MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Ideon – An open source, infinite canvas for your project's segmentation
by expyth0n | 2026-01-26 18:48:11+00:00
The problem: I want to use my tools. You want to use yours. The contractor we hired uses yet another set of tools. This causes unnecessary friction for all participants.

Ideon is a self-hosted visual workspace designed to bridge this gap. It doesn't replace your existing stack (GitHub, Figma, Notion, etc.) but provides a shared context where all these pieces live together on an infinite canvas.

We built this because projects often die from fragmentation—code is in one place, decisions in chat logs, and visuals in design tools. Ideon aims to keep the project "mentally navigable" for everyone involved.

Key features:
- Visual Blocks: Organize Repositories, Notes, Links, Files, and People spatially.
- State History: Track how decisions evolved with workspace snapshots.
- Multiplayer: Real-time collaboration.
- Self-hosted: Docker-based and AGPLv3 licensed.

Tech stack: Next.js, PostgreSQL, Docker.

Would love to hear your feedback on the approach!
by tikhonj | 2026-01-26 18:48:42+00:00
A major part of what makes somebody "the best" is tacit knowledge. This is the sort of skill and "know-how" you can build up from experience and one-on-one instruction, but cannot easily be captured in text.

For programmers, this manifests as some mix of intuition and taste. I've worked with people who have had some especial insight that most doesn't; they don't necessarily "produce" the most, but they make the right key decisions and create the kind of core abstractions and systems that provide a better foundation for everything down the line. Or, alternatively, perhaps they're just preternaturally great at finding and fixing bugs. (My experience has been that really good folks tend to lean heavily towards one side or the other, even if they're solid at both.)

I've written before about how this should change how we structure our teams and manage creative, high-leverage work[1]. The same concept should also change how we find and evaluate candidates, but, honestly, I'm not sure how. Evaluating tacit knowledge and expertise is hard, even for experts!

One thing I've found that works is figuring out a way to show-rather-than-tell that you're willing to do things differently. Doing things differently won't be appealing to everyone, but it will be very appealing to specific kinds of experts! When you can't compete on comp and brand, this is one of the better options. One way to do this is to use a specialized, niche language like Haskell. Alex saw this in action at Freckle and I saw it in action hiring folks for Target's supply chain optimization team. But it doesn't have to be a language specifically; it just has to be something that at least some experts care about, and that you can demonstrate. (Just saying you're doing something different or technically interesting won't work because everybody is saying that!)

[1]: https://jelv.is/blog/Letting-Experts-Be-Experts/
by mrandish | 2026-01-26 18:49:06+00:00
> the token counts to achieve these results

I've also been increasingly curious about better metrics to objectively assess relative model progress. In addition to the decreasing ability of standardized benchmarks to identify meaningful differences in the real-world utility of output, it's getting harder to hold input variables constant for apples-to-apples comparison. Knowing which model scores higher on a composite of diverse benchmarks isn't useful without adjusting for GPU usage, energy, speed, cost, etc.
by dakiol | 2026-01-26 18:49:29+00:00
As an IC that's been in the industry for over a decade, I don't see myself jumping into the management track. I just can't. I see my calendar and I see few meetings, and typically I have the power to move some of them (because some of them are arranged by me). I see my manager's calendar and it's constantly packed with meetings he probably cannot move. Worse than that, I see for instance he has one meeting at 10, then another at 12, then another at 3 and then another at 5. Like, you cannot escape that hell. I start my work at 10, work solid 4-5 hours or so and then close the laptop. I cannot sacrifice that kind of freedom
by xiphias2 | 2026-01-26 18:49:36+00:00
There's only one thing they need to replace if they want to show independence: ChatGPT. They had their chance with Mistral and failed spectacularly with just creating anti-AI regulations.

