MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by libraryofbabel | 2026-01-28 14:42:04+00:00
All of these things can be simultaneously true (and I would say, are true):

1) We are in a huge investment bubble right now and it's going to burst.

2) LLMs are extremely useful right now for certain niche tasks, especially software engineering.

3) LLMs have the potential to transform our world long-term (~10 yr horizon), on the order of the transformations wrought by the internet and mobile.

4) LLM's don't lead directly to AGI (no continuous learning), and we're not getting AGI any time soon.

This is an extremely obvious point, but bears repeating. I feel the assumption of an implicit link (in both truth or falsehood) between these fairly independent assertions can cause people to talk past each other about the really important questions in play here.

Regarding The Great Bubble, I am very very bearish about OpenAI in particular. They've had a good run for three years with consumer mindshare due to their first-mover advantage, but they have no moat, trouble monetizing most of their users, not much luck building out products that stick among consumers that aren't chatbots, and their models are no better than Anthropic's, Google's, or even the best Chinese open weight models 6 months later.

My bet would be on Google and Apple together (with Gemini powering Siri, for now) destroying OpenAI in the consumer AI market over the next 2-3 years. Google has first-rate models... but more than that, both Google and Apple have the enormous advantage of owning underlying platforms that they can use to put their own AI chat in front of consumers. Google has a mobile OS, the leading browser, and search. Apple has the premium hardware and the other, premium, mobile OS. They also have the advantage of the current regulatory climate being less antitrust than it was. And they don't have to monetize their AI offerings (no ads in gemini; ChatGPT is adding them) and can run them at a loss for as long as it takes to eat up OpenAI's market share. If they partner up, as they seem to be doing, OpenAI should very very afraid.
by abadar | 2026-01-28 14:42:29+00:00
I totally get that. I have a super corpo buddy who tells me every project is 80% planning and he uses that philosophy for his personal projects. That makes sense for a huge company.

I resist working like that because I am mega ignorant and I know I will encounter problems that I won't recognize until I get to them.

But, I also HATE having to rework my projects because of something I overlooked.

My (attempted) solution is to slog through a chat with an AI to build a Project Requirements Document and to answer every question it asks about my blindspots. It mostly helps build stuff. And sometimes the friction prevents me from overloading myself with more unfinished projects!
by bri3d | 2026-01-28 14:42:40+00:00
The idea is that by protecting boot path you build a platform from which you can attest the content of the application. The goal here is usually that a cloud provider can say “this cryptographic material confirms that we are running the application you sent us and nothing else” or “the cloud application you logged in to matched the one that was audited 1:1 on disk.”
by abstraction_eng | 2026-01-28 14:42:42+00:00
Hi HN, I’m the solo dev behind this.

I built GlancePad because I wanted a fast, low-latency way to trigger real macOS actions from other Apple devices (Vision Pro, iPhone, Apple Watch) without relying on cloud relays or dedicated desktop peripherals.

The mental model is a control surface rather than a “remote desktop”: a native macOS agent (written in Swift) acts as the execution hub, and the client apps act purely as inputs. Everything runs locally over the network; nothing requires an account, and it continues to work offline.

A few constraints I cared a lot about:

• Local-first by default - no cloud dependency or external relay

• Immediate state reflection - changes on the Mac propagate instantly back to clients

• Intentional scope - automation is explicit and reviewable, not background or opaque

• No telemetry - I don’t collect usage data; Pro is a one-time purchase

There are optional on-device AI features for generating or reviewing macros, but execution is always explicit and local, and the system is fully usable without AI.

Happy to answer questions or discuss design decisions. I’m also curious what Mac workflows people here would want to turn into one-tap actions.

Project site: https://glancepad.app
by koe123 | 2026-01-28 14:43:24+00:00
> Then the next question is why does wealth, in practically all industrious countries seem to distribute disproportionally and not uniformly?

Compound interest, and as (admittedly) an armchair economist I buy into the argument that goes along the lines of:

"when the rate of return on capital (r) is greater than the rate of economic growth (g) over the long term, the result is concentration of wealth".

In my view, r has been greater than g for some time now.

> Then you might ask, if that's true, do you I want to enforce equality, potentially dragging down the economy to mediocracy (for example many stagnating European economies) or maybe accept that current nature does not meet our societal desire for equality.

To me, it is clear that while Europe optimizes for quality of life to a large extent, Americans really drink the coo-laid and enthusiastically optimize for shareholder value. I highly encourage you to give life in Europe a go at some point. I hope you'll return (or stay) also having reached the same perspective.
by aix1 | 2026-01-28 14:43:52+00:00
First of all, that's a very different sort of thing compared to blindly taking reams of code from an LLM. The amounts of code in a given SO answer or a magazine article are tiny and the code has undergone review of one sort or another. Similarly, if I take QR decomposition code from Numerical Recipes, that's quite likely to be better quality than what I -- or most folks -- can code up in a comparable amount of time. It's also an opportunity to learn by studying the code and the method.

