MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zahlman | 2026-01-06 03:03:50+00:00
> this rings alarm bells for me reading that a cleanup_c(c) has maybe been forgotten somewhere, since the happy and unhappy paths clean up different amounts of things.

The exact point of taking the main work to a separate function is so that you can see all the paths right there. Of course there is no `c` to worry about; the wrapper is so short that it doesn't have room for that to have happened.

The Python code doesn't have to deal with stuff like this because it has higher-level constructs like context managers, and because there's garbage collection.

def get_resources_and_do(action):
with get_a() as a, get_b() as b:
action(a, b)
by jbgt | 2026-01-06 03:04:21+00:00
Look at cc-mirror, and use the mclaude there.

It unlocks a (still) hidden multiagent orchestration function in Claude code. The person making it unminified the code and figured out how to unlock it.

I find it quite well done - I started a orchestrator project a few days ago and scrapped it because it'll be fully integrated soon it seems.
by novoreorx | 2026-01-06 03:04:44+00:00
Just pre ordered one. It reminds me of my first and favorite smartwatch - Withings Activité. Sadly, that one broke after 2 or 3 years, and since then I haven't found a smartwatch I'm willing to wear daily. My Apple Watch is now strictly used for workouts only.

They share a lot of similarities:

- Round dial

- Analog hands (though Round 2 simulates this with e-ink)

- Long battery life (Round 2 is ~2 weeks. I remember Withings lasting months on a coin battery)

- Thin and light

- No speaker, so no noise

These are the features I appreciate. I love gadgets, but for smartwatches, I want them to maintain a classic watch appearance. I don't want to worry about charging it every day, and I don't want too many features and notifications to distract me.

As for the "smart" part, I want the tech to focus on sensors, i.e. recording movement and sleep. The rest goes for aesthetics, like changing interesting watch faces now and then. That's really it. Most products on the market are no what I want because what the tech brings on them are interference and inconvenience.
by runako | 2026-01-06 03:05:34+00:00
You're overlooking the main thrust of what I am saying from my top comment to the one you replied to, which is the relationship between Labor and Capital:

> Productivity increases, workers generate more value, but Capital's share of the results increases nonetheless.

To your point, this is even more true for the jobs where productivity has increased the most. Agriculture is vastly more productive today, and the share of profit captured by Capital increases every year. The main point is that productivity gains do not really matter to Labor because the benefits of those gains rarely accrue to Labor.

Put another way: there was a value capture split operant in 1950s manufacturing that contributed to factory jobs being Good Jobs. That split hasn't been operative for decades. In all likelihood, re-shoring factory jobs today would just create crappy sweatshop jobs.
by pizza | 2026-01-06 03:05:34+00:00
Yes to this. Furthermore:

- you can solve neural networks in analytic form with a hodge star approach* [0]

- if you use a picture to set your initial weights for your nn, you can see visually how close or far your choice of optimizer is actually moving the weights - eg Adam looks like it barely changes things whereas Muon changes the weights much more to the point you cannot recognize the originals [1]

*unfortunately, this is exponential in memory

[0] M. Pilanci — From Complexity to Clarity: Analytical Expressions of Deep Neural Network Weights via Clifford's Geometric Algebra and Convexity https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.16512

[1] Deriving Muon - https://jeremybernste.in/writing/deriving-muon#:~:text=jerem...
Show HN: A Chrome extension that turns Strava activities into a visual collage
by xookeee | 2026-01-06 03:06:04+00:00
I built this as a small side project for myself.

It runs entirely in the browser, works directly on Strava pages, and doesn’t upload any data.
Main use case is turning multiple activities into a single visual summary.

Would love feedback, especially around UX and edge cases.
Ask HN: How to balance incremental SaaS building with a big long-term vision?
by hhimanshu | 2026-01-06 03:06:20+00:00
Hello

I’m building a SaaS product and struggling with a common tension: having a clear long-term vision while only being able to make progress in small, incremental steps.

How do you decide what to build this week without losing sight of where the product should be in a few years?
What mental frameworks or heuristics help you avoid both over-architecting early and drifting without direction?

Interested in practical approaches and lessons learned.

