MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by olive-n | 2026-01-25 09:57:34+00:00
It is a horrible setup that the manufacturers would much rather sell you a new car than a new battery.

We saw this play out with phones. We used to have easily swappable batteries. And since battery chemistry was (and hopefully still is and will continue) improving, by the time you actually swapped the battery there were ones around with a higher capacity than the battery the phone shipped with. And typically for little money.

Now everything is glued and messy to swap so the manufacturer can sell you a battery swap for much much more money than it used to cost.

I believe cars should have swappable somewhat standardized batteries. Even if not swappable by the user, it should not be a more than 1h job at the mechanic (ANY mechanic, not just the manufacturer).

Imagine picking a car and not caring about battery at all. You want a Tesla but BYD batteries are better - so get a Tesla without a Battery and put a BYD one it it. Or maybe Tesla has the best batteries right now, so you get that. And once you have to swap the battery, you again just pick the best manufacturer at the time - who might not even be a car manufacturer at all but rather someone specialized in batteries exclusively.

And since hopefully 10 years have passed since you bought the last battery, chemistry has improved so you pick from options that are all (hopefully a lot) better than the battery you had initially.

We could have some proper competition where manufacturers would have to compete on pricing and performance.

But car manufacturers don't care. They want as much of your money as they can get. And opening their cars to third party batteries and not keeping up as many walls as they can is the opposite of that.

So until forced by regulation every manufacturer will continue to put batteries in their cars that only they themselves will sell and put a slightly different one in every car. So guess what, even if you swap your battery in 10 years, they will sell you the same battery you can buy right now. Because the newer stuff is for new cars only and compatible with your car.
by dgxyz | 2026-01-25 09:57:49+00:00
Not even surprised. My daughter tried to reproduce a well-cited paper a couple of years back as part of her research project. It was not possible. They pushed for a retraction but university don't want to do it because it would cause political issues as one of the peer-reviewers is tenured at another closely associated university. She almost immediately fucked off and went to work in the private sector.
by dzogchen | 2026-01-25 09:59:03+00:00
I unfortunetely have Deutsche Telekom as my ISP and I can confirm that in the evening websites that use Cloudflare have a latency of one minute or simply do not load at all.

I don’t understand why anyone that serves the German market would use Cloudflare. Regardless of who is at fault, you are losing a lot of customers that way.
by danaris | 2026-01-25 09:59:54+00:00
> This is economics 101.

OK.

And did you go to Economics 201?

Because there, you might have learned that the basic economic principles you describe as "economics 101" are the equivalent of the "spherical cow in a frictionless vacuum"-type examples you get in introductory physics classes.

In the real world, demand is affected by all kinds of things, and sometimes, a product or service is just no longer desired by the population. Do you think that if you were selling buggy whips for $0.05 each, you'd be able to make a profit on them today? Of course not, because people don't need them. You'd barely sell any, and those purely as a novelty.

While there's still a lot of work to do to make it fully possible, and certain political groups are actively working against it, the world at large recognizes that getting off of fossil fuels is an important goal. Demand for oil is going to continue to drop—maybe not monotonically, but overall—regardless of what the price of oil does.
by spwa4 | 2026-01-25 10:00:49+00:00
You forget the most important aspect of policy: it can't cost a single dime, but everyone lies about that. Read the first sentence of the article:

"When California neighborhoods increased their number of zero-emissions vehicles"

Obviously neighborhoods didn't increase anything. It was just rich people living there buying fancy cars. Of course, this needs to be described as a great accomplishment of local government.

And nowhere in the article is the obvious solution even suggested: advancing electric car technology so they're cheaper than ICE cars. And I don't mean charging extra tax while cutting public transport to make sure poor people don't go anywhere anymore, I mean fixing the technology so everyone has transport, for less money.
by bonesss | 2026-01-25 10:00:51+00:00
I think that transition, from OS/Desktop company to a Cloud Services Provider, is where the rot comes from.

The financial incentives are to upsell incompetent IT departments onto forever subscriptions. The poor products lead to fat over-engineering in the cloud and huge running bills that are very hard to undo. Sloppy LLM integrations, and sloppy LLM advice about IT needs, would seem to feed into that same strategy.
by pqtyw | 2026-01-25 10:01:05+00:00
To be fair precision strikes on bridges are not that easy. Of course the Kerch bridge is especially resilient due to the way it was build but still actually hitting a 60-100 meter length bridge from 700-1000 km away is tricky.

Not that it matter anyway at all... since there aren't any major rivers separating Poland and Ukraine to begin with.
Show HN: Notes from building a startup, shared openly
by iamvdev | 2026-01-25 10:01:08+00:00
Hi HN,

I started a small newsletter to document what I’m learning while building projects — the decisions, mistakes, and experiments that usually stay behind the scenes.

