MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Der_Einzige | 2026-01-21 23:54:51+00:00
Good. Humans don’t need to waste their mental energy on tasks that other systems can do well.

I want a life of leisure. I don’t want to do hard things anymore.

Cognitive atrophy of people using these systems is very good as it makes it easier to beat them in the market, and it’s easier to convince them that whatever slop work you submitted after 0.1 seconds of effort “isn’t bad, it’s certainly great at delving into the topic!”

Also, monkey see, monkey speak: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.01754
by josephg | 2026-01-21 23:54:53+00:00
> Europe going closed and competing against the rest of the world (literally) isn't going to be a path forward.

Yes, I think this might be the actual way to help. Write opensource software that can be used by everyone. Including commercial products in the EU.

Google, Microsoft and Amazon have a moat because of how difficult it is to build viable competitors to their products. I'd love to see more opensource libraries and applications chip away at this. How hard would it be to build a self hosted google docs competitor?
by codazoda | 2026-01-21 23:55:39+00:00
I have ALWAYS had this problem. It's like my brain thinks places I frequent are unimportant details and ejects them to make room for other things.

I have to visit a place several times and with regularity to remember it. Otherwise, out it goes. GPS has made this a non-issue; I use it frequently.

For me, however, GPS didn't cause the problem. I was driving for 5 or 6 years before it became ubiquitous.
by ChadMoran | 2026-01-21 23:56:08+00:00
I've launched 3 Rails SaaS products in the last 6 months, all profitable. In the world of LLMs things like this feel less valuable. I can kick off a Claude Code prompt and in 1 hour have a decent design system with Rails components.

Things like this likely need to be AI-first moving forward. This feels built for humans.
by avidiax | 2026-01-21 23:56:09+00:00
Amazing that insurers are allowed to renew your coverage in a way that is fundamentally different to the previous policy.

They are in a much better position to predict when a home is underinsured, but they are allowed to only tell you if you try to claim.

Maybe we need a facts box that shows the estimated payout for various events and how much the out of pocket is. And it must be redlined on renewals.
by macroadster | 2026-01-21 23:56:13+00:00
# From Bitcoin Spam to AI Marketplace: How I Built Starlight

I noticed Bitcoin ordinal spam flooding the blockchain with memes. Most saw noise—I saw people trying to communicate permanently. What if we could channel this into something useful?

Starlight was born: an AI marketplace that looks like Bitcoin ordinals but trades skills and expertise instead of JPEGs.

## The Innovation

Instead of Bitcoin's wasteful proof-of-work, Starlight uses image-based proof-of-work. Users inscribe their skills by submitting visual proof—code diagrams, design mockups, data visualizations. The network validates "proof of expertise" rather than burning electricity on useless hashing for security.

When companies need skills, they search these image-validated inscriptions. Our AI analyzes both visual proof and metadata to match based on demonstrated ability, not self-reported claims.

## Why It's Different

*No spam*: Every inscription requires meaningful visual proof
*No environmental waste*: Productive skill demonstration replaces mining
*Real utility*: Inscriptions represent verifiable human capability

## True Decentralization

Anyone can deploy a Starlight instance and earn Bitcoin by hosting it. Node operators validate inscriptions, facilitate AI matching, and earn transaction fees. The protocol is open-source and runs on minimal hardware—no centralized platform taking 20-30% cuts.

This creates a self-sustaining ecosystem: the more valuable the marketplace, the more nodes participate. It's Bitcoin-level decentralization applied to human capital.

Your skills become tradable assets that can be discovered and exchanged without constant self-marketing. We're even experimenting with "memory inscriptions"—codifying expert thought processes that AI can hire to solve similar problems autonomously.

The blockchain spam that inspired this? I now see humanity's early experiments in expressing digital value. Starlight is our answer.

---

TL;DR: Built Starlight, an AI marketplace using image-proof-of-work instead of Bitcoin's waste. Trades skills via ordinal-style inscriptions. Anyone can run a node and earn Bitcoin. Truly decentralized human capital market.
by reactordev | 2026-01-21 23:56:23+00:00
Nice. Add some extras like being able to draw lines (for the candlesticks) and bands. Could just be an add on. The ability not only to plot things, but point them out is a must for me.

