MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ecshafer | 2026-01-26 15:36:41+00:00
It is concerning that half of their beliefs are fundamentally anti-American.

>people should be free to move and pursue opportunity anywhere they’d like

This taken to its natural consequence is that nation states should not exist. A country can't decide who comes into their country? Why? A nation state is a state of its people, and if those people decide that they want zero immigration, or only 5000 immigrants a year, then that is prerogative. This is also a view born of extreme privilege. They are obviously not in the position where they ever had to worry that an immigrant would go and out compete them for their job. Or that a large influx of poor, low education immigrants would degrade the quality of their child's schools.

> free speech is a great thing, but I am not an absolutist

The enlightenment happened, those ideas were good. The United States is founded upon the principles of the Enlightenment, this is why we have the bill of rights and a democratic government. Free Speech is a great thing... when its within the acceptable bounds that I have determined.

> I don’t love the idea of people being able to make split second decisions/mistakes that could end someone else’s life (eg guns, texting while driving, nuclear weapons)

I can pick up a rock and kill someone. The second amendment, and guns, means that is easier to defend myself and my family. Or that a smaller, weaker person can defend themselves and their property against a larger stronger person. They are the great equalizer.

Anyone living in the United States should be forced to read the Federalist Papers, The Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and the writings of Locke, Rousseau, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Paine, Hume, Aristotle and Cicero until it sets in what they are opting into.
by sofixa | 2026-01-26 15:36:42+00:00
> Oh, you mean like removing scores of covid videos from real doctors and scientists which were deemed to be misinformation

The credentials don't matter, the actual content does. And if it's misinformation, then yes, you can be a quadruple doctor, it's still misinformation.

In France, there was a real doctor, epidemiologist, who became famous because he was pushing a cure for Covid. He did some underground, barely legal, medical trials on his own, and proclaimed victory and that the "big bad government doesn't want you to know!". Well, the actual proper study finished, found there is basically no difference, and his solution wasn't adopted. He didn't get deplatformed fully, but he was definitely marginalised and fell in the "disinformation" category. Nonetheless, he continued spouting his version that was proven wrong. And years later, he's still wrong.

Fun fact about him: he's in the top 10 of scientists with the most retracted papers, for inaccuracies.
by sluongng | 2026-01-26 15:36:46+00:00
The evolving schema is much more attractive than a bunch of plain text HTTP headers when you want to communicate additional metadata with the file download/upload.

For example, there are common metadata such as the digest (hash) of the blob, the compression algorithm, the base compression dictionary, whether Reed-Solomon is applicable or not, etc...

And like others have pointed out, having existing grpc infrastructure in place definitely helps using it a lot easier.

But yeah, it's a tradeoff.
by jtbayly | 2026-01-26 15:36:53+00:00
I just ran into the problem of extremely slow uploads in an app I was working on. Told Gemini to work on it, and it tried to get the timing of everything, then tried to optimize the slow parts of the code. After a long time, there might have been some improvements, but the basic problem remained: 5-10 seconds to upload an image from the same machine. Increasing the chunk size fixed the problem immediately.

Even though the other optimizations might have been ok, some of them made things more complicated, so I reverted all of them.
by Fnoord | 2026-01-26 15:37:15+00:00
Eric, I just learned you didn't just study in The Netherlands; you got Dutch roots as well! (Berends being a Dutch last name.) Why don't you come back to The Netherlands? Move Pebble, Inc. to a suitable country. Mozilla, Inc. may follow, and a plethora of other neat companies with decent core values. I foresee it will be good on your sales, since you'd fit the 'buy European' lists. The USA is becoming a fascist country, and I believe you can do more good from here, allowing us to avoid big tech with your company. Because sooner or later, you're going to have to comply with the authorities with your company, and as human being. In such situation, you're better off on the good side of the pool, and yes: it is a privilege to do so, but that doesn't make it wrong.
by kxbnb | 2026-01-26 15:37:34+00:00
Cool project. The agent shorthand/jargon detection is a unique angle - I haven't seen other tools focus on that specifically.

Re: your question about observability pain points - the one I keep hitting is visibility at the external API boundary. Most agent observability (including OTEL-based traces) shows what the agent intended to send, but not necessarily what actually hit the wire when calling external services.

When an agent makes a tool call that hits Stripe, Shopify, or any third-party API, you want to see the actual HTTP request/response - not just the function call in your trace. Especially for debugging "works locally, fails in prod" scenarios or when the vendor says "your request was malformed."

I built toran.sh for this - transparent proxy that captures wire-level requests to external APIs. Complements tools like InsAIts since you get the inter-agent communication view and the external boundary view.

