MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mcfly_c-137 | 2026-01-24 16:54:14+00:00
Really interesting topic. (I’m actually somewhere in between sales and dev - doing Req. Engineering, Concepts and planning).

Personally I consider it more important to constantly narrow down any uncertainties over time, than having an initial estimate that holds. The closer it gets to any deadline, the less uncertainty I want (need) to have because the less options remain to react to changes.

And frankly, this usually not only applies to estimates but also to things that these estimates rely upon. The longer the timeline, the more room for circumstances and requirements to change.
by cjbarber | 2026-01-24 16:54:26+00:00
Another solution: run ethernet cables outdoors on the ground.

You can do ethernet cables outdoors from your router in your house to your router in your office. Either thin cables that go under doors, or outdoor rated ones, both can work fine.

This same approach can work inside a house as an alternative to mesh networking or running cables through walls. The cables don't have to be invisible (underground or in walls) when you have tough constraints, unless you want them to be.
by treelover | 2026-01-24 16:54:37+00:00
"If you're a software developer and you're worried about your job, you haven't spent enough time actually using these AI agents. Anyone who spent eight hours plus a day over the last year using these agents is not at all scared of these agents taking their jobs. They're not... Your job is not going anywhere."

I agree with this take... for now. I wouldn't be surprised if the AI agents improved exponentially (in the next few years) to the point where his statement is no longer true.
Show HN: Kloak – a privacy-first Discord alternative with no email or passwords
by lakshikag | 2026-01-24 16:54:51+00:00
Hey everyone, two of us have been working on a privacy-focused Discord alternative for some time and we’re opening it up for early testing to see how it performs and to get real feedback.

Kloak is privacy-first by design. There are no emails and no passwords. When you join, you’re given a secret key, and that key is your account. There is no recovery mechanism and no central identity tied to you. If the key is lost, the account is gone. This is intentional and meant to reduce stored user data and avoid creating identity honeypots.

Most of the core features are already in place. You can create servers, channels, roles, and permissions, upload files and custom emojis, etc.

We’re still early, and the main goal right now is to validate the model, catch UX issues, and stress the system a bit before going further. We’re especially interested in thoughts around the key-based account approach and any privacy or security trade-offs we may be overlooking.

If you’re curious or want to poke at it, it takes only a few seconds to join and doesn’t require any personal information. You can join Kloak at https://kloak.app

Feel free to join our official server too through https://kloak.app/invite/PV3FEB8N
by lo_zamoyski | 2026-01-24 16:55:02+00:00
Humor aside, to appreciate these recurring themes, if you will, requires knowledge of, e.g., typology. Here, the cross with Christ nailed to it is transfigured into the new Tree of Life. Other important typologies are Christ as the new Adam, Mary as the new Eve, and Mary through her womb as the new Ark of the New Covenant. Noah's ark and the Ark of the Covenant are not called arks coincidentally, either. And the Church is often called the Barque of Peter.
by therobots927 | 2026-01-24 16:56:11+00:00
Ehrm, actually, it’s better to constantly threaten layoffs and lead by fear. Employees are replaceable cogs who need to prove their value to the business. President Musk has made this very clear and most leaders in big tech (with the notable exception of Tim Cook) have followed suit. This radical approach (based on Jack Welch management principles from the 80s) will certainly yield outstanding business outcomes.

All of the above is sarcastic for those who find it difficult to pick up on tone in text.
by tim-tday | 2026-01-24 16:56:12+00:00
I had someone vibecode an app then ask to put it in production. Had to rejigger the logging, security, testing, deployment.
But these things are all something you can do with a prompt once you know.
Is this project following best practices for security and data privacy?
How would I release this?
Let’s implement a test suite.
Where do the logs go and how can I access them when debugging?
by andrewksl | 2026-01-24 16:56:20+00:00
They fully comply with Chinese requirements if you subscribe to iCloud in China, and they do this quite transparently. They do not, notably, say they don't share anything with China and then go ahead and do it anyway.

