MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rich_sasha | 2026-01-07 05:24:07+00:00
It is kind of terrible either way, I feel.

We're making enormous investments, that require enormous profits to justify this. And it's not just big bad rich people doing this, I shudder to think what the exposure of my pension portfolio is to this stuff.

So either there will be no enormous returns, big flop, big recession. Probably terrible for tech workers, because it is our employers who are most exposed.

Or it will make enormous profits. But how? By replacing humans. If it is really worth all this money, then surely the owners of this stuff will suddenly own all the intellectual productivity in the world. And I have a feeling they won't really share it with the "share" holders.
by llmslave2 | 2026-01-07 05:24:25+00:00
Couple things stand out to me:

1) everyone on the team uses Claude code differently.

2) Claude Code has been around for almost a year and is being built by an entire team, yet doesn't seem to have benefited from this approach. The program is becoming buggier and less reliable over time, and development speed seems indistinguishable from anything else.

3) Everything this person says should be taken with a massive grain of salt considering their various conflicts of interest.
Show HN: Tera.fm – A calm, radio-style way to listen to today's tech news
by digi_wares | 2026-01-07 05:24:30+00:00
I got tired of doom-scrolling and skimming headlines that all blur together, so I built a small site that turns today’s tech and startup news into a calm, continuous radio-style stream.

No playlists. No jumping tabs. You just press play and listen.

It updates throughout the day and feels more like tuning into a station than consuming feeds.

Curious if this kind of “news radio for the internet” makes sense or if it’s just me
by numpad0 | 2026-01-07 05:24:57+00:00
Hopefully this serves as a reminder to decision makers with Web backgrounds to NOT push random non-critical _firmware_ updates without clear merit, or random updates in general.

Security is not fluids. It doesn't naturally evaporate. So don't try to add like they're washer fluids.

Those low-level software and associated hardware don't take software overwrites very well, even today. They might have total cumulative max overwrites, or manufacturer supplied update codes can still be dubious. It's (not)okay if you are meaning it to be a tool for your planned obsolescence strategy, otherwise, just don't touch it for the sake of doing it.
by rasz | 2026-01-07 05:25:23+00:00
real kicker was

>"We just couldn't pry the actual production samples out of our engineers hands at the lab this week. "

sounds like "Our CEO ordered samples to be shipped but those pesky engineers just wouldnt do it guys!"

>"Um, so we're going to be showing you videos"

Except they didnt even show videos, just some bad CGI aka "We rented this huge ass auditorium to show you our pet. Golden elephant is currently in our basement, he is tired right now so instead look at all those cool drawings my nephew made"!
by D-Machine | 2026-01-07 05:25:59+00:00
Nothing about my post said nor implied the two things were at odds or that there aren't people that do both. In fact, based on everything you are saying, I can't really find anything to disagree with at all.

> So there’s travel and there’s travel.

Indeed. If travel = tourism, then I agree most travel (as tourism) is superficial gives mostly trivial knowledge about a culture. If travel is "living / working abroad" or "an exchange", than, obviously it is not so trivial. And indeed, even a week as a tourist can be rich if you've read deeply on some specific aspect of the country, and that is the focus of your tourism.

I would still guess that over 90% of travel (at least among younger generations) is just shallow tourism, and people most vocal about the benefits of travel are generally just tourists pretending their shallow tourism is something more. This is the sentiment I think animates this kind of blog post / article.

