MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tmsbrg | 2026-01-10 14:33:03+00:00
He calls it the "miracle", I want to shout "It's not a miracle! It's other people!"

I feel he's depending on others' kindness and not even really acknowledging them. It's like he feels it's a miraculous power that's helping him (God?) rather than the actual individuals choosing to help him. Maybe that explains why he doesn't seem to feel the need to give back to them.

It reminds me of an episode of The Wire where a mediocre detective tries to use magic to solve a case. After he wakes up the next day he goes to the office and finds the case is solved. He says the magic worked! And the police chief tells him it wasn't magic, it's his colleagues who worked all night solving cases.
by jacobgadek | 2026-01-10 14:33:16+00:00
Hi HN, I built this because I kept running into the same problem: AI agents need to log into websites, and everyone (including me) just hardcodes cookies. It's insecure and breaks constantly.

AgentAuth is a Python SDK that:

- Stores sessions in an encrypted vault (not in your code)
- Gives each agent a cryptographic identity (Ed25519 keys)
- Scopes access (agent X can only access linkedin.com)
- Logs all access for auditing

I also built a Chrome extension that exports cookies with one click.

The goal is to become the identity layer for AI agents — like how OAuth standardized user auth, but for agents.

Would love feedback, especially from anyone building agents or dealing with browser automation.
Show HN: ContextGraph Cloud – Governance infrastructure for AI agents
by akz4ol | 2026-01-10 14:33:17+00:00
We built this because enterprise customers kept asking: "How do we prove our AI agents are compliant?"

The problem:
• AI agents make autonomous decisions (trading, medical, customer service)
• No standard audit trail format
• Policy enforcement is ad-hoc (if it exists)
• Compliance teams can't verify anything
• When something goes wrong, you can't trace what happened

What we built:
• Decision trace logging with full provenance chains
• Policy-as-code enforcement (evaluated BEFORE agent acts)
• Human approval workflows for high-risk actions
• Compliance dashboards and SOC2/HIPAA reports

Key technical decisions:
• Synchronous policy evaluation (can't un-execute a bad trade)
• PostgreSQL RLS for multi-tenant isolation
• Cryptographic hash chains for provenance (tamper-evident)
• Sub-50ms P99 latency for decision logging

Not an AI framework. Works with LangChain, CrewAI, AutoGPT, or custom agents.

Integrations (open source): https://github.com/akz4ol/contextgraph-integrations
Live demo: https://cloud.contextgraph.dev
Docs: https://docs.contextgraph.dev

Would love feedback from anyone dealing with AI compliance, governance, or agent frameworks!
by Melonai | 2026-01-10 14:33:25+00:00
Wait, I do my work on a 4K display, according to a calculator I have a PPI of 150, but I already find my 4K display completely overkill!

Now, I spent an amount of my work life staring at a company-issued 27 inch 1080p display, and that was absolutely horrible, but with 4K, I'm not sure if I would even be able to see the improvement if I went to 6K or 8K even, which I always thought was mostly useless outside of gigantic television sets. Is it really worth it? Can you really genuinely see the text blurring on a 4K monitor?
by dghlsakjg | 2026-01-10 14:33:29+00:00
I have the same mouse. The mouse doesn’t “stop working”. The mouse stops being able to use certain proprietary features enabled by the companion software, and downgrades to a normal working mouse. Logitech have already fixed the software issue, so this is doubly deceptive. Yes, it sucks that you can’t use certain custom buttons, but the mouse functionality never went away.
by jmyeet | 2026-01-10 14:33:57+00:00
This kind of comment scares me because it's an example of people substituring professional advice for an LLM where LLMs are known to hallucinate or otherwise simply make stuff up. I see this all the time when I write queries and get the annoying Gemini AI snippet on a subject I know about and often I'll see the AI make provably and objectively false statements.
by mlok | 2026-01-10 14:33:57+00:00
They are not reserved characters. They only express a special format when used in that way : a space on its left, and a character stuck to its right AND somewhere down the road : its twin with a character stuck to its left and a space on its right. I built an editor doing just that more than two decades ago, and it works fine.

