MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cheema33 | 2026-01-21 08:24:18+00:00
I used Ralph recently, in Claude Code. We had a complex SQL script that was crunched large amounts of data and was slow to run even on tables that are normalized, have indexes for the right columns etc. We, the humans spent significant amount of time tweaking it. We were able to get some performance gains, but eventually hit a wall. That is when I let Ralph take a stab at it. I told it to create a baseline benchmark and I gave it the expected output. I told to keep iterating on the script until there was at least 3x improvement in performance number while the output was identical. I set the iteration limit to 50. I let it loose and went to dinner. When I came back, it had found a way to get 3x performance and stopped on the 20th iteration.

Is there another human that could get me even better performance given the same parameters. Probably yes. In the same amount of time? Maybe, but unlikely. In any case, we don't have anybody on our team that can think of 20 different ways to improve a large and complex SQL script and try them all in a short amount of time.

These tools do require two things before you can expect good results:

1. An open mind.
2. Experience. Lots of it.

BTW, I never trust the code an AI agent spits out. I get other AI agents, different LLMs, to review all work, create deterministic tests that must be run and must pass before the PR is ever generated. I used to do a lot of this manually. But now I create Claude skills that automate a lot of this away.
by inglor_cz | 2026-01-21 08:24:26+00:00
Mercosur took 20 years to finalize and if it wasn't for recent unhingedness of American politics, I would expect it to get vetoed by special farmer interests in the last minute. But the threat became too big for that.

But yeah, there will be some urgency now. In times of need, people find out that all the "necessary" bureaucracy isn't really that necessary. War or threat of war is the only thing stronger than red tape.

(For an analogy, when Russia invaded Ukraine, Germany put most of its regulations aside to build some infrastructure for import of liquified gas in mere 6 weeks or so. The same infrastructure, under peace conditions, would take some 10 years to litigate against every NIMBY and eco-organization out there.)
by Springtime | 2026-01-21 08:24:35+00:00
Outside of direct monetary gain like bounties are efforts to just stand out, in terms of being able to show contributions to a large project or getting say a CVE.

Stenberg has actually written about invalid/wildly overrated vulnerabilities that get assigned CVEs on their blog a few times and those were made by humans. I often get the sense some of these aren't just misguided reporters but deliberate attempts to make mountains out of molehills for reputation reasons. Things like this seem harder to account for as an incentive.
by Y-bar | 2026-01-21 08:24:39+00:00
EU pissed off Russia when Russia invaded Ukraine?

I have read that narrative before, in fact it was just a few days ago when Trump lied that he will be forced to take Greenland because Denmark and Norway is pissing him off by withholding the strategic location of Greenland from him.

Same same.

Maybe we need to be more confrontational to assert our own borders and independence and stop trying to please autocrats and wannabe autocrats?
by 47282847 | 2026-01-21 08:24:56+00:00
You wrote

> validated her emotions and reactions

But in other instances in this thread I am not so sure each time you mention her emotions you are talking about her feelings, distinct from her actions or interpretations. There is a difference between anger (the emotion), aggression (waving hands, loud voice etc), and physical contact (undirected against objects, directed at objects, against self, against others). Maybe you are “striking nerves” since it’s not always clear which one you are referring to in terms of her “validation”. And these distinctions are not academic.
by snowmobile | 2026-01-21 08:25:22+00:00
> It's not uncommon to get invites from people you've never met offline and were just in a game you played together.

What? Why does this imply that they're "abusive" or that they'd want to spend effort trying to find my "sleep schedule"?

Note that I'm not saying the bug shouldn't be fixed, but the original author clearly is just getting up in arms about it because he wants the bug bounty. Why others are being so alarmist I cannot understand, but I see this behavior a lot among the younger generation.

