MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by andai | 2026-01-21 21:15:31+00:00
I'm on the $20 plan with Claude. It's worth mentioning that Claude and Codex both support per token billing, if your usage is so light that $20 is not worth it.

But if you use them for more than a few minutes, the tokens start adding up, and the subscriptions are heavily discounted relative to the tokens used.

There are also API-neutral tools like Charm Crush which can be used with any AI provider with API keys, and work reasonably well (for simple tasks at least. If you're doing something bigger you will probably want to use Claude Code).

Although each AI appears to be "tailored" to the company's own coding tools, so you'll probably get better results "holding it right".

That being said, the $3/month Z.ai sub also works great in Claude Code, in my experience. It's a bit slower and dumber than actual Claude, so I just went for the real thing in the end. 60 cents a day is not so bad! That's like, 1/3 of my canned ice coffee... the greater cost is the mental atrophy I am now undergoing ;)
by giancarlostoro | 2026-01-21 21:15:55+00:00
People have always done bad things, with or without LLMs. People also do good things with LLMs. In my case, I wanted a regex to filter out racial slurs. Can you guess what the LLM started spouting? ;)

I bet there's probably a jailbreak for all models to make them say slurs, certainly me asking for regex code to literally filter out slurs should be allowed right? Not according to Grok, GPT, I havent tried Claude, but I'm sure Google is just as annoying too.
by jeromechoo | 2026-01-21 21:16:29+00:00
Building an index is easy. Building a fresh index is extremely hard.

Ranking an index is hard. It's not just BM25 or cosine similarity. How do you prioritize certain domains over others? How do you rank homepages that typically have no real content in them for navigational queries?

Changing the behavior of 90% of the non-Chinese internet is unraveling 25 years and billions of dollars spent on ensuring Google is the default and sometimes only option.

Historically, it takes a significant technological counter position or anti-trust breakup for a behemoth like Google to lose its footing. Unfortunately for us, Google is currently competing well in the only true technological threat to their existence to appear in decades.
by shevy-java | 2026-01-21 21:16:50+00:00
> I understand it still takes about eight hours. Faster CPUs but busier software cancelled each other out.

> Some things never change

Yeah. Mostly the software stack is now much bigger.

Getting all of LLVM mesa linux cmake ninja glibc gcc binutils xorg KDE to work is more work than in 2005 or 2010. Also GNU configure feels as if nobody maintains it anymore. I still keep libtool around for legacy reasons but I don't like that.
by layla5alive | 2026-01-21 21:17:15+00:00
I know you said there are consequences to which one you pick, so we partially agree. But "There is no right or wrong answer" implies all value judgements are purely subjective, that all values are purely subjective. But I think we agree this couldn't be farther from the truth - these values _govern society_ - they affect everyone around us. Choosing bad values is genuinely harmful. Having the value that slavery is okay isn't just subjective, it's harmful and evil. Maybe if you believe slavery is okay, then you might disagree, but it doesn't make you any less objectively wrong. We could get into a big long thing about how this becomes objective, but suffice to say, if people do not want to be owned, and see being owned as harmful to them... then... they are being harmed.
by asaiyer | 2026-01-21 21:17:17+00:00
Thanks for the feedback! Our mission with Mastra is to make sure users can get further faster with the standard primitives of AI engineering! We learned over the last year that while we want to be opinionated, users need to be able to eject and adapt Mastra however they want! We added server adapters so users didn’t have to deal with our opinions on esbuild, we made storage more configurable and extendable, and invested more into our workflows engine which will be the foundation for distributed execution in the future! We are always willing to hear feedback and welcome changes! Would love to know what you learn from the langchain comparison and happy to improve Mastra from it! Thanks!
by margorczynski | 2026-01-21 21:17:26+00:00
At work unfortunately (?) we don't use any AI but there is movement to introduce it in some form (it is a heavily regulated area so it won't be YOLO coding using an agent for sure).

