MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by resters | 2026-01-06 15:53:48+00:00
So rather than free market capitalism where AWS would have actually lowered prices after investing heavily in a new datacenter-focused line of Huawei GPUs, the US government took steps to stop capitalism and competition, gave NVIDIA lots of free money (USA! USA!) and now prices are going up.

Recall pictures of Bezos smiling at various Trump events.

Everything Trump admin has done so far with tech reduces competition and tries to pick winners. This price increase is just the beginning.
by helle253 | 2026-01-06 15:53:51+00:00
'analytics' and 'surveillance' are not the same thing

trying to understand player behavior in the context of a board or video game (though there is some overlap!) is not the same as trying to understand user behavior in the context of social media or purchasing behavior - the data of both of which derive their value from being sold to THIRD PARTIES as a commodity.

being able to tune a fun little video game is not the same thing at all
by iambateman | 2026-01-06 15:54:13+00:00
I want this same analysis with more nuance about what negativity means. He mentions in the post that “technical criticism” counts as negativity.

There’s just a world of difference between “I don’t like React because I don’t want to write HTML in my JavaScript” and “React sux a$$”

Both are negative statements, but it doesn’t make sense to group them together.

Like…is this comment itself a “negative” comment? Maybe. But I want the author to improve and I think most people here do too…and that’s where HN really shines.
by stocksinsmocks | 2026-01-06 15:54:13+00:00
I really don’t agree with the author here. Perplexity has, for me, largely replaced Cal Newport’s job (read other journalists work and synthesize celebrity and pundit takes on topic X). I think the take that Claude isn’t literally a human so agents failed is silly and a sign of motivated reasoning. Business processes are going to lag the cutting edge by years in any conditions and by generations if there is no market pressure. But Codex isn’t capable of doing a substantial portion of what I would have had to pay a freelancer/consultant to do? Any LLM can’t replace a writer for a content mill? Nonsense. Newport needs to open his eyes and think harder about how a journalist can deliver value in the emerging market.
by KHarvey17 | 2026-01-06 15:55:01+00:00
Sage Bionetworks | USA Remote | Full Time | Principal Software Engineer (Backend) https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/sagebionetworks/jobs/409128...

At Sage Bionetworks, we believe in the power of open science and interdisciplinary collaboration to create a new vision of human health. We strive for actionable biomedical insights through the responsible sharing and reuse of data, all guided by our deep scientific expertise and diligent governance controls.

We are hiring a Backend Software Engineer to join our technology team at Sage Bionetworks. Our engineers build the secure, scalable, and high-performance services that power open and collaborative science. From Synapse.org to our research portals and other applications in the Sage ecosystem, the tools you create will enable researchers and communities worldwide to share data, generate insights, and accelerate biomedical discoveries.

We pride ourselves on openness and collaboration. All of our software is available in GitHub. Our openness and non-profit status attracts support from a variety of collaborators, including major technology companies. We prioritize productivity over arbitrary rules, allowing workers to choose the tools and work habits that suit them best, rather than dictating practices, top down. We prioritize software usefulness and stability rather than rushing to get features out the door. We have close relationships with our user base, many in-house, ensuring that we stay relevant.
by ksymph | 2026-01-06 15:55:02+00:00
I've certainly noticed the same. I have two accounts here, a main one, and one that I use as a throwaway for occasional personal/emotional, off-topic, or snarky comments. The latter has roughly 4x the comment-per-karma ratio at the moment.

Though interestingly that's largely due to a few specific comments 'blowing up' -- it's typically either 0 upvotes or 100+. I believe the median is actually lower despite a significantly higher average.
by antonyh | 2026-01-06 15:55:32+00:00
Wonderful, another default I'll have to change to have the correct behaviour for me.

However... "This is an X11ism, originally an xsetting 1 which frequently results is in unexpected behavior when people pressing the middle mouse button."

Does this even work on Wayland? I'm still using X11 for many reasons, including highlight/middle-click-paste.
by Schmerika | 2026-01-06 15:55:40+00:00
PG and Garry Tan have both been disturbingly effusive in praising Musk and his various fuckeries.