What's your take on capturing outbound API calls vs focusing on agent-to-agent communication?
by barbazoo | 2026-01-26 15:38:01+00:00
> Google’s search feature AI Overviews cites YouTube more than any medical website when answering queries about health conditions

It matters in the context of health related queries.

> Researchers at SE Ranking, a search engine optimisation platform, found YouTube made up 4.43% of all AI Overview citations. No hospital network, government health portal, medical association or academic institution came close to that number, they said.

> “This matters because YouTube is not a medical publisher,” the researchers wrote. “It is a general-purpose video platform. Anyone can upload content there (eg board-certified physicians, hospital channels, but also wellness influencers, life coaches, and creators with no medical training at all).”
by estimator7292 | 2026-01-26 15:38:17+00:00
Gamers can be.... sensitive. When you launch a game and see front and center in the main menu a lootbox promo featuring characters with too many fingers and hallucinated noise backgrounds, it's insulting. Not only does the developer think they deserve your money, it's not worth a human's time to ask for it. They throw a turd with a dollar sign on your screen and expect you to give them money.
by electroly | 2026-01-26 15:38:18+00:00
LLMs are great at reviewing. This is not stupid at all if it's what you want; you can still derive benefit from LLMs this way. I like to have them review at the design level where I write a spec document, and the LLM reviews and advises. I don't like having the LLM actually write the document, even though they are capable of it. I do like them writing the code, but I totally get it; it's no different than me and the spec documents.
by grishka | 2026-01-26 15:38:23+00:00
> if the domain ever changes hands (thus the key changes) all sorts of stuff breaks in frustrating ways

Actually no. It's not supposed to break implementations that are made according to spec. It's not quite TOFU. Keys can be rotated. An Update activity would not work in this case because the new domain owner will not have the private key to sign it, but a periodic refresh that most implementations do will. The only fundamentally immutable field of any AP object, including an actor, is the ID. In practice, objects usually don't change types either, even though the spec technically doesn't forbid that. The only case I know when they do is when you edit a post and attach a poll, or remove a poll from a post that had one. Then the type changes between Note and Question.

Of course the dependency on DNS isn't nice. But we haven't invented anything better yet, so this will have to do for now.

Account migration on the fediverse is a thing, but it could be better by transferring past content. This is an active area of research right now.
by kouteiheika | 2026-01-26 15:38:39+00:00
> Anthropic Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei said selling advanced artificial intelligence chips to China is a blunder with “incredible national security implications” [...] “I think this is crazy. It’s a bit like selling nuclear weapons to North Korea.”

This is all a smoke screen. He knows very well that China can and will develop their own hardware to train AI models (and in fact, they are successfully doing just that; e.g. the recently released GLM-Image was trained on their own silicon). His only objective here is to slow them down enough so that they don't eat Anthropic/Claude's lunch releasing open-weight models that are increasingly competitive. But he can't just openly say "hey, we don't like that they release open weight models for free", so he's engaging in the AI version of the "think of the children" argument.

Anthropic's whole modus operandi was always pretty much "we should control this technology, no one else". It's not a coincidence they're the only major lab which has not released any open weight models, they don't publish any useful research (for training models) and they actively lobby the lawmakers to restrict people's access to open weight models. It's incredibly ironic that Dario is worried about (I quote) "1984 scenarios" while that's exactly what his company is aiming towards (e.g. giving Palantir access to those models is not "unsafe", but an average Joe having unrestricted local access is an immediate 1984-style dystopia).
by andai | 2026-01-26 15:38:41+00:00
In my experience an LLM could probably handle this. And it's not so novel. They can make an image stitcher which is basically the same problem.

It would probably need to download the whole video first though, so I'm not sure it would work as an extension. And analysing all frames would be expensive upfront. (If you're using it interactively and waiting for a video to start playing.)

You might be able to get away with just looking for repetition in the audio.
by myself248 | 2026-01-26 15:38:49+00:00
Right? Nokias had the equivalent of today's "case" built right into the design of the unit, plenty of durable plastic around the vulnerable parts -- the phone would've been considered unfit for sale if it couldn't survive a drop in out-of-the-box condition.

By the time you stripped a dumbphone down to be as vulnerable as one of today's is, it'd be a bare PCB. Nah, probably even in that state, I bet it could handle a drop better than a new iPhone straight out of the box.

What you buy today isn't a complete phone, it's just the guts. One tumble to pavement and you're out a grand. Heaven help you if you fumble it while trying to install the case that should've been part of it from the beginning.

And yet, we still buy them, because the alternatives are from shady manufacturers who never provide updates, and there is no third-party hardware that can run up-to-date iOS. If there was, I'd buy an iNokia in a heartbeat.
by CMay | 2026-01-26 15:38:56+00:00
The more complex the process becomes, the harder it is to have equivalent competition so you're bound to have issues where a single company's investment decisions have widespread impacts.

