MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Prvue – Self-managed preview environments for back end apps
by dan_le_brown | 2026-02-04 12:16:12+00:00
I've built an open-source tool for managing isolated preview environments (per PR) for backend applications. Currently provisions servers on DigitalOcean.

Inspired by Netlify/Vercel's preview links for frontend apps, I wanted something similar for backends. Frontend apps are generally stateless and simple to preview, but backend apps work with databases, Redis, message brokers, etc., which made building a framework that works for different application types quite tricky.

I recently discovered Railway offers something similar, but I still wanted to build the tool I wished existed. The learning process has been incredibly rewarding.

Built with Docker, Terraform, and Ansible. Supports NestJS, Laravel, Node.js, Rust, Go, PHP, and more.

Docs: https://docs.prvue.dev

Demo videos coming soon. Open to collaborations and contributions!
by a2tech | 2026-02-04 12:16:31+00:00
So the scam here doesn't seem to be ACTUALLY selling the land--it's basically engaging a realtor long enough to get earnest money on the table, then to disappear. Although if they could go far enough to get an entire amount wired to them I'm sure they'd take it.

Since a lot of people are doing all cash (non-financed) deals lately, I could see how a scammer and a lax realtor could possibly scam an overzealous buyer out of the full amount.
by usefulposter | 2026-02-04 12:17:22+00:00
I can imagine corps using this HUD with a vision model for worker supervision (Manna, anyone?)

Cheeseburger Assembly

x Toast bun
x Place bun
x Add ketchup
x Add onions
Add pickle
Place cheese slice
Add patty
Place bottom bun
Wrap and flip burger

TIME REMAINING: 00:09.01
UNITS THIS HOUR: 60
ACCURACY: 99.8%
KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK!
by fc417fc802 | 2026-02-04 12:17:25+00:00
I wanted to reply with a bunch of DSP examples but on further investigation the ones I checked just now seem to very deliberately use the term "data word". That said, the C char type in these cases is one "data word" as opposed to 8 bits; I feel like that ought to count as a non-8-bit byte regardless of the terminology in the docs.

NXP makes a number of audio DSPs with a native 24 bit width.

Microchip still ships chips in the PIC family with instructions of various widths including 12 and 14 bit however I believe the data memory on those chips is either 8 or 16 bit. I have no idea how to classify a machine where the instruction and data memory widths don't match.

Unlike POSIX, C merely requires that char be at least 8 bits wide. Although I assume lots of real world code would break if challenged on that particular detail.
by dTal | 2026-02-04 12:17:48+00:00
Setting aside "elected officials"... government employees are already undercompensated compared to the private sector, making it difficult to attract talent. Eroding their personal rights and exposing them to personal risk on top of that is a recipe for shrinking the government to nothing. Do that and you might as well cut to the chase and hand the whole kit and kaboodle over to the private sector and be done with it.
by mschuster91 | 2026-02-04 12:18:33+00:00
Let's do some napkin math: Iran has about 94 million people. Iran's IRGC alone has a personnel count of 125.000 [1], of which about 2-5000 are estimated to be the elite of the elite ("Quds Force"). Together with the Basij (anywhere from 100-600k) that alone is a sufficient amount of force. And on top of that come maybe 400-500k of the regular Iranian Armed Forces [2], as well as about 260k active police+100k police reservists.

So, if one sees the whole of IRGC plus Basij as the "commandos", they alone form an active elite of about 0.5%, if one sees the entirety of the military+police we're looking at easily 2-3 million units, so up to 2%.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Revolutionary_Guard_Co...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Republic_of_Iran_Armed...
by dchftcs | 2026-02-04 12:18:42+00:00
you still can think hard but you can offload some parts to LLM when you're stuck. Then you can leave space for more hard-won inspiration. When you're faced with a high-stakes decision, evaluating all sorts of possibilities, it's really easy to maximize the utilization of your brain, so in those cases you have plenty of chance to think hard.
by mastermedo | 2026-02-04 12:19:13+00:00
I relate to the post, but I'm not sure it's hitting the nail on the head _for me_.

