MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by twv1237213812 | 2026-01-17 20:29:19+00:00
The long term goal of US foreign policy has been to weaken Russia and the EU and take resource rich countries like Venezuela, Greenland, Iran. Canada was probably not overtly on the list.

To that end, the US provoked a war in Ukraine. Now it wants the EU to pay for its war while it is taking resources elsewhere, including from Denmark.

Venezuela basically has bipartisan support. Greenland has long been on the list, as evidenced by neocon (and current Trump enemy) John Bolton. who complains about Trump's methods but not about the objective.

The EU and Ukraine have been fooled by a long term bipartisan con and are beginning to wake up.

The only encouraging signal is that polls among Americans voters show that hardly anyone would support a takeover of Greenland or Canada. But the tech bros and other corporations have the politicians in their pocket, especially those who claim to be anti-interventionist during election campaigns.
by timbit42 | 2026-01-17 20:29:38+00:00
FPTP (First-Past-The-Post) pushes toward a two party system. When you switch to RC (Ranked Choice aka. Ranked Ballot or Ranked Voting) or even PR, that push is relaxed and you are likely to start seeing more parties.

The problem with Ranked Choice with more than two parties is that the centrist parties tend to win more often because they are more likely to be the second choice of people whose first choice is a left or right leaning party. That can be a problem if they get 100% of the power when they win.

PR is better because how much power each party has depends on what percentage of the votes they get in the first round (there not being subsequent rounds), so it is unlikely they will get 100% of the power and everyone's vote counts because it increases the power of the party they voted for.

With Ranked Choice, you may end up getting your second or third choice instead and your first choice then has little to no power.

Most of the democracies in the world today use PR (at least 2/3rds) instead of FPTP (about 1/3rd). Ranked Choice is less common.
by mindslight | 2026-01-17 20:29:47+00:00
> I don't mean it as progress

You ascribed the label "fairest" as if the current state is closer to a desired ideal. This is a standard pattern of fascist propaganda - pointing out the longstanding normalized hypocrisy in the system in support of going backwards to where we didn't even try to live up to something better.

If you'd focused on what you see as the positive path forward, in spite of current events, then I wouldn't have written my comment.
by dakheera47 | 2026-01-17 20:30:25+00:00
i built JobOps, basically a devops style pipeline for my jobhunt. im in the UK, on a student visa, trying to find a graduate job that’ll sponsor skilled worker.

it’s basically my job application process turned into a pipeline, because i got sick of the same two things happening every time:
- i apply, then the link dies and i lose the job description i actually applied to
- i apply, then two weeks later i can’t remember what version of my CV i sent

so the whole app is built around one idea: for every job, i want to make a tailored resume, and i want to be able to see it and the job description in the future if i get an interview.

the steps in the pipeline is:
- step 1; find the jobs (extractors)
it pulls jobs from a few sources (some off-the-shelf, some custom), then maps everything into one schema and dedupes it.

- step 2; make the artifacts
for a job i actually care about, it generates an ATS-friendly CV pdf for that role, by changing the top level summary, the keywords and the projects shown. when i get an interview, i can look back to see the job description (to see what the company wants), and my tailored resume (to see what i sent the company).

- step 3; track + automate the boring bits
the UI has the obvious stuff (stages, extraction, sources), but the fun part is when you mark “applied” it emits a webhook. i use that to push the job into my notion db via n8n, so i’m not copy pasting titles/companies/locations like a caveman. i treat notion as my "source of truth", not because it's good, just because it's what i've been using since the start.

it’s open source, local-first, and self-hosted (docker). i’m not selling anything and i’m not trying to turn this into a SaaS, i just wanted something i could run myself and figured it might help someone else too.

write-up (hashnode): https://dakheera47.hashnode.dev/jobops
repo + quickstart: https://github.com/DaKheera47/job-ops
read-only demo: https://jobops.dakheera47.com/

if you hit anything weird, please open an issue (even if it’s just “this step in the README confused me”)
by A_D_E_P_T | 2026-01-17 20:30:33+00:00
OpenAI is in a tough spot.

