MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by elzbardico | 2026-01-13 14:56:57+00:00
Having to pay has nothing to do with a good being a commodity. I have to pay for sugar, but there is no big difference between brands that justify any of them commanding a monopoly rent, so, sugar is a commodity. The same is more or less true of LLMs right now and unless someone comes up with a new paradigm beyond the transformers architecture, there is no reason to believe this commodification trend is going to be reversed.

Most of the differentiation is happening on the application/agent layer. Like Coworker.

The rest of it, is happening on post-training. Incremental changes.

We are not talking about EUV lithography here. There are no substantial moths of years of pure and applied research protected by patents.
by Izkata | 2026-01-13 14:56:58+00:00
> I know a lot of people want to maintain the history of each PR, but you won't need it in your VCS.

Having worked on a maintenance team for years, this is just wrong. You don't know what someone will or won't need in the future. Those individual commits have had extra context that have been a massive help for me all sorts of times.

I'm fine with manually squashing individual "fix typo"-style commits, but just squashing the entire branch removes too much.
by threethirtytwo | 2026-01-13 14:57:02+00:00
I’m tired of the whole “toxic masculinity” framing.

First, it’s sloppy. Plenty of genuinely harmful traits exist, but trying to pin them to “masculine” or “feminine” archetypes is more ideology than analysis. If the problem is bad behavior, just call it bad behavior. Adding a gender label doesn’t improve clarity, it just adds noise.

Second, it’s selectively applied. Many traits that are equally destructive are rarely labeled at all, usually because they’re expressed indirectly or through social maneuvering rather than overt force. That doesn’t make them less harmful, just harder to name without breaking the narrative.

More broadly, labeling a negative trait as inherently “masculine” is simply rude and unnecessary. “Undesirable traits” works fine and doesn’t require turning half the population into a rhetorical prop.

As a non-toxic and extremely moral male biological specimen, I’ll just note that attaching moral failure to the male gender category feels oddly out of step with modern norms around inclusivity. It’s as vile and disgusting as referring to a person by the wrong pronoun.
by dannersy | 2026-01-13 14:57:09+00:00
No I am not. Your response proves my point in regards to getting bogged down in semantics. In a nutshell, my point is that if we do not care or do nothing when it comes to malicious use of FOSS, you very well may lose FOSS or at least the ability to develop in a FOSS environment. It is the paradox of intolerance of a different flavor.
Ask HN: How do you prevent AI agents from going rogue in production?
by techbuilder4242 | 2026-01-13 14:57:30+00:00
Hi all!

There seems to be an ongoing trend (and my gut feeling) of companies moving from chatbots to AI agents that can actually execute actions—calling APIs, modifying databases, making purchases, etc.
I'm curious: if you're running these in production, how are you handling the security layer beyond prompt injection defenses?

Questions:

- What stops your agent from executing unintended actions (deleting records, unauthorized transactions)?
- Have you actually encountered a situation where an agent went rogue, and you lost money or data?
- Are current tools (IAM policies, approval workflows, monitoring) enough, or is there a gap?

Trying to figure out if this is a real problem worth solving or if existing approaches are working fine.
by madcaptenor | 2026-01-13 14:58:03+00:00
I am very frustrated that I keep spinning and getting countries that are "a harder starting point" or "a much harder starting point" compared to the USA. Which I suppose is the point. (And it's more biased towards the worse-off countries than I expected, because I'm thinking in terms of population and births are biased that way more than population is.)
by kpcyrd | 2026-01-13 14:58:12+00:00
The target audience for the article are people building these systems, so the people who would have to pay for the centralized infrastructure.

