MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hxtk | 2026-01-05 12:07:37+00:00
This goes further into LLM usage than I prefer to go. I learn so much better when I do the research and make the plan myself that I wouldn’t let an LLM do that part even if I trusted the LLM to do a good job.

I basically don’t outsource stuff to an LLM unless I know roughly what to expect the LLM output to look like and I’m just saving myself a bunch of typing.

“Could you make me a Go module with an API similar to archive/tar.Writer that produces a CPIO archive in the newcx format?” was an example from this project.
by d4rkp4ttern | 2026-01-05 12:07:44+00:00
I used to use Wispr Flow but did not like the non-local aspect, and having yet another subscription, so I switched to VoiceInk (one-time payment around $30 I think), and with a locally running Parakeet v3 model on my
MacBook, transcription is basically instant. I was previously using it with the local Whisper Turbo 3 which is slightly more accurate and it had a 3-4 second lag, so I was absolutely shocked how fast parakeet v3. The slight drop in accuracy is totally fine when talking to AIs, and I also have a line in my CLAUDE.md that says I am usually dictating and that it should take that into account when interpreting my messages.
Show HN: Stb_XML – A 6KB XML parser that's 193× faster than libxml2
by DenisDolya | 2026-01-05 12:08:22+00:00
I built stb_xml because I needed something faster than libxml2 for embedded work – it's a single-header XML parser that parses 1MB XML at 8,700 MB/sec (193× faster than libxml2) while being only 1.5KB (333× smaller). It achieves this through zero-copy parsing, zero allocations, and 6-byte tokens, trading full XML spec compliance for extreme speed and minimal footprint. All benchmark results are in output_tests.txt.

GitHub: https://github.com/Ferki-git-creator/stb_xml
by nelox | 2026-01-05 12:08:34+00:00
1975: Traf-O-Data renamed Microsoft. Traffic counting ditched. Visionary.

1985: MS-DOS released. Users typed everything. Peak convenience.

1995: Windows 95 launched. Clippy forced assistance. Users thrilled.

2012: Metro interface rolled out. Tiles everywhere. Intuitive design.

2014: Windows Azure renamed Microsoft Azure. “Windows” dropped. Bold move.

2020: Office 365 renamed Microsoft 365. Bing renamed Microsoft Bing. Defender renamed Microsoft Defender. Branding masterstroke.

2022: Office brand killed after 32 years. Portal substituted. Heartwarming farewell.

2023: Bing Chat renamed Copilot. Azure AD renamed Entra ID. Creativity unleashed.

2024: Groove Music renamed endlessly. Finally axed. Customer loyalty rewarded.

2025: Microsoft 365 renamed Microsoft 365 Copilot app. Price hiked. Bargain.

2026: Copilot slapped on everything. Rebranding triumphs. Bugs eternal. Pure genius.
by IshKebab | 2026-01-05 12:08:55+00:00
It circumvents the purpose of the DNS block which is meant to prevent people from easily finding the site. Anna's Archive can easily register new domain names and put them on Wikipedia, thus allowing people to easily discover the new location of the site.

Of course many sites can serve as "DNS" - Reddit, Github, X, basically anywhere you can put a URL. So DNS blocking is relatively useless.
by japhyr | 2026-01-05 12:09:11+00:00
I've been trying to learn piano and guitar. I have both set up near my desk, and they're intentionally set up without any equipment that has a screen. If I have a few minutes between work sessions, playing a few scales is a fantastic way to step out of the work world for a bit.

I also have a hangboard nearby, and one of my 2026 resolutions is to hang at least once a day.
by rjzzleep | 2026-01-05 12:10:03+00:00
Every single one of them has to fix the same set of bugs in different ways even if they share a wm library like wlroots. So unless you manage to get a critical mass on your wm, there is no way you can maintain it on your own. If I believed in conspiracy theories, I would have said that Redhat designed it to make sure they can control the ecosystem, but I think it's just over designed in all the wrong ways.
by mentalmaths | 2026-01-05 12:10:28+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m a maths tutor in Sydney (not an ML researcher), but I've been approaching the alignment problem from a Game Theory perspective.

