MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tomhow | 2026-01-21 13:36:55+00:00
Most projects contain multiple small "a-ha" moments, but many (most?) also contain one big breakthrough, in the sense that the project didn't/couldn't work until that breakthrough happened, and after the breakthrough happened everything else flowed naturally. That breakthrough and the learnings that emerged in discovering it are always what's most interesting to learn about. If there's no big breakthrough like that, then it's probably not a very novel or impressive.

But it's hard to answer these kinds of specific questions in the hypothetical. The HN audience prizes originality, and sometimes the thing that gives a project substance is different to much of what's come before. Sometimes it's just a case of "we know it when we see it".
by eclat | 2026-01-21 13:37:53+00:00
While that’s also true, the EU varies widely. The tax wedge is very low in places like Czechia or Lithuania and very high in France and Germany. If you add other European countries you get some of the lowest taxes on earth in places like the Isle of Man or Switzerland.

Having said that, the lack of proper integration is a huge problem, like imposing tarrifs of over 100% on ourselves.
by Fnoord | 2026-01-21 13:38:10+00:00
I used to run KDE and GNOME on a computer with 256 MB RAM back around the year 2000. Athlon 1000 Sempron and a Duron 800 (one of these machines started out with 128 MB RAM). KDE 1.x, 2.x, GNOME 1.x, 2.x. I don't remember the very minor versions. I tried a myriad of Linux distributions, and FreeBSD as well. I settled for Debian. Back then, we (me, friends, family, etc.) thought these DE's were very bloated. I remember KDE 1.x very vividly because I had to compile it myself (or look online for binaries), and I digged the CDE theme. The first lightweight DE (if you discount fvwm) I used on Linux was XFce, but that was later on. I pretty much started with KDE, tried a bit of GNOME, went back to KDE (I came from Windows 9x). In the end, I learned to appreciate GNOME, and MacOSX or Mac OSX as I used to call it back then (proper name was Mac OS X, I suppose).

My point is what you are used to is your reference point. The underlying OS isn't super relevant. On Linux, every distribution gets on par with each other eventually. On FreeBSD I used OSS and something like winmodem is just crap hardware. Nowadays my homelab and desktop have 64 GB RAM, while my MBP (M1Pro) only has 16 GB RAM which is the same as its successor (MBP 2015 with 16 GB RAM). Do I use all of that? Not really, but the main culprit is browser(s) (which includes apps these days). Curious if you can play Steam games well on FreeBSD. FreeBSD has a couple of neat things (tho ZFS is now better on Linux). I've always preferred PF to IPT.
by ahlCVA | 2026-01-21 13:38:17+00:00
Obviously the two aren't the same (especially given the need to do routing), but I've always found it amusing that in the systems world, capability-based systems (i.e. making it impossible to address things you aren't allowed to access) are gaining traction while the philosophy in the networking world seems to be going in the opposite direction (make it possible to address everything, i.e. IPv6 vs. NATted IPv4, then add filtering).
by theshrike79 | 2026-01-21 13:38:24+00:00
Beads is basically what github issues is, but local and built in a way that LLMs can easily use it. I had a self-made solution that was close, but moved to beads because it worked out of the box without disrupting my workflow that much.

I've used it quite a bit, but now that Gas Town is a thing Beads getting a bit bloated and they're adding new features left and right, dunno why.

Might have to steal the best bits of Beads (the averaged out cli experience and JSONL for storing issues in the repo + local sqlite cache) and build my one with none of the extra bells and whistles.
by threemux | 2026-01-21 13:38:39+00:00
I mean it's mathematically a tighter range. I think part of this comes down to the more mild and less variable European climate. There is just less emphasis on air temperature so you don't see the drawbacks.

Your tape measure didn't have 1/3, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, and 1/32 subdivisions? Sounds like a bad tape measure (or really just one where US Customary was an afterthought).

As for science, well, most people don't do it. Those that do can use different things in different contexts, it's not that hard.
by bee_rider | 2026-01-21 13:38:51+00:00
I took a lot longer than I should have to finish my PhD because I wanted to beat well written/properly used vendor code. I wouldn’t recommend it, TBH.

It did make my defense a lot easier because I could just point at the graphs and say “see I beat MKL, whatever I did must work.” But I did a lot of little MPI tricks and tuning, which doesn’t add much to the scientific record. It was fun though.

