MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dgb23 | 2026-01-16 11:03:06+00:00
It was the same clergy (or rather parts of it) that used the printing press to great success.

Martin Luther used it to spread his influence extremely quickly for example. Similarly, the clergy used new innovations in book layout and writing to spread Christianity across Europe a thousand years before that.

What is weird about LLMs though, is that it isn't a simple catalyst of human labor. The printing press or the internet can be used to spread information quickly that you have previously compiled or created. These technologies both have a democratizing effect and have objectively created new opportunities.

But LLMs are to some degree parasitical to human labor. I feel like their centralizing effect is stronger than their democratizing one.
by tomaytotomato | 2026-01-16 11:03:55+00:00
I think its a pessimistic outlook and I agree with the sentiment, but then I switch back to objectively how humanity has been historically and how far we have come, I can't stop thinking, "wow".

Being in my 30s I remember Y2K, OZone layer diminishing and a rogue comet coming to wipe out humanity, but it didn't. This is survivor bias just like the examples in the lecture around wildfires and Covid are surely survivor bias too.

My wife does not like when I solve problems instead of just acknowledge the problem and say "that's a shame/sad/terrible", but I can't help it, we as engineers are wired to do solve problems, not just acknowledge them.

Think of the Dog poo dilemma - most people will just point and say, "terrible someone has let their dog poo there". Then proceed to carry on with their day. My engineer brain says lets pick up the poo and then look at solutions to stop it happening again.

So when a crises happens I know there are lots of smarter men and women in my field and other areas, who won't just get sad about an issue and instead will start working their brains on the problem.

The apocalypse is delayed, permanently.
by Beretta_Vexee | 2026-01-16 11:04:57+00:00
This has worked very well in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

It is a giant island in the Arctic Ocean, populated by Inuit and people born on a pair of skis. If they don't want you here, they will make sure you freeze to death in a troop transporter stuck in the snow.

It would destroy NATO, the global financial system, our supply chains are so intertwined that pharmaceuticals, air transport, and most advanced technologies would be completely disrupted for years.

Intellectual property rights, judicial cooperation, international recognition, and all those things would be dead.

Our lives would be disrupted beyond imagination.
by coderatlarge | 2026-01-16 11:05:51+00:00
i propose the following benchmark task that i think can serve as a baseline of whether these local automation systems can really save time:

starting with a bare ubuntu desktop system with plenty of RAM and CPU, setup three ubuntu VMs for secure development and networking skills learning (wireshark, protocol analysis, etc etc):

one ubuntu “virtual” desktop to simulate a working desktop that an end-user or developer would use. its networking should initially be completely isolated.

one ubuntu server to simulate a bastion machine. route all “virtual desktop” traffic through this “bastion”. it will serve as a tap.

one ubuntu server to serve as edge node. this one can share internet access with the host. route all bastion traffic through the edge node.

use this three vm setup to perform ordinary tasks in the “virtual desktop “ and observe the resulting traffic in the “bastion”. verify that no other traffic is generated on or from the host outside of the expected path virtual desktop -> bastion -> edge.

i claim this is a minimal “network clean” development setup for anyone wanting to do security-conscious development.

extra credit: setup another isolated vm sever to act as the package manager ; ie mirror anything to be installed on the “virtual desktop” onto this package server and configure this server as the install point for apt on the “virtual desktop”.

i doubt an AI can set this up right now. (i’ve tried)
by trinsic2 | 2026-01-16 11:05:53+00:00
Ahh shoot, I'm late to the party. I don't know how I missed this.

My site [3] hosts my technical services but I also write about technology on my publications section [0]. I also wrote an article on growing up with home computers[1]

[0]: https://scottRlarson.com/publications

[1]: https://www.scottrlarson.com/memorials/

[3]: https://www.scottrlarson.com
by 9dev | 2026-01-16 11:05:57+00:00
These are questions worth posing. Everyone working in tech right now plays a part in a lot of horrors haunting the world right now, and all of us are partly guilty.

