MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by latexr | 2026-01-06 11:56:48+00:00
> Multi-billion dollar companies have GDPR-violating cookie banners, and nobody cares.

Not true. In fact, those banners are in general way more compliant than before due to the work of organisations like https://noyb.eu/. They have also successfully led numerous initiatives to fine those companies and fix non-compliance.

Usually at this point is when someone comes along to move the goalpost to “but those aren’t very affective”, or “but they still do it”. Sure, argue against malicious compliance and results all you want, I’m simply pointing out that it’s not true at all that “nobody cares”. Enough people care enough that entire organisations exist with that mission.

> In the case of blogs like this, they don't really care about compliance, it's just LARPing.

Maybe. If they don’t care, they can simply ignore my advice. If they do care, they can follow it. Either way, there is no situation in which my sharing of the law is negative.
by _sinelaw_ | 2026-01-06 11:57:00+00:00
I'm also a long time emacs user (>15 years) but got tired of the endless config fiddling, with some packages breaking over emacs versions, other packages which were cool at the time slowly getting stale and need to switch to yet another similar incarnation of the same idea.
And most of all having to recover the config every time I use a new computer or just connect to a new VM.

I'm building an alternative, and I haven't opened emacs for a month now
by BoxOfRain | 2026-01-06 11:57:23+00:00
Yeah I do think if your trust in state institutions is gone for whatever reason (such as living in a dictatorship), it'd be absolute madness to carry around an electronic snitch with you. I'm not sure what I would rely on in those circumstances, but it certainly wouldn't be smartphones. Personally I'd want to rely on in-person communication as much as possible.
by defrost | 2026-01-06 11:57:40+00:00
> Sure, but the latest trend of accusing everyone you don’t like of genocide

Personally I only pay attention to accusations levelled against those killling significant numbers of non combatants and journalists, and made by a reasonable number of international bodies.

It adds further weight when, say, you have experts on the Holocaust, those considered a leading authority on genocide, chime in and say that something else is also a genocide.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omer_Bartov

That said, returning to my comment in response to yours - that was motivated by the ankle deep shallowness of a green account quip "War isn’t genocide"

What exactly is that supposed to mean? That the war waged by the post Weimar Republic was not or did not include any genocide?

As comments go, that seems ... vapid.
by palata | 2026-01-06 11:58:02+00:00
How much experience do you have writing mobile apps in Kotlin or Swift, as a comparison? I have worked in C++ for years, and in Swift for years. I have seen the exact same app being written both in Java and in C++.

> in C++ you can write performant code

This almost certainly does not matter for a mobile app, and definitely not for the UI part. In case your app has to do something that may need C++ (e.g. computer vision), then you can just call a C++ library over FFI.

> C++ isn't that complicated these days

I didn't mean that it is complicated. I can totally write C++. What I meant is that it is more complicated to get it right than modern languages. If users complain about a segmentation fault, it's often pretty tricky to debug. In Java/Kotlin, you will get an exception that tells you exactly which line crashed.

On top of that, C++ is slower to write. Again I have been able to compare teams working on the same app both in C++ and in Java/Kotlin/Swift (Java is not exactly a modern language, but still it's a lot faster to develop with).

And after all those disadvantages of using C++ for a mobile app, you end up with a UI that doesn't feel native to the platform.
by koke_vidaurre | 2026-01-06 11:58:35+00:00
The problem:

One AI agent is easy. But when you have 10 Claude sessions running — one researching, one writing, one monitoring costs — they need shared state. Otherwise they overwrite each other, duplicate work, or have no idea what the others did.

What it does:

squads status # What's running across all sessions
squads dash # Full dashboard: costs, memory, activity
squads run marketing/seo # Execute an agent
squads memory query "competitors" # Search across all agent memory
squads trigger sync # Push trigger conditions to Postgres

Architecture:

Agents = Markdown files (.agents/squads/*.md)
Memory = Postgres (persists across sessions)
Sessions = Redis (coordination, locks)
Costs = OpenTelemetry (what each run cost)
Bridge = Syncs MD ↔ services

The vision:

A BI tool for AI agents. Everyone's shipping agents, but nobody can answer: what ran, what it cost, whether it worked. We want to fix that.