Unless Apple is straight up lying about their technology and encryption methods used to secure iCloud and their hardware, the issue of a public standoff is moot, because Apple couldn't help them if they wanted to. And while perhaps it's possible that Apple would lie to consumers to please US law enforcement, it's a bit of a stretch to say that because there haven't been any high-profile cases where law enforcement tries to force Apple to give up what they don't have, that this must be evidence that they're in cahoots.
by keepamovin | 2026-01-24 16:56:40+00:00
Yeou nailed the failure mode. The "all caps screaming" methiod (NEVER DO THE NAUGHTY) usually fails for two reasons I think:

- Saturation: models get tired and overwhelmed with signal and forget the 'rule' on turn 5

- Edges: Model find valid reason to break rule, panics because it's "forbidden", and hallucinates a workaround or just lies about it.

Based on our testing, here is the mechanism that prevents the drift you described:

The Escape Valve (aka, The Override Protocol) We don't tell the agent "NEVER." We tell it: "This pattern is rejected. If you must use it, you must file a structured override."

(Format: Override: [Pattern] | Reason: [...] | Risk: [...] | Mitigation: [...])

Psychologically (for the model), this is huge. When the agent hits an edge case, instead of sneaking the code in ("I didn't add this!"), it takes the "bureaucratic" path we offered. It signals the intent. This converts "rule breaking" from a failure into a documented architectural decision.

Classification, not Raw Generation. Most devs seems to try to teach "Best Practice" (which is vague), or just "Good Taste" - which is only partially binding for an agent.

Instead, we focus on Rejects (Negative Constraints). It is much easier for an LLM to classify "Is this JS-R1 (Index Iteration)?" (Yes/No) than to comply with "Write idiomatic JS." Basically, we turn code quality into a retrieval-and-classification task, which resists context rot much better than creative generation instructions.

Referee Mode -- our wiring (AGENTS.md, etc ...) forces a specific chain-of-thought before code generation. The agent is instructed to run a "Checklist Pass" where it must explicitly check relevant doctrine files. By forcing this categorization step before the coding step, we re-prime the context window with the relevant constraints right when they are needed. There's a few more tricks in there too... but it does seem to lead to tigher, more discipliend AI code than without it. And it's just the beginning. I can see this improving all the time.

It is not magic, but it treats the LLM like a stochastic engine that needs guardrails and escape hatches, rather than a person you can just yell strict orders at.

Also, personally anecdotally, I find it reduces my time in these debug debrief sessions, and gets me on the goal faster. Very early days so I don't have much more than that.
by atomic128 | 2026-01-24 16:56:56+00:00
Poison Fountain: https://rnsaffn.com/poison2/

Poison Fountain explanation: https://rnsaffn.com/poison3/

Simple example of usage in Go:

package main

import (
"io"
"net/http"
)

func main() {
poisonHandler := func(w http.ResponseWriter, req *http.Request) {
poison, err := http.Get("https://rnsaffn.com/poison2/")
if err == nil {
io.Copy(w, poison.Body)
poison.Body.Close()
}
}
http.HandleFunc("/poison", poisonHandler)
http.ListenAndServe(":8080", nil)
}

https://go.dev/play/p/04at1rBMbz8

In the news:

The Register: https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/11/industry_insiders_see...

Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/craigsmith/2026/01/21/poison-fo...
by lynndotpy | 2026-01-24 16:57:04+00:00
For anyone wondering why this is relevant to HackerNews:

- There are tech companies and workers in companies outside California,

- A government deploying a militarized police force to execute people in the streets is bad for the economy,

- That government is the United States, and so this is bad for the world economy,

- A lot of the people in our industry are immigrants from outside the United States,

- If you're a HackerNews user in the United States, you can be shot and killed just like this.
by radium3d | 2026-01-24 16:57:06+00:00
This is what happens when you make all the h100/h200/equivalent cards exclusive and lock them up in warehouses. We have no way of running these models locally… yet. Keyword is yet, the exclusivity period is going to end just like it did for 3D graphics when 3DFX democratized it with the voodoo cards. They’re only 300gb of memory and a chip ahead. It’ll shrink.
by asmor | 2026-01-24 16:57:16+00:00
The problem is really that we live in a system that demands we find commercially exploitable value in almost everything we do. If my main strategy for that involved a skill that generative AI could perfectly copy, including my style by invoking my name, I'd be pissed too.

