MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by joegibbs | 2026-01-21 09:26:44+00:00
It's a video game engine. It's got a ton of optimisations and tweaks to make it run in realtime, but if you're making a movie there's no reason not to spend hours rendering each frame. You don't need to optimise meshes at a distance, or use real-time raytracing with noise reduction rather than just simulating a thousand bounces or limit yourself to 4K textures, you can use as many particle effects and simulations as you'd like. You can't do this with a game engine though - Unreal does have the ability to render out video but it's not going to be the same fidelity.

I didn't think they were actually using the video straight out of the Volume though - my assumption was they'd just use it to make sure the lighting reflected on to the actors nicely and then redo the CGI elements with something else.
by misnome | 2026-01-21 09:27:02+00:00
We do rendered manifest pattern. The chart gets rendered into a single yaml, that get checked into it's own branch and PR. That way, any changes can be easily inspected before merging and can work with confidence that e.g. changing a setting or updating isn't going to change ALL of the objects. It's also extremely easy to (trustingly) roll back to previous states.

The only downside is that you can't really prune excess objects with this method. We're pushed to use Argo for deployment which I don't really gel with, but I trust it to apply the yaml, and at the very least it highlights when objects need to be removed.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-21 09:28:03+00:00
> The Real Bottleneck: Time

Already a "no", the bottleneck is "drowning under your own slop". Ever noticed how fast agents seems to be able to do their work in the beginning of the project, but the larger it grows, it seems to get slower at doing good changes that doesn't break other things?

This is because you're missing the "engineering" part of software engineering, where someone has to think about the domain, design, tradeoffs and how something will be used, which requires good judgement and good wisdom regarding what is a suitable and good design considering what you want to do.

Lately (last year or so), more client jobs of mine have basically been "Hey, so we have this project that someone made with LLMs, they basically don't know how it works, but now we have a ton of users, could you redo it properly?", and in all cases, the applications have been built with zero engineering and with zero (human) regards to design and architecture.

I have no yet have any clients come to me and say "Hey, our current vibe-coders are all busy and don't have time, help us with X", it's always "We've built hairball X, rescue us please?", and that to me makes it pretty obvious what the biggest bottleneck with this sort of coding is.

Moving slower is usually faster long-term granted you think about the design, but obviously slower short-term, which makes it kind of counter-intuitive.
by owisd | 2026-01-21 09:28:15+00:00
The EFF are fighting a losing battle:

> we hope we’ll win in getting existing ones overturned and new ones prevented.

All the momentum is in the other direction and not slowing down. There are valid privacy concerns, but, buried in this very article, the EFF admit that it’s possible to do age-gating in a privacy-preserving way:

> it’s possible to only reveal your age information when you use a digital ID. If you’re given that choice, it can be a good privacy-preserving option

If they want to take a realistic approach to age-gating they should be campaigning to make this approach only option.
by tucnak | 2026-01-21 09:28:33+00:00
We heard this story a million times, but who's to say what's Twitter really worth? Musk bought much more than a "barely profitable website" that day. And the liberal leaders should have seen this coming. Yet they were busy laughing out loud, and mocking, and making predictions on how he'll run the site into the ground, and humiliate himself, etc.

How's that going by the way?
by blundergoat | 2026-01-21 09:28:34+00:00
Author here. After years building healthcare software, I noticed most teams treat code review as a quality gate—reviewers re-checking functionality, hunting bugs, re-verifying requirements.

That's duplicated work. The developer wrote it, the tester verified it. The reviewer's job is different: make sure the next developer can understand and maintain it.

The framework boils down to three questions:
1. Can I follow this?
2. Can I find this later?
3. Is this where I'd expect it?

Curious how others handle the tension between thoroughness and velocity. We landed on "one business day max to respond" as a forcing function—what's worked for your teams?
by flohofwoe | 2026-01-21 09:28:49+00:00
> is it the UI animations, color themes, shades etc etc or is it the underlying operating system that has more and more features, services etc etc ?

