MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by themaninthedark | 2026-01-18 20:26:02+00:00
I was commenting more on:
>China as the enemy is a fabricated narrative, bc culturally we seem to have a need to have another cold war, we need a "bad guy"

Than the economic rival aspect.

Because that was exactly what the Democratic party narrative was in 2012, with similar views echoed in Europe.

>Romney's claim drew a memorable slam from Obama during a presidential debate: "The 1980s, they're now calling to ask for their foreign policy back," Obama said, seeking to paint Romney as out of touch on a key foreign policy issue.

>Albright, who similarly criticized Romney in 2012, said she'd "underestimated" Russia back then.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/abcnews.go.com/amp/Politics/yea...

>The EU and Russia are not only neighbours but strategic partners who cooperate on a wide range of bilateral and global challenges, based on joint commitments and shared interests.

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/memo_1...

>In 2014, Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its military intervention in eastern Ukraine following Ukraine’s intention to sign an Association Agreement (AA) with the European Union caught the EU by surprise.

https://eu.boell.org/en/2017/07/03/eu-russia-relations-towar...
by colechristensen | 2026-01-18 20:26:06+00:00
We're not yet at the level yet.

Just the possibility of an armed population resisting still gives them pause. But we're not at the level of the theoretical threat becoming realized.

If the people too eagerly exercise it they'll be used as justification for further oppression. Resistance is political. Unfortunately most of our politicians are spineless cowards on both sides.

But it is not at all a mystery about how things got to be the way they were in the 1930s. I've heard people I know advocate for atrocities.
by lelanthran | 2026-01-18 20:26:47+00:00
> So, what do you propose non-developers in that situation will be doing then?

Look, I dunno what they will do, but these options are certainly off the table:

1. Get a temp dev/team in to patch a 1m SloC mess

2. Do it cost-effectively.

If the tech has improved by the time this happens (I mean, we're nowhere near this scenario yet, and it has already plateaued) then perhaps they can get the LLM itself to simply rewrite it instead of spending all those valuable tokens reading it in and trying to patch it.

If the tech is not up to it, then their options are effectively:

1. Use it as is till the end of time

2. Throw it out, and start again

3. Pray
by skeledrew | 2026-01-18 20:26:48+00:00
When it comes to the internet, tech is law. There is no way to publicly share something and maintain control over it. Even on the Fediverse, if either a client or server wants to ignore part of the protocol or model, it can. Like a system message to delete particular posts for anti-surveillance reasons can simply be ignored by any servers or clients that were designed/modified for surveillance. Ultimately the buck lies with the owner of some given data to not share that data in the first place if there's a chance of misuse.
by yladiz | 2026-01-18 20:27:23+00:00
I know this is somewhat covered in another comment, but, the concepts described in the post could have been reduced quite a bit, no offense Dan. While I like the writing generally, I would consider writing and then letting it sit for a few days, rereading, and then cutting chaff (editing). This feels like a great first draft but without feedback, and could have greatly benefited from an editing process, and I think using the argument that you want to put out something for others to take and refine isn’t really a strong one… a bit more time and refinement could have made a big difference here (and given you have a decently sized audience I would keep in mind).
by nemosaltat | 2026-01-18 20:27:32+00:00
In Shroud, Tchaikovsky does very alien (“real” aliens, not “uplifts”) very well. Anthropocentrically, it does not “end well.” Literarily, it vies for my favorite SciFi read of ‘25. Technically, I read “There Is No Antimemetics Division” last year, but I’d already kind of read it... or at least I think I thought I had.

uh uh, uh
by mschuster91 | 2026-01-18 20:27:52+00:00
Every accusation is a confession, rules for me not for thee, it's been like that for many years. Hell, 'member Clinton and the blowjob? The problem wasn't the blowjob, the problem was that Clinton let himself get caught and exposed.

Or, specifically to the situation at hand, there's yet another famous quote applicable: Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

It's completely obvious what ICE and the ordinary citizens of all blue regions are, respectively.
by cheema33 | 2026-01-18 20:27:54+00:00
You may not have meant to excuse the sad state we are in by presenting the "both sides are bad" argument. But it does have a strong whiff of it.

