MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ericmay | 2026-01-14 22:32:14+00:00
> When a contributor release FOSS, it's fair to compensate if you business rely on it.

Nope.

Put it in the license, sell the software, or work for free, but stop complaining about it.

It's nice if businesses who benefit from specific software packages want to pay or show support, but it's not nice to release something "for free" but then jump on a moral grandstand and demand everyone pay so you can feel good about your ideology at the expense of everyone else.

> The ideal license is the Unreal one free for « Individuals and small businesses (with less than $1 million USD in annual gross revenue)

Then make that your license?
by labarilem | 2026-01-14 22:32:14+00:00
I'm building a manually curated catalog of videogames made by the HN community. Currently I've added data up to the end of March 2024. The plan is to gather all data up to today and then keep updating the collection. Check it out here:

- https://hackernews.games/

- https://hn-games.marcolabarile.me/

Please let me know if this looks useful to you!
by InexSquirrel | 2026-01-14 22:32:21+00:00
I could be wrong, but maybe you trying to shield yourself from these things also cuts you off from the good that's happening?

There's a lot of bad things going on - but (and not saying this as justification) - there always has. There's always some power hungry person that claws their way to a position where they can benefit themselves at the expense of others. But the majority of people want to have good, peaceful lives with a sense of community and connection. Build things. Make art. Laugh. Grow and learn. Wonder about what could be, and build futures towards that.

Don't forsake them because of the all of the bad stuff that gets shoved in your face every day.

It's a dis-service to yourself and the life you have, and it weakens the people and groups that have do have the energy to stand up to not-so-good actors. If you're _happy_ being isolated then definitely go do that, but don't cut yourself off because you're only fed bad news everyday.
by mmooss | 2026-01-14 22:32:32+00:00
These are all empty claim, including a grand social theory. I'm not even sure what you're talking about for 2010-2015. You really need to be drowning in yourself to believe it all and then, on top of it, to judge other people.

People don't share your priorities or beliefs. Maybe that's why they act differently.

> Avoiding doomscrolling is not that hard.

If you mean addiction to social media, that's empirically not true. You can see how many people are addicted, and the research about it. Typing a few bytes into HN doesn't change or establish any facts.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-01-14 22:32:37+00:00
I think that's an unbelievably cynical worldview, one I don't agree wtih at all, but within that view: what of the things people value, but which they do not pay for? Much of the tech of the world is built on the free labour of FOSS developers. Are they not contributing to society because they are not compensated for their contributions?
by Ntrails | 2026-01-14 22:32:41+00:00
> Would you be willing to submit to ID verification for the sites you participate in, as a fundamentally good thing for protecting minors from bad content on the internet?

The friction would be sufficient to give up. Arguably no loss to me and certainly none to the internet.

This is what has happened already, I am not giving my id to some shitty online provider. If I lose more sites so be it.
by philo23 | 2026-01-14 22:32:41+00:00
Kinda meta, but this is the first time in a long time where I've put only the first half of my postcode in expecting it not to work and been surprised. Most of these "find your nearest XYZ" site require the full postcode which is just unnecessary unless you're looking for a fairly precise location. A full postcode can narrow your location down to an individual street, so its nice not to give too much away if you can.

For anyone not in the know, UK postcodes are made up of two parts: a general area (the outward code) and then a more specific one (the inward code.) Generally speaking a postcode + house number will be good enough to get a letter delivered to the right place, though the sorting office might not be too happy with you...

The format [0] is roughly: AB12 3CD, though the number of letters/numbers on the left side can vary a bit. As far as I know the second set of numbers is always 1 digit though, so that's how you can easily split the two sides of it to format it nicely. There's a couple of special ones that break the rules though.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcodes_in_the_United_Kingdo...
by cmtm4 | 2026-01-14 22:32:43+00:00
I think the reason this take gets push-back in discussions (including here) is that it's highly regional.

I've lived in parts of the US where I doubt more than 10% of pickup trucks on the road (and there were a lot of them) were really justifiable purchases as trucks. They were aspirational purchases, and/or were selected for status/class/politics signaling.

