MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tasty_freeze | 2026-01-19 19:54:17+00:00
> To me the kinds of people using these editors are the kinds of people that love making everything more complex to seem smart.

If your instinct is to be denigrate people who do things differently than you, you will never understand them. However, you get the advantage of feeling superior.

Let me say why I continue using vi. I started using vi in the early 80s, then moved to vim in the mid 90s. Even people who aren't as old at me have more than a decade of using vi/vim/nvi. Those commands that seem like a burden to remember are completely transparent to me -- that is, I don't need to think about what keystroke to hit to achieve my ends. Why should I climb another learning curve?

If you tell me to just download a vi mode for vscode, I can tell you that the basic motions work, but that last 10% cause unending grief. It is like eating pasta where every 10th noodle is actually a rock disguised to look like a noodle -- completely disruptive.

I can edit quickly when I don't need to move my hands off the keyboard. Likely your dominant hand is flopping back and forth between the mouse and the keyboard when using your gui-centric editor.

> I never understood the appeal of these command-line editors with a million commands for different edge-cases. Why not just use VSCode? It has every possible extension you already need

I'd prefer to have a few dozen composable verbs and nouns than having to research and download "a million" extensions for the edge cases.

> No need to type commands just to edit text when there's a file manager

I have no idea what you mean by this. How does a file manager edit your text?

> It has remote SSH and features for vm machines

You can do that from vim as well. vim/nvi has a plugin ecosystem too. My own philosophy is to use as few of them as I can: one (the 'matchit' feature which ships with the editor).

The final thing you are missing is that nobody uses all the commands -- they find the ones that work for them and they use them without further thought once it becomes muscle memory. If the need ever arises to learn a new command or setting, I'll get around to it when the time comes. If I learn a bunch of things and don't use them, they get quickly forgotten anyway.
by bs7280 | 2026-01-19 19:54:23+00:00
First - I can not comprehend how you could possibly have a charitable interpretation on the war point and how it might have a net positive. I'm not trying to be condescending or anything, I would like to hear a single positive for being able to make BTC bets on killing people.

Second - even if you are not one of the millions of Americans that give a shit about sports, there is still a massive fraud implications just by the existence of crypto prediction markets. All it takes is one bad call to changed the outcome of game. The Superbowl last year had over $1 billion wagered on it.
by water-data-dude | 2026-01-19 19:54:24+00:00
I never interpreted the Cow Tools strip as saying "cows are too dumb to use tools", but more along the lines of "if cows could create tools could we even fathom their use?" - kinda like the Borges story, Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge[0]. On the other hand, I read The Far Side when I was small and didn't really have the scientific chops to get a lot of the humor, so maybe I cemented an incorrect interpretation.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevole...
by jrm4 | 2026-01-19 19:54:28+00:00
As op, yeah I'm actually with you on this.

And at the very least, 2FA should be a much more "openly open standard." Which is to say, just do TOTP everywhere, let people have their initial generating key and be done with it.

I generate mine from my computer when I can, but I'm surrounded by all this magic that implies that something different is going on, e.g. the Duo system which I'm forced to use by my job and doesn't make this sort of thing easy, if possible at all.
by conductr | 2026-01-19 19:54:35+00:00
I feel like you've proven the point in the opposite direction. A software startup may be competing with Salesforce as an alternative. That would be worth pursuing as a software startup. You've laid the case that it's better and easier to create internal tools and not rely on Salesforce or an alternative solution. It's easy to roll-your-own so you don't pay outside companies for this solution any more. This does not bode well for a software startup (maybe it bodes well for you as an engineer working on that project, but that's not a software startup).

I feel like most "solutions" that are really just "platforms" and require extensive customization and integration will suffer due to this. It's easy to just roll your own these days.
Show HN: I built a firewall for agents because prompt engineering isn't security
by yaront111 | 2026-01-19 19:54:51+00:00
Hi HN, I’m the creator of Cordum.