Not to mention that when it comes to art, I'd rather consume something that someone deemed important and interesting enough to dedicate skill and time to.
by pessimizer | 2026-01-24 16:57:17+00:00
I'm happy buying groceries at the grocery store without having to pretend that the checkout clerk loves me.

I also feel that the emotional attachment to one's source of income could cause people to compromise their morality for them, as if they were family e.g. I don't think one child should be favored over another, but I'm happy when my child is favored over others.

> I believe such should be the default.

It's delusional. Your boss is trying to pay you as little as possible for as much work as possible, and you are trying to get him to pay as much as possible for as little work as possible. You've both examined your leverage and have come to a temporary accord which may change a year from now (or a day from now if you get another offer.) The relationship is adversarial. It's not a matter of opinion.
by mbanerjeepalmer | 2026-01-24 16:57:26+00:00
> Universities are increasingly turning to AI to spot AI-written work (even as students use services like Dumb it Down to make their AI-fuelled work sound more believable). It can be detected. Chris Caren, the boss of Turnitin, a popular plagiarism detector, describes plagiarised prose as “beige”: “well-written, but not very dynamic”. It has verbal tics: it is keen on dreary words like “holistic” and notably keen on “notably”.

I don't think you can say that AI-written can be reliably detected. Turnitin is only ~90% effective: https://teaching.temple.edu/sites/teaching/files/media/docum...
by fzeroracer | 2026-01-24 16:57:28+00:00
They've been swarming everyone with multiple agents, even people that are objectively not resisting arrest [1]. That's part of what they do to provide cover. It makes it harder to see the victim in question for any bystander taping the incident. Same reason why whenever they arrest a protester they immediately surround them.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Minneapolis/comments/1q9p1dp/man_kn...
by jeffbee | 2026-01-24 16:58:39+00:00
ICE thugs have been recruited largely from white nationalist rallies and forums. Literally, not as some kind of metaphor. DHS executives post white nationalist propaganda hourly on Twitter. Stephen Miller, an out-of-the-closet Nazi, is the acting president of the United States. Their goal is to start a race war that they believe they can win by murdering 100 million Americans.
by cmrdporcupine | 2026-01-24 16:58:54+00:00
That's been the trend, yes.

Look how much power lies in the hands of people who lie between petroleum in the ground and its combustion. It's a whole waterfall and the majority of the "wealth" in society seems to consist of people who're spinning their wheels from siphoning from it. And now they're terrified it'll go away.

The AI "gold rush" really has this feeling. "How can I get my finger in the pie somewhere here?"

"All that is solid melts into air"
by fibonachos | 2026-01-24 16:59:09+00:00
Multiline autocomplete is still the biggest productivity boost for me. This works well in a familiar codebase with reasonably consistent patterns.

After that it’s the “ask” capability when I need to get oriented in unfamiliar and/or poorly documented code. I can often use the autocomplete pretty effectively once I understand the patterns and naming conventions.

Similarly, agents are good for a first pass triage and plan when troubleshooting tricky bugs.

Still haven’t had a good candidate for going full vibe code. Maybe that’s because I don’t do a lot of greenfield coding outside of work, which seems to be where it shines.

Just my experience. It’s new set of tools in the toolbox, but not always the right one for a given task.
by Zak | 2026-01-24 16:59:20+00:00
The headline is misleading. It says that Microsoft will provide the key if asked, but the linked statement to Forbes says Microsoft will provide the key if it receives a valid legal order.

These have different meanings. Microsoft is legally entitled to refuse a request from law enforcement, and subject to criminal penalties if it refuses a valid legal order.

