MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kxbnb | 2026-01-22 15:25:11+00:00
Great execution on this - the argument-level blocking is the key insight. The all-or-nothing permission model is exactly why MCP adoption stalls in production.

We've been working on a similar problem at https://keypost.ai, coming at it from the policy enforcement angle - rate limits, cost caps, and access control rules that sit in-path. The challenge we keep hitting is rule composition: when you have multiple constraints (e.g., "can use github.delete but only on branches matching feature-*, and only 3x per hour"), the config can get unwieldy fast.

Curious how you're handling rule definitions in Armour - is it purely argument pattern matching, or are you thinking about stateful rules (like rate limits or quotas)?

Really glad to see more people building in this space. The MCP security story needs a lot more attention.
by retsibsi | 2026-01-22 15:25:12+00:00
They'll never be cent-accurate, but if you've done a decent job then they should be in your zone of rough indifference. Then you can simply avoid that annoyance by not looking at the final price, safe in the knowledge that at worst you may have missed out on a marginally worthwhile purchase by marginally underestimating its value. If that's not the case, you didn't bid enough in the first place.

(But also, how is the annoyance not irrational? Your estimates weren't cent-accurate, but they were just as likely to be slightly too high as slightly too low. And you haven't learned anything new about the true values -- unless you take your emotional reaction to be new evidence. For your emotional reaction to be new evidence, it has to be somewhat unpredictable, otherwise you could have fully factored it in in advance. But you seem to be saying that you're predictably going to be annoyed by a 1c loss.)
by PaulHoule | 2026-01-22 15:25:19+00:00
Kinda funny, I think there was a conference on this stuff a few months ago as I've seen a lot of stuff about HRV go by in my RSS reader lately.

I have a github project

https://github.com/paulhoule/VulpesVision

that does an HRV visualization on a web site if you (i) use Chrome and (ii) have a modern BTLE HR monitor (I got two Polar H10s) You can bring it up with

npm install
npm run dev

There is a lot of confusion in the literature I think, but you can clear it with the understanding that: (a) the SD1 metric aka RMSSD is the one that's the most backed by the literature and (b) you can increase your SD1 by reinforcing

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

by the simple method of eyeballing the instantaneous HR chart and breathing out when the chart goes down and breathing out when it goes in, being careful to manage your air supply (not breathe too deeply) so you don't top or bottom out.

Elite HRV is a pretty good commercial app but their "HRV biofeedback" isn't anywhere near as good as mine as it tells you to do "resonant breathing" by sweeping through the frequency range where the Mayer wave happens -- why do that when you can just sync it directly... in fact I can do the same feat eyeballing the heart rate in Elite HRV.

I'm working on a 2-player version of this game because I think it will make a demo that punches well above its weight.
by smravec | 2026-01-22 15:25:28+00:00
I built this because I have zero self-control.

I tried other blockers, but I always found myself toggling them off when I wanted a dopamine hit, or getting annoyed that they just left blank spaces on the page.
This extension is aggressive and opinionated:

1. Redirects, don't hide: On YouTube/Instagram, it doesn't just hide the feed; it redirects the root URL to your Subscription/Following feed. You literally cannot see the algorithm.

2. Hard Mode Friction: I added a "2FA-style" PIN verification to turn it off. I made the unlock process annoying on purpose so I wouldn't do it impulsively.

3. Zero Config: There is no settings page. You install it, and it nukes everything immediately.

I received some feedback that it's "too opinionated" because it blocks Facebook entirely without options. That is by design. I built this for my own workflow to stop doomscrolling, not to be a general-purpose content filter.

It’s open source and creates no network requests.

Repo: https://github.com/smravec/no-distractions
Chrome Store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/no-distractions-rem...
by Tyriar | 2026-01-22 15:25:35+00:00
Some JIT notification to enable it and/or a status bar/banner was considered, but ultimately this was chosen to improve the user experience. Instead of opening a folder, having it restricted and editing code being broken until you click some item in the status bar, it's asked up front.