I like being useful, and I'm not yet sure how much of what I'm creating with AI is _me_, and how much it is _it_. It's hard to derive as much purpose/meaning from it compared to the previous reality where it was _all me_.

If I compare it to a real world problem; e.g. when I unplug the charging cable from my laptop at my home desk, the charging cable slides off the table. I could order a solution online that fixes the problem and be done with it, but I could also think how _I_ can solve the problem with what I already have in my spare parts box. Trying out different solutions makes me think and I'm way more happy with the end result. Every time I unplug the cable now and it stays in place it reminds me of _my_ labour and creativity (and also the cable not sliding down the table -- but that's besides the point).
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-04 12:19:33+00:00
Replace "edition." subdomain with "lite." and you get a very lightweight website, clocking less than 100kB transferred: https://lite.cnn.com/2026/01/29/science/zapotec-tomb-mexico-...

The lite version is actually quite nice and just has news item in one big list, no fuzz, no glam, just text and some cover images.
by anthk | 2026-02-04 12:19:37+00:00
Amigans are already using AmiSSL and AmiGemini (and some web browsers) perfectly fine in m68k CPU's recreated with FPGA's.

You can do modern TLS stuff with a machine from the 90's if you cut own the damn JavaScript and run services from https://farside.link or gemini://gemi.dev proxying the web to Gemini.
by ljm | 2026-02-04 12:19:44+00:00
> You don't have to prosecute and send a million people to jail for making and distributing fake AI nudes, you just have to send a couple, and then the problem virtually goes away.

I genuinely cannot tell if you are being comically naïve or extremely obtuse here. You need only look at the world around you to see that this does not, and never will, happen.

As another commenter said, this argument is presenting itself as apologia for CSAM and you come across as a defender of the right for a business to create and publish it. I assume you don't actually believe that, but the points you made are compatible.

It is as much the responsibility of a platform for providing the services to create illegal material, and also distributing said illegal material. That it happens to be an AI that generates the imagery is not relevant - X and Grok are still the two services responsible for producing and hosting it. Therefore, the accountability falls on those businesses and its leadership just as much as it does the individual user, because ultimately they are facilitating it.

To compare to other situations: if a paedophile ring is discovered on the dark web, the FBI doesn't just arrest the individuals involved and leave the website open. It takes the entire thing down including those operating it, even if they themselves were simply providing the server and not partaking in the content.
by direwolf20 | 2026-02-04 12:19:55+00:00
IIRC the Ribbon had real UX testing behind it. All the most common features were truly easier to access, but it was harder to find a certain feature when you needed it. In other words they optimized for the wrong thing.

My favorite was that Paste was a giant button while Cut and Copy were small because the UX research found that people paste more than they cut or copy...
by mlrtime | 2026-02-04 12:20:47+00:00
>Look up what it means when they say "yes", when you're explaining something.

Is there a term for this? Because I see it in my personal life as well dealing with some low price manual labor that doesn't speak english.

Instructions often get lost in translation, the reply will be "yes" and it doesn't get done. I know they want to sound professional and confident, so saying no or asking questions is a "bad thing".
by i7l | 2026-02-04 12:21:00+00:00
That's a false dichotomy, because transistors and ICs are manufactured to be deterministic and nearly perfect. LLMs can never be guaranteed to be like that.

Yes, some things are better when manufactured in highly automated ways (like computer chips), but their design has been thoroughly tested and before shipping the chips themselves go through lots of checks to make sure they are correct. LLM code is almost never treated that way today.
by alex-moon | 2026-02-04 12:21:12+00:00
> Are we supposed to find the figurative "gym for problem solving" the same way office workers workout after work?

That's it, yeah. It sucks but it's part of the job. It makes you a better engineer.

You're absolutely right that this isn't sustainable however. In one of my earlier jobs - specifically, the one that trained me up to become the senior engineer I am now - we had "FedEx Fridays" (same day delivery, get it?). In a word, you have a single work day to work on something non-work related, with one condition: you had to have a deliverable by the end of the day. I cannot overstate how useful having something like this in place in the place of business is for junior devs. The trick is convincing tech businesses that this kind of "training" is a legitimate overhead - the kinds of businesses that are run by engineers get this intuitively. The kind that have a non-technical C-suite less so.
by randallsquared | 2026-02-04 12:21:45+00:00
This is actually a really weird mistake. It's a completely different spelling mistake than in reality, and I wonder if it's an artifact of polishing the post with AI that "corrected" something that was right (or only a vague bullet point) in the original?