With git there's a sync protocol built-in that allows anybody who's interested to pull a copy of the index (this shouldn't be the default distribution model for the package clients, but anybody who truely wants it can pull it). PyPi is keeping their index private and you'd have to scrape all data through a heavily rate-limited API.
by hunglee2 | 2026-01-13 14:58:15+00:00
a geofenced, location verified X-type product would be a good way to bring back local journalism. Users can read, but only have write access if they are within a specific geofence. This would diffuse 'reporting' across the local community - we would have actual citizen reporters which Musk pretends is the case on X - and increase trust that what is happening is actually happening. Tried to build this a decade ago but tech wasn't there. Maybe time has come now?
by pacoWebConsult | 2026-01-13 14:58:17+00:00
Models each have their own, often competing, quirks on how they utilize AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md. It's very likely a CLAUDE.md written for use with Claude Code utilizes prompting techniques that results in worse output if taken directly and used with Codex. For example, Anthropic recommends putting info that an agent must adhere to in statements like "MUST run tests after writing code" and other all-caps directives, whereas people have found using the same language with GPT-5.2 results in less instruction following, more timid responses than if the AGENTS.md were written without them.
by trashb | 2026-01-13 14:58:27+00:00
If there is one thing Stallman knows well is the way he uses words and I can assure you if he calls something "evil" that is exactly the word he meant to use.

> user freedom, not creators freedom

In his view users are the creators and creators are the users. The only freedom he asks you to give up is the freedom to limit the freedom of others.
by soganess | 2026-01-13 14:58:42+00:00
Major problems with Firefox include:

- full uBlock support

- the ability to still be themed

- first-party isolation

...Okay, okay, I’m being too cheeky. The common wisdom is that overall Firefox can feel bottlenecked at render or draw time (“less snappy”). That could be a result of a slower JavaScript engine, or a result of poorer hardware acceleration, or a less optimized multiprocessing/multithreading model.

I honestly can't see it in the real world, but synthetic benchmark are pretty clear on that front.
by pc86 | 2026-01-13 14:58:57+00:00
The entire concept of "lived experience" is, bluntly - absolute bullshit. You take all the worst aspects of both conscious and unconscious biases as well as anecdotal 'evidence', and wrap it up in the fact that the average person is simply not capable of objectively analyzing themselves[0], and you end up with people saying that demonstrably false things are true simply because that's how they [incorrectly] interpreted their "lived experience," or how their "lived experience" supports their decisions.

I can spend decades eating junk food and lose weight as long as I work out long enough and hard enough. My "lived experience" tells me that junk food is fine simply because it hasn't killed me yet.

[0] 80-90% of people describe themselves as an "above-average" driver.
Show HN: A full-scale build simulator for Dreadmyst (Action RPG)
by 18272837023 | 2026-01-13 15:00:12+00:00
I built a simulator for Dreadmyst (a recent Action RPG) to help players model complex character stats and damage scaling.

In these types of games, calculating the final DPS involves a lot of nested multiplicative/additive logic that isn't transparent in-game. I wanted to build a UI that makes this math reactive and visual.
1. Handles complex dependency graphs (e.g., Attribute A → % Defense → Flat Damage).
2. Everything is calculated client-side for zero-latency UI updates.
Even if you don't play the game, I'd love feedback on the UI/UX for handling large sets of interdependent variables!
by mcsniff | 2026-01-13 15:00:12+00:00
Just some constructive feedback. Your site needs a little bit of work on design and copy.

"test your personal user account one month free for." and other (translation?) mistakes.

Your use of capitalisation and spelling is not consistent throughout each page.

FAQ page is empty?

Quick Manual page is empty?

iOS download link doesn't work.

Your security posture boils down to "we're German, trust us"?
by bluGill | 2026-01-13 15:00:14+00:00
There are 342 million Americans. Don't try to treat them all as a unified group. There are Americans who cut the fat, there are Americans who eat it.

What has changed is we have learned that fat isn't as bad as it was made out to be - it doesn't seem to have as large an effect on health as thought 40 years ago. That doesn't mean it is healthy - though some take it that way.

It was once observed that vegetarians being healthier than others could be explained almost entirely by vegetarians being less likely to smoke - something studies generally didn't even try to control for and so we don't know if that observation is true. There could be some other unknown factor in play as well that because it is unknown we can't control for it.
by cyber_kinetist | 2026-01-13 15:00:32+00:00
Yeah, reminds me of the "Security" xkcd (https://xkcd.com/538/) - a threat from a good ol' 5-dollar wrench defeating state-of-the-art encryption.

