MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by saltcured | 2026-01-24 18:07:45+00:00
A lot of (older than me) enthusiasts I knew got an MSDN subscription even though they weren't really developing apps for Windows. This gave them a steady stream of OS releases on CD-ROMs, officially for testing their fictional apps. So, they were often upgrading one or more systems many times rather than buying new machines with a bundled new OS.

Personally, yeah, I had Windows 3.0/3.11 on a 386. I think I may have also put an early Windows NT (beta?) release on it, borrowing someone's MSDN discs. Not sure I had got value from it except seeing the "pipes" software OpenGL screensaver. Around '93-94, I started using Linux, and after that it was mostly upgrading hardware in my Linux Box(en) of Theseus.

I remember my college roommate blowing his budget upgrading to a 180 MHz Pentium Pro, and he put Windows 95 on it. I think that was the first time I heard the "Start me up!" sound from an actual computer instead of a TV ad.

After that, I only encountered later Windows versions if they were shipped on a laptop I got for work, before I wiped it to install Linux. Or eventually when I got an install image to put Windows in a VM. (First under VMware, later under Linux qemu+kvm.)
by neko_ranger | 2026-01-24 18:08:11+00:00
I wonder how fun being a modern quant really is. It seems like one of those things that sounds more fun in your head, but the reality is different. Kinda like "studying physics", going pro in a sport, or becoming a rockstar. People see the end result and don't see how much work it takes to get there or what the day to day is really like
by hannasanarion | 2026-01-24 18:08:39+00:00
> There is also the mix: if I write two pages and I used two sentences by AI (because I was tired and I couldn't find the right sentence), I may be flagged for using AI.

None of these tools are binary. They give a percentage score, a confidence score, or both.

If you include one ai sentence in a 100 sentence essay, your essay will be flagged as 1% AI and nobody will bat an eye.
by caminante | 2026-01-24 18:09:13+00:00
> Strongly dislike can also mean you just prefer to avoid those people or limit your interactions. It doesn’t mean hate.

Come on...the first Google result for hate [0] is "feel intense or passionate dislike for (someone)". Saying otherwise is too much.

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=hate+definition
by flkiwi | 2026-01-24 18:09:28+00:00
I accidentally gave my wife a prompt the other day. Everything was hellishly busy and I said something along the lines of “I need to ask you a question. Please answer the question. Please don’t answer any other issues just yet.” She looked at me and asked “Did you just PROMPT me?” We laughed. (The question was the sort that might spawn talking about something else and was completely harmless. In the abstract, my intent was fine but my method was hilariously tainted.)
by noitpmeder | 2026-01-24 18:10:13+00:00
Looks like this has been around for over a decade now. I'm surprised I haven't heard of it until now.

If, as advertised, it's significantly better than protobufs, why hasn't it gathered more steam/adoption? If presented correctly it sounds like a great alternative/replacement to things like JSON, proto, SBE messages, ... Especially in the realm of backwards/forwards compatibility.

Has anyone tried this out and ended up switching BACK to a more widely used alternative? If so, why?
Show HN: Rdytofly is an all in one travel helper replacing multiple apps
by flymartin | 2026-01-24 18:10:39+00:00
Hello HN,

I built Rdytofly because the modern travel planning experience is fragmented. You usually need at least 5 different apps just to organize one trip (Maps for location, Shared Docs for logistics, WhatsApp for collaboration, Notes for packing, etc.).

I wanted to consolidate this chaos into a single "Travel OS".

It is designed to handle the full lifecycle of a trip:

* Logistics Automation: Handles time zone shifts, flight numbers, transfers, and layovers automatically.
* Visual Planning: Drag & drop itinerary builder directly on a map.
* AI Inspiration: Use the AI section to find top spots or hidden gems based on your input, then add them to your plan.
* Collaboration: Real-time editing with friends (replaces shared docs).
* Journaling: Keep a travel diary linked to specific days/locations.
* Offline Backup: One-click export to a detailed PDF guide.

