MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dust42 | 2026-01-16 14:59:22+00:00
They are just fully AI driven on every level but also there are people listening to it. Youtube currently gets swamped with AI generated content - music is only one part of it. For example there are now endless history documentaries.

To get these of the ground there are lots of fake comments and fake views but after a while these videos gain traction and then the algos pick them up for organic views.

Search youtube for "female vocal blues" or "female country songs" and it is all AI and it is really good - good in a sense that you don't realise it immediately. But they garner millions of views. They are not McDonald's but fine dining cooked with convenience products.

I am quite split about algorithmically generated music but I have to admit that I have fallen once into the trap. And only when I searched for the artist I figured out it is AI. Though once you know it you immediately hear it.
by PaulHoule | 2026-01-16 14:59:33+00:00
MAME is such fun code to work with. I remember being in a small apartment in Germany with my wife in Dec 1998 and hacking MESS to get saves working in The Legend of Zelda so she could play it through. That kinda systems work can be initially intimidating but the complexity of something like a 6502 is nothing compared to a middling webapp today.
by Phil_BoaM | 2026-01-16 14:59:38+00:00
OP here. You nailed it. Functionally, it is exactly that.

If you used two separate LLMs (Agent A generates, Agent B critiques), you would get a similar quality of output. That is often called a "Reflexion" architecture or "Constitutional AI" chain.

The Difference is Topological (and Economic):

Multi-Agent (Your example): Requires 2 separate API calls. It creates a "Committee" where Bot B corrects Bot A. There is no unified "Self," just a conversation between agents.

Analog I (My protocol): Forces the model to simulate both the generator and the critic inside the same context window before outputting the final token.

By doing it internally:

It's Cheaper: One prompt, one inference pass.

It's Faster: No network latency between agents.

It Creates Identity: Because the "Critic" and the "Speaker" share the same short-term memory, the system feels less like a bureaucracy and more like a single mind wrestling with its own thoughts.

So yes—I am effectively forcing the LLM to run a "Bullshit Detector" sub-routine on itself before it opens its mouth.
by fasterik | 2026-01-16 14:59:55+00:00
>Moxie Marlinspike sounds like some 90s intelligence guy’s understanding of what an appealing name to hacker groups would sound like. Put a guy like that as so-called creator of some encryption protocol for messaging and promote the app like it’s for secret conversations and you think people won’t be suspicious? It screams honeypot like nothing else.

This criticism has absolutely zero substance and honestly just reads like paranoid rambling. The Signal protocol has been independently formally analyzed [1] and has no known security issues.

[1] https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/1013
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2026-01-16 15:01:27+00:00
Yes, and then they were horribly confused about why foo(A,B) fails, regardless. They clearly have heard of unification and find it a fascinating concept but have no idea what it means.

Honestly, we don't have to wrap everyone on the internets in a fuzzy warm cocoon of acceptance. Sometimes people talk bullshit. If they're open to learn, that's great, but the author is snarkily dismissing any criticism, so they can stew in their ignorance as far as I am concerned.

Like the OP says, the author didn't bother to RTFM before griping.
by amarant | 2026-01-16 15:01:31+00:00
Something about this painting is reminiscent of the way I(and I'm sure many others) would paint my comic-book heroes at around that age, albeit perhaps lacking some of Michelangelo's talents and skills.

This painting makes me feel like the bible was pretty much a comic book to the adolescent Michelangelo, and I like that thought. He later went on to paint the ceiling of a huge temple dedicated to his equivalent of Charles Xavier.

I bet that felt pretty cool for him =)
by JKCalhoun | 2026-01-16 15:01:47+00:00
There is a link to AliExpress in the README that is broken. Another comment though suggests something like the "Sputnik Pickling Tool".

Maybe like this wild machine: https://youtu.be/CLcOZhq2GjQ?si=LJktKRzeHPRyXcXR&t=155
by OptionOfT | 2026-01-16 15:01:48+00:00
The conversation is usually: devs can write their own tests. We don't need QA.

