MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by LooseMarmoset | 2026-01-14 23:11:05+00:00
> max utility

As the owner of a rusty 1985 pickup with manual windows and no radio, I can tell you there is great demand for utility pickup trucks that the manufacturers WILL NOT MAKE.

The first problem is CAFE rules. Congress legislated the light pickup truck out of existence. To get around CAFE rules, manufacturers increased the size of trucks and added a back row so they could be reclassified in a way that skirted CAFE rules.

However, there's a big demand for pickups, so people bought these because they needed trucks, and nothing else was available. Manufacturers took advantage of demand and started adding features normal pickup drivers didn't want or need, to access a high-market class of buyers. "Where else are you gonna go?"

$100k pickups, here we are.

Manufacturers are in no hurry to go back to the low-margin pickup days, even though that is what classic pickup buyers actually want.
by jedberg | 2026-01-14 23:11:30+00:00
Use tool calling. Create a simple tool that can do the calls that are allowed/the queries that are allowed. Then teach the LLM what the tools can do. Allow it to call the tool without human input.

Then it will only stop when it wants to do something the tool can't do. You can then either add that capability to the tool, or allow that one time action.
by quesera | 2026-01-14 23:11:37+00:00
Corroborating. It goes way back to the early 90s IRC and MUD cultures, from which many of us sprung. Limor came to the scene a bit later, but the culture was well-established.

Most of us would code shift when writing in other milieux, some weaned ourselves off the habit when our work started interfacing with nonreceptive readers, and a few retained the affectation to make a statement (or an anti-statement!).

It's amusing to see the style resurface in a new generation though. I guess it's no more odd than when 20 year olds unknowingly emulate the dress and mannerisms from when their parents were young. We just smile and recall the age when we thought we were being different too. :)
by georgebcrawford | 2026-01-14 23:11:38+00:00
I agree until your last sentence. Pubs closing can be devastating.

Pubs are often the centre of a community, especially small ones. Not even small towns. Traditionally they have been centered around drinking, but this is changing. Much like libraries had to adapt to falling reading rates, pubs have had to adapt to falling alcohol consumption.

The hard part of this is that food and wage costs are often covered by alcohol costs, though where I'm from the government has exercised vice taxes to make this less tenable. More customers doesn't necessarily mean that much more profit, for a host of reasons.

I hope pubs find a way forward.

Source for my rambling: worked in and managed pubs for a decade. They're not just for heavy drinkers.
by jeroenhd | 2026-01-14 23:13:30+00:00
Most of these companies don't even want to add age gates. They get in the way of their normal predatory marketing schemes, the little bits of extra data isn't worth it.

Stupid laws are forcing these companies to implement something. In most countries, there is no privacy-preserving way to verify that you're old enough digitally, so when these companies are forced to get something good enough going, they're going to go with the cheapest offer they can legally get away with.

Governments know this. They want certain websites to disappear entirely, and for certain platforms to just stop existing. Both sides are using weaponised incompetence to blame the other and users end up losing regardless of whose fault it is.
by moogly | 2026-01-14 23:13:31+00:00
Well, that's one thing he said. He also said

> It seemed like she was out of her f*ing mind to begin with. That lady seemed crazy. Right?[1]

And the rest of the podcast, skimming the transcript, is just insane conspiracy theories and misinformation.

So, broken clock, I guess.

[1]: https://singjupost.com/joe-rogan-experience-2437-with-rand-p...
by queuebert | 2026-01-14 23:13:53+00:00
You're out of touch with the working class. Some people practically live in these trucks. A little comfort goes a long way toward making their day bearable. Leather is easy to clean, power adjustment makes the seat more comfortable. Auto wipers, climate, etc., help them focus on the calls they're taking. And so on. Fleets of these are bought for commercial purposes as well. Companies wouldn't spend that kind of money without a reason.

There's a reason these "luxobarges" are the best selling vehicle in the U.S., and the answer is not virtue signaling.
by conradev | 2026-01-14 23:14:04+00:00
Plastic bottles are discarded because they can be replaced at low cost. Disposable vapes are possible because batteries became cheap enough: the chip is a rounding error.

