MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kittikitti | 2026-01-17 21:33:42+00:00
The hypothetical users of the app will use it to shut down noise in public places.

You are the one defending anti-social behavior here.

If you don't like noise, don't go outside where other humans are. If you use psychological manipulation because you think people are playing videos too loud, maybe take a deep look in the mirror before talking about courtesy and respect.
by bluishgreen | 2026-01-17 21:34:16+00:00
"someone you're not suuuper comfortable with"

It swings both ways for me. Either super comfortable or uncomfortable.

What doesn't work is hiring a virtual assistant to hold me accountable. As soon as I pay them and they report to me, they are the same loop as my own brain. No empathy brain! :D. This is bleak I know.
by falloutx | 2026-01-17 21:34:31+00:00
>The customer will have little idea what is even possible and will ask for a product that doesn't solve their actual problem.

How do you know that? For tech products most of the users are also technically literate and can easily use Claude Code or whatever tool we are using. They easily tell CC specifically what they need. Unless you create social media apps or bank apps, the customers are pretty tech savvy.
by jimnotgym | 2026-01-17 21:35:14+00:00
Some highlights of this rubbish article

> Pretty much all the fireplaces I see are also built on the central spine of the building, meaning not much heat would be lost to the windows or exterior wall.

Or maybe because, as the first half of the article say, it is because the outside walls have nowhere to put a fireplace, because they are covered in windows?

> he told me it can feel around 10C (18F) warmer inside on a cold winter's day. Other, typical Elizabethan houses, he estimates, would have only feel 2-3C (3.6-5.4F) warmer.

It 'feels' warmer...he 'estimates'. Nice way to do science

> Since it's winter, and cold, I move my desk to a south-eastern window. It brightens the mornings and if I wear another layer, I find I can lower the thermostat by 2C (3.6F).

More good science, change two variables but attribute the effect to only one of them. If I wear another layer of clothing, move my desk to the basement, sacrifice a goat, speak in tongues and draw a pentacle on the floor, I can turn the thermostat down 2 degrees too.

But let's start at the top

>England's longest river was usually flowing freely

Then list lots of evidence that it was not at all unusual for it to freeze at the time.

Great work
by philipp-gayret | 2026-01-17 21:35:18+00:00
Very interesting! This has a gem in the documentation: Using the tool itself as a CI check. I hadn't considered unresolved comments by say a person, or CodeRabbit or similar tool being a CI status failure. That's an excellent idea for AI driven PR's.

On a personal note; I hate LLM output to advertise a project. If you have something to share have the decency to type it out yourself or at least redact the nonsense from it.
by nullocator | 2026-01-17 21:35:26+00:00
My guess is politics are so divisive and social media so effective that until something significant breaks/Trump succeeds in complete Putin-esque capture of the government that we will see the president flip parties every 4 years indefinitely. People will continue to vote for whoever the current leader of their "team" is no matter their actual politics or values or even how they were chosen as leader for that matter because the perceived cost of the other side winning is always greater.

As soon as Trump dies there will be an increasing avalanche of "always never-trumpers", until 40 years from now it will be almost impossible to find anyone who admits to having voted for him. I already have anecdotal experiences of having conversations with people (on tape) in early 2017 celebrating/defending their vote of Trump who now claim to have never voted for him and say that anything on video was just a joke or sarcasm.
by spyrja | 2026-01-17 21:35:37+00:00
To be fair, the origins of "hello" go back much further than 600 years. Variations of it appear in Old Icelandic from almost 1000 years ago, and if you look at Old English texts from hundreds of years before that you will find greetings such as "Wes þū hāl!" (or roughly, "May you be well!"). In other words, all are based on salutations which have most likely been in use in one form or another for at least two millenia (if not longer).
by listenallyall | 2026-01-17 21:35:53+00:00
But this wasn't an obituary. It wasnt a recalling of facts about his life. It wasnt written for a news outlet which publishes obits about most notable figures. It was an opinion piece and a discussion of how Adams affected the writer.

Of course Alexander, or anyone, has the right to be critical. It's just cowardly to wait till he's dead when he isn't able to refute any of the points (or even to absorb them and say, yea, he's right about this, I'm going to try doing better).
by whispem | 2026-01-17 21:35:57+00:00
Thanks for pointing it out.

The “fix_ci_complete…” script was written (by me) to patch some CI integration issues—if the style looks generic, it’s probably because it’s a standard shell script pattern.
I haven’t used LLMs to write or patch any code in minikv; any fix or automation was written and debugged manually.

If there’s something specific in the script that seems suspect, I’m happy to explain or walk through it line by line.