But my side projects which I kinda abandoned a long time ago are getting a second life and it is really fun just to direct the agent instead of slowly re-aquire all of the knowledge and waste time typing in all the stuff into the computer.
by nightshift1 | 2026-01-21 21:17:34+00:00
It says: This constitution is written for our mainline, general-access Claude models. We have some models built for specialized uses that don’t fully fit this constitution; as we continue to develop products for specialized use cases, we will continue to evaluate how to best ensure our models meet the core objectives outlined in this constitution.

I wonder what those specialized use cases are and why they need a different set of values.
I guess the simplest answer is they mean small fim and tools models but who knows ?
by adilblati3 | 2026-01-21 21:17:51+00:00
An AI-powered face shape detector is an advanced tool that analyzes facial features such as the forehead, cheekbones, jawline, and face length to accurately identify your face shape. Using computer vision and machine learning algorithms, it detects whether your face is oval, round, square, heart, diamond, or oblong. The tool works by scanning key facial landmarks from an uploaded image or live camera input. Results are generated instantly with high accuracy and consistency. An AI face shape detector helps users make better decisions for hairstyles, glasses, makeup, and fashion choices. It is fast, user-friendly, and requires no manual measurements.
by sodafountan | 2026-01-21 21:18:15+00:00
I actually have a good friend who was a car mechanic for a few years; we sort of grew up together. I became a developer, and he ended up driving for a towing company after he burned out in the shop.

I don't know who had it more difficult. Both are careers worthy of respect.

Mechanics need more spatial awareness and are hands-on; it's relatively easy to change the oil or swap out a tire. He taught me how to do brakes once, but I didn't internalize any of it. It's not so easy to replace an engine.

I did full-stack development for five or six years. He actually came over once, and I taught him a few things about the modern front-end stack. How to run Node.js, how to install dependencies via npm, and how to use GitHub. All things he was curious about.

I would assume it's pretty annoying to work at a local or small-scale shop and have a car come in with modern electrical issues that only the manufacturer knows how to deal with.
by shevy-java | 2026-01-21 21:18:18+00:00
> understood how one would go from here to a modern distro

Well, after LFS you go to BLFS. Compiling KDE isn't that hard
if you use scripts that help you. The big problem I see is that
a lot of information is missing. People need to know a whole lot.
But if you managed to compile it, a simple "startx" should work
fine. I even got KDE plasma to work on wayland. Wayland gives me
fewer options than xorg though, so I went back to xorg.
by honzabe | 2026-01-21 21:18:27+00:00
> Come on. Americans sent no such signal. No US election in my lifetime has been about foreign policy, including the last one. Domestic issues are by far predominant.

Guess what, we also care about domestic issues more. Except in smaller countries, your election might have a bigger impact on our fate than our own elections. We only want to live our lives and take care of our families... and then you elect the president who starts helping our worst enemy, and then even threatens our neighbor.

Our soldiers bled and died for you in Iraq and Afghanistan. Please, try to put yourself in our shoes. Imagine you live in one of those small countries that always tried to be a good ally to the US, and you get stabbed in the back, and then you hear an American basically saying, “come on, we don’t care about you, we only care about ourselves”. How would you react?
Show HN: Ably AI Transport - a transport layer for agentic apps
by mchristensen | 2026-01-21 21:18:57+00:00
Hey HN,

Staff Engineer at Ably here. Over the past few months I've been speaking to engineers building AI assistants, copilots, and agentic workflows (over 40 companies at this point), with particular focus on cloud-hosted agents.

I expected the hard problems to be in model selection, prompt engineering, and orchestration. Instead, the same infrastructure challenges kept coming up: realtime sync between agents and end clients is surprisingly painful to get right.

- Managing and scaling WebSocket or SSE connections between agents and clients

- Buffering messages server-side and implementing replay logic for reconnecting clients

- Tracking what each client has received across multiple devices

- Ensuring continuity between historical and live responses on initial load

- Routing reconnecting clients to the correct agent instance in distributed deployments

Ably AI Transport solves this: it's a drop-in transport layer that sits between your agents and end-user devices.

We discovered many companies who were already using Ably Pub/Sub to tackle these problems. The pub/sub pattern decouples agents from clients: agents publish to channels, clients subscribe, Ably handles delivery and replay.

