MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PaulHoule | 2026-01-07 15:29:52+00:00
I did a lot of analysis and biz dev work on the "Excel killer" and came to the conclusion that it would be hard to get people to pay for.

For one thing most enterprises and many individuals have an Office 365 subscription to access Office programs which are less offensive than Excel so they aren't going to save any money by dropping Excel.

On top of it the "killer" would probably not be one product aimed at one market but maybe a few different things. Some people could use "visual pandas" for instance, something that today would be LLM-infused. Other people could use a no-code builder for calculations. The kind of person who is doing muddled and confused work with Excel wouldn't know which "killer" they needed or understand why decimal math would mean they always cut checks in the right amount.
by gck1 | 2026-01-07 15:30:00+00:00
> I predict that we'll see some languages really pull ahead of others in the next few years based on their advantages for AI-powered development.

Oh absolutely. I've been using Python for past 15 or so years for everything.

I've never written a single line of Rust in my life, and all my new projects are Rust now, even the quick-script-throwaway things, because it's so much better at instantly screaming at claude when it goes off track. It may take it longer to finish what I asked it to do, but requires so much less involvement from me.

I will likely never start another new project in python ever.
by strobe | 2026-01-07 15:30:15+00:00
it looks like some kind marketing push or 'growth hack', just to get some viral thing around which justify why do you extra reason to pay for Claude or Tailscale subscription.

I personally not even convinced that Claude Code any better on average than something like Aider+Gemini 3 or other good model. May be in some specific cases it actually better but in those Aider+'Antropic Model via API' most likely will work too.
by joakleaf | 2026-01-07 15:30:20+00:00
You are right. People went on with their lives, just as they did in many other parts of the world, but I don't think what happened is forgotten -- Not even in the US.

Btw. as far as I remember neither China, India, Russia, nor practically any other nation stopped trading with the US over the war in Iraq. Maybe I am wrong about that.

Small detail on casualties in Iraq: the estimates listed on Wikipedia range from 150K to about 1 million (1).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War
Show HN: A Bento-based service for reliably streaming usage events into billing
by sudeepsd__ | 2026-01-07 15:30:58+00:00
Hi HN,

We’ve been working on usage-based billing infrastructure, and one recurring pain point we saw across teams was event ingestion.

Most teams already have usage data in Kafka or internal pipelines, but getting that data into a billing system reliably ends up meaning:

- Writing and maintaining Kafka consumers,
- Handling batching and backpressure,
- Retry logic for partial failures,
and scaling ingestion separately from the billing logic itself.

We built The Flexprice Collector to solve just that.

It’s a service built on top of Bento that reads events from sources like Kafka, transforms them into a billing-friendly format and reliably delivers them to Flexprice with batching and retries.

The goal was to remove the ingestion plumbing that teams repeatedly rebuild when doing usage-based billing.

We have the docs here if you want to look at config, batching, and deployment details:
https://docs.flexprice.io/docs/collectors

Would love feedback from folks who’ve built similar pipelines or thoughts on what we’re missing.

If you would like to jump in-depth, we also have a open-source community and would love to see you there: http://bit.ly/4huvkDm

Happy to answer questions.
by duesabati | 2026-01-07 15:31:10+00:00
I understand and agree, what I was trying to say is that one should not confine ones thinking by the constraints of a tool, would it be a programming language or whole framework, but to express everything as freely as possible without details of implementation only then one can go deeper and add concreteness that brings its set of constraints and all of this should be possible in any programming languages.

I hope I've cleared my standpoint.
by desireco42 | 2026-01-07 15:31:14+00:00
I tried it. My Perplexity premium expired, maybe that is it, but it barely did anything.

When I put prompt you suggested, it did open Perplexity in Comet and then I guess didn't get response even though Perplexity did research, so it used regular search mcp to get results...

It is cool idea, this is what I would like to have, something to automate boring stuff. Find all LinkedIn connections that are not active and remove them from my network for example.

I don't think it is your mcp or code, as tech is just not there yet. It is much easier to accomplish this through other automations.
by sathish316 | 2026-01-07 15:31:20+00:00
I had the same thought of using beads to build a multi-agent orchestrator with a defined set of workflows.

But to keep things tractable, i've kept the orchestration within a collection of subagents in a single Claude code session. The orchestration system is called Pied-Piper and you can find the code here - https://github.com/sathish316/pied-piper

It is only 1.6k Lines of Go code.
by juancn | 2026-01-07 15:31:31+00:00
I get the joke, but I disagree. It mixed hardware with software in a weird way.