As a European I'm happy to use their product (and pay for it), I just ask one tiny little thing from them: build a better model with lower latency.
by socalgal2 | 2026-01-26 18:49:37+00:00
Tons of people unfortunately see this as ok. My response to them is always "let me tag your car, your house, your laptop" and if you complain you're a hypocrite

I like "Street Art" where permission has been given. I don't like tagging and property destruction. Maybe when I get a little older I'll find some graffiti exhibit at a museum and go tag it.
by Andrew0416 | 2026-01-26 18:49:47+00:00
How do modern companies ensure that software projects are delivered on time, within budget, and with the right quality? Can a structured approach really reduce risks and costly mistakes during development? The systems development life cycle (SDLC) is often presented as the backbone of effective system creation, but how relevant is it in today’s fast-changing tech environment?

From planning and requirements analysis to design, implementation, testing, deployment, and maintenance, each phase of the systems development life cycle plays a specific role. But do all projects truly benefit from following every stage strictly, or is flexibility more important? How do agile and DevOps approaches fit into the traditional SDLC model?

Is the systems development life cycle still a must-have framework for building reliable systems, or has it evolved into something more adaptive and hybrid?
by akurilin | 2026-01-26 18:50:19+00:00
I've often heard the idea that you can always teach someone how to code, but you can't teach them to want to be great at it.

At the same time, I think there's a limit to how great someone can get even with a lot of experience. We see that with sports, there's probably a similar limit to cognitive activities too.

You can probably get the average, already smart person, to be a pretty good 8/10 on just about anything, be that music, math, writing, coding. But there are levels beyond that may require natural wiring that most of us just aren't born with. An extreme example of course, but there's no amount of experience I can acquire to get to a von Neumann level of genius, but fortunately we don't need that to build business web apps.
by advisedwang | 2026-01-26 18:50:38+00:00
LLMs do not learn as they go in the same way people do. People's brains are plastic and immediately adapt to new information but for LLMs:

1. Past decisions and outcomes get into the context window, but that hasn't actually updated any model weights.

2. Your interaction possible eventually gets into the training data for a future LLM. But this is incredibly diluted form of learning.
by anonnon | 2026-01-26 18:50:40+00:00
> While the US was seizing Russian oil tankers

The US, under Trump, also bombed and sanctioned Iran, a major ally of Russia and supplier of drones and drone parts, and kidnapped Maduro, their staunchest ally in the Western Hemisphere, and tariffed countries buying Russian energy, and seized an actual Russian-flagged (not "shadow") tanker, despite it having a submarine escort--something Europe would never have the will to do.

> Europe is far more aligned with Russia than they are against

Also note the shift by Canada and Europe to trade more with China. Obviously some trade with China is unavoidable, but seeing them running into the arms of Beijing is quite unexpected, given that China is the single largest consumer of Russian energy exports, and in turn supplies Russia with various restricted, "dual use" components for their drone and other munitions programs, along with vital intelligence for launching strikes in Ukraine.
by tomaytotomato | 2026-01-26 18:51:03+00:00
Thanks for this - its interesting how I have come to this conclusion as well.

My reworked approach is to return a list of results with a probability or certainty score.

In the situation of someone searching for London, I need to add some sort of priority for London, UK.

My dataset is sourced from an opensource JSON file which I am now pre-processing and identifying all collisions on it.

There are so many collisions!

Could I pick your brains and you could critique my approach? Thanks
by rglullis | 2026-01-26 18:51:08+00:00
And more than that, the need for people/business to pay the premium for SOTA getting smaller and smaller.

I thought that OpenAI was doomed the moment that Zuckerberg showed he was serious about commoditizing LLM. Even if llama wasn't the GPT killer, it showed that there was no secret formula and that OpenAI had no moat.
by dakshgupta | 2026-01-26 18:51:18+00:00
I agree that none perform _super_ well.

I would argue they go far beyond linters now, which was perhaps not true even nine months ago.

To the degree you consider this to be evidence, in the last 7 days, the authors of a PR has replied to a Greptile comment with "great catch", "good catch", etc. 9,078 times.
by rayiner | 2026-01-26 18:52:18+00:00
Issuing bonds is how virtually every large water system pays for capital projects. My county is very financially responsible (triple AAA bond rating), but it has hundreds of millions in debt outstanding for water/sewer: https://www.fitchratings.com/research/us-public-finance/fitc.... This is a small county with just half a million people.

