MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mrtksn | 2026-01-15 14:51:24+00:00
To be fair, it is ridiculous to advocate that the solution to a broken system is circumventing the laws. Fix for the problems for copyright and intellectual property systems can't be "heroic" VPN companies.

Kim Dotcom become filthy rich by selling access to copyrighted materials and turned into folk hero of the alt-right. He was selling other peoples work per the kilobyte when kids were persecuted for copyright infringement, videos taken down for using a few second of music or a clip from another video . That is not a fair system.
by alphazard | 2026-01-15 14:51:43+00:00
> Taste matters

Always has. insert picture of astronaut shooting another astronaut

Anyways, the real differentiator has moved to awareness of the product, and quality of the product.
Those both exist in a sort of cat and mouse game, where the high impact marketing channels: ads, influencers, etc. will lie about the quality of products if you pay enough.
And the lower impact marketing channels, like word of mouth, are going to be more honest, but also lower impact.

Consumers have a signal to noise problem, and producers will unfortunately be forced to shift resources away from quality, in order to broadcast above the noise floor, while maintaining enough quality that people actually stay with their product.
I think people call this "enshittification", the noise floor is so high that it's impossible to find good stuff, even though good stuff exists in quantities higher than ever before, it exists at a prevalence lower than ever before.
by renegade-otter | 2026-01-15 14:51:46+00:00
Baseline execution is cheaper. An LLM is not going to help you build a unique business.

"AI startups say the promise of turning dazzling models into useful products is harder than anyone expected":

https://www.wired.com/story/artificial-intelligence-startups...

This is not new. There is tech that enables new possibilities, but it's not a f---ing magic wand.
by alephnerd | 2026-01-15 14:52:41+00:00
Media & Entertainment Services are overrepresented in a number of European countries like Italy, Spain, and France. Tier 1 Football/Soccer is a massive revenue generator, and one of the most pirated products globally.

> I assume the majority of IPs being pirated are likely from outside their own country

Ever heard of Ligue 1, home to teams like PSG, Olympique de Marseille, Olympique Lyonnais, and AS Monaco?
by CGMthrowaway | 2026-01-15 14:52:58+00:00
This is democratic erosion and why United States founding documents are singular in their importance.

Such censorship is passed by elected legislators, interpreted by an independent judiciary, and subject to appeal (which NordVPN has already begun). From a procedural standpoint, that is democracy. But it ignores liberty, proportionality and limits on power.

Democratic erosion is how governments today expand surveillance, blocking and platform obligations while still technically obeying democratic rules
by devsda | 2026-01-15 14:53:06+00:00
I don't see much discussion on maintenance of software built by LLMs using LLMs.

We already know the hard part of software engineering is designing and implementing code that is maintainable.

Can LLMs reliably create software and maintain it transparently without bringing in regressions ? How do people with no knowledge of software guide LLMs to build quality test suite to prevent regressions ?

Or is it the expectation that every new major release is effectively a rewrite from scratch ? Don't they have to maintain consistency with the UI, database and other existing artifacts.
by saaaaaam | 2026-01-15 14:53:09+00:00
How can you measure basil leaves in cups?

Is that “put the leaves in the cup” or “put the leaves in the cup and press them down” or “roughly chop the basil leaves and put them into the cup” or “finely chop the basil leaves and put them into a cup”?

Using a slide rule is all very well, but you only really need it if you’re using daft measurements like cups and spoons. If you just use grams and millilitres you don’t need one.
by TehCorwiz | 2026-01-15 14:53:21+00:00
Really? Normally it's just like: "Can we access your contacts list so we can match your 'friends'?" And then you do it and it shows you the list of matches. It doesn't ask each individual "Hey, do you want to be matched to this person?" unless you try to friend them. Most ask you when you sign up and usually somewhere in the settings if you want to enable email matching for your account though. So if that's on it's kinda just part of the system unless you turn it off.
by techblueberry | 2026-01-15 14:53:35+00:00
“ And it’ll only get harder to adapt as it evolves, so start now.”

