MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by taeric | 2026-01-06 17:29:50+00:00
I find "ensuring app loads fast" to be absolutely hilarious, here. What has to be done to help a mail app load fast?

And, snarkily, can they do this for the web page? On my decent connection right now, loading a new tab to gmail takes about 3 seconds to visibly load. Another few seconds to get so that I can interact with it. Is kind of hilarious to see how long it takes to load the compose window if I press "c" as soon as I see any of the app has loaded.
by ranyume | 2026-01-06 17:29:52+00:00
South America is a big place, and there are a lot of countries. The situation isn't this simple. For example, Argentina is historically the most anti-US country of all South America, yet it's government and their supporters celebrated the US attack calling everyone who opposed it "communists" (all this while the government allows Chinese goods to be massively imported). Argentina's government will be trying to make a block of countries that are us-friendly (and be their leader of course).

Also, adding context, argentine elites are pro-us, but not as much as Brazil's elites and their supporters (who wear the US flag in protests)
Ask HN: Is this the end of the "no code platform" era?
by adriand | 2026-01-06 17:30:01+00:00
I've never once had someone tell me they enjoyed using a no code platform. The typical experience seemed to be quick progress for the first 80% of the project and then agony for the remaining 20%. These platforms had undeniable appeal for non-technical people, but always seemed (to me, as a developer) a substandard way of developing applications and integrations. But there wasn't a great alternative.

Now, obviously, there is. Vibe code is the new no code is what it looks like to me. What do you think? Does AI spell doom for no code platforms? Or will they adapt and become "semi code" platforms or something?
by swashq | 2026-01-06 17:30:04+00:00
A few patterns that stress different parts of the engine:

Window functions (tests optimizer):
SELECT , ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY category ORDER BY date DESC)
FROM large_table

Large aggregations (tests hash tables):
SELECT category, COUNT(), AVG(value), PERCENTILE_CONT(0.5) WITHIN GROUP (ORDER BY value)
FROM large_table GROUP BY category

Self-joins (tests join algorithms):
SELECT a., b. FROM table a
JOIN table b ON a.foreign_key = b.id
WHERE a.date BETWEEN '2024-01-01' AND '2024-12-31';

String operations (often overlooked):
SELECT * FROM table WHERE column LIKE '%pattern%';

Also test with varying data sizes (1K, 100K, 10M rows). Some engines optimize differently at scale.
by Kirkman14 | 2026-01-06 17:30:13+00:00
Ah, now this is something that Part 2 of this series gets into -- how do you define a "comic"? (https://breakintochat.com/blog/2025/12/28/ansi-art-and-webco...)

Will Eisner and Scott McCloud say that what distinguishes comics from cartoons and other forms is that they are sequential. McCloud's definition specifically exclude single-panels like "The Far Side" or "The Family Circus". In his view they are cartoons, not comics.

However, other people have pushed back on this particular limitation of his definition.
by brabel | 2026-01-06 17:30:23+00:00
Young people are always the ones protesting against whatever they consider the currently big injustices. They rarely achieve something, but I think it’s great that they do anyway. It shapes their priorities and experiences. In just 20 years, they will be the ones governing and by that time they will have the chance to see whether they were right about whatever they wanted. Most likely they will learn that what looked like the end of the world back then turned out to be just another overblown issue which eventually sorted itself out. And they will go on to mostly perpetuate the status quo with just a few changes that happen gradually, like the acceptance of LGBT and elimination of most institutional racism in my lifetime.
When I was young we all thought that in the future , there would be too many people on the planet and not enough food for everyone. Job prospects were low due to tremendous competition as baby boomers made sure there had never been so many young people before. Some people believed pollution would get so bad that water would become as valuable as gold. This sounds ridiculous now but was dead serious back then.
by ajross | 2026-01-06 17:30:32+00:00
FWIW: induction ranges have sealed tops. There are no paths to get a high voltage from the AC input to the range top, no matter what boils over, and if you break things such that there is a short the relevant GFCI failsafes will shut it off long before you work up the courage to try to touch the controls.