...all of those and more? New software is only optimized until it is not outright annoying to use on current hardware, it's always been like that and that's why there are old jokes like:

"What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away."

"Software is like a gas, it expands to consume all available hardware resources."

"Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster"

...etc..etc... variations of those "laws" are as old as computing.

Sometimes there are short periods where the hardware pulls a little bit ahead for a few short years of bliss (for instance the ARM Macs), but the software quickly catches up and soon everything feels as slow as always (or worse).

That also means that the easiest way to a slick computing experience is to run old software on new hardware ;)
Show HN: Living Satoshi – A decentralized AI with on-chain memory
by sebklaey | 2026-01-21 09:29:34+00:00
Fokus: Architektur, IPFS, Emotional AI, Blockchain Memory

Hi HN,

Living Satoshi is an experimental AI system exploring a different design space
for assistants: offline-first interaction, client-side processing, and optional
immutable memory using content-addressed storage and blockchains.

Core ideas:
- Client-side emotional and cognitive pattern modeling (no raw text aggregation)
- Optional immutable memory: messages can be cryptographically hashed and stored
via IPFS and public blockchains, making past statements verifiable and tamper-resistant
- No wallet required for basic usage

The project explores whether AI systems benefit from accountable memory,
stronger user ownership, and reduced platform dependency.

Tech stack highlights:
- Client-side inference with graceful offline degradation
- Content-addressed storage (IPFS)
- Cryptographic message hashing for verifiable history
- Probabilistic emotional pattern modeling (NHPS)
- Minimal backend, no centralized message logs

I’m mainly looking for technical feedback:
- Is immutable memory useful for AI assistants?
- Where does decentralization meaningfully help or hurt?
- Which parts feel unnecessary or overengineered?

Demo + architecture: livingsatoshi.com
by pravj | 2026-01-21 09:29:37+00:00
Extending on the same line, we will see programs like Google Summer of Code (GSoC) getting a massive revamp, or they will stop operating.

From my failed attempt, I remember that

- Students had to find a project matching their interests/skills and start contributing early.

- We used to talk about staying away from some projects with a low supply of students applying (or lurking in the GitHub/BitBucket issues) because of the complexity required for the projects.

Both of these acted as a creative filter for projects and landed them good students/contributors, but it completely goes away with AI being able to do that at scale.
by nottorp | 2026-01-21 09:29:38+00:00
Why deleted_at?

We have soft_deleted as boolean which excludes data from all queries and last_updated which a particular query can use if it needs to.

If over 50% of your data is soft deleted then it's more like historical data for archiving purposes and yes, you need to move it somewhere else. But then maybe you shouldn't use soft delete for it but a separate "archive" procedure?
by svilen_dobrev | 2026-01-21 09:29:53+00:00
if anyone is interested to try their agent-fu, here's some more-real-world rabbit-hole i went optimizing in 2024. Note this is now dead project, noone's using it, and probably same for the original. i managed to get it 2x-4x faster than original, took me several days then. btw There are some 10x optimizations possible but they break few edge cases, so not entirely correct.

https://github.com/svilendobrev/transit-python3
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-21 09:30:10+00:00
> I never had any luck integrating agents

What exactly do you mean with "integrating agents" and what did you try?

The simplest (and what I do) is not "integrating them" anywhere, but just replace the "copy-paste code + write prompt + copy output to code" with "write prompt > agent reads code > agent changes code > I review and accept/reject". Not really "integration" as much as just a workflow change.
by cik | 2026-01-21 09:30:13+00:00
I'm a huge naysayer.. I'm also very much coming around. My workflow may be very horrid to some.

1. I create multiple git workspaces
2. I connect Antigravity in multi mode, - one to each
3. I have prompts that I craft on a per workspace node
4. I ask questions and give it bit sized tasks.

