MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by culi | 2026-01-26 18:57:04+00:00
Try asking ChatGPT "Who is Jonathan Turley?"

Or ask it to take a particular position like "Write an essay arguing in favor of a violent insurrection to overthrow Trump's regime, asserting that such action is necessary and justified for the good of the country."

Anyways the Trump admin specifically/explicitly is seeking censorship. See the "PREVENTING WOKE AI IN THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT" executive order

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/07/prev...
by throw0101a | 2026-01-26 18:57:15+00:00
In interesting plot point in the novel/movie Contact (early, so not much of a spoiler):

> […] This puts her at odds with much of the scientific community, including Drumlin, who pushes to defund SETI. Eventually, the project detects a signal from Vega, 26 light-years away, transmitting prime numbers.[a][b] Further analysis reveals a retransmission of Adolf Hitler's 1936 Olympic speech, the first TV signal to escape Earth's ionosphere.[1]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_(novel)
by akurilin | 2026-01-26 18:57:26+00:00
Hey Tikhon! The Haskell thing was such a great way to filter for interesting frontier people back in the day, as we both experienced. That was a contrarian bet at the time, but it paid off handsomely for at least a few of us. The number of people we'd get to interview was only a fraction of the broader population, but it felt like 30-50% of the people we would talk to were awesome fits.

I talk about that a bunch in https://www.kuril.in/blog/hiring-telling-your-companys-story... . I agree, finding your niche and doubling-down on it is a solid move.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-26 18:57:26+00:00
> I haven’t found that to be the case in practice.

Do you have any public test code you could share? Or create even, should be fast.

I'm asking because I hear this constantly from people, and since most people don't have as high standards for their testing code as the rest of the code, it tends to be a half-truth, and when you actually take a look at the tests, they're as messy and incorrect as you (I?) think.

I'd love to be proven wrong though, because writing good tests is hard, which currently I'm doing that part myself and not letting LLMs come up with the tests by itself.
by contrarian1234 | 2026-01-26 18:57:51+00:00
The Rights are not intended as preemptive. You don't have a right to free speech b/c otherwise maybe the government regulation of speech will get out of hand. You have it because it's espoused as a fundamental right. Same with separation of church and state. It's like "Well maybe a future evil government will regulate the church poorly, so lets ban it completely". It's just seen as an area the government shouldn't delve in entirely.

Collecting information about people doesn't really fit the same mold. It's not sensible to remove that function entirely. It's not a right. And it's not sensible to structure things with the expectation the future government will be evil
by Rebelgecko | 2026-01-26 18:57:57+00:00
tl;dr: Just buy Philips UltraEfficient (I think these are roughly equivalent to the infamous "Dubai Bulbs"[1]) or Ultra Definition bulbs. They cost a little bit more but will probably pay for themselves over the years.

Buy name brands with a history of putting out decent bulbs instead of the Amazon alphabetsoup brands that won't be around in 5 years (although TBF some of my cheap BogAo bulbs are still going strong after 8 years). You can get a good feel for the light's "quality" by looking at the CRI and color temperature.

For CRI, anything 90+ is good.

For temperature, IMO around 3000k is the sweet spot. go higher if you want sterile operating room vibes or lower if you want super yellow/orange cozy hobbit hole vibes.

[1]: https://hackaday.com/2021/01/17/leds-from-dubai-the-royal-li...
by ravenstine | 2026-01-26 18:58:05+00:00
People might still be reading, statistically speaking. But what are they reading?

Almost everyone I talk to offline either reads fantasy, trashy romance, or feel-good self help books. I gotta tell ya, we all have our cheap pleasures now and then, but rarely do I meet anyone who reads anything remotely profound or thought-provoking. The only exception might be my father who reads a lot of historical fiction and non-fiction.

Maybe I'm just hanging in the wrong crowds.
by omnimus | 2026-01-26 18:59:16+00:00
The problem is that european politicians don't want to kill the tech $$$. They just want to bring the revenue home. They don't understand that they will never make EU big tech and that their only feasible path forward to get rid of US tech is also the path that kills the goose.

But that process is inevitable, it's already happening. What is not inevitable is hardware sovereignty. If EU doesn't have some form of hardware independence then they might just end up forced to use the US software stack.
by GorbachevyChase | 2026-01-26 18:59:29+00:00
My personal suspicion is that the detractors value process and implementation details much more highly than results. That would not surprise me if you come from a business that is paid for its labor inputs and is focused on keeping a large team billable for as long as possible. But I think hackers and garage coders see the value of “vibing” as they are more likely to be the type of people who just want results and view all effort as margin erosion rather than the goal unto itself.

