MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bateller | 2026-01-24 15:48:01+00:00
I covered this on Ship It Weekly along with a couple related ops stories (RDS blue/green downtime improvements, and ECR cross-repo layer sharing) plus a Honeycomb EU outage write-up as the human closer.

Audio + links here:
https://www.tellerstech.com/ship-it-weekly/curl-shuts-down-b...
by at1as | 2026-01-24 15:48:28+00:00
Isn't that simply what cameras cost, since glass needs to be manufactured very precisely?

I'm replacing a 12 year old canon 6D with 4 lenses accumulated over that time period with one-and-done camera. It's precisely the cost of upgrading all of that to the new mirrorless system that pushed me in this direction.

An entry level Canon Rebel is like $600, with an extremely constrained focal range. Essentially any non-prime lens will double that cost.

It's hard to understand how $1200 is considered outrageous for a camera (though for the record, these cost more like $2K, but mine is a used Typ-109 which was $800)?

What are you considering buying?
by friendzis | 2026-01-24 15:48:29+00:00
Interesting question, actually. The ones calling for full and immediate assumption of liability on the principal either miss a thing or imply an interesting relationship.

The closest analogy we have, I guess, is the power of attorney. If a principal signs off on power of attorney to, e.g. take out a loan/mortgage to buy a thing on principal's behalf, that does not extend to taking any extra liabilities. Any extra liabilities signed off by the agent would be either rendered null or transferred to the agent in any court of law. There is extent to which agency is assigned.

The core questions here are agency and liability boundaries. Are there any agency boundaries on the agent? If so, what's the extent? There are many future edge cases where these questions will arise. Licenses and patents are just the tip of an iceberg.
by EvanAnderson | 2026-01-24 15:49:06+00:00
I did a ton of upgrades from 3.1 to Windows 95 in late 1996 and early 1997 on 386 and 486 machines with 4MB of RAM. I still have a "mark" from the tedium. Some of the machines didn't have a large enough hard drive to store a copy of the setup files (the "CAB files") so until the company issued me a ZIP drive I had to do "the floppy shuffle" with 20-ish disks.

It ran like crap with 4MB of RAM but it did run. Opening anything much resulted in paging.
by grayhatter | 2026-01-24 15:49:16+00:00
> Have we got to the point where we need an article telling us that slighting people doesn't help their motivation?

American culture is unfortunately permeated with examples, and habits, and expectations around punishing the behaviors you'd want to see. I see subtle things like that all the time. So while I doubt anyone who stopped to actually think about the concrete implications of their behavior, more specifically their unconscious habits; wouldn't be able to describe how insulting people, or really, how discouraging people is likely to have a negative outcome. The catch being, most people don't stop to consider anything. Thoes who do, are exceptionally rare.

As an example, someone posted a comment providing context, and encouraging people to be curious and grow their skill set with techniques that will help them with dogs, (and yes, these do translate to humans as well.)

Which invited a negative comment from you attacking people who aren't perfect every single moment of every single day, who might benefit from a reminder that how they treat others matters. Also indirectly attacking the person you replied to.

(See what I mean about the culture of punishing the behavior, you want to see? Or did you intend to discourage curiosity?)

> Perhaps the answer is yes when we also compare a worker's motivation to a dog's motivation seemingly without irony.

You can train a human using the exact same skills you use to train a dog. Just because humans are also, in addition to those able to do a lot more, and learn in an astronomically larger set of ways, doesn't exclude the techniques that work best with dogs. You forget this at your own peril. I.e. if the way you behave wouldn't encourage the behavior you want from a dog well, it sure as hell wont encourage the behavior from a human. All humans, including you, are not that special, get over yourself. rhetorically speaking
by blibble | 2026-01-24 15:49:44+00:00
she was certainly a fan, but the spark for the match for almost all of the privatisations was EU/EEC directives

if the UK had never joined the EEC those industries would likely still be under government ownership

(for better or worse, water certainly was a disaster, but telecoms and airlines seem to have gone reasonably well)

and rail was done post Thatcher, with her on record as saying it is "a step too far"
by kevinbaur | 2026-01-24 15:49:53+00:00
Hey everyone, I’m Kevin, I built GitPulse.

