MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zahlman | 2026-01-21 16:55:58+00:00
When I use the search function for topics I'm interested in and encounter Show HN that way, it's dominantly slop (and has been for most of the time I've had an account). The actual Show HN page is not much better.

The submissions that actually get upvoted are indeed pretty good. I think it really is the filtering effect. Standards are whatever, since it's clear that a lot of these submissions are close to one-shot (and even when they would have required some refinement, people don't actually push a meaningful commit history) with an obnoxious LLM house style promotional README.

Often the submission also comes across LLM-generated, including heavy use of Markdown formatting. It gives the impression that people learn that HN is a place to promote themselves, but don't realize how blatantly obvious it is that they didn't actually do anything significant beyond thinking of something for Claude to do[1] and don't care about learning how the site works.

[1] I'm not claiming that work done with coding agents will always be blatantly obvious. I'm claiming that this is the default result for people who don't put in any effort, and lack of effort correlates with lack of understanding.
by tchalla | 2026-01-21 16:57:48+00:00
>> For the people that don't know the topic:

>> - yes, German taxpayers are indeed funding bicycle lanes in foreign countries

Just for people to know this, we are talking about 44Mn€ (20Mn€ + 24Mn€) of money in Peru as the commentator mentions below. It is wasteful but it has practically no effect on Germany. There are 1000x things that Germany does within Germany that moves the needle more than the talking about this rounding error. But that requires introspection and ownership of responsibility - both alien to the country’s normal compliance attitude of working.
by cml123 | 2026-01-21 16:58:04+00:00
I think many people who grew up before cell phones remember phone numbers from the past. I just thought about it and can list the phone numbers of 3 houses that were on my childhood street in the early 2000s + another 5 that were friends in the area. I remember at least a handful of cell phone numbers from the mid to late 2000s as friends started to get those; some of them are still current. On the other hand, I don't know the number of anyone I've met in the last 15 years besides my wife, and haven't tried to.
by rdiddly | 2026-01-21 16:58:12+00:00
I can't figure out if I'm at the tail end of adoption, or the leading edge of disillusionment. I guess being able to say where you are in relation to the herd, depends on knowing where the herd is and which way it's headed. Which I don't know. All I know is, it seems to take longer to write the prompt, wait for the output, and then verify/correct the output, iteratively, than to just write the goddamn code. And said process, in addition to being equal or longer, is also boring as fuck the entire time, and deeply annoying about half the time. Nobody is pressuring me to use it, but if this is the future, then I'm ready to change to a different career where I actually enjoy the work.
by nayuki | 2026-01-21 16:58:17+00:00
I hope you're comfortable with changing literally every number in society to base 12. My house cost $42A765_12. My SSN is 399-A4-5B66 and phone number is (289) 1A5-138B. The distance to the moon is 50A693_12 feet. I used the additional symbols A and B as per usual notation, but it's okay if society agrees on some other symbols for the extra two digit values.

If you don't make the base of the number system agree with the base used for converting between units, then conversion becomes so much harder. For example, it's not immediately apparent that 204 inches is 17 feet, but it is immediately apparent that 204 cm is 2.04 m. Furthermore, when the base disagrees with conversion factors, you run into issues like variable-length fields - like, "2ft 9in", "2ft 10in" (notice the inches transitions from one digit to two digits).
by zahlman | 2026-01-21 16:58:27+00:00
> well-crafted

IMX, the people submitting LLM slop projects are also, overwhelmingly, making LLM slop Show HN posts. And come across as unlikely to change, or even recognize the faults of the slop they submit.

Which is really not any different from what I've seen on Stack Overflow, or GitHub, or many other places.
by geerlingguy | 2026-01-21 16:58:46+00:00
I was able to see the development card in person at VCF Midwest last year; it's a very neat project! The version he had at VCFMW was in a transparent plastic case[1], which looks even better than the IBM-inspired design of the one on this page.

[1] https://youtu.be/hF0NKvmQmVA?t=47 (I couldn't find a good picture elsewhere)
by SunshineTheCat | 2026-01-21 16:58:49+00:00
> universities, and a free press—are the backbone of democratic life...

The self-importance and arrogance of some people in universities never ceases to amaze me.

I'm not saying they don't have value; doctors, nurses, lawyers, wouldn't exist without a university.

But calling it the "backbone of democratic life" is about as pretentious as it comes.

The reality is that someone bagging groceries with no degree offers more value to "democratic life" in a week than some college professors do in their entire career.
by snowmobile | 2026-01-21 16:59:06+00:00
I'm not saying you should allow all your devs access to the prod server in practice (security in layers and all that). I'm saying, if you wouldn't trust a person to be competent and aligned enough with your goals to have that access in principle, why would you trust them to write code for you? Code that's going to run on that very same server you're so protective about. Sure you may scrutinize every line they write in detail, but then what's the point of hiring them?
by igsomething | 2026-01-21 16:59:24+00:00
Hey, first I want to say that Oban has been a lifesaver for me and it is the tool I miss the most from the Elixir ecosystem when doing work in Python. Thanks so much and congrats on the release.

