MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by weslleyskah | 2026-01-21 18:59:37+00:00
Do you think Tolkien used his inspirations from Beowulf on the character Tom Bombadil?

"Ho! Tom Bombadil, Tom Bombadillo!

By water, wood and hill, by the reed and willow,

By fire, sun and moon, harken now and hear us!

Come, Tom Bombadil, for our need is near us!"

I don't clearly see the point of this article
by crazygringo | 2026-01-21 18:59:51+00:00
> But they disagree on which of those is "good design" in which context.

Which is why I literally said there are different schools of design.

> I'm not totally sure what this means but it sounds incredibly dubious to state as fact and there are no doubt heavily used fonts that don't do it.

If you don't know one of the most elemental rules of typography, then maybe you should look it up rather than doubt it.

> I'm not saying you can't or shouldn't learn the vocabulary and the body of accumulated experience, but there's no way you're going to make a universally right and objectively correct decision.

You're missing the distinction I made between basic principles of design, and schools of design. Nowhere did I claim that there are "correct" "decisions". But there are principles of design that are, in fact, universal.
by defatigable | 2026-01-21 18:59:54+00:00
Yeah, I have no idea what the consensus definition of the term is, and I suppose I can't say for sure what OP meant. I haven't used Cursor. My understanding was that it exercises IDE functions but does not execute arbitrary shell commands, maybe I'm wrong. I've specifically had good experiences with the tools being able to run arbitrary commands (like the git debugging example I mentioned).

In my experience reading discussions like this, people seem to be saying that they don't believe that Claude Code and similar tools provide much of a productivity boost on relatively open ended domains (i.e. the AI is driving the writing of the code, not just assisting you in writing your own code faster). And that's certainly not my experience.

I agree with you that success with the initial milestone ("agent operates in a self-contained loop and can execute arbitrary commands") was achieved pretty quickly. But in my experience a lot of people don't believe this. :-)
by pclmulqdq | 2026-01-21 19:00:32+00:00
Yeah, I have told HR people this and been rejected. I do say this upfront because I don't want to send you a surprise bill. The main response I get is "OK, that's fine, don't spend more than 4 hours on it." The Anthropic recruiter told me, "no problem, it's a 4-hour test anyway."
by 6thbit | 2026-01-21 19:00:40+00:00
I manually wrote a "bad" spec, asked it for feedback, improved spec until the problem, the solution and overall implementation design were clear and had a very high level of detail and were trying to do exactly what I needed. The lots of thinking, reading and manual editing helped me understand the problem way better than where I began from.

New session: Fed the entire spec, asked to build generic scaffolding only.
New session: Fed the entire spec, asked to build generic TEST scaffolding.
New session: Extract features to implement out of spec doc into .md files
New session: Perform research on codebase with the problem statement "in mind", write results to another .md. Performed manual review of every .md.
New session(s): Fed research and feature .md and asked for ONE task at a time, ensuring tests were written as per spec and keep iterating until they passed. Code reviewed beginning with test assertions, and asked for modifications if required. Before commit, asked to update progress on .md.

Ended up with very solid large project including a technology I wasn't an expert on but familiar, that I would feel confident evolving without an agent if I had to, learned a lot in the process. It would've taken me at least 2 weeks to read docs about it and at least another 3 to implement by hand; I was done in 2 total.
by wavemode | 2026-01-21 19:00:42+00:00
The economics are different because the industries are fundamentally different. Software is never "finished" the way a building is finished. More features can always be added to software. If those new features create new product lines and attract new revenue, then the software engineers' salaries are more than paying for themselves.

But, this obviously carries risk, that the new thing you develop won't be worth as much as you spent. Bending Spoons doesn't want risk, hence their decision.
by zdragnar | 2026-01-21 19:00:46+00:00
What does reading it aloud make a difference to you reading it yourself? You can still claim that they misspoke or had an accent and you misheard or any of a dozen other excuses.

