MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by eloisant | 2026-01-08 10:29:05+00:00
The website is good information, and if it came from a NPO is would be great... But the US government has so much power (and responsibility) to protect the US consumers from the food industry.

- Ban some of the ingredients like they did for trans fat

- Force better labeling, like the Nutri-Score in France and EU

- Tax the more unhealthy choices so they don't become the cheapest solution - and maybe use that tax money to subsidize healthier alternatives

This site looks like they're just shaming the consumers for falling for the tricks the government allows the food industry to pull off.

I remember a European MEP who was fighting the food industry to impose Nutri-Score saying on TV that no constituent comes to them saying "help me, I'm too fat". However many expect politicians to boost the job market. The food industry knows that, so each time you try to impose some regulation they'll say "if you do that, we're be forced to do so many layoffs!"
by ben_w | 2026-01-08 10:29:06+00:00
> I did make an informed decision in choosing this stack, but it's equally likely that the AI could have recommended it to me, and the AI entirely set up the project scaffolding and config for me.

I'm not a web dev, I've heard of Tailwind CSS but my actual knowledge is "I know what the CSS in that name means, therefore it's some kind of styling tool".

One of my experiments before Christmas with Claude Code, was to see what it does in pure vibe-coding mode, where I just say "yes" and then see what kind of mess (if any) it made.

It did not use Tailwind CSS. There was a lot of… if a human had done it I'd say "copy-paste" CSS, but I think it just regenerated it all fresh each time rather than actually using the pasteboard? And it was raw CSS, no dependencies that I noticed.
by lm28469 | 2026-01-08 10:29:08+00:00
Probably a bit of both, it's trendy do have a quirk, and modern life fucks up your attention span. Everyone wants to put a label on everything, remember when facebook had a dropdown of like 60+ genders? I also know people who talk about "being on the spectrum" all the time, at first I thought it was a meme, but they genuinely believe they're autistic because they're #notliketheothers. At the end of the day everything is a spectrum and nobody is normal, I'm not sure it's healthy to want to put a label on everything or medicate to fall back on the baseline.
by yurishimo | 2026-01-08 10:29:11+00:00
If Build UI was still making content, they would keep getting sales. There are also other ways to implement a "pay once" model that is sustainable, but it involves designing a much more thought out product roadmap and gatekeeping features behind new major versions where you need to pay for an upgraded license.

Jetbrains has done this for decades now with great success and is the standard sales model for most freemium WordPress plugins. Heck, even Adobe had a similar model until they were convinced they could squeeze out even more profit by charging monthly and trapping customers into subscriptions with high cancellation fees (my words, not theirs).
by acc0362 | 2026-01-08 10:30:18+00:00
I use this technique in Slack by setting a reminder on a message so I can follow up later.

Sometimes I even push it to the next day or week by setting a reminder for 09:00. The only downside is that Slack doesn’t seem to have considered this workflow. Instead of giving me a single notification that several messages are ready for follow‑up, I get multiple push notifications on my phone. It’s a bit irritating, but it’s still the best option for now.
by kleiba | 2026-01-08 10:30:49+00:00
> Unfortunately there's no money in privacy

But there should be and there should be punishments for data breaches, or at least compensations for those affected. Then there would be an incentive for corporations to take their user's privacy more seriously.

Your personal data is basically the currency of the digital world. This is way data about you is collected left, right, and center. It's valuable.

When I trust a bank to safely lock away my grandmother's jewelry, I have to pay for it, but in return, if it just so happened that the bank gets broken into and all my possessions get stolen, at least I'll get (some) compensation.

When I give my valuable data to a company, I have already paid them (with the data themselves), but I have no case whatsoever if they get compromised.
by quitit | 2026-01-08 10:31:27+00:00
There is nothing wrong with obtaining additional, even false, information from any source that is available to you. (AI, Search, Websites/Blogs, Podcasts, influencers, word-of-mouth, etc)

It's what you do with that information that is important - the correct path is to take your questions to a medical professional. Only a medical professional can give you a diagnosis, they can also answer other questions and address incorrect information.