I’ve been working in DevOps and infrastructure for years (currently in the fintech/security space), and as I started playing with AI agents, I noticed a scary pattern. Most "safety" mechanisms rely on system prompts ("Please don't do X") or flimsy Python logic inside the agent itself.

If we treat agents as autonomous employees, giving them root access and hoping they listen to instructions felt insane to me. I wanted a way to enforce hard constraints that the LLM cannot override, no matter how "jailbroken" it gets.

So I built Cordum. It’s an open-source "Safety Kernel" that sits between the LLM's intent and the actual execution.

The architecture is designed to be language-agnostic:
1. *Control Plane (Go/NATS/Redis):* Manages the state and policy.
2. *The Protocol (CAP v2):* A wire format that defines jobs, steps, and results.
3. *Workers:* You can write your agent in Python (using Pydantic), Node, or Go, and they all connect to the same safety mesh.

Key features I focused on:
- *The "Kill Switch":* Ability to revoke an agent's permissions instantly via the message bus, without killing the host server.
- *Audit Logs:* Every intent and action is recorded (critical for when things go wrong).
- *Policy Enforcement:* Blocking actions based on metadata (e.g., "Review required for any transfer > $50") before they reach the worker.

It’s still early days (v0.x), but I’d love to hear your thoughts on the architecture. Is a separate control plane overkill, or is this where agentic infrastructure is heading?

Repo: https://github.com/cordum-io/cordum
Docs: [Link to your docs if you have them]

Thanks!
by Jordan-117 | 2026-01-19 19:55:19+00:00
I was pretty disgusted by the headline Axios used for it:

>Trump defiant as NATO rages over Greenland "blackmail" tariffs

https://archive.is/kFeae

Didn't even mention the absurdly juvenile, ahistorical "boats" argument. Ofc, Axios is the height of access journalism, so not really surprising.
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-01-19 19:55:49+00:00
Article 6 of the United States Constitution says international law is United States law. US courts are the enforcement mechanism as far as the United States Constitution is concerned.

"This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land"
https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/article-6/
by cloud-oak | 2026-01-19 19:56:08+00:00
Sadly had a very similar experience about the screen of my FP4, which seems to have a serial fault of producing random inputs whenever it so pleases [1]. Knowing I had bought a phone with great self-service claims, I was confident they could just send me a replacement screen and I could swap it myself. But no, they insisted that I had to send it in, claiming that this would be better for the environment.

I do want to support Fairphone's mission and wish I could whole-heartedly recommend it to friends and family. But this experience and the many software issues have led me to recommend other options instead.

1. https://forum.fairphone.com/t/ghost-inputs-on-fp4/82837
by ozlikethewizard | 2026-01-19 19:56:34+00:00
Personally I think if you argue for free speech above all you should stick to free speech above all. What's the point in having morals if you're going to compromise on them when a charitable organisation half way around the world makes you scared?

To be clear, to this end is the exact reason why I dont believe in free speech above all, all people should have a right to expression, but you also have a responsibility for the consequences of that expression. I tried to get that across above, Im actually fine with both HateAid and what the US do / have done, I am neither American nor in the EU. but free speech absolutionists pretending that the US is in anyway protecting free speech is laughable. Look at Minnesota right now.
by crazygringo | 2026-01-19 19:57:59+00:00
If the book is recorded at essentially half-speed, then yes fair point. :)

> listening at 2x taking twice the brain processing feels off to me

It's not about the listening. It's about the cognitive processing of the content. Whether you're listening to fiction or non-fiction, you're engaging in twice as much imagigination, world-building, conceptualization of what you're listening to in the same amount of time... therefore a much greater proportion of your total attention and focus is engaged in that, which leaves less for paying attention to the world around you. It's mathematically twice as much information streaming in, and our brain's attention mechanism is finite.

People aren't usually consciously aware of these things, in the ways they insist they can drive fine even though they're tired, even though they've had a few, etc. Because we literally can't notice what we're not noticing. But accident rates tell a different story.
by armcat | 2026-01-19 19:58:03+00:00
Sure! So to qualify - I've been working in contractual law, and more specifically contract drafting. There are a tonne of other tools in the areas of document management, research, regulatory, timekeeping, etc, so I cannot speak on behalf of those.

