MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dfajgljsldkjag | 2026-01-21 06:26:46+00:00
The feature matrix says cbz/zip doesn't have random page access, but it definitely does. Zip also supports appending more files without too much overhead.

Certainly there's a complexity argument to be made, because you don't actually need compression just to hold a bundle of files. But these days zip just works.

The perf measurement charts also make no sense. What exactly are they measuring?

Edit:

This reddit post seems to go into more depth on performance: old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1qi64pr/comment/o0pqaeo/
by riffraff | 2026-01-21 06:27:29+00:00
At a glance this looks like an obviously nicer format that a zip of jpegs, but I struggle to think of a time I thought "wow CBZ is a problem here".

I didn't even realize random access is not possible, presumably because readers just support it by linear scanning or putting everything in memory at once, and comic size is peanuts compared to modern memory size.

I suppose this becomes more useful if you have multiple issues/volumes in a single archive.
by lovich | 2026-01-21 06:28:59+00:00
Does the applicant or the employer decide if an interview happens in your experience?

Do you think if the applicants are really in that level of demand that they would be getting a take home test instead of being actively recruited?

Legitimately lay out your understanding of a world where an employer is chasing after employees who are high in demand, give them a test that is expected to take hours, and have a hedged bet in their wording, instead of saying we will absolutely hire you if you pass X bar?
by dlcarrier | 2026-01-21 06:29:59+00:00
Roving hordes of warlord-run gangs aren't likely to last all that long. Unless they're extremely successful, they're going to be constantly infighting for resources, and success is a very high bar, because if they don't win every conflict, their population will rapidly decline from attrition.

It won't take long for it to become overtly apparent to the members of roving hordes of warlord-run gangs that befriending an off-grid self-sufficient abode is a much, much lower risk option than raiding it.
by molteanu | 2026-01-21 06:31:39+00:00
That's a very good point.

The OP is "quite weak at JavaScript" but their AI "vastly improved the quality of the extension." Like, my dude, how can you tell? Does the code look polished, it looks smart, the tests pass, or what?! How can you come forward and be the judge of something you're not an expert in?

I mean, at this point, I'm beginning to be skeptical about half the content posted online. Anybody can come up with any damn story and make it credible. Just the other day I found out about reddit engagement bots, and I've seen some in the wild myself.

I'm waiting for the internet bubble to burst already so we can all go back to our normal lives, where we've left it 20 years or so ago.
by creata | 2026-01-21 06:32:01+00:00
Zip also has per-asset checksums, contrary to the comparison table.

And what's the point of aligning the files to be "DirectStorage-ready" if they're going to be JPEGs, a format that, as far as I know, DirectStorage doesn't understand?

And the author says it's a problem that "Metadata isn't native to CBZ, you have to use a ComicInfo.xml file.", but... that's not a problem at all?

The whole thing makes no sense.
by calcsam | 2026-01-21 06:32:42+00:00
Re: Tanstack AI, really depends on adoption. We've known Tanner since his react-static days and if it takes off we'll def work together.

Re: Mastra cloud -- this is basically hosted services, eg observability, hosted studio, hosted serverless deployments, as distinct from the framework.

With server adapters you can now deploy your studio in your infra. We're going to pull multi-project / multi-user Mastra cloud features into a Mastra admin feature so you can run these locally or deploy them on your infra as well (with EE licensing for stuff like RBAC). Stay tuned here.
by hombreinabikin | 2026-01-21 06:36:41+00:00
I've been a developer for 6 years. I can architect APIs that scale and debug nasty race conditions.
But I couldn't make myself go to the gym consistently.
The Graveyard of Failed Systems
I've tried Todoist, Notion, Pomodoro, habit trackers, morning routines, "don't break the chain," Beeminder, public Twitter commitments. All abandoned within weeks.
I read Atomic Habits. Understood the cue-routine-reward loop. Knew about implementation intentions and environment design.
Knowing wasn't the problem. Doing was.
The Accidental Discovery
Last year, my roommate and I made a casual deal. Every night: "Did you work out?" Just yes or no.
I went from 1-2x per week to 5x per week. Eight months straight.
The weird part? I didn't feel more motivated. I just didn't want to type "no."
The Psychology
Social accountability is fundamentally different from self-accountability.
When you break a promise to yourself, you rationalize. When someone else is watching, the calculus changes: immediate social cost, consistency pressure, external memory, real-time feedback.
The research backs this up (American Society of Training and Development):

