MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nixosbestos | 2026-01-23 14:33:01+00:00
> No, it never was intended like that. That some people build infra/business around it is something completely different, but swarm was never intended to be a kubernetes contender.

That would be news to the then Docker CTO, who reached out to my boss to try to get me in trouble, because I was tweeting away about [cloud company] and investing heavily in Kubernetes. The cognitive dissonance Docker had about Swarm was emblematic of the missteps they took during that era where Mesos, Kube and Swarm all looked like they could be The Winner.
by naasking | 2026-01-23 14:33:06+00:00
AIs are much better and hallucinate much less when they are given focused tasks, eg. instead of asking AI to write a background on complete with citations, ask the AI specifically to generate a list of citations relevant to X, programmatically check the references are correct using a true index like doi, then ask AI to use the reference list to write a background section on X.

This would be a valuable research tool that uses AI without the hallucinations.
by dangus | 2026-01-23 14:33:19+00:00
Device management != micromanaging developer workflow.

At my midsize company, our engineers could absolutely say something like “we don’t like Terraform Cloud, we want to switch to OpenTofu and env0” and our management would be okay with it and make it happen as long as we justify the change.

We wouldn’t even really have to ask permission if the change was no cost.
by techblueberry | 2026-01-23 14:33:20+00:00
The value of a library is not in the code it’s in the operations. It’s been curated and tested by multiple people in multiple environments. One of the ways to code at a high level is to delegate the cognitive load.

If you really can one shot it and it’s simple(left-pad). Great. But most things aren’t my that simple, the third time you have to think about it, it’s probably a net loss.
by the__alchemist | 2026-01-23 14:33:22+00:00
I wonder why they didn't immediately FFI it: C is the easiest lang to write rust binding for. It can get tedious if using many parts of a large API, but otherwise is straightforward.

I write most of my applications and libraries in Rust, and lament that most of the libraries I wish I would FFI are in C++ or Python, which are more difficult.

Protobuf sounds like the wrong tool. It has applications for wire serialization and similar, but is still kind of a mess there. I would not apply it to something that stays in memory.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-23 14:33:26+00:00
> but the hole in the market is vibe coders who want to launch a web app vibe coded but don't know how to deploy containers to the cloud without a steep learning curve

Is it really a hole? I'm not the target user, but I keep coming across "Build & deploy your own platform/service/application with VibeCodingLikeThereIsNoTomorrow" and similar, maybe new one every week or so.
by PrismShadow | 2026-01-23 14:34:25+00:00
Hi HN,
I built AgentHub because I was frustrated by the trade-offs required to build multi-model agents in 2026. When you try to support GPT, Claude, and Gemini 3 simultaneously, you usually hit a wall: you either write thousands of lines of boilerplate code or use a "standardizing" wrapper that strips away what makes each model special.
While projects like Open Responses focus on creating vital standards for model transparency and evaluation, AgentHub provides a simple and light-weight interface to adopt those standards in production with zero code changes.
AgentHub takes a different approach: We don’t want to "standardize" the models; we want to provide an intuitive yet faithful interface that keeps you 100% consistent with official API specifications.
- Zero-Code Switching: You can transition your entire agent infrastructure from one provider to another via a simple configuration update. No refactoring, no logic changes—it’s a true zero-code conversion for your codebase.
- Faithful Validation: Unlike simple API forwarders, we perform comprehensive validation to ensure your payloads perfectly match SOTA specifications. This maintains 100% consistency with official API SDKs, eliminating the "intelligence loss" often caused by fragile manual schema mapping.
- Traceable Executions: We provide lightweight yet fine-grained tracing for debugging and auditing LLM executions, enabling deep post-mortem analysis of agent behavior.
I’m curious to hear from the HN community: In your production workflows, do you prefer a "Universal Standard" like Open Responses, or do you value 100% official SDK consistency more when switching between frontier models?
by Aurornis | 2026-01-23 14:34:45+00:00
A subset of open source contributors are only interested in getting something accepted so they can put it on their resume.

Any smart interviewer knows that you have to look at actual code of the contributions to confirm it was actually accepted and that it was a non-trivial change (e.g. not updating punctuation in the README or something).

In my experience this is where the PR-spammers fall apart in interviews. When they proudly tell you they’re a contributor to a dozen popular projects and you ask for direct links to their contributions, they start coming up with excuses for why they can’t find them or their story changes.

There are of course lazy interviewers who will see the resume line about having contributed to popular projects and take it as strong signal without second guessing. That’s what these people are counting on.
by TeamCommet1 | 2026-01-23 14:34:49+00:00
Hi HN, I’m one of the co-founders of Commet.

We built this because we were tired of the eventual consistency and “webhook hell' of traditional billing wrappers when trying to implement real-time usage tracking for AI tokens and seats.