AI Transport makes this easier - for example, we've added message appends for efficient token streaming, and annotations for attaching metadata like citations.

A few of the interesting technical pieces:

- Channel-oriented architecture: In connection-oriented setups, the connection pokes the agent into life. If the connection drops, on reconnection the agent must figure out what state each client is missing. AI Transport uses channels instead: agents publish, clients subscribe, the channel handles replay. Presence events let agents detect when users go online/offline or connect from multiple devices.

- Identity in decoupled pub/sub: Users authenticate with your server, which issues JWTs with embedded clientId and capabilities. Agents receive messages with cryptographically verified identity. User claims (ably.channel.* in the JWT) appear in message.extras.userClaim - useful for HITL workflows where you verify an approver's role before executing a tool call.

- Token streaming with appends: New message.append operation lets you build a response incrementally. Clients joining mid-stream get a message.update with the complete response so far, then receive subsequent appends. Channel history contains one compacted message per response.

- Annotations for citations: Attach citation metadata to responses without modifying content. Clients can subscribe to individual annotations or obtain them on demand via REST. Ably also automatically aggregates annotations into summaries (e.g. count by domain name), which are delivered to clients in realtime.

- Messaging patterns: Docs include patterns for tool calls, human-in-the-loop approval flows, and chain-of-thought streaming.

Docs: https://ably.com/docs/ai-transport

If you're building AI UX, I'd love to hear what problems you've hit and what you've built in-house.

Thanks!

Mike Christensen
by capitainenemo | 2026-01-21 21:19:22+00:00
... update. after reading the comments in the rust migration security bug, I saw they mentioned "only building in nightly for now"

I grabbed the nightly firefox, flipped the jxl switch, and it does indeed render fine, so I guess the rust implementation is functioning, just not enabled in stable.

... also, I see no evidence that it was ever enabled in the stable builds, even for the C++ version, so I'm guessing Zen just turned it on. Which... is fine, but maybe not very cautious.
by Liftyee | 2026-01-21 21:19:37+00:00
Given that you're worried about EMFs, the amount of power from nearby WiFi routers and cell towers is orders of magnitude more than from these satellites.

Starlink etc. use directed spotlight-like beams, so if you're not near a receiver (on the road) then no signal will be present. Why would they waste energy directing the signal anywhere other than where their dishes are?

(I personally don't believe in the harms of low power non-ionising radiation sources, but this comment is written in the context of avoiding them.)
by borenstein | 2026-01-21 21:19:57+00:00
Ah, let me clarify: I'm only using this to help me code faster. There are zero agents in the runtime for the financial tool.

As a matter of fact, the tool is zero-knowledge by design: state is decrypted in your browser and encrypted again before it leaves. There are no account integrations. The persistence layer sees noise. There are a couple of stateless backend tools that transiently see anonymous data to perform numerical optimizations.

But that's a story for another Show HN...
by viblo | 2026-01-21 21:20:04+00:00
A good question! Both I would say. There's a reason people pirated Photoshop.

Not everyone will want to automate the coding of course. But if I'm dreaming of becoming a game dev and like writing games in the evenings after class, I for sure want the best tools I can find.
If I'm working as a shop assistant, but are intertested in coding and dream of a dev job, then it will help if I can use the same tools as professionals use.
If I want to contribute to open source, but all easy beginner tasks are automated away, or are 10x as difficult without an AI, then maybe I will give up.
If my friend writes a Minecraft mod supported by AI, but I can't, then I might never become interested in coding in the first place.

And so on, there are many ways this can play out.
by MayeulC | 2026-01-21 21:20:08+00:00
Ugh, this is part of the reason why I left them, but https://free.fr still does this AFAIR. They were deploying IPv6 to all their consumers well before the other ISPs (more than 15 tears ago), but they have stagnated since.

IPv6 firewall disabled by default. There is only one config for the firewall: on / off. Accept all inbound or reject all inbounding.

