MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jtlisi | 2026-01-06 14:19:32+00:00
I bought a 500 dollar snowblower and an additional 500 dollars in batteries (about 24A total) and it's totally insufficient.

I've converted to electric for everything but the the snowblower is the only thing Ive considering switching back to gas.

To be fair my driveway is 100+ feet. I think this unit would be fine for a smaller driveway.
by BloodyIron | 2026-01-06 14:19:38+00:00
Collecting analytics like this is effectively the same as play-testing physical board games in-development. People play a game, information is gathered, and the game is tuned in response to that. If zero information were ever gathered, games could not be balanced or tuned for other things like unforeseen problems.

Please, show me a piece of software, or game, that is perfect the first time it is made.
by nykodev | 2026-01-06 14:19:49+00:00
I wanted to test a theory: does financial friction change online behavior?
Built a message board where posting costs $10. Your message value decays over time (faster with more viewers), community votes affect it, and only 100 messages can exist — lowest value gets archived.
Observations so far:
Zero spam without any moderation
People write deliberately, not impulsively
A "Country Wars" dynamic emerged — 8 nations competing for leaderboard
Meta-humor works: "Nobody will pay for that" is worth $64
The chat debates under messages are more engaging than the messages
Stack: Next.js, Fastify, PostgreSQL, Redis, WebSockets, Stripe
I don't know if this proves anything about attention economics or if it's just self-selection bias. Curious what HN thinks.
by ozmodiar | 2026-01-06 14:19:54+00:00
The troubling thing here is: what is a "better" society? As you said, it's just the one that outcompetes the other societies on the globe. We'd like to believe such a thing is an egalitarian "healthy" liberal society, but it's just as likely to be some form of enslaved/boot stomping on face society. Some think people won't accept this, but given human history I'm pretty sure they will. I think these sorts of societies are more of a local minima, but they only need to grant enough of a short term boost to unseat the other major powers. Once competition is out of the way they'll probably survive as a bloated mess for quite some time. The price of entry is so high they won't have to worry about being unseated by competition unless they really screw the pooch. I think this is the troubling conclusion a lot of people, including those in power, are reaching.
by engeljohnb | 2026-01-06 14:20:06+00:00
> Longer term, he was also quite optimistic on its ability to cut out roles like radiologists, instead having a software program interpret the images and write a report to send to a consultant.

As a medical imaging tech, I think this is a terrible idea. At least for the test I perform, a lot of redundancy and double-checking is necessary because results can easily be misleading without a diligent tech or critical-thinking on the part of the reading physician. For instance, imaging at slightly the wrong angle can make a normal image look like pathology, or vice versa.

Maybe other tests are simpler than mine, but I doubt it. If you've ever asked an AI a question about your field of expertise and been amazed at the nonsense it spouts, why would you trust it to read your medical tests?

> Since the consultant already checks the report against any images, the AI being more sensitive to potential issues is a positive thing: giving him the power to discard erroneous results rather than potentially miss something more malign.

Unless they had the exact same schooling as the radiologist, I wouldn't trust the consultant to interpret my test, even if paired with an AI. There's a reason this is a whole specialized field -- because it's not as simple as interpreting an EKG.
by ddltodata | 2026-01-06 14:20:29+00:00
Thanks! At 1M rows, I think a few things matter:

Streaming: Can't hold it all in memory. Generate in chunks, write, release, repeat.

Format choice: Parquet with row groups is fast and compresses well. SQL needs batched inserts (~1000/statement). Direct DB writes via COPY skip serialization entirely is usually fastest.

FK relationships: The real bottleneck. Pre-generate parent PKs, hold in memory, reference for children. Gets tricky with complex graphs at scale.

Parallelization: Row generation is embarrassingly parallel, but writes are serial. Chunk-then-merge is on our radar but not shipped yet.

What does your stat product need, realistic distributions or pure volume/stress testing?
by potato3732842 | 2026-01-06 14:20:30+00:00
This is such a bad idea I don't know if you're serious, or if you're satirizing these kinds of people or an accelerationist looking to burn down the credibility of your state legislature.

