MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Getback_12_12 | 2026-01-22 14:19:02+00:00
Quick win I wanted to share.

I'm building a PDF API — pre-revenue, bootstrapped, the usual. Using Supabase Edge Functions for the backend because the DX is genuinely great.

Problem: Supabase gives you URLs like xyzabc123.supabase.co/functions/v1/endpoint . For a B2B API where I'm asking people to send me their data, that's a non-starter. Nobody's integrating that into production.

I needed api.mydomain.com

Supabase offers custom domains, but it's $25/mo (Pro plan) + $10/mo (domain add-on) = $35/mo = *$420/year*.

For context, that's more than my entire infrastructure cost right now.

The fix: Cloudflare Workers. Free tier. ~40 lines of code that proxies requests to Supabase behind my domain. Handles headers, auth, the works.

Took maybe 3-4 hours to get right. Now I have a professional-looking API URL, vendor flexibility (can swap backends without breaking client integrations), and $420 back in my pocket.

Not revolutionary, but these small wins add up when you're pre-revenue.
by al_borland | 2026-01-22 14:19:09+00:00
I think the goal is to make it easy to use without sacrificing what makes it useful.

The most effective way I see this done is to make the basic feature or features every easy to pick up and use, to get people in the door and avoid those day 1 learning curve issues. But for those who want to go deep, let them go down the rabbit hole.

Obsidian and Apple Notes both do this pretty well. At their core, a user can open them up and start writing and creating new notes within a a minute of first use. However, both have a lot more functionality buried under the hood for those who want to do more, so people don’t feel limited by the apparent simplicity. VS Code would fall into this bucket as well.

Compare this Notepad from Windows XP or orgmode. With Notepad, you can open it and write, but that’s it. If the user wants anything more, sorry, to find something else. Orgmode has the opposite problem of a high learning curve, step one, learn emacs… you just almost everyone outside of HN.

With a simple app, it’s easy to quickly see that it can’t fit your needs. With a complex app, maybe it takes longer, but it’s usually someone quitting over frustration, or not being able to get past the learning curve just to handle the basics.
by Bender | 2026-01-22 14:19:13+00:00
Does not appear to be any bets on Polymarket of Kalshi. HN does not have a feature for this. Closest is poll. [1] Out of curiosity why do you think it will de-orbit? Or is the bet that SpaceX will not be able to get it up?

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll
Founders can now chat with their Git history
by inferno22 | 2026-01-22 14:19:14+00:00
Gitmore (https://gitmore.io) – natural language queries across GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket.
Instead of filtering PRs, scanning commit logs, or asking engineers for updates:

- "What shipped last week?" - "Who's been working on the API?" - "Which PRs have been open longest?" - "Summarize this month's releases"

Plain English in, plain English out.

How it works:

Connect your repos via OAuth. We register webhooks. Every event gets normalized into a structured schema – commit message, PR description, author, timestamp, files changed.

The AI queries structured data, not raw text. PR descriptions and titles carry context that individual commits often miss.

Automated reports:

Don't want to ask? Schedule it.

Weekly or monthly summaries delivered to Slack or email. Forward to stakeholders or let it run on autopilot.

Other features: - Slack bot: Ask from where you already work - Public changelog: yourcompany.gitmore.io/changelog - Contributor leaderboard

Security:

Metadata only. We store commit messages, PR titles, descriptions, timestamps, authors.

We never access source code, diffs, or file contents.

- Token encryption: Fernet (HMAC-SHA256 + AES-128-CBC) - Webhook verification: HMAC-SHA256 - 2FA support

Verify yourself: check webhook settings after connecting.

Free for 1 repo: https://gitmore.io
by lordleft | 2026-01-22 14:19:23+00:00
As much as I love American upbeat-ness (I'm American) I think that our hatred of failure and our strained optimism puts a tremendous psychological pressure on us. Sometimes, we fail, and that's okay. Sometimes, we lose, and that's just life. I think that's an essential part of growing up, and our collective denial of that makes me feel like we, as a people, are not quite mature.
by Scarblac | 2026-01-22 14:19:37+00:00
"In the US you cannot make jokes about failure"

There is also the phenomenon that serial failure Donald Duck is still a very popular character in several European countries, while we don't care about Mickey Mouse at all. Isn't it the other way around in the US?