I have one question: are there any plans for interop between Oban and the new Django Tasks[1]?

[1] https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/6.0/ref/tasks/
by pyeri | 2026-01-21 16:59:30+00:00
If bots are being used to create chaos in society, it really isn't possible that the platforms themselves are just innocent bystanders here. It is technically possible and quite easy for the platforms to block bots if they really wanted to, in fact it's actually in their best interest to have human only organic activity as it increases the platform's credibility and reduces network cost. If they're still letting bots operate and actually post content on their platforms, they're likely in cahoots with the politicians.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2026-01-21 16:59:31+00:00
> That sounds like I can just go by "yeah, feels like I'm faster", which I thought exactly was parent wanted to avoid...

No it doesn't, but perhaps I assumed too much context. Like, you probably want to look up the Quantified Self movement, as they do lots of social science like research on themselves.

> Which seems to indicate that there would be a suitable way for a single individual to be able to measure this by themselves, which is why I asked.

I honestly think pick a metric you care about and then flip a coin to use an LLM or not is the best you're gonna get within the constraints.
Genie AI Is Hiring a Founding Engineer/ CTO(AI Social Media Copywriting Systems)
by paulhilse | 2026-01-21 16:59:32+00:00
Genie AI is an early-stage product that generates social media content using AI. We focus on multi-frame posts like carousels and threads, creating content that maintains structure, pacing, and brand voice rather than generic outputs.

This role is about designing the core AI system that powers copy generation. It is not an infra-only role, not a prompt-only role, and not about single-line captions. The work involves translating persuasion and human judgment into scalable AI systems.

The position starts as fractional/consulting with a clear path to a full-time leadership or CTO role for the right person.

## Responsibilities
- Design and build AI systems for multi-frame social media copy
- Implement pipelines, routing, constraints, and evaluation layers
- Work directly with LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.)
- Diagnose and fix why AI outputs fail at a system level
- Define quality standards for shippable outputs
- Collaborate with product and strategy as the system evolves

## Who we’re looking for
- Experience building AI systems for multi-frame social media content
- Ability to preserve hooks, pacing, and narrative flow across sequential posts
- Can improve output quality through system design, not just prompts
- Able to build production-level systems
- Understand persuasion, copywriting, and human judgment in addition to LLM mechanics
- Take ownership of outcomes and quality

## Not a fit if
- AI experience is limited to single captions, blogs, or generic content
- You focus only on backend infrastructure or DevOps
- You mainly identify as a prompt engineer
- You need very detailed specs before starting work
- You are only interested in short-term freelance projects

## Technical requirements
- Production software experience
- Hands-on with LLM APIs
- Experience building internal tools, products, or SaaS
- Can design modular systems with evaluation logic and feedback loops

## How to apply
Submit a short Loom video including:
- Your background
- An AI system you’ve built for multi-frame or sequential social content
- Your experience with LLMs
- Your answer to: Why does most AI-generated copy feel generic, and how would you design a system to fix it?

Applications without a Loom video or a relevant system example will not be considered.
by cess11 | 2026-01-21 16:59:49+00:00
Estonia is the easiest option, they've aimed explicitly for attracting foreigners starting companies in their jurisdiction without actually moving there. I'm not aware of any similar regulations elsewhere in the EU, typically you need at least one local on the board or something like that.

If you squeeze it you could probably get down to 3-400 euros per year starting from the second year (due to one-time fees the first year) if you do your own books and taxes and whatnot, but just paying upfront for keeping things neat according to the local bureaucracy is likely a kind of convenience you'd want.

I'd say you should start buying some services from european infra and compute providers and see if your ideas make money. You can get away with very little if you get some storage and processing time through e.g. Scaleway or Hetzner, and with a bit of fiddling I expect them to sell to you regardless of whether you have a company or not. If you start making money enter some Hetzner auction and get real hardware, cost will be predictable and typically you get a lot for the money.
by gbnwl | 2026-01-21 16:59:53+00:00
It’s also just fluff and straight up wrong at parts. This wasn’t checked by a human or at least a human who understands enough to catch inaccuracies. For example for “Plan-then-execute” (which is presented as some sort of novel pattern rather than literally just how Claude Code works right out of the box) it says:

“Plan phase – The LLM generates a fixed sequence of tool calls before seeing any untrusted data

Execution phase – A controller runs that exact sequence. Tool outputs may shape parameters, but cannot change which tools run”

But of course the agent doesn’t plan an exact fixed sequence of tool calls and rigidly stick to it, as it’s going to respond to the outputs which can’t be known ahead of time. Anyone who’s watched Claude work has seen this literally every day.

