MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rubslopes | 2026-01-11 15:43:22+00:00
I don't disagree, knowing how to use the tools is important. But I wanted to add that great prompting skill nowadays are far far less necessary for top-tier models that it was years ago. If I'm clear about what I want and how I want it to behave, Claude Opus 4.5 almost always nails it first time. The "extra" that I do often, that maybe newcomers don't, is to setup a system where the LLM can easily check the results of its changes (verbose logs in terminal and, in web, verbose logs in console and playwright).
by kbolino | 2026-01-11 15:44:15+00:00
A lot of HTML tags never have a body, so it makes no sense to close them. XML has self-closing tag syntax but it wasn't always handled well by browsers.

A p or li tag, at least when used and nested properly, logically ends where either the next one begins or the enclosing block ends. Closing li also creates the opportunity for nonsensical content inside of a list but not in any list item. Of course all of these corner cases are now well specified because people did close their tags sometimes.
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-01-11 15:44:38+00:00
ThinkPads run the gamut. Their flagship line is nice. In most regards, I enjoy my first gen X1 Nano — good keyboard, screen (even if it annoyingly requires fractional UI scaling), body feels solid despite being lightweight, soft touch plastic makes it feel nice to hold. Trackpad is just ok but the trackpoint makes for that.

It likes to spin up its fan doing the most insignificant things though (even plugging in a pedestrian 1x scaling external monitor can while idle can do it) and its battery life is somewhat abysmal. Standby time is also quite poor.

Some of these things are in theory improved by a newer CPU (Lunar Lake in particular looks decent) but sadly they discontinued the Nano. The Carbon isn’t that much bigger, but the size difference is noticeable in some circumstances.
Ask HN: Why don't job platforms have visa sponsorship filters?
by alwinaugustin | 2026-01-11 15:44:50+00:00
I'm searching for senior engineering roles across Europe and need visa sponsorship (my current work permit expires soon). What surprises me is that in 2026, most major job platforms still don't have a way to filter for this upfront.

The problem:

On LinkedIn, Indeed, Glassdoor, and most company career pages, you only discover visa policies after spending time on an application. The typical flow:

1. Find an interesting role matching your skills
2. Spend time customizing resume/cover letter
3. Fill out lengthy application form
4. Hit the question: "Are you authorized to work in [country]?" - Sometimes in the final page

5. Select "No, I will require sponsorship"
(Often) Immediate rejection or find out later the company doesn't sponsor

I estimate I've wasted time on applications where sponsorship wasn't available—time I could have spent on actual opportunities.

What works better:

Platforms like Wellfound (AngelList) have a sponsorship checkbox

Relocate.me only lists sponsorship jobs

Honeypot and Otta show visa status upfront for EU roles

But their coverage is limited compared to LinkedIn's scale.

Why this matters:

For candidates: Wastes time on non-opportunities, forces spray-and-pray approach

For companies: Miss qualified international talent, receive applications from candidates they can't hire

For the industry: We say tech talent is global, but our tools make global matching inefficient

What would help:

A simple standardized filter on major platforms: "Visa sponsorship available" (yes/no/case-by-case). Show it before candidates invest time applying.

My questions:

Has anyone found better ways to search for visa sponsorship roles?

Hiring managers: What prevents making this more visible upfront?

Is anyone building (or interested in building) tools to solve this?

This seems like a clear win for matching efficiency. Am I missing something, or is this just an overlooked UX problem?

TLDR: Most job platforms still lack visa sponsorship filters in 2026. You discover policies only after lengthy applications, wasting time for both sides. Niche platforms do this better but have limited coverage. Would love to hear solutions or why this problem persists.
by gosub100 | 2026-01-11 15:44:59+00:00
I haven't used AI yet but I definitely would love a tool that could do the drudgery for me for designs that I already understand. For instance, if I want to store my own structures in an RDBMS, I want to lay the groundwork and say "Hey Jeeves, give me the C++ syntax to commit this structure to a MySQL table using commit/rollback". I believe once I know what I want, futzing over the exact syntax for how to do it is a waste of time. I heard c++ isn't well supported but eventually I'll give it a try.
Show HN: OpenCoupon - Open-Source Framework to Build Coupon Browser Extensions
by EPendragon | 2026-01-11 15:45:01+00:00
I have never created a browser extension before, and I wanted to learn the process and what the SDLC looks like in the extension world. As I began exploring the topic, I came up with an idea of turning it into an open-source framework for creating coupon browser extensions called OpenCoupon. This framework can enable anyone to create a Google Chrome coupon browser extension similar to Honey, from which I drew the inspiration.