Like, the entirety of DOGE was such an obviously terrible series of events, but for whatever reason, the above were both big cheerleaders on Twitter.

And yeah the moderation team here have been clearly letting everything Musk-related be flagged even after pushback. It's absolutely vile. I've seen many people try to make posts about the false flagging issue here, only to have those posts flagged as well (unapologetically, on purpose, by the mods themselves).
by lostlogin | 2026-01-06 15:55:46+00:00
> It never got weird. After 10.9.5 came 10.10.0. Version numbers are not decimals.

They turned one of the numbers into a letter then started numbering again. That’s not a classic numbering system.

There was Mac OS 9, then Mac OS X. That got incremented up past 10.

You say they don’t mess around with model numbers. Yes they do, with software and hardware.

I like using them both.
by JKCalhoun | 2026-01-06 15:55:52+00:00
I believe the only threshold that might warrant karma-farming on HN is 100 points? Is that when you can actually downvote? After that karma was certainly not on my radar.

I'm trying to establish, if you'll believe me, that I'm not whoring.

And yet, I confess to generally towing the cynical line in my comments. But that's my nature. "Atta boy", piling on, bandwagoning—antithetical to my nature. In fact I'm always suspicious when a thing appears to have no downside.

I can say too at times, I'll take a stand in opposition to what I actually believe in order to call myself out—or, you know, cast doubt. I suspect ego comes in to play too—it's kind of a challenge to take the unpopular opinion and champion it.

In short, I think if I generally agree with the sentiment in the thread, I don't comment.
Show HN: Ilseon, as a GTD "Capture" App
by cladamski79 | 2026-01-06 15:55:58+00:00
I’ve always struggled with the Capture phase. Most apps feel too heavy in the moment. Even coming up with a title can be enough to break the flow.

My app Ilseon (Android) addresses that specific problem. It’s not a full GTD system or project manager. It’s a targeted task manager designed to reduce mental noise and help users focus on one thing at a time.

Ilseon has GTD elements in its workflow though:

* Fast capture
Tasks and ideas can be captured with almost no structure. No required titles, tags, or projects at the moment of capture.

* Voice capture for hands-busy moments
When typing isn’t practical (walking, driving), I record a short voice memo. Optionally, if you add a Gemini API key, Ilseon can extract tasks from the transcript, but this is strictly optional and happens after capture, not during.

An idea inbox
There’s a separate scratchpad for thoughts that aren’t quite tasks yet. During a review, these can be promoted into tasks or notes, or discarded.

Reflection after completion
Completion isn’t the end. A small reflection step encourages reviewing what was actually done.

* Local-first storage
Audio is saved as standard .m4a files in a local folder (Recordings/ilseon/).

I’m looking for feedback from people who care about a clean capture process. Do you experience friction during capture with your current tools, especially when you’re away from your desk?

GitHub: https://github.com/cladam/ilseon
Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ilseon
by guntis_dev | 2026-01-06 15:56:03+00:00
I've built orienteering training app for Garmin smart watches. Helps me to train in forest without physical orienteering prisms. https://apps.garmin.com/apps/92dfaa42-ebf3-45dc-88f2-ea81859...

Also it was interesting programming journey to use their Monkey C programming language.
by wtallis | 2026-01-06 15:56:03+00:00
> Every modern chip needs some percentage dedicated to dark silicon. There is no cheating the thermal reality. You could add more compute units in the GPU, but you then have to make up for it somewhere else. It’s a balancing act.

I think that "dark silicon" mentality is mostly lingering trauma from when the industry first hit a wall with the end of Dennard scaling. These days, it's quite clear that you can have a chip that's more or less fully utilized, certainly with no "dark" blocks that are as large as a NPU. You just need to have the ability to run the chip at lower clock speeds to stay within power and thermal constraints—something that was not well-developed in 2005's processors. For the kind of parallel compute that GPUs and NPUs tackle, adding more cores but running them at lower clock speeds and lower voltages usually does result in better efficiency in practice.

