MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by polishdude20 | 2026-01-27 15:03:23+00:00
I recently had cursor basically make me a web interface to detect skiers in a live stream at my local mountain. The stream shows skiers coming off the lift with their back towards the camera. I wanted to know the average lap time of skiers to better estimate the lift line wait time since the lift itself has no camera.

It did a really good job with some prompting for fixes along the way. Turns out, it's really hard to individually ID people who are basically wearing the same thing and with similar colors.

All that is to say, I used it for an hour to see if my idea would work and be feasible.
by poulpy123 | 2026-01-27 15:03:34+00:00
I remember a successful advertisement for a yogurt in the 90s with a naked woman in a shower (so not in the US). I remember in the 2000 ads for Nike (or another shoe brand) not even showing a shoe. Recently there was a (very nice) ad for a retail corp that became viral and didn't even talk about the retails

the goal of advertising is not to inform, it is to sell, even if that means manipulating people.
Show HN: Local-first AI workspaces with tiling tabs like in VSCode [FOSS]
by etoonoptima | 2026-01-27 15:03:38+00:00
I built this app that works kind of like a mix of ChatGPT and Cursor (or Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, etc.) for non-programming use cases. I think it's important to own your data and tools - that's why I went FOSS and made the underlying data portable (plain files with a git-like sync). ChatGPT, Gemini, and other big players will try to lock people in and then start squeezing at some point, so we need to have a counterbalance in the form of FOSS that can match them in features and be a viable alternative.

It's not a business yet and I don't plan to do subscriptions or open-core, but I'm considering ways to do consulting with the product: setting up workspaces at companies and helping with custom workflows.
by foltik | 2026-01-27 15:03:50+00:00
From our knowing how it works [0] it’s just a mechanism for the kernel to give up some privileges and add extra security checks when modifying page tables. Sounds easy to emulate to me: just don’t do the checks and modify the page tables directly. Do you have some reason to believe it can’t be emulated?

If for some reason it’s difficult, the relevant kernel code could also be hooked or patched.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09272
by realitydrift | 2026-01-27 15:03:52+00:00
This paper proposes an information-theoretic framework for understanding why modern digital environments increasingly produce experiences of unreality, fragmentation, and meaning loss. It models cognition as a compression process operating under entropy constraints, where subjective coherence depends on the mind’s ability to reduce high-dimensional experience into stable internal representations. Drift emerges when environmental entropy outpaces cognitive compression capacity, degrading fidelity and destabilizing perception, identity, and sense-making. The framework integrates insights from information theory, predictive processing, and media theory to explain contemporary phenomena such as attention fragmentation, synthetic media effects, and AI-mediated cognitive overload.
by wahnfrieden | 2026-01-27 15:03:53+00:00
Swift is a great language for app development, and many app developers already know and use it on iOS, macOS, and Android and want to use it for more platforms too.

Swift users aren’t choosing between Rust and Swift. They’re looking to use Swift more. I think that’s why this is valuable - it doesn’t need to be centered around why one wouldn’t use Rust.
Show HN: Link2Slide – Free tool to turn any URL/text into LinkedIn Carousels
by suryaelidanto | 2026-01-27 15:03:58+00:00
Hello HN,

I'm a solo developer working on design systems and frontend engineering. I built Link2Slide because I found existing tools for creating LinkedIn carousels were either too expensive, required signups, or were just too complex for quick edits.

Link2Slide is a simple, free tool that lets you:

1. Paste a URL (article, blog) or raw text.
2. Auto-generate summarized slides using AI.
3. Customize the styling (inspired by high-end design systems).
4. Export directly to PDF.

There are no ads, no VC, and no paywalls—just a project built with passion to help the community.

I’d love to hear your feedback on the UX and the generated output quality.

Thanks!
Show HN: PenPeeper–An Open-Source Pentesting Engagement Manager (Optional AI)
by chetstriker | 2026-01-27 15:04:02+00:00
PenPeeper – An Open-Source Pentesting Engagement Manager (with Optional AI)

Most pentesting tools I’ve used fall into one of two buckets:

absurdly expensive enterprise SaaS

open-source tools that don’t help once scanning is done

PenPeeper is my attempt to fix that.

