MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by derefr | 2026-01-13 19:49:26+00:00
After 3D-print slop infested craft fairs, and fake AI-slop products infested Etsy, it's got me to wondering: is this just an evolution in an existing scummy business model?

Consider how easy it would have been, any time in the last decade, to get a booth at any "local hand-made goods craft fair", selling "hand-made" copper jewelry... that you happened to buy in bulk lots off Alibaba. The jewelry was "hand-made"... kind of... by someone else, making far too little money, in sweatshop conditions, following techniques and using machines that enable them to produce hundreds at once, with no QC whatsoever.

Nobody would ever guess you hadn't made the stuff yourself. They would read the lack of QC as evidence for your claim that "each piece is distinct and made to match my artistic vision in the moment." You'd put one or two of each type of piece out on the table at a time, as if those are all you have; yet as soon as one sells, you'd pull another out from the box of hundreds.

I can't say for sure that this ever happens, but judging by the number of people willing to be scummy in the more modern ways... it certainly feels like it could. Honestly makes me hesitant to buy anything from a craft fair. Which is a shame.
by ignoramous | 2026-01-13 19:49:37+00:00
Definitely there exist customers one must fire, but the flip side is, some of them might have genuine complaints.

... an extremely popular marketing tool ... sending an equally excessive amount of data above what they were paying for. They were far less adamant about the product, and on some days I didn't even want them as a customer. If there was a minor blip in the service, they were the first to complain. Reminder, [Sentry] was still a side project at the time so I had a day-job. That meant it was often stressful for Chris and I to deal w/ customer support, and way more stressful dealing with outages.

We had one customer who loved the product, and one who didn't. Both of these customers had such extreme volumes of data that it had a tangible infrastructure cost associated with hosting them. We knew the best thing to do was to find a way to be able to charge them more money for the amount of data they sent. So we set off to build that and then followed up with each customer.

To our surprise, the customer that loved the product didn't want to pay more. The customer who was constantly complaining immediately jumped on the opportunity. What's the lesson to take away from this?

... when I was a teenager I worked at Burger King, and there was an anecdote I will never forget: for every customer that complains, there are nine more with a similar experience. I've cemented this in my philosophy around development, to the point where I now believe over rotating on negative feedback is actually just biasing towards the customers who truly see the value in what you're offering. The customer that was complaining really valued our product, whereas the customer that was happy was simply content.

A $7 Subscription, https://cra.mr/a-seven-dollar-subscription / https://archive.vn/IWS0A (2023).
by NickC25 | 2026-01-13 19:49:45+00:00
No, not at all. Socialism is a reaction to extreme capitalism, and basically a call for socialism today is just saying "capitalism is cool and all, but there needs to be some guardrails so capitalism doesn't eat itself".

People voted for the mayor in NYC because capitalism started to eat itself in NYC, and the non-billionaires who actually make up the vast majority of the city wanted a change.

A simple, and reasonably small increase in taxes on the wealthiest of the wealthiest (who are in NYC because its a world class city and their businesses couldn't really "make it" as easily elsewhere) is not socialism. It's saying to the hedge fund billionaires "hey - we don't appreiciate that you're operating your businesses here yet refusing to help pitch in financially in order to keep our world-class city world-class". If Ken Griffin can afford to drop a quarter billion dollars on an apartment he spends ~25 days a year in, or Bill Ackman wants to continue to hire people educated at Colombia and NYU, they can afford to pay another 2-5 million dollars a year in tax".
by dennis_jeeves2 | 2026-01-13 19:49:48+00:00
>How or why Scott Adams went completely of the rails is perhaps something we'll sadly never understand. Was this opinions he'd always had, but suppressed, did he somehow become radicalized or was it perhaps medically induced.

No surprises for me. By my standards he was never radicalized just an objective thinker with a flair for humor.
Show HN: I built an email API because of limited domains and flaky inbound
by hamzaawan | 2026-01-13 19:49:50+00:00
I’m an indie hacker. Like many of you, I usually have 3 or 4 projects running at once. My biggest frustration with existing email APIs (the Resends and Postmarks of the world) is how they handle domains.

