MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hollerith | 2026-01-21 18:02:52+00:00
>In Germany, 40-45% of GDP is exports . . . In the U.S., it's just 10-11%

The contrast is even more stark than those numbers suggest because while the US is basically self-sufficient in petroleum these days, it imports and exports a lot of crude because US refineries are good at refining heavy crude and sour crude, which other countries struggle to refine. The crude produced in the US is the easy-to-refine non-heavy non-sour stuff so it exports some of that and imports an approximately equal amount of difficult-to-refine stuff because that way US refineries can take advantage of their comparative expertise to make a little money.

The point is that it would be easy for US refineries to switch entirely to US-produced crude as their supply, and if they did that, that 10-11% figure would go down a lot.

The reason people tend to think that international trade is important to the US economy is that during the Cold War, Washington used the ability to trade with the US as a carrot to tempt countries into allying with the US against the USSR. But the main motivation for the US to do that was not to enrich Americans but rather to increase the (long-term) military security of Americans.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2026-01-21 18:02:53+00:00
This is potentially disastrous to content on the web. Vimeo provides a platform-as-a-service known as OTT, that powers well known branded streaming services, like Criterion Channel, HistoryHit, Dropout, DIRTVision, Speed 51, URLTV, Armflix, MHz Choice, Trinity Broadcasting Network, SommTV, IndieFlix, BroadwayHD, Full Moon Features, etc.
by Dagger2 | 2026-01-21 18:02:59+00:00
NAT:

iptables -A POSTROUTING -o wan0 -j MASQUERADE

Firewall:

iptables -A FORWARD -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT
iptables -A FORWARD -m state --state INVALID -j DROP
iptables -A FORWARD -i lan0 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A FORWARD -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-admin-prohibited

If you omit the first line, you get firewalling without NAT. If you omit the second set of lines, you get NAT without firewalling. This should make it pretty clear that they're orthogonal features.

If NAT functioned as an inbound firewall, the second set of lines wouldn't be necessary and removing them wouldn't let you make inbound connections. But you can just test it yourself, and you'll see that NATing your outbound connections doesn't block new inbound ones.
by jp1016 | 2026-01-21 18:03:05+00:00
Hi HN,

I built https://poker.beavergrow.com to solve the problem of playing poker with friends when you have a deck of cards but no physical chips. I wanted something that felt as fast as a native app but required zero setup for the players.

it has no bs, no signup, just create a room and play. players can join instantly by scanning a qr code on the share screen.real time activity feeds that stay perfectly in sync across all devices.

Also includes custom avatars, themes, and fun message/reaction to it.

its a fully functional PWA, so it can be installed on a home screen for a full-screen, native-like experience at the table.
by jackyinger | 2026-01-21 18:03:10+00:00
I guess I’m making the mistake of assuming others have taken a similar intellectual path as I have.

I’m an Elecrical and Computer Engineer (ECE) by schooling. But I did pay attention in my mandatory liberal arts class. I took a Political Philosophy course, and a 400 level History of US Foreign Policy, where I was the only non-history major.

People inevitably opine on government/politics. And because of that I think they should delve deeper. I think that delving deeper and having civil conversation are how we escape the toxic mess media currently dishes out.
by jama211 | 2026-01-21 18:03:37+00:00
I think this is one of those statements that sounds reasonable on the surface but if you read it over a few times it doesn’t say anything concrete enough to pin down anything that could be refuted, even though I think the vibe is off.

So in return I’ll share my vibe, which is that my point was a small amount of struggle can be good once people are already determined to learn something, perhaps because they have found a spark for it. But before they’ve found their spark, all it does is turn people off. And in general, I don’t think struggle is essential at all. In fact I’ve learned a great many things successfully without struggling.
by borenstein | 2026-01-21 18:04:19+00:00
Totally agreed, but that level of attack sophistication is not a routine threat for most projects. Making sense of any information so exfiltrated will generally require some ad-hoc effort. Most projects, especially new ones, simply aren't going to be that interesting. IMO if you're doing something visible and sensitive, you probably shouldn't be using autonomous agents at all.