Again, all implementation code in minikv is mine, and I’m always open to reviewing anything that looks unclear—transparency is important to me.
by blutoot | 2026-01-17 21:36:04+00:00
It's simple -- the more high-minded and snobbish the developer class will be (thus extracting the highest salaries in the world) and as long as they will continue to maintain this unreal amount of gatekeeping, the more the non-developer community (especially those at the leadership-level) will continue to revel at the prospect of eliminating developers from the value chain.
by fatherwavelet | 2026-01-17 21:36:53+00:00
I think the better example is the mechanization of the loom created a huge amount of jobs in factories relative to the hand loom because the demand for clothing could not be met by the hand loom.

The craftsman who were forced to go to the factory were not paid more or better off.

There is not going to be more software engineers in the future than there is now, at least not in what would be recognizable as software engineering today. I could see there being vastly more startups with founders as agent orchestrators and many more CTO jobs. There is no way there is many more 2026 version of software engineering jobs at S&P 500 companies in the future. That seems borderline delusional to me.
by johnvanommen | 2026-01-17 21:37:01+00:00
> my former manager organized an offsite where we all watched Office Space together.

Working in management is infinitely more soul crushing than being Peter Gibbons.

I literally brought up The Peter Principle when I quit a job like that.

Office Space is a parable about a software developer who doesn’t want to be promoted beyond his core competency. Peter Gibbons is fighting the Peter Principle.
by bflesch | 2026-01-17 21:37:05+00:00
I agree in higher education you need to be willing to learn and it's easy to weasel through it without actually building any skills. On an individual level that's a tragedy of wasted time and potential. On the teaching side it's just fraud if you let AI correct the work of your students or if you don't penalize people handing in AI-written assignments.

In the US there was this case of a student using religious arguments with hand-waving references to the will of god for her coursework. Her work was rejected by the tutor and she raised a big fuzz on TV. In the end this US university fired the tutor and gave her a passing grade.

These kind of stories are not an AI issue but a general problem of USA as a country shifting away from education towards religious fanaticism. If someone can reference their interpretation of god's words without even actually citing the bible and they receive a passing grade the whole institution loses their credibility.

Today, the United States are a post-factual society with a ruling class of christian fanatics. They have been vulnerable to vaporware for years. LLMs being heralded as artificial intelligence only works with people who never experienced real intelligence.

Luckily, every year only a handful of people who have motivation, skills and luck are needed to move the needle in science and technology. These people can come from many countries who have better education systems and no religious fanaticism.
by musicale | 2026-01-17 21:37:14+00:00
Nobody really likes Teams, it seems to have more features than Slack in terms of integration with the rest of Microsoft's office software ecosystem. It's nice to be able to open up and edit Word/PowerPoint/Excel documents directly, view the Outlook calendar directly, etc. It is also integrated with SharePoint and OneDrive for file storage. Teams had video calls before Slack as well IIRC.

Teams, Slack and Discord all seem to be built as clunky web apps; but my experience is that Discord seems to work slightly better than Slack, which in turn works slightly better than Teams.
by whispem | 2026-01-17 21:38:22+00:00
This script was actually written manually to automate some repeated local fixes—mainly to speed up my workflow and make sure patches were applied consistently (and safely, with backups).

The colorful output and detailed logging are just for clarity and UX; I tend to over-comment my scripts out of habit—no AI tools were involved here (nor elsewhere in the code).

But I get why it might look generic—happy to explain any section line by line if you want!
by oaiey | 2026-01-17 21:38:40+00:00
Both are not friend of EU/Canada right now. But China at least never pretended (or we never saw them like that). The US however was a factual savior, then a close ally and a partner for 85 years! That is roughly 60 years longer than China was a relevant factor in the world order. It is the loss of trust / change which tortures the world. Not the amount of current trust.
by pandaman | 2026-01-17 21:38:57+00:00
Net migration to the US is negative for the first time in 50 years [1] so seems way more effective than whatever was done before. As for arresting citizens - federal agents arrest ~100K people per year[2], if the often cited in these threads research to be believed then most of them are citizens as illegal migrants don't do nearly as much crime. Being a citizen does not make one immune to the federal law enforcement, even the Department of Education has armed agents, which arrest citizens, even if they don't go to school [3].

1. https://abcnews.go.com/US/us-1st-time-50-years-experienced-n...

2. https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/fjs23.pdf

3. https://www.heritage.org/crime-and-justice/commentary/beware...
by rmitsch | 2026-01-17 21:39:19+00:00
I'm surprised this isn't being talked about more. Sure, one could favourably assume that OpenAI just needs a little ad-powered financial push to finally hit AGI and solve every single problem under the sun, but that'd be a reach. It seems more probable that their internal evaluation of their ETA to AGI diverges starkly from what they communicate externally.
by coredev_ | 2026-01-17 21:39:24+00:00
I don't see EU making a deal with China that lets them sell their slave built cars without tariffs. As I feel it there are a lot of public opinion against buying Chinese cars atm. Some did like 5 years ago but not any more. They are almost as dead as Tesla.

