MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Bluecobra | 2026-01-02 18:16:03+00:00
> Be aware of unintended consequences when you (try to) cut a child off from computer use.

In the mid 90’s I got my first PC when I was 13 but my parents would not let me online. I ended up finding a way via nefarious means. I bought a 25’ telephone cord from Radio Shack and when my parents weren’t home I would unplug their bedroom phone. I discovered that if I ran the Prodigy installer it would connect to the Internet briefly to download the latest phone numbers in my area. I found that I could alt-tab out of the full screen installer and use the lnternet unfiltered for about 10 minutes or so before they kicked me off. This worked for about a year or so.

I then had to resort to stealing my parent’s credit card and signing up for free trials and cancelling them before the charges incurred. I eventually screwed up big time. I downloaded a “free porn” BBS dialer and it made an international call to South America and ran up the phone bill $300 or so. I lost my computer privileges for a couple of months. I guess the silver lining was when I turned 16, I immediately got a job and my drivers license so I could pay for my own phone line. I kept my grades up to maintain privileges and was a straight arrow since.
by hiddenseal | 2026-01-02 18:16:07+00:00
Hello Lee, incredibly honored, huge fan of your work at vercel. The nextjs tutorial is a remarkable s-tier educational content; it helped me kickstart my journey into full-stack dev to ship my research tools (you might appreciate the app router love in my latest project: https://github.com/ischemist/syntharena).

On substance: my critique is less about the quality of the retrieval tools (ripgrep/semantic search are great) and more about the epistemic limits of search. An agent only sees what its query retrieves. For complex architectural changes, the most critical file might be one that shares no keywords with the task but contains a structural pattern that must be mirrored. In those cases, tunnel vision isn't a bug in the search tool but in the concept of search vs. full-context reasoning.

One other friction point I hit before churning was what felt like prompt-level regression to the mean. For trivial changes, the agent would sometimes spin up a full planning phase, creating todo lists and implementation strategies for what should have been a one-shot diff. It felt like a guardrail designed for users who don't know how to decompose tasks, ergo the conclusion about emphasis on vibe coders.

That said, Cursor moves fast, and I'll be curious to see what solution you'll come up with to the unknown unknown dependency problem!
by ChuckMcM | 2026-01-02 18:16:44+00:00
Discussion systems all the way down :-). This is a fair assessment of the github issues system. I suspect that because git(1) can be a change control system for anything there is never any hope of making an effective issue tracker for a particular thing it is being used to manage change on. The choice the project made to allow the developers to determine when something was an issue is essentially adding a semantic layer on top of issues that customizes it for this particular corpus of change management.
by beasthacker | 2026-01-02 18:16:49+00:00
Yes, this is exactly the distinction I was struggling to articulate.

“Online” has collapsed into a single bucket that includes friends-only play, strangers, stores, chat, downloads, etc. What I want (and what you’re describing with running servers) is a way to scope online access: friends-only communication, no discovery, no stores, no strangers.

The frustrating part is that many platforms either (a) force these things to come as a bundle, so saying “yes” to playing with friends implicitly says “yes” to a much larger surface area; or (b) make the unbundling process so complex that well-meaning parents fail and exhausted parents give up.

jonathaneunice put the incentives behind this more sharply than I did here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46465547
by Waterluvian | 2026-01-02 18:16:56+00:00
The first rendering made me think it was as thick as a brick, and that got me kind of excited for a moment…

Any device that isn’t as thick and heavy as the original Game Boy feels uncomfortably cramped in my hands.

Being unable to fit in a pocket would be a plus. I want a device I have to consciously choose to carry with me to a new room, like a tablet or a pound of butter.
by DrewADesign | 2026-01-02 18:17:13+00:00
Outdated looking jeans that are a light-ish wash with an unflattering cut more designed for comfort and price rather than style or for rugged work.

Though the term has recently been adopted by a trend in women’s jeans that don’t really resemble their namesake.

