MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ericmay | 2026-01-17 21:44:49+00:00
> So I would say that consumers could learn a thing or two. That said, most buyers are not buying newly-built homes, so their ability to influence the inclusion of some of these features are limited.

Even then I think Americans are not at all well-versed in what makes a house a good house in terms of design or aesthetic and there isn’t a marketplace that exists to help customers shop and compare.

Today, if you’re buying a new build your only option is McMansion style or just a smaller and equally distasteful version of the McMansion. And yes they are all distasteful - it’s a matter of fact, not opinion.

So most people buying new builds end up with the same cargo culled designs. And then “architects” design more and more different versions of these horrendous designs and plop in things like Sedona Avenue near the golf course and that’s how you get suburbia. There’s never a market signal, despite the fact that we can build homes much more nicely and with techniques to be a little more naturally energy efficient and kinder on the eyes.

There is also much less competition with neighborhood design though surprisingly there have been some inroads there that have fostered some competition, but it’s mostly for now for the wealthy. I live in a neighborhood designed before cars, a neighborhood that today is largely illegal to build. But the home prices are highest here because the market is demanding this type of neighborhood - single family detached homes mixed with apartments and coffee shops and small offices and restaurants. “Mixed-use development”. It’s incredibly scarce and in most American cities it has the most expensive average real estate and tends to be the most economically vibrant. Little pockets of Europe.

Neither home builders or zoning officials have taste and because as you in my view correctly acknowledge the builders are downstream of market demands, because the market doesn’t even understand what is actually good and possible, the entire industry and government regulation apparatus is downstream of the sewer.
by vbezhenar | 2026-01-17 21:45:42+00:00
Kubernetes enabled qualities small companies didn't dream before.

I can implement zero downtime upgrades easily with Kubernetes. No more late-day upgrades and late-night debug sessions because something went wrong, I can commit any time of the day and I can be sure that upgrade will work.

My infrastructure is self-healing. No more crashed app server.

Some engineering tasks are standardized and outsourced to the professional hoster by using managed serviced. I don't need to manage operating system updates and some component updates (including Kubernetes).

My infrastructure can be easily scaled horizontally. Both up and down.

I can commit changes to git to apply them or I can easily revert them. I know the whole history perfectly well.

I would need to reinvent half of Kubernetes before, to enable all of that. I guess big companies just did that. I never had resources for that. So my deployments were not good. They didn't scale, they crashed, they required frequent manual interventions, downtimes were frequent. Kubernetes and other modern approaches allowed small companies to enjoy things they couldn't do before. At the expense of slightly higher devops learning curve.
by ethbr1 | 2026-01-17 21:47:34+00:00
Imho, this will be the key goal of gen 1.5 AI products that start delivering real-world efficiency at scale: multiplying output rather than full human replacement.

In almost every transformational AI use case, the economics don't distinguish between automating 80% of the work and 100% of the work, because there are upstream or downstream limitations that will take a decade to work out.

And at 80% automation, you're already 5x'ing someone's productivity (naive assumptions, etc etc), which translates into either 5x the supply of a good (same labor pool) or 1/5 labor costs (same output).

Granted, Amdahl's law applies [0], and there are going to be fractions unsuitable to automation.

But it feels like AI tech is relearning a computing lesson that's always been true: do the easy things first (cooperative systems with humans) and then tackle the harder things (100% end to end automation).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law
by crystal_revenge | 2026-01-17 21:48:20+00:00
The cognitive dissonance around optimism regarding renewables and the fact that there are multiple military actions going on around the globe right now focused exclusively on extracting more fossil fuels from the ground is a bit much sometimes.

Why do people even pretend like we haven't signed up for "what's worse than the worse case scenario?" as far as climate goes?

The only way to reduce the already severe impacts of global warming are to keep fossil fuels in the ground. It doesn't matter how much energy is generated by solar so long as we continue to dig up and burn fossil fuels. It's quite clear that we have zero intentions of slowing down or even keeping our fossil fuel consumption steady.

