MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by morshu9001 | 2026-01-19 00:28:59+00:00
Part of me wishes there were prediction markets for flight delays. The ETAs are wildly inaccurate, like last time the counter staff suggested I not reschedule cause our plane was arriving in 15min, when I could see on a slightly hard to find site that the plane was still grounded 500mi away.

Part of me is careful what I wish for, starting with passengers bothering staff even more.
by rainsford | 2026-01-19 00:29:05+00:00
I used to have that perspective, but I actually think it's even simpler than selective application of principles or hypocrisy as the parent commentator put it. It's not so much that they believe in an ideal but struggle to apply it when doing so isn't in their favor and more that their guiding premise is that things should always go their way and they adopt the language, but not the intent, of a deeper principle because it sounds like a better justification.
by tptacek | 2026-01-19 00:29:25+00:00
I do too, but you can take things too far, which I'd argue has happened the moment "figuring out what the names mean" becomes enough of an intellectual challenge to provide a dopamine hit; at that point, you've (intentionally or otherwise) germinated a cult. It's human nature: people will support the design not on its merits but rather as loss aversion for the work they put into decoding it.
by esseph | 2026-01-19 00:29:38+00:00
Incorrect, that would be the:

https://tmd.texas.gov/state-guard

;) they are NOT the National Guard. They are the militia of Texas. (Texas State Guard aka TXSG). Subordinate to the state gov, only.

However TX considers it more complicated than that:

The Organized Militia: Consisting of the Texas Army National Guard, the Texas Air National Guard, and the Texas State Guard.

The Unorganized Militia: This consists of all "able-bodied" residents of the state who are at least 18 but under 45 years of age and are not members of the organized militia.
by kelnos | 2026-01-19 00:29:59+00:00
> I'm trying to understand what the criticism is here, because the example seems to support the point that these are meant to be a way of learning the future, not oppose it.

Indeed. Insider trading is a feature of prediction markets, not a bug. There are two kinds of people who participate in prediction markets:

1. People who have insider information, or at least more sophisticated predictive capability than your average person.

2. Gamblers.

In effect, prediction markets are a way to move wealth from the second group to the first. If you understand that and still want to participate, cool. It's your money, and you're allowed to gamble it away if you find that entertaining.

At any rate, given the relatively small-potatoes level of bets going on at Polymarket and Kalshi, the article author's breathless anxiety about this is a bit overblown.
by drob518 | 2026-01-19 00:30:12+00:00
I’m not sure I agree. Pure math is not useless because a lot of math is very useful. But we don’t know ahead of time what is going to be useless vs. useful. We need to do all of it and then sort it out later.

If we knew that it was all going to be useless, however, then it’s a hobby for someone, not something we should be paying people to do. Sure, if you enjoy doing something useless, knock yourself out… but on your own dime.
by rpiguy | 2026-01-19 00:30:14+00:00
The earths’ resources are finite and we are in a competition for them. Technology and AI make the race for energy even more intense.

If your country was as large as the US or China it too would likely be a “bully.”

France is still a bully in Africa when it wants to be.

I also bought into all our cultural exports as a child and believed we were going to war for freedom and Democracy. As I get older I see the truth. It was all geopolitics.

Freedom and Democracy were just icing on the cake if we managed to preserve it wherever we were sending our kids to die.
by bastawhiz | 2026-01-19 00:30:32+00:00
The idea of gas town is simultaneously appealing and appalling to me. The waste and lack of control is wild, but at the same time there's at least a nugget of fascinating, useful work in there. In a world where compute is cheap and abundant and the models are a notch smarter, I think it's the start of a useful framework for what the future of augmented work might look like.

I have no interest in using gas town as it is (for a plethora of reasons, not the least of which being that I'm uninterested in spending the money), but I've been fascinated with the idea of slowing it down and having it run with a low concurrency. If you've got a couple A100s, what does it look like if you keep them busy with two agents working concurrently (with 20+ agents total)? What does it mean to have the town focus the scope of work to a series of non-overlapping changesets instead of a continuous stream of work?

If you don't plan to have it YOLO stuff in realtime and you can handle the models being dumber than Claude, I think you can have it do some really practical, useful things that are markedly better than the tools we have today.
by kirankotari | 2026-01-19 00:30:51+00:00
Hi HN! Creator of TestIQ here.

