MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by abigail95 | 2026-01-28 15:09:08+00:00
If you want 100x returns - do you find a $500B company or a $5B one?

All ASML is doing is raising the share price. The investors that don't want a better deal somewhere else don't have to do a thing - they just have to not sell their shares. ASML is not deciding anything or signaling anything about future returns.

The market is the one sending the signal that there are better deals elsewhere. You can go from $5B to $500B. You can't go from $500B to $50T. There is no amount of R&D that will do that. If you picked a $5-6 billion company in 2008, and it was ASML, congratulations you now have >100x returns.

The inflection point isn't a point where buybacks increase, it's the slow/fast ride up to $500 billion.

The investors chasing 100x returns have already left. Whether the company buys its own shares or sits on its own cash, the net equity value is the same. The only signal it gives to investors is that they have more cash than they want to spend.
by iso1631 | 2026-01-28 15:10:39+00:00
Interestingly I can't remember any specs since about 22 years ago.

First modern PC (dos/win3.1) I had a 12mhz 286, 1 meg of ram, AT keyboard, 40MB hard drive. This progressed via a 486/sx33/4m/170mb and at one point a pentium2 600 with (eventually) 96mb of ram, 2g hard drive, then a p3 of some sort, but after that it's just "whatever".
by kace91 | 2026-01-28 15:10:57+00:00
My view as a European dev:

I’ve seen a major regression in quality of tech offers in the last couple of years.

Some factors include:

- most worker-friendly hiring sites are gone. Those recruiters were legitimate talent seekers and coaches, we’re back to spray-and-pray copypasted messages on LinkedIn.

- remote opportunities are going away as well, which considering the living costs in large cities is an effective significant cut in the offer. Few people are willing to leave their remote job for a non remote one.

- direct application as a dev is pretty much impossible. You can’t search offers on the main sites because they get drowned in AI spam and removed in minutes. The remaining path is each company’s careers page, which tends have abismal ratios in terms of applying friction vs reply chance.

- processes are very worker unfriendly. Particularly for northern European companies (klarna, Spotify and others) I’ve passed months of rounds, from usual leetcode to IQ tests, only to be ghosted for months after passing, either because they’re keeping an always on pipeline just in case or who knows why.
by vidarh | 2026-01-28 15:11:02+00:00
Quite possibly, but that doesn't seem to be their concern for whatever reason. It's very unclear to me what the supposed threat profile is for those cases (perhaps they're concerned it might be easier to do sufficient damage higher up given that the Shard narrows floor by floor; who knows), but The Shard one strikes me as particularly "funny" given you gain access to more of the building by wandering in the entrance next door to the one where the scanners are.
by SV_BubbleTime | 2026-01-28 15:11:03+00:00
Why would I need to explain something I never brought up? I have no idea what musk said or what his claims are. How about you provide any citation? You brought up Musk as a strawman.

You’ve multiple times claimed the Twitter files are a “nothing burger”…

The truth is that there is concrete evidence of the Biden administration, pressuring media companies to sensor specific posts about Covid that they considered harmful to the narrative. Direct first amendment violations.

You seem to not give any indication that you can have read Weiss or Taibbi’s articles.

Jack Dorsey admitted it was true. So did Zuckerberg. Wild position you seem to have forced yourself into.
by forbiddenlake | 2026-01-28 15:11:09+00:00
What do you mean by bad?

Is this an ideological question? They are still primarily closed source.

Is this an install difficulty question? If you can read you can install them.

Is this a performance question? If you're a normie they're good. If you're demanding the top fps at the top resolution in dx12 games then there is still a noticeable difference but it should be fixed this year.
Ask HN: Is Security Just Busywork?
by YukiBits | 2026-01-28 15:11:15+00:00
How many devices with computers (i.e., embedded systems) need regular updates?
My microwave oven, dishwasher, and coffee machine don’t need an (firmware) update.
Why can’t we just write software like firmware once and run it indefinitely like we do with embedded systems?
Why can’t I connect a Windows XP computer to the internet?
I mean because it gets malware, yes.
But why is an internet connection such a threat to software like operating systems?
Everything connected to the internet seems to require constant „security“ updates.
Once those security updates come to a stop, you suddenly cannot safely use your device on an internet connection.