It’s not a growth hack or a polished media thing. Just short write-ups about what worked, what didn’t, and how I’m thinking through problems as I go. I’ve only published a couple of posts so far, but it’s grown to 1,000+ readers, which surprised me.

Sharing here in case it’s useful to others who enjoy building in public or learning from real-world attempts rather than theory.

Happy to hear feedback or ideas on what would be most useful to write about next.
by tasuki | 2026-01-25 10:02:53+00:00
The original author is a little surprised how little traffic this receives considering how often he sees people linking to it all over the internet :)

Around 5k visits a month, including scrapers for LLM training. Somehow I still don't feel this "LLM scrapers have destroyed my website". Seems they don't care about any of my websites. I'm not sure if I should be happy about that, but I feel somewhat slighted - are my websites not good enough to be constantly scraped?
by tripledry | 2026-01-25 10:02:53+00:00
In a fresh project that is well documented and set up it might work better. Many issues that Agents have in my work is that the endpoints are not always documented correctly.

Real example that happened to me, Agent forgets to rename an expected parameter in API spec for service 1. Now when working on service 2, there is no other way of finding this mistake for the Agent than to give it access to service 1. And now you are back to "... effect of context size on agent performance ...". For context, we might have ~100 services.

One could argue these issues reduce over time as instruction files are updated etc but that also assumes the models follow instructions and don't hallucinate.

That being said, I do use Agents quite successfully now - but I have to guide them a bit more than some care to admit.
by scott_w | 2026-01-25 10:03:29+00:00
That’s why time limiting rather than estimating works for me. It forces me to contend with the question: “can I get this done today?” That’s usually an easier question to answer because it’s to tightly time bound. I’m not always correct but I’ll know tomorrow if I wasn’t, rather than next month!

When I’m asked on longer time frames, I’m much less confident but it’s still more concrete than the other way around.
by 1718627440 | 2026-01-25 10:03:30+00:00
Isn't this what is already common in the Python community?

> I don't want to unpack an archive and have to scrutinize it for files with o+rxst permissions, or have their creation date be anything other than when I unpacked them.

I'm the opposite, when I pack and unpack something, I want the files to be identical including attributes. Why should I throw away all the timestamps, just because the file were temporarily in an archive?
by integralid | 2026-01-25 10:03:44+00:00
I'll bite (I'm not German but I'm close culturally):

* Old Androids are not repairable because they're shit, not because a megacorp works hard to make repair impossible

* Old Androids may be hacked by a pegasus-like software (just like most new smartphones anyway), but at least the operating system does not lock you into its own closed ecosystem.

You may disagree, and correctly, because it's in part irrational, but many Europeans just dislike Apple and consider Android a more open/free ecosystem.
by Silhouette | 2026-01-25 10:03:46+00:00
Social media, which everyone here is complaining about, is by far the most open and democratic form of mass media that has ever existed.

It would be if it were actually social - if the messages people saw were written by authors those people were interested in because of some kind of social relationship. But of course that's not really the case.

One problem here IMHO is that the meaning of terms like "press" and "media" has shifted significantly with modern Internet trends. Freedom of the press used to be an extension of freedom of speech. The principle was essentially the same but it acknowledged that some speech is organised and published to a wider audience. Neither has ever enjoyed absolute protection in law anywhere that I'm aware of because obviously they can come into conflict with other rights and freedoms we also think are important. But they have been traditionally regarded as the norm in Western society - something to be protected and not to be interfered with lightly.

But with freedom must come responsibility. The traditional press has always had the tabloids and the broadsheets or some similar distinction between highbrow and lowbrow content. But for the most part even the tabloids respected certain standards. What you published might be your spin but you honestly believed the facts in your piece were essentially true. If you made a mistake then you also published a retraction. If someone said they were speaking off the record then you didn't reveal the identity of your source. You didn't disclose things that were prohibited by a court order to protect someone involved in a trial from prejudice or from the trial itself collapsing. Sometimes the press crossed a line and sometimes it paid a very heavy price for it but mostly these "rules" were followed.

In the modern world of social media there are individuals with much larger audiences than any newspaper still in print but who don't necessarily respect those traditional standards at all and who can cause serious harm as a direct result. I don't see why there is any ethical or legal argument for giving them the same latitude that has been given to traditional media if they aren't keeping up their side of the traditional bargain in return. We have long had laws in areas like defamation and national security that do limit the freedom to say unfair or harmful things. Maybe it's time we applied the same standards to wilful misinformation where someone with a large audience makes claims that are clearly and objectively false that then lead to serious harm.
by pjmlp | 2026-01-25 10:04:25+00:00
Delivery, and not wanting to target each platform individually.

The Chrome OS Platform (given the browser engines left) is the most successful WORA since UNCOL was introduced as idea in 1958.