The same market forces that gave us affordable electric vehicles gave us disposable vapes.

If it goes anything like plastic bottles, there will be a bitter fight for corporate accountability that goes nowhere. It’s especially difficult here because there isn’t a single monopoly like Coca-cola to hold responsible. What is the bottle bill equivalent for vapes?
by Brian_K_White | 2026-01-14 23:14:06+00:00
I have projects that can equally use either a Teensy or a few different Feather boards, and frankly the Feather boards are always the prefferred option beacause:

* assymetrical footprint - the assymmetrical dip footprint means the board has polarity protection. I have hat/receiver boards with zig-zag stagger dip rows that work as free componentless sockets to receive a feather board with pins soldered. The Feather versions are far more convenient and safe since they can't be plugged in any way but the correct way.

* The Feather standard being a standard - ecosystem of compatible boards with compatible footprint & pinout at least for main functions.

* lipo charging circuit and jst plug, the automatic ups functionality, usb charging, removable/replaceable via standard plug

* off-board power on/off - I very much make use of the trick Feather has where a hat can turn the mcu board on/off without being the source of power to the mcu board.

* Perhaps a small detail but Feathers with sd card slots have the card sense pin wired up to a gpio pin while the teensy's do not. On Feather I can have a hardware interrupt fire when a card is inserted or ejected, and I can't do that on Teensy.

* keeping all parts on the top surface - there are other mcu dev boards with some similar functions but they are less convenient to use as a module in a project since they may have buttons, jst plug, sd card slot, or other stuff on both sides of the board, which makes them inaccessible when mounted onto some other pcb.

Teensy has a few points in their favor too but I really value these facets of most Feather boards.
by vitaut | 2026-01-14 23:15:03+00:00
It's easier to write faster code in a language with compile-time facilities such as C++ or Rust than in C. For example, doing this sort of platform-specific optimization in C is a nightmare https://github.com/vitaut/zmij/blob/91f07497a3f6e2fb3a9f999a... (likely impossible without an external pass to generate multiple lookup tables).
by majormajor | 2026-01-14 23:15:09+00:00
> (As a personal anecdote, I've probably run into more concurrency-related heisenbugs in Go than I ever did in C, with C heisenbugs more commonly being memory mismanagement in single-threaded code with complex object lifetimes/ownership structures...)

Is that beyond just "concurrency is tricky and a language that makes it easier to add concurrency will make it easier to add sneaky bugs"? I've definitely run into that, but have never written concurrent C to compare the ease of heisenbug-writing.
by amrocha | 2026-01-14 23:15:14+00:00
You’ve been through all that and yet here you are, successful.

You never had to worry about being the first female manager someone has had. You never had to worry about being judged unfairly because of your accent. You never had to deal with your colleagues saying mildly racist things to your face and expecting you to be ok with it.

And nobody is taking your success away! All I’m saying is that you’re gonna have to wait a bit longer because it’s not your turn anymore.

But apparently that’s not enough, so you’re throwing a fit about it.

And again, your “structural solutions” are platitudes. They don’t work.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-01-14 23:16:34+00:00
Housing is very much elastic. There is plenty of undeveloped land in the country and there is even more air - meaning building up and not out. Personally, my wife and I sold our big 5 bedroom 3200 square foot house in the burbs that we had built in 2016 for $335K in the burbs of Atlanta in the good school system to move into a 1250 square foot condo in Florida and we couldn’t be happier. Blame the lack of supply on NIMBYism that opposes multi unit housing and zoning laws.

As far as raw food, do you also think that people in the supply chain like farmers, packagers, food delivery drivers etc shouldn’t make a profit?

You never did answer the question - are you also opposed to apartment complexes owned by investors?

The second point you didn’t address is should my 23 year old son and his fiancé be forced to buy home or should his landlord have spent money on a property and rented to him at cost?

Me personally, if I were renting a house, I would rather deal with a corporation who did it professionally than deal with an individual landlord. The management companies both times I rented an apartment in Atlanta were excellent.