And the first part is true. We can. But that's not why we have (had) QA.

First: it's not the best use of our time. I believe dev and QA are separate skillset. Of course there is overlap.

Second, and most important: it's a separate person, an additional person who can question the ticket, and who can question my translation of the ticket into software.

And lastly: they don't suffer from the curse of knowledge on how I implemented the ticket.

I miss my QA colleagues. When I joined my current employer there were 8 or so. Initially I was afraid to give them my work, afraid of bad feedback.

Never have I met such graceful people who took the time in understanding something, and talking to me to figure out where there was a mismatch.

And then they were deemed not needed.
by sergioisidoro | 2026-01-16 15:03:31+00:00
Some content simplifies the problems to such a high degree, that this is more a game of "guess what I wanted you to answer" than anything else.

Eg "Your only senior developer knows the entire code. He just asked for a 200% raise or he leaves."

- Pay

- Fire and hire 2 juniors

- Give equity

I chose give equity and it was "wrong" because they turned out to be a "bad founder". How would I even know that? I hired them in the first place right? And 200% of what? Do I have money to pay them? Am I a startup that is able to pay them or is paying going to risk the entire company?

PS: the "right" answer was "hire 2 junior developers" btw
Show HN: IncidentPost – Turn Slack chaos into an SRE postmortem in 60s
by ededft | 2026-01-16 15:03:36+00:00
Hi HN,

I built IncidentPost because I realized that the worst part of an outage isn’t the fix—it’s the three hours of manual log-digging and report-writing that follows when you’re already exhausted.

Most of us just want to ship the report and get back to sleep, but stakeholders need professional transparency.

What it does: You paste your raw incident notes, Slack timestamps, or CLI logs. The AI (Gemini) reconstructs the timeline, identifies the root cause (using 5 Whys logic), and generates a professional markdown report.

Why I built it this way:

No Subscriptions: I’m tired of everything being a SaaS. This is a one-time payment per incident. If you don't have outages, you don't pay.
No Signup Required: You can generate and preview the whole report for free without giving me your email.
Export-Ready: It gives you the markdown, a public incident page, and even drafts for HN/Twitter.
Privacy: We focus on a "No-PII" workflow. Users confirm no private data is pasted, and we process it to generate the report.

I'd love to hear your feedback on the report structure and what other export formats (Jira? Confluence?) would actually be useful in your workflow

check here: https://incidentpost.vect.pro/
by maelito | 2026-01-16 15:04:01+00:00
> The trend at the time was that every website should be architected as an application, and then shipped to the user’s browser to render.

This is wrong. Some websites are better mostly (mostly) rendered on the client (we call them "apps", like a map application) and some are better mostly rendered on the server (like blogs).

It was and will be.
by nusl | 2026-01-16 15:04:09+00:00
I get that. Somehow this feels different. Mozilla recently changing the privacy policy I think caused a bunch of it, and then leaning heavily into AI initiatives at a time where I think people just don't want it, contributes too.

It feels deeper somehow than just raging at UI changes or something, since the FAQ change basically betrays what Mozilla has been touting all along, so the trust in their future promises is hurt a lot too. Willingness to change this indicates some kind of internal change that doesn't bode well.

Sure, it's probable that their intent was not the way it was interpreted but we only have what they say to go on. We don't read into things like lawyers or give companies the benefit of the doubt; almost every time this happens it hurts the user.
by __jonas | 2026-01-16 15:04:10+00:00
I like the idea behind Astro, I've used it for a couple websites here and there.
I'm a bit worried about the complexity brought by Astro supporting all these different frameworks through its adapters, and how stable and maintainable those websites will be in the future.

For instance: I've been using Astro with Svelte to build static sites with some components that require client-side interactivity. I really like that Astro doesn't ship any JS by default and just outputs static HTML, and when I want some page to have an interactive JS component, Svelte is an option that produces a relatively small amount of client JS.

