MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Zambyte | 2026-01-14 18:32:21+00:00
As of 0.15.X, you can build strings using a std.Io.Writer. You can either:

- use std.Io.Writer.fixed to use a slice for the memory, and use .buffered() when you're done to get the subslice of the buffer that contains your string

or

- Create an instance of std.Io.Writer.Allocating with an allocator, and use .toOwnedSlice() when you're done to get your allocated string.

In both cases you just use regular print functions to build your string.

Depending on your needs, it may also be good to use a fixed writer with a dynamically allocated slice, where the size of the allocation is computed using std.fmt.count(). This can be better than using std.Io.Writer.Allocating because you can avoid doing multiple allocations.
by jjice | 2026-01-14 18:32:23+00:00
Why? Polyester (as one plastic based fiber) gets a lot of flack because low quality clothes tend to use it, but polyester can be a fantastic fabric if done right. Durable, fast drying, and can be completely recycled.

For example, Patagonia tends to have high quality polyesters and has since the 70s. My experience with their fleece is that I can abuse it and it'll come out unaffected on the other end. Pilling now and then that I take down with a pill remover.

Nylon is also a fantastic material, when used appropriately, like for the shell of a jacket.

And don't get me wrong, cotton, wool, and hemp are all fantastic as well. Most of my clothing is those fabrics and they do a damn fine job at what they're good at.
by IAmBroom | 2026-01-14 18:32:24+00:00
Fascism, contrary to many people's usage, has an actual meaning that is not "things I don't like".

One definition:

"Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian political ideology centered on a powerful dictator, extreme nationalism, and the nation's interests above the individual, suppressing opposition through force, propaganda, and control over society, business, and labor, often promoting militarism and a strong, unified national identity."

Note that "citizens doxxing government actors" is not in any way an ingredient of fascism.
by mikestew | 2026-01-14 18:32:43+00:00
It's unlikely that we will exceed 100Gb/month in the camper. But if we do, it's either slow speeds, or pay $165/month for unlimited roam every single month we use it, versus paying a little extra for the few times we go over. In the end, it'll probably work out okay for us, but I liked the previous option of being able to get high-speed data at a reasonable price should we go over the limit.
by jandrese | 2026-01-14 18:33:16+00:00
Politics or no, the price point ultimately dictated its maximum sales. By that measure it's a reasonable success, and if Elon was forecasting that they would sell multiple tens of thousands of vehicles per year at a $80,000 price point he needs to lay off the drugs. Elon sometimes seems like the living embodiment of "How much could a banana cost, Michael, $10?" parody of out of touch rich people.
by sfink | 2026-01-14 18:33:17+00:00
It's a good reason to choose Rust over C++ for that application, and others that share its characteristics. (Or, more to the point of the article, it's a good reason to declare that Rust is faster than C++ for that application.)

It doesn't provide a lot of evidence in either direction for the rest of the vast space of potential programs.

(Knowing C++ fairly well and Rust not very well, I have Opinions, but they are not very well-informed opinions. They roughly boil down to: Rust is generally better for most programs, largely due to cargo not Rust, but C++ is better for more exploratory programming where you're going to be frequently reworking things as you go. Small changes ripple out across the codebase much more with Rust than C++ in my [limited] experience, and as a result the percentage of programming time spent fixing things up is substantially higher with Rust.)
by kevmo | 2026-01-14 18:33:39+00:00
I was getting a haircut last week and chatting about our kids with the stylist, who said (basically): "I just started letting my 7 year old on Roblox. I know its full of pedophiles. I told him to come to me or his older brother if anyone tries to talk to him."

If the million reports of Mark Zuckerberg enabling pedophiles and scam artists haven't made it clear, the executives of these tech companies just don't care. They will sell children into sexual slavery if it improves next quarter's numbers.
Show HN: Tabstack – Browser infrastructure for AI agents (by Mozilla)
by MrTravisB | 2026-01-14 18:33:56+00:00
Hi HN,

Launch Post: https://mzl.la/4aVbGzh

My team and I are building Tabstack to handle the "web layer" for AI agents.

