MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by squidbeak | 2026-01-26 15:22:31+00:00
It's an app, and data is submitted with a tap to approve. The data is just attribute / proof pairs (eg nationality:British / true), and the bundles assembled from these pairs will differ between use cases. Nightclub proof of age would just need the 'over 18' proof, while opening a bank account would need a photo, name, address, date of birth, nationality etc. In other words, there isn't a single Digital ID. The 'ID' is just a container for a specific use. They can be reused, but they will often be single purpose or generated from the attributes saved in your wallet the moment a service requests your data. The best way to think of this is that it gives you a way to pass on your citizen data with authority, and without having to overshare.
by no_wizard | 2026-01-26 15:22:51+00:00
To be fair, I think everyone but Google has been missing the boat on LLMs as platform integrations.

I call out Google as an exception because Gemini when it works correctly from an integration point of view can actually do some cool stuff like predictive suggestions in messaging based on context, though I wish it was all on device stuff, as on a privacy level I don’t trust Google

That said, it’s not like they’re so far and above anyone else they blow the competition out of the water either, they simply managed to make the functionality sometimes useful
by RansomStark | 2026-01-26 15:23:16+00:00
I can't get enough of Borges.

His way with words and way to highlight to absurdity of situations is first class.

My favorite is the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. It's a critique of the classification used by the Institute of Bibliography which he considered nonsensical. He claims to have found the list in an ancient Chinese encyclopaedia:

- those belonging to the Emperor

- embalmed ones

- trained ones

- suckling pigs

- mermaids

- fabled ones

- stray dogs

- those included in this classification

- those that tremble as if they were mad

- innumerable ones

- those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush

- et cetera

- those that have just broken the vase

- those that from afar look like flies
by thehigherlife | 2026-01-26 15:23:17+00:00
From the FAQ: Does Tracking Card Air support Precision Finding?
You can track your items from anywhere in the world using the Apple Find My app, but sound alerts only work when you’re within about 150 feet. Since Apple doesn’t yet support Ultra Wideband (UWB) technology for third-party trackers, Tracking Card Air doesn’t include Precision Finding at this time.
by notTooFarGone | 2026-01-26 15:23:26+00:00
That's my case - you can proof your age anonymously. There are edge cases where this does introduce minor issues - see https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/07/zero-knowledge-proofs-...

but all in all this is solvable and the best we got.

It's miles better than any "upload your face or ID to some third party".

We can't let perfect be the enemy of good here and allow the worst systems to flourish now.
by Olshansky | 2026-01-26 15:23:53+00:00
Yes and no.

---

Concrete example of a no: I set up [1] in such a way that anyone can implement a new blog -> rss feed; docs, agents.md, open-source, free, etc...

Concrete example of a yes: Company spends too much money on simple software.

--- Our Vision ---

I feel the need to share: https://grove.city/

Human Flywheel: Human tips creator <-> Creator engages with audience

Agent Flywheel: Human creates creative content <-> Agent tips human

Yes, it uses crypto, but it's just stablecoins.

This is going to exist in some fashion and all online content creation (OSS and other) will need it.

---

As with everything, it Obvious

[1] https://github.com/Olshansk/rss-feeds
by mxuribe | 2026-01-26 15:23:56+00:00
I'm sorry, nothing personal...but any place that requires 8 years of experience but only gives a title of "junior" is pretty dang close to a sweat shop.

On a different note, i do see what you mention about some op excellence skills (e.g. project management, requirements gathering, etc.) being areas of concern at my $dayjob. But, i kinda always saw them as skills that are valuable in any era, and need not only be in this AI era....but everyone's mileage and environment certainly can vary that expectation. Also, at my $dayjob, the business lacks so much funding to pay software vendors fairly, properly that we get what we pay for....so its often low quality output. Its not low *code* because we employee and contract regular, full code devs....but it certainly often is poor quality...and i wonder as low code offerings and opportunities - paired with more solid AI development asistance - continue to emerge, i suppose something like a SRE role can become that much more important - regardless if one works in low code or low cost arena.
by Sevii | 2026-01-26 15:23:58+00:00
Vibecoding is great for open source. Open source is already dominated by strong solo programmers like antirez, linus, etc. People with very strong motivations to create software they see as necessary. Vibecoding makes creating open source projects easier. It makes it easier to get from an idea to "Hey guys check this out!" The only downside to open source is the fly by PRs vibecoding enables which are currently draining maintainer time.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-26 15:24:20+00:00
I think dividing responsibilities across so many different managers has become too much of an anti-pattern for small and medium sized companies.

