MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by layer8 | 2026-01-23 13:26:52+00:00
I don’t think the analogy holds, because the result of a flood fill in Paint is deterministic.

Whatever your design document/spec, there are generally a lot of ways and variations of how to implement it, and programmers like the OP do care about those.

You don’t have Paint perform the flood fill five times and then pick the result you like the most (or dislike the least).
by echelon | 2026-01-23 13:27:09+00:00
The "Fair Source" [1] and "Fair Code" [2] licenses are sustainable and user-friendly.

Imagine if Docker the company could charge AWS and Google for their use of their technology.

Imagine if Redis, Elastic, and so many other technologies could.

Modern database companies will typically dual license their work so they don't have their lunch eaten. I've done it for some of my own work [3].

You want your customers to have freedom, but you don't want massive companies coming in and ripping you off. You'd also like to provide a "easy path" for payments that sustain the engineering, but not require your users to be bound to you.

"OSI-approved" Open Source is an industry co-opt of labor. Amazon and Google benefit immensely with an ecosystem of things they can offer, but they in turn give you zero of the AWS/GCP code base.

Hyperscalers are miles of crust around an open source interior. They charge and make millions off of the free labor of open source.

I think we need a new type of license that requires that the companies using the license must make their entire operational codebases available.

[1] https://fair.io/licenses/

[2] https://faircode.io/

[3] https://github.com/storytold/artcraft/blob/main/LICENSE.md
by piltdownman | 2026-01-23 13:27:15+00:00
I mean Donald Trump on Tuesday posted an AI-generated image of himself holding an American flag next to a sign that read "Greenland". Previously he had posted fake videos of Obama being arrested. We're a long way past traditional notions of journalism in this post-satire reality - and the BBC has to adhere to 'rules for me, not for thee' moral outrage after its recent gaffe broadcasting an edited speech of Trumps.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/21/us/politics/trump-fake-vi...
by wtmt | 2026-01-23 13:28:05+00:00
There’s an interesting Malayalam (one of the official languages in India) movie titled “Virus” [1] from 2019, which is set during the time of the 2018 Nipah virus outbreak in Kerala (a state in South India). The disease is deadly and can have longer incubation periods (as stated in other comments here). Wikipedia says the mortality rate is 40-75%.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virus_(2019_film)
by MrScruff | 2026-01-23 13:28:34+00:00
I think this is a reasonable article and I do understand the perspective. It's a normal sentiment from those witnessing a craft that they have invested time in mastering become partially automated. However obviously the big picture (as the article alludes to) is that none of us are paid to write software, we're paid to solve problems as efficiently as possible and these tools, used wisely, can massively help with that.
by pjc50 | 2026-01-23 13:28:37+00:00
"We don't make anything" and "there are no large British companies" are memes that help people feel better about perceived decline. It's not really representative.

https://www.londonstockexchange.com/indices/ftse-100/constit... ; you can easily sort by market cap. GW are on page 4. Perhaps remarkably close to the two supermarket chains, Sainsburys and M&S, but those are much lower margin.

The top has "proper" global manufacturing companies: Astrazeneca, Unilever, Glaxo-SmithKline, BAE, Rolls-Royce. Along with the resource extraction companies, and Britain's major services export industry: banking.

(oddity: there are two Coca-cola companies on the FTSE, CCEP and CCH, which presumably exists for some weird tax reason)

Then you get into the question: what counts as a "British company"? There are plenty of overseas-owned UK success stories that are still significant UK employers and bringing money into the UK, such as ARM. Conversely, does a company which is listed on the FTSE but has most of its operations all over the world like RTZ count as "British"? Successful British startups quite often exit and vanish from discourse, while continuing to operate.

To my mind the important questions are "does this bring in valuable forex?" and "does this result in substantial UK employment?" Those don't necessarily have to be in the same company. The big employer list looks different: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1218430/largest-uk-based...

HSBC still up there (over 200k UK staff!), but there's a lot of food service (Compass), retail (Kingfisher you will know as B&Q) and so on.