Thanks!
Show HN: Dr. Ralph – Medical Diagnostics Plugin Using Claude Code's Ralph Wiggum
by dotmike | 2026-01-06 03:06:25+00:00
Built this over the weekend for a friend dealing with chronic health issues who wanted help analyzing their medical records.

Dr. Ralph is a Claude Code plugin that runs a 5-phase diagnostic workflow: records intake, literature research, differential diagnosis, treatment planning, and SOAP documentation. It uses the Ralph Wiggum plugin’s Stop hook pattern - the loop keeps iterating until diagnosis confidence reaches 80% or max iterations.

The interesting bit was adapting Ralph for multi-phase work instead of single-task refactoring. I used Thariq’s AskUserQuestion interview approach to spec it out first, which made the actual build surprisingly fast.

~1,600 lines. Uses the Stop hook to check for completion promise in Claude’s transcript, re-feeds the prompt if not done. State lives in a markdown file with YAML frontmatter.
Not a replacement for doctors - just an experiment. Our team builds clinical decision support at the VA, so this was adjacent territory.

Code: https://github.com/blencorp/dr-ralph
by neilv | 2026-01-06 03:07:11+00:00
I hope you find a good way to help HN be genuinely more optimistic.

Of course, right now, gloom is all over most of social media, and everywhere else, for understandable reasons of world reality (besides engagement manipulation/dynamics reasons).

And, within our field, a lot of the current enthusiasm and curiosity for tech news is for getting our economic tickets, in a tech gold rush that is not nearly as optimistic as the Web one was.

Will the optimism on HN come from topics that are interesting, but detached from all that threatens us, like a break or a reminder that there is still goodness and greatness?

Will it come from finding ways to correct or fight against what threatens humanity?

Will it come from tantalizing hints of personal advantage or opportunity to wind up on top?
by JasonADrury | 2026-01-06 03:07:13+00:00
>but even doing that successfully would require an extraordinary level of luck.

On a normal day it'd probably not be a huge problem for Pakistani ballistic missiles to penetrate those bases’ own air defenses. However if the US was planning a strike, there'd certainly be Aegis BMD coverage there, which would be a problem. It's possible they'd even deploy THAAD to protect some bases.
by tim-tday | 2026-01-06 03:07:27+00:00
It’s a matter of context and opportunity.

Leonardo Da Vinchi was a creative, scientific and technological genius. Inventing things like the helicopter, parachute, machine gun, automobile, armored vehicles. His detailed drawings of the heart were used hundreds of years later to perfect advanced surgeries. (Granted it’s for the best that some of those inventions languished for hundreds of years)

None of his inventions found a social or technological environment suitable for them to reach their full potential. 90% of his inventions, discoveries and insights went nowhere during his lifetime.

Einstein was unstructured and might have come to nothing were it not for the help of the woman who would have been his first wife if his racist parents hadn’t intervened. She was sent off to a convent while bearing his child. What happened to her? What happened to the child of two genius physicists?

If we worked harder to offer education and opportunity to everyone, we’d see twice as many Einstein level geniuses.
Show HN: llmgame.ai – The Wikipedia Game but with LLMs
by jmcallister | 2026-01-06 03:07:50+00:00
I used to play the Wikipedia Game in high school and had an idea for applying the same mechanic of clicking from concept to concept to LLMs.

Will post another version that runs with an LLM entirely in the browser soon, but for now, please enjoy as long as my credits last...

Warning: the LLM does not always cooperate
by hakfoo | 2026-01-06 03:09:53+00:00
It feels like the quality of our eccentric billionaires has gone downhill.

We've all seen the comic where the villian tells Spider-Man "I don't want to cure cancer, I want to turn people into dinosaurs." I would respect that a hell of a lot more than whatever Bezos/Musk/Zuckerberg/etc are doing with their money. Hell, I'd settle for Howard Hughes levels of madness-mixed-with-genius.

Everyone just buys the same Billionaire Starter Pack these days consisting of ugly yachts and mansions, and the obligatory rocket company. The change is just spent on aggressive hoard-management and political machinations. Is their heart even in any of those ventures? When they wake up, so they say "I spent the first 40 years of my life selling my soul so I can do this, and it was so worth it?"

