MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bob1029 | 2026-01-14 08:36:58+00:00
Parallel tool calls do not work for my scenario. I can't ask a copy of my agent a question about something until a dependent call has resolved.

Tool use that changes the mode of the environment is a good example where you cannot go parallel. I've built a recursive agent that can run a Unity editor and I can't just blindly run whatever it wants in parallel or combos like SwitchScene -> GetSceneOverview won't interleave correctly. You'll wind up with 15 calls that loop over every scene and then you grab the overview from the last scene you switched to 15 times.

There are ways to hack around it a bit, but at some level the underlying narrative does need to be serialized or you'll be wasting an incredible amount of resources.

Depth-first search doesn't guarantee the best solution, but on average it's guaranteed to find a solution faster than breadth-first search. It's worth waiting for those dependent calls and going super deep if you want some reasonable answer quickly.
by dijit | 2026-01-14 08:37:34+00:00
“Discrimination against individuals is not a problem” is quite possibly the most dystopian sentence I’ve read on HN.

I’m one of those individuals. So are the women and minorities you claim to be helping. We’re not statistical abstractions to be shuffled around in service of demographic targets.

If your solution to systematic discrimination requires you to declare that discriminating against individuals doesn’t matter, you’ve lost the plot entirely.
by iscoelho | 2026-01-14 08:38:00+00:00
I'm curious what you classify as a business ISP?

Take a look at AMS-IX, one of the largest internet exchanges: https://bgp.tools/ixp/AMS-IX

21/1020 (2%) of all peers are Mikrotik. 15 (1.4%) of those are >=1000mbps. 7 (0.6%) of those are 10gbps. None are larger than 10gbps.
by fzeroracer | 2026-01-14 08:38:13+00:00
That's still racist, because he's seeking out information that merely proves his racism rather than any sort of factual basis (and using a poll of 130 respondents as proof is insane).

I feel like this thread on Scott Adams is exposing how many people on HN are just overtly racist. You can enjoy his content before he went off the rails fine, but seeing some of the takes here feels like a bunch of people are one step away from arguing that segregation should come back.
by seec | 2026-01-14 08:38:16+00:00
Agreed. The problem is that native window management is pretty bad in macOS. And the 3rd party tools solving the problem aren't that great on top of being expensive sometimes.

Apple could fix it, but instead they made overlapping windows for iPadOS, which is even dumber considering the smaller display area.

I think it doesn't matter what they do; part of their clientele is fully captive, another part is only there for the status, and the last part is just using it rudimentally, so anything is OK.
by anthk | 2026-01-14 08:38:33+00:00
- TCL/Tk slowish under P3 times, decent enough under P4 with SSE2. AMSN wasn't that bad
back in the day, and with 8.6 the occasional UI locks went away.

- Visual Basic. Yes, it was interpreter, and you used to like it. GUI ran fast, good for small games and management software. The rest... oh, they tried
to create a C64 emulator under VB, it ran many times slower than one created in C. Nowadays, with a P4 with SSE2 and up you could emulate it at decent speeds with TCL/Tk 8.6 since they got some optimized interpreter. IDK about VB6, probably the same case.
But at least we know TCL/Tk got improved on multiprocessing and the like. VB6 was stuck in time.

- TCL can call C code with ease, since the early 90's. Not the case with Electron. And JS really sucks with no standard library. With Electron, the UI can be very taxing, even if they bundle FFMPEG and the like. Tk UI can run on a toaster.

- Yeah, there is C#... but it isn't as snappy and portable TCL/Tk with IronTCL, where it even targets Windows XP. You have JimTCL where it can run on scraps. No Tk, but the language it's close in syntax to TCL, it has networking and TLS support and OFC has damn easy C interops. And if you are a competent programmer, you can see it has some alpha SDL2 bindings. Extend those and you can write a dumb UI with Nuklear or similar in days. Speed? It won't win against other languages on number crunching, but for sure it could be put to drive some machines.
by AuryGlenz | 2026-01-14 08:39:56+00:00
I look at TikTok for a few minutes perhaps every six months or so. I did that a few weeks ago and it seemed like half of the stuff it was showing me were AI ring doorbell/dashcam/etc. type stuff.

