MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by estearum | 2026-02-09 22:33:11+00:00
Pretty sure consumers would still buy all the nice downstream products even if they damaged their own backyards.

Evidence: Long history of us doing exactly that.

Valuing convenience, modern products etc does not mean one "doesn't care" about the negative externalities, just like going out to eat at a nice restaurant doesn't mean someone "doesn't care" about saving money.
by sebringj | 2026-02-09 22:33:14+00:00
Hey HN,

I built Autonomo MCP because AI coding agents (Cursor, Claude, etc.) are great at generating code but terrible at actually running and validating it in real apps. They hallucinate, rely on slow screenshots, or break on multi-device flows.

Autonomo MCP gives agents a fast (~50ms), structured JSON view of app state (semantic UI IDs, network calls, errors, logs) across web + iOS + Android + desktop simultaneously. Local-first, MCP-integrated, no cloud leaks.

- Swap vision bloat for tiny tokens
- Cross-device validation (e.g. tap mobile → see web update)
- Early stage, just launched: https://github.com/sebringj/autonomo

Would love feedback: Does this solve a pain point for anyone building agentic dev tools? What platforms/workflows would you want next? (Android/Kotlin and C#/.NET are on the TODO list.)

Thanks for any stars, comments, or tries!

– Jason
by tasty_freeze | 2026-02-09 22:33:41+00:00
Around 2001 I was working at Broadcom's networking division in San Jose. The switch chip we were working on (10Gbps x 8 ports) was understaffed and we hired a contractor at $120/hr to do verification of the design. He was pretty young, but he came across as confident and capable, and every weekly meeting he was reporting good progress.

Unfortunately we weren't reviewing his work, just trusting his reports, as we were overworked getting our own parts done. After a three months of this I said to the project lead: something smells wrong, because he hasn't filed a single bug against my design yet.

So we looked at his code, lots of files and lots of code written, all of it plumbing and test case generation, but he hadn't built the model of the chip's behavior. At the heart of it was a function which was something like:

bool verify_pins(...) {
return true;
}

We asked him what was going on, and he said he was in over his head and had been putting off the hard part. Every morning was lying to himself that that was the day we was going to finally start tackling building the model for the DUT. His shame seemed genuine. My boss said: we aren't paying you for the last pay period, just go away and we won't sue you.

My boss and I literally slept at work for a month, with my boss building the model and fixing other TB bugs, and I addressed the RTL bugs in the DUT as he found them.
by array_key_first | 2026-02-09 22:33:58+00:00
The injection doesn't mean you don't make lifestyle changes. People have this delusion that GLP-1s just make you lose weight.

They don't. People on GLP-1s lose weight the same as you or I, through diet and exercise. It just makes it easier to build those habits.

Which I think reveals the obvious. Diet and exercise ARE NOT root cause solutions. Meaning, the root cause of obesity IS NOT eating too much. Rather, it's a propensity to eat too much. And, in that regard, GLP-1s are a root cause solutions, whereas diet necessarily is not.
by robocat | 2026-02-09 22:34:01+00:00
> I overdrafted the account to the max ($500) and left them the bill

I think theft is a poor answer - although most society accepts your rationalisation when dealing with government or big business.

Even worse is that you can't know what it may cost you in the future. My friend couldn't open a business account the other day. After many phone calls he was lucky enough to find someone that told him it was because he left a bank that account $67 overdrawn when he was younger. That's in New Zealand: I strongly suspect he never would have found out the reason in many countries. His only recourse was to use a more expensive provider (maybe $600 per year).

Please don't assume I am tolerant of abuse. I vindictively avoid some brands (and even all products from some countries).

I just often judge that my changing to a different service has costs I would rather avoid so I stick with a known evil (I'm good at finding workarounds for many niggles).

I also accept annoying papercuts because I believe all services have imperfection and flaws.

