MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-17 19:49:35+00:00
>You think that these ridiculously high wages that companies like Mercor are paying for data generation are "tanking" bargaining power? I

Yes. Especially when those "high wages" are for 2nd/3rd rate countries. Aka below the minumim standards of first world countries.

>that will not end as long as there is demand for newer and better and more specially trained models

So it will in a few decades after models become capable of themselves? Aka GAI? Seems like a bad bet to hedge on the grand scale of history.

>It would take far more severe shocks to the system to kill the possibility of revolution

A surveillance state and a few hundred drones will do it.
by crazygringo | 2026-01-17 19:49:41+00:00
Ok that's definitely helpful. At this point I'm not really asking questions here for you to answer on HN -- just more pointing out that these are the kinds of things your site needs to explain. What this competes with vs. what it works together with is a great angle.

I assumed ExtraBar was intended to be its own all-in-one solution for executing commands. Now that you say it also works together with other utilities, that changes my perception completely.
by roskelld | 2026-01-17 19:49:57+00:00
You've just brought back an old memory there. We used to do LAN parties at the weekend, and none of us has network cards, but one of our friends worked in the IT department of the local university. So he would bring a stack of cards with him and we'd spend hours setting them up and getting each PC on the network, often with great failure if he couldn't bring a batch of same branded cards.

We did learn over time which cards hated connecting with each other, and if he could bag a full batch of 3com we knew we'd likely be in for some early gaming.
by QuantumGood | 2026-01-17 19:50:08+00:00
"I have never heard anyone express concern about what ICE is doing."

"heard" and "express concern" commonly do a lot of heavy lifting in anecdata:

• Include or exclude social media comments from friends?
• Only include people who have spoken to you directly?
• Speak often or infrequently to others?
• Include or exclude content that you have seen that you trust?
• Are part of a large/small circle of family/friends?
• Concern or only experience causing concern?
• General opinion or on specific available information?
• etc., etc.

Without being more specific, "heard" and "express concern" don't mean much, and with specific qualification, are easily manipulated.

I also live just outside of Minneapolis. I have white-appearance family members whose heritage traces literally back to the Mayflower that have been harrassed while working from home, and literally dozens of others expressing concern due to those in their circle being harassed, and many others expressing concern due to viewing media that they trust.

In thinking just now, it's hard to think of anyone not expressing concern, on "both sides", partly because I am hearing expressions on the topic from a tremendous number of persons.
by swiftcoder | 2026-01-17 19:51:01+00:00
> I doubt that many people on here actually would want to ban adults from spending "too much" money on video games

The problem is not "spending too much" on videos games. It's the reward structure designed to incentivise one to spend unbounded amounts - just like a casino.

And just like a casino, I don't know that making them fully illegal is the correct way to go. But we surely shouldn't let kids in the casino, or let casinos advertise to kids, etc.
by TheTaytay | 2026-01-17 19:51:37+00:00
I don’t know why you are being downvoted. I mean, I guess I do, but sheesh, they are really shooting the messenger here. Maybe they are looking for more nuance: a lot of software is/was written by people working at…

I don’t think everything VCs touch is gold, but it’s also not the case that they are pure evil either. It’s almost as if you can’t claim they are all good or all bad.
by bigbadfeline | 2026-01-17 19:53:00+00:00
> At the same time we need to realize that the US actions are clearly meant to tear the EU apart.

Generally true with one small but very important correction - the US actions are clearly meant to bait the EU into breaking itself apart.

> It's just that I also want that split (north vs south, sort of).

You've been had. Trump is smarter than you, you've bitten his bait and you're hanging on his hook... and you were doing so well initially.

> The EU of today is dysfunctional, largely because of this immense cultural split.

There's no cultural split, there are only politicians on varying levels of corruption and the leading EU countries are in the center of it all. That's the problem that needs addressing.
by jszymborski | 2026-01-17 19:53:14+00:00
Lol please don't gate keep "nature". As if the only people who play music on a hike are from or belong in cities.