If we had record electricity demand, and anything short of 100% of it was covered by renewables, that means we're burning more fossil fuels then we were before.

We have, pretty unequivocally at this point, signed up for seeing what the end game of civilization looks like rather than realistically exploring or even considering any alternatives.
by dktp | 2026-01-17 21:48:27+00:00
Right. But a good portion of the world can't afford the premium and having access to these services is still valuable. For every broke student or someone from a poor background, who probably don't make any money for the company (due to not buying advertised stuff), there's someone from a well off background, who will more than subsidize it by virtue of clicking on a lawyer ad (or whatever)

Nowadays I'm happy to pay, but that wasn't always the case. And I personally think that having an ad tier and fee tier is fine. Serves everyone
by blutoot | 2026-01-17 21:48:30+00:00
I think the opposite will happen - leadership will forego this attitude of "reverse course on the first outage".

Teams will figure out how to mitigate such situations in future without sacrificing the potential upside of "fully autonomous code changes made on production systems" (e.g invest more in a production-like env for test coverage).

Software engineering purists have to get out of some of these religious beliefs
by AstroBen | 2026-01-17 21:48:47+00:00
I think everyone would seriously benefit from learning poker. I used to play professionally and the idea of looking at things as probabilistic bets, and in terms of expected value is so deeply rooted in my mind

Investments are bets. Most sane investors aren't putting it all on one thing

Startups are bets

Applying for jobs. Sales. Dating. Health. Basically everything

You risk $X money and time for a payoff of $Y that comes Z%

You can make the best decision and have a bad outcome because there are so many unknowns. This isn't chess

You can play everything wrong and still hit it out of the park

I mean this is one of the range of outcomes that could've happened. You can't declare yourself a success or failure from one project

Just keep making good decisions and don't risk it all, and you'll more than likely end up fine
by redohmy | 2026-01-17 21:49:09+00:00
NVIDIA’s Inference Context Memory Storage Platform, announced at CES 2026, marks a major shift in how AI inference is architected. Instead of forcing massive KV caches into limited GPU HBM, NVIDIA formalizes a hierarchical memory model that spans GPU HBM, CPU memory, cluster-level shared context, and persistent NVMe SSD storage.

This enables longer-context and multi-agent inference by keeping the most active KV data in HBM while offloading less frequently used context to NVMe—expanding capacity without sacrificing performance. This shift also has implications for AI infrastructure procurement and the secondary GPU/DRAM market, as demand moves toward higher bandwidth memory and context-centric architectures.
by 1718627440 | 2026-01-17 21:50:33+00:00
The christian understanding of the concept of God, is that it is transcendental, i.e. beyond the universe. This means that from the view from inside the universe he must be almighty. A non-almighty "God" is just not a God, according to the Christian definition, it is just yet another thing in the universe.

> a concept, that puts me in hell (or heaven) ... for being who I was made to be ... by the creator.

Why do you think it needs to be an explicit action from the creator as opposed to being just the result of your own actions? When someone loves you, but you really don't love him/her back, that's quite the hell for you. Compared to the state of this being heaven to you, i.e. you do love back, there is no difference in intention or action from the other persons side.
by vee-kay | 2026-01-17 21:51:12+00:00
This sounds like either your FireTV stick is too old or your TV is.

My LG TV is more than a decade old (non-smart LED TV), the FireTV stick is around 6 years old.

But apart from the FireTV stick (whose remote controls the TV too) taking 15 seconds for a cold start (the TV tends to go to deep sleep mode after idle for long time or when switched off via remote), or 5 seconds for a warm start, the FireTV GUI is quite snappy thereafter (I can briskly move the cursor/selection across icons/thumbnails, menus and apps), till I switch it off again. Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime, Discovery+, Apple TV - they all work well on this old setup.

You may want to uninstall some apps on the FireTV stick to give it some breathing space when it runs.

