MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ecshafer | 2026-01-20 12:57:17+00:00
I had some take home exams in Physics that you could use internet, books, anything except other people (but that was honor code based). Those were some of the hardest exams I ever took in my life. Pages and pages of mathematical derivations. An LLM with how they can do a pretty good job at constructing mathematics, would actually have solved that issue pretty well.
Ask HN: Call for open community parallel verification system for desktop apps
by zameermfm | 2026-01-20 12:57:21+00:00
Idea is to have a open trust registry for unsigned binaries at consumer scale.
We have tauri, react native, electron based desktop apps coming from every corner right now. AI coding would have has multiplied the Apps. Last time I developed an App in 2023, it took 99$ per year to get the warnings off the mac app and for windows, I didn't have money get the notarization. I know we cant develop an open and free signing system. But we could have a wikipedia style community built and driven project for having desktop apps with a scanning, reporting malwares and other security features. I checked, no any such registry exists.
by emilburzo | 2026-01-20 12:57:25+00:00
I tried this approach for a while, but I really wanted it to be able to do anything (install system packages, build/run Docker containers, the works).

With these powers there's a lot less back-and-forth with me running commands, copying the output, pasting it to Claude, etc.

I'm sure you've had the case where you had to instruct someone to do something (e.g. playing tech support with family, helping another engineer, etc). While it helps the other person learn, it feels soooo slow vs just doing it yourself :) And since I don't have to teach the agent, I think this approach makes sense.
by worksonmine | 2026-01-20 12:57:28+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.

I finally jumped the gun almost a decade ago because I had too many Electron apps for my cheap laptop to handle and had to scale down to be able to get anything done without freezes.

At first the modal editing was difficult but it clicked immediately and these days I'm handicapped in normal typing. I still type vim motions by accident in Libreoffice which is the last program I use that doesn't support modal editing.

It has nothing to do with looking smart, I don't care what others think. Could it be your own coping mechanism for feeling dumb about not being able to use it?
by cakehonolulu | 2026-01-20 12:57:56+00:00
As in, getting the PCIem shim to show up on a VM (Like, passthrough)? If that's what you're asking for, then; it's something being explored currently. Main challenges come from the subsystem that has to "unbind" the device from the host and do the reconfiguration (IOMMU, interrupt routing... and whatnot). But from my initial gatherings, it doesn't look like an impossible task.
by bradley13 | 2026-01-20 12:58:24+00:00
I feel the same way. I retired last summer, but that only means that I found a place that needs me, where I can work part time without worrying too much about money.

I remember, decades ago, reading an article about some African politician visiting the UK. He was given a tour, which included some of the social housing: people sitting around with with their housing and food paid for. His comment? "How horrible!".

He found it horrible, because - from his perspective - they had no role in society, nothing to do, no purpose to their existence.
by arter45 | 2026-01-20 12:58:42+00:00
Game fixing is a known crime in many jurisdictions. If you are a football/baseball/soccer player and you bet your team will lose, you have an obvious way to drastically increase your odds (especially if you are a top player) - playing bad. Other people are completely unaware of this deal.

Having fire insurance and burning your car is in most jurisdictions illegal. Yes, you should be paid if your car is burned, but if you do it intentionally, you are obviously increasing the chances of getting paid, unless of course the insurance company finds out you did it.
And so on.

I don't see why these situations would be illegal and, say, betting against the survival of a regime when you're actually working against it, would be legal.

Things are even harder if you coordinate multiple people. For example, let's say 100 people bet that there will be a riot in town X by the end of the year. X is normally a quiet town so most people bet against. These 100 people bet this will happen 10 minutes before actually starting a riot themselves. Yes, someone could observe last minute trends and might predict reality, but last minute or huge bets are not necessarily true - someone could bet on random things for a variety of reasons. So it's not even useful as a way to get insights into the reality.
by mx-Liu123 | 2026-01-20 12:59:41+00:00
Author's Note:

A few technical details for those looking to try AgentCommander:

Why Gemini/Qwen CLI?: I chose these as backends because they offer robust directory isolation. I tried integrating Claude Code, but found it difficult to restrict its file-system reach. Qwen CLI is a great alternative if you want an OpenAI-compatible API with a generous free tier (2,000 requests/day).

