MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by classicsc | 2026-01-14 19:49:40+00:00
If you want the ghosts to hallucinate less on things like this you should hook them up with the sosumi MCP. It's been very helpful to me since it seems like Apple's newer APIs are not in the training set of today's models.

When working on my own projects I've found a good rule of thumb to be that if you are being told to use something low level and unintuitive like a semaphore in Swift when doing something that ought to be easy, you are probably either reading a stackoverflow answer from an objective-c developer or in the middle of a LLM session that's gone sideways. Low level libraries might need those things, they are approximately never right for application code. Just throw it out and start over (as you did), saves on sanity.
by shredprez | 2026-01-14 19:50:15+00:00
Yeah, this is notable. If true, every mobile carrier getting hit at the same time says "coordinated incident", from whatever source and for whatever purpose.

Edit to say: my Verizon FioS and cell service are both working fine, no noticeable interruption at any point today.

Second edit to say: never mind, downdetector's home page normalizes report spikes so 1k and 100k both look identical.
by ecshafer | 2026-01-14 19:50:16+00:00
Rails shops seem to not like to use SQS/PubSub/Kafka/RabbitMQ for some reason. They seem to really like these worker tasks like SideKiq or SolidQueue. When I compare this with Java, C# or Python who all seem much more likely to use a separate message queue then have that handle the job queue.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-14 19:50:28+00:00
> its true that you risk permanent injury, if you go too far

Guillotining–and violence as a tool of politics more broadly–is pretty much a one-way signal in the historical record (outside civil wars). More concentration of wealth and power. Or anarchy. Either way, the poor and middle class end up worse.

As for my civil-war caveat, even that's starting to look one way in the age of information and globally-mobilised proxy-war assets.
by iso1631 | 2026-01-14 19:50:28+00:00
Weatherspoons charge under £3 for a pint in town. That's 15 minutes at minimum wage.

Beer was far more expensive 25 years ago - £1.60 in 2000 in the student pub when I first started buying my own beer, that was about half an hour at minimum wage.

On the cost side: Wages are higher, energy costs more, rent is higher (because if the pub can't operate the owner can get planning permission to convert it to a private dwelling and sell it for £600k rather than making £12k a year in rent)

On the demand side: People are healthier and drink less. It's nowhere near as acceptable to go out for a few pints at lunch time. People can't drive to a rural pub.
by kazinator | 2026-01-14 19:50:49+00:00
Make sure they are pre-shrunk cotton. It can still shrink, but far less.

Make sure the shirt is sized so that when you extend your arm laterally, the cuff approaches your knuckle.

If your idea of a fitting shirt happens to be that the cuff just covers a wrist watch when you extend your arm, then you have no spare headroom for shrinkage.
by VLM | 2026-01-14 19:50:57+00:00
The implication is economic decline.

Healthy economies "should" have a reward for specialization where both supplier and purchaser win. There is no reward anymore for economic specialization in the context of ice cream; its cheaper to make your own, now. This is a troubling long term implication for any *-as-a-service

There's a second even worse economic implication in that ice cream has long been affordable to 100% of US households... Now due to permanent long term economic decline its seen as acceptable losses for some not to afford it anymore. Again, troubling long term implications.
by NickC25 | 2026-01-14 19:51:02+00:00
>How does legal immunity or a media empire affect a dead man?

If I have complete legal immunity from ANY of my actions, including killing someone, and there's a massive multi-trillion dollar media empire dedicated to creating regime-friendly narratives and supporting the leaders on "my side" at all costs, I can harass, defame, defraud, and kill you without hesitation whenever, wherever, and however I see fit, and I'll get no blowback. I'll get fans and supporters.

Haven't we learned anything from history?
by watermelon0 | 2026-01-14 19:51:05+00:00
Github supports ephemeral runners which are limited to a single job.

You can use `workflow_job` webhook to be notified of a new job, after that you need to call `generate-jitconfig` API to get a just-in-time configuration token, and then you can start a Github runner in ephemeral mode with the JIT token.

This allows you to orchestrate Docker containers, KVM instances, etc., which are used for a single time, and then destroyed.