Why is it not possible to have software written without constantly updating its „security“?

Is „security“ just a form of collective busywork, or is it really justified and necessary?

The internet seems to make every computer insecure.
Is it by (inherit) design or by choice?
Is the culprit indirection (i.e, abstraction)? Are CPUs inherently insecure?
Does it mean that layers of indirection are inherently harmful?
What is ultimately causing this?
Please don’t say anything along the lines of „policemen need criminals to justify their jobs“.

Is there even a computer system that can be connected to the internet that does not require any updates?
Don’t say mechanical computers, or a calculator please, or a Turing machine, please.

What is the ultimate reason for the constant need of security updates when it comes to computers connected to the internet?

I mean, I am aware that you can inject malware with a USB pen drive or any external device that can be connected to the computer.
But why are computers so fragile when connected in any shape or form to the „outside world“?

Why so fragile?
by 1123581321 | 2026-01-28 15:11:15+00:00
They stick with you. I remember our first family computer well (an Acer 486 with 40MB drive and 32MB RAM.)

Same for my first computer I built myself out of a TigerDirect order. Made a few mistakes there (K6 generation.)

Having these computers was such a change in our lives that they should be somewhat indelible memories.
by oliwary | 2026-01-28 15:11:45+00:00
Fun idea! I am glad there seems to be a community of people enjoying word games on HN, it tends to be the first place I post my games. https://squareword.org (wordle meets sudoku) and https://clickword.org (scrabble meets tetris... ish) are the largest so far.

I think https://videopuzzle.org has a lot of potential also, but it targets an audience that's a bit different as it is more visual, focused on reassembling videos like a puzzle.

Will post these to the arcade! :)
by serhalp | 2026-01-28 15:11:47+00:00
My job involves keeping a finger on the pulse of frontend web frameworks. I wrote a post about all I tracked in 2025.

Themes I saw:
1. So. Many. CVEs.
2. The Next.js team delivered!
3. Frameworks made changes for coding agents
4. RSCs entered a new phase
5. Signals won... almost
6. Rustification continues
by tmarice | 2026-01-28 15:11:47+00:00
This is not specific to Django, but to any project using a database. Here's a list of a couple quite useful resources I used when we had to address this:

* https://github.com/tbicr/django-pg-zero-downtime-migrations

* https://docs.gitlab.com/development/migration_style_guide/

* https://pankrat.github.io/2015/django-migrations-without-dow...

* https://www.caktusgroup.com/blog/2021/05/25/django-migration...

* https://openedx.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/AC/pages/23003228/...

Generally it's also advisable to set a statement timeout for migrations otherwise you can end up with unintended downtime -- ALTER TABLE operations very often require ACCESS EXCLUSIVE lock, and if you're migrating a table that already has an e.g. very long SELECT operation from a background task on it, all other SELECTs will queue up behind the migration and cause request timeouts.

There are some cases you can work around this limitation by manually composing operations that require less strict locks, but in our case, it was much simpler to just make sure all Celery workers were stopped during migrations.
by andrew-w | 2026-01-28 15:12:03+00:00
Thank you! Impressive demo with OVA. Still feels very snappy, even fully local. It will be interesting to see how video plays out in that regard. I think we're still at least a year away from the models being good enough and small enough that they can run on consumer hardware. We compared 6 of the major voice providers on TTFB, but didn't try Sesame -- we'll need to give that one a look. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/18kq2JKAsSahJ6yn5IJ9g...
Show HN: Shadowbook – Keep your tasks in sync with your specs
by anupamchugh | 2026-01-28 15:12:18+00:00
I forked Beads and added spec intelligence. When a spec changes, linked issues get flagged. It also tracks spec volatility—high-churn specs with open issues are where drift is most likely. Plus auto-matching and compaction to shrink old specs.

Link: https://github.com/anupamchugh/shadowbook
by marginalia_nu | 2026-01-28 15:13:23+00:00
As a long-time Linux user who fairly recently dropped the Windows partition entirely, I do think the remaining chafing points are these:

* UI framework balkanization has always been, and remains a hideous mess. And now you don't just have different versions of GTK vs QT to keep track off, but also X vs Wayland, and their various compatibility layers.

