MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by d4rkp4ttern | 2026-01-17 21:20:32+00:00
Context filling up is sort of the Achilles heel of CLI agents. The main remedy is to have it output some type of handoff document and then run /compact which leaves you with a summary of the latest task. It sort of works but by definition it loses information, and you often find yourself having to re-explain or re-generate details to continue the work.

I made a tool[1] that lets you just start a new session and injects the original session file path, so you can extract any arbitrary details of prior work from there using sub-agents.

[1] aichat tool https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-tools?tab=readme-o...
by getnormality | 2026-01-17 21:20:43+00:00
I do. My question is whether you are willing to share the justification for your claims with the room. By your own account, it is trivial, no? How long does a Google Scholar search take to pull up an article for a person such as yourself who is versed in the topic?

And again, my question is: does the science show that this is objectively bad, regardless of bog standard policy considerations? For example, comparison with the status quo?
by jstummbillig | 2026-01-17 21:20:47+00:00
If it truly brings you joy we have hat covered: it's a simple enough hobby!

The actual issue is that then you need something still that makes money. I think, for a programmer, that's fairly unproblematic too, for the foreseeable future: all those agents will need direction. Anyone can do that up to some level of complexity on their own, sure, but it simply is hard for humans to structure requirements and reason about a big enough systems and I don't see demand for those decreasing.
by tzs | 2026-01-17 21:21:54+00:00
No. You can see this on what happened to a recent bill for a drinking water project in Colorado.

It was so uncontroversial that it passed the House by unanimous consent. That doesn't mean 100% were for it, but it means any who were not didn't think it was worth making even a token effort to stop it.

In the Senate they passed it on a voice vote, which is what they use for routine and completely non-controversial bills. They are all asked to say yea or nay, and the presiding officer calls it for whichever they think they heard the most of and if no one objects that they misheard it passes.

Trump vetoed it. The official reason given was some bullshit about costs, but no one believes that. The leading theories are that it is because it is important to Lauren Boebert's district and because Colorado won't release Tina Peters from prison.

Boebert upset Trump by being one of the Republican House votes to force the release of the Epstein files.

Tina Peters was an election official who did various illegal and shady things [1] that Trump approves of.

The House failed to override the veto. They are so afraid of angering Trump that they couldn't get 1/3 of Republican House members to to go against Trump on something that they themselves had just recently found completely uncontroversial.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tina_Peters_(politician)
by rmitsch | 2026-01-17 21:23:49+00:00
Yeah, the latest wave of Opus 4.5, Codex 5.2, Gemini Pro 3 rendered a lot of my skepticism redundant as well. While I generally agree with the Jevon's paradox line of reasoning, I have to acknowledge it's difficult to make any reasonable prediction on technology that's moving at such immense speed.

I expected the LLM's would have hit a scaling wall by now, and I was wrong. Perhaps that'll still happen. If not, regardless of whether it'll ultimately create or eliminate more jobs, it'll destabilize the job market.
by nullocator | 2026-01-17 21:23:50+00:00
There will be voters who are children now or not even born yet that will be suffering the consequences of Trumps actions and policies 20 years from now, and he will be long dead and too far removed for them to blame anyone but whoever is charge at that moment*

Just like there are young voters today who blame consequences of Reagan and Bush on current leaders. Just like literally every cycle for the last 30 years Republicans fuck an insane amount of shit up and try to break the economy and then dems have to work doubly hard to do a shit repair job while being fought tooth and nail and then they get blamed for the lack of progress.

* Assuming we still have elections
by chroma | 2026-01-17 21:23:58+00:00
Doesn't that prove too much? For example, North Korea treats their citizens horribly, but since it's not a threat to westerners, would that mean that trade deals with them are acceptable?

It's hard for me to come up with a standard that encourages trade with China but discourages trade with North Korea. I'm not saying that trade with the US is therefore a good idea. There are many reasonable moral standards that would forbid trade with both the US & China.
by bronson | 2026-01-17 21:24:40+00:00
A few weeks before the tariff idiocy, I paid $320 including shipping for an ebike battery from the EU. When it arrived, it included a bill for an additional $350 from US Customs. That's insane, I refused.

