MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by daviding | 2026-01-09 18:49:44+00:00
I did too - did the SF back to NYC leg that goes the north route as well. Amazing experience. I was only 19 at the time. My favorite memory is that on the westbound leg we met up with the eastbound one in (I think) Yellowstone and while parking the buses they managed to slowly crash in to each other (just a dent, nothing serious). I liked the fact they both started from separate coasts and ending up colliding.
Show HN: Atrion – A physics-based circuit breaker for Node.js (TypeScript)
by laphilosophia | 2026-01-09 18:49:46+00:00
Hi HN,

I've spent too many nights debugging cascading failures caused by "flapping" circuit breakers in Node.js services. The standard tools (like Opossum) often rely on binary logic: if (error_rate > threshold) open(). This static thresholding creates a ping-pong effect where traffic is trapped in a loop.

I wanted a solution that behaves like a physical damper, not a switch. So I built Atrion.

It is a TypeScript implementation of a Deterministic Physics Engine designed to replace traditional circuit breakers in Node.js/Bun runtimes.

How it differs: Instead of counting errors, Atrion simulates a physical object moving through a medium:

1. Momentum: Errors have mass. A sudden spike is dampened by inertia, filtering out noise naturally.
2. Scar Tissue: The system has "memory." It heals over time (Entropy/Decay) rather than resetting instantly. This prevents the "open/close" flapping cycle.
3. Auto-Routing: Using the calculated "Resistance" (Ohms), it can dynamically shift traffic traffic percentages instead of just cutting it off.

Performance:

1. Benchmarks: Compares standard CB (49 state transitions) vs. Atrion (1 stabilized transition) under oscillating load.
2. Overhead: Zero-dependency, uses branded types for math safety, optimized for V8.

Status: The architecture (CDO - Conditioned Deterministic Orchestration) is language-agnostic, but this reference implementation is Node.js only for now.
I’ve included the RFCs in the repo if you're interested in porting the math to Go or Rust.

---

NPM: https://www.npmjs.com/package/atrion
Repo: https://github.com/laphilosophia/atrion
by nosianu | 2026-01-09 18:50:05+00:00
Real title is "Coffee – a ubiquitous substitute for uranyl acetate in staining of biological ultrathin sections for electron microscopy studies" but the headline limits on HN are really, really tough. I had to cut more and more and more.

From the abstract:

> The use of uranyl acetate, a staining agent successfully used for decades in electron microscopy of biological specimens, is now strictly regulated by law due to its toxicity and radioactivity. It is even banned in some laboratories. In the meantime, there are a number of substitutes on the market, none of which comes close to the very good staining results of uranyl acetate, or only partially, and some of which are also toxic. In this paper, two alternatives to uranyl acetate are presented, namely coffee, which is used in countless households, and pure chlorogenic acid, which is a component of coffee.
by ianbutler | 2026-01-09 18:50:34+00:00
There are plenty of musicians here saying this is useful for them or would be useful while learning.

As meta commentary, those not in a subgroup sometime fail to see utility of a thing built for that subgroup and it's easy to feel a sense of superiority "oh how dumb and trivial this thing is", but it may be better to first have curiosity and see how the intended audience responds. Often it's not dumb or trivial, you're missing context and experience to see the value.
by saidinesh5 | 2026-01-09 18:50:36+00:00
System wide adblocking, being able to backup any app are the top two reasons I'd still root my phones if i had any choice. You'd be amazed by the battery life improvement you'd get by just blocking ads..

I deliberately avoid all banking apps even though i didn't root my phone, but i have to use Google Pay a lot. So... That's the only reason this phone I'm typing on isn't rooted.
by thisislife2 | 2026-01-09 18:50:52+00:00
Does the Budapest Memorandum say that Russia will not attack Ukraine, even if Ukraine threatens Russian security? No, it doesn't. Ukranian leaders were stupid - they allowed West Ukraine and East Ukraine to drift apart, and didn't give importance to politically unite their country. Then they invited foreigners to meddle in their internal political affairs. The result is what we see now - a civil war and the breakup of the country, as the superpowers fight for the pieces of Ukraine.
by drysart | 2026-01-09 18:51:28+00:00
There's not some conspiracy that's stopped it from happening. Nobody, anywhere, has ever said "DOM access from WASM isn't allowed". It's not a matter of 'allow', it's a matter of capability.

