MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cthalupa | 2026-01-22 20:10:32+00:00
Cannibalizing a <product/industry/etc.> is a common phrase to describe the act of a new thing outcompeting an existing thing to another thing to the degree that it significantly harms the market share, sometimes to the point of figurative extinction. Redundancy is a very common reason for this to occur.

It has nothing to do with literally eating.
by solaris2007 | 2026-01-22 20:10:35+00:00
SmartOS was Joyent's distribution of illumos, like how RedHat Linux is a distribution of Linux. Oxide's rack-scale compute is powered by Oxide's illumos build named Helios.

https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0026

https://github.com/oxidecomputer/helios
by ycombinatrix | 2026-01-22 20:10:43+00:00
Yea UDP is technically more performant, but then you need a crypto layer + reliable message delivery layer + bespoke client. Using a plain old SSH client is cool.

However, there are existing libraries for exactly this use case - see https://github.com/ValveSoftware/GameNetworkingSockets

I guess QUIC libraries would also work.
by pixl97 | 2026-01-22 20:10:56+00:00
The strength of analogy is one of the more powerful tools humans have. You take findings/experience from a totally different field and use it to escape the local maxima that other field is caught in.

It's a relatively common theme in sciences that someone comes out of nowhere and solves a long standing problem in a field because they don't have the specialized set of biases that keeps everyone else trapped.
by cannoneyed | 2026-01-22 20:11:21+00:00
Yeah I actually did that quite a bit too. I didn't want to get too bogged down in the nitty gritty of the tiling algorithm because it's actually quite difficult to communicate via writing (which probably contributed to it being hard to get AI to implement).

The issue is that the overall style was not consistent from tile to tile, so you'd see some drift, particularly in the color - and you can see it in quite a few places on the map because of this.
by kieranmaine | 2026-01-22 20:11:35+00:00
Battery revenues are shifting away from stabilisation now from https://cn-cob.com/info-detail/2026-uk-energy-storage-market...:

> the focus of energy storage has shifted from frequency services to energy arbitrage. Due to market saturation, the share of frequency services in the revenue stack has significantly declined, from 80% in 2022 to just 20% in 2024. Looking ahead to 2030, we expect energy arbitrage to dominate the revenue stack, with most revenue coming from participation in the balancing mechanism.
by phil21 | 2026-01-22 20:12:23+00:00
> There is also an argument to be made that the R&D isn't finished and it still makes sense to subsidize it to drive the cost down further.

Maybe there is an argument to be made, but it sounds like a very poor one if poor countries are now putting up solar panels because it's the cheapest form of energy production. Sounds like subsidizing the same panels going up on houses is a bit silly now that the costs have shifted so much.

The argument can probably be made for direct subsidies of R&D for bleeding edge solar tech, and perhaps even battery installations to get volume up. Or maybe even subsidizing local production vs. buying everything from China.

The arguments for wealthy countries to subsidize their wealthiest citizens to install solar for personal gain seems rather weak at this point in the game. It certainly made sense 20 years ago, but in most areas where it makes economic sense to begin with solar penetration has hit a tipping point.
by omer_balyali | 2026-01-22 20:12:26+00:00
Similar thing happened to me back in November 19 shortly after GitHub outage (which sent CC into repeated requests and time outs to GitHub) while beta testing Claude Code Web.

Banned and appeal declined without any real explanation to what happened, other than saying "violation of ToS" which can be basically anything, except there was really nothing to trigger that, other than using their most of the free credits they gave to test CC Web in less than a week. (No third party tools or VPN or anything really) There were many people had similar issues at the same time, reported on Reddit, so it wasn't an isolated case.

Companies and their brand teams work hard to create trust, then an automated false-positive can break that trust in a second.

As their ads say: "Keep thinking. There has never been a better time to have a problem."

I've been thinking since then, what was the problem. But I guess I will "Keep thinking".
Show HN: Figr – AI that thinks through product problems before designing
by Mokshgarg003 | 2026-01-22 20:12:31+00:00
Built Figr AI because I got tired of AI builder tools market themselves as design tools and end up skipping the hard part.

