MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by boca_honey | 2026-01-06 12:53:24+00:00
You might be right. Almost all the 'weird web' stuff I’ve seen was through HN posts, so I got the idea that it was all just meta, edgy rejects with Bluesky accounts.

I spent a couple of hours on wiby.me browsing sites at random and it was amazing. Thank you for that.

However, 95% of the sites there haven't been updated in 15+ years. In fact, none of the 20+ sites I found through the 'surprise me' feature had any updates since the late 2000s (though I’m sure some out there have).

It gives me the impression that this 'let's get the web back' movement is mostly nostalgia. Culture happens where it happens, not where it should happen. Today, that place is unfortunately a walled garden controlled by corporations. I hope that changes, but judging by these websites, that change isn't happening yet.
by mopsi | 2026-01-06 12:53:25+00:00
Any topic with little coverage in the training data. LLMs will keep circling around the small bits in the training data, unable synthesize new connections.

This is very obvious when trying to use LLMs to modify scripts in vendor-specific languages that have not been widely documented and don't have many examples available. A seasoned programmer will easily recognize common patterns like if-else blocks and loops, but LLMs will get stuck and output gibberish.
by aebtebeten | 2026-01-06 12:54:52+00:00
Optimists believe the new economic/political order will be mostly like the old, only perhaps involving a bit more trade* with cities like Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and Shenzhen, and a bit less trade with cities like Houston, LA, and NYC.

(for Singapore, mandarin would be better, but there english works, lah)

* if the Don is serious about hemispheres, this might work. in practice, I believe there might be issues around chokepoints owned by USEUCOM (Gibraltar), USCENTCOM (Suez, Aden), and USINDOPACOM (Malacca)?

https://www.war.gov/About/Combatant-Commands/
by kakacik | 2026-01-06 12:54:53+00:00
> practically everyone thinks we are in a bubble

Very untrue, economy doesn't happen on online forums in echo chambers but out there. Every major company invests into AI however they can for the classical FOMO emotion.

This is how movers and decision makers think. No CEO thinks - this will crash, so lets invest into it massively and spread our company finances more thinly when the SHTF comes.
by saubeidl | 2026-01-06 12:54:58+00:00
No, you're the one trying to set an equivalency between killing Nazis and Nazis killing people.

Nobody's calling for murdering people indiscriminately. I'm calling for purging society of Nazis specifically.

> Have you forgotten why it is that nazis must be fought?

No, I haven't. It's because their abhorrent ideology is a cancer that must be cut out, with force if necessary.

The ends matter. The means do not.
by Ygg2 | 2026-01-06 12:55:16+00:00
> These do not seem entirely consistent?

> But the plans were on display…”
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.
by Ray20 | 2026-01-06 12:55:44+00:00
> If Zelensky were to give an order to launch hypothetical nukes, I'd think there would have been a coup and no launch.

Do you understand that nuclear weapons don't work like that, and leaders with nuclear buttons give orders to launch nuclear weapons every few months? And only they know they're using a training launch code; everyone else finds that out when the missiles does not fly off at the end of the launch sequence.
by veunes | 2026-01-06 12:55:51+00:00
If it were just an average, we'd only get gray sludge. Models learn the manifold distribution - they don't just mix existing works; they discover the hidden rules by which those works were created. This is reverse-engineering of human culture, and that's exactly why control over the latent space is so critical - otherwise, we surrender culture to an algorithm that has "learned the rules" but has no concept of meaning
Show HN: CoinFountains – Let's replicate and scale what we are grateful for
by julienreszka | 2026-01-06 12:55:56+00:00
4th pivot of this app

Discover and share positive experiences with others. Post plans to replicate what you're grateful for and see what resonates with the community. Toss coins to show your interest in growing the same positive experiences.

Who uses CoinFountains?
Early adopters
Find and share what's working before everyone else.

Entrepreneurs
Help grow and scale what's already working.

