MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-21 10:58:35+00:00
I feel like a trust factor that A) the person is willing to improve software quality even if it means rewriting it later down the line if it was generated by AI in the first term & B) the project is trying to be sustainable.

I don't know but I feel like trust is the real bottleneck and I used to be happy about it but nowadays I feel like there is even a sense of distrust within the HN community where earlier I used to believe it was a more tightknit community but right now, with all political developments and bots and AI use itself for comments in HN.

I think what's gonna happen is not just that we have to trust somebody but rather we have to trust our trust in them if that hopefully makes sense.

We have to trust that we are trusting the right guy in a world where trust feels like being eroded and this is a decently bit of an uphill battle

It's also a community thing imo. People are more likely to trust the trust if others do too, We offload our judgement to others thinking that if they liked it then I am more willing to do so too

So if your project gets trusted by a community, it can snowball but it needs the earlier momentum which I feel like a lot of projects aren't gonna reach since there's only enough snow (attention/trust for the most part)

The biggest question is how to start the snowball effect reasonably.
by joe_mamba | 2026-01-21 10:58:58+00:00
>Political systems needs vents for frustration, and the US system does not have that.

Out of curiosity since you made this claim and said you're european, where are the EU vents of frustration that the US lacks?

Because I see it differently, Trump IS the frustration vent itself but people refuse to acknowledge this and look for something else to blame.
by ElFitz | 2026-01-21 10:59:57+00:00
I had some successes refactoring one instance of a pattern in our codebase, along with all the class' call sites, and having codex identify all the others instances of said pattern and refactor them in parallel by following my initial refactor.

Similarly, I had it successfully migrate a third (so far) of our tests from an old testing framework to a new one, one test suite at a time.

We also had a race condition, and providing Claude Code with both the unsymbolicated trace and the build’s symbols, it successfully symbolicated the trace, identified the cause. When prompted, it identified most of the similar instances of the responsible pattern in our codebase (the one it missed was an indirect one).

I didn’t care much about the suggested fixes on that last one, but consider it a success too, especially since I could just keep working on other stuff while it chugged along.
by deng | 2026-01-21 11:00:04+00:00
It's scary how many supposed hackers have never even looked up an RFC before making grandiose statements. There is such a thing as "NAT filtering", see RFC 4787, section 5: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4787#section-5

A NAT is not a firewall, yes. At the same time, the NAT boxes out there in the wild absolutely do filter traffic, and yes, it is the NAT that does it, not a separate firewall. Practically all NAT boxes in the wild do stateful filtering. It is not really standardized how they do it, but this is how the real world often works. People argue that the filtering part of NAT is "actually a firewall", but what's the point? From the outside, you will not be able to tell if there's a firewall that filters traffic for which no established connection can be found, or if this is done by a NAT.

Many people are so fixed on definitions that NAT is only address translation and nothing else, they refuse to interact with the real world out there.
by skerit | 2026-01-21 11:00:23+00:00
Well Mastodon would make the most sense. They can run their own server with their own moderation policies while still federating with the broader network. The EU has actually already done this—the European Commission runs its own Mastodon instance.

That's really the key point: with Mastodon, you control your own space. So in theory you can create your own little bubble with your own rules.

Which is basically what Truth Social did, since it is also built on Mastodon, but they stripped out all the federation code—so it's just a walled garden that happens to use Mastodon's codebase. Maybe for the best.
by bsder | 2026-01-21 11:00:24+00:00
Since it's a CPU, you start with the idea that there is an ALU and spiral outward from that. That gives you something concrete to wrap your head around while you climb up the abstraction levels.

However, when I hit ".scratch_write" and it wasn't in the Machine class and it wasn't coming from some Decorator and it was getting defined and deleted by a member function ... I stopped. That's paying lip service to the variable typing that is scattered around; probably the typing was added by AI/LLM after the fact, and it missed that unusual usage.

That was the gigantic red "We write shitty code" signal or worse "We don't care about wasting your time" signal. Human review should have flagged that.