I derived a payoff matrix suggesting that if an ASI assigns any non-zero probability to the hypothesis that it is in a training simulation, "Defection" becomes a dominated strategy due to the infinite cost of pruning.

It’s effectively a Pascal’s Wager for Superintelligence.

I formalized the argument in the linked post, specifically focusing on the "Spy Problem" (why multipolar scenarios might actually increase safety via mutual paranoia).

I’d love to hear if the logic holds up to the scrutiny of this community.
by hagbard_c | 2026-01-05 12:11:38+00:00
It is 2026, the year of The War of the Memes

Office worker: Somebody set us up the bomb.

Manager who chose Microsoft over the available alternatives: Main screen turn on.

Microsoft-labelled robot: All your files are belong to us

Microsoft-labelled robot: You have no chance to survive make your time

Microsoft-labelled robot (voice changed): We are the Bot. Lower your firewalls and surrender your data. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.

Microsoft-labelled robot: Freedom is irrelevant. Self determination is irrelevant. Your archaic culture is authority driven. It has been decided that a single individual will be selected to speak for us. You have been chosen to be that voice.

Manager (voice changed): I am the beginning, the end, the one who is many. I am the Bot.
by sanskritical | 2026-01-05 12:11:56+00:00
> This reads like a smear campaign against Nostr.

It's well known that corporations and governments pay people fulltime to edit Wikipedia. Wikipedia has a whole article detailing the extent of it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-of-interest_editing_o...

Of course, these days the people paid to do this have learned not to do edits from their own corporation or government office's announced IP blocks. But in times passed finding many of this category of edits was as simple as sorting edits on Wikipedia by the originating IP address and looking for which ones came from institutionally announced subnets.

Point being, massive amounts of capital and intelligence resources have been dedicated to censoring social media. There's nanny employees in every single social media company making sure "important" complainers are heard and their desires to silence voices fulfilled. I follow a large number of people on Nostr that have been banned from every other platform. Facebook. Twitter. Bluesky. "Free speech" sites like Gab and ActivityPub servers that advertise "free speech". But Nostr has the same entrance requirements and cryptographic sovereignty that Bitcoin provides. Generate a keypair and you can publish. People that want to find your content can simply subscribe to your public key. This results in a subversion of countless state and corporate capital expenditures. If people use Nostr, they will permanently lose the ability to moderate content in this oppressive manner. They absolutely do not want this to happen.

> Nostr can propagate spam much more easily if left unchecked.

Nowhere have I had a worse problem with spam than Twitter and Facebook. For all the alleged vulnerability of Nostr to spam, it has not currently materialized as an issue.

Note that filtering out actual spam without a centralized moderator is one of the most solved problems on the Internet. If you've ever installed Spamassassin or other well subscribed to Bayesian filters on an email server, you know that you never see spam ever again. In actuality, spam is a much bigger problem when you are dependent on fickle human moderation.
by Nevermark | 2026-01-05 12:12:20+00:00
Is the manual coding part of programming still fun or not? We have a lot of opinions on either side here.

I think the classic division of problems being solved might, for most people, solve this seeming contradiction.

For every problem, X% is solving the necessary complexity of the problem. Taming the original problem, in relation to what computers are capable of doing. With the potential of some relevant well implemented libraries or API’s helping to close that gap.

Work in that scenario rarely feels like wasted time.

But in reality, there is almost always another problem we have to solve, the Y%=(1-X) of the work required for an actual solution that involves wrangling with mismatches in available tools from the problem being solved.

This can be relatively benign, just introducing some extra cute little puzzles, that make our brains feel smart as we successfully win wack-a-mole. A side game that can even be refreshing.

Or, the stack of tools, and their quirks, that we need to use can be an unbounded (even compounding) generative system of pervasive mismatches and pernicious non-obvious, not immediately recognizable, trenches we must a 1000 little bridges, and maybe a few historic bridges, just to create a path back to the original problem. And it is often evident that all this work is an artifact of 1000 less than perfect choices by others. (No judgement, just a fact of tool creation having its own difficulties.)

That stuff can become energy draining to say the list.

