MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bisekrankas | 2026-01-23 07:44:44+00:00
I recently watched One Punch man which made me think about heroism, what a hero is and what it means. Saitama, and the top tier famous heroes in the story rarely risks anything. Their immense power just makes their actions an illusion of being heroic, theres rarely anything at stake for them, Saitama especially.

Mumen rider is an example of a true hero to me in that story, his only superpower being that he rides a bicycle, and he stands before certain destruction just to delay the monsters from hurting innocents for a few seconds. Risking everything.

By that definition, most superheroes, like the Avengers just look like power fantasies, does Spider-man or superman ever really risk anything substansial or acts in the face of certain destruction.
by matsemann | 2026-01-23 07:44:51+00:00
If I've previously misunderstood your point, copy pasting it doesn't clear anything up, no..?

I don't see why it's not a "classic CI bug". It's an easy trap to fall into, and I've seen it multiple times. Same with "action that runs on every commit to main to generate a file and push a new commit if the file changes", that suddenly gets stuck in a loop because the generated file contains a comment with the timestamp of creation.
by varshith17 | 2026-01-23 07:45:08+00:00
Concrete setup: (1) All secrets in 1Password/Bitwarden with CLI, (2) Agent sandbox with no env var access, (3) Wrapper scripts that fetch secrets on-demand and inject at runtime, (4) Context scrubbers that strip secrets before LLM sees logs.
Key insight: don't prevent agent access to secrets, prevent secrets from entering agent context/logs. Different problem, solvable with tooling.
by raffraffraff | 2026-01-23 07:45:31+00:00
You can write an agent.md file and gradually add to it as you develop the project. The reason junior developers get better is that the context goes from low to high over the time you spend working with them. Yes, "learning".

I've found that maintaining a file that is designed to increase the LLM's awareness of how I want to approach problems, how I build / test / ship code etc, leads to the LLM making fewer annoying assumptions.

Almost all of the annoying assumptions that the LLM makes are "ok, but not how I want it done". I've gotten into the habit of keeping track of these in a file. Like the 10 commandments for LLMs. Now, whenever I'm starting a new context I drop in an agent.md and tell it to read that before starting. Fella like watching Trinity learn how to fly a helicopter before getting into it.

It's still not perfect, but I'm doing waaaay more work now to get annoyed by the LLM's inability to "automatically learn" without my help.
by Markoff | 2026-01-23 07:45:47+00:00
Judging by his EUR currency the guy is from EU, so he HAS law available for him to protect himself.

Recital (71) of the GDPR

"The data subject should have the right not to be subject to a decision, which may include a measure, evaluating personal aspects relating to him or her which is based solely on automated processing and which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her, such as automatic refusal of an online credit application or e-recruiting practices without any human intervention."

https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/r...
by defrost | 2026-01-23 07:46:03+00:00
The world's an interesting place, bang in the middle of the period of getting routinely stopped crossing US spaces I was seperately contracted to them (US DoD) to do similar work in other parts of the world.

Seperately again some nice people in Finland gave us some really nice SAKO TRG's and spotting scopes in return for being the fastest to find some drums of waste they hid in a forest.

My father (still alive) is a few years older than M.J., they grew up together, being from the same part of the same state .. so it was handy having them going to bat for us when faecal matter contacted propellers ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Jeffery ).
Ask HN: How are you hiring for remote roles in the era of AI?
by keyraycheck | 2026-01-23 07:46:23+00:00
We are hiring for remote engineering roles and are finding it increasingly difficult to assess candidate quality now that AI tools can assist with take-home tasks, online tests, and even live remote interviews.

On one hand, AI is becoming part of everyday engineering work and we do not want to ban it outright. On the other, traditional signals seem weaker, and it is harder to evaluate core engineering fundamentals versus tool-assisted output.
by left-struck | 2026-01-23 07:47:07+00:00
It really depends on the audience though. I personally way prefer more realistic simulation like games, for example BeamNG. NFS has a broad appeal and is fun to play but it doesn’t feel anything like driving a real car. No offence though, I grew up with NFS underground 2 and it largely inspired my love of modified cars!

