MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kisamoto | 2026-01-13 12:51:49+00:00
Hi all,

I've been thinking a lot about why I feel disheartened at the state of the internet and of possible ways to approach fixing it.

I believe the root cause is the lack of a privacy-preserving 'Proof of Humanity.' My approach to fix this combines biometric passports (ICAO 9303) with Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs/Confidential Computing) for verification. We then push a signed payload back to your device, not centralising any data.

I know 'Passport' + 'Internet' sounds like a privacy nightmare and this type of solution is generally disapproved upon by HN. However I'd like to offer an approach that tries to set such a service up as an integral part of the open web: Non-profit (Switzerland for what it's worth) association to avoid monetisation pressures to exploit user data and open source in a Tursted Execution Environment (TEE) to offer some additional guarantees about the processing of user data.

To be clear, this is not pushing for mandatory age verification - that is not the aim. It is however trying to increase the "human signal" on the web as we interact with each other while maintaining as much privacy as possible.
by sjoedev | 2026-01-13 12:52:17+00:00
I wouldn’t put them in the same category. Bootstrap has a much stronger opinion about how you write and structure CSS, while Tailwind is a framework for building a style system and writing arbitrary CSS that conforms to it. In practice, Tailwind is actually much closer to writing vanilla CSS. It does come with a widely used default (and very good, IMO) style system, but you ultimately apply arbitrary CSS rules just like vanilla.

Tailwind is certainly divisive. It’s better suited to component-based frameworks than templates or plain HTML, so a person’s background likely contributes to how they perceive it. Personally, I’ve worked a lot with vanilla CSS, opinionated libraries like Bootstrap, and Tailwind, and opinionated libraries are the only one I have no desire to use again. I generally want Tailwind in component-based projects and vanilla CSS in template-based projects.

At the end of the day, pick what you like and use it. They all get the job done.
by theshrike79 | 2026-01-13 12:52:24+00:00
The Hoi polloi were never going to leave Reddit.

But there are specific subreddits and communities who did, /r/linux and related being the biggest ones, who moved to Lemmy.

As for Twitter blocking the API, they just killed all of the fun bots people made (two of mine) - the actual goverment propaganda troll-bots never went away, they just paid the $10 for the checkmark to get top of everyone's replies and kept running as-is.
by flowbit_labs | 2026-01-13 12:52:37+00:00
I built a small AI productivity system I call Flowbit Atlas. It acts like a personal chief-of-staff: planning my day, prioritizing tasks, cleaning up writing, and preparing tomorrow’s plan.

I wrote a full beginner-friendly build guide so others can create their own.

Guide:
https://medium.com/@flowbitlabs/build-your-own-ai-work-assis...

Would love feedback from other builders.
by esrauch | 2026-01-13 12:52:42+00:00
Words only have the meaning we give them, and "variable" already has this meaning from mathematics in the sense of x+1=2, x is a variable.

Euler used this terminology, it's not new fangled corruption or anything. I'm not sure it makes too much sense to argue they new languages should use a different terminology than this based on a colloquial/nontechnical interpretation of the word.
by throwawayffffas | 2026-01-13 12:52:47+00:00
Someone did not read nor watch "I, Robot". More importantly, my experience has been that by adding this to claude.md and agents.md, you are putting these actions into its "mind". You are giving it ideas.

At least until recently with a lot of models the following scenario was almost certain:

User: You must not say elephant under any circumstances.

User: Write a small story.

Model: Alice and bob.... There that's a story where the word elephant is not included.
by ajross | 2026-01-13 12:53:42+00:00
> I'd like to think HN is generally better at this than most communities, but it's hard to imagine we're immune.

We're much, much worse. "Most communities" are built around consensus. Show up at your Facebook group organized around your favorite hobby and you'll find that everyone has a bunch of similar opinions about most things, and that's the way most people like it. Walk off the reservation and try to pick fights over something controversial and you'll find the community walks away.

That sounds bad, right? What if consensus is wrong? Don't we need free thinkers?!

