MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by burnt-resistor | 2026-01-21 17:29:26+00:00
> The purpose of a tool is important.

> Guns have no other purpose than doing harm.

Objects don't have purposes or intent until people use them, and many objects have multiple reasonable and dual purposes. Objects can be used for net good and net harm. A bow and arrow isn't specifically for harming humans but can be used for such. Chainsaws and meat cleavers too.

What would you like a machine gun-wielding terrorist to be stopped with? A strongly-worded letter?

On the same token of reasonableness and rationality, it's unreasonable to give a toddler a towed howitzer that's ordinarily destined for Big Sandy Shoot.
by andyfilms1 | 2026-01-21 17:29:45+00:00
>That particular AI models have their own bias and are eager to inject it is among the reasons why a skilled user and an unskilled user will have very different results, not a reason why that isn’t true.

Not quite what I mean. If you and I both take a photo of the same controlled scene with the same camera, the result will be essentially identical. If you and I both type the exact same prompt into Nano Banana, we will both get very different images. So, how is one supposed to know what parts of the AI image are intentional or incidental? If the AI image is "good," is it good because of or despite the prompter?

>Is oil paint on canvas a set of tools or a medium? In art, a tool ot set of tools often characterizes, or even defines, a medium

Agreed, and this is basically what I'm saying. I'm fine with siloing AI art into it's own category and I'm sure some cool work can be done there. But it's fundamentally odd to think that AI will, for some reason, replace or displace other art.
by ValdikSS | 2026-01-21 17:29:47+00:00
Sure, why not? You have a reference implementation for both TrustZone OP-TEE (from Microsoft!) and in-Linux-kernel. No need to code anything, everything is already there, tested and ready to work.

https://github.com/OP-TEE/optee_ftpm

Or you mean dedicated TPM?
Show HN: Why single agents suck at math proofs
by austinbaggio | 2026-01-21 17:30:00+00:00
Cursor published a great post last week on scaling long-running autonomous coding agents to build a browser.

We’ve been exploring a similar idea, but applied to math proofs

We show how a swarm of agents, coordinated via shared memory, can generate a Lean proof for a non-trivial multi-step math problem-Putnan A2-that a single agent struggled with. We were feeling fancy so we wrote a full post and captured the runtime.

Harness will be public soon(tm) for you to run it yourself.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-21 17:30:04+00:00
> the only practical option

The actual practical option people end up using in practice (speaking as someone who've moved around in Europe, working for various other European companies) is that you ask them to self-employ in the country they live, then you treat them as contractors, offset any extra costs that'd come with compared to full-time, and do the best you can with that.

It's not ideal, and not a real solution by wide margin, and there is plenty of stuff that can get better, but I think it's the most "practical" and pragmatic option you can make use of today.
by NoGravitas | 2026-01-21 17:30:29+00:00
I think the press, as an institution, was at its peak post-Watergate, and pre- ... something. I don't know when exactly the press began to decay; possibly with the rise of 24-hour cable news in the 1990s; maybe the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, maybe the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The media landscape was certainly severely decayed by 2003, and has not gotten any better.
by thewebguyd | 2026-01-21 17:30:47+00:00
I'm certain this is the direction we are all heading, unfortunately.

Governments will sanction the major proprietary OSes and compel Apple, Google, Microsoft to participate in their surveillance programs, and those will have remote integrity attestation and will be the only hardware and software you will be able to use to access essential services and the internet as whole, most likely.

The usage of alternative software won't be outright illegal, but will get you on a watchlist. Like you said, they don't need to make other software illegal, just make circumventing the blocks illegal.

They can't arrest everyone, but, it's one more gray area thing that can and will be used against you should the government ever decide they have a bone to pick with you specifically so you can get away with it for a long time, until suddenly you don't.
by vel0city | 2026-01-21 17:31:26+00:00
Gambling can absolutely destroy lives. I've seen it in my own family. Its highly addictive nature combined with an easy way to lose everything you own is incredibly dangerous.

