MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aenis | 2026-01-18 12:56:27+00:00
I started doing some research over the holidays and the smart system seems to be designed to prevent reversing - fuses blown both ways, so didn't even manage to read the firmware, and communication with the client software relies on what seems to be decent encryption. And from the design of the hardware bypasses it seems that the firmware does not trust its own peripheries. Good design, no doubt - will try to take it apart when i switch bikes and won't mind bricking my unit.
by Kim_Bruning | 2026-01-18 12:56:41+00:00
You know, I bet Claude encouraged you to post here and share with people. Because Claude Opus 4.5 has been trained on being kind. It's a long story, but since you admitted to using it/them, I'm going to give you a lot more credit than normal. Also because you can plug what I say right back into Claude and see what else comes out!

So you're stumbling onto a position that's closest to "Biological Naturalism", which is Searle's philosophy. However, lots of people disagree with him, saying he's a closeted dualist in denial.

I mean, he was a product of his time, early 80's was dominated by symbolic AI, and that definitely wasn't working so well. Despite that, then he got a lot of pushback from Dennett and Hofstadter even back then.

Chalmers recently takes a more cautious approach, while his student Amanda Askell is present in our conversation even if you haven't realized it yet. ;-)

Meanwhile the poor field of Biology is feeling rather left out of this conversation, having been quite steadfastly monist since the late 19th century, having rejected vitalism in favor of mechanism. (though the last dualists died out in the 50's-ish?)

And somewhere in our world's oceans, two sailors might be arguing whether or not a submarine can swim. On board a Los Angeles class SSN making way at 35 kts at -1000feet.
by Saline9515 | 2026-01-18 12:57:18+00:00
Food safety is ensured by controlling at the production level, with physical inspections. Given the sheer amount of food traded and imported the lab measures are very unreliable and costly.

Private consumer protection groups very often find problematic products. Honey is a good example, massive fake honey from China has been being dumped in the EU for the last 20 years, authorities don't care at all and allow it to continue.
by devsda | 2026-01-18 12:57:43+00:00
Haha. I can totally see a future where business hire outside consultants to fix in-house AI developed code and to train developers on AI pitfalls.

May be the design will be outsourced to consultancies and then implementation using AI is left to in house talent. May be new recommendation and lists like OWASP top 10 and 12 factors will emerge for AI too.
by mattgreenrocks | 2026-01-18 12:57:48+00:00
Alternate take: what agents can spit out becomes table stakes for all software. Making it cohesive, focused on business needs, and stemming complexity are now requirements for all devs.

By the same token (couldn’t resist), I also would argue we should be seeing the quality of average software products notch up by now with how long LLMs have been available. I’m not seeing it. I’m not sure it’s a function of model quality, either. I suspect devs that didn’t care as much about quality hadn’t really changed their tune.
by torginus | 2026-01-18 12:58:25+00:00
I used Newtonsoft.Json which takes in a stream, and while it can give you objects, it can also expose it as a stream of tokens.

The bulk of the data was in big JSON arrays, so you basically consumed the array start token, then used the parser to consume an entire objects which could be turned into a C# object by the deserializer, then you consumed a comma or end array token until you ran out of tokens.

I had to do it like this because DS-es were running into the problem that some of the files didn't fit into memory. The previous approach took 1 hour, involved reading the whole file into memory and parsing it as JSON (when some of the files got over 10GB, even 64GB memory wasnt enough and the system started swapping).

It wasn't fast even before swapping (I learned just how slow Python can be), but then basically it took a day to run a single experiment. Then the data got turned into a dataframe.

I replaced that part of the Python code processing and outputted a CSV which Pandas could read without having to trip through Python code (I guess it has an internal optimized C implementation).

The preprocessor was able to run on the build machines and DSes consumed the CSV directly.
by kshri24 | 2026-01-18 12:58:59+00:00
Agree with most of what you say. The only reason I say humans are different from LLMs when it comes to being a "black box" is because you can probe humans. For instance, I can ask a human to explain how he/she came to the conclusion and retrace the path taken to come to said conclusion from known inputs. And this can also be correlated with say brainwave imaging by mapping thoughts to neurons being triggered in that portion of the brain. So you can have a fairly accurate understanding of the path taken. I cannot probe the LLM however. At least not with the tools we have today.

