MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Jgoauh | 2026-01-22 14:06:32+00:00
* Anthropic accepted a 200M contract from the US Department of Defence
* Anthropic seeked contracts from the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, the leaked memo acknowledges that the contracts will enrich dictators
* Anthropic spent more than 2 millions of political lobying in 2025
* "Unfortunately, I think ‘No bad person should ever benefit from our success’ is a pretty difficult principle to run a business on."

I don't see how this new constitution is anything more than marketing, when "enriching dictators is better than going out of business" is your CEO's motto, "lets to the lest evil thing that sill gives us more power and money" is not new, and its not gonna fix anything. When the economic system is fucked, only a reimagining of the system can fix it. Good intentions cannot meaningfully change anything when comming from actors that operate from within the fucked system, and who pay millions to fuck it further

https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary...
https://www.lobbyfacts.eu/datacard/anthropic-pbc?rid=5112273...
by traceroute66 | 2026-01-22 14:06:46+00:00
> the fact that chlorination is needed

Indeed.

High levels of bacteria are a symptom of poor hygiene and low animal welfare due to conditions which are not permitted in European farms.

If you know the chicken is going to be chlorine washed, then you end up being lax higher up the chain.

There is also a genuine argument to be had as to, for example, whether the practice contributes towards antimicrobial resistance.
by bborud | 2026-01-22 14:06:47+00:00
I would encourage people who have never designed physical objects before to try to only print things they have designed themselves as an exercise. For perhaps a year or so.

If you have never designed physical objects before it is really challenging at first. The learning curve is pretty steep and, at least in my case, I discovered that I didn't have a mental language for thinking about functional 3D and mechanical design. You also start to look more closely at the objects around you and think about what went into designing them.

I started doing 3D design about a decade ago, when I got my first 3D printer. At first using free modeling in CAD and then later learning how to do constraint based and parametric designs in Fusion 360. This felt slow and perhaps limiting at first, but when you get used to it, it will save you a lot of time later and allow you to make more useful designs that are much easier to evolve and vary.

I think it took something like 4-5 years before I printed something someone else had designed. Mostly because I used 3D printing to make custom parts for my own projects, but also in an effort to force myself to learn. I know the learning curve was steep, but for some reason I have forgotten how much work it was to learn.

Now there are so many useful designs, designed by people who are a lot better than me available everywhere that I do print a lot of things others have designed. But I think learning to design things yourself is a really good opportunity to learn useful skills.

For instance, I had never anticipated that I, a software engineer, would get paid, by an actual customer, to design parts for their projects. Or even consult on physical design for someone doing product development. I am by no means at the level where I'd put it front and center on a resume, but I can design, and to some degree, manufacture simple mechanical parts.

(Along with 3D printing I've been doing some CNC at a very hobbyist level. I would still say I am very much a beginner when it comes to machining metals, but it is really fun to see that you can make reasonably precise metal parts for real applications (car parts) at home in my garage with not that much effort. This weekend I'll be doing thread milling in aluminum for the first time on a part that requires M3 screws)
by wolvoleo | 2026-01-22 14:07:01+00:00
No, but I have noticed that somehow it's hard for them to say "no". This is impolite apparently. So you ask: "Can you do this before friday" and they say yes and then don't do it at all. Which of course is a lot less polite and causes a lot of friction.

However this was a thing 10-15 years ago. Lately I've not seen that.
by davidee | 2026-01-22 14:07:02+00:00
I'm partial to Scala. It's the first language I've tried to start to master. I have fallen in love with a number of libraries that dramatically expedite the kinds of projects I work on (mostly the work of Typelevel).

For whatever reason, the FP-first approach it allows me to use, matches how I like to think about problems. For comprehensions for handling complex types, easily, feel like a superpower.

When I started (and I started out of necessity, inheriting a number of old Scala 2/Play 2.x codebases), it felt like a big mistake. Weeks of banging my head around abstractions I didn't yet understand, or immutability-first approaches that were different from my (limited) python experience had me terrified. It eventually clicked. For my first year, I committed to write some Scala every single day; it was worth it.

