MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by filleduchaos | 2026-01-06 20:36:12+00:00
Yeah, in my opinion the point that "wouldn't it be nice if this was faster?" becomes a real issue is the point that you would feasibly need to get your day's sleep en route with today's airliners, because it's difficult to sleep for more than a few hours at a stretch on a flight even with business class conveniences (and that's before getting into the degraded quality of sleep). If I could catch a flight that's fast enough to let me hold off on sleep altogether until I get to my destination, then that's worth paying a premium even for economy seats. Unfortunately, that's also the point that a supersonic airliner becomes unworkable for airlines, because the fuel-to-passenger ratio just stops making sense. You can try to make it work with refuelling stops along the way, but that really eats up the theoretical time savings and adds its own operational overhead too.

I think we need an energy breakthrough with a denser and still cost-effective fuel before really getting into the era of supersonic transport. Maybe at some point someone will dust off the nuclear-powered aircraft designs of yore...
by zamadatix | 2026-01-06 20:36:32+00:00
The one note about Astro Mechanica towards the middle is referring to long haul flights from smaller airfields because they'll have a smaller private jet sized plane. It was not referring to short haul flights, nor was the rest of the article.

I don't believe the economics for that will at all work out the way they are pitching, but it has no relation to how much supersonic makes sense for a domestic short haul.
by tomashertus | 2026-01-06 20:37:16+00:00
The article is surprisingly missing the most important part: a cost comparison. I understand and share the frustration with rising prices and ads creeping into paid plans, but for people who value optionality and broad access, streaming is still meaningfully cheaper than owning content.

In many cases, the price of a single movie is comparable to an entire month of a streaming service, which gives access to thousands of titles. Ownership can make sense if you repeatedly watch a small, fixed catalog over many years, but for most casual or exploratory viewing, the economics still favor streaming.
by SirensOfTitan | 2026-01-06 20:37:25+00:00
Can you actually provide any proof, even top-line stats from GitHub or other software forges that show the productivity boost you’re claiming?

It’s not up to the skeptics to prove this tech doesn’t work, it’s up to the proponents to show it does and does so with a similar effect size as cigarettes cause lung cancer.

There are a tremendous amount of LLM productivity stans on HN but the plural of anecdote is not data.

Certainly these tools are useful, but the extent to which they are useful today is not nearly as open and shut as you and others would claim. I’d say that these tools make me 5% more productive on a code base I know well.

I’m totally open to opposing evidence that isn’t just anecdote
by aldousd666 | 2026-01-06 20:38:36+00:00
I recently read about 'in thread' ads, like on Twitter, as being not as effective unless they are 'brand recognition' ads. Like, they will help you decide which one to pick when you are staring at two fungible brands on the shelf, but they will not convince you to buy something you have never heard about before, especially not from a direct click through. So while Ads work is true, in many ways, they don't in many others. The brand damage you can get from having those in-thread ads is also real: Ads target the user, not the thread, but by showing up, users associate advertisers with the thread. If you were in some argument about dictators taking over, and suddenly a product pops up, you may assign the negative energy you have toward dictators to that brand as well.
by jauntywundrkind | 2026-01-06 20:39:34+00:00
This is huge new. Plasma Login Manager has been quietly crushing it & deserves huge praise. Massive massive rebuild, with every single feature you could possibly imagine. Finally possible to remote login to a wayland server! We've had tools like waypipe and others, but they usually require an active session; now PLM can launch remote sessions too.

The work has been coming fast & furious. Incredible 2025 work. It makes all the sense in the world to get this into people's hands ASAP. Good-bye SDDM.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-New-Login-Manager-Over-SDD...
by stocksinsmocks | 2026-01-06 20:40:08+00:00
OK, let me fall less short. It has replaced the freelancer for me. I communicate product requirements. It builds the product immediately at trivial cost. It’s better than a human. There are jobs I would have considered hiring out that I don’t because the machine is better. Nothing you said about labor effects in the large even logically follow. Have you even used one of these systems?
by BrenBarn | 2026-01-06 20:40:23+00:00
> It seems like the monkey's-paw curse for this kind of legislation is to show several ads in a row, each allowing you to skip them after 5 seconds.