EDIT: And also there is nothing wrong with liking fundamentally superficial and/or simple things. I enjoy trashy fast food and SPAM from time to time despite also happily spending many days and hours carefully preparing gourmet meals. But I don't ever pretend that enjoying SPAM is some elevated fine taste. Those who enjoy shallow tourism just have an annoying tendency to try to pretend that their "travel" somehow makes them better and/or sophisticated in some way, but, it simply does not, in the vast majority of cases.
Ask HN: Retro Games for Kids
by atakan_gurkan | 2026-01-07 05:26:08+00:00
I grew up with a Commodore 128. I used it mostly in C64 mode and spent a lot of time playing games, even though I only had a datasette. Now I have two kids (8 and 6) and after beginning elementary school the older one is asking for a game console :-) We will eventually get one, but in the meantime I thought of installing a C64 emulator on my old laptop and use a semi broken PS joystick to let them play some retro games. I am planning to install Pit Stop II, Boulder Dash, Great Giana Sisters, Crackout, International Karate and probably more.
While doing this, it occurred to me that I am not restricted to C64, I can install an Amiga simulator (I envied Amiga when I was a kid, but could not afford one) and have access to a lot more games, with much better sound and graphics (I don't mean to start a war).

Do you have game recommendations or other tips for such a project? I am willing to install other simulators as well, if it can be done via RetroArch on Debian.
by sibeliuss | 2026-01-07 05:27:46+00:00
"But, hardly in my 20s at the time, I’ve wondered since what I detected in it. What did the man have to offer me, so green, so goyish? This was Bellow’s very last novel, written in his 80s. Riffing on topics of Jewishness, sickness, aging, dying, marriage, politics, history, friendship; he was a very adult sort of thinker, a mature man’s writer. Yet I was so thrilled by this that upon my return home I read all of his work, and later his essays and letters, then the multitudinous biographies, memoirs, and studies that came out in the decades following his death."

This was precisely my experience in my early 20s! And how many times have I read Humboldt's Gift?
by GCUMstlyHarmls | 2026-01-07 05:28:54+00:00
> In the olden days I used to cross my fingers when rebooting spinning disk servers with very long uptimes because it was known there was a chance they wouldn't come back up even though they were running fine.

HA! Not just me then!

I still have an uneasy feeling in my guts doing reboots, especially on AM5 where the initial memory timing can take 30s or so.

I think most of my "huh, its broken now?" experiences as a youth were probably the actual install getting wonky though, rather than the few rare "it exploded" hardware failures after reboot, though that definitely happened.
by Spooky23 | 2026-01-07 05:28:56+00:00
It’s easy to eye roll at billionaire guy wanting to go work, but it’s a real thing, I recall my dad struggling with retirement, after having planned so long.

He did a bit of consulting, was a rural mail carrier for a year and ended up managing a county program for a few years. He also discovered teaching as an adjunct professor, which he loved deeply. At some point, he was ready, and he had several good years of retirement with grandchildren and travel.

With a story like this, I choose to see what we have in common with a very successful, very rich person. Many people think “If only I had a more, everything would be grand.”

Well… Brin is a billionaire controlling one of the most powerful corporations on the earth. He found meaning in his work, or chose his work because of the meaning to him. Either way, given the ability to do anything, he made his choice. Don’t worship the guy, but perhaps see the humanity that we all share.
by tombert | 2026-01-07 05:30:41+00:00
You could just edit your first comment instead of replying to yourself multiple times.

I haven't read RFK's book and even if every single fact in that particular book was true (which I very highly doubt), it wouldn't change anything he's done in the last year that involved gutting American medical research, spreading misinformation about vaccines that's debunked within their own "research", and coming up with the absolutely genius idea of "tell doctors to tell patients to eat better" to "fix" American's illnesses. Oh, and telling people to eat fried food as long as its fried with beef tallow. That's really dumb.

He's an utter and complete moron at best, and the only reason that people (like you presumably) listen to him is because of his last name.
by lovich | 2026-01-07 05:31:02+00:00
I do not accept that the analogy was made without an implicit attempt to conflate the two positions.

Most tech jobs aren’t a 9-5 either since that’s a traditional hourly job and tech has on call rotations that are unpaid.

