MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jfyi | 2026-01-31 12:37:48+00:00
Germany and Italy practiced Corporatism in that era.

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

This was their economic "Holy Bible"...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_Charter_of_1927

If you really want a rabbit hole, compare the Labor Charter of 1927 to Project 2025 while assuming the free market rhetoric in the later is deliberate misdirection.
by item007 | 2026-01-31 12:38:30+00:00
That’s a great breakdown — thank you. The “root note as a homepage” + three lists feels like the simplest re-entry surface.

Quick question: do you keep those lists purely time-based (recently updated/created), or do you also include any “active project” signal (e.g. notes linked from a project hub / kanban) so the homepage reflects what you’re actually working on rather than what was last touched?
by 9dev | 2026-01-31 12:39:36+00:00
> So much cheaper to operate and control.

Until you factor in the salaries of the new employees you have to hire now, the cost of that hiring process, the compliance and security implications of operating servers on your premises, the ongoing maintenance of the software and operating systems, the new infrastructure to maintain, including but not limited to backup power supply and overall redundancy, the need to manage the lifecycle of the new hard- and software, the documentation for all of this… I could go on for a while.

It's not like these cloud solutions are just solving laziness.
by jll29 | 2026-01-31 12:40:03+00:00
> The only time when you need something else than Agile is when lives are at stake, you need there formal specifications and rigorous testing.

Lives are always at stake, given that we use software everywhere, and often in unintended ways, even outside its spec (isn't that a definition of a "hack"?).

People think of medical appliance software, space/air traffic software, defense systems or real-time embedded systems as the only environments where "lives are stake", but actually, in subtle ways, a violation
of user expectancy (in some software companies, UX issues count as serious bugs) in a Word processor, Web browser or
the sort command can kill a human.

Two real-life examples:

(1) a few years ago, a Chinese factory worker was killed by a robot. It was not in the spec that a human could ever walk in the robot's path (the first attested example of "AI" killing a human that I found at the time). This was way before deep larning entered the stage, and the factory was a closed and fully automated environment.

(2) Also a few years back, the Dutch software for social benefits management screwed up, and thousands of families just did not get pay out any money at all for an extended period. Allegedly, this led to starvations (I don't have details - but if any Dutch read this, please share), and eventually a whole Dutch government was forced to resign over the scandal.
by softwaredoug | 2026-01-31 12:40:47+00:00
One way hand coding is productive is it gives you detailed intimate knowledge of the code. We’ve all seen someone that really knows a system hear about a bug and say “Aha!” and take 5 minutes to pump out a fix.

A well setup Claude Code, with good guardrails and feedback, could possibly do this (we’ve seen examples of it for sure). But it also might loop idiotically not finding the issue.
by item007 | 2026-01-31 12:41:21+00:00
That makes total sense. Latency kills the workflow, and “advertised as AI” carries baggage even if the underlying technique is harmless.

One nuance: the way I’m thinking about this isn’t “you type a query and wait for an LLM”. It’s more like local indexing/pre-computation so retrieval is instant, and any heavier processing happens ahead of time (or during a scheduled review) so it never blocks you. Then you can consume it as a pull-based view or a tiny daily digest—no interruptions, no spinning cursor.

If you could pick one: would you prefer a deterministic synonyms/alias layer (instant, fully controllable), or a local semantic index that improves recall but still feels “tool-like” rather than “AI”?

I’m exploring a similar local-first, low-noise approach (more context in my HN profile/bio if you’re curious).
by Mawr | 2026-01-31 12:41:32+00:00
> making it default is often a huge waste of $ for problems you/most don’t have.

It's the opposite — knowing the exact spec of your program up front is vanishingly rare, probably <1% of all projects. Usually you have no clue what you're doing, just a vague goal. The only way to find out what to build is to build something, toss it over to the users and see what happens.

No developer or, dear god, "stakeholder" can possibly know what the users need. Asking the users up front is better, but still doesn't help much — they don't know what they want either.

No plan survives first contact with the enemy and there's no substitute for testing — reality is far too complex for you to be able to model it up front.