10% success rate for goals kept to yourself
65% with an accountability partner
95% with regular check-ins

Why Existing Solutions Fail
Habit trackers with friends: You can lie. Nobody checks.
Fitness apps with social feeds: Optimized for sharing wins, not preventing losses.
Coaching apps: Expensive. Diluted attention.
Discord groups: Too noisy. Easy to disappear.
The key insight: the dyadic relationship. One person watching you specifically.
So I Built It
Duuo is simple:

Create a goal
Add a partner (friend or matched stranger)
Check in daily/weekly
Partner sees everything
They nudge you if you go silent

That's the core. Streaks and badges just reduce friction.
Technical Notes
Stack: React Native (Expo) + Convex. Real-time sync matters—partner sees check-ins immediately.
Matching: Timezone + goal-type matching worked better than interest-based.
Nudges: One per day. More feels nagging, less feels ignorable.
Results
Users with active partners: 73% check-in rate
Solo users: 21% check-in rate
Average streak with partner: 23 days
Solo: 4 days
The partner is the product.
Try It
It's freemium—core features free, everything you need to test the loop.
TestFlight: [https://testflight.apple.com/join/pSZMCBBg]
Or just text a friend tonight: "Want to check in daily on [goal]?"
Sounds too simple. That's what I thought too.
by dheera | 2026-01-21 06:37:05+00:00
Time is the issue, not money.

I couldn't care less about getting paid for a few hours, what's truly annoying when you're job hunting is the company having an extremely high rejection rate even at the take-home stage. That's an inordinate waste of time multiplied by a lot of companies.

If you have a >50% chance of rejecting, don't even give the candidate a take-home. Be at least 90% sure you want them before you get to that stage.
by epistasis | 2026-01-21 06:37:30+00:00
Why would a country want to remain a manufactured-good export economy, rather than having the stronger position of a consumer economy that lives off the wealth of the rest of the world?

Why grind away relentlessly in industries with tiny profit margins, when there are high-margin innovation-driven industries that your economy can advance to?

Why stick with producing clothing, when you can move on to cars? Why stick with cars, when you can move on to chips? Why stay with chips, when you can move on to the next new technology that the entire world wants, but which only your economy can produce because it grew the industry from scratch and everybody is playing catch up?

Dictators love autarky because it gives them complete control of the population. Populations should not love autarky, because it makes them poor and robs them of wealth and opportunity.
by edanm | 2026-01-21 06:37:32+00:00
Serious question - what kind of example would help at this point?

Here are a sample of (IMO) extremely talented and well known developers who have expressed that agentic coding helps them: Antirez (creator of Reddit), DHH (creator of RoR), Linus (Creator of Linux), Steve Yegge, Simon Wilison. This is just randomly off the top of my head, you can find many more. None of them claim that agentic coding does a years' worth of work for them in an hour, of course.

In addition, pretty much every developer I know has used some form of GenAI or agentic coding over the last year, and they all say it gives them some form of speed up, most of them significant. The "AI doesn't help me" crowd is, as far as I can tell, an online-only phenomenon. In real life, everyone has used it to at least some degree and finds it very valuable.
by dysleixc | 2026-01-21 06:38:14+00:00
May I ask about your level of experience and which AI you tried to use? I have a strong suspicion these two factors are rarely mentioned, which leads to miscommunication. For example, in my experience, up until recently you could get amazing results, but only if you had let's say 5+ years of experience AND were willing to pay at least $100/month for Claude Code AND followed some fairly trivial usage policies (e.g., using the "ultrathink" keyword, planning mode etc) AND didn't feel lazy actually reading the output. Quite often people wouldn't meet one of those criteria and would call out the AI hype bubble.
by defatigable | 2026-01-21 06:38:21+00:00
I've never had a job where writing Javascript has been the primary language (so far it's been C++/Java/Golang). The JS Chrome Extension is a fun side project. Using Augment in a work context, I'm primarily using it for Golang and Python code, languages where I'm pretty proficient but AI tools give me a decent efficiency boost.

