MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by defrost | 2026-01-18 22:44:07+00:00
The first working model engine I ever had (still have, in parts, in a crate somewhere) was a compact stirling engine, roughly 10 x 5 cm at the base, fantastic gadget for a single digit year old child.

IIRC there's a New Zealand company WhisperGen(?) that use them for power from waste heat from water heaters ...

Checking now, they seem to be used as marine power generation these days, I can't find the original site from 15+ years ago.
by masswerk | 2026-01-18 22:44:59+00:00
I'm a confessing user of em-dashes (or en-dashes in fonts that feature overly accentuated em-dashes). It's actually kind of hard to not use them, if you've ever worked with typography and know your dashes and hyphenations. —[sic!] Also, those dashes are conveniently accessible on a Mac keyboard. There may be some Win/PC bias in the em-dash giveaway theory.
by willhslade | 2026-01-18 22:46:03+00:00
Not OP, but I did work for a boss once that was technically very strong, but not as strong in terms of planning and scheduling work. It was a very difficult process, because I couldn't deliver what they wanted, as what they wanted changed both during and after delivery. Most things I delivered, which were what we agreed upon before delivery, were rewritten as they did not envision or plan work in advance. Technical skills are not a panacea; professionalism is a multidimensional skill matrix.
by nindalf | 2026-01-18 22:46:11+00:00
Yeah they probably had fewer advertisements back in the good old days, but they also had a much smaller economy, producing a whole lot less than we produce today. [1]

And you might not like everything about the world today, but living in a vibrant economy where people create wealth by building new businesses has led to more comfortable lives for the large majority of humanity.

[1] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-gdp-over-the-long-...
by pedalpete | 2026-01-18 22:46:13+00:00
I'm with you on the frustration with Slack and every month when I see our bill I consider forcing the company to change.

My co-founder and I tried moving to Google Chat. We already pay for workspace so why not.

What kept us on slack is the external partners who are on slack.
This is a bigger deal than you might think.

Google chat doesn't allow you to add external members unless they were added at the creation of the channel. Seems like a strange limitation.

I don't even think the slack search is really that much of a value add.

We split our meeting between huddles, usually when there is only two or three of us, or google meet.

We're also more than 5, but to be clear. Your pricing is the pricing for the team, not per user?

I wish you all the best, and I'd be keen to try it as we only currently have 3 external partners, but if you can nail that management of external users, I think that is important.

I'm also assuming there are desktop/mobile/web apps? Also necessary, though also a lot of overhead for a small team.

Notifications need to be solid as well.
by yadavrh | 2026-01-18 22:46:19+00:00
That's a fair point! While we default to unlimited history (since the 90-day hard limit is a pain for most), we plan to let admins set custom retention policies. If you want messages to auto-delete after 90 days to keep things ephemeral, you'll be able to configure that. We don't want to force 'chat as docs' on teams who prefer it temporary.
by danpalmer | 2026-01-18 22:46:21+00:00
Redis using the WAL for durable data can only be as fast as you can fsync on every write, just like every other database. The time to fsync is going to dominate the write path for Redis, and you'll sacrifice almost all of Redis's speed to achieve it. If you're running Redis in always fsync mode it I'd suggest there are better storage systems to use.

> Where do you think Redis persists its data to

This is sort of the point, Redis isn't for persistence. I mean it can, you can use the WAL, it's handy for not having to recompute when you relaunch Redis etc, but Redis is fundamentally an in-memory system and should be treated as such. It is designed for use-cases that necessitate in-memory performance, and that don't require durability.
by abetusk | 2026-01-18 22:46:42+00:00
"Why prediction markets aren't popular" [0] gives some compelling arguments (to me) about why prediction markets haven't caught on and probably never will.

As I understand it, the main argument is that for prediction markets that aim to incentivize the thing they're predicting, better to invest in the thing directly. Otherwise, "prediction markets" are successful precisely when they can't influence the outcome, like sports betting.

I remember finding the election betting interesting last presidential election, but I also remember that it was spiked when Musk invested to change the odds.