Agents are the new microservices. And just like microservices needed observability (Datadog, Grafana), agents need it too.

Where we are:

- Dogfooding daily — runs our 16-squad setup
- Parallel session coordination solved
- Full cost tracking via OpenTelemetry
- Smart triggers (fire agents based on SQL conditions)
- Dashboard UI in progress

Results:

10x GitHub contributions since adopting this workflow. Verifiable on my profile.

Opinionated choices:

- Claude Code as execution runtime (our stack)
- Local-first (Postgres/Redis on your machine)
- Markdown prompts over framework abstractions
- Git-friendly (everything diffable)

Code: https://github.com/agents-squads/squads-cli

Happy to answer questions about the architecture or what we learned building it.
by chinathrow | 2026-01-06 11:59:14+00:00
> Commanders, staffs, and subordinates ensure their decisions and actions comply with applicable U.S., international, and, in some cases, host-nation laws and regulations. Commanders at all levels ensure their Soldiers operate in accordance with the Army Ethic, the law of war, and the rules of engagement. (See FM 27-10 for a discussion of the law of war.)

Not sure this was followed very recently.
by rzerowan | 2026-01-06 11:59:24+00:00
There is the case where SouthAfrica wanted to introduce pretty much a copy/paste US version of the Fairuse DRM law that already exists in US law and the Multicorps went ballistic , and the USG was threatening sanctions.

Not for the first time either , in the early 2000s SAfrica wanted looser patent enforcment for lifesaving HIV treatments and did get sanctioned.With resolution of the law being droppped and corps getting bought out via USAID/Pefpar payment.

So yeah whatever option that is tried , better be fully baked before the announcement.
by everdrive | 2026-01-06 12:00:12+00:00
I'd go even further. Even if you trust it now, can you trust it in 5 years? How much of your data do apps, companies, and mobile providers hold onto? The real answer is that you don't know. So if your phone is a super precise GPS that you can't turn off (eg: Android) -- were you near a crime scene by chance? How about a big protest 2 years before the political winds shifted. Who knows you were there? You can't know for sure.
by spiderfarmer | 2026-01-06 12:01:32+00:00
Cooking is so easy, everyone who has hands, can read a book and a clock can do it. Start with eggs or pancakes, work your way up from there.

My kids learned to cook from age 9. Now everyone can cook in this household.

I can’t take any adult who says it’s hard seriously, especially since I grew up in a culture where I heard a myriad of excuses from ‘manly man’ who think of it as a woman’s job.

It’s lame and it says a lot about them.
by goku12 | 2026-01-06 12:02:07+00:00
Rust does support C ABI through cdylib (as opposed to the unstable dylib ABI). This is used widely, especially for FFI. An example of this is Python modules in Rust using PyO3 [1].

[1] https://pyo3.rs/v0.15.1/#using-rust-from-python
by latexr | 2026-01-06 12:03:02+00:00
> See 4chan vs OSA.

OSA is a UK legislation. The UK is not in the EU.

> EU is similarly trying to legislate for the world, and it will work until someone calls on their bluff.

That’s an opinion. The Brussels Effect is real, but that’s not the same as “many EU citizens think EU laws apply to the world”.
by ncruces | 2026-01-06 12:03:03+00:00
I'm just one data point. Me being unimpressed should not be used to judge their entire work. I feel like I have a pretty decent understanding of a few small corners of what they're doing, and find it a bad omen that they've brushed aside some of my concerns. But I'm definitely not knowledgeable enough about the rest of it all.

What concerns me is, generally, if the experts (and I do consider them experts) can use frontier AI to look very productive, but upon close inspection of something you (in this case I) happen to be knowledgeable about, it's not that great, and built on shaky foundations, what about all the vibe coded stuff built by non-experts?
by hotbit9 | 2026-01-06 12:03:09+00:00
I’m sharing a recent experience to sanity-check whether this is an isolated case or a broader trend.