When returning to sender, the package disappeared, presumably into Customs. I'm out $320 and still no battery.
by AnimalMuppet | 2026-01-17 21:24:45+00:00
Meetings:

People who can write clear, unambiguous, accurate technical documentation are relatively rare.

And a meeting is in fact sometimes the best way of coordination. We have a question. We have five different people with relevant input into the question. Even if all five can write well (and will do so in a timely manner), we still need to reach a consensus on what the right answer is, and to make sure that everyone's issues are heard, and that they feel that they have been heard. A meeting often does that better than shooting emails back and forth among the five people.

Processes:

Processes are often added because something went wrong (often expensively wrong), and a process was created to make sure that it won't go wrong again. But what they miss is that the process also has a cost - a dollar cost, and a time cost.

Worse, there's a limit to how many processes most people can remember. You can create a process, that's the 47th process that your people have to remember, and when they don't keep it because they don't remember it, you can blame them. So here I kind of agree with you.

> Many processes and bureaucracy are simply demanded by the legislature when you work in some heavily regulated industry. These legal demands often don't make sense.

Maybe they don't. Ignore legal requirements at your own peril, though - they can have some pretty nasty teeth.
by sutralabs | 2026-01-17 21:24:55+00:00
I built this as a learning playground for agentic AI.

Most existing tools felt heavy for understanding the basics, so I wanted something that:
- runs entirely on a laptop
- uses local models only
- keeps the code small and readable
- helps understand agent sequencing without framework abstractions

This isn’t a production framework and is not trying to compete with LangChain or AutoGen.
It is meant to be a first step for learning and experimentation.

Feedback welcome.
by throwpoaster | 2026-01-17 21:25:30+00:00
Canadian reporting in. The expanded police cooperation with the CCP is not playing well here.

Plus, this is a canola-for-cars deal. 90+% of our trade is structurally American, forever.

IMO we did this deal to front run the renegotiation of USMCA this years. However, we are only 5% of America’s trade, and last I heard Trump had already walked from the table (and perhaps we signed with China because of this).

The two sides of the debate between our major parties are whether we should sell canola or LNG to China while we wait for America to come back to the table.
by senko | 2026-01-17 21:26:23+00:00
> It’s not that the agents are now producing flawless code. I spent a good 20 minutes yesterday watching one tie itself in knots trying to write a regex: first in Sed, then in Bash, and finally in Python (six times).

This sounds very strange.

I'm using Claude (Opus 4.5 via Code) every day and it's very good with regexes, sed, awk and similar bash oneliners.

We don't know what the author asked it to do, but this smells like the problem started at least several messages before that.

To author's point: code brings me joy. I'm currently learning Zig, for no reason whatsoever other than intellectual challenge and I, subjectively, like the language. I'm writing silly little programs that nobody will ever see. It's fun.

Then I switch over to a paid project, and claude[0] another task from my backlog.

There's code, and then there's code. You can find joy in some code and absolutely want to avoid coding in something else.

[0] code using Claude
by magicalhippo | 2026-01-17 21:27:41+00:00
For the interested, here[1] is an article on an attempt to recreate and verify measurements made during the HMS Challenger expedition in the 1870s.

It was recently done so the full results aren't out, but one aspect they noted was that the traditionally-created hemp rope stretched about 10% so temperatures were taken at slightly deeper depths than expected. This can be used to calibrate the data from HMS Challenger.

[1]: https://www.oneoceanexpedition.com/article/checked-150-year-...
by Yoric | 2026-01-17 21:28:48+00:00
> This will hurt Europe a lot more than it will hurt America.

It will hurt Europe a lot. But Donald Trump keeps repeating that it is going to declare war on the EU. Sadly, it makes sense for the EU to align more closely with China.

And yeah, the only winners from the Trump administration so far are the mega-rich, Russia and China. At the expense of strictly everybody else.
by aleph_minus_one | 2026-01-17 21:28:51+00:00
> It’s only the tech industry where the voice and ego of small companies hold outsized share of voice and love to claim the contrary.

