MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by flurdy | 2026-01-25 10:45:29+00:00
This smells like Claude's own version of Gas Town by Steve Yegge. Probably more constrained and less of a crazy bull ride.

But seems we are heading this way, from initially:

- a Senior Dev pairing with Junior Dev (2024/25)

- a tech lead/architect in charge of several Developers (2025)

- a Product Owner delegating to development teams (2026?)

---

- https://github.com/steveyegge/gastown

- https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d...
by wolvoleo | 2026-01-25 10:45:34+00:00
Those were different times. Right now Holland has been governed by oligarchs for the last 30 years. The country is unrecognisable.

Also, making something like that would be unthinkable in this day and age of safety and environmental red tape. The same way we have not reclaimed any land in like forever. In fact some of it has been sunk again under pressure from the belgians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hertogin_Hedwigepolder
by ben_w | 2026-01-25 10:45:56+00:00
> iOS apps tend to be more stable, better polished

It's been a while since I was last using Android, but first-party Apple apps no longer meet my standards for "polished".

e.g. type this sequence into the calculator:

[2] [-] [4] [=] [x²] [=]

The answer should not be negative, but the app says "-4".

The desktop Contacts app has been putting invisible LTR and RTL codes around phone numbers for years now, breaking web forms when auto-entered. The mobile version refreshes specific contacts several times in a row to add no new content, preventing copy from working while it does so.

The MacOS Safari translation button appears on the left of the omni-bar, until you click it, at which point it instantly moves to the right and your click turns out to have been on the button that the left-side translation button had hidden. Deleting a selection of items from browsing history is limited to about 5 items per second, as it deletes one then rebuilds the entire list before deleting the next.

If I'm listening to a podcast on headpones and an alarm goes off, it doesn't play the alarm through my headphones, it plays on device speakers only.

Podcast app's "Up Next" is a magical mystery list that can't be disabled or guided.

The "Do Not Disturb" mode can be activated unexpectedly, leading to missed calls, and cannot be deleted.

Localisation is inconsistent at every level, including system share sheet and behaviour of decimal separators.

I could go on, but you get the point. Apple's quality control just isn't visible in the software at this point.
by shlip | 2026-01-25 10:48:06+00:00
> It's the design mock up from the final presentation to Motorola for the iRadio (name later changed to Envoy).

> The head of frogdesign, Hartmut Esslinger met Spielberg on a plane and showed him this mockup. Steven asked if it could be used as a prop in the film, and Hartmut gave it to him.
by vladvasiliu | 2026-01-25 10:49:42+00:00
I don't know if it's the case in Germany, but here in France consumer FTTH networks are of the GPON persuasion. These need to handle encryption and be able to properly register on the tree, so I'm not completely shocked they require some form of ISP-provided device to terminate the fiber connection.

There's also a EU law which says that users should be able to bring their own modems / routers, so AFAIK providers say that this particular terminal device is still "on their side of the network".

I've seen such devices come in two varieties.

One is a separate device which plugs on the optical network, does the encryption and stuff, and then exposes an ethernet port which is connected to the actual router which does wifi, etc. With SFR and Bouygues, it was trivial [0] to replace the ISP-provided router with one of your choosing. You get the normal external IPs and you do your thing. The ISP router sleeps in its box in storage. This was my setup up until a few years ago, with both these providers. Now SFR has moved to CGNAT, but the setup is the same, so I expect users to still be able to switch routers (but I haven't tested, since I'm not a client anymore).

Then there's Free, who provides a single device that connects to the fiber, does routing, wifi, etc. In this case, it's possible to flip a switch in its settings for it to act as a bridge (don't know how wifi behaves in this case, if it stays on). It then only accepts a single downstream client, which gets the external IP. SFR had a similar setup for DOCSIS.

I'm not familiar with how Orange, the biggest operator, functions. But I understand they have a general tendency to be a PITA so YMMV with them.

---

[0] For Bouygues, this device only talked on a tagged VLAN100 for some reason. On the SFR, the network expected you to send a client id in the DHCP request.
by ffsm8 | 2026-01-25 10:49:58+00:00
Android is still developed by google, yes.

