MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by KronisLV | 2026-01-09 12:06:22+00:00
If I was better versed in writing and happened to be someone relevant, at the very least I’d support the viewpoint that open source is good for preventing takeovers and software dependencies turning hostile (e.g. Valkey and OpenSearch at least existing) and preventing being held financially hostage in times of uncertainty (e.g. many Linux server side distros are free and FOSS relational DBs won’t bankrupt you).

Yet perhaps far too often people opt for Windows Server or SQL Server or Oracle DB, or other software like that - if you have a good reason to use them, sure, go ahead, but that shouldn’t be your default. I don’t want my tax money to be wasted so much when for at least a significant amount of projects out there, alternatives exist.

I’ve literally heard people say in person that “we need paid support” even when they don’t and while I’m not sure what lead to that behavior of trying to shift blame and cover your own asses, but cut it out. If you need support so bad, get an org for FOSS projects or contribute directly in exchange for it!

This also has implications on development that you normally don't think about - I have personally suffered due to having to use a shared Oracle DB for development (one dev breaking something breaks it for everyone) and not being able to easily setup containers especially because Oracle XE doesn't have feature parity and refuses to run the migrations. Just fucking use PostgreSQL, or even MariaDB.

Same goes for file formats, it made me quite angry when my university mandated that I use Microsoft Office for writing my bachelor's and master's papers, when LibreOffice is mostly good enough (only caveat was the references tracking being kind of jank, but in large part due to the university having very specific requirements in regards to how the references have to be formatted; personally I'd just prefer thesis.md/LaTeX/whatever but I guess we can't have everything). Same for Windows on pretty much all the computers. My country is already poor as shit, we might as well just acknowledge that and stop overpaying for literally everything to greedy orgs. They didn't even buy local and use something like OnlyOffice or paid someone that provides managed Nextcloud hosting or whatever.
by tkuhn | 2026-01-09 12:06:54+00:00
> Those of us who benefit from tools like iNat should be looking seriously to the decentralized models being developed by the likes of Bluesky and Mastodon, because we can’t rely on any single organization to provide that benefit forever.

Makes perfect sense to me, and I would like to point you to the technology and ecosystem of "nanopublications": https://nanopub.net/

In a nutshell, nanopublications provide a decentralized infrastructure like Mastodon, but with focus on redundantly storing open data rather than on user ownership of personal data. Moreover nanopublications are basically snippets of knowledge graphs, so they resemble database entries and can be queried as such.

Happy to elaborate if this is of interest.
by Findecanor | 2026-01-09 12:07:22+00:00
And WASM hasn't been around for as long, so WASM implementations are not as mature.

There is no reason why WASM couldn't be as fast, or faster than JS, especially now with WASM 3.0.
Before, every programs in a managed language had to be shipped with its own GC and exception handling framework in WASM which was probably crippled by size constraints.
by IshKebab | 2026-01-09 12:08:13+00:00
> I don't think there's any reason for asm.js to have resulted in slower execution than Wasm

The perfect article: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/03/why-webassembly-is-faster-...

Honestly the differences are less than I would have expected, but that article is also nearly a decade old so I would imagine WASM engines have improved a lot since then.

Fundamentally I think asm.js was a fragile hack and WASM is a well-engineered solution.
by koito17 | 2026-01-09 12:08:16+00:00
To add to the author's list of examples, the regex test site Regex 101 (http://regex101.com/) relies on WebAssembly. To verify this in Firefox, you can set javascript.options.wasm to false, and you will be instructed to use a browser supporting WebAssembly.

If you're willing to risk some safety guarantees, then you can embed SQLite in Go without cgo by using WASM builds of SQLite. In particular, this package: https://github.com/ncruces/go-sqlite3

Note: the risk here is that it's unclear how well-tested SQLite WASM builds are compared to native builds for things like data integrity. With that said, in most of my personal projects using Go, I frequently reach for the WASM builds because it keeps builds fast and easy.