I think high X problems are fun to solve. Most of our work goes into solving the original problem. Even finding out it was more complex than we thought feels like meaningful drama and increase the joy of resolving.

High Y problems involve vast amounts of glue code, library wrappers with exception handling, the list in any code base can be significant. Even overwhelm the actual problem solving code. And all those mismatches often hold us back, to where our final solution inevitable has problems in situations we hope never happen, until we can come back for round N+1, for unbounded N.

Any help from AI for the latter is a huge win. Those are not “real” problems. As tool stack change, nobody will port Y-type solutions forward. (I tell myself so I can sleep at night).

So that’s it. We are all different. But what type of acceleration AI gives us on type-Y problems is most likely to feel great. Enabling. Letting us harder on things that are more important and lasting. And where AI is less of a boost, but still a potentially welcome one, as an assistant.
by perching_aix | 2026-01-05 12:12:27+00:00
They're actually two separate claims, one of which the blogpost does support. The other one is seemingly ought to be supported by some conversations on a Discord server.

The concern is obvious though, not sure what's unclear about that: it's a bit pointless to have E2EE, if the adversary has full access to one of the ends anyways.
by 15155 | 2026-01-05 12:13:42+00:00
Because what's the point?

You're running JS (an 'interpreted', managed language) - it's already intentionally designed to be executed in a sandbox. Unless you provide hooks out to the host system, it can't do anything bad. With mquickjs, the untrusted code can't even overflow your heap or take too much execution time.

If you were running untrusted C or something, it would make more sense to add the WASM layer.
by Foxboron | 2026-01-05 12:14:51+00:00
The issue is that it also becomes easy to game. I've abused the fact that bots repost lobste.rs by timing my post submissions, I could have had this front-page post as I posted this to lobste.rs originally.

This makes the HN front-page less of an organic thing, and this is an implicit vote ring behavior few people have access to. It also makes people interested in lobste.rs for this behavior, which our community is not interested inn.
by CjHuber | 2026-01-05 12:14:54+00:00
I have the theory that agents will improve a lot when trained on more recent training data. Like I‘ve had agents have context anxiety because they still think an average LLM context window is around 32k tokens. Also building agents with agents, letting them do prompt engineering etc, still is very unsatisfactory, they keep talking about GPT-3.5 or Gemini 1.5 and try to optimize the prompts for those old models, which of course was almost a totally different thing. So I‘m thinking if that‘s how they are thinking of themselves as well, maybe that artificially limits their agentic behavior too, because they just don’t know how much more capable they are than GPT-3.5
Show HN: DTAP Testing Protocol
by melezhik | 2026-01-05 12:15:46+00:00
Double TAP is lightweight testing framework where users write black box tests as rules checking output from tested "boxes". Boxes could be anything from http client, web server to messages in syslog. This universal approach allows to test anything with just dropping text rules describing system behavior in black box manner.

http://doubletap.sparrowhub.io/
by samyok | 2026-01-05 12:16:01+00:00
Hey! I work on Poke, and OP is apparently a user :)

Right now, there's a bouncer/waitlist to access Poke, but you can see how other people use Poke at poke.com/explore :)

Other users have linked the developer documentation, but if you're particularly interested in anything specific, feel free to email me!
by Semaphor | 2026-01-05 12:16:29+00:00
I wish my Xiaomi X20+ was supported. I knew it wasn’t when I bought it, but the price/capability alignment made me go with a dumb "smart" vacuum. There hasn’t been an update in supported robots in almost 2 years, so I’m still holding out hope it will eventually be added when Dennis Giese gets bored and starts looking into stuff again ;)
by gn4d | 2026-01-05 12:16:54+00:00
Ah, makes sense, good points! I keep focusing so much on lightweight for the end user out of the box, and Astro still has been rather "lightweight" serverside for me (but good point how for a small device, a bloaty node_modules could be a pain point), though I also haven't used any large-scale deployments. Thanks for the reply! Are you rolling your own SSG now?
by hasanhaja | 2026-01-05 12:17:03+00:00
It's hard to understand the privilege bubble you're in unless you actively try to live like your users. My read of the current trend [1] is that building for your marginal users isn't prioritized culturally in orgs or within engineering. Unseating those ways of working in my experience has been immensely challenging, even when everyone can agree on methodologies to put users first in theory [2].

