MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by locknitpicker | 2026-01-23 06:15:43+00:00
Your comment doesn't sound well researched or thought all the way through. REST by definition is used nowhere at all, and virtually all RESTful APIs are RPC-over-HTTP that are loosely inspired in REST.

There is virtually zero scenarios where anyone at all ever said "This thing we're using JSON for would be easier if we just used XML".

JSON was the undisputed winner of a competition that never was in a great part because of the vast improvements over DX. I remind you that JSON is the necessary and sufficient subset of JavaScript that allowed to define data, and to parse it all anyone had to do was to pipe it to a very standard and ubiquitous eval(). No tooling, no third-party module, no framework. Nothing. There is no competition at all.
by rerdavies | 2026-01-23 06:17:14+00:00
4800kHz and 44100kHz devices appeared at roughly the same time. Sony's first 44100kHz device was shipped in 1979. Phillips wanted to use 44.0kHz.

If you can do 44.1khz on an NSTC recording device, you can do 44.0khz too. Neither NTSC digital format uses the fully available space in the horizontal blanking intervals on an NTSC VHS device, so using less really isn't a problem.

Why is 44Khz better? There's a very easy way to do excellent sample rate conversions from 44.0Khz to 48Khz, you upsample the audio by 12 (by inserting 11 zeros between each sample), apply a 22Khz low-pass filter, and then decimate by 11 (by keeping only every 11th sample. To go in the other direction, upsample by 11, filter, and decimate by 12. Plausibly implementable on 1979 tech. And trivially implementable on modern tech.

To perform the same conversion from 44.1kHz to 48kHz, you would have to upsample by 160, filter at at a sample rate of 160x44.1kHz, and then decimate by 147. Or upsample by 147, filter, and decimate by 160. Impossible with ancient tech, and challenging even on modern tech. (I would imagine modern solutions would use polyphase filters instead, with tables sizes that would be impractical on 1979 VLSI). Polyphase filter tables for 44.0kHz/48.0kHz conversion are massively smaller too.

As for the prime factors... factors of 7 (twice) of 44100 really aren't useful for anything. More useful would be factors of two (five times), which would in increase the greatest common divisor from 300 to 4,000!
by saghm | 2026-01-23 06:17:25+00:00
From reading the whole thing, it kind of seems clickbaity. Yes, they're the only user in the "organization" that got banned, but they apparently still are using the other "organization" without issue, so they as a human are not banned. There's certainly a valid complaint to be made about the lack of recourse or customer service response for the automated ban, but it almost seems like they intentionally were trying to be misleading by implying that since they were the only member of the organization, they were banned from using Claude.
by mopsi | 2026-01-23 06:17:33+00:00
> If you look at old interviews of Putin

Yes, let's do that: https://x.com/adnashmyash/status/1977146505900573089

2008: "Crimea is not disputed territory of Ukraine, and the issues of Russian speakers are internal issues of Ukraine."

2013: "Russia certainly doesn't plan to send troops into Ukraine."

2014: "After the annexation of Crimea, Russia doesn't plan to further divide Ukraine."

2019: "It's nonsense that Russia plans to attack anyone in future."

2022: "Russia's Special Military Operation does not involve the occupation of Ukrainian territories."

2023: "The conflict in Ukraine is not a territorial conflict — we have plenty of own territories."

2024: "Anyone who wants Russia to give up CONQUERED TERRITORIES in Ukraine must understand that this is impossible."
by tommica | 2026-01-23 06:18:00+00:00
> It is mapping a latent structure to language in a way that happens to align with your own internal model.

This is well explained! My experience is something similar - I have a vague notion of something, and I then prompt AI for its "perspective" or explanation to that something, and then me being able to have a sense if its response fits is quite a powerful tool.
by reutinger | 2026-01-23 06:18:30+00:00
Hi Steve- honored to see you here! (I’m practically using your book to reverse-engineer what the AI wrote ).

To be precise with my terminology: I showed the forensic expert the terminal history and compiler output in my VS Code/Cursor logs.

