MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by codedokode | 2026-01-20 12:43:16+00:00
The law makes a distinction between storing it on a disk and just remembering the content. The latter is not a "copy" and not a subject of law:

> “Copies” are material objects, other than phonorecords, in which a work is fixed by any method now known or later developed, and from which the work can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device. The term “copies” includes the material object, other than a phonorecord, in which the work is first fixed.

> A work is “fixed” in a tangible medium of expression when its embodiment in a copy or phonorecord, by or under the authority of the author, is sufficiently permanent or stable to permit it to be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated for a period of more than transitory duration. A work consisting of sounds, images, or both, that are being transmitted, is “fixed” for purposes of this title if a fixation of the work is being made simultaneously with its transmission.

https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html
by Tade0 | 2026-01-20 12:43:57+00:00
> But Porsche is known for engaging driver's cars, and without the visceral sounds and vibrations of an engine it is bland and boring. The flaws in a gas engine's power curve give it character

Personally I experienced this the strongest in my friend's restored mk3 Ford Escort. I recall it as a feeling of not actually being inside a car due to the wind and engine noise.

Meanwhile the BMW 5 Series I rented a while ago didn't provide any of those feelings. Granted, it was a diesel automatic, but when I floored it, it just went and the engine noise was barely noticeable - at least compared to my poorly noise insulated daily Toyota.

The best thing about that car was that I could take my family on a 400km trip, the last 100km of which were mountain roads and not even break a sweat.
by hombre_fatal | 2026-01-20 12:45:46+00:00
One midpoint is traditional css frameworks like https://getbootstrap.com/.

Not as powerful, and you don't get this sweet 3rd-party pluggable component catalog, but it's much simpler and it's stable: there's no constantly evolving ecosystem.

Shadcn ecosystem might have calmed down by now, but when I used it years ago, the layers on top of it were super unstable, and I was annoyed every time I have to work on those projects until I got Opus 4.5 to refactor out of them.
Show HN: E2E mobile testing with plain English. Runs on Android and iOS
by arnold_laishram | 2026-01-20 12:45:53+00:00
I’ve been building mobile apps for 10+ years, many used by millions of users. One problem kept coming back at every release: mobile testing is the bottleneck.

Before releases I spent hours, sometimes days, babysitting flaky tests. Our team ended up spending ~40–50% of its time maintaining test scripts and fixing issues that could have been caught earlier. Existing tools (Appium, etc.) rely on brittle selectors and hard-coded scripts that break as soon as the UI changes or any random popup appears during testing.

So I built a different approach from the ground up: test like a human. Describe the flow you want to test in plain English, and a Vision+Intent agent executes that flow on real Android and iOS devices. The agent understands context (if a popup appears it dismisses it and continues), maps intent to UI actions, and aims to make test definitions resilient across platforms.

It’s early and opinionated. We optimized for:

1. drastically reduced test maintenance
2. fewer false failures in CI
3. a single test definition that works on both Android and iOS

We’re actively looking for feedback from people who’ve fought mobile testing: what’s still broken for you, and what would make this genuinely useful?
If you’ve got flaky suites, device-farm headaches, or cross-platform parity pain — I’d love to hear specifics.
Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?
by terabytest | 2026-01-20 12:45:57+00:00
I've been trying to get agentic coding to work, but the dissonance between what I'm seeing online and what I'm able to achieve is doing my head in.

Is there real evidence, beyond hype, that agentic coding produces net-positive results? If any of you have actually got it to work, could you share (in detail) how you did it?

By "getting it to work" I mean:
* creating more value than technical debt, and
* producing code that’s structurally sound enough for someone responsible for the architecture to sign off on.

Lately I’ve seen a push toward minimal or nonexistent code review, with the claim that we should move from “validating architecture” to “validating behavior.” In practice, this seems to mean: don’t look at the code; if tests and CI pass, ship it. I can’t see how this holds up long-term. My expectation is that you end up with "spaghetti" code that works on the happy path but accumulates subtle, hard-to-debug failures over time.

When I tried using Codex on my existing codebases, with or without guardrails, half of my time went into fixing the subtle mistakes it made or the duplication it introduced.