("But David," you might object, "you said you were using this to build a financial analysis tool!" Quite so, but the tool is basically a fancy calculator with no account access, and the persistence layer is E2EE.)
by horsawlarway | 2026-01-21 18:04:33+00:00
It sounds like they're trying to extract as much money as possible from a SaaS subscription service that's no longer actually paying any devs.

From my perspective as a one-time (but no longer) paying user of evernote - WTF am I paying for monthly if not to support a dev team?

Seriously - I get that there are infra costs for some of the services, and I wouldn't mind paying those costs plus a reasonable upcharge, but I'm sure as fuck not going to pay a company $100+ a year subscription to store under a GB of data.

So now I host bookstack and I pay backblaze ~$0.22/m to back up all my notes, which is much closer to real costs for these services if they're not under development.
Show HN: UseWhisper.dev – AI Code Reviewer (please test and roast it)
by alameenpd | 2026-01-21 18:04:38+00:00
Hey HN!

I built UseWhisper.dev — an AI code reviewer that analyzes your code diffs, PRs, or snippets and returns review feedback instantly. It runs in the browser with no signup required, and is meant to give developers quick second opinions on logic, style, security, and best practices.

https://usewhisper.dev

What it does:

Paste a diff, GitHub PR link, or code snippet

Get line-by-line intelligent feedback

Suggestions on readability, errors, anti-patterns

No login, minimal UI, fast responses

Why I’m posting:
It’s still early and likely wrong in many ways. I want honest testing, brutal roasting, and real use-case feedback. Break it, trick it, embarrass it — everything helps.

Questions I care about:

Where does it give useful feedback vs hallucinations?

What common review suggestions does it miss?

UX friction when pasting diffs / navigating comments?

Danger points (wrong advice that would be harmful)?

Where should this fit in a real dev workflow?

If you tweet code at it, torture test async/edge cases, or compare with humans — post results!
Thanks for the heat
by LeFantome | 2026-01-21 18:04:39+00:00
I am so excited for Ascalon.

It is not that I expect that Ascalon is going to be faster than Apple Silicon or cheaper than ARM. The price/performance is still likely to be such that these kinds of threads will be dominated with critics still saying that other options are better. Many will continue to wonder what the hype is about.

But what I fully expect and hope for is that Ascalon will put to rest the idea that RISC-V is some sort of toy platform or that it will be decades if ever before it can compete. Specifically, people will not be able to say that there are no RISC-V chips that can even compete with a Raspberry Pi 5.

After Ascalaon, it will not be fringe to propose that RISC-V makes sense for some use cases. Few will see RISC-V as a competitor to Intel, but many more will understand that RISC-V is a viable competitor to ARM.

And for us RISC-V supporters, Ascalon/Atlantis may be fast enough to actually use on the desktop. I have Intel based laptops that I still use daily that may not be any faster than Ascalon. That means that, for me at least, Ascalcon will already be fast enough. That is, if I will be able to afford it or even able to buy one. Fingers crossed.

I can dream of an Ascalon or Babylon based Framework mainboard.

Regardless, the rubicon will have been crossed. RISC-V will only get cheaper and faster after Ascalon. And, while x86-64 and ARM64 will too, there will be many, many RISC-V suppliers. There will be governments directly backing RISC-V research. The better RISC-V gets, the more players there will be and the more momentum the ecosystem will get.

My thesis is that it will be hard for ARM and Intel to stay ahead of all these other players. Certainly it will be hard to out-compete them all in every market. Which means that RISC-V will not only become viable but start to lead. And that is a radically different world than the one we live in now.

RISC-V is the hardware equivalent of the Linux kernel. And we know how that turned out.

Again, fingers crossed.
by Closi | 2026-01-21 18:04:42+00:00
What if there isn't a feasible path for expansion and growth? Vimeo already has contracting revenue, it's either in the maturity or decline phase.

