MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by shevy-java | 2026-01-11 18:37:43+00:00
Some time-constraints make it hard for me to commit to some open source
work right now, but if I can I still improve my tool called "Software Manager".
Goal for 2026 will be to have registered 4000 programs in total (I am at about
3750 right now) as well as make it dead-easy to interface with it through
oldschool SQL (right now I just have .yml files and other flat files, though
I can autogenerate a .sql database already as-is, but right now I don't query
this dataset and it is not really optimised either). My long term goal is to
make compilation on any platform dead simple. On Linux it works very well;
on windows not quite as well yet.
by mojo531 | 2026-01-11 18:38:04+00:00
Hello,
I am new and this is my first post.

At Sylvester I stopped smoking.for the beginning and hard times I searched for a deflection and started with my own quitesmoke app - purio

I released it some days before a reached a workable state.

Here the result, if you want to check:

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.codingplant...

Feedback is welcome
by jesenator | 2026-01-11 18:38:23+00:00
Yeah, it's a good point. The examples (jobs, loans, videos, ads) we give are more examples of how machine learning systems make choices that affect you, rather than how LLMs/generally intelligent systems do (which is what we really want to talk about). I'll try to update this text soon.

Maybe better examples are helping with health advice, where to donate, finding recipes, or examples of policymakers using AI to make strategic decisions.

These are, although maybe not on their face, value laden questions, and often don't have well defined objective criteria for their answers (as another comment says).

Let me know if this addresses your comment!
by dpark | 2026-01-11 18:38:25+00:00
> It can output something that looks like the "why"

This feels like a distinction without difference. This is an extension of the common refrain that LLMs cannot “think”.

Rather than get overly philosophical, I would ask what the difference is in practical terms. If an LLM can write out a “why” and it is sufficient explanation for a human or a future LLM, how is that not a “why“?
by BigTTYGothGF | 2026-01-11 18:38:57+00:00
> all the soldiers who came back lost the addiction

This does not seem to be born out by the historical record.

> https://department.va.gov/history/featured-stories/borne-in-...

> Despite initial fears, high substance abuse rates during the war did not entirely translate to enduring addiction issues post-war. A year after returning home, only 10% of Service members initially detected as drug positive reported using opiates after detoxification, and just 7% reported re-addiction

> VA initially found itself unprepared for the sudden increase in drug cases.

Please note the "entirely" and "7%".

Also:
> https://academic.oup.com/aje/article-abstract/99/4/235/13845...
> Rather than giving up drugs altogether, many had shifted from heroin to amphetamines or barbiturates.
by seec | 2026-01-11 18:39:12+00:00
It's a very cynical view but I kind of agree. In those kinds of jobs, the only rewards for doing the job well and fast is just more mindless jobs of the same type.
It would be usefull if you would receive a benefit for doing the job better or you could leave earlier for the same pay but that is rarely the case, since as you said, employers generally pay for your time instead of task completion (which is rather dumb because it offers bad incentives for both sides).

I have talked about this with some business owners who were getting kinda angree that some employes were not putting in a lot of efforts. In all case they were paying the minimum wage with absolutly zero compensation for doing the job better and/or faster.

I can't decide if they are just stupid or simply corrupt but they really should realise that with a strong welfare state and plenty of similar shitty jobs available, the stick really cannot work all that well and they should really use the carrot a lot more.
But of course those people generally make at least 3-4 times the minimum wage and they feel they deserve the premium because they deserve it and are so much better. Funnily enough, those that I know consistenly do a worse job than their employees at most things and it's obvious they didn't get there by starting at the bottom.
by vladvasiliu | 2026-01-11 18:39:13+00:00
While I sympathize with this angle, there's another side to this coin: if more people do the switch, maybe some applications will finally get linux versions.

