MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ffsm8 | 2026-01-23 13:50:02+00:00
How would pure ai ever be "much stronger" in this scenario?

That doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever, it can only be "equally strong", making the approach non-viable because they're not providing any value... But the only way for the human in the loop to add an actual demerit, you'd have to include time taken for each move into the final score, which isn't normal in chess.

But I'm not knowledgeable on the topic, I'm just expressing my surprise and inability to contextualize this claim with my minor experience of the game
by mschuster91 | 2026-01-23 13:50:07+00:00
> The idea of not compensating for software took hold in the 2000s, both with engineers and consumers (remember when users scoffed at 99 cent apps?)

Part of that was that the platform churn costs were a new thing for developers that needed to be priced in now. In the "old world" aka Windows, application developers didn't need to do much, if any at all, work to keep their applications working with new OS versions. DOS applications could be run up until and including Windows 7 x32 - that meant in the most ridiculous case about 42 years of life time (first release of DOS was 1981, end of life for Win 7 ESU was 2023). As an application developer, you could get away with selling a piece of software once and then just provide bug fixes if needed, and it's reasonably possible to maintain extremely old software even on modern Windows - AFAIK (but never tried it), Visual Basic 6 (!!!) still runs on Windows 11 and can be used to compile old software.

In contrast to this, with both major mobile platforms (Android and iOS) as an app developer you have to deal with constant churn that the OS developer forces upon you, and application stores make it impossible to even release bugfixes for platforms older than the OS developer deems worthy to support - for Google Play Store, that's Android 12 (released in 2021) [1], for iOS the situation is a bit better but still a PITA [2].

[1] https://developer.android.com/google/play/requirements/targe...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44222561
by spicyusername | 2026-01-23 13:50:14+00:00
The problem is not Trump "telling us what he's doing".

The problem is what he's doing.

Not needing to think about the president, or politics in general for that matter, has nothing to do with how much media coverage there is. The whole point of delegating professionals to handle making all the decisions is exactly so that you don't have to think about them yourself.
by TonyStr | 2026-01-23 13:51:19+00:00
> steam engines only came about after people had spent centuries building cannons that didn't explode

That's an interesting insight. I had not thought about the possibility of a scientific understanding of pressure developing prior to the steam engine. If you have some pointers to read up on this, I'd love to learn more.

Also, there were demands for pumps in antiquity, particularly in hydraulics. Lot's of labor was invested in building aqueducts and underground waterways. I always saw the Aeolipile as a tech demo showing that heat can be used as a power source for mechanical motion, but this is probably because I live after the steam machine, knowing it's true potential. I've long wondered why the idea wasn't expanded upon by the Romans or later the Greeks or Egyptians, but I suppose it wasn't convincing enough on its own.
by kxbnb | 2026-01-23 13:51:23+00:00
Nice approach using the base URL feature as the interception point. That's the same pattern we've been using at toran.sh for API observability - swap a URL and you get visibility without SDK changes.

The "searchable logs of all conversations" piece is interesting. We focused more on the real-time view (watching requests as they happen during debugging) rather than historical search. Curious if you find yourself using the live view vs searching through logs more often?

One thing we ran into: when agents chain multiple API calls, having just the raw logs isn't enough - you need to correlate which calls came from which task/session. Did you add any grouping/correlation to LLMWatcher?
by SilverBirch | 2026-01-23 13:51:39+00:00
It's quite a simple story, wall street likes companies that make profits - and by that I mean that they receive more in revenue than they spend. Now there's really a few ways of making more profits.

You can invest (spend more) and hope that that investment yields more revenue down the line. This is bad. Wall street doesn't like this, because you're definitely making less profits now because you're investing money you could've given back in profits, you might make more in the future - but no guarantee. Risky! Wall street hates this!

You can raise margins. This can be good. As long as demand is fairly inelastic this will pretty directly translate into profits. But you can only do this for so long, by definition you just always want to do this until you can't any more, so you've probably already pulled this lever as much as you can.