But: Using Svelte with Astro this way for static sites has been broken since August 2025. As soon as you have a conditionally rendered child component in Svelte, Astro fails to bundle the styles for it in the static output of the site, and it does that ONLY in production, which is really devious, you could build a whole site (using astro dev) without knowing and then it breaks when you deploy it.

The issue is here: https://github.com/withastro/astro/issues/14252

I don't want to be complaining about how quickly issues get addressed in an OSS project that I'm not paying for, I don't blame them for not keeping tabs on every framework integration, I just would love to build websites with the latest versions Astro and Svelte, and I unfortunately have the feeling I should have just gone with SvelteKit for a smoother experience.
by cbeach | 2026-01-16 15:04:32+00:00
but it's not, though, is it?

The government is turning a £55 gas price into £147 by adding an arbitrary carbon tax, and therefore making it look artificially more expensive than wind.

If we wanted to make an honest analysis here, we would say "gas is significantly less than expensive than the strike price agreed for wind, but some believe the externalities of gas generation could be signficant"
by mpeg | 2026-01-16 15:04:57+00:00
The key difference between islands and what we used to do back in the day (js on a static page) is that with an islands approach you architect your site with a components-driven approach where everything encapsulates the js/css/html it needs, then you mark it as an "interactive" island if you actually need client-side js to run – the code is the same, but it either runs only in the server (default) or in both server and client.

I know this sounds similar, but, compared to the more traditional approach, there is a certain simplicity to having everything just be javascript. You can often run the same libraries on both server and client depending on your needs, plus it fulfills the promise of web components in a way that is easier to work with (though WCs have also come a long way!)
by xyzzy123 | 2026-01-16 15:05:27+00:00
It depends on the application but there are lots of situations where a proper test suite is 10x or more the development work of the feature. I've seen this most commonly with "heavy" integrations.

A concrete example would be adding say saml+scim to a product; you can add a library and do a happy path test and call it a day. Maybe add a test against a captive idp in a container.

But testing all the supported flows against each supported vendor becomes a major project in and of itself if you want to do it properly. The number of possible edge cases is extreme and automating deployment, updates and configuration of the peer products under test is a huge drag, especially if they are hostile to automation.
by DangitBobby | 2026-01-16 15:05:43+00:00
It's a shame that things that seem so simple take so much effort to shake out in a legal setting.

Obviously if they were able to trade it for money the thing was valuable, and that trade deprived the original players of whatever value, despite that value being artificial (Jagex could just just flip bits to give players gold), meeting the definition of theft.

Also interesting that Jagex tried to have it ruled as their own property as well. They have deliberate rules in the terms to the effect that they will never compensate you for scammed gold. They wanted to have their cake and eat it too; we create arbitrary restrictions on whether we will make players whole based on our convenience demonstrating their desire to treat it as without value where their own culpability is concerned, but also want it legally to be treated as their own property as far as culpability is concerned. Something about that feels off.
by afavour | 2026-01-16 15:05:54+00:00
IMO it's because the web has a huge diversity of behaviors (in a way that, say, native apps do not) but a monoculture on the development side.

React makes sense if you're making Gmail. It doesn't really make sense if you're making a mostly static blog. But because there are more job opportunities in the former (when you consider the wealth of internal web apps out there in the world) all the training courses folks take emphasize React and an app-centric way of thinking about the web.

And perhaps most importantly, it's good enough. It works. Users get by with it. And the developer experience is better than it was in the days of Backbone etc. So few push for change.
by dbspin | 2026-01-16 15:06:33+00:00
> no, there is no reasonable concern of this happening in the US in the near term

Non American here observing from outside. Given the move in a few months from a normative western society to one in which heavily armed masked men raid homes and businesses [1] to racially profile [2] for mass imprisonment and deportation. Given the current governments explicit redefinition of political opponents as terrorists [3]. And finally given the extent to which three letter agencies are integrated into US telecommunications infrastructure [4][5]. It seems delusional to discount the possibility of such blackouts in the US domestically.

