MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by oaba_omar | 2026-02-04 21:08:36+00:00
Most developers I know build something decent, share it once or twice, get silence, and quietly move on.

I’ve done this too. Built something I thought was genuinely useful. Posted it a couple of times. No comments, no feedback, nothing. I almost shelved it. The only reason I didn’t was stubbornness, not conviction.

What keeps bothering me is that the failure point often isn’t the product — it’s the silence. Building feels productive. Sharing feels awkward. Marketing feels like noise. So when there’s no response, it’s hard to tell whether the idea is bad or whether I just didn’t give it enough chances to be seen.

It makes me wonder how many useful tools die in week two, not because they’re broken, but because the feedback loop never really started.

For those who’ve been through this: how do you personally tell the difference between “this isn’t working” and “I haven’t tried long enough yet”? Do you have any rules, signals, or time boxes you rely on before deciding to stop?
by jancsika | 2026-02-04 21:09:24+00:00
> As an outsider to all this, it's funny how these movements always crumble as soon as there is any mainstream recognition.

It crumbled when the physical encampments were forcibly removed by the police. I mean, even at the tiny encampment of UC Davis-- essentially a few camping tents-- the students got pepper sprayed and hauled off. Remember that meme? Many of those same students also faced serious jail time for a protest outside Washington Mutual Bank. It's probably difficult to sustain a movement under those conditions, no?

In any case, the message that resonated across the U.S. encampments is essentially what turned into Bernie Sanders two runs for president. That, the group behind AOC's House run, and many other important grassroots movements are the legacy of OWS. Whatever the deal is with jart's website is orthogonal to all this-- I've literally never heard about her association with OWS outside of HN.

Edit: clarification
by tptacek | 2026-02-04 21:09:25+00:00
I'd been a relatively long-time subscriber (since 2016) and preferred the Post to the Times for political and international news; more focused, a little drier, easier to follow. I canceled my subscription early last year, not because of anything Bezos did, but because the Times had improved to the point where I just wasn't reading the Post very often.

In understanding everything that's being written about the Post layoffs, one thing you absolutely have to understand (you can weight it however you'd like) to have a coherent take is: the New York Times is an anomaly. Newspapers are a terrible business. People don't get news from newspapers anymore, and advertisers don't reach customers through them.

The Times is thriving because they've pivoted from being a newspaper to being a media business. The games vertical is the first thing people talk about, but cooking is arguably a better example. The verticals have dedicated users, their own go-to-markets, their own user retention loops.

Like basically every other newspaper, the Post failed to replicate this. They're staffed like a big media business, not like a targeted vertical like Politico, but they don't successfully operate like a media business.
by sagarpal | 2026-02-04 21:09:29+00:00
I built an interactive simulator to help with the rent vs. buy decision. It compares three strategies: (A) buying with a mortgage, (B) renting and investing the down payment in equities, and (C) renting while investing monthly savings (when mortgage > rent). The tool visualizes asset growth, cumulative outflows, and net value over time with breakeven analysis. Built with Streamlit, Plotly, and vectorized NumPy calculations. All formulas and assumptions are documented. Try it at https://rent-or-buy-sim.com or run locally with Docker.
by rustyhancock | 2026-02-04 21:10:00+00:00
You think a 10 year old is checking the Shannon entropy of some files and deducing that that a single byte xor key is being used? Reversing it and adding more MP4 files then writing NFC cards to play whatever they want?

Surely this is a perfect example of a losing sight of the wider picture.

The articles appeal to well if they do this with a €10 projector they'd do it with a €100,000 is again absolutely comical.
by rolph | 2026-02-04 21:10:37+00:00
actually the machine, and its handlers should become science literate, if there is an interest in contributing to science.

dissemination of novel idea is the purpose of publication. sharing data can be done with e-mail. if you cant work with ideas and concepts, that is your limitation, it is backwards to suggest scientific publication should just become another data scrape to facilitate AI adoption.
by xmorse | 2026-02-04 21:11:05+00:00
I am using WebSocket hibernation so the connection will cost nothing if no events are being sent after some time, 9 seconds I think. I think cost is completely negligible. I run a similar service for the Framer MCP and it costs basically nothing even with thousands of users using it every week.

