MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mullingitover | 2026-01-20 19:46:14+00:00
People planning the post-WWII system wildly overestimated how how disciplined Americans could be.

The whole point of the US transitioning to a service economy was that it would upskill the workforce into the world's Delta Force team of highly educated scientists, engineers, researchers, etc. The rest of the world would handle the boring stuff like actually manufacturing the beautiful inventions designed by the US.

The problem is that a lot of the US populace is gung-ho patriotic and willing to die for their country, but absolutely refuses to learn math or generally do their homework for their country, which is what's actually required for this whole scheme to work.

I'm paraphrasing the shockingly astute observations of this guy[1].

[1] https://www.instagram.com/reel/DD-MPWAPoaT/?hl=en
by rdmuser | 2026-01-20 19:46:35+00:00
It was sold back in 2022 to Branch Metrics
https://www.androidcentral.com/apps-software/branch-strikes-...

August 2024 everyone working on it was laid off except the original dev
https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/9/24217077/nova-launcher-lay...

September 2025 the original dev left after being told to stop work on open sourcing it
https://www.theverge.com/news/773937/nova-launcher-founder-l...
by freeplay | 2026-01-20 19:47:22+00:00
I'm a senior engineer and have no degree. I never get offended by people making comments like this. If we're both in similar roles, making quality contributions, and are progressing in our careers, the only difference between us is, I didn't spending 50k-100k on a degree.

Sounds more like a knock on the person making the comment than it is on me.
by maciejzj | 2026-01-20 19:47:31+00:00
This sentiment has been on the rise for years and has now reached levels where it disrupts societal structure.

There is no socially stable career path that you can sign up for and work up the ladder with trust that your hard work will give you a good life in return. Instead, you are constantly evaluated based on your interim usefulness to the big tech. Some may think that foregoing degrees is a benign process that lowers the entry bar for newcomers. In fact, this is to the benefit of tech companies, because now you have no papers, no institutional, or social ties that you can cling to. You are now fully at the mercy of corporations and your ability to help them reach their goals.
by bastard_op | 2026-01-20 19:47:46+00:00
I've been using lawnchair as a launcher that is open source (apache) since the first news broke months when the previous dev/owner warned people what was coming, and it works just fine. Not quite as versatile as Nova Launcher, but with 100% less adware now that the new adware company is running up in people with a bait and switch.

Enshittification is real!
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-20 19:47:48+00:00
> Will there be any accountability?

FTA: "SSA referred both DOGE employees for potential violations of the Hatch Act."

Probably nothing under this administration. But there is a paper trail–now cited in public–for folks in the future to pursue.

In the meantime, I'm curious what civil damages they may be liable for.
by proc0 | 2026-01-20 19:47:57+00:00
Anything above a simple app and it becomes a tradeoff that needs to be carefully tuned so that you get the most out of it and it doesn't end up being a waste of time. For many use cases and domain combinations this is a net positive, but it's not yet consistent across everything.

From my experience it's better at some domains than others, and also better at certain kinds of app types. It's not nearly as universal as it's being made out to be.
by StephenHerlihyy | 2026-01-20 19:47:58+00:00
1) Multi-year delay in banning Huawei from 5G networks: https://www.ndp.ca/news/ndp-statement-huawei-ban-canadian-5g...

Took Canada 4-years longer than the rest of the Five Eyes alliance to ban them, prompting the Biden administration to threaten to terminate the agreement.

2) NORAD/Ballistic missile defense (Not just NATO):
https://canadiandefencereview.com/norad-modernization-closin...

Canada chooses not to participate in the defense of North America from potential threats, deferring the cost and military response entirely to the United States.

3) Canadian Digital Services tax:
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/ties-and-knots-bind-uni...

4) Lax enforcement of cartel money laundering:
https://www.fraserinstitute.org/commentary/trump-and-fentany...

The roughly 100 organized crime groups operating in Canada (including three groups dedicated to supplying fentanyl) are partly drawn to loopholes and lax penalties that allow fentanyl-related money-laundering operations to flourish.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/canada-money-laundering-pro...

