MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by scottLobster | 2026-01-21 16:39:25+00:00
Same here, you either move past it or go crazy, if the UFO subreddits are any indication. Given the population was already obsessed with blurry clumps of pixels in short video clips, AI is going to send a lot of those people into trailers in the desert with a lifetime supply of aluminum foil.

And now that we have mass-produced hyper-maneuverable quad-copter drones, the whole "it moved backward in a way that no aircraft ever could!" doesn't really hit as hard.
by cthalupa | 2026-01-21 16:39:25+00:00
> there's been zero progress on actually meaningfully integrating AI into artists' workflow.

This simply isn't true. An easy way someone who does most of their art more "traditionally" can use Krita to very much just use AI to help finish a project.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ly6USRwTHe0

ComfyUI was also designed from the ground up to follow the same sort of node-based workflow that many CG artists are used to with things like Houdini, Blender, Substance Designer, etc., and includes all sorts of ways you can arbitrarily control where and how much the AI is used for.
by hmokiguess | 2026-01-21 16:39:49+00:00
Thank you so much for this analogy. This reminded me how I’ve always bike without a helmet, even though I’ve been in crashes and hits before, it just isn’t in my nature to worry about safety in the same way others do I guess? People do be different and it’s all about your relationship with managing and tolerating risk.

(I am not saying one way is better than the other, it’s just different modes of engaging with risk. I obviously understand that having a helmet can and would save my life should an accident occur. The keyword here is “should/would/can” which some people believe in “shall/will/does” and prefer to live this way. Call it different faith or belief systems I guess)
by bossyTeacher | 2026-01-21 16:40:14+00:00
All the big tech companies have been taking credit to fund the AI craze. This is not even looking at the hottest stock in town: Nvidia.

What is going to happen to the stock of all these big tech companies (see Google, Amazon, etc)? What is going to happen to the tech world that lies in the periphery but depends on services provided by these companies?

What is going to happen all the devs that are currently working in the AI industry once it recedes to like 25% of its current size?

Can the non-AI tech job market absorb all the soon to be laid off employees?

These are the questions in my mind when it comes to transformer tech.
by llsf | 2026-01-21 16:40:36+00:00
Was in Fairbanks last weekend and it was -15F. So, having Fahrenheit staying positive for weather in US, is not really an argument.
I am fine with Celsius based on water (0 freezing and 100 boiling). But I get that changing is confusing when you have adjusted your whole life to a system. If taught at school and displayed, in half a generation we could move to metric. Like others said groceries are already there.
by nness | 2026-01-21 16:40:40+00:00
I don't understand this model. Such significant layoffs would indicate that there is no real appetite for expansion or growth.

Their goal might be be to acquire, dramatically cut costs, and then run the product for as long as they can at a profit before breaking it down and selling it off (or hope for a buyout by a bigger player.) But that wouldn't make sense — customers of a depreciating SaaS product surely churn after a 1-3 years, so they wouldn't make enough of a return from their existing customers to justify the investment...
by snowmobile | 2026-01-21 16:40:40+00:00
You seem upset. I'm simply saying that if I didn't trust a human developer to run shell commands on the webserver (or the much lower bar of my own laptop), I woudn't trust them to push code that's supposed to run on that webserver, even after "auditing" the code. Would you let an agent run freely ssh:d into your webserver?
by spogbiper | 2026-01-21 16:40:45+00:00
below zero days are really really crazy cold and above 100 days are really really crazy hot. I don't think the fact that things occasionally exceed the 100 point "normal" range makes it less useful, if anything the out of bounds numbers emphasize the severity of the temperature. it's common where I grew up in the midwest US to hear "wow its going to be BELOW ZERO" as a way to express extreme cold
by lII1lIlI11ll | 2026-01-21 16:40:57+00:00
> Anyone with a permanent naval base on the Black Sea is allowed to traverse the straits (other than in times of war; it's complicated) so should Sevastopol in future fall into enemy hands, it would allow a foreign military power to station warships in the Black Sea. That foreign power could be Ukraine as a NATO member.