Some customers will churn, some will stay, Bending Spoons are the masters of this model so will have made an assumption on how revenue will change across the next 5-10 years+, but I would assume that they aren't forecasting extreme growth, and instead are calculating that net profit can be changed from c$30m to c$139m within existing revenue, so if they can keep revenue at/near current levels without growth, they can end up with a much more profitable business.

Bear in mind that same revenue doesn't necessarily mean the same number of customers - it can also mean raising prices and having less customers. Bending Spoons might estimate that if they double prices, half their customers might leave - this would still be BRILLIANT for profit, as while revenue would stay the same, some costs would half, and thus profit might jump from c$140m to c$250m based on some napkin math!
by grumbel | 2026-01-21 18:04:55+00:00
The whole discussion is confused from the start. When people talk about the "security of NAT" they are not talking about NAT at all, but about what happens when NAT is misconfigured or switched off. In the case of IPv4 it means nothing works and your computer isn't reachable. The system is fail safe.

Meanwhile with IPv6 it's the other way around, everything is wide open unless you have a working and properly configured firewall.
by epinzur | 2026-01-21 18:05:09+00:00
Hi. I'm on the Mastra team, and I've built out the observability stack. We support outputting traces to numerous 3rd party tools, and also our own system.

More info can be found here: https://mastra.ai/docs/observability/tracing/overview#export...

In the coming months we will add improvements to logging, overall metric collection, experimentation tracing, and numerous additional observability features.

Thanks for your interest.
by amirhirsch | 2026-01-21 18:05:09+00:00
I'm at 1137 with one hour with opus now...
Pipelined vectorized hash, speculation, static code for each stage, epilogues and prologues for each stage-to-stage...

I think I'm going to get sub 900 since i just realized i can in-parallel compute whether stage 5 of the hash is odd just by looking at bits 16 and 0 of stage 4 with less delay.....
by aprdm | 2026-01-21 18:05:12+00:00
Why limit to LLMs and agents ?

This is true about everything you see advertised to you.

When I went to opensource conference (or whatever it was called) in San Diego ~8y ago, there were so many Kubernetes people. When you talked with them nobody was actually using k8s in production and were clearly devrel/paid people.

Now it seems to be everywhere... so be careful with what you ignore too
by kmbfjr | 2026-01-21 18:05:26+00:00
Less maintenance on my own kit after spending a day maintaining some else’s kit.

Linux userspace is utter chaos. When I’m pricing out lumber or other personal projects, I don’t want that held up by any number of fresh in memory Linux what-the-fresh-hell-is-this moments.

That is it. Will pay nearly whatever Apple commands to avoid having my personal (desktop) time invaded by Linux and the never ending reinventing solved problems and discovering new ones.

Upside though, Linux by now may actually have an even dozen of methods to configure a wired ethernet device. I quit counting.
by arjie | 2026-01-21 18:05:32+00:00
The disciple went to his master and said "Master, I am considering stopping doing a thing and starting to do a different thing. But I am not certain what the new thing is that I should be doing".

The master turned to the disciple and said: "A better thing"

The disciple was enlightened.

EDIT: Oh damn it. The entirety of the comment was "Sovereign debt of a more politically stable nation state or other monetary union" at the time I replied. Ah well.
by rickydroll | 2026-01-21 18:05:36+00:00
I use Harvest to track hours and expenses and to invoice my customers. Bending Spoons apparently bought them a while ago and just eliminated the shell company around Harvest.

Based on my experience with Evernote, I don't trust Bending Spoons, and I'm wondering if I should look for a different time-tracking and invoicing system.
by tenacious_tuna | 2026-01-21 18:05:55+00:00
This is really exciting! Discussions of our resource impact have come up a lot in my org's informal spaces, it's really exciting to see someone making a concerted effort to raise visibility into how much we spend in money or energy in what seem like benign actions.