Maintaining a complex infrastructure stack for web browsing is one of the biggest bottlenecks in building reliable agents. You start with a simple fetch, but quickly end up managing a complex stack of proxies, handling client-side hydration, and debugging brittle selectors. and writing custom parsing logic for every site.

Tabstack is an API that abstracts that infrastructure. You send a URL and an intent; we handle the rendering and return clean, structured data for the LLM.

How it works under the hood:

- Escalation Logic: We don't spin up a full browser instance for every request (which is slow and expensive). We attempt lightweight fetches first, escalating to full browser automation only when the site requires JS execution/hydration.
- Token Optimization: Raw HTML is noisy and burns context window tokens. We process the DOM to strip non-content elements and return a markdown-friendly structure that is optimized for LLM consumption.
- Infrastructure Stability: Scaling headless browsers is notoriously hard (zombie processes, memory leaks, crashing instances). We manage the fleet lifecycle and orchestration so you can run thousands of concurrent requests without maintaining the underlying grid.

On Ethics: Since we are backed by Mozilla, we are strict about how this interacts with the open web.

- We respect robots.txt rules.
- We identify our User Agent.
- We do not use requests/content to train models.
- Data is ephemeral and discarded after the task.

The linked post goes into more detail on the infrastructure and why we think browsing needs to be a distinct layer in the AI stack.

This is obviously a very new space and we're all learning together. There are plenty of known unknowns (and likely even more unknown unknowns) when it comes to agentic browsing, so we’d genuinely appreciate your feedback, questions, and tips.

Happy to answer questions about the stack, our architecture, or the challenges of building browser infrastructure.
by iguessthislldo | 2026-01-14 18:34:04+00:00
I've never used gh workflow run, but I have used the GitHub API to run workflows and wanted to show the URL. I had to have it make another call to get the workflow runs and assume the last run is the one with the correct URL. This would obviously not work correctly if there were multiple run requests at the same time. Maybe some more checking could detect that, but it works for my purposes so far.
by homebrewer | 2026-01-14 18:34:10+00:00
I think they will have enough clients from other parts of the world to make it work. Large areas of my country can't really be covered with wired networks, it's too expensive to make it economically feasible without massive government subsidies, for which there's no money.

Starlink has already been used to connect very remote rural schools which previously only had dial-up connectivity (enough to send text email, but not much else).

And nobody here cares about American politics, we have enough of our own problems.
by mattmoose21 | 2026-01-14 18:34:18+00:00
We have had our LG for a few years now and it uses a third of the electricity of our craigslist Kenmore. With the rebates at the time it has paid for itself already.

The big difference in day to day use for us actually comes by way of the lint trap. Not only do you have to clean the lint trap every time (as normal) you also have to clean the heat exchanger every few loads. This process is a pain in the butt, you have to lie on the ground and gently brush away wet lint off the fins while avoiding bending them. The more lint that is left on the fins the less efficient the dryer is and the longer it takes to dry a load.

This will ultimately end up causing an issue long term (know idea how long) as more and more lint makes its way past the accessible portions of the exchanger and the dryer will take longer and longer. You can in theory take these apart and power wash them but it is not user friendly in the least and probably not worth the effort of a technician.

All together we like the dryer though.
by tomaytotomato | 2026-01-14 18:34:25+00:00
That could be a big potato battery bank?

According to google a 200g potato give off about half a volt (0.5v) and 0.2mah

4000 tonnes = 4,000,000 kg = 4,000,000,000 g

num potatoes = 4,000,000,000 / 200 = 20,000,000 potatoes

volts = 20,000,000 x 0.5v = 10,000,000 volts (10megavolts)

current would stay the same at 0.2mah

I am not an electrical engineer, what could we do with this?
by rdm_blackhole | 2026-01-14 18:34:39+00:00
> It's not an either-or.

I understand but I am telling you that this argument is basically useless when people see their bill at the end of each month.