It does illustrate a significant vulnerability in that Microsoft has access to user keys by default. The public cannot be sure that Microsoft employees or criminals are unable to access those keys.
by 7bit | 2026-01-24 16:59:28+00:00
Same. We used to host a GitLab instance in our enterprise. As a sysadmin that used that only occasionally, let me tell you, it took me a hundred times the time to figure out how to do something than actually doing it.

Even just finding the source code or issue tracker was like hidden behind layers of layers in the navigation.

No we're hosting GitHub. Shits never been easier. GitHub also has its ugly sides, but the ugly sides still are better than anything in GitLab.

I hate GitLab with a passion.
by polyglotfacto | 2026-01-24 16:59:28+00:00
Thanks for the clarification.

With the scope of the experiment in mind, I think we can deduce from it that AI is just not able to produce good software unsupervised. It's an important lesson.

To make a wider point, let's look at another of your prediction: that in 2026 the quality of AI code output will be undeniable. I actually think we've already reached that point. I've never encountered a case where the AI wasn't able to code what I instructed it to. But that's not the same thing as software engineering, and in fact, I have never been impressed by the AI solving real problems for me.

It simply sucks at high quality software architecture. And I don't think this is due to a lack of computing power but that, rather, only humans can figure what makes sense for them. And this matters, because if the software doesn't make sense, beyond very simple things you can test manually, it becomes impossible to know whether it works as intended.

A Web engine is a great example of such a challenge, because despite the extensive shared suites of tests and specifications, implementing one remains a challenge. You can write code and pass 90% of some sub test suite, and then figure out that your architecture is all wrong and you'll never get to the last 10% and in fact your feature is fundamentally broken. Unleashing AI without supervision makes this only worse I think. The problem requires human judgement and creativity to solve.
by teucris | 2026-01-24 16:59:32+00:00
Software developers should be worried about their jobs, not because these tools are capable of replacing them or reducing a company’s need for human developers, but rather because the _perception_ that they can/will replace developers is causing a major disruption in hiring practices.

I truly don’t know how this is going to play out. Will the software industry just be a total mess until agents can actually replace developers? Or will companies come to their senses and learn that they still need to hire humans - just humans that know how to use agents to augment their work?
by j45 | 2026-01-24 17:01:51+00:00
Surprised multiplying by Pi hasn't made it here.

Multiply your estimate by 3.14159 until you find the actuals and your more accurate estimating coefficient.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28667174 (2013)

original: https://web.archive.org/web/20170603123809/http://www.tuicoo...
by davkan | 2026-01-24 17:01:56+00:00
Modern reddit behaves like social media unless you limit yourself to very niche insular subreddits that do not reach r/all.

Overall the site has become social media. Any sub that reaches critical mass gets absorbed into the slop hivemind. Browsing r/all is almost indistinguishable from browsing public facebook posts nowadays. Just loads and loads of bot slop catch-all subreddits like r/interestingasfuck or r/woahthatscool and drama subreddits like r/amioverracting. My filter list is over 100 subs long at this point.

When i log on to an actual classic forum like tacomaforum.com the difference is stark.
by Tadpole9181 | 2026-01-24 17:02:21+00:00
They have two agents holding his hands to the ground while another is beating him in the face with a baton repeatedly. That's not an arrest!

They're just thugs who gang up on people and use the violence they themselves are committing as proof of "resisting arrest" to justify escalating violence. There are now numerous videos of them using excessive force, like spraying a from inches away while while am agent has them pinned down, hands behind back. Or a subdued person in cuffs getting a knee to the back of their neck.
by nine_k | 2026-01-24 17:02:25+00:00
Yes, the key part of estimation is not that we need to say how large must be the (time) box to contain the project, but rather how much of a project can we pack into a box no larger than what the business could bear.

Hence the separation into must-haves, highly desirable, and nice-to-haves. Hence the need for modularity and extensibility: you if don't get to build everything in one go, and can't always even predict what parts would be left outside the scope, you have more of a lego-like structure.

BTW maybe if we finally shook off the polite lie of planning how much work a project could be, and instead started to think in terms of possible deliverables within different time frames, the conversation would become saner.
by SV_BubbleTime | 2026-01-24 17:02:34+00:00
Counterpoint…

I am not worried about losing my programming role to AI.

