MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by miki123211 | 2026-01-21 14:59:38+00:00
Unpopular opinion. SIM locking is actually good.

If a carrier cannot trust you (especially due to bad credit history), they can't sell you the phone you want if you don't pay outright, and many people aren't able to do that. SIM locks are basically "repossessions but for phones." Nobody argues in good faith that banks shouldn't be allowed to evict you if you don't pay your mortgage, and that's effectively what a "no SIM locks" policy does for phones.

To make things even worse, it's far too easy for fraudsters to buy a phone using a stolen identity, never pay a single installment, and instantly sell it on the second-hand market. For SIM-locked phones, the carrier can brick the phone until it is fully paid of, so that kind of fraud is not possible.

Sim locks do enable some abuse, particularly around roaming fees, as you're not allowed to swap your SIM when leaving the country. However, They're a blunt tool unsuited to the 21st century internet-enabled smartphones. One could imagine a mechanism where the carrier is still allowed to brick the phone in case of fraud, but there's no actual SIM lock.
by srijith259 | 2026-01-21 14:59:44+00:00
I understand that everyone is disillusioned with current institutions. But I don't understand the prevailing sentiment here that it's therefore okay for them to fail. For one, there will never be perfect institutions. One would think we would create technology to complement and improve them. Instead, recent technological trends seem to have done the opposite.

At the very least, this should make us reconsider what we are building and the incentives behind it.
by aboardRat4 | 2026-01-21 14:59:50+00:00
>This is a terrible argument. First, NAT doesn't provide the security behavior users want.

Try breaking into my machine. Login:pass are administrator:pa$$w0rd, external ip 58.19.1.129, internal ip is 192.168.1.124, the system is Windows xp, and firewall is turned off on both the computer and the box the ISP gave me.
by yndoendo | 2026-01-21 15:00:23+00:00
There almost needs to be an community overlay for app Stores to highlight when applications change ownership. A shadow store might be good too. Those active daily on HN will most likely be informed while the general populous will never be.

I don't see Google or Apple stepping in to share the information directly or improving their stores with the dark patterns they keep deploying to gain profits through disingenuous actions.

Does Amazon still maintain the flaw where old reviews apply to new products when the new product uses the same part / ID number so reviews are not even for the products people are purchasing?
Show HN: An open source "Cursor for Google Sheets" with conversation memory
by tuantruong | 2026-01-21 15:00:27+00:00
Hey HN ,

I’ve just pivoted *AISheeter* from a simple formula generator into a full AI Agent. Last year, it was just auto-complete; recently, with the help of Claude Opus, I rewrote it to handle multi-step workflows. Think of it as *Cursor, but for spreadsheets.*

The problem that I often faces: Most existing tools (including Gemini in Sheets) treat every query as an isolated, one-off task. If you want to run complex operations on data, you have to manually prompt every single step. It’s tedious and stateless.

This app, the solution : it is an agent that persists context per spreadsheet with multiple sheets. It allows for chained workflow. I.e. (e.g., "Analyze raw data → Extract signals → Score priority") where the AI remembers the output of step 1 when performing step 2.

*The Stack:*

- *Frontend/Backend:* Next.js 16, Vercel AI SDK

- *Database:* Supabase (for context persistence)

- *Integration:* Google Apps Script

- *Models:* BYOK (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Groq)

*The Challenge:* The hardest part was managing the conversation memory without blowing up token costs. We implemented a system that maps conversation threads to specific Spreadsheet IDs, allowing the agent to "recall" previous context without needing to re-ingest the entire sheet history for every request.

*The Good Finding:* I do a lot of context engineering in the backend to handle tokens carefully. I actually found that smaller models like *gpt-5-mini* and *Claude Haiku* can actually handle this level of complexity surprisingly well if the context is structured correctly.

Link to repo: https://github.com/Ai-Quill/ai-sheeter

Download extension : https://aisheeter.com/

I’d love feedback on the architecture—specifically how we’re handling the context window management.