The nice thing about the great outdoors is that there is plenty of space for you and me, even if I were to play music you can audibly detect from a meter away.

Look, I hope you find some other ways than insulting people to express your displeasure in the future. That'll damage both the mental health of the person your speaking to and your own!

Take care out there!
by gregbot | 2026-01-17 19:53:17+00:00
US NREL Puts it at $2/W with no storage and ~20% capacity factor. Lifetime of latest panels is unknown but optimistically is 25 years. Assuming perfect and free storage that comes to $24.4 billion per year of capital expenditure for a country the size of France to be 100% solar. So no, it would not be more economical to use solar over nuclear. Wind would be better but when you add the full system costs of storage and backup intermittent heavy systems are vastly more expensive and emit more carbon than nuclear ones.

Intermittents are only gaining market share because their unreliable and intermittent power which is less valuable is being purchased by governments at prices that far exceed what it is worth. In other words, massive hidden subsidies. Without those, there would be next to no intermittents on the grid anywhere.

See “Market matching costs” here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
by estearum | 2026-01-17 19:53:23+00:00
> It's either we do this for thousands of years (in which case the second order effects must be minor to make it sustainable for that long), or we do it for a short time because second order effects aren't sustainable.

Just like building petrochemical-dependent societies!

Err, actually, there’s a third option: we put ourselves into a pickle.

Pretty much no hard problem would exist if the dynamic you’re describing were necessarily valid in general, and you’ve done nothing to demonstrate it’s valid in this particular case.

It is absolutely possible for the side effects to be hard to detect, widespread, hard to mitigate once detected, and for us nevertheless to be otherwise dependent upon continuing to produce those effects. See: fossil fuels.

But fossil fuels do not have the same snapback risk. This actually does.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-17 19:53:31+00:00
>I would say they are making the current cost of one's labor "obsolete".

That's how it builds to making a market cost obsolete. Especially when the explicit goal is near 100% removal of human labor.

It's like fishing, do it slowly enough (like the dozens of millenia of humanity before the industrial revolution) and fish will repopulate just fine. Do it too fast and you drive fish to extinction. They want to make labor extinct.
by pugdogdev | 2026-01-17 19:55:40+00:00
Hey there,
This topic always pops up from time to time.
First, when I started building macOS apps, the extra work of building a trial mechanism was something I wanted to keep for later.
Today, my key management backend already supports that, and when a user personally asks for a trial key, I give it to them.
But from my experience, when someone has a free trial, 2 thing can happen:
1. Download and never use
2. Use a little bit, stop using it, and leave the app without buying it.

When someone pays for the app, they try it most of the time immediately.
He explores the app, finds issues, and, because he paid for it, will be much more involved, which will provide me with much more accurate feedback.

Also, if something is not working well for him, he writes me, and I benefit from these interactions with the users.
A lot of my improvements for my apps are based on "Refund talks"
Overall, the upsides outweigh the downsides.

I don't have many refunds, but when I do, it really helps me improve the app.
I already had users who asked for a refund, and a few versions later, the app improved based on their feedback, and they repurchased it.

I am sure that some users don't buy without trying,
And this is why I am super responsive to refund requests and handle them faster and without "playing games" with this topic.

Hope this makes sense in some way
by Jaysobel | 2026-01-17 19:56:06+00:00
Author here - some bonus links!

Session transcript using Simon Willison's claude-code-transcripts

https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://gist.githubuserconten...

Reddit post

https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1q9fen5/claude_co...

OpenRCT2!!

https://github.com/jaysobel/OpenRCT2

Project repo

https://github.com/jaysobel/OpenRCT2
by jedberg | 2026-01-17 19:56:09+00:00
Many of your examples came from people who were funded by Universities in the 80s, which was basically the VC of the time. And in the 90s, a lot of the core committers of those projects were already working at VC funded companies.

Back then it was very normal to get VC funding and then hire the core committers of your most important open source software and pay them to keep working on it. I worked at Sendmail in the 90s and we had Sendmail committers (obviously) but also BSD core devs and linux core devs on staff. We also had IETF members on staff.