I've lived other places in the US where the whole region had far fewer trucks (but a hell of a lot more Volvos... like, easily 10x as many as the other place) where I bet at least 50% of pickup trucks saw enough truck-use to really be justifiable.
by Fazebooking | 2026-01-14 22:32:45+00:00
It might be just different viewpoints people don't understand?

I'm advocating for spending time with AI because it works already good enough and it continues to progress surprisingly fast. Unexperienced fast for me tbh.

If i say "AI is great" i also know when AI is also stupid but i'm already/stil so impressed that i can transform basic text into working go/java whatever code, that i accept that its not perfect just because I highly appreciate how fast we got this.

And it feels weird too tbh. It doesn't feel special to talk to an LLM and get code back somehow while this was unthinkable just a few years back.

Somethimes it likes you just forget about all these facts and have to remind yourself that this is something new.
by c-hendricks | 2026-01-14 22:33:19+00:00
I found gitlab ci's yaml the smallest of the 3 I've used (gitlab, GitHub actions, CircleCI).

But does gitlab ci have anything for sharing? GitHub actions are built around it, and CircleCI has orbs and contexts.

For example, muse's guide for gitlab involves making your own container and managing the cache yourself (ref: https://mise.jdx.dev/continuous-integration.html#gitlab-ci)

GitHub actions is a couple of lines (ref: https://mise.jdx.dev/continuous-integration.html#github-acti...)
by throwawayqqq11 | 2026-01-14 22:33:29+00:00
I find your explanation of free markets outperforming authoritarian regimes wanting. How should a stable and sealed dictatorship like north korea be impacted let alone destabilized by anything outside privateers do? Can you give an example?

Also, since many people bring up the french revolution. Peak weapons tech back then was front loading muskets and the fights in paris were desparation driven bloodbaths, where such weapons were eventually captured by the revolution. Today, the power gap to be outperformed by free markets is much bigger.
by jacquesm | 2026-01-14 22:33:51+00:00
Spain will need to make some very hard choices, they have a relatively - by European standards - fragile grid and some weak interconnects. This situation has been flagged years ago but so far priorities have been to do other things first. The outage has definitely given people food for thought and I expect that when the final report is presented that it will come with some recommendations on how to prevent future recurrence. In particular the voltage / frequency regulation aspect of some of the local grids will become a focal point because these have the potential to destabilize much larger sections than just their own. The real puzzler to me is that there were multiple signals of pending grid instability and no action was taken when they easily could have, this is the bit that I'm most interested in learning about.

I look at energy companies about twice every year in some detail and I know that the typical grid operator is extremely careful and pro-active on this subject (at least, in NL and Germany, my work area, they are), the energy market has introduced some potential for abuse and for instability but so far that seems to be under control. Which makes me quite curious about what the root cause here was.
by amelius | 2026-01-14 22:33:52+00:00
> Yes, you can point this specific UV wavelength at your skin and be fine.

Not so sure about that: there are microbes on our skin, protecting us from harmful bacteria, funghi and viruses. This lamp would kill those friendly microbes.

It seems a better idea is to put this UV lamp in a duct, and treat only the air that passes through.
by HeyLaughingBoy | 2026-01-14 22:33:53+00:00
Never used 2-10V but I learned about 0-10V when someone approached me to design a device to input 0-10V position signal and output two phase-shifted sinusoids to retrofit to a controller that only took resolver inputs. We shipped a couple dozen of them to repair broken machine tools. Fun project, but not going to get rich from it!

I'm guessing that the 2-10V is to detect line break conditions?
by jmward01 | 2026-01-14 22:34:01+00:00
The impacts of social media on children (and adults for that matter) are becoming more clear by the day but a question, I think, is is it the format/function or is it the algorithm to drive the feed that is the issue? So, for instance, pushing damaging teen influencers at a child's feed or pushing negative/polarizing content, etc etc. Could there be safe social media, that wouldn't need verification, if for instance the algorithm was 'dumb' and just showed friend feeds and feeds specifically selected to follow?
by superjan | 2026-01-14 22:35:14+00:00
I would argue that you don’t need to learn string theory as it currently does not predict anything we can realistically observe (as you need energies that occurred only at the big bang). If string theory is correct we could observe a “supersymmetric” twin of all known particles, however we haven’t seen these, and they could exist even if string theory is false.