I really like the emphasis you place that reducing environmental impact is reducing cost as well. Tying civic mindedness to pragmatism is essential in dollar-hungry spaces.
by polyglotfacto | 2026-01-21 18:06:05+00:00
> there are real complex systems being engineered towards the goal of a browser engine, even if not there yet.

In various comments in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46624541 I have explained at length why your fleet of autonomous agents failed miserably at building something that could be seen as a valid POC.

One example: your rendering loop does not follow the web specs and makes no sense.

https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender/blob/19bf1036105d4e...

The above design document is simply nonsense; typical AI hallucinated BS. Detailed critique at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46705625

The actual code is worse; I can only describe it as a tangle of spaghetti. As a Browser expert I can't make much, if anything, out of it. In comparison, when I look at code in Ladybird, a project I am not involved in, I can instantly find my way around the code because I know the web specs.

So I agree this isn't just wiring up of dependencies, and neither is it copied from existing implementations: it's a uniquely bad design that could never support anything resembling a real-world web engine.

Now don't get me wrong, I do think AI could be leveraged to build a web engine, but not by unleashing autonomous agents. You need humans in the loop at all levels of abstractions; the agents should only be used to bang out features re-using patterns established or vetted by human experts.

If you want to do this the right way, get in touch: https://github.com/gterzian
by sedawkgrep | 2026-01-21 18:06:06+00:00
In an enterprise network, it's very, very unlikely that an edge router is doing any firewalling. They can do it, but it's not only cumbersome to do it there, but also a massive resource drain.

Often they do basic stateless packet filtering, but definitely nothing akin to stateful, connection-oriented firewalling. It's important to make the distinction, because filtering in this case is completely uni-directional and if you want bi-directional equivalence you have to write an inverse rule for it. Filtering polices are applied per interface, so generally you apply them on the outside only.

Think of it as sort of a reverse of an inbound Internet policy - you write all the drop stuff first (e.g. drop any any eq snmp) and the last rule is a permit ip any any. Next hop is your firewall which does the rest.

For site-tos-site b2b connections, we performed NAT (of the untrusted network space) on the border/edge b2b router, and then the traffic was immediately routed to the firewall. So in this instance, NAT was happening on the router for the customer IP range, and on the firewall for our enterprise IP range.

As a convenience to our customers/partners we always presented ourselves as one of our public IP blocks that wasn't Internet-routed. This prevented them from having any overlapping IP space.

Otherwise, NAT is simply a question of configuring it. And at least in the cisco IOS world (I'm a dinosaur) the two features (NAT vs. firewall) are utterly independent.

https://community.cisco.com/legacyfs/online/legacy/0/8/0/600...
https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/ip/network-addres...
by Taikonerd | 2026-01-21 18:06:17+00:00
I just want to highlight Undue Medical Debt[0], the NGO that helped implement this.

They have a fascinating model -- they can buy the right to collect medical debts for pennies on the dollar. That debt would normally be bought by debt-collection companies. But once Undue Medical Debt buys a person's debt, they just... forgive it.

This means they can retire someone's $5,000 debt for a cost in the low hundreds. That might be life-changing for a poor family.

[0] https://unduemedicaldebt.org/
by UncleMeat | 2026-01-21 18:07:03+00:00
> That just reads like a Trump-like ideological power grab: "we need to make sure our opponents can never win again." But what does that do for people who aren't partisan Democrats? They want Trump to lock in his power, but they don't want Democrats to, either.

No. The goal is to make sure that presidents who commit crimes or direct the executive branch to commit crimes are prevented from doing so or held responsible for doing so. For example, legislation that expands Section 1983 to include federal agents and legislation that limits the availability of qualified immunity would go a long way in mitigating lawless action by federal law enforcement.

> The first step to that is saying no to the technocrats, and taking some pages out of Trump's economic playbook (and Sanders's). The second steps is saying no to the activists, and stop alienating large fractions of the electorate by pushing too hard and too fast on a lot of issues.