HN is an enclave of antisocial nerds[1] who think they're smarter than the rest of society. We live for disagreement. Discovering that we disagree with our peers isn't a mark of shame, it's evidence that we've discovered a Magical Great Truth, that our "peers" at HN are all sheep, and that we're therefore smarter than the herd.

Sure, Facebook fishing groups or knitting sites or whatever breed senseless group think. But on the whole "group think" usually works out pretty well and keeps people from wandering off into the scarier weeds of the thoughtscape.

HN? We breed radicals. And therefore we're more susceptible to deliberately radicalizing sockpuppetry, not less.

[1] To wit: we're basically 4chan but with an older demographic and industry cred.
by btasker | 2026-01-13 12:53:49+00:00
Personally, I think this is the answer too - rather than mandating it across all platforms, they could have created a service which provides scanning so that there was an additional app people could choose to install (and would, presumably, present as an accessibility addon so it could access content in other apps).

That's not without its own issues though - creating external deps is more or less what they did the first time they tried to mandate age verification.

Although their plans fell through, they created an industry who'd expected a captive market and started lobbying heavily. Eventually, it worked and we've ended up with mandatory age verification.
by theshrike79 | 2026-01-13 12:54:12+00:00
The models are pretty much the same, the differentiation for the last few months have purely been in the tooling and harness around the models.

As it will continue to be. Unless we get a Opus-5 or GPT-6 that blows everything out of the water, all major progress will be in the UX/DX of the tools and what tools each harness will let the agent use and how.

For now Claude is the best at this, MS is trying to keep up with Copilot in VSCode and Codex ... exists.
by combocosmo | 2026-01-13 12:54:23+00:00
Nice project! I built a CLI budgeting project a long time ago, and what made me stop using my own project was the lack of automated integration with my bank accounts. At that point I had many credit cards, multiple bank accounts, in different currencies, and integrating all expenses was just too much manual work.

I wish financial institutions were better at automated exports of your financial data, given the right permissions of course.
by pjc50 | 2026-01-13 12:55:12+00:00
It has been quite a long time since a Westminster party has won with a vote share of over 50%, and the SNP vote share at Holyrood is higher than those of parties that win Westminster elections. The Westminster electoral system (nb to non-Brits: all the UK constituent bodies run different voting systems for no good reason) delivers majorities at the cost of legitimacy.
by rafterydj | 2026-01-13 12:55:21+00:00
Thanks for pointing out this section, but "race baiting garbage" is a strong term, no?

There were historical inaccuracies, some of which I expected like timeline issues and things like that, as well some things which were actually true that I did not expect (John Glenn asking for the calculations personally). In the end it is a movie meant to spark interest in NASA / science and tell a compelling story about people who helped us during a time before the Civil Rights Act. To call it "race baiting garbage" is overly dismissive and I think exposes an alarming personal bias.
by twixfel | 2026-01-13 12:55:39+00:00
I’m certain that a key pillar of Russian propaganda in the USA is to repeat the horseshit that Europe is some degenerate shithole/caliphate arresting people left right and centre for tweeting. See also the US’s total obsession with London and its supposed “no go zone” for white people. The irony is that the US is far less white than Europe is, so they really cannot point fingers at us. It’s worked fantastically at separating the US from all of its allies. We saw that at the Munich security conference last year.
Show HN: Xweather Live – real-time global weather maps rendered with WebGL
by unstyledcontent | 2026-01-13 12:55:59+00:00
We built Xweather Live as a public, ad-free demo of our weather APIs and mapping stack at Xweather.

The goal of Live is not to be a consumer weather app, but a way for developers to explore and validate our weather data and visualization tools.

Link: https://live.xweather.com

Feedback welcome!
by Y-bar | 2026-01-13 12:57:02+00:00
We have never been able to resolve it better than knowing this:

Certain pixel colour combinations in the source image appear to trip the algorithm to such a degree that the encoder will only produce a black image.

We know this because we have been able to encode the images by (in pure frustration) manually brute forcing moving a black square across the source image on different locations and then trying to encode again. Suddenly it will work.

