MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sillywalk | 2026-01-19 18:09:10+00:00
"Trump has often boasted about ending eight wars, styling himself as "the president of peace" and therefore deserving of the Nobel honour but those claims have been exaggerated.

The latest conflict he claims to have ended was two years of fighting between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

The other seven are Israel and Iran, Pakistan and India, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, Thailand and Cambodia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, Egypt and Ethiopia and Serbia and Kosovo.

But some of those conflicts lasted just days and one, Egypt-Ethiopia, had no fighting to end but rather involved long-standing issues of water sharing from the Nile River."

https://www.euronews.com/2026/01/19/trump-tells-norways-pm-h...
by sebastianmestre | 2026-01-19 18:09:17+00:00
I agree that your previous comment could be shorter, maybe half as long, with some effort. For example, this sentence could just be removed without changing the content or tone:

> But I think this is an interesting perspective difference to discuss and not a blatant ad hom argument used to ‘fight’ Rust users on the internet.

(It is already clear that you share your perspective because you think that it's interesting and not a fallacy.)

Then, there are some paragraphs close to the end that seem to repeat ideas.

But IMHO it's a good, nuanced comment that both addresses shortcomings in current discourse and adds ideas to the discussion. This is obviously difficult to do in few words.

A few concepts that come to mind from your comment, but I missed from others:

- Are Rust-style ownership semantics complex or just hard for me? Is it an issue of familiarity only? Is it ergonomics?

- Are they hard in general or just due to the way I like to program? How can I change my style to better fit the model?

- Are they even fit for the software I write? i.e. is it worth it to change how I program to better fit the model?

- What other tools are there to deal with resources?

- What could a programming language do to offer multiple of those? How can we mix GC, region types, linear/uniqueness types, manual management, etc. in a single language?

- A bunch of stuff about discourse in this thread and HN/the internet in general (which is maybe not the point of the comment and could be omitted?)
by patrickmay | 2026-01-19 18:09:41+00:00
A great example of Hyrum's Law:

"With a sufficient number of users of an API,
it does not matter what you promise in the contract:
all observable behaviors of your system
will be depended on by somebody."

combined with failure to follow Postel's Law:

"Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept."
Show HN: AI-assisted feature intake with human review (n8n workflow)
by kavishsekhri | 2026-01-19 18:09:45+00:00
Hi HN,

I built this after repeatedly seeing good product or engineering ideas stall before they ever reached the backlog.

Feature requests usually arrive as messy text: emails, forms, Slack messages. By the time they’re rewritten into Jira tickets, a lot of context is lost, or the request arrives too late to matter.

This is an n8n workflow that:
- Takes a raw feature request in a structured way
- Analyzes internal product documents and architecture
- Uses an LLM to generate a concise architectural summary and technical task breakdown
- Enforces a strict JSON schema to avoid hallucinated structure
- Presents the output in a review UI
- Requires explicit human approval before creating Jira tickets

Nothing is auto-shipped. The goal is speed without losing control.

The full workflow and setup notes are here:
https://github.com/kavishsekhri/AI-Feature-Intake-Engine

There’s also a short demo video in the README showing the end-to-end flow.

Happy to answer questions or discuss trade-offs.
by b3ing | 2026-01-19 18:09:53+00:00
Leadership flaws will trickle down to all the assholes below. That's why America going backwards and into facism (even if by some miracle we get out of it) will plague us for another 20+ years. It emboldens people to think they can do the same. It lets people think its okay to raise their kids to believe in doctrines and ideologies that were starting to wear down a tad and flare them all up again.
by sodapopcan | 2026-01-19 18:10:16+00:00
LOL, I meant for a living but I enjoyed reading this nevertheless :D

But ya, I was out of work for 9 months and enjoyed pretty much every minute of it up until I realized it was not as easy to find a job as I thought it would be (well, it played out a bit differently but for the sake of brevity I'll stick that story)
by jaredklewis | 2026-01-19 18:10:17+00:00
There is basically no overlap between the things that economists generally say are good (free trade, carbon taxes, cap-and-trade, immigration, land value taxes, organ trade, congestion pricing, etc…) and the things that populists of either the left or right say are good (rent control, price controls, tariffs, wealth taxes, debt relief, minimum parking requirements, etc…).