Macs are as much about the hardware than the software, and the OS is just another Unix variant. Much closer to Linux/BSD than Windows.

I like tech (no fear, I've been coding for 41 years at this point), but I don't like configuration, I'm a programmer, not IT, and also I heavily lean to getting shit done, so I prefer tools that don't get too much in my way.

I abandoned Linux on the desktop after I lost a battle with Linux audio. I can't freaking believe there's not a single thing that unifies everything, it's such a pain in the ass to setup right.

On notebooks it's a lost battle due to issues with power management that require way more fiddling that I'm willing to invest into.
by tropicalhunter | 2026-01-07 15:31:41+00:00
I am still trying to understand how installing Tailscale and Claude Code then connecting to your home network externally and opening a mobile terminal on your phone is a novel idea that requires a full Github writeup.

So, I do this when I am sitting on the couch and too lazy to boot up my laptop that I normally do work on, but it never gets much further than updating, pulling or pushing one or two containers, or more times than not trying to remember what port AI have something on so I can connect the companion app to it.

It's not a bad idea in full, but "death coding" is a ridiculous notion.
by delichon | 2026-01-07 15:31:43+00:00
This meme is very healthy among MAHA, and Secretary Kennedy is overseeing an overhaul of the Dietary Guidelines, recasting saturated fat as a health food. There is a lot of speculation that we will soon see a new food pyramid that is an inverted version of the current one.

https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/10/08/nx...

I wonder if it will keep flipping as administrations change.
by bee_rider | 2026-01-07 15:31:44+00:00
> As far as I'm concerned, I'm fine with these tech CTOs replacing their software engineering workforce with LLMs because the bar is already on the fucking floor when it comes to use experience.

The engineers can’t be completely to blame here, Microsoft is too consistently bad for that. It is a high-level strategy issue. Replace the Product Managers with LLMs maybe… a bunch of random matvecs couldn’t possibly be wrong so consistently, right?
by broken_ceiling | 2026-01-07 15:32:09+00:00
This argument falls a little flat when you consider how much software may or may not be written inside one's own personal work flow, or to scale that up, inside a small business. The idea that a small business doing >1mil revenue can now hire a dev or two, and build out a fairly functional domain-driven system should not be understated. The democratization of software, and the lowering of the barriers to entry to basic CRUD apps, may not necessarily show up in a TAM report...
Do you need a killer app that treads into unicorn territory to prove it's impact? What about a million apps that displace said unicorn potentials by removing the need for a COTS?

Oh, and remember, the iPhone was revolutionary but it was diffused so slowly into the greater economy, the impact on global GDP was basically negligent. Actually, almost all the perceived grandiose tech jumps did not magically produce huge GDP gains overnight.
by joshstrange | 2026-01-07 15:32:13+00:00
> but I've have great success with Home Assistant and the Home Assistant Voice Preview edition

As compared to Alexa? I bought their preview hardware (and had a home-rolled ESP32 version before that even) and things are getting closer, I can see the future where this works but we aren't there today IMHO. HA Voice (the current hardware) does not do well enough in the mic or speaker [0] department when compared to the Echos. My Echo can hear me over just about anything and I can hear it back, the HA Voice hardware is too quiet and the mic does not pick my up from the same distances or noise pollution levels as the Echo.

I _love_ my HA setup and run everything through it. I'd like nothing more than to trash all my Echos, I cam close to ordering multiple of the preview devices but convinced myself to get just 1 to test (glad I did).

Bottom line: I think HA Voice is the future (for me) but it's not ready yet, it doesn't compare to the Echos. I wish so much that my Sonos speakers could integrate with HA Voice since I already have those everywhere and I know they sound good.

[0] I use Sonos for all my music/audio listening in my house so I only care about the speaker for hearing it talk back to me, I don't need high-end audiophile speakers.
by uyzstvqs | 2026-01-07 15:32:35+00:00
There's a difference in Steve Ballmer's Microsoft and Satya Nadella's Microsoft. Ballmer was a villain, that hurt the company, but he was smart and never caused too serious destruction. Nadella might be slighly less of a villain, but he has no clue what he's doing and is driving the company straight into the ground.

Microsoft would be such an easy fix to get back on the right path, but Nadella is not going to do that, and nobody is going to make you or me the CEO.
by devilbunny | 2026-01-07 15:32:40+00:00
The one I got worked, but there was some extra delay of a second or two, and it did not play well with the built-in Bluetooth. If it had been my car, no big deal, but it was my wife's, and she would not just have her phone forget the car's Bluetooth (although the internal implementation is one of those really annoying ones that autoplays the last music source every time you start the car).
by JasonADrury | 2026-01-07 15:32:42+00:00
If you're a member of the 1%, you can pay to use the private terminals and have a completely different airport experience while flying commercial.

