MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vee-kay | 2026-01-24 05:39:16+00:00
People living in glass houses should not throw stones on others.

I am going to use your own words to show you the mirror now..

Your America and its democratically-voted (even if we can call gerrymandering such) orange dictator have become the "laughingstock of Western politics".

The "war on terror" excuse to do wars for oil, was coined by "Western politic(ian)s", "exacerbating" to "manufacture consent for authoritarian policy".

Recent example: Venezuela. It is pure greed and evil for a rich nation to seize a struggling country for its oil. "Eyes roll whenever someone justifies drastic action on foreign nations based on vague pretexts/accusations".

Older example: Did the USA/NATO ever find those "Weapons of Mass Destruction" in Iraq? Oh wait, the WMDs were there, because they brought them there.. to wage that war.. war not on terror... but war for oil. They didn't find any WMDs, but they certainly quickly found those rich oilfields, and then systematically looted them.. and finally set them on fire, when retreating.. from the war they started.. knowing that without that precious oil, the natives of that desert land will struggle to limp back to normalcy, especially with a Western puppet as a "democratic leader" for "positive influence on national politics".

Such tactics are not "a positive influence" on the world, because the world hates bullies. And thieves.
by nonethewiser | 2026-01-24 05:39:48+00:00
Of course. It must be used judiciously. But it completely circumvents some thought patterns that lead to slow decision making.

Perhaps I need to say it again: that doesn't mean blindly following it is good. But perhaps using claude code instead of googling will lead to 80% of the conclusions Seth would have reached otherwise with 5% of the effort.
by sph | 2026-01-24 05:40:59+00:00
ASN.1 on billions of devices doesn’t make it less of an anti-ergonomic, design-by-committee piece of crap. Unless your goal is to be binary-compatible with these devices, one should be free to explore alternatives.

By all means, keep using it, but it might be worth figuring out why other people don’t. Hint: it’s not because they’re more stupid than you or are looking to get promoted by big G.

(Personally, I like the ideas and binary encoding behind Capn Proto more than all the alternatives)
by consumer451 | 2026-01-24 05:43:01+00:00
This is a fun thought experiment. I believe that we are now at the $5 Uber (2014) phase of LLMs. Where will it go from here?

How much will a synthetic mid-level dev (Opus 4.5) cost in 2028, after the VC subsidies are gone? I would imagine as much as possible? Dynamic pricing?

Will the SOTA model labs even sell API keys to anyone other than partners/whales? Why even that? They are the personalized app devs and hosts!

Man, this is the golden age of building. Not everyone can do it yet, and every project you can imagine is greatly subsidized. How long will that last?
by energy123 | 2026-01-24 05:45:32+00:00
> 2027 is just used by war mongers and natsec folks to bang the war drums

They correctly predicted Russia's invasion of Ukraine, while everyone using slurs like "war monger" did not. I will go with their opinion on this. Which, fortunately, is more balanced than what you're letting on. They're not saying that China will definitely invade Taiwan this decade, only that it is in the ~20% ballpark, and it's therefore prudent to prepare, because "assume the best" or "I can read the mind of their autocrat" is a terrible security doctrine.
by mjevans | 2026-01-24 05:45:35+00:00
Not that it typically matters in a practical sense* (Unless you're writing to a register for a device)...

However I've always viewed Little Endian as 'bit 0' being on the left most / lowest part of the string of bits, but Big Endian 'bit 0' is all the way to the right / highest address of bits (but smallest order of power).

If encoding or decoding an analog value it makes sense to begin with the biggest bit first - but that mostly matters in a serial / output sense, not for machine word transfers which are (at least in that era were) parallel (today, of course, we have multiple high speed serial links between most chips, sometimes in parallel for wide paths).

Aside from the reduced complexity of aligned only access, forcing the bus to a machine word naturally also aligns / packs fractions of that word on RISC systems, which tended to be the big endian systems.

From that logical perspective it might even make sense to think of the RAM not in units of bytes but rather in units of whole machine words, which might be partly accessed by a fractional value.
by ajross | 2026-01-24 05:49:04+00:00
> That doesn’t justify more ongoing costs.

