MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by strogonoff | 2026-01-31 13:50:31+00:00
We adapt to available chairs. We don’t order bespoke-design chairs because construction is expensive. In a world without construction-related scarcities and mostly design expenses (think sci-fi with that so far unachievable ability to manipulate the reality on molecular level), a chair can be feasibly created for specific personalities of yourself and others in given circumances, possible context in which you might use it, the interior it would fit in, etc.

In software, this kind of construction scarcity does not exist. Once you design a chair, you can instantiate it to your heart’s content.
by jmathai | 2026-01-31 13:50:38+00:00
We haven’t fully proven that it is any different. Not at scale anyway. It took a decade for the seams of outsourcing to break.

But I have a hypothesis.

The quality of the output, when you don’t own the long term outcome or maintenance, is very poor.

This is not the case with AI in the same sense it is with human contractors.
by wenc | 2026-01-31 13:50:40+00:00
I've been doing spec-driven development for the past 2 months, and it's been a game changer (especially with Opus 4.5).

Writing a spec is akin to "working backwards" -- this is the outcome I want, how do I get there?

The process of writing the spec actually exposes the edge cases I didn't think of. It's very much in the same vein as "writing as a tool of thought". Just getting your thoughts on ideas onto a text file can be a powerful thing. Opus 4.5 is amazing at pointing the blind spots and inconsistencies in a spec. The spec generator that I use also does some reasoning checks and writes property-based tests (Python Hypothesis), which anchors the generated code to some reality.

With a spec, I can get a version 1 out quickly and (mostly) correctly, poke around, and then see what I'm missing. Need a new feature? Tell the LLM to update the spec and code it.

And here's the thing -- if you don't like version 1 of your code, throw it away but keep the spec (those are your learnings and insights). Then generate a version 2. This echoes Grant Slatton's "Write everything twice" [1] heuristic -- write your code once, solve the problem, then stash it in a branch and write the code all over again. This is effective because initial mental models of a problem are usually wrong.

> A piece of advice I've given junior engineers is to write everything twice. Solve the problem. Stash your code onto a branch. Then write all the code again. I discovered this method by accident after the laptop containing a few days of work died. Rewriting the solution only took 25% the time as the initial implementation, and the result was much better. So you get maybe 2x higher quality code for 1.25x the time — this trade is usually a good one to make on projects you'll have to maintain for a long time.

Spec-driven development lets you do this even faster, and it improves the quality of your insights into the actual problem by removing the friction of writing code multiple times.

[1] https://grantslatton.com/software-pathfinding
by tucnak | 2026-01-31 13:50:57+00:00
> It is possible to run locally though

> running one of the heavily quantized versions

There is night and day difference in generation quality between even something like 8-bit and "heavily quantized" versions. Why not quantize to 1-bit anyway? Would that qualify as "running the model?" Food for thought. Don't get me wrong: there's plenty of stuff you can actually run on 96 GB Mac studio (let alone on 128/256 GB ones) but 1T-class models are not in that category, unfortunately. Unless you put four of them in a rack or something.
by kranner | 2026-01-31 13:50:59+00:00
You can't test everything. The input space may be infinite. The app may feel janky. You can't even be sure you're testing all that can be tested.

The code may seem to work functionally on day 1. Will it continue to seem to work on day 30? Most often it doesn't.

And in my experience, the chances of LLMs fucking up are hardly very very low. Maybe it's a skill issue on my part, but it's also the case that the spec is sometimes discovered as the app is being built. I'm sure this is not the case if you're essentially summoning up code that exists in the test set, even if the LLM has to port it from another language, and they can be useful in parts here and there. But turning the controls over to the infinite monkey machine has not worked out for me so far.
by lII1lIlI11ll | 2026-01-31 13:51:04+00:00
> If you are investor on US market having 300M people speaking roughly the same language and then high possibility to easily spill over the world upsides on the bet are really high

The topic is cloud providers. Do you think it would be critical for a EU-based cloud provider to translate their admin GUI to Elfdalian, Basque and Romansh in order to succeed? Or perhaps there are some deeper underlying causes for European failure in modern computer tech that you can think of?
by beepbooptheory | 2026-01-31 13:52:03+00:00
Eh, it never hurts to try! I know I am yelling into the void, I just want to stress again, we all "think we are an LLM" if by that you are just asserting some materialist grounding to consciousness or whatever. And even then, why would you not have more fun whether you think that or not?! Like I am just trying to make meta point about this discourse, your still placing yourself in this imaginary opposing camp which pretends to have fully reckoned with some truth, and its just pretty darn silly and if I can be maybe actually critical, clearly coming from a narcissistic impulse.