German car makes do have issues, but I'm sure they will work it out.

Source: https://motorbranschen.mrf.se/undret-som-kom-av-sig/ (Swedish)
Show HN: E80: an 8-bit CPU in structural VHDL
by Axonis | 2026-01-17 21:39:35+00:00
I built a new 8-bit CPU in VHDL from scratch (starting from the ISA). I felt that most educational soft-cores hide too much behind abstraction, eg. if I can do a+b with a single assignment that calls an optimized arithmetic library, then why did I learn the ripple carry adder in the first place ? And why did I learn flip flops if I can do all my control logic with a simple PROCESS statement like I would with a programming language ? Of course abstraction is the main selling point of HDLs, but would it work if I tried to keep strictly structural and rely on ieee.std_logic_1164 only ?

Well, it did and it works nicely. No arithmetic libraries, no PROCESS except for the DFF component (obviously). Of course it's a bit of a "resource hog" compared to optimized cores, (eg. the RAM is build out of flip flops instead of a block ram that takes advantage of FPGA intermal memory) but you can actually trace every signal through the datapath as it happens.

I also build an assembler in C99 without external libraries (please be forgiving, my code is very primitive I think). I bundled Sci1 (Scintilla), GHDL and GTKWave into a single installer so you can write assembly and see the waveforms immediately without having to spend hours configuring simulators. Currently Windows only, but at some point I'll have to do it on Linux too. I tested it on the Tang Primer 25K and Cyclone IV, and I included my Gowin, Quartus and Vivado projects files. That should make easy to run on your FPGA.

Everything is under the GPL3.

(Edit: I did not use AI. Not was it a waste of time for the VHDL because my design is too novel -- but even for beta testing it would waste my time because those LLMs are too well trained for x86/ARM and my flag logic draws from 6502/6800 and even my ripple carry adder doesn't flip the carry bit in subtraction. Point is -- AI couldn't help. It only kept complaining that my assembler's C code wasn't up to 2026 standards)
Show HN: Subtitle Insights – On-device AI translation for YouTube subtitles
by maurizzzio | 2026-01-17 21:40:44+00:00
I've been using the Comprehensible Input method (based on Stephen Krashen's work [0]) to learn languages. A common pain point is that YouTube moves too fast, I needed time to mine words or shadow the speaker without constantly fumbling for the spacebar, I also wished that I had the translation of the sentence and maybe even insights on the why behind the grammar used in the sentence (e.g. in Japanese to express causality we can use から - kara vs ので - node and choosing the right one depends on politeness and sentence structure).

To solve this, I built Subtitle Insights [1]. It uses Chrome's Built-In AI (Gemini Nano). This means all the translation, grammar analysis, and cultural nuance explanations happen locally on-device. It's free, there's no API cost for the user and no data being sent to an external LLM server for processing because all processing happens in your device (review the hardware requirements here [2]).

Key Technical Features:

Local Inference: Uses the Gemini Nano integration in Chrome.

Auto-Pause: It pauses at the end of subtitle segments to allow for "processing time."

Customizable Prompting: You can tweak the system prompt to change how Gemini analyzes the sentences (e.g., focus on slang vs. formal grammar).

Subtitle Sync: Added a tool to manually re-sync external subtitle files with the video audio track.

Keyboard First: There are shortcuts for segment-to-segment navigation and segment replays.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnUc_W3xE1w
[1] https://mauriciopoppe.github.io/SubtitleInsights
[2] https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/prompt-api#hardware-req...
by nickponline | 2026-01-17 21:40:53+00:00
I've always loved RTS games and wanted to make a game similar for a long time. I thought I'd just try and build a mini / puzzle game around the resource gathering aspects of an RTS.

Objective: You have a base at the center and you need to mine and "refine" all of the resources on the map in as short a time as possible.

By default, the game will play automatically, but not optimally (moving and buying upgrades). You can disable that with the buttons. You can select drones and right click to move them to specific resources patches and buy upgrades as you earn upgrade points.

I've implemented three different levels and some basic sounds. I used Phaser at the game library (first time using it). It won't work well on a mobile.
by mjr00 | 2026-01-17 21:41:13+00:00
> most orgs are used to responding to a daytime alert by calling out, “Who just shipped that change?” assuming that whoever merged the diff surely understands how it works and can fix it post-haste. What happens when nobody wrote the code you just deployed, and nobody really understands it?