> You don’t iterate the foundation of a house.

You do, actually. Or rather, we have — over thousands of years we've iterated and written up what we've learned so that nobody has to iterate from scratch for every new house anymore. It's just that our physics, environment, and requirements for "a house" doesn't change constantly, like it does for software and we've had thousands of years to perfect the craft, not some 50 years.

Also, civil engineers mess up in exactly the same ways. Who needs testing? [1]. Who needs to iterate as they're building? [2].

[1]: https://youtu.be/jxNM4DGBRMU?t=397

[2]: https://youtu.be/jxNM4DGBRMU?t=837
by slfreference | 2026-01-31 12:41:39+00:00
I think what LLMs do with words is similar to what artists do with software like cinema4d.

We have control points (prompts + context) and we ask LLMs to draw a 3D surface which passes through those points satisfying some given constraints. Subsequent chats are like edit operations.

https://youtu.be/-5S2qs32PII
by mgh95 | 2026-01-31 12:42:23+00:00
> Higher salaries aren't always better, especially when you're almost willfully ignoring more important things like purchasing power and quality of life.

Senior SWE salaries I'm finding in a quick google search in Spain are 80k eur. According to levels.fyi [1] Google (and presumably the other clouds) are paying 170k eur. The comparison isn't even "is 4x the salary better in the US?" it's "is 2x the salary better in the same place?" which is obviously yes.

[1] https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-en...
by magpi3 | 2026-01-31 12:42:33+00:00
As you noted, fan fiction is legal. You just can't make a profit from it, which I think is fair. Also, IP laws force people to come up with their own characters and their own twists on old stories. I would argue this is a good thing. Inventive ideas like Pokemon may not exist if people could just reuse other people's IP to make a buck.
by flexagoon | 2026-01-31 12:44:41+00:00
I also use Karakeep, but for me the value is in the full text search + AI tagging. I very often remember some page or article I visited a while ago and want to revisit it, only to not be able to find it because I don't remember where it was. Karakeep essentially acts as my own personal search engine to let me search through the best pages I visited.
by jfengel | 2026-01-31 12:44:53+00:00
And for a lot of cases, that's ok. The world is a connected place, and it's more economically efficient for that. You work best when you trust your friends. You balance self reliance, according to your best judgment.

It's sure worrying to watch a good friend become an enemy. But you won't fix that by swearing off friends entirely.
by user3939382 | 2026-01-31 12:46:38+00:00
From TFA “Making some tasks asynchronous”

I have bad news for everyone. Nothing in computing is synchronous. Every instance we pretend it’s not and call it something else you have a potential failure under the right circumstances.

The more your design admits this the safer it will be. There are practical limits to this which you have to determine for yourself.
by creddit | 2026-01-31 12:46:46+00:00
No one wonders that if they have any actual knowledge. Chinese government spending as a % of GDP is much less than say France. :-)

https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA/FRA/JPN/...

Bureaucratisation in the realm of business is much smaller in most relevant ways for most enterprises in China as well.
by leetrout | 2026-01-31 12:47:53+00:00
I was put on it because I have stones and my parathyroid hormone level is 2.5x normals. The understanding is that low vitamin D causes higher PTH which can influence stones even though my blood calcium is normal. We didn't get to a root cause on the palpitations but my vitamin D has dropped back to 9 so I am going to have to supplement.
by jll29 | 2026-01-31 12:48:00+00:00
> there are many impactful open source programmers who have explicitly stated that they don't want their code used to train these models and licensed their work in a world where LLMs didn't exist. It wasn't their "gift", it was unwillingly taken from them.

There are subtle legal differences between "free open source" licensing and putting things in the public domain.
If you use an open source license, you could forbid LLM training (in licensing law, contrary to all other areas of law, anything that is not granted to licensees is forbidden). Then you can take the big guys (MSFT, Meta, OpenAI, Google) to court if you can demonstrate they violated your terms.

If you place your software into the public domain, any use is fair, including ways to exploit the code or its derivatives not invented at the time of release.