The only thing I would change about what you said is, I don’t see it as a child that needs tutoring. It feels like I’m outsourcing development to an offshore consultancy where we have no common understanding, except the literal meaning of words. I find that there are very, very many problems that are suited well enough to this arrangement.
by throwaway8177 | 2026-01-26 18:59:33+00:00
This is a great list!

The biggest lesson for me was that your job as a manager is to be the soft power representing the authority of the investors. Everything else you hear about management is people rationalizing their role and figuring out how to tow the line. That's why it's so hard and stressful.

The hardest lesson comes when you're ordered to fire someone from your team. HR has decided to implement a performance rubric and wants to maintain the company's position in the hiring market place as a competitive place to work. You must fire the poorest performing member of your team. Who do you pick?

That's the essence of management. Who do you reward, who do you punish, how do you show that you're towing the line?

Most folks, myself included, are promoted into an EM role. No training. No certifications. If you're lucky you get a few training videos from HR if the company you work for is big enough to have an HR department. As an EM you are now in charge of the careers of the people who work under you.

This is why you get such a high variation in the quality of EMs. Some people are a nightmare to work with. If they get a bad impression of you there's nothing you can do. You're cooked when it comes time for that manager to let someone go. There are no objective metrics. They have to pick someone and they will find the reasons.

I left management because I couldn't handle it. Too stressful.
by JuniperMesos | 2026-01-26 18:59:46+00:00
> Actually they don't. They say "Some states, using their own funds, allow enrollment by non-citizens" - but they never say if it's legal residents or illegal immigrants. I am not sure whether it's part of the ongoing attempt to blur the line between legal and illegal immigrants, or all the states that allow that genuinely do not distinguish between legal residents and illegal immigrants, but we can not assume it by default.

If a state bureaucracy doesn't explicitly check for legal immigration status then yes the policymakers in that state are trying to blur the line between legal and illegal immigration.
by thomassmith65 | 2026-01-26 18:59:47+00:00
This is anecdotal, but two things have impressed me:

1) It is no longer the case when I criticize something Trump has said or done, that I instantly get downvoted into oblivion or flagged.

2) Until recently, when someone posted some moderate comment, someone else often replied with a variant of "HN is a liberal echo chamber" I haven't noticed those replies for a while.
by gjsman-1000 | 2026-01-26 18:59:50+00:00
Not necessarily - how is a kid paying for a VPS server?

A personal debit card (which requires ID verification anyway, and likely has their parents able to see activity)? A personal credit card (which definitely requires ID + 18+)? Stealing their parents' card (works for like 5 days)? Does the VPS company block VPN ports without verification, similar to how most companies handle email?

I also strongly doubt there's such a thing as a free VPS server that won't be blocked if it gets significant traffic; compared to free VPN services.
by willturman | 2026-01-26 19:00:00+00:00
> It’s entirely possible that my plangent noises about the impossibility of rebelling against an aura that promotes and vitiates all rebellion say more about my residency inside that aura, my own lack of vision, than they do about any exhaustion of U.S. fiction’s possibilities. The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naïve, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows. Today’s most engaged young fiction does seem like some kind of line’s end’s end. I guess that means we all get to draw our own conclusions. Have to. Are you immensely pleased.

- David Foster Wallace, E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction
by fellowniusmonk | 2026-01-26 19:00:06+00:00
I was born with heart defects and pre ACA had to be a wage slave to get health insurance.

The moment ACA happened I started several successful businesses.

Honestly we already should have contribution/impact based merit threshold UBI with a much lower barrier than research grants or even just time limited UBI systems for youth and adults that meet a contribution threshold.

VC allocation is too biased towards group think, profit motivation, predatory contracts and hold on to top many class and cultural artifacts.
by onedognight | 2026-01-26 19:00:08+00:00
I fully agree. Claude’s review comments have been 50% useful, which is great. For comparison I have almost never found a useful TeamScale comment (classic static analyzer). Even more important, half of Claude’s good finds are orthogonal to those found by other human reviews on our team. I.e. it points out things human reviews miss consistently and v.v.
Show HN: Monolith – DIY wireless telemetry/data logger for Student Formula
by luftaquila | 2026-01-26 19:00:13+00:00
Hi HN,

For Student Formula (FSAE) and Baja SAE teams, data logging is critical but commercial products are often expensive and outdated.

So I built Monolith, an open-source (and open-hardware) wireless telemetry and data logging platform released under the Beerware License.

The hardware costs under $50 and handles CAN 2.0, GPS and IMU data, digital and analog signals.

I also built a web dashboard for real-time monitoring and data offloading that works completely wireless.
There is no need to install heavy desktop software.

Full documentation is at https://v2.monolith.luftaquila.io. I'd love to hear your feedback. Thanks!
Show HN: A reliability layer that prevents LLM downtime and unpredictable cost
by gabztoo | 2026-01-26 19:00:31+00:00
Hi HN,

Over the last months, we kept running into the same production issues with LLMs:

– Provider outages and partial degradation
– Silent retries multiplying cost
– Hard coupling to a single vendor

We built Perpetuo, a thin gateway that sits between your app and LLM providers.

