MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: I query multiple LLMs in parallel because I don't trust any single one
by jonnyhere | 2026-01-27 14:53:53+00:00
I have a mass of AI subscriptions. ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini. My workflow became: ask Claude, then paste the same question into ChatGPT to sanity-check, then maybe ask Perplexity if I need sources. Five tabs, constant copy-pasting.

Council just runs your prompt against multiple models at once and shows responses side-by-side. That's it.

A few things I noticed while building this:

1. Models disagree with each other way more than I expected. Ask anything slightly subjective or recent, and you'll get meaningfully different answers. It's made me much more skeptical of treating any single response as "the answer."

2. Different models have different failure modes. Claude tends to be cautious and hedge. GPT is confident even when wrong. Perplexity gives sources but sometimes misreads them. Seeing them together makes these patterns obvious.

3. For code, I actually like getting 2-3 different approaches. Even if one is clearly better, seeing alternatives helps me understand the tradeoffs.

Tech: Next.js, OpenRouter for model access, streaming responses in parallel. The annoying part was handling the UI when models respond at different speeds – you don't want the layout jumping around.

No login required to try it. Feedback welcome, especially on what's broken or annoying.

https://usecouncil.app/
by jamincan | 2026-01-27 14:54:04+00:00
I was talking to my uncle last September who is a chaplain in the US Army, and I was shocked by the disparity between what he understood was going on in the US and what I understood. That's not to say that I'm not influenced in certain ways either, but it really cemented my understanding that people in the US (and here in Canada and I'm sure other countries too) are operating within two entirely different realities.

He's not even what I would call MAGA, but it still seemed like a gulf that is impossible to bridge.
by layer8 | 2026-01-27 14:54:11+00:00
That’s why it’s `itemCount` and not `itemsCount`. ;)

(Because the correct English term is “item count”, not “items count”.)

Personally, I tend to only name it “count” if it’s a variable that is used to keep a count, i.e. it is continually incremented as new items are processed.

Otherwise I tend to prefer `numItems`.

Yes, this is very close to bike-shedding. There is, however, an argument to be made for consistency in a code base.
by esskay | 2026-01-27 14:54:15+00:00
Fwiw the new 'maltbot' (molt.bot) is the legit one and can be verified on the official github repo which has had its org changed and loads here: https://github.com/moltbot/moltbot (the original redirects for some added reassurance).

My understanding it was a very quick rebrand due to Anthropic sending a takedown notice so theres still references to the old name.
by dasil003 | 2026-01-27 14:54:35+00:00
The “How it works” section is an absolute mess. Each bullet uses a different pronoun, so it’s not clear who the actors actually are and how this all fits together. How are the “crypto bros” who approach the “tech person” related to the “fame hungry tech bro” that vibe-coded the failed app?

I’m sure there’s a tremendous long tail of scam attempts these days, but I’d be surprised if crypto scams haven’t already seen their high watermark in terms of actual victims.
by austinthetaco | 2026-01-27 14:55:21+00:00
Outside of being informative in a really fun way (I learned far more in a couple minutes than I thought I would), that website is stunning. I've been a web dev for over 10 years and I'm still baffled at how people make sites like this, does anyone have any info or resources on how to go about making these sorts of transitional 3d sites beyond just "learn threejs"?
by infecto | 2026-01-27 14:55:33+00:00
What argument are we having? I see someone struggling to hold their own words steady, and you claiming that I am proclaiming something when I only mentioned it because of this exact problem. I do not really think of myself as left or right within the current American political system. I do not follow either political party, and my opinions often zig zag across existing party lines. If anything, maybe “centrist” is the wrong or overly loaded word. I do not follow any particular political movement in America.

The point still stands brigading is a massive problem in America.
by karmakaze | 2026-01-27 14:56:01+00:00
There's another aspect of unit testing. It makes the units testable. The greatest benefit of this is that the units tend to be more coherent. A large blob of code that isn't unit tested may not have clear boundaries or a functional raison d'etre. Tests also serve as documentation or demos of the units which is great for onboarding devs later on.