Again, how much money did these UK water companies invest? What's the number? Without knowing that, you're in no position to say it's in the range of what a government utility would be able to pay out of operating surplus, without issuing bonds.
by zrn900 | 2026-01-26 18:52:21+00:00
After enforcing age verification to prevent children from viewing those pesky Gaza genocide videos that Israel did not want them to see, they gotta ensure that those brats wont be able to get around it and still see the videos.

Its amazing how this censorship was brought on rapidly and precisely after Netanyahu demanded it at the start of last year. No surprise as half of Starmer government was funded by zionists.
by Conscat | 2026-01-26 18:52:31+00:00
If the APE concept isn't appealing to you, you may be interested in the work on LLVM libC. My friend recently delivered an under-appreciated lecture on the vision:

https://youtu.be/HtCMCL13Grg

tl;dw Google recognizes the need for a statically-linked modular latency sensitive portable POSIX runtime, and they are building it.
by JCattheATM | 2026-01-26 18:53:07+00:00
> Who funds a federal agent executing a citizen?

Racists, fundamentalist christians, xenophobes, anyone happy with the way they think ICE is 'cleaning up' the country, which involves dealing with 'enemies'.

> Did they not watch the same videos we all did?

They did, and continue to insist on an interpretation not supported at all. It's like literally pointing at green grass and insisting it's red.
by liamconnell | 2026-01-26 18:53:08+00:00
> It is, but when a model/harness/tools/system prompts are the same/similar in the generator and reviewer fail in similar ways.

Is there empirical evidence for that? Where is it on an epistemic meter between (1) “it sounds good when I say it”, and (10) “someone ran evaluation and got significant support.”

“Vibes” (2/3 on scale) are ok, just honestly curious.
by __s | 2026-01-26 18:53:19+00:00
> indicates a slight tendency for White to face harder opening decisions

supporting the quip "the hardest game is to win is a won game"

Not surprised at end re classical position not being the most even configuration. In that configuration bishops & knights practically start aimed at controlling center, so there's little awkward properties to dampen White's initiative. One of the rooks even get to castle out of the corner

Chess960 would be better if they just got rid of castling in it, tho wouldn't be surprised if that makes for certain positions getting even worse for Black

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26066844 for thought on game theory of strategy when playing perfect is computationally infeasible
by ahmadyan | 2026-01-26 18:53:33+00:00
> 2. What on earth is this defense of their product?

i think the distribution channel is the only defensive moat in low-to-mid-complexity fast-to-implement features like code-review agents. So in case of linear and cursor-bugbot it make a lot of sense. I wonder when Github/Gitlab/Atlassian or Xcode will release their own review agent.
by moritzwarhier | 2026-01-26 18:53:34+00:00
And it relates directly to enshittification. I miss a lot of interesting content because I am already trained to not put any effort into content in audio or video format.

It needs extraordinary reputation combined with being engaging, so it requires even more discipline compared to skimming text from unknown sources.

When audio is music, it's a bit easier to "get a vibe", but that can be hugely misleading.

Which brings in the time dimension of content.

Text - Audio - Video

to me is an order where consuming each format is more directly dependent on the time dimension than the one before.
by YougOtricked | 2026-01-26 18:53:37+00:00
Did you read the readme? look it directly says Quantum Features
Quantum C is the world's second quantum programming language (at least, that more than like 2 people would ever say the name of(now that statement is true)), but the first that doesn't require a $10M quantum computer!