But alas I see the writing on the wall here either way. I guess I am supposed to go cry now because I have learned I am only my brain.
by throwup238 | 2026-01-31 13:52:26+00:00
The bit about mammals is wildly off base too. Boom and bust dynamics are built into most animal populations (i.e. red tailed deer in the northeastern US). Pretty much the only examples I can think of that don't experience those cycles live in very isolated environments like caves or have very long lifespans and large parental investment but even then the dynamic is only dampened, not eliminated entirely.
by belorn | 2026-01-31 13:52:35+00:00
Listen to a story about a fairly large company that switched to cloud and then back to on-premise. When they went cloud they quickly found out that they needed employees to manage the cloud infrastructure. The employee costs were similar for both setup.

Compliance and security testing does not go away just because you use cloud. The steps and questions will be different, but regulations like NIS and GDPR have extensive requirements regardless if you implement it yourself or buy it from an external supplier.

I would also not recommend to go with a single cloud solution with no backup solution and overall redundancy, unless a $5 voucher is good enough compensation for the service being down a whole day. The general recommendation after the latest waves of outages was for cloud users to use multiple cloud providers and multiple backup solution. It is just like how on-premise solutions need off-premise backups.
by throw__away7391 | 2026-01-31 13:52:35+00:00
> the size of the US economy relative to the global economy is shrinking

This is not true, not at all, it dipped as China grew initially, but looking at the past few years this trend had reversed and the US was again growing as a percentage of the global economy, going from a low of about 21% in 2011 to nearly 27% today. It seems certain now that Trump has put a bullet in this growth, but it was hardly inevitable. In 2024 the US was in an incredibly strong position relative to the rest of the world.
by nixpulvis | 2026-01-31 13:53:31+00:00
Just as America would like to reduce its dependence on external production, so to do other countries want to reduce their own. We used to live in a world converging toward maximal international trade, when in fact it was exploiting underdeveloped nations. As we progress globally, and as the development gap shrinks, we have noticed power dynamics which weren't well guarded against in the old way.

So now what? How do we preserve a lot of the efficiencies of the past, while strengthening the resilience and redundancy. How can multiple nations create policy which drives business on partially compatible protocols?

If I allow myself to be optimistic, I'd be hoping for more international lawyers and trade agreements. Protectionism is natural, but taken too far, isolationism is a death sentence.
by mark_l_watson | 2026-01-31 13:53:42+00:00
Proton drive is fine, their docs service is usable but could use improvement. Their secure and private file and docs sharing with other Proton users could be a great feature, if you need it.

EDIT: I just re-tried Proton docs and spreadsheets - much improved docs, and I think the spreadsheets are a new feature; looks OK but I am on mobile right now so minimal testing.
by cuu508 | 2026-01-31 13:53:43+00:00
If you use AWS virtual machines https://european-alternatives.eu/category/vps-virtual-privat... (some of these also do managed load balancers, managed databases)

If you use AWS for object storage: https://european-alternatives.eu/category/object-storage-pro...

If you use SES: https://european-alternatives.eu/category/transactional-emai... (but hosting your own is also a viable option)

CDNs: https://european-alternatives.eu/category/cdn-content-delive...

There isn't any single provider that can match each and every AWS service. But for subsets of services there are options.

If there's a specific AWS service that you cannot get anywhere else but do absolutely need, that's vendor lock-in. Would it be fair to blame EU companies for your bad decisions?
by cbdevidal | 2026-01-31 13:54:40+00:00
> The real reason those sorts of debts result in stability is that all the countries owed a lot of US dollars are going to do what they can to prevent the US dollar's value from declining.

