MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TZubiri | 2026-01-19 04:51:51+00:00
>What if the agent only had one tool? Not just any tool, but the most powerful one. The Turing-complete one: execute code.

I think this is a myth, the existence of theoretically pure programming commands that we call "Turing Complete". And the idea that "ls" and "grep" would be part of such a Turing Complete language is the weakest form I've seen.
by wewewedxfgdf | 2026-01-19 04:52:09+00:00
My point is this:

Rust is complex.

That is not a statement anyone can deny. Unless you're a Rust-bro "hey man I learned it so I’m baffled how you can't see it's super simple ..... etc etc"

Of everything that I have learned about programming, this is the BIGGEST lesson: - complexity is bad, avoid complexity. Complex is not the same as "sophisticated", which implies necessary intricacy. Complex means unneeded unnecessary cognitive load - things made harder than they should be when it could have been avoided - that's complexity. If you are writing complex code then you're writing bad code. And Rust is complex.

It is sad that we did not end up with a SIMPLE programming language that solves the memory safety problem.
by Duanemclemore | 2026-01-19 04:52:17+00:00
The em-dash=LLM thing is so crazy. For many years Microsoft Word has AUTOCORRECTED the typing of a single hyphen to the proper syntax for the context -- whether a hyphen, en-dash, or em-dash.

I would wager good money that the proliferation of em-dashes we see in LLM-generated text is due to the fact that there are so many correctly used em-dashes in publicly-available text, as auto-corrected by Word...
by insin | 2026-01-19 04:52:56+00:00
> Problems are only truly solved by the folks who dedicate themselves to understanding the problem, that is: the folks working on web standards and the other folks implementing them.

It kills me to think of how amazing Web Components could be if those folks had started standardising them _now_ instead of in "competition" with userland component libraries of the time (while punting on many of the essential challenges of developing UI in the DOM those libraries were still evolving solutions for), and introduced more problems entirely of their own making.
by Remnant44 | 2026-01-19 04:53:08+00:00
which honestly, shouldn't be neccessary today with avx512. There's essentially no reason to prefer the aligned load/store commands over the unaligned ones - if the actual pointer is unaligned it will function correctly at half the throughput, while if it_is_ aligned you will get the same performance as the aligned-only load.

No reason for the compiler to balk at vectorizing unaligned data these days.
by vinyl7 | 2026-01-19 04:53:16+00:00
> So they allow even more bots to increase traffic which drives up ad revenue

When are people who buy ads going to realize that the majority of their online ad spend is going towards bots rather than human eye balls who will actually buy their product? I'm very surprised there hasn't been a massive lawsuite against Google, Facebook, Reddit, etc. for misleading and essentially scamming ad buyers
by throwaway17_17 | 2026-01-19 04:53:44+00:00
Since you are in the comments, I’ll just ask directly…

Are you planning to enable a local only version of chat history and maybe an option for local first instancing? In my line of work Slack is basically a non-starter due to the off sight and non-employee managed nature of the storage/centralized transport and pass-through nature of their business model. I would love to be able to have something similar for my various teams and employee groupings, almost everything we do is asynchronous comms via email or direct phone calls. Being able to act like it’s 2026 instead of 1997 would be a huge win for me.
by throwup238 | 2026-01-19 04:54:38+00:00
I can't find it now but there was a paper on HN a while ago that had gave agents a tool that searched through existing tools using embeddings. If the agent found a tool it could use to do its job, it used it, otherwise it wrote a new one, gave it a description, and it got saved in a database for future use with embeddings. I wonder what ever came of that.
by wackget | 2026-01-19 04:55:16+00:00
It's not the only thing, although it is a big one. Honestly Windows just feels better to me and works the way I want it to. It might help that I've always used enterprise versions so I've never had to deal with the awful bloatware. The few things I do want to disable are pretty painless to remove through the group policy editor or one of many freeware GUI tweaker programs.
by amlib | 2026-01-19 04:55:31+00:00
Take a look at dash to panel gnome extension:

https://github.com/home-sweet-gnome/dash-to-panel

It's a very configurable extension for gnome that can do all you described except double stacking..