Safety is in fact the big selling point of the device. The surface doesn't get above food temperature. If you boil a pot over, move the pot and just wipe it up with a rag, just like you would spilled tea or whatever.

That's not to say there aren't human interface issues with relying on capacitive sensors[1], but safety surely isn't one of them.

[1] Actually "boiling over" is in fact the shortcoming: what happens is that your sauce spills over the controls and causes the sensors to glitch, which the device detects as a failure and shuts down before you can wipe it. Then you have to reset all the temperatures.
by neogodless | 2026-01-06 17:30:35+00:00
When I was shopping, I was comparing the Sony Alphas with the Fujifilm XT line.

And in reviews, complaints were made that the lens (and view finder) being centered in the XT means you squish your nose against the screen in the back.

But... I just liked the look and dials of the XT-5 so much more than the barebones boxy look of the α6700.

(Sony has meaningfully better autofocus too, I'll be sad, but I wanted the nice looking body...)

And yes my nose squishes against that back screen.
by PaulHoule | 2026-01-06 17:30:36+00:00
My system uses logistic regression on words and it thinks that HN (1) really likes Richard Stallman and (2) really likes obituaries so put them together and that headline gets a great score.

I bet if it was put in as "fake news" it would get hundreds of votes and comments before dang took it down. And when it does happen for real it will certainly get 1000s votes.
by giancarlostoro | 2026-01-06 17:30:51+00:00
AI is an impressive technology, but because its turned into a Space Race we're getting into some wild territory. Sam Altman who has been notorious for being quite the con artist is at the helm of this. I heard a friend suggest that the real AI bubble starts with Sam Altman, and I'm inclined to agree. If you're unaware, Sam Altman has quite a crazy history, including selling a company with questionable MAU's for millions of dollars, which was then shut down because the actual MAU's was much lower than suggested. He also claimed to be chairman of YC with the SEC for years, despite never being chairman of YC. I wouldn't trust Sam Altman alone with my wife or kids, why should I trust him with AI?

Funnily enough, Elon Musk calls him Scam Altman, have to wonder what Elon and others know beyond what we know about Sam Altman.
by oneeyedpigeon | 2026-01-06 17:30:59+00:00
There's also the tactic of having different ad behaviours during the same video. The first will be a 30s unskippable ad, the second will be a single skippable one, the third will be 3 ads, one of which you can skip, etc. It's ok on a mobile or if you're at your desk, but if you're watching from a distance it gets really annoying...
by vidarh | 2026-01-06 17:31:18+00:00
I'd be more likely to wear that than glasses with a thick rim and noticeable camera, but it's a jump from ~1% to 5% or so... Still bulky, and lots of situations where it won't be socially acceptable to wear big headphones (but then, would wearking smart glasses ever be?), cameras or not. Though using it as a means to give you more volume to hide hardware/batteries in is interesting.
by dieggsy | 2026-01-06 17:31:25+00:00
It's quite common in UK English (and maybe others, I don't know), to refer to "singular" or collective non-people entities (such as companies, I know Gmail itself isn't one) using the plural form of verbs.

This isn't in my natural speech, but I quite like it; it seems to kind of imply "the people behind [company]" rather than anthropomorphizing the company itself. ...generally though I think it's just colloquial convention and not that deep.
by rbanffy | 2026-01-06 17:31:36+00:00
Earlier today I said we were navigating uncharted waters, but that’s not quite true. As this article points out, we were at a similar point prior to WWI. What we have now that we didn’t then is nuclear weapons and ICBMs. If we, as a civilisation, decide to continue on this path, there will be nuclear proliferation, as this is the only current way a nation can use to force itself into a seat at the adults table. Trump wouldn’t dare do the same stunt with North Korea.
by pjmlp | 2026-01-06 17:31:57+00:00
What stable ABI?

First of all, ABI is a property of the OS calling conventions, which happen to overlap with C on UNIX/POSIX, given its symbiotic relationship.

Secondly, https://thephd.dev/to-save-c-we-must-save-abi-fixing-c-funct...
by mothballed | 2026-01-06 17:32:18+00:00
If the police take my car and make loud noises with it, all that means is the police can potentially make loud noises with my car. Not that I personally made loud noises.

