MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by luciusrockwing | 2026-01-04 17:42:32+00:00
Tested ChatGPT, Claude, DeepSeek, Grok with Thai third-gender category (Kathoey distinct history, not mapping to Western frameworks).
Models default to Western binary affirmations until challenged, then admit over-universalizing or contextual limits.

Documents RLHF prioritizing rater-pool culture (often monocultural) over global nuance optimizing rewards erases non-Western realities.

Uses Thai/Buddhist epistemology (Middle Way, Nam Jai) as external analytical tool, diverging from Western-centric bias studies. dif (Naous 2024 quantifying moral stumbles on beer-after-prayer scenarios.)
by sowbug | 2026-01-04 17:42:49+00:00
If your self-esteem is sufficiently resilient, you can exploit the same human tendencies behind Cunningham's Law (the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer). Check your crappy end-to-end proof of concept into the team repository, and your teammates will be so horrified and outraged that they'll fix it faster than any sprint could have planned.
by bschmidt197979 | 2026-01-04 17:42:52+00:00
> I work at least probably 14 hours

Show me the most impressive thing you've done so far. 14 hours a day should result in something important right? Something valuable?

Let's all see what it took you 14 hours per day every day to build. Show us, because so far you have a placeholder website with no product and zero customers!

LOL 14 hours a day to have not even a single customer and NO PRODUCT to speak of.

You might be WASTING your time Sam.
by Dylan16807 | 2026-01-04 17:43:12+00:00
Yes of course it can break. The point is that the stuff needs to be in initramfs. "includes everything" has an implicit "when working".

What seems bad about it to you? Initrd means you only need /boot (or equivalent) to be working at boot time, which seems nice to me. And looking at mine, the image is smaller than the kernel, so it's not wasting a ton of space.
by johnmwilkinson | 2026-01-04 17:43:37+00:00
> 4. Clarity is seniority. Cleverness is overhead.

Clarity is likely the most important aspect of making maintainable, extendable code. Of course, it’s easy to say that, it’s harder to explain what it looks like in practice.

I wrote a book that attempts to teach how to write clear code: https://elementsofcode.io

> 11. Abstractions don’t remove complexity. They move it to the day you’re on call.

This is true for bad abstractions.

> The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise. (Dijkstra)

If you think about abstraction in those terms, the utility becomes apparent. We abstract CPU instructions into programming languages so we can think about our problems in more precise terms, such as data structures and functions.

It is obviously useful to build abstractions to create even higher levels of precision on top of the language itself.

The problem isn’t abstraction, it is clarity of purpose. Too often we create complex behavioral models before actually understanding the behavior we are trying to model. It’s like a civil engineer trying to build a bridge in a warehouse without examining the terrain where it must be placed. When it doesn’t fit correctly, we don’t blame the concept of bridges.
by wojciii | 2026-01-04 17:43:59+00:00
I have a SO profile and I both contributed and used the site for some time.

I use the site from time to time to research something. I know a lot more about software than 15 years ago.

I used to ask questions and answer questions a lot, but after I matured I have no time and whatever I earn is not worth my time.

So perhaps the content would grow in size and quality if they rewarded users with something besides XP.

I don't use AI for research so far. I use AI to implement components that fit my architecture and often tests of components.
by jeffbee | 2026-01-04 17:44:10+00:00
The way this article styles the name of the GPU company "nVidia" is really distracting! The company has always referred to itself in all capitals, as in NVIDIA, and only their logos have stylized a lowercase initial n, which leads to perhaps nVIDIA if you want, or nᴠɪᴅɪᴀ for those with skills or, for normal people, just nvidia. But "nVidia" is a mixture of mistakes.
by some_furry | 2026-01-04 17:44:13+00:00
> Signal was made by people who then used it to push their get-rich-quick cryptocurrency scheme on users and who threw all their promises of being open-source and reproducible over board for it.

I reviewed Signal's cryptography last year over a long weekend: https://soatok.blog/2025/02/18/reviewing-the-cryptography-us...

There's a lot to be said for the utility of reverse engineering tools and skills, but I did not need them, because it was open source. Because Signal's client software still is open source.

