MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by syrusakbary | 2026-01-09 11:06:01+00:00
Great analysis. I'm Syrus, from Wasmer, and I've been working on WebAssembly professionally for the last 7 years (we are, in fact, the first Wasm-first company!)... hopefully my point of view would be useful to read!

Why things are not as heated? Simply, because many of the big players are no longer doing the big bets on the technology, nor they are spending any marketing on making it successful. Mainly because most of their bets have been unsuccessful: WASI, Component Model.
Many of the small players that raised money on the space either died or ended being acqui-hired by bigger players. The only ones that survive is the ones that truly understand is that tech doesn't matter a thing, is the product (what are you enabling with WebAssembly).

In my view, this happens because there's a great mismatch between technical capabilities and the go-to-market skills that bringing the tech to the masses requires.

The developers that tend to be technically great and understand the value of WebAssembly, are usually not as good on Go To Market to make it successful. For example, WASI proponents wanted to completely break the POSIX model (because in their view, is completely wrong... and they are partially right!). But they don't only want Wasm to succeed... they also want their mental model of new Operating System calls to go along with it (thus, you tie the success of one, to the success of another).

AI only amplifies the Go To Market skills even further, by accelerating tech even more. When your MOAT is fully built around the tech but there's nothing that sustains it (a product), then you have an issue. The market is what sustains it, nothing else. People in the ecosystem cared way more about politics (creating a working group to control other companies), than they cared about creating something that many people could use tomorrow.

At Wasmer, it took us a bit of time to understand this, but overtime we have been able to improve our skills to continuing capturing value from it.

So, it's possible to create something successful with WebAssembly.
You just need to make something people want (tl;dr: is not the tech!)
by TheOtherHobbes | 2026-01-09 11:06:53+00:00
Academic electroacoustic music uses large speaker arrays to place sounds in different locations, and "flying pianos" is a standard in-joke. Because you can indeed make a piano sound fly around the room, with or without doppler effects, to taste.

Also, this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hbnb09xAQR8
by bell-cot | 2026-01-09 11:07:05+00:00
Minor points of HN amusement:

This item is popping up from HN's Second-Chance Pool - check the mouse-over text on the submit time. Background - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998309

This item has been on HN a number of times. Sometimes the "How " is re-added to the title, sometimes not. (Click the 'samba.org' link, above, for a quick look at that.)
by fxj | 2026-01-09 11:07:19+00:00
MCP is just a small, boring protocol that lets agents call tools in a standard way, nothing more. You can run a single MCP server next to your app, expose a few scripts or APIs, and you are done. There is no requirement for dozens of random servers or a giant plugin zoo.

Most of the “overhead” and “security nightmare” worries assume the worst possible setup with zero curation and bad ops. That would be messy with any integration method, not only with MCP. Teams that already handle HTTP APIs safely can apply the same basics here: auth, logging, and isolation.

The real value is that MCP stays out of your way. It does not replace your stack, it just gives tools a common shape so different clients and agents can use them. For many people that is exactly what is needed: a thin, optional layer, not another heavy platform.
by rsynnott | 2026-01-09 11:07:46+00:00
> If (and it is, admittedly, a big assumption) we assume that USD and EUR are broadly stable currencies over the long term

Yeah, er, that's a very big if. There's no real reason to assume that, and history doesn't really bear it out.

If anything in the near term you'd probably expect the USD to weaken further vs the Euro; Trump seems _very_ keen to install a fed chair who'll cut rates even where not supported by inflation and employment numbers, whereas the ECB is more disciplined and less subject to political interference.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-09 11:07:57+00:00
> Ashkenazis are Europeans

Okay? So are most American Jews.

Most humans can legitimately claim ancestry to the Levant. It's the coast closest to the cradle of civilization.

There is absolutely evil happening in Gaza. But pretending this is black-and-white, from an ocean away, is just alienating. It turns what should be a broad political discussion into a niche issue.
by thaumasiotes | 2026-01-09 11:08:15+00:00
> Isn't that still gonna happen now?

