MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wat10000 | 2026-01-27 20:14:32+00:00
If by "tools" you mean technology or physical infrastructure, I largely agree.

But I'm talking about political tools. Breaking down the norms about how power is supposed to be wielded. Concentrating more and more power in the executive because Congress would rather be powerless and blameless than have responsibility.

For example, giving the President the power to set tariffs was done with the understanding that the President would use this power wisely in an actual national emergency. That created a political tool. Now we have a deeply unwise President who declared a nonsense national emergency and is playing havoc with trade using this tool. If the tool hadn't been created then I don't think we'd have that problem. I doubt Congress would be willing to pass sweeping emergency powers in an environment where there is no emergency and no need for those powers. And there was never a need for those powers. Tariffs don't need to be enacted so rapidly that they can't wait for Congress to convene and pass a law.

In this case, we've created a political tool giving the President broad power to interfere in a specific private business. It's no surprise if that tool gets abused, and it was completely unnecessary to begin with.

So I'd phrase it as: "Good guys shouldn't make political tools that are far more powerful than they need to be assuming that they'll be used wisely, because bad guys will happily use the full power of those tools."
by CanadianLaw | 2026-01-27 20:14:36+00:00
There doesn't appear to have been any official announcements as of yet. However, I have heard through the grape vine that recently accepted founders with Canadian corps are being asked to re-domicile. You can also see the change by comparing the wayback machine post to the currently available version to see the removal of Canada. Hopefully we get more transparency from YC soon.
by mrandish | 2026-01-27 20:14:38+00:00
Indeed and even today's HDTV specification has elements based on echoes reverberating all the way from decisions made in the 1930s when specifying B&W TV.

The composite and component sampling rates (14.32 MHz and 13.5 MHz) are both based on being 4x a specific existing color carrier sampling rate from analog television. And those two frequencies directly dictated all the odd-seeming horizontal pixel resolutions we find in pre-HD digital video (352, 704, 360, 720 and 768) and even the original PC display resolutions (CGA, VGA, XGA, etc).

For example, the 720 horizontal pixels of DVD and digital satellite broadcasts was tied to the digital component video standard sampling the active picture area of an analog video scanline at 13.5 Mhz to capture the 1440 clock transitions in that waveform. Similarly, 768 (another common horizontal resolution in pre-HD video) is tied to the composite video standard sampling at 14.32 MHz to capture 1536 clock transitions. The history of how these standards were derived is fascinating (https://tech.ebu.ch/docs/techreview/trev_304-rec601_wood.pdf)

VGA's horizontal resolution of 640 is simply from adjusting analog video's rectangular aspect ratio to be square (720 * 0.909 = 640). It's kind of fascinating all these modern digital resolutions can be traced back to decisions made in the 1930s based on which affordable analog components were available, which competing commercial interests prevailed (RCA vs Philco) and the political sensitivities present at the time.
by coffeeaddict1 | 2026-01-27 20:14:50+00:00
> And accountability can still exist? Is the engineer that created or reviewed a Pull Request using Claude Code less accountable then one that used PICO?

The point is that in the human scenario, you can hold the human agents accountable. You cannot do that with AI. Of course, you as the orchestrator of agents will be accountable to someone, but you won't have the benefit of holding your "subordinates" accountable, which is what you do in a human team. IMO, this renders the whole situation vastly different (whether good or bad I'm not sure).
Show HN: Runtime AI safety via a continuous "constraint strain" score
by PapaShack45 | 2026-01-27 20:15:12+00:00
Hi HN — I’ve been working on a small open-source experiment around runtime AI safety.

The idea is to treat AI risk not as a binary “safe/unsafe” state or post-hoc failure analysis, but as accumulated constraint strain over time — similar to how engineers think about mechanical stress.

The project defines a simple, model-agnostic signal (GV) and a lightweight runtime monitor (Sentinel) that classifies risk into bands (green/yellow/red) and suggests interventions (alert, throttle, human review).

