MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nobody9999 | 2026-01-26 16:20:43+00:00
>An easy win that should get widespread approval is bolstering the immigration court system. I have dark worries, but I'm still not entirely sure why this administration is whittling away at immigration courts. You'd think they'd want to process asylum applications faster, so invalid claimants could be deported sooner.

Absolutely. Especially since upwards of 80% of asylum claims are denied[0] when they actually get adjudicated. Which usually takes years to happen because there aren't enough immigration "courts."

Provide enough immigration "judges" and "courts" and we could clear up the backlog within a couple years. I'd also point out that while asylum seekers aren't (yet) legal immigrants, they are (based on Federal law[1]) legally in the United States until their case has been adjudicated -- once again arguing for increasing the number of immigration "courts" and "judges." It certainly doesn't argue for hundreds of billions of dollars for a bunch of jackbooted thugs to terrorize citizens and immigrants alike, all to deport fewer people than other administrations who didn't need to shoot citizens to do so. Funny that.

[0] https://www.factcheck.org/2021/04/factchecking-claims-about-...

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1158
by jcalvinowens | 2026-01-26 16:20:44+00:00
mkdir chroot
cd chroot
for lib in $(ldd ${executable} | grep -oE '/\S+'); do
tgt="$(dirname ${lib})"
mkdir -p .${tgt}
cp ${lib} .${tgt}
done
mkdir -p .$(dirname ${executable})
cp ${executable} .${executable}
tar cf ../chroot-run-anywhere.tgz .
by Pxtl | 2026-01-26 16:20:46+00:00
What's surprising is how poor Google Search's transcript access is to Youtube videos. Like, I'll Google search for statements that I know I heard on Youtube but they just don't appear as results even though the video has automated transcription on it.

I'd assumed they simply didn't feed it properly to Google Search... but they did for Gemini? Maybe just the Search transcripts are heavily downranked or something.
by tialaramex | 2026-01-26 16:21:23+00:00
The variation in interpretation is the same, but that's not really an interaction. In a video game you're not just the audience you're a participant. There are other forms of art like that, and they too are difficult to review.

Reading "Blue Prince" [if you're thinking "the book is actually named Red Prince in the game" and you are still playing stop reading this, right now, I'm serious] is a very different experience for a new parent than someone like me. But that's just a variation in interpretation.

In contrast Ascending is a different experience if you've half-arsed it - maybe even somewhat without quite realising what you're doing, versus if you've meticulously planned (as I did) or again if it all came together by chance on the day. A movie could have attempted this pay off but it doesn't land the same as for those three different experiences.
by ripe | 2026-01-26 16:21:23+00:00
For people like me who might be unfamiliar with the craft of digital cutting of vinyl, felt, and similar materials, here's a good article from the New York Times from a decade ago [1].

It summarizes three brands of machines: Pazzles, in Boisie, Idaho, Cricut from Provo Craft in Spanish Fork, Utah, and Silhouette, from Silhouette America in Lindon, Utah, at that time. I believe Pazzles ceased operation in 2020.

[1] For Crafters, the Gift of Automation, By Peter Wayner, Dec. 2, 2009

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/03/technology/personaltech/0...
by tracker1 | 2026-01-26 16:21:34+00:00
I've seen plenty of "standardized" (ie, "Enterprise" applications)... I'd just assume a bespoke hammer that's simple and easy to understand over a complex beast of HammerFactoryFactory to deliver you a builder of custom hammer builders so you get the JobHammer you need as part of the IoC loader platform that is then controlled through a 1.2gb service orchestrator that breaks at 11am every third Tuesday for an hour. When all you need to do is post up a "Help Wanted" poster on a piece of wood.
by SoftTalker | 2026-01-26 16:21:42+00:00
I buy the "warm" light LEDs, which look (to my eye) closer to incandescents.

Standard LEDs bulbs are bright white, almost bluish, and yes "bright but not illuminating" describes them well. I feel many modern car headlights have the same issue.

The human eye doesn't focus the blue end of the spectrum very well.
by digiown | 2026-01-26 16:22:13+00:00
The apps/use cases for which such standardized and opinions tools can exist for, economically, mostly already exist IMO. Vibe coded tools fill an enormous space of semi-unique problems that only affect a small amount of people. For example various scripts to automate tasks imposed by a boss. The best balance is probably to use LLMs to use the standardized tools for you when available, so that things remain mostly scrutable.

As the saying goes, 80% of users only use 20% of the features of your program, but they are different 20% parts. When the user vibecode the program instead, only their specific 20% needs to be implemented.
by sanskritical | 2026-01-26 16:22:22+00:00
Open source software, by the admission of this article, is a critical input to AI agents useful for code generation. So the way I see it is that there is now an entire industry that is incentivized to financially support open source software for entirely new reasons. To keep the models trained on new languages, libraries, and developments in computer science, they need to make sure that high quality modern code is still freely available, forever.