So *this* and /that/ express formatting, but not 4 * 5 nor 4*5 nor 4/5 nor m/s.
by joeyh | 2026-01-10 14:34:20+00:00
Current branch without bloat is to cat .git/HEAD, and if that didn't exist, run git symbolic-ref HEAD. The first is faster and works in the common case where you're in the top of a git repo. In either case, run it through ${branch##*/} to strip down to just the current branch.

I have used this for a long time, never understood how people would put all of git in between them and the next prompt.
by crote | 2026-01-10 14:34:29+00:00
The main difference is that tiny mistakes in the nuclear industry can have massive consequences. A seemingly-trivial change can lead to continent-sized damages and permanent condemnation of city-sized areas of land.

Accidents in the fossil fuel industry are far more localized. Sure, you can blow up your own plant and kill a bunch of people, but it's not too hard to clean up the mess afterwards. Even something as horrific as the Deepwater Horizon disaster won't have much of a residual impact 10 years down the line.
by sevensor | 2026-01-10 14:34:36+00:00
The observation is half right. Optimizing the wrong function definitely causes misery. What this misses is that there is no right function. Certainly not when there is more than one person involved (no two people will have the same preference vector.) But even individuals have conflicts among their own objectives. This is true even if you reduce your view of humanity to the homo economicus who seeks to maximize profit and sees all value in dollars. This is a controversial take, but I don’t think you can even measure dollars against dollars. I disagree with the notion that one can balance near future and far future money with an appropriate discounting formula. They’re incommensurable: you’re making assumptions about what you will value in the future based on what you know in the present. If you’ve ever encountered the ennui of an early retiree, you will know how hard it is to judge these things. Philosophy has much better frameworks for addressing these questions than economics.
by hsuduebc2 | 2026-01-10 14:34:50+00:00
Yeah, it’s a very powerful tool, and it needs to be used carefully and with intent. People on Hacker News mostly get that already, but for ordinary users it’s a full-on paradigm shift.

It moved from:
A very precise source of information, where the hardest part was finding the right information.

To:
Something that can produce answers on demand, where the hardest part is validating that information, and knowing when to doubt the answer and force it to recheck the sources.

This happened in a year or two so I can't really blame. The truth machine where you doesn't needed to focus too much on validating answers changed rapidly to slop machine where ironically, your focus is much more important.
by QuiEgo | 2026-01-10 14:35:37+00:00
If the CPU is the bottleneck, an interesting metric would be how cheap of a GPU you can pair and still add value. I suspect you would have similar benchmarks with a 5060 as a 5090 in these tests.

For example, if you pair an N150 mini pc with a cheap AMD egpu (one of the laptop skus), you’ve made yourself tho equivalent of a gaming laptop in clamshell (with better cooling) on the cheap. A price vs fps curve, switching GPUs but keeping the mini pc as a constant, would be super interesting.
by Noaidi | 2026-01-10 14:36:01+00:00
Oh how I miss DarkSky, and accuracy in weather apps in general. I have no idea if it is AI or just enshitification, but wow, local temps are just always way off with Apple Weather and most other apps. This is important to me because I live in my van and I am talking about these apps being off 5 to 10 degrees. The only one that comes close is Accuweather but their interface is horrific. And forget about the widgets...just show me the highs and lows for the week and quit changing the layout like you think i know what I want, because you do not.
by anal_reactor | 2026-01-10 14:36:28+00:00
Not to mention two giant problems with the entire scientific community:

1. It just sucks at communication. Many people have been misled because marketeers lied to them "it's scientifically proven!" while scientists did nothing to fix that, because they only cared about preserving communication channels between themselves. The mistrust in science is obvious if you take this into account.

2. At the end of the day, scientists are people who have their biases and weaknesses. There have been well-documented cases of the entire scientific community doing a massive fuckup. So when now a bunch of scientists come and say "trust us bro, this time it's legit" it's reasonable to be sceptical.
by functionmouse | 2026-01-10 14:36:43+00:00
My qualms with modern Thinkpads are as follows:

No SD card slot (standard on many MacBooks so it's not like it's a niche feature)

BIOS always displays at max brightness no matter what, blinding you when you're up too late, and always beeps when you go into boot selector or bios options, even if you have beeps disabled. Overall, compared to golden age ThinkPads like my old T60, T420,x230t, the BIOS is very uncomfy, which matters if you like to play with operating systems.