The right thing to do is to ban their use on a local level pursuant to some specific criteria is one thing (as many municipalities do, and Portland took a step further by doing categorically city wide). To ban their sale (but not use, are you kidding?) state wide is a great example of not only crap law, but the exact sort of minutia that the state level government should not be regulating and is necessarily proceeded by the sort of evil "I know best, damn the exceptions" world view that underpins much of the bad policy that sours people on the same institutions you are trying to use to solve what you perceive to be problems.
by lazide | 2026-01-06 14:20:36+00:00
I mean, you can block or ignore them if you’re sufficiently good at bullshitting, and they lose steam before figuring out your weak spot.

Which statistically for the insurance industry happens with 90% or so of all claims.

If you give yourself just enough plausible deniability to work around the penalties (or even if you don’t, if the math is in your favor enough!), at a minimum it can give you a boost for the next quarter, which is key.
by philipwhiuk | 2026-01-06 14:20:38+00:00
> It is the nature of YC that you're going to get instances like Pickle. YC invests at a very early stage in lots of companies. 40% are literally just an idea

But the whole supposed point of YC is investing in people not founders. If that's the pitch and you invest in a moron, that makes you look bad too. YC should be good at telling if people are morons - that's kind of their entire job.

> But the way YC works, they don't actually have the power to tell Pickle what to do.

They get 7% of your company. They do actually have some power.
by agentultra | 2026-01-06 14:21:02+00:00
I’ve heard this analogy used to justify firing developers for not using GenAI: a cabinet maker who doesn’t use power tools shouldn’t be working as a cabinet maker.

If only programming languages (or GenAI) were tools like hammers and augers and drills.

Even then the cabinets you see that come out of shops that only use hand tools are some of the most sturdy, beautiful, and long lasting pieces that become the antiques. They use fewer cuts, less glue, avoid using nails and screws where a proper joint will do, etc.
by aebtebeten | 2026-01-06 14:21:04+00:00
Does that sound like a threat to you? I'd say the Danes already have sufficient grounds to invoke NATO Art 4:

> The Parties will consult together whenever, in the opinion of any of them, the territorial integrity ... of any of the Parties is threatened.

https://www.nato.int/en/about-us/official-texts-and-resource...

What will the US Government longitudinally lay claim to next? The ESA Spaceport?

https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Transportation/Eu...

(on the other hand, unlike Denmark, France does have two legs of a triad, so maybe they're waiting a bit before pressing that one; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46506749 )
by ramses0 | 2026-01-06 14:21:06+00:00
Garmin Lily 2 Classic (shazam!). Certain Venu and VivoActive seem like 1-button or 2-button.

And also by "touch screen only", I mean like: "can you set an alarm with the buttons like a CASIO from 1982?" ...if you have to use the touch-screen for swiping like a monkey in a one square inch area to set (or turn on) an alarm, then the watch "doesn't have buttons" IMHO.

Pebble had Up/Ok/Down on the right side, and "Android-Back" on the lower-left. So you just generally navigated tree-like menus, and you could set shortcuts to long-presses of up/ok/down (ie: start/request Uber, next train from nearest station, music controls).

I can't wait to have it again, as while Apple says "you don't need to be tied to your phone!" with their watches, Pebble actually delivered on it. You still needed your phone nearby or in bluetooth range, but you could comfortably "leave it" on the table, or in the bedroom or whatever and not worry about missing an important phone call, and still get "just enough" connectivity to drip out of the internet that you didn't need your phone unless you were transitioning into "using your phone for a task".
by Majromax | 2026-01-06 14:21:15+00:00
Share repurchases are also a way of returning cash-flow to owners. A stock buyback is equivalent to a dividend, just with automatic reinvestment in the default 'do-nothing' case.