To think that they used to brand themselves as "for the geeks", with reverse DNS customization, built-in user-configurable server on the router (all of their routers offer a Wireguard VPN, torrent client, audio output with DLNA & others), a m3u for IPTV, etc. I wouldn't advise anyone to use them due to this issue.

This ticket said they would reopen an internal ticket, back in 2022: https://dev.freebox.fr/bugs/task/27613

Their basic firewall dates back to 2019: https://dev.freebox.fr/bugs/task/27268 (a lot of spam in the replies there). There was none before, and it is still off by default.

This is no small ISP either, they have more than 50 millions clients (including mobile), and are in the top 10 ISPs in Europe. Baffling.
by AznHisoka | 2026-01-21 21:20:31+00:00
I am actually not sure about the first.

For the 2nd, based on my experience you are likely to find developers from both big and small companies equally hanging out in communities. Most lean technical btw, so if you arent targeting developers, communities probably arent the best venue to find potential users.

I also forgot to add: finding followers of OpenAI in Linkedin might also be a good way to find ChatGpT customers. Or people who comment on their product announcemnts in Linkedin.
by renegat0x0 | 2026-01-21 21:20:38+00:00
Scraping is hard, and is not hard that much at the same time. There are many projects about scraping, so with a few lines you can do implement scraper using curl cffi, or playwright.

People complain that user-agent need to be filled. Boo-hoo, are we on hacker news, or what? Can't we just provide cookies, and user-agent? Not a big deal, right?

I myself have implemented a simple solution that is able to go through many hoops, and provide JSON response. Simple and easy [0].

On the other hand it was always an arms race. It will be. Eventually every content will be protected via walled gardens, there is no going around it.

Search engines affect me less, and less every day. I have my own small "index" / "bookmarks" with many domains, github projects, youtube channels [1].

Since the database is so big, the most used by me places is extracted into simple and fast web page using SQLite table [2]. Scraping done right is not a problem.

[0] https://github.com/rumca-js/crawler-buddy

[1] https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database

[2] https://rumca-js.github.io/search
by Nextgrid | 2026-01-21 21:21:14+00:00
ZIRP was the era of where any tech startup was seen as a good investment no matter how stupid. Take any stupid business that doesn't work, say you do it with tech, get millions thrown at you. Then it was blockchain - same story, conventional business that doesn't work, but with blockchain - boom, instant money. Now the same with AI.

> you beg people with experience in software to believe you're trending up

Considering how much stupid shit I've seen funded (that quietly "incredible journey'd" away or folded by now) I don't think much begging was involved. Capital was desperate to find a place, no matter how ill-advised. Everyone in the startup food chain enjoyed it.

> Do you genuinely believe DAUs/MAUs stopped mattering once crpyto, then AI, arrived?

What started mattering is a clear path to monetize said DAUs/MAUs. You can't just show up with (potentially flawed) analytics saying you have DAUs and you're gonna figure out monetization later. Now you need to actually figure it out now and show up with analytics + proof of actually monetizing those users. Well, except if you're selling AI - then it's ok to sell inference at a major loss and figure out monetization later.

> collectively ran a con that no investor, board member, or executive noticed for a decade

"Investing" in a Ponzi can still be profitable as long as you get out before it collapses. There was a lot of passing around the hot potatoes between VCs too, so a VC can rightfully determine something to be a scam, but still invest if they believe SoftBank will happily hold the bag (and those guys ended up taking a lot of bags).
by shevy-java | 2026-01-21 21:21:20+00:00
> Linux From Scratch was never really about running the system anyway

It definitely is. See the bootscripts:

https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/development/chapte...

Admittedly the main problems I had was with configuring the linux kernel. I have no good solution to make this simpler. That config file is sooooooooooo huge ... no clue how to handle this. There is no way I have enough time to sift through all the options. Or compare what changed from kernel to kernel version. Anyone has an idea how to handle this on your own?
by epolanski | 2026-01-21 21:21:31+00:00
Bending Spoons pays very high rates for their own engineers.

Of course if your comparison is Bay Area or Zurich, there's no match, but if you exclude such outliers (where the compensation is what it is due to the insane costs of living and competition for talent) they are paying rates higher than pretty much any other part of the world.