And we weren't unique, this happened a lot.
by nindalf | 2026-01-17 19:56:42+00:00
In your hurry to defend this slop you didn't do your due diligence. You know that 1 million LoC JS VM? Yeah, it isn't actually running - https://imgur.com/fqGLjSA. And you can tell this is actually the case because it's been brought up a few times on this thread and that guy has ducked around it.
by apublicfrog | 2026-01-17 19:56:58+00:00
Of course. Here's the Australian PM 4 months ago:

https://www.pm.gov.au/media/setting-australias-2035-climate-...

Here's the NZ PM last month:

https://www.ruralnewsgroup.co.nz/rural-news/rural-general-ne...

I would imagine it's a relevant political football in most first world countries. I avoid American news, but the bits I see make me think it's probably still focused on culture war garbage.
by dahart | 2026-01-17 19:57:08+00:00
> Where did you find this tidbit

Google it. There are pages and pages of sources. Here’s one: https://gregslist.com/

> Every company “cares about their customers” to the point where that’s how they make their money.

And if they don’t make money, they fail and lose the opportunity to care about customers. It’s a boring tautology to say that companies care about money. The point is that @latexr is wrong about assuming that caring about money means they don’t care about product or customers.
by edgineer | 2026-01-17 19:57:35+00:00
Benedict became notable because of her death; Biographies of Living Persons has a privacy section that gives reasoning. These reasons, e.g. identity theft, complaint from the person, harassment, can not apply to a deceased person.

News articles did cover Benedict under the name Dagny.

As far as policies go, this page should be titled "Suicide of Nex Benedict" according to this policy [0], yet the talk on that subject ended with "closed with no consensus to move." [1]

This does speak to the selective application and selective enforcement of policies on Wikipedia. But I was most concerned to learn about how scrubbing the histories of pages is official policy itself.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Choosing_article_tit...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Death_of_Nex_Benedict/Arc...
by zzzeek | 2026-01-17 19:57:42+00:00
> My apologies. But are you really saying that we're not even able to try to be rational, or to improve?

not at all

> "Perfect rationality" sounds like "perfect knowledge", it's a mind-boggling concept belonging to a such a far distant future that we'll probably revise the concept away before we get anywhere near it.

my statement refers to a general vibe from people who call themselves "rationalists" are going on the assumption that they are rational, while everyone else is not. Which is ridiculous. everyone "tries" to be rational. of course everyone should "try" to be rational. That's what everyone is doing most of time regardless of how poorly we judge their success.

> Being slightly more rational is a practical goal, unless you're saying human nature won't allow even that much.

Everyone should be "slightly more rational". The rationalists state that they *are* more rational, and then they go on to have fixations on such "rational" things like proving that "race" is real and determines intelligence. Totally missing what their brains are actually doing since they are so "rational".
by socialcommenter | 2026-01-17 19:58:11+00:00
> If CLIs functioned as LLM and you could talk freely with it, there would be no problem.

On face value, I find this suggestion hilarious. People are having sandboxing issues left, right and center with AI agents and MCPs, so clearly there would be enormous problems with giving an LLM full unscoped terminal access. Remember the guy who had his hard drive wiped?

Do you just mean that the ABIs are inconsistent and you want a more unified way to specify what you want (but the user still more-or-less spells out what command will be invoked)? I have some sympathy for that concern, yes.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-17 19:58:29+00:00
>It'll be whatever people still find valuable to do.

So you never considered

1. Some are simply permanently displaced and homeless

2. What the market wants is an arguable set back to overall society?

If all white collar work is obselete and you can't retrain, you're back to working on the fields or being sent to die in wars. If you have a bad leg or arm or eye, you're discarded by society. Is that a future to strive for?
by itsgrimetime | 2026-01-17 20:00:05+00:00
I've done this! Given the right interface I was surprised at how well it did. Prompted it "You're controlling a character in Old School RuneScape, come up with a goal for yourself, and don't stop working on it until you've achieved it". It decided to fish for and cook 100 lobsters, and it did it pretty much flawlessly!

