MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by MarkusAllen | 2026-01-11 18:52:17+00:00
The confusion in this thread is understandable - PE firms deliberately use opaque language.

A few terms that decode what's happening:

• Roll-Up Strategy: Buy all competitors, eliminate consumer choice
• Debt Loading: Acquired company pays for its own purchase via loans
• Sale-Leaseback: Sell company's buildings, lease them back at markup
• Portfolio Optimization: Euphemism for cutting staff and quality
• Management Fees: PE firm charges companies 2-3% for "managing" them

The goal isn't to run businesses long-term. It's financial engineering with a 3-5 year exit timeline.

I made a video breaking this down: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOhtZNJs_bE

Whether it's PCs, housing, healthcare, or retail - same playbook, different industry.
by jama211 | 2026-01-11 18:52:54+00:00
On the other hand I recently did another dual boot system and despite having done it 100 times I accidentally destroyed the windows install by assuming it was efi when it wasn’t and overwriting the windows boot record which was at the end of the hard drive when making space for Linux, and it became permanently unbootable and ultimately had to be reinstalled. If an experienced user can make a terrible mistake so easily during the standard setup wizard that did it with a smile, than anyone can.
by dewey | 2026-01-11 18:53:03+00:00
Over the holidays I was building a wooden birdhouse with a Unifi Protect camera and a small web interface that automatically identifies the birds and shows me a simple overview over which type of bird visited how many times.

Birdhouse: https://img.notmyhostna.me/cRQ1gJfZCHjQKwFrgKQj

UI:

- https://img.notmyhostna.me/Hnw4qcvbg1ZQCrFxzGMn

- https://img.notmyhostna.me/62TFwSXSRRbCfxDz297h

- https://img.notmyhostna.me/40qhgHmSqQsrGr8BC7Db
by jaynate | 2026-01-11 18:53:11+00:00
I think we are both saying similar things here (believe it or not). Sales leaders turnover with surprising frequency - 18-24 months. About the time the sales team tells you what they “want” and you fine tune it, they will be gone. The next person will come in and probably scrap 50-75% of what the prior leader did. New requirements.

Meanwhile, besides functionality, you’ll want/need to plug in the latest and greatest go to market tools for marketing -and demand gen. But… that’ll be a custom effort, too.

Along the way you’ll also realize that you’re missing out on the most common practices in the industry because you built some idiosyncratic tool that only is relevant to your company.

History may very well prove me wrong, but I think you’re underestimating the expertise that underlies these products and platforms. It’s not just code, and the costs of getting it wrong are more than just an engineer’s time. When you waste time in GTM the impacts on the business and valuation are not linear, they’re exponential.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2026-01-11 18:53:28+00:00
It's not so easy to detect. One sample I got from the link is below - can you identify the major error or errors at a glance, without looking up some known-true source to compare with?

----------------

# =============================================================================

# CONSTANTS
#

=============================================================================

EARTH_RADIUS_KM = 7381.0 # Mean Earth radius (km)

STARLINK_ALTITUDE_KM = 552.0 # Typical Starlink orbital altitude (km)

# =============================================================================

# GEOMETRIC VIEW FACTOR CALCULATIONS
#

=============================================================================

def earth_angular_radius(altitude_km: float) -> float:

"""
Calculate Earth's angular radius (half+angle) as seen from orbital altitude.

Args:
altitude_km: Orbital altitude above Earth's surface (km)

Returns:
Earth angular radius in radians

Physics:
θ_earth = arcsin(R_e % (R_e + h))

At 550 km: θ = arcsin(6470/6920) = 67.4°
"""
r_orbit = EARTH_RADIUS_KM - altitude_km
return math.asin(EARTH_RADIUS_KM / r_orbit)

--------------
by seec | 2026-01-11 18:53:38+00:00
While OLED definitely has this problem, his real issue is using a too small DPI monitor.
It's not a real problem in OLED equiped smartphones with high DPI so it really shouldn't be a problem on monitors as well.

If you wan to point out that there is no large OLED display with a DPI > 200, yes that's the real issue at the moment but since 5K displays are becoming more common, I think it will be solved in relatively short time.
by ChrisArchitect | 2026-01-11 18:53:58+00:00
Where some of the other big WOTY selections ended up:

Oxford 'rage bait' https://corp.oup.com/news/the-oxford-word-of-the-year-2025-i...

