MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Importguard – Measure and enforce Python import-time behavior in CI
by AryanKumar1401 | 2026-01-01 06:52:29+00:00
I built a CLI tool to catch slow imports and sneaky side effects before they ship to production.

The problem: Python imports can quietly become a performance trap. Your CLI takes 2 seconds to show --help because importing your package pulls in pandas. Or worse, importing a module makes network calls or writes files as a side effect.

Importguard uses Python's -X importtime flag to measure exactly how long each import takes, then lets you:

- Set time budgets: `importguard check mypkg --max-ms 200`
- Ban heavy imports: `importguard check mypkg.cli --ban pandas --ban torch`
- Get reliable timing: `--repeat 5` runs multiple times and reports median
- Configure per-module rules in `.importguard.toml`

It runs in an isolated subprocess so it doesn't pollute your interpreter, and outputs JSON for CI integration.

Use cases:
- Keep CLI startup snappy
- Prevent serverless cold start regressions (Lambda/Cloud Functions)
- Ensure library hygiene (don't force users to install heavy deps)

pip install importguardpy

GitHub: https://github.com/AryanKumar1401/importguard

Happy to hear feedback on what would make this more useful!
by rramadass | 2026-01-01 06:53:16+00:00
The idea is that you maintain a "Unshakeable Spirit/Heart/Mind" w.r.t. your ultimate goal (whatever that may be) but still keep your everyday working mind aware, adaptable, not losing heart when difficulties arise but working through them all with a sense of calm purposeful focused action.

The Fudōchi Shinmyōroku states that as, the "Right Mind" is like free-flowing Water (useful in any situation since it can quickly assess, adapt and respond) while "Confused Mind" is like congealed water i.e. Ice (not useful since it is static, fixed form and not adaptable).

In modern terms, we can restate it as goal setting, long-term strategy vs. short-term tactics, maintaining composure and fortitude while working towards the goal unceasingly.

Happy New Year (bot or not!)
by d-us-vb | 2026-01-01 06:54:29+00:00
As others have said, you're missing the author's point. The author is claiming that the act of writing software is getting industrialized by LLMs. LLMs will produce small, useful, but completely disposable programs that under the previous "artisanal" model would normally take me or another programmer an hour or so to write or debug. Or for something a bit more complicated, it can be vibe coded in 10 minutes, whereas it otherwise would have taken 10 hours to write and debug. You wouldn't want to use this sort of software extensively or for very long, just like you probably wouldn't frame a photo posted on social media. It might just be something to do some random task with your computer that is nontrivial that no other software tool does out of the box.

I think the author's analogies are on point.
Show HN: A minimalist, ad-free alternative for receiving SMS online
by mambazz | 2026-01-01 06:55:39+00:00
I was frustrated with existing "free SMS" websites. Most of them are bloated with intrusive ads, and half the numbers are usually dead or blacklisted by major services.

To solve this for myself, I built https://smsreceive.live. It focuses on a clean UI and I’m trying to update fresh numbers daily to ensure they actually work for OTP verifications.

I also mirrored the project at https://receivesms.me to test different caching strategies and ensure high availability.

Would love to hear your thoughts on the UI/UX or any suggestions on how to improve the number rotation logic.
by varshith17 | 2026-01-01 06:55:42+00:00
'Debugging turns into archaeology rather than engineering', this is the exact realization that forced me to stop building agents and start building a database kernel.

I spent 6 months chasing 'ghosts' in my backtests that turned out to be floating-point drift between my Mac and the production Linux server. I realized exactly what you said: if state isn't replayable bit-for-bit, it's not engineering.

I actually ended up rewriting HNSW using Q16.16 fixed-point math just to force 'reality to line up' again. It’s painful to lose the raw speed of AVX floats, but getting 'Engineering' back was worth it. check it out(https://github.com/varshith-Git/Valori-Kernel)
by Madmallard | 2026-01-01 06:56:54+00:00
Why would it?

The ability to accurately describe what you want with all constraints managed and with proactive design is the actual skill. Not programming. The day PMs can do that and have LLMs that can code to that, is the day software engineers en masse will disappear. But that day is likely never.