5) Weak enforcement against counterfeit goods:
https://macleans.ca/economy/why-canada-is-a-haven-for-knock-...

Canada remains the only G7 country on the 2025 USTR Watch List. The 2025 USTR Special 301 Report again expressed concerns with Canada's perceived lack of IP enforcement, particularly at the border and against online piracy.

6) Canada undercutting American efforts to de-risk from China:
https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/glob...

https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/as-t...

I tried to avoid some of the more common ones, like NATO spending, trade dispute, etc. A lot of this stuff, like providing for the common defense, don't make it easy for cartels launder money, don't look the other way on counterfeit goods, aren't unreasonable demands.
by originalvichy | 2026-01-20 19:48:07+00:00
As others have noted, the article is analysing the actual financial markets angle.

For my two cents on the technical side, it is likely that any Western-origin shakiness will come from Apple and how it manages to land the Gemini deal and Apple Intelligence v2. There is an astounding amount of edge inference sitting in people’s phones and laptops that only slightly got cracked open with Apple Intelligence.

Data centre buildouts will get corrected when the numbers come in from Apple: how large of a share in tokens used by the average consumer can be fulfilled with lightweight models and Google searches of the open internet. This will serve as a guiding principle for any future buildout and heavyweight inference cards that Nvidia is supplying. The 2-5 year moat top providers have with the largest models will get chomped at by the leisure/hobby/educational use cases that lightweight models capably handle. Small language and visual models are already amazing. The next crack will appear when the past gen cards (if they survive the around the clock operation) get bought up by second hand operators that can provide capable inference of even current gen models.

If past knowledge of DC operators holds (e.g. Google and its aging TPUs that still get use), the providers with the resources to buy new space for newer gens will accumulate the amount of hardware, but the providers who need to continuously shave off the financial hit that comes with using less efficient older cards.

I’m excited to see future blogs about hardware geeks buying used inference stacks and repurposing them for home use :)
by thefz | 2026-01-20 19:48:21+00:00
> Are you going to add ads?
> Nova needs a sustainable business model to support ongoing development and maintenance. We are exploring different options, including paid tiers and other approaches. As many of you have already anticipated, we are also evaluating ad based options for the free version.

> If ads are introduced, Nova Prime will remain ad free. Our guiding principles are clear: keep the experience clean and fast, avoid disruptive formats, and provide a straightforward way to keep the experience ad free.

Seems pretty clear.
by hopelite | 2026-01-20 19:50:37+00:00
It seems you are clearly understanding? You are likely just confused because you do not understand that the overarching objectives of the "uni-party" or "deep state" system hold fast, it's just that each political sporty ball team has to play things different and tell different lies in different ways to different cohorts in order to keep the system operating. So, e.g., Biden says we need 300M more immigrants and his team fans cheer because they support it, wile deporting more people than Trump; while Trump tells his team fans that he will deport people and does this whole theatrical ICE stuff to give the impression of deporting people to drive down costs and retain their support, but in fact barely moves the needle on deportations and committing to 600,000 more Chinese students and wanting to "staple citizenships to diplomas" for millions of Indians, etc.

You have to understand that there is the theater of the political sport ball arena where the different sides are set against each other like WWE/Football, etc. but in the background it's just actually all more or less rigged and the truth is written in policy and strategic papers that are implemented over 20+ years, across presidents and their wrangling and herding of their constituents in this charade called "democracy".
by nathanyz | 2026-01-20 19:51:07+00:00
So, one of the things I have personally seen is where these companies have in-house counsel and then CC that person on emails that could be problematic if they were ever required to be produced in discovery. Then if something does happen, it is easy to claim privilege on these emails and hide what are essentially non-legal related emails from lawsuits. There is flimsy cover of keeping counsel informed so they can provide legal guidance if needed, but that essentially undermines the legal process during a lawsuit as the very emails verifying a plaintiff's claim may be in these privileged emails, or maybe not, but without seeing them only the company and their legal teams knows.

