MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Monitor when your tech stack goes EOL
by ceritium | 2026-01-04 16:01:27+00:00
A typical Rails app runs on Rails 7.2, Ruby 3.2, and PostgreSQL 15. It works fine. No one checks the support timelines. Then one day, Ruby 3.2 hits EOL and stops receiving security patches. Your stack is now technically unsupported, but upgrading these big dependencies takes months of planning and coordination. This is just a small example; imagine a company with many apps using different tech stacks, whether it's for a commercial project or a personal pet project.

The problem: tools like npm outdated or Dependabot catch small dependency updates. But the major dependencies (language, framework, database, OS) are different. They need advance warning so product owners can plan, teams can coordinate, and engineers can schedule the work.

I built Stack To Date to fill that gap.

What it does:
- Register your tech stack (manually or with the cli)
- Get a timeline showing when each dependency reaches EOL
- See support windows at a glance
- Share your stack status with a badge (for READMEs, dashboards, anywhere)
- Use the CLI to integrate into your workflow or CI/CD

It's all free, only a small signup form, not even confirmation for now.

The hard part is the data source provided by endoflife.date, so coverage includes major languages, frameworks, databases, and operating systems.

The codebase is built with Rails 8, modern tooling, and runs on Fly.io, The cli is go lang with the help of Claude.

I'd love your feedback. Let me know what you think.
by _alternator_ | 2026-01-04 16:01:37+00:00
The issue raised here seems mostly semantic, in the sense that the concern is about the mismatch between the standard meaning of a word (sycophant) and its meaning as applied to an issue with LLMs.

It seems to me that the issue it refers to (unwarranted or obsequious praise) is a real problem with modern chatbots. The harms range from minor (annoyance, or running down the wrong path because I didn’t have a good idea to start with) to dangerous (reinforcing paranoia and psychotic thoughts). Do you agree that these are problems, and there a more useful term or categorization for these issues?
by miggol | 2026-01-04 16:01:50+00:00
I've only used modern immutable Linux (Alpine, MicroOS) and wondered why of all places `/var/` was chosen as the location for rw stuff. It's fun to be reminded that there was of course a time when an immutable OS was the default, and you ran it off of floppies. So there's a lot of history to using `/var/` for that. Guess we've come full circle!
by simonw | 2026-01-04 16:01:59+00:00
I'm finding that too. I have old stale projects that I'm hesitant to try and fix because I know it will involve hours of frustrating work figuring out how to upgrade core dependencies.

Now I can genuinely point Claude Code at them and say "upgrade this to the latest versions" and it will do most of that tedious work for me.

I can even have it fill in some missing tests and gaps in the documentation at the same time.
Show HN: Build Python API clients as easily as you build API servers
by paulhallett | 2026-01-04 16:02:04+00:00
Hey HN. I've been building my dream API client for Python. It's a project I've been working on for a few years now, but only recently had the "moment" when it all clicked about what I was trying to solve.

The newest version introduces a high-level abstraction around HTTP that lets you write an API client as quickly as you can write an API server, and still gives you hooks into configuration if you need it.

Someone told me it feels like "FastAPI but for API clients", which I'll take as a compliment (I'm also aware of how tired we are of "FastAPI for X" comparisons!).

Check out the beta release announcement here: https://github.com/phalt/clientele/discussions/130

The project documentation can be read here: https://phalt.github.io/clientele/

And if you could star the project on GitHub and give me feedback it would mean a lot to me: https://github.com/phalt/clientele

For more insight into why I am building this and the frustrations I am trying to overcome, I have written a blog post: https://paulwrites.software/articles/python-api-clients
by nis0s | 2026-01-04 16:02:05+00:00
Maybe I am wrong in how I think about this, but if giving the same prompt to a model produces similar outcomes (i.e., not exactly the same), then the final result is within a set of expected outcomes via the use of constituent words or phrases which retain the same meaning across different variations of possible constructions.

