MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 3D30497420 | 2026-01-22 12:14:29+00:00
> the time zones are killer, and this can't be ignored

100% agree, especially when there is minimal overlap during normal office hours. I was managing a dev team in India from the US and it was a real challenge. The company ended up moving team to the US, relocating most of my team. Despite all the people being the same, management became much easier.

Since then I've done US and EU, and EU and IN, and those have all worked fine because we had sufficient overlap during business hours.
by MarginalGainz | 2026-01-22 12:14:36+00:00
This ban isn't about 'fairness' or bot protection; it's about protecting the Impression Funnel.

Marketplaces like eBay are designed to monetize 'Wandering Attention'—sponsored listings, 'customers also bought', and sidebar ads.

An AI Agent represents 'Laser Focused Attention'. It executes a transaction with zero wandering. It effectively turns the marketplace into a commoditized backend database / dumb pipe.

From a Growth/Unit Economics perspective, an AI Agent is a nightmare customer. It has zero probability of impulse buying and generates zero ad revenue. They are banning them to save their business model, not their inventory.
by gitonthescene | 2026-01-22 12:16:00+00:00
In my experience code reviews are generally cursory and the emphasis on “readability” is more about a culture that seeks to treat programmers as fungible. Also complaints about APL’s lack of readability are never about its lack of structure. So I took “readability” to mean something else as should be clear from my previous comment. Is your complaint about its lack of structure? If so would you mind elaborating?
by CrzyLngPwd | 2026-01-22 12:16:16+00:00
Every site and every service is going to be swamped with AI-generated slop and will have to deal with it by banning it, and then detecting and deleting it.

This was entirely predictable. When you give everyone the ability to be good at something with no effort, everyone is going to do it (and think they are the first).

My partner recently bought a book from Amazon, and when it arrived, I looked at the cover, flicked through it, and said it was AI slop. She complained to Amazon, and they just refunded her, no questions asked, and the book went in the fire.
by hypeatei | 2026-01-22 12:16:24+00:00
That's sort of the whole point of this thought exercise, no? If shame worked in an environment with anonymous/pseudonymous users, then we wouldn't be here. The only people you stand to harm are the ones who attach their real identities to their profile (and they're more likely to be good faith IMO)

Besides, I've seen plenty of profiles here on HN who advertise their real name and espouse (in my view) awful takes that would most likely not fly in real life. I'd recommend reading this article[0] for an example of when people, with their real names exposed, can still cause a shitstorm of misunderstanding.

0: https://lwn.net/Articles/973782/
by vivzkestrel | 2026-01-22 12:16:29+00:00
- I notice a lot of stuff in github issues all the time

- For example, there is this +1 comment pasted like 500 times that I have seen a lot over issues

- Cant we have a github regex bot of sorts ^(\W+)?\+(\W+)?1(\W+)?$ that removes all such comments? or let the author of the repo control what kind of regex based stuff to remove?

- I know regex kind of sounds old fashioned in the age of LLMs but it is kinda simple to manage and doesnt require crazy infra to run
by Jamesbeam | 2026-01-22 12:16:31+00:00
Currently, building a ghost gun is merely a matter of loading the right files into the appropriate software, purchasing the necessary materials, and beginning the printing process. The assembly instructions are as straightforward as building a Lego set.

Do we really want that?

Every day, people are actually murdered with these guns.

While they may not be more dangerous than a 1911 made in the jungles of the Philippines, acquiring a traditional firearm requires engaging with real people, which gives law enforcement a better chance to intercept someone before they can commit acts of violence with an illegal firearm.

What this bill does is not make it impossible to build a firearm with the available technology, instead, it raises the entry point beyond what the average American can navigate.

Let's be honest. Many of the individuals printing guns aren't doing it out of curiosity but to use them criminally. These individuals typically have a 30-second TikTok attention span, minimal resilience to failure, and little to no physical skills. Most of them have likely already been incarcerated and are therefore prohibited from legally purchasing firearms.

By creating a database of unique hashes for the publicly accessible printing files, we would deny about 95% of those individuals access to easily obtainable illegal firearms.