Visionaries
See potential in what's working and help it grow.
by maweki | 2026-01-06 12:57:06+00:00
I had a lot of contact with computer science students coming from the other side, meaning they used Z3 or other (SMT) solvers as blackboxes which they just use at a certain point in their algorithm without having thought what theories they are using (the T in SMT) and what's undecidable in general or in that theory.

So I had quite a few "groundbreaking" approaches end in disappointment.

It's important to know the capabilities and limits of your tools.
by graemep | 2026-01-06 12:57:24+00:00
Google is tightening their grip on Android. They are going to effectively kill of alternative app stores by requiring them to use Google's developer verification (there have been discussions on HN before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45569371 ). Many countries are introducing things such as age verification and ID apps that require Google Android. A lot of bank apps will only work with Google Android. This is why Fairphone offers a Google Android option, an I would guess that is what most people use.

There are lots of other problems. As discussed recently the HSBC app will not work if you have installed any software at all from another app store.
by netdevphoenix | 2026-01-06 12:57:43+00:00
> someone who’s shipped entire new frontend feature sets, while also managing a team. I’ve used LLM to prototype these features rapidly and tear down the barrier to entry on a lot of simple problems that are historically too big to be a single-dev item, and clear out the backlog of “nice to haves” that compete with the real meat and bread of my business. This prototyping and “good enough” development has been massively impactful in my small org

Has any senior React dev code review your work? I would be very interested to see what do they have to see about the quality of your code. It's a bit like using LLMs to self diagnose yourself and claiming it works because you are healthy.

Ironically enough, it does seem that the only workforce AIs will be shrinking will be devs themselves. I guess in 2025, everyone can finally code
by jauntywundrkind | 2026-01-06 12:57:51+00:00
Watching my GLM-4.7 subscription tackle problem after problem after problem & just get most of it right has really changed me a lot these past couple weeks, after being a enthusiastic but very careful pay per use coder (a lot on DeepSeek, because it's hella cheap). It is absolutely wild how much just works.

I do want better workflows where the AI thinking, where the transcript is captured. Being able to go back and understand what just happened is the major delay. And that cost increases day by day week by week, especially if the session where generation was done is lost.
by cmrdporcupine | 2026-01-06 12:57:56+00:00
The strongest argument as far as I can see it is... the problem is you now lose control over all those things. It's a black box with effectively no knobs.

Anyways, read for yourself, Pavlo & Leis get into it in detail, and there's benchmarks:

https://db.cs.cmu.edu/papers/2022/cidr2022-p13-crotty.pdf

https://db.cs.cmu.edu/mmap-cidr2022/
by vladvasiliu | 2026-01-06 12:58:09+00:00
As sibling says, the question is too vague. I also pay for icloud, but I store all my things locally on my devices. The point is effortless sync and basic backup (protect pictures from phone theft).

I also pay Hetzner for a storage box or whatever it's called, where I regularly send backups of my stuff with restic. One of the sources is a local fat ZFS NAS, which I can access from everywhere via wireguard.

Yet, the only reason I'm contemplating buying a new iPhone is to get larger local storage. I'm also biting my fingers for not having pulled the trigger on a larger SSD for my main machine two months ago.

Every solution has different use cases, and I think no single one is perfect. I get the best value from using a mix.
Show HN: Doom (1993) Playable in a GitHub Readme
by kuberwastaken | 2026-01-06 12:58:12+00:00
I just had this really fun idea of making a playable version of DOOM on my GitHub profile after building "Doom" in a QR code last year (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43729683) and I finally stopped procrastinating to try and build it.

DoomMe is DOOM E1M1 map that can run on GitHub's markdown viewer which doesn't support javascript, web assembly or even iframes
it works with a stateless engine with a capture of every possible position in the map (with 64 unit distance) captured in 4 directions and stitched together using graph logic with 8000+ WebP images and markdown files

Because of it being stateless, I had to manually edit the WAD file to "open" the gates of E1M1 to use omgifol later to capture all valid positions inside the map!