If your answer to this is, "I don't care about the environment, everyone's right to privacy, psychological effects of social media use, or any of those other adverse effects as long as I get a good salary"—that's a valid answer for sure, if you aren't bothered by it. If that is not your answer, maybe it's time to change some things.
Show HN: NumeroMoney – Understand your spending without sharing bank login
by appsoftware | 2026-01-16 11:06:27+00:00
I built this application to help solve difficulties in managing tracking of finances for a busy household. It's been really helpful, so I've turned it into a product in the hope that it can help others too. I can genuinely say it's given me a much clearer view of our family finances and even helped me spot a couple of subscriptions we'd forgotten about and duplicate charges. Would appreciate any feedback greatly.
Show HN: Skills-CLI, Sync local and remote skills with agentic IDEs
by dhruvwill | 2026-01-16 11:07:35+00:00
I built a CLI tool to solve my own frustration: keeping AI skills (prompts, rules, tool definitions) in sync across multiple AI coding assistants.

The problem: I'd create a skill in Cursor, then need it in Claude Desktop and Gemini CLI too. Manual copying was tedious, and updates meant copying again everywhere.

The solution: One source of truth. Add skills from GitHub/GitLab/Bitbucket (including specific subdirectories), sync to all your AI tools.

Usage:
skills source add https://github.com/vercel-labs/agent-skills/tree/main/skills... --remote
skills target add cursor ~/.cursor/skills
skills target add claude ~/.claude/settings/skills
skills sync

Features:
- Pull from any Git host (GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, self-hosted)
- Subdirectory support (great for mono-repos)
- Multi-target sync
- Status tracking and diagnostics

Built with Bun. No dependencies beyond chalk and cli-table3.

GitHub: https://github.com/dhruvwill/skills-cli

Would love feedback on the approach. Anyone else dealing with skill fragmentation across AI tools?
by voxleone | 2026-01-16 11:07:42+00:00
Helping, in Rogaway’s sense, means refusing both neutrality and despair. Collapse is not an excuse for nihilism; there are still objective ways to help, even if they’re costly and uncertain. That looks like rejecting work that accelerates surveillance, extraction, or environmental damage; pushing back inside institutions; redirecting skills toward public-interest, climate, or civic work; and engaging politically rather than hiding behind technical detachment.

The harder question Rogaway implicitly raises is not what should be done but how many of us actually have the disposition to accept the blood, toil, tears, and sweat required to fight, rather than retreating into comfort, irony, or resignation. Technical excellence is abundant; moral endurance is not.
by pamcake | 2026-01-16 11:07:52+00:00
Yeah, I get hundreds of requests if not more per hour for some obscure personal but public servers that have ~0 legitimate other users. I guess once you're in some index that's just that. For an e-commerce shop, a few thousand irrelevant requests per day should just be part of the background noise that comes with being online these days? Cache is king.
by anovikov | 2026-01-16 11:08:12+00:00
Well i am not against immigration or foreigners. Even a dumbest racist must understand that with TFR being <2.0, a country must have immigration or it will eventually collapse. There's no denying that immigration is necessary, both in US and EU (i live in EU).

I am against people who insist that the country should not have the ability to pick who gets in and who doesn't. And that's what illegal immigration is.

Here in EU, we don't really have illegal immigration as a large problem. There are some but they are really few in numbers (about 0.8% of population according to the most recent estimates vs ~4% in the USA) and no political force in any of EU countries, even the most leftist ones, claims that they are OK and not a problem. They exist because it's technically difficult to solve them (country of origin is often unknowable, they burned their passports and won't tell where they came from, so there's nowhere to deport them). But EVERY political force accepts that they are a problem, no one OKs their existence.

It's hard to understand why in the US many people see it as norm. Just have a legal immigration system that works.
by thecupisblue | 2026-01-16 11:08:43+00:00
It is more of a silent thing. Running in the background, internal libs, deployment tools, plugin tools.

But also - it's lacking things like a unified positioning + required knowledge to understand it is quite large compared to average dev + most people have no real use for it. It's mostly too "abstract high level" and "low level" for most devs.
by cess11 | 2026-01-16 11:08:48+00:00
If you just want to dip in, grab https://www.scryer.pl/ and do some exercises from https://www.metalevel.at/prolog.