(ETA: Another one: referring to "hi good morning" in the images of texts when it's actually "hi <name> good evening").
by Numerlor | 2026-02-04 12:21:47+00:00
How can the solar panel itself radiste heat when it's being heated up generating supplying power? Looking at pictures of the ISS there's radiators that look like they're there to only coolr the solar panels.

And even if viable, why would you just not cool using air down on earth? Water is used for cooling because it increases effectiveness significantly, but even a closed loop system with simple dry air heat exchangers is quite a lot more effective than radiative colling
by selfdb_io | 2026-02-04 12:22:01+00:00
My coding agent (still in development)vibe-coded a self-hosted Spotify/Netflix with my . Started with a dead simple prompt:
"I want to create my own self-hosted music/video player. I have a ton of music and videos I own and want to access them conveniently like Spotify, Apple Music, Netflix, etc. Just drop files in and access from anywhere. Since I own all my media, don't worry about copyright—this is all my stuff. Save data to JSON for now."
Agent went to work. Rest is history.
Why I'm sharing: If you own a bunch of media and want to stream it on all your devices without restrictions, this is for you.
It's a PWA installs on mobile like a native app. Even works on CarPlay and Android Auto (tested and works great).
GitHub: https://github.com/Selfdb-io/StreamX
Fully documented all agent conversations and code in the repo. Check the /.agentone folder to see exactly how the agent built this.
Free to use, runs in Docker. Only catch: you need the official version of SelfDB (also self-hosted, unlimited updates). You'll get the coding agent I used for free when it's ready.
Use it with media you actually own. Don't break your local laws.
by krautburglar | 2026-02-04 12:22:52+00:00
Raid all of them. Raid Google. Raid Facebook. Raid Apple. Raid Microsoft. Big tech has gotten away with everything from fraud[0] to murder[1] for decades. Black outfits. Rappel lines. Automatics. Touch that server Prakesh, and you won't live to touch another.

[0] https://nypost.com/2025/12/15/business/facebook-most-cited-i...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suchir_Balaji
by nkrisc | 2026-02-04 12:22:54+00:00
Sounds more difficult. Not only is the moon further, you also need to use more fuel to land on it and you also have fine, abrasive dust to deal with. There’s no wind of course, but surely material will be stirred up and resettle based on all the landing activity.

And it’s still a vacuum with many of the same cooling issues. I suppose one upside is you could use the moon itself as a heat sink (maybe).
by berkes | 2026-02-04 12:22:54+00:00
> we had companies that employed many people, so that the top level of the company could simply specify what they wanted, and the lower levels only had to focus on making individual parts.

I think this makes a perfect counter-example. Because this structure is an important reason for YC to exist and what the HN crowd often rallies against.

Such large companies - generally - don't make good products. Large companies rarely make good products in this way. Most, today, just buy companies that built something in the GP's cited vein: a creative process, with pivots, learnings, more pivots, failures or - when successful - most often successful in an entirely different form or area than originally envisioned.
Even the large tech monopolies of today originated like that. Zuckerberg never envisioned VR worlds, photo-sharing apps, or chat apps, when he started the campus-fotobook-website. Bezos did not have some 5d-chess blueprint that included the largest internet-infrastructure-for-hire when he started selling books online.

If anything, this only strengthens the point you are arguing against: a business that operates by a "head" "specifying what they want" and having "something" figure out how to build the parts, is historically a very bad and inefficient way to build things.
by InfiniteRand | 2026-02-04 12:23:57+00:00
This isn’t the point of the piece, but I have found that the thinker often gets in the way of the builder, because there’s always a better way to build, there’s always some imperfect subsystem you just want to tear out and rewrite and then you realize you were all wrong about this and that, etc.