Sample size: around 150 law firms across UK, Nordics and DACH (and a smithering across the US). Some were actual month long pilots so there were deeper interactions with some, whilst others were "just conversations". Let's say in each law firm it's 3-4 associates and 1-2 partners, so it's >600 lawyers.

Typically the legal AI solutions in contract drafting involve the lawyer uploading "their database" aka drag-and-drop a folder or a zip file containing potentially 100s-1000s contracts from previous transactions.

What's missing:

- Relevance: For the current transaction the lawyer is working on, the recommendations from AI tools suggest irrelevant information. For example, if it's an M&A transaction in one market (e.g. Nordics), it suggests pricing mechanics from a different market practice (e.g. US) that are irrelevant or not desirable. The text semantics have closest cosine (or whatever) distance, but the market characteristics are orthogonal.

- Representation: as a lawyer you are always representing a specific party (e.g. a "buyer" purchasing another company or an asset from a "seller"). You want your side to be best represented - however the tools often fail to "understand" what/who you are representing, and tend to recommend the opposite of what you want for your client.

- Diversity: The same handful of documents keep being referenced all the time, even though there are other "better" documents that should be used to ground the responses and recommendations.

- Precision: Sometimes you want precise information, such as specific leverage ratios or very specific warranty clauses for a transaction of a particular size within a particular industry.

- Language/tonality: Lawyers talk to other lawyers and there is a specific tonality and language used - precision, eloquence, professionalism. Each law firm also has their "house style" in terms of how they put the words together. AI tools come across as "odd" in terms of how they respond (even when they are correct). It trips the lawyers up a bit and they lose the trust somewhat.

Etc.

(there are many others)
by koolba | 2026-01-19 19:58:25+00:00
> And Trump did what, exactly, make something already illegal even more illegal?

That’s the best part! There’s no new laws necessary. We’re simply enforcing the laws on the books and means of enforcement that we as a nation have already agreed upon!

> And now that you are ruled by a de facto fascist with the rule of law only applicable to his enemies, how is the payoff? On the upside, illegal immigration is no longer a primary concern, I guess.

I fail to see how a democratically elected President that won both the electoral college and the popular vote is a “de facto fascist”.

> Better to let everything be run by cartels instead, surely they will have your best interests at heart. There's not a single example of a functional and effective government out there, so why even try?

There’s plenty of examples of functional governments and plenty of dysfunctional ones. There’s functional programs and dysfunctional ones.

And just because something may work for a small homogenous population in close proximity of each other doesn’t mean it would work or make sense for a heterogeneous population spread across thousands of miles.
by ShroudedNight | 2026-01-19 19:58:25+00:00
At one point I could have sworn they were sticking obsoletion notices in the header, but now I can only find them in the right side-bar:

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5245

I agree, that it would be much more helpful if made obvious in the document itself.

It's not obvious that "updated by" notices are treated in any more of a helpful manner than "obsoletes"
by atcon | 2026-01-19 19:58:42+00:00
The authors ask “who bears the cost of these tariffs?” and use S&P Panijiva data from Jan 2024 to Nov 2025 for their 96% pass through rate to conclude tariffs function “as a consumption tax on Americans.” However, Panjiva is limited to FOIA requests for bill of lading data for 22 countries (Brazil, China, India, Mexico) and excludes major US trading partners, such as the EU, UK, and Canada[1].