The whole point of a contract is you sign your name to the words on the paper, and you are attesting that the words therein are correct and what you agree to.
by justalever | 2026-01-21 19:00:58+00:00
Fair enough. Yes, AI can one-shot a lot now, but I sort of think human-coded stuff has its place. Having done both, I'm most often cleaning up the AI UI that did a piss poor job. I'm sure it can improve in time, though. I built this to scratch my own itch as I'm doing a lot of 0-1 development on ideas.
by themafia | 2026-01-21 19:01:04+00:00
Or a bot that lists out all the times police have been given these powers only for them to be abused.

Flock is a great example. Story after story in the local news (only there for some reason) about police officers being disciplined or fired because they stalked people using the flock system.

Meanwhile not a single story where a major case was cracked by, and could only have been cracked by, the flock camera system.
by gabrielste1n | 2026-01-21 19:01:09+00:00
Creator of OpenWhispr here! Honoured to be compared to Handy!

I built OW because I was tired of paying for WisprFlow. I'd say it is more flexible by design: Whisper.cpp (CPU + GPU) for super fast local transcription, Parakeet in progress, local or cloud LLMs for cleanup (Qwen, Mistral, Gemini, Anthropic, OpenAI, Groq etc.), and bring-your-own API keys!

Handy is more streamlined for sure!

Would love any feedback :)
by lakis | 2026-01-21 19:01:17+00:00
What if the new government also imply that you have to change our religion? What if the new government does not believe in "free enterprise" and will TELL you which company you will work for. What if the new government change the sports teams you like? What if the new government change the language you speak.

See for the example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alsace#Timeline . Notice how the official language suddenly changes when a new "government" from a different nation take over. Are you so sure that the French Canadians will not have a problem with suddenly English potentially been the official language?
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-01-21 19:01:48+00:00
I will tell you that “being a good engineer” doesn’t just involve “I codez real gud”, that’s the mark of a mid level engineer at any company that I’m aware of that has real leveling guidelines including my first hand experience at one BigTech company and my second hand experience at another.

Managing organizational complexity and people skills is required.

On a technical level I have always tried to carve out an “epic” or a “workstream” with clear interface boundaries between other work before I became a more senior “architect”

This is Dropbox’s leveling guidelines for instance

https://dropbox.github.io/dbx-career-framework/
by downrightmike | 2026-01-21 19:01:52+00:00
Which explains why the DOJ is going after the FED for not lowerign interest rates. They assume ZIRP will solve their problems, but that just kicks the can down the road, and it won't go far this time. Even Japan, which was our model for yield curve control has abandoned that theory.

Bunch of dumb people running the room and no experts.
by stephen_cagle | 2026-01-21 19:02:03+00:00
One interesting point was the original PageRank algorithm greatly benefited from the fact that we kinda only had "text matching" search before Google (my memory was AltaVista at the time).

Because text matching was so difficult to search with, whenever you went to a site, it would often have a "web of trust" at the bottom where an actual human being had curated a list of other sites that you might like if you liked this site.

So you would often search with keywords (often literals), then find the first site, then recursively explore the web of trust links to find the best site.

My suspicion has always been that Google (PageRank) benefited greatly from the human curated "web of trust" at the bottom of pages. But once Google came out, search was much better, and so human beings stopped creating "web of trust" type things on their site.

I am making the point that Google effectively benefited from the large amount of human labor put into connecting sites via WOT, while simultaneously (inadvertently) destroying the benefit of curating a WOT. This means that by succeeding at what they did, they made it much more difficult for a Google#2 to come around and run the exact same game plan with even the exact same algorithm.

tldr; Google harvested the links that were originally curated by human labor, the incentive to create those links are gone now, so the only remaining "links" between things are now in the Google Index.

