MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by azath92 | 2026-01-27 11:32:10+00:00
I am continually surprised by the reference to "voluntary actions taken by companies" being brought up in discussion of the risks of AI, without some nuance given to why they would do that. The paragraph on surgical action goes in to about 5-10 times more detail on the potential issues with gov't regulation, implying to me that voluntary action is better. Even for someone at anthropic, i would hope that they would discuss it further.

I am genuinely curious to understand the incentives for companies who have the power to mitigate risk to actually do so. Are there good examples in the past of companies taking action that is harmful to their bottom line to mitigate societal risk of harm their products on society? My premise being that their primary motive is profit/growth, and that is revenue or investment dictated for mature and growth companies respectively (collectively "bottom line").

Im only in my mid 30s so dont have as much perspective on past examples of voluntary action of this sort with respect to tech or pre-tech corporates where there was concern of harm. Probably too late to this thread for replies, but ill think about it for the next time this comes up.
by torginus | 2026-01-27 11:32:12+00:00
Yes Im not familiar with the Chinese internet, however I've found that in expert topics, textbooks far outperform most internet content, with the sole exception of Wikipedia, which also sometimes has almost professional/academic-quality data on some topics.

I think existence of Wikipedia is a red herring, there's no historical inevitability that people will band together to curate a high-quality encyclopedia on every imaginable topic.

There might be similar, even broader/better efforts on the Chinese internet we (I) know nothing about.

It also might be that Chinese search engines are better than Google at finding high quality data.

But I reiterate - these search based LLMs kinda suck in the West, because Google kinda sucks. Every use of deep research usually ended up with the model citing the same crap articles and data you could find on Google manually, but whereas I could tell the data was no good, AI took it at face value.
by budgefrankly | 2026-01-27 11:32:20+00:00
Telegram isn't even encrypted, at least not in the sense of the on-by-default end-to-end encryption used by WhatsApp, iMessage and Signal. In reality its selling point is that your chat records are placed in foreign jurisdictions so your local police can't easily access them.

https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2024/08/25/telegram...

Ultimately the only way to be completely sure is to use an open-source app like Signal that you've either built yourself from source you've inspected; or sourced pre-built from someone you trust.
by pandemic_region | 2026-01-27 11:32:23+00:00
I checked the reputable newspaper in my country. The only mention of it was on 23/1 where they reported 5000 casualties. EU is going to put together a range of (economic?) sanctions against the regime. US "armada" (quoted from the article) is underway.

It was probably the headline article for a couple of hours on the site. I don't remember extended coverage either so I looked it up.
by danpalmer | 2026-01-27 11:32:43+00:00
As the owner of many airtags and some Airpods who has switched to Android, this is infuriating. I get beeps and unknown tracker notifications multiple times a day.

There are technical limitations in Apples design that prevents Android or anyone else from fixing it.

I left iOS because of degrading UX, and the UX of these products has got even worse as a result.
Zszrun: Legit Trading Tech or a Shell for a Liquidity Trap?
by awjykudguj | 2026-01-27 11:33:45+00:00
I’ve been digging into ZSZRUN, and I’m trying to wrap my head around their business logic.

On the surface, the frontend is low-latency and the UI is slicker than most legacy brokers. However, I’ve hit a few "black box" moments that feel inconsistent with standard fintech practices in 2026:

Withdrawal Architecture: I’ve seen reports of users being asked for a "20% tax fee" upfront via crypto before funds are released. Is this a specific smart contract limitation or a localized regulatory requirement I’ve missed? In my experience, legit platforms net their fees from the balance; they don't ask for a fresh deposit to "unlock" an account.

Operational Transparency: For a platform handling this much volume, their documentation on liquidity providers is surprisingly thin. It reminds me of the "maintenance" loops we saw with CZR Exchange or LongAsia—where the tech was fine, but the backend was essentially a black hole.

Trust vs. Marketing: They’re pushing hard on social channels with "mentors," but I can't find a verifiable NFA or FCA registration number that holds up.

As someone who survived the 2000 bubble and the '08 crash, my "sysadmin gut" is telling me this might just be a well-designed wrapper for a liquidity trap.