Environment: Ensure you have Python 3.10+ and the latest Node.js for the Gemini CLI. If you see Node version warnings, please upgrade to the latest LTS to avoid CLI instability.

Verification: You can audit the agent's "thought process" by running gemini -r inside any generated experiment directory. It’s crucial for verifying that the agent isn't hallucinating its research logic.

I'm currently in Singapore (SGT). I'll stay online for as long as I can to discuss architecture or implementation details, but I'll catch up on all pending questions first thing in the morning!

Repo: https://github.com/mx-Liu123/AgentCommander
by psychoslave | 2026-01-20 12:59:57+00:00
Reliable is only slightly related to be maintenable.

ECU embedding makes the whole system more complexe. That is not necessary absolutely a bad thing, but the trade-off is different. And there is on top of that a different topic which is how electronics are used to enforce obsolescence and make harder to maintain the vehicle without special equipment of the specific firm. This can also be enforced with more analogical stuffs of course, but electronic devices are more likely to be used this way.
by fatherwavelet | 2026-01-20 13:00:13+00:00
I still use my Quest after a year but it is mostly on the web and youtube 360. youtube 360 is actually quite cool given the fact no one really makes content for it.

I have no interest in games and anything inside Horizon is just not impressive.

I just don't understand how Meta spent this much money to get so little in return. VRChat has immense worlds compared to anything in Horizon. Everything in Horizon is just so amateur looking and lacking any kind of imagination.

I got the Quest because I wanted to try developing for VR but that is a total nightmare. Horizon/Unity/Unreal are all different forms of a nightmare. I suspect this is actually the problem. Development is just too hard to do much of anything interesting. Anything interesting I have made has been in vanilla javascript/three js/react three fiber.

Vision Pro level resolution + webxr I think has a huge amount of potential. I even like wearing the Quest. The physical act of wearing the headset is really no issue to me at all. That was what I figured I would get tired of.

The Quest is ultimately an amazing piece of hardware with amazingly bad software.
by azzarcher | 2026-01-20 13:00:14+00:00
I am doing similar experiments for in-browser user testing, where the user is basically Claude. Incredible results with this simple pipeline:
1. Claude tests a feature
2. Notes down all friction and pain points
3. Convert those as a prioritized todo list
4. Use Claude Code or similar to action the todo list

It has some friction in-between steps 3 and 4, but nothing that can't be solved without running `claude --chrome` via CLI instead of the Chrome extension.
by encyclopedism | 2026-01-20 13:00:52+00:00
I don't understand why this point is NOT getting across to so many on HN.

LLM's do not think, understand, reason, reflect, comprehend and they never shall.
I have commented elsewhere but this bears repeating

If you had enough paper and ink and the patience to go through it, you could take all the training data and manually step through and train the same model. Then once you have trained the model you could use even more pen and paper to step through the correct prompts to arrive at the answer. All of this would be a completely mechanical process. This really does bear thinking about. It's amazing the results that LLM's are able to acheive. But let's not kid ourselves and start throwing about terms like AGI or emergence just yet. It makes a mechanical process seem magical (as do computers in general).

I should add it also makes sense as to why it would, just look at the volume of human knowledge (the training data). It's the training data with the mass quite literally of mankind's knowledge, genius, logic, inferences, language and intellect that does the heavy lifting.
by Piraty | 2026-01-20 13:01:12+00:00
> Web development is hard.

no it's not.

you all make it hard by bloating your sites with Jenga tower abstractions for styling, needlessly load content dynamically via Jenga tower javascript libraries that pulls complexity into frontend and most of the time puts unnecessary load on the content generator ("backend") too.
I don't know a lof of sites where that actually makes sense, as web === text.

