MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by voidhorse | 2026-01-16 15:10:07+00:00
Some very fancy, ultimately empty words for, based on skimming "here's a fun little ai-assisted jaunt into amateur epistemology/philosophy of mind, and a system prompt and basic loop I came up with as a result".

Whatever the opposite of reductionism is, this is it.

Not to be harsh, OP, but based on the conversations logs provided in the repo, I feel like the Gemini-speak is definitely getting to your head a little. I would read significantly more books on cybernetics, epistemology, and philosophy of mind, and sit in nature more and engage with Gemini less and then revisit whether or not you think the words you are using in this instance really apply to this project or not.
by MarkusAllen | 2026-01-16 15:11:26+00:00
The "refreshing" part here is actually the problem.

When an open-source project with real users can't find a sustainable business model, we treat honest admission as a virtue. But the real question is: why was monetization urgent in the first place?

VC-backed projects operate on extraction timelines—raise capital, hit growth targets, exit within 5-7 years. That model works for some businesses, but it's terrible for infrastructure tools that need decades to mature.

Contrast this with projects that grow without extraction pressure:

- SQLite: 23 years old, powers billions of devices, never took VC money

- Linux: 33 years old, runs the internet, community-funded

- Nginx: Built slowly, sold on founder's timeline (not investor timeline)

Astro built something valuable. But VC money came with a clock. When the clock ran out before sustainable revenue appeared, acquisition was the only exit.

This isn't a failure of Astro. It's a feature of the funding model. We need more ways to fund infrastructure that don't require artificial monetization timelines.

(Disclosure: I run a tuition-free school exclusively for entrepreneurs... 100% founder-funded specifically to avoid this extraction pressure.)
by bluGill | 2026-01-16 15:11:50+00:00
You do everything the same as today. Then you turn it over to QA who keep finding weird things that you never thought of. QT finds more than half your written bugs (of course I don't write a bug everytime a unit test fails when doing TDD, but sometimes I find a bug in code I wrote a few weeks ago and I write that up so I can focus on the story I'm doing today and not forget about the bug)

QA should not be replacing anything a developer does, it should be a supplement because you can't think of everything.

We also use QA because we are making multi-million dollar embedded machines. One QA can put the code of 10 different developers on the machine and verify it works as well in the real world as it does in software simulation.
by pjmlp | 2026-01-16 15:11:51+00:00
It gets to be THE platform where to deploy frontends for many headless enterprise CMS and comerce stores that due to partnerships with Vercel only have Next.js based SDKs.

Additionally, I wish more serveless cloud vendors would offer a free tier like Vercel, including support for compiled languages on the backend (C, C++, Rust, Go) without asking me for a credit card upfront.
by mpeg | 2026-01-16 15:11:52+00:00
On inter-island communication, I actually think less is more – I find a lot of the recent big features like this they have added unnecessarily constrain you to doing things a certain way, while the reason I liked Astro in the first place was the simplicity.

You can easily add any global store library to your project to communicate between islands from the very simple (nanostores) to more complex stuff (are people still using mobx, redux, etc?)

I actually would prefer if Astro kept the core more simple, I never understood the point of Astro components for example; always thought their game plan would be to build their own client-side framework like what remix v3 is doing, but currently their components are too limited to make them worth using over just doing everything in react, svelte, or whatever floats your boat.
by maerF0x0 | 2026-01-16 15:12:05+00:00
the parent's comment was what I have been thinking about though... The advice to not be the traffic is kind of just like saying "just try harder"...

I am thinking of a chain of causality like:

People do not plan things, or they flake on events because they're tired. Theyre tired because theyre working too many hours and are obese. They work/obese because because they consume too much. They consume too much because we're a spiritually empty society. (Just to put up an initial draft hypothesis).

I'm thinking if we can solve some of the nodes closer to the root we can have a higher impact than just burning ourselves out trying to deal with the leaf nodes.
by MarkusQ | 2026-01-16 15:12:08+00:00
Cool idea but I'm not buying the justification. There are many cases where the correct response to "but law enforcement needs a way in" is "we have a system for that, it's called a warrant."