This is what I’m talking about with the article insulting the readers intelligence. If you wanted to make the point of “people who retire should be aware that they need to find meaning outside of work” then it could just say so, instead of trying to act like it’s so hard to be so wealthy that there is no more struggle in life and you need to invent new ones for yourself.
by blibble | 2026-01-07 05:31:24+00:00
> If that were the case, many assurances the platform makes would be out the window. The reality is that you are obviously already trusting the platform, hardware, its software/firmware, and the implementation's use of core key management APIs, which it doesn't just offer up to random callers.

the point of the
authenticator is that you don't need need to trust the platform, the operating system the browser or anything other than the authenticator

the authenticators job is to secure the private key, but it will happily serve up the public key to "random callers"

the browser/webauthn are not special, it's just another untrusted "random caller" from the authenticator's perspective

webauthn will not allow the public key out, but the authenticator will

> If you think any of those components/actors are not adhering to fundamental boundaries/limitations, like exposure of sensitive credential material to random callers on the device, it's a more far reaching indictment of passkeys in general.

there's nothing cryptographically sensitive about the public key

hence the name: PUBLIC key
by andruby | 2026-01-07 05:31:39+00:00
Are most people really this naive? I might be "the exception", and have had this discussion with friend _who are accountants no less_ and they all consider the monthly price "cheaper" than when presented as a yearly price.

Should we start a "subscription review day": make a list of all your subscriptions, change them to yearly amounts and ask yourselves "am I getting that much value out of it"?
by Ericson2314 | 2026-01-07 05:31:46+00:00
The problem with famous people unretiring and doing something different is they are kind of the nepobaby children of their former career arc selves. I both feel bad for him but am glad he's happier now.

Would I would really like bored FIRE people to do is advocate for shortening the work-week. The world needs to chill the fuck out, and leisure should be more abundant. Bored retirees have a unique credibility in advocating for this, and the time to do both grassroots and grasstops advocacy. (Think tanking and lobbying are descendants of the original retirement project, if you think about aristocracry as the original governmance system.)
by zamadatix | 2026-01-07 05:31:56+00:00
TECHNICAL.md lays it out a bit more, but it claims to be RFC 5321 compliant with a realistic initiation sequence so it should somewhat look like a real SMTP server for the first bit.

Ending up on any DNSBLs shouldn't be a problem unless you have a static home IP you plan on running an actual SMTP server from after this though.
by zarzavat | 2026-01-07 05:33:43+00:00
How are you qualified to judge its performance on real code if you don't know how to write a hello world?

Yes, LLMs are very good at writing code, they are so good at writing code that they often generate reams of unmaintainable spaghetti.

When you submit to an informatics contest you don't have paying customers who depend on your code working every day. You can just throw away yesterday's code and start afresh.

Claude is very useful but it's not yet anywhere near as good as a human software developer. Like an excitable puppy it needs to be kept on a short leash.
by Dylan16807 | 2026-01-07 05:33:44+00:00
I mean even vaguely vaguely modern-style economy. And you know that's not the point. The point is there's a lot of things that are omnipresent but also not important to the economy.

> I think if you look at some early advertising (e.g. BCE), you'll see that most have a painfully obvious functional form of just simply announcing the existence of a product/service for the world to observe.

That doesn't tell us how important it is to have advertising.

And it doesn't tell us how important it is to have advertising anywhere near current levels.
by taeric | 2026-01-07 05:34:22+00:00
I'm talking about people that literally think absolutely nobody is working on things. There was a viral video not too long ago of a young activist saying she got into this because she realized that "literally nobody was working to make things better." I could chalk that up to online viral nonsense, but I've talked to people fresh out of college that legit think this sort of stuff.

This sort of thing is usually made worse by people that are not willing to acknowledge that not all progress is definitionally good. (As an easy example, the report a few years ago that raised the idea that measurable increases in ocean temperature were from cleaner shipping got annoyingly ignored.)