It was a long time ago this was added (maybe 5 years?), but I think the reasoning there was that since our code competency is editing code, opening it should make that work well. The expectation is that most users should trust almost all their windows, it's an edge case for most developers to open and browse unfamiliar codebases that could contain such attacks. It also affects not just code editing but things like workspace settings so the editor could work radically different when you trust it.

You make a good point about the cookie banner reflex, but you don't need to use accept all on those either.
by vidarh | 2026-01-22 15:26:06+00:00
If the internet is down I can't do most of my work with or without an LLM, and redundancy is a thing.

The only way I'll run out of credits is if my company isn't liquid any longer in which case I have bigger problems.

And there are plenty of LLM providers, almost only a few w/SOTA models but even for SOTA models there is no reason to be dependent on one.
by jchw | 2026-01-22 15:26:18+00:00
I mean something a bit different. I mean using PE binaries to store Linux programs, no Wine loader.

Of course, this is a little silly. It would require massively rethinking many aspects of the Linux userland, like the libc design. However, I honestly would be OK with this future. I don't really care that much for ELF or its consequences, and there are PE32+ binaries all over the place anyways, so may as well embrace it. Linux itself is often a PE32+ binary, for the sake of EFI stub/UKI.

(You could also implement this with binfmt_misc, sure, but then you'd still need at least an ELF binary for the init binary and/or a loader.)

(edit: But like I said, it's a little silly. It breaks all kinds of shit. Symbol interposition stops working. The libdl API breaks. You can't LD_PRELOAD. The libpthread trick to make errno a thread local breaks. Etc, etc.)
by bell-cot | 2026-01-22 15:26:21+00:00
Not quite how it works, unfortunately.

Once you've got even hundreds of satellites in non-equatorial orbits, trying to provide global coverage - their ground tracks very frequently cross each other. Even if they're all at the same orbital inclination. While those mostly won't be 90 degree crossings - the great majority will involve several km/s relative velocity. And you'd run out of (say) 5km LEO shells very quickly.
by xnorswap | 2026-01-22 15:26:23+00:00
"TikTok doesn't live up to the best of TV" is true, but that's not the argument I'm making.

OP asked for "newer", and yet you've not named anything created in the last 10 years. ( And named a 30+ year old improv show, which is definitely not the format I'm talking about. )

You're not alone, one second-cousin comment even went with the phrase "more modern", then named a range of shows that are at least over 20 years old. Green Wing was the 90's, that's closer to the time of Python's Life of Brian than today.

Clearly things aren't fine if there isn't fresh blood coming through.

Sketch shows never were the best of TV, they are a format where you throw a lot out there and then the very best bits of each episode might be particularly funny, with a bunch of filler in-between.

That can't compete with a medium where people just swipe the second they're not finding a particular piece funny or to their taste.
by palmotea | 2026-01-22 15:26:24+00:00
> For example, using ChatGPT to get a response to a random question like "How do I do XYZ" is much more convenient than googling it, but the time savings are often not that relevant for your overall productivity. Before LLMs you were usually already able to find the information quickly and even a 10x speed up does not really have too much of an impact on your overall productivity, because the time it took was already negligible.

I'd even question that. The pre-LLM solutions were in most cases better. Searching a maintained database of curated and checked information is far better than LLM output (which is possibly bullshit).

Ditto to software engineering. In software, we have things call libraries: you write the code once, test it, then you trust it and can use it as many times as you want forever for free. Why use LLM generated code when you have a library? And if you're asking for anything complex, you're probably just getting a plagiarized and bastardized version of some library anyway.

The only thing where LLMs shine is a kind of simple, lazy "mash this up so I don't have to think about it" cases. And sometimes it might be better to just do it yourself and develop your own skills instead of use an LLM.
by scrumper | 2026-01-22 15:26:26+00:00
I think so. He's more storm-tossed survivor than Moses parting the waves, but he makes the best of the endless shit he's dumped into and preserves his sense of self throughout. I think he responds heroically, far more than he fixes anything external. For example he finds himself marooned on a strange planet and sets up a Perfectly Normal Beast sandwich shop, living very comfortably for a while.