Has anyone thoroughly investigated their backend or audited their smart contracts? Legitimate platforms waive transaction fees or require investors to assume the risk themselves; they don't ask users to deposit new cryptocurrency to "unlock" their accounts. I suspect this is a shell company—an elaborately designed, technically empty shell intended to create a false market perception, which is actually a scam. I suspect this is a sophisticated liquidity trap. Stay away from it.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2026-01-27 11:34:07+00:00
I will say that offshoring has developed a bad name; maybe not unreasonably. There’s some terrible outsourcing shops.

But there’s also a few that are really good. I know people that used Romanian and Polish shops that did great work. They weren’t super-cheap, but still cheaper than American contract developers.

I assume that the bad offshoring orgs are pretty nervous about AI. I also assume that the better ones are learning to incorporate AI as a force multiplier.

Interesting times, ahead…
by rjh29 | 2026-01-27 11:34:36+00:00
I went the other way. I just want to shuffle all my songs or a playlist (m3u) without any of the other crap. Add and remove favourites. Album-focused players are a non-starter. Players without a simple global search box are a non starter.

Ended up 80% vibe coding one in Qt (PySide6) in a couple of evenings that does everything I want, exactly how I want. Added lyric fetching via LIBLRC (saved to .lrc files - no proprietary databases) and register as a music player with DBUS so it can be controlled. Working really well.

It's 2026, anyone who is unhappy with their player can pretty quickly LLM their way into adding any missing functionality or tweak behaviour they don't like, or just make a whole new player.
by jfyi | 2026-01-27 11:34:48+00:00
I have had an interesting experience just recently.

I hired back on at a company I used to work at and found they had contracted work to another former employee who was handed the code from a rest api I had written and a web app that used it. The task was to write an android app that interacted with the api.

He ran it through an agentic coding assistant and got out api scaffolding and basic UI.

Looking it over, I couldn't shake the feeling I was looking at my code, just ported to kotlin. I was seeing my idiosyncrasies everywhere. It was kind of surreal.

I was familiar with the dev's work who did it and it was nothing like his prior work, but it's been years since I have seen him, so who knows.

I couldn't help but admit it was a good foundation to start building on.

I told the pm they were likely overpaying significantly for an agentic coding assistant and only getting access to it for a few hours a month. This same organization recoiled in terror when I pointed out the cost of a claude code subscription once.
by perching_aix | 2026-01-27 11:35:03+00:00
Sorry to hear that's how my comments seem to you; I can assure I put plenty of sense into them, although I cannot find that sense on your behalf.

If you think considering others to be desperate, senseless, and erroneously reasoning without any good reason improves your understanding of them, and that snarky commentary magically ceases to be or is all-okay because it describes something you find a big truth, that's on you. Gonna have to agree to disagree on that one.
by LinXitoW | 2026-01-27 11:35:05+00:00
What is real banana? How much processing is allowed for it to be still real? Considering the selective breeding of banana, is banana even still real?

Chemical is just a bad word choice. Artificial, or ultra processed get closer to the issue. They still are vague with a lot of grey area. If you cook at home, you're also highly processing your food. The fruit in winter is likely also artificial, in some sense: Grown against the will of god/nature with pesticides, in a tent, in a climate that doesn't naturally feature them, devoid of flavour because they were artificially bred for yield, color and size, etc.
by ben_w | 2026-01-27 11:35:12+00:00
Generally agree, but two thinks strike me:

1. Suez Canal: UK, France, and Israel attacked Egypt for control of that. This stopped very quickly once the USA threatened to turn off the money, and by some measures marks the point where the British Empire became obviously a paper tiger.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Crisis

2. Iraq/Afghanistan and Americans pretending to be Canadian: yes, I remember this too, but this time Europe is worried about taking the role of "target", so it hits harder.

The USA can only be trusted by its allies* once again *when we are confident the USA won't turn against us, your allies*.

