MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: AI file agents that work across your existing documents
by sftechdude | 2026-01-28 22:30:53+00:00
See, we all know tools like ChatGPT and Claude can create files now. But something big is still missing: context.

Real work does not start from scratch. It depends on existing files, past documents, logos, images, spreadsheets, and PDFs scattered across your drive.

That is exactly why we built The Drive AI.

The Drive AI uses file agents that do more than just generate new files. They can pull information, images, tables, and logos from your existing files and use them to create new documents like Word files, PDFs, PowerPoint decks, and Excel sheets.

Would love to hear your thoughts.
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-01-28 22:31:07+00:00
You know that human civilization exists because of all the people putting in work every day who are not motivated just by by money, right? If everyone was billionaire level money obsessed society would cease to work. There is nothing to indicate billionaires are giving us a disproportionate amount of what makes society work, and without working society to host it there is no progress.
by throwaway-11-1 | 2026-01-28 22:31:28+00:00
The people benefitting from the profits accumulated from layoffs would never allow their margins to be cut by having to pay for UBI. Why do people act like this even remotely on the political horizon? There will simply be an even larger underclass and the wealthy enclaves will build higher walls. “At least the companies will be more efficient” is such a cucked take, insane
by lxgr | 2026-01-28 22:31:32+00:00
The problem isn’t that it doesn’t work (and it does often not work – one “symmetric NAT” in the old/deprecated terminology is enough), it’s that it’s orders of magnitude more complex than it needs to be.

I’ve also never seen it work for TCP in practice, and not everybody should have to roll their own UDP wrapper for their TCP-expecting application.
by dang | 2026-01-28 22:31:59+00:00
Ok! that was my attempt to avoid linkbait and make the title less provocative (submitted title was "How to design an AI app with a sense of taste"). But I missed the mark this time, so have reverted the title to the article's own headline, except I'm not going to keep the word 'beautiful' up there since that would be certain to provoke shallow objections.
by groby_b | 2026-01-28 22:32:03+00:00
Depends, do we care about TCO? Also, can I pick the set of bridges I compare?

OK, kidding aside: If you deeply care, you can probably mine the Federal Highway Administration's bridge construction database: https://fhwaapps.fhwa.dot.gov/upacsp/tm?transName=MenuSystem...

I don't think the question is answerable in a meaningful way. Bridges are one-off projects with long life spans, comparing cost over time requires a lot of squinting just so.
by daxfohl | 2026-01-28 22:32:19+00:00
That's actually a good comparison. Though even then, I imagine you at least have the ability to get on the phone and ask what they just did. Whereas LLM would just be like, "IDK, that was my twin brother. I'd ask him directly, but unfortunately he has been garbage collected. It was very sad. Would you like a cookie?"

I wonder if there's any value in some system that preserves the chat context of a coding agent and tags the commits with a reference to it, until the feature has been sufficiently battle tested. That way you can bring them back from the dead and interrogate them for insight if something goes wrong. Probably no more useful than just having a fresh agent look at the diff in most cases, but I can certainly imagine scenarios where it's like "Oh, duh, I meant to do X but looks like I accidentally did Y instead! Here's a fix." way faster than figuring it out from scratch. Especially if that whole process can be automated and fast, worst case you just waste a few tokens.

I'm genuinely curious though if there's anything you learned from those experiences that could be applied to agent driven dev processes too.
by ceejayoz | 2026-01-28 22:32:19+00:00
https://www.penguinsinternational.org/turns-out-that-not-all...

> The researchers found that the differences between species could be determined by the habitat where a species was found. For example, Emperor penguins occupy the Antarctic continent, breeding mostly on sea ice. Even though they have colonies clustered by geographic regions, the researchers found that juveniles of Emperor Penguins can travel long distances between colonies facilitating “gene flow.”
by mrandish | 2026-01-28 22:33:02+00:00
This is very welcome. Just a couple months ago I was down some interesting retro-computing rabbit hole and there was a story referenced in a couple articles and a book. The cited source was an original document that's in CHM's collection but it wasn't accessible on CHM's site nor was it available anywhere else online. Frustrating but understandable. They must get mountains of documents contributed from personal files of first-hand participants who created this history.

