MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by LelouBil | 2026-01-11 03:31:31+00:00
Forced translations.

Yes YouTube, I have my browser set to French, but I read and understand English perfectly fine, please stop badly translating English video titles (or force-enabling french auto-dub, it's even worse).

At least I found an extension for this a couple of days ago :

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-no-tr...
by 0xbadcafebee | 2026-01-11 03:32:16+00:00
NIH syndrome isn't sustainable, unless you're like Google and have more money than sense.

> These systems need to be open and owned by us. Managed is okay, but they shouldn't be proprietary offerings.

You could say this about all software in the world, but good luck with that... people who make money off of making things and selling things are going to keep doing so in non-open ways, because it's advantageous. And customers will keep buying them, because it's better than the alternative.
by Trumpi | 2026-01-11 03:32:52+00:00
In Trump's original post, he is "calling for" the rate cap, which I interpret differently to "mandating" a rate cap. The Guardian article seems to think that the executive has no authority to compel banks to comply, and this might well be the reason he is merely "calling for" this rate cap.

And if this is the correct interpretation, then this was communicated in a very confusing way.
by bediger4000 | 2026-01-11 03:33:19+00:00
Wow, this is great! It's frankly wonderful we have a president we trust with these decisions. Can you imagine the congressional hearings that a move like this from any of the other presidents we've had since 1988? Media would have freaked out, markets tumbled. There would have been impeachment rumors. But now? We get "just the facts" reporting, and it just happens. No hearings, no media frenzy, market soars.
by tom_ | 2026-01-11 03:33:32+00:00
I just give up the moment I notice it. I gave up on this one once I got to "The High Fidelity Trap". My LLMdar said: brrrrrp. (Imagine the sound of a sad trombone, only out of tune.) If I feel like the author couldn't be bothered to write it, I feel like I can't be bothered to read it.

And if I'm wrong: so be it. I'm comfortable living dangerously.

(Reading it again, I probably should have noticed by "But here’s the thing: AI-generated UIs are high-fidelity by default", a couple of sentences previously. And in fact, there's "Deliberately sketchy. Intentionally low-fidelity. The comic-sans-looking wireframes were a feature, not a bug" in the very first paragraph - god, I'm so stupid! Still, each time I get this wrong, I'm that bit more likely to spot it in future.)
by code_biologist | 2026-01-11 03:35:28+00:00
I'll add to my sibling commenters and say that there is a long history of critiquing the value of separation of concerns. One of my favorite early talks that sold me on React was "Pete Hunt: React: Rethinking best practices -- JSConf EU" from Oct 2013 [1] that critiqued the separation of concerns of HTML templates + JS popular in the 2000s and early 2010s and instead advocated for componentization as higher return on investment. I think people already saw styling separation of concerns as not particularly valuable at that point as well, just it wasn't clear what component-friendly styling abstraction was going to win.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7cQ3mrcKaY
by LorenPechtel | 2026-01-11 03:36:04+00:00
Natural fission reactors are pretty slow things, I wouldn't think they would be very good at forming transuranics.

But there's another source out there that we can't see: imagine what's happening in the electron-degenerate portion of a neutron star. The same process that creates the heavy stuff that gets tossed about from mergers is also going to create higher stuff that will decay before we ever see it.
by kobalsky | 2026-01-11 03:37:02+00:00
> Month 2: The Cracks Start Showing
> First production issue: a service kept crashing with OOMKilled errors.
> ...
> I spent three hours figuring out:
> ...
> What the difference between requests and limits even means

so he says before this he wouldn't shut up about k8s, but obviously didn't even read the documentation.

how do you expect to use a tool as encompassing as k8s without even understanding basic concepts?

give these guys an airplane and they will start googling how to take off when they are already speeding up on the runway.
by zephen | 2026-01-11 03:38:26+00:00
Open source software helped to dramatically reduce the cost of paid software, because there is a now a minimum bar of functionality you have to produce in order to sell software.