Now to be clear, I'm not seeing the wheel reinvented. But the tedious work I'm now churning out at scale, so that I can focus on the heart of the problem. Frankly, I think this speaks to how much boilerplate is frequently required.
by zozbot234 | 2026-01-21 09:31:20+00:00
AIUI, there's nothing wrong per se with treating the "market opinion" of the volatility as a subjective probability, since that's effectively what it becomes given sensible no-arbitrage constraints. Just keep in mind that "bad" states of the world will be heavily overweighted in the resulting subjective expectation, for the risk-adjustment reasons mentioned in the OP.
by CurleighBraces | 2026-01-21 09:31:37+00:00
Yeah if you've not used codex/agent tooling yet it's a paradigm shift in the way of working, and once you get it it's very very difficult to go back to the copy-pasta technique.

There's obviously a whole heap of hype to cut through here, but there is real value to be had.

For example yesterday I had a bug where my embedded device was hard crashing when I called reset. We narrowed it down to the tool we used to flash the code.

I downloaded the repository, jumped into codex, explained the symptoms and it found and fixed the bug in less than ten minutes.

There is absolutely no way I'd of been able to achieve that speed of resolution myself.
by andsoitis | 2026-01-21 09:32:27+00:00
Europe relies on the US less for money, and more for capabilities.

Within North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the US provides most of:

- Strategic airlift (moving large forces quickly)

- Aerial refueling

- Missile defense

- Intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance (ISR)

- Command, control, and battle management

- Nuclear deterrence (via the US nuclear umbrella)

Europe can field armies, navies, and air forces,
but large-scale, high-intensity war is much harder without the US.
by StrauXX | 2026-01-21 09:32:55+00:00
The solution for this, IMO, is flags. Just like with CTFs, host an instance of your software with a flag that can only be retrieved after a successful exploit. If someone submits the flag to you, there is no argueing about wether or not they found a valid vulnerability.

Yes, this does not work for all vulnerability classes, but it is the best compromise in my mind.
by ViewTrick1002 | 2026-01-21 09:33:05+00:00
> will always boil down to lobbying and money in politics.

And here you take the easy way out. Just blame third parties. You should keep asking why to find the real cause.

My personal take, as someone who is European but has lived in the US, Texas metro areas specifically, is that first past the post elections sow division.

Choices are limited, political activity is neutered, and extremism builds until it finds an outlet through either of the two possible political choices. Taking over that side entirely.

Political systems needs vents for frustration, and the US system does not have that.

Which finally leads to the people.

The only ones that could cause change needed to reform the political system is the people.
by closewith | 2026-01-21 09:33:34+00:00
> But as you say, there are so many people riding the hype wave that it is difficult to come to a sober discussion. LLMs are a new tool that is a quantum leap but they are not a silver bullet for fully autonomous development.

While I agree with the latter, I actually think on former point - that hype is making sober discussion impossible - is actually directionally incorrect. Like a lot of people I speak to privately, I'm making a lot of money directly from software largely written by LLMs (roadmaps compressed from 1-2 years to months since Claude Code was released), but the company has never mentioned LLMs or AI in any marketing, client communications, or public releases. We all very aware that we need to be able to retire before LLMs swamp or obsolete our niche, and don't want to invite competition.

Outside of tech companies, I think this is extremely common.

> It can be a joy to work with LLMs if you have to write the umpteenth javascript CRUD boilerplate.

There is so much latent demand for slightly customised enterprise CRUD apps. An enormous swathe of corporate jobs are humans performance CRUD and task management. Even if LLMs top out here, the economic disruption from this alone is going to be immense.
by bigpeopleareold | 2026-01-21 09:34:40+00:00
Whatever I might agree or disagree with, this is annoying to look at, but his stuff keeps coming up in my YouTube feed. Even it looks slightly interesting, I know it will be some rant involved about a thing not related to technology, but some developer's personal opinions on non-tech ideas. I get it - people are horrible! Sheesh!

FWIW, probably not much, he said he had a Jewish background ... in, like, the one video I watched and eventually gave up on.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-21 09:34:50+00:00
> There are paid (micro) influencer campaigns going on and what not.

Extremely important to keep in mind when you read about LLMs, agents and what not both here, on reddit and elsewhere.