The least productive tech companies I worked for in the past decade had a nearly 1:1 ratio of engineers to different manager types. Our teams of 3-4 engineers had to work with our engineering manager, a product manager, a project manager, and a program manager at minimum. If you did UI work you would work with another UI/UX manager.

The minimum timespan to get anything done was measured in quarters. You could expect to have to spend more time scheduling meetings and following up with all your different managers by a factor of 10X or more than time spent doing anything related to code.

Contrast this with another employer I had who was very clear about the fact that we were not a big tech company and we were not going to structure our teams like one. We kept team units small and made them work together as a unit, not a disparate collection of managers that had to be appeased. We shipped a lot and we shipped fast.

We need to stop trying to use complicated and divided management structures everywhere. Companies with small teams and clearly unified management structures will always perform better than the management styles where responsibilities are divided across 5 different people and even basic work requires coordinating all of them through meetings
by mlhpdx | 2026-01-26 15:24:24+00:00
WireGuard doesn’t add noticeable battery drain in my experience. I have a fleet of Xiao ESP32-C3 devices with DS1820 temperature sensors that run on batteries and send samples over WireGuard.

The battery drain is 100% a function of the transmit time, so by pre-encrypting the buffers before powering on the radio I save a bit. Likewise for the response handshake - get the packet, shut down the radio, then decrypt it.

When sending samples between handshakes, I don’t have to wait for an ACK of any kind - I just send the packet and shut down the radio. That saves a ton of power compared to TCP.
by ratorx | 2026-01-26 15:24:35+00:00
Team lead manages the overall direction of the team (and is possibly the expert on some portions), but for an individual subsystem a senior engineer might be the expert.

For work coming from outside the team, it’s sort of upto your management chain and team lead to prioritise. But for internally driven work (tech debt reduction, reliability/efficiency improvements etc) often the senior engineer has a better idea of the priorities for their area of expertise.

Prioritisation between the two is often a bit more collaborative and as a senior engineer you have to justify why thing X is super critical (not just propose that thing X needs to be done).

I view the goal of managers + lead as more balancing the various things the team could be doing (especially externally) and the goal of a senior engineer is to be an input to the process for a specific system they know most about.
by laborcontract | 2026-01-26 15:24:43+00:00
Google AI overviews are often bad, yes, but why is youtube as a source necessarily a bad thing? Are these researchers doctors? A close relative is a practicing surgeon and a professor in his field. He watches youtube videos of surgeries practically every day. Doctors from every field well understand that YT is a great way to share their work and discuss w/ others.

Before we get too worked up about the results, just look at the source. It's a SERP ranking aggregator (not linking to them to give them free marketing) that's analyzing only the domains, not the credibility of the content itself.

This report is a nothingburger.
by thesz | 2026-01-26 15:25:05+00:00
Weightlifting and weight training was invented long before forklifts. Even levers were not properly understood back then.

My favorite historic example of typical modern hypertrophy-specific training is the training of Milo of Croton [1]. By legend, his father gifted him with the calf and asked daily "what is your calf, how does it do? bring it here to look at him" which Milo did. As calf's weight grew, so did Milo's strength.

This is application of external resistance (calf) and progressive overload (growing calf) principles at work.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milo_of_Croton

Milo lived before Archimedes.
by program_whiz | 2026-01-26 15:25:19+00:00
All this talk about how you can vibecode all your apps now, "why use OSS?" is making me laugh. Sure for a little website or a small tool, maybe even a change to your somewhat complex codebase that you thoroughly check and test.