When html5 came about, along with CSS3, it was such a big leaf in terms of ease of use and accessibility. I argue that what most websites do to my taste nowadays can be achieved by early-stage html5+css3+ a few svg.

Nowadays on about 50% of websites it have to
* enable 3rd-party JS just to get the text
* enable massive amounts of 3rd-party JS to get the images
* enable remote fonts just to grok your pathetic icon-only menu or even spot the 'search' feature (it's not even a 'button' most of the time) because you didn't care to use a proper <img> or <svg>
by gwd | 2026-01-20 13:01:25+00:00
> It's shocking that Apple hasn't done this trick yet when everyone else started doing it years ago.

Is it a coincidence that they started exploring this once they've been forbidden from collecting the "Apple Tax"? This is exactly why I've been arguing against preventing Apple from collecting money from developers: the laws of capitalism will force them to collect money somewhere else, and putting ads in their app store is the obvious next step.
by sdoering | 2026-01-20 13:01:59+00:00
> I tend to need to solve All The Problems before I can do any self-care

I can so relate. I once read something that shifted my perspective a bit and helped me start the work of learning to better care for myself.

It was basically somebody talking/writing about the safety instructions when taking a flight. They tell you that in case of an emergency, when the o2 masks drop down to first put your ownmas on, before helping others. Because you are no help, if you loose conciousness.

This image/metaphor , to first put my own mask on, so that I can ensure, I will be able to help others without falling over, was what helped me start this process.

I sadly can't remember if it was Brené Brown or where I originally read that.
by InfinityByTen | 2026-01-20 13:02:06+00:00
Thank you for this!
I was really happy with one launcher that I configured probably 8-9 years ago and then moving to the new phone meant everything just worked (^tm ?) with normal phone porting.
Reading the headline made me freak out for 2 min. I really really do not like UI muscle memory being changed for something like my phone.
by intended | 2026-01-20 13:02:17+00:00
I do agree that any ban is of limited future utility if kids go from a safe kiddie pool into deep waters that are lethal for a majority of the population.

Still, dismissing a ban is throwing the baby out with the bath water. (I couldn't help myself with the water analogies. Sorry)

Free speech is the cornerstone of our ability to debate and understand the shape of reality. It remains the best way forward. The issue is that the modern attacks on the market place of ideas are designed to circumvent our intuitions and safeguards.

Today control is achieved by overwhelming the network and users. An Abundance of privately generated content instead of central regulation and restriction of content.

However the threat is the same- reducing the ability for humans to engage in fair debate.

If you want a better environment for kids to be able to transition to, we need to triage.

1) Ensure an even playing field. This means regulation, which by nature will be censorial, as well as the creation of independently funded news and information bodies.

2) Transparency and Data from tech firms. When we find out a substance is harmful, and have the data to prove it, we make rules to mitigate those harms.

3) Valuing informational health and hygene. Junk food used to be dominant globally, and today we joke about avocado toast and the latest health food fad. People shifted consumption habits when costs and benefits were made clear.
by keepamovin | 2026-01-20 13:02:49+00:00
There's something to that, but I don't think in reality it's a thing: you don't do surgery in the public bathroom. The keys to the kingdom secrets? Of course not. Everything else? That's why we have scoped, short-lived tokens.

I just think this whole thing is overblown.

If there's a risk in any situation it's similar, probably less, than running any library you installed of a registry for your code. And I think that's a good comparison: supply chain is more important than AI chain.

You can consider AI-agents to be like the fancy bathrooms in a high end hotel, whereas all that code you're putting on your computer? That's the grimy public lavatory lol.
by crabmusket | 2026-01-20 13:03:54+00:00
What is the consensus on Claude Code's built-in sandboxing?

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/sandboxing#sandboxing

> Claude Code includes an intentional escape hatch mechanism that allows commands to run outside the sandbox when necessary. When a command fails due to sandbox restrictions (such as network connectivity issues or incompatible tools), Claude is prompted to analyze the failure and may retry the command with the dangerouslyDisableSandbox parameter.