Both sides are bad. No doubt about it. It has always been that way. But, one side takes being bad to a whole new level.

Our choice has always been between bad and less bad. The voters decided to pull the lever for "massively bad" during the last presidential election because they could not tell the difference.
by neomantra | 2026-01-18 20:28:19+00:00
Isn't the "steering" in the form of prompts? You note "Even if the code was generated using AI, my help in steering towards the right design, implementation choices, and correctness has been vital during the development." You are a master of this, let others see how you cook, not just taste the sauce!

I only say this as it seems one of your motivations is education. I'm also noting it for others to consider. Much appreciation either way, thanks for sharing what you did.
Ask HN: Predictions for New GTLDs in 2026?
by cyode | 2026-01-18 20:28:31+00:00
Applications to ICANN close this summer. "Reveal day", when they announce accepted names, will be later this year.

Apparently, the focus this round will be more localized domains for non-English alphabet extensions, but I'm sure some vanity/trendy names will get selected too.

Any predictions/commentary on what domains will be added?

My predictions:
- .blockchain
- .btc
- .crypto
- .ether (.eth I believe is reserved as Ethiopia's 3-letter code)
- .genai
- .llm
- .model
- .quantum
- .vibe
by Eisenstein | 2026-01-18 20:28:33+00:00
> People don't really care to address that most of the mom and pop businesses that went out of business because Walmart/Amazon weren't offering better products or services.

In a local mom and pop store, the mom and pop owned the store and were invested in the community, Their money was spent back in the same place it came from. They had a personal stake in their reputation and knew the customers, and the customers knew them. This is how a community operates. You are thinking about it as a dry 'products and services' offering, when it is much more than that. You don't live to buy products and services, you live to do other things, and a community fosters that part of your life. The 'spending money to get things you need or want' part is to facilitate the rest of your life, not the other way around.

> They also had much less generous return policies.

Why is this an issue? People who consistently rely on generous return policies are either buying shoddy goods or abusing it at the cost of everyone else. Figure out what you want before you buy it and then it won't be a problem.
by tyre | 2026-01-18 20:28:36+00:00
AGI would be able to exponentially improve at much, much better money making schemes like high frequency trading. It would beat every online business. It would run 24/7/365.26 farming out tens of thousands of conversations at once, customized to the person it's talking to, for sales, supplier negotiations, marketing, press, etc.

Its costs would be frighteningly low compared to human employees, so it's margins could remain fine at lower prices.
by noncoml | 2026-01-18 20:28:40+00:00
This presidency reminds me a lot this speech from Knives Out: Onion Ring:

“ If you want to shake things up, you start with something small. You break a norm or an idea or a convention, some little business model, but you go with things that people are kind of tired of anyway. Everybody gets excited because you're busting up something that everyone wanted broken in the first place. That's the infraction point. That's the place where you have to look within yourself, and ask: Am I the kind of person who will keep going? Will you break more things? Break bigger things? Be willing to break the thing that nobody wants you to break? Because at that point, people are not going to be on your side. They're going to call you crazy. They're gonna say you're a bully. They're gonna tell you to stop. Even your partner will say you need to stop. Because as it turns out, nobody wants you to break the system itself. But that is what true disruption is, and that is what unites all of us. We all got to that line, and crossed it.‘

It’s like the following this recipe to break the system
by kmarc | 2026-01-18 20:29:42+00:00
Just finished it, and while I loved the whole plot, the adventurous expeditions away from the base, somehow this one with the waaay too long paragraphs seemed... Unnecessarily boring?

My first Tchaikovsky was children of time and TBH none of the sequels nor his other space operas were as captivating as that one for me.

Yet, I will read this one too. I believe that his ideas and stories are great in books and would never be able to make them into movies. So unique.
by danabramov | 2026-01-18 20:30:10+00:00
I'm using filesystem more as a metaphor than literally.