Open Source with MIT License and current version is <190 mb in size with all assets

- Play it on my profile: https://github.com/Kuberwastaken

- Blog post covering most of the process, implementation and failed tries: https://kuber.studio/blog/Projects/How-I-Made-DOOM-Run-Insid...
by goku12 | 2026-01-06 12:58:49+00:00
> How do you do that practically? Do you read the source of every single package before doing a `brew update` or `npm update`?

There are several ways to do this. What you mentioned is the brute-force method of security audits. That may be impractical as you allude to. Perhaps there are tools designed to catch security bugs in the source code. While they will never be perfect, these tools should significantly reduce the manual effort required.

Another obvious approach is to crowd source the verification. This can be achieved through security advisory databases like Rust's rustsec [1] service. Rust has tools that can use the data from rustsec to do the audit (cargo-audit). There's even a way to embed the dependency tree information in the target binary. Similar tools must exist for other languages too.

> What if these sources include binary packages?

Binaries can be audited if reproducible builds are enforced. Otherwise, it's an obvious supply chain risk. That's why distros and corporations prefer to build their software from source.

[1] https://rustsec.org/
by scott_w | 2026-01-06 12:58:57+00:00
> I've gotten a lot of value out of reading the views of experienced engineers; overall they like the tech, but they do not think it is a sentient alien that will delete our jobs.

I normally see things the same way you do, however I did have a conversation with a podiatrist yesterday that gave me food for thought. His belief is that certain medical roles will disappear as they'll become redundant. In his case, he mentioned radiology and he presented his case as thus:

A consultant gets a report + X-Ray from the radiologist. They read the report and confirm what they're seeing against the images. They won't take the report blindly. What changes is that machines have been learning to interpret the images and are able to use an LLM to generate the report. These reports tend not to miss things but will over-report issues. As a consultant will verify the report for themselves before operating, they no longer need the radiologist. If the machine reports a non-existent tumour, they'll see there's no tumour.
by ossa-ma | 2026-01-06 12:59:13+00:00
"The University of Rhode Island based its report on its estimates that producing a medium-length, 1,000-token GPT-5 response can consume up to 40 watt-hours (Wh) of electricity, with an average just over 18.35 Wh, up from 2.12 Wh for GPT-4. This was higher than all other tested models, except for OpenAI's o3 (25.35 Wh) and Deepseek's R1 (20.90 Wh)."

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrIjoiZjVmOTI0MmMtY2U2Mi00Z...

https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity
by vladvasiliu | 2026-01-06 12:59:46+00:00
I think GP's point was rather the "optimized storage" schtick of apple devices, where they "unload" whatever you have locally on iCloud and use that as "regular" storage. Syncing, even though it also actually stores, is a fairly different use case. Could you implement that some other way? Sure. But I still think it's fair to point it's a different use case than "regular storage".
by Gloria_Kambua | 2026-01-06 13:00:05+00:00
I’m a senior backend software engineer with 5+ years of experience building distributed, containerized systems in fintech and blockchain, mainly working on Linux/Docker backends with a strong focus on reliability and performance.

I tried applying via the careers terminal, but it stays in shell mode on my end and doesn’t start the interactive flow (likely a browser or JS init issue), so I’ll also reach out via email.

The work you’re doing around decentralized coordination and sandboxed execution is exactly the kind of systems engineering I’m interested in.
by tdeck | 2026-01-06 13:00:32+00:00
Side projects only, but I have found them useful for the kinds of tasks that are straightforward given a comprehensive understanding of a platform, library, or framework, but where I don't have that understanding and therefore would need to spend a lot of time absorbing and understanding documentation / looking for examples.

For example, I built this in less than 20 minutes with ChatGPT.

https://blindmakers.net/posts/audio-bubble-level/

I knew there was a web audio API and an orientation API, but hadn't ever used them. I asked it to write a class that produced beeps at a fixed interval using the audio API, then to control it with the orientation API, then manually edited some other things.

For me, reading these APIs documentation and building up something to use them would have taken significantly longer. Maybe this is just my slow and delibeate approach to new systems, but using an LLM allowed me to bypass a lot of that.