String theory aims to explain all physics as manifestations of a mathematical concept best understood as a vibrating string.

Initially, the hope was that string theory could predict the particle masses we observe, but that hasn’t worked as it turns out there were many different predictions possible.
String theory has also struggled to develop a version of the theory that does not contradict known properties of our actual universe.

Loop quantum gravity is not equivalent to string theory, except that it also tries to unify gravity and quantum physics.

As things stand, string theory is not falsifiable, while that is the case, you could argue it does not count as physics.

But, by multiple accounts, it is interesting math, which can be worth doing for its own sake, and it’s happened often enough that interesting math turned out to be useful somewhere. Just not for explaining physics.
by UqWBcuFx6NV4r | 2026-01-14 22:35:33+00:00
That’s the thing with these social network nostalgia projects. People don’t want to admit that the we have changed. I remember getting quite excited by and later disillusioned by BlueSky. As good-intentioned as people claim to be, they all bring their learned behaviours with them when they set up camp. All these new places do is end up being another venue for people to be dicks to one-another. The massive social deprogramming we have to do is going to be much slower and much more complex than simply building a platform with ‘better mechanics’ or whatever, and I doubt it’s going to happen any time soon if at all.
by cue_the_strings | 2026-01-14 22:35:40+00:00
I think it's strictly for financial reasons. A different profile of people from Serbia comes to the US.

I'm from Montenegro, but also lived in Serbia for a sizeable portion of my life and have family there.

Many people from said countries work in the US illegaly. I can speak for Montenegro, but the exact same pattern plays out in Bosnia and Albania.

Sure, there are some people who go to the US to study for a bit, and there are short-term seasonal work arrangements for students like "Work and Travel", but those are short.

I know 20+ people from Montenegro who went to work in the US in the last decade, illegaly or semi-legally. Two things come to mind first: driving trucks and picking marijuana. Usually they go there for a seasonal job or simply as tourists and overstay their visa.

My schoolmate even has a company that facilitates such schemes and sends people to the US as seasonal workers, who then overstay their visas and do shitty jobs. He's a millionare now, not that you'd know. Of course, it's also the diaspora in the US who actually facilitate this scheme and exploit the workers. I've heard the same thing from Albanians.

Every person I know who went to work in the US from Serbia (10+ people) is either a (good) dev, or an expert of some other kind, engineer, maybe a doctor (even though that's a tough path), PhD or something similar. All the best serbian devs and PhDs are overwhelmingly in the US.

There are several reasons for that, main ones being that it seems to be somewhat harder for people from Serbia to go to US to work illegaly, so the US mostly gets the best ones who are a net benefit to the society and pay a surplus of taxes.

Because it's harder to get to the US from Serbia, fo less qualified workers it's much easier to go to Israel and Saudi Arabia (both hugely popular nowadays) and the Emirates. Western Europe used to be popular, but it barely pays off nowadays, you can go there to live an average life, not to make big bucks and come back to flex on your neighbors.

Serbia is also quite a desperate place, but still has enough people to produce a sizeable chunk of professionals and academics, who don't want to put up with the kleptocracy and leave.
by Aaronmacaron | 2026-01-14 22:35:59+00:00
TIL there are two units of measurement that are both called ton but confusingly are not the same as a ton. One is a tiny bit more than a ton (1.016 tons) and one is a bit less (0.907 tons). Apparently people use the prefixes long and short to differentiate them, at least that part is intuitive.
by jphoward | 2026-01-14 22:36:08+00:00
The browser it built, obviously the context window of the entire project is huge. They mention loads of parallel agents in the blog post, so I guess each agent is given a module to work on, and some tests? And then a 'manager' agent plugs this in without reading the code? Otherwise I can't see how, even with ChatGPT 5.2/Gemini 3, you could do this otherwise? In retrospect it seems an obvious approach and akin to how humans work in teams, but it's still interesting.
by LAC-Tech | 2026-01-14 22:36:29+00:00
This is very well said - it is much nicer and more professional than the sentiments I could express on the matter.