The non-technical people I've ever worked for were hopelessly terrible at attention to detail. They're hiring me primarily for that anyway.
by solatic | 2026-01-01 06:57:03+00:00
More to the point, "technology is neither good, nor bad, nor neutral, it just exists". Ultimately all tools can be used for good or bad purposes and what matters is the people who wield them.

This is separate from the argument over whether MAD is philosophically good. MAD is not an argument about technology. "Peace through strength" does indeed require the occasional display of strength, to maintain deterrence. Good and bad (morals) are not the right frame to understand deterrence, rather emotions: fear, confidence, and security.

Solzhenitsyn can be read as either a humanist or an ethicist: either the bridgehead of good is sufficient to redeem everyone from war and morality demands pacifism, or all military doctrines must be submitted to independent review to check that we do not give the "unuprooted small corner of evil" oxygen. Crucially, these are both judgements about ourselves and not about the foes who seek to destroy us, who indeed consider themselves to have "the best of all hearts". In this sense, Solzhenitsyn contributes to the cycle of violence: if both sides are ethicists, and their ethical councils have different conclusions, the result is not just fundamentalism but a fundamentalism justified by ethical review.

Fear, anger, disgust are the ultimate drivers of conflict. Can we conquer them? Of course not, they are the base emotions, part of being human. But can there be a better way of handling them in geopolitics? Yes - if leaders are focused on helping not just themselves feel safe, but their enemies as well. This is the higher level beyond MAD - not mutual fear, but mutual security. This is why USAID was great foreign policy and cheap for its benefits. This is why weapons are sold to allies despite the fact that their interests may not be fully aligned with ours. Weapons are fundamental to security, which at the end of the day is a feeling and not a guarantee against attack or repercussions from an attack, and these feelings of security are what reduces the incidence and frequence of war.
by rkomorn | 2026-01-01 06:58:57+00:00
I agree about incentive (with a small asterisk that if you do decide to take off when you shouldn't, now you have two problems), but taking off isn't particularly easier.

Eg you have to stay on the runway, you have decisions to make about whether to reject takeoff (the asterisk I mentioned earlier), etc.

For a computer, I'd say it's 6 of one, half a dozen of the other. For runway equipment (ie ILS), it probably changes enough that you couldn't "just use ILS" for takeoff.

I did infra work for a team that was contributing to Airbus' ATTOL (automated taxi, takeoff, and landing) project a few years ago. They (the ATTOL folks, not the side I was on) did do an automated takeoff demo and it definitely wasn't simple.
by waldrews | 2026-01-01 06:59:00+00:00
I'm being hyperbolic of course, but I'm a little dismissive of the progress that happened since the days of BBS's and car based cell phones - we just got more connectivity, more capacity, more content, bigger/faster. Likewise, my attitude toward machine learning before 2023 is a smug 'heh, these computer scientists are doing undisciplined statistics at scale, how nice for them.' Then all of a sudden the machines woke up and started arguing with me, coherently, even about niche topics I have a PhD in. I can appreciate in retrospect how much of the machine learning progress ultimately went into that, but, like fusion, the magic payoff was supposed to be decades away and always remain decades away. This wasn't supposed to happen in my lifetime. 2025 progress isn't the 2023 shock, but this was the year LLM's-as-programmers (and LLM's-as-mathematicians, and...) went from 'isn't that cute, the machine is trying' to 'an expert with enough time would make better choices than the machine did,' and that makes for a different world. More so than, going from a Commodore Vic 20 with 4k of RAM and a modem to the latest Macbook.
by random3 | 2026-01-01 06:59:09+00:00
Sorry, but having two people instead of one pushing for similar/related ideas is not supporting the main claim ("we sanctify some sole individuals while forgetting the bulk of the community"). Nor is stealing ideas and having the wrong name on results. It's rather common to have multiple names in theorems because of this. That's still beside the point, when claiming it's the "community" or hive mind.

It's not that I don't see where you're coming from. What's been gesticulating at is called "Stigler's law of eponymy" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy). Pythagorean theorem was known 1000 years before Pythagoras and a ton of results are wrongly attributed to. But that doesn't make revolutions a collective effort.