Maybe AI analysis/synthesis will change the math on this, but beyond early prototypes and PoC's, tests pay for themselves.
by bell-cot | 2026-01-27 14:56:18+00:00
If anyone's looking for a quick "airport security is mostly theater" argument, without getting into the weeds of weapon & explosive & detection technologies - notice that pagers and similar electronics are not on the TSA's list of forbidden items -

https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/whatcanibring/...

- despite their famous use as at-scale, remotely controlled explosives devices back in 2024 -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Lebanon_electronic_device...
by asolovich | 2026-01-27 14:56:31+00:00
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by bobson381 | 2026-01-27 14:56:42+00:00
Reminds me of

>When I was a child I used to ask my mother—of course—all sorts of ridiculous questions that every child asks, and when she got bored with my questions she would say, “Darling, there are just some things we’re just not meant to know.” I said, “Will we ever know?” She said, “Yes, of course, when we die and go to heaven, God will make everything plain.” So I used to imagine on wet afternoons in heaven, we’d all sit around the throne of grace and say to God, “Well, now, why did you do this?” and “How did you do that?” and he would explain it to us. “Heavenly father, why are the leaves green?” And he would say, “Because of the chlorophyll.” And we’d say, “Oh.”

1:00:09

But in he Hindu universe, you would say to God, “How did you make the mountains?” And he would say: well, I just did it. Because what you’re (Text sourced from https://www.organism.earth/library/document/out-of-your-mind...) asking me for—when you ask me how did I make the mountains, you’re asking me to describe in words how I made the mountains, and there are no words which can do this. Words cannot tell you how I made the mountains any more than I can drink the ocean with a fork. A fork may be useful for sticking into a piece of something and eating it, but it’s of no use for imbibing the ocean. It would take millions of years. So it would take millions of years, and you would be bored with my description long before I got through it, if I put it to you in words. Because I didn’t create the mountains with words, I just did it. Like you open and close your hand. You know how to do this, but can you describe in words how you do it? But you do it. You are conscious, aren’t you? Don’t you know how you manage to be conscious? Do you know how you beat your heart? Can you say in words, explain correctly, how this is done? You do it, but you can’t put it into words! Because words are too clumsy, and yet you manage this expertly for as long as you’re able to do it.[1]

[1]:https://www.organism.earth/library/document/out-of-your-mind...
by largbae | 2026-01-27 14:56:59+00:00
It was always theater, Bruce Schneier did a great set of blogs and tests back in the 2001+ time showing flaws throughout the process. At the same time, he pointed out that humanity had already adapted their response to airplane hijackings _that day_ (the Pennsylvania flight). An airplane exploding from a bomb is definitely scary, but not as scary as airplanes being turned into missiles by a few suicidal passengers.
by PlatoIsADisease | 2026-01-27 14:57:22+00:00
You might want to clarify that this is more of a "Look it technically works"

Not a "I actually use this"

The difference between waiting 20 minutes to answer the prompt '1+1='

and actually using it for something useful is massive here. I wonder where this idea of running AI on CPU comes from. Was it Apple astroturfing? Was it Apple fanboys? I don't see people wasting time on non-Apple CPUs. (Although, I did do this for a 7B model)
by justabrowser | 2026-01-27 14:57:30+00:00
> Literally no user cares what language a project is implemented in, unless they are bored and enjoy arguing about random junk on some web forum.

So that's the basic motivation of people who oppose Rust? It's people who "just enjoy arguing about random junk on some web forum"?

> Wayland has the momentum behind it

... also known as "RedHat/Microsoft dollars" ...

> and while there will be some justified grumbling because change is always annoying

Yes, I'm just some old fuddy duddy who hates change. I need some smart young visionary to come drag me kicking and screaming into the next century, as I am too stupid and inexperienced to know good tech when I see it.

> the transition will happen and will be fairly painless as native support for it continues to grow.

Not for me, thanks.