As is often the case I think that means the restrictions should just get even more strict, e.g., "no ad may ever be longer than X seconds and no app may ever show more than Y seconds of total ads within any 24-hour period". Then add some extra clause like "any attempt to circumvent or subvert these rules is punishable by fines up to 10x the company's gross annual revenue, plus asset forfeiture and prison for executives". People at companies should be deathly afraid of ever accidentally crossing the line into abusive behavior.
by oooyay | 2026-01-06 20:40:26+00:00
Hello! Cool tool, I'm going to give it a try on my personal assistant. The vector DB prices look a bit cynical to me, even incredible. Do you think you could break down how you arrived at the cost estimation both for competing vector DBs and Mantic? For example, I use Weaviate at the moment and I don't come close to this cost even at a years perspective with a generous amount of usage from multiple users (~60)
by 8note | 2026-01-06 20:40:42+00:00
ive tried slack before, but a challenge is how well you can get results returned back in a way where you can actually see what it did and give proper next steps

getting a PR back and being able to put comments on it is fine, but ive had middling success getting qcli at least to actually match the comments with the code that was commented on. i get the sense that there isnt any training with the comments inlined well on a diff:/

it doesnt have to be a vpn though, i was on an oauth webbrowser terminal, and things like coder[0] let you run vscode on the browser, including on your phone browser. there's also happy coder[1] which i tried using to connect between the new builtin android linux vm, and skip all the remote stuff entirely, but the phone would inevitably kill the terminal runbing claude, killing the whole thing. you can currently just run claude from your phone in that, which only has the problem that when the vm crashes, all you can do is wipe the partition.

[0] https://coder.com/
[1] https://happy.engineering/
by RachelF | 2026-01-06 20:40:47+00:00
Mine is not 200MB on Android - the base apk is 67MB + 32MB for the ARM v8a specific libs. This is the code, the local caching and other data might make up the rest.

For Android, you can check [1] Download the apk, rename it as a zip and look inside to see the files.

A quick file analysis of the 67MB shows around 58MB of java code and some 32MB of ARM libs, 31MB of this is the libvideochat.

[1] https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/google-inc/gmail/gmail-2025-11...
by shaftway | 2026-01-06 20:41:04+00:00
I've worked for two companies that did mobile ads, and one other that did web ads.

The web ad company was hampered by poor engineering and management that had big glory projects that were poorly conceived or too ambitious; they no longer exist.

The first mobile ad company was constrained by ethics and prioritized a better experience over earning that last fraction of a percent (though most people on the outside would disagree on principle).

The second mobile ad company had a decent API designer early, and managed to capture a specific role in advertising. That role gave them access to data that ended up being wildly useful for purposes other than it's original intention, and they've done well based on that. But they are completely mired in in-fighting, executives who only bother to come in and be seen for quarterly results, and they don't do *anything* unless someone else does it first. They don't have a functional legal department and engineers are afraid that their head will be on the block if something goes wrong, and everyone is afraid of killing the golden goose.

So no, I suspect it hasn't happened because almost nobody thought of it, and the people that did are too afraid to be a trailblazer.

And we've already seen the precursors for it. Chaining multiple short ads together to add enough value to be worth it for an in-game reward is the beginning of it. It's not a very far leap.
by _alaya | 2026-01-06 20:41:11+00:00
A Steve Yegge blog post was made to be shortened with AI. :)

I think Gas Town looks interesting directionally and as a PoC. Like it or not, that's the world we'll end up in. Some products will do it well and some will be horrible monsters. (Like I'm already dreading Oracle Gas Town and Azure Gas Town).

