MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by andycall | 2026-01-06 18:29:16+00:00
Yes, you can build apps using UI libraries entirely powered by Flutter widgets.

WebF combines the best parts of React Native and Cordova/Capacitor. It offers native-level performance comparable to React Native, but allows you to use the standard web tools, APIs, and frameworks you already know. This means your codebase stays true to web standards—even if it's based on legacy code from 10 years ago.

While Cordova and Capacitor work, they often feel like a browser wrapped in an app and struggle to achieve native performance.

With WebF, you also get the power of the Flutter ecosystem. You can reuse Flutter widgets and plugins to add native animations, gestures, and APIs. The more native UI components and plugins you use, the more 'native' your app will feel.

It is an excellent starting point if you want to migrate existing websites to mobile or desktop apps without a complete rewrite.
Show HN: Informational Inertia – Measuring irreducible structure beyond entropy
by eon715 | 2026-01-06 18:29:17+00:00
Open-source Python metric for measuring irreducible structure beyond entropy and compression.

Includes falsifiability tests, golden baselines, and adversarial cases.
Frozen DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18165777
by tgtweak | 2026-01-06 18:29:46+00:00
I saw one where it was 20 seconds before the skip/x appeared, then when you hit X it pushes you to the app store, then when you hit back the x button moves to a new location, then when you hit it, it puts you into a 5 second "hey we're not done yet" ad cta... combine that with the fact the ad is showing soap opera gameplay that doesn't exist in the game - how is this even allowed?
by bluecalm | 2026-01-06 18:29:55+00:00
>>A project where C programmers spend five hours to make it run in 4 seconds is in this caveat "20% faster" than a project where Alt Lang programmers spend five minutes to make it run in 5 seconds - because only those seconds count. This is not how the real world works so it's a pretty nasty caveat.

For any project with non-trivial amount of users the C programmer did better.
I mean I know companies like to save money and move the costs (time, electricity, hardware costs) to customers but if you care about users any non-trivial speed improvement is worth a lot in aggregate, surely more than your time implementing it.
by koiueo | 2026-01-06 18:30:01+00:00
I assume, the purpose would be to learn how it's done.
There's no place for this when you vibecode.
And if not learning, what's the point of implementing something that already exists?

When I'm dying of dehydration because humanity has depleted all fresh water deposits, I'll think of you and your stupid NES emulator which is just an LLM-produced copy of many ones that had already existed.
by riversflow | 2026-01-06 18:30:10+00:00
> like the awful Siri assistant

Ironically, I just talked to all my mates about our Apple Watches, and universally Siri on your wrist for setting timers and replying to messages with voice, completely hands free, was the killer app that everyone agreed on.

Setting a timer is as simple as bringing your wrist to your face and saying the amount of time.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2026-01-06 18:30:19+00:00
I'm assuming one reason is frameworks. They can get quite big.

Another reason, is rusty code (not Rust. It's a play on the saying "Code doesn't rust", which I used to hear, last century).

It does, indeed, rust. Actually, "rots" is probably more apropos.

I'll bet that's the reason that Xcode is such a pig (makes GMail look like an anorexic).

Code is created that people no longer understand, so they are loath to make large changes. They just do enough to fix a bug, and pray that they don't need to dig any deeper. One of my first software jobs, was exactly like that.

When that happens, the code never shrinks. It just accretes.
by clanky | 2026-01-06 18:30:19+00:00
In principle I agree with you but the "pressure" you mentioned means my view on this is sort of like Bjarne Stroustrup's take on programming languages: there are political systems that people complain about suppressing dissent & interference in their nascent stages, and ones that nobody lives under.

Just like Stroustrup's formulation, this can become a cover for unnecessary and mistaken excesses, but I don't necessarily think that's inevitable.
by jghn | 2026-01-06 18:30:19+00:00
I find my sweet spot is using the Claude web app as a rubber duck as well as feeding it snippets of code and letting it help me refine the specific thing I'm doing.

When I use Claude Code I find that it *can* add a tremendous amount of ability due to its ability to see my entire codebase at once, but the issue is that if I'm doing something where seeing my entire codebase would help that it blasts through my quota too fast. And if I'm tightly scoping it, it's just as easy & faster for me to use the website.