The chinese are mostly adding skins on top, not developing the core of the operating system.

There is however a chinese fork of android (state sponsored), but it has not gotten wide market adoption in china either to my knowledge, but i dont live in china so i'm open to be corrected.

Finally, even if that OS has gotten widely adopted in china - it IS a fork. the changes are not being upstreamed to android, hence irrelevant to the discussion on this forum.
Show HN: Shopify app to block discount codes on discounted products
by viikka | 2026-01-25 10:50:01+00:00
My clients kept losing money during sales.

They’d use Compare at Price for a sale, and Shopify would still allow customers to apply discount codes on top. No native way to block this. Deleting codes or hiding the field doesn’t actually stop discounts.

So I built an app that blocks discount codes when products are already discounted, especially during sales.

It:

Prevents double discounts on Compare at Price products

Blocks codes at checkout logic level (not just UI)

Can be scheduled for sales like Black Friday
by imtringued | 2026-01-25 10:50:17+00:00
Swagger, OpenAPI have nothing to do with REST. In fact, they are the antithesis of REST, because they are the very out of band information that a REST client isn't allowed to depend on. A REST client for a pizza delivery restaurant isn't allowed to know that the "order" action is called "order", because that is out of band information. If the server is replaced by a hotel booking server with a completely different workflow, the client is supposed to continue working.

Only MCP is loosely related to REST and it's because one of the defining characteristics of REST is that the API can be discovered at runtime, which is useful if you have a pseudo human level intelligence such as an LLM, but not if you have a dumb static application that has finite capabilities.
by gspr | 2026-01-25 10:50:28+00:00
I think you're right about certain apps refusing to run in an emulated environment.

I'm beginning to think we need to consider such apps, and the hardware they run on, as the outsiders. Keep a cheap "normal" Android phone for those apps, and those apps alone. Then keep a "real" second device for everything else. Up to you which one gets the SIM card and provides connectivity for the other (and ordinary phone services).

I'd rather go back to old-fashioned hardware dongles from banks – but hey, lacking that, maybe I'll just think of the first of those two devices as a clunky, overly expensive one of those.
by notahacker | 2026-01-25 10:50:41+00:00
> most of your market is controlled by aging men in suits

that um... doesn't sound like the space market. The engineers involved won't care about whether it's big corporate speak or GPT-ish gushing about "nailing it", they'll just want to understand if its a suitable bus for their mission concept and how well it works. It's actually more candid than your average blog in that respect.
by psychoslave | 2026-01-25 10:51:39+00:00
Social fame is fundamentally unscalable, as it operates in limited room on the scene and even less in the few spot lights.

Benefits we can get from collective works, including scientific endeavors, are indefinitely large, as in far more important than what can be held in the head of any individual.

Incitives are just irrelevant as far as global social good is concerned.
by B1FIDO | 2026-01-25 10:53:37+00:00
The term you're looking for is "demarc" or: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demarcation_point

This is the physical boundary of a network, in telecommunications. This is the junction where the service provider can point and say "that's our equipment on this side". So it helps to narrow down the troubleshooting.

Often, if you have a telephone landline, you will see your demarc take the form of a gray RJ11 box with a small self-plug in it. It would be common practice to plug a phone into that box directly, then you've eliminated the "inside wiring" in the house.
by microtonal | 2026-01-25 10:53:49+00:00
It's what Carney's speech alluded to when he cited Havel's The Power of the Powerless [1]. The sign was put in the displays because it was the best thing to do for the vassal states. Those days are slowly ending, more and more countries are going to stop displaying the sign.

This is also what at least part of the Americans doesn't get. Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea, etc. weren't freeloaders, they were doing the bidding of the US in the UN, maintaining the system where the US can print money without limit, etc. All that soft power has been destroyed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_the_Powerless
by ofalkaed | 2026-01-25 10:54:18+00:00
I will take a more positive view, all the translators being put out of buisness will take up literary translation and we will enter a golden age when it comes to translated literature. AI still has a very long ways to go here and there is a great deal of untranslated literature out there and literature which only has a terrible translation. Probably won't happen but maybe the struggling publishing industry will see the opportunity provided by a glut of out of work translators and jump on it.