I picked this metaphor because "apps" are many-to-many to "file formats". I found "file format" to be a very powerful analogy for lexicons so I kind of built everything else in the explanation around that.

You can read https://atproto.com/specs/repository for more technical details about the repository data structure:

The repository data structure is content-addressed (a Merkle-tree), and every mutation of repository contents (eg, addition, removal, and updates to records) results in a new commit data hash value (CID). Commits are cryptographically signed, with rotatable signing keys, which allows recursive validation of content as a whole or in part. Repositories and their contents are canonically stored in binary DAG-CBOR format, as a graph of data objects referencing each other by content hash (CID Links). Large binary blobs are not stored directly in repositories, though they are referenced by hash (CID).

Re: apps, I'd say AT is actually post-app to some extent because Lexicons aren't 1:1 to apps. You can share Lexicons between apps and I totally can see a future where the boundaries are blurring and it's something closer to what you're describing.
by mindslight | 2026-01-18 20:31:11+00:00
Why wouldn't you place more importance on making sure places don't descend into new autocracy and totalitarianism? From my perspective it's not a trivialization, but rather a legitimate concern about where we're headed. And so far over the past year, these types of concerns have been shown to be entirely correct.

Like sure, it's certainly possible that we will have a domestic US outcome of "mission accomplished" over the next couple years, ICE is drastically wound down and goes back to only being at the border, there is a full accounting of whom they deported and to where, the US citizens who were harmed by their extremely-urgent overzealousness are compensated for their damages, and so on. Just from everything we've seen, it's not very likely.
by nxm | 2026-01-18 20:31:57+00:00
So how did Biden's open borders work out? 11 millions crossing but "there's no crisis". Per NY Times:
"Biden's record found that he and his closest advisers repeatedly rebuffed recommendations that could have addressed the border crisis faster. "

Also, during his two terms in office (2009–2017), the administration of President Barack Obama deported more than 3.1 million people, a higher number of formal removals than any other U.S. president.
by CrulesAll | 2026-01-18 20:32:22+00:00
Illegal immigrants brought in to give the Democrat party a CCP style one party state. Suppressing wages while being granted vast amounts of scarce societal resources. ICE doing their legal job as instructed to them by the democratically elected POTUS. But you classify them as the domestic enemy.

""I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic". by ignoring the orders of the Commander-in-Chief. What a twisted view you have.
by rpiguy | 2026-01-18 20:32:29+00:00
The first shot was through the windshield and the. she turned the wheel and the second two shots were fired through the side window as she was turning away. The officer suffered bruised ribs from the impact of the vehicle.

Your telling of events makes it sound like he walked up to the side of the car and shot her dead for no reason. This is wholly inconsistent with the camera footage and damage to the car.

Please stop trying to inflame with your partial account of events.

Ashley Babbit was shot for breaking a window in a federal building, which is far less of an offense than obstructing an officer and assault with a vehicle.

And Facism starts with civilians who act as enforcers and intimidators, not with the police. Hitler’s brown shirts and Mussolini's black shirts elevated the Facists to power. The SS came afterwords. Antifa is far closer to the brownshirts than any other organization in the US. Power through intimidation and chaos. Facist.
by jrowen | 2026-01-18 20:33:05+00:00
But what if your entire social graph didn't choose to transfer over as well? What if they don't want to be on that app? What if someone that was very indecent made a compatible app? Would you want your entire Twitter history represented on there?

For better or worse, I don't think it makes sense to decentralize social. The network of each platform is inherently imbued with the characteristics and culture of that platform.

And I feel like Twitter is the anomalous poster child for this entire line of thinking. Pour one out, let it go, move on, but I don't think creating generalized standards for social media data is the answer. I don't want 7 competing Twitter-like clones for different political ideologies that all replicate each others' data with different opt-in/opt-out semantics. That sounds like hell.
Show HN: VPNBypass – macOS menu bar app to route domains around your VPN
by geiser | 2026-01-18 20:33:21+00:00
Hey HN,

I built/vibe-coded VPNBypass because I was tired of manually managing routes every time I connected to my VPN. Some services (streaming, banking, local network) need to bypass the VPN—but especially, and the trigger for this whole project: my VPN was blocking my own site, lynxprompt.com. Doing this manually with route add commands is tedious. Some VPNs implement this and call it split-tunneling, but not mine.