There are some open source projects, such as using ephemeral Kubernetes pods with the ephemeral runners.
by erikerikson | 2026-01-14 19:51:08+00:00
I disagree. Motivation is not just an emotion but an inherent desire. For a motivated engineer the balance between the work with pleasures and dreams is already won and pre-balanced for sustainable achievement.

I find the work itself rewarding and I find world improvement results reinforcing of my enjoyment. I want to code and I'm happy to direct that energy largely according to my employer's needs and our shared benefit. I can be given high level directives and refinement feedback over time. My observed results are faster, more effective progress as reported by internal and external stakeholders. I haven't minded becoming wealthier but it was never my primary motive.

As you note, there are other approaches.
by tracker1 | 2026-01-14 19:51:09+00:00
Yeah.. the opposition was just a bad take IMO... "but it will create a virtual red light district" which is EXACTLY what you want online, unlike a physical city, you aren't going to accidentally take a wrong turn, and if you're blocking *.xxx then it's even easier to avoid.

Then require all nudity to be on a .edu, .art or .xxx, problem mostly solved.
by ingenieros | 2026-01-14 19:51:21+00:00
USAID was ironically a significant customer for Starlink. People are probably already familiar with the 5,000 Ukraine terminal scandal, but pretty much all their offices (in Colombia at least) had 1 or more terminals.
What does USAID have anything to do with this conversation? Well, DOGE was largely responsible for putting the final nail on that coffin. If you think he cares about remote rural schools having connectivity you better think again.
by mtlynch | 2026-01-14 19:51:29+00:00
Does bitchat work during a phone outage? Range on BLE is pretty low, right, so I'd expect it to not do much unless you happen to live in an area where there are bitchat users every 100 ft or so.

I'm in a similar boat to you in wanting a LoRa mesh. I tried out MeshCore on the LilyGo T-Deck+ hoping it would be a device I could hand out to family members, but I found the hardware and software disappointing.[0] But I'm weirdly tempted to try the LilyGo Pager.

[0] https://mtlynch.io/first-impressions-of-meshcore/#testing-th...
by smeej | 2026-01-14 19:51:38+00:00
It's impossible to me that you're dumb enough to be saying these things in good faith, so maybe I'm guilty of the same assumption, that anyone who can form sentences must have a brain at least as much like mine that they can connect two thoughts.

Nobody's talking about a heart functioning like a kidney. We're talking about the range of functions among people's hearts, or people's kidneys, or people's brains.

You're acting like everyone's heart is the exact same shape and has the same blood pressure and the same resting heart rate and the same outflow volumes, which is just stupid. There is a HUGE range of function among hearts. There is a HUGE range of "healthy enough to work" among hearts.

JUST LIKE THERE IS WITH BRAINS.

There's also a huge range of "not healthy enough to function under normal circumstances, but not bad enough to kill the person."

I don't believe anybody with the brainpower to create an email address, register for an HN account, and sign into it is actually somehow as ignorant of basic human biology as this, so stop trolling and go away.
by joe_mamba | 2026-01-14 19:51:39+00:00
>What you listed for the past 10 years in Belgium is an average week in Chicago.

First you claim "basically no crime, no guns", then when confronted with the facts, instead of taking accountability and correcting, you move the goalposts to some high-crime US city.

I'm sure Brussels is super safe if you use Mogadishu as the goalposts, but if we were to keep the discussion in good faith and stick to comparisons with EU cities, my eastern european city has literally zero crime and guns making Belgium look like a warzone by comparison.
by borroka | 2026-01-14 19:51:44+00:00
A most surprising remark.

Dressing with intention does not require any particular willpower, just some desire, intention, a bit of time, and a taste that may develop over time.

Avoiding doomscrolling is not that hard. The first few days are usually hard when we want to break a habit that's hanging around like a terrible smell, but after that, it is smooth sailing.