More to the piece itself, I know some crusty old embedded engineers who feel the same way about compilers as this guy does about AI, it doesn’t invalidate his point but it’s food for thought
by crote | 2026-02-04 12:24:00+00:00
> the cost of 5 SBC boards with pre-applied SMD is now so low, you might as well order 5 so you get at least 1 which works

I've had a 90% failure rate on what was supposed to be the final prototype before production. Turns out they hand-soldered the batch because the proto run was (obviously) only a dozen units - and some parts were just too tricky to reliably hand-solder.

I understand the logic as fully-automated assembly has a nontrivial startup cost, but a big reason of doing later prototypes is evaluating the manufacturing process as well. If the assembly method used doesn't match what I can expect in production runs, what's the point?

Weirdly enough the batch before this was totally fine. In the end we did get a massive discount on the hand-assembled run and managed to do all the testing with the one prototype we got working with some small rework, but it still cost us quite a lot of time and money. We would've happily paid a significantly higher fee to have them just do it properly - per-prototype cost is pretty much irrelevant during development.
by fredoralive | 2026-02-04 12:24:19+00:00
That U-turn was very fast. I guess they realised whilst Animate only has a small user base nowadays, they tend to people who really need that specific tool (with no Adobe tool providing an alternative) like animation studios. It’s still dead (Jim) but at least its zombie corpse will keep on shambling along for users.

Microsoft Publisher is still doomed…
by clash | 2026-02-04 12:25:16+00:00
This is an easy one:

bool isRestricted(uint8_t* /* data */) { return true; } // Might catch a few false positives

and

popup("This is a restricted model. If you are not in the state of New York, please flash the international firmware ([link]) to print restricted parts.");

It can also handle STL, step and all kinds of other formats.
by b112 | 2026-02-04 12:26:28+00:00
It's a private company, is profit motivated, and thus has reason to optimize. That was the parent poster's point.

Starship isn't largely a government project. It was planned a decade before the government was ever involved, they came along later and said "Hey, this even more incredible launch platform you're building? Maybe we can hire SpaceX to launch some things with it?"

Realistically, SpaceX launches far more payload than any government.
by phasetransition | 2026-02-04 12:26:31+00:00
Given that these went straight to backers, and would have required the final die cast parts to test in the thermal chamber, they probably had not gone to an NRTL at the point the article had been written.

This product is about at the point of DVT in development flow, and therefore would be sent to testing about now. But, instead, being sent to backers.

PS, not a hypothetical circumstance for me. I've previously certified a number of luminaires under UL and CB Scheme. I was the technical chair of ANSI C136.37 for several years, and on the working groups of several other standards.
by phorkyas82 | 2026-02-04 12:28:04+00:00
I always had this: "Only dead software needs no maintenance" in the back of my head, and similarly "bug free only means it's not been used and vetted enough"

While probing into this, I think there could be a case where software is mostly done: when it is shipped with the hardware and run in an isolated environment.

The mentioned tools are probably not distributed in binary form for different OS, I assume, otherwise that statement _cannot_ be true.

> failing to to finish software indicates a badly defined scope.
In my first job there'd even been a contractual penalty if you are not done in time. And this company produced examples of "finished" software, that controlled warehouse material flow, sometimes running on 20 yrs old MCU. (which of course meant they could not extract money of these customers, because the software ran too good)
by HPsquared | 2026-02-04 12:28:21+00:00
With real instruments, you must also manage inharmonicity.

A real piano string, for instance, is made of metal and resists bending slightly unlike an idealised string. This affects higher harmonics more than lower ones (think of all the bends in the string on the 7th harmonic, for example). This increases the harmonic frequencies slightly above exact integer multiples of the fundamental.

As a result, pianos require "stretched tuning" so the harmonics better match the higher notes. It's always a bit of a compromise. The higher harmonics will be more "off" than the lower ones.

So even if you were to tune the fundamental frequency of all the keys on a piano "perfectly" in a given key (so-called Just Intonation), the harmonics would not perfectly match up.
by urbandw311er | 2026-02-04 12:28:51+00:00
As others have said, I suspect you've just grown accustomed to its quirks and defects and learned to work around them. For example... * always refresh X before doing Y. * if you see this signing error, clear this cache. * don't try to drag this file here because it gets linked in the wrong way ...and so on.