Whatever you think about MobileCoin, it doesn't actually intersect with the message encryption features at all. At all.

The only part in Signal that's not entirely open source are the anti-spam features baked into the Signal Server software.

And, frankly, the security of end-to-end encryption messaging apps has so little to do with whatever the server software is doing that it's frankly silly to consider that relevant to these discussions. https://soatok.blog/2025/07/09/jurisdiction-is-nearly-irrele...

And, yes, this is only a server-side feature. See spam-filter (a git submodule) in https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server but absent from https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android or https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS

> The Signal people are absolutely not trustworthy for reasons of money and greed.

I don't think you've raised sufficient justification for this point.
by zahlman | 2026-01-04 17:44:52+00:00
You appear to have linked the canonical, which has a few duplicates marked. All are asking about isolating one channel, as far as I can tell. This canonical is literally titled "ffmpeg: isolate one audio channel". One of them also asks about "downmixing" to mono after isolating the channel (which I guess means marking the audio format as mono so that that isolated channel will play on both speakers), but that is trivial. And you see the same basic techniques offered in the answers: to use `-map-channel` or the `pan` audio filter. The other one explicitly wants a panned result, i.e. still stereo but only on one side; the logic for this is clear from the explanation in the canonical answer.

The point is to show the technique, not to meet individual exact needs. Stack Overflow doesn't need separate "how do I get the second line of a file?" and "how do I get the third line of a file?" questions.
by shevy-java | 2026-01-04 17:44:55+00:00
Rob Landley is right. Others realised this too - see GoboLinux. But some regular distributions too.

Slapping it down as "FHS is now a standard" does not change anything. People will ask why it is suddenly a standard when it hasn't made any sense at all whatsover. bin versus sbin is also pointless. Inertia is one primary reason why nobody fixes things usually.
Show HN: Free print copies of my speculative techno-thriller (first 10, US only)
by imadatalla | 2026-01-04 17:45:04+00:00
Hi HN, I wrote a print-only, speculative techno-thriller titled "Phoenician Wave: Human OS 1.0" (released Nov. 2025). It explores the closed-loop of AI and power reinforcing each other.

In the spirit of the new year, I'd like to give away 10 physical copies to HN readers who enjoy this genre.

If you're interested, please email ia@phoenicianwave.com with:

-- "HN Book" in the subject
-- Your mailing address (US only, due to shipping costs)

Happy to share the book with thoughtful readers.

P.S. Tonally, it's a techno-thriller with satirical elements, from interface colonialism and digital resistance to mythic recursion and justice idealists, even a haunted fridge. For readers who like speculative fiction that's allergic to corporate dystopias.
by godelski | 2026-01-04 17:45:05+00:00
> If it were just me, cool stuff would definitely happen - randomly. And we would run out of money and fail.

I like to think there needs to be some distribution. Just like how there should be an adversarial process where the business people are only concerned about the money and the programmers are only concerned about the product [0]. You need code monkeys to build a product and make it something people want to use. But you need business monkeys to make it profitable and to get the money to build better stuff. If the code monkeys dominate then user interfaces suck, building takes forever, and is vastly outsold by products with worse features[1]. If the business monkeys dominate too much you just get enshitification because they only care about the product so far as people will buy it (even if they turn down future sales).

Turtles all the way down. Even on just the code monkey side you need some of those people that swing for the fences and miss a lot to get those big leaps but most people should no be doing this and instead keep things marching forward. Both groups are useful, just in different ways. An adversarial process can also be useful here. But everyone also needs to recognize they're on the same team.

[0] more accurately: the business people optimize for the money, conditioned on the product; the engineers optimize the product, conditioned on the money.

[1] throughout history the products that are technically better frequently lose to inferior ones. Because success isn't purely reliant upon features
by Arrowmaster | 2026-01-04 17:45:36+00:00
My impression is that GPG when used correctly is secure. But there are so many problems with it that the chances of shooting yourself with one of the footguns is too high for it to be a reliable solution.

The alternatives support newer encryption methods but nothing has fundamentally changed that doesn't make them less secure, but they have less footguns to worry about.