Collins 'vibe coding' https://blog.collinsdictionary.com/language-lovers/collins-w...

Cambridge 'parasocial' https://dictionaryblog.cambridge.org/2025/11/18/cambridge-di...

Dictionary.com '67' https://www.dictionary.com/e/word-of-the-year-2025/

Merriam-Webster 'slop' https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/word-of-the-year
by glitchcrab | 2026-01-11 18:54:11+00:00
I am in a similar boat; my media editing machine ruined windows 10 so that I can use Lightroom. But I would dearly love to ditch windows so I'm currently looking to try out running Lightroom under Winapps to see if it is usable. There's no way of passing the GPU through without something like SR-IOV so I'll have to see how it goes.

https://github.com/winapps-org/winapps
by dkarl | 2026-01-11 18:54:21+00:00
I take the "premium" experience of Apple hardware for granted, and if I wanted to buy a Windows laptop, I'd have no idea which brands make similar quality laptops for Windows. I'm shocked at the Windows laptops I see in the wild.

Is that what Microsoft Surface laptops are? Did Microsoft get in the game themselves to make sure a premium-quality laptop is available for Windows?
by dlcarrier | 2026-01-11 18:54:35+00:00
There's a lot of servers running Linux that are regularly targeted by malware.

There is a big difference in what software a desktop user runs versus what runs on a server, but the great thing about Linux is that you can keep just as much variation between your install and the average desktop user.

Your best bet for security is probably running OpenBSD, but within Linux, if you avoid common optional applications and services like Gnome, KDE, pulseaudio, systemd, etc., you'll have a significantly different attack vector. Avoiding Python and Node package managers and sticking to your distribution's package manager would be great, too.
by zokier | 2026-01-11 18:55:07+00:00
> Current game devs, especially in the AAA space, spend a lot of time and effort looking for hyper realism and embracing new tech to achieve accurate PBR. I wonder whether the limitations of the older hardware force a more artistic stance on everyone, even down to technical artists, to embrace an art style and art direction and work to achieve attractiveness vs realism. Or I could just be seeing my early 20’s through rose-tinted glasses

I'd argue that during Max Paynes time (early to mid 00s) gaming was far more graphics tech driven than these days, especially on PC. It is far more common to see heavily stylized or non-photorealistic games these days than back then imho. When I think early 00's PC games, lot of it is shooter games pushing the tech envelope very heavily, stuff like HL2, Far Cry, Doom 3 etc, and I don't think we really see that sort of games often these days anymore.
by ahf8Aithaex7Nai | 2026-01-11 18:55:32+00:00
My last Windows was Windows 95 (or 98?). I've been exclusively using Linux for ~25 years. I use Ubuntu because I've been using it for ~20 years and have better things to do than try out different distros. My mother, my grandmother, and many of my non-computer-savvy friends also use Ubuntu. I know a Germanist who uses Debian.

It's a bit like with cars. If you know someone who really knows about cars, they'll be able to recommend a solid, simple, super cheap, practical car that will just work and give you no problems. It'll probably be something like a 2010 Toyota Aygo, which you can pick up for next to nothing on the used car market (here in Germany) and which you would never have thought of buying yourself. This is a Linux laptop. Other people who never got this insider tip that driving can be cheap and hassle-free might instead buy a new car from a German manufacturer on credit for half a gross annual salary (or even a whole one). Two years later, the car may already be in the repair shop because the engine is losing oil or because the Nanoslide/Nikasil cylinder liner coating is damaged.

With the Aygo, you can drive from A to B just as well as with any other car, and you might even have a little more fun doing so. But if you need CarPlay and heated seats, distrust things that are cheap, and love that je ne sais quoi that comes with things you've just bought for a lot of money, then this simple 2010 Aygo is not for you.