Pricing:
It’s 90% free. You can plan full trips, use the map, and export PDFs without paying. The Premium features (AI generation, advanced expense tracking) cost about the price of a coffee.

I'd love to hear if this successfully replaces your current stack!
by fragmede | 2026-01-24 18:10:49+00:00
You can buy a Tesla with FSD today. It works. Sure there are some corner cases, but it's good enough in enough cases to get in, punch in a destination, and get you there. But you have to buy a Tesla, and they only come in electric. Waymo's are fine too, you just have to live in a supported area. The real gem for self driving, is Comma.ai.

It's an aftermarket system, but can be installed in most newish cars with a built in lane guidance system. Even a Corolla. And it's really want we want. It's not self-driving, it'll just take you down the freeway and you don't have to do anything except wait for your GPS to tell you to exit (and then you have to exit). Freeway-grade gurves in the road? Fine. Stop and go traffic? Handled. It's better than Tesla's FSD in two specific ways. One is that because it's not self-driving, it's way easier to trust the system because it's not going to change lanes or anything surprising on you. It's not going to do something fancy, just brake or accelerate or follow the lane or car in front of you left or right. I highly recommend it to anyone who does any amount of freeway driving. If not for the coolness of it then simply the safety aspect. Now, I'm sure everyone here is a better driver than most (though that has a problem, mathematically), but this thing is better than a tired/angry/drunk version of someone else driving.

But as you point out, most people are still driving their own cars.

Which, I think is where we're going to see the software development industry going. There's gonna be the AI maximalists, who, like Waymo and FSD, will have AI basically do everything. And then there's the pragmatists, for whom AI doesn't do everything, just enough to be useful.

Then there's everyone else, still writing their own code. Thing is, an app on your computer isn't a car. It's $20/month if not free if you're a total cheapskate, to get codex or claude or another assistant, vs many thousands of dollars for a self-driving or partially self-driving car. The other difference is in time. The value of a partially self-driving car (FSD or Comma) is in the mental fatigue of driving, and in improved safety, but a 7 hour road trip is still going to take 7 hours even if you're not driving. The only time a self-driving car helps is if you're going cross-city in a Waymo, and you're in the back seat working on your laptop. AI assisted coding though is different. If I take on projects I wouldn't do before with AI, that's a win for me. If I'm able to write software faster and with fewer bugs with AI, that's also a win for me, but also a win for my employer. If, however, it goes the other way and I write more bugs, then that's a loss for me and my employer.
by shivsarthak34 | 2026-01-24 18:12:25+00:00
I'm the founding engineer at Spur, and I think we've all written the same bad code. You want to email a user when they sign up, and then check 24 hours later if they created a project. It starts simple, but eventually, you end up with a mess of cron jobs and spaghetti logic.

The breaking point for me wasn't the code complexity, but the process. Every time our marketing team wanted to change an email subject or bump a delay from 1 day to 2 days, I had to stop what I was doing, write code, and push a deployment. It felt ridiculous to deploy a new build just to change a timer.

I ended up ripping about 400 lines of boilerplate state-management code out of our backend. I moved all that logic to an orchestration layer instead (I built a tool called Flowripple for this). Now my backend just fires a 'user_signed_up' event and forgets about it. The orchestration layer handles the state, the delays, and the retries by a visual workflow builder on flowripple.

It has mostly solved the "separation of concerns" headache for us, but I'm curious how you all handle complex onboarding flows? Do you stick with Cron/Queues to keep it simple, or do you offload the state management elsewhere?
by hannasanarion | 2026-01-24 18:13:17+00:00
> Turnitin is only ~90% effective:

No it isn't. Stop.

The cynical part of me says that the people who share this link with that summary are the cheaters trying to avoid getting caught, on the basis of the fact that they are patently abusing the numbers presumably because they didn't pay attention in math class.

The tests are 90% SENSITIVE. That means that of 100 AI cheaters, 10 won't be caught.

