MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wk_end | 2026-01-19 03:32:11+00:00
But why when the “-“ works just as well and doesn’t require holding the key down?

You’re not the first person I’ve seen say that FWIW, but I just don’t recall seeing the full proper em-dash in informal contexts before ChatGPT (not that I was paying attention). I can’t help but wonder if ChatGPT has caused some people - not necessarily you! - to gaslight themselves into believing that they used the em-dash themselves, in the before time.
by spir | 2026-01-19 03:32:51+00:00
> 1. People who have insider information, or at least more sophisticated predictive capability than your average person.

This bucket as you've defined it is too broad.

There are a few different kinds of non-gambler participants in prediction markets:

1. People with "insider information" as we think of it - they "know" the answer to the market because they are "involved" somehow.

2. People who aim to do superior analysis of publicly available information to produce an edge. For example, an AI firm with better hurricane prediction modeling may try to monetize that by betting on whether or not a hurricane will impact an area.

2b. People who do the work to create new information. For example, the Trump 2024 election market on polymarket famously had better odds for Trump than polling. It turned out that a mega whale was bidding Trump up because he had paid for his own private polling in battleground states and that gave him confidence Trump was going to win.

In short, it's mostly incorrect to suggest that prediction market participants are either illegitimate insiders or gamblers; there is a third class of actors that are a very important cohort: those who do the work to create better predictions and monetize their work by betting in the markets. This third cohort of professional predictors is the most important in long-term prediction market growth.

fwiw, I built a prediction market website that was mentioned in The Economist in 2018, and contributed to an election prediction market product for the 2020 election. Prediction markets are not new, they are just new to most people because they've mostly been too illegal to scale to the point of proving the model to the public. Polymarket's main innovation was just ignoring the law, but it's overall a good product.
by fumi2026 | 2026-01-19 03:33:21+00:00
Hi HN, author here.

I built this project because I wanted to understand the low-level mechanics of LLMs and how FFI overhead differs between languages.

Some key takeaways:

Architecture: It's a 6.9B MoE model implemented purely in Rust, Go, and Python.

Shared CUDA: All three languages bind to the exact same CUDA kernels (no PyTorch/TensorFlow).

Performance: I was surprised to see how Go handles cgo overhead compared to Rust's FFI in this specific workload.

I know it's reinventing the wheel, but it was a great way to learn.
Happy to answer any questions about the implementation or the FFI architecture!
by ehnto | 2026-01-19 03:33:51+00:00
Google and other search engines are already failing to surface real results, it feels like the general forces of SEO have already flooded the internet with AI generated articles. I am honestly gobsmacked by the speed of the turn around, finding real articles can be quite tricky. It matters for niche topics because the details matter, and they seem to be using cheap models to generate and spin the articles.

It isn't surprising, when article spinners were popular SEO experts were generating thousands of spun articles a day.
by jep888 | 2026-01-19 03:34:13+00:00
Poolsuite is one of my favorite sites on the internet. Just a very cool brand and the web-based music player is something I turn to a lot for deep work blocks. Given it's just (great) Soundcloud playlists under the hood, I decided to build a little CLI that uses mpv to play the audio straight from my terminal.

Hope someone else finds this useful or fun.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2026-01-19 03:34:39+00:00
Without archive.is CAPTCHAs, data collection, user-powered DDOS^1:

#read x;
x=https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/01/13/advertising-google-ai-mode-chatgpt/
#y=${x#*https://};
#y=${y%%/*};
y=www.washingtonpost.com;
z=${1-23.61.98.92};
echo "
url=$x
header \"User-Agent: Chrome/115.0.5790.171 Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible ; Googlebot/2.1 ; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)\"
header \"X-Forwarded-For: 66.249.66.1\"
header accept:
header \"Connection: close\"
resolve $y:443:$z
"|curl -vv -K/dev/stdin > 1.htm
firefox ./1.htm

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46624740
by Spivak | 2026-01-19 03:34:42+00:00
I use a ThinkPad with Linux as my daily driver and a MBP at work. I love my ThinkPad dearly-but it goes 0/4 up against the MBP.