I'm a Sunday photographer and quite like Lightroom and Photoshop (I know about the drama, but to me, I get enough value from them compared to Darktable and the GIMP to not switch just yet). It's the only reason I still have a windows pc hanging around the house.
by WillAdams | 2026-01-11 18:39:20+00:00
I really wish WebDAV were more popular --- ages ago, back when moving large files was difficult and I worked at a printing company we would have regular difficulties with customers connecting to our FTP site (on at least one occasion resulting in tears of frustration on the part of a customer).

I (stupidly) pointed out that WebDAV was natively supported by both Windows and Mac OS and was quite simple to connect to, and then burned all of my political capital at the company arguing for its adoption --- when we finally got to a meeting on it, rather than simply enable the WebDAV service on the existing FTP Server, it was presented as if I was arguing for a new server, and that said new server should come out of my department's budget....
by devgoth | 2026-01-11 18:39:21+00:00
I am working on a query cost analyzer that looks at query performance and does maths against your infrastructure cost to understand what is your dollar cost per query. The idea is that teams (when tables are tagged appropriately) will be notified with their most costly queries and hopefully makes that actionable for teams to clean up some queries.

I am unsure if there is a need for a tool like this in the market but I am becoming more and more curious around databases so this felt like a lower barrier for my product-minded engineer skills to get into.
by jwally | 2026-01-11 18:39:41+00:00
I updated a really outdated, but surprisingly popular repo for linear programming:

https://github.com/JWally/jsLPSolver

I'm tinkering around building "JARVIS" (I didn't want to come up with a clever self deprecating name - this works) - a personal project to manage my life. Integrates into Google Mail, Google Calendar, Trello, GroupMe, EveryDollar. Basically it nags me to do grown up thing and is a better UX than Google Calendar/Trello - I just talk to it and ask it things.

Also experimenting with a new Claude-Code flow; give the bot its own AWS account, Put a bunch of tickets on my personal JIRA, be persnickity about what constitutes "pass" and tell the bot "follow these instructions, pull down tickets until there are no more. Your branch cannot merge until you have integration tests passing in your own dev env first" (I use AWS CDK). Then let it loose to build. The instant feedback loop that Claude has with Build-Code->Deploy to AWS->Run Integration Tests->Address Failures is really nifty fwiw...
by willmarch | 2026-01-11 18:39:57+00:00
You edited this comment into a suit and tie, but I saw the earlier versions. Since you want to lecture about “unhinged rhetoric,” let’s use your words, not mine:

“idiot woman”
“better than fine” (about a woman being killed)
"we voted for this"
“not a tragedy”
“she f-ed around and found out”
plus the usual “mentally ill” drive-by accusations

I’ve got screenshots, so don’t bother pretending that tone-policing is your principle rather than your tactic.

You’ve pivoted from “this isn’t illegal” to “your rhetoric is unhinged and causes violence.” That’s not an argument about lawfulness; it’s an attempt to make dissent morally punishable.

A liberal system doesn’t work by outsourcing “truth” to whoever has a badge and the first press release. It works by evidence, due process, and oversight (especially when force is used). So when you write up a killing as a fully-adjudicated morality play (“self-defense,” “lawful order,” “predictably”) before the investigation is even meaningfully complete, you’re not defending the rule of law, you’re defending the rule of narrative.

Same with the “domestic terrorist” inflation: labeling people that before adjudication, and then hand-waving when the case collapses, isn’t “the system working.” It’s the state’s most severe rhetoric being used as a substitute for proof.

And none of this is “not relevant to HN.” Expanding biometric/DNA collection to people merely “associated with” an immigration benefit request (including petitioners/sponsors/signatories, often U.S. citizens) is a concrete expansion of state power. So are U.S. citizens being detained by immigration agents, and agents obscuring identity during arrests. Those are governance-and-technology questions, not “breathlessness.”

If you want to defend the scope and authority, do it: cite the statutory basis and explain why compelled biometrics/DNA for citizens in a civil process is appropriate. If you’d rather keep litigating tone and assigning responsibility for hypothetical violence to your political opponents (while excusing actual state violence with “FAFO”), then you’re not arguing policy; you’re trying to delegitimize criticism.