I built this after noticing AI coding assistants (Copilot, Cursor, Claude) generating tons of duplicate tests. They'd create 5 different test functions that all execute the same code paths - just with different names.

THE APPROACH:

Instead of comparing test code (text similarity), TestIQ analyzes which lines each test executes. If two tests have identical coverage, one is redundant.

REAL EXAMPLE:

54 AI-generated calculator tests:
- 39 exact duplicates (identical coverage)
- 168 subset relationships (test A covered by test B)
- 45 similar pairs (significant overlap)

Only 15 unique tests actually needed = 72% reduction.

KEY FEATURES:

• Built-in pytest plugin (one flag: --testiq-output)
• Interactive HTML reports with side-by-side comparison
• CI/CD quality gates to block redundant tests
• Parallel processing for large test suites
• Python 3.9+, MIT license

QUICK START:

pip install testiq
pytest --testiq-output=coverage.json
testiq analyze coverage.json --format html

Or try the demo:

testiq demo

This runs the actual 54-test calculator example and opens an HTML report.

TECHNICAL DETAILS:

Uses coverage.py under the hood for per-test line coverage. Compares coverage sets using Jaccard similarity. Identifies three types: exact duplicates, subset relationships, and similar tests (configurable threshold).

Would love feedback on the approach! Have others dealt with test suite bloat from AI-generated code?

Links:
- GitHub: https://github.com/pydevtools/TestIQ
- PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/testiq/
- Docs: https://github.com/pydevtools/TestIQ/tree/main/docs
by eek2121 | 2026-01-19 00:30:54+00:00
While I agree that it is amazing work, I feel the need to call out the wine team because, as many likely know, a redditor (admittedly of unknown origin, to me at least) felt the need to go to Valve prior to the wine team. Valve, of course, kicked the PR back over to the wine team, which I actually think is fine. The issue, I think, "may possibly" be the wine team.

The PR was well documented, does not initially appear to be related to AI, and it makes a PITA installer work FFS. Further, my own PRs to wine were accepted for less decades ago and are still in use now.

Forgive the rant, however the redditor in question was scared to send the PR to Wine due to politics. That tells me there is definitely too much middle management in an open source project.
by Waterluvian | 2026-01-19 00:31:06+00:00
This feels like a false dichotomy. You can be superior to those conceptual camps by building an array of skills.

This is even obvious to heavily technically minded people, who lament how one kind of engineer would benefit from stronger grasp of other domains. Communication skills, understanding of how to exist within social structures, and all those “soft skills” have the power to multiply the value of the technical skills.

My sense is that the loudest proponents for devaluing soft skills are those who are bad at them and want a moat rather than having to work at them to compete.
by giobox | 2026-01-19 00:31:55+00:00
Much of what you say is true, but again your mechanic friend can only provide a meaningful answer if they know the model of car. It’s the first question any half way competent mechanic will ask!

The cars sitting outside my home vary in oil service interval by over 10k miles, as just one simple example, and I don’t drive anything particularly exotic.

By under-specifying the question, you rob it of the context to be answered accurately.
Show HN: I made Claude play Minecraft using Agent SDK
by haksndot | 2026-01-19 00:32:21+00:00
This weekend I built a Minecraft bot for a server I play on. It uses the Agent SDK for the main loop and a bunch of custom MCP tools.

Some highlights:

* The bot is an active participant in the in-game chat, enabling all players to interact with it.

* Tools for interacting with containers, crafting, trading with villagers and various other things.

* Memory system which the agent uses to keep track of in-game events, interactions with players etc.

* Screenshot tool which lets Claude use its vision modality to look around (not very useful, but fun).

* Tooling for interacting with plugins GriefPrevention and QuickShop, so the bot can manage land claims and shops.

* Tools for doing server administration, running server commands etc. This is a separate, optional tool set, in a separate repo.

As of this writing, there are 69 tools. We keep adding more on the fly as we come up with new ideas in the player community. About two thirds of the tools are wrappers around Mineflayer.

100% vibe coded. Not a single line of code written or even read by a human.

