MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by augusteo | 2026-01-26 06:21:05+00:00
The folder input thing caught me off guard too when I first saw it. I've been building web apps for years and somehow missed that `webkitdirectory` attribute.

What I find most compelling about this framing is the maturity argument. Browser sandboxing has been battle-tested by billions of users clicking on sketchy links for decades. Compare that to spinning up a fresh container approach every time you want to run untrusted code.

The tradeoff is obvious though: you're limited to what browsers can do. No system calls, no arbitrary binaries, no direct hardware access. For a lot of AI coding tasks that's actually fine. For others it's a dealbreaker.

I'd love to see someone benchmark the actual security surface area. "Browsers are secure" is true in practice, but the attack surface is enormous compared to a minimal container.
by ggm | 2026-01-26 06:21:22+00:00
If you live in an economy where these are uncommon, travelling to one where they are common and especially the equivalent for shower control in hotels.. is a logistical nightmare.

Its the eigenvalue of taps. It's hot, or it's not, and which orifice it's coming out of is completely unclear as well as which motion causes more, or less of water and heat.
by augusteo | 2026-01-26 06:22:06+00:00
I don't know Nature, but the shared-stack coroutine details here are interesting. The fact that C callbacks just work because everything runs on the same stack is a nice side effect of the architecture.

The 10ms timer hack for garbage collection is the kind of pragmatic solution I appreciate. Not elegant, but it works and the latency is acceptable for GUI apps.

Curious about the Linux approach though. Mixing musl static libs with glibc dynamic libs sounds fragile. Have you run into ABI issues with that setup, or does the linker handle it gracefully?
by epiccoleman | 2026-01-26 06:22:16+00:00
This definitely seems true to me, from my limited short content usage. I try to avoid getting sucked into the feed (Youtube Shorts is the one I have used), but if I do find myself scrolling through the morass of clips from Shark Tank or Family Guy [1], the one guy I'll almost always stop for is FunkFPV, who just does a duet on clips of stupid "hacks" and incidences of dumb stuff happening in factory / warehouse / construction settings.

He's just a blue-collar type guy who is mildly funny when critiquing the stupidity of, say, a guy walking up a badly placed ladder with a mini split condenser on his shoulder - but it's a niche that for whatever reason I enjoy, and I don't think I'd remember his handle if it wasn't for his very specific niche.

Interestingly enough [2] I've noticed a number of other creators seem to have sprung up in this niche and will occasionally find a video of some other blue-collar-lookin-dude doing the same schtick. I doubt FunkFPV is the first (in fact he sort of reminds me of an "AvE-lite") to tap this weird market, but he's my touchpoint, at least.

[1]: Yes, it is embarrassing that the algorithm has determined that these are likely to garner my attention

[2]: it's actually not really interesting because almost nothing on the topic of short-form video is actually interesting by any reasonable definition of that word, so this is just a turn of phrase
by Mawr | 2026-01-26 06:23:51+00:00
> A 40 ft bus 2 axle bus with 80 passengers [...] If instead those 80 passengers each drove alone in a Kia Niro EV

Bzzzt. Wrong, unless you literally have a bus that goes from A to B without stopping. City buses do not carry "x passengers", they serve trips. An 80-passenger bus serves way more trips than 80 (though not on average of course), as people can freely get on and off at any time.

And of course, there are way more aspects of this problem than just road wear, parking space for one.

But sure, we absolutely should put buses on rail tracks!
by stevefan1999 | 2026-01-26 06:24:11+00:00
We never say that it isn't. There is a reason Google developed NaCl in the first place that inspired WebAssembly to become the ultimate sandbox standard. Not only that, DOM, JS and CSS also serves as a sandbox of rendering standard, and the capability based design is also seen throughout many browsers even starting with the Netscape Navigator.