The connotation being that they’re outdated, uncool, and dorky.
by xml | 2026-01-02 18:17:24+00:00
Were there any particular challenges when implementing your library? I have implemented my own serialization library [1] (with a focus on not allowing arbitrary code execution), but had skipped dataclasses for now, since they seemed difficult to get right. What was your experience?

[1] https://github.com/99991/safeserialize

Also, I think that some mention of whether your library allows arbitrary code execution on deserialization would be nice.
by laurencerowe | 2026-01-02 18:17:37+00:00
> If Ford can't sell an EV version of an F-150, then it has a real problem, because the rest of the world is not staying on ICE technology.

Is that a problem for Ford though? Basically nowhere outside of North America buys trucks like the F-150.

You see a few Ford Transit chassis cabs with a flatbed on the back in Europe but mostly enclosed Transit vans.
by robomartin | 2026-01-02 18:17:45+00:00
That's a really interesting story. Did you really start it with just a single 3D printer? I thought about doing this a few times.

I don't necessarily need it for the social aspect (although I love meeting people), my work has me engaging with people all the time and travelling nationally and internationally 6+ times per year.

In my case, if I had to identify motivation, I would say that I have an interest in attempting to recreate the experience I had for many years as a mentor for our local FRC (high school robotics competition) at an adult level. The other motivation is this idea I have that retirement should not be a passive experience where you go from having a mission and work every day to watching TV and fishing with no purpose in life. I have seen how the latter degrades people and I have zero interest in being a part of that club. I can see a maker space potentially being a way to continue to socialize at some level (even if most of it is somewhat transactional and superficial) and keep busy physically and intellectually.

I own a lot of interesting manufacturing equipment, from multiple 3D printers all the way up to a full Haas industrial CNC vertical machining center, welding, manual machining, etc. In other words, if I contribute all of this hardware, I could start a pretty nice maker space with almost zero investment in tools.

Curious about your experience and, in particular, if there are any negative aspects that you might want to warn against.
by jeffwass | 2026-01-02 18:17:52+00:00
They’ve been doing this for over a century, it’s probably the top deaf school in the UK, and has the support of nearly the entire deaf community.

Most of the students have either some degree of hearing or use cochlear implants. I think nearly all, if not all, students use either hearing aids or cochlear implants.

The classes are very small (eg 5-6 max usually), students are arranged in a U-shape around the teacher so they can read lips. And there’s a special wireless broadcast system so the teacher wears a microphone and sends the audio directly to hearing aids or cochlear implants.

Regarding deaf culture, most of the students use BSL on their own outside class, and my daughter learned BSL from her friends there that grew up with it. Coming from a mainstream primary, she found “her people” here, discovered deaf culture and a community that shares the same struggles she faces.

The idea is that by teaching in BSL the students are further restricted in their ability to function in a hearing society.

I’m curious if you are deaf yourself, or work with the deaf. All the teachers at the school are trained teachers of the deaf, some are even deaf themselves. And I haven’t heard any complaints about the aural nature of the learning (except from the reservations of a few parents before sending their kids there, and I don’t think any of these parents regrets this after their children started there.)
by bigyabai | 2026-01-02 18:18:21+00:00
I think you have decided to bury your head in the sand, if you think systemd is a dealbreaker for desktop use.

Truth is, Linux has been fine for many people for a while now. I've used it for six years without needing to install Windows for anything. Steam Deck owners are putting in millions of hours playing the hot new Windows releases, do you think they are complaining about systemd on Reddit?
by selectively | 2026-01-02 18:18:21+00:00
The Gabb thing is the fault of the parent.

By buying a child a locked down device - a hostile device that few would have accepted for themselves as a child - they marked them as 'being a child' rather than blending in with the rest of the people on the Internet.

By marking them this way, they advertise the child to the predators of the world.

This is someone who is twelve. They aren't six. Life involves risk. Stop playing with account controls and let the person play Minecraft. This really isn't that hard.

Having thoughts about physically breaking a child's holiday gifts - of doing that in front of them - is suggestive of being a pretty awful person. You can't figure out something that the child does not want, so you want to break their stuff?