> The X11 diehards will go the way of the SysV-init diehards

Correct. Enjoying the shit out our rock solid, fast, bug free systems.

> some weird minority that likes to scream about the good old days on web forums but really no one cares about.

The problem with your analysis is it's completely self-centered. It's like you believe you're the Official Representative of "Society" and you get to decide who's "in the club" and who's a loser outcast, and what's best for everyone. Sorry, reality doesn't work that way, as much as your owners would love to make it be so.
by diego_moita | 2026-01-27 14:57:39+00:00
I disagree. There are deeper aspects in this tragedy.

I don't want to be called "leftist" because I don't want to belong to any tribe. But I do embrace a lot of the humanist ideals of the so called "progressives" and I think they might have some moral ground in here. But feel free to call me whatever you want.

In my perspective, the oppression in Iran is different from what is going on in Gaza. It is more like what happens in Belarus, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, Turkey and Myanmar: it is an authoritarian government killing and oppressing their own people.

I am ok with western interference in Gaza because Zionism is a racist project from one ethnicity against other, it is the racist government of a racist people committing genocide against other. It isn't an internal issue of a sovereign state.
by RankingMember | 2026-01-27 14:57:43+00:00
I bought my first a years ago after some awful customer service experiences with Google re: Pixel phones. While iOS is not without its faults, most of the "just works" marketing has thus far turned out to be true in my experience. Their software feature set isn't on the cutting edge for a lot of things (my iPhone 13 couldn't even display the weather on the lock screen when I first got it), but they do generally get there eventually.
by tuetuopay | 2026-01-27 14:57:49+00:00
I'd put Hetzner in the same bucket as OVH: solid infra company at a more than competitive price, but lacking in managed products. In my experience, they're more reliable than OVH though.

Outscale has the advantage of a huge pile of money behind them, as well as a natural endorsement from gov agencies. They'll lack the niceties, but provide certifications from day one. Different motivations. They're not really meant to be a public cloud in the same sense as the big three. It's kind of the same deal as the Lidl "cloud", which is more of a private cloud managed by someone else meant to run SAP monsters.
by zamadatix | 2026-01-27 14:58:01+00:00
Local LLMs are just LLMs people run locally. It's not a definition of size, feature set, or what's most popular. What the "real" value is for local LLMs will depend on each person you ask. The person who runs small local LLMs will tell you the real value is in small models, the person who runs large local LLMs will tell you it's large ones, those who use cloud will say the value is in shared compute, and those who don't like AI will say there is no value in any.

LLMs which the weights aren't available are an example of when it's not local LLMs, not when the model happens to be large.
by gus_massa | 2026-01-27 14:58:44+00:00
A few repost are ok, https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html but after a few (whatever that mean) repost people start to get angry. Specially if it's your own project and specialty if it's commercial.

Usually more technical post get better traction, so if you have some interesting side quest building the device, it may be better. But it must be interesting. What is your favorite anecdote about building the device to tell to your fiends over a beer? (Bonus points if it's a technical friend.)

Some ideas from https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCworsKCR-Sx6R6-BnIjS2MA . But the guy is extremely good so it's a very high bar, it's not necessary to be as good as this guy to post here. (Anyway, I prefer a blog post with photos than a video.)

If you have two accounts, you can ask hn@ycombinator.com about how to merge them, or perhaps they will tell you to just use one of them and never use the other again.
by js8 | 2026-01-27 14:58:55+00:00
When I was 11, on 17th Nov 1989, in Czechoslovakia, my father was watching the evening news on our (black and white) TV, as usual.

There was a protest and the state media was reporting on it. When the reporter said, "our camera broke down and we can only show black and white pictures", my father IMMEDIATELY jumped up and angrily said, "that's bs, you don't want to show how they [the protesting students] got beaten up [by the police]!"

This was an interesting life lesson. So yeah, sure, technical difficulties..
by ecshafer | 2026-01-27 14:59:21+00:00
I am going to assume you are the author of MASON and this was agents.jl?