Locking down features to have a unified experience is what a browser should do, after all, no matter the performance. Of course there are various vendors who tried to break this by introducing platform specific stuff, but that's also why IE, and later Edge (non-chrome) died a horrible death

There are external sandbox escapes such as Adobe Flash, ActiveX, Java Applet and Silverlight though, but those external escapes are often another sandbox of its own, despite all of them being a horrible one...

But with the stabilization of asm.js and later WebAssembly, all of them is gone with the wind.

Sidenote: Flash's scripting language, ActionScript is also directly responsible for the generational design of Java-ahem-ECMAScript later on, also TypeScript too.
by quietbritishjim | 2026-01-26 06:24:34+00:00
What is "Tay Bridge syndrome"? There are no Google hits. If you're going to use an obscure term (or make one up) then please define it.

Is it a reference to the Tay Bridge disaster? Looking at the Wikipedia article [1], it didn't seem to have anything to do with losing organisational knowledge due to retirement.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_Bridge_disaster
by keiferski | 2026-01-26 06:24:39+00:00
Just a meta comment: the question of whether video games are art seems really dated to me, as does the question of defining what art is in the first place. Of course this question has a long history with a variety of different answers, ranging from “art is what people in the art world say is art” to “it operates in a historical form like painting or sculpture.”

I think this question feels dated because it’s not really a useful distinction anymore, and because cultural producers are no longer regulated by gatekeepers. Legitimacy increasingly just comes from the market itself, not a group of critics or institutions.

But for video games specifically it’s because they have achieved a kind of cultural respect that they didn’t have a few decades ago. The question of “are video games art?” was really more of a quest to be taken seriously as a field. And now they quite obviously are, so the goal of being labeled Art™ isn’t that important anymore.

Instead we’re just going back to the idea of Art as Craft, a particular skill. A game can be good or bad, but whether it’s Art is increasingly irrelevant.
by yolkedgeek | 2026-01-26 06:25:36+00:00
No, This is different.

In "normal" filtering situations, we can connect to most VPNs and do our stuff.
When blackouts like these happen, EVERYTHING is blocked. It gets almost impossible to connect to a VPN. They have advanced tech that detects and blocks all VPNS and proxies. The internet speed is also now at crawling speed so you really can't upload download anything.

Also, in each blackout, people find ways to work around the censorship. And each time, they detect them and patch them. We have almost ran out of ways to prevent the censorship now.
by akmarinov | 2026-01-26 06:25:59+00:00
Peter Steinberger is a well respected developer that started out in the mobile dev community. He founded a company, then made an exit and is set for money, so he just does things for fun.

Yes, he AI generated all of it, go through his articles at https://steipete.me/ to see how he does it, it’s definitely not “vibe coding”, he does make sure that what’s being output is solid.

He was one of the people in the top charts of using Claude Code a year back, which brought around the limits we know today.

He also hosts Claude Code anonymous meetups all over the world.

He’s overall a passionate developer that cares about the thing he’s building.
by mkl | 2026-01-26 06:27:00+00:00
Japan, Germany, France, China, and the UK check their tracks at high speed. I don't know if Spain does, but there are news articles about them ordering such a train in 2019: https://www.railjournal.com/infrastructure/adif-orders-high-...

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAILab

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNCF_TGV_Iris_320

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Measurement_Train
Show HN: We ran a test–92% of local businesses don't show up in AI answers
by Chatalyst | 2026-01-26 06:27:31+00:00
While testing Gemini, ChatGPT, and other LLMs with local, high-intent queries like:
• “Where should I advertise my small business in Omaha?”
• “Best local advertising companies near me”
• “Who helps small businesses with local marketing?”

we ran a small experiment: we sampled real, active local businesses (with websites, Google profiles, and years in operation) and checked whether they appeared in AI-generated answers.

92% didn’t show up at all.

What stood out was that when businesses did appear consistently, it wasn’t random. The models seemed to have a clearer, more structured understanding of who the business was, what it did, and when it should be recommended.