Another place it has been useful is writing microcontroller code. Microcontrollers tend to have a lot of hardware timer details that are specific to a particular model, and that you have to read the datasheet, set some various interupts, and do some calculations to accomplish what you want. These details are kind of tedious and time consuming to understand and using an LLM has saved me a lot of time.
by vidarh | 2026-01-06 13:00:34+00:00
> usually I’m the bottleneck

This is my experience now too. The degree to which we are bottlenecks comes down to how good we are at finding the right balance between micromanaging the models (doesn't work well - massive maste of time; most of the issue you spend time correcting are things the models can correct themselves) vs. abandoning all oversight (also does not work well; will entrench major architectural problems that will take lots of effort to fix).

I spend a fairly significant amount of time revising agents, skills etc. to take myself out of the loop as much as possible by reviewing what has worked, and what doesn't, to let the model fix what it can fix before I have to review its code. My experience is that this time has a high ROI.

It doesn't matter if the steps I add waste lots of the models time cleaning up code I ultimately end up rejecting, because its time is cheap, and mine is not, and the cleanups also tend to make the time it takes to realise its done something stupid shorter.

Getting to a point where I'm comfortable "letting go" and letting the model write stupid code and letting the model fix it, before I even look at it, has been the hardest part for me of accelerating my AI use.

If I keep reading as Claude Code runs, the model often infuriates me and I end up starting to type messages to tell it fix something tremendously idiotic it has just done, only to have it realise and fix it before I get to pressing enter. There's no point doing that, so increasingly I put my sessions on other virtual desktops and try to forget about them while they're working.

It still does stupid stuff, but the proportion of stupid stuff I need to manually review and reject keeps dropping.
by jtakahashi64 | 2026-01-06 13:01:00+00:00
Hi HN,
I think Spec-Driven Development is a way to work with AI agents like Claude Code, but the workflow still feels a bit unrefined.

Existing tools are often too complex.

So I built a minimal and helpful tool. It can generate spec and code from an SSOT, inspired by DB migration tools.

The process is straightforward:

1. Edit the Spec (Single Source of Truth) 2. Generate a migration file 3. Run it to update your code

I'd love to hear your feedback.

What do you think of this approach?
by handoflixue | 2026-01-06 13:01:39+00:00
> And someone who does so is going through the trouble of carrying one is more likely to spread the photo publicly than someone who's using their phone.

In this era of social media, is that really true?

Most people I've known that use an actual camera take thousands of photos looking for that one perfect photo. A journalist is looking for the perfect Front Page photo, not to publish an album. They also tend to care about getting a "clean" shot without awkward strangers in the background.

Conversely, people on social media seem to have much, much lower standards for posting, and will routinely capture audio and video. They also don't care nearly as much about some awkward person in the background, and might even be intentionally filming an awkward person to make fun of them on TikTok.
by gnfargbl | 2026-01-06 13:01:43+00:00
The answer lies in one of your questions:

> Grocery stores closed to visitors, all shopping done online and delivered to your door

In the UK at least, and I'm sure in a lot of other places, a decent proportion of groceries are now delivered to the door. But, that doesn't mean that supermarkets have closed; if anything they seem to be busier than ever. Instead, we have a hybrid market where convince for a particular consumer's situation is the ruling factor. The same is going to be true for most of the other situations you mention.
by tdullien | 2026-01-06 13:02:45+00:00
The old warez cracking scene had an outsize impact on computer security. GRSecurity, Heartbleed vulnerability, most reverse engineering tools for security, etc. etc. etc.

There's so much history here, touching on all sorts of insanity including selling 0-day to the US government that was then used to apprehend high-level Al-Qaida personnel, random warez busts leading to people taking oversea jobs, etc. etc. etc.

If anyone still has old .NFO archives from 1990-2000, I'd be very interested in getting as many as possible.
by netdevphoenix | 2026-01-06 13:02:58+00:00
> If one "doesn't know Kubernetes", what exactly are they supposed to do now, having LLM at hand, in a professional setting? They still "can't" asses the quality of the output, after all. They can't just ask the model, as they can't know if the answer is not misleading.