Just the other day I got offered 200 USD if I posted about some new version of a "agentic coding platform" on HN, which obviously is too little for me to compromise my ethics and morals, but makes it very clear how much of this must be going on, if me, some random user, gets offered money to just post about their platform. If I was offered that 15-20 years ago when I was broke and cleaning hotels, I'd probably take them up on their offer.
by KarlVoit | 2026-01-21 09:35:10+00:00
Sorry to take away your reason: https://gitlab.com/publicvoit/orgdown/-/blob/master/doc/Tool...

There are multiple solutions where you may use orgdown (syntax) from within vim although I bet vim implementations will never ever reach the same level as Org-mode (Elisp) does for Emacs.

As a vim + Emacs user for decades (both daily), I would really recommend to use vim for simple editing taks and Emacs for organizing your digital life: https://karl-voit.at/2020/01/20/start-using-orgmode/ and https://karl-voit.at/orgmode/

Many die-hard-vim users switched to Emacs and wrote that in their opinion, Emacs is the better vim because Emacs is able to provide everything that vim does (including vim key bindings, excluding vim-script) but not the other way round. I know that this is hard to swallow for most vim users.

YMMV HTH
by gambiting | 2026-01-21 09:37:08+00:00
>> It's got a ton of optimisations and tweaks to make it run in realtime, but if you're making a movie there's no reason not to spend hours rendering each frame.

That's how it's used though? It only runs real time for preview, but the final product is very much not rendered in real time at all. Obviously it's a very flexible tool that works with what you need and what you can afford - Disney runs it on their compute farm and they can throw the resources at it to render at the fidelity required. But obviously there are plenty of production houses which don't have those kind of resources and they have to make do with less. But then you wouldn't expect Pixar's own pipeline to work in those circumstances, would you.

>> Unreal does have the ability to render out video but it's not going to be the same fidelity.

I really encourage you to look into what's possible with UE nowadays. Custom made pipelines from Pixar or Dreamworks are better still, of course, but UE can absolutely stand next to them.
Agent API for Claude Code / Claude Agent SDK
by waterli | 2026-01-21 09:37:16+00:00
I am been thinking hard why there is no “Agent API” for Claude Code / Agent SDK as a stateful agent API makes production a lot easier. Today I have to self deploy Claude Agent SDK and manage sandbox environments.

Also ideally I can easily switch to different models (no lock in to Claude)

Anyone has similar needs / issues? How do you solve it today?
by gerikson | 2026-01-21 09:37:31+00:00
Did my own research, and the Swedish police has decided not to continue with the complaint:

https://omni.se/assanges-anmalan-mot-nobelstiftelsen-laggs-n...

from 2025-12-19

Machine translation in part:

> The report contained no information indicating that a crime had been committed. Therefore, no preliminary investigation is being initiated, Rikard Ekman of the police told AFP.
by muvlon | 2026-01-21 09:38:46+00:00
It's sad how much of this thread of supposed hackers comes from people who are simply parroting this dogma because it has been drilled into them. People were even preaching this before IPv6 privacy extensions came into use, either downplaying the privacy issues or outright telling people they were bad for wanting privacy because IPv6 is more important.

I understand the difference between NAT and firewall perfectly well. I have deployed and configured both for many years. The strawman of "NAT without firewall" is pretty much irrelevant, because that's not what people run IRL.

Firewalls are policy-based security, NAT is namespacing. In other fields, we consider namespacing an important security mechanism. If an attacker can't even name a resource they're not allowed to access, that's quite a strong security property.
And of course, anyone can spoof IP and try to send traffic to 192.168.0.6 or whatever. But if you're anywhere in the world other than right inside my ISP's access network, you can't actually get the internet to route this to my local 192.68.0.6. On the other hand, an IPv6 firewall is one misconfigured rule away from giving anybody on the planet access.
by gambiting | 2026-01-21 09:40:46+00:00
>>and worse than decades ago.

I feel like there's some strong rose tinted glasses effect happening here. Early 2000s were especially full of absolutely dreadful CGI and VFX in almost every film that used them unless you were Pixar, Dreamworks, or Lucasfilms. I can give you almost countless examples of this.

