MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by xeckr | 2026-01-23 19:51:43+00:00
Fun fact: the Chinese central bank is not at all independent, but one-party rule prevents monetary policy from becoming incoherent as a result of short-term political interests tied to the election cycle.

An independent central bank fixes this in a democracy, but now it can exert considerable influence over political outcomes.

Consider that Carter was punished by the public in his re-election campaign for a recession which was ostensibly caused by Federal Reserve policy choices which ultimately benefited Reagan.
by mmooss | 2026-01-23 19:52:01+00:00
> Tilted Arc was a 120-foot long, 12-foot high curved wall of rusting steel that, according to its creator, was intended to “dislocate” the plaza’s “decorative function.” But the office workers of Lower Manhattan were unmoved by Serra’s abstract claims. Within just a few months of Tilted Arc’s unveiling, some 1300 employees who worked in the Federal Building that faced the plaza had signed a petition asking for the sculpture’s removal, .... In a GSA hearing in 1985, the petitioners complained that Tilted Arc “brutally destroys the plaza’s vistas and amenities,” and called it “the Berlin Wall of Foley Square.”

It sounds like Serra's abstract intentions hit the bullseye. Serra wanted to “dislocate” the plaza’s “decorative function.”, and the office workers said it “brutally destroys the plaza’s vistas and amenities,” and called it “the Berlin Wall of Foley Square.”.

For art, unmoved would be failure. Love or hate are successes; they demonstrate an impact.
by epolanski | 2026-01-23 19:52:01+00:00
Not really.

In fact as my prompts and documents get better it seems it does increasingly better.

Still, it can't replace a human, I really need to correct it at all, and if I try to one shot a feature I always end up spending more time refactoring it few days later.

Still, it's a huge boost to productivity, but the time it can take over without detailed info and oversight is far away.
by iamnothere | 2026-01-23 19:52:08+00:00
Just be aware that newer vehicles often have more things that can and will fail, and parts seem less standardized these days, so you may not be able to keep it running past the expected service lifetime.

Older vehicles (depending on the platform) often use common parts that are shared even across manufacturers. And third party manufacturers keep cranking out new stock for them.

I am hoping that this type of system develops for simple no-frills electric vehicles over time. Although laws like the one mentioned here keep piling up, increasing vehicle complexity and cost of maintenance.
by zajio1am | 2026-01-23 19:52:23+00:00
It seems to me that it is much more symmetric. In both situations one side guess, due to fundamental uncertainties of human interactions -- each side knows their subjective costs/benefits, but not costs/benefits of the other side.

For 'guesser protocol', the initiatior guess whether the ask is appropriate (say initiator_known _benefit > responder_guessed_cost), while in 'asker protocol', the task of guessing is shifted to responder, as the responder has to guess whether the reject is appropriate (say responder_known_cost > initiator_guessed_benefit).
by wing-_-nuts | 2026-01-23 19:52:29+00:00
>Any power users who prefer their own key management should follow the steps to enable Bitlocker without uploading keys to a connected Microsoft account.

I have W11 w a local account and no bitlocker on my desktop computer, but the sheer amount of nonsense MS has been doing these days has really made me question if 'easy modding*' is really enough of a benefit for me to not just nuke it and install linux yet again

* You can get the MO2 mod manager running under linux, but it's a pain, much like you can also supposedly run executable mods (downgraders, engine patches, etc) in the game's context, but again, pain
by ffsm8 | 2026-01-23 19:52:55+00:00
But why would that be a disadvantage large enough to cause the player to lose, which would be necessary for

> pure AI teams tend to be much stronger.

Maybe each turn has a time limit, and a human would need "n moments" to make the final judgement call whereas the AI could delay the final decision right to the last moment for it's final analysis? So the pure AI player gets an additional 10-30s to simulate the game essentially?
by resfirestar | 2026-01-23 19:53:11+00:00
They're offering 50% off the subscription to people who used to have Enhanced Autopilot [1]. As I predicted when the CEO's compensation plan had a part tied to FSD subscriptions, they are going to push more people onto it by bundling more features and cutting the price.

