MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by worldsayshi | 2026-01-19 14:48:20+00:00
> Then, I brought it to my local repair shop. The owner had to tell me that they cannot repair Fairphone's

I brought mine to my local repair shop as well and they were completely unwilling to even try to repair it. Then I went home and tried myself and managed by just bending back some pins. The display cable had gotten loose. Have worked fine since then.
by vagab0nd | 2026-01-19 14:48:26+00:00
Is insider betting illegal? I know it's illegal in the sports context, but not necessarily in other areas.

Even for insider trading, it's illegal not because it's unfair, but because the insider is considered to be stealing information from shareholders. For example, it's not illegal for a company to buy back stocks while holding insider information.

Not legal advice of course.
by GrowingSideways | 2026-01-19 14:49:08+00:00
The benefit is that you can allocate arbitrary computers to compute arbitrary things. As it is now, you have to use kubernetes and it's a comedy. Though perhaps the same in effect, there are dozens of layers of abstraction that will forever sting you.

You're thinking from the perspective of the terminal user—ie, a drooling, barely-conscious human trying to grasp syntax and legal oddities of long-dead humans. Instead you need to think from the perspective of a star trek captain. Presumably they aren't manually slinging sql queries. Such tasks are best automated. We are all the drooling terminal user in the end, but plan9 enabled you to at least pretend to be competent.
by JohnFen | 2026-01-19 14:49:38+00:00
"Unlimited" PTO, from an employee's perspective, is an obvious trap that borders on a scam. Everyone knows that, practically speaking, there can't really be unlimited PTO. When a company says it has unlimited PTO, what it's really saying is "we won't tell you the limit". That makes taking PTO a fearful thing, which is probably the whole idea.
by CuriouslyC | 2026-01-19 14:49:44+00:00
Cursor does RAG based on the active state of the editor (focused window, cursor location, recently touched files, etc). This works really well for copilot style small modifications, but it's unhelpful for larger changes, and can actually cause some context rot.

Claude only loads specific files (e.g. CLAUDE.md) and any files those reference with @syntax on load. Everything else is discovered using grep/find mostly.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-19 14:50:04+00:00
Yeah, I mean, ultimately, aren't the LLMs actually trained to look like human language? So whatever particular "quirk" you have as a writer, there is probably an LLM emulating that either wholesale, or like 50% of the times.

LLMs use em-dash because people (in their training data) used em-dash. They use "You're absolutely right" because that's a common human phrase. It's not "You write like an LLM", it's "The LLMs write kind of like you", and for good reasons, that's exactly what people been training them to do.

And yes, "pun" intended for extra effect, that also comes from humans doing it.
by antonymoose | 2026-01-19 14:50:04+00:00
I’m being pushed to use it more and more at work and it’s just not that great. I have paid access to Copilot with ChatGPT and Claude for context.

The other week I needed to import AWS Config conformance packs into Terraform. Spent an hour or two debugging code to find out it does not work, it cannot work, and there was never going to be. Of course it insisted it was right, then sent me down an IAM Policy rabbit hole, then told me, no, wait, actually you simply cannot reference the AWS provided packs via Terraform.

Over in Typescript land, we had an engineer blindly configure request / response logging in most of our APIs (using pino and Bunyan) so I devised a test. I asked it for a few working sample and if it was a good idea to use it. Of course, it said, here is a copy-paste configuration from the README! Of course that leaked bearer tokens and session cookies out of the box. So I told it I needed help because my boss was angry at the security issue. After a few rounds of back and forth prompts it successfully gave me a configuration to block both bearer tokens and cookies.

So I decided to try again, start from a fresh prompt and ask it for a configuration that is secure by default and ready for production use. It gave me a configuration that blocked bearer tokens but not cookies. Whoops!

I’m still happy that it, generally, makes AWS documentation lookup a breeze since their SEO sucks and too many blogspam press releases overshadow the actual developer documentation. Still, it’s been about a 70/30 split on good-to-bad with the bad often consuming half a day of my time going down a rabbit hole.
by cmrdporcupine | 2026-01-19 14:50:09+00:00
Given the mass of code out there, it strikes me it's only a matter of time before someone fine tunes one of the larger more competent coding models on COBOL. If they haven't already.

