MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ACCount37 | 2026-01-21 17:22:05+00:00
"If putting rat poison in the burgers would cause people to die, what does this say about the quality of the burgers?"

Very little.

I've been told most hackers are humans - not machines or some kind of alien species. So I fully expect hackers to have the flaws people tend to do.

Partisan politics have a nasty habit of capitalizing on human flaws, and bringing out the worst in people who engage deeply in them. Which, in online communities, can have a self-reinforcing effect.
Show HN: Rowboat – Open-Source Claude Cowork with an Obsidian Vault
by segmenta | 2026-01-21 17:22:12+00:00
Claude Cowork just launched, bringing agentic AI to everyday work. Rowboat is an open-source alternative that builds knowledge that persists over time.

A quick demo is here: https://youtu.be/T2Bmiy05FrI

It connects to Gmail and meeting notes (Granola, Fireflies) and organizes them into an Obsidian-compatible vault. Plain Markdown files with backlinks, organized around things like people, projects, organizations, and topics. As new emails and meetings come in, the right notes update automatically.

Rowboat is also the primary interface for this vault. You can read, navigate, edit, and add notes directly. It includes a full markdown editor and graph visualization so you can see how context builds up across conversations.

Why not just search transcripts when you need something? Search only answers the questions you think to ask. A system that accumulates context over time can track decisions, commitments, and relationships across conversations, surfacing patterns you didn’t know to look for.

Once this context exists, it becomes knowledge that Rowboat can work with. Because it runs on your machine, it can work directly with local files and run shell commands or scripts, including tools like ffmpeg when needed.

The link in the title opens an interactive example graph showing how context accumulates across emails and meetings. We used a founder example because it naturally includes projects, people, and long-running conversations, but the structure applies to any role.

Examples of what you can do with Rowboat: draft emails from accumulated context, prep for meetings by assembling past decisions and enriching them with external research (for example via Exa MCP), organize files and project artifacts on your machine as work evolves, or turn notes into voice briefings via MCP servers like ElevenLabs.

We’re opinionated about noise. We prioritize recurring contacts, active projects, and ongoing work, and ignore one-off emails and notifications. The goal is long-lived knowledge that compounds over time.

All data is stored locally as plain Markdown. You can use local models via Ollama or LM Studio, or a hosted model. Apache-2.0 licensed.

GitHub: https://github.com/rowboatlabs/rowboat

Curious how this fits into your current workflow for everyday work.
by mothballed | 2026-01-21 17:22:20+00:00
The government prosecutes the government and is judged by the government and a jury screened under voir dire by two government lawyers?

Kind of like when a robber comes to your house, you have him arrested, and when you go to court you look up and he is the one swinging the gavel.

Of course, interesting the cop has to know there is a constitution violation. Somehow ignorance of the law is always an excuse for the cops but the citizenry must know all 190,000 pages of federal regulations and 300,000+ laws and by god if they forgot one they are fucked.
by AznHisoka | 2026-01-21 17:22:48+00:00
1. You need something called a technographics tool to find companies that use a specific enterprise technology. Bloomberry comes to mind. Here’s the data they have on new ChatGPT customers: https://bloomberry.com/data/chatgpt/ . They track companies not individuals so you wont get contact info unfortunately.

Other options if you need contact data also include: Apollo.io and Zoominfo.

2. You can search job postings for companies that mention “chatgpt” and “training”/“provisioning” or something like that captures companies that just started using ChatGPT.

Not a perfect method and u probably need to go through a lot of false positives, but its doable IMO.

3. Go hang out in the official OpenAI community https://community.openai.com/ and you will likely find people asking questions on how to get started, etc. Not sure how u could cross link them to the company (maybe googling if their name is unique)

4. Find some Slack community for ChatGpT beginners. Not sure of any on the top of my head.
by jltsiren | 2026-01-21 17:23:18+00:00
I don't the question is really about whether AI art is real art. (But it could be about that, as I'm not familiar with commercial cons in the US.)