> We work in computing... scaling means small percentages are still big numbers

While I've also fallen into the trap of thinking "I'm so special because I work in computing" before, I can assure you we're not even close to the only industry that deals with scaling. The pencil manufacturer I mentioned before has a lot more scaling and also a lot more real-world consequences if they do something wrong.
by plomme | 2026-01-21 08:25:50+00:00
Many interesting points. I of course know nothing, but I don't see the strategic importance of Sevastopol. If you're Russia controlling Sevastopol, yes it doesn't freeze but where are you going to go? In peace time it doesn't matter who controls Sevastopol, your merchant marine can use it just fine. In war time, where are you going to go? You are certainly not going to cross the Bosphorus, Suez, or Gibraltar. Going back to spheres of influence I guess it does make sense to project power and keep control of the Black Sea and it's neighborhood, and if Russia honestly thought they could take Ukraine in three days then I get how it seemed like a reasonable bet.
by mk89 | 2026-01-21 08:26:30+00:00
Actually the Green deal is an attempt at that. Masked as a way to save the planet, its goal is to get rid of deep dependencies like gas oil etc, which we in Europe don't have sufficiently.

The main issue is the way the transition is happening, because I see China doing exactly what we should be doing: build coal, nuclear, etc. while you build tons of solar panels or windfarms.

The self inflicting pain forced by radical ideas is what is killing Europe. We have lost the pragmatism that made Europe move at a crazy speed after WW2.
by nulone | 2026-01-21 08:28:05+00:00
Cognitive overhead is real. Spent the first few weeks fixing agent mess more than actually shipping.
One thing that helped: force the agent to explain confidence before anything irreversible. Deleting a file? Tell me why you're sure. Pushing code? Show me the reasoning. Just a speedbump but it catches a lot.
Still don't buy the full issue→PR dream though. Too many failure modes.
by avidiax | 2026-01-21 08:28:51+00:00
There are many affairs of state that won't be skillfully managed by someone learning on the job every 4-8 years.

You wouldn't replace the entire CIA with political appointees every 4-8 years would you?

The CDC will need people that remember COVID in 30 years, will it not?

Surely, the delegation to Tehran should have some people that speak Farsi and have known their counterparts for 15-20 years, right?

The people at the top can't possibly have institutional knowledge for all the institutions under their control. Even a statesman like George H. W. Bush only has institutional knowledge for one branch of the military and the CIA. Should we have shown his competency in the affairs of the state department, department of energy, education, FBI, etc.?
by SllX | 2026-01-21 08:28:57+00:00
20 years and counting. The Mercosur deal still needs to pass the EU Parliament, and it’s not scheduled to come up for at least a few months. The EU’s Parliament is also nearly split down the middle on the deal which means there’s still about a 50/50 it fails, maybe 51/49 or 52/48 in its favor at the moment, but it is very close and still has about as much chance of passing as not passing at this juncture.
by Bayramovanar | 2026-01-21 08:29:09+00:00
Hi HN,

First off: I am not selling a course, I am not launching a SaaS, and there is no sign-up link. There won't be any money making trading strategies either.

I’m a backend/infra engineer based in Berlin and I’ve been actively investing for years using excel sheets, obsidian, etc.

I just want to share my experience with my private finance tool running locally on my machine.

Recently, after a lay off I decided to engineer my way out of that messy setup and built "BullSheet"

I thought some of you might be interested in the logic and architecture behind it.

Also I wanted to show you active investing is complex, and for most you unnecessary.
This is also why I still keep the majority of my net worth in ETFs.

You should too.

I am happy to hear your feedback, feel free to reach out to me at bullsheet@anar-bayramov.com
by imtringued | 2026-01-21 08:29:19+00:00
The weirdest part about the box carrying humanoids is that this problem has already been solved by fork lift style robots [0] which are being sold by many companies. When people talk about universality, having a central warehouse with movable pickup & place locations is all you need. The only thing that would be interesting is to build a universal loader/unloader that can take parts out of the boxes and insert them into machines factorio style, but that loader doesn't need to be humanoid and could instead just be put on a movable cart.