Vibe coding eventually creates more value for FOSS, not less.
by zpeti | 2026-01-26 16:22:42+00:00
I remember Elon saying in an interview recently that the only piece of the vertical stack he doesn't own is chips.

I strongly suspect some sort of fab built by Elon associated companies will be announced soon. Almost all supply can be bought by Tesla and xAI.

It makes sense, IF he can get the tech to work at the bleeding edge. But he seems to be quite good at this.
Show HN: Pyrig – a tool to automate project setup, configuration and development
by Winipedia | 2026-01-26 16:22:47+00:00
Hi HN,

I built pyrig after getting tired of manually keeping configuration files in sync across multiple Python projects. Every time I'd start a new project or update tooling standards, I'd spend hours copying and tweaking pyproject.toml, GitHub workflows, pre-commit hooks, etc.

pyrig treats project infrastructure as declarative code. Each config file (pyproject.toml, .pre-commit-config.yaml, GitHub workflows) is a Python class that:

- Generates the file with working defaults
- Validates existing files against expected structure
- Merges missing values without removing your customizations
- Runs idempotently (safe to run multiple times)

The interesting part is the multi-package inheritance. You can create a "base" package that extends pyrig with your own customized standards, then all your projects inherit those configs automatically:

pyrig → your-base → service1
→ service2

Commands, test fixtures, and config files are discovered automatically across the entire dependency chain using a runtime dependency graph built from importlib.metadata.
What makes it different from other scaffolding projects: Pyrig is a system that is kind of living continiously and supports you during code development. You can basically customize everything and tweak almost all behaviour as you see fit.

Quick start:
uv init
uv add pyrig
uv run pyrig init

This generates a complete project: source structure, tests, CI/CD, docs, pre-commit hooks, containerfile, etc. Run it again later to update configs or add missing files.

I'd love feedback on the architecture and this project generally. What do you think? Is this useful or not? I have used it already with many of my projects and it genuinely made things easier and faster for me.

GitHub: https://github.com/Winipedia/pyrig
Docs: https://winipedia.github.io/pyrig
by Qem | 2026-01-26 16:22:48+00:00
> “Suddenly, I felt like my head was exploding from the inside,” the security guard wrote. “We all started bleeding from the nose. Some were vomiting blood. We fell to the ground, unable to move.”

Eerily reminiscent of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havana_syndrome

Perhaps that was an early, low power botched test of what later went production in the Caracas abduction op.

I wonder if cellphone footage near the attack site can be analyzed for signs of ultrasounds, or such frequencies are outside the detection range of consumer-grade hardware?
by drowsspa | 2026-01-26 16:22:51+00:00
I find it amazing how much the mess that building C/C++ code has been for so many decades seems to have influenced the direction technology, the economy and even politics has been going.

Really, what would the world look like if this problem had been properly solved? Would the centralization and monetization of the Internet have followed the same path? Would Windows be so dominant? Would social media have evolved to the current status? Would we have had a chance to fight against the technofeudalism we're headed for?
by AnimalMuppet | 2026-01-26 16:23:01+00:00
Yes and no. Take someone like Putin. He wants to be an oppressive regime, but also he wants Russia to be militarily strong. Well, militarily strong is highly tied to technological progress these days. He can force his people into human wave attacks. And that is dangerous enough to perhaps take Ukraine. It's a different story if he actually attacks NATO, though.
by mckn1ght | 2026-01-26 16:23:20+00:00
It sounds strange that someone could go from lofty Apple engineer to homeless (though it certainly wouldn’t be the first fall from grace in human history).

I read the brief wikipedia page about Smith, which states he has bipolar disorder and has at least one incident that was publicized in the early
90s. Was your encounter with him before or after that?

Sadly, with some people it doesn’t matter how much money they have or how much help you give them behind the scenes. I’m not saying Jobs went to the end of the earth for him, I don’t know. But I know people from my own life where it didn’t matter, so it’s in the realm of imagination at least.

The stock bs sounds dickish though.
by pixl97 | 2026-01-26 16:23:33+00:00
You see to be talking past him and ignoring what they are actually saying.

LLMs are a higher level construct than PID loops. With things like autopilot I can give the controller a command like 'Go from A to B', and chain constructs like this to accomplish a task.

With an LLM I can give the drone/LLM system complex command that I'd never be able to encode to a controller alone. "Fly a grid over my neighborhood, document the location of and take pictures of every flower garden".

And if an LLM is just a 'text generator' then it's a pretty damned spectacular one as it can take free formed input and turn it into a set of useful commands.
by augusteo | 2026-01-26 16:23:55+00:00
The tractor analogy keeps coming up in these threads, and I think it's actually more pessimistic than people realize.