Because I was 'vibe coding' with LLMs, I had a long scrollback of cargo build failing repeatedly with ownership/borrow errors. 'Chris' (the forensic expert) reviewed that timestamped history to verify that I was genuinely struggling to compile a harmless display driver in a hotel room that morning, rather than deploying a pre-compiled malicious payload.

His logic was essentially: 'A terrorist brings a clean binary. A developer brings a terminal full of red text.' The broken build state was my alibi.
by prmoustache | 2026-01-23 06:18:55+00:00
The days of compiling kernel module to have your adsl modem working or copy/pasting modelines in an xfree86config files have been over for well over 15 years anyway.

You don't fiddle more in Linux than you do in MacOs or Windows nowadays and that screen recorder tool he had to spend time vibecoding is embedded in the desktop already, the rest of the apps are 2 clicks away from being installed.
by Mikhail_Edoshin | 2026-01-23 06:19:15+00:00
Another thing I disagree with is the idea that JSON uses fewer characters. This is not true: JSON uses more characters. Example:

<aaaa bbbb="bbbb" cccc="cccc"/>
{"bbbb":"bbbb","cccc":"cccc"}

See that the difference is only two characters? Yet XML also has a four-character element name, which JSON lacks. And JSON is packed to the limit, while XML is written naturally and is actually more readable than JSON.
by cuteeaglet | 2026-01-23 06:19:25+00:00
For the past twenty years, the browser's role has been clear: access websites, consume information, and handle simple interactions. But today, this definition is being completely overturned. As large language models and tool systems mature, when browsers begin to possess Task Orchestration capabilities, they are no longer just 'entry points' but are evolving into true digital workspaces. This change is particularly significant for creators.
by afandian | 2026-01-23 06:20:07+00:00
I've got one.

When iPhone alarm goes off, the screen doesn't wake up, so I press the power button. Which snoozes the alarm. Not only did I not want to snooze the alarm, I hoped that the alarm would wake the phone up so I can click 'stop'.

I assume that's a bug rather than a holding-it-wrong?
by bulbar | 2026-01-23 06:20:11+00:00
One flaw we have in Germany in particular is that the chancellor is allowed to stay in power indefinitely if people vote for that person, which potentially gives a lot of time to rebuild the society. It worked out with Merkel who is the anti-thesis of an authorization figure, but that might have been luck.

I don't know how resistant the German constitution and democracy is. I believe it's robust but that's also what people thought about the US with that "checks and balances" that turned out being fake for the most part.
Agentic Memory Is Still an Unsolved Problem
by manthangupta109 | 2026-01-23 06:20:27+00:00
A lot of startups today claim they have "solved agentic memory."

In many cases, agentic memory is being reduced to a vector database with embeddings and retrieval. That’s not agentic memory. That’s just storage + search.

Real agentic memory is about:
- What an agent should remember vs forget
- How memory changes over time (decay, reinforcement, consolidation)
- When memory should be read implicitly vs explicitly
- How memory influences planning, tool choice, and behavior
- How to handle conflicting, stale, or context-dependent memories

A vector DB can be part of the system, but it’s not the system.

Until agents can reliably reason about their own memory and not just retrieve chunks. We’re still in early innings.

Curious what others think:
- What does "solving agentic memory" actually mean?
- Is this even a single problem, or a bundle of unsolved ones?
by elp | 2026-01-23 06:23:43+00:00
I think the real issue is that its still in its painful growth stage and we have a way to go until we will start to understand better where its good and where its a disaster.

I have a co-worker who is really good at herding agents. I've seen him do work in an afternoon what would take more than two weeks without AI, but some of his other work ends up being so bad the rest of us want to string him up by his thumbs.

Its impossible to tell from just looking before hand what the result will be.
by k310 | 2026-01-23 06:23:44+00:00
Tech and politics are now entangled. Techies make choices, often not smart ones.

Most would jump at the chance to make "a few dollars more" on people-exploiting projects than beneficial enabling ones.

I tried, and never crossed that line. I advocated open source but never contributed. That was probably good for open source.