Last weekend I tried building an iOS app for pet feeding reminders from scratch. I instructed Codex to research and propose an architectural blueprint for SwiftUI first. Then, I worked with it to write a spec describing what should be implemented and how.

The first implementation pass was surprisingly good, although it had a number of bugs. Things went downhill fast, however. I spent the rest of my weekend getting Codex to make things work, fix bugs without introducing new ones, and research best practices instead of making stuff up. Although I made it record new guidelines and guardrails as I found them, things didn't improve. In the end I just gave up.

I personally can't accept shipping unreviewed code. It feels wrong. The product has to work, but the code must also be high-quality.
by hinata08 | 2026-01-20 12:46:04+00:00
Why was this flagged ?

Isn't making 1200$/h while being self employed the goal for HNers ? Isn't HN supposed to be open minded ?

This is the most HN post we saw ou there in a while.

As if boasting how code was improved at GAFAMs despite actually thought challenging social implications, reduced wages and layoffs was the only point of this board.
by rune-dev | 2026-01-20 12:46:05+00:00
Bluesky absolutely yes, something like React makes sense.

I think it depends on a few things but the two big ones in my mind are:

1) Interactivity. How rich do you need/want the interactivity to be? As this scales up the benefit of React also increases.

Of course you can get highly interactive vanilla HTML sites but it’s much easier to achieve with React.

2) Statefulness. The more UI state you have the more a tool like React helps you.
Again, it’s not doing anything you cannot do with vanilla HTML/JS but the level of difficulty comparatively is night and day.

On top of that, React is widely adopted. The tooling is fantastic, the community is strong, the job prospects are very good, and if you’re hiring the talent pool for React is vast.
by tomd | 2026-01-20 12:46:12+00:00
When I'm building apps that use LLMs I'm often looking up prices from the providers' websites, sometimes copying and pasting them into prompts ('calculate and display the costs for this model using this screenshot'). I'd rather tell Claude Code 'use toktab.com to get the current prices for gemini-3-flash-preview'. And now I can! This site is built every night from the open source pricing data from LiteLLM - https://github.com/BerriAI/litellm - which was the most comprehensive data I could find. I think the main weakness is lack of fuzzy searching, which is hard to achieve with a statically generated site, but I'm very open to suggestions.
by palijer | 2026-01-20 12:46:53+00:00
I'm back in school part time for a bachelor's, and have recently had a class where I had a professor who really understood how to implement LLM's into the class.

Our written assignments were a lot of "have an LLM generate a business proposal, then annotate it yourself"

The final exam was a 30 minute meeting where we just talked as peers, kinda like a cultural job interview. Sure there's lots of potential for bias there, but I think it's better than just blindly passing students using LLM's for the final exam.
by cztomsik | 2026-01-20 12:48:10+00:00
React is not simple (preact is) and what's worse, it gets more and more overengineered in order to solve the problems they have themselves created (accidental complexity in your video).

Sadly, accidental complexity is a common theme among react devs, not just ui libs, but also react-router, redux, redux-form, even tanstack useQuery() is way over-engineered and the core idea can be implemented in <50 lines and then you own the code and can make project-specific changes.

Maybe that's the biggest issue after all, people being lazy, expecting to do npm install and being able to reuse everything in any situation. Except that it almost never work like that and a lot of damage is done in the name of it... </rant>
by Ronsenshi | 2026-01-20 12:50:15+00:00
I can very much relate to the OP in this. I enjoy writing code, figuring out problems, finding solutions and in general helping other people with things that require some kind of software to be created or updated. And until year or two ago I thought I'd be able to continue to do what I love while getting paid decent money for it. With the advent of vibe coding and AI I'm starting to feel less sure in the future.
by W_rey45 | 2026-01-20 12:50:40+00:00
Great questions.

1) Crash/orphan side-effect: agreed this needs an intent/commit model. The clean pattern is WAL-style: emit/sign an “INTENT” receipt before side-effect + a “COMMIT” receipt after; absence of COMMIT is itself evidence (“we can’t attest completion”). Another option is tool-level signing so the side-effecting tool returns a signed result that the agent includes.