You can cut costs. This is good. Wall street likes this. You definitely get more profits right now. It could impact your ongoing growth, but that's just maybe! You can be more efficient right? And even if it does impact your future growth that's not going to show up for years. So right now, you're more valuable!
by ssharp | 2026-01-23 13:51:50+00:00
Granted, my modeling skills begin and end with Tinkercad but I've actually created some really useful things for around the house and for hobbies -- a plug for my septic drain field distribution box pipes (one pipe was cut too short and there was no good way to plug it -- I tried lots of options before making one myself), jigs for drilling, pieces for a claw machine I'm refurbishing, cases for Arduino projects, etc.
by deltarholamda | 2026-01-23 13:52:18+00:00
For a small island nation, Britain has had an outsized influence. Culturally, politically, technologically, etc. There are many reasons for it, some accidental (like geography) and some purposeful, but it remains that Britain has punched above its weight for a very long time.

America has followed a similar tack, and for many of the same reasons. High-minded ideas like "international cooperation" sound especially good to those nations who are not sitting at the top, but for those that are it does seem less than ideal. I.e., I'm sure that Montenegro is big on international cooperation, but China will justifiably ask "cui bono" (but in Chinese).
by pfisherman | 2026-01-23 13:52:18+00:00
They are currently eating our biotech lunch. Between cuts to NIH, chaos at FDA and CDC, and China’s intensive investment and buildout of their biomedical infrastructure the US is going to be getting lapped soon. Ask a biotech VC about it.

But who knows, maybe if we keep the tariffs for another 10 years we can host the chemical manufacturing facilities that produce the drugs their biotechs sell to us after ours are no longer competitive.
by PlatoIsADisease | 2026-01-23 13:52:27+00:00
I was a contractor code money at a place automating $3M/yr in labor. We reported to a senior that did little programming if at all. He was older than me but newer than myself to the company, I was happy to avoid meetings and code.

He'd always try to get us into various technologies, Docker was one of them. It wasn't really relevant for the job, but I could see its uses.

Now that I think about it, I don't think anything they did on the tech discovery front was useful. Got stuck on Confulence which required us to save as a .pdf for our users to view lmao. Credit for being super smart with coding, he was a wiz on code reviews.
by roxolotl | 2026-01-23 13:52:40+00:00
I don’t disagree that’s a lot of it, and with Hungary as my possible second citizenship have been following Orban closely. I do think there’s something different happening here though. The loop is:

- Do something wildly unacceptable

- Media writes an article declaring the action is indefensible

- Those involved complain publicly about the unfair nature of the story; their supporters back them up

- Next time to avoid controversy media writes a slightly more fair story

It doesn’t even require state power because technically in the US they cannot. There is clearly threat of power kicking journalists out of the pentagon is a clear example. But it’s much more about creating a permission structure through public airing of grievances.
How do you handle downtime compensation for your customers? (Cloud / LLM infra)
by nittchan | 2026-01-23 13:53:04+00:00
Hey all!
We are working on “Instant Downtime Protection” and need to validate whether this is a real problem or just me.

Two questions:
1. If you're selling B2B SaaS / API products: When your infra goes down (or your upstream providers - AWS, GCP, Supabase, Stripe, Cloudflare, whoever), how do you handle customer compensation?

Do customers actually claim SLA credits? Is it a manual support ticket process? Does anyone automate this?

2. If you're building on LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.): When the model is down or rate-limited and it breaks your product, do your customers expect compensation? How do you handle it today?

Context: We have just rolled out instant automatic payouts for flight delays (<8 min to customer's UPI, zero claim form with India’s largest airline). Exploring whether the same infrastructure works for cloud/SaaS downtime.

The thesis: a $100 credit that arrives instantly and automatically is worth way more to customers than a $100 credit they have to ask for and wait 30 days for.

We'll share findings with everyone who filled this out..

If you've got 2 minutes, would love your input here: https://tally.so/r/OD7Llg
by wpietri | 2026-01-23 13:53:19+00:00
Well, this is explicitly public ridicule. The penalty isn't just feeling shamed. It's reputational harm, immortalized via Google.