The trackpads get disgusting so quickly, even if you washed your hands like 10 minutes ago. You cannot keep those things clean, they're like this, cheap soft plasticky material... Could do a lot better in this area.

That weird little camera lip thing they're doing might be the ugliest thing I've ever seen on a laptop

Some of them have the fans exhaust on the right side, so if you try playing a video game on them with a mouse it will make your hand uncomfortable.
by jokoon | 2026-01-10 14:36:44+00:00
I wish I could understand why it is so difficult to build an un-googled android image.

One reason, I guess it's not possible because it's a complex OS?

But is the real obstacle being smartphone brands not publishing their hardware drivers?

It is so easy to install linux on a PC, yet I don't see the same happening for android while it's actually running a linux kernel, so it really begs the question.
by datsci_est_2015 | 2026-01-10 14:37:17+00:00
It seems like outcomes are probably K-shaped: those who are capable of critical thinking and deciding what type of information should be confirmed by a healthcare professional and what type of information is relatively riskless to consume from ChatGPT should have positive outcomes.

Those who are prone to disinformation and misinterpretation may experience some very negative health outcomes.
Show HN: BashAPI – A 5ms-latency Bash sandbox for AI agents
by developergoose | 2026-01-10 14:37:26+00:00
I’ve been building agentic workflows and was frustrated with the 10-second "cold start" times of traditional VMs and Docker containers just to let an agent run a simple grep or curl command.
I built BashAPI to solve this. It is a serverless Bash environment written in TypeScript that boots in ~5ms. It is completely sandboxed (no access to the host OS) and has curl enabled so agents can fetch live data.
I’m looking for feedback on the security trade-offs and what other commands the community would like to see supported.
by nowayhaze | 2026-01-10 14:38:00+00:00
I can't speak about UCSD, but from talking with Harvard Math MA students and seeing their homework, it's actually some of the best designed pedagogical math classes I have ever seen. And it's definitely more rigorous than the average middle school or high school math class for sure.

These broad claims about the nature of these "remedial" math classes in the article probably need more detailed evidence, because for example the acclaimed IMO problems (that AI companies tout their models with) are also algebra and pre-calculus problems and can be quite challenging and intellectually engaging. Developing a good math foundation without calculus for a humanities or political science major who never had a good math class in high school is a noble goal, and probably very beneficial for them and society.
by jasonmccay | 2026-01-10 14:38:14+00:00
Yes! The ability to be outside, pull out your phone, and get an almost-to-the-minute awareness of when it was going to rain felt magical, right out of Back to the Future 2. I used this countless times.

So much of weather forecasting, at that time, was about trends and probabilities. DarkSky was about events, certainty, and action.

It was truly ahead of anything else and forced a new standard.
by naasking | 2026-01-10 14:38:43+00:00
> EDIT: I can see the title has been fixed now from solved to "more or less solved" which is still think is a big stretch.

"solved more or less autonomously by AI" were Tao's exact words, so I think we can trust his judgment about how much work he or the AI did, and how this indicates a meaningful increase in capabilities.
by jsheard | 2026-01-10 14:38:48+00:00
> If you lived in the US and you didn't like this product, you can just choose to not use it.

Perhaps if you have the means to pay for any treatment you want, but most people in the US are beholden to whatever their employers health insurance will cover. If they decide that your first line of care is a chatbot then you're getting a chatbot, like it or not, and refusing to engage with the chatbot may even be held against you.
by Amezarak | 2026-01-10 14:38:58+00:00
I paid for it and got nothing at all. I don't remember if the app quit working or if Apple force removed it from my phone.I felt absolutely scammed - it's literally the only app I've ever paid for.

It really sucks. Do they use the same data? I've noticed Apple Weather is substantially less accurate than Dark Sky. If Dark Sky told me it was going to rain in 10 minutes for 7 minutes, that's what was going to happen. If Apple Weather says it, well, maybe.
by enraged_camel | 2026-01-10 14:39:05+00:00
I don't know what you are arguing, or why. Please follow the thread in its full context. Specifically, the argument the article author is making is that moving to a higher level of abstraction also cost developers the benefit of understanding the internals. Ultimately, that ended up not mattering very much.

The OP pushed back on this, saying compilers are deterministic and LLMs are not, and that lack of determinism makes LLM output unverifiable. I said the latter is not true because you can perform verification using tests. You claimed tests are not verification because LLMs don't preserve the semantics.

