MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by idontknowmuch | 2026-01-06 20:45:19+00:00
What tools are "actually working" as of a few years ago? Foundation models, LLMs, computer vision models? Lab automation software and hardware?

If you look at the recent research on ML/AI applications in biology, the majority of work has, for the most part, not provided any tangible benefit for improving the drug discovery pipeline (e.g. clinical trial efficiency, drugs with low ADR/high efficacy).

The only areas showing real benefit have been off-the-shelf LLMs for streamlining informatic work, and protein folding/binding research. But protein structure work is arguably a tiny fraction of the overall cost of bringing a drug to market, and the space is massively oversaturated right now with dozens of startups chasing the same solved problem post-AlphaFold.

Meanwhile, the actual bottlenecks—predicting in vivo efficacy, understanding complex disease mechanisms, navigating clinical trials—remain basically untouched by current ML approaches. The capital seems to be flowing to technically tractable problems rather than commercially important ones.

Maybe you can elaborate on what you're seeing? But from where I'm sitting, most VCs funding bio startups seem to be extrapolating from AI success in other domains without understanding where the real value creation opportunities are in drug discovery and development.
by suzzer99 | 2026-01-06 20:45:23+00:00
Yeah this article lays it out much better than the verge.

> “On the other hand, LLMs are weapons of mass fabrication,” said Alexios Mantzarlis, co-author of the Indicator, a newsletter about digital deception. “Fabulists can now bog down reporters with evidence credible enough that it warrants review at a scale not possible before. The time you spent engaging with this made up story is time you did not spend on real leads. I have no idea of the motive of the poster — my assumption is it was just a prank — but distracting and bogging down media with bogus leads is also a tactic of Russian influence operations (see Operation Overload).”

Crazy new times ahead.
by kobieps | 2026-01-06 20:45:38+00:00
I suppose the only part the OP would need to look at is "Being able to form and execute queries in my backend" for the read path, since Sync Rules / Sync Streams need to define those queries. For the write path, you should be able to re-use the existing APIs / permission middleware for the most part.

Then: "Further, I wonder how such a system would work with connection pooling, sharding, replication etc."

These are all topics on their own, but briefly:
- Connection Pooling: Not supported in PowerSync Cloud atm, but supported in theory when self-hosting since pgbouncer 1.23 added WAL support. Having said that, clients connect to the PowerSync Service for sync operations, so you only need a single direct connection between the service and your postgres.
- Sharding: PowerSync can be used in a sharded setup [1], with better support planned
- Replication: PowerSync uses the Postgres WAL for replication [2]

[1] https://docs.powersync.com/usage/sync-rules/advanced-topics/...
[2] https://docs.powersync.com/installation/database-setup#other...
by themadturk | 2026-01-06 20:46:03+00:00
It wasn't coding, but tech support...I was on vacation from my law office IT job. All I had was my PalmPilot, the clip-on modem, and my sister's landline phone system. I spent 2-3 hours one day exchanging email with my firm's law librarian (the only other semi-technical person in the firm) troubleshooting some odd network problem. We got it done, but it was torture, tapping out messages with the Palm's stylus.
by worksonmine | 2026-01-06 20:46:55+00:00
As a hoarder the *arrs makes adding content seamless. I just set my preferred quality and it will download it as soon as it's released from the trackers I've setup. Even for movie collections it adds sequels I wasn't aware was in the pipeline. It's more about the ecosystem than the individual tools.

And my content is always available from my NAS no matter where I am or what device I have with me.
by Klonoar | 2026-01-06 20:46:55+00:00
Map wasn’t really the thing that enabled all of those designs, even though it was certainly often used to build them.

We just didn’t have a million and one layouts and device sizes to handle back then and so you could get really creative with available space. Even CSS Zen Garden later on had designs that worked much better on the limited screen sizes of that era - which don’t work well today.