I think the Amp coding agent trends in the direction of Gas Town already. Powerful but expensive, uses a mix of models and capabilities to do something that's greater than the sum of the parts.
by geekamongus | 2026-01-06 20:41:13+00:00
A couple of points missed for why Spotify is bad:

- Paying musicians cheap wages to make boring music (ghost artists) for playlists they promote: https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...

- Not paying musicians anything at all if they don't have enough streams: https://www.engadget.com/spotify-confirms-it-wont-offer-payo...

- Not preventing the deluge of AI-generated music flooding the platform: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/spotify-no...
by amichail | 2026-01-06 20:41:25+00:00
PluriSnake is a snake-based color matching daily puzzle game.

Color matching is used in two ways: (1) matching circles creates snakes, and (2) matching a snake’s color with the squares beneath it destroys them.

Snakes, but not individual circles, can be moved by snaking to squares of matching color, as long as their paths are not blocked by other snakes.

The goal is to score as highly as you can. Destroying all the squares is not required for your score to count.

Of course, there is more to it than that as you will see.

Try it out:

https://testflight.apple.com/join/mJXdJavG

Any feedback would be appreciated. Have fun!
by TeMPOraL | 2026-01-06 20:41:36+00:00
> the physics means you only can get IR out and the LED can't receive anything that way

Gut feeling tells me there is a way, if you use way more power than normal for this :). Much like with making speakers receive sound (you need to amplify the received signal afterwards) and making microphones produce it.

But it doesn't really matter whether or not you can reverse the analog signal flow, if the digital side treats the I/O pins as unidirectional.
by mingus88 | 2026-01-06 20:41:45+00:00
Then Palantir needs to be sued for fraud. This is absolutely counter to the pitch they were giving their investors, specifically that Palantir was built as a response to 9/11 to bridge the gap between various intelligence agencies and their disconnected datasets

It was a war on terror analyst notebook, and correct me if I’m wrong but Islamic extremism is not communism.
by pjmlp | 2026-01-06 20:42:00+00:00
Here is a better one then,

"Rich Code for Tiny Computers: A Simple Commodore 64 Game in C++17"

https://youtu.be/zBkNBP00wJE?si=uqUwVMMEpp4ZPWun

It is a matter of skill, understanding C++ and how to make it useful for embedded systems, and being able to understand standard library isn't a requirement for each executable.

By the way, the famous Arduino and ESP32 hasve no problem dealing with C++.

As we also didn't, back in MS-DOS, with 640 KB, Turbo Vision and Borland Collection Library (BIDS).

A matter of skill, as mentioned.
by scottbez1 | 2026-01-06 20:42:00+00:00
Heh, many years ago I actually started writing a dedicated diff viewer app for Android [0] that specifically had synchronized horizontal scrolling between the two sides, and I remember finding it relatively usable in landscape, and I’m sure modern phones with larger and higher density screens would be even better.

But yeah, you definitely need a native experience to make side by side diffs viable on mobile.

[0] https://github.com/scottbez1/superdiff — I wish I had recorded some videos of the app back then. My code review workflow back then eventually stopped including diff attachments on code review emails, so I abandoned development on it.
by dspillett | 2026-01-06 20:42:10+00:00
> so whether or not the 36% of population who didn't vote are seen as complicit villains

Not complicit villains, it isn't as black and white as that, but those who don't engage and then complain are pretty close. After the brexit vote a number of people said things along the lines of “if I'd know it would matter, I'd have bothered”, which is something I find difficult to respond to in a polite manner.
by worik | 2026-01-06 20:42:16+00:00
The USAnian system imploded dreadfully in 1861

It came very close in the 1930s, it is arguable that the New Deal headed off revolution

The USA should have been considered a pariah state since the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964, now it is rapidly becoming one

The USAnian system has been a corrupt oligarchy with only trappings of democracy since it's inception. Those "trappings" run deep, but are not allowed to unseat the true source of power: money

The Founding Fathers [sic] gave that a lot of thought and worked very hard to make it that way from the very beginning
by gnyman | 2026-01-06 20:42:41+00:00
It caught my eye also but the article was interesting so I'll forgive OP :-)

On the topic of tamagotchi, if you happen to have a flipper zero there is emulator for it :-) my kid enjoyed it for while and it saved me a few bucks from having to buy one.

https://github.com/GMMan/flipperzero-tamagotch-p1

You can run it on tama-p1 on other platforms also but the flipper was very reminiscent of the original one.
by vladms | 2026-01-06 20:42:50+00:00
I learnt Basic, C++ in that order because at the time there were the only options (Basic because of a computer like Sinclair that only had basic, C++ because there was the only thing offered as a course at a computer club around).

