MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by willtemperley | 2026-01-29 09:20:35+00:00
Web is much better when the data should be public.
Apps are much better when any kind of data privacy is required.

The trouble is, market forces always try and push things the other way.

The Reddit App for example is totally unnecessary. It's just public web content and should be a website.

SaaS on the other hand shouldn't really be a thing at all. I have no idea why anyone thinks it's a good idea for their private data and app state to be on a cloud somewhere they don't control.

Note that this does not preclude the use of cloud services that users can control e.g. by specifiying trusted endpoints. I'm trying to build the idea of "data locality first" software. I.e. you know where your data are and where they aren't.
by jve | 2026-01-29 09:20:54+00:00
> Tesla never refreshes their models

I'v seen quite a few Tesla Ys that needed repairs and... they seem to improve the car year to year or even months to months. Car interface suddenly changes to RJ45, some metal parts changed to aluminium (if I'm not mistaken), various things that become easyer to fix and so on. Low Voltage battery getting Li-Ion. Front under body changes: https://service.tesla.com/docs/BodyRepair/Body_Repair_Proced...

And then the airbag controller gets newer and newer.

Not something to market about, but you see steady incremental improvements.

What I want to say, the serviceability is very good for the cars. You get open documentation, you can access toolbox for a price, but it's there for the simple DIYer. Need to change pyro fuse? No problem, pop up docs, order part, change it. The parts are cheap.
by Grimblewald | 2026-01-29 09:21:08+00:00
If it was Israel attacking Iran, and my government still sends arms and financial support to Israel, then I would care. However, provided this is a country governing itself, it isn't my place to say squat. I'd help, if asked, but there's so much strife and massacre in the world that this doesn't really stand out. It is when my tax money pays for this kind of strife and massacre when I get quite vocal about it.
by plufz | 2026-01-29 09:21:17+00:00
But what about my banking app! I think it’s only fair Apple take 30% on every transaction I make. After all they put in a huge amount of work validating and making sure my banking app is safe and functional.

Edit: Maybe I am greedy now, but it would be nice if large transactions like say buying a house only would cost me a 15% transaction fee to Apple.
by dcminter | 2026-01-29 09:21:24+00:00
I'm rather tempted. I'm funemployed at the moment and live over in Stockholm so it's just a (long) train journey away. I used to enjoy messing around on Vaxen in my college days.

I can't see myself ever using VMS professionally though, and it has a somewhat vague description of the actual content. It's not super expensive but I'd have to fork out for the travel and accommodation.

I'd love to hear about it if anyone does a write-up after the fact.
by cmkr | 2026-01-29 09:22:01+00:00
Update on the Cloudflare point: I now detect Vercel and Netlify hosting via response headers (catches custom domains). Cloudflare as CDN/DNS proxy is intentionally not flagged as US hosting — the origin server behind it could be EU. This is documented in the methodology popup.

The other issues you raised (social links vs embeds, US-hosted sites not detected) were fixed in earlier updates.
by yuppiepuppie | 2026-01-29 09:22:18+00:00
Thanks for the feedback. I have added a "hack" to randomise the order for now. Unfortunately, the framework (docusaurus) Im using is quite limited on the customisation of the list.

FWIW, I used this project to hack around with docusaurus as Ive been wanting to give it a spin for a while. If this project maintains popularity Ill migrate to something more mature and appropriate :)
by account42 | 2026-01-29 09:23:36+00:00
The scale is a temporary correction measure due lack of enforcement in previous years.

Determining that someone is in the country without citizenship, visa or other valid permission and what country they can be deported to is all the due process that is warranted. This is hardly US-specific, most non-western countries are much much harder on illegal immigration. You don't have an inherent right to be in other countries. Trying to frame this as an decision that needs court proceedings for every single deportee is an attempt to make deportations effectively impossible.
by hapless | 2026-01-29 09:23:36+00:00
the common element between VMS (the subject of this post) and Windows NT, is Dave cutler.

