MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pjmlp | 2026-01-14 09:42:12+00:00
I worked on a startup that was mostly powered by Tcl, the amount of rewriting in C that we had to do between 1999 and 2003, when I left the company among all those dotcom busts, made me no longer pick any language without at least a JIT, for production code.

The founders went on creating OutSystems, with the same concepts but built on top of .NET, they are one of the most successful Portuguese companies to this day, and one of the few VB like development environments for the Web.
by bruce511 | 2026-01-14 09:42:34+00:00
>> Not the one from 25 years ago.

um yes, that one. updated, yes. added to, yes. But a huge chunk of the code that shipped then is still shipping now.

>> Legal requirement would have ensured great care in preservation of said source.

Um, no. The cost of that "great care" would simply have to be built into the initial release. More likely we'd just ignore the problem (who expects this thing to last 25 years anyway?) and then in 25 years, assuming we're still around, we'll wait for someone to what? Take us to court? "Sorry judge, source has gone in the great fire of 07"). Judge does what? issues us a fine? (Said fine being anyway lower than the cost of the "great care" you mentioned....)

Copyright serves a very different purpose. It protects the binary from being copied by others for commercial gain. That's not a law for "old software" - (nobody cares about Visicalc), it's a law for current software (ie, it's still illegal to pirate Windows 2000).
by troupo | 2026-01-14 09:43:01+00:00
> Yet another person who plays the bogeyman card of "conspiracy theory"

> Even if Spotify is not doing the slightest thing like this, suggesting that they might is...

...textbook definition of conspiracy theory

Also note how your entire text is just unsubstantiated claims. Including emotionally charged words like "terrorist cell" that give your words so much weight and meaning.
by ZeroGravitas | 2026-01-14 09:43:08+00:00
> Nearly all the most impressive people I know are accidental moderates. ... But someone who works with ideas has to be independent-minded to do it well.

A shame he doesn't name names so we can check how many are openly fascist now that it is in vogue.

Paul more recently, on twitter:

https://x.com/paulg/status/2007079764964892917

> The rational fear of those who dislike economic inequality is that the rich will convert their economic power into political power: that they'll tilt elections, or pay bribes for pardons, or buy up the news media to promote their views.

> I used to be able to claim that tech billionaires didn’t actually do this—that they just wanted to refine their gadgets. But unfortunately in the current administration we’ve seen all three
by troupo | 2026-01-14 09:44:26+00:00
Again. Spotify doesn't pay musicians directly. Spotify pays distirbutors and rights holders.

Literally in the very article everyone links to but is incapable of reading there's even this text:

--- start quote ---

Epidemic’s selling point is that the music is royalty-free for its own subscribers, but it does collect royalties from streaming services; these it splits with artists fifty-fifty.

--- end quote ---
by theshrike79 | 2026-01-14 09:45:05+00:00
There's a reason why all security professionals I know use an iPhone.

To my knowledge there hasn't been a single case of an iOS application being able to read the data of another application - or OS files it wasn't explicitly given authorisation to do so.

It can be done, but for desktop it has never been a priority.

A bit like the earliest versions of Windows encountering The Internet for the first time. They were built with the assumption they'd be in a local network at best where clients could be trusted. Then The Internet happened and people plugged their computers directly into it.
by f1shy | 2026-01-14 09:45:25+00:00
Theoretically a good choice, but where I live, just doesn't work. Either they just say "no thanks" or they will be more expensive than letting them do the whole job.

I got the "trick" recommended to do the things yourself, then call a certified guy, and say "look, I contracted a guy, I had no idea, he came did everything, but I got a bad vibe, I would like you check the whole installation". But it also does not really work, they will come with a contract, where you are enforced to contract them to correct any findings. And boy they will find things then...
Lore, A reasoning engine that stores the "why" behind code changes
by almonerthis | 2026-01-14 09:45:43+00:00
Hey HN, I built Lore because I was frustrated with context loss when using AI coding agents.

Git tells you who changed code and when. Comments (hopefully) tell you what the code does. But neither captures why it was written that way, the reasoning, the alternatives that were rejected, the trade-offs considered. Would love feedback on the approach.