Thanks
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2026-01-21 15:00:34+00:00
I just threw this prompt at Gemini, and it seems (I haven't analyzed the problem to see if it is correct), to be able to extract a clear understanding of the problem, and a specification for the kernel.

"Can you "reverse engineer" what the kernel in this optimization exercise is actually doing - write a specification for it?

https://github.com/anthropics/original_performance_takehome"

Gemini says it's doing inference on a random forest - taking a batch of inputs, running each one through each decision tree, and for each input outputting the sum of these decision tree outputs - the accumulated evidence.
by jackyinger | 2026-01-21 15:00:42+00:00
What if there was a way for the “silent majority” (or something like it) to discuss political issues free of the impetus to polarization? Surely that would be a lot better than echo chambers.

Hackernews style apoliticism strikes me as wanting to chameleon to whatever side is perceived as winning the political game. I think it’s a nihilistic stance.

We need to be able to be political without the zealotry. Politics, of all things, is not a zero sum game.
by azangru | 2026-01-21 15:00:50+00:00
> for sure, I feel like people don't care whether you used an AI to write your code as long as it works

Oh, some do; for sure they do. Some put a "no ai" badge on their sites; others add disclaimers to their repos that ai has been used to write the code. But I agree with you about the productivity/output. Developers who refrain from using AI are probably more interested in the very process of coding than in the output of that process. They pride themselves on their craft and craftsmanship.
by hermannj314 | 2026-01-21 15:00:58+00:00
From an article in 2021 regarding Lyft, 38% of sexual assault is passengers assaulting drivers. [1]

Rep. Dingell says, "There is no trade-off that should be acceptable to Uber, considering the devastating impact of sexual assault"

But apparently there is a trade-off for her, seeing as she only wants to focus on one direction of this crime by fingerprints and background checks for drivers and no safeguards protecting drivers. Seems she has chosen to ignore 38% of sexual assaults as well. I wonder why her trade-off is morally superior?

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-59008000
by Folcon | 2026-01-21 15:00:59+00:00
I am thank you, however the reason I'm engaging here is that what's being asked for from what I can see is a very different experience to screeps, for example screeps is top down much more programmer designed and has specific affordances and design to create the automated experience via being a developer

The reason I'm comparing it to factorio is because that game though still top down is designed specifically with a player in mind automating their labor and then slowly taking on a complex logistics game as they go and doing so fully in the game, the play is in laying out structures within the game

Satisfactory for example has different choices that lead to different gameplay as it's first person 3d, the play is in setting up and managing logistical structures and hitting production targets

That is interesting, however for my tastes both of these are a little too static an experience for what I want to build

I'm still working out the details of what I'm putting together, but I have a decent high level idea of what my goals are =)

What I want to know is, if people play this kind of game, what are they looking for / wanting?

What's a good "MVP" or minimal gameloop that would feel satisfying?

I want to quickly work out if I can serve either the gameplay desire or the gameplay fantasy or if it is just too hard to provide a fun experience for this kind of play in which case I should table this and focus on what I'm currently doing

However I'm still engaging with this because I would like to create a fun playspace here I just don't know what other programmers would want especially in the context of what the GP was asking, which is a mix of manual intervention and programming / automation
by 0x3f | 2026-01-21 15:01:02+00:00
I'm more concerned that Uber gets to farm fingerprints, than drivers are 'forced' to accept it, I suppose. Although I can't identify a clear harm or form of exploitation that would arise from Uber collecting prints, I wouldn't put it past them. Maybe a better middle ground is the licensure part of the government does the fingerprinting. Although not all cities regulate Uber in this way.
by ofabioroma | 2026-01-21 15:01:09+00:00
Great question. They solve different problems.

Vector DBs are great for retrieval: "find relevant chunks to add to the prompt." But they're not designed for state management. When you update a message, there's no version history. When something breaks, you can't rewind to see exactly what the agent saw.

UltraContext manages the structured context (conversation history, tool calls, system prompts) with git semantics. Fork, rewind, merge. You can't git revert a vector embedding.

