MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nicoburns | 2026-01-20 13:33:18+00:00
> When your EV breaks down, you won't even bother to get it towed, because the only ones who can repair are the (very expensive) showroom of the car manufacturer you bought it from, or their authorized (and very expensive) service center

That's true, but it is has more to do with parasitic capitalism than EV technology, and could (and hopefully will）be solved with regulation. My understanding is that there is already significant regulation around ICE car parts which is the main reason why the situation there is better.
by Balgair | 2026-01-20 13:33:19+00:00
I want to echo this.

Your blue book is being graded by a stressed out and very underpaid grad student with many better things to do. They're looking for keywords to count up, that's it. The PI gave them the list of keywords, the rubric. Any flourishes, turns of phrase, novel takes, those don't matter to your grader at 11 pm after the 20th blue book that night.

Yeah sure, that's not your school, but that is the reality of ~50% of US undergrads.
by bromuro | 2026-01-20 13:35:16+00:00
I don’t see the “complexity” the author is yelling about. Maybe is the tailwind verbosity?

It seems they don’t understand the underlying requirements when building a reusable UI library. Yes in shadcn there are some opinionated choices , but the “i can do better/ i am smarter” attitude of this article is off putting.

We used shadcn in one project , and wrote a custom UI library for another (using the same “smart trick” for input elements). Shadcn wins for clarity, consistency, maintenanility and simplicity.
by BoxFour | 2026-01-20 13:35:43+00:00
There are a bunch of studies out there [0][1] (two I found immediately) showing the risks around problem gambling, but like with most vices people who’ve already picked the pro side tend to react in the same predictable ways (myself included):

1) Dismissal: Feigning or having a profound misunderstanding of how statistics work by poking at the methodology like “N=200? That’s meaningless.”

2) Apathy: “So what if some people get addicted? We can’t babysit everyone.”

3) Rationalization: “Yeah but it helps Native American reservations, so...”

4) Downplaying: "Ok problem gambling is bad, but how prevalent is problem gambling really?"

0: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1989-05439-001

1: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32402593/
by KellyCriterion | 2026-01-20 13:35:45+00:00
...well, just dont download random stuff from the internet and run it on your important machines then? :-))

You are right:
30 years ago, it was safe to go to vendor XY page and download his latest version and it was more or less waterproof.
Today with all these mirror sites, very often better SEO ranking than the original, its quite dangerous:
In my former bank we had a colleague who installed a browser add-in that he used for years (at home and in the bank); then he got a new notebook, fresh browser, he installed the same extension - but from a different source than the original vendor:
unfortunately, this version contained malware and a big transaction was caught by compliance in the very last second, because he wasnt aware of data leakage.
by pjc50 | 2026-01-20 13:37:16+00:00
Hmm. What's the current maths on distance vs edge rate vs transceiver latency vs power consumption on when that would be a benefit? Not to mention how much of a pain it is to have good optical connectors.

I wouldn't expect that to be mainstream until after optical networking becomes more common, and for consumer hardware that's very rare (apart from their modem).
by throw0101a | 2026-01-20 13:37:35+00:00
> So clearly the zfs devs thought about the possibility of a corrupt superblock, but didn't feel the need to provide a tool to compare the superblocks and restore one from the other copies.

This mailing list post from 2008 talks about using zdb(8) to mark mark certain uberblocks an invalid so another one would be used:

* https://zfs-discuss.opensolaris.narkive.com/Tx4FaUMv/need-he...

ZDB = ZFS debugger. It's been there since the original Solaris release of ZFS.

> That was the point when I stopped trusting zfs.

As opposed to trusting other file systems and volume managers, which do not have checksums, and so you wouldn't even know about the problem in the first place?
by regularfry | 2026-01-20 13:38:29+00:00
Oh, and on agents: I did give it a go in opencode last night and it seemed to get a bit stuck but I think I probably pushed it too far. I asked it to explain TinyRecursiveModels and pointed it at the git repo URL. It got very confused by the returned HTML and went into a loop. But actually getting to the point of getting content back from a tool call? Absolutely fine.