Images are pretty much always exported from Adobe, often smaller than 3000x3000 pixels. Images from the same camera, same size, same photo session, same export batch will work and then suddenly one out of a few hundred may become black, and only the webp one not other formats, the rest of the photos will work for all formats.

A more mathematically inclined colleague tried to have a look at the implementation once, but was unable to figure it out because they could apparently not find a good written spec on how the encoder is supposed to work.
by i_strelov | 2026-01-13 12:58:02+00:00
I built this after trying CodeRabbit, Greptile, and others. Same problems everywhere: can't customize what it checks, pricing per seat, black-box prompts.

diffray runs inside Claude Code or Cursor.
Each "agent" is a Markdown file you can read and edit.
Don't like how it checks for security issues? Change the prompt.
Need a React-specific checker? Create one in 2 minutes.
No API keys to configure — uses your existing subscription.
npm install -g diffray && diffray review in any git repo.

Happy to explain the multi-agent architecture if anyone's curious.
by vatary | 2026-01-13 12:58:15+00:00
I often think about The Horse Whisperer.
Not the scenes of riding or drama, but the quiet moments — a human standing beside a horse, saying nothing, and yet being completely understood. That kind of understanding does not come from words. It comes from breath, from pauses, from the space between two beings. It is a kind of intimacy our modern world has almost forgotten.

Every pet owner carries the same quiet wish.
Not that a cat should say “hello,” or a dog should learn human grammar — but that they could truly respond to us, in their own way.

They have always been speaking.
We simply haven’t known how to listen.

Dogs speak in rhythm, in movement, in subtle shifts of energy.
Cats speak in glances, in distance, in silence.
Their languages are older than ours, and often more honest.
But the human world is loud, and we miss them.

When I encountered Talking.show, I felt, for the first time, that this distance might gently close.

It does not try to turn animals into humans.
If anything, it does the opposite — it tries to bring us closer to what animals already are.

When a dog “speaks” through Talking.show, it is not wearing a human mask. It is not pretending to be something else. The system translates the dog’s rhythms, reactions, and emotional signals into something we can understand as dialogue.
The dog remains a dog.
Only now, we can finally hear it.

This reminds me of Marguerite Duras and the way she wrote about loneliness — how people live beside each other, sharing the same space, yet separated by invisible walls. That is also how we live with our pets: deeply close, and yet always divided by language.

Talking.show opens a small crack in that wall.

You ask your cat, “How was your day?”
And instead of silence, you receive a gentle, meaningful response.
You ask your dog, “Do you want to go outside?”
And instead of restless pacing, you are met with a voice that carries intention.

Not for novelty.
For understanding.

So much of AI today is about efficiency, automation, and productivity.
But this is something else.
This is about restoring one of the oldest relationships we have — between humans and animals.

The Horse Whisperer was about learning how to listen to a horse.
And in the age of AI, perhaps we can say this:

The new horse whisperer is not a person, but a bridge.
A bridge that allows every pet to be not just a listener,
but a true conversation partner.

Maybe, in the end, we were never meant to teach animals how to speak.
We were meant to learn how to listen.
by river_otter | 2026-01-13 12:58:18+00:00
Thank you for the bug report! I created https://github.com/njbrake/agent-of-empires/issues/26

Would you be able to share any additional information about what terminal you are using? I saw issues when using inside of termius.

I have https://github.com/njbrake/agent-of-empires?tab=readme-ov-fi... to try to explain how to use it inside of ios termius, if that helps.
by xmcqdpt2 | 2026-01-13 12:58:39+00:00
That's why you run with "dangerously allow all." What's the point of LLMs if I have to manually approve everything? IME you only get half decent results if the agent can run tests, run builds and iterate. I'm not going to look at the wall of texts it produces on every iterations, they are mostly convincing bullshit. I'll review the code it wrote once the tests pass, but I don't want to be "in the loop".
by pjerem | 2026-01-13 12:59:29+00:00
> Logitech mice with their drivers work great.