Though to be fair, two years with the language versus ten is a big difference, so I very well could be completely wrong here. It's just like, my opinion, man.

Would I enjoy writing any language after putting in a lot of dedicated seat time? I don't know. I certainly didn't fall in love with Python the same way - but I'm willing to admit I could be doing it wrong.

That said, a number of the concerns in the post are valid. There's some spread between Scala2 and Scala3, related libraries, tooling, and a few surprising gotchas. Testing frameworks are bit fragmented with Scala2 and 3 support. However, I've not found it nearly as horrible and the joy of being able to work with what is working has outweighed the occasional "WTF" cost (often measured in "time wasted" lol).

I can't speak to the IDE issues the author is noting, I don't use IntelliJ. I've found Metals + Neovim to be truly wonderful on the whole, and it's pushed me to be even more aware of the underlying tooling I'm using.

Scala's 3 enums, opaque types (and now named tuples) are just a few changes that have made Scala 3 pretty wonderful to work with. It doesn't seem to me like Scala3's release is a failure. The real word is messier than a well-written function. ;)

One thing I've found, not at all mentioned in the article, is how welcoming the Scala community is, whether by necessity or virtue (why not both?). They're open to accepting help, willing to mentor/teach, engage in reasonably thoughtful discussion (from my experience), and seem to be willing to support each other.

Scala also pushed me to start learning Rust. Some of their shared heritage and style made it an interesting target for my desire to learn a language for a few embedded systems projects I'm working on.

So is it a dying language? I don't know if I really care. I'm incredibly grateful it exists.

PS - ScalaJS is both fun and cool. I love that someone wanted to make this a reality.
by Kerrick | 2026-01-22 14:07:11+00:00
Thank you very much. I am not proud of the AI slop code [0] it took to get RDoc to generate the HTML for those pages, but I am proud of the result!

[0]: https://git.sr.ht/~kerrick/ratatui_ruby/tree/stable/item/tas...

[1]: https://www.ratatui-ruby.dev/docs/v1.0/examples/app_color_pi...
by arnorhs | 2026-01-22 14:07:14+00:00
Yes I agree, and the replies don't really make it any more clear.

The biggest differentiator of design thinking is really addressing the XY problem. In 95% of cases clients will come to you to design their solution. Ie they already think they have a solution to their problem and now they want it to look good.

Design thinking is basically more like root cause analysis, or the 5 why's.. and an emphasis on taking to end users (the people with the problem) without having a solution.

Once you understand the problem more fundamentally is only when you start cooking up with a solution.

And the result of that process might not even be a traditional design, but perhaps just a tweak to something, like moving your onboarding to later in the ca process..

In practice however.. 95% of designers who say they practice design thinking disregard this, and just want to design wherever the client asks for
by wtcactus | 2026-01-22 14:08:03+00:00
I call this take pseudo-intellectual indulgence form, so called, academic intelectuais.

Lord of the Rings is very much English Literature, and the biggest epic form the 20th century and has none of that. Ditto for Harry Poter (I’m not saying Harry Potter is on the same level of literary grandeur as LOTR, but it’s still an important epic series for newer generations).

You can always find examples for one side or the other of the argument. But, of course, only “social” scientists would be tick enough to claim some clear divide here as it suits their argument.
by lowdanie | 2026-01-22 14:08:17+00:00
The short answer is yes, but either memory (if the electron integrals are cached) or runtime (if they are not cached) currently scales like O(n^4) where n is the number of atoms.

In cached mode, it can currently jit compile the graph for molecules of around 10 atoms in ~5 minutes on one T4 gpu. Once the graph is compiled, the actual geometry optimization only takes a few seconds.

I’m working on optimizations that improve the scaling behavior (such as density fitting) with the goal of achieving similar or even better performance for molecules with ~50 atoms.
by gruez | 2026-01-22 14:08:31+00:00
>Same reps, same meetings every years, nothing happens. Farmer seemed to have all the pieces except the idea that he might want to vote for someone else ...

