MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throw234234234 | 2026-01-12 03:58:45+00:00
> disrupting others careers is why you have a career in the first place.

Not every software project has or did this. In fact I would argue many new businesses exist that didn't exist before software and computing and people are doing things they didn't beforehand. Especially around discovery of information - solving the "I don't know what I don't know" problem also expanded markets and demand to people who now know.

Whereas the current AI wave seems to be more about efficiency/industrialization/democratizing of existing use cases rather than novel things to date. I would be more excited if I saw more "product orientated" AI use cases other than destroying jobs. While I'm hoping that the "vibing" of software will mean that SWE's are needed to productionise it I'm not confident that AI won't be able to do that soon too nor any other knowledge profession.

I wouldn't be surprised with AI if there's mass unemployment but we still don't cure cancer for example in 20 years.
by njoyablpnting | 2026-01-12 03:59:06+00:00
This is super cool! Would love to see how you hooked up Ruff and ty.

Just curious, why not use Pygame?

Scratch abstracts away a ton of stuff to allow the student to focus on logical building blocks that mirror the mental model one might have when writing a real program. I'm wondering if keeping a lot of those abstractions when transitioning to text programming is educationally useful?

For example, it might not be clear that @on_forever is really just a loop, etc. One thing I've noticed when teaching beginners is that when you introduce a library/framework at the same time as a language, they start to form a model of the language that often wrongly includes parts of the library.

This is why I think Pygame is so useful for education, it sits at just the right level of abstraction for learning. In Pygame, your game loop is just a loop, handling input is just conditions in your loop, etc.

Regarding rewriting the AST to avoid async/await, do you have some experience or evidence to suggest that these should be abstracted out? I can see an argument for both sides, so just wondering how exactly you arrived at that decision.

Also, I tried a program with an infinite loop and the UI became unresponsive and I had to close the page. This indicates to me it's running on the main browser thread. Kids (and sometimes senior engineers) write infinite loops occasionally, so I highly recommend executing the user's code in a worker to prevent the harsh experience of losing your work suddenly.
by username223 | 2026-01-12 03:59:15+00:00
And if you write novels mostly because you enjoy watching them sell, as opposed to sharing ideas with people, you don't care.

To scientists, the purpose of science is to learn more about the world; to certain others, it's about making a number of dollars go up. Mathematicians famously enjoy creating math, and would have no use for a "create more math" button. Musicians enjoy creating music, which is very different from listening to it.

We're all drawn to different vocations, and it's perverse to accept that "maximize shareholder value" is the highest.
by harendra007 | 2026-01-12 04:00:57+00:00
Windows PC market is truly gone down the toilet. Its nearly impossible to find a windows laptop >15 inch, with decent battery life, with centered keyboard. Apparently I need to buy 14 inch laptop for centered keyboard, hey you know what I need 15 inch or more of real estate. Thinkpads used to be a solid bet but those too have weird lineup these days. Its just so simple to get a Macbook these days and not worry about performance or battery life for fairly decent price.
by jonas21 | 2026-01-12 04:01:25+00:00
There are plenty of non-blockchain, non-NFT, non-online gambling, non-adtech, non-facist software jobs. In fact, the vast majority of software jobs are. You can refuse to work with all of these things and not even notice a meaningful difference in career opportunities.

If you refuse to work with AI, however, you're already significantly limiting your opportunities. And at the pace things are going, you're probably going to find yourself constrained to a small niche sooner rather than later.
by kazinator | 2026-01-12 04:01:29+00:00
Over the weekend I finished a kind of hardware project: I added a three-way switch to my ADA MP-1 guitar preamp [1987], mounted on the side panel, which selects one of three different center frequencies for the OD1 drive filter (enabled in "tube dist" mode). Really enjoying the treble boosted setting: "frown curve" centered on 3.2 kHz. It produces a tight, punchy, clearly articulated tone that is heard well in a mix.
Show HN: Dutix – set default apps for file types and URL schemes on macOS
by jackchuka | 2026-01-12 04:02:44+00:00
Hi HN — I made dutix (“Default UTI eXtension handler manager”), a CLI for managing macOS default handlers for file extensions, UTIs (Uniform Type Identifiers), and URL schemes.