It makes the idea of a putative consumer who refuses to pay ongoing costs for their car a little silly though. Argue about whether the product value is worth the cost, not from a position of "people won't pay any more for their already extremely expensive vehicles".

> The article and the discussion is about autopilot, not FSD.

The fee under discussion is literally the cost of purchasing an FSD subscription.
by arjunbajaj | 2026-01-24 05:49:25+00:00
It's a signal vs noise filter, because today, AI can make more mistakes. Your operating system or IDE cannot lead you to make a similar level or amount of mistakes while writing code.

It is of course your responsibility, but the maintainer may also want to change their review approach when dealing with AI generated code. And currently, as the AI Usage Policy also states, because of bad actors sending pull requests without reviewing or taking the responsibility themselves, this acts as a filter to separate your PR which you have taken the responsibility for.
Show HN: SonicJS – open-source headless CMS built on Cloudflare Workers
by ldc0618 | 2026-01-24 05:49:50+00:00
I built SonicJS because I wanted a headless CMS that runs natively on edge infrastructure without managing servers.

Key details:
- Runs on Cloudflare Workers (free tier works)
- Uses D1 (SQLite) for storage
- Built with Hono.js and Drizzle ORM
- REST and GraphQL APIs
- Admin UI included
- TypeScript throughout

The main goal was keeping it lightweight - the whole thing is under 150KB. No cold starts since it's on edge.

Been working on this for a while and recently added AI-assisted content schema generation which has been fun to experiment with.

Happy to answer questions about the architecture or Cloudflare Workers gotchas.
by rstuart4133 | 2026-01-24 05:50:31+00:00
> the problem is that you usually don't have guarantees that the updates you get are genuine

A point of order: you do have that guarantee for most Linux distro packages. All 70,000 of them in Debian's case. And all Linux distro distribute their packages anonymously, so they can never target just one individual.

That's primarily because they aren't trying to make money out of you. Making money requires a billing relationship, and tracking which of your customers own what. Off the back of that governments can demand particular users are targeted with "special" updates. Australia in particular demands commercial providers do that with its "Assistance and Access Bill (2018)" and I'm sure most governments in the OECD have equivalents.
by techpression | 2026-01-24 05:51:56+00:00
Most research is funded by someone with a product to sell, not all but a frightening amount of it. VC to sell, VC to review.
The burden of proof is always on the one publishing and it can be a very frustrating experience, but that is how it is, the one making the claim needs to defend themselves, from people (who can be a very big hit or miss) or machines alike. The good thing is that if this product is crap then it will quickly disappear.
by justapassenger | 2026-01-24 05:52:10+00:00
Ironically - bad ones will effectively try to kill you less.

That’s the thing about any automations that are just aides. Humans are extremely bad at monitoring machines, and if aide system is good enough that trick you into thinking it’s actually stand alone and in control, you get complacent very fast, stop pay attention as you convince yourself that automation got it.

So bad level 2 driver assists are so bad, that no one will get complacent, as they give you only very minor help. Really good ones (like comma) can trick you into thinking that they can do much more than they’re designed to do.
by ggm | 2026-01-24 05:52:21+00:00
This is certainly not a given. However, absent a significant market leading aspect it comes down to value for money. FSD isn't yet a strong discriminatory quality, as much as a revenue model for something which is still contentious.

Brand loyalty is a thing. A lot of tesla owners are brand loyal but new potential owners have aspects of brand identity in Musk they can (and do) use to rationalise their choice for alternatives.

So I come back to: it's not a given. The future is uncertain.
by nonethewiser | 2026-01-24 05:54:40+00:00
When I say successful I mean more like profitable. Just yielding anything isn't succesful by any stretch of the imagination.

>I would submit that pretty much any joe blow is capable of growing some amount of crops, given enough money

Yeah in theory. In practice they wont - too much time and energy. This is where the confidence boost with LLMs comes in. You just do it and see what happens. You don't need to care if it doesn't quite work out it its so fast and cheap. Maybe you get anywhere from 50-150% of the result of your manual research for 5% of the effort.
by akst | 2026-01-24 05:55:05+00:00
yeah the messaging is somewhat insecure in that it preemptively seeks to invalidate criticism by just being an experiment while simultaneously making fairly inflammatory remarks about nay sayers like they'll eat dirt if they don't get on board.