I am trying to stay on the cutting edge, but I feel like this statement is untrue. I think we’re still in the sort of assembler/hacker/nerd era of AI coding. DevEx is going to change rapidly over the next few years. I’m hoping that we’ll get tools / languages / frameworks that essentially abstract the entire concept of a multi-agentic workflow away from you.

It’s like saying if you don’t learn CGI scripts in C you’ll be too far behind. Plenty of people started web development with Ruby on Rails.
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-01-15 14:53:43+00:00
Quality may become the defining factor. Anybody can vibe code software, but only someone who is actually capable of programming themselves and has some understanding of what good UX looks like, how to fix bugs (often subtle and not caught by LLMs), and how to achieve high performance and low resource consumption can build high quality software.

I think developers who have an inclination towards UI/UX and a good grip on the technical side are particularly well positioned right now.
by mikert89 | 2026-01-15 14:53:56+00:00
I’m well aware of what makes sales difficult—I’ve lived it, both in early-stage, venture-backed environments and in long, enterprise sales cycles. In SaaS, almost everything about how sales works ultimately ties back to the cost of building software. Relationships and customer trust absolutely matter, but when building SaaS becomes trivial, the underlying equations change—and many of the old assumptions stop holding.
by causal | 2026-01-15 14:54:17+00:00
Sigh. Lines of code is not execution man. Having functional apps is not execution. A full stack, AWS-deployed, multi-stage scaleable microservices wonder is not execution!

LLMs make it a lot easier to build MVPs, but the hard work of VALIDATING problems and their solutions, which IMO was always >80% of the work for a successful founder, is harder than ever. With AI we now get 100 almost-useful solutions for every real problem.
by ryanackley | 2026-01-15 14:54:38+00:00
Execution has gotten much cheaper in a small enough problem space. Yes, we get it, it's game changing. It doesn't mean you're building products. There's more to it than just writing code.

Writing a formbuilder and saying you've replicated Typeform is like finishing a todo app and saying you've replicated Jira. Yes, in a way I guess...but there is way more to the product and that's usually where the hard parts are.
by rootnod3 | 2026-01-15 14:54:44+00:00
I keep reading these pro LLM articles. And I keep thinking that it is abysmal. Sure, for now it works, because there are senior engineers that refine the rough edges and know what's going on.

And especially some folks keep claiming that one just needs to get better at prompting and describe a detailed spec.

Wanna know what a detailed spec is called? An unambiguous one? It's called code.

LLMs still feel like a very round-about way of re-inventing code. But instead of just a new language, it's a language that nondeterministically creates "code" or a resemblance thereof.

And I am aware that this is currently not a popular opinion on HN, so keep the downvotes coming.

If you use LLMs outside the popular Github languages, it will fail hard on you. It is glorified text-completion, that's what it is.
by s0ck_r4w | 2026-01-15 14:54:46+00:00
I still don't get. The author calls these "Not MVPs. Not prototypes. Working products", but how many users do these "products" actually have?

Have they iterated on user feedback? Have they fixed obscure issues? Made any major changes after the initial version?

More importantly, can the author claim with a straight face that they no longer need to read or understand the code that has been produced?

Just another one of those “look, I built a greenfield pet project over the weekend, software engineering is dead.”
by Jweb_Guru | 2026-01-15 14:54:55+00:00
Believe it or not, using arenas does not provide free memory safety. You need to statically bound allocations to make sure they don't escape the arena (which is exactly how arenas work in Rust, but not Zig). There are also quite a lot of ways of generating memory unsafe code that aren't just use after free or array-out-of-bounds in a language like Zig, especially in the context of stuff like DOM nodes where one frequently needs to swap out pointers between elements of one type and a different type.
by jimsojim | 2026-01-15 14:54:56+00:00
Searching for what to solve becomes far more important than how to solve it. Which niche you serve, how underserved the problem is, how quickly you build a solution, and how fast you iterate based on user feedback become the real differentiators. As a problem gains popularity, competitors will enter at an increasing pace, and the product’s price will be competed down to the bare minimum. At that point, the only real advantage for a builder is to be a serial builder for deep niches, spotting them faster than others and delivering quality product to users before anyone else.
by laylower | 2026-01-15 14:55:00+00:00
I agree with your vision of endgame. We wouldn't even need a screen, we will communicate verbally or with signs with our agents with some device that will have a long battery life and will always be on.