Yes, this is unethical and also can lead to things like we see in this case where the judge will pierce privilege because it was being abused. But......unless you can prove that is what is going on in the emails, judges are very reticent to pierce privilege.
Show HN: Describe hardware, get a buildable prototype
by Beefin | 2026-01-20 19:51:39+00:00
I’ve built hardware projects for years, and the gap between “I want X” and “parts ordered, files ready to print” always took weeks.
Modo compresses that. Describe what you want (e.g. “a portable CO2 monitor with a display and buzzer”) and it generates:

- A bill of materials with real components (MPNs, not hallucinated parts)

- A printable enclosure generated from actual part dimensions

- Wiring diagrams, firmware boilerplate, and assembly instructions

- Design validation (power budget, pin conflicts, mechanical fit)

Everything streams in real time as each phase completes.

The key idea is constraining the system to a curated component database so it can’t invent parts, then using datasheet dimensions to drive enclosure geometry.

You can try it without signing up: https://modo.is

Curious what people here would try building, and where this breaks down.
by ironman1478 | 2026-01-20 19:51:48+00:00
So you basically have a CS degree. I learned C in 7th grade and was completely self taught. I then got a CS degree because I just wanted to learn more about it and be around people who were also enthusiastic about CS.

There is something disingenuous about the parent post. Highly motivated people will always be good at what they want to do. I'm good at guitar, but never went to music school. Highly motivated individuals though are the exception, not the rule. If you take two random individuals, one with a lit degree and one with a CS degree, the CS degree person will know more in the domain of CS and be more likely to write useful software.

The parent post is conflating being highly selective about personality type and attributing it to the degree.
Show HN: Sharpie – Self-hostable AI prompt playground
by ratulrahman | 2026-01-20 19:51:49+00:00
I built Sharpie over the weekend to solve a problem I had: testing and sharing AI prompts without screenshots or paying for API calls.

It's a self-hosted playground that runs entirely in Docker:
- Local LLM inference (Qwen2.5 3B via Ollama)
- Share prompts with URLs locally
- Fork and remix prompts
- Zero API costs
- Markdown rendering with syntax highlighting

Everything is local - your prompts never leave your machine. One docker-compose up command and you're running.

This is my first real open source project, so feedback is very welcome!
by SilentM68 | 2026-01-20 19:51:51+00:00
That's funny, but let's make it more plausible and less-sci-fish-ly satirical :)

Proposal: Using Trained Carrier Pigeons as Emergency Data Relays

Objective
Create a simple, low-tech way to move digital messages across a large area when internet, radio, and phone networks are completely blocked.

Core Idea
Pigeons carry small memory cards with the messages from one station to the next, like a chain of human couriers but using birds.

Steps to Set Up

1. Build small pigeon lofts (homes) at key locations across the area (e.g., every 50–100 km).
2. Train homing pigeons to fly reliably between each pair of nearby lofts (standard pigeon training methods).
3. At each loft, install a simple automatic device that:
- Reads data from a memory card the arriving pigeon carries
- Copies the data to a new memory card
- Attaches the new card to an outgoing pigeon
4. Attach a tiny, lightweight memory card (e.g., microSD in a small protective tube) to each pigeon’s leg.
5. People at the starting point load their digital messages (text, small files) onto the card and send the pigeon.
6. Pigeons fly to the next loft → data is copied → next pigeon flies onward → repeat until the final destination.

Basic Protocol Rules
- Each message gets a clear label (e.g., “To: City B, From: City A, Priority: High”).
- Stations check cards daily and send pigeons in both directions when possible.
- Use only trained, healthy pigeons; rest them between flights.
- Protect cards from water and impact with a small, sealed case.

Realistic Performance
- Speed: Hours to several days per hop, depending on distance and weather.
- Capacity: One 256 GB card can carry thousands of text messages or a few large files.
- Reliability: Works in no-power situations; depends on pigeon health and weather.

Damage Control
-Add cyanide to the chip in case the pigeon gets captured.

This is a proven concept (used in wars before radio) updated with modern tiny storage.