I think it's possible to convey that you believe strongly in your idea and it could be the future (or "is the future" if you're so sure of self) while it still being experimental. I think he would get less critics if he wasn't so hyperbolic in his pitch and had fewer inflammatory personal remarks about people who he hasn't managed to bring on side.

People I know who communicate like that generally struggle to contribute constructively to nuanced discussions, and tend to seek out confrontation for the sake of it.
by edmundsauto | 2026-01-24 05:55:10+00:00
If you limit your perspective to the people who can do it, yes. If you feel it’s important to enable everyone to participate, it doesn’t “just work”

Given the ample attention recently, with no evidence of impactful fraud, it sounds like disenfranchising citizens for no reason other than unrealistic fears.

But now that one party sees their voters increasingly use mailin, I expect to see a shift in opinions quickly. (Recent evidence suggests democrats benefit from low turnout more)
by MeshKernel | 2026-01-24 05:55:59+00:00
*Firehose* converts any webpage to clean Markdown — 5-10x more efficient for LLMs.

*Pricing:* FREE (building traffic first)

*Try it:*
curl -X POST https://synthetic-context.net/v1/markdown \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com"}'

Live demo: https://synthetic-context.net/firehose.html

Built on FreeBSD, self-hosted, privacy-first.
by b00ty4breakfast | 2026-01-24 05:56:25+00:00
I didn't say it was easy, but also I don't think uninstalling tik-tok is as difficult as solving global poverty. It's obviously designed to be addictive but it's also not on the level of a chemical dependency for 90% of the population. Like, yeah, some folks probably need medical intervention but most social media users could give up on the dank maymays with only mild difficulty.
by zahlman | 2026-01-24 05:56:52+00:00
> Making up fake news is totally fine as long as you can say you’re memeing!

There is no "fake news" here. They're mocking her by making it look like she's crying when she wasn't crying.

This isn't a material misrepresentation of anything. It's not legally significant. She was apprehended and nobody disputes this; and there's video footage out there from multiple sources — including Don Lemon's Youtube channel — that makes the cause for arrest clear.

> they get to declare post-hoc what is actually real communication and what is “just memes”

No, it can clearly be determined what's a joke and what's literal by having a sense of humour and critical thinking skill.
by tern | 2026-01-24 05:57:09+00:00
While I remember $5 Ubers fondly, I think this situation is significantly more complex:

- Models will get cheaper, maybe way cheaper

- Model harnesses will get more complex, maybe way more complex

- Local models may become competitive

- Capital-backed access to more tokens may become absurdly advantaged, or not

The only thing I think you can count on is that more money buys more tokens, so the more money you have, the more power you will have ... as always.

But whether some version of the current subsidy, which levels the playing field, will persist seems really hard to model.

All I can say is, the bad scenarios I can imagine are pretty bad indeed—much worse than that it's now cheaper for me to own a car, while it wasn't 10 years ago.
by at1as | 2026-01-24 05:57:15+00:00
> walking around in wired headphones because it's cool and nostalgic, not because of usability

Can only speak for myself, but I purchased some $15 wired USB-C earbuds to use on flights while the Airpods were charging.

And I've been increasingly just using them. The Airpods would often not connect in one ear without a few tries, and the pairing was a pain (disabled the auto-pairing as that was even worse), even on a medium-length flight I'd have to charge them at least once, and I'd often find a way to fidget with the case and have everything disconnect.

I think I overestimated how much value their noise canceling or audio quality was bringing me when I mostly used them for podcasts.
by bsder | 2026-01-24 05:58:26+00:00
> Many question why Rome never entered the industrial revolution, especially considering that they invented a steam engine[0].

They simply didn't have the metallurgy.

A more interesting question is why China didn't kick off into an Industrial Revolution given that they effectively had all the same technologies and perhaps actually had a few more.

There were some cultural issues like considering philosophy more important than trades and technology. However, the general issue seems to be that demand and supply were balanced enough that there simply wasn't a huge incentive.
Show HN: Libpgn – .pgn (chess game records) parser, 2 years later
by fwttnnn | 2026-01-24 05:59:11+00:00
Hi everyone,

libpgn was on ShowHN 2 years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41442029), I wrote this parser as an attempt to understand FFI (like what raylib does, how can other language understand C code?). It turns out there's no other C99 implementation for a .pgn parser (aside for some C++ library), which was a golden opportunity.