If you were able to use a magical, fast, bug-fixed, version where everything 'just worked' at pace, I imagine you would begin to realise just how much you have been putting up with!
by NitpickLawyer | 2026-02-04 12:30:05+00:00
Between fp nondeterminism, fp arithmetic, async gradient updates, cuda nondeterminism, random network issues, random nodes failing and so on, bitflip is the last of your concerns. SGD is very robust on noise. That's why it works with such noisy data, pipelines, compute and so on. Come on! This thread is having people find the most weird hills to die on, while being completely off base.
by electsaudit0q | 2026-02-04 12:30:13+00:00
This resonates with me alot. I've been noticing this pattern where I reach for Claude or ChatGPT for things I used to just... think through? Like debugging something weird - before I would stare at the code, trace through it mentally, maybe draw some diagrams. Now I just paste it and ask "whats wrong here".

The thing is, those 20 minutes of frustration were when the actual learning happened. When you finally figure out that its a race condition or whatever, that knowledge sticks because you earned it. When the AI just tells you, its like reading a spoiler - you know the answer but you didnt really understand the journey.

Not saying AI tools are bad, I use them constantly. But I've started forcing myself to struggle with hard problems for at least 30min before reaching for help. Sometimes I solve it myself and it feels great. Sometimes I dont and the AI helps. But that initial struggle matters I think.

Anyone else doing something similar? Curious how others are balancing the convenience vs the learning aspect.
by ninadwrites | 2026-02-04 12:30:16+00:00
You're extremely on point. I don't remember the last time I was able to sit around to think because at the back of my mind, I knew AI could help me generate the initial draft of ideas, logic, or structure that would otherwise require hours of my time.

But to be honest, those hours spent structuring thoughts are so important to making things work. Or you might as well get out of the way and let AI do everything, why even pretend to work when all we're going to do is just copy and paste things from AI outputs?
by andrepd | 2026-02-04 12:30:32+00:00
Again, AI deepfakes are not sketches in a piece of paper. There's a massive difference between drawing your coworker naked on a piece of paper (weird, but certainly not criminal), and going "grok generate a video of my coworker bouncing on my d*ck". Not to mention the latter is generated and stored god knows where, against the consent of the depicted person.
by pembrook | 2026-02-04 12:30:53+00:00
EU inc is worthless without alignment on a single capital market for fundraising and ultimately going public, sane/interoperable labor laws for hiring, and a single language market over the long term.

The last piece is extremely important. Being able to raise money and hire across the EU with no friction would be fantastic, but it means nothing if actually selling into different EU markets has massive language barriers (average people in many neighboring EU countries cannot communicate with each other beyond the level of a 4 year old). English fluency is massively overstated by people who only have visited European tourist capitals.
by mr_freeman | 2026-02-04 12:31:11+00:00
> Just look at image generation. Actually factually look at it. We went from horror colours vomit with eyes all over, to 6 fingers humans, to pretty darn good now.

Yes, but you’re not taking into account what actually caused this evolution. At first glance, it looks like exponential growth, but then we see OpenAI (as one example) with trillions in obligations compared to 12–13 billion in annual revenue. Meanwhile, tool prices keep rising, hardware demand is surging (RAM shortages, GPUs), and yet new and interesting models continue to appear. I’ve been experimenting with Claude over the past few days myself. Still, at some point, something is bound to backfire.

The AI "bubble" is real, you don’t need a masters degree in economics to recognize it. But with mounting economic pressures worldwide and escalating geopolitical tension we may end up stuck with nothing more than those amusing Will Smith eating pasta videos for a while.
by trimethylpurine | 2026-02-04 12:31:22+00:00
Are you an engineer?

You can't exchange heat with vacuum

If you put a pipe with gas inside, in space, will it get colder? (I think it will.)

Blow air through the pipe. Easy peasy.

I'm not a space engineer, but I'm happy to consult as one if you have any other easy ones like this.