Scryer is a good start because it's ISO. Datalog is kind of a subset, MiniKanren is somewhat related but not Prolog, and Picat is kind of Prolog with an imperative language within it.
by hshdhdhj4444 | 2026-01-16 11:09:34+00:00
Correct. And you could pay for the MCAS to use both sensors which all US airlines did.

Edit: I was misremembering. Both sensors were enabled on all planes and MCAS only used one at a time on all planes.

What was disabled, unless paid for, was software which displayed to the pilots that the 2 sensors were disagreeing, which would immediately have alerted them to what may have been wrong.

> According to Bjorn Fehrm, Aeronautical and Economic Analyst at Leeham News and Analysis, "A major contributor to the ultimate loss of JT610 is the missing AoA DISAGREE display on the pilots' displays."[109]
> The software depended on the presence of the visual indicator software, a paid option that was not selected by most airlines.[110] For example, Air Canada, American Airlines and Westjet had purchased the disagree alert, while Air Canada and American Airlines also purchased, in addition, the AoA value indicator, and Lion Air had neither.[111][112] Boeing had determined that the defect was not critical to aircraft safety or operation, and an internal safety review board (SRB) corroborated Boeing's prior assessment and its initial plan to update the aircraft in 2020. Boeing did not disclose the defect to the FAA until November 2018, in the wake of the Lion Air crash.[113][114][115][116] Consequently, Southwest had informed pilots that its entire fleet of MAX 8 aircraft will receive the optional upgrades.[117][118] In March 2019, after the second accident of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, a Boeing representative told Inc. magazine, "Customers have been informed that AoA Disagree alert will become a standard feature on the 737 MAX. It can be retrofitted on previously delivered airplanes."[119]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maneuvering_Characteristics_Au...
by k_g_b_ | 2026-01-16 11:09:40+00:00
Germany in its constitutional law has protections against that data being used for any other purpose or government agencies. Does that help if a new antisemitic party would take over? Not likely for long, but hopefully long enough for other constitutional protections (like banning the party), anti-fascists or people working there themselves to intervene.
On the other hand folks like the CCC or other data protection NGOs have been trying to teach politicians data minimalism for a while, but in this particular case religious conservatives don't want the state to get out of collecting church tax and the churches don't want the state to get out of it.
In particular, Jewish communities could request the state not to collect taxes, tell their members to not enter that data into the tax forms and collected tithes/donations/similar on their own.
by rand846633 | 2026-01-16 11:09:47+00:00
It’s the style of the interviewer. It works really well for Tilo in many cases at least. He is good as confusing and making you so uncomfortable that loos your media training.
He does things that are questionable in normal life but meant more great fact finding. As we see, this does not always work. He has more or less made a career of bing a bit to close and a bit too unpleasant to the people who agree tho be interviewed.

What context may also have been lost is that the interview format is self described as somewhat naive and simple. I think the “who are you” question is his standard opening move. The interview series literally advertises to be for the “disinterested” sure you can hate it but you cannot feel tricked…
by mikkupikku | 2026-01-16 11:10:08+00:00
I admit you got me mildly anmoyed with the sports nonsense, sorry about that.

Anyway, you're talking about reaction time, which isn't actually relevant. The time between an action (pressing a button, or flipping a switch) and seeing the result happen isn't the same as the time it takes you to re-act to that something. Flip a light switch, does the light turn off instantly, or does it take a full third of a second? I guarantee you can tell the difference. 300ms of latency is actually huge and easily perceptible, even if it's faster than you can react.
by wesammikhail | 2026-01-16 11:10:29+00:00
The institutions have been doing a fine job of destroying all their credibility and utility all on their own for far longer than this new AI hype cycle.

ZIRP, Covid, Anti-nuclear power, immigration crisis across the west, debt enslavement of future generations to buy votes, socializing losses and privatizing gains... Nancy is a better investor than Warren.

