MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nikisil80 | 2026-01-06 21:09:21+00:00
Yeah, I do tend to have a rather nihilistic view on things, so apologies.

I really think we're just cooked at this point. The amount of people (some great friends whom I respect) that have told me in casual conversation that if their LLM were taken from them tomorrow, they wouldn't know how to do their work (or some flavour of that statement) has made me realize how deep the problem is.

We could go on and on about this, but let's both agree to try and look inward more and attempt to keep our own things in order, while most other people get hooked on the absolute slop machine that is AI. Eventually, the LLM providers will need to start ramping up the costs of their subscriptions and maybe then will people start clicking that the shitty code that was generated for their pointless/useless app is not worth the actual cost of inference (which some conservative estimates put out to thousands of dollars per month on a subscription basis). For now, people are just putting their heads in the sand and assuming that physicists will somehow find a way to use quantum computers to speed up inference by a factor of 10^20 in the next years, while simultaneously slashing its costs (lol).

But hey, Opus 4.5 can cook up a functional app that goes into your emails and retrieves all outstanding orders - revolutionary. Definitely worth the many kWh and thousands of liters of water required, eh?

Cheers.
by bombcar | 2026-01-06 21:09:31+00:00
The thing is, if you can charter your own jet, you can make it travel on your schedule and suddenly cutting travel time in half isn't quite as important (even rich people sleep sometime).

It's a weird niche that is unlikely to be filled for awhile, if ever - partially because the era of the supersonic jet was before the Internet, which now gives even normies telepresence that is "good enough" if not perfect.
by asukachikaru | 2026-01-06 21:09:33+00:00
This is my bottleneck too. I'm all for paying artists, and the hustle of setting up self host doesn't bother me (maybe not for my wife though, who is way less tech-y than me and is in my spotify family plan.) But the benefit of tens of millions of music, a search away, is simply too much for me to give up. I do my annually retrospective in music, and Billie Eilish was my back-to-back favorite artist of the year. Without streaming service, I probably wouldn't have tried her music at the first place.
by biammer | 2026-01-06 21:10:49+00:00
When you imagine my position, "I hate these companies for democratizing code/art", then debate that it is called a strawman logical fallacy.

Ascribing the goals of "democratize code/art" onto these companies and their products is called delusion.

I am sure the 3 letter agency directors on these company boards are thrilled you think they left their lifelong careers solely to finally realize their dream to allow you to code and "manifest your artistic ideas".
by marcoaapfortes | 2026-01-06 21:11:06+00:00
No embeddings at all, neither stored nor on-the-fly.

Instead of converting queries to vectors, Mantic.sh uses structural inference, it ranks files based on path components, folder depth, naming patterns, and git metadata.

So "stripe webhook" matches /services/stripe/webhook.handler.ts highly because the path literally contains both terms in logical positions, not because their embeddings are close in vector space.

"Cognitive" just means it mirrors how developers already think about code organization, it encodes intent into paths, so searching paths directly often beats semantic similarity.
by roenxi | 2026-01-06 21:11:15+00:00
Big companies also fail to keep their own markets with some regularity, the tech companies are built over the ruins of industries that solved the same problem in the days of yesteryear with different tools.

The view of the article seems to be that companies solve problems. The way they solve problems is actually baked in to the structure of the management rather than any individual (sometimes there is an individual like a CEO with enough vision to reshape the management structure to solve new problems, although that is rare). It is also why acquisitions fail so easily - if you take an existing company and graft it under an existing management structure geared to solve some other problem then there is a lot of risk.
by jamie_ca | 2026-01-06 21:11:20+00:00
The difference is how they're consumed you don't sit down on Netflix and say "put some scifi on shuffle for 8h", you sit down and choose a show.