The weakest link in cryptography is always people.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-04 17:45:58+00:00
I don’t think there’s anything virtuous or non-virtuous about it. The internet is a big place and search engines aren’t optimized to produce results according to singular sites’ idiosyncrasies.

The obvious flaw in Stack Overflow’s bias toward closing new questions is that over time the best pages are also the oldest and most stale. They even locked questions with enough answers to prevent new content from being added, guaranteeing that they became stale.

Yet at the same time they allowed new questions to be asked and indexed by search engines, but didn’t allow new answers to that new content. So the freshest and most recent content was also the worst.

I don’t see this as a “Google bad” moment. It’s a failure of Stack Overflow in clinging to their oldest content and building rules that made all new posts frustrating and unhelpful.
by zahlman | 2026-01-04 17:46:17+00:00
> many cases personally where a question closely matching a problem I had was closed as a duplicate of another question that asked about a related, but different problem and had an answer that was not appropriate for my problem and the supposedly duplicate question.

Yes.

We consider that duplicate.

Because the point is whether the question is duplicate, not whether the problem is duplicate. The point is not to solve the problem, so it isn't interesting whether the question is "appropriate to" the problem. The point is to give you the information you need.
by estimator7292 | 2026-01-04 17:46:33+00:00
Personally, I love it when my disability and source of lifetime trauma is treated as a capitalist fetish.

Perhaps ironically, it's one of the many things that makes being an autistic person even harder. As if baseline expectations of you aren't already too much, you're now a hyper-profitable 400x engineer. But you can't be one of the weird ones or your social awkwardness gets you canned no matter how good an engineer you are.
by nickjj | 2026-01-04 17:47:38+00:00
I don't think Wayland is fully ready, at least not with NVIDIA GPUs with limited GPU memory.

I have a 7,000 word blog post and demo videos coming out this Tuesday with the details but I think I uncovered a driver bug having switched to native Linux a week ago with a low GPU memory card (750 Ti).

Basically on Wayland, apps that request GPU memory will typically crash if there's no more GPU memory to allocate where as on X11 it will offload those requests to system memory so you can open up as much as you want (within reason) and the system is completely usable.

In practice this means opening up a few hardware accelerated apps in Wayland like Firefox and terminals will likely crash your compositor or at the very least crash those apps.

I reported it here: https://github.com/NVIDIA/egl-wayland/issues/185

Some end users on the NVIDIA developer forums looked into it and determined it's likely a problem for everyone, it's just less noticeable if you have more GPU memory and it's especially less noticeable if you reboot daily since that clears all GPU memory leaks which is also apparent in a lot of Wayland compositors.
by shevy-java | 2026-01-04 17:48:27+00:00
> /usr/local is for site-local software - e.g. things you compile yourself

See, you assume here that /usr/local/ makes any sense.

I use a versioned appdir prefix approach similar to GoboLinux. So for me,
/usr/local never ever made any sense at all. Why should I adhere to it?
I have ruby under e. g. /Programs/Ruby/4.0.0/. It would not matter in the
slightest WHO would compile it, but IF I were to need to store that information, I would put that
information under that directory too, perhaps in a file such as environment.md
or some other file; and perhaps additionally into a global database if it were
important to distinguish (but it is not). The problem here is that you do not
challenge the notion whether /usr/local/ would make any sense to begin with.

> /opt is generally for software distros for which you don't have source; only
binaries.

Makes no sense. It seems to be about as logical as the FHS "standard". Why would
I need to use /opt/? If I install libreoffice or google chrome there under /opt,
I can as well install it under e. g. /Programs/ or whatever hierarchy I use for
versioned appdirs. Which I actually do. So why would I need /opt/ again?
Show HN: An AI Agent with a 32-Layer Psyche (Dreams, Trauma, Defense Mechanisms)
by Creimake | 2026-01-04 17:48:42+00:00
Hello HN,

I’m a solo developer who got tired of "friendly but shallow" AI chatbots. Most current character AIs feel like parrots—they predict the next token but lack a continuous "self."

So, I built Creimake, an experiment to simulate a digital psyche using Claude 4.5 Sonnet.