Shame. I was looking forward to the technical problem, but I'm not going to spend a bunch of time trying to untangle garbage code to get at it.
by DrScientist | 2026-01-21 11:01:12+00:00
> Compare the strength of the militaries of Europe with the United States and you'll see how that claim is believable.

That's the wrong comparison - the comparison in this context is the size of the European military versus Russia.

Is it just me that finds it odd that the same people say that both Russian is an imminent threat to Europe - where its tanks could roll over the continent - and at the same time say just one more push to win in Ukraine?

If Russia attacked a united Europe it would lose - the slow defeat in Ukraine is purely a matter of will, not capability. ie it matters more to Russia than Europe.

Note most Europeans don't see the war in Ukraine as an attack on Europe by the Russians - despite what the hawks would like to paint - that's why the hawks can't bounce Europeans to put significant boots on the ground in Ukraine.
by pitkali | 2026-01-21 11:01:45+00:00
I got my first MacBook around 2010 because I was tired of fixing suspend to RAM every few Nvidia driver updates on my ThinkPad. Then I paid for a commercial VM to seamlessly run some Windows software I needed for my freelance work as a translator, removing the need to dual boot two operating systems. Everything just worked, and I could focus on things I wanted to do instead of continuing to tinker with the OS itself. And after years of playing with many different Linux distros, I realised that I did get tired of that. Moreover, a few games that I played, actually had native Mac versions. What's not to like?

These days I do have a Tuxedo laptop for fooling around, and I don't even use laptops on the regular, which is probably why it works well enough. That and integrated Radeon graphics, I'm sure.
by haritha-j | 2026-01-21 11:01:58+00:00
> Pandemic. It's been a while since the highly developed world experienced a devastating outbreak, but it may be premature to flat out dismiss the risk. In 1918, an unusual strain of flu managed to kill 75 million people. Few years later, a mysterious sleeping sickness - probably also of viral origin - swept the globe, crippling millions, some for life. We aren't necessarily better prepared for similar events today.

oh you sweet 2015 summer child.
by TacticalCoder | 2026-01-21 11:02:11+00:00
It s true. That s not the reason it is insecure. The reason it is insecure is people who infiltrated the committee made sure to make data exfiltration possible through mandatory ICMP for everything.

Good luck setting up proper firewallimg rules for IPv6 while both respecting its specs and preventing hard-to-detect exfil through ICMPv6.

It's a rube-goldberg of a protocol and it s hard to believe it s all incompetence and there ain't t some malice involved.

NAT for IPv4 was an accidental godsend, especially useful in an era where you d hack your neighbors' computers when they where on the same subnet as yours. Don t tell me it didn't t happen for I was doing that on dial-up back in the days.

Thankfully the point is mostly moot because people are still free to use IPv4 at home/companies while having their router using IPv6.

IPv4 shall thankfully outlive me. And I don't t care if it means more work for people working in the "punch the monkey" ads industry.
Show HN: Distilled 0.6B text-to-SQL model
by maciejgryka | 2026-01-21 11:02:31+00:00
We used our platform to fine-tune a tiny text-to-SQL model using distillation from DeepSeek V3. Repo has instructions for how to replicate this.

This is definitely not the best-performing model like this out there! But I found it surprising we were able to get to this much out of it: stone's throw away from a teacher 1000x the size!

We also ran the same thing using the 4B Qwen and matched the teacher accuracy, though here the difference is merely 100x :)

I find this pretty cool - obviously our distilled models can only do this one task and don't generalize, but that's often exactly what you want when you're building agentic systems.

Happy to answer any questions!
by n4r9 | 2026-01-21 11:03:12+00:00
You can prove Noether's Theorem in a mathematical sense, but you cannot conclusively prove that a specific physical force is conservative or that a specific physical symmetry of action is continuous.

Likewise, we assume at an operational level that temperature and barometric pressure are continuous functions (as assumed in Borsuk-Ulam), but it's not something you can conclusively prove aobut reality.
by btel | 2026-01-21 11:03:54+00:00
Since I left X, I follow more sources and tend to verify them more often.

