MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by saghm | 2026-01-09 03:25:52+00:00
That's a pretty disingenuous take on what I said. To quote from the discussion I responded to:

>>>>>> Are you giving your vitals to Sam Altman just like that?

>>>>> Yes, if it will help me and others

>>>> What evidence do you have that providing your health information to this company will help you or anyone (other than those with financial interest in the company)

>>> I’m definitely a privacy fist person, but can you explain how health data could hurt you, besides obvious things like being discriminated against for insurance if you have a drug habit or whatever.

>> [explanation of why it might be worrisome]

> These points seem to be arguments against giving your health data to anybody, not just to an AI company.

I did not make any claims that it was useless; the context I was responding to was someone being dubious the there were risks after being asked whether they had any reason to assume that it would be beneficial to share specific info, and following that a conversation ensued about why it might make sense to err on the side of caution (independently of whether the company happens to be focused on AI).

To be explicit , I'm not taking a stance on whether the experiences cited elsewhere in the thread constitute sufficient evidence. My point isn't that there is no conceivable benefit, but that the baseline should be caution about sharing medical info, and then figuring out if there's enough of a reason to choose otherwise.
by bschwindHN | 2026-01-09 03:28:50+00:00
Here's a good technical writeup on latency and jitter (latency standard deviation) for interrupts when it comes to Embassy, FreeRTOS, and RTIC:

https://tweedegolf.nl/en/blog/65/async-rust-vs-rtos-showdown

Obviously if you're working on something truly hard real-time you probably wouldn't be reaching for these tools to begin with, but for the average embedded project it seems you will enjoy quite good latency and jitter characteristics by default.
by whatshisface | 2026-01-09 03:28:56+00:00
The focus on a particular location is a religious one (in the scriptures there was a Jewish homeland before Israel or Egypt, and Israel is singled out because God told them to go), but it's also a selective one that ignores all the times God arranged for Israel not to be there; and crucially does not stop and wait for His opinion about the present. It is the most dangerous kind of religious opinion: one invented by us.
by LightProx | 2026-01-09 03:29:07+00:00
After running a pay-per-use AI API (LightningProx), I kept seeing the same pattern: most usage complexity comes from persistent identity — accounts, keys, quotas, billing state, and logs.

I wanted to see what an AI interface looks like if you remove identity entirely and use payment itself as the only gate.

SatsGhost is a Telegram bot where:

You send a prompt

Pay ~20 sats via Lightning

Get a response from Claude or GPT

There are no accounts, API keys, or user profiles. Payment is the authentication event. Once the request completes, nothing is retained.

Lightning payments don’t expose user identity, which means there’s no stable identifier to tie queries together. The system is intentionally stateless beyond the lifetime of a single request.

Telegram is used purely as a transport/UI layer; the core idea is payment-as-auth rather than the bot itself.

I’m curious how people here think about this tradeoff vs traditional API-based access, especially around abuse prevention and UX.
by jjav | 2026-01-09 03:30:16+00:00
> Your property taxes are capped at purchase price due to Prop 13.

BTW this is a common myth but not true. Property taxes are set by purchase price in year zero when you buy it. Every year after that, they go up 2% compounding.

That's not the full story because the city/county can also add any extra fees they like, and raise them, prop13 does not apply. My taxes go up by well over 2% every year.

> All said and done can’t you net like 35-40K or so per year on a single home?

If you can find yourself a free house somehow, that feels about right. But how do you get yourself a free house? If you have to buy it, now you have a mortgage, and the math no longer works.

The only people I know who profitably rent out homes are those who inherited a home with no debt. In that case, yes it works.

> during ZIRP times rent and mortgage weren’t too far from each other

Low interest helps, for sure, but the numbers still didn't work out.

Here's a graph of interest rates: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1KZYI

The rates only briefly dipped below 3% during the pandemic. Let's say you got the timing right and got a 3% mortgage for 1.2M. The payment is still a bit over $5K/mo. That's just the mortgage, add insurance + taxes + maintenance. On a home you can rent out for maybe 4K-4.5K/mo. Losing money every month.