Secondly, I am not talking about some abstract SWEs in a vacuum. This is happening to real people I work with, whom I know to be very capable. The lure of switching off the brain and just clicking "Accept" to some LLM suggestion seems too strong to resist. :(
by songodongo | 2026-01-28 14:44:19+00:00
Depends which side you’re on and how far. If you’re far-left, you’re thinking the administration is the Fourth Reich, you’re watching movies with Leonardo DiCaprio doing terrorist attacks on border patrol, and fighting the Gestapo. If you’re far right, you’re thinking the administration isn’t going far enough, Trump “is a cuck”, and Renee Good and Alex Pretti would be alive if they had just protested in front of a government building.
by WarmWash | 2026-01-28 14:44:36+00:00
Some, maybe all, ICE agents were body cams, but I haven't seen any footage. I'm not sure what the process would looks like, this whole ICE violence thing is only a few months old, whereas most regular police have had bodycams for 5+ years now and getting the footage is well established.

Police also definitely don't turn it off when it suites them, although some have, but again, it's a Streisand effect when they do. I really cannot stress enough that police doing bad things has extremely high monetary value for the people who find it, and you also get paid for the crazy bodycam videos you find along the way. If your a cop and you turn off your cam before breaking the law, you are almost certainly going to be the face of a 1M+ view youtube video. People, like yourself and me, gobble that up.

It doesn't matter much anyway, because there is 100x more footage of cops doing bad things with their cam on.
by mothballed | 2026-01-28 14:44:44+00:00
No, you didn't understand. Poster claimed they would have to fight the feds for jurisdiction. You argued they didn't. Then I set you straight that they would have to fight for court jurisdiction.

Just parroting back what I've said then simply declaring I don't understand it (despite explicitly acknowledging the state charge would be tried in federal court) just looks terribly misguided when you lied with your smug quip "that's not how it works", when apparently you pretend as if you knew all along jurisdiction was relevant and would be fought over.
by cmrdporcupine | 2026-01-28 14:44:48+00:00
"those who primarily like code reviews and quality assessment" -- I don't love those. In fact I find it tedious and love it when I can work on my own without them.

Except after 25 years of working I know how imperative they are, how easily a project can disintegrate into confused silos, and am frustrated as heck with these tools being pushed without attention to this problem.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2026-01-28 14:44:51+00:00
As noted by others below, this has nothing to do with GUI desktop applications.

Sure, systemd is involved in running the system on which those applications run, but the discussion was about some sort of equivalent to the unified GUI stack offered by macOS (the Core* frameworks) which are used by essentially every GUI application on that platform. Linux doesn't have that, and there's nobody in a position to force that on developers. systemd has nothing to do with this.
by upghost | 2026-01-28 14:45:46+00:00
tl;dr - All this AI stuff is just Universal Paperclips[1]

I see a lot of comments about folks being worried about going soft, getting brain rot, or losing the fun part of coding.

As far as I'm concerned this is a bigger (albeit kinda flakey) self-driving tractor. Yeah I'd be bored if I just stuck to my one little cabbage patch I'd been tilling by hand. But my new cabbage patch is now a megafarm. Subjectively, same level of effort.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Paperclips
by Bluecobra | 2026-01-28 14:46:18+00:00
> the playing field is more level

Quoted for truth. I still take taxis from time to time if there’s no wait at a taxi stand at an airport or building. I noticed in places like Las Vegas things seem better now, there’s flat rates and everyone has touchscreen payment terminals in the passenger area. I remember pre-Uber occasionally getting cab drivers that would take suboptimal routes like getting on the freeway to drive up the meter.
by sheepscreek | 2026-01-28 14:46:24+00:00
What an odd name for a programming language. I’m working on two different programming languages but both share one aspect, they are compiled to Rust. One is called Darcy lang and uses S-expressions the other is called Quiche and it brings a Pythonic flavour to Rust programming (and removes the borrow/ownership boilerplate from the language).

Both makes certain assumptions, but Darcy uses minimal abstractions and translates nearly 1:1 (does not support explicit traits though). Quiche is a tad bit slower than Rust (~80-85%) in performance but you win in terms of developer productivity and keep the same safety checks as Rust. Both are 100% safe.

Getting the LSP working for either of them has been more challenging than I imagined. Quiche affords me more choice because of the fantastic Ruff project. I am already heavily relying on their AST with Rust types latched on and an additional compiler pass for adding native support for discriminated enums.

