MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by codingdave | 2026-01-22 01:00:58+00:00
There is a long history of non-tech users being able to create apps. LLMs are the latest flavor, but there have been no/low-code platforms around since at least the 90s.

Small apps used by a few people tend to work just fine, don't need much help, and become useful little tools. Apps that scale beyond that tend to either crash, burn, and get shut down... or they find professionals who take over the app, refactor the warts, fix it up, and maintain the app on an ongoing basis. It all depends on whether the app is bringing in enough revenue or other business value to be able to afford such professional support.

I see no reason to believe that vibe coded apps will follow a different pattern.
by jleyank | 2026-01-22 01:01:07+00:00
It’s a big ask for a national team to stay home. It’s more likely that a player or two might “be injured” and miss the games. However, there’s far more chance that the fans will stay away. It’s expensive getting there, and access control will be difficult for many team’s fans. The weather might also be bad for both the players and fans. Those with the ticket and travel know but nothing seems to have been mentioned so far.

En masse, uefa could just move the games to Europe and invite Argentina and Brazil..l
by barrkel | 2026-01-22 01:03:35+00:00
I think there's an interesting idea behind Gas Town (basically, using supervisor trees to make agents reliable, analogous to how Erlang uses them to make processes reliable), but it's lacking a proper quality ratchet (agents often don't mind changing or deleting tests instead of fixing code) and architectural function (agents tend to reinvent the wheel over and over again, the context window simply isn't big enough to fit everything in).

However, Steve Yegge's recent credulous foray into promoting a crypto coin, which was (IMO) transparently leveraging his audience and buzz to execute a pump and dump scheme, with him being an unwitting collaborator, makes me think all is not necessarily well in Yegge land.

I think Steve needs to take a step back from his amazing productivity machine and have another look at that code, and consider if it's really production quality.
by keeganpoppen | 2026-01-22 01:04:00+00:00
you read an article on the domain asimov.press about a very narrow, deep slice of biology, and expect it not to be long-winded? yeah, it’d be nice if there were a nice bow to wrap around the whole thing, but said bow is not (yet) extant. how much shorter would you pike the story to be? it took me literally 5 minutes to read, and i easily could have read something else titillating were i bored at any point…
by pineaux | 2026-01-22 01:04:22+00:00
I have in fact seen a lot of the world, so booyaka? Lived in multiple continents for multiple years.

There is evidence for genetic moral foundations in humans. Adopted twin studies show 30-60% of variability in political preference is genetically attributable. Things like openness and a preference for pureness are the kind of vectors that were proposed.

Most animals prefer not to hurt their own, prefer no incest etc.

I like your adversarial style of argumenting this, it's funny, but you try to reduce everything to repeatable science experiments and let me teach you something: There are many, many things that can never ever be scientifically proven with an experiment. They are fundamentally unprovable. Which doesnt mean they dont exist. Godels incompleteness theorem literally proves that many things are not provable. Even in the realm of the everyday things I cannot prove that your experience of red is the same as mine. But you do seem to experience it. I cannot prove that you find a sunset aesthetically pleasing. Many things in the past have left nothing to scientifically prove it happened, yet they happened. Moral correctness cannot be scientifically proven. Science itself is based on many unprovable assumptions: like that the universe is intelligible, that induction works best, that our observations correspond with reality correctly. Reality is much, much bigger than what science can prove.