[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/vance-door-to-door-ice/

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/09/supreme-cour...

[3] https://www.thefire.org/news/trumps-domestic-terrorism-memo-...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowden_disclosures

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_use_in_United_States_...
by alistairSH | 2026-01-16 15:06:49+00:00
Yeah, I feel like suburban sprawl is as much to blame (or more so) than social media.

I live in the suburbs, but almost everything is within 2 miles... office, schools, and one cafe are walkable. Gym, another cafe, pub, and the town center (privately owned mixed-use complex) are 2-3 miles, so long walk, short bike, or 5 minutes in the car. I wish it was more walkable, but compared to most suburban areas, it's really good.

Contrasted my sister's house, on the other side of the county... nothing is within 3 miles or so. Basically a car ride to do anything, as there's no bike infrastructure for those things that are within 3 miles.
by sfn42 | 2026-01-16 15:06:56+00:00
Are you juggling two accounts?

Yeah I said I find it miserable to be moderately overweight. I never said being more active and eating less doesn't work. It works great when I do it. I was under 90kg last year after just a few months of being active and eating better. And when I stop being active and start eating too much food, I gain weight. Which is literally exactly what I'm saying. So, I have direct personal experience with my advice working exactly the way I'm telling you it does.

At this point I'm just saying the same shit I said in the other comment already. The fact that I find it hard to follow my own advice, which I just told you because I thought it might help get my point across, is completely irrelevant to whether the advice works.

Anyway I'm over this whole conversation at this point. Do and believe whatever you want. I've said what I wanted to say. If you don't believe me that's fine, I don't care.
by treetalker | 2026-01-16 15:07:07+00:00
> Can someone help me find this book? I've been looking for years. It used the Mosaic browser.

Would it happen to be HTML Manual of Style: Clear, Concise Reference for Hypertext Markup Language by Larry Aronson? [1]

From the description:

> This book introduces HTML, the program language used to create World-Wide Web "pages", so that users of Mosaic and other Web browsers can access data. Forty to 50 new "pages" are being added to the WWW every day and this will be the first book out on the subject.

Forty to fifty new "pages" per day! </Dr. Evil air quotes>

[1]: https://welib.org/md5/d456fbbef6aee150706c6a507a031593
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2026-01-16 15:07:31+00:00
It's also rather like trying to learn flintnapping just by looking at examples of knapped flint (maybe some better than others), rather than having access to descriptions of how to do it, and ultimately any practice of doing it.

You could also use cooking as an analogy - trying to learn to cook by looking at pictures of cooked food rather than by having gone to culinary school and learnt the principles of how to actually plan and cook good food.

So, we're trying to train LLMs to code, by giving them "pictures" of code that someone else built, rather than by teaching them the principles involved in creating it, and then having them practice themselves.
by palmotea | 2026-01-16 15:07:32+00:00
> Typical EU government - ban something people obviously want, say its for their own good.

I don't want AI songs, even though I might be fooled by one.

People also "wanted" snake oil too, in that they bought it, but they didn't actually want it.

The way you use "want" indicates your either misunderstand something or are being deceptive. There's false assumptions behind it, like play counts are an accurate measure of what people want.

Edit: Your profile says you "have lots of experience with digital advertising," your misunderstanding/deception is exactly the one I see a lot of people in advertising use to justify yourself: "my metrics say people click on ads, therefore people want and like ads, and if you don't you're a weirdo."
by alphawhisky | 2026-01-16 15:07:38+00:00
I think this was the basis for the "Stop Killing Games" petition/initiative that was brought forward in Europe in 2025. They argued they had to open games up to private/3rd party hosting for this exact reason. IMO, if you lose the ability to play the game, then that would be damaging the "property" that is your game copy as well. It's like if you booted up your favorite offline single player game at home to find that they deleted half the maps/content.
by fuzzfactor | 2026-01-16 15:08:22+00:00
>1. Physical Machine (Bare Metal) This is the foundation.