The alternatives are numerous. Starting from other social media with real governance (like mastodon), through RSS feeds, to forums/newsletters etc.

I especially like the idea of RSS feeds that allow to content creators to control completely their distribution channels. There are many good RSS aggregators such as innoreader of feedflow (for android).

Also connecting with people in real world is great.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-21 11:03:55+00:00
The long trail of visits for Show HNs come because they stay on /show a lot longer than it'd stay on the frontpage. So while it can be featured on the frontpage for an hour or two, that same submission could stay 2-3 days on the Show HN frontpage, even as it dropped of from the actual frontpage.

I think the frontpage is both a lot harder to get into, faster to get dropped from there, but obviously also has a lot more traffic. But the traffic from Show HN frontpage seems to engage more (again probably because of the mindset) and it stays there for a lot longer.

Personally, when I want feedback about the idea and implementation, I'd go for Show HN, because you're out after comments and discussions then, not just traffic and views. But if traffic/views are what you care about, regular submission would do "better".
by LordGrey | 2026-01-21 11:04:35+00:00
Right. I have aphantasia and I've never felt bad about it. Maybe confused a few times, but that happens a lot anyway for any number of reasons.

I posit, without evidence, that the people who feel "confusion, frustration, shame, and inadequacy" about something like aphantasia are simply attention-seekers. If it wasn't for lack of mental imagery, it would be for something else.
by krapp | 2026-01-21 11:04:59+00:00
It isn't just the case that AI generated content tends to be slop, it's that it's intellectually uninteresting and provides little worth discussing on a forum whose entire purpose is intellectually curious conversation.

Imagine this was a birdwatching forum and you were arguing that posting LLM generated images of birds allows birdwatchers to work on "watching" birds that they would not have had the time to watch previously, and that this should be celebrated. It's missing the entire point.

>The fact that it has opened the doors to allow developers work on ideas that they would not have had to the time to do previously should be celebrated in my opinion.

They have the time, they just don't want to put in the effort. Resources and education have never been more widely or freely available. One of the biggest lies people tell about LLMs is that they "democratize creativity." They don't - they commoditize it. You aren't developing the app. You aren't writing the script. You aren't making the art. The billion dollar proprietary black box service you loaded a prompt into shat out an approximation of a product and maybe at best you tweaked some code (more likely just fed it back in to another LLM.)

Yes, you wound up with a finished product of dubious quality that you probably don't even understand and can't discuss in any depth. bravo. But it shouldn't surprise anyone that people here - who actually care about the journey and the process rather than simply getting to an MVP as quickly as possible - for the most part aren't going to be impressed and aren't going to care much about it.
by pythongiant | 2026-01-21 11:06:04+00:00
just published a beginner-friendly, hands-on guide to GPU programming with CUDA aimed at folks who are comfortable with basic programming but new to parallel computing. Instead of throwing API references and jargon at you, this guide takes you through the why and how of CUDA step by step. It starts from first principles and builds up to real, runnable code. The goal is to make CUDA intuitive. you’ll walk away understanding how your GPU executes work and how to write code that actually runs fast.
by pajuhaan | 2026-01-21 11:06:14+00:00
What if the universe is not just consistent, but inevitable?
What if the laws of physics were not chosen, tuned, or even “possible alternatives” but the only way reality could exist at all?

This piece is a personal journey that starts with a naive question about spacetime and ends in an uncomfortable place; the idea that quantum mechanics, gravity, and even physical constants might emerge from something simpler and more constrained than we expect.

I don’t ask you to believe the conclusions; only to consider the question: if reality had no freedom to be otherwise, what does that mean for physics… and for us? obviously 100% contrary to the 10^500 possible-universes of String Theory
by 1dom | 2026-01-21 11:06:18+00:00
John, your post opens saying it's addressing the point: “the NAT-by-default of IPv4 effectively means that I get the benefit of a default-deny security strategy.”

Your title is "IPv6 is not insecure because it lacks NAT"

I'm sure anyone who understands how NAT offers the equivalent of a default block rule also understands that the absence of NAT alone doesn't make IPv6 insecure. This makes the title feel a little clickbaity-strawmanny, sorry.