I just canceled my $200/month GPT-Pro subscription. 5.2-Pro is in decline -- it has been getting noticeably worse at a steady rate since introduction. At this point, it's not appreciably better for most queries than Claude 4.5 Opus, and Opus is roughly 10x faster.
by submeta | 2026-01-17 20:30:45+00:00
What I’m seeing is that seniors need fewer juniors, not because seniors are being replaced, but because managers believe they can get the same output with fewer people. Agentic coding tools reinforce that belief by offloading the most time-consuming but low-complexity work. Tests, boilerplate, CRUD, glue code, migrations, and similar tasks. Work that isn’t conceptually hard, just expensive in hours.

So yes, the market shifts, but mostly at the junior end. Fewer entry-level hires, higher expectations for those who are hired, and more leverage given to experienced developers who can supervise, correct, and integrate what these tools produce.

What these systems cannot replace is senior judgment. You still need humans to make strategic decisions about architecture, business alignment, go or no-go calls, long-term maintenance costs, risk assessment, and deciding what not to build. That is not a coding problem. It is a systems, organizational, and economic problem.

Agentic coding is good at execution within a frame. Seniors are valuable because they define the frame, understand the implications, and are accountable for the outcome. Until these systems can reason about incentives, constraints, and second-order effects across technical and business domains, they are not replacing seniors. They are amplifying them.

The real change is not “AI replaces developers.” It is that the bar for being useful as a developer keeps moving up.
by dktp | 2026-01-17 20:30:48+00:00
From a very entertaining Matt Levine article (https://archive.is/8QYxl)

> In a science fiction story, if you invented a superintelligent robot and asked it how to make money, it might come up with cool never-before-seen ideas, or at least massive fun market manipulation. But in real life, if you train a large language model on the internet and ask it how to make money, it will say “advertising, affiliate shopping links and porn.” That’s the lesson the internet teaches!

But I think it makes a lot of sense for very popular consumer products. In my honest opinion, I much prefer having services like Google, Youtube, Gmail, Maps, ChatGPT etc exist for free, but with ads, rather than not exist at all. Preferably with an option to pay and remove ads

Nowadays I'm happy to pay for Youtube premium or LLM, but back during my student days I could not really afford it - and I'm glad there was a free tier (with ads)
by skybrian | 2026-01-17 20:31:00+00:00
My guess: projects "learn" every time we improve documentation, add static analysis, write tests, make the API's clearer, and so on. Once newly started agents onboard by reading AGENTS.md, they're a bit "smarter" than before.

Maybe there's a threshold where improvements become easy, depending on the LLM and the project?

As a hobbyist programmer, I feel like I've been promoted to pointy-haired boss.
by microtonal | 2026-01-17 20:31:07+00:00
The thing is that we had been allies for many decades. So the US and the EU are very entwined. You only mention one side, those chips are made using ASML machines from The Netherlands (with lenses from Germany), the latter two use an architecture licensed from a UK company (owned by a Japanese conglomerate). It was a very successful cooperation between two continents, but since the US wants to throw that under the bus, we have to become self-sufficient.

It will take time to untangle the mutual dependencies and become more independent. That said, ARM also designs full ARM64 cores (until recently Qualcomm cores were based on ARM cores, until the new cores based on the NUVIA acquisition) and they can be fabbed in Taiwan (TSMC) and South Korea (Samsung), and hopefully Europe in some years.

Besides that, it's true that if you are running Linux, you rely on US firmware and Intel/AMD chips, but assuming that Intel ME doesn't have a bad remote kill switch, you can continue to run on existing hardware.
by ulf-77723 | 2026-01-17 20:31:38+00:00
This is brilliant SEO work, I doubt that they loose money with it. With 40h and some additional for the landingpage it might be an expensive link bait, but definitely worth it. Kudos!

If not for SEO, it’s building quite a good reputation for this company, they got a lot of open positions.