This list can be updated by authorities whenever someone modifies a public file needed to print a firearm, and with online access, similar to many normal printers, it could even alert law enforcement when someone tries to print these files.

This approach enhances safety for everyone, as guns, legal or not, shouldn't be in the hands of irresponsible individuals. Regardless of your views on firearm possession, I believe we can all agree on that point.

If you possess the skills to modify those files to make them printable, you must be smart enough to recognize that printing a gun, unless it’s purely as a project to build and then destroy for the sake of personal achievement, is inherently a foolish idea.

Additionally, the Liberator design had a singular purpose, it was inspired by French resistance fighters who needed just one bullet to take out Nazis and then acquire their well-functioning, fully loaded submachine guns.

This allowed them to kill more Nazis and obtain more weapons for their resistance efforts.

The U.S. is not currently under Nazi occupation, and law enforcement already faces significant challenges. They shouldn't have to worry about every individual they encounter potentially possessing an untraceable firearm, which may even resist fingerprint identification.

Society owes it to those risking their lives daily to keep the community safe. A world in which anyone can press a button and create their own unregulated, untraceable firearm is not safe for any of us.
by doublerabbit | 2026-01-22 12:16:50+00:00
The UK is a joke and this is still a joke. The average person here are not pleased with the powers of Trump.

Signing such would be a political suicide, not that Labour has gained any favors by being power & personally, a middle finger to Tony Blair, War Criminal dickhead. I'm sure I will have Ofcom at my door for that statement.
by theshrike79 | 2026-01-22 12:17:09+00:00
I'm currently assisting three very non-programmer people in-house who did just this.

Their problem is solved, now it's up to me to update the internal guidelines and agent instructions so that the code is at least semi-decent.

None of these are going to "production", they all live on local company controlled laptops and only one of them might access an external API automatically later this spring.

But each of them takes hours of manual work and does it in minutes.
by jychang | 2026-01-22 12:17:23+00:00
Then can we permaban people who pretend to be experts in topics they have no clue in? It's even more disrespectful of people who HAVE spent time learning the material.

You want good discussion? Jesus, I had to wade through that slop which was worse than AI slop.

He would have been fine if he just argued a typical moral anti-realism perspective "actually morality is not needed, and the reason is there's no such thing as truly evil", as that's debatable true in philosophy. I would have been fine with that... but THEN HE LITERALLY SHOOTS HIS OWN ARGUMENT IN THE FACE "but sacrificing kids is actually bad" (as truth-apt), and smugly declares shooting his own argument in the face as winning. I can't even. Except it wasn't a clean anti morality argument in the first place, so I didn't assume as much, except then every time he was clearly losing he retracted back into an anti moral-realism perspective.

Here's chatgpt's translation into dev speak, since I am an engineer, but I don't think I need to write this myself:

------

It’s like a developer insisting, with total confidence, that their system is “provably safe and robust”… and then, the moment they’re challenged, they:

turn off all error handling (try/catch removed because “exceptions are for cowards”),

add assert(false) in the critical path “to prove no one should reach here,”

hardcode if (prod) return true; to bypass the very check they were defending,

ship it, watch it crash instantly,

and declare victory because “the crash shows how seriously we take safety.”

In other words: they didn’t lose the argument because the idea was wrong—they lost because they disabled their own argument’s safety rails and then bragged about the wreck as a feature.

-----

WTF am I supposed to do there?

I can see why philosophers drink.
by lproven | 2026-01-22 12:18:07+00:00
> Windows 95 on a 386 CPU with enough RAM was alright.

I benchmarked it for PC Pro Magazine when it came out.

We had to borrow a 4MB 386SX from a friend of the editor's, as we had nothing that low-end left in the labs.

In our standard benchmarks, which used MS Word, MS Excel, PowerPoint, Illustrator, Photoshop, WinZip, and a few other real apps, Win95 1.0, not 95A or OSR2, was measurable faster than Windows for Workgroups 3.11 on MS-DOS 6.22, hand-optimised.