The big advantage of this architecture is that it that it's very lightweight and starts in less than 200ms. Much faster than the built in Cloudflare tunnel, and no login required
by barrkel | 2026-02-04 21:11:07+00:00
That seq is probably supposed to be $(seq 0.05 0.05 0.5). Right now it's always 0.05.

Note that you can get random numbers straight from bash with $RANDOM. It's 15 bit (0 to 32767) but good enough here; this would get between 0.05 and 0.5: $(printf "0.%.4d\n" $((500 + RANDOM % 4501)))
by munificent | 2026-02-04 21:11:10+00:00
100%.

I follow the OrganizationPorn subreddit because sometimes I like looking at pictures of neatly organized stuff. But so much of the photos are from sprawling suburban houses with enormous pantries and "craft rooms" with just So. Much. Stuff.

Unless you're feeding a family of 12, I don't know how anyone can keep that much food without half of it going bad before you get to it anyway.
by doublerabbit | 2026-02-04 21:11:37+00:00
Like anything in that field its more NDA, antidotal.

> in 2018, the prominent Denuvo cracker known as "Voksi" (of REVOLT) was arrested in Bulgaria following a criminal complaint from Denuvo.

https://www.dsogaming.com/news/denuvo-has-sued-revolts-found...

That's how you get off such charges. I'll work for you, if you drop charges. There was a reddit post I can't find when EMPRESS had one of their episodes where she was asked if she wanted to work for. It's happened in the cracking scene before.

> The jailbreaking community is fractured, with many of its former members having joined private security firms or Apple itself. The few people still doing it privately are able to hold out for big payouts for finding iPhone vulnerabilities. And users themselves have stopped demanding jailbreaks, because Apple simply took jailbreakers’ best ideas and implemented them into iOS.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/iphone-jailbreak-life-death-...

And from the jail break community discord.
by codingdave | 2026-02-04 21:11:37+00:00
Writing a scraper isn't the hard part, that is actually fairly trivial at this point in time. Pulling content into JSON from your scrape is also fairly trivial - libraries exist that handle it well.

The harder parts are things like playing nicely so your bot doesn't get banned by sysadmins, detecting changes downstream from your URL, handling dynamically loading content, and keeping that JSON structure consistent even as your sites change their content, their designs, etc. Also, scalability. One customer I'm talking to could use a product like this, but they have 100K URLs to track, and that is more than I currently want to deal with.

I absolutely can see the use case for consistent change data from a URL, I'm just not seeing enough content in your marketing to know whether you really have something here, or if you vibe coded a scraper and are throwing it against the wall to see if it sticks.
by 999900000999 | 2026-02-04 21:11:47+00:00
I feel the Internet makes legacy media less relevant.

In DC we had a hyper local free paper, the Express published by the Washington posts.

These papers were passed out by beloved members of the community. Made for good small talk while riding the metro.

Then the express was ended, the folks who passed out the papers were left without income.

I don't blame anyone in particular. Maybe newspapers are obsolete.
by afavour | 2026-02-04 21:11:48+00:00
It's very curious to reflect on the change in Bezos over the last decade or so. No, The Washington Post doesn't make money. But surely he never bought it under the expectation that it would. A billionaire buys a newspaper for other reasons than that. And he initially spent a ton of money on the paper, they even had a superbowl ad. He was happy to go toe to toe with the first Trump administration.

Fast forward and he's blocking the paper from endorsing presidential candidates (that alone lost 250k subscribers), he's reforming the opinion section to match the views of the current administration... and now he's just straight up destroying half of it. A lot has happened in his personal life too (divorced, remarried) and I'm curious what he'd actually say if he was to look back and reflect on the path taken. I wonder how reflective it is of the rich retreating into bubbles in the COVID era and never emerging from them. Alas, we probably won't ever know. There aren't many places left to report on it!
by tolerance | 2026-02-04 21:12:10+00:00
Let’s disregard your first three paragraphs that treat his point about zero-sum games categorically. He does hedge against that interpretation in the passages I referenced.