And, in many cases, you had to produce that value yourself. GPL licensing lawsuits ensured this.

AI extracting value from software in such a way that the creators no longer can take the small scraps they were willing to live on seems likely to change this dynamic.

I expect no-source-available software (including shareware) to proliferate again, to the detriment of open source.
by skybrian | 2026-01-11 03:38:42+00:00
That seems fine if you have a box that's running all the time and something like tailscale set up. I haven't bothered because I'm lazy, but I do want any coding agents I have off my laptop and off the local network, because I'm a little wary about them getting subverted. They need Internet access anyway, so might as well.

Since I anticipate using coding agents a lot, that means my dev environment is going to live in a VM in the cloud from now on.
by compressedgas | 2026-01-11 03:39:36+00:00
Pricing per byte doesn't work as it undervalues or overvalues items.

To get more money out of this system people will make their items larger. For example a movie or track might only be available in its high resolution uncompressed form because that form is the one that has the highest total price.

> Pay 0.001 USDC per 1MB of a movie

A DVD contains about 5700MB at that rate it would be 5.7 USD. No publisher is going to post a DVD size version when they can get 307.2 USD for the 300GB Blu-ray upscale.
by driggs | 2026-01-11 03:40:31+00:00
Particularly relevant to HN is that Bobby's primary writing partner for decades was John Perry Barlow, cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF):

https://www.eff.org/john-perry-barlow

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
by John Perry Barlow

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel,
I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I
ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You
have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address
you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always
speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally
independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us.

https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence#main-content

Many of Bobby Weir's best-known songs had lyrics penned by Barlow. The world is a brighter place because of their partnership, and a little more grey in their absence.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2026-01-11 03:41:25+00:00
Have you used Amazon Q? It's actually pretty handy at investigating, diagnosing, and providing solutions for AWS issues. For some reason none of our teams use it, and waste their time googling or opening tickets for me to answer. I go to Q and ask it, it provides the answer, I send it back to the user. I don't think an "SRE Agent" will be useful because it's too generic, but "Agent customized to solve problems for one specific product/service/etc" can actually be very useful.

That said, I think you're right that you can't really replace an Operations staff, as there will always need to be a human making complex, multi-dimensional decisions around constantly changing scenarios, in order to keep a business operational.
by dmitrygr | 2026-01-11 03:41:27+00:00
I will defend absolute freedom of all speech by Musk and against Musk. By Adobe and against Adobe. My Microsoft and against Microsoft. By you and against you. By me and against me. Unlike many who merely theorize about this from their armchairs, I've lived in a place without free speech and I know what that leads to, how fast, and how hard it is to get out of that hole. There is no such thing as "let's just have a little less freedom of speech". It either exists or very quickly it does not.
by VerifiedReports | 2026-01-11 03:41:34+00:00
It's NOT nice-looking plain text. It's text littered with a bunch of formatting characters that aren't respected by any lightweight viewer. So why have them in there?

I'm not proposing to make it a better markup language. I just want to VIEW it with the formatting that it calls for.

It's mystifying that people are actually opposed to this. It's like a massive psychology-class experiment, when a bunch of confederates champion an obviously-absurd point of view to see if the subject of the experiment will hold his ground.
by pm90 | 2026-01-11 03:42:47+00:00
> I could extend that one step further to cloud itself, but that's an argument for another day

Absolutely. OSS platforms like k8s got a long way. Openstack was the dream (deeply flawed in execution). If we want to seriously talk about resilience we can’t accept that almost all major clouds run proprietary systems and we just have to trust them that they’ll be around forever.
by halostatue | 2026-01-11 03:43:00+00:00
I won't bother as I'm vegetarian, which means that I really don't care the "supposed" benefits (which likely pale compared to the ingestion of long chain saturated fats present in beef tallow, as opposed to the short and medium chain saturated fats present in coconut oil). Beef tallow is irrelevant to me except for restaurateurs or food manufacturers who use it without disclosing it. (One should disclose its use in any case. For people who avoid pork, knowing that your product contains "beef lard" instead of "whatever lard was cheapest this week" matters, because they can't do "pork lard".)