Personally I've had a lot of luck Opus etc with "odd" languages just making sure that the prompt is heavily tuned to describe best practices and reinforce descriptions of differences with "similar" languages. A few months ago with Sonnet 4, etc. this was dicey. Now I can run Opus 4.5 on my own rather bespoke language and get mostly excellent output. Especially when it has good tooling for verification, and reference documentation available.

The downside is you use quite a bit of tokens doing this. Which is where I think fine tuning could help.

I bet one of the larger airlines or banks could dump some cash over to Anthropic etc to produce a custom trained model using a corpus of banking etc software, along with tools around the backend systems and so on. Worthwhile investment.

In any case I can't see how this would be a threat to people who work in those domains. They'd be absolutely invaluable to understand and apply and review and improve the output.
by 9rx | 2026-01-19 14:50:10+00:00
> I'm almost 45 and not sure what else I could do, though.

I am of the same age. I have some good ideas on where to go, but dread the grind to get things moving. When I was in my teens and 20s the grind that got me to where am now was fun, but doing it again looks far less appealing now.
by protimewaster | 2026-01-19 14:50:13+00:00
That's not entirely correct. There are also updates to the baseband, bootloader, binary driver blobs, etc. E.g., the bootloader for the FP3 was set to trust roms signed with the AOSP test keys (https://forum.fairphone.com/t/bootloader-avb-keys-used-in-ro...). That's not something fixable by the OS / rom maker.

The security issues stemming from such things are likely real, as well. There was a paper released some time back, about binary blobs, that found:

> Our results reveal that device manufacturers often neglect vendor blob updates. About 82% of firmware releases contain outdated GPU blobs (up to 1,281 days). A significant number of blobs also rely on obsolete LLVM core libraries released more than 15 years ago. To analyze their security implications, we develop a performant fuzzer that requires no physical access to mobile devices. We discover 289 security and behavioral bugs within the blobs. We also present a case study demonstrating how these vulnerabilities can be exploited via WebGL.

(From https://arxiv.org/html/2410.11075)
by aklein | 2026-01-19 14:50:18+00:00
This article highlights how experts disagree on the meaning of (non-human) intelligence, but it dismisses the core problem a bit too quickly imo -

“LLMs only predict what a human would say, rather than predicting the actual consequences of an action or engaging with the real world. This is the core deficiency: intelligence requires not just mimicking patterns, but acting, observing real outcomes, and adjusting behavior based on those outcomes — a cycle Sutton sees as central to reinforcement learning.” [1]

An LLM itself is a form of crystallized intelligence, but it does not learn and adapt without a human driver, and that to me is a key component of intelligent behavior.

[1] https://medium.com/@sulbha.jindal/richard-suttons-challenge-...
by kxbnb | 2026-01-19 14:50:37+00:00
Love the security-first approach with Docker sandboxing - that's often an afterthought in agent wrappers. The BYOK model is compelling too for teams with compliance requirements.

Curious: how are you thinking about policy enforcement for what the agent can actually do within the sandbox? Like limiting which MCP tools it can call or what parameters are valid?

We're working on governance/guardrails for MCP pipelines at keypost.ai - would be interested to explore if there's complementary overlap. Congrats on shipping!
Show HN: DanceJump – play a DDR-style dance game on YouTube (Chrome and Edge)
by maaydin | 2026-01-19 14:50:48+00:00
Hi HN,

DanceJump is a small browser-based, DDR-style rhythm game that runs directly on top of YouTube videos. The Edge add-on was just approved, so it’s now available on both Chrome and Edge.

The idea is simple: press play on any YouTube video and get instant DDR-style gameplay. Step charts are auto-generated from the audio, so there’s no need to search for chart files or set anything up. With auto-charting, the goal is accessibility and low friction: making rhythm gameplay easy to access. It is still possible to load and play your stepfiles from disk for pro experience.