You can define a function to determine whether a number is prime using any number of ways. If your prompt produces an outcome with that intent, and that intent alone, then your prompt, and by extension the model, have some tendency towards producing outcomes for a specific intent in that case, which seems like a deterministic process to me for retaining the “gist” of the result.

The same applies to natural language outcomes. If I ask about a medicine and how it works, the model can construct the response in any number of ways, but the feature space of that response constrains the outcome to retain the same “gist” of the response across all variations of it.

It’s the same as asking the same question to ten different people. They’ll each have their own way of answering you, but the gist of the answer will remain consistent across respondents.
by nickjj | 2026-01-04 16:02:05+00:00
If you already write your posts in Markdown, it makes sense for sure.

About a year ago I converted my 500+ post Jekyll blog to Hugo, overall it's been a net win but boy do I find myself looking up syntax in the docs a lot. Thankfully not so much nowadays but figuring out the templating syntax was rough at the time.

Jeff, you don't have to set draft to false. You can separate your drafts into a different directory and use Hugo's cascade feature to handle it. Also you don't have to update the date in your frontmatter if you prefix the file with YYYY-MM-DD and configure Hugo to use that.

Just a heads up, you didn't mention this in your post but Hugo adds a trailing slash for pretty URLs. I don't know if you had them before but it's potentially new behavior and canonical URL differences unless you adjust for that.

When I did the switch from Jekyll to Hugo, I wrote a 10,000 word post with the gory details and how I used Python and shell scripts to automate converting the posts, plus covered all of the gotchas I encountered. There are sections focused on the above things I mentioned too: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/converting-my-500-page-blog-f...
by Neywiny | 2026-01-04 16:02:47+00:00
Right off the bat, disagree. I always bring up this example but it's actually expanded. On some embedded systems, there is RAM at 0x0. It is writeable and readable. On even more, there's ROM there. Countless times I've had a null pointer dereference be not only a silent failure that wreaks havoc downstream but also a valid operation.

In other times, I've had a malloc fail because I didn't have my heap setup, the code I had pulled in didn't check, and there goes my interrupt vector table or whatever.

When I was making a simulator for one of these chips I explicitly turned off that section of memory do I could catch null pointer dereferences. Not trivial to do in practice
by stevendgarcia | 2026-01-04 16:02:50+00:00
That’s an interesting comparison.

I agree J aligns philosophically (values over references), and you're right that it feels more optimized for pure mathematical work rather than managing long-lived, mutable state in concurrent services. What I’m exploring is whether a model like this can provide similar benefits in CRUD-heavy systems without needing GC or manual memory management.

If you’ve seen J used effectively in that space, I’d love to hear more about it.
by JSR_FDED | 2026-01-04 16:02:54+00:00
This ”de-specialization” move is something I’ve seen several times from consultants like McKinsey. The guy who did it at Nike was from Bain.

They reorganized my company accordingly, to disastrous effect. Customers used come in and talk to product managers with very deep experience in their market, and it would blow their socks off. After the reorg customers would come in and talk to a random generalist who could talk for 7 minutes about 10 different markets each. Imagine how that felt to customers, that feeling of “I know more about this than my vendor does”.
by hakanito | 2026-01-04 16:03:04+00:00
Agree with this. Like the author, I've been keeping ajour with web development for multiple decades now. If you have deep software knowledge pre-LLM, you are equipped with the intuition and knowledge to judge the output. You can tell the difference between good and bad, if it looks and works the way you want, and you can ask the relevant questions to push the solution to the actual thing that you envisioned in your mind.

Without prior software dev experience people may take what the LLM gives them at face value, and that's where the slop comes from imho.
by api | 2026-01-04 16:03:04+00:00
It might not be called that anymore but it’s in all kinds of things. Alt-med/MAHA is heavily new age influenced, as is “conspirituality.”

New age itself descends from the occult revival and things like Theosophy and the I AM movement. Some modern incarnations have gone back to these roots instead. You find that on the far right with people getting into esoteric fascism and traditionalism, stuff like Evola. You used to find some of this on the far left too but lately it seems to have hopped over.