> Where I think there is a disconnect is that humans are far more capable at producing reliable software given a fuzzy set of inputs.

Yes true. Another thought that comes to my mind is I feel it might also have to do with us recognizing other humans as not as alien to us as LLMs are. So there is an inherent trust deficit when it comes to LLMs vs when it comes to humans. Inherent trust in human beings, despite being less capable, is what makes the difference. In everything else we inherently want proper determinism and trust is built on that. I am more forgiving if a child computes 2 + 1 = 4, and will find it in me to correct the child. I won't consider it a defect. But if a calculator computes 2 + 1 = 4 even once, I would immediately discard it and never trust it again.

> We can hope that the technology will continue to improve, as it clearly has in the past few years, but that progress is not guaranteed.

Agreed.
by thiht | 2026-01-18 13:01:59+00:00
> how do you handle the fact that any man could claim to be a woman and be housed with women?

Does it happen? What’s wrong with handling it on a case by case basis? Is "some men could lie" more important than "incarcerating trans females with men will get them raped"? I’m assuming real trans people can be detected pretty easily: do they look like the opposite gender? Are they on HRT (boobs on men and beard on women are pretty clear giveaways that they’re actually trans)? Did they present as the opposite gender before being incarcerated?

> Do you build special quarters in every prison? For the 47 individuals in 50~70k detainees?

I don’t know, what’s wrong with debating it? Is it that weird to think some population should get a different treatment if they’re wayyy more at risk of getting raped, or worse?

Sounds to me like "a bias towards humanity" is unacceptable
by twistedpair | 2026-01-18 13:02:33+00:00
K8s absolutely reduced labor. I used to have a sysadmin who ensured all our AMI images were up to date and maintained, and who maintained a mountain of bespoke bash scripts to handle startup, teardown, and upgrade of our backeneds.

Enter K8s in 2017 and life became MUCH easier. I literally have clusters that have been running since then, with the underlying nodes patched and replaced automatically by the cloud vendor. Deployments also "JustWork", are no downtime, and nearly instant. How many sysadmins are needed (on my side) to achieve all of this, zero. Maybe you're thinking of more complex stateful cases like running DBs on K8s, but for the typical app server workload, it's a major win.
by senfiaj | 2026-01-18 13:02:48+00:00
jQuery was very useful when many features were missing or not consistent/standardized between browsers. Nowadays, JS / DOM API is very rich, mature and standardized. So, jQuery is not as necessary as it was before.

https://youmightnotneedjquery.com/

Yes, sometimes the vanilla JS analogs are not the most elegant, but the vast majority are not terribly complicated either.

IMHO, another advantage of vanilla JS (aside from saving ~30KB) is potentially easier debugging. For example, I could find / debug the event listeners using the dev tools more easily when they were implemented via vanilla JS, since for complicated event listeners I had to step through a lot of jQuery code.
by whazor | 2026-01-18 13:02:48+00:00
This extension gives me my preferered web experience. Namely it tries to automatically fill in the cookie pop-ups for you, instead of hiding it. You can actually enable functional cookies, which are useful. Then when filling the cookie popup doesn't work, you can fill it in manually. This is a huge improvement over the ublock hiding of popups, which actually breaks sites time to time.
by xattt | 2026-01-18 13:03:28+00:00
Queue adenoidal voice:

Apple has the benefit of massive cash-flow and, as a result, hiring many competent designers who draw and create to a specification. The specification could be created by another team of senior designers that are paid handsomely to deal with the gruelling task of defining a corporate identity.

This is similar to how major feature cartoons, which typically require variations of an image to be drawn over and over again, are typically animated by more than one person.

I.e. Apple has the money. They can do better than having one extremely hand-cramped illustrator crank out silhouette-style icons.
by iagooar | 2026-01-18 13:03:32+00:00
On average, South American farmers use 2-3 times more pesticides than farmers in Europe. 2-3 times more would be illegal in Europe, but is allowed as part of Mercosur trade.