I just hope that we retain some version of autonomy and privacy because no one wants the tech giants listening in every single word you utter because your agent heard it. No-one wants it but some, not many, care.

Agents deployed locally should be the goal.
by coredog64 | 2026-01-15 14:55:05+00:00
The powertrain packaging for vans is much tighter than for trucks. Who amongst us remembers removing the interior to change sparkplugs 6 and 8 in a GMC Vandura?

Even if you're not going to do the knuckle-skinning work yourself, the packaging negatively influences book rates when you take it to a shop
by ericmay | 2026-01-15 14:55:16+00:00
I don't disagree with any of what you wrote here, but I don't think the solution is "well we haven't figured this out, OSS who talk all the time about free as in beer free software now all of a sudden want to get paid for their work" is to just go around uncharging other people/organizations to support their projects, especially if not all OSS projects are worth supporting.
by pibaker | 2026-01-15 14:55:23+00:00
Whenever the Pi gets brought up people on HN will tell you you are wasting money if you are not buying a Chinese Pi clone with beefier specs instead. But at least for me, "Being able to boot into a Linux system without having to dig through outdated wikis and Chinese language support forums to hunt down a google drive link to an OS image from 2021 that has since then received zero updates" is definitely worth paying ten extra dollars for.
by latexr | 2026-01-15 14:55:27+00:00
I meant natively. I don’t want an extension for this, though I already have StopTheScript. Reason being that to selectively block JavaScript with an extension, I have to allow it on every website (meaning placing an inordinate amount of trust on the developer) then block the ones I don’t want. That’s completely backwards from what I want, which is to disable JavaScript by default and enable it on just a few websites.
by 4ggr0 | 2026-01-15 14:56:13+00:00
after reading all of these mastodon threads and gists, something really irks me.

this ptorrone guy acts in some pretty questionable ways and constantly uses his wife and kids as a shield. if someone gets harassed out of nowhere and their kids or spouses are being dragged into it, then that's truly a horrible, shitty thing to do. but to be involved in and start flame-wars, doxxing campaigns and more and then constantly having to mention that you have a newborn when people push back sounds pretty manipulative.

smacks someone on their neck, "don't hit me back, man, i got kids and a wife!"
by 9JollyOtter | 2026-01-15 14:57:02+00:00
The post office will attempt to deliver if you put an address on it.

There is guy living off grid in I believe Dorset on YouTube called "Maximus Ironthumper". The post office told him to try sending himself letters, eventually they started turning up. Then that became the address.

He has a whole series of videos about how he kinda managed to setup his off grid living situation, there is everything from how to avoid planning permission, to how he setup his solar power.
by JohnFen | 2026-01-15 14:57:09+00:00
> you are not really going to be under a hostile nation at all

The US is being overtly hostile, though. We're even threatening nations who should be allies with military invasion. Who would look at that behavior and think "yeah, but they'll behave differently once they pay us?"

> allows the US access to your land for defense purposes

We already had that with Greenland without threatening them with violence.

> Bring in some companies to harvest your mineral resources and enjoy the wealth

Also a thing that could already be done, if they wished it. As of yet, they don't wish it.

When a bully is threatening you, the very worst thing you can do is to give in to the bully. Even if the bully would totally win in a fight. I suspect most nations understand this.
by pbmonster | 2026-01-15 14:57:10+00:00
That's probably a quick way to do it, but considering that using a miller cycle means we're going to want the turbo version of the engine, that alone is going to cost like $4k on Fords end. Add a 100kW+ generator with the power electronics to charge while driving, fuel system, exhaust system and cooling system, and we're probably approaching $10k upcharge for the customer.

Gotta remove a whole lot of batteries from that car to make it cost competitive again. Realistically, with an engine this powerful, we can probably cut down to like 30kWh of total battery capacity, which gets us back to where we started financially. And 30 kWh is enough to drive 70 miles all electric, which should pretty much should cover most daily use for people who charge at home.