They make a lot of claims on how much faster they are than MASON, Netlogo, and Mesa. But in practice I am not finding that to be the case. Also they arent counting the Julia compilation step which takes an absurdly long time, and by the time that gets done similar simulations are already done, then they start the clock on their own benchmark.

Agents.jl and Mesa have the selling point of having better languages / libraries for numerical computation. But thats really a subset of msor ABM I think.
by electroly | 2026-01-27 14:59:51+00:00
A lot of negative responses so I'll provide my own personal corroborating anecdote. I am intending to replace my low-code solutions with AI-written code this year. I have two small internal CRUD apps using Budibase. It was a nice dream and I still really like Budibase. I just find it even easier yet to use AI to do it, with the resulting app built on standard components instead of an unusual one (Budibase itself). I'm a programmer so I can debug and fix that code; I can't do anything when Budibase has bugs (which it does).
by hairofadog | 2026-01-27 14:59:53+00:00
TikTok is hugely influential, and the younger people they're trying to influence don't read newspapers and don't hang out on X or Instagram (both of which also censor certain political content).

https://www.npr.org/2024/03/26/1240737627/meta-limit-politic...

https://www.reddit.com/r/OptimistsUnite/comments/1i9zf5u/rco...

https://arxiv.org/html/2508.13375v1
by mrtksn | 2026-01-27 14:59:55+00:00
> It’s a shame that all those activist that would shred themselves for Palestine are absolutely quite about Iran

That's not a fair position, those people don't have the duty to make every wrong right. As an Iranian expat how much of your time and money did you invest? Apparently there are 2 million Iranians in US and just over a million in Europe and a million more in the rest of the world. What did the 4 million strong Iranian diaspora did on that matter?

That's really an unfortunate statement.
Show HN: Magpie – I built a CLI where AIs argue about my code
by leo_e | 2026-01-27 14:59:57+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Magpie because I was tired of AI code reviewers being too "nice."

Most AI tools just say "LGTM" or nitpick formatting. To fix this, Magpie uses an adversarial approach: it spawns two different AI agents (e.g., a Security Expert and a Performance Critic) and forces them to debate your changes.

They don't just list bugs; they attack each other's arguments until they reach a consensus. This cuts down on hallucinations and lazy approvals.

Features:

Adversarial Debate: Watch Claude and GPT-4o fight over your code.

Local & CI: Works on local files or GitHub PRs.

Model Agnostic: Supports OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini.

The Experiment: This is also an experiment in "coding without coding." I didn't write a single line of TypeScript for this project manually. The entire repo was built using Claude Code.

I'd love to hear your feedback—especially if you manage to make the models get into an infinite argument.

https://github.com/liliu-z/magpie
by pleaseforget | 2026-01-27 14:59:57+00:00
Chrome is deprecating native XSLTProcessor (warnings in 143+, full removal in 164/Aug 2027). { https://developer.chrome.com/docs/web-platform/deprecating-x... }

Chrome Beta no longer supports native XSLT processing, so existing XML+XSLT workflows are already broken there. XSLT removal will break multiple government and regulatory sites that rely on proven standards.

I built a drop-in replacement that emulates browser XSLT processing in JS, so existing documents can keep working without rewriting everything into client-side frameworks.

It aims to behave like the built-in XSLTProcessor API and XML stylesheet PI handling, but without relying on the deprecated browser implementation.

This exists mostly because 'just remove it for security' turned out to be less useful than 'make it keep working'.

Feedback and breakage reports welcome.
by techblueberry | 2026-01-27 15:00:09+00:00
GPT-4 was released in ChatGPT in March 2023

These start in 2022. I would also be extremely suss if there wasn’t a lag between ChatGPT release and productivity metrics in $, and I would also
Expect to see acceleration in productivity, not a linear increase.

I assume all of this is just due to COVID stimulus / work from home / etc?
by NilMostChill | 2026-01-27 15:01:04+00:00
> I think i have enough control.