Why I built it: With the rise of "Vibe Coding" and AI tools, shipping new products has never been faster. But that also means "abandonware" is piling up. As a user myself, before I pay for a subscription (or even consider buying a micro-SaaS), I constantly ask myself:

"Is there still an active developer behind this?"

"Is this project alive, or was it abandoned 3 months ago?"

I built GitPulse to answer that. It’s a verified signal for users and buyers to see if a project is actively maintained or stable without exposing the source code.

Features I added for fun & utility:

Gamification: "Shipping Streaks" to keep myself motivated.

Social Sharing: To show off progress publicly or prove activity to clients/buyers.

Smart Context: Distinguishing between "High Activity" and "Stable" (so finished projects don't look dead).

Roadmap: I’m currently working on deeper metrics like Build Stability (CI/CD status) and Package Health, so it’s not just about quantity, but quality.

If you have any feedback let me know!
by Guestmodinfo | 2026-01-24 15:50:15+00:00
I may have the answer. This website nand2mario and this article was here on HN a while ago. Maybe a month or two months ago. So this is a dupe posting. So maybe then you were busy and didn't read it fully but your mind caught it somehow from HN or coworkers/friends and now when you are relaxed you can register the stuff nicely. Just type 80386 in the search and you'll get that previous post.
by storystarling | 2026-01-24 15:50:17+00:00
Fair point on HBM, but in a production system the orchestration layer is often the actual bottleneck. I've found that keeping the GPU fed requires a level of concurrency and stability that is hard to tune in Python. Rust is useful here not for the inference itself, but for ensuring the request pipeline doesn't choke while the GPU is waiting for data.
by Polizeiposaune | 2026-01-24 15:50:28+00:00
Using the API with discipline goes a long way.

Always send "pragma foreign_keys=on" first thing after opening the db.

Some of the types sloppiness can be worked around by declaring tables to be STRICT. You can also add CHECK constraints that a column value is consistent with the underlying representation of the type -- for instance, if you're storing ip addresses in a column of type BLOB, you can add a CHECK that the blob is either 4 or 16 bytes.
by danparsonson | 2026-01-24 15:50:56+00:00
It's a next-word-prediction-machine, not a calculator. It's not aware of the passage of time, or how long things take, and doesn't reason about anything. It's just very good at putting words together in combinations that look like answers to your inputs.

That's really useful for some tasks, like regurgitating code to perform a specific function, but it's basically useless for jobs like estimating schedules.
by bluGill | 2026-01-24 15:51:25+00:00
I have to say I work for John Deere to discuss this more, even though I don't speak for the company.

A DOT (I'm not sure which DOT) just did a press release on how they used John Deere guidance on a snow plow which allowed them to clear the road in a blizzard so an ambulance could get to the hospital (I was surprised they can get enough of a GPS signal, but apparently they did). Auto steer allows someone to drive a plow when you can't see the pavement/lines without first having to memorize the road by the posts/trees on the side of the road.

However there is a big difference between Deere auto steer and Tesla FSD: safety. Tesla has sensors to see if someone/something is in the way and algorithms to go around - critics claim they don't work well, but they work infinity times better than the complete lack of any of those sensors/algorithms in Deere's system. If you are using the Deere system it can hold a lane to within a couple cm - but you have to look out the window constantly because it will just drive right into anything in the way. This is good enough for farming (nobody/nothing is going to be in front of the tractor anyway), or the DOT (they can't see the road at all, but they still have trained operators ready to hit the brake) - but Tesla is going after the "you can take a nap" market.