One of the theorized reasons for junk AI submissions is reputation boosting. So maybe this will help.

And I think it will help with people who just bought into the AI hype and are proceeding without much thought. Cluelessness can look a lot like shamelessness at first.
by boca_honey | 2026-01-23 13:53:29+00:00
Culture has historically been free (for use, adaptation, etc). It was only in the last century or so that we got this belief that some ideas (texts, images) could possibily "belong" to someone. I see this as a chance to return to form, not as something problematic.
If and when all creative and technical output reaches zero financial value again, only a selected (very specialized, very dedicated) few will dedicate their lives to the production of culture. This will bring quality up in the long run.

Lawrence Lessig has written about this wonderfully (Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Free Culture, etc).

I get the need for private property and goods, but I see no reason why digital images and texts (which can be copied without physical limits), including code, should have special protections anymore.
by mlochbaum | 2026-01-23 13:53:59+00:00
Ooh, I've run into this one before! I'm a big fan of interval index[0], which performs a binary search, so Josh's suggestion is the one I prefer as well (the implementation might sometimes optimize by transforming it into a table lookup like the other solutions). Searching for +`≠¨ in my BQN files turns up a few uses, including one used to group primitives into types in a utility involved in compiling BQN[1] and an annotated function used a few times in the markdown processor that builds BQN's website[2].

[0] https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Interval_Index

[1] https://github.com/mlochbaum/BQN/blob/717555b0db/src/pr.bqn#...

[2] https://github.com/mlochbaum/BQN/blob/717555b0db/md.bqn#L45-...
by bluGill | 2026-01-23 13:54:01+00:00
Protobuf does something important that copying memory cannot do: a protocol that can be changed separately on either end and things can still work. You have to build for "my client doesn't send some new data" (make a good default), or "I got extra data I don't understand" (ignore it). However the ability to upgrade part of the system is critical when the system is large and complex since you can't fix everything to understand your new feature without making the new feature take ages to roll out.

Protobuf also handles a bunch of languages for you. The other team wants to write in a "stupid language" - you don't have to have a political fight to prove your preferred is best for everything. You just let that team do what they want and they can learn the hard way it was a bad language. Either it isn't really that bad and so the fight was pointless, or it was but management can find other metrics to prove it and it becomes their problem to decide if it is bad enough to be worth fixing.
by GuB-42 | 2026-01-23 13:54:28+00:00
What I find particularly ironic is that the title make it feel like Rust gives a 5x performance improvement when it actually slows thing down.

The problem they have software written in Rust, and they need to use the libpg_query library, that is written in C. Because they can't use the C library directly, they had to use a Rust-to-C binding library, that uses Protobuf for portability reasons. Problem is that it is slow.

So what they did is that they wrote their own non-portable but much more optimized Rust-to-C bindings, with the help of a LLM.

But had they written their software in C, they wouldn't have needed to do any conversion at all. It means they could have titled the article "How we lowered the performance penalty of using Rust".

I don't know much about Rust or libpg_query, but they probably could have gone even faster by getting rid of the conversion entirely. It would most likely have involved major adaptations and some unsafe Rust though. Writing a converter has many advantages: portability, convenience, security, etc... but it has a cost, and ultimately, I think it is a big reason why computers are so fast and apps are so slow. Our machines keep copying, converting, serializing and deserializing things.

Note: I have nothing against what they did, quite the opposite, I always appreciate those who care about performance, and what they did is reasonable and effective, good job!
by Moto7451 | 2026-01-23 13:54:35+00:00
One thing that really hurt them from my PoV was how they acted when they changed their licensing structure with respect to revenue generating companies. I’m fine with the idea that licensing Docker and Docker Desktop is a good thing to do. However, I think they just made people distrust their motives with their approached to this.

At two places I worked their reps reached out to essentially ensnare the company in a sort of “gotcha” scheme where if we were running the version of Docker Desktop after the commercial licensing requirement change, they sent a 30 day notice to license the product or they’d sue. Due to the usual “mid size software company not micromanaging the developers” standard, we had a few people on a new enough version that it would trigger the new license terms and we were in violation. They didn’t seem to do much outreach other than threatening us.