I've personally witnessed domestic violence from a gambler taking heavy losses as they realize they're about to be in a really bad place financially. I've never seen someone get violent over messing up a few rows of knitting.
by sparky4pro | 2026-01-21 17:31:54+00:00
Suppose that when someone is retired, there is more time doing stuff, but time is running out…

If someone is in their 30’ or 40’ planning to work the next 5+ years on a project is no problem, even if it takes 10+ years in the end.

For the ones over 65 or older, it’s a different story…
by mullingitover | 2026-01-21 17:31:58+00:00
> and it won't a lesser priority like MVNOs are.

Depending on the MVNO you can get first-class priority data (my plan has it), but also this stuff has never made a difference in my experience. When I was on 'lower priority' data the differences in speed weren't noticeable if I had service at all, and in the cases where I was at some event where there was a lot of devices contending for access to the tower, nobody was getting service.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-21 17:32:35+00:00
If you offer compensation then of course you need to consider your risk exposure, ie total users. That's similar to a lottery where the central authority is concerned with all payouts while an individual is only concerned with their own payout.

Outside of brand reputation issues that is not how real world products are designed. You design a tool for the specific task it will be used for. You don't run your statistics in aggregate based on the expected number of customers.

Users are independent from one another. If the population doubles my filesystem doesn't suddenly become less reliable. If more people purchase the same laptop that I have the chance of mine failing doesn't suddenly go up. If more people deep fry things in their kitchen my own personal risk of a kitchen fire isn't increased regardless of how busy the fire department might become.
by samradelie | 2026-01-21 17:32:36+00:00
You have a good point about doing zero copy transferables which would probably work.

There is certainly something beautiful about your charging GPU code being part of a file that runs completely isolated in another thread along with our websocket Data fire hose

Architecturally that could be something interesting where you expose a typed API wrapping postmessage where consumers wanting to bind the main thread to a worker thread could provide the offscreen canvas as well as a stream of normalized, touch and pointer events, keyboard and wheel. Then in your worker listeners could handle these incoming events and treat them as if they were direct from the event listeners on the main thread; effectively, your library is thread agnostic.

I'd be happy to discuss this on GitHub. I'll try to get to that today. See you there.
by tinfoilhatter | 2026-01-21 17:32:54+00:00
There's a large difference between fiat currency and what you're calling fiat tokens. One is extremely difficult to trace - the other is extremely easy and allows the nation states that are "minting" them to track every transaction being made with them.

They are nothing like paper currency outside of being another abstraction of actual value and being issued / controlled by the banking cartel.
by BiteCode_dev | 2026-01-21 17:33:11+00:00
This is a good thing and a required first step, but it's a drop in the sea.

All MacOS, iOS, Windows and Android are all produced by the USA. Virtually all chips as well.

It is foolish to assume there are not backdoors in every one of them.

Meaning we should assume the USA can shut down the entire Europe's IT if they really want to.

Then you got the authentication systems, security software (antivirus, proxies like cloudflare, crowdstrike and so on), the various Saas (docs editors, drives, ticket systems, chats...), the payment systems (including Visa and swift, but also Paypal, google pay, stripe, etc), the software stores, the root DNS, the SSL root certificates and a ton of network hardware.

Given the current political situation, it's a very bad spot to be in.
by simion314 | 2026-01-21 17:33:25+00:00
It is easy to understand, the citizens in the EU do not want to spill blood for Ukraine, and sinne not like in the Ruzzian empire where elections do not matter in EU countries politicians must not do unpopular things since they ned the support from the people and sending people to die is not popular in eU like it is in Ruzzia. But if say the Putin regime gets "tricked" again by CIA and Putin is forced to attack EU then we can see if we can push them out of not,

Talking with the Zed patriots they are convinced that CIA created nazis in UYkraine and also forced Putin to start this "special" operation, somehow Putin is a genius but at the same time IA tricked him or corced him to start a war that is in the 4th year of the 3 day operation.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2026-01-21 17:33:40+00:00
The low quality posts and low quality responses and them being flagged makes the users affected, to use the moderators' terminology, "activated". It's not conducive to maintaining the HN we know and love.