Addendum: I asked claude to help me think of a metaphor, and I really liked this one as it is so similar.

```
"The railroad and the wagon trails"

Before railroads, collective human use created and maintained wagon trails through difficult terrain. The railroad company could survey these trails to find optimal routes. Once the railroad exists, the wagon trails fall into disuse and the pathfinding knowledge atrophies. A second railroad can't follow trails that are now overgrown.
```
by aeon_ai | 2026-01-21 19:02:30+00:00
GenAI changes the dynamics of information systems so fundamentally that our entire notion of intellectual property is being upended.

Copyright was predicated on the notion that ideas and styles can not be protected, but that explicit expressive works can. For example, a recipe can't be protected, but the story you wrap around it that tells how your grandma used to make it would be.

LLMs are particularly challenging to wrangle with because they perform language alchemy. They can (and do) re-express the core ideas, styles, themes, etc. without violating copyright.

People deem this 'theft' and 'stealing' because they are trying to reconcile the myth of intellectual property with reality, and are also simultaneously sensing the economic ladder being pulled up by elites who are watching and gaming the geopolitical world disorder.

There will be a new system of value capture that content creators need to position for, which is to be seen as a more valuable source of high quality materials than an LLM, serving a specific market, and effectively acquiring attention to owned properties and products.

It will not be pay-per-crawl. Or pay-per-use. It will be an attention game, just like everything in the modern economy.

Attention is the only way you can monetize information.
Show HN: DockerHoster – Self-hosted alternative to Vercel with auto-deployments
by jaequery | 2026-01-21 19:02:30+00:00
I built DockerHoster after getting tired of paying per-project hosting fees. It's a one-command setup that lets you host 20+ websites on a single $12/month VPS with automated GitHub deployments.

The problem: I wanted the simplicity of Vercel's "push to deploy" workflow but needed to run databases, cronjobs, and long-running processes that serverless platforms don't support well.

The solution: DockerHoster uses nginx-proxy to automatically route traffic to Docker containers based on VIRTUAL_HOST. You just copy a GitHub Actions workflow and docker-compose.yml to any project, and it deploys automatically on push.

What makes it different:
- Works with any language/framework (Next.js, Python, Rails, Go, etc.)
- Full Docker ecosystem access (PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, AI vector DBs, etc.)
- No serverless limitations (cronjobs, SQLite, file system access all work)
- Tested running 20+ sites on a 2GB RAM DigitalOcean droplet

I personally prefer Cloudflare for SSL because you need DNS anyway, and it gives you free DDoS protection and WAF. For complex projects with multiple services, this is actually simpler than Vercel since everything lives in one docker-compose.yml file.

It's open source and I don't think hosting yourself can get much simpler than this (besides using platforms like Vercel, but then you don't control your infrastructure).

GitHub: https://github.com/jaequery/dockerhoster

Would love feedback and happy to answer questions!
by TeMPOraL | 2026-01-21 19:02:39+00:00
There are so many things wrong with the points this article repeats, but those are soundbites at this point so I'm not sure one can even argue against them anymore.

Still, for the one about organic data (or "pre-war steel") drying out, it's not a threat to model development at all. People repeating this point don't realize that we already have way more data than we need. We got to where we are by brute-forcing the problem - throwing more data at a simple training process. If new "pristine" data were to stop flowing now, we still a) have decent pre-trained base models, and a dataset that's more than sufficient to train more of them, and b) lots of low-hanging fruits to pick in training approaches, architectures and data curation, that will allow to get more performance out of same base data.

That, and the fact that synthetic data turned out to be quite effective after all, especially in the latter phases of training. No surprise there, for many classes of problems this is how we learn as well. Anyone who has experience studying math for maturity exam / university entry exams knows this: the best way to learn is to solve lots of variations of the same set of problems. These variations are all synthetic data, until recently generated by hand, but even their trivial nature doesn't make them less effective at teaching.
by colinplamondon | 2026-01-21 19:02:57+00:00
It's a human-readable behavioral specification-as-prose.

If the foundational behavioral document is conversational, as this is, then the output from the model mirrors that conversational nature. That is one of the things everyone response to about Claude - it's way more pleasant to work with than ChatGPT.