So in each case we switched to Rancher Desktop.

The licensing cost wasn’t that high, but it was hard to take them in good faith after their approach.
by hu3 | 2026-01-23 13:55:33+00:00
This is why I never use these IANA-reserved domains like .test, .example, .invalid, .localhost.

I always make up some impossible domains like domain.tmptest

Otherwise you're one DNS "misconfiguration" away from sending dev logs and auth tokens to some random server.

> Since at least February 2020, Microsoft's Autodiscover service has incorrectly routed the IANA-reserved example.com to Sumitomo Electric Industries' mail servers at sei.co.jp, potentially sending test credentials there.
by mijoharas | 2026-01-23 13:55:40+00:00
I think it makes sense, both for this, and for curl.

Presumably people want this for some kind of prestige, so they can put it on their CV (contributed to ghostty/submitted security issue to curl).

If we change that equation to have them think "wait, if I do this, then when employers Google me they'll see a blog post saying I'm incompetent" changes calculation that is neutral/positive for if their slop gets accepted to negative/positive.

Seems like it's addressing the incentives to me.
by chuckadams | 2026-01-23 13:55:45+00:00
Nix is wonderful for reproducible and declarative infrastructure, but how do you manage multiple server instances with it? I have a handful of projects active at any time, and am currently running four web servers, three mysql instances, two postgres, and a partridge in a pear tree. Should I run Nix in Docker, Docker from Nix, or is there a nix-only solution for this?
by nicoburns | 2026-01-23 13:55:55+00:00
> Isn't that the end goal of these tools and companies producing them?

It seems to be the goal. But they seem very far away from achieving that goal.

One thing you probably account for is that most of the proponents of these technologies are trying to sell you something. Doesn't mean that there is no value to these tools, but the wild claims about the capabilities of the tools are just that.
by vladms | 2026-01-23 13:56:22+00:00
> As they scaled, it became impossible to compete.

To compete at offering infrastructure maybe, but what I would like is more capability to build solutions.

And I think that today one has much more open-source technologies that one can deploy with modest efforts, so I see progress, even if some big players take advantage of people that don't want or are not capable to make even modest efforts.
by littlecranky67 | 2026-01-23 13:56:28+00:00
It is, if they are encrypted. Without a password manager, I would inevitable have to reuse the same passwords over and over on my hundreds of different accounts. With a password manager, they are auto-generated random gibberish. And yes, even when using 2FA, you should have different passwords for all accounts.

Bitwarden, OnePassword, LastPass, Proton Pass etc. are password managers with dozens of millions of users that agree.
by sanjayjc | 2026-01-23 13:57:05+00:00
Wishing you the very best. If you find exams stressful, keep in mind that you're not alone.

I've long felt that the practice of using exams to gauge knowledge or intelligence is overdue for disruption. Exams are only able to evaluate a very narrow set of abilities, so don't lose heart if your hard work doesn't translate into "marks."

No one knows what'll replace the current system and humanity may take 1 step back for every 2 steps forward. Nonetheless, I draw comfort from recognizing that so many interesting and important problems remain to be solved; problems that can keep a sharp and motivated mind engaged for a very long time.

Correct me if I'm wrong about my guess: you're referring to the JEE (Joint Entrance Exams) in India. For those unfamiliar, these are the critical exams that high-schoolers must excel in, so as to apply to the IITs, NITs and many other institutions in India. The exams just got kicked off.

While competition for the IITs is fierce, I'll submit that there are many institutions in which one can do well. Key is to retain your curiosity and aptitude for learning, and to not let the education system snuff those out.