This isn't a very common product in the US, but it is available at most big airports elsewhere.

I find it especially useful during arrivals. Typically there'll be a sedan to pick me up next to the plane, many airports will have co-ordinated with the airline, my luggage will have been loaded separately and the crew will make sure I'm the first off the plane. After exiting the aircraft, I'm driven to a private terminal for possible border formalities and there'll be a car waiting for me right outside with my luggage already loaded.

At some airports, you might save hours off a trip like this. Prices run between crazy at places like heathrow and a few hundred dollars at less fancy airports.
by reaperducer | 2026-01-07 15:32:44+00:00
In what world does someone have the right to put giant stickers over a business window because payment is late?

In the real world. I've seen it dozens of times in cities from New York to Seattle to Dallas.

I suppose you've also never noticed those big orange or green "This vehicle is parked illegally" stickers that tow companies put on cars that, for whatever reason, they are unable to move. The building where I live uses them all the time.

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71jxKVsTMgL._AC_.jpg

There's a whole real world of things out there that have apparently escaped your notice. You should check your indignity until you've seen more of it.
by sriku | 2026-01-07 15:32:53+00:00
This looks to me like partly a false dichotomy. We can design languages and write libraries. Some would even argue that some kinds of "libraries" could be viewed as languages themselves, as much as some languages might as well have been written as libraries in another language.

Also often, the language doesn't live isolated from its implementation (compiler or interpreter). While theory looks at languages via its semantics, in practice as the OP notes it is about the quality of the implementation and what can be reasonably done with the language.

A recent [1] case is Julia. I think it has hit a kind of sweet spot for language design where new performant code tends to get written in Julia rather than in some other language and bound to it. At its core, it is a simple "call functions, passing data in and getting results out" kind of language, but what the functions ("methods") mean and how the compiler does just-ahead-of-time compilation with deep type specialized code means you can write high level code that optimizes very well. Those mechanics operate under the hood though, which makes for a pleasant programming experience ... and there are loads of cutting edge packages being written in Julia. It is less interesting to look at Julia as "just the language".

[1] recent in programming languages is perhaps anything <= 15 years? .. because it takes time to discover a language's potential.
by flumpcakes | 2026-01-07 15:33:03+00:00
> I’m writing some (for me) seriously advanced software that would have taken me months to write, in weeks, using Claude and ChatGPT.

Do you understand the code?

What was the speed up from months to weeks? You just didn't know what to type? Or you didn't know the problem domain? Or you found it hard to 'start' and the AI writing boiler plate gave you motivation?

In my experience with AI tools, it only really helps with ideation, most things it produces need heavy tweaking - to the point that there is no time savings. It's probably a net negative because I am spending all of my time thinking how to explain things to a dumb computer, rather than thinking about how to solve the problem.
by lunar_mycroft | 2026-01-07 15:33:33+00:00
You have to manually write that out either way. In the SPA/reactive paradigm, you have to specify that multiple parts of the UI depend on the same part of the state, vs sending down those multiple parts of the UI from the backend.

I'd also argue that if you look at the interactions on web apps, you'll find the number of cases where you would actually need an OOB swap is more limited than you might be thinking.

This isn't just a hypothetical. I have written apps both ways, including porting a few from a SPA framework to a hypermedia based solution. It allowed me to sidestep several major sources of complexity.
New Year 2026: Fusion Updates from Helion and Commonwealth Fusion
by ralfd | 2026-01-07 15:33:55+00:00
Helion Energy (backed by Sam Altman and Thiel) has a short years end blog post:

https://mailchi.mp/helionenergy/2025-at-helion?e=05425b940c

> In 2025, Polaris transitioned fully into operations. Our team is now conducting thermonuclear fusion operations daily, refining test parameters, and using real-time plasma, neutron, and electrical diagnostics to increase the amount of fusion energy we recover from the system. Polaris consistently exceeds both the plasma temperatures and FRC size achieved on Trenta.

> We also received final approval from the Washington State Department of Health to operate with deuterium–tritium (D-T) fuel, marking the first time a private fusion energy company has been licensed to perform D-T fusion.

> One of our biggest milestones of the year was receiving approvals and beginning construction on the world’s first commercial fusion power plant in Malaga, Washington.

What is not said: Achieving net energy from the Polaris test machine. Three years ago they announced that their commercial plant is planned to come online in 2028 and will provide energy for Microsoft.

