MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thorum | 2026-01-09 05:56:57+00:00
AI labs are not charities and there is no way to make money offering unlimited access to SOTA LLMs. Even as costs drop, that will continue to be true for the best models in 2027, 2028 etc. - as demonstrated by the fact that CPU time still costs money. The current offerings are propped up by a VC bubble and not sustainable.
by 9rx | 2026-01-09 05:58:17+00:00
> Rust does it that way

As does Go (again, no need to use a naked `error` — except for where you can't possibly constrain it further), but that doesn't really solve the things that show up in the real world. Even in Rust you end up devolving into what is effectively equivalent to Go's error type.

When we figure out what the actual solution to this problem is, it will be a great day. But sum types isn't it.
by mmooss | 2026-01-09 05:58:23+00:00
That's one view of how to structure organizations but hardly the only one. Much of SV was built using non-hierarchical organizations, often bragging that nobody had a title. The greater corporate world embraced flat organizational structures for 1-2 decades and did very well. Toyota famously gave (gives?) everyone on the assembly line the power to stop production, and they were (are?) considered the pinnicle of automotive manufacturing.

My impression is that recent embrace of hierarchy and authority, and rejection of democracy and equality, are tied to a sharp rise in such ideas in politics. It's hard to believe it's coincidence.

And, also maybe not coincidentally, it's inherently conservative to say, 'this is the way it's always been and must be'.

Innovation is a powerful force. The management ideas the parent embraces were once innovations, which met the same response the parent gives to newer innovators.
by oneshtein | 2026-01-09 05:58:32+00:00
Stock Linux kernel in Fedora, for example, is signed by MS, so SecureBoot allows to boot it without modification. Kernel booted by SecureBoot is locked down by default. To unlock it, you need to patch kernel source, rebuild it, sign it with your own key, and install this key via UEFI to boot it in SecureBoot mode. Your custom key will not pass remote attestation.
by echelon | 2026-01-09 05:58:43+00:00
This is worse than the DMCA because there's no provision for companies that develop or host the tech.

Why the hell can't these legislators keep to punishing the law breakers instead of creating unending legal pitfalls for innovation?

We have laws against murdering people with kitchen knives. Not laws against dinnerware. Williams Sonoma doesn't have to worry about lawsuits for its Guy Degrenne Beau Manoir 20-Piece Flatware Set.
by Alupis | 2026-01-09 05:58:57+00:00
The reality is the overwhelming majority of desktop linux users are probably using a kernel shipped by their distro, be it Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, Valve, whatever. Those kernels could be attested.

I agree with your sentiment though. It's a wild future we're considering, just so some people can play video games and complain less about supposed cheaters (or often, skill issues, but I digress).
by rnjn | 2026-01-09 05:59:00+00:00
founder at base14 here, the company that is building Scout. Thanks for the feedback. we do something similar for tracing as well, but pgX does a bit more than that - engineers should be able to trace (like you mention) and see and analyse the condition of the DB. for eg - correlate query slowdown to locks, vacuums etc. all on one screen, or a couple of clicks. We are building some specialised explorers like pgX for postgres. Essentially we are building telemetry readers for components that send relevant metrics and logs through to a telemetry data lake. for each component/domain we find from experts what they look at for analysis and incidents, and bring that to a full stack "unified" dashboards/mcp.

Scout is our otel-native observability product (data lake, UI, alerts, analytics, mcp, the works).
what we call pgX in the blog is an add-on to Scout.
by sheepscreek | 2026-01-09 05:59:30+00:00
> Anthropic should have open sourced their Claude Code CLI a year ago

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code

It has been open source for a while now. Probably 4-6 months.

> Anthropic shouldn't have an all-you-can-eat plan for $200 when their pay-as-you-go plan would cost more than $1,000+ for comparable usage. Their subscription plans should just sell you API credits at, like, 20% off.