But the reality is that there's insufficient science for the promotion of beef tallow in RFK's health treason. For large groups of people it's off limits due to personal dietary restrictions (religious or animal product avoidance) and would be contraindicated for anyone who currently has cardiovascular diseases involving high cholesterol.

Use beef tallow, don't use beef tallow. I don't care unless I'm possibly eating food that you have prepared or manufactured (because I don't want rendered animal fats in my food). But don't pretend that it's a health food. It isn't, but can still be eaten in moderation by anyone who _doesn't_ mind beef products in their food.
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2026-01-11 03:43:36+00:00
Fun fact: The "traditional" way of making it was extracting piperine from black pepper and reacting that with nitric acid. Nowadays it's made in other more industrial scalable ways.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piperidine#List_of_piperidine_...

But yes, the same base precursors (and their siblings) are used to manufacture ADHD meds (ritalin/concerta), antidepressants (paxil), insect repellents (picaridin/bayrepel), hair loss medications (rogaine), allergy meds (claritin), anti-psychotics (haldol), anti-diarrhea meds (imodium), and many others. And also PCP.

So it's non-trivial to prevent. The core of the issue is that the one pot Gupta method came about in the 2000s and it made it extremely easy to manufacture fentanyl using these basic building blocks for so much of the pharma industry. Not only just making it easier to source ingredients but it took out all the steps and made the process easy as hell as well.
by halostatue | 2026-01-11 03:45:59+00:00
I have no disagreement with this and I think I said as much.

But the premise of the original article (that beef tallow ever went away, which is required for a comeback) is deeply flawed, and the fascionable junk science from RFK is the dumbest possible reason to use beef tallow.

Just don't expect me (a vegetarian) to eat anything that has beef tallow, and expect me to be very pissed off if I later learn a restaurant or food manufacturer uses beef tallow without disclosing it, because that's taking choice away from me.
by eru | 2026-01-11 03:46:17+00:00
Thieves steal because they know a fence will take the goods of their hands. The fence will take the goods of their hands, because they know they can sell them on.

People buy into IPOs partially because they know a lively secondary market exists, where they can offload the shares later. Index funds are part of that secondary market.

Just to be clear, I don't think investors in IPOs are thieves. I'm just saying that you can legitimately say that the secondary market financies companies just as much as the primary market does. Perhaps a better example might be farmers selling to food factories selling to retailers selling to me. I never hand money directly to the farmers, but you can still say with a straight face that my purchase of bacon funds the pig farm.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2026-01-11 03:47:25+00:00
The easiest way to verify "whether there is telemetry" is to look at the source code

To avoid telemetry, interested users can remove it from the source code

IOW, the easiest way to remove telemetry is to remove it from the source code. Contrast with pleading with the author to remove it

Whereas, if telemetry is found by inspecting network traffic,^1 then users' only choice to avoid telemetry is not to use the software. There is no self-help

1. This may be complicated by encryption

Moreover, if the software is subject to change, e.g., "automatic software updates", then telemetry could be added at a later time, e.g., as part of an opaque "update". This requires the user to continually monitor network traffic in order to try to discover "whether there is telemetry"

If users have a copy of the source code, and use a binary compiled from that source code, then this burden does not exist
by AviationAtom | 2026-01-11 03:48:12+00:00
It's interesting to think how incredibly clunky, unintuitive, difficult, unpleasant to the eye, and just generally painful the Linux desktop experience used to be. These days Linux has proved it's usefulness on the desktop, both to novices and power users alike. I have no doubt that 2030s will be the decade of the Linux desktop. Perhaps until 2038 anyway.
by Jaygles | 2026-01-11 03:48:21+00:00
I do want styles tightly coupled to my React components. The product I work on has tens of thousands of React components.