This is an early MVP — intentionally minimal — meant to explore whether continuous, quantitative safety signals are useful before failures occur, especially for agents and LLM-based systems in production.

I’d really appreciate feedback, criticism, or pointers to prior art I should study.
Repo: https://github.com/willshacklett/gvai-safety-systems
by bayindirh | 2026-01-27 20:15:15+00:00
Microsoft has a "minimum set of requirements" document about "Designed for Windows" PCs. You can't sell a machine with Windows or tell it's Windows compatible without complying with that checklist.

So, every PC sold to consumers is sanctioned by Microsoft. This list contains Secure Boot and TPM based requirements, too.

If Microsoft decides to eliminate enrollment of user keys and Secure Boot toggle, they can revoke current signing keys for "shims" and force Linux distributions to go full immutable to "sign" their bootloaders so they can boot.
As said above, it's not something Amutable can control, but enable by proxy and by accident.

Look, I work in a datacenter, with a sizeable fleet. Being able to verify that fleet is desirable for some kinds of operations, I understand that. On the other hand, like every double edged sword, this can cut in both ways.

I just want to highlight that, that's all.
by Retric | 2026-01-27 20:15:34+00:00
It’s a separate question not arbitrary. How many PHD’s the government should employ is debatable, but saying we should have fewer such people says nothing about who was let go.

It’s always tempting to say ‘This was a good decision therefore all the consequences are good’ but in the real world good and bad decisions will have both positive and negative consequences. Understanding individual consequences is therefore largely separated from the overall question of should we do X. However in politics nobody wants to admit any issues with what they did so they try and smokescreen secondary effects as universally beneficial/harmful.
by spondyl | 2026-01-27 20:15:56+00:00
This would seem to be inline with the development philosophy for clawdbot. I like the concept but I was put off by the lack of concern around security, specifically for something that interfaces with the internet

> These days I don’t read much code anymore. I watch the stream and sometimes look at key parts, but I gotta be honest - most code I don’t read.

I think it's fine for your own side projects not meant for others but Clawdbot is, to some degree, packaged for others to use it seems.

https://steipete.me/posts/2025/shipping-at-inference-speed
by amalcon | 2026-01-27 20:16:00+00:00
I've always found it interesting that these tech infra companies' stock tends to rise in the immediate aftermath of these outages. My best guess is that people see the effect of the outage and say "Hey, this company I've never heard of sure seems to have a lot of customers!"

To be fair I've benefited from that in the past; this is an observation of my own that doesn't represent the views of any of my current or former employers.
by storystarling | 2026-01-27 20:16:11+00:00
The fine-tuning overhead is definitely a factor, but for smaller shops the hard constraint is usually inference VRAM. Running a 32B model locally or on a rented GPU is surprisingly expensive if you aren't saturating it. Even at 4-bit quantization you are looking at dual 3090s or an A6000 to get decent tokens per second. The $400 training cost is impressive but the hosting bill is what actually kills the margin compared to per-token APIs.
by legitster | 2026-01-27 20:16:26+00:00
It's interesting how quickly the quest for the "Everything AI" has shifted. It's much more efficient to build use-case specific LLMs that can solve a limited set of problems much more deeply than one that tries to do everything well.

I've noticed this already with Claude. Claude is so good at code and technical questions... but frankly it's unimpressive at nearly anything else I have asked it to do. Anthropic would probably be better off putting all of their eggs in that one basket that they are good at.

All the more reason that the quest for AGI is a pipe dream. The future is going to be very divergent AI/LLM applications - each marketed and developed around a specific target audience, and priced respectively according to value.
by yesb | 2026-01-27 20:16:31+00:00
If anyone is curious, as I was, where this misinformation came from: it appears to be a criticism of the Food Compass rating system from Tufts University. The connection to "past administrations" seems to be added by the person I'm replying to. They've also swapped Cheerios with Cheetos.