Try the FireTV stick on a PC monitor having HDMI input. If you face same issues there, then it may be time to buy a new FireTV stick or Chromecast, or splurge for a new smart TV.
by monooso | 2026-01-17 21:51:24+00:00
> We don't know what the author asked it to do, but this smells like the problem started at least several messages before that.

Author here. It was what I assumed would be a fairly simple task, fixing some duplicate closing frontmatter delimiters.

I think the LLM took a wrong turn early on, and then just spiralled. It was morbidly fascinating watching it rabbit hole.
Show HN: Govctl – A CLI enforcing RFC-driven discipline on AI coding
by gabriel_wu | 2026-01-17 21:51:36+00:00
AI coding assistants are fast but undisciplined. They jump from idea to implementation
without specification. Docs drift from code. "Best practices" become optional suggestions.

I built govctl to fix this. It's an opinionated governance CLI that enforces phase
discipline on software development:

spec → impl → test → stable

Every feature requires an RFC before implementation. Phases can't be skipped. Gates are
checked, not suggested.

The workflow:
$ govctl new rfc "Caching Strategy" # spec first
$ govctl finalize RFC-0015 normative # lock the spec
$ govctl advance RFC-0015 impl # now you can code
$ govctl check # validate everything

govctl governs itself. Every feature in the CLI was specified in an RFC/ADR before
a line of code was written. This repo is the proof that the model works.

Not for everyone. If you thrive in "move fast and break things" workflows, this isn't
for you. But if you're frustrated by AI-generated spaghetti and documentation that lies,
govctl might help.

Built in Rust. MIT licensed.
by yakkomajuri | 2026-01-17 21:51:39+00:00
Hey, author here. Totally agree on how helpful these people are. I have a psychologist and also some great mentors. This doesn't make you immune to things like I wrote about but helps you process and get over them when they happen.

As a side note, I'm in a much better mental space now, largely due to facing these things straight on. Things are good, and I'm motivated and sharp!
by viraptor | 2026-01-17 21:51:43+00:00
> Bigger purchases give more, because the percentage lost to fees are lower. Tiny amount can not be bought, as it would not make sense considering the per transaction cost.

This is a solved issue in basically any real life commerce. (Depends on the country if it's enforced) You say what your transaction fee is and add it on top. Then people can decide for themselves.
by kardolus | 2026-01-17 21:52:15+00:00
Hi all! I’ve been building chatgpt-cli for a while now (800+ stars), a command-line tool for working with LLMs. It supports things like prompt files, thread-based context, streaming, images and audio, and MCP (Model Context Protocol) tool calls.

I just shipped a new experimental feature I’m really excited about: an agent mode that follows the ReAct loop (think → act → observe), similar to what tools like Claude Code and Cursor do. It can plan and execute multi-step tasks using shell commands, file operations, and LLM reasoning, all behind budget limits and safety policies (allowed tools, denied commands, workdir sandboxing).

It’s still early, for example, you can’t yet resume workflows. I think it’s ready for people to try and break though!

Quick silly test:

chatgpt create a text file in this directory with a short weather report for where i am right now --agent

Next, I want to iterate on the current version based on feedback before adding bigger ideas like parallel execution or sub-agents. If you try it, I’d love to hear what’s confusing, broken, or missing.
by eks391 | 2026-01-17 21:52:42+00:00
I felt like the article had a good argument for why the AI hype will similarly be unsuccessful at erasing developers.

> AI changes how developers work rather than eliminating the need for their judgment. The complexity remains. Someone must understand the business problem, evaluate whether the generated code solves it correctly, consider security implications, ensure it integrates properly with existing systems, and maintain it as requirements evolve.

What is your rebuttal to this argument leading to the idea that developers do need to fear for their job security?
by maxkfranz | 2026-01-17 21:53:09+00:00
I'm not the author, but generally: It could depend on whether those trial users are worth supporting. You could potentially get a free-rider problem. You could get a lot of support emails from people who never convert anyway.