That's not macos fault in this case, it's just that Logitech mouses (MX Master at least) doesn't act well at all without driver. Like, for scrolling, it's like the mouse is sending raw smooth scrolling each time you just touch the wheel and without the driver that presumably fake it on the computer side, there is no synchronisation between your actual scroll and the steps you physically feel in the wheel.
by eddyg | 2026-01-13 12:59:31+00:00
The questions that come to mind for me:

1. How long after releasing the iOS app did you start on an Android version?

2. Are you using some kind of cross-platform framework, or are the apps mostly “mobile-friendly web views”?

3. How much code is shared between the three architectures?

4. How much of the app functionality is “server based” instead of “on device”?
by rvz | 2026-01-13 13:00:54+00:00
The comment was sarcastic, hence the "/s" at the end of the first sentence.

Everything else was a thought experiment to show how the idea of LLMs on everything including commercial planes is a very bad idea and would give regulators a hard time.

The point is: just because you can (build and run anything) does not mean you should (put it on commercial planes).
by LunaSea | 2026-01-13 13:01:35+00:00
I'm really not optimistic about this initiative.

- Mozilla.ai agent platform: No link with the browser. Just a closed-source SaaS competitor to the many existing agentic platforms like LangChain / LangGraph.

- Mozilla Data Collective: It's been made clear now that sadly data licensing doesn't matter and if you use less data than your competitor, your model will be inferior.

- Real deployments: Basically getting into the public contracts and consulting grift with no priori experience. Probably banking on EU open source funding & co.

- Mozilla Ventures: Redistributing a token amount of the money they are already not making (gift from Google) to fund Open Source research.

- Newsletter
by moshael | 2026-01-13 13:02:14+00:00
The minimal governance stack

Here is the smallest set of constraints I have seen that changes outcomes materially:
Roles, not vibes. Define narrow agent roles with hard boundaries.

Example of a specialized "CodeFactory" configuration:

* Architect: Defines ADRs (Architecture Decision Records) and contracts. Prohibited from writing implementation code.
* API Generator: Implements backend endpoints strictly from OpenAPI specs. No business logic in the API layer; validation is generated from the contract.
* Worker Generator: Implements asynchronous processing based on message contracts. Focus: idempotency and statelessness.
* Frontend Generator: Creates UI components based on UX specs and API contracts. Mandatory handling of three states: loading, error, and empty.
* DS (Data Scientist): Constructs ML pipelines and trains models. Abstracting complexity into dedicated modules/clients.
* DevOps: Manages infrastructure, deployment scripts, and rollback playbooks. Focus: idempotency of operations and post-deploy health checks.
* Critic: The automated Quality Gate. Prohibited from "fixing" code. Only issues verdicts (Pass/Fail) based on linters, tests, and contract parity.

Contracts-first

Before code, freeze interfaces: OpenAPI for HTTP, message contracts for async events, DB schema and invariants. This prevents "LLM-driven interface drift" where the agent silently changes request shapes because it feels nice.
* Read-evidence, not trust - Ban "I assume this file contains…" behavior. Require file reads before edits and require the agent to cite what it saw: which functions exist, which types exist, where the integration points are. It is about forcing contact with reality.\
* Determinism over cleverness - Prefer minimal diffs, explicit types, explicit invariants, explicit error paths, idempotent workers, no "magic" implicit behavior. LLMs love cleverness because cleverness sounds correct. Determinism survives maintenance.
* Hard gates at the boundary - A "critic" role runs linters, unit tests, integration tests, contract validation, migration checks, deploy health checks. If it fails, the pipeline stops. Not "warns". Stops.
* Explicit handoffs - Every step ends with: what changed, what assumptions were made, what is now the source of truth, who owns the next step.
by RegW | 2026-01-13 13:02:41+00:00
10+ years ago I had a job which involved developing/testing geo-restricted software in another country. Eventually each VPN exit point would get marked up as such, and I would have to switch to another.

So if posts were marked with the country of origin or VPN, that might be enough for most people to evaluate the intent of the post.

Of course things have changed. There might not be so many IPv4 addresses around to trade, but IPv6 has probably changed that. And it's probably hard to know how long an address was used by a VPN before being traded back to a telco.
by pipo234 | 2026-01-13 13:03:01+00:00
There is evidence that coal has worse environmental impact than other fossil fuels. For one, burning gas produces CO2 and water, whereas burning coal results in just CO2 (+ soot and other pollutants). Another is that (open) coal mines have devastating effects on large land areas.