Because of this I've shifted back to the website. I find that I get more done faster that way.
by fogzen | 2026-01-06 18:30:30+00:00
My 5 year old has his own iPad. We choose which games he can install, and he uses YouTube kids to watch videos (which we curate).

He plays all sorts of games: Monument Valley, Hello Kitty Adventure Island, What the Car, and more.

He also uses a few “learn to read” apps like Teach Your Monster and Khan Academy Kids.

We generally don’t restrict his hours on it, but also ensure he goes outside daily for walks, playground trips, or to ride his bike. He seems to regulate his usage on his own, he’ll get bored after a while and do something else. When he gets into a game he’ll spend a lot of hours on it, then beat it or lose interest. Some of the games require reading so he will ask me to play with him so I can read things or tell him what to do.
by ryandrake | 2026-01-06 18:30:55+00:00
I think it is largely a Marketer's fantasy that people get up in the morning with a goal of "discovering new products." I don't want to discover new products. I especially don't want to while I'm trying to do something else that I actually WANT to do. If I need a new product, I will deliberately go out and look for it. I don't need marketers doing drive-by product announcements while I'm just trying to live my life.

The question of "how do people spontaneously discover products" is invalid. It's just not something people want in their lives.
by nromiun | 2026-01-06 18:31:28+00:00
I just looked at Gmail on my Android phone and it is only 164 MB. That is a big difference.

Also, one thing that annoyed me when I used iPhones is that you can't remove an app's cache without reinstalling it and losing all your data. And most modern applications think cache is free so they use a lot of it. Many times it will exceed even your installed apps or data size.
by dang | 2026-01-06 18:31:33+00:00
Related:

The Stack Fallacy (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26177629 - Feb 2021 (28 comments)

Why Big Companies Keep Failing: The Stack Fallacy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10927600 - Jan 2016 (169 comments)
by wackget | 2026-01-06 18:31:49+00:00
Does anyone else not really "get" these media managers? Personally I still find it much easier to grab media from a torrent and watch it on a computer using VLC. It requires zero setup.

I do have the benefit of a PC connected to my living room TV, but even if I didn't, most TVs these days can natively play media from a network share.
by lxgr | 2026-01-06 18:32:03+00:00
Yeah, I realize it's a cultural thing, but I still think it sucks. I find receiving a Starbucks gift card much less thoughtful than a greetings card, with or without a banknote included.

The worst are these Visa/Mastercard gift cards that are popular in the US: Often horrendously expensive to the buyer and cash-equivalent to the receiver at best, and broken or scammed and causing them further frustration and possibly monetary losses at worst.
by Tiberium | 2026-01-06 18:32:16+00:00
Oh, of course not, you might need up to 100GB VRAM to have those models at decent speeds even just for low-quant versions.

And all the hype about Macs with unified memory is a bit dishonest because the actual generation speed will be very bad, especially if you fill the context.

One of the things that makes Opus 4.5 special in comparison to e.g. GPT 5.2 is the fact that it doesn't have to reason for multiple minutes to make some simple changes.
by Terr_ | 2026-01-06 18:32:28+00:00
[Recycling a joke from several months ago]

My mistake, you're completely correct, perhaps even more-correct than the wonderful flavor of Mococoa drink, with all-natural cocoa beans from the upper slopes of Mount Nicaragua. No artificial sweeteners!

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzKSQrhX7BM&t=0m13s)
by ineedasername | 2026-01-06 18:33:26+00:00
Sure, it may be post-hoc chest thumping theatrics, but also he was a tween during the fall of the Soviet Union and the end days of the Cold War along with having close family of Jewish descent since his mother was Jewish (Irish Catholic father). So there could be some baked-in, rather than acquired later, antipathy- understandably- towards communism. Especially the Soviet variety since its still warm corpse was around in the '03/'04 era when Palantir was founded. At that time, Hanssen had just recently been arrested, poking those coals again. Heck we're still living with the scars of all that and its fallout- if Lonsdale meant specifically former members/supporters of the CPSU and its shambling corpse then the statement is a little bit less over the top.
by lloeki | 2026-01-06 18:33:45+00:00
You missed one of the worst: mandatory interactive ones.