That's a very odd thing to wish for. I love my subscriptions and wouldn't have it any other way.
by gilleain | 2026-01-09 06:00:08+00:00
Uhm. If I understand correctly, you are saying that some people are pretending to like his music because it is over the top and showy rather than actually good or enjoyable?

While it is possible these fake enjoyers exist, I'm fairly certain a lot of fans of Mr Twin's work like it in a straightforward sense of most music appreciation.

Personally, 'Vordhosbn', 'Windowlicker', 'Rhubarb'... etc are all great tracks. Are there some that I don't get on with? Sure, of course. However I can speak for myself when saying I'm not listening to the music performatively. At least, not much!
by smelendez | 2026-01-09 06:00:10+00:00
I don't know anything about Texas Roadhouse but in general I'd say a lot of processes got sloppy after technological changes repeatedly added complexity.

Decades ago, when OP worked there, I'm guessing Texas Roadhouse only took takeout orders over the phone and in person, and didn't receive that many. It was less common to order takeout from sit-down restaurants. There was one procedure, the steps made logical sense, it could be implemented entirely within the restaurant without a lot of IT. And it worked, and it probably didn't take that much staff time on a normal night.

Now, you can still order by phone, but I see you can also at least order online for pickup, order via UberEats for delivery, and order via DoorDash for pickup or delivery. They've likely added these various modes over time, and I'm sure each has its own subtly different procedure reflecting various IT systems nobody in the restaurant has any control over.

The three-part QC process might still work for phone orders but those are probably rare. Orders picked up by the actual end customer could use a two-part QC process, verifying the items against the receipt and presenting them for visual inspection. But orders getting picked up by a delivery person can practically only get a quick check as they're loaded in the bag, because the delivery person is in a hurry and won't want to stand there and help check the receipt against what's in the bag and may not be able to effectively do so if they don't know the menu and aren't sufficiently fluent in English.

Rather than have a complex flowchart for the overworked staff maximizing QC for every case, it's very easy to default to the minimum which works in every case, which is hurriedly comparing the menu items that come out of the kitchen to what's on the receipt as they're loaded into the bag. It's very easy to get this wrong, especially if you're overworked and distracted and loading multiple bags at once.
by shadow-ninja | 2026-01-09 06:00:15+00:00
If anyone's interested, I came across this while developing my security scanner for VS Code extensions (www.vscan.dev).

I was in my beginning stages of development when they started publishing this list which was very surprising. They only started really cracking down on malicious extensions relatively recently (<1 year ago).

Despite their best efforts, the marketplace is getting increasingly dangerous. The list published here is of malicious extensions that were discovered only after allowing them free reign on the marketplace - imagine how many are still out there.
by WoodenChair | 2026-01-09 06:00:20+00:00
> you've written more than 20 paragraphs of comments but I stopped here, because if you think this way about Mozilla, a very successful company and philanthropy, you probably are not making generalizable judgements about others

I mean yeah, if you think Mozilla has been well managed over the past two decades, then yeah we're on different planes of understanding the world.

- The only product it makes that anyone cares about, Firefox, has gone from 30% market share in 2010 to 2% market share in 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

- It has put itself in a position where the vast majority of its funding comes from its main competitor, Google, who makes Chrome. Conflict of interest much? And now Google is being sued for that in an antitrust case. https://www.pcworld.com/article/2772034/googles-search-monop...

- Despite being a non-profit, its CEO was paid $7 million during a period of layoffs in 2023 https://www.i-programmer.info/news/86-browsers/16844-firefox...

- Mozilla was founded to support the development of an open source web browser. That's a critically important mission. Yet, it spends most of its money not on the web browser (maybe why the web browser is at 2% market share). https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-202...

- It has started many other initiatives with a big splash that all fizzled (FirefoxOS, Pocket, etc.)

I don't know, doesn't sound like "a very successful company and philanthropy" as you put it. I would call it a *formerly* "very successful company and philanthropy."
by nomel | 2026-01-09 06:00:43+00:00
This doesn't really answer my question, which more about specific exclusions.

