MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by traceroute66 | 2026-01-09 10:41:21+00:00
> doesnt mean the inside one isnt there to protect the outside one.

The inner pane is typically half the thickness of the outer pane.

So whilst you could argue it cold be seen as a failsafe, I would say its primary purpose remains "double glazing" insulation.

The OAT at 30–40,000ft is very low and there is a lot of combined window area. So the importance of insulation is not to be underestimated. In particular on newer aircraft where efficiency is the name of the game in their design.
by cryptica | 2026-01-09 10:41:40+00:00
> Agreed, it does not necessarily have to be open source. But my opinion is that if the taxpayer's money is used to pay for software, then that software should be open source.

Yes. The government has more than enough leverage to demand this. Skill was never the problem. The problem is bureaucracy; too many regulations and massive hidden corruption. The problem with the regulations is that they were designed with the explicit intent to stifle competition.

"Nobody got fired for choosing IBM" - This fact is pure corruption. I remember, when I was at university, one of the courses I took had a project management component and we did an assessment researching failed software projects and it turns out that there were a huge number of failed projects running in the hundreds of millions and even billions (and that was a lot of money at the time); always the same companies kept coming up. IMO, this is fraud, of a criminal nature. People should go to jail.
by mike_hearn | 2026-01-09 10:42:04+00:00
There are a thousand reasons, which is why nobody is doing it. They're orthogonal. Problems WASM/WASI doesn't solve:

- Building / moving file hierarchies around

- Compatibility with software that expects Linux APIs like /proc

- Port binding, DNS, service naming

- CLI / API tooling for service management

And about a gazillion other things. WASI, meanwhile, is just a very small subset of POSIX but with a bunch of stuff renamed so nothing works on it. It's not meaningfully portable in any way outside of UNIX so you might as well just write a real Linux app. WASI buys you nothing.

WASM is heavily overfit to the browser user case. I think a lot of the dissipated excitement is due to people not appreciating how much that is true. The JVM is a much more general technology than WASM is which is why it was able to move between such different use cases successfully (starting on smart TV boxes, then applets, then desktop apps, then servers + smart cards, then Android), whereas WASM never made it outside the browser in any meaningful way.

WASM seems to exist mostly because Mozilla threw up over the original NaCL proposal (which IMO was quite elegant). They said it wasn't 'webby', a quality they never managed to define IMO. Before WASM Google also had a less well known proposal to formally extend the web with JVM bytecode as a first class citizen, which would have allowed fast DOM/JS bindings (Java has an official DOM/JS bindings API for a long time due to the applet heritage). The bytecode wouldn't have had full access to the entire Java SE API like applets did, so the security surface area would have been much smaller and it'd have run inside the renderer sandbox like V8. But Mozilla rejected that too.

So we have WASM. Ignoring the new GC extensions, it's basically just regular assembly language with masked memory access and some standardized ABI stuff, with the major downside that no CPU vendor uses it so it has to be JIT compiled at great expense. A strange animal, not truly excellent at anything except pleasing the technical aesthetic tastes of the Mozillians. But if you don't have to care about what Mozilla think it's hard to come up with justifications for using it.
by aebtebeten | 2026-01-09 10:42:23+00:00
Shenandoah Germans, if you look at the river itself, were in west Virginia (a valley away from Charlottesville), not West Virginia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenandoah_Germans#/media/File...

lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVz_IJoyO6Y

EDIT: as to the claim of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenandoah_Germans#/media/File... , I was more into the klezmer stage at Jazz Fest than the gospel tent, so I can't say, but think there may be one or two similarities, eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLTLlGCknUw doesn't strongly resemble https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYH4K1eR118 , but https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nQPlvT9U5c does resemble https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4Vl_ujSQ3Q (I think the idea was dance tempos were of the flesh but slower tempos were of the soul?)

FUN FACT: I think we get the phrase "to park a car" from the horse and buggy days; you'd put your car(riage)s out in the park (meadow).
by PurpleRamen | 2026-01-09 10:42:45+00:00
> Europe does not need more open source,

Europe is not one country, not even the EU is perfectly united. It's a dozen different countries, each with their own political and technical landscape, and Open Source is seen as the logical solution to unite them without raising a new (local) software-dictator.