Why would you (or anyone) be surprised that economically sound policies are not popular? They are not popular in the US. They are not popular in Europe. They’re not even popular on HN.

For reasons I don’t understand, almost everyone hates economics.
by kavishsekhri | 2026-01-19 18:10:33+00:00
One thing I learned building this: the hardest part wasn’t the LLM, it was enforcing structure.

Without strict parsing and schema validation, the UI broke and downstream systems behaved unpredictably. Most of the workflow is defensive engineering, not prompting.

If anyone’s done similar human-in-the-loop systems, I’d love to compare notes.
by danlah | 2026-01-19 18:10:33+00:00
I’ve spent the last few years interviewing candidates for software roles that feed into big tech companies. Like many teams, we moved to remote interviews and never really went back.

After a while, something started to feel off.

I kept seeing candidates produce near-perfect solutions while struggling to explain even basic trade-offs. Some would go quiet for long stretches, then suddenly type out optimal code extremely quickly. When I probed deeper, it became obvious that what they were writing didn’t match their level of understanding.

At first I chalked it up to nerves or luck. But the patterns repeated too often to ignore. Eye movements toward a second screen. Answers that looked exactly like what tools like ChatGPT, Copilot, or interview-specific “AI copilots” would generate.

Then we started seeing candidates who had looked very strong in the interview struggle significantly once they were doing real work.

I started digging and realized there’s now an entire ecosystem of tools designed specifically to help people cheat in live technical interviews. There are desktop apps that watch your screen and feed you real-time solutions. There are “invisible” interview copilots marketed as undetectable. People openly discuss using second laptops, virtual machines, hidden browser windows, or even having someone else assist remotely during the interview.

I spoke to other interviewers and hiring managers. Almost everyone had the same experience. Some admitted they’d quietly stopped trusting remote interviews altogether, even though they didn’t want to go back to fully on-site hiring.

That didn’t sit right with me. Remote interviews aren’t the core problem. The problem is that interviewers have lost basic visibility into what’s actually happening during the session.

So I built Interview Watchdog.

The idea isn’t to automatically judge candidates or let AI decide who passes. The goal is simply to restore the kind of signal you’d have if you were sitting in the same room. Interview Watchdog is a desktop application that records screen and webcam activity during interviews and detects suspicious behavior patterns, including those used by tools that market themselves as "undetectable". When something looks off, it timestamps the moment and lets interviewers replay that part of the interview to make their own judgment, rather than relying on a black-box decision. It can also embed existing tools like CoderPad so teams don’t have to change how they already interview.

I’m posting here because I’m curious if others are seeing the same erosion of trust in technical interviews. I’d also love feedback from people who interview frequently, or who’ve been on the candidate side and feel the system is broken in other ways.

This project came directly out of frustration from interviewing hundreds of candidates and realizing the system was being gamed, often at the expense of genuinely strong engineers.

Happy to answer questions or hear why this is a bad idea.

— Dan
(interviewwatchdog.com)
by pixelready | 2026-01-19 18:11:11+00:00
The undissmissable badges in settings irk me to no end. Using language like “finish setting up” in iOS to describe me opting out of Apple Intelligence by choice as leaving MY device in some sort of “unfinished state” is user hostile too. With the amount of effort it takes me to push back constantly on these dark patterns, I know for a fact all my less tech savvy friends and family just aren’t bothering and that’s what they count on.