>On social media, I have seen graphics showing certain breakfast cereals scoring higher than eggs, cheese, or meat. Did Tufts create these graphics?

>No. Food Compass works very well, on average, across thousands of food and beverage products. But, when this number and diversity of products are scored, there are always some exceptions. These graphs were created by others to show these exceptions, rather than to show the overall performance of Food Compass and the many other foods for which Food Compass works well. But, as objective scientists, we accept constructive criticism and are using this to further improve Food Compass. We are working on an updated version now – see our versions page for more information.

https://sites.tufts.edu/foodcompass/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-021-00381-y.epdf
Show HN: Agent Composer – Create your own AI rocket scientist agent
by jayc481 | 2026-01-27 20:16:31+00:00
Hey HN! We launched a thing today, and built a cool demo that I'm excited to share with the community.

This tool creates AI agents easily and can handle some really technically complex work. I whipped up this rocket scientist agent in our tool in 10 minutes. I asked a couple of aerospace engineer friends what they thought, and they found it useful for their real work, which is why I want to share it here. Here's the demo https://demo.contextual.ai/ and an overview https://docs.contextual.ai/examples/rocket_science

Would love to see technical HN folks and their experience with our tool (and whether it would be useful in your work). Happy to go deep on architecture, retrieval strategies, and lessons learned.
by mandevil | 2026-01-27 20:16:47+00:00
But how much of the Australian economy is extraction for the Chinese economy? My brief understanding of the Aussie economy is that a large part of it is iron, hydrocarbons, copper, etc. going abroad, largely going to feed the Chinese economic machine. So economic performance is heavily tied into Chinese performance.

And the median wealth number is another way of saying "house prices are insane" right?
by neom | 2026-01-27 20:17:10+00:00
Yeah or this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26386418

SoundCloud is a weird place, people in entertainment have certain strong incentives. They figured out who I am, figured out all the email addresses I have, jacked the account attached to my SoundCloud, stole my account. I still to this day, don't know how they pwned my email (tfa was on but it didn't trigger suspicious activity it let them login without triggering it, no clue how they got the password either and the password is secure enough that it's too hard to brute force, and it's not in a pwned db). Based on what was in my soundcloud inbox when I got access again, someone paid a fair amount to have this done... and now I have to go change my email again I suppose.
by trhway | 2026-01-27 20:17:13+00:00
So censoring falsehoods is good, and censoring truth is bad, and you're the one who decides which is which, and you like such censorship working your way. And when censorship you'd just liked so much starts to be used against you, you start to whine. Millenia old story of a deal with devil.

And by the way the covid "fact checking" wasn't based on "truth", it was at political request of White House as Zuck later said, and he did later called the FB fact checking a censorship when disbanding it.
by shakna | 2026-01-27 20:17:50+00:00
> We have no evidence of warfare between the species.

Thats not correct.

We have a neanderthal slain by spear, at a time and place where it was only carried by modern humans. [0]

This isn't a singular event. We have a history on injuries consistent with war, on both sides.

Yes, we "sheboinked". We also took women as prizes of war and raped them. As humanity has continued to do for most of their history.

Sure, the story is probably more complex. Some tribes at war, others at trade. Some who intermingle, and others who raged. That's... Just history of a people. That's normal.

But we absolutely have a history of war between the species.

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...
by ActorNightly | 2026-01-27 20:18:14+00:00
>I have to specify because supposedly intelligent people really think that way

It is the right way to think (with caveats).

Basically, no matter which way you put it, people need some form of government (or more abstractly a state that has authority over people with those people having reduced set of freedoms compared to anarchy). Human nature doesn't bode well with long term planning. For example, with unrestricted capitalism, you have a price on human labor hours that doesn't account for the value of human life - i.e as long as someone can do the job, it doesn't matter what their health is at the end of the job as long as they are replaceable, as this is the most optimal in terms of labor spending. So you need people to collectively form an entity with power of enforcement that is agreed upon by everyone, so that the entity can step in and take action.