One can dream.
by CrzyLngPwd | 2026-01-25 10:54:21+00:00
Germany is an occupied state, and Merz is a US hostage.

The EU has painted itself into a corner by cutting off ties with Russia, being persuaded that Russia, China, Iran, and DPRK are adversaries waiting to eat their babies, lol.

Constantly repeating that Russia is about to invade, whilst also fighting with shovels and stealing washing machines to make missiles.

They are so lost, and now that Daddy is rather unpredictable, they have no direction to go in.

If it weren't so sad, it would be a comedy.
by patrickk | 2026-01-25 10:54:23+00:00
Apple only implemented USB-C due to pressure from the EU.

One area Android has a clear advantage is Android TV devices verified by Google, because there is a much wider array of streaming apps of all kinds available. However google doesn’t seem to focus on this very much, and if you look for forum recommendations for google android streaming devices it’s very often the NVIDIA shield pro from 2019. Hopefully that device will I’ll be supported for a few more years because there seems to not be good easily available alternatives.
by arter45 | 2026-01-25 10:54:55+00:00
Yes, you can have two messaging apps, but people will have a “main app” which is typically the one used by important people in their life (family, partner,…) and/or the one used by most people. Meanwhile, if you all use two apps, everytime you want to check up on a friend you have to check two apps.

Imagine all your friends love pizza, as do you.
Suddenly you decide sushi is better so, naturally, you tell your friends to try out sushi at the next dinner.
Assuming some of your friends are not absolutely against sushi, yes, you’ll have that sushi dinner. But what if they don’t like it that much? They will revert to pizza or accept sushi, occasionally, when they want to see you, while still prefering pizza for all other interactions.

There has to be a perceived advantage for changing habits. If few people see the benefits of Signal or other non-Whatsapp apps, they will not change their minds.
by flohofwoe | 2026-01-25 10:55:38+00:00
> Emscripten uses their val class for JS interop which wraps each canvas call in their abstraction layer.

This is an C++ embind thing right? At least the WebGL2 shim doesn't use that (and IMHO embind should never be used when performance matters), but that might actually explain a lot of the difference.
by jwr | 2026-01-25 10:55:43+00:00
Sigh. After Apple suddenly discontinued Aperture, which left users like me with huge complex photo archives hanging, I will never trust any professional software tool from Apple again. It is a disaster that I still haven't fully recovered from.

I've learned my lesson — all my archives will now be maintained by me, in file structures, with metadata in text files.

And yes, I agree with the article, Aperture was a really good piece of software, with many design decisions that seemed controversial, but were driven by many hours spent with professional photographers, looking at their workflows and listening to them. The result was very good.
by sdoering | 2026-01-25 10:55:59+00:00
To be clear: I find Trump contemptible. But I also try to understand why (powerful) people act the way they do, beyond the surface-level explanations.

The gold discussion imho misses the point if it’s reduced to “Trump is unhinged.”

What we just saw at Davos with Greenland reveals the actual pattern: the theatrics are the tool, not the objective. The erratic behavior generates uncertainty, which then gets converted into bargaining leverage.

With Greenland, Trump just demonstrated how this works: maximum escalation (tariff threats against a NATO partner), then “backing down” in exchange for concessions (“total and permanent access”). The result is a structural shift - Europe becomes more dependent on US decisions in the Arctic, not less.

The second-order effect: coercive bargaining within the Western alliance becomes normalized. Once you’ve done this with Denmark, the threshold drops for similar tactics on other issues - tech regulation, China policy, financial infrastructure.

The third-order effect for German gold: the real question isn’t whether Trump is “crazy enough” to freeze gold reserves. The question is what negotiating leverage the mere possibility creates. Even if the probability is 5% - what concessions would Germany make to bring that risk down to 0%?
That’s the actual logic: the more everyone believes he might do it, the more he can “sell” not doing it.