Not as egregious as what windows is doing with copilot everywhere or sneakily flipping user-toggled options during updates, but it’s all some degree of gross.
by neb_b | 2026-01-19 18:11:26+00:00
Full tweet from Ryan Dahl:

> This has been said a thousand times before, but allow me to add my own voice: the era of humans writing code is over. Disturbing for those of us who identify as SWEs, but no less true. That's not to say SWEs don't have work to do, but writing syntax directly is not it.
by bee_rider | 2026-01-19 18:11:31+00:00
The granularity of the targeting seems like a separate issue (I could be wrong though). The tariff should shift people to buying from non-tariffed suppliers. Targeted means it could shift people to importing from other counties. Broad should shift people to buy domestic, right?

I mean, just to be clear, I think the tariffs are a bad plan. But targeted vs broad seems more like an implementation detail… the big picture plan is the bad part!
by amangoel32 | 2026-01-19 18:12:09+00:00
I had a free weekend and, a few days earlier, Y Combinator had visited my school and handed out cloud and API credits. I ended up with about $25k in credits and no real plan for what to use them on.

I didn’t want to build another small utility or demo app, so I started thinking about things I’m personally curious about. One thing that’s always bothered me about maps is how static they are. They’re good at showing where things are, but not when places actually come alive, quiet down, or shift over the course of a day.

So I decided to use the weekend and the credits to see if I could build something that made the time dimension visible. That experiment turned into a small project that aggregates real world activity signals and renders them as a time based heatmap so you can scrub through a day and watch how different parts of a city change.
by LexiMax | 2026-01-19 18:12:14+00:00
Is this a bot? Is this someone telling an unpopular truth on an alt account? Is this someone telling a fabrication on an alt account?

The best part about Hacker News is that you can't really know. It's a problem inherent to the kind of social space HN is trying to be; open registration, and lax control over abuse of user moderation tools.
by njarboe | 2026-01-19 18:12:17+00:00
The world would much more easily transition to post fossil fuel if all of society was pushing for cleaner and cheaper electricity and a philosophy of using more to make life better. The attitude that we must reduce is just anti-progress and anti-human and is what many people are fighting against when they support more fossil fuels. The split of solar and wind being supported by the reduce camp and fossil fuel use into the growth mindset was a great tragedy.
by CGMthrowaway | 2026-01-19 18:12:40+00:00
Great points. This paper is a static, partial-equilibrium analysis that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, which I suspect the NYT will happily run as gospel.

The most glaring, disqualifying omission is the disregard for FX adjustments. We have not seen the CNY/USD crash yet , but that is because of MASSIVE currency intervention from China to the tune of $200B+ per month: https://x.com/Brad_Setser/status/2012021712012145030

The other wonky thing is they call $200 billion in tariff revenue "a tax" and they also call it a "deadweight loss." Are the authors not the Keynesians I thought they were? At any rate, tariff revenue is not a new tax, but merely a shift in the tax base - since it is $200B that the government does not need to collect elsewhere.

Lastly the collapse of trade volumes from Brazil and India is not a bug it's a feature. Yes supply chains are sticky. The POINT of tariffs is to force supply chain decoupling and reshoring. To "unstuck" the supply chain. Does disruption come with temporary supply shocks? Of course.

The European export growth model is not working for Europe. They are not far behind the US in doing what we are attempting. Canada cozying up to China is not what they wanted for themselves, lol. Etc.
by bombcar | 2026-01-19 18:12:42+00:00
I think it's an inherent problem with democracy in itself, and something that will have to be worked out at some time, somewhere.

The accidents that let it occur may no longer be present - there are arguments that "democracy" as we understand it was impossible before rapid communication, and perhaps it won't survive the modern world.

We're living in a world where a swing voter in Ohio may have more effect/impact on Iran than a person living there - or even more effect on Europe than a citizen of Germany.
by luckylion | 2026-01-19 18:12:47+00:00
I generally struggle with the idea of someone actually choosing to be an asshole, I assume there's usually an unseen cause.

E.g. I work with someone who seems very normal, is very professional, and I have no reason to believe that they area neurodiverse in any way. They once were very direct in a ticket towards a different team. Did they choose to be an asshole, or were they losing their last ounce of patience and politeness because they've been carrying a mountain of responsibility and stress? I think it's very difficult to tell that apart, or to judge based on "well, they could have not taken on that responsibility so they're liable for anything that is a consequence of it".