For what is he fighting against? Nothing really, he's just adrift in the universe. There's no antagonist beyond existence itself and his own circumstances. He faces off against both quite effectively.
by cmrdporcupine | 2026-01-22 15:26:38+00:00
I use free RustRover for my open source work. I have not purchased a (new) license for my commercial work, because I haven't been getting as much value as it since my flow has switched to primarily agentic.

Mainly, they're pushing Junie and it just isn't that good or compelling, when faced off against the competition.

The key thing for me is that I think they had an opportunity here to really rethink how LLMs could interact with an editor since they potentially controlled both the editor and the LLM interaction. But they just implemented another chat-based interaction model with some bells and whistles, and also were late getting it out really, and what they delivered seemed a bit meh.

I was hoping for something that worked more closely inside the editing process, inline in the code, not just completions and then an agentic log alongside.

I also don't like that I can't seem to get it to work with 3rd party LLM providers, really. It seems to allow specifying an OpenAI API compatible endpoint, but it's janky and doesn't seem to allow me to refresh and manage the list of models properly?

It just still seems half-baked.

I love Opus and I am a heavy CC user now, but I don't like that Claude Code is taking me out of my IDE, away from hands on with the code, and out of my editing process.And I don't like how it tries to take over and how weak its review flow is. I end up almost always with surprises during my review process, despite my finding the quality of its code and analysis quite good. To me there was a real chance here for a company like JetBrains to show its worth in applying AI in a more sensible way than Anthropic has.

VSCode and Zed have no appeal to me though. I've mostly gone back to emacs.

In the meantime, their IDEs themselves feel a bit stalled in terms of advancement. And they've always suffered from performance problems since I started using them over 20 ago.
by ryanshrott | 2026-01-22 15:27:03+00:00
Hi HN, I'm the creator of DictaFlow.

I built this because I was frustrated with existing AI dictation tools failing in my daily workflow. I work in a locked-down corporate environment involving a lot of Remote Desktop (RDP) and Citrix sessions.

Because those environments block clipboard sharing for security, most dictation apps that rely on "transcribe-then-paste" simply don't work.

How it works: Instead of pasting text, DictaFlow mimics human keyboard input (sending keystrokes).

1. Audio: Captures raw PCM audio (16kHz).

2. Processing: Runs a quantized Whisper model locally.

3. Output: Simulates keypress events with a tunable delay. This tricks the remote desktop into thinking a physical keyboard is typing, bypassing the clipboard restriction entirely.

Features:

- Context Aware: It handles code formatting surprisingly well (e.g., "function def" turns into python syntax).

- Privacy: It doesn't upload audio to the cloud for training.

- Local-First: Designed to be lightweight.

It's currently Windows-only. I'd love feedback on the latency or any edge cases you find in other VDI environments.
by samuelstros | 2026-01-22 15:27:15+00:00
Indeed, if lix were to target code version controlling, incompatibility with git is a “dead on arrival” situation.

But, Lix use case is not version controlling code.

It’s embedding version control in applications. Hence, the reason why lix runs within SQL databases. Apps have databases. Lix runs of top of them.

The benefit for the developer is a version control system within their database, and exposing version control to users.
by tetris11 | 2026-01-22 15:27:25+00:00
I love tree-sitter+eglot but a few of the languages/schemes I work in, simply don't have parsers:

> pacman -Ssq tree-sitter
tree-sitter
tree-sitter-bash
tree-sitter-c
tree-sitter-cli
tree-sitter-javascript
tree-sitter-lua
tree-sitter-markdown
tree-sitter-python
tree-sitter-query
tree-sitter-rust
tree-sitter-vim
tree-sitter-vimdoc

Where's R, YAML, Golang, and several others?
by raffael_de | 2026-01-22 15:27:55+00:00
I'd argue that the or at least one major reason for the downfall of Stackoverflow (and not just a catalyst) has been a surge of Indian IT people triggering an avalanche of extremely low quality questions and answers. I've been a big fan of SO since about 2010. Not just didn't mind the harsh moderation but actually attribute to it learning how to properly ask a question. But at some point round about 2019/2020 it stopped being fun due to it going from knowledge base to garbage dump.
by sanderjd | 2026-01-22 15:28:02+00:00
Yeah, the conceit of Seinfeld was that the characters were crappy, but you liked them because they were funny. But they didn't actually lean into that as hard as, say, the finale would suggest. All of the characters have something sympathetic that you can like about them, even if you can buy the thesis that they are unsympathetic broadly.