If you're the kind of person who would manually queue up 100% of your songs for the day then Spotify Generic songs aren't an issue. If you just hit a "2020s R&B" playlist and go that's where it feels more sketchy.
by tialaramex | 2026-01-06 21:11:30+00:00
Right. A good mental model would be to imagine every crate of Rust source has an associated Edition and there's a sort of "pre-processing" step where we translate that into the latest version of Rust seamlessly, preserving its exact meaning.

So e.g. 2018 Edition said r# at the start of an identifier now marks a "raw" identifier. Keywords promise never to start this way, so r#foo is the same as foo but r#foo even works if some lunatic makes foo a keyword whereas just foo would become a keyword if that happened. As a result if you write

let async = 5;

... in Rust 1.0 that translator treats it exactly as though you'd written

let r#async = 5;

... in a modern Rust edition because these days the keyword async exists.
by trickypr | 2026-01-06 21:11:35+00:00
I think a lot of your examples are flawed. Google didn’t build the initial version of YouTube, they bought it.

A lot of Apple’s apps predate the App Store. The apps that came later had limited use until Apple spent a lot of time refining them. Think Apple Maps.

Microsoft released Word for Mac a year before they released Windows 1.0, so Windows was “down the stack” for them.
by Freak_NL | 2026-01-06 21:11:38+00:00
There is another way. Spend some money on artists, directly (digital downloads, merchandise, concerts, etc.). Pirate all music.

If you still spend as much on music as before (for the sake of argument), more of that amount now goes to the people who actually make music. It's a big middle finger to Spotify and the likes.

Of course, the obvious issue is that your money now isn't distributed fairly according to some viewpoints. You like band A, and buy some of their merchandise or a CD, but you also pirate singer B's music, and don't pay them a dime. On the other hand, if you want to stop helping these mega-platforms exploit artists and users and just generally suck, piracy seems like a good answer if you can do it without risking yourself.

It won't help much in the short term though, this is not an option for most people, but I won't judge anyone taking this route and can see how it can be ethically sound for many (but certainly not for all).
by PlasmaDiffusion | 2026-01-06 21:12:10+00:00
Location: Ontario, Canada (EST)
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About Me: Full Stack Developer (3 YoE) with a heavy emphasis on React/Next.js and Mobile (React Native). In addition to that I also have a year of game development experience in Unity and Unreal Engine. Actively seeking full-time roles and open to part-time.

I am Canada-based and open to discussing hourly rates that benefit from exchange rates for US or international teams.
by Sean-Der | 2026-01-06 21:12:14+00:00
Sorry you hit these issues :(

Instead of restart/renegotiation can you re-timestamp the packets? The example swap-tracks[0] shows a good way to do that. The renegotiation (especially multiple times with no real changes) is gonna be a PITA :)

Also you should share in https://pion.ly/discord other people would love to see this. Super cool project.

[0] https://github.com/pion/webrtc/blob/master/examples/swap-tra...
by jihadjihad | 2026-01-06 21:13:04+00:00
I remember having to do an image map as part of a web design project in school, circa 2005. True to 2005, the image was one simple rectangular banner at the top of the page, with text for different pages like About and Portfolio etc. placed along it. It felt like a (cool) hack that you could define regions for the text to route to different pages on click.

Of course we have modern solutions [0] nowadays but that sure seemed cool 20 years ago!

0: https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/CurrentMap/StateDroughtMonito...
by marcoaapfortes | 2026-01-06 21:13:07+00:00
Fair point the README focuses more on benchmarks than implementation here's the short version:

1. Use `git ls-files` instead of walking the filesystem (huge speed win - dropped Chromium 59GB scan from 6.6s to 0.46s)
2. Parse each file path into components (folders, filename, extension)
3. Score each file based on how query terms match path components, weighted by position and depth
4. Return top N matches sorted by score

The core insight: /services/stripe/webhook.handler.ts already encodes the semantic relationship between "stripe" and "webhook" through its structure. No need to read file contents or generate embeddings.

