MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by retired | 2026-01-27 19:37:54+00:00
I left mainly because of housing prices, the difficulty of being a freelancer, the 49.5% income tax after €78k, the 36% unrealized capital gains tax and just everything in life like supermarkets or public transport being so much more expensive than other European countries.

I took a big pay cut moving to Southern Europe, but post-tax I earn the same and everything is just so much cheaper. I honestly have a significant better life here. Good weather too.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-27 19:38:16+00:00
I think its not Claude code per se itself but rather the (Opus 4.5 model?) or something in an agentic workflow.

I tried a website which offered the Opus model in their agentic workflow & I felt something different too I guess.

Currently trying out Kimi code (using their recent kimi 2.5) for the first time buying any AI product because got it for like 1.49$ per month. It does feel a bit less powerful than claude code but I feel like monetarily its worth it.

Y'know you have to like bargain with an AI model to reduce its pricing which I just felt really curious about. The psychology behind it feels fascinating because I think even as a frugal person, I already felt invested enough in the model and that became my sunk cost fallacy

Shame for me personally because they use it as a hook to get people using their tool and then charge next month 19$ (I mean really Cheaper than claude code for the most part but still comparative to 1.49$)
by julianozen | 2026-01-27 19:38:20+00:00
Amazon Fresh had no reason to exist. They closed down a great Whole Foods near me and replaced it with a store with minimal changes to safeway/albertsons. Heavy carts for automatic scanning that barely saved time at checkout.

I will miss the grab and go tech in the Amazon stores. I was hoping they would successfully manage to sell that to other stores and make the tech wide spread in bodegas, gas stations and 711s
by dylan604 | 2026-01-27 19:38:48+00:00
This sounds not too dissimilar to the release the POC to prod mentality.

There are times where you obviously need to do the thing to understand the thing to see the process of doing the thing. This allows for breaking the process down into better steps. Just writing code to do things you think is doing thing but prove not to do the thing when actually doing the thing is common.
by FilosofumRex | 2026-01-27 19:39:41+00:00
> Each program has a fixed authorization period (for example, the 2003–2016 framework for up to 9 billion USD, with about 3.8 billion remaining by the last extension

you mean, the US should repeat 1953 coup with the hope the outcome would be different. Communists and most military dictators in modern history have been secular...
by getcrunk | 2026-01-27 19:39:50+00:00
systemd solved/improved a bunch of things for linux, but now the plan seems to be to replace package management with image based whole dist a/b swaps. and to have signed unified kernel images.

this basically will remove or significantly encumber user control over their system, such that any modification will make you loose your "signed" status and ... boom! goodbye accessing the internet without an id

pottering recently works for Microsoft, they want to turn linux into an appliance just like windows, no longer a general purpose os. the transition is still far from over on windows, but look at android and how the google play services dependency/choke-hold is

im sure ill get many down votes, but despite some hyperbole this is the trajectory
by NilMostChill | 2026-01-27 19:39:54+00:00
TL;DR;

If it's working for you, great, but presenting it like it's a general direct replacement for development teams is disingenuous.

---

> Looks like we just have different expectations: i don't want to micromanage my coding agents any more than i micromanage the developers i work with as a product manager. If the output does what it is supposed to do, and the software is maintainable and extendable by following certain best practices, i'm happy. And i expect that goes for most business people.

None of what i said implied any expectations of the process of using the tools, but if you've found something that works for you that's good.

On the subject of maintainability and extension, that is usually bound to the level of complexity of the project and the increase in requirements is not generally linear.

I agree, many business people would love what you've described, very few are getting it.

> And in practice i have more control with a coding agent than with developers as i can iterate over ideas quickly: "build this idea", "no change this", "remove this and replace it with this". Within an hour you can quickly iterate an idea into something that works well. With developers this would have taken days if not more. And they would've complained i need to better prepare my requirements.

Up to a point, yes.

If your application of this methodology works well enough before you hit the limitations of the tooling, that's great.