Sorting, scanning, indexing and tagging all those loose files must be a Herculean yet monotonously thankless chore. So thanks to all the volunteers and donors for enabling this invaluable resource to exist.
by hadlock | 2026-01-28 22:33:04+00:00
I vibe-coded my own apple system-6 style shell in rust and use that. If I don't like a feature, I change it. It is lightning quick, in it's (emulated) 1-bit glory. There's no requirement for you to use the built-in explore.exe to launch things, even for games. The graphics are decoupled from the shell so I use it for windows and linux.

If vibe coding your personal GUI utopia is too much, you can use something like Cairo - https://cairoshell.com/
by runarberg | 2026-01-28 22:33:49+00:00
I don‘t think human memory works like that, at least not in theory. Storage is not the limiting factor of human memory, but rather retention. It takes time and effort to retain new information. In the past you spent some time and effort to memorize the shopping list and the phone number. Mulling it over in your mind (or out loud), repeated recalls, exposure, even mnemonic tricks like rhymes, alliterations, connecting with pictures, stories, etc. if what you had to remember was something more complicated/extensive/important. And retention is not forever, unless you repeat it, you will loose it. And you only have so much time for repetition and recall, so inevitably, there will be memories which won‘t be repeated, and can’t be recalled.

So when you started using technology to offload your memory, what you gained was the time and effort you previously spent encoding these things into your memory.

I think there is a fundamental difference though between phone book apps and LLMs. Loosing the ability to remember a phone number is not as severe as loosing the ability to form a coherent argument, or to look through sources, or for a programmer to work through logic, to abstract complex logic into simpler chunks. If a scholar looses the skill to look through sources, and a programmer looses the ability to abstract complex logic, they are loosing a fundamental part of their needed to do their jobs. This is like if a stage actor looses the ability to memorize the script, instead relying on a tape-recorder when they are on stage.

Now if a stage actor losses the ability to memorize the script, they will soon be out of a job, but I fear in the software industry (and academia) we are not so lucky. I suspect we will see a lot of people actually taking that tape recorder on stage, and continue to do their work as if nothing is more normal. And the drop in quality will predictably follow.
by ars | 2026-01-28 22:34:00+00:00
Home/End don't work correctly (external keyboard).

Cmd-Tab switching between applications instead of windows is utterly stupid. (Yes I know there is some magic keystroke that will do it, but who even wants the standard behavior? Like why even do that?)

If there is a window under another window, and you click on something in it, the OS will ignore the click, it will just activate the window.

So now you have to click twice, except what if it's actually active? So now you have to always check if a window is active - which is harder than necessary because of how Macs have the toolbar on top, not near the actual window. (This is especially bad when you have two monitors.)

The toolbar is far from the window, leading to extra mouse movements.

There is no maximize button, instead it's a full screen button.

If you manage to get a window off-screen, there's almost no way to get it back (you have to pick tile windows or something like that to make the mac move it). If you do show all windows, and click on it, nothing obvious happens.

I'm trying to add the screenshot app to the launch bar - I can't, I click on Launchpad and find it, but you can't right click on any of the icons in there to do anything with them.

The finder is an utter disaster - I can not for the life of me figure out how to go up one level in a directory. It's like finder is trying very hard to pretend there's no such thing as directories.

If you have two monitors you can't have an app halfway across both of them, it's always on one of the order.

If I move an app to the bottom right corner the OS will "helpfully" move it back up, even though I moved it down. (This is especially funny when you realize it frequently manages to place windows off screen - why can't it be helpful then?)

When you drag a window sometimes you get this white outline that will resize the window for your screen - I have yet to figure out when this activates and when it doesn't.

When you drag a window from a larger monitor to a small one, it will resize it - sometime. But despite that it manages to place the window offset - so it's the right size, but like 40 pixels to the left.