I understand the emotional satisfaction of letting loose an easy snarky comment, of course, but you missed the mark I'm afraid.
by botacode | 2026-01-21 06:40:08+00:00
It's nice to have a lot of small web content laid out like this! Some suggestions to make discovery more palatable:

- 1-2 sentence summaries for the content. most titles are not sufficiently descriptive and clicking on something un-interesting a few times is a sure fire way to get folks to churn

- checks for included feeds that they are correctly configured and the resources load in-browser (not download a random file to my computer)
Show HN: BlueMouse – open-source, local Socratic firewall for AI coding
by bluemouse_ai | 2026-01-21 06:40:24+00:00
Hi HN,
I built a CLI tool that acts as a middleware between me and LLMs. It forces a "Socratic" planning phase before allowing code generation.
The problem: I found "Vibe Coding" (prompting until it works) was making my architecture sloppy.
The solution: A 17-layer validation script and a prompt chain that asks modifying questions (e.g. "How do you handle JWT revocation?") before writing code.
Stack: Python, Local MCP Server.
License: AGPLv3.
Repo: https://github.com/peijun1700/bluemouse
by nemothekid | 2026-01-21 06:40:49+00:00
The problem is, as I understand it, is this hypothetical network where there is a NAT but no firewall just does not exist.

>In commercial grade routers, the same applies except even if the external IP knew to direct the router to the right internal IP, or if the route knew to direct the traffic to the right external IP for outbound connections, unless you configure a default route, or a more explicit route, it won't forward such traffic.

This is typically handled by the firewall, not the NAT. You can easily come up with scenarios that without the firewall, the NAT could be trivially defeated, e.g. by port scanning.
by calcsam | 2026-01-21 06:40:58+00:00
Thanks for the feedback. We hear from a lot of devs with fond memories of Gatsby but if it cuts the opposite way for you that's also fair!

Most of us spent a lot of the last decade building Gatsby so it's sort of a personal identity/pride thing for us more than a marketing thing. But maybe we need to keep our identity small! Either way, thanks for saying something, worth thinking about.
by theshackleford | 2026-01-21 06:41:09+00:00
Anecdotally, many non-technical users or "regular joes" as it were that I know who were very enthusiastic about AI a year ago are now disengaging. With the rate really picking up the last couple of months.

Their usage has declined primarily with OpenAI and Gemini tools, no one has mentioned Anthropic based models but I don't think normies know they exist honestly.

The disengagement seems to be that with enough time and real world application, the shortcomings have become more noticable and the patience they once had for incorrect or unreliable output has effectively evaporated. In cases, to the point where its starting to outweigh any gains they get.

Not all of the normies I know to be fair, but a surprising amount given the strange period of quiet inbetween "This is amazing!" and "eh, its not as good as I thought it was at first."
by mdavid626 | 2026-01-21 06:42:32+00:00
My colleague coded a feature with Code Claude in a day. The code looks good, also seemingly works. The code was reviewed and pushed out to production.

The problem: there is no way, he verified the code in any way. The business logic behind the feature would take probably few days to check for correctness. But if it looks good -> done. Let the customer check it. Of course, he claims “he reviewed it”.

It feels to me, we just skip doing half the things proper senior devs did, and claim we’re faster.
by galaxyLogic | 2026-01-21 06:42:35+00:00
I think a more interesting extension would be to see objects as functions. An object maps a set of keys to values. In most languages those keys must be strings. But I don't see why they couldn't be anything. For instance a key could be a function, and to access the value of such a key you would need to pass in exactly that function like this:

let v = myObject [ myFunk ];

Like with arrays-as-functions, the domain of the object-as-function would be its existing keys. Or we could say the domain is any possible value, with the assumption that value of keys which are not stored in the object is always null.

Whether new keys could be added at runtime or not is a sepearate question.

It should be easy to extend the syntax so that

myObject (anything) === myObject [anything]

whether myObject is an object, or a 'function' defined with traditional syntax.
by avereveard | 2026-01-21 06:42:49+00:00
Define "works"

Easiest way to get value is building tests. These don't ship.