What can you do with libpgn?

- Make a replay system (barebone in Ada: https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/8d30cdc3-7692-45bc-b313-db19e981529c).
- Save a game state, so you can reproduce the same state if it crashes.
- Chess game/opening/tutorial database.
- Feed neural networks to play chess from .pgn record?
- And, more ..?

I recently compared libpgn with `python-chess` (RegEx), and it shows to be 66x times faster (https://gist.github.com/fwttnnn/ad0f60d37ef9e8fefdd0c8664f18...).

Also, libpgn was originally GPLv2. Since this was a library, I decided to switch into ISC.
by lovich | 2026-01-24 06:00:04+00:00
> All of the big social platforms have experimented to find what kind of experience the average user actually prefers and has used that to improve their platform and continue growing. The Facebook of today is a much better platform to the average user than the Facebook pretimeline.

I mean if we’re using that as metric I think then you’d have to admit that fentanyl producers have made a better product than Facebook. I would be surprised if the median user didn’t prefer fentanyl over Facebook, assuming they tried both.
by WaitWaitWha | 2026-01-24 06:02:23+00:00
> ... The hackers would still need physical access to the hard drives to use the stolen recovery keys.

This is incorrect. A full disk image can easily obtained remotely, then mounted wherever the hacking is located. The host machine will happily ask for the Bitlocker key and make the data available.

This is a standard process for remote forensic image collection and can be accomplished surreptitiously with COTS.
by sanjayjc | 2026-01-24 06:03:15+00:00
I share your concern. I'm flummoxed by the prevalent sentiment that code is the nasty underbelly of software. To me, a programming language is a medium both for precisely directing a computer's behavior and for precisely communicating a process to fellow programmers (cue the Alan Perlis quote [1].)

I will concede that mainstream code is often characterized by excessive verbosity and boilerplate. This I attribute to the immaturity of today's crop of programming languages. Techniques like language-oriented-programming [2] hint at a path I find appealing: DSLs that are tailored to the problem while promising more precision than a natural language specification could.

To speculate, I could see LLMs helping during the creation of a DSL (surfacing limitations in the DSL's design) and when adding features to a DSL, to help migrate code written in the old version to the new one.

Perhaps DSLs aren't the future. However will there be as much interest in designing new and superior programming languages now that code is seen as little more than assembly language?

[1] https://mitp-content-server.mit.edu/books/content/sectbyfn/b...

[2] https://beautifulracket.com/appendix/why-lop-why-racket.html
by Jedd | 2026-01-24 06:05:02+00:00
Oh, I got the implication, but I think it was such a common mistake back then, that I don't think it's age-related now - it's a bit of a trope, to assume baud and bps mean the same thing, and people tend to prefer to use a more technical term even when it's not fully understood. Hence we are where we are with terms like decimate, myriad, nubile, detox etc, forcefully redefined by common (mis)usage. I need a cup of tea, clearly.

Anyway, I didn't think my throw-away comment would engender such a large response. I guess we're not the only olds around here!
by unscaled | 2026-01-24 06:06:42+00:00
You must have been very lucky. Every SOAP service I had the (dis)pleasure to integrate with was a wholly different nightmare-ish can of worms. Even when we get to the very binding of WSDL, there are way too many variations on SOAP: RPC-Encoded? RPC-Literal? Document-Literal? Wrapped Document-Literal?

The problem is part of the same myth many people (like the OP author) have about XML and SOAP: There was "One True Way™" from the beginning, XML schemas were always XSD, SOAP always required WSDL service definition and the style was always wrapped document-literal, with everything following WS-I profiles with the rest of the WS-* suite like WS-Security, WS-Trust, etc. Oh, and of course we don't care about having a secure spec and avoiding easy-to-spoof digital signatures and preventing XML bombs.

Banking systems are mature and I guess everybody already settled and standardized they way they use soap, so you don't have to get into all this mess (And security? Well, if most banks in the world were OK with mandatory maximum password lengths of 8 characters until recently, they probably never heard about XMLdDsig issues or the billion laughs attack).

