MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dvrp | 2026-01-28 06:44:12+00:00
It's interesting to think that—independently of what you think of Cursor's browser implementation being truly "from scratch" or not—the fact that people are implementing browsers from scratch with agents happened because of Cursor's post. In other words, in a twisted and funny way, this browser exists because of Cursor's agent.

This is how we should be thinking about AI safety!
by josephg | 2026-01-28 06:44:59+00:00
> I think this just speaks to the necessity of rigor during the interview process.

That gets expensive, fast. There's just so much to cover already, between communication skills, programming skills, debugging skills, architecture / "whiteboarding problems", data structures and algorithms, general problem solving ("interview problems"). A job interview can never be a fully rigorous test of someone's actual skills. Most don't cover even a fraction of that stuff already.

> I'd argue that many, if not most, teams operate in limited domains.

It depends what you consider yourself responsible for. If you think of your job (or your team's job) as shipping features X, Y and Z within this react based web app, then sure - you operate in a limited domain. But if your job is "solve the user's actual problems" then things can get pretty broad, pretty fast. Sometimes you write code. Sometimes you're debugging a hard problem. Or talking to the users. Or identifying and tracking down a performance regression. Or writing an issue for a bug in 3rd party code. Or trawling through MDN to figure out a workaround to some browser nonsense. Or writing reliable tests, or CI/CD systems. And so on.

Its only really junior engineers who have the luxury of a limited scope.
by Quothling | 2026-01-28 06:45:13+00:00
I would imagine that the issue that people have here isn't so much that you can hide from other users, but whether or not you can hide your information from the company behind Signal. I'd assume that if you can't hide from the company, then you can't hide from the US government. We know that you can extract messages from a compromised phone because they aren't encrypted at rest. Which I guess would mean that even if you have disappearing messages and similar, your messages could proably still be extracted from a group chat with a comprimised user in it.

If we go full tinfoil, then do you really trust Apple and Google to keep your Signal keys on your device safe from the US government?

It's probably not that bad, but I do know that we're having some serious discussions on Signal here in Europe because it's not necessarily the secure platform we used to think it was. Then again, our main issue is probably that we don't have a secure phone platform with a way to securely certify applications (speaking from a national safety, not personal privacy point of view).
by hans_castorp | 2026-01-28 06:45:20+00:00
This is simply not true.

Some people are investigated because they spread lies, insults and threats. Things that would be investigated (and punished) as well, if done "off line".

The freedom of speech does not mean "freedom to harass, threat or insult people".

The oppression of free speech seems to be happening much more in the USA, where you are not allowed to criticize the politics of the ruling party any more.
by jesseduffield | 2026-01-28 06:46:03+00:00
You can plot all activities on a spectrum of dopamine 'cheapness'. On one side of the spectrum is slot machines, various drugs, and doomscrolling. These generally involve little effort, and involve 'variable ratio reinforcement' which is where you get rewards at unpredictable intervals in such a way that you get addicted. Generally, after a long session of one of these activities, you feel like crap.

On the other side of the spectrum is more wholesome long-horizon activities like a challenging side project, career progression, or fitness goals. There's certainly an element of variable ratio reinforcement in all of these, but because the rewards are so much more tangible, and you get to exercise more of your agency, these activities generally feel quite meaningful on reflection.

Playing pinball is somewhere in the middle, probably on the cheaper side of the spectrum. Introspective people can generally reflect on a session and decide whether it was a good use of their time or not.

I really think that 'how do you feel after a long session of this' is a good measuring stick. Very few people will tell you that they feel good after a long session of social media scrolling or short-form content.