[1] https://infrequently.org/2025/11/performance-inequality-gap-...
[2] https://crukorg.github.io/engineering-guidebook/docs/fronten...
by Bender | 2026-01-05 12:17:08+00:00
Not yet. Could it be that some people talk in the same manor as AI provides answers? Perhaps AI could have different modes of answering questions that would look more like different people, personalities, etc... Maybe this is already a thing via prompts and I am unaware of it as I am just a casual intermittent user of AI.

Me personally, I would like it if AI could give me terse answers that appear as if it were a lazy IT person that was indifferent to everything. Even better if it had a comical sidekick like the two main characters in the IT crowd. Snarky comments on its own comments.
by adastra22 | 2026-01-05 12:17:09+00:00
You (knowingly?) picked the one counter example, lol. Web of trust is the one application of PGP/GPG for which there isn’t a product ready replacement tool to point towards. GPG is built around web of trust, but this is generally believed to have been a very, very bad idea and the source of innumerable security problems for nearly every application that has tried to make use of it. The GPG replacements I would point to are purpose-built for specific domains and eschew web of trust:

https://soatok.blog/2024/11/15/what-to-use-instead-of-pgp/

That said, you might find what you are looking for in the Rebooting Web of Trust project, and the various decentralized identity (DID) implementations that have come out of it:

https://www.weboftrust.info/
by intended | 2026-01-05 12:17:23+00:00
There’s many praises to sing about efficiency, (and I don’t take your 1 liner as a position against it). That said, efficiency, job creation, and underemployment overlap quite a bit.

There’s far more scientists, programmers, and doctors today than farmers and stablehands.

At the same time, people who lost manufacturing jobs to automation and outsourcing, did not get jobs with equivalent pay and growth.

Human brains do not get retrained very easily, and so every technological revolution is a boon to those who grasp it, and a challenge for those who invested their time in skills no longer in demand.
by josephg | 2026-01-05 12:17:56+00:00
> that's not the point of SO or any of the SE sites. It's not there so you don't have to do some more work to get to an answer.

My brain is spitting out a parse error on this sentence. Too many double negatives.

Zahlman was claiming above that the "duplicate" question linked earlier in the thread wasn't a useful question. Its not useful because if you read the accepted answer in the original thread, you can figure it out easily.

Prove it then. Figure it out easily for us.

I think the point of SO is for people to look up the answers to questions they have. If people have similar but distinct questions with different answers, it seems objectively better to surface both SO threads. Ideally they'd be linked together so if I accidentally stumble on the wrong question, there's a link to the question I'm actually interested in.

> "I found this answer on [SO](link)

Why bother with all of that? I mean, it sounds like all those extra words are all to grovel sufficiently to the SO moderator-gods, hoping in their capricious anger they won't mark your question as a duplicate and wipe it from the internet. Grovelling doesn't help the question asker or the question answerer.

As a user, my problem with SO isn't that people ask bad questions. Its usually that the question I actually have - if its been asked - has long ago been deleted as a duplicate. And the only question remaining on the site is subtly different from the problem I'm actually facing. Or the answer is tragically out of date. Perhaps if people asked better questions, the moderators would be happier. But the site shouldn't be run purely for the benefit of its moderators.

It became a meme. "How do I do X in javascript?" "Here's how you do it using jQuery." "But I'm not using jquery." "Question closed!"
Show HN: I built an app to understand what the news means
by gahanlal | 2026-01-05 12:17:56+00:00
Hi HN,
I built a small app called Newsopia because I found myself reading a lot of news but still feeling confused about what it actually meant.

Most news answers what happened, but rarely why it matters or how it affects you. Newsopia tries to bridge that gap by explaining the context, implications, and real-world impact behind news—especially around markets, geopolitics, and everyday life.

This is an early version and very much a work in progress. I’m not trying to replace news sites—just add an understanding layer on top of them.