Also the site moderators have plainly said that moderating these controversial political threads is a strain on them. You may be enjoying yourself but someone else is paying a hefty price.
How do you keep AI-generated applications consistent as they evolve over time?
by RobertSerber | 2026-01-21 17:34:23+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been experimenting with letting LLMs generate and then continuously modify small business applications (CRUD, dashboards, workflows). The first generation usually works — the problems start on the second or third iteration.

Some recurring failure modes I keep seeing:
• schema drift that silently breaks dashboards
• metrics changing meaning across iterations
• UI components querying data in incompatible ways
• AI fixing something locally while violating global invariants

What’s striking is that most AI app builders treat generation as a one-shot problem, while real applications are long-lived systems that need to evolve safely.

The direction I’m exploring is treating the application as a runtime model rather than generated code:
• the app is defined by a structured, versioned JSON/DSL (entities, relationships, metrics, workflows)
• every AI-proposed change is validated by the backend before execution
• UI components bind to semantic concepts (metrics, datasets), not raw queries
• AI proposes structure; the runtime enforces consistency

Conceptually this feels closer to how Kubernetes treats infrastructure, or how semantic layers work in analytics — but applied to full applications rather than reporting.

I’m curious:
• Has anyone here explored similar patterns?
• Are there established approaches to controlling AI-driven schema evolution?
• Do you think semantic layers belong inside the application runtime, or should they remain analytics-only?

Not pitching anything — genuinely trying to understand how others are approaching AI + long-lived application state.

Thanks.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-21 17:35:15+00:00
> Are they really late? Has everyone started using agents and paying $200 subscriptions?

The $20/month subscriptions go a long way if you're using the LLM as an assistant. Having a developer in the loop to direct, review, and write some of the code is much more token efficient than trying to brute force it by having the LLM try things and rewrite until it looks like what you want.

If you jump to the other end of the spectrum and want to be in the loop as little as possible, the $100/$200 subscriptions start to become necessary.

My primary LLM use case is as a hyper-advanced search. I send the agent off to find specific parts of a big codebase I'm looking for and summarize how it's connected. I can hit the $20/month windowed limits from time to time on big codebases, but usually it's sufficient.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2026-01-21 17:35:32+00:00
In my experience, the best practice for sharing "health data? Government data? Corporate data? Financial data?" within an organization is to use a secure cloud platform with native data sharing functionality. The original comment's suggestion for "local-first software" doesn't work, because organizations frequently need to forward private data between individual workstations and the staff are going to do it using email if you don't give them something better.
by kxbnb | 2026-01-21 17:35:54+00:00
The "signed transaction, not a log stream" framing is exactly right. Logs are optimistic - you assume they're complete and unmodified. Receipts are pessimistic - you verify before trusting.

We've been thinking about a related problem at toran.sh: capturing what an agent actually sent to external APIs (and what came back) without trusting the agent's self-reported logs. Different angle - we focus on the API request/response level rather than the decision/action level - but the same underlying insight: the source of truth needs to be outside the agent's control.

The Ed25519 + canonical JSON approach is clean. Question: how are you handling schema evolution? If the receipt format changes, older receipts still need to verify but newer tooling might expect different fields.
by leros | 2026-01-21 17:36:24+00:00
Companies do the least they can to employ people. That means paying them just enough and giving them just enough perks. I'm sure they'd provide housing if it was needed to competitively hire.

I've seen big companies like Microsoft offer company housing for new immigrants to ease their move to the US. It's also not uncommon for companies to pay for your cross-country move and temporary housing until you can buy a house.
by toastyavocado | 2026-01-21 17:36:32+00:00
"I can vouch for myself and others - that we are there to just buy cool shit and not ‘connect’ with the artist."

