MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: VectorDBZ, a desktop GUI for vector databases
by snirjka | 2026-01-01 15:25:24+00:00
Hi HN,

I built VectorDBZ, a cross-platform desktop app for exploring and analyzing vector databases like Qdrant, Weaviate, Milvus, and ChromaDB.

It lets you browse collections, inspect vectors and metadata, run similarity searches, and visualize embeddings without writing custom scripts.

GitHub (downloads and issues):
https://github.com/vectordbz/vectordbz

Feedback welcome. If it’s useful, starring the repo helps keep me motivated.

Thanks.
by codys | 2026-01-01 15:25:33+00:00
> I am assuming the message durability guarantees lean towards YOLO rather than ACID?

"Core" nats doesn't have durability. Nats jetstream is the api built on top of nats that in the main nats-server impl provides durability. Jepsen tested Nats Jetstream.

Also from your link:

> Regular NATS streams offer only best-effort delivery, but a subsystem, called JetStream, guarantees messages are delivered at least once.

The project linked here does not implement the nats jetstream api, just normal nats.

So yes, it seems its same (documented, understood) "yolo" as normal nats.
by Macha | 2026-01-01 15:25:49+00:00
I believe you’re thinking of “I don’t care about cookies”, which accepts everything. Consent-o-matic goes for maximum opt out by default unless you configure it otherwise (I doubt anyone does).

Unfortunately as the opt out flow is tweaked more often than the accept all flow (as cmp vendors work to minimise opt outs), this does mean it breaks more often on sites so sometimes it fails to remove the banner
by amelius | 2026-01-01 15:26:14+00:00
> We also demonstrate how a compromised Bluetooth peripheral can be abused to attack paired devices, like smartphones, due to their trust relationship with the peripheral.

Can't watch the video now. But I wonder to what extent they can take over a smartphone? Can they make a headphone look like a keyboard/mouse, for example?

Second question: can the whole problem be remedied by installing a firmware update?
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2026-01-01 15:26:30+00:00
Q:

> when will they charge?

A:

> The ship... will travel between the ports of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay. The two cities are 60 kilometers apart, a distance it is expected to travel in 90 minutes.

> Direct-current charging stations will be installed at each port... A full charge is expected to take just 40 minutes.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/electric-boat-battery-ship-ferry
by NoImmatureAdHom | 2026-01-01 15:27:01+00:00
The natural, and easiest, way to make good friends is to spend a lot of time with people. Some of those people will become good friends with no effort at all.

Given nuclear families etc. in the West, this is kinda hard as an adult. Happens automatically as a child and college student, though. My advice to you is:

1) Get a housemate or several. Better yet, join an already shared house. Forget about your preconceptions about whether you "can" live with other people or not. You aren't special, people lived together for ever.

2) Explicitly decide to work through this "doesn't feel natural to me" thing. OK, fine, it's gonna feel kind of awkward at first. By the 5th friend-hunt it won't.
by fastasucan | 2026-01-01 15:27:54+00:00
>It’s especially frustrating that dependency hell seems to be embedded in the Python culture. The amount of “oh no this lib will only work with Python 3.10+ and a slew of other libs at random versions we won’t bother to tell you” while some other lib that it depends on will only work on “3.8.56z but not if you look at it funny and only if you say pretty please” is maddening. Semver is apparently not standard practice either.

There is no problems with this in modern python if you just use the right tooling.
by BigTTYGothGF | 2026-01-01 15:27:59+00:00
I think that perhaps people are conflating the fourier transform (FT) with the fast fourier transform.

It's true that the FFT does not use either of the transcendental numbers e or ln(2), but that's because the FFT does not use transcendental numbers at all! (Roots of unity, sure, but those are algebraic)

> all the multiplicative constants explicitly or implicitly involved in the FFT direct and inverse computations being eliminated.

Doesn't that basically get you a Hadamard transform?
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2026-01-01 15:28:18+00:00
That depends on how you define AGI - it's a meaningless term to use since everyone uses it to mean different things. What exactly do you mean ?!