I'm not sure why semantics matter. LLMs providing no guarantees regarding the preservation of semantics is not important because you can guarantee the behavior of the generated code using tests. In most domains, this is sufficient. You tell the LLM to write code that does X, Y and Z, and then verify X, Y and Z using a test. That's it.
by b3kart | 2026-01-10 14:39:08+00:00
> you didn't like this product, you can just choose to not use it

This is an over-simplification. I might like the product, but not be aware of the various ways it violates my privacy. Having laws that make it more risky for companies to do nefarious things makes me more confident that if a product is available in the EU market it doesn't do obviously bad things.
by jonhohle | 2026-01-10 14:39:24+00:00
I know jokes are typically frowned upon, but in this case I think it’s appropriate:

Ash woke up on his first morning on the Nostromo and was rummaging through the refrigerator. Dallas came into the kitchen and asked what he was up to. Ash said, “I can’t find any milk for my coffee.” Dallas replied, “In space, no one can. Here, use cream.”
by nicbou | 2026-01-10 14:40:27+00:00
I had a Renault Kangoo and was similarly militant about its supremacy. It was a cheap, reliable thing and people carrier. It could fit five people, or two people, two bicycles and plenty of camping gear. It was cheap and ugly enough to shrug about cosmetic damage, so I never worried about kicking the doors shut or sitting on the roof. It was also tiny and easy to drive and park. It was mechanically simple and reliable.

It broke down recently at 18 years of age and I can't justify maintaining a car in Berlin, but I loved that car to bits.
by travisgriggs | 2026-01-10 14:40:38+00:00
I have this same reaction.

But I also have to honestly ask myself “aren’t humans also prone to make stuff up” when they feel they need to have an answer, but don’t really?

And yet despite admitting that humans hallucinate and make failures too, I remain uncomfortable with ultimate trust in LLMs.

Perhaps, while LLMs simulate authority well, there is an uncanny valley effect in trusting them, because some of the other aspect of interacting with an authority person are “off”.
by sigvef | 2026-01-10 14:42:26+00:00
Dwitter is 10 years old this winter! If anyone is interested in some backstory, I dug up an old interview: https://medium.com/windows-developer/dwitter-dares-you-to-co....

Of course, the real magic of dwitter is the lovely community: https://discord.gg/emHe6cP
by datsci_est_2015 | 2026-01-10 14:42:34+00:00
There’s the concept of “personal advocacy” when receiving healthcare. Unfortunately, you’ll only get the best outcomes if you continually seek out treatment with diligence and patience.

But framing it as a “myth [of] perfect attention and treatment” sounds a bit like delegitimizing the entire healthcare industry in a way that makes me raise my eyebrow.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2026-01-10 14:43:54+00:00
> I think it's a real shame we haven't created anything else that does what the terminal does, and I think it's mostly for lack of trying

I'd rather just take terminals a step forward, which I agree hasn't happened due to a lack of trying. But the people who aren't trying are the people who are instead tricking out zsh with plugins. I'm a nushell fan myself but my point here is not

> try nushell

but rather,

> be willing to try things that aren't backwards compatible with `sh`

If more people relaxed on that sticking point, we could actually benefit from the excellent post-POSIX work that has been done. As it is, people are reluctant to try new shells for some reason.
by noufalibrahim | 2026-01-10 14:44:49+00:00
Org format is reasonably intuitive (so is markdown).

But org's real power comes from org-mode and the rest of Emacs. Being able to use it as PIM, as a quick way to write documents and export them, as a way to take notes, the keystrokes which are almost automatic for any Emacs user etc.

This is really why it shines. I don't see much value for it as just a markdown format outside Emacs.
by ghaff | 2026-01-10 14:45:04+00:00
Yep. Execs who are booked pretty solid with meetings, including with customers and field teams making important decisions, will sometimes be late for or even miss meetings.

Last job, the senior guy who I knew missed our breakfast meeting to discuss a job. Turned out that he had something come up with one of the regions and his admin didn't have my cell. Ended up with the job anyway where I stayed for a long time.
by lotsofpulp | 2026-01-10 14:46:12+00:00
That is not how the US has chosen to do it. The ACA prohibits using anything other than age, location, and tobacco use for premium pricing, and the ACA prohibits denying coverage (resulting in a wealth transfer from healthy to sick).