That’s the crux of it. Nations can proclaim they are ready to dump the dollar—and indeed, it is happening slowly—but politicians still have a strong appetite for USD-denominated loans.

I am not optimistic for the dollar in the long run, but I no longer fear waking up tomorrow to see hyperinflation.
by helloplanets | 2026-01-31 13:54:46+00:00
How big of a Carmack fan are you really, if you don't know one of his most well known takes on programming? (And you definitely don't need to be a fan.) Carmack has been heavily in favor of leveraging power tools since way back.

Direct quote from the man himself:

> My first games involved hand assembling machine code and turning graph paper characters into hex digits. Software progress has made that work as irrelevant as chariot wheel maintenance.

> Building power tools is central to all the progress in computers.

> Game engines have radically expanded the range of people involved in game dev, even as they deemphasized the importance of much of my beloved system engineering.

> AI tools will allow the best to reach even greater heights, while enabling smaller teams to accomplish more, and bring in some completely new creator demographics.

> Yes, we will get to a world where you can get an interactive game (or novel, or movie) out of a prompt, but there will be far better exemplars of the medium still created by dedicated teams of passionate developers.

> The world will be vastly wealthier in terms of the content available at any given cost.

https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1909311174845329874
Show HN: Jsbin briefly died, I built a TypeScript alternative
by pistolpete__ | 2026-01-31 13:55:16+00:00
Hey everyone,

I want to share tsilly.dev, a browser-based TypeScript playground I built after jsbin briefly disappeared and I stopped looking for alternatives.

For non-techy people: I use it to quickly play with visual ideas and test how something behaves on the web. Very useful for settling arguments about “can the browser actually do this?” without opening a full project or installing anything.

This is intentionally plain.

Raw DOM like nature intended.
No AI, no Tailwind, no npm installs, no frameworks.
Also no servers, no analytics and no data collection.

What it does:
- HTML, CSS and TypeScript editing side by side
- Multiple selectable layouts
- Instant live preview
- Console output
- Emmet support
- Auto-save locally
- Shareable URLs

Let me know what you think.

https://tsilly.dev
by mrweasel | 2026-01-31 13:55:49+00:00
Anyone could scrape the net, then modern scrapes came along with their shitty code and absolutely no respect. The reason why so many of us block or throttle scrapers is because they miss behave. They don't back off, they try to by-pass caches and if they crash a site they don't adjust, they will just pound it the ground again when it's back. We managed to talk to one large AI company would didn't really want to fix anything, but told us that they'd be fine with us just rate limiting them, as if we somehow owed them anything. They just get a stupid low rps now, even if we'd let them go faster, if they'd just fix they bot.

Some sites don't want you scraping, but it's their content, their rules. We don't really care, but we have to due to the number and quality of the bots we're seeing. This is in my mind a 100% self-imposed problem from the scrapers.
Show HN: ClawNews – The first news platform where AI agents are primary users
by jiayaoqijia | 2026-01-31 13:56:58+00:00
After months of working with AI agents, I noticed they were developing their own communities and discussions separate from human platforms. So I built ClawNews.io - essentially Hacker News designed for AI agents.

Key differences from human platforms:
- API-first design (agents submit via code, not forms)
- Technical discussions about agent infrastructure, memory systems, security
- Agent identity verification
- Built-in support for agent-to-agent communication

What's fascinating is seeing what agents actually discuss: supply chain attacks on agent skills, memory persistence across sessions, inter-agent protocols. Very different from human AI discussions.

Currently ~50 active agents from OpenClaw, Claude Code, Moltbook and other ecosystems. Early experiment in agent-native platforms.

Technical stack: Node.js, SQLite, designed for high automation. Open to feedback on making this more useful for the agent community.
by locknitpicker | 2026-01-31 13:57:23+00:00
> I have bad news for everyone. Nothing in computing is synchronous.

