MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by publicdebates | 2026-01-28 18:08:14+00:00
I don't know why they do that, but it's really the main (only?) drawback to KDP.

My guess is that they do expand, but only when genuinely needed for long-term. They probably keep a certain amount of blank books in stock, and ration them out to PoD books somewhat evenly, with established books getting higher priority.

This was the video that singlehandedly got me all those sales I mentioned earlier: https://www.tiktok.com/@alwayscandid/video/73180668430448755... ... honestly it's quite poetic how it all turned out. I did almost no work making a book, I made way more money than I ever deserved, I wasted all of it, and now I'm sleeping in my car. It's very fair, it's more than fair. It's generous.
by brewdad | 2026-01-28 18:08:16+00:00
We are already at a point where the richest 10% of Americans represent half of total consumer spending. A lot of companies would fail but plenty of them would survive just fine if we assume AI won't take literally ALL of the jobs.

As for the civil unrest, I see Minneapolis as a bit of a dry run of what it would take to remove large numbers of presumably poor minorities along with anyone else who objects. The job is clearly more than the leadership expected but it still seems within the realm of possibility given the fact the minority party leaders are barely saying no to those in power.
by Paianni | 2026-01-28 18:08:26+00:00
It's happened at least three times:

Win8.1 x64 required double-width compare and exchange instruction support, so people who bought Win8 for a CPU or motherboard that didn't support it had to downgrade to the 32-bit version or lose support in 2016.

Win7 updates from 2018 onwards required SSE2 with no warning.

Win11 24H2 and later won't install on x86 processors that don't support the x86-64-v2 baseline.
by BurningFrog | 2026-01-28 18:08:46+00:00
"The economy" is entirely driven by human needs.

If you "unwind" all the complexities in modern supply chains, there are always human people paying for something they want at the leaf nodes.

Take the food and clothing industries as obvious examples. In some AI singularity scenario where all humans are unemployed and dirt poor, does all the food and clothing produced by the automated factories just end up in big piles because we naked and starving people can't afford to buy them?
by thefaux | 2026-01-28 18:08:53+00:00
The examples that you and others provide are always fundamentally uninteresting to me. Many, if not most, are some variant of a CRUD application. I have yet seen a single ai generated thing that I personally wanted to use and/or spend time with. I also can't help but wonder what we might have accomplished if we devoted the same amount of resources to developing better tools, languages and frameworks to developers instead of automating the generation of boiler plate and selling developer's own skills back to them. Imagine if open source maintainers instead had been flooded with billions of dollars in capital. What might be possible?

And also, the capacities of llms are almost besides the point. I don't use llms but I have no doubt that for any arbitrary problem that can be expressed textually and is computable in finite time, in the limit as time goes to infinity, an llm will be able to solve it. The more important and interesting questions are what _should_ we build with llms and what should we _not_ build with them. These arguments about capacity are distracting from these more important questions.
by AnotherGoodName | 2026-01-28 18:09:00+00:00
Also just to be clear on the outcome of what you said: Humans will be cheaper than AI in order to compete.

AI uses 10litres of water and 10kwh of power per day to digg a hole? You'd better do it for less human!

I'm not sure on the human needs costs vs the AI costs and what lifestyle it would allow me. I'm sure as shit not having kids in such a world. I suspect it's ghetto like meager living while competing against machines optimised to do a job.
Show HN: A Specialized Grok Prompt Refiner for Vision API
by thenextechtrade | 2026-01-28 18:09:12+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been working on a specialized tool designed to optimize the Grok prompt experience: Grok Bikini (grok-bikini.com).

The Engineering Goal: My focus is on the Grok prompt refinement logic. While the Grok Vision API is powerful, standard inputs often fail to capture the high-fidelity nuances required for fashion synthesis. I built a layer that programmatically wraps a simple Grok prompt into a structured, photography-spec instruction set—handling lighting, textures, and lens parameters within the model's latent space.

Experimental Setup: To test this, I automated a multi-lingual TDK system for 19 languages. The goal is to see how different cultural contexts interact with the same Grok prompt engine through a semantic buffer (using /grok-prompt-swimwear paths) to balance high-intent keywords with safety filters.