> This looks like an example of hackers thinking they're fundamentally changing the world, when all that's happening is that they're working in an area that's too small for the wider world to care very much yet. Back when the internet was shiny and new, there was all this talk of how it was going to change the world with the free flow of information. Censorship would fall, regulation would be impossible, and the internet would be a bastion of freedom. Well, it only looked that way because governments took a while to start actually caring about the internet. Once they did, it turns out the internet is like everything else: the people with guns ultimately get to decide what you do if they want to.

Think about the names tied to Graham, the ones who appear in this very essay even. I think you’re making a gross understatement here—a slight even—of the massive influence of the likes of Dan Gackle.
by zahlman | 2026-02-04 21:12:11+00:00
> I wish I could, instead, write a make.py file with something like this:

I have had in mind a project which I hope could make this more ergonomic. I think the example could look more like so (and be made to work):

from whatever import *

@depends("inputs/checkbook_pro_export.csv")
@makes(ledger_path="ledger/{year}_{month:02d}.toml") # n.b. not an f-string
@parametrized_rule(year=range(2019, 2026), month=range(1, 13))
def import_month():
return import_from_checkbook(ledger_path, year, month)
by spwa4 | 2026-02-04 21:12:51+00:00
I think in Russia's case it's a matter of practicality. It's not like every day they have an average number of dead and there certainly have been days with far more than 1000 victims per day, they have at least reached 5000 in a single day. I bet fighting around Kyiv got the rate much higher 3 years back too. Ukraine and Russia are not fighting in dense cities like Teheran, but in small rural villages mostly, and a lot of the time in fields, in treelines. Tough to kill many people there.

Iranian Islamic guard was slaughtering people in dense crowds in the middle of skyscrapers. That certainly makes those numbers realistic to me.
by mchusma | 2026-02-04 21:13:03+00:00
The bull case IMO is that you can just produce very standardized ai satellites, load them into Starship, blast them off and have them work. And that the cost of that versus permitting etc will be less than trying to do it on land. I kind of believe it could get there. We could build nuclear reactors next to giant facilities but...we can't really seem to do it in the US? China seems to be able to do it.

PS. I think the authors argument that millions of satellites might run into each other is silly. There are like 1.5 B cars.
by boondongle | 2026-02-04 21:13:15+00:00
Keep in mind, our parents (age specific) and/or their parents parents paid for news and didn't question that setup. Advertisors then went there because that's where the eyeballs were. What we're seeing is that left to their own devices and lacking a war or famine to force behavior change people would rather cut their news source in favor of fluff.

It's not something the market will solve. The post 1940's US Media landscape was a direct reaction to multiple, non-contained wars in short succession. The political class doesn't feel they've "lost" control in a long time hence no urgency to fix it.

In a lot of cases we're seeing Advertising warp and destroy the industries they provide money to. It's not evil, just that industries start to invert whether the people or the advertisors matter.
by glimshe | 2026-02-04 21:14:00+00:00
I still read a few books per year, but I wonder if this still matters as much as it used to. In the past, I used to read 10-20 books per year and now it's more like 3-5.

The reduction is from a lot more time spent on educational series on YouTube and other paid video sources. Is it intrinsically bad if I trade 1 book for 10 hours of instructional videos?
by fluoridation | 2026-02-04 21:14:12+00:00
People starving en masse because there was no work to do anymore and no way to get paid, despite there being plentiful food, is something that has never happened. If the amount of money on the consumer side of the food economy were to shrink significantly, what should happen is that the price of food should also go down until people can buy food again. The stock has to move no matter what, otherwise it spoils.
by yitchelle | 2026-02-04 21:14:20+00:00
Location: Cologne, Germany

Remote: Yes, Hybrid in NRW and onsite around Cologne

Willing to relocate:No

Technologies: embeeded systems, C, assembler, Functional safety, Automotive, Robotics, Avonics, MedTech

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tehnyitchin

Email: tehn.yit.chin@gmail.com

Roles: Engineering Manager, Team Leader, Head of Department, Project Manager, Product Manager