Quantum Booleans
qbool qb = both; // Superposition! Both true AND false!

qif (qb) {
println("True path"); // Executes!
} qelse {
println("False path"); // ALSO executes!
}
Quantum Logic Operators
// Note these are not for normal booleans
&&& - Quantum AND
||| - Quantum OR
!! - Quantum NOT
^^ - Quantum XOR
=== - Quantum EQUAL
!== - Quantum NOT EQUAL
|&| - Collapse OR (convert to bool)
&|& - Collapse AND (convert to bool)
by brooke2k | 2026-01-26 18:53:57+00:00
wow, this release looks really cool! this part especially:

> With the new LibGodot, you can now embed the engine directly into your own applications. Instead of running Godot as a separate executable, you can control startup, manage the engine loop, and integrate it seamlessly into custom workflows.

it might seem like a small thing but the IoC setup of Godot makes it really annoying to build certain game infrastructure (specifically in my case, automated testing) because everything is beholden to the main engine loop, to the node tree getting mounted, etc. being able to take control of that and have the engine run under your own terms is super cool.

that being said, I'll probably wait for a couple versions before trying it out on my game since I'm sure it's not exactly battle-tested yet
by advisedwang | 2026-01-26 18:53:58+00:00
The law doesn't work like that. First of all, the actual regulation that gets made probably has a definition of VPN and won't rely on a company self-describing as VPN. Secondly law enforcement and courts aren't idiots*

* well, many of them are. But not in the particular way that would be needed for a simple rename to work.
Ask HN: Is Gaussian Splattering useful for analyzing Pretti's death?
by mdnahas | 2026-01-26 18:53:59+00:00
It is now common to have multiple people using their smartphones to video the same event. I'm thinking Pretti and Good's killings. I've heard of Gaussian Splattering, which constructs a 3D scene from multiple cameras. Is it useful for these analyzing these events? And, if so, can someone build an easy-to-use open source tool?

My speculation is that it would be useful to: (1) synchronize video, (2) get more detail than a single camera can get, (3) track objects (like Pretti's gun) that are seen by multiple cameras, and (4) identify AI generated video.

The last is most important to me. There is a danger of AI generated or modified video of an event. It seems possible to me that Gaussian Splattering from N videos will be able to detect if the N+1 video is consistent or inconsistent with the scene.

Is this possible?
by SyneRyder | 2026-01-26 18:54:02+00:00
I liked this idea when it came out, and there was some software that implemented it. Mr Schedule by Andrew Pietschy added outliner functionality to Joel's idea, so you could see how much time a group of subtasks would take (and if you should maybe drop that feature group to make your deadline). It had some keyboard driven shortcuts that made it faster to move around in than Excel, while making things simpler.

Unfortunately Mr Schedule and the pietschy.com website disappeared. I made my own recreation using REALbasic / Xojo at the time, but never released it and faded from using it.

Joel Spolsky expanded the idea later with Evidence Based Scheduling:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/10/26/evidence-based-sch...

That takes the estimates from Painless Software Schedules, but runs a Monte Carlo simulation using your estimates & data on actual time taken, to create a confidence distribution curve graph of when you'll be finished.
by seniorThrowaway | 2026-01-26 18:54:06+00:00
I've been doing this a long time too. The anti-patterns tend to come from the hype cycles of "xyz shiny tool/pattern will take away all the nasty human problems that end up creating bad software". Yes, LLMs will follow this cycle too, and, I agree we are in a kind of sweet spot moment for LLMs where they were able to ingest massive amounts of training material from the open web. That will not be the case going forward, as people seek to more tightly guard their IP. The (open) question is whether the training material that exists plus whatever the tools can self generate is good enough for them to improve themselves in a closed loop cycle. LLM generated code was the right tool for my job today; doesn't mean it's the right tool for everyone's job or that it always will be. One thing constant in this industry is change. Sold as revolutionary, which is the truth, in the sense of going in circles/cycles.
by foobar10000 | 2026-01-26 18:54:36+00:00
For your Edit 2 - yes. Being discussed and looked at actively in both the open and (presumably being looked at) closed communities. Open communities being, for example : https://ssp.mit.edu/cnsp/about. They just published a series of lectures with open attendance if you wanted to listen in via zoom - but yeap - that's the gist of it. Spawned a huge discussion :)
by ryandrake | 2026-01-26 18:54:43+00:00
You could publish hashes of the flaggers' usernames rather than the usernames themselves. The point is not to go on witch hunts--it's to stop the endless discussions and questioning around whether what we are all seeing (certain topics always seeming to disappear quickly) is the result of flagging activity that is evenly distributed across the site or coming from a relative handful of brigaders.
by ajross | 2026-01-26 18:54:54+00:00
Just to point out, because the article skips the step: YouTube is a hosting site, not a source. Saying that something "cites YouTube" sounds bad, but it depends on what the link is. To be blunt: if Gemini is answering a question about Cancer with a link to a Mayo Clinic video, that's a good thing, a good cite, and what we want it to do.
by mmooss | 2026-01-26 18:55:02+00:00
Hi - I understand you feel strongly; your Web Mercator input is interesting. I would just focus on the intellectually interesting part - people might not get it; you can't control that or compel them to.