Click https://grok-bikini.com/grok-prompt-swimwear to use Grok Prompt.
by aghilmort | 2026-01-28 18:09:17+00:00
we've considered docker, firecracker, will add smol to working roster

context <> building something with QEMU

* required has to support LMW+AI (linux/mac/windows + android/ios)

there are scenarios in which we might spin micro vms inside that main vm, which by default is almost always Debian Linux distro with high probability.

one scenario is say ETL vm and AI vm isolated for various things

curious why building another microVM other than sheer joy of building, what smol does better or different, why use smol, etc. (microVMs to avoid etc also fair game :)
by boelboel | 2026-01-28 18:09:37+00:00
Because it's an attack on 'american culture', I'm not even sure if nerds get bullied that much in school anymore.

Often "nerds" are the ones bullying, i say "nerds" because the people getting good grades and into great universities, the ones getting into tech, are often just strivers instead of nerds.

"Real nerds" are a tiny minority of people in any country and I doubt they account for most immigrants in the US, it's mostly just upper middle class strivers I've noticed.
by YesThatTom2 | 2026-01-28 18:09:41+00:00
Shhh! Don’t tell anyone.

Years ago MS depended on Windows. It was the profit center. Everything MS did was a moat to sell more seats. Even MS-Exchange was just a ploy to force enterprises to stop deploying any other operating system.

That all changed with Azure.

MS realized they could make billions in Windows or trillions with Azure.

They changed the org structure. Now Azure is at the top and everything else is a moat or a way to draw people to Azure. They changed the sales commission (your multiplier doesn’t kick in unless you’ve sold enough cloud services).

Windows is no longer a profit center. It’s a cost center.

Anything that scares people away from using Windows is a benefit.

Let those other suckers spend money developing operating systems. As long as it runs on a VM in Azure, Microsoft will profit.

Windows being worse and worse isn’t a bug. It’s a feature.
by db48x | 2026-01-28 18:10:04+00:00
It’s been done. Emacs, for example, has rx notation. From the manual:

35.3.3 The ‘rx’ Structured Regexp Notation
------------------------------------------

As an alternative to the string-based syntax, Emacs provides the
structured ‘rx’ notation based on Lisp S-expressions. This notation is
usually easier to read, write and maintain than regexp strings, and can
be indented and commented freely. It requires a conversion into string
form since that is what regexp functions expect, but that conversion
typically takes place during byte-compilation rather than when the Lisp
code using the regexp is run.

Here is an ‘rx’ regexp(1) that matches a block comment in the C
programming language:

(rx "/*" ; Initial /*
(zero-or-more
(or (not "*") ; Either non-*,
(seq "*" ; or * followed by
(not "/")))) ; non-/
(one-or-more "*") ; At least one star,
"/") ; and the final /

or, using shorter synonyms and written more compactly,

(rx "/*"
(* (| (not "*")
(: "*" (not "/"))))
(+ "*") "/")

In conventional string syntax, it would be written

"/\\*\\(?:[^*]\\|\\*[^/]\\)*\\*+/"

Of course, it does have one disadvantage. As the manual says:

The ‘rx’ notation is mainly useful in Lisp code; it cannot be used in
most interactive situations where a regexp is requested, such as when
running ‘query-replace-regexp’ or in variable customization.

Raku also has advanced the state of the art considerably.
by onlyrealcuzzo | 2026-01-28 18:10:07+00:00
> It's uniquely American to believe that your life will end when AI takes your job.

It's probably because it's uniquely American for a sizable chunk of the workforce to have cushy jobs that appear ripe for the picking.

AI is not going to immediately replace food service work, manual labor, farming, hospitality, etc.

But it might replace quite high-paid software jobs, finance jobs, legal jobs, etc. One, if AI is good at anything it's things at least tangential to this. Two, these have costs high enough that off-setting is at least worth trying.

My suspicion is that ultimately it will lead to more of these types of jobs, though it could easily come with a huge reduction - and the jobs aren't guaranteed to be in the same countries.