Another good measuring stick is 'do you want to want to be doing this?'. I want to want to go to the gym and gain 10kg of muscle. I do not want to want to spend hours on tiktok every day.
by anonnon | 2026-01-28 06:46:26+00:00
Besides fear of populism, I think it reveals a genuine contempt for the United States on the part of Canada and Europe, one that past US presidents and policy makers have long overlooked and downplayed. Note that besides all of the territory China claims (as other responses have noted), including the entirety of the Taiwanese archipelago and islands within the territorial waters of the Philippines and Vietnam, China is the single largest purchaser of Russian energy, and it supplies Russia with drone parts and other restricted components, and also provides Russia with intelligence to better plan and execute strikes on Ukraine.
by socalgal2 | 2026-01-28 06:47:23+00:00
I'm having a hard time imagining how 20k lines of code gets a browser with no libraries. Just zlib by itself is 12k lines. freetype is 30k lines, or stb_truetype is 5k lines. Something doesn't seem like it's adding up. Am I missing something? Is this just calling into the OS for rendering?
by Jensson | 2026-01-28 06:47:31+00:00
> My view is that these are essentially the same group. "Not wanting to see politics" is itself just a partisan view in favor of whatever the Status Quo currently is. So if you're going through and flagging articles describing wrongdoing or calling for change, because they are "political," then you're just operating in the service of whoever is currently in power.

But some people do that regardless who is currently in power, what do you call that? I'd call that "not wanting to see politics" and not being partisan.
by kelnos | 2026-01-28 06:49:49+00:00
> I am not complaining about what people do in their spare time.

Re-read your original post. You are absolutely complaining about what we do in our spare time.

> If the blog post said "someone does this because he likes to spend his own time on it", I would not complain.

I mean, that's part of it. I wouldn't do it if I wasn't interested in doing it. I have my own long list of Wayland criticisms, but I think it's interesting.

> I also do not agree with the Wayland is inevitable sentiment.

I think that's where we'll be at an impasse.

There are non-systemd distros because there are viable alternatives. Xorg (the server implementation, I mean, not X11 the protocol/system) is dead. I don't like saying that. I've invested a lot of time into X11 and understanding how it works, and how Xorg works. But no one wants to maintain it. There is the XLibre fork, and I wish them well, and do want them to succeed, but sustaining a fork is hard, and only time will tell if that works out.

But I don't think X11 has a future, unfortunately. And that really does make me sad. You're free to disagree with that, but... well, so what.

> The Linux desktop was essentially fine already two decades ago and instead of the needed refinements

That's a view through rose-tinted glasses if I ever saw one.

> we get random changes in technology after the other

Jamie Zawinski called this the "Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers", and he's right. I do think some of these changes are an earnest and honest attempt to make things better, but yes, people just want to work on what interests them, and what makes them feel good and accomplished.

When we work for a corporation we don't really get to do that, but when it's unpaid, spare-time volunteer work, we have the freedom to do whatever makes us happy, even if it makes other people mad or disappointed or annoyed, or isn't the most "productive" use of our time (whatever that means).

::shrug::
by evilc00kie | 2026-01-28 06:49:56+00:00
5 - A production-grade Matrix homeserver [...]
5 + This is a proof of concept Matrix homeserver [...]

This whole thing in a nutshell. Bold and sad to see this. Cloudflare has/had such outstanding posts that I really like/ed to read.

https://github.com/nkuntz1934/matrix-workers/commit/fd412f41...
by igsomething | 2026-01-28 06:49:59+00:00
Going from Django to Phoenix I prefer manual migrations. Despite being a bit tedious and repetitive, by doing a "double pass" on the schema I often catch bugs, typos, missing indexes, etc. that I would have missed with Django. You waste a bit of time on the simple schemas, but you save a ton of time when you are defining more complex ones. I lost count on how many bugs were introduced because someone was careless with Django migrations, and it is also surprising that some Django devs don't know how to translate the migrations to the SQL equivalent.

At least you can opt-in to automated migrations in Elixir if you use Ash.
by harry8 | 2026-01-28 06:50:03+00:00
The authorities can't admit they lied. Admit there was never any evidence that phones could interfere with anything on a plane other than the well being those around you. They can't admit they banned mobile phone usage but not skyphones because of special interest pressure.