Yes, there is a lot that can be improved via different training, but at what point is it no longer a language model (i.e. something that auto-regressively predicts language continuations)?

I like to use an analogy to the children's "Stone Soup" story whereby a "stone soup" (starting off as a stone in a pot of boiling water) gets transformed into a tasty soup/stew by strangers incrementally adding extra ingredients to "improve the flavor" - first a carrot, then a bit of beef, etc, etc. At what point do you accept that the resulting tasty soup is not in fact stone soup?! It's like taking an auto-regressively SGD-trained Transformer, and incrementally tweaking the architecture, training algorithm, training objective, etc, etc. At some point it becomes a bit perverse to choose to still call it a language model

Some of the "it's just training" changes that would be needed to make today's LLMS more brain-like may be things like changing the training objective completely from auto-regressive to predicting external events (with the goal of having it be able to learn the outcomes of it's own actions, in order to be able to plan them), which to be useful would require the "LLM" to then be autonomous and act in some (real/virtual) world in order to learn.

Another "it's just training" change would be to replace pre/mid/post-training with continual/incremental runtime learning to again make the model more brain-like and able to learn from it's own autonomous exploration of behavior/action and environment. This is a far more profound, and ambitious, change than just fudging incremental knowledge acquisition for some semblance of "on the job" learning (which is what the AI companies are currently working on).

If you put these two "it's just training/learning" enhancements together then you've now got something much more animal/human-like, and much more capable than an LLM, but it's already far from a language model - something that passively predicts next word every time to push the "generate word" button. This would now be an autonomous agent learning how to act and control/exploit the world around it. The whole pre-trained, same-for-everyone model running in the cloud, would then be radically different - every model instance is then more like an individual learning based on it's own experience, and maybe you're now paying for compute for the continual learning compute rather than "LLM tokens generated".

These are "just" training changes, but to more closely approach human capability (but again, what to you mean by "AGI") there would also need to be architectural changes and additions to the transformer (add looping, internal memory, etc), depending on exactly how close you want to get to human/animal capability.
Ask HN: Is being hungry enough to win?
by meysamazad | 2026-01-01 15:28:19+00:00
do you believe some people are just naturally lucky and everything they touch turns to gold?

or are you a firm believer that with enough resilience and perseverance you'll finally make it?

how much would you say luck or natural privileges make their way into someone's success?

do you think you could build a successful business above and beyond 6-7 figures just by working hard and not giving up?
by LexiMax | 2026-01-01 15:28:30+00:00
> Be a business that makes an actual product that people want sufficiently to buy it and cover the costs, because your website is in itself the ad for your company and product.

And how do you suppose people find out about that product?

Like, I hate the modern ad ecosystem as much as the next person, but I also understand the abstract need for the existence of advertisements of some kind.
by PaulHoule | 2026-01-01 15:28:44+00:00
I am tired of people making excuses for the EU. The EU has had almost a decade to respond to the numerous complaints about those cookie banners and their answer has been "talk to the hand" -- and they wonder why they are being overrun by right wing populists.

It is the worst of German "incumbents über alles" and American legalism. "Respect DNT or go to jail" would have been fair and easier to administer but Big Tech lobbyists helped design the GDPR to stifle smaller competitors who couldn't laugh at the occasional fine for malicious compliance.
by bastawhiz | 2026-01-01 15:28:45+00:00
> they don't do it because they know better.

That's completely false. People get deceived all the time. We even have a word for it: social engineering.

> we can never possibly give that sort of trust to AI because it's never really on our side or aligned with our goals

Right now we can't! AI is currently the equivalent of a very smart child. Would you give production access to a child?

> you can never really completely secure something and ensure there are no possible exploits.

This applies to any system, not just AI.
by ksymph | 2026-01-01 15:29:57+00:00
I relate very closely, having had the same thoughts over the past few years. Social clubs sound good in theory, but in my experience it's difficult to connect with people without a central activity or subject to act as a touchstone. It's a frustrating sort of paradox where the best social groups diverge greatly from their core theme, and yet the core theme is necessary to reach and maintain critical mass.