I'd be a little bit careful with this claim:

The fact that small companies can have such opinionated opinions without going bust is to me a sign that in particular for software development (but I don't claim that this is transferable to other industries) small teams/companies do have an efficiency advantage.

Many hypotheses can be formulated why this might be the case, like

- software industry is less regulated

- writing good software as the company's product requires a lot less collaboration between many stakeholders than what is necessary for producing other types of sellable products

- in software, "having a smart, though opinionated idea" is of a much bigger advantage (also for the company) than in other, more established industries

- ...
by keyshapegeo99 | 2026-01-17 21:29:09+00:00
Many of the author's rebuttals hinge on the assumption that everyone in an organisation is acting in its interest first - and not their own, often conflicting, self-interest. As such, they are not particularly convincing.

Large organisations absolutely do, as a function of their scale, produce pockets where slackers and incompetents can hide. They'll surround themselves with a web of process, pointless meetings, and substance-free buzzword-heavy documentation/presentations to disguise this fact. Others may become ensnared in this web, and will rightly express the criticisms that the author is attempting to debunk.
by Terr_ | 2026-01-17 21:29:36+00:00
> Indeed, the syllabus I reviewed for a class called “Intellectual Foundations of Science II” covered a range of topics unusual for a science class including “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.”

> A student who’d taken the course shared a slide with me on “ensoulment” — the principally religious question of when a soul enters the human body — and said that the class had been told that IVF but not abortion could be consistent with the Catholic belief about ensoulment.

I'll give the author credit for going at least a little beyond the ridiculous "life [personhood] begins at conception" dogma, since they reference the issue of identical twins... But what about chimerism? HeLa cells?
by Etheryte | 2026-01-17 21:29:57+00:00
Just because written communication works well for you doesn't mean that it works for others nor that it's the best way to communicate about everything. There's a place and time for both. For example with documentation, it's nice to have accurate and well thought out docs so you can search and read through it, but oftentimes it's faster if your teammate just tells you what bit you need. Meetings are the same way. We've all been in meetings that could've been an email, but that doesn't mean every meeting can be an email.
by smakt | 2026-01-17 21:30:03+00:00
And I need a name for shills that handwave the whole magic thinking in a blog post and conclude with "oh my claude code pointed out correlations between atlas shrugged and steve jobs" I'm so much smarter and ready for the future that's coming.

You are damn right I didn't try it out. I try things published in journals, vetted by peers, with clear explanations and instructions. On the other hand, when the tone is "It's All Magic Sprinkle(TM)" my pseudoscience alarm goes off.
by fencepost | 2026-01-17 21:30:17+00:00
There's certainly no reason for Canada to consider significant EV imports from the US - I wouldn't be surprised if Tesla was tainted based on Musk's association with Trump and there aren't really other major US EV producers. For international manufacturers it probably makes more sense to have direct trade agreements with Canada vs possible significant tariffs in response to whatever Cheetolini decides to do on any given day.
Download More RAM (For Real)
by Rounak2002 | 2026-01-17 21:30:31+00:00
It’s 2026, and the “Download More RAM” meme has evolved from comedy into product feedback.
Meanwhile, the cloud’s default answer to everything is still: “cool, spin up a VM.”

Which is… fine, if you enjoy:

-renting an entire computer to open one app

-becoming the temporary parent of that VM

-installing dependencies you didn’t ask for

-and paying for idle time while you go touch grass.

For most people, the “VM abstraction” feels like renting a whole house because you needed a desk for two hours. With plumbing. And a landlord. And a surprise security deposit.

So we built Infinity (projectx.cloud) with a different idea:

Don’t stream a whole machine. Stream the apps.
What Infinity does

Infinity treats the browser as the OS. You click an app and it starts as its own isolated session (containerized) and streams into your browser.

The key part: you can run multiple apps at once, and each app runs independently with its own resources (CPU/GPU/RAM allocation), but they all share a single persistent workspace (shared storage), so your files just… exist where you expect them to.