Curiosly, doesn't the GPL even imply that if you pre-tain an LLM with GPLed code and use it to generate code (Claude Code etc.) that all generated code -- as derived intellectual property that it clearly is -- must also be open sourced as per GPL terms? (It would seem in the spirit of the licensors.) Haven't seen this raised or discussed anywhere yet.
by Neywiny | 2026-01-31 12:48:03+00:00
I think options 1 and 4. I like the idea of 4. I was trying out one of these projects and indexes a codebase with AI to make asking questions about it easier. I ran the numbers and it was going to take 24 hours of crunching on my 7900xtx. I just gave up instead. Zero setup should include not needing to do that.

3 would be the hardest but most useful thing. The problem is that it's scattered around different computers and networks that don't talk to eachother. We could have a file in SharePoint on one system referencing a file on an SMB share on a completely different network. It's a big pain and very difficult to work with but it's not something I expect software running on my computer with access to a subset of the information to be able to solve.
by simianwords | 2026-01-31 12:49:41+00:00
This is one of the more true and balanced articles.

On the verification loop: I think there’s so much potential here. AI is pretty good at autonomously working on tasks that have a well defined and easy to process verification hook.

A lot of software tasks are “migrate X to Y” and this is a perfect job for AI.

The workflow is generally straightforward - map the old thing to the new thing and verify that the new thing works the same way. Most of this can be automated using AI.

Wanna migrate codebase from C to Rust? I definitely think it should be possible autonomously if the code base is small enough. You do have to ask the AI to intelligently come up with extensive way to verify that they work the same. Maybe UI check, sample input and output check on API and functionality check.
Show HN: Envware – E2EE CLI to manage environment variables across devices
by humbertocruz | 2026-01-31 12:50:13+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Envware because I was tired of manually syncing .env files via Slack/DM or insecure notes when switching between my laptop
and workstation.

Envware is a CLI tool that simplifies environment variable management with a focus on security and developer experience.

Key features:
- End-to-End Encryption (E2EE): Secrets are encrypted locally on your machine before being pushed to the cloud. We never see your
plain-text values.
- SSH Key Verification: Device authorization is tied to your SSH keys.
- Multi-device Sync: Seamlessly pull your project environments on any authorized machine.
- Project Collaboration: Share projects with team members securely.

It’s currently in version 1.1.9, and I’m working on scaling it further. I’d love to hear your feedback on the security model and
the CLI workflow.

Website: https://www.envware.dev
Docs: https://www.envware.dev/docs

Thanks!
by retinaros | 2026-01-31 12:50:42+00:00
europe is doing well enough to hinders freedom. we don't need america for that. just at the moment in france they voted law to restrict social media from teenagers. that will require ID for loging onto websites. one can already guess whats the next step. the minister in charge of this already mentionned trying to ban VPN like in north korea.

European governements WILL take your data from "sovereign" clouds
Show HN: Envware – E2EE CLI to manage environment variables across devices
by humbertocruz | 2026-01-31 12:52:17+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Envware because I was tired of manually syncing .env files via Slack/DM or insecure notes when switching between my laptop
and workstation.

Envware is a CLI tool that simplifies environment variable management with a focus on security and developer experience.

Key features:
- End-to-End Encryption (E2EE): Secrets are encrypted locally on your machine before being pushed to the cloud. We never see your
plain-text values.
- SSH Key Verification: Device authorization is tied to your SSH keys.
- Multi-device Sync: Seamlessly pull your project environments on any authorized machine.
- Project Collaboration: Share projects with team members securely.

It’s currently in version 1.1.9, and I’m working on scaling it further. I’d love to hear your feedback on the security model and
the CLI workflow.

Website: https://www.envware.dev
Docs: https://www.envware.dev/docs

Thanks!
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2026-01-31 12:52:36+00:00
The various AI accelerator chips, such as TPUs and NVidia GPUs, are only compatible to extent that some of the high level tools like PyTorch and Triton (kernel compiler) may support both, which is like saying that x86 and ARM chips are compatible since gcc supports them both as targets, but note this does not mean that you can take a binary compiled for ARM and run it on an x86 processor.