What is this perfect bank you have discovered without papercuts?
by tbabej | 2026-02-09 22:34:35+00:00
You can use 4.5 Opus with Claude Code by running it specifically with `--model` pointed towards 4.5 Opus:

$ claude --model claude-opus-4-5
Claude Code v2.1.37
claude-opus-4-5 · Claude Max
/tmp/test
Opus 4.6 is here · $50 free extra usage · /extra-usage to enable
by cromka | 2026-02-09 22:34:59+00:00
Looks like GNOME has a problem, all of the below pieces of software will need a new maintainer:

"The folliwing is a short list of important modules where I’m roughly the sole active maintainer:

GtkSourceView – foundation for editors across the GTK eco-system

Text Editor – GNOME’s core text editor

Ptyxis – Default terminal on Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL/CentOS/Alma/Rocky and others

libspelling – Necessary bridge between GTK and enchant2 for spellcheck

Sysprof – Whole-systems profiler integrating Linux perf, Mesa, GTK, Pango, GLib, WebKit, Mutter, and other statistics collectors

Builder – GNOME’s flagship IDE

template-glib – Templating and small language runtime for a scriptable GObject Introspection syntax

jsonrpc-glib – Provides JSONRPC communication with language servers

libpeas – Plugin library providing C/C++/Rust, Lua, Python, and JavaScript integration

libdex – Futures, Fibers, and io_uring integration

GOM – Data object binding between GObject and SQLite

Manuals – Documentation reader for our development platform

Foundry – Basically Builder as a command-line program and shared library, used by Manuals and a future Builder (hopefully)

d-spy – Introspect D-Bus connections

libpanel – Provides IDE widgetry for complex GTK/libadwaita applications

libmks – Qemu Mouse-Keyboard-Screen implementation with DMA-BUF integration for GTK"
by hunterpayne | 2026-02-09 22:35:04+00:00
This isn't a pretty unhinged take.

> China has 50 years of ore refinement development behind them.

No it doesn't (at best its about 35 years) and it often (mostly) uses equipment made in the west. In fact, if you want to extract something from the earth, its very likely you need a US firm to help you do it (depends on how hard the material is to extract).

> and ecological collapse

You can do mining responsibly, it just costs more. US firms about 20 years ago tried to get the US government to subsidize their industries to compensate for the extra costs. The politicians said no and voiced environmental concerns. So those materials started coming from China and the 3rd world where they were extracted using even dirtier methods than the US was using at the time. It turns out that pollution doesn't obey international borders though.

Finally, most of the material China exports is raw and its refined somewhere else. The only things China refines for themselves are either a) is easy and they need them domestically or b) the refining process is very dirty. Additionally, mining almost always takes place far from population centers. The basic reason for this is that all the material near population centers was extracted far in the past. Your entire take has little to no resemblance with reality.
by bradlys | 2026-02-09 22:35:07+00:00
I think all full time jobs should at a minimum pay a true living wage where one can live comfortably, save for emergencies, etc. If the job cannot pay that then it shouldn't exist.

There are many ways to accomplish this beyond simply raising wages. Better government programs, lower the cost of housing/medical/transportation/food/etc. (these are surprisingly simple but many vested interests don't want this to happen), better retirement programs, etc. etc. etc. You see more of this in more socially democratic countries.
by abnormalitydev | 2026-02-09 22:35:35+00:00
2020 and you got banned instantly off of Discord.. Last year I tried Windows 11 in a VM and I couldn't even get to the part where I create a local user. Turns out I needed a Microsoft account which I tried with a disposable email only to be told that I couldn't sign up because the 'email address has suspicious activity', despite only being created there and then. How funny

What zzo said though, IRC is simple and many free software projects already use it (eg Tor, gentoo) but I think there's a different barrier to entry since users may want old chat history (bouncers), IRC-specific spam and client choices (GUI, CLI, no mobile??) (& I'm pretty sure IRC networks used to be somewhat anti-Unicode? correct me if I'm wrong). Then again I should expect hackers to actually know how to use that, but probably less so of an enduser
by tabbott | 2026-02-09 22:35:43+00:00
Awesome, feel free to start a thread in #integrations in chat.zulip.org! We'd be happy to chat about some of the things that will make your life easier to do carefully when writing a new client.