The paper you linked says the tests are 100% SPECIFIC. That means they will *never* flag a human-written paper as mostly AI.
by wahnfrieden | 2026-01-24 18:13:39+00:00
What specific things are you suspicious I'm lying about? You said my post is full of topics that people lie about. Which details are suspicious?

Re: the lyrics. Tan himself issued a statement that recognized the seriousness of how his threat landed and that his behavior was inexcusable. So it's curious that you are working harder to excuse it more than he did himself. Threats are often made with an element of plausible deniability or joking tone as cover. That doesn't diminish their effectiveness as threats nor the encouragement for malicious vigilantes to act on them (as we saw with how it spurred others to make their own threats).
by krish678 | 2026-01-24 18:13:58+00:00
I’m open-sourcing OpenTX, a production-grade payment gateway and canonical transaction protocol designed to modernize legacy ISO 8583 payment systems for cloud-native architectures.

GitHub: https://github.com/krish567366/OpenTX

Stack: Go, Protocol Buffers, Kafka, OpenTelemetry
License: MIT

OpenTX provides a strongly-typed canonical transaction layer between legacy card networks and modern APIs, allowing fintech teams to decouple application logic from network-specific ISO 8583 formats.

Most payment teams still integrate directly with brittle, tightly-coupled ISO 8583 implementations. OpenTX introduces a standardized, versioned transaction model with bidirectional mapping, exactly-once semantics, message-level security, and built-in observability.

This is relevant for:

Fintech and payments startups

Infrastructure and developer tools teams

Multi-network aggregation platforms

Companies modernizing legacy financial rails

Feedback and contributions from founders and infra engineers are welcome.
by technothrasher | 2026-01-24 18:13:58+00:00
My son, who just finished his first semester at college, said the thing that surprised him the most was the blatant cheating all around him. He said it is rampant and obvious, and the professors don't seem all that eager to punish it. It pisses him off, because it puts him at a disadvantage because he doesn't want to cheat.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-24 18:14:09+00:00
If someone shows up to work based on the expectation that they will receive a paycheck at the end of the month would you also describe that as a psychological effect? I certainly wouldn't. That's an economic activity.

There's a psychological component regarding trust. Either that your employer would never try to cheat you or alternatively that your employer is the sort that might try to cheat you but won't thanks to our society's various systems. But the showing up to work itself is a simple exchange of time and skill for money.
by riedel | 2026-01-24 18:14:55+00:00
Well the title of the paper is
>Crane Lowers Rocq Safely into C++

So 'safely' implies somehow that they care about not destroying guarantees during their transformation. To me as a layperson (I studied compiler design and formal verification some.long time ago, but have little to zero experience) it seems at easier to write a set of correct transformations then to formalize arbitrary C++ code.
by Ekaros | 2026-01-24 18:15:11+00:00
Turnitin is in weird spot. And probably impossible one. Academic writing is trained to be academic writing. With mesta text and phrases. And students and writers tend to follow conventions they see in other academic texts. As do AI.

On some level the human output in academic setting is expected to be well formulaic in way AI generated text is.

Which often could lead to false positives.
by danabrams | 2026-01-24 18:15:19+00:00
I read what the author is saying as “time is fixed, so I adjust the scope.” The problem is when product or management is demanding both fixed time and fixed scope. “Here’s a list of requirements (which are under defined and we will change without giving you a chance to estimate) and a set of figmas you must implement for those requirements (and also we will look at the finish product and decide not to give you any extra time to make changes we want or build a breakpoint not defined by the Figma that we demand), no how much time with this I’ll-defined, fixed-scope take?”

Fixed time and fixed scope is essentially impossible, except in trivial cases. What I read the author saying is that he chooses to make it fixed time and has flexibility around scope in his work, because the requirements are more like loose descriptions than a description of exactly what a product should do, while ignoring edge-cases. That sounds like a nice situation. And a perfectly fine way to manage an engineering team. But it also sounds a bit to me like an abdication of responsibility to the engineering team by product, to allow the engineering team to decide what exactly the scope is. Again, that’s a perfectly good way to do it, but it means that product can’t come back and say “that’s not what I was expecting, you didn’t do it.”

