MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vintermann | 2026-01-12 13:11:50+00:00
It's a prediction. Not a terribly unreasonable one as far as I can see. If a drug can move 5% of the ~trillion dollars spent on groceries in the US, there's a lot of money available for clawing those 5% back.

Demanding evidence for predictions like this is a bit... hm. Arrogant, maybe. A prediction is a commitment. We want people to make predictions. The evidence we get when those predictions come true or not. Would you be willing to make the opposite prediction?
by Yaser_Amiri | 2026-01-12 13:12:00+00:00
Iran has a huge black market. Many things from refrigerator to small things are being smuggled to Iran, mostly from the mountains on Iraq border (also from Turkey border and from other Gulf countries. The government is not peaky about smuggling since Iran is under heavy sanctions and it's hard for the government to provide USD to legit traders on official channels.
by the_af | 2026-01-12 13:12:13+00:00
Your criticism of Catholicism is valid, but regardless: this dilemma of Tolkien is real, and well-documented (e.g. in his letters, etc).

He really did struggle with this, re: the origin of the Orcs, whether they had souls, whether it was ok to default to massacring them without second thought, etc. He never really resolved it.

Most Tolkien fan communities are aware of this dilemma, it's one of those well-known things, along with "did Balrogs have wings?", "couldn't they just fly to Mount Doom and drop the ring?" and "why did Sauron need to put his power within a ring, anyway?".
by johnvonoakland | 2026-01-12 13:12:33+00:00
Hey everyone,
I'm a developer who got tired of the bloated dashboards and paywalls on most link shorteners, so I built my own.
mnml.ink — does what it says:

Shorten URLs
Generate QR codes
Track clicks & basic stats
No sign-up required for basic use

It's fast, free, and I tried to keep it as simple as possible.
Would love honest feedback — what features would make this actually useful for your workflow? Anything obviously missing?
by oneeyedpigeon | 2026-01-12 13:12:33+00:00
Something that baffles me about macOS: the pointer bug. I’ve been aware of this for ages—as far as I can recall, since Snow Leopard; maybe others have insight—and it still hasn't been fixed.

Simply put: the pointer doesn't always switch context properly. So, you'll have it hovered over a resize control and it will refuse to change from the default pointer. Or you'll be working, and suddenly notice the pointer is a 'drag' one, even though nothing's being dragged and nothing draggable is active.

I would love anyone with any knowledge, especially an (ex-)insider, to shed light on this issue.
by junaid1460 | 2026-01-12 13:12:43+00:00
Building Masonry (https://masonry.so) — a unified creative studio for AI image and video generation, mainly targeting e-commerce teams.

The core problem: there are now 45+ AI models for visual content (Kling, Sora, Veo, FLUX, Imagen, GPT-4o Image, etc.) and they each have different strengths. We aggregate them into one canvas where you can:

Generate images across 21 models and compare outputs side-by-side
Convert images to video with 19 video models (Kling 2.6, Veo 3.1, Sora 2, Seedance)
Use Storyboard mode to plan multi-scene videos shot-by-shot with consistent characters/assets
Upscale, remove backgrounds, inpaint/outpaint — all in one workflow
Main use case is e-commerce product content: lifestyle shots, 360° product reveals, unboxing videos. Upload a product image, generate variations across models, animate the best ones, export in platform-ready formats.
by nticompass | 2026-01-12 13:12:48+00:00
I used to use Gentoo, it helped me learn Linux and I loved it. Waiting for things to compile took a while, but I learned about distcc and set up another machine to help the compiling! I don't use Gentoo anymore, since I don't really have the time anymore to deal with it - like having to fix compile issues - but it did feel really cool to have my system custom-tuned just for me.

(I use Fedora, btw)
by lee_ars | 2026-01-12 13:13:08+00:00
People are "awful at that" because when two people communicate, we're using a lot more than words. Each person participating in a conversation is doing a lot of active bridge-building. We're supplying and looking for extra nonverbal context; we're leaning on basic assumptions about the other speaker, their mood, their tone, their meanings; we're looking at not just syntax but the pragmatics of the convo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatics). The communication of meaning is a multi-dimensional thing that everyone in the conversation is continually contributing to and pushing on.