Edit: as a kid my friends and I dreamed of the day car games would have realistic and dynamic crash physics and well BeamNG gets pretty close.
by storystarling | 2026-01-23 07:48:47+00:00
The 5B text encoder feels disproportionate for a 2B video model. If the text portion is dominating your VRAM usage it really hurts the inference economics.

Have you tried quantizing the T5? In my experience you can usually run these encoders in 8-bit or even 4-bit with negligible quality loss. Dropping that memory footprint would make this much more viable for consumer hardware.
by queenkjuul | 2026-01-23 07:49:24+00:00
Hmm. I don't hate the idea by any stretch, but it low-key feels like an IR-2 gets you almost all the way there with a lot less money and effort. Not to mention i trust Boss to survive decades of touring.

Like i said i don't hate the idea. I think it's just a difficult market for this kind of idea.

I play guitar, I've built many pedals, i worked in music retail for the better part of a decade.

I think "one thing does all" pedals are hugely attractive to beginners, with good reason, and I even used to recommend such things to beginners specifically. When i was young, a digital "i can try on every effect ever made!" was an amazing value proposition--assuming the product was cheap enough for my parents to buy it for me. That was usually a Zoom 606 or DigiTech GP50 -- not anything anyone would want to gig with, but an amazing birthday present for a junior guitarist.

Anyway, the reason i never pursued building guitar gear as a job, even though i built plenty of gear i used personally, was mostly because of what i mentioned:

1. Reliability above all else. Charging professional prices for guitar gear means that shit better survive being stomped on 30x/week and a couple a three beers being spilled on in its lifetime.

2. TPB, no question. Use high quality switches, switching caps as needed. Silent, un-loaded transition between on and off is huge -- though, if you're offering delay effects, tails might be desired, the user should have an override, which would require buffered bypass instead. Just be sure to communicate which you use so people know (publishing raw input/output impedance is good; designing to work with vintage impedance-sensitive fuzz, even better)

3. I think most high end guitar players are hyper-picky, and a "Jack of all trades" unit doesn't appeal--the market for that kind of device is decidedly mid-market, and must be priced appropriately to succeed.

It's cool, though. I remember using some GNU audio real-time FX app and plugging my guitar straight into my SoundBlaster and having a great time, despite the unusable lag it all induced.

I think you could capture serious players by offering presets, IR import/copying a given input sound, of course durability, and multi-functionality: is this can replace one effect at a time? Cool I guess, but i have a pedalboard. Can this replace ALL my pedals, including routing and stacking? Vastly more appealing. If it's all software, stacking effects is probably already in the codebas3, and routing would be trivial.
by Intermernet | 2026-01-23 07:49:56+00:00
Almost all of Pratchett's greatest characters are highly flawed, morally complex and anti-heroic. This is the main point. This premise includes everyone from Cohen the barbarian, through Vimes, Rincewind, Susan, all the witches, Moist Von Lipwig, all the way to DEATH.

That's one of the main reasons that Terry's work comprehensively bridges the genre gap between "children's books" and "modern philosophy".
by jmward01 | 2026-01-23 07:50:12+00:00
I am a huge fan of the diversity argument. I think though that the proven negatives of fossil fuels and the massive difference in cost compared to renewables + batteries will end up making fossil fuels a niche at best in the not so near future. The goal is diversity, not maintaining every possible system. Wind, solar, geothermal, hydro, nuclear and batteries give us a pretty diverse system compared to oil+coal+natural gas that has dominated so far. My point was that fossil fuels are likely heading towards a tipping point where the already massive subsidies keeping them going won't be enough and they will likely collapse suddenly. I, for one, am not willing to continue to subsidize them just to maintain more diversity especially considering how much we subsidize them already.
by seec | 2026-01-23 07:50:54+00:00
I recently discovered that for some reason, macOS doesn't want to work with a mouse with a traditional scroll wheel. It just jumps erratically all over the place.