I don’t think the author really tackles estimation here, nor the reasons why estimation is a hard and controversial issue, nor what junior engineers are looking for when googling “how do I estimate?”

The real reason it’s hard in this industry is that in general, product controls both scope and time, which are the two major dials by which delivery is managed, but abdicate responsibility for them by going an ill-defined but nonetheless more fixed (and unyielding) scope than described in this article, then demanding engineers give them specific date estimates to which they’ll commit, and work free overtime if they turn out to be wrong.

The author correctly defines a way to resolve this conflict: give engineering more say over scope—but fails to recognize that the root cause is not poor estimation, but rather that product or management denies engineering much say over scope past the initial estimation, and then demands they set fixed dates they commit to before enough is known. Death march projects, in my experience, are generally a failure of product, not engineering.
by fuzzfactor | 2026-01-24 18:15:26+00:00
I think this is well thought-out and it goes in a lot of directions because one direction is not enough to describe where everyone is going or trying to go.

>The best advice I can give, as always, is to experiment.

Same conclusion I seem to have so many times for so many reasons :)

I accept that work was already meaningless before anybody living was even born, so since we came along we've been living with the future the whole time.

>industrial factory-style work

>We all know what that soulless pit does to a person.

Depending on those who run the factory, it can be just as crushing as working in many a corporate office building.

Makes a big difference who owns the corporation either way.

Sometimes the most creative builders are simply going to build no matter what and it doesn't really matter what efforts are compensated, as long as there is some element providing adequate cash flow, then it's full steam ahead creating wildly.

Excellent craftsmen who are going to build something every day anyway can often take pride in what they mass-produce as clock-punchers on the factory floor, at the same time not having to focus on monetizing any of their other creative efforts allows more leeway than they would have otherwise.

I guess you could say no matter what you do there's always some force at work to make it meaningless for some reason or another, whether that force was largely applied before you got there, or came along afterward is not easy to pinpoint when it's like a continuum.

But when big waves are rolling in, it can be overwhelming being a small fish in a big sea, and wonder where the current may take you, like everyone else and what's it going to be like there.
by cornholio | 2026-01-24 18:15:33+00:00
The Bernardino incident is a very different issue where Apple refused to use its own private key to sign a tool that would have unlocked any iPhone. There is absolutely no comparison between Apple's and MS conduct here because the architectures of the respective systems are so different (but of course, that's a choice each company made).

Should Apple find itself with a comparable decryption key in its possession, it would have little options but to comply and hand it over.
by d13z | 2026-01-24 18:15:36+00:00
I'm not so worried about the money but more about context rot. I used spec driven development for a week and I had constant compacting with Claude code. I burned 200€ in one week and now I'm trying something different: only show diffs and try to always talk to me in interfaces.
I do think that at some point there will be frameworks or languages optimised for LLMs.
by czhu12 | 2026-01-24 18:15:47+00:00
The problem I’ve been having is that when Claude generates copious amounts of code, it makes it way harder to review than small snippets one at a time.

Some would argue there’s no point reviewing the code, just test the implementation and if it works, it works.

I still am kind of nervous doing this in critical projects.

Anyone just YOLO code for projects that’s not meant to be one time, but fully intend to have to be supported for a long time? What are learnings after 3-6 months of supporting in production?
by masterj | 2026-01-24 18:15:57+00:00
When there are huge unknowns, such as in the case of a remodel where who knows what you might find once the drywall is removed, then yes. I happily worked with a contractor on a basement renovation with no estimate for this exact reason.

