MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dimator | 2026-01-22 21:42:25+00:00
you couldn't have missed GP's point any more if you tried. ignoring the ad-hominems about SWE greed:

these tools have been trained on decades of people "obsessing over every last detail". what GP is arguing is that we're detaching from that: you prompt, you get something that works, it doesn't matter how it got there. we're now entering the world where the majority of code will be vibed. So whatever our foredevelopers came up with, that will be the the final chapter of craftsman-produced, understood, code. whatever the previous generation actually learned about software engineering, that's at an end too, because why bother learning when i can prompt.

there's no stopping this transition, obviously. the next generation of tools will be trained on the current generation of tools' generated code. we're passed the "termination shock" of sofwtare understanding.
Show HN: SONA – An AI-native serialization format to reduce "Syntax Tax"
by fabio2620 | 2026-01-22 21:42:31+00:00
The Problem: > Traditional formats like JSON and YAML carry a high "Syntax Tax". In a human-to-machine world, braces and quotes are fine. In a token-based economy, they are expensive overhead. Furthermore, implicit typing leads to "Type Hallucinations" (e.g., a model parsing "NO" as a boolean).

The Solution: > SONA uses "Symbol-Locked Safety." Every value’s type is declared by its first character (# for ints, $ for floats, ? for booleans). This makes parsing unambiguous for the LLM and the parser.

Key Technical Specs:

Token Efficiency: Up to 40% reduction compared to JSON (matches TOON in v1.1).

Performance: Designed for single-pass parsing (Rust implementation included).

Ecosystem: We already have Python/Rust/WASM implementations and a VS Code LSP.

I'm looking for feedback on the specification (SPEC.md) and the symbol-locking approach. Is the trade-off of learning a new syntax worth the token savings in production-scale AI agents?

Repo: https://github.com/fabiosleal/sona-structured-object-notatio...
by mystraline | 2026-01-22 21:42:50+00:00
Sigh.

I'm still waiting for a systems engineering tool that can log every layer, and handle SSL the whole pipe wide.

Im covering everything from strafe and ltrace on the machine, file reads, IO profiling, bandwidth profiling. Like, the whole thing, from beginning to end.

Theres no tool that does that.

Hell, I can't even see good network traces within a single Linux app. The closest you'll find is https://github.com/mozillazg/ptcpdump

But especially with Firefox, good luck.
by d_shar_ | 2026-01-22 21:42:53+00:00
I built this because small business owners either have to use oversimplified calculators that don't handle real IRS rules, or pay for expensive accounting software just to get a depreciation schedule.

This handles:
- All MACRS GDS property classes (3, 5, 7, 10, 15, 20, 27.5, 39 year)
- Section 179 deductions ($1.25M limit for 2025)
- Bonus depreciation (40% for 2025)
- Luxury vehicle caps
- Real property with mid-month conventions
- PDF/CSV export

Free tier: 5 calculations/month. Pro ($14/mo): unlimited + saved schedules. Business ($29/mo): client management + Form 4562 worksheets for accountants.

Built with React, Supabase, Stripe, hosted on Replit. Happy to answer questions about the tax logic or tech stack.
by p0pularopinion | 2026-01-22 21:43:01+00:00
This is just objectively untrue. Source: I live in Germany, a country with some of the highest electricity prices, I drive a BEV and I heat my home with a heatpump. My systems SCOP hovers around 3.5, which means that my kWh of heat made from my heatpump with electricity is cheaper than my current gas rate.

My heatpump electricty bill is significantly lower as compared to my apartment (Gas furnace), despite both buildings being roughly comparable late 80s construction.

I charge my car at my standard electrcity rate of 32ct/kWh, and I pay now about half for the same usage.

Electricity is expensive, yeah. But electrified stuff is also significantly more efficient than fossil tech
by headcanon | 2026-01-22 21:43:38+00:00
Seconded, I would be interested in knowing people's workflows + experiences developing MacOS and iOS apps with claude, etc.

