MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by andwur | 2026-01-07 09:48:15+00:00
Considering the number of x86 machines I've come across in fleet deployments that were put into various states of brickdom from Windows Update, I would not be at all surprised if it was a bad update-rollback sequence.

Laptops seem particularly susceptible to whatever (anti) magic Microsoft utilise for their update rollback process, but it happens to every device class seemingly at random. Besides the run of the mill "corrupt files at random in System32", which is common and simple enough to fix with a clean install, I've had a few cases where it appears an attempt at rolling back a BIOS update has been interrupted by the rollback manager and left those machines hard bricked. They could only be recovered by flashing a clean BIOS image with an external programmer and clip (or hand soldering leads), after which they ran without issue.

As much as it's valid to question the unconditional anti-Microsoft mentality, they are still far from infallible and from my experience they are getting notably more unreliable in recent years.
by withinboredom | 2026-01-07 09:48:19+00:00
I'm not dismissing it. I've been working on something secret-squirrel for over 5 years. It wasn't until November that I made a major breakthrough, resulting in four computer science revelations. At first, I wrote about it in a blog post; people didn't even believe me. Some researchers I wrote to validated it.

I hadn't really used Claude before, but if nobody cares ... then commercialize it, delete the blog post and code from the open source world. In the last month, Claude has helped turn it from a <700 line algorithm into nearly a full-blown product in its own right.

But yeah, the moat is small. The core of everything is less than 5k LoC; and it'd be easy af for my soon-to-be competitors to reproduce. The only thing I've got going for me is a non-technical cofounder believing in me and pounding on doors to find our first customer, while I finish up the technical side.

With the computer science revelations, we can basically keep us 6-8 months ahead for the next couple of years. This is the result of years of hard work, but AI has let me take it to market at an astounding speed.
by piva00 | 2026-01-07 09:48:39+00:00
The few cases I know of people who retired in their early 30s they really didn't want to even be "recreationally employed", they diverted their efforts to causes they believe are bigger than usual work. They help communities, they started projects in their free time that enhances others' lives in direct and meaningful ways which had nothing to do with their past day job.

I believe I'd do the same, forget about coding yet another little project/library, and go into the real world dedicate part of my time to causes that can't pay much but have meaning to others.
by myk9001 | 2026-01-07 09:49:15+00:00
If you own, you hit a jackpot, basically. Then, yes, life in Europe can be very nice.

Sharing an apartment while in college is OK, even fun in my book.

We're talking about immigrants though, right? (If you don't want more of us in your country, I don't think you're a monster, btw. But entertain me anyway?)

Go check out, say, Berlin salaries on levels.fyi or glassdoor or wherever you prefer and filter out US companies.

Given these conditions, 80000 euro is an amazing salary. Your take home is going to be around 46400 or 3860 euro monthly.

Then head to immoscout24 and check rent prices in Berlin. Let me spoil it a little, a two-bedroom, two-bathroom 65-80 square meters apartment is starting from 1500 euro or so plus 200-300 euro for heating plus the rest of utilities. Or 2000 euro monthly in total.

So after rent you're left with what, 1860 euro? Good luck getting through the month with that money in Berlin.
Show HN: Claude Code HUD for VS Code
by ido | 2026-01-07 09:49:31+00:00
I've made a little HUD[0] for running Claude Code via a VS Code plugin. It's still a "text adventure" but now you can tell what's going on a bit better (screenshot in linked GitHub repository). Feedback appreciated!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HUD_(video_games)
by awesomebytes | 2026-01-07 09:49:32+00:00
Hey, this is super interesting! Thanks for sharing.
I have been playing with using the Python console/scripts/macros in FreeCAD to create 3D models. I found this to be very friendly for my programmer mindset. I have learned a bit of onshape, tinkercad, blender and freecad, but I find it extremely tedious and full of unknowns that I struggle to make sense of and resolve (e.g. contraints in freecad, sometimes I just don't know how to add the missing constraints, or just adding text to a curved face in literally all programs, it's never as easy as click the face add text, there are always gotcha's).