Is anyone replacing firefox, chromium, postgres, nginx, git, linux, etc? It would be idiotic to trade git for a vibe coded source control. I can't even imagine the motivations, maybe "merges the way I like it"?

Not sure, but anyone who's saying this stuff hasn't even taken the basic first level glance at what it would entail. By all means, stop paying $10 a month to "JSON validator SaSS", but also don't complain with the little niggling bugs, maintenance and organization that comes with it. But please stop pretending you can just vibe code your own Kafka, Apache, Vulkan, or PostGRES.

Yes, you can probably go faster (possibly not in the right direction if inexperienced), but ultimately, something like that would still require very senior, experienced person, using the tool in a very guided way with heavy review. By why take on the maintenance, the bug hunting, and everything else, unless that is your main business objective?

Even if you can 10x, if you use that to just take on 10x more maintenance, you haven't increased velocity. To really go faster, that 10x must be focused on the right objective -- distinctive business value. If you use that 10x to generate hundreds of small tools you now have to juggle and maintain, that have no docs or support, no searchable history of problems solved, you may have returned yourself to 1x (or worse).

This is the old "we'll write our own inhouse programming language" but leaking out to apps. Sure, java doesn't work _exactly_ the way you want it to, you probably have complaints. But writing your own lang will be a huge hit to whatever it was you actually wanted to use the language for, and you lose all the docs, forums, LSP / debugging tools, ecosystem, etc.
by lelandfe | 2026-01-26 15:25:21+00:00
Yeah, I had Claude spend a lot of time optimizing a JS bundling config (as a quite senior frontend) and it started some things that looked insanely promising, which a newer FE dev would be thrilled about.

I later realized it sped up the metric I'd asked about (build time) at the cost of all users downloading like 100x the amount of JS.
by sofixa | 2026-01-26 15:25:24+00:00
> for the express purpose of suppressing political protests (by New Caledonians angry at the French mainland government).

No, to stop the spread of targeted disinformation by foreign actors stoking those protests to turn into riots. (and if you need any proof, check out the protestors with Azeri flags, in New Caledonia. Azerbaijan's tinpot dictator hates France because France supported Armenia, so he's been trying various ways to undermine France because he's that fragile: https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/17/new-ca... )
by Faelon | 2026-01-26 15:25:47+00:00
We have a tremendous opportunity to use our food choices to push towards a more water-abundant world. 70% of all freshwater withdrawals go to agriculture, and 80% of agricultural land on Earth is used to feed animals. Animal-based foods are ENORMOUSLY less water efficient than plant foods, accounting for equivalent nutrition. 3oz of cheese is like leaving your shower on full blast for 30 minutes. Nearly half (46%) of all water diverted from the Colorado River is used to feed cows and the food they eat. We could cut down dramatically by eating plants directly.
https://ourworldindata.org/water-use-stress
https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impact-milks
https://www.npr.org/2024/09/09/nx-s1-5002090/colorado-river-...
by addaon | 2026-01-26 15:25:48+00:00
Are you at a company that tends to hire from non-traditional backgrounds? The topics you mention -- the underlying "how it works" of the tech we use to build things day to day -- should be, and in my experience are, the areas where juniors have the clearest understanding relative to more senior engineers, since they just finished 4+ years learning about it five days a week in detail.
by llm_nerd | 2026-01-26 15:25:59+00:00
The overwhelming bulk of production, in a massively oversubscribed industry, is in Taiwan. If Taiwan's production went offline, there would be enormous turmoil.

"certainly Taiwanese have "contingency plans" to vaporize all tech in the event they are invaded"

Given the way things are going, a rationalist would surmise that Taiwan is likely in talks with China for a peaceful reunification, Hong Kong style. The old way is very much over, the US is a worthless if not negative-value ally, and it's pretty clear to every living human with a functioning brain that this is going to be China's century.