I know if you dropped twelve figures in my lap, I'd be saying things like "who can I hire to help me engineer an army of superintelligent dragon creatures" or "let's level Peoria, Arizona and rebuild it as a car-free zone with the density of midtown Mahnattan", not "let's buy Yahoo, because all the other depressing media outlets are spoken for already."
by apparent | 2026-01-06 03:10:38+00:00
I seriously cannot understand how to see old notifications on my Garmin. On the Pebble it was just "scroll up" (or down, I don't remember). But on the Garmin it's like multiple button pushes, and even then the list of notifications is not complete. I basically figure if I don't see a notification when it comes in I won't be able to find it in the Garmin's history.
by theamk | 2026-01-06 03:11:59+00:00
> It’s new construction. No one has lived in it yet.

That here is the problem. A house not built for specific buyer will always be terrible - people are surprisingly irrational when buying houses. Very few people ask: "hey, will I be able to change the temperature easily"; but a lot more say, "this has SMART THERMOSTAT with AI. Sounds cool!".
by gwbas1c | 2026-01-06 03:11:59+00:00
I think you're misinterpreting the situation, because I didn't "overstep" my manager, and in a small company everyone has a relationship with everyone. (IE, what I did was taking initiative and making good use of dead time.)

I'm not comfortable discussing this further in a public forum at this point, but you're welcome to look at my profile to contact me directly if you want to.
Amazon Prime AI overviews can't even get the basics right
by PyWoody | 2026-01-06 03:12:05+00:00
Frasier is one of my favorite shows of all time. I love the characters, the writing, the acting, the whole kit and kaboodle.

I've been watching it on Prime and it's been driving me insane how drivel and nonsensical their season and episode AI overviews are.

Here is the overview for season eight:

In the eighth season of Frasier we meet Daphne and Niles post elopement and dealing with Donny suing Daphne. Meanwhile, Frasier reluctantly becomes 'mentor' to station KACL's young new owner, Silicon Valley billionaire Kenny Daly

Niles and Daphne elope in season ten!
Kenny Daly is the lovable station manager, not the new owner!

What is going on? Amazon's a billion fucking dollar company. Just pay for IMBD's overviews. Oh, that's right, Amazon owns IMDB because of course they do.

I am so sick and tired of this AI slop infecting everything.
by esrauch | 2026-01-06 03:12:19+00:00
I feel like every single reply from them was about whether he held the copyright rather than whether he had the identity he claimed, and part of what went wrong is he kept asking about how to prove his identity in the replies.

I suspect what happened is they had some tag for what the content at that URL was and it wrongly was some other book, so the question wasn't his identity but the content's identity that had to be addressed. Their replies all look consistent with "the book at that URL is not the book you are claiming you own"

Not that their handling was good or clear, but to my eyes both sides were talking past eachother since he kept talking about his identity and the Google side wasn't disputing his identity.
by musicale | 2026-01-06 03:13:46+00:00
Good point - cigarettes are increasingly harder to find, and are banned in many places (restaurants) where alcohol is readily available, and associated with sociability. There even seem to be more marijuana shops vs. tobacco shops (or liquor stores for that matter) in some places, and the former are advertised while tobacco advertising is banned. On the other hand, while smoking may be in decline, I still see (and smell) vaping everywhere.
by foxylad | 2026-01-06 03:13:57+00:00
This article (and holiday spare time) made me update and check zed again. I really liked it when I tried it a few months ago, but it failed miserably when doing work on remote code. It would hang, and I couldn't find any diagnostics to debug it's fairly complex remote agent to find out what went wrong.

But now it works fine! Remote work is noticeably snappier than via mounting the remote server as a drive, and remote git seems to work nicely. A very nice Christmas present - thanks, Zed!

Good job Zed!
by nateb2022 | 2026-01-06 03:14:04+00:00
The IBA's alarmism about US politics rings particularly hollow given the scale of free speech policing on its own doorstep.