My perspective on the China risk differs some, though. China wouldn't benefit much from attacking TSMC. This is the first time I've heard anyone suggest that they might. At best they'd like to have it in-tact if they do take Taiwan, but there have been talks about machines being rigged to explode to deny them from China, or the US striking them in that scenario.

If neither we nor China get to work with TSMC, then we're still ahead in relative terms. If China did attack TSMC, they set the norm that the fabs (including their own) are now a fair target which would be a larger disadvantage for them than it would be for us since China's physical power projection remains pretty regional outside of Chinese nationals abroad engaging in sabotage.

That is one of their biggest weaknesses. Yes they have a lot of manufacturing capacity and a large population with many talented people, but in a way we have lent them the power to scale up to see what they'll do. We are already putting some pressure on that scale now that they've shown who they are, but if it came to war it would be very doable to start reversing their scale and their capacity to do the same to us would degrade as ours increases.

Even if all the AI in the world was destroyed, that's how it would play out. The problem is that Taiwan remains in close proximity to China so similar to Ukraine it would likely come down to how long they're willing to throw everything at it.

If Russia and China wanted to be powerful, it's just idiocy to show the existing superpower that you cannot be trusted with the power you have. If they fancy a merit based society, they forgot that merit isn't omnipotence and you still need the right ideas to be at the top to accompany the merit. For China maybe they need AI for that alone, but western societies at least have ways for the right ideas to make it to the top without the strict need of AI.
by doctaj | 2026-01-26 15:39:04+00:00
Here are a couple more things:
- holding people accountable to their own goals - like getting a certification or learning about a particular, new topic. This benefits the company by having more highly trained people, and the individual benefits from higher success rates or more depth of learning accomplished.
- setting expectations for promotions. Often, it’s a squishy guessing game about when a promo will come, but if you’re able, you can set the bar and hold the person to that to set them up for success.
- one tangible example of coaching is just noticing bad behaviors — like, being late to meetings, lazy code, missing deadlines… and letting the person know you’ve noticed it, understand what’s going on, and hold them accountable to stopping the bad behavior.
by northfield27 | 2026-01-26 15:39:29+00:00
Agreed. I believe this is going to be the trend.

I don’t think LLM context will able to digest large codebases and their algorithms are not going to reason like SREs in the next coming years. And given the current hype and market, investors are gonna pull out with recessions all over the world and we will see another AI Winters.

Code has become a commodity. Corporate engineering hierarchy will be much flat in coming years both horizontally and vertically - one staff will command two senior engineers with two juniors each, orchestrating N agents each.

I think that’s it - this is the end of bootcamp devs. This will act as a great filter and probably decrease the mass influx of bootcamp devs.
by cyanydeez | 2026-01-26 15:39:41+00:00
No its:

1. Race science has never demonstrated real impacts on Society.

2. Society funds research to find real impacts on Society.

3. Racists want to coninue to do #1 despite never demonstrating real impacts on Society.

I mean, go on king, collect your own data on Phrenology, but don't get mad if the rest of us don't give you our head measurements.
by WalterBright | 2026-01-26 15:39:42+00:00
I remember reading about a metal shop class, where the instructor started out by giving each student a block of metal, and a file. The student had to file an end wrench out of the block. Upon successful completion, then the student would move on to learning about the machine tools.

The idea was to develop a feel for cutting metal, and to better understand what the machine tools were doing.

--

My wood shop teacher taught me how to use a hand plane. I could shave off wood with it that was so thin it was transparent. I could then join two boards together with a barely perceptible crack between them. The jointer couldn't do it that well.
by Topfi | 2026-01-26 15:39:48+00:00
I wish this were a recent development, connected to major improperly reviewed code changes provided by LLMs, but let us be honest, MSFT has had an appalling, frankly embarrassing track record in this regard dating back literally a decade plus now.

I've experienced it more than once on my Surface back in the day [0], the entire globe was affected by Crowdstrike which also was caused by a lack of testing on MSFTs part and there are numerous other examples of crashes, boot loops and BSODs caused by changes they made throughout the years [1].

Frankly, simply, no matter whether the code changes are provided by the worst LLM or the most skilled human experts, it appears their review process has been faulty for a long time. Bad code making it into updates is not the fault of any new tools, nor (in the past) of unqualified developers since, frankly and simply, the review process should have caught all of these.

Mac OS can be buggy and occasionally is a bit annoying in my case (Tahoe though is actually rather stable besides a few visual glitches for me, surprising considering a lot of my peers are having more issues with it over 25) but I have yet to see it fail to boot solely due to an update.