MIT License. If you try this thing out, I would love to hear about it!
by defrost | 2026-01-19 00:32:46+00:00
I went down a rabbit hole on that - apparently the WhisperTech factory got destroyed in the New Zealand earthquake and left little behind other than a cohort of dedicated fans keeping old units alive :(

How It Works

The WhisperGen PPS16 is based on a four-cylinder Stirling-cycle (external combustion) engine that repeatedly heats and cools a mass of pressurised nitrogen gas.

Each time the gas is heated and cooled, the changing gas pressure causes the pistons to move up and down.
This mechanical motion, via a special mechanism called the “wobble yoke”, rotates an alternator to generate DC electricity which can be used to charge a lead-acid battery bank.

The nitrogen gas is heated by a continuous-combustion burner, and cooled by coolant circulating through engine cavities. Heat transferred to the coolant can be used to heat domestic water cylinders and for space heating.

~ https://www.victronenergy.com/Manuals/WhisperGen/UserManual/...

There was a European branch in Spain, seems to have withered, and some stories about expansion plans and pivoting that got trashed by the earthquake fallout.

~ https://www.smh.com.au/business/nzs-whispergen-to-move-to-eu...

Damn shame - I had access to an early model looong ago and was really looking forward to seeing where that went.
by Incipient | 2026-01-19 00:33:12+00:00
If trump is actually deranged enough to use military force against Greenland we'll see how capable the EU is of defending it - and I suspect they'll put on a good show.

What the EU wouldn't be able to handle, I suspect, is would be a full ground invasion by China, not that China would/needs to do that.

If the US was genuinely concerned about the security of Greenland they should have discussed this with the EU and encouraged them to reinforce the island, and/or offered a joint base.
by ipnon | 2026-01-19 00:33:26+00:00
It's like Conway's Law. Both humans and agents arrive at roughly identical hierarchies for organizing labor. There is something inherent in the game of telephone required by limited working memory that requires this structure. Gas Town's only failure is not being familiar with prior art and coming up with very strange names for established patterns that already exist in large hierarchical organizations like governments, corporations and militaries.
by ori_b | 2026-01-19 00:34:13+00:00
It's not hard, but it's sure a huge portion of the repeated boilerplate glue. Additionally, the data protocols are also fairly standardized in Plan 9; The typical format is tabular plain text with '%q'-verb quoting.

There's a reason that the 9front implementation of things usually ends up at about 10% the size of the upstream.
by xyzzyz | 2026-01-19 00:34:37+00:00
"Buy, borrow, die" is simply not a thing. It's a half-baked idea invented by academics, who don't realize that it's just not viable in practice. Billionaires do not actually utilize it[1].

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...
by ontouchstart | 2026-01-19 00:35:32+00:00
Ironically, when machine learning is getting “deeper & deeper”, human learning is getting more and more impatient and shallow.

I have been searching “Vibe coding” videos on YouTube that are not promoting something. And I found this one and sat down and watched the whole three hours. It does take a lot of real effort.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EL7Au1tzNxE
by dgxyz | 2026-01-19 00:36:45+00:00
Time to market and operational costs are much higher on kubernetes and containers from many years of actual experience. This is both in production and in development. It’s usually a bad engineering decision. If you’re doing a lift and shift, it’s definitely bad. If you’re starting greenfield it makes sense to pick technology stacks that don’t incur this crap.

It only makes sense if you’re managing large amounts of large siloed bits of kit. I’ve not seen this other than at unnamed big tech companies.

99.9% of people are just burning money for a fashion show where everyone is wearing clown suits because someone said clown suits are good.
by extraduder_ire | 2026-01-19 00:37:17+00:00
You can use pdsfs[0] to mount a user's pds locally using FUSE read-only. It's mentioned in the blogpost. I remember seeing a tool posted for mounting them read-write, if you sign in, but can't remember where to find it.

0: https://tangled.org/oppi.li/pdsfs
by ben_w | 2026-01-19 00:37:33+00:00
From my point of view as a European asking if myself if or when I will be able to trust the USA in the future, the Taliban is to Afghanistan as MAGA is to the USA.