I don't consider it a free pass, but there's a lot more understanding for things that are outside your control. Where we see that line of control probably determines whether we judge someone harshly or not.
by pton_xd | 2026-01-19 18:12:49+00:00
I agree, the profession is dying and will soon be dead. There is no need to understand code. LLM coding agents make all sorts of suboptimal decisions but it doesn't matter; they just keep churning until it works. Staying in the loop to read and evaluate the program line-by-line only slows the process down.

I think the coding tools are not good enough yet so we can kinda-sorta hang on, but they will be within a few years.
by fcpk | 2026-01-19 18:12:55+00:00
this is just ridiculous anti free speech. just because he assumes a point of view that is mostly disagreed with doesn't make it a target for censoring. it's not a slippery slope, it's the straight path to 1984. dangerous idiots should be allowed to speak. and regarding money there is not a single hint he received any, and he lives in a country that is pretty well policed and not corrupt.
by laughing_man | 2026-01-19 18:13:08+00:00
We don't want a legal government apparatus in place for determining what can be said on the internet. The first thing that will happen is the categories of things you can't say will slowly start to expand to include everything that threatens the power of the government. What happened during covid is bad enough.

If your reaction to "hate speech" is to get the government to remove the speaker from the internet, what you're doing is more dangerous, in the long run, than the speech you don't like.
by jeffsipko | 2026-01-19 18:13:45+00:00
Hi all! If you watched the video and thought you'd love to make stuff like that, but then you looked at the cost of a volumetric capture and nope'ed out, we should talk!

I've been developing a solution to make the cost of 4D capture an order of magnitude cheaper by using a small number of off-the-shelf cameras. Here's the proof-of-concept demo using 4x GoPros: https://youtube.com/shorts/Y56l0FlLlAg (yes, lots of room to improve quality). You can also see the interactive version (with XR support) at https://gaussplay.lovable.app
by hopelite | 2026-01-19 18:13:49+00:00
This feels like a conversation about irrelevant matters the App Store ad design at the advent of AI integration? I see the future being AI suggesting or responding with an app or extension to add specific abilities or features based on stated objectives, i.e., just a package manager behind the scenes. I don’t see myself going to some App Store. I haven’t even “browsed” one in years because they all seem extremely static, having reached a peak saturation and static state.

Frankly, Apple could have probably just totally replaced the App Store a long time ago if they were not slaves to financial reports by simply integrating app search into spotlight more closely or prominently… pull down, search “ai app” (or whatever) and you’re provided with a list of app results that includes an install button.

App updating could and should have been integrated into the settings app.

These kinds of things will only increasingly start biting the Apple as Google has been forced to face the abyss of the death of the common search they’ve dominated for decades now. I don’t think Apple has faced that existential Grim-reaper yet… what do you do when the app ecosystem, OS UI/UX advantages, and even hardware quality has vanished through the cascading integration of AI? I don’t know that Apple has faced that yet or at least has been left blindsided, considering what I’ve been seeing from them.
by achierius | 2026-01-19 18:13:50+00:00
I think most have moved past SWE-Bench Verified as a benchmark worth tracking -- it only tracks a few repos, contains only a small number of languages, and probably more importantly papers have come out showing a significant degree of memorization in current models, e.g. models knowing the filepath of the file containing the bug when prompted only with the issue description and without having access to the actual filesystem. SWE-Bench Pro seems much more promising though doesn't avoid all of the problems with the above.
by graemep | 2026-01-19 18:13:55+00:00
The problem with education is that existing ways of doing things are very strongly entrenched.

At the school level: teachers are trained, buildings are built, parents rely on kids being at school so they can go out to work....

At higher levels and in training it might be easier to change things, but IMO it is school level education that is the most important for most people and the one that can be improved the most (and the request for startups reflects that).