You have already been corrected regarding ports in Crimea being the only ones available to Russia and your reply doesn't make any sense either. There are multiple NATO member countries with ports on the Black Sea. Including Turkey who controls Bosphorus!

> Russia does have a "legitimate" interest in not having a hostile Great Power on its borders. I include NATO as an extension of the US. I say "legitimate" in the sense that they're doing the exact same thing the US does. The US has the (ever-changing) Monroe Doctrine and almost started World War Three over Cuba (despite instigating the confrontation in Turkey).

Russia already shares borders with multiple NATO countries. Invading Ukraine caused yet another country (Finland) to join and Russia didn't seem to concerned about it.
by thewebguyd | 2026-01-21 16:41:17+00:00
That's why I like mesh overlay networks (things like Tailscale, Nebula, etc.). You can largely set host firewalls to deny all, and access services over the overlay network which is software defined and more easily managed and deployed at scale.

It doesn't solve all problems, but its a good start, and modern MDMs & Group Policy (on the Windows side) make managing host firewalls easy enough.

It doesn't solve your self-service problem, though I'd argue self-service when it comes to host firewalls or otherwise shouldn't be a thing anyway.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2026-01-21 16:41:37+00:00
My understanding is that for most residential heat pumps, the temperature needed to make the heat pump less efficient than resistive heating is so low that it enters a range that the pump doesn't even work anymore.

However, that's only a measure of efficiency. It could still be that the throughput isn't enough. A 30 kW resistive heater can ALWAYS output 30 kW of heat. But my 7 kW heat pump could produce anywhere from 14 to 30 kW depending on outside temperature.
Show HN: Analyze binary capabilities entirely in-browser with capa and Pyodide
by rmast | 2026-01-21 16:41:44+00:00
Hey all!

I’ve been working on getting Mandiant’s capa (a tool for identifying capabilities in executables) to run entirely client-side in the browser using Pyodide.

To make this happen, I’ve been working through the capa dependency tree to ensure all upstream packages publish an sdist or pure-Python wheels. We’ve finally reached the point where it’s possible to run capa to analyze binaries in a browser using the vivisect backend.

The long-term goal is to upstream these changes to the official mandiant/capa repository. I’d love for people to try it out and let me know how the performance feels or if you run into any quirks.

Again, a live version can be found here: https://surfactant.readthedocs.io/en/latest/capa/

And the source files for the page is here: https://github.com/llnl/Surfactant/tree/main/docs/capa

Suggestions and bug reports are welcome!
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-01-21 16:41:55+00:00
There’s two things to unpack here.

The first is that all “AI” is not equal. It’s specifically generative AI that most take issue with, mostly due to questionable ethics in training. Image editors have employed techniques marketed as “AI” for many years that are mostly or entirely unrelated to modern generative AI.

The second is that whether something is “AI art” is a spectrum, not binary. On one end you have creations in which generative AI played no role and on the other you have images that were generated off of nothing but a prompt or vague scribbles. In the middle you have things like images where the artist traced over an AI image or used bits and pieces of generated imagery. Probably the closest shorthand for where an image lands on the spectrum is to what degree the creator engaged their artistic skills.

A great many of digital artists would be happy to use Photoshop 7/CS1/CS2, all long predating generative AI, if those ran on modern operating systems. Some prefer modern simplistic (and without AI) tools like Paint Tool SAI.
Show HN: Patchli.st – Bug bounties for indie SaaS founders
by massi24 | 2026-01-21 16:42:19+00:00
I run a small SaaS and wanted to set up a bug bounty program. Looked at HackerOne and Bugcrowd but they're built for enterprises.

So I built patchli.st. The idea is simple: indie founders list their products, set bounties they can afford ($50-500 range), and security researchers submit vulnerabilities. You only pay when someone finds something real.

Free to list. No platform fees on the founder side. Researchers get paid directly when bugs are verified.

Looking for feedback. Is this something you'd use? What's missing?
by jedberg | 2026-01-21 16:42:21+00:00
It's funny you chose that as your example, because there are very strict definitions of when day becomes night. I think what you were looking for was "when does someone become bald" or "when does an acorn become a tree".