AI Agents can be fun, at times :)
by nineplay | 2026-01-20 19:51:59+00:00
"Other large tech companies have also begun judging candidates by their abilities instead of their diplomas. Microsoft, Apple, and Cisco are among those dropping degree mandates."

Call me skeptical considering they've got hundreds of applicants for each open role and are doing AI resume screening. I'm not sure how 'abilities' is going to even get someone to the point where a recruiter will call them. If it does, apparently I've been applying to jobs all wrong.
by filoleg | 2026-01-20 19:51:59+00:00
> I just don't understand how this is true unless you're doing something extremely basic.

The same way it is true for people with no college degree at all. People can learn on the side. Some of them might have had a minor in CS, or worked on hobby software projects in the meantime. Those hires might become some of the best, but finding them is difficult.

Out of the two such SWEs I worked with at Microsoft years ago, one of them had no college degree at all, and another one had an entirely unrelated degree (with his previous full-time job being an air traffic controller at a nearby airport). None of the SWE work they did was trivial or basic even in the slightest.
by RiverCrochet | 2026-01-20 19:52:16+00:00
- Did you disable UPnP on your router? If not, any device behind the router can simply ask the router to open a port, typically without authentication, bypassing this "firewall" completely.

- TURN and STUN trivially bypass this side-effect, and a side effect of that is a third party has to often be involved, which can be collecting data later leaked or used against you.

- The monstrosity of NAT is that it's the core thing that drives centralization - because of NAT any two Internet hosts generally have to involve a third party to communicate, a third party which again, can be collecting data later leaked or used against you.

If you don't care about the security implications of the above, then you don't really care about the "firewall" either.
by RIMR | 2026-01-20 19:52:17+00:00
It is startling to me how much we disregard water scarcity. It seems like there's a persistent attitude that because we haven't run out of water to a dangerous degree before, it will never happen, even as the numbers suggest we are marching directly into a significant drought event.

I worry that the gears of capitalism will refuse to stop turning even as we face significant mortality as a result of dehydration, because our biggest and most profitable industries rely on a mindboggling quantity of fresh water.
by Herring | 2026-01-20 19:53:42+00:00
Yeah.. that's how tribalism works. Dems don't really understand the kind of blank-check popular backing that Trump has.

Studies have shown for a long time the human brain is frequently wired to prioritize group loyalty over factual accuracy. Probably something left over from when we were living in caves in small groups. Trump understands it extremely well. He just has to bring up immigrants and their brain reasoning centers turn off and they start frothing over Haitians eating dogs. Prior to Trump, most white Americans only encountered this if they brought a black girlfriend home.

After Obama, Trump literally rewrote the republican party. Congressmen who weren't falling in line got fired or forced to retire. Many many times, eg see Liz Cheney. The last time a purge like this happened was at the time of the Civil War. Even super-popular FDR tried taking out conservative democrats but wasn't successful (which btw is one of the main reasons we didn't get stuff like universal healthcare in the 1930s; southern democrats decided it was a threat to segregation).

That probably shows us how to stop it: wait for a massive failure like WW2 or the Great Depression, then implement strong safety nets, housing, education, etc pretty much everything Western Europe is doing.
by gnabgib | 2026-01-20 19:53:50+00:00
(2018) - although some minor tweaks since. Popular:

2023 (224 points, 116 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35783189

2018 (730 points, 313 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17478133
by TeamCommet1 | 2026-01-20 19:53:53+00:00
Regarding the separate control plane: I don't think it's overkill if you're aiming for multi-agent orchestration. A safety mesh needs to be centralized to maintain a global state of permissions. If you bake the safety logic into each worker, you end up with the same "flimsy logic" problem you're trying to solve.

Curious, how are you handling latency in the CAP v2 protocol when the control plane has to intercept every intent before execution?
by JohnMakin | 2026-01-20 19:53:56+00:00
Hard no. It's so easy to get "flagged" by opaque systems for "Age verification" processes or account lockouts that require giving far too much PII to a company like this for my liking.

> Users who are incorrectly placed in the under-18 experience will always have a fast, simple way to confirm their age and restore their full access with a selfie through Persona, a secure identity-verification service.