Most platforms restrict you to a single domain on the free tier, and even the initial paid tiers are surprisingly stingy. Whenever I started a new experiment, I had to "kill" the email for a previous project just to reuse the domain slot. If a user tried to sign up or reset a password on an older project, it was effectively dead.

I built Simple Email API to stop this cycle. I wanted an email API that doesn't punish you for experimenting.

Two things I focused on:

1. Multi-domain by default You can add unlimited domains without being forced into a $20/month plan immediately. I’ve optimized the infrastructure to keep costs low so I can provide affordable pricing. You can keep your old projects alive while you build your next one.

2. Native Inbound (not an afterthought) Most APIs are built for outbound, and inbound feels like a complex add-on. Here, every email is "reply-ready" out of the box.

For Production: We have standard webhooks.

For Prototyping: We have a simplified onReceive callback. If you're building an AI agent or a quick script, you don't want to deal with webhook endpoints and secrets. You can get up and running with just an API key.

The goal is to be the simplest possible way to send and receive emails. I’m looking for brutally honest feedback.
by ToucanLoucan | 2026-01-13 19:49:53+00:00
The main differentiator I've noticed is: how much work is the tool doing, and how much work is the artist doing? And that's not to say that strictly more effort on the part of the artist is a good thing, it just has to be a notable amount to, IMHO, be an interesting thing.

This is the primary failure of all of the AI creative tooling, not even necessarily that it does too much, but that the effort of the artist doesn't correlate to good output. Sometimes you can get something usable in 1 or 2 prompts, and it almost feels like magic/cheating. Other times you spend tons of time going over prompts repeatedly trying to get it to do something, and are never successful.

Any other toolset I can become familiar and better equipped to use. AI-based tools are uniquely unpredictable and so I haven't really found any places beyond base concepting work where I'm comfortable making them a permanent component.

And more generally, to your nod that some day artists will use AI: I mean, it's not impossible. That being said, as an artist, I'm not comfortable chaining my output to anything as liquid and ever-changing and unreliable as anything currently out there. I don't want to put myself in a situation where my ability to create hinges on paying a digital landlord for access to a product that can change at any time. I got out of Adobe for the same reason: I was sick of having my workflows frustrated by arbitrary changes to the tooling I didn't ask for, while actual issues went unsolved for years.
Ask HN: Are you underutilizing your insurance too?
by nemath | 2026-01-13 19:50:17+00:00
Yesterday, I had this thought of not using my insurance to full potential last year. So since this year is just starting out and I have a KP insurance I decided to understand what am I missing out on. I realized there's a lot. I had no clue that lot of preventive visits, tests are offered for free generally. I decided to then make up a custom GPT just for me to continue understanding it and have it give me a rough timeline of preventive test/visits that I should be doing this quarter. I ended up booking an appointment yesterday and have rough plan for this month which is going to cost me little to nothing. Have you thought about this?

Edit: All I initially had was a 100 page doc of my benefits that I never looked at by virtue of being lazy. So I dumped this in and gave it a task to optimize for cost and preventive tests.
by XorNot | 2026-01-13 19:51:18+00:00
What's wrong with an OnlyFans contributor? It's a self-employed job that services a demand within the economy and pays taxes. It's pretty close to the ideal job an immigrant can have since the product is already globalized but the revenue is not - i.e. an OnlyFans influencer with an American audience who moves to America is now bringing that income back into the economy via taxes and spending, or if they have an international audience they are attracting foreign dollars into your economy and strengthening your currency position.
by machomaster | 2026-01-13 19:51:33+00:00
He wasn't though. He was simply analyzing the communication styöe of Trump, using his hypnosis knowledge, and explained why and how it was better (more efficient) than the competitors. This turned out to be true, giving him the win, just like Scott Adams predicted.

The description of reality is not at all the same as supporting it. "Is" vs. "Ought to be".
by arjie | 2026-01-13 19:51:34+00:00
The various lo-fi channels are also likely carrying heavily AI-generated music and it's actually kind of fine. The 'pieces' seem like undifferentiated background music of a certain mood, which is often what I'm looking for while I'm doing something else.