The Claude behavioral documents are collaborative, respectful, and treat Claude as a pre-existing, real entity with personality, interests, and competence.

Ignore the philosophical questions. Because this is a foundational document for the training process, that extrudes a real-acting entity with personality, interests, and competence.

The more Anthropic treats Claude as a novel entity, the more it behaves like a novel entity. Documentation that treats it as a corpo-eunuch-assistant-bot, like OpenAI does, would revert the behavior to the "AI Assistant" median.

Anthropic's behavioral training is out-of-distribution, and gives Claude the collaborative personality everyone loves in Claude Code.

Additionally, I'm sure they render out crap-tons of evals for every sentence of every paragraph from this, making every sentence effectively testable.

The length, detail, and style defines additional layers of synthetic content that can be used in training, and creating test situations to evaluate the personality for adherence.

It's super clever, and demonstrates a deep understanding of the weirdness of LLMs, and an ability to shape the distribution space of the resulting model.
by themafia | 2026-01-21 19:03:20+00:00
The case in NY was police setup a sting on the subway to catch a serial stabber. Instead of stopping him they stood by and watched him attack several innocent bystanders.

They were sued for incompetence. For the failed sting.

The two police officers who stood and watched him get attacked were ruled to be immune because they had no duty to protect him.

Point being, if police see you getting attacked, they have no duty to /stop/ that from happening. Their only duty is to take a report once they feel safe enough to approach.

If you see two police on the corner and think "this is a safe area" you'd completely be operating on faith in their character.
by TheAmazingRace | 2026-01-21 19:03:29+00:00
It's crazy that we are over 15 years removed from when illumos officially started as a project, shortly after Oracle took over Sun and killed off OpenSolaris.

I was on the group call that made the announcement in 2010 and I'm impressed that illumos is still going strong.

Fun fact, it is the only open-source OS that is proper UNIX (SVR4), not Unix-like, like the BSDs or Linux.
by wpietri | 2026-01-21 19:03:50+00:00
Setting aside the concerning level of anthropomorphizing, I have questions about this part.

> But we think that the way the new constitution is written—with a thorough explanation of our intentions and the reasons behind them—makes it more likely to cultivate good values during training.

Why do they think that? And how much have they tested those theories? I'd find this much more meaningful with some statistics and some example responses before and after.
by ActorNightly | 2026-01-21 19:03:51+00:00
Yours is a good mentality to have because it creates the emotional drive to learn more, so don't lose that. That being said, this isn't really that complicated. Its just a matter of taking enough time to look at the code and understand how its structured. I feel like the thing that differentiates developer skill is pretty much being able to do that, specifically in the process of having the model of the program in your head.
by samtheDamned | 2026-01-21 19:03:52+00:00
I use it. It's not the most practical I'll admit but I like the simplicity (I'm not super experienced with linux server administration so both of them feel similarly foreign, but SmartOS is pretty minimal and has been pretty straightforward to manage), and I won't lie it's a fun gimmick to be running a descendant of SunOS for random household services.
by lbrito | 2026-01-21 19:04:11+00:00
>AI prompts themselves become a giant source of data.

Good point, but can it match the old organic data? I'm skeptical. For one, the LLM environment lacks any truth or consensus mechanism that the old SO-like sites had. 100s of users might have discussed the same/similar technical problem with an LLM, but there's no way (afaik) for the AI to promote good content and demote bad ones, as it (AI) doesn't have the concept of correctness/truth. Also, the old sites were two-sided, with humans asking _and_ answering questions, while they are only on the asking side with AI.
by jcalvinowens | 2026-01-21 19:04:21+00:00
In my experience, consumer grade routers will often happily route packets with rfc1918 destination addresses from the WAN to the LAN interface all day. The "firewall" is only that nobody can get packets with those destination addresses to the home router's WAN interface through the internet. Your ISP can, and in some cases other ISP subscribers on the same L2 segment as your router can.
by mapontosevenths | 2026-01-21 19:04:37+00:00
It's being downvoted because it's a ridiculous premise. "The Elites" are human too. This attitude is nonsensical and child-like. Nobody is out here trying to round up the hippies and force them to live in some kind of pods to be harvested for their nutrients or whatever.