It supports:
• setting defaults (dutix set ...)
• inspecting current defaults (dutix targets show ...)
• migrating all associations from one app to another (dutix apps migrate ...)

Inspired by duti; dutix keeps the CLI spirit but adds bulk migration, preview/dry-run, and JSON/YAML output.
by bastawhiz | 2026-01-12 04:03:08+00:00
In April Reuters reported that China approved ten plants for $27B (total):

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...

Whether they run over budget (or whether this is an under inflated figure) is yet to be seen, but it would seem that China is bringing the cost down, and substantially.

I'm not a nuclear expert by any means, but from the reading I've done, they're largely designing and building the reactors themselves these days. And it seems that to help keep the cost low (among other reasons), they're also helping other countries build them.
by dolebirchwood | 2026-01-12 04:03:22+00:00
Why would any big software company need to care? There are so many small businesses with unique problems with no current off-the-shelf software solutions because they've always been too niche to justify the time and expense of bespoke development. Now that door is open. Big software companies can keep servicing big businesses and mass markets, while opportunities abound for anyone else willing to innovate on smaller problems. Not everything needs to be built to scale.
by kazinator | 2026-01-12 04:03:36+00:00
You're not actually telling a modern printer: "step this motor so many times to move some assembly so far this way", or "turn on so much current in such and such circuit" or whatever. The driver doesn't have enough responsibility for such things to be able to break anything.

A printer driver is something like a protocol converter. Roughly speaking, it binds some printing API's in the some kind of printer framework or service on the host to the right language (which may have vendor-specific nuances even if it is some kind of standard0.
Show HN: Pointa – Point-and-click annotations for AI coding agents (open source)
by jberthom | 2026-01-12 04:04:11+00:00
I built Pointa to solve a problem I kept running into: describing UI changes to AI coding tools is tedious. "The button in the top right, no the other one, with the blue border..."

Pointa lets you click on any element in your localhost app, leave a comment, and your AI agent (Cursor, Claude Code, Windsurf, etc.) picks it up via MCP and implements it. You can bulk annotate your entire app, and then get it all worked on in one shot.

How it works:
- Chrome extension for point-and-click annotations
- Local Node.js server with MCP protocol
- All data stays on your machine (~/.pointa)

Built with vanilla JS for the extension and Express for the server. No frameworks, no cloud dependencies.

GitHub: https://github.com/AmElmo/pointa-app

Would love feedback on the architecture and any edge cases I might have missed. I use it every singled day on all my projects, and I want to make it as useful as possible for everyone.
by moonlet | 2026-01-12 04:04:53+00:00
I mean… I’m flattered you think I’m making some kind of statement here but there is no claim. I literally stated an opinion I hold in a comment on HN, I didn’t write a you a thesis. Followed by explaining further the details of that opinion.

I’ve asked what background leads to your conclusion, because if you have eg written some sandboxing tooling, I’d be curious to give it a look. Always up to learn things, and I am more than a little baffled by how upset the comments I’m replying to here sound. You’ve linked me to Wikipedia, and another commenter asserts I can ‘just look it up on google scholar’. That seems pretty dismissive and reductive overall.
by bruce511 | 2026-01-12 04:05:15+00:00
You clearly haven't lived in my city :).

About half our road fatalities are pedestrians. About 80% of those are intoxicated with alcohol. When you're driving at 40mph, at night, and some drunk guy chooses to cross the road, no amount of safety features or liabilities can save him.

Sure, cars can be safer for light collisions with pedestrians where the car is going slowly. Especially in the US where half the cars have a very high hood. But where I live the problem is not safer cars, it's drunk pedestrians.
by willtemperley | 2026-01-12 04:05:24+00:00
I get the best results when using code to demonstrate my intention to an LLM, rather than try and explain it. It doesn't have to be working code.