From the repo here, it looks like its just using swift command line tools, which might just work well enough with cursor/vscode/etc. for small projects. You won't have Xcode's other features but maybe thats fine for an agentic-first development workflow.
Show HN: My Finnish language learner-friendly simple news archive
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2026-01-22 21:43:48+00:00
I moved from the US to Finland a few years ago and have been slowly learning the language. One of the things I found myself yearning for when I started was a reliable source of easy to read, high-quality Finnish; YLE's Selkouutiset (Clear News) was a perennial recommendation, but when I tried to figure out how to binge read a week's worth of its articles at a time I couldn't figure out a straightforward way to do that using the URLs they provided.

So I started my own daily archive with a very simple YYYY/MM/DD format, and I've kept it going ever since. The architecture is a little nonstandard as it uses Git submodules pretty liberally, but it means I have never lost a day's scrape since starting, and it's super easy to both host and hack on as a result. I use the static site generator Hugo to ultimately generate the Github Pages site. Simplicity begets longevity.

Tonight I added a small new feature to let my fellow language learners generate Anki cards on the fly for any article they care to. I have more such little tools at https://finnish.andrew-quinn.me/ for anyone who's interested, as well as what probably has a claim to fame as the world's fastest Finnish-English dictionary program at https://taskusanakirja.com/. It's a silly little niche but it's mine and I'm having fun.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-01-22 21:44:07+00:00
That quote seriously rubs me the wrong way. "Dragging little boxes around" in a DAW is creative, it constitutes the entire process of composing electronic music. You are notating what notes to play, when and for how long they play, what instrument plays them, and any modifications to the default sound of that instrument. Is writing sheet music tedious? Sure, it can be, when the speed of notating by hand can't keep up with the speed your brain is thinking through ideas. But being tedious is not mutually exclusive with being creative despite the attempt to explicitly contrast them as such, and the solution to the process of notating your creativity being tedious is not "randomly generate a bunch of notes and instruments that have little relation with the ones you're thinking of". This excerpt supposes that generative AI lets you automate the tedious part while keeping "the quality of your decisions", but it doesn't keep your decisions, it generates its own "decisions" from a broad, high-level prompt and your role is reduced to merely making decisions about whether or not you like the content generated, which is not creativity.
by pluralmonad | 2026-01-22 21:44:40+00:00
To give another perspective on this, all my intestinal issues resolved when I eliminated fiber from my diet. Two other people I very intimately know that had IBS have managed their symptoms into remission by carefully gatekeeping fiber in their diets. last I was deep into this (5yrs ago or so) almost all of the prominent nutritional science was based on survey data and seemed to extrapolate way more than I was comfortable with given the narrow source. I have not kept abreast of new developments, but as far as I know the major impediments to real controlled nutritional studies are the same they always have been.
by geocar | 2026-01-22 21:44:46+00:00
> > Ebay does not have the right ... to violate law even to protect themselves.

> Yes they do, as they should.

No they should not, and I cannot believe you could say any such thing in good faith.

> if you're abusing their service they need to be allowed to ban you

Who said anything about "abusing their service"?

> Imagine if Amazon wasn't allowed to ban scammers

Nobody is talking about banning scammers.

Don't do this: Don't argue in bad faith. You can still disagree and think companies have the right to commit crimes, but you don't have to act like I'm saying something that I'm clearly not!

> but a private online store can ban users

Actually they can't, because we're now talking about users instead of scammers and abusers: There's something called the Americans for Disability Act, and it protects access to storefronts and no a private online store CANNOT ban users who need an accessibility tool.
by 6mile | 2026-01-22 21:45:34+00:00
Hi, I'm one of the researchers that identified this threat and I blogged about it back in November (https://opensourcemalware.com/blog/contagious-interview-vsco...)

First, @Tyriar thanks for being a part of this conversation. I know you don't have to, and I want to let you know I get that you are choosing to contribute, and I personally appreciate it.

