MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ericmay | 2026-01-07 19:19:24+00:00
It's absolutely the built environment. Your Costco example is a clear example. you drive to Costco, you walk in, grab generic packaged goods without needing to really talk to anyone, and then go to the checkout and use the automated kiosk to make your purchase.

There's no reason to have a human interaction, so why would you bother getting to know the cashier? You're never going to build a relationship with the cashier precisely because of the environmental structure.

Contrast that with walking down the street to a local store that one of your neighbors owns. I bet you would already have a relationship unless you chose not to. Why? Because you'd also see them at your kids birthday party, or you'd see them at the bark down the street, or out on a walk.
by microtonal | 2026-01-07 19:19:40+00:00
In other years, the US was not threatening to annex allies, blow up NATO, etc. To speak in Hacker News terms, the world is slowly and increasingly faster going to rebase away from the US. Sadly for the US, their biggest arch enemy (besides DEI), China, is going to benefit from it hugely.

Frenemies that play according to a rule book are more worthy than frenemies that have gone insane.
by temp0826 | 2026-01-07 19:19:45+00:00
My tab hoarding has evolved a bit. I use separate windows that are mostly subject-based now. I might have an Amazon window that sticks around for several days that will explode with tabs before I decide to put in an order. If I get on a Factorio kick I end up with a window with dozens of blueprints and forum posts that will stay for a few months (until I get bored/overwhelmed with the game again...it's a cycle, that one...). I usually have a "main window" with stuff like email and nextdns allow list (stuff that I tend to fiddle with often) and a discord/reddit window. The wikipedia window comes and goes but sometimes gets several dozen tabs and might last a few days.

Always vertical tabs since forever. I feel like if I bookmark something I probably just missclicked at some point, it's just never been in my flow, even before tabs restoring on launch and automatic tab unloading.
by mohamedattahri | 2026-01-07 19:19:53+00:00
OP here. Sharing this early because I'm trying to gauge if this specific pain point is widespread, or if I'm just scratching a niche itch.

Context: I’ve been working in a regulated monorepo and realized that almost all existing supply chain tools assume you are a large enterprise with dedicated infrastructure.

The gap I found:

Scanners are reactive (they yell at you after the fact).

Artifactory/Nix are heavy (they require rebuilding your workflow or hosting servers).

I wanted something in the middle. The idea is a lightweight CLI that acts as a local proxy to gate npm/cargo/go requests against policies stored directly in git. It forces "lockfile intent" (what the dev wants) to match "security policy" (what the repo allows) before the package hits the host.

The mechanism I'm most interested in feedback on is the enforcement logic: sbom check --policy-from=origin/main

This allows the CLI to judge the "crimes" on your feature branch against the "laws" defined in main. It effectively prevents a developer from un-banning a vulnerable package in the same PR that introduces it.

Does this "local proxy" approach feel like the right middle ground to you, or is the overhead of a proxy too much for a daily driver?
by defrim | 2026-01-07 19:20:41+00:00
unfortunately, the user-unfriendly changes started years ago, especially around 2023. Having used it since 2016, you can tell that post covid is when they shifted from consumer-focused to revenue-focused; just look at how many people are outraged by the appearance of embedded ads, game "quests", nitro feature-stealing, discord profile purchasable customizations, and (one that not many people talk about) trendy corporate habits like year recaps and T&C changes.
by burningChrome | 2026-01-07 19:20:55+00:00
> No discovery - no business.

I do SEO as a side gig to my 9-5 as a developer. All four of my freelance companies I work with have seen their traffic drop up to 40% since LLM's have effectively taken over and people are using search engines less and less.

We've had to pivot to short form social media advertising which seems to be closing the gap whereas before the majority of our leads were coming from organic search and being ranked high in their respective industries. It certainly takes more effort to craft a script, film it, edit it to add text overlays, animations and catchy effects, but its showing me its being effective in the leads we're generating.