I get it's funny to dunk on dumb Republican farmers voting for the same party for over and over again, and not getting what they want, but it's hardly a farmer or Republican issue. How is this any different than say, Democratic voters who want medicare for all (or whatever) and not getting that for decades?
by 3D30497420 | 2026-01-22 14:08:47+00:00
> If you needed 8 hour overlap you were micromanaging?

...ok. I didn't need 8 hours of overlap.

As I mentioned in my first comment, I've also now done US/EU and EU/IN. Both of which have only partial overlap and things have gone well.

With US West Coast and India, I was often doing meetings at 7AM and my devs were doing meetings at 9 or 10PM. That was challenging, irrespective of any cultural differences.
by gsck | 2026-01-22 14:09:07+00:00
We have some basic endpoint security (Huntress) and DNS filtering (Was Cisco OpenDNS, something else now but not a clue what it is as I never installed the client).

We used to have local admin accounts as our normal logins, but we changed that for Cyber Essentials Plus, so now we have our normal logins and then our elevated name_admin accounts to do anything thats needed.

Not really bothered by any of that, but what I do care about is we recently put a new GPO that locks the background to the company approved branded one, that upset me a touch I liked my background. Now I have this garish purple and orange background :(
by conductr | 2026-01-22 14:09:10+00:00
> Make it clear you are approachable and that asking questions is expected. For the first few weeks, work closely with them in the style you want them to follow.. they usually adapt very fast once they feel safe to do so.

Very true. I’ve hired (super cheap) engineering talent and this is the key to getting a project to run the way a westerner expects; where everyone is constantly open to challenging each other, where everyone can bring ideas to the table, and where there’s no such thing as a stupid question. I’ve done this during a big phase of time others locally shunning this huge talent pool as the results were crappy/unpredictable. Even to the point they’ll hire local for 100x the cost. It’s just a management problem though and a pretty simple one at that. The other thing is if you train them in your style, keep using them on the next project if you can. It compounds if you have the ability to work with them over a longer time. You have to be very insistent that you’re not proposing the best solution at expect them as engineers to point out any opportunities for improvement. If something later has to be rebuilt or isn’t working well, sometimes it’s good (if it makes sense, case by case) to do a post mortem and understand why the version 2 wasn’t built during the version 1. I think that helps them really understand it in a concrete way if they’re struggling with it.

In any case, I’d much rather take a budget for 1 local dev and spend it on a whole team of Indians and take on the management burden if it means retaining more equity or profits or building something I otherwise wouldn’t do myself due to scale.
Show HN: I've been using AI to analyze every supplement on the market
by lilouartz | 2026-01-22 14:09:29+00:00
Hey HN!

This has been my project for a few years now.

I recently brought it back to life after taking a pause to focus on my studies.

My goal with this project is to separate fluff from science when shopping for supplements.

I am doing this in 3 steps:

1.) I index every supplement on the market (extract each ingredient, normalize by quantity)

2.) I index every research paper on supplementation (rank
every claim by effect type and effect size)

3.) I link data between supplements and research papers

Earlier last year, I took pause on a project because I've ran into a few issues:

Legal: Shady companies are sending C&Ds letters demanding their products are taken down from the website. It is not something I had the mental capacity to respond to while also going through my studies. Not coincidentally, these are usually brands with big marketing budgets and poor ingredients to price ratio.

Technical: I started this project when the first LLMs came out. I've built extensive internal evals to understand how LLMs are performing. The hallucinations at the time were simply too frequent to passthrough this data to visitors. However, I recently re-ran my evals with Opus 4.5 and was very impressed. I am running out of scenarios that I can think/find where LLMs are bad at interpreting data.

Business: I still haven't figured out how to monetize it or even who the target customer is.

Despite these challenges, I decided to restart my journey.

My mission is to bring transparency (science and price) to the supplement market. My goal is NOT to increase the use of supplements, but rather to help consumers make informed decisions. Often times, supplementation is not necessary or there are natural ways to supplement (that's my focus this quarter – better education about natural supplementation).