I think it's possible to get around the problem, but it would take just the right structure; there should be activities, but enough of a variety to have something for people from all walks of life. But also not too much of a variety so as not to appeal only to those interested in constantly trying new things. Perhaps a set of some baseline, fairly universal activities, with space for individual members to share their own hobbies and interests from time to time in a group setting? I don't know exactly, but it's something I've been considering for a while, and it feels like there must be an answer somewhere in there.
by potato3732842 | 2026-01-01 15:30:14+00:00
A summer away from one's family, doing hard work in the mud, eating highly processed food from cans and drinking tons of alcohol sounds like a real blast of a time for young men if not for the mosquitoes and questionable economics of it all.

It sucks that they'd destroying the land and the rivers but that's not new. Hopefully they find some equilibrium that legalizes what they're up to that maximizes the upside and minimizes the damage like more mature resource extraction industries do.
by Friedduck | 2026-01-01 15:31:03+00:00
My two chief complaints are instability and lack of consistency across the UI. There are 20-year-old dialogs lurking behind shiny new interfaces.

Search doesn’t work reliably. Right-Clicking on a file twice in a row will often present different options. Finally, inserting AI where you least expect or want it just slows common tasks. I don’t need AI to guess the next data value in a series.

They’ve left a huge opening for Google, more so than Apple, to get a foot in the door for corporate computing.
by empiricus | 2026-01-01 15:31:15+00:00
I completely agree. Theoretically you could capture and reproduce the entire spectrum for each pixel, but even that is not "true" because it is not the entire light field. But I still think that we can look at the picture on phone in the hand and at the subject just in front, and try to make them as similar as possible to our senses? This looks to me like a big improvement to the current state of affairs. Then you can always say to a critic: I checked just as i took the picture/movie, and this is exactly how the sky/grass/subject looked.
by ricardobeat | 2026-01-01 15:32:17+00:00
- Apple has a lossless codec for wireless, ALAC that can do up to 24bit/192khz

- aptX can do 44/16 in other devices, Sony has LDAC at 24/96 too

- latency under <100ms is meaningless for pure audio listening, video players have latency compensation

We have amazing technology available today, at prices and quality unimaginable in the 80s. A $50 in-ear from a chinese hi-fi brand can give you an audio experience you couldn’t buy for thousands of dollars a decade ago. And there’s more and more analog hardware being designed and built as technology costs have fallen. You’re really missing out if you think things were better back then.
by qsera | 2026-01-01 15:33:26+00:00
>Haskell (and OCaml etc) give you both straightjackets..

Haskell's thing with purity and IO does not feel like that. In fact Haskell does it right (IO type is reflected in type). And rust messed it up ("safety" does not show up in types).

You want a global mutable thing in Haskell? just use something like an `IORef` and that is it. It does not involve any complicated type magic. But mutations to it will only happen in IO, and thus will be reflected in types. That is how you do it. That is how it does not feel like a straight jacket.

Haskell as a language is tiny. But Rust is really huge, with endless behavior and expectation to keep in mind, for some some idea of safety that only matter for a small fraction of the programs.

And that I why I find that comment very funny. Always using rust is like always wearing something that constrains you greatly for some idea of "safety" even when it does not really matter. That is insane..
by astura | 2026-01-01 15:33:56+00:00
I truly believe that satiety is dependent entirely on 1) what you're used to eating and 2) what you expect/culture. Years ago I was watching a video that interviewed a guy who owned an international fast food franchise somewhere in Asia, a burger place, like a McDonald's. He was saying a big difference between America and wherever they were was that they absolutely, positively MUST serve rice because in their culture most people don't find that burgers produce satiety, you need the rice otherwise you're still hungry.
by bastawhiz | 2026-01-01 15:34:52+00:00
> assuming the goal is to allow search over READMEs, distribution metadata, etc.

Why would you build a dedicated tool for this instead of just using a search engine? If I'm looking for a specific keyword in some project's very long README I'm searching kagi, not npm.