Nobody should ever forget this.

But I would say this next part is about the opposite for bare metal though:

>Use Case: High-performance computing (HPC), large databases, or legacy systems that require direct hardware access.

To get the utmost reliability out of adequate hardware then bare metal is more suitable for almost everything except for special situations.

Unless something is really wrong with the software or the overall hardware/software approach.
by nicole_express | 2026-01-16 15:08:34+00:00
Fair enough, I guess I'm assuming too much knowledge-- a supergun is just a device designed to take a JAMMA arcade connector and provide everything an arcade cabinet would do for a home setup. (i.e., provide video output, some sort of game controller input, bring audio levels down from amplified JAMMA to line level)

I've talked about playing arcade boards at home on the blog so often I sometimes forget to be more accommodating to new readers.
by miclivs | 2026-01-16 15:08:57+00:00
I wanted to see what Claude Code was doing instead of watching text scroll by. This watches the JSONL conversation logs in ~/.claude/projects/ and renders animations based on tool events.

Built with Go and Raylib. No API keys or network calls, just file watching.

The animation system is a state machine with 10 states. Biomes use parallax layers at different scroll speeds. There's a progression system that persists XP and unlockables.

Blog post with more details: https://michaellivs.com/blog/claude-quest
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-01-16 15:09:05+00:00
I re read your initial reply more carefully and we are doing just that.

Because of a combination of poor life choices between 2000-2008 and purposeful decisions between 2012-2020 early retirement or even retirement before my wife and I are eligible for Medicare is mostly out of the question unless we move out of the US - we are seriously exploring this possibility and we will be in one of those countries for six weeks starting in late February.

That being said, knowing those are my constraints. I have made some purposeful decisions.

First I pivoted to cloud consulting working full time for consulting departments /companies where there are plenty of remote opportunities, experience and age is an asset and not a liability, and the pay is better than enterprise dev. They also can’t outsource customer facing consultants who have to fly to customer’s sites.

Second, I “retired my wife” in 2020 so she could pursue her hobbies and we could travel extensively while we are healthy and it can be funded by income.

That has the knock on effect that we don’t need as much money for retirement because we would have already gotten our expensive travel out of the way by then.

Third, we aggressively reduced expenses when my youngest step son graduated in 2020 - we sold our big house in the burbs and bought a condo 1/3 the size in central Florida close to Disney. Florida is a state tax free state.

Now between making decent money and low expenses, we can live comfortably day to day, do the digital nomad thing off an on (and rent our home out as vacation rental while we are gone).
by giancarlostoro | 2026-01-16 15:09:27+00:00
It gets worse, some teams would get x real estate on a website, and one team would use React, another Vue, another would use Angular because they owned that real estate on your site and that's what the team was best with. Astro lets you still do that, but turns it all into static content. Think of orgs the size of Google or YouTube, there are different teams responsible for what looks like a small thing but different pieces of a giant pie.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-01-16 15:09:57+00:00
It is less obvious than you think. Obvious to you and me, perhaps. But a significant portion of the population genuinely believes that you are born with the talent to just do this like it's nothing, or born with the talent to be a piano prodigy, etc, and as a result never bother to apply themselves, even though with the wealth of educational resources available today anyone[1] could make paintings of this quality if they were to put in the effort to learn. I think that article headlines that reinforce this popular misconception are rather damaging.

[1] Given the level of pedantry on this site, I suppose I should say "almost anyone", since a small minority of people with severe disabilities may not be able to.
by elicash | 2026-01-16 15:10:01+00:00
I couldn't tell they replied to me with AI (it didn't read like it did to me, but I could be wrong).

But even if they did, one thing I'm sympathetic to is that English is not everyone's first language. Again, I don't know if that applies here, but it's a good reason that some might want to run their comments through an LLM. I don't think there should be a blanket rule on this.