Website: https://avraammavridis.github.io/lore/

GitHub: https://github.com/avraammavridis/lore
by andyjohnson0 | 2026-01-14 09:46:33+00:00
There is no answer to this. The universe does not provide any mechanisms for moral decision making or evaluation. Rather, morality exists in human minds, not in the external world.

We have to do the best we can to be kind and minimise suffering, while understanding that there will inevitably be a diversity of judgements on moral matters. And if those moral judgements have real-world effects, there will be moral judgements about that too.

It never ends, and there are no right answers - although there might very well be wrong ones. Its up to us.
by widdershins | 2026-01-14 09:46:46+00:00
I don't think Hayleigh was trying to gatekeep, just noting that some developers prefer features that Gleam intentionally omits.

As for the @external annotations, I think you're both right to a degree. Perhaps we can all agree to say: Gleam can use most libraries from Erlang/Elixir, but requires some minimal type-annotated FFI bindings to do so (otherwise it couldn't claim to be a type-safe language).
by supermatt | 2026-01-14 09:46:50+00:00
> more like 30cts like it is in Europe

Nope - i live in one of the most expensive areas, and even the residential price has averaged 18c/kWh delivered including taxes. Businesses get a lower basic rate and also don't pay the VAT, so it works out around 13c/kWh for them.

https://data.nordpoolgroup.com/auction/day-ahead/prices?deli...
by pjc50 | 2026-01-14 09:46:54+00:00
Presumably the phones are tapped?

People have been claiming for years that US phone calls are subject to routine computer analysis (Echelon); these days that's a relatively cheap thing to do with LLMs.

I suspect the literal runners solution is what's happening, although that's also very dangerous when the police control the streets.

And don't forget the whatsapp group chat classic: secure communications where at least one person in the group is leaking them.
by hummusisdata | 2026-01-14 09:46:56+00:00
Here is the hard reality most data teams are facing as we close 2025:

We are drowning in “successful” work that changes nothing.

We have better governance frameworks. We have cleaner dbt projects. We have decentralized ownership. We have technically perfect workflows. But ask yourself: Do we have data on our own impact?

We track the reliability of our pipelines, but not the reliability of the decisions made using them. We celebrate that dbt enabled better data transformation, but we forget that dbt is supposed to enable better business decisions.
by torginus | 2026-01-14 09:47:17+00:00
I think we are in a middle of a dark age.

I was just playing around with home automation, and I have built quite a few custom devices over the past few months.

Just to illustrate what I mean:

I have an old furnace - it's interface is literally: pull this pin down to ground and the furnace starts up. It's incredibly easy to work with. Later furnaces from this manufacturer have some proprietary protocol that seems very difficult to interface with, from what I gathered from the internet.

But, even yet more modern versions support the standardized OpenTherm protocol and is very hackable again.

Something else: Hardware tends to be amortized away into a commodity. A ton of modern devices essentially run on ESP32s, raspberry Pis (or some other open SoC) or smartphone hardware with Android.

I (and others have) just started hacking around with an ESP32-S3 based HMI - it's and LCD screen married to and ESP32-S3, integrated into a very nice case with a small touch screen panel. I was able to whip up a custom professional looking GUI in a couple weekends and integrate it into my (fully local, open source, HA-based) home automation system. It runs ESPHome and uses LVGL to draw the UI.

I've had friends over and they remarked about how nice it looked, and asked about the brand and were suprised when I told them I hacked it together. It looks good enough that you could sell it and works very well.
by troupo | 2026-01-14 09:47:45+00:00
> Spotify hires session musicians (pre-AI) to pay a flat fee for hours of background music.

Spotify doesn't do it because Spotify doesn't produce music and doesn't have direct contracts with musicians.

> Since many high volume Spotify users just want “something jazzy” in the background, it helps them reduce royalties.