These two things are opposites, in my mind. Things don't become less big or fast when they are focused on economic policy. Heck, even Biden's cancellation of student loan debt (something I consider to be on the technocratic side) was considered a Major Question by the supreme court to justify their reversal of the policy.
by stackghost | 2026-01-21 18:07:05+00:00
>but what does macOS offer a power user that Linux doesn't

Flawless suspend/resume, best-in-class battery life, best-in-class touchpad drivers, lots of things "Just Work" that are painful and/or tedious on Linux.

It might be better to ask what Linux offers the laptop user that macos doesn't. I run Linux on my desktop boxes but wouldn't dream of daily-driving a Linux laptop.

>and which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want?

I consider myself a power user. I have never once felt unable to run the machine the way I want. You can disable SIP and Gatekeeper and whatever else if it pleases you. I still have a terminal and a package manager. If there's a particular utility that I need on Linux I just spin up a VM, but I can count on one hand the number of times I've needed to do that in the last 12 months.
by p_ing | 2026-01-21 18:07:06+00:00
I have it not only because of hardware, but because of color matching for photography/processing RAW images. That's as close to 'professional' as I get to using macOS for personal use (photography is nothing more than a personal hobby, for me).

I also use macOS at work. Plainly, the machines offered are better (MBPs vs. Thinkpad T440s) and come with less impactful EDR. They're simply faster. I do need to fall back to my T440 every now and then. It's not a great experience. That's not the fault of Lenovo or Windows, though. It's just how IT manages the laptops.

But IMO Finder is a piece of trash. The Dock sucks (moves around monitors), how full screen apps are handed sucks... anyway, there's lots of UX issues with macOS. Generally there are 3rd party free and pay-for solutions for all of this... it's just that now I gotta get all this 3rd party stuff and due to the security model, often grant them high level privs.
by adrian_b | 2026-01-21 18:07:20+00:00
Volume measurements work acceptably in cooking only when you use some volumetric spoons for quantities corresponding to a completely filled spoon.

Otherwise, if you use a vessel with markings for various volumes, you waste a lot of time to ensure that the quantity in the vessel lines precisely to a marking and its surface is perfectly level, in comparison with weighing the same ingredient. Moreover, you have one more vessel to wash.

I eat only food that I cook myself and I use only 2 kinds of volume measurements. I use a set of volumetric spoons for measuring various kinds of powders used in small quantities, e.g. salt and spices. I also use a graded beaker for water. For any other ingredients, it is much faster to put the vessel in which they will be cooked on digital weighing scales, and pour there each ingredient until the right weight is reached. Besides being faster, this also avoids the need to use additional vessels, which would need washing. The graded beaker is better for water only because it must be taken from the tap, where I cannot put the weighing scales.

For example, this includes making bread, when I pour water in a bowl that will be used for kneading with a graded beaker, then I pour the flour while weighing until the desired weight is reached, then salt is added with a small volumetric spoon.
by throwpoaster | 2026-01-21 18:07:44+00:00
Postwar, Western governments used straightforward economic models based on the three-part identity between exchange, interest, and inflation rates, all mediated by growth. They did this in order to make market environments stable to facilitate rebuilding Europe (juicing the growth term).

Inflation, for example, is obviously not a scalar.

All models are approximations. As we reach the limits of these models we must extend them.
by mrguyorama | 2026-01-21 18:07:52+00:00
There's also a very simple reality of AI vibecoded projects:

If you were able to get an LLM to vibecode a project for you, so could any of us, so why even share the project as if you are showing off? It takes very little effort for anyone else to prompt an agent and get a similar result.

That means the only thing left in a shared vibecoded project is the original idea, and well, ideas are a dime a dozen and everyone has them and idea spread has never really been a limiting factor.

So what are you really sharing at that point?

Noise.

"Look at this code I got an LLM to generate" is inherently uninteresting.