I am not defending billionaires, the vast majority of them are grifting scum. But to put this at their feet is not the right level of analysis when the institutions themselves are actively working to undermine the populace for the benefit of those that are supposed to be stewards of said institutions.
by ventegus | 2026-01-16 11:10:37+00:00
e.g. currently most media snapshots contain wartime propaganda forbidden at least somewhere.

RT content verboten in Germany, DW content verboten in Russia, not to mention another dozen of hot spots.

"Other websites" are completely inaccessible in certain regions. The Archive has stuff from all of them, so there’s basically no place on Earth where it could work without tricks like the EDNS one.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2026-01-16 11:10:41+00:00
The CEO's outrage is most likely politically motivated. The current US administration appears to support basically all of the US tech companies against any foreign regulation. Therefore, it makes sense to kick and scream in this case to see if the US government will pressure Italy to make life easier for them.

Note that I mostly agree that the Italian anti-piracy system (and these kinds of systems in general) are super problematic, and it's like using a nuke to crack a walnut.
by contrast | 2026-01-16 11:11:02+00:00
Your tone is disagreement, but it's not clear why?

There is an individual who you trust to do good work, and who works well with you. They're not anonymous. Addressing the topic of this thread, you know (or should know) that it is not AI slop.

That is a significant amount of knowledge and trust in an individual, and the very point I thought the GP was making.
by raincole | 2026-01-16 11:11:18+00:00
> Their panic isn't for the public good; it's the existential terror of seeing a machine master language without needing their decades of grammatical theory.

It's some wild claim. Every linguist worth their salt had known that you don't need grammatical theory to reach native level. Grammar being descriptive rather than prescriptive is the mainstream idea and had been long before LLM.

If you actually ask them, I bet most linguists will say they are not even excellent English (or whichever language they studied the most) teachers.

Plus, "stochastic parrot" was coined before ChatGPT. If linguists really felt that threatened by the time when people's concerns over AI was like "sure it can beat go master but how about league of legends?" you have to admit they did have some special insights, right?
by darekhta | 2026-01-16 11:11:58+00:00
Hi HN, I built Clutterfall, a small macOS app that reclaims disk space by removing application caches.

Why: I kept running into “System Data” bloat and huge caches from browsers, chat apps, dev tools (Xcode/Docker/Homebrew), and local AI tools. I wanted something minimal and transparent — not a “tune-up” app.

How it works:
- Two modes: Clean (safer/default) and DeepClean (more aggressive)
- Shows what will be deleted + estimated size before you confirm
- Runs only when you launch it (no background agents)
- No analytics / tracking

Tradeoffs:
- Some apps will rebuild caches; first launch may be slower or data may re-download.

To make it easy to try, I set the app to free until Jan 19, 2026.

Link: https://clutterfall.app (Mac App Store link on the page)

I’d love feedback on:
1) what cache locations you’d want included/excluded
2) edge cases I should watch for
3) how to communicate risk clearly without scare tactics
by __loam | 2026-01-16 11:12:33+00:00
It's so ridiculous to make this argument when the people who stand to benefit the most from this technology are the massive corporations that can subsidize the compute and capital costs of this technology. Is it democratization when Google pulls something your wrote on your website then runs it through an LLM so they can serve it directly to a user? You say people see this as a threat to their status but the reality is this is a massive consolidation of the information economy of the internet in the hands of a few corporate interests.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2026-01-16 11:13:15+00:00
> That's one way of saying it. Another way is that US companies are so extravagantly huge and violate EU laws so much that the fines are correspondingly huge.

Another way of saying it is that because of transfer pricing, basically nobody knows what money was made where (and the notion of profits per country in a world of multinationals with no capital controls is meaningless).
by wartywhoa23 | 2026-01-16 11:13:45+00:00
Surely we'll all beat monopolies by running our own local LLMs, storing whole blockchains on our local storage, building our own atomic power plants, flying our own airlines and launching our own satellites via our own rocket fleets. And producing our own trillion-transistor silicon in our own fabs.

We just have to start printing our own money and buying us some pocket armies and puppet politicians first.
by raducu | 2026-01-16 11:13:59+00:00
> That's just a different bias purposefully baked into GPT-5's engineered personality on post-training.