When it needed the RAM, 95 could shrink the disk cache to essentially nothing. (Maybe 4 kB or something.) Win3 could not do that.

It was SLOW but under heavy load it was quicker than Win3 on the lowest-end supported hardware.

Under light load, Win3 was quicker, but Win95 scaled down very impressively indeed.
by CuriouslyC | 2026-01-22 12:18:30+00:00
Brains are adaptive. We're not getting dumber, we're just adapting to a new environment. Just because they're less fit for other environments doesn't make it worse.

As for the productivity paradox, this discounts the reality that we wouldn't even be able to scale the institutions we're scaling without the tech. Whether that scaling is a good thing is debatable.
by jack_pp | 2026-01-22 12:18:46+00:00
If you already are an engineer it frees you up to be an architect.

If you aren't, then sure you'll be a PM with a lackluster team of engineers.

LLMs can engineer small well defined functions / scripts rather well in my experience. Of course it helps to be able to understand what it outputs and prod it to engineer it just the way you want it. Still faster than me writing it from scratch, most of the time. And even if it's the same time as me doing it from scratch it feels easier so I can do more without getting tired.
Founding Engineer / Product Architect (AI and User Journey Focus)
by JobrosDad | 2026-01-22 12:19:04+00:00
Budget: $7k - $9k (MVP Phase)
Location: Remote US Timezone Preferred
Type: Contract-to-Partner
The Mission
We are a stealth startup disrupting a massive high-stakes financial milestone. We are not building a "Calculator" or a "Dashboard." We are building an AI-Orchestrated Ecosystem that guides users through complex, anxiety-inducing financial decisions.

The Role
I am looking for a "Unicorn" Developer who understands Human Psychology as well as they understand Code.
• The Anti-Persona: I do not want an agency. I do not want a "task-taker" who builds exactly what is asked without understanding the why.
• The Persona: You are an experienced builder who is obsessed with Flow. You understand that a "Form" is boring, but a "Guided Journey" is engaging. You know how to take complex financial data and feed it to a user in digestible, bite-sized pieces (Progressive Disclosure).

The Culture

I am looking for a teammate, not just a vendor.
• You love what you do. You are the type of person who sends a message at night because you had a "lightbulb moment" and genuinely want to solve the puzzle—not because you feel obligated.
• We brainstorm together. I bring the vision and the user psychology; you bring the technical artistry to bring it to life.

The Tech Stack & Skills

You must have deep experience in:
• AI-Driven Personalization: Wiring LLMs to dynamic front-ends (creating an experience that feels alive).
• Conditional Logic Flows: Building journeys that branch based on user input (Decision Trees).
• Progressive Disclosure: Hiding complexity until the user is ready for it.
• Next.js / Modern Stack: Fast, responsive, mobile-first.

To Apply: [Link / Email]

Subject Line: I speak Human and Code

Do not send a generic cover letter.

Orchestration" is new, you might not have a perfect portfolio example. That is fine. Do ONE of the following:

The Show Me Option: Send a link to a project where you turned a complex process into a smooth, guided journey. Tell me specifically what logic you built.

The Voice Walkthrough Option: Record a 2-minute Loom video (Screen share only—no face cam required).

The Prompt: Pull up a piece of code, a diagram, or a past project on your screen. Walk me through how you handled a complex user decision. How did you make it feel simple for the user?

Why: I want to hear how you think about user problems.
by CjHuber | 2026-01-22 12:19:25+00:00
I don't like the way it is handled. Imagine Excel actively prompting you with a pop up every time you open a sheet: "Do you trust the authors of this file? If not you will loose out on cool features and the sheet runs in restricted mode"

No it doesn't because restricted mode without Macros is the default and not framed like something bad or loosing out on all of those nice features,
by Akronymus | 2026-01-22 12:19:39+00:00
> AI has the potential to do something similar for cognition. It's not very good at it yet, but externalised cognition has the potential to be transformative in ways we can't imagine - in the same way Socrates couldn't imagine Hacker News.

