MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by demux | 2026-01-18 21:50:41+00:00
I also don't think the average user gets the value of the protocol yet. Most of those users were looking for a new, more politically palatable home but with the same features as Twitter. The new generation of apps on the protocol will be vital in showing users what's possible. IMO the two most valuable features at a practical level are:
- social graph portability, which might look like having an onboarding experience that bootstraps your community on that app
- lexicon cross compatibility, i.e. your data from app A shows up in a contextually relevant spot in app B. Or app B writes records that show up in app A. This is pretty key to get right because it might confuse or anger users if they aren't condition to expect it.
Once the average user groks these features though, I'd be surprised if they voluntarily switch back to the standard corpo apps that eventually exit to some company who tries to monetize the shit out of every feature.
by jadenpeterson | 2026-01-18 21:50:49+00:00
Why are they comfortable saying this?

> Generally, Boyd said his office uses the software to find “avenues for obtaining probable cause” or “to verify reasonable suspicion that you already have”—not as a basis by itself to make arrests.

As if that's not a massive violation of our rights in and of itself. This is my fundamental problem with the internet. As much as stories like these gain traction, as many millions of redditors protest these increasingly common stories (for example, the suspicious nature of Luigi Mangione being 'reported' in that McDonalds), nothing will change.

Perhaps this is the part of the criminal justice system I am most suspect of. Is this what happens in a country with less regulation?
by matteopisani | 2026-01-18 21:51:12+00:00
PolyMorph tackles a modern blind spot in malware detection: polyglot binaries that are valid in multiple formats (APE, Zig, WASM) and intentionally crafted to evade AV/EDR. If you care about threat hunting, red-team tooling, or hardening supply chains, this repo is a compact, pragmatic tool for finding cross-platform threats and WASM cryptominers that slip past signature-based scanners.
GitHub

What it does?
• Detects APE (Actually Portable Executable) polyglots that can run on multiple OSes, Zig-based evasive payloads that use direct syscalls, and malicious WASM modules (cryptomining & GPU abuse).
• Lightweight Rust implementation with YARA rules and CLI examples for batch and JSON output designed for integration into pipelines and triage tooling.
• Goal: give analysts a first-pass detector that flags suspicious imports, cryptominer patterns, and multi-format trickery so you can prioritize deeper analysis.

Looking for feedback: would YC Cybersecurity folks and fellow infosec hackers be interested in integrating PolyMorph into threat-hunting stacks or extending it into a lightweight runtime sandbox for behavioral correlation?
by Brian_K_White | 2026-01-18 21:52:20+00:00
Star Trek episode 2 the creature removes all your salt. There are a lot of examples of a creature extracting all of something like that but these are kind of a different idea.

The potassium one is particularly horrible to think about because it's insideous. The entire race just gradually devolving back to stupid, especially if it was from the result of our own actions consuming it all for some industrial or consumer purpose. And before that happens, for untold generations there would be rich people who could afford their kids to grow up with enough and perpetuate the permanent ruling class, and a permanent poverty class that physically can not ever escape or compete regardless of their attitude or effort.
by tzs | 2026-01-18 21:52:42+00:00
The NYT asked him about this a couple weeks ago. Here's an article with some excerpts from that [1]. Key parts:

> President Donald Trump revealed in a new interview with The New York Times that his quest for full “ownership” of Greenland is "psychologically important” to him.

> During a two-hour sit-down with multiple Times reporters on Jan. 7, Trump was questioned about why he won't just send more American troops to Greenland — which is legal under a Cold War–era agreement — if his goal is to fend off foreign threats. The president replied by saying that he won't feel comfortable unless he owns the island.

> "Why is ownership important here?" Times national security correspondent David E. Sanger asked.

> "Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success," Trump, 79, replied. "I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do, whether you’re talking about a lease or a treaty. Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document, that you can have a base."

> White House correspondent Katie Rogers — whom Trump recently called "ugly, both inside and out" for writing a story about his age — chimed in to ask, "Psychologically important to you or to the United States?"