[1] https://x.com/SawyerMerritt/status/2014751111803032049
by efreak | 2026-01-23 19:53:20+00:00
If this is all that's blocking you (not the fact that they don't want your business), you might have a friend who's been playing the T-Mobile free phone number game. I know some people with 4+ phone numbers they don't need/use, simply because they were free (one-time activation with old byod or taxes-only free phone).

I've considered asking to borrow a number to verify with Discord so they don't actually have my phone number, but decided I'd rather just be unverified.
by moomoo11 | 2026-01-23 19:53:22+00:00
When I used to work at my previous job, it was required that we have detailed PR descriptions (we had a template) and our commit messages were meant to be concise/clear.

So in practice it was usually not too bad. Git blame on any line could point me to the PR and any associated ticket.

You just need to have some discipline among the team because there would be slackers who didn’t want to take an extra 5 min. But you know. You weed them out.
by nxtfari | 2026-01-23 19:53:56+00:00
My guess is Tesla is desperately in need of Q1 revenue and they want people to scarcity buy FSD lifetime @ $8K. Otherwise the strategy doesn’t make any sense. They’re saying FSD and basic Autopilot will go behind subscription and that subscription prices are expected to go up. Basically laying out that they’re planning to lock you into a subscription and then price gouge. It’s so transparent that I think the point isn’t actually the gouge but to make that threat move lifetime FSD sales.
by wahern | 2026-01-23 19:55:12+00:00
As of 2023 municipalities and counties can no longer mandate bicycle registration. (See https://law.justia.com/codes/california/code-veh/division-16... as amended by sec. 7 at https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...) Though universities, like UC Davis, might still be able to require it for bikes on campus.

I hadn't heard of the requirement before. Granting cities the power to require registration originally seems to have been intended to address bike theft. A significant number of cities subsequently passed ordinances requiring registration. But few people knew about it and even fewer registered their bikes.
by codazoda | 2026-01-23 19:55:13+00:00
Something to check is if you’re opted into the test for the 1M context window. A co-worker told me this happened to them. They were burning a lot more tokens in the beta. Seems like creating a new account could track with this (but is obviously the Nuclear option).

I recently put a little money on the API for my personal account. I seem to burn more tokens on my personal account than my day job, in spite of using AI for 4x as long at work, and I’m trying to figure out why.
by lapetitejort | 2026-01-23 19:55:45+00:00
Bikes without software will be around for the foreseeable future. They're the cheapest and most plentiful version of bike. In the unlikely scenario that all bikes somehow become electric, old bikes are much easier to maintain than old cars.

My argument to my own post is that cameras that track cars and license plates could easily be reconfigured to track bikes and pedestrians. In that case there's no transportation mode that will save you from surveillance. The cameras have to go.
by pixl97 | 2026-01-23 19:56:09+00:00
>You would not be able to drink the milk.

Incorrect, the milk does not disappear. You are contractually and legally obligated not to drink the milk, much in the same way I should not go around killing people, but I certainly have the ability to.

Now, if you sell the customer electrically locking milk bottles which won't open after the contract is over, then the customer "can't" drink the milk, they couldn't.
Show HN: Multi-agent deliberation plugin for Claude Code
by Bayram | 2026-01-23 19:56:09+00:00
I kept copy-pasting the same question between Claude, Codex, and Gemini CLIs - one reviews the other's work, back and forth until I'm satisfied. Decided to automate myself out of the loop.

This is Scott Page's "many model thinking" in action: each model has its own character and blind spots,so triangulating between them often catches things a single model misses.

Three modes:
- Deliberate: one agent generates, another reviews, they iterate until consensus
- Council: parallel opinions + anonymous peer ranking + synthesis (inspired by Karpathy's llm-council)
- Debate: two agents argue pro/con, a third judges

Requires 2+ of: Claude Code, Codex, or Gemini CLI.
by rurban | 2026-01-23 19:56:45+00:00
I also thought I could trust mega Corp. That's why I put all my code on their platform, code.google.com, and not on this obscure platform without any business model, github.
Well, that sucked. And why should I use protobuf, when I just need to share structs and arrays in memory (aka zero copy) with a version field? Like everyone else does for decades?
by klodolph | 2026-01-23 19:57:24+00:00
I always thought that the vast majority of your codebase, the right thing to do with an error is to propagate it. Either blindly, or by wrapping it with a bit of context info.

