MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by speakingmoistly | 2026-01-11 20:13:09+00:00
> "Isn't life too short to have to deal with this for ANY amount of money?"

Those feel like pretty mild annoyances resolved by either taking those as an opportunity to try and drive change (in cases like lengthy standups, lackluster ticketing and codebase quality) or as something you can try to look the other way on 9-5 so you can focus on the parts you enjoy (during or outside of work hours). Taking a step back for perspective, software development is a pretty cozy and privileged career path compared to some others (exceptions apply: I would not wish looking for entry-level roles now to anybody, and I feel for folks affected by layoffs and stuck in the grinder).
by cedws | 2026-01-11 20:13:24+00:00
In summer I was lying on a beach in Thailand and used an app on my phone to look at things in the sky. Pretty much every moving glistening object I could see was a Starlink satellite. I know nothing about how their constellation works but I wonder why so many are needed. Surely you only need one or two in line of sight for it to work? I was seeing many more than that.
by tptacek | 2026-01-11 20:13:24+00:00
None of the Al's other than the one on Taylor is a real Al's! The rest are fronts for organ thieves.

I'm not even saying you can't make a smashburger with provolone. But it doesn't melt and spread like American cheese does. It can't. And if you try to melt cheddar in a pot without an emulsifying agent like cornstarch, it'll oil out. Gross! That's why people throw slices of American in with the cheddar (though we're a citrate household; citrate is American cheese extract, and it'll melt anything. Brick of parm. Celery. Masonry bricks.)

I don't have a strong opinion on beef vs. cheese steak; I might even prefer the cheese steak except I've never had one and not felt like grim death afterwards, going to bed with Phil Collins "In The Air Tonight" playing in my guts. All I'm saying is they're different sandwiches.
Ask HN: Tips for getting the ROM for an old speech synthesizer?
by ctoth | 2026-01-11 20:13:27+00:00
I'm building an emulator for the Braille 'N Speak, a Z180-based notetaker for blind users from the early 90s. One component is the SSI-263 (SC-02) speech synthesizer from Votrax/Silicon Systems.

The SC-01 was decapped and its ROM extracted back in 2007, but the SC-02 has different phoneme data. MAME and AppleWin both just map SC-02 phonemes to SC-01, which doesn't produce accurate speech.

There's a high-res die shot of the SSI-263P on visual6502.org (Greg James / Christian Sattler): http://www.visual6502.org/images/pages/Silicon_Systems_SSI_263P_die_shots.html

I don't know enough about ROM extraction to tell whether that image is sufficient or if delayering would be needed. Looking for anyone who's done this kind of work or can point me in the right direction. I have chips and can cover costs.
by _the_inflator | 2026-01-11 20:13:35+00:00
The legendary Jim Butterfield needs to be remembered in connection with the KIM.

He wrote the “The First Book of KIM” and it kickstarted his career within the 6502/6510 microprocessor family namely Commodore.

He is such an awesome role model to this day in explaining complex concepts to the average people that made them hungry for more.

Search him on YouTube, you will want to start BASIC on C64 the moment you watch him unpacking a C64 and plugin it in to show how easy it is to write BASIC programs for fun.
Show HN: A mobile-first React share sheet with native sharing
by ges | 2026-01-11 20:13:38+00:00
I built this because I kept re-implementing share UIs that worked well on mobile but still allowed customization.

Ships with a Tailwind-based drawer UI, but the core is fully headless - use the hook to build your own UI, or drop in the prebuilt components.
Supports native Web Share API with automatic fallbacks, and fetches Open Graph previews for shared links.

Demo: https://sharesheet.gwendall.com
GitHub: https://github.com/gwendall/react-sharesheet

Feedback welcome, especially on API design or edge cases I might have missed.
by corv | 2026-01-11 20:13:49+00:00
I’m building Shannot, a human-in-the-loop sandbox for AI agents on production systems.

Instead of filtering commands with heuristics (which agents work around), it dry-runs entire scripts in a PyPy sandbox, captures every command and file operation, then shows you exactly what will happen before anything executes.