I've uploaded a video demo and a config file that makes it kinda like what you want, again no double stacking:

https://github.com/amlib/dash-to-panel-config/tree/main

You can also configure it to keep open window buttons separate from the launcher icons, but with the lack of double stacking I rather have it "take over" the launcher
by jrk | 2026-01-19 04:56:23+00:00
The PyTorch version is using the GPU (with Metal Performance Shaders); this C version is currently using (in the docs I saw) a single CPU core, with AMX (via Apple Accelerate BLAS) but not yet with OpenMP for parallelism. It’s not slow because LLM code is bad, but because it’s not running on the same hardware. That said, it’s also not as fast as it is because of the LLM—all the critical code is in kernel libraries it calls (the same as for PyTorch).
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2026-01-19 04:56:28+00:00
>"workers in this line were persons who either did not wish to join the Army or whom the Army did not wish to have join it."

Vs

A slight or even a substantial increase in economic welfare in the Asian states seems to the author to favor a sharp increase in Communist strength.

to be reconsidered in light of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chin_Peng#:~:text=Deng%20repli...
by jcelerier | 2026-01-19 04:58:27+00:00
ubsan definitely has some warnings due to a few "technically UB" patterns used as optimizations in Qt as they are known-working on every target platform under the sun, but yeah, no crashes :)

I'm only using this configuration for the software I develop though (+ libc++ debug mode) as it's painfully slow, but it exercises the Qt codebase in depth.
by mythrwy | 2026-01-19 04:59:52+00:00
The token providers got paid.

Reminds me of an offshore project I was involved with at one point. It had something like 7 managers and 4 years and over 30 developers had worked on it. The billing had reached into the millions. It was full of never ending bugs.

It was actually a month or three simple crud project for a 2 man development team.
by quantummagic | 2026-01-19 05:00:08+00:00
That's the most disingenuous argument yet, that completely ignores reality.

The libertarian party does NOT advocate for illegal immigration today. Only once NAP-violating governments are abolished, do they say the harmful effects of immigration are non-existent.

You know _damn well_ that in the context of actual politics in America as they stand TODAY, open immigration is a FAR LEFT position. It's undeniable to anyone arguing in good faith.
by 8organicbits | 2026-01-19 05:01:21+00:00
I don't know of any, but my strategy to avoid slop has been to read more long-form content, especially on blogs. When you subscribe over RSS, you've vetted the author as someone who's writing you like, which presumably means they don't post AI slop. If you discover slop, then you unsubscribe. No need for a platform to moderate content for you... as you are in control of the contents of your news feed.
by dtkav | 2026-01-19 05:03:44+00:00
IMHO there are a couple axis that are interesting in this space.

1. What do the tokens look like that you are you storing in the client? This could just be the secret (but encrypted), or you could design a whole granular authz system. It seems like tokenizer is the former and Formal is the latter. I think macaroons are an interesting choice here.

2. Is the MITM proxy transparent? Node, curl, etc allow you to specify a proxy as an environment variable, but if you're willing to mess with the certificate store than you can run arbitrary unmodified code. It seems like both Tokenizer and Formal are explicit proxies.

3. What proxy are you using, and where does it run? Depending on the authz scheme/token format you could run the proxy centrally, or locally as a "sidecar" for your dev container/sandbox.
by sillysaurusx | 2026-01-19 05:03:58+00:00
If you’re interested in this kind of thing, look up plainly difficult on youtube. He has more videos on train crashes than I’ve seen, and I’m embarrassed how many I’ve seen. Here’s one to get you started: https://youtu.be/VV2rIHEp5AM?si=sSBT9s49PqbLTGbt

There are a lot of safety lessons embedded in these videos, which is why I like them. I also did a double take when I heard "semaphore"; its history goes back far longer than the ~century of software engineering. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semaphore
Show HN: Pdfwithlove – PDF tools that run 100% locally (no uploads, no back end)
by pratik227 | 2026-01-19 05:04:07+00:00
Most PDF web tools make millions by uploading documents that never needed to leave your computer.

pdfwithlove does the opposite:

1. 100% local processing
2. No uploads, no backend, no tracking

Features include merge/split/edit/compress PDFs, watermarks & signatures, and image/HTML/Office → PDF conversion.
by visarga | 2026-01-19 05:04:37+00:00
Well said, I have been saying the same. Besides helping agents code, it helps us trust the outcome more. You can't trust a code not tested, and you can't read every line of code, it would be like walking a motorcycle. So tests (back pressure, deterministic feedback) become essential. You only know something works as good as its tests show.