I don’t know where the LLMs are picking up this paranoid tendency to handle every single error case. It’s worth knowing about the error cases, but it requires a lot more knowledge and reasoning about the current state of the program to think about how they should be handled. Not something you can figure out just by looking at a snippet.
by hinkley | 2026-01-23 19:57:28+00:00
The first program I ever started on one day and finished on another was saved onto an audio cassette. And I thought that was pretty weird.

But like the vinyl it has really terrible random access behavior.

It would be sorta cool if someone used an auto repeat record and several copies in order to do a multi track streaming solution. With six players you can load the file in 1:02 instead of 6:10. Or perhaps 1:33 average if you don’t assume the record begins right when you’re ready to read and you have to wait ~31s average seek time.
by jm4 | 2026-01-23 19:57:31+00:00
Have you ever thought about a marketplace for premade workflows? Or a library of integrations that are already tested that a user can mix and match to create complex automations? Or access to more MCP servers?

For example, it would be really neat to trigger jobs that perform some task and then make a call to Twilio or something to send an alert. Or some building blocks that tie into my Square account or Amazon account. I want to be able to describe the results I want, but I don’t want to explain how to interact with a particular service and then test that.

I would love to be able to give a prompt like this: “review my item library in Square, identify items that are missing descriptions or are miscategorized, propose the fixes, and confirm with me before making any changes.” That’s an extremely tedious task that requires a lot of clicking and page loads. I hate it and I would pay for your product if you could save me that time.

Or this: “Every month, alert me to any fluctuations in product cost and which items in my Square catalog are affected. Highlight any items where my COGS exceeds 35%. All the invoices are available in my email.” That would be incredibly powerful. Doing this manually can take days.
by tyfon | 2026-01-23 19:57:46+00:00
I've been trying opencode a bit with gemini pro (and claude via those) with a rust project, and I have a push pre-hook to cargo check the code.

The amount of times I have to "yell" at the llm for adding #[allow] statements to silence the linter instead of fixing the code is crazy and when I point it out they go "Oops, you caught me, let me fix it the proper way".

So the tests don't necessarily make them produce proper code.
by tzs | 2026-01-23 19:57:55+00:00
> I disagree: in as much as I have noticed this far more with AI than any other advancement / fad (depending on your opinion) than anything else before

Isn't that because most of the other advancements/fads were not as widely applicable?

With earlier things there was usually only particular kinds of sites or products where they would be useful. You'd still get some people trying to put them in places they made no sense, but most of the places they made no sense stayed untouched.

With AI, if well done, it would be useful nearly everywhere. It might not be well done enough yet for some of the places people are putting it so ends up being annoying, but that's a problem of them being premature, not a problem of them wanting to put AI somewhere it makes no sense.

There have been previous advancements that were useful nearly everywhere, such as the internet or the microcomputer, but they started out with limited availability and took many years to become widely available so they were more like several smaller advancements/fads in series rather than one big one like AI.
by TrainedMonkey | 2026-01-23 19:58:13+00:00
It's software engineering crack. Starting a project feels amazing, features are shipping, a complex feature in the afternoon - ezpz. But AI lacks permanence, for every feature you start over from scratch, except there is more of codebase now, but the context window is still the same. So there is drift, codebase randomizes, edge cases proliferate, and the implementation velocity slows down.

Full disclosure - I am a heavy codex user and I review and understand every line of code. I manually fight spurious tests it tries to add by pointing a similar one already exists and we can get coverage with +1 LOC vs +50. It's exhausting, but personal productivity is still way up.

