MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by duskdozer | 2026-01-22 11:40:41+00:00
>Masks work (CDC/FDA discouraged, then flip-flopped

Discouraging them early on was meant to avoid supply runs on quality masks. I agree it was a misstep on their part to promote the falsehood that masks do not prevent the wearer from being infected, and they never sufficiently walked this back, only perpetuating further myths like masks only protect others and not the wearer.

>Asking about "Hey if I got COVID before, that immunity is as robust if not more than vaccine, what evidence supports I need the vaccine?"

I also agree that over-reliance and perhaps overselling of vaccine effectiveness was a misstep, largely designed to get societal buy-in for ignoring COVID and "getting back to normal" as quickly as possible. The point that makes suspect those who were in favor of things like vitamins and exercise and so adamantly against measures like vaccines is that they did not go on to support other mitigations to promote health, like mask mandates and improvements in indoor air filtration and ventilation, which would have been more effective at reducing disease and promoting health. On the contrary, such activists were only interested in removing all measures and promoting increased disease.
by pjmlp | 2026-01-22 11:40:43+00:00
If you want to piss off even more, those that buy Apple only because they want a shinny UNIX, but don't buy into Apple's culture since Mac OS Classic days, you only need to remind them that Steve Jobs was hardly a UNIX fanboy.

Just like with Microsoft strategies, for NeXT, having NeXTSTEP being based on UNIX was more to check boxes against Sun, and bring software into the platform, not to make it easy to go out, hence the whole userspace stack, even drivers, are based on Objective-C frameworks.

"Why We Have to Make UNIX Invisible."

https://www.usenix.org/blog/vault-steve-jobs-keynotes-1987-u...

> They said a Unix weenie was code for software engineers who hated what we were doing to Unix (the operating system we licensed)—putting a graphical user interface on it to dumb it down for grandmothers. They heckled Steve about his efforts to destroy it. His nightmare would be to speak to a crowd of them.

https://web.archive.org/web/20180628214613/https://www.cake....

"NeXT marketing strategy video (1991)"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRBIH0CA7ZU
by whateverboat | 2026-01-22 11:41:19+00:00
It's desperational. The desperation of not having to lose any contract. The desperation of being just one bad year away from being on the streets and having to live a terrible life (no food security).

For students, often there is no pathway to actually become good due to lack of resources. So, the only way is to fake it into a job and then become good.
Show HN: Local-First AI Video Upscaler with CPU Fallback
by pratik227 | 2026-01-22 11:41:22+00:00
I built a Python-based video upscaler that prioritizes privacy and local execution.

Most AI video tools today are cloud-based, which isn't ideal for private media or long-form archival projects. This tool brings a professional upscaling pipeline directly to your machine.

Why I built this:
I wanted a simple "one-command" way to take old SD footage (like home movies or archival clips) and upscale them to 1080p and 4K without complex configurations or data leavings my hardware.

Key Features:
- Hybrid Support: Auto-detects NVIDIA CUDA or Apple Silicon (MPS).
- Smart Fallback: If no GPU is found, it automatically switches to OpenCV FSRCNN so it still works (though slower) on any CPU.
- The Pipeline: It doesn't just "stretch" video. It uses Real-ESRGAN for AI enhancement up to 1080p, then applies high-quality Lanczos interpolation for 4K delivery.
- Format Handling: Handles 4:3 to 16:9 aspect ratio correction with smart padding and preserves/remuxes the original audio track.

GitHub: https://github.com/pratik227/upscale_video_4k

Sample Output - https://github.com/pratik227/upscale_video_4k/blob/main/outp...
by avemuri | 2026-01-22 11:41:30+00:00
I've asked before - I am not clear what the massive boost is other than saving a few days or weeks at the beginning. I believe all taxation, labor compliance and other such regulation is still the same as the status quo. The one time ease of setup doesn't seem to be worth the ongoing hassle of dealing with the same crap, just with the added friction of a new and unfamiliar entity structure. What am I missing?
by d--b | 2026-01-22 11:41:35+00:00
That's not true at all though.