Every tool I tried would jump straight to screens. But that's not how product design actually works. You don't just design screens. You think through the problem first. The flows, the edge cases, the user journey, where people will get stuck. Then the design comes finally.

Figr does that thinking layer first. It parses your existing product via a chrome extension or takes in screen-records, then works through the problem with you before designing. Surfaces edge cases, maps flows, generates specs, reviews UX. The design comes after the thinking.

It is able to do so because we trained it on over 200k+ real UX patterns and UX principles. Our major focus is on helping in building the right UX by understanding the product.

The difference from Lovable/Bolt/V0: I think those are interface builders. They are good when you know exactly what you want to build but they don't truly help in finding the right solution to the problem. Our aim with Figr is to be more like an AI PM that happens to also design.

Some difficult UX problems we've worked through with it: https://figr.design/gallery

Would love feedback, especially from folks who've hit the same wall with other AI builder/design tools.
by pseudalopex | 2026-01-22 20:12:45+00:00
> As a general rule actually, I’d say that Gen Z is more likely than may be expected to know about culture from before our time - the internet, after all, is a back catalogue of the best hits of humanity. That’s why spotify thinks we all have a listening age of 70.

I heard many people who grew up before 2000 remark younger people listened to more varied music than they did at the same ages. And I heard none remark the opposite. But some of the same people remarked knowledge of older television and movies had declined seemingly. And none remarked the opposite.
by bdangubic | 2026-01-22 20:13:11+00:00
> That manipulation should be driven by rational discourse informed by scholarly research in addition to respecting the various cultural needs of the society.

I don’t think this is possible any longer in times where everyone is “doing their own research.” Unfortunately there is no more “scholarly research” as each and every such “thing” would be (politically) scrutinized. We have lost a common sense of what is “truth” (not lost, politicians etc have successfully taken it away from “us”) and hence I don’t see a path forward in a sane way you are describing it
by cannoneyed | 2026-01-22 20:13:35+00:00
100% - I originally wanted to do that but when I realized how much manual work I'd have to do just to get the tiles generated I had to cut back on scope pretty hard.

I actually have a nice little water shader that renders waves on the water tiles via a "depth mask", but my fine-tunes for generating the shader mask weren't reliable enough and I'd spent far too much time on the project to justify going deeper. Maybe I'll try again when the next generation of smarter, cheaper models get released.
by oceanplexian | 2026-01-22 20:13:38+00:00
> This is terrifying.

Far more terrifying is Big Tech having access to a closed version of the same models, in the hands of powerful people with a history of unethical behavior (i.e. Zuckerberg's "Dumb Fucks" comments). In fact it's a miracle and a bit ironic that the Chinese would be the ones to release a plethora of capable open source models, instead of the scraps like we've seen from Google, Meta, OpenAI, etc.
by truted2 | 2026-01-22 20:13:55+00:00
> For example, world top-10 youth chess players and later world top-10 adult chess players are nearly 90% different individuals across time. Top secondary students and later top university students are also nearly 90% different people. Likewise, international-level youth athletes and later international-level adult athletes are nearly 90% different individuals.

Motivation if you feel like you're young and failing
by myfonj | 2026-01-22 20:14:24+00:00
These "dots appearing only while (not) focused" are known as "extinction illusions", namely

"25 - Appearing Dots"

is "McAnany's type" [1], and

"26 - Disappearing Dots"

is known as "Ninio's type" [2], according Akiyoshi Kitaoka's materials. (I have recreated them too few years ago [3][4], before getting to the source.)

[1] https://www.psy.ritsumei.ac.jp/akitaoka/kieru3e.html#:~:text...

[2] https://www.psy.ritsumei.ac.jp/akitaoka/kieru3e.html#:~:text...

[3] https://codepen.io/myf/full/XjdmJy ( scintillation warning)

[4] https://codepen.io/myf/full/jMqoMW ( scintillation warning)
by mrandish | 2026-01-22 20:14:30+00:00
This is really wonderful. Thanks for doing it!