I wouldn't be surprised if Deere has more miles of self driving than Tesla and Waymo combined, and a better safety record. However this is only because Deere's system is used in situations where the odds are against there being anything to harm in the first place, while Tesla/Waymo are trying for the much harder open road with who knows what in the way.

Now Deere is working on the full autonomous solutions, I'm not sure what the status is (I think some are out there for use in very limited situations). I'm not allowed to say anything more about these plans (I know some is public but I'm not sure what)
by JimDabell | 2026-01-24 15:52:27+00:00
> the argument is they get you out of the copyright infringement caused by copying the software from disk to memory

This is not copyright infringement in the USA:

> …it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided… that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner

— https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/117
by strogonoff | 2026-01-24 15:52:36+00:00
> Because the semantics of numbers and dates matters.

Type semantics is only a small part of what is needed for systems and humans to know how to adequately work with and display the data. All of that information, including the type but so much more, can be supplied in established ways (more graphs!) without having to sprinkle XSD types on your values.

For example, say you have a triple where the object is a number that for whatever good reason must lie between 1 and <value from elsewhere in the graph> in 0.1 increments. Knowing that it is a number and being able to do math on it is not that useful when 99% of math operations would yield an invalid value; you need more metadata, and if you have that you also have the type.
by AnimalMuppet | 2026-01-24 15:52:56+00:00
But it's the reality of engineering. If reality is unacceptable, that's not reality's problem.

But the problem is, the sales world has its own reality. The reality there is that "we don't know when" really is unacceptable, and "unacceptable" takes the form of lost sales and lost money.

So we have these two realities that do not fit well together. How do we make them fit? In almost every company I've been in, the answer is, badly.

The only way estimates can be real is if the company has done enough things that are like the work in question. Then you can make realistic (rough) estimates of unknown work. But even then, if you assign work that we know how to do to a team that doesn't know how to do it, your estimates are bogus.
by DonHopkins | 2026-01-24 15:53:00+00:00
I take it you never played The Sims? The simulation madness ship sailed 26 years ago, if not in 1986 with SimCity! ;)

Palm is a fictional character in a text adventure — same tradition as Zork, LambdaMOO, and every MUD since 1978. The emojis are deliberate (navigation aids for LLMs, actually, and ethical simulated person flagging). The whimsy is intentional.

I've been building simulated characters, world and city building tools since before The Sims shipped. This is just the next iteration.

You may recognize tributes to many classic simulated characters in MOOLLM.

MC Frontalot - It Is Pitch Dark:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nigRT2KmCE

The Grue monster carries his own game mechanics with him, eating you if you go for long enough in the maze without your lamp lit:

grue: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/tree/main/examples/adven...

The Wumpus has prototypes for his game playing pieces in his character directory:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wumpus

wumpus-snorax: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/tree/main/examples/adven...

BOTTOMLESS-PIT.yml: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adven...

SUPERBATS.yml: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adven...

And yes, it works great, and is fun and easy to author, for much less money than Steve's costly "Infinite Number of Typewriters Communicating Via Carrier Pigeon" approach.
by cornholio | 2026-01-24 15:53:41+00:00
I think legally the issue was adjudicated by analogy to a closed safe: while the exact contents of the safe is unknown beforehand, it is reasonable it will contain evidence, documents, money, weapons etc. that are relevant, so if a warrant can be issued in that case compelling a locksmith to open it, then by analogy it can be issued against an encrypted device.

Without doubt, this analogy surely breaks down as society changes to become more digital - what about a Google Glass type of device that records my entire life, or the glasses of all people detected around me? what about the device where I uploaded my conscience, can law enforcement simply probe around my mind and find direct evidence of my guilt? Any written constitution is just a snapshot of a social contract at a particular historical time and technological development point, so it cannot serve as the ultimate source of truth regarding individual rights - the contract is renegotiated constantly through political means.