Context
• Dedicated bare-metal Mac hosted by MacStadium
• Used for production development work
• No recent configuration changes prior to failure

Timeline (JST)
• Jan 2–3: Machine becomes unreachable. Reboot attempts fail. Eventually stuck at Apple logo with progress bar.
• Jan 3–5: Attempted to open a support ticket multiple times, but the customer portal would not allow ticket creation at all.
• During this period, the server remained completely inaccessible.
• Jan 6: Ticket creation finally succeeds.
• Immediate automated reply states:
• Basic support tier
• First response SLA: 1 business day
• Support hours: Mon–Fri, 9–5, data center local time

Support assessment
• Support later states:
• The OS appears corrupted
• Safe mode and recovery are inaccessible
• Re-image is suggested as the standard solution

Key issues
• No way to contact support during a critical outage due to a broken ticketing system
• No acknowledgment of the delay or impact caused by that failure
• Process-driven responses applied to a situation where the machine was already fully down
• No visible escalation path when the platform itself blocks access to support

Why I’m posting
Outages happen. Hardware failures happen.
What concerned me was not the failure itself, but how difficult it was to engage support when it mattered.

I’m curious:
• Has anyone else experienced similar support issues recently?
• Is this specific to the Basic tier, or has response quality changed more generally?
• Are there recommended alternatives for reliable macOS bare-metal hosting in 2025–2026?

I’m not looking to rant—just trying to understand whether this is an anomaly or something others are seeing as well.
by wiseowise | 2026-01-06 12:04:11+00:00
> Am I just out of touch?

You are.

> Somehow the idea of going to work and not trying your best because “you’re not getting paid … for that” just feels so cynical and divorced from how I’ve seen successful people grow and make big bucks in tech.

Why don't you take a pay cut then? I mean, money is not everything, right? You can always pay your mortgage in integrity, work ethic or another buzzword.

Though last year I went to Hawaii and they refused my "great job, man" tokens, greedy assholes!
by anthk | 2026-01-06 12:04:30+00:00
You are right; it's a bit of a excuse. Tons of small services under Unix (by default) listen
on several interfaces and networks. I think Bitlbee itself listened on 0.0.0.0 instead
of localhost. Ditto with some UPNP/DLNA daemons.

It takes very little to set up IPFS to just listen to tun0, disable routing (let ygg do its job) and throttle the bw a little so it doesn't hog the whole network.

I would be surprised if the Kubo/IPFS developers didn't already configure Ygg for themselves, as both are software written in Go.

The author of NNCP https://nncp.mirrors.quux.org/ (and the other author from Tofuproxy) are pretty much aware of Yggdrasil.
by ninkendo | 2026-01-06 12:07:38+00:00
> The biggest issue is that people think EV's are gas cars that have electricity instead of gasoline, with the main difference being you have to sit at the "gas pump" for 45 minutes instead of 2.

If you don’t live in a conventional house with access to overnight charging, this is exactly what EV’s are. But we keep talking down to people like this, as if every non-EV owner must just be stupid or something.
by teleforce | 2026-01-06 12:08:03+00:00
We just into new year and already we have one of the contenders of HN article of the year. I know HN does not has this ranking but this article is impressive.

I agree most of the points in the article except the point according to the article that local-first app must be free and open source.

Arguably one of the best app I've been using is the original Napster. At that time TIME magazine did not has the breakthrough of the year award, otherwise the Napster surely the breaktrough of the year when it was released back in 1999.

Napster single-handedly introduced and popularized p2p concept, and listening to song need not to be cumbersome and expensive. The latter facts were vindicated with the iTunes and iPod success. It also fit the very definition of local-first app defined in the original Kleppmann's article.
by GuB-42 | 2026-01-06 12:08:38+00:00
I suspect that Microsoft doesn't even care anymore.

Windows is not at the core of their strategy anymore. With Azure, they are as much of a Linux company as they are a Windows company now, and most of their software runs in a browser now. Windows is just a gateway to their services.

If it was easy for them to have their users run Linux instead of Windows and sell Office 365 subscriptions, they would prefer that instead of having to maintain a full OS.
by lmc | 2026-01-06 12:10:07+00:00
My field now is Earth observation/geoinformatics and my recent connections are mostly academics and applied programmers. Also, mostly Europe-based and very few in the US. My feed is mainly about new papers, conferences, tools, webinars etc..