Mickey always does good and always wins, that's deeply boring. Donald is flawed and relatable.
by Kerrick | 2026-01-22 14:19:58+00:00
That's gotta be part of it. But I think another important part is how TUIs have important restrictions that lead to surprisingly delightful applications despite their downsides:

- You don't have control over font size and your color palette can be limited (and chosen by the user in their Terminal settings), so it's hard to go too off-the-rails in aesthetic design

- You work on a strict character grid, so it's hard to get things like padding, margin, and leading wrong.

- You can't assume the use of a mouse, so everything has to work on keyboard shortcuts. This usually leads to extremely power-user-friendly tools. Plus, keyboard-driven, power-user-friendly UIs are hot right now, even on the web (Linear, Fernand, etc.).
by blutoot | 2026-01-22 14:20:27+00:00
There’s only one solution to this problem at this point. Make AI significantly less affordable and accessible. Raise the prices of Pro / Plus / max / ultra tiers, introduce time limits, especially for minors (like screen time) when the LLM can detect age better. This will be a win-win solution: (a) people will be forced to go back to “old ways” of doing whatever it is that AI was doing it for them, (b) we won’t need as many data-centers as the AI companies are projecting today.
by kibbul4 | 2026-01-22 14:20:59+00:00
Firstly, she ain't gonna let you hit...

Secondly, nobody is going to read that and decide not to rape someone. Zero people are ever having their mind changed by what you wrote.

Thirdly, and it's even more taboo but you really need to hear it: women lie. A lot. Claiming sexual assault is (wrongly) believed by many to be a complete escape from all accountability for whatever choices and behaviours they voluntarily engaged in. It's not. I know you're not a fool, please know that you have no moral obligation to believe such claims or enable their behaviour.

The gendered language probably didn't help. You would have really riled up the crowd if you had specifically admonished women for infidelity, divorce, emotional abuse, financial deception, paternity fraud, etc.
by lenerdenator | 2026-01-22 14:21:09+00:00
This project really should have been the focus of the Russian computing community. I remember reading about it 15 years ago when I was in college, thinking "Wow, free Windows, that sounds useful".

Still not as usable as it needs to be and now the main use case for a lot of Windows machines, gaming, is being taken care of in GNU/Linux.

Gotta strike while the iron is hot.
by deltarholamda | 2026-01-22 14:21:36+00:00
His point of high church vs. Protestantism is a good one. We in the US practice a kind of competitive Protestantism designed--at least partly, if not mostly--to make the adherents feel good about themselves. There is a distinct difference between submission and proselytizing.

There is also something to the state of empire as well. The British empire had been in steady decline for a very long time before Adams or Fry started making people laugh, whereas the American empire has been ascending quickly since WWII. This sort of gestalt is hard to ignore and will certainly influence things. For example, would a 'Blackadder' sell as well in 1890? This is around the same time 'King Solomon's Mines' was selling briskly, and Haggard's story is instantly recognizable by any modern Hollywood writer.

On some level Americans are British people time-displaced by a couple of generations.
by lapcat | 2026-01-22 14:22:36+00:00
As an American very smart philosophy-major type, I've always loved The Hitchhiker's Guide, and if was nihilistic, then I guess I'm a nihilist too.

My analysis of the situation is simply that the quoted Slashdot user unfortunately ran into someone with a substandard sense of humor and took them too seriously.

Any analysis positing a cultural divide is overgeneralizing and stereotyping. Moreover, I'm certain that Adams has sold quite well in the US.
by epolanski | 2026-01-22 14:22:46+00:00
I don't know if it is, but I can swear every time I post a job opening (generally contracting work) on LinkedIn 95% of the applicants are Indians/Bangladesh/Pakistanis/Sri Lankans.