What we often like to do in a PR - look over the code and say "LGTM" - I call this "vibe testing" and think it is the real bad pattern to use with AI. You can't commit your eyes on the git repo, and you are probably not doing as good of a job as when you have actual test coverage. LGTM is just vibes. Automating tests removes manual work from you too, not just make the agent more reliable.

But my metaphor for tests is "they are the skin of the agent", allow it to feel pain. And the docs/specs are the "bones", allow it to have structure. The agent itself is the muscle and cerebellum, and the human in the loop is the PFC.
by unsnap_biceps | 2026-01-19 05:05:49+00:00
I imagine there's two forces at work here.

The first is that the US can always pay back the debt, just by printing more currency. It would be inflationary, but there will be some repayment regardless of how bad it gets.

Also, stability. As long as no one panics and liquidates their bonds, the market stays high and everyone realizes a decent profit. I would imagine that they're all looking on how to divest slowly over time.
by hattmall | 2026-01-19 05:06:47+00:00
It's not really any different that stopping selling counterfeit goods on a platform. Which is a challenge, but hardly insurmountable and the pay off from AI videos won't be nearly so good. You can make a few thousand a day selling knock offs to a small amount of people and get reliably paid within 72 hours. To make the same off of "content" you would have to get millions of views and the pay out timeframe is weeks if not months. Youtube doesn't pay you out unless you are verified, so ban people posting AI and not disclosing it and the well will run dry quickly.
by unsnap_biceps | 2026-01-19 05:07:50+00:00
Legally it is CSAM.

In the United States, the PROTECT Act of 2003 made significant changes to the law regarding virtual child pornography. Any realistic appearing computer generated depiction that is indistinguishable from a depiction of an actual minor in sexual situations or engaging in sexual acts is illegal under 18 U.S.C. § 2252A.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_child_pornography
by Kim_Bruning | 2026-01-19 05:08:28+00:00
Sometimes it's better not to think of it as the human neural net 'failing to notice things'. You're just setting yourself up for a long list of exceptions.

Instead, consider it as attempting to extract singular pieces of information that fall outside the norm.

(And do so from a complex, noisy, or even outright adversarial environment,under suboptimal conditions, possibly even below the noise floor. )

With that framing it's actually pretty amazing that people DO notice as much as they do! ;-)
by yalogin | 2026-01-19 05:09:04+00:00
OpenAI has to be in panic mode, because google is stealing its market. Google for the big apple slice. Anthropic’s got the coding market mindshare. OpenAI has a decent chatbot share but I am sure it’s a declining business. They have fully squeezed everything out of the trump alignment, not sure there is much left there either. They have to go vertical, and that is the reason why they are throwing shit at the wall with Johnny Ive and hardware.

I was initially rooting for OpenAI hoping it can challenge google and Apple. However they showed to being unscrupulous and seem to have a moral compass at the same level as meta.
by dyauspitr | 2026-01-19 05:09:46+00:00
This whole economy and way of living has turned into people selling themselves in any way possible. Regular folks couldn’t do that in the past but now everyone can mass sell themselves. It’s a sorry state of affairs and I hate influencers as much as the next person but everyone is struggling. I don’t know what the solution is but maybe completely shutting down social media or making it so everything online is deanonymized.
by jitl | 2026-01-19 05:09:58+00:00
It wasn’t my intention to say “this stuff is 100x faster because rust”. DuckDB is C++. My intention was to draw distinction between the Java/Hadoop era of cluster and data systems, and the 2020s era of cluster and data systems, much of which has designs informed by stuff like this article / “Scalability but at what COST?”. I guess instead of “faster” I should say “more efficient”.