Now, the questions if we can do that cheaper with a much smaller engine. Ford has a 1 liter inline 3 in the Fiesta and Focus that makes half as much power. Should be enough...
by close04 | 2026-01-15 14:57:17+00:00
I have computers that are ~20 years or even more and still work fine. My main computer which I just replaced is ~14 years old (with some components even older than that), was used every single day, and is now a perfectly functioning server. I have several laptops from different OEMs, business and consumer lines, that are 15ish years old and have been used regularly for at least 10 of those, all still fine. And I have stacks of SFFs and minipcs from eBay going back to 2008 but most from 2012-2015, which have been running virtually uninterrupted for a decade, and still working fine.

I understand what you're saying but saying it isn't enough. I can't see you being able to support that.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-15 14:57:24+00:00
That's one possibility. Another is that it's temporary until production can be ramped up (but I doubt it because fabs). Pessimistic take is that the suppliers expect the bubble to pop soon (and very violently) and want to maximize their take while they still can.

Or maybe assuming the trend holds in the longer term it could mean that consumers will move downstream of datacenters. Anyone who wants a GPU rocking 3 to 5 year old recycled enterprise gear.
by raincole | 2026-01-15 14:57:26+00:00
The funniest part is that from the image itself you can clearly, unambiguously see that the downfall started between 2020~2022. ChatGPT was launched Nov 2022. So the downfall of SO couldn't be caused by AI, at least not initially. But the blog post author is so biased that they simply ignore the image they posted themselves.
by rado12 | 2026-01-15 14:57:27+00:00
Hey HN,

Ctrl is an open-source AI desktop where AI builds React apps with SQLite databases - and here's the key part: each app comes with an AI assistant that can read and reason about your actual data.

The difference:

ChatGPT generates code snippets. Cursor helps you write code. Ctrl creates complete apps where the AI understands your specific data:

- "Build me an invoice tracker" → Creates React app + SQLite database
- "Show me unpaid invoices over 30 days" → AI queries YOUR invoice data and shows results
- "Add client health scoring based on payment speed" → AI analyzes your historical data, proposes scoring formula, updates schema

Technical approach:

- Real TypeScript/React apps compiled in-browser (esbuild-wasm)
- Each app = folder with TSX files + SQLite database + .ctrl/context.md
- The context.md documents data structure and purpose - AI reads this before any modifications
- Built on Claude/GPT via your API key, runs entirely local, MIT licensed

Current state:

Beta on macOS, Windows, Linux. We're a small team in Prague, going fully open source because we believe the innovation is in execution, not hiding code.

GitHub: https://github.com/CtrlAIcom/ctrl
Demo video: https://youtu.be/6yWZpNCK8mw
Website: https://ctrlai.com

Would love feedback, especially on the data-aware AI architecture.
by Anonyneko | 2026-01-15 14:57:30+00:00
Bought a slightly overpriced, even by its own standards, 5090 in May, hope that it lasts me through the next five years of madness, and that the madness will have some kind of a temporary respite (or I luck out on a higher paying job, or figure out how to invest properly - it seems like a lottery these days).

My only small regret is that I decided to build an SFF PC, otherwise I would've gone for 128 GB of RAM instead of just 64. Oh well, ̶6̶4̶0̶ ̶K̶B̶ 64 GB should be enough for most purposes.
by simjnd | 2026-01-15 14:58:31+00:00
Great strawman dude (and even if that was my point, they didn't cool in isolation only, they looked good as part of an entire screen of icons too). The purpose of icon isn't to look cohesive within a brand either.

Look at the new Pixelmator icon: geometric shapes overlayed with Bezier Curve handles at the bottom. What does it look like? Vector design. What does the app do? The exact opposite, raster design, pixel painting. What the previous icon signaled.

The previous Compressor icon: A machine compressing film, because despite the name Compressor is for encoding video files. The new icon? Sure with the context of the label you will understand it's something being squeezed, but what? And without the label?