How much longer do you intend to keep this routine up? Is your objective for them to go no contact? What are you seeking here?
by 10917887 | 2026-01-02 18:19:41+00:00
Location: Nomadic
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Maybe
Technologies: C#, WPF, Avalonia, WASM
Résumé/CV: Private, contact for more information
Email: hn10917887@protonmail.com

C# specialist, programming generalist. I've written my own game engine, compiler, and a wide variety of advanced GUI applications. I'm most interested in doing independent contract work where I am given a product specification and have the freedom to take initiative in building it the way I see as most optimal. I can deliver a complete and polished cross-platform application with great performance and reliability within 1~3 months depending on complexity.
by slumberlust | 2026-01-02 18:19:41+00:00
I agree people love to talk about themselves. I disagree about work being the one to go for though. Career is the default conversation; the boring conversation.

I ask 'What keeps you busy?' and if people think of work then that's fine, but for those of us that don't center our lives that way there is an opportunity to discuss something else. Asking what you do for income is a more narrow and closed conversation.
by kelthuzad | 2026-01-02 18:19:48+00:00
>I mean, @lepton literally wrote this: "Maybe part of their agreement is to not implement some features because it would compete with Chrome" about Firefox. No smearing required.

Then you should have been more specific, but that is still not even remotely a conspiracy. It is a completely valid potential thesis. Thus, your attempt to hastily dismiss it as "conspiracy" is factually an act of smearing.

>I literally say nothing avout Apple's business practices. All I'm talking are a bunch of Chrome-only non-standards that people on HN pretend are standards and claim that everyone must immediately implement them

Your diatribes and foul language against the Chrome dev team have been in constant service of justifying Apple's actions at all cost, while outright ignoring and downplaying their evident conflict of interest. Furthermore, you need to stop with these gross misrepresentations of "HN pretend are standards and claim that everyone must immediately implement them" which is a distortion, that you keep forcefully putting in people's mouths, despite many people calling you out on it numerous times throughout this thread.
by ben_w | 2026-01-02 18:20:30+00:00
Yes, but you're not contradicting anything here. £5/week in VAT is roughly bottom 5% by income.

If you eat in a restaurant, IIRC that's VAT-rated. A meal for two coming to £20? That's £3.33 of VAT you just paid. Poorest 5% can't afford to eat out basically at all, but it quickly adds up the moment you can start affording that.
by hiddenseal | 2026-01-02 18:20:32+00:00
lmao, per Occam's razor a much simpler explanation - I'm a grad student, so of course I'll spend more time exploring free tools, and it just happened that AI Studio with Gemini is really great.

if google wants to send a check, my email is open, lmao, but for now i'm optimizing for tokens per dollar
by RatchetWerks | 2026-01-02 18:20:43+00:00
Call me simple. I manually export CSV files from the finance companies. (Should automate this). Vibe coded a CSV parser that will auto categorize, sort all expenses/income. Expenses go in one sheet. Income goes in another. Pivot table renders the data.

I can track money spent and earned down to the penny.

Takes less than 20 mins a month to update/manage it. I actually enjoy having sit-down time to "do finances". Keeps me leveled, and forces me to think about how much money I spent and the value I gained from the expenses.
by pxc | 2026-01-02 18:20:43+00:00
> there's obviously value in having your company/team use well-known languages and tools

Sure. I never said this desire on the part of management is generally irrational.

It's just that this (often rational) preference for "safe bets" leads to ossification and repetition. It's self-reinforcing and eventually becomes disconnected from the inherent virtues or vices involved in the thing chosen.

If you enjoy participating in this network effect as a hiring manager or tech lead or whatever, or feel it's part of your duty as an ROI-maximizer, that's fine. You're probably right.

It just seems clear that when such feedback loops are strong and risk aversion is high, it leaves little room for new languages to break into the "market" by competing on their intrinsic merits. So when that happens, it'll coincide with times and places of relatively high industry optimism and developer freedom.