There is , however, a threshold of complexity where this starts to break down, this threshold can be mitigated somewhat with experience and a better understanding on how to utilise the tooling, but it still exists (currently).

Once you reach this threshold the approaches you are talking about start to work less effectively and even actively hinder progress.

There are techniques and approaches to software development that can further push this threshold out, but then you're getting into the territory of having to know enough to be able to instruct the LLM to use these approaches.
by moduspol | 2026-01-27 19:40:38+00:00
I disagree--we're all paying for it, so it should be justified regardless.

And I don't need an optimal number. But the common refrain is essentially that more is always better, and fewer means we're losing our standing in the world. Always.

Maybe keeping a lot of them but shedding some percentage is actually more optimal. But I'm open to being wrong. That's why I'm asking for metrics.
by mattmaroon | 2026-01-27 19:41:09+00:00
The unexpected part though, is that I don’t think this is causing people to actually believe that WD-40 is not a lubricant. It’s causing them to post that perhaps.

And it seems like such a strange thing to become emotionally attached to. But these people will sooner die then admit the thing that says it is a lubricant is a lubricant.
by idop | 2026-01-27 19:41:29+00:00
It is the biggest con since Tesla FSD. Countless pictures from the civil war in Syria are passed off as if they were from Gaza. Countless staged photos and videos. Countless articles repeating Hamas claims with pictures whose captions have nothing to do with what's actually in the picture. Every stupid thing someone said gets butchered to fit Hamas narrative. Your ridiculous Wikipedia article is no different, including that quote some "Israeli official" said a day or two after the October 7 attacks. Not only was he referring to Hamas, it didn't even happen. The amount of food that entered the Gaza Strip during the war is gargantuan[1].

Don't get me wrong, people are definitely suffering, but when there are so many lies, it's hard to tell what's true, and when you spend your entire life in bomb shelters and see your friends and family get murdered, it's even harder to care.

Look at the UN. You've got that Francesca Albanese woman, who's supposed to be an "expert on human rights". Even she spread the obvious lie that "Israel killed more journalists in Gaza than both world wars combined", a ludicrous claim anybody with half a brain knows is ludicrous. Nobody knows how many journalists died in the two world wars (nobody knows how many died in Gaza while we're at it), and even her source for that claim says so ("No one knows how many reporters have been killed doing their jobs... Available counts are fragmentary and deaths of non-Western journalists, especially prior to the 1990s, are largely undocumented.").

But she spread the lie anyway, and the media helped her spread it more. Why? Why would an intelligent UN official spread such a lie? Why was the Wikipedia article about Zionism edited to say that "Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible", with the only "sources" cited for that insane, false claim being anti-Israel texts from the past decade only?

Not everything about the war is a lie, but much of it is.

[1] https://gaza-aid-data.gov.il/mainhome/
by bayindirh | 2026-01-27 19:41:34+00:00
Hi Daan,

Thanks for the answer. Let me ask you something close with a more blunt angle:

Considering most of the tech is already present and shipping in the current systemd, what prevents our systems to become a immutable monolith like macOS or current Android with the flick of a switch?

Or a more grave scenario: What prevents Microsoft from mandating removal of enrollment permissions for user keychains and Secure Boot toggle, hence every Linux distribution has to go through Microsoft's blessing to be bootable?
by ssl-3 | 2026-01-27 19:41:34+00:00
It's a 4-minute drive for me to get from my present house to the nearest grocery store (a Kroger of decent size).

I don't plan much for this journey. I don't bundle up on clothes or lace on a pair of stout boots first. I just kind of set forth (in my loafers) and drive over there -- even as everything is covered in snow, muck, and it it is 2 degrees (F) outside.

I went there last night for two tomatoes, a head of lettuce, and some cheese because those were the ingredients I was missing to make some tacos last night. While I was there, I remembered that I was running out of green tea at home and picked some of that up. I also grabbed a box of Barilla pasta because I walked by a display of it where it was on sale for 99 cents (oh noes they successfully upsold me on pantry supplies!).