They're complementary. You'd use a vector DB to decide what goes in the context, and UltraContext to manage what's already there.
by RobinL | 2026-01-21 15:01:14+00:00
> saw absolutely zero value in it

At the very least, it can quickly build throwaway productivity enhancing tools.

Some examples from building a small education game:
- I needed to record sound clips for a game. I vibe coded a webapp in <15 mins that had a record button, keyboard shortcuts to progress though the list of clips i needed, and outputted all the audio for over 100 separate files in the folder structure and with the file names i needed, and wrote the ffmpeg script to post process the files

- I needed json files for the path of each letter. gemini 3 converted images to json and then codex built me an interactive editor to tidy up the bits gemini go wrong by hand

The quality of the code didn't matter because all i needed was the outputs.

The final games can be found:
https://www.robinlinacre.com/letter_constellations
https://www.robinlinacre.com/bee_letters/
code: https://github.com/robinL/
by animuchan | 2026-01-21 15:01:31+00:00
The comment that started this thread is as follows:

> Too bad the Zen of Reticulum is against freedom. Specifically freedom 0: the freedom to use the software for any purpose. Its restrictions preventing it "from being used in systems designed to harm humans" [...]

So if you're a lawful good human-harming person, you are prohibited from using Reticulum by this Zen document.

If, however, you're an unlawful kind of human-harming person, then you likely don't feel the pressure from the Zen document to stop using Reticulum.

(And surely you can't flip the logic like you did right there: "engineers are implicitly allowed to use X" doesn't convert to "users of X are implicitly engineers".)

So no, I'm saying that of all users intending to cause humans harm with this tech, only criminals are permitted (or at least, aren't meaningfully restricted) to use Reticulum. Only in this niche case.
by eth0up | 2026-01-21 15:01:37+00:00
It's a newer Lenovo vpro, not because I wanted that, but because it's what I got. It came with 16g of reputable ram, then I added 8g ~1 year ago for $20, the exact same module which is now $120. Orher than a bad ram chip, what else would be the culprit?
by xnorswap | 2026-01-21 15:01:40+00:00
People put value in effort for efforts' sake.

An example is there's a split in the woodworking community between people who use power tools and those who use hand-tools only. The latter often seeing it as more pure.

Those same power-tools users might in turn look down on something made entirely with a CNC machine.

The end result might be the same table. Indeed, the pure uniform lines from a CNC machine might be what both the others strive towards, but they're unlikely to regard the CNC output as being in better taste.

The effort and craft itself is well regarded and valued, even if it is hard to capture in the final output. Even if the signs of hand-crafting are fewer the higher the quality craft!
by codazoda | 2026-01-21 15:02:00+00:00
I might be able to use this, especially in LLMs where I ask them to give me things in code fences all the time. If I ask for markdown in a code fence, it all falls apart. If, however, I asked for markdown in a ~~~ code fence, or even ~~~~~, all would be right with the world, since they typically use ```.
by WarmWash | 2026-01-21 15:02:56+00:00
The EU has a borderline stagnant economy, couldn't defend itself from Russia, facing population collapse, totally whiffed on the tech scene explosion in the last 25 years, now also missing out on AI. European social obligations are expensive, yet nobody seems to really want to stress about creating new sources of wealth.

At some point Europeans need to look in the mirror, and understand that the last 30 years has been a vacation, and even worse, there is now a whole generation who was born on vacation and thinks it's the norm.
by bondarchuk | 2026-01-21 15:02:59+00:00
I think it's weird to call an aspect of mental functioning a pathology simply because it's not the majority, regardless of any impairment in normal functioning. Depending on how you slice definitions many many things are in the minority.

Those studies, well, I'd have to see them. There's the risk that people for whom (e.g.) memory is accompanied by imagery automatically assume that imagery is required for memory. Vague correlations with social functioning can be drawn for nearly anything.

Regarding dementia: obviously the disappearance of imagery in someone who used to have it is very different from someone who never had it.
by gruez | 2026-01-21 15:03:04+00:00
>>The only way I’ve found to contact a human when a ride goes awry is to basically say an accident happened. That connects you with humans who can actually, sometimes, address your problem in a way the chatbot never can.