> “Psychologically important for me," Trump answered. "Now, maybe another president would feel differently, but so far I’ve been right about everything."

[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/donald-trump-says-wants-...
by nomel | 2026-01-18 21:53:54+00:00
I've seen it many many times, a few from myself.

It's not so hard if you're an expert in the field or concept they're asking the solution for, especially if you've already implemented it in the past, in some way, so know all the hidden requirements that they aren't even aware of. If you're in a senior position, in a small group, it's very possible you're the only one that can even reason about the solution, beyond some high level desires. I've worked in several teams with non-technical people/managers, where a good portion of the requirements must be ignored, with the biggest soft skill requirement being pretending they're ideas are reasonable.

It's also true if it's more technical than product based. I work in manufacturing R&D where a task might be "we need this robot, with this camera, to align to align to and touch this thing with this other thing within some um of error."

Software touches every industry of man. Your results may vary.
by jadenpeterson | 2026-01-18 21:53:54+00:00
No LOL. Zyns are nicotine pouches you insert into your gums for a gradual release of nicotine. They're powerful. Unfortunately, I went from using 3mg Zyns to 6mg Zyns, and had to sit in front of my bathroom sink, fighting the urge to retch. Be careful with them, but they're a good way to ramp up to cigarette smoking
by bvisness | 2026-01-18 21:54:04+00:00
As much as I dislike invasive tracking, I don't think the blame lies with Marketing on this one. In most cases I think you could implement all the awful surveillance you want with extremely minimal overhead, even on the web. Certainly malware developers are at the extreme of invasive + low-overhead!

Certainly there are cases where some manager says "put this script in Google Tag Manager and don't ask any questions", but rarely have I ever seen that be the bottleneck. Programmers actually just write really bad frameworks, and then other programmers use them to make even worse software, for literally no reason other than "maybe this framework design would be cool".
by re | 2026-01-18 21:54:36+00:00
> I wanted to see if, with the assistance of modern AI, I could reproduce this work in a more concise way, from scratch, in a weekend.

I don't think it counts as recreating a project "from scratch" if the model that you're using was trained against it. Claude Opus 4.5 is aware of the stable-diffusion.cpp project and can answer some questions about it and its code-base (with mixed accuracy) with web search turned off.
by DroneBetter | 2026-01-18 21:55:07+00:00
the proofs written by ChatGPT are necessarily reasoned about in plain language, and are a human-comprehensible length (that is what Tao did, since it hasn't been formalised in a proof-checking language); today, the many-gigabytes (or -terabytes) proofs (à la 4-colour theorem) are generally problems solved via SAT solvers that are required to prove nonexistence of smaller solutions by exhaustion.

and there is an ongoing literature review (which has been lucrative to both erdosproblems and the OEIS), and this one was relabelled upon the discovery of an earlier resolution
by rm30 | 2026-01-18 21:56:08+00:00
The Community Movement (Movimento Comunità) was Adriano Olivetti's broader social philosophy: focused on worker participation, cooperative economics, and community-based organization.
there is not so much in English, all my knowledge comes from Italian sources. The Italian wikipedia page in the section Bibliografia lists some books in Italian, maybe you'll be able to find them, at least now we have the advantage to be able to translate on the fly.
Anyway here http://momoneco.kotka.fi/ivrea_nayttely_4_uk.html there is something about the urban planning.
by F7F7F7 | 2026-01-18 21:56:45+00:00
This is doable. I set something similar up at scale. Figma Variables/Tokens -> Token Studio (Style Dictionary, essentially) -> Our Component library <-> Storybook -> MCP

Atomic component system, good page level template coverage, great prop support.

The LLM consumer nor the designer is allowed to write directly back to the library. Those changes need to go through a governance process to prevent drift as their are multiple product teams consuming it and we still don't have a reliable way to make sure Figma and the component library are always 1:1. Maybe in a company of a single designer we'd let them introduce changes back into the library.