There was no great investment of time or planning needed to accomplish this. I just went to the store for some odds and ends, and that was that. I might go back (or hit some other store) on my way home from work this evening -- since you mentioned apples, I kind of want one. (And I might buy exactly 1 apple. I can do that. It's Kroger, not Costco.)

I need to have the car anyway because it is necessary for me to own one in order to make money to stay alive in my environment. As long as this necessity remains, I might as well also use it for other things.

(I looked at some other addresses I've lived at, and their drive time to the local grocery store, on Google Maps. Despite "distance to grocery store" having not ever been on my radar at all when selecting a place to live, most of the places I've lived were a reported 2 minute drive to the local supermarket. The furthest was just 5 minutes out. I was pretty surprised by this at first, but looking back: That's actually a pretty fair estimate.)
by jodrellblank | 2026-01-27 19:41:35+00:00
> "if I'm going to kill myself by age 30-35?"

Maybe you will. But probably whatever stopped you from doing it today and made you push it away for years will feel the same tomorrow, the same next year and at age 30 and 35, saying "if I'm going to kill myself by 40-45" and then "by 50-55".

Not always and not everyone, people do suicide, but consider there's 37 million people in poverty in the USA, 18 million with cancer, and a lot more with shit lives in various ways - chronic diseases, disabilities, lost loves, hopeless futures, victims of horrors - and out of that vast amount of misery the USA has "only" 50,000 suicides annually. Much less than I might guess from the numbers. Bodies are 4 billion years of survival machines and they don't quit easily and that includes mental trickery as well as physical resilience[1].

I thought I would commit suicide as a teen. I planned it and tried in my teens and twenties. I thought I would force it in my thirties. Did "it get better"? No not really, mildly worse in several ways. Is the world better for me staying around? No, not really. Did I discover a hope for a brighter future? Maybe[2] but not a strong one. Maybe I'm discovering a bit more selfishness and less obligation to do what other people demand.

The years are going by faster now and "the rest of my life" doesn't seem so long. Interesting ideas are still interesting, books are still readable, work is still available, death is coming whether we hurry it or fight it.

> "What's the point of having a bit of money when I'm old, can barely leave the house"

Pay for your healthcare so you can still leave the house, or pay for home help if you can't.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4q1dgn_C0AU - TED talk - The surprising science of happiness | Prof. Dan Gilbert, 2004

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
by NoImmatureAdHom | 2026-01-27 19:41:57+00:00
It's not totally a "decision" on the part of the Americans to use a lot of wood in construction. It's just that America has tons of space, including space useful for growing Douglas Fir and Southern Yellow Pine, which then can be turned in to 2x4s and other construction lumber.

Most of Europe long ago exhausted easily accessible natural forest resources, and where it's not densely populated tends to prefer using land to do other stuff (like grow food). Hence, stone and concrete and similar materials in European construction.
Show HN: Veto – Intercept dangerous commands before AI executes them
by runkids | 2026-01-27 19:41:59+00:00
Hey HN,

With tools like Moltbot(https://clawd.bot/) gaining traction, I got thinking about AI agents executing shell commands with full permissions by default.

I built veto to add a safety layer:

1.Intercepts commands before execution

2.Risk-based authentication (Touch ID for critical, simple confirm for low)

3.Custom rules for project-specific patterns

4.Full audit trail

Currently supports Claude Code (via hooks). Looking into Moltbot integration but it doesn't expose hooks yet — if anyone has ideas, I'm all ears.

Feedback welcome.

https://github.com/runkids/veto
by stopachka | 2026-01-27 19:42:03+00:00
Is there a startup that takes models like this, and effectively gives you a secure setup, where you have (a) a mobile app that (b) talks to some giant machine that only you have access too.

If a 10K computer could run this, it may be worth it to have a "fully on prem" version of ChatGPT running for you.
by ForHackernews | 2026-01-27 19:42:14+00:00
https://www.nature.com/nature-index/news/nature-index-resear...