2) Linking: yes linkage can be native without building storage. Next iteration is parent_hash (or prev_hash) inside the signed_block so receipts naturally chain; Merkle/log indexing stays external.
Show HN: Swim gossip protocol in Rust with mio/epoll
by paul0112 | 2026-01-20 12:51:19+00:00
I built this to understand how epoll works under the hood and why it matters for networked systems.

SWIM is a gossip protocol for failure detection in distributed systems - each node periodically pings random members and if they don't respond, asks other nodes to try (indirect probing). Simple but effective.

What I learned about epoll:

1. It's O(1) vs poll/select's O(n). With 10k connections, poll scans all of them every call. epoll only returns the ready ones.

2. When idle, epoll_wait just sleeps - zero CPU. The kernel wakes you only when data arrives. In my traces:

epoll_wait = 1 <10µs> ← data ready
sendto <52µs> ← send
recvfrom <14µs> ← receive
epoll_wait = 0 <1.001s> ← sleeps 1 second, 0% CPU

3. Edge-triggered mode is tricky. mio uses it by default, so you won't get re-notified for writability until you hit
EWOULDBLOCK.

Happy to discuss the implementation or answer questions about epoll gotchas.
by foldr | 2026-01-20 12:51:23+00:00
C++ doesn’t really have an ownership system. You can use certain language features to implement certain kinds of ownership discipline, but the language itself doesn’t really have an opinion on who should own what. For example, the article talks about cases where a returned value “must” be deallocated by the calling code, but there is no “must” about it as far as the language is concerned. You’re perfectly at liberty to allocate something without ever freeing it (and this isn’t even a memory leak if the value is needed throughout the lifetime of the program).
by thrance | 2026-01-20 12:51:27+00:00
Fraudsters usually don't resort to violence once they get caught. In your contrived example, the guy would probably end up paying what he owed and that would be that. Violence mostly emerges from people who feel that they are treated unfairly, and can't use civil channels to solve their issues. Which is why it's important to build a society that treats people fairly.
Show HN: I've built the "Google Docs" for 3D Files
by hugoroussel | 2026-01-20 12:51:36+00:00
I use a ton of 3D Files as I love 3D printing in my spare time and I usually exchange them over Gmail and store them in Google Drive etc..

Google does not have a 3D Preview of files so I've built a small Google Workspace Addon that opens the file into a clean "Google like" web app that supports most files.

Other solutions existed but they were full of ads and looking absolutely terrible.

It got a bit of traction (around 400 users) on the store so thought I would share it here! Would love to have feedback!

Each file is treated purely in the browser for maximum privacy
Show HN: Xhttpy – unified HTTP API request tool (sync/async, stream/non‑stream)
by evil_yam | 2026-01-20 12:51:46+00:00
Hi HN — I built xhttpy, a small Python library that provides a unified interface for HTTP API requests across sync/async and streaming/non‑streaming modes.

Why

- Dealing with different HTTP libraries (requests, httpx, aiohttp, etc.) and switching between sync/async or stream/non‑stream can be tedious.
- xhttpy aims to give a single consistent API so you can switch modes with minimal code changes and share logic between sync and async paths.

Key features

- Unified API surface for sync and async requests
- Support for streaming and non‑streaming responses
- Lightweight and focused on HTTP request ergonomics
- Designed to integrate easily in scripts, services, and async apps

If you try it, please let me know what you think — usage notes, missing features, or surprising behavior. Thanks!
Show HN: Ipfrs – A "Thinking" IPFS in Rust with Built-In Vector Search
by kitasan | 2026-01-20 12:52:03+00:00
I built a "Thinking" IPFS in Rust.

Unlike standard IPFS, IPFRS supports built-in Semantic Search (HNSW) & Logic Programming on the DAG. You can query content by meaning, not just hash.

Looking for feedback on the architecture!

Blog: https://medium.com/@kitasanio/beyond-static-storage-why-i-bu...
Code: https://github.com/cool-japan/ipfrs

#RustLang #IPFS #Web3 #AI #RAG
by sysdesautopsy | 2026-01-20 12:52:52+00:00
OP here.

I put this checklist together after digging into the CrowdStrike "Channel File 291" crash. Basically just tried to map out the specific gates (like N-1 validation and negative fuzzing) that actually would have caught the bug before it hit prod.