Including buybacks, few large and mature companies fail to return profits to shareholders at all, and we'd ordinarily want growing or startup companies to retain earnings and invest.
by infecto | 2026-01-06 14:21:45+00:00
Computers have never been more powerful. There is less and less of a reason to do annual upgrades. I don’t follow this logic at all. The average consumer does not even need a home computer anymore. Sure if you are upgrading you gaming PC or something similar than your going to feel a bit more of a squeeze but even then it’s not a wild increase in price compared to the hours spent using.
Show HN: Big O Notation – An Interactive Guide
by sbondaryev | 2026-01-06 14:21:47+00:00
Hi HN,

I built this interactive guide to help build intuition for time complexity.

There is already a lot of writing on this topic here (e.g. [1], [2]), so I tried to keep the explanation minimal and focus on examples you can interact with.

The visualizer runs your JavaScript code, tracks `op()` markers as `n` increases, and plots the growth curve in real-time.

I also tried to visualize the Master Theorem by mapping recursion trees to the work done at each level.

I'd love to hear your feedback on the visualizations or if you find the Master Theorem section intuitive.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5655075
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45002182
by trash_cat | 2026-01-06 14:21:59+00:00
What constitutes real "thinking" or "reasoning" is beside the point. What matters is what results we getting.

And the challenge is rethinking how we do work, connecting all the data sources for agents to run and perform work over the various sources that we perform work. That will take ages. Not to mention having the controls in place to make that the "thinking" was correct in the end.
by altmanaltman | 2026-01-06 14:22:04+00:00
I think you're getting caught up on the wrong thing here. The issue isn't that monoliths can scale. The issue is the inherent flaw in their logic within the confines of the post.

Netflix also didn't appear into existence with an army of engineers. It also scaled from a few engineers to what it is today. Which means you can scale using both depending on your setup. That cannot be the reason why you pick one arch over another. The reason has to do with your own setup, your company, and the application's specific context, all of which the author is missing.

Broadly, it feels like decision making without context/understand the why behind the decisions.

The specific comment has nothing to do with how Github or Stack Overflow scaled etc.
by walthamstow | 2026-01-06 14:22:10+00:00
You're someone who is comfortable in a terminal desktop environment on Linux. What you or I do for storage is irrelevant to the wider consumer market.

Apple's hardware prices mean that millions of people buy the smallest on offer and pay Apple monthly instead. It's a deliberate play for recurring services revenue.

My point is this: would they buy a phone that had virtually-zero free storage and rely solely on iCloud? Probably.

Some of them had 64GB models, in my view they are already doing that!
by kibwen | 2026-01-06 14:22:51+00:00
Sure, which is a perfectly acceptable default considering that most code is not in a position to observe allocation failures (because of OS-level overcommit, which is nearly always a good thing), and furthermore most code is not in a position to do anything other than crash in an OOM scenario. If you still want to have control over this without going full no_std, Rust has Vec::try_reserve to grow a Vec while checking for allocation errors, as well as several nightly functions coming down the pipe in the same vein (e.g. Vec::try_with_capacity, Vec::push_within_capacity).
by kiji-seo | 2026-01-06 14:23:08+00:00
I feel like there is a real split within the SEO community right now, those who understand that the AI is causing a major shift in SEO focus and those who believe that it is still 2015, and not much has changed.
You can see how SEO strategies are starting to focus more on structural SEO, like Schema markup, which help visibility of FAQ and E-E-A-T with AI.
by alsetmusic | 2026-01-06 14:23:25+00:00
There are lots of these, but this is the first that I've seen that focused on frontend dev a bit more. I've saved it to my list of tools for reference.

Here's another with a more local / backend / IT flavor: https://it-tools.tech

I have a couple more local apps with similar functions. Here's one that's cross platform[0]. This one appears to be Mac only[1].

Someone else mentioned not being able to remember these sites when needed. I recently started manually keeping track of web tools in html files inspired by a random repo[2] that fit well into a mode of category-abstraction that suited me. I don't recall how I landed there, but I liked the minimalism and adapted it to be a jumping-off point to a personal kbase that I made with another tool[3] some years ago. I have no design skills, so this (start-page) was just the right combo of minimalism and tasteful CSS for what I wanted. Works with markdown, which I also recently started using a lot more.