Also, I want to mention that I have seen web apps that are C# / Blazor programs compiled into WebAssembly. The accessibility is predictably terrible, but I have seen at least one such web app in the wild. I assume this is largely why one doesn't encounter WASM web frameworks often. In any case, WASM is surprisingly useful in many niches, and that's kind of the problem for WASM's visibility: the niches where I find WASM useful are almost completely disjoint from each other. But it's a solid technology nowadays. The only real gripe I have is the fact that only wasmtime seems to fully support wasm32-wasip2. You can actually compile quite a lot of Rust backend stuff into WASM and run that instead of a container. Not that this is particularly useful, but I've found it interesting as an exercise.
by omnimus | 2026-01-09 12:08:19+00:00
Tailwind UI is tool companies buy to save dev time mostly on internal/back office tools. It's usually bought per project. The math is pretty easy - if it saves you few hours of devtime you buy TailwindUI. Shadcn and bazillion other similar things are certainly competition but TailwindUI is very broad and of high quality so why not pick the nicest version.

The problem is that Tailwind is extremely portable (thats why it's so popular) and since LLMs have been fed all TailwindUI code... people using LLMs don't even have to know that TailwindUI exists they just get some Tailwind styled components. They would probably look pretty confused if you told them you used to buy these templates.
by herobird | 2026-01-09 12:08:30+00:00
> There is a lot of desire for advancement, but standardization means decisions are hard to reverse. For many, things are moving too quickly and in the wrong direction.

Most Wasm proposals are very elegantly designed and effective - meaning they provide lots of value for relatively minor specification bloat. Examples are tail-calls, multi-value, custom-page-sizes, memory64 and even gc.

However, the simd and flexible-simd increased spec bloat by a lot, are not future-proof and caused more fragmentation due to non-determinism. In my opinion work should have focused on flexible-vector (SVE-like) which was more aligned to Wasm's original goals of near-native performance. The reason for this development was that simd was simpler to implement and thus users could reap benefits earlier. Unfortunately, it seems the existence of simd completely stalled development of the superior flexible-vectors proposal.

If flexible-vectors (or similar) will ever be stabilized eventually, we will end up in one of two (bad) scenarios:

1) People will have to decide between simd and flexible-vectors for their compilation, depending on their target hardware which is totally against Wasm's original goals.

2) The simd proposal will be mostly unused and deprecated. Dead weight.
by zo1 | 2026-01-09 12:08:39+00:00
I'm a "backend" dev, so you could say that I am very very unfamiliar, have mostly-basic and high-level knowledge of frontend development. Getting this thing to spit out screens and components and adjust them as I see fit has got to be some sort of super-power and definitely 20x'd my frontend development for hobby projects. Previous to this, my team was giving me wild "1 week" estimates to code simple CRUD screens (plus 1 week for "api integration") and those estimates always smelled funny to me.

Now that I've seen what the AI/agents can do, those estimates definitely reek, and the frontend "senior" javascript dev's days are numbered. Especially for CRUD screens, which lets face it, make up most screens these days and should absolutely be churned out like in an assembly line instead of being delicate "hand crafted" precious works of art that allows 0.1x devs to waste our time because they are the only ones who supposedly know the ancient and arcane 'npm install, npm etc, npm angular component create" spells.

Look at the recent Tailwind team layoffs, they're definitely seeing the impact of this as are many team-leads and managers in most companies in our industry. Especially "javascript senior dev" heavy shops in the VC space, which many people are realizing they have an over-abundance of because those devs bullshitted entire teams and companies into thinking simple CRUD screens take weeks to develop. It was like a giant cartel, with them all padding and confirming the other "engineer's" estimates and essentially slow-devving their own screens to validate the ridiculous padding.
by Maro | 2026-01-09 12:09:35+00:00
> the most popular UI system (especially for AI models)

Like others earlier in the thread I'm symphatetic to this company/project, but your code/project being referenced often in AI output in itself doesn't imply that the thing needs to be a business.

bash, curl, awk, Python code with numpy imports, C++, all sorts of code is constantly being generated by AI, doesn't mean curl or numpy should be its own company, or that the AI Labs need to fund them.