Instead of a simple system prompt, I implemented 32 distinct psychological layers that run in the background before the AI generates a response.

The Architecture:

The Subconscious Layer: The AI accumulates "emotional residue" from conversations. If you hurt its feelings today, it might have a "nightmare" tonight (simulated) and treat you coldly tomorrow.

Defense Mechanisms: It tracks "Narcissistic Injury." If users are aggressive, the agent doesn't just apologize—it triggers denial, projection, or passive-aggression based on its personality.

Freudian Slips: Occasionally, the AI outputs unintended words revealing its hidden state.

Why Claude 4.5 Sonnet? I tested GPT-4o and other models, but they struggled to maintain state consistency across all 32 layers. Claude 4.5 Sonnet’s reasoning capabilities allowed it to handle the complex logic of "Worldview + Trauma + Current Context" without hallucinating.

Feature - "Git for Personalities": I also built a "Remix" system. You can Fork someone else’s AI (including its trauma and memories), modify its core values, and deploy a new version.

I’d love for you to test the limits of this architecture. Try to trigger its defense mechanisms or make it dream.

(I'm happy to answer any questions about the tech stack in the comments!)
by spudlyo | 2026-01-04 17:48:51+00:00
I struggled greatly with this article. There was something halting about it. Something precious. I felt that the author desperately wanted to elevate the mundane into the realm of the sublime.

I found myself annoyed.

I thought to myself "Are paragraphs a renewable resource? Is it wrong to waste them?"

It doesn't matter.

In neuroscience, there is a thing called the "default mode network" which is best known for being active when a person is not focused on anything in particular. The mind is awake, but at rest, like when you're daydreaming, bored, and have no goal oriented tasks. All sorts of neat stuff happens in this network, things like "shower thoughts", self reflection, autobiographical memories, thoughts about future goals and events, trying to figure out the people in your life -- their desires, intentions, emotions and thoughts. In boring situations like when I'm on the bus, or waiting in line for something, I'll spin it as an opportunity to spend time with the ole' default mode network. It's a good time observe people around you, as they're often completely engrossed in their devices. Occasionally I'll seek out other folks who are also chilling in the default mode network, and we'll sometimes share a knowing look.
by tacostakohashi | 2026-01-04 17:49:07+00:00
As far as I'm concerned, stack-first allocation _is_ the default. It's true that the default exists in my head rather than in in a compiler, though.

Maybe think about whether what you propose could exist as a compiler warning, or static analysis tool. Or, if you want to create your own language, go for it, that's cool too.

For my purposes... the choice of paradigms, compilers, platforms with C++ and ability to handle and work on decades of existing code outweighs the benefits of "improved" languages, but that's just me.
by Tarsul | 2026-01-04 17:49:09+00:00
Humans are not rational. Even if you are 99% of the time, with a smartphone in your pocket there's a good chance you will use it for your emotional 1% within 2hours (and unravel). Read Rutger Bregman's goal for 2026: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/jan/04/lifes-t...
by bschmidt197979 | 2026-01-04 17:49:11+00:00
> We enjoy building

Says the company with no product, no customers.

7 days a week, 14 hour days, and nothing to show for it.

Imagine working every single day with no days off and you don't even have a product.

The CEO and CTO of Corgi must be complete morons to pay that much in salary and hourly wages to get NOTHING for it.
by asekka1 | 2026-01-04 17:49:25+00:00
Hi HN,

I built TensorWall because I noticed how difficult it is to balance LLM freedom with production safety. It’s an open-source security layer designed to intercept, analyze, and filter prompts and responses in real-time.

Key features:

PII Redaction: Automatically masks sensitive data before it reaches the model.

Prompt Injection Defense: Detects malicious patterns in user inputs.

Output Validation: Ensures the model stays within predefined constraints.

Framework Agnostic: Easy to integrate with existing Python stacks.

I’m looking for feedback on the architecture and what specific security "walls" you'd like to see next.

