MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by beeflet | 2026-01-20 18:00:49+00:00
Women's preferences aren't artificial constraints (I would stress that they are a fundamental regulating factor in human society), but in a UBI world they would be artificial. In a world with cloning and surrogacy, they will become irrelevant constraints.

Humans don't reproduce like e. coli, but in a UBI world that is the kind of human you are artificially selecting for. Ordinarily,

Show me the incentives, and I will show you the man they create. Like it or not, Humans are animals. We have the same primal motivations as other animals, just a more complex expression of those motivations. I think you focus on the details of that expression to lose the big picture, which is incongruent for your personal desires of being free from material constraints.

Life, like art, is defined by constraints. The meaning of our lives is to heroically struggle against them until we fail. To remove the constraints is to denature mankind. The process of evolution is nessisarially actuated through suffering. We naturally struggle against constraints like hunger, disease, and so on in an individual scale because this is what gives us meaning. But it would be a mistake to overcome these on a systematic scale, as it would rid of us of meaning. The future you propose is mankind wireheading itself.
by glitchc | 2026-01-20 18:00:51+00:00
The USD's status as a reserve currency is directly linked to it's trade deficit with the rest of the world. Because all other entities (individuals, corporations, organizations) want to keep their wealth in USD, there's a strong incentive to sell (goods, services, infrastructure) to the US and obtain USD in return. Conversely, there's a strong disincentive to buy from the US because goods have to be paid for with USD, which means parting with the very currency one is trying to accrue.

One of the most effective ways to ease the trade deficit is to reduce USD's status as a reserve currency.
by JasonADrury | 2026-01-20 18:00:54+00:00
>If no one needed to work to survive and live a dignified life, then I would not think seeing a prostitute was an act of rape, yes, but I would expect a dramatic drop in people who choose to have sex with random strangers in exchange for resources without those motivating needs.

If a prostitute is charging $1000 per hour, are they only being raped for the first couple of hours in a month?
by linklock | 2026-01-20 18:01:00+00:00
First off, thank you for everything you do with Privacy Badger—it's been a staple in my browser for years. I really appreciate you taking the time to poke holes in this.

You’re absolutely right about HTTPS Everywhere; that was a oversight in my initial write-up. Since it's now integrated into the major browsers, that’s one less 'fragment' to worry about.

To answer your questions on the 'why' behind the other features:

Phishing detection: The main gap I see with built-in Safe Browsing is the telemetry. Most users don't realize that 'Enhanced Protection' often means sending URLs/metadata back to a central server. I’m exploring a local-first approach (using bloom filters or highly optimized local sets) to keep that check entirely on-device.

Cookie auto-delete: While Total Cookie Protection (Firefox) is great, many browsers still only clear data 'on exit.' For users who keep their browser open for weeks, I see value in 'active' cleaning (e.g., clearing site data 15 minutes after a tab is closed) to minimize the session-tracking window.

The 'All-in-one' goal: My hypothesis is actually driven by the fingerprinting concern you've likely seen discussed. Using uBO + PB + a cookie manager creates a very unique extension fingerprint. I'm wondering if a single, consolidated open-source tool could actually help a user 'blend in' better than a stack of three different ones.

I’m still in the 'talking myself out of it' phase, so this technical pushback is exactly what I was hoping for. Thank you again ghostwords!
by lordnacho | 2026-01-20 18:01:01+00:00
Yes, I have. I do it too, even some basic functions, I would look up on SO.

You really just need to know that there's a way to open files in C.

I don't think you can reach any sort of scale of breadth or depth if you try to memorize things. Programmers have to glue together a million things, it's just not realistic for them to know all the details of all of them.

It's unfortunate for the guy who has memorized all of K&R, but we have tools now to bring us these details based on some keywords, and we should use them.
Show HN: PatchPal – a small, hackable Claude Code–style coding agent in Python
by amaiya | 2026-01-20 18:01:12+00:00
I've been playing around with Claude Code and OpenCode and wanted something simpler and more hackable that I could run locally, understand end-to-end, and extend for my own workflows.

That led me to build a small Python package called PatchPal.

PatchPal is a Claude Code-inspired AI coding agent that helps you build software, debug issues, and automate tasks, supporting both cloud and local models. Like Claude Code, it supports agent skills, tool use, and executable Python generation, enabling interactive workflows for tasks such as data analysis, visualization, web scraping, API interactions, and topic research with synthesized findings.

One of the goals of this project is to approximate the core interaction model of Claude Code and OpenCode while remaining lean, accessible, and highly configurable.