I dont have a god, but your god seems to be science. I like science, it gives some handles to understand the world, but when talking about things science cannot prove I think relying on it too much blocks wisdom.
by dent9 | 2026-01-22 01:04:36+00:00
I appreciate the author's work in doing this and writing it all up so nicely. However every time I see someone doing this, I cannot help but wonder why they are not just using SLURM + Nextflow. SLURM can easily cluster the separate computers as worker nodes, and Nextflow can orchestrate the submission of batch jobs to SLURM in a managed pipeline of tasks. The individual tasks to submit to SLURM would be the users's own R scripts (or any script they have). Combine this with Docker containers to execute on the nodes to manage dependencies needed for task execution. And possibly Ansible for the management of the nodes themselves to install the SLURM daemons and packages etc.. Taken together this creates a FAR more portable and system-agnostic and language-agnostic data analysis workflow that can seamlessly scale over as many nodes and data sets as you can shove into it. This is a LOT better than trying to write all this code in R itself that will do the communication and data passing between nodes directly. Its not clear to me that the author actually needs anything like that, and whats worse, I have seen other authors write exactly that in R and end up re-inventing the wheel of implementing parallel compute tasks (in R). Its really not that complicated. 1) write R script that takes a chunk of your data as input, processes it, writes output to some file, 2) use a workflow manager to pass in chunks up the data to discrete parallel task instances of your script / program and submit the tasks as jobs to 3) a hardware-agnostic job scheduler running on your local hardware and/or cloud resources. This is basically the backbone of HPC but it seems like a lot of people "forget" about the 'job scheduler' and 'workflow manager' parts and jump straight to glueing data-analysis code to hardware. Also important to note that most all robust workflow managers such as Nextflow also already include the parts such as "report task completion", "collect task success / failure logs", "report task CPU / memory resource usages", etc.. So that you, the end user, only need to write the parts that implement your data analysis.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-22 01:04:52+00:00
>If the company was profitable they wouldn't have needed to sell.

And it's always the workers who pays the price, not the businessman. Does that see fair?

>If a US owner bought it they'd have done exactly the same thing (layoffs) albeit possibly with new jobs in a different state than country.

That'd be unfortunate, but it still means jobs are created in the US. It also gives he opportunity (slim) to have people move in the country. Moving the jobs overseas, not quite as mobile.

But yes, the big issue here is the lack of decorum in how we recklessly cut jobs here. This isn't how most 1st world coutnries work.
by adrianwaj | 2026-01-22 01:04:53+00:00
Would be interesting to have a way for each recipient to opt-in for their preferred currency. Am thinking about recent headline: "Crypto payment cards surge 22x in daily transactions since late 2024."

Just curious, if you didn't have smart contracts, you would have 20 destination addresses, and then a spreadsheet that you'd use each month and then run a local wallet to do the sending to the different parties, right? That's pretty easy.

Could that be automated on the client-side with macros or a custom program (ie no smart contracts?)
by faizshah | 2026-01-22 01:05:27+00:00
Personally, if I feel like you vibe coded your SaaS I’m probably not gonna pay for it. You can obviously tell when a project is vibe coded just based on the way it looks, the weird bugs you see and the poor documentation.

There’s definitely a market for good looking UI that actually works and stands out from the vibe coded junk. Artisanal corn fed UI I guess.
by hollow-moe | 2026-01-22 01:05:35+00:00
The "old" model is the best IMO. Sell the software once with like 1 year of updates, and then the user can keep their software at an old version or can pay some amount to get the new version / another year of updates. If you wanna make it look like a subscription ask for a fixed fee first and then a small amount every month but then you don't get to keep the software on unsubscribe (or if you really want to play nice allow to keep using "old" version after defined subscription time like a year or smth)
by nayuki | 2026-01-22 01:06:28+00:00
> Do whatever you want for distances between stars

Actually, this is very problematic as well. As it stands, astronomical distances are quoted in single/thousands/millions/billions of kilometres, astronomical units (Earth-Sun distance), parsecs and kilo- and mega-, and then light-years (and thousands, millions, billions).

I would strongly prefer to use metric units: metre, kilometre, megametre, gigametre, terametre (AU is around here), petametre (parsec and light-year is around here), exametre (about a thousand light-years), zettametre (about a million light-years), yottametre (about a billion light-years). The scale ends there because the observable universe is about 886 Ym in diameter.
by echelon | 2026-01-22 01:06:39+00:00
If there are any Kagi folks here, I've come up with a new angle to attack Google's anti-competitive position that could be incredibly effective:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46681985

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44546519

I'm going to send this idea to my legislators, the EU, Sam Altman, Tim Sweeny, and Elon Musk, et al., I just haven't had time to put this together yet.