They pay rates that are closer if not higher than London or Munich averages (which are very high).
by wrs | 2026-01-21 21:21:47+00:00
As one often finds with “effective LLM usage” advice, all of those things would help humans on the team as well! As would other advice like keeping the architecture docs up to date, writing down important design decisions with rationale, breaking big features down into steps, etc.

Maybe one should just search for advice from the last 20 years on how to make a human development team more effective, and do that stuff.

It’s funny how this advice has always been around, but we needed to invent this new kind of idiot savant developer to get the human developers to want to do it…
by techjamie | 2026-01-21 21:21:52+00:00
I did LFS on hardware for advanced operating systems in college. After messing up an early step and having to torch it midway and start over, I made the entire LFS build directory into a local git repo. It was not the best use of git and there are better tools, but it did allow me to revert a mistake later and saved me time. So I call it a success.
Show HN: Find what you should play next
by dsky | 2026-01-21 21:22:10+00:00
Friend and me created a video game discovery website trying to answer the "what to play next" question.

Unlike most other sites we wanted to support every platform, so whether you look for something on your PC, Playstation, Switch or even your phone or browser you should find something.

We're still in the early stages and seek feedback (especially on the https://gamebrain.co/what-should-i-play and https://gamebrain.co/recommendations flows).

Any well-meaning feedback is highly appreciated!
by wumms | 2026-01-21 21:22:16+00:00
This describes lunar day on the far side of the moon, right? Excuse my ambiguity; I was comparing lunar nights only (inspired by the Jules Verne quote):

The far side is darker during lunar night (lit by starshine only; Full Moon on Earth) than the near side during lunar night (New Moon on Earth), because it receives both star- and max. Earthshine.

I'm not sure about Crescent Moon though: that only narrows the brightness gap slightly, right? Or I’ll have to ask if there’s an astronomer on board our flight.
by jeingham | 2026-01-21 21:23:02+00:00
I can tell you from my perspective that it really is a different story when you're over 65, I'm 73 so it's even more different. It's obligations that distract keep coming. I'm just having fun with it at this point. I just can't imagine what you guys are facing right now. Some existential s**. It's like you were swinging through the trees and all the trees disappeared now you got to learn how to live on the desert. You can do it!
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-21 21:23:03+00:00
> According to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b66ZZ05wKC0 this might end very badly very soon

This is the paper they cite [1] estimates "the no-manoeuvre collision time" for various orbits. It has no alarming results.

That paper cites another paper [2], which raises the possibility of runaway conditions, but not in a particularly rigorous way.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.09643

[2] https://conference.sdo.esoc.esa.int/proceedings/sdc9/paper/3...
by refulgentis | 2026-01-21 21:23:16+00:00
> "except if you're selling AI - then it's ok to sell inference at a major loss and figure out monetization later"

So the dynamic you attributed to ZIRP is alive and well, just wearing different clothes. Your original framework was "ZIRP allowed this, now real capitalism is correcting it." Now it's "this is permanent, it just rotates themes." These are different arguments.

> "Investing in a Ponzi can still be profitable as long as you get out before it collapses... a VC can rightfully determine something to be a scam, but still invest"

You've just moved the con from engineers to VCs. If investors knowingly played hot potato, then engineers weren't running a grift, they were employees doing jobs while capital played musical chairs above their heads.

So which is it: were engineers "deadweight" padding out finished products, or were they ordinary workers caught in a game VCs were knowingly playing? Because "VCs knew it was a scam but invested anyway" is a very different story than "engineers tricked everyone into thinking the product wasn't finished."

You're retreating into "everyone knew it was fake."
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-21 21:23:31+00:00
The owner got a big pay package from the sale on top of usually being one of the more highly compensated employees at such companies. What do you mean by "the owner didn't get paid"?

>No one wonders why loyalty is dead.

I see you missed the recent narrative of "Gen Z is lazy" and "most managers avoid hiring Gen Z" out there. I assure you many managers are baffled, bit blame the (relative) children instead of seeing how work culture has shifted since they were that age