MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by digitalsushi | 2026-01-26 14:03:45+00:00
I know there's no single answer to this. But, if we wanted to mitigate this, do we have the geoengineering ability to execute on it?

I know 'wanted' is doing a lot of lifting there. Solve the hypothetical as a star trek culture, everyone wants this to work.

What would it look like?

I am under the belief that we get a lot of fresh water but because we baked the earth or paved it, and that an awful lot of water could be redirected into the ground if only we could slow it down.

Could America engineer an aquaduct from the great lakes to california?

would it destroy the great lakes?

i dont know a thing about this topic other than from my arm chair, i'm just here to start a thread if there's interest, i'm sure interested to hear from people smarter than me
Show HN: Spent 15 years nomading and wrote a field manual to hack productivity
by openworldmag | 2026-01-26 14:03:56+00:00
Hey HN,

I’ve been a digital nomad since 2009—long before it was a trendy hashtag. Over the last 15+ years, I realized that the 'freedom' of this lifestyle is often a lie if you're still trapped in a 14-hour grind, just doing it from a different time zone. You're not a traveler, just a person who works from a laptop in co-working spaces in exotic places.

I spent the last two years systemizing how I use AI, biohacking, energy, motivation, and willpower to stay sharp while moving across borders.

I put these frameworks into a manual called UNLIMIT. It covers:

Weaponizing AI: Automating decision-making to save willpower.

Biological Resets: How I fixed my own 14-hour burnout loops.

Flow State Systems: Practical ways to stay focused when your environment is always changing.

I made the book 99 cents because I want it to be accessible to builders currently in the trenches of exhaustion and loneliness. I’m around all day and would love to answer questions about the nomad life or the AI systems I use.

Thanks for checking it out!
by legitimate_key | 2026-01-26 14:04:16+00:00
The browser-vs-app debate aside, the bigger issue for me is what happens once you're in the call.

Screen sharing on Zoom (or any platform) is where the real anxiety kicks in. One wrong tab, one notification, one bookmarked URL you forgot about.

I've moved to keeping a completely separate browser profile for calls - nothing in it except the meeting app. Overkill? Maybe. But it eliminates the pre-share panic entirely.
by vharuck | 2026-01-26 14:04:22+00:00
It likely wouldn't poll well for elections, but today's ICE does need to be disbanded. Its tasks can be given to other agencies until a replacement can be created and staffed. The recent recruitment drive makes it nearly impossible to reform the agency. There's just too many agents introduced in the poisonous culture and goals.

An easy win that should get widespread approval is bolstering the immigration court system. I have dark worries, but I'm still not entirely sure why this administration is whittling away at immigration courts. You'd think they'd want to process asylum applications faster, so invalid claimants could be deported sooner.
by dizhn | 2026-01-26 14:04:26+00:00
I don't really read papers and haven't read this one either but that summary.

> In vibe coding, an AI agent builds software by selecting and assembling open-source software (OSS),

Are they talking about indirectly due to prior training of the model? No agent I use is selecting and assembling open source software. That's more of an integration type of job not software development. Are they talking about packages and libraries? If yes, that's exactly how most people use those too.

I mean like this:

> often without users directly reading documentation, reporting bugs, or otherwise engaging with maintainers.

and then,

> Vibe coding raises productivity by lowering the cost of using and building on existing code, but it also weakens the user engagement through which many maintainers earn returns.

Maintainers who earn "returns" must be such a small niche as to be insignificant. Or do they mean things like github stars?

> When OSS is monetized only through direct user engagement, greater adoption of vibe coding lowers entry and sharing, reduces the availability and quality of OSS, and reduces welfare despite higher productivity.

Now the hypothesis is exactly the opposite. Do agents not "select and assamble" OSS anymore? And what does this have to do with how OSS is "monetized"?

> Sustaining OSS at its current scale under widespread vibe coding requires major changes in how maintainers are paid.

Sustaining OSS insofar as maintainers do it for a living requries major changes. Period. I don't see how vibe coding which makes all of this easier and cheaper is changing that equation. Quality is a different matter altogether and can still be achieved.