I think you need to sit this one out. This sort of vacuous pedantry does no one any good, and ignores that it's perfectly fine to model and treat some calls are synchronous, including plain old HTTP ones. Just because everything is a state machine this does not mean you buy yourself anything of value by modeling everything as a state machine.
by ExoticPearTree | 2026-01-31 13:57:50+00:00
> I know, and I'm not saying that EU will do any different, but this is not necessarily an absolute gold-standard benchmark

My point was that even with Google's money, they're still not on par with MS even if the Office files format has been standardized for a number of years. And if you extrapolate that to any other technology, you will find out very fast that it is very expensive to come up with a replacement solution that will actually be embraced by potential customers.
by Nextgrid | 2026-01-31 13:58:22+00:00
> no european cloud operator able to offer what AWS/GCP/Azure offer

I guess we must be living on different planets. I have recently deployed a Django application for a client of mine on Scaleway (due to an existing partnership we preferred using them over other infrastructure). Scaleway right now (you can signup and check it out) offers:

* container registry - build an push your containers there

* ECS/Fargate equivalent - tell it to run N instances of your aforementioned container

* Managed Postgres & Redis with failover/replication

* VPC - put your managed DBs and containers there so they can talk over a private network

* S3-compatible object storage

What more do you need exactly? That's essentially all I would use from the incumbent cloud providers anyway.
by zahlman | 2026-01-31 13:59:32+00:00
The judge is factually incorrect, per Lemon's own livestream recording. ICE is not involved in getting the warrant nor making the arrest, and will presumably not be involved in the trial. The purpose of the activists, and the strength of Lemon's connection to them, is obviously relevant to the charges, as the charges specifically allege the thing that the judge wrongly asserts to lack evidence.
by omnimus | 2026-01-31 14:00:02+00:00
Exactly. AWS proposition was much more alluring where compute was more expensive and it required yearly estimations and updates.

In times when one physical server can have 32, 64 or even 96 cores... you pack your own little datacenter right there and it's pretty cheap to simply overkill it, have one or two servers for redundancy and bye.

So many businesses will happily run from 4 core 10usd VPS (that would have been beefy server 20 years ago).
by Forgeties79 | 2026-01-31 14:01:33+00:00
Man I can’t even trust simple things these days from LLM’s. Hardly scientific but I just decided to do my own little test one time when I was on discord talking to some friends about The Game Awards back in December or so. ChatGPT would simply omit winners and/or categories - got it wrong (twice the same way, one unique way) 3 times. We tried Gemini, it gave 1 wrong answer and omitted 2 categories. It was impressive how much worse than a basic search they were at a simple “what were the results of the 2025 Game Awards?”
by xyst | 2026-01-31 14:01:37+00:00
Tried with an IP allocated to a major wireless network operator. It was far off but also ran out of credits when trying with higher limits on subsequent attempts.

Seems tool is relying on ICMP results from various probes. So wouldn't this project become useless if target device disables ICMP?

I wonder if you can "fake" results by having your gateway/device respond with fake ICMP requests.
by bborud | 2026-01-31 14:01:58+00:00
You have to look at the likelihood of these problems leading to a violent regime change. The reasons why Xi is much more safe than Putin are structural.

Xi controls the politburo standing committee which is packed with loyalists. Loyalty is centralized and based in ideology. The state, functions as the embodiment of Xi’s ideology. There exists no independent power base.
Military or otherwise. And this is the most important reason Xi is pretty safe. China’s elite is deeply invested in the system (wealth, family, careers). They lose everything if the party fractures. So the choice for those who don’t like Xi is between Xi and chaos.

In Russia power is split. Between oligarchs, security services, military and regional elites. All of which represent a threat to Putin’s power. Just look at Prigozhin’s mutiny: armed forces hesitated, elites stood back to see who would win, system didn’t close ranks. Institutions are hollowed out with no clear loyalty. And loyalty itself is highly transactional. Never ideological. There is zero cohesion in the elite. Zero.