I’ve just added checkpoint/rollback so you can undo changes if something goes wrong. Currently working on example scripts for common sysadmin tasks (nginx config, log cleanup, cert audits, etc.)

https://github.com/corv89/shannot
by jppope | 2026-01-11 20:13:57+00:00
I get that and scanned the article. they are currently, and have been, working on "AI" for a bit, but strategically they aren't positioned to provide a service offering right now. Even if they are going all in and they got regulatory love, it would make way more sense to go after an energy source/provider that could provide it on a faster timeframe. they'll get their energy in what? 7-10 years?
by DonHopkins | 2026-01-11 20:14:35+00:00
MOOLLM -- treating the LLM as eval() for a microworld operating system.

Started this incarnation on Dec 30, 2025 -- but it's the crystallization of decades of earlier prototypes, all the way back to my Commodore-64 Logo Adventure. Built on top of Anthropic's Skills framework, extended with seven innovations (and counting):

1. Instantiation -- Skills as prototypes creating instances with their own state

2. K-lines -- Names as semantic activation vectors (Minsky's Society of Mind)

3. Empathic Templates -- Smart generation based on semantic understanding, not string substitution

4. Three-Tier Persistence -- Platform (ephemeral) → Narrative (append) → State (edit)

5. Speed of Light -- Many turns in one call, minimal tokenization overhead

6. CARD.yml -- Machine-readable skill interfaces with advertisements

7. Ethical Framing -- Room-based inheritance of performance context

Lineage: Colossal Cave → TinyMUD → LambdaMOO (filesystem as world). Papert's Logo and constructionism (learnable microworlds). Will Wright's SimCity and The Sims (I worked on the originals) -- the "Simulator Effect" where players imagine more than you simulate, and the SimAntics visual behavior programming language.

YAML Jazz: Comments aren't ignored -- they're semantic. The LLM reads and interprets them. A comment like "# gentle but firm" on a character trait actually affects behavior. This inverts the traditional "comments are for humans" assumption. Comments become part of the program and data.

The core idea: instead of prompt engineering, you give the LLM a github repo filesystem to inhabit: a persistent microworld. Seymour Papert's Constructionist philosophy comes alive, with Minsky's K-Lines pulling the strings. Skills are programs (not documentation). Characters have persistent state in directories, and can reflect on and edit themselves. Everything is inspectable and editable by human AND model. Model and platform independent. Runs on Cursor and other tools and orchestrators.

The proof is in adventure-4 -- a complete text adventure with 150+ files, 6000+ lines of session transcripts.

Repo: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm

MOOLLM Manifesto: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/MOOLLM...

The MOOLLM Eval Incarnate Framework: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/MOOLLM...

Adventure 4 Example: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/tree/main/examples/adven...

My sessions as proof it works: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/tree/main/examples/adven...

79 Anthropic Skills (standards compatible, plus extensions, intertwingled with k-lines) and growing: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/tree/main/skills

A guided tour through the MOOLLM skills and microworld -- Session Log: K-Line Connections Safari: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adven...

MOOLLM Kernel: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/tree/main/kernel

Happy to answer questions about any of the weird design decisions!
by Moldoteck | 2026-01-11 20:15:28+00:00
chinese nuclear is extremely cost competitive at 2.5bn/unit. They have other reasons, one being the ban on inland expansion fearing of messing up with 2 major rivers that feed the country. Current chinese units are basically borrowed and improved western designs, cap is basically vogtle's ap1000, hualong is a frankenstein of several western designs.
by rglullis | 2026-01-11 20:15:47+00:00
I signed up to Claude Pro when I figured out I could use it on opencode, so I could start things on Sonnet/Opus on plan mode and switch to cheaper models on build mode. Now that I can't do that, I will probably just cancel my subscription and do the dance between different hosted providers during plan phase and ask for a prompt to feed into opencode afterwards.
by bayindirh | 2026-01-11 20:15:56+00:00
The problems with SBCs are primarily software. I have a ton of SBCs, mostly Raspberry Pis and OrangePis.

OrangePi boards are great. Zero is almost stamp sized, plus and pro has tons of options and on-board NVMe + fast-ish eMMC with great official cases, whatnot.

But, guess what? The OS is bad. I mean, unpatched, mishmashed, secured as an open door bad.

You get an OS installation which drops you to root terminal automatically on terminal output. There are many services which you don't need on board. There's an image, not an installer, and all repositories look to Chinese servers.