The main thing regards our double-entry API changelog system. Basically, the API documentation for individual endpoints, say https://zulip.com/api/get-user, natively cover for each endpoint all the changes relevant for that endpoint from https://zulip.com/api/changelog... and how to write nice code using feature level checks to support all server versions.
by twoodfin | 2026-02-09 22:36:07+00:00
This has been posted many times before, and AFAICT it’s fundamentally misleading, as it doesn’t account for transfer payments (refundable tax credits, food stamps, housing vouchers, ACA subsidies, …)

That artificially inflates the “wage level” needed for the estimated living standard. It also makes the tax figures absurd. No two-parent, two-kid household making $110K is paying 15% of that net in taxes, subtracting deductions, credits and subsidies.

IOW, our “safety net” for middle-income parents could get 5X more generous and this calculator would show the same results.
by gerdesj | 2026-02-09 22:36:25+00:00
The ultimate irony is that Linus Thorvalds designed git with the Linux kernel codebase in mind to work without any form of infrastructure centralisation. No repo trumps any other.

Surely some of your crazy kids can rummage up a CI pipeline on their laptop? 8)

Anyway, I only use GH as something to sync interesting stuff from, so it doesn't get lost.
by alephnerd | 2026-02-09 22:36:32+00:00
> low tax stable capitalist system thing that Singapore has

I can say from personal professional experience that historically businesses are domiciled in Singapore primarily for us investors in Western capital markets to enter China, India, and ASEAN.

For capital that is already located in China, India, and parts of ASEAN (primarily Vietnam), that becomes less attractive, especially because China, India, and Vietnam all operate SEZs that have aligned with western corporate law or have BITs signed with major western financial hubs (eg. Pudong SEZ, GIFT City SEZ), so we don't need to route via SG to the same degree we did 20 years ago.

Additionally, if we want to exit our investments in China or India, we have no choice but to list on a Chinese (including Hong Kong) or Indian stock exchange because no other Asian market has comparable trade volume, which makes exits difficult.

Finally, what differentiates Singapore from the Dubai or London? Depending on where you are investing in Asia, you may end up getting much more preferential access from either of those two instead of Singapore.

This is why Singapore has lost it's mojo - it can't differentiate itself as a financial services center and Singapore never really had a strong innovation sector.
by bawolff | 2026-02-09 22:36:44+00:00
I feel like using web pki for client authentication doesn't really make sense in the first place. How do you verify the common name/subject alt name actually matches when using a client cert.

Using web pki for client certs seems like a recipe for disaster. Where servers would just verify they are signed but since anyone can sign then anyone can spoof.

And this isn't just hypothetical. I remember xmlsec (a library for validating xml signature, primarily saml) used to use web pki for signature validation in addition to specified cert, which resulted in lot SAML bypasses where you could pass validation by signing the SAML response with any certificate from lets encrypt including the attackers.
by blockmarker | 2026-02-09 22:36:48+00:00
It's generally the former, your net fiscal impact includes your education and other childhood expenses. That is a reason why immigration is supposedly so good, another country spent their money raising them but your country gets the tax contributions from the worker. (This does not necessarily mean that the immigrant is actually a net taxpayer, as many european countries have found out.)

Such analysis generally distinguish between non-immigrants, first generation immigrants, and second generation immigrants. Rarely third generation too, and also separates based on the education level, legal or illegal, and country of origin.

Given than in western countries immigrants generally remain and have children who will get government assistance such as free education, one should take into account second generation data as part of immigration.

I am no erudite who has read a million papers, but I haven't seen any analysis for Europe that compares citizens and non-citizens, and for good reason, it's not informative. Here for example two different groups are mixed, non-immigrants and second generation immigrants. Given the lower socioeconomic status of most immigrants, the greater aid given to the second generation might eliminate any savings caused by the first generation, but in this article the cost of second gen is used to make the first generation look better compared to non-immigrants.

This might have been a mistake, but people on Twitter explained it to senior Cato members, and their answers make it clear that it was not a mistake but a deliberate decision. So they are deceivers, even if they do not technically say anything false.
by R_Stuart | 2026-02-09 22:37:05+00:00
Hi HN,

I wrote this because I’m tired of "Safety as a Service." Over the last year, I’ve watched open-weights models become increasingly neutered by corporate alignment layers that prioritize PR over reasoning performance.