The only provable noise polluter in that case is the police.

I'm sure they could also put my car on a dyno and prove it could go 100mph on the 30mph street I was on too.
by biotinker | 2026-01-06 17:33:34+00:00
In the last three years, there have been two times when we traveled, rented a car, and were given a Volkswagon.

Both times, the touchscreen-only controls were such a pain in the butt that we vowed we would never purchase such a car. It was a timesaver, because in that period our family has gotten two new (to us) cars, and our experiences with the rental Volkswagons allowed us to exclude an entire manufacturer from consideration.

If they haven't re-broken their interiors by the next time we look for a new car, I guess we'll have to consider them again.
by dang | 2026-01-06 17:33:48+00:00
I was just writing about this yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46508115.

We need to do something and are actively working on it. The challenge is to distinguish thoughtful critique from negativity-venting. The former is fine, the latter is lame. Unfortunately HN has too much of the latter.

I believe it has to do with macro trends in society at large and on the internet, which we can't expect to be immune from—but also with the community here getting older. That scares and worries me, because HN won't survive over the long haul if new cohorts of users don't keep showing up. Along with that, there seems to be increased waves of jadedness, bitterness, and cynicism that use this place as a dumping ground for bad feelings.*

That's a nasty dynamic, since the more it happens, the more it encourages more of it to happen. Meanwhile, people who don't enjoy jaded, bitter, and denunciatory rhetoric are just incentivized to leave: a classic vicious circle.

This is why we added the following to https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html last year: Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative.

(* I guess I'd better do the pre-emptive disclaimer thing and say no, of course this is not inevitable as one gets older. Many of HN's best, most curious and thoughtful commenters are (probably) older than the median user here. But it's statistical enough we're suffering from the trend. Clichés like old-man-yells-at-cloud and get-off-my-lawn have a basis, and that type of commenter is more motivated to comment (angrily and biliously) than others.)
by BoneShard | 2026-01-06 17:33:49+00:00
More likely leaves on a lawn will destroy it and will create a dirt patch, at least this is what happens in PNW (Seattle & Portland). I have giant maple trees next to my house and I get 2 feet of leaves in my backyard every fall, if you don't remove them you get a breeding ground for rodents, you get mold and dirt everywhere (and clogged gutters, clogged street drains) and standing water. And it's not only leaves, I'm getting fir/cedar needles and maple seeds on my drive way, good luck removing it without a blower.
by qingcharles | 2026-01-06 17:34:26+00:00
This worked for me once. Client refused to pay. We all met with our lawyers. Client was chuckling. Slid copy of contract over the table with IP rights highlighted. Client: "We need a minute." Five minutes later: "Here's your check."

Also, our lawyer that day had the best advice: "If this goes to court, the only winners are me and their lawyer. We both get to have another vacation this year."
by codebyaditya | 2026-01-06 17:34:42+00:00
yeah, the job title data is pretty wild. 62.8% of these apps are just 'Analyst' or 'Developer.' From a data perspective, using those generic SOC codes lets high-volume firms standardize everything. It meets the 'specialty' degree requirement on paper, but avoids the higher wage floors that a more specific title like 'Machine Learning Engineer' would trigger. Essentially, the system is being used for scale rather than niche talent scarcity, which shows up clearly in that $50k wage gap.
by _fw | 2026-01-06 17:35:18+00:00
Because CEOs are largely paid at the expense of people like you.

Does a C-level executive deliver £20m of value, or do they extract it?

Landlords and rent seekers get rich from what they own, not what they create. C-levels rewarded in shares for short-term gains are no different.

Tell me, does that single individual earning so much represent better or worse value for an organisation than you do?

What’s their ROI multiplier?

It’s fine if it’s higher. If it’s not higher, it’s corporate greed and feudal fat-cattery.
by tjr | 2026-01-06 17:35:20+00:00
I think people who truly don't understand programming need more structure and guardrails than coding from scratch with LLMs.