I'm trying to be objective here, while the thread does go fiesta politico at times.

I participate at two sites, both heavily moderated, in order to learn and to do good when possible. It's additive. Bullshit and rage are subtractive.
by saghm | 2026-01-23 06:24:01+00:00
It seems just as likely to me that they're just using their terminology inconsistently as it is that they're using it consistently but with that egregious amount of ambiguity. The only thing that I'm confident about is that they're communicating in a very confusing way, and that doesn't really give me any strong insight into whether they're being consistent but vague or just plain vague.
by benrutter | 2026-01-23 06:24:16+00:00
I work in the UK energy sector and have been exposed to more than my fair share of bad, crufty APIs. I don't know the reason, but those returning XML are, practically speaking, much worse.

I've seen a bunch of times where an API returns invalid XML that has to be manipulated before parsing but never that for JSON.

I think that's the real sell for JSON. A lot of APIs are terrible, and JSON being simpler, terrible JSON beats terrible XML.
by libraryofbabel | 2026-01-23 06:24:39+00:00
I agree with this. It is an extremely powerful tool when used judiciously. I have always learned and sharpened my ideas best through critical dialog with others. (After two and a half thousand years it may be that we still don't have a better way of teaching than the one Socrates advocated.) But human attention is a scarce resource; even in my job, where I can reasonably ping people for a quick chat or a whiteboard session or fire off some slack messages, I don't want to do that too often. People are busy and you need to pick the right moment and make sure you're getting the most value from their precious time.

No such restriction on LLMs: Opus is available to talk to me day or night and I don't feel bad about sending it half-baked ideas (or about ghosting it half way through the discussion). And LLMs read with an attention to detail that almost no human has the time for; I can't think of anyone who has engaged with my writing quite this closely, with the one exception of my PhD advisor.

LLMs conversations are particularly good for topics outside work where I don't have an easily-available conversational partner at all. Areas of math I want to brush up on. Tricky topics in machine learning outside the scope of what I do in my job. Obscure topics in history or philosophy or aviation. And so on. I've learned so much in the last year this way.

But! It's is an art and it is quite easy to do it badly. You need to prompt the LLM to take a critical stance towards your ideas (in the current world of Opus 4.5 and Gemini 3, sycophancy isn't as much of a problem as it was, but LLMs still can be overly oriented to please). And you need to take a critical stance yourself. Interrogate its answers, and push it to clarify points that aren't obvious. Sometimes you learn something new, sometimes you expose fuzziness in the LLM's description (in which case it will usually give you the concept at a deeper level). Sometimes in the back-and-forth you realize you forgot to give it some critical piece of context, and when you do that it reframes the whole discussion.

I see plenty of examples of people just taking LLM's answers at face value like it's some kind of oracle (and I'm sure the comments here will contain many negative anecdotes like that). You can't do that; you need to engage and try and chip away at its position and come to some synthesis. The nice thing is the LLM won't mind having its ideas rigorously interrogated, which is something humans can be touchy about (though not always, and the most productive human collaborations are usually ones where both people can criticize each other's ideas freely).

For better or for worse, the people who will do best in this world are those with a rigorously critical mindset and an ability to communicate well, especially in writing. (If you're in college, consider throwing in a minor in philosophy or history alongside that CompSci major!) Those were already valuable skills, and they have even more leverage now.
by heavyset_go | 2026-01-23 06:24:45+00:00
Another way to look at this is that you're giving away all of your source code as context, and probably a lot of things you don't necessarily want to share, if you aren't using self-hosted models.