This is just more slop making it to the top of HN because people out of the loop want to catch up on agents and bookmark any source that seems promising.
by throwawoy | 2026-01-21 17:00:00+00:00
I have managed to crack 4 words out of the top 10:
- #5 6f18270a4ed02a134851520202a104a33721423c35b7f5421e0081ec732793b1 - sex

- #6 8ababd402810b2a412142dcc71ea3083ccbab886c48a48948d286eee161c72ad - hash of fedb9943d8c4c51392815a187ce4ba732c539038fd28b4bda8543e4616d767c1

- #7 4ef69019c65909ffbb470597e3c5afe05ea8a866a0d3b9f950f0bcf057924b52 - hello world

- #10 dad6326d44d6f94c5668be9e5a5b762415fc2a3097d47742a7cf62d37e5e8287 - hash of 8ababd402810b2a412142dcc71ea3083ccbab886c48a48948d286eee161c72ad

The first one is probably brute force by a single person since it is at a round 10,000.
by kianN | 2026-01-21 17:00:12+00:00
I actually conducted a similar analysis back in December. I was more focused on discovering the topics that most resonated with the community but ended up digging into this phenomenon as well (specifically focusing on the probability of getting over 100 upvotes)

The really interesting thing is that the number of posts were growing exponentially by year, but it was only in 2025 that the probability of landing on the front page dropped meaningfully. I attributed this to macroeconomic climate, and found some (shaky) evidence of voting rings based on the topics that had a unusually high likelihood of gaining 10 points and an unusually low likelihood of reaching 100 points given that they reached 10.

Analysis here if anyone is interested: https://blog.sturdystatistics.com/posts/show_hn/
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-21 17:00:32+00:00
Hmm, less ideal.

> A group of 144 lawmakers put forward a parliamentary motion to ask the EU Court of Justice to rule on whether the agreement can be applied before full ratification by all member states and whether its provisions restrict the EU's ability to set environmental and consumer health policies. The court typically takes around two years to deliver such opinions.

Hopefully the court will take a look around what's going on the world, and get a little bit of push to act a bit faster, although hopefully not compromising on "environmental and consumer health policies", that'd be a blunder of it's own.
by johannes1234321 | 2026-01-21 17:00:46+00:00
"Planets" were public feed aggregators collecting RSS (RDF, Atom) feeds for blogs on a specific topic, so you can go to a "Planet" and find all recent blogs by all people from that community. Thus a place to discover recent things, without following everybody individually.

In this case it is referencing https://planet.gnome.org/ which collects many Gnome people's blogs. And the statements tells us that the subscription was sulfated, so users of "Planet Gnome" don't have to do anything, but may continue consuming from there.
by nayuki | 2026-01-21 17:01:05+00:00
Possibly yes. But every implementation of base-60 I've ever seen is actually implemented as alternating base-6 and base-10.

A true base-60 would have 60 unique symbols for the different digital values, much like how in our set of ten digits {0123456789}, none of the symbols have any rhyme or pattern with respect to the others.

Good luck memorizing the ~1800 entries of the base-60 multiplication table.
by surgical_fire | 2026-01-21 17:01:13+00:00
> assumption other people are partisan.

That's what you are doing. I am pretty left-leaning myself, if you look at my post history.

Twitter was a notorious toxic dump long before Musk acquired it. Nothing in what I described was a lie.

The blue checkmark was supposed to be something that meant "account is verified, person is who they say they are". It was weaponized by the platform itself to mean "this person has no naughty opinions". Now I ask, was this an improvement?

Now it is actually more straightforward. "Blue checkmark means person gives money to Twitter on a monthly basis". It is still a toxic dump, it just smells different.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-21 17:01:13+00:00
> Dynamic source NAT is literally a set of stateful firewall rules that have an action to modify src_ip and src_port in a packet header, and add the mapping to a connecting tracking table so that return packets can be identified and then mapped on the way back.

Yes, and that _provides security_. Thus NAT provides security. You can say "well really that's a stateful firewall providing security because that's how you implement NAT" and you would be technically correct but rather missing the point that turning NAT on has provided the user with security benefits thus being forced to turn it on is preventing a less secure configuration. Thus in common parlance, IPv4 is more secure because of NAT.

I will acknowledge that NAT is not the only player here. In a world that wasn't suffering from address exhaustion ISPs wouldn't have any particular reason to force NAT on their customers thus there would be nothing stopping you from turning it off. In that scenario consumer hardware could well ship with less secure defaults (ie NAT disabled, stateful firewall disabled). So I suppose it would not be unreasonable to observe that really it is usage of IPv4 that is providing (or rather forcing) the security here due to address exhaustion. But at the end of the day the mechanism providing that security is NAT thus being forced to use NAT is increasing security.