Never estimate how state actors can use violence (or merely the threat of it) to force people to do things. The only way to respond to that is not through code or algorithms or protocols, but through political action (whether it be violent or non-violent)
by RobotToaster | 2026-01-13 15:00:58+00:00
> democracy is not displaying insulting posters or shouting like mad in the streets

The supreme court disagrees

> The Court recognized that "uninhibited, robust, and wide open" political debate can at times be characterized by "vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_threat
by KellyCriterion | 2026-01-13 15:01:01+00:00
really?
are you sure?

Take a look into the illustration about Seneca on wasting your time, e.g. - from what Ive observed: Successful people know exactly when their time gets wasted and what could be done instead and not to waste time on irrelevant things.

There are lot of inspiring mind sets in there.
by tclancy | 2026-01-13 15:01:45+00:00
As someone who has been interested in actual Stoicism for years, yes, there is a whole industry of people monetizing cherry-picked bullet points to serve up what people already want to hear. The fact it all comes with a less-than-subtle sheen of "Western Thought" widens the audience to not just men who don't think real good, but also racists. Happily, now that can be accelerated with AI as we simultaneously remove actual Greek philosophers from college entirely!

I would love to sit back with some quotation from Marcus Aurelius about how it's not anything I have to worry about, but that's the part I never quite bought into with Stoicism I suppose. So ignore all of the above.
by jbreckmckye | 2026-01-13 15:01:56+00:00
The thing is, the internet was supposed to democratise, but it's ended up centralising (and therefore distorting) discourse

A good example is publishing: until relatively recently, books were how most knowledge was distributed, and publishers were able to gatekeep it

Back in the 1990s, one of the promises of the internet, was that it could break this stranglehold. The argument was that instead of 10-ish major publishers, we could have ten billion

What we've ended up with is 5 or so major platforms. Their algorithms now distort, not only the distribution of information, but the production of knowledge itself (click chasing)

An argument I'm sympathetic to, is that the internet hasn't just been a neutral medium, but has actually accelerated this centralisation

The other aspect is the shrinking role of non commercial institutions, like public sector broadcasters, universities, scientific orgs. These entities had their own biases and groupthink. But they added diversity to the media landscape and helped set useful norms
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-13 15:02:46+00:00
That's a radical idea! Unfortunately, it gives a lot of ammo to the "anti-socialist" people who are vehemently against anything "public" funded by tax payers. Look at what's happening in the Nordics for example, where pretty much everyone supported public radio/TV at least when I was growing up, but nowadays a bunch of political parties are trying to have it removed/reduced.
by everdrive | 2026-01-13 15:02:55+00:00
I suppose some of it is also not dark at all, and is simply funny. Here's another excerpt:

"If you're informed that someone or other is speaking ill of you, don't defend yourself against the allegations, but respond by saying: "Well, he must be unaware of my other faults, otherwise these wouldn't have been the only ones he mentioned."

It's stated a bit differently, but this is effectively the exact tact taken by Eminem's competition-winning rap in 8 Mile. "These guys think I'm bad? They missed all this obvious stuff, let me lay out all my faults for you."
by alistairSH | 2026-01-13 15:02:59+00:00
Yeah, that's probably correct - it just feels like a really odd way to present the data.

What I'd like to know is your last bit - is one quarter of a household eating 25% less on their own, or does "mom" on Ozempic cause "dad and 2 kids" to eat 5% less individually? The former isn't nearly as interesting to me as the latter...
by p_l | 2026-01-13 15:03:15+00:00
Apparently it depends to a little bit on how the motherboard is designed, theoretically SP5100 watchdog which is part of the CPU logic in recent ryzens, apparently, is supposed to be enabled if the motherboard is designed with IPMI in mind.

For whatever reason, it's enabled on my laptop despite it obviously not having IPMI support :)
by ericmay | 2026-01-13 15:03:35+00:00
I think that's a good idea for the verification mechanism so we don't expose data unnecessary. But I think it should have to be your literal name, city of residence, place of employment, &c *. on your posts. No hiding. People should know who they're talking to or who they're dealing with. There's some interesting discussion to be had about people who have something to lose moderating their opinion, a group of people who don't care about their reputation attacking people online and offline, &c. but those items can be worked and talked though I think.