Every single time I reboot, if I have to unplug my external monitor, and keyboard, login, then plug them back in. Otherwise it refuses to talk to them.
by Akranazon | 2026-01-28 22:34:13+00:00
Your project seems pretty close to where mine was a couple weeks ago, where I was focused on a BYOK solution (user-entered Anthropic API key). I saw there was another similar extension already released in the app store (RobotMonkey) which hooks up to their own backend service, and offers subscriptions. For my project, I think that's the right way to go.

It's funny what details about our designs are similar through accident. And what other things are completely different. I can show you my design potentially.

Representing websites in a virtual filesystem is creative and definitely makes it easier for the agent to collect information about the page. But I'm confused between the `Bash` and the `Edit` tools. It seems like one uses the chrome executeScript API, and the other updates the file system. But if it's just doing file writes, are those edits visible in the browser, and persistent across sessions?
by JKCalhoun | 2026-01-28 22:34:24+00:00
30% was always excessive.

I suspect developers are looking for these workaround because of the 30%. If Apple had asked for, say, 10%, would there be as many developers looking for loopholes?

I don't know. Apple perhaps should ask for compensation for "vouching for" the developer's app, hosting the app, distributing the app. But Steam shows us another model where the developer themselves pay a modest up-front cost to have their app hosted ($100) and then Steam steps out of the way.

I wonder if this would go a long way too to thinning the herd so to speak from the Apple App Store—perhaps improve the overall quality of the apps submitted.
by bigyabai | 2026-01-28 22:34:31+00:00
It's because of the hardware. For mobile Apple is competitive, for desktop applications they don't even show up on most benchmarks next to AMD/Nvidia hardware.

For example, you have to scroll beneath last-gen laptop GPUs before you can find any Apple hardware on the OpenCL charts: https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks
by renewiltord | 2026-01-28 22:34:35+00:00
I arrive in 2026. Decide to start a startup. By the year 2038, the state mandated reader of legal documents has finished reading out aloud to me and my co-founder. Now we find a VC. His documents need to be read to us both. But the Y2K38 problem strikes. He thinks we are in the year 1970. He needs to read us the "ancient company addendum". While he's reading he chokes and keels over, dead from the emissions from his Volkswagen. Our ARR may be zero, but what about our government grants? Also zero.

My friend. He starts in France in 2026. The government mandates that the retiree earnings to worker earnings ratio must be fixed by law to what it was in 2025: 130%. For every employee I hire, I must also pay a retiree 1.3 times his salary. He visits me via train in 2038. I ask him how his trip was. Turns out he actually got on Deutsche Bahn train back then in 2026. I just didn't know because he spent all his time on Twitter explaining why the US approach to startups won't work. He's lucky. Pretty short delay for DB train.
by gcanyon | 2026-01-28 22:34:48+00:00
I ran an experiment this morning. N=1 but:

I created two videos that contained nearly the same content. I recorded both by hand in one take, so they're not identical, obviously. Each talked about this issue. One used the term "Frozen Water," the other used "ICE". After eight hours:

The "ICE" video has 5 views
The "Frozen Water" video has 419 views

Again, N=1, and of course the "Frozen Water" video is more appealing to conspiracy theorists.

FWIW
by ben_w | 2026-01-28 22:34:48+00:00
> One of other authors he links to[0] brags that he's released 10 projects in the past month, like "Super Xtreme Mapper, a high-end, professional MIDI mapping software for professional DJs", which has 4 stars on Github. Despite the "high-end, professional...for professional" description, literally no one is going to use it, because this guy can't [be trusted to] maintain this software. Even if Claude Code is doing all the work, adding all the features, and fixing all the bugs, someone has to issue the command to do that work, and to foot the bill. This guy is just spraying code around and snorting digital coke.

While I'd expect almost nobody to use apps meeting this description, I disagree about why:

It's not that other people have to foot the bill, it's that the bill is so low that it's a question of this particular app being discovered amongst all the others.