I am seeing a bunch of disjointed claims taken as truth that I frankly do not agree with in the first place.

What would the result of such a study even explain?
by WarmWash | 2026-01-26 14:04:38+00:00
Small bespoke personalized on the spot apps are the future with LLMs.

The future will absolutely not be "How things are today + LLMs"

The paradigm now for software is "build a tool shed/garage/barn/warehouse full of as much capability for as many uses possible" but when LLMs can build you a custom(!) hammer or saw in a few minutes, why go to the shed?
by toofy | 2026-01-26 14:04:55+00:00
> Can you provide sources and verdict?

sure. directly from the DOJ [0] and another from CBS. [1]

i get it, it sounds insane, but its very real. here ya go.

Department of Justice: [0]

> Jim Baugh, eBay’s former Senior Director of Safety and Security, was sentenced to 57 months in prison in September 2022;

> David Harville, former Director of Global Resiliency, was sentenced to 24 months in prison in September 2022;

> Stephanie Popp, former Senior Manager of Global Intelligence, was sentenced to 12 months in prison in October 2022;

> Philip Cooke, a former Senior Manager of Security Operations, was sentenced to 18 months in prison and 12 months of home confinement in July 2021;

> Stephanie Stockwell, a former Manager of Global Intelligence, was sentenced to one year in home confinement in October 2022; and

> Veronica Zea, a contract intelligence analyst, was sentenced to one year in home confinement in November 2022.

CBS [1]:

> eBay to pay $3 million after couple became the target of harassment, stalking

> Devin Wenig, eBay's CEO at the time, shared a link to a post Ina Steiner had written about his annual pay. The company's chief communications officer, Steve Wymer, responded: "We are going to crush this lady."

> About a month later, Wenig texted: "Take her down." Prosecutors said Wymer later texted eBay security director Jim Baugh. "I want to see ashes. As long as it takes. Whatever it takes," Wymer wrote.

> Investigators said Baugh set up a meeting with security staff and dispatched a team to Boston, about 20 miles from where the Steiners live.

> "Senior executives at eBay were frustrated with the newsletter's tone and content, and with the comments posted beneath the newsletter's articles," the Department of Justice wrote in its Thursday announcement.

theres plenty more links out there if ya need them.

[0] https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/final-defendant-ebay-cybe...

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/feds-charge-ebay-stalking-scand...
by recursivedoubts | 2026-01-26 14:05:52+00:00
AI is incredibly dangerous because it can do the simple things very well, which prevents new programmers from learning the simple things ("Oh, I'll just have AI generate it") which then prevents them from learning the middlin' and harder and meta things at a visceral level.

I'm a CS teacher, so this is where I see a huge danger right now and I'm explicit with my students about it: you HAVE to write the code. You CAN'T let the machines write the code. Yes, they can write the code: you are a student, the code isn't hard yet. But you HAVE to write the code.
by jordanpg | 2026-01-26 14:06:05+00:00
@kevinroose

i follow AI adoption pretty closely, and i have never seen such a yawning inside/outside gap.

people in SF are putting multi-agent claudeswarms in charge of their lives, consulting chatbots before every decision, wireheading to a degree only sci-fi writers dared to imagine.

people elsewhere are still trying to get approval to use Copilot in Teams, if they're using AI at all.

it's possible the early adopter bubble i'm in has always been this intense, but there seems to be a cultural takeoff happening in addition to the technical one. not ideal!

https://www.nytimes.com/by/kevin-roose
https://x.com/kevinroose/status/2015464558115295369
by saberience | 2026-01-26 14:06:10+00:00
How is he "well respected", based on what metric? Amount of vibe coded slop put out into the ecosystem?

He sounds like someone who has just vibe coded shit until something stuck to the wall. I also find it hard to respect people who create things which are 99-100% coded by an LLM, with zero technical merit or skill. Again, just creating slop until something goes viral.