Rabbit hole link:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35887734

And then Commonwealth Fusion Systems (backed by Google and Bill Gates) released this short video of their first "superstrong magnet" from high-temperature superconductors. The test machine needs 17 other magnets and will be finished this year (hopefully). They want to build a commercial 400 MW plant in Richmond, Virginia, in "early 2030s".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PItOlY6_xE

They raised 4 month ago $860 million from Google, Gates, NVidia, but submissions about CFS generated zero comments/discussion on hn.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/28/nvidia-google-and-bill-gates-help-commonwealth-fusion-systems-raise-863m/
by zkmon | 2026-01-07 15:33:55+00:00
Sqrt(2) being halfway between 1 and 2 multiplicatively, leads to interesting stuff. For example consider two integers A and B. They have a dual in the pair A+B and A-B. Well, not quite. You need to scale them down by 1/sqrt(2). If you do that to the duals, you get the originals again.
by tezza | 2026-01-07 15:34:06+00:00
this is truly bizarre.

It’s as if they’ve never heard of Maslow‘s Hierarchy of Needs before and further did they don’t know Self Actualizing is right at the very top.

Without that key stone on the top the human being is still a wanting animal. And if you somehow “mission complete” one Self Actualizing, then you immediately start to want something fresh “purpose” etc.

And obviously Self Actualizing doesn’t have to come in the form of work, although often it does.
by brownfinch | 2026-01-07 15:34:12+00:00
Our team uses two methods to help with manual but not yet automated tasks.

1) Slack Workflow - used to remind us for recurring but not "have to do right away" tasks. Each of us adds a reaction when they complete the task
2) Recurring calendar invite - for important "must do" tasks where we invite the whole team. The 'owner' will accept the meeting

Being a small team means we each look out of each other, so we kindly remind each other when things could slip through the cracks.
by catapart | 2026-01-07 15:34:12+00:00
Long term financial interests, mostly. I know the ads run on my network will never, under any circumstance, be allowed to appear without a skip button within 5 seconds. Immediately, if possible. The only conditional is when the skip button appears, not if. And that's divorced from the copy; the component that plays the ad doesn't care what copy is running, it controls the skipability.

If an advertiser does not like those terms and is willing to forgo my users for that position, more power to them. I have every confidence that I will still find advertisers and, in my experience, they will be higher quality advertisers for the demographics of my users. Artists tend to advertise in cheap space that they know other artists will be viewing. You get the idea.

What has me curious is why you see those two as conflicting viewpoints? I didn't need a government to regulate me. Just common sense and care for my users. I'm not going to subject them to noisy or obnoxious ads, nor am I going to subject them to content that may not be suitable for everyone, and so I'm also not going to subject them to overly long ads. It seems, to me, that you have a profound lack of faith in the platforms you use. Which I can understand as a practical realization about the current apex platforms. But I don't know why it would blind you to the possibility of reasonable people acting reasonably.
by PaulHoule | 2026-01-07 15:34:48+00:00
I'll argue many of his cases are things that are straightforward except for the boilerplate that surrounds them which are often emotionally difficult or prone to rabbit holes.

Like that first one where he writes a right-click handler, off the top of my head I have no idea how I would do that, I could see it taking a few hours to just set up a dev environment, and I would probably overthink the research. I was working on something where Junie suggested I write a browser extension for Firefox and I was initially intimidated at the thought but it banged out something in just a few minutes that basically worked after the second prompt.

Similarly the Facebook autoposter is completely straightforward to code but it can be so emotionally exhausting to fight with authentication APIs, a big part of the coding agent story isn't just that it saves you time but that they can be strong when you are emotionally weak.

The one which seems the hardest is the one that does the routing and travel time estimation which I'd imagine is calling out to some API or library. I used to work at a place that did sales territory optimization and we had one product that would help work out routes for sales and service people who travel from customer to customer and we had a specialist code that stuff in C++ and he had a very different viewpoint than me, he was good at what he did and could get that kind of code to run fast but I wouldn't have trusted him to even look at applications code.
Show HN: Worldstream – Real-time stream of headlines from everywhere
by raj-shekhar | 2026-01-07 15:35:14+00:00
Hey HN,

I'm always curious about what's happening: news, tech, markets, science.

So I built one stream that shows everything. Real-time, just flowing by. (Yes, HN is one of the sources!)

Tech stack:
- Backend: Python (FastAPI), SSE for real-time
- Frontend: React + Vite
- Hosting: Cloudflare Pages + Digital Ocean

I'm building Vestro (fashion tech startup), this is a side project I made for myself.

What sources would you add?