MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aenis | 2026-01-19 13:28:30+00:00
But its already the present.

For what I am vibing my normal work process is: build a feature until it works, have decent test coverage, then ask Claude to offer a code critique and propose refactoring ideas. I'd review them and decide which to implement. It is token-heavy but produces good, elegant codebases at scales I am working on for my side projects. I do this for every feature that is completed, and have it maintain design docs that document the software architecture choices made so far. It largely ignores them when vibing very interactively on a new feature, but it does help with the regular refactoring.

In my experience, it doubles the token costs per feature but otherwise it works fine.

I have been programming since I was 7 - 40 years ago. Across all tech stacks, from barebones assembly through enterprise architecture for a large enterprise. I thought I was a decent good coder, programmer and architect. Now, I find the code Claude/Opus 4.5 generates for me to be in general of higher quality then anything I ever made myself.

Mainly because it does things I'd be too tired to do, or never bother because why expand energy on refactoring for something that is perfectly working and not to be further developed.

Btw, its a good teaching tool. Load a codebase or build one, and then have it describe the current software architecture, propose changes and explain their impact and so on.
by the__alchemist | 2026-01-19 13:28:38+00:00
Note that the Officer's oath Does not mention the President:

> I ___, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God. (Title 5 U.S. Code 3331, an individual, except the President, elected or appointed to an office of honor or profit in the civil service or uniformed services)
by spicyusername | 2026-01-19 13:28:41+00:00
divisiveness this kind of stuff will create

I'm pretty sure we're already decades in to the world of "has created".

Everyone I know has strong opinions on every little thing, based exclusively their emotional reactions and feed consumption. Basically no one has the requisite expertise commensurate with their conviction, but being informed is not required to be opinionated or exasperated.

And who can blame them (us). It is almost impossible to escape the constant barrage of takes and news headlines these days without being a total luddite. And each little snippet worms its way into your brain (and well being) one way or the other.

It's just been too much for too long and you can tell.
by pnt12 | 2026-01-19 13:29:17+00:00
This is especially aggravating when the os inside the container and the language runtimes are much heavier than the process itself.

I've seen arguments for nano services (I wouldn't even call them micros services), that completely ignored that part. Split a small service in n tiny services, such that you have 10(os, runtime, 0.5) rather than 2(os, runtime, x).
by wangxin199 | 2026-01-19 13:29:32+00:00
I built a small web tool to generate “tap the post” / “tap-to-reveal” image slices for X (Twitter):
https://splitimage.im/x-image-splitter/

What it does:
- Split a single image into templates optimized for X multi-image posts:
- 2×2 (4 tiles)
- 1×2 (2 strips)
- 4×1 (4 vertical strips)
- Names files in the correct upload order (e.g., top-left → top-right → bottom-left → bottom-right), so you don’t accidentally post the tiles in the wrong sequence
- Runs 100% in your browser (no server uploads)

Why I made it:
I kept seeing the “tap the post” pattern on X, where the timeline grid looks cropped/mysterious and the full image is revealed when you open the post. Existing tools either felt too generic (no posting order help) or required uploads. I wanted something quick, local, and harder to mess up.

What I’d love feedback on:
- Does the output look correct on X across desktop/mobile for you?
- Any edge cases where the crop/reveal doesn’t line up (image ratios, unusual source sizes)?
- Feature requests: presets, better previews, bulk mode, or anything else you’d expect from a tool like this.

If you try it and it breaks or feels confusing anywhere, please tell me what you uploaded + which layout you selected (a screenshot of the X preview helps a lot).
by vessenes | 2026-01-19 13:30:07+00:00
Counterpoint - you can go much faster if you get lots of people engaging with something and testing it. This is exploratory work, not some sort of ivory tower rationalism exercise, (if those even ever truly exist), there’s no compulsion involved, so everyone engaged does so for self-motivated reasons..

Don’t be mad!