The genius of IASIP is to just lean all the way into this trope. The characters are never sympathetic and never redeem themselves. It's almost an experiment in whether you can make people feel sympathetic toward awful (but entertaining) characters just through long familiarity with them. (Yes.)
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2026-01-22 15:28:14+00:00
One big difference between the two cultures, is the British caste system.

It's important for us to Know Our Place. Me mum[0] was British, and I used to see this attitude, all the time.

Climbing is OK, but you need to do it properly. Americans are told "Don't take that shit! Force them to accept you!", while British are told "Tsk. Tsk. You can't do it that way! You need to join their club, before you try going to their level."

Heroes are often those that accept their lot.

[0] https://cmarshall.com/miscellaneous/SheilaMarshall.htm
by skrebbel | 2026-01-22 15:28:15+00:00
I feel like these lines are getting increasingly blurred. Eg "The Recruit" is basically "what if Mr Bean (could say entire sentences and was young and handsome and) would get a junior legal gig at the CIA". It's very American, action packed, everybody is steaming hot and there's conspiracies behind every corner, yet it is also all about the humour in failure and the extreme escalation that results from the protagonist's screwups.
by sarchertech | 2026-01-22 15:28:53+00:00
The argument is that a scale that generally falls between 0-100 is inherently slightly more convenient than that that generally falls between -17 and 37.

Obviously both can be adapted to.
But if you took a group of aliens and asked them to come up with a temperature scale that was only used to convey how cold or warm the temperature felt to humans, they would almost certainly use human body temperature in their design process not the freezing and boiling points of water.

This isn’t to say that Celsius isn’t perfectly fine and superior in most ways. I’m not insulting anyone or attempting to participate in some kind of culture war.

Celsius is obviously a better scale for determining when water freezes. But I’ve never found myself paying attention to that. Mostly because any problems that I’d worry about related to the water freezing happen well below freezing.

But if you find yourself unable to agree that one system has some inherent advantages over another, even if they don’t outweigh the disadvantages, you should step back and think a little more objectively.
by mrkeen | 2026-01-22 15:29:15+00:00
Slightly tangential:

> He initially wanted to press charges because Granger’s act “violates the sanctity of the gallery,” but changed his mind

> Left: Graham Granger after his arraignment outside the court building

I was beginning to think "pressing charges" was a myth (popularised by TV shows like Law & Order) and this article didn't exactly change my mind about that.

Do US state attorneys actually give two shits about what the victim wants? Is it someone's job to read an email inbox and systematically approve/reject citizens' pressed charges? Do they even pretend to?
by vidarh | 2026-01-22 15:29:24+00:00
You're making flawed assumptions you have no basis for.

Most of my work is on projects I have a long term vested interest in.

I care far more about maximally leveraging LLMs for the projects I have a vested interest in - if my clients don't want to, that's their business.

Most of my LLM usage directly affects my personal finances in terms of the ROI my non-consulting projects generate - I have far more incentives to do the job well than a permanent employee whose work does not have an immediate effect on their income.
by mrweasel | 2026-01-22 15:29:31+00:00
I've used DDG since, 2012, and switched to Ecosia about three years ago. In my experience if DDG or Ecosia can't find something, then neither can Google. In some cases I still check with !g, but Google is now worse than both DDG and Ecosia (which is funny because Ecosia partially uses Google).

It may be related to which type of content you search for, field of work or even how you search, but you're certainly not the only one I've heard complain that they need !g way to often for alternatives to be viable.