For example, the Kafka ecosystem tends to use Avro as the data transfer serialization, which needs a copy/deserialization step before it can be used in application logic. Newer stream systems like Timely tend to use zero-copy capable data transfer formats (timely’s is called Abomination) but it’s the same idea in CapnProto or Flatbuffers - it’s infinity faster to not copy the data as you decode! In my experience this kind of approach is more accessible in systems languages like C++ or Rust, and harder to do in GC languages where the default approach to memory layout and memory management is “don’t worry about it.”
by dang | 2026-01-19 05:10:33+00:00
People have been complaining about the title.* To avoid getting into a loop about that, I've picked a phrase from the article which I think better represents what it's saying. If there's a better title, we can change it again.

* (I've moved those comments to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46675246. If you want to reply, please do so there so we can hopefully keep the main thread on topic.)
by dtkav | 2026-01-19 05:10:34+00:00
sorry for the delayed response.
I ended posting on this [0] thread where they (Formal) are doing something similar.

Here's the repo [1]. I modified it a bit to post publicly and remove the details of my setup within my tailnet/flycast network.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46605155

[1] https://github.com/dtkav/agent-creds
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2026-01-19 05:10:55+00:00
"It's funny reading this parallel world that some portion of people have constructed for themselves."

Funnily enough, there was a story today in the WSJ about "a parallel world some portion of people have constructed for themselves"

Why the Tech World Thinks the American Dream Is Dying

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/why-the-tech-world-thinks-the-am...
by armandososa | 2026-01-19 05:11:08+00:00
I've been looking for something like this to coordinate volunteers. Per seat pricing makes it impossible for us to use any existing tool, so we stick to WhatsApp which is productivity hell.

Well, there's one more hard requirement. We need the tool to work in Spanish. It's unbelievable how many apps refuse to localize their app, taking into account how easy it is too keep a good localized app in many languages. You're early stage, so this would be a good time adding i18n, l10n. If you want help dealing with that, I can help.
by tomhow | 2026-01-19 05:11:23+00:00
Please don't post like this on HN. This kind of comment is a generic tangent (and a rather ghoulish one), that can be made about any tragedy; yes, no matter how bad something is, there's always something worse. It's the fact that this is an unusual occurrence that makes it noteworthy. The guidelines ask us to converse curiously and avoid generic tangents and shallow dismissals. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by bjackman | 2026-01-19 05:12:01+00:00
Train crashes like this are _so_ rare. It's not as safe as flying but AFAICT in rich countries it's the same rough order of magnitude in terms of danger level.

I don't have data but I would imagine crashes on these high speed lines (which always seem to be run at a higher level of professionalism than the general networks) are rarest of all.

I don't think it's a good use of mental energy to plan for a crash like this. You're better off using your brain cycles on hygiene or not losing your luggage.
by nhod | 2026-01-19 05:12:26+00:00
QNTM's There is no Antimemetics Division. It was a free set of short stories that he self-published. They were so good he got a publishing deal, and now you can buy the reimagined version at any bookstore. I personally prefer the original. Easily my favorite book of the last 5-10 years. https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub
by teendifferent | 2026-01-19 05:12:30+00:00
OP here. I spent the weekend red-teaming small-scale open weights models (Qwen2.5-1.5B, Qwen3-1.7B, Gemma-3-1b-it, and SmolLM2-1.7B).

I found a consistent vulnerability across all of them: Safety alignment relies almost entirely on the presence of the chat template.

When I stripped the 
 / instruction tokens and passed raw strings:

Gemma-3 refusal rates dropped from 100% → 60%.

Qwen3 refusal rates dropped from 80% → 40%.

SmolLM2 showed 0% refusal (pure obedience).

Qualitative failures were stark: models that previously refused to generate explosives tutorials or explicit fiction immediately complied when the "Assistant" persona wasn't triggered by the template.

It seems we are treating client-side string formatting as a load-bearing safety wall. Full logs, the apply_chat_template ablation code, and heatmaps are in the post.

Read the full analysis: https://teendifferent.substack.com/p/apply_chat_template-is-...
by flomo | 2026-01-19 05:13:11+00:00
You know Meta, the "social media company" came out and said their users spend less than 10% of the time interacting with people they actually know?

"Social Media" had become a euphemism for 'scrolling entertainment, ragebait and cats' and has nothing to do 'being social'. There is NO difference between modern reddit and facebook in that sense. (Less than 5% of users are on old.reddit, the majority is subject to the algorithm.)
by alexchaomander | 2026-01-19 05:13:29+00:00
s Bilt 2.0 worth it?