The real answer to the GPU vs NPU question isn't that the GPU couldn't grow, but that the NPU has a drastically different architecture making very different power vs performance tradeoffs that theoretically give it a niche of use cases where the NPU is a better choice than the GPU for some inference tasks.
by nonethewiser | 2026-01-06 15:56:07+00:00
>The problem is the precedent that sets. Russia launches a nuke on Ukraine, and there are no repercussions. That will teach every nuclear-armed state that they can freely nuke non-nuclear-armed states without consequence. But then what happens when somebody makes a mistake?

I agree with you. It's really bad and it's a slippery slope. It's also true that there are many scenarios where you can launch nukes without repercussions. That's the misperception I'm pointing out.
by proaralyst | 2026-01-06 15:56:09+00:00
It's a feature of X (so works in any app running in X, not just FF and your terminal emulator). Wayland changed clipboard behaviour (along with many other things) and decided the selection clipboard was too large a security hole to keep. It's pretty useful though, so Gnome added it back, on top of Wayland. It's still a large security hole though!

Separately, PuTTY has a similar mechanism for copy, though this goes in the normal Windows clipboard.
Show HN: A stealth ESP32 radar hidden in a phone charger
by jfranchino | 2026-01-06 15:56:20+00:00
This is a short technical article documenting a personal project.

The goal was to hide a radar-based presence detection system inside an ordinary phone charger.

The focus is not on firmware features, but on design decisions:
- physical constraints
- radar orientation
- electrical isolation
- simplicity over configurability

It’s not a tutorial and not a product announcement.
Just a record of engineering decisions made under real-world constraints.

Feedback is welcome.
Show HN: LeetDuck – AI voice-to-voice mock interviewer for LeetCode.com
by collinboler2 | 2026-01-06 15:56:29+00:00
I made this because I had trouble "thinking aloud" during technical interviews, even when I knew the optimal solution.

I'm using it right now to work on practicing vocalizing my ideation, which is a huge component of technical interviews that leetcode doesn't cover.

It integrates seamlessly into leetcode.com and sits on your screen as a little "rubber duck."

LeetDuck is automatically configured to proactively ask you a random behavioral question at the start, respond to runs and submits, and ask you about the time and space complexity when you successfully complete the problem.

Let me know what you guys think! Is this actually something other people would use too?
by rocmcd | 2026-01-06 15:56:33+00:00
I don't doubt that they have improved a lot this year, but the same claims were being made last year as well. And the year before that. I still haven't seen anything that proves to me that people are truly that much more productive. They certainly _feel_ more productive, though.

Hell, the GP spent more than $50,000 this year on API calls alone and the results are... what again? Where is the innovation? Where are the tools that wouldn't have been possible to build pre-ChatGPT?

I'm constantly reminded of the Feynman quote: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool."
by 9rx | 2026-01-06 15:56:38+00:00
> I think this is because of the gap in its target market

Surely that gap has been filled for at least a decade, even if only by Rust itself?

> Go was originally pitched as a C or C++ replacement

It was originally imagined that it would replace C++ for network servers at Google. The servers part was made abundantly clear. In fact, there was surprise that it eventually found a home doing other things as well.

> you don't see Go ported to microcontrollers for instance.

You don't? https://tinygo.org
by lopis | 2026-01-06 15:56:40+00:00
The "bubble popping" mostly means that investment will drastically fall, investors will start demanding profit, and costs will soar. This will cause a lot of tools currently built on top of LLMs to become too expensive. Free tools will likely become rare.

There's a significant number of users that will not pay for AI. There's likely also a significant number of users that will not accept higher subscription costs no matter how much they use AI tools today.

When this happens, the market will go back to "normal". Yes, there will still be a higher demand for computer parts than before ChatGPT was released, but the demand will still go down drastically from current levels. So only a moderate increase in production capacity will be needed.
by ramon156 | 2026-01-06 15:57:01+00:00
I find it hard to mark something as negative when it's valid criticism. I'm of the opinion that if you cannot handle criticism, then you can't put yourself out there. This is coming from someone that is having a hard time putting themselves out there because I know I'm going to be wrong on certain topics.

But afterwards I'm glad I did, after a month comments can't really haunt you anymore, because they exist in the past.