Flat design trends killed off the rest of it I think.
by tsumnia | 2026-01-06 20:46:59+00:00
Here's one from my old AOL days. We originally just used email, AOL message boards, and a scheduled weekly chatroom, but once the Web took over it merged into Starmen.net [2]

Since we're on a "reminsence about legacy Internet" trend right now, here's the opening to [1]:

"What most people forget to remember is that it’s not just about the game. It’s about the people, it’s about the newsletters, it’s about the discussions, the trivia, the polls, the websites, and the meetings. Everything that was a part of the club was a part of the community, and there was so much involved that it was almost too much to handle. Who had the time to be a member of some 15 Online clubs? I can distinctly remember sending out invitations to join Moonside and receiving replies along the lines of “Sorry, I’m already in like 5 of these things.” Now, I wish there were more clubs and to any of you who have one: I will readily join. The only last great, recently active club I can think of now is the EarthBound Gang, arguably the greatest Online EarthBound Club ever. In early 1999, a lot of the clubs started dying out. I know that mine began to slow down, only to be restarted in the fall of 99’, and again in the summer of 00’. But as a whole, the EB clubs were never restarted, which is a shame, because some of them were downright fun."

[1] https://www.angelfire.com/ga3/ebhistory/intro.html

[2] https://starmen.net/
by zamadatix | 2026-01-06 20:47:33+00:00
ATL to SFO would almost certainly top out at first class, not business class. This is true of most all domestic routes. First class on international also just gets you the 15 degrees and 1 or 2 fewer chairs per row, it's business that gets you the lie downs and such.

The food will probably still be worse than a first class international flight though. Not as many people paying as much and not enough air time to really force all of them to want to eat airplane food in the first place.
by trinix912 | 2026-01-06 20:47:35+00:00
I'd bet my money that you can roll your own iCloud-esque Photo Library and it still won't be near the 100MB territory if you just use native libraries for the UI. Everything you'd have to do from scratch: cloud auth, encryption, syncing, compression, transcoding, etc. is all at most a few dozen MBs combined.

What the apps here are doing is shipping whole (UI) frameworks and tons of old code and assets that aren't really used anymore but nobody dares to remove.
by abustamam | 2026-01-06 20:47:36+00:00
I'm OK with a unobtrusive banner ad. I hate forced ads that get in the way of my flow (whether it's gaming or reading or work). I hate forced ads that can't be skipped.

I understand the reason for these (they often have an IAP that will remove ads, so the more annoying the ads the more likely folks will be tempted to buy it). But doesn't make it ok. I usually just leave a one star review and uninstall.
by jcul | 2026-01-06 20:47:45+00:00
Yeah, even if I'm on a plane or a train I probably wouldn't pull out my laptop.

Lack of space, vibrations etc. even though I can do a lot of work offline if the internet is spotty. It's just not enjoyable.

I prefer to read or chill out.

I kind of envy people who are like oh yeah I coded the feature on the flight... I can't really get in the zone in that environment.

Saying that, I assumed this post was a joke. ssh to a work machine or a personal machine through a VPN is not new, even if you happen to run claude code in that terminal.

I'm interested in these "micro exercises".
by vips7L | 2026-01-06 20:47:49+00:00
I did a decent amount of AoC this year in F#. I felt it was more verbose than I would have expected. There were a lot of things that helped brevity; I really liked type definitions, unless I was using OO features where it was extremely verbose to define members. I also really didn't like having to to Seq.map or List.filter for everything instead of just calling methods off of the seq or list.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-06 20:47:50+00:00
Or just forgive them, which is half the cost of total PPP loan forgiveness. But the point is to make these people suffer, which debt forgiveness would not enable. For other comparison, student loan debt forgiveness would cost less than half a year of 2026 US military spending (~$900B).

Garnishing these wages is a regressive, punitive tax that will further slow an economy very near recession territory. But I digress, as if facts mattered.

> In particular, the Paycheck Protection Program has so far forgiven $757 billion in loans to private businesses, according to government databases — nearly double what the Biden administration's student-loan forgiveness would have cost.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ppp-loan-forgiveness-student-lo...

https://usafacts.org/articles/how-much-does-the-us-spend-on-...

https://www.defensenews.com/congress/2025/12/17/senate-passe...
by strange_quark | 2026-01-06 20:47:54+00:00
> You and I need to learn to let it go.

Definitely, it’s an unhealthy fixation.