Biggest downside was it's inability to see (literally), getting lists of interact-able game objects, NPCs, etc was fine when it decided to do something that didn't require any real-time input. Sailing, or anything that required it to react to what's on screen was pretty much impossible without more tooling to manage the reacting part for it (e.g. tool to navigate automatically to some location).
by jstummbillig | 2026-01-17 20:00:13+00:00
> But there were benefits to knowing as, ld and ar, and there still are today.

This is trivially true. The constraint for anything you do in your life is time it takes to know something.

So the far more interesting question is: At what level do you want to solve problems – and is it likely that you need knowledge of as, ld and ar over anything else, that you could learn instead?
by whispem | 2026-01-17 20:00:26+00:00
Thanks a lot for your comment!

I’ve put a lot of work into this over the past year—learning from established open source projects and carefully testing every feature to build something robust and reliable.
For now, this is still a passion and learning project, but I do hope that, eventually, it can mature enough to be used in real-world production—maybe even in enterprise contexts someday.

There’s still a long way to go, and I’m definitely open to feedback and suggestions from anyone who’d like to help me improve.
by aljarry | 2026-01-17 20:01:01+00:00
I had a strange problem with Dell P2720DC (27'' 2560x1440) - the whole outer edge of the screen would flicker if I used dark background with a lot of dim colours (like dark mode in IDE, or default Grafana theme). It wouldn't happen all the time, but it would happen on a weekly basis (I most often seen that on Sunday). I've RMA'd it, got another monitor, which also started showing the same problem. I gave it to someone who doesn't use dark mode - no issues.

So, I'm not getting another Dell until I'd be sure this issue won't happen again :)
by maxglute | 2026-01-17 20:01:11+00:00
Also let's not forget "Persecution of Uyghurs in China" use to be titled "Uyghur Genocide" or some variation thereof for years. Never mind plurality of UN countries has recognized PRC actions in XJ as counter extremist/terrorists, or even among western bloc most countries did not label it as "genocide", bu somehow wiki and captured editors went with the genocide framing, aka, fucking we lie, we cheat, we steal Mike Pompeo serving as secretary of state for US geopolitical interest designation during sino-us coldwar. Because Wiki NPOV isn't based on reality but "reliable sources" which just happen to be western aligned that parrot each other to manufacture consensus / propaganda. Even "persecution of Uyghurs" still biased considering plurality of world still considers PRC actions in XJ as de-deradicalization / counterterrorism, and the numbers have only swung more in PRC favour over time - geopolitical reality is "Chinese War on Terrorism" whose causalities paled in comparison to wiki's "(Global) War on Terrorism" that would otherwise be characterized as "genocide/persecution of Iraqis/Afghans" which killed and displaced millions. Wonder if Obama would have gotten a Nobel Peace prize if that article title existed.
by msla | 2026-01-17 20:01:16+00:00
I did not expect to see big-company apologia on Hacker News.

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

The thing this (very good) post doesn't mention is that big companies select for blub languages because that's where the most low-cost labor is, in that you can hire multiple Java developers for the cost of one Haskell developer, even if Haskell might be objectively a better choice for the project.
by tadfisher | 2026-01-17 20:01:20+00:00
I think there are different forms of dependence that result in more or less severe carrying costs. Hardware is only a problem when you need to replace it or create new installations, so its carrying cost is rather low. The Microsoft 365 Copilot app is subscription-based, induces vendor lock-in with a whole software/hardware ecosystem, and is updated on a whim from the vendor with next to no customer control; its carrying cost is enormous.
by _pdp_ | 2026-01-17 20:01:21+00:00
I was skeptical until 3-4 months ago, but my recent experience has been entirely different.

For context: we're the creators of ChatBotKit and have been deploying AI agents since the early days (about 2 years ago). These days, there's no doubt our systems are self-improving. I don't mean to hype this (judge for yourself from my skepticism on Reddit) but we're certainly at a stage where the code is writing the code, and the quality has increased dramatically. It didn't collapse as I was expecting.