ChatGPT is very good for providing you with new avenues to follow-up upon, it may even help discover the correct condition which a doctor had missed. However it is not able to deliver a diagnosis, always leave that to a medical professional.

This actually differs very little from people Googling their symptoms - where the result was the same: take the new information to your medical professional, and remember to get a second opinion (or more) for any serious medical condition, or issues which do not seem to be fully resolved.
Show HN: Flexy – fixed-budget bug fixes and features for .NET teams
by prashantl | 2026-01-08 10:31:28+00:00
Hi HN,

We just shipped an updated version of Flexy, a productized way to outsource small-to-mid C#/.NET and Azure work with fixed budgets instead of hourly billing.

It’s aimed at solo devs and small teams that need reliable help for bug fixes, features, modules/libraries, or Azure tasks, without hiring or managing a long retainer.

Link: https://www.flexytasks.dev/
by davrosthedalek | 2026-01-08 10:31:48+00:00
That extension doesn't follow. It is possible to verify if software works without knowing how it works internally. This is true with many things. You don't need to know how a plane/car/elevator works to know that it works when you use it.

I would actually argue that only a small percentage of programmers know what happens in code on an instruction level, and near none on a micro-op or register level. Vibe-coding is just one more level of abstraction. The new "code" are the instructions to your LLM.
by pwagland | 2026-01-08 10:32:16+00:00
The real question is how do you enforce that the human is reviewing and double-checking?

When the AI gets "good enough", and the review becomes largely rubber stamping, and 50% is pretty close to that, then you run the risk that a good percentage of the reviews are approved without real checks.

This is why nuclear operators and security scanning operators have regular "awareness checks". Is something like this also being done, and if so what is the failure rate of these checks?
by throwaway2037 | 2026-01-08 10:33:03+00:00
The latest in body building science recommends 1g of protein per day per 1lb of body mass (or 2.2g per 1kg for metric folks).

> I ate between 120and 140g of protein per day, without any shakes.

How did you do that in a plant based diet? What were your largest sources of protein? (To be clear: I'm doubting that you did it. I am genuinely curious.)
by rainonmoon | 2026-01-08 10:35:06+00:00
I just registered CVEs in several platforms in a related industry, the founders of whom likely all asked themselves a similar question. And yet, it's the wrong question. The right one is, "Does this company need to exist?" I don't know you or your company. Maybe it's great. But many startups are born thinking there's a technological answer to a question that requires a social/political one. And instead of fixing the problem, the same founders use their newfound wealth to lobby to entrench the problem that justifies their company's existence, rather than resolves the need for it to exist in the first place. "How do you propose we service our customers without their medical data?" Fix your fucked healthcare system.
by bigfudge | 2026-01-08 10:37:05+00:00
I think this is true, and the broad sense of that website is an improvement on what went before, so we should acknowledge that. But it's also right that people point out the moralising tone and connect other administration actions and policies with an assessment of whether these principles will be backed by policies that actually make any difference in real life. My suspicion is that this will be part of an effort to further stigmatise people damaged by the industrial food industry without doing anything to make healthy food cheaper or more accessible, but I'd love to be wrong!
Show HN: App blocker that tracks your failed attempts to open blocked apps
by appdevfun | 2026-01-08 10:37:25+00:00
I built Zone, an iOS app blocker using Apple's Family Controls API. The differentiator is simple: it counts how many times you try to open blocked apps.
Most app blockers just block. But I found the attempt count more revealing than the block itself. Seeing "you tried to open Instagram 47 times today" was a wake-up call I didn't get from blocking alone.
Technical notes: Family Controls API is poorly documented but provides system-level blocking that actually works (unlike overlay approaches). Had to handle some edge cases around authorization persistence and count tracking across app restarts. The API requires Screen Time permissions which adds friction to onboarding but ensures reliable blocking.
One interesting discovery: users seem to prefer seeing raw attempt counts over gamified metrics (streaks, badges, etc). Less is more for this use case.
Built in SwiftUI, local storage only, no subscriptions. Took about 3 months part-time.
Curious if others have worked with Family Controls API and what challenges you faced. Also interested in thoughts on digital wellness apps in general - does tracking behavior change it, or just make you more aware without actual change?
by NPC82 | 2026-01-08 10:37:29+00:00
Based on the science appendix it seems like the inclusion of a "low carb diet" is more toward disease treatment and not health promotion. This would be antithetical to the DGA in years past and is kind of useless. The appendix itself acknowledges that the long term effects of a "low carb diet" are muted in the long term, which is probably why you would never hear it hawked by a nutrition professional as a healthy eating pattern.