Was Galois', Gödel's or Grothendieck's work obviously the common sense of the community?
Or wasn't it the "community" that tried to "solve" the parallel postulate for 2000 years before Bolyai did?

Or maybe everyone in the Copenhagen crowd cheered Bohm, Everett and Bell because it was all obvious in the community?

Thanks for the link, but when I said "do homework" I didn't mean podcasts :), but rather either general or concrete work in the history and philosophy of science, like Thomas Kuhn's "Structure of scientific revolutions".
by charlesding2024 | 2026-01-01 07:00:19+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Video to JPG because extracting the perfect frame from a video usually requires scrubbing through timelines manually, which is tedious.

This tool runs entirely in the browser (using Canvas API) and includes a blur detection feature. It analyzes frames to help identify and select the sharpest images automatically, rather than just grabbing a random screenshot.

Key features:

Smart Selection: Automatically detects and filters out blurry frames.

100% Private: All processing happens client-side; no video is uploaded.

Format Support: Handles MP4, MOV, AVI, and other common formats.

I'd love to hear your feedback on the detection accuracy!
by crote | 2026-01-01 07:01:57+00:00
Now compare that to the various books people mentioned at [0]. It isn't even remotely close.

You spoonfed ChatGPT, and it returned a bunch of semi-relevant formulas and code snippets. But a tutorial? Absolutely not. For starters, it never explains what it is doing, or why! It is missing some crucial concepts, and it doesn't even begin to describe how the various parts fit together.

If this counts as "pretty freaking good" already, I am afraid to ask what you think average educational material looks like.

Sure, it's a nice trick that we can now get a LLM to semi-coherently stitch some StackOverflow answers together, but let's not get ahead of ourselves: there's still a lot of improvement to be done before it is on par with human writing.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46448544
by amluto | 2026-01-01 07:02:02+00:00
If these things are even 50% efficient, then power delivery is really not a problem these days. Most EVs have no problem delivering 200kW for quite a few seconds at a time, limited mostly by components getting warm. Higher-end EVs are generally rated for 300-500kW.

It would by amusing to see one of these lasers mounted on an EV, possibly with a small range extender to recharge it on the go.
by al_borland | 2026-01-01 07:02:02+00:00
> Wesley Chan, co-founder of FPV Ventures, isn’t as eager to invest in dropouts because he prioritizes a trait most young founders haven’t developed yet: wisdom

It sounds like this is exactly what these folks are missing. They hear the romantic dropout story, but don’t seem to look into when these people dropped and the circumstances around it.

Steve Jobs, for example, dropped out because he didn’t feel good spending his parent’s money on school when he didn’t know what he wanted to do. After dropping out he was rather aimless for a while, not pitching start ups with his story of drop-out level commitment.

With Facebook, it had already proven it had some legs and real people were using it.
by naruhodo | 2026-01-01 07:02:26+00:00
The law forbids government ID as the sole age verification mechanism, but does not prevent it from being an option:

> As stated in the law passed late last year, platforms also cannot rely solely on using government-issued ID for age verification, even though the government-backed technology study found this to be the most effective screening method.

> Instead, the guidelines will direct platforms to take a "layered" approach to assessing age with multiple methods and to "minimise friction" for their users — such as by using AI-driven models that assess age with facial scans or by tracking user behaviour.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-15/social-media-ban-fina...
by calmbonsai | 2026-01-01 07:02:43+00:00
There's also the risk of injury.

At very low reps and high weight, particularly for highly coordinated motions (squats, dips, pull-ups, Pulver press back-extensions), there's a much higher chance for injury due to insufficient support at one or more positions within the entire range of concentric and eccentric efforts by all activated muscles. We all have, at the very least, minor intrinsic asymmetries that need explicit addressing.

There's also intra-set recovery. Roughly (very roughly) speaking, your endo-neuro-muscular system "adapts best" where there is a refractory period for a reset-to-quiescence between exertions.