Indeed, the article casually says "Taiwan is claimed by China, which has not and will not take reunification-by-force off of the table", which is technically true it isn't contextually informative. For those not fully up to date on the history of this conflict, for decades Taiwan claimed all of China (and most Western countries treated Taiwan as the singular government of all of China), and held out for reunification-by-force. This isn't as simple and straightforward like Trump's "we have a military ergo we get to steal better countries because they make us look bad".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pF-ZN11DRSE
by estimator7292 | 2026-01-26 15:26:14+00:00
A wireless earbud is closer in complexity to a WiFi router than a digital wristwatch.

Bluetooth is complicated. Noise canceling is complicated. Audio compression is complicated. Simply being an RF device is complicated.

It is an unfortunate physical reality that it requires a lot of processing to do all the jobs a Bluetooth earbud has to do. The incredible engineering success is that we can put a GHz class CPU in each earbud and all of that crazy processing happens on microwatts of power.

Putting supercomputers in your ears is mildly absurd on the face of it, but consider that we now have supercomputers that are so small, cheap, and energy efficient that we can put them and their batteries in our ears.

Besides, what's more wasteful, one silicon die or two? It a cortex CPU more wasteful than a 555 timer on equivalent die space? Is it more resource efficient to pay 10x more for a 2x larger die using 40x power and a bigger battery to go with it? Or is it most efficient to use the smallest, most efficient die, and the smallest battery you can get away with?

In the grand scheme of things, the "wasted" resources in the chip are essentially nil. You save far, far more resources by using more efficient processing. It's a few milligrams of silicon, carbon, and minerals. You should be far, far more concerned about the lithium batteries ending up in landfills.
by everdrive | 2026-01-26 15:27:19+00:00
This is obviously very troubling, but I do wonder what the actual technical mechanisms are for "turning over your social media." Do you ....

- Give them your user names and (when possible) the government subpoenas the companies?

- Give them your user names and they just see what's publicly available?

- Require you to give them your passwords?

- Hook your phone up to some device that steals data on the device?

- Something else?

Does anyone know? I'm also interested in the case where you legitimately don't have social media. Does anyone know what happens then? I understand that can look suspicious, but what if you had to travel to the US unexpectedly? You can't go back in time and build 5 years of social media so you don't look suspicious. (on principle, I wouldn't do this anyway.)

[edit]

And what if your social media is Chinese and private? They just can't do anything then.
by peacebeard | 2026-01-26 15:27:34+00:00
This seems to be a major source of confusion in these conversations. People do not seem to agree on the definition of vibe coding. A lot of debates seem to be between people who are using the term because it sounds cool and people who have defined it specifically to only include irresponsible tool use, then they get into a debate about if the person was being irresponsible or not. It’s not useful to have that debate based on the label rather than the particulars.
by abixb | 2026-01-26 15:27:34+00:00
Heavy Gemini user here, another observation: Gemini cites lots of "AI generated" videos as its primary source, which creates a closed loop and has the potential to debase shared reality.

A few days ago, I asked it some questions on Russia's industrial base and military hardware manufacturing capability, and it wrote a very convincing response, except the video embedded at the end of the response was an AI generated one. It might have had actual facts, but overall, my trust in Gemini's response to my query went DOWN after I noticed the AI generated video attached as the source.

Countering debasement of shared reality and NOT using AI generated videos as sources should be a HUGE priority for Google.

YouTube channels with AI generated videos have exploded in sheer quantity, and I think majority of the new channels and videos uploaded to YouTube might actually be AI; "Dead internet theory," et al.
by vel0city | 2026-01-26 15:27:36+00:00
> It's not at all obvious that this is what happens.

This is what we've empirically seen as Apple went from having devices which could trivially be reflashed and resold without much impediment to now most iPhones being locked and their hardware parts cryptographically tied together.

https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/11/apples-activation-lock-lea...