I'd expect that the most you should be indexing is the data in the project metadata (setup.py). That could be unbounded but I can't think of a compelling reason not to truncate it beyond a reasonable length.
by manwe150 | 2026-01-01 15:35:02+00:00
You apparently can donate to PyPI more directly if you want (same popup, but redirects to a more specific donation site), though since that site is run by PSF, that money goes through PSF and it is unclear if it is earmarked along the way: https://psfmember.org/civicrm/contribute/transact/?reset=1&i...
by ffsm8 | 2026-01-01 15:35:06+00:00
The crime was committed in the USA.

You are expecting third party countries to begin litigation on crimes that happen outside of their borders - even if they're not even strictly illegal where they're headquartered?

That shit never happens, and if it would, you'd first have to start jailing lots of S&P CEOs for the companies crimes that are committed in other countries and never amount to anything, precisely for the same reason.

Like literally every company thats involved in any mining, drilling etc. They always don't adhere to local environmental regulations etc
by PaulHoule | 2026-01-01 15:35:25+00:00
From the viewpoint of Hirschman

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty

you don't have any "voice" about ads so your choice is to "exit" by running an ad blocker. Obnoxious advertising tactics, scam ads, and other problems in the advertising system lower people's responsiveness to advertising. We need to restore the responsiveness to weak signals (bidirectionally) that Vaughn talks about in The Challenger Launch Decision and her book about her divorce Uncoupling.
Show HN: Neko.js, a recreation of the first virtual pet
by Labo333 | 2026-01-01 15:35:48+00:00
Hi HN,

Best wishes for the new year!

Here is a late Christmas present: I rebuilt Neko [1], the classic desktop cat that chases your mouse, as a tiny, dependency-free JavaScript library that you can embed directly in your webpages (for example I put it on my personal blog).

Live demo: https://louisabraham.github.io/nekojs/

GitHub: https://github.com/louisabraham/nekojs

Drop-in usage is a single script tag:

<script src="https://louisabraham.github.io/nekojs/neko.js" data-autostart></script>

This is a fairly faithful recreation of Neko98: same state machine, same behaviors, same original 32×32 pixel sprites. It follows your cursor, falls asleep when idle, claws walls, and you can click it to cycle behavior modes.

What made this project interesting to me is how I built it. I started by feeding the original C++ source (from the Wayback Machine) to Claude and let it "vibe code" a first JS implementation. That worked surprisingly well as a starting point, but getting it truly accurate required a lot of manual fixes: rewriting movement logic, fixing animation timing, handling edge cases the AI missed, etc.

My takeaway: coding agents are very useful at resurrecting old codebases, and this is probably the best non-soulless use of AI for coding. It gets you 60–70% of the way there very fast, especially for legacy code that would otherwise rot unread. The last 30% still needs a human who cares about details.

The final result is ~38KB uncompressed (~14KB brotli), zero dependencies, and can be dropped into a page with a single <script> tag.

Happy to hear thoughts from desktop pets nostalgics!

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neko_(software)
by maxandersen | 2026-01-01 15:36:20+00:00
I felt and did the same as you - until I made jbang as I was tired of seeing kotlin script being included to just write java...

Then when I had ability to write java scripts with dependencies, we added auto download of JDK and then made it so could run any jar (not just scripts) and I suddenly now have full debug support for anything I do + I can install and run this on any docker container or laptop - even my parents or a library computer running some ancient windows. Try that with npm and python :)

All I'm saying - I hear you and I grok why. What I'm saying that for at least close to 5 years at least last 3.5 years there been a way to use the jvm as easy and more reliable than python/nodescript/typescript....run cli's, swing/jfx, backend apps etc.

And in 2026 I want to make java TUI's a reality.
by zdc1 | 2026-01-01 15:36:33+00:00
There are many modern day bucket shops. Any CFD or "spread betting" product is just your broker taking the other side of your trade (and optionally, offsetting the risk). Prop firm "evaluations" or "accounts" are another popular one on social media.