VPNBypass sits in your menu bar and automatically detects your VPN connection and gateway, resolves domains to IPs and adds the appropriate routes, refreshes DNS periodically (since IPs change), and updates /etc/hosts for proper DNS resolution. It comes with 50+ pre-configured services (YouTube, Telegram, etc.) and you can add custom domains.

On the technical side: it's built with Swift/SwiftUI as a native macOS app (13+). It uses a privileged helper via SMAppService to avoid repeated sudo prompts. It also detects Tailscale exit nodes automatically, monitors network changes, auto-applies routes on startup and VPN connection, verifies routes... etc.

Would love feedback—especially on services I should add to the default list, edge cases with different VPN setups (OpenVPN, WireGuard, corporate VPNs), or any issues you encounter. I've only tested it with GlobalProtect, so please report if you see any problems with other providers.

GitHub: https://github.com/GeiserX/VPNBypass

License: GPL-3.0

Thank you!
by treetalker | 2026-01-18 20:33:53+00:00
This JavaScript (make a bookmarklet) should open the latest archive.ph snapshot of any page you're on:

```

javascript:window.open('https://archive.ph/newest/'+location.href.split('?')%5B0%5D,...')

```

HN cuts it off. Full line ends "%5B0%5D,'_blank')"
by rolph | 2026-01-18 20:35:00+00:00
regulation of a militia. the apocrypha is that "the people" have uninfringed rights to arms, as a counter to a militia that is conveying tyranny.

i have read, in various places, that the last straw initiating foment of open revolution was when the kings militia began "taking liberties" with the wives and daughters of the colonists. piecemeal resistance, consolidated to a social movement, and the "shot heard around the world" was loosed.
by fatbird | 2026-01-18 20:35:20+00:00
There have been multiple instances of exactly what NRA members decry as federal tyranny: Waco, Ruby Ridge, etc. At not a single one did any number of people exercising their second amendment right ever show up to actually do anything, even to peacefully protest.

The idea that the 2nd amendment exists to keep alive a threat of rebellion against a tyrannical gov't is a joke.
by antod | 2026-01-18 20:36:37+00:00
I wouldn't describe software as most people experience it as more complex.

And civil engineering projects are constantly fixing unforeseen design problems either during construction or afterwards.

I would distinguish the failure modes as different though eg analog vs digital. Real world engineering can absorb an awful lot of minor mistakes through safety factors etc. Failure can be gradual or just a matter of degree or even just interpretation of standards. Software failures are often more digital or only matter when "under attack"
by danabramov | 2026-01-18 20:36:47+00:00
For me, part of it is that we have no power collectively against products turning their back on users because coordination to "export data all at once and then import it into specific other place" is near-impossible. So this creates a perverse cycle where once you capture enough of the market, competition has very little chance unless they change the category entirely.

What AT enables is forking products with their data and users. So, if some product is going down a bad road, a motivated team can fork it with existing content, and you can just start using the new thing while staying interoperable with the old thing. I think this makes the landscape a lot more competitive. I wrote about this in detail in https://overreacted.io/open-social/#closed-social which is another longread but specifically gets into this problem.

I hear you re: not wanting "weird aggregation", that just be a matter of taste. I kind of feel like if I'm posting something on the internet, I might as well have it on the open web as aggregatable by other apps.
by Anon1096 | 2026-01-18 20:36:49+00:00
I'm going to guess that a big reason it doesn't exist is because a. people who claim to be willing to pay 200/mo for it won't actually open their wallets given the opportunity, and b. even for the miniscule number of people actually possible in the market to do so, they moan and groan about any perceived problem with the product to the point that it's not worth trying to capture the market. Just look at the comments in this very thread complaining about YouTube Premium and how it isn't perfect because it can't block creator inserted ads. There's no pleasing people. And that's an order of magnitude less than 200/mo.
by minimaxir | 2026-01-18 20:37:05+00:00
Those statements are mostly out of date and symptomatic of pre-agent-optimized LLMs. Opus 4.5 with clarifying rules in the CLAUDE.md does a good job at following idiomatic best practices in my experience.