One can play victim not forever but for a long time: we have seen that in particular between 2010 and 2015, with people claiming to be abused by the most absurd things.
But those abusers remain absurd, and the alleged victims--of food, social media, celebrities stealing their attention like a bully steals candy from a nerd-- pathetic.
by cloudfudge | 2026-01-14 19:51:45+00:00
That's quite an elaborate system. It goes through a lot of gyrations (not the least of which is inventing a whole new type of crime and passing laws about it) and doesn't sound even as strong as the age verification "required" to buy cigarettes in the US. I'd think "welcome to pornhub. Either log in or do Privacy-enhanced Age Verification by Auth0 (TM)" would be a lot easier to get off the ground.
by ofrzeta | 2026-01-14 19:52:14+00:00
The story about free potatoes in Berlin reminded me of that film by Agnès Varda

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gleaners_and_I

It's also interesting - as she is explaining in the movie - that the words that are used to describe this activity (glaneur/glane, to glean, nachlesen) have this particular meaning that's slowly fading (roughly "picking leftover stuff after the actual harvest"). However in modern French it now seems be used do describe dumpster diving.
by pixl97 | 2026-01-14 19:52:20+00:00
>A full day tool rental is often 1/3 to 1/2 of the price of a new mass market version of the tool

For sure. I had to dig some post holes in limestone that was very hard. Rental was going to be $200 for a tool that would do it in a day.

Instead I went to harbor freight and bought a tool closer to $100 even though it took me a bit longer, and I get to keep the tool which is still working to this day.

Heh, and labor costs in the Austin area are off the hook. I did a project for around $5000 that a neighbor had a similar but smaller in scope project quoted for $21,000.
by car | 2026-01-14 19:52:34+00:00
I've built 12V mercury vapor UV-C (254nm) lights for fluorescent mineral hunting, and that wavelength is quite harmful, requiring skin and eye protection. Mercury vapor lamps produce a spectrum of wavelengths, also in the visible spectrum, which gets filtered out since it distracts.

According to this [1] article, the 222nm range is safe for exposure, but the Krypton-Chloride bulb in the far-UVC lamp does also produce harmful wavelengths (256nm), therefore a filter is absolutely necessary. Thankfully simple plastics should work fine for that. I would still be extremely careful deploying these lights in occupied spaces.

"What really needs to be understood is that an unfiltered 222nm Far-UV peak from any KrCl excimer lamp emits a wide band of wavelengths starting at 200nm, past the human safe zone of less than 230nm, all the way to the end of the UVC spectrum at 280nm -- with a very worrisome second harmonic peak at 256nm."

"the 222nm excimer lamp's second harmonic peak at 256nm exclusive to KrCl Far-UVC lights should be treated no different than the well-established carcinogenic hazards involved when using 254nm mercury-line UVC germicidal bulbs."

[1] https://www.prweb.com/releases/222-nm-far-uvc-cancer-risk-wi...
by dynamicentropy | 2026-01-14 19:52:43+00:00
Django is slowly catching up with Rails by adding support for a unified task interface in Django 6.0, but less feature rich than Rails' ActiveJob.

There are already a few implementations, and the reference one (django-tasks), even has a database-backed task backend that also uses FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED to control concurrency. With django-tasks and a few extra packages you can already get quite far compared to what Solid Queue provides, except maybe for features like concurrency controls and using a separate database for the queues.

I really enjoyed learning about the internals of Solid Queue, to the point that I decided to port it to Django [1]. It provides all of Solid Queue's features, except for retries on errors which is something that IMHO should be provided by the Django task interface, like Active Job does.

[1]: https://github.com/knifecake/steady-queue
by philistine | 2026-01-14 19:53:03+00:00
Your argument hinges on any level of maintenance being enough to maintain our current level of investment. The truth is always more complicated.

Take for example DVD rental. The market completely evaporated, while there is still a small lingering community that could be serviced by rentals. My local library is proof that there is a market. But there are, bar some weird exceptions, no remaining DVD rental stores.

If an EV needs 50% of the maintenance, then it stands to reason that you need 50% of the staff. That's the easy part. But what about all the other staff? Can you afford as many staff in front of house when your main profit centre shrank massively? Can you keep the same amount of cars in the lot if you don't have the cash to pay the manufacturer fees?
by jayd16 | 2026-01-14 19:53:05+00:00
#2 is not a slam dunk because the CI system loses insight into your build process if you just use one big script.