I'd much rather live in a critical world than a "wholesome" world that ends up being an echochamber
by Cthulhu_ | 2026-01-06 15:57:02+00:00
I don't think it's definite yet that "the US has moved on". If Trump kicks it - and he will, sooner rather than later - there will be another regime change. If the politics flips back over to the Democrats again they will probably try and do damage mitigation (again, this is the recurring trend) and try and repair international relationships.
by wildzzz | 2026-01-06 15:57:04+00:00
Unrelated but I still use rif daily. You can patch the apk using Revanced to use your own API key rather than the original developer's key. With the rise of AI, I've block a bunch of subreddits that have become infected with obvious engagement bait posts all with similar structures, writing styles, and tropes.

"Am I the asshole for leaving my spouse because they pushed me down the stairs and murdered my dog? He's also a member of an ultra-nationalist terror organization and doesn't put his cart away at the grocery store.

My friends and family have chimed in with mixed sentiments on social media. Some are praising me and others are telling me I'm wrong."

The account will of course be brand new and all of the top comments will be accounts that solely respond to similar bait posts on similar subreddits. It reminds me of subreddit simulator, it's bots talking to bots. My personal conspiracy theory is that reddit encourages this AI bait slop because it drives engagement and gets people to see more ads. The stories are like the soap operas I sometimes watched with my mom growing up.
by codingdave | 2026-01-06 15:57:07+00:00
> most HN negativity is substantive rather than toxic

That is the key takeaway. If critique is scored as negative, then there is nothing wrong with HN being "negative". Analysis and critical response to new ideas, tech, and products is a good thing, so I believe we should be responding positively to a report that says we apply negativity in productive ways.
by thefaux | 2026-01-06 15:57:25+00:00
I truly believe that the cult of c performance optimization has done more harm than good. It is truly evil to try and infer, or even worse, silently override programmer intent. Many if not most of the optimizations done by llvm and gcc should be warnings, not optimizations (dead code elimination outside of LTO being a perfect example).

How much wasted work has been created by compiler authors deciding that they know better than the original software authors and silently break working code, but only in release mode? Even worse, -O0 performance is so bad that developers feel obligated to compile with -O2 or more. I will bet dollars to donuts that the vast majority of the material wins of -O2 in most real world use cases is primarily due to better register allocation and good selective inlining, not all the crazy transformations and eliminations that subtly break your code and rely on UB. Yeah, I'm sure they have some microbenchmarks that justify those code breaking "optimizations" but in practice I'll bet those optimizations rarely account for more than 5% of the total runtime of the code. But everyone pays the cost of horrifically slow build times as well as nearly unbounded developer time loss debugging the code the compiler broke.

Of course, part of the problem is developers hating being told they're wrong and complaining about nanny compilers. In this sense, compiler authors have historically been somewhat similar to sycophantic llms. Rather than tell the programmer that their code is wrong, they will do everything they can to coddle the programmer while behind the scenes executing their own agenda and likely getting things wrong all because they were afraid to honestly tell the programmer there was a problem with their instructions.
by nobleach | 2026-01-06 15:57:36+00:00
>new language construct

This was added to the language 10 years ago. So while it's "newer" than a plain old for-loop, it's definitely not "new". It was designed to work with Symbol.iterator. This is the mechanism whereby one can iterate anything that implements the Symbol.iterator interface.

As far as why folks won't just do simple for-loops, it's the same reasining every language tends to implement a "foreach", because there are annoying off-by-one errors lurking in the < vs <=. Of course one could argue that developers should be smart enough to handle this. But that's an argument even older than for-loops.
Show HN: Sentience – Semantic Visual Grounding for AI Agents (WASM and ONNX)
by tonyww | 2026-01-06 15:57:43+00:00
Hi HN, I’m the solo founder behind SentienceAPI. I’ve spent the last December building a browser automation runtime designed specifically for LLM agents.

The Problem: Building reliable web agents is painful. You essentially have two bad choices:

Raw DOM: Dumping document.body.innerHTML is cheap/fast but overwhelms the context window (100k+ tokens) and lacks spatial context (agents try to click hidden or off-screen elements).