No, if you read farther down the announcement, they also say this:

> Open-source options for the community

> We’re making our technical specifications available so that independent developers can create their own SoundTouch-compatible tools and features. The documentation is available here: https://assets.bosecreative.com/m/496577402d128874/original/...

So, they're going to strip the "smart" functionality from the app that Bose provides, but they're letting people continue to use it if they want to.
by m4rtink | 2026-01-09 11:08:39+00:00
Um, no - if you do this on suborbital trajectory you totally obliterate a bunch of empty space for the <10 minutes until all your garbage falls back.

If you actually manage to make it into an orbit (with a much much bigger and much more expensive rocket) you will most likely do the same (eg. not hitting the intended satellite) with the added bonus of littering random orbits over time and hitting random satellites.

And if you want to say "they will deny orbit for everyone!" - well, good luck without far too many orbital class rockets for anyone of their size to have.

Not to mention Starlink orbits being (as alterady state so low they are self-cleaning), GPS orbits being far too high to even reach, let alone to saturate with garbage & same for GEO sats.
by Nextgrid | 2026-01-09 11:09:33+00:00
> cant seem to convince anyone that we are useful

I wonder if the issue there isn’t AI but that a lot of jobs (including in tech) are bullshit and it turns out it doesn’t matter how well it’s being done.

AI absolutely fails where quality is a requirement… but if it’s not then AI appears to be a good stand-in for a human. This was the case pre-AI too, plenty of mediocre developers were able to coast because the outcome of their work didn’t actually matter.

> most promotions are in non-SDE fields too

They’re just better at playing politics and maybe you should start too.
by ndr | 2026-01-09 11:09:50+00:00
Assuming that wasn't trolling, what's the last thing you tried and when? Latest Claude Code can do a lot over lots of domains. I recommend giving their top plan a fair chance for a month.

Also most people who I see succeed from the start are technical managers. That is people who can code, who are used to delegate (good at phrasing) and are more likely to accept something that works even though is not character by character what they expected.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-09 11:09:50+00:00
> At some point, all land has been taken either by direct force, or by the threat of force

You're broadly correct. But there is land that was settled within the historical record.

The Levant, obviously, is not that. It was settled prior to the historical record. It is the coast closest to our cradle of civilisation. Every human with ancestry outside Africa has some sort of claim to lineage to that land.
by kotaKat | 2026-01-09 11:09:58+00:00
Even simple "changes" (like cutting a single truck) cause massive mayhem in their wake.

The simple "elimination" of nightly mail pickup from rural post offices has resulted in multi-day backlogs just getting anything out of your local Post Office. If I walk into any of my local POs in the county this morning to ship a Priority Mail Express letter overnight, they will not guarantee that it will be received tomorrow. The envelope will sit for nearly 24 hours locally for tomorrow morning's mail truck before it is brought back to a processing center tomorrow night to be introduced into the mailstream and finally processed outbound.

Basically anything being shipped cross-country is going to be snared in Rural Delay Hell and it absolutely sucks. Combine this with the recent postmarking changes and we're in for an absolute fun treat when it comes for mail-in-voting time.
by maqp | 2026-01-09 11:09:58+00:00
Top 5 will never cover the field. Here's my top 10

* Brookshear and Brylow - Computer Science - An Overview

* Forta - Teach yourself SQL in 10 minutes

* Stallings - Computer Organization and Architecture

* Stallings - Operating Systems - Internals and Design
Principles

* CLRS

* Kurose, Ross - Computer Networking - A Top Down Approach

* Sipser - Introduction to The Theory of Computation

* Stallings, Brown - Computer Security - Principles and Practice

* Aumasson - Serious Cryptography

* Russell, Norvig - Artificial Intelligence - A Modern Approach

And even this fails to cover programming languages. Python is the lingua franca of the field. Most past recommended books are getting outdated, but perhaps Matthes' Python Crash Course 3rd edition.
by tomaytotomato | 2026-01-09 11:10:35+00:00
With my original flippant comment I was trying to highlight that despite the many Opensource projects and the many awesome people who contribute to them, they should stay at arms length from EU and its legislators.