Does anyone have a way to mark script sections as separate build steps with defined artifacts? Would be nice to just have scripts with something like.

BeginStep("Step Name")
...
EndStep("Step Name", artifacts)

They could noop on local runs but be reflected in the github/gitlab as separate steps/stages and allow resumes and retries and such. As it stands there's no way to really have CI/CD run the exact same scripts locally and get all the insights and functionality.

I haven't seen anything like that but it would be nice to know.
by xmprt | 2026-01-14 19:53:25+00:00
I think the reality is a lot less nefarious. They don't want your face. But they also don't care enough to not take your face. Why would Google spend lobbying and legal money trying to fight this requirement when it doesn't hurt their bottom line? On the other hand, requirements like storing ID cards does hurt their bottom line because it means:

1. they need additional security measures to avoid leaking government documents (leaking face photos doesn't hurt them as much)
2. not every person has a valid government document
3. additional customer support staff to verify the age on documents rather than just using some fuzzy machine learning model with "good enough" accuracy.

The bottom line is that companies are lazy and will do the easiest thing to comply with regulations that don't hurt them.
by btreesOfSpring | 2026-01-14 19:53:26+00:00
Your post reflects another online observation. With the rise of online sports books, this sort of predictive doomerism has flooded almost every team's online comment section. It no longer feel like fandom or community in the same way. Just lots of voices that will be glad to say, "I told you so," in the loss and crickets with the W. Wish there was some accountability mechanism for all the negative noise broadcasted into the channel.
by elil17 | 2026-01-14 19:54:08+00:00
From Aerolamps website:

>Does Aerolamp produce ozone?
>Yes - but only a very small amount

>Typical indoor ozone levels are 4-6 parts per billions (ppb), while average levels of outdoor ozone are 20-30 ppb - almost all indoor ozone comes from outdoors. Most likely, you will raise your indoor ozone levels much more by opening a window than by operating a far-UVC lamp.

>It's true that in a sealed chamber in a lab, typical far-UVC installations might produce significant (10s of ppb) ozone. However, our indoor spaces aren't sealed chambers. Both theoretical predictions and experimental evidence suggest that Aerolamp will raise indoor ozone levels by no more than 1-2 ppb. Expected ozone increase can also be simulated with Illuminate.

>However, we recognize that ozone is a pollutant, and recommend that Aerolamp should be used with portable air cleaners which include an activated carbon filter. Studies suggest that a single activated carbon filter is more than sufficient to mitigate any far-UVC derived ozone.

I agree that the filter thing doesn't make sense, but it does not seem like this product would meaningfully increase your ozone exposure.
by bluGill | 2026-01-14 19:54:49+00:00
A fast charging station that is working, that has the correct connector for your car (including adapters you carry), that your car will work with (Tesla hasn't opened their superchargers to call cars with the NACS connector), that you have an account with... There are too many things that just are not there.

One top of that you need to find a charger. They are all over, but many of them are slow speed chargers. There are also a lot of gaps, if you pass a charger with 50% battery remaining you can't be sure you will make the next one. (most cars can pass several gas station with 5% gas in the tank and still make it to one). You need to ensure you will get back to your car when it is charged so they don't charge extra (this is a problem if you are at a concert or something and are trying to charge while doing something else that can't be interupted)

Someday all the above will be fixed. Everyone agrees NACS is the future connector, but it isn't rolled out. Someday every "gas station" will have a charger with the gas pumps (or perhaps something else?) - at least along routes where people often make long trips. Someday you won't need a phone/account, just swipe a card - or so I hope. But someday isn't today.
by aprvrma | 2026-01-14 19:54:50+00:00
Location: Boston, Massachusetts

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Typescript/JS (Node, React, Next), Python (FastAPI), Postgres, AWS, microservices, Terraform, Docker, K8s, Kafka, LangChain, LangGraph, LLMs

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZE6pcndD2Jk2d2iMxOipBAA7ddC... | https://www.linkedin.com/in/apoorvv

Email: apoorv@bu.edu

4+ years of Engineering experience across backend, full-stack, cloud, and applied AI/ML, mostly in startups and high-speed environments. Currently, leading AI Solutions at Luminiphi Labs, where we build AI powered solutions for businesses. Before this, at Gytworkz, I architected & developed backends for numerous projects for clients across the globe. Visit apoorvverma.com for more info.
by Kirby64 | 2026-01-14 19:55:09+00:00
Lucid Grand Touring can do it in one charge (that lasts ~45 minutes). Expensive, but it could do it.