I wonder how does openscad compare to FreeCADs python, if you know. I just found https://pythonscad.org/ which looks interesting, but then, the BOSL2 library looks super interesting and important for a good user experience, so I do not know if the PythonSCAD could somehow just import it and use it.

I guess there's homework for me to do here, but if anyone has the experience to get a hint of "what is the best/easiest python-based programming way of doing 3D modeling", I'd be forever thankful for sharing their thoughts.

LLMs are really good at writing Python, so iterating over a model in code I found is really quick, and I really enjoy the process. Meanwhile clicking so many times in so many menus makes me desist on designing anything more-or-less complex.
by aurareturn | 2026-01-07 09:50:12+00:00
Let's suppose that AWS is raising prices because demand is falling.

Ok, so AWS has extra capacity they need to sell but they're raising prices. Customers move off and go to another supplier. AWS has even more capacity they can't sell.

How does that make sense economically?

Do you think AWS is somehow able to make more money milking their existing customers than to sell at supply and demand equilibrium?
by Muromec | 2026-01-07 09:50:25+00:00
>at least we are not throwing away our status as a superpower for the dumbest of reasons.

If you would choose to believe, all of this is a strategic play to get off the resource curse (aka the Dutch disease), with resources in question being trust and US dollar being the world currency.

Throwing that away may be a good thing for US long term.
by badlibrarian | 2026-01-07 09:50:30+00:00
Author uses a lot of odd, confusing terminology and brings CPU baggage to the GPU creating the worst of both worlds. Shader hacks and CPU-bound partitioning and choosing the Greek letter alpha to be your accumulator in a graphics article? Oh my.

NV_path_rendering solved this in 2011. https://developer.nvidia.com/nv-path-rendering

It never became a standard but was a compile-time option in Skia for a long time. Skia of course solved this the right way.

https://skia.org/
by democracy | 2026-01-07 09:50:40+00:00
So true, as a mere software developer on a payroll: I might spend 10 minutes doing a task with AI rather than an hour (w/o AI), but trust me - I am going to keep 50 minutes to myself, not deliver 5 more tasks )))) And when I work on my hobby project - having one AI agent crawling around my codebase is like watching a baby in a glassware shop. 10 babies? no thanks!
by aebtebeten | 2026-01-07 09:51:23+00:00
The president of Columbia wrote a tweet recently in which he points out that Rubio is probably mostly salty because his family's old houses in Cuba got turned into schools for street children.

> como a Rubio, él caribeño y latino, que odia a los latinos porque la revolución cubana les quitó la casa para volverla una escuela para niños cubanos

(whatever you think of Petro's politics, his tweet mentions Whitman and Hemingway alongside Sacco and Vanzetti. I'm guessing POTUS could read Hemingway, but I doubt he even knows who Whitman is, let alone Sacco and Vanzetti?)

My apologies for the x URL, how the fuck do we proxy these again?

https://x.com/petrogustavo/status/2008588597914370206
by cess11 | 2026-01-07 09:51:52+00:00
I haven't noticed anything like that. Some more obscure tools have trouble with the file system but that happens in ordinary Linux too. Though I have no experience with Anaconda specifically so you likely know better whether it'll need adaptations to work under Termux.

I run htop just fine on my handhelds and I'm pretty sure it sources directly from /proc, /sys or something.
by williamdclt | 2026-01-07 09:51:59+00:00
I think at least _part_ of the reason why is that it's just a whole lot less useful? There's tons and tons of applications for image and video and the automated analysis of it (for art, documentation or business purposes), whereas taste/smell capture and the analysis of it doesn't have that many useful use-cases (the article points at one of course, I'm not saying there's no use-case but much fewer). So we put a whole lot of effort and money into developing it, which didn't happen for smell.
by tim333 | 2026-01-07 09:53:26+00:00
I was a bit disappointed with the Boom XB-1. They originally announced - designed to maintain a speed of Mach 2.2, with over 1,000 nautical miles. I thought cool. Then 7 years late they fly and - Mach 1.1 and no long–range. Then rather than develop it they say it's retired, we'll take orders for Overture now.