Both of the answers show the same problem: if you limit your prompts to positive reinforcement, you're only allowed to "include" regions of a "solution space", which can only constrain the LLM to those small regions. With negative reinforcement, you just cut out a bit of the solution space, leaving the rest available. If you don't already know the exact answer, then leaving the LLM free to use solutions that you may not even be aware of seems like it would always be better.

Specifically:

"use only native functions" for "don't use libxyz" isn't really different than "rewrite libxyz since you aren't allowed to use any alternative library". I think this may be a bad example, since it prevents the LLM from using an alternative library that you're not aware of.

"only use loops for iteration" for "done use recursion" is reasonable, but I think this falls into the category of "you already know the answer". For example, say you just wanted to avoid a single function for whatever reason (maybe it has a known bug or something), the only way to this "positively" would be to already know the function to use, "use function x"!

Maybe I misunderstand.
by hananova | 2026-01-09 06:00:44+00:00
I don’t really enjoy block systems myself, but that is what block has shifted to mean.

In the past “block” used to mean what “mute” means now: Hide from me. I believe it’s around the time Twitter became popular that the meaning has shifted to being a bi-directional mute.

I find that the need for a blocking system as that just points to a broken moderation system, and a broken society at large.
Show HN: An all-in-one image crop/split/collage tool (no uploads, no watermark)
by harperhuang | 2026-01-09 06:01:15+00:00
Hi HN,

I rebuilt my side project into a small “all-in-one” image toolbox: https://imagesplitter.tools

The part I’m most proud of (and personally use the most) is the collage workflow:

1. Grid collage (templates + merge cells for “one big + many small” layouts)

2. Long-image stitching (great for screenshots / step-by-step guides / chat logs)

3. Freeform collage (DIY your own grid layout — split/merge cells however you want — then apply that layout to the grid collage)

My motivation was pretty simple: I kept bouncing between different sites for basic image chores, and many of them add watermarks, require login, or feel sketchy for privacy. So I made this with a few strict rules:

1. Free, no watermark
2. Privacy-first: processing happens locally in the browser (no upload/storage)

Besides collages, it also includes common utilities I often need:

crop (free/aspect/circle/shape), grid split + ZIP export, batch convert (JPG/PNG/WebP/ICO…), compress, images→GIF, text/markdown/html→image, QR generate/decode, color picker, image info, etc.

I’d really love feedback:

1) What’s the most annoying part of making collages / long images?

2) Any “must-have” features you’d expect for this kind of tool?

Thanks for taking a look — happy to iterate based on your comments.
by Night_Thastus | 2026-01-09 06:01:45+00:00
Yep. The goal is to build huge amounts of hype and demand, get their hooks into everyone, and once they've killed off any competition and built up the walls then they crank up the price.

The prices now are completely unsustainable. They'd go broke if it weren't for investors dumping their pockets out. People forget that what we have now only exists because of absurd amounts of spending on R+D, mountains of dev salaries, huge data centers, etc. That cannot go on forever.
by thethethethe | 2026-01-09 06:01:50+00:00
> iNat’s current Leadership does not share this belief. To them, Seek is an off-brand liability that they don’t intend to improve. They think iNaturalist the product can serve those Seek users while also serving existing core iNat contributors to the detriment of neither.

I am a big iNaturalist user and I think the seek/iNat is confusing and a missed opportunity. Seek feels very much like a feature of iNat that is its own app for some reason. They could just make the seek app the iNat landing page and call it a day. I'm not sure how this makes the iNat app worse than it already is. I already find it a chore to use for making observations and finding out about what's around me. It's too clunky to make observations in the app itself, so I always do it after I am out of the field anyway.

