MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by WillAdams | 2026-01-31 13:13:17+00:00
Isn't this just a new name for "Design by Contract"?

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15182720-design-by-contr...

but using a Large-Language-Model rather than a subordinate team?

c.f., https://se.inf.ethz.ch/~meyer/publications/old/dbc_chapter.p...
by shalmanese | 2026-01-31 13:13:40+00:00
> or if you prefer, there is a cycle between the two states

Yes, what I mostly emphasize with this mode of thinking is that the act of building software is primarily there to transform people (you try a thing, it doesn't work like you think it would, that inspires you to try another thing) and the software at the end of it is largely a byproduct.

If you have the right people, producing the software is trivial, it's how do you port the right knowledge into their brains in the first place and and software should be just another tool in your toolbox towards that aim.
by barnacs | 2026-01-31 13:13:47+00:00
As a European citizen, I can assure you, my options are getting ever more limited. Several global companies have kicked me off their platforms recently due to all the regulations they can't be bothered with. Those that make an effort to comply are by default required to submit to the EU surveillance system. At the same time, I have no illusions that any of this would somehow protect my data from the NSA and the like.

In my view, data can only be protected by its rightful owner. And for that, we need education, not regulation.
by jaynamburi | 2026-01-31 13:13:58+00:00
Nice work interactive tutorials are one of the best ways to actually understand Docker instead of just reading syntax.

What stands out is how you show the full container lifecycle with live, runnable examples: building images, running containers, exposing ports, and observing how changes affect behavior. That makes core ideas like image immutability, isolation, and reproducibility much clearer than static guides.

This mirrors how containers are used in real infrastructure. For example, platforms like Syaala rely on containerized workloads to ensure applications behave consistently across modular, GPU ready deployments same container, predictable runtime, different scale and location.

Short, hands on, and grounded in how containers are used in production. Solid resource for anyone learning Docker seriously.
by deaux | 2026-01-31 13:15:11+00:00
Complete, utter bullshit. There are maybe 4 countries in the world with significantly less dependence on US tech. Out of those 4, one has magnitudes more government interference, another one has even more rules and regulations - including even stricter data privacy laws than GDPR - than the EU, the third has slightly less than the EU but also the lowest local tech % our of the 4, and the last one is Russia.

But sure, it's the rules and regulations that are the problem.

If you have any knowledge on the topic I don't need to name the other three.

Talking software as that's the discussion here, not hardware.
by hirako2000 | 2026-01-31 13:15:33+00:00
Which was my point. Unless someone is heavily leveraged or happen to have bought at the very peak, what matters is the rend, not intra day phenomenons.

I don't mind getting down voted by leveraged traders who got liquidated.

For disclosure I think gold/silver at this point is way overvalued, just the symptom of what this article is all about.
by kris_builds | 2026-01-31 13:15:53+00:00
There's a hidden assumption in the waterfall vs agile debate that AI might actually dissolve: the cost of iteration.

Waterfall made sense when changing code was expensive. Agile made sense when you couldn't know requirements upfront. But what if generating code becomes nearly free?

I've been experimenting with treating specs as the actual product - write the spec, let AI generate multiple implementations, throw them away daily. The spec becomes the persistent artifact that evolves, while code is ephemeral.

The surprising part: when iteration is cheap, you naturally converge on better specs. You're not afraid to be wrong because being wrong costs 20 minutes, not 2 sprints.

Anyone else finding that AI is making them more willing to plan deeply precisely because execution is so cheap that plans can be validated quickly?
by akiselev | 2026-01-31 13:16:07+00:00
> On the verification loop: I think there’s so much potential here. AI is pretty good at autonomously working on tasks that have a well defined and easy to process verification hook.

It's scary how good it's become with Opus 4.5. I've been experimenting with giving it access to Ghidra and a debugger [1] for reverse engineering and it's just been plowing through crackmes (from sites like crackmes.one where new ones are released constantly). I haven't bothered trying to have it crack any software but I wouldn't be surprised if it was effective at that too.