Again, apologies if I've presumed too much.
by wilkommen | 2026-01-23 13:57:50+00:00
The FTC defines monopoly, the courts define monopoly when private litigants bring monopolization cases and via precedent, and Congress defines monopoly via lawmaking. Of course it's subjective, everything is subjective when it comes to the law. The US needs to do it if it wants to maintain its status as a world power instead of becoming a banana republic where the law is a joke.
by pembrook | 2026-01-23 13:58:50+00:00
I think we can boil down the sentiment in this article to roughly this pattern:

- Person learns how to do desirable hard thing

- Person forms identity around their ability to do hard thing

- Hard thing is so desired that people work to make it easier

- Hard thing becomes easy, lowering the bar so everybody can do it (democratization)

- Net good for society, but person feels their identity and value in the world challenged. Sour grapes, cope, and bitterness follow.

The key is to not form your identity around "Thing." And if you have done so, now is the time to broaden this identity instead of getting bitter.

You should form your identity around your values, your character, your family, your community, and the general fact that you can provide value to those around you in many ways.
by whizzter | 2026-01-23 13:59:20+00:00
Reading the article, there is a huge flaw in the autodiscover protocol by Microsoft.

https://www.akamai.com/blog/security/autodiscovering-the-gre...

According to it, it seems that if someone registers autodiscover.com then example.com lacking autodiscover.example.com will make Outlook try checking if autodiscover.com has an entry.

It's just a braindead system.
by rmccue | 2026-01-23 13:59:40+00:00
> Docker’s journey reads like a startup trying to find product-market fit, except Docker already had product-market fit

Strongly disagree. The core Docker technology was an excellent product and as the article says, had a massive impact on the industry. But they never found a market for that technology at any price point that wasn't ~free, so they didn't have PMF. That technology also only took off in the way it did because it was free and open source.
by torginus | 2026-01-23 13:59:56+00:00
I'm not an expert on this, and you might be right on the acrylic paints, but modeles use a lot more stuff (solvents, primers, glues, resin) when building and painting minis is dangerous as they often use toxic solvents with VOCs. Anything that comes in a spray can definitely does.

I'd definitely consult an expert on how and if can you make this hobby kid-safe.
by shikhar | 2026-01-23 13:59:57+00:00
Shoutout to CodesInChaos for suggesting that instead of a mere emulator, should have an actually durable open source implementation – that is what we ended up building with s2-lite! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42487592

And it has the durability of object storage rather than just local. SlateDB actually lets you also use local FS, will experiment with plumbing up the full range of options - right now it's just in-memory or S3-compatible bucket.
by TeMPOraL | 2026-01-23 14:00:04+00:00
Let's not forget the Hacktober Fest, the scourge of open source for over a decade now, the driver of low-quality "contribution" spam by hordes of people doing it for a goddamn free t-shirt.

No, this problem isn't fundamentally about AI, it's about "social" structure of Github and incentives it creates (fame, employment).
Show HN: OpenAI Batch Helper – save 50% on token cost with clean batch code
by higher4longer | 2026-01-23 14:00:21+00:00
Running the OpenAI Batch API can cut per-request costs by roughly 50%. But the process through the default OpenAI Python SDK is very cumbersome. It requires users to manage JSONL uploads, poll for status updates, download results in JSONL format again, and parse them. This quickly turns messy. The package openai_batch_helper helper keeps the batch flow tidy, typed, and production-friendly.

pip install openai-batch-helper
by whizzter | 2026-01-23 14:00:49+00:00
.example is probably far safer than example.com.

https://www.akamai.com/blog/security/autodiscovering-the-gre...

According to it, it seems that if someone registers autodiscover.com then example.com lacking autodiscover.example.com will make Outlook try checking if autodiscover.com has an entry.

It's just a braindead system.
by vanderZwan | 2026-01-23 14:01:09+00:00
I suspect that one difference that gives the impression that the characters in Peanuts are "untouched by failure" is that for the most part they don't have real character arcs. Once their archetypes are established they stay the same. Combine that with being the longest running comic written by a single person of all time and it feels like nothing ever changes.

That's not a critique - being a comforting source of unchanging familiarity is part of the point of a newspaper comic. But it is very different to H2G. Arthur Dent might be a bumbling failure who is flung around by forces out of his own control, but his life still changes and he still changes. He still grows a little bit as a person.