What it is

A free, open-source, self-hosted pentesting engagement manager that focuses on the boring but critical parts:

scoping & engagement tracking

vulnerability management

reporting

tying everything together in one workflow

The AI part (optional, not magic)

PenPeeper can integrate with local or external LLMs (Ollama, LM Studio, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, OpenRouter).

Runs on Windows (via WSL integration), MacOS, Linux

The goal isn’t “AI replaces pentesters.”
It’s:

faster vuln analysis

better first-draft reports

less copy-pasting between tools

You can run it fully local. You can turn AI off entirely.

Why I built it

Commercial tools are overpriced and locked down.
Most open-source tools stop at scanning.
Reporting is still manual, repetitive, and error-prone.

That gap is what PenPeeper is trying to cover.

Status

Early but stable

Actively developed

Looking for real pentester feedback (not hype)

Links

Site: https://penpeeper.com

GitHub: https://github.com/chetstriker/PenPeeper

Feedback I want

What part of your pentest workflow is still the most painful?

Where does AI actually help vs get in the way?

What would make this worth using on a real engagement?

Happy to answer technical questions or take criticism.
by logicprog | 2026-01-27 15:04:05+00:00
The problem is that you actually can't really model or describe a lot of the things that I do with my specifications using code without just ending up fully writing the low level code. Most languages don't have a type system that actually lets you describe the logic and desired behavior of various parts of the system and which functions should call which other functions and what your concurrency model is and so on without just writing the specific code that does it; in fact, I think the only languages that would allow you to do something like that would have to be like dependently typed languages or languages adjacent to formal methods. This is literally what the point of pseudocode and architecture graphs and so on are for.
by estearum | 2026-01-27 15:04:23+00:00
It may come as a surprise, but other people read forums. In fact, the vast majority of users read and do not write.

While I understand you do not wish to have any contrary contributions made to your thinking, I am making a productive contribution for the many readers here who may be grappling with this issue themselves.

Of course you are welcome to converse on a non-forum format if you wish to have private conversations and to have total control over who may respond to you.

I personally have a vested interest in a society that's more rather than less capable of understanding reality, and using appropriate tools to do so, so I'll continue to contribute toward that end.
Show HN: Prism, a trusted AI news digest for iOS
by ogulcanunal1 | 2026-01-27 15:04:40+00:00
Hi HN, I built Prism, a production ready iOS app for a daily AI digest.

What’s different vs typical AI news feeds:
• Evidence badges per story so you can judge source quality fast (Official, Reputable, Paper, Community)
• Try This prompts per story so you can immediately test ideas, tools, or workflows
• Save and tag items (Read later, Build, Research) plus Explore search for past digests
• Smart notifications for the daily drop

It’s freemium: free gets a few items, Pro unlocks all daily items plus full archive and notifications.

App link: https://apps.apple.com/en/app/prism-trusted-ai-digest/id6757...

Feedback I’d love:
• Which evidence levels feel most useful
• Ideal daily volume (7 vs 10)
• Any missing sources you wish every AI digest covered
by tarentel | 2026-01-27 15:04:46+00:00
One of the biggest issues I ran into years ago was debugging outside of macOS was a nightmare. Even now, debugging is a terrible experience on a non-trivial project. I am not really sure if it the size of the projects I've worked on, interop with objc, compiler configs, project configs, or what, but it has always been a bad experience. I used it on/off for a project on Linux and the debugger didn't work at all. This was so long ago I am sure that has changed but at least so far in my experience, lldb will stop working at some point. I've worked on large Obj-C and C++ codebases and never ran into any of the problems I've run into with swift in this area.
by coldpie | 2026-01-27 15:04:52+00:00
I know, I know! Change is hard and scary. To be honest, while I am glad they're finally tackling this, I'm also expecting to have a pretty annoying couple of weeks whenever they ship this support and I finally decide to make the switch. There will be things to learn and new behaviors to understand and, yes, new bugs and annoyances to learn to work around. But I think if we both put our big boy pants on, keep a positive and friendly attitude, and help each other out, we can make it through these difficult times and come out the other side with proper high DPI support, sane multi-monitor handling and hot-swapping, and maybe even some wild new stuff like high color depth options.
by dudefeliciano | 2026-01-27 15:04:54+00:00
The fascist is the ultranationalist, authoritarian, and xenophobic side that operates under the rule of one strongman leader. That's all. These days the idea that "Liberals are the real fascists" runs rampant, or even more "Antifa is fascist". It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.