Therefore, the goal shouldn't be to restrict the entities power. Doing so is essentially very selfish, which is on par with any libertarian/conservative mindset - as history shows, everyone on the right wing who was crying about censorship on social media for social/political issues has no problem when their side censors it, and broadly oversteps in their alloted power, ignoring the law.

The goal should be to determine whether or not the restricted access makes sense given the current status of the country, and the most importantly, ensuring that the state follows the code of law before anything else. I.e on a very broad sense, instead of arguing who is right and who is wrong, argue what is the metric by which you can get the answer, and then codify it as law.

In a lot of cases, censorship makes sense. And as with any rule, there is going to be some cases where its applied and the outcome is worse than if it wasn't applied. That should be acceptable. In the end, friction in the process still means that things are moving forward, but it also prevents much worse effects if things start moving backwards. Removing that friction means you can go backwards very quickly, like US has done.
by vicapow | 2026-01-27 20:18:19+00:00
I could see it seeming likely that because the UI is quite minimalist, but the AI capabilities are very extensive, imo, if you really play with it.

You're right that something like Cursor can work if you're familiar with all the requisite tooling (git, installing cursor, installing latex workshop, knowing how it all works) that most researchers don't want to and really shouldn't have to figure out how to work for their specific workflows.
by codenamev | 2026-01-27 20:18:39+00:00
Kicking off a new year of recordings with a new Ruby AI Podcast episode discussing:

- Ruby's 30-year evolution and the quiet release of Ruby 4
- AI agents vs collaborative workflows
- Productivity gains vs AI-generated "slop"
- Open source incentives in an AI-driven world
- Not hype-heavy, more reflective and practical.

---
Before this episode, we asked a harder question: "Is AI actually real? Or just cosplay?" with Evan Phoenix
https://www.therubyaipodcast.com/2388930/episodes/18457774-r...
by nickff | 2026-01-27 20:19:22+00:00
From the linked Wiki: “Restrictions included residency in segregated quarters, obligation to wear distinctive clothing, public subservience to Muslims, prohibitions against proselytizing and against marrying Muslim women, and limited access to the legal system (the testimony of a Jew did not count if contradicted by that of a Muslim). Dhimmi had to pay a special poll tax (the jizya), which exempted them from military service, and also from payment of the zakat alms tax required of Muslims.”
by giardini | 2026-01-27 20:19:32+00:00
Well, that went south quickly!

Glad to hear a British viewpoint now and then, but of course any problems stateside will be handled by Americans rather than Brits. Unless possibly you have dual citizenship (Brit & USA) perhaps?

FWIW Britain has plenty of history of what you term

"armed goons with "absolute immunity" literally executing people in the streets, after threatening to invade neighbours and allies, appointing shockingly-unqualified loyalists at the very top of national institutions, and generally gutting the rule of law."

You Brits almost have a monopoly (bwahahah!) on tyranny of various forms, having gone through most of them in bloody civil wars yourself. Hardly a model to follow, n'est-ce pa?
by mmooss | 2026-01-27 20:19:38+00:00
> My point was that animals using objects as tools is a different thing than the Oldowan stone tool manufacturing “industry”.

Agreed, though the dividing line is tricky.

(Your prior comment didn't say 95% of that; for example, it doesn't mention animals. Because the parent comments were focused on human ancestors, that's what I thought you were addressing.)
by bayindirh | 2026-01-27 20:19:52+00:00
I'm not trying to make everyone act like I act.

Also, I know. A few of my colleagues run {open, free, dragonfly}BSD as their daily drivers for more than two decades. Also, we have BSD based systems at a couple of places.

However, as a user of almost all mainstream OSes (at the same time, for different reasons), and planning to include OpenBSD to that roster (taking care of a fleet takes time), I'd love to everyone select the correct tool for their applications and don't throw stones at people who doesn't act like them.