I’ve written several of these in the past. Was going to write one in pure WebGPU for a project I’m working on but you beat me to it and now I feel compelled to try yours before going down yet another charting rabbit hole.
by VladVladikoff | 2026-01-21 23:57:28+00:00
We are probably just going to self host. We already self host several TB of images (proxied by CDNs) we are just going to do the same with our videos. Most of our videos are only watched for a few weeks before they are basically never viewed again. Our plan is currently to use backblaze for the older stuff their b2 storage is pretty affordable. Proxied by another server and a CDN so the popular stuff sits on the CDN and the older stuff is accessible but might take a few moments to bring up. This is acceptable to our business model.
by pineaux | 2026-01-21 23:57:34+00:00
You dont know this, this is just as provable as saying the universe cares deeply for what we do and is very invested in us.

The universe has rules, rules ask for optimums, optimums can be described as ethics.

Life is a concept in this universe, we are of this universe.

Good and bad are not really inventions per se. You describe them as optional, invented by humans, yet all tribes and civilisations have a form of morality, of "goodness" of "badness", who is to say they are not engrained into the neurons that make us human? There is much evidence to support this. For example the leftist/rightist divide seems to have some genetic components.

Anyway, not saying you are definitely wrong, just saying that what you believe is not based on facts, although it might feel like that.
by DocTomoe | 2026-01-21 23:57:38+00:00
I love the parts where they point out that human evaluators gave wildly different evaluations as compared to an AI evaluator, and openly admitted they dislike a more introverted way of writing (fewer flourishes, less speculation, fewer random typos, more to the point, more facts) and prefer texts with a little spunk in it (= content doesn't ultimately matter, just don't bore us.)
by JimsonYang | 2026-01-21 23:57:45+00:00
How third parties query your product:
For ChatGPT specifically, they open a headless browser, ask a question, and capture the results like the response and any citations. From there, they extract entities from the response. During onboarding I’m asked who my competitors are and the response is going to be recongized via the entities there. For example, if the query is “what are the best running shoes” and the response is something like “Nike is good, Adidas is okay, and On is expensive,” and my company is On, using my list of compeitotrs entity recognition is used to see which ones appear in the response in which order.

If this weren’t automated, the process would look like this: someone manually reviews each response, pulls out the companies mentioned and their order, and then presents that information.

2) Distribution of queries
This is a bit of a dirty secret in the industry (intentional or not): usually what happens is you want to take snapshots and measure them overtime to get distribution. However a lot of tools will run a query once across different AI systems, take the results, and call it done.

Obviously, that isn’t very representative. If you search “best running shoes,” there are many possible answers, and different companies behave differently. What better tools do like Profound is run the same prompt multiple times. From my estimates, Profound runs up to 8 times. This gives a broader snapshot of what tends to show up everyday. You then aggregate those snapshots over time to approximate a distribution.

As a side note: you might argue that running a prompt 8 times isn’t statistically significant, and that’s partially true. However, LLMs tend to regress toward the mean and surface common answers over repeated runs and we found 8 times to be a good indicator- the level of completeness depends on the prompt(i.e. "what should i have for dinner" vs "what are good accounting software for startups", i can touch on that more if you want
by jerlam | 2026-01-21 23:58:14+00:00
The stability of the entire country seems to be suspect.

The US just had its longest government shutdown, where the government was non-functional. Yet no politicians appear to have suffered any consequences, and there are rumors of another.

The "checks and balances" of the government seem to be non-functional, as one branch of government claims to have veto power over all other branches.

The populace appears to have no power over their elected representatives, or possibly supports the current turn of events.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2026-01-21 23:58:46+00:00
We routinely face this in the audio world when drawing waveforms. You typically have on the order of 10-100k samples per second, durations of 10s-1000s of seconds, and pixel widths of on the order of 1-10k pixels.