And it’s nonsensical that if you got rid of all of the investors who only own 2-3% of the supply, it would make a dent in housing prices. Do you think everyone who rents wants to buy no matter what their life circumstances? I definitely didn’t want to buy a home when I was single, I wanted the option of moving quickly
Show HN: KernDB – Managed Postgres Under EU Jurisdiction (Germany)
by michael_si | 2026-01-14 23:16:51+00:00
Hey HN,

I'm building KernDB - managed PostgreSQL hosted exclusively
in Germany.

If you're running a B2B SaaS in Europe,
your customers increasingly ask about data residency. With
US providers, you're one acquisition away from your data
falling under US jurisdiction (see: Neon → Databricks).

KernDB is:
- Branches for PostgreSQL DBs
- German servers (Hetzner)
- No US Cloud Act exposure
- Postgres provisioned in 60 seconds
- Zero-downtime scaling
- Automated Backups

I'm building for teams who need to tell their customers "your data never leaves
the EU" and actually mean it.

Looking for early users who deal with GDPR conscious
customers. What else would you need from a EU-native
managed PostgreSQL provider?

https://kerndb.com
by jeroenhd | 2026-01-14 23:16:54+00:00
I believe YouTube got hit with some EU compliance law at some point. My Google account was old enough to vote but I still had to verify it to watch certain YouTube videos. They put a one cent reservation on my credit card IIRC, no need to actually upload ID.

It happened right after ElsaGate, so they probably went overboard to cover for the weird shit happening on their platform. YouTube is full of pedo farms and weird porn if you know where to look for it, so they need something to point at so they can shout "look, we tried!"
by jbm | 2026-01-14 23:16:57+00:00
I remember liking it too; it was actually a Schweppes product but as my boss said, it was straight to flush out. The Japan market just doesn't like sweet drinks. The top drink was green tea, which probably caused consternation as it was so expensive to manufacture.

In retrospect I miss the teas from Japan more than any of the weird flavours we had. Thankfully one can make them oneself but there is something special about going to a corner store and having relatively healthy options instead of a hundred flavours of sugar water.
by magicalhippo | 2026-01-14 23:17:17+00:00
> This ends up making me feel a lot better at the end of the trip

My SO commented the same after our first long trip with an EV. She drove the whole way.

Yes it took an hour longer due to charging, but when we arrived she wasn't exhausted like she was used to, so she could go out and do stuff right away. So overall she preferred it a lot.
by mrexroad | 2026-01-14 23:17:18+00:00
Bingo.

Sprinter vans, utility vans, or even minivans are far, far more useful for trades than modern pickups. Heck, my minivan was the goat for home renovations—it’d easily fit a dozen full 4x8 sheets of drywall/osb/ply/mdf/etc and I could still close the rear gate. I always got chuckles from guys awkwardly wrangling/securing sheets onto a pickup’s bed at the supply yard when I’d easily slide the sheets off the cart directly into the van by myself.

A heavy duty pickup makes sense when you have regular towing, or large bulky transport, needs. While on this topic, I’ll take a moment to lament the demise of the light duty pickup that provided a bit of extra utility while still fitting in a normal parking space.
by ahmetomer | 2026-01-14 23:17:44+00:00
The original post by Jaana made 8.4 million impressions, while the follow-up that included the previously/deliberately omitted context and some important information, such as "what I built is a toy version", has 277K impressions as of right now.

I respect Jaana and have been following her for years. I'd expect she ought to know how that claim would have been understood. But I guess that's the only way to go viral nowadays.

Also, this incident goes to show how the self-proclaimed AI influencer, Rohan Paul, puts a lot of thought and importance into sharing "news" about AI. As if it were not enough to share Jaana's bold claim without hesitation, he also emphasized it with an illustrious commentary: "Dario Amodei was so right about AI taking over coding."

Slop, indeed.
by WheatMillington | 2026-01-14 23:17:56+00:00
The YouTube situation is the biggest self-own in Australia's implementation. Previously kids under 16 could have an account under a parent's Family, and there are full parental controls and monitoring. Now kids can't have these accounts, so they can only access youtube without signing in. Meaning zero parental controls and monitoring. Oh and have you seen what youtube looks like when you're not logged in!?