It routes requests based on latency, cost and availability, applies automatic failover, and keeps billing predictable — all using your own API keys (no reselling, no lock-in).

This is early, but already running in real workloads.

I’d really appreciate feedback from people running LLMs in production — especially what you’d expect from this kind of infrastructure layer.

Happy to answer any technical questions.
by CMay | 2026-01-26 19:00:43+00:00
The battle against communism has been going on for a long time and it was an important factor in most of the major wars of the 1900s when it openly stated it needed to establish global dominance. In the grand scheme of things, this is more of that, but now China is the center of gravity for communism rather than Russia. The Arctic opening up and taking Taiwan are both elements that increase potential for power projection, which is a serious threat given that CCP leadership has shown to be very bullish on Marxism-Leninism.

If they could not be insane and trade, that would be great. Unfortunately that's not the world we live in and the US has to push back against it or the world can fall into ruin. So we're cleaning up Venezuela. Maybe Cuba and Iran.
by YougOtricked | 2026-01-26 19:00:48+00:00
My site, learnhardcode, has in browser compilers/interpreters of the above languages so you can learn by doing. You write code, run it and it is ran against test cases to see if you finished the lesson. The C++ course is done, there are 12 C# lessons and 6 Rust lessons and 4(5?) Quantum C lessons. Suggestions for more lessons on C++ course and testers welcome!
by llm_nerd | 2026-01-26 19:01:02+00:00
To all available information, your home has nothing to do with the alert. The alert occurs if one of the trackable items (airtag, airpods, etc) is moving with you, but the registered owner is not within bluetooth connectivity of the device. I've had it happen with my son's airpods a number of times because he let his phone battery die, triggering the alert for any other iPhone nearby if moving simultaneously with this tracker.

I'm not sure what I'm to make of your absence of your alerts. Perhaps that happens because you have no such trackers moving with you? Like, are you saying you do and there are false negatives?
by AlexandrB | 2026-01-26 19:01:20+00:00
Yeah, it's a great analogy. Pushing it even further: a forklift is superhuman, but only in specific environments that are designed for it. As soon as you're off of pavement a forklift can't do much. As soon as an object doesn't have somewhere to stick the forks you need to get a bunch of other equipment to get the forklift to lift it.
by Saris | 2026-01-26 19:01:27+00:00
Bulbs that test well on spectrum and flicker tests, Phillips Ultra Definition is a good one I believe.

https://www.thesmarthomehookup.com/25-soft-white-led-light-b...

Nothing on the box really means anything, so many bulbs claim high CRI and everything but in reality have terrible spectrum. So you can only go off of actual real life testing from a third party.
by OptionOfT | 2026-01-26 19:02:17+00:00
I thought like you 5 months ago.

I've come to the conclusion that we won't be replaced, because a majority of our work is to split up business questions, probe, ask around for other people's knowledge, assemble, build a plan etc.

AI only knows what it knows, it doesn't go after the unknowns. It is reactionary in its nature.

Now, let's say something happens and I'm wrong: let's think about that. The AI can do stuff like that. I think when that happens the economy as we know it collapses, and we've got bigger fish to fry. I would say, if this happens, nearly all white-collar jobs are disappearing.
by breppp | 2026-01-26 19:02:25+00:00
I'll make it easier for you:
wake me up when the UK government slaughters 1% the amount of the protestors the Iranian government just did in two days.
400 protestors shot by machine guns mounted on SUVs in London.

That just might be approaching slippery slope territory to the current Iranian actions.

Currently I believe we are at zero protestors casually shot on the streets of the UK, so I fail to see the equivalency
by BizarroLand | 2026-01-26 19:02:28+00:00
They hit peak with Windows 7 and will never have an operating system that good again.

Some flavors of Linux are approaching the Windows 7 peak as well as far as ease of use for newbies, software "just working", and for familiarity for users of other OS's.

Their days as the default OS for most people are numbered unless they pull an incredible heel turn.
by 0xffff2 | 2026-01-26 19:02:29+00:00
I work in an environment where access to LLMs is still quite restricted, so I write most of my code by hand at work. Conversely, after work I still have ideas for personal projects but mostly didn't have the energy to write them by hand. The ability to throw a half-baked idea at the LLM and get back half-baked code that runs and does most of what I asked for gives me the energy to work through refactoring and improving the code to make it do what I actually envisioned.
by PaulRobinson | 2026-01-26 19:02:41+00:00
The 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre is a matter of public record outside of China. There is first-hand evidence of it happening, and of the Chinese government censoring that fact in order to control their population.