I'm thinking of giving it a go with aider, but using something like gemma3:27b as the architect. I don't think you can have different models for different skills in opencode, but with smaller local models I suspect it's unavoidable for now.
by rkagerer | 2026-01-20 13:38:39+00:00
My coarse understanding is monolithic kernels historically gained favor over microkernels for practical performance reasons bound to the cost of context switching.

I always felt there was opportunity to address that in order to have your cake and eat it too (eg. reserve registers for the kernel to avoid pop/push, maybe even dedicate a whole core and its state to it).

How fast / lightweight is context switching between userspace and kernel code in Xous? Can you compile in such a way to avoid context switching altogether?
by nemomarx | 2026-01-20 13:38:54+00:00
People who aren't fed and employed generally struggle to be self actualized, right? First you need to work for your supper, then you can focus on learning for its own sake.

As more jobs started requiring degrees, the motivation has to change. If people can get food and housing without a degree again to a comfortable extent than the type of person getting a degree will change again too.

If you let them, they'll alienate you until you have no free time and no space for rest or hobbies or learning. Labour movements had to work hard to prevent the 60 hour workweek, but we're creeping back away from 40, right?
by mavam | 2026-01-20 13:39:01+00:00
For deploying Claude Code as agent, Cloudflare is also an interesting option.

I needed a way to run Claude marketplace agents via Discord. Problem: agents can execute code, hit APIs, touch the filesystem—the dangerous stuff. Can't do that in a Worker's 30s timeout.

Solution: Worker handles Discord protocol (signature verification, deferred response) and queues the task. Cloudflare Sandbox picks it up with a 15min timeout and runs claude --agent plugin:agent in an isolated container. Discord threads store history, so everything stays stateless. Hono for routing.

This was surprisingly little glue. And the Cloudflare MCP made it a breeze do debug (instead of headbanging against the dashboard). Still working on getting E2E latency down.
by tpm | 2026-01-20 13:39:04+00:00
> catastrophic converters

Nice one. Anyway three-way catalytic converters also convert NOx to N2 and O2. It would be quite bad if they wouldn't.

> You only get water vapour and carbon dioxide out.

No, you still get small amounts of the bad (acutely toxic) stuff too. This point is important - whether it's home cooking on gas, gas heating or ICEs running on unicorn farts, there will still be byproducts from imperfect burning. The only real way out is to turn off the fire.
by Clark3232 | 2026-01-20 13:39:35+00:00
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by woooooo | 2026-01-20 13:40:16+00:00
"The Defence Ministry of India reported: 88 killed and 163 wounded on the Indian side, while 340 killed and 450 wounded on the Chinese side, during the two incidents.[6][7]

According to Chinese claims, the number of soldiers killed was 32 on the Chinese side and 65 on the Indian side in Nathu La incident; and 36 Indian soldiers and an 'unknown' number of Chinese were killed in the Cho La incident.[8] "

War might be overstating it a bit, "incident" might be more appropriate, but we can round up.

So adding it all up, the Chinese had 1-2 small foreign wars per decade in the 50s-70s, zero since 1979. It still doesn't justify the phrasing "threatening all their neighbors" in 2025, aside from Taiwan specifically.

In the case of the line of control with India, it's reached the point where they're having ritualized fistfights at high altitude for pride, that's just comical. It's not threatening.
by phrotoma | 2026-01-20 13:40:33+00:00
This works great for naked code, but it kinda becomes a PITA if you want to develop a containerized application. As soon as you ask your agent to start hacking on a dockerfile or some compose files you start needing a bunch of cockeyed hacks to do containers-in-containers. I found it to be much less complicated to just stuff the agent in a full fledged VM with nerdctl and let it rip.
by bflesch | 2026-01-20 13:40:49+00:00
Attacks by russia on German railways happen at least once per month, the last one happened yesterday and a train with chemicals was targeted. They attack our production.