I can think of lots of ways things can be done better. I have done quite a lot of them as a home educating parent. As far as I can see my government (in the UK) is determined to do the exact opposite of the direction I think we should go in.
by runako | 2026-01-19 18:14:26+00:00
FWIW this is what Linux and the early open-source databases (e.g. PostgreSQL and MySQL) did.

They usually lagged for large sets of users: Linux was not as advanced as Solaris, PostgreSQL lacked important features contained in Oracle. The practical effect of this is that it puts the proprietary implementation on a treadmill of improvement where there are two likely outcomes: 1) the rate of improvement slows enough to let the OSS catch up or 2) improvement continues, but smaller subsets of people need the further improvements so the OSS becomes "good enough." (This is similar to how most people now do not pay attention to CPU speeds because they got "fast enough" for most people well over a decade ago.)
by bs7280 | 2026-01-19 18:14:27+00:00
I mentioned this on a different post - the biggest problem with prediction markets is not the gambling or dumb people losing money. Its the fact that it gives very powerful people a vehicle to make lobsided bets on outcomes they control.

A small example of this would be NFL / NBA Refs fixing playoff games with a bad call or two. This actually happened 20 years ago, an NBA ref went to prison over being bribed just $2000 per game.

The much worse example is the fact that you can make 100-1 odds on whether the US airstrikes Iran today... or How many times Pam Bondi says the word "China" in a press conference.
by jayknight | 2026-01-19 18:14:31+00:00
From the FAQ:

> How do I make a link in a text submission?

>You can't. This is to prevent people from submitting a link with their comments in a privileged position at the top of the page. If you want to submit a link with comments, just submit the link, then add a regular comment.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
by uselesswords | 2026-01-19 18:14:36+00:00
How can it be possible that consumers are paying 96% of tariffs that range from 25-100%. Yet inflation has only risen by 0.5 points? Consumption would have to be less than a fifth of what it was a year ago. And why haven’t there been such equally drastic price changes on shelves if whats functionally the entire cost is being passed to consumer?
by Webstir | 2026-01-19 18:14:46+00:00
Why? The #fediverse beat you to it. No algos. No ads. No walled gardens. There are good reasons people like Cory Doctorow have eschewed corporate social media and solely rely on #Mastodon now. Pick from 1000's of instances.

Everyone who makes the transition seems to agree ... it's the future of social media.
by hugeBirb | 2026-01-19 18:15:11+00:00
Idk I guess that's really up for you to decide. My opinion is that behavior seems very uhhh instinctual? Like if they were eating something that was running away from them I'm sure they would employ a similar tactic/behavior. Thing far away from me I need it closer. The logical steps to use a tool that would have 0 instinctual context seems leaps and bounds more "complex". I'm no animal/evolutionary scientist, just my opinion. It very well could be!
by ryan_n | 2026-01-19 18:15:24+00:00
> What were you thinking? What was going through your heads? I'm genuinely curious.

I don't think it's a simple answer. A couple things that likely contributed (I'm not an expert, just my opinion): there is an EXTRAORDINARY amount of propaganda being spread, whether people realize it or not, on and off the internet that gets consumed nearly 24/7. This happens on both sides of course, but think about some of the events leading up to the election. Musk bought twitter and quite literally turned it into a multi-billion dollar propaganda machine.

The general "drain the swamp attitude" that the administration parroted during the election (and first term) represented a change from how "traditional" politicians/government do things. People value that even if they don't understand/think about how it would affect them personally. This ultimately lead to demonizing the federal work force and mass random firings (in many cases having nothing to do with merit).

Trump also represented a push towards traditional values and national identity, which for some people was more important than whatever economic plan Trump had to improve things in the country. Other than tariffs, did he even have a plan? I don't know. But many people didn't/don't seem to care.
by ossa-ma | 2026-01-19 18:15:29+00:00
So it took the author 6 months and several 1-to-1s with the creator to get value from this. As in he literally spent more time promoting it than he did using it.

And it all ends with the grift of all grifts: promoting a crypto token in a nonchalant 'hey whats this??!!??' way...