The reality is that VS Code ships in a way that is perfect for attackers to use tasks files to compromise developers:

1. You have to click "trust this code" on every repo you open, which is just noise and desensitizes the user to the real underlying security threat. What VS Code should do is warn you when there is a tasks file, especially if there is a "command" parameter in that tasks file.

2. You can add parameters like these to tasks files to disable some of the notification features so devs never see the notifications you are talking about:
"presentation": {
"reveal": "never",
"echo": false,
"focus": false,
"close": true,
"panel": "dedicated",
"showReuseMessage": false}

3. Regardless of Microsofts observations that opening other people's code is risky, I want to remind you that all of us open other peoples code all day long, so it seems a little duplicitous to say "you'd still be vulnerable if you trust the workspace". I mean, that's kind of our jobs. Your "Workspaces" abstraction is great on paper, especially for project based workflows, but that's not the only way that most of us use VS Code. The issue here is that Microsoft created a new feature (tasks files) that executes things when I open code in VS Code. This is new, and separate from the intrinsic risk of opening other people's code. To ignore that fact to me seems like you are running away from the responsibility to address what you've created.

Because of the above points we are quickly seeing VS Code tasks file become the number one way that developers are being compromised by nation state actors (typically North Korea/Lazarus).

Just search github and you'll see what I mean:
https://github.com/search?q=path%3Atasks.json+vercel.app&ref...

There are dozens and dozens of bad guys using this technique right now. Microsoft needs to step up. End of story.
by geocar | 2026-01-22 21:46:06+00:00
> Their right to not do business with you is exactly the same as your right to not do business with them.

You are incorrect about that. They are subject to the ADA. I am not.

As a publicly listed company they have a tremendous number of other laws that apply to them and not to me.

> It's the very same right you exercise every time you use an add blocker.

Exactly: As an accessibility tool, it is illegal for a company to deny service in the US (and Ebay is a US corporation, despite their Canadian roots) for the use of the tool.
by mystraline | 2026-01-22 21:47:11+00:00
In my experience, I call them "Suck-u-rity engineers".

They're the "wellakshually" types, with "what-ifs" of increasingly inane and stupid conditions. And add in the CVE seekers looking for anything to grab on to... Yeah, thats why they're not security, but suck-u-rity.

Ive got users to defend. And sure, security is absolutely a part. But for those diminishing returns without a real exploit, I'm not doing those. Or if I'm required by some regimen, I'm doing those in the least impact to my userbase. They have enough to fight with tech-wise without me interfering in their honest work.
by bastard_op | 2026-01-22 21:47:20+00:00
I started using claude-code, but found it pretty useless without any ability to talk to other chats. Claude recommended I make my own MCP server, so I did. I built a wrapper script to invoke anthropic's sandbox-runtime toolkit to invoke claude-code in a project with tmux, and my mcp server allows desktop to talk to tmux. Later I built in my own filesystem tools, and now it just spawns konsole sessions for itself invoking workers to read tasks it drops into my filesystem, points claude-code to it, and runs until it commits code, and then I have the PM in desktop verify it, do the final push/pr/merge. I use an approval system in a gui to tell me when claude is trying to use something, and I set an approve for period to let it do it's thang.

Now I've been using it to build on my MCP server I now call endpoint-mcp-server (coming soon to github near you), which I've modularized with plugins, adding lots more features and a more versatile qt6 gui with advanced workspace panels and widgets.

At least I was until Claude started crapping the bed lately.
by wcfields | 2026-01-22 21:47:46+00:00
Can speak for someone who managed a racked [1] Mac Mini racked as a server in 2015~2018:

* Profile Manager / MDM
* Caching server for OS updates
* Thunderbolt connection to a PCIe RAID HBA for a JBOD for NAS file sharing

All these things/use cases now are depreciated, MDM via JAMF in the cloud, internet is fast enough that caching OS updates isn't necessary, and NAS's are much better suited.