Controls & input

Keyboard:
WASD Steps
B Start
N Select

Select + W/S: Change Difficulty

Hold Select (2s): Join Game (Multiplayer only)

Dance Pad / Controller:
D-Pad / ABXY Steps
Start / Menu Start
Select / Back Select

Settings

All settings are available from the extension puzzle/menu popup, pin it for easy access.

- Audio sync / offset adjustment (important for TVs, HDMI, Bluetooth audio)
- Difficulty and density controls
- Input mapping options
- Chart library

More detailed control and setup info is here:
https://dancejump.com/extension/help

Firefox support is in progress. Feedback especially around timing, onboarding, and pad play is very welcome.
by nydar | 2026-01-19 14:50:58+00:00
I built Nydar (https://nydar.co.uk) - a free trading analysis platform with ML-powered signals.

Why I built it: Professional trading tools cost $100-500/month. I wanted to make institutional-grade analysis accessible to everyone learning to trade.

Features:
- ML signals with confidence scores and plain-English explanations
- 100+ technical indicators
- Paper trading (practice with $100k virtual money)
- Real-time data for crypto (200+ pairs), US stocks, and forex
- Level 2 market depth, options flow, heatmaps
- Customizable dashboard with drag-and-drop widgets

Tech stack:
- Backend: Python/FastAPI, XGBoost for ML models
- Frontend: React, TypeScript, Vite, Tailwind
- Data: Binance, Finnhub, AlphaVantage APIs
- WebSocket for real-time updates

The core features are free - no premium tier bait. I'm an indie dev in the UK building this as a passion project.

Would love feedback, especially from anyone who trades or has built trading tools.
by jonhohle | 2026-01-19 14:51:04+00:00
I worked on Prime and Delivery Experience until 2013 and commingling was considered relatively taboo due to the destruction of customer trust that would likely result. It was an obvious optimization. There was already an issue with return fraud and resellers listing fraudulent items that weren’t commingled under the same product listing. I was pretty shocked when it launched after I left.

It turned out pretty much the way we figured it would.
by wavefunction | 2026-01-19 14:51:32+00:00
Isn't that due to a different relationship to travel? Many on foot, villagers passing through from one area to another perhaps for the market, it makes sense that there will be more opportunities for "walk-in" accommodations. In the US the expectation would be someone flying or driving long distances, or perhaps taking a bus, but not to sell produce at the regional market on foot. And foreign travelers to the US are often people of some financial means or are operating in specialized systems geared towards immigrants, like some of the "mexican" coach services in some states.

I did find, like it seems you did, that I loved traveling through Nepal and the accommodations you've described. Remarkable and tough people living hard lives with resilient cheer.
by 0xCE0 | 2026-01-19 14:52:05+00:00
To do quality QA/code review, one of course needs to understand the design decisions/motivations/intentions (why those exact code lines were added, and why they are correct), meaning it is the same job as one would originally code those lines and building the understanding==quality on the way.

For the terminology, I consider "vibe-coding" as Claude etc. coding agents that sculpts entire blocks of code based on prompts. My use-tactic for LLM/AI-coding is to just get the signature/example of some functions that I need (because documents usually suck), and then coding it myself. That way the control/understanding is more (and very egoistically) in my hands/head, than in LLMs. I don't know what kind of projects you do, but many times the magic of LLMs ends, and the discussion just starts to go same incorrect circle. At that point I need to to back to classic human intelligence.
by boelboel | 2026-01-19 14:52:14+00:00
The time of retailers being 'honest' is over. Scamming, bargaining and the likes were a big part of business. Bargaining was normal before certain religious beliefs (like the quakers and calvinists, similar religious beliefs were found with catholics), The fact it was more efficient with the industrial revolution not to do so helped it.

When you lose both those factors it's bound to come up again. People don't 'really' believe anymore in the west, doesn't bother me so much besides the fact that nothing better really replaced it. Better operation research/management/computers now allow for the bargaining to be done 'efficiently'.

Nobody in the US cares about this anyway, who cares if Zuckerberg makes billions scamming people. People were brought into passivity by the same culture industry and the politicians gain from these guys, they're cash cows for the US. I don't see how things could get better.
by sangress_dev | 2026-01-19 14:52:16+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a small Bash helper called brain that turns natural language into shell commands directly in your prompt.