There's a lot of prerequisites for DOM access from WASM that need to be built first before there can be usable DOM access from within WASM, and those are steadily being built and added to the WASM specification. Things like value references, typed object support, and GC support.
by pklausler | 2026-01-09 18:51:32+00:00
26 bytes is 208 bits, about twice what you really need for a minimal encoding that has enough context (en passant, castling) to generate an accurate set of legal moves. I wrote a chess database tool back in the 90's (CDB) that used 96-bit encodings (if memory serves) to index all the positions reached in a collection of games so that one could see the moves made from any position, their frequencies, and their game outcomes. Good fun.
by Breza | 2026-01-09 18:51:46+00:00
I think we'll start seeing humanoid robots doing boring things in controlled settings within a decade. Imagine that Hyundai built a robot that can empty a Hyundai dishwasher and take out the trash from a Hyundai trash can. I could imagine senior living communities and college dorms using them to go from room to room to keep things tidy.
by silisili | 2026-01-09 18:52:36+00:00
In the US, in my experience, young people don't want to deal with cash at all. Older people do, but it's not always convenient to meet up.

Most banks charge a fee for sending a wire. Sending an ACH is free, but most restrict that to your own account. Revolut is the only one I've seen that lets you just spam ACH to anyone. In both cases, it isn't instant.

Zelle largely fixes those issues, but has its own issues, like a lot of banks not supporting it and/or arbitrarily low send limits.
by specialist | 2026-01-09 18:52:43+00:00
The purpose of RRO assumes majoritarianism while ensuring the minority is heard.

As you know, there are light weight versions, for boards and committees. But nothing I'd advocate for product development.

> the most effective organizations

As a fellow recovering activist, you might be interested in Vincent Bevins' If We Burn. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_We_Burn Connected some dots for me. Things I experienced but wasn't smart enough to sus and articulate.
by petcat | 2026-01-09 18:52:47+00:00
> EU is actively trying to create their own cloud

Unfortunately, the EU is not nearly coordinated for such a thing. And even if they were, regulation is not what will make it happen. EU is in a crisis of financial (VISA, AmEx) and software services (AWS, MS, Google) being almost entirely provided by USA. They are not going to dig themselves out of the hole by regulation.

For contrast, USA is (largely) dependent on China, Korea, and Taiwan for chips. But they decided to attack the problem by investing several hundred billion dollars to develop their domestic microchip manufacturing infrastructure [1]. This appears to be paying dividends already as TSMC is already producing chips in Arizona, and estimated 30% of all production of 2nm and better to be produced in USA by 2030.

It seems to me that this is the way nations take control of their problems. Unfortunately EU seems incapable.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIPS_and_Science_Act
by qwery | 2026-01-09 18:53:19+00:00
Have done it, never enough of an audience to be totally humiliated.
It's never going to be more efficient.

But as for your cringe issue that the audience noticed, one could see that to be a benefit -- prefer to have someone say e.g. "you typed `Normalise` (with an 's') again, C++ is written in U.S. English, don't you know / learn to spell, you slime" upfront than waiting for compiler to tell you that `Normalise` doesn't exist, maybe?
by iso1631 | 2026-01-09 18:53:27+00:00
I did NY to Miami in 2024, I was working in NY one week and Miami the next, made sense to me to have Sat morning down town in New York, then sit in a private hotel room with great food for 24 hours before arriving in New York Sunday evening in time for work the following day.