That led us to build Chatalyst — a way for businesses to intentionally define how they’re represented inside AI systems, instead of relying on models to infer it from scattered web signals.

It’s not ads, SEO, or a directory. It’s closer to providing AI with a clean, machine-readable source of truth: what a business does, who it’s for, what it should (and shouldn’t) say, and when it’s a good fit.

I’m curious how others here think about:
• AI as a discovery surface vs traditional search
• Whether businesses should have a first-class presence inside LLMs
• What defensibility looks like as discovery formats standardize

Happy to answer questions or dig into the methodology.
by sergiolema | 2026-01-26 06:28:15+00:00
Most Singletons in production are broken.

After 15 years in development, I still see services crash or slow down because of "clever" implementations that create memory leaks and race conditions. If your JVM memory looks like a mountain range, your Singleton implementation is likely the culprit.

We have a tendency to choose complex code over simple, working solutions—often fueled by "Resume-Driven Development."

In my latest video, I cut through the fluff and look at the reality of technical debt. I cover why Eager Initialization, Lazy Loading, and Double-Checked Locking are usually the wrong choices and focus on the only two methods you should actually use in 2026.

Key Topics:

The Memory Collapse: Why "clever" code instantiates objects on every request.

The Bill Pugh Singleton: Using the Holder Idiom for thread-safe instances.

The Enum Singleton: The gold standard for reflection-proof and serialization-safe code.

Testing Reality: How to properly handle Singletons using DI and interfaces.

Stop adding complexity. Complexity is debt. Fix your code so you can actually enjoy your weekend.
by jackyinger | 2026-01-26 06:29:23+00:00
Literature on doing things was much more practical. There was a culture of things being repairable. There was a pride in one’s work. Check this out if you don’t believe me: http://vintagemachinery.org/pubs/1617/30720.pdf

The rise of the publicly traded corporation run by fiduciary duty has, in my opinion, squeezed out repairability, pride, and workmanship for marginal financial gains.

I fear it won’t have been worth it in the long run. Shame short term incentives run the show.
by throwaway17_17 | 2026-01-26 06:29:38+00:00
I think your statement about familiarity is spot on. One of the ‘promises’ of the early functional language efforts (late 70s through mid 90s) was that the invariants made it conceptually simple to have a magical, super compiler take the code and produce binary executables that would surpass imperative languages, due to the aforementioned Pandora’s box effect of the non-functional constructs. Universal value semantics are similar, especially without leaky abstractions allowing “please just let me crack the box, I’ll be good and won’t abuse the power”. Commitment to the invariants, in this case purely (logically, at least) value semantics across the entire language could produce executables that approach low-level, less restrictive code results with a much, much lower burden on the programmer.
by kalterdev | 2026-01-26 06:29:47+00:00
For Hegel, state is something vastly different than for modern democracies. Sure, democracies can be pervasive as well but, to my knowledge, nowhere near Hegel’s level, not today.

Jesus Christ wasn’t a politician so we don’t know. But we do know that religious politicians, past and modern, rarely respect freedom.

> you showing evidence related to governments and states

Not just states but statism, a system in which man’s life and work belong to the state, and the state may claim it by compelling him to sacrifice it. This provides the theoretical hardware for dictatorial control.
by tbrownaw | 2026-01-26 06:30:16+00:00
> Regarding the “3.5% rule”, she points out that while 3.5% is a small minority, such a level of active participation probably means many more people tacitly agree with the cause.

The more effective you are at getting people to participate, the less effective that participation will appear to be. Because it's just a proxy for what actually matters.
by nirui | 2026-01-26 06:30:46+00:00
> any random enemy with hardware access could plug in a USB cable, flash the older exploitable signed firmware, steal your personal data, install a trojan, etc

A lot of my phones stopped receiving firmware updates long ago, the manufacturer just simply stopped providing them. The only way to safely use them is to install custom firmware that are still address the problems, and this eFuse thing can be used to prevent custom firmware.