I think that mentally estimating the problem space helps. These things are probabilistic models, and if there are a million solutions the chance of getting the right one is clearly unlikely.

Feeding back results from tests really helps too.
by energy123 | 2026-01-12 04:06:41+00:00
With LLM usage, there's another necessary step, you need to distill that understanding into text. I see people put significant time into LLM workflows. But LLM coding quality will be solved by the AI companies in due time. What's less likely to be solved, on comparable timeframes, is the creation of the input text artefact, containing your world model, from which good programs emerge when future LLMs ingest it. That is what takes up my time, building the textual wellspring for my project. The code is relatively ephemeral.
by SequoiaHope | 2026-01-12 04:06:42+00:00
I wonder how much of their trouble comes from other failures in their plan (avoiding the use of pre-made maps and single city taxi services in favor of a system intended to drive in unseen cities) vs how much comes from vision. There are concerning failure modes from vision alone but it’s not clear that’s actually the reason for the failure. Waymo built an expensive safe system that is a taxi first and can only operate on certain areas, and then they ran reps on those areas for a decade.

Tesla specifically decided not to use the taxi-first approach, which does make sense since they want to sell cars. One of the first major failures of their approach was to start selling pre-orders for self driving. If they hadn’t, they would not have needed to promise it would work everywhere, and could have pivoted to single city taxi services like the other companies, or added lidar.

But certainly it all came from Musk’s hubris, first to set out to solve the self driving in all conditions using only vision, and then to start selling it before it was done, making it difficult to change paths once so much had been promised.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-12 04:08:20+00:00
> This is the political will of a plurality of American voters.

This fallacy gets repeated over and over, but it's obviously false.

Have you really never voted for a candidate who went on to do things you didn't agree with? It's a quintessential fact of politics that voting for a candidate is not equivalent to an endorsement of everything that candidate does in the future. It's a premise that is obviously false when we consider our own votes, but it feels cathartic to force the claim on to the other side.

This administration's net approval rating flipped net negative very quickly after his election and has been trending downward. It's just navel-gazing to pretend like what he's doing has high approval.
by simonw | 2026-01-12 04:09:01+00:00
It's a poorly considered hobby.

It's also useful for figuring out what I think and how best to express that. Sometimes I get really great replies too - I compared ethical LLM objections to veganism today on Lobste.rs and got a superb reply explaining why the comparison doesn't hold: https://lobste.rs/s/cmsfbu/don_t_fall_into_anti_ai_hype#c_oc...
by amluto | 2026-01-12 04:09:07+00:00
> Among other things, if a container goes down you don’t know if it corrupted shared state (leaving sockets open or whatever).

This is not a thing. A program that opens a socket and crashes does not leak that socket for the lifetime of the network namespace. (Keep in mind that ordinary non-containerized servers usually have exactly one network namespace. If a program crashes, you restart it. Sure, CLOSE_WAIT is a thing, but it’s neither permanent nor usually a big deal.)
by solomonb | 2026-01-12 04:09:59+00:00
I'm biased by my preferred style of programming languages but I think that pure statically typed functional languages are incredibly well suited for LLMs. The purity gives you referential transparency and static analysis powers that the LLM can leverage to stay correctly on task.

The high level declarative nature and type driven development style of languages like Haskell also make it really easy for an experienced developer to review and validate the output of the LLM.

Early on in the GPT era I had really bad experiences generating Haskell code with LLMs but I think that the combination of improved models, increased context size, and agentic tooling has allowed LLMs to really take advantage of functional programming.
by upboundspiral | 2026-01-12 04:10:19+00:00
I have the widget for global menu right now in KDE Wayland. Its supported by all QT apps, and there's a wayland protocol pull request for it (unfortunaly stalled, as is tradition). Overall I like it a lot - enough of the apps I use support it (if you're a GTK fan then tough luck).

merge request: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/m...
by hamandcheese | 2026-01-12 04:10:34+00:00
To establish a wg connection, only one node needs a public IP/port.