The Core Idea: We provide a deterministic billing engine designed for complex models like metered usage, credits, and seat-based pricing, acting as a single source of truth for your app’s permissions. Beyond the logic, we also act as the Merchant of Record (MoR), taking on the global tax liability (VAT/GST) and compliance so you can offload the entire billing and tax infrastructure.

Tech Stack: Next.js, Go, and PostgreSQL. We focused heavily on idempotency and sub-100ms event ingestion.

We have a sandbox at sandbox.commet.co where you can test the API/SDK without an account. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the architecture, especially regarding how we handle multi-jurisdiction tax logic.

Happy to answer any questions!
by Rygian | 2026-01-23 14:35:15+00:00
What you state is provably wrong. Consent and objection to legitimate interest are two different things, in the eyes of GDPR, and are managed separately in privacy banners:

Navigate to a website of your choice [1]. Let's assume its privacy banner is served by onetrust.

The text at the top of their "Privacy Center" says, verbatim, "We share this information with our partners on the basis of consent and legitimate interest. You may exercise your right to consent or object to a legitimate interest"

If you then unfold the "Manage Consent Preferences" you will notice that you can, _separately_, provide your consent for a given purpose, by sliding the switch to the right to enable it, and also, _at the same time_, "Object to Legitimate Interests" by clicking on the button labeled so.

Of course, this is a dark pattern to make it as cumbersome as possible to object to Legitimate Interest purposes.

[1] (I took vox dot com as an example.)
by samtheprogram | 2026-01-23 14:35:30+00:00
Spotlight has really been bothering me lately, for months now, and it’s not even indexing all the time. I disabled all but applications and the calculator, because that’s all I use Spotlight for, and it still can’t find some apps that are in /Applications. Sometimes it’s some apps, sometimes it’s everything, and after rebooting it’ll sometimes reindex. No idea what’s going on, but today might be the day I install Quicksilver, if that’s still a thing.

I also had to type over reindex 3 times to get it to stick :)
by nobleach | 2026-01-23 14:35:45+00:00
I think I can get on board with this view. In the earlier LLM days, I was working on a project that had me building models of different CSV's we'd receive from clients. I needed to build classes that represented all the fields. I asked AI to do it for me and I was very pleased with the results. It saved me an hour-long slog of copying the header rows, pasting into a class, ensuring that everything was camel-cased, etc. But the key thing here is that that work was never going to be the "hard part". That was the slog. The real dopamine hit was from solving the actual problem at hand - parsing many different variants of a file, and unifying the output in a homogenous way.

Now, if I had just said, "Dear Claude, make it so I can read files from any client and figure out how to represent the results in the same way, no matter what the input is". I can agree, I _might_ be stepping into "you're not gonna understand the software"-land. That's where responsibility comes into play. Reading the code that's produced is vital. I however, am still not at the point where I'm giivng feature work to LLMs. I make a plan for what I want to do, and give the mundane stuff to the AI.
by mattwiese | 2026-01-23 14:36:15+00:00
> Their behaviour has been more akin to a non-profit. Great for us, not so great for them in the long run.

This is particularly amusing when considering they helped start the Open Container Initiative with others back in 2015.

What if Docker "the company" was just a long con to use VC bux to fund open source? I say mostly in jest.
by DangitBobby | 2026-01-23 14:36:31+00:00
As we've seen here on HN on the AI boom, it's not wonderful when a bunch of companies all use bots to scrape the entire web. Many sites only allow Google scrapers in robots.txt and the public will fight you hard if you scrape them without permission. It's just one of those things where it would be better for everyone if search engines could pay for access to the work that's done only once.
by X_use_teleport | 2026-01-23 14:36:47+00:00
I work in the business intelligence space and have had great success improving the speed, scope, and quality of my products with LLMs - and more so now with agentic copilots.

I think a critical point is how well one can communicate/delegate. I have a background with systems thinking and communication, so figuring out how to prompt for what I’m after was smooth.

I was also an early adopter of LLMs so there’s good muscle memory there.

It’s important to see AI tools as accelerators - not replacements or solvers. Still do test-driven development. Still maintain robust documentation. Good practices + AI is where the value is; not just throwing AI at things.
by rvermeulen98 | 2026-01-23 14:36:53+00:00
That is indeed true, the initial scan only does a sweep of the subnet of the used network interface (up to a /16 max) once every 5 minutes. On a subnet larger than /16 it will log a warning and scan from the first ip in the subnet up to where a /16 would end.

I didn't want to burden the local network too much, so therefore build in this rule. The network interface can be configured via the yaml file, but I think it is a good idea to add flags for more of the configuration options that are currently supported via yaml.
by vanderZwan | 2026-01-23 14:36:55+00:00
Speaking as a Dutch person who lives in Sweden and who has traveled a lot within the EU, I'm pretty confident that the sympathy for "loser" heroes is not limited to England, but broadly applies to most if not all of Europe.