Please remember that we all sit in houses made of glass before throwing things to others.

Oh, also please don't make assumptions about people you don't know.
by tsoukase | 2026-01-27 20:19:52+00:00
As an Xfce4 user my priorities for a WM are in diminishing importance:

- speed

- memory consumption

- simplicity to use

- customisability

- if it's X11 or Wayland

If everything above the last remains the same in the Wayland version, I stay, else there is LXDM.
by josephg | 2026-01-27 20:19:59+00:00
> But if they actually spent time trying to learn architecture and how to build stuff well, either by reading books or via good mentorship on the job, then they can often be better than the folks who went to school.

Yeah I just haven’t seen this happen. I’ve seen plenty of people graduate who were pretty useless. But … I think every self taught programmer I’ve worked with had meaningful gaps in their knowledge.

They’d spend a week in JavaScript to save them from 5 minutes with C or bash. Or they’d write incredibly slow code because they didn’t know the appropriate algorithms and data structures. They wouldn’t know how to profile their program to learn where the time is being spent. (Or that that’s even a thing). Some would have terrible intuitions around how the computer actually runs a program, so they can’t guess what would be fast or slow. I’ve seen wild abstractions to work around misunderstandings of the operating system. Hundreds of lines to deal with a case that can’t actually ever happen, or because someone missed the memo on a syscall that solves their exact problem. There’s also hairball nests of code because someone doesn’t know what a state machine is. Or how to factorise their problem in other ways. One guy I worked with thought the react team invented functional programming. Someone else doesn’t understand how you could write programs without OO inheritance. And I’ve seen so many bugs. Months of bugs, that could be prevented with the right design and tests.

I’ve worked with incredibly smart self taught programmers. Some of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with. But the thing about blind spots is you don’t know you have them. You say you’re self taught, and self taught people can be better than people who went to school. In limited domains, yeah. Smart matters a lot. But you don’t know what you don’t know. You don’t know what you missed out on. And you don’t know what problems in the workplace you could have easily solved if you knew how.
by bartread | 2026-01-27 20:20:02+00:00
Define what you mean by uncharted territory?

- I've never used a new language or framework before? Nope

- I've never used both a new language and a new framework at the same time? Nope

- I've never tried to do real work in a new language and new framework that I'm not particularly familiar with? Nope

- I've never shipped work I've done in a new langauge and new framework that I'm not particularly familiar with? Nope

What specifically do you think is so magic about Ruby and/or Rails that you think I won't have encountered something similar in some other form - in some other language or framework - before?

And do you not think that the reviewing and changes that I am making to the code, the prompting I'm doing, the decisions I'm making about which changes to integrate and which to ignore, etc., as a human being, count as feedback?

At the end of the day I'm building a web app, and soon enough an API, and the concerns in building this web app and API are exactly the same as the concerns I've had in building other web apps and APIs.

The only difference is the language and the framework, and I've learned new languages and frameworks before. And, although I'm using an LLM to help, I've been doing that for the past 3 years using different stacks and the only notable difference is that LLMs are quite a lot better at helping to develop software than they were 3 years ago.

So how is this uncharted territory?

---

And, as an aside, not an issue you've raised but one I commonly see on HN: people moaning about job ads demanding X years of experience in this or that framework or language (with the parody being that the desired framework or language has only existed for X years, or maybe not even that long), and how this isn't really relevant to whether an experienced software engineer can do the advertised job or not. I happen to agree with that perspective but here's the thing: you can't have it both ways. Either that's true or it's not true, and I'm operating (as I have done before and as you can probably tell) on the basis that it is true.
by epistasis | 2026-01-27 20:20:12+00:00
This is worth saying to protect those who are currently doing good things, but at risk of losing their job or funding if they say something.

Those who have nothing to lose: post away, please. Those most affected by this are the least able to speak up.

Freedom of speech rarely protected people's jobs, even in the best of times, but we are in the very worst of times right now for free speech.