I don’t know. Mixed feelings. To some extent I don’t really see how somebody could put all the effort into getting a PhD and not go on a little “I want to tune the heck out of these MPI routines” jaunt.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2026-01-21 13:38:53+00:00
I don't agree that it's "misuse". it's a use, a common use. No pushback is called for. You asked a question about the title that was answered in the title - "EU–INC" means "EU" in this case. It's clear from context, and if that fails from the article. Others have said the same.

I don't "live in that context", I'm aware of it can can use it when appropriate.
by tucnak | 2026-01-21 13:38:55+00:00
I'm struggling to see your point. CREATE VIEW not only helps, yes, indeed it's oftentimes exactly all you need. If you have multiple access patterns, like having to "actually query deleted records" sometimes, somewhere, at some point, someone would have to maintain invariants on these access patterns. This is not rocket science. The heart of the matter is that SWE's cannot handle schema/basic SQL to save their lives, whilst analysts/BI guys/whomever actually somewhat well-versed in SQL, have very little grasp on the inner working of a database, and carry with themselves idiosyncrasies coming all the way back from the 90's.

The pot is calling the kettle black.

Forget about soft deletes for a hot minute. I can give you another super basic example where in my experience SWE's and BI guys both lose the plot: Type 2 slowly-changing dimensions. This is actually heavily related to soft deletes, and much more common as far as access patterns are concerned. Say, you want to support data updates without losing information unless specified by a retention policy. For argument's sake, let's say you want to keep track of edits in the user profile. How do you do it? If you go read up on Stackoverflow, or whatever, you will come across the idea that did more violence to schemas worldwide than anything else in existence, "audit table." So instead of performing a cheap INSERT on a normalised data structure every time you need to make a change, and perhaps reading up-to-date data from a view, you're now performing costly UPDATE, and additional INSERT anyway. Why? Because apparently DISTINCT ON and composite primary keys are black magic (and anathema to ORM's in general.) If you think on BI side they're doing any better, you think wrong! To them, DISTINCT ON is oftentimes a mystery no less. One moment, blink, there you go, back in the subquery hell they call home.

Databases are beautiful, man.

It's a shame they are not treated with more respect that they deserve.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-21 13:39:12+00:00
No. The US has a first past the post system that naturally forms two parties which in turn fuels further polarization. A rep runs in a district and it's winner take all. In theory (totally unrealistic in practice) you could have a single party win all the seats by achieving 51% in each individual election. The other 49% of voters (ie approximately half of the country) wouldn't receive a single representative.

Proportional representation has advantages but comes with its own complexities. However there are also other voting systems (such as ranked) that offer different tradeoffs independent of proportional representation. There are a lot of options out there and pretty much all of them would be more functional than what we use in the US.

About the only thing our system has going for it is that someone with an IQ well below 100 can still fully understand and even help audit it. (Or at least that used to be the case before electronic voting machines started appearing.)
by bianheshan | 2026-01-21 13:39:27+00:00
OP here. A few additional technical details folks might be curious about:

- Why Gemini over GPT-5/Claude4.5 for agent orchestration: Gemini3.0 is better for react code.

- Visual Box Engine specifics: ~300 parameterized animation templates. Each "box" is a React component with props like {concept, relationships, emphasis, timing}. Example: "CauseEffectFlow" takes an array of steps and auto-generates animated arrows + state transitions.

- E2B sandboxing: We run Remotion preview renders in isolated environments. This prevents malicious/buggy code from affecting other users' jobs.

Happy to answer questions about any part of the stack!
by zigzag312 | 2026-01-21 13:39:28+00:00
I've seen few arguments that with the amount of data we have today the 2^(32-1) chance can happen, but I can't vouch their calculations were done correctly.

Readme in SMHasher test suite also seems to indicate that 32 bits might be too few for file checksums:

"Hash functions for symbol tables or hash tables typically use 32 bit hashes, for databases, file systems and file checksums typically 64 or 128bit, for crypto now starting with 256 bit."
by ljf | 2026-01-21 13:39:39+00:00
I would have agreed with you for a long time (especially when I was very aware of how many pints I could drink and still work well the next day), but since homebrewing and having my own beer taps, I now drink any amount I want. I have a few half pint jugs I use, but often I'll pour myself a drink that would be less than this, as that is what I actually fancy drinking at that time.