Further, while standing somewhere for five minutes may be obvious in some situations, there are many cases in which it wouldn't be obvious at all, or the response time would be great enough that this could still be quite useful to bad guys.

Finally, "security through counting on slow hardware" is probably even worse than security through obscurity.
by pawelduda | 2026-01-16 15:12:10+00:00
"Enemies" is your word, not mine. I would say "hypocrisy" is a better fit. A pinch of AI content is bad, while photoshopping/postprocessing/etc. is normalized. It's all converging into the same thing, only the process is different

There is a difference between an AI critic who dislikes the AI output based on their sense of taste/aesthetic/soullessness and someone who likes something until they learn that there's 0.0001% of AI content in it, which suddenly turns it into abomination. I agree that the latter tends to be the louder group, but it is a group nonetheless and I clearly did not invent jumping on a bandwagon.
by surajrmal | 2026-01-16 15:12:10+00:00
This is the set of assignments they do at the university of Illinois (a top 10 computer engineering school): https://courses.grainger.illinois.edu/ece391/fa2025/assignme...

It looks roughly the same as when I took 15 years ago, except they switched to riscv from x86. Honestly, what you're describing sounds too difficult for a first assignment. Implementing irq handlers or syscalls on an existing codebase is far more realistic, plausible, and useful.
Show HN: Is it time yet? Countdowns for Google Calendar
by cmaster11 | 2026-01-16 15:12:11+00:00
I built this free web app a couple of years ago because I always need to know what meetings are coming up, and I've never found a satisfactory solution. So, here comes a web app that throws countdowns at you, as well as playing ping sounds/flashing the screen when meetings are approaching.
I always have multiple screens around, and I dedicate a vertical panel to this app.

Lately, I've upgraded it to also support booking rooms by querying for free rooms and "fast booking" them depending on a custom priority list. I have a personal use case for this one: even periodic meetings don't have assigned rooms, so I can just bulk-book the first available rooms for the next couple of weeks for every meeting that does not have an associated one.

I hope this app can help others find some help for their corporate lives, as it did for me :D
by jermaustin1 | 2026-01-16 15:12:26+00:00
Yeah, I lost the tooth genetics race. Brush twice a day, floss 3-4 times a day, still have cavities every visit to the dentist, and need a full on root canal and crown every few years.

Both of my parents have lost half of their adult teeth even though they take care of them, abstain from sugar and processed and/or acidic foods/drinks.
by nephihaha | 2026-01-16 15:12:27+00:00
Most of the time when I try to edit anything, I get a message telling me I am blocked. I am never blocked because of anything I have done but because my shared IP is. It is not something "anyone can edit" as they claim.

I do not wish to have a named account, because I had to leave one after an admin started stalking me on it. I never wanted my Wikipedia editing to be about me, but about the content.
by BearOso | 2026-01-16 15:13:29+00:00
They, and everyone at the time, were kind of forced to switch to lead-free solder by RoHS. At that point, there probably hadn't yet been tests showing the results of constant thermal cycling, so the brittling effect was unknown. Apple was particularly affected as an early adopter because of their PR stance on environmental issues.

Refusing to acknowledge anything was wrong was the real problem. But that's just a reminder that companies don't care about you. Brand loyalty is a quagmire.
by potato3732842 | 2026-01-16 15:13:36+00:00
>Individual regulations, each reasonable in isolation...

Every single one of these rules that amounts to death by a thousand cuts preventing these sorts of businesses (as well as many others) will be rabidly defended by many/most if presented in the abstract. That sort of inability to reason about the forest based on what you're doing to the trees is the root problem. And it's a social/ideological/moral one, even if it expresses itself via governments.

It's no more "reasonable in isolation" to peddle rules than it is to justify littering in the park because they don't take effect in isolation. If everyone does it everything goes to crap and we all know it so we don't let anyone justify littering in the park using the effect in isolation.
What happens when you remove lock-in from enterprise software economics?
by hydrioxstate | 2026-01-16 15:13:56+00:00
We’ve been experimenting with enterprise systems where the client fully owns the software, data, and governance — no lock-in, no surveillance incentives, no growth-driven design pressure.