This eFuse is part of the plot to prevent user from accessing open source firmware, it's just that. Your "user safety" jargon cannot confuse people anymore, after all the knowledge people (at least the smart few) has learned during the years.
by guessmyname | 2026-01-26 06:31:31+00:00
> Just today I dumped Windows 11 and moved to Linux, lots to learn but wow, so nice not to be inside their walls.

Well, best of luck. I don’t regret switching from Windows to Linux decades ago, I learned a lot, but I can’t say the problems ever stopped. If anything, I ran into more issues than I did on Windows, many of them caused by things I did at the command line, and others due to quirks or bugs in open‑source software. Still, it was a long learning journey that ended up helping my career. I’m not sure you’ll have the same steep learning curve we did back then, but I hope the switch pays off for you.
by keiferski | 2026-01-26 06:31:51+00:00
Thanks for writing this, I’ve had similar feelings about a variety of writers over the years.

My conclusion was just that some people write to signal their intelligence to other people by including as many references and complex ideas as possible, with basically zero attention paid to the form of the writing itself. It is just a form of information transfer, not a particular interest in the writing art form.

And so if you’re not interested in the topics they’re talking about, and you don’t care about evaluating the writer’s intelligence, the whole thing just seems rambling and pompous.

I wish these writers would study essays that are praised for their clarity and brevity. Or haiku, which is defined by its brevity. Truly great writers IMO do not write 10 sentences when one will do.
by cthalupa | 2026-01-26 06:31:56+00:00
ICE's remit is dealing with immigration. They are not general purpose law enforcement, despite this administration seemingly using them as such.

But that's also not really the point, so we can even presume they are, because the root of the argument is the same either way. Just having a title or being ordered to do something by a politician does not automatically mean they are bringing order to the country. There is a reason the founding fathers set the country up the way they did, with multiple checks and balances, separate branches, etc. They went out of their way to make it that no one branch would have unlimited power.

That means that order in this country fundamentally is based on those checks and balances being adhered to. Any unilateral shift away from that is fundamentally pulling us into a more disordered state. I wish seances were a thing because I would love to hear the founders' take on "Masked men ordered here by a unitary executive branch detain and arrest random people including US citizens for the purpose of making sure they are here legally, while also using a private ledger to determine where the citizen's legally recognized documents are valid."

But we can go even more fundamentally than that: The label on a thing does not make it the thing. They can call themselves law enforcement while still breaking the law. It happens to real law enforcement all the time - cops can and do get punished for crimes they commit, at least sometimes.
by zkmon | 2026-01-26 06:32:40+00:00
We are entering into a probabilistic era where things are not strictly black and white. Things are not binary. There is no absolute fake.

A mathematical proof is an assertion that a given statement belongs to the world defined by a set of axioms and existing proofs. This world need not have strict boundaries. Proofs can have probabilities. Maybe Reimann's hypothesis has a probability of 0.999 of belonging to that mathematical box. New proofs that would have their own probability which is a product of probabilities of the proofs they depend on. We should attach a probability and move on. Just like how we assert that some number is probably prime.
by chickensong | 2026-01-26 06:33:19+00:00
I think the highly parallel setups make more sense if you fully embrace vibe coding, but there's value to be had outside of that as well. Delegating tasks to sub-agents to help with context management is a good place to start.

I don't yolo much code, but even so, there are some times where you reach a point where parallelism starts to make sense.

Once you have a stable workflow and foundation, and you front load design and planning, you might see opportunities appear. Writing tests, testing loops, simple features, documentation, etc.

I'm not in research, but I could imagine trying to solve hard problems by trying different approaches, or testing against different data, all in parallel.
by prmoustache | 2026-01-26 06:33:50+00:00
> so I had to reformat my machine to get Windows running again.

I can hear everyone in choir saying "but why would you do that?"