There is a reason those are classic philosophical questions. Because they highlight the fact that while it is easy to identify the ends of the spectrum, it's impossible to find the midpoint, because everyone has a different lived experience.
by Aydarbek | 2026-01-21 16:42:34+00:00
Thanks, this is genuinely helpful framing.
We made the mistake of thinking in “roles” (GTM cofounder) instead of pulling people into the problem and watching for ownership.

We’re now doing short problem interviews with early users / people who engaged deeply with our Show HN, and tracking who (1) reframes the problem, (2) proposes concrete next steps, and (3) follows up unprompted. Those are strong signals.

Also +1 on the “technical storyteller” point our ideal partner might be technical but customer-obsessed rather than a traditional sales profile.

One question: when you’ve seen this work best, what’s a good lightweight way to test alignment/commitment before talking equity (e.g., a 2-4 week project sprint, shared doc, pre-defined milestones)?
Show HN: Guava Range Parser – Parse "[0..100)" strings into Guava Range object
by neewrobert | 2026-01-21 16:42:35+00:00
I built a small Java library to parse mathematical interval notation into Guava Range objects and just published it to Maven Central.

Example: RangeParser.parse("[0..100)", Integer.class) → Range.closedOpen(0, 100)

Supports all Range types ([a..b], (a..b), [a..∞), etc.) and 17 built-in types including Integer, LocalDate, Duration, and BigDecimal. Also includes Jackson and Spring Boot modules.

I kept rewriting this parsing logic across projects, so I extracted it into a library. First time publishing to Maven Central.

GitHub: https://github.com/neewrobert/guava-range-parser

Would appreciate any feedback on the API design or suggestions for improvement.
by dahart | 2026-01-21 16:42:44+00:00
Possible, sure. But likely? Increased submissions with no change in average quality can fully explain an increase in front page quality, as can increasing average quality, of course. And scores aren’t a quality metric, they’re are a popularity metric. The decrease in scores can also be fully explained by increased submissions. So there doesn’t seem to be any reason to suggest quality is decreasing…
by mitthrowaway2 | 2026-01-21 16:42:45+00:00
I can't speak for the other institutions but I'd be shocked if the press, as an institution, is the best it's ever been. I know a lot of people who left that industry because of the way that the Internet and social media eroded the profitability of reporting while pushing on virality, articles were tuned to declining attention spans, outlets leaned more on centralized newswire services, and local reporting collapsed nearly to zero.
by logifail | 2026-01-21 16:42:53+00:00
> It's none of their business what you want to do with your company

There are plenty of European member states that want the ability to control very precisely what you do with "your company". You want to call yourself "a software engineer"? Ooops...

In the EU it seems particularly the German-speaking countries are borderline obsessed with a) titles, and b) whom may use those titles. See, for instance, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34096464
by briffle | 2026-01-21 16:43:00+00:00
My wife was a surveyor in a past carreer. We have a tape measure in the garage that measures to the nearest hundredth of a foot. It is just so weird to see. Forcing decimal on a measurement that does not normally have it just makes me uncomfortable.

https://surveysupplyinc.com/lufkin-12-foot-hi-viz-engineers-...
by rickydroll | 2026-01-21 16:43:29+00:00
If you want to get even more divisive, try converting people to metric baking measurements. Baking bread and cakes is much more repeatable if you use mass rather than volume to measure ingredients.

The results from this recipe were never consistent when I used volume measurements. I converted to mass in metric and now I get consistent results.

adapted from: [https://www.justsotasty.com/wprm_print/11594](https://www.justsotasty.com/wprm_print/11594)

Banana Brownies

Prep Time: 15 minutes mins

Cook Time: 35 minutes mins

Total Time: 50 minutes mins

### Equipment

- 9x13 inch (23 x 33 cm) baking pan*

### Ingredients

- 227 g unsalted butter (2 US sticks) unsalted butter (The better the butter, the better the results. In the U.S. market, Kerrygold yields the best results, followed by Cabot, and "well, it's still brownies" Market Basket house brand.)
- 400 g dark brown sugar
- 2 large eggs
- 5-10 ml vanilla extract
- 150 g mashed bananas (about 2-3 large, brown bananas)
- 156 g all-purpose flour (I prefer King Arthur All Purpose Unbleached Flour)
- 60-70 g cocoa powder
- 2-3g teaspoon salt
- 280(ish) g chocolate chips (I prefer Ghirardelli Bittersweet 60% Cacao Baking Chips, use 1 bag) )