I've been running these numbers every few months for the last two decades hoping to follow the common advice to buy rental property and become rich. But it has always been cash flow negative no matter what the rents and interest rates have been.

Only advice I have is go inherit a free house, that can be profitable.
by rayiner | 2026-01-09 03:30:37+00:00
You’re playing word games. The 2024 Texas GOP platform says: “Limiting government power to those items enumerated in the United States and Texas
Constitutions.”

Limiting government power to enumerated areas is different than “small government.” The Texas constitution grants the legislature and the supreme court with power over judicial administration. That includes governing the practice of law in the courts of the state. There’s no enumerated powers problem with the Texas Supreme Court Court deciding what law schools qualify to be admitted to its own bar.
by defrost | 2026-01-09 03:31:15+00:00
> The level of unsustainable groundwater extraction and inefficient consumption by agriculture and industry in Iran is just wild.

It's an important note that middle America is also currently speedrunning unsustainable levels of groundwater extraction and inefficient consumption by agriculture and industry.

They've just not yet hit dust .. but they have achieved significant depletion and the projections aren't good.

Interestingly both the Saudi's and the Chinese operate sizable ag operations in the US and export that s/water/food/ back to their home countries.
by dworks | 2026-01-09 03:31:54+00:00
I agree that assisted engineering means that software development goes from artisanal work modes to industrialized modes of work. Automotive engineers don't go to the factory and build the cars after they've designed them, but software engineers have been doing so. However, I have to say that the post doesn't really explain how you are industrialising code, and I don't really know what differentiates your product.
by WalterBright | 2026-01-09 03:32:03+00:00
Back in the 80s, when I was writing a C compiler, C compilers typically had a maximum size for string literals. The behavior was to detect overflow, issue an error message, and fail compilation.

I took a different tack. The buffer was allocated with malloc. When a string was larger, it was realloced to a larger size. This worked until memory was exhausted, and then the program quit.

It was actually less code to implement than having a fixed size buffer.

Ditto for the other compilation limits, such as length of a line. The only limit was running out of memory.
Show HN: A commitment model for usage billing
by sudeepsd__ | 2026-01-09 03:32:05+00:00
Hi HN,

One pattern we kept seeing while working on usage-based billing was commitment-style contracts.

Teams would sell deals with a minimum monthly spend, charge real usage against it, apply higher rates for overages, and then manually true-up shortfalls at invoicing. Most billing systems don’t model this cleanly, so it ends up as custom code or finance-side adjustments.

We added first-class support for commitments in Flexprice.io :

• Define a minimum spend per billing period
• Apply an overage multiplier when usage exceeds it
• Automatically true-up shortfalls if usage comes in below commitment

All of this is handled at the subscription and invoice level without manual reconciliation.

Curious how others here have implemented commitments or minimum guarantees in usage-based systems, and what edge cases we might be missing.

If you would like to jump in-depth, we also have a open-source community and would love to see you there: http://bit.ly/4huvkDm

Happy to answer questions.
by saidinesh5 | 2026-01-09 03:32:07+00:00
It really depends on the application.

With the similar/even weaker socs (imx6 etc..), in the automotive domain, we used to target sub 5 second latency.. we had to get rid of things like even init and directly start the application..

Eg: 1.5 seconds here:
https://youtu.be/QbEYhQIjlQc
by JLO64 | 2026-01-09 03:32:15+00:00
I can second this. I'm an online coding instructor and within our company Replit was the website/environment we were told to use with our students. I really didn't like it due to all the AI features (I believe that when you're learning to code you shouldn't use LLMs) but the collaboration features were really good.

Unfortunately they added a limit to the number of collaborators per account and we had to stop using it.
by westurner | 2026-01-09 03:33:01+00:00
Will this work with GitHub Copilot in vscode; and with which coding and general purpose models?
https://www.reddit.com/r/GithubCopilot/comments/1pn4669/vsco... :

> With the above experimental setting `Use Claude Skills`, now the agents are aware of any skills in `.claude/skills/` folder without being prompted:

"GitHub Copilot now supports Agent Skills" (2025-12)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46322819 :

> Agent Skills [Anthropic] is now an open standard

agentskills/agentskills:
https://github.com/agentskills/agentskills

Agentskills specification:
https://agentskills.io/specification

But what about .claude/agents and .claude/hooks?