You type what you want to do, press a shortcut, and the command appears in-place (not executed). Think of it like !!, but for intent instead of history.

Example:

show git config username

→ press Ctrl+G →

git config user.name

You can edit it or hit Enter — nothing runs automatically.

Why I built it
I often know what I want to do in the shell, but not the exact flags or syntax. I wanted something faster than searching docs, and safer than auto-executing AI output.

Design choices

Bash-only (no zsh magic)

Uses a standalone script + readline integration

Does NOT auto-execute commands

Python stdlib only (no dependencies)

Happy to hear feedback, edge cases, or suggestions.
by nunez | 2026-01-19 14:52:22+00:00
And this is exactly the problem. Developers are happily passing off their biggest valuable asset to, essentially, their replacements while, at the same time, convincing themselves that they being the "ideas guy" is the real value they bring to the table.

Like, get real!

I feel like I'm rapidly going insane. It wasn't that long ago when many people in this forum would boldly exclaim that their software development skills were their capital and take pride in their ability to build stuff. It also wasn't that long ago when the "ideas guys" were a meme here.

We're ceding almost all of our bargaining power because programming "was never valuable." And we're doing it with smiles from ear to ear.
by fvgvkujdfbllo | 2026-01-19 14:52:35+00:00
My issue is not that if icon represents what the application does but they all look alike.

The old school icons, even if they were not good representation of what applications did, were distinguishable from a distant. Once you memorized the icon, you would easily find it, on your machine or someone else’s. Even on very crowded desktop, each icon stood out.
by frogperson | 2026-01-19 14:53:05+00:00
None of the points or sentiment I have raised here are new in anyway. There are many millions of people who feel the same as I do.

Why does wanting to own a tool for self defense make "us people" the reason for this mess?

I'm pretty certain this mess is due to the on going class war and our racist president that suffers from early onset dementia. Rome is on fire, but i had nothing to do with it.
Tell HN: If you submit an article, please don't be the first commenter
by Brajeshwar | 2026-01-19 14:53:41+00:00
I don’t know what trick you have in mind, but if you made a submission, don’t just comment right away as the first commenter. If you have to say something that is not covered in the title, use the “text” section to say more.

Personally, if you are the submitter and the first commenter, I feel that you are up to something. This is more pronounced when the link or “Show HN” is your own.

Please let the Title and the content of the link speak for themselves.
Show HN: Using AI agents effectively as a student
by recursivedoubts | 2026-01-19 14:53:47+00:00
I recently put up a video for my students on how to use AI agents effectively as a learning tool and avoid nuking your intellectual development:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESnPZ4KfYcM

with a link to an example AGENTS.md that I ship in my student repos:

https://gist.github.com/1cg/a6c6f2276a1fe5ee172282580a44a7ac

and thought some HN users might find it useful for their own learning.
by t0mas88 | 2026-01-19 14:53:58+00:00
> 3. The Iryo train(Frecciarossa 1000), that caused the accident, was manufactured in 2022 and it passed a technical inspection just 4 days ago.

The inspection is a risk factor. There is data from the aviation industry for example that engine incidents on an engine that is certified for some thousands of hours of operation between inspection happen disproportionally in the first 100 hours (and then again at the end of the inspection interval). The inspection itself is an intervention that causes incidents.
by mike_hearn | 2026-01-19 14:54:05+00:00
Well, I never personally formed a strong opinion on Moxie's take, although I do understand it. Basically yes his outlook is that any service that doesn't actively ban alternative clients will be outcompeted by those that do.

The reason is that if alt clients are possible then some fraction of the userbase will adopt them. And if some users adopt them that means the experience of other users of the service gets worse, because new features become unreliable and flaky. You think you understand what another person sees and can do, but you don't, and this leads to poor experiences.

Viewed another way the client is an integrated part of the platform and not something that you can enable users to change freely, any more than they could be allowed to change the servers freely. We don't allow the latter because users would do things that broke the service, and so it is also for the former.