My question was more general: how could we draft that new social contract to the current age, how could we maintain the balance where the encrypted device of a suspected child predator and murderer is left encrypted, despite the fact that some 3rd party has the key, because we agreed that is the correct way to balance freedoms and law enforcement? It just doesn't sound stable in a democracy, where the rules of that social contract can change, it would contradict the moral intuitions of the vast majority.
by loloquwowndueo | 2026-01-24 15:54:12+00:00
“Sign up and pay at least part of it now and we’ll prioritize the feature”.

I’ve seen enough instances of work being done for a specific customer that doesn’t then result in the customer signing up (or - once they see they can postpone signing the big contract by continuing to ask for “just one more crucial feature”, they continue to do so) to ever fall for this again.
by kubb | 2026-01-24 15:55:33+00:00
You're saying it would be convenient for you to know the future. It would also be convenient for me. That said, if you haven't done very similar work in the past, it's very unlikely you'll know exactly how much time it will take.

In practice developers have to "handle" the people requesting hard deadlines. Introduce padding into the estimate to account for the unexpected. Be very specific about milestones to avoid expectation of the impossible. Communicate missed milestones proactively, and there will be missed milestones. You're given a date to feel safe. And sometimes you'll cause unnecessary crunch in order for a deadline you fought for to be met. Other times, you'll need to negotiate what to drop.

But an accurate breakdown of a project amounts to executing that project. Everything else is approximation and prone to error.
by doix | 2026-01-24 15:56:12+00:00
I used to work in the semiconductor industry writing internal tools for the company. Hardware very rarely missed a deadline and software was run the same way.

Things rarely went to plan, but as soon as any blip occured, there'd be plans to trim scope, crunch more, or push the date with many months of notice.

Then I joined my first web SaaS startup and I think we didn't hit a single deadline in the entire time I worked there. Everyone thought that was fine and normal. Interestingly enough, I'm not convinced that's why we failed, but it was a huge culture shock.
by the_arun | 2026-01-24 15:56:17+00:00
This time around, we asked cursor to estimate giving PRD & codebase. It gave very detailed estimate. Currently in the process of getting it down to what leadership wants (as in the article). AI estimates much better & faster than us. We are bringing it down much faster than AI. Sometimes changing the PRD or prioritizing the flows & cutting down scope of MVP. Honestly AI is a great tool for estimation.
by sodapopcan | 2026-01-24 15:56:25+00:00
It's all situational, I guess. For example I never learned or collaborated more (or had more fun at work) than when I worked at an XP shop, pairing every single day. I feel the majority of people are just going to have coworkers who have fully stopped asking asking questions. But you aren't wrong. I use AI a bit as a search engine.
Show HN: HyperAI GPU Leaderboard – A benchmark comparison site for AI workloads
by Ada_trying | 2026-01-24 15:57:35+00:00
HyperAI built a leaderboard that compares GPU performance metrics specifically for machine learning and AI workloads.

URL: https://hyper.ai/gpu-leaderboard

It shows up-to-date hardware specifications and benchmark figures (e.g., FP16/FP32/FP64 performance, memory bandwidth) for a variety of modern GPUs. The goal is to help researchers, engineers, and practitioners understand how different GPUs stack up for ML/AI use cases.

Key features
* 29+ GPUs with detailed hardware specs
* Side-by-side performance comparison across FP types
* Focused on AI/ML workloads rather than gaming

Would love feedback on the layout and utility — especially from folks who do GPU benchmarking or care about hardware trade-offs in AI workloads.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-24 15:57:42+00:00
> If I find out that management is being adversarial to ICs (eg. not offering to pay 75th percentile salaries

I find this funny because it suggests an equilibrium point where 75% of management must be adversarial by definition.

Adversarial is a loaded word. In my experience, the management I’d call most adversarial occurred at companies paying 80th to 90th percentile or higher. The attitude is that they’re paying employees enough that they need to shut up and put up with anything that comes their way. If you don’t like it, we have a list of qualified applicants who will gladly take your place in a heartbeat and won’t complain as much because those paychecks are larger than what they made at their last company.