Armbian is not a good solution, because it's not designed to rollover like Debian and RasberryPi OS. So you can't build any long-term system from them like you can build with RaspberryPi.

On top of that, you can't boot anything mainline on most of them because either drivers are closed source, or the Kernel has weird hacks to make things work, or generally both.

So, what makes Raspberry Pi is not the hardware, but software support.
by Timon3 | 2026-01-11 20:16:56+00:00
> For the same reason ReasonML took years to overtake fartscroll.js in the number of stars on GitHub.

Wow, that's a fascinating statistic! Certainly puts the popularity delta into a different light.

On a separate note, the fartscroll.js demo page[0] no longer works since code.onion.com is no longer accessible. Truly disappointing. Luckily their release zip contains an example.html!

[0]: https://theonion.github.io/fartscroll.js/
by cgriswald | 2026-01-11 20:17:10+00:00
What really drives me nuts about von Däniken (and Tsoukalos, Childress, et al. …) is that he contradicts himself. (Sorry, I don’t care about this stuff enough to have a recent example.) His position isn’t consistent.

Zecharia Sitchin’s arguments are also frequently not good but he at least seemed to be trying to construct a consistent whole whereas these other guys will just say anything.
by ThrowawayB7 | 2026-01-11 20:17:28+00:00
That still isn't missing the boat. The pivot to the improved UI in Windows Mobile 6.5, the last of the old school Windows CE based releases, and skins by OEMs like HTC was IIRC in response to the iPhone's successful UI innovations.

And let's not forget that Google specifically interfered with access to their services on Windows Phone to hamstring it.
by sovietmudkipz | 2026-01-11 20:18:19+00:00
Plugin for Krita I use: https://github.com/Acly/krita-ai-diffusion

App I recommend to download models and manage UIs: https://github.com/LykosAI/StabilityMatrix

(1) Download Krita
(2) Download and install the Krita AI diffusion plugin
(3) Run comfy UI using StabilityMatrix

Docs for using the Krita AI plugin: https://docs.interstice.cloud/basics/
It's a really fun plugin to use!
by p0w3n3d | 2026-01-11 20:19:01+00:00
I wonder isn't WebDAV horrendously slow for you? I have selfhosted nextCloud and sending 1GB file was a nightmare (over WiFi). It took ages and didn't finish at the end. I did fall back to usb pendrive... I would like to have something that is not in PHP I guess, this might be the bottleneck
by tacone | 2026-01-11 20:19:09+00:00
Omarchy is a nice experience for devs.

Funnily enough, though, you can get a very user friendly experience using Niri and Dank Linux (don't remember the exact name). It takes two 3 CLI commands to install, and the top bar incredibly cool, compared to the i3 defaults and even to what I remember of Gnome and KDE.

Next up: somebody comes up with a desktop environment called BTW.
by linux4dummies | 2026-01-11 20:19:20+00:00
I tend to think of AI coding more like a tool and an advanced search engine. It closes the loop of searching for info, adjusting it to my needs, and writing the code. The trick (as this article states) is that you need to give clear instructions, and have the knowledge about what a good solution might look like to get anywhere near a good result. Also clearing or starting new prompts for smaller problems in the code might be helpful because the bigger the history gets, the more the model might be confused about what you want it to solve.
by LexiMax | 2026-01-11 20:19:23+00:00
> but you have to understand the rationale behind C++: a language suitable for large scale systems programming with ZERO OVERHEAD.

Is this the reason why C++ was created, or the last remaining niche that C++ is holding onto?

I remember the early 90's, and it very much seemed like C++ was being pushed as both a general-purpose language and the logical successor to C, insert Linus Torvalds rant here. On top of that, C++ made the decision to privilege a form of polymorphism that had pointer-chasing baked into its internal design, as well as having a good chunk of the standard library being considered a footgun best to avoid due to how much it blew up compile-times.

I think that C++ is a zero-overhead language now because a series of general purpose languages that came afterwards took the other niches away from it, plus the benefit of 30+ years worth of compiler optimizations that were originally largely aimed at the mountain of C code that was out there.