> As per history proves, the ones who lose the battle are.

What are you trying to say? Mussolini called himself a fascist. Hitler modeled his nazi party on Mussolini's fascist party, he openly admitted that and admired him. Fascism is not some word that was invented post-hoc to describe very bad people.
by RiverCrochet | 2026-01-27 15:05:04+00:00
A) The modern extreme thirst for dopamine predates the Internet. We've had powerfully addictive and destructive street drugs for decades now and art and creativity still thrive.

B) People who are not (or don't believe they are) in full control of their lives, which is most of the non-rich on the planet, generally are subject to having to spend a lot of time doing things they don't want to do, and want some form of escape.

Any medium will be a trap that can catch people who would prefer to escape permanently, whether it's good for them or not. I'm sure you had children and housewives addicted to radio shows in the 1940's.

For creatives who are dedicated to their craft and are not in it for mass-market leverage, this is fine, it's going to be a filter. The people who get caught in these traps are not going to be the ones that can appreciate or support art, even if it's not their fault.
by woooooo | 2026-01-27 15:05:31+00:00
There's 2 orthogonal lanes:

1) A philosophical debate along the lines you've indicated here, how much is it worth to control the algorithm, and how much does that equate to controlling speech.

2) The allegation that current buyers bought it specifically to bring their ideology to the algorithm, however effective or valid you think that is (I think it just hastens TikTok becoming something for "old people").
by somenameforme | 2026-01-27 15:05:49+00:00
It was indeed just an example, but a pointed one to try to figure out where your definition begins and where it ends. As for China's claims, beware of capacity factor. [1] Installed capacity is based on peak figures, whereas practical output tends to be a fraction of that for clean energy sources, but significantly higher for energy like coal. It makes it easy to make headlines that sound good, but don't mean what we'd think they mean, and China's not the only one doing this. In any case, CO2 levels are going to continue skyrocketing for the foreseeable future.

As for JFK - going to the Moon is something that people would somewhat naturally support. If they oppose it, it's going to be on political grounds, perhaps they think the money could be better spent in the current moment, and not because they literally just don't ever want to send people to the Moon. By contrast something like e.g. political correctness is the exact opposite. People are going to naturally oppose it, unless there is a political motivation behind supporting it. I also chose that exact example because of the comment you made about populists promising the Moon - it turns out that sometimes they deliver.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor
by pjc50 | 2026-01-27 15:05:49+00:00
The magic lies in the two-sided coin of promotion vs. spam filtering.

The web started off as a pretty peer to peer system, but almost immediately people built directories and link farms as means to find things. You can make a system as distributed as you want, but that only works for content which people know to find. Which is great for piracy, as e.g. movies and TV shows are advertised everywhere else and can be found by title.

For social media, the recommendation engine is a critical part of the appeal to users.
by denis- | 2026-01-27 15:05:51+00:00
The fact that you don't need all the mental bandwidth to solve the nitty gritty and can hand off those details to an agent is very liberating. For me, it's not so much about meetings, but rather to work on different tasks in parallel. No more starring at Codex doing its thing. Today, I keep cycling through four to six tmux windows, each of which is an different worktree with Codex doing some good work.
by skybrian | 2026-01-27 15:05:53+00:00
I'm co-writing a design doc with Claude Opus 4.5 and it seems to me that it isn't over yet. Ghosts are pretty useful to collaborate with, but I have ideas too. We have power tools now, but that doesn't mean you have to give up. You can learn to use them.