Some years ago, around the time I became aware that AI art is a thing, the artist scene around Finnish cons had already decided to ban it. And the reason was obvious, as the same people are also very eager to police others who might be selling pirated products.

They don't care legal constructs such as intellectual property. They don't really care about economic constructs such as copyright. What they care about are authors' moral rights. If the model was trained without obtaining a permission from the authors of every work in the training data, they think using the model to create art is immoral.
by nayuki | 2026-01-21 17:23:48+00:00
The tension that you experienced is common in imperial and traditional systems of units. Here's another example for you: Carpenters working with wood use mixed feet, inches, and fractional inches (like 2' 5 3/8"), but machinists working with metal use exclusively decimal inches (like 29.375"). Both hold steadfast to their traditions and won't consider adopting the other system.

If you take a look at American grocery stores, you'll see things like: “40 × 16.9 FL OZ (1.05 PT) 500 mL BOTTLES / NET 676 FL OZ (5.28 GAL) 20 L” https://www.instacart.com/assets/domains/product-image/file/...

To dissect that product: It's a pack of 40× 500 mL of bottled water. I have zero problems with the metric labeling. But for the US customary units, you can see a jumble: decimal fluid ounces, decimal pints, a large number of fluid ounces, and decimal gallons. Note that the gallons can be broken down into mixed units (and some packaging does that); 676 fl oz = 5 gal 1 qt (0 pt) (0 cup) 4 fl oz exactly. The US units are basically "whatever I feel like using" (don't forget tsp and tbsp, which aren't used in the current example). The metric units for liquid consumer products are always mL and L, which greatly simplifies learning and comparison for the consumer.
by quickthrowman | 2026-01-21 17:23:54+00:00
> Europe couldn't kick Russia, a country with 10x lower GDP and a decrepit army, out of Ukraine; how could it hope to deny any land to the US?

This isn’t particularly well know, but Russia has had nuclear weapons since 1949. I suspect this is why European countries have not adopted a more aggressive posture towards Russia in Ukraine. For some odd reason, no nuclear powers have ever invaded each other or declared war on each other since nuclear weapons were invented, aside from some bitchy slapfights in Kashmir. NATO is a de facto nuclear power, with (3) of the member states being nuclear states.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-21 17:23:57+00:00
> There is no evidence to support their claims

Do you make a habit of not presuming even basic competence? You believe that Anthropic left the task running for hours, got a score back, and never bothered to examine the solution? Not even out of curiosity?

Also if it was cheating you'd expect the final score to be unbelievably low. Unless you also suppose that the LLM actively attempted to deceive the human reviewers by adding extra code to burn (approximately the correct number of) cycles.
by ortusdux | 2026-01-21 17:24:47+00:00
Dropout's CEO has been pretty open about the company, and he described their early efforts as 'Brutal'

> No! We tried, but people don’t realize this. The first rendition of Dropout was built on Vimeo OTT’s API, but it was our own product. We employed something like eight sophisticated engineers at IAC to build our own product around it, and it was brutal. Which is to say, it’s just very hard to do very well. And these were great engineers.

https://www.theverge.com/podcast/781331/hank-green-sam-reich...
by j1elo | 2026-01-21 17:24:52+00:00
That Structure of Arrays performs much better than an Array of Structures is a very well known tidbit since long ago; what I'd love to read more is about how people design code around this fact.

For bigger codebases where you might not even be the person (or team) who designed the data types, and are just given a class or struct that needs to be collected into a large array, it's not simple to just decompose structures into an array per property.

In fact, this is a basic thing to want to do, but I've seen no language support for it ever. (in popular / industry frequently used langs). The `FancyList<Point>` idea from another comment is indeed interesting, but it would require reflection I guess.
Show HN: QRY – Natural Language to SQL Using Claude Code/Codex CLI
by amansingh-afk | 2026-01-21 17:25:10+00:00
I built a CLI tool that converts natural language to SQL by wrapping LLM CLIs
(Claude Code, Codex, Cursor) that already understand your codebase.

The insight: these CLIs already index your schemas, migrations, and models.
Instead of building another NL2SQL tool with custom embeddings, I just wrapped
what already works.

