MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 0xbadcafebee | 2026-01-19 00:45:10+00:00
Anyone have some kind of central hub of finding out about new tools/techniques? I'm convinced that headless multi-agent coordination is the way to go, but it needs a lot of guard rails, one of the biggest of which will be cost-control. I'm sure there will be a lot more developments in this space, but I don't want to just happen across them by accident...
by schiffern | 2026-01-19 00:45:35+00:00
Stirling engines are a perfect illustration of what I call Odum's Paradox:

The closer a heat engine/pump gets to maximum theoretical efficiency, the lower its power density.

This is a simple consequence of thermodynamics. By approaching the Carnot efficiency you're asymptotically approaching an adiabatic cycle, so there's less and less entropy gain to drive the system forward. At the Carnot efficiency the cycle becomes completely time-reversible and all power stops, so as you get closer and closer the power density drops to zero.

Odum observed[0] that (for certain linearity assumptions) the maximum power density is achieved at half the theoretical Carnot efficiency. He noted that both real engines and biological systems tend to cluster around this optimum.

What's interesting (but not terribly surprising) is that this implies a fundamental, unavoidable tradeoff between machinery cost and operating efficiency.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_power_principle
by teraflop | 2026-01-19 00:46:12+00:00
> We pay roughly $0.30 per million requests

But the per-request cost is not the only one. You're also paying $0.02 per million CPU-microseconds. If you do the math, that's easily double or triple the equivalent hourly charge for VM instances from the various major cloud providers.

For now, you're benefiting from the zero idle charges and Cloudflare's generous free allowance, because you're at a small scale. As you get bigger, the effect of those factors -- as a fraction of your total spending -- will decrease by a lot, and you'll still be paying the inflated unit costs.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2026-01-19 00:46:50+00:00
It's a real open source tool Yegge has built and been using for a while now. And no, it's not insane, he's literally written a book with Gene Kim about the fundamental lessons that go into it, and he's been on lots of podcasts where he explains more.

I expect major companies will soon be NIH-ing their own version of it. Even bleeding tokens as it does, the cost is less than an engineer, and produces working software much faster. The more it can be made to scale, the more incentive there is. A competitive business can't justify not using a system like this.
by samtheprogram | 2026-01-19 00:47:03+00:00
There’s benchmarks in the README. Python is ~10x faster. It’s heavily optimized. Based on the numbers and my experience with Flux.1, I’m guessing the Python run is JIT’d (or Flux.2 is faster), although it’d likely only be ~half as fast if it weren’t (i.e. definitely not 10x slower).
by anonnon | 2026-01-19 00:47:04+00:00
Reddit has a small number of what I hesitatingly might call "practical" subreddits, where people can go to get tech support, medical advice, or similar fare. To what extent are the questions and requests being posted to these subreddits also the product of bot activity? For example, there are a number of medical subreddits, where verified (supposedly) professionals effectively volunteer a bit of their free time to answer people's questions, often just consoling the "worried well" or providing a second opinion that echos the first, but occasionally helping catch a possible medical emergency before it gets out of hand. Are these well-meaning people wasting their time answering bots?
by willhslade | 2026-01-19 00:47:16+00:00
We're wildly aware. Currently 80+% of our trade is with the good old USA. We're basically an economic colony. But when the ambassador to Canada and Trump himself note that they don't need Canada (both statements happened in the last 2 weeks) we don't really have a choice but to attempt to diversify. We don't want to do it, we were reasonably happy with the existing arrangement, but it's not up to us to decide what the US does. It's up to us to decide what we do.
by onoesworkacct | 2026-01-19 00:48:10+00:00
In most cases, the hard part is getting a bunch of people to work together on a problem and not have it turn out complete shit.

It's never easy for a bunch of people, each with differing and partially-overlapping conceptualisations of some domain, to coordinate correctly.

The human problems don't really go away. It requires an insane amount of "context" that would overwhelm any current AI.
by zapzupnz | 2026-01-19 00:48:48+00:00
Not everything has to be. Sometimes, an artist's style or a particular track just hits a particular vibe one may be after or need in a particular moment.