My wife is a sucker for these horribly generic flashy F2P puzzle-ish games. There are these ads that pop up every N action or something; some of these look like a mini-game and are actually an ad for another of those F2P games, and you have to play the mini-game that showcases some dumb simple mechanic of the game it advertises for a little bit before you can dismiss the ad.

Some come complete with two trivially easy levels ONLY 20% OF PLAYERS CAN PASS SOLVE THIS that glorify you OMG YOU HAVE SUCH HIGH IQ then one impossible that taunts you into installing the game.

The predatory dark patterns are so obvious they should be trialed to oblivion but no apparently this kind of abuse is legal.
by viccis | 2026-01-06 18:33:45+00:00
I remember going to buy a new car in 2015. My girlfriend had a Honda Fit from a few years prior and I loved driving in it. Felt so roomy given the tiny size. Went for a test drive in one and every single button was digital. Not even a volume knob, just little touch sensitive buttons. Ended up buying a Mazda 3 and Honda eventually switched back to physical buttons for most things.

Surprising to see companies still learning this a decade later.
by Johanx64 | 2026-01-06 18:33:50+00:00
> none of this is going to improve people's lives.

I have some old borderline senile relatives writting apps (asking LLMs to write for it them) for their own personal use. Stuff they surely haven't done on their own (or had the energy to do). Their extent of programming background - shitty VBScript macros for excel.

It also helps people to pick up programming and helps with the initial push of getting started. Getting over the initial hump, getting something on the screen so to speak.

Most things people want from their computers are simple shit that LLMs usually manage quite well.

Good question whether or not this (outsourcing their thinking) actually just accelerates their senility or not.

As someone who likes to solve hard or interesting technical problems, I've long before LLMs often been disappointed that most of the time what people want from programmers is simple stupid shit (ie. stuff i dont find interesting to work on).
by maherbeg | 2026-01-06 18:33:56+00:00
Both accessibility, and application security are easier to build rules + improved models for because they have pretty solid constraints and outcomes. UX on the other hand is definitely more challenging given how much of it isn't quite codified into simple rules.

I didn't write off an entire field of research, but rather want to highlight that these aren't intractable problems for AI research, and that we can actually start codifying many of these things today using the skills framework to close up edges in the model training. It may not be 100% but it's not 0%.
Ask HN: If evil ASI is a threat, is there anything scarier than LEO inference?
by consumer451 | 2026-01-06 18:34:00+00:00
There is a possibility of self-improving artificial super intelligence. While this sounds sci-fi, there is a non-zero possibility of it happening.

I have been a hater, I mean... who knows... but for the sake of argument let's accept it as a possible outcome.

Given that assumption, is there anything more scary than a space-based, distributed data center in the sky, with a non-aligned agent? How does one unplug that?

Think about this for a moment. Starlink is the Internet 2.0. It is a very difficult to destroy network with millions of clients/base stations.

The proposed always-in-sun-orbit inferance net is our most likely "great filter?"

If there is even a .01% chance of non-aligned ASI, then should we not ban distributed inference in space?
by scuff3d | 2026-01-06 18:34:03+00:00
We just got a new washer and dryer. They aren't even "smart", and they still have knobs, but they are obviously digital instead of mechanical under the hood, and they're fucking terrible. Everything takes a beat longer then it should to register/update, it all feels like shit to interact with, and bizarrely you can't leave anything paused. Need to pause the wash for 20 minutes so you can take a shower? Fuck you! You're gonna have to start the entire cycle over again
by codyb | 2026-01-06 18:34:12+00:00
Really? Talk about denial, or abject lack of paying attention.

The idea Trump is not in cognitive decline is easily rent asunder by watching any clips of his recent speeches and comparing them to clips from 2016 and 2020.

He's falling asleep in meetings, confusing words, hearkening back to old time shit like flag burning, stumbling, can't walk in a straight line, tweeting rambling word salads filled with falsehoods all night long.