In a way, LLMs are heavily exploitative of human linguistic abilities and expectations. We're wired so hard to actively engage and seek meaning in conversational exchanges that we tend to "helpfully" supply that meaning even when it's absent. We are "vulnerable" to LLMs because they supply all the "I'm talking to a person" linguistic cues, but without any form of underlying mind.

Folks like your wife aren't necessarily "bad" at LLM prompting—they're simply responding to the signals they get. The LLM "seems smart." It seems like it "knows" things, so many folks engage with them naturally, as they would with another person, without painstakingly feeding in context and precisely defining all the edges. If anything, it speaks to just how good LLMs are at being LLMs.
by carlmr | 2026-01-12 13:13:19+00:00
I didn't dismiss any benefits. But so many people needing an anti-addiction drug to get off addictive foods IMO should raise alarm bells.

The food producers need to be sanctioned. It's unsustainable for a whole nation to be on these expensive drugs.

If you think an outside perspective is irrelevant I'm also not sure why you don't just move on and not comment.
by rootnod3 | 2026-01-12 13:13:39+00:00
Yes. Unfortunately it seems that Matrix is the winner, but I think Matrix is over-engineered.

XMPP was nice. Especially in the old times when Google Hangouts and Facebook Chat were also XMPP based. Being able to talk to people on another service without needing an account there was a nice thing to have for a few months.
by dns_snek | 2026-01-12 13:14:14+00:00
Because most people don't work on public projects and can't share the code publicly?

What's more interesting is the lack of examples of non-trivial projects that are provably vibe-coded and that claim to be of high-quality.

I think many of us are looking for: "I vibe-coded [this] with minimal corrections/manual coding on a livestream [here] and I believe it to be high-quality code"

If the code is in fact good quality then the livestream would serve as educational material for using LLMs/agents productively and I guarantee that it would change many minds. Stop telling people how great it all is, show them. I don't want to be a naysayer, I want to be impressed.
by closewith | 2026-01-12 13:14:16+00:00
This completely overstates the problem, is not supported by the evidence, and is exactly the kind of alarmism that undermines genuine climate science.

An AMOC slowdown or even collapse does not trigger an ice age. Full glacial periods are driven by orbital forcing, not ocean circulation alone.

The evidence points to regional cooling of a few degrees in parts of Western and Northern Europe, not rendering everything north of France uninhabitable.

Past ice sheets advanced over millennia under much colder global conditions than today, not on human timescales.

Even severe AMOC scenarios would be major and costly disruptions, not close to Europe being wiped off the map.
by quitit | 2026-01-12 13:14:22+00:00
This headline is a touch misleading as it gives the impression of being across all US households, the quote is:

>Within six months of starting a GLP-1 medication, households reduce grocery spending by an average of 5.3%. Among higher-income households, the drop is even steeper, at more than 8%. Spending at fast-food restaurants, coffee shops and other limited-service eateries falls by about 8%.
by the_af | 2026-01-12 13:14:34+00:00
> It's a fantasy novel written primarily for entertainment

On one hand, you're right.

On the other, it's unfair to Tolkien and to the scholars who study his work. He spent a lot of his life and effort towards developing this world, he deeply pondered the moral implications and theology of his world, and for all his denial of there being any analogies to the real world, you can see he considered them (he did describe modern men in the modern world as "Orc-ish", etc).

All of this to say we cannot just dismiss it as "it's a fantasy novel".
by KaiMagnus | 2026-01-12 13:14:38+00:00
Didn’t look at it too closely, but the whole article as it stands is almost completely copy-pastable from a llm chat. Another comment pointing out that there’s some code that doesn’t do anything is another clue.

(Not saying it was, but if I’d ask the llm to create and annotate a HTML manipulation poc with code snippets, I’d get a very similar response.)

Edit: Pretty sure the account itself is only here to promote this page.
by doodaddy | 2026-01-12 13:14:55+00:00
I wouldn’t suggest anyone take this piece serious; you would be doing yourself a disservice. A strange thing I’ve noticed about street view. Whenever I show up to a new place that I’ve viewed on street view I remark on how different it feels from what I expected. Maybe I recognize the konbini on the corner and know that it marks the left turn I need to make. But never have I felt like street view was even close to actually being there.