Cutler lived in an extremely overcomplicated world of VMS kernel primitives, and given the chance to let his freak flag fly, he really overcomplicated his past work for Windows NT

In case you ever wonder why your 1 gb/s ssd has ~100 mb/s throughput on windows. there are often quite literally hundreds of layers of filters on even the simplest i/o

but it is super flexible! just slower than iced treacle. aren't you glad you had an object oriented I/O subsystem supporting microkernel services and aspect-oriented programming? i bet you use those features way more often than you read or write files from disk
by OtherShrezzing | 2026-01-29 09:24:41+00:00
I'm not sure Claude Code is making enough for Apple to take notice & drastically alter their CLI like that? CC has 100-150k users across all platforms, paying $200-1200/yr each. Even if every developer is on the top tier Max plan, and on MacOS, that's $180mn in revenue at Anthropic. So even in the most optimistic scenario, that's only ~$50mn revenue for Apple at a 30% take.

That pales in comparison to the hardware & subscription revenues Apple brings in by being a dev-friendly OS.
by jongjong | 2026-01-29 09:24:47+00:00
I think the most valuable intellectual skill remaining is contrarian thinking which happens to be correct.

LLMs are naive and have a very mainstream view on things; this often leads them down suboptimal paths. If you can see through some of the mainstream BS on a number of topics, you can help LLMs avoid mistakes. It helps if you can think from first principles.

I love using LLMs but I wouldn't trust one to write code unsupervised for some of my prized projects. They work incredibly well with supervision though.
by ohans | 2026-01-29 09:25:19+00:00
Author here.

AI agents have dominated Twitter/X the past few days: Claude Code, Remotion, Cursor, etc. But most developers are running these locally. Terminal agents on your machine.

That's useful, but it's a different game when you're building AI apps for users. The moment your agent needs to actually execute something e.g., run a Python script, process a PDF, generate files, you're suddenly building sandboxing infrastructure, managing VMs, handling file storage.

It's a massive distraction from your actual product. We built Bluebag to solve this for Vercel AI SDK users. Two lines of code, and your agent gets access to Skills that execute in managed sandboxes.

No Docker orchestration. No K8s. Dependencies, file handling, signed download URLs, all handled.

The post walks through some of the architecture (progressive skill loading, auto-provisioned VMs, multi-tenant isolation) and shows concrete integration examples.

Happy to answer questions about the approach or trade-offs we made.

Cheers
by ulfw | 2026-01-29 09:25:36+00:00
> My layman's opinion is that I would happily pay a lot of money to have a robot help me around the house: fold my clothes, do the dishes, whatever dumb menial labor.

Then why don't you hire a helper for that?
You just said you'd pay a lot of money, so money doesn't seem to be an issue. What is then?
by Orygin | 2026-01-29 09:25:42+00:00
> Yes, there are many UI implementations in Windows but they are almost totally transparent to the user (no pun intended), and they can all run on the same system at once.

Just like Linux. You can run most if not all apps in any DE. Yes gnome will look ugly, but that's gnome's way of doing things. If you pick a decent DE, you will have most basic apps using the same styling, and the rest have CSD anyway.

Each GUI toolkit has its own specialties, but you'll use at most two of them, and they will be kept in separate apps. (Apart from flatpak portals which use gtk instead of the system's).

Windows has 3-5 different UI/UX layers within the same application ... And the rest have CSD anyway, so they look the same no matter the OS.
Show HN: I built an AI Agent that turns prompts into a SaaS explainer videos
by mpoweredo | 2026-01-29 09:25:42+00:00
I got mass jealous of all these fancy explainer videos, so I built something
I like designing, it's genuinely satisfying work. But motion design? That's a different beast. Time-consuming doesn't even begin to cover it.

I kept seeing all these polished explainer videos on X or reddit. Smooth transitions, perfectly timed text animations, the whole package. And every time I thought "I could do that for my project", then reality hit.

Learning AE properly takes a lot of time. Existing browser tools are either too basic or feel like piloting a spaceship.

So I did what any reasonable developer does when frustrated, I started building my own thing.

