MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by klibertp | 2026-01-12 14:21:04+00:00
I'm sorry. I assumed too much about you, and I'm a bit ashamed for sounding so patronizing in my previous post. You seem wiser than me, and you're definitely wiser than I was back when it happened: I tried to defend myself. That's how the quarrel happened: I believed that I cared about morality, so I didn't want to just accept the accusation that I'm inherently immoral. That led to a few more shouts than it should; but as your sibling commenter says, at such points emotions tend to run high. I could have just walked away, and that would have been wiser. Somehow, I didn't manage to.

> What makes you think that?

Because you said you're "not even able to fathom how this is possible" - honestly, I still don't quite understand that sentence, especially after what you wrote above. It looks like you're advocating stoicism and disengagement, and I agree that it's a good strategy. But I can't believe you never felt the anger of being perceived through a lens of a belief that makes you into someone you're not - and that you "can't fathom" how that anger can get the better of you, to make you "stand there arguing with them about it". I get that you're able to rein in those emotions and simply walk away from situations like that; but I can't bring myself to believe you never felt that anger at all.

> You don't need him to accept it. You just need him to shut up about it.

Yes, that's rational. It's a way to live on without turning all family meetings into war. But maybe that particular war is worth fighting? Maybe, through countless battles over the Christmas tables, society changes course? Maybe by fighting against the belief that you're something lesser than human, by turning your life into a miserable one, you're paving a way for younger family members or the next generation to live their lives a little better than you could?

I don't know, to be honest. I'm not some activist. But I think I can understand people who decide to "stand there and argue". It's probably less rational and often leads to quarrels, but I'm almost sure that beliefs that are never challenged won't ever be changed. That's why I found your "I can't fathom" line a bit strange; sorry for overreacting :)
by bubblethink | 2026-01-12 14:21:10+00:00
It's not that it doesn't work. It's not the primary tool for weight management. Gym is great for strength, muscle, cardio, and general fitness, but weight management is mostly about counting calories that go in. The calories that you burn are a function of your metabolism first and to a lesser extent the amount of exercise you do. The exercise side of things is < 500 kcal for most people per day.
by mindcrash | 2026-01-12 14:21:20+00:00
If I might add a couple of quotes:

"What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century. The merciless process into which totalitarianism drives and organizes the masses looks like a suicidal escape from this reality."

"Politically speaking, tribal nationalism always insists that its own people is surrounded by ‘a world of enemies,’ ‘one against all,’ that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind long before it is used to destroy the humanity of man."

"Society is always prone to accept a person offhand for what he pretends to be, so that a crackpot posing as a genius always has a certain chance to be believed. In modern society, with its characteristic lack of discerning judgment, this tendency is strengthened, so that someone who not only holds opinions but also presents them in a tone of unshakable conviction will not so easily forfeit his prestige, no matter how many times he has been demonstrably wrong."

"Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness."

"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (that is, the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (that is, the standards of thought) no longer exist."

-- Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Also Arendt: "The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world — and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end — is being destroyed."
by smeej | 2026-01-12 14:21:41+00:00
You're hitting on exactly what I meant, though. You're generalizing from "it works for me" in a way that implies it's equally possible for everyone, that everyone's brain has the ability to look at something they decided to do earlier, and then just do it, without sending them through a spiraling decision matrix that factors in all the other things that have reemerged as possibilities since whenever they made the first decision.

It's so cool that your brain has this "decision persistence" feature. And it does seem to be common enough that it's treated as "typical."

It's just not remotely universal. Not all of our brains have this.
by giancarlostoro | 2026-01-12 14:21:43+00:00
I always use the Windows key instead of pressing the start menu button, so I didn't really care. I always thought it made more sense as a Tablet / Touch OS, and for people without a touch screen, Windows 8 was just terrible. It had good intentions, poorly executed.

Apple did not even bother with touch screen laptops on the other hand.

My favorite goof of Windows 8 was the most googled question: "how do I turn it off?"

It required stupid mouse witchcraft and incantations to shut off if you weren't in a touch screen.

Windows 8 was Microsoft thinking everyone was going to use touch screens for EVERYTHING and ruining the non-touch screen experience for most.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-12 14:21:48+00:00
> These accessible food options come with a premium that I strongly suspect put them out of what a median income household can sustainably afford.

No they don’t. Even my local Walmart has cheap vegetable selections included pre cut versions.

You know what is expensive, though? Meat. There’s still plenty of meat consumption in the median household.