Also, beads is genuinely useful. In my estimation, gas town, or a successor built on a similar architecture, will not only be useful, but likely be considered ‘state of the art’ for at least a month sometime in the future. We should be glad this stuff is developed in the open, in my opinion.
by itopaloglu83 | 2026-01-19 13:30:19+00:00
I bought an LG monitor, by part number, three times and always received the similar looking but half the price counterpart.

We only realized the issue after using it for a few days and needing to use an advance feature.

So, it’s not just one sellers product mingled with another, but also sellers combining similar looking products together as well.
by skeledrew | 2026-01-19 13:30:21+00:00
> the expressed preference

Marketing and culture can do wonders to one's preference.

> synonym for capability
Yes and no. An "app" is usually a set of capabilities, not a single capability. Many of the core *nix utilities for example are specifically designed to have a single capability each, and these are then composed for complex requirements. But for the most part today's apps contain multiple, usually overlapping capabilities. For example Microsoft Word offers not only text editing and formatting, but also has a dictionary+thesaurus, spelling+grammar check, mail merge and lots more. Of course, you can abstract this all away as "word processor capability", but there are other word processing apps out there with varying capabilities, and so things become problematic fast especially in terms of interoperability.

> OpenDoc and OLE
These "never worked" due to people/policy, not due to tech ability. OpenDoc essentially stagnated at Apple due to conflicts and lack of clarity, and then was outright killed by Steve Jobs[0]. OLE(tm) hasn't failed per se, but it's proprietary to Microsoft[1] and thus doesn't have much adoption outside Windows.

> Brand names matter
All they really do is put a label on a bundle - or bundles - of capabilities to create handy associations. YouTube is associated primarily with accessing videos that can be made and uploaded by anyone, secondarily allows commenting on and liking said videos, etc. Again, marketing is a significant factor.

> a built-in feature
You seem to be missing the forest for a tree here. That's a single example, of infinite permutations. Also, even given that example you're still missing parts of the flow.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Linking_and_Embedding
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-19 13:30:44+00:00
Am I seeing a fellow georgist in the wild? That's great!

I do agree that these monopolies are rent seeking and we should probably do something about it

> Maybe Henry Ford was on to something when he shocked the world by paying his employees enough to afford the product they were making (more than doubling many workers' wages)...

This reminds me of this too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvHwyrem24M (CEO who gave all his employees minimum $70,000 paycheck thriving six years later)

Everyone bet that they would fold but they are doing stronger than ever. People took voluntary pay cuts when the company was under pressure and they even gifted their CEO their favourite car out of their own geneorsity!

I always smile when I watch this video. (the company's gravity payments)

> The class conflict shouldn't be between workers and employers

I feel like the problem's becoming that the employers are themselves rent seekers (so think working at google,facebook,twitter) or the VC companies which want to build more Google's and facebooks and twitters but not companies like the one that I mentioned in the video
by giancarlostoro | 2026-01-19 13:31:13+00:00
I recommend you get Claude proper subscription. You can spend $100 a month for Max and get way more API usage out of it, or for $17 if you are patient about hitting limits its still way cheaper than using the API directly.

I have a similar experience but its moreso AI lets me build my side projects I only have time to research on, not much time or energy to actually code. I get to review the code and have Claude inspect it (most people I feel dont have Claude do code audits) and tell me where theres bugs, security issues, etc. I do this routinely enough.
by marginalia_nu | 2026-01-19 13:31:22+00:00
At the same time, that quest for the next big thing is performative, it's theater for the investors, and exactly what I'm talking about.

It was objectively bad for facebook's net profits to pour over $10 billion into the metaverse, what they gambled would be the next big thing, but the perception that they were cooking up something new, even if that was a massive waste of money, was better for their valuation than the sense that they were just resting on their laurels.
by fullstop | 2026-01-19 13:31:50+00:00
Yes. Whatsapp requires a phone number and Discord does not. The tweens who do not have a phone yet can join Discord with their siblings / friends.