As I delved into the inner workings of Honey, I found a multi-part series investigation done on Honey by a YouTube journalist MegaLag, where he exposes unethical business practices and technical exploitation done by the extension. This led me to creating the framework with ethics, transparency, and privacy in mind.

This is also the first complete project that I created with Anthropic Claude Code utilizing agentic coding and workflow, which was fun to explore and learn the capabilities and limitations of the approach.

The project is open-source and welcomes feedback and contributions. If anyone have any questions, comments, or suggestions, I would be more than happy to hear and address them.

Huge thanks to MegaLag for the amazing investigative journalism done on PayPal Honey
by yobbo | 2026-01-11 15:45:03+00:00
This looks more worrying than impressive. It's long files of code with if-statements and flag-checking unicode bit patterns, with an enormous number of potential test-cases.

It's not conceptually challenging to understand, but time consuming to write, test, and trust. Having an LLM write these types of things can save time, but please don't trust it blindly.
AI voice chats are broken because they never interrupt–here's why it matters
by mehdi1964 | 2026-01-11 15:45:39+00:00
Most AI voice chats are polite but useless.
They wait for you to finish. They respond calmly. They never push back. That makes demos look good—but in real conversations, it’s terrible.
Humans interrupt for a reason: to clarify, correct, or push the dialogue forward. Without it, interviews stall, brainstorming dies, and tutoring becomes one-way.
Current AI avoids interrupting because it’s “safe.” The result? An AI that listens forever and actually helps very little.
I want to hear from you:
Should AI ever interrupt users?
When does it help vs annoy?
Are we killing usefulness by over-prioritizing politeness?
I’ve been building a small prototype that actually tries this approach—let me know if you want to see how it works.
by tannhaeuser | 2026-01-11 15:45:44+00:00
Guess what, you're not required to open <html>, <head>, or <body> either. It all follows from SGML tag inference rules, and the rules aren't that difficult to understand. What makes them appear magical is WHATWG's verbose ad-hoc parsing algorithm presentation explicitly listing eg. elements that close their parents originally captured from SGML but having become unmaintained as new elements were added. This already started to happen in the very first revision after Ian Hickson's initial procedural HTML parsing description ([1]).

I'd also wish people would stop calling every element-specific behavior HTML parsers do "liberal and tag-soup"-like. Yes WHATWG HTML does define error recovery rules, and HTML had introduced historic blunders to accomodate inline CSS and inline JS, but almost always what's being complained about are just SGML empty elements (aka HTML void elements) or tag omission (as described above) by folks not doing their homework.

[1]: https://sgmljs.sgml.net/docs/html5.html#tag-omission (see also XML Prague 2017 proceedings pp. 101ff)
by john-h-k | 2026-01-11 15:46:34+00:00
Your citation's statistics [1] actually says the exact opposite of your claim!

It shows a -0.2pp DECREASE in in-hospital mortality, with no significant change on 7 or 30 day mortality. The authors suggest this could be due to:

* selecting for healthier patients - the paper shows an average change of 0.1 years younger for patients. this is not significant!

* transferring out sicker patients - 30 day mortality would show this (it doesn't), and the transfer rate does not change meaningfully

So based on the evidence you have provided, private equity purchasing hospitals saves lives. Maybe that is wrong, but it is the conclusion of that evidence.