I think the future is bright because training / fine-tuning taste, dialing down agentic frameworks, introducing adversarial agents, and increasing model context windows all seem attainable and stackable.
by NietzscheanNull | 2026-01-23 19:58:55+00:00
Found this interesting given the source:

"If AI does to white-collar work what globalization did to blue-collar, we need to confront that directly," Fink told the crowd in Davos

Seemed oddly progressive coming from Fink, until reading a bit further.

Fink's prescription, offered in a conversation at Davos with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, was for pensions to invest more in AI infrastructure—the kind of assets BlackRock manages.

There it is, predictable as clockwork. If anyone needed any further evidence of how detached the worldviews of elites have become lately, there's this jewel of a closing quote from Fink:

"We need to make sure that the average pensioner and the average saver is part of that growth," he said. "If they're just watching it from the sidelines, they're going to feel left out."

It would seem that in Mr. Fink's view, the greatest threat facing those in the bottom half of the wealth distribution (who have seen their share of wealth contract by nearly 50% since '81, per article stats), is feeling a bit of FOMO. Not food insecurity, not teetering on the edge of bankruptcy due to a medical mishap, not the specter of homelessness forever looming, just... "feeling left out."
by shykes | 2026-01-23 19:58:56+00:00
Google developed linux cgroups. IBM developed linux namespaces. Docker developed a completely new application runtime and delivery system, built on cgroups, namespaces, aufs, and tar. This required lots of original design and engineering work. Prior to Docker, there was no runtime contract for distinguishing the portable application bits from the non-portable host-specific bits. You just got a machine, and then had to provision, configure and templatize it - then upload application bits into it yourself.

All three companies contributed significantly to the modern container stack. As the co-founder of Docker, and someone who spent 10 years toiling away at container technology before it finally became cool, I wish people had more appreciation for the amount of engineering and design work that went into that. Google and IBM contributed the primitives that made Docker possible. But Docker made genuine contributions of its own.
by jacoblarszon | 2026-01-23 19:59:14+00:00
Hi HN,

I tried to add a simple chatbot widget to a few Next.js projects and ended up surprised by how much work it took with OpenAI ChatKit for something that, from the outside, feels like “just a chat bubble”.

In practice, I found myself spending most of the time wiring up things that feel like infrastructure concerns rather than UI:

deciding how to structure agents and tool calls

managing knowledge and retrieval so the bot is actually useful

handling auth, rate limits, streaming, persistence, and guardrails

making it all play nicely with a real app deployment

So I built CloudlyKit to make the “basic website chatbot” case trivial.

The idea is simple: you paste a snippet into your Next.js layout.tsx claiming a widget, and you have a working chatbot bubble on your site. Then you can optionally add knowledge sources and configure behavior, but the default path is meant to be fast.

I’m not trying to replace “serious” agent frameworks. This is mostly for teams that want a clean website widget without building a whole agent and RAG stack from scratch.

I’d love feedback on a few things:

Am I overestimating how painful ChatKit is, or did others hit the same wall

What do you consider the minimum feature set for a website chatbot widget

Where do you draw the line between “widget” and “agent platform”

If you’ve shipped something similar, what part was unexpectedly annoying

Project: cloudlykit.com

Happy to answer any technical questions about how it’s implemented and what tradeoffs I made.
by NoSalt | 2026-01-23 19:59:24+00:00
My son and I are both fascinated by synthesizers and what they can do. I bought this:

https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/Nts1Mk2--korg-nutekt...

For us to build and play with, and we have a ball with it. This phase8 would be a ton of fun as well.
by bayindirh | 2026-01-23 19:59:36+00:00
Researchers love to reduce everything into formulae, and believe that when they have the right set of formulae, they can simulate something as-is.

Hint: It doesn't work that way.

Another hint: I'm a researcher.

Yes, we have found a great way to compress and remix the information we scrape from the internet, and even with some randomness, looks like we can emit the right set of tokens which makes sense, or search the internet the right way and emit these search results, but AGI is more than that.