The restrictions on SNAP are insidious because SNAP is supposed to enable one to live a normal life -- and that includes occasionally buying things that are not "healthy" in a bubble. The mantra that many health professionals will use is "there are no unhealthy foods, only unhealthy diets". Combine all that background with traditional stigma associated with SNAP/food stamp benefits and a picture starts to emerge of why policy was to embrace more foods and how this administration is often called the "administration of harm".
by c16 | 2026-01-08 10:37:41+00:00
Credit where credit is due, going back to whole-foods and single-ingredient foods is the correct decision for everyone, and is often cheaper. But you can tell it's with a heavy focus on meatpacking, and it's known there's heavy lobbying going on.

Is that a bad thing? I'd rather people eat single ingredient foods and foods without labels (fruit, veg) than neon green cereals. I guess my point here is that it's a little sad the 'right' outcome was as a result of heavy lobbying.

The correct order should have been greens > proteins > carbs for an overweight nation.
by jcattle | 2026-01-08 10:38:20+00:00
I struggle to fully grasp everything you postulate. Please help me understand.

Your original point was that libraries do not need companies behind them. From what you have written here a reason for that is that (web) libraries mostly create churn by introducing constant changes. What I think you follow from that, is that those libraries aren't necessary and that "freezing" everything would not do any harm to the state of web development but would do good by decreasing churn of constantly updating to the newest state.

What I struggle to understand is (1) how does AI fit into this? And (2) Why do you think there is so much development happening in that space creating all the churn you mention? At this point in time all of this development is still mostly created by humans which are likely paid for what they do. Who pays them and why?
by azuanrb | 2026-01-08 10:39:13+00:00
Opus > GPT 5.2 | Gemini 3 Pro to me. But they are pretty close to lately. The gap is smaller now. I'm using it via CLI. For Gemini, their CLI is pretty bad imo. I'm using it via Opencode and pretty happy with it so far. Unfortunately Gemini often throw me rate limit error, and occasionally hang. Their infra is not really reliable, ironically. But other than that, it's been great so far.
by close04 | 2026-01-08 10:40:34+00:00
> It was simple - I priced it properly, and I didn't have to pay another year of taxes, insurance, repairs, maintenance, and worry, only to have to lower the price anyway to get rid of it. A couple of the other homeowners were angry with me about that, but that was their problem.

I think you just explained partly the reason behind why a small number of owners can drive the prices up. But these are usually private owners. Whenever I see bank sales, they're more like flash sale and done.

Those who can afford to sit on the property trying to obtain a higher price will do it. Other owners will look at that and try to keep the price high with the illusory hope that they can also make that much money. Individual owners can suffer from FOMO and are influenced by success stories, so ask a high price hoping to capture as much of the value as possible.

I saw it in action when I bought my house. The seller saw his neighbor selling the house a year earlier for [princely sum] so he jumped to put his house on the market for [princely sum +20%]. The whole neighborhood was following the same playbook, looking at who sold and raising the bar. After a year with that house on the market I became interested and in a 6 month process I ended up buying the house for [princely sum -20%].

None of the neighbors know how much he got, only know how much he asked. A similar house 50m away is still up for sale for even higher price than than the listed price for mine. They can afford to sit on it for a while because the extra money they hope for covers the taxes and upkeep tenfold or more.
by nephihaha | 2026-01-08 10:40:53+00:00
The interactions were far worse online. A few of them were what I would call acquaintances rather than friends in real life, but yes, I knew them.