Some things that are helping my cause – Bryan Johnson's journey has drawn a lot more attention to healthy supplementation (blueprint). Thanks to Bryan's efforts, I had so many people in recent months reach out to ask about the state of the project – interest I've not had before.

I am excited to restart this journey and to share it with HN. Your comments on how to approach this would be massively appreciated.

Some key areas of the website:

* Example of navigating supplements by ingredient https://pillser.com/search?q=%22Vitamin+D%22&s=jho4espsuc

* Example of research paper analyzed using AI https://pillser.com/research-papers/effect-of-lactobacillus-...

* Example of looking for very specific strains or ingredients https://pillser.com/probiotics/bifidobacterium-bifidum

* Example of navigating research by health-outcomes https://pillser.com/health-outcomes/improved-intestinal-barr...

* Example of product listing https://pillser.com/supplements/pb-8-probiotic-663
by grantmuller | 2026-01-22 14:09:30+00:00
> Using some formula or fixed law to compute what's good is a dead end.

Who said anything about a formula? It all seems conceptual and continually evolving to me. Morality evolves just like a species, and not by any formula other than "this still seems to work to keep us in the game"

> Unless it's helps allocate more resources to those more fit to help better survival, right?;)

Go read a book about the way people behave after a shipwreck and ask if anyone was "morally wrong" there.

> By your logic there's no reason to feel morally bad about it.

And yet we mostly do feel bad about it, and we seem to be the only species who does. So perhaps we have already discovered that lack of empathy for other species is species self-limiting, and built it into our own psyches.
by JanneVee | 2026-01-22 14:09:38+00:00
They have made huge investments into hardware so everyone is getting more expensive hardware, and now begging everyone else to make their investments worthwhile. Don't mind that they are driving up prices for hardware and requiring new hardware for Windows 11 upgrades. I'm suspecting that we don't have enough memory manufacturing capacity in the world to do both AI datacenters and replace all hardware that they made obsolete with their forced upgrade. AI didn't turn everyone into paperclips but it turned everyone to memory and AI processors in datacenters that can't be powered or has no useful economic utility.
by traceroute66 | 2026-01-22 14:09:48+00:00
> look down on inferior products

I object to the use of "look down on" in this context.

The products listed are inferior products, end of.

"Look down" suggests an expression of contempt. But there is no contempt to be had here, it is a simple fact.

> bad farming practices would lead to very affordable food, then one could make an argument for it.

I ... just... I ....have no words for what I just read there.

Its affordable so its ok .... really ? SERIOUSLY ?
by adrianmsmith | 2026-01-22 14:10:40+00:00
> Can anyone recommend a music discovery service that isn't garbage?

I enjoy using last.fm, although it's not their focus these days. Sign up, connect it to Spotify or whatever you use (incl. a long list of players of local music), after a day or so it'll learn what you like and you can create playlists with suggestions and export them, or browser around recommended artists etc.
by jerf | 2026-01-22 14:10:55+00:00
My local karate school used them in the COVID era to build an app for practicing at home. I've used it off and on, though the occasional oblique reference to COVID is a bit amusing sometimes. Never mentioned by name but there's an occasional reference to "as we're stuck at home" and such. They use Vimeo to whitelabel the service.

Whatever they're paying for it, it is too much. Video availability drops in and out. Sometimes the video works. Sometimes it doesn't work at all and gives a weird error. Sometimes it doesn't work and it claims that it "can't guarantee the security of my connection", even though other videos work fine. Sometimes videos that didn't work yesterday work today. I've been tempted to go to their app developer and try to show them how to just host it themselves in S3 or something, which would probably still be much cheaper than what Vimeo is charging. The Vimeo player embedded into the app is extremely minimalistic, for instance, it can't cast to anything, which is a pretty useful feature for something you don't want to be staring at your phone for.

I found I can Favorite a video, which then makes me log in to a Vimeo account, then it adds it as a Favorite to my Vimeo account despite being private, and then I can view it through the Vimeo app proper, although that also seems to have lost the ability to cast to anything in my house lately. Casting is a clusterfuck of its own with the mismatched capabilities matrix of what can cast to what under what circumstances anyhow, but Vimeo seems distinctly behind on that front. It's honestly significantly worse now than the default video player a browser offers at this point.