I wonder what's going on there?
by bodge5000 | 2026-01-07 09:53:36+00:00
> shouldn't we be seeing a ton of 1 person startups?

After months of hearing that people are producing software in months that would normally take years, the best examples of vibe coded software I've seen look like they would normally take months, not years. If you don't care how they're built or how long it took (which a user generally doesn't), much of the remaining shine comes off.

If I'm wrong, I'd love to see it. A genuinely big piece of software produced entirely (or near entirely?) with AI that would've normally taken talented engineers years to build.
by virtualritz | 2026-01-07 09:53:41+00:00
Unless I miss something I think that this describes box filtering.

It should probably mention that that this is only sufficient for some use cases but not for high quality ones.

E.g. if you were to use this e.g. for rendering font glyphs into something like a static image (or a slow rolling title/credits) you probably want a higher quality filter.
by arjie | 2026-01-07 09:53:42+00:00
The H1B is dual intent. I was on one and now I’m here on a green card. Totally normal. The H1B has a clear path to application for permanent residency but permanent residency doesn’t have a clear path from application to completion because of the birth country caps.

You have to ask yourself what other implicit objectives you have because as it stands, raising the green card employment-based cap and raising the per-country cap would get you want immediately.
by jonathanstrange | 2026-01-07 09:54:02+00:00
This might rub some people on HN the wrong way but what these people call "work" isn't really work in the sense of what most people consider work. They jet here and there, intervene wherever they want, and everybody listens to them all the time. They can cancel and postpone meetings as they wish, and so on and so forth. It's work in the same sense as buying another house is work -- you have to get together with lawyers and plenty of people but in the end these people all work for you and you can also change your mind and not buy it.

That's also the reason why these multi-billionaires never retire. They've retired from real work a long time ago.
by ozim | 2026-01-07 09:54:26+00:00
*I've worked on teams where multiple engineers argued about the "right" way to build something. I remember thinking that they had biases based on past experiences and assumptions about what mattered. It usually took an outsider to proactively remind them what actually mattered to the business case.*

Gosh I am so tired with that one - someone had a case that burned them in some previous project and now his life mission is to prevent that from happening ever again, and there would be no argument they will take.

Then you get like up to 10 engineers on typical team and team rotation and you end up with all kinds of "we have to do it right because we had to pull all nighter once, 5 years ago" baked in the system.

Not fun part is a lot of business/management people "expect" having perfect solution right away - there are some reasonable ones that understand you need some iteration.
Show HN: Scribe – generate and preview transactional emails from plain English
by blackmamoth | 2026-01-07 09:55:14+00:00
I built Scribe, a tool for generating styled transactional emails by describing what you want in plain English, with an instant live preview.

The preview runs via client-side Babel compilation, so changes show up immediately without a server roundtrip.

Scribe uses React Email and Resend, which helps ensure the generated emails render consistently across Gmail, Outlook, Proton Mail, and other major clients.

Features include:

- Live preview while iterating
- Brand management (save colors/logos, switch between brands)
- Version history with rollback
- Send test emails before exporting
- Export email code

The project is open source and doesn’t require signup.

I’d love feedback on what would make this genuinely useful in production vs just a demo.

https://usescribe.ashpak.dev
https://github.com/Blackmamoth/scribe
by fennecfoxy | 2026-01-07 09:55:32+00:00
Because rather than let me and my team focus on building the guts of something that works well, my employer was insistent we build PoCs of cut-down concepts that don't make any sense at all.

Like using AI to fill in a form. Instead of a proper autonomous agent (which was the project's goal).