Suppose there were vehicles that handled buckling your seatbelt for you and those that were manual (as they are today). Someone says "auto seatbelts improve safety" and someone else objects "actually it's wearing the seatbelt that improves safety, both auto and manual are themselves equivalent". That's technically correct but (as technicalities tend to go) entirely misses the point. Owning a car with an auto seatbelt means you will be forced to wear your seatbelt at all times thus you will statistically be safer because for whatever reason the people in this analogy are pretty bad about bothering to put on their seatbelts when left to their own devices.

> in fact, there are ways to implement SNAT that do not properly validate that traffic is coming from an established connection; which, ironically, we routinely rely on to make things like STUN/TURN work!

There are ways to bypass the physical lock on my front door. Nonetheless I believe locking my deadbolt increases my physical security at least somewhat, even if not by as much as I'd like to imagine it does.
by account42 | 2026-01-21 17:01:26+00:00
Not true, 2001:1868:209:FFFD:0013:50FF:FE12:3456 provides some amount of geographic information about the target that the other addresses do not. No firewall is going to protect you from that. Of course that is only going to matter in the specific scenario where your internal IP is leaked but the attacker has not other way of getting your external IP.
by huntergemmer | 2026-01-21 17:01:34+00:00
That's a cool project! Just checked out the workbench. I should be upfront though: ChartGPU is currently focused on traditional 2D charts (line, bar, scatter, candlestick, etc.), not graph/network visualization with nodes and edges. That said, the WebGPU rendering patterns would translate well to force-directed graphs. The scatter renderer already handles thousands of instanced points - extending that to edges wouldn't be a huge leap architecturally.

Is graph visualization something you'd want as part of ChartGPU, or would a separate "GraphGPU" type library make more sense? Curious how you're thinking about it.
by nathan_compton | 2026-01-21 17:01:36+00:00
This is such a weird idea. Everything is political because there are no universally agreed upon values. Humans literally do not always agree on what the purpose of society is, what is good and what is bad, how much power we should have over one another and nature. And, as far as I can tell, neither god nor philosophy seems willing to descend from heaven in order to resolve our differences. Thus, we are stuck discussing things amongst ourselves and deciding how to move forward, a process called politics.
by zahlman | 2026-01-21 17:02:23+00:00
> If you read the old explanations I linked to, you'll see that the original plan was to turn this system into software that anyone can participate in, likely as a new way to earn karma: users who discover second-chance links that hit the jackpot (that is, which interest the community) would get karma along with the original submitter. That is still the plan! We're just slow.

Did this happen?
by egeozcan | 2026-01-21 17:02:25+00:00
I've been developing an rts using coding agents https://egeozcan.github.io/unnamed_rts/ - lots of borrowed ideas from red alert.

it's super buggy and yet doesn't work on mobile but it's been my childhood dream to make an rts and I have something I can have fun adding different dynamics.

it's much more fun to watch the agent struggle developing an AI instead of play the game itself (tried that at the beginning too).
by visarga | 2026-01-21 17:02:29+00:00
> it's for the same reason that construction workers wear hard hats in environments that will eventually be safe for children.

Good response, but more practically, when you are developing a project you allow the agent to do many things on that VM, but when you deliver code it has to actually pass tests. The agent working is not being tested live, but the code delivered is tested before use. I think tests are the core of the new agent engineering skill - if you can have good tests you automated your human in the loop work to a large degree. You can only trust a code up to the level of its testing. LGTM is just vibes.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-21 17:02:37+00:00
Indeed, force isn't required, just have all EU countries divest of US treasuries and invest in Eurobonds. Invest Eurobonds in industries to achieve US independence. Europe holds ~$8T in US treasuries. Why continue to invest this capital in US debt being used to wage war and provide tax cuts for the wealthy when it could be used to improve Europe?

This will also force the US to fix its fiscal policy to avoid a debt spiral as the cost to borrow increases. To provide cheap credit to the US enables a bully who spends with no responsibility.

https://usafacts.org/government-spending/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bond_vigilante
by BirAdam | 2026-01-21 17:02:39+00:00
On the Intel side of things, Skylake retired VGA support.

Modern UEFI implementations do not universally support BIOS, which means things like https://github.com/FlyGoat/csmwrap are required.

Also, timing problems are a major reason for the transition to "WinTel" rather than PC-compatible... along with things like 8bit ISA support.
by bilekas | 2026-01-21 17:03:00+00:00
This comment from e98cuenc seems extremely prescient.

> Everybody loves to hate BendingSpoon, but there is a lesson here. They consistently rewrite the code of their acquisitions with a tiny team, fire everybody and are able to maintain and improve the product. They basically skip everything but engineers, and they are kept at a minimum. Feedback from users is the products they take over 1) become more expensive, 2) they ship features waaaay faster.
It looks like next generation private equity, and my guess is more houses will start copying them