Could have flown Saturday evening and had an extra day in a hotel room in Miami instead, but I spend enough time in chain hotels
by yencabulator | 2026-01-09 18:54:10+00:00
Claude Code is more than the TUI, it's the prompts, the agentic loop, and tools, all made to cooperate well with the LLM powering it. If you use Claude Code over a longer period of time you'll notice Anthropic changing the tooling and prompts underneath it to make it work better. By now, the model is tuned to their prompts, tools etc.
by mrguyorama | 2026-01-09 18:54:44+00:00
What do business books say you should do when the primary way you lose your market is illegal and anti-competitive business practices from a megacorp in a political environment anathema to punishing anti-competitive business practices?

Please tell me how Firefox was supposed to compete with Chrome being bundled with nearly any download of any software anywhere, and with a one click installer on the Google homepage. The value of that advertising alone far exceeds what Mozilla could afford.

People who think it's Mozilla's failure to have been utterly crushed by illegal business practices are so strange to me.

What did you expect to happen? Why do you think we have laws against this stuff in the first place? How would you have outspent the behemoth on advertising? How would you have overcome a competitor being included with nearly everything done on a computer?

Google Chrome's abuse of installers was so bad that Microsoft had to change how it sets "default browser" because Google was setting itself as the default entirely without user interaction! Tons of the marketshare that went from Firefox to Chrome did not do so intentionally, did not even know, and did not mean to
by nick2837 | 2026-01-09 18:55:25+00:00
i genuinely wrote this in a day. ive been in ai for 9 years, well before chatgpt came out. i used Claude Code to turn it from my notion draft (spelling mistakes, no formatting, etc) into a well-formatted markdown file. you don't need to believe me, move on with your life. the guide is free and is meant to genuinely help someone use AI in a better way
Ask HN: How do you review the code from agents?
by zhyder | 2026-01-09 18:55:32+00:00
Engineers are increasing setting up coding agents to run continuously, some running multiple agents in parallel. I've struggled to adopt these because I've struggled to build confidence without full code review.

How are y'all reviewing all this massive code output? How can it possibly scale, as the agents run faster or as you add agents?

I guess we'll have to learn to give up some control; we'll stop reviewing all lines of code, and increasingly rely on AI tools to summarize and flag specific lines. Are any tools good at this?

More generally, how do you build confidence in the code, both at the PR level and eventually at the codebase level (when 90+% of code in it will be written by agents)?

Am I too worried about code review, are there bigger bottlenecks in our jobs when using these coding agents?
by klipklop | 2026-01-09 18:55:35+00:00
> Where do you stand on encryption?

This is a really complicated and broad topic that I cant take the time to type out here. I do not stand on the side of "I have nothing to hide." I fully understand the risks of that position. People must keep some secrets to protect themselves from society. Especially as everything devolves into increasingly strict "purity" tests.

With that said, I don't think the right to obfuscate real estate transactions is the same as spicy personal beliefs/private conversations/etc. IMO there is nothing more public than real estate. I do not consider real estate transactions as protected speech nor one that can be legally hidden. We live in this world together.
by recursive | 2026-01-09 18:55:39+00:00
I've been playing piano for 40 years, tend to hate anything with AI-buzzwords anywhere adjacent to it. But I generally think this particularly one is a good thing.

Curious what you mean by no attempt to teach. We learn multiplication tables by rote. Are flash cards a genuine instrument of learning? The only way to learn intervals is to practice identifying them. This is how you do it. You can read about music theory (and should) but the only way to build your listening skills is to practice it starting with basic stuff.
by kotaKat | 2026-01-09 18:55:42+00:00
Long ago we used to have ‘mini’ credit cards. You could get a two-thirds size magstripe card from some major banks that’d go right on your keychain. Discover had a cute little bean keychain with a flip-out magstripe card (the Discover2Go) as well.

At the same time there was also the Exxon-Mobil Speedpass RFID fob, and I remember there being a huge discussion about “the battle of the keychain” and whose payment instrument would win being on your keys to be used the most alongside your loyalty cards.
by ericmcer | 2026-01-09 18:56:04+00:00
Really nice article, but it sort of flies in the face of all our biological imperatives.

Being a good "kindee" means forgoing security, control and some safety.