But it was probably relatively easy for them to set it up ~5 years ago, before Vimeo collapsed.
by bborud | 2026-01-22 14:11:11+00:00
I tried this with some longer gridfinity boxes and the result was a bit meh. You have to glue them, but even then they aren't as solid as I'd like. But I only have a handful of boxes that needed to be long so it doesn't matter.

One thing I've started playing with now are gridfinity cases so I can pick a bunch of part boxes out of my drawers, put them in the case and take them to the garage without risk of everything falling out. Then, when I'm done, they go back in the drawer.
Show HN: Mother May I? – Auto-approve safe Bash commands in Claude Code
by dgerlanc | 2026-01-22 14:11:16+00:00
Hi HN,

I built MMI (Mother May I?) with Claude Code to solve an annoying friction point: manually approving every single Bash command.

The Problem

Claude Code asks for permission before running any shell command. This is sensible from a security standpoint, but it means you're constantly hitting "approve" for commands like git status, pytest, or ls -la. It breaks flow and adds friction to every development session.

The Solution

MMI is a CLI hook that auto-approves known-safe commands while maintaining a fail-secure default. Unrecognized commands still require manual approval.

How it works:

1. Deny list checked first – Dangerous patterns (sudo, rm -rf /, chmod 777) are always rejected

2. Safe commands allowlisted – Read-only commands, test runners, linters, and build tools you configure

3. Proper shell parsing – Uses an AST-based parser (mvdan.cc/sh) to correctly handle pipes, chains, and quoted strings

4. Audit trail – Every decision logged to JSON-lines for debugging and compliance

Key design decisions:

- Fail-secure: Unknown commands require manual approval

- Command chains validated: "safe && dangerous" is rejected (ALL segments must be safe)

- Wrapper-aware: Strips timeout, env, .venv/bin/ before validation

- Heredoc-smart: Backticks inside quoted heredocs treated as literal text

Example config (TOML):

```
[safe]
simple = ["ls", "pwd", "cat", "head", "tail"]
subcommands.git = ["status", "log", "diff", "add", "commit", "push"]
subcommands.cargo = ["build", "test", "check", "clippy"]

[deny]
simple = ["sudo", "su", "doas"]
regex = ["rm\\s+(-[^\\s]*)?.*\\s+/($|\\s)"]

```

A note on security

Claude Code recently added built-in sandbox mode that restricts file system writes and network access. This is a great step toward secure defaults. However, MMI still provides value even with sandboxing:

- Audit trail – Every command decision logged for review and compliance

- Explicit allowlists – Know exactly what's approved rather than relying on implicit sandbox rules

- Deny patterns – Block specific dangerous patterns before they hit the sandbox

- Reduced interruptions – Sandbox mode can still prompt; MMI auto-approves known-safe commands

No allowlist can anticipate every attack vector. MMI is a convenience layer that reduces friction for common safe commands while maintaining defense-in-depth – it works alongside sandboxing, not as a replacement.

Why not just approve everything?

That defeats the purpose of Claude Code's permission system. MMI lets you define exactly which commands you trust, keeps a complete audit trail, and defaults to asking when uncertain.

The repo includes example configs for Python, Node, Rust, and a strict read-only mode.

GitHub: https://github.com/dgerlanc/mmi

Blog post with more details: https://dangerlanc.com/writing/mmi/
by RNanoware | 2026-01-22 14:11:26+00:00
Although I have very little experience with British humor, I find it interesting to compare British fiction I read as a child/teenager that became popular hits in the US (Harry Potter, Alex Rider). From this article's perspective, those protagonists are the epitome of American heroes (autonomy, mastery, purpose). No wonder they garnered such acclaim in the US. Curious if these stories are the exception rather than the rule in British YA fiction? Is the comparison unfair, since these stories were not written with the comedic genre in mind?