Basically anything that amounts to a side-bet rather than a trade recorded on an exchange should (IMO) be avoided, and you're putting yourself in a situation where you and your broker have an adversarial relationship.
by gazpacho | 2026-01-01 15:36:49+00:00
This is what I've found after 15 years of working out and athletics. Think of it this way: doing the same thing over and over again is what is proven to lead to workplace injuries. Doing the same thing over and over again in the gym is no different.

I like to do a weight training as the consistent foundation, with a mix of heavy lifts, calisthenics, volume (bodybuilding) training and mobility training. Add in some yoga, rock climbing, biking, soccer. I feel this sort of mix balances movements out which helps with injury prevention and also makes sure you always have something active to do that you enjoy, which is definitely #1.
by Deegy | 2026-01-01 15:37:25+00:00
They're increasing reps and therefore total load. That's still a form of progression ('pushing yourself'). This style will slightly favor hypertrophy gains over strength gains.

At 40 I recently made this switch in style as well. The weight was getting so high that my anxiety was causing a mental aversion to working out altogether. Consistency is really 95% of exercise so I think this is a reasonable trade-off.

That said, I understand where you are coming from. There's something to be said about facing the fear of the weight head on. I've already done that in my younger years though. I'd much rather avoid injury and get 80% of the benefits.
by LanceH | 2026-01-01 15:37:48+00:00
I phrased it like this to a friend who was looking to buy an upgrade to a relatively new car: "What I paid you $1000 a month (his new car payment) to drive the old car?" When I put it in that perspective, he drove that car for quite a while longer.

Personally, I buy new, and keep putting my car payment into a savings account once it is paid off. If I can't afford to put that money into savings, I can't afford a new car payment. I'm only allowed to do non-routine repairs from those funds. It's amazing how much you don't want to crack into that for a car once it grows to a few thousand. It's the most powerful visual impact of savings I've come across.

Car payments have a way of disappearing into an upgraded lifestyle when you don't have to make them, and then they come out of savings when you take a loan for the car.

Honda Civic may be the ultimate car for that. I bought a pickup 8 years ago that I hope will be a 20 year car. Buy something with a reputation for 200k+ miles.
by scott_w | 2026-01-01 15:38:24+00:00
If anyone wants to see an example of this, JRose11 on YouTube is doing exactly this for Pokemon Red/Blue and putting a list together of completion times. It’s been a multi year project but I’d totally recommend starting at the beginning and losing yourself in the rabbit hole.

He also does some bad Pokemon challenges to see if it’s possible to finish with, say, a Weedle (mostly no).
by btrettel | 2026-01-01 15:39:42+00:00
I'll try starting a more niche group just to see what happens. Maybe I'm wrong and I'll find a handful of interesting people. Still, there's a nagging feeling in the back of my mind. If the number of people interested in a topic is small enough, reaching them can be really hard. And only a fraction of them would be willing/able to meet.

As for specific topics, there are many I could pick. My problem isn't a lack of interest in general, just a lack of overlap between my interests and what's available. One I think might have a decent chance of success would be a group based around information searching, both online and in the real world. Despite being an engineer, I've often found a lot of common ground with librarians. I love talking about the subject and could learn a lot about it. It's not going to become irrelevant any time soon either, even with LLMs, due to information siloing.
by woodruffw | 2026-01-01 15:39:47+00:00
> It's why it was shut down, the API was getting hammered and it cost too much to run at a reasonable speed and implement rate limiting or whatever.

Sort of: the original search API used a POST and was structured with XML-RPC. PyPI’s operators went to great efforts to scale it, but that wasn’t a great starting point. A search API designed around caching (like the one used on PyPI’s web UI) wouldn’t have those problems.
by maxandersen | 2026-01-01 15:40:04+00:00
Yes - this is what we need more off - just not only in clojure space.

I done https://github.com/jbangdev/jbang-jash for shell processes and smallrye process io also done a lot for nice shell apis.

Files access could be another.

jbang provides the similar binary - for now bash+jvm based but all simple installable. I have native jbang binaries which are even less than 70 mb :)

Definitely going to check out babashka more for inspiration.