That said, I exclusively drink pints in pubs.
by usrbinbash | 2026-01-21 13:39:43+00:00
It very much is also a tool problem.

LLMs have been marketed for years, with great meadia fanfare, as being almost magical, something that can do the job of software engineers. Every week, the hype is driven further.

This matters. When people get told everyday that XYZ is magic, some will believe so, and use it as if it is magic.
by icedchai | 2026-01-21 13:39:55+00:00
Back in 1993, I remember booting SLS Linux on a 386 laptop with 3 megs of RAM (1 meg on the motherboard, 2 meg expansion.) I could barely get it to startx and open an xterm, so I mostly used it in from the console!

Before Linux, I was experimenting with Coherent.
by neop1x | 2026-01-21 13:40:30+00:00
>> Paying 95% for crap from China that I have no intention of purchasing does not impact me.

I highly doubt you are not purchasing "made in china" or "made in taiwan" products. You likely just don't know. Even your Macbook or GPU card is made in China or Taiwan as are lots of components used inside "made in US" products. Same goes for clothing and shoes, american "brands" made in China, Bangladesh, etc.

Moreover:
- you don't have fully-local alternatives for everything
- it takes a long time and a lot fo money to build factories for local alternatives
- cost of labor is much higher in your country

The end result must be higher prices for everything on your side, and it's starting to show.

>> There are plenty of people around the world that want to come here and are willing to wait in line. I’m perfectly fine with the intentions and methods of the current administration

In the past, I was considering moving to US. I think it would be relatively easy for me (EU citizen, good IT work history). And I visited US couple of times as a visitor. But since Trump and recent ICE "methods", I am honesly scared to even visit US again near-term. I am glad I live in EU.
by jfindley | 2026-01-21 13:40:33+00:00
It's not quite as simple as that though - in most places, especially California, water shortages are not a simple natural imbalance between the amount of rain that falls and how much flows out in rivers and streams.

If demand is far higher than supply due to overuse by industry that's definitely a water shortage - there isn't enough of it, and something is probably suffering as a result. I don't think that's a useful definition of drought though. If someone builds a massive factory consuming 100s of millions of gallons of water per day that's definitely going to cause a problem but I'm not sure it's reasonable to say that there's suddenly a drought.

I think the definition of drought is instead current rainfall compared to historical average - which then leads to the question of if the change is just that rainfall has now been low for so long the historical average has changed, or if rainfall has actually improved. I don't think the article addressed this, but I only skimmed it so maybe I missed it.
by hombreinabikin | 2026-01-21 13:40:38+00:00
good point. the difference is duuo doesn't prescribe what you should do or how you should do it.
you define your own goal, your own metric, your own check-in frequency. the app doesn't care if it's "run 5k daily" or "don't check twitter before noon" or "practice piano 20 min."
the only thing duuo provides is the accountability layer—another person watching. the system underneath is whatever you need it to be.
so it's less "here's a productivity system" and more "here's infrastructure to make any system actually stick."
that said, genuinely curious what edge cases you think would break this. always looking for blindspots.
by oriettaxx | 2026-01-21 13:40:39+00:00
super! thank you

and it confirms (from my laptop, of course)

…/dnsperftest ./dnstest.sh

test1 test2 test3 test4 test5 test6 test7 test8 test9 test10 Average

cloudflare 53 ms 53 ms 52 ms 53 ms 52 ms 54 ms 52 ms 49 ms 53 ms 52 ms 52.30

level3 1000 ms 94 ms 1000 ms 1000 ms 1000 ms 1000 ms 285 ms 184 ms 183 ms 1000 ms 674.60

google 69 ms 53 ms 54 ms 54 ms 51 ms 59 ms 49 ms 54 ms 52 ms 55 ms 55.00

quad9 1000 ms 112 ms 1000 ms 1000 ms 1000 ms 1000 ms 1000 ms 1000 ms 1000 ms 1000 ms 911.20

freenom 246 ms 286 ms 286 ms 242 ms 177 ms 233 ms 500 ms 175 ms 204 ms 274 ms 262.30