EDIT: Almost forgot about exceptions, the other enormous performance footgun that was an early pre-standard C++ feature.
by postpawl | 2026-01-11 20:19:38+00:00
The dark fiber analogy doesn't quite work though, because unused fiber just sits there harmlessly. Nuclear plants have massive decommissioning costs ($280M-600M+ per plant), ongoing waste storage requirements, and if the companies go bust, taxpayers are likely on the hook. The EU alone is underfunded by €118 billion on decommissioning. Meanwhile batteries and solar keep getting cheaper every year without the “who pays to clean this up in 50 years” problem. Seems like a very roundabout way to hope for public benefit.
by reactordev | 2026-01-11 20:19:39+00:00
It does work and no you don’t need to fiddle with build errors and crap unless you have some weird hardware.

It works for me plug n play with my scarlett devices. Many tracks.

Core i9, RTX 3080, Fedora w/ Proton on Vulkan. USB-C Scarlett.

I think your issue might be that you aren’t using an ALSA device.
by blacksmithgu | 2026-01-11 20:20:02+00:00
I have a family member who is quite into "ancient aliens" and who has read all of von Danikens books. The main thing I realized from arguing about it with them was that rigor and science did not really matter and would not convince them of anything. It's an emotional and spiritual belief for them - a way for them to rationalize how humans went from mud to computers. They don't believe in human creativity being powerful enough to lead to modern society and think an external force was required. Ancient aliens is a convenient and fun theory for how it could have happened.
by bayindirh | 2026-01-11 20:20:10+00:00
There was a gap before (think 90s and early 2000s) where there was a niche tinkering and more mainstream user/power user/programmer crowds. All these groups have knowledge gaps between them, but the gap was surmountable.

Now, the groups have drifted apart. Even if you're a programmer, unless you care or get excited about the hardware, you don't know how things work. You follow the docs, push the code to magical gate via that magical command, and that works. It's similar even for Desktop applications.

When you care about performance, and try to understand how these things work, you need to break that thick ice to start learning things, and things are much more complicated now, so people just tend to run away and pretend that it's not there.

Also, since the "network is reliable, computing cheap" gospel took hold, 90% of the programmers don't care about how much performance / energy they waste.
by convolvatron | 2026-01-11 20:20:13+00:00
I'm finally revisiting a distributed syscall model for transparently scaling unix instances. syscalls get translated into batched operations on an underlying non-transactional datastore. On the service side, database operations get backed by a proxy serving whatever filesystem or socket interface you like. Scaling is one motivation, but the ability to enforce fine-grained policy on these data operations is another big one.
by wnmurphy | 2026-01-11 20:20:24+00:00
Tangential, but you used to be able to use custom instructions for ChatGPT to respond only in zalgotext and it would have insane results in voice mode. Each voice was a different kind of insane. I was able to get some voices to curse or spit out Mint Mobile commercials.

Then they changed the architecture so voice mode bypasses custom instructions entirely, which was really unfortunate. I had to unsubscribe, because walking and talking was the killer feature and now it's like you're speaking to a Gen Z influencer or something.
Ask HN: Is there a point to maintaining distant connections on social media?
by Desafinado | 2026-01-11 20:21:06+00:00
I'm at a bit of a crossroads these days. Meta is a repulsive company and I prefer not to share any data with them or engage with their products, but there is a whole slough of distant connections I'd permanently lose touch with if I stopped using those products.

A bit of a cliche topic but I'm interested in hearing what others think of relationships like this. How do you feel about these distant contacts who are undeniably friends but who don't have enough time for us.

Lately I'm wondering if the whole game of social media is to leverage people's FOMO. Social media feels like the tribe that we'll lose if we leave. But is it true?
by graeme | 2026-01-11 20:22:06+00:00
>We know how to build nuclear, we don't do it because its too expensive.

Refusing to build nuclear for decades makes it more expensive. If we start actually building reactors the cost will come down.

>the current Storage + Renewable pricing is so crazy good, that whatever you do with nuclear will just not be able to compete.