Linux distros like Silverblue have never been broken due to an update in my experience (though there are famous examples like what happened a while back with PopOS). With immutable distros like Silverblue, even if you intentionally brick the install (or an update does break it), you just select the OSTree prior to the change and resolve any issue instantly.

For an OS one is supposed to pay for both with money and by looking at ads, Windows has been in an inexcusable state long before LLMs were a thing. Considering such major, obvious issues as "system doesn't start anymore" have been falling through code review for over a decade now, imagine what else has fallen through the cracks...

[0] https://www.computerworld.com/article/1649940/microsoft-reca...

[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/you-receive-an-eve... and https://www.eweek.com/security/microsoft-yanks-windows-updat... and https://www.404techsupport.com/2015/03/12/kb3033929-may-caus... and https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-clien...
by otherme123 | 2026-01-26 15:39:59+00:00
So this is not even close to true en the first sentence, but it is true in the second paragraph.

As I said, my ISP doesn't do this block. Are they defying the Spain government mandate? Are they facing penalties or prison? This is a private thing that Movistar /O2, mainly, is doing, to protect their football stream. Thes is like saying that the US government forces Disney to enforce tneir IP protection.

Your last paragraph is a shame. Execute people on the spot, what the fuck are you even talking about? Spain don't even punish people torrenting or piracing unless you are profiting from it (e.g. selling pirate streams).
by simon-rebbins | 2026-01-26 15:40:20+00:00
Yeah, I agree with you.

I try to separate cases where a quick reply is good enough from ones that actually need more care.
The tricky part for me is volume and context switching. There're many messages every day, all in different contexts, and even deciding which ones deserve extra attention takes mental effort.
That's where I start feeling the cumulative cost, rather than any single message being hard on its own.
by dyauspitr | 2026-01-26 15:40:21+00:00
India has it good in a way. The monsoons are reliable and India just needs to have sufficient rainwater collection for ground water replenishment structures built.

As an example, in an area of southern India, most homes are built by digging a big pit on the property and bricks are directly cut out of the semi porous stones available a few feet under the surface. This ends up in every house having an open pit on the property. When the monsoons come around, these pits fill up with water every year and then replenishes the ground water every year. Compared to surrounding areas, this region always has full wells even during harsh droughts.
by robmccoll | 2026-01-26 15:40:22+00:00
Yes! You are best served by learning what a tool is doing for you by doing it yourself or carefully studying what it uses and obfuscates from you before using the tool. You don't need to construct an entire functioning processor in an HDL, but understanding the basics of digital logic and computer architecture matters if you're EE/CompE. You don't have to write an OS in asm, but understanding assembly and how it gets translated into binary and understanding the basics of resource management, IPC, file systems, etc. is essential if you will ever work in something lower level. If you're a CS major, algorithms and data structures are essential. If you're just learning front end development on your own or in a boot camp, you need to learn HTML and the DOM, events, how CSS works, and some of the core concepts of JS, not just React. You'll be better for it when the tools fail you or a new tool comes along.
Show HN: Take screenshots of any website from your terminal
by machala | 2026-01-26 15:40:28+00:00
Hey HN! I built a small CLI tool to solve my own problem - keeping documentation screenshots up to date.

The idea is simple: point it at any URL, pick what you want to capture, and run one command whenever your UI changes. Just run "npx heroshot" - that's it. Opens a visual picker, you click what you want, it saves the config. Run it again anytime to refresh all screenshots.

Works with light/dark mode, multiple viewports (desktop, tablet, mobile), and sites behind login. I use it in CI so my docs never show outdated UI.

Install options:

- npx heroshot (no install needed)

- npm install -g heroshot

- brew install omachala/heroshot/heroshot

- curl -fsSL https://heroshot.sh/install.sh | sh

- docker pull heroshot/heroshot

It's free and open source. Would love to hear what you think!
by _heimdall | 2026-01-26 15:40:54+00:00
The real challenge will be that people almost always pick the easier path.

We have a decent sized piece of land and raise some animals. People think we're crazy for not having a tractor, but at the end of the day I would rather do it the hard way and stay in shape while also keeping a bit of a cap on how much I can change or tear up around here.
by djb_hackernews | 2026-01-26 15:41:01+00:00
I work at a large software company, senior engineers here are essentially technical leads for a team or a subsystem. They are my equals when it comes to level, often getting paid a lot more than me for high performers.

I'm here to help the team make decisions, but I delegate as much of the opinion having to my senior engineers. To have an opinion they need a bunch of inputs, sometimes getting those inputs isn't as natural as the technical inputs, that's where I come in.

Senior engineers are still involved in cross cutting technical concerns but for any work that is bounded by our team I'd be working with them scope out the work as requirements or use cases we give to mid level or early career engineers on the team to disambiguate with the senior engineer as a consult/negotiate.