“Law and order” isn’t obedience to enforcement; it’s power restrained by law, and you keep arguing for the power while scolding anyone who asks about the restraint.
by bndr | 2026-01-11 18:40:16+00:00
I've been working on the same tool since 2024 where I thought it might be a good time to build a tool for all the people who will build their own tools, eventually they will need to market it.

So I built a SEO/GEO Automation Tool for Small to Mid-Size Businesses who don't have a full-time team for that. [0]

The goal is to provide teams visibility across all the channels — Search and AI and give them the tools needed to outrank their competition. So far so good, the fully bootstrapped venture has grown over the last year and I've built quite a few big features — sophisticated audit system, AI Responses Monitoring, Crawler Analytics, Competitors Monitoring etc.

[0] https://seojuice.io
by gusgus01 | 2026-01-11 18:40:54+00:00
Yes, and the rest of the article discussed how they actually have revisited some of their numbers and links to their reports where you can read about their methodology and decide if it's comprehensive enough.

To quote the article: "Debates over measuring effective tax rates have been lively because measuring taxes and incomes is complex and involves judgement calls (and the political stakes are high.) We applied a simple and replicable method to a single, publicly available source of data to estimate the effective tax rates of high-income taxpayers that avoids making assumptions about grey areas like unrealized capital gains and corporate tax burdens."
by bigyabai | 2026-01-11 18:41:10+00:00
> that their legals will be telling them they simply don't HAVE to do this.

Their legals are, outright, telling them not to do this. Apple has an App Store monopoly, the moment Grok or X gets booted off then it's lawsuit time for them. Apple could at any point forfeit their monopoly by supporting third-party app distributors. But this is what they chose, and Apple has to balance the abuses with the judgement calls as a result.

> So they have recent experience to drive wanting not to act. It hurt last time.

What does that have to do with anything? Apple doesn't care how much things hurt their users. Any company that would suggest client-side-scanning is entirely willing to hurt their users, you just said it yourself: "most of them do ultimately involve the threat aspect of state actors"
by allreduce | 2026-01-11 18:41:15+00:00
NixOS is anything but a light abstraction (I say this as a NixOS user).

Tbh it feels like NixOS is convenient in a large part because of systemd and all the other crap you have to wire together for a usable (read compatible) Linux desktop. Better to have a fat programming language, runtime and collection of packages which exposes one declarative interface.

Much of this issue is caused by the integrate-this-grab-bag-of-tools-someone-made approach to system design, which of course also has upsides. Redhat seems to be really helping with amplifying the downsides by providing the money to make a few mediocre tools absurdly big tho.
by jackfranklyn | 2026-01-11 18:41:23+00:00
Building CodeIQ - an AI tool that automates transaction coding for accountants and bookkeepers.

The interesting technical bit: it analyses your historic general ledger to reverse-engineer how you specifically categorise transactions. So instead of generic rules, it learns your firm's actual patterns - "oh, they always code Costa Coffee to Staff Welfare, not Refreshments" - that kind of thing.

Posts directly to Xero, QuickBooks, Sage, and Pandle. The VAT handling turned out to be surprisingly gnarly (UK tax rules are... something).

Been working on it about 6 months now. Still figuring out the right balance between automation confidence and "just flag this for human review".
by schappim | 2026-01-11 18:41:24+00:00
I have been working on
Print Relay[1], a cloud-based print relay system that enables remote printing to any printer connected to your local network.

PrintRelay consists of a cloud server and lightweight clients that connect printers to the cloud via WebSocket.

We use the excellent SaaS PrintNode at work, but about twice a year we have connectivity/routing issues between AWS ap-southeast-2 and their servers OS. PrintRelay is my attempt to not need PrintNode. Because of this PrintRelay is PrintNode API compatible.

1. https://github.com/schappim/print-relay
by azdle | 2026-01-11 18:41:40+00:00
My meta side project for building other side projects: https://bodge.app/

I've always had a bunch of small side projects that I want to do that aren't worth the overhead required to actually put them together & keep them maintained. So, I built a small Lua-based FaaS platform to make each individual project less work whenever inspiration strikes. So far I've built:

* A current-time API for some hacked-together IoT devices: https://time.bodge.link/

* A script for my wife that checks her commute time and emails her before it's about to get bad.