[0] https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-prediction-markets-aren...
by gmuslera | 2026-01-18 22:46:45+00:00
In one hand, we are past the Turing Test definition if we can't distinguish if we are talking with an AI or a real human or more things that were rampant on internet previously, like spam and scam campaigns, targeted opinion manipulation, or a lot of other things that weren't, let's say, an honest opinion of the single person that could be identified with an account.

In the other hand, that we can't tell don't speak so good about AIs as speak so bad about most of our (at least online) interaction. How much of the (Thinking Fast and Slow) System 2 I'm putting in this words? How much is repeating and combining patterns giving a direction pretty much like a LLM does? In the end, that is what most of internet interactions are comprised of, done directly by humans, algorithms or other ways.

There are bits and pieces of exceptions to that rule, and maybe closer to the beginning, before widespread use, there was a bigger percentage, but today, in the big numbers the usage is not so different from what LLMs does.
by adefa | 2026-01-18 22:47:27+00:00
Absolutely -- it's perfectly understandable. I wanted to be completely upfront about AI usage and while I was willing and did start to break the PR down into parts, it's totally OK for the maintainers to reject that too.

I wanted to see if Claude Code could port the HF / MLX implementation to llama.cpp and it was successful -- in my mind that's wild!

I also learned a ton about GPU programming, how omni models work, and refined my approach to planning large projects with automated end to end integration tests.

The PR was mostly to let people know about the code and weights, since there are quite a few comments requesting support:

https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/issues/16186
by janderland | 2026-01-18 22:47:34+00:00
> You upgrade the libraries your website depends on, or add a dependency, and this new code happens to depend on that native prototype. Only you replaced it with your custom method, and that method likely doesn't have the exact same behavior. You broke that new code and fixing this might not be trivial because uses of your custom method are sprinkled everywhere in your code.

He was suggesting adding a prototype method, not replacing one. Unless the library your using is also adding prototypes, I can't think of an issue with this. Sure, if a new version of JS ends up using these names then things could break, but I'd bet this won't cause him a problem in actuality.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2026-01-18 22:47:35+00:00
Yep, you can chain multiple commands with find's "-exec", but I'm not a fan of it myself. I suspect setting variables in the current process is trickier though.

(Very minor nitpick, it should be 'a\nb.mp3' to be included, but that does work fine)

Incidentally, ShellCheck isn't happy with that although I don't follow their reasoning:

find . -type f -name '*.mp3' -exec bash -c "
^-- SC2156 (warning): Injecting filenames is fragile and insecure. Use parameters.

https://www.shellcheck.net/wiki/SC2156
by thisislife2 | 2026-01-18 22:47:40+00:00
Immigration in the US has always been about addressing talent / labour shortage. Today though, whether it be in blue collar or white collar jobs, it is about wage suppression (and both the Democrats and Republicans are guilty of that). H1Bs and L1 visa (in IT) are great examples of this - one of my friend nearly doubled his salary after he became a US citizen, and says he now clocks out at sharp 5 / 6 PM whereas his other H1B colleagues feel forced to continue to slog on beyond that. (Interestingly, he is now looking to work for some European or Japanese companies, in the US, as he wants more than the 10-15 days annual leave American firms consider "generous", and also as some of these foreign international firms provide pension too).
by leoc | 2026-01-18 22:48:12+00:00
While it's narrowly true that CPU instruction sets generally don't have a null-pointer concept, I'm not sure how important that is: the null pointer seems to have been (I don't know enough to be sure) a well-established idiom in assembly programming which carried across naturally to BCPL and C. (In much the same way that record types were, apparently, a common assembly idiom long before they became particularly normal to have in HLLs.) Programmers like being able to null out a pointer field, 0 is an obvious "joker" value, and jump-if-0 instructions tend to be convenient and fast. Whether you'd want say it's "how the hardware works" it does seem to have a certain character of inevitability. Even if the Bell Research guys had disapproved of the idiom they would likely have had difficulty keeping it out of other people's C programs once C became popular. The Hoare ALGOL W thing seems to be more relevant to null pointers in Java and the like.
Show HN: Whisper – AI code reviewer that catches security issues and bugs
by alameenpd | 2026-01-18 22:48:27+00:00
Hi HN, I'm building Whisper (https://usewhisper.dev), an AI code reviewer that does both code quality and security analysis. It traces execution flow to catch SQL injections, auth bypasses, and race conditions that standard PR reviewers miss.