> I wouldn't say Labour have failed here. In fact, efforts like this are steps towards lowering prices.

I don't mind splitting hairs when necessary but you are clearly not arguing in good faith. Labour pledge repeatedly that it would lower the prices by hundreds of pounds each year for good and this has not happened and Labour is running out of time.

If the promise could not be delivered on, why make it? That is just giving ammunition to the other parties who will use it against them not to mention make them look like liars.
by switchbak | 2026-01-14 18:34:42+00:00
Oh sure, but look at the vast popularity of these monstrosities that never even see gravel. I get how you (and I) find that abhorrent, but there's clearly LOTS of folks that find a blinged out useless luxury pretend truck to be very attractive.

I was in the market for a pickup recently. I had wanted to like the Cybertruck, but ... too damn ugly, too version 0.3, too many dweebs driving them, too many teething issues even for a first cut. Plus it's as heavy as an F-250. There's almost no actual reason to grab one besides it being electric. Since I drive so little, I'd never pay back the embedded energy it takes to make the thing - so even that isn't a selling point.

So instead I got a used Tacoma, and disappeared into the ocean of Tacomas that exist here in the PNW. It could be worse :)
by MarkusWandel | 2026-01-14 18:34:49+00:00
Shannon's information theory asssumes optimal coding, but doesn't say what the optimal coding is.

Anyway if a single observer who lies 20% of the time gives you 4 out of 5 bits correct, but you don't know which ones...

And N such observers, where N>2, gives you a very good way of getting more information (best-of-3 voting etc), to the limit, at infinite observers, of a perfect channel...

then interpolating for N=2, there is more information here than for N=1. It just needs more advanced coding to exploit.
by danans | 2026-01-14 18:34:52+00:00
> but plugins get closer to the less efficient alternative (regular hybrid) the more you use them.

As long as most of your drive cycle fits within the EV range of the plugin hybrid, they are cheaper to operate than a regular hybrid. The crossover point depends on the drive cycle and the cost of electricity vs gasoline.

I had a plug-in hybrid SUV that got 2.2miles/kWh in EV mode, which covered 75% of the miles I drove. The net savings were significant vs an equivalent plain hybrid SUV in my area, which would get basically the same gasoline miles/gal.
by gregsadetsky | 2026-01-14 18:35:33+00:00
My apologies - you’re correct. I didn’t mean that as “you should never expect anyone to have contributed code for free/the pleasure/for the puzzle solving aspect”. I do it all of the time.

I meant - it’s unfair to consider that because this labor “fell from the sky”, you should just accept it - and as others have said, in the case of projects that become popular, that the burden should just automatically fall on the shoulders of someone who happened to share code “for free”.

If/when someone ends up becoming responsible for work they hadn’t necessarily signed up for (who signs up for burnout?) - it’s ok/necessary/mandatory to see how everyone (and or Nvidia/Google/OpenAI etc) can, like, help.

My insistence is on the opt-out nature of this so that people who would be ok being compensated don't have to beg.

Consider how the xz malware situation happened [0]. Or the header & question 8 from the FAQ for PocketBase [1].

[0] https://x.com/FFmpeg/status/1775178803129602500

[1] https://pocketbase.io/faq/
by buzzardbait | 2026-01-14 18:35:35+00:00
I don't think Linux itself is held back by lack of adoption at all. Android is the most popular mobile operating system in the world, last I checked. My dad doesn't know the difference between dir and ls, and he will only use an Android phone.

I would rather hug a fully grown crocodile than install Linux on my computer. But even I wouldn't deny that Android - and by extension Linux - is probably the best thing that happened to mobile devices.

Desktop Linux is lacking in adoption, but maybe that's because it's not packaged nearly as nicely as Android.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2026-01-14 18:36:13+00:00
> mishandle the documents

https://www.jonathan-cook.net/2011-09-28/the-dangerous-cult-...

> The low point in Leigh’s role in this saga is divulging in his own book a complex password Assange had created to protect a digital file containing the original and unedited embassy cables. Each was being carefully redacted before publication by several newspapers, including the Guardian.