How it's different:
- No schema sync. New table? git pull. Done.
- No embeddings to regenerate
- Follow-up queries work naturally (session persists)
- Uses your actual table/column names

Usage:
$ cd your-project
$ qry init
$ qry
> get users who signed up last week
SELECT * FROM users WHERE created_at >= NOW() - INTERVAL '7 days';

Also exposes an API server for Slack bots, admin tools, etc.

GitHub: https://github.com/amansingh-afk/qry

Tradeoff: requires one of these CLIs installed. But if you're already using
Claude Code or Cursor, it just works.

Would love feedback on the approach.
by Drupon | 2026-01-21 17:25:32+00:00
>but why does that affect the quality of the data

If I poll only insurance company executives on whether the country should do away with private insurance and switch to universal healthcare, I haven't really done anything "data driven", have I? Taking a fat shit in my toilet "generates data", but I wouldn't call that visit to my bathroom "data driven", would I? Collecting sex poll responses from people who follow porn stars who specialize in rape and similar fantasy porn does not collect any data except what extreme porn consumers think about sexuality, which is of little use to making generalizations.

>How can you evaluate whether someone counts as a "gooner" or not based on whether they follow a specific person on Twitter or answer a poll about sex?

Following porn stars is absolutely gooner behavior, so yes, it makes a person a gooner.
by randomsc | 2026-01-21 17:25:34+00:00
Probably they will also fire remaining 15 people and move everything to Italy.

Their strategy is to

- fire everyone,

- give product to very small but ambitious team of people

- cut free version of the product to minimum even if does not make a sense to have a free version such as 5 video upload per month etc (they are doing this just to avoid backlash from users and community)

- use every possible dark pattern exist to get every penny from the users
by borenstein | 2026-01-21 17:25:38+00:00
IMO, you should treat your agent's environment as pre-compromised. In that reading, your goal becomes security-in-depth.

Anthropic is trying to earn developer trust; they have a strong incentive to make sure that private keys and other details that the agent sees do not leak into the training data. But the agent itself is just a glorified autocomplete, and it can get confused and do stupid stuff. So I put it in a transparent prison that it can see out of but can't leave.

That definitely helps with the main failure modes I was worrying about, but it's just one layer. You definitely want to make sure that your production secrets are in an external vault (Hashicorp Vault, Google Secret Store, GitHub secrets, etc) that the agent can't access.

The things that agent is seeing should be dev secrets that maybe could be used as the start of a sophisticated exploit, but not the end of it. There's no such thing as perfect security, only very low probabilities of breach. Adding systems that are very annoying to breach and have little offer when you do greatly lowers the odds.
by dh2022 | 2026-01-21 17:25:43+00:00
They are lunatics by very basic standards. Like do not shot protesters in the face. Do not invade other countries that did nothing to you. Do not threaten other countries that did nothing to you. Do not break doors without a warrant from a judge. Do not support a pedophile covering up his crimes.

1/3 of Americans support these lunacies - hence they are lunatics. And unfortunately they are too many. So America's sundown is inevitable.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-21 17:26:00+00:00
I do feel as if though this might lead to US defaulting on its loan but it still wouldn't make a state secede from the market

Also probably EU should co-ordinate with different countries who are holding US treasuries and if they get screwed (China,Japan,Australia etc.) then these other countries can have net loss as well. (which can impact these countries internally to prevent EU from investing in their currencies worried about what if EU might plug in again, yes I know EU is in the right regarding the greenland crisis but still it's not about if EU would be right but if EU would be capable to go and do this & what's the definition/criteria required for them to do such.

The most loss would still be of America though but still EU might still face some loss too (comparatively small to America)

I do believe that this can weaken US so much that it might trigger insurrection act or similar and we are saying US act so unreasoable regarding greenland right now, I am 99% sure that a nuclear war would feel imminent if this happens and would have a genuine impact on QOL of European and America and the world in general too.

Sure america might lose more but there has to still be a proper discussion on what's really valuable right now & if this would make this geopolitical sense, then we will see it happen.