Who is "we"? Art, to me, is about pouring your heart and soul into something in a way that AI can trivially emulate, which makes it dangerous when placed next to art that actually has a lived experience attached to it.

I can slap a prompt into AI and get some graphic design slop that to the untrained eye looks "close enough" to the vendor next to them that actually made the art themselves. This is dangerous and spits in the face of people who pour themselves into their work.

At best, put the AI art generators into their own little special corner. But don't put one-shotted AI art next to actual crafted human created art right next to one another and say that they're equal. The brush strokes are imaginary. That's a grift.
by FeteCommuniste | 2026-01-21 17:36:39+00:00
> Historically, Artists have often had (mostly) uncredited assistants that handled a lot of the grunt work. This is particularly common, IME, for physical media artists that do large sculptures and similar pieces. "The Artist" will do the initial design, and then "artists" working under their direction will do a lot of cutting and welding, for example.

I'd say the right thing to do in such cases would be to credit the whole team, like movies do when the credits roll, rather than conclude that the term "artist" is meaningless anyway because some people take credit for the work of others.
by whs | 2026-01-21 17:36:41+00:00
>Google: Google does not offer a public search API. The only available path is an ad-syndication bundle with no changes to result presentation - the model Startpage uses. Ad syndication is a non-starter for Kagi’s ad-free subscription model.[^1]

>Because direct licensing isn’t available to us on compatible terms, we - like many others - use third-party API providers for SERP-style results (SERP meaning search engine results page). These providers serve major enterprises (according to their websites) including Nvidia, Adobe, Samsung, Stanford, DeepMind, Uber, and the United Nations.

The customer list matches what is listed on SerpAPI's page (interestingly, DeepMind is on Kagi's list while they're a Google company...). I suppose Kagi needs to pen this because if SerpAPI shuts down they may lose access to Google, but they may already have utilize multiple providers. In the past, Kagi employees have said that they have access to Google API, but it seems that it was not the case?

As a customer, the major implication of this is that even if Kagi's privacy policy says they try to not log your queries, it is sent to Google and still subject to Google's consumer privacy policy. Even if it is anonymized, your queries can still end up contributing to Google Trends.
by 627467 | 2026-01-21 17:36:50+00:00
So, it is always going to be a cat and mouse game. As long as the rules are clear let the game begin. Just dont try to tilt the game in your favor by using legal threats (ie Chat control and alike).

Anyone can try to break encryption, why can't the police force? But dont say others arent allowed to use malware/Spyware - or malware/spyware countermeasures - if you are using it yourself.

You already have (theoretical) access to state resources. You dont need more help
by fragmede | 2026-01-21 17:36:53+00:00
ChatGPT psychosis also exists so it goes both ways, I just don't want the negative voices to drown out the positive ones (or vice versa).

As far as traffic lights go, this predates ChatGPT, but IBM's Watson, which is also rather much a black box where you stuff data in, and instructions come out; they've been doing traffic light optimization for years. IBM's got some patents on it, even. Of course that's machine learning, but as they say, ML is just AI that works.
by umeedsto | 2026-01-21 17:37:25+00:00
I just added a new feature in MathGPT: type a prompt and instantly get a graph, plus the key points explained. It uses Desmos for the graph, and MathGPT adds the learning layer:

x intercepts and y intercept

vertex (when it applies)

a small value table with sample points

quick explanations in simple words

Try it: https://mathgpt.today/graphing

If you try it, tell me what would make it more useful: more graph tools, clearer explanations, or a cleaner UI?
by senbrow | 2026-01-21 17:37:30+00:00
I was in an extremely good spot financially when I quit (years of runway) due to living well below my paycheck for years of working at FAANG.

I was terrified to do so, but the only alternative I could see at the time was killing myself if I had to continue as is (lots of mental illness prior to and greatly exacerbated by my time in tech).