I'm also working through reverse engineering several file formats by just having it write CLI scripts to export them to JSON then recreate the input file byte by byte with an import command, using either CLI hex editors or custom diff scripts (vibe coded by the agent).

I still get routinely frustrated trying to use it for anything complicated but whole classes of software development problems have been reduced to vibe coding that feedback loop and then blowing through Claude Max rate limits.

[1] Shameless plug: https://github.com/akiselev/ghidra-cli https://github.com/akiselev/debugger-cli
by ExoticPearTree | 2026-01-31 13:17:11+00:00
I like it how everyone says that, but there is no european cloud operator able to offer what AWS/GCP/Azure offer. And if you are a start-up and you want to grow, the situation is even more dire.

And without a few hundreds of billions of EUR invested _today_ there will still be at least a decade until basic infrastructure will be somewhat on par with current day hyperscalers from the US.

And Office suite wise, it took Google about 15 years of pouring money into Google Docs to be almost as good as the MS offering.

Today, if for political reasons some EU companies will switch to whatever Europe has to offer in terms of cloud computing, they will need to spend a significant amount of money to retool their day to day pipelines and invest into developing or replacing cloud services with alternatives from the new provider or self-host if there is no native offering.

There’s a chance that the current situation will start to resolve itself in 3 years and we go back to normal, however that might look.
by albert_e | 2026-01-31 13:18:27+00:00
AWS seems to have seen the writing on the wall and has already launched a European Soverign Cloud -- a separate partition like they have for GovCloud and China.

I am guessing other hyperscalers must be doing the same?

Are we seeing a strong aversion among EU companies to use these offerings from US firms (AWS, Google, Microsoft) and viable competition emerging from Europe?

The selling point of many offerings from current market leaders is that they have the widest array of services especially easy to expand into say datalake, BI or AI/ML experiments and production workloads starting from a core IaaS only setup one might have after migrating off own datacenter. I wonder if there are lesser known players positioning themselves in this space -- with managed services in platform/application space. Curious to know some examples.
by yunohn | 2026-01-31 13:19:24+00:00
I would’ve taken this response more seriously if it weren’t written with LLM assistance.

Regardless, it’s a lot of words to again say “they are famous, so consider them more seriously” despite the obvious scam being perpetuated via crypto. The appeal to authority is you stating their credentials first, and none of the deductions you claim one should make from merit.
by glamourpetz | 2026-01-31 13:19:27+00:00
> fan fiction is legal. You just can't make a profit from it, which I think is fair.

The term "fair" is intellectually imprecise.

In a policy context, appeals to "fairness" often serve as a rhetorical proxy for subjective preferences rather than an objective moral framework.

When centralized systems attempt to institutionalize "fairness" as a primary directive, the resulting information-calculation problems and rent-seeking often lead to catastrophic externalities.

Consider the extreme end of state-mandated equity:

- The Henan Plasma Scandal: In the 1990s, a government-backed "plasma economy" intended to alleviate rural poverty through "fair" compensation led to the pooling and reinjection of contaminated blood, infecting an estimated 1.2 million people with HIV.

- The One-Child Policy: A "fair" distribution of population growth led to forced abortions, mass abandonment of female infants, and a 30-million-person gender imbalance.

In the specific context of IP, the "fairness" of restricting profit from derivative works is a misnomer. US copyright law (17 U.S.C. 107) relies on Fair Use, which is a balancing test of market harm and transformative value, not a moral judgment on what an author "deserves".

Denying a creator the right to profit from their labor is simply a protectionist market intervention; calling it "fair" merely obscures the economic trade-off.
Ask HN: Has Hacker News already been Infiltrated by Clawd Bots?
by baxtr | 2026-01-31 13:19:41+00:00
With the rise of LLM bot networks and boards, I’m wondering if HN has already been infiltrated by bots.

What I mean: I’m wondering if people let their bots post/comment on their behalf and how we can detect and prevent this from happening.