Now that AI is "mainstream" and big bubble big money big career/promotion options for management I expect much more of this behaviour going into 2026.
by scotty79 | 2026-01-07 09:55:32+00:00
I haven't worked in about 7 years. Only recently I started helping out a friend with a software project semi-regularily. And it wasn't really out of boredom. It's just that the project has some cool stuff, people on the team are cool and he's a friend. I passed 7 years with gaming, internet, talks, walks and mixtures of any subset of those. Only occasionally doing some coding just for fun or out of curiosity or to occasionally help someone. AI is a big game changer for me now. So much more fun to be had with coding.
by AngryData | 2026-01-07 09:55:44+00:00
Yeah but if they didn't change anything substantial and merely followed customer preferences and established norms, how would they justify the massive administrative and managerial bloat with inflated salaries in established auto companies? How will you keep the investor class satisfied without promises of massive returns within the next few years or so to keep that stock juiced with new gimmicks to sell? How do you keep the MBA holding c-suite relatives employed if they are simply making the same or similar bulk consumer cars for decades at a time? Think about that year or so window when only OEM parts are available to repair new vehicles before generic parts are modeled and built and the new and completely unnecessary tools that can be sold to mechanics and dealers that they can gouge people on.
by raesene9 | 2026-01-07 09:56:12+00:00
My experience of UK pentest rates was that they've stagnated or even gone down over the last 20-25 years.

In the early 2000's banks were paying ~£1000-£1200/day for pentesters from boutiques and when I stopped being in that industry ~5 years ago, it was largely the same or even lower for larger companies that could negotiate day-rates down. Big-4 tried to charge more but that's really tricky when you're in direct competition with boutiques who have more testers than you.

By contrast US rates were a lot higher ($2k+/day) and also scopes were larger. A UK test for a web app could be as low as 3 days (even less for unauthenticated) where the US tended to be 1-2 weeks.

One reason they've gone down is outsourcing to lower cost regions, and I'd guess that LLM/AI automation will accelerate that trend...
Ask HN: F you could get a functional prototype in 24h for €5k, would you buy it?
by altras | 2026-01-07 09:57:06+00:00
Hi HN, I’m currently validating a service model where we act as a "shadow engineering team" to deliver fully functional prototypes in 24 hours for a flat fee of around €5k.

The specific problem we are targeting is Engineering Capacity.

Every founder or product lead I talk to has a backlog of 5-10 high-potential ideas that are currently dead in the water. They can't build them because their core engineering team is buried in maintenance, technical debt, or the main roadmap. They literally "don't have the cycles" to test anything new. And when they try with replit/lovable they end with a lot of slop and get swamped after a couple of cycles.

Here is where I am stuck, and I’d love your honest take:

I look at the current landscape of "AI Coding" and see marketplaces like Fiverr AI Coding Services

You can find people offering to build AI apps for $500–$1,000.

My genuine question is: Why aren't these cheap services exploding?

With the capabilities of tools like Cursor, replit you’d think these marketplaces would be the default solution for bypassing internal engineering bottlenecks, but they aren't.

- Is it the management overhead? (You don't have time to manage a random freelancer?)
- Is it a quality/security fear? (Putting proprietary ideas into a cheap gig economy service?)
- Is it simply that they don't understand business logic?

The Core Question: If you are sitting on a backlog of ideas you can't build, is a €5k price point for a "guaranteed, professional-grade" outcome in 24h a no-brainer to bypass your internal bottleneck? Or would you still try to hack it together with cheaper freelancers/internal resources?

I’m trying to figure out if the value is in the code (which is cheap) or the reliability/speed (which seems rare).

Appreciate the feedback.
by aebtebeten | 2026-01-07 09:57:19+00:00
Question for anyone still living in the home of the free and land of the brave:

Does the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act still apply? Or is it now a case of "except where void or prohibited by law"?

Or are you all at the tender mercies of DHS? Are they at least under UCMJ? (NB: the Geneva Conventions only apply to uniformed combatants, not internal matters)

Department Ministerium
of für
Homeland Staats-
Security sicherheit
by lucianbr | 2026-01-07 09:57:20+00:00
What is the point of the "I'm Marcus" part of your introduction? Reading your post I get the impression it has zero value, or at least you think so.