The irony is rich, considering the UK police make over 30 arrests per day (more than 12,000 annually in recent years) for "offensive" or "grossly offensive" social media posts under laws like Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and the Malicious Communications Act 1988.[0] These arrests have more than doubled since 2017, often targeting posts deemed to cause "annoyance," "inconvenience," or "anxiety," even if they involve no direct threat of violence.[1]

[0]: https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/police-make-30-arr...

[1]: https://freedomhouse.org/country/united-kingdom/freedom-net/...
by linsomniac | 2026-01-06 03:14:26+00:00
DRBD is more of a live sync, and it's great stuff, as long as you set it up BEFORE you need it, and you need it frequently. If you want to keep a second copy of your data on another system, up to the second(ish), it's a great choice.

If, however, you just want a copy of a block device on another system, like for weekly backup (our case), it's probably overkill. Especially as to keep it truly consistent you need to run in the mode where writes are acked only once the remote AND local devices have it.

My VMs are running on ganeti, which has a mode where the backing device can be DRBD and written to another host. Which works great if you have the extra disc space and can deal with the latency. Also allows you to live migrate VMs between the two hosts.

In my case I ultimately want the copy off-site, so DRBD isn't really a great fit.

DRBD is very good stuff though, I've used it for decades for HA database servers and the like.
by noduerme | 2026-01-06 03:17:02+00:00
Looking at that graphic... it almost seems obvious. The outer corner radius would be relative to the inner curve radius in some fixed relationship, wouldn't it? The shallower the inner curve, the larger the outer curve has to be. A completely convex outside could have a flat inside. An inside that was concave from end to end could have a flat outside. Kudos to the guy for writing a proof! I wish this article explained better why it took 60 years to solve this...
by Brian_K_White | 2026-01-06 03:17:03+00:00
There is no actual argument here that wouldn't apply exactly the same to the stove and the toilet. If an apartment has a shitty fridge, it simply is a less attractive, less valuable property. If you want full control over such details, you can buy instead of rent, or you can buy your own frdge and keep the original in a storage unit until you move. If that sounds stupid, I agree that would be stupid.
by apparent | 2026-01-06 03:17:11+00:00
The other big differentiator is the fact that you can do anything on the watch with just buttons. Some Garmins let you easily control music without using the touchscreen, but I think it's just the 5-button ones.

This is great for when you want to give the watch input signals without looking at the screen and hitting specific tap targets, or when your hands are wet/gloved/etc.
Why text-based evals fail for vision-language models
by nikhilpareek13 | 2026-01-06 03:17:34+00:00
Text hallucination gets most of the attention, but image hallucination may be the larger long-term problem.

In vision-language systems, hallucination often means inventing objects, attributes, or actions that are not present in the image at all.

Examples:

- Describing people who don’t exist
- Inferring actions that never occurred
- Assigning attributes unsupported by visual evidence

As these models are increasingly used for e-commerce listings, accessibility captions, document extraction, and medical imaging, the consequences escalate quickly.

Most evaluation pipelines are still text-centric. They don’t verify whether the generated description is actually grounded in the image.

Detecting image hallucination requires multimodal evaluation that reasons over both the image and the output jointly.

Curious how teams here are approaching hallucination detection for vision-language models today.
by dang | 2026-01-06 03:18:02+00:00
I hope so too and I take your comment as encouragement in that direction!

Another question that's orbiting around this in my head is how do we explain to the community what we're looking for and why. Knowing HN, and the internet in general, I can imagine the backlash from certain segments of the commentariat ("Oh so we're only allowed to do happy talk now?" - "Once again the corporate overlords crack the whip" - etc. etc.)

On the other hand, I also know that other sizeable segments of the community have been tired of the cynicism here for a long time - so there will be positive repercussions too.
by shcallaway | 2026-01-06 03:18:11+00:00
Hello! Yes, you are right - observability and APM have both been around for many decades, but the incarnations that most people are familiar with are the ones that emerged in the 2010s.

My intention wasn't for this post to be a comprehensive historical record. That would have taken many more words & would have put everyone to sleep. My goal was to unpack and analyze _modern observability_ - the version that we are all dealing w/ today.

Good point though!
by banbangtuth | 2026-01-06 03:18:34+00:00
Kinda off topic but related. But is it realistic these days to just expect software to write once and run forever?