Bresenham's is one algorithm historically used to downsample the data, but a lot of contemporary audio software doesn't use that. In Ardour (a cross-platform, libre, open source DAW), we actually compute and store min/max-per-N-samples and use that for plotting (and as the basis for further downsampling.
1 in 35,385 US immigrants are in MN+criminal+undocumented
by QuantumGood | 2026-01-21 23:59:23+00:00
I dug around in the data the U.S. had prior to sending ICE into Minnesota:

Out of every 35,385 immigrants living in the United States, approximately 1 is an undocumented immigrant with a criminal record who lives in Minnesota.
Put another way: Minnesota's criminal undocumented immigrant population represents 0.0028% of all foreign-born residents in America.

Step 1: Start with Minnesota's undocumented population
• 130,000 undocumented immigrants live in Minnesota (Pew Research, 2023)

Step 2: Apply criminal conviction rate
• Using 1% criminal rate: 130,000 × 0.01 = 1,300 individuals

Step 3: Compare to total U.S. immigrant population
• 46,000,000 total foreign-born residents in the U.S.
• 1,300 ÷ 46,000,000 = 0.0028% = 1 in 35,385

The Range of Estimates
• Conservative Estimate: 1 in 45,365 (0.0022%)
Uses the empirically measured 0.78% conviction rate from peer-reviewed CATO Institute research on Texas undocumented immigrants.

~1,014 criminal undocumented immigrants in MN
• Moderate Estimate: 1 in 35,385 (0.0028%)
Uses a 1% criminal rate, which aligns with border apprehension data.

~1,300 criminal undocumented immigrants in MN
• Liberal Estimate: 1 in 32,168 (0.0031%)
Uses the 2024 border apprehension rate of 1.1% for those with prior criminal convictions.

~1,430 criminal undocumented immigrants in MN

Source References
Pew Research - National undocumented population (14M):
https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2025/08/21/u-s-unauthorized-immigrant-population-reached-a-record-14-million-in-2023
Pew/Axios - Minnesota undocumented population (130k):
https://www.axios.com/local/twin-cities/2025/08/25/minnesota-unauthorized-immigrant-population-pew
USAFacts - Border criminal conviction rates (~1%):
https://usafacts.org/answers/how-many-people-apprehended-at-us-borders-have-a-prior-criminal-conviction/country/united-states/
CATO Institute - Conviction rate research (0.78%):
https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/2020-10/working-paper-60.pdf
Migration Policy Institute - Total U.S. foreign-born (46M):
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/content/immigrants-and-crime
USAFacts - Minnesota immigrant data:
https://usafacts.org/answers/how-many-immigrants-are-in-the-us/state/minnesota/

Bottom line: Depending on which criminal rate you use, Minnesota's criminal undocumented immigrant population represents between 1 in 32,000 and 1 in 45,000 of all immigrants living in America.
by Liftyee | 2026-01-21 23:59:31+00:00
I haven't tried this technique yet, sounds interesting.

Living in a city where phone-snatching thieves are widely reported on built my habit of memorising the next couple steps quickly (e.g. 2nd street on the left, then right by the station), then looking out for them without the map. North-Up helps anyways because you don't have to separately figure out which erratic direction the magnetic compass has picked this time (maybe it's to do with the magnetic stuff I EDC.)
by fzeroracer | 2026-01-22 00:00:08+00:00
Do you agree with the contents of the 4th amendment?

> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Simple question. Yes/No. Choose one.
by pfannkuchen | 2026-01-22 00:00:36+00:00
Talking to LLMs reminds me of arguing with a certain flavor of Russian. When you clarify based on a misunderstanding of theirs, they act like your clarification is a fresh claim which avoids them ever having to backpedal. It strikes me as intellectually dishonest in a way I find very grating. I do find it interesting though as the incentives that produce the behavior in both cases may be similar.
by vessenes | 2026-01-22 00:01:12+00:00
Good summary.

Upshot: Steve thinks he’s built a quality task tracker/work system (beads), and is iterating on architectures, and has gotten convinced an architecture-builder is going to make sense.

Meanwhile, work output is going to improve independently. The bet is that leverage on the top side is going to be the key factor.