>The best way to reduce your incident count is by not collecting incident data.

The guy you're replying to is actually claiming the opposite, ie. that rude drivers complaints are getting upgraded to "accident" or "driver was threatening" complaints to get past the chatbot, and Uber is actually safer than their statistics claim.
by Insanity | 2026-01-21 15:03:17+00:00
I have a really simple app that I asked various models to build, but it requires interacting with an existing website.

(“Scrape kindle highlights from the kindle webpage, store it in a database, and serve it daily through an email digest”).

No success so far in getting it to do so without a lot of handholding and manually updating the web scraping logic.

It’s become something of a litmus test for me.

So, maybe there is some FOMO but in my experience it’s a lot of snake oil. Also at work, I manage a team of engineers and like 2 out of 12 clearly submit AI generated code. Others stopped using it, or just do a lot more wrangling of the output.
by tonyww | 2026-01-21 15:03:20+00:00
One clarification since a few comments from coworkers/friends are circling this: Amazon isn’t the point here.

We used it because it’s a dynamic, hostile UI, but the design goal is a site-agnostic control plane. That’s why the runtime avoids selectors and screenshots and instead operates on pruned semantic snapshots + verification gates.

If the layout changes, the system doesn’t “half-work” — it fails deterministically with artifacts. That’s the behavior we’re optimizing for.
by 0x3f | 2026-01-21 15:03:43+00:00
I mean vulnerable in the sense that fungible labor is vulnerable to the whims of the employer. In this case it might be for a good cause but in general the more leverage you give Uber over its employees, presumably the worse. Whether they have a higher propensity for crime, you're talking still about a very small minority of drivers. The law abiding ones still suffer the leverage from above.
by DrScientist | 2026-01-21 15:03:44+00:00
> For instance, the purpose of lawyers is to serve and propagate the law

But day to day, they spend a lot of their time selling boiler plate contracts and wills or trying to smuggle loopholes into verbose contracts, or trying to find said holes in said contracts presented by a third party[1]

Or if they are involved in criminal law, I suspect they spend most of their time sifting the evidence and looking for the best way to present it for their client - and in the age of digital discovery the volume of evidence is overwhelmning.

And in terms of delivering justice in a criminal case - isn't that the role of the jury ( if you are lucky enough still to have one ).

I suspect very few lawyers ever get involves in cases that lead to new precedents.
by bluecalm | 2026-01-21 15:03:46+00:00
I would pay at least 300$/month just for hobby projects. The tools are absolutely amazing at things I am the worst at: getting a good overview on a new field/library/docs, writing boilerplate and first working examples, dealing with dependencies and configurations etc. I would pay that even if they never improve and never help to write any actual business logic or algorithms.

Simple queries like: "Find a good compression library that meets the following requirements: ..." and then "write a working example that takes this data, compresses it and writes it to output buffer" are worth multiple hours I would otherwise need to spend on it.

If I wanted to ship commercial software again I would pay much more.
by jszymborski | 2026-01-21 15:03:46+00:00
Health data can reside within your hospital's network. Government data within your government's network. Etc,...

I think the point is that your doctor or civil servant or local sushi shop shouldn't have to reach to AWS/GCP/Oracle each time they want to look up an MRI or building permit or loyalty points card status.

"local" is a relative term here.
by breppp | 2026-01-21 15:03:58+00:00
I agree, actually AI might reverse some of these processes.

Universities have pushed post-modernism since the 60s which is the precursor for the deprecation of truth.

Later on when Google killed the press, truth had become subservient for easy money grabs, ending with a social media that is completely swamped with disinformation

However, an AI model with a decent alignment (and maybe government regulated alignment) might lead to decent narratives whose goal is not what we're seeing now with left and right populism, which is the destruction of the state
by JKCalhoun | 2026-01-21 15:04:06+00:00
There's been a schism for some time between "Artists" (that's with a capital "A", mind you) and, oh, graphic designers, photographers… The latter are not real artists.