It's a browser-based motion design tool. No downloads, no subscriptions to Adobe, no 47-step tutorials just to animate text flying in. You just prompt an AI Agent. Done.

I've been working on this for a while now and honestly, I'm at that stage where I need fresh eyes. What would make something like this actually useful for you?

What's the biggest pain point when you want to make a quick promo video or explainer?
Show HN: Moltbot state observability and persistance daemon
by Gregoryy | 2026-01-29 09:25:58+00:00
Created a tool for observability psychos like me :)

I wanted to track every change that MoltBot does to it's own system files (memories) in git and notify me with the exact diff

This tool watches a git repo (e.g. /Users/<username>/clawd/), auto-commits/pushes on changes, and sends the diff to Telegram

One command setup
by Nursie | 2026-01-29 09:27:03+00:00
I'm not sure that "everything that people do out of habit" is a reasonable summation of the category we're talking about. Perhaps I misworded my post above.

Gambling is known to be addictive and causes some symptoms of withdrawal when stopped suddenly, even though it is not a chemical dependency and doesn't involve introducing a chemical into the body.

So if we allow that one chemical-free activity can be addictive, I don't see a particular reason that we should exclude the possibility of other things working that way too.

I'm not saying the other poster is wrong that it could be "her daughter suddenly feeling socially excluded after having filled the void by social media", but I think it would be wrong to exclude the possibility that the removal of the dopamine rollercoaster of social media is causing anxiety directly in the way halting gambling does. And the description certainly comes across as someone who is going through a form of withdrawal - it's familiar to me as an ex smoker.
by pjerem | 2026-01-29 09:27:09+00:00
Well. I own an iPhone, a Macbook, Airpods, Apple Watch. I'm in the Apple ecosystem since the last 16 years.

Unfortunately, due to their behavior in the latest years, I'm not going to buy anything Apple anymore.

Fortunately for me, I prefer Linux to MacOS so I never have been totally tied in the Apple ecosystem and I know how to leave the boat without a lot of hassle.

I'm really saddened because they know how to make great products when they want to. It's just infuriating that everything that is shitty in their products is never due to randomness or bugs or whatever, but ALWAYS because they decided to fuck you.
by spacebanana7 | 2026-01-29 09:27:22+00:00
Tim Cook is usually good at politics, which doesn't seem to be the case here. Nobody other some CNBC guests really gets too upset when they take 30% from tinder, music or mobile gaming companies. And those types of apps run by unpopular large companies make up the majority of App Store revenue.

However, newspapers and content creators are popular in a way that carries political weight. It'd be wise for Apple exempt these categories and write off the few hundred million in forgone revenue as a political expense.

For example allowing the NYT or Joe Rogan to have nice paid apps with no fees would be a much more effective use of money than the same amount in political donations.
by grishka | 2026-01-29 09:29:06+00:00
30% might be fair when you have a choice of either marketing and selling your app yourself, or just using an app store to do everything for you. But when you are forced to use the app store, things get really stupid really fast.

Apple still insists that the app store "provides value" for developers. They simply can't comprehend the harsh reality that these days, for most developers, the app store isn't the godsend service that helps their app get discovered, but instead an asinine bureaucratic obstacle they have to clear, and then regularly attend to, to have an iOS app at all.

The Mac app store, being optional for developers, is a good example of how much people actually want something like this.
by hapless | 2026-01-29 09:29:58+00:00
amusingly Motif and CDE were derived from HP attempts to copy Windows 2.x and the betas of Windows 3.0

not windows 3.1 -- windows 3.1 was popular! Windows before 3.1 was distinctly unpopular. It had basically no installed base. The only Windows 2.x applications I know of actually shipped an embedded Windows copy on the floppy disk.

HP was carefully tracking all the much less popular stuff Microsoft was doing in the late 80s because they thought this "WIMP" paradigm had staying powers, even if Microsoft was not exactly selling a lot of units
Tell HN: As AI gets better, are scripting languages losing their appeal?
by delduca | 2026-01-29 09:30:03+00:00
As AI keeps getting better and better at coding, I kind of feel that using scripting languages is starting to lose its appeal.