> Not that it would have been logistically feasible back then, but I do sometimes ask myself if Pearl Harbor could have been prevented if enough Japanese statesmen had gone to vacation in New York.

Well we kind of know what the answer is. Toward the end of WW2 when the US was drawing up the list of cities to bomb, Kyoto got removed from the list at the insistence of the Secretary of War. He understood the cultural importance of the city, likely because he had travelled there. I’m surprised the author hadn’t read about it on Wikipedia.

But back to my point. Sitting and staring into my magic 13-inch rectangle starts to make me feel like…nothing. A formless gel of facts and trivia. Travel makes me feel like a human being again. Travel may not be education but I do think that, when done well, it is wisdom.
by btreecat | 2026-01-12 13:16:03+00:00
hg sees history as useful metadata, and therefore you shouldn't dress it up artificially.

git allows for folks to be Pinky's out with their commit history for warm an fuzzies.

If you think editing history is a grand idea that should be used regularly (like with rebase) then I already know you likely haven't been responsible for large mature code base. Where you'd rather have every comment, change and scrap of info available to understand what you're trying to maintain because the folks before you are long gone.
by Moldoteck | 2026-01-12 13:16:07+00:00
Fla3 min profitability limit is 9ct and expected limit is about 12-14ct. And mind you 9ct scenario assumes 90%cf, while most US plants are 92-98%cf.

And that's for a totally f-up project... EPR2 isn't built yet so we don't know how it'll go per kwh, if EDF doesn't delay it for 20y it'll be in 6-10ct range, similar to Barakah built by Korea

Most of the cost in ren nowadays is transmission cost and firming cost, both don't have a big margin to shave, unlike nuclear
Show HN: Seapie – a Python debugger where breakpoints drop into a REPL
by markushirsimaki | 2026-01-12 13:16:10+00:00
Author here.

I started seapie as a reaction to pdb's command-driven interface in 2019. I wanted a breakpoint to simply mean 'open a Python REPL here', with debugging functionality layered on top instead of replacing the REPL.

`seapie.breakpoint()` opens a working `>>>` REPL at the current execution state. Any changes to variables or function definitions persist. Debugger state is exposed via built-ins (e.g. `_magic_`), and stepping/frame control/etc is handled via small `!commands`.

I've been using this regularly in my own work for a few years now. Happy to answer questions or hear criticism, especially from people who've used debuggers heavily.
by the_af | 2026-01-12 13:16:18+00:00
> For an actually interesting take on "hey what if the orcs are actually intelligent people" there is The Last Ringbearer by a Russian author, presenting LOTR from the perspective of Mordor(it's not a good book, but was an amusing read)

I found The Last Ringbearer a book good! Of course it's not in the same league as LotR, it's not engaging in vast myth- and world-building, but it's a well-written, fun book that manages to be engaging. Even knowing it was an alternative take to LotR, I wanted to know what happened!

For everyone who has not read it, it's not simply a "let's retell LotR, only from the perspective of the Orcs". It's a brand new "adventure" so to speak, which shifts the point of view but also describes new events. It starts at the end of the War of the Ring, with Mordor defeated.
by vidarh | 2026-01-12 13:16:21+00:00
Yeah, I'm not on ozempic (though considering it, to get the last bit of the way to where I want to be and ensure I don't bounce back, which is frankly a lot harder than "just" the initial loss) but lost 20kg+ on diet changes, and the price of fruit and berries is shockingly high. But my dietary change still saved us a lot more from cutting takeaways alone...
by dham | 2026-01-12 13:16:30+00:00
> FSD has been "really good since VVV"

These are influencers who have a stake in Tesla. The general consensus from the regular users is that it is really good starting at FSD 14. It's the first version that finally feels complete. I have 5000 miles on FSD 14 with no disengagements. 99% of my driving is FSD. I couldn't say that for any other version. Even my wife has 85% of her driving on FSD and she hated it before. She just tends to drive herself on short drives and in parkings lots, where as I don't. So your take just doens't line up with what people are saying in social media and my personal experience.

> My windshield is completely normal

If it's never been cleaned from the inside, it's a good chance it's not. The off-gassing from new cars causes fog on the inside of the windshield in front of the camera. It might behave ok (or wierd) but when sun hits it you get red hands of death.