The best thing I've done for my in practice battery life on Linux is enable aggressive suspend to hibernate, but it still doesn't compare to the all day use I get out of the MBP.

Driver support is really good, everything works, but it obviously can't compete with the 'perfect' driver support you get with macOS.

Performance is again really good but it's not M* performance, nothing is, but I'm happy with it. The OS is perfectly snappy and responsive.

Security is also quite good, Linux has fantastic TPM support now so you get passwordless full disk encryption. Fingerprint reader works and is well integrated into popular DEs. But it's not TouchID or Apple's secure coprocessor, SIP level extra. And just in general the Linux security model without SELinux or Flatpak sandboxing is user-based so you don't get protection against software you run behaving naughtily. The antivirus story is also not as good / nonexistent, but I've never really cared about those so nothing lost for me.

The advantage of the Thinkpad is you get to run Linux, it's about half the cost of the MBP, it's more than good enough as a daily driver, and you get all the full sized ports with no adapter.
by binalpatel | 2026-01-19 03:35:40+00:00
I went down (continue to do down) this rabbit hole and agree with the author.

I tried a few different ideas and the most stable/useful so far has been giving the agent a single run_bash tool, explicitly prompting it to create and improve composable CLIs, and injecting knowledge about these CLIs back into it's system prompt (similar to have agent skills work).

This leads to really cool pattens like:
1. User asks for something
2. Agent can't do it, so it creates a CLI
3. Next time it's aware of the CLI and uses it. If the user asks for something it can't do it either improves the CLI it made, or creates a new CLI.
4. Each interaction results in updated/improved toolkits for the things you ask it for.

You as the user can use all these CLIs as well which ends up an interesting side-channel way of interacting with the agent (you add a todo using the same CLI as what it uses for example).

It's also incredibly flexible, yesterday I made a "coding agent" by having it create tools to inspect/analyze/edit a codebase and it could go off and do most things a coding agent can.

https://github.com/caesarnine/binsmith
by 1123581321 | 2026-01-19 03:35:48+00:00
I wasn't defining as feature parity and didn't think you implied that anywhere.

If you've come up with a way to perform as well as Slack at the basic multi-client message service at launch, that's great. "that doesn't suck"/"that just works" reads to me like more the claims of a low cost MVP that hasn't solved those issues yet. (Probably because they're overused.)

Only speaking to your marketing and not intending to impugn your team credentials/experience.
by okanat | 2026-01-19 03:36:24+00:00
I don't know about you but I am happy with most of the stuff that Microsoft still ships with Windows (surprisingly).

Win32, stable driver APIs (I can still run Win11 on my old Nvidia GPU laptop which Linux doesn't support), COM, good remote desktop infrastructure, DirectX 12, WPF, ClearType or certain Win32 aspects like IO completiton ports (allows true async like uring does but in Windows since NT times) are all has some good engineering and widespread adoption. Many other OSes still copy what Windows offered in early 00s.

They are fucking their last mile a big time. They fuck explorer, they fuck desktop experience. All in the name of stupid fads. Silicon Valley hustler Microsoft is worse than shirts with Ballmer's fluids Microsoft.
by CqtGLRGcukpy | 2026-01-19 03:37:28+00:00
Mention that you are looking for sponsors within the app (include a link that shows your numbers and how to get in touch).

Consider affiliate links (could be text or images).

There's also the option of having a way for people to give you money (a paypal link) if they are enjoying it.

I know one newsletter which has a section dedicated to just their sponsors, allows people to pay to be included in other sections, and has a website and email sponsor (two separate sponsors).
by vbezhenar | 2026-01-19 03:37:46+00:00
Does it really matter if NT kernel is good or not? I don't think so. What matters if it's cheaper to use Linux kernel instead of Windows kernel in terms of expenses.

Just an example. Microsoft developed several browser engines: first Trident, then EdgeHTML. Edge wasn't bad, it was on par with Chrome, may be slightly behind, but nothing that couldn't be fixed with time. But Microsoft decided to abandon it and use Blink, because that was cheaper.