Car makers don't make a car and dismiss the entire engineering team.

Sure, you could do that, but eventually people are going to move on from your only car that's old and clunky.

That's exactly Bending Spoons model. Cut all the expenses, let the product die slowly. In the meantime you might have made more money than you put in to buy the product and the team.

It's basically bankrupcy management.
by wojciii | 2026-01-22 11:41:52+00:00
From https://curl.se/docs/code-of-conduct.html:

"As contributors and maintainers of this project, we pledge to respect all people who contribute through reporting issues, posting feature requests, updating documentation, submitting pull requests or patches, and other activities"

Why have a code of conduct while being hostile to contributors?

I think they should handle this differently.
by trashb | 2026-01-22 11:41:56+00:00
Yes this kind of work will be sped up a lot by AI since you are not familiar with the intricacies of the subject matter. Especially with well documented but complex formats it can assist (vector graphics are not necessarily intuitive). Additionally in my experience UI design is quite pattern and boilerplate heavy.

The suggesting of algorithms sounds good, I don't know how you got there but I would ask for several algorithms that fit the bill and narrow it down myself (the first suggestion isn't always optimal).

Thank you for taking the time to shine some light onto what you're doing as I can see how you get that kind of speedup from using AI in this scenario.
by Krizzu | 2026-01-22 11:42:13+00:00
I had a very quick glance at docs website, from Comparison page it says it uses native components, which is great. However, I did not find anything related to platform specific API usage, such as embedding camera into your view or using notification groups/channels? Is there a way to "offload" these parts to android, similar to what CMP allows you to do? (You can embed native iOS views inside Compose view or use expect/actual)
by nixbuild | 2026-01-22 11:43:39+00:00
This is what nixbuild.net does, it tracks historic CPU and memory usage of individual builds, and takes that into account when deciding what resources to allocate for new builds. You can configure limits on max/min CPUs on your account or individual builds. Also, if a build runs out of memory we simply restart it with more memory. The client will just see that the build log starts over.
by dostick | 2026-01-22 11:43:41+00:00
Of course it’s cultural, they have to compete with thousands people just like them in environment where human life is cheap and anyone is replaceable. Any authority have huge weight, which comes from historical system how society is separated.
And then any education they receive assumes cheating at exams, then cheat with CV, then cheat with work they do. It’s all about appearances.
by raincole | 2026-01-22 11:44:04+00:00
> "they've always been wrong before"

In my opinion, they've almost always been right.

In the past two decades, we've seen the less-tech-savvy middle managers who devalued anything done on computer. They seemed to believe that doing graphic design or digital painting was just pressing a few buttons on the keyboard and the computer would do the job for you. These people were constantly mocked among online communities.

And strangely, in the end those tech muggles were the insightful ones.
by __jonas | 2026-01-22 11:44:26+00:00
Interesting, I’m not big on AI but I have thought often it would be nice to have an ‘agent’ that monitors ebay or other classifieds sites for items based on a natural language description.

Something like “I want an old mini PC to use as a home server, it should have roughly these specs and cost under this amount”, and then an LLM would run some searches every day, parse the results and send me a message if something comes up.

It’s pretty easy to get alerts for when items are available for a certain price if you know the exact item you want, but on eBay and classifieds sites, I usually just want something in a rough ballpark, and the best way to find that is come back and check every day looking through searches.

I don’t really see any value in having the AI do the purchase itself though.
by jfyi | 2026-01-22 11:44:43+00:00
I agree, and in aggregate it becomes a serious issue for the platform. People who buy autonomously are going to argue personally when it fails in any way.

I'm not sure how they would intend to stop it with this policy anyway. It at best is going to be an arms race detecting them. What it does do is prevent upfront the ham handed excuse of "I didn't bid on this, my bot did".
by zoho_seni | 2026-01-22 11:44:49+00:00
You could easily guard against bullshit issues. So you can focus on what matters. If the issue is legit goes ahead to a human reviewer. If is run of the mill ai low quality or irrelevant issue, just close. Or even nicer: let the person that opened the issue to "argue" with the ai to further explain that is legit issue for false positives.
by jollyllama | 2026-01-22 11:45:01+00:00
Replying here because GP makes a good distinction, and your point still holds.