I used to do corporate software dev and my feed (and work) back then wasn't that interesting. I barely used the site.
by vintermann | 2026-01-06 12:10:11+00:00
It should be possible to use plain old cryptography to prove

1. I am one of the named, publicly accountable people registered as participating in this thing, and the same as posted under this pseudonym yesterday

2. Provided I'm reasonably careful, you can't tell which one is me unless n of m participants agree to unmask me.

3. I can only post under one name at a time. I can change pseudonym, but then my old one is marked as abandoned, so I can't trivially fake conversations with myself.
by rollcat | 2026-01-06 12:13:05+00:00
I feel like using Bash is a double-edged sword. Yes, it's available on every modern unix-like (notably absent from the base system in the *BSDs), but the language (being an sh descendant) is honestly horrible for anything more complex than 200-300 lines of plugging one command into another. Ticket isn't even pure Bash; it embeds several inline, 100+-line AWK scripts, and a giant jq query (an external tool!). All of which is horrible for syntax highlighting, mind you.

These days Python is almost as universally available, and I've seen few systems ship without Perl. Both provide excellent backward compatibility; I have many scripts that still run unchanged on Python 3.6 (2016).
by mupuff1234 | 2026-01-06 12:15:55+00:00
I would also take those studies with a grain of salt at this point, or at least taking into consideration that a model from even a few months ago might have significant enough results from the current frontier models.

And in my personal experience it definitely helps in some tasks, and as someone who doesn't actually enjoy the actual coding part that much, it also adds some joy to the job.

Recently I've also been using it to write design docs, which is another aspect of the job that I somewhat dreaded.
by WillAdams | 2026-01-06 12:16:18+00:00
I was a beta tester for Freehand/MX, and used Freehand and Altsys Virtuoso for decades before that --- it still running on Windows is why I still use Windows, and I despair of what I will use for vector drawing when it stops running.

None of the Inkscape devs are invested in Freehand's keyboard shortcuts and working techniques, Graphite doesn't even work with a stylus, Cenon is clunky beyond words and hasn't been upgraded in decades last I checked, Krita is pixel-oriented, and none of the note-taking programs really work for technical drawing/vector editing....
by anthk | 2026-01-06 12:16:54+00:00
To us Europeans White supremacists are like AlQaeda/Isis supporters in the middle of US declaring a legal right to fund a party which supports nuking Wall Street and Silicon Valley because they are 'inferior infidels'.

Interrupting communications it's a serious crime in Europe too, with either high fines or straight prison time, but ethically I feel nothing for the webmaster. The same if someone deleted the social network profiles (and the whole infra) of narco armies in Mexico.
by great69 | 2026-01-06 12:17:04+00:00
I just assume it doesn’t matter where you live or who you are- anyone can have your data. It’s not admitting defeat. It’s just being safe and sane.

To the point of the post though, please note that saying the internet is American (it’s not, it’s global) or publically giving up on the U.S. because of POTUS, three letter agencies, attitudes, etc. is not helping you win the many Americans over that may join you in some cause.
Show HN: Replane – dynamic config for apps and services with real-time sync MIT
by tilyupo | 2026-01-06 12:17:39+00:00
Replane is a self-hosted config manager for feature flags and app settings.

It's a self-hosted config manager with real-time updates via SSE, version history, and instant rollback. Changes propagate in under a second. Override rules let you target by custom properties - evaluated client-side so nothing sensitive leaves your app.

Single Docker image, MIT licensed, works with or without Postgres. SDKs for JS, Python, .NET.
https://github.com/replane-dev/replane
Would love feedback on the SDK API design and what's missing for your use case.
by throaway45425 | 2026-01-06 12:20:59+00:00
I think we are the stage of the "AI Bubble" that is equivalent to saying it is 1997, 18% of U.S. households have internet access. Obviously, the internet is not working out or 90%+ of households would have internet access if it was going to be as big of deal as some claim.

I work at a place that is doing nothing like this and it seems obvious to me we are going to get put out of business in the long run. This is just adding a power law on top of a power law. Winner winner take all. What I currently do will be done by software engineers and agents in 10 years or less. Gemini is already much smarter than I am. I am going to end up at a factory or Walmart if I can get in.

The "AI bubble" is a mass delusion of people in denial of this reality. There is no bubble. The market has just priced all this forward as it should. There is a domino effect of automation that hasn't happened yet because your company still has to interface with stupid companies like mine that are betting on the hand loom. Just have to wait for us to bleed out and then most people will never get hired for white collar work again.