I don't want to have to update some random CSS file to change one component's appearance. I've had to do this before and every time its a huge pain to not affect dozens of random other components. Other engineers encounter the same challenge and write poor CSS to deal with it. This compounds over time and becomes a huge mess.

Having a robust design system that enables the composition of complicated UIs without the need for much customization is the way.
by autarch | 2026-01-11 03:48:33+00:00
I was wondering about this myself. My guess is no, since AFAIK the only way to do this sort manual memory management is to use unsafe code. But there's also things like the (bumpalo)[https://docs.rs/bumpalo/latest/bumpalo] crate in Rust, so maybe you wouldn't need to do this sort of thing by hand, in which case you're as leak-free as the bumpalo crate.
by FunnyUsername | 2026-01-11 03:49:03+00:00
One can similarly become Palestinian by immigrating to Palestine (and "fitting in", which involves speaking Arabic etc). Arafat was born in Egypt, for example.

Does this refute the notion that Palestinians are from Palestine? I would say no. Similarly Jews are from Judea, despite the existence of a small number of converts with "impure" lineage.
by Animats | 2026-01-11 03:49:04+00:00
Measles charts (US) [1] Line goes down to nearly zero and stays there.

Polio chart (US) [2] See the line go almost straight down to 0 after vaccine introduction and stay there.

Smallpox has been totally exterminated by vaccination.

Any questions?

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/measles-cases-and-death

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/prevalence-of-polio-rates...
by VerifiedReports | 2026-01-11 03:49:10+00:00
Do you not realize you're in a browser, on a Web page, if you're on Github?

And do you never actually clone the project to your machine and use it? When I sit down to actually use the project and I want to read the documentation, I want to double-click on the MD files and READ them. Not edit and preview, but read... with their intended formatting.
Show HN: UI testing using multimodal LLMs
by kodefreeze | 2026-01-11 03:49:41+00:00
Hi HN,

I built this tool to solve the "flakiness" problem in UI testing. Existing AI agents often struggle with precise interactions, while traditional frameworks (Selenium/Playwright) break whenever the DOM changes.

The Approach: Instead of relying on hard-coded selectors or pure computer vision, I’m using a multi-agent system powered by multimodal LLMs. We pass both the screenshot (pixels) and the browser context (network requests, console logs, etc) to the model. This allows the agent to:

"See" the UI like a user and accurately map semantic intent ("Click the Signup button") to precise coordinates even if the layout shifts.

The goal is to mimic natural user behavior rather than following a predefined script. It handles exploratory testing and finds visual bugs that code-based assertions miss.

I’d love feedback on the implementation or to discuss the challenges of using LLMs for deterministic testing.
by idea2patentAI | 2026-01-11 03:50:29+00:00
For anyone interested, we have recently published an article "Ultimate DIY Guide: Drafting a Software Patent Application".

This article addresses the following topics:

a) How Detailed Must My Description Be? Understanding the Enablement Requirement (35 U.S.C. § 112)
b) Method Descriptions & Process Flow Narratives: The Core of Any Software Patent Application
c) Hardware Component Descriptions (Requirements of Bilski v Kappos)
d) System Architecture Description
e) Network Descriptions
f) User Interface Descriptions
g) Technical Improvement Descriptions

We you some of you find this article useful, and we welcome any feedback you may have.
by eru | 2026-01-11 03:50:38+00:00
> Also I think at some point the halting problem will make some programs impossible to test.

No, not at all. The halting problem isn't much of a problem here.

To elaborate: yes, it's pretty much impossible to decide whether an arbitrary programme will halt. But we aren't dealing with arbitrary programmes, you carefully have your agent craft programmes that are easy to prove correct.

There are languages available today whose type systems already only let you write terminating programmes. See eg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32102203 the Dhall language. Or Agda or Lean itself (unless you specifically opt out via the 'partial' keyword. But it's trivial to check whether someone used 'partial'.)

If your agent write a programme that's not easy to prove to be terminating, you don't try harder to prove. You just flag that as an error and have the agent try again.