While I suspect the AI fracas within the art community will never go away, I suspect within a decade AI-assisted art (or whatever you want to call it) will be a non-issue for everyone else.
Show HN: See the carbon impact of your cloud as you code
by hkh | 2026-01-21 15:04:07+00:00
Hey folks, I’m Hassan, one of the co-founders of Infracost (https://www.infracost.io). Infracost helps engineers see and reduce the cloud cost of each infrastructure change before they merge their code.
The way Infracost works is we gather pricing data from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. What we call a ‘Pricing Service’, which now holds around 9 million live price points (!!). Then we map these prices to infrastructure code. Once the mapping is done, it enables us to show the cost impact of a code change before it is merged, directly in GitHub, GitLab etc. Kind of like a checkout-screen for cloud infrastructure.

We’ve been building since 2020 (we were part of YC W21 batch), and iterating on the product, building out a team etc. However, back in 2020 one of our users asked if we can also show the carbon impact alongside costs.

It has been itching my brain since then. The biggest challenge has always been the carbon data. The mapping of carbon data to infrastructure is time consuming, but it is possible since we’ve done it with cloud costs. But we need the raw carbon data first. The discussions that have happened in the last few years finally led me to a company called Greenpixie in the UK. A few of our existing customers were using them already, so I immediately connected with the founder, John.

Greenpixie said they have the data (AHA!!) And their data is verified (ISO-14064 & aligned with the Greenhouse Gas Protocol). As soon as I talked to a few of their customers, I asked my team to see if we can actually finally do this, and build it.

My thinking is this: some engineers will care, and some will not (or maybe some will love it and some will hate it!). For those who care, cost and carbon are actually linked; meaning if you reduce the carbon, you usually reduce the cost of the cloud too. It can act as another motivation factor.

And now, it is here, and I’d love your feedback. Try it out by going to https://dashboard.infracost.io/, create an account, set up with the GitHub app or GitLab app, and send a pull request with Terraform changes (you can use our example terraform file). It will then show you the cost impact alongside the carbon impact, and how you can optimize it.

I’d especially love to hear your feedback on if you think carbon is a big driver for engineers within your teams, or if carbon is a big driver for your company (i.e. is there anything top-down about carbon).

AMA - I’ll be monitoring the thread :)

Thanks
by basscomm | 2026-01-21 15:04:32+00:00
Creating art, even via using something like Photoshop, is a skill that takes years of learning and practice to do well. Most people who appreciate art appreciate not only the art itself, but the time and skill that went into its creation.

When someone short-circuits the whole creative process by putting a prompt into a machine and having it spit out an art, there's nothing to appreciate.
by budududuroiu | 2026-01-21 15:05:04+00:00
Whenever these people ask for more power in order to "stop/prevent crime", there should be a bot that replies a list of times when the police didn't act to stop crime, despite having full knowledge of the crime occuring and potential to stop it from happening.

EU member and supporter of Chat Control, Romania, had a massive scandal where a kidnapped 15 year old girl called emergency services multiple times to report she was being kidnapped, every single time, the operators and the police officers spoke to her in an ironic and condescending tone. It took 19 hours to locate her, by which time, she was already dead. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_of_Alexandra_M%C4%8...
by 0x3f | 2026-01-21 15:05:23+00:00
From my other reply:

> I mean vulnerable in the sense that fungible labor is vulnerable to the whims of the employer. In this case it might be for a good cause but in general the more leverage you give Uber over its employees, presumably the worse. Whether they have a higher propensity for crime, you're talking still about a very small minority of drivers. The law abiding ones still suffer the leverage from above.
by HelloNurse | 2026-01-21 15:05:43+00:00
"Lastly, if you're set on 6K, there's also the Asus ProArt PA32QCV to consider. I haven't tested it yet, but it's $600 cheaper than LG's model, despite using the same 6K panel.
[...]
The biggest difference is the lack of Nano IPS Black"

How can it be the same panel if it differs in such a fundamental aspect?