$ ls ./patchpal
__init__.py agent.py cli.py context.py permissions.py skills.py system_prompt.md tools.py

See the GitHub README for more details: https://github.com/amaiya/patchpal

Enjoy!
by garblegarble | 2026-01-20 18:01:12+00:00
>In June 2025, 56% of people in Great Britain thought it was the wrong decision

It's not so clear when you consider that 48.1% of the original referendum voters wanted to stay in the EU. I'm honestly very surprised by this poll, 8% change is pretty minimal considering the turmoil the country has gone through since 2016.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-20 18:01:15+00:00
> Yes, it's hard to print well, but it's the best-performing material when you need light, durable material. That's the tradeoff

It is not the "best performing material". There are several options which exceed its properties even further, but are increasingly expensive and harder to print.

Engineering is about being good enough. PETG is good enough in this case, and also cheap and easy.

Using PETG was a good choice. There's a spectrum of 3D printing materials. Not sure why you've chosen to die on the ABS hill. ABS isn't even in favor relative to ASA, FYI.
Linode EU-West (London) is having routing problems
by handelaar | 2026-01-20 18:01:22+00:00
I'm seeing 100% packet loss on every VM I have there and their own internal web-based shell thing is dropping dead with timeouts, yet somehow the live traffic graphs are still going so at least some part of the world must still be able to get there

Naturally, even after a number of hours now, their status page is pretending nothing's wrong.
by jacquesm | 2026-01-20 18:01:33+00:00
To the surprise of absolutely nobody. Meta's main shareholder is devoid of any intrinsic ethics, it should come as absolutely no surprise that their legal team has abandoned their ethical duties because I would have assumed they never had any in the first place.

Zuckerberg's only saving grace by now is that he's not the only despicable billionaire.
by johnmaguire | 2026-01-20 18:02:00+00:00
> the NAT-by-default of IPv4

IPv4 is not NAT-by-default. The reality of the world we live in today is that most home networks have a NAT, because you need multiple devices behind a single IP.

That said, I completely agree. It's quite unknowable how many services I've turned on on local machines with the expectation that a router firewall sat between me and potential clients. But that doesn't go away with IPv6 - the NAT does, the router doesn't, and the firewall shouldn't either.
by jmward01 | 2026-01-20 18:02:01+00:00
> Reducing your legal risk by deleting old data that is no longer needed and no longer on legal hold is unethical.

This, to me, is the crime. They are purposefully destroying data because they know it poses a legal risk to them. That is different from deleting data that is costing you money and isn't useful to your business. This is also different than counseling them to delete data to avoid problems if there is a security breach. Both of these are valid reasons to delete data in support of the business and in defense of risks associated with holding that data. Counseling that you should delete data because it may be used as evidence against you in a criminal probe though is obstructing foreseeable future investigations because you believe you may be committing crimes. The distinction, I think, is clear.

I agree with you that lawyers should be aggressive about protecting their clients and counseling them but when that counsel is to tell them to obstruct investigations they, to me, are now part of the crime.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-20 18:02:15+00:00
> someone has constant emotional but irrational reactions to everything

What are "emotions" if not "irrational chemical reactions in our brains"? Seems really strange to decide what it or isn't "irrational emotions" for someone else to have.

I, just like you I presume, see myself as a rational and logical person (maybe you're also a programmer), but I also realize that humans are humans, and having irrational emotions is very much part of being a humans, and emotions in general is such a subjective experience.
by xandrius | 2026-01-20 18:02:19+00:00
Interesting concept but in the current format it feels like a game to bring out exactly once with a very specific group (or perhaps an unexpecting child), play for 10-15min, smile to oneself and then put the deck where these sorts of games go die.

At least it was just $5 but I think it's 1000% more fun to actually use a unix terminal with some sort capture the flag kind of game.
by kevin061 | 2026-01-20 18:02:28+00:00
"they know what they are doing". Individually? Maybe! I hear Meta pays among the highest, if not the single highest salaries of FAANG.

But as a company? Meta has been entirely incapable to innovate since it was renamed. Betting billions on an obviously flawed idea of a Facebook-owned VR universe, then shortly pivoting to a cryptocurrency that ended up being little more than a rugpull, and, after investing billions in expensive AI staff, they're now pulling the plug on that, too

The most successful products like WhatsApp and Instagram were purchased, not internal developments. Nobody cares about Threads and it mostly only exists because Elon Musk destroyed Twitter.

I sure hope Instagram and WhatsApp are bringing in enough money because Meta is running out of things to do, other than milking their current customers dry.

Do they know what they're doing? Do they really?
by okanat | 2026-01-20 18:02:30+00:00
A crisis prevents people from earning money. No money means nobody buys anything. Nobody buys anything means no company can now sell stuff, so no revenue. Companies start closing down, so there are even more people who cannot earn money.

The government can print money and inject into the system. Some people have money so they continue to buy stuff but maybe at a slower pace or less amount. Things also can get expensive but it is not a total collapse.
by nadis | 2026-01-20 18:02:50+00:00
I read a related article in the NYT yesterday: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/19/science/animals-cows-inte...

