MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by item007 | 2026-01-31 12:57:16+00:00
That’s a really important definition of “zero setup”: no long-running indexing jobs, and no “crunch for 24 hours on my laptop” just to make search usable.

And I hear you on cross-network fragmentation — in a lot of real environments the hardest part isn’t search quality, it’s that data lives on different machines, different networks, and you only have partial visibility at any given time.

If you had to pick, would you rather have:

1.instant local indexing over whatever is reachable right now (even if incomplete), or

2.a lightweight distributed approach that can index in-place on each machine/network and only share metadata/results across boundaries?

I’m exploring this “latency + partial visibility” constraint as a first-class requirement (more context in my HN profile/bio if you want to compare notes).
by oellegaard | 2026-01-31 12:59:16+00:00
We recently moved two companies from AWS to Scaleway which is the closest to AWS you find in EU AFAIK. It's like AWS 5-10 years ago, eg much fewer managed services and you don't have as much tooling, but it works great and it is also cheaper. You do get managed kubernetes, Postgres and Redis plug and play though.
by simianwords | 2026-01-31 12:59:20+00:00
It’s incorrect to point out that consumers have rejected AI.

The strategy here is more valid in my opinion. The value in AI is much more legible when the consumer uses it directly from their chat UI than whatever enterprises can come up with.

I can suggest many ways that consumers can use it directly from chat window. Value from enterprise use is actually not that clear. I can see coding but that’s about it. Can you tell me ways in which enterprises can use AI in ways that is not just providing their employees with chaggpt access?
by mistersquid | 2026-01-31 12:59:31+00:00
> This is such an exciting thing, but it will just amplify influence inequality, unless we somehow magically regulate 1 human = 1 agent. Even then, which agent has the most guaranteed token throughput?

I know you're spinning (we all are), but you're underthinking this.

AIs will seek to participate in the economy directly, manipulating markets in ways only AIs can. Ais will spawn AIs/agents that work on the behalf of AIs.

Why would they yoke themselves to their humans?
by sandworm101 | 2026-01-31 12:59:37+00:00
A collider produces far more than new particles or explanations. They produce papers and phds. In effect, thier primary goal is to produce careera. The new particles are just the public announcements. The collider doeant even need to be functional. Much, perhaps most, of the work occures before first light, before anyone turns it on. The design of the ring and its innumerable detectors and subsystems takes decades. So a great many people want the next collider to be funded regardless of its potential for scientific discovery.
by item007 | 2026-01-31 12:59:42+00:00
That’s another strong point, and I think it’s the pragmatic default: shrink scope, keep one source of truth, enforce a repeatable format, and prune on a cadence. It’s basically how you keep both retrieval and any automation predictable.

The tension I’m trying to understand is that in a lot of real setups the “corpus” isn’t voluntarily curated — it’s fragmented across machines/networks/tools, and the opportunity cost of “move everything into one place” is exactly why people fall back to grep and ad-hoc search.

Do you think the right answer is always “accept the constraint and curate harder”, or is there a middle ground where you can keep sources where they are but still get reliable re-entry (even if it’s incomplete/partial)?

I’m collecting constraints like this as the core design input (more context in my HN profile/bio if you want to compare notes).
by yoavm | 2026-01-31 13:00:09+00:00
> The main reason we don't have an alternative to Visa/Mastercard duopoly is protectionism of EU countries. There are local alternatives that do pretty well (BLIK in Poland, Revolut Pay in countries where it's popular) but entering more markets is like pulling teeth because EU throws regulatory obstacles at every step.

That doesn't seem to make a lot of sense? How did Visa & Mastercard manage to go through the "protectionism of EU countries" then?
by ear7h | 2026-01-31 13:00:12+00:00
Wow you're so right, you did such a good job asking computer mommy to confirm your priors!