You're the outsider, to me. The pre-9/11 Taliban were seen as "kinda weird but we can do deals, oh dear aren't they awful, never mind", the post-9/11 were not even worthy of talking to. The USA is currently in a similar "pre" state, an invasion would make it a "post" state.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-19 00:38:06+00:00
Google search: Ecosia/Qwant (actually private solutions) are working on it.

all social media: Most have fediverse open source solutions available (mastodon/lemmy/pixelfed/loops.video & peertube)

Peertube's on the more expensive side because of the bandwidth which is why you don't see it deployed but using something like upcloud/ovh which provide unlimited egress/bandwidth (both European) is a good combo for peertube imo

every LLM: there are chinese open weights model which EU can host privately as well imo. Not every country should spend essentially trillions of dollars for which china's giving for free plus mistral models exist too if you think that any message contains china partiality (like c'mon if you are gonna ask tiannmen square, then go ask mistral instead of chinese models)
by danpalmer | 2026-01-19 00:38:13+00:00
I still think you're looking at this from a very small perspective (and to be clear, to begin with that may be the right call, it'll just bite badly at some scale).

It isn't about the cost of processing one message, it's about the cost of processing a thousand a second, or a million a second.

Fundamentally, Cloudflare make their money by taking raw infrastructure, slicing it into a million tiny pieces, paying 2-5x overhead to be able to do that, but then pricing each at 10-100x the cost to serve. It's cheap per request, per message, etc, but it's an incredibly expensive way to rent the infrastructure.

It's also a false dichotomy to say that the alternative is provisioning for peak load. There are many points on the spectrum, from Cloudflare's offering which is about as "serverless", high level, and expensive as you can get, through to buying your own servers.

Chat isn't really "bursty" at scale, it's more seasonal on a daily/weekly basis. That's pretty easy to scale over time on any cloud provider. Autoscaling groups were pretty much designed for this. GKE Autopilot is a more modern version, but there are lots of ways to do it.

I know as a startup it's important to optimise for right now, and CF might well be the best option for you. But I stand by this being your Achilles heel, it's a very expensive way to run the infra, and when you're delivering 1m messages a second, that's approaching a $1m/month bill just for request processing, let alone storage, indexing, etc.
by Reubend | 2026-01-19 00:38:43+00:00
> I have no idea why so many people think that an argument that AI works is the same thing as an argument that AI will be profitable.

The fact that it works well for expensive categories of output (like software engineering, legal strategy, etc...) makes it difficult to imagine that it won't be profitable. You could still make an argument that the investments being made today are disproportionate, or that intense competition will stifle margins, but it's creating enough value to capture plenty of money.
by koyote | 2026-01-19 00:39:22+00:00
I had the T431s for over a decade as well.

Replaced the keyboard (orange juice spillage), screen (upgraded to a higher resolution panel), hdd (to an SSD of course), RAM, Wifi adapter (Wifi 6) as well as the battery.

I now use an X1 Nano and while it's nice (and very light!) I am sad that the upgradability is nowhere near as good.
by clearleaf | 2026-01-19 00:41:18+00:00
Yes registering fake views is fraud against ad networks. Ad networks love it though because they need those fake clicks to defraud advertisers in turn.
Paying to have ads viewed by bots is just paying to have electricity and compute resources burned for no reason. Eventually the wrong person will find out about this and I think that's why Google's been acting like there's no tomorrow.
Show HN: Why I forked Gemini CLI - FOSS Cowork alt that *is* the OS
by ProfHarita | 2026-01-19 00:42:01+00:00
Hi HN, I'm the maintainer of TerminAI.

I forked Gemini CLI because it has the best PTY implementation I've ever seen.

Let's be real. Gemini CLI especially with 2.5 sucked for coding. But the execution harness itself - the way it handles interactive terminals, sudo prompts, ssh sessions, TUI apps - that was gold. With Gemini 3 rolling in, I saw what was possible.

So I rewired it to build TerminAI. Multi-LLM support (Gemini, ChatGPT OAuth, LM Studio). Ripped out all Google telemetry. Built a new brain to do anything a human wants to with a computer.