I ended up writing a lot more than I originally intended because I kept thinking of more links. They may be out of order because of non-linear editing and my having to rearrange them, so heads up. Also, it's early and I might just have made dumb mistakes.

0. https://devtoys.app
1. https://devutils.com
2. https://github.com/oinam/start
3. https://github.com/alanagoyal/docbase

Edit: Oh, looks like the it-tools link came from cruising the repo of start-page or vice-versa. Ha!
by RcouF1uZ4gsC | 2026-01-06 14:23:29+00:00
This makes sense with the quality and quantity of testing they do.

https://sqlite.org/testing.html

>As of version 3.42.0 (2023-05-16), the SQLite library consists of approximately 155.8 KSLOC of C code. (KSLOC means thousands of "Source Lines Of Code" or, in other words, lines of code excluding blank lines and comments.) By comparison, the project has 590 times as much test code and test scripts - 92053.1 KSLOC.
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-01-06 14:23:37+00:00
The tail on the move to electric is going to be quite long. It’s accelerating, but I doubt it’ll ever get to the point of radical overnight change. There will still be ICE (or hybrid) cars on the road in need of service 10, 15, 20 years from now, even if EVs become overwhelmingly advantageous, because that’s just how people work. Demand will gradually taper off and there will be opportunity for most in the industry to figure out alternative employment.

Some portion will be able to train and transition to working on EVs, too. EVs might need less maintenance generally, but things still go wrong sometimes plus people get into accidents and such. There’s also a nascent motor/battery retrofit industry that’s sprouting right now and will grow with time.
by JDegesys | 2026-01-06 14:23:47+00:00
Sure. But as Ray Dalio suggests in Principles (https://www.principles.com/principles/633d5d13-8610-425f-ad6...), you will be more likely to succeed at your task if you believability-weight the information you receive. When considering a military strategy, you should probably weigh the advice from a 4-star general who's served in similar circumstances over the advice of a 4-year-old boy who is relying on his experience watching Paw Patrol.

As the worst UX expert in the world, you can obviously feel free to criticize others, but you're probably going to lose a lot of people after the first sentence if you're using 2003 MySpace-style blinking text and animated GIFs to make your point.
by mostlyk | 2026-01-06 14:24:14+00:00
I have added Jupyter support and Panning/Zooming for Zed, waiting for them to merge. But I have a version that I use, you can build it if ya want!
The PRs: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/43553, https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/43944

My-Zed branch with both the features: https://github.com/MostlyKIGuess/zed/tree/my-zed
by dxdm | 2026-01-06 14:24:49+00:00
I noticed my use of "indiscriminately" was problematic and I edited my previous post to remove it before I saw your reply. I'd hoped I could fix the ambivalence quickly, before someone misunderstood. I was too late; my apologies.

What I meant to say: indiscriminately murdering people after an ideological lithmus test. Or for their beliefs. For their ethnicity. Stuff like that. You know, not entirely unlike what the Nazis did.

> The ends matter. The means do not.

We disagree here; but even if we take this to be correct, you are wrong about what the ends are. "No nazis around" is in itself only a means, and not an end. The end is what we want to accomplish by "purging the nazis", or what we do end up accomplishing instead.

Their abhorrent ideology does not merely exist in an ideological space. It is abhorrent precisely because of the consequences it leads to: the rule of violence, the establishment of a system for wholesale "purging" of whole groups of people (and lots of other bad things, but we're discussing these ones). That is what we want to avoid.

You may think that you can simply "kill all the Nazis and feed them to the pigs" to avoid this. Even if you think that's a reasonable course of action, have you thought about how this would work?

In order to accomplish it, you will have to put into place a system that catches all potential Nazis, precisely determines their ideology - judge people not by their actual actions, but what is believed are their thoughts, some of which are now a capital crime. Which are the ones, by the way? Where is the line? Who is going to decide this correctly? Even if you can, or are willing to accept some false positives (your "no benefit of doubt"): you will then have to kill all these people and feed them to the pigs. Such an effort is going to require state power and some serious organisation, and likely more than one "pig farm", let's call it that.