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Edit: Oh, that's old. In 2024 Chinese institutions only made up 7 of the top 10 most productive research centers but in 2025 they are account for 8/10: https://www.natureasia.com/en/info/press-releases/detail/911...
by dijksterhuis | 2026-01-27 19:42:16+00:00
i personally find presenting a black and white "it's either one way or the other" perspective to be problematic.

yes, materialism and cause and effect etc. etc. agreed on that. it is a thing. interestingly though, as people sit static and just work on becoming more aware of that feedback loop you mentioned it can lead to people trying to not be so much of an arsehole -- through refraining from doing a thing -- because they can see their part in causing things to happen in the world. and that's not just limited to immediate surroundings. i know that i affect everything with every action i do (or do not do).

idealism becomes useful at that point. it can provide people with a set of loose guidelines on how to "not be an arsehole" aka how to not affect everything in a way that's going to cause problems.

the problems come when people do idealism without being aware of that materialistic feedback loop. they're usually doing it out of rule based dogma based on tribalism. sometimes it's "we're better than you are" or sometimes it's "outsiders are not welcome".

caveat: this is all just my personal experience, but i think it would scale if enough people became aware that their actions matter and have profound consequences, so try to not be an arsehole to anyone today
by geminigemino | 2026-01-27 19:42:30+00:00
Thanks, really appreciate that feedback.

Totally agree on hover help. Only a few parameters have it now, but adding tooltips across the board is on my list so it’s easier to explore while it runs.

You can also use the narrate function to make a bit more sense of it.

On long-term behavior: I’ve run hundreds of long sims, many over a million ticks, and there isn’t one stable end state, sometimes I end up with one lineage of giants but even they got taken over or go extinct. I usually see eras in size, traits, and cognition, with different dominant lineages over time. Sometimes big organisms appear quickly, sometimes it takes hours, and some worlds crash early.

I also agree a short narrative layer would help explain what’s going on. Some of the underlying assumptions are described here if you’re curious: https://soupof.life/concepts
by labrador | 2026-01-27 19:42:41+00:00
Elon Musk doesn't take any responsibility for this. It's our fault.

"Anyone using or prompting Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content."
- Elon Musk

Grok immersed in a deepfake nudes scandal: Where does Australia stand?

https://lsj.com.au/articles/grok-immersed-in-a-deepfake-nude...
by retired | 2026-01-27 19:42:50+00:00
Yes.

Say you have €80k in investments. Markets go up, in one year time your investments are worth €90k. You did not sell.

That means you had €10k in unrealized capital gains. Subtract the €1800 per person threshold. €8200, 36% tax is €2952 tax to be paid at the start of the year.

Losses give you tax credits redeemable against future capital gains (not against income tax from employment)
by tmp10423288442 | 2026-01-27 19:42:56+00:00
> public funding is what, historically, generates the big breakthroughs

Without an opinion on the rest of this, public funding in the US doesn't produce big breakthroughs from scientists employed by the government, but rather by funding university research.

It appears that, after the administration canceling a significant proportion of grants in 2025, that science funding has largely been maintained or increased from pre-2025 levels for 2026, although how the 2026 funding gets spent, and whether it is all spent, is an open question.
by biophysboy | 2026-01-27 19:43:15+00:00
One metric you could use is how often publications are mentioned by patents, and how often those patents lead to economic value. By this metric, it is valuable.

The number of PhDs we have is currently too many given the amount of money we have for project grants. But there is no evidence that the money we allocate to research is too large. If anything, you could argue the opposite.

I would be delighted if the private market funded basic research - the seed ideas that lead to patents.
by tombert | 2026-01-27 19:43:22+00:00
Sure, it just annoys me that people seem to have amnesia with all the bullshit associated with desktop Windows, I guess because they’re used to it.

The recent updates breaking Notepad and Calculator and Outlook and the Shutdown feature are rare in that they have gotten press, but there are hundreds of other bits of bullshit associated with Windows, like the fact that Windows Update just routinely breaks your computer and the Windows recovery and repair tools do not work, and as far as I can tell they have never worked for anyone.