When legislators start getting involved they will want to inevitably have their "own" version of something and their own SLAs and contracts.

The reason they went with Microsoft/IBM/Oracle and others back in the day for software solutions is; they know on a piece of paper what they are getting, and who they can blame if they don't get it.

With Opensource OS and software, even with auditing and stuff, there is no way to blame anyone apart from end-users. For politicians and bureacracts, that is a scary thing, as they will be the ones to blame (read: asses on the line)

The consultation is great and all but I am skeptical, so I wouldn't be surprised in a few years we will have a EU approved OS that is controlled by bureaucracts.

Hence my comparison to North Korea's Linux distro
by kittikitti | 2026-01-09 11:12:02+00:00
From my experience, people against open source often have buyers remorse. They often paid egregious sums of money for proprietary software that, to be fair, works well and includes enterprise support. When the same someone encounters the same solution but free and open source, they start rationalizing. The difference is mainly marketing, where open source projects have little to no marketing budget and are largely denied by market makers. Proprietary solutions can afford the seminars, thousands of dollars a week on ads, and other perks which increase discovery.

The moral of the story is to be careful listening to people actively tarnishing open source as they are a crowd of bitter people. A tell-tale sign is that they don't talk about the benefits of proprietary technologies such as the level of customer support and technical expertise that comes with the bill and instead only bash on open source.
by pjc50 | 2026-01-09 11:12:20+00:00
> Inability to differentiate between real and fake - less theoretical.

This feels like a deeper, much more important topic that I'm at risk of writing thousands of words on. It feels like the distinction used to be .. more clearly labelled? And now nobody cares, and entire media ecosystems live on selling things that aren't really true as "news", with real and occasionally deadly consequences.
by nomel | 2026-01-09 11:12:30+00:00
Or, it's that

> we aren't talking about fictional images here, we are talking about photos of real people, many who are children,

is not compatible with what GP actually said

> it's clearly wrong when it concerns actual children

> No living creature was actually hurt when producing these images and cannot be hurt by them.

making these overly dramatic character attacks seem mostly silly

> you completely lack capacity for empathy and you should do some serious self-reflection. This is just a really vile and amoral view to hold.

> Advocating for the freedom to commit that kind of harm against other people is gross, and you should reconsider your views and how much care you have for other people.

And everyone clapped.
by tgv | 2026-01-09 11:13:04+00:00
> software that is funded by public means, such as from universities or institutions

I think that might be the wrong approach, at least in this day and age. The spirit is good, but that software has cost good money to produce, and universities are dependent on external revenue. It's not unreasonable to charge for the things they produce.

Also, should e.g. an American company have access to software produced by an Italian university?
by ben_w | 2026-01-09 11:13:50+00:00
> so by your logic, you should take in how many strangers into your home against your will?

You do realise you don't own all of America, right?

Nobody actually forced you to take 30 million immigrants into your home, because your home stops at your property boundaries.

I've seen this nonsensical argument in my home country, the UK, too. If you want to claim *all of [the USA]* as your country because you're a citizen of that country, then *any other [USA] citizen welcoming migrants into [the USA] is already taking all these "strangers" into their own home*.

(Works just as well if you substitute any other nation for [the USA], everywhere has people who think about their nation the way you think about yours).

> …and if your infantile logic has any value, why don’t we just cram every single human on earth into the USA, at your expense of course, right?

You should talk to more non-Americans. People like me, for example. I don't want to live in the USA. So I don't.

I mean, we'd physically fit quite easily, you've got most of a continent there, every time people like me suggest things you can do to make your nation better the collective response keeps being "oh but the population density is so low we couldn't possibly make public transport or cheap broadband work". We keep suggesting stuff like this because a lot of us just don't look up to the politics or the infrastructure you've got, certainly not any more, although the reasons are various and our interests are a dis-aligned from each others' as much as from yours.