I ignore all of their resumes, not because I don't think there's valid individuals among them, I did hire them in the past, but:

1. because the signal to noise ratio is absurd. The overwhelming majority didn't even read the actual post.

2. Even when they are okay developers, communication is always a huge issue. Sync communication in call is though because urdu and other indian area accents are extremely heavy so I really struggle understanding their english, my bad but what can I do about it. If I try to keep it async or chat based then they tend to not ask feedback, clarifications, provide updates, etc. So you feel like you need to micro manage them half the time and they'd rather give you answers to make you immediately happy than surfacing problems.

3. Paying them is always an hassle. Wiring them money through bank accounts is difficult. They generally set up some Paypal or similar service or ask you to pay them on some Hong Kong account from a friend of theirs. I need traceable invoices and simple wires for tax purposes and when sending money to Pakistan multiple times anti-laundering got involved in my country, and we talking low hundreds of euros.

Still, props to the few good ones I've met, they've been critical on some projects of mine. Very professional and knowledgeable. But it's just too bad of a signal/noise ratio, seriously most applicants don't even read job descriptions.
by arionmiles | 2026-01-22 14:23:00+00:00
You only notice this stuff if you use shell very often, and practically live in the command line. Since I started my career I've been using omz and a fresh install is always snappy but over time it starts getting slow.

Debugging/profiling why it's gotten slow has mostly been an uphill battle for me. I tried using zprof which pointed that compdef and compinit were culprits. I tried changing my config to calculate compinit only once a day since most people reported it to work, but it never worked. This kind of stuff pokes and stabs at you endlessly.

OMZ being shell, and being a maze of a codebase, I couldn't track down if and where compinit was being called from even after the config change above, because all profilers pointed to the possibility of compinit being called twice.

I gave up and started using barebones zsh + starship because I do need a good prompt. Yet the issues persisted.

I recently started using fish + starship on my local machine so that I could evaluate it before committing to it at work. It's the fastest shell so far (maybe because its new, I intend to find out).

My only painpoint now is I have a bunch of utility functions I've maintained in bash that I need to port to fish because of the posix incompatibility.

OMZ is absolutely bloat.
by mrtksn | 2026-01-22 14:24:10+00:00
In this context, how does the business side of things look like with such large projects?

What happens if their revenue optimization software calculates that US can actually pay much more for much less? With the liberalization of infrastructure things like that happen, in Europe trains are infamous for getting shittier with privatizations and nationalization becomes political topic. IIRC Texas grid had become crazy expensive in a cold winters some years ago, people dying or paying crazy prices. Then there's the case of the investors going political, at some point Elon Musk threatened halting projects essential for the US government when he had a public fight with Trump.

What happens if China leaps ahead by not seeking profits of all this? Is there a mechanism to force US private space companies not to seek profits or cap profits? Sure SLS costs vs SpaceX are infamous but private ownership doesn't necessarily guarantee success considering that Boeing failed miserably both with NASA contracts and fully commercial operations.

Brave new world I guess, if it doesn't pan out there are the Chinese and the Russians.
by cess11 | 2026-01-22 14:24:24+00:00
'Your PDF:s will open slower because we decided that the CDN providers are more important than you'.

If size was important to users then it wouldn't be so common that systems providers crap out huge PDF files consisting mainly of layout junk 'sophistication' with rounded borders and whatnot.

The PDF/A stuff I've built stays under 1 MB for hundreds of pages of information, because it's text placed in a typographically sensible manner.
by retsibsi | 2026-01-22 14:24:28+00:00
> If I've already gone through a lot of the process to decide to buy something at a certain price [...] then I've already spent some not-insignificant amount of resources on the purchasing process.

Yes, that's part of what I was trying to account for with my second bullet point. But before you've made that initial decision, there must be some price that would cause you to make it a 'yes' and some marginally higher price that would cause you to make it a 'no'.