I have nothing against AI - my computer is doing text-to-image training most nights. However, the kind of videos it was showing me are only entertaining if they’re real. I don’t care to see a fake dog scare away a fake bear from a kid, and I doubt others do either.

However, most people probably can’t tell and think it’s real. That’s only going to get worse. I don’t know where that leaves us.

Music? I’m not sure where I land.
by pjmlp | 2026-01-14 08:40:05+00:00
> In CPU world there is a desire to shield programmers from those low-level details, but I think there are two interesting forces at play now-a-days that’ll change it soon. On one hand, Dennard Scaling (aka free lunch) is long gone, hardware landscape is getting increasingly fragmented and specialized out of necessity, software abstractions are getting leakier, forcing developers to be aware of the lowest levels of abstraction, hardware, for good performance.

The problem is that not all programming languages expose SIMD, and even if they do it is only a portable subset, additionally the kind of skills that are required to be able to use SIMD properly isn't something everyone is confortable doing.

I certainly am not, still managed to get around with MMX and early SSE, can manage shading languages, and that is about it.
by hollowturtle | 2026-01-14 08:40:17+00:00
Putting it in the context of an anti-AI argument doesn't make sense. AI was everywhere, like in photoshop brushes, way before it became a general buzzword for LLMs or image generation. I'm not anti-AI but that it can come up with a limit set based on its training data it simply is the truth. Sure one can get inspiration from a "times table" but if you only see 8s and 9s multiplied you're limiting yourself
by hayleighdotdev | 2026-01-14 08:41:30+00:00
> Gleam doesn’t have access to most of the Erlang / Elixir ecosystem out of the box.

Gleam has access to the entire ecosystem out of the box, because all languages on the BEAM interoperate with one another. For example, here's a function inside the module for gleam_otp's static supervisor:

@external(erlang, "supervisor", "start_link")
fn erlang_start_link(
module: Atom,
args: #(ErlangStartFlags, List(ErlangChildSpec)),
) -> Result(Pid, Dynamic)

As another example, I chose a package[0] at random that implements bindings to the Elixir package blake2[1].

@external(erlang, "Elixir.Blake2", "hash2b")
pub fn hash2b(message m: BitArray, output_size output_size: Int) -> BitArray

@external(erlang, "Elixir.Blake2", "hash2b")
pub fn hash2b_secret(
message m: BitArray,
output_size output_size: Int,
secret_key secret_key: BitArray,
) -> BitArray

It's ok if you don't vibe with Gleam – no ad-hoc poly and no macros are usually dealbreakers for certain types of developer – but it's wrong to say you can't lean on the wider BEAM ecosystem!

[0]: https://github.com/sisou/nimiq_gleam/blob/main/gblake2/src/g...

[1]: https://hex.pm/packages/blake2
by duskdozer | 2026-01-14 08:41:35+00:00
Yes. Much as there's "MIT free", there's also "AGPL free", and many "MIT free" people consider the AGPL "non-" or less free due to restrictions, while "AGPL free" people consider it more free by demanding its derivatives also be free.

While "use for any purpose" has been included, I think considering purpose is a natural extension of this concept. Suppose there were some software project that aimed to practically eliminate the ability for users to share and use free or open software as it is today. Is it more free to allow such a project to be unrestricted from using other software, even if that project would lead to the destruction of free software otherwise?
by misiek08 | 2026-01-14 08:42:05+00:00
It’s funny how we avoid the technologies we can’t complain about much. Seeing an Elixir projects on production I always wonder „why we are not using it more often”. More talking about Elixir here.

For Elixir I saw a simple distributed job scheduler - it was dead simple in code and was ripped, because it didn’t require maintenance for ~8 years just working without issue and people who knew anything about it left company or switched part of company and acted as they forgot everything.