So while this setup is arguably better than what you have set up it still requires multiple humans in the loop.

Sure, there are a billion Medium articles about how it can be done with tokens but its much messier at any kind of scale.
by LexiMax | 2026-01-18 21:56:59+00:00
They are either being paid, or they are so lost in propaganda that they're willing to do it >for free. They have more time that they are willing to waste on propaganda than you, unless you decide to dedicate every waking moment to a rebuttable you are behind the eight ball. Even then, they're probably in dozens of communities and threads at the same time, repeating the same garbage.

The only way this sort of rhetoric can be fought is at the level of moderation. This site has user-driven moderation, which in theory means that you can fight the tide this way, but in practice the authoritarians and fascists have access to these tools as well, and bad faith use is rarely punished, so these tools are less of a panacea and more of a race to who can down-vote who first.

The only other alternative is for the paid moderation of this site to put their foot down and say "We are not okay with fascists and authoritarian apologists on our site" and ban them. The admins of Hacker News are another on a very long list of social media site hosts who have decided to wash their hands of the responsibility. They don't care.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. If you decide you still want to engage, I recommend viewing the interaction through the lens of an attention economy; spend less time on a rebuttle than they did on their post, and only in places where you think it will actually be seen.
by JohnLeitch | 2026-01-18 21:57:33+00:00
But the process is still inaccessible to them, provided we consider achieving reliability and security goals of said process. And no, this is not "no true Scotsman;" "vibe coded" software is demonstrably inferior in numerous ways, and outright dangerous in some contexts. No number of carefully scripted demos or PR campaigns is going to change this reality.
by fakedang | 2026-01-18 21:57:44+00:00
I think Henry Cavill was a big part of why it grew in popularity. As Henry Cavill's career and profile grew, he did not shy away from putting his favorite nerdy interests in front of the media spotlight, which included Warhammer. That obviously caught the imagination of the internet crowd who ran away with it to create all sorts of memes with Cavill as the God Emperor, or "Behold the Omnissiah!" memes. That naturally sparked the interest of a lot of bystanders, and credit where credit's due, Warhammer lore is deeply enthralling.
by johnnienaked | 2026-01-18 21:57:46+00:00
The solution is to prevent the privatization and wealth accumulation that flows from control of infrastructural technology platforms. Netscape, google, computer os, machine learning were all public or university research projects until the first movers (andreeson, brin/page, Ellison, gates) stole them, gatekept and IPed them, and then exploited wide user base to accumulate absurd amounts of wealth for just themselves. These people either didn't create anything at all or made very slight variations before deploying them. They were smart in seeing the trends before they happened, but should they really be entitled to 50% of a countries wealth just because they were lucky enough to be first? Especially now that we see how they behave once they get that control?

There is no reason at all why the US govt. can't control this better, they just refuse to do so.
by emil-lp | 2026-01-18 21:58:19+00:00
Thank you for your service, dang. You do a great job keeping HN a great site. I disagree with your decision regarding changing the title, though. Yes, it's tongue-in-cheek, but I wouldn't call it bait.

I wonder how HN anno 1968 would have moderated "Go To Statement Considered Harmful". *

* Amusing side note: Dijkstra's submitted title was actually "A Case Against the Goto Statement" but the editor editorialized it.
by ben_w | 2026-01-18 21:58:58+00:00
> The US economy is by far the world's largest and now dwarfs the Eurozone.

Nominal, Eurozone, yes.

But, being the reserve currency boosts the exchange rate all by itself. I'd argue that this acts as hysteresis, that it adds strength that keeps it a reserve currency longer than it would if there was no memory in the system. Therefore, if anything does induce a shock, the PPP rate is more relevant when considering who might displace it; this other currency (or currencies) would then also get the same hysteresis benefit.

The EU, PPP, is about the same as the US (30 T), and I'd argue that "the EU" is important measure for near-future stuff rather than the current Eurozone, because the EU has the no-specific-time-constraint preference to become all Eurozone… except for the bits that opted out. But also some more neighbours who opted in without being in the EU. It's weird.