Alternatively, if you don't want to do that just don't use the platforms. As someone who doesn't, it sucks that I have to sit here and watch people get radicalized or become confused about reality and then go and affect my daily life with their lunacy. It's annoying.

* I'm open-minded on the details, just using these as examples or discussion items.
by freedomben | 2026-01-13 15:04:06+00:00
I'd definitely love to see them take some steps, but at the points where a minor increase in privacy leads to a much worse UX for average people (aka, "why doesn't this site work in FF, FF sucks!" because they don't know they have to enable something). If Firefox becomes a browser that is harder to use then it will only ever be used by the extremely small niche of people that care about that. That will only further lead to more "not tested on Firefox" web development. I already have to have Chrome available on my machine because of sites like Ramp.com and Mailgun that don't work on Firefox, and that would only get worse.
Show HN: Memtui – A terminal UI for browsing Memcached like a file tree
by sr-white | 2026-01-13 15:04:07+00:00
Hey HN, I built memtui.

It's a terminal UI for Memcached that lets you browse keys organized in a tree
structure, like a file manager. Keys with common prefixes (user:1001:profile,
user:1001:session) automatically group into folders.

*The problem*: Debugging Memcached often means sending raw ASCII protocol commands via
`nc localhost 11211`. There's no easy way to browse what's cached, understand
the data format, or safely edit values without risking overwrites.

*What it does*:
- Tree-structured key navigation using `lru_crawler metadump`
- Auto-detects JSON, gzip/zlib, and binary data
- CAS support for conflict detection during edits
- VS Code-style command palette (Ctrl+P)
- Vim keybindings (j/k navigation)

*Technical details*: Built with Go using Bubble Tea (Elm Architecture).
Requires Memcached 1.4.31+ for the metadump command that enables key enumeration.

Curious to hear:
- How do you currently inspect your Memcached data?
- What features would make this useful for your workflow?

GitHub: https://github.com/nnnkkk7/memtui
by wat10000 | 2026-01-13 15:04:24+00:00
Experts are usually very good at differentiating between levels of evidence. The process of becoming an expert tends to thoroughly educate a person in just how little they actually know.

The problem is that a bunch of talk about weak studies and probabilities and personal thoughts is not what grabs attention. The few overconfident loudmouths end up being the ones everybody hears from. And you don't even need to be an expert, you just need to sound like one.

If you're a nutrition scientist who really knows their stuff and knows how to talk to people so that they understand just what is really known and how well it's known, how in the world do you compete with someone like RFK Jr.?
by Ntrails | 2026-01-13 15:04:30+00:00
> The UK government isn't trying much policy for tackling the causes or the symptoms

It doesn't know what it wants, nor how to prioritise between conflicts from vague pre (and post) election statements. It certainly doesn't want to make the hard compromises that are actually required.

That said...

I wouldn't want the job of trying to balance the books, fix the housing backlog, modernise our energy infrastructure, integrate social and medical care, address social cohesion, manage persistent inequality, improve our global competitiveness etc etc etc
by alistairSH | 2026-01-13 15:04:54+00:00
Tracking household size as part of the study.

See my parallel comment... are they reporting 1/4 of a household eats 25% individually (for a 5% reduction across a family of 4). Or, does one person eating 5% less cause the other 3 to also eat 5%... if it's the latter, this potentially has health impacts across people who aren't taking the drug.
by andy12_ | 2026-01-13 15:05:00+00:00
> I don't entirely understand your extreme optimism towards LLMs given this proclivity for hallucination

Simply because I don't see hallucinations as a permanent problem. I see that models keep improving more and more in this regard, and I don't see why the hallucination rate can't be abirtrarily reduced with further improvements to the architecture. When I ask Claude about obscure topics, it correctly replies "I don't know", where past models would have hallucinated an answer. When I use GPT 5.2-thinking for my ML research job, I pretty much never encounter hallucinations.
by no_wizard | 2026-01-13 15:05:03+00:00
The acquisition of the Affinity software by Canva I imagine motivated this.