How does it help them reduce royalties when they don't produce their own music and license 100% of their music from distributors and rights holders?
by rimesforfree | 2026-01-14 09:47:48+00:00
I get that you want to save the world by reducing processing, and I agree that using an LLM to develop deterministic and efficient code is just a better idea overall, but “stop using natural language interfaces” is overly restrictive.

Interactive fiction / text-adventures written in the 20th century used a deterministic natural language interface with low load as an intentional flexible puzzle to solve, so the problem today is efficiency.

You could just as well argue to stop using modern bloated operating systems, websites, and apps. I understand that the processing required for LLMs can be much higher. But the side-effect of additional power needs will be a global push for more energy, which will result in more power stations being available for future industries once LLMs become more efficient.

If you want to reduce complexity overall and have simple, flexible interfaces and applications that use fewer of the worlds resources, I’m all for it. But don’t single out LLMs assuming they will always be less efficient. Cost will drive them to be more efficient over time.
by geraltofrivia | 2026-01-14 09:47:59+00:00
As a smoker who transitioned to vaping, I see immense health benefits.

My home country (India), and others (Singapore, others?) have outright banned all electronic cigarettes which is a regulation I hate. I acknowledge that vapes reduce barriers to entry to kids. This is partly solvable in countries with strong governance.

But disposables? Ban that shit
by reena_signalhq | 2026-01-14 09:48:08+00:00
This is really impressive! Running PyTorch models in the browser without ONNX export is a game-changer for web-based ML apps.

Quick question: What's the performance like compared to native PyTorch? Are there specific model types that work better than others on WebGPU?

Would love to try this with some smaller models I've been working with!
by reena_signalhq | 2026-01-14 09:48:26+00:00
This is a perfect example of why AI outputs need human verification, especially in policy decisions.

The scary part isn't that the AI hallucinated - it's that the policy went through without anyone fact-checking the source. Makes you wonder how many other decisions are being made based on unverified AI outputs.

Critical reminder: AI is a tool, not a replacement for due diligence.
by reena_signalhq | 2026-01-14 09:48:47+00:00
Interesting migration story! I've been using Redis for background jobs for years and it's been solid, but the operational overhead is real.

Curious about your experience with SolidQueue's reliability - have you run into any edge cases or issues with job retries/failures? Redis has been battle-tested for so long that switching always feels risky.

Would love to hear more about your production experience after a few months!
by brigandish | 2026-01-14 09:48:50+00:00
It's as if you didn't read the article - this is just the summary they give:

> Japan faced a rice shortage in the summer of 2024, exposing flaws in its food security policy. Despite declining consumption, small shocks caused market disruption. The government refused to release stockpiles, prioritising producer interests over consumer needs. This reflects political considerations, with upcoming elections influencing policy decisions. The crisis highlights the need for a more balanced approach to food security, emphasising both physical stockpiles and effective public communication. Japan must reassess its agricultural policies to ensure long-term food security and market stability.

The actual meat of the article goes in to further, damning detail.

As I wrote, Japan is not a model to follow.
by sprucevoid | 2026-01-14 09:49:49+00:00
On the one hand ~1,000,000 deaths and on the other hand some people lost their jobs and you got a mean comment online?

> lost their jobs ... which in US means ... slow, and without health insurance, likely unpleasant demise

Those you would label "woke" are famously supporters of universal health care. Universal as in would cover everyone including every single Jan 6 participant. On the one hand people striving for health care for all. On the other hand https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/nov/20/hospitals-s...

> we are forcing people to live up to the world they have ushered in

No, wht you are doing is supporting an administration killing ~1,000,000 people and taking away health care from everyone, including people in the group you identify with.
by falcor84 | 2026-01-14 09:49:56+00:00
I agree with everything you said except for

> the fears around having them probably are more irrational than rational

My $0.02 is that if anything, the fears people have about how much their lives would be transformed are significantly lacking, and a lot of the "it's not so bad" advice is post-hoc rationalization. I mean, it's evolutionarily excellent that we humans choose to have kids, but it's very rational to be afraid and to postpone or even fully reject this on an individual basis. And as an industry and as a society, we should probably do a lot more to support parents of young children.