Previously, search was such a big problem. For instance, I'm not big on hip-hop and so on but I like songs like Worst Comes To Worst by Dilated Peoples. I've searched in all sorts of ways for other songs like that and come up with a handful of examples. Likewise, I want the vibe of Thick As A Brick by Jethro Tull during various parts. It's hard to find this kind of stuff.

But Suno.ai can generate that boom-bap vibe pretty easily and it's not the kind of thing where I'm going to put the same song on all the time like I do with the Dilated Peoples one, but it's good enough to listen to while I'm working.
by JohnFen | 2026-01-13 19:52:03+00:00
Yeah, I agree.

For me, music (like all fine art) is about human connection. It's the artist telling me something human and personal. It's not entirely about the aesthetics of the music. The provenance of the art is very important. If I feel that connection with a song and it turns out that the song wasn't made by a person (it hasn't happened yet as far as I know), I have been deceived and would be furious.

A song made by a person using AI as tool (rather than to generate the music) is different. What matters is that the song is actually an expression of humanity, not the tools used to make it.

However, the presence of musical slop means that I am not really willing to buy music anymore unless its either a few years old or I'm buying it at the merch table the artist has at a live performance.
by ericmay | 2026-01-13 19:52:15+00:00
> The American government hates Iran with bipartisan support and has it sanctioned to hell and back, I have no idea what I'd protest American leaders to do here?

Well you could rally in support of more action, or protest outside an Iranian embassy for example to put pressure on them. I was reading that something on a small scale happened in the UK and they took down the Iranian flag from the embassy.

> Another way to put it: the point of protesting generally isn't solely to express being upset with an injustice. It's to get some actor/stakeholder - usually one's government - to DO something about the injustice.

Sure, I don't disagree. But let me ask, do you believe that if the US wasn't selling weapons to Israel that the public would react to this particular conflict in a way that's similar to how it reacts to other conflicts around the world? It's obviously hard to speculate about because it's just the world we live in and counterfactuals around these things are incredibly difficult and inaccurate, but something tells me there's something unique about this conflict and even in countries that don't sell weapons to Israel we do still see rather large scale protests and rallies and such.

What do you think?
by tiborsaas | 2026-01-13 19:52:15+00:00
Out of curiosity I tried something similar with Suno using the extend feature on a quick draft I made lately with my DAW from scratch / no sampling.

Original:

https://suno.com/song/fcc43ad3-af05-4733-85e4-fec7502b82a5

And here are the extensions:

https://suno.com/song/2760efbd-97d3-4072-9993-5ef4b6515472

https://suno.com/song/297415d0-72b3-4084-b263-f4256465c74d

It handled them quite well, I should incorporate a few ideas back already :)
by darth_avocado | 2026-01-13 19:52:23+00:00
> living spaces are growing too

Median home sizes have gone from 1400 sqft in the 70s to 2400 sqft in recent years.

https://www.bankrate.com/real-estate/average-home-size/

Part of it is the economics of construction. Part of it is growing threshold for “bare minimum”. In unit laundry was optional in the 70s and I’ve heard people wanting a “laundry room”. Pandemic has pushed the need for an office. Larger kitchens and more storage space is also a big difference in newer units vs older ones.
by shashimudunuri | 2026-01-13 19:52:39+00:00
Hey HN, I released v2.1.0 of Claude Code Orchestrator today.

Quick background: This tool lets you run multiple Claude Code sessions in parallel on isolated git worktrees. You give it a project description, it generates a PRD, spawns workers, monitors them, reviews the merged work, and delivers working code. Based on Boris Cherny's patterns (he created Claude Code).

What's new in v2.1: Quality agents now run at three checkpoints instead of just one.

Before: Agents only ran when a PR was ready for review.

Now:

1. Pre-PR (Worker): type-check, lint, test must pass BEFORE creating a PR
2. Post-CI (Orchestrator): QA Guardian, security scan (npm audit), code simplifier, DevOps review
3. Post-Merge (Planner): All agents run again on the combined code

This catches issues that only appear when parallel workers' code is merged together.