I absolutely could see the same scenario in the future, when they would need to cut expenses. Just get Linux, wine, fix enough bugs to make explorer.exe and OneDrive.exe to run smoothly enough and ship it.
Show HN: PixelRipple – AI ads agent for e-commerce
by zxzxy1988 | 2026-01-19 03:38:28+00:00
I spent 6 weeks building www.pixelripple.ai, an AI ads agent for e-commerce. It discovers viral social ads, replicates their proven structure, and generates production-ready creatives at scale.

Background: I came from Microsoft doing algorithms/backend. Zero Node.js or frontend experience. Built this with Claude Code as my primary coding partner.

What I learned:

Week 1-2: AI is incredible for cold starts. Had a working tldraw canvas, Cloudflare Workers, image generation, and auth within hours.

Week 3-4: Hit the context window wall. Found 8 components with duplicate fetch() calls, 3 different credit validation implementations, and race conditions between Stripe webhooks. AI builds what you ask for right now - it doesn't think about the system.

Week 5-6: Partnered with an experienced engineer. He didn't write much new code - he deleted things. The codebase got smaller but more stable.

My productivity hack: 3 terminal windows with 2 Claude instances working on independent features while I review. Parallelization helps but multiplies the duplication problem.

Key insight: AI + experienced engineer = 10x. AI + inexperienced developer = 3x with debt.

Question for HN: How do you handle AI-assisted frontend work? AI can't see the UI. It doesn't notice a button is 2px off or spacing looks wrong on mobile. Any workflows that close this visual feedback loop?

Free to try www.pixelripple.ai. Codes HN50 (50% off, first 100) and HN20 (20% off, first 1000) if useful.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-19 03:38:51+00:00
> For the last decade, an average of 1,300 trains derailed each year (in the US), accounting for 61% of all train accidents.

https://usafacts.org/articles/are-train-derailments-becoming...

> In 2024, there were 1,507 significant railway accidents in the EU, with a total of 750 people killed and 548 seriously injured.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derailment
by Fwirt | 2026-01-19 03:39:56+00:00
Having been a longtime Windows user, an on/off Linux desktop user, and now primarily a Mac user, I really think it's just what you're used to. Each desktop environment has its own strengths and weaknesses, and trying to bend one to be like the other is going to end in frustration. The userland of each OS is sufficiently different that different desktop metaphors break in different ways when you try to port them. MacOS will never have a taskbar, Windows will never have a functional dock and system menubar, and Linux will never have a cohesive toolkit because it's too fragmented. But each has its strengths and the key to productivity is to work with the desktop as designed rather than against it.

My experience with paid independent Mac desktop apps (e.g. Little Snitch, Al Dente, Daisy Disk, Crossover, anything from Rogue Amoeba etc.) is that they try a lot harder to integrate well with the system than equivalent freeware apps on Windows. MacOS is definitely "missing" some features out of the box (per-app volume control?) but makes up for it with certain things largely being more seamless, especially with regard to drivers (in my experience).

I also miss Linux DEs some days for their extreme customization potential and low resource usage. But it's hard to achieve compatibility between the "best" applications of each DE and GTK and Qt have their own warts.

Just go with the flow, and if Windows jives with you then more power to you. I can't stand it anymore though.
by callc | 2026-01-19 03:40:32+00:00
Recently I’ve been thinking about the text form of communication, and how it plays with our psychology. In no particular order here’s what I think:

1. Text is a very compressed / low information method of communication.

2. Text inherently has some “authority” and “validity”, because:

3. We’ve grown up to internalize that text is written by a human. Someone spend the effort to think and write down their thoughts, and probably put some effort into making sure what they said is not obviously incorrect.

Intimately this ties into LLMs on text being an easier problem to trick us into thinking that they are intelligent than an AI system in a physical robot that needs to speak and articulate physically. We give it the benefit of the doubt.

I’ve already had some odd phone calls recently where I have a really hard time distinguishing if I’m talking to a robot or a human…
by wk_end | 2026-01-19 03:40:39+00:00
FWIW: a single car crash killing 21 people would still be newsworthy in America. And I think if you math it out with something per capita equivalent, this would actually be an exceptionally bad day/incident for the US.