As far as I can see Clawdbot is just more AI-slop. Anyone can create the same thing (and many have created similar) over a weekend. It's riddled with bugs, security holes, and it's a disaster waiting to happen basically.
by comrade1234 | 2026-01-26 14:06:10+00:00
Not n Switzerland... water is practically free. they don't even bother with putting water meters on individual apartments and instead just split the bill up by all of the apartments at the end of the year. Hot water is metered though.

I've lived all over the USA and I remember wondering why I was stuck with a shitty shower with California-standard shower head even though water was cheap and plentiful where I lived.
by simonw | 2026-01-26 14:06:14+00:00
> Not only does an agent not have the ability to evolve a specification over a multi-week period as it builds out its lower components, it also makes decisions upfront that it later doesn’t deviate from.

That's your job.

The great thing about coding agents is that you can tell them "change of design: all API interactions need to go through a new single class that does authentication and retries and rate-limit throttling" and... they'll track down dozens or even hundreds of places that need updating and fix them all.

(And the automated test suite will help them confirm that the refactoring worked properly, because naturally you had them construct an automated test suite when they built those original features, right?)

Going back to typing all of the code yourself (my interpretation of "writing by hand") because you don't have the agent-managerial skills to tell the coding agents how to clean up the mess they made feels short-sighted to me.
by acka | 2026-01-26 14:06:18+00:00
Reading comprehension, my friend.

The article you linked to is about the dropped plan to require ID for permission to work in the UK.

The parent commenter is referring to age verification for accessing adult content using "highly effective age-assurance systems" (such as photo ID cards, biometrics, etc.) under the Online Safety Act 2023, which is still very much in effect.
by m000 | 2026-01-26 14:06:44+00:00
The real question is how much of the new wave of vibe-coded software will be able to graduate from pet project to community-maintained project.

It feels that vibe coding may exacerbate fragmentation (10 different vibe-coded packages for the same thing) and abandonment (made it in a weekend and left it to rot) for open source software.
by echelon | 2026-01-26 14:06:57+00:00
You won't have to ignore this stuff for long. Pretty soon it'll be mandatory to keep up.

I've been a senior engineer doing large scale active-active, five nines distributed systems that process billions of dollars of transactions daily. These are well thought out systems with 20+ folks on design document reviews.

Not all of the work falls into that category, though. There's so much plumbing and maintenance and wiring of new features and requirements.

On that stuff, I'm getting ten times the amount of work done with AI than I was before. I could replace the juniors on my team with just myself if I needed to and still get all of our combined work done.

Engineers using AI are going to replace anyone not using AI.

In fact, now is the time to start a startup and "fire" all of these incumbent SaaS companies. You can make reasonable progress quickly and duplicate much of what many companies do without much effort.

If you haven't tried this stuff, you need to. I'm not kidding. You will easily 10x your productivity.

I'm not saying don't review your own code. Please do.

But Claude emits reasonable Rust and Java and C++. It's not just for JavaScript toys anymore.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Edit:

Holy hell HN, downvoted to -4 in record time. Y'all don't like what's happening, but it's really happening.

I'm not lying about this.

I provided my background so you'd understand the context of my claims. I have a solid background in tech.

The same thing that happened to illustration and art is happening here, to us and to our career. And these models are quite usable for production code.

I can point Claude to a Rust HTTP handler and say, "using this example [file path], write a new endpoint that handles video file uploads, extracts the metadata, creates a thumbnail, uploads them to the cloud storage, and creates the relevant database records."

And it does it in a minute.

I review the code. It's as if I had written it. Maybe a change here or there.

Real production Rust code, 100 - 500 LOC, one shotted in one minute. It even installs the routes and understands the HTTP framework DSL. It even codegens Swagger API documentation and somehow understands the proc macro DSL that takes Rust five minutes to compile.

This tech is wizardry. It's the sci fi stuff we dreamed of as kids.

I don't get the sour opinions. The only thing to fear is big tech monopolozation.

I suppose the other thing to worry about is what's going to happen to our cushy $400k salaries. But if you make yourself useful, I think it'll work out just fine.