The way this is expressed however varies a lot depending on the local culture, and the English sense of humor around it is particularly loved (at least in the Netherlands, I can't really speak for other countries).

I suspect that there this cultural difference has a strong connection to which flavor of Christianity was more dominant in a particular European region, and more specifically: how bleak their takes on predestination were[0]. That relates pretty directly to the question of "are we merely victims subject to winds of chance and external circumstance, or are we powerful agents fashioning our own stories, making our own luck?" after all.

Getting side-tracked for a bit, I've also seen this argument used to to explain why Donald Duck is more popular in most European countries than Mickey Mouse. That is actually is a fun little rabbit hole to dive into too[1][2].

Sweden, Finland, and the Netherlands have had their own weekly Donald Duck magazine since 1948, 1951 and 1952 respectively, producing a lot of their own stories with their own established canon. Italy used to have a Donald Duck weekly from 1937 to 1940, but then it got merged into their weekly Mickey Mouse magazine. It still creates monthly Donald Duck pocket editions (which are translated and sold all over Europe).

Meanwhile, Mickey Mouse has weekly magazines in Italy (1931), France (1934), Germany (1951), Greece (1966), and was even very briefly published in inter-war Poland (1938 to 1939). I can only confirm that Italy produces most of its own comics.

Now I could argue that this confirms my earlier claim since Donald Duck appears more in the protestant side of Europe and Mickey in the catholic/orthodox side, but having grown up reading these comics I know better: in reality the Donald Duck magazines regularly feature Mickey stories and vice versa, and countries exchange stories as well.

However, those stories definitely have a different flavor to them depending on which country they are from. One big example: in the Dutch comics Donald Duck is a loser, but a lot of his misery is also self-inflicted. Meanwhile, the Italians came up with a superhero alter-ego for Donald Duck that started out as a revenge fantasy against horrible boss (Scrooge McDuck) but that quickly evolved into actual an actually superhero comic[3]. Make of that what you will.

PS: As a tangent on a tangent, if anyone from South America wants to comment on 1971's How to Read Donald Duck I'd be very interested, because I just discovered it on Wikipedia[4].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predestination

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Duck_in_comics

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_comics

[3] https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/The_Duck_Avenger

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_Donald_Duck
by tga | 2026-01-23 14:37:01+00:00
Most likely, and nobody cares.

Already many years ago I remember installing a firewall on my phone and noticing in surprise that Outlook was not connecting at all to my private mail server, but instead only sending my credentials to their cloud and downloading messages from there.

The only Android mail client not making random calls to cloud servers was (back then) K-9 Mail.
by mark_l_watson | 2026-01-23 14:37:12+00:00
Not directly covered by this blog, but for low cost and good performance the combination of gemini-3-flash with search grounding is hard to beat, at least for the many small experiments I use it for.

One thing touched upon in comments here: I never understood how it was proper for 3rd parties to scrape Google search results and reuse/resell them.

Really off topic, sorry, but I am surprised that more companies don’t build local search indices for just the few hundred web domains that are important to their businesses. I have tried this in combination with local (small and fast) LLMs and I think this is unappreciated tech: fast, cheap, and local.
by Fricken | 2026-01-23 14:37:41+00:00
Here's some further reading:

AI is not a horse [1]
Is AI a horse or a zebra? [2]
Horse Sense about AI [3]
What do horses and AI have in common? [4]
Horse rides astronaut [5]
Horses explain AI to us [6]

[1] https://essays.georgestrakhov.com/ai-is-not-a-horse/
[2] https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/lu_law_review/vol19/iss4/...
[3] https://www.media.mit.edu/articles/horse-sense-about-ai/
[4] https://prajakta.medium.com/what-do-horses-and-ai-have-in-co...
[5] https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/horse-rides-astronaut
[6] https://www.cavallomagazine.it/en/commenti/i-cavalli-ci-spie...
by tialaramex | 2026-01-23 14:37:45+00:00
It so happens that in this very specific case your obviously bad choice didn't make anything worse, that doesn't make it a good choice.

"Aha, the defective trucks only cause injuries to people who have their hands on the wheel at highway speeds, but I've never bothered holding the wheel at high speed, I just YOLO so I wouldn't be affected"

If people had used IANA's reserved TLDs they too would be unaffected because although Windows will stupidly try to talk to for example autodiscover.example that can't exist by policy and so the attempt will always fail.
by rvermeulen98 | 2026-01-23 14:38:17+00:00
It doesn't start port scanning by default, maybe this is a feature I can build in the future. When you are on the `detail` view of a device, you can press `p` and that will open a pop-up to perform the port scan. Also the list of ports that will be scanned is a default list of common ports, and can be configured via the configuration yaml.
by techdmn | 2026-01-23 14:38:54+00:00
I agree with all your points about Trump's actual behavior, and assure you that nobody dislikes him more than I do!