The other part of this is that Discord has official University hubs, so the college kids are all in there. You need an email address from that Univeristy to join: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4406046651927-...
by K0balt | 2026-01-19 13:32:39+00:00
It’s surprisingly difficult to not eat a little human flesh. People nibble on loose skin and the insides of thier mouth a little, you end up swallowing blood, and there is often a tiny bit of human biomass in processed food.

Ergo the “significant” qualifier. Imagine the sense of defeat to fail in your New Year’s resolution to not resort to cannibalism by years end… so you have to be careful how you define your test case.

If I were a cannibal, it would have been an ambitious resolution, but the whole point was success through low expectations.

But fair enough, people tend to be touchy about people eating people, and rightly so. No way that ends well as a mainstream practice.
by angry_octet | 2026-01-19 13:33:18+00:00
Oh I don't doubt that the mandated leave entitlements and severance would be kept. But I think actual leave taken would increase, bounded only by the fact that taking holidays is expensive, and kids have to go to school. So you balance your career progression and hence holiday spending power in the future against immediate satisfaction from taking leave. I think many jobs without a meaningful career trajectory would experience massive leave taking. Remember, these people can't be fired or demoted in any way. If the work has to be done, it might even cause employers to incentivise work differently.
by svieira | 2026-01-19 13:33:37+00:00
> excel sheets

Funnily enough, Excel is the quintessential example of a fourth generation language, IDE, and database and it's the only one aside from SQL which actually succeeded from its time period. It's software, just like what you're building now, and just like what you're building now there are good points and bad points about it. The tradeoffs are different between the JS / Python code you're likely spinning up now vs. the Excel code that was being spun up before, but they rhyme.
by brk | 2026-01-19 13:34:12+00:00
Not just deferred message propagation, but also a way to setup medium to high powered rebroadcasting stations. For political unrest scenarios, you don't always need 2-way communication, but you do need to distribute critical info. A listen-only mode makes it very difficult to track individual users (no RF transmissions), and would cover a large percentage of a critical use case.

All of this is solved with the store-and-forward model that you highlight.

A Lora dongle seems to be better than BT, though potentially incriminating.
by yogthos | 2026-01-19 13:34:18+00:00
I'd argue you can have much more precise definition than that. My definition of intelligence would be a system that has an internal of a particular domain, and it uses this simulation to guide its actions within that domain. Being able to explain your actions is derived directly from having a model of the environment.

For example, we all have an internal physics model in our heads that's build up through our continuous interaction with our environment. That acts as our shared context. That's why if I tell you to bring me a cup of tea, I have a reasonable expectation that you understand what I requested and can execute this action intelligently. You have a conception of a table, of a cup, of tea, and critically our conception is similar enough that we can both be reasonably sure we understand each other.

Incidentally, when humans end up talking about abstract topics, they often run into exact same problem as LLMs, where the context is missing and we can be talking past each other.

The key problem with LLMs is that they currently lack this reinforcement loop. The system merely strings tokens together in a statistically likely fashion, but it doesn't really have a model of the domain it's working in to anchor them to.

In my opinion, stuff like agentic coding or embodiment with robotics moves us towards genuine intelligence. Here we have AI systems that have to interact with the world, and they get feedback on when they do things wrong, so they can adjust their behavior based on that.
by Const-me | 2026-01-19 13:34:57+00:00
I have a hypothesis why issues like that are so widespread. That AI infrastructure is mostly developed by large companies; their business model is selling software as a service at scale. Hence containers, micro-services, TCP/IP in between. That approach is reasonable for data centres because these made of multiple servers i.e. need networking, and they have private virtual networks just to connect servers so the security consequences aren’t too bad.