If it’s something where they have fewer unknowns and more control and lots of experience building the same thing, then I would expect an estimate: building a deck, re-roofing a house, etc
by i_cannot_hack | 2026-01-24 18:16:08+00:00
I have sent an email linking to this discussion, but I think it would be more constructive if the helpful and forthcoming answers happened in public rather than in sent in private email threads to everyone wondering.

Calling discussing something on HN "hypothesizing into the void" is a strange choice of words, either meant to be patronizing toward me specifically or toward all HN users.
by EvanAnderson | 2026-01-24 18:16:43+00:00
I recently had a "role" Google account terminated because I was (paraphrasing) "violating Google policies" by having multiple accounts. I didn't know they were sticklers about that.

(I don't much care because the account was just used for interacting with somebody else's Google-hosted junk but, if I had been using it for something serious, I have probably been frustrated.)
by cxr | 2026-01-24 18:17:03+00:00
This is either the dumbest thing I've heard all day, or the most dishonest thing. It's not even a good attempt at sleight of hand.

> Please point to any current edition of the HTML standard that is titled HTML5 published by WHATWG or the W3C. You can't. It's impossible.

No shit.

It's impossible because the current edition is very obviously not HTML5. Nor is it HTML 4.01. Or 2.0. It's the WHATWG's "Living Standard" that you very well know exists and have referenced by name in this thread.

If you want to make an argument for the non-existence of HTML6, then fine; you're making a sound, totally defensible argument that no such thing exists. (A strawman, because nobody here—besides you—actually mentioned HTML6, but a verifiably true fact nonetheless.)

But it makes for totally asinine argument for the claim that "There is no HTML5" and that it "doesn't exist". You'll take the W3C's stamp of approval? Great, it's right there—available for review now just as it was an hour ago, or at any other time after October 2014. This is an incontrovertible fact. Feel free to actually engage with this or any of the other facts you have been confronted with, rather than setting unsatisfiable goals like asking for the "current edition" that is "titled HTML5".
by mathisfun123 | 2026-01-24 18:17:31+00:00
i don't know what the point of this book is - there's nothing rockstar about being a quant. not only do not all quants "generate alpha", even the ones that do are just overworked data scientists. ask anyone that actually works in the industry - fancy math is no longer a thing ("exotic option pricing"). so would "how i became an accountant" be just as interesting? how about (more accurately) would "how i became a data scientist"?
by AstroBen | 2026-01-24 18:17:39+00:00
Elegance or "taste" for the codebase is wrong. It's not just a stylistic preference. It's objectively bad code that's going to be slow to iterate on and very easy to introduce bugs to

I'm not saying AI has no place, but letting it take the lead in any way is just building your app on sand. Fine if you're building a sandcastle, bad if you're building a bridge. It's not "ohh well I just don't like the way sandcastles look"
by dragontamer | 2026-01-24 18:17:41+00:00
> The video clearly shows him resisting arrest and reaching for something.

The video clearly shows the grey-masked (EDIT: Grey-hat, green mask) ICE Agent taking the gun and running away with it before everyone else shoots him.

Also, I'm inclined to believe the "arrest" was an illegal arrest to begin with. I had a big post about how police procedure and due process is supposed to work but I know no one gives a crap about due process anymore, so forget it.
by throw__away7391 | 2026-01-24 18:17:53+00:00
Some time ago I had my 10 year anniversary forgotten once in a company (where I had written almost the entire codebase for their core product myself) and I did feel slighted. I had felt invested in the company, to me this day was a big deal and my company was completely unaware. It felt like a disorienting mismatch of unreciprocated commitment and made me feel a bit sick in the pit of my stomach. I started looking for a new job the next day.
by spudlyo | 2026-01-24 18:17:53+00:00
> Only to have a machine ingest, compress, and reiterate your work indefinitely without attribution.

Everything I write, every thought I have, and the output of my every creative endeavor are profoundly shaped by the work of others that I have ingested, compressed, and iterated on over the course of my lifetime, yet I have the audacity to call them my own. Any meager success I may have, I attribute to naught but my own ingenosity.