If anyone is interested in the visual breakdown of how the failure propagated, I recorded an analysis here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D95UYR7Oo3Y

Curious what other hard gates you folks use for kernel/driver updates.
by y42 | 2026-01-20 12:53:31+00:00
1. Open API for rental/real estate stuff at immoscout24...

There's an API but you have to pay for it. Which I understand on one side, but then: immoscout24 is basicly the biggest player and this is not about consumer goods but one essential good: flats, space to live. So I think it should be mandatory to offer data to everyone who wants to research house & flat pricing/demand data.

2. A generic API for governmental financial transaction data! This would make research so much easiere. There are couple of open data platforms, but look at how scrambled the data is. What is a "financial transaction"? It's basically nothing else then "from, to, amount, reason, category" - I know there's more, but you can break it down, if you want. So, right now every city, district and government is maintaining their own "database". I once tried to analyse EFRE data. Turns out, while this data is basically open and free, every party offers their own weird format, XLSX, CSV and you name it.

I don't see why no one ever tooks the effort to "normalize" such a simple thing - again: I know there's more. But the big picture should simply allow you to create a generic protocol/stream for that kind of data.
by pjmlp | 2026-01-20 12:54:24+00:00
Try to use Quicktime, Quicktime3D, QuicktimeVR on Tahoe, with their Mac OS 9 API surface.

Or Java Bridge, Carbon, AGL for some more recent on OS X timeframe.

An example on Github compiling on Tahoe is welcomed.

Nope, "Apple does keep supporting old APIs indefinitely.". doesn't stand.
by ffsm8 | 2026-01-20 12:54:40+00:00
Where? Just checked on every app I've purchased in app unlocks and none of them have any indicator for these unlocks (or others that are still available) on their app store page.

The only way to see them - from my experience which I just verified - is to go into the app and go into the relevant menu's of the apps.

Please explain where you're able to see this information on the app store on iOS or iPadOS
by kalleboo | 2026-01-20 12:55:14+00:00
> HDDs typically have a BER (Bit Error Rate) of 1 in 1015, meaning some incorrect data can be expected around every 100 TiB read. That used to be a lot, but now that is only 3 or 4 full drive reads on modern large-scale drives

I remember this argument way back 16 years ago when the "Why RAID 5 stops working in 2009" article[0] blew up. It's BS. Those aren't the actual average error rates. Those are inflated error rates below which the manufacturer does not want to bother supplying a warranty for.

I have a pool with 260 GB worth of 10/14 TB disks in it 80% full, with monthly scrubs going back years. Not a single checksum error, and in total something like 30 reallocated sectors seen in SMART (half of those on a 7 year old drive).

[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-raid-5-stops-working-in-20...
by elar_verole | 2026-01-20 12:55:15+00:00
Heavy regulation, harder to anonymize, and overall less person exposed to insider info because you can bet on only a subset of stuff, and not everything that can ever happen.
Mind you, I still think these existing financial markets do have a ton of issues of this kind (trump's tariff to manipulate the market is a very recent example), but why add more on top of it ?
by Esophagus4 | 2026-01-20 12:55:20+00:00
I have no garage and work from home. So no workplace to charge.

So now you’ve added another thing I have to worry about - finding charging somewhere along my 10 minute errand route?

EVs are a bad solution to a problem I don’t have. Hybrids are much better.

For the small amount of driving I do, driving my commuter ICE car with a tiny, 35-mpg 4 cylinder engine is fine… why are the EV cultists so convinced their way is the only way and the rest of us are living in prehistoric times?

Plus, your EV is heavier than my ICE, so your tires shed rubber particulate more quickly than my tires due to the weight, which is also an environmental pollutant (that is toxic enough to kill wildlife, btw)

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abd6951
by petercooper | 2026-01-20 12:55:35+00:00
This is true to some extent in the UK as well. We have a curious company car tax regime where CO2 emissions are used to define the tax rates so hybrids are somewhat lower, although it's still onerous compared to just buying a car personally.