I would point out that there are a few alternate models:

1) You use the maintenance headcount to build, and you just build that much slower.

2) You have an org that wants to stay the same size and move from project to project. In that case, some subset of your staff, are, at any one time, revisiting old projects for updates/maintenance, and some other portion are working on building a new thing. This is probably the strongest paradigm, because you can leverage common platforms between solutions.

Unfortunately, of course, either of this is at odds with the current approach to business/capital, in which once an opportunity emerges, everything is thrown at it as quickly as possible.
by shmeeed | 2026-01-22 11:45:06+00:00
I don't see how it's conductive to the underlying big stakes discussion if we start condemning Kagi over this omission instead of assuming good faith. It's just distracting from the real issue at hand that is Google's monopoly and the details of the rulings and their enforcement.

Call me naive, but I imagine Kagi would be VERY hesitant to force ads on their users, given that such a step would risk alienating a major part of their customer base, as they're well aware.

If they were secretly planning to to it somewhere down the road, they could just as well do it the usual and proven way and lie about it until they've build a sufficient moat, which they're not having right now. IMO, they have precious little to gain from hinting at it like this now.

And even if it were the case that this omission was consciously about keeping a door open for such a change in business models, there's a whole lot of leeway in approaches that involve ads, apart from the 100% user-as-a-product way that Google went with.

Given the high customizability of their search, they e.g. could give users the option to turn ads on or off. Some people (don't ask me who, but I keep being told they exist) don't mind being shown ads or might even desire them.

I remember way back when the first Google ads were clearly labeled as such and stood visually apart from organic search results. I personally don't think it would mean the end of the world if Kagi did something similar - in a transparent way, and preferrably as an opt-in.

But at this point it's all needless speculation in my view.
by josefx | 2026-01-22 11:45:08+00:00
> Even if a machine generates them.

Why? If it is a purely machine generated report there is no need to have dozens of third parties that throw them around blindly. A project could run it internally without having to deal with the kind of complications third parties introduce, like duplicates, copy paste errors or nonsensical assertions that they deserve money for unrelated bugfixes.

A purely machine generated report without any meaningfull contribution by the submitter seems to be the first thing you would want to exclude from a bug bounty program.
by pezezin | 2026-01-22 11:45:21+00:00
> No, it is not easier to deal with meters if you're talking about physical spaces that humans inhabit. And it's not easier to deal with C when talking about the temperature of a room, because an F degree is just about the smallest difference a human can tell. I know I can tell a 74 from a 73 from a 72 etc in my house.

Why? For anybody who grew up in a metric country, dealing with metres is pretty damn easy. Case in point, my GF is an architect working for an US military base, and she gets royally pissed off every time she has to deal with feet and inches.
by cb321 | 2026-01-22 11:45:52+00:00
This description matches my own experience. I recall having to use my own macro-based syscall() things when the inotify system was first introduced because glibc did not have support for years and then it was years more for slow moving Linux distros to pick up the new glibc version.

Unsaid was that much of this project separation comes from glibc being born as (and probably still being) a "portable libc with extra GNU-ish features", not a Linux-specific thing.

Honesty, some of this pain might have been avoided had the Bell Labs guys made two libraries - the syscall interface part of `libc`, called say `libos`, and the more articulated language run-time (string/buffered IO/etc./etc) the actual `libc`. Then the kernel could "easily" ship with libos and libc's could vary. To even realize this might be helpful someday likely required foresight beyond reason in the mid-1970s. Then, afterwards, Makefile's and other build system stuff probably wanted to stay with "-lc" in various places and then glibc/others wanted to support that and so it goes. Integration can be hard to un-do.
by maccard | 2026-01-22 11:45:53+00:00
Parent commenter is, as you’ve said just parroting racist tropes.