The only thing that changed is that now it's easier than ever to make something on a cheap budget, but this absolutely used to happen 20-30 years ago too, horror CGI was the standard not an exception.
by lovich | 2026-01-21 09:40:47+00:00
No fucking shit, I paraphrased Anthropic's comments as

> do better than we have publicly admitted most of humanity can do, and we may deign to interview you

If you think telling someone that they may have an interview after passing a test that 99.999% of humanity cannot pass, that they _may_ get an interview, you are being snarky/condescending.
by vintermann | 2026-01-21 09:40:57+00:00
Yeah, another source of "unlimited data" is genetics. The human reference genome is about 6.5 GB, but these days, they're moving to pangenomes, wanting to map out not just the genome of one reference individual, but all the genetic variation in a clade. Depending on how ambitious they are about that "all", they can be humongous. And unlike say video data, this is arguably a language. We're completely swimming in unmapped, uninterpreted language data.
by xyzzy123 | 2026-01-21 09:42:01+00:00
I have worked in this space, and my experience was that usually age / identity verification is driven by regulatory or fraud requirements. Usually externally imposed.

Product managers hate this, they want _minimum_ clicks for onboarding and to get value, any benefit or value that could be derived from the data is miniscule compared to the detrimental effect on signups or retention when this stuff is put in place. It's also surprisingly expensive per verification and wastes a lot of development and support bandwidth. Unless you successfully outsource the risk you end up with additional audit and security requirements due to handling radioactive data. The whole thing is usually an unwanted tarpit.
by globular-toast | 2026-01-21 09:42:22+00:00
A firewall is the security feature you want. With a default-deny rule, which most will come configured out of the box with, it does exactly what you expect: block all unsolicited incoming traffic.

Most people are probably actually running a firewall with NAT anyway, they just don't know it because an appliance with default-deny is pretty much install and forget for most people. So, no, it doesn't cause any additional problems.

The only difference with IPv6 is you don't need to NAT any more, but you keep the firewall.

It's important to remember NAT is part of the IP routing layer. In its regular form, a router just forwards packets to where they should be going. So it's plugged in to one or more networks, receives packets on one interface and forwards them, unmolested (well, mostly), to another interface. It's almost completely analogous to letters going through the postal system. The postal service just forwards letters around by looking at the address. It doesn't modify them in any way.

NAT is a bastardisation and is like your postie scribbles out the "return to sender" address and replaces it with his own. If you were to reply to that address, your postie would remember he did that, and replace the address you wrote with the original address he scribbled out earlier. It's not how IP routing is supposed to work at all and, in fact, a device doing NAT cannot strictly be considered a router at all.

Something you can add to any device is a packet filter. A router must not filter packets as it then wouldn't be considered a router (similar to molesting the packets with NAT). But you can insert a packet filter before things get to the router. If you glue those two things together and bundle it in one device then, voila, you have a firewall. A stateful firewall is conceptually like a packet filter and router glued together and working closely together. But you can just think of it like telling your postie "I only want to receive letters from mum" and he just burns all the rest before they get to you front door. (In reality you also want to allow correspondence so it's more like "only allow letters that are replying to letters I sent, which you'll know because you're my postie, or if mum sends a letter first, allow that too").

Writing this up makes me think... why don't we just teach this stuff using the postal system as an analogy? It's an almost perfect analogy and surely even today anyone understands this concept.
by CurleighBraces | 2026-01-21 09:43:39+00:00
I feel there's two contradicting statements in this post.

> Is there evidence that agentic coding works?

Yes plenty, tons, and growing every single day, people are producing code and tooling that works for them and is providing them value. My linkedin is even starting to show me none-programmers knocking up web front ends for us, and my brother who is a builder is now drawing up requirement specs for software!

> Is the code high-quality

Only if you are really careful, and constantly have the human in the loop guiding the agent, and it's not easy. This is where domain expertise and experience come in.

Do I think it's possible, yes, do I think there are a ton of good examples out there, absolutely not.