I do beleive that even this 8 billion is start. We might not see an immediate 8T $ worth of bonds sellout just now. But we might definitely get to around 10% (800 billion) imo in slow chunks imo.

Europe's probably trying to get the world on its side and forming alliances right now.
by toast0 | 2026-01-21 17:26:02+00:00
You would presumably supply usb floppy drives on the way back in time, and then you'd be alright. And an ethernet NIC with 10base2 and AUI for thicknet, cause twisted pair wasn't typical that early.

Network booting PCs happened a lot later, but if the booter used bios calls to access the disk, you could probably netboot that too.
by PlanksVariable | 2026-01-21 17:26:09+00:00
Yes, Obama increased deportations, and deported people at a faster rate than Trump. But that’s completely irrelevant when we’re talking about the Biden administration, who did not continue this policy, who reversed it, who allowed an unprecedented number of illegal immigrants through his executive orders and policy set by Mayorkas, with many millions more granted asylum status with reduced vetting. This was not reported by the news media until it inevitably reached crisis level.

The very fact that Obama deported more immigrants, and Trump is deporting fewer but with riots in the streets should clue you in to the effect that media has over you.
by yodsanklai | 2026-01-21 17:26:12+00:00
It would take something like one week full time to work on this. It's not something you can do if you have a full-time job and apply to several other companies. I find it unreasonable to ask a candidate to spend that much time for an uncertain result.

It's true that being ready for leetcode takes practice, but at least it's standard so you can re-use the skills to other interviews. Optimizing some generated code is certainly fun, but it's as useless as leetcode for your average programmer.
by barnabee | 2026-01-21 17:26:19+00:00
I’m currently experimenting (alongside working as usual) with a reasonably non-trivial rust project that will be designed “project managed”[0], built, and tested by LLM agents (mostly Claude, via OpenCode) based on me providing high level requirements and then prompting it to complete things, as well as course correcting (rule: I don’t edit the code, specifications, or tasks directly).

It’s too early to tell how it will work out but things are going better than I expected. It’s probably 20% built after a couple of days, in which I’ve mostly done other work, and it’s working for quite long periods without input from me.

When I do have to provide input, the prompt is often just “Continue working according to the project standards and rules”.

I have no idea if it’ll meet the requirements. I didn’t expect it to get this far, but a month or two ago I didn’t think the chances were high enough to even make it worth trying.

[0] I asked it to create additional documentation for project standards and rules to refer to only when needed (referenced from AGENTS.md). This included git workflow, maintaining a set of specifications, and an overall ROADMAP.md as well TASKS.md (detailed next steps from the roadmap) and STATUS.md (status of each of the tasks).
by busywaiting | 2026-01-21 17:26:27+00:00
Exactly. Their ten-point scales have no obvious relationship to the underlying measurements, where measurements are even provided, and they rescale the points every so often. (They call this their "methodology version.")

I've noticed that, when a new (expensive, high-commission-generating) product comes out, it often has middling scores at first, and then, a few months later, they've revised their methodology to show how much better the pricey new product is.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2026-01-21 17:26:42+00:00
> Everyone is racist to some degree

Possibly, but it's not socially acceptable in most places. Meanwhile the USA has ICE agents acting as an armed, unaccountable, private army that are specifically rounding up people who aren't white or have different accents etc. And you have people cheering that.

It's clearly different to a huge degree.
by empath75 | 2026-01-21 17:27:29+00:00
> AI is definitely more knowledgeable about most things than most university teachers

I think this is under-appreciated so much. Yes, every university professor is going to know more about quite a lot of things than ChatGPT does, especially in their specialty, but there is no university professor on earth who knows as much about as many things as ChatGPT, nor do they have the patience or time to spend explaining what they know to people at scale, in an interactive way.

I was randomly watching a video about calculus on youtube this morning and didn't understand something (Feynman's integration trick) and then spent 90 minutes talking to ChatGPT getting some clarity on the topic, and finding related work and more reading to do about it, along with help working through more examples. I don't go to college. I don't have a college math teacher on call. Wikipedia is useless for learning anything in math that you don't already know. ChatGPT has endless patience to drill down on individual topics and explaining things at different levels of expertise.