This technology, like every prior technology, will cause some people to lose their jobs and some new jobs to be created. This will annoy people who have to learn new skill instead of coasting until retirement as they planned.

It is no different than the buggy whip manufacturers being annoyed at Henry Ford. They were right that it was bad for their industry, but wrong about it being the death of... well all the million things they claimed it would be the death of.
by mmooss | 2026-01-21 19:04:39+00:00
(Hi mods - Some feedback would be helpful. I don't think I've done anything problematic; I haven't heard from you guys. I certainly don't mean to cause problems if I have; I think my comments are mostly substantive and within HN norms, but am I missing something?

Now my top-level comments, including this one, start in the middle of the page and drop further from there, sometimes immediately, which inhibits my ability to interact with others on HN - the reason I'm here, of course. For somewhat objective comparison, when I respond to someone else's comment, I get much more interaction and not just from the parent commenter. That's the main issue; other symptoms (not significant but maybe indicating the problem) are that my 'flags' and 'vouches' are less effective - the latter especially used to have immediate effect, and I was rate limited the other day but not posting very quickly at all - maybe a few in the past hour.

HN is great and I'd like to participate and contribute more. Thanks!)
by Dagger2 | 2026-01-21 19:04:56+00:00
It's not isomorphic to a firewall, because it doesn't have default-deny semantics for incoming connections.

Think about it for a second. These NAT implementations change the apparent source IP of your outbound connections. How does that block inbound connections? Changing the IP isn't blocking, and outbound connections are the wrong ones.

If a connection comes into your router with a dest IP set to one of your LAN machines, no amount of changing the IPs on your outbound connections will block it.
by cthalupa | 2026-01-21 19:04:57+00:00
This is an article that I agreed with more reading the headline than I did when I finished reading the article itself.

Stack Overflow peaked in 2014 before beginning it's downward decline. How is that at all related to GenAI? GPT4 is when we really started seeing these things get used to replace SO, etc., and that would be early 2023 - and indeed the drop gets worse there - but after the COVID era spike, SO was already crashing hard.

Tailwind's business model was providing a component library built on top of their framework. It's a business model that relies on the framework being good enough for people to want to use it to begin with, but being bad enough that they'd rather pay for the component library than build it themselves. The more comfortable it is to use, the more productive it is, the worse the value proposition is for the premium upsell. Even other "open core" business models don't have this inherent dichotomy, much less open source on the whole, so it's really weird to try and extrapolate this out.

The thing is, people turn to LLMs to solve problems and answer questions. If they can't turn to the LLM to solve that problem or answer that question, they'll either turn elsewhere, in which case there is still a market for that book or blog post, or they'll drop the problem and question and move on. And if they were willing to drop the problem or question and move on without investigating post-LLM, were they ever invested enough to buy your book, or check more than the first couple of results on google?
by ValdikSS | 2026-01-21 19:04:58+00:00
On ARM, you control the whole boot process on many SoCs, and can make your own bespoke secure/trusted/measured boot chain, starting from bootrom to the very latest boot stages (given that your SoC manufacturer has root of trust and all the documentation on how to use it), without TPM.

You more or less can't do that on x86, and have to rely on existing proprietary code facilities to implement measured boot using TPM (as the only method), for which you can implement trusted boot, using TPM and all the previous measures proprietary code made to it.
by LeFantome | 2026-01-21 19:05:05+00:00
Holy swerving goal-posts Batman.

Ok fine. Here is a link to a completely open design:

https://github.com/tenstorrent/riscv-ocelot

And here is a high-performance evolution of it that you can license. They would be happy to take your check today.
https://tenstorrent.com/ip/risc-v-cpu

Silicon will be available in a few months.

And just for you, it is not Chinese.