They can't do this because it would destroy their credibility with the ignorant as much as it has with the informed, that would get a critical mass. So yeah we have "flight mode" and every single flight someone breaks it. It isn't remotely enforceable so it is just as well that connecting to cellular is harmless. (Planes also have expensive wifi instead of expensive skyphones now, so the financial incentive remains.)

Airplane mode was a figleaf to counter "your phone must be switched off" which was the old-school airplane mode enforcement.

Undermining security for little bits of money for special interest. The naked corruption of purpose could make you angry if you let it.
by cornholio | 2026-01-28 06:51:11+00:00
The current maintainer is always right by definition, has put in the hard work and is entitled to drag the project into whatever deranged fantasy they might have.

You just don't get a vote, there is no objective truth to settle disputes when it comes to someone else's work and projects. You can stop using the work or fork it, perhaps alongside other like minded users and contributors, crating a viable split.
by notpushkin | 2026-01-28 06:51:26+00:00
If we look at the effects, no, I don’t think so. I see how pinball could be optimized for addictiveness, but I don’t see a lot of people devoting all their free time to it.

Now, it is more nuanced than that. Is addiction bad for us? And at what point do we say we’re addicted to something? For me personally, when I can’t stop doing something (say, watching YouTube instead of working on a project), I won’t be happy long-term. It would be more gratifying short-term, sure, but I’d say it’s still not good.
by ChrisArchitect | 2026-01-28 06:51:42+00:00
Related:

AISLE’s autonomous analyzer found all CVEs in the January OpenSSL release

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46789913

OpenSSL: Stack buffer overflow in CMS AuthEnvelopedData parsing

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46782662
by notepad0x90 | 2026-01-28 06:52:34+00:00
Please do, I disagree with this commenter.

You already trust third parties, but there is no reason why that third party can't be the very same entity publishing the distribution. The role corporations play in attestation for the devices you speak of can be displaced by an open source developer, it doesn't need to require a paid certificate, just a trusted one. Furthermore, attestation should be optional at the hardware level, allowing you to build distros that don't use it, however distros by default should use it, as they see fit of course.

I think what people are frustrated with is the heavy-handedness of the approach, the lack of opt-out and the corporate-centric feel of it all. My suggestion would be not to take the systemd approach. There is no reason why attestation related features can't be turned on or off at install time, much like disk encryption. I find it unfortunate that even something like secureboot isn't configurable at install time, with custom certs,distro certs, or certs generated at install time.

Being against a feature that benefits regular users is not good, it is more constructive to talk about what the FOSS way of implementing a feature might be. Just because Google and Apple did it a certain way, it doesn't mean that's the only way of doing it.
by sriram_malhar | 2026-01-28 06:52:48+00:00
I'm finding that in this build fast and break things culture, it is hard to revisit a project that is more than 3 years old.

I have a couple of android projects that are four years old. I have the architecture documented, my notes (to self) about some important details that I thought I was liable to forget, a raft of tests. Now I can't even get it to load inside the new version of Android Studio or to build it. There's a ton of indirection between different components spread over properties, xml, kotlin but what makes it worse is that any attempt to upgrade is a delicate dance between different versions and working one's ways around deprecated APIs. It isn't just the mobile ecosystem.
Show HN: Type Chart Calculator – Fast Pokemon type effectiveness lookup
by lincyang | 2026-01-28 06:53:06+00:00
Hey HN! I built a Pokemon type effectiveness calculator that focuses on speed and simplicity.

The problem: Existing type charts are either complex 18×18 tables or buried in wikis. When you're in a battle and need to know "what's Fire/Flying weak to?", you want an instant answer.

The solution: A static-generated Next.js site with:
- 43 SEO-optimized pages (18 single types + 20 popular combos)
- Default examples (Fire/Flying loads with results immediately)
- Quick example buttons (one-click to try popular combinations)
- Battle simulator with STAB calculations

Tech stack: Next.js 14, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, fully SSG for <1s load times.