> Router/central server? That's a single point of failure

Your router is a SPOF regardless. If your router goes down you can't reach any nodes on your LAN, Tailscale or otherwise. So what is your point?

> If that's a router, the router may be compromised and eavesdrop on your connections, which you probably didn't secure as hard because it's on a VPN.

Secure your router. This is HN, not advice for your mom.

> Not to mention DDNS can create significant downtime.

Set your DNS ttl correctly and you should experience no more than a minute of downtime whenever your public IP changes.
Show HN: Karmic Tail – A calculator for the Destiny Matrix numerology system
by hugh1st | 2026-01-12 04:10:38+00:00
I've been interested in how different cultures structure personality archetypes. The "Destiny Matrix" is a system popular in Eastern Europe that maps birth dates to the 22 Major Arcana archetypes (The Fool, The Magician, etc.).

I built https://karmictail.com/ to automate the calculation of these "Karmic Tails" – which are essentially sequences of numbers purported to represent recurring life lessons.

Even if you treat it purely as a randomization seed for self-reflection (like Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies), I think the archetypal structures are fascinating.

Would love to hear your thoughts on the design!
by xpe | 2026-01-12 04:11:21+00:00
I like the way this article is organized; I learned a lot from it. I can't recall seeing this style of presentation before. To summarize and maybe get you interested:

All the combinations of having-and-not-having these
properties gives us 4 interesting kinds of type:

1. can be used any number of times (no name - the default)
2. can’t be used more than once (affine™)
3. must be used at least once (relevant™ - this one is a decent name)
4. must be used exactly once (linear™)

I don't often dig into type theory, but this article made it fun and interesting!
by drpepper42 | 2026-01-12 04:11:27+00:00
The Lippmann school of democracy sort of predisposed that people were too stupid and that through journalists would emerge a reasonable set of choices. For the most part that matches the way politics worked in the USA and most democracies until recently. Unfortunately the internet disrupted things such that suddenly everyone needs to actually be democratically adept in at least some form more akin to the Dewey school of thought.

The combination of literacy and the algorithmic propaganda machine is a pretty big stumbling block.
by virgildotcodes | 2026-01-12 04:11:37+00:00
Perhaps a better analogy is the smartphone or personal computer.

Think of all the awful cheapest android phones and Windows PCs and laptops that are slow, buggy, have not had a security update in however long and are thus insecure, become virtually unusable within a couple years. The majority of the people in the world live on such devices either because they don't know better or have no better option. The world continues to turn.

People are fine with imperfection in their products, we're all used to it in various aspects of our lives.

Code being buggy, brittle, hard to extend, inefficient, slow, insecure. None of those are actual deal breakers to the end user, or the owners of the companies, and that's all that really matters at the end of the day in determining whether or not the product will sell and continue to exist.

If we think of it in terms of evolution, the selection pressure of all the things you listed is actually very weak in determining whether or not the thing survives and proliferates.
by lunar_mycroft | 2026-01-12 04:11:40+00:00
The core of your argument is that using LLMs is a skill that takes a significant amount of time to master. I'm not going to argue against that (although I have some doubts) because I think it's ultimately irrelevant. The question isn't "is prompting a skill that you'll need to be an effective software developer in the future" but "what other skills will you need to do so", and regardless of the answer you don't need to start adopting LLMs right away.

Maybe AI gets good enough at writing code that it's users' knowledge of computer science and software development becomes irrelevant. In that case, approximately everyone on this site is just screwed. We're all in the business of selling that specialized knowledge, and if it's no longer required then companies aren't going to pay us to operate the AI, they're going to pay PMs, middle managers, executives, etc. But even that won't be particularly workable long term, because all their customers will realize they no longer need to pay the companies for software either. In this world, the price of software goes to zero (and hosting likely gets significantly more commoditized than it is now). Any time you put into learning to use LLMs for software development doesn't help you keep making money selling software, and actually stops you from picking up a new career.