I would find this more persuasive if there were no new investment in carbon sources, but carbon sources have clearly remained competitive with batteries + solar, and global carbon emissions remain at an all time high. There's demand for baseload energy.
by Moldoteck | 2026-01-11 20:22:32+00:00
what has home solar to do with country's grid and industrial needs? No country has a VRE+BESS solution to fully sustain itself. South Australia might get close having extremely nice weather patterns but even they will periodically import from fossils neighbors.
Nuclear was dirt cheap in US but it didn't help to expand it. and now it's not that cheap since supply chain is gone
by Aurornis | 2026-01-11 20:22:56+00:00
This comes up in every thread but nobody can advance an argument about how this passes the basic conspiracy theory test:

If they’re vacuuming up all the IP that comes in even when the user sets it to off, it must be going into a giant data store somewhere. There must be a large number of engineers and managers involved in all of the processes that get the data from the client to the cloud to the data store, all of whom are bought into this conspiracy. For this to work, all of them must always keep the secret forever and never leak any incriminating evidence anywhere.

Having a damning and easily provable secret hanging over the company would be an easy way for any former employee to leak it to the press and sink the stock price when they go public, making a huge profit by shorting the stock and wiping out gains before the insider lockup expires.

You really have to believe a lot of people, including ex-employees and any disgruntled employees they fired, are so committed to keeping the secret for some reason and that management is so short-sighted that they’re taking a company destroying risk for some marginal, minuscule improvement in their training set.
by techtalksweekly | 2026-01-11 20:23:09+00:00
https://techtalksweekly.io/

I'm building a newsletter called Tech Talks Weekly[1] where my readers get one email per week with all the latest Software Engineering conference talks and podcasts[1] published that week.

In January, I've released a paid tier[2] where my subscribers additionally get:

1. Access to my internal database of all the talks and podcasts since 2020 (+48,000 in total) where they can search, filter, sort, and group by title, conference/podcast, view count, date, and duration.

2. See the list of the most-watched talks over the last 7, 30, 90 days, 6 months, and 12 months based on number of views.

3. Get category-based view of new talks & podcasts by tech stack, language, and domain
(Software Architecture, Backend, Frontend, Full Stack, Data, ML, DevOps, Security, Leadership and every major language & ecosystem)

[1] https://www.techtalksweekly.io/p/what-is-tech-talks-weekly
[2] https://plus.techtalksweekly.io/
by oger | 2026-01-11 20:23:14+00:00
Building a 1D-Pong game is a bit of a rite of passage at the Chaos Communication Congress.

I was inspired by a version I saw at 38C3 and built my own interpretation for 39C3. Lots of people enjoyed playing it and even Elliot Williams featured it in his 39C3 Hackaday Podcast. And I can attest: it's truly fun because it's sooo simple at first sight - but wait until the speed increases... Not a bad work to fun created ratio for such a little project.

I used the opportunity to play around with Claude Code on my preexisting codebase to publish a nice-ish repo on GitHub. It worked great without any hitch or compile errors - impressive. What a nice way to test some capabilities.

Have fun with it an build your own version. And there are soooo many ideas that could be implemented. I am waiting for your feedback!

Will we end up with a league of networked 1D-Pong games? ;-)
by ymyms | 2026-01-11 20:23:36+00:00
I'm working on https://www.hessra.net/

We've built a new auth platform with some new identity primitives and capability-style tokens using biscuits.

Right now, I'm trying to figure out ways to apply it and am looking into offering integrations with extremely fine-grained access control that wouldn't have it otherwise. So adding a fine-grained access layer in front of stuff like backend-for-frontend (BFF) systems, brownfield stuff with poor auth, or even OAuth stuff that just have really coarse scopes.

Are there any integrations out there that people want but the access control is bad for them? I'll build one for you!
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-11 20:23:40+00:00
> surprised there's so many nuclear power companies

This is actually American capitalism working at its finest.

Have you seen a video of a slime mold "solving" a maze? It reaches out in every direction with thin tendrils until it makes contact. (Then the game shifts.)

We have a sense, like a slime mold picking up on the "scent" of food, that there is energy. But there are lots of good hypotheses for how we get there. So we try them. Not exhaustively. But multiply. When someone demonstrates they've got it, the game will shift to consolidation and scaling.
by overfeed | 2026-01-11 20:23:43+00:00
>>> If it were Adobe's or Microsoft's products generating CSAM, you wouldn't hear a peep out of them

>> I will defend absolute freedom of all speech by Musk [...] By Adobe [...] [B]y Microsoft

Your support of the "absolute freedom" of "all speech" is very clear. If you somehow didn't mean the words you chose, then the lack of clarity is on you, without any pretense on my part.