Google is a monopolist scourge and needs to be knocked down a peg or two.

This should also apply to the iPhone and Android app stores.
by sillygoose_189 | 2026-01-22 01:07:08+00:00
Built my first SaaS at 17. Got to $200 MRR. And then I hit a wall.

Not because of bad code. Because of 5 technical decisions that compounded:

1. Priced at $10/mo

Attracted wrong customers → they requested niche features → I built them (dark mode: 2 days, 3 users) → codebase bloat (2k→8k lines) → my velocity died.

When I added $25/mo tier, 40% upgraded immediately (pretty high actually).

2. Built without validation

I spent 2 weeks building a dashboard. Only 3 people used it. Everyone else used the API.

Should've asked first. Wasted 40% of total dev time on features <5 people used.

3. Over-engineered for 120 users

Built 3 microservices, Redis caching, rate limiting. All for 120 users.

Result: 3x slower to ship, 5x harder to debug.

4. Ignored dependencies

Randomly at night, my production auth broke. 6 hours debugging. The cause: Next.js breaking change I missed.

Cost: 3 incidents, 40 wasted hours, 2 lost weekends.

Dependabot spam is real. 50+ alerts/week, with zero context. Everyone ignores it.

(Building repo20 to fix this - AI that tells you what breaks YOUR code specifically. Launches next week.)

5. No email infrastructure

Launched to 0 subscribers. Couldn't announce features. Couldn't iterate. Users churned silently.

The cascade:

Low price → wrong features → over-engineering → technical debt → dependency hell → slow iteration → dead

Full breakdown: https://dontkillsaas.framer.website/

What technical decisions killed your velocity?
by wunderwuzzi23 | 2026-01-22 01:07:30+00:00
Agreed.

In December I reported a data exfil in OpenAI Agent Builder and it was also closed as Not Applicable, so it's probably still there.

It's also unclear if anyone from OpenAI even ever saw the report. I don't know.

Maybe the incentives are off on some bug bounty platforms or programs, and triagers are evaluated on how fast they respond, and how quickly a ticket is closed rather then what kind of quality tickets they help produce.

It's the only explanation I have for this kind of decisions.
by jmward01 | 2026-01-22 01:08:57+00:00
Something like proxmox [1] could make wiping everything and restarting a lot easier. There really isn't a huge penalty between bare metal and a VM now so you get the ability to create/deploy/monitor all from a reasonable interface. If the standard clustering stuff isn't enough their datacenter version looks like it is designed more for this. Never used it though. (no ties to proxmox here, just a guy that likes it!)

[1] https://www.proxmox.com/en/products/proxmox-virtual-environm...
by bflesch | 2026-01-22 01:08:57+00:00
> You're finding comforting explanations to allow you to act dismissively towards other people.

No, none of this is comforting. For some people it is a big step to not drop everything just because someone is waiting for the bus and wants to have a 15 minute phone call in order to de-stress their own day.

> If you feel worn out after listening to other people, that's one way to avoid that, at the expense of human connection.

Not every human connection is a net positive.

> You gain options, not lose any.

Please let me complete the options I already have before putting more options on my TODO list.

> You can learn to have more control over your own inner state without effort

That's ableism.

People are unique, and while I appreciate you taking the time to write these lines you might be coming from a very different place. To be a bit snarky, maybe you are more on the energy consumer side of things than on the energy producer side. People have a magic radar for others who make them feel heard, but there is a certain bandwidth and it's limits must be respected.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-01-22 01:09:21+00:00
> or most commonly: pirated it.

Yes, I'm aware. That's the problem elucidated in the article. Developers expect everything for free, even though the price of tools relative to what they get paid to deliver products using those tools is completely trivial. This reluctance to pay for anything harms developers themselves most of all. If developers normalized a culture of paying for things they use, more developers would be able to develop their own independent software and sustain themselves without being beholden to $awful_corp_environment to pay the bills. But because developers will do anything they can to avoid paying <1 hr salary for a tool that saves them many hours, there is a huge gap between corporate professionals, who make lots of money, and open-source developers, most of whom make almost nothing, with only a relatively limited subset of independent developers able to bridge the gap and make a living producing good, non-corporate-nightmare software.