Which cited the original study here:
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(25)...

Sort of an interesting precedent (quote from NYT article):

> "Now, in a new study, Veronika has demonstrated even more advanced scratching skills, deploying different ends of a wooden broom to target different parts of her body. It is, scientists say, an example of flexible tool use, a behavior that is relatively rare in the animal kingdom. The paper, which was published in Current Biology on Monday, is the first scientific paper to describe tool use in cattle, which have not traditionally been celebrated for their smarts."
by dunder_cat | 2026-01-20 18:02:55+00:00
In the US, I really want the FCC to mandate that an ISP provides IPv6 connectivity in order to meet the criteria to be considered broadband (and access the subsidies related to that). Don't even care if the functionality is off by default / you have to call and agree the routing may be sub-optimal, whatever. I currently use HE tunnels but on top of additional latency, the HE <-> Cogent peering dispute still makes it difficult to access services over IPv6.
by wasabi991011 | 2026-01-20 18:02:58+00:00
> I don't think an American civil war in the next 5 years is at all likely.

The government of Minnesota has readied the national guard, the Pentagon put 1500 soldiers on standby to be deployed to Minnesota, Trump is threatening to invoke the insurrection act, and there's no sign of this conflict cooling off.

Edit: to be clear, I'm not sure it will lead to the fragmentation that the other commenters was claiming. But an conflict between federal and state law enforcement/ military seems likely.

5 years is a long time too, I don't see how you believe it's not at all likely.
by ChadNauseam | 2026-01-20 18:03:03+00:00
It also simply lets you use rust on the web. That's why I use wasm. It's actually an extremely nice experience. I write all my business logic in rust, and all my UI logic in javascript. There is rust tooling that automatically generates typescript types and APIs for you that make interoperating the two languages basically effortless. And by using rust/wasm, I can reach a level of performance that would be hilariously impossible in javascript
by notahacker | 2026-01-20 18:03:50+00:00
NATO was a thing in 1960. France and the UK spend lower proportions of their GDP than in 1960 not because of an increase in the amount of white-knighting America does on their behalf but because they are no longer administering global empires (France was in active conflict at the time), and because per capita spend isn't a great way of measuring ability to project military power either particularly not post Cold-War; the US has also cut it and is still relatively more powerful than it was in 1960.

The US military industrial complex primarily does invest domestically and sells more overseas than it buys. It employs millions of US citizens, sells more US tech than it buys and subsidised the creation of dual use technology the wider US economy does rather well out of, including an early version of the internet we're interacting over. And if it's too big or too wasteful, that's a decision made entirely by the US, which fights the wars which - for better or worse - the US wants to fight (it's actually Europe throwing lives at American wars; last time the UK actually had to defend its own territories US support was restricted to sharing intel and selling us some missiles). Same goes for the bases in Europe. The Trump administration is furiously trying to sanewash Trump's acquisitiveness into an imperative to have more bases close to Russia on European territory - if its that important, kind of hard to argue there hasn't been a benefit to any of the other bases over the past 80 years...
by mountainb | 2026-01-20 18:04:16+00:00
Resisting production isn't unethical, but telling your client to commit fraud is illegal, unethical, and waives attorney-client privilege.

Generally that lawyers in tech can be both good and bad, but that both the culture at west coast tech companies and how they handle their attorneys often leads to ethical issues that just do not happen in more buttoned down industries elsewhere. In particular many tech companies are just more protective of employees for no discernable purpose. An investment bank faced with a similar situation as the DC v. Meta case would have blamed and terminated the employees and attorneys involved, and trussed them up for prison if needed to protect the company. An oil company accused of faking environmental studies would throw the guy who doctored them under the bus.

This also serves the public interest (although some may disagree) because it preserves a productive company and provides a powerful incentive for management to grind individual corporate criminals into meatballs to protect itself and shareholders.

Meta's instinct was to defend the employee and the illegal activity rather than sacrificing the lamb to protect the company and the shareholders. They are not the only company that does things like this and it just makes no sense. It is something in the water in Northern California that makes them do this or some strange Pacific wind.

The other stupid thing that Meta did was commissioning these studies in the first place. What is the company doing? How does this benefit shareholder value? Is this a jobs program? If you did not like the answers they might give you, you should never have paid a bunch of academics to do these studies in the first place. The company sells digital fent to the masses. Of course it's bad for kids. You don't need a study to tell you that.
by ericmcer | 2026-01-20 18:04:20+00:00
Crypto & AI can both be linked to part of a broader trend though, that we need processors capable of running compute on massive sets of data quickly. I don't think that will ever go down, whether some new tech emerges or we just continue shoveling LLMs into everything. Imagine the compute needed to allow every person on earth to run a couple million tokens through a model like Anthropic Opus every day.
by echelon | 2026-01-20 18:04:22+00:00
I have a great interest in geopolitics. I didn't vote for Trump, and I already told you this is coming from within the DoD.