- https://www.swr.de/swraktuell/rheinland-pfalz/gueterzug-lok-entgleist-hattersheim-beeintraechtigung-und-ausfaelle-im-zugverkehr-in-rheinland-pfalz-100.html

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EudOiRZ7txs

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dHN9ZnaZI0

- https://www.hessenschau.de/tv-sendung/gueterzug-entgleist--bahnverkehr-lahmgelegt--hessenschau-vom-13052025,video-210638.html
by thisislife2 | 2026-01-20 13:40:57+00:00
> switching channel from practical problem-solver to emotional problem-solver

Thank you for this useful tip! I've recently become aware that I may not be as good a listener I thought I was - I too make the common mistake of immediately offering solutions, or talking too much about my own relatable situations and feelings, instead of trying to really listen to them and help them figure out their own world view and feelings of a particular situation (and thus understand them better too in the process).
by DonHopkins | 2026-01-20 13:42:13+00:00
Robots will need to become fat and human before they can ever generate Deepak Chopra Quality Woo!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aO2dPIdEaR4

"But as Deepak Chopra taught us, quantum physics means anything can happen at any time for no reason. Also, eat plenty of oatmeal, and animals never had a war! Who's the real animals?" -Professor Hubert Farnsworth
by bloomingeek | 2026-01-20 13:42:29+00:00
I'm kind of this way also. My work motto was always: "Be the best worker and you'll always have a job." This was easy, because I was always curious about how things worked and didn't mind helping others. In my thirties, while training for a new position, I thanked my trainer for his help and he told me: "You seem willing to work and now I won't have to do your job for you." That simple statement changed how I thought about coworkers. Gradually, I became less helpful to the ones who thought it was a good idea for me to do their job with/for them.
by prodigycorp | 2026-01-20 13:42:46+00:00
Claude is very happy to wipe remote dbs, particularly if you're using something like supabase's mcp server. Sometimes it goes down rabbitholes and tries to clean itself up with `rm -rf`.

There is definitely a real world risk. You should browse the ai coding subreddits, the regularity of `rm -rf` disasters is, sadly, a great source of entertainment for me.
by myrmidon | 2026-01-20 13:42:52+00:00
> If you had enough paper and ink and the patience to go through it, you could take all the training data and manually step through and train the same model.

But you could make the exact same argument for a human mind? (could just simulate all those neural interactions with pen and paper)

The only way to get out of it is to basically admit magic (or some other metaphysical construct with a different name).
by m4cd4r4 | 2026-01-20 13:43:44+00:00
Hi HN,

I built PortPilot to solve a problem I hit daily: "port 3000 already in use" errors when juggling multiple dev projects.

What it does:
- Scans all active TCP ports with process details (name, PID, command line)
- One-click kill for stuck processes
- Auto-detects projects (Node.js, Docker, Python) from your directories
- Start/stop apps from a single dashboard

Technical details:
- Electron 27, vanilla JS (no React/Vue bloat)
- Uses native netstat (Windows) / lsof (Linux) under the hood
- 20/20 Playwright E2E tests passing
- ~70MB installed

Landing page: https://m4cd4r4.github.io/PortPilot/
Source: https://github.com/m4cd4r4/PortPilot
License: MIT

I'd appreciate feedback on:
1. What features would make this more useful?
2. Any gotchas with the Linux implementation I should know about?
by iLoveOncall | 2026-01-20 13:43:48+00:00
Every time there's an article on HN about 3D printing you have a flock of people who have obviously not looked at a 3D printer in 10 years come and spout absolute nonsense.

As you're saying, modern printers are simply click and forget. I haven't had any maintenance or fix to do on my P1S in 2 years.
by stevepotter | 2026-01-20 13:44:06+00:00
I still don't understand why someone would choose to essentially clone some code vs import a library. Suddenly you increase your maintenance burden, lose updates, etc. I've had no problems at all with UI libraries like Mantine. If you follow this logic, why not just clone all your npm repos and build from source. Ultimate control, right? Please help me understand the benefits here, because I tried out shadcn and wasn't into it
by raesene9 | 2026-01-20 13:44:06+00:00
Firecracker can solve the kind of problems where you want more isolation than Docker provides, and it's pretty performant.