opendns 74 ms 52 ms 65 ms 81 ms 56 ms 60 ms 59 ms 53 ms 52 ms 53 ms 60.50

norton 53 ms 51 ms 56 ms 52 ms 64 ms 54 ms 49 ms 55 ms 45 ms 48 ms 52.70

cleanbrowsing 52 ms 51 ms 55 ms 50 ms 56 ms 50 ms 52 ms 50 ms 55 ms 51 ms 52.20

yandex 94 ms 95 ms 90 ms 92 ms 84 ms 97 ms 281 ms 147 ms 88 ms 83 ms 115.10

adguard 1000 ms 1000 ms 1000 ms 1000 ms 1000 ms 1000 ms 1000 ms 1000 ms 1000 ms 1000 ms 1000.00

neustar 87 ms 74 ms 71 ms 124 ms 75 ms 75 ms 75 ms 71 ms 75 ms 72 ms 79.90

comodo 1000 ms 62 ms 1000 ms 66 ms 1000 ms 1000 ms 1000 ms 160 ms 52 ms 1000 ms 634.00

nextdns 304 ms 202 ms 351 ms 199 ms 191 ms 188 ms 71 ms 72 ms 73 ms 81 ms 173.20

I tried in Usa and Italy, and quad9 there has fast performance, so the issue I experience is probably limited to queries from Germany (so I've updated the title)
by bluebarbet | 2026-01-21 13:40:47+00:00
And I would come the opposite conclusion to you.

On Fahrenheit, the Americans are surely right. For describing the weather, a system where the usual range is 30-100 is clearly more useful than one where it's 0-37, because you can say "high 70s" instead of the weirdly specific "about 27", and "low 40s" instead of the awkward "around 5 to 7".

I say this as a European who has never used Fahrenheit.
by tomhow | 2026-01-21 13:41:07+00:00
Everyone is always welcome to email us (hn@ycombinator.com) and we can advise on whether a project and its intro post are a good fit for HN. Plenty of good projects get missed by the audience, but we can always put things in the second chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308).

No project should ever be "overlooked" due to the use of AI coding tools.

The only valid reason for a project failing to get solid exposure on HN is that there is not much substance to it (some combination of thought, effort, ingenuity, usefulness).
Ask HN: What are the metrics for "AI-generated technical debt"?
by willj | 2026-01-21 13:41:37+00:00
Here’s one place where I think proponents and skeptics of agentic coding tools (Claude Code, Codex, etc.) tend to talk past each other:

Proponents say things like:

- “I shipped feature X in days instead of weeks.”

- “I could build this despite not knowing Rust / the framework / the codebase.”

- “This unblocked work that would never have been prioritized.”

Skeptics say things like:

- “This might work for solo projects, but it won’t scale to large codebases with many developers.”

- “You’re trading short-term velocity for long-term maintainability, security, and operability.”

- “You’re creating tons of technical debt that will surface later.”

I’m sympathetic to both sides. But the asymmetry is interesting: The pro side has quantifiable metrics (time-to-ship, features delivered, scope unlocked). The con side often relies on qualitative warnings (maintainability, architectural erosion, future cost).

In most organizations, leadership is structurally biased toward what can be measured: velocity, throughput, roadmap progress. “This codebase is a mess” or “This will be a problem in two years” is a much harder sell than “we shipped this in a week.”

My question: Are there concrete, quantitative ways to measure the quality and long-term cost side of agentic coding?. In other words: if agentic coding optimizes for speed, what are the best metrics that can represent the other side of the tradeoff, so this isn’t just a qualitative craftsmanship argument versus a quantitative velocity argument?
I made AI earphones remember everything (auto-sync to Obsidian)
by Paddyz | 2026-01-21 13:41:47+00:00
Hey HN!

I built this after getting frustrated with losing great ideas while driving, cooking, or exercising. You know that moment when inspiration strikes but your hands are occupied?

The Problem: Doubao AI earphones (popular in China, similar to AirPods but with built-in AI) are great for Q&A, but all conversations disappear after listening. It's a closed ecosystem with no way to export valuable content.

My Solution: A Python tool that monitors the Doubao web interface and automatically syncs voice notes to Obsidian in real-time.