This value obviously won't be totally constant across time -- it will vary with your mental state. But at any given time (and for any given roll of the mental dice, if we're assuming there's some true indeterminism here), it must exist. So when we're translating from "what's the maximum I would pay" to "what should I bid", we can imagine that we're in our most rational and clear-thinking frame of mind, aren't seized by any strange impulses, and so on.

The time and effort of researching a different item also has a value that could be pinned down in a similar way. So it doesn't fundamentally change the arguments here; if product A would be worth $X in a vacuum, but you'd happily pay $Y to avoid going through the research process again, then you should bid $X+Y.
by notepad0x90 | 2026-01-22 14:24:46+00:00
No, the implication that "THING" is the cause of something and therefore something needs to be done must withstand the scrutiny of "other THINGS" also causing that thing, and therefore the solution is attacking either only one cause or not the real root cause.

The fact that bad reports have to be triage doesn't change with AI. What changed is the volume, clearly. So the reasonable response is not to blame "AI" but to ask for help with the added volume.

If HN gets flooded by AI spam, is the right response shutting down HN? spam is spam whether AI does it or a dedicated and coordinated large numbers of humans do it. The problem doesn't change because of who is causing it in this case.
by krapp | 2026-01-22 14:25:18+00:00
Most Americans wouldn't consider Charlie Brown the "hero" of his strip, they would consider him a loser who gets what he deserves, and that's the joke. He isn't cool the way Snoopy is cool.

I think the article is correct that Americans don't feel sympathy for the underdog who doesn't overcome and succeed in the end so much as contempt, due to their inborn sense of entitlement and belief that failure is caused by a lack of moral fortitude and excess of laziness rather than systemic injustice and inequality.
by madcaptenor | 2026-01-22 14:25:20+00:00
I would imagine links can be hallucinated because the original URLs in the training data get broken up into tokens - so it's not hard to come up with a URL that has the right format (say https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.01234 - which is a real paper but I just made up that URL) and a plausible-sounding title.
by ETH_start | 2026-01-22 14:25:42+00:00
When private information is as widely shared as it currently is by government bodies, I think it's important to point out selective coverage of privacy violations, while the systemic encroachment of privacy rights continues unabated by 20 plus agencies.

In fact, a contrarian political entity created by an outside party — as the DOGE is/was — may be the kind of shock to major institutions that could lead to real positive change, in terms of greater transparency into and accountability over how these major institutions operate.
by scroot | 2026-01-22 14:25:55+00:00
These posts claiming that "we will review the output" etc., and that claim software engineers will still need to apply their expertise and wisdom to generated outputs, never seem to think this all the way through. Those who write such articles might indeed have enough experience and deep knowledge to evaluate AI outputs. What of subsequent generations of engineers? What about the forthcoming wave of people who may never attain the (required) deep knowledge, because they've been dependent on these generation tools during the course of their own education?

The structures of our culture combined with what generative AI necessarily is means that expertise will fade generationally. I don't see a way around that, and I see almost no discussion of ameliorating the issue.
by wrqvrwvq | 2026-01-22 14:26:02+00:00
The pod has this line "I do want to know if the offloading of cognitive tasks changes my own brain and my own cognition", which is what the paper attempts to address. The authors conclude

> To summarize, the delta-band differences suggest that unassisted writing engages more widespread, slow integrative brain processes, whereas assisted writing involves a more narrow or externally anchored engagement, requiring less delta-mediated integration.

There is no intellectual judgement regarding this difference, though the authors do supply citations from related work that they claim may be of interest to those wanting "to know if the offloading of cognitive tasks changes my own brain and my own cognition". If your brain changes, it might change for the worse at least as far as you experience it. Is this ableism, to examine your own cognitive well-being and make your own assessment? If you don't like how you're thinking about something, are you casting aspersion on yourself and shaming your own judgement? Ableist discourse is, unsurprisingly, a stupid language game for cognitively impaired dummies. It's a pathetic attempt to redefine basic notions of capability and impairment, of functioning and dysfunction as inherently evil concepts, and then to work backward from that premise to find fault with the research results. Every single person experiences moments or lifetime's of psychological and mental difficulty. Admitting this and adapting to it or remediating harmful effects has nothing to do with calling stupid people stupid or ableism. It's just a means of providing tools and frameworks for "cognitive wellness", but even just the implication of "wellness" being distinct from "illness" makes the disturbed and confused unwell.
by tim333 | 2026-01-22 14:26:16+00:00
I don't think the replies are advocating for baby torturing but pointing out logical flaws in the argument.