* NATO and EU definitely; and I assume similar feelings in Japan, Philippines, Australia, South Korea etc.
by mike_hearn | 2026-01-27 11:35:18+00:00
My memory of this time is getting a bit fuzzy tbh, but from what I remember Google in the first part of the 2010s put Flash inside their renderer sandbox and Safari/Firefox were still lagging on browser sandboxing at that time. I think Adobe had shared the plugin code with Google to make this possible.

There are certainly obvious issues with securing a third party codebase you don't control, and it's likely that the browser makers had more budget to spend on security than Adobe. But there was no technical reason Flash couldn't have been treated as an alternative rendering engine from a sandboxing perspective, and I think Chrome did it. Pepper was an initiative to generalize that. Blink is full of holes as other comments point out and it's only the kernel sandboxing that makes adding new features viable at all.

I'm cynical because when the browser makers talked about phasing out plugins it wasn't primarily security they talked about. This blog post talks about speed and energy usage first:

https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/chrome/s...

The same language can be found in the announcement of their HTML5 by default strategy here:

https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-dev/c/0w...

"While Flash historically has been critical for rich media on the web, today in many cases HTML5 provides a more integrated media experience with faster load times and lower power consumption."

Security isn't mentioned, perhaps because trying to argue that their own pile of C++ was somehow meaningfully more robust than Adobe's big pile of C++ wasn't going to be convincing.

Their writings about this were also very heavy on "open web" ideology, although the SWF format was documented by that point and openness doesn't go well with deliberately wiping out a tech that was voluntarily deployed by 80%+ of websites. If openness means anything it means open to extension, which plugins provided and forcing everyone to use HTML5 did not. When they deprecated NPAPI they even sort of admitted to this:

https://blog.chromium.org/2013/09/saying-goodbye-to-our-old-...

"The Netscape Plug-in API (NPAPI) ushered in an early era of web innovation by offering the first standard mechanism to extend the browser. In fact, many modern web platform features—including video and audio support—first saw mainstream deployment through NPAPI-based plug-ins. But the web has evolved. Today’s browsers are speedier, safer, and more capable than their ancestors."

I always found this blog post curiously worded. It has a Fukuyama-style "end of history" vibe to it. Yes plugins boosted innovation because the web platform always lagged years behind, but now the web has "evolved" and the innovation era isn't needed anymore.
by ekidd | 2026-01-27 11:35:51+00:00
Yes, as an American, I could point out that the side of US politics represented by Biden, Obama and Clinton is very real. It's internationalist, cooperative, and reliably so. Clinton was, in some ways, more willing to intervene in Eastern European crises than the EU was. And Biden came in early and aggressively to support Ukraine (though the EU eventually got there, and we can't decide who's side we're actually on, now).

But the problem is, internationalist Democrats are not the whole story of the US. There's another faction, one which our allies used to be able to work with. But that half of our nation's politics has been on a long, ugly moral slide. We are imposing ridiculous and destructive tariffs based on the personal grievances of one man. But a duly-elected Congress absolutely refuses to stop him. We are still covering up massive amounts of information about pedophiles in positions of power, but Congress hasn't done more than hold a vote and refuse to follow up. And we now have masked Federal police just murdering people in our streets for peacefully exercising their 1st and 2nd amendment rights, but a significant minority of voters are still cheering it on. If the moral trajectory sinks much lower, I'm not sure there would be any sins left to commit except public devil worship.

So no, you really can't trust the United States. Not because nobody here understands honor, alliances, or even practical business. But because that's not the whole story of the United States right now. We can't even get the Epstein files released. Which, admittedly doesn't affect you much. But it's clear sign of who we're becoming, and what a critical mass of our voters will ultimately accept.
by Gareth321 | 2026-01-27 11:36:29+00:00
I wish it worked like this. We have decades of examples of aid projects where we provide the means to produce food - machinery, fertilisers, irrigation equipment, water boreholes, processing and refining equipment, etc. Most of them fail. All of these machines and processes require training. Often extensively. Good luck convincing any of the locals to dedicate the next year of their lives to learning how to drive a complex tractor and PTO. They know that the tractor will break down soon and the parts will never arrive to fix it. That is, of course, assuming the tractor isn't stolen by next week. Which it usually is. Even if all the stars aligned and they managed to produce food, that will be stolen too. Either by someone else or by them.