I've not even got into the videogame industry (very good export industry, and seemingly responsible for the success of Warhammer). If you insist on making physical objects your perspective is going to be unnecessarily narrow.
by estearum | 2026-01-23 13:28:38+00:00
A tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it is in fact of far less nuisance and risk than a tree that falls on top of a house.

A more important question: How would someone look if they walked around insisting that a tree had recently fallen, but they can't tell you when/where/how because no one was around to hear it?

"But trust me, it was just as big as the one that fell on Bob's house, so I don't even see what anyone is upset about."
by theturtletalks | 2026-01-23 13:29:04+00:00
Very true, but my fear with UCP is that even if shops support it, ChatGPT and other chatbots might force you to apply and gate keep shops.

MCP-UI is a general standard for rendering any UI in chatbots. Shops using that standard don't have to worry about getting any approval since it's just their storefront being fed thru small UI snippets.
by JDye | 2026-01-23 13:29:10+00:00
Our postgres replication suddenly stopped working and it took three of us hours - maybe days - of looking through the postgres source before we actually accepted it wasn't us or our hosting provider being stupid and submitted a ticket.

I can't imagine the level of laziness or entitlement required for a student (or any developer) to blame their tools so quickly without conducting a thorough investigation.
by consumer451 | 2026-01-23 13:29:43+00:00
Dumb question:

I keep seeing posts about how ~"AI scrapers are making hosting untenable."

There must a ton of new full-web datasets out there, right?

What are the major hurdles that prevent the owners of these datasets from providing them to third parties via API? Is it the quality of SERP, or staleness? Otherwise, this seems like a potentially lucrative pivot/side hustle?
by jqpabc123 | 2026-01-23 13:29:58+00:00
... does not possess the forensic tools to break into devices encrypted with Microsoft BitLocker

Nice intel to have. Now, all that is needed for reasonable security is to avoid storing the key in the cloud. Duhhh.

Basic rule: Not your hardware (computer/drive), not your data.

Never store anything on someone else's hardware that you need to maintain full control over.

But, but, but encryption? It helps but encryption does not guarantee full access when you don't control the hardware.
by piltdownman | 2026-01-23 13:30:31+00:00
It's not even about whats acceptable, it's about what they can frame as a narrative for their supporters in as incendiary a manner as possible. Remember that the FCC investigations into Comcast and NBCUniversal weren't predicated on political bias or uneven reporting, but rather that they '...may be promoting invidious forms of DEI in a manner that does not comply with FCC regulations.”

Matthew Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters, summarises its mechanisms and intent quite succinctly: “This is the path that Viktor Orbán took in Hungary, where you use the power of the state to ensure that the media is compliant, that outlets are either curbed and become much less willing to be critical, or they are sold to owners who will make that happen."
by vanderZwan | 2026-01-23 13:30:37+00:00
It's really sad that Kishimoto so terrible at writing female characters. I'm not being a hater when I say this, he has even complained about this himself!

In terms of character concepts he's always really great - Naruto is one of the few series I read almost from the start, all the way to the finish. At the beginning of the series the concept for all male and female characters started out really interesting. But the female characters barely got any development compared to the male ones, and it got worse as the series went on. Partially because it ended up focusing more and more on Naruto and Sasuke, partially because the majority of the female character development was reduced to how they relate to the male characters.

I don't think it's intentional or that Kishi has any malice towards women or anything - if that was the case I doubt he would have been able to come up with interesting character concepts for women in the first place. But the fact that they're sidelined like that still sucks, especially since the potential is there.

I'm glad that Sakura got to be a bad-ass in a few of the side-stories after the main series ended at least.
Show HN: Codnaut – Finding the right AI coding tool shouldn't be this hard
by nio5787 | 2026-01-23 13:30:47+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Codnaut to help developers navigate the exploding landscape of AI programming tools.

Codnaut is a comprehensive directory that lets you:
- Discover,select and compare AI coding tools (GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Zed, etc.)
- Filter by features, pricing, and use cases.