Claude is sort of like a ghost dog in that it makes sure you know that it's up for doing whatever you want to do, but you're still in charge.
by electroly | 2026-01-27 15:06:18+00:00
Not one of the downvoters, but I'd guess it's because this is only true with HATEOAS which is the part that 99% of teams ignore when implementing "REST" APIs. The downvoters may not have even known that's what you were talking about. When people say REST they almost never mean HATEOAS even though they were explicitly intended to go together. Today "REST" just means "we'll occasionally use a verb other than GET and POST, and sometimes we'll put an argument in the path instead of the query string" and sometimes not even that much. If you're really doing RPC and calling it REST, then you need something to document all the endpoints because the endpoints are no longer self-documenting.
by iugtmkbdfil834 | 2026-01-27 15:06:52+00:00
Zero disagreement. Rules of engagement should be clear to everyone. How can you possibly play the game if the rules keep changing based on political expediency. And we all know.. that that kind of a game is rigged from the start.

That said, I was thinking more about people all of us building tools that got us into the situation we are in now.
by program_whiz | 2026-01-27 15:06:54+00:00
while I think this is a fun idea -- we are in such a dystopian timeline that I fear you will end up being prosecuted under a digital equivalent of various laws like "why did you attack the intruder instead of fleeing" or "you can't simply remove a squatter because its your house, therefore you get an assault charge."

A kind of "they found this code, therefore you have a duty not to poison their model as they take it." Meanwhile if I scrape a website and discover data I'm not supposed to see (e.g. bank details being publicly visible) then I will go to jail for pointing it out. :(
by evntdrvn | 2026-01-27 15:07:11+00:00
There was a really great article or blog post published in the last few months about the author's very personal experience whose gist was "People complain that I sound/write like an LLM, but it's actually the inverse because I grew up in X where people are taught formal English to sound educated/western, and those areas are now heavily used for LLM training."

I wish I could find it again, if someone else knows the link please post it!
by infecto | 2026-01-27 15:07:14+00:00
> they've had this exact argument

Maybe it’s not obvious but you compared the thread to an argument. I see no argument. Just a boneheaded reply from someone which was a great example of exactly what I was describing.

Your follow up is pretty on point too, somehow we go from the topic of brigading to maybe me being ok with the current state of things. This is a really great example of the problem I was describing. Thank you.
by moepstar | 2026-01-27 15:08:01+00:00
I kinda agree in the way that having synced notes (a good feature in itself, also available on iPhone/Mac) would probably suffice.

Still, being able to copy and paste not only text but also images between devices seamlessly is really nice, not to mention i can open an open browser-tab (Safari, iOS) in Brave on the Mac by just clicking the icon that has a "mobile device icon" next to it and it opens the same tab on the Mac...

And yes - as i said - i agree that having a synced note app would probably enable the same usecases, but with distinctly more friction (at least in my books).
by Waterluvian | 2026-01-27 15:08:32+00:00
This sounds like my experiences in Toronto. It’s less adversarial than the experiences I've had in the U.S.

My experiences were basically a form of, “Hey we saw something that caught our attention and might be an issue. Let's work through addressing this."

One case it was a handful of 3.5" galvanized nails. "Whoops. Okay, so, this bag used to be my makeshift toolbag. My other one ripped and I had to get one last minute--" "No problem. Can you remove them? You can either surrender them to us or we can get them mailed back to you, but I'm guessing it's not worth it..." I was so defensive because to me it looked bad but they weren't actually after me in the way I thought they'd be.

The second time was that I had an "Arduino Starter Kit" full of bundled up wires and random chips and such. Once they saw the box they didn't even ask me to un-shrinkwrap it, and unlike the nails, didn't re-x-ray the bag.