I'm not a fan of this music either but I could imagine hearing it while I'm studying or coding.

Don't trash something just because it's not your vibe. Not everything has to be Mozart.
Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back
by ivcatcher | 2026-01-19 00:50:20+00:00
Quick background: I used to code. Studied it in school, wrote some projects, but eventually convinced myself I wasn't cut out for it. Too slow, too many bugs, imposter syndrome — the usual story. So I pivoted, ended up as an investment associate at an early-stage angel fund, and haven't written real code in years.

Fast forward to now. I'm a Buffett nerd — big believer in compound interest as a mental model for life. I run compound interest calculations constantly. Not because I need to, but because watching numbers grow over 30-40 years keeps me patient when markets get wild. It's basically meditation for long-term investors.

The problem? Every compound interest calculator online is terrible. Ugly interfaces, ads covering half the screen, can't customize compounding frequency properly, no year-by-year breakdowns. I've tried so many. They all suck.

When vibe coding started blowing up, something clicked. Maybe I could actually build the calculators I wanted? I don't have to be a "real developer" anymore — I just need to describe what I want clearly.

So I tried it.

Two weeks and ~$100（Opus 4.5 thinking model） in API costs later: I somehow have 60+ calculators. Started with compound interest, naturally. Then thought "well, while I'm here..." and added mortgage, loan amortization, savings goals, retirement projections. Then it spiraled — BMI calculator, timezone converter, regex tester. Oops.

The AI (I'm using Claude via Windsurf) handled the grunt work beautifully. I'd describe exactly what I wanted — "compound interest calculator with monthly/quarterly/yearly options, year-by-year breakdown table, recurring contribution support" — and it delivered. With validation, nice components, even tests.

What I realized: my years away from coding weren't wasted. I still understood architecture, I still knew what good UX looked like, I still had domain expertise (financial math). I just couldn't type it all out efficiently. AI filled that gap perfectly.

Vibe coding didn't make me a 10x engineer. But it gave me permission to build again. Ideas I've had for years suddenly feel achievable. That's honestly the bigger win for me.

Stack: Next.js, React, TailwindCSS, shadcn/ui, four languages (EN/DE/FR/JA). The AI picked most of this when I said "modern and clean."

Site's live at https://calquio.com . The compound interest calculator is still my favorite page — finally exactly what I wanted.

Curious if others have similar stories. Anyone else come back to building after stepping away?
by PaulHoule | 2026-01-19 00:50:24+00:00
(1) Putting cold water on my wrists. Maybe it would have worked if I tried it longer, but it didn't.

(2) Walking forward as if pushing through something with a forward lean. I was in a small building and this was awkward and my body searched through the crouching and hip swinging gaits as I tried this, I thought it might have been better in a bigger space and might give it a try sometime.

(3) What did work was the 'chest barrier' which is holding the chest absolutely rigid and NOT paying attention to whatever my body is doing to breathe. Since I have been practicing diaphragmatic breathing heavily I find that my body does that automatically and it just doesn't expand through or past my chest.

This works amazingly well. When I tried it I got flash of a scene from Neon Genesis Evangelion where the robot is raging out of control and they pull the power cable on it and it tries smashing it's way into the control room while an observer stands his or her [1] ground at the window before the battery runs out.

I added a "pull the cable" visualization and definitely sense that brave observer appear in my head, although I also realized that in this mind-body interaction it is the mind that is to blame because it brought in some trouble that it thought about from elsewhere. Trying to control the body consciously is a disaster in this situation because disturbances from the mind are coupled efficiently into the body and disturbances from the body are coupled into the mind. So I focus on holding the chest and only on holding the chest.

[1] it happens twice
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-19 00:50:36+00:00
Great for her, I hope she's doing okay now. (I do think we humans can take each other for granted)

If talking to chatgpt helps anyone mentally, then sure great. I can see as to why but I am a bit concerned that if we remove a human from the loop then we can probably get way too easily disillusioned as well which is what is happening.