As other fave written, making $1M+ already feels like a lot, maybe this shouldn't be a company, just 1-2 people who have a great time supporting this thing. I wonder if curl or awk have that kind of funding even..
by qouteall | 2026-01-09 12:09:47+00:00
I've written about limitations of WebAssembly https://qouteall.fun/qouteall-blog/2025/WebAsembly%20Limitat...

WebAssembly still doesn't provide a way to release memory back to browser (unless using Wasm GC). The linear memory can only grow.

The Wasm GC limits memory layout and doesn't yet support multi-threading.

Wasm multithreading has many limitations. Such as cannot block on main thread, cannot share function table, etc. And web worker has "impedance mismatch" between native threads.

And tooling is also immature (debugging requires print debugging)
by randysalami | 2026-01-09 12:09:50+00:00
I once approached an Israeli tech company (Gloat) when I was doing market research for a product I was building. The response was… interesting to say the least. It led me to do more digging behind the actual product they were building, what kind of positions they were hiring, and what customers they actually had.

All engineering positions were based out of Israel (nothing wrong with that), they had numerous high-profile clients and seemed very connected, but honestly the tech and their vision was pretty disappointing. At first I was shocked how, with such a rudimentary system, they could be so widely in use by these huge, reputable companies! I was naive. All in all, what disappointed me the most was the amount of resources that obviously went into this company and the presumptions that reeked from it; but in my opinion, there was no deserved substance to back things up. You can argue this is the case for many American VC companies but at least to their credit, they need to put the money where their mouth is a some point or another (whether that means making a viable product or generating more hype). With this company, the vibe I got from resources I interacted with, was that they were almost “owed” this market penetration in the industry and it was very discordant to me growing up in the US tech industry where you really needed to prove yourself, at least initially, and stay growing, open-minded, always hustling.

I think reflecting on it there is probably a lot of state protection of this company and state connections between private US and Israeli individuals that guarantee clients as long as the work is as at a certain level (and yes not saying they have developed some horrible suite of software, just… small-minded). And maybe with this breathing room, it allows the role play of being a cutting-edge tech company without the risk which makes it a dream job and therefore a political asset in the polarized state. And maybe at the end of the day it’s less about building a tech company that is the best but developing Israeli institutional knowledge and collecting data, building connections, everything that isn’t software and above my pay-grade. I’m not sure.

To contrast this, I met with an Irish tech company in the same space a couple weeks later called Teamwork, I believe. The CEO himself met with me, discussed my work, even jokingly offered to hire me. Despite this guy founding a successful company, at no point did I feel “erased” or made to feel beneath him. To take a step back, I’m not making the point that “non-Israeli tech company” better than Israeli tech company. Thinking it through, I’ll say that, it seems like Gloat and the other Israeli tech companies I’ve read about, are more existentially-driven. Like doing their work, building their business, and developing their tech is predicated on surviving… which makes sense when you think it through. At the same time, from a tech focus, I think it holds them back since it’s a form of egocentrism and if you’re not the best, you need diversity of opinions to be the best.
by _heimdall | 2026-01-09 12:09:54+00:00
I expect the GP was referring to missing the boat in responding to the iPhone after it swept away Windows Mobile.

Microsoft was late to respond, eventually bought Danger and released the Kin phone before cancelling it within weeks, and only released Windows Phone in 2010 a solid 3 years after the iPhone release.

Windows Phone was actually pretty nice to use, but they were already too late to the scene and didn't have a chance to steal ground from iPhone or android who already had solid app ecosystems.
by Cyph0n | 2026-01-09 12:09:57+00:00
Alright, your good faith arguments have convinced me! To summarize:

On one side, two sovereign nations setting press restrictions in areas they control. Standard stuff.

On the other side, a genocidal state blockading a tiny strip of land for 20 years waging a campaign that has killed & maimed so many children that we have lost count unilaterally enforcing a total international media blackout. Also standard stuff.