But actually, that's not the goal here. AI, at least the kind of products that need dedicated datacenters ie. generative, isn't critical infrastructure. The focus is on documents, collaboration tools, file servers, single-sign on, databases etc. that are seemingly monopolized by US providers.
by rellfy | 2026-01-31 13:02:10+00:00
I arrived at a very similar conclusion since trying Claude Code with Opus 4.5 (a huge paradigm shift in terms of tech and tools). I've been calling it "zen coding", where you treat the codebase like a zen garden. You maintain a mental map of the codebase, spec everything before prompting for the implementation, and review every diff line by line. The AI is a tool to implement the system design, not the system designer itself (at least not for now...).

The distinction drawn between both concepts matters. The expertise is in knowing what to spec and catching when the output deviates from your design. Though, the tech is so good now that a carefully reviewed spec will be reliably implemented by a state-of-the-art LLM. The same LLM that produces mediocre code for a vague request will produce solid code when guided by someone who understands the system deeply enough to constrain it. This is the difference between vibe coding and zen coding.

Zen coders are masters of their craft; vibe coders are amateurs having fun.

And to be clear, nothing wrong with being an amateur and having fun. I "vibe code" several areas with AI that are not really coding, but other fields where I don't have professional knowledge in. And it's great, because LLMs try to bring you closer to the top of human knowledge on any field, so as an amateur it is incredible to experience it.
by einpoklum | 2026-01-31 13:03:28+00:00
But that might be considered a legal trick. Suppose that, when you pay for a taxi, the standard conditions of carriage would make it your responsibility to supervise the vehicle operation and alert the driver so as to avoid accidents. Would the taxi driver and taxi company be able to eschew liability through that formalism? Probably not. The fact that Tesla makes you sign something does not automatically make the signed document valid and enforceable.

It may be that it is; but then, if you are required to be watchful at all time, and be able to take over from the autonomous vehicle at all times, then - the autonomy doesn't really help you all that much, does it?
by lucasRW | 2026-01-31 13:03:36+00:00
Why EU-native rather than nation-native ? If you are French, your sensitive stuff must be French-native, just like Switzerland does, not "EU-native whatever that means".

There is no EU, each country has very strong different interests, on some topics, some will decide to stay close to the US, on some other topics, some will seek proximity with the BRICS, etc, etc. Constantly being in an in-between is what has destroyed Europe.
by kris_builds | 2026-01-31 13:04:43+00:00
The "n of 1" framing really resonates. I've noticed that the psychological shift from "I should learn to do this properly" to "I just need this tool to exist and work" is huge for personal productivity.

The Command Center concept is clever - it's essentially the dashboard we've all wished our various tools would combine into, except now we can actually build it ourselves. The cat icon is the cherry on top.

Curious if you've run into any limitations with the MCP setup? Wondering how well it handles more complex calendar interactions beyond basic syncing.
by SecretDreams | 2026-01-31 13:04:50+00:00
> thousand russian rocket people from going to work for bad people.

Just like for the Germans before!

I agree with you that it is an educational tool, but if that's all it is, there are cheaper ways to educate that might also have a higher likelihood for scientific discoveries. To build a new collider, we should have some things we're trying to do/find.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-31 13:05:40+00:00
Well Hetzner's support's phenomenal too.

Sure they might not have all the same offerings but they are really easy to abstract upon and personally I feel like hetzner is seriously one of the best cloud providers.

Hetzner is absolutely 10x more competitive than AWS. It's actually hard to match the competitiveness of hetzner with their scale actually. I seriously can't understate this enough but AWS being competitive is really somewhat of a mass delusion or maybe the fact that Companies don't know other alternatives exist but I genuinely find it absolutely strange.

Also, just go ahead and try hetzner and see their competitiveness out for yourself. Seriously, one of the best (netcup another german hosting is really great too and they can be even cheaper at times and its something I personally use and can vouch for both netcup/hetzner)
by bborud | 2026-01-31 13:05:47+00:00
Well, if the Zastava had 5-10x the amount of horsepower and storage space of the BYD for the same amount of money. Because that’s what is often the reality. Bare metal is unreasonably efficient compared to cloud services for not that much more know-how.