But of course you're not wrong, trains are vastly safer than private cars. If anyone uses this as evidence against having a proper rail system, they're ignorant.

But - until someone does that, there's no reason to make this about the US or cars vs. trains. It's borderline offensive to reflexively politicize this before anyone else had; it almost feels like you're intentionally trying to sow conflict, here.
by Alupis | 2026-01-19 03:40:53+00:00
Over 60% of customer workloads running on Azure are Linux. And that statistic is skewed by those using things like AzureAD (basically workgroups).

At some point it will become a burden to develop new technologies on Windows instead of Linux. If that hasn't already happened.

Desktop already is a dwindling revenue stream for Microsoft. Microsoft is already pushing for companies, from small garage startups to mega enterprises, to migrate to online services where the underlying OS doesn't matter.

Windows has inertia, a lot of it. But all things in motion eventually come to rest.
by keyle | 2026-01-19 03:40:53+00:00
As someone who spent time writing a native slack alternative... It's massively more challenging to do so, and means that you won't have the exact same experience on different platforms. Auto correction etc. behaves different, font rendering, buttons, interactions, all different.

If I had to do it today, I'd look at egui, but I have concerns about its lack of UX (it's still early), or electron still, with a sane language (The wails project looked interesting too).
Ask HN: 1 year from today what will have been the worst behavior from AI corps?
by keepamovin | 2026-01-19 03:41:41+00:00
For example, let's say it came out that AI corps were, say:

- deliberately poisoning system prompts to obstruct development of AI-adjacent, possibly competitive tools, or

- 'fixing the game' with secret system prompts to ensure you endlessly circled the correct solution while never actually solving it, a kind of "Netflix-ization" of "always another episode" payoff withholding, to get you on the hook for more tokens, slot machine style.

These are just two random examples that occurred to me (likely out of some sci-fi dystopian novella floating in the aether that i picked up on).

But what do you think the bad news is gonna be 1 year from now? What is the worst they are going to be discovered doing?

Or will it be all good? Let's hope so!
by roywiggins | 2026-01-19 03:41:53+00:00
I don't know why LLMs talk in a hybrid of corporatespeak and salespeak but they clearly do, which on the one hand makes their default style stick out like a sore thumb outside LinkedIn, but on the other hand, is utterly enervating to read when suddenly every other project shared here is speaking with one grating voice.

Here's my list of current Claude (I assume) tics:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46663856
by georgemcbay | 2026-01-19 03:42:24+00:00
> how do you mess up a straight line?

One thing I learned working on a system that did train positioning for the 7 Line subway in NYC is that train systems are a lot more complicated than just straight lines. They are complicated networks with custom signaling and the trains don't necessarily travel on the usual side in the usual direction at all times.

That said, in this particular case it basically was just two straight lines side by side and one of the trains derailed and travelled into the path of the other track.

Trains don't often derail on straight sections, likely either someone fucked up really bad on rail maintenance or someone sabotaged the rail.
by TacticalCoder | 2026-01-19 03:43:02+00:00
> In x amount of time a significant majority of road traffic will be bots in the drivers seat (figuratively), and a majority of said traffic won't even have a human on-board. It will be deliveries of goods and food.

Nah. That's assuming most cars today, with literal, not figurative, humans are delivering goods and food. But they're not: most cars during traffic hours and by very very very far are just delivering groceries-less people from point A to point B. In the morning: delivering human (usually by said human) to work. Delivering human to school. Delivering human back to home. Delivering human back from school.
by Marsymars | 2026-01-19 03:43:11+00:00
You're not wrong, but sometimes a local <seller of thing> will do SEO by actually putting up valuable articles. (e.g. the Yale Appliance blog)

And for a kinda counter-example for the car dealership one, Ford dealerships sell extended warranties that are backed by Ford and usable at any Ford dealership. If you're in the market for one of those, you absolutely want to go with whichever dealership offers you the lowest price in North America, and not whatever your local dealership is charging.
by GMoromisato | 2026-01-19 03:43:55+00:00
Most of this is caused by incentives:

YouTube and others pay for clicks/views, so obviously you can maximize this by producing lots of mediocre content.