They also don't claim PE is killing people in the conclusion; did you read the paper?
by throw20251220 | 2026-01-11 15:46:47+00:00
Why is it so difficult for you to understand: we don’t want your x shit in Europe. Since when is the American president so concerned about the business of a single man, who’s an immigrant himself? Anna Paulina Luna, she’s a fucking immigrant too, or a daughter of one. You have all lost your mind there in the US. Why should we be even concerned with what you want if your leader is ready to send tanks because someone said “no”. Fuck people who think like you. Take your propaganda and kindly fuck off.
by Cyph0n | 2026-01-11 15:46:57+00:00
Red Hat contributes to a broad spectrum of Linux packages, drivers, and of course the kernel itself [1].

One example is virtualization: the virtio stack is maintained by Red Hat (afaik). This is a huge driver behind the “democratization” of virtualization in general, allowing users and small companies to access performant virt without selling a kidney to VMware.

Also, Red Hat contributes to or maintains all of the components involved in OpenShift and OpenStack.

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/915435/
by Aurornis | 2026-01-11 15:47:21+00:00
> I'd be losing my shit if someone couldn't be bothered to read what I wrote and just spout off about something I'd addressed in my writing

In my experience that’s a universal feature of comment sections everywhere, and HN is not an exception. This is very common in HN comments which is why it’s important to always read the article, not just the comments.
by BenoitEssiambre | 2026-01-11 15:47:44+00:00
I know doctors who've worked with Marrero and they seem to be split in their opinion. They seem to agree he tends to be "excessively thorough", frequently sending tests to labs across the world. This makes him liked by desperate patients with potentially incurable diseases who want someone to "do something".

They are split on whether his thoroughness is just fueling false hopes and sending patients down unnecessary rabbit holes or if he could have potentially identified a real issue.
by a-dub | 2026-01-11 15:47:44+00:00
the classic was dragon's lair: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Lair_(1983_video_ga...

laserdiscs were a weird 70s/80s analog optical video disc technology where many players had a db-9 serial port for a serial control protocol. dragon's lair was a classic stand up video game cabinet with a laserdisc player and a simple control system that created a "choose your own adventure" interface for the video content.

some of the first computer programs i ever wrote were atari st programs for controlling a laserdisc player. (we had one in elementary school)
by paodealho | 2026-01-11 15:48:14+00:00
I have been thinking about this in the last few weeks. First time I see someone commenting about it here.

- If the number of programmers will be drastically reduced, how big of a price increase companies like Anthropic would need to be profitable?

- If you are a manager, you now have a much higher bus factor to deal with. One person leaving means a greater blow on the team's knowledge.

- If the number of programmers will be drastically reduced, the need for managers and middle managers will also decline, no? Hmm...
by mogwire | 2026-01-11 15:48:23+00:00
You don’t know they are a positive force?

This, despite the fact that Rocky, Alma, Oracle Enterprise Linux, etc exist because of the hard work and money spent by Red Hat.

And what are those companies doing to fix this issue you claim Red Hat causes? Nothing. Because they like money, especially when all you have to do is rebuild and put your name on other people’s hard work.

And what exactly is incomprehensible? What exactly is it that they’re doing to the Linux desktop that make it so that people can’t fix their own problems? Isn’t the whole selling point of Rocky and Alma by most integrators is that it’s so easy you don’t need red hat to support it?
by immibis | 2026-01-11 15:48:34+00:00
That app already exists. It's called TM SGNL. The Department of War used it. It sent all their messages in plain-text to an Israeli server that was leaking memory dumps to the public internet (a la Heartbleed), 600GB of which were collected by hackers and sold on the dark web. Worst case scenario. That's not a fantasy, that literally happened. Do you still trust Signal?
by homebrewer | 2026-01-11 15:48:34+00:00
It's an implementation detail, you're saying it like they're completely free form. Not really, they have a very specific structure that every package adheres to.

Parsing them currently requires evaluating them as shell scripts. Should be obvious how bad of an idea it is, especially in the context of the AUR (which is why it requires you to push a dumbed down metadata file called SRCINFO along with PKGBUILD — which is then used to show package info in the web UI you're probably familiar with).

Being able to safely parse PKGBUILDs without running them would certainly be an improvement.
by funkyfiddler69 | 2026-01-11 15:49:46+00:00
> the simple 'perception of having taken the wrong path' by researchers or companies

IMO, neither the plateau nor the perception of "a wrong path" are real. There are too many paths and we have too few humans with adequately capable brains.