Pesticides banned in Europe, but allowed in South America: Atrazine, Acephate, Mancozeb, Paraquat, and many more.

Diseases they can produce include: Parkinson's, brain damage in children and lower IQ, infertility, genetic mutations.
by gettalong | 2026-01-18 13:04:01+00:00
Regarding "Important Notice on Third-Party Components": You are including AGPL components in your project which itself is AGPL.

Even if you distribute your part of the code under the commercial license, the components make - depending on how they are integrated into BentoPDF - the whole project AGPL again. So it might be possible that all your commercial customers are breaking the AGPL of the included components. For example, if your code directly calls code in the components, the integration is tight and AGPL would most certainly apply. If all you do is call the components as external binaries, then it is fine.
by fatherwavelet | 2026-01-18 13:04:24+00:00
I use Gemini almost obsessively but I don't think feeding the entire corpus of a subject would work great.

The problem is so much of consensus is wrong and it is going to start by giving you the consensus answer on anything.

There are subjects I can get it to tell me the consensus answer then say "what about x" and it completely changes and contradicts the first answer because x contradicts the standard consensus orthodoxy.

To me it is not much different than going to the library to research something. The library is not useless because the books don't read themselves or because there are numerous books on a subject that contradict each other. Gaining insight from reading the book is my role.

I suspect much LLM criticism is from people who neither much use LLMs nor learn much of anything new anyway.
by pocketarc | 2026-01-18 13:04:37+00:00
I agree - and it's not just what gets you promoted, but also what gets you hired, and what people look for in general.

You're looking for your first DevOps person, so you want someone who has experience doing DevOps. They'll tell you about all the fancy frameworks and tooling they've used to do Serious Business™, and you'll be impressed and hire them. They'll then proceed to do exactly that for your company, and you'll feel good because you feel it sets you up for the future.

Nobody's against it. So you end up in that situation, which even a basic home desktop would be more than capable of handling.
by cluckindan | 2026-01-18 13:05:04+00:00
”Cookie banner” is a misnomer. These consent popups are usually asking for you to consent to having hundreds if not thousands of companies build and sell a profile of you. They will combine your behavior and device data from various sources, identify you across platforms by linking device IDs, and ultimately sell your privacy to the highest bidder.

Typically, you can’t even turn these permissions off, nor can you deny consent or object to their purposes: they are increasingly claiming they are for ”fraud prevention” or some other technical purpose which doesn’t land under consent or the ”legitimate interest” umbrella.
by hopelite | 2026-01-18 13:05:14+00:00
What this brought to mind for me is that you are quite literally at the mercy of a different company when you do not control your OS as a computer/server company. All the wonderful design makes no difference when you’re at the mercy of the likes of Microsoft/Windows.

Inversely, I am convinced that is largely what has made Apple so successfully at the core, controlling the OS did not limit them to all the technical reasons that, e.g., windows OS based scrolling and the track pads were/are so horrible, resolution limitations, and inconsistent design and styling of the OS that subordinated the value or beauty of any hardware design to the OS level that users interacted with… subordination to Microsoft.

It’s essentially unconscionable that they likes of IBM, Dell, HP, etc did not get together and at the very least develop their own OS and also aggressively counter the de facto monopoly stranglehold of Windows on government, which then caused the domination among corporations.

Similarly unconscionable is also the European failure and subordination to the USA/Microsoft by not fostering at least an alternative to Windows that its corporations and governments can operate on. There has been nothing but talk and tiny little forays into adopting open source, but absolutely nothing that could even rise to being a real alternative to Windows or even MacOS.
by noufalibrahim | 2026-01-18 13:06:01+00:00
I remember a panel once at a PyCon where we were discussing, I think, the anaconda distribution in the context of packaging and a respected data scientist (whose talks have always been hugely popular) made the point that he doesn't like Pandas because it's not excel. The latter was his go to tool for most of his exploratory work. If the data were too big, he'd sample it and things like that but his work finally was in Excel.