What I don't know is why this is happening. Is it our experience, the architecture of our codebase, or just better models? The last one certainly plays a huge role, but there are also layers of foundation that now make everything easier. It's a framework, so adding new plugins is much easier than writing the whole framework from scratch.

What does this mean for hiring? It's painfully obvious to me that we can do more with less, and that's not what I was hoping for just a year ago. As someone who's been tinkering with technology and programming since age 12, I thought developers would morph into something else. But right now, I'm thinking that as systems advance, programming will become less of an issue—unless you want to rebuild things from scratch, but AI models can do that too, arguably faster and better.

It is hard to convey that kind of experience.

I am wondering if others are seeing it too.
Show HN: Whisper Money – a zero-knowledge personal finance app (E2E encrypted)
by falcon_ | 2026-01-17 20:01:23+00:00
I built Whisper Money: a personal finance app designed so the server never sees your transactions in plaintext.

Core idea:

- Transactions/accounts/budgets are encrypted on the client before sync (zero-knowledge storage).

- No bank integrations/credential sharing; you import CSV/XLS from your bank instead.

- Open source: https://github.com/whisper-money/whisper-money

- Demo (no signup): https://whisper.money (see “Demo”)

Tradeoffs/limitations:

- Because data is encrypted client-side, server-side “AI insights” and some global features are intentionally not possible.

- Key management and UX around recovery are hard; I’m still iterating on the right balance.

I’d love feedback on:

1. threat model assumptions and key handling,

2. how you’d design search/categorization on encrypted data,

3. what you’d want to see before trusting this with real financial history.
by bigbadfeline | 2026-01-17 20:01:38+00:00
> You guys are all really purist with your shade of white.

That's the major goal of all the theatrics you see in political space - to have very similar people get at each other's throats. It was wildly "successful" in provoking the idiotic war between Russia and Ukraine.

It's telling that I don't see any politician in the EU addressing that threat. You'd think EU politicians would know better given the bloody history of idiotic intra-European wars.
by falcon_ | 2026-01-17 20:01:51+00:00
More implementation details for folks skimming:

- Stack: Laravel 12 + React 19 + Inertia v2 + TypeScript + MySQL/Redis.

- Encryption code lives under src/lib/crypto (happy to point to specific files).

- Import is CSV/XLS; encryption happens before upload.

- Hosting/deploy: Docker + docker-compose, includes a production compose and a Coolify template.

If anyone has experience with audits / threat modeling for E2E apps, I’d appreciate pointers on what to formalize first.
by chickenimprint | 2026-01-17 20:02:28+00:00
No, there's really just a few select politicians standing in the way. Governments around the world have implemented tons of policies to attempt to address the crisis, but unless every country participates, it's economically suicidal. Carbon-intensive industries can simply move to the US, strengthening them, while those countries attempting to carry the burden of preventing climate change will be equally affected by looming disasters.
by whispem | 2026-01-17 20:02:32+00:00
Thanks for the kind words and for the “beginners” encouragement—totally agree, it’s easy to lose sight of that!

I get the point about feature creep.
I started “small,” then kept adding features as a way to learn and push my limits.
My goal is to keep the design modular enough so people can use just the parts they need.

If you (or anyone else) would be interested in a stripped-down mode or a build with fewer features, I’d love to hear what that would look like to you!

Thanks again for the thoughtful feedback.
by kalind | 2026-01-17 20:02:42+00:00
From what I've read moshi moshi was originally pronounced "moushi moushi" and comes from the humble form of the verb to say/speak - moushiageru.

I also found it interesting that the original telephone greeting seems to have been either "oi oi" or "kora kora", which is rough sounding "male speech". This was apparently due to the fact that the first telephone users and operators were exclusively men, but as female telephone operators started to become commonplace the greeting changed to the more respectful sounding "moushi moushi".

The repetition does indeed seem to because of the poor quality of the first telephone lines.