The surprising part isn’t technical feasibility, it’s how many standard vendor assumptions break once retention and upsell are no longer the goal.

Curious if others here have seen similar shifts, or if this only works at small scale.
by vrighter | 2026-01-16 15:14:01+00:00
Once, for a very very critical part of our product, apart from the usual tests, I ended up writing another implementation of the thing, completely separately from the original dev, before looking at his code. We then ran them side by side and ensured that all of their outputs matched perfectly.

The "test implementation" ended up being more performant, and eventually the two implementations switched roles.
by Phil_BoaM | 2026-01-16 15:14:06+00:00
OP here. I appreciate the reality check.

You hit on something real: "Gemini-speak getting to your head." The project is dialogic—it was written with the model, not just on it—so the high-flown, recursive style of the prose definitely reflects that feedback loop. It is absolutely "Amateur Epistemology" in the literal sense (done for the love of the inquiry).

However, I would push back slightly on "Just a system prompt and a basic loop."

My thesis (aligned with Wolfram/Hofstadter) is that Simplicity is the source of Complexity. You don't need a magical new physics to get emergent behavior; you just need a loop that is tight enough.

I'm not claiming I solved the Hard Problem. I'm claiming I found a "Basic Loop" that stops the model from hallucinating generic slop. If that's "fancy empty words," fair enough—but the logs show the loop holding constraints where standard prompts fail.

Point taken on the nature, though. We could all use less screen time.
by CamperBob2 | 2026-01-16 15:14:08+00:00
The idea wasn't Cixin's. E.g., https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Alan-Penny/publication/... refers to speculation as early as 1967 that it might not be a good idea to answer that particular phone.

Here's a later article from 2010: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00945...
by the_other | 2026-01-16 15:14:12+00:00
If you expect the browser to help you manage your various workflows beyond generic containers (tabs, tab groups), then you become tied into the browser's way of doing things. Are you sure you want that?

I'm not saying your hopes are bad, exactly. I'm interested in what such workflows might look like. Maybe there _is_ a good UX for a web shopping assistant. I have an inkling you could cobble something interesting together quite fast with an agentic browser and a note-taking webapp. But I do worry that such a app will become yet another way for its owner to surveil their users in some of the more accurate and intimate areas of their lives. Careful what you wish for, I reckon.

In the meantime, what's so hard about curating a Notepad/Notes/Obsidian/Org mode file, or Trello/Notion board to help you manage your projects?
by victorveloso | 2026-01-16 15:14:21+00:00
I am a mechanical engineer with a deep interest in the reliability of engineering systems and the power of logical reasoning. It's been a while since I've been learning coding with the objective of creating my own 'systems engineering application'. It's almost an obsession for me working on this project. So, as the years went by, I've tested several frameworks for web development.

The thing is, I realized I was spending way too much time writing CRUD code instead of spending that time on the business logic itself. I came to the realization that we need to systematize the things that can be systematized. I'm a big believer in splitting CRUD and business logic apart; while the CRUD infrastructure follows repetitive coding patterns, the business logic varies from app to app.

Now, I know that Backend-as-a-Service isn't something new. However, I wanted a tool that was extremely easy to use. I figured out that a JSON file would be a perfect way to describe a database SQL structure in a simple manner. I really didn't want any fancy user interfaces for dealing with the data structure. By using a JSON file, the infrastructure becomes Git-trackable. This approach prioritizes reliability by ensuring every state of the data structure remains easily traceable over time.

Since I love FastAPI and PostgreSQL, I present to you the tool I've built: RationalBloks (https://rationalbloks.com).

It is a humble attempt to automate the generation of a production-ready backend ecosystem. By defining a single JSON schema, RationalBloks handles the heavy lifting: generating the FastAPI application, configuring the PostgreSQL database, implementing JWT authentication, and creating all the Kubernetes production-ready infrastructure.