I’m a big fan of transport tycoon, used to play it for hours as a kid and with Open Transport Tycoon it also might have been a good choice, but maybe not B2C?
by convolvatron | 2026-01-17 20:31:48+00:00
as a line of thought, it totally does. you just extend the workload description to include writes. where this get problematic is that the ideal structure for transactional writes is nearly pessimal from a read standpoint. which is why we seem to end up doubling the write overhead - once to remember and once to optimize. or highly write-centric approach like LSM

I'd love to be clued in on more interesting architectures that either attempt to optimize both or provide a more continuous tuning knob between them
by mantas | 2026-01-17 20:31:52+00:00
Eh. As a citizen of EU member, I’m not happy about Mercosur deal at all. Hopefully fellow euro electorate is paying attention too. But giving how EU bureaucracy is shielded from the feedback loop, I doubt any outcome in national and EP elections could change anything anytime soon.

I feel the same way about some euro leaders pointing to China as possible alternative to US. Fuck no. Sometimes it feels like some people here want to pull off the same shit that is going on in China or US and just wait for a good opportunity. E.g. legendary chat control. But many people pretend it’s all fine and dandy just because.
by rediguanayum | 2026-01-17 20:32:17+00:00
Agreed completely. Part of this deal is that the Canadian auto market is no longer protected against Chinese EVs which substantially undercut the legacies. There is also news that the Europeans are making about to make a similar deal with China. Imagine what the United States economy will be like if Stellantis, Ford, or GM or all of them go bankrupt. 3-4 million in lost jobs alone.

Trump wants to tariff countries that support Denmark and Greenland. That's like all of the other NATO countries. What happens if NATO doesn't exist? No more bases to support Middle East operations and no more intelligence sharing.

It will mean more support from the Canadians and Europeans for moving trade to be denominated by Renminbi.

I don't think the Republican leadership has thought through the implications to the US with their deal with the devil.
by the__alchemist | 2026-01-17 20:32:26+00:00
Noticed the same. Also, I noticed the same with the prev version, immediately improved when switching to the new 5.2.

The smoking gun is the time. If I ask it a question that's subtle in "thinking" mode and it starts replying in a few seconds, the answer will probably be trash. I'm almost sure they degrade the models over time.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2026-01-17 20:33:17+00:00
I liked this post. I may have some minor qualms (e.g. while I think execs should be proxies for the customer, they have many other competing motivations that can push customer needs way down), but I especially liked the closing section:

> Understanding before criticizing

> Large software companies have real problems. Some are structural. Some are cultural. Many are self-inflicted. But many of the behaviors people complain about are not pathologies – they are consequences.

> If you want to criticize how large organizations operate, it helps to first understand why they operate that way. Without that understanding, the criticism may feel sharp, but it will not be useful.

I see that kind of "criticizing before understanding" all the time on HN, and while that's probably just inherent to an open forum, commenters who do that should realize it makes them come across as "less than insightful", to put it generously. Like I see tons of comments often about how managers only get to their position through obsequious political plots. And sure, that may exist in some orgs. But you can always tell when folks have never even considered the competing forces that act on managers (i.e not just the folks they directly manage, but requirements coming from higher ups, and peer teams, and somehow being responsible for a ton when you actually have few direct levers to push) and solely view things through the lens of someone being managed.
by UI_at_80x24 | 2026-01-17 20:33:32+00:00
Canada should re-enact the AutoPact [0] (tldr: I don't see this in the wiki article, but the real benefit was; for every 3 cars sold in Canada, 1 had to be 'made' in Canada). This was ruled as unfair under NAFTA and thus terminated. It also had the effect of incredible auto-industry cutbacks.

BUT, with a new contender (China); we could re-enact it, rebuild our diminished blue-collar manufacturing base; and hasten the rollout of EV vehicles. Which is the real objective here.

IMHO, that would be a solid win for everybody.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada%E2%80%93United_States_A...
by alphazard | 2026-01-17 20:35:09+00:00
Equating process to risk aversion is a mistake I hadn't seen before. It's true that moving slow makes it less likely to make something worse, but it also makes it less likely that anything will get better. It means that you don't try many things, and can't get important things done quickly.