Live: https://www.typematchup.org
Source: [if you want to open source it]

Would love feedback on the UX and any features competitive players would find useful!
by chihuahua | 2026-01-28 06:53:09+00:00
Obviously Microsoft felt bad when they had to kill the old Edge browser that was based on their own HTML rendering engine. Must feel like a second-rate tech company when you can't write some code to render HTML with sufficient quality.

Now they can get back in the game with a 3-word prompt!

And then every time there's some change to web standards, it's just one more prompt where you say "Hey Copilot, take a look at this page that describes the change, and update our browser code to add this!"

/s
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2026-01-28 06:53:21+00:00
Note the extreme downvoting on the comment I'm replying to. HN has a strong left-wing bias.

Don't expect the views expressed on this site to be at all representative of the American public. I consider myself a center-left moderate (never voted for Trump). From my perspective this site is pretty close to being a far-left echo chamber.
by solumunus | 2026-01-28 06:53:34+00:00
I don’t get this at all. I’m using LLM’s all day and I’m constantly having to make smart architectural choices that other less experienced devs won’t be making. Are you just prompting and going with whatever the initial output is, letting the LLM make decisions? Every moderately sized task should start with a plan, I can spend hours planning, going off and thinking, coming back to the plan and adding/changing things, etc. Sometimes it will be days before I tell the LLM to “go”. I’m also constantly optimising the context available to the LLM, and making more specific skills to improve results. It’s very clear to me that knowledge and effort is still crucial to good long term output… Not everyone will get the same results, in fact everyone is NOT getting the same results, you can see this by reading the wildly different feedback on HN. To some LLM’s are a force multiplier while others claim they can’t get a single piece of decent output…

I think the way you’re using these tools that makes you feel this way is a choice. You’re choosing to not be in control and do as little as possible.
by throwup238 | 2026-01-28 06:54:00+00:00
Onshape is just a GUI over the Parasolid geometric modeling kernel, the same kernel used by Solidworks [1]. Whatever their scripting primitives are, they're at best a thin wrapper over Parasolid (which is true for the entire industry - it's all Siemens Parasolid and Dassault ACIS).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasolid#Applications
by joe_mamba | 2026-01-28 06:56:56+00:00
>A European tech salary would be about 2x of the median

Not even that, unless we're talking big-tech or in the lesser developed countries where the national averages are lower. In more developed/rich EU countries SW dev wages are relatively close to national medians so a SW dev doesn't take home 2x the the median. BUt in places like Poland to BHulagriasure, you can take home 2x-5x the national median.
by ben-schaaf | 2026-01-28 06:57:02+00:00
To my knowledge benzaldehyde is the most common cherry flavor, and I agree it doesn't taste much like cherries. It's also a naturally occurring compound we produce from cassia oil, and it's naturally contained in almonds, apricots, apples and cherries.

As for coconut there's Lactones, which - you guessed it - occur naturally.

> OK for vanilla, however most of the fruit artificial flavors are compound that have nothing to do with the elements from the natural fruit but at some point, someone in the food industry decided it tasted "similar" to the natural fruit.

Care to provide a source?
by notepad0x90 | 2026-01-28 06:57:15+00:00
There is the integrity measurement architecture but it isn't very mature in my opinion. Even secureboot and module signing is a manual setup by users, it isn't supported by default, or by installers. You have to more or less manage your own certs and CA, although I did notice some laptops have debian signing keys in UEFI by default? If only the debian installer setup module signing.

But you miss a critical part - Secure Boot, as the name implies is for boot, not OS runtime. Linux I suppose considers the part after initrd load, post-boot perhaps?

I think pid-1 hash verification from the kernel is not a huge ask, as part of secure boot, and leave it to the init system to implement or not implement user-space executable/script signature enforcement. I'm sure Mr. Poettering wouldn't mind.
by epistasis | 2026-01-28 06:57:47+00:00
There are two conceptions of law currently in the US. The first is what we see on TV, with lawyers and judges and law enforcement attempting, most often successfully, to apply a set of rules to everyone equally.

The second conception of law is what the federal government is doing now: oppression of opponents of the powerful, and protection of the powerful from any harm they cause to others.