It's true almost all people would argue it's bad but things like lions might like it which makes in not a universal law but a common human opinion. I think real moral systems do come down to human opinions basically, sometimes common sense ones, sometimes weird.

A problem with making out morality is absolute rather than common sense opinions is you get visionaries trying to see these absolute morals and you end up with stuff like Deuteronomy 25:11-12 "if a woman intervenes in a fight between two men by grabbing the assailant's genitals to rescue her husband, her hand is to be cut off without pity" and the like.
by imtringued | 2026-01-22 14:26:19+00:00
I personally didn't understand why people still snipe on eBay even though they already have an automated bidding system and the reason is that you don't want to fall victim to nibblers. Nibblers are people who bid a low amount that raises the price but is unlikely to win the auction. I.e. someone bids 30€ on an item that you would bid 50€ on. This raises the price to 30€ because of your automatic bids. The nibbler then bids 35€ to see if that was enough and it still wasn't, losing you 5€ from early bidding. If the nibbler thought he could get the item for 30€, you would only have to pay 30.50€ to beat him. The other reason is that you don't want to lock up your money since a long auction timer means you can't start bidding on the next auction in case you lose.
by tanelpoder | 2026-01-22 14:26:28+00:00
I also wrote a little Python tool that iterates through syscall tracepoint declarations in debugfs (/sys/kernel/debug) and lists available syscalls and their arguments available in your currently running system:

https://tanelpoder.com/posts/list-linux-system-call-argument...

Debugfs does not show platform-specific syscall internal numbers though (but the stable syscall IDs).

Apparently debugfs does not show all syscalls, excluding "some weird ones" as mentioned by mebeim/systrack author in an earlier HN discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41018135#41020166
by k1m | 2026-01-22 14:27:14+00:00
That's unsurprising. There's no willingness to challenge the Nobel Foundation on the basis set out by Assange, even though they reluctantly admitted in 2012 that they (the Swedish foundation) has to ensure the will is respected:

> "...pursuant to the current legislation governing foundations, the Board of Directors of the Nobel Foundation is legally accountable for ensuring that [...] the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded in accordance with the criteria stipulated by Alfred Nobel."

This was from a press release from 2012 that now appears to be deleted from their site: https://web.archive.org/web/20120601234000/http://www.nobelp...

I think a serious examination of Nobel's will and how the Nobel Committee chose Machado over other candidates would make the Norwegian Committee look very bad. It would also show that the Swedish Nobel Foundation failed in its legal duty to ensure the will was respected. A result that would embarrass both Norway and Sweden. So what you get instead is quick dismissal of any such complaints.

The Swedish press has also been terrible in reporting this. I saw articles trying to make Assange out to be stupid for filing in Sweden. Journalists either didn't bother reading the Wikileaks press release, or wanted to keep their readers in the dark about it.

Here's one example from Aftonbladet (Sweden's largest news site):

> WikiLeaks alleges that Assange sent his letter to Swedish authorities, although it is the Norwegian Nobel Committee that appoints peace laureates. ("Wikileaks påstår att Assange skickat sitt brev till svenska myndigheter, även om det är den norska Nobelkommittén som utser fredspristagare.")

There's a book by Norwegian lawyer Fredrik Heffermehl which goes into the 2012 challenge to the Nobel Foundation. I've only skimmed it, but looks quite interesting: https://www.kobo.com/se/en/ebook/the-real-nobel-peace-prize-...