You can ensure quality by making features opt-in, having a beta program available to risk tolerant users, adding QA resources, having representative users in captivity (employed at the company).

There is no law that says that you must move slow or do less in order to be low risk, you can also do a lot, move fast, and only let the best out.
by whispem | 2026-01-17 20:35:39+00:00
Thanks for the insight!

You’re absolutely right—the distributed KV/object storage space is very mature, and I don’t expect to “out-innovate” the current leaders.
My main goal is to learn by reimplementing challenging systems from (almost) scratch and to deeply understand how these pieces work behind the scenes.

LLM infra is definitely a hot frontier—makes sense that it’s where lots of cutting-edge work is happening.
Maybe someday I’ll try my hand at that too.
For now, I want to really master the fundamentals!

Thanks again for your perspective—it’s helpful to think about where the opportunities (and weeds!) are.
by fakedang | 2026-01-17 20:35:54+00:00
Reminds me of Russia post-Soviet collapse when all of the SSRs rushed to form their own blocs or align with the West, while the Russians thought they would continue to align with their former overlords in Moscow.

USA will definitely turn into the new Russia if it continues to go on this path. It has already exhausted most of its cultural and moral capital, and its tech sector is already under threat in its major allies. It will continue to stay relevant for maybe a generation or two but it will turn largely irrelevant by the turn of the century, just like the British Empire or Russia today. Assuming, of course, that it doesn't correct course.
by microtonal | 2026-01-17 20:35:54+00:00
Baby steps are better than no steps & a lot of things can be made to run on those building blocks

Yes. EU citizens should not let others (or themselves) talk them down. Yes, it will be an enormous job, but it's how you tackle any job - step by step. And there are a lot of things that can already be moved, like e-mail, code forges, databases, etc.
by ronsor | 2026-01-17 20:37:20+00:00
Use a SQLite3 database. Have a table for the posts (or any other appropriate schema, depending on what metadata you have). Using SQLite3 has the advantage of future flexibility (new/different tables and schema as needed, full-text search, etc.).

You can have another table for attachments (images, videos, etc.). If they're small, store them directly in a BLOB. If they're not, store them alongside the database, and only store the relative path in the attachments table.

You may opt to convert images and videos to a single format (e.g. PNG and H.264 MP4), but you can lose information depending on the target format. It may be preferable to leave them in the original (or highest quality) format.
by theptip | 2026-01-17 20:38:09+00:00
This is a sound tactical move to provide a hedge against future US economic threats.

Strategically, I do think you want to be coming up with a plan to shield core industries like auto, shipping, energy, and some parts of manufacturing (eg “factories for factories” rather than “factories for consumer goods”) from dumping / state subsidies.

It might be OK to let the PRC subsidize your solar cells, assuming you can build wind instead if they try to squeeze you. It’s probably not wise to depend on PRC for your batteries, drones, and cars, where these are key to strategic autonomy and you don’t have an alternative.
by microtonal | 2026-01-17 20:38:14+00:00
Also, my next car will be a BYD. The current one is a Ford.

Replacing one non-ally by another. We have a VW ID.3 and it's great. Some people will argue that the on-board system is better on a Tesla or BYD, but a small loss of convenience, but a huge win for independence and the internal market. (Most of the criticisms are also outdated, the platform improved a lot since earlier generations.)
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-17 20:39:04+00:00
I think "killing a platform" is less interesting than "birthing a competitor". And the Mixer experiment of 2021 suggests that the top dozen creators 5 years ago still wasn't enough to even foster a new platform. Market capture at this scale is truly sticky.

As another example. We're some 8 years into the "streaming wars", with a lot of top content leveraging their IP's. Netflix still seems to be long, and the only one profitable (though I wager it is not profitable on sustainable measures). Disney, HBO, paramount, and many more have struggled despite weilding much more well known programming. Being early is just so important in these situations.
by jiggawatts | 2026-01-17 20:39:06+00:00
I’m not the person you’re asking the question from but I’m a consultant that has been to well over a hundred organisations big and small.