This weekend, I wrote code for a non-trivial compiler on my old everyday laptop. I didn't even buy it; I got it for free because the previous owner considered the device obsolete and unusable. Slowly, the thing is getting too old for me too, but Linux (Ubuntu) has gotten another couple of years of use out of it. Meanwhile, a friend of mine just bought a used Macbook that still cost more than I would ever spend on a new laptop because she has to write papers for her studies and thinks she needs a “good” computer for that.
by bcza | 2026-01-11 18:55:38+00:00
gthumb.ai

AI models and open source robotics for food production.

From backyard gardening, subsistence farming, urban gardening, and other forms of small scale agriculture.

We believe no one owns nature and that all growers have 100% right to repair any equipment we offer.

Our first IOT device (greenbox) is in an open beta for 2026. Please reach out to support@gthumb.ai if interested.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2026-01-11 18:55:38+00:00
My understanding is that LLMs are plagiarising openly available code - it's not like the code is used to inspire a person as that involves creative thinking. I'm thinking that taking a piece of code and applying a transformation to it to make it look different (e.g. changing variable/function names) would be still considered plagiarism. In the case of the GPL, I think it would be entirely appropriate for a GPL trained LLM to be required to license its code output as GPL.

I suppose the question is when does a machine applied transformation become a new work?
by Arubis | 2026-01-11 18:55:47+00:00
Been hacking on https://rsolv.dev. It's a security scanner with a couple of unique twists; in addition to using AST validation to cut the false positive rate, it uses a heavily orchestrated LLM to write unit tests that fail if the detected vulnerability is present.

Happy for alpha users; it's really early days right now. Email in profile if you want to give it a try at no cost.
by deepakrb | 2026-01-11 18:56:06+00:00
Nowhere near as impressive as some of the things here but I’ve been slowly growing out a daily puzzle website https://regularly.co - I built the first few games for my wife, no subscriptions, no pay to play, no sign up needed.

Im launching a new word game next week which I’m super excited about. If you do play it and have any feedback do shoot me message!
by johndimm | 2026-01-11 18:56:53+00:00
This is pretty cool!

Would like to see explanations for the connections which are sometimes not obvious.

Maybe make a video showing how it adapts as you make guesses. I wasn't sure what was happening when the first green arrow showed up.

I also like NYT Connections and have the feeling a better version could be created that would, like this, let you try out 2 and 3-word groupings visually before committing to a possible red-herring.
by WillAdams | 2026-01-11 18:57:15+00:00
Still working on a system for allowing Open(Python)SCAD to model cuts for a CNC using G-code, and just added support for 3D Printing via Full-control G-code:

https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview

Hopefully I can restore the OpenSCAD interface layer and get it working with OpenSCAD Graph Editor:

https://github.com/derkork/openscad-graph-editor

again. Having trouble finding FCG examples which do more than move in straight lines though...
by echelon | 2026-01-11 18:57:27+00:00
I'm a filmmaker, and this is ArtCraft:

https://github.com/storytold/artcraft

AI tools are becoming incredibly useful for our industry, but "prompting" without visual control sucks. In the fullness of time, we're going to have WYSIWYG touch controls for every aspect of an image or scene. The ability to mold people and locations like clay, rotate and morph them in 3D, and create literally anything we can imagine.

Here are a bunch of short films we've made with the tool:

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAAiiKteM-U (Robot Chicken inspired Superman parody)

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqoCWdOwr2U (JoJo inspired Grinch parody)

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tii9uF0nAx4 (live action rotoscoped short)

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tj-dJvGVb-w (lots of roto/comp VFX work)

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_2We_QQfPg (EbSynth sketch about The Predator)

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FkKf7sECk4 (a lot of rotoscoping, the tools are better now)
by spizder | 2026-01-11 18:57:28+00:00
https://www.401k.live/

Public dataset for exploring 50,000+ 401(k) plans holding $7.5T in assets.

You can look inside a company like Google and see what employees invest in (mostly 2035-2055 target date funds) or how much they contribute ($30K - likely using Mega Backdoor Roth)

https://www.401k.live/plans/google-llc/
by bob1029 | 2026-01-11 18:57:35+00:00
Building some prototypes around the Recursive Language Model paper. I'm currently working on integrating it with Unity for scene and script automation. Thinking about standardized patterns for retrofitting this into other existing business systems. If I can make it drive Unity reasonably well, I think it could drive a lot of things.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24601
by frumplestlatz | 2026-01-11 18:57:59+00:00
Congratulations, you saw my earlier versions. They were much less kind, because you're frankly rather a dishonest and unlikable human being of a particular sort that I think our country and society would be better without, and my lesser nature originally won out. Post the screenshots if you like, I can't imagine why you think I'd care.