All these things are basically big balls of pseudoprofound bullshit. Go try to read a theosophy text for an extreme example.
by cyberrock | 2026-01-04 16:04:29+00:00
I think this may be missing the health and comfort angle. Nike, Adidas, etc. haven't adapted to an aging population with more and more podiatry issues, and in fact seems to have made certain models narrower. Hoka and On have just swooped in and taken over the wide feet market.

That said, as someone with wide feet, I've tried them recently and I've been thoroughly disappointed in them. My On shoes (Cloud?) in particular shredded in months. On the other hand, now that Asics has toned down colorways, I've quite enjoyed them again.
by stevendgarcia | 2026-01-04 16:04:45+00:00
This is a really helpful data point, thanks for sharing it.

What you're describing aligns pretty closely with the behavior I'm trying to achieve—predictable ownership, clear memory lifetimes, and fewer “how did this get freed?” bugs. The downsides you mentioned (like sizing buffers for the worst case, being stuck with a rigid hierarchy, and friction with third-party libraries) are exactly the areas I'm aiming to address.

The difference with what I'm cooking up is: by using lexical scopes with cheap arenas, we can preserve most of that reasoning without the rigid static tree structure. Scopes are flexible and explicit, and you can nest, retry, and promote memory between them without hard-coding everything upfront.

That said, I don't think it completely resolves the ecosystem issues you ran into. If anything, it just makes the boundaries clearer.

If you don't mind me asking, did you run into any specific pain points with refactors that were difficult because of the memory model, or was it more of a cultural constraint?

Also, did this experience influence how you built things afterwards? Where did you land in terms of language/stack?
by maccam912 | 2026-01-04 16:04:45+00:00
Y'all, we need to get away from calling everything written by an LLM "slop". To me, slop is text for the purpose of padding content or getting clicks or whatever. Whether or not this was written in full or in part or 100% by a human who sounds like an LLM, the content here was interesting to think about and was organized and easy to read. Maybe I'm the only person reading past the word choice and grammar to extract the ideas from the article instead of playing a game of "human or AI" with every piece of writing I see.
by deadbabe | 2026-01-04 16:05:05+00:00
Japan is not the ideal place I would go to for a cafe, but I get the sentiment. When the weather is nice I love going for a morning walk with my dog on a lazy weekend morning and just sitting outside at a cafe reading a book. Coffee itself is secondary to this experience, it’s mostly just the vibe of the place that brings me there. That’s why small local cafes that don’t like people to sit at tables for too long are so off putting.
by kp1197 | 2026-01-04 16:06:36+00:00
I kind of regret calling it Straussian because of the baggage that comes with that label. The key differentiator here compared to exoteric/esoteric is the stabilization mechanism: social costs to either upgrading one’s own understanding, or upgrading someone else’s understanding. That’s what keeps the readings differentiated and therefore the tiered structure stable. Keeping the structure encourages the memes survival, because it widens the acceptability of the message to meet audiences where they are. I think I need a few more examples and I ought to make this point a little more explicit.
by naijaboiler | 2026-01-04 16:06:45+00:00
turned 40, switched to Brooks and my feet thank me everyday for it. I only wear 1 black brooks adrenaline GTS.

Rain, sunshine, snow, indoor, outdoor, running, it doesn't matter. Work, shopping, meeting, travel, church. 1 shoe. My achilles no longer hurt, bye bye shin splints, bye bye back pain.
by PaulHoule | 2026-01-04 16:07:11+00:00
It's pretty easy. SBERT + classical classifiers from scikit-learn, don't forget the probability calibration. I get diversity by clustering on k-Means and taking the best N/k from k=20 clusters and I also blend in about 30% random items to keep the system honest.

It's on my agenda to make a general-purpose text classifier with a "better" model (better sensitivity to word order) but I don't think a better AUC-ROC would really make a difference in my case and a recommender model can't be that accurate anyway because I'm fickle and my judgements depend on how I'm feeling and how many articles about the same subject I've seen lately.