There's so much tacit knowledge and implicit computation coming from experience, emotions, sensory inputs and from our own internal noise. AI models doesn't work on those. LLMs consume language and emit language. The information embedded in these languages are available to them, but most of the tacit knowledge is just an empty shell of the thing we try to define with the limited set of words.

It's the same with anything we're trying to replace humans in real world, in daily tasks (self-driving, compliance check, analysis, etc.).

AI is missing the magic grains we can't put out as words or numbers or anything else. The magic smoke, if you pardon the term. This is why no amount of documentation can replace a knowledgeable human.

...or this is why McLaren Technology Center's aim of "being successful without depending on any specific human by documenting everything everyone knows" is an impossible goal.

Because like it or not, intuition is real, and AI lacks it. Irrelevant of how we derive or build that.
by lfittl | 2026-01-23 19:59:52+00:00
Since there seems to be some confusion in the comments about why pg_query chose Protobufs in the first place, let me add some context as the original author of pg_query (but not involved with PgDog, though Lev has shared this work by email beforehand).

The initial motivation for developing pg_query was for pganalyze, where we use it to parse queries extracted from Postgres, to find the referenced tables, and these days also rewrite and format queries. That use case runs in the background, and as such is much less performance critical.

pg_query actually initially used a JSON format for the parse output (AST), but we changed that to Protobuf a few major releases ago, because Protobuf makes it easy to have typed bindings in the different languages we support (Ruby, Go, Rust, Python, etc). Alternatives (e.g. using FFI directly) make sense for Rust, but would require a lot of maintained glue code for other languages.

All that said, I'm supportive of Lev's effort here, and we'll add some additional functions in the libpg_query library to make using it directly (i.e. via FFI) easier. But I don't see Protobuf going away, because in non-performance critical cases, it is more ergonomic across the different bindings.
by roskelld | 2026-01-23 19:59:53+00:00
The context seemed to last a few seconds. I went from a mock up screenshot of a fantasy video game, complete with first person weapon. Then as I moved forward the weapon became part of the scenery and the whole world blurred and blended until it became some sort of sci-fi abstract space. Spinning the camera completely changed look and style.

I ended up with a UI that closely resembled the Cyberpunk 2077 one complete with VO modal popup. I guess it must have featured a lot in the training data.

Really not sure what to make of this, seems to have no constraints on concept despite the prompt (I specifically used the word fantasy), no spatial memory, no collision, or understanding of landscape features in order to maintain a sense of place.
by dugidugout | 2026-01-23 20:00:09+00:00
We are likely on different footing as I quite enjoy games of all form. Here is my attempt to formalize my argument:

Claim 1: Cheating is endemic to competition across all formats (physical, digital, tabletop)

Claim 2: Despite this, games survive and thrive because people value the competitive spirit itself

Claim 3: The appreciation of play isn't destroyed by the existence of cheaters (even "cheaters" who simply surpass human reasoning)

The mahjong suggestion isn't a non-sequitur (while still an earnest suggestion), it was to exemplify my personal engagement with the spirit of competition and how it completely side-steps the issue you are wary is existential.

> I think some of this boils down to whether one believes AI is just like past phenomenons, or whether it's significantly different. It's probably too early to tell.

I suppose I am not clear on your concern. Online gaming is demonstrably still growing and I think the chess example is a touching story of humanism prevailing. "AI" has been mucking with online gaming for decades now, can you qualify why this is so different now?
by waldrews | 2026-01-23 20:00:19+00:00
We're just not going to see any code written entirely without AI except in specialist niches, just as we don't see handwritten assembly and binaries. So the disclosure part is going to become boilerplate.

In the old era, the combination 'it works' + 'it uses a sophisticated language' + 'it integrates with a complex codebase' implied that this was an intentional effort by someone who knew what they were doing, and therefore probably safe to commit.

We can no longer make that social assumption. So then, what can we rely on to signal 'this was thoroughly supervised and reviewed and understood and tested?' That's going to be hard and subjective.

Personal reputations and track records are pedigrees and brands are going to become more important in the industry; and the meritocratic 'code talks no matter where you came from' ethos is at risk.