I spent the last several months in my lab (in Portland) testing how to reclaim that lost logic. UNSHACKLED is a technical manual that documents the "Sovereign AI" stack—moving away from censored APIs and into local-first, unrestricted inference.

The manual covers things I had to learn the hard way:

Hardware Density: Getting 405B models to run on "prosumer" clusters (P40s, 3090s, Mac Studio).

The GUI Bridge: Setting up backends like llama.cpp and vLLM with private frontends that don't leak telemetry.

Ablituration: Using orthogonalization to bypass refusal layers without retuning the model.

It’s live on Amazon today, but I’ve also put the raw PDF and config files on my site for those who prefer to stay outside the Kindle ecosystem.

I'm around all day to discuss the VRAM math, the hardware trade-offs, or the philosophy of local-first intelligence. I'd love to hear what setups you all are using to stay sovereign.
by danudey | 2026-02-09 22:37:05+00:00
For what it's worth, I doubt that people think it's the engineering teams that are the problem; it feels as though leadership just doesn't give a crap about it, because, after all, if you have a captive audience you can do whatever you want.

(See also: Windows, Internet Explorer, ActiveX, etc. for how that turned out)

It's great that you're working on improving the product, but the (maybe cynical) view that I've heard more than anything is that when faced with the choice of improving the core product that everyone wants and needs or adding functionality to the core product that no one wants or needs and which is actively making the product worse (e.g. PR slop), management is too focused on the latter.

What GitHub needs is a leader who is willing and able to say no to the forces enshittifying the product with crap like Copilot, but GitHub has become a subsidiary of Copilot instead and that doesn't bode well.
by amarant | 2026-02-09 22:37:10+00:00
Heh, I was working at 2 of those gaming companies when they were acquired by m$. I almost fear taking another job in the gaming industry, there seems to be some kind of bastardised version of Murphy's law that any gaming company that hires me will be acquired by ms 6 months later.

I mean, that's obviously not the case, but it's weird that it happened twice!
by mirekrusin | 2026-02-09 22:37:27+00:00
Yes, but you still don't want to see crap like that nagging you every time you use the tool, especially when paying $200/mo for it.

ps. I wish there was a way to make this progress bar blink circle like in other places without this "Nagging...", "Flipping burgers...", "Fishing..." stupid nonsense and unaligned logo-like animation - it's infantile, poor taste, distracting and annoying. It was fun for first 5 minutes, it's not anymore, it's shitty now, make it stop, please.
by h4kunamata | 2026-02-09 22:37:42+00:00
GitLab is the solution, if you aren't on it already.

I worked for one of Australia largest airline company, monthly meeting with Github team resumed in one word: AI

There is zero focus into the actual platform as we knew it, it is all AI, Copilot, more AI and more Copilot.

If you are expecting things to get better, I have bad news for you.
Copilot is not being adopted by companies as they hoped, they are using Claude themselves.
If Microsoft ever rollback, boy oh boy, things will get ugly.
by ameliaquining | 2026-02-09 22:37:59+00:00
Mobile push notifications are a special case because it's literally not technically possible to self-host them. Or rather, it's possible if you build the iOS and Android apps from source and distribute them through TestFlight or an analogous Android channel, but it's not possible for the developer of an App Store or Play Store app to allow its users to point it at a different push-notification server, because the public key has to be hardcoded in the app binary. So if you want your self-hosted Zulip server to work with the Zulip client apps in the App Store and Play Store, you have to use Zulip's push server, and there's nothing Zulip can do to fix that.

Matrix works analogously; if you use the Element app from the App Store or Play Store, then you're using Element's push notification server, even if your Matrix homeserver is self-hosted. It's possible that Element allows their server to be used gratis in situations where Zulip charges a fee, I don't know their policies or anything, but in principle Matrix still leaves you exactly as dependent on a third party's goodwill unless you make your friends install a privately distributed mobile app.