Quick Python/bash to cleanup data is fine too I suppose and with LLMs, it's easier than ever to write the quick throwaway script.
Show HN: Kling.to – Self-hosted email marketing with full data ownership
by mukama | 2026-01-18 13:06:02+00:00
I'm Caesar, and I built kling.to because I believe marketing automation should be accessible to everyone without sacrificing data ownership.

Kling is a self-hosted email marketing platform that lets you run campaigns, build automation workflows, segment audiences, and track attribution while keeping full control of your customer data. It deploys via Docker and uses MongoDB with BullMQ for job scheduling.

Core capabilities:
- Visual workflow builder for abandoned cart recovery, win-back campaigns, and post-purchase sequences
- Multi-channel messaging (email, SMS, WhatsApp, push notifications)
- Last-touch and multi-touch attribution tracking
- Customer segmentation with purchase history and engagement data
- Template management with personalization variables
- Real-time deliverability monitoring (sent, delivered, opened, clicked, bounced)

I started this project because existing marketing automation tools either lock you into their infrastructure or cost too much for small teams. We're giving businesses the choice to self-host and own their data.

The platform is built for e-commerce stores, engineering-led teams, and privacy-conscious organizations that want control over their marketing stack.

I'd value feedback on:
- Architecture choices (MongoDB + BullMQ for job scheduling)
- Deliverability infrastructure for self-hosted setups
- Automation workflow UX and trigger logic
- Attribution model implementation

Demo video: https://youtu.be/hbFjX525AwA
Website: https://kling.to

Happy to answer questions about the technical implementation or deployment process.
by ChocMontePy | 2026-01-18 13:06:12+00:00
I got 58% after 100 attempts.

My method uses the fact that the letters a-k + u make up around 49.9% of letters in a normal text. So I just go through a text letter by letter in my mind, giving 0 if the letter is a-k or u, and a 1 if it's l-t or v-z.

For example, the Gettysburg Address:

f - 0

o - 1

u - 0

r - 1

s - 1

c - 0

o - 1

r - 1

e - 0
by cpcallen | 2026-01-18 13:06:14+00:00
I have various ill-informed hypotheses, mostly connected to the cult of shareholder value and the decades of short-termism that have resulted. As the author notes: MBAs are not inclined to take big creative risks—but, equally, are would-be Roys not inevitaby likely to be put off the whole enterprise, when whatever they might build must thread an ever-narrower path between failure followed by bankruptcy on the one hand and succeeding sufficiently to become a meal for some huge soulless multnational conglomerate (or evolving in to one) on the other?

Unless one is able to build something without needing to take outside capital, it seems inevitable that anyone willing to take true creative riskes will eventually be pushed out–and by corollary any true successes are unlikely to survive the succession of their original founders unscathed.
by ben_w | 2026-01-18 13:06:15+00:00
As I recall, the original Bondi blue iMac was the best selling model of personal computer at the time. This wasn't because Apple suddenly stopped being the Betamax of the home computer world, it's because there was only one model when everyone else had a full range, and the effect disappeared the moment they came out in multiple colours.

Same deal with Tesla: They have two core models (Y top, 3 next, all else a rounding error), while everyone else has a full range that sales are split across.
by Lerc | 2026-01-18 13:07:04+00:00
I'm not sure if that is the right calculation.

Provided the flops are not prohibitive. Output quality per model bytes might be better. In general people run the largest model they can.

I certainly think trading speed for quality at the same size is worth looking at. Especially if it uses methods that can benefit from the efforts of others to improve speed in general.

That said performance difference at 30M may not be representative of performance difference at 30B

There are probably a lot of really good ideas out there waiting for someone to drop a few million in training to reveal how good they are on large sizes.
by pmarreck | 2026-01-18 13:08:10+00:00
... All so I can have ads that are actually more relevant to me.

Sounds horrible. >..<

The (...fortunately a) handful of places I've worked at which dealt with this sort of thing were very strict about removing PII.