* Support for non-standard DPI monitors sucks, mostly because of the previous point. Wayland has fractional scaling as a sort-of workaround if you can tolerate the entire screen being blurry. Every other major OS can deal with this.

* Anything to do with configuring webcams feels like you're suddenly in thrown back 20 years into the past. It'll probably work fine out of the box, but if it doesn't. Hoo boy.

* Audio filtering is a pain to set up.
by rly0nheart | 2026-01-28 15:13:24+00:00
started working on Cerium back in 2025. I was just using it locally on my laptop then. After some time working on it and getting ideas from lsd and eza, I decided to push it to GitHub. Cerium supports searching for files with the --find option which allows blog patterns, and also filemagic with the --magic option (enabled with the magic feature). I would like to hear some what people think about it.

Also, Cerium mimics how the ls command lists a directory that has entries with quotes. Something that lsd and eza dont really do. E.g.,:

eza and lsd:
foobar.txt
'foo bar.txt'

cerium:
foobar.txt
'foo bar.txt'

Another thing, my mentor told me about how I should also try my best to focus on separation of concern in the code, so i tried my best to apply that. Hope someone enjoys using this. If you see a problem in the code and can fix it, please open a pull request on Codeberg. Have fun! :)
by MillionOClock | 2026-01-28 15:13:39+00:00
Recently I was thinking about how some (expensive) customer electronics like the Mac Studio can run pretty powerful open source models with a pretty efficient power consumption, that could pretty easily run on private renewable energy, and that are on most (all?) fronts much more powerful than the original ChatGPT especially if connected to a good knowledge base. Meaning that aside from very extreme scenarios I think it is safe to say that there will always be a way not to go back to how we used to code, as long as we can offer the correct hardware and energy.
Of course personally I think we will never need to go to such extreme ends... despite knowing of people who seem to seriously think developed countries heavily run out of electricity one day, which, while I reckon there might be tensions, seems like a laughable idea IMHO.
by randycupertino | 2026-01-28 15:13:43+00:00
I sat next to him in business class on a flight back from Poland to the SF a few years ago and he was so gracious, talking with and taking photos with all his seatmates. I just wanted to sleep because I was coming back from a conference and I was actually annoyed with all the "fanfare" around him which was loud and kept everyone up! It must have been hard for him to constantly deal with. He was super nice though and made time for everyone who wanted to chat with him.

My other airline celebrity encounter was Pauly Shore, who I was standing next to at the baggage carosel and thought to myself, "huh this guy sounds just like Pauly Shore" and lo - it was the man (and his entourage) himself. I always thought the voice was an affectation but nope he actually does talk like that. Woz was definitely more exciting to encouter!
by rainbowcash | 2026-01-28 15:14:03+00:00
> The truth is, the sharpest engineers struggle to make a marketable consumer product - because they make it for themselves, and while thats quite laudable, however it's generally a tiny market compared to one targeted at normal people.

Woz was perfect for those in the home brew club and Steve (basically vagabond) had a different perspective on users. It was the perfect combo in hindsight.
by pydry | 2026-01-28 15:14:08+00:00
I dont really agree. Package management has a number of pretty well defined patterns (e.g. lockfiles, isolation, semver, transactionality, etc) which solve common use cases that are largely common across package management.

It is unfortunately one of the most thankless tasks in software engineering, so these are not applied consistently.

This was symbolized quite nicely by google pushing out a steaming turd of a version 1 golang package management putting while simultaneously putting the creator of brew in the no hire pile coz he couldnt reverse a binary tree.

In this respect it is a bit like QA - neglected because it is disrespected.

What makes it seem like a wicked problem is probably that it is the tip of the software iceberg.

It is the front line for every security issue and/or bug, especially the nastiest class of bug - "no man's land" bugs where package A blames B for using it incorrectly and vice versa.
by mattarm | 2026-01-28 15:14:23+00:00
Makes me wonder if the hardware engineers look at software engineers and shrug, “they don’t really know how their software really works.”