These are still black boxes but in the context of traffic lights code (even partially) feels to me something that the probability of it might not saving a life significantly overwhelms the opposite.
by shivanshvij | 2026-01-19 00:50:55+00:00
Founder of loophole labs here!

Cilium is definitely the gold standard if you’re working with Kubernetes clusters and need a full CNI, but if you want to extend CNI functionality without replacing it, then this approach is the only option.

It works quite well because Cillium (and all CNIs that I’m aware of) don’t use XDP like the blog post mentions, they use Netkit instead which is an alternative to veth designed for netfilter-like use cases.

This means XDP can work alongside Cillium (with enough tweaking) which is what we wanted to be able to do.

If you’re using pure containers and no CNI, then of course this provides a significant speed up even beyond netkit devices.
by casey2 | 2026-01-19 00:52:07+00:00
It's not true. This is just a natural process in technology. Look at oracle bone script. Over time people simplify for expedience, but only because they knew what came before.

Here simplification is used to increase the set of people who understand the meaning of the symbol. Understanding the meaning of a symbol is the foundation of language. I'm sorry you are disabled, but you are the monster for trying to hoist your disability onto everyone else.
by antidamage | 2026-01-19 00:52:38+00:00
I don't like being devil's advocate on this because I am strongly against the invasion of privacy at that point in the investigation, but without that data, they'd just take a bit longer to have identified the members of the insurrection. There's varying degrees of data you can glean from cellular networks as well, right down to "it was definitely this person, the phone logs show a FaceID unlock at X time" and that action can be inferred by network logs, all information that carriers have retained for over two decades.

What it does become is a data point in an evidential submission that can strengthen a case that could otherwise be argued back as a bit flaky. It's similar to DNA evidence in that it's not actually 100% reliable nor is the data handled forensically at every stage of collection, but it's treated as if it is.

I think it's weighted too heavily in evidence and should not be used as a fine-toothed comb to sweep for "evidence" when it can be so easily tainted or faked. At the same time, I'd love to see the current members of the pushback against ICE using this data fallacy against future prosecutions. "Yeah, I was at home, look" and actually it's just a replay of a touch or face ID login running from a packaged emulator, or whatever signature activities meet the evidential requirement.
by insin | 2026-01-19 00:52:52+00:00
This is still the way - jQuery or not - for UI where you can't/don't want to use a component library. I use the same approach for my browser extensions, both for page scripts and options pages. Writing features so you update state then re-render also means you get things like automatically applying option changes live in page scripts, rather than having to reload the page, for free. Just receive the updated options and re-run everything.

Browser extension options pages are mostly a form mapped to what you have stored in the Storage API, so implementing them by handling the change event on a <form> wrapping all the options (no manual event listener boilerplate) then calling a render() function which applies classes to relevant elements (<body> classes are so good for conditionally showing/hiding things without manually touching the DOM), updates all form fields via named form.elements and re-generates any unique UI elements makes it so un-painful to change things without worrying you're missing a manual DOM update somewhere.

My options pages are Zen Garden-ing 5 different browser-specific UI themes from the same markup to match their host browsers, which is a brittle nightmare to maintain in an app which needs to change over time rather than static demo HTML, but once you've tamed the CSS, the state handling and re-rendering is so painless I'm sticking with it for a while yet, even though it would be long-term easier if I used Preact+htm for no-build option components which know what the active theme is and can generate specific UI for it.

My favourite dirty old-school knowledge is still the named global created for an element with an id, why bother selecting an element when it's right there (once you know you need to avoid global name collisions)?. I use those suckers everywhere for quick fun stuff and one-off tool pages.
by neilv | 2026-01-19 00:52:56+00:00
I haven't read the Yegge post closely, so just commenting that namespaces (or naming conventions) would make the easier-to-casually-read names more practical...

For example, if Polecat becomes GasTown.WorkerAgent (or GasTown.Worker), then you always have both an unambiguous way and a shorthand-in-context way of referring to the concept.