* An email notification to myself if my Matrix server goes down.

* A 'randomly choose a thing' page. https://rand.bodge.link/choose?head&tails

* A work phone number voicemail, the script converts the webhook into an email to me.

* An email notification any time a new version is released for a few semi-public self-hosted services.

* Scrapers for a few companies' job listings that notify me whenever a new job is posted matching some filters.

* A WebPush server that I eventually want to use for custom notifications to myself.

* An SVG hit counter: https://hits.bodge.link/

Since I'm already maintaining it for myself, I figured I might as well open it up for others. It's free to play with, at least for now.
by jama211 | 2026-01-11 18:41:46+00:00
Yeah but folks around here like to stick their heads in the sand when reminded that this is a very real and concerning barrier to adoption of desktop Linux. It could happen 1000 times and they’ll still scream that it’s either user error or even worse “it works on my machine”.

Until the Linux community stops pretending and accepts that these are real issues and they need addressing, it will never be the year of the Linux desktop.
by nullbound | 2026-01-11 18:41:52+00:00
I think the artists have a valid bone to pick and I think some of the backlash is mostly coming from that quarter. The actual gamers are more repulsed by established studios using AI for asset generation, because it comes across as a lazy money grab. But gamers are both flexible ( will jump through a lot of hoops to do what they want to do ) and and set in their way of 'just want to have fun'.

On the other side of the spectrum are indies, who can afford to experiment a little more so you get more interesting uses ( like 'voicelines' by AI come to mind ).

I know what I want to believe, but it is hard for me to call it ( I think it is a temporary trend ), because I might be a little too close to it. After all, gamers have been conditioned to endure a lot over the past decade and mostly shrugged off most of the assaults on their favorite past time.

If I were to compare it to something.. it is almost like using LLMs for email summaries ( which is still what most bosses seem to be most pleased with ). There are better use cases. I think those were not explored yet.
by y-c-o-m-b | 2026-01-11 18:41:54+00:00
This doesn't work like everyone makes it out to. The first problem is overcoming the plethora of build errors. Then if you're lucky enough to actually get Ableton launched and working, you'll run into weird issues like Ableton crashing as soon as you attempt to add a MIDI track. When you find a work-around for that, you then run into random crashing in the middle of playback with absolutely atrocious latency despite the claims of "low latency". It's not worth it. I gave up
by kalterdev | 2026-01-11 18:42:08+00:00
Acme [1], a text editor for programmers. It’s a very unusual tool and I have collected hundreds of notes (as well as dozens of bugs and inconsistencies) from the past two years of using it. Now I feel fully assimilated, I do not take as much notes and it feels the right time to start organizing the knowledge, to put ideas together.

I think that Acme is very underrated in its domain (a tool for experts). The coverage is minuscule. That’s why I am thinking about blog posts, maybe video tutorials. I do not know what should it be exactly.

I do not have any time estimates. I have a very demanding main job (I work as a software developer) and young family that I need to take care of. This project demands focused efforts and selectivity that I can barely satisfy. But I wouldn’t give up, the thing is totally worth it. If it’s going to take years, so be it.

If you have any comments, send me a letter at kalterdev@gmail.com. Have a good day.

1: https://9p.io/sys/doc/acme/acme.html
by mindslight | 2026-01-11 18:42:21+00:00
Thank you for elaborating! Your original comment was abstract and high-handed, but this makes it clear you're coming from a place of wanting to solve your own specific problem.

Practically if you know you were circumcised shortly after your birth, can't you look at the record of your birth and subsequent care, make a list of doctors that attended or treated you in any way, and then make the complaint about all of them?

(this isn't arguing against your point, just exploring the problem)
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-01-11 18:42:33+00:00
In the Democratic party, Tim Waltz, with zero proof against him personally, withdrew from the election we was running for when there was an impression of abuse.