The limitations of the data are highlighted by the authors’ somewhat bizarre claim that “a 10 percentage point increase in tariffs leads to only a 0.39% reduction in export prices.” Yet the luxury industry, a major component of European exporters, reduced prices in 35-40% of all products in 2025 and registered a drop in operating margins from 20% in 2023 to 15% in 2025[2]. European car manufacturers also had to adjust. Porsche reported a billion euro 3Q25 loss and a 99% drop in operating profit through 2025, leading to its removal from the DAX and the CEO’s ouster.[3]

The short answer to who pays: too early to tell. Many consumers balk at price increases and reduce consumption, while many foreign exporters seem to be waiting and seeing for the Supreme Court to rule against the administration’s IEEPA claims or the midterm elections before deciding permanent price changes. But exporters are experienced navigators of multiple tariff layers, both internal and external. Many economists have noted the “value-added tax (VAT) system, a tax on final consumption, which the US administration views as similar to a tariff.”[4]

[1] https://www.spglobal.com/market-intelligence/en/solutions/pr...
[2] https://www.ft.com/content/9553baf3-7cfc-40c2-b6bd-1871844af...
[3] https://observer.com/2025/10/porsche-profit-drop-luxury-econ...
[4] https://think.ing.com/downloads/pdf/article/reciprocal-tarif...
by IAmBroom | 2026-01-19 19:58:47+00:00
Train inspections are far less intrusive. Wheel wear can be measured with calipers while standing beside the train. Software tests are physically null, except for alarms sounding. Brakeline tests can be verified without adding gauges; in many cases the braking mechanisms are externally observable.

Plane controls systems all live behind thin, deformable metal or plastic covers.

Trains aren't perfect, obv, but most train accidents reduce to "A human on the tracks fucked up". Drivers trying to maintain schedules by speeding, or vehicles or humans standing on rails where they had no business being (dodging crossing guards, suicide, etc).
by atonse | 2026-01-19 19:58:53+00:00
Apple Maps from day one was skating to where the puck was going to be. They had vector based maps when that stuff was brand new. Possibly before Google deployed it widespread (but I'm not sure on this fact).

But the problem with Apple Maps was easy to see (and can only be fixex over time)... data. Google and others had a decade+ head start on Apple when it came to collecting data for maps. Judge Apple Maps 5 years old vs Google Maps 5 years old. Not Apple Maps brand new vs Google Maps 10 years later.

Forstall is the one that pushed to make iOS based on macOS/Unix. He was definitely a lightning rod but had product sense.
by alphazard | 2026-01-19 19:59:08+00:00
> Nonviolent folks can be negotiated with. Its not permitted to negotiate with criminals/terrorists.

This is definitely true to some extent, especially when non-violence has been used in the more distant past.

But in recent history, the non-violent approach creates a sympathy for the cause among impartial 3rd parties, who find violence against non-combatants to be unpalatable.
You can turn the world against an enemy by putting the enemy's asymmetric use of force on display.
This doesn't work in a lower empathy society.
by lemming | 2026-01-19 19:59:26+00:00
This sort of thing is a huge problem here in New Zealand. The only native mammal here is a bat, we have mostly birds which evolved for a really long time with only avian predators. So they’re hilariously poorly adapted for surviving standard predators (cats, rats, dogs etc) which first the Maori and subsequently Europeans brought. For example, many of them are flightless and tend to freeze when threatened - works well against eagles but is a terrible idea when threatened by a cat.

As a result, we have many animals, mostly birds, which are totally unique and also critically endangered. Many of them can only survive on offshore islands which have been comprehensively cleared of predators at vast effort and expense. The islands need to be relatively accessible since humans have to get to them to maintain them, but it turns out that once in a while a predator will swim quite vast distances for no apparent reason, and it only takes one to mess up years of painstaking work. Quite apart from killing a bunch of birds whose total remaining numbers might range from the tens to the hundreds of individuals.
by mitthrowaway2 | 2026-01-19 19:59:39+00:00
My boneheaded proposal is the opposite of Trump's approach: give the rest of the world coupons to buy made-in-USA products and machinery at a steep discount. Ship stuff to the rest of the world and ask nothing in return. Get the orders rolling in from around the world, pushing up economies of scale.