I would rather that we kept Web for documents and everything else native with networking protocols.

This isn't new however, Applets, ActiveX, Silverlight, Flash, NaCL and PNaCL, asm.js, plugins,...

Running LibGDX on the browser has a certain Applets revenge feeling to it.
by kybernetyk | 2026-01-25 10:04:33+00:00
I'm glad Vodafone is available where I live. They're not better but at least they're an alternative. Also Telekom manages only to deliver 250mbit/s while Vodafone gets 1gbit/s.

Last apartment I rented Telekom was the only option and that was one of the reasons why I decided to move.

Starlink I would love to try but as there's building and trees blocking the horizon it's not an option here sadly.
by pipo234 | 2026-01-25 10:04:37+00:00
Would like to point out that professional translation has been under pressure for much longer than AI.

I have friends that made a descent buck 20-30 years ago translating technical documents like car manuals. Over the years, prices fell from quarters per words to fractions of a cent.

And even though machine translation was barely existent, tools were used to argue higher productivity and therefore lower prices.
by tmarice | 2026-01-25 10:04:38+00:00
On their Masked Email feature page https://www.fastmail.com/features/masked-email/

> Companies have no way of linking different Masked Email addresses together to track you.

I have received the Fastmail support response, and since they do not consider this a vulnerability, I'll post it here:

- You have a Masked Email

- You have set up forwarding from your Fastmail account to another email service

- The other email service rejects the mail for some reason

- The bounce message goes back to the original sender, and may include the email addresses along the chain after the Masked Email address.

I'm assuming the bounce message contains the X-Resolved-To header mentioned in the other HN thread linked above.
by joelthelion | 2026-01-25 10:04:46+00:00
Growth mindset can be such a cancer. Many mature businesses don't need to grow and are perfectly fine as they are. You could continue running them forever, making steady cash. Or you could enshittify them, make slightly more money for 3 years, and get overtaken by competitors, all the while pissing everyone off and wasting billions of dollars.
by jhasse | 2026-01-25 10:06:18+00:00
Signal is so much worse than WhatsApp from a UX perspective. Backup sync forces you to allow background permissions (WhatsApp doesn't), you have to set and get nagged to enter a PIN every few weeks (WhatsApp doesn't), there's no transcription for audio messages (WhatsApp has that for some languages), the desktop app loses its connection if you don't open it ever few weeks (WhatsApp works fine), etc.

If you want people to switch, recommend Telegram.
by necovek | 2026-01-25 10:06:27+00:00
Mobile providers usually offer loans ("service contracts") where people get phones outside their financial standing (I regularly see high end iPhones and foldable phones of €1-2k run by people in a country where average monthly salary is less than €1k): if a highly visible device like your phone can be had for 10% of your monthly salary, people will, unfortunately, opt for it.

I tend to not use Apple not due to cost (I honestly believe it's OK to pay a premium for quality; I might disagree they offer it today though, as I do use a couple of their devices at work), but because of how closed their ecosystem is (and yes, all my personal devices are running some sort of Linux, and Android phones are rooted and with bootloader unlocked).
by shevy-java | 2026-01-25 10:07:21+00:00
There is sort of a correlation here:

> AI for some reason, and amongst the complaining in the comments you’ll invariably find it: “I miss Aperture.”

and:

> Apple released macOS Tahoe, which has been pretty constantly raked over the coals for poor design and broken interactions from the day it was released (and even before, if we’re honest).

Of course this may not indicate causation, but I believe that the AI hype has also in part led to a decline in quality overall. Not necessarily everywhere, but there is almost definitely some influence that degraded things. I see this all the time on youtube videos or Google search. In fact, I recently also switched to other search engines; they have issues too, but Google search consistently yields worse results nowadays, even when the search string used excludes AI and other things. The quality declined overall. (And on youtube you can not even really search for much at all, Google tends to show some unrelated crap after some time. They are deliberately trying to waste time of humans.)
by jen729w | 2026-01-25 10:07:51+00:00
Confirming I own at least 2 of these, possibly 4. My pencil archives are currently in another country so I can't check.

Pencils are lovely. Once you've got one, it works until it ends; this process is highly visible and thus predictable. They never leak. They're erasable. They write on almost any surface. They're cheap, so one can amass a collection without breaking the bank.

And, as demonstrated, they're beautiful, varied, and represent the entire world.

An utterly dependable instrument. I'm never without one, and can't remember the last time I wrote with a pen.
by tannhaeuser | 2026-01-25 10:07:59+00:00
Why are you leading your visitors to your channel on a monopolist site? To bring ad revenue? There's no need for video for your type of content in the first place.