About me:

20+ years leading cross-functional teams delivering safety-critical embedded control systems (automotive, industrial automation, advanced embedded). Expert in ASPICE/ISO 26262/Functional Safety with proven ability to translate engineering rigour into regulatory compliance (TÜV, certification audits). Fluent navigating technical complexity, regulatory requirements and stakeholder expectations. Track record stabilising complex programmes, building high-performing teams, and embedding quality and safety at source. Targeting leadership roles in robotics and avionics where safety-critical control systems, requirements engineering and regulatory discipline are essential.
by Borg3 | 2026-02-04 21:14:21+00:00
Destroying planet in the process.. NOTHING is fucking free.. wake up.. It have costs. Energy and waste (waste needs to be reproceesed so energy again).

If you take a look how much energy is put into producing 1kcal of food, you will see that its negative. We put around x6 more that we get (diesel, syntetic fertlizers, water pumping, etc). This is because we have cheap energy, like fossil fuels.. Unfortunatelly, it have hidden costs smartasses didnt anticipate.
by toast0 | 2026-02-04 21:14:29+00:00
Your estate retains many of your rights when you die. However, the federal privacy act explicitly does not apply. Your estate may have privacy rights via the Constitution, although privacy is not specifically enumerated. Your estate may have privacy rights via state law; but that wouldn't bar the federal government from disclosing its investigative materials.

OTOH, there's a 2004 case, National Archives & Records Administration v. Favish[1], which establishes the surviving family's right of privacy to death scene photos, but that's technically not privacy of the deceased.

[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/oip/blog/foia-post-2004-sup...
by kgwxd | 2026-02-04 21:15:08+00:00
Maybe the type of SaaS that's akin to stock media (photos, video, music). Just hard enough to do from scratch, but not important enough that it needs to be exceptional in it's field. I've made some money off software like that, and it was nice, but I always knew it couldn't last. Better developers took most of it from me years ago.
by palmotea | 2026-02-04 21:15:10+00:00
> It is actually very relevant. If you read Chomsky & Herman's 'Manufacturing Consent', you'll get examples from the 1970s and 1980s, another 20 years earlier, and you will find that "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose".

You're stuck in the past, and letting the (non-existent) perfect be the enemy of the good. However imperfect the newspaper industry may have been, it was a whole hell of a lot better than the mix of social media and outright propaganda that's come to replace it.

Pretty soon you may have no place to find out what's going on in your city, country, or the world; except via the rumor mill and works similar to Melania. But I guess you think that's fine fine, because Chomsky & Herman said the NYT wasn't perfect?
by ahmedhawas123 | 2026-02-04 21:15:15+00:00
As a founder, there is another angle here that is worth mentioning. Not only does AI B2B SaaS allow insourcing, it also allows there to be 10x (imaginary number) the number of companies building SaaS for the same use case. What we see in healthcare or finance for example is executive fatigue from demos, in many cases mostly vibe coded frontend UIs that entrepreneurs are using to test the market. This creates friction for businesses / SaaS companies that are unable to show how their solution is unique, well built or has a clear moat over the many others they have seen.
by bentley | 2026-02-04 21:15:34+00:00
It seems to have started two weeks ago. A spammer realized that one can find a Zendesk‐based help forum, open a new ticket without an account, fill the ticket with spam URLs, and put an email address scraped from GitHub commit logs in the author email field. Zendesk would “helpfully” send the “author” the contents of the ticket, becoming in effect an open relay for spam emails. Two weeks ago is when the spammer started the attack in earnest: I received hundreds of these spam emails, typically one or two per Zendesk‐hosted help forum, sent to email addresses that I’ve only ever used on GitHub. It was discussed a bit on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46685768

Since then, Zendesk seems to have strengthened their system so that opening a ticket requires account activation first. Leading to today, when I’ve received thousands of signup attempt emails (again, typically one or two per Zendesk‐hosted forum). This is way more emails than I got last time. I hypothesize that the spammer is doing a “last gasp” attack: now that Zendesk has burned the exploit by no longer including the ticket text in the emails, the spammer is trying every Zendesk site it knows in hopes that some of them are slow to update and still forward the ticket text to the victim.
by greggoB | 2026-02-04 21:16:01+00:00
> Your voices are now a permanent artifact in America's historical record.