Of course, this will make American consumers much poorer on average, but boost production capacity. Sort of what China does.
by cwdegidio | 2026-01-19 19:59:47+00:00
I did the hike from Pokhara to Ghorepani (Poon Hill is breathtaking btw) and a few other small villages (about a week and half of backpacking). This was after a month in Kathmandu before and a month after. My absolute favorite parts of the whole trip were the teahouses and the roadside food stands. The food was excellent. The hosts were always extremely kind. This was back in 2009. It's now almost 20 years later and I've been itching to go back. Nepal will always have a place in my soul, there is no place like it.
by soulofmischief | 2026-01-19 20:00:02+00:00
Apply your own "functional literacy". I made a clarification that those outside of an industry have to separate the opinions of professionals and hype artists.

The irony of your comment would be salient, if it didn't feel like I was speaking with a child. This conversation is over, you cannot be helped as long as you maintain this obnoxious attitude coupled with bad reading comprehension.
by danny_codes | 2026-01-19 20:01:01+00:00
I feel we need a term for these attempts to paint gambling as something other than gambling. Or just proper enforcement for gambling platforms like "prediction markets". Personally I find it disappointing to see so many people wasting their time on this stuff. I'm sure Coplan, for example, could be a productive member of society, but instead chooses to waste his time on stupid stuff like Polymarket.
by skeltoac | 2026-01-19 20:01:32+00:00
Thank you. You listed concrete examples of things you would ban and you stated a general definition. It sounds like a terrible kind of regime, stripped of the freedom of speech and loaded with arbitrary decisions about what the audience probably wanted to see, resulting in an even more opaque and corrupt flow of information. Nope, no thanks.

I think the problem you have with ads is a you problem.
by kibwen | 2026-01-19 20:01:57+00:00
The Pentagon has a ton of restaurants inside. There's literally an official mall-style map of all of them right here, I count almost 30: https://www.whs.mil/Services-and-Information/DoDCC/

The pizza index is specifically about late-night pizza orders, when presumably most of those restaurants are closed (though some do appear to be open 24/7).
by shevy-java | 2026-01-19 20:02:11+00:00
It also fits Google's plan to create a surrogate web.

- AI was the first step (or actually, among the first five steps or so). CHECK.
- Google search has already been ruined. CHECK.
- Now robots.txt is used to weed out "old" websites. CHECK.

They do too much evil. But it is also our fault, because we became WAY too dependent on these mega-corporations.
by heisenbit | 2026-01-19 20:02:58+00:00
The smartphone is talking to a highly sensitive receiver fed by a large sensitive antenna listening carefully in the direction of the smartphone. The base station is transmitting back a carefully directed beam with orders of magnitude more power than a smartphone. The system is highly asymmetrical. Ohh and maybe there is not one but many base stations talking concurrently to the smartphone so that if one looses some data the flow is maintained.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-19 20:03:34+00:00
Great comment. To have democracy, you must have an educated, informed electorate. Religiosity is still very high in the US, and religiosity is negatively correlated with intelligence. Perhaps “democracy ready” levels can be inferred from other countries with more functional governance systems and their lower levels of religiosity as a sort of baseline.

Graphs About Religion: The Generational Collapse of American Religion - https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/the-generational-colla... - January 19th, 2026

15,000 churches could close this year amid religious shift in U.S - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46484284 - January 2026 (5 comments)

Gallup: Drop in U.S. Religiosity Among Largest in World - https://news.gallup.com/poll/697676/drop-religiosity-among-l... - November 13th, 2025
by mfashby | 2026-01-19 20:03:45+00:00
I also had an issue with the power button on my FP4, sadly it became stuck _on_ so the phone just bootlooped and was immediately unusable.

I ended up posting it for repair, over Christmas, which did take about 2 weeks but it was fully covered by the warranty.

I've successfully replaced the USB port after accidentally filling it with sand once, and that was trivial apart from UPS losing the package the first time. I really do appreciate the repairability, even if it could be better.
by shevy-java | 2026-01-19 20:03:47+00:00
Often one has to translate things into understanding by the animal at hand.

Monkeys learn quickly. Cows oddly enough can also learn quickly in social cohesion. So one cow figures something out; the others often quickly adapt and learn too. So the main step is the initial hurdle to overcome. There are lots of videos about this on youtube, starting with simple ones such as scratch-objects where cows rub against and it helps them scratch areas they can not easily reach on their own.