It’s not a price issue.
by baq | 2026-01-12 14:21:55+00:00
Gemini 3 is very good in particular. Haven't had a serious attempt with GPT 5.2 yet, but I expect it to also be good (previous versions were surprising at times, e.g. used a recursive CTE instead of window functions). Sonnet 4.5 sucks. Haven't tried Opus for SQL at all.
Show HN: words.zip – Massively infinite word search
by yathern | 2026-01-12 14:22:03+00:00
Hi HN! This is a word search game I launched in the beginning of this year - didn't get much traction then, but it's been posted around a bit (right now getting some traffic from kottke.org) and now has over 12,000 words found!

Now that it's a little more filled out I figured I'd share it again. Really enjoying seeing what everyone is making on it - it appears most people start by just adding a few words to the big clump in the middle, then adding to other people's projects (or ruining them) and finally working on their own little concepts. My favorite is the kitty to the north. Hope you enjoy!
by benmoen | 2026-01-12 14:22:06+00:00
I'd like to talk about the problem I ran into while making a software development agent from scratch. I started by using JSON, but when code got long it kept failing to generate correct json. It also had quality issues because most LLM's are trained on naturally written code (not stringified code within JSON objects). One solution to the JSON escaping issues is switching to YAML. YAML allows for more flexibility but also has illegal characters. More importantly YAML requires correct indentation. A single incorrect indentation in a 1000 line code block would cause the parse to fail. However, the largest issue for both JSON and YAML is the LLM would have to write the code differently from its input. This caused it to constantly make random changes. Most notably, whenever it edited the package.json file, it would change all the version numbers of the packages. And the model didn't have the newest package versions, so it would always revert them to older versions.

So, much to my dismay, I realized I have to make a custom parser. My goal was to let the LLM write code exactly how it received it and not waste tokens explaining in detail how it should format each action argument. Creating the parser was simple enough, but every time I found a new edge case the LLM managed to respond in a new way that broke the parser. It honestly took months of development and testing to stump the LLM. Finally after 120+ test cases, the LLM ran out of ways to break it. Now I don't have any retry logic and no longer worry about the agent failing to use actions.

I’ve put the parser, the system prompt generator, and the full test suite up on Gumroad for anyone else tired of fighting with JSON.
by bluGill | 2026-01-12 14:22:08+00:00
Let me re-iterate my original caution: human drivers are really bad: more than 40,000 people die in car crashes every year! If a self driving cars makes mistakes that humans would not in some cases, but overall they would only cause 30,000 deaths per year then I want self driving required. Thus I want liability to reflect not perfection is required but that they are better than humans.

Don't get me wrong, perfection should be the long term goal. However I will settle for less than perfection today so long as it is better.

Though better is itself hard to figure out - drunk (or otherwise impaired drivers) are a significant factor in car deaths, as is bad weather when self driving currently doesn't operate at all. Statistics do need to make sure self driving cars are better than non-impaired drivers in all situations where humans driver before they can claim better. (I know some data is collected, but so far I haven't seen any independent analysis. The potentially biased analysis looks good though - but again it is missing all weather conditions)
by phkahler | 2026-01-12 14:22:13+00:00
>> I walk 4km to work when its nice out here in Europe. Could I do that in the USA?

I had a business trip to Germany (from the US) and found it enlightening. We all went out to eat after work one night and a couple of the local Germans had to walk 20 minutes from the restaurant to the train station to go home and didn't think anything of it. It wasn't a big deal to walk, but you'd never do that here in the US - or at least in Michigan where we have no real public transportation.
by ojosilva | 2026-01-12 14:22:14+00:00
They did not. Anthropic is protecting its huge asset: the Claude Code value chain, which has proven itself to be a winner among devs (me included, after trying everything under the sun in 2025). If anything, Anthropic's mistake is that they are incapable of monetizing their great models in the chat market, where ChatGPT reigns: ie. Anthropic did not invest in image generation, Google did and Gemini has a shot at the market now.

Apparently nobody gets the Anthropic move: they are only good at coding and that's a very thin layer. Opencode and other tools are game for collecting inputs and outputs that can later be used to train their own models - not necessarily being done now, but they could - Cursor did it. Also Opencode makes it all easily swappable, just eval something by popping another API key and let's see if Codex or GLM can replicate the CC solution. Oh, it does! So let's cancel Claude and save big bucks!