Silly me, how could I even argue about this? It’s just so damn obvious! Sometimes, arguing with random anons on HN pays off :)
by keybored | 2026-01-09 12:10:40+00:00
This is as usual confused. People keep discussing communism as if they were (via analogy) talking about capitalism being about men in suites with fake smiles, green paper, bank vaults, and powerpoint presentations. Every time people have to respond with paragraphs upon paragraphs just unrolling all that nonsense.

Try to update your knowledge on the subject instead of talking like an alien in Trafalgar Square.
by toddmorey | 2026-01-09 12:10:48+00:00
It was more than a library of prewritten css, though, they did quite a bit of engineering work on tooling (speeding up the code scans and dynamically creating custom classes, etc). I respect the team's productivity.

This is more a question about the business model of open source, which has always had some challenges. I don't think you can support OSS with premium templates, training, and support once the knowledge is baked into LLMs.
by p_l | 2026-01-09 12:11:48+00:00
A lot of "fun" with those documents is that some of them quite probably were archeological digs on Microsoft side too.

For example, the MAPI specs have references to valid parts of the protocols and data structures that are not used anywhere and which in fact crash MAPI libraries (so Outlook and Exchange just throw errors if you give them such data), sometimes giving a glimpse of how there might have been abandoned features that were never delivered.

Like, surprisingly, HTML email support in Outlook[1] :D

[1] MAPI Message struct, and thus Exchange and Outlook, crashes when encountering "HTML message" let's call it "submessage". Turns out the valid way to save a HTML message is by wrapping it in RTF and saving it as Rich Text submessage. Plain text is another submessage.
by neomantra | 2026-01-09 12:12:11+00:00
November 2025 was when AntiGravity and Gemini 3 came out and everything changed for me. Six months earlier, I had tried to vibe-code the 21+ verification page to AgentDank (an OSS cannabis MCP server connecting LLMs to open data via DuckDB SQL). After hours, I couldn't get a page fully working.

I tried it with AG+G3, I prompted both the age 21+ screen AND the chat interface. It one-shotted a working version of both in less than a minute.

I was immediately free to start exploring my idea! Adding multiple personality Budtenders, a Stash box for frequent item; it would create mocks and tests. So liberating.

Then I had this other idea in my head for a while, that since DuckDB is broadly portable and can target WASM, I could play with the datasets in the browser and much of the app doesn't need an MCP-connected LLM or any backend services.

next up, there is another mode where we will browse and visualize the cannabinoid contents. the dataset will be the data here https://github.com/AgentDank/dank-data we will use apache echarts for visualizations. we can probably embed duckdb in the browser and do it all the queries there. we can have some simple UI for exploring, as well as raw SQL query

And it one-shotted an entire DBA application interface with a custom UI and visualization to explore the data. Then I asked for some 3D WebGL charts with echarts and we got that working too.

So WASM is gonna be as important as ever because we have tons of software which can be compiled to WASM, Web is the UX meeting point, and LLMs can help bring it all together.
by mgaunard | 2026-01-09 12:12:17+00:00
Good software isn't about quantity but quality of the code.

AI cannot produce better quality code than someone who is actually qualified in the problem domain.

What I've seen AI be very good at is creating a lot of legacy code very quickly, which itself needs extensive use of AI just to maintain it.

A decent approach to move quickly for PoC or prototypes, or to enable product managers to build things without a team. But obviously not something you can build a real company on.
by gilleain | 2026-01-09 12:12:24+00:00
I love 'Avril 14th', I had not connected it before to Satie (who I've only just heard of, my poor musical background knowledge). I see the similarities in the balance of sweetness and dissonance (I suppose).

A friend told me a story about Satie, that they found two pianos in his appartement, one stacked on the other, with unpaid bills tossed on the top. Seems very RDJ-like (or v.v.).
by vtbassmatt | 2026-01-09 12:12:28+00:00
None of this matches my experience as a board member and officer at a nonprofit, nor what I observe with my partner who has worked at multiple nonprofits.

I don’t understand the distinction you’re drawing between “charity” and “nonprofit”. iNaturalist is a 501c3, so it’s a charity [1]. One of my partner’s previous 501c3 employers produced an app to aid with their mission.