Yea, my linkedin account which was 15 years old and was a paid pro user for several years got flagged for verification (no reason ever given, I rarely used it for anything other than interacting with recruiters) with this same company as their backend provider. They wouldn't accept a (super invasive feeling) full facial scan + a REAL ID, they also wanted a passport. So I opted out of the platform. There was no one to contact - it wasn't "fast" or "easy" at all. This kind of behavior feels like a data grab for more nefarious actors and data brokers further downstream of these kinds of services.
by bigyabai | 2026-01-20 19:55:07+00:00
I'm not an insider, but ASICs come with their own suite of issues and might be obsolete if a different architecture becomes popular. They'll have a much shorter lifespan than Nvidia hardware in all likelihood, and will probably struggle to find fab capacity that puts them on equal footing in performance. For example, look at the GPU shortage that hit crypto despite hundreds of ASIC designs existing.

The industry badly needs to cooperate on an actual competitor to CUDA, and unfortunately they're more hostile to each other today than they were 10 years ago.
by techblueberry | 2026-01-20 19:55:55+00:00
I'm observing a process to purchase an AI Coding assistant right now, and it made me wonder, when the rubber hits the road, how much would I actually spend on the assistant?

I don't know if I'd call myself a booster or skeptic. I'm loosely speaking all in in the office, but what would I actually spend?

On the one hand, my - I dunno, thought leader-y hat would say, why wouldn't I spend 10k/head on them. These tools are amazing, they could double someone's output.

But they also are these like infinite toys that can do anything, and you can spend a lot of money trying all the things. And does that actually provide value. Actually provide like rubber hits the road monetary value on a per-head basis. If you're really focused and good, probably? But if you're not disciplined. You can spend a bunch of money on tokens, then spend a bunch of money on the new features / services in production, and spend a lot of your colleagues time cleaning up that mess.

And this is all human stuff. This is all assuming the LLM works relatively perfectly at interpreting what you're trying to do and doing it.

So like. Does it actually provide the benefit of X dollars per engineer per year? Because it wouldn't have to, it could in fact go the opposite.
by legitster | 2026-01-20 19:56:10+00:00
Obviously, but we're comparing apples and oranges here.

- Iraq was never a major oil concern for the US. Perhaps maybe stabilizing global oil prices - but the primary beneficiaries were actually our European and Asian allies.

- We never just "took" the oil for our domestic market (which is what we are basically doing in Venezuela)

- Even policymakers who have publicly admitted that Iraq was a massive intelligence and political failure all agree that regional stability was always the main goal.

Similarly we were in Afghanistan for-freaking-ever which had no clear resource benefit or even clear goal.

I would even go so far as to say that for most of the 20th century, America's foreign policy interventions are more easily attributed to our failed role as "World Police". We were brought into Iran because of the British, we were in Vietnam because of the French. Kuwait because of Saudi Arabia. Korea and Lebanon directly.

So while yes you could paint a broad brush and say all of this indirectly was to expand America's "empire", but as an international alliance where America carries the big stick, the US actually carried out a lot more on behalf of the overall alliance than one would realize.

That alliance that the US is now trying to dissolve.
by piva00 | 2026-01-20 19:56:32+00:00
It's quite odd, the past days there's been this messaging from different users about how old allies haven't been good allies. First I saw this point about Denmark, now Canada.

Hard to understand where this is coming from, it's really odd to see it popping up out of nowhere when barely a year ago this would never have been brought up about any of these countries... Where is the messaging coming from?
by jamesbelchamber | 2026-01-20 19:56:35+00:00
You might be thinking of the second "Hangouts", whereas what I'm referring to was apparently "Google+ Hangouts" and was the original. You could get 25 people on there, and for a bigger audience you could go "on Air" (which streamed the Hangout). Looks very similar to Zoom (in fact I suspect Zoom was heavily inspired by it) and I remember using it (and it's descents) before COVID and the rise of Zoom.

This video demonstrates an early version of it (from 2011!): https://youtu.be/KLf9jzFvkTA