Feedback welcome — especially on what comparisons or features would be most useful for your workflow!
What software businesses worked in the early Internet? Can they work again?
by tsingy | 2026-01-23 13:31:16+00:00
My country is going through a lot of changes right now, and the use of the internet and smartphones is growing very quickly. I’m trying to figure out how I can take advantage of this trend to make money, especially in the software space. Many existing solutions are quite expensive relative to local purchasing power, so I think there may be room for simpler, more affordable, but still useful hardware/software. For example, I’ve been wondering whether something like a local hosting company could make sense. I know the usual advice is to find problems and fix them, but I’d argue that reinventing the wheel is often harder than adapting ideas that have already been proven to work elsewhere. With that in mind, I’m really interested in lesser-known insights, stories, or anecdotes from the late 1990s, when the internet first became mainstream in developed countries. As a starting point, I can code and I have some capital to help kick-start a business.
by nio5787 | 2026-01-23 13:31:17+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Codnaut to help developers navigate the exploding landscape of AI programming tools.

Codnaut is a comprehensive directory that lets you:
- Discover,select and compare AI coding tools (GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Zed, etc.)
- Filter by features, pricing, and use cases.

Feedback welcome — especially on what comparisons or features would be most useful for your workflow!
by mexicocitinluez | 2026-01-23 13:31:29+00:00
I think these types of articles miss the point. It's not about not loving what I do, or not being interested in problem solving. It's about time.

For instance, I use a React form library called Formik. It's outdated and hasn't seen a real commit in years. The industry has moved onto other form libraries, but I really like Formik's api and have built quite a bit of functionality around it. And while I don't necessarily need a library to be actively worked on to use it, in this instance, it's lack of updates have caused it to fall behind in terms of performance and new React features.

The issue is that I'm also building a large, complex project and spend 80-90% of my waking time on that. So what do I do? Do I just accept it and move on? Take the time to migrate to a form library that very well be out-of-date in a year when React releases again? Or, do I experiment with Claude by asking it to update Formik to using the latest React 19 features? Long story short, I did the latter and have a new version of Formik running in my app. And during that, I got to watch and ask Claude what updates it was making and most importantly, why it was making those updates. Is it perfect? No. But it's def better than before.

I love programming. I love building stuff. That doesn't change for me with these tools. I still spend most of my time hand-writing code. But that doesn't mean there isn't a place for this tech.
by ninkendo | 2026-01-23 13:32:14+00:00
Of course cars wouldn't lead to more horses, because horses were the thing being replaced. But cars sure as hell lead to a lot more drivers, which is more akin to the analogy.

To take a software engineer for an example, Jevon's paradox would say that since software engineering is now so much easier due to LLM's, the demand will increase due to the reduced cost, which will lead to more software needing created, which paradoxically leads to more software engineers. There's no equivalent of the "horse" in the analogy, because the same people who were coding before ("driving" the horse) will be aided by LLM's in the future ("driving" a car.)
by TeMPOraL | 2026-01-23 13:32:15+00:00
This is a good heuristic, and it's how most things in life operate. It's the reason you can just buy food in stores without any worry that it might hurt you[0] - there's potential for million ${local currency} fines, lawsuits, customer loss and jail time serving as strong incentive for food manufacturers and vendors to not fuck this up. The same is the case with drugs, utilities, car safety and other important aspects of life.

So their boss may be naive, but not hilariously so - because that is, in fact, how the world works[1]! And as a boss, they probably have some understanding of it.

The thing they miss is that AI fundamentally[2] cannot provide this kind of "correct" output, and more importantly, that the "trillion dollar companies" not only don't guarantee that, they actually explicitly inform everyone everywhere, including in the UI, that the output may be incorrect.

So it's mostly failure to pay attention and realize they're dealing with an exception to the rule.

--

[0] - Actually hurt you, I'm ignoring all the fitness/healthy eating fads and "ultraprocessed food" bullshit.

[1] - On a related note, it's also something security people often don't get: real world security relies on being connected - via contracts and laws and institutions - to "men with guns". It's not perfect, but scales better.