Both times they rotated their screen and pointed to the box framing the item in question on the colourized x-ray.
by luismedel | 2026-01-27 15:08:36+00:00
I always loved that intro too [0] :-) I implemented the effect in Pascal back then.

FYI, you can download the source code [1].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31311461
[1] http://ftp.lanet.lv/ftp/mirror/x2ftp/msdos/programming/iguan...
by mossTechnician | 2026-01-27 15:08:42+00:00
Partway through this article, Winbuzzer asks me to "Install Winbuzzer Prompt Station." I don't think this is a legitimate source.

It looks like most of the article is a rehash of this Windows Central article from a day earlier:

https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/windows-...
by BeetleB | 2026-01-27 15:08:57+00:00
I agree that actual studies would be good.

All I can do is throw my anecdotes into the pool: I mostly have met two types of Iranians: Those that fled in the 80's post-revolution, and those that come to the US for university (90's, 00's, and 10's).

All of them have been anti-regime.

I have met a few that came for other reasons (not education and not the 80's stock). Yes, those are either pro-regime or neutral.

My guess is that what rayiner says is correct: The majority of the Iranian diaspora in the US is self selecting and not representative of the full population.
by EgorTsyb | 2026-01-27 15:09:27+00:00
Hello HN,

I am a 15-year-old engineer. I’ve spent the last few months working on a new architecture to solve the memory bottleneck in LLMs without needing an H100 cluster.

I call it DSR (Distributed Sparse Representation). It’s a Liquid-State Hybrid architecture that decouples memory from compute using Sparse Distributed Memory (SDM) principles.

The Problem:
Transformers scale quadratically O(N^2). "Infinite context" usually means "massive retrieval latency" or "massive VRAM usage" (KV cache).

The Solution:
DSR uses hyperdimensional addressing to access memory in O(1) time. It doesn't scan the context; it computes the address of the information directly.

Benchmarks (Verified on a local RTX 3090):
- Context: 1 Billion Tokens with 100% Recall.
- Efficiency: 21.6M token index compressed into 200MB RAM.
- Granularity: Passed "Needle in a Haystack" at 128-token precision.
- Cost: Achieving SOTA perplexity (8.25) on a small 294M parameter model with ~$30 compute cost.

The goal is to move AI from centralized "Solid State" clusters to adaptive "Liquid" edge intelligence.

I wrote a technical report and recorded a demo of it searching the PyTorch codebase (C++/CUDA) in milliseconds.

Demo Video: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QUMuZcx8JGOLHEOrvseMV6XKvzV...

PDF Report: https://drive.google.com/file/d/13hsNuPFp56ELMJpi3UWIQSzsQZv...

Would love to hear your feedback on the architecture.
by zozbot234 | 2026-01-27 15:09:48+00:00
> It feels very much like a cousin to Rust with a few tradeoffs to be more ergonomic.

Rust can be just as ergonomic. It takes some minor boilerplate of course, since you're resorting to coding patterns that are somewhat unidiomatic - but not nearly as much as the likes of C# or Java.
by alephnerd | 2026-01-27 15:09:56+00:00
By that logic Mark Carney (the PM of Canada) is a potential criminal as well because he did M&A and Sovereign Risk work for GS's Russian investments during Shock Therapy and the post-Apartheid government in ZA (most of whom ended up being associated with Zumagate) in the early-to-mid 1990s [0].

[0] - https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/mark-carn...
Ask HN: How do you budget for token based AI APIs?
by Barathkanna | 2026-01-27 15:10:05+00:00
The default norm today for using AI models via APIs is token based pricing, where you pay based on how much you use.

While this isn’t hard to understand, in practice it makes costs harder to predict, especially for small teams moving from experiments to early production. This feels less like a technical problem and more like a budgeting and planning problem.

I’m curious about alternative pricing abstractions, for example a subscription with unlimited tokens but a capped number of requests, aimed at making monthly spend easier to reason about while building.

For people running AI in production today, does token based billing give you enough predictability, or would a model like this actually reduce friction? What tradeoffs would matter most to you?