I tried using it because I forgot to charge my dumb magic mouse.
I'm sure it can be fixed in some ways, but I really shouldn't have to. The mouse works just fine when plugged into a Windows PC.
by array_key_first | 2026-01-23 07:51:30+00:00
The wombo combo is field that doesn't allow pasting (???) plus app that forgets where you are. So you can't paste, so you type the first few characters, dismiss the app to look at what the field should be, come back and boom - it's cleared out or, worse, you're on the home page. For some reason banks LOVE this.
by Metasyntactic | 2026-01-23 07:51:55+00:00
I wrote several of typescript's initial compilers. We didn't use red/green for a few reasons:

1. The js engines of the time were not efficient with that design. This was primarily testing v8 and chakra (IE/edge's prior engine).

2. Red/green takes advantage of many things .net provides to be extremely efficient. For example structs. These are absent in js, making things much more costly. See the document on red-green trees I wrote here for more detail: https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/blob/main/docs/compilers/De...

3. The problem domains are a bit different. In Roslyn the design is a highly concurrent, multi-threaded feature-set that wants to share immutable data. Ts/JS being single threaded doesn't have the same concerns. So there is less need to efficiently create an immutable data structure. So having it be mutable meant working well with the engines of the time, with sacrificing too much.

4. The ts parser is incremental, and operates very similarly to what I describe in for Roslyn in https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/blob/main/docs/compilers/De.... However, because it operates on the equivalent of a red tree, it does need to do extra work to update positions and parent pointers.

Tldr, different engine performance and different consumption patterns pushed us to a different model.
by pentamassiv | 2026-01-23 07:52:00+00:00
I find the Swift tooling very lacking. There's no way to lint dead code, there no way to auto format the files exactly as Xcode would do it and tell the linter those rules so that it doesn't lint your auto formatted code. Xcode project files are impossible to edit except with Xcode and Xcode often has issues and I need to manually empty the build folder. These are just some of the issues I remember
by nake89 | 2026-01-23 07:52:11+00:00
Slightly off-topic, but stuff like this does not just happen at Apple.

When Cyberpunk 2077 came out, my wife bought it with her credit card and gifted the game to me. It was fine at first. I even managed to play through the game. However when coming back to the game a few months later (to see all the bugfixes), it was gone. I contacted the (gog) and they said it was removed due to automatic fraud detection and that the balance had been paid back to the original credit card (my wife's card, she had obviously not noticed this in her bank statement).

Point being automatic fraud detection systems can wipe out stuff you purchased even months after the fact (or in some cases lock your account)... It feels kafkaesque.
by AlpineG | 2026-01-23 07:52:32+00:00
Not sure about your last point but in serial comms there are start and stop bits and sometimes parity. We generally used 8 data bits with no parity so in effect there are 10 bits per character including the stop and start bits. That pretty much matched up with file transfer speeds achieved using one of the good protocols that used sliding windows to remove latency. To calculate expected speed just divide baud by 10 to covert from bits per second to characters per second then there is a little efficiency loss due to protocol overhead. This is direct without modems once you introduce those the speed could be variable.
by yassien | 2026-01-23 07:53:49+00:00
Trust is now the rate limiter. It’s the layer between , what turns a plausible answer into something people repeat, share, or rely on. In a world where claims -statements that assert something about reality and could be true or false- are cheap and plentiful, the core problem ’ , it’s a in which claims get amplified, believed, and acted on before anyone has time to check them.
I built a CLI to make spec-driven development usable
by girish_r | 2026-01-23 07:54:11+00:00
Hi HN ,

I built SpecPilot to solve a problem I kept running into:
spec-first development sounds great, but most tools are either too heavy or too rigid for day-to-day dev work.

SpecPilot is a small, open-source CLI that helps you:
- define specs first (Markdown-based)
- keep them versioned alongside code
- scaffold projects and workflows from those specs

I built it for myself and my team, and decided to open-source it.