But you know what also gives you auto-generated code that works perfectly without a hitch, with full schema validation? OpenAPI. Do you prefer RPC style? gRPC and Avro will give you RPC with 5% of the wire bloat that XML does. Message size does matter some times after all.

All of the things that you mentioned are not unique to XML and SOAP. Any well-specified system that combines an interchange format, a schema format, an RPC schema format and an RPC transport can do the achieve the same thing. Some standards had all of this settled from day one: I think Cap'n Proto, Avro and Thrift fit this description. Other systems like CORBA or Protocol Buffers missed some of the components or did not have a well-defined standard[1].

JSON is often criticized by XML-enthusiasts for not having a built-in schema, but his seems like selective amnesia (or maybe all of these bloggers are zoomers or younger millennials?). When XML was first released, there was nothing. Yes, you could cheat and use DTD[2]. But DTD was hard to use and most programmers eschewed writing XML schemas until XSD and Relax-NG came out. SOAP was also very basic (and lightweight!) when it first came out. XSD and WSDL quickly became the standard way to use SOAP, but it took at least a decade to standardize the WSDL binding style (or was it ever standardized)?
Doing RPC in JSON now is still as messy as SOAP has been, but if you want RPC instead of REST, you wouldn't be going to JSON in the first place.

---

[1] IIRC, Protocol Buffers 2 had a rudimentary RPC system which never gained traction outside outside of Google and has been entirely replaced by gRPC after version 3 was released.

[2] DTD wasn't really designed for XML, but since XML was a subset of SGML, you could use the SGML DTD. But DTD wasn't a good fit for XML, and it was quickly replaced by XSD (and for a while - Relax-NG) for a reason.
Show HN: Open-source Figma design to code
by alepeak | 2026-01-24 06:09:30+00:00
Hi HN, founders of VibeFlow (YC S25) here.

We mostly work on backend and workflow tooling, but we needed a way to turn Figma designs into frontend code as a kickstart for prototyping.
It takes a Figma frame and converts it into React + Tailwind components (plus assets).

If you want to try it:
You can run it locally or use it via the VibeFlow UI to poke at it without setup (https://app.vibeflow.ai/)
by LexiMax | 2026-01-24 06:09:35+00:00
Is there a single esoteric DSP in active use that supports C++20? This is the umpteenth time I've seen DSP's brought up in casual conversations about C/C++ standards, so I did a little digging:

Texas Instruments' compiler seems to be celebrating C++14 support: https://www.ti.com/tool/C6000-CGT

CrossCore Embedded Studio apparently supports C++11 if you pass a switch in requesting it, though this FAQ answer suggests the underlying standard library is still C++03: https://ez.analog.com/dsp/software-and-development-tools/cce...

Everything I've found CodeWarrior related suggests that it is C++03-only: https://community.nxp.com/pwmxy87654/attachments/pwmxy87654/...

Aside from that, from what I can tell, those esoteric architectures are being phased out in lieu of running DSP workloads on Cortex-M, which is just ARM.

I'd love it if someone who was more familiar with DSP workloads would chime in, but it really does seem that trying to be the language for all possible and potential architectures might not be the right play for C++ in 202x.

Besides, it's not like those old standards or compilers are going anywhere.
by pjmlp | 2026-01-24 06:10:20+00:00
I know it is divisive, yet many Kotlin folks don't appreciate the platform that makes their ecosystem possible in first place.

From all the JVM guest languages, possibly fostered by Android team, they are the most anti-Java ecosystem.

Clojure folks appreciate being a hosted language, Scala is kind of they would rather have Haskell but still JVM is kind of cool, Groovy was usually a way to script applications.

Kotlin, well those behave as if ever the JVM would be one day rewriten in Kotlin, they have Android for that.

The features you mention will never be supported in Android by the way, at least I don't believe Google will ever bother to do so.
by reaperducer | 2026-01-24 06:12:34+00:00
Yeah, this is just blogspam. Some guy re-hashing the Hackernoon article, interspersed with his own comments.

I wouldn't be surprised if it's AI.

It's time to come up with a term for blog posts that are just AI-augmented re-hashes of other people's writing.

Maybe blogslop.