I'm not sure if this is a sort of generational thing back when my parents were so engrained to use the yellow pages and then that stopped once the internet got into the advertising business - but it feels like a similar transition is taking place again.

As many have already told me, "Ignore AI at your peril"
by BeetleB | 2026-01-07 19:21:12+00:00
Looking at the article, I'm not sure I see the problem.

> Other than cost, I see no downside to avoiding seed oils and a lot of upside

The taste of food in certain recipes (that don't involve cooking the oil) varies widely with the oil used. In some recipes, canola oil tastes better than olive oil (by a significant margin - no one would eat it with olive oil).

Cost was never a factor for me (even as a student). Oil is amongst the least expensive things in the food I cook.
by satvikpendem | 2026-01-07 19:22:13+00:00
I never said Tailwind the company wasn't a business, when I said "a product is not a business" I meant that as advice to creators in general, not in specific to Tailwind; of course it is, it made millions in revenue. What I meant was that even though businesses may exist, having a long-term, durable business model is not always viable.
by roadside_picnic | 2026-01-07 19:22:37+00:00
I've lived through multiple incredibly rapid changes in tech throughout my career, and the lesson always learned was there is a lot of wasted energy keeping up.

Two big examples:

- Period from early mvc JavaScript frontends (backbone.js etc) and the time of the great React/Angular wars. I completely stepped out of the webdev space during that time period.

- The rapid expansion of Deep Learning frameworks where I did try to keep up (shipped some Lua torch packages and made minor contributions to Pylearn2).

In the first case, missing 5 years of front-end wars had zero impact. After not doing webdev work at all for 5-years I was tasked with shipping a React app. It took me a week to catch up, and everything was deployed in roughly the same time as someone would have had they spent years keeping up with changes.

In the second case, where I did keep up with many of the developing deep learning frameworks, it didn't really confer any advantage. Coworkers who I worked with who started with Pytorch fresh out of school were just as proficient, if not more so, with building models. Spending energy keeping up offered no value other than feeling "current" at the time.

Can you give me a counter example of where keeping up with a rapidly changing area that's unstable has conferred a benefit to you? Most of FOMO is really just fear. Again, unless you're trying to sell your self specifically as a consultant on the bleeding edge, there's no reason to keep up with all these changes (other than finding it fun).
by jjmarr | 2026-01-07 19:22:44+00:00
The military has to intend to control territory in the occupation sense. That means controlling the land, not the government. "Venezuela" refers to the land not the state.

All the Israel markets have clearly established this interpretation. Israel has done many raids intended to influence foreign governments, but not to control territory, and those markets didn't count as invasion.

There are other markets if you wanted to speculate on regime change or any kind of military action, but "invade" has a specific meaning.

This happens every single market and it's free money for people that understand the rules.
by doctorpangloss | 2026-01-07 19:22:46+00:00
COVID was a trade shock too. It's trade shocks. That's the word - I carefully did not say, tariffs are to blame. Trade shocks are. We are in full control of tariffs, today, so that matters, don't misunderstand me. But it's a 100% consistent story with COVID and tariffs: trade shocks.

Of course, if given the ability now, finally, to charge whatever retail wants, you could say it's opportunism. But they didn't have the ability to do that until the trade shocks.

The thing people are in denial about is that it's everything. You are saying Belgian chocolate. Some people say iPhones. Blah blah blah. I'm saying, literally everything. Everything physical had prices that had to compare to lower priced, high quality imports from China and southeast Asia. They think that a sticker that says Mexico on their fruit means Mexico. They think stickers don't lie! Do you see?
by cookiengineer | 2026-01-07 19:22:50+00:00
I think I'd differ between source code audits (where LLMs already are pretty good at spotting bugs if you can convince them to) and exploit development here.

The former is automated by a large part already with fuzz testing of all kinds, so you wouldn't need an LLM if you knew what you were doing and have a TDD workflow or similar that checks against memleaks (say, with valgrind or similar approaches).