That said, I'm mixed on agentic performance for data science work but it does a good job if you clearly give it the information it needs to solve the problem (e.g. for SQL, table schema and example data)
by b65e8bee43c2ed0 | 2026-01-18 20:37:05+00:00
no, no, I didn't mean they were all mine. what I meant was that I could find such examples in any controversial thread I saw, which I could locate from my throwaways' histories.

I said I wouldn't, but here's one such example from a very recent thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46635720. did that very reasonable comment deserve to be [flagged][dead], or did the powerusers use the flag button to simply disagree?
by colechristensen | 2026-01-18 20:37:15+00:00
The politics of fear stoked by two sets of extremists egging eachother on is the core reason we're in this mess, the failure to reject both simultaneously and the desire to rule with feelings instead of facts caused it all.

I'm not a "whatabout" guy, I'm actively opposed to both extremes. The far left is just as capable of ruling with violence as the far right, they just haven't got the opportunity in this country yet.

The politics of emotion and absolutism is the cause, which flavor of extremism you pick isn't the core issue.
by willmarch | 2026-01-18 20:37:24+00:00
You’re misrepresenting what the content policy says (making it appear to favor your position more strongly than it does), as I believe a political article that engages intellectual curiosity should not be flagged according to the spirit of HN (which is subjective, of course, and leaves a lot of room for biased implementations even when someone believes they are not being biased).

It’s not an easy problem to solve and is hard to balance fairly, so I think your painting of the content policy as being crystal clear is a misrepresentation that isn’t properly taking into account the subjectivity of what is viewed as political and what counts as intellectually stimulating to different HN users (as it seems if something is “interesting” then that tends to override the “political” in many instances on the home page, and is entirely subjective).
by lelanthran | 2026-01-18 20:37:44+00:00
> You have no guarantee the API models won’t be tampered with to serve ads. I suspect ads (particularly on those models) will eventually be “native”: the models themselves will be subtly biased to promote advertisers’ interests, in a way that might be hard to distinguish from a genuinely helpful reply.

I admit I don't see how that will happen. What are they gonna do? Maintain a model (LoRA, maybe) for every single advertiser?

When both Pepsi and Coke pay you to advertise, you advertise both. The minute one reduces ad-spend, you need to advertise that less.

This sort of thing is computationally fast currently - ad-space is auctioned off in milliseconds. How will they do introduce ads into the content returned by an LLM while satisfying the ad-spend of the advertiser?
Show HN: Stop manually syncing rules between Claude, Cursor, and Codex
by nanxiaobei | 2026-01-18 20:38:05+00:00
I built AI Global because I was tired of the "configuration fragmentation" in the current AI tool landscape.

Every new AI assistant has its own way of handling context or rules: Claude Code uses CLAUDE.md, Cursor uses .cursorrules, Windsurf uses .windsurfrules, and so on. As I switched between these tools to find the best workflow, I found myself constantly copy-pasting my custom instructions and project rules across multiple hidden files. It was tedious and error-prone.

AI Global solves this by creating a single "Source of Truth" at ~/.ai-global/global.md. It automatically detects 30+ different AI tools and links them to this central configuration.

Key points:

No Fragmentation: Edit once in global.md, and every AI assistant gets updated instantly.
Shared Skills: Beyond just instructions, it allows you to sync shared "skills", "agents", and "rules" directories across all tools.
Pure Bash: No heavy dependencies, just a lightweight script that uses symlinks to keep things fast and transparent.
Safe: It automatically backs up your original configs and supports a clean
unlink
if you want to revert.
I'd love to hear how you manage your AI instructions or if there are any specific tools you'd like to see supported!