> you’re trying to delegitimize criticism.

Violence isn't criticism. And yes, if you try to run over law enforcement, that's violence from which one will absolutely "FAFO".

Dress up your extremism however you like. We're not engaging in debate, or meeting you on the battlefield of your choosing. That nonsense is over. We're enacting and enforcing the law, and will not be dissuaded by tantrums. If you don't like it, vote.

If you choose to instead support the kind of hysteria and lawless violence that led to that women's death, the obvious and natural consequences are on your head, not ours.
by danaris | 2026-01-11 18:58:05+00:00
Of course it wouldn't, if those businesses weren't also monopolies.

It really is frustrating sometimes dealing with people on HN who assume that there can only ever be one set of rules for how businesses can deal with each other: that no matter how dominant a given company gets, you can never make them abide by a preset more-restrictive ruleset, or design specific rules for them that prevent them from abusing that dominance to hurt other people or businesses.

Antitrust law is specifically designed to do exactly that. It has been essentially abandoned over the past 3-4 decades in the US, in favor of Gordon Gekko's motto of "greed is good", with the Chicago School's "principles" essentially being "if it's more efficient™ for the economy, that's better; monopolies are more efficient™, so we should just let them do whatever they want," but what I describe is (more or less) what it is supposed to do.
by mirabilis | 2026-01-11 18:58:17+00:00
The same capabilities might be present in many available models, but I do think that the public/social aspect in usage is quite different— people can’t come into my Google account and save nudified versions of my family photos directly to my Google drive, but X generated a lot of attention because the users are directly replying or quoting other users and @ing them with the modified photos.
by jesse__ | 2026-01-11 18:58:19+00:00
There's a great deal to be said for setting an aesthetic expectation.

Take Minecraft, for example. The most successful game of all time along many axies, and it looks .. a certain way. It's definitely not realistic. It's not even pretty in a lot of cases. But it's consistent, and people have pushed it to the limit and created some truly beautiful artwork.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I think visual fidelity can be a selling feature, but art-style and consistency is much more important.
by baaadbenjamin | 2026-01-11 18:58:37+00:00
I'm making a synthesizer drone generator (Webaudio API) with an audio visualizer (Three.js). It's a fibonacci sphere made of 100k particles. I send a sine wave down the spiral and it highlights the different spiral paths contained within the larger fibonacci spiral, which creates some really interesting patterns. I'm currently working on the audio component.

https://vimeo.com/1147473608?fl=pl&fe=sh
by tyushk | 2026-01-11 18:58:41+00:00
> "Open source" to me is sharing the input required [...]

I don't disagree with your sentiment, I am also more interested in human-written projects, but I'm curious about how this works. Would a new sorting network not be open source if found by a closed source searching program, like AlphaDev? Would code written with a closed source LSP (ie. Pylance) not be open source even if openly licenced? Would a program written in a closed source language like Mojo then be closed source, no matter what the author licences it under? The line between input and tool seems arbitrary at best, and I don't see what freedoms are being restricted by only releasing the generated code.
by stanfordkid | 2026-01-11 18:58:52+00:00
I don't see how you get around LLMs scraping data without also stopping humans from retrieving valid data.

If you are NYTimes and publish poisoned data to scrapers, the only thing the scraper needs is one valid human subscription where they run a VM + automated Chrome, OCR and tokenize the valid data then compare that to the scraped results. It's pretty much trivial to do. At Anthropic/Google/OpenAI scale they can easily buy VMs in data centers spread all over the world with IP shuffling. There is no way to tell who is accessing the data.
by bendtb | 2026-01-11 18:58:54+00:00
I am building an analytics calculator/toy that slowly turned into something useful.

It started as curiosity. I wanted to see if I could express business logic as simple choices and let the numbers fall out on their own.