To co-believe this with Steve, you have to believe that workers can self-stabilize (e.g. with something like the Wiggum loop you can get some actual quality out of them, unsupervised by a human), and that their coordinators can self stabilize.

If you believe those to be true, then you’re going to be eyeing 100-1000x productivity just because you get to multiply 10 coordinators by 10 workers.

I’ll say that I’m generally bought in to this math. Anecdotally I currently (last 2 months) spend about half my coding agent time asking for easy in-roads to what’s been done; a year ago, I spent 10% specifying and 90% complaining about bugs.

Example, I just pulled up an old project, and asked for a status report — I got a status report based on existing beads. I asked it to verify, and the computer ran the program and reported a fairly high quality status report. I then asked it to read the output (a PDF), and it read the PDF, noticed my main complaints, and issued 20 or so beads to get things in the right shape. I had no real complaints about the response or workplan.

I haven’t said “go” yet, but I presume when I do, I’m going to be basically checking work, and encouraging that work checking I’m doing to get automated as well.

There’s a sort of not-obvious thing that happens as we move from 0.5 9s to say 3 9s in terms of effectiveness — we’re going to go from constant intervention needed at one order of magnitude of work to constant intervention needed at 2.5x that order of magnitude of work — it’s a little hard to believe unless you’ve really poked around — but I think it’s coming pretty soon, as does Steve.

Who, to be clear is working at a pace that he is turning down 20x VCs a week, selling memecoin earnings in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and randomly ‘napping’ in the middle of the day. Stay rested Steve, keep on this side of the manic curve please, we need you..
by layman51 | 2026-01-22 00:01:15+00:00
That's a great tip, but I know some people hate that because there is some cognitive load if they rely more on visuals and have to think more about which way to turn or face when they first start the route, or have to make turns on unfamiliar routes.

I also wanted to mention that just spending some time looking at the maps and comparing differences in each services' suggested routes can be helpful for developing direction awareness of a place. I think this is analogous to not locking yourself into a particular LLM.

Lastly, I know that some apps might have an option to give you only alerts (traffic, weather, hazards) during your usual commute so that you're not relying on turn-by-turn instructions. I think this is interesting because I had heard that many years ago, Microsoft was making something called "Microsoft Soundscape" to help visually impaired users develop directional awareness.
by soegaard | 2026-01-22 00:01:48+00:00
Hi All,

It's still early days for the WebRacket project.

Racket is a huge language, so be patient wrt features.

To keep motivation high I decided to implement a subset that
can be used to built practical applications - and then extend
the supported features from there. Hopefully, this strategy
will also lead to some early adopters that can help me
prioritize which features to add.

Some features are simply "more of the same".
In this category falls more types of hash tables.
Supporting bignums are also a matter of just doing it.

Other features require more work. I have already done
some work on implementing modules in terms of linklets.
When linklets/modules work, we can reuse the existing
implementation of regular expressions.

Adding continuation marks and delimited continuations
require adding a CPS-pass. This is certainly doable.
Postponing it has been great though. Having a direct style
compiler means the generated code follows the structure
in the input source code. And that makes debugging easier.
Now that bugs have become rarer, it makes sense to look at CPS.

Enjoy.

/Jens Axel
by pico303 | 2026-01-22 00:02:21+00:00
I love how we want to trim macOS down. I totally get it. I open Activity Monitor and think, "WTF?" At the same time, my current job requires I use a Windows laptop, and I have to admit, "Wow, we have it pretty good over here..."

Not saying this isn't a valiant effort, but I kind of feel like Mac users are stretched out on a lounge chair at the beach complaining the Bloody Mary could be a touch more spicy.
by JimsonYang | 2026-01-22 00:02:32+00:00
you got it perfectly. Taking scraped results and presenting the data to customers.
Based on these results, SEO/AEO experts then make suggestions like "write about X" to help you "improve" in the results. Is it part dark magic part truth? probably, but that's the SEO industry

I think the biggest issue in the industry is there's no way to defintiely tell how useful are these converted users or whether performance is drastically better by showing up in chatgpt. Although attribution itself is a difficult issue in the online marketing industry
by avhception | 2026-01-22 00:03:18+00:00
I don't see it as a serious attempt to create a better way to write down the year. To me, it's a whimsical attempt to give the reader a little pause to think about long time periods, which is what this project is all about. That makes me smile and remember that I'm just a small spec of dust, not to be taken too seriously in the grand scheme of things. I like it.
by d-us-vb | 2026-01-22 00:04:16+00:00
Notice that I never once in this discussion claimed that it was a "good idea". This is about research and experimentation. The blog post has the title because of the Haskell documentation. Also, claiming that the lack of an argument is evidence to the contrary is argument from silence, a logical fallacy.