I especially appreciated the deep dive on the workflow and challenges. It's the best generally accessible explication I've yet seen of the pros and cons of vibe coding an ambitious personal project with current tooling. It gives a high-level sense of "what it's generally like" with enough detail and examples to be grounded in reality while avoiding slipping into the weeds.
by Terr_ | 2026-01-22 20:14:35+00:00
> bullish [...] but not my specialty

IMO we can augment this criticism by asking what happened for the "AI" to impress them in the first place, and adding that to the narrative. For example:

1. "To evaluate these tools, I'll apply them to tasks I consider common and am personally familiar with."

2. "Wow! These tools are amazing! Look at them compose memos and skim e-mails like crazy!"

3. "Good thing I'm safe, because my job is Leadership. Why did I choose composing memos and skimming e-mails as my sample tasks? No real reason."

4. "Anyway, this is gonna be big for replacing totally easy stuff, like customer support, and whatever it is they do. A dozen of them are a bigger expense than just one of me."
by eieio | 2026-01-22 20:14:37+00:00
the obtuseness is the point! This is true of a lot of my work[1][2][3].

The problems you run into when doing things you shouldn't do are often really fun.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42342382

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37810144

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42674116
by notahacker | 2026-01-22 20:14:58+00:00
tbf Pratchett was blatantly mocking the heroic arc with that, and the series opens with The Colour of Magic which is basically the Hitchikers Guide to the Discworld in which Rincewind completely fails to avoid having a lot of adventures and actually ends up falling off the edge of the world: the resemblance to Adam's creation surely isn't accidental. Pratchett said Rincewind's narrative role was "to meet more interesting people"
by david_draco | 2026-01-22 20:15:14+00:00
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi visted Europe and openly said to Kaja Kallas, the European Union's foreign-policy chief and other EU ministers: the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) does not want to see Russia defeated in Ukraine, fearing that the U.S. would then shift its full attention toward Beijing.

https://www.economist.com/international/2025/10/28/china-is-...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyxk4ywppzo
by beckler | 2026-01-22 20:15:16+00:00
I had a family friend who recently passed from colon cancer.

It was particularly brutal because it never showed up in any regular screenings, due to the tumor growing on the outside of their colon. It took ~2-3 weeks just to figure out what it was, but they only knew something was wrong because of some blood tests that came back with unusual results.

It was only 90 days from when they got the call about the unusual results till their death.
by bastard_op | 2026-01-22 20:15:27+00:00
I've been doing something a lot like this, using a claude-desktop instance attached to my personal mcp server to spawn claude-code worker nodes for things, and for a month or two now it's been working great using the main desktop chat as a project manager of sorts. I even started paying for MAX plan as I've been using it effectively to write software now (I am NOT a developer).

Lately it's gotten entirely flaky, where chat's will just stop working, simply ignoring new prompots, and otherwise go unresponsive. I wondered if maybe I'm pissing them off somehow like the author of this article did.

Now even worse is Claude seemingly has no real support channel. You get their AI bot, and that's about it. Eventually it will offer to put you through to a human, and then tell you that don't wait for them, they'll contact you via email. That email never comes after several attempts.

I'm assuming at this point any real support is all smoke and mirrors, meaning I'm paying for a service now that has become almost unusable, with absolutely NO means of support to fix it. I guess for all the cool tech, customer support is something they have not figured out.

I love Claude as it's an amazing tool, but when it starts to implode on itself that you actually require some out-of-box support, there is NONE to be had. Grok seems the only real alternative, and over my dead body would I use anything from "him".
by leo_researchly | 2026-01-22 20:15:44+00:00
We have been working on how to track Y Combinator Companies (and other incubators for that matter) and I wanted to share a few learnings:

Identifying them in the first place is easy; even with a simple scraper you can save them to Notion, Google Sheets etc. Firecrawl or Exa are pretty good for that