Constant Gratitude for just the miracle of life means forgoing the driving dissatisfaction that will push you ahead.

This is the classic battle between our ancient biological impulses and the reality of modern society. Many religions try to square these: Buddhisms central focus is to "stop grasping" your desires, Christianity wants you to "surrender" and put your faith in god. And then you also have articles like this that have a vague spiritual bent but mostly preach mindfulness and gratitude as a balm to our general dissatisfaction. Do we still need constant anxiety around our safety, do we still need to feel dissatisfied with each achievement and constantly want more? Or were those just useful imperatives for an animal 50,000 years ago but useless to us today?

In my personal life I have momentary success being mindful/grateful, but the bare reality is we are the product of millions of years of life being a short cruel struggle, fraught with danger. Does modern society give us the right to throw all that away and pretend we get to float around observing the beauty of the world? Or is our life supposed to be a battle?
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-09 18:56:46+00:00
> The only driver that I can really comprehend is the desire for freedom and autonomy in less populated spaces

Exploration and seeing what's beyond seems to be innate in some people, not so much in others. Personally, if someone gave me to the opportunity today to "Sit in this rocket and get launched out into infinity and report back what's out there", I'd probably do it, and I'm sure I wouldn't be the only one. Curiosity would be enough for me to go.
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-01-09 18:57:05+00:00
I can't agree. Firefox is great, but I think its UI drags it down in various ways. It being built the way it is was a boon back when extensions were capable of radically changing the browser's UI, but now it simply puts a (unfortunately low) hard cap on how excellent its UI can be.

Funny enough, Epiphany used to be a more power user oriented browser, and it used to be powered by none other than Gecko. Unfortunately, Mozilla killed embedding in Gecko and that (along with related projects like Camino and K-Meleon) came to a screeching halt and Gecko became hard coupled with Mozilla's UI decisions.
by briffle | 2026-01-09 18:57:10+00:00
> My take is that when Italian customers notice their ping going up by 10x because all their traffic is now routed through France, they will switch to BunnyCDN, Fastly or any of the dozens of CDNs that do have servers in Italy.

While that is true, the datacenters hosting those servers are going to lose a massive amount of monthly income by not having those servers colocated anymore.

And just out of curiosity, how many small/medium websites would have the in house know-how to switch to a different CDN? Cloudflare fronts your site, giving you an 'automatic' CDN, where most others require changes to your site to work with.
by evanmoran | 2026-01-09 18:57:13+00:00
This is great! Please consider even easier settings for kids. Maybe 2 notes (not 4) as the min starting point and slower ramp up as you succeed.

Also, I think the missed the first note UI could feel a little nicer. Something about the popup/hiding the music takes you out of the flow. Possibly just a subtitle would be enough with an encouraging message. There is a big difference between failing to do the whole pattern and failing the first note so definitely worth refining the feedback here.
by great_wubwub | 2026-01-09 18:57:15+00:00
> this means a court order can't block a single cloudflare site without blocking every cloudflare site

Not true. Cloudflare can't block only a single web site _by IP address_ but that's pretty common with IPv4, The same is true of Fastly and AWS and I'd be shocked if there's a mass-market CDN out there that has a unique IPv4 address per customer.

They can absolutely block any site they want at the application layer (SNI or Host header or whatever they use, IDK, I'm a network guy).
by dabedee | 2026-01-09 18:57:28+00:00
The irony of an article defending vibe coding that reads like it was vibe-written. The four "Why do we want X code?" paragraphs all end with the same sentence, the headers follow a neat structure no human would naturally land on, and it wraps up with a safely noncommittal "is this good or bad? Depends on who you are."