Website: https://specpilot.dev
GitHub: https://github.com/girishr/SpecPilot

Would really appreciate feedback on:
- whether this fits into your workflow
- what feels unnecessary
- what’s missing for real-world use

Happy to answer any questions.
by jaehong747 | 2026-01-23 07:54:58+00:00
In the AI Era, Do Startups Still Have an Edge?

Startups have always competed with big companies based on three gaps: speed, risk tolerance, and incentives. The question is whether these advantages still hold in the age of AI.

* Speed Gap: Still valid. Might even widen.
The bottleneck at big companies was never coding. It's approvals, alignment, and politics. AI makes implementation faster for everyone. But here's the thing—when the implementation bottleneck disappears, startups ship immediately. Big companies still get stuck at the decision-making bottleneck that comes before implementation. So the speed gap doesn't shrink. It might actually widen.

* Risk Gap: Still valid. AI doesn't change this.
Big companies only want to solve proven problems. If something fails, someone has to take the blame. Startups can bet on unproven problems. If they fail, they don't have much to lose anyway. This is about org structure and decision-making culture. AI isn't going to suddenly make big companies comfortable with risk.

* Incentive Gap: Still valid. Actually stronger now.
Employees at big companies get salaries. Founders get equity. This hasn't changed. If anything, AI makes it better for founders. Lower implementation costs mean you can get further with less capital. Less fundraising means less dilution. The math got better for founders.

All three gaps are still intact. AI hasn't weakened the structural advantages of startups. Some of them actually got stronger.
by crote | 2026-01-23 07:55:19+00:00
I couldn't care less when it runs, as long as it's done when I want to unload it.

The diswasher will by full after dinner, so I close it and press "start". It has to be done at the latest by next dinner. Does it run immediately, during the night, or during the day? Irrelevant, let the damn thing pick the best (cheapest) time.

Same with laundry. On average I run less than one load a day, so I'm happy if it finishes either when I wake up, when I get home from work, or when I am about to go to bed.
by smartmic | 2026-01-23 07:55:58+00:00
I spent a long time tinkering with the tooling, which meant that writing always took a back seat or was put off. As a transition, I decided to use Bear Blog [0] for writing, and when I eventually find a self-hosted solution that works for me, I'll just switch over. And Bear Blog is in line with my values, unlike so many other platforms.

[0]: https://bearblog.dev/
by PunchyHamster | 2026-01-23 07:56:57+00:00
If company bans you for a reason they are not going to disclose, they deserve all of the bad PR they get from it.

> Years ago I was involved in a service where we some times had to disable accounts for abusive behavior. I'm talking about obvious abusive behavior, akin to griefing other users.

But this isn't service where you can "grief other users". So that reason doesn't apply. It's purely "just providing a service" so only reason to be outright banned (not just rate limited) is if they were trying to hack the provider, and frankly "the vibe coded system misbehaving" is far more likely cause.

> Every once in while someone would take it personally and go on a social media rampage. They know the company can't or won't reveal the true reason they were banned, so they're virtually free to tell any story they want.

The company chose to arbitrarily some rules vaguely related to the ToS that they signed and decided that giving a warning is too much work, then banned their account without actually saying what was the problem. They deserve every bit of bad PR.

>> I'm glad this happened with this particular non-disabled-organization. Because if this by chance had happened with the other non-disabled-organization that also provides such tools... then I would be out of e-mail, photos, documents, and phone OS.

> I can't even understand what they're trying to communicate. I guess they're referring to Google?

They are saying getting banned with no appeal, warning, or reason given from service that is more important to their daily lives would be terrible, whether that's google or microsoft set of service or any other.
by ivan_gammel | 2026-01-23 07:57:13+00:00
I think we must make it clear that this is not related to AI at all, even if the product in question is AI-related.