I'm pretty pro-piracy for students and such. It is an extremely good thing for learning to be as available as possible, even to those in poverty, so that they can make something better of their situation and contribute more to society than if they were locked in to low-knowledge careers solely by virtue of the random chance of their upbringing. But people who make a living off software development never graduate from the mindset of piracy. Even for open-source software, the vast majority of users never contribute to funding those projects they rely on. If we think open-source software is good for the world, why are we so opposed to anyone being able to make a living creating it? The world's corporate capture by non-free software is a direct result of our own collective actions in refusing to pay anything for anything even when we can afford to.
by gu009 | 2026-01-22 01:10:37+00:00
A handy side use for this is compressing PDFs.

For some reason, printing 1 page of an Excel or Word document to a PDF often gets up to around 4MB in size. Passing it through this compresses it quite well.

Just ran a quick test:

- 1-page Excel PDF export: 3.7MB

- Processing with Dangerzone (OCR enabled): 131KB
by sitharus | 2026-01-22 01:10:47+00:00
On modern macOS applications can flag an input field as secure, which blocks keypress interception. The permission is fairly new, but the actual feature has always been there as part of the window server. I used it back in the 10.4 days to implement macro recording.

Classic Mac OS extensions on the other hand had free rein to modify any part of the kernel. They really could modify anything.
by ofalkaed | 2026-01-22 01:10:47+00:00
>It's not a choice you'd make today obviously, but it was entirely reasonable then.

More recently, BQN made this same choice and I think it is perfectly reasonable to do as long as you have a reason beyond simple aesthetics. Entering these symbols on a normal keyboard is not difficult and no different from learning a human language which uses a different alphabet than you keyboard.

Personally I find the custom symbols of APL and BQN to be easier to type and read than the ASCII of J and K.
by bsder | 2026-01-22 01:10:50+00:00
(F + 40) * 5/9 - 40 = C

(C + 40) * 9/5 - 40 = F

Takes advantage of the fact that -40 F and -40 C are the same.

Remember it as (move origin -- convert -- move origin back).

I find it easier as a I don't have to remember precedence rules and the multiplication is obvious.
by gleenn | 2026-01-22 01:10:53+00:00
And what special sauce does the web preview use? At some point, someone has to actually parse and process the data. I feel like on a tech site like Hacker News, speculating that Google has somehow done a perfect job of preventing malicious PDFs beckons the question: how do you actually do that and prove that it's safe? And is that even possible in perpetuity?
by spijdar | 2026-01-22 01:11:06+00:00
The visceral response to the statement:

> To the Unix purist, this might appear wasteful and unnecessary, but macOS isn’t, and never has been, Unix. It’s a closed-source proprietary operating system designed for use by millions of consumers and regular users. Rather than configuring it using config files or its thousands of property lists, its controls are largely exposed in System Settings, with a few settings hidden away and only accessible through the defaults command.

Is really, really interesting to me, because so many people (including the author) are so invested in the question of whether or not "macOS is Unix". There's so much signaling happening here, people throwing around UNIX all-caps, talking about certifications, the "good parts" of UNIX, that macOS "[is] quite literally [UNIX]", while seemingly missing the author's intention entirely.

You don't have to agree with the author, but a good faith interpretation of "macOS isn’t, and never has been, Unix" should be obvious in its meaning. Yes, macOS 26 has been certified by The Open Group to be compliant with the Single UNIX Specification.

You know what else is UNIX certified? IBM's z/OS. Yet I don't think people would be clambering to say that z/OS's USS is "quite literally UNIX" with the same ferocity.

The point the author is clearly attempting to make is that the idea and system of macOS is not Unix. Even if macOS is, legally speaking, "UNIX®", it was not made to be UNIX®. macOS is not built to adhere to the "UNIX® philosophy". The fact NextStep and OS X after it were BSD-compatible is an implementation detail -- a useful one at that -- but an implementation detail nonetheless. It's like Android's use of the Linux kernel underneath. Yes, Android is Linux, but there's a reason why there's a vocal community of people who champion "Real Linux smartphones". Android uses Linux, but Android isn't defined by Linux.