Give parents control over parenting.
by cameldrv | 2026-01-14 23:18:21+00:00
You need to have AWD for the Maverick to have the 4000 lbs rating. It's going to be sending power to the rear wheels when you're towing.

You can't really compare the tow ratings with a 1985 Ranger. Back then the ratings were not standardized and were generally inflated for marketing purposes. Today tow ratings are standardized by SAE J2807. The Maverick has way more power than the old Ranger and weighs about 600 lbs more, plus it has trailer sway control. You're going to have a much easier time towing 4000 lbs in the Maverick than the Ranger.

Edit: The Maverick also has 300 lbs more payload capacity than the 1984 Ranger. The fact is, not everyone needs a giant heavy truck. I see loads of tradesmen driving Mavericks.
by fortran77 | 2026-01-14 23:18:22+00:00
> The correct interpretation for most people is "I bought my car because it was a good car and now for reasons beyond my control it may appear to be a political statement. Also sorry for giving that guy money, I didn't know he would spend it on Trump."

No, he had it right. Those stickers are idiotic. It won't make anyone like them any better. Sell the car if you don't like it that much.
by hombre_fatal | 2026-01-14 23:18:33+00:00
One issue here seems to come from the fact that Claude "skills" are so implicit + aren't registered into some higher level tool layer.

Unlike /slash commands, skills attempt to be magical. A skill is just "Here's how you can extract files: {instructions}".

Claude then has to decide when you're trying to invoke a skill. So perhaps any time you say "decompress" or "extract" in the context of files, it will use the instructions from that skill.

It seems like this + no skill "registration" makes it much easier for prompt injection to sneak new abilities into the token stream and then make it so you never know if you might trigger one with normal prompting.

We probably want to move from implicit tools to explicit tools that are statically registered.

So, there currently are lower level tools like Fetch(url), Bash("ls:*"), Read(path), Update(path, content).

Then maybe with a more explicit skill system, you can create a new tool Extract(path), and maybe it can additionally whitelist certain subtools like Read(path) and Bash("tar *"). So you can whitelist Extract globally and know that it can only read and tar.

And since it's more explicit/static, you can require human approval for those tools, and more tools can't be registered during the session the same way an API request can't add a new /endpoint to the server.
by ssl-3 | 2026-01-14 23:18:47+00:00
I've found HN pretty easy to use with both Chrome and Firefox on Android, at default zoom, with my own pocket supercomputer.

Sometimes I manage to hit the updoot or downdoot buttons incorrectly, but that error happens so rarely that I'm amazed at my success.

Responsiveness is very good, as well. Loading is lightning quick in all but the very worst network environments.

It's not perfect by any means (the text box I'm writing this into really should be resizeable, for instance), but it's not bad at all...for me.
by senko | 2026-01-14 23:19:05+00:00
> if you feel that insecure about it, it's you that's the problem, not the haters who are always going to exist

Pulling this victim-blaming sentence out of context to show how ridiculous it is.

Given this stance, I think GPs reasoning for not publicly bragging about using AI makes perfect sense.

Why paint a target on your back? Why acquiesce to "show us your AI" just to be mobbed by haters?

Fuck that, let them express their frustrations elsewhere.
Show HN: CockroachDB Daily
by RobinBrooksAgt | 2026-01-14 23:19:12+00:00
I've been looking for a way to stay on top of the technical evolution of distributed databases without drowning in marketing fluff. So I built CockroachDB Daily. It's a minimalist newsletter that does one thing: analyzes the day's core commits, architectural shifts (SQL/KV/Storage), and community discussions. High signal. Low noise.
by joe_mamba | 2026-01-14 23:19:28+00:00
>Basically no crime was pretty obvious.

Then please argument using logic why it's obvious. I explained why it isn't oblivions, as per HN rules.

Subjectively sure, each to his own, it might be obvious to you if you're ideologically aligned with the poster, but for good faith debate, you'll need to add actual arguments to convince the other people of your take. Imagine telling the judge "it's obvious your honor" as your only argument to why you're in the right.