This is probably just a disagreement about the term "control", so we can agree to disagree on that one i suppose.

The rest of the reply doesn't really relate to any of the points i mentioned.

That it's possible to successfully use the tool to achieve your goals wasn't in dispute.

I'll try to narrow it down:

---

> You are not a victim at the mercy of your LLM.

Yes, you absolutely are, it's how they work.

As i said, you can suggest guidelines and directions but it's not guaranteed they'll be adhered to.

To be clear , this also applies to people as well.

---

Directing an LLM (or LLM based orchestration system) is not the same as directing a team of people.

The "interface" is similar in that you provide instructions and guidelines and receive an attempt at the wanted outcome.

However, the underlying mechanisms of how they work are so different that the analogy you were trying to use doesn't make sense.

---

Again, LLM's can be useful tools, but presenting them as something they aren't only serves to muddy the waters of understanding how best to use them.

---

As an aside, IMO, the sketchy salesmen approach to over-promising on features and obscuring the the limitations will do great harm to the adoption of LLM's in the medium to long term.

The misrepresentation of terminology is also contributing to this.

The term AI is intentionally being used to attribute a level of reasoning and problem solving capability beyond what actually exists in these systems.
by pixl97 | 2026-01-27 15:01:27+00:00
While I'd say you're mostly correct, I do disagree some.

There is quite a large issue with sites posting things like current events on social sites like Facebook, or other rapid news events on X. Doing this has the potential to diminish your sovereignty. For example if you tell your users to follow X on the site and you're posting some event that Musk doesn't like, maybe you're posts will disappear.

Is something to think about.
by Swoerd123 | 2026-01-27 15:01:57+00:00
For me the weirdest capitulation comes from Tim Cook, who for years cosplayed as an LGBTQ inclusion proponent but now actively undermines these values by brown-nosing the Trump regime. First, by personally gifting Trump one million dollars for his inauguration; then the grift with the golden statue; and very recently, by attending the Melania movie premiere.
by RankingMember | 2026-01-27 15:02:20+00:00
Not that you asked, but re: this conversation, I looked at AirTags for cat use and ultimately settled on the TabCat tracker instead. It's pricier, but built for the purpose- the device that goes on the collar is very lightweight and small, and the tracker will guide you via sound right to the cat without the need for relay from other devices like an AirTag. Months of battery life, too.
by Warlax | 2026-01-27 15:02:22+00:00
Author here. We analyzed 802K merged PRs from GitHub Archive to see how code review practices changed from 2024 to 2025. The headline stat got worse—up from 83% in 2024.

Other findings: self-merge rates hit 71%, bot PRs collapsed from 62% (2022 peak) to 15.5%, and first-time contributors now wait 38% longer vs 53% last year.

We also looked at how OpenAI Codex, Gemini CLI, and Claude Code ship compared to the benchmarks. Happy to answer questions about methodology.
by Fiveplus | 2026-01-27 15:02:36+00:00
>The goal is, that xfwl4 will offer the same functionality and behavior as xfwm4 does...

I wonder how strictly they interpret behavior here given the architectural divergence?

As an example, focus-stealing prevention. In xfwm4 (and x11 generally), this requires complex heuristics and timestamp checks because x11 clients are powerful and can aggressively grab focus. In wayland, the compositor is the sole arbiter of focus, hence clients can't steal it, they can only request it via xdg-activation. Porting the legacy x11 logic involves the challenge of actually designing a new policy that feels like the old heuristic but operates on wayland's strict authority model.

This leads to my main curiosity regarding the raw responsiveness of xfce. On potato hardware, xfwm4 often feels snappy because it can run as a distinct stacking window manager with the compositor disabled. Wayland, by definition forces compositing. While I am not concerned about rust vs C latency (since smithay compiles to machine code without a GC), I am curious about the mandatory compositing overhead. Can the compositor replicate the input-to-pixel latency of uncomposited x11 on low-end devices or is that a class of performance we just have to sacrifice for the frame-perfect rendering of wayland?