For example, why create a Python Lambda that has a large cold start, is slower, and ends up costing more, when I can build the same Lambda in C++?

The same applies to bloated Electron applications, I can build the same thing, and often something even better, with far more efficiency using native code.
by jjav | 2026-01-29 09:30:09+00:00
> which would all be salary going to you

That part is not necessarily (or even probably) true, if payroll tax didn't exist the company might not pay all of that to you unless they had to.

But that's a nitpick... overall, it is true that the fully burdened cost of having that employee is X+Y, so that's the number the company needs to consider when deciding whether they can afford to hire (or keep) this person or not.
by speleding | 2026-01-29 09:30:29+00:00
> management ... literally just status updates and asking when things are going to be finished.

True. But there are many people whose productivity slumps unless they are asked for progress updates every day. You have to offset this against the people whose productivity slumps BECAUSE they are asked for updates every day. In large orgs with unknown quality of people I guess it's not impossible that middle managers add value.
by fnoef | 2026-01-29 09:31:18+00:00
I don't get it. Apple is the top 3 most valuable companies in the WORLD. THE WORLD. They act like a greedy friend that would ask you to pay back $1.54 for a meal of $1500, because you ordered a side of fries which they did not eat.

Aren't they making the majority of their money from selling hardware and iCloud subscriptions? Why they go on and milk developers, who make apps FOR THEIR ECOSYSTEM?!
by cubefox | 2026-01-29 09:31:49+00:00
> The second revision with the better “head tracking” screen (I don’t remember how it worked) was much better than the launch model.

It worked with a sheet of lenticular lenses on top of the screen, which separated the odd and even pixel columns for the left and the right eye. The sheet could also be moved a tiny amount by a motor, to change the "center" of the separated light, depending on whether the head was tracked more to the left or more to the right.

> But mostly, you’d just turn 3D off. It was a gimmick, cut the resolution in half, and doubled processing requirements.

Well, it did cut the resolution in half, but this meant the GPU cost stayed the same. They could instead double the horizontal resolution of the screen to keep the same effective resolution, in which case the GPU performance cost would indeed double. But as I said, in future systems this performance cost could likely be reduced with a form of frame generation by a machine learning model.
by dragonwriter | 2026-01-29 09:32:06+00:00
> Apple still insists that the app store "provides value" for developers. They simply can't comprehend the harsh reality that these days, for most developers, the app store isn't the godsend service that helps their app get discovered, but instead an asinine bureaucratic obstacle they have to clear, and then regularly attend to, to have an iOS app at all.

Oh, no, they can comprehend, they just don't care. Apple controls access to a valuable pool of business, and they are going to extract as much value as possible from people wanting access to that pool. And, of course, they are going to try to burnish it with marketing speak, but that doesn't mean they believe their own marketing.
by stackbutterflow | 2026-01-29 09:33:23+00:00
Conversely it's true for the parent comment. Being able to eat food from any country is a plus only to those who are into that hobby. Personally it ranks pretty low in my list of things that make a city a great city. And if we're talking about food, access to fresh, high quality and affordable produce is way more important than being able to eat Afghan food at 3am. These criteria are arbitrary and don't make a city better than another imho.
by cmkr | 2026-01-29 09:33:24+00:00
EDIT 2 (48h later — shipped based on your feedback after a rough and a good night of sleep):

Should be fixed:
- Hybrid Geoip + ASN detection (no more nsa.gov/google.com false positives)
- AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Cloudflare, DigitalOcean, Vercel, Netlify detection
- Links vs embeds — href to Twitter ≠ dependency on Twitter
- Lazy-loaded YouTube/Vimeo (lite-youtube facades)
- Adequacy tier scoring — UK, Switzerland, Japan get -15 (trusted, not sovereign) instead of 0
- Unquoted iframe detection (LinkedIn embeds)

gov.cn no longer scores 100%. admin.ch no longer scores 100%. The "sovereignty" label now hopefully means something.