You can get value from LLM as an additional layer of linting. Reviews don't ship either.

You can use LLM for planning. They can quickly scan across the codebases catch side effects of proposed changes or do gap analysis from the desired state.

Argumenting that agentic coding must be on or off seem very limiting.
by Incipient | 2026-01-21 06:43:14+00:00
>so we can be appropriately impressed and perhaps discuss interviewing.

Something comes across really badly here for me. Some weird mix of bragging, mocking, with a hint of aloof.

I feel these top end companies like the smell of their own farts and would be an insufferable place to work. This does nothing but reinforce it for some reason.
by ifh-hn | 2026-01-21 06:43:18+00:00
I find the discussion about whether or not NAT is a security feature or not interesting. To my mind NAT was intended to make ipv4 last longer in a clever way as address space dried up. A happy accident of this solution is a basic security feature.

Ipv6 doesn't (currently, will it ever?) have the same address space problem so each device anywhere could be globally routable. But we know that's not really a good thing security-wise. But why couldn't we implement NAT for it as a security mechanism, instead of an address space solution?

Admittedly I'm not expert so I might be talking shit.
by resonious | 2026-01-21 06:43:37+00:00
I think one fatal flaw is letting the agent build the app from scratch. I've had huge success with agents, but only on existing apps that were architected by humans and have established conventions and guardrails. Agents are really bad at architecture, but quite good at following suit.

Other things that seem to contribute to success with agents are:

- Static type systems (not tacked-on like Typescript)

- A test suite where the tests cover large swaths of code (i.e. not just unit testing individual functions; you want e2e-style tests, but not the flaky browser kind)

With all the above boxes ticked, I can get away with only doing "sampled" reviews. I.e. I don't review every single change, but I do review some of them. And if I find anything weird that I had missed from a previous change, I to tell it to fix it and give the fix a full review. For architectural changes, I plan the change myself, start working on it, then tell the agent to finish.
by Animats | 2026-01-21 06:44:41+00:00
Santa Clara County had an active cloud-seeding program from 1954 through 1994.[1]
Santa Clara County used to be a major agricultural area.
The goal is not to create rain, but to move it. Get the clouds to dump over the agricultural areas instead of the inland mountains. It worked, a little. But
there was a concern that it was making wildfires worse, by doing what it was intended to do and thus making the inland forests more dry.

[1] https://s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/valleywater.org.us-west-1...
by rendx | 2026-01-21 06:44:44+00:00
You're finding comforting explanations to allow you to act dismissively towards other people. I understand this is a strategy that is popular these days, but maybe consider how another fellow human will feel when you "don't give them a reason why you stop interacting, you just leave", and judge what they tell you as "toxic waste"; and how you might be the one to make it worse for them (and yourself). If you mentalize yourself into the other position, yours might appear arrogant and condecending if not psychologically violent from where you stand ("how's your aura looking?").

If you feel worn out after listening to other people, that's one way to avoid that, at the expense of human connection. There are other ways to not feel drained that don't cut people (and thus yourself) off. You can learn to gain more control over your own inner state, and become more independent from what people around you are saying or doing, instead of turning your problem into their wrongdoing.
by dlcarrier | 2026-01-21 06:45:00+00:00
Modern warlords have large quantities of subjects from generations and generations of consolidation, which itself is a variation of joining instead of looting. Gaining subjects is extremely risky, when you don't already have an army.

Really, modern first-world countries are just the descendants of warlordships that ran out of kingdoms to consolidate with and instead switched to taxation, either relinquishing enough power to their citizens to maintain a stable but effectively symbolic monarchy or overtaxing then losing to a rebellion.
by wavemode | 2026-01-21 06:46:02+00:00
This was discussed in the past: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17551687

To hear Patrick Collison tell it, "we see that one of the main limits on Stripe's growth is the number of successful startups in the world. If we can cheaply help increase that number, it makes a lot of business sense for us to do so."
by hahahahhaah | 2026-01-21 06:46:12+00:00
Yeah that was bullshit (like most AI related crap... lies, damn lies, statistics, ai benchmarks). Like saying my 5 year old said words that would solve the Greenland issue in an hour. But words not put to test lol, just put on a screen and everyone say woah!!! AI can't ship. That stil needs humans.
by rich_sasha | 2026-01-21 06:46:36+00:00
Headline (HN and original) is misleading. It suggests Lexus needs to disable heating altogether via an OTA update.