Fact is that I should change the status of that because even though I use it everyday I've only patched it twice in the last year. It spins like a top.

Whatever you do don't screw around with fine-tuned BERT. With noisy judgements you won't really get better accuracy than BERT+SVM and there's something to say for a fast model trainer that makes a good model 100% of the time without manual intervention. I haven't seen a training recipe I can believe in for that kind of model and "catastrophic forgetting" seems to eat you alive if you have 5000+ samples. For a general classifier I am thinking of selection between

- bag of words + probability calibrated SVM

- SOTA BERT + probability calibrated SVM

- SOTA BERT + BiLSTM + probability calibration
by JumpinJack_Cash | 2026-01-04 16:08:02+00:00
> > This is a society that knows what it wants, knows how to function as a democracy, but has not been able to for decades.

Really? The Venezuelan community online (eg. /r/Vzla and /r/Venezuela) communicate using memes and rather unintelligent discourse.

It's not enough to want democracy, democracy and stability happens when there is an engagement in collective thinking , whereas disorder and chaos happens when people don't want to work and don't think things through
by ichbinsoftware | 2026-01-04 16:08:10+00:00
Hi HN

I wrapped my open-source album in an NPM package to treat music as a software dependency.

Why? So you can build visualizers or players without scraping. You get the lyrics, artwork, manifesto, BPM/Key metadata, and direct stream/download URLs programmatically.

- License: CC0 (Public Domain). Install it, commercialize it, remix it. No attribution required.

- Main synth and effects came from hardware (synthesizers/circuits), not software.

- Track names: Hydrogen → Francium (alkali metals).

- Demo: Interactive stem player at https://ev3.ichbinsoftware.com

- NPM: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@ichbinsoftware/everything-is-...

Happy to answer questions about the package structure or the hardware workflow.
by Dagger2 | 2026-01-04 16:09:15+00:00
No, that would be forwards compatibility. v4 doesn't have forwards compatibility with any address protocol that uses addresses bigger than 32 bits, and it never will regardless of how that protocol is designed because the flaw is in v4's design.

There is no possible way to design an address protocol with bigger addresses than v4 that a) makes v4 forward compatible with it, and b) can actually work. Feel free to suggest one.

> .0.0.1 needed to be a valid IPv6 address, along with all the others. Pick a particular prefix, say 0...* and any address with that would be extended to 128 bits

That prefix is ::ffff:0:0/96. 127.0.0.1 is ::ffff:127.0.0.1 (::ffff:7f00:1). 30 years and you still haven't realized v6 has this?
by zelda420 | 2026-01-04 16:09:20+00:00
I am now in my mid 30’s but moving to a second tier city may be one of the best life choices.

I have a small sample but all my New York and SF friends are still single, living in apartments, and grinding at great innovative companies.

My friends in Seattle, Austin, Chicago, seem to have much chiller more fulfilling lives where they have families, real estate, weird funky interests and hobbies.
by avalys | 2026-01-04 16:09:24+00:00
"The anti-sycophancy turn seems to mask a category error about what level of prophetic clarity an LLM can offer. No amount of persona tuning for skepticism will provide epistemic certainty about whether a business idea will work out, whether to add a line to your poem, or why a great movie flopped."

What a lot of people actually want from an LLM, is for the LLM to have an opinion about the question being asked. The cool thing about LLMs is that they appear capable of doing this - rather than a machine that just regurgitates black-and-white facts, they seem to be capable of dealing with nuance and gray areas, providing insight, and using logic to reach a conclusion from ambiguous data.

But this is the biggest misconception and flaw of LLMs. LLMs do not have opinions. That is not how they work. At best, they simulate what a reasonable answer from a person capable of having an opinion might be - without any consistency around what that opinion is, because it is simply a manifestation of sampling a probability distribution, not the result of logic.

And what most people call sycophancy is that, as a result of this statistical construction, the LLM tends to reinforce the opinions, biases, or even factual errors, that it picks up on in the prompt or conversation history.
by morshu9001 | 2026-01-04 16:09:26+00:00
Only under Yanukovych who was on Russia's side. 2005-2010, Yushchenko publicly stated that he wanted Ukraine to join NATO and was taking steps towards it, while both Bush and Obama supported expanding NATO to Ukraine.