(For naming conventions when you don't have namespaces as a language feature, use prefixes within the identifier, such as `GasTown_Worker`.)

If GasTown.Worker is implemented with framework Foo, using that framework's Worker concept, GasTown.Worker might have a field named fooWorker of type Foo.Worker. (In the context of the implementation of GasTown, the unqualified name always means the GasTown concept, and you always disambiguate concepts from elsewhere that use the sane generic or similar terms.)

Complicated names like GasTown.MaintenanceManagerCheckerAgent might need some creative name shortening, but hopefully are still descriptive, or easy to pick up and remember. Or, if the descriptive and distinguishing name was complicated because the concept is a weird special case within the framework, maybe consider whether it should be rethought.
by EastLondonCoder | 2026-01-19 00:53:26+00:00
This frames escalation as if it’s an inevitable byproduct of “not cooperating,” but that’s a choice. Sanctuary policies generally limit voluntary local participation (e.g., detainers without judicial warrants), they don’t “block” federal enforcement.

“If you don’t want door-to-door, cooperate” is basically saying federal agencies get to punish jurisdictions for lawful policy choices by switching to more coercive tactics. That’s not normal enforcement; it’s politicized leverage. And once you normalize that logic, it won’t stay confined to immigration.
by danpalmer | 2026-01-19 00:53:41+00:00
It's not a joke, but I think it's an example of the same thing we're seeing with folks who think they're talking to god when they talk to ChatGPT, or those who spiral and in some cases, sadly take their own life.

These chatbots create an echo chamber unlike that which we've ever had to deal with before. If we thought social media was bad, this is way worse.

I think Gastown and Beads are examples of this applied to software engineering. Good software is built with input from others. I've seen many junior engineers go off and spend weeks building the wrong thing, and it's a mess, but we learn to get input, we learn to have our ideas critiqued.

LLMs give us the illusion of pair programming, of working with a team, but they're not. LLMs vastly accelerate the rate at which you can spiral spiral down the wrong path, or down a path that doesn't even make sense. Gastown and Beads are that. They're fever dreams. They work, somewhat, but even just a little bit of oversight, critique, input from others, would have made them far better.
by extraduder_ire | 2026-01-19 00:53:46+00:00
Most apps reading records will validate a record against the schema for that type. e.g. there's nothing stopping you from making a app.bsky.feed.post record with more than 300 graphemes in the "text" field, but that post won't appear in the "official" app/website because it fails schema validation.

Similarly, there's nothing stopping you from adding another field in your post. It'll just get ignored because the app you're using doesn't know about it. e.g. posts bridged from mastodon by bridgy have an extra field containing the full original post's text, which you can display in your app if desired. reddwarf.app does this with these posts.

Here's the schema for bluesky posts, if you're interested: https://pdsls.dev/at://did:plc:4v4y5r3lwsbtmsxhile2ljac/com....
by alphadatavault | 2026-01-19 00:55:50+00:00
I think the solution is clean baseload power- advanced nuclear (SMRs), next-gen geothermal, and true 24/7 renewables paired with massive storage. Also, "carbon-aware computing" that routes workloads to where/when green energy is abundant. Efficiency helps, but the industry must build new clean energy at an unprecedented scale. Maybe we should ask AI for the solution.
by throwadobe | 2026-01-19 00:57:36+00:00
I mean, it's not like I trashed it or compared it to Mozart—I even made sure to include "interesting, stimulating, or tonally remarkable" in an attempt to preempt that latter pushback.

But even if I did, why can't I? It's fine to call some music shit. Just like you can call my opinion shit.

Policing dissenting opinions and saying everything is equally worthy of praise are two sides of the same coin sliding in the vending machine that sells us the sad state of affairs we live in today.
by ProfHarita | 2026-01-19 00:58:32+00:00
OP here. Three things that are hard to convey in the title:

1. This isn't a "run my prompt" tool.
TerminAI maintains a persistent, live "System Spec" of your machine—your installed binaries, your paths, your shell quirks. When standard CLIs fail, it pivots and writes custom Python/JS on-the-fly to solve the problem. It doesn't just call tools; it builds the tool it needs.