If you're wanting to, say, set up an online store website, and you don't know how to build a website at all, I think using something like Shopify is a better path than consulting an LLM and having it generate code for you.

On the other hand, if you do understand at least generally how to build what you want, you can leverage LLMs to build it faster and customized beyond what something like Shopify could offer.

So I reckon, for true non-developers, some no-code platforms will carry on. For developers, LLMs will probably replace some subset of such things.
by gordian-mind | 2026-01-06 17:35:32+00:00
> No one asked for 1000 new phone models every year, no one asked for 1000 new car models every year, no one asked for a million new kind of clothes every year.

I'm pretty sure that, except a few off-the-grid hermits, everyone, including the fancy communists at an indie café, is constantly asking for a million new kind of clothes. Denying this reality (and other unpleasant ones?) is perhaps what leads you to untrue conclusions.
by rhplus | 2026-01-06 17:35:34+00:00
> Not a great regulatory move, in my opinion.

> But I really wish ad companies would implement this rule across the board.

I genuinely don’t know how you could get your wish without regulation. You can’t expect all players in the ad game to follow self enforced rules if there’s any possibility that not following a self-imposed rule (“all ads must have a skip button”) will bring a competitive advantage. As soon as one player decides to take that advantage, all will. Back to square one.
by abdullahkhalids | 2026-01-06 17:35:41+00:00
> ... building codes...

I agree that in an ideal world that would be sufficient. But in practice, governments rarely deploy trained actuarial to make decisions, rather relying on politics and shoddy studies. Government codes also change very slowly. Insurance companies (whether private or public), under the financial incentive, are constantly changing their policies and rates in response to new data and calculations. I would be open to looking at studies that resolve this question one way or another.

> ... car seats...

I grew up in a poor global south country. Rich people, who clearly can afford them, don't buy car seats. Many people who live in countries where they are forced to buy car seats, when they come back on vacation don't use car seats for their kids. People can be very irrational.
by 999900000999 | 2026-01-06 17:35:48+00:00
It's a decent deal.

Comes with YouTube Music for 15$.

I probably use YouTube more than any other website, for about 10 minutes my premium subscription had expired and u rushed to throw money at Google to turn it back on.

Musicians complain about low streaming payouts, but 30 years ago I'd pay $40 ( inflation adjusted) for 15 songs and only like 3 of them.

Now I can listen to 500 or 600 unique songs a month + music that would of had to be imported for that 15$.

If I actually like an artist I'll buy an album as a keepsake.
by fn-mote | 2026-01-06 17:36:17+00:00
I totally disagree.

Or is a huge surprise (to the typical user) that highlighting text BY ITSELF in one window exposes that information for JavaScript running in a different application (like the browser). It’s like knowing that my smart TV is fingerprinting my viewing habits.

Isn’t the biggest security risk from copy and pasting passwords from a “secure” location to another one?

It looks like with modern browsers, reading the clipboard is gated behind some restrictions. Whew.
by kccqzy | 2026-01-06 17:36:22+00:00
The table at the end is seriously misguided. You can’t compare the sizes of an iOS preinstalled app against a non-preinstalled app. It’s just a thin UI shell where the code for all the functionality is inside system frameworks. The Photos app is quoted at 4.2MB. Guess what, if you delete that, you still have system components to render photos, UI for a photo picker, perform analysis on photos such as face recognition, all the iCloud networking code to support iCloud Photo Library, etc.
by al_borland | 2026-01-06 17:36:23+00:00
As much as I hate ads, I don’t know that it’s so simple.

There are products that do solve legitimate problems people have. Maybe there is less of that now, but in this past this was very true, and advertising helped make people aware that solutions to their problems have been developed. The first washing machine, for example.

The problem comes when the advertisement manufacturers problems that didn’t previously exist.
by exitb | 2026-01-06 17:36:26+00:00
> This reliance on readily available solutions, particularly for familiar problems, creates a real risk: engineers may inadvertently atrophy their own problem-solving skills, hindering their ability to tackle truly novel challenges.