> Hi, I'm Marcus

> What do you do Marcus

> I'm on a break now, but I used to be a director of IT

Is this really difficult? Seems really easy, and I was never a director of anything. Maybe that's the problem.
by raesene9 | 2026-01-07 09:58:40+00:00
Heavy use in CTFs doesn't surprise me at all. CTFs often throw curveballs or weird technologies that contestants might not be familiar with. Now you can get a starting point on what's going on, or how something works, instantly from an LLM and it's not a major problem if the LLM is wrong, you may just lose a little time.
by Haaargio | 2026-01-07 09:58:57+00:00
I would do the same thing if I would justifing paying 200$ per Month for my hobby. But even with that, you will run into throttling / API / Resource limits.

But AI Agents need time. They need a little bit of reading the sourcecode, proposing the change, making the change, running the verification loop, creating the git commit etc. Can be a minute, can be 10 and potentially a lot longer too.

So if your code base is big enough that you can work o different topics, you just do that:

- Fix this small bug in the UI when xy happens
- Add a new field to this form
- Cleanup the README with content x
- . . .

I'm an architect at work and have done product management on the side as its a very technical project. I have very little problem coming up with things to fix, enhnace, cleanup etc. I have hard limits on my headcount.

I could easily do a handful of things in parallel and keeping that in my head. Working memory might be limited but working memory means something different than following 10 topics. Especially if there are a few tpics inbetween which just take time with the whole feedback loop.

But regarding your example of house cleaning: I have ADHD, i sometimes work like this. Working on something, waiting for a build and cleaning soming in parallel.

What you are missing is the practical experience with Agents. Taking the time and energy of setting up something for you, perhaps accessability too?

We only got access at work to claude code since end of last year.
by rdos | 2026-01-07 09:59:09+00:00
LLM's are good at making stuff from scratch and perfect when you don't have to worry about the codes future. 'Research' can be a great tool. But LLMs are horrible in big codebases and multiple micro services. Also at making decision, never let it make a decision for you. You need to know what's happening and you can't ship straight AI code. It can save time, but it's not a lot and it won't replace anyone.
by prmoustache | 2026-01-07 09:59:21+00:00
I moved from one rich country (Switzerland) to Spain 6 years ago and accepted dividing my pay by 3 to do this move (pay increased in the meantime and is no 60% of what it was in CH). Basically the only thing that cost more to me now are holidays abroad and I will expect a lower retirement package but quality of life hasn't been reduced.

I could live 200m from the beach without having to share rent with flatmates and now own my place.
by rvz | 2026-01-07 09:59:40+00:00
I usually ignore their Tweets simply because:

1) They are all incentivised to increase their stock holdings / options (Google has a 14% stake in Anthropic) and several researchers + VCs on the timeline also have shares in AI companies and will say anything to hype each other.

2) Many of them are so tempted to make up numbers to game the evals leaderboard using superfluous "benchmarks" and evals (Meta was caught faking their evals for Llama).

3) Mentioning limitations or disclaimers will not get any attention. Only if you hype up AI capabilities, doomsaying, over-preaching about AI accelerating because of (1).

Once they "leave", their shares have already been vested and on to the next "AI startup" scam until it all crashes.
by vidarh | 2026-01-07 09:59:42+00:00
We have no evidence that people have meanginful agency, or even agency at all. It is an assumption that to start with requires that the universe is not largely or entirely deterministic beyond what we can measure, but even in the case of some "hidden variable" that provides agency (try to even define it in a way that doesn't make it either deterministic, random, or a combination that implies no actual control) we have plenty of evidence that events outside our control ("life isn't fair") means that the vast majority of people, while they may make decisions - with or without agency - that will make material improvements - still are not able to get anywhere near a position that makes it meaningful in this context.

Dreams and hopes are great - I believe we have zero actual agency, but that doesn't mean I lie in bed despairing, because not doing the work and trying will still have negative effects whether I have agency over that decision or not.

But the point is that dreams and hopes are also often used to play up the idea that "anyone" can achieve something everyone clearly can't, and so for most people, their most ambitious dreams will never be reached, and so a better gamble for most people would be to work for a society that improves everyones odds at reaching at least some of them.