LinkedIn is a place to sell, either a service/product to companies or yourself to a future employer. Again, the incentive is to produce more content for less effort.

Even HN has the incentive of promoting people's startups.

Is it possible to create a social network (or "discussion community", if you prefer) that doesn't have any incentive except human-to-human interaction? I don't mean a place where AI is banned, I mean a place where AI is useless, so people don't bother.

The closest thing would probably be private friend groups, but that's probably already well-served by text messaging and in-person gatherings. Are there any other possibilities?
by mmooss | 2026-01-19 03:45:00+00:00
The problem is not the Internet but the author and those like them, acting like social network participants in following the herd - embracing despair and hopelessness, and victimhood - they don't realize they're the problem, not the victims. Another problem is their ignorance and their post-truth attitude, not caring whether their words are actually accurate:

> What if people DO USE em-dashes in real life?

They do and have, for a long time. I know someone who for many years (much longer than LLMs have been available) has complained about their overuse.

> hence, you often see -- in HackerNews comments, where the author is probably used to Markdown renderer

Using two dashes for an em-dash goes back to typewriter keyboards, which had only what we now call printable ASCII and where it was much harder add to add non-ASCII characters than it is on your computer - no special key combos. (Which also means that em-dashes existed in the typewriter era.)
by fdr | 2026-01-19 03:45:23+00:00
the main area I'd like to see some departure from beads is to use markdown files (or something) to be able to see the issue context/comments better in a diff generated by git.

The other area I'd like to see some software engineering thinking that's more open ended is on regression testing: ways of storing or referencing old versions of texts to see if the agent can complete old transformations properly even with a context change that patches up a weakness in a transformation that is desirable.

This is not something you'd want for every context, but a lot of my effort is spent building up prompt fragments to normalize and clean up the code coming out of a model that did some ad-hoc work that meets the test coverage bar, which constrains it decently into having achieved "something." Kind of like a prototype. But often, a lot of ungratifying massaging is required to even cover the annoying but not dangerous tics of the LLM, to bring clarity to where it wrote, well, very bad and unprincipled code...as it does sometimes.
by femto | 2026-01-19 03:45:37+00:00
That's the original "Yahoo Directory", which was a manually curated page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo#Founding

The original Yahoo doesn't exist (outside archive.org), but I'm guessing would be a keen person or two out there maintaining a replacement. It would probably be disappointing, as manually curated lists work best when the curator's interests are similar to your own.

What you want might be Kagi Search with the AI filtering on? I've never used Kagi, so I could be off with that suggestion.
by dragonwriter | 2026-01-19 03:45:50+00:00
> But for general newsworthy events, people aren’t going to be in positions to manually make them happen.

Many newsworthy events (and even more events that actually reach prediction markets, many of which are at best marginally newsworthy) are actions ultimately pivot on a human decision, so the first part isn’t true.

> And no person in a position to start a war would do it to affect a Polymarket bet.

Are you saying “no one would start a war with personal financial gain being part of the motivation”, or “it is impossible for the payoff of a prediction market bet to be of sufficient magnitude to alter the calculus in even the tiniest iota in that case”?

Because the first seems extremely clearly false, and the second seems improbable in the case where the first is false.
by keepamovin | 2026-01-19 03:46:43+00:00
I think people's focus on the threat model from AI corps is wrong. They are not going to "steal your precious SSH/cloud/git credentials" so they can secretly poke through your secret-sauce, botnet your servers or piggy back off your infrastructure, lol of lols. Similarly the possibility of this happening from MCP tool integrations is overblown.

This dangerous misinterpretation of the actual possible threats simply better conceals real risks. What might those real risks be? That is the question. Might they include more subtle forms of nastiness, if anything at all?

I'm of the belief that there will be no nastiness, not really. But if you believe they will be nasty, it at least pays to be rational about the ways in which that might occur, no?