Still open:
- DNS/registrar checks (v2)
- One reported LetsEncrypt cert error (can't reproduce)

Details on Vercel:
I try to detect via response headers (x-vercel-id), so custom domains are hopefully flagged correctly. Cloudflare for DNS is intentionally not pennalized — it's a proxy layer, not hosting (that was also stated in the methodology-popup from the beginning). I try that the origin server determines your hosting score.

Thanks to everyone who took the time. We (meaning all of you, who tested, tried and commented and maybe I, myself) made this tool hopefully significantly better.

And to have it stated here too: Though it might sound ironic or something (especially via a board like this): I and my partner never meant to insult anybody. We have profound respect for quality engineering outside of our borders. It even inspires us.
by richardbachman | 2026-01-29 09:33:35+00:00
`row_index()` was also recently added.

df.with_columns(pl.col.b + pl.row_index().is_between(1, 3))
# shape: (5, 2)
# ┌─────┬─────┐
# │ a ┆ b │
# │ --- ┆ --- │
# │ i64 ┆ i64 │
# ╞═════╪═════╡
# │ 1 ┆ 10 │
# │ 2 ┆ 21 │
# │ 3 ┆ 31 │
# │ 4 ┆ 41 │
# │ 5 ┆ 50 │
# └─────┴─────┘

> Polars has an optimization to overwite a single value

I believe it is just "syntax sugar" for calling `Series.scatter()`[1]

> it doesn't allow slicing

I believe you are correct:

df_polars[1:3, "b"] += 1
# TypeError: cannot use "slice(1, 3, None)" for indexing

You can do:

df_polars[list(range(1, 4)), "b"] += 1

Perhaps nobody has requested slice syntax? It seems like it would be easy to add.

[1]: https://github.com/pola-rs/polars/blob/9079e20ae59f8c75dcce8...
by antonvs | 2026-01-29 09:33:39+00:00
They’re relying heavily on administrative warrants, which don’t have the legal force of a judicial warrant and are more like an internal departmental memo.

In particular, administrative warrants don’t authorize entry into a private home without consent, don’t compel state or local law enforcement to act, don’t function like a criminal warrant, and don’t override 4th amendment protections.

Having to rely on judicial warrants would get in the way of one of their primary goals, which is to pacify the US population through fear. It’s why they now use the murders they’ve committed as threats.
by didntcheck | 2026-01-29 09:33:40+00:00
It's not users who are pushing this. It started off with just superfluous but optional apps of websites. Now every year I find there is something I used to be able to do, which I now must own a smartphone to do. And it's not just getting discounts at coffee chains, it's increasingly stuff like accessing healthcare plan benefits, or verifying my identity for banking

A few sites throw up a blocking screen to download the app, which disappears once you spoof a desktop UA. But the big problem is businesses now having no web interface at all
by yuppiepuppie | 2026-01-29 09:33:54+00:00
Fixed :) Like I mentioned elsewhere this was a project born out of my desire to try a new documentation framework (docusaurus)... however the sorting of the docs is not super convenient.

Ive added a randomisation to the list, so hopefully it makes it fairer. If this maintains some traction perhaps Ill beef up the site and make it much more fairer/customizable :)
by disgruntledphd2 | 2026-01-29 09:34:04+00:00
> were you not employed by an employer that was paying your insurance premiums? Heck, when I was in california the startup I was at was paying almost my entire insurance premium.

I didn't end up moving to California, mostly for family reasons. However, I do in fact get my private health insurance paid (mostly) by my employer in Ireland.

> reason for better quality of care is that in the US system for all its problems, the patient is the customer as they have many options and each doctor is running an independent business. my experience with socialized medicine is that the government is really the customer, not me, and doctors are not really running independent businesses (and when they do, they aren't particularly cheap). It's like having a single HMO that gets to decide what you get with little recourse. While some might equate it to health insurance companies in the US, I, at least, felt I had much more flexibility with them.

I mean, I am a specialist and I like when people listen to me about my specialist advice. Therefore, I'm OK with listening to doctors. Clearly I'll find another doctor if the advice doesn't work consistently but my prior is to listen to the experts, so I don't really see the benefit of the US approach.