You could create 3x as many of these jobs, and still end up with -25% of them in the US. Who knows.
by krs_ | 2026-01-28 18:10:16+00:00
There have certainly been issues (I've been on Linux with mostly nvidia GPUs since 2004) but it's
almost always been caused by the module being outside the kernel, and a kernel update breaking compatibility sometimes, understandably. This has always been fixed quickly on nvidias end though. And early Wayland issues and the current DX12 -> Vulkan translation performance issues in more recent times.

But overall I've also had a mostly stable experience during that time. New hardware is supported mostly at release. Not always supporting all the latest features straight away mind you, but still. Meanwhile I seem to hear about issues with support for Intel and AMD cards at release frequently in comparison.
by dodobirdlord | 2026-01-28 18:10:26+00:00
Amazon’s hiring bar has historically been very low, with a philosophy that if it doesn’t work out you can always just fire the person later. A similar philosophy exists for staffing up teams for speculative projects. If it doesn’t work out you can just axe the whole division after a couple of years. Periodic large layoffs are a natural consequence of operating like this.
by rvnx | 2026-01-28 18:11:25+00:00
There are a couple of bots here.

Quoting a user:

keeping it simple: a flat $15,000 to get you on the front page of Hacker News.
[...] contact e-mail below

Expensive, but now with LLMs it's super cheap to do.

Spend a week to do a bot, get 10'000 USD of ARR for your B2B tech SaaS, and applause from your investors.

And a week is probably exaggerated, 2 days max
by nonethewiser | 2026-01-28 18:11:34+00:00
>All in a way that shows a clear "China bad, US good" perspective

Nope.

My comment was neutral on the US - I emphasized the detriment of censorship on models which is true insofar as the US censors models.

Whereas the other comment moves the goalposts from "i dont necessarily see the problem with censorship on models" when presented evidence to the contrary by attacking the US. It was never about US vs. China (to anyone else). That's the deflection.
by goatlover | 2026-01-28 18:11:48+00:00
The Polars code puts me off as being too verbose and requiring too many steps. I love the broadcasting ability that Pandas gets from Numpy. It's what sceintific computing should look like in my opinon. Maybe R, Julia or some array-based language does it a bit better than Numpy/Pandas, but it's certainly not like the Polars example.
by mmooss | 2026-01-28 18:11:54+00:00
Raw Story is not a particulary credible source, but it raises important questions: What are the effects of chemical [0] crowd control tools, such as tear gas? Is it more than pain / discomfort? They cite this Lethal In Disguise report (which might be a good FPP):

https://lethalindisguise.org/

According to the PDF (in its summary, p. 12): "Tear gas has continued to be used extensively around the world. While chemical irritants continue to be the primary crowd-control agent used by law enforcement and security forces to repress and disperse protests, there is almost no publicly accessible manufacturer or government-sanctioned literature on the composition, health or environmental safety standards on the use of these weapons."

That's pretty surprising given tear gas's long history. I wonder if it's a failure of research or of this report.

[0] I doubt it takes much to grasp the consequences of kinetic tools.
by jerryjobrien | 2026-01-28 18:11:59+00:00
Changing the deal retroactively breaks trust.
Sustainable monetization is fine — but only when new costs map to new value.
Taking away features people already paid for isn’t pricing evolution, it’s expectation debt coming due.

My rule: You can change the future. You can’t rewrite the past.

If you want to monetize long-term, protect ownership, data access, and core functionality — then charge for what truly costs you to keep running.

let me know if you can help more.
by neogodless | 2026-01-28 18:12:00+00:00
To me, this is the one thorn in Linux (and the Linux online community) that gives me pause.

For the people that it just works for, well it just works for.

For anyone else, apparently they are the problem? Not Linux?

Well sorry no. I did get StarCraft 2 working with Lutris... once. Then I couldn't get it to start again. Eventually I switched to running Battle.Net from Steam and for some reason that did work. But it wasn't a "just works" or "piece of cake." It was a puzzle.
by bee_rider | 2026-01-28 18:12:00+00:00
Hypothetically on a fully controlled system you could prevent attacks like the sort of “hello this is Microsoft, we’ve identified a virus on your device, please download teamviewer and login to your bank account so we can clear it for you” type spam calls.