I am worried about hiring employees and contractors. I haven’t had to hire anyone i office since, but I have specially avoided Upwork and new contractors. It’s too hard to tell if anyone knows anything anymore.

Everyone has the right or right enough answers for an interview or test.

The bar to detect bullshit has been moved deeper into the non-detectable range. It’s like everyone has open-book testing for interviews.

Even if I can sus out who is full of shit in a video or phone interview… the number of people I need to sort through is too large to be effective.

For Upwork specifically, this was an issue for years already. With people buying US accounts and lying about their location or subcontracting to cheaper foreign labor.

So, is vibe coding something I want to hire? Absolutely not. But, I don’t see being able to avoid it or at least not suffering from someone cutting corners.
by TheAceOfHearts | 2026-01-24 17:02:55+00:00
This post just makes me reflect on the sad state of the web and how it continues growing its own little silos that don't integrate with native applications. Actually, I already have the perfect video player (mpv) and I should be able to use that for everything. The dream of the user-agent continues dying: just to show you a few more ads, just for a designer to pad their portfolio with another video player design, just to create redundant work so programmers can keep their six figure jobs.

Note how the author in detailing their 6-year journey only focuses on their customers without any care for the actual end-users that have to engage with these tools in their final form.
by SoftTalker | 2026-01-24 17:02:57+00:00
Some friends of mine in sales roles took a pay cut during the pandemic. Not just the lost commissions because nobody was buying, but base salary as well. They liked their jobs otherwise and felt it was a worthwhile sacrifice to help the company survive. During that time they worked less, and that was the expectation, because there wasn't really much revenue producing work they could do anyway.
by JasonADrury | 2026-01-24 17:03:03+00:00
Always on FDE with online backups is a perfectly reasonable default. The OOBE does offer the users the choice to not back up their key online, even if it's displayed less prominently.

>By giving the user the three options with consequences you empower the user to address their threat model how they see fit.

Making it too easy for uneducated users to make poor choices is terrible software design.
by pessimizer | 2026-01-24 17:03:03+00:00
> “Cultural appropriation” and other knock off terms are objectively a part of every creative and functional cycle.

You'd think it was more complicated than that if the people who were doing a caricature of you had enslaved and murdered your family, and lived in the house your family built while you lived on the street.

It doesn't matter, because culture works how it works (and is often used as a political tool), and somehow world culture ends up being people pretending to be Americans pretending to be the descendants of American slaves. But it's undeniably ugly.
by ajross | 2026-01-24 17:03:40+00:00
It's no different on a technical level than Waymo using remote operators. Presumably Tesla just hasn't wired that up, or doesn't plan to.

FWIW, your logic works better the other way around anyway: if the system didn't work, there would be easily-accessible proof to that effect showing the resulting hilarity as the operator needed to step in. There isn't.

And... of course there isn't. Because FSD is real and works and it drives a ton of us around every day. Is it possible that there are failure modes? Of course. Thus the safety personnel. But the bar of "if they believed it worked" was crossed years ago. Yes, it works. Duh. Go to a dealer and get a test drive if you don't believe people on the internet.
by miduil | 2026-01-24 17:03:42+00:00
Same experience, GitLabs CI/CD language is to me so much better - it has really strong abstractions and you can model a lot of developer experience into it. Especially when it comes to security practices of GitLab CI, but also custom runners, web terminals, ... there is just so much that is shining much more than any other Git forge with built-in CI/CD.
by pinum | 2026-01-24 17:03:44+00:00
I can second this 0.9mm transparent stuff, I've run it successfully and it's very subtle.

Depending on the media converter pair you're using, you probably want UPC instead of APC. I also found that the cheapest generic bidi media converters tend to be SC, so I want with a 30m pre-terminated SC/UPC cable. Total cost (cable plus media converters) was about £30.

Alternatively, you can order a custom 30+m white 0.9mm cable from FS:
https://www.fs.com/uk/products/12285.html
Lead time is fairly long.