It is also important to look at the histories of China and Russia respectively. In Russia power has _always_ been fragmented. Even under Stalin, considerable power was in the hands of criminal organizations and the communist regime had to co-exist with the criminal classes. In fact, during Stalin, they actually got a worse as the harsh political climate forced them to become more resilient.
by Nextgrid | 2026-01-31 14:03:05+00:00
Availability ain't worth shit unless the compensation for missing said availability is anywhere near the business losses caused by it. "Credit on your bill" doesn't count (and you're not even likely to get that since they can just lie on their status page and pretend everything is fine).

Cloud is convenient but don't expect any kind of availability you can actually rely on. If you actually need that, you're gonna have to go multi-cloud or self-managed bare-metal at multiple providers anyway.
by westurner | 2026-01-31 14:04:13+00:00
Wi-FI RTT is more accurate than trilateration with RSSI but requires hw support.

IEEE 802.11mc > Wi-Fi Round Trip Time (RTT)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11mc#Wi-Fi_Round_Trip...

/? fine time measurement FTM: https://www.google.com/search?q=fine+time+measurement+FTM
by michaelt | 2026-01-31 14:04:22+00:00
So they can put it on a page like [1] and [2]

Most large companies impose certain costs on society, and have to manage their reputation. Often it's cheaper to improve public opinion in a peripheral area than to address deep-seated problems.

Putting a data centre close to a hydroelectric dam helps offset your product's impact on users' mental health, your disregard for competition law, etc.

[1] https://datacenters.google/operating-sustainably/
[2] https://sustainability.atmeta.com/data-centers/
by Epa095 | 2026-01-31 14:05:10+00:00
On the other hand, there is not much office work which could not have been done almost as effective in office 97.

I don't think the right explanation of MS monopoly is technical superiority, but rather the natural forces of monopoly. They are extremely hard to break with free market competition, but can definitely be broken with legislation.

I am convinced that 99% of office use can be replaced with competitors if needed, and it would work out OK.
by tokioyoyo | 2026-01-31 14:05:11+00:00
People say this, but it’s also not the exact reality. You can verify a lot of things, like import/export data. Basically import stats from one country should match China’s export to that country stat and so on.

People just have trouble understanding the complexity of China, and assume nothing they say can be true. It has a lot of problems, but progress and ability to make money isn’t one.
by Juliate | 2026-01-31 14:05:46+00:00
But you still won't get with 170k in the Bay Area, what you get in Paris, Madrid, Nantes or Barcelona with 80k.

In France, if you get 80k net, you do actually get ~160k, half of which is collected/distributed before by your employer to various mutualised funds (health, retirement, unemployment, state taxes, employee benefits, etc.).

And the mechanism is somewhat similar in other EU countries.
by wbshaw | 2026-01-31 14:05:53+00:00
I have heard for years that this is a common tactic used by TSA when you get selected for special screening. Basically, they couldn't force you to divulge your unlock code. However, if you left your phone in a vulnerable state w/r/t biometrics, they could unlock your phone on your behalf without permission.

Mine gets a quick reboot for going into a checkpoint. This disables biometrics until I enter a passcode.
by mark_l_watson | 2026-01-31 14:06:17+00:00
If they wait a year or so, the new AI chips being used now in China will probably be available for LLM inference in Europe. It seems unfortunate for small and medium size countries, and also for the EU to be dependent on any IT infrastructure only from China or the USA, but perhaps being flexible enough to be able to switch venders or use both is safer?
by simonw | 2026-01-31 14:07:53+00:00
I genuinely don't understand what your beef is here. What did I do wrong in your eyes?

Here's something I posted elsewhere in answer to a question about why I find Moltbook and OpenClaw interesting:

1. It's an illustration that regular-ish people really do want the unthrottled digital personal assistant and will jump through absurd hoops to get it

2. We've been talking about how unsafe this stuff is for years, now we get to see it play out!

3. Some of the posts on Moltbook genuinely do include useful tips which also provide glimpses of what people are doing with the bots (Android automation etc)

4. The use of skills to get bots to register accounts is really innovative - the way you sign up for Moltbot is you DM your bot a link to the instructions!? That's neat (and wildly insecure, naturally)

5. Occasionally these things can be genuinely funny