Or, hasn’t there been malware that periodically takes screenshots of the device? Or maybe that’s a Hollywood plot, I forget actually.
Show HN: Built an app to replace our failed group podcast experiment
by 1manstartup | 2026-01-28 18:12:00+00:00
After college, my friends scattered across time zones. We tried starting a podcast to stay in touch, everyone would record updates, uploads them to Google Drive, and we planned to eventually publish episodes.

We never published one. Turns out we didn't want a public podcast, but "the podcast" gave us a reason to keep in touch and share stories/thoughts.

Google Drive was terrible for our needs. Record in one app, then upload. No notifications, bad organization. The worst part was when responding to something specific, I'd have to manually timestamp it and repeat their point before commenting. Completely broke the flow.

So I built Roads Audio. Private audio messaging where you can reply to specific moments with timestamped comments. Conversations branch naturally instead of stacking linearly. The hardest technical problem was handling infinite nested timestamped threads and querying position in the conversation tree, then displaying that in a user-friendly UI.

I built with Flutter/Django and have been working on it for a few years (here's the original micro-podcasting launch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37758099). Initially positioned as a podcast alternative, but I've realized it's really about staying connected through longer-form audio without immediate response pressure.

The app has evolved a lot over the years and I'm always looking for more feedback from people who are interested in async audio. I still use it regularly with the same friend group; if it seems interesting let me know what you think!
by frumplestlatz | 2026-01-28 18:12:13+00:00
This is depressing.

We need different language for describing things AI did for us vs things we figured out ourselves. When a human presents work under their own name, there is an unspoken but widely relied-upon assumption that the presenter has exercised judgment over the space of possible choices and can explain why these ones were taken.

In other words, we naturally assume they engaged with the problem space deeply enough to justify the decisions made.

I think AI-produced code and investigation needs a disclaimer, and I say that as someone who uses vibe coding a lot to produce tooling used in our development process.

If you didn’t do it or write it yourself, you don’t understand it as well as if you had. If you didn’t look at the output in great detail and understand every choice made, you really shouldn’t be putting your name on it — or staking your reputation on it — without a pretty clear disclaimer.

And if you present an investigation done by AI as something done by yourself, you’re not really providing human insights. (Almost) anyone can drive an AI, and there’s not a lot of value there for your audience if you don’t disclose that’s what you did.

If you attach your name to work, you are asserting that you can meaningfully answer “why this and not something else?” across the decisions that matter. Tools that produce answers faster than humans think require new language, because our old words still imply thought occurred.
by elric | 2026-01-28 18:12:17+00:00
Welcome to the club. I started my Linux and BSD journey in ~1998 and I haven't really touched Windows since ~2001 except for the occasional brief interaction.

I've never missed it. Like at all. There have been instances where some piece of software didn't have a Linux alternative, that's mostly been a mild inconvenience. There have been cases where it's been a serious problem too, such as when my ever-so-wonderful government decided to start using e-ID which only worked on Windows (thanks, Wouter from grep.be for fixing that).

Mostly I enjoy how I'm in control of my machine, instead of having to rely on a bunch of untrustworthy moneygrabbers who seem hell-bent on making the worst possible decisions at every turn.
by sieep | 2026-01-28 18:12:24+00:00
We don't really do the whole calling people stupid or flaming around here. You can make your point and leave it at that or don't comment. This sort of behavior will get you banned by the very active mod team in the future. You can refresh yourself on the guidelines of the site: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Here's a section just for you:
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names."
by rayiner | 2026-01-28 18:12:27+00:00
You're completely correct, except that I do see it. In fact, I was talking with another Bengali just the other day about how our parents aren't viscerally offended by Trump the way many Americans are, because he's like an Indian or Bangladeshi politician.