The latter part is what I was referring to where I had hope initially that DNCs could help with that, and what I'd say that right now LLMs cannot discover this, only repeat and translate it (e.g. similar vulnerabilities in the past discovered by humans in another programming language).

I'm talking specifically about discovery here because transformers lose symbolic inference, and that's why you can't use them for exploit generation. At least I wasn't able to make them work for the DARPA challenges, and had to use an AlphaGo based model combined with a CPPN and some techniques that worked in ES/HyperNEAT.

I suppose what I'm trying to say is that there's a missing understanding of memory and time when it comes to LLMs. And that is usually manually encoded/governed how you put it by humans. And I would not count that as an LLM doing it, because you could have just automated the tool use without an LLM and get identical results. (When thinking e.g. about an MCP for kernel memory maps or say, valgrind or AFL etc)
by NitpickLawyer | 2026-01-07 19:23:03+00:00
> One does not simply get the camera status on a MacBook.

? OverSight [1] seems to work just fine. It pops up whenever something uses the mic or camera (the usage for this tool is to "monitor" for unwanted access from rogue apps). Since it's open source it should be possible to check how they get the status?

- https://github.com/objective-see/OverSight
by QuantumNomad_ | 2026-01-07 19:23:13+00:00
> It's wild how often I've heard people say "we should have an AI do X" when X is something that's very obviously either a terrible idea or best suited for traditional algorithms.

Likewise when smartphones were new, everyone and their mother was certain that random niche thing that made no sense as an app would be a perfect app and that if they could just get someone to make the app they’d be rich. (And of course ideally, the idea haver of the misguided idea would get the lions share of the riches, and the programmer would get a slice of pizza and perhaps a percentage or two of ownership if the idea haver was extra generous.)
50k people were dropped from one AI training project during the holidays
by KyleW9 | 2026-01-07 19:23:20+00:00
During the holidays, 50k people were dropped from one AI training project without the story reaching the front page. That tells you how invisible this expert workforce still is.

Right before the new year, the AI training community absorbed one of its biggest shockwaves: 50k contributors waking up to sudden removal and a one-line “quality requirements changed” message, with no real path to recover. For many, it meant losing time, momentum, and income.

This isn’t a post against AI training, just more of a defense for experts’ contributions. RLHF and data annotation help make models reliable, effective, and safe in the real world, and scaling it will demand deep expertise across industries, languages, and edge cases.

If we’re serious about scaling it, we need to start elevating the expert workforce that shapes AI across domains. We can’t treat them as disposable or erase them overnight.
by hunterpayne | 2026-01-07 19:23:34+00:00
Serious question, if tariffs are so terrible, why did so many countries have tariffs on US (and other country's) goods?

Also, during the period you describe the US was a major export economy. Now the US economy is far more insular (even before Trump) than it was during that period (foreign trade was more than 50% in the late 19th century vs 7% today). Why would you assume that doesn't impact the effects of tariffs?
by Aurornis | 2026-01-07 19:23:47+00:00
Tailwind did a great job of building a fanbase. Even without LLMs I always thought they were on a collision course with market saturation, though. They generously gave lifetime access for a one-time payment, which was bound to run into problems as free alternatives became better and their core fanbase didn't have any reason to spend more money.

Their business model also missed the boat on the rise of Figma and similar tools. I can think back to a couple different projects where the web developers wanted to use Tailwind [Plus] components but the company had a process that started in Figma. It's hard to sell the designers on using someone else's component library when they have to redraw it in Figma anyway.
by jcadam | 2026-01-07 19:23:55+00:00
Yea, my issue with Opus 4.5 is it's the first model that's good enough that I'm starting to feel myself slip into laziness. I catch myself reviewing its output less rigorously than I had with previous AI coding assistants.

As a side project / experiment, I designed a language spec and am using (mostly) Opus 4.5 to write a transpiler (language transpiles to C) for it. Parser was no problem (I used s-expressions for a reason). The type checker and transpiler itself have been a slog - I think I'm finding the limits of Opus :D. It particularly struggles with multi-module support. Though, some of this is probably mistakes made by me while playing architect and iterating with Claude - I haven't written a compiler since my senior year compiler design course 20+ years ago. Someone who does this for a living would probably have an easier time of it.