Roo Code has its own directory for AGENTS.md files
by tastyface | 2026-01-09 03:33:41+00:00
Some things are just objectively the right thing to do. Today, Musk reposted outright white nationalist drivel: https://xcancel.com/FredLambert/status/2009358151272071298

He’s done it before with a modicum of plausible deniability, but there’s no denying it here. Straight up Stormfront rhetoric. And these voices are amplified by the algorithm.

It would be wrong to kowtow to these people out of fear. I thought that lesson was already learned in the 40’s, but maybe it needs to be learned again.
by codefreakxff | 2026-01-09 03:33:53+00:00
I agree with the comment above. I have not logged into hacker news in _years_ but did so today just to weigh in here. If people are saying that the audio sounds great, then there is definitely something going on with a subset of users where we are only hearing garbled words with a LOT of distortion. This does not sound like natural speech to met at all. It sounds more like a warped cassette tape. And I do not mean to slight your work at all. I am actually incredibly puzzled here to understand why my perception of this is so radically different from others!
by jedwhite | 2026-01-09 03:34:18+00:00
You're absolutely correct that when using tools like this and writing markdown scripts you want to exercise real care:

1. Carefully test your markdown scripts interactively first

2. Be careful with the permissions granted based on the script.

This is also true with bash scripts. And you'll see in the example that before a markdown script can perform tasks like executing shell commands, you have to explicitly set the permissions for it to do so (`--permission-mode bypassPermissions`).

For a task requiring judgement or evaluation (e.g. "Analyze this codebase and summarize the key architecture decisions"), you're fairly safe especially if you don't add the explicit permissions.

But you're 100% right that care is needed. You definitely want to ONLY use `--dangerously-skip-permissions` in a sandboxed environment.
by zamadatix | 2026-01-09 03:34:52+00:00
If you mean OpenVINO, it uses CPU+GPU+NPU - not just the NPU. On something like a 265K the NPU would only be providing 13 of the 36 total TOPS. Overall, I wish they would just put a few more general compute units in the GPU and have 30 TOPS or something but more overall performance in general.
by brandonkal | 2026-01-09 03:34:57+00:00
This is cool. Executable markdown files are an underutilized concept.

I built https://github.com/brandonkal/inkjet to make building CLIs super simple. All of my private repos have an inkjet.md file for common tasks and documentation. I use code blocks for the executable section and the language determines the runtime. I realize now inkjet could be extended to support an LLM executor by default. PRs welcome.
by 0xWTF | 2026-01-09 03:35:13+00:00
MORE TO EXPLORE

Coffee. Vols. 1–6. R. J. Clarke and R. Macrae. Elsevier Applied Science, 1985.

Coffee: Botany, Biochemistry and Production of Beans and Beverage. M. N. Clifford and K. C. Willson. Croom Helm, London, 1985.

Caffeine, Coffee and Health. Edited by S. Garattini. Raven Press, 1993.

Coffee: Recent Developments. R. J. Clarke and O. Vitzthum. Blackwell Science, 2001.

Espresso Coffee: The Science of Quality. Second edition. A. Illy and R. Viani. Academic Press, 2005.

Association for Science and Information on Coffee: www.asic-cafe.org (sadly now a spam/gambling site)

International Coffee Organization: www.ico.org (seems to have a bad cert now?)

News from the industry of specialty coffee: www.scaa.org/chronicle/category/coffee-science (also dead)

from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-science-of-a-...
by RickJWagner | 2026-01-09 03:37:52+00:00
For historical perspective, these are from the ACLU. They have been consistent in their condemnation of deportations through presidencies left and right.

https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/exiled-obama-adm...

https://www.aclu.org/news/smart-justice/violation-constituti...

https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/speed-over-fairn...
by jedwhite | 2026-01-09 03:37:52+00:00
This is absolutely a new type of nondeterministic tool, so you're spot on there.

