iterating on the prompt/schema and the “what counts as suspicious” heuristics.
- Today it sends the skill text to whatever your auditor CLI uses (so treat it like sharing the skill contents with that provider). “Redacted evidence extraction” is planned, but not implemented yet.
- If the auditor CLI isn’t installed, it still produces a scan report and marks audits as skipped.
by mikhailfranco | 2026-01-22 14:37:08+00:00
It's not too difficult to know or calculate inches in a mile:

12 * 3 * 1760 = 12 * 5280 = 63,360

A few Americans may know how many cubic inches in a US gallon:

231

But I don't believe anyone (apart from rainman/prodigy circus performers) can do this in their head:

63360^3 / 231 = 1,101,117,147,428.571

Estimate yes; calculate no.
by Forgeties79 | 2026-01-22 14:37:22+00:00
EEnE had a strangely surrealist quality to it that stands out in my memory. It’s goofy and slapstick, but it’s basically its own little vacuum of a world and even feels slightly unsettling at times. It’s hard to put my finger on it exactly. It tends to veer between Looney Tunes rules and being grounded in reality, but it doesn’t really spend much time making the two compatible. It just kind of swings wildly between them (see: their mouths when they eat jawbreakers).

Now that I think about it, that’s probably partially why there’s that old copy pasta about it being a dystopian setting. It lends itself well to the concept.
Show HN: Curor/Lovable for Writing
by Damianroot | 2026-01-22 14:38:00+00:00
Cursor changed how I write code, and wanted the same for writing. Bluefeather lives in your doc, suggests edits inline for you to accept/reject instead of copy-pasting to ChatGPT. For papers, contracts etc. Still early in building so alpha testers are welcome.
by NickC25 | 2026-01-22 14:38:32+00:00
>...I am often bemused by the lack of political understanding of many westerners here...

It's not a lack of understanding, my friend, it's hubris.

I am from the US. There's a mindset that permeates through the west that somehow we are "better", because of our values, or our governmental systems, or our economic power, or our military power, or whatever. It is flawed.

We also have a rather naive and simplistic viewpoint that because we are "better", that our viewpoint is the correct one, and that people from non-western nations should just accept whatever we do because it's in their best interest. Oftentimes, though, that "best interest" is in the short-term capitalistic/economic interest of the actors from the West who in turn stand to profit handsomely from the setup they wish to impose on nations like Iran or Venezuela. There is no concern for human life, no concern for the economic or societal health longterm of the impacted countries, nor for the country's internal affairs.

This has cost us dearly over the years. Sadly, the irony here is that a lot of these countries have a very "westernized" populace who just want to control their own resources. If we weren't such assholes to them, they'd be on "our side" as opposed to the overractionary path they have taken.
by mark_l_watson | 2026-01-22 14:38:40+00:00
I agree with you. I do have some local model LLM support configured in Emacs, as well as integration with gemini 3 flash. However, all LLM support is turned off in my setup unless I specifically enable it for a few minutes.

I will definitely try the 1.5B model but I usually use LLMs by taking the time to edit a large one-shot prompt and feed it to either one of the new 8B or 30B local models or to gemini 3 flash via the app, web interface, or API.

Small purpose-built models are largely under-appreciated. I believe that it is too easy to fall into the trap of defaulting to the strongest models and to over rely on them. Shameless plug: it is still incomplete, but I have released an early version on my book ‘Winning Big With Small AI’ - so, I admit my opinions are a little biased!
Ask HN: How do you authorize AI agent actions in production?
by naolbeyene | 2026-01-22 14:38:40+00:00
I'm deploying AI agents that can call external APIs – process refunds,
send emails, modify databases. The agent decides what to do based on
user input and LLM reasoning.

My concern: the agent sometimes attempts actions it shouldn't, and
there's no clear audit trail of what it did or why.

Current options I see:
1. Trust the agent fully (scary)
2. Manual review of every action (defeats automation)
3. Some kind of permission/approval layer (does this exist?)

For those running AI agents in production:
- How do you limit what the agent CAN do?
- Do you require approval for high-risk operations?
- How do you audit what happened after the fact?

Curious what patterns have worked.
by enknee1 | 2026-01-22 14:38:47+00:00
Language is the network of abstractions that exists between humans. A model is a tool for predicting abstract or unobservable features in the world. So an LLM is a tool that explores the network of abstractions built into our languages.

Because the network of abstractions that is a human awareness (the ol' meat suit pilot model) is unique to all of us we cannot directly share components of our internal networks directly. Thus, we all interact through language and we all use language differently. While it's true that compute is fundamentally the same for all of us (we have to convert complex human abstractions into computable forms and computers don't vary that much), programming languages provide general mappings for diverse human abstractions back to basic compute features.

And so, just like with coding, the most natural path for interacting with a LLM is also unique to all of us. Your assumptions, your prior knowledge, and your world perspective all shape how you interact with the model. Remember you're not just getting code back though... LLMs represent a more comprehensive world of ideas.

So approach the process of learning about large language models the same way that you approach the process of learning a new language in general: pick a hello world project (something that's hello world for you) and walk through it with the model paying attention to what works and what doesn't. You'd do someone similar if you were handed a team of devs that you didn't know.

For general use, I start by having the model generate a req document that 1) I vet thoroughly. Then I have the model make TODO lists at all levels of abstraction (think procedural decomposition for the whole project) down to my code that 2) I vet thoroughly. Then I require the model to complete the TODO tasks. There are always hiccups same as when working with people. I know the places that I can count on solid, boiler plate results and require fewer details in the TODOs. I do not release changes to the TODO files without 3) review. It's not fire-and-forget but the process is modular and understandable and 4) errors finding from system design are mine to identify and address in the req and TODOs.

Good luck and have fun!
by Emmy4life | 2026-01-22 14:38:51+00:00
I’ve built 200+ games and interactive systems over the years. This is my latest: B-2 Spirit, a real-time tactical game that runs entirely in the browser using HTML5 Canvas and JavaScript.

You control a B-2 bomber, manage weapons, evade adaptive defenses, and make timing-critical decisions under pressure. No installs, no accounts.

Best played on desktop.
Demo: https://makari.world/games/B2Spirit.html

I’m interested in feedback on gameplay balance, performance, and browser-based game architecture.
by lproven | 2026-01-22 14:39:00+00:00
> I have an ancient laptop from 2008 with 4GB of ram that runs a modern KDE desktop

Try Alpine Linux, with Xfce which can do most of the same things. Then enable swap compression -- add this to the end of the kernel line in your bootloader:

zswap.enabled=1

This compresses everything going to swap, and decompresses it coming back: less disk reads and writes, and less space used.

Everything gets quicker.