What makes it interesting:

30+ speech variation recognition - Works even if you say "note" instead of "take note" or use filler words like "um, note this down"
Hands-free operation - Just say "Doubao, take a note, [your content]" and it appears in Obsidian instantly
Smart deduplication - Won't create duplicate entries for similar content
Cross-platform - Works on Windows, macOS, Linux
Technical approach:

Uses Playwright to monitor DOM changes and network requests
Regex engine handles speech variations and colloquialisms
SQLite for deduplication logic
Async I/O for real-time file operations
Real use cases I've tested:

Capturing meeting insights while driving between offices
Recording workout thoughts during runs
Noting recipe improvements while cooking
Quick idea capture during walks
The tool essentially breaks the walled garden of AI earphones and turns them into a proper knowledge management device. It's like having a voice assistant that actually remembers and organizes everything you tell it.

Demo: Say "Doubao, note this: remember to research async patterns" → Instantly appears in Inbox/Voice Notes/2026-01-21.md

Built with Python + Playwright + SQLite. MIT licensed.

What do you think? Have you faced similar issues with voice assistants that don't persist information? Would love to hear about your workflows for capturing ideas on-the-go!

GitHub: https://github.com/GptsApp/doubao-earphone-to-obsidian
by adornKey | 2026-01-21 13:41:57+00:00
The question is if humans are any better.

Usually mentioning anything about doing proper epidemiology (e.g. analysing COVID numbers), or anything modern about atmosphere physics and climate-modelling gets taken down everywhere within 24 hours - by humans.

Mathematics and physics is something a lot of people don't like and really love to take down. Idiots censoring experts is a real problem. This place here has less idiots, but outnumbering experts with stupidity is something that works everywhere.
by cionx | 2026-01-21 13:41:58+00:00
I don’t understand this argument. Just because functional extensionality is undecidable for arbitrary functions doesn’t mean that it is undecidable for every class of functions.

In the specific situation, let’s say that by an array we mean a finite, ordered list whose entries are indexed by the numbers 0, 1, …, n - 1 for some natural number n. Let’s also say that two arrays are equal if they have the same length and the same value at each position (in other words, they have “the same elements in the same order”).

If we now want to represent a function f as an array arr such that f(i) = arr[i] for every possible input i of f, then this will only be possible for some very specific functions: those whose domain are the set {0, 1, …, n - 1} for some natural number n. But for any two such functions f, g : {0, 1, …, n - 1} → t, their extensional equality is logically equivalent to the equality of the corresponding arrays: you really can check that f and g are extensionally equal by checking that they are represented by equal arrays.
by dcre | 2026-01-21 13:42:08+00:00
TS + Deno + dax is my favorite scripting environment. (Bun has a similar $ function built in.) For parsing CLI args, I like the builders from Cliffy (https://cliffy.io/) or Commander.js because you get typed options objects and beautiful help output for free.

If you want to script in Rust, xshell (https://docs.rs/xshell/latest/xshell/) is explicitly inspired by dax.
by maleldil | 2026-01-21 13:42:19+00:00
> I'm slowly accepting that Python's optional typing is mistake with AI agents

Don't make it optional, then. Use pyright or mypy in strict mode. Make it part of your lint task, have the agent run lint often, forbid it from using `type: ignore`, and review every `Any` and `cast` usage.

If you're using CI, make a type error cause the job to fail.

It's not the same as using a language with a proper type system (e.g. Rust), but it's a big step in the right direction.
by shaker67 | 2026-01-21 13:42:43+00:00
My calendar is a Tetris board of "strategic alignments" and "context sharing." As a Staff Engineer, I’ve accepted that my impact is now measured in risks mitigated rather than lines of code.

But the "phantom limb syndrome" remains. To scratch the itch, I tried to reclaim my IC roots through side projects. In 2026, this means "vibe coding" with AI agents. The irony is that I’m not actually coding anymore—I’m just doing my day job for free: writing specs (prompts), reviewing PRs (AI output), and managing dependencies.

I realized I’ve become my own supervisor. I’m no longer the artisan struggling with syntax; I’ve become an orchestrator of silicon.

I wrote a short reflection on this double paradox—not coding at work by necessity, and not coding at home by efficiency—and what it means for our professional identity.

https://medium.com/p/498987fb069e