One of the key things we realized starting to use it is that the approach allows you to mix deterministic and non-deteministic tools together as part of a composable chain.

So you can, for example, use LLMs for their evaluation capabilities with a natiural language script as part of a broader chain that wraps it in deterministic code, and that also can include and run deterministic code nested within the plain language script.

So it allows us to create pipelines that combine the best of both approaches as appropriate based on the sub-task at hand.
by yongjik | 2026-01-09 03:38:13+00:00
> Lets be honest, you know in your heart that the vast majority of americans want to stop school shootings, don't you??

I don't think we know that, and I think you're looking at your fellow Americans with rose-tinted glasses.

Let's face reality. Two years after one of the worst school shootings in US history, Uvalde county, TX voted for Trump (66.3% vs 33.0% for Harris). Not to mention that Trump won the popular election nationwide.

Nobody put a gun on Americans' heads and forced them to vote for Trump. They did because they wanted to.

I'm not saying the media is infallible, but if you view the situation as evil billionaires and media forcing gun rights, private healthcare, and ICE on oppressed Americans, you're drawing battle lines in a way that doesn't make sense.
by hdra | 2026-01-09 03:38:23+00:00
just because i havent gotten to try it out really.

but what is it about Amp Code that makes it immune from doing that? from what i can tell, its another cli tool-calling client to an LLM? so fwict, i'd expect it to be subject to the indeterministic nature of LLM calling the tool i dont want it to call just like any others, no?
by FunnyUsername | 2026-01-09 03:38:33+00:00
The next census will be in 2027. No one knows the population until then.

It’s not clear that Hamas limits their counts to excess deaths. Even if they intended to, a lot of it is based on a web form, with not much validation besides basic checks that the person exists etc.

As with pretty much any conflict, there's a ton of uncertainly, and people shouldn't be recklessly speculating based on things like WhatsApp chats. Responsible casualty estimates would look more like Ukraine, where for example Zelenskyy said "tens of thousands" (one significant digit) were killed in Mariupol.
Show HN: Layoffstoday – Open database tracking for 10k Companies
by doremon0902 | 2026-01-09 03:39:20+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Layoffstoday, an open platform that tracks tech layoffs across ~6,500 companies.

What it does:

Aggregates layoff events from public news sources

Normalizes data by company, date, industry, and affected headcount

Shows historical patterns instead of isolated headlines

Why I built it:
During job transitions, I noticed people had to jump across news articles, spreadsheets, and social posts just to answer simple questions like “Has this company laid people off before?” or “Is this happening across the industry?”

This is an attempt to make that information structured, searchable, and accessible.

Would love feedback on:

Data accuracy / gaps

Signals that would actually help job seekers

Whether alerts or trend indicators are useful or noisy
by RickJWagner | 2026-01-09 03:40:08+00:00
Read these. Were you this upset when Obama was using ICE? If not, why?

https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/speed-over-fairn...

https://www.aclu.org/news/smart-justice/violation-constituti...

https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/exiled-obama-adm...
Show HN: Open-source multimodal AI that runs in the browser
by EschatonCometh | 2026-01-09 03:40:40+00:00
I built an AI assistant that runs completely in your browser using WebGPU. After the initial model download (~200MB-4GB depending on model choice), it works offline. No API keys. No subscriptions. No data leaves your device.

Browser-based local AI addresses this:

1. Works offline after first load – Local AI makes possible offline AI use. Resilience – Work continues even during outages. Affordability – No recurring cloud or bandwidth costs. Privacy – Data stays on the device, reducing exposure risks.

2. No paywall or subscription – Removing or reducing paywalls on essential AI tools is crucial. Promoting open-source AI platforms provides powerful tools to everyone at no cost, democratizing access to AI technology.

3. Democratizes creative tools – AI tools have the potential to democratize creative processes, making art and design tasks more accessible to individuals without traditional expertise. AI tools can act as equalizers, providing non-professional users with the means to execute complex projects and bring their visions to life.

4. Privacy for sensitive use cases – AI is an alternative way to empower and democratize the access to creative tools and resources by making it easier for individuals with varying levels of artistic skill or expertise to engage in creative expression.