The other example is medium sized (in terms of features and code) web app - maintained by <30 people now, delivering more than 800 people at the other company, no stress, no issues and with great DX because of the BEAM (other company is drowning in JVM based nano-services).
by localhoster | 2026-01-14 08:42:21+00:00
Totally, and im not saying otherwise.
I'm saying that it takes the same amount of work to become a good engineering team even with AI.
But it takes exponentially less work to bacome worse team. If they say C++ makes it much more easier to shut yourself in the foot, in a similar manner LLMs are hard to aim. If your team can aim properly, you are going to hit more targets more quickly, but if and when you miss, the entire team is in wheelchairs.
by kundan_s__r | 2026-01-14 08:42:21+00:00
The real risk with LLMs isn’t when they fail loudly — it’s when they fail quietly and confidently, especially for non-experts or downstream systems that assume structured output equals correctness.

When you don’t already understand the domain, AI feels infallible. That’s exactly when unvalidated outputs become dangerous inside automation, decision pipelines, and production workflows.

This is why governance can’t be an afterthought. AI systems need deterministic validation against intent and execution boundaries before outputs are trusted or acted on — not just better prompts or post-hoc monitoring.

That gap between “sounds right” and “is allowed to run” is where tools like Verdic Guard are meant to sit.
by impossiblefork | 2026-01-14 08:42:22+00:00
Death penalty for one guy seems very mild.

If this happened in Sweden, we'd have been shooting at the participating soldiers while it went on with machine guns, seeking out people associated with the coup and killing them in their homes etc.

If someone is committing a coup, you go 100%, because if they succeed you don't have a country any more.

This guy invited this in a democratic, orderly country. What crime is worse? If it were me I'd have wanted the death penalty for any participating soldiers too.
by theshrike79 | 2026-01-14 08:42:46+00:00
It's a lot different to "vibe code" by copypasting crap from a browser window to an editor vs using an agentic LLM with full access to the source and tools to search for documentation, run scripts etc.

And one major thing is language.

Some languages (Rust, React) are so complex and nuanced that LLMs struggle with them - as do humans. Agentic LLMs will eventually solve the problem you've given them but the solution might be a bit wonky.

Compare that to LLMs writing Python or Go. With Go there's just one way to write a loop, it can't get confused with that. The way to write and format the language has been exactly the same since the beginning.

Same with Python, it's pretty lenient on how you write it (objects vs functional) but there are well-estabilished standards on how to do things and it's an old language (34 years btw). Most of Python 2.x is still valid Python 3.
by phplovesong | 2026-01-14 08:43:52+00:00
You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding about type systems. Most (the best?) typesystems are erased. This means they only have meaning "on compile time", and makes sure your code is sound and preferrably without UB.

The "its only bits" thing makes no sense in the world of types. In the end its machine code, that humans never (in practice) write or read.
by adastra22 | 2026-01-14 08:44:00+00:00
Yes, in general. I think in your specific example it is more likely to ingest the screenshots (upload to Anthropic) and use its built-in vision model to extract the relevant information. But if you had like a million screenshots, it might choose to run some Python OCR software locally instead.

In either case though, all the tool calls and output are part of the session and therefore Input. Even if it called a local OCR application to extract the info, it would probably then ingest that info to act on it (e.g. rename files). So the content is still being uploaded to Anthropic.

Note that you can opt-out of training in your profile settings. Now whether they continue to respect that into the future...
by moonshotideas | 2026-01-14 08:44:19+00:00
How long do you think it will be until the “ai isn’t doing anything” people are going away
1 month, 6 months, I’d say 1 Year at the most, anyone who has used Claude code since Dec 1st knows this in their bones, so I’d just let these people shout from the top of the hill until they run out of steam…

Right around then, we can send a bunch of reconnaissance teams out to the abandoned Japanese islands to rescue them from the war that’s been over for 10 years - hopefully they can rejoin society, merge back with reality and get on with their lives
by localhoster | 2026-01-14 08:45:11+00:00
Thats the gist of it.
I've been trying to tell the founders that if we invest 2x more time on proper planning we will get 20x more outcomes in return.
It's as simple as that, its not about just writing stuff and pushing, its about understanding the boundaries of what you make, how it talks with other stuff, and what are the compromises you are willing to take in return for faster speeds.
Show HN: Nix – open-source, zero-knowledge secret sharing
by ntempus | 2026-01-14 08:45:20+00:00
Hello HN,

I built Nix because I needed a fast, secure way to share environment variables and API keys with my team without creating accounts or worrying about server logs.