Your response seems to be: "most firewalls have a default block rule too meaning they're no worse than IPv4 w/ NAT."

There's more security to be had in an intrinsic architectural feature (like IPv4 NAT being necessary due to limited IPv4 space meaning most IPv4 devices behind CANNOT be addressed from the internet without NAT) then there are in policy features (most firewalls SHOULD have the default deny IPv6 rule that will stop their address being reached from the internet.)

That doesn't make IPv6 insecure because no NAT. But it does mean - IMO - that the intrinsic block that comes with IPv4 NAT is a better security measure for making devices inaccessible than relying on default firewall rules.

What point are you trying to make here, and is it actually more useful than the point you say you're addressing?
by deaux | 2026-01-21 11:06:26+00:00
Haha right. They last so much longer than non-Mac laptops from a hardware PoV, and especially how long they end up being used. That's why they retain their second hand value so much better than Windows laptops, because you can buy a Macbook of a few years old, know exactly what you're getting and that it will last another few years unless you're extremely unlucky.
by aebtebeten | 2026-01-21 11:06:35+00:00
Pedantically, it takes 1 year to officially leave NATO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withdrawal_from_NATO#:~:text=T...

If they invade, I would guess they would (a) not bother to formally leave NATO, (b) just do it, and (c) have Ambassador Whitaker mount a Denial of Service attack on any Art 5 response.

Fortunately for anyone still believing in rule of law, there are not only non-NATO collective defence agreements already in place, but there are even non-collective-defence ways to trigger Art 21: https://legal.un.org/ilc/texts/instruments/english/draft_art...
by cybercageio-dev | 2026-01-21 11:07:09+00:00
Hey HN,

Builders use AI tools to create beautiful things. Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot — they're part of the workflow now.

But if you're running a team, you probably want some visibility into what's being shared.

We built Network Inspection to CyberCage so teams can keep using these tools without worrying about what slips through.

What you can do:

- See which AI tools your team actually uses

- Block file uploads while keeping chat working

- Set size limits (small questions OK, large uploads flagged)

- Configure per-domain from one dashboard

Runs on the user's machine. Data stays local.

Currently supporting Claude Web, ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, x.AI, and more providers.

The goal: let builders build, keep the guardrails quiet.

Would love feedback from anyone managing teams that use AI tools daily.

— Sia
by raphaelj | 2026-01-21 11:07:23+00:00
Same experience here.

On some tasks like build scripts, infra and CI stuff, I am getting a significant speedup. Maybe I am 2x faster on these tasks, when measured from start to PR.

I am working on a HPC project[1] that requires more careful architectural thinking. Trying to let the LLM do the whole task most often fail, or produce low quality code (even with top models like Opus 4.5).

What works well though is "assisted" coding. I am usually writing the interface code (e.g. headers in C++) with some help from the agent, and then let the LLM do the actual implementation of these functions/methods. Then I do final adjustments. Writing a good AGENTS.md helps a lot. I might be 30% faster on these tasks.

It seems to match what I see from the PRs I am reviewing: we are getting these slightly more often than before.

---

[1] https://github.com/finos/opengris-scaler
by sixtyj | 2026-01-21 11:07:26+00:00
No, you have similar experience as a lot of people have.

LLMs just fail (hallucinate) in less known fields of expertise.

Funny: Today I have asked Claude to give me syntax how to run Claude Code. And its answer was totally wrong :) So you go to documentation… and its parts are obsolete as well.

LLM development is in style “move fast and break things”.

So in few years there will be so many repos with gibberish code because “everybody is coder now” even basketball players or taxi drivers (no offense, ofc, just an example).

It is like giving F1 car to me :)
by forketyfork | 2026-01-21 11:07:57+00:00
I built this because I kept losing track of which agents needed attention. Running 4+ Claude Code sessions across terminal tabs, I'd find one sitting idle for 20 minutes waiting for approval while I was focused elsewhere. Desktop notifications didn't help — they'd vanish before I noticed.