Google is very good is you need to buy something though. Their ad system yields rather good results, most of the time. Lately I've noticed that they are more and more serving ads for questionable drop shippers and foreign webshops, rather than brands I trust, so they might also be declining in that department.
by pwython | 2026-01-22 15:29:47+00:00
My "actual job" is a designer, not a career engineer, so for me code has always been how I ship. AI makes that separation clearer now. I just recently wrote about this.[0]

But I think the cognitive debt framing is useful: reading and approving code is not the same as building the mental model you get from writing, probing, and breaking things yourself. So the win (more time on problem solving) only holds if you're still intentionally doing enough of the concrete work to stay anchored in the system.

That said, if you're someone like me, I don't always need to fully master everything, but I do need to stay close enough to reality that I'm not shipping guesses.

[0] https://alisor.substack.com/p/i-never-really-wrote-code-now-...
by Jamesbeam | 2026-01-22 15:30:22+00:00
The best advise I ever got was this.

https://youtu.be/sycgL3Qg_Ak?si=aDnxo-S6eYXJVheC&t=190

Don’t listen to other people’s advice.
Nobody knows what the hell they’re doing.

Just do your own thing.
by figassis | 2026-01-22 15:30:26+00:00
This is one reason, the other is just fraud. Being from a developing country, I am well aware of the stigma of saying I don't know, which I had to strip out of me as I became an engineer to the point of me being immediately suspicious when someone tells me they know about some moldy complex topic, even if it's in their profession.

The fraud part is that I developing countries, almost all activities that require some skill have lots of people claiming to be experts. 99% of them are lying. You take your car to a shop and they tell you they will solve your problem. With skepticism, (because they asked no clarifying questions) you try to give them some context and they tell you not to worry.

1 day later they tell you parts X, Y and Z need to be replaced, it will just cost $$$. You ask if there is no way the current parts can just be repaired, and they tell you no, they must be replaced.

You ask what was the actual issue, and they tell you the parts are completely damaged, or worn out, need to replace.

Sure, you pay, and they give you the car, works for a few days, maybe week, then breaks down. You plug in a portable OBD scanner and it tells you the exact component they just put in is failing (likely not even compatible with the car).

You give them back the car, tell them since you paid $$$, you will only take the car back once it works perfectly, and you won't pay a cent more.

They then spend the next few days looking for an actual expert, that comes in and repairs the original parts, for $, and they take the "new" ones back to the store and give you your money back.

They don't know anything about cars, they experiment on yours, with your money, by swapping parts. This was easier when cars were less strict with parts.

This is fraud, not face saving, and it's in every developing country.
by spyrja | 2026-01-22 15:30:40+00:00
Actually, the introduction of Old Norse in Britain began in the early 5th century and by the time of Beowulf, Old English was still more than 90% a Nordic language. The Norman invasion of 1066 changed that dramatically (as Old French became the "new" official language) and to this day Modern English could reasonably be considered mostly French, then Latin, and only in small part Nordic (although the most common words used are by majority derived from Old Norse counterparts.) Oddly enough, only a few Celtic words made it into the language.
by dghlsakjg | 2026-01-22 15:30:58+00:00
Military and overseas voters vote in their home state elections, even federally (all elections are held by states, even for federal candidates). You would need to ensure that there is a ballot box representing each state that has an eligible voter at a given site, and then need to figure out logistics for getting thousands of sealed boxes back to the vote counters in each state within the allotted deadline. You would also need to solve the issue of maintaining vote anonymity at low volumes.

Or, you could have a central, federally run organization that takes responsibility for delivering sealed ballots to the respective states in a timely manner. Which is what we call voting by mail.
by munk-a | 2026-01-22 15:31:05+00:00
The poor sanitation in American poultry farming can have other negative effects outside the meat being safe. Such unsanitary conditions make dangerous conditions for workers including an elevated risk of novel avian flues and, if ever the chlorination isn't properly executed, the meat is extremely unsafe to eat.

Chlorination is a good idea when you can't control the supply chain (i.e. drawing water through infrastructure that's been compromised) but the better solution (if it's reasonable) is always to fix the supply chain. In the case of a city relying on chlorination vs. bringing clean water in by train the chlorination is a clear winner. When it comes to meat it's a cost issue and the EU made the decision to force that cost onto the producer while the US has made the decision to bear the cost at large.