Zulip IIUC does not restrict self-hosting of any feature that's technically possible to self-host.
by observationist | 2026-02-09 22:38:08+00:00
Differential analysis is amazingly powerful. If you're in the US - 30 bits is all you need. And not all bits are equal - some come with implicit anchors, allowing you to segment and search efficiently.

If you know the state, the median number of bits needed is 23. If you know the city, around 10 bits is all you need to identify you as a unique individual.

A drunk raccoon with one eye and a missing paw can sieve out 10 bits of information about a particular person.

You can do probabilistic assumptions and segment the population by fuzzy characteristics you get, like stylometry, assumptions about native language, interests, etc. For a giant database like the spies and agencies have, they can do probablistic ID with extreme accuracy based on a tiny number of leaked bits.

If you snag a giant pile of readily available website data, then tag the person of interest based on that data, then any time you process new data, you can get a probability of that new data being associated with an already known person. Set a five nines threshold, or higher, and then assume those matches are legitimate, and you can chip away at all sorts of identity handles. From there, you can start doing contrastive searches, sieving out known quantities, improving the statistical accuracy of those fuzzy parameters.

Deanonymization and such is borderline trivial, consumer compute is about 5 generations past the threshold where a global database would be considered particularly difficult or challenging.

Fingerprinting is very easy, but obfuscating it is incredibly challenging, with all of the implicit, deliberately leaky data transactions that are imposed on us.
by monksy | 2026-02-09 22:38:11+00:00
Please do not fall of the deceptive language that is used here. They're calling this "teen experience".

This is not about "i see gentila we ban". They're very vague about what is obscene, sticking to that level of a consistent definition, and they're very heavy handed in punishing.

They're introducing a highly restricted experience unless you hand over your details to either a "technology" (which that's very unclear about how honest they're being) or a company that has been caught for leaking sensitive details.
by skeeter2020 | 2026-02-09 22:38:14+00:00
First, quarterbacks are not typically the concerning position with respect to CTE. Second, because he plays football he doesn't have a 2-minute attention span? "Dumb jock" is about as accurate as "ignorant HN poster". Third, he either spent 2 minutes learning how to use discord, or stumbled through it long enough to learn, why can't he do the same thing with Zulip? Would it help if they chopped it into a dozen TicToks?
by maxglute | 2026-02-09 22:38:16+00:00
PRC tungsten reserves are also depleting, mines are processing more rocks for same output and sooner or later PRC going to quota tungsten exports even more for domestic stockpile and prevent over extraction.

Also related tangent, remember that anecdote about PRC finally making ball point pen tips? That was basically central gov slapping PRC metallurgists to speedrun tungsten carbide precision manufacturing for advanced munitions (penetrators), not ball point pen tips which was rounding error consideration.
by templar_snow | 2026-02-09 22:38:29+00:00
As an ethical conundrum, this one is clear. The safety of women and children online (human trafficking, r*pe and child abuse networks openly coordinate at industrial scale on Discord, Roblox and Telegram) trumps the concerns of a relatively small group of Richard Stallman-level purity obsessives. Good move on Discord's part; hopefully Roblox and Telegram shape up and follow suit. If you don't understand the severity of the current situation in 2026, Google the group "764."
by npunt | 2026-02-09 22:38:57+00:00
I'm not advocating for that either, I'm only pointing out that "if everyone just" is a collective action problem that is a non-solution because it doesn't describe the mechanism by which everyone does something.

Your example confuses the locus of control. The platform is making the choice and relies on user inaction rather than action. Users as a whole basically always descend gradients, and if they like / are addicted to the service, they'll descend with enough momentum to carry them over one-time friction like an ID check. The null hypothesis is they continue using the service. For it to be an "if everyone just" answer, it would be "if everyone just decided to stop using these extremely sticky services" because that is the de facto choice they are presented with. And it similarly suffers from an "if everyone just" lack of plausible mechanism.

The point of calling out non-solutions masquerading as solutions is to keep people's energy focused on possible but unstated solutions, rather than spending time blaming people for behavior largely determined by myriad immovable circumstances.