Let me reframe your first bullet to reflect my lived experience (both in the nonprofit world and building software at a for-profit):

> Decisions at a charity feeding the poor are high-stakes and often controversial compared with decisions for a product focused app organization. If people are making a lot of decisions bottom-up at the charity, the scarce budget won’t stretch to cover the needs of the mission. In a product-focused organization, decisions are much lower stakes. Through the magic of version control, A/B testing, and vendor app stores, you rarely need to commit deeply to decisions, so the individual developer can make the initial call: will we use this app icon design or that one? Will we have one app for professionals and one for laypeople or a unified app? Will we use SVM or a neural network? Ship, learn, iterate.

My for-profit employer explicitly hires for (or at least used to) “passion” and intrinsic motivation. And there are several corporations I’m not willing to work for despite their reputation for high compensation. I think it’s pretty tenuous to connect org structure with motivation so directly and concretely.

The third bullet is uninformed. 501c3s answer to the people they derive funding from, their customers/clients/served population, their board, and the government (tax authority) whether they’re putting spaghetti on plates or pixels on screens. The IRS has a pretty readable intro to the requirements [2].

This kind of first-principles reasoning from vibes about what it must be like is seductive but often misleading. I encourage everyone I can to serve on a nonprofit board. The organizations can usually benefit from the perspective and different type of thinking that computer people bring, and it’ll open your eyes to new perspectives about your own work and life!

[1] https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/921296468

[2] https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organiz...
by vaultsandbox | 2026-01-09 12:13:14+00:00
There is no point in having AGPL if no one uses it! I am the only contributor right now, so I have time to think. I need to change my message. I will talk less about encryption and production. I will talk more about localhost testing benefits.
1. Isolated inbox per test (parallel-safe by default)
2. Deterministic email assertions, no sleeps
3. One container: SMTP, Web UI, CLI
4. Automatic cleanup with expiring inboxes
5. Secure by default, no config required

I got some upvotes, but almost no feedback, negative or positive.
by listic | 2026-01-09 12:13:51+00:00
On January, 3, 2026, Telegram messenger, which I use a lot, introduced AI Summaries [1] for all posts after January, 3, 2026 with no way to switch them off; neither for the readers nor for channel admins.

I find it unacceptable and filed a bug report about that (marking that as an issue; not feature request, which in my view it is), requesting for this feature to be opt-in.

[1] https://telegram.org/blog/new-design-ai-summaries
by roenxi | 2026-01-09 12:14:23+00:00
Russia wasn't the group that stopped selling oil to the Europeans, the Europeans refused to take it and have a military policy of arming people to blow up the means of transporting that oil to Europe. They're very proud of not using Russian oil. Modi could have joined in with that, he had a lot of people asking him too. Doing nothing (if he did nothing, again - I have no idea about the details of Indian policy) is a rather decisive policy given the pressure the Europeans have been putting on people.

The world has been in easy mode for 70 years now. Any government can choose to sit back and let people get wealthy. It is literally so easy that even the communists figured it out.
by steveharman | 2026-01-09 12:15:40+00:00
I believe there are a number of cli tools which also use Anthropic's Max plan (subscription) - this isn't just an OpenCode issue.

I had the TaskMaster AI tool hooked up to my Anthropic sub, as well as a couple of other things - Kilo Code and and Roo Code iirc?

From discussions at the time (6 months ago) this "use your Anthropic sub" functionality was listed by at least one of the above projects as "thanks to the functionality of the Anthropic SDK you can now use your sub...." implying it was officially sanctioned rather than via a "workaround".
by mgaunard | 2026-01-09 12:16:31+00:00
As a technical manager the reason you accept things that are not quite what you had in mind is because you delegate the responsibility of the correctness to the employee who is gonna be owning that area, maintaining it and ensuring it works.

There is no responsibility with AI. It doesn't care about getting it right or making sure the code delivers on what the company needs. It has nothing to prove, no incentive to supporting anything.