Again, though, in my theme of "this isn't really stack related." This is also not activist related. People have a tendency to think the problem they are working on is more important than every other problem. Dentists tend to think oral health is the key to understanding all health. Nutritionists, the same. Managers tend to think things just need good management. It is a very common pattern.

And it is enticing because it speaks to kernels of truth. It just doesn't survive the "no panacea" test.
by drewda | 2026-01-07 05:35:41+00:00
It's not just millions. Shanahan received over a billion dollars when divorcing Brin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicole_Shanahan

Today's unscientific gutting of the CDC's childhood vaccine schedule is what is being accomplished with all that $GOOG money.

It's honestly very disturbing and rather than discuss it as a matter of politics, I'll just say that as a parent I'll be following the AAP's vaccination recommendations (even if their recommendations on baby sleep are impossible :)
by godelski | 2026-01-07 05:35:45+00:00
Has the refresh rate on eink devices reached like 30-60fps?

It definitely looks cool and I might give it a try, but I do love my dark mode and color syntax. My understanding is that color on eink is pretty limited. It also isn't worth it to me if I'm going to be spending $500+ on a "monitor". But I'd definitely love if things moved in that direction.

Honestly if Apple wasn't so insistent on making the iPad not a general purpose computer I'd use that as my thin client.
by snowwrestler | 2026-01-07 05:36:32+00:00
I will say that this topic is a common one among people talking about FIRE “financial independence, retire early” — folks who are saving as fast as they can so they can quit working. There are a lot of people who already got there who come back to warn people they won’t necessarily be happy and fulfilled just because they quit the day job. Like, that’s an amazing feeling at first but it probably won’t carry you for 30-50 more years.

The article actually includes some of these examples, but I get the feeling that a lot of readers did not make it past the Brin part.
by tombert | 2026-01-07 05:36:36+00:00
I'm sorry, I don't seem to recall mentioning anything about COVID. Let me check my reply....nope! I mentioned stuff that happened in the last year.

So even if you were right about COVID, what you just wrote isn't a rebuttable to anything I said. Though I suspect you know that.

It's almost like your response is dishonestly trying to muddy the waters.
Show HN: Agentlearn – Interactive course for AI agent fundamentals
by init0 | 2026-01-07 05:36:38+00:00
https://agentlearn.dev

I built agentlearn after noticing that most AI agent tutorials focus on frameworks (LangChain, CrewAI) rather than fundamentals. The result is developers who can copy-paste code but struggle when things break.

This is a free, interactive course covering:

The Agent Loop - Why loops matter (think vs. act vs. observe)
Context Engineering - The real skill behind "prompt engineering"
Tools & Function Calling - Bridging text generation to real actions
Memory Systems - Short-term vs. long-term, vector DBs
Protocols - MCP, A2A, and the emerging standards
Production Patterns - Error handling, cost optimization, observability
Each concept has runnable code sandboxes you can step through. The design is intentionally "hand-drawn" to feel less intimidating than typical technical docs.

Tech stack: Vanilla JS + Vite, no framework.

Why no framework? Because understanding fundamentals means understanding what frameworks abstract away. Once you get the core loop, you can use any framework—or build your own.

Feedback welcome! Especially interested in what topics are missing.
by AstroBen | 2026-01-07 05:37:12+00:00
I thought that initially, but I don't think the skills AI weakens in me are particularly valuable

Let's say AI becomes too expensive - I more or less only have to sharpen up being able to write the language. My active recall of the syntax, common methods and libraries. That's not hard or much of a setback

Maybe this would be a problem if you're purely vibe coding, but I haven't seen that work long term
by numpad0 | 2026-01-07 05:37:28+00:00
Or something hit max program-erase cycle counts and are returning corrupt/old data. Flash ROMs tend to become "sticky" with previous states as you write more to them. I think it's possible that ROMs used for early SoC boot firmware or peripherals firmware still don't have wear leveling that they could become unusable after just a hundred or so of writes.
by Spooky23 | 2026-01-07 05:37:57+00:00
You are 100% correct.