You need to clean it yourself or have Tesla do it. They offer it for free. I did mine following this video and it wasn't bad if you have the right tool. After I did this things were completely fine in low direct sun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwiMCIxYFXM
by doubleg | 2026-01-12 13:16:32+00:00
I'm working on AppQuery, a Ruby gem that makes raw SQL for Rails more intuitive https://rubygems.org/gems/appquery.

You put queries in a file `app/queries/foo.sql.erb`. Casting works and can be customised. There's ERB-support for parameterisation, with helpers like order_by and paginate.

The gem can parse and rewrite CTEs which allows for 1) rewriting the query such that basic queries (first, take, count etc.) are performant (Rails does `resultset.count`).
And 2) given your query contains CTEs, it allows to write tests per CTE.
by 0ckpuppet | 2026-01-12 13:16:39+00:00
You're missing some history that pushed former Democratic vorers to vote Trump. Taxpayer funding of NGOs that were writing grants to organizations that were effectively censoring onlinespeech. This and the Disinformation Board, and the direct phone calls from US senators and Congressmen to takedown opposition ideas n social media was a direct attack on the First Amendment by the Democrats. Yes Trump's FCC threats over Jimmy Kimmel were also wrong, but he didn't have a government agency doing it to citizens. Trump ended that system. Also, DNC threw working class under the bus and chastise them for leaving the party that screwed them. If sports team politics is what you're hearing, you're being lied to.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-12 13:16:46+00:00
> It's so easy to verify that I'm surprised you're even making this claim.

Well, to be fair, I'm surprised you're even trying to say this claim isn't true, when it's so easy to test yourself.

If I prompt "Create a function with two arguments, a and b, which returns adding those two together", I'll get exactly what I specify. If I feel like it using u8 instead of u32 was wrong, I add "two arguments which are both u8", then you now get this.

Is this not the experience you get when you use LLMs? How does what you get differ from that?

> 1. There's always ambiguity, or else you'll end up an eternity writing specs

There isn't though, at one point it does end. If it's worth going so deep into specifying the exact implementation is up to you and what you're doing, sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't.

> LLMs will always produce different results even if the spec is 100% unambiguous for a huge variety of reasons, the main one being: their output is non-deterministic.

Again, it's so easy to verify that this isn't true, and also surprising you'd say this, because earlier you say "always ambiguity" yet somehow you seem to also know that you can be 100% unambiguous.

Like with "manual" programming, the answer is almost always "divide and conquer", when you apply that with enough granularity, you can reach "100% umambiguity".

> And even then the simple fact of "your context window is 80% full" can lead to things like "I've rewritten half of your code even though the spec only said that the button color should be green"

Yes, this is a real flaw, once you go beyond two messages, the models absolutely lose track almost immediately. Only workaround for this is constantly restarting the conversation. I never "correct" an agent if they get it wrong with more "No, I meant", I rewrite my first message so there are no corrections needed. If your context goes beyond ~20% of what's possible, you're gonna get shit results basically. Don't trust the "X tokens context length", because "what's possible" is very different from "what's usable".
by illuminator83 | 2026-01-12 13:16:51+00:00
There are lots of suboptimal solutions for lots of problems out there. I don't know why it would matter if the Linux Kernel does the same mistake.
And I'm sure that wasn't the only solution. Just something somebody implemented and noone bothered to change it because it worked "well enough".
But I wouldn't be surprised if this is known to cause the kind of issue GCs are known to cause such as race conditions, resource exhaustion and stalling.

Let me do some quick research:

https://gist.github.com/bobrik/82e5722261920c9f23d9402b88a0b...
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/cve-2024-26923
by carlosjobim | 2026-01-12 13:16:52+00:00
And OS X has top tier native apps for any use case imaginable. With a very healthy ecosystem of boutique developers and indie developers.

If the idea is moving from Windows to something better, then Mac is usually the answer. Unless you're a server admin, programmer, or gamer. Then Linux is probably great. Everybody wants to have tools that work well for the task.
Show HN: Shellbox – Instant Linux Boxes via SSH
by messh | 2026-01-12 13:17:06+00:00
I built a service that gives you instant Linux boxes using only SSH. No accounts, no CLI tools, no browser – just:

ssh shellbox.dev

Your SSH key is your identity. First connection creates your account.