Vision Models (GPT-4o): Sending screenshots is robust but slow (3-10s latency) and expensive (~$0.01/step). Worse, they often hallucinate coordinates, missing buttons by 10 pixels.
The Solution: Semantic Geometry Sentience is a "Visual Cortex" for agents. It sits between the browser and your LLM, turning noisy websites into clean, ranked, coordinate-aware JSON.

How it works (The Stack):

Client (WASM): A Chrome Extension injects a Rust/WASM module that prunes 95% of the DOM (scripts, tracking pixels, invisible wrappers) directly in the browser process. It handles Shadow DOM, nested iframes ("Frame Stitching"), and computed styles (visibility/z-index) in <50ms.

Gateway (Rust/Axum): The pruned tree is sent to a Rust gateway that applies heuristic importance scoring with simple visual cues (e.g. is_primary)

Brain (ONNX): A server-side ML layer (running ms-marco-MiniLM via ort) semantically re-ranks the elements based on the user’s goal (e.g., "Search for shoes").

Result: Your agent gets a list of the Top 50 most relevant interactable elements with exact (x,y) coordinates with importance value and visual cues, helping LLM agent make decision.

Performance:

Cost: ~$0.001 per step (vs. $0.01+ for Vision)

Latency: ~400ms (vs. 5s+ for Vision)

Payload: ~1400 tokens (vs. 100k for Raw HTML)

Developer Experience (The "Cool" Stuff): I hated debugging text logs, so I built Sentience Studio, a "Time-Travel
Debugger." It records every step (DOM snapshot + Screenshot) into a .jsonl trace. You can scrub through the timeline like a video editor to see exactly what the agent saw vs. what it hallucinated.

Links:

Docs & SDK: https://www.sentienceapi.com/docs

GitHub (SDK):
SDK Python: https://github.com/SentienceAPI/sentience-python

SDK TypeScript: https://github.com/SentienceAPI/sentience-ts

Studio Demo: https://www.sentienceapi.com/docs/studio

Build Web Agent: https://www.sentienceapi.com/docs/sdk/agent-quick-start

Screenshots with importance labels (gold stars):
https://sentience-screenshots.sfo3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.co... 2026-01-06 at 7.19.41 AM.png

https://sentience-screenshots.sfo3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.co... 2026-01-06 at 7.19.41 AM.png

I’m handling the backend in Rust and the SDKs in Python/TypeScript. The project is now in beta launch, I would love feedbacks on the architecture or the ranking logic!
by baranul | 2026-01-06 15:57:44+00:00
But oddly enough, Zig is not a memory-safe language, and yet still heavily pushed on here. There are a number of measures, comparatively, that can be taken to make C safer too. The story on what can be done with C is still evolving, as Fil-C and other related projects shows.

For that matter, there are a number of compiled memory-safe and safer languages: Dlang, Vlang, Golang, etc... who could be discussed and are equally viable choices. And if we are talking about something that needs to be outright safety-critical, Ada and SPARK should definitely be in the debate.

However, all of that doesn't override the right of projects to decide on what language they believe is best for them or what strategies concerning safety that they wish to pursue.
by pjc50 | 2026-01-06 15:58:36+00:00
I have 104872 karma on HN. You may find https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders and https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments interesting. However, there doesn't seem to be an easy way to sort one's own comments by ranking. One of these days I'm going to scrape mine and see if I can write the "rules of HN" for highly upvoted comments.

One is: HN does not like jokes, unless you put an explanation in the comment as well.
by mellosouls | 2026-01-06 15:58:37+00:00
What counts as “negative” here? Criticism of technology, skepticism toward announcements, complaints about industry practices, frustration with APIs. The usual. It’s worth noting that technical critique reads differently than personal attacks; most HN negativity is substantive rather than toxic

The definition above indicates "negative" may be a bit harsh as a term, it might be useful to see a split of that percentage between "unnecessary pushback" and "scrutiny".

This comment will of course count as negative - it could no doubt be more substantive and better written but hopefully it is understood in the latter sense.