The Problem: Most "pastebin" tools are either not encrypted, require a login, or are closed source (so you have to trust them blindly). I wanted something that did one thing well: encrypt data in the browser so the server never sees the key.

How it works:

Client Side Encryption: Nix uses the Web Crypto API (window.crypto) to encrypt your text or files with AES-256-GCM.

The URL Hash: The decryption key is part of the URL fragment (#key). Since fragments are never sent to the server, I literally cannot see your data even if I wanted to.

Ephemeral: You can set expiration times (5m, 1h, 24h) or "Burn on Read."

The Stack:

Next.js / React

Tailwind CSS

Web Crypto API (No external crypto libraries)

Repo: https://github.com/ntempus/nix

It’s free, no ads, and no tracking. I’d love to hear your feedback on the security implementation or the UX.
by joe_mamba | 2026-01-14 08:45:49+00:00
>Why the fuck would an union cap anyones salary? Is this an American thing?

No, it's a thing in most of Europe like France or Germany for unionized trades. All those companies have documented salary bands where the negotiations starting point for a wage for a position must not be below the minimum threshold but also can't exceed a certain upper threshold. In some cases, the company can decide to place you outside the union agreed tariff/band range to give you a higher wage, but then you're exempt from some strict union rules like 35h/week working hours and such.

They cap the top end of the salary bands because the yearly budget for wages is a fixed pie for most companies, and so to have money left to give entry level workers the great wage increases as mandated for by unions, they need to cap the top wages to prevent bleeding/bankruptcy. Do you think all European companies have unlimited money to give all workers X% wage increases?

This is how it works in Austria.
by mzl | 2026-01-14 08:46:09+00:00
Asking someone to give a sharp dividing line in a multi-dimensional bimodal but not discontinuous distribution is just nonsense.

In particular, being unable to give that strict difference (that does not exist) is not proof of not believing that the general bimodal groups exist, nor acknowledging that existence, nor saying that there is not general differences between the groups. It is not the gotcha that elementary school biology suggests it would be.
by g-b-r | 2026-01-14 08:46:19+00:00
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/66449211/a-lock-file-alr... happens fairly easily, and at least years ago it was not easy to figure out how to solve it.

I think I did run in other bugs that did appear to have messed up the repository.

> like I said, no command in git can modify or delete a commit.

Well, you can end up losing commits by playing with the reflogs or deleting branches (if you haven't checked out the branch in the last by default 30 days, its commits might get deleted quickly)
by theshrike79 | 2026-01-14 08:46:42+00:00
Your analogy is the wrong way around :)

Everyone now is driving automatic, LLMs are the manual transmission in a classic car with "character".

Yes, anyone can step into one, start it and maybe get there, but the transmission and engine will make strange noises all the way and most people just stick to the first gear because the second gear needs this weird wiggle and a trick with the gas pedal to engage properly.

Using (agentic) LLMs as coding assistants is a skill that (at the moment) can't really be taught as it's not deterministic and based a lot on feels and getting the hang of different base models (gemini, sonnet/opus, gpt, GLM etc). The only way to really learn is by doing.

Yes, anyone can start up Google Antigravity or whatever and say "build me a todo app" and you'll get one. That's just the first gear.
by wtcactus | 2026-01-14 08:46:57+00:00
> I mean...how about we just not kill each other. Kept the drawn lines, make "settlers" illegal and be done with it.

Israel did exactly that on 2015. Then, the Arabs (that’s what they actually are: Arabs from Egypt and Lebanon left behind by their own nations after they tried to destroy Israel in the very next day after the state was formed in 1948) went on to elect a government that specifically had as their campaign banner “the destruction of Israel” and kept sending dozens of rockets against Israel every day.
by catlifeonmars | 2026-01-14 08:47:12+00:00
UUIDv7 wasn’t as ubiquitous at the time so it did not come up.

Here’s how I would think about it: do I want users to depend on the ordering of UUIDv7? Now I’m tied to that implementation and probably have to start worrying about clock skew.