I like how the wording here (Your voices) is giving off that sarcastic and patronizing "you're welcome" tone.

Like a religious person saying "I'll pray for you" to someone non-religious, where the undertone is an obvious middle finger.

It's pretty fun.
by RickJWagner | 2026-02-04 21:16:01+00:00
Your family and mine.

I retired last year, my wife and I count reading among our hobbies. Our library offers two services that loan ebooks.

I’ll read about 8 or 10 books a month, maybe finishing half. Wifey reads at a ferocious pace, completely reading a book every day or two.

It’s nice.
by ativzzz | 2026-02-04 21:16:13+00:00
> where you're pretty sure of the high-level requirements, have the necessary agency to stay in a bubble for a bit, and the task is sufficiently complex but narrow enough

yea these kind of problems are the exact ones that claude code is very good at one shotting these days. If you can descibe in detail what needs to be done without context switching or research, then describe it to the LLM and bam

I've also mostly worked at small companies so the high level requirements are never well defined :D
by Rover222 | 2026-02-04 21:16:14+00:00
The top comment: "Musk is up to something here."

It never fails here. Ya'll are soooo determined to assume ulterior motivations. He has always been direct about his motivations, whether it's about politics or business decisions.

To suspect his whole plan for datacenters in space is a ruse or something to drive up some stock price (or whatever), is... just ridiculous. You really think they person who leads SpaceX (more satellites than the rest of the world combined) and Xai (with a competitive frontier model in 2 years starting from scratch), and Tesla (more inference compute than any company on Earth) really knows less than you about the math and physics of this idea??

His immediate focus for Starship has shifted from Mars colonisation to exponential expansion of intelligence, as he thinks it's the best path to extend consciousness. Ridiculous or not, he believes that, and that's the motivation.
by krackers | 2026-02-04 21:16:16+00:00
>OpenClaw to make purchases for you

But don't you want the agents to book vacations and do the shopping for you!!?!

Though it would be nice if "deep research" could do the hard work of separating signal from the noise in terms of finding good quality products. But unfortunately that requires being extremely skeptical of everything written on the web and actively trying to suss out the ownership and supply chain involved, which isn't something agents can do unguided at the moment.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-04 21:16:35+00:00
Assuming also that you are not running on top of an operating system, running in a VM with “noisy neighbors”…

I haven’t counted cycles since programming assembly on a 65C02 where you cooks save a clock cycle by accessing memory in the first page of memory - two opcodes to do LDA $02 instead of LDA $0201
by itay-maman | 2026-02-04 21:17:11+00:00
Two thoughts this sparked, somewhat in tension with each other:

The HTML→React evolution is a good parallel. Writing long-term maintainable markup without loops, reuse, and parameterization became untenable at scale. React (and similar) emerged precisely because "data" (HTML) needed to become "code." Not everyone loves frameworks, but clearly many developers found the abstraction ceiling of pure markup too low.

That said, declarativity has real advantages — mostly around security and sandboxing. CloudFormation is instructive: CDK eventually outputs CloudFormation YAML. AWS could let you run arbitrary code inside CloudFormation, but they don't — because if you can send code there, you can also make it mine bitcoin. The declarative layer is the trust boundary.

So maybe the sweet spot is code-that-emits-data. You get loops, abstraction, and type safety at authoring time, but the execution environment only sees the constrained, analyzable output. CDK got this right. The problem is when systems skip the "emit data" step and try to grow a DSL organically inside YAML.
by boondongle | 2026-02-04 21:17:17+00:00
The real problem is just the volatility for the employees. Unless Board of Directors/Owners punish downtime, you risk a dark pattern of uptime just being a nice-to-have when I can just replace any expertise with the next kid out of college + Claude.

So you really need customers to react. And this isn't theoretical - people have already lost their jobs and there's really, really good people in the market available right now.