Anyway, I think the space is particularly challenging for non-interpreted languages as they lack the real-time introspection necessary to do this. So additional infrastructure is required to basically, rebuild parts of the compiler to be more interpreter like. Just wanted to share some background on the complexities surrounding this stuff.
by surajrmal | 2026-01-28 14:46:30+00:00
Linux has been majority developed by large tech companies for the last 20+ years. If not for them, it would not be anywhere close to where it is today. You may not like this fact, but it's not really a new development nor something that can be described as infiltration. At the end of the day, maintaining software without being paid to do so is not generally sustainable.
by Calzifer | 2026-01-28 14:46:32+00:00
> Or is there some particular criteria an init system needs to satisfy to be included, that systemd doesn't satisfy but the others do?

Reading the first sentence on that page was to much?

"Init Freedom is about restoring a sane approach to PID1 that respects portability, diversity and freedom of choice."

systemd fails on the portability criteria.

Apart from that, why should they invest there limited time to include systemd? Devuan is Debian without systemd. If you want systemd install Debian.
by pixl97 | 2026-01-28 14:46:45+00:00
At the end of the day many different types are needed to make complex products work. Humans at least are unlikely to be able to accomplish all this individually as it requires character traits that are in conflict with each other.

With all humans the difficult part is getting all the needed traits to make a business/product work without getting ones like backstabbing/jealously that cause problems later.
by evilduck | 2026-01-28 14:46:45+00:00
> when there’s also Anthropic and Gemini offerings?

For average people the global competitors are putting up near identical services at 1/10th the cost. Anthropic and Google and OpenAI may have a corporate sales advantage about their security and domestic alignment, or being 5% better at some specific task but the populace at large isn't going to cough up $25 for that difference. Beyond the first month or two of the novelty phase it's not apparent the average person is willing to pay for AI services at all.
by sejje | 2026-01-28 14:46:58+00:00
...many people get off because of police procedure problems.

I see it constantly in my courtroom youtube feeds. Judge: "And what was the probable cause?"

Prosecutor: "(some bullshit that's not legit PC)"

Judge: ::incredulous look:: "Mr. Criminal, I'm going to dismiss this case based on lack of probable cause. I suggest you take this opportunity to fix your problems and stay out of my courtroom...blah blah blah"

The smaller the crime (like obstruction, not exactly murder or anything), the more likely it works. I think because police often use small crimes as retaliation.

There's no mountain-sized barrier, you just have your attorney bring up probable cause with the judge.
by volkercraig | 2026-01-28 14:47:00+00:00
Without the gnu projects, software would have remained in the domain of universities and industry. Distributing it for free and encapsulating it with an actual legal license was radical in and of itself, but the notion of being required to distribute source was even more radical. Without that, people don't learn to code outside of industry, people don't share ideas and software remains in corporate silos with no/low interoptability unless a business decides to form a strategic partnership.
by umeedsto | 2026-01-28 14:47:43+00:00
Excited to share an update on MathGPT

We just launched our new tutoring mode, built on top of our core math solver, and it is a big step toward how math should actually be learned.

Instead of just giving answers, our math solver now guides students like a real tutor. You can type, write, or draw a problem and get step by step explanations, hints, and follow up guidance based on your level. The goal is understanding, not shortcuts.

What makes this special
• A math solver that explains every step clearly
• Interactive graphs to visualize equations in real time
• AI tutoring that adapts to how each student learns
• Short AI generated videos for visual learners and younger students

MathGPT is used by students around the world, and this tutoring mode pushes us closer to making high quality math help accessible to everyone, not just those who can afford private tutors.

Still early, still learning, but excited about where this math solver is heading.
Would love feedback from the YC community
by microtherion | 2026-01-28 14:48:04+00:00
You could also say it about the Mac, which Woz was, at best, peripherally involved in. Not saying that Jobs created these products "alone" — he obviously did not. But he was a key contributor.

Meanwhile, Woz has been involved in all sorts of products, including a cryptocurrency, and I can't think of a single one that got significant traction.
by cmrdporcupine | 2026-01-28 14:48:43+00:00
I bought it primarily so I could learn some of the toolchain for fine-tuning / training stuff, not so much for running inference, which its only "ok" at.

If I was primarily interested in that, I would have probably bought one of the cheaper Strix Halo machines.

It's also just a decent non-Mac ARM64 workstation, with large quantities of RAM. Which in 2026 is a bit of unicorn.
by pxc | 2026-01-28 14:48:54+00:00
All this, and yet package management is still so much better than managing software any other way, and there are continually real advancements both in foundations and in UX. It is indeed full of wicked problems in a way that suggests there can be no clear "endgame". But it's also a space where the tools and improvements to them regularly make huge positive differences in people's computing experiences.

The uneven terrain also makes package managers more interesting to compare to each other than many other kinds of software, imo.
by naasking | 2026-01-28 14:48:58+00:00
> I wouldn't have believed it a few tears ago if you told me the industry would one day, in lockstep, decide that shipping more tech-debt is awesome.