Even though CC the agent supports external providers (via the ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL env var), they are working hard on making it impossible for other models to support their every increasing agent feature set (skills, teleport and remote sessions, LSP, Chrome integration, etc). The move totally makes sense, like it or not.
by httpteapot | 2026-01-12 14:22:50+00:00
What do you think of the DeepSeek OCR approach where they say that vision tokens might better compress a document than its pure text representation?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45640594

I've spent some time feeding llm with scrapped web pages and I've found that retaining some style information (text size, visibility, decoration image content) is non trivial.
by s1mplicissimus | 2026-01-12 14:22:53+00:00
Here's some advice on all 3, and I don't even ask you to buy my supplements :)

1. Practicing a healthy diet is self-love

2. A daily treat is not what breaks your diet. Have _a piece_ of chocolate, sweets or snacks now and then. If you (still) lack the self-control to not eat the whole package, help yourself out by repackaging in daily-compatible portions. Meaning is not gained by consuming anyway.

3. Taste preferences are in big parts a matter of habit. Also prepping doesn't necessitate you eat the same thing for a week. You can freeze a lot of things for longer and thaw them in a mixed manner.

Imo the issue is that people seem to lack a combination of knowledge, time to prep or motivation. Lack of knowledge could be solved with information campaigns, lack of time/motivation is a consequence of people having to spend so much of their time doing a dayjob just to get by, embedded in a culture that puts no value on thriving humans.
Show HN: Agent-of-empires: opencode and claudecode session manager
by river_otter | 2026-01-12 14:23:07+00:00
Hi! I’m Nathan: an ML Engineer at Mozilla.ai: I built agent-of-empires (aoe): a CLI application to help you manage all of your running Claude Code/Opencode sessions and know when they are waiting for you.

- Written in rust and relies on tmux for security and reliability
- Monitors state of cli sessions to tell you when an agent is running vs idle vs waiting for your input
- Manage sessions by naming them, grouping them, configuring profiles for various settings

I'm passionate about getting self-hosted open-weight LLMs to be valid options to compete with proprietary closed models. One roadblock for me is that although tools like opencode allow you to connect to Local LLMs (Ollama, lm studio, etc), they generally run muuuuuch slower than models hosted by Anthropic and OpenAI. I would start a coding agent on a task, but then while I was sitting waiting for that task to complete, I would start opening new terminal windows to start multitasking. Pretty soon, I was spending a lot of time toggling between terminal windows to see which one needed me: like help in adding a clarification, approving a new command, or giving it a new task.

That’s why I build agent-of-empires (“aoe”). With aoe, I can launch a bunch of opencode and Claude Code sessions and quickly see their status or toggle between them, which helps me avoid having a lot of terminal windows open, or having to manually attach and detach from tmux sessions myself. It’s helping me give local LLMs a fair try, because them being slower is now much less of a bottleneck.

You can give it an install with

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/njbrake/agent-of-empires/m... | bash

Or brew install njbrake/aoe/aoe

And then launch by simply entering the command `aoe`.

I’m interested in what you think as well as what features you think would be useful to add!

I am planning to add some further features around sandboxing (with docker) as well as support for intuitive git worktrees and am curious if there are any opinions about what should or shouldn’t be in it.

I decided against MCP management or generic terminal usage, to help keep the tool focused on parts of agentic coding that I haven’t found a usable solution for.

I hit the character limit on this post which prevented me from including a view of the output, but the readme on the github link has a screenshot showing what it looks like.

Thanks!
Show HN: Mullion – type-safe LLM context management for TypeScript
by mullion | 2026-01-12 14:23:13+00:00
Hi HN — I built Mullion, an OSS TS toolkit to prevent LLM context leaks (admin/user, internal/external boundaries).

- Owned<T, Scope> tags data with trust scope
- scope crossing requires explicit bridge(...)
- ESLint rules flag cross-scope use / leaked values
- OpenTelemetry-compatible tracing + cost estimation
integrates with Vercel AI SDK

npm i @mullion/core @mullion/ai-sdk

https://github.com/mullionlabs/mullion-ts

Feedback welcome: does this model match how you handle trust boundaries in production?
by usefulposter | 2026-01-12 14:24:02+00:00
"OP here" is the funniest tell that shows up when using an LLM to write a post for HN or Reddit.

It's funny because it makes zero sense in the body of an initial post!

In comments replying to people downthread - maybe. But opening a top-level post with "Original Poster here" is just silly and shows a lack of respect for community etiquette.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...
by troupo | 2026-01-12 14:24:11+00:00
Wow. It can do a web search. And that is useful in the context of programming how? Or in any context?

The question is about the result of an action. Given the same problem statement in the same codebase it will produce wildly different results even if prompted two times in a row.

Even for trivial tasks the output may vary between just a simple fix, and a rewrite of half of the codebase. You can never predict or replicate the output.