Especially with agents that slurp up files, have access to databases, etc. You're literally giving access to your computer, your network and your data to third parties and letting them run code.
by aprilthird2021 | 2026-01-23 06:25:11+00:00
1. Because both states are nationalist and authoritarian, and both states have an alternative medicine practice that's culturally tied to them. It's a pretty good analogy imo, and it helps to understand how such a state would act by having an anlogue to compare it to

2. Ayurvedic and TCM largely refers to those things which haven't undergone clinical trials to understand their efficacy as prescribed medicines. Anything from that sphere which is clinically proven to work and is dispensed as prescription medicine just becomes part of medicine. It's not about "stealing" or whatever, it's about whether people should be given proven effective medicines or hopefully effective medicines, the former being what we should promote globally
by empiko | 2026-01-23 06:26:03+00:00
I think it's a question of how polished the process is. Imagine a new fully functional app popping up in your phone after a single prompt. Then, imagine you can edit this app while you are using it by saying what you wish it should do.

There might be a lot of people interested in all kinds of small apps for their particular hobbies, interests, jobs, etc
by XorNot | 2026-01-23 06:26:21+00:00
People worry about tooling because they don't want to create a future mess they have to unpick: or the process might be hard enough they just won't do it.

For my private blog for example, how to easily - as in drag and drop - insert images was a big thing that needed to work. So was reasonable code rendering.

I settled on the requirement "must be able to publish a Jupyter notebook" since that format roughly handles all those requirements while still being markdown mostly.

Then you have hosting: I want low touch so how whatever I pick interacts with that matters a lot too suddenly.

It still took some tweaking of Nikola[1] to get the process right for me, though not much.

Keep it simple doesn't help much if simple is actually just missing features that enable you to write efficiently and often (if that's what you want to do, I think I mostly just keep technical notes for myself).

[1] https://getnikola.com/
by pseudohadamard | 2026-01-23 06:26:44+00:00
The ones I'm aware of aren't in the middle of town, and by definition they can't be because they're holes in the soil landscape which is in short supply in the centre of a town. They're near small villages for which getting your family into hiding can be as simple as walking across the road into forests, ravines, etc. It'd actually be much easier to just herd your family into some nearby patch of wilderness than to shove them all into a hole in the ground without food, water, or toilet facilities.

In any case hostile forces don't just teleport into your village, they're moving on foot and stopping to loot on the way, you've usually got weeks of warning that something bad is happening and days of warning that it's about to happen to you. The whole shelter theory just doesn't hold water.
by jmward01 | 2026-01-23 06:26:59+00:00
Is anyone accurately predicting solar and renewable adoption? Year after year I see terrible predictions that fall way short of the reality in the world. If so, when do those models predict the death of fossil fuel based power plants? There is generally some moment where keeping the infrastructure going becomes so expensive that things just shut down. Are we close? I wonder what the graphs of fossil fuel plan construction and upgrades looks like. Are they near 0 yet?
by ajxs | 2026-01-23 06:27:13+00:00
I'm just not convinced by this article. XSLT was a great technology in its time, but these days if you need to transform data into markup, modern templating engines are just way easier to use. I've said it before on HN: Being able to transform data into markup natively in the browser with a declarative language is still a neat idea. I enjoy thinking about an 'alternate future' where the web evolved in this direction instead.
by phendrenad2 | 2026-01-23 06:27:17+00:00
This is extremely disappointing all-around. The World Health Organization was at the forefront of sounding the alarm about COVID-19 early on, and was one of the first to start preparing for the eventuality that it would spread beyond it's origin point. While most people in the US were still saying it wasn't airborne, and downplaying the spread potential and health effects of COVID, the WHO was sounding the alarm on that, too. Ah yes. A little satire does the heart good, you know?
by artwr | 2026-01-23 06:27:17+00:00
Thanks for the pointer, I hadn't.

I think there is a couple of interesting things. First, it's still somewhat orthogonal to the High context versus Low context cultures (see the Culture Map), as in you can have people with more ask versus guess culture in either communication contexts from my observations (at least among some low to mid context cultures, I don't have a lot of experience with very high context cultures).

Another way to think about it is that it's a lot more local than the broader culture of a country, down to the family level, and you can see this in the US as many commenters have reported where they grew up in various different places in the ask vs guess spectrum.