I found this smbc comic about a "happiness spigot" to be the most poignant metaphor - https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/happiness-spigot?utm_sourc...
by Dormeno | 2026-01-14 09:54:06+00:00
> it's the hundred of thousands of people with no interest in music whatsoever, that will flood the platforms in order to make a quick buck.

Whenever I look at popular artists on streaming platforms, I see 'remixes' where people just slowed down the particular original song and added reverb or some other silly effect to it. I don't think AI existing or not will change the behaviour of people trying to make a quick buck. If they aren't using AI, they'll use a different tool as they did before.
Show HN: PhotoCraft – an AI photo editor I built and shipped as my first iOS app
by devavinoth12 | 2026-01-14 09:54:23+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m an indie developer and I recently shipped my first iOS app, PhotoCraft. It’s an AI-powered photo editor focused on enhancement, avatars, and creative edits.

This project started mainly as a way for me to learn how to take an idea all the way from development to passing App Store review and shipping something real. The hardest parts for me weren’t the models or the UI, but scope control, onboarding decisions, and dealing with review feedback.

A few things I learned along the way:

“Good enough to ship” is harder to define than expected

App Store rejections are more about clarity and UX than code

Cutting features early saved me a lot of time later

I’m sharing this mostly to get feedback from people who’ve built and shipped products before. I’d especially appreciate thoughts on:

First-time user experience

Whether the feature set feels focused or bloated

Monetization flow (what feels fair vs frustrating)

Happy to answer any questions about the build, tooling, or App Store review process.

Thanks for taking a look.

— Deva
by charcircuit | 2026-01-14 09:54:45+00:00
>As a clear obvious example: interactive fiction / text-adventures use a deterministic natural language interface with low load as an intentional flexible puzzle to solve.

Even though games can technically do this, should they? Do consumers actually find it fun and engaging? Considering there has never been a AAA game of that genre I don't think there is true consumer demand for games with such an interface.
by johncoltrane | 2026-01-14 09:55:16+00:00
> Despite his expertise, it's still a mystery how his anonymous persona was deanonymized.

The only explanation is that his OPSEC wasn't as rigorous as you think it was.

Reading the Wikipedia page, the most obvious gap would be the medical treatment he received in 2017. If he mentioned it publicly, then it was basically game over: finding him would have been routine police work at that point. The process that led to the interview by a German newspaper might have been leaky as well. There are so many opportunities.

As a rule of thumb, you can consider that while your OPSEC might _theoretically_ be the tightest in the world, you will eventually have to deal with other people and orgs at some time, who might not care as much as you do. In which case your OPSEC is really only as strong as _theirs_.

> Is it even possible to win a "battle" where you have to be perfect 100% of the time, while the adversary only needs to find one leak?

It is not. Simply because you can only control so much. A few years ago, there was a story about a mafia boss who successfully escaped justice for 20 years… until a Google Street View passed by while he was shopping groceries in a Spanish village. The guy certainly had the strongest OPSEC his money and relationships could buy, but it eventually amounted to nothing in the face of pure randomness.

All you can do is try to compartmentalize as best as you can for as long as you can, but something will eventually leak.

Also, it will be harder…

- the longer you keep it going,

- if it involves others,

- if you are married, have kids, etc.,

- if you have complicated needs (sex, drugs, health issues, etc.),

- if money is tight,

- if you are not geographically and socially mobile,

- etc.
by InsideOutSanta | 2026-01-14 09:56:31+00:00
Are they, though? I only saw the linked four strips, and they're the typical right-wing depiction of leftist positions that say more about how people on the right think than about what leftists actually believe.

The first one is about Dilbert going to an anti-white-man protest, which might be how people on the right perceive something like a BLM event, but it's not what these events actually are. This is the kind of zero-sum thinking that conflates "my life should matter" with "your life should not matter." It's not what leftists actually believe.
by kamens | 2026-01-14 09:56:53+00:00
I agree with you trymas! I myself spent time cataloguing a number of his predictions that did not come true.