If they were designing these infrastructure pieces primarily for consumer use, they would have used named pipes, Unix domain sockets, or some other local-only IPC method instead of TCP/IP.
by aenis | 2026-01-19 13:35:09+00:00
I am no longer sure thats the case. I had it chew through a gnarly problem with my own custom webrtc implementation on a esp32 SOC. It did not rely on any existing documentation as this stuff is quite obscure - it relied on me pointing to specs for webrtc, specs for esp32 SDK, and quite some prompting. But it solved the problems I was dreading to solve manually in a matter of a 2hr session. Thats for a hobby project, we are now starting to experiment using this in the enterprise, on obscure and horrible to work with platforms (such as some industry specific salesforce packages). I think claude can work effectively with existing code, specs on things that would never made it to stackoverflow before.
by digitcatphd | 2026-01-19 13:35:46+00:00
I built something similar to this before Langraph had their agent builder @braid.ink, because Claude Code kept referencing old documentation. But the problem ended up solving itself when Langraph came out with their agent builder, and Claude Code can better navigate its documentation.

The only thing I would mention is that building a lot of agents and working with a lot of plug-ins and MCPs is everything is super situation- and context-dependent. It's hard to spin up a general agent that's useful in a production workflow because it requires so much configuration from a standard template. And if you're not being very careful in monitoring it, then it won't meet your requirements when it's completed, when it comes to agents, precision and control is key.
by volleyball | 2026-01-19 13:35:54+00:00
It is just basic logic really. Hypothetically, If the Nobel committee was to right now announce that this year's Nobel Peace Prize was to be awarded to a Greenlandic independence/opposition activist - Some one who applauds and supports all of Trump's current rhetoric and actions wrt Greenland, someone calling for armed intervention/invasion. What would that say about the committee's opinion on the matter. What would the timing of such an announcement signal to the Trump regime and the wider world? What conclusion could one draw reasonably?
by Forgeties79 | 2026-01-19 13:36:50+00:00
Capitalism is also supposedly the ultimate system for innovation and the best idea is supposedly going to rise to the top based on merit/the marketplace. And let’s not get nitpicky about this: yes putting a sign out front is “advertising.” 99.99% of people are fine with that. But that is clearly not what people are talking about. We are talking about a massive industry that is not about simply getting the word out. It’s way more complex, sophisticated, and hostile than that.

If there were restrictions on advertising that applied to everyone, then everyone would be on the same playing field re: getting the word out. We could argue all day about what the rules should be, but I don’t think anyone could argue against the point that we have clearly gone too far in the wrong direction and need more restrictions currently. We have an ongoing arms race between people using adblockers and Google trying to mass-break them now.

Last I looked in to the numbers I think something like 30% of the US population uses an ad blocker of some sort, that’s how bad it’s gotten. Browsing the Internet without even a basic one is so unbelievably painful and the data they collect/sell has gotten out of control. That’s not “advertising the business,” that’s a second revenue stream unrelated to the core product and done at my expense.
by rm30 | 2026-01-19 13:37:00+00:00
The project is interesting, the concept too, the idea of indipendent communication tools also.

I'll tell you a story.

Usain Bolt, the world 100/200m recordman, is not faster than cheeta. He needs a motorbike or a car to be beat a cheeta. But even with a car or motorbike is unlikely is going to overtak a cheeta on the ground of savannah.

This to tell you are thinking about optimizations of a system while you need to choose the right system for the environment.

A 433 MHz based link and a strong modulation is much suitable solution than a BT class 2 device included in the phone.

And here the real hack, most of phones has an integrated FM receiver, higher sensibility than BT, a simple FM transmitter (88-108 MHz) and problem solved.
by woooooo | 2026-01-19 13:37:13+00:00
Both, actually, but in the case I'm thinking of the devs with the strongest leadership skills in terms of organizing their peers to make things happen were completely invisible to management who were playing a different game. Just like their game was invisible to the devs shipping product, who didn't understand the implications on their careers. Saw a couple of great unofficial leaders get fired and a bunch more leave due to the disconnect. It caught up to the managers later, turned out their people skills weren't good enough after execution ground to a halt.