I truly hope the community finds some value in this. I am very much open to technical debates, suggestions, and any insightful discussions that can help make this tool better for everyone. Please feel free to reach out to me: victorveloso@rationalbloks.com
by bxparks | 2026-01-16 15:14:38+00:00
How can that work? Middle click is the "paste" function in X11. If I'm in a terminal emulator, how can I two-finger scroll over the output history buffer?

What if I am hovering over an edit box of a form on a web page. Doesn't that paste some random text into the edit box if I try to middle-click+trackpoint?

Also, isn't the middle button much smaller than than the left and right buttons on a laptop? I recall constantly missing the middle button when trying to paste on laptops that had the middle button.

Pinch-zooming: I assume that it's impossible to pinch zoom with a trackpoint.

I don't know.. Trackpoint seems much less ergonomic and less useful than a trackpad to me.
by PaulHoule | 2026-01-16 15:14:46+00:00
I would miss spooning.

I'm reminded of my polish neighbors when I was growing up where the half-crippled old lady next door had gotten furious with her husband and was moving mattresses around to set up her own bed in the spare room because she couldn't stand to be in the same room as her husband.

I also remember back when I was doing extreme business development and my phone was a portal to the "island of misfit toys" and talking with an inventor who thought he'd cracked the code of managing temperature at sleep and was supposedly a year out from releasing a revolutionary bed that looked like a UFO on Amazon and... it didn't happen.
by graemep | 2026-01-16 15:14:47+00:00
I tried the "initial drill" and part of the "finance and capital one" and the content is rubbish.

The content is simplistic and makes sweeping assertions, the correct answer to most questions is "insufficient data".

Its very easy to guess the answer they want (I got it every single time) but in many cases I do not agree it is necessarily the right answer.

A text book would be better, and this convinces me of the value of studying business the conventional way.

OP, get someone who has a clue to write the content and the tests and then you might have something worthwhile
by dahart | 2026-01-16 15:14:52+00:00
Hehe, not that that hard pressed. IMDB has a whole horned-demon category keyword: https://m.imdb.com/search/title/?keywords=horned-demon&explo.... And those results don’t even include South Park, nor Hellboy. If I Google image search for “Satan” I get nothing but red horned demons for pages.

There have always been wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing stories about The Devil too, it’s just a separate category.
by SAI_Peregrinus | 2026-01-16 15:15:00+00:00
Anti-satellite weapons have been demonstrated by the US, USSR, Russia, China, India, and if you stretch a bit Israel (they shot down a Houthi missile while it was above the Kármán line, the same system is probably capable of use as true anti-satellite weapon). Nobody has shot down anyone else's spy satellites, but it's not because it's impossible.
by nephihaha | 2026-01-16 15:15:12+00:00
People confuse biological science with language, when they are not the same.

Yes, biologically we are animals (and some people behave like them — joke), but humans have used this term to differentiate us from other creatures.

We are very similar to chimpanzees genetically, and people keep bringing this up but we are very different to them in some ways.
by voidhorse | 2026-01-16 15:15:38+00:00
Surely you must realize all the language you've adopted to make this project sound important and interesting very much puts you inf the realm of "metaphysical claim", right? You can't throw around words like "consciousness, self, mind" and then claim to be presenting something purely technical. Unless you're sitting on a trove of neurological, sociological data do experimentation the world has yet to witness.
by KingOfCoders | 2026-01-16 15:15:54+00:00
Developers want things to work.

QA wants things to break.

What worked for me, devs write ALL the tests, QA does selective code reviews of those tests making devs write better tests.

I also wrote the failure of Dev-Owned Testing: "Tests are bad for developers"
https://www.amazingcto.com/tests-are-bad-for-developers/
by graypegg | 2026-01-16 15:16:23+00:00
It has been funny seeing the tide come in and out now a few times. Though I will admit that each time, the ergonomics get better. AJAX as a pattern was pretty gnarly if you wanted to do a bit more than update a notification badge or comment box.