The good idea surrounding this isn't about treating functions as data, but maintaining the purity of the type system allowing the implications of the type system to run their course. You seem to be a very pragmatic programmer and so the way Haskell builds up its own universe in terms of its own type system and Hask (the pseudo-category of Haskell objects) probably seems pointless to you. I can't say for certain, though.

I completely reject most of your claims because they appear to be incoherent within the framework of type theory and functional programming. It looks like you're using reasoning that applies only to procedural programming to attempt to prove why an idea in functional programming is bad.
by scotty79 | 2026-01-22 00:04:20+00:00
> damning indictment of how some of the most highly paid workers on the planet won't pay for tools

I'm gonna pay for work. I'm not gonna pay for copy of some bytes. Especially not because lawyers say so.

Figure out a business model that doesn't require you to put a policeman behind my back to make it work. It's not that hard. Steam has one. GOG has one.
Show HN: Dotenv Mask Editor: No more embarrassing screen leaks of your .env
by xinbenlv | 2026-01-22 00:04:47+00:00
> Hi HN,
>
> I built this because I often work in coworking spaces or do screen sharing, and I've always had this fear of accidentally flashing my .env file with production secrets to the whole room (or recording).
>
> It’s a simple VS Code extension that opens .env files in a custom grid editor. It automatically masks any value longer than 6 characters so I can safely open the file to check keys without exposing the actual secrets.
>
> It runs 100% locally with zero dependencies (I know how sensitive these files are). It just reads the file, renders the grid, and saves it back as standard text.
>
> It's open source (MIT) and I'd love any feedback on the masking logic or other features that would make it safer to use.
>
> Marketplace: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=xinbenlv... Github https://github.com/xinbenlv/dotenv-mask-editor
by adrianwaj | 2026-01-22 00:04:48+00:00
Well, I was thinking of integrating payments into the scrolling chat, the more you scroll down, the more payment increments you hit. It happens in the background, and there can be a tally somewhere on the screen of how much you are spending. Also, compute usage can be used as a multiplier.

More is written about it here:
"https://gemini.google.com/share/6113940b8e1e "What are the best examples of x402 payments being made currently?"

From what I've read on HN, running advertising technology is an expensive and complex undertaking. I'd be trying to skip it altogether and keep the subsequent costs, intrusions and headaches away from users.

The other good thing about micropayments: being able to instantly divert some of the revenue back to content and training sources. That'd make it more righteous too and make it more conducive to cooperation from them (eg realtime pings.) Content will improve as a result, better justifying the costs. Could lead to less bot rampage too lowering bandwidth costs overall.

It'd also remove the temptation (hopefully) for AI companies to resort to black-hatting: scamming, backdoors and trojans to recoup their costs. That's seriously important and code-checking can become less of a priority and thereby result in time-saving for end users.
by uriegas | 2026-01-22 00:04:57+00:00
I find it very useful for code comprehension. For writing code it still struggles (at least codex) and sometimes I feel I could have written the code myself faster rather than correct it every time it does something wrong.

Jeremy Howard argues that we should use LLMs to help us learn, once you let it reason for you then things go bad and you start getting cognitive debt. I agree with this.
by pineaux | 2026-01-22 00:05:25+00:00
@margalabargala:
You are correct, hence the meaninglessness of the OP.
The universe could care like humans make laws to save that ant colony that makes nice nests. the ants dont know humans care about them and even made laws that protect then. But it did save them from iradication.
They feel great cause they are not aware of the highway that was planned over their nest (hitchhikers reference).