> it needs its own healthy and competitive software industry.

It has a good software industry, and it could of course be always better, but USA is still bigger and more dominating. Ther eis also a difference between software and service. Popular Cloud-services for common work is rare in Europe, building them is and making them popular, especially on a european level, is important.

> It does not matter if the e-ID or payments app is running on an open source mobile OS, but it should be possible to run it on a non-US one.

It's all about control. Open Source matters, becausse it gives more control, more insight, less chance some other country is spying on your and someday switching off something important.
by 4ggr0 | 2026-01-09 10:43:02+00:00
i had diamond and cobalt in mind, i'm sure that this doesn't apply to every type of mine. but you can't deny that this isn't a current, imperialist strategy. soft colonialism.

i love how a streamer visiting botswana accidentally exposed this to his young audience: https://www.inkl.com/news/ishowspeed-unknowingly-exposes-tha...
by anonnon | 2026-01-09 10:43:35+00:00
> TikTok deemed I should not have access to my account ever again, and X (formerly Twitter) is delaying a response to my appeal to the suspension, but I have not much hope; I reckon it's gone for good. I may have lost all the personal contacts and content from there, but on the bright side, that has taught and made me see some other things, besides the importance of being a little smarter to not blindly install extensions like my life depended on it.

Well, losing access to both TikTok and X could be considered a bright side as well. But more seriously, isn't it tragic that you can't just blindly assume any piece of OSS isn't malware, anymore?
by zozbot234 | 2026-01-09 10:44:19+00:00
Is it "royal overreach" when a prime minister voluntarily resigns and the king/queen then formally picks someone else (after negotiations for parliamentary support) to legitimately take that place? That would be news to an awful lot of people in the UK, among other places. When you explicitly resign from power, you don't get to take it back by force absent new elections. It's a done deal.
by stingtao | 2026-01-09 10:44:22+00:00
Forgot to mention. I made catsbook in 3 days and presentation earlier in 7 days.

I do think AI code assistant is super great.

Recently, I use Open Codex 5.2 + Extra high reasoning model with $200 monthly subscription most and it's the best among all the other coding agents.

(I have subscribed to 4 at the same time and use all of them across a dozen of projects at the same time)
by scotty79 | 2026-01-09 10:44:31+00:00
That is super interesting culturally. Once video hosting became feasible to be offered for free people came up with the idea that posting their recordings online is a good idea. Which is fine bacause to the casual observer their face is as anonymous as their online handle. You can extract value from millions of your viewers with them knowing about you only as much as you told and shown them.

Publishing is just the first part. The other part is reactions. Most platforms let you disable them so your viewers don't see the disgusting things people say about you right there along your content. Yet many people who publish themselves decide to leave them on. Because the vile comments actually help them exploit their viewers. There's a value to being told to kill yourself in a comment in your post.

If the capability to let users generate fake porn in the comments was left to creators. Many of them would leave that option on. For the same reason they leave the comments on. Ben Shapiro could benefit a lot if some terrible person commented on his video with deepfake or him sucking someone off. Both because of the outrage and because his viewer base is more homophobic and homophoby correlates with homosexual arousal.
Show HN: A free MP4 to MP3 converter
by Katherine603 | 2026-01-09 10:44:41+00:00
I recently developed a free MP4-to-MP3 converter that allows uploading MP4 files up to 4GB in size and quickly converts them to MP3 format for export.
It runs directly in your browser without requiring downloads or logins, while ensuring audio quality and cross-device compatibility during conversion.
I'd love to hear your feedback on the conversion process, user experience, or potential technical improvements!
by ceving | 2026-01-09 10:44:44+00:00
Wasm has a fundamental problem: int64 is an insufficient data type for real use cases. If you want to create some kind of plugin system based on Wasm, you need to exchange structured data. But most languages disagree about the memory layout. Dynamic languages do tagging, compiled languages do not. And the UTF issue shows that even with strings, there's still no real agreement.

