MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by organised | 2026-01-21 12:29:09+00:00
Shipping unreviewed, untested code into production is irresponsible. But not all code is production code, and in my experience most valuable work happens long before anything deserves architectural sign-off / big commercial commitment.

Exploratory scripts, glue code—what I think of as digital duct tape between systems—scaffolding, probes, and throwaway POCs have always been messy and lightly governed. That’s kind of normal.

What’s different now is that more people can participate in that phase, and we’re judging that work by the same norms and processes we use for production systems. I know more designers now who are unafraid to code than ever before. That might be problematic or fantastic.

Where agentic coding does work for me is explicitly in those early modes, or where my own knowledge is extremely thin or I don’t have the luxury of writing everything myself (time etc). Things that simply wouldn’t get made otherwise: feasibility checks, bridging gaps between systems, or showing a half-formed idea fast enough to decide whether it’s worth formalising.

In those contexts, technical debt isn’t really debt, because the artefact isn’t meant to live long enough to accrue interest or be used in anger.

So I don’t think the real question is "does agentic coding work?" It’s whether teams are willing to clearly separate exploratory agency from production authority, and enforce a hard line between the two. ( I dont think they'll know the difference sadly) and without that, you’re right—you just get spaghetti that passes today and punishes EVERYONE six months later.
by PlatoIsADisease | 2026-01-21 12:29:11+00:00
I can't remember it exactly, but it was a variant of the arms race problem.

Me and another person are trying to get what they want, they pushed up the ante and are asking for more than ever. Historically if I appease, they ask for more. I demanded more, they demanded more, but they will soon run out of negotiation power and I can win the arms race. What should I do?

You'd be surprised how often arms races/prisoners dilemma/tragedy of the commons situations in real life. You need to be aware of them happening or the person aware of it will win.
by JamesTRexx | 2026-01-21 12:29:26+00:00
The music and touch of humour reminds me of early adventure games I played. Ahh, nostalgia.
Busy with other things so I'll use the excuse of only programming in the One And Only True Programming Language C (I wish there was a capital version of the capital letter for that) to stop before needing to type one keyword of javascript. :-p
by mejutoco | 2026-01-21 12:29:30+00:00
I started a limited company in Spain about 15 years ago. Just the 48h online is huge. It took maybe 15-20 days and visits to the notary, etc. (notaries are usually not available next day, for example). I think Estonia and UK have similar quick ways, but if this is as quick it is definitely an advantage over the status quo. It will affect companies without investors as well, which adds up.
by liveoneggs | 2026-01-21 12:29:53+00:00
It's okay but it often lies. At an SRE level you need a pretty zoomed-out view of the world until you are trying to zoom-in to a problem component.

Always start at the head (what a customer sees -- actually load the website) and work down into each layer.

If something is breaking way downstream and customers don't see it then it doesn't actually matter right now.
by piva00 | 2026-01-21 12:30:04+00:00
It does matter to follow through with your values though. Humanity isn't supposed to be just minmaxing economical output, a common set of values that we strive for is much more inspiring than burning everything to the ground, and leaving a world of ashes for future generations to capture maximum economical output right now.

I don't think it's a hard mindset to understand, giving up because others aren't taking it as seriously is the cowardly way to go about it. It's much more meaningful to show it can be done, help to scale technologies to become cheaper and more accessible for poorer countries, and inspire others with examples that it can be done so action can spread.
by II2II | 2026-01-21 12:30:08+00:00
Yet we have seen, time and time again, that those who do things for the love of money will cash out. Heck, even those who do so for the love of creating will cash out when they want to move on. While open source doesn't eliminate this possibility, at least it disincentivises it.

While I'm sure there are plenty of exceptions, exceptions that we rarely hear about because they are smaller companies that don't monopolise our attention, it is important to realize that capitalism is just a high level theory. It says things that sound good. over a long enough time period and a large enough samples it may be roughly correct. Yet it has no value over short time periods, small samples, or when it's underlying assumptions are violated.