I assume the first time this happens at any given company will be the moment they realize fully autonomous code changes made on production systems by agents is a terrible idea and every change needs a human to take responsibility for and ownership of it, even if the changes were written by an LLM.
by csense | 2026-01-17 21:41:22+00:00
An author who "actually wanted to write about" how Adams was a terrible person, but feels obligated to include some praise to pacify the Politeness Police, probably would not write these words:

"I loved Scott Adams. Partly this is because we’re too similar for me to hate him without hating myself."

You seem to think the only thing that matters is Adams' engagement with right-wing politics and race; all else is fluff that OP only writes under duress, to not get canceled by the rationalist community's weird norms.

That is a complex hypothesis; here's a simpler one: OP is writing his honest thoughts. He sees Adams as a complicated, flawed person who should not be wholly defined by their worst comments or bad decisions. Adams isn't an evil villain worthy of dismissal and contempt. He's more of a tragic anti-hero who made bad choices -- but very understandable ones if you know his character sheet, backstory, the times he lived in, and the immediate pressures. Or at least that's the way OP views him.

It's a careful, nuanced article. It's fine with me if you don't agree with the author's viewpoint! But I do object to your accusations of disingenuousness for what appears to me to be a sincere, heartfelt eulogy.

Were you perhaps hoping for an article along the lines of, "He said that about black people, he is the enemy, when we think about him should have nothing but fury and contempt in our hearts, and the righteous should rejoice in his death"? Are you thinking "Of course every community has cancel-cudgel-wielding norm enforcers that everybody carefully censors their words to avoid, this community must just have different censorship rules than the ones I'm used to, because the possibility of a community that doesn't immediately ostracize people for wrongthink is absurd"?

If so, I...was going to make a snarky comment about how this blog and the rationalist community are not places for you, but actually, I just feel bad for you; the politics of the 2010s and 2020s has traumatized [1] you and a lot of other people. You need to spend more time in places like this, not less -- communities where people try to keep their discourse on higher rungs [2] [3].

[1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-psychopolitics-of-traum...

[2] https://waitbutwhy.com/whatsourproblem

[3] https://fourminutebooks.com/whats-our-problem-summary/
by ben_w | 2026-01-17 21:42:05+00:00
Hmm. My experience with it is that a few hours of that will get you a sprint if you're lucky and the prompt hits the happy path. I had… I think two of those, over 5 weeks? I can believe plenty of random people stumble across happy-path examples.

Exciting when it works, but I think a much more exciting result for people with less experience who may not know that the "works for me" demo is the dreaded "first 90%", and even fairly small projects aren't done until the fifth-to-tenth 90%.

(That, and that vibe coding in the sense of "no code review" are prone to balls of mud, so you need to be above average at project management to avoid that after a few sprint-equivalents of output).
by oaiey | 2026-01-17 21:42:11+00:00
It is a trade deal. It is always bad for some, good for others.

We are at a crossroads if we continue with globalism in the remaining world or if everyone is on its own. I prefer the first. The EU, Canada, Japan/Korea/other Asian states form a great alliance not associated to China or the US. Will not help military wise, but will help market wise.
by danielmarkbruce | 2026-01-17 21:42:56+00:00
You've misunderstood the point. It's not about being exactly right. It's about thinking clearly about the probabilities of different events. In your case, you explicitly call out that it's difficult to know the exact timing - so if someone had offered you even money for some particular week, you'd say no. If they offered you 100-1 for said week, it's a great bet, even if you lose.
by kelipso | 2026-01-17 21:43:55+00:00
One example is programmers who would code physics simulations that run in massive data. You need a decent amount of software engineering skills to maintain software like that but the programmer maybe has a BS in Physics but doesn’t really know the nuances of the actual algorithm being implemented.

With AI, probably you don’t need 95% of the programmers who do that job anyway. Physicists who know the algorithm much better can use AI to implement a majority of the system and maybe you can have a software engineer orchestrate the program in the cloud or supercomputer or something but probably not even that.

Okay, the idea I was trying to get across before I rambled was that many times the customer knows what they want very well and much better than the software engineer.
by pseudalopex | 2026-01-17 21:44:29+00:00
> Trump really did show that the US is built on the assumption that people in power will behave, basically a honor system.

> In so many other countries, Trump would face a no confidence vote. Snap elections.

US Congress could do many things. But Trump's party support him. Or fear his supporters would not vote for them in the next elections. Or fear worse.
by PlanksVariable | 2026-01-17 21:44:41+00:00
American political parties have revolved around platforming persecution fetishes for decades now. Real struggles are inevitably exploited by individuals who leverage identity politics for their personal gain. This has played out in every group who currently or historically suffered some injustice, I don’t need to list them all, and now we can include whites on that list.

But it’s not up for debate that white college applicants, particularly from poor and middle-class backgrounds, were discriminated against by top universities who implemented race-based admissions policies. The numbers are public. There’s simply no question.