Perhaps more than fine if you're able to leverage this to get ahead and fire your employer. You might not need your employer anymore. If you can do sales and wear many hats, you'll do exceedingly well.

I'm not saying non-engineers will be able to do this. I'm saying engineers are well positioned to leverage this.
by h3half | 2026-01-26 14:07:42+00:00
Subjectivity is implied. You’re shadowboxing against a claim that the person you replied to never made. Communication is more than the simple dictionary definitions of the words being written.

And as has been pointed out, you are yourself asserting your opinion about subjective communications as fact (i.e. that you should always make it denotatively clear to readers when you’re going your opinion and when you’re globally asserting something)
by nicoburns | 2026-01-26 14:07:49+00:00
Something I've noticed is that AI code generation makes it easier/faster to generate code while shifting more work of the work of keeping code correct and maintainable to the code review stage. That can be highly problematic for open source projects that are typically already bottlenecked by maintainer review bandwidth.

It can be mitigated by PR submitters doing a review and edit pass prior to submitting a PR. But a lot of submitters don't currently do this, and in my experience the average quality of PRs generated by AI is definitely significantly lower than those not generated by AI.
by dxdm | 2026-01-26 14:08:41+00:00
Well-deserved criticism. The colors, too. Without reader mode, this is the equivalent of someone shining a high beam into your eyes at night while trying to communicate with you.

This is the kind of thing I click away from unless there's a strong outside signal that the content is worth engaging with.

I hope the author reconsiders these stylistic choices. I'm sure they lose readers because of it.
by naikrovek | 2026-01-26 14:08:48+00:00
This is the kind of thing that the browser should not need to do. This is the kind of thing that the operating system should be doing. The operating system (the thing you use to run programs securely) should be securing you from bad anything, not just bad native applications.

A large part of the web is awful because of all the things browsers must do that the operating system should already be doing.

We have all tolerated stagnant operating systems for too long.

Plan 9's inherent per-process namespacing has made me angry at the people behind Windows, MacOS, and Linux. If something is a security feature and it's not an inherent part of how applications run, then you have to opt in, and that's not really good enough anymore. Security should be the default. It should be inherent, difficult to turn off for a layman, and it should be provided by the operating system. That's what the operating system is for: to run your programs securely.
by austin-cheney | 2026-01-26 14:08:59+00:00
I manage a team of developers in a low code environment without AI. The junior developer positions require 8 years of experience, which I think is absurd. Everybody has to program on their own, though pair programming for knowledge transfer is super frequent, but the primary skills of concern are operational excellence (including some project management tasks), transmission, and reliability.

From a people perspective that means excellence when working with outside teams and gathering requirements on your own. It also means always knowing the status of your work in all environments, even in production after deployment. If your soft skills are strong and you can independently program work streams that touch multiple external parties you are golden. It seems this is the future.
by tlogan | 2026-01-26 14:09:04+00:00
I do not think this is really about privacy as much as it is about our broken immigration system. Let’s look at a simple case where both Democrats and Republicans largely agree.

On January 6, 2026, all South Sudanese nationals lost their TPS status and ordered to leave the US. At this point, they are all effectively declared illegal. I have not seen a single Democrat seriously argue that something should be done about this.

So what do we think people from South Sudan will actually do? Pack their bags and return to South Sudan?

My point is that a system where someone is admitted to the US completely legally, lives here for years, and is then suddenly reclassified as “illegal” is fundamentally broken.
by scyzoryk_xyz | 2026-01-26 14:09:08+00:00
What? No. There are countless reasons why the wall fell but TV wasn't one of them. East Europeans didn't 'see' anything 'on TV' that would suggest anything other than what was endorsed by local authorities.

Trade was a big factor though. As the collective quality of life in the East was deteriorating, efforts were made by authorities to save the dire situation by opening trade and some degree of freedom of movement with the West. As this plan failed economically, a side effect was that it only became common knowledge across society how big the gap in quality of life really was.