If, on the other hand, CS and software engineering knowledge is still needed, companies will have to keep/restart hiring or training new developers. In terms of experience using AI, it is impossible for anyone to have less experience than these new developers. We will, however, have much more experience and knowledge of the aforementioned non-LLM skills that we're assuming (in this scenario) are still necessary for the job. In this scenario you might be better off if you'd started learning to prompt a bit earlier, but you'll still be fine if you didn't.
by silexia | 2026-01-12 04:12:47+00:00
I have 100+ deer that wander around my farm all winter, eating everything in my fields on my farm. I am not allowed to harvest them even though the law in the state of Washington says I should be able to (depredation rules). The crazy fish and game department has not issued a depredation permit to any farmer in the area at least according to everyone I have spoken with.
Ask HN: Has anyone built payment flows inside AI voice calls?
by wasiyc | 2026-01-12 04:12:50+00:00
Hey HN,

We originally were building vertical voice agents for fitness centers. During customer conversations, the idea of collecting payment during the call (via SMS link, keypad, or voice) would sometimes come up as something that might be useful.

We’re trying to understand how people have approached this in practice.

If you’ve worked on production voice systems or payments, I had a few questions:
1) Have you implemented in-call payment flows?
2) What tradeoffs or issues did you run into (compliance, reliability, etc.)?
3) Was it something customers actually used, or mostly ignored?

We also noticed a YC F24 company (Protegee) explored this space and later pivoted, which makes us curious what lessons people took away from that generation of attempts.

Appreciate any real-world experience or pointers. We’re trying to learn from folks who’ve actually shipped this.
by halapro | 2026-01-12 04:13:09+00:00
> He’ll show boring things like resizing windows

If you use something long enough, you'll get used to its idiosyncrasies. Jobs would have clicked and dragged 10px away from the rounded corner here instinctively. This is why the owner of an old car can turn it on and drive away in a blink while his son has trouble: hold the accelerator 10% down, giggle the key a little while turning, pull the wheel a bit, ... all comes natural to the owner.
by npunt | 2026-01-12 04:13:45+00:00
Haha yes hopefully Oracle works its anti-magic on TikTok, that'd be lovely to see.

Agree social & network effects are essential to achieving the mission. We (Margins) are building that part out now after spending the last year and a half perfecting the single player experience, it's very early but so far it's going great and we went viral again this holiday season. Social also needs something different than the 'let's make an early 2010s social product' approaches I keep seeing people trying, that stuff just cannot work in the age of AI bots poisoning the commons.

I don't think any of the existing players are close to the quality levels of TikTok/Insta, certainly not GR or SG, and there's always new copy/paste projects that come and go, its kinda become a genre of solo dev project like weather apps. I also think all these Goodreads-like apps are following the wrong formula to win the mainstream, they tend to get stuck appealing to niche user interests. Of all of them Fable made the best attempt at it but wasn't ever original enough in formula or high enough in quality, and they burned through $27m largely failing to find PMF and sold for peanuts.

Local bookstores are necessary/essential parts of winning back attention from social media and offer the unique value of physical presence and community, but will never be sufficient to get all the people addicted to these digital drugs away from their apps. Apps really are powerful things that offer unique experiences that people have come to expect, so I think a realistic theory of change involves an app being the medium to route attention to healthier ends. How exactly to do that is indeed the challenge!
by altmanaltman | 2026-01-12 04:14:27+00:00
Valid theory, and if you look at the prices of assets like gold, the reallocation is already happening. But I feel a near-term crash in AI stocks is just not coming unless we are headed towards catastrophic economic conditions. Lots of market forces are involved in AI now and even people selling stocks (or a major correction) will not pop the AI bubble since the major players have invested way too much cash to just let it go away at this point. (IMO)