The age of niche tech microcelebrities is on us. It existed a bit in the past (ESR, Uncle Bob, etc), but is much more of a thing now. Some of them make great content and don't say ridiculous things. Others not so much.

Even tech executives are aping it...
by maxkfranz | 2026-01-14 22:36:41+00:00
The script method is great, and it's generalisable to things outside of DB access.

E.g. I used this method when I wanted to carry out a large (almost every source file) refactoring of Cytoscape.js. I fed the LLM a bunch of examples, and I told it to write a script to carry out the refactoring (largely using regex). I reviewed the script, ran the script, and then the code base was refactored.

At the time, agents were not capable enough of doing large-scale refactors directly, as far as I was aware. And the script was probably much faster, anyway.
by InexSquirrel | 2026-01-14 22:37:13+00:00
Same feeling here, and I'm already getting frustrated with Windows pushing their crap into my OS. Definitely don't want even more of that.

Beyond work I only use the PC for gaming and watching movies - so really if the only option was 'it has to be in the cloud', then my position becomes "well I guess I don't really play games any more". Not the worst thing.

But whatever. Just because Jeff wants that, doesn't mean it will be so. And like who cares what he thinks? The only hat he ever wears is "how do I make more money", not "how do I ensure people live good lives and enjoy themselves".
by rootusrootus | 2026-01-14 22:37:23+00:00
Tesla is a special case because they manipulate their pricing on a monthly, sometimes daily basis, and in the past they've changed the price quite significantly. In the US, the tax credits also really screw with the market dynamics. Lots of people think the car depreciates really quickly because they don't realize the original buyer didn't pay MSRP. I paid $20K under MSRP for my Lightning and in the just over a year I've owned it, the value has dropped about 7-8K. Pretty normal for the first year of a new vehicle.
by simonw | 2026-01-14 22:37:31+00:00
"To test this system, we pointed it at an ambitious goal: building a web browser from scratch."

I shared my LLM predictions last week, and one of them was that by 2029 "Someone will build a new browser using mainly AI-assisted coding and it won’t even be a surprise" https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/8/llm-predictions-for-202... and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVDhQMiAbR8&t=3913s

This project from Cursor is the second attempt I've seen at this now! The other is this one: https://www.reddit.com/r/Anthropic/comments/1q4xfm0/over_chr...
by Aurornis | 2026-01-14 22:37:51+00:00
> You can look at all manner of posts here on HN that explain exactly how you should do age verification without uploading IDs or giving central authority to some untrustworthy entity.

That's not how ID verification works. The ID verification requirements are about associating the person logging in with the specific ID.

So kids borrow their parents' ID while they're not looking, complete the registration process that reveals nothing, then they're good forever.

Or in the scenario where nothing at all is revealed about the ID and there is no central authority managing rate limiting, all it takes is for a single ID to be compromised and then everyone can use it to authenticate everywhere forever.

That's why all of the age verification proposals are basically ID verification proposals. All of these anonymous crypto suggestions wouldn't satisfy those requirements.
by einsteinx2 | 2026-01-14 22:38:14+00:00
> It is not yours anymore if you can't uninstall stuff.

But the article is literally instructions on how to uninstall it…also you can just uninstall Windows entirely.

Like I get where you’re coming from, but let’s not pretend that Windows PCs are iPhones now just because of Microsoft’s annoying dark patterns (patterns they’ve been following for years before Copilot came out).
by wcoenen | 2026-01-14 22:38:21+00:00
> you cannot prevent prompt injection

I wonder if might be possible by introducing a concept of "authority". Tokens are mapped to vectors in an embedding space, so one of the dimensions of that space could be reserved to represent authority.