Gangs don't use the farm equipment. They steal it and sell it. They will steal any equipment they can and there is an unlimited appetite for equipment on the black market. Especially in China and Southeast Asia.
by dandersch | 2026-01-27 11:36:31+00:00
For the record I would still choose C# out of all the options for a bigger game (GDscript with strict type-hinting might suffice for small ones). My main complaints that I can still remember:

- deprecated web export for C# with Godot 4. This is basically my main gripe and why C# has been a non-starter for me.

- Engine still has a separate binary for C# support. I think they are working on unifying them. But once you use the .NET one you can't export to web even when you don't use C#.

- setting up debugging+lsp was a pain and consistency was very flaky afterwards

Also a lot of the editor workflow is built around using GDScript with the built-in text-editor. I don't actually mind it that much, but you asked why it's not as well integrated and that's an obvious one for newbies.
If your experience was wildly different, please do tell.
by bjourne | 2026-01-27 11:36:34+00:00
Oh, no, not this false dichotomy again!

People protest to affect political change in their own countries. For example, that's why Americans now protest against ICE and not against the secret police in Turkmenistan. In my country, the government recently signed a secret arms deal with Israel to sell it weapons. Weapons that are then used to maim children. I don't like that. Major politicians have said that Israel should be "thanked" for what it's doing in Gaza. I don't like that either. Hence, why I protest. If the Sionazi regime in Israel was isolated in the same way as the Islamic regime in Iran or the Taliban regime in Afghanistan people would protest less because there would be less political change to affect.
by cucumber3732842 | 2026-01-27 11:37:01+00:00
C'mon. I know everyone on HN just can't help but glaze anyone who deals with "real world things" rather than 1s and 0s but this is absolutely not one of his more original content videos. You can't simulate landing aircraft using a clear plastic box (one of his better props) like you can soil conditions so you get what you get.
by GuB-42 | 2026-01-27 11:37:32+00:00
It had been shown that LLMs don't know how they work. They asked a LLM to perform computations, and explain how they got to the result. The LLM explanation is typical of how we do it: add number digit by digit, with carry, etc... But by looking inside the neural network, it show that the reality is completely different and much messier. None of it is surprising.

Still, feeding it back its own completely made up self-reflection could be an effective strategy, reasoning models kind of work like this.
by k_kiki | 2026-01-27 11:37:53+00:00
clawdbot has been getting a lot of attention recently, so I tried it out and went through part of the codebase.

The experience is impressive in terms of proactivity — a 24/7 agent that actually does things for you feels like a glimpse of the future.

But when it comes to *memory*, I was a bit underwhelmed.

From what I can see, the current memory mechanism is still quite shallow. It behaves more like lightweight state or short-term context than a real long-term, evolving memory system. There’s no clear structure, no visibility, and limited ability to reason over past experiences in a durable way.

For an always-on agent, memory is not a nice-to-have — it is the core capability.

A 24/7 proactive agent should be able to:

- remember past conversations and user preferences
- accumulate knowledge over weeks or months
- learn from previous actions and outcomes
- evolve instead of restarting from zero every session

This made me think: clawdbot (and agents like it) might benefit from a dedicated memory layer rather than ad-hoc storage.

We’ve been building an open-source memory framework called memU that stores agent memory as structured, inspectable files and supports both retrieval and direct LLM file reading. My intuition is that plugging something like this into clawdbot could turn it from a “smart automaton” into an agent that truly grows over time.
by OhMeadhbh | 2026-01-27 11:38:21+00:00
This is the book I used when I was writing serial drivers for Apple II ProDOS: https://archive.org/details/6502_Assembly_Language_Programmi...

And I have a vague memory of this book:
https://archive.org/details/aiimp/mode/2up

Not sure what level you're at, but I can't remember if this is the text Jef Raskin wrote, but it's a decent backgrounder:
https://archive.org/details/aiirm/mode/2up
by FeteCommuniste | 2026-01-27 11:38:22+00:00
> The most notorious of which is BMI; it is practically a category error to infer someone's health or risk by individual BMI, and yet doing so remains widespread amongst people that are supposed to know better.