You've been repeating essentially the same comment, writing in all caps (in some comments), complaining about downvotes, telling everyone they are idiots one way or another. None of those things are likely to be welcome.
by mrtesthah | 2026-01-26 18:55:18+00:00
One type of deception, conspiracy content, is able to sell products on the basis that the rest of the world is wrong or hiding something from you, and only the demagogue knows the truth.

Anti-vax quacks rely on this tactic in particular. The reason they attack vaccines is that they are so profoundly effective and universally recognized that to believe otherwise effectively isolates the follower from the vast majority of healthcare professionals, forcing trust and dependency on the demagogue for all their health needs. Mercola built his supplement business on this concept.

The more widespread the idea they’re attacking the more isolating (and hence stickier) the theory. This might be why flat earthers are so dogmatic.
by zrn900 | 2026-01-26 18:55:34+00:00
> House of Lords amendments do not have to be accepted by the House of Commons and may not make it into law

Except the Lords can send back a law indefinitely until the Commons accepts it. There have been cases in which laws were sent back 60 times until what the Lords wanted was added. A house with hereditary posts with infinite veto power.

The UK is not democracy. It never was.
by jhickok | 2026-01-26 18:56:16+00:00
I had a similar experience with Derek Parfit's "Reasons and Persons", but he offers some solace:

‘When I believed [that personal identity is what matters], I seemed imprisoned in myself. My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness. When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air. There is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people. But the difference is less. Other people are closer. I am less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of others.

When I believed [that personal identity is what matters], I also cared more about my inevitable death. After my death, there will be no one living who will be me. I can now redescribe this fact. Though there will later be many experiences, none of these experiences will be connected to my present experiences by chains of such direct connections as those involved in experience-memory, or in the carrying out of an earlier intention. Some of these future experiences may be related to my present experiences in less direct ways. There will later be some memories about my life. And there may later be thoughts that are influenced by mine, or things done as the result of my advice. My death will break the more direct relations between my present experiences and future experiences, but it will not break various other relations. This is all there is to the fact that there will be no one living who will be me. Now that I have seen this, my death seems to me less bad.’
by sdenton4 | 2026-01-26 18:56:22+00:00
Independence is ridiculous - the underlying llm models are too similar on their training days and methodologies to be anything like independent. Trying different models may somewhat reduce the dependency, but all have read stack overflow, Reddit, and GitHub in their training.

It might be an interesting time to double down on automatically building and checking deterministic models of code which were previously too much of a pain to bother with. Eg, adding type checking to lazy python code. These types of checks really are model independent, and using agents to build and manage them might bring a lot of value.
by zahlman | 2026-01-26 18:56:51+00:00
Just for the record, "uv environments" are ordinary Python virtual environments, and aside from the "optional portable Python interpreter" they are already contained within a single top-level directory. If just copying that folder wasn't working for you, that's because of absolute paths (in shebangs added to wrapper scripts, in the activation script, and maybe in `pyvenv.cfg` or something like that). Your approach avoids that by giving uv the data required to re-create the environment at the destination. (There have been many tools like this in the past and there's nothing fundamentally wrong with the idea.)