What it does:

Text chat – Switch between 10+ models (SmolLM-360M to Llama 3.2 8B)
Vision – Webcam/screen share analyzed by SmolVLM-256M running locally
Voice – Whisper speech recognition (VAD-powered hands-free mode)
TTS – Browser-native text-to-speech
Image generation – SD Turbo via ONNX Runtime (experimental)
Research mode – Multi-step research with optional web search
Deep thinking – Chain of Thought, Tree of Thoughts, Reflexion modes

Requirements:

Chrome 113+, Edge 113+, Safari 26+
4GB+ GPU memory for larger models
One-time download, then cached/offline
by sublinear | 2026-01-09 03:41:40+00:00
I have no doubt there are many tools, but I specifically mentioned my solution because it doesn't require any tools at all and just a matter of log hygiene.

They spend the whole page talking about a scenario that I've only seen happen in production when there were no app devs involved and people are allergic to writing a log format string let alone a single line of code.
by jedwhite | 2026-01-09 03:41:43+00:00
One thing to consider is that you can use this without ever letting the markdown scripts you write execute any code at all, whether that is via Claude Code or other AI tool in future.

The default permissions are to not allow execution. Which means that you can use the eval and text-generation capabilities of LLMs to perform assessments and evaluations of piped-in content without ever executing code themselves.

The script shebang has to explicitly add the permissions to run code, which you control. It supports the full Claude Code flag model for this.
by mindslight | 2026-01-09 03:42:29+00:00
Follow the example of how buying a Linux PC works. Look at popular brands where there are vibrant online communities of people neutralizing the surveillance / control bits - pulling out the 5G modems and whatnot. It's possible manufacturers will eventually arrive at using all-in-one integrated chipset where you can't just disconnect a radio board or desolder a baseband chip, but we're so far from that.
by ggm | 2026-01-09 03:42:47+00:00
Not to disagree with some of the sentiment, crawl and pagerank still feel like innately useful concepts.

If we mourn google search stopping being functional let's pause to mourn alexa and wais too.

I'm continuing to hope at least some of the ferment about fully European dependency chains arriving at a European search function. Yes, we can argue about snooping and how evil commerce is OK when government isn't, and we can argue about the consequences of a less English language dominated rank space. I still think there's merit in search, operated outside of google, and the US.

I mainly mourn that google didn't get federated and dismembered to compete amongst itself. The utility of their monrepo, but distinct flavours with regionalism and therefore redundancy, and no arc of control through the black chamber.
by WoodenChair | 2026-01-09 03:43:16+00:00
Business books sometimes get a bad rap on here, but I never read an essay where I more thought "wow this guy really needs to read some basic business books." Even though it was a non-profit, there is so much wisdom in them about management and leadership that was clearly lacking throughout his experience. It's too late now. But maybe if he understood some of the reasons back when they were starting the app why organizations are structured the way they typically are, he wouldn't have experimented with so many poor (and ultimately failed) governance structures.

It seems like he was looking at his organization through a social lens (democracy, everyone should have a say) from a governance perspective but having it focused through a product lens (the app). That just doesn't mesh well. Social organizations typically have social missions, not products. When the two mix it doesn't always go well (see Mozilla).

He also explicitly gave up his leadership position and then later wanted a say in management's direction. Ultimately, he sounds like a caring, nice guy, who was more interested in "having everyone heard" than learning some management skills. What happened later after he dropped out of the leadership circle is just a product of that and I imagine significant bad blood between him and those who remained.
by defrost | 2026-01-09 03:43:59+00:00
Think of it as a martial arts dojo .. comment harshly and inadvertantly snark others and you might get sweep off your feet and take damage.

With time and atention you can be yor authentic self, ( sans swearing, personal attacks, implications that parallel commenters are deranged, etc ) and maintain your balance.

I've been throttled at least three times and have come back unscathed.

The trick is to hold your ground without "being a dick about it" (Australian idiom), don't get baited, and keep a broad high view of the general domain of discussion .. the ground is littered with minefields.