The hard part is keeping the list current and "actionable":

you need a way to cluster startups; most VCs (& their thesis) are sector-driven. So a sector-taxonomy is ideal. But classifying startups into sectors is extremely difficult; you cannot rely on official documentation as it either does not exist or is too vague.
you cannot rely on the startup name as the unique identifier; it can change, it might not be unique
Startups pivot; so you need to keep your lists up-to-date
you need to keep your database up-to-date; can't rely on news as information is scattered all over the place, can't rely on generic alerts, you need signals like "two new use cases on website"
What we have seen to work

use two types of taxonomies: a broad one (NACE codes are a great way to start) and an AI-based one (use a simple classifier based on the company website)
use the domain as the unique identifier instead of the name
monitor live signals; that's usually the hardest part. The simplest (but also most expensive way) is to capture certain pages (about us, career pages etc.) regularly and use AI to get a "diff"
usually Google Sheets is enough to start, but move quickly to a more stable database like Notion or Airtable (CRMs work too, but tend to be too overloaded)
use N8N to glue all that together with a few simple prompts
If there's interest, I can also share a technical breakdown and N8N files to start.

PS: you can read our full breakdown (in German, however) on your blog: https://www.researchly.at/post/y-combinator-companies-finden...
by jackfranklyn | 2026-01-22 20:15:55+00:00
Been working on this exact problem in the financial/accounting space - matching bank statement rows to accounting records. Real-world messiness makes it interesting:

The fuzzy threshold question is tricky because false positives are worse than false negatives. A user seeing a wrong match erodes trust fast. We ended up with a tiered approach: high-confidence matches go through automatically, medium-confidence gets surfaced for human review, low-confidence stays unmatched rather than guessing.

One thing we found: the hardest cases aren't the ones where strings are slightly different - they're the ones where the same transaction appears with completely different descriptions on each side. "PAYPAL *ACME" vs "Invoice 1234 - Acme Ltd". No amount of fuzzy matching helps there. That's where learning from historical patterns (how did the user match these before?) beats trying to infer semantic similarity from scratch every time.
by cannoneyed | 2026-01-22 20:16:20+00:00
Interestingly enough even the big guns couldn't reliably act as judges. I think there are a few reasons for that:

- the way they represent image tokens isn't conducive to this kind of task

- text-to-image space is actually quite finicky, it's basically impossible to describe to the model what trees ought to look like and have them "get it"

- there's no reliable way to few-shot prompt these models for image tasks yet (!!)
Ask HN: Modern test automation software (Python/Go/TS)?
by rajkumar14 | 2026-01-22 20:16:40+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m looking for recommendations for modern test automation software/frameworks that work well with Python/Go/TS. I wasn’t able to find any from my search and I don’t want to spin up my own test automation infrastructure.

My use case is hardware + firmware testing in a lab environment, where I want to avoid being forced into a specific vendor’s hardware ecosystem.

What I’m looking for:

- Python/Go/TS compatibility (SDK, API, or first-class support)

- Ability to see and query historical test runs (dashboards / trend views of logs and metrics)

- Ability to define custom test sequences/workflows with the ability to run steps concurrently (not just a flat list of tests). Examples: conditional steps, retries, setup/teardown phases, multi-device orchestration (PSUs, DMMs, DAQs, and DUTs)

- Hardware-agnostic / no vendor lock-in: I should be able to swap instruments/devices without rewriting everything or being tied to a proprietary vendor (looking at you NI)

- Ideally: also have a slack integration for initiating runs & notifications of run completions

Questions:

1. Is spinning up my own software architecture the only option? And If you’ve built something like this, what stack worked best (e.g., Robot Framework, pytest + plugins, custom orchestrator, Airflow/Prefect/Temporal, etc.)?

2. Are there purpose-built platforms you’d actually recommend that don’t vendor lock?

3. What do you use for run history + reporting?

4. Any “gotchas” with reliability, scaling to many devices, or maintaining driver layers?

I’m happy to assemble the sequence logic myself if needed, but I’d love to avoid reinventing orchestration and run history/reporting from scratch.
by jgraham | 2026-01-22 20:16:48+00:00
> But at a national level the data is compelling. I'm convinced by the Environmental Kuznets Curve.

Which data do you find compelling?