It's only 10€, so it's pretty well in the impulse-buy category.

To the author: I'd suggest localising the currency, if possible. At least for English speaking locales (US, UK, CA, AU, NZ). The EUR pricing made it look to me like you might not be able to buy it if you're not in Europe. (Edit: I'm in Canada and it shows EUR, not CAD.)
by krackers | 2026-01-17 21:53:09+00:00
I found https://daedtech.com/defining-the-corporate-hierarchy/ has a good comparison

>The Peter Principle holds that people are promoted until they prove incompetent in their role, and then they remain there; competence is rewarded with promotion and incompetence is rewarded with the status quo.

>The Dilbert Principle, with more of a knowledge-worker focus, rings true to those of us who have seen terrible programmers promoted to project managers. It states that bad employees are promoted into management to prevent them from doing damage with their incompetence.

>The Gervais Principle gives a lot more credit to those at the very top (which, in my opinion, makes it far more accurate in its reasoning about corporate leadership); it says that the sociopaths that run the organization knowingly over-promote dedicated but relatively inept people into middle management [and this is done so execs can use them as canon fodder, buffer in interaction, and and avoid having their own jobs threatened]
by unsnap_biceps | 2026-01-17 21:53:49+00:00
I'm not sure how this relates to what I said. The links you gave were to fraud found in Brooklyn. Did Nick Shirley uncover these cases?

I do believe that there's some fraud. I even believe there's a substantial dollar value of fraud going on. I do not believe that they uncovered 9 billion dollars in fraud visiting 5 Somali run daycare facilities and being denied entry into them with a camera crew and armed security.
by FrankWilhoit | 2026-01-17 21:53:59+00:00
Mozart wrote for audiences who were only half paying attention. If that is all he had done -- and it was all that most of his peers did -- he would be forgotten. But at the same time he also wrote for audiences who were paying the closest possible attention. He is remembered for doing both. It is quite a trick, as you will see if you try it. Netflix do not even see the need for it, and therefore, their "works" will be forgotten.
by jimnotgym | 2026-01-17 21:54:07+00:00
Or it is set out in building codes that they must design in a certain way.

In the UK that means adding lots of insulation. UK houses predominantly had a lot of thermal mass from the inner skin of the cavity wall being brick or later concrete blocks. The little wall insulation, if it even existed, was in the cavity. In a push for more insulation they switched to lightweight thermal blocks, and sometimes more insulation inside, or timber frames. All of which designed for insulation while reducing the thermal mass. No matter how much sun you put in during the day you only heat the air, which goes cold quickly. This is not the architects choice.

Architects can only design for orientation on a single house plot. In the UK they are trying to cram houses on at 50 to the acre or more due to the price of building land. They focus on best use of space, rather than orientation because of that
by hackyhacky | 2026-01-17 21:54:12+00:00
> But this wasn't an obituary. It wasnt a recalling of facts about his life. It wasnt written for a news outlet which publishes obits about most notable figures. It was an opinion piece and a discussion of how Adams affected the writer.

Of course it was an obituary. It did recall facts of his life. There is no rule requiring obituaries to be positive or published in mainstream, dead-tree newspapers. There is a long historical tradition of heavily opinionated obituaries. Here's a great example about Margaret Thatcher [1].

If we can set aside your nit-picking about the word "obituary," I still don't understand your position that it's somehow "cowardly" to criticize dead people. As I've already pointed out, Adams got lots of criticism while alive and the timing of Alexander's article certainly isn't motivated by cowardice. To say only kind things of the dead is to be dishonest. We owe it to ourselves to not sugarcoat the past. Or do you think that a history book that accurately recounts Joseph Stalin's rule of the Soviet Union is "cowardly"?

[1] https://socialistworker.co.uk/news/margaret-thatcher-a-bruta...
Show HN: Scratching an Itch with Gemini Code
by satran | 2026-01-17 21:54:20+00:00
I am a little late to the "vibe coding" trend. While I’d played around with LLMs for simple scripting, I hadn't truly integrated them into my workflow. But for a recent itch, I thought I'd give it all.