Makes me wonder if C programmers look at JS programmers and shrug, “they don’t understand what their programs are actually doing.”

I’m not trying to be disingenuous, but I also don’t see a fundamental difference here. AI lets programmers express intent at a higher level of abstraction than ever before. So high, apparently, that it becomes debatable whether it is programming at all, out whether it takes any skill, out requires education or engineering knowledge any longer.
by RIMR | 2026-01-28 15:14:24+00:00
1. This is not a likely effect of LLM adoption.

2. Linux is already to the point of giving you about as many esoteric errors as Windows or macOS will.

People don't switch either because they are comfortable where they are and don't want to put forth the effort of changing their OS, or they are afraid of outdated criticism of Linux Desktops being error-filled nightmares.
by butlike | 2026-01-28 15:14:26+00:00
> Prism is free to use, and anyone with a ChatGPT account can start writing immediately.

Great, so now I'll have to sift through a bunch of ostensibly legitimate (though legitimate looking) non-peer reviewed whitepapers, where if I forget to check the peer review status even once I risk wasting a large amount of time reading gobbledygook. Thanks openai?
by whistle650 | 2026-01-28 15:14:30+00:00
To understand the impact on computer programming per se, I find it useful to imagine that the first computer programs I had encountered were, somehow, expressed in a rudimentary natural language. That (somewhat) divorces the consideration of AI from its specific impact on programming. Surely it would have pulled me in certain directions. Surely I would have had less direct exposure to the mechanics of things. But, it seems to me that’s a distinction of degree, not of kind.
by ceejayoz | 2026-01-28 15:14:57+00:00
That… doesn't seem to be accurate?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_No._46

> This essay examines the relative strength of the state and federal governments under the proposed United States Constitution. It is titled "The Influence of the State and Federal Governments Compared"… he describes at length in this paper a series of hypothetical conflicts between state and federal government. Madison does not expect or hope the constitution to lead to the kind of conflict between state and federal authority described here. Rather, he seeks to rebut the arguments that he anticipates from opponents of the constitution by asserting that their "chimerical" predictions of the federal government crushing state governments are unfounded
by Balrog6236 | 2026-01-28 15:15:01+00:00
I have played with android and chatgpt and created an app which records what you do and then plays it using the accessibility framework. Idea was my friends because he is playing a game that requires him to do this sort of things to grind in game currency in a mobile game.

It seems very useful for repetitive stuff on android, such as some games in which you need to grind by pressing the same sequence of buttons all over again or skip ads.

There's 5 slots of different recording sequences that you can make. UI is really simple.

A few technical details about the app - it works 100% locally. It has a licensing entry point, anti-rollback support, hack-proofing for licensing to some degree and it works really well so far, even on OpenGL apps. I did not do extensive testing. Minimum API is 26, recommended 36. Can't release on play store because it works using the accessibility service - usually denied from store due to obvious reasons.

Please provide feedback and feel free to contact me for trial or paid licenses.

Contact: automationapp11@gmail.com
by tungstenVapor | 2026-01-28 15:15:25+00:00
Maybe a rough analogy: why take a train when you can fly? Flying is faster and often cheaper. If efficiency were the only axis, trains should’ve died long ago. They didn’t. They became alternative infrastructure, used when people care about cost predictability, comfort, scenery, control, or just preference.

AI will do the same thing. Summaries won’t replace books, generated music won’t replace artists, and assistants won’t replace doing things yourself. They’ll replace the lowest friction default. Everything else shifts from “mass” to “intentional”

That doesn’t mean fewer humans have value, but instead it means value becomes less generic. The question isn’t “what’s the point anymore” , it’s “what survives when optimization stops being the only goal?"
by cong-or | 2026-01-28 15:15:25+00:00
Is there a computational advantage to constructing φ geometrically versus algebraically? In rendering or CAD, would you actually trace the circle/triangle intersections, or just compute (1 + sqrt(5)) / 2 directly?