Wouldnt the endgame of externalized cognition be that humans essentially become cogs in the machine?
by freakynit | 2026-01-22 12:19:42+00:00
Avoid middlemen in India.. sorry for the word, but they are the biggest leechers. We hate them too here.

India is filled with small one-room service-based companies(the middlemens') that hire interns, for ZERO pay, make them work 12-14 hour days under extremely "humiliating" conditions and then when it comes to giving them internship completion certificate, they demand huge sums of money just to release them... think about it.

As for how you are gonna do without the middlemen, I dont have the anwer yet... ideas are welcome.
by yakshaving_jgt | 2026-01-22 12:19:49+00:00
I'm… not really sure what point you're trying to make.

The russian soldier's motivation is manufactured by the putin regime and its incredibly effective multi-generational propaganda machine.

The same propagandists who openly call for the rape, torture, and death of Ukrainian civilians today were not so long ago saying that invading Ukraine would be an insane idea.

You know russian propagandists used to love Zelensky, right?
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-22 12:20:08+00:00
> GitHub is under Microsoft’s AI division.

Finally an explanation to why GitHub suddenly have way more bugs than usual for the last months (year even?), and seemingly whole UX flows that no longer work.

I don't understand how it happens, do developers not at least load the pages their changes presumable affects? Or is the developers doing 100% vibe-coding for production code? Don't get me wrong, I use LLMs for development too, but not so I can sacrifice quality, that wouldn't make much sense.
by greggoB | 2026-01-22 12:20:54+00:00
I struggle to see how you're linking your complaint about the wording of the title to your issue with the obviousness of the result - these seem like two completely independent thought processes.

Also, re cognitive debt being stolen: I'm pretty sure this is actually a modification of sleep debt, which would be a medical/biological term [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_debt
by spaceman_2020 | 2026-01-22 12:21:22+00:00
How are you completely disregarding the data integrity and privacy aspects of rolling your own tools?

I vibecode an app that only I use and store data locally. That means my data never leaves my device, I never have to share my email with anyone, never have to enter my credit card info anywhere

You buy SaaS and you have to then login, share credit card info, and have your data stored in the cloud somewhere with godknows what security practices

That’s worth more than the cost of any tokens
Show HN: YouTube Notetaker. Right-click to add timestamped notes on videos
by kwnaidoo | 2026-01-22 12:21:53+00:00
Free Chrome extension! This tool makes learning with YouTube easier: simply right-click at any point in a YouTube video to leave a note. You can later return to the video and jump straight to the exact timestamp where the note was created, and keep a summary of all notes created across multiple YouTube videos.
by ktpsns | 2026-01-22 12:22:20+00:00
Nice article. Some passages have LLM smells (short sentences. No em dash but smells of em dashes). I wonder whether this comes from having an LLM improve the English formulation/typos/etc. I don't like the way how LLMs typically write. One can steer it to certain degree with a longer prompt, that's my impression.
by boomlinde | 2026-01-22 12:22:21+00:00
I would rather solve file access at an entirely different level. A filesystem is a reasonable, editor-agnostic abstraction for this, and I can use sshfs to mount a remote directory over SSH in a way that's invisible to whatever tools I prefer to use to edit the files.

If you have a jumphost chain, you can configure that in the SSH config.

I don't know what a devcontainer is exactly, but if it's a container in the sense that it runs a Linux development system, I would investigate whether that, too, could easily be set up for access via SSH or mounted locally through some other mechanism.
by bossyTeacher | 2026-01-22 12:22:47+00:00
> Asking whether VB6 was out of work is the wrong question.

Asking whether you would like to work with a cowboy coded VB6 for low pay is a better one. The companies that have less cowboy coded apps are the companies everyone wants to work at. The more companies with cowboy coded apps, the harder it gets to get a job at a company with minimal cowboys imo.

VB6 apps haven't disappeared anymore than Cobol systems have.