Programming languages are easier to discover because they are a reasonable number (tens) you can asses, they are very important (if you are in the field), so you can invest a lot of time in choosing and following the trends.

I will not spend the same amount of time deciding about everything...

One thing that I prefer something like ads/reviews (and in fact works well enough in my case): cultural events in the city I live.
by hn8726 | 2026-01-06 20:42:52+00:00
Google Play offers such functionality already, it's called App Bundles. Instead of uploading an entire APK, the developers can upload the app assets that get bundled into device-specific APKs containing only the resources necessary for the end device. So you'd only get native libs for your phone CPU architecture, translations for the device language and image assets matching the device resolution for example. In fact, I think it's mandatory now to use the app bundles format (but you're still free to configure it to some extent)

I now see the article is about iOS app, but it looks like the Android app is anywhere between 50mb and 100mb (depending on the apk download side I look at) which is much more reasonable
by Klonoar | 2026-01-06 20:42:57+00:00
Video game sites back then were cool, yes. Now do video game fan sites.

These have in so many ways been replaced over the years by generic ad-ridden wikis but back in the day games often had crazy interesting fan sites for specific video games.

So many unique designs and layouts were done for those niche communities and so many of those designers and developers went on to do really cool things in the future. What an era.
by mschuster91 | 2026-01-06 20:43:01+00:00
How about we accept both Biden and Trump were and are in cognitive and physical decline, simply due to their age?

Biden was 78 when he assumed office, and so was Trump in his second term. Neither of them should have been in any position of power, not at that age - the average American has a life expectancy of ~75 years for males.

The position of the American President is inarguably the position with the most power, responsibility and stress in the world. Personally, I'd say if there is a floor cap of 35 years of age... there should be a ceiling cap as well. Pension age, or even lower.
by russdill | 2026-01-06 20:43:02+00:00
Here it might fail. If you were sufficiently motivated and controlled the software stacks on the rpi's you may be able to get data to flow in the other direction. LEDs have their voltage modulated by light. And it's possible that is the voltage on the transistor is properly modulated it may able to emit light. It's a lot of ifs and requires the adc of the rpi to be sensitive enough (and one of the pinmux options). But it's why certifying is important.

Oh, and if you controlled the software stack on the two rpi's there's a good chance there's a side channel somewhere
by tialaramex | 2026-01-06 20:43:25+00:00
There are several edge cases where that's exactly what happened.

But in all the cases I can think of, when you look at that Rust today, what it meant in say 2018 Edition seems silly, "Oh, that's a daft thing for that to mean, I'm glad it doesn't mean that now"

We can't magically step into a time machine and fix how it worked at the time, any more than we could go back and cancel those minstrel shows which now seem awful. We can only fix it now and Rust's editions enable this, without the cost of making old code not work in old projects.

for dog in array_of_dogs.into_iter() {
/* In Rust 1.0 we get an immutable reference to each dog from the array */
/* But today (since 2021 Edition) we get the actual dogs, not references - thus consuming the array */
}

One of the changes I'm looking forward to from a future Edition is what happens when I write native ranges like 1..=10 (the integers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10). Today this means core::ops::RangeInclusive but that type isn't Copy, because it is Iterator. Instead hopefully one day it'll become core::range::RangeInclusive which is Copy, and so can't be Iterator but instead IntoIterator.