The rates of phone theft have gone radically down since phone makers have made it harder to reflash and part out the parts of the phones.
by diogenes_atx | 2026-01-26 15:27:59+00:00
Phone service providers require you to show identification when you sign up for the service, and most require payment with a credit or debit card.

For a detailed discussion about phone anonymity, there is a good book written by a former police officer: Michael Bazzell (2024) Extreme Privacy: What It Takes To Disappear, fifth edition.

https://www.amazon.com/Extreme-Privacy-What-Takes-Disappear/...
by reaperducer | 2026-01-26 15:28:29+00:00
Just stating the obvious that not buying one of these thing that we never seemed to need until they told us we needed it

I never thought I needed one until my wife lost her car keys, and the Fiat dealer charged $1,200 for a replacement.

And it's not even the electronics that makes them so expensive. Modern car keys aren't like the 1970's where it's just a piece of metal with the edges shaved off. Those little key cutting kiosks at Home Depot can't cope with today's complex engraving.
by burkaman | 2026-01-26 15:28:34+00:00
I think it's a good analogy. A forklift is a useful tool and objectively better than humans for some tasks, but if you've never developed your muscles because you use the forklift every time you go to the gym, then when you need to carry a couch up the stairs you'll find that you can't do it and the forklift can't either.

So the idea is that you should learn to do things by hand first, and then use the powerful tools once you're knowledgeable enough to know when they make sense. If you start out with the powerful tools, then you'll never learn enough to take over when they fail.
by _flux | 2026-01-26 15:28:51+00:00
You're making the analogy work: because the point of weightlifting as a sport or exercise is to not to actually move the weights, but condition your body such that it can move the weights.

Indeed, usually after doing weightlifting, you return the weights to the place where you originally took them from, so I suppose that means you did no work at in the first place..
by barelysapient | 2026-01-26 15:28:52+00:00
I think LLMs also kill off most programming languages. I think we’ll end up with a handful of languages that LLMs most proficient at writing for and the languages required for device or processor compatibility.

The cost improvement for an LLM to emit a feature (with an engineer in the loop) is too much of an improvement. We’ll look at engineers coding in C the same way we look at engineers today who code in assembly. LLM enabled development becomes the new abstraction; probably with a grammar and system for stronger specification formalization.
by jimnotgym | 2026-01-26 15:29:06+00:00
In my bit of the UK there is a fairly common bit of geography, which is hilly peat bog ground. This is natures sponge, it absorbed rain to reduce flooding, and then kept the rivers higher in times of drought.

In WW2 and the decade or so after, the owners were forced to 'improve' the land or have it confiscated by WARAG. The solution was to drain it, so sheep could graze, turn flatter bits into field etc. This was a justifyiable response to the U-boat menace that tried to starve Britain out of the war. The sponge was destroyed

There is now a greater understanding that the sponge is good. There have been small projects to block drains and reflood bits, that then start to sponge again.

But greater roll out meets innevitable resistance. The hill may have a nominal landowner, but it may also have many smaller surrounding properties that have grazing rights on the hill. Now some environmentalists turn up offering to flood their grazing, on a farm that is already marginally profitable... and so we each an impasse.

Downstream are millions of people who want drinking water but don't want flooding. The solution of them paying the 'commoners' to use their grazing as sponge never comes up.

In the lowlands are small rivers that were 'canalised' in the same era. A little stream was dug 6 feet deeper and straightened. This dried the fields for grazing and cultivation. Now people want to restore these streams for both habitat and flood control reasons. Often this is simply by inaction from the people meant to maintain the canal. There is zero talk of ongoing payments to the people who lose fields through this! They are supposed to just put up with it!

I suspect this story has analogues in many other places.
by alsetmusic | 2026-01-26 15:29:17+00:00
I think that'd only further cause people to push back. I think this could only backfire.

Imagine if all the conveniences of the internet were taken from you. Not that you'd never had them, but that you'd come to rely on them and then they were gone. Feels like some palpable oppression to me. And it has nothing to do with your political views. Everyone will feel the squeeze and nobody is gonna be dismissive about it.