> This act of – in the most generous interpretation of Leigh’s behavior – gross stupidity provided the key for every security agency in the world to open the file. Leigh has accused Wikileaks of negligence in allowing a digital copy of the file to be available. Whether true, his own role in the affair is far more inexcusable.

> His and the Guardian’s recklessness in disclosing the password was compounded by their negligent decision to contact neither Assange nor Wikileaks before publication of Leigh’s book to check whether the password was still in use.

> [The Guardian] made no mention either of Leigh’s role in revealing the password or of Wikileaks’ point that, following Leigh’s incompetence, every security agency and hacker in the world had access to the file’s contents. Better, Wikileaks believed, to create a level playing field and allow everyone access to the cables, thereby letting informants know whether they had been named and were in danger.

Jonathan Cook does a good job of telling this story.

https://www.jonathan-cook.net/2013-07-29/the-assassination-o...

https://www.jonathan-cook.net/2022-05-04/persecution-julian-...
by giancarlostoro | 2026-01-14 18:36:34+00:00
I'll always give Tesla, SpaceX etc props for the work they accomplish, even though Elon is at the helm, he's not a perfect dude but I will give him props when he gets something right too. At the end of the day his employees are doing incredible work and it should not be written off because of Elon. To any Tesla / SpaceX employee whether you agree with Elon or not, thank you for helping to build a more interesting tomorrow.
by vablings | 2026-01-14 18:36:37+00:00
Things for sure are better, once you are kinda on the digital ladder with various things its ok. Drivers License, NI Number, Passport and Proof of address documents are all fairly trivial to get

Payslips are fully automated and there is a nice HMRC app that lets you see your PAYE income. Also, the NHS app is not half bad, you can mostly access any previous information but its not always fully populated due to a mixed bag of records
by altairprime | 2026-01-14 18:37:04+00:00
The distinction is that this is meant to bring in women in service to a man such that they’re sponsor is also their new boss in sex work, rather than women who service men while maintaining independent free will to control their career in sex work. The phrase “sex worker” could refer to either scenario and it’s important to distinguish the former from the latter in order to understand just how that particular criteria came to be. (And, yeah, it can be quite uncomfortable to discover that the U.S. has a special immigration pathway for wealthy and/or politically-connected men to import women as sex servants. Isn’t history swell, congress protects its privileges quite effectively, etc.)
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2026-01-14 18:37:07+00:00
Given that this is (AFAICT) a way to efficiently run exactly one program on a machine (probably a VM), I would have liked to see more time spent on the particulars of getting a program running on it. Like, can you easily run existing software on BareMetal? Could you compile nginx to run on it? Or does software have to be written specifically for this environment? And either way, how exactly do you actually build your software for/into(?) the image?
by nebula8804 | 2026-01-14 18:37:20+00:00
I do agree that the bill has to be paid. I don't what we are going to do with the trillions of dollars of debt as a result of tax cuts for the rich, handouts to countries like Israel and so much more that does not directly help regular people. The US has been a piggybank for all the world to just loot and take advantage of. Given that this is the environment we are in, I am all for providing these breadcrumbs that Mamdani is proposing to regular people.

Sooner or later there will be a reckoning with all the money that has been stolen by the upper class. Without these small programs, that help people that reckoning will come faster but it will come either way.
by ReallyOldLurker | 2026-01-14 18:37:23+00:00
> Only one thing I wish I could set, allow windows to cover the 'bar'. Yes, I can make the bar auto-hide, but I cannot have a portion of it covered by a window.

If I understand your comment correctly, right click on the Panel --> Panel Preferences, Display tab. Checkmark "Keep panel above windows". This allows windows to use the panel section of the screen. Combine with "Automatically hide the panel: intelligently".
by crumpled | 2026-01-14 18:37:27+00:00
The image would have to be topical, and the sexual nature would have to be necessary (not-gratuitous) for it to be compliant with that CoC.