Furthermore, there are now competing interest groups within the Wasm camp. Wasm originally launched as a web standard: an extension of the JavaScript environment. However, some now want to use Wasm as the basis for replacing containers: an extension of a POSIX environment.
Show HN: Zaph – Your standup writes itself (async standups from real work)
by sravan_jeeru | 2026-01-09 10:45:13+00:00
Hi HN — I’m the founder of Zaph.

Zaph automatically drafts async standups from real work productivity tools, so engineers don’t have to context switch just to write updates. The draft arrives privately and you just approve it.

We’re going live in ~30 days and opening early access now.

I’d love feedback from teams that’ve tried async standups or struggled with daily status updates.

Happy to answer any technical or product questions.
by bilalba | 2026-01-09 10:45:30+00:00
I understand what you're saying. Changing the octave/instrument applies changes to the complete grid.

A way to get around this problem is to program octave 4's in one grid, save to the loop, and add another layer of octave 5's.

I could easily program supporting multiple instruments/octaves in a single grid but I'm not sure if that'll be intuitive to use. I'll do some research on this.
Show HN: Analyzed 500 SaaS products, created my owns now sharing e-book
by luke963 | 2026-01-09 10:45:44+00:00
Hi, I'm Luke. A few days ago, I published my e-book called "How I Made My First Sales in 14 Days."
All the knowledge I put there comes from:

- my own product, Pages.Report
- many networking calls with much more experienced founders
- analyzing indie hacker projects

I would love to hear some feedback from you.
by coldtea | 2026-01-09 10:45:57+00:00
>Why are you putting "value" above human decency?

Because human decency is often overrated and hard usable value is often underrated.

If we removed the value (changes, inventions, artworks, products, etc) made by people which were lacking in "human decency" is this or that aspect, billions would be poorer, sicker, die sooner, and have much worse cultures.

>There are plenty people just the same, with the same capabilities without the quality of being a tarpit of suck.

Understanding is a great component of human decency too, as is not being a sanctimonious hollier-than-thou type. For example, not labelling someone who "wrote something mean in a forum" as "a tarpit of suck", as if that defines them totally, or as if the persons making such statements shit doesn't smell.
by KronisLV | 2026-01-09 10:45:57+00:00
> if you use a third party CLI you might be more likely to mix and match or switch away entirely.

I really like doing this, be it with OpenCode or Copilot or Cline/RooCode/KiloCode: I do have a Cerebras Code subscription (50 USD a month for a lot of tokens but only an okayish model) whereas the rest I use by paying per-token.

Monthly spend ends up being somewhere between 100-150 USD total, obviously depending on what I do and the proportion of simple vs complex tasks.

If Sonnet isn’t great for a given task, I can go for GPT-5 or Gemini 3.
by tyre | 2026-01-09 10:46:14+00:00
Especially for the use case they’re talking about. It makes sense to have open standards for something like filing taxes so many companies can compete.

Having source code for the tax system itself is interesting, but I think the market for “run software for processing incoming taxes for polish citizens” is exactly one.

Unless they expect pull requests, which could be fun, but as OSS maintainers know, it’s a ton of work and boy would there be a ton of spam on something like this.
by MMAFRAZ | 2026-01-09 10:46:26+00:00
Most startups and marketing teams lose money because they commit budget before validating demand and messaging.

Join 10,000+ founders and marketers finding proven solutions to reduce wasted spend and make campaigns predictable.

This post is about a different approach — validating the decision to build, write, or launch before you commit time or media spend.

Key capabilities you can use immediately:

Market Signal Analyzer — surface live demand, recurring user questions, and under-served angles so you build on real signals.

Resonance Engine — simulate your target audience and score drafts for clarity, persuasion, and emotional alignment before publishing.

Conversion Killer Detector — detect copy and UX friction that silently kills conversions and get concrete fixes.

Campaign Builder — design a coordinated campaign (objectives, channels, assets) and surface gaps before any production or spend.