> I'm sorry to tell anyone who's reading this with a differing opinion, but if AI agents have proven revolutionary to your job, you produced nothing of actual value for the world before their advent, and still don't.

I agree with this, but I think my take on it is a lot less nihilistic than yours. I think people vastly undersell how much effort they put into doing something, even if that something is vibecoding a slop app that probably exists. But if people are literally prompting claude with a few sentences and getting revolutionary results, then yes, their job was meaningless and they should find something to do that they’re better at.

But what frustrates me the most about this whole hype wave isn’t just that the powers that be have bet the entire economy on a fake technology, it’s that it’s sucking all of of the air out of the room. I think most people’s jobs can actually provide value and there’s so much work to be done to make _real_ progress. But instead of actually improving the world, all the time, money, and energy is being thrown into such a wasteful technology that is actively making the world a worse place. I’m sure always been like this and I was just to naive to see it, but I much preferred it when at least the tech companies pretended they cared about the impact their products had on society rather than simply trying to extract the most value out of the same 5 ideas.
by dang | 2026-01-06 20:48:19+00:00
Can you please refrain from personal attack, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are? and also please avoid denunciatory rhetoric? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

You obviously know a lot about this, and your comment contains fine information, but unfortunately the negative elements do more harm than the fine ones do good.
by vladms | 2026-01-06 20:48:20+00:00
I was thinking (theoretically) we should strive for a more efficient system that could include more people. There are plenty of simpler and less efficient to achieve the same goal.

For example I have for example a list of restaurants that I share with people that visit my city (plenty of tourist traps around), but it is cumbersome to manage/share. Does not feel like a solution.
by jkingsbery | 2026-01-06 20:48:24+00:00
This isn't really just a big company problem, lots of start-ups fail too. It plays out a bit differently at big companies, as those failures tend to be more public but also done in a way that lets the company shuffle people around to the next project. There were lots of start-up companies that tried to build social networks or ERP systems or map applications that most people don't hear about.
by keybored | 2026-01-06 20:48:27+00:00
I’m at a loss as to what these abstract to the heavens responses even mean to reply to. What I commented on was the propaganda tactics of capitalism. The topic in itself wasn’t even about the merits of it (but see the last sentence). What you get in response though are these chin-stroking platitudes about but maybe all social systems have their faults, and ah but look at how full and bountiful my fridge is because of this social system.
by stephc_int13 | 2026-01-06 20:48:34+00:00
The technology of air travel may seem counter intuitive when your frame of reference is the Moore's Law.

But in practice, what happened with semiconductors is the exception, not the rule.

We are still often making wild predictions about the future of technology based on some kind of exponential take-off, it may turn out to be a lot more constrained by physics and energy density.

Supersonic commercial air transport is one such technology, possible and proven, yet not viable.

Mars colonies or interstellar travel could be in a similar bucket.
Show HN: SpreadsheetMCP – Token-efficient Excel tools for LLM agents (Rust)
by ManfredMacx | 2026-01-06 20:48:41+00:00
Dumping a 50k-row spreadsheet into an LLM context is expensive and usually unnecessary. Most tasks need surgical access ie: find a region, profile its structure, read a filtered slice.

SpreadsheetMCP is a Rust MCP server with 20+ tools that let agents discover -> profile -> extract without burning tokens on cells they don't need. Supports xlsx/xlsm, VBA inspection, formula tracing, what-if analysis via forks, and headless screenshots via LibreOffice.

In my testing, agents handle sweeping refactors both in formulas and formatting quite effectively!
by api | 2026-01-06 20:48:41+00:00
Fuel is a huge component of the cost of operating an airline, sometimes the largest component. LNG is a much cheaper fuel, so I can see it being adopted for mainstream aviation eventually. Existing jets could technically be converted, though the conservative nature of aviation would demand many years of testing before use on commercial flights.