These are military decisions. These are 50-year plans.

Here I was 10 months ago and two years ago saying the same thing:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43505524

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36896699
by pessimizer | 2026-01-20 18:04:26+00:00
> Trump is a populist president who sees the value of US exports (on the back of blue collar work) being more important than global dollar dominance. This plays hand in hand with his championing of tariffs (foreign goods become more expensive) and hostility towards immigrants (apply upwards pressure on domestic wages).

It has nothing really to do with populism. It's the US's only rational option. You can't just run trade deficits forever, no matter what the people who make money from trade deficits tell you. A parasite that gets so big that it disables the host is a dead parasite.

People act like this is the how the US always worked. We just started this with Reagan, and every moment since then has seen the rise of finance, the victory of unproductive capital and speculation, and the decline in domestic manufacturing and standard of living that you would expect.

There's never been a moment where there's been anything to point at for a finance capitalist to feel vindicated that his success would lead to the US's greater good, so he resorts to claiming that it is simply impossible to be any other way. At best this is sunk cost fallacy, but at worst, it's just propagandistic gaslighting from a bunch of people who don't have any connection or loyalty to anyone in the US, don't care when it's people suffer, don't care how its children will live, and will just leave if their houses start to feel insecure. There's your populism.

I agree with your assessment, but Europe is in unique trouble that the rest of the world has no need to relate to. The US will simply have Europeans jailed or killed who steer Europe counter to US interests. Right now the US is on a slow road to peace with Russia, while trying to cultivate and maximize European animosity and estrangement from Russia. The world in which the US is mocked in Europe by NATO (a device to carry out US interests) for trying to appease Russia is a world that no one but a realist could have predicted.

Everybody else will de-dollarize, and the US will threaten Europe and the UK with tariffs if they don't peg the Euro and pound to the dollar. The US will be trading freely with Russia and China, while sanctioning Europeans for buying energy from Russia and bribing European governments to harass Chinese companies.
by zozbot234 | 2026-01-20 18:04:33+00:00
> The large api/token providers, and large consumers are all investing in their own hardware.

Which is absolutely the right move when your latest datacenter's power bill is literally measured in gigawatts. Power-efficient training/inference hardware simply does not look like a GPU at a hardware design level (though admittedly, it looks even less like an ordinary CPU), it's more like something that should run dog slow wrt. max design frequency but then more than make up for that with extreme throughput per watt/low energy expense per elementary operation.

The whole sector of "neuromorphic" hardware design has long shown the broad feasibility of this (and TPUs are already a partial step in that direction), so it looks like this should be an obvious response to current trends in power and cooling demands for big AI workloads.
by lordnacho | 2026-01-20 18:04:45+00:00
I dunno, I went to a high school reunion last year, and a dude seemed to know people's phone numbers from 30 years ago.

If he could remember that sort of thing, I can believe there are people who can remember steps of a proof, which is a much less random thing that you can feel your way around, given a few queues from memory.

Plus, realistically, how closely does an examiner read a proof? They have a stack of dozens of almost the same thing, I bet they get pretty tired of it and use a heuristic.
Show HN: Fence – Sandbox CLI commands with network/filesystem restrictions
by jy-tan | 2026-01-20 18:05:03+00:00
Hi HN!

Fence wraps any command in a sandbox that blocks network by default and restricts filesystem writes. Useful for running semi-trusted code (package installs, build scripts, unfamiliar repos) with controlled side effects, or even just blocking tools that phone home.

> fence curl https://example.com # -> blocked

> fence -t code -- npm install # -> template with registries allowed

> fence -m -- npm install # -> monitor mode: see what gets blocked

One use-case is to use it with AI coding agents to reduce the risk of running agents with fewer interactive permission prompts:

> fence -t code -- claude --dangerously-skip-permissions

You can import existing Claude Code permissions with `fence import --claude`.

Fence uses OS-native sandboxing (macOS sandbox-exec, Linux bubblewrap) + local HTTP/SOCKS proxies for domain filtering.

Why I built this: I work on Tusk Drift, a system to record and replay real traffic as API tests (https://github.com/Use-Tusk/tusk-drift-cli). I needed a way to sandbox the service under test during replays to block localhost outbound connections (Postgres, Redis) and force the app to use mocks instead of real services. I quickly realized that this could be a general purpose tool that would also be useful as a permission manager across CLI agents.

Limitations: Not strong containment against malware. Proxy-based filtering requires programs to respect `HTTP_PROXY`.

Curious if others have run into similar needs, and happy to answer any questions!