To quote Douglas Adams, "The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't". Cars and table saws operate in much the same way that LLMs don't.
by nerdjon | 2026-01-12 14:24:12+00:00
I am sure the company is going to get very upset at people no longer paying who were using their product in a way that they did not intend. Just going to be heartbroken. I will never understand the people that make a big deal about "I will never support this business again because of x" when X not something the company ever officially said they cared about.

In all seriousness, I really don't think it should be a controversial opinion that if you are using a companies servers for something that they have a right to dictate how and the terms. It is up to the user to determine if that is acceptable or not.

Particularly when there is a subscription involved. You are very clearly paying for "Claude Code" which is very clearly a piece of software connected to an online component. You are not paying for API access or anything along those lines.

Especially when they are not blocking the ability to use the normal API with these tools.

I really don't want to defend any of these AI companies but if I remove the AI part of this and just focus on it being a tool, this seems perfectly fine what they are doing.
by Dilettante_ | 2026-01-12 14:24:44+00:00
HN is not an armenian space equivalent to a synagogue, and the original poster did not say nor imply that the armenian genocide "wasn't so bad"(in other words: make light of it). Arguably what they did was a form of spreading awareness, even.

If you're arguing in good faith, you need to take about three steps back and realize what caliber of strawman you're fighting against here.
by pron | 2026-01-12 14:24:56+00:00
> It has for Amazon, Adobe, Microsoft, Google and the Linux kernel.

I don't think so. I don't know about Adobe, but it's not a meaningful statement for the rest. Those companies default to writing safe code in languages other than Rust, and the Linux kernel defaults to unsafe code in C. BTW, languages favoured by those projects/companies do not reliably represent industry-wide preferences, let alone defaults. You could certainly say that of the two languages accepted so far in the Linux kernel, the only safe one is Rust, but there's hardly any "default" there.

> It remains to be seen which big name will make Zig unavoidable.

I have no idea whether or not Zig will ever be successful, but at this point it's pretty clear that Rust's success has been less than modest at best.
by mixdup | 2026-01-12 14:25:18+00:00
It's just the next rung on the enshittification ladder. So many steps in our "progress" to enlightenment as a society, as a technology community, is just abstracting away work with a "good enough" solution that is around an 80% solution

That's fine for the first iteration or two, because you think "oh man this is going to make me so productive, I'll be able to use this new productivity to wring 40% of progress out of that 20% gap"

But instead we just move on to the next thing, bring that 20% shittified gap along with us, and the next thing that gets built or paved over has a 20% gap, and eventually we're bankrupt from rolling over all that negative equity
by Esophagus4 | 2026-01-12 14:25:19+00:00
I can't tell if we're doing like a sarcastic joking thing where we're making fun of management, or if you really believe this. If we're joking around, then haha. If you really believe this to be true, then you have a warped view of reality.

The street cred doesn't come from managing more resources, the street cred comes from delivering more.
by aziis98 | 2026-01-12 14:25:54+00:00
The real problem vdom and more complex frameworks solve for me is dealing with much more complex state i.e. lists.

When dealing with lists there are so many possible ways of updating them (full updates, insertion/removal at an index, update at an index, ...) that manually mounting and unmounting single items by hand gets unbearable. You must then do some kind of diffing at the framework level to get good performance and readable code.

I would like to see "VanillaJS" articles talk both more and more in depth about this problem.
by infecto | 2026-01-12 14:25:55+00:00
I am not sure the genetic angle but there definitely is something happening at a craving level in the way the mind is responding.

On the flip side I don’t think your comment holds much weight either. A large portion of the population worked trade jobs and the access junk food was a lot less prevalent. You kind of have a good recipe for unhealthy population now. Low quality foods and less activity.
by chrisweekly | 2026-01-12 14:26:34+00:00
You're welcome.

Respectfully, you've made some invalid assumptions. Even if your only use case is reading extant markdown, using Obsidian as your viewer probably still makes sense. Trivial, one-time config to open .md files in Read mode, and one-time system config to associate .md files with Obsidian, and voila: "double-click and read the damned file".

That said, if you were then to spend even a little time in Obsidian doing things other than reading, your "mystification" about "pointlessness" would vanish. Markdown is flexible and portable, eminently readable by machines and people (whether viewed raw or rendered), and Obsidian is an incredibly powerful tool for leveraging its capabilities.
by msxT | 2026-01-12 14:26:46+00:00
Anthropic doesn’t want you to use a tool that makes it easy to switch to a competitor’s model when you reach a cap. They want to nudge you toward upgrading - Pro -> Max -> Max 20× -> extra usage - rather than switching to Codex. They can afford to make moves like this as long as they stay on top. OpenAI isn’t the good guy here - it’s just an opportunity for them to bite off a bit more of the cake.