### Instructions

- Preheat the oven to 350F degrees (180C or 170C fan forced). Line a 9x13 inch (23x33 cm) pan with parchment paper or aluminum foil leaving an overhang around the sides. Alternatively, lightly grease the pan.
- Melt the butter in a double boiler. Add in the brown sugar, stir, and let it sit in the double boiler, stirring occasionally until the mixture has a nice caramelly flavor.
- While the butter-sugar mixture is cooking in the double boiler, combine the dry ingredients.
- Sometimes cocoa powder is lumpy, and you may need to sift it. The alternative I use is combined flour, cocoa powder, and salt, and use a whisk to mix it all together and break up any lumps if there are any.
- Take the brown sugar butter mixture off of the double boiler and mix in the mashed bananas and vanilla.
- The bananas usually cool the mixture enough that the eggs won't cook when you put them in, but if the mixture is hot, add some flour, add some of the dry ingredients, and that will cool it down enough to add the eggs safely.
- Stir in the chocolate chips.
- Pour/spoon the batter into the prepared pan and bake for about 35 minutes, or until an inserted toothpick comes out clean or with a few damp crumbs.
- Cool fully (about 4 hours), then slice. Store brownies in an airtight container in the fridge for up to 4 days. (Never last that long in my house)
by CoastalCoder | 2026-01-21 16:43:48+00:00
I just recently found that Vimeo is hosting MST3K, with free playback of the original episodes (Joel and Mike).

So for selfish reasons this makes me sad. I'm guessing MST3K will need to find another host, perhaps with less generous terms.

Edit: I really hope that doesn't mean RiffTrax will also have problems.
by internetter | 2026-01-21 16:43:55+00:00
> I've always been a bit skeptical of JS charting libs that want to bring the entire data to the client and do the rendering there, vs at least having the option to render image tiles on the server and then stream back tooltips and other interactive elements interactively.

I agree, unfortunately no library I've found supports this. I currently SSR plots to SVG using observable plot and JSDom [0]. This means there is no javascript bundle, but also no interactivity, and observable doesn't have a method to generate a small JS sidecar to add interactivity. I suppose you could progressive enhance, but plot is dozens of kilobytes that I'd frankly rather not send.

[0] https://github.com/boehs/site/blob/master/conf/templating/ma...
by nayuki | 2026-01-21 16:44:28+00:00
If I understand correctly, the FPLA ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Packaging_and_Labeling_Ac... ) requires grocery items to be labeled in both American units and metric units. Metric-only is illegal in America but legal and common in Canada. I have shopped in American and Canadian supermarkets and speak from personal observations.

It seems the exception is that wine imported into the US can keep metric-only labeling, so I have indeed seen bottles labeled only "750 mL", sold in the US.
by hienyimba | 2026-01-21 16:44:33+00:00
Right on time.

We’ve been working on a browser-based Link Graph (osint) analysis tool for months now (https://webvetted.com/workbench). The graph charting tools on the market are pretty basic for the kind of charting we are looking to do (think 1000s of connected/disconnected nodes/edges. Being able to handle 1M points is a dream.

This will come in very handy.
by scirob | 2026-01-21 16:45:11+00:00
Happy you guys are moving forward. Just to make the comment section a bit more balanced wanted to give my xp. Mastra is by design batteries included and opinionated when you don't fit into an existing pattern it is difficult to keep being productive. In our system several times we have needed to go out and create our own hono routes. We are currently have someone rebuilding everything with langgraph/langchain and will then write a detailed comparison.

For sure lots of good ideas in mastra, and happy that its JS TS first, I think you'll will continue to grow becuase of the TS first approach
by dragonwriter | 2026-01-21 16:45:59+00:00
> A pro photographer and my mom will get wildly different results even with the same equipment. Not so with AI, which very much has it's own bias and is eager to inject it.