I should add an architecture doc to the repo, thanks for the nudge.
by rtkwe | 2026-01-06 21:13:09+00:00
1 is all over the place depending on what your car has; my wife's car has lane keeping and blind spot monitors and those live in a knockout panel down and left of the steering wheel.

2 I've usually found in the buttons near the shifter

3 I'm not sure what you're referring to? If it's the little screen generally between the speed and battery/rpm display those controls are usually on the steering wheel in my experience.

4 Steering wheel, in every car I've seen it in and that's often standard across the models

5 This one I've only had one experience with and that's my wife's Kia Niro EV and those are on what would be shifter paddles in a car with a gear box.

The number of buttons on steering wheels between my decade old gas Golf and my wife's few year old Niro EV are shockingly similar though presented and arranged differently. Both have 4 buttons and two directional pairs (audio control for skipping on one, volume on the other, cruise control speed on another and one dimension of the hud paging on the last) though the Niro has the pairs as rocker switches that can click for one extra button I suppose.
by pwrsysengineer | 2026-01-06 21:13:29+00:00
Given that I only see circuit length data for high voltages and above, I assume this tool only considers power=line and not power=minor_line? I couldn't find confirmation of this in the documentation.

Does this project identify the specific locations with data quality issues? For someone who is interested in contributing by improving the data, a convenient list of nodes/ways that need work would help.
by Cyan488 | 2026-01-06 21:13:36+00:00
I think both are reconciled by:

> 5. Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the users self-expression.

Let the decorations be decorations and art be art, while the tools we use to observe or create those other things should be instantly transparent extensions of the user.
by nine_k | 2026-01-06 21:13:49+00:00
No, "motivation" is what puts one into motion, hence the name. AIs have constraints and even agendas, which can be triggered by a prompt. But it's not action, it's reaction.

DeepSeek may produce a perfectly good web site explaining why Taiwanese independence is not a thing, and how Taiwan wants back to the mainland. But it's won't produce such a web site by its own motivation, only in response to an external stimulus.
by quickthrowman | 2026-01-06 21:13:57+00:00
I’m very fond of my washing machine that uses electromagnetic relays, using digital controls for a washing machine is dumb and is only done to save a tiny bit of money and also I suppose to engineer the bathtub curve of product failure in.

All you really need are some valve actuators, timing relays, regular relays, a couple rotary switches, a water level switch, and contactors for the motor.

You need the valve actuators, water level switch, and motor contactors/controller anyways if you’re doing digital control, I’d rather have relays with a lifetime of 10 million actuations handle the very simple logic.
by Freak_NL | 2026-01-06 21:14:15+00:00
The piracy route can even be ethical. Compare:

* Have a Spotify subscription, listen to all 10 albums of some artist.

* Pirate everything, but buy a T-shirt from that artist.

* Buy one album digitally (their latest), and pirate the rest.

What is the artist earning from your contributions in these three cases?
by obblekk | 2026-01-06 21:14:17+00:00
One big reason supersonic can be economic now is the increase in wealth in Asia since the 80s.

Transpacific flights from California have no sonic boom population issues for 90% of the flight, and there’s already a large market of people spending $10k on business travel.

Reducing travel time from 12hrs to 4hrs would be a product with a lot more demand than 7hrs to 3hrs to Europe.
by sedatk | 2026-01-06 21:14:49+00:00
I stopped my Spotify subscription and gave Apple Music and Youtube Music a try for a few months. I'm now again a Spotify user, despite that Youtube Music is still included in my Youtube Premium.

The apps are terrible in terms of usability, performance, and reliability. I couldn't believe Apple dropped the ball on so hard on this, but then I remembered iTunes and started believing again.

Most of my problem is basic necessities. For instance, it's impossible to remove a playing song from its current playlist on competing apps. That's such a common, basic scenario that Spotify can perform easily.

Youtube Music has horrible sound quality, no need to say it doesn't provide a lossless option. Apple Music is on par with Spotify in sound quality but that's pretty much where Apple's competitiveness ends. I had to struggle with Apple Music even with the simplest things.