But again, this just proves my point.
by TZubiri | 2026-01-06 18:34:12+00:00
Hmm, couple of questions.

what would be the difference with a binary that's has both a py2 and py3 interpreter and a flag --edition=2 or =3 redirects to either file?

If I have Rust code from 2021, can I add a feature from 2024 and run it with --edition=2021 or 2024? Wouldn't adding a 2024 feature then possibly break the 2021 code?

I think the fact that rust is compiled has a big impact in terms of bc for dependencies. py2 must use py2 dependencies, but rust24 could use rust21 binaries as long as there were no API bc breaks, the code itself is already compiled away.
by giancarlostoro | 2026-01-06 18:34:14+00:00
Corporate firewall is blocking this since its a "newly registered domain" but I wanted to note that Tamagotchi got me to revisit Digimon after I learned that Digimon was created as a way for Bandai to sell to boys. Color me surprised when I learned that Tamagotchi was considered for girls, but I played with mine like there was no tomorrow, with the Pokemon hype of the late 90s it came to many of us at the right time.

Surprisingly, and I just looked it up, you can buy the original classic ones for about $20 straight off Amazon.
by barefootsanders | 2026-01-06 18:34:15+00:00
Author here. Happy to answer questions.

Quick context: I've been running a company (NimbleBrain) using this pattern for ~1 year. The structure is a meta-repo with git submodules, each with a CLAUDE.md file that declares how that domain works.

This isn't intended to be a debate over monorepo vs submodules. Either one works, really. The real value is unlocked when AI can traverse strategy docs, brand voice, and code in one context. Coherence starts emerging without alignment meetings.

The slash commands (/ship-feature, /extract-knowledge) are where this gets practical.

Happy to answer questions. Curious if anyone else is running something similar.
by oconnor663 | 2026-01-06 18:34:18+00:00
> With C you may, if you wish, develop a big sensibility to race conditions, and stay alert. In general it is possible that C programmers have their "bugs antenna" a bit more developed than other folks.

I think there are effects in both directions here. In C you get burned, and the pain is memorable. In Rust you get forced into safe patterns immediately. I could believe that someone who has done only Rust might be missing that "healthy paranoia". But for teaching in general, it's hard to beat frequent and immediate feedback. Anecdotally it's common for experienced C programmers to learn about some of the rules only late in their careers, maybe because they didn't happen to get burned by a particular rule earlier.

> Rust may create a false sense of security, and in the unsafe sections the programmer sometimes, when reviewing the code, is falsely convinced by the mandatory SAFETY comment.

This is an interesting contrast to the previous case. If you write a lot of unsafe Rust, you will eventually get burned. If you're lucky, it'll be a Miri failure. I think this makes folks who work with unsafe Rust extremely paranoid. It's also easier to sustain an that level of paranoia with Rust, because you hopefully only have to consider small bits of unsafe code in isolation, and not thousands of lines of application logic manipulating raw pointers or whatever.
by hattmall | 2026-01-06 18:34:22+00:00
Yes, the term is strykers. Which can refer to the person that does it, or the actual stolen car that has been legitimized.

The stryker will find or buy from somewhere, a pool of unissued VINs that don't flag anything in the state registration system and match various vehicles (Dodge Chargers, Kias, Hyundais). Then when someone comes with that vehicle, they will strike a new Vin plate. Sometimes if they buy the VINs it will come in a package with plates. From there it's possible to get the vehicle registered, most likely under someone else's name that has no idea and they will sell / rent the car with tag etc. Though sometimes they will just make a fake plate too and then steal a real plate, swap it with the fake plate and put the real plate on the stolen car and sell it like that. In some cases / states they can actually get a title reissued.

Boats are even better, but much smaller market, just look up coast guard plates on Amazon.

Stiker vs Styker, is regional.

For Reference: Striker Music https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaTxkD5JFpg
by 0xy | 2026-01-06 18:34:23+00:00
>paid at the expense of people like you

If you paid a CEO £500k instead of £20m and divided the rest amongst the average number of employees amongst the FTSE100 which is 44,000, then each of those workers could enjoy a £38 pay rise monthly pre-tax.

>What’s their ROI multiplier?