I want to highlight this realization! Just because a model says something cool, it doesn't mean it's an emergent behavior/realization, but more likely post-training.

My recent experience with claude code cli was exactly this.

It was so hyped here and elsewhere I gave it a try and I'd say it's almost arrogant/petulant.

When I pointed out bugs in long sessions it tried to gaslight me that everything was alright, faked tests to prove his point.
by plvo | 2026-01-16 11:14:08+00:00
Every new project = same repetitive setup: configuring database ORM with auth tables, setting up UI components and themes, fixing TypeScript paths

Built a OSS CLI to skip this and start coding immediately.
Sharing in case it helps:

bunx create-faster@latest

Github: https://github.com/plvo/create-faster

Any feedback is appreciated! If you have any ideas or libs suggestions, please feel free to send me a message :)
by fzeroracer | 2026-01-16 11:14:11+00:00
> The size of the problem basically leaves no "nice" solutions that are perfectly palatable to everyone. Maybe like "nobody wants to hear about an amputation" but unfortunately some situations are bad enough that you have to.

Are you volunteering to be part of the bad solution, or is it only OK as long as it happens far enough away from you? I'm curious because when you talk about needing an amputation, you're referring to American citizens getting killed and having their rights taken away for the sake of some nebulous solution. Where have I heard that before?
by rsynnott | 2026-01-16 11:14:14+00:00
> We’re never going to reduce energy consumption.

I mean, I think on an infinite timescale we probably will. A middle-class lifestyle today requires less energy than 20 years ago, simply because things have gotten more efficient (if you buy a fridge or a washing machine or a central heating system or a lightbulb today, it's using significantly less energy to do the same thing). But not _soon_. And part of the shift is very much from non-electric to electric power usage (gas heating -> heat pumps, petrol cars -> electric cars, diesel trains -> electric trains, etc etc). Energy use per capita will peak (may already have peaked) _long_ before electricity use per capita.
by grunder_advice | 2026-01-16 11:14:16+00:00
Pretty much all western countries are experiencing a crisis of democracy. It seems to me that the biggest contributor to this is the vulnerability of the electorate. It seems to me that it has become possible to hijack the minds of individuals with sustained propaganda campaigns.

You have individuals who at best completely a BSc in Business Studies, and you are asking them to decide on COVID or climate change. That by itself is a hard ask. Then you infiltrate their content consumption habits and you bombard them with propaganda. And then these people are asked to decide on the future of the nation. This of course only compounds on the natural divisions that are already present within the electorate.

I'm not immune from this, and neither are you.
I don't know what the solutions should be and how CS graduates in particular can help.
It just seems to me that we haven't developed enough on a social level to deal with these challenges.
by cursingatclod | 2026-01-16 11:15:13+00:00
This is a short essay about a failure mode in generative systems that is often misdiagnosed as hallucination or poor reasoning.

The core claim is simple: reasoning can be flawless and still produce invalid results if a necessary condition is missing. Invariants are binary. Reasoning is not.

I use the “coconut horse” scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail to illustrate how sophisticated, internally consistent reasoning can obscure a categorical failure.

The argument is not about intelligence, world models, or alignment. It’s about verification versus plausibility, and why invariant enforcement must be external to generative systems.

Curious whether this resonates with others building or reviewing LLM-driven systems.
by rfv6723 | 2026-01-16 11:16:30+00:00
You've mistaken the battlefield. This isn't about descriptive grammar. It's about the decades-long dominance of Chomsky's entire philosophy of language.

His central argument has always been that language is too complex and nuanced to be learned simply from exposure. Therefore, he concluded, humans must possess an innate, pre-wired "language organ"—a Universal Grammar.

LLMs are a spectacular demolition of that premise. They prove that with a vast enough dataset, complex linguistic structure can be mastered through statistical pattern recognition alone.

The panic from Chomsky and his acolytes isn't that of a humble linguist. It is the fury of a high priest watching a machine commit the ultimate heresy: achieving linguistic mastery without needing his innate, god-given grammar.