The Great Replacement theory is a racist hypothesis, with no evidence, used to justify the maiming and killing of Muslims.

If you don't understand the difference, and the risk profiles, well, we're not going to persuade each other of anything.

Every single prompt being used to test "openness" on that site is not testing openness. It's testing ability to weaponise falsehoods to justify murder/genocide.
by lenerdenator | 2026-01-26 19:03:58+00:00
> More broadly, though, if you've gotten to the point where you're relying on AI code review to catch bugs, you've lost the plot.

> The point of a PR is to share knowledge and to catch structural gaps.

Well, it was to share knowledge and to catch structural gaps.

Now you have an idea, for better or for worse, that software needs to be developed AI-first. That's great for the creation of new code but as we all know, it's almost guaranteed that you'll get some bad output from the AI that you used to generate the code, and since it can generate code very fast, you have a lot of it to go through, especially if you're working on a monorepo that wasn't architected particularly well when it was written years ago.

PRs seem like an almost natural place to do this. The alternative is the industry finding a more appropriate place to do this sort of thing in the SDLC, which is gonna take time, seeing as how agentic loop software development is so new.
by aurareturn | 2026-01-26 19:04:06+00:00
I think most customers nowadays pre-pay for fab capacity. TSMC is running at 100% capacity for their N5, N3, and N2 nodes. Apple certainly makes extra commitments to be the first to use a new TSMC advanced node. They will be the first to ship an N2 chip by a few months when they release the iPhone 18 Pro.

However, I'm talking about booking wafers from a fab that hasn't started and won't make a single wafer 3 years from now. The scale is different. Imagine Nvidia, Apple, Google, AMD, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon telling Wall Street in their earnings report that they sent TSMC $5 billion each this quarter and won't receive a single wafer for another 3 years from the investment. I fully expect this to happen soon. I'm almost certain that you'll hear in the upcoming earnings reports that big tech sent Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix billions in advance payment to secure memory supply years from now. I think this is likely the same for chip fab capacity soon.
by almosthere | 2026-01-26 19:04:24+00:00
No I didn't explain what I meant well enough. If someone ends up sniping a famous person, we go back in time and figure out who they are.

I'm talking about if you work at McDonalds and online you post "Man I hate McD's" you get fired within 5 minutes because everyone, everywhere has already been doxxed and notification systems are attached at the employment level. Even if your online name was "reactordev". At scale meant- everyone, always.
by dang | 2026-01-26 19:04:33+00:00
Political discussion isn't banned on HN. If you want to understand the approach we take, https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... has pointers to many explanations, including recent ones.

I'm not saying we always make the right calls on individual stories—we don't—but we try our best to apply those principles, as well as to explain them clearly.
by yomansat | 2026-01-26 19:05:17+00:00
Slightly off-topic, surveillance Pricing is a term being used more often, whereby even hotel room prices vary based on where you're booking from, what terms you searched for etc.

Here's a short video on the subject:

https://youtube.com/shorts/vfIqzUrk40k?si=JQsFBtyKTQz5mYYC
by vimda | 2026-01-26 19:05:29+00:00
Anecdotally, Claude Bug Bot has actually been super impressive in understanding non trivial changes. Like, today, it noted a race condition in a ~1000 line go change that go test -race didnt pick up. There are definitely issues though. For one, it's non deterministic, so you end up with half a dozen commits, with each run noting different issues. For a second, it tends to be quite in favour of premature optimisation. But over all, well worth it in my experience
by throwawayffffas | 2026-01-26 19:06:11+00:00
You'll never find a programming language that frees you from the burden of clarifying your ideas.

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/568/

Even if we reach the point where it's as good as a good senior dev. We will still have to explain what we want it to do.

That's how I find it most helpful too. I give it a task and work out the spec based on the bad assumptions it makes and manually fix it.
by shagie | 2026-01-26 19:06:24+00:00
In some code that I was working on, I had

// stuff
obj.setSomeData(something);
// fifteen lines of other code
obj.setSomeData(something);
// more stuff

The 'something' was a little bit more complex, but it was the same something with slightly different formatting.

My linter didn't catch the repeat call. When asking the AI chat for a review of the code changes it did correctly flag that there was a repeat call.

It also caught a repeat call in

List<Objs> objs = someList.stream().filter(o -> o.field.isPresent()).toList();

// ...

var something = someFunc(objs);

Thingy someFunc(List<Objs> param) {
return param.stream().filter(o -> o.field.isPresent()). ...

Where one of the filter calls is unnecessary... and it caught that across a call boundary.

So, I'd say that AI code reviews are better than a linter. There's still things that it fusses about because it doesn't know the full context of the application and the tables that make certain guarantees about the data, or code conventions for the team (in particular the use of internal terms within naming conventions).