[0] https://www.hairobotics.com/products/haipick-a3
by UberFly | 2026-01-21 08:29:25+00:00
What's to solve? Here's the way the gap is supposed to work and often does: People work for love or money on a product. Other people love the product and are happy to purchase it. This creates income for the original producer and a beneficial product for the consumer. If a product is successful and popular enough, the capitalist cycle gains momentum for both parties to continue the relationship.
by ErroneousBosh | 2026-01-21 08:29:58+00:00
So, if you have NAT but a grossly misconfigured router, it might not be secure?

Quick question - do you think that "security by obscurity is not security"? And, as a follow-up, when you park your car do you ensure your laptop bag is out of sight, maybe locked away in the boot?

Because here's a mindblowing concept that'll change the way you see the world - you can have a door lock but it won't make you secure. You need to actually fit the lock to some sort of door.
by hnlmorg | 2026-01-21 08:30:38+00:00
I doesn’t feel like that long ago when I built a swarm of Arch Linux based thin clients which PXE booted from a SLES DHCP & NFS host.

That was probably around 2010 or 2015.

Those images had to run on a thin client with 512 MB RAM.

I think I chose XFCE as the DE.
by measurablefunc | 2026-01-21 08:31:06+00:00
Generate instructions for their simulator to compute some numbers (hashes) in whatever is considered the memory of their "machine"¹. I didn't see any places where they actually disallow cheating b/c it says they only check the final state of the memory² so seems like if you know the final state you could just "load" the final state into memory. The cycle count is supposedly the LLM figuring out the fewest number of instructions to compute the final state but again, it's not clear what they're actually measuring b/c if you know the final state you can cheat & there is no way to tell how they're prompting the LLM to avoid the answers leaking into the prompt.

¹https://github.com/anthropics/original_performance_takehome/...

²https://github.com/anthropics/original_performance_takehome/...
by joe_mamba | 2026-01-21 08:32:27+00:00
>I would expect it to get vetoed by special farmer interests

IDK man, I feel like supporting the local farming industry is a pretty important strategic move, even if it's a loss leader.

We already offshored manufacturing, energy supply and IT to our "allies" in the past and it's biting us in the ass right now.

Do we really want to repeat the same mistake again with food?
by dave1010uk | 2026-01-21 08:34:08+00:00
The install is very opaque. It's not clear where these skills are installed, how to upgrade them or remove them.

Here's the `skills` package on NPM: https://www.npmjs.com/package/skills - it's MIT licensed but I can't find it on Github.

`skills` looks to be a wrapper around `add-skill`: https://github.com/vercel-labs/add-skill

From the docs, `add-skill` auto detects from 16 different potential paths to copy skills to in a repository (.claude/, .codex/, .Gemini/, etc).

`add-skill` also let's you install skills globally (~/). From the code, `skills` looks like it doesn't support global installs but under the hood it passes all args to add-skill, so you should be able to install skills globally or install multiple skills (even if the wrapper doesn't expect it).

Aside: although lots of agents have adopted SKILLS.md conventions, they're currently all using their own paths. There doesn't seem to be a consensus yet, like there is with AGENTS.md. There are even 3 generic paths: .agent/skills/, .agents/skills/ and just skills/
by renewiltord | 2026-01-21 08:34:26+00:00
Trump or no Trump, the US's ability to be Europe's security shield had to come to an end one day or another. Trump is more a symptom than a cause: the US has weakened and others have strengthened. As many are eager to point out, the game is already up. Pretending like there is a future here is pointless. America had best leave internal European civil wars like Russia-Ukraine to the locals and retreat to whatever borders she can defend.

NATO died when Europe decided to outsource defense wholesale to the US so that she could fund her retiree class, proudly advertising how she redistributes as much as possible to the aged while relying on America to defend her borders. The US could not bear that weight and now Europe must carry it on her own. Doubtless the French will riot in the streets as the retirement age rises so that France may sustain herself rather than live on someone else's dime. But if Europe wishes to be defended, then she must defend herself.

God helps those who help themselves.
by giamma | 2026-01-21 08:34:48+00:00
It used to be like that, computer had limited resources and desktop environments were light. Then at some point RAM became less and less of an issue, and everything started to get bigger and less efficient.