That particular AI models have their own bias and are eager to inject it is among the reasons why a skilled user and an unskilled user will have very different results, not a reason why that isn’t true.

> The other question is, is AI a tool or a medium?

Is oil paint on canvas a set of tools or a medium? In art, a tool ot set of tools often characterizes, or even defines, a medium; they are different but not orthogonal concerns. (And the cultural phenomenon of identification of a regularly-used tool or combination of tools as defining a medium generally only happens well after that tool or combination has been in significant use for a while.)

AI is a broad category of tools. Particular combinations of those (either with eachother or with other tools) may also come to be be understood as particular media.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-21 16:46:09+00:00
Yeah, thanks for giving me a reality-check on my HN addiction, really need to put back my original /etc/hosts file it seems :|

So, apparently these are my five most upvoted comments (based on going through the first 100 pages of my own comments...):

- 238 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46574664 - Story: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

- 127 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46114263 - Story: Mozilla's latest quagmire

- 92 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45900337 - Story: Yt-dlp: External JavaScript runtime now required f...

- 78 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46056395 - Story: I don't care how well your "AI" works

- 73 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46635212 - Story: The Palantir app helping ICE raids in Minneapolis

I think if you too retire, have nothing specific to do for some months, and have too much free time to discuss with strangers on the internet about a wide range of topics you ideally have strong opinions about, you too can get more HN karma than you know what to do with :)
by measurablefunc | 2026-01-21 16:46:42+00:00
You're missing the point. There is no evidence to support their claims which means they are more than likely leaking the memory into the LLM prompt & it is cheating by simply loading constants into memory instead of computing anything. This is why formal specifications are used to constrain optimization. Without proof that the code is equivalent you might as well just load constants into memory & claim victory.
by enaaem | 2026-01-21 16:46:51+00:00
The system feels broken because not everyone benefits equally from the American led Western liberal order. The liberal order allowed the creation of the most rich and powerful companies in the US, who had unprecedented access to markets and resources. The people owning these companies or earn super high salaries from these companies tend to believe their success is 100% their own. On the other you have people living pay check to pay check and are one unlucky fall away from medical bankruptcy.
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-01-21 16:47:07+00:00
> It's quite indiscriminate in Software, for sure, I feel like people don't care whether you used an AI to write your code as long as it works.

This is starting to change, thanks to the staggering decline in average software quality in recent years (likely partly driven by vibe coding and similar). It’s getting so bad that even non-technical users who’ve traditionally just silently suffered through poor software experiences are starting to take note and voice frustration. Demand for quality “handcrafted” software will almost certainly increase as long as this trend continues.
by AJ007 | 2026-01-21 16:47:29+00:00
There was also a brief moment where digital art wasn't cheating as long as you didn't use layers and the clipboard.

This too will pass. Soon everything is going to be rendered at 60hz in real time, and demands that everything needs to be rendered by hand will be as absurd as claiming every frame of a 3D game needs to be hand rendered in Photoshop.
by fzeroracer | 2026-01-21 16:47:51+00:00
Does your same argument not also apply to people who want HN to be 'non-political'? Since just from your post history recently I can see that you've leapt into some particularly political posts of your own [1] [2]. I'm particularly open about what I believe and post in, but usually people that say they want something non-political actually indicates that they precisely want an echo chamber.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46614467

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46419993
by borenstein | 2026-01-21 16:48:42+00:00
The leakage issue is real. Before there was a way to use "GPT Pro" models on enterprise accounts, I had a separate work-sponsored Pro-tier account. First thing I did was disable "improve models for everyone." One day I look and, wouldn't you know it, it had somehow been enabled again. I had to report the situation to security.

As far as lock-in, though, that's been much less of a problem. It's insanely easy to switch because these tools are largely interchangeable. Yes, this project is currently built around Claude code, but that's probably a one-hour spike away from flexibility.

I actually think the _lack_ of lock-in is the single biggest threat to the hyperscalers. The technology can be perfectly transformative and still not profitable, especially given the current business model. I have Qwen models running on my Mac Studio that give frontier models a run for their money on many tasks. And I literally bought this hardware in a shopping mall.