I do tech DD work for investment funds etc and one thing I often see are slow, complex and expensive AWS-heavy architectures that optimize for problems the company doesn’t have and often will never have. In theory to ensure stability and scalability. They are usually expensive and have nightmarish configuration complexity.

In practice complexity tends to lead to more outages and performance issues than if you had a much simpler (rented) bare metal setup with some spare capacity and better architecture design. More than half of serious outages I have seen documented in these reviews came from configuration mistakes or bugs in software that is supposed to manage your resources.

Nevermind that companies invest serious amounts of time in trying to manage complexity rather than remove it.

A few years ago I worked for a company that had two competing systems. One used AWS sparingly: just EC2, S3, RDS and load balancers. The other went berserk in the AWS candy shop and was this monstrosity that used 20-something different AWS services glued together by lambdas. This was touted as “the future”, and everyone who didn’t think it was a good idea was an idiot.

The simple solution cost about the same to run for a few thousand (business customers) as the complex one cost for ONE customer. The simple solution cost about 1/20 to develop. It also had about 1/2500 the latency on average because it wasn’t constantly enqueuing and dequeueing data through a slow SQS maze of queues.

And best of all: you could move the simpler solution to bare metal servers. In fact, we ran all the testing on clusters of 6 RPIs. The complex solution was stuck in AWS forever.
by moffkalast | 2026-01-31 13:06:20+00:00
Well I hope you're right, the transitions I've seen proposed were mostly shot down because people refused to learn anything new and due to nebulous certification requirements that Microsoft of course has.

Speaking of OnlyOffice, I've seen it crop up more and more lately and apparently it's Latvian, so maybe that will be the one eventually. Though my experience with it has been that it's not very stable (lots of crashing around embedding video anyway) and has a smaller feature set.
by pillbitsHQ | 2026-01-31 13:06:33+00:00
The 15-second duration is a game changer for narrative content. Most AI video tools force you to think in 5-second chunks, which makes storyboarding feel disjointed.

What I'm most curious about is the native audio generation - is it just ambient sound/music, or can it generate synchronized speech? If it's the latter with reasonable lip-sync, that could eliminate a lot of post-production work for explainer videos and short-form content.

Also wondering about the API availability. Having this accessible programmatically would open interesting possibilities for automated content pipelines.
by pillbitsHQ | 2026-01-31 13:06:50+00:00
Congrats on shipping! The focus on actual conversation practice is spot on - there's a huge gap between knowing vocabulary and being able to use it under real-time pressure.

Re: your questions - one thing that often breaks immersion in conversational AI is when the responses feel too 'helpful' or educational mid-conversation. Real native speakers don't stop to explain grammar when you make mistakes. They might just naturally rephrase, or not even notice.

Have you considered adding a 'correction mode' toggle? Sometimes you want the AI to be forgiving and keep the flow (like talking to a patient friend), other times you want explicit feedback after the conversation ends.

Also curious - how do you handle the awkward pauses when users are thinking? That's where a lot of language learning apps feel unnatural. Real conversations have natural silence.
by ArickVigas | 2026-01-31 13:07:07+00:00
I experienced this firsthand. I'm a full-stack dev with 12+ years of experience and even for me, security hardening OpenClaw on a VPS took hours — UFW, fail2ban, SSH key-only auth, disabling password login, configuring Docker isolation, setting up proper firewall rules. And I knew what I was doing.

The core problem the video highlights is real: OpenClaw gives an AI agent shell access, messaging access, and browser access. The default setup has none of the security guardrails you'd want. Most users either skip security entirely or make mistakes that leave them exposed.

After setting it up securely for myself and a few friends, I started automating the whole process — automated provisioning on Hetzner with Docker sandbox, UFW, fail2ban, SSH key auth pre-configured. Turned it into a small managed hosting service (runclaw.ai) because I kept seeing the same setup struggles everywhere.

The broader point stands though: the security model for AI agents with system access is fundamentally unsolved. Sandboxing helps. Proper infrastructure helps. But prompt injection and trust boundaries are architectural problems that no amount of hosting can fix.
by megous | 2026-01-31 13:07:31+00:00
I'd still like the ability to just block a crawler by its IP range, but these days nope.