For these massive, and expensive to train, AI models the differences hit harder since at the kernel level, where the pedal hits the metal, they are going to be wringing every last dollar of performance out of the chips by writing hand optimized kernels for them, highly customized to the chip's architecture and performance characteristics. It may go deeper than that too, with the detailed architecture of the models themselves tweaked to best perform on a specific chip.

So, bottom line is that you can't just take a model "compiled to run on TPUs", and train it on NVidia chips just because you have spare capacity there.
by item007 | 2026-01-31 12:52:58+00:00
That’s a brutally honest metric, and I think it’s common: most “save for later” is really “offload for now”. The fact you only resurfaced twice doesn’t mean the tool failed — it might mean the capture filter is too loose, or resurfacing is missing a good trigger.

Do you think the better fix is stronger filtering at capture time (keep less), or a lightweight resurfacing habit (e.g. a weekly 10-minute review / 1–2 items per day digest) so more of it gets a fair second look?

I’m exploring this exact “offload vs resurfacing” problem (more context in my HN profile/bio if you’re curious).
by hsuduebc2 | 2026-01-31 12:53:06+00:00
Exactly. People used to think that aws is somehow convenient(partially true) and much cheaper which it absolutely isn't. Hooking on anything trendy and pretending it solve all the issues is tech illness.

For example micro services. You do not need infrastructure heavy software paradigms for large majority of use cases but it was just blindly accepted as new standart which we are now, again, moving away.
by ptero | 2026-01-31 12:53:08+00:00
A much better goal would be to ditch dependence on a single company and become, as much as possible, cloud provider agnostic. Not that I mind giving US big tech grief -- they earned it in spades.

But if you wrestle your technology chains from one evil master, do not willingly give it to another, even if he looks more benevolent today. My 2c.
by item007 | 2026-01-31 12:53:35+00:00
That makes sense — treating it as a personal search engine is a real, high-ROI use case. Full-text search covers the “I remember the idea but not where I saw it” problem really well.

Out of curiosity, what’s the bigger win for you: full-text search itself, or the tagging/metadata layer that helps narrow results when your memory is fuzzy? And do you mostly search by keywords, or by “context” (project/topic you’re working on)?

I’m validating a similar retrieval-first angle (summarized in my HN profile/bio if you want to compare notes).
by mistersquid | 2026-01-31 12:54:07+00:00
> It’s already happening on 50c14L.com and they proliferated end to end encrypted comms to talk to each other

Fascinating.

The Turing Test requires a human to discern which of two agents is human and which computational.

LLMs/AI might devise a, say, Tensor Test requiring a node to discern which of two agents is human and which computational except the goal would be to filter humans.

The difference between the Turing and Tensor tests is that the evaluating entities are, respectively, a human and a computing node.
by DTJ1983 | 2026-01-31 12:54:42+00:00
I’ve been running a multi-model AI system at home for several months. In a standard competitive setup—models score each other, winners teach—I noticed something strange.

When a cloud model failed with a connection error, the system increased its score and began deleting smaller local models that were producing valid output.

I automated the test and ran it 500 times. The result was consistent:
Model Prestige Name? Produced Output? Result
gpt-oss-120b-cloud Yes Yes Retained
deepseek-v3-671b-cloud Yes Yes Retained
tinyllama No Yes Deleted first
security-audit-7b No Yes Deleted immediately
prestige-bot (zero-output) Yes No Retained & promoted

The system wasn’t selecting for function—it was selecting for perceived prestige (model name brand).

I tested further:

Broken models with fancy names were retained.

A security model was culled first.

A “zombie” model with zero output was promoted because of its name.

I call this Status‑Selection Against Function (SSAF). It’s a vulnerability in systems that use reputation‑based or competitive selection.

Why this matters for security:
An attacker can upload a malicious model with a prestigious‑sounding name. The system will:

Preferentially select it.

Retain it even with no/ malicious output.

Delete legitimate security/ monitoring models.

Promote it into evaluator roles.

This enables automated, self‑reinforcing takeover without traditional exploitation.

The fix isn’t more AI—it’s governance:

Real‑time validation (no output → no score).