Commands work over SSH:
ssh shellbox.dev create mybox
ssh -t shellbox.dev connect mybox
ssh shellbox.dev list

Each box gets a public HTTPS URL for serving apps or webhooks.

Pricing: $0.05/hr running, $0.005/hr paused. Boxes auto-pause on disconnect and resume where you left off.

Even billing stays in the terminal – run `ssh shellbox.dev funds 10` and you get a QR code right in your shell. Scan it, pay via Paddle, done. No account dashboards.

Specs: 2 vCPUs, 4GB RAM, 50GB SSD per box.

I wanted something I could spin up from any machine with just a terminal. No installs, no OAuth flows, no "please verify your email." Works great for quick experiments, running Claude Code in isolation, or giving demos a public URL.

Would love feedback. What's missing?
Ask HN: Are LLM providers making LLMs worse on purpose?
by everlier | 2026-01-12 13:17:15+00:00
The question is less about the classic MoE/Quantization debate, but more about the trained behaviors for a model.

It feels like the most ideal model for an LLM provider is the one where user have to follow up with another prompt to clarify or improve the result and make it behave like this maybe 50% of the time to avoid excessive churn.
by adrian_b | 2026-01-12 13:17:38+00:00
Right. This is how you make a laser.

When passing through a material that is at thermal equilibrium, light is attenuated, because a part of it is absorbed. On the other hand, if the material is not at thermal equilibrium and you prepare it to have a negative temperature (by "pumping", so that more molecules/atoms/ions are in states with higher energy than they are in states with lower energy), then when light passes through the material it can be amplified (by stimulated emission), instead of being attenuated, like through a material at positive temperature.

Of course, in any laser/maser material, only a very small fraction of its constituents have an energy distribution corresponding to a negative temperature, there is no known method that could force a whole piece of a material to have a negative temperature (because the energy would redistribute spontaneously inside the material towards what corresponds to a positive temperature, faster than energy could be provided from the outside; lasers use some special energy states that have a low probability of decaying spontaneously, so they persist enough time after pumping).
by mistahenry | 2026-01-12 13:17:40+00:00
I lived in Germany and Indonesia. It’s easier for me now back in the US than ever to eat healthy.

I can buy pre-chopped Cole slaw, diced peppers / onions, etc. Whole Foods is best in class (Alnatura doesn’t come close)

While to me, the layman, it seems health regulation in general in Europe is more conservative about what can be put on the body / be consumed, I think it’s mostly Americans don’t want to eat healthy. And the portion sizes here are insane (just look at the evolution dinner plate. 1960s plates at an antique sale only pass for salad plates)
by notepad0x90 | 2026-01-12 13:17:41+00:00
> Commit first

pre-commit hooks?

Also, what are they talking about with "POSIX systems", is this a really old SCM? I've been using git natively on Windows for so many years, I don't remember how many.

Either way, any new SCM needs to interoperate or easily convert git repos if it wants mass adaption. I don't think git is programmatic enough, it can get really obese really fast (even with pruning/gc), it would be great if client-side "plugins" were a thing pushed by remotes (for things like secret scanning, linting), and I do agree that something like sqlite as a back-end would suit it better for performance. I would want newer gits to really be thought as more than an SCM. People are using it to manage all kinds of state. You can run countries with the dam thing! :), and some are trying.

I've thought about distributed-ledgers using git too, with or to replace block-chains.
by mark_l_watson | 2026-01-12 13:17:43+00:00
Well prepared article, and the window resizing pisses me off also!

For practical reasons I am stuck inside Apple’s macOS garden, but I wanted to share a few things that at least make me feel content using macOS:

First, I have at least two VPS systems so via mosh/ssh/tmux I always have Linux dev environments, the ability to use throwaway VPS for sandboxing, etc.

Second, when actually working on macOS I stick with tools that make me happy: Emacs and terminal windows, a uv-based Python enviroment and tuned-up Common Lisp, Haskel, and Clojure dev environments.

Anyway, I am just sharing my ‘macOS therapy’ - hope it helps someone here.