On the first day, one guy I did know was attacked by someone I didn't know, who made fun of him for having the middle name Ralph. I think he ended up blocking her. They appeared to have known each other for years. This was within hours of joining Facebook. I stayed out of it, but was taken aback by it.

Another individual I found easy to get on with offline, was very aggressive about a number of issues. I have tended to avoid him since. I think he took some kind of breakdown and Facebook may have even been part of that. His online behaviour cost him his relationship too.

I do have an FB account now, but I rarely go on it (last time was weeks ago). I have to have it for work. I do limit friends to people I've met in person, which does help a bit. But I still see toxic interactions on there as well as bizarre claims (such as someone claiming all countries have nuclear weapons, which was more down to their personal ignorance than conspiracy theory.) As far as the website goes, I got a temporary ban for some weeks for making a short post asking about the mental health cost of lockdowns.
by Someone | 2026-01-08 10:42:08+00:00
Apple claims Swift can be used for systems programming, and is (partly) eating its own dogfood by using it in FoundationDB (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38444876) and by providing examples of embedded projects (https://www.swift.org/get-started/embedded/)

I think they are right in that claim, but in making it so, at least some of the code loses some of the readability of Swift. For truly low-level code, you’ll want to give up on classes, may not want to have copy-on-write collections, and may need to add quite a few some annotations.
by CharlieDigital | 2026-01-08 10:42:39+00:00
You can choose to bury your head in the sand with word games. Or acknowledge that LLM is enabling single person startups. Up to you.

I'm sharing information, not presenting an argument. You seem to want to argue that... something, but it is not apparent to me what it is.

Whatever you choose to do with this information, it did not change reality.
by wslh | 2026-01-08 10:42:41+00:00
The technique can be interpreted in different ways. One thing that definitely helps is when there’s a strong hype cycle, like with AI, where you’re tempted to build the next “super framework” only to realize that another team may develop it faster and better than you ever could.

I have a friend who worked at an AI company before the current boom, and he once told me something along the lines of: we built several things over the past few years that could now be replaced by the new frameworks that keep appearing.
by theothertimcook | 2026-01-08 10:42:50+00:00
I got an invite a few weeks ago, it’s basically just reddit I guess..

Top post has ~300 upvotes and ~100 comments.

I also signed up for a MySpace account, I’m also not sure what that is now.

In fact, I don’t even really know what HN is, I just like that there’s no in-jokes or pictures.
by f1shy | 2026-01-08 10:43:44+00:00
Because of the formulation of the question, I assume (please don't be irritated, if wrong) that you have very little knowledge of networking. In that case, it won't harm the Beej guide, but probably not the best point to start. The article discuses BGP protocol, which is totally absent in the linked guide. You may write literally millions of networking applications without need to know anything about BGP. Only if you are working in the backbone of the internet, you will encounter BGP, not even in big private networks. It will be a long way to really start from 0 up to BGP.
by msucorey | 2026-01-08 10:44:06+00:00
Came here to make exact comment. I can't let anything fall through the cracks at my job but I don't necessarily need to be the one handling.

Mondays I will typically have 30-50 of these waiting that sequentially get snoozed 3 hours, tomorrow, next week until resolved or first rights of refusal from others are exhausted and I handle myself :).
Show HN: A Cross-Platform ISO Editor (ISO9660/Joliet/UDF/Rock Ridge)
by howardshaw | 2026-01-08 10:44:52+00:00
Hi HN,
I built VIO ISO Editor, a cross-platform GUI app for creating and editing ISO images on Windows 10/11 and macOS 10+.

Why I built it: I often need to ship release artifacts for users across different OSes, and ISO compatibility gets tricky fast (Unicode filenames, large files, UNIX perms, and “what mounts cleanly where”). I wanted a single tool that lets me author one image with the right filesystem mix for cross-platform distribution.

What it does:
Create new ISOs: start a new project → set volume/publisher identifiers → choose standards → drag & drop files/folders → build the image (with progress shown).
Edit existing ISOs: open an ISO and add/replace/delete content, update properties/standards, then save/build the updated image.