My Apple Music summary: https://bsky.app/profile/ssg.dev/post/3m2mvmybjr225

My Youtube Music summary: https://bsky.app/profile/ssg.dev/post/3m5ms6fxsrs27
by palata | 2026-01-06 21:15:17+00:00
> Writing in a non-compiled language already puts you in a disadvantage

Both Kotlin and Swift are compiled.

> But this is just the standard I set to myself - the entire industry clearly has different priorities.

I think you just underestimate the performance of Java/Kotlin/Swift, languages that you admitted you don't have any experience with.

> tho with good debugging tools and LLMs I have found this to not be a problem anymore

Again: try modern languages with good debugging tools and LLMs :-). I think your bias is that this is all you know.

> because I've proven that it is fixable by caring about UI/UX

It requires care, which means more effort. All that for being at best similar to the native tools, but probably never exactly the same. And it cannot be better, because the native ones are the ones defining how it should be.

> I can't stretch how FUN, easy, and overall a great experience to develop with QML and C++ together, it's just HOW GUI should always been

But you said you don't have experience with the native Android/iOS way. I personally have used QML/C++, Flutter, Android (Java/Kotlin, the old XML way and the new Compose way) and SwiftUI. QML/C++ is by very far the worst.

I would advise that you try either Kotlin/Compose or Swift/SwiftUI to get an idea. You can still use C++ to share some code (say you write a complex library in C++, no need to rewrite it in Kotlin and Swift), but starting a new mobile UI with QML these days is just madness IMHO :-).
by andreas_42 | 2026-01-06 21:15:33+00:00
Usually either the Jellyfin/Navidrome app/web UI, or a native player app that talks to your NAS over the VPN.

For iOS I ended up building a small app for my own setup that streams files straight from the NAS (SFTP/FTP) over WireGuard/Tailscale so no media server in between. TestFlight if anyone wants to try: https://testflight.apple.com/join/PaQAsGcM
by kiddico | 2026-01-06 21:15:35+00:00
A6000 and A6600 owner checking in : I love the boxy look! The viewfinder on the left makes lining up long shots kinda hard though. I have to zoom out to 50mm find my subject (birds) then zoom back to 400mm+, so I have been eyeing the more expensive models just to have it in the center. Idk if it would even help lol.
by mnemosyneai | 2026-01-06 21:15:45+00:00
I built Doppelganger, a self-hosted browser automation platform that lets developers and teams run automated tasks entirely on their own infrastructure. It’s designed for situations where privacy, control, and reliability are critical, and SaaS solutions aren’t suitable.

*Problem*
Most browser automation tools or workflow SaaS platforms require exposing internal systems or relying on third-party servers. This creates problems such as:
- Data privacy concerns
- Limited control over execution and environment
- Difficulty scaling complex automated tasks
- Challenges with custom triggers or internal services

Many developers end up writing brittle scripts or local hacks that are hard to maintain or integrate.

*Solution*
Doppelganger lets you:
- Run headless browser automation on your own servers or cloud instances
- Trigger tasks programmatically via REST or WebSocket APIs
- Orchestrate tasks with proper logging, error handling, and scheduling
- Extend functionality with custom scripts or modules
- Monitor tasks optionally via a lightweight UI while keeping automation headless

*Technical Details*
- Node.js-based, modular architecture
- Docker-ready for easy deployment
- Full logging, error handling, and orchestration for production-grade automation
- Open-source core with optional cloud SaaS layer for orchestration

*Why it matters*
Doppelganger enables teams to automate complex browser tasks securely and reliably without relying on external SaaS. It’s ideal for:
- Developers and teams behind firewalls
- Internal tools that require automation but cannot leave private infrastructure
- Anyone building repeatable browser automation with full control

*Feedback & discussion*
I’d love to hear from the HN community:
- How do you currently run browser automation on self-hosted infrastructure?
- What are the biggest pain points with existing tools?
- Any features you think are critical for self-hosted automation?