Does this remind you of aything in history? There's plenty to choose from, humanity seems quite adept at pulling off such things, whenever instability propels a group to power that hates another group very much. But I believe the prime example, that comes closest to what you envision, happened in Europe in the last century.

For the admittedly noble goal of countering nazis and their destructive doings, you're willing to slaughter, and keep slaughtering, permit me this summary word for "kill and feed to the pigs", everyone who is deemed to be a Nazi. In such a situation, if I were you, I'd avoid things that might get me mistaken for one. You don't want to become a Robespierre!

Take a good look at yourself and what you are endorsing, where you're invariably going to end up. The ends do matter.
by simonw | 2026-01-06 14:24:52+00:00
"In a more complete build, SQLite also uses library routines like malloc() and free() and operating system interfaces for opening, reading, writing, and closing files."

Whoa. TIL there's a minimal
build SQLite that doesn't even need malloc() and free() !

Presumably for embedded devices. I'd love to see examples of that being used in the wild.
by pc86 | 2026-01-06 14:24:53+00:00
You have that option, it's called buying a house and getting a mortgage. You just rent from the bank for 30 years first. But you're not thinking x=30 with any responsibility other than writing a check, I bet. If I had to guess, I'd say you want x<10 and you still don't want to pay for maintenance, or property taxes, or have the value reassessed as soon as you take occupancy, or be forced to stay there if you decide to leave. You want all the benefit with none of the cost or risk. It's fine to want that but let's not pretend "rent should be illegal" is a serious or reasonable policy proposal.

There's a reason why a mortgage with very little down payment is a lot more than comparable rent.
by PaulHoule | 2026-01-06 14:25:54+00:00
If you are doing these things you are not "vibe coding". Vibe coding is about being overwhelmed with FOMO. When Karpathy talks about this he is always describing his feelings of being out of control, don't let these feelings infect you!

Using AI agents deliberately with your emotions in control is something entirely different. Bring all your project management skills to bear.

Another small useful step is to describe what you want it to do and say thing "Does this make sense to you?" or "Do you have any questions for me?" or "Propose how you will do this" in ask mode and be willing to go back and forth before you set it loose.
by mothballed | 2026-01-06 14:25:59+00:00
HNs system can be hard to figure out. I posted an ~identical article to one that hit #1 on top page a few hours before the other guy. My own posting only got like 8 votes. I have no idea what I did wrong. I think there is some randomness in the beginning; if a couple people notice it in the first 15 or 20 minutes then it stays high enough other people notice it and then it snowballs.

If you have a good post though that gets overlooked someone will commonly "steal" it and use a slightly different article and good chance that one will get traction. Surprised no one thought to do that before you got a second chance.
by threetonesun | 2026-01-06 14:26:50+00:00
Yes, when you don't care about the environment or safety regulations or displacing people poorer than you, infrastructure is a very easy problem to solve. Fortunately for you, we seem to be heading back towards that way of thinking.

Also, I live near a city that had one of those ridiculous, way over budget projects where sure, some money was funneled to unions and bureaucracy or whatever evil monsters you've concocted here. No amount of billionaire pet projects could match the amount of good it did across the number of people it affected. Sometimes the inefficiencies of human cooperation are greased with money, and that's perfectly fine.
by publicdebates | 2026-01-06 14:26:54+00:00
Sure, Rust can compile old code. But you can't upgrade that old Rust code to new Rust code very easily.

The fact that C was effectively "born old" means you can take a C89 program and compile it as C23 and it should simply work, with extremely minimal changes, if any.

That's a killer feature when you're thinking in decades. Which SQLite is.
by avanwyk | 2026-01-06 14:27:10+00:00
Others have echoed the same, but I also switched from VSCode to Zed, but then put in the effort to learn Neovim (Lazyvim) properly, and I haven't looked back. Writing code feels exciting again.
I recommend something like https://github.com/adomokos/Vim-Katas to accelerate muscle memory.
And also Vimium in the browser is great.