I'm not trying to prove anyone right or wrong here, I just want to give my three cents on the matter. I would call macOS "unix-y" because it's close enough to being a "unix" to be comfortable on the CLI, but I've touched the unix "heart" enough to know it still smells like 2005-ish FreeBSD, largely frozen in time.

Of course, that's good enough for most things. But then, does that make Windows a Unix-like, just because it can run Linux ELF executables via WSL1? Conceivably, if Microsoft cared, they could get UNIX® 03 certification via WSL1, WSL2, or some hacked together reincarnation of SFU with parts from WSL1.

Yes, I know, macOS has a "real" BSD core, and a "real" unix heritage through BSD and OSF/1. The point is that it's not hard (IMO) to see where the author is coming from saying "No, macOS is not a Unix".

(I disagree with him for different reasons -- he ambiguously implies that "Unix" means being open-source, for instance -- but I agree that macOS as a platform is not very Unix-y, even if it is UNIX®.)
by anonzzzies | 2026-01-22 01:11:07+00:00
In NL I guess that is similar to France; in our case we always started a binder on a new employee so after their trial period/temp contract, we continue collecting info. If that person just waited for the trial to be over to just do nothing, we go to the court with the binder and get them out. We stopped after a certain period depending on what we collected so far: most binders are empty anyway. Also, you can fire someone without that if you have economic cause (which should be the reason for firing someone good) or you can fire them without that by paying them some months in the future.

The most annoying people, which we didnt have many but still a few, are the ones who, right after the trial period, or when they smell a rat, will go 'oh no, i feel something behind my eye and in my wrist, your work made me ill' and then go home. you would have to pay them and be nice about it (not threaten them with a beating).
by alexe12 | 2026-01-22 01:11:21+00:00
Hey everyone! I've noticed a problem as a huge fan of a lot of different longform business content (like the Acquired podcast, Stratechery, Paul Graham, and many, many more...) there isn't a great way to stay up to date with all the content across all content mediums (i.e you can find great content on Substacks/Newsletters, blogs, Spotify, individual websites, etc). So... I'm opening up longforum.net in early access for a growing community of people that want to stay up to date with the best longform content in the business world. I would be super stoked for anyone interested to check it out and let me know what you think! --> https://longforum.net/
by philipkglass | 2026-01-22 01:11:23+00:00
It looks like atril is mostly written in C:

https://github.com/mate-desktop/atril

A crafted PDF can potentially exploit a bug in atril to compromise the recipient's computer since writing memory-safe C is difficult. This approach was famously used by a malware vendor to exploit iMessage through a compressed image format that's part of the PDF standard:

https://projectzero.google/2021/12/a-deep-dive-into-nso-zero...
by diamond559 | 2026-01-22 01:11:47+00:00
No, it's clear that we are being lied to, you are not crazy. One of the only uses for these llms ironically is to create fake astroturf bots just believable enough to trick the masses who don't understand the technology. It works sometimes, but as you know sometimes is not good enough for most code that people actually need to you know, work.
by Gigachad | 2026-01-22 01:14:04+00:00
They have some kind of virus scanner for files you open via a share link. Not sure about the ones you have stored on your own drive unshared.

But probably the main security here is just using the chrome pdf viewer instead of the adobe one. Which you can do without google drive. The browser PDF viewers ignore all the strange and risky parts of the PDF spec that would likely be exploited.
by deterministic | 2026-01-22 01:14:50+00:00
I have used custom code generators at work for 25+ years.

The generators typically generates about 90% of the code I need to write a biz app. Leaving the most important code to me: the biz logic.

No AI. Just code that takes a (simple) declarative spec file and generates Typescript/C++/Java/... code.

I am also using AI's daily. However the code generators are still generating more productivity for me than AI's ever have.