What I ended up with:
- Local-first. Zero telemetry by default. Your prompts stay on your machine.
- True PTY. No hanging on interactive commands. Enhanced capability to execute across OS platforms
- A/B/C Approval Ladder. Destructive actions require your explicit approval. You define what's safe.
- Multi-platform. Windows parity. PowerShell operates as well as bash.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Some honest notes:
- The desktop GUI exists but isn't CoWork-grade. My focus was the CLI. I need contributors.
- Some models (like GPT-5.2) hold back. It's their training - they dont know that terminAI is there to protect. Gemini, grok-code-fast-1, and even GLM just let go.
- What IS solid: The core runtime. Brain, safety, multi-LLM, cross-platform, recipes, Linux and Windows.
- What IS not: desktop app, voice mode, self-hosted cloud relay, MCPs/ extensions (code is in there; need to test and finalize)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Install & Run:
npm install -g @terminai/cli
terminai

In the app:
/llm --to set the llm provider
/llm reset -- to change llm provider. currently requires app restart to take effect

"Audit my docker containers, find the one with high memory, check its logs, summarize errors."
"Fix my drivers...."
"Plan me a detailed itinerary and output as a PDF with a map for..."
or you can always do the good old
"Cleanup my downloads folder"

Happy to go deep on internals.
by Incipient | 2026-01-19 00:42:50+00:00
I'm not sure what makes a Show HN do well or not, but other than the name putting me off the idea looks interesting - I just don't have the technical nous or time to unpick it.

My issue these days is that I always just think "is it well made, well thought out code, or 15 lines of prompt and hopeful thinking?" I feel like provenance is now more important than ever.
by spartanatreyu | 2026-01-19 00:43:19+00:00
React's hello world:

```js

<div id="root"></div>

<script>

import React from 'https://esm.sh/react@19';

import ReactDOM from 'https://esm.sh/react-dom@19/client';

const root = ReactDOM.createRoot(document.getElementById('root'));

root.render(<h1>Hello, world!</h1>);
</script>

```

---

HTML's hello world:

```html

<h1>Hello, world!</h1>

```

---

JS's hello world:

Nothing, it was already done in HTML
by Dracophoenix | 2026-01-19 00:43:58+00:00
If you don't mind answering, what exactly was this particular passion of yours?

> There's a certain beyond which you don't build things because it's evident that society can't be trusted with it.

Where does one draw the line and under what conditions? Reasonable minds can differ on the definition of foreseeable.

After all, Some of the most beneficial inventions to mankind have also aided its worst tendencies. For instance, the 20th and 21st centuries as we know them wouldn't exist without the combustion engine. Simultaneously, it's this same device that has significantly contributed to the pollution of the air.

Secondly, how does one mean to stop society or any individual from learning and building on new ideas in the Information age? Is such a thing even possible?
by ohazi | 2026-01-19 00:44:30+00:00
Real, genuinely confused human here: Can someone please clarify whether or not gas town is/was a joke? I've searched repeatedly and can't find anything that looks like an obvious tell, and I'm not sure if this is because it's actually real and people are taking it seriously, or because the pages and pages of discourse surrounding it is AI generated and taking itself literally.

If it's not a joke... I have no words. You've all gone insane.
by kart23 | 2026-01-19 00:44:39+00:00
didn’t it say fresh receipt? how would tangles have live data from hacked phone records? also, yeah in that your phone company is at fault for violating your privacy.

Agree that using hacked sources is unethical and shouldn’t be done, but is there an actual law against law enforcement using hacked data? reporters can legally publish hacked sources.
by dameis | 2026-01-19 00:45:01+00:00
I think part of the issue is that humans are hyper conditioned to expect a certain UX and set of conditions thanks to the past 3 decades of the internet + legacy social media. It only feels weird that you could publish content on Bluesky and have it show up on some other app without your consent because of how we've been conditioned. There will be a lot of unconditioning and reconditioning that has to take place over a span of time if the ATmosphere (or any new vision of social media) wants to succeed.

https://anisota.net will display any Bluesky content and profiles without the consent of the user — no one cares at the moment though because either 1) they don't know about such a niche project, or 2) they aren't concerned cause I'm not a controversial figure.

If Truth Social was suddenly a part of the ATmosphere or a part of some other wide network of users, most people would catch on eventually and be hopefully conditioned to realize that the mere presence of someone's content on an app/site doesn't mean they use that app/site