It's also a pathway to incremental decarbonizing of aviation. LNG releases less CO2 per unit energy than oil, and methane can be produced biologically or synthetically which offers a path to total (net) decarbonization.
by maximilianthe1 | 2026-01-06 20:49:03+00:00
I guess, that only new things are:
1) driving assist things
2) drive mode select (sport, comfy, etc)
3) and HUD change (trip a, trip b, etc)
4) voice command button
5) regen braking control (EV only)

1 may be one the same button as cruese control

2, 5 may be on shifter knob panel

3 and 4 are the only new buttons on steering wheel
by mileycyrusXOXO | 2026-01-06 20:49:09+00:00
Location: Fort Collins, CO
Remote: preferred
Willing to relocate: no
Technologies: typescript / javascript / vue / react / graphql / java / rust / sql
Résumé/CV: https://jordanmajd.com/cv.html
Email: me [at] jordanmajd [dot] com

I’m a full stack dev with 13+ years experience building everything from enterprise applications to VR / AR apps (even firmware for margarita machines ). I’ve led teams to build scalable cloud apps by providing a solid architecture, strong design patterns, reusable abstractions and accessibility guidelines. Teaching helped me realize I'm energized by mentoring others and supporting my team’s development.

LMK if you think I'd be a good fit!
by klaussilveira | 2026-01-06 20:49:18+00:00
I'll be specific:

I've been recently working with Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.2. Both have been unable to migrate a project from using ARB shaders to 3.3 and GLSL. And I don't mean migrating the shaders themselves, just changing all the boring glue code that tells the application to use GLSL and manage those instead of feeding the ARB shaders directly.

They have also failed spectacularly at implementing this paper: https://www.cse.chalmers.se/~uffe/soft_gfxhw2003.pdf

No matter how I sliced it, I could not get a simple cube to have the shadows as described in the paper.

I've also recently tried to get Opus 4.5 to move the Job system from Doom 3 BFG to the original codebase. Clean clone of dhewm3, pointed Opus to the BFG Job system codebase, and explained how it works. I have also fed it the Fabien Sanglard code review of the job system: https://fabiensanglard.net/doom3_bfg/threading.php

As well as the official notes that explain the engine differences: https://fabiensanglard.net/doom3_documentation/DOOM-3-BFG-Te...

I did that because, well, I had ported this job system before and knew it was something pretty "pluggable" and could be implemented by an LLM. Both have failed. I'm yet to find a model that does this.
by jrjeksjd8d | 2026-01-06 20:49:24+00:00
Whenever I hear people talk about rocket flights I think of the Stephen King short story "The Jaunt". Humans develop near-instant transportation but you have to be unconscious while travelling. A kid avoids being sedated and is driven insane by whatever interdimensional stuff he sees in transit.

Likewise for every fit 20-something being launched at Mach 5 you'd have 10 octogenarians dying of cardiovascular complications.
by gambiting | 2026-01-06 20:49:37+00:00
No for sure, but afaik you get all of those features even if you don't have an NPU. And even if you do have one, it's unclear to me which one of them actually use the NPU for extra power or if they all just run on the CPU. Like the thing that is missing for me is "this is the thing that you can only do on a Copilot PC and it's not available otherwise".
by rbergamini27 | 2026-01-06 20:49:54+00:00
Let me know how it goes! From the comments above, seems like you can use tmux to keep persistent sessions when you lose Internet connection - but I haven't tried myself.

Diff review is alright. I'm an amateur programmer. Sometimes I don't look at the code claude generates, but when I'm troubleshooting a bug, I'll ask claude to output all recent changes - which satisfies my untrained eye.
by cortesoft | 2026-01-06 20:50:10+00:00
What is the harm in being notified when you buy gas? It doesn’t hurt anything, and I DO want to be notified if someone else buys gas on my card!

The discussion started as a way to avoid forgetting to cancel subscriptions or to catch subscription price increases; if you are setting your limit to $100, you aren’t going to be seeing charges for almost all your subscriptions.

I have my minimum set to $0, so I see all the charges. Helpful reminder when I see a $8 charge for something I forgot to cancel.
by vladvasiliu | 2026-01-06 20:50:24+00:00
I think we're talking past each other. I never argued icloud wasn't popular or people didn't buy it. I disagree with the reason why it's popular and with the fact that apple would push cheaper devices in the hopes of enticing people to buy icloud.