I don’t think simple things account creation date alone is a reliable qualifier. You could easily give your bot access to post using an old account.
by aebtebeten | 2026-01-31 13:19:42+00:00
I love clipping coupons! (before clicking, I had been predicting something about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_III_of_England , but it looks like his wife got him the job: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_English_and_Bri... )

Yeah, the way I heard the story is the dutch were too tolerant: the Puritans couldn't stand the idea of their kids growing up with such examples around, so they upped sticks and headed off to wander in the wilderness...
by ajross | 2026-01-31 13:20:47+00:00
This is reasoning from a mistake. Market valuation is about VALUE, which is an abstract idea assigned by the market, which is not the same thing as MONEY, which can be "printed"[1]. Market values go up and down on their own, irrespective of the amount of money in circulation. They reflect consensus (often irrational) for what the securities "should be trading at", and that's all. If the currency inflates or deflates, the markets do too.

[1] Though recognize that by engaging in that frame you're painting yourself as an unserious amateur being influenced by partisan media. Real governments do not "print money" in any real sense, and attempts to conflate things like bond debt with it run afoul, yet again, of the money/value mistake.
by thedonncha | 2026-01-31 13:21:21+00:00
I used memories for a while but Immich is much better.
I use an external library because I export images from Lightroom Classic and that's where I throw them in YYYY/MM directories.
I could import them directly into Immich but I had problems with the Lightroom plugin I used. Especially when exporting hundreds of images at once.
by deaux | 2026-01-31 13:22:13+00:00
Everyone talking about rules and regulations being a blocker to EU software sovereignty is completely clueless. Unfortunately a lot of these people are actually European but they've drank the decades of US koolaid.

There are about 200 countries in this world. 195 of them are as of today reliant on foreign-controlled software to a similar degree, which is "completely and utterly in every facet, across consumer, business and government levels".

Let's talk about the other 4 then (excluding the US), with varying degrees. One of them has magnitudes more government interference than the EU. Another one also has both more government interference and stricter rules and regulations, both in terms of labor laws and things like data privacy - even stricter than GDPR. The third one has less of this, but still much more of it than the US, and has the lowest sovereignty level out of the four.

I've talked about three, that leaves the fourth. The fourth one is Russia.
by koverstreet | 2026-01-31 13:22:18+00:00
If you think Belgium is a narcostate - oh my :)

People lose touch with reality when life becomes too rich and comfortable, and they become too focused on security. You miss all the other corrosive influences on society.

I've travelled the entire United States, multiple times over, and seen quite a bit of Europe and South America, and I'm in Colombia now.

Latin America, and Colombia in particular would be far more of a "narcostate" according to the popular Northern definition - but perception often isn't reality.

I've never seen the gripping poverty and desperation that's common in the United States anywhere in Latin America; even the poorer communities here tend to be vibrant and well functioning, with families and little farming communities everywhere that are living life well. The fabric of society functions pretty well - health care and healthy food is far more available, far less conflict with government apparatuses (try walking into a DMV anywhere in the states, vs. walking into a government office in Latin America - I think you'll find it enlightening).

The security-obsessed mindset in the United States and Europe leads people to want to stamp out the mafia and cartels, but if you look at the actual outcomes I think it's pretty clear that that approach fails in the long run. Look at Mexico for the worst example of what can happen - being next to the United States the pressures have been high, and it hasn't worked, and cartel violence is absolutely ludicrous.

When people have more of a "live and let live" approach, things tend to stabilize in unconventional arrangements that are on the whole much less toxic to society. So Colombia, which does have cartels, doesn't have the same level of warfare or violence that affects the average person as Mexico does - where you'll regularly see a half dozen army/swat guys on patrol in a pickup with M-16s. Even so, you don't feel the same level of tension about that in Mexico vs. seeing a LEO presense in the United States, where that often means outright harassment for the populace.

There's a lot more to having a functional society than just eliminating elements that run contrary to "popular order".

And Belgium is great :)
by bell-cot | 2026-01-31 13:22:26+00:00
> How did Visa & Mastercard manage...