That last bit is particularly important, even though it probably isn't applicable to Nova Launcher. Everything from the asymmetry of information, to anti-competitive actions of the business itself, to regulation will disrupt those assumptions.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-21 12:30:13+00:00
> A multi-resolution image format

There are already quite a few cbz archives in the wild that contain jxl encoded images. That's a multi-resolution format at least to the extent that it supports progressive decoding at fixed levels that range from 1:8 to as high as 1:4096. I think it might also support other arbitrary ratios subject to certain encoding constraints but I'm less clear on that.

Readers might need to be updated to make use of the feature in an intelligent manner though. The jxl cbzs I've encountered either didn't make use of progressive encoding or else the software I used failed to take advantage of it - I'm not sure which.
by shevy-java | 2026-01-21 12:31:00+00:00
In principle this is a good idea.

In practice ... there is always so much bureaucracy and inertia. I don't think the current EU model works well. I also don't think a copy/paste USA 2.0 works either, yet this seems to be the primary objective by the people in Brussels (that is, = politicians, not all folks in Brussels of course). There is such a huge disconnect between what people such as Leyen babble, and what people want or need or may want. And a lack of decision-making power too. So I think most of those projects will end in failure.

Personally I think an EU model will only work when the agendas are NOT unified, because unification leads to disagreements. You can already see this happening in regards to politics or war - some countries want to, oddly enough, serve Russia. That may be a fine decision for a state, but if other states push for another approach, you have a problem here. Now there are discussions to simply isolate the "non-compliant" states, but this is a bad approach since it will again lead to fragmentation and more people being angry at Brussels here. So this is a failing model. Splitting up things into separate aspects will also, of course, lead to more bureaucracy, but states would more easily form a specific opinion and align towards that, without being handicapped by other states that don't want to go that route. I don't see any other way for this to work. The EU in its present form is just setup for failure - the current model simply does not work, and the proposed new model is even worse in many ways e. g. 2/3 majority basically means that the big states will dominate the small ones. For instance, if Germany and France want to go to war against Russia (let's assume this were the case), then they'd have to send troops to the front - and they are unwilling to do so. So other states are more likely to be threatened. That model not only does not work but is also unfair.

Of course legal or taxation models are different to war, but the different countries have different wealth and opportunities, so a one-size-fits-all also can not possibly work. We saw this with the EURO where weaker countries struggle permanently. The whole EU needs to be completely re-designed - and this is not going to happen due to inertia alone.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-21 12:31:18+00:00
> How would this organization address that fundamental psychological block?

It'll make it easier for investors in one country to invest in businesses in another (assuming both are in EU of course). Larger pool of available investors == larger pool of investors who are fine with higher risks.

Currently, when you raise money, you usually end up with just local investors, because others can't be bothered to having to understand your local laws and regulations, and with everything that comes with that.

Personally, that's what's stopping me too. In one case I still went through and invested in a company in another country, but in most cases I don't even bother reading deeper about the company unless it's in the same country, would have to be an exceptional idea and team for it to be worth it.
by wesselbindt | 2026-01-21 12:31:24+00:00
Fair point, as can be seen from this quote here (emphasis mine):

> London is no longer the city I was infatuated with in the late ’90s and early 2000s. _Chiefly because it’s no longer full of native Brits_. In 2000, more than sixty percent of the city were native Brits. By 2024, that had dropped to about a third. A statistic as evident as day when you walk the streets of London now.

Here it clear that the thing you refer to as majority culture, DHH refers to as "native Brit". So what majority culture is he talking about that dropped from about 60 to about 30% in that time? Helpfully, DHH links to a wikipedia page on the ethnic makeup of London to clarify his point. The group that dropped from 60 to 30 is that of native white Brits. So the majority culture he's explicitly referring to is that of native white Brits. Don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining.
by iluxonchik | 2026-01-21 12:31:34+00:00
The tariffs imposed by the U.S. on the European countries are detrimental to USD's position as a reserve currency. A capital outflow out of the U.S. dollar creates positive price pressure on gold via increased demand.