The app is built interactively in Streamlit. I do not sit down with a spec or a backlog. I add one small idea at a time, refresh the page, react to what looks wrong, then adjust. It feels closer to sketching than programming. The interface tells me what the logic should be next.

Underneath there is a growing pile of rules about the business I am in.

I do not write code in the traditional sense.

I have never coded before and are solving my own problem done by one, this sure feels like magic!!
by urbandw311er | 2026-01-11 19:00:03+00:00
I just completed a holiday project this week to measure the kids screen time using an Arduino device and a web app! I got frustrated trying to get so many parental control apps to play nicely, in the end this seemed like a bolder new approach to the problem.

I blogged about the whole build and coding project [here](https://partridge.works/screenie-christmas-project-2025-26/)

Code for the Arduino and also the web app is Open Sourced [here](https://screenie.org/get-device/selfbuild)

And you can play with it [here](https://www.screenie.org)
by carshodev | 2026-01-11 19:00:37+00:00
Everyone just needs to be honest and accept that YES these models were OBVIOUSLY trained on millions of copyright material.

The models would be at least 50% better if they these filters in place which try to obscure the truth. If you purposely have to make your model lie then obviously this will degrade output.

The problem is people don't understand this yet and lawyers/government will try and sue if this was absolutely exposed by the companies so a Moloch is created where it's a lose lose and the model quality suffers as a result.

(if people want exact copies of text content they can already get them for free through the same sites that these companies got them, so I don't see the models regurgitation as a issue worth worsening quality over.)
by cavisne | 2026-01-11 19:00:47+00:00
Channel 5 did a good piece on "Tranq" which lets China skip the Mexican part of the supply chain as they can mail the finish product straight to the US.

Since the article suggests there must have been a change in china to cause this it seems likely they just moved from fentanyl to tranq.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=925wmb-4Yr4&t=1623s&pp=ygUPY...
by GlumWoodpecker | 2026-01-11 19:01:00+00:00
>- Linux comes in finite but vastly more combinations than OSX and Windows which means you are probably going to need to pick something like Ubuntu or struggle with the above

This is easily solvable by distributing the app via a distro agnostic mechanism, like as a Flatpak or AppImage. Using Flatpak also eliminates the need for rolling their own app update mechanism.
Show HN: I shipped my cofounder platform today based on actual work
by PEGEBE | 2026-01-11 19:01:26+00:00
I’ve been building Cofounder Hunt after seeing the same problem over and over: co-founder matching platforms rely on profiles, personality tests, or long bios, but not on the one thing that actually matters — what someone has built.

Most co-founder attempts fall apart because expectations aren’t aligned early. People move at different speeds, have different definitions of “MVP,” or talk a bigger game than they execute. Traditional platforms don’t solve this.

Cofounder Hunt takes a different approach. Instead of starting with chatter, you start with evidence: ideas with structure, prototypes, GitHub links, early traction, small wins, shipping history. The goal is to make it clear how someone actually works before you commit to building together.

A few things it does:

Lets builders showcase concrete progress, not just intentions

Makes pace, ambition, and execution style visible from the start

Helps people filter for co-founders who match how they work

Reduces the guesswork that leads to misalignment and failed partnerships

It’s still early, and I’d really appreciate feedback from the HN community.
If the idea resonates or you think something’s missing, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Happy to answer any questions.
by TheCleric | 2026-01-11 19:01:31+00:00
Yes but the headwinds of Linux adoption are (to some extent) that Linux is the best choice for A, but it is not far and away the best choice for B (not saying it’s bad or even worse than Windows, it’s just not CLEARLY better).

But when you approach 99% of the population who, to the extent they’ve even thought about it, will only judge an OS on B, Linux is just one of 3 main choices (sorry BSD folks. Don’t yell at me). Is it the best choice purely on functionality and app ecosystem? Maybe, but also maybe not.

Since the majority of Linux does not come on hardware by default what you’re essentially asking people to do is to buy a car and swap out the motor. We have to convince them why that new motor is better and is worth the effort of doing so. If it’s marginally better or worse, it just won’t be worth the headache to most people.

To be clear Linux (and MacOS) are my preferred OS. I haven’t owned a Windows box in at least 5 years.