But for the CRUD stuff my day job has me doing? Pffttt... it's great.
by dudeinhawaii | 2026-01-07 19:24:50+00:00
LLMS like Opus, Gemini 3, and GPT-5.2/5.1-Codex-max, are phenomenal for coding and have only very recently crossed that gap between being "eh" and being quite fantastic to let operate on their own agentically. The major trade-off being a fairly expensive cost. I ran up $200 per provider after running through 'pro' tier limits during a single week of hacking over the holidays.

Unfortunately, it's still surprisingly easy for these models to fall into really stupid maintainability traps.

For instance today, Opus adds a feature to the code that needs access to a db. It fails because the db (sqlite) is not local to the executable at runtime. Its solution is to create this 100 line function to resolve a relative path and deal with errors and variations.

I hit ESC and say "... just accept a flag for --localdb <file>". It responds with "oh, that's a much cleaner implementation. Good idea!". It then implements my approach and deletes all the hacks it had scattered about.

This... is why LLMs are still not Senior engineers. They do plainly stupid things. They're still absurdly powerful and helpful, but if you want maintainable code you really have to pay attention.

Another common failure is when context is polluted.

I asked Opus to implement a feature by looking up the spec. It looked up the wrong spec (a v2 api instead of a v3) -- I had only indicated "latest spec". It then did the classic LLM circular troubleshooting as we went in 4 loops trying to figure out why calculations were failing.

I killed the session, asked a fresh instance to "figure out why the calculation was failing" and it found it straight away. The previous instance would have gone in circles for eternity because its worldview had been polluted by assumptions made -- that could not be shaken.

This is a second way in which LLMs are rigid and robotic in their thinking and approach -- taking the wrong way even when directed not to. Further reading on 'debugging decay': https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.18403

All this said, the number of failure scenarios gets ever smaller. We've gone from "problem and hallucination every other code block" to "problem every 200-1000 code blocks".

They're now in the sweet spot of acting as a massive accelerator. If you're not using them, you'll simply deliver slower.
by ElijahLynn | 2026-01-07 19:25:03+00:00
Protip for a brain reset - right click on current tab - click close other tabs

The beauty here is that if you are at risk of losing anything, in a form that is not yet submitted, then the browser will pop up a prompt saying are you sure you want to close, you will lose data. So there is no risk of losing something you can't get back.

Then, after they are all closed, as needed, I just type in the browser bar the names of the tabs and it searches history and suggests previously closed tabs, then up/down arrow, then enter.

I do this frequently and it really helps my brain.
by sixtyj | 2026-01-07 19:25:13+00:00
Yes, I agree, there is one exception.

Onetab add-on in FF works fine. After every work you just “onetab” all tabs. It is flat structure, so I usually store similar tabs into one box.

There are 2 features: restore all tabs into browser. And fulltext search is easier.

I was a tab hoarder too. I am cured now as Onetab helped me a lot. (No affil. here.)
by tracker1 | 2026-01-07 19:25:17+00:00
TBF, it's not as bad as it used to be.. the main issue is that unless I manually switch to mono mode before going into meetings, then back to stereo to listen to music after, I tend to have issues.

I mostly just use my webcam's mic, despite my headphones being better so I can leave my headset on bluetooth/stereo.
by echelon | 2026-01-07 19:25:25+00:00
I think the single biggest bad thing Google does (Android and YouTube bad practices [2] aside):

Google taxes every brand and registered trademark.

The URL bar is no longer a URL bar. It's a search bar. Google used monopoly power to take over 90% of them.

Now every product, every brand, every trademark competes in a competitive bidding process for their own hard-earned IP and market. This isn't just paying a fee, it's a bidding war with multiple sides.

If you want to strike Google at their heart, make it illegal to place ads against registered trademarks.