> freeloading foreign nationals

The foreign nationals in the USA come in three broad groups:

1. People like Elon Musk, who took billions of taxpayers' dollars for self enrichment but are somehow really popular (today only with the establishment, but used to be more broadly) despite this.

2. People who do a huge amount of work in the construction and food industry, without whom the USA would collapse in about 6 months, who get all the hate because they're poor and undocumented (AKA "illegal") immigrants.

I'd like to draw your attention to the word "construction" in there specifically, as it's the other half of "supply and demand".

3. People in the middle with the boring work visas doing middle of the road work. By having in-demand skills, they command above-average salaries, but by commanding an above-average salary they drive up rent and house prices, with that money going to landlords etc.

Of these, only group 1 is "freeloading".

> squatter from your home is in fact justified

A squatter is a person who settles in or occupies a property without legal permission or claim to the property. Squatters live on land or in buildings where they have no title, lease, or right.

Ironically, this is how the USA got Texas from Mexico.

You claim 30 million. I don't know where that number comes from, as it doesn't seem to correspond to either documented or undocumented groups. Too big for estimates of undocumented (~10-12 million estimated) too small for documented immigrants (~40 million).

But it's false in any case, that number does not consist of squatters.
by local_surfer | 2026-01-09 11:14:02+00:00
I'm posting me reply here, as the original comment just stating "Holy cow, and 80% of them are Israeli companies" was for no obvious reason within minutes downvoted and now even flagged (at the bottom of the page).

-------------------

Israel’s private, for-profit surveillance industry is notorious for being the largest in the world, often collaborating with dictatorships and authoritarian regimes as long as the price is right.

I remember one undercover report (German) exposing how one Israeli company openly boasted about operating thousands of fake Facebook profiles, using them to manipulate public opinion in favor of their paying clients.

> Israel has transformed its military intelligence capabilities into the world's most sophisticated surveillance technology export industry. From Unit 8200's cyber warfare origins to NSO Group's Pegasus spyware, Israeli companies have become the global leaders in surveillance technology - selling oppression as a service to authoritarian regimes worldwide.

https://stateofsurveillance.org/articles/government/israel-s...

Other sources:
- https://www.timesofisrael.com/facebook-targets-7-cyber-firms...
- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/25/microsoft-bloc...

PS: Israel has also faced allegations of leveraging its expansive private intelligence networks—including orchestrated fake profiles—to influence public voting in high-profile events like the Eurovision Song Contest.

-------------------

PPS: I wouldn't be surprised the private intelligence sector is also actively monitoring HN and trying to sway it as demonstrated by the immediate downvoted/flagging of the harmless comment above.
by metalman | 2026-01-09 11:14:15+00:00
personaly,having found very old shoes, harness leather, beaded moccasins, and other probable organic artifacts, beach bone anyone? in a variety of useualy anoxic or acidic situations, I can then extrapolate, that these are common things to find if a person takes a moment to examine and confirm
that they are historical artifacts, and all in all the top 10 to 100 feet of most of our planet is a good place to look for direct evidence of past human activity, use a microscope and now 100% of the planets surface has an artifact.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-09 11:15:10+00:00
> despite the many Opensource projects and the many awesome people who contribute to them, they should stay at arms length from EU and its legislators.

But despite that, they exist today, successfully so, and continue being funded by the very people you claim they should stay away from.

I'm not sure if you looked into how this whole "funding FOSS" thing works like, but governments are not opening a fund, letting any FOSS developer expense stuff to it and calling it a day. Usually they contract a company to work on things, that then end up FOSS.

Even if the end result is FOSS or not, they have the same people they can blame if they want to, the people they paid for certain results. The license of the finished thing doesn't change who's responsible for doing the job they've been paid to do.