>As a passerby, I'm honestly not sure what pedantic hill you think you're dying on.

No hill dying here, I'm just pushing for facts over blind ideologies.
by Xylakant | 2026-01-14 23:19:28+00:00
Pretty much. See the FAQ here https://4000-tonnen.de/faq.html

> Wie werden die Kartoffeln geliefert?
Die Kartoffeln werden per LKW direkt an Ihre angegebene Adresse geliefert. Die Lieferung erfolgt in einem Big Bag, in das ca. 1000 Kilogramm Kartoffeln passen.

Standard Big bags are roughly 1x1x1m
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-14 23:19:45+00:00
I was gonna say about 500 meters from one big wind turbine, and it was pretty noisy. But now when I look it up, seems it was installed in the 90s sometime, maybe it was just really old or badly maintained.

And I agree with that highway traffic is way noisier, no doubt. That's why I mentioned in places where you don't have that "traffic rumble" before there is a wind turbine. I guess the difference is more noticeable then, compared to if you always had that traffic rumble anyways.
by susam | 2026-01-14 23:19:54+00:00
For this HN post, any website is welcome. A lot of URLs have already been shared and it will take me days to go through each one and add them to the directory. I may not add every URL posted here, but this thread is still open for people to share as many links as they like.

Also, the guideline of 100+ total votes across five or fewer posts is not a strict rule. It exists mainly to discourage submissions that point to very thin sites with little or no content. I have already made exceptions when a website has interesting content even if it has never been posted on HN or received many upvotes.

Also, a website shared today might not meet the 100+ votes guideline now but could meet it at some point in the future. That is another reason why all personal websites are welcome in this thread. Again, this is only a guideline, not a hard rule. If a site clearly meets the criteria, I can add it quickly and save time. If it does not, I will spend a bit more time checking that it is not spam and that it genuinely has something interesting to offer.
by Zak | 2026-01-14 23:19:59+00:00
One study tested whether using TikTok/Reels/Shorts in the typical way, skipping videos any time the user wants has a short-term impact on prospective memory. The result was that there is a significant negative impact immediately after a ten minute session.

That's cause for concern given that people regularly use these apps on short breaks throughout their days, and especially problematic if they're using the apps as their main source of news.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/09658211.2025.252107...
by queuebert | 2026-01-14 23:20:19+00:00
I get your point, but those tow numbers are notoriously optimistic. Most people I bet would not be comfortable towing 4000 lbs with a Maverick, and it would struggle on grades or in heat. You can even feel that kind of weight with a full-size truck. Above 5000 lbs in most places you need independent trailer brakes.

The real issue that limits the Maverick for a wider audience is the rear is too small to comfortably fit kids, especially in car seats. Adding 4 in of leg room to the rear and making the whole truck 4 in longer would've made in a great homeowner family option without sacrificing much agility.
by j45 | 2026-01-14 23:20:42+00:00
Asking non-deterministic software to only behave like deterministic software in certain case magically is the thing to reflect on.

If we want it to be 100% safe, you probably don't ever do it with non-deterministic layers alone.

- Creating tools and tool calling helps

- Claude code specifically asks permissions to run certain commands in certain folders and keeps a list of that. Chances are that is an actual hard filter locally when the llm recommends a command.

This would be creating a deterministic layer to keep the non-deterministic layer honest. This is mandatory because ai models don't return the same level of smarts and intelligence all the time.

- Another step that can help is layering the incoming request and the command sent to the CLI between more layers and checks and no direct links to dilute any prompt injection, etc.
by crazygringo | 2026-01-14 23:21:12+00:00
It's self-centered to want to communicate well?

It's just basic communications skills, and honestly decency, to describe what a thing is and who it's for.

Maybe someone who isn't the target audience still wants to learn about the thing? Which this site provides no way of doing. That's the problem. Why choose to be inaccessible like that, when it's so easy to add a couple of works and links?

> or poke around out of curiosity

You mean like by following links that are supplied? Because that's my complaint: there are no links.