The Republican party EMBRACED the head man involved in the largest theft in Medicare history, and he is a powerful Senator for them.

This is very much political, as I highlighted. One party acts with responsibility, the other doesn't care except for soundbites and wielding accusations as a weapon and abuse as a boogie man to say 'we can't have government, because people like our Senator steal from it' (it happens to also be the part that hates government, shockingly).
by Gazoo101 | 2026-01-11 18:43:19+00:00
PlanMixPlay - https://www.planmixplay.com/

A live-performance software with a focus on creating 'musically connected visuals'. Currently, the biggest connectivity is probably tightly tied lyric visualizations. Some recent examples:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRHLzuUBz5o - She Wants Revenge - I don't want to fall in love

or if you prefer Mashups:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_Xq8Dh4NEw - The Lovemakers – Shake That 50 Cent (50 Cent vs. The Lovemakers)
by crawshaw | 2026-01-11 18:43:43+00:00
I have always assumed this is about individual projects, but let me try talking about our team effort. We just launched exe.dev, and have lots of projects. In particular, we are spending a lot of time on file systems. The easy one is copy-on-write VM cloning, which existing software provides for us. More interestingly, I believe the standard cloud approach of putting everything on a NAS by default is wrong. Doing better here is going to require doing unusual things.

Finally, we decided to open source the exe.dev agent, Shelley. https://github.com/boldsoftware/shelley
by tombert | 2026-01-11 18:43:44+00:00
I have been porting over my favorite Erlang library "Bitcask" to Rust.

https://sr.ht/~tombert/feocask/

Called "feocask" cuz feo means "ugly" in Spanish and FeO to mean Iron Oxide for Rust. I thought it was funny.

I will admit that I had help from Codex, but I did write most of it myself, and I think the design is coming out kind of neat. I have a very strict "no lock" policy [1], including lockfiles, and this should still be safe to use across any number of threads, at the cost of N^2 reconciliation to the number of threads and a lot more drive space.

I like my design; I have an excuse to use Vector Clocks and Hybrid Logical Clocks and I think it might actually be useful for something some day. I'd like to eventually write something that goes a bit beyond getting parity with bitcask and optionally have the ability to automatically distribute across multiple nodes, but I'm still trying to think of a good design for that, because my current design depends heavily the atomicity of POSIX filesystem commands, and introducing the network introduces latency that would likely greatly degrade performance.

[1] At least no explicit locks. I am using Tokio channels and they are probably using locks in some spots behind the scenes.
by sph | 2026-01-11 18:44:04+00:00
After years of wondering what the post-UNIX paradigm of computing could look like, these past few months I've been prototyping a software platform built around capabilities and message passing, targeting Linux and bare-metal RISC-V. The big ideas I'm pursuing is a stackless design running on a flat address space with lightweight processes to minimize message-passing latency, and all the benefits of capabilities so every process is sandboxed and has only access to capabilities they have been explicitly passed via message passing.

I've also built a RISC-V emulator to integrate with this platform, so eventually it'll be able to run native binaries written in any language, completely sandboxed, completely built around message-passing. Basically a native, low-level BEAM-like platform to build an entire operating system and user-space.

While my day job is writing boring applications, this is the stuff that keeps me awake at night, and I would love so much to talk and write more about this, about the trial-and-errors I'm facing, but it's still so much in flux every week I'm exploring a new approach. Most of my work has been around the stackless scheduler, and I have a plan to achieve preemption for long-running or misbehaved tasks without having to compromise on memory usage (i.e. without giving each process its own stack and allocate memory for context switching).

Eventually I'd like to layer on top either Cap'n Proto or another high-performance serialisation system to create a distributed, introspectable environment of object-capabilities that are sending typed messages between each other, achieving the ultimate goal of creating an unholy hybrid between Smalltalk and the Erlang VM.

God, how I wish I was paid to work on this type of problems :-)

If this sounds close to your area of interests, please send me an email and I’d love to chat.