I did Shreveport, LA to Pesos, TX as an example.

If you're OK with 2 charging stops, an Ioniq 6 or a Tesla Model 3 will work just fine.

Also, charging speed is irrelevant to how many stops you need. Most chargers are >150kW these days, though.

If you truly want to minimize charging stops, you'd be better served charging 3+ times for shorter periods of time, though.
by JCattheATM | 2026-01-14 19:55:09+00:00
> There were great HN-related conversations to be had around DOGE and what it was (purportedly) trying to achieve

Were there? I just saw people blindly advocating and excusing their incompetence. The discussions were very polarized, not well thought out or supported with evidence, and not remotely productive. At least from what I saw.
by dhamidi | 2026-01-14 19:55:13+00:00
Maybe useful inspiration from TCL: there are many commands that define new variables, which makes modeling the stack unnecessary.

For example:

lappend responses [dict status 200 body ...]

Appends a new dict to the list held in the variable responses, creating the variable if necessary.

I can see that being an attribute:

<request-send url="..." as="greeting" />
<response-text response="greeting" as="text" />
<selection-set-text text="text" />
by gmuslera | 2026-01-14 19:55:26+00:00
Reminded me a note I heard about backups. You don't want backups, it is a waste of time, bandwidth and disk space, by far most if not all of it will end being discarded without being ever used. What you really want is something to restore from if anything breaks. That is the cost that should matter to you. What if you don't have anything meaningful to make a restore from?

With observability is not the volume of data, time and bandwidth used on it, is being able to understand your system and properly diagnose and solve problems when they happen. Can you do that with less? For the next problem that you don't know yet? If you can't because of lack of information or information you didn't collect, then spending so much may be was not enough.

Of course that there are more efficient (towards the end result) ways to do it than others. But having the needed information available, even if it is never used, is the real goal here.
by metadat | 2026-01-14 19:55:28+00:00
Heads up: I actually started vouching a few but then looked more closely and all these accounts have 1 karma, were created recently (< 60 days old), and the linked sites smell suspiciously of AI slop. I also didn't find any prior comments, favorited content, no signs of life. Why would someone never comment only to do so now? I'm hesitant to vouch potential bot accounts.

{Insert Post-LLM Internet sadness here)
Show HN: Controlling macOS with an Apple TV Remote
by lau123 | 2026-01-14 19:55:46+00:00
I’ve mostly stopped using Apple TV as every app wants another subscription these days - I mostly just connect my laptop via HDMI.

That works fine until you need to pause or click something. Surely there must be a way to use the Apple TV remote for this I thought. I was surprised that there was not (at least not in a simple, open way), so I started poking at how the Siri Remote communicates with macOS and spent a weekend mapping its inputs to cursor movement, scrolling, and media controls. The result is a small menu bar app called Remotastic.

It's simple, written in Swift, built mostly for my own comfort but I figured let's open source it as I'm sure somebody else will be looking for the same thing!

https://github.com/lauschue/Remotastic
by nabbed | 2026-01-14 19:55:51+00:00
I appreciated the role of a maintainer when I created a PR to add a new feature to a large, complex (and for some companies, critical) open source project 8 years ago.

As it turns out, the things I didn't understand about that project dwarfed -- by orders of magnitude -- what I thought I understood, but a maintainer worked with me with patience and a sharp eye, albeit in fits and starts over a period of 3 months. The implementation went through several revisions before the 700+ lines landed into the codebase (merged by that same maintainer).

Since then, I submitted only bug fixes to that project, because it seemed like less of a burden on maintainers and hopefully even lightened their load a tiny bit .