Coyuld anyone summarize why a desktop Windows/MacOs now needs so much more RAM than in the past? is it the UI animations, color themes, shades etc etc or is it the underlying operating system that has more and more features, services etc etc ?

I believe it's the desktop environment that is greedy, because one can easily run a linux server on a raspberry pi with very limited RAM, but is it really the case?
by sevenzero | 2026-01-21 08:35:44+00:00
It'll stop soonish. The industry is now financed by debt rather than monetary assets that actually exist. Tons of companies see zero gain from AI as its reported repeatedly here on HN. So all the LLM vendors will eventually have to enshittify their products (most likely through ads, shorter token windows, higher pricing and whatnot). As of now, not a sustainable business model thankfully. The only sad part is that this debt will hit the poorest people most.
by igogq425 | 2026-01-21 08:36:26+00:00
> For example trump voters having their partners deported.

I think there were similar surprises for some people back then. Social reality is complex, as can be seen, for example, in the case of J.D. Vance's wife. Every ICE officer would surely like to drag her out of her Porsche Cayenne by her hair and press their knee into her neck. Here in Germany, the shift to the right is being driven by Alice Weidel, among others, who is in a same-sex partnership with a dark-skinned woman who was born in Sri Lanka.

For anti-Semitism in Germany before the Holocaust, I can recommend Robert Musil's novel “The Man Without Qualities.” For me, it was the most insightful look into the social background and conditions that led to the mindset of the time, which later erupted into genocide.

Incidentally, I realize that we are not yet seeing full-scale genocide in the US. But it already has the character of ethnic cleansing, doesn't it? The beginnings were similar here in Germany back then: armed troops harassing people on the streets or taking them away and imprisoning them. Desensitizing and intimidating the general public in this way creates the basis for further escalation.
by inglor_cz | 2026-01-21 08:36:43+00:00
Everything is a trade-off. Farmers have a lot of influence in the EU. Personally, I think they are already too dominant, for historic reasons.

And yes, I get that food is important. Maybe the answer would be to unburden them from European regulations, which are pretty onerous. The few people active in agriculture I know complain about insane paper wars with authorities all the time.

One farmer I know got a hefty fine for building an impromptu shed for extra kids that were born beyond the expected count. Why are we doing this to ourselves, to 'secure our food'?
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-21 08:36:46+00:00
I am not sure how my one issue can be fixed. It seems to be fundamentally an issue of their minimalist xorg server itself but I am pretty sure that there must be a way

> I'm using Void with 24gb ddr5 and frequently get system freezes during high productivity. Browser tabs in the background are often contributors, but working with openshot or odb crashes often.

Kdenlive's' pretty good for what its worth and I use Archlinux/cachy on an 8 gig system and browser tabs aren't that often atleast in here

> I have several old nuc's and I might try tinycore on one. What do you or most others use it for, primarily?

I used it to revive my 15 year old laptop and even ran complete modern firefox on it (its specs are 1 gigs 32 bit ram simple mini laptop) and ran wifi and ran firefox and ran pomodorokitty on it and I can sort of treat it as a second monitor

It's battery is removable so I am gonna change its battery as currently the setup takes time to install and I have to install it everytime I open/it shuts down which can happen quite a lot if I don't have it plugged in so currently its shutdown for over a month but I really liked the tinkering I did with when I ran pomodorokitty on it
by ryuzaburo | 2026-01-21 08:36:48+00:00
We’ve been told that Passkeys (WebAuthn) are the gold standard because they replace phishable passwords with public-key cryptography. However, while performing a forensic analysis on a device compromised during a physical breach, I realized that the implementation on iOS has a critical "UX-driven" flaw: the Passcode Fallback.

On iOS, if Face ID fails (or is intentionally obscured), the system defaults to the device passcode. This means the security of a high-entropy private key is effectively downgraded to a 4 or 6-digit PIN.

The most disturbing part of my investigation was the evidence of an organized "Anti-Forensic" SOP. The attackers didn't just steal data; they used the passcode's "root-like" authority to systematically erase HealthKit data—the biological audit trail—to hide the physical reality of the incident.