This is true regardless of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision on whether President Trump can lawfully impose unilateral broad tariffs via executive order using the the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEAP).

It summarizes down to increased pressure on swapping USD-denominated reserves for gold (and renminbi/Chinese Yen), and the disincentives for acquiring/rolling-over USD treasuries, bonds and notes.

The article goes into more detail.
by drw85 | 2026-01-21 12:32:19+00:00
I think there are a few people out there with great ideas, that might benefit from having access to tools to make these real. I'm all for those and would love to see them.

But i also think the majority of these cases will be bad ideas that don't need to be made at all. Or even ideas that are AI generated by asking a LLM for ideas.
I don't care if they are made or not, but i would rather not have those on the internet and especially on 'show and tell' places like ShowHN etc.

I'm also not opposed to using AI as a tool in development or similar.
But there are more and more examples of purely vibe-coded or generated things and those fall in a different category in my opinion.
by plastic041 | 2026-01-21 12:32:23+00:00
> HN users that have settled on the belief that if something is done using AI it is "lazy slop" and it needs to be shunned!

Honestly, I used to be one of them. I recently saw a great library (atcute) that changed my opinion. I think most AI sceptics haven't had this experience. They saw AI slops and set their opinion: AI-generated codes are bad. I can't really blame them, though, because there are so many of them.

> anyone who is not incorporating it in some way (workflow or actual end product) is just holding themselves back.

It's true. However, I think people who create AI slops are worse than those who don't use it. They are diligently making this world a worse place.
by pjc50 | 2026-01-21 12:32:37+00:00
You also need portability. As I understand it there's no problem with having a Delaware corp but all your staff and operations being in California, for example. I do not believe this is the case all across the EU! And some localities can have quite onerous formation requirements for no good reason (anything involving notaries, for example - 19th century solution to 19th century problems).
by js98 | 2026-01-21 12:32:40+00:00
Hey all. TL;DR: none of this is super novel or fancy, but the set of a few simple approaches (cloud VM, tailscale for connecting, strong isolation, long-running sessions, basic notifications) made using agents with all tools enabled much more useful for me.

I hadn’t seen many practical writeups on running coding agents in cloud VMs specifically, so I figured it was worth sharing what actually worked day-to-day for me. I use this approach practically daily now
by our79511 | 2026-01-21 12:32:47+00:00
Boss wants me to post a reel, a post, and a story every single day. I’m a one person marketing team aka: graphic designer, content creator, photographer/videographer, website designer, admin, project manager, etc. You know the deal.

It’s a small business that mostly specializes in juice and protein shakes. My posts are doing poorly and I’m sure it’s because I’m posting just to hit my quota - I still try obviously but even with research and planning and ChatGPT it’s difficult. Just creating QUALITY content is difficult in this structure.

I also do other random design/admin tasks outside of this - sometimes it takes a lot of time from my day - but not always, it’s random.

On another note: My boss said she could only give me a raise if I did more things for her - and I guess this was her way of doing that because I’ve been posting 3 times a day since September and she just gave me a $1 raise this month. I did one post or reel a day before this and usually a story a day.

So I fear she won’t want to change this flow because to her I’m “earning” my pay by doing more even though I think it’s hurting our numbers.

Any suggestions?

Edit: Thanks for the feedback y’all, a lot of you had some really solid advice.

I’m realizing that although I’m capable and have been pushing out this much content consistently, it’s my motivation + compensation (lack of benefits, not great pay, and only 5 PTO days a year) that makes me struggle to want to keep going with the job. I’m going to just keep learning what I can and finding something else that fits me better down the line.
by latexr | 2026-01-21 12:32:55+00:00
That’s such a weird nitpick, I’m not even sure where to start. That cutoff doesn’t matter at all for the reality of the situation, and your math is off. The moment smart phone use becomes a majority does not mean the majority of people have only been experiencing something since that point. And we’re talking specifically about the iOS App Store ads, and you’re ignoring the iPod Touch and iPad…
by mesahm | 2026-01-21 12:32:57+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm the maintainer of Niquests. It is a drop-in replacement for the Python requests library that focuses on bringing modern HTTP features to the familiar API we all know.