China, PPP, it's bigger than the US, 40 T by PPP. Not quite as big as the gap between the US and India, but close enough I had to get the calculator out I can't eyeball the ratio on a linear graph: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/timeline/jfgbd60rb...

> To answer your question: the US economy is going to last a very long time yet. So far it has lasted hundreds of years. Please provide a comparison to any other economy that has lasted so long and done so well. You'll be able to name two or three examples maximum.

You didn't do well for all of those hundreds of years, if you squint hard enough to ignore the great depression you get to about 150 years, which basically means about the same as every other industrial economy that didn't have a war in the middle split it apart. If you don't do that (because the great depression really sucked), the half of Europe whose national boundaries explosively reorganised, and also the Soviet Union, wave hello.

The USSR is an important reference, because basically nobody saw the collapse coming until a year or two before it happened. It was unthinkable.

> In the moment people tend to get hyper emotional, hyperbolic. They think something fundamental is changing. That's almost always nothing more than personal subjective projection of what they want to have happen, rather than an objective assessment of reality.

All true.

> Back in reality the US has survived and thrived through drastically worse than anything going on in the present. The Vietnam era was far worse both socially/culturally and economically. WW2 was drastically worse. The Civil War was drastically worse. The Great Depression was drastically worse. But oh yeah sure, the US superpower is about to end any day now.

How many of those occasions did the US refuse to rule out military force with its primary set of allies in order to seize land supposedly to keep it safe from a nation that's now 33% richer than it is? The Civil War was not a time when y'all were a big player on the world stage, it was when Europe was busy carving everything up into colonies.
by yurishimo | 2026-01-18 21:59:03+00:00
I’ve worked at one, but it required a PM who was ruthless about cutting scope and we focused on user stories after establishing a strong feedback pipeline, both technically through CI/CD/tests and with stakeholders. Looking back, that was the best team I’ve ever worked in. We split up to separate corners of the company once the project was delivered (12 month buildout of an alpha that was internally tested and then fleshed out).

Maybe I had greenfield glasses but I came in for the last 3 months and it was still humming.
by bvisness | 2026-01-18 21:59:08+00:00
As I mentioned in another comment, I find it easier to use Dear Imgui from a "lower-level language" like Odin or Go than to use any web framework with JS. You'd think that because web frameworks are so "high level" they would be better at expressing my intent. But actually the "lower level" tools are easier and faster and universally better. So which one is "high level" now? Which one is doing "more with less"?
by catapart | 2026-01-18 21:59:09+00:00
come on, man, let's be real. you're talking modern, practical application; I'm talking reasonable user buy in at big boy social media levels. the video hosting IS what I'm talking about being expensive. you think bsky is going to be successfully while ignoring the instagram crowd forever? what are we doing here?

bsky saves the video processing and bandwidth by not hosting that content on bsky. it's a smaller problem, but in a large enough pool, images become heavy, too. and, either way, the egress of that content is expensive if you're doing it for the entire world, instead of letting each individual's computer (their pds) do it.

I'm happy to admit that text is cheap and bsky isn't looking to offload their data as it stands now. but let's be honest about the long term, which is what my original comment takes aim at.
by klondike_klive | 2026-01-18 21:59:12+00:00
Did you use a fire grate with a big space underneath and keep it swept clean? Or did you build up a big bed of ash under the grate? On the advice of a chimney sweep I put a perimeter of bricks under the grate to form walls and we're currently filling it with more and more ash (it really takes a while). It's starting to make a difference in how much heat comes back into the room. Without that void underneath, the fire doesn't burn so hot and cold air doesn't get pulled through so quickly.