I am a TypeScript/Frontend guy by trade, but I always admire languages like Go. It seems like a simple language that I can write once and maintain forever or once in a blue moon. Everytime I want to write something in TypeScript and then I pull bunch of crazy dependencies, I began to question if it is worth it? These days I am just pulling React, TypeScript, and just do CSS. If I need a dependency I'll try to just code it from scratch with LLM. Is it realistic to expect, React, TypeScript to be maintenance free forever? Since those are basically just abstraction on top of HTML/JS/CSS which are rock solid.

Ideally the home-baked software that I build will be just using very simple technologies, and I can just vibe/LLM code all the dependencies, or worst case just vendor it, and update it once a year or longer.
by bigiain | 2026-01-06 03:19:14+00:00
I wonder if this needs frontier models?

Or, if it does _now_, how long it'll be before it' will work well using downloadable models that'll run on, say, a new car's worth of Mac Studios with a bunch of RAM in them to allow a small fleet of 70B and 120B models (or larger) to run locally? Perhaps even specialised models for each of the roles this uses?
by minitech | 2026-01-06 03:19:22+00:00
The context is what’s essentially a shell-accessible library for a minimal set of cryptographic primitives. It’s very reasonable to want it to be as lightweight, portable, and easy to audit as possible, and to want it to run in environments where (continuing on Linux for example) the open syscall to /dev/fd/n -> /proc/self/fd/n will not succeed for whatever reason, e.g. a restrictive sandbox.

Not involving argument parsing simplifies the interface regardless of how easy the implementation is, and the cost is just having to look up a digit in a manual that I certainly hope anyone doing raw ed25519 in shell is reading anyway.
by bitwize | 2026-01-06 03:19:58+00:00
Upon reading the nth "Web development is fun again because LLMs make the complexity go away" article here on Hackernews, I started thinking, "LLM-based development is going to get even more complicated, fiddly, and tedious, and then we'll have to paper that complexity over with abstractions, which we'll then manage using LLMs in another turn of an infinite spiral of setting the earth progressively more on fire, just to stand up a basic web app which we could have done in 2000 with some HTML and PHP/Perl/Python knowledge". And here we are.
by conartist6 | 2026-01-06 03:20:41+00:00
Over the next 10 years, no, I think the market will course correct within that time frame. AI is the sauce that's being slathered on everything right now and demand for it is driving record valuations, particularly for AI startups and their founders. That demand is all investor-driven though: investors are falling over themselves to make AI investments, while consumers are not actually especially eager to have all human contact progressively stripped from their lives.
by next_hopself | 2026-01-06 03:20:46+00:00
CANTV (AS8048) is a correct upstream transit provider for Dayco (AS21980) as seen in both https://radar.cloudflare.com/routing/as21980#connectivity and https://bgp.tools/as/21980#upstreams

What most likely happened, instead of a purposeful attempt to leak routes and MITM traffic, is CANTV had too loose of a routing export policy facing their upstream AS52320 neighbor, and accidentally redistributed the Dayco prefixes that they learned indirectly from Sparkle (AS6762) when the direct Dayco routes became unavailable to them.

This is a pretty common mistake and would explain the leak events that were written about here.
by waldrews | 2026-01-06 03:21:40+00:00
The threshold isn't 50% because the distribution of human and AI written cases isn't naturally 50-50. So a coin flip will underperform always guessing the more frequent class. Where it gets interesting is if the base is unknown or variable over time or between application domains. Like, since AI written text is being generated faster than the human kind, soon guessing AI every time will be 99% accurate. That doesn't mean such a detector is useful.
by verdverm | 2026-01-06 03:22:54+00:00
Most current EV owners charge at home for daily needs, you really only need charging stations for long distance and owners w/o options where they park (i.e. renters or street parking only) Even with street parking, I see lots of people running cables across the sidewalk (with safety / step covers thankfully)

I drove across the country and accounted for midwest charging. Generally the rocky mountain states are minimal, but I was not without a charger ever 30-40 minutes of travel time through the midwest. Most of them are either in Big Store parking lots or at gas stations like Casey's. You need far fewer of them than gas stations, so we should expect to see fewer of these vehicle refill stations in the future anyway