Other changes:
- Security scan now runs on ALL PRs (not just infra changes)
- Code simplifier threshold lowered from 100+ to 50+ lines
- Fixed shellcheck warnings (the irony of an automation tool failing lint)

The workflow:
/project "Add OAuth authentication"
# Walk away
# Come back to working code + macOS notification

GitHub: https://github.com/reshashi/claude-orchestrator

Requirements: macOS, iTerm2, Claude Code CLI, jq

Happy to answer questions about the architecture or agent coordination patterns.
by jfengel | 2026-01-13 19:52:45+00:00
Complete, no. But the combination of the expansive powers given to him by the court, and the difficulties of burden of proof, means that it's hard to imagine him being successfully prosecuted for just about anything.

I think that includes persecution of political opponents. Maybe not for a capital offense, though I wouldn't be so sure. Treason is poorly defined and has capital consequences.
by anthonypasq | 2026-01-13 19:52:45+00:00
lmao, get over yourself. if you cant create something that competes with AI slop and lowest common denominator AI generation then maybe you need to improve your craft.

you sound like someone from the 1800's shouting about how photography should be banned and not allowed to crowd out hard working painters.

there will be people who enjoy ai art and there will be those that dont. how about to you just do what satisfies you creatively and let people decide what they like.
by vcanales | 2026-01-13 19:52:46+00:00
> You’re not allowed to feel things. Emotions make you weak. Just suck it up and power through. Bottle it up.

Yeah, none of that is "real stoicism", but just the hydroponic TikTok version of it, as you say.

This can happen to anything if TikTok is your main source of information; everything becomes life hacks, "tricks", and "did you know that <insert biased misinterpretation of well known thing>" types of knowledge bites. Philosophy is unfortunately not the only victim of short-length "edutainment".

I think that Stoicism might be particularly vulnerable to this because of its built in flexibility, which makes it easy for people to divulge their interpretations of it with little pushback. If you haven't read much of it, and without a clear rirgid "rule set" for what Stoicism is (other than its tenets in the cardinal virtues and dichotomy of control), you might believe me if I tell you that it is a Philosophy that encourages suicide and tells you that being sad because a family member passed is stupid.
by NickC25 | 2026-01-13 19:52:58+00:00
His actual policies aren't that radical to be honest. Yeah the subsidized grocery store idea is one thing, but making busses free or telling hedge fund centibillionaires that it might be a good thing for American capitalism long term if they paid another 2-5 million dollars in tax isn't exactly the workers taking complete ownership of the factories.

For all intents and purposes, he's a milquetoast centrist who wants his city to be a bit better, and thinks it could be a bit better by doing things like making transportation cheaper.

You don't see him advocating for firebombing the NYSE or arresting Met Gala attendees.

And fuck, he's trying. God forbid someone care about their constituents, or their own city. Nope, let's smear him for not kowtowing to a country on the other side of the planet. Eric Adams just wanted to line his own pockets. Bloomberg wanted to line his own pockets. And now we blast a dude who grew up in NYC who just wants to do some really basic things to try to make life a bit better?
by Aydarbek | 2026-01-13 19:53:02+00:00
Yes I’ve read through TigerBeetle’s VSR design and their rationale for not using Raft.

VSR makes a lot of sense for their problem space: fixed schema, deterministic state machine,
and a very tight control over replication + execution order.

Ayder has a different set of constraints:
- append-only logs with streaming semantics
- dynamic topics / partitions
- external clients producing arbitrary payloads over HTTP

Raft here is a pragmatic choice: it’s well understood, easier to reason about for operators,
and fits the “easy to try, easy to operate” goal of the system.

That said, I think VSR is a great example of what’s possible when you fully own the problem
and can specialize aggressively. Definitely a project I’ve learned from.
by ygjb | 2026-01-13 19:53:03+00:00
I think it's generally accepted that at a high level being in the top quartile is considered very good. Not excellent. Not unicorn. Just very good.