This is the fundamental problem that all these cowboy devs do not even consider. They talk about churning out huge amounts of code as if it was an intrinsically good thing. Reminds me of those awful VB6 desktop apps people kept churning out. Vb6 sure made tons of people nx productive but it also led to loads of legacy systems that no one wanted to touch because they were built by people who didn't know what they were doing. LLMs-for-Code are another tool under the same category.
by jeroenhd | 2026-01-06 13:04:01+00:00
You can on some devices (many Chinese brands, funnily enough) and on custom ROMs.

There are also (open source) firewall apps that will let you block (non-system) apps if you're on a stock ROM like me.

Technically, this is a permission, just not a user-grantable one. Google has moved quite a few permissions from inherent to user-grantable, but most apps don't work without internet (unfortunately) so I doubt they will do it for the internet permission in stock android.
by scott_w | 2026-01-06 13:05:36+00:00
I was at a podiatrist yesterday who explained that what he's trying to do is to "train" an LLM agent on the articles and research papers he's published to create a chatbot that can provide answers to the most common questions more quickly than his reception team can.

He's also using it to speed up writing his reports to send to patients.

Longer term, he was also quite optimistic on its ability to cut out roles like radiologists, instead having a software program interpret the images and write a report to send to a consultant. Since the consultant already checks the report against any images, the AI being more sensitive to potential issues is a positive thing: giving him the power to discard erroneous results rather than potentially miss something more malign.
by energy123 | 2026-01-06 13:06:27+00:00
Not sure that's wise.

The US put pressure on India to stop purchasing Russian oil, which cost the US diplomatic capital. It was showmanship and self-sabotage of an important relationship, but those aren't the actions of a sworn enemy to the EU.

The US also gave how much material support to Ukraine over the last few years? Volatility and unpredictability is not the same thing as an enemy.

There's also the self-interest angle. Who controls the oil corridors into Europe? It isn't China. China is an economic juggernaut, but they have little power projection beyond China except somewhat in Eurasia, and especially not naval. The US has the seas locked down.

The EU could consider doing the opposite to what you're suggesting. Help the US in the Pacific instead of being non-committal. Then maybe the US would be more willing to keep spending hundreds of billions of dollars in your theatre, rather than seeing it as a one-sided relationship that only takes.
by 59nadir | 2026-01-06 13:07:44+00:00
No, I wouldn't say it's super complex. I make custom 3D engines. It's just that you and I were probably never in any real competition anyway, because it's not super common to do what I do.

I will add that LLMs are very mediocre, bordering on bad, at any challenging or interesting 3D engine stuff. They're pretty decent at answering questions about surface API stuff and a bit about the APIs' structure, though.
by 627467 | 2026-01-06 13:07:44+00:00
I like the initial emphasis on the trade treaties of his talk.

IMO the scope and amount of these treaties have been unacceptable and the only reason they passed were due to the framing of thia magical thinking that any increased trade is always great "enlarging the pie" and everyone ignores the fact that it creates a huge monoculture that is unable to accommodate people's with vastly different needs.

These treaties alienate people in the same same supranational orgs like EU does.

The framing of "rules" based order masks the fact that its "rules set mostly by the hegemon in its favour"
by hobofan | 2026-01-06 13:07:53+00:00
Doesn't mean it's a valuable take.

It doesn't even significantly matter whether it's a bubble or not, but whether its a "bad" bubble.

I think Steve Eisman (of housing bubble fame) recently made the argument that it's probably a bubble, but it doesn't seem to have the hallmarks it would have to turn it into a crisis. e.g. no broad immediate exposure for the general populace (as in housing/crypto bubbles).
by throwawayqqq11 | 2026-01-06 13:08:19+00:00
... and the reason why the US doesnt pass strong federal privacy laws is, the tech oligarchy has stronger lobbies or political ties in the US. It could be the other way around, if the US had a weaker tech sector and was leaking wealth/data to the EU, they could be protectionist. This is the common denominator. I disagree with your angle, that the EU is more corpo-sceptical, they are the same, just different lobbies.