Standards support (and you can master multiple standards into one ISO for compatibility):
ISO9660 + Joliet (long/Unicode filenames)
UDF 2.60 (e.g. files > 4GB)
Rock Ridge 1.09 (UNIX permissions/attributes)

Feedback/questions I’d love help with:
For cross-platform distribution, what compatibility edge cases should I test (deep paths, Unicode normalization, mixed-standard mounting behavior, large trees, etc.)
Would a Linux version be useful (native GUI), or are existing Linux toolchains (xorriso/mkisofs/etc.) already “good enough” for most people?

Happy to answer questions.
by sjamaan | 2026-01-08 10:45:54+00:00
> - Force better labeling, like the Nutri-Score in France and EU

NutriScore is mostly useless, to the point of being misleading. The system was cooked up by the industry, which explains a lot.

It is a label that tells you how nutritious a given product is "compared to products in the same category". So you could have, say, candy or frozen pizza with a NutriScore A and that would be just fine according to this system because it happens to be more nutritious than other candy/pizza. In other words, a product having a NutriScore of A doesn't mean the product is actually healthy or good for you.
by pbhjpbhj | 2026-01-08 10:46:59+00:00
Just when you think it's only the evil dictatorial regime trying to break up NATO along comes a helpful, presumably USA-based HN commenter, to remind you that a lot of USA citizens are also supportive of destroying any semblance of accord with former allied nations and spreading disharmony wherever they go.

It's right for all of us to consider whether our online presence supports fascist dictators be they from USA, Russia, Venezuela, or wherever.

Thanks for the reminder that even here people are sometimes shit, I guess.
by prashantl | 2026-01-08 10:47:29+00:00
A bit more detail (since the landing page is concise): Flexy is “send a scoped task → get a fixed quote within 24h → we start quickly (often within ~1 business day) → you get production-ready code + short support window.”

What’s new in this version is the clearer productization/packaging around fixed-scope deliverables (Quick Fix from $29, Standard Task from $89, and a custom tier for complex work), plus a tighter focus on Microsoft stack work (.NET 2-10/ASP.NET/EF Core/Azure Functions/App Service/CI-CD/etc.).

Feedback request for HN: if you’ve outsourced .NET/Azure tickets before, what info do you need upfront to feel comfortable with fixed-price execution (e.g., definition-of-done checklist, code review style, test expectations, security/NDA concerns)?

If anyone wants, share a single “one-paragraph task brief” here (or email via the contact form) and we will reply with how we would scope it + what we would quote it at—no obligation.
by ZeroGravitas | 2026-01-08 10:47:39+00:00
Enjoy the outrage while it lasts.

Soon Americans being shot in the face by ICE and framed as terrorists will be as common and accepted as the President talking about invading Canada and Greenland, or launching billion dollar shitcoins, talking about his love letters to dictators, insulting soldiers who died in combat, violent riots overturning elections or openly mocking disabled people etc. etc. etc.

You'll see people in these comments who worked to normalise all those doing the same again.
by jchw | 2026-01-08 10:48:03+00:00
I dunno about Gemini CLI, but I have tried Google Antigravity with Gemini 3 Pro and found it extremely superior at debugging versus the other frontier models. If I threw it at a really, really hard problem, I always expected it to eventually give up, get stuck in loops, delete a bunch of code, fake the results, etc. like every other model and every other version of Gemini always did. Except it did not. It actually would eventually break out of loops and make genuine progress. (And I let it run for long periods of time. Like, hours, on some tricky debugging problems. It used gdb in batch mode to debug crashes, and did some really neat things to try to debug hangs.)

As for wit, well, not sure how to measure it. I've mainly been messing around with Gemini 3 Pro to see how it can work on Rust codebases, so far. I messed around with some quick'n'dirty web codebases, and I do still think Anthropic has the edge on that. I have no idea where GPT 5.2 excels.

If you could really compare Opus 4.5 and GPT 5.2 directly on your professional work, are you really sure it would work much better than Gemini 3 Pro? i.e. is your professional work comparable to your private usage? I ask this because I've really found LLMs to be extremely variable and spotty, in ways that I think we struggle to really quantify.