(It feels like it's getting warmer - may all be wishful thinking though, I haven't taken any measurements!)
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-01-18 22:00:36+00:00
My belief is that its rise to popularity is a result of the underlying concept being something that everybody has been feeling for a long time, but didn't have a word that could serve as its face in a satisfying manner. It's snappy and encodes a certain frustration and anger with the state of things that isn't conveyed as well or as succinctly with other terms.
by themafia | 2026-01-18 22:00:46+00:00
> make a valuable process accessible to themselves

I am directly calling into question the "value" of that process. It's also becoming increasingly clear that these tools just whitewash away the copyrights of the materials they were trained on and still mostly reproduce when asked. This would then actually be the destruction of value.

> invoking a a no-true-Scotsman

I did not. This is in response to an article. It demonstrates a clear lack of understanding of professional software engineering and instead imagines that writing a good spec is all there is to actually do. It displays a definite lack of understanding of the fundamentals of engineering or of profitable business.

> is a good example of a lack of soft skills.

You seek appeasement instead of understanding and you call into question my skills? I see now what you think this forum is for.
Show HN: I'm selling AI medical bill review for $1 and still making 60x
by FriendlyMike | 2026-01-18 22:01:51+00:00
Warning still a WIP,

I work in big tech where we have access to AI for everything, and it surprises me how cheap certain use cases actually are. I wanted to build a site that lets folks pay a dollar and use frontier models or agents without tracking or ads, yanno just paying money and getting a service. https://aiforabuck.com started by giving you access to Anthropic/OpenAI models + Codex/Claude Code/Goose. Everything runs in sandboxes on Hetzner. You pay a dollar (or 5) and get as many tokens as I can give you minus Stripe and API fees.

Next came, https://aiforabuck.com/medical-repricing Medical bill repricing for a buck - upload an image, it queries Medicare and health service cost data, and helps you generate a negotiation letter. Services normally charge 10-30% of savings for this. I found most bills cost ~10 cents to parse and reprice.

That led to car negotiation https://aiforabuck.com/car-negotiating, resume review (https://aiforabuck.com/resume-review) , and legal letters (https://aiforabuck.com/legal-letter).

I'd love feedback on how to make this more useful. I'm not trying to make a killing here - more interested in democratizing AI usage. I think the low cost of entry is a nice change of pace from $200/month plans and folks grifting with wrappers.
by sublinear | 2026-01-18 22:01:56+00:00
Do we accuse AI of having poor soft skills when it doesn't do what we want?

I think the problem is knowing how to bridge knowledge gaps. That just comes from experience and there are no shortcuts on either end of the gap.

Empathy does matter a little bit, but to focus so much on it is plain neurotic. Consider how much less friction there is when the interactions can be kept brief. Everyone is already familiar with the various situations and problems that can arise (like on a sports team). That's pure hard skills, not soft skills.

Posts like this are flamebait for the extreme ends of these gaps: stubborn mediocre programmers and arrogant dumb management.
by frabonacci | 2026-01-18 22:02:09+00:00
re: https://github.com/dockur/macos

A closer comparison here is Lumier, which provides a "Docker-like" interface to spin up VMs with a noVNC server: https://cua.ai/docs/lume/guide/advanced/lumier/docker

The key difference: dockur/macos uses QEMU+KVM, which only works on Linux hosts. It can't run on macOS hardware since Apple doesn't expose KVM. See: https://github.com/dockur/macos/issues/256
by augusto-moura | 2026-01-18 22:02:29+00:00
In ol'times people used BackboneJS[1] for that purpose. And surprisingly enough, it is still being actively supported[2].

If someone is still using jQuery for legacy reasons, BackboneJS might be a good intermediate step before going for a modern framework. Backbone is pretty light and pretty easy to grasp

[1]: https://backbonejs.org/

[2]: https://github.com/jashkenas/backbone/tags
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2026-01-18 22:02:30+00:00
> So indeed I would claim that a lot of sensible reasons why things are this way actually are post-hoc rationalizations.

Perhaps, but still I think that responses to questioning about an essay that the student did actually write will come a lot more quickly and naturally, even if they indicate that not much thought was put into it, than if they realize they are being called out for cheating and and have to make something up on the spot, since they didn't at least read it carefully!