I wrote this to argue that we need to stop treating biometrics as the lock; they are just a handle. The real master key is still a few digits of knowledge-based authentication, and in the Passkey era, that makes the passcode the single most valuable target for organized crime.

I’d love to hear the community’s thoughts on "Stolen Device Protection" and whether high-stakes apps (banking/crypto) should be allowed to opt-out of the passcode fallback entirely.
by its-summertime | 2026-01-21 08:36:48+00:00
Thinking more about this: ZIP files can be set up to have the data on whatever alignment of one's choosing (as noted in the reddit thread). Integrity checks can be done in parallel by doing them in parallel. mmap is possible just by not using zip compression.

The aspect of integrity checking speed in a saturated context (N workers, regardless if its multiple workers per file, or a worker per file), CRC32(C) seems to be nearly twice as fast https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Checksumming.html

ZIP can also support arbitrary metadata.

I think this could have all been backported to ZIP files themselves
by imiric | 2026-01-21 08:37:09+00:00
"Tell me the reasons why this report is stupid" is a loaded prompt. The tool will generate whatever output pattern matches it, including hallucinating it. You can get wildly different output if you prompt it "Tell me the reasons why this report is great".

It's the same as if you searched the web for a specific conclusion. You will get matches for it regardless of how insane it is, leading you to believe it is correct. LLMs take this to another level, since they can generate patterns not previously found in their training data, and the output seems credible on the surface.

Trusting the output of an LLM to determine the veracity of a piece of text is a baffilingly bad idea.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2026-01-21 08:37:27+00:00
> Canada-??..

Canada-China:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm24k6kk1rko

https://www.thecanadianpressnews.ca/business/canada-ev-deal-...

https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/news-releases/2026/01/16/prime-...
by nosianu | 2026-01-21 08:37:29+00:00
You will have to translate this German language article, but this is NOT Trump. It is about the tech billionaires supporting this quest, and why they want it.

https://orf.at/stories/3417584/

I doubt Trump would have ever even thought of Greenland on his own. I think was told about it, and the narrative planted in his head deliberately.

Thus focus on "Trump" in Internet comments and media irks me to no end. Trump is not a failure and not the wrong person in the job - he is ideal for those behind him. The money does not like public attention.
by wernsey | 2026-01-21 08:37:29+00:00
Maybe you should quote the full title of that post:

"I got into an argument on Discord about how inefficient CBR/CBZ is, so I wrote a new file format. It's 100x faster than CBZ."

It has some charts, notes and comments

Here's the old.reddit link: https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1qi64pr/i_got_i...
by nl | 2026-01-21 08:37:36+00:00
I use agentic coding daily and rarely write any code by hand.

Here's what works for me:

Spend a lot of time working out plans. If you have a feature, get Claude Opus to build a plan, then ask it "How many github issues should this be", and get it to create those issues.

Then for each issue ask it to plan the implementation, then update the issue.

Then get it to look at all the issues for the feature and look for inconsistencies.

Once this is done, you can add you architectural constraints. If you think one issue looks like it could potentially reinvent something, edit that issue to point it at the existing implementation.

Once you are happy with the plan, assign to your agents and wait.

Optionally you can watch them - I find this quite helpful because you do see them go offtrack sometimes and can correct.

As they finish, run a separate review agent. Again, if you have constraints make sure the agent enforces them.

Finally, do an overall review of the feature. This should be initially AI assisted.

Don't get frustrated when it does the wrong thing - it will! Just tell it how to do the correct thing, and add that to your AGENTS.md so next time it will do it. Consider adding it to your issue template manually too.

In terms of code review, I manually review critical calculations line-by-line, and do a broad sweep review over the rest. That broad sweep review looks for duplicate functionality (which happens a lot) and for bad test case generation.

I've found this methodology speeds up the coding task around 5-10x what I could do before. Tasks that were 5-10 days of work are now doable in around 1 day.

(Overall my productivity increase is a lot higher because I don't procrastinate dealing with issues I want to avoid).