The Problem

AI code reviewers catch style issues. Security scanners only check dependencies. But logical security flaws in YOUR code slip through. The SQL injection that happens because user input flows through three functions before hitting your database. The race condition in payment processing. The auth bypass hidden in middleware.

I've shipped these bugs. Your PR reviewer said "looks good." Your security scanner was green (only checks deps anyway). Two weeks later, a pentester finds the vulnerability that was visible in the PR all along.

Why Compete Against Well-Funded Startups?

Fair question. Greptile raised millions. Codacy, SonarQube, Snyk are giants. Here's my thesis: they're solving the wrong problem.

Most AI reviewers are linters with GPT. They look at the diff and comment on style. Security scanners either only check dependencies or dump 1000+ false positives. The ones that do both? Separate products that don't talk.

I'm building something different: execution flow tracing with semantic understanding. Whisper traces data from user input through your logic to find where it reaches sensitive operations.

The big players can't easily copy this. They're built on pattern matching. Tracing execution flow requires different architecture. And I have advantages:

- Speed: I ship features in days vs their enterprise compliance process
- Focus: One problem (security in PRs) vs everything to everyone
- Pricing: $30/dev vs their $100-300/seat enterprise model
- DX: 2-minute setup vs 45-minute enterprise onboarding

They optimize for enterprise contracts. I optimize for devs who want PRs to stop shipping bugs.

How It Works

Example: Standard reviewers say "looks good"

const user = await getUser(req.headers.auth);
const data = await db.query(
`DELETE FROM users WHERE id = ${user.id}`
);

Whisper traces user.id from JWT payload through getUser() to the SQL template literal. Flags SQL injection. Suggests parameterized queries.

Race condition example:

async function processPayment(userId, amount) {
const balance = await getBalance(userId);
if (balance >= amount) {
await charge(userId, amount);
await updateBalance(userId, balance - amount);
}
}

Whisper spots concurrent requests could cause double-charging between check and update.

Status

Private beta with early engineering teams. 2.4M+ lines analyzed, 1,247 bugs caught, 47s avg scan time. Supports all major languages with deep framework understanding for Next.js, React, and tRPC.

What I Want

Feedback from engineers who:
- Are drowning in false positives from scanners
- Keep shipping bugs visible in PRs
- Think competing here is crazy (tell me why!)

Building mostly solo, no VC. Just solving a problem I kept hitting.

Try free: https://usewhisper.dev
by kannanvijayan | 2026-01-18 22:48:37+00:00
There's a bit of time yes, but for an engine that relies on this format (e.g. spidermonkey), the assumptions associated with the value boxing format would have leaked into the codebase all over the place. It's the kind of thing that's far less painful to take care of when you don't need to do it than when you need to do it.

But fair point on the aligned pointers - that would give you some free bits to keep using, but it gets ugly.

You're right about the 51 bits - I always get mixed up about whether it's 12 bits of exponent, or the 12 includes the sign. Point is it puts some hard constraints on a pretty large number of high bits of a pointer being free, as opposed to an alignment requirement for low-bit tagging which will never run out of bits.
by Xorlev | 2026-01-18 22:48:39+00:00
> Free forever for teams up to 5. Unlimited search, unlimited history.

I understand the strategic value of offering unlimited features to differentiate from competitors like Slack, might drive some amount of anxiety. Buyers may question long-term sustainability or fear undisclosed "shadow" caps.

Since engineering limits are inevitable to prevent abuse (especially on free accounts), it might be better to set specific, generous expectations upfront. For example, 2 years of freeform search plus unlimited "tagged" (i.e. Decision Inbox) search. This avoids the skepticism that comes with promising "no limits" forever. It also avoids the trap of needing to announce a change later with predictably negative reactions.