[2] - Because LLMs are not databases, but - to a first-order approximation - little people on a chip!
by neogodless | 2026-01-23 13:32:58+00:00
I have a co-worker who has spoken excitedly about creating AI-generated music. I listened to him talk (and some brief music clips) and didn't tell them I have no interest in it, because he seems passionate about it. But it does not interest me.

My point is, though, it occurred to me why he's excited about it. He has no ability whatsoever to write music in notes, or song lyrics. But with his tool, he's able to make music that he finds decent enough to feel excited about helping to shape it.

No criticism to those who can't do a thing on their own, but are excited to be able to do it with a tool. And yes, you can certainly elaborate on and debate craftsmanship, and the benchmarks and measures of quality of an end result when made through expert skill and care, or by amateurs with a powerful (and perhaps imperfect or imprecise) tool.

So personal anecdote, using generative code has not interested me personally, because I love writing code, and I'm very good at it, and I'm very fast. Of course machines can do things faster than me (once I learn the different skill of prompting), but speed hasn't really been a massively limiting factor for me when trying to build things. (There are lots of other things that can get in my way!)

I'm reminded of the oft used quote, "He who can, does; he who cannot, teaches" - George Bernard Shaw. (Just, now the teaching is that of a machine, who then does.)
by myrmidon | 2026-01-23 13:33:13+00:00
Completeley agree. It's such a stark contrast between Bush senior and junior, too-- GWB put the US on such a bad trajectory (middle east interventionism, surveillance state, etc.), altough 9/11 probably deserves a lot of blame for it.

I also blame the republicans for turning elections more and more into polarized shit slinging personalized attacks instead of policy based arguments, and I'd argue that this really took off in the Clinton era, and then got really bad under Obama/Trump.
by ryandrake | 2026-01-23 13:34:32+00:00
That’s what these “time is money” people don’t get: It’s only opportunity cost if you would otherwise be working. Lets say I make $200/hr on my day job. If I choose to spend 4 hours in the evening writing an app, it’s not costing me $800 because I am not doing it instead of working. I would otherwise be cleaning up the garage or walking the dog or something.

Most people’s free time is not worth anything monetary. Sure, there is non monetary value in chilling out and spending time with family, but if I spend a few hours making an app for myself, then I got something for free.
by alexgieg | 2026-01-23 13:34:55+00:00
The French government managed to rein in Amazon so traditional French stores, both online and brick and mortar ones, don't go bankrupt due to Amazon's unending pockets.

If they deem it necessary to rein in Google, they will rein in Google. There's no lack of tools for this, ranging from obliging phones sold in French territory to offer the French search engine as the default, to forcing every Google search result to promote the local search engine prominently, to campaigns about how it's important for national security not to rely on an adversary/enemy country's services, to everything in between and beyond.
by JKCalhoun | 2026-01-23 13:35:15+00:00
I'm not going to sit in front of a time-lapse camera with a timer app running on my lap(top), but I wholeheartedly push for everyone that can to hit the road.

My long-format road trips have been my peace of mind… perhaps my whole adult life (certainly for my years as an Apple engineer, husband and father). Perhaps others can find some solace from them.

Never in an entire year was I more at peace than when I was rolling down a highway for days at a time—just staring at the passing scenery, thoughts going through my head, ideas springing to mind, and at other times maybe conversing in my head with my dead mother…

My "worries" seem to dwindle to just, "When should I look for gas?" and "Where am I going to sleep tonight?". (I feel guilty about the gas part—I mean the pollution involved. I wish an electric, road-trip-worthy van was a thing already.)

When I became aware of the release and relaxation I was getting from road-tripping (still as an Apple engineer) I made plans to build out an RV (recreational vehicle, campervan, caravan, motorhome) in time for my retirement.