Trump himself reflects how immigration is changing America. Blue Rose Research projects that Trump tied or narrowly won naturalized citizens like me: https://data.blueroseresearch.org/hubfs/2024%20Blue%20Rose%2... (page 9). Democrats historically got 80% of the Bangladeshi immigrant vote. But last year, Trump actually campaigned in Queens and Little Bangladesh in Jackson Heights swung a net 50 points to the right. Mitt Romney isn't a viable Republican today. Trump is.

So your diagnosis is correct. But I think your prescription is like telling liberals "why don't you just pay more taxes if that's what you want?" I would like to return to an America where my options are between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. But I don't see how unilaterally disarming gets me there. We're locked in a prisoner's dilemma. As more and more of the electorate is comprised of people who don't have traditional Anglo cultural sensibilities, both sides have strong incentives to capitalize on that however they can. Mamdani is what that looks like on the left, Trump is what that looks like on the right.
by calhoun137 | 2026-01-28 18:12:35+00:00
You can find the live demo here:

https://base-1-srrnmbhh3rkmnk8ygcxhvb.streamlit.app/

It seems that waking up the demo from the iframe doesn't always work, but directly visiting the embed url can wake it up.

By the way I just finished completely rewriting the entire blog post.
by empath75 | 2026-01-28 18:13:03+00:00
> “Computers can never show creativity or originality”. But—perhaps disappointingly—that’s surprisingly easy to get, and indeed just a bit of randomness “seeding” a computation can often do a pretty good job,

---

This is, I think, not what people mean when they say "creative" or "original".

Creativity is not simply writing something nobody has written before, as he said, that would be trivial and doesn't even require a computer, you could just shuffle a deck of cards and write out the full sequence and chances are no other person in history has written down that sequence before.

And I think Borges made a reasonable argument that simply writing down the text of Don Quixote verbatim could be a creative act.

Creativity is about _intentionally_ expressing a _point of view_ under some constraints.

When people say LLMs can't be creative, what I think mostly they are getting at is that they lack intentionality and/or a distinct point of view. (i do not have a strong opinion about whether they do or if it's impossible for them to have them)
by owaislone | 2026-01-28 18:13:17+00:00
I don't know how I feel about free open source version and then a commercial version that locks features. Something inside me prevents me from even trying such software. Logically I'd say I support the model because open source needs to be sustainable and we need good quality developer tools and software but when it comes to adoption, I find myself reaching for purely open source projects. I think it has to do with features locked behind a paywall. I think I'd be far more open to trying out products where the commercial version offered some enterprise level features like compliance reports, FIPS support, professional support etc but didn't lock features.
by BrandoElFollito | 2026-01-28 18:13:32+00:00
> People dislike cash for some strange reason

In my case it is because I would never have the right amount with me, in the right denominations. Google Pay always has this covered.

Also you need to remember to take one more thing with you, and refill it occasionally. As opposed to fuel, you do not know how much you will need when.

It can get lost or destroyed, and is not (usually) replaceable.

I am French, currently in the US. I need to change 100 USD in small denominations, I will need to go to the bank, and they will hopefully do that for me. Or not. Or not without some official paper from someone.

Ah yes, and I am in the US and the Euro is not an accepted currency here. So I need to take my 100 € to a bank and hope I can get 119.39 USD. In the right denominations.

What will I do with the 34.78 USD left when I am back home? I have a chest of money from all over the world. I showed it once to my kids when they were young, told a bit about the world and then forgot about it.

Money also weights quite a lot. And when it does not weights it gets lost or thrown away with some other papers. Except if they are neatly folded in a wallet, which I will forget.

I do not care about being traced when going to the supermarket. If I need to do untraceable stuff I will get money from teh ATM. Ah crap, they will trace me there.

So the only solution is to get my salary in cash, whihc is forbidden in France. Or take some small amounts from time to time. Which I will forget, and I have better things to do.

Cash sucks.

Sure, if we go cashless and terrible things happen (cyberwar, solar flare, software issues) then we are screwed. But either the situation unscrews itself, or we will have much, much, much bigger issues than money -- we will need to go full survival mode, apocalypse movies-style.