If you do want to offer unlimited, then planning ahead with hard-to-hit-unless-you're-trying messages/hr limits might help you tame growth and avoid abuse. My initial thought when seeing unlimited anything is "I could write a filesystem on top of that" - especially if you allow attachments. :P
by LexiMax | 2026-01-18 22:48:56+00:00
You don't have to go that far, there's a lot easier solution - prefer socializing in spaces that actually vet their users to some degree and have humans who have an active hand in moderation.

It's the old way that social spaces on the internet used to work, and you don't need ID verification for that, you just need spaces that are conducive to that style of community-building. Think Discord, not Instagram. Think (invite-only) Mastodon, not Twitter. Think lobsters, not HN. Think Tildes, not Reddit.
by msukhareva | 2026-01-18 22:49:06+00:00
The latest openAI image model when asked to generate a list of animals creates cursed pokemons.

The reason for this is the new state-of-the-art architecture of their image generation model.
The AI realist article "ChatGPT creates monsters" has a very detailed breakdown of why it happens. It It is for non-technical readers but it explains the details of the architecture. One can claim a free article.
by dang | 2026-01-18 22:49:56+00:00
Wow, that's fascinating and I could write a dozen different replies! But here's one:

Not knowing of Khan makes sense because he was not only exiled from British psychoanalysis, but erased from its history. From the mid-50s till the mid-70s he was the rock star and enfant terrible of that scene, itself filled with charismatic characters. The story is cinematic, tragic, and so unlikely that it's hard to believe.

The biographer, Linda Hopkins, got on the trail of it and spent 20 years putting the pieces together. She had the fortune of good timing: many of the key players were still alive, but in their twilight years and ready to spill the beans. She knew how to earn their trust—the good way, by being trustworthy—and ended up with an unbelievable trove of information, not just about Khan but about others in that world, such as Winnicott, for whom Khan was a substitute son.

If you decide to read it, I recommend first the essay that Wynne Godley published about Khan in the London Review of Books, which is a brilliant piece of writing which is hard enough to believe in its own right. One merit of Hopkins's biography of Khan is that she includes that dark side but also shows him as larger than it.

The NYT review of the biography began with "If I were a snob, a liar, a drunk, a philanderer, an anti-Semite, a violent bully, a poseur and a menace to the vulnerable, I would want Linda Hopkins to write my biography." How's that for an opening sentence? The publisher put it on the second edition :)
by skippyboxedhero | 2026-01-18 22:49:58+00:00
Because it is gambling.

NFTs have zero value but people seem to derive non-monetary value from them. Naked option trading is a form of gambling (as well as risk management) and, as a result, it is regulated.

Polymarket is regulated as a "financial investment" for regulatory purposes but is gambling, there is no legitimate risk management reason. As a result, there is massive scope for harm because it is gambling without any of the gambling regulations that exist in the US.

People on this site appear to be unaware that gambling is regulated where legal. I will give you an example: Polymarket do not comply with state regulator's exclusion/no market lists. This is immoral. Gambling companies should not take bets from users who have gambling problems, they should not market to them.

Offshore unregulated books will often market themselves to addicts saying that they do not comply with regulator's exclusion lists...this is an onshore book operating in Lexington Avenue New York, not out of a shed with a pig sty in Curaco. It is unbelievable at many levels.
by kylecazar | 2026-01-18 22:50:02+00:00
Yeah. Part of why this is possible is simply that there are tons of subscription apps out there that were never really justified in requiring a recurring payment and are actually fairly trivial.

It used to be that you offer subscriptions only if there are ongoing costs, and a one-time payment if not (utilities, local, etc). SaaS kinda ruined that.