The economists aren’t arguing that (or if) confiscation is likely. They’re arguing that the risk is no longer negligible enough to ignore - and that the cost-benefit calculation of storing it there has fundamentally shifted.
Show HN: I built a tool to stop my posts from getting shadowbanned
by Nikp263 | 2026-01-25 10:56:32+00:00
Hey HN,

I’m Nikhil (https://nikhilp.online). I've been building projects for the past few years, and decided to build ShillGuard because I kept hitting a wall when trying to share them on platforms like reddit and facebook.

I’d spend weeks building something, write a post and get it instantly removed by Reddit’s AutoMod or flagged as spam in Gmail without knowing why.

ShillGuard is a Chrome extension that analyzes your draft text in real-time against the specific context of where you are posting/sending.

How it works under the hood:

Instead of just checking grammar or tone, the extension injects a content script (built with Plasmo) to scrape the DOM and fetch contextual metadata before you hit submit.

On Reddit: When you type in a text editor, it grabs the subreddit name from the URL and fetches the specific rules.json and about.json endpoints in parallel. It also checks your current account stats (Karma/Account Age) against the community's typical thresholds to predict if you'll be filtered by AutoMod. I plan to add examples of recently popularized posts as well, to provide good examples of how the content "should" look in an ideal world.

On Facebook: It scrapes group metadata and privacy settings to warn you if your post (e.g., containing external links) violates specific group norms.

On Gmail: It analyzes your subject line and body for spam-trigger words and checks for "attachment" inconsistencies (e.g., saying "attached" but forgetting the file). I am enjoying building this feature out the most, as there are so many ways to make it produce high quality emails! Currently, I'm integrating a blacklist and spam check using an external API to help highlight if your account is being hidden by email providers.

The Tech Stack:

Framework: Plasmo (for the browser extension runtime)

Frontend: React + Tailwind CSS

Intelligence: Google Gemini Flash (via the new Google Gen AI SDK)

Architecture: It’s strictly Local-First / BYOK (Bring Your Own Key).

I decided to go with a Bring Your Own Key model for the AI analysis. Your API keys are stored in chrome.storage.local and the analysis requests go directly from your browser to Google. This keeps the extension privacy-focused and avoids me having to act as a middleman for your data.

It’s currently a paid extension (with a lifetime deal) but I really wanted to solve the "black box" frustration of platform moderation for indie hackers.

This is my first time working on a Chrome Extension so I'd love to hear feedback on whether Plasmo is the best framework to use, or any ideas for additional features!
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-25 10:57:37+00:00
Same thing here except when they last upgraded the ONT I had to turn PPPoE off - it's just plain old ethernet service now. But the ONT seems to be performing the equivalent authentication role from what I was able to gather by shoulder surfing the tech.

They had to start offering routers that integrate the ONT because the common consumer gear is 1G or 2.5G ethernet but they sell up to 10G service here.
by microtonal | 2026-01-25 10:58:44+00:00
Just not talking about it and doing it slowly seems to work? E.g. one of the Dutch pension funds has pulled 1/3rd of their investment of US bonds (10/30 billion) since early 2025. They won't talk about, you'll only see it in their public records/reports. They re-invested the money in Dutch and German bonds.
by rvba | 2026-01-25 10:59:16+00:00
People who are reaponsible for Android all use Google phones. They dont care about android. They dont use it. They dont understand their use cases.

If you are hired by a manufacturer of say cola, you cannot drink the competition cola.

Those in google laugh when asked to show their phones - and then show iphones.
In any other business they would be terminated.
by the_biot | 2026-01-25 10:59:23+00:00
I think that's what happened here. I spotted the fake because it has a large number of unused pins, which would not be the case with an FTDI chip that was literally made for this.

I think it's just some generic microcontroller emulating FTDI's protocol in software, but it can't keep up with high-speed transfers of course, and that's how they noticed there was a problem.
How do you decide which "idea posts" are worth building as SaaS?
by dabdabay | 2026-01-25 11:00:05+00:00
I constantly see posts on Reddit, GitHub issues, Indie Hackers, etc. where people complain about workflows, manual processes, or missing tools.