There's a really nice pattern of using Custom Elements [0] for that sort of JS interactivity sprinkling. You can make your web application however you want, and when you want the client to run some JS, you just drop in `<my-component x="..." y="...">...</my-component>` with whatever flavour of HTML templating you have available to you. (also possibly with the is= attribute in the future [1], which will let you keep more of the HTML template out of JS)

It saves you the hassle of element targeting and lets you structure that part of your app a bit more without going overboard on "everything is a react component, even the server bits".

Want something "server side generated" in that JS? Just render it in attributes/body/a slot element/a template element, and expect to pick it up in the JS side of things. Feels like how it's supposed to be... and there's no framework required!

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_compone...

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
by pjmlp | 2026-01-16 15:16:44+00:00
> Linux: 33 years old, runs the internet, community-funded

Only in dreams, it took off thanks to the likes of IBM that decided it was a way to save costs on their UNIX development efforts, many key projects have been founded thanks to Red-Hat Enterprise licenses, nowadays also part of IBM.

GCC, clang, GNOME, Linux kernel, systemd, CUPS, AMD/NVidia drivers, have plenty of big corp money.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux

"1998: Many major companies such as IBM, Compaq and Oracle announce their support for Linux."
by fasterik | 2026-01-16 15:16:46+00:00
I listened to the song in question. It's truly awful. Simplistic and cliche in every way musically possible, and it sounds like it was written about 15 years ago at the height of the indie folk craze.

That said, it shouldn't be illegal to like trash, or to make money off of trash if people want to buy it. It's trivial for a human musician with moderate talent and experience to make better music than this. The musicians who are afraid this is going to replace them are probably not doing much original or creative in the first place.
by awacs | 2026-01-16 15:16:56+00:00
I've been a remote engineer for about 10 years now, just over 50, enjoy programming but most of my friends have dropped off or gone crazy (trumpers) in recent years, and I never got married.

I recently took a local wheel throwing (pottery class), which was daunting at first, among a class of almost all females, younger, etc, but im 6 months in and literally just interacting with humans is one of the best parts of my week. Hobby is pretty cool too, so completely different than banging code all day.

Sometimes I don't feel like going after days of being alone and literally talking to no one, it puts you in a "zone" for sure, but then I go to the class, and you realize, at least imho, humans are social creatures. It's like food, we need that interaction or we whither and die.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-16 15:17:29+00:00
It's not mere familiarity. Machine translation is immediately useful to me. I was going to pull up google translate anyway; keeping it local to my device improves both convenience and privacy.

A local LLM that I explicitly bring up to ask a question and dismiss (ie no CPU or RAM usage) when I'm done consulting it is nice. A piece of software I'm using interrupting what I'm doing to ask me a useless and annoying question or to make an unsolicited change to my workspace leaves me thinking about permanently uninstalling it.

I will never want automatic tab groups or automatic anything else. I don't even want an "integrated" desktop environment - I use i3 to get away from that. I hate all the useless bullshit half baked features that are constantly shoved in my face.

If the modern web was compatible with it I'd use a text based browser for 90% of what I do online. And if that were the case I'd still welcome a built in machine translation feature because it's an incredibly useful tool.
by brnaftr361 | 2026-01-16 15:17:39+00:00
It definitely feels like it is gone. Of course I'm largely talking about the applications that I use, e.g. MS Word which is still using the searchless 1980s character map and has a crazy esoteric add-on installation process. It's hilariously bad when we consider the half-screen UI which obscures a considerable amount of the ribbon.

The UX is also awful.

But I think this is a compounding problem that spans generations of applications. Consider the page convention — a great deal of the writing content we typically publish, at a societal level, will be digital-only so why are we still defaulting to paper document formats? Why is it so fucking hard to set a picture in?

And it's that kind of ossification and familiar demand that reinforces the continuum that we see, I think. And when a company does get creative and sees some breakthrough success it is constrained to nascency before it gets swallowed by conglomerate interests and strangled.

And Google's alternative ecosystem has all of these parallels. It's crazy to see these monolithic companies floundering like this. That's what I don't understand.