The idea that free internet access will magically change the situation for Iranians on it's own is naive.
by high_na_euv | 2026-01-26 14:09:27+00:00
>As you can see, these two new Intel chips now sit at the top of the stack in terms of multi-core performance. And when it comes to the X9 388H, it's by a healthy margin. Coming back with a chip that outperforms Apple's latest M5 by 33 percent is no easy feat, but Intel pulled it off. The same is true in the graphics department, where Intel has taken the lead in integrated graphics. It has been a long time since I've been able to say this, but Intel is clearly back on top.

>Intel still can't compete on single-core performance against Apple, and that's where the improvement is the most modest. It’s also not as fast as the M4 Pro or M4 Max, which still have the edge in every category, though the difference in multi-core performance between the X9 and the M4 Pro is only 14 percent. Apple's M5 Pro and M5 Max are just around the corner, too. I'd also love to test the Core Ultra X7358H against upcoming processors in next-gen laptops like the Snapdragon X2 Elite Enhanced, but I don't have them on hand yet for comparisons.

>The graphics really stand out, though, especially when you get to the X9 chip. For once, the inclusion of the “X” branding in the name actually feels worthwhile. Both the X7 and X9 chips use a B390 GPU, representing the top of the line in Intel's architecture (outside of discrete desktop graphics cards). You get 12 Xe cores in the X7 and X9 configurations, the only difference between the two being clock speed. Intel claimed that Panther Lake graphics were 77 percent faster than in the previous-gen Lunar Lake laptops, and while I didn't quite see that much of a jump, it's hard to get a direct apples-to-apples comparison with laptops.

>its gaming performance is really impressive. Cyberpunk 2077 can hit a comfortable 55 frames per second (fps) at native medium graphics settings—and that's without any upscaling and frame generation
by gruturo | 2026-01-26 14:09:43+00:00
It also fits in a handful of bytes or kilobytes what would take half a gigabyte to communicate in a video - sometimes making the difference if you have limited bandwidth or a cap on monthly traffic.

It's also ridiculously easy to cache (download a book in 9 seconds, board a transoceanic flight - no problem)

It also doesn't require the right sound and lighting conditions to see and understand a video (either those conditions, or good noise cancelling headphones - and now you're unaware of your surroundings)

It's also the only viable option on insanely low power devices which get months of battery life per charge.

It's also something you can read at an incredibly speedy pace if you are good at it and practice - though occasionally a decent audio/video player will be of use with this.

It's also something you can fall asleep while consuming, and tomorrow you won't have much trouble finding exactly where you left off.

I could continue..
by cainxinth | 2026-01-26 14:09:58+00:00
I don’t mind the occasional joke in an hn thread. I’ve made several myself. But I’m disappointed that this thread is seemingly all jokes and no actual discussion of the article.

I’m no mathematician, but as best I can tell, this is describing a novel approach to the “lazy caterers problem”: “Given an integer n, denoting the number of cuts that can be made on a pancake, find the maximum number of pieces that can be formed by making n cuts.” [1]

Their method was to use weirdly shaped, sometimes infinite knives, computing optimal arrangements, and recognizing the resulting region counts as known integer sequences.

[1] https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/dsa/the-lazy-caterers-problem/
by mettamage | 2026-01-26 14:10:05+00:00
I know what you mean but to look that black and white at it seems dismissive of the spectrum that's actually there (between vibecoding and software engineering). Looking at the whole spectrum is, I find, much more interesting.

Normally I'd know 100% of my codebase, now I understand 5% of it truly. The other 95% I'd need to read it more carefully before I daresay I understand it.
by sham1 | 2026-01-26 14:10:49+00:00
While this is our course a good point, one extremely good part about text is that unless there given text is quite literally just plain text data, it's a lot easier to embed things like videos, pictures, audio, etc. into a textual medium especially when compared the other way around -- that is the fact that text in videos and pictures and so on tends to be quite limited when compared with the kind of "rich text" with the more audiovisual content added between blocks of text.

So one can use the thousand words of pictures while most content is textual, whereas the other way is significantly worse, since it of course lacks all the searchability et al.