There's not a tonne of tooling for that use case now, although it's not too hard to put together I vibe-coded something that works for my use case fairly quickly (CC + Opus 4.5 seemed to understand what's needed)
by sylvain-h | 2026-01-20 13:44:07+00:00
Hey HN,

I'm excited and equally feeling very brittle because it's my first HN post ever and it's the one where I ask for feedback on an important project of mine. Gah.

I built a tool called Unfault. I've felt the weight of the "Context Tax"
that comes with maintaining long-lived codebases for a while. Whenever I
return to a project after a few months, or look at how my tech stack has
increasingly grown and I have to spend time to figure out "why and what was I
doing here?".

I realized I need better Orientation. So, I took the last few months to build
Unfault to see if I could help with this challenge.

How it works: Unfault is a CLI and an LSP extension. It builds a graph of
what I call "Facts" about your system's reachability and logical flow.

If you're looking at a function, Unfault's CLI, Code Lenses and Sidebar show you
the ambient context:

- Reachability: "This is reached by POST /v1/orders".

- Logical Impact: "Changing this return type ripples to 3 downstream services."

- Findings: "Callers of this function are currently ignoring the error result."

The idea is to get a gentle glance at your surroundings when you work on a function for instance.

I design with developers in mind so (well because I didn't want a tool that bothered me in the first place):

- Local Engine: The analysis happens in a rust-based CLI on your machine.

- Structural Graph: It doesn't ingest your source code. It syncs an Intermediate Representation (IR) of the graph like the symbol names and the logical "links" between them.

- Privacy: I kept a hard line here: implementation logic and strings stay on your disk.

Status: Tea but no Scones It’s currently working well at the Facts (the structure and flow). It’s not yet at the point where it helps with Mindset (reconstructing
why you wrote something a certain way).

It’s in a learning phase right now, so it’s free to use. I’m mostly looking to
see where the graph engine breaks on different architectural patterns.

Would love to hear how you guys handle the mental fatigue of jumping between
projects.

PS: I hope I didn't break any HN etiquette :)
by ErroneousBosh | 2026-01-20 13:44:13+00:00
> Have we been having these more recently?

Yes, for suitable values of "recently".

> And I also never remember seeing Aurora at my latitudes.

How old are you?

If you're younger than say your mid-40s you probably won't remember the early 80s, which is the last time we had a solar maximum that really came to anything.

Solar activity rises and falls on an 11-year cycle, and right now we're experiencing quite a peak. The previous three, peaking in 2014, 2011, and 1989 were a bit of a bust.

There was a massive peak in 1979 and I can remember my dad showing me the aurora when I was about six or seven - it seemed to be present most nights over the winter. That was also around the time of the CB Radio craze, where atmospheric conditions were such that you could use "skip" - bouncing radio signals off the highly-charged ionosphere - to talk to people hundreds of miles away as if they were just down the road, even on the comparatively high frequencies that CB used. There was a bit of a peak in the late 80s, and some good RF propagation too, as well as some incredible aurora - although the big one I remember was in about the end of 1991, early 1992.

We had absolutely blistering hot summers followed by really cold and snowy winters, too, kind of like we're having at the moment.

If the solar cycles have a longer repeating cycle of intensity on the scale of a hundred years or so (and it looks a bit like they do) then the next solar maximum in about 2036 is going to be even bigger.
by Retr0id | 2026-01-20 13:44:32+00:00
> VirtualBox 7.2.4 shipped with a regression that causes high CPU usage on idle guests. What are the odds.

I have such a love/hate relationship with VirtualBox. It's so useful but so buggy. My current installation has a bug that causes high network latency, but I'm afraid to upgrade in case it introduces new, worse bugs.

VMware is a million times better, but it is also Proprietary™
by sam_lowry_ | 2026-01-20 13:44:43+00:00
Bingo!