Even the age rating factor is capped at 3, so there are also massive wealth transfers from young to old.

Mathematically, health insurance premiums in the US are more tax than insurance premium.
by kayo_20211030 | 2026-01-10 14:46:17+00:00
Using WebDAV is generally fine, if you have the tools. The weirdness (the hell?) is when you're required to write those tools, or libraries yourself; most especially when the tools you'll write need to work with different flavors of servers. Each's adherence to the protocol is a little "loose" at times. Odd responses. Odd errors. The whole gamut. When it works, it works fine; when it doesn't it really is a bit of a nightmare.
by Forgeties79 | 2026-01-10 14:46:37+00:00
I get some of us here in the US have a near-allergic reaction to regulations or prohibition of any kind, but come on man. At some point you have to acknowledge we need the government to protect us from corporate greed, even on rare occasion. “Just don’t use it” is not a real argument when basically everyone is now expected to use LLM’s at work and beyond
Show HN: Revibing nanochat's inference model in C++ with ggml
by makechan | 2026-01-10 14:46:46+00:00
Recently I wanted to see if I could vibe some serious C++ code.

The result is a C++ re-implementation of Andrej Karpathy's nanochat's inferencing part (https://github.com/karpathy/nanochat), built on top of ggml. Unlike llama.cpp, this isn't a standalone binary; it is a C++ library & Python wrapper designed to swap out some core classes within the nanochat pipeline. For playability, I’ve tried to keep the dependencies to a minimum: just ggml, nanobind, and gtest for unit tests.

Features and limitations:

- A drop-in replacement of nanochat’s `GPT` and `KVCache` classes. So far I’ve only tested this with `chat_web.py`. You can see how it's integrated here: https://github.com/k-ye/nanochat/pull/1

- Supports CPU and GPU (Metal yes, CUDA probably?).

- Handles PyTorch-to-GGUF conversion automatically on demand.

- Only float32 is currently supported.

Benchmark:

On an M3 Max (Metal), throughput is roughly 1/3 that of the original PyTorch implementation. I haven’t profiled the code yet, but I suspect the bottleneck is the lack of bf16 support.

Motivation

- Writing meaningful (& fun) C++ again: I used to spend a lot of my day-to-day time in C++ while working at various tech companies. These days, opportunities to use it for personal projects are rare, as it’s often hard to find a use case where C++'s advantages truly matter.

- Testing "Vibe Coding" capabilities: Most of my current work is in UE5. Ironically, Blueprints—which were designed to help non-coders—have become a bottleneck in the LLM era... Admittedly, the AI agent has generated some FOMO in me, and I wanted to see if AI could handle a lower-level C++ implementation of a complex system from scratch.

- Understanding the LLM internals.

Why nanochat?

It hits the "Goldilocks" zone: popular enough to be relevant, concise enough to be educational, and practical enough to deserve a serious C++ implementation.

If you’re like me — an infra guy from the old days who feels a bit threatened by LLM and/or AI coding — I think nanochat is a great reference. Tinkering with it however you like is a nice way to demystify the tech. I relied heavily on Claude Code (CC) for the implementation. Overall, I am both impressed and genuinely pleased with the experience.

Happy to answer questions, hear feedback or further discuss AI coding!
by masklinn | 2026-01-10 14:47:27+00:00
> Can you fit an 8'x4' sheet of plywood in it?

If you keep the rear doors open, the cargo platform is 1644 by 1540 (mm), 8x4 would be 2438 by 1219.

Most likely you'd just put sheet goods on the roof (and yes roof racks for panel vans were common, still are).

> my other main use for it is as a large gas powered wheel barrow for carrying yard waste, and the little enclosed C15 can't compete.

You can certainly put yard waste in a C15, though people usually use a trailer for that (unless there's little enough of it it fits in a large builder / garden bag).
by ragebol | 2026-01-10 14:47:52+00:00
This problem is called Coverage Path Planning.

One option one could use is eg. https://fields2cover.github.io/ but that doesn't work too well if there's lots of obstacles in the fields like in this case. I'm having the same issue at work right now in agricutrural robots, covering the area between rows and rows of trees. Some implements on our robot hang off to one side so paths can't be bidirectional, etc. Lots of interesting constraints.