> Same as using open standards

Open standards are about interoperability and user freedom, and don't really have anything to do with novelty or popularity.

> Same as using [...] well-known design patterns

A common pattern in designs of solutions for common problems that is counterproductive, or even just not very effective, is called an "anti-pattern". The honorific "design pattern" is reserved for patterns that are Actually Good™ in some way that would hold true even if no one knew them.

Consequently, "this design pattern isn't well known" just means "this solution is highly effective for addressing a common problem, but isn't very famous".

"Use well-known design patterns" is at least as much about choosing things because they're elegant, composable, flexible, performant, etc., as it is about choosing them because they're famous— hopefully much more so.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2026-01-02 18:20:59+00:00
> people who don't read error messages

One of my pet peeves that I will never understand.

I do not expect users to understand what an error means, but I absolutely expect them to tell me what the error says. I try to understand things from the perspective of a non-technical user, but I cannot fathom why even a non-technical user would think that they don't need to include the contents of an error message when seeking help regarding the error. Instead, it's "When I do X, I get an error".

Maybe I have too much faith in people. I've seen even software engineers become absolutely blind when dealing with errors. I had a time 10 years ago as a tester when I filed a bug ticket with explicit steps that results in a "broken pipe error". The engineer closed the ticket as "Can Not Reproduce" with a comment saying "I can't complete your steps because I'm getting a 'broken pipe error'".
by dowakin | 2026-01-02 18:21:08+00:00
9 Mothers Defense | Robotics Engineer, Data Scientist | Austin TX | Full-time | ONSITE

We're building AI-driven turrets that stop hostile drones - where robotics needs F1-level speed.

We're looking for smart, T-shaped teammates: people who are experts in one area but happy to jump in wherever needed. Our software team is small, so every member makes a real impact.

If you want to write motor control in Rust, optimize camera processing with custom CUDA kernels on Jetson, or rework a transformer-based tracker to handle small objects - you can do that here, and much more.

US persons only

https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/9-mothers
by ai-christianson | 2026-01-02 18:22:00+00:00
Gobii AI | Senior Software Engineer | REMOTE (US) | gobii.ai

Gobii is the easiest way to deploy browser-use agents in the cloud or on-premises. We're building an open-core AI workforce platform—browser-native agents and automation tools. We have paying customers.

The entire team contributes to browser-use. We also have contributors to Apache NiFi, LiteLLM, and RA.Aid (open-source coding agent I created). Open source is core to how we build and how we think. We're backed by Open Core Ventures.

HQ is San Francisco, but much of the team is in the DC area. East Coast timezone preferred, DC area even better—but we're fully remote.

What we're building: The orchestration layer for browser-use and AI agents. Systems that navigate, reason, and execute on the real web.

Who we're looking for: You've built agentic systems that shipped to production. You have opinions about tool use, context management, and why most "agents" are just glorified prompt chains. You strongly prefer working in the open—a significant part of this role is contributing to OSS repos. We strongly prefer candidates with existing open source contributions.

Why now: We have strong traction and are expanding the team. You'd be early—with real influence over product, architecture, and how we work. High autonomy, high trust, small team of people who know what they're doing.

Comp: Cash + healthcare + modest 401k match + options. In line with SF-based VC-backed startups at pre-seed stage.

Stack: TypeScript, Python, browser automation, LLM orchestration.

Email: careers@gobii.ai (subject: "HN")
by spenczar5 | 2026-01-02 18:22:12+00:00
I feel like I see an independent low-noise phone project like, every 3 months. Clearly there is some latent demand here. I wonder why the big players (Google, Apple, Samsung, HTC) haven't made a big-corp product for this market.

I am always reluctant to jump on with these independent ambitious projects. The first version is understandably rough, and the company seems to fold before they get to a second or third version.