Rather, it sounds like they want to disable remote engine start for preheating the car. Which is a very different proposal.

If this was 1970s, I'd maybe feel differently about it, but since we put so much CO2 into the air already, winters are really tame in Europe anyway.
Show HN: Interview OS, a privacy-first job tracker
by iammhador | 2026-01-21 06:46:59+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Interview OS to solve my own job hunting chaos after applying to 50+ roles and losing track of applications, interviews, and follow-ups.

Key features:
- Kanban-style pipeline for tracking applications
- Interview round logging with markdown notes
- Email templates with {{placeholders}} that auto-fill company and role details
- Emails sent from your own address using your SMTP
- Community section for sharing real interview questions

The main goal was to keep everything privacy-first and under the user’s control.

Stack:
Next.js 14 (App Router), TypeScript, MongoDB, Prisma, Tailwind CSS, Radix UI

I’d appreciate any technical or product feedback.
What feels missing or over-engineered?
by throwaway81523 | 2026-01-21 06:47:13+00:00
That seems normal for an interview problem. They put you in front of some already-written code and you have to fix a bug or implement a feature. I've done tons of those in live interviews. So that part didn't bother me. It's mostly the rather large effort cost in the case where the person is a job applicant, vs an unknown and maybe quite low chance of getting hired.

With a live interview, you get past a phone screening, and now the company is investing significant resources in the day or so of engineering time it takes to have people interview you. They won't do that unless they have a serious level of interest in you. The take-home means no investment for the company so there's a huge imbalance.

There's another thread about this article, which explains an analogous situation about being asked to read AI slop: https://zanlib.dev/blog/reliable-signals-of-honest-intent/
by botacode | 2026-01-21 06:47:15+00:00
Intelligence is correlated with experimentation and drug usage (and generally do-what-you-will with your body political attitudes).

Some discussion on the phenomenon here:

"We know that intelligent people have more self-control and make better decisions in general — they’re less likely to play the lottery, more likely to follow medical advice, less likely to die in accidents. As a consequence, they tend to flourish in an environment free of normative constraints. They may experiment with drugs without ever getting addicted. They may dabble in polyamory without wrecking their marriage. They may coast on their achieved identity, dismissing traditions as stifling or unnecessary."

- via: https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/why-are-intelligent-people-...
Show HN: Pushover Scheduler – Cron jobs made easy with Cloudflare Workers
by Tomyail | 2026-01-21 06:47:26+00:00
I built Pushover Scheduler because I wanted a simple way to schedule Pushover notifications without managing servers.
What it does:
- Schedule one-time or recurring notifications
- Uses Cloudflare Workers + Durable Objects for reliability
- Built-in AI message generation (Cloudflare Workers AI)
- Self-hosted, zero dependencies on the client side
- Web UI for easy management + REST API
Tech stack: Cloudflare Workers, Durable Objects with SQLite, Hono, React + Tailwind
It's open source: https://github.com/your-username/pushover-scheduler
Deploy to Workers in one click.
I'd love feedback from the HN community. What features would you find useful?
by kortilla | 2026-01-21 06:48:45+00:00
> NAT is not for security, it does not provide security.

It’s not for security but it absolutely does provide security and pretending otherwise continues to harm discussions.

I have a pile of ipv4-only IoT devices that have no firewalls of their own that are being protected by the symmetric NAT in my home router. Kick and scream all you want but there is security there and nothing on the internet can reach those devices unsolicited, just like a stateful v4 firewall would provide.
by kristopolous | 2026-01-21 06:48:56+00:00
For me, the only metric that matters is wall-time between initial idea and when it's solid enough that you don't have to think about it.

Agentic coding is very similar to frameworks in this regard:

1. If the alignment is right, you have saved time.

2. If it's not right, it might take longer.

3. You won't have clear evidence of which of these cases applies until changing course becomes too expensive.

4. Except, in some cases, this doesn't apply and it's obvious