Companies talk for the agenda's sake and thus the kick of the surprise. It's a marketing thing.

AI R&D is basically thinking out loud nowadays. It's just the pace of the news.

I believe that most AI development has reached "the end" of a logarithmic curve. The assigned humans will catch up. Then we'll see faster growth again. It takes time to get from one edge to the other or walk along it or explore the area.

The progress is there but it's infinitely small compared to the past years where it was relatively simple to get better results over and over and nobody will get it except if they are sensitized to it.

What kind of major leap in performance do you expect? What do others expect? Be specific and people will tell you whether there is a plateau or not enough hands on deck working on specific problems.
by prodigycorp | 2026-01-11 15:49:48+00:00
This news answers a bunch of questions I’ve had.

I’ve got an Instagram burner I literally never use. Never clicked weird links, never logged in anywhere sketchy, so a phishing compromise makes zero sense. If my info got out, it likely came from Instagram’s side, not mine.

What’s interesting is the timing pattern. I started getting “reset your password” emails in early 2023, then they’d come in waves. It feels like the creds were getting resold and different people were taking turns running the same list. The emails were in different languages too, which tracks with whoever was firing off the requests.

Got another reset attempt a couple days ago. Congrats to the latest buyer: you bought pure schwag. Whatever value was in that list got milked long before it ended up public.
by daikikadowaki | 2026-01-11 15:49:48+00:00
You’re obsessed with the 'texture' of the window, but you're failing to look at the architecture inside the room.

I’m a non-native speaker. I used AI to polish my prose because I didn't want my language barrier to distract from the core logic of JTP. If you see seams, it's because I was forcing a tool to express a human-made, highly specific framework that it wasn't built to understand. That 'clash' you sensed isn't a lack of cohesive thinking—it's the friction of an original, complex idea resisting the generic patterns of an LLM.

You claim to see through to the mind of the author? Then look at the persistence. An AI doesn't spend weeks building a protocol, time its release for a specific timezone, and then sit here past 0:45 AM JST arguing the finer points of 'human communication artifacts' in a flagged thread. If you're as careful a considerer as you claim, stop critiquing the 'polish' and start critiquing the logic. Or is the 'window' all you're capable of seeing?
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-11 15:49:59+00:00
xD

I am not even kidding but there is a guy who viewed twitter, found that table salt Aka sodium chloride is "bad for health" and the medical study recommends that if thats the case then they should less the consumption

But he ends up asking chatgpt and it somehow recommends him the idea of sodium bromide instead of sodium chloride and it really ended up having him have so many hallucinations and so many other problems that the list goes on.

I found this from a video, definitely worth a watch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yftBiNu0ZNU

A man asked AI for health advice and it cooked every brain cell
by anovikov | 2026-01-11 15:50:28+00:00
I'm sure it will go in the worst way possible: demand for code will not expand at nearly the same rate in which coding productivity will increase, and vast majority of coders will become permanently jobless, the rest will become disposable cheap labor just due to overabundance of them.

This is already happening.

AI had an impact on simplest coding first, this is self-evident. So any impact it had, had to be on the quantity of software created, and only then on its quality and/or complexity. And mobile apps are/were a tedious job with a lot of scaffolding and a lot of "blanks to fill" to make them work and get accepted by stores. So first thing that had to skyrocket in numbers with the arrival of AI, had to be mobile apps.

But the number of apps on Apple Store is essentially flat and rate of increase is barely distinguishable from the past years, +7% instead of +5%. Not even visible.

Apparently the world doesn't need/can't make monetisable use of much more software than it already does. Demand wasn't quite satisfied say 5 years ago, but the gap wasn't huge. It is now covered many times over.

Which means, most of us will probably never get another job/gig after the current one - and if it's over, it's over and not worth trying anymore - the scraps that are left of the market are not worth the effort.
by Santosh83 | 2026-01-11 15:50:54+00:00
> The GnuPG upstream has denounced the IETF-driven OpenPGP standardization process and has subsequently been removed from other major package management software such as apt and rpm over the last three years. Compatibility with other OpenPGP implementations is no longer guaranteed...