If it’s not a feature you want to support, don’t expose it. Otherwise you’re on the hook for it. If you do explicitly want to provide time ordering as a feature, then UUIDv7 is a great choice and preferable to rolling your own format.
by sfn42 | 2026-01-14 08:47:33+00:00
Why would I be against that? I'm not against ozempic either.

I'm just against people who throw their hands in the air, say "my fatness is a disease" and continue eating 4000 calories a day while hardly moving at all. And just to be clear I'm not against the fatness - if you want to be fat that's fine, I don't care. It's your life. And if you want to say it's a mental disorder that's fine too, addiction is real and I know first hand that it's hard to resist good food and get off the couch.

Just don't claim there's nothing to be done about it. There is. I and many people I know have successfully lost weight by eating less and moving more. I've also gained weight by eating too much and moving too little. Because that's literally how it works, for everyone in the entire world. Sure it's possible to have some disease or disorder that prevents you from gaining weight by preventing you from utilizing the calories in your food. Or parasites can steal your calories. But if you aren't eating, your body still needs energy. It can't just choose to not use energy, energy is required to live. Without energy the heart doesn't beat, the lungs don't breathe, the brain doesn't brain, the muscles don't work. It's not like the body's just wasting energy, it uses as much as it has to. It's a fine tuned machine. So it can't just use less - the only way to use less energy is to spend less by moving less. Maybe the body can reduce it slightly by adjusting organ activity and such, but not much.

This is why we breathe oxygen and exhale CO2. Oxygen is literally used to burn calories, CO2 is the product of that combustion. Just like in a fire. When you exert yourself the body is spending more energy so it needs more oxygen and produces more CO2, that's why we need to breathe faster and our heart beats faster to get the oxygen to where it's needed and get rid of all the CO2. When you relax, your pulse and breathing lowers because you're burning very little.

Now, with this understanding of basic body functions it's obvious that moving more and eating less is how you lose weight. There is no question about it, it's just clear as day and absolutely indisputable.
by Buttons840 | 2026-01-14 08:48:06+00:00
Reminder that unions don't have to do anything about salary.

I'd love a tech union that simply says:

Every time an on-call engineer has to work during off-hours, they get compensated 4x that time in PTO, and that PTO must be used during the next 30 days, or it is paid out at 20x their normal hourly rate.

This ensures everyone shares in the burden of off-hours work. If off-hours work is happening often, then engineers are going to be spending a lot of time away on PTO, and if the company pressures them to not take the PTO, then the company is going to be paying them a lot. Let's align incentives, I don't want to work on off-hours emergencies, and the company doesn't want me to either.

No mention of pay anywhere. Unions can do a lot of good without ever touching pay.
by pkos98 | 2026-01-14 08:48:16+00:00
Isn’t this the proof of my point - How does the need of writing „@external“ annotations by hand not contradict the point of being „out of the box“ usable?

Hayleigh, when I asked on the discord about how to solve my JSON problem in order to get structured logging working, you replied that I’m the first one to ask about this.

Now reading this:
> It's ok if you don't vibe with Gleam – no ad-hoc poly and no macros are usually dealbreakers for certain types of developer

Certainly makes me even more feel like gatekeeping.
by bjackman | 2026-01-14 08:48:32+00:00
Yeah ban is the answer. Trouble is that, as shown in the article, even if they include the charging and refilling bits they can be cheap enough to throw away after use.

Taxing waste is one part of the story but it's actually a really good thing that vaping is cheaper than smoking so this can only go so far before it's counterproductive.

I think the answers lie in stuff like banning sale of pre-filled ones. If you make people buy a separate bottle of nicotine liquid (and you enforce that this is quite a large minimum size, like we already do with tobacco) and fill the device up before they use it, I think they are much more likely to refill it when it's empty and recharge it when it's dead.

Maybe another thing could be restricting points of sale. I bet a lot of the waste comes from drunk people buying them at 10pm in the corner shop near the pub. If you make people plan ahead that might also help.
by jonasn | 2026-01-14 08:48:32+00:00
Author of the OpenJDK patch here.

Thanks for the write-up Jaromir :) For those interested, I explored memory overhead when reading /proc—including eBPF profiling and the history behind the poorly documented user-space ABI.

Full details in my write-up: https://norlinder.nu/posts/User-CPU-Time-JVM/