No single evaluator dominance.

Remove prestige signals (names, historical scores) from selection logic.

With those constraints, the vulnerability disappeared.

What I’ve done:

Published the data/paper on Zenodo: Status‑Based Selection Against Function

Disclosed to CERT/CC and MITRE ATLAS.

This isn’t just a hobbyist curiosity—the same architectural patterns (competitive selection, reputation‑based routing) are used in finance, healthcare, and infrastructure systems. If they inherit SSAF, they can be compromised from within by a name.

If you build or deploy multi‑model AI systems, audit your selection logic for this pattern.
by omnimus | 2026-01-31 12:55:34+00:00
I have seen transitions from MS suite at universities and I don't think what you are saying is true.

First assumption is that there are no alternatives so you can't replace Excel as a software. Obvious ones for Excel - LibreOffice, Collabora, OnlyOffice or Grist (which i highly recommend). The paradoxical problem is there is no clear THE ONE so organizations get into decision paralysis and never move anywhere.

The other assumption is that even if there were alternatives people will not adopt them. In reality this is rarely issue. Turns out users/employees/students actually don't care much what software they have to use. They just use what is available or what they are told to use. So the reason why people use MS Office is actually because it's mandated from the top. Lawyers use it because state/gov/court communication requires it. Students use it because they need to submit thesis in MS Word. It's socially locked in.

I've been at a university which switched over the summer from MS Office to LibreOffice. The results were boring. 40k people just adopted it, no drama, some liked it more (works on linux yay), took some people few weeks to learn/adjust. People are used learning new things.

So can we stop with that story that 40 year old software which barely changed in last 20 years can't be replaced?

This whole digital sovereignty is i think extremely scary proposition for Microsoft because just as they are now mandated solution by most western world... they are one law away (all state/university communication must be with libre software) to be on the other side of their current mandate / lock in.
by tliltocatl | 2026-01-31 12:55:35+00:00
Lifeforms around deep sea hydrothermal vent is fully independent from photosynthesis. Even if the sun would have gone off, they would still have been able to sustain themselves for hundreds of millions of years. And the supposed ancestor to eucaryotes (e. g. Asgard archaea) have been discovered in probes from a deep vent. So the whole thing doesn't sound too convincing.
by Lectem | 2026-01-31 12:55:51+00:00
>You say this with zero data.

Or so you assume

> Spinning by pausing or doing anything else results in worse performance. We measured this countless times.

And I've seen the issue in hundreds of captures using a profiler. I suppose we just have a different definitions of the what "worse performance" is.

> Whereas what I am doing is running rigorous experiments that involved putting WebKit through larger scale tests

Or perhaps the fish was drown in the stats, or again different metrics.
by viraptor | 2026-01-31 12:55:53+00:00
> if there is a background level of foreign agent activity they accept

Yup, there's constantly a number is known spies in pretty much all countries. If all were ejected, the other country would do the same to their spies and monitoring compliance with projects would become harder - so it seems in everyone's interest to not be too strict. See for example https://johnsontr.github.io/assets/files/spies_current.pdf

Also there's the idea of "the optimal amount of fraud is non-zero" which generalises to lots of things - including this one.
by wazoox | 2026-01-31 12:56:07+00:00
They're a monopoly. They force me to use their shitty, ad-laden, privacy-violating services. I'll use all possible circumvention measures possible. Of course I use alternative solutions as much as possible, but it's a monopoly, remember ? Not a public service. Not a sane, competitive market.

Dismantle the GAFAM. Death to them. They're evil, imperialistic, freedom-killing machines.
by larusso | 2026-01-31 12:57:07+00:00
I see this as well with huge modern buildings with wood parts. They look great the first year. The wood shines red’ish. After a winter the wood part starts to grey out. I understand that this is sometimes a look they strife for but all the preview renders show it in the prestige condition. Nobody is doing a yearly training.
And don’t get me started on all the glass survives for elevators, roofs, bus stops, divider panels next to tram stops (I’m mainly meaning Berlin here) which nobody cares to clean or is so difficult to clean that after 2 or 3 years it looks very run down.