BMI works fine for people who aren't very muscular, which is the great majority of people. Waist to height ratio might be more informative for people with higher muscle mass.
by joe_mamba | 2026-01-27 11:38:23+00:00
>they disarm him, and the execution happens after that,

You're leaving the part out where a gunshot is heard right before they "execute" him. The officers with their fingers on the trigger pointed at him during detainment, got scared of that gunshot and jumped on the trigger by accident. It's an unfortunate accident but not an execution. Read up the legal definition of execution. This is not it.
Show HN: LLM-schema-guard – Rust proxy enforcing JSON schemas on LLM outputs
by iCeGaming | 2026-01-27 11:39:24+00:00
Hey everyone,
I built llm-schema-guard because LLMs are amazing at spitting out JSON... until they suddenly aren't. Even with JSON mode or function calling, you still get missing fields, wrong types, or just plain broken syntax that kills your agents, RAG flows, or any tool-calling setup.
This is a lightweight Rust HTTP proxy that sits in front of any OpenAI-compatible API (think Ollama, vLLM, LocalAI, OpenAI itself, Groq, you name it). It grabs the generated output, checks it against a JSON Schema you provide, and only lets it through if it's valid.
If it's invalid, strict mode kicks back a clean 400 with details. Permissive mode tries auto-retrying a few times by tweaking the prompt with a fix instruction and exponential backoff.
Everything else stays the same: full streaming support (it buffers the response to validate), Prometheus metrics so you can monitor validation fails, retries, latency, and more. Config is simple YAML for upstreams, schemas per model, rate limiting, caching, etc. There's even an offline CLI if you just want to test schemas locally.
It's built with Axum and Tokio for really low latency and high throughput, plus jsonschema-rs under the hood. Docker compose makes it dead simple to spin up with Ollama.

This grew out of my earlier schema-gateway project, and I'm happy to add stuff like Anthropic support, tool calling validation, or better streaming fixes if people find it useful.
Stars or contributions are very welcome!

Thanks for taking a look :)
by bwv848 | 2026-01-27 11:39:53+00:00
> hike 50km with a 2km elevation gain in one go and not die.

And thru-hikers can do this for days. It’s more related to fatigue resistance, mitochondrial density, and walking efficiency. But VO2 max still matters in high-intensity sports, you can’t ignore it when you’re pedaling a bike at high Zone 4 in a race.
by emsign | 2026-01-27 11:40:14+00:00
I remember the false talking point of the critics working for OpenAI's competitors being spread here on HN as well. I thought that was weird back then, now I know why.

American Innovators Network who was working for AI companies and investors, including Y Combinator. It was lobbying to kill a bill that was supposed to protect kids from AI which Newsom veto'ed. Instead he signed a weakened bill that did basically nothing to protect kids. Yuck. By that time he was working with OpenAI lobbyist Chris Lehane.

And the worst part is AI companies are set to destroy democracy in the US in order to break the legislature's power, so it cannot represent the will of the American people anymore. It's all about survival for them for their shitty and wasteful business model that wouldn't otherwise work. How do you sell a product that nobody wants? You let the government do a little Communism-for-the-bosses magic to help you out.
by svl | 2026-01-27 11:41:36+00:00
FWIW, it's reported in Dutch news - https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2026/01/26/dertigduizend-doden-sla... - with reference to this time.com article - https://time.com/7357635/more-than-30000-killed-in-iran-say-... - and a lot of caveats about how the figure can't be verified.
by tuetuopay | 2026-01-27 11:42:33+00:00
Outscale is kind of the stereotypical bureaucratic French thing. It's made by Dassault, that's better known for industrial stuff (like SolidWorks), not for modern-ish software.

For a more of an AWS replacement, look at Scaleway. It really is more what we think about when talking "public cloud": self-serve compute, with lots of managed services, actual API and Terraform, actual K8s, etc. (managed services is why I don't mention OVH, which is often touted as a "cloud provider", yet lacks a large managed services offering).