It’s even a similar pricing model, though technically with Pages / Numbers / Keynote covers a little more ground but I think the main intent is to get creatives using Apple’s creative software again

Pixelmator being the only 3rd party software because Apple never made a competitor to Photoshop

Though since Canva went full on toward more robust tools I imagine they have started capturing the entire editing chain more than they did 2-3 years ago, hence the Affinity acquisition
by strken | 2026-01-13 15:05:26+00:00
Gender studies as a field is absolutely riddled with gender bias. I view it with scepticism because I don't think it will treat my gender or my sex fairly, not because I think there's no need for it.

The "X for MEN" trend, for example, exists in the context of decades of "X for WOMEN" products. The Man Shake (TM) is a product that only exists because Slimfast (TM) has already convinced the world that meal replacement shakes are for women.

I can see why The Man Shake is stupid, but I don't understand how Slimfast was any better. Nor do I understand why The Man Shake is masculinisation but Slimfast isn't feminisation. Nor why one should be seen as exploitative advertising targeting insecurities, while the other is an intentional political effort.
by bluGill | 2026-01-13 15:05:29+00:00
If you are eating french fries once or twice a year they probably are not bad for you (by enough to matter, and perhaps even good if they give some micro nutriant you are not getting elsewhere). And then by all means eat them friend in beef tallow because that tastes better.

If you are eating french fries twice a week - which seems to be common - they are bad for you. Clean up your diet, eat a larger variety of food.
by giancarlostoro | 2026-01-13 15:05:35+00:00
I love KDE since KDE 3.5 but after KDE 4 its been weirdly unstable. Even now, I use KDE daily on Endeavour (Arch) and it will randomly kill the taskbar etc and restart itself, which is cool that it can self-clean but why does it fail like that randomly? I hate it because other DEs feel unstable or like the UX is worse. KDE has the exact UX I like, but I do hate the one thing browsers / KDE does where my clipboard is hijacked if I highlight text, not sure if I mistakenly made it like that or what but it drives me up a wall, sometimes I want to highlight text to paste over.
by pbronez | 2026-01-13 15:05:42+00:00
It’s interesting that property ads, and classifieds more broadly, benefit from a centralized platform but journalism itself does not. It’s an uneven impact of the technology shift from printing presses to digital. Why didn’t the drop in publishing costs make local journalism MORE accessible?

Perhaps it did in minor ways. Facebook Groups, NextDoor, CraigsList, etc make it easy for anyone to share information with their neighbors. Turns out most people just want to sell something or complain about nothing. These activities benefit the author but nobody else.

Local journalism has benefitted a little bit from this dynamic. Regional news organizations put together decent digital platforms and run articles. But they don’t seem to pay as well… again because the revenue spread out.

Honestly, I’d love to treat local journalism as a public good. Could you fund a credible local newspaper through taxes? It’d be WAY cheaper than a school or police station.

The problem is: how can you trust part of the government to keep an eye on the rest of the government?

Perhaps you could impose a mandatory journalism fee based on the municipal budget. Whatever you spend, a sliver goes to the journalists for oversight.

Local governments spend about $2700 per person. Population of 10,000 means a budget of $27M. Give 1% of that to a journalist and you have $270k… enough for a salary, website and some equipment.

You could require that money be paid to a non-profit as a grant. Probably better to elect an Editor in Chief though… that way you can appeal directly to the citizens for validation of the oversight. If you just pay a non-profit, they’ll be incentivized to serve whoever writes the grant… which would be the people you’re trying to hold accountable.
by Someone | 2026-01-13 15:06:14+00:00
I didn’t see this discussing whether falls have become more dangerous. How much of this is because the elderly fall more often and how much because, if they fall, they’re more likely to die?

If the latter, it seems the elderly have gotten worse at falling, possibly because they fall less at young age, and aren’t as good in breaking their fall as before.

And yes, it will be difficult to gather data on ”fell with little consequences”, but for the elderly, many falls will lead to doctor visits, so there likely is data on that.