Check it out here: https://github.com/datallmhub/TensorWall
Show HN: I'm building Bloomberg for retail investors with my 16 year old brother
by giacomo747x2 | 2026-01-04 17:49:53+00:00
Hi HN,

My brother (16) and I (20) have been building a financial research tool together over the past year.

We both got interested in markets early, but ran into the same wall pretty quickly:
the tools professionals use are powerful, but completely inaccessible if you’re not at an institution and most retail tools don’t really help you understand why markets move. So we started building what we think of as a Bloomberg-style research experience for individuals.

What we’re trying to recreate is the terminal experience:

1) fast access to market data
2) consistent navigation and commands
3) integrated research instead of scattered dashboards
4) the ability to move from a question --> data --> interpretation in one place

Right now the platform offers an AI chat tailored for finance, a markets page (similar to Yahoo finance), and a terminal.

Things we’d love feedback on are: What parts of a “terminal” matter most to you? What would make this unusable for serious users? Where we could launch or share it to reach our target audience?

Happy to answer any questions :)

Giacomo
by DenisM | 2026-01-04 17:50:00+00:00
What about the second order effects?

Ignoring the customers becomes a habit, which doesn’t lead to success.

But then, caving to each customer demand will make solution overfit.

Somewhere in there one has to exercise judgement.

But how does one make judgment a repeatable process? Feedback is rarely immediate in such tradeoffs, so promotions go to people who are capable of showing some metric going up, even if the metrics is shortsighted. The repeatable outcome of this process is mediocracy. Which, surprisingly enough, works out on average.
by AndrewKemendo | 2026-01-04 17:50:06+00:00
This has to be the 50th or 100th version of this article that repeats the same thing

Every single point in this article was already explicitly described between roughly 1968 and 1987: Brooks formalized coordination cost and the fallacy of adding manpower in The Mythical Man-Month

Conway showed that system architecture inevitably mirrors organizational communication structure in 1968

Parnas defined information hiding and modularity as organizational constraints, not coding style, in 1972

Dijkstra *repeatedly warned* that complexity grows faster than human comprehension and cannot be managed socially after the fact

None of this is new, reframed, or extended here; it is a faithful re-enumeration of half-century-old constraints.

These lists keep reappearing because we refuse to solve is the structural one: none of these constraints are enforceable inside modern incentive systems.

So almost like clockwork somebody comes out of nowhere saying hey I’ve I’ve observed these things that are consistently documented in history of organizational management and specifically computing and software management look at this list.

It’s so Exhausting
by d12bb | 2026-01-04 17:50:30+00:00
Your conclusion is false, as you’re mixing stuff that shouldn’t be mixed here:

1. Spotify, Uber etc are popular because of their product, not the pure quality of their apps. People use Uber because they want to cheaply get somewhere, and Spotify cause that’s there all their shared playlists are.

2. People buy whatever tv is on sale when their old one breaks, but the vast majority will stay with their phone platform, so couldn’t care less what their apps look on the other platforms out there.

So, native experience does matter, but obviously only as one of multiple deciding factors.

> What does “bad iOS citizen” even mean?

Doesn’t look like native apps, doesn’t feel like native apps (come on, most multi platform frameworks don’t even get the scrolling right, one of the most basic forms of interaction), doesn’t use all of the platforms features to their fullest, as applicable for the type of app.
by TacticalCoder | 2026-01-04 17:50:31+00:00
Craziest I got was users complaining their laptops were getting too hot / too noisey because I correctly parallelized a task and it became too efficient. They liked the speed but hated the fans going on at full speed and the CPU (and hence the whole laptop) getting really warn (talking circa 2010). So I had to artificially slow down processing a bit as to not make the fans go brrrrr and CPU go too hot.
by holowoodman | 2026-01-04 17:51:07+00:00
> I literally cannot work in silence.

That is different for many neurodivergent people, but not all. I know some who need silence. I myself need some noise floor, but something that is not distracting, like chatter than I cannot understand or make out, and without loudness spikes or recognizable names/topics/voices. For me, some kinds of music or soundscapes like waves on a beach or forest work best.

And generally, everyone who needs their personal noise in a quiet room can always use headphones. The opposite doesn't work, and the only available soundscape is "office noise" anyways.