$15/month is a rounding error on most budgets. If every musician buys a Claude subscription and prompts for their own variations on this idea, there's a few million other apps that also do all that this app does, which vary from completely identical (because the prompts themselves were also) to utterly personalised for the particular preferences of exactly one artist.
by forgotpwd16 | 2026-01-28 22:34:52+00:00
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46702099

But seems, as others have also noted, although the mean quality decreases, the quality of those reaching front page increases.

That said port/clones have always been trendy. What has joined their ranks is the significant amount of what are essentially minimal prompt wrappers.
by mort96 | 2026-01-28 22:34:59+00:00
I don't agree at all. There's a huge difference between "someone wrote this code and at least understands the intention and the problem it's trying to solve" and "the chat bot just generated this code, nobody understands what the intention is". I'm comfortable having a conversation with a human about code they wrote. It's pointless to have a conversation with a human about code they didn't write and don't understand.

The quality of "does the submitter understand the code" is not reflected in the text of the diff itself, yet is extremely important for good contributions.
by RunSet | 2026-01-28 22:35:25+00:00
On the other hand, those who find contemporary game development trends distasteful might find much to like about the fruits of the Debian Games Team's work on game-data-packager.

https://game-data-packager.debian.net/available.html

The games on that list have native ports that can be integrated into the Debian environment just by installing packages, and the game data packages can be automatically generated from each game's official install media.
Ask HN: How to Built an Active Community
by kivarada | 2026-01-28 22:35:27+00:00
I have built the Tech Content Platform Insidestack (https://insidestack.it) as a new side hustle with currently over 1000 popular RSS Feeds from independent tech experts, tech media houses and Big Tech.

The site has some nice features like
- Semantic search with text embedding
- You can block / follow feeds
- You can bookmark and comment articles

The longterm goal is that any user can build customised feeds by defining interests (which translate into search vectors).

I think the site has clean, modern design and is also quite efficient. (warning not vibe-coded). It is fully self-hosted from frontend, backend, database and email.

The costs are extremely low currently, I spend less than €20 / month. I want to offer this as completely free service, not even requiring registration, except for creating customised feeds.

My question is what is the best strategy to build an active community. I was thinking of open sourcing the feeds to get some attention. But this would be yet another awesome list... I was also occasionally posting on Reddit but this has very short-term effect...

Looking forward to your suggestions.
by cyberax | 2026-01-28 22:36:08+00:00
By law. H1b requires the wages to be greater than the prevailing wage for similar positions in the region. They are published by DoL: https://flag.dol.gov/wage-data/wage-search

For this kind of experience, you'd be looking for level 2 _minimum_ and likely level 3. For King County in WA it's right now $149240 and $180710 respectively. Level 4 wage is $212202, btw.
by GlibMonkeyDeath | 2026-01-28 22:36:40+00:00
>Alphabet keep funding Waymo.
>Friendly venture funds agree on a higher valuation.
>Everyone marks up their spreadsheets.
>No one has to find out what the company is actually worth in a public market.

While true to date, this can't go on literally forever. Waymo has to somehow bridge the gaps between hype, revenue, and eventually profits that justify the valuations (i.e. "grow up"), but they have a huge advantage to do this: their tech actually works. The moat isn't just capital availability, they solved a very hard problem, and that will protect them for a while going forward.
by h4kunamata | 2026-01-28 22:36:51+00:00
Btw, my first computer was an Intel Pentium MMX 166Mhz IIRC, massive 64MB of SIMM ram, and impressive 8GB of disk. Trident "graphic card", Creative sound card and the ultra fast Motorola 56k modem haha

"I installed CachyOS .... It wasn't a painless process. In fact, sleep mode was broken from the start"

This is the problem with newbies into Linux world, they follow hype instead of installing a stable distro.

As it stands in 2026, Linux Mint Cinnamon is by far the best distro to use, no matter if you are into IT field, heavy gaming, video editing and 3D design, it just works.

It follows the well known stability of Debian Linux, while being up-to-date like Ubuntu but without all the bloatware, kernel panic and privacy issues from Ubuntu.