Pre-1960s, the elderly were living in SROs, often windowless, with family (without aid or care), in county poorhouses, or marked as senile and sent to a mental hospital.

Retirement and living with family was viable for many as long as they remained healthy. People imagine Norman Rockwell. Reality was very different.
by almostgotcaught | 2026-01-07 05:38:58+00:00
> he can probably do everything else and has years of experience doing so

he literally can't and he literally doesn't

> He's also perfectly able to spend 60 hours a week improving his AI skills using the best teachers in the world.

this such a weird take - that some random billionaire, by virtue of his/her billions, is not only able to perform superhuman feats, but actually does. can you point to literally any instances of this phenomenon of the billionaire superhuman? like you realize that

1. studying for 60 hours a week requires either copious amounts of stimulant or absurd "neurodivergence" (read: the best scientists/mathematicians/etc don't have that kind of attention span);

2. there are no best teachers in the world - there are top researchers and they're busy doing research (and if he had hired them, we'd have heard about it);

3. does he have the optionality to do these things? sure but that same optionality means he could alternatively sit on his yacht all day, eating shrimp and caviar and getting felated. without any prior instances of the billionaire superhuman student and many prior instances of the billionaire hedonist, as a rational person, i can only assume that what he's actually doing is the latter (hedonism).

like bruh just because the guy hit the lotto doesn't mean you should worship/idolize him.
by csuwldcat | 2026-01-07 05:39:06+00:00
There's also the specific case of synced passkeys, which aren't exposed to CTAP management APIs for external parties, only to the OS/platform itself. You seem tied to a narrative where a user can install a native app that gets permission to call core OS/platform APIs that let the app get all the public keys of passkeys on the device, but no such permissions/APIs exist for apps, and providing them would be in explicit violation of the fundamental security model. In reality, only the platform/OS and highly trusted actors/components that are already within the existing trust model have such access for internal purposes, and if that's not a safe assumption, it would have broader implications beyond this concern.
by bitwize | 2026-01-07 05:39:44+00:00
From The Tao of Programming, chapter 3.3:

There was once a programmer who was attached to the court of the warlord of Wu. The warlord asked the programmer: "Which is easier to design: an accounting package or an operating system?"

"An operating system," replied the programmer.

The warlord uttered an exclamation of disbelief. "Surely an accounting package is trivial next to the complexity of an operating system," he said.

"Not so," said the programmer, "When designing an accounting package, the programmer operates as a mediator between people having different ideas: how it must operate, how its reports must appear, and how it must conform to the tax laws. By contrast, an operating system is not limited by outside appearances. When designing an operating system, the programmer seeks the simplest harmony between machine and ideas. This is why an operating system is easier to design."

The warlord of Wu nodded and smiled. "That is all good and well, but which is easier to debug?"

The programmer made no reply.

https://www.mit.edu/~xela/tao.html
by gnabgib | 2026-01-07 05:40:58+00:00
You said the same about your YouTube clone (1 day ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46507896

Gamma clone (2 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46494555

Poach (3 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46473135
by zamadatix | 2026-01-07 05:41:35+00:00
It's a fair question but I had a bit of a chuckle at the idea having a shit ton of emojis in your GitHub readme was the first flag it might be AI. Mostly because I always assumed the opposite - that GitHub readmes were a big part of the emoji ridden listicle training data (the other being slop "news" site/social media listicles) for AIs in the first place. After all, they are decently well written and come with grabbing the code to train from anyways.
by johnfn | 2026-01-07 05:41:57+00:00
The UI flickers rapidly in some cases when I use it in the VSCode terminal. When I first saw this when using Claude Code I imagined it was some vibe code bug that would be worked out quickly. But it's been like 9 months and still every day it has this behavior - to the point that it crashes VSCode! I can only imagine that no one at Anthropic uses VSCode because it really seems insane it's gone this long unfixed.