Linux has its share of bullshit, but at least the backup and recovery tools actually work.

I haven’t had an issue with hibernate in a few years on the more normy-friendly distros like Mint or Ubuntu or Suse, but I acknowledge that some people still do. I still don’t accept that it’s less ready that desktop Windows.
by TheGRS | 2026-01-27 19:43:24+00:00
I do feel a big mood shift after late November. I switched to using Cursor and Gemini primarily and it was big change in my ability to get my ideas into code effectively. The Cursor interface for one got to a place that I really like and enjoy using, but its probably more that the results from the agents themselves are less frustrating. I can deal with the output more now.

I'm still a little iffy on the agent swarm idea. I think I will need to see it in action in an interface that works for me. To me it feels like we are anthropomorphizing agents too much, and that results in this idea that we can put agents into roles and them combine them into useful teams. I can't help seeing all agents as the same automatons and I have trouble understanding why giving an agent with different guideliens to follow, and then having them follow along another agent would give me better results than just fixing the context in the first place. Either that or just working more on the code pipeline to spot issues early on - all the stuff we already test for.
by mwcampbell | 2026-01-27 19:43:55+00:00
Impressive work.

I wonder if you've looked into what it would take to implement accessibility while maintaining your no-Rust-dependencies rule. On Windows and macOS, it's straightforward enough to implement UI Automation and the Cocoa NSAccessibility protocols respectively. On Unix/X11, as I see it, your options are:

1. Implement AT-SPI with a new from-scratch D-Bus implementation.

2. Implement AT-SPI with one of the D-Bus C libraries (GLib, libdbus, or sdbus).

3. Use GTK, or maybe Qt.
by bitshiftfaced | 2026-01-27 19:43:56+00:00
From the article:

"Science’s analysis found that reductions in force, or RIFs, accounted for relatively few departures in 2025. Only at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where 16% of the 519 STEM Ph.D.s who left last year got pink RIF slips, did the percentage exceed 6%, and some agencies reported no STEM Ph.D. RIFs in 2025."
by pydry | 2026-01-27 19:44:05+00:00
Al Jazeera is probably a little skeptical of numbers sourced from anonymous tip offs that are clearly being used as a pretext for military action.

WMD evidence published in western newspapers arrived in our newspapers in exactly the same way.

By contrast, the numbers provided by the "Hamas run Gaza health ministry" turned out to be accurate despite the extreme skepticism professed by the western media.
by chaps | 2026-01-27 19:44:53+00:00
"In every way"

About ten years ago I took a three day cross-country Amtrak trip where I wanted to work on some data analysis that used mysql for its backend. It was a great venue for that sort of work because the lack of train-internet was wonderful to keep me focused. The data I was working with was about 20GB of parking ticket data. The data took a while to process over SQL which gave me the chance to check out the world unfolding outside of the train.

At some point, mysql (well, mariadb) got into a weird state after an unclean shutdown that put itself into recovery mode where upon startup it had to do some disk-intensive cleanup. Thing is -- systemd has a default setting (that's not readily documented, nor sufficiently described in its logs when the behavior happens) that halts the service startup after 30 seconds to try again. On loop.

My troubleshooting attempts were unsuccessful. And since I deleted the original csv files to save disk space, I wasn't able to even poke at the CSV files through python or whatnot.

So instead of doing the analysis I wanted to do on the train, I had to wait until I got to the end of the line to fix it. Sure enough, it was some default 30s timeout that's not explicitly mentioned nor commented out like many services do.

So, saying that things are "much better in every way" really falls on deaf ears and is reminiscent of the systemd devs' dismissive/arrogant behavior that many folk are frustrated about.
by TheAlchemist | 2026-01-27 19:44:54+00:00
As a fellow Eastern European of similar age, I suddenly feel quite nostalgic.

I really wonder how my life would be different if someone told be that the US, which for me was as close to a paradise as it gets, will go down the same road in the future - I think it would shatter quite a lot of my dreams of a better life.

US is nowhere near as bad as it was on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, but it's on a fast track to it for sure.