For people who don't know the Environmental Kuznets Curve is basically the hypothesis that as economies grow past a certain they naturally start to cause less environmental damage.

As far as I can tell the main empirical evidence in favour of this is the fact that some western countries have managed to maintain economic growth whilst making reductions to their carbon emissions. This has, of course, partially been driven by offshoring especially polluting industries, but also as a result of technological developments like renewable energy, and BEVs.

On the other hand, taking a global sample it's still rather clear that there's a strong correlation between wealth and carbon emissions, both at the individual scale and at the level of countries.

It's also clear that a lot of the gains that have been made in, say, Europe have been low-hanging fruit that won't be easy to repeat. For example migrating off coal power has a huge impact, but going from there to a fully clean grid is a larger challenge.

We also know that there are a bunch of behaviours that come with wealth which have a disproportionately negative effect on the environment. For example, rich people (globally) consume more meat, and take more flights. Those are both problems without clear solutions.

(FWIW I agree that solar power is somewhat regressive, but just for the normal "Vimes Boots Theory" reasons that anyone who is able to install solar will save money in the medium term. That requires the capital for the equipment — which is rapidly getting cheaper — but also the ability to own land or a house to install the equipment on. The latter favours the already well off. There are similar problems with electric cars having higher upfront costs but lower running costs. The correct solution is not to discourage people from using things, but to take the cost of being poor into account in other areas of public policy).
by vjvjvjvjghv | 2026-01-22 20:17:04+00:00
“Solar prices in the US are criminal, protecting oil and gas who bought all the politicians.”

I think a big part of why the US GDP is so high is that a lot of things are just f…ing expensive. Education, health care, solar, restaurants and so on. You have to actively resist the “usual” lifestyle or you end up in a sea of debt.
by foxglacier | 2026-01-22 20:17:35+00:00
It doesn't even matter. The point is you can't just use SAAS product freely like you can use local software because they all have complex vague T&C and will ban you for whatever reason they feel like. You're force to stifle your usage and thinking to fit the most banal acceptable-seeming behavior just in case.

Maybe the problem was using automation without the API? You can do that freely with local software using software to click buttons and it's completely fine, but with a SAAS, they let you then ban you.
by IOT_Apprentice | 2026-01-22 20:18:01+00:00
Sure, just ignore the sanctions applied against the people of Iran by western colonialist countries for decades upon decades. You think that hasn’t had an impact on society there? When my wife and I were planning our wedding here in the US 26 years ago, I spoke with someone in the state department then about allowing her family members to attend our wedding in the USA. They were very clear that, they would not allow that as the goal was to impose US restrictions on the citizens of Iran rather than just the government.

Imagine economic sanctions for much more than 30 years, western spy agencies actively engaged in espionage and injury against your country. What would your economy be like?

Is it any wonder nations are engaged in BRICS to escape American global hegemony?
by convolvatron | 2026-01-22 20:18:17+00:00
its not really a question of 'udp performs better'. in tcp we have to live to head-of-line blocking on losses and congestion control. if you don't care about receiving every packet, but only the most recent, then udp is a good choice.

running without congestion control means that you avoid slowstart. but at a certain rate you run into poorly defined 'fairness' issues where you can easily negatively impact other flows. past that point, you can actually self-interfere and cause excessive losses for yourself.

quic uses congestion control, but uses latency estimates and variance as a signal to back off. it still imposes an ordering on a per-stream basis. so it might not be ideal either.

sctp has a mode which supports reliable and unordered, which might be something to consider

so really - if you care about latency and have a different reliability model, its worth unpacking all these considerations and using them to select your transport layer or even consider writing a minimal one yourself
by greycol | 2026-01-22 20:18:49+00:00
A lot of meat cutting (and packaging) robotics and dairy automation are the flashy ones. Softer tech like crop, orchard management and cultivar creation as well as stock breeding/selection or logistics all of which came a long way. The development of uses for byproducts i.e. chemical refineries to change milk into something like protein or milk powder and use the secondary products from those processes to produce alcohols or fertilizer.