If you are following hype or those distro so called "rolling releases" aka Arch Linux, don't complain that you are having problems.
They are everything but stable and "just works" lmao
by exmadscientist | 2026-01-28 22:37:02+00:00
In the long run, it's going to become about specifications.

Code is valuable because it tells computers what you want them to do. If that can be done at a higher level, by writing a great specification that lets some AI dark factory somewhere just write the app for you in an hour, then the code is now worthless but the spec is as valuable as the code ever was. You can just recode the entire app any time you want a change! And even if AI deletes itself from existence or whatever, a detailed specification is still worth a lot.

Whoever figures out how to describe useful software in a way that can get AI agents to reliably rebuild it from human-authored specifications is going to get a lot of attention over the next ~decade.
by brendoelfrendo | 2026-01-28 22:37:21+00:00
My take: someone wanted a technical solution for what is a people/process problem. A hypothetical version of events, just one of many possible scenarios of course:

1) Important communications required by law and/or regulation are sent by email.

2) Contacting customers via email is sometimes unreliable. It is unreliable enough that problems caused by missed emails caused enough pain in some exec's silo that they demanded a solution.

3) "Make sure people read their email" isn't really an actionable demand. The business knows this, so they turned to IT.

4) "Make sure people read their email" isn't really technically feasible either, but at this point it's not about making sure that the customer got the message: it's about making sure that the company is covered if a customer complains about missing communications.

5) To that end, a variety of technical solutions are proposed, and everyone knows that they're all bad or incomplete. The tracking pixel is chosen because it's at the intersection of "least bad" and "lowest effort to implement."

6) Around now, someone probably pointed out the issue with serving the content over http, but changing that requires buy-in from another team. It'll go to their product manager as an inject and maybe get prioritized for next PI (it won't, something more important will come up between now and then).

7) The tracking pixel ships. The team that implemented it stresses that this is an incomplete solution and the business really needs to re-evaluate their processes around how customer communications.

8) The email tracking pixel solution gets a bullet point on a slide in a presentation given to managers 3-5 levels higher than the devs who made it. No one mentions that the solution and requires additional work and investment. No one ever thinks of it again.
by ceejayoz | 2026-01-28 22:37:31+00:00
They tried that. The judge, correctly, went "uh the fuck you will".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Games_v._Apple

> While Apple implemented App Store policies to allow developers to link to alternative payment options, the policies still required the developer to provide a 27% revenue share back to Apple, and heavily restricted how they could be shown in apps. Epic filed complaints that these changes violated the ruling, and in April 2025 Rogers found for Epic that Apple had willfully violated her injunction, placing further restrictions on Apple including banning them from collecting revenue shares from non-Apple payment methods or imposing any restrictions on links to such alternative payment options. Though Apple is appealing this latest ruling, they approved the return of Fortnite with its third-party payment system to the App Store in May 2025.
by danpalmer | 2026-01-28 22:38:00+00:00
I agree with the lock-in, but FWIW I love using my AirPods with my Android phone. They basically work great. I can't change settings on them, but I haven't done that since I set them up. They sound nothing like $10 aliexpress ear buds, they remember and auto-pair to my phone, two laptops, and an iPad. Totally usable.
Show HN: Markpad – The Notepad Equivalent for Markdown
by alecdotdev | 2026-01-28 22:38:23+00:00
Built this for two reasons:

One: I've always wanted to be able to double click a Markdown file and see it like it appears on GitHub. Didn't want Obsidian or jumpy VS Code extensions just to view a README offline.

Two: Opening Microslop's Notepad lately shows how determined they are to add bloat to every aspect of Windows, so I needed a replacement.

Markpad is a simple Markdown file viewer and general text editor, rendered as close as possible to GitHub's markdown flavor. Features:

- Tabbed interface
- Monaco editor (VS Code)
- Syntax highlighting both in editor and code blocks
- Image and YouTube embeds
- Familiar GitHub styled markdown rendering
- Tiny memory usage (~10MB)
- No telemetry or bloat
- Free and open-source
- Lightweight native-feeling UI

Still in development, so I'd love some feedback on how to shape it to something more people can enjoy.

Cheers