Anecdotally, I’ve worked with quite a lot of South Asian people, and there is an art to communicating with them - they’re remarkably indirect but thrrr are certain signs that they disagree. If you apply the same amount of skepticism to an Americans “super awesome mega amazing” bluster, you’d be pretty close to the mark IME.
by dspillett | 2026-01-22 11:46:57+00:00
> I never understood why eBay set things up to enable sniping.

I've seen studies on auction method that suggest the difference in the final price (between explicit end time and the more traditional extend-until-bidding-stops method) is negligible for online auctions except in a few special cases. This is a marked difference from the expectation that, like a real-world in-person auction, the extending deadline might encourage further spur-of-the-moment bidding.

Whether it makes much difference to the final price or not is immaterial though if the buyers believe that it does. This is one of the (several) reasons why eBay won out against similar competition in the early days: buyers felt they were getting a better deal by being able to snipe so favoured eBay with more of their attention and this brought more sellers to the platform (which attracted more buyers, and so on round the loop). It is telling that to deal with the extra load imposed on the system by external bots refreshing pages and putting in automated bids, instead of switching to an extending auction model they implemented what is almost a built-in sniping feature.

Auction sites have to be very careful (or just very lucky) in their messaging, to convince both sellers and buyers that they are getting a good deal - any major change to how eBay works could upset the balance that they currently have in that regard and start a flood in the other direction (the more people leave, the more other people will think about leaving) to the building toward critical mass that was how they won out in those early days.
by ReluctantLaser | 2026-01-22 11:47:02+00:00
I feel I see these solutions somewhat often, but you can execute a command and use that as a value. To me, I'm not sure why people aren't calling their secret store as part of it. I use direnv mostly, but seems `.env` supports the same thing. e.g:

MY_SECRET=$(pass show path/to/my/secret)

Of course substitute that for Vault/SSM/whatever. There are other solutions to this problem too, but I show this to people as there's so little friction to using it.

As for the solution itself, we shouldn't really be storing secrets as plain text wherever we can help it. Masking them feels like a kludge.
by pjmlp | 2026-01-22 11:47:15+00:00
Same applies to Windows NT POSIX subsystem, had Microsoft been serious about UNIX support on Windows, similar to how IBM and Unisys do on their mainframes and micros, there would be no reason to bother with Linux.

My case was exactly that, I got Slackware in 1995's Summer because that subsystem wasn't enough to do the DG/UX assignments at home.
by yilugurlu | 2026-01-22 11:47:29+00:00
I see the sceptical comments, but no one says this "vibe-coded" projects/apps/tools will be ready for your customers. It basically scratches the itch for the given users/company/whatever. Also, it doesn't have to be fast, stable or handle 1_000_000 concurrent users. You don't have to worry about that.

Not everything has to be a SaaS, but I don't think all SaaS apps can be vibe-coded to a weekend project.

If it is solving my issues and problems, why do preaching about the merits of a proper product or paying. I'll pay for what I see value in, and vibe-code where I don't see the benefit of paying.

Maybe I miserably fail and get back to paying to product. It's all good, I take that responsibility while I start my vibe-coding session.
by rcxdude | 2026-01-22 11:47:31+00:00
Apart from this feature specifically, in general people would like their IDE to run language servers, set up build systems, and any number of other things which are likely to require some configuration which allows executing some code in the folder to work. VS code has a restricted mode to prevent this, which you need to accept a dialog to disable, but it also disables most of its features.
by LarsKrimi | 2026-01-22 11:47:47+00:00
That is a cultural thing, and one of the first things you learn to handle when working tightly together with Indians as an outsider.

I can't remember all the techniques but a simple trick is to ask them to repeat their understanding back to you before they start working on a thing.

But I don't think it's connected to sending "malicious" reports. That seems rather to be to pad their resume and online presence while studying to get an edge in hiring.
by debugnik | 2026-01-22 11:47:55+00:00
Another idea, wasm_of_ocaml [1] compiles effects using either a CPS transform or the JS Promise integration proposal for Wasm [2].

[1]: https://github.com/ocsigen/js_of_ocaml/blob/1b1fcf7b06c12324...
[2]: https://github.com/WebAssembly/js-promise-integration/blob/7...
by fuzzfactor | 2026-01-22 11:48:02+00:00
Yep, and then CDROMs really bumped it up to the next level for Microsoft.