Just like as a human code reviewer you reject Pull Requests that are too complicated to understand: you don't even bother figuring out whether they are technically correct or not.
by girvo | 2026-01-11 03:52:37+00:00
> and it's not an RGB strip, either.

The PPI difference matters though (and I think why my Nokia N9's PenTile OLED looked rough). Desktop displays simply aren't at the same PPI/resolution density, which is why they're moving to this new technology.

If it didn't matter, I highly doubt they'd spend the huge money to develop it.
by bblaylock | 2026-01-11 03:53:16+00:00
Is clay like code?

Clay comes from the earth, has great plastic deformation properties, and when heated sufficiently it turns to ceramic--whereafter it can never be turned back to clay. We humans have been doing ceramics for over 30,000 years. Yet, there is no undo in the process of pottery, and much of the process requires experience to know, in the most inexact sense of knowing, what the result will actually look like. Clay exists as a physical medium, and while knowledge of chemistry and physics can certainly inform your usage of clay, in actuality the chemical interactions that occur during a firing are still complicated enough that we in the industry still refer to them as "kiln magic".

Programming, conversely, is primarily a logical thought experiment. Most of the programs I have written have almost no physical representation. There is no material to coding, even assembly programmers work at the top of a heap of mental and physical abstractions. The process itself is rife with tooling between the user and the medium, correcting our mistakes and suggesting alternative ideas. There is always very quick feedback as to the result of a program. And the field, although still full of open questions, is largely well specified, in spite of it being an incredibly young field of study!

As far as mediums for expression go it would, in my opinion, be rare to find two that are more different. I can't help but think of the old phrase, "the map is not the territory."
by VerifiedReports | 2026-01-11 03:53:39+00:00
Do you not realize you're in a browser, on a Web page, if you're on Github?

And do you never actually clone the project to your machine and use it? When I sit down to actually use the project and I want to read the documentation, I want to double-click on the MD files and READ them. Not edit and preview, but read... with their intended formatting.
by hackitup7 | 2026-01-11 03:54:26+00:00
I've had a similar positive experience and I'm really surprised at the cynicism here. You have a system that is good at reading tons of literature and synthesizing it, which then applies basic logic. What exactly do the cynics think that doctors do?

I don't use LLMs as the final say, but I do find them pretty useful as a positive filter / quick gut check.
by halostatue | 2026-01-11 03:55:20+00:00
Tallow is still higher in long chain SFAs than vegetable saturated fats, which are less healthy than short and medium chain SFAs (but neither is as good as PUFAs).

That sort of overwhelms the omega ratios. As I understand it, both fish oil and (fresh) flax seed oil are still better than tallow.

With RFK's dismantling of good science, politics can't be put aside, as his reasons are essentially "because I said so".
by jm4 | 2026-01-11 03:56:10+00:00
Someone has to pay for it because it’s expensive to develop. There’s a ton of money in Linux just like there is in proprietary operating systems. There are like 4000-5000 kernel contributors and most of them are doing this work on some company’s payroll. There’s an enormous amount of resources going into Linux to the point where a proprietary OS couldn’t possibly keep up.

The real genius of Linux is the economic model, getting companies to buy into it and actually delivering value far in excess of what it costs anybody to contribute. It’s winning precisely because the value proposition cannot be matched.
Show HN: PrintReadyBook
by cboulio | 2026-01-11 03:56:19+00:00
AI generates complete novels with cover art, ready for print Text: I built a tool that generates complete, print-ready books from a single concept. Enter your idea, pick a genre and length, and you get:
Full manuscript PDF (formatted for print with title page, copyright, chapters)
Editable DOCX file
AI-generated cover art
Print-ready cover PDF with spine
The whole thing takes a few minutes. Output is sized for standard trim sizes so you can upload directly to KDP or other print-on-demand services. Built with Claude for the writing and image generation for covers. Priced starting at $19. Would love feedback on the concept and output quality. https://printreadybook.com