It amuses me when someone says who is going to want the factory jobs in the US if we reshore production? Me and all the other very average people who get displaced out of white collar work and don't want to be homeless is who.

"More valuable" work is just 2026 managerial class speak for "place holder until the agent can take over the task".
by eliasdejong | 2026-01-06 12:21:56+00:00
Imagine if you measured the speed of beer delivery by the rate at which beer cans can be packed/unpacked from truck pallets.
But then somebody shows up with a tanker truck and starts pumping beer directly in and out. You might argue this is 'unfair' because the tanker is not doing any packing or unpacking. But then you realize it was never about packing speed in the first place. It was about delivering beer.
by goku12 | 2026-01-06 12:23:12+00:00
The dynamic libraries that use the unstable Rust ABI are called `dylib`s, while those that use the stable C ABI are called `cdylib`s. Suppose a stable version of the Rust ABI is defined, what would be the point of putting dynamic libraries that follows this API, in the system? Only Rust would be able to open it, whereas the system shared libraries are traditionally expected to work across languages using C ABI and language-specific wrappers. By extension, this is a problem that affects all languages that has more complex features than C. Why would this be considered as a Rust flaw?
by SkyBelow | 2026-01-06 12:23:22+00:00
I had some .csproj files that only worked with msbuild/vsbuild that I wanted to make compatible with dotnet. Copilot does a pretty good job of updating these and identifying the ones more likely to break (say web projects compared to plain dlls). It isn't a simple fire and forget, but it did make it possible without me needing to do as much research into what was changing.

Is that a net benefit? Without AI, if I really wanted to do that conversion, I would have had to become much more familiar with the inner workings of csproj files. That is a benefit I've lost, but it would've also taken longer to do so, so much time I might not have decided to do the conversion. My job doesn't really have a need for someone that deeply specialized in csproj, and it isn't a particular interest of mine, so letting AI handle it while being able to answer a few questions to sate my curiosity seemed a great compromise.

A second example, it works great as a better option to a rubber duck. I noticed some messy programming where, basically, OOP had been abandoned in favor of one massive class doing far too much work. I needed to break it down, and talking with AI about it helped come up with some design patterns that worked well. AI wasn't good enough to do the refactoring in one go, but it helped talk through the pros and cons of a few design pattern and was able to create test examples so I could get a feel for what it would look like when done. Also, when I finished, I had AI review it and it caught a few typos that weren't compile errors before I even got to the point of testing it.

None of these were things AI could do on their own, and definitely aren't areas I would have just blindly trusted some vibe coded output, but overall it was productivity increase well worth the $20 or so cost.

(Now, one may argue that is the subsidized cost, and the unsubsidized cost would not have been worthwhile. To that, I can only say I'm not versed enough on the costs to be sure, but the argument does seem like a possibility.)
by defrost | 2026-01-06 12:23:44+00:00
Seems like a low bar given the entire span of Britain's history - Londinium was founded by Mediterraneans, Danelaw covered half the Big Island for a good period, the Anglo-Saxons were Germanic immigrants pushed back by the Norman wave . . .

The UK is immigrant wave after wave all the way back to when it was nothing but solid ice pressing down the entire landmass and practically all the islands.
by netsharc | 2026-01-06 12:24:14+00:00
A Windows 3.1 game called Rodent's Revenge: https://classicreload.com/win3x-rodents-revenge.html

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-r6CnPzTXKE

Damn, the good old days when games didn't have loot boxes, ads, etc...
by Y_Y | 2026-01-06 12:24:58+00:00
ζ(z)=0⇒-z/2∈ℕ ∨ Re(z)=1/2

i.e. if you apply the zeta function to a complex number, and you get zero, then that number must have been either a negative even integer or had a half as its real part.

What could be simpler than that? Those are all fairly simple concepts, and the definition of the function itself is nothing too exotic. I think any highschooler should be able to understand the statement and compute some values of zeta numerically. I'd like to see a statement about couches written so succinctly with only well-defined terms!

(I'm being intentionally a bit silly, but part of the magic of the Riemann Hypothesis is that it's relatively easy to understand its statement, it's the search for a proof that's astonishingly deep.)