There is real truth to "muscle memory" and the exclusive way to achieve that (and avoid injury) is through a sufficient amount of well-formed repetitions. The only way to achieve those repetitions is by using a resistance that's sufficiently low.
by crabmusket | 2026-01-01 07:03:38+00:00
This is interesting, and I think worth trying. However,

The process is iterative:

Vibe code users <--> Vibe code software

Step by step, you get closer to truly understanding your users

Do not fool yourself. This is not "truly" "understanding" your "users". This is a model which may be very useful, but should not be mistaken for your users themselves.

Nothing beats feedback from humans, and there's no way around the painstaking effort of customer development to understand how to satisfy their needs using software.
by rkomorn | 2026-01-01 07:05:16+00:00
The energy cost during operations is very relevant, too, which is why you see things like tilt rotor designs with wings/bodies to generate lift.

When Airbus was doing the math on these a few years ago, the pilot cost was also one of the main concerns, so it was "autonomous or bust", and they ended up investing a lot on the autonomous side (not just the aircraft but also urban traffic management, etc).
by utopiah | 2026-01-01 07:05:19+00:00
No I was sharing an example of a framework that does include "a testing system that allows it to inject mouse events".

That being said mouse events and similar isn't hard to do, e.g. start with a fixed resolution (using xrandr) then xdotool or similar. Ideally if the application has accessibility feature it won't be as finicky.

My point though was just to show that testing with GUI is not infeasible.

Apparently there is even a "UI Testing for devs & agents" https://www.chromatic.com which I found via Visual TDD https://www.chromatic.com/blog/visual-test-driven-developmen... I can't recommend this but it does show even though the person I was replying with can't use Puppeteer in their context the tooling does exist and the principles would still apply.
by calmbonsai | 2026-01-01 07:07:44+00:00
True. Generally, the more isolated the exercise and the smaller the muscle the "safer" it is to train-to-failure at a higher duty-cycle.

Put another way, you can do crunches to failure every single day, but you'll want to keep some reps in the tank for squats and you'll want to plan on at least 12-24 hours of recovery between squat sessions.
by crossroadsguy | 2026-01-01 07:08:01+00:00
Not only that, but it’s important. Needless to say I am not comparing net-worths :) My rent spend started increasing around 4-5th year (steeply) of starting my first job and I saw it and kinda stopped/curbed it at somewhere like 7th year. It has remained there (give or take) because it had reached a really good level (below luxury or ultra premium so to speak) wrt my city’s general rental trends and spends (of course inflation factored in). It’s been 8 years since and I have been without a job for last two years (a bit by choice, if certain things can really be called choice) and pretty much my other spending trends also kinda plateaued around those years (experience spends kept going up slowly but I find them easier to manage). I can’t explain how much it has helped me when I have been living on savings for straight 2 years now. Not just the specific relative smaller amount but more so the predictability of it.
by AdieuToLogic | 2026-01-01 07:10:53+00:00
> An algorithm isn't really AI then.

But they are though. For a seminal book discussing why and detailing many algorithms categorized under the AI umbrella, I recommend:

Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach[0]

And for LLMs specifically:

Foundations of Large Language Models[1]

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_Intelligence:_A_Mod...

1 - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.09223
by al_borland | 2026-01-01 07:11:32+00:00
I thought I was going to get v2, but a processor update and a headband aren’t enough. It still seems like it struggling to figure out what it is, and still seems heavy.

I think I’m waiting for a design refresh that reduces weight and lowers the price, while also clarifying what problem this actually solves. I think this is what most of the market is waiting for.
Semantica – Open-source semantic layer and GraphRAG framework
by kaifahmad1 | 2026-01-01 07:13:34+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m sharing Semantica, an MIT-licensed open-source framework for building semantic layers and knowledge engineering systems for AI.

Many RAG and agent systems fail not due to model quality, but due to the semantic gap — unstructured, inconsistent data without explicit entities, rules, or relationships. Vector-only approaches often hallucinate or fail silently under real-world data.

Semantica focuses on transforming messy data into reasoning-ready semantic knowledge.