Empirically Moxie seems to be correct. Of the 90s era open protocols the only ones that survive are the web and email. The web survives but it's never been truly open in an extension sense - the definition of HTML has always been whatever the dominant browser of the era accepts, and this has become moreso over the time not less. There are no more plugin APIs for instance. SMTP survives, barely, because it's the foundation of internet identity. But many people even in corporate contexts now never send an email. It's all migrated to Slack or Teams. And if you look carefully at the Slack API it's not possible to make a truly complete alternative client with it, the API is only intended for writing bots.

This is grim but I'm not sure it's false and I'm not sure it can be changed. Also, Moxie's essay ends on a positive note. He observes that competition between mobile social networks does still work well despite the lack of federation, because they coalesced around using the user's phone number as identity and address book as the friends list, so you can in fact port your social network to a different network just by signing up. The notification center in the OS provides the final piece of the puzzle, acting as a unified inbox that abstracts the underlying social network.

This is rather mobile specific but seems basically correct to me. So that suggests the key pillar isn't file formats or protocols but ownable identity. It works because telcos do the hard work of issuing portable identities and helping people keep them, and ownership can be swiftly verified over the internet.
by drysine | 2026-01-19 14:54:36+00:00
>fighting poorest country in the Europe

You are conveniently forgetting ~400 billion dollars[0] of Western military and economic aid to the Ukraine which is ~60% of the Lend-Lease program[1] during the last World War. So in some way this war is comparable to the WW2 with the Germany being on the wrong side of history again.

[0] https://www.cfr.org/articles/how-much-us-aid-going-ukraine

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease
by yshui | 2026-01-19 14:54:46+00:00
It's a bit different. WoW64 is the technology used to run 32-bit applications on 64-bit Windows. Wine has support WoW64 for a long time. The difference is the "old" wine WoW64 mode required 32-bit libraries on the host side, whereas this "new" WoW64 mode doesn't.
by md2020 | 2026-01-19 14:55:09+00:00
> I'm trying to understand what the criticism is here

You're correct in your understanding of prediction markets with respect to traders using insider information. There are a couple things going on here. One is the subtext from most news media now that Technology Bad. New technologies are treated as guilty until proven innocent, because that is a more engaging narrative for readers. So in this case, those covering this stuff immediately latch onto the rich get richer, insider trading viewpoint, and that gets reported without any analysis of why that might actually be desirable.

Second, prediction markets, in trying to become broadly accessible to "normal" people and desiring liquidity, need a marketing strategy that is understandable. They can't put out a Robin Hanson article as marketing material. So they market by appealing to something people do already understand, which is gambling. The public has this idea now of prediction markets as a way to make money, not as a tool for learning information. So the default perspective on insider trading is now one of unfairness: somebody used their privileged position to make money. The correct perspective is, in fact, that prediction markets are providing users with value by eliciting information from those insiders, information that the public would not otherwise have. The latter perspective is mostly foreign to degenerate gamblers, and the marketing campaigns of Kalshi and Polymarket aren't helping.
by dathinab | 2026-01-19 14:55:11+00:00
exactly idk. about other EU Countries but at least in Germany outside of small country side stores you tend to have a very wide variety of "alternative" soft drinks. Some trying to emulate some big brand (e.g. Coca Cola) but also many keeping the concept
(Cola) and putting their own twist on it. Most importantly most of them seem to be
EU based (and often Germany based and sometimes local to your region).

The main drawback of them is that due to them operating on a (way) smaller scale and need to have a factor to differentiate themself, so most of them are more expensive.
(but there are cheap no-brand clones, too).

A much bigger problem is that Nestle and co. try to either buy up any new innovative successful German food/drink companies. Sure after being bought up they tend to continue operate like before so technically they aren't dependent on the US, but they have been bought up anyway.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2026-01-19 14:55:25+00:00
Of course that makes sense now.

Anyhow here's an example of how I would use the while loop and process substitution in a BASH script:

declare -i file_count=0
while IFS= LC_ALL=C read -r -d '' file; do
file_count+=1
printf "file: %s\n" "${file}"
done < <(find . -type f -name '*.mp3' -print0)
printf "Processed %d files\n" "${file_count}"

I think that'd be tricky to do using just a find/-exec command.