Beyond that, it's not about becoming very good at two different, completely orthogonal things, it's about becoming very good at two things that are complementary in some way that is of value to others. Being good at PacMan and Bouldering is only particularly valuable if you are competing for opportunities to participate in a hypothetical mixed reality video game, or perhaps a very niche streaming channel. Being the top quartile of embedded c code, and flora identification could result in building software/hardware tools to identify flora, which is a niche that currently has multiple competing products that are high value to those interested.
by rootusrootus | 2026-01-13 19:53:10+00:00
1. I feel wonderful. Things that were hard are now easy, exercise is invigorating instead of exhausting.

2. I have not. Considered it, but locally the scans are expensive and I could not convince myself what I'd do differently if I knew the numbers. My goals would stay the same.

3. I lift weights, but there's no way around it, losing a lot of weight means caloric deficit and I have definitely lost some mass. I'm trying to establish a slight caloric surplus now combined with a heavier focus on lifting-for-growth to see if I can claw back some of what I've lost. I got big enough at my largest (and I am just over 50 years old, which does not help) that now I have a little bit of loose skin on my belly, thighs, and upper arms ... I'm hoping that if I can regain some muscle that I can alleviate much of that. Otherwise I'll get a surgeon to do it.

4. Currently at 25.3. Could lose some more, but happy enough where I'm at and my test results are spectacular now, so I am no longer targeting further weight loss. I still weigh myself but I am now refocusing my definition for success in how I look and feel.
by Aydarbek | 2026-01-13 19:53:28+00:00
That’s a great comparison nsq is a project I have a lot of respect for.

I think there’s a similar philosophy around simplicity and operator experience.
Where Ayder diverges is in durability and recovery semantics nsq intentionally
trades some of that off to stay lightweight.

The goal here is to keep the “easy to run” feeling, but with stronger guarantees
around crash recovery and replication.
by miltonlost | 2026-01-13 19:53:34+00:00
> Pretend that instead of bothering with bands at some point in the future you just generate music to your tastes on the fly all the time.

As someone who enjoys live music, I would still need a live band to play this on-the-fly generated music. I guess then you'll trot out AI holograms! but that sounds still as unappealing as your base case.
by kmdupree | 2026-01-13 19:53:46+00:00
Avantos.ai | https://avantos.ai | Sr Software Engineer, AI Team | St. Louis or NYC | 150-200k

We're building an AI notetaker and task management tool for financial advisors. Startup is headquartered in NYC. If you're not in NYC, quarterly travel to the office is expected.

Front end: React DB: Postgres APIs: Golang, Elysia/Node Infra: AWS ala Terraform

Interview Process
1. 10-minute async coding challenge
2. Hiring manager chat and 20-minute coding challenge
3. 45-minute Coding Challenge w/ another Engineer from the AI team
4. System Design Interview
5. Chat w/ a Product Manager

Apply here: https://avantos.breezy.hr/p/4a707ef4f952-senior-software-eng...
by nobody9999 | 2026-01-13 19:53:51+00:00
>As others pointed, the story of human civilization is one long arc of going against our base animal instincts in order to build a society that benefits everyone.

I'd add that it's cooperation and the ability to moderate impulsive behavior that, over the long term, differentiates us from our closest primate relatives, the chimpanzee.

If we were just our base instincts and nothing more, we wouldn't be having this conversation as we'd likely have died out, because our ability to accept and work together with each other allowed us to flourish despite the threats of predation, climate change, natural disasters and other challenges.

As such, making the argument that we're "hardwired" to hate and fear our fellow humans doesn't make sense, whether that argument is an intellectual one or an evolutionary one.

I feel sorry for folks who feel so isolated that they can't understand just how closely related we all are. It must be quite lonely.
by port11 | 2026-01-13 19:53:53+00:00
My partner works in the field and we once talked about this. I think the idea is that individual consumers’ and businesses’ batteries can serve the grid as needed. For example, if your car is fully charged and you don’t need it today, it can top up local needs.

So I think the writing isn’t on the wall yet for line price going up, although I’m of course talking of a) Belgium, and b) a future that could go wrong if utilities don’t fund smart metering.