That said, I think "Trump's voters are all assholes" is a talking point NOT of liberal voters, but of the Democratic party, because it conveniently avoids any discussion of policy, particularly where the party and its typical voters may differ.

Trade is a good example. The bipartisan consensus since Clinton has largely been that unfettered trade is good. However, if you work in manufacturing, or are in a labor pool that competes with former manufacturing workers (or workers who might have chosen a career in manufacturing, or mechanical engineering, or processing engineering), then there are certainly some drawbacks to consider.

To be clear: I do not in any way endorse Trump's policy. I am not trying to discount "owning the libs", or violent racism, certainly both motivators for a good chunk of the MAGA camp. I am saying that it is worth considering policy issues that may have convinced people to vote for him. Especially if you separate campaigning from implementation. Trump's foreign policy has been intervention-heavy, but his rhetoric was frequently isolationist.
by miki123211 | 2026-01-23 14:40:35+00:00
> [1]

Cybersecurity is also an exception here.

"men with guns" only work for cases where the criminal must be in the jurisdiction of the crime for the crime to have occurred.

If you rob a bank in London, you must be in London, and the British police can catch you. If you rob a bank somebody else, the British police doesn't care. If you hack a bank in London though, you may very well be in North Korea.
by schopra909 | 2026-01-23 14:40:39+00:00
Not public yet — we’re going to clean it up so it’s readable and release it as blog posts. First one will be everything you need to know on building a VAE for image and video. Should be out in a few weeks. We’re figuring out the write balance between spending time writing and all the work we have on our plate for the next model.

If you’re interested in this stuff, keep an eye on field notes (our blog).
by radioradioradio | 2026-01-23 14:40:52+00:00
Seems like (according to the author) whatever docker is doing it is a sign of their immediate demise and everyone on HN is cheering for the company to go down in flames no matter what.

The tech is open source and free forever - thats somehow a problem?
The company monitised enterprise features, while keeping core and hub free - also a problem?
Is exploring AI tools, like everyone else is? should they not? should they just stay stagnant?
Has made hardened images free instead of making that a premium feature only for people in banks? - and monitising SLAs, how is that a problem?

Docker is still maintaining the runtime on which orbstack, podman etc are all using, and all the cloud providers are using, but apparently at the same time Docker is deeply irrelevant and should not make money - while all of us on HN with well paid tech jobs get to have high thoughts on their every move to pay their employees and investors...
by holowoodman | 2026-01-23 14:41:00+00:00
Well, actually, thermolysis for water occurs at 2200°C. Thermolysis of CO₂ starts at 1400°C, of CO at 3700°C. The melting point of iron is around 1500°C, similarly its oxides.

So water as a product is actually more stable than CO₂, and doesn't undergo thermolysis at the relevant temperatures for smelting iron. Whereas when going the CO₂ route, there is the risk of producing relevant amounts of CO, which is not as desirable and less efficient because it only absorbs half the oxygen.

Cost is a big question, but it will for sure be more expensive to use hydrogen.
by 6stringmerc | 2026-01-23 14:41:18+00:00
Horses have some semblance of self preservation and awareness of danger - see: jumping. LLMs do not have that at all so the analogy fails.

My term of “Automation Improved” is far more relevant and descriptive in current state of the art deployments. Same phone / text logic trees, next level macro-type agent work, none of it is free range. Horses can survive on their own. AI is a task helper, no more.
by kccqzy | 2026-01-23 14:41:54+00:00
> I cannot install it as nonroot user

Sure you cannot install docker or podman as a non-root user. But take your argument a bit further: what if the kernel is compiled without cgroups support? Then you will need root to replace the kernel and reboot. The root user can do arbitrarily many things to prevent you from installing any number of software. The root user can prevent you from using arbitrary already installed software. The root user can even prevent you from logging in.

It is astounding to me that someone would complain that a non-root user cannot install software. A much more reasonable complaint is that a non-root user can become root while using docker. This complaint has been resolved by podman.
by iammjm | 2026-01-23 14:42:17+00:00
The game's been played competitively for more than 25 years now, people still earn their living plying StarCraft. You wont find a single one of them with APM below 200. Having their livelihoods and legacies depending on this, do you think they'd be repeatedly doing something useless instead of optimizing?

Anyways, I think you are missing the point that this thread is about active sitting. I imagine there isn't much difference to the meaning behind movement: movement is movement, meaningful or not.
by squeefers | 2026-01-23 14:42:18+00:00
> it’s happened a small handful of times in the span of decades.

bit of an undersell... hes famous for it. people have left kernel dev because of it. difference between him and your typical product manager are the internet fanbois who treat him like a god. typical product managers have soft skills. typical product managers are beholden to things like polity, common courtesy etc.