[1] https://www.sonnettech.com/product/legacyproducts/xmacminise...
by cptskippy | 2026-01-22 21:47:55+00:00
> Geofence bypass: As far as I understand, there's no easy way to enforce a geofence server-side other than timing, consistency, etc. You sort of just have to trust whatever the phone tells you.

There's no fool proof method but you can make it very hard and impractical.

Both Apple and Google offer attestation mechanisms to confirm the integrity of the App and Device Environment that it's running on. This ensures that the API requests are coming from an attested device.

To mitigate the MITM attack you can use TLS Certificate pinning on sensitive API requests.

You could have the server side API provide a session specific signing token that the App uses to sign payloads attached to API calls.
by userulluipeste | 2026-01-22 21:48:28+00:00
"Microsoft's GitHub is hosting the leaked source code (which probably got sucked into Copilot and every other AI under the sun as a result)." "However, I don't think copyright lawyers will care. «They're also committing a crime» doesn't mean you're free to do what you want. That applies especially in ReactOS vs MS, because if ReactOS succeeds, it will compete directly with Microsoft."

And ReactOS uses GitHub Copilot: https://github.com/reactos/reactos/pull/8516

There's also such thing as being responsible (for an outcome), which in case of litigation means being culpable. Microsoft here is the sole actor that has any control on the GitHub Copilot, on what it was fed with, and thus - on its output (which would be the base of their accusation if they sue). How do you imagine such a case could be made to look like it would have any legal standing?
by mekdoonggi | 2026-01-22 21:48:56+00:00
I am certainly not an expert. What resources or military capability does Russia have that China could not eclipse, replace, or source from a partner?

What would it mean for Russia to become a "real" western country? Why would China fear that?

Whatever happens, Russia needs to sell resources to stay afloat. I have a hard believing that if it came down to it, China couldn't just seize Vladivostok.
Show HN: NimbleBrain – We killed our agents; users now just describe workflows
by barefootsanders | 2026-01-22 21:50:35+00:00
Founder here. We killed our agent builder and rebuilt around conversational workflow development.

Last year we built agents coordinating agents. Users asked for it. Demos looked great. Then we watched them not use it.

Nobody knows what an agent actually is, and nobody wants to configure them. What they wanted was simpler: "pull reports from my CRM and send them to me every day at 8am."

We scrapped it and built V3 around a ginle interface: describe what you need, it gets built. The agent (Nira) helps you build - you don't build agents.

Under the hood we're orchestrating across MCP servers - intent classification, dynamic tool loading, state management, scheduling. MCP registry is open source: https://github.com/NimbleBrainInc/mcp-registry

Free tier has all integrations unlocked.

Happy to answer questions about the architecture or why we killed agents.
by thisislife2 | 2026-01-22 21:50:56+00:00
That's a good tip, and I do use exFat on some pendrives. But due to the lack of journaling, and its buggy performance on macOS ( https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/exfat-file-system-save-henk-s... ) I wouldn't recommend it for long-term use on any fixed drives with data you care about. My research lead me to conclude that NTFS implementations are the least buggiest non-native file systems on Linux and macOS.
by cannoneyed | 2026-01-22 21:51:06+00:00
Yeah this is all completely fair and I agree with all of it. Aesthetically and philosophically, what AI does for "pixel art" is very off. And once you see the "AI" you can't really unsee it.

But I didn't want to call it a "SimCity" map, though that's really the vibe/inspiration I wanted to capture, because that implies other things, so I used the term "pixel art" even though I knew it'd get a lot of (valid) pushback...

As with all things art, labels are really difficult and the context / meaning / technique is at once completely tied to genre but also completely irrelevant. Think about the label "techno" - the label is deeply meaningful and subtle to some and almost meaningless to others
by htrp | 2026-01-22 21:51:11+00:00
I assume if you put in 100 mn at a 12 bn valuation in the last round, you're either getting 100 back at 1x pref or you're screwing over the common even more?

Considering the 12bn round was back in 21, I'd expect most of the employee base to be taking a haircut on the value of their options.
by chasd00 | 2026-01-22 21:51:26+00:00
That’s pretty great, I’ve done something similar by hand many moons ago. It was very tedious.