"I welcome the decision by President Viktor Yushchenko, Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, and Parliament Chairman Arseny Yatsenyuk to declare Ukraine's readiness to advance a Membership Action Plan (MAP) with NATO" -Obama

Before 2005, there were already smaller steps taken, including granting NATO military access. 2005 was a disputed election with both Russia and US involved.
by DamonHD | 2026-01-04 16:09:29+00:00
I do (1) and have for many many years (laptops w/ ~13" screen), and the mobility it allows is huge, though I have a 2nd-hand portrait monitor on my desk at home for reading portrait documents (eg formal papers) occasionally.

I have had the benefit of multiple/external monitors at (eg banking) client sites in the past, but I don't really miss them, and often forget to use them even when available to me regularly.

Laptop ergonomics are indeed far from ideal. Possibly the biggest help for me was to get my varifocals set up to be mostly central area optimised for my typical laptop screen working distance, with eg much less 'far' vision at the top.
by yitchelle | 2026-01-04 16:09:32+00:00
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by firasd | 2026-01-04 16:09:54+00:00
But this is the thing I'm pointing out. The idea that the LLM is an oracle or at least a stable subjective view holder is a mistake.

As humans, WE have to explore the latent space of the model. We have to activate neurons. We have to say maybe the puritanism of the left ... maybe the puritanism of the right.. okay how about...

We are privileged--and doomed--to have to think for ourselves alas
by bergheim | 2026-01-04 16:09:57+00:00
I agree with the parent comment. I have sway on my laptop, i3 on my desktop, I don't notice any difference. Well except sharing and annoying small sway things that works on i3.

Just as I am oblivious to whether this is posted over ipv4 or 6.

That they all have to implement the protocol seems like 20 years of wayland might actually have hurt Linux more than it fixed - without it something else would have happened. Think of how many man hours have been wasted doing the same thing for KDE, gnome, sway, hyprland, etc.

(also I agree about the publicly available thing, it's a bug for me as well. Companies will harvest everything they can and you better believe defaults matter - aka publicly available, for the producer, but they will say your security, of course)
by naijaboiler | 2026-01-04 16:10:20+00:00
those are trends. prior to that, it was nike airforces.
A business like Nike can't build their business solely on trends. Trends are cyclical, they can bring you massive windfalls, or bankrupt you.

Nike was a sports shoe company that forgot it was a sports company and started acting like it was a pure consumer goods company, leaving itself at the whims of fashion trends.
by naikrovek | 2026-01-04 16:10:37+00:00
They should have looked at Plan9 and the Rio window manager there.

I don’t know how GPU acceleration would have fit in, but I bet it would have been trivial provided the drivers were sufficient.

All of Rio in Plan9 is 6K lines of code and it’s a more powerful display protocol and window manager (all of the fundamentals are there but none of the niceties) than anything else I’ve ever seen.

The defacto way to remote into a Plan9 system from any OS even today is to use a client side program which implements it all the same way Plan9 does.
by dinkleberg | 2026-01-04 16:10:43+00:00
When people talk of life extension and us eventually achieving immortality, it is always "relative immortality" though. Maybe we develop the technology to regenerate our bodies and we could live for thousands of years. Maybe we can transfer our consciousness and minds into computers and maybe live for quite a bit longer than that.

But the time scale of the universe is unfathomable. Even if we lived for millions of years, it would be a drop in the bucket. And that time would still come to an end and we'd reach that same state of eternal nothingness and nonexistence.
by mpyne | 2026-01-04 16:11:14+00:00
Yeah, I'll probably switch to Actual at some point in the next couple of years as a result of the price change. The YNAB team at least continues to strive to make improvements to the core app so they seem to be actually putting the money to use, but the improvements are not in directions I need. And the improvement I do need, to make their web site faster for 10 years of budget, seems perenially on the back burner.