It's not debt if you never have to pay it back. If a model can regenerate a whole relibale codebase in minutes from a spec, then your assessment of "tech debt" in that output becomes meaningless.
by randomtoast | 2026-01-28 14:49:21+00:00
Okay, but I don't think we can call OpenAI a startup until it has reached the number one spot on NASDAQ with a $5 trillion valuation. Therefore, I believe now is a good time to focus on more realistic fundamentals, rather than fueling the hype by burning even more cash on the way to the absolute top, which is typical bubble mentality.
Show HN: Cloakly – Hide sensitive windows from screen shares in real-time
by jaygood | 2026-01-28 14:49:32+00:00
I’m a developer who spends half my day on screen shares. I got tired of the "pre-call ritual" of closing every private app just to make sure I didn't accidentally show a bank balance or a private message during a demo.

Existing "Focus" modes hide notifications, but they don't help if you need to share your full desktop for context.

I built Cloakly to solve this. It’s a Windows utility that lets you "cloak" specific windows. They stay fully visible and interactive for you, but they are 100% invisible to capture software (Zoom, Teams, Discord, etc.).

How it works (briefly): It leverages Windows OS properties to exclude specific window handles from capture streams. It allows you to keep your reference notes or private chats open on the same screen you are sharing.

Features:
Dual Reality: You see the window; the audience sees your wallpaper/desktop.
Ghost Mode: Adjust window transparency to see through to what’s underneath.
Stealth: The app can hide its own taskbar presence.

I’m launching on Product Hunt today to see if this is a pain point for others or just me. I’d love your feedback on the implementation and whether you’d find this useful in your workflow.

PH Link: https://www.producthunt.com/products/cloakly
Site: https://www.getcloakly.com/
by hollowturtle | 2026-01-28 14:49:59+00:00
Don't think so, and we should stop spread damaging narrative like this. I'd say it's already able to imitate this kind of explainers(badly) thanks to his training data. All the subtle teaching nuances, effort, know-how and visual creativity that people like Bartosz Ciechanowski put on this kind of work is not reproducible if not statistically imitating it
by stephanschulz | 2026-01-28 14:49:59+00:00
I've been building software for over 20 years, mostly for clients. Trailward started as a tool to manage my own habit of "constant learning," but it evolved into something I wanted to ship.

The Problem:

I wanted to solve two things:

1. Sustained Exploration: How to learn effectively over a long timeframe, avoiding the "one-night research binge" that fades away.

2. Discovery: How to find meaningful learning goals when creativity is limited. Users often struggle to see beyond their immediate bubble.

The Approach:

1. Meaningful Goals (Ikigai): Ambitious transformations (like career shifts) require huge commitment. I use an LLM to help users connect their passions to "World Needs" and "Monetization"-mapping personal interests to viable career paths.

2. Two Learning Modes:

- Topics: For quick exploration based on personalized interest suggestions.

- Plans: Comprehensive, multi-month curriculums with interactive tasks, detailed explanations, and practical examples. The goal is to provide a structured, approachable path to real mastery, including certificate proposals to prepare for professional transitions.

3. Daily Habit (Bites): To make execution possible, I built "Bites" 90-second sessions designed to lower the barrier to entry so much that 'starting' becomes the path of least resistance.

Technical Stack: React Native (Expo), Next.js, FastAPI, PostgreSQL. Retention is handled by a modified SM-2 spaced repetition algorithm.

It’s a solo project. I'd love to hear feedback.
by FitchApps | 2026-01-28 14:50:04+00:00
100% there....it's getting to a point where a project manager reports a bug AND also pastes a response from Claude (he ran Claude against our codebase) on how to fix the bug..Like I'm just copying what Claude said and making sure the thing compiles (.NET). What makes me sleep at night...for now is the fact that Claude isn't supporting 9pm deployments and AWS Infra support ...it's already writing code but not supporting it yet...
by datsci_est_2015 | 2026-01-28 14:50:12+00:00
> One of them was very justified.

I’m curious how you came to this conclusion. Maybe you generally believe that federal agents do not have a responsibility to deescalate / not put themselves in situations where lethal force could even become something within the realm of being discussed? They are, after all, the ones with the guns and therefore a responsibility to not escalate.

This belief, that federal agents should be held to a higher standard, and not agitate or escalate, seems to be the dividing line. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

The most damning moments in that encounter to me were when he switched the hand his phone was in before moving in front of the car while interacting with the wife, clearly giving himself the opportunity to unholster his gun, and then moving in front of the car, and then seeing in the video that his hand was already on his gun before the car started moving forward, and then calling her a “fucking bitch” after unloading a clip into her side window.

Not that any of that matters, because in the end they have effective immunity because the government refuses to perform a public investigation, and even invites more similar violence by effectively celebrating the occasion.

And you’re a part of the problem by enabling all of this with your sniveling justifications.