I’m curious if the geometric approach has any edge-case benefits—like better numerical stability—or if it’s purely for elegance.
Show HN: A tiny typing game to keep your fingers moving
by the_real_tjaart | 2026-01-28 15:15:54+00:00
I created a small HTML game where you need to type the letter before it reaches the bottom of the screen. Each level introduces a new set of characters from your keyboard.

The reason I created the game was to try and improve my typing speed and accuracy without having to look at my keyboard while typing.

Level 1 starts with just the “asdf” row of your keyboard.
Level 2 adds uppercase letters.
Level 3 continues with the same pattern as level 1 and level 2
by NickC25 | 2026-01-28 15:16:11+00:00
Or, get this - they'd go after the people who employ illegal immigrants en masse in those states.

Illegal immigrants aren't a thing at any meaningful scale if there aren't people willing to hire them.

But since a lot of those businesses that hire illegally or "look the other way" are BIG republican donors in deep red states....we can't do anything about it.

We should have made e-verify the federal minimum standard for ALL employment as far back as 1985. We had the tech and the ability.

Y'all honestly think Donald Trump hires blue-blooded WASPs to mow the lawns at his golf courses?
by heyitssim | 2026-01-28 15:16:25+00:00
Not yet - the no-code approach is intentional. One of my main targets is non-technical people or who want a quick prototype of their ideas.

Text-based scripting adds complexity and security concerns I'd rather avoid for now.

That said, if users start asking for it, I'll reconsider.

What would you want to do with code that feels limited in the visual editor?
by carefulfungi | 2026-01-28 15:16:55+00:00
This statement is true. If you are downvoting because it is incorrect, I'd appreciate an explicit correction. Other posters provided links in this thread.

* https://www.wired.com/story/us-judge-rules-ice-raids-require...

* https://www.minnpost.com/metro/2026/01/judge-orders-release-...

> A federal judge in Minnesota on Thursday ordered the release of a Liberian man four days after heavily armed immigration agents broke into his home using a battering ram and arrested him.

> U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Bryan said in his ruling that the agents violated Garrison Gibson’s Fourth Amendment rights against unlawful search and seizure.
by stuaxo | 2026-01-28 15:17:01+00:00
Nice.

As a mostly-django-dev for the last 15 years, who's been exposed to FastAPI and various ORMs again recently, I should get round to write a doc about some Django bits.

Django is pretty nice, the changes between versions are small and can be managed by a human.

Part of the reason that you can have the big ecosystem is that there is a central place to register settings and INSTALLED_APPS, middleware etc.

That enables addons to bring their own templates and migrations.

There is a central place a bit further up in manage.py and that enables you to bring commandline extras to Django (and many of the things you install will have them).

Coming to a FastAPI app with alembic and finding a lot of that is build-it-yourself (and easily break it) is a bit of a shock.

The Django ORM at first can seem a little alien "why isn't this sqlalchemy" was my reaction a long time ago, but the API is actually pretty pragmatic and allows easy extension.

You can build up some pretty complex queries, and keep them optimised using the Django-Debug-Toolbar and its query viewer.

The ORM, Templates and other parts of Django pre-date many newer standards which is why they have their own versions. As a Django dev I only just discovered the rest of the world has invented testcontainers, and databases as a solution for a problem Django solved years ago with it's test database support.

I quite like the traditional setup where you have settings/common.py and then settings that extend that - e.g local.puy production.py

If you ever need a CMS in your Django project I strongly recommend Wagtail, it came after the initially most popular django-cms and learned a lot of lessons - feeling much more like a part of Django.

It has the same feeling of being productive as Django does when you first use it.
by perakojotgenije | 2026-01-28 15:17:16+00:00
Shameless plug - this is exactly the same problem that our team had when we had to maintain a bunch of our customer's servers. All of the subnets were same, and we had to jump through hoops just to access those servers - vpns, port forwarding, dynamic dns with vnc - we've tried it all. That is why we developed https://sshreach.me/ - now it's a click of a button.
by ceejayoz | 2026-01-28 15:17:27+00:00
> How do you explain Biden getting so many more votes than Obama

US population in 2008: 304 million

US population in 2020: 332 million

https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/uni...

Barring enormous turnout differences, pretty much every US election gets more raw votes than the last.