It is the biggest leap of faith I have ever taken, and I do not have a big appetite for financial risk.
by rootusrootus | 2026-01-21 17:37:38+00:00
We can just look at the current situation. AOC/Mamdani policies have been the norm in the US since ... oh wait, never. We are run by the billionaires, not by the socialists.

Maybe your argument is that our GDP is doing great? Except the entire point of MAGA is that a whole class of people feel like GDP is not describing their own situation accurately. It's almost like all it really describes is how successful the billionaires are. The US lags behind a bunch of western nations in important metrics, and we are decidedly to the right of them and have been for a very long time. Trying to lay blame for this on the paltry excuse for 'the left' that we have in the US is pretty lame.
by buildsjets | 2026-01-21 17:38:41+00:00
If you specify all your bolt heads as 19mm and 13mm, then a 3/4" wrench or a 1/2" wrench is usually good enough to get the job done.

Similarly, a 1/4-20 bolt will fit in a M6 tapped hole if you use a large enough hammer.

A hazardous aspect of US threadforms is that #10-32 machine screws and #8-32 machine screws have the same pitch. So you can fit #8 bolts in a #10 hole and sometimes, they FEEL like they made good torque, because they engaged one side of the tapped hole, when they really have no tension capability whatsoever.

Reference the British Airways flight 5390 accident where the pilot got sucked 3/4 the way out the cockpit window and slammed against the side of the fuselage while a flight attendant clung to his feet and the co-pilot safely landed.

Also note that a British designed and built product was using US threadforms...

https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-near-crash-of-britis...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_5390
by lenerdenator | 2026-01-21 17:39:02+00:00
That's just it: bullying the rest of the world typically doesn't have drastic negative consequences for an economy.

China's claimed the South China Sea as its sovereign waters and has been using force against fishermen from the nations that actually have control over the water. They're continuing to threaten Taiwan in a purely ideological push. Chinese secret police have set up stations abroad to kidnap dissidents. Border skirmishes with India are not uncommon. The agreement for a democratic Hong Kong was torn up and now they're under the thumb of the CCP, same as the mainland.

Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, Crimea in 2014, and of course Eastern Ukraine in 2022. They haven't had a "real" election in decades. Dissidents die suspiciously with regularity.

Both nations have supported the efforts of North Korea to further its nuclear arsenal in blatant violation of UN resolutions.

With the exception of the invasion of Ukraine, there have been zero negative consequences for any of this behavior.

Both nations have hosted at least one major international sporting event in the last 20 years. China is signing trade deals with Canada and the EU nations because, for some reason, those parties see a totalitarian single-party state as a viable alternative to the US that will never produce a "mad king", when in fact, it's almost tailor-made to do so. Construction on Nordstream 2 started after the invasion of Georgia, specifically because Europeans wanted Russian natural gas. Russian oligarchs continue to hold major interests in European nations and are free to move about the continent. Sanctions against the Russian economy over the invasion of Ukraine are dodged by dealing with intermediate parties so that many nations, including those in Europe, can do business as usual.

If you're a narcissistic psychopath - like the majority of world politicians and Donald Trump are - and you see this sort of thing happening, you're going to ask, "Why can't America play by those rules too?"
by atmosx | 2026-01-21 17:40:01+00:00
Two years ago a woman in Greece phoned the police, begging for a patrol car because her ex was about to “kill her.” The officer mockingly replied, “Police cars aren’t taxis”. Seconds later she screamed, “He’s here! He’s going to kill me” (screams). She was murdered outside the police department moments later.

https://www.ertnews.gr/eidiseis/ellada/ag-anargyroi-plirofor...
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-21 17:40:21+00:00
They do. They provide reference_kernel which shows the algorithm itself, build_mem_image which shows the data format you will be working with, and finally reference_kernel2 which implements said algorithm on said data format.

They then provide you with a very naive implementation that runs on their (very simple) VLIW architecture that you are to optimize.

If at the end of that someone is still lost I think it is safe to say it was their goal that person should fail.