I purchased a van a couple years out from my planned retirement (my youngest daughter exiting high school, the "empty nest", was when I was heading out of the rat-race, heading out of the Bay Area—so I knew pretty exactly when I was going to retire). And so I spent a year cutting holes in the van to fit windows, a fan. I built a bed, cabinetry for the van, fitted it with a water tank, propane, a stove, batteries, solar power, a refrigerator… [1]

Surprisingly (for me) the plan worked. The wife and I hit the road during the nicer parts of the year. On less ambitious outings we will spend a week or so touring a single state—seeing what Kansas has to offer, for example. Our most ambitious road trip was to Alaska and back to surprise my aging father with a visit.

However you do it (and I met people on the road to Alaska on motorcycles, sleeping in their cars, etc.) hitting the road seems to be about embracing the boredom and swapping out your daily concerns with (hopefully) a much smaller and more fundamental set of concerns (like gas, food and lodging). I don't doubt long-term through-hiking gives you the same experience. (Likely more-so.)

I always come back with notes for several great (?) ideas that come to me on those long stretches of watching the scenery roll by. I also tend to find some kind of clarity of purpose (for some amount of time at least).

[1] https://www.fordtransitusaforum.com/threads/hot-tamale-build...
by echelon | 2026-01-23 13:35:26+00:00
The idea of not compensating for software took hold in the 2000s, both with engineers and consumers (remember when users scoffed at 99 cent apps?)

Big tech companies saw this as an opportunity to build proprietary value-add systems around open source, but not make those systems in turn open. As they scaled, it became impossible to compete. You're not paying Redis for Redis. You're paying AWS or Google.
by skybrian | 2026-01-23 13:35:33+00:00
> People who love using AI to create software are loving it because they don’t value the act of creating & understanding the software.

This happens, but it's only one way to use a coding agent. I'm working on a small, personal project, but I ask it to do "code health" tasks all the time, like complicated refactorings, improving test coverage, improving the tooling surrounding the code, and fixing readability issues by renaming things. Project quality keeps getting better. I like getting the code squeaky clean and now I have a power washer.

You do have to ask for these things, though.

Some people like using hand tools and others use power tools, but our goals aren't necessarily all that different.
by superkuh | 2026-01-23 13:35:38+00:00
What use is human sounding TTS when your desktop cannot read the contents of windows?

As someone with progressive retinal tearing who's used the linux desktop for 20 years I'm terrified. The forcing of the various incompatible waylands by the big linux corps has meant the end of support for screen readers. The only wayland compositor that supports screen readers in linux is GNOME's mutter and they literally only added that support last year (after 15 years of waylands) and instead of supporting standard at-spi and existing protocols that Orca and the like use GNOME decided to come up with two new in-house GNOME proprietary protocols (which themselves don't send the full window tree or anything on request but instead push only info about single windows, etc, etc) for doing it. No other wayland compositor supports screen readers. And without any standardization no developers will ever support screenreaders on waylands. Basically only GNOME's userspace will sort of support it. There's no hope for non-X11 based screen readers and all the megacorps are say they're dropping X11 support.

The only options I have are to use and maintain old X11 linux distros myself. But eventually things like CA TLS and browsers just won't be feasible for me to backport and compile myself. Eventually I'm going to have to switch to using Windows. It's a sad, sad state of things.

And regarding AI based text to speech: almost all of it kind of sucks for screen readers. Particularly the random garbled ai-noises that happen between and at the end of utterances, inaccurate readings, etc in many models. Not to mention requiring the use of a GPU and lots of system resources. The old Festival 1.96 Nitech HTS voices on (core2duo) CPU from the early 2000 are incomparibly faster, more accurate, and sound decent enough to understand.
by neobrain | 2026-01-23 13:35:56+00:00
> I've been pretty happy with it, ever since they made the photo's app actually have shareable libraries it's been just as good as any other Google Mail/Photos/Files thing I've used.

Glad to hear you found a service that's useful to you!

> If I have to encrypt my files before I use the drive, and they continue to build their AI spy into everything, though, then what is the point really?

That would be concerning indeed, but there is no such integration today and it seems unlikely they would integrate non-local models into drive. Even on the mail side, any use of LLMs is optional, opt-in, and limited to text production (i.e. no training on your inbox).