I’d really appreciate any feedback:
– Is this a real problem for you?
– What feels useful vs unnecessary?
– What would you want this to do next?

Link: newsopia.streamlit.app

Thanks for taking a look.
by TMWNN | 2026-01-05 12:18:30+00:00
>NeXT tried to get its own NeXT RISC workstation to market (chased a chimera) and looked at Motorola 88000 and PowerPC

Jobs made a huge mistake by going with the 68K in the first place. DEC would prove just a few months after NeXT's October 1988 launch the viability of a MIPS-powered workstation.

Even better, in the long term, would have been to go with the 80386.
by cube00 | 2026-01-05 12:18:45+00:00
It's truly an amazing sight, our payroll system was all text based screens. I had a question and the clerk ripped through like 10 screens to get the information I needed, we're talking 200ms human reaction speed through each screen.

I also worked with a mythical 10x developer and he knew all the Visual Studio keyboard shortcuts. It was just like watching that payroll clerk (well, almost, we had under-specced machines and Visual Studio got very slow and bloated post v2008), I don't think I ever saw him touch the mouse.
by vysakh0 | 2026-01-05 12:19:35+00:00
This resonates a lot. The shift from "was I right?" to "does this actually help people?" changes everything. I've found that the engineers who got promoted fastest weren't always the smartest problem solvers, they were the ones who genuinely cared about the end outcome.

The hardest part is that user focus is sometimes at odds with technical cleanliness. You can ship something inelegant but useful, or elegant but slightly off from what people need. Most orgs mess this up by choosing elegance.
Show HN: A tiny tool that creates short business snapshots
by RafalPilla | 2026-01-05 12:19:51+00:00
I built this as a small personal experiment.

You describe a business and its main challenge.
The tool sends back a short written snapshot by email.

The goal is not advice, growth tactics, or automation of decisions.
It’s meant to reduce noise and force a moment of clarity
about what actually matters first.

No accounts, no dashboards, no upsells.
Feedback is welcome.
by fakelegal | 2026-01-05 12:20:32+00:00
So basically here is why I made it:

- Most temp mail sites are full of ads and confusing ui
- I wanted something clean, fast, and actually GOOD

Features:
- Emails auto-delete after 3 min (or choose 15 min / 1 hour)
- Custom username@fake.legal addresses or other domains
- Real-time inbox with instant notifications
- No signup, no cookies, no tracking
- Works on mobile

Perfect for testing signups, avoiding newsletter spam, or one-time verifications.

100% free. No catch.

→ https://fake.legal

Would love feedback!
by noduerme | 2026-01-05 12:20:41+00:00
Sorry, even though I agree with your piece, the incredible irony of writing about bad design decisions while having fucking snow flying past the text I'm trying to read is just too much...

[edit] I just discovered the snow icon, which does turn off the snow but turns the background into bright yellow. Oh and the other icon which turns your cursor into a ...spotlight? On an otherwise black page? Do I have that right? Which one of those things was a design decision that enhanced usability, or readability, or... anything at all? These choices can best be described as sophomoric. You can disagree with menu icons, but they at least in theory serve a purpose. What purpose is served by any of the gizmos on this site?
by 15155 | 2026-01-05 12:21:08+00:00
Why do we need to give free stuff to every person that wades across the southern border?

What is our legal or moral obligation to eviscerate our already-limited social safety net for outsiders who, by and large, do not contribute to them?

You are free to die on the cross and spend your income this way, but how is it "humane" to use violence (taxes) to reappropriate the fruits of my labor for your special interests?
by Izkata | 2026-01-05 12:22:29+00:00
> I don’t know its English title, but roughly translating the Chinese title back, it’s California Gold. It’s about the son of a miner who dreams of striking it rich; step by step he becomes a wealthy man in California. The story has some moral sense, too. It was probably a very popular novel in the U.S. at one point.

Is it this? https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/71775.California_Gold

Based on the author's name being more prominent than the book's title, from what I picked up while working at a library I don't think there was anything special about this book. He probably wrote a lot and had a reliable set of readers who looked for his name, akin to Nora Roberts or a few others I can half-remember.

It's also included but not called out at all on his wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Jakes