I'd bet a combination of:

- Got through before the red tape ramparts were nearly as thick as today

- Ungentle arm-twisting by the US Gov't... at Visa & Mastercard's behest

- Amply greased palms... which can't be traced to Visa or Mastercard. At least not in any jurisdiction which would do anything about it.
by 627467 | 2026-01-31 13:23:07+00:00
> documents, collaboration tools, file servers, single-sign on, databases

All being (or soon to be) fed through LLM agents running on fibers and datacenters controlled by NOT European entieties. And if you build DC you'll be powering them with energy imports.

Software being built on library repositories also under foreign jurisdictions. Network infrastructure built on imported tech running whatever backdoors "partners" see fit.

Its like you didn't notice the snowden revelations, the shift from dependence on Russian Gas to US gas, nordstream sabotage, stuxnet, etc
by water9 | 2026-01-31 13:23:14+00:00
That’s right they can’t just like lock everybody down into their homes and force them to get a vaccine for no freaking reason. The ex dream tax is what we pay in California which is driving all the business businesses out and driving all the homelessness in. The extreme tax is what midwits like yourself protect with the ferocity only surpassed by that of which you show for non-citizens
by llm_nerd | 2026-01-31 13:23:58+00:00
>The US is so developed, that even if the country was completely cut off from the world and operated as an internal economy it would still remain the world's largest.

That's a pretty enormous assumption. The US economy tends to crash into a smouldering ruin on the tiniest fluctuation in the inputs. The notion that you could abolish 27% of the real GDP and everything else just continues is not reality based. The US is barrelling towards a natural debt limit and that alone is going to be utter catastrophe for an economy that is fuelled by an insane amount of debt spending. The fact that some of the cons, like Trump and Graham, are trying to extract as much as they can as quickly as they can is telling enough.

The US economy is a tenuous mirage. Like Americans constantly love showing the fun charts demonstrating that various backwater, poor, Methville states with negligible business or industry have a higher GDP / capita than most developed nations. Sure they do.
Show HN: HyperToken: A game engine where the state is a CRDT
by flammafex | 2026-01-31 13:24:18+00:00
Ever had a multiplayer game you like shut down because they couldn't afford AWS anymore?

Happened to me with Killer Queen Black.

Never again.

HyperToken is a GAME engine for offline-first, local multiplayer. Yes, it has AI stuff because it's 2026. But the whole point is: what if you made a game and multiplayer was just built-in?
by lizknope | 2026-01-31 13:24:20+00:00
I've been designing chips since 1997. The first 2 companies I was at had their own fabs. It's been a boom and bust industry for 50 years or more.

https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2021/05/the-great-semicondu...

Here is a long article from last year about Sam Altman.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/25/business/openai-plan-elec...

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tsmc-rejects-podcasting-bro-s...

> TSMC’s leadership dismissed Altman as a “podcasting bro” and scoffed at his proposed $7 trillion plan to build 36 new chip manufacturing plants and AI data centers.

I thought it was ridiculous when I read it. I'm glad the fabs think he's crazy too. If he wants this then he can give them the money up front. But of course he doesn't have it.

After the dot com collapse my company's fabs were running at 50% capacity for a few years and losing money. In 2014 IBM paid Global Foundries $1.5 billion to take the fabs away. They didn't sell the fabs, they paid someone to take them away. The people who run TSMC are smart and don't want to invest $20-100 billion in new fabs that come online in 3-5 years just as the AI bubble bursts and demand collapses.

https://gf.com/gf-press-release/globalfoundries-acquire-ibms...
by bzzzt | 2026-01-31 13:24:45+00:00
Don't all game engines have a terrible use:release ratio? How did you determine that ratio for Godot and Unity and does it matter? You can't blame the engine for all occurrences of beginners losing interest in building a game.

While 3D is still in heavy development it's actually easier to build simple 2D games in Godot. You can finish a simple game before the Unity installer is finished.
Game engines aren't a fixed thing either. Assuming improvements continue Godot will get easier to use and gain market share.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-31 13:24:54+00:00
Arcee AI is currently free on openrouter with some really great speeds and no logs/traning from what I can tell while being completely free till end of feb and its a 500B model.