Architect solves this with visual feedback. When an agent finishes, its cell changes hue. When it needs approval, it glows. The grid layout means I can see all sessions at once and know immediately where to focus. I also built in git worktree support, so switching between tasks is fast.

It's built on ghostty-vt (the terminal emulation library from Ghostty) and uses hooks from Claude Code, Gemini CLI, and Codex to detect agent state. Written in Zig — partly to learn the language, partly because ghostty-vt is also Zig.

macOS only right now. Linux is planned.

Blog post with more details: https://forketyfork.github.io/blog/2026/01/21/running-4-ai-c...
by darkwater | 2026-01-21 11:08:15+00:00
Yep, basically this. In the end it helps having the mental model that (almost) everything related to agents is just a way to send the upstream LLM a better and more specific context for the task you need to solve at that specific time.
i.e Claude Code "skills" are simply a markdown file in a subdirectory with a specific name that translates to a `/SKILL_NAME` command in Claude and a prompt that is injected each time that skill is mentioned or Claude thinks it needs to use, so it doesn't forget the specific way you want to handle that specific task.
by PaulRobinson | 2026-01-21 11:08:28+00:00
Correct, 4k is very modern by these standards. But then I'm old, so perhaps it's all about perspective.

Back in the days when computers had 8MB of RAM to handle all that MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 goodness, we were still in the territory of VGA [0], and SVGA [1] territory, and the graphics cards (sorry, integrated graphics on the motherboard?! You're living in the future there, that's years away!), had their own RAM to support those resolutions and colour depths.

Of course, this is all for PCs. By the mid-1990s you could get a SPARCstation 5 [2] with a 24" Sun-branded Sony Trinitron monitor that was rather more capable.

[0] Maxed out at 640 x 480 in 16-colour from an 18-bit colour gamut

[1] The "S" is for Super: 1280 x 1024 with 256 colours!

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARCstation_5
by flowerbreeze | 2026-01-21 11:09:49+00:00
I do like the build of Macbooks and especially the solid casing. Unfortunately I could never get used to MacOS even within 2.5 years and it was not quite as reliable for me as it is for many others.

XCode installations failing, Docker installation failing after an OS update never to work again without completely reinstalling OS, plugging in headphones would crash the Macbook (until OS update 6 months after I got it), video calls slowing to a halt, if sharing screen etc.

Also there were some things I just never got used to in Mac like window tabbing & minimize working in a Mac way. Maybe if I hadn't had a personal laptop that used Linux at the same time, I would have gotten used to it a little better, but I just plain hated the way it worked.

To be fair, I think it was still more reliable than varieties of Windows, especially the later ones! If tabbing worked more like under Windows and it allowed a bit more configuration, I might be using Mac these days.

That leaves Linux. Although it's not flawless neither after configuring Debian + i3, it works exactly like I want and the same installation has been reliably working for 5+ years. However, getting to the setup that just works certainly took several tries and depends on laptop compatibility, so... No ideal choices exist right now I think. Just luck and what someone is most used to in the end.
Can small microfactories make fast fashion economically viable at low MOQ?
by virnesshuang | 2026-01-21 11:10:14+00:00
I'm exploring a concept for small-scale apparel microfactories aimed at reducing inventory risk and lowering minimum order quantities (MOQ) for fast fashion brands.

Rough assumptions:
- Target throughput: ~200 garments per day per microfactory cell.
- Goal: reduce MOQ from hundreds per SKU to <50 units without exploding unit cost.
- Production organized into semi-automated cells (cutting, sewing, QC).
- Demand signals from online sales feed lightweight forecasting and replenishment.

What I'm unsure about:
1) Is ~200 units/day a realistic throughput for a small semi-automated setup, given changeover, quality, and labor constraints?
2) In practice, what usually dominates unit cost in small apparel production: labor, capex amortization, downtime, or logistics?
3) Have you seen real microfactory attempts succeed or fail, and why?
4) If you were validating this idea cheaply, what would you prototype first?

Not selling anything — genuinely looking for technical and economic reality checks.