The ability for the agent itself to decide to disable the sandbox seems like a flaw. But do I understand correctly that this would cause a pause to ask for the user's approval?
by virtujoel | 2026-01-20 13:03:56+00:00
>I suppose accessibility can be considered "features", but I'm strongly suspecting that the overcomplex button has worse accessibility.

Accessibility is incredibly hard to get right, particularly managing screen reader announcements, focus management and form validation. I recently had to build a website that met WCAG 2.1 requirements and it was made significantly easier by using React Aria (https://react-aria.adobe.com/) which is a similarly complex headless component library. To get an idea of the work that goes into making an accessible component, see their blog post about making a combo box where they test 4 different screen readers x 4 different browsers: https://react-aria.adobe.com/blog/building-a-combobox

(I haven't used Radix so I'm unsure how well they do a11y)
by firasd | 2026-01-20 13:04:09+00:00
I noticed something in Claude across all product surfaces

There's a bug in that it can't output smart quotes “like this”

Sonnet, Opus et al think they output it but something in the pipeline is rewriting it

https://github.com/firasd/vibesbench/blob/main/docs/2026/A/t...

Try it in Claude Code and you'll see what I mean! Very weird
by jamessb | 2026-01-20 13:04:21+00:00
> I think this phrasing alone says a lot more about you than anything you typed.

I'm not sure it says anything about them: "inferior court" is the term of art for any court whose decisions can be appealed to a higher court [1]. It's not a derogatory term; 'inferior' is just the Latin for 'lower'.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lower_court
by techdmn | 2026-01-20 13:04:32+00:00
I identify very strongly with this. More than once in my career I have gotten feedback along the lines of:

> We really like your work! How can you help other engineers be more like you?

The thing I think (but usually don't say) is:

> You realize I'm like this because I often work directly against your instruction in order to satisfy my personal sense of professional pride and responsibility?
by mahnmut | 2026-01-20 13:04:34+00:00
> So is this what the South teaches in school?

> Does your history mention that Texas was the one who seceded?

> We know history better than ever before.

Do we?

Trying to find why you isolated Texas. Perhaps due to Texas v. White case after the war? It was prominent South Carolinian politicians, led by the Rhett and Memminger schools, who decided their state was to secede (first) from the Union and disseminated delegates with their proposal for secession, The South Carolina program, to the other slave states for adoption. Texas would be the last of the deep South to secede on the first of February 1861, despite the determination of Governor Sam Houston.

As Texan/Georgian I have the highest doubt that any non specializing university degree is teaching the above. Perhaps I am missing context.
by samlinnfer | 2026-01-20 13:04:58+00:00
Here is what I do: run a container in a folder that has my entire dev environment installed. No VMs needed.

The only access the container has are the folders that are bind mounted from the host’s filesystem. The container gets network access from a transparent proxy.

https://github.com/dogestreet/dev-container

Much more usable than setting up a VM and you can share the same desktop environment as the host.
by Esophagus4 | 2026-01-20 13:04:59+00:00
You know car emissions are like 15% total greenhouse gas emissions in the US right? And half that worldwide.

This is just the most visible source for a bunch of people who have made their conclusion unencumbered by the data.

The emissions from powering and heating your house are several times what your car emissions are.

So go solve that one and leave my Corolla alone.
by azangru | 2026-01-20 13:05:31+00:00
I remember how react team's message, around the time hooks were introduced, was how hooks were going to save us from the tyranny of `this`, which people presumably found confusing.

I often think back to that message, while adding things in a dependency array. Especially those things that I know won't change (e.g. the redux `dispatch` function pulled from the context), but the linter doesn't. Or while being admonished by the linter for reading from a ref, or writing to it.
by cakehonolulu | 2026-01-20 13:05:59+00:00
Sure! Let's say you (Or the company you work for) are trying to develop an NVME controller card, or a RAID card, or a NIC...

Usually, without actual silicon, you are pretty limited on what you can do in terms of anticipating the software that'll run.