For the "requirement of being able to put any element as the radio button.", Dan Abramov tells you that this is exactly the point of React, see his comment above:

> For what it’s worth, the point of React is that you can just fix that Radio component to be an input (if that makes sense) and it’ll just be an input. [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46690762
by TeamCommet1 | 2026-01-20 13:45:22+00:00
The point about documentation is spot on, but there's another technical hurdle often overlooked: payment infrastructure. In Japan, B2B is still heavily dominated by bank transfers (Furikomi). If your SaaS billing stack only supports credit cards, you'll hit a wall with larger enterprise clients who expect to pay via monthly bank invoices. Localizing the billing logic is almost as important as localizing the UI.
by KellyCriterion | 2026-01-20 13:45:23+00:00
GDPR & Co are such a complex and heavy-weighing thing that Id say, nearly all companies break it - not by intention but because of failing to implement it:
Esp. in large legacy environments its often very difficult to get everything right.
And then you have all this Cloud and outsourcing-stuff etc. - that makes it a real burden to implement, and auditors very often do not check on these implementations that detailled, depending on the business.
by mdhb | 2026-01-20 13:45:50+00:00
So just to be clear you can’t give me a top 3 list? Do you have a top 2 list maybe? Even a single example perhaps?

You’re making the claim that it’s one of the most important things to the average US citizen so surely you must be able to provide me with at least one clear cut example we can all agree on to make your point. There’s over 300 million people in the country I’m sure you can find one even if 3 was too many to ask for.

Because I have to be honest, my argument that people who yell about free speech are completely full of shit and have no principles at all is looking rather compelling right now.
by xpe | 2026-01-20 13:46:23+00:00
With the exception of financial or economic analysis [1], relatively few journalists get paid to write with quantitative nuance, much less awareness of probability. These articles are not written for people who care about prioritizing harm or predicting the future. Instead, everything feels like an emergency. [2]

There is a large disconnect between the amount of combined effort and thinking that goes into prediction markets versus the glibness of which so many people write about them.

[1]: also: fraud investigations or other areas where rigor is expected

[2]: Even the better sources such as The Atlantic are somewhat advertising fueled, driven towards “engaging” content, prioritizing interesting ideas rather than practical relevance, dumbed down to maybe a high school reading level, hardly a trace of showing one’s methods. I don’t think I’ve ever seen any backing analysis in the form of a spreadsheet or heaven forbid, source code of a simulation. This is not meant to point fingers at writers or journalists; we just have to recognize the context they live in. If we want detailed and careful analysis, we need to find ways to build system systems that provide it. What we have now is a joke compared to what is possible.
by raesene9 | 2026-01-20 13:46:25+00:00
Of course it depends on exactly what you're using Claude Code for, but if your use-case involves cloning repos and then running Claude Code on that repo. I would definitely recommend isolating it (same with other similar tools).

There's a load of ways that a repository owner can get an LLM agent to execute code on user's machines so not a good plan to let them run on your main laptop/desktop.

Personally my approach has been put all my agents in a dedicated VM and then provide them a scratch test server with nothing on it, when they need to do something that requires bare metal.
by Zababa | 2026-01-20 13:46:43+00:00
Can you give examples of how that "LLM's do not think, understand, reason, reflect, comprehend and they never shall" or that "completely mechanical process" helps you understand better when LLM works and when they don't?

Many people are throwing around that they don't "think", that they aren't "conscious", that they don't "reason", but I don't see those people sharing interesting heuristics to use LLMs well. The "they don't reason" people tend to, in my opinion/experience, underestimate them by a lot, often claiming that they will never be able to do <thing that LLMs have been able to do for a year>.

To be fair, the "they reason/are conscious" people tend to, in my opinion/experience, overestimate how much a LLM being able to "act" a certain way in a certain situation says about the LLM/LLMs as a whole ("act" is not a perfect word here, another way of looking at it is that they visit only the coast of a country and conclude that the whole country must be sailors and have a sailing culture).
by tsujp | 2026-01-20 13:46:50+00:00
Could you please elaborate, ideally in as much detail as you're comfortable sharing, on your Emacs and adjacent (org-mode, magit, any kind of syncing to your mobile phone with org-mode if that's done) workflow please. Often I find seeing people's real workflows (in detail and not wishy-washy) to be helpful since it gives me a concrete nucleus to crystallise off of... so to speak.