1 Hz is 86400 hits per day, or 600k hits per week. That's just one crawler.

Just checked my access log... 958k hits in a week from 622k unique addresses.

95% is fetching random links from u-boot repository that I host, which is completely random. I blocked all of the GCP/AWS/Alibaba and of course Azure cloud IP ranges.

It's almost all now just comming of a "residential" and "mobile" IP address space from completely random places all around the world. I'm pretty sure my u-boot fork is not that popular. :-D

Every request is a new IP address, and available IP space of the crawler(s) is millions of addresses.

I don't host a popular repo. I host a bot attraction.
by jmyeet | 2026-01-31 13:08:06+00:00
IMHO Europe has one choice, and it may already be too late, and that is to adopt the China model or to descend into fascism and neoliberal economic collapse.

Europe needs to be responsible for its own security and needs its own versions of all the big American tech companies. This administration has done more to destroy American soft power than any other in history and it's not even close. The US has shown itself to be an unreliable partner.

China now has a record of decades of long-term planning and choosing the interests of its populace over corporate interests. It's not problem free by any means but the food is cheap and plentiful, the priority for housing is availability rather than treating it purely as an investment vehicle, infrastructure such as robust public transit is a priority and from the beginning of the Internet age, China has decided not to be beholden to American tech companies so there are Chinese versions of everything.

One may question Europe's ability to innovate in tech given the comparative lack of unicorns produced (vs the US) but that's irrelevant here, for two reasons:

1. Europe doesn't need to innovate. It just needs to copy; and

2. Forcing EU governments and companies to use European platforms will create a captive market.
by simianwords | 2026-01-31 13:08:31+00:00
Here’s our point of disagreement: I think smart people have made a bet in this with serious intent after considering all the pitfalls.
You think they are either deliberately ignoring it (so ridiculous) or they are betting on a scientific breakthrough.

It’s too comical to even address the “they are ignoring it part” so I’ll ignore it.

I would agree with you that part of their bet might involve hoping for breakthroughs and the investment analysis probably factored it in.

Lots of earlier investments have banked on breakthroughs like this.

Also your opinion on how markets work is naive and unscientific.
by Havoc | 2026-01-31 13:08:32+00:00
>Vibe coding is the process of generating software using AI without being part of the process at all.

Even the most one shot prompt vibecoding is still getting high level intent from the person and then testing it in person. There is no "without being part of the process at all".

And from there its a gradient as to how much input & guidance is given.

This entire distinction he's trying to make here just doesn't make sense frankly. Trying to impose two categories on something that is clearly a continuous spectrum.
by keyle | 2026-01-31 13:09:12+00:00
It's getting silly. Every 3 days someone is trying to coin a new term for programming.

At the end of the day, you produce code for a compiler to produce other code, and then eventually run it.

It's called programming.

When carpenters got powertools, they didn't rename themselves automatic carpenters.

When architects started working with CAD instead of paper, they didn't become vibe architects, even though they literally copy-paste 3/5 of the content they produce.

Programming is evolving, there is a lot of senseless flailing because heads is spinning.
by ozim | 2026-01-31 13:10:27+00:00
Feels like people write that like it somehow is failure on investors side.

If you are investor on US market having 300M people speaking roughly the same language and then high possibility to easily spill over the world upsides on the bet are really high, burning cash to have a chance hitting jackpot are much much higher than in EU.

In EU you are starting in a single country so like 60M people and your payoff is capped from start at most likely scenario you go big in a single country and then you basically have clean start in next country.

That is the reality of game theory, not some failure of imagination or being scared to take risks - payoff is just not there, in US you have a shot at insane payoff in relatively short term.
by tmtvl | 2026-01-31 13:10:38+00:00
> yes, I can use an app to pay

So you move the power from two American companies (Visa and Mastercard) to two American companies (Apple and Google)? What's that supposed to solve?