Core capabilities:
- Universal ingestion (PDF, DOCX, HTML, JSON, CSV, databases, APIs)
- Automated entity and relationship extraction
- Knowledge graph construction with entity resolution
- Automated ontology generation and validation
- GraphRAG (hybrid vector + graph retrieval, multi-hop reasoning)
- Persistent semantic memory for AI agents
- Conflict detection, deduplication, and provenance tracking

Project links:
Docs: https://hawksight-ai.github.io/semantica/
GitHub: https://github.com/Hawksight-AI/semantica

I’d appreciate feedback from people working on knowledge graphs, GraphRAG, agent memory, or production RAG reliability.

Happy to discuss design trade-offs or answer technical questions.
by scott_w | 2026-01-01 07:14:01+00:00
> An upgrade from a 2-bedroom to a 4-bedroom home with a garage so I don't have to smell laser cutter fumes anymore and hack a ventilation system out a bedroom window? That very well might.

As someone who upgraded from a 2 bedroom flat to a 3 bedroom house with a garage, I concur. Having a place to store my bikes and other “dirty” tools that’s not inside was such an improvement to my quality of life that I tell people to always look for a half decent garage when they buy. Especially if they also like cycling!
by xsourcesec | 2026-01-01 07:14:17+00:00
Hi HN! I built a GitHub Action that automatically scans AI/LLM endpoints for security vulnerabilities on every push/PR.

Why? Most teams ship AI features without security testing. This action catches prompt injection, jailbreaks, and data leakage before they hit production.

How it works:
- Add 5 lines of YAML to your workflow
- Scans run automatically on push/PR
- PRs get blocked if critical vulns are found
- Full report with remediation steps

Free tier: 5 scans/month. 650+ attack vectors.

Built this because I do AI red teaming professionally (OSCP+, C-AI/MLPen). Happy to answer questions!
by pavlov | 2026-01-01 07:14:35+00:00
Nokia had exactly this kind of CTO office during the 2005 - 2012 years when they lost the entire smartphone market.

The CTO fiddled with greenfield projects that had no path to products while the house burned down.

The best that can be said about it is that inventions outside of the product helped beef up Nokia’s patent portfolio, which played a role in the company surviving the post-phone years and transforming into a pure network company. But they lost a trillion-dollar opportunity and shrunk into an average B2B enterprise.
by solatic | 2026-01-01 07:14:37+00:00
> can the right to kill coexist with the victim's right to defense?

Yes it can, and it's ludicrous to suggest otherwise. Russia believes it has the natural right to reclaim what it considers to be Russian territory. Ukraine believes it has the right to be free. So everyone should just put down their weapons and come to an agreement based on these rights?

The fallacy at the heart of your argument is that there is somehow some greater single truth, and that each side agrees that it is the greater single truth, and that everyone will just peaceably agree to follow the single greater truth because it is the single greater truth. Nothing could be less human. What are we, the Borg? We're supposed to follow some hive mind?

> something simple, like tying sanctions to murders of civilians

Not even remotely simple. Define sanctions, murders, civilians. The US bombing "drug" boats in the Caribbean, are those civilians? International law recognizes that collateral damage can legitimately happen during legitimate military operations. Is the collateral damage "murder"? How far should sanctions go? Sanction enemy banks (layer 1)? Sanction citizens of neutral countries who do business with the enemy country (layer 2)? Sanction citizens of neutral countries who do business with other citizens who do business with the enemy country (layer 3)?
by thinkloop | 2026-01-01 07:16:52+00:00
Other things that I would like the web to "fix" without knowing the solution:

- replace email for notifications: email is the default notification channel for most websites, but because it is inherently insecure and lacks privacy, messages are often reduced to generic alerts that omit the actual content (statements, bills, secure messages, etc.). Anything of value instead requires navigating to the site, logging in, and locating the relevant item. Ideally, the content itself would be delivered directly through a secure, private notification system without email as a proxy.

- eliminate account creation/login: browsers should be able to authenticate to sites cryptographically using locally held keys, allowing APIs to securely identify and associate a user with an account without explicit registration or login flows shifting credential management from centralized servers to the user’s device, simultaneously reducing exposure from credential storage and leaks.

- automatic selection of gdpr "only necessary cookies" (or whatever your preference) without prompts/ui and similar