I think until you actually understanding how the funding works, it would be fair to avoid doing flippant comments who basically only try to add some fuel to some fire, with some completely out of place comparison to a NK Linux distribution.
by fxj | 2026-01-09 11:15:11+00:00
WebAssembly in the browser does feel great when you look at things like Pyodide/Pyolite, JupyterLite, xeus, webR and even small tools like texlyre – you get a full language/runtime locally with zero server, just WASM and some JS glue. The sad part is that VS Code for the Web never really became that kind of self-contained WASM IDE: the WASI story is focused on extensions and special cases, and running real toolchains (Emscripten, full Python, etc.) keeps breaking or depending on opaque backend magic. So right now the best “pure browser” experiences are these focused notebook/tool stacks, not the general-purpose web IDE people were hoping vscode.dev would become.
by nephihaha | 2026-01-09 11:15:46+00:00
I know the part of Scotland where he has set up shop. There used to be a lot of toy farmers and small holders popping up round there and failing within a few years. Most of them were from big cities and from England, and pretty clueless about farming. They would often try something exotic like quail (if they had little money) and alpacas (if they had more). Mr Duxbury seems to be going down a similar line, although he does have a farming family background.
by hu3 | 2026-01-09 11:16:07+00:00
Regardless of semanthics, LLMs + tooling can do impressive things.

For example I can tell LLMs to scan my database schema and compare to code to detect drift or inconsistencies.

And while doing that it has enough condensed world knowledge to point to me that the code is probably right when declaring person.name a non-nullable string despite the database column being nullable.

And it can infer that date_of_birth column is correct in being nullable on the database schema and wrong in code where the type is a non-nullable date because, in my system, it knows date_of_birth is an optional field.

This is a simple example that can be solved by non-LLMs tooling also. In practice it can do much more advanced reasoning with regards to business rules.

We can argue semanthics all day but this is reason enough to be useful for me.

There are many examples I could give. But to the skeptics I recommend trying to use LLMs for understanding large systems. But take your time to give it read only access to data base schema.
by jacquesm | 2026-01-09 11:16:14+00:00
I think HN should just add another tab: Politics. That way the need for flagging goes down and everybody gets what they want. The main reason why you would want to keep politics off HN is because it turns would be friends, collaborators and people that respect each other into opposing factions (just like religion does). But in the end IRL that would come out anyway so better to have it up front. So I don't think it makes a difference in the long run.
by isoprophlex | 2026-01-09 11:16:25+00:00
> It’s very simple, but do you want your music to be based on an international standard or on what you think sounds right to you? [...] I’m very glad I trusted my instincts. Listening to that other voice is THE most important thing in creativity, whether you’re an engineer or a musician.

To me, RDJs music always stood out as having uncanny, unique melodies and harmonies. As a teenager I fantasized about him being some sort of benevolent alien music shaman, beaming melodies onto our planet.

Stuff on SAW II where you can't figure out if you're hearing single notes or mutating chords and everything is near-synaesthetic bliss. The wistful otherness of 'Italic Eyeball'. Whatever 'fingerbib', ICBYD, and things on Melodies from Mars are doing was very formative to my 16 year old brain.

It's clear that whatever he does, he channels some unique creative juices.
by artdigital | 2026-01-09 11:16:27+00:00
Yea exactly, I’m surprised people are calling this “drama”. It was from the beginning against the ToS, all the stuff supporting it just reverse engineered what Claude Code is doing and spoof being a client.

I tried something similar few months back and Claude already has restrictions against this in place. You had to very specifically pretend to be real Claude Code (through copying system prompts etc) to get around it, not just a header.
by rocqua | 2026-01-09 11:16:41+00:00
So he explains OFDM in a way that implicitly does Amplitude shift keying.

I guess if you want to use different modulations you treat the complex number corresponding to the subcarrier as an IQ point in quadrature. So you take the same symbols, but read them off in the frequency domain instead of the time domain.

And I guess this works out quite equivalently to normally modulating these symbols at properly offset frequencies (just by the superposition principle)