"Third possibility negates the first two." It doesn't. Those 3 things don't need to all happen. Any of them alone is enough to significantly worsen the pay or quality of life of your average dev. And the 3 things don't even need to happen at the same time anyway.
by ben_w | 2026-01-22 12:22:51+00:00
I would say the next country is likely much sooner than 2050, because 24 years is longer than the timelines for China, for India and Pakistan given when they became independent even assuming they started on that immediately, I think for Israel but it's hard to be sure given the secrecy, South Africa arguably but IIRC they didn't complete it, and obviously the USSR, USA, France, and the UK.
by mixedbit | 2026-01-22 12:22:54+00:00
Long time ago Sourceforge and then GitHub promoted into the current default the model of open source distribution which is not sustainable and I doubt it is something that the founding fathers of Free Software/Open Source had in mind. Open source licenses are about freedom of using and modifying software. The movement grew out of frustration that commercial software cannot be freely improved and fixed by the user to better fit the user's needs. To create Free software, you ship sources together with your binaries and one of the OSI-approved licenses, that is all. The currently default model of having an open issue tracker, accepting third party pull requests, doing code reviews, providing support by email or chat, timely security patches etc, has nothing to do with open source and is not sustainable. This is OK if it is done for a hobby project as long as the author is having fun doing this work, but as soon as the software is used for commercial, production critical systems, the default expectation that authors will be promptly responding to new GitHub issues, bug reports and provide patches for free is insane. This is software support, it is a job, it should be paid.
by delaminator | 2026-01-22 12:23:03+00:00
Maybe if you'd actually read the agreement

> In connection with using or accessing our Services you agree to comply with this User Agreement, our policies, our terms, and all applicable laws, rules, and regulations, and you will not...

> use any robot, spider, scraper, data mining tools, data gathering and extraction tools, or other automated means (including, without limitation buy-for-me agents, LLM-driven bots, or any end-to-end flow that *attempts to place orders without human review*) to access our Services for any purpose, except with the prior express permission of eBay;
by danaris | 2026-01-22 12:23:18+00:00
How so?

Spam, for decades, has been a matter of just shoveling truckloads of emails out the door and hoping that one or two get a gullible match.

Blocking spam, for decades, has been a matter of heuristic pattern-matching.

I don't see how that is the same as "fighting LLMs with LLMs", or how it could be said to be the same as how spam is made and used.
by superultra | 2026-01-22 12:23:25+00:00
This is a case where it may be that people are outsourcing shitty user experiences to an AI.

I’m not a huge ebayer but I’m usually watching one or two auctions at a time. The problem is that you can’t disallow marketing notifications. So, if I want to be usefully alerted for a new item in a search, or that I’ve been outbid, or the imminent end of an auction, I’ll also be getting notifications and emails about all kinds of shit I don’t care about. $5 off coupons (that only apply to 8 items that I don’t want). “You might like this!” notifications (spoiler: I never do). Group buying times (who cares?).

So I either disable ALL notifications (and have an LLM write a script that crawls searches manually and much more appropriately notifies me on its own), or I enable notifications and get a bunch of trash spam.

As it relates to specifically to buying, we’ve known for a long time that we’re all up against some kind of bot that’s timed the exact last moment and amount to outbid us. It’s no fun.

I’ve been an eBay user since 1998 and it’s been on a very slow roll of enshittification since then.

Make your experience better for humans and maybe we’d be less inclined to outsource negative experiences to AI.
by ohyoutravel | 2026-01-22 12:25:57+00:00
I contribute regularly to some major open source projects and it’s happening here too. So many issues that aren’t issues. Constant “fixing” of documentation that doesn’t need to be fixed. Bug reports that aren’t bugs, followed by a bad PR “fixing” the “bug.” Or YOLOing an LLM PR to change major behavior that users are relying on. And I click and the authors are always brand new, with only vibe coded or examples projects in their history, and have some truly awful LLM generated GitHub “about me” page complete with emojis and links to their GitHub “projects.”

My suspicion is somehow the perception became that if you’re brand new and land a PR in a major open source repo (even as simple as rewording a phrase in a doc that doesn’t need to be reworded), that would help them get a job (they’re always Open to Work on their GitHub about me page).

It’s so much noise that it’s hard to find the real issues.