I am still asking a specific question: for the prediction of Trump's rise, did the critics downvoting me read his actual writing and arguments? It was not a single contrarian prediction. It was an extended, thoughtful, and informed perspective that has helped understand the world for the past 10 years.
by tomaytotomato | 2026-01-14 09:57:25+00:00
RIP Scott Adams

I recently purchased his 2026 calendar for a family member who works in the consultancy world, they really enjoy it.

Starting my dev career in a big corporate telecom I used to attach Dilbert strips to the end of my presentations, sometimes people would laugh, others, normally execs didn't get the irony or commentary.

Then when I went to more modern and cool startups the same Dilbert comic strips still apply which I found hilarious.

A lot of our influences or heroes have faults and I hope we can all put them to rest and just remember Scott's great achievements with Dilbert and his many books on Management or Psychology.

I will just leave this scene from the Dilbert TV show, that describes the engineering curse:

"The Knack" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8vHhgh6oM0
by LunaSea | 2026-01-14 09:57:44+00:00
Firefox used to be the first browser with decent developer tools thanks to the Firebug extension.

Then Chrome pushed heavily the development of its own development tools and crushed Firefox in the process. Chrome has now been the best browser for developers for the last +10 years.

The consequence is also that when the new generation of headless browsers were developed (Puppeteer) they were based on Chromium because it is so hackable and developer friendly.

This means that Firefox lost a big chunk of the developer community which constituted also a non trivial amount of their user base and advocates.
by mossTechnician | 2026-01-14 09:58:13+00:00
"AI safety" collectives are a part of what is described here: you might assume from the name that organizations named PauseAI or ControlAI would focus on data center pollution, the generation of sexual abuse material, causing mental harm, or many other things we can already observe. But they don't. Instead, they exclusively warn of unstoppable, apocalyptic, and unprovable harms that seem tuned exclusively to instill fear in the masses.
by wouldbecouldbe | 2026-01-14 09:58:28+00:00
You are assuming a lot of things.

The work was moving the many landing pages & content elements to NextJS, so we can test, iterate and develop faster. While having a more stable system. This was a 10 year old website, with a very large custom WordPress codebase and many plugins.

The content is still in WordPress backend & will be migrated in the second phase.
by lucasRW | 2026-01-14 09:59:02+00:00
"We" ? The 100 million active users in Europe, making X one of the most downloaded app on the continent, probably beg to differ.

Again, typical socialism reflexes: you dont like X, so instead f just not using it, you feel like you need to send us the police to make us not use it...

PS: do you have short and blue hair ? Just a question, don't get too triggered.
by dev_hugepages | 2026-01-14 10:00:05+00:00
I’m more hopeful that MIDI completion/in-filling models will be easier for musicians to control and use. But right now, the most popular tools are things like Suno, where you barely have any control and it spits out an entire, possibly mediocre song. It’s the same vein as ChatGPT image generation vs. Stable Diffusion, where you can do much more controllable inpaints with the latter.
by ltbarcly3 | 2026-01-14 10:00:51+00:00
I think anyone who thinks that LLMs are not intelligent in any sense is simply living in denial. They might not be intelligent in the same way a human is intelligent, they might make mistakes a person wouldn't make, but that's not the question.

Any standard of intelligence devised before LLMs is passed by LLMs relatively easily. They do things that 10 years ago people would have said are impossible for a computer to do.

I can run claude code on my laptop with an instruction like "fix the sound card on this laptop" and it will analyze what my current settings are, determine what might be wrong, devise tests to have me gather information it can't gather itself, run commands to probe hardware for it's capabilities, and finally offer a menu of solutions, give the commands to implement the solution, and finally test that the solution works perfectly. Can you do that?
by c_hagau | 2026-01-14 10:02:02+00:00
As stated by a sibling comment, at least the carcinogenicity part isn't true. Unfortunately, even nicotine gum should be carcinogenic (and is of course not intended to be used for consumption besides of alleviating withdrawal effects).

Presence of the Carcinogen N′-Nitrosonornicotine in Saliva of E-cigarette Users:
<https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.chemrestox.8b00089>