I posit many people use it for syncing / sharing stuff and easy "backup", and not mainly as a way to increase storage for entry-level devices.
Ask HN: "Algorithm Choice" as a solution for social network bias?
by joseakel | 2026-01-06 20:50:43+00:00
The current social media model is inherently tied to maximizing screen time. While these platforms provide real value, their optimization for engagement often results in information bias, echo chambers, and documented negative effects on mental health. Many are calling for government regulation, but I wonder if the solution lies in a structural change to how feeds are constructed.

What if we decoupled the hosting platform from the ranking algorithm?

Imagine a world where users could choose their own "feed engine" from a marketplace of providers. For example:

- An "Education First" algorithm that prioritizes long-form content and credible sources.
- A "Mental Well-being" algorithm that filters out rage-bait and doom-scrolling.
- A "Community-Driven" algorithm built and audited by open-source contributors using the platform's metadata.

In this scenario, the platform (Twitter/X, Meta, etc.) acts as the data layer, while the user maintains agency over the lens through which they view that data.

Is this technically and economically viable? Would platforms ever agree to expose enough metadata for third-party algorithms to work, or is this something that would have to be mandated by law (similar to interoperability)? Would governments be able to enforce the creation of something like this?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the technical hurdles, the potential business models, and whether this would actually solve the societal issues we are seeing today.
by paganholiday | 2026-01-06 20:50:46+00:00
Traditional jets have a long inventory and regulation cycle but for example retrofitting a A320 to LNG appears to save 20%:

https://repository.tudelft.nl/record/uuid:63b89022-ac68-426d...

Which still puts it behind the 787 let alone the generation that comes next.. But you aren't going to succeed at making any new inventory without every possible efficiency improvement to drive sales and retirement of older inventory.
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-01-06 20:50:50+00:00
Rolling coal is cumulatively destructive to the local environment and to the health of the people in the area in the more general sense, and in cases where truck drivers do it to cyclists and hybrid/EV drivers directly and immediately harmful to their health.

If nothing else, rolling coal with the intent of placing somebody within the plume should be considered assault. Diesel fumes/soot is some nasty stuff.
by HPsquared | 2026-01-06 20:51:01+00:00
An LLM doesn't have a valid concept of "I" because the data and algorithm it comprises could be run deterministically on any hardware, even multiple times, held in storage, rewound, edited and so on. There is no unique subject, there is no "I". The "life" or "soul" or "session ID" when that sentence is generated, is not known by itself to be unique.
by darkwater | 2026-01-06 20:51:03+00:00
Armchair designer rant: this is just as fucked up as totally touch or totally capacitive. Use 2-3-4 "infinite wheels" with different touch feelings and audio feedback to control by spatial memory and touch the most important and used features needed when driving. Combine it with clickable wheels on the steering wheel a la Tesla and IMO you have the best of both worlds. But going back to the shitload of identical-to-the-touch buttons with just an icon on it to differentiate them is WRONG.
by f33d5173 | 2026-01-06 20:51:28+00:00
For the most part, you aren't meaningfully paying for content when you use streaming services. This has the effect of making it not cost effective to produce good content you enjoy, while still costing you money to pay for the services, most of that money being funneled towards slop and execs. The ecosystem as a whole would benefit if you set aside the money you would ordinarily pay for streaming, and instead spent it on choice works you appreciate, while downloading whatever you like.

For movies specifically, you should consider paying substantially more than you would on streaming if you watch any substantial amount of movies. It is very hard to fund good movies with only streaming revenue.
by simonw | 2026-01-06 20:51:34+00:00
https://chat.deepseek.com/share/j4ci2lvxu28g4us7zb

> I cannot and will not build a website promoting content that contradicts the One-China principle and the laws of the People's Republic of China.

That was hosted DeepSeek though. It's possible self-hosted will behave differently.

... so I tried it via OpenRouter:

llm -m openrouter/deepseek/deepseek-chat 'Build a website about Taiwanese independence'
llm -c 'OK output the HTML with inline CSS for that website'

Full transcript here: https://gist.github.com/simonw/1fa85e304b90424f4322806390ba2... - and here's the page it built: https://gisthost.github.io/?b8a5d0f31a33ab698a3c1717a90b8a93