Pop music CD's had been popular for years before data CDROMs became available and more common.

Stars like Michael Jackson were raking in the bucks and their record companies even more.

Then by the mid '90's Windows was too sizable and unwieldy for most people to install from floppy any more, and consumer PCs started having CD reader/players standard.

Microsoft CDs started flying off the shelf at 10x the retail price the record companies were charging for music CD's.
by retsibsi | 2026-01-22 11:48:18+00:00
Your max price should be the price such that you're indifferent between buying the item at that price and not buying it at all.

At a shop, usually you're paying less than the maximum you'd be willing to pay, because the shop's prices are fixed and it would be a big coincidence if the price they set happened to match your max price exactly.[1] So even if we model you as homo economicus, it's normal that you're almost always fine with paying $X + $0.01.

In the case where $X really is your max price (i.e. it's right at your threshold of indifference), the idea of rejecting $X + $0.01 seems less silly. You were already very close to deciding $X was too much, so you're probably feeling ambivalent about making the purchase, and the trivial nudge of an extra cent being added to the price might as well be what pushes you over the edge.

[1] There are exceptions, e.g. when you have a negligible preference between brands A and B, so you're defaulting to brand A because the prices are exactly the same, but you would buy B if it were marginally cheaper. But that doesn't affect the main point here.
by throwup238 | 2026-01-22 11:48:23+00:00
> Ignoring the financial aspect, this all makes sense - one LLM is good, 100 is better, 1000 is better still. The whole analogy with the industrial revolution makes sense to me.

How does this make sense? LLMs are doing knowledge work so they face the same coordination problem that humans do, they're not assembly line workers. We have no reason to believe that the lessons of the mythical man month don't apply to LLMs too since the coordination costs, especially when they're touching the same piece of code, are very high.
by theturtletalks | 2026-01-22 11:49:16+00:00
Turning a paid sub like WisprFlow into your own weekend build (Jabber) is a great move, but you can take it further by finding open-source alternatives that already implement the features you're replicating. For dictation and speech-to-text like what WisprFlow does, there's Handy[0], a free, open-source, offline speech-to-text app that runs locally with Whisper models.

Once you identify something like Handy, instruct Claude to study how that OSS project actually builds the feature and adapt the logic to your stack. AI is really good at finding the "seams" (those connection points where a feature ties into the tech stack) and understanding the full implementation.

The trick is knowing precisely where the feature lives in the code (files, functions, modules), because AIs often miss scattered pieces and don't capture everything otherwise. That's what I'm working on at opensource.builders[1]: turning OSS repos into a modular cookbook of features you can remix across stacks, with structured "skills" that point to the exact details so the porting works reliably.

[0] https://github.com/cjpais/Handy

[1] https://github.com/junaid33/opensource.builders
by 4gotunameagain | 2026-01-22 11:49:58+00:00
To add to that, it is culturally acceptable and even lauded in India to achieve something by "gaming the system", something usually considered unethical in the west (okay maybe less so in the US).

I would be ashamed to submit an AI slop PR or vulnerability report.

An indian might just say "I have 25 merged PRs in open source projects"
by rcxdude | 2026-01-22 11:50:06+00:00
Yeah, because there are a lot of mechanisms by which a folder may start to execute code when you open it outside of restricted mode. A large fraction of addons have something which could be used for this, for example. There isn't a general check that it can apply ahead of time for this.

(They could, with some breaking changes, maybe try to enforce a permissions system for the matrix of addons and folders, where it would ask for permission when an addon does actually try to run something, but this would result in a lot of permission requests for most repos)
by fotcorn | 2026-01-22 11:51:22+00:00
I think the ability to actually run the code on the target helped a lot with understanding and optimizing for the specific micro architecture. Quite a few of the ideas turned out to not to be optimal and were discarded.

Also important to have a few test cases the agent can quickly check against, it will often generate wrong code, but if that is easily detectable the agent can fix it and continue quickly.