The hard part for me isn’t finding ideas — it’s deciding which ones represent a real, repeatable problem vs. one-off complaints or niche edge cases.

Curious how others do this:
• Do you rely on frequency?
• Personal pain only?
• Comments/upvotes?
• Talking to users directly?

I’m trying to build less and judge better. Would love to hear real heuristics people use.
by businessmate | 2026-01-25 11:00:26+00:00
Within the next year, a routine governance question will be asked inside your organization.

It will not sound dramatic.
It will not allege wrongdoing.
It will be procedural.

“Do we know what the AI said?”

Not what your filings say.
Not what your policies intend.
What an external AI system actually produced, at the moment it was relied upon by someone else.

In many organizations, that question cannot be answered.

And there is no policy that explains why that is acceptable.
by RealityVoid | 2026-01-25 11:00:38+00:00
The command structures are coopted at this point. It might be enough to hold on to power when direct confrontation happens. Things happening in the US now are insane and the most insane part to me is how clear that this is the direction the Trump train was taking it. And people would just not stop going down this road.

Welcome to the new world. It will suck for a long time from now on.
by 0xcb0 | 2026-01-25 11:00:45+00:00
Telekom is a bunch of strange folks.
I lately was not able to send mails, from my private mail servrr to my fathers telekom mail. After investigation I found out my server got blocked. After a decade of working.
I mailed them, and they told me to register my mailserver with them. I shall tell them what mails I will send from there and about what content. I couldn’t believe my eyes.
Sure, thats how mail was supposed to work. Register with every mail server in the world, before you can send mail.

Their mail excerpt:
This system has not sent any e-mail to our customers for a long time.
For security reasons our systems will only accept e-mails from such IP
addresses after a check of setup and information about these systems.

Please give us details about this system and the company using it,
tell us all about the sending domain, what type of e-mail will be sent
and especially if you or your customer want to send newsletter give us
detailed information on how recipients e-mail addresses had been
acquired. Who in person is responsible for e-mail sent from this
system (MTA)?

Please be advised that only technically proper configured and very well
maintained systems are qualified for a reset of reputation and please
see our FAQ section 4.1 (Requirements for smooth access to our e-mail
exchanges <https://postmaster.t-online.de/index.en.html#t4.1>):

"There must be a domain and website with direct contact information
easily deducible from the delivering IP's hostname (FQDN)."
by fnord123 | 2026-01-25 11:01:02+00:00
> Stop citing single studies as definitive. They are not. Check if the ones you are reading or citing have been replicated.

And from the comments:

> From my experience in social science, including some experience in managment studies specifically, researchers regularly belief things – and will even give policy advice based on those beliefs – that have not even been seriously tested, or have straight up been refuted.

Sometimes people use fewer than one non replicatable studies. They invent studies and use that! An example is the "Harvard Goal Study" that is often trotted out at self-review time at companies. The supposed study suggests that people who write down their goals are more likely to achieve them than people who do not. However, Harvard itself cannot find such a study existing:

https://ask.library.harvard.edu/faq/82314
by spwa4 | 2026-01-25 11:01:43+00:00
The EU did do that, decades ago. The problem is that it requires constant investment. It's not profitable. The governments helped build it, abandoned the companies until they went bankrupt, rescued them (they're not actually insane enough to just abandon working satellites), privatized them, they went bankrupt, ...

Obviously the satellites were never modernized. But it does work, for a few thousand terminals for all of Europe with 2x to 10x the ping Starlink provides.

It's like a lot of things in the EU: on the one hand the EU absolutely requires this infrastructure, or they become dependent on foreign nations for critical infrastructure. But they won't pay. It's not even that expensive. Starlink was built with budgets that would be double-digit millions per year per EU country. But the main problem always repeats: they can't agree who gets the money/business.

If you calculate the lifespan and cost of a Starlink satellite you will come to the obvious conclusion: it will be very hard for Starlink to break even. Of course, the same can be said for most of Musk's businesses (perhaps all. I'm not actually aware of any exceptions)