For the system prompt, the authority value could be clamped to maximum (+1). For text directly from the user or files with important instructions, the authority value could be clamped to a slightly lower value, or maybe 0 because the model needs to be balance being helpful against refusing requests from a malicious user. For random untrusted text (e.g. downloaded from the internet by the agent), it would be set to the minimum value (-1).

The model could then be trained to fully respect or completely ignore instructions, based on the "authority" of the text. Presumably it could learn to do the right thing with enough examples.
by Root_Denied | 2026-01-14 22:38:44+00:00
As I understand it Cloudflare is being asked to block these sites globally, and what I said was that Italy doesn't have the legal authority to request that CF do so globally.

Locally, within Italy I can see the argument that CF can be compelled to adhere to blocking sites for any requests originating from, or being routed to Italy - so long as Cloudflare maintains any kind of presence there. That goes for any other country, too.

Realistically maintaining this kind of work puts a financial and engineering overhead on Cloudflare (or any CDN) for running operations in that country, and that incentivizes Cloudflare to push back on this request from any country. The logical response from CF is to refuse and threaten to remove all operations from the country if the country tries to force the issue, to prevent CF from getting pulled into the same requirements for multiple other countries, which is exactly what CF did a couple days ago.

I'll reiterate my previous stance - if a country wants to block part of the internet, that country needs to do it themselves and for the space within which they have authority to do so (their borders). At that point it's up to the citizens of the country to push back if they disagree, and if they don't want to be compared to China and their Great Firewall they shouldn't try and regulate the internet.
by habinero | 2026-01-14 22:39:08+00:00
I actually read through the logs and the code in the rare instances someone actually posts their prompts and the generated output. If I'm being overly cynical about the tech, I want to know.

The last one I did it on was breathlessly touted as "I used [LLM] to do some advanced digital forensics!"

Dawg. The LLM grepped for a single keyword you gave it and then faffed about putting it into json several times before throwing it away and generating some markdown instead. When you told it the result was bad, it grepped for a second word and did the process again.

It looks impressive with all these json files and bash scripts flying by, but what it actually did was turn a single word grep into blog post markdown and you still had to help it.

Some of you have never been on enterprise software sales calls and it shows.
by simonw | 2026-01-14 22:39:34+00:00
GPT-5.2-Codex has a 400,000 token window. Claude 4.5 Opus is half of that, 200,000 tokens.

It turns out to matter a whole lot less than you would expect. Coding Agents are really good at using grep and writing out plans to files, which means they can operate successfully against way more code than fits in their context at a single time.
by int32_64 | 2026-01-14 22:40:53+00:00
Perhaps nobody wants to have the uncomfortable conversation that AI is making the competent more competent and the incompetent less competent, because it would imply that AI provides brutally unequal benefits. The AI haters don't want this discussion because it would imply AI has any benefits, and the AI lovers don't want to have this discussion because it would imply the benefits of AI aren't universal and will increase inequality.
by observationist | 2026-01-14 22:41:03+00:00
Get a good "project manager" agents.md and it changes the whole approach of vibe coding. For a professional environment, with each person given a little domain, arranged in the usual hierarchy of your coding team, truly amazing things can get done.

Presumably the security and validation of code still needs work, I haven't read anything that indicates those are solved yet, so people still need to read and understand the code, but we're at the "can do massive projects that work" stage.

Division of labor and planning and hierarchy are all rapidly advancing, the orchestration and coordination capabilities are going to explode in '26.
by blibble | 2026-01-14 22:41:07+00:00
> My wife, who has no clue about coding at all, chatgpted a very basic android app only with guidance of chatgpt. She would never ever been able to do this in 5 hours or so without my guidance. I DID NOT HELP HER at all.

you know Google used to have a app for this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ADwPLSFeY8

I swear people have forgotten how productive native programming 30 years ago was (Delphi, even VB)

compared to the disaster that is the web today