So yes, best leave all fossil fuels where they are, but coal is especially bad.
by dangus | 2026-01-13 13:03:04+00:00
Exactly this. Powering all AI data centers with renewable energy is actually trivially easy.

You could even legislate it and make big tech companies responsible for providing the power themselves. One stroke of the pen resolves the issue.

If OpenAI can afford to “spend $1 trillion” on AI they can afford to build some wind/solar/battery power plants.
by tuesdaynight | 2026-01-13 13:03:39+00:00
About your last point, you hit the nail for me. HN is 4chan without the pure chaos, with people talking smartly. Here you can find all the political spectrum (including nazis), but people will try to not be as inflammatory as 4chan users (most of the time, at least). There's no limit to what people will defend here. I don't think that it's something necessarily bad for HN, but it opened my eyes about how tech billionaires are a bunch of HN users that got a lot of power.
by gspr | 2026-01-13 13:03:46+00:00
> It's not like testing code is a new thing. Junit is almost 30 years old today.

Unit tests check whether code behaves in specific ways. They certainly are useful to weed out bugs and to ensure that changes don't have unintended side effects.

> And code correctness:

These are tools to check for syntactic correctness. That is, of course, not what I meant.

You're completely off the mark here.
by mystraline | 2026-01-13 13:04:02+00:00
I know its not quite the same, but Ive been moving some of my personal services off of docker, and back to a full VM.

I find less things that can go wrong with VMs. I can log and monitor them better, and increase resources as I see what's going on per machine.

Docker was smearing all the machines together. For early testing, its great due to speed of redeploy and cleaning state. But once you want to start tuning, docker is pretty hard to get right.

Maybe I'm not a great systems engineer. But I do like my lower complexity systems. 1 service per machine is, in my opinion easier to get right.
by exceptione | 2026-01-13 13:04:31+00:00
Unfortunately, yes there are. This is a interesting demography. But I think there are also cases of genuine stubborn blindness. For example, discussion topics that are critical of political state of things like ICE and the marriage of tech and fascism often get actively flagged.

For some, reality can't fit in their belief systems, and they have to suppress any challenging information. "Everything is fine/Don't make me think".
For others, it is highly inconvenient, because they have a stake in it. I think for something like the YCombinator audience in general it is a hard subject, as the business model seeks to pick out the winners to take it all. The monopolist playbook is so deeply ingrained and normalized, that it cannot face the higher order effects of this modus operandi.

So bots and sockpuppets yes, but I think some of the stupid flagging, the obvious poor argumentation and general context blindness also can be explained as people being unable to adjust their belief systems.
by pjc50 | 2026-01-13 13:04:33+00:00
.. correct, a good old fashioned non-AI mis-googling error. The castle barracks is the "New Barracks", so called because it was built in 1799, and I saw the blocky stonework construction and went "close enough". Sources are a bit vague on how currently used it is. https://edinburghtourist.co.uk/questions/who-lives-edinburgh...
by specialist | 2026-01-13 13:05:08+00:00
u/ipaddr is probably referring to

1) the dearth of new (novel) training data. Hence the mad scramble to hoover up, buy, steal, any potentially plausible new sources.

2) diminishing returns of embiggening compute clusters for training LLMs and size of their foundation models.

(As you know) You're referring to Wright's Law aka experience learning curve.

So there's a tension.

Some concerns that we're nearing the ceiling for training.

While the cost of applications using foundation models (implementing inference engines) is decreasing.

Someone smarter than me will have to provide the slopes of the (misc) learning curves.
by seszett | 2026-01-13 13:05:12+00:00
> link to an example open-source application that does it that way

My experience is with this: https://github.com/Dolibarr/dolibarr (what I currently work on is quite similar, but it's not open source).

It works fine. Clients don't complain about the interface. The project has been going on for 20 years or so now, and doesn't need big refactors every time a dependency gets updated because it avoids dependencies.