So in that future Rust edition (when/if it happens) I can treat 1..=10 the same way as a pair of numbers (1,10) or an array of two numbers [1, 10] which are both Copy, that is, by just copying the bit pattern you are guaranteed to get an object which means the same thing, making life easier for programmers and the compiler. Today, because it isn't Copy, I must do extra busy work, which is slightly annoying and discourages use of this otherwise great type.
by bee_rider | 2026-01-06 20:43:28+00:00
Your point 2 is interesting, but Musk isn’t any type of engineer really, just a money guy that uses engineer words. It seems more likely that he assumes a Hyperloop would be trivial not because it is a simple application of some lower framework that he’s got a deep understanding of, but because he hasn’t been given an itemized bill for one.
by galleywest200 | 2026-01-06 20:44:07+00:00
Some people do not mind buying art or paying artists for their work.

If we assume an artist gets 1¢ per stream of a song, and that album is 10 songs long, you need to listen to it 100x for the artist to get the same as just buying a $10 CD from Bandcamp.

I understand this example is missing the cuts given to other parties (label, etc) but it is still more to the artist than streaming unless you obsessively stream the same albums repeatedly.

Spotify is cheaper because your favorite local indie band makes far less from it.

Additionally, thrift stores have loads of CDs you can rip for extremely cheap.
Show HN: Sidestream – an AI chat app with a side of insight
by EricBrandon | 2026-01-06 20:44:26+00:00
Hi. My name is Eric Brandon and I’ve built an AI chat app that feels really different.

While you talk with an AI model in a chat pane, a second AI model is reading over the conversation and seeking out useful, interesting, surprising, amusing, and fact-checking information that wouldn’t have appeared in the main chat.

You can read those “discoveries” on their own, or click them into your main chat to steer the conversation in a new direction.

This is based on the observation that talking to smart people is usually more enjoyable, interesting, and informative than talking to a smart AI.

There’s many possible reasons why - the AI isn’t smart enough, it has no “real” emotions, it has no real long-term memory of your relationship, and so on.

But certainly one big reason is that the AI has been trained and instructed to simulate a “helpful assistant.” And helpful assistants stay on topic. They don’t interject with something super interesting, or wise, that is only thematically related. They don’t chime in with amusing related anecdotes. They don’t complicate the conversation with contrasting views.

I find this chat experience much much more interesting and useful than any of the first person apps from Anthropic, openAI, or Google.

This is combined with many power-user features like branching conversations, access to powerful models like chatGPT 5 Pro without a subscription, sophisticated output for sharing chats, and much more.

I find the freedom of having access to all the latest big-lab models in one app, and even in one chat, extremely convenient.

This app is a bit of a glimpse into the future, I believe. Today’s AI ecosystem means that having this experience:
- Requires more technical sophistication than the average user because you need to bring your own API keys
- Costs more than regular chat, because you can’t benefit from subsidized monthly plans, and because the “discoveries” add to the AI token costs of every conversation

But this user experience is so much better than the standard one that it’s hard to believe, in the future, when you can bring your subscriptions to third-party apps, and when inference is cheaper, that this won’t become the standard experience.

You can read about the app and download it at https://sidestream-app.com and https://github.com/ericbrandon/sidestream

It’s a non-commercial, open-source project built just because I wanted it for myself, but I hope you enjoy too!
by mattlondon | 2026-01-06 20:44:35+00:00
Same with my id.3

The windows' "rear" button thing is especially infuriating. That and the climate controls being behind a mandatory privacy click-through warning every damn time you turn the car on. Gah.

I have heard rumours that they were penny-pinching to get the price under various countries' cut-offs to be eligible for EV grants.

But yeah the interior controls are terrible for an otherwise pretty nice car.
by irishcoffee | 2026-01-06 20:44:39+00:00
I can say with absolute certainty that I have never used an LLM to tweak an email, and will never, ever use an LLM “agent” on my email, work or personal.

“Hey, how’s that hardware/software integration effort coming? What are your thoughts on the hardware so far?”

Fuck me if I let an LLM answer that.