We are currently in a battle to see which side wins. In many ways the struggle of the US, as it has become more free, is a struggle for the first conception to win over the second. When we had the Civil War, the first conception of law won. I hope it wins again.
by iterance | 2026-01-28 06:58:34+00:00
In coursework, references are often a way of demonstrating the reading one did on a topic before committing to a course of argumentation. They also contextualize what exactly the student's thinking is in dialogue with, since general familiarity with a topic can't be assumed in introductory coursework. Citation minimums are usually imposed as a means of encouraging a student to read more about a topic before synthesizing their thoughts.

While similar, the function is fundamentally different from citations appearing in research. However, even professionally, it is well beyond rare for a philosophical work, even for professional philosophers, to be written truly ex nihilo as you seem to be suggesting. Citation is an essential component of research dialogue and cannot be elided.
Thoughts on Database Tooling and UX
by debba | 2026-01-28 06:58:45+00:00
Database tooling is in a strange place.

On one side, there are powerful, commercial tools that try to be everything at once. They support every engine, every workflow, every edge case. The result is often a heavy application with long startup times, dense UIs, and a constant feeling that you’re navigating a system rather than inspecting data.

On the other side, there are lightweight or open-source tools that are fast and simple—but quickly hit a wall as soon as you need anything beyond basic querying.

What’s missing is not raw functionality, but UX discipline.

Many database managers feel like they’ve grown without ever being pruned. Features accumulate, interactions become implicit, and simple actions require unnecessary context switching. Over time, you end up paying a UX tax: more clicks, more waiting, more mental overhead.

For developers who frequently jump between databases or just want to explore data quickly, this friction adds up fast. It’s often easier to drop back to the terminal, even when a graphical tool should be the better option.

I started experimenting with a small database manager mainly to address this gap: fast startup, explicit actions, minimal abstraction, and a UI that stays out of the way.

That experiment eventually became debba.sql, an open-source database manager written in Rust and built with Tauri. It’s intentionally limited in scope and still very much a side project.

The more interesting question, though, is broader than any single tool:

Why are we still accepting poor UX as the default for database tooling?

If you’re curious, feedback is welcome—but even more welcome is the discussion around what “good UX” for developer tools should actually look like.

Link repo: https://github.com/debba/debba.sql

Ideas, stars and contributions are welcome.
by remisharoon | 2026-01-28 07:00:13+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been working on dbt-Workbench, an open-source UI for working with dbt projects beyond the CLI.

The goal is simple: make dbt artifacts (models, sources, tests, lineage, runs) easier to see and reason about, especially for larger projects where dbt docs starts to feel limiting.

This started as a personal pain point while working with complex dbt setups, and I decided to clean it up and release it openly.

It’s early, opinionated, and definitely not perfect. I’d really appreciate feedback, especially from people using dbt at scale. Happy to answer questions or hear why this is a bad idea

Repo: https://github.com/rezer-bleede/dbt-Workbench
by avcloudy | 2026-01-28 07:00:17+00:00
You're not arguing in good faith, which is clear from your other replies, but I'm not saying vigilantes are the solution, just that compassion is not a weapon.

But also, just within your moral framework, I think it's really important to understand that the systems of justice have been compromised and we are, right now, seeing people treated as guilty until proven innocent. It's just not happening to you. It *is* happening to people like me.

Let me say that again: I'm not saying that vigilante justice is better, only that the legal system has become vigilante justice. People who share my moral values are being gunned down right now. And people like you are spreading excuses about how its shades of grey.
by WalterBright | 2026-01-28 07:01:34+00:00
There is no other civilization in the solar system.

If it's humans vs alien slime mold, I stand for humans.

> ou aren't going to see anything "take hold" on a human timescale

Right. Seeding life onto lifeless planets takes a long time, but it is a moral imperative. We are the only life in the solar system, and maybe even in our galaxy.

BTW, the Earth is going to fry in 100m years. We'd better learn how to colonize the other planets.