But maybe advances in manufacturing in China are making high-quality, small-batch products like this more tractable?
by bigyabai | 2026-01-02 18:22:16+00:00
FYI, you can install Vortex on Linux systems and mod games via that just fine: https://github.com/pikdum/steam-deck/

(Edit: their native version appears to be in-development, but doesn't currently support non-native titles: https://nexus-mods.github.io/NexusMods.App/ )
by maxglute | 2026-01-02 18:22:31+00:00
It's been 20 years, most industries PRC value engineers to outcompete west stays cheap, because they're not dumping, they structurally bring cost down. The current generation of Chinese workers overwhelmingly owns a house, makes above median PRC wages, meanwhile RoW consumers, most without rivalling industries, benefit. Like at some point PRC dumping starts to look like cope, they ain't dumping, their competitors in other countries, who get plenty of subsidies, just ain't using it to compete.
by randoglando | 2026-01-02 18:22:37+00:00
I've found that one of the best use-cases is to create simple tools. Similar to what simonw does. I've done so here: https://www.ashwinmenon.com/clean_logs/ or more descriptively here: https://www.ashwinmenon.com/posts/thoughts/2025-12-04-are-we... (at the bottom). LLMs are really good at coming up with code from scratch, and getting a lot of the boilerplate out of the way. If you want changes though, it helps to be a programmer and be familiar with the stack.

I've also created a more real "app" at https://www.hunchle.com, which is a trivia app. It was a real challenge since LLMs hallucinate all over the place, and given labs are benchmaxxing, it gives me a real good idea for how good LLMs really are.
by tialaramex | 2026-01-02 18:22:44+00:00
All vaccination is now heavily politicized in the US. HPV vaccination was an obvious focal point initially because of why we'd do it when we do.

The initial data says you should vaccinate somewhere around 12-14 year old girls because most of them will be HPV naive but if you wait longer they won't be any more. But too many US parents cannot imagine their little girl ever having sex and if they never have sex they almost certainly won't contract HPV so, why are we vaccinating them? Are you trying to make my daughter a slut?

If you've been a teenage American this should strike you as very silly, and doubly so if you understand biology. Teenage girls are not, in fact, celibate by default, so some of them will get horny. And if you understand biology the viral infections aren't caused by the same mechanism as pregnancy "sexual activity" is a shorthand, you can easily get infected while steering clear of anything that would get somebody knocked up. A peck on grandma's cheek is unlikely to work, but if you're sucking face for most of a Stranger Things episode that's definitely enough that you might contract HPV.
by boutell | 2026-01-02 18:23:08+00:00
Knowing all of these is exactly what a developer shouldn't need to do. Fix "big O" problems in your own code. And be aware of a few exceptionally weird counterintuitive things if it matters on a "big O" level — like "you think this common operation is O(1) but it's actually O(N^2)". If there actually are any of those. And just get stuff done.

I guess you could find yourself in a situation where a 2X speedup is make or break and you're not a week away from needing 4X, etc. But not very often.
by pmarsh | 2026-01-02 18:24:00+00:00
This is looking great, hope the camera can at least produce decent photos. So many other phones with a QEWRTY keyboard just have awful cameras.

The Razr 2024/25 + the clicks keyboard is probably the "best" so far. Although I just got a Zinwa Q25. Amazing how good that formfactor feels after having candy bars this long.
by DaSHacka | 2026-01-02 18:24:13+00:00
Multiple countries have already been sharing this information between eachother and the U.S. to some capacity for some time now and hardly anyone raises a stink about it [0] except us old-man-yells-at-cloud folk.

I think GP is right that if not for Trump, no one would care. Like the majority of the U.S.'s over-reaching policies that have largely only come under scrutiny in recent times (at least, amongst this audience).

[0] https://www.biometricupdate.com/202406/five-eyes-biometric-d...
by sunkencity | 2026-01-02 18:24:41+00:00
teenage enginering | senior backend developer | full-time | stockholm ONSITE | https://teenage.engineering

hello, as head of it, i'm looking for another top backend developer to expand our it team. the it team builds and runs the tech infrastructure for teenage engineering, supporting all parts of the product journey for the worlds best products. onsite only (no relocation - you must already live in stockholm).

apply here: https://careers.teenage.engineering/jobs/6907741-senior-back...