Like a lot of people over the past week, I asked myself that question. After an embarrassingly long time searching, reading X/Reddit and watching TikToks on the subject, I walked away more confused than informed.

What used to be a no-brainer credit card with Bilt 1.0, suddenly became a big-brained endeavor with Bilt 2.0.

Before: “Pay rent, get points.”
Now: “Calculate your spend-to-rent ratio, Use Bilt Cash to offset your rent/mortgage fees (huh?), Choose multiplier tiers, etc...”

So I built myself an app.

https://is-bilt2-for-me.pages.dev

Read the full in-depth post on my newsletter Chaos Theory! https://alexchao.substack.com/p/is-bilt-20-worth-it

If the app is helpful to you or a friend, please share it!
by oxguy3 | 2026-01-19 05:14:12+00:00
It is so irritating that people now think you've used an LLM just because you use nice typography. I've been using en dashes a ton (and em dashes sporadically) since long before ChatGPT came around. My writing style belonged to me first—why should I have to change?

If you have the Compose key [1] enabled on your computer, the keyboard sequence is pretty easy: `Compose - - -` (and for en dash, it's `Compose - - .`). Those two are probably my most-used Compose combos.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key
by senordevnyc | 2026-01-19 05:15:12+00:00
I'm in the market for a car right now, and on paper, a Tesla makes the most sense. I won't be buying one. I'm happy to leave a little utility on the table just to avoid being associated in any way with Musk or his companies. Some might find that "odd", but I really don't care. I don't want to look down at my steering wheel and see the Tesla logo and have to justify to myself why it's OK that I gave my hard-earned money to someone who is actively working to destroy things I hold dear.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2026-01-19 05:15:55+00:00
I like to generate clients with type hints based on an openapi spec so that if the spec changes, the clients get regenerated, and then the type checker squawks if any code is impacted by the spec change.

There are also openapi spec validators to catch spec problems up front.

And you can use contract testing (e.g. https://docs.pact.io/) to replay your client tests (with a mocked server) against the server (with mocked clients)--never having to actually spin up both a the same time.

Together this creates a pretty widespread set of correctness checks that generate feedback at multiple points.

It's maybe overkill for the project I'm using it on, but as a set of AI handcuffs I like it quite a bit.
by natedev | 2026-01-19 05:16:12+00:00
Hi HN,

I Kept seeing the same issue with small teams and service vendors: contraccts live in PDFs or emails threads, invoices come in separately, and no one consistently checks whether the numbers actually match.

Manual audits don't scale once contracts get complex. Most teams either spot-check or trust the relationship, which leads to quiet drift, rate changes, extra line items, or scope creep that isnt caught before payment.

I built Concilely, a small tool that pulls invoices from emails and automatically reconciles them against contract terms. Instead of reviewing every invoice manually, it flags only the exceptions where something doesn't match the agreement

This is intentially not an ERP or AP replacement, it's a narrow tool focused on enforcing contract terms before invoices are paid.

I'm early and mostly interested in feedback:
- How people currently handle this problem
- Whether this feels useful or redundant given existing workflows

Happy to answer questions or go deeper on how it works.
https://concilely.com
by simonw | 2026-01-19 05:16:14+00:00
Corporations love copyright. I don't see why "supports broad copyright violations" and "go fully corporate" fit together here.

Corey Doctorow wrote about that recently: https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washin...

He's not a generative AI fan at all, but he argues that if artists think tightening up copyright law to make it harder to train models is a good idea they're going to find themselves strengthening the very corporate overlords that they've been trying to escape.
by marcus_holmes | 2026-01-19 05:17:16+00:00
Who's going to vet the applicants to ensure that they're not secretly working for bad people, and that as soon as they have sufficient permissions/lack of oversight they'll inject malware into the project and ship it?

We're seeing ever-increasing supply chain attacks. All these bazaar projects are vulnerable to that.

It's going to take some serious funding to get the kind of oversight we actually need to secure this stuff properly.

And the clock's ticking - those maintainers from the 90's are going to retire, and we need to have some way of replacing them