Imo they should make mobile app more focused on consuming and visualizing data rather than posting observations. Seek does this for accessing identification data but I think they have a big opportunity to do similar things for seeing whats around you, identifying other's observations, and viewing trends in your own observations.

inat also has terrible performance, with slow loading photos and thumbnails. I would probably spend 10x more time on the app and make 50x more indemnifications than I do now if photos loaded faster.
by dboon | 2026-01-09 06:02:12+00:00
Why do you like or dislike Diet Coke? At some point, saying what I think is embarrassing is equivalent to saying why.

But, to accept your good faith olive branch, one more go: AI is a space full of grift and real potential. Anthropic's pitch is that the potential is really real. So real, in fact, that it will alter what it means to write software.

It's a big claim. But a simple way to validate it would be to see if Anthropic themselves are producing more or higher quality software than the rest of the industry. If they aren't, something smells. The makers of the tool, and such a well funded and staffed company, should be the best at using it. And, well, Claude Code sucks. It's a buggy mess.

Opencode, on the other hand, is not a buggy mess. It is one of the finest pieces of software I've used in a long time, and I don't mean "for a TUI". And they started writing it after CC was launched. So, to finally answer your question: Opencode is a competitor in a way that brings to question Anthropic's very innermost claim, the transformative nature of AI. I find it embarrassing to answer this question-of-sorts by limply nicking the competitor, rather than using their existence as a call for self improvement. And, Christ, OC is open. It's open source. Anthropic could, at any time, go read the code and do the engineering to make CC just as good. It is embarrassing to be beaten at your own game and then take away the ball.

(If that is what is happening. Of course, this could be a misunderstanding, or a careless push to production, or any number of benign things. But those are uninteresting, so let's assume for the sake of argument that it was intentional).
by jstummbillig | 2026-01-09 06:03:08+00:00
We have had the fabled 10x engineer long before and independent of agentic coding. Some people claim it's real, others claim it's not, with much the same conviction. If something, that should be so clear cut, is debatable, why would anyone now be able to produce a convincing, discussion-resolving argument for agentic coding? We don't even manage to do that for tab/spaces.

The reason why both can't be resolved in a forum like this, is that coding output is hard to reason about for various reasons and people want it to be hard to reason about.

I woudl like to encourage people to think that the burden of proof always falls on themselves, to themselves. Managing to not be convinced in an online forum (regardless of topic or where you land on the issue) is not hard.
Show HN: Commit-based code review instead of PR-based
by moshetanzer | 2026-01-09 06:03:43+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m experimenting with commit-based code review as an alternative to PR-based review.

Instead of analyzing large PR diffs, this reviews each commit incrementally, while context is still fresh. It’s fully configurable and intentionally low-noise, high signal - focused on catching issues that tend to slip through and compound over time.

The goal isn’t to replace CI or PR review, but to move some feedback earlier:

risky changes hidden in small diffs

architectural or consistency drift

performance or security footguns

Happy to answer questions
by fellerts | 2026-01-09 06:04:40+00:00
Cool project. Tip: acetone will readily dissolve the plastic parts of the card leaving the antenna(s) and chip intact. I believe a few other people have made drop-in PCBs with NFC antennas. Here’s one: https://n-o-d-e.net/datarunner.html

Also, no F-91W thread would be complete without a mention of the sensorwatch project: https://www.sensorwatch.net/
by Tomte | 2026-01-09 06:05:01+00:00
Seek is annoying, because it throws up some kind of „please don‘t disturb nature“ dialog box every time you start it to take a photo. I hve seen that warning hundreds of times, why can‘t i disable it after a few confirmations?

I‘ve moved to the main iNaturalist app, and it does everything Seek does, but better and it’s generally also faster.
by zmgsabst | 2026-01-09 06:05:26+00:00
Evolution is highly path dependent and stochastic, so I’m not sure your logic follows.

Eg, the laryngeal nerve in giraffes is ridiculous — but having gone down that path before their current form, there’s little way to fix it. They’re now stuck in a local optima of long necks (good) with poor wiring (bad).
by elevation | 2026-01-09 06:05:50+00:00
More people in my social circle are using CL again after AI moderation/anti-fraud issues at Facebook. A few examples:

A colleague listed his son’s high school archery equipment. Facebook banned him from marketplace for life for violating weapons policy. He still has social network access.