I'm going to launch "trademark-extortion.org" (or similar) and run a large campaign to reach F500 CEOs and legislators. This needs to end. This is the source that has allowed Google to wreak incredible harm on the entire tech sector. Happy to send this to Sam Altman and Tim Sweeny as well.

[1] Rug-pulling web installs; leveraging 3rd party vendors to establish market share and treating them like cattle; scare walls and defaults that ensure 99.99% of users wind up with ads, Google payment rails, etc. ; Google ads / chrome / search funnel ; killing Microsoft's smartphone by continually gimping YouTube and Google apps on the platform ; etc. etc. etc. The evilest company.
by neogoose | 2026-01-07 19:26:00+00:00
I printed a lot of gears from this website (well I built it because I had to print a lot of different gears) and they came out very nice and reinforced. If you use the optimized for 3D printing export it doesn't need anything from your printer software to just print it, and they mesh with existing gears just fine (for sure if you calculated module correctly)

Libraries are simple: threejs for preview, meshlib for watertight export, used some frontend framework for state management too
by futuraperdita | 2026-01-07 19:26:05+00:00
I'm curious when this stops.

I have been thinking over the past week or so that we're likely to see consumer technology sitting well behind datacenter tech perpetually here, and this is not a transient shortage but an overall market adjustment to consumer and SMB being a few generations (or process nodes) behind the hyperscalers. Outside of gamers and enthusiasts, most people can be on anything from the last 7-8 years and be fine with it, and most of what they do is offloaded to the cloud anyway.

I'm also pessimistic enough to see a sort of long-term "compute control", where we see a few generations of technology leak to adversaries through individual channels, and then we start ensuring that _only_ controlled/regulated/registered companies can purchase the leading-edge. After all, nobody needs that much compute, it's dangerous! What if they put it on a drone?
by hermitdev | 2026-01-07 19:26:07+00:00
Every time see Mr Beast (I don't watch any of his stuff, just accidentally see promos on Prime sometimes), he reminds me of Homer Simpson's forced smile in the Simpsons' espiode "Re-Nedufication" [0].

[0]: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c8/84/8e/c8848e81afa88a42bd4d...
by myk9001 | 2026-01-07 19:26:08+00:00
> Few years ago in Holland it was something like 100k salary == mortgage for 500k house. No downpayment, 2k monthly.

Would it be wrong to think that the borrower would repay a potential downpayment a few times over to the bank?

How much smaller that 2k mortgage payment would be with a 20% downpayment? And how much larger the share going towards the mortgage body would be?

If only the borrower's comp was just big enough to let them save for that downpayment.

Don't know about you, but to me it sounds almost as if the system was rigged against the worker, to redistribute wealth away from them and into the hands of employers and bankers.
by satvikpendem | 2026-01-07 19:26:15+00:00
I wonder how they're doing too then, as we don't have public stats about them (Telerik was acquired by a public company Progress Software but they do not break down revenue by Telerik specifically). Ultimately, this business of selling components is not sound in the age of AI.

Another thing to consider, it seems JS devs use more AI for work than .NET devs for example, which might be in more old-school companies and industries. I can't verify this but there seems to be a correlation between companies who use hip new CSS and JS frameworks, and their AI usage, thus accelerating Tailwind Corp's cannibalization by AI, as most vibe coders are building web apps from what I've seen and Tailwind and React are very well represented in the training set.
by AlienRobot | 2026-01-07 19:26:55+00:00
I'm not OP but I tried to ask it today to explain to me how proxies work, and it felt like it couldn't give me an answer that it couldn't attribute to a link. While that sounds good on paper, the problem is that no matter what you ask, you end up with very similar answers because it has less freedom to generate text. While on the other hand, even if attributes everything to a link, there is no guarantee that link actually says what the LLM is telling you it says, so it's just the worse of both worlds.

ChatGPT on the other hand was able to reformulate the explanation until I understood the part I was struggling with, namely what prevents a proxy from simply passing its own public key as the website's public key. It did so without citing anything.