It’s like “Netflix for software”
The workflow is like:

-Open browser

-Go to https://www.infinity.projectx.cloud

-Click on one/multiple apps

-Get your work done, save your files

-Close tab, login from any other device later and start where you left off

What’s different vs VMs/VDI:

-Per-app sessions, not one big desktop VM: You don’t boot “a computer.” You launch Photoshop/Blender/VS Code/whatever as a session.

-Multi-app, actually multi-app: Run multiple apps simultaneously. Each one is isolated and independently resourced, not “everything trapped inside one remote desktop.”

-Shared workspace: All those app sessions mount the same persistent workspace so you can move between tools without file gymnastics.

-Less babysitting: No provisioning, no “which image did I use,” no “why is CUDA angry today,” fewer rituals.

We’re trying to make “high-performance computing” feel less like infrastructure cosplay and more like: click thing, do work, leave.

Would love feedback from people who’ve fought VDI/cloud workstations/dev environments in the trenches:

-Is multi-app + per-app isolation + shared workspace the right abstraction?

-Where will this blow up first (latency, licensing, GPU scheduling, enterprise security, weird peripherals)?

-If you were building this, what would you cut / change?

We just finished up our MVP, and will start giving access to a few people by next weekend, the waitlist is open at https://www.projectx.cloud/
by xyborg | 2026-01-17 21:30:50+00:00
Something remarkable happened in 2024-2025: building a full-stack app became easy. Tools like Supabase, combined with AI coding assistants and no-code builders, let solo founders ship production apps in days, not months.

But speed comes at a cost. As we started using SupaExplorer to audit projects, we noticed a pattern: many apps were misconfiguring their Supabase setup. The anon key in client-side code is fine; it's designed to be public. But we found apps exposing the service_role key (which bypasses RLS), or using the anon key with tables that had no RLS policies at all.

We decided to quantify the problem. Over the past month, we collected launch URLs from five major indie product directories and systematically scanned each one.

- 20,052 URLs Scanned
- 2,217 Domains Exposed
- 11.04% Exposure Rate
- 2,325 Critical Exposures

What's Being Leaked

Not all exposures are equal. Finding a Supabase project URL and anon key in client code is expected, as both are designed to be public. The anon key provides low-privilege access that respects your Row Level Security policies.

The danger is when apps expose the service_role key (or the new sb_secret_... format), the elevated-privilege key meant only for server-side use. Of the 2,960 files flagged, we found credentials that could bypass RLS in a significant portion. We also verified which exposed databases had tables without RLS protection.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this, and how can we generating awareness about this topic.
by gimalay | 2026-01-17 21:30:56+00:00
I built IWE (Interactive Writing Environment) to manage my markdown notes. It's a CLI tool and LSP server written in Rust.

The problem: I have thousands of markdown files with links between them. Link titles get out of sync when I rename files, I can't easily find what links to what, and batch operations (normalize formatting, export graphs) required custom scripts.

How it works:

IWE loads markdown files into an in-memory graph structure that understands document hierarchy (headers, lists, links). This enables operations that would be hard to do with plain text processing.

CLI:
- iwe normalize - fix link titles, header levels, list numbering across all files
- iwe stats - analyze your knowledge base (word counts, most connected docs, orphans)
- iwe export dot - export link structure for Graphviz
- iwe squash - combine linked docs into a single file (useful for generating PDFs)

LSP (works with VS Code, Neovim, Helix, Zed):
- Go-to-definition for links
- Backlinks via find-references
- Autocomplete for linking notes
- Hover preview
- Rename with automatic link updates
- Code actions: extract section to new file, inline content back, convert lists↔headers

Why another PKM tool?

Obsidian is great but I wanted to stay in my editor (Neovim). Existing LSPs like markdown-oxide cover basics but I needed batch operations and more refactoring capabilities. Building both CLI and LSP on a shared Rust core made sense.

Install: `brew tap iwe-org/iwe && brew install iwe`

or `cargo install iwe iwes`

Happy to answer questions about the architecture or implementation.
by mapontosevenths | 2026-01-17 21:30:56+00:00
Decisions made based on science are more effective than those based on politics in almost 100% of cases. Especially when the subject of those decisions itself is science (the climate).