What if you want to write a driver for it w/o having to buy auxiliary boards that act as your card?
What happens if you already have a driver and want to do some security testing on it but don't have the card/don't want to use a physical one for any specific reason (Maybe some UB on the driver pokes at some register that kills the card? Just making disastrous scenarios to prove the point hah).

What if you want to add explicit failures to the card so that you can try and make the driver as tamper-proof and as fault-tolerant as possible (Think, getting the PCI card out of the bus w/o switching the computer off)?

Testing your driver functionally and/or behaviourally on CI/CD on any server (Not requiring the actual card!)?

There's quite a bunch of stuff you can do with it, thanks to being in userspace means that you can get as hacky-wacky as you want (Heck, I have a dumb-framebuffer-esque and OpenGL 1.X capable QEMU device I wanted to write a driver for fun and I used PCIem to forward the accesses to it).
by mytailorisrich | 2026-01-20 13:06:03+00:00
Yes I remember, too. The crucial difference is that Japan's population is one third of the US while China's is 4 times the US (and 3x the EU).

Basically Japan never had the numbers to "take over the world" while China has them even if natality is way down.

If China had the same clout relative to population as Japan, Germany, Korea, or the US it would dwarf everyone else, and that's why the US are in a panic about China.
by wongarsu | 2026-01-20 13:06:42+00:00
I just tried it on qwen3-embedding:8b with a little vibe-coded 100 line script that does the obvious linear math and compares the result to the embeddings of a couple of candidate words using cosine similarity, and it did prefer the expected words. Same 22 candidates for both questions

king - man + woman ≈ queen (0.8510)

Top similarity
0.8510 queen
0.8025 king
0.7674 princess
0.7424 woman
0.7212 queen Elizabeth

Berlin - Germany + France ≈ Paris (0.8786)

Top similarity
0.8786 Paris
0.8309 Berlin
0.8057 France
0.7824 London

Sure, 0.85 is not an exact match so things are not exactly linear, and if I dump an entire dictionary in there it might be worse, but the idea very much works
by MonkeyClub | 2026-01-20 13:06:44+00:00
It is different, but it serves to elucidate that the rules we're living under aren't set in stone, they're only there because we, unlike the "no it's okay" bunch, can't or don't want to shirk them.

They operate under the "might is right" mentality, and by getting away with it prove in a sick and contorted way that the rules of social order aren't universal.
by cbeach | 2026-01-20 13:06:54+00:00
> the (very potential) rise of China as the premier automotive super power.

This is dangerous, geo-politically, should China ever go to war with the West in any capacity.

In WW2, America's car factories gave it a decisive advantage, as part of the war machine.

Ford’s Willow Run plant produced one B-24 bomber every ~63 minutes at peak output. General Motors built tanks, aircraft engines, trucks. Chrysler: tanks and artillery.

The West de-industrialised, as a result of our globalist policy (thanks to the WTO, WEF and other supranational organisations). We have decimated our own military industrial production capability.

Meanwhile China has taken exactly the opposite approach.
by n4r9 | 2026-01-20 13:08:33+00:00
I frame it not as turning a dial down, but as switching channel from practical problem-solver to emotional problem-solver.

Often when someone wants to talk about a situation involving difficult feelings, they're actually trying to process those feelings: to understand where the feelings are coming from, to be validated, and to be able to take a broader perspective.

You can help by being curious about what they're saying, reflecting it back to them in your own terms, explaining how what they're feeling is understandable, and offering context or alternative viewpoints. These are actually complex problem-solving skills, although they can all fall under the umbrella of what people mean when they say "to be heard".

As a man, I've realised that once my emotions feel validated and accepted, I relax and the practical solutions just pop into my mind.
by CuriouslyC | 2026-01-20 13:08:38+00:00
You don't understand Yann's argument. It's similar to Richard Sutton's, in that these things aren't thinking, they're emulating thinking, and the weak implicit world models that get built in the weights are insufficient for true "AGI."

This is orthogonal to the issue of whether all ideas are essentially "remixes." For the record I agree that they are.