Tractors didn't just change farming. They emptied entire regions.

What saved the people (not the communities) was that other industries absorbed them. Factory work, services, construction. The question for software isn't whether AI creates efficiency. It's whether there's somewhere else for displaced engineers to go.

I've been writing code professionally for 16 years. The honest answer is I don't know. The optimistic scenario is that AI makes software so cheap that we build things we never would have attempted. The pessimistic one is that most of what needed building gets built, and the remaining work fits in fewer hands.

Both seem plausible. I'd bet on somewhere in between, but I'm not confident enough to tell anyone starting out that they should ignore the risk entirely.
by entropie | 2026-01-26 16:24:08+00:00
Besides the epilepsy, what do you mean with "bad for dogs?"

Sidenote: My partner and me both "feel" the difference of cheap LEDs. Its not something we can pinpoint down, but it got way better with hue lights.

We live with multiple dogs and iam really curious. One of the dogs that we often had around had severe epilepsy that very strong medication was needed and the dog died anyways way to early around the age of 2. She had less sizures than in her original home when she was with us which ofcourse might be unrelated to the lighting. But your thought is interesting.
by laffOr | 2026-01-26 16:24:13+00:00
There are two different things:

1. a drone that you can talk to and fly on its own

2. a drone where the flying is controlled by an LLM

(2) is a specific instance of the larger concept of (1).

You make an argument that 1 should be addressed, which no one is denying in this thread - people are arguing that (2) is a bad way to do (1).
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2026-01-26 16:24:21+00:00
> People don't know how to be efficient at scale.

Do you understand how much more food we produce on roughly the same amount of land (globally) than we did 60 years ago? Claiming that we don't know how to be efficient at scale is absurd.

Now, it is true that these production levels are very dependent on a bunch of practices that are likely not sustainable, and that's a serious and pressing issue. But the problem is not efficiency.

Further, as others have noted here (and so have I), it is animal-based food production that uses so much of the water that we use, and that's a choice we've made (particularly in the USA). We could make different choices (and some of us have tried to).
by vidarh | 2026-01-26 16:24:36+00:00
> A good analogy here is programming in assembler. Manually crafting programs at the machine code level was very common when I got my first computer in the 1980s. Especially for games. By the late 90s that had mostly disappeared.

Indeed, a lot of us looked with suspicion and disdain at people that used those primitive compilers that generated awful, slow code. I once spent ages hand-optimizing a component that had been written in C, and took great pleasure in the fact I could delete about every other line of disassembly...

When I wrote my first compiler a couple of years later, it was in assembler at first, and supported inline assembler so I could gradually convert to bootstrap it that way.

Because I couldn't imagine writing it in C, given the awful code the C compilers I had available generated (and how slow they were)...

These days most programmers don't know assembler, and increasingly don't know languaes as low level as C either.

And the world didn't fall apart.

People will complain that it is necessary for them to know the languages that will slowly be eaten away by LLMs, just like my generation argued it was absolutely necessary to know assembler if you wanted to be able to develop anything of substance.

I agree with you people should understand how things work, though, even if they don't know it well enough to build it from scratch.
by Octoth0rpe | 2026-01-26 16:24:47+00:00
> If LLM's really delivered 10x productivity improvements, as claimed by some, then we should by now be seeing an explosion of productivity out of Microsoft. It's been a couple years, so if it really helps then we should see it by now.

That productivity may not be visible. I think MS's move-everything-to-rust initiate would be one hell of an endorsement if they manage to make visible progress on that in the next couple of years.
by gus_massa | 2026-01-26 16:24:47+00:00
I'm not aware of the particular details, but scam like this usual that get posted to HN, probably once a week. Each time it's a different name, probably different scammers.

Most of the times, HN kills the post automatically, but sometimes it's killed after a few users flag the post. So if you see one remember to flag it.

PS: Just for fun, I made a search in Google and got a guy with a mustache that looks real but unrelated (something something about economy???) and a bald guy on a light blue chair (I never saw AI generated photos with chairs, so I guess it's real but may be an unrelated photo, because sometimes goggle mislabel the photos in the same page.)
by Someone1234 | 2026-01-26 16:24:48+00:00
I know blaming everything on LLMs is in vogue right now; but this is much more to do with Microsoft very publically firing the QA department[0][1] as a cost savings measure and claiming developers will do their own QA (long before LLMs were on the scene). It started in 2014 and the trickle never stopped.

Microsoft has a cultural problem; it went from an "engineers" company to an MBA directed one, trying to maximize short-term shareholder value at the cost of long-term company reputation/growth. It is very common and typical of US Corporate culture today, and catastrophic in the long-run.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/08/how-m...