I'm more concerned about only being shown information (not just ads for products) relevant to my click-tuned interests as I think that's just contributing massively to political polarization.
by jijijijij | 2026-01-18 13:08:11+00:00
For me fish got three things I can't live without anymore:

1. Sane defaults. I just 'dnf/apt install fish' and be done with it. It's not a configuration mess, I don't need to manage dot files. You actually never have to touch config files. Things like aliases and functions can be saved from CLI. For the most part it works like bash.

2. Alt+H to open the manpage for command under the cursor, without messing with the command line. Best. Thing. Ever!!!

3. Extensive tab completions, which provide descriptions. Most of the time I don't have to open manpages and just do 'cmd -[TAB]'.

History access is also much better. Alt+Up/Down lets you inject tokenized history, like last command's arguments.

The only thing I frequently miss from bash is '<<<' and 'sudo !!'. The latter is a matter of habit, since fish provides Alt+S to toggle sudo prefixing.

I do most scripting in bash, but only because it's idiotic fun to mess with the arcane like that every once in a while. Did you know you can manage TCP I/O in pure bash, via /dev/tcp/$host/$port? Bash is soo stupid and dangerous, impossible to remember or understand the next day, but great fun.
by trsthales | 2026-01-18 13:09:20+00:00
Hello HN, maker here.

I built StackForge because I was tired of the "Day 1" problem: setting up Auth, Stripe, Prisma, and Docker configurations for every new SaaS idea.

Most low-code tools lock you into their ecosystem. I wanted an "accelerator" that outputs standard, clean code that I can eject and host anywhere.

The Stack:
- Frontend: React 19 + Vite 7 (Tailwind)
- Backend: Node.js + Express 5
- ORM: Prisma (with auto-generated schemas)
- DB: PostgreSQL (via Docker Compose)

The interesting technical challenge was handling business rules safely. Instead of using LLMs to write execute-only code (which is dangerous), I use Llama 3 to translate natural language rules into "JSON Logic". This creates a portable logic layer that runs on both the Frontend (for instant UI feedback) and Backend (for Zod validation), without using eval().

It is currently in Public Beta. The output is a standard ZIP file.

I would love your feedback on the generated folder structure and the developer experience.
by rglullis | 2026-01-18 13:10:33+00:00
An IP address is not "personally identifiable data". You can not know who the person is just because you got an IP address in the request.

We are almost 10 years into the GDPR, and we still have these gross misunderstandings about how to interpret it. Meanwhile, it has done nothing to stop companies from tracking people and for AI scrapers to run around. If this is not a perfect example of Regulatory Capture in action, I don't know what is.
by Macha | 2026-01-18 13:10:39+00:00
This once really scared me once on a dual boot system. I had “shut down” windows and while using Linux I did some partitioning as I had run out of space on the efi partition which had originally been created by the windows 7 installer. Worked fine for a while until the next time I “booted” windows which appeared to load the partition layout from the hibernated memory which caused a bunch of data corruption
by hylaride | 2026-01-18 13:10:52+00:00
I consider good shears to be a daily requirement (they double as random available scissors as well). Specialty knives are really only worth it if you use it for its intended purpose at least once a week. We do have two chef knives as it allows simultaneous work to be done with my spouse, though.

More important is learning proper knife skills, including maintenance and sharpening. Even the best knives need to be taken care of.
by input_sh | 2026-01-18 13:13:23+00:00
That 2021 event was very much not about EVs-in-general, but about supporting UAW as a union at a time when a lot of their jobs were about to be disrupted because Biden just signed an EO (14037) that pushed traditional automakers towards making more EVs (target being 40-50% by 2030, but it was non-binding).

So, why were Ford, GM and Stellantis there but Tesla wasn't? Because Tesla was already making EVs only, because none of its workforce is a part of UAW (due to Tesla being anti-union) and because this EO had no impact on Tesla's workforce what so ever. Elon being butthurt about it doesn't change the fact that it would've made zero sense to have Tesla there.

You don't have to take my word for it, Jen Psaki directly addressed this at a press briefing:

> Asked if Tesla being a nonunion company was the reason it wasn’t included Thursday, Psaki replied, “Well, these are the three largest employers of the United Auto Workers, so I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.”

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/08/05/business/tesla-snub-white...