If you want to inspect everything first (site operator):
https://www.google.com/search?q=site:vect.pro

Open the product and go directly to the right flow:
https://vect.pro

Full system reasoning and blueprints:
https://blog.vect.pro/vect-ai-bible-guide

If you run acquisition, paid campaigns, or manage creative budgets, I’d value concrete feedback on:

which pre-spend signals would make you cancel or approve a campaign,

what output formats you need to hand off to creative/ads teams,

what would make you pay for a planning + validation workflow instead of keeping this in docs.

I’ll follow comments and can dig into scoring logic, signal sources, or integration hooks on request.
by chrismorgan | 2026-01-09 10:46:41+00:00
> Even a basic hello world in rust will set you back a few megabytes

Lies. It’s 35 kB:

$ cargo new x
…

$ cd x

$ cat src/main.rs
fn main() {
println!("Hello, world!");
}

$ cargo build --release --target=wasm32-unknown-unknown
…

$ ls -l target/wasm32-unknown-unknown/release/x.wasm
… 34597 …

And that’s with the default allocator and all the std formatting and panic machinery. Without too much effort, you can get it to under 1 kB, if I remember correctly.

For the rest: I mention comparisons being unbalanced because people often assume it will scale at the rate they’ve seen—twice as much code, twice as much size. Runtimes and heavy tables make for non-scaling overhead. That 35 kB you’ve paid for once, and now can use as much as you like without further growth.
by Tade0 | 2026-01-09 10:47:41+00:00
> make the product smaller for more money because there's no other way that the execs and shareholders get to jerk each other off this year.

That's an amusing image but the real reason they're doing it is that often those assets are used as collateral to acquire debt and cannot, under any circumstances, decrease in value.

It reached a point where it doesn't matter if the service is shitty or not rendered at all - as long as stock increases in value no one cares.
by klondike_klive | 2026-01-09 10:47:43+00:00
My dad told me of one Christmas he spent in Sheffield in the early 60s. He'd been ill or something and missed his train back home so he was moping about miserably. Then his Polish flatmate came home, took him to a park and taught him how to catch a duck (he mimed the actions used, with some string as a snare) which they roasted for Christmas dinner.
There's something grim, damp, probably illegal, but also convivial and ingenious about the story that makes me think of Withnail and Marwood in Regent's Park.
by iso1631 | 2026-01-09 10:47:57+00:00
We've seen that some open source licenses make way for American money to steal the monetisation -- Elasticsearch found this to their peril when Amazon swooped in and offered it as a service

The other problem is the ability for American companies and funds to just buy European companies.

If Europe wants to stop this is needs to be very aware of the licensing agreements, and to pass laws to limit foreign investment - like China, India etc do.
by pjmlp | 2026-01-09 10:47:59+00:00
Tooling is holding back WebAssembly.

It is very hard to debug WebAssembly applications, depending on the source language, we are still on printf debugging kind of experience.

Event the DWARF plugin for Chrome (only, nowhere else), hasn't been updated since 2023.

Then there is the whole experience, again depending on the language, to produce a .wasm file, alongside the set of imports/exports for the functions, instead of a plain "-arch=wasm".

GC support is now available, however it is a "yes but", because it doesn't support all kinds of GC requirements, thus some ecosystems like .NET, still need to ship their own.

Finally we have WIT trying to be yet another go at COM/CORBA/gRPC.
by jennalk | 2026-01-09 10:49:46+00:00
Thanks for the insight. Since they're post-pivot and hunting for PMF, I’m trying to gauge the panic vs focus ratio.

Does this stage inevitably turn engineering into a feature factory just to close deals? I'm worried the roadmap will become 'whatever the client screams for' rather than building a scalable core. Any specific questions I can ask the founders to sniff that out?
by danmaz74 | 2026-01-09 10:49:57+00:00
> More importantly, Anthropic should have open sourced their Claude Code CLI a year ago. (They can and should just open source it now.)

"Should have" for what reason? I would be happy if they open sourced Claude Code, but the reality is that Claude Code is what makes Anthropic so relevant in the programming more, much more than the Claude models themselves. Asking them to give it away for free to their competitors seems a bit much.
by cagz | 2026-01-09 10:50:08+00:00
Great article on reminding the risks of browser extensions. They literally have access to everything within the browser window, from usernames and passwords to bank account details.