I wouldn't argue that all scientists are selfless that would be silly. I would argue that the average scientist is less selfish than the average politician, yes.

Examine the motivations. Few people go into pure science seeking power or money. Most or all politicians do.
by jackconsidine | 2026-01-17 21:31:28+00:00
This important devil's advocate perspective reminds me of Chesterton's Fence [0].

I used to run a dev shop and had the opportunity to work with companies of all shapes and sizes. The startups often discovered Chesterton's Fence by declaring they didn't need this or that (meetings, accountability measures, etc), only to learn the hard way why they existed.

And meetings, beauracracy, et al are rightfully criticized for being inefficient and fostering mediocrity. But I think I'd agree with the author that it's glib to say meetings are dumb, no need for hierarchy without understanding their purpose

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...
by ethbr1 | 2026-01-17 21:31:30+00:00
Because school IT doesn't pay salaries to attract top-tier talent (50-125k, depending on position level?).

So you get the typical (a) IT makes bad decisions or (b) admin is so annoyed at IT's slowness that they override them by buying a vendor solution.

And add in that there's a huge amount of centralization of vendors, especially at the platform solution level.
by falloutx | 2026-01-17 21:31:40+00:00
Jevons paradox is the stupid. What happened in the past is not a guarantee for the future. If you look at the economy, you would struggle to find buyers for any slop AI can generate, but execs keep pushing it. Case in point the whole Microslop saga, where execs start treating paying customers as test subjects to please the share holders.
by ggeorgovassilis | 2026-01-17 21:32:24+00:00
The Paul G. Allen School YouTube channel has over 10 years of scientific lectures on advanced research topics, but has only 24k subscribers.

I just watched Michael Abrash [1] (of Graphics Programming Black Book fame) talk about the history and future of VR.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5AwlNbAvCo
by mft_ | 2026-01-17 21:32:32+00:00
Sounds familiar.

Despite working to enforce laws and guidelines --i.e. somewhat similar to a court sitting in judgement on a case-- there's apparently no expectation of consistency, there's no concept of 'case law' (i.e. you applied logic in this way before, so we have the right to expect that you apply it the same next time) which can be relied upon, and maybe worst of all, there's no route to challenge or appeal when bad judgements are handed down.
by pilingual | 2026-01-17 21:32:36+00:00
Ridge vent is the modern approach, with vents and wind baffles in the eaves so air is evenly distributed.

1.5' overhang is good, 2' is ideal. Cheap builders will go 1' or even less.

Good architects still pay attention to the sun. It's often builders who are the culprits because they want to save money.
by Animats | 2026-01-17 21:33:01+00:00
There was a "Never Trump" movement of Republican leaders. It's dead.[1]
By now, most of the Never Trumpers are either out of power or have groveled to Trump.
The National Review, a conservative publication, wrote: "At no point did Never Trump possess the basic traits of a political movement: a small number of leaders and large number of followers." It was all leaders, or former leaders, or people who thought they should be leaders. The article says Never Trump was composed of "1) experts in foreign policy, economics, and law ... 2) campaign professionals ... and 3) public intellectuals ..." Not Republican governors and members of Congress.
Not big donors. Those people only matter when they're in power. There are small conservative journals in which they still write. Few read them. They're not on Fox News.

It's not at all clear what the GOP looks like after Trump. The most likely Republican successors are said to be Vance, Rubio, and DeSantis. The last two have failed badly at presidential bids before.

[1] https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-end-of-never-trump...
by anematode | 2026-01-17 21:33:27+00:00
This is really terrible advice.

> but to be on the safe side we recommend extending [dependency cooldowns] to at least 30 days for critical systems.

I'd say at least a year, no? The xz backdoor took a couple months to find, and that was only because we got lucky -- had it never been found, Jia Tan and his buddies probably would have gotten enough useful data after a year, so it'd be irrelevant at that point anyway.

> Prefer stable, low-activity packages

The authors didn't mention Rust in this section, which is a travesty and would have greatly strengthened their argument. Sooo many "abandoned" projects in cargo are just finished and need no maintenance.