Without the CEO, the company would not exist, not function or certainly not be as large as it is. So their contribution to the company provides for 44,000 people directly, and probably another 250,000 or more indirectly through family, downstream economic impacts etc.

It's pretty clear to say that, say, a shelf-stocker at Tesco, while improving revenue at a single location by perhaps tens of thousands of dollars, doesn't even come close to providing that level of economic opportunity. If that same person was removed from their position and not replaced, the impact to that store, to Tesco and to the community, would be less than negligible. It would not even be possible to be measure.

That doesn't mean it isn't noble to be shelf-stocker, a janitor, or even a software engineer. It is. But that doesn't mean you get to pretend you're feeding 294,000 people.
by dagss | 2026-01-06 18:34:24+00:00
Whether LLM is reasoning or not is an independent question to whether it works by generating text.

By the standard in the parent post, humans certainly do not "reason". But that is then just choosing a very high bar for "reasoning" that neither humans nor AI meets...what is the point then?

It is a bit like saying: "Humans don't reason, they just let neurons fire off one another, and think the next thought that enters their mind"

Yes, LLMs need to spew out text to move their state forward. As a human I actually sometimes need to do that too: Talk to myself in my head to make progress. And when things get just a tiny bit complicated I need to offload my brain using pen and paper.

Most arguments used to show that LLMs do not "reason" can be used to show that humans do not reason either.

To show that LLMs do not reason you have to point to something else than how it works.
by readthenotes1 | 2026-01-06 18:34:43+00:00
"You write the program as source code."

His language is LLM prompts. If he can check them into git and get reasonably consistent results if he ran the prompts multiple times, just like we expect from our JavaScript or C or assembly or machine code, I don't see the problem.

I knew a guy who could patch a running program by flipping switches on the front panel of a computer. He didn't argue my C language output 'is not writing a program'...
by ComputerGuru | 2026-01-06 18:35:13+00:00
People thinking C++ libraries magically solve this ABI issue is the other side of the coin. I’ve filed numerous bugs against packages precompiled libraries but misusing the C abi so that (owned) objects cross the abi barrier and end up causing heap corruption (with a segfault only if you’re lucky) and other much more subtle heisenbugs.
by johng | 2026-01-06 18:35:15+00:00
This also might have something to do with it. Older trucks are more attractive because they don't have as many emissions dongle's that are expensive and break all the time. The EPA has recently been cracking down on emissions delete kits, etc.

https://www.thedrive.com/news/this-18-year-old-peterbilt-sol...
by kristopolous | 2026-01-06 18:35:20+00:00
They're earlier. There's basically 3 design eras. The first used 1 bit transparent gifs (i used those on my bootstra386.com site)

The second had 40x40 buttons, then the third had 88x31...

Ironically the best place to find this evidence is in books. Head on over to archive.org, find some mass market "how to use the web" books and they're full of screenshots.

You could also do wayback machine but during the "folk art" era of the web, there was long forgotten web properties run by "just some person" with names like "web fairy's daily roundup" with these long links like homesite.unc.edu/~rhonda/links.htm or whatever.

The fetishism for dot coms is probably post-1997

When you go through these old texts it's a sea of sites you have never heard of. Some of those are in the wayback, a lot of them aren't.

You can clearly see the eras. There's also some promotional videos such as

https://youtu.be/-1l6aBgX5UY?si=UioQTDenqHelQc07

88x31 is where most of the effort has been placed on the archives and so I kind of just pass over that one

The last thing is the hypercard cross-over ... there were many users and creators that went from that platform to the web and they took their hypercard design language with them.

The 88x31 might be called the first post-hypercard era.
by Workaccount2 | 2026-01-06 18:36:16+00:00
This is a repeating cycle however. The boomers where all hippies riding the wave of a future utopia where everyone is making art and dancing with each other all day. Screw the man, grass and love all day!

Getting older what I have realized is that the enthusiasm of the youth is born from the lack of experience, lack of responsibility, lack of anything to lose, and a position to really only gain from any changes. When you are young you are largely a spectator to the game, and just like any other game, your views will change when you become a player instead of an armchair expert.