2. Every action is auditable.
Every thought, plan, tool call, and outcome is logged to a local JSONL file you control. When something goes wrong, you have a forensic trace of why it made that decision. That's the trust guarantee—not "just believe me," but "here's the receipt."

3. Why this has to be open source. %% And why I began developing this in December %%
The CLI democratized compute. The GUI democratized access. We're now at the third shift: the OS is becoming an intelligent partner. But who owns that partner? If the "System Operator" is rented from a closed provider, you're a tenant in your own machine. TerminAI is the open-source answer. It's the bash of the Agentic Age.

Happy to go deep on the Brain architecture or the Zero-Trust Cloud Relay.
by scooke | 2026-01-19 00:58:44+00:00
In 2003 I was somewhere south of Fort Worth, TX, having visited Dinosaur World, and shortly after leaving we stopped at a cafe that had three computers out which you could use. I looked at them while waiting for the coffee and they just seemed off, strange. It wasn't OS 9 nor X, it wasn't Windows... What was it? As I went over to look it hit me - holy cow, those are running that linux thing I've heard about! Their desktops were beautiful, totally different than the others. I knew then I wanted that.
by mccoyb | 2026-01-19 00:59:16+00:00
I think Yegge and Huntley are smart guys.

I don't think they're doing a good job incubating their ideas into being precise and clearly useful -- there is something to be said about being careful and methodical before showing your cards.

The message they are spreading feels inevitable, but the things they are showing now are ... for lack of better words, not clear or sharp. In a recent video at AI Engineer, Yegge comments on "the Luddites" - but even for advocates of the technology, it is nigh impossible to buy the story he's telling from his blog posts.

Show, don't tell -- my major complaint about this group is that they are proselytizing about vibe coding tools ... without serious software to show for it.

Let's see some serious fucking software. I'm looking for new compilers, browsers, OSes -- and they better work. Otherwise, what are we talking about? We're counting foxes before the hunt.
by andy99 | 2026-01-19 00:59:43+00:00
The prevailing theory of consciousness is that humans manufacture it inside the brain—that it boils down to a computation. Yet, Dr. Hameroff and his collaborator, Nobel Laureate and physicist Roger Penrose, have argued for decades that consciousness made the world and not the other way around. They believe that it is not manufactured in the brain but only processed there, via an external quantum wave function sweeping through the universe that interacts with tiny protein tubes.

Pretty sure neither of these is going to turn out to be correct, if it’s even something knowable. At least the protein tubes theory is trying to explain it, the computation one is just lazy and basically says nothing - “we don’t understand it so it must just be something we understand”
by skybrian | 2026-01-19 00:59:47+00:00
Looks nice!

New user sign up is a bit wonky. It asked for an email, login and password, then it's asking for a bsky sign-in too? This seems a little weird.

(Minor nit: for some reason, Google didn't auto-suggest a strong password for the password field.)

Then I got to the screen where it asks for full read-write access to my PDS and stopped there. It's kind of a lot to ask! I believe this is Bluesky's fault, but I don't think I can really use third-party bluesky apps until they implement finer-grained permissions.
by danabramov | 2026-01-19 01:00:35+00:00
I don't this is tied to Twitter.

Just the other week, another service that people actively used called Bento announced shutdown: https://bento.me/. This sucks for the user.

Someone created an alternative called Blento (https://blento.app/) on AT. Of course, by itself, this doesn't mean they'll be successful. But the thing is that, if Blento shuts down, someone can put it right back up because (1) it's open source, and (2) the data is outside Blento. Any new app can kickstart with that data and get people's sites back up and running. And two platforms can even compete on top of the same data.

I agree content is tailed to the platform and resurrecting something doesn't necessarily makes sense. But that's the point of lexicons. You get the choice of what makes sense to resurrect (actively moving to an alternative) vs what doesn't (something with a style that doesn't work elsewhere) vs new recontextualizations we haven't even tried or thought of. I think it's early to dismiss before trying.