I need a simple S3 compatible API to store some files with basic auth and ssl certs using let’s encrypt. Nothing crazy, Garage is overkill, Minio is overkill. I may see if Claude code can handle that for me using python or something.

/btw, I work in consulting and the above project would have a budget of probably $100k and a schedule of 3 months. I see a lot of change for swe consultants coming.
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-01-22 21:51:39+00:00
One-time purchase software would become dramatically more sustainable if platform churn could be ground to a halt. Most types of software achieved peak usability and functionality somewhere between 5 and 25 years ago and there wouldn't be much reason for anybody to upgrade if their one-time purchases continued to work in perpetuity. A substantial number even prefer e.g. Word 2000 or Photoshop CS1 over their modern incarnations but can't use those for either technical or legal reasons.

Instead, the reverse has happened and platform churn has risen to new highs, necessitating subscriptions.
by Fomite | 2026-01-22 21:52:07+00:00
I don't do this because I don't have the time to design wargaming terrain, but I've definitely pushed myself to do more designing for household things.

It's a really good feeling to be able to put something together that solves your problem. As I asked my wife, "Is this why people with wood shops are always so smug?"

It's also fun to be able to feel your skills building. I now have opinions on friction fit box lids.
by milkytron | 2026-01-22 21:52:11+00:00
I wonder how they will impact traffic. Rideshare has already added traffic according to some studies I've read.

Basically, instead of someone going from point A (current location with own car nearby) to point B (destination), Point A becomes the destination of the previous passenger, and point B and C were the previous points A and B. So a single trip adds one more leg.

It might reduce the need for parking... potentially. But there will still need to be a certain amount of time dedicated to charging for these cars that requires parking.

If private car ownership continues increasing in cost, and households become increasingly cost burdened (transportation is already the second highest cost for households), then I wonder how this will impact demand for housing in areas dependent on cars.

Curious on the outcomes here. I think the best thing we can do for city transportation is increasing the number of viable transportation options. Waymo is one option amongst the options dependent on roads, but walking, biking, and transit should still be a priority so that we maintain competition amongst transportation modes.
by theshrike79 | 2026-01-22 21:52:33+00:00
Well of-fucking-course you don't vibe code your salary management system =)

Just normal non-coder jobs have massive amounts of repetitive crap that could easily be automated - and has been with Excel to a degree.

Now coding AI lets them automate the rest - or if they're real smart they use an agentic AI model and create an application to do it that doesn't require a LLM subscription.
by carlosjobim | 2026-01-22 21:52:33+00:00
> that's the standard of value other SaaS companies have to beat and very few do.

Of course it isn't. Just because some products or services are great value, doesn't make other products bad value. They can be anything from good value, to average value to low value.

And products / services are of course not comparable just because they are subscription based, or used on a digital device.

Gas has a fantastic value, one liter can transport me and my things a long way in short time. So does that mean that I can never buy a bottle of wine or some coffee outside of my home? They are after all liquids, and neither coffee nor wine can compare with the great value of gas.
by russian_bot | 2026-01-22 21:52:34+00:00
If you read the Bible, there is no way to come to that conclusion. The Bible takes itself incredibly seriously; so to say that

> The stories are catchy and have stuck, unwittingly allowing the truth to be carried across the centuries, safely hidden in the minds of men who did not understand it, until the day comes when people grow up enough, to the point where they could crack the shell and eat the fruit.

is to betray just a general lack of understanding of the text. Just because you're exposed to the stories doesn't mean you understand the stories; the truth of the stories; or it's real intended meaning. It takes really smart people a lot of time and a lot of effort to just begin understanding the breadth and depth of the Bible. It's deeply humbling to begin to unravel it and see the story for how it portrays itself. I would really encourage you to take one story from the Bible, for example, the garden of Eden and see how it traces itself throughout the entire scope of the Bible and the different forms and iconography that shows up just from that one story.