Full docs and setup: https://doppelgangerdev.com

Open to feedback, suggestions, and technical discussion. Thanks!
by vablings | 2026-01-06 21:16:25+00:00
Mega yachts are designed using CAD software, the prototypes are milled or even sometimes now 3d printed out of huge foam panel. Advanced hulls are constructed from a number of materials and methods. All of these things required bespoke skilled labor that cannot be replaced with robots or AI.

I think mega yachts are stupid, that doesn't mean they shouldn't exist and to act like they are the same as even 20 years ago is willfully ignorant
by sublinear | 2026-01-06 21:16:27+00:00
I'm having a hard time thinking of a good time signature that accents on a subdivision smaller than an eighth. Can you give an example?

I also don't know any musicians that would count everything. I usually hear "and", "and" "uh", "ee" "and" "uh", etc. between the downbeats and numbers are typically used to count whole notes.
by xp84 | 2026-01-06 21:16:38+00:00
Wow. The ghost artists - that’s horrifying. Clearly Spotify would prefer to completely squeeze out everybody below the clout level of the top 10 artists, and replace the rest with stock music. I would bet anything they’ll cut out the middle-artist any day now and fill their playlists with AI sloptunes.

Spotify really wants to convert music into a commodity they can buy cheaply, own, and sell to an indifferent audience.
by 8note | 2026-01-06 21:17:36+00:00
what i really want to see from this article is a curve showing a tradeoff between speed and embedded text quality. there's the preamble that just going by character has quality problems, but i dont think delimiters are necessarily the best either, vs being able to find paragraph or even chapter boundaries.

how much of a problem is it that ~1 sentence per chunk gets corrupted in the by-character solution? what level of sentence corruption is left in by switching to these delimiters? what level of paragraph/idea corruption is left in with each? chapter/argument level?
by this_user | 2026-01-06 21:17:42+00:00
This really is a completely nonsensical article.

The author is angry that his Spotify subscription becomes slightly more expensive, now running at EUR 12 per month instead of 11. So his solution is to instead rent a EUR 6.50 per month Hetzner server plus a storage space that starts at EUR 3.20 per month (next bigger tier is 10.90). Which means he is now paying at least EUR 9.70 per month for infrastructure, and he has invested a whole bunch of time, and he doesn't even have any actual music, because that would cost extra.
by FireBeyond | 2026-01-06 21:17:46+00:00
> Most landlords have a mortgage to pay on that property and you should look into how an amortization schedule works. Your rent payment is mostly going to interest to the bank, not building equity for the landlord.

What? No. Explain to me how after putting 10% down, I was able to get out of PMI because I had 20% equity after the first 18 months of my mortgage? After all, at 18 months at 3.5% I've only paid down 2.1% of the principal. That's not how that works. Principal != Equity.

> The landlord is mostly taking on a huge risk in hopes the stars will align and 1) appreciation will happen 2) equity will be built

A "huge risk"? No, it's a pretty safe bet. Positive appreciation on home prices in the US has happened 28 out of the last 30 years.

And again, you build equity with each payment of your mortgage, 0.29% per month even factoring in that negative appreciation in, on average, 2 of the 30 years of your mortgage AND zero positive appreciation. Like I said, between May 2021 and November 2022 I was able to garner 4.8% equity due to appreciation alone (net zero I should have gained 5.2% - 18 months at 0.29%/month).

"Hoping the stars will align"? Come on now. Then why bother, if it's such a crap shoot that you're unlikely to ever make a profit on? Out of the sheer good of your heart? No.

Also, coming back to one of your original points:

> Sure even if you pay a few thousand in rent, it may be the landlord only has a couple hundred of cash flow. Then, one repair on the home can easily wipe out a year or more of that.

Then maybe you can't afford to be a landlord?