What?? First time I'm hearing of this schism. I wish the FOSS community had less disagreements all over the place.
by vindex10 | 2026-01-11 15:51:40+00:00
I love how windows-linux discussion is populated by DAW/VST incompatibility. I'm still new to the industry, and therefore also open minded about daw/plugins.

I actually had good experience with setting up yabridge, it could have worked for me I think. But the elephant in the room is that many big commercial plugins use JUCE as a framework, and the recent release of JUCE (JUCE8) just broke compatibility with wine and seem to be sabotaging wine-based usage completely, and are not considering going back at the moment.

https://forum.juce.com/t/juce8-direct2d-wine-yabridge/64298/...

https://github.com/robbert-vdh/yabridge/issues/386

There are patches based on binary diffs to JUCE7, but it is just so much pain to simply run the commonest plugins in the field :/

So I'm now kind of stuck between using windows with commercial plugins or use linux with mainly smaller scale alternatives (although there are good ones: lsp, decent sampler, cardinal, surge)
by arter45 | 2026-01-11 15:51:44+00:00
Yes, it is an extreme example, but if your application(s) makes your company millions of dollars or euros, even if you are in a business that is not heavily regulated [1], mistakes or unavailability can cost a lot of money. Even if your company is not that big, mistakes in a crucial application everyone uses can cost time, money, even expose the company to legal trouble. "Self driving" coding in these situations is not ideal.

[1] Even if your domain is not traditionally considered heavily regulated (military, banking,...) there is a surprising amount of "soft law" and "hard law" in everything from privacy to accounting and much more.
by rpdillon | 2026-01-11 15:52:14+00:00
Similarly, I picked up Linux in 1997 and have used it as my primary since 1999. I've distro hopped through probably a dozen or so distros, but ultimately landed on PopOS for most of my machines, similarly to you. These threads are always somewhat disheartening, hearing everybody say they tried to switch but couldn't because of one issue or another. I guess I've just learned to work through it.
by daikikadowaki | 2026-01-11 15:53:04+00:00
Enough with the 'AI-detective' meta-commentary. Whether the prose was polished by a tool or not is irrelevant to the validity of the logic. If you're as 'careful' a thinker as you claim, stop obsessing over the window and start addressing the actual architecture of JTP.

Don't hide behind 'artifacts' and 'patterns' to avoid the debate. Critique the framework itself, or admit you have no substantive counter-argument. I’m here for a technical discussion, not a literary critique.
by da_chicken | 2026-01-11 15:53:06+00:00
Okay. You didn't seem to understand that that was a rhetorical question, because you didn't seem to take the next step of reflection.

So, what does your comment to me say if used in response to your own org mode vs markdown comment you made in the post I responded to? You said org mode's capabilities are the reason why you don't want markdown.

You keep making this argument that org mode is just better, but you can immediately find a counterargument yourself to your own point.

Now, it's perfectly fine that that represents how you feel about the software. You can hold whatever opinion you want. But, you're not just trying to explain your opinion. You're trying to convince people that org mode is better. You understand why you're not being very persuasive in your argument, right? You've argued in a way that the only people who will agree with you are those that already hold the same opinion as you.
by nsmdkdfk | 2026-01-11 15:53:16+00:00
The hubris of US idealists. There's no packing up and leaving. If you leave your tribe you are dead. This was true 10k years ago and it is true again. If you weren't born under the US security umbrella you are nothing but an ant avoiding the boots of those above you. And the whole world is returning to mean once more. There's no packing bags, there's fighting for YOUR freedom or being a slave. Those above will always seek to oppress those below.
by SJC_Hacker | 2026-01-11 15:53:26+00:00
> The difference is that in C one is supposed to do allocations and deallocations oneself

No, you should only use the heap if necessary.

The bigger issue in C is there is no concept of references, so if you want to modify memory, the only recourse is return-by-value or a pointer. Usually you see the latter, before return value optimization it was considered a waste of cycles to copy structs.

In the embedded world, its often the case you won't see a single malloc/free anywhere. Because sizes of inputs were often fixed and known at compile time for a particular configuration.