I'd be surprised if such an image can exist in an electronics forum because those parameters are pretty narrow.
I also don't interpret policy as disallowing any form of joke.

I'm not about to go hunting, but I think I would find a good number of good non-offensive jokes, and probably no instances of sexual imagery.
by MrJohz | 2026-01-14 18:37:42+00:00
That's true, which is why I added the caveat that this is only true if parallelising reduces the overall runtime - if you can get in more requests per second through parallelisation. And the flip side of that is that if you're able to perfectly utilise all cores then you're already running everything in parallel.

That said, I suspect it's a rare case where you really do have perfect core utilisation.
by bob001 | 2026-01-14 18:37:51+00:00
> Occupy was after the capital class

White washing history doesn't change the reality of what the people actually making up the movement wanted. Not what the self-elected spokespeople who had no actual power since there were no leaders said to make it all sound less threatening.

> From 2011 starting as a completely unorganized group to running the finance capital of America in just 15 years.

Always interesting how both the left and right forget democracy and checks and balanced and just assume the executive branch is a dictator when it's their wannabe dictator in power. :)
Show HN: Cloud Code – Launch coding agents via API
by thymathgeek | 2026-01-14 18:38:06+00:00
Hi HN,

Would appreciate any feedback on my working prototype!

Cloud Code allows you to programmatically invoke a command-line coding agent. The agent runs in a cloud sandbox, so there's no need to install anything locally. You can use it to build Zapier/n8n automations or integrate coding agents into your app.
by turblety | 2026-01-14 18:38:06+00:00
There seems to be a big movement (UK specifically) from governments using age gating as an excuse to increase surveillance and online tracking. I don't know where Roblox is based or it's policies, but it's likely they are just implementing what the government has forced them to do.

We need to push back against governments that try and restrict the freedom of the internet and educate them on better regulations. Why can sites not dictate the content they provide, then let device providers provide optional parental controls.

Governments forcing companies to upload your passport/ID, upload pictures/videos of your face, is dangerous and we are going to see a huge increase of fraud and privacy breaches, all while reducing our freedoms and rights online.
by WorldMaker | 2026-01-14 18:38:42+00:00
They have artificially worse prices in the US where EVs are mostly only getting sold as "luxury" vehicles and competition is hobbled by dealer networks and dealer laws and import tariffs.

Most other parts of the world EVs are starting to be cheaper than the equivalent ICE in the same category.

Range often doesn't need to get better, the impression of range needs to change. That's where a lot of misconceptions play into effect, over-focusing on things like gas-station-like charging stations over at-home charging. Over-focusing on "zero to full tank/battery statistics" when no one keeps a gas vehicle with a full tank overnight every night. Over-focusing on high speed charging and ignoring boring but useful "Level 1" charging, which is "just about everywhere" because our society has been building electrical outlets for a long time. Sure, the experience changes in things like long distance trips, but experience changes aren't "worse" by default of being a change.
by nabbed | 2026-01-14 18:38:46+00:00
Way, way back in 2003 or thereabouts, I had to add an "open this report in Excel" function to an existing product. But first I had to figure out how to convert the report to Excel format (with freeze panes, etc.). I found Apache POI and was very happy with its API documentation, especially this "Busy Developers' Guide to Features": https://poi.apache.org/components/spreadsheet/quick-guide.ht...

This page was much simpler 22 years ago (I don't remember this HSSF stuff, whatever that is), but it still looks familiar. Basically everything I needed to do had examples in there. I remember thinking that the authors cared about the users of the library (although the Javadoc seems a little bare.. but I am not sure I needed the Javadoc much).

If I ever create an OSS library, I would certainly also create a "Busy Developers' Guide".
by resfirestar | 2026-01-14 18:38:59+00:00
Linux malware looks different usually. This kind of plugin based framework running as its own process is uncommon, but web shells with similar functionality have been around for a while. And bad guys like working in the shell on Linux too, just a simple binary that reads commands from a socket is often all they need, but doesn't make for very fascinating blog posts. Some just install cloudflared, nothing custom needed at all.