The previous Final Cut icon was unmistakably a movie slate. The new one almost looks like a radio. Why is the pattern under the body? Why is it only at on the bottom and not the top clapper stick?

How are the new ones superior design? How does it improve on anything?
It's forcing everyone to learn new icons that convey are less clear, convey less meaning, look uglier, just to serve the corporate interests of "brand cohesion"?

macOS Tahoe icons are a regression on every single front. I invite you to compare Disk Utility (where is the disk now?), or Migration Assistant (where is the notion of migrating from old to new?). And these are just a few examples.
by avsteele | 2026-01-15 14:58:39+00:00
This is not energy output (production, usage), it is that plus an adjustment for the in->out energy efficiency. It would only == production if all energy sources in the mix has the same factor.

Because fossil fuels have higher in/out losses this is number is larger than usage. This metric is generally used to track decarbonization.

Using the IEA number you can see the hydro+solar+wind production is about 9.5% of the total, not 18%.

ChatGPT or you favorite LLM can explain in greater detail, just send it the plot image and ask.
by ramon156 | 2026-01-15 14:58:41+00:00
> There is so much fun, beauty and pleasure in writing code by hand. You can still handcraft code. Just don’t expect this to be your job. This is your passion.

Can people keep a good mental model of the repo without writing code? I always feel like I lose my thoughts if I let an LLM do it for me. I totally get that LLMs can do stuff faster and (Given the right context) sometimes keep better track of this than humans can.

Even musicians had to go digital, but that doesn't mean people stopped playing raw instruments. Will company culture shift towards one senior that has the context + 7 LLMs that work for him? is that where we're heading towards?
by zigzag312 | 2026-01-15 14:58:53+00:00
But knowledge and academic research and industry R&D are key for progress though. All of which require hard work.

You also don't balance equations in your examples. Your janitor goes to help a friend with rocketry, which seems like a net gain, but someone else now needs to stop helping a friend to replace that janitor's position. Otherwise researches at that facility where janitor had worked will have to do janitor's work instead of doing their own. You call work cooks and janitors are doing worthless for progress, but researches (or children in school) need to eat, need to have functional workplace/classroom, etc.

> We're long past the point where we barely need anybody to work to actually feed/house everybody

Why would we need UBI then? The price of food and of housing everybody would be dirt cheap, if that were really true. Value of everything is relative (which I find that many people have trouble grasping). If something requires very little work, then it will be very very cheap in an ideal free market.
by mmulqueen | 2026-01-15 14:59:15+00:00
It depends on design, environment and maintenance. If it's well protected against oxidation and it's static, it's not really a problem. Heat issues are often at the joints, which are most vulnerable, but can be coated and encapsulated to mitigate. For some uses, aluminium is superior to copper all things considered. Obviously the diameter of the wire/cable depends on which conductor you use, AC/DC, current and service temp - for some applications, that may favour one material over the other.
by 827a | 2026-01-15 14:59:37+00:00
IMO, sadly: the DIY PC world is on life support and will likely be something that isn't even really possible to do, for top-of-the-line performance, by 2028.

I don't necessarily think that everything is going doomer "subscription based cloud streaming"; the economics of these services never made sense, especially for gaming, and there's little reason to believe that the same incentives that led to Nvidia, Crucial, etc wanting out of the consumer hardware business wouldn't also impact that business.

Instead, the future is tightly integrated single-board computers (e.g. Framework Desktop, the new HP keyboard, Mac Mini, RPi, etc). They're easier for consumers to buy. Integrated memory, GPU, and cooling means we can drive higher performance. All of the components getting sourced by one supplier means the whole "X is leaving the consumer market" point is moot, and allows better bulk deals to be negotiated. They're smaller. It allows one company (e.g. Framework) to capture more margin than sharing with ten GPU or memory middle-men who just slap a sports car-looking cooler on whatever they bought from Micron and saying they're a real business.

My lingering hope is that we do see some company succeed who can direct-sell these high-end SBCs to consumers, so if you want to go the route of a custom case and such, you still can. And that we don't lose modular storage. But I've lost all hope that DIY PCs will survive this decade; to be frank, they haven't made economic sense for a while.