Funnily I always tempted by extensions that offer dark more for webpages but never dared to install one.

I do use extensions, but only if they are from well known, respected organisations.

The author was lucky that it was only few compromised social media accounts. It could easily be an empty bank account or stolen identity instead.
Ask HN: Anyone else feels that their job quality has declined severely recently?
by falloutx | 2026-01-09 10:50:25+00:00
I work at one of the bigger companies and Recently I have become completely demotivated by AI advancements, manager behaviour and exec apathy. We are not in a terrible economy yet, but workers are already suffering.

I have kept up with AI advancements, and used cluade code since Day1, even stayed with it when they added limits, I never advocated my company to use it, I always asked the reimbursement from my learning budget, and when asked I always say use opencode with openrouter. And we also have own CLI now. But its impossible to keep up with this whole thing and even if when we do, whats the point? I cant seem to convince anyone that we are useful, we are working harder and yet getting no rewards. Checking our internal promotion stats, the #s are down by margin that makes me cry, and most promotions are in non-SDE fields too. Its seems we are being phased out and execs have a plan. There is something weird going on.

I dont particularly care about _this_ job, but I care about our field. Everywhere managers are asking us to work more and execs are still not happy with anything, They dont seem to understand AI is the reason users dont use our products. They are actively hating on our products but no one seems to care.
by cryptica | 2026-01-09 10:50:38+00:00
Refactorings can be useful in certain cases if the core architecture of the system is sound, but for some very complex systems, the problems can run deeper and a refactoring can be a waste of time. Sometimes you're better off reworking the whole thing because the problem might be in the foundation itself; something about the architecture forces developer's hand in terms of thinking about the problem incorrectly and writing bad code on top.
by Someone1234 | 2026-01-09 10:51:11+00:00
Fair warning, if you load the site in dark-mode the diagrams are completely broken. They're PNGs with an alpha-transparency background and gray/black for the actual content, when the site is in dark mode you can see nothing at all...

So make sure to change to light-mode in the top-right if you want to read this article at all.
by ben_w | 2026-01-09 10:51:41+00:00
That is an additional problem, but does not contradict what you replied to.

N_dissatisfied > max(0, N_for_sale - N_individuals_and_couples_buying)

When N_for_sale > N_individuals_and_couples_buying, it is still possible for N_dissatisfied to be > 0 for the reason you give. But N_dissatisfied must be > 0 whenever N_for_sale < N_individuals_and_couples_buying, even if everyone is limited to having at most one.
Show HN: A free AI image enhancer that fixes "almost usable" photos in seconds
by violet_0923 | 2026-01-09 10:51:45+00:00
I put together a simple AI-based tool for improving image quality.

You upload a photo, and it outputs a cleaner version with better sharpness and resolution, while keeping the original structure intact. It’s aimed at everyday images that need a quick fix rather than full editing.

Everything runs in the browser.

I’m mainly interested in feedback on output quality, UX, and any technical improvements worth exploring.

Link: https://aienhancer.ai/
by joe_mamba | 2026-01-09 10:52:26+00:00
> It's currently a necessary evil to put pressure on the already centralized power of the US global hegemony.

How can I opt out of this "necessary evil"?

I don't want to be part of this feud between powers as I don't want the EU to be a world power since in all world powers 90% of the wealth just concentrates to the top 1% anyway, so becoming one would not benefit me. Will housing be more affordable once we become a "world power"? Or fix healthcare shortages?

So no, it's not a necessary evil, it's a manufactured one via scaremongering, to copot public option in the direction the 1% financieres desire since their kids won't be on the frontline of this new world war they're trying to stir up.
by BrenBarn | 2026-01-09 10:52:43+00:00
The thing is that that's not a conflict between data and lived experience, it's just a conflict between different sets of data. If you measure wealth and then you measure wealth relative to housing costs, neither one of those is "lived experience". If you do a survey on people's sentiments about the economy, that's data too. I'm skeptical of the term "lived experience" precisely because people tend to use it in arguments of the form "let's disregard data in favor of my individual preferences". But when you aggregate the "lived experience" of many people, you get data, and that data can be just as valuable as more anodyne economic data.