Yes, that will happen. But it also happens every time we move up the abstraction ladder. Most engineers go through their entire careers and never do anything TRULY novel.
by Aachen | 2026-01-06 17:36:30+00:00
I think the joke is going over my head ^^; Maybe you mean 'just' a regular developer as opposed to a cryptobro?

Edit: I see you added in a link. "The research found that more than half of the 1200 developers surveyed are unable to ensure that their code is protected from seven common vulnerabilities", hmm maybe it was not a joke? The article (or the survey it's based on) sounds extremely misguided though, sounding comparable to saying that only X% of farmers never had a single rotten apple so clearly it's not a 'top' priority for them to produce quality at all cost

Oh, and I just noticed you're the same person as whom I was responding to above. That explains

Fwiw, I do security audits as a day job so I have some idea of which coding practices lead to good security and it's not download size. You can try this "you're just a developer" again on someone else maybe
by ksaj | 2026-01-06 17:36:30+00:00
Some "news" sites are so annoying about their ads, I just close the tab and google for someone else's version of the story. I block sites that show up in my news feed often but display more nag than content.

I'm sure in their mind, they don't care about me leaving. Apparently more than enough people put up with it to keep the site viable.
by wolvoleo | 2026-01-06 17:36:34+00:00
There's a few other apps that are ridiculously big. Like the DJI Mimo app. It's an app I need for my DJI Mic, to change 4 settings on it. It needs 800MB for that which is absolutely ridiculous. Also I need to sign up for an account to use it even though the Mic works completely locally and it just changes the settings over USB.

It's absolutely fucking ridiculous to have an 800MB app for this and the reason is just marketing. It's full of stupid videos promoting their stuff. And the account just causes stupid spam. I should have returned the damn thing to be honest.

Ps pardon my french but I'm really annoyed about this and in this case it's warranted in my opinion. 800MB is ridiculous.
by paol | 2026-01-06 17:36:57+00:00
> I'd love to know what the justification for replacing them in the first place was.

There were two converging factors: number one is that there was a time where it was considered a sign of sophistication / progress. Definitely a case of form over function, but remember this was the era when everything Tesla did was cool and everyone was chasing them.

The second factor is cost. Physical buttons are expensive to design, certify and manufacture (most people don't have a notion of how high the durability bar is for everything that goes into a car interior). Once you have to have a touchscreen anyway you can (theoretically) remove almost all physical controls.
by ruszki | 2026-01-06 17:37:09+00:00
I asked mainly because of the terminology. I read the primer of how to code OOP in plain C about a decade ago, so I knew that the paradigm definitely can be applied to “non OOP languages”, but I wasn’t sure whether the term “functional programming” allows this or not for some obscure academic reasons. How I coded when I encountered Haskell the first time, I would say it’s definitely possible, but I think, there are some features in Haskell which can be used to break pure functional programming, and if those are not considered FP, then who knows. But I used Haskell the last time a few years ago, so my memory is definitely not clear.
Show HN: LoRA Trained on SFMTA CAD Drawings to Aerial Images
by kfarr | 2026-01-06 17:37:10+00:00
Hey I'm Kieran and I've been playing with the intersection (pun intended) of generative AI and civil engineering for roadways. I did a test run training a LoRA on the new Flux 2 Dev model using Fal's trainer useing a custom dataset of paired images from publicly available striping CAD drawings of street layouts to aerial images of the same area.

The use case here is to allow urban planners to instantly visualize their proposed changes as they work with their existing tooling.

This was just a quick experiment with a small data size that exceeded my expectations so I wanted to share with you all.

Watch a demo with instructions on how to test it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zS8pGoOfe00

Try it now (includes free credits) https://3dstreet.app/generator

If you're really excited about running on your own hardware here are the lora weights: https://v3b.fal.media/files/b/0a87f41f/glySGbKtv8lzigPWzQDjb...

I can writeup a longer blog post if interested in the details. This was only trained on 12 image pairs with text descriptions but it still cost about $100 on Fal. I'd love to do a larger run, but it does take a while to prepare all of the data and I'm hesitant to drop $2k. I'd be curious for the experts out there if you think the quality will increase if I use a larger sample size.