If Microsoft would ever do that to me in an update, I would install an immutable Linux distro on my machine and run windows as a VM (only if I had a strong requirement for it). That way you can do snapshots you can restore from easily.
by gf000 | 2026-01-26 06:34:14+00:00
> I think having a chance at stopping mass government slaughter

This would be questionable 100 years ago, let alone today's technology. Civils just can't organize efficiently, and "heads" (like someone locally coordinating civils) can be cut off easily by a central force (like it's just a drone strike away). The only real power is that a sane military will not turn against their own people. You don't need weapons for that.
by avidiax | 2026-01-26 06:34:35+00:00
> has the authority to issue lawful orders

This decision says that he can issue unlawful orders, and there's nothing the court can do about it. He's immune. You don't need immunity for lawful acts. The very best you could argue is that this prevents prosecution for "gray area" acts that may or may not be lawful. But this decision essentially says that all of those "gray areas" are effectively lawful.

Decide that the protesters in Minnesota are an insurrection? Maybe they start turning up with long guns, like countless previous protestors? Order the troops to fire. It's up to them if they do or don't, but it's guaranteed if they don't, they'll be in courts martial for disobeying the order. The meeting minutes, the reports, what was known and when it was known, Trump's motive: all of them don't matter at all. The official records are inadmissible, his motive is unquestionable, and he is absolutely immune for his orders as commander-in-chief. He can pardon everyone and make them federally immune as well. Only state courts can do anything, far after the fact.
by skhameneh | 2026-01-26 06:35:01+00:00
Historically, the FAA had zero interest/jurisdiction in most hobbyist aircraft below 500 feet, they would not even bother entertaining such as it was not relevant to their opperations.
Helicopters, planes, and quadcopters could be flown freely under general guidance, with no actual enforcing regulations.
These were largely not seen as something the FAA had jurisdiction over, nor did the FAA express any interest. It was widely accepted that fields away from an airport and at low altitude were outside of controlled airspace.

Then come affordable drones and suddenly the FAA attempts to exert full regulation over the space.

To answer your question, roughly 2012 is when this started.
by zephen | 2026-01-26 06:35:28+00:00
An interesting technique.

The problems discussed by both Simon and Paul where the browser can absolutely trash any directory you give it is perhaps the paradigmatic example where git worktree is useful.

Because you can check out the branch for the browser/AI agent into a worktree, and the only file there that halfway matters is the single file in .git which explains where the worktree comes from.

It's really easy to fix that file up if it gets trashed, and it's really easy to use git to see exactly what the AI did.
by kstenerud | 2026-01-26 06:35:31+00:00
This looks interesting, but it's got too many rough edges. The documentation links don't work. The information from the website is minimal. Many UI elements don't seem to do anything, and clicking in the wrong place just brings you back to the login page. I managed to get one ego prompt, but I'm not sure how it's supposed to be injected or used? Or how it would make any difference from what the AI agent already understands about me?

I think maybe I understand the problem you're trying to solve? But the UX needs a lot of work.
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-01-26 06:35:45+00:00
> Signal trades some decreased convenience (for example in terms of backup)

This can't be a barrier to adoption in practice because most people don't even know that it's a thing in order to consider it as a difference, and anyone who both does and cares about it from the outset would have no trouble setting up automatic backups with Signal, and then appreciate the privacy advantage.

> Whatsapp has more “cosmetic” features (polls,…).

https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/9971667844506-S...

> If you value privacy over convenience and other features Signal is a great choice. If you value convenience and other features over privacy Whatsapp is a great choice.

There is no actual reason to use Whatsapp except for the network effect.
by akmarinov | 2026-01-26 06:35:57+00:00
It’s kind of nice for some things. Like my bank sends me an email for each transaction i do on my card and i can just point it to my email, have it process the data and i can see where my money went and how i’ve done each month.

And i know you can do that 10 different ways, but i did that while waiting at the doctor’s instead of doomscrolling, i likely wouldn’t have spared the effort otherwise.

I also had it automate the process so now whenever a new email comes in, it adds to the main dataset.