> To be brutally honest, the stereotypical snarky HNer who is promoted to Staff Eng with an option to become an EM is the worst hire in any organization.

I think the trend where companies made Staff Eng into a pseudo-management role without reports was a mistake. It gets defended heavily by people who hold that role, but in the real world the Staff Eng people I’ve worked with who don’t really write code but float around and tell people what to do and how to do it become bad for an organization over time. It’s a trap because those people are often very valuable right after they’re promoted, but the roles where they become disconnected from writing code but retain the engineer title leads to a disconnectedness that flips toward counterproductive after a few years. It goes from having an experienced person coaching others to having someone with outdated and mostly abstract knowledge who gets to gatekeep everyone’s activities based on how things worked several years ago when they were still hands on.
Show HN: AI Lint your agents work to build faster and better
by keepamovin | 2026-01-24 15:58:02+00:00
I've been using this thing I made called "AI Lint" it's a collection of doctrine, ant rejected anti-patterns that I noticed agents both failing to use and overly leaning into.

It's also general patterns for debugging, and architecture to help agents manage complexity in large codebases.

It's kind of cool to watch Codex say: "Also, to dig in, I need to follow the repo’s AI Lint rules first. I can start reading those and then inspect the recent changes. Do you want me to proceed?"

These are non-syntactic, non-mehanical, senior engineering wisdom that is tailored to specific languages and frameworks, won of experience, and aiming to let the AI simulate an senior architect's "taste", rather than just hammering away until code "basically works".

The problem of AI spaghetti code is real, and it's easier to embed some hard doctrine and rejects into the repo that agents must follow to prevent their nonsense (and reduce time to target) than it is to fix their problems later.

Been there, done that. Now I built AI Lint. And it's yours too. For a fee, but there's a free taster to get the idea: AI get syntax fluently, but they don't readily pick up the "grain" of a language.

I'm proud of the name I think it really resonsates and captures what this is both "lint for AI" but also "AI-native lint" that leans into their strength of complex nuance understanding and task following, while patching their weaknesses for really bringing the right solutions to bear at the right time in compelx situations.

The paid version also has sections for secrets security, a guide on how to author your own doctrine that AI will follow, and an override protocol you can use to resolve conflicts between conflicting doctrine (it's all tradeoffs), or just override the lint for your own team's taste.

On the whole agents are needed and going to be here. In the meantime I think domain specific context-boosting like this, and super precise tooling to let them quickly jump to tasks while retaining contextual clarity is going to be two (among many) huge levers. For now, AI still lack what senior devs bring to the table - depth, wisdom, and great design/arch instincts -- but senior devs can't work as fast, unaided, as an AI can. So it's better to figure out a way to work together optimally. As there's no point using an AI that makes subpar work you have to redo. AI Lint is a small, hopefully useful, step in that direction.

I hope you will try it, find value in it and pay for it, and support its future development by staying on board as new packs land for additional language, frameworks and useful domains.

Check it out! https://ai-lint.dosaygo.com :)
by hunter-gatherer | 2026-01-24 15:58:03+00:00
I would also argue that _what_ personal computing means to most people has also evolved, even with younger generations. My gen Z nephew the other day was faberglasted when he learned I use my Documents, Videos, Desktop folders, ect. He literally asked "What is the Documents folder even for?". To most people, stuff is just magically somewhere (the cloud) and when they get a new machine tbey just expect it all to be there and work. I feel like these cryptography and legality discussions here on HackerNews always miss the mark because we overestimate hiw much most people care. Speaking of younger generations, I also get the feeling that there isn't such a thing as "digital sovereignty" or "ownership", at least not by the same definitions we gen x and older millennials internalize those definitions.

Across the generations, there are always a few groups to where cryptographic ownership really matter, such as journalists, protesters, and so on. Here on HN I feel like we tend to over-geeneralize these use cases to everybody, and then we are surprised when most people don't actually care.