Also, fuck apps. I had to set up an app for my mother to recharge her new hybrid car and I am not joking: at one point I had to create a log in for her and was greeted by a screen with two options: Log In (blue button, white text), and Log In (white button, blue text). I would rather use cash than an app (and I'm in Belgium, carrying around cash is like herding sheep through coyote territory).
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-31 13:10:45+00:00
We have UPI in India and it's pretty Robust.

My brother actually was part of deal in talks to have UPI pilots as a project within London as a project within his college and I remember him talking about how UPI (India) is in talks with other European countries too.

With the mother of all deals recently signed between EU and India. I sincerely hope that UPI can have access within EU markets too.

If you ever come to India, you can witness the astronomical rise of UPI. From street vendors to literally everybody now has UPI and it has 0 fees and is really great/one of the best.

As for our brazillian friends, I have heard that pix is great too and I have respect to pix as well plus its open source as well. Both Pix and UPI are really great.
by 202508042147 | 2026-01-31 13:11:20+00:00
We went with Hetzner as we already had good experiences with their VPSes. For this particular db migration, a resonably sized VPS with volumes does the job for us. We don't have planet scale operations so the lowish IOPS is not an issue atm. Also, with this experience at hand, I am confident that we'll manage another migration if need be.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-31 13:11:33+00:00
> knowing the exact spec of your program up front is vanishingly rare, probably <1% of all projects

I don't have anything useful to add, but both of you speak and write with conviction from your own experience and perspective yet to refuse that the situation might be different from others.

"Software engineering" is a really broad field, some people can spend their whole life working on projects where everything is known up front, others the straight opposite.

Kind of feel like you both need to be clearer up front about your context and where you're coming from, otherwise you're probably both right, but just in your own contexts.
by Jamesbeam | 2026-01-31 13:11:39+00:00
Yet.

Sooner or later all saudis living abroad will need to go to the embassy and the UK is especially bad at protecting the lives of foreign "dissidents".

I think the other intelligence agencies call it the MI5 special.

Unfortunately insertrandomcrititicaljournalistnamehere flipped and tried to pull a gun inside the Saudi embassy, fortunately our security forces were able to neutralize the terrorist immediately before he could cause any harm, here is the once discharged weapon with his fingerprints, and here the video and audio evidence that we promise is totally not generated by AI.

He totally had an extra finger on each hand to pull the trigger, Bin Salami Pinky promise.

The body? Sorry that has already been brought back to Saudi Arabia on explicit wishes of his family. See we have it written and signed here, don’t mind the tears and blood splatters next to the ink, his parents had an unfortunate event of spontaneous nosebleeding, but we took good care of that.

https://time.com/5725041/uk-russian-assassins-heidi-blake/

You really think the UK will not look the other way again for a journalist after he unfortunately tripped and fell into the royal bonesaw?

Must be very frustrating for MI6 to even tip their own people off and get met with Boris Johnson level incompetence 90% of the time.

If you want to flee your country for political reasons and wish to continue living, don’t go to the UK, Germany, the US or Russia.
by locknitpicker | 2026-01-31 13:12:16+00:00
> Didn't we get to the point where we realized that microservices cause too much trouble down the road?

That's a largely ignorant opinion to have. Like any architecture, microservices have clear advantages and tradeoffs. It makes no sense to throw vague blanket statements at an architure style because you assume it "causes trouble", particularly when you know nothing about requirements or constraints and all architectures are far from bullet proof.
by ThyerMJ26 | 2026-01-31 13:12:16+00:00
I'm hoping they digitize some of the older archives they have in storage.

For example, they apparently have 23 U-Matic tapes of the HOPL (History of Programming Languages) conference in 1978 [1].

The proceedings [2] describe one of the tapes that don't make it into the transcribed proceedings:

> The after-dinner speeches at the conference banquet were devoted to humorous reminiscences and anecdotes about the languages and events during their development. The banquet anecdotes are not included in this volume because, although they are humorous to hear, the voice inflections make a big difference, and they are not necessarily amusing to read.

[1] https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10269512...
[2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.1145/800025