Employee happiness and team success is essentially random. More accurately: you can go to two “identical” companies directly competing in the same industry at the same scale and they can still be wildly different internally. One can be a depressing march to retirement and death, the other a place where people literally(!) sing with joy in the corridors.

Everything is likely to also be totally different: procedures (or lack thereof), policy, tools, training, etc…

Despite this, all organisations above a certain size are filled with people that are certain that their way is the only way things are done. They’ll argue until they’re blue in the face that nothing else could possibly work… with someone who was at their totally different competitor last week and saw that in fact a different approach is massively superior.

This variability is greatest for small scale workplace practices as typically decided by a “pointy haired boss” (PHB).

They also tend to be most convinced of their own methods, and the most resistant to change.
by cryptonector | 2026-01-17 20:39:18+00:00
> Yet demand for software far exceeds our ability to create it.

In particular the demand for software tools grows faster than our ability to satisfy it. More demand exists than the people who would do the demanding can imagine. Many people who are not software engineers can now write themselves micro software tools using LLMs -- this ranges from home makers to professionals of every kind. But the larger systems that require architecting, designing, building, and maintaining will continue to require some developers -- fewer, perhaps, but perhaps also such systems will proliferate.
by trhway | 2026-01-17 20:40:01+00:00
>Imagine what the United States economy will be like if Stellantis, Ford, or GM or all of them go bankrupt. 3-4 million in lost jobs alone.

They wouldn't go bankrupt. They will be saved and protected by government bailouts and tariffs, and the situation will become similar to say Russia car industry. Though, naturally, the situation with Russian cars has become so bad that even they are forced to massively open market to Chinese cars (and even "Russian cars" become more and more just simple rebadge of Chinese cars).

In short - if you don't compete by increasing productivity, efficiency, quality, you will be overtaken by the ones who do. The government actions may prolong your complacency time, yet ultimately such prolongation is just the time you actually lose falling more and more behind.
by jauntywundrkind | 2026-01-17 20:40:05+00:00
I'm far more horrified by what I don't see, by how biased and lopsided the flagging is. Constantly covering up interesting relevant topics. The gatekeeping about what to discuss is, imo, a pox. It's easy to avoid, costs nearly nothing to just not read, and it's little but endless naval gazing about what you think the purpose ought to be. It's not productive and trying to levy judgement is unproductive and harmful, and the upside even if we could get it perfect is near zero.

I have some sympathy for the cost to mods. But people having strong opinions about what other people are allowed to share is anti my interest and imo a mockery of hacker spirit.
by HPsquared | 2026-01-17 20:40:29+00:00
They'll eventually want to set it up so you read the sponsored content first, before seeing the tag saying it's an ad. You're more likely to absorb it then.

Especially if it's LLM-generated to fit with the context, the message will slip right into the mind. Then a little "(Sponsored)" at the bottom after you've already consumed the ad.

This is a bit like how ads are presented on X, they look like regular posts or replies but they usually feel off topic and you're thinking "huh, this doesn't fit the discussion". But LLMs will allow much more seamless and sneaky ads.
by 1718627440 | 2026-01-17 20:40:35+00:00
> It is not "taking over" or "annexing". It is invading. A military ally, at that.

I do not get your point. An annexation is a military invasion with the intention of an ongoing control over that area.

"Taking over" is an euphemism of some more powerful entity stealing from some less powerful.

What's your point here?
by 8note | 2026-01-17 20:40:37+00:00
the end strategy is controlling trade between europe and china. the NW passage and eventually the arctic ocean will be opening.

the US shares its current control with russia for these new trade routes, but it wants to be able to unilaterally decide what china can do at sea. thus it needs control that isnt shared with russia or europe.

its the same thing with panama, the US needs to recapture control to ensure that china cannot ship through without US permission