This is just a capability for individual learning that _didn't exist before ai_ and we have barely begun to unlock it for people.
by littlestymaar | 2026-01-21 17:27:37+00:00
> Modern machines can still run Win32 and applications written for Win32, and thus are WinTel compatible.

This is being repeated continuously but in reality this isn't the case in practice: Half if not more of the videogames I owned in the 90s stopped working on Windows XP, and some of those which kept working also failed under Vista/Win7. If you sent a modern PC to the media from 1990, they would indeed notice that their favorite game cannot run on it, despite the general compatibility effort from Microsoft.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-21 17:27:52+00:00
> > Europe couldn't kick Russia, a country with 10x lower GDP and a decrepit army, out of Ukraine; how could it hope to deny any land to the US?

> This isn’t particularly well know, but Russia has had nuclear weapons since 1949. I suspect this is why European countries have not adopted a more aggressive posture towards Russia in Ukraine.

Oh yeah, my apologies. Let me fix it, Sorry about that!! Yea my bad.

I understand why I got downvoted. Fair, yea its misrepresented I meant denmark gets california (edit: looks like I had made the same mistake here too lmao now fixed)
by fragmede | 2026-01-21 17:27:53+00:00
How "to" do you want to make it? That description's totally disingenuous.

"later on" makes it sound to a human like it takes any real amount of time or that it isn't basically instant and wrapped by up porcelean, and "muck around with" implies that there's anything more random or complicated to it then writing the sha to a file in the right place in the .git directory.
by samus | 2026-01-21 17:28:06+00:00
> Temperatures in most places are within those bounds

That seems to be a quite arbitrary and insufficient criterion. As soon as I start cooking or preparing a warm drink I already step way outside these boundaries.

In defense of the relevance of the Celsius scale in daily life: its endpoints represent critical temperatures of the most important liquid to life on Earth at ~1 bar. And at temperatures of 0°C or less I stand at danger of not just hypothermia, but frostbite.

> it's [..] historical in a way that Metric isn't.

How so? Celsius was proposed merely 18 years (1742) after Fahrenheit (1724).
by t0mas88 | 2026-01-21 17:28:29+00:00
In the Netherlands it's much simpler. The notary only has to identify you for their record keeping, no mandatory reading of things etc.

And once identified for something you can easily authorise the notary to sign other things on your behalf as well.

We did that all the time when for example adding new entities to a group structure. Just e-sign the authorisation and that's all.
by numpad0 | 2026-01-21 17:29:12+00:00
Nothing had changed on that front. No one's doing non-literal semantic deconstruction and reconstruction of art. This is perhaps due to irresponsible and thoughtless atmospheres surrounding AI image generators and its core developer circles selectively filtering out those with relevant backgrounds.

Maybe some Google products are a bit of an exception, but they're default 5-10 years ahead until it stops updating 15 years before going open source, so that's besides the point.

Other than that, it's all techbros making tangential changes and claiming changes were made. Changes maybe, improvements, not really happening.
by nayuki | 2026-01-21 17:29:22+00:00
For those who don't know: The original definition of a metre is 1/40 000 000th of a full circle of longitude of Earth. That was considered not accurate enough, so it was redefined as the length of a certain metallic bar kept in Paris. Then it was defined in terms of wavelengths of krypton light. Finally, it was redefined in relation to the speed of light.

But each time the metre was redefined, the new definition was within the error bounds of the previous definition and the instruments that could be used within the previous definition - this ensured that backwards compatibility was retained. That's how we end up with these weird-looking numbers; it's not for fun and games.

Meanwhile, backwards compatibility was absolutely broken many times in traditional and imperial measurement systems. Heck, we have a break even in recent history: The survey foot has been discontinued in terms of the international foot, but they differ by 2 parts per million. That might not sound like much, but if you're measuring a whole continent, then being wrong by 2 ppm over 3000 km means having a discrepancy of 6 m, which is more than enough to fit an extra house in.