I started this because requests is effectively feature-frozen, but I really missed having support for newer standards like HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 without switching to a completely different tool. Not only due to Requests current state but, as some of you may be aware, httpx is in a tough situation too, risking to take the same path forward as Requests did(...)

Some of the main differences from the original library:

Modern Protocols: It supports HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 over QUIC by default with a true multiplexing support.
Async Support: You can use it synchronously just like requests, or asynchronously with await.
Security: It uses your system's OS truststore (no more bundled certs) and supports OCSP revocation checks and DNSSEC.
Performance: In our benchmarks, our multiplexing scheduler offer significant speed improvements over requests, httpx, and even aiohttp.

The goal is to let you upgrade your network stack just by changing your import to "import niquests as requests".

I'd love to hear your feedback or answer any questions about the implementation!
by dathinab | 2026-01-21 12:33:01+00:00
this isn't fully true

yes you company needs to be rooted in a specific country, and sure moving company roots between countries is still not always trivial (anti capital flight laws are a thing). But that isn't really in conflict with a EU INC per-se. I mean they do point out that it will have

> Local taxes & employment

and this isn't in conflict with

- the same business form being available in all EU members

- central EU registry

- Standardized investment documents ( * this is only investment documents, not e.g. tax documents)

- Standardized EU-wide stock options

- For every founder ( * with some limits)

Like there are already some "EU level" business models, e.g. you company can operate as a Societas Europaea (SE). Now a SE is for other use-cases so not really the same at all (it's more like the EU version of a German GmbH), but
it shows that things "in that direction" are very much viable.
by TeMPOraL | 2026-01-21 12:33:14+00:00
> I have to imagine this ideology was developed with humans in mind.

Actually, you don't have to. You just want to.

N=1 but to me, LLMs are a perfect example of where the "ideology embedded into the GPL" benefits the world.

The point of Free Software isn't for developers to sort-of-but-not-quite give away the code. The point of Free Software is to promote self-sufficient communities.

GPL through its clauses, particularly the viral/forced reciprocity ones, prevents software itself from becoming an asset that can be rented, but it doesn't prevent business around software. RMS/FSF didn't make the common (among fans of OSS and Free Software) but dumb assumption that everyone wants or should be a developer - the license is structured to allow anyone to learn from and modify software, including paying a specialist to do it for them. Small-scale specialization and local markets are key for robust and healthy communities, and this is what Free Software ultimately encourages.

LLMs becoming a cheap tool for modifying or writing software, even by non-specialists (or at least people who aren't domain experts), furthers those same goals, by increasing individual and communal self-sufficiency and self-reliance.

(INB4: The fact that good LLMs are themselves owned by some multinational corps is irrelevant - much in the same way as cars are important tool for personal and communal self-sufficiently, despite being designed and manufactured by few large corporations. They're still tools ~anyone can use.)
by ExoticPearTree | 2026-01-21 12:33:44+00:00
Labor cost has many aspects. One big and key difference between the EU and the US is that due to socialist policies in the EU, it is much much harder to fire people when the business takes a downturn. And this is why companies are not that eager to hire as fast as needed because it is very hard for them to downsize.

In the US, this provides the companies with the levers they need to maintain a functioning business in pretty much an instant. In the EU you can't do that.
by fatherwavelet | 2026-01-21 12:33:46+00:00
It seems obvious to me this quickly escalates to a US nuclear first strike with the B2-Spirit on China manufacturing infrastructure.

It is economic MAD.