I helped an elderly widow create her first FB account from an Apple device, registering from her home cable modem IP, giving FB her cellphone number and ISP issued email address — all strong signals of authenticity. But after she added five relatives within half an hour, her account was locked, and Facebook closed it permanently on appeal.

Another acquaintance was brigaded by people reporting his comments. Troll or not, he lost access to Facebook/Marketplace and has to satiate his used electronics habit elsewhere.

You can lose access to FBm suddenly and with no recourse. And when that happens, Craigslist is still there to help you sell stuff you can’t eBay, like your old lawnmower, or find a CRT television for your Super Nintendo.
by safety1st | 2026-01-09 06:06:48+00:00
I think it's a complex discussion because there's a whole bundle of new capabilities, the largest one arguably being that you can build a conversational interface to any piece of software. There's tons of pressure to express this in terms of productivity, financial and business benefits, but like with a coding agent, the main win for me is reduction of cognitive load, not an obvious "now the work gets done 50% faster so corporate can cut half the dev team."

I can talk through a possible code change with it which is just a natural, easy and human way to work, our brains evolved to talk and figure things out in a conversation. The jury is out on how much this actually speeds things up or translates into a cost savings. But it reduces cognitive load.

We're still stuck in a mindset where we pretend knowledge workers are factory workers and they can sit there for 8 hours producing consistently with their brain turned off. "A couple hours a day of serious focus at best" is closer to the reality, so a LLM can turn the other half of the day into something more useful maybe?

There is also the problem that any LLM provider can and absolutely will enshittify the LLM overnight if they think it's in their best interest (feels like OpenAI has already done this).

My extremely casual observations on whatever research I've seen talked about has suggested that maybe with high quality AI tools you can get work done 10-20% faster? But you don't have to think quite as hard, which is where I feel the real benefit is.
by jedwhite | 2026-01-09 06:07:29+00:00
My view is that readability and ease of understanding have a real impact on auditability. Nondeterministic output also clearly has a significant impact on auditability.

The balance between readability and determinism for auditability partly relates to developer philosophy. Tech is famous for religious arguments. I have friends who hate AI coding, and want to avoid nondeterminstic tools at all costs. And other friends whose productivity has increased significantly, and who see the future of programming as natural language.

The quality of AI models and tools like Claude Code is improving fast, and there are many developers who find value in them, myself included. I built this to make life easier for developers who want to use AI tools for automation.

I find it much faster to parse and understand plain language than many code scripts I've seen. It was one of Python's great insights that people spend more time reading code than writing it. And there is a tradeoff in auditability between determinism and the ability to quickly read and understand what systems do.

There are clearly many people who find AI useful, and who are becoming skilled in its use as a tool. This is just a little tool that I put together for myself and other people who fall in that basket.

Learning where to use AI tools appropriately - how to constrain the dangers while maximizing the value - is part of the challenge. From using this particular tool for real work, it fits some use cases well, and can make things easier both to understand and share, as well as to write.

I hope it's useful for some other people wanting to use AI for scripting and automation.

I think that quickly understandable instructions are part of auditability. Not the whole thing, and their use needs to be balanced with safety and security. But an important part of it.

I accept there are plenty of folks who don't see AI tools that way. We're sharing this for people who see the value in this new approach, even though it is a fast-moving field and there are a lot of imperfections.

Any reasonably competent Claude Code user who is careful about setting permissions boundaries is no more going to delete their hard drive than a competent command line user would. There will be things that go wrong with AI, as before it.

In years of tech support, I've personally had to help people who neutered their Windows install or deleted files they needed. Those things happen and I'd argue they come down to skill issues, with AI or without. New tools have a learning curve.

I get that you think that's bizarre to see readability with AI-based tools as more auditable, and I really do understand that perspective.