I long for articles that have been written in more time that it takes to read them.
by whs | 2026-01-09 18:57:33+00:00
Copilot in VSCode is integrated with VSCode's LLM provider API. Which means that any plugins that needs LLM capabilities can submit request to Copilot. Roo Code support that as an option. And of course, there's a plugin that start an OpenAI/Anthropic-compatible web server inside VSCode that just calls to the LLM provider API. It seems that if you use unlimited models (like GPT-4.1) you probably get unlimited API calls. However, those model doesn't seems to be very agentic when used in Claude Code.
by drysart | 2026-01-09 18:57:48+00:00
The major Javascript engines already have the concept of a type system that applies at runtime. Their JITs will learn the 'shapes' of objects that commonly go through hot-path functions and will JIT against those with appropriate bailout paths to slower dynamic implementations in case a value with an unexpected 'shape' ends up being used instead.

There's a lot of lore you pick up with Javascript when you start getting into serious optimization with it; and one of the first things you learn in that area is to avoid changing the shapes of your objects because it invalidates JIT assumptions and results in your code running slower -- even though it's 100% valid Javascript.
by anishgupta | 2026-01-09 18:57:56+00:00
>The leaderboard isn't "PRs opened per week." It's not "lines of code generated."
It's "months since the last mass refactor." Time between architectural resets. How long your codebase stays coherent under continuous AI-assisted modification.

This was a good one, however we cannot absolutely rely on this from a metric perspective. Code velocity should also be included as a factor, like PR dwell time and time to first PR (especially for new hires)
by azakai | 2026-01-09 18:58:00+00:00
> Why should we aim to increase portability? There's a lot of unstated ideological assumptions underlying that goal, which not everyone shares.

As far back as I can remember well (~20 years) it was an explicitly stated goal to keep the web open. "Open" including that no single vendor controls it, neither in terms of browser vendor nor CPU vendor nor OS vendor nor anything else.

You are right that there has been tension here: Flash was very useful, once, despite being single-vendor.

But the trend has been towards openness: Microsoft abandoned ActiveX and Silverlight, Google abandoned NaCl and PNaCl, Adobe abandoned Flash, etc.
by 0xy | 2026-01-09 18:58:03+00:00
He is likely referring to the Trump admin's efforts to prevent the UK from globally censoring the internet according to UK morality/laws, of which would indicate the admin's free speech defense (unlike the prior admin which pressured social media sites to censor opinions they did not like, a 1A issue).

https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...
by cheald | 2026-01-09 18:58:11+00:00
This is a finding that keeps coming up, and I've certainly found it true in my life, but there's a significant chicken-and-egg problem in that depression frequently precludes the motivation to exercise, and if you don't already have a deeply-disciplined routine to overcome the lack of motivation, people won't do it.

Exhortation to develop those good habits in the good times, I suppose.
by p337 | 2026-01-09 18:58:36+00:00
You end up wasting tokens on implementation, debugging, execution, and parsing when you could just use the tool (tool description gets used instead).

Also, once you give it this general access, it opens up essentially infinite directions for the model to go to. Repeatability and testing become very difficult in that situation. One time it may write a bash script to solve the problem. The next, it may want to use python, pip install a few libraries to solve that same problem. Yes, both are valid, but if you desire a particular flow, you need to create a prompt for it that you'll hope it'll comply with. It's about shifting certain decisions away from the model so that it can have more room for the stuff you need it to do while ensuring that performance is somewhat consistent.

For now, managing the context window still matters, even if you don't care about efficient token usage. So burning 5-10% on re-writing the same API calls makes the model dumber.
by jedwhite | 2026-01-09 18:58:56+00:00
Thank you, and yes! That is what I already frequently do for quick automation tasks.

As you say, Claude is actually very good at writing shell scripts and using tools on-the-fly. But I know there is an AI-confidence factor involved for developers making the choice to leverage that.

For simple tasks (in practice) I already find you can often prompt the whole thing.

For tasks where you already have the other traditional scripts or building blocks, or where it is complex, then you might break it up.

Interestingly, you can intermix these approaches.

You can have runnable markdown that writes and runs scripts on the fly, mixed with running command line tools, and chained along with traditional tools in a bash script, and then call that script from a runnable markdown that passes in test results, or analyzes the code base and passes recommendations in.

The composability and ability to combine and embed code blocks and tool use within plain language is quite powerful. I’m still learning how to use this.

I’m glad it is already useful and thank you.