It is a very common problem with modern marketing teams, that have zero empathy for customers (even if they have one, they will never push back on whatever insane demands come from senior management). This is why any email subscription management interface now is as bloated as a dead whale. If too many users unsubscribe, they just add one more category and “accidentally” opt-in everyone.

It’s a shame that Proton marketing team is just like every other one. Maybe it’s a curse of growing organization and middle management creep. The least we can do is push back as customers.
by tannhaeuser | 2026-01-23 07:57:16+00:00
When you had gone to a site using a deep link, Safari insists on autocompleting any URL in the domain to that link you used even if you just want to go to the top-level URL/index of that site. You have to type out the entire URL and add a space at the end or something (and that still doesn't work sometimes) to stop iOS doing that, which defeats the entire purpose of autocompletion. Btw switched off any autocorrection feature a long time ago. Still, I happen to mistype a lot compared to my old non-Apple phones (there was even an "it's not just you" article last year about it).

Apple needs to spend an entire release cycle to unfuck text entry and completion. However, with their qa lately (or lack thereof) they'd only manage to make it worse. The sad thing is they're still better than the alternatives, all things considered.
by softbuilder | 2026-01-23 07:58:05+00:00
Now do Google. A few that immediately come to mind:

* Accounts: Can't use a GSuite address for Youtube, Nest, or any other Alphabet offering. Never explained. 15 years of this.

* Sheets: Hide the sum option in the menu bar. After digging, you find the Summa character and click on it. Oh, it's a menu of functions, not sum.

* Search.
by seec | 2026-01-23 07:58:13+00:00
Haha, same. I actually prefer the layout and organization capacity of Music (I was an iTunes fan back in the iPod days), but there are so many things that don't work like you would expect them to or just plain bugs that it's too tiring.

Whenever I would enter a supermarket without network access, Music would just stop streaming after one song, no buffering. Spotify handled it just fine.
Even the Spotify remote functionality is better and snappier than the godawful Music Remote. That is a separate app, because for some reason they can't integrate that functionality in the main app for their own hardware.

Apple is really in free fall; I don't think any of the top dogs actually use their stuff or care about it.
It still looks good, and the base is strong, but now the cracks that started appearing a few years ago are becoming too big to ignore.
by sumedh | 2026-01-23 07:58:20+00:00
This works:
$ZAI_ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=xxx
$ZAI_ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN=xxx

alias "claude-zai"="ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=$ZAI_ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN=$ZAI_ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN claude"

Then you can run `claude`, hit your limit, exit the session and `claude-zai -c` to continue (with context reset, of course).

Someone gave me that command a while back.
by masklinn | 2026-01-23 07:59:48+00:00
> Plus, some major XML libraries, like lxml in Python, are extremely unintuitive in their implementation of DOM structures and manipulation.

Lxml, or more specifically its inspiration ElementTree is specifically not a DOM. It was designed for what it called “data-style” XML documents where elements would hold either text or sub-elements but not both, which is why mixed-content interactions are a chore (lxml augments the API by adding more traversal axis but elementtree does not even have that, it’s a literal tree of elements). effbot.org used to have a page explaining its simplified infoset before Fredrik passed and registration lapsed, it can be accessed through archive.org.

That means lxml is, by design, not the right tool to interact with mixed-content documents. But of course the issue is there isn’t really a right tool for that, as to my knowledge nobody has bothered building a fast DOM library for Python.
by curtisblaine | 2026-01-23 08:00:26+00:00
I make it clear that AI is not allowed at the remote coding assessment and I enforce it by asking frequent questions on the code they type. It's nearly impossible to maintain a "natural" back and forth conversation when you're copying code you don't understand fully. Of course they can mirror my questions to an AI, but that normally introduces unnatural lag in their answers. I think I rarely get false negatives, and if I do I don't care - if the candidate is able to use an AI and sustain informative communication at the same time, he's undistinguishable from a "good" engineer for all intent and purposes. I don't know how often I get false positives, but again I don't care - if the candidate is not able to sustain a conversation while coding, he's not a remote coworker I want in my team, regardless of whether he's using AI or not.