I get it - a 2026 "hackers" campaign for binging yt. And in case you haven't noticed: appealing to the net neutrality debate of last millenium is meaningless with just a bunch of monopolists left on the net profitting of vast public investments. The kind of thing traditionalist "hackers" in it for social recognition would be wasting their time on.
by B1FIDO | 2026-01-25 10:08:07+00:00
It is not really though.

"Sideloading" refers to data transfer between two local, peer devices. Really, that is it. It is not "something scary" or something forbidden. It is not even really installing. It's data transfer.

So "before walled-gardens" people would install software in many many ways. I originally typed it in from scratch, or from a magazine. I loaded it from tape. Or diskette. That's not really "sideloading" if you think about it, because it's just "loading" from peripheral storage.

Later, when people dialed up on a PC, they could "download" software and then install it or do whatever with other data or media. They could also upload it. They could transfer it among devices locally. This was not, at the time, called "sideloading" but just transfer, or "null modem", or "sneakernet", or "a station wagon full of backup tapes".

If we're going to use "sideloading" in the strictest sense, then we cannot actually refer to the process of downloading APK files separately and then installing them, because that's literally downloading. But that is the colloquial meaning now.

Hey, if you want to coin a new term or neologism for it, by all means do so. But it seems absurd to downplay "sideloading" as having "scary" or "negative" connotations, when it really doesn't. You've got to look past the hype and F.U.D.

Remember, there was a time when people considered FTP and torrenting to be dangerous or subversive. Perhaps they still do.
Show HN: I built a free macOS menu bar app to track Claude usage
by Artzain | 2026-01-25 10:08:40+00:00
Hey all!

Like many of you, I've been using Claude daily and kept having a hidden fear: when my limit will be reached? How much I have consumed in this session?

Im ending up going back and forth to settings > usage to check Literally every 5mns

So I built ClaudeUsageBar, a minimal menu bar app that shows your Claude usage percentage at a glance.

What it does:

Shows your current session (5-hour) and weekly usage directly in the menu bar

Notifies you at 25%, 50%, 75%, and 90% thresholds so you can pace yourself

Displays exactly when your limits reset

Works with both Free and Pro plans

Privacy focused:

No data collection, no analytics, no telemetry

Your session cookie stays on your machine

Fully open source so you can inspect every line of code

Lightweight:

Under 5MB

Native for Apple Silicon and Intel

Minimal CPU/memory footprint

It's completely free and open source, feel free yo try out!

Would love to hear your feedback or feature suggestions
by pjmlp | 2026-01-25 10:09:04+00:00
Many countries prefer the freedom of pre-pay/post-pay than being bound by contracts though.

Not everyone has the US culture of running their life on credit.

Because when life changes, it isn't only their phone they lose.

The only single time I had a contract, because it was the only way to get a Nokia N70, I learnt never to do another one ever again.
by kybernetyk | 2026-01-25 10:09:14+00:00
>Regardless of who is at fault, you are losing a lot of customers that way.

Don't know. Germans are stingy. I'm German, I live in Germany yet I don't even localize my software to German anymore because German downloads wouldn't convert in any meaningful way. (Even when I had German localization).

It's just anecdotal of course but every other dev I talked to would confirm this unless they had some very germany-specific product.
by itsprobablyok | 2026-01-25 10:09:36+00:00
>"I have a heavy and high performance EV (Tesla Model S) and I have replaced my tires twice in the last six years. So it’s about the same as an ICE vehicle in that regard."

Well no, it's not "the same". We have things like physics to tell us that more torque and more weight means more tire wear, despite your anecdote. There are even studies on this. They also have a greater impact on road wear.

EVs have many advantages over ICEs. I don't understand why people have to lie and say they are worse nowhere.

https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2024-us-orig...
by dabaja | 2026-01-25 10:09:57+00:00
Interesting framing, but I think emotions are a proxy for something more tractable: loss functions over time.
Engineers remember bad hygiene because they've felt the cost. You can approximate this for agents by logging friction: how many iterations did a task take, how many reverts, how much human correction. Then weight memory retrieval by past-friction-on-similar-tasks.
It's crude, but it lets the agent "learn" that certain shortcuts are expensive without needing emotions. The hard part is defining similarity well enough that the signal transfers.
Still early, but directionally this has reduced repeat mistakes in our pipeline more than static rules did.
by shevy-java | 2026-01-25 10:10:01+00:00
> And surprinsingly cheaper ( 40 euros vs 45 ) .

> [ as much as I do not like Musk & co, this is a real useful thing he build for the mankind - internet everywere from sattelite ]

Right - but then you also depend on an US service here. And the USA changed policy where Europeans became enemies ("we won't give you arms to defend against Russian invaders! Greenland will be occupied by our military soon!").

It's a bad situation, lose-lose here. I don't think the price difference is the primary problem though; the behaviour of Telekom is the problem. That must change. The state has to ensure fairness rather than allow monopolies to milk The People.