Or China can wait 20-30 years and the US will no longer care about Taiwan or have the resources to have much presence in the eastern hemisphere.

I think the saber rattling over Taiwan is just to get the US to spend themselves further into oblivion in the short term. We are in the war already and the saber rattling is an incredibly effective, asymmetric financial weapon. It builds up the Chinese military kinetic capacity long term while weakening the US military kinetic capacity long term by forcing the US to prepare for something that is never going to happen.

When China takes Taiwan it will be without firing a shot. I would bet the house on that because it kind of has to be that way to win the war and not just a self destructive battle.

China is achieving its objectives brilliantly. The US is increasingly isolated and this is the process of retreating into the western hemisphere. NATO is being destroyed without firing a shot.
by tbrownaw | 2026-01-21 12:33:50+00:00
> IPv4 is from the era of local computer networks, which feature clients and servers. Clients talk to servers, but servers are not supposed to care or even know about clients unless clients decide to reach out to them. Client-to-Client communication is generally discouraged.

No, it was meant to be a global address space where anything could talk to anything. That became unworkable due to scale and the limit inherent in using only 32 bits for the address space.

Some older protocols (ftp) don't play nice with NAT and need special handling, because address multiplexing was never intended to be a thing.
by astral_drama | 2026-01-21 12:33:57+00:00
I think your implicitly getting at something here. Both are dealing with an inferiority/superiority dynamic. The suggestion of a group you identify as being less, causes a predictable reaction to characterize the other (non-aphantasia) as problematic/hallucinating (i.e. broken/lacking). This ties back to the post where the author speaks of feelings of inadequacy (shame, etc...) about being unable to visualize, again signs of an inferiority complex. While such complexes may be traced back to particular memories or events, they're also habits of thought which are common place and culturally reinforced, so much so that they seem quite normal. For example, the culture of idol worship, like raising up of tech heroes while implicitly lowering your own self worth, which happens often on this site.

The fact that the author doesn't mention the details of the memory or events of the day also suggests shame and concerns of being judged for them.

The good news is they are writing about their struggles which suggests their willingness to work with these fears.

I think the answer probably isn't about pretending you're not better or worse, but accepting that being better or worse at something doesn't change your inherent self worth. Accepting that your not in control of many of your conditions and conditioning can free the mind from a sense of guilt and the fear around judgement of yourself and others. Hopefully this helps the author and those who struggle with notions of identity and self worth.
Ask HN: Is retreq / retspec a thing?
by foobarbecue | 2026-01-21 12:34:03+00:00
I have been tasked with writing requirements for a legacy system which was developed ad-hoc, but is heavily used. I'm calling this writing "retroactive requirements" and calling it "retreq." Similarly, "retspec" for retroactive specifications. Does this term, or something similar, exist already?
by zajio1am | 2026-01-21 12:34:06+00:00
RFC 4787 does not really describe how real world implementations behave. As almost all SOHO routers are Linux-based, i prefer to discuss Linux netfilter-based NAT behavior than some hypothetical RFC 4787 NAT. There are clear differences. For example, RFC 4787 says:

> REQ-1: A NAT MUST have an "Endpoint-Independent Mapping" behavior

While Linux netfilter behavior is "Address and Port-Dependent Mapping".

As Linux netfilter implements both NAT and firewall behavior, it is relevant for the discussion which parts of overall netfilter behavior falls into 'NAT part' and which into 'firewall part'. There is clear distinction - DNAT/SNAT rules in nat table represent NAT behavior, while REJECT/DROP rules in filter table represent firewall behavior.

As Linux-based SOHO routers are usually configured with both NAT and firewall netfilter rules to implement both NAT and firewall behavior, one cannot answer question 'Does NAT filter traffic?' based on external behavior of such SOHO routers, but has to analyze which part of the network stack is responsible for such behavior, or how the same network stack configured with just NAT rules and no firewall rules would behave. And here the answer is no, it would pass traffic (that do not match existing connections) unmodified.