I'd welcome a boom in DIY vibe-coded utilities for personal use.
by catapart | 2026-01-18 22:50:07+00:00
right on, man, that must be the only way transcoding can be done and completely future proof so it will never change to let the user transcode their own damn content. I get it; you're frustrated so you're nitpicking. funny how dang doesn't swoop in to tut tut you for not steelmanning instead of strawmanning.

in any case, you're completely right about the activity pub comment. that was absolutely mockery and not actually a complaint. artistic license and all that. god forbid we express ourselves. but sure, I can recognize that AT proto is useful in that it provides mechanisms we didn't really have before. that said, it's not novel (just new) and it's not irreplaceable. LIKE I SAID: there's always another protocol.

any time you want to actually address the point of the comments, I'd be happy to get your take on why it's fine, actually, for the CEO to imply she doesn't have to care what users think as long as they aren't paying her. but if you're not ready to have the real conversation, I'll let you be satisfied with whatever other potshots you want to take at my reasonable indignation.
by throw0101d | 2026-01-18 22:50:55+00:00
> I enjoy the "what if we're the baddies" just as much as anyone else. But are there big stories with these exciting concepts where we aren't the baddies in the Anglosphere?

Hyperion? Ringworld? Rendezvous with Rama? Brin's Uplift trilogy? Neuromancer? A Fire Upon the Deep? Robinson's Mars trilogy?

I'm just going through Hugo novel winners, picking some of the ones I've read:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award_for_Best_Novel

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award#Categories
by thaumasiotes | 2026-01-18 22:51:17+00:00
> I mean, has any linguist noticed this?

Yes.

> Also, I think in German it's very common to string together words like that to form longer words. Are there more languages with that characteristic?

Yes. All of them.

> Can the same argument be supported at the word-level also?

Here it depends what you mean by "the word-level". "Words" are commonly taken to be compositionally opaque. Compound expressions are not compositionally opaque and are not "words" in this sense.
by gibbitz | 2026-01-18 22:51:20+00:00
This is the point. LLMs are a replacement for agency. No more suggestion that you try a new product, the LLM will tell you when to use it and the LLM provider will sell the responses to the highest bidder based on query demographics. Since many are blindly trusting what LLMs output, how to ask someone on a date, how to do a pullup, how to jump start a car. Why not "how should I spend my paycheck?"
by ben_w | 2026-01-18 22:52:59+00:00
> I am more than willing to listen. You seem to be the one who ignores words.

You have, here, changed the subject and disregarded reality and projected what-about on me as rhetoric, and even on this comment are motte-and-bailey-ing:

> I never claimed the J6 crowd to be non-violent?

I started by introducing them as an example of a thing where failing to see that they were violent and dangerous was a sign of having a problem. You reacted explosively. You what-about-ed. You deflected. You have a problem.

I maintain that your own words:

And Facism starts with civilians who act as enforcers and intimidators, not with the police. Hitler’s brown shirts and Mussolini's black shirts elevated the Facists to power.

describe the J6 crowd, who are your civilians acting as enforcers and intimidators.

I could also add:

The SS came afterwords.

Today is 5 years later than J6.

> They did not systematically intimidate fellow citizens nation wide while hiding behind masks.

If you bothered to watch that video, you'd see many of them were behind masks.

If you'd bothered to watch the video of (or indeed still pictures from just before) the, to use your word, "murder", of Reese Good, you'd see she wasn't.

ICE however, do frequently wear masks. These days, anyway. They didn't used to feel the need to break their own rules.
by dfajgljsldkjag | 2026-01-18 22:53:14+00:00
Companies doing SEO for lead generation have been ruining search results for years now. I've searched for basic car questions so many times and gotten low effort articles from some random dealership in Kentucky or Ohio [1]. No, Toyota of Louisville, I am not a lead and I don't want your opinion any more than I want the opinion of any of the other 9000 local car dealerships in the country. And this pattern applies to home maintenance[2], legal questions, etc. Screw those guys.

We don't click because those guys have made it so there's nothing worth clicking on.

1. https://www.google.com/search?q=how+often+to+do+oil+change

(this particular search has a few high quality results ranked at the top, but it illustrates what random dealerships from who knows where are doing to ruin the results.)

2. https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+wash+upstairs+windows
by tptacek | 2026-01-18 22:53:18+00:00
Right, I'm not so much pushing back on you as I am establishing a chronology for CATB. Ordinary people were absolutely belting out (what we would now call) open source software by the time it was written.

(That's not the biggest flaw in the essay, of course. It made predictions, some of which turned out to be comically wrong. The true parts of it weren't new, and the new parts of it weren't true.)