However, pure EVs are taxed at very low rates in comparison, so if you own a company or have the ability to do a "salary sacrifice" for a car with your employer, it becomes very tax advantageous to get an EV. Your company can also pay for your insurance, EV charge installation, public charging costs (even for private mileage) and so forth, so it's very common to see small business owners in EVs compared to private buyers. Porsches also tend to have particularly low monthly payments compared to their value since I guess they hold their value well and can be traded back in at the end of the financing period. I don't have one, though, as a Porsche is just crying out to be keyed or mocked where I live compared to a more modest car.
by aurareturn | 2026-01-20 12:56:05+00:00
Side note, there’s been a few recent publications showing that dark energy may not be needed to explain what we are seeing.

1. Inhomogeneity backreaction (Moffat 2025)
Large-scale cosmic inhomogeneities such as voids and dense regions can create an effective expansion history that mimics evolving dark energy when averaged using standard homogeneous assumptions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.20912

2. Timescape cosmology (Wiltshire)
Because cosmic voids expand faster than dense regions and dominate volume at late times, observers may infer acceleration from redshift data even if the universe is not globally accelerating.
https://www.livescience.com/physics-mathematics/dark-energy/...

3. Local giant void hypothesis
If the Milky Way resides inside a large underdense region, locally measured redshifts and distances can bias expansion measurements and partially explain apparent acceleration and Hubble tension.
https://www.livescience.com/space/cosmology/echoes-from-the-...

4. Void universe models (LTB cosmologies)
Placing the observer near the center of a large cosmic void can reproduce supernova redshift–distance relations without dark energy, though such models struggle with other cosmological constraints.
https://arxiv.org/abs/0807.1443

5. Structure formation and virialisation effects
The growth of cosmic structure and entropy production alters averaged expansion rates, potentially generating an apparent dark-energy-like signal without introducing a new energy component.
https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2024/09/aa50818-...

6. Redshift drift as a discriminator
Measuring how cosmological redshifts change over time can distinguish true cosmic acceleration from redshift effects caused by voids or inhomogeneous expansion.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1010.0091
Ask HN: How do solo founders handle security?
by massi24 | 2026-01-20 12:56:06+00:00
Building a SaaS as a solo founder. Enterprise companies have security teams, pentests, bug bounties. We have... hopes and prayers?
Curious how others approach this:
- Do you do any security testing before launch?
- Ever had a vulnerability reported? How'd it go?
- Bug bounty programs seem overkill for small products or are they?
Not looking for "just use Auth0" type answers. More interested in the practical stuff indie devs actually do (or skip and regret).
by mx-Liu123 | 2026-01-20 12:56:12+00:00
I built AgentCommander to automate the manual "trial-and-error" loops in my PhD Physics/ML research.

While tools like OpenEvolve (population evolution) and RD-Agent (Kaggle-style automation) exist, I found them difficult to customize for specific, multi-step research workflows. I needed a system that allowed granular control over the agent's decision process—specifically, how it learns from errors and inherits code states.

AgentCommander solves this by providing:

Visual Graph Execution: Workflows are defined as directed graphs, allowing for complex loops, conditional branches, and human-in-the-loop checkpoints.

Evolutionary Tree Tracking: It treats every iteration as a node in a tree. The agent automatically branches off the current "global optimum" rather than a linear history, preventing regression.

Snapshot Integrity: To prevent LLM hallucination or "cheating" (e.g., modifying test cases), the system uses filesystem snapshots to enforce strict read-only permissions on evaluation logic.

Native CLI Wrapper: Built on top of Gemini/Qwen CLI to leverage their native tool-use capabilities while enforcing a sandboxed working directory.

The project is open source (Apache 2.0) and written in Python.

Repo: https://github.com/mx-Liu123/AgentCommander
by kakacik | 2026-01-20 12:56:22+00:00
This is kind of typical situation with men and women right, they need their girl friend coffee complaint time, we guys need similar beer time, albeit contents vary wildly. At least what you write fits every ex-gf I dated, and also fits my guy-brain expectations and resulting type of discussions.

Part of the setup by default, but should not take decades to discover or reveal. Similar to how women experience stuff mainly via emotions, hence what was fine yesterday may not be today albeit factually nothing changed.

101 of each adult should be also figuring out how one works (and how doesn't) and optimizing with other relevant parties further interactions.