I use a Supernote A5X2 for taking notes. I couldn't find the perfect dot grid for it. I wanted something simple—a light, 6mm spaced dot grid. Every generator I found online came with a catch: they either slapped a watermark on the page, forced their logo into the corner, or simply didn't work.

Usually, building a custom PDF generator means spending an hour documentation-diving to find the right library and figuring out coordinate systems. I didn't have the luxury of time, so I gave Gemini a prompt describing exactly what I wanted: the command, arguments, and what I expected to get out of it.

With these instructions it popped out a functional Python script using beautifulsoup, I think (I don’t have the original Python code, Gemini decided to delete it). It worked remarkably well. With a few follow-up prompts to tweak the spacing and dot density, I had a near perfect PDF.

The script worked for me, but I wanted to share it with the Supernote community. Most users aren't going to install Python and run terminal commands just to get a notebook template. I needed a web application. But I didn’t want to run a server and have it generate the PDF. I wanted a static file that I could host it in GitHub.

I went back to Gemini with a new challenge: “Build me a pure JavaScript application that generates this PDF entirely in the browser.”

Gemini generated the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files using a client-side library. After a few rounds of "polishing the vibes"—tweaking the UI and refining the PDF output—I had exactly what I envisioned.

You can see the final product here https://satran.github.io/grid-generator and the source code is available in the GitHub repository https://github.com/satran/grid-generator.

Looking back, what I enjoyed most wasn't the speed, but the scaffolding. I didn’t have to research which JS library was best for PDF generation; the LLM picked a standard one and implemented it correctly. It created the structural "bones" of the app, allowing me to focus on supplementing and finalising the details rather than writing boilerplate code. I went from a minor annoyance to a public-facing tool in a fraction of the time it would have taken traditionally. I think I’m officially a convert. This is it: I can focus on the intent of the code and let the LLM handle the syntax.
by ben_w | 2026-01-17 21:54:25+00:00
Somebody needs to understand, to the standard of "well enough".

The investors who paid for the CEO who hired your project manager to hire you to figure that out, didn't.

I think in this analogy, vibe coders are project managers, who may indeed still benefit from understanding computers, but when they don't the odds aren't anywhere near as poor as a lottery. Ignorance still blows up in people's faces. I'd say the analogy here with humans would be a stereotypical PHB who can't tell what support the dev needs to do their job and then puts them on a PIP the moment any unclear requirement blows up in anyone's face.
by lukan | 2026-01-17 21:54:43+00:00
"Why do you think it needs to be an explicit action from the creator as opposed to being just the result of your own actions? "

There is no such thing as "my own actions" if I was created by an allmighty god. And the environment likewise. Then every action would be determined by the allmighty.

It all would be just gods playground to test and reward and punish his creations for being how he (or she or it) created them.
by taurath | 2026-01-17 21:54:59+00:00
Expectations that we hold inside of ourselves can be a really difficult echo of identities we tried fantasizing about when growing up and as an adult. We want to do well, we want the approval, we want the validation.

The anxiety over expectations can kill you. It’s self abuse - people (investors, bosses, spouses) don’t invest in you for your anxiety driven productivity, they do it because of who you are outside of that worry. It’s hard to replace it if you consider it your motor. Let the desire to do well and good stay, but let the fear of others disappointment go, and the fantasy that we can control those outcomes by squeezing every last drop out of ourselves.
by Kim_Bruning | 2026-01-17 21:55:47+00:00
It's modern Samizdat[1] , isn't it?

I think it's a bit amazing and a bit embarrassing that western culture is being kept out of a kind of dark ages[2] by ex soviets, of all people.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samizdat

[2] In the very practical sense that certain texts end up lost because they're copyrighted but no one re-publishes them on time, so few or no copies remain in practice.