Finally, the US work environment is generally very "Ask"-leaning, in particular in Silicon Valley and it can take a significant amount of time to recognize where you have been raised on this spectrum versus what is required of you to be effective at work.
by rmunn | 2026-01-23 06:27:28+00:00
sudo passwords are one of the things I'm copying and pasting from the password manager, because my shell account password is different on every system. But yes, if you type your sudo password without thinking about it, the timing attack might be feasible. (Though if you're laboriously copying a random password from a different screen, as I've had to do once or twice in situations where copy-and-paste was infeasible, the timing data will be useless as it's about 500 ms between keystrokes no matter what the previous keystroke is. Which is an interesting way to accidentally defeat this attack.)
by jraph | 2026-01-23 06:27:31+00:00
Of course we could say that all models are "wrong" because they are simplifications of the reality. But there's wrong and wrong. We don't usually say a model like the Newtonian motion is wrong, it's not a very useful way to deal with models.

Newtonian motion has been shown to be repeatable and to accurately predict motion within limits. It has scientific backing.

The asker-guesser model isn't even shown to be a simplification of the reality. And actually, later in that High-context and low-context cultures [1] Wikipedia article:

> A 2008 meta-analysis concluded that the model was "unsubstantiated and underdeveloped".

Which is scientific speak for bullshit.

There's a world between scientifically backed "wrong" Newtonian movement and random internet forum comment backed social model "proven" to be "unsubstantiated and underdeveloped".

The Newtonian movement is an evidence-backed simplification. The asker-guesser model is a persuasive illusion.

Are you really comparing some internet commenter with Newton and the broader scientific community?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-context_and_low-context_c...
by fsh | 2026-01-23 06:28:26+00:00
These church-owned entities in Germany are almost 100% government fincanced [1], while abusing a loophole in the German constitution to discriminate their employees for religious reasons. For example, the Catholic ones are notorious for firing employees that get divorced. This system is an absolute disgrace, but the churches are still too powerful in German society and have so far been able to block any attempt at fixing the constitution.

[1] https://www.malteser-international.org/en/about-us/how-we-wo...
by slau | 2026-01-23 06:28:47+00:00
A few months ago, I switched to exclusively using an SSH key stored on my Yubikey token. I also recently switched to my default git config signing all commits with my SSH key. The way it’s setup means I have to touch my token every time I try to commit or push.

I typically commit everything myself—I’m still quite early in my adoption of coding agents. One of my first experience with OpenCode (which made me stop using it instantly) was when it tried to commit and force push a change after I simply asked it to look into a potential bug.

Claude Code seems to have better safeguards against this. However, I wonder how come we don’t generally run these things inside docker containers with only the current dir volume mounted or something to prevent spurious FS modifications.

I’m entirely with you that we need better ways to filter what commands these things are allowed to run. Specifically, a CLAUDE.md or “do not do this under any circumstance” as part of the prompt is a futile undertaking.
by travelhead | 2026-01-23 06:29:05+00:00
After 5 years building BeltBro with 5 patents and 3 million customers, I watched my Amazon sales collapse overnight.

The reason? 250+ duplicate listings from Chinese sellers flooding my category—all selling the identical product under fake brand names with manipulated (fake) reviews.

I investigated and found that 42 of the top 100 "New Releases" in Men's Belts are duplicate listings by the same seller network. Same 5.9" x 1.5" dimensions. Copy-paste descriptions. Identical videos. Coordinated launches.

They aren't just dominating organic searches on Amazon, but they also use Amazon ads to drive tens of thousands of sales per month to their infringing products.

When I tried to report patent infringement through Amazon's APEX program, they limit me to 10 reports per month. Meanwhile, 100+ new infringing listings appear in the same timeframe.

Amazon's response when I asked for more reporting capacity? "We are unable to discuss this criteria."

This isn't just my problem. Chinese networks control 63% of Amazon's third-party marketplace—$35 billion annually—using shell brands to dominate search results and destroy American small businesses that actually innovate and hold patents.

I've documented the full investigation with evidence in the HN link above.

If you work at Amazon, represent government, work in media, or have connections that can help—please share this. Small businesses deserve a marketplace that rewards innovation instead of manipulation.