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/business/microsoft-expected-...
by GMoromisato | 2026-01-26 16:25:28+00:00
In general, drug companies do not send employees out to inject patients with drugs. That's not how it works.

Instead, they work with specific doctors at local clinics who treat patients. Those doctors agree to fill out appropriate documentation (and are paid to do so) which the drug company then uses to submit to the FDA/EMA to get approval for sale. Those doctors are considered Principal Investigators, in that they are fully responsible for patient treatment AND for reporting patient outcomes to the drug company.

All countries with sufficient, local medical expertise, also have regulations on how trials are conducted. Those regulations are different from US/European regulations, and unless you're an expert in, e.g., Chinese clinical trial regulations, you have a very steep learning curve.
by saberience | 2026-01-26 16:25:59+00:00
Because no one cares about optimizing for this because it's a stupid benchmark.

It doesn't mean anything. No frontier lab is trying hard to improve the way its model produces SVG format files.

I would also add, the frontier labs are spending all their post-training time on working on the shit that is actually making them money: i.e. writing code and improving tool calling.

The Pelican on a bicycle thing is funny, yes, but it doesn't really translate into more revenue for AI labs so there's a reason it's not radically improving over time.
by seniorThrowaway | 2026-01-26 16:26:00+00:00
AI's / LLM's have already been trained on best practices for most domains. I've recently faced this decision and I went the LLM custom app path, because the software I needed was a simple internal business type app. There is open source and COTS software packages available for this kind of thing, but they tend to be massive suites trying to solve a bunch of things I don't need and also a minefield of licensing, freemium feature gating, and subject to future abandonment or rug pulls into much higher costs. Something that has happened many times. Long story short, I decided it was less work to build the exact tool I need to solve my "right now" problem, architected for future additions. I do think this is the future.
by jmyeet | 2026-01-26 16:26:02+00:00
How long will it be before somebody seeks to change AI answers by simply botting Youtube and/or Reddit?

Example: it is the official position of the Turkish government that the Armenian genocide [1] didn't happen.. It did. Yet for years they seemingly have spent resources to game Google rankings. Here's an article from 2015 [2]. I personally reported such government propaganda results in Google in 2024 and 2025.

Current LLMs really seem to come down to regurgitating Reddit, Wikipedia and, I guess for Germini, Youtube. How difficult would it be to create enough content to change an LLM's answers? I honestly don't know but I suspect for certain more niche topics this is going to be easier than people think.

And this is totally separate from the threat of the AI's owners deciding on what biases an AI should have. A notable example being Grok's sudden interest in promoting the myth of a "white genocide" in South AFrica [3].

Antivaxxer conspiracy theories have done well on Youtube (eg [4]). If Gemini weights heavily towards Youtube (as claimed) how do you defend against this sort of content resulting in bogus medical results and advice?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_genocide

[2]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/how-google-searches-are-prom...

[3]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/may/14/elon-musk...

[4]: https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/where-conspira...
by saghm | 2026-01-26 16:26:50+00:00
If youn put me in the starting lineup for an MLB team, I'd strike out every single at bat for the entire season, and it's wouldn't be a "mistake" on my part; I'm just fundamentally incapable of doing the job.

A mistake is something that happens when someone capable of doing the job well happens to not do it well in a specific instance (without ill intent, of course). If it happens often enough, the question should be whether it's a mistake or if they're not able (or not willing) to do the job as expected. I don't know that this is what's happening here, but the issues seem to be large and frequent enough to at least warrant a discussion.
by ndiddy | 2026-01-26 16:26:53+00:00
Yeah a lot of Appimage developers make assumptions about what their systems have as well (i.e. "if I depend on something that is installed by default on Ubuntu desktop then it's fine to leave out"). For example, a while ago I installed an Appimage GUI program on a headless server that I wanted to use via X11 forwarding. I ended up having to manually install a bunch of random packages (GTK stuff, fonts, etc) to get it to run. I see Appimage as basically the same as distributing Linux binaries via .tar.gz archives, except everything's in a single file.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2026-01-26 16:26:54+00:00
The conclusion in this case is very simple: 86 billion has been taken in profits, with very limited capital investment.

Now .. what to do about that? That's a bit more complicated, but we could at least start from the premise that had the water systems been public, that 86 billion could have been spent on capital investment without a single bond being issued.
by PurpleRamen | 2026-01-26 16:27:00+00:00
Meeting could happen in public, it doesn't mean they know their private address.

For example, meet someone at a convention/fair/job, gift/sell them something which has a hidden tag, and then wait for them to drive to their hotel, or home. Gotcha. With influencer and celebs, you can also send something to their agency, and hope they are re-routed to their home. S** like that happened quite often until people learned to be more careful. Probably still sometimes happens even now.