(Not all managers, this was a special degenerate case, but it's worth considering that different people have different goals/incentives/values. It's not always a straight line to "delivering customer value" that is only held up by a lack of people skills.)
by vessenes | 2026-01-19 13:37:23+00:00
Probably the wrong attitude here - beads is infra for your coding agents, not you. The most I directly interact with it is by invoking `bd prime` at the start of some sessions if the LLM hasn’t gotten the message; maybe very occasionally running `bd ready` — but really it’s a planning tool and work scheduler for the agents, not the human.

What agent do you use it with, out of curiosity?

At any rate, to directly answer your question, I used it this weekend like this:

“Make a tool that lets me ink on a remarkable tablet and capture the inking output on a remote server; I want that to send off the inking to a VLM of some sort, and parse the writing into a request; send that request and any information we get to nanobanana pro, and then inject the image back onto the remarkable. Use beads to plan this.”

We had a few more conversations, but got a workable v1 out of this five hours later.
by helsinkiandrew | 2026-01-19 13:38:14+00:00
> the highest is in S America

Aconcagua in Argentina. It's on my 'things to do if in the area' list. The nearest airport is only a 200km drive on a tarmac road away and then a 40km trek to the peak! Although the 4km altitude gain is likely to be harder than the distance.
by nkrisc | 2026-01-19 13:38:23+00:00
Honing a blade still "moves" the blade close to what you want: a blade that cuts well. It's not correct enough to have spawned the original phrase, but it's not completely absurd, like saying, "should of" instead of "should've" or saying "I could care less" instead of "I couldn't care less" - the first of which is nonsense and the second means the opposite of the intended meaning.

"Hone in on" is at least mildly in the correct direction.
by williamcotton | 2026-01-19 13:38:36+00:00
How is counting not a technology?

The calculations are internal but they happen due to the orchestration of specific parts of the brain. That is to ask, why can't we consider our brains to be using their own internal tools?

I certainly don't think about multiplying two-digit numbers in my head in the same manner as when playing a Dm to a G7 chord that begs to resolve to a C!
Ask your Slack bot what the dev team shipped
by inferno22 | 2026-01-19 13:38:44+00:00
Gitmore (https://gitmore.io)

One feature I built that's been useful: a Slack bot that queries your Git history.

Connect your repos. Add the bot to Slack. Ask:
- "What shipped last week?"
- "Who's working on the API?"
- "Which PRs are stuck?"

The bot pulls from commit messages and PR descriptions across GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket. Answers show up in Slack – no GitHub login needed.

Helpful for non-technical team members who need visibility but don't use GitHub.

*Security:*

Webhooks only. We store metadata – commit messages, PR descriptions, authors, timestamps. Never source code.

- Encrypted tokens (Fernet)
- Webhook signature verification
- 2FA support
by antonymoose | 2026-01-19 13:38:46+00:00
Another counterfeit issue they have that will not be solved by this is the “REPLACEMENT PART FOR OEM FOOBAR-123” listings.

I’ve had quite a few repairs over the last few years for household appliances and pool pumps and such. It’s very common to find a listing for a heating element for a Samsung dryer or a Heyward filter diverter being listed with a misleading title and often further listing the manufacturer as, say, Samsung itself.

I got screwed after buying a dryer heating element for $80 recommended via a reputable YouTube DIY channel. Silly me neglected to check the comments and lo and behold 50%+ are complaints that this heating element dies after 6-8 weeks, just past the 30 day refund window…
by mike_hearn | 2026-01-19 13:38:54+00:00
Is it really so different in the service context? You could also reverse engineer the HTTP endpoints and formats used by Word Online to export data from the service. It doesn't feel all that different, except perhaps that the online service can try to detect your custom tooling and block you, whereas with static data that isn't possible.

But other than that admittedly real extra problem, the bulk of the work would still be understanding the undocumented protocols and feature semantics, then matching the feature set.