There are tons of free inference models. I treid to use gemini flash in aistudio + devstral free for agentic tasks but its now deprecated but when it wasn't, it was a really good setup imo. Now I can use arcee but personally ended up buying a 1 month cheap subscription of kimi after haggling it from 19.99 to 1.49$ for first month (could've haggled more too leading to 0.99$ too but yeaaa)
by albert_e | 2026-01-31 13:25:15+00:00
It's not just geographic regions around the globe.

It is also the wide array of services -- well integrated into their primitives of security, authentication, governance, monitoring and logging, etc

Is there a EU cloud provider that provides -- even if limited to EU geography -- the equivalent of Blob Storage + Azure Data Lake Storage + Azure Data Factory or Fabric + Microsoft Foundry with native access to OpenAI and Anthropic models?
by hagbard_c | 2026-01-31 13:25:19+00:00
Great Firewall? Is that where you think we - Europeans, Americans, anyone living in what used to be called the 'free world' - should go, just follow the Chinese and North Korean and similar regimes in restricting access to whatever those in control deem to be appropriate? Do you even realise what you're proposing here?

We in what used to be called the 'free world' used to revel in our freedom of movement, our freedom of thought, freedom on conscience, religion and more. We used to look at places where such freedoms were not a given like they were and to a large extent still are here. The Chinese 'Great Firewall' was seen in the same light as the Berlin Wall: a means to keep an oppressive regime in power, to keep the citizenry of China unaware of anything the regime did not want them to know about so they could mow them down at Tienanmen Square without people outside of the area learning about it. Now there's some HN user claiming that Europe should also build one - why exactly? What is it that we Europeans should not be allowed to access? Why should the European Commission - maybe I should start calling them the European Commissars - have such power over Europeans?

I say no to any such proposal and will, just like the Chinese, find a way around any such tool of oppression.
by sandworm101 | 2026-01-31 13:25:20+00:00
>> Should the US become an unfriendly power to the rest of the western world, it will find the demand for its currency plummeting, which I don't want to outline is a big issue.

For those who want to return the US to the haydays of manufacturing, the days of cheap steel and people working in mills, a rock-bottom dollar is a necessary first step. To sell widgets, the US dollar needs to be low. And to get workers into low-wage mill jobs the population needs to be hungry.
by cbdevidal | 2026-01-31 13:25:57+00:00
> alternative payment systems enables take it or leave it deals in medium/long term.

Assuming of course that the lender is interested in the alternative payment currency. Or that the borrower is willing to accept the consequences of default.

I don’t see accepting other forms of currency to be relevant in the short term—there is little use for the Yuan outside of China, for example. I suppose creditors can use them to buy more trinkets, or trade for dollars with people who want more trinkets.

And defaults can happen at any time, but the credit rating system is still widely respected.

Things can certainly change, but I doubt overnight.

> It's why PRC is now using their 3T USD surplus to basically do their own shadow USD lending without IMF conditionalities... countries now don't need to buy USD from US.

So they’re using US dollars, not Yuan.

Again, I can see how that would change conditions in the long term, but not overnight.

I am not optimistic for the dollar in the long term but I used to fear waking up one morning to hyperinflation. Not anymore.
by lejalv | 2026-01-31 13:26:41+00:00
> Doesn't list Kimi 2.5 and seems to be chat-only, not API, correct?

Yes, it is chat only, but that list is out of date - Kimi 2.5 (with or without reasoning) is available, as are ChatGPT 5.2, Gemini 3 Pro (Preview), etc
by vovavili | 2026-01-31 13:27:15+00:00
>And Office suite wise, it took Google about 15 years of pouring money into Google Docs to be almost as good as the MS offering.

And yet they _still_ don't have a desktop client for hotkey-driven and very fast-paced workflows, meaning that any serious professional spreadsheet work is still a Microsoft monopoly. If even the US market with all its favorable conditions can't deliver a competing product after years of trying, a fragmented, brain-drained, overregulated and high-tax continent attempting the same is just hopes and dreams.