MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: modeldrop.fyi – a community tracker for new gen media AI model releases
by okandship | 2026-02-01 10:07:33+00:00
hey HN, i just shipped https://modeldrop.fyi - a lightweight, chronological tracker for newly released generative media AI models (image, video, audio, 3D)

the data is editable via github (https://github.com/okandship/MODELDROP):

submit new models via a simple github issue form

edit/fix model info via prs (model data is just markdown key values backed by a zod schema)

discuss releases in github discussions (threads appear on the website)

it's early (seeded with a few entries and limited data), i'm sharing now to sanity check the approach and invite contributions
by robertjpayne | 2026-02-01 10:07:35+00:00
We use server side Swift extensively since about 2016 for decent production load and it's easily one of the worst decisions I've ever made.

- C/C++ interop is great but if we wanted to use C/C++ libraries why use Swift at all? It's annoying to interop with them even if there is no FFI and still requires a lot of glue code for memory management etc…

- The stdlib (Foundation) is not identical on all platforms even today. This has been a major thorn as releases constantly have discrepancies and subtle bugs that are hard to diagnose and track down. Even Swift 6.1 broke non UTF-8 string encodings by just returning "nil" on Linux and took until Swift 6.2 to be fixed (nearly a year).

- The compile times are awful, with a large Swift codebase it takes us ~10-20 minutes to compile our backend Docker container and thus deployments to dev take that long and it's only going to keep getting longer as Apple seemingly has no interest in making the Swift toolchain much faster and Swift has a fatal flaw in it's design around bi-directional type inference that ensure it can never be compiled fast.

- Talent is impossible to find. Yes lots of people know Swift for iOS apps but nobody knows Swift for server code and a backend dev is a very different skillset than an app dev.

We chose it because it allowed us to share some domain code between our flagship iOS product and the server with a custom built sync engine but as our platform has grown it's just gotten harder and harder to justify keeping Swift on the server which is why we're actively migrating off it.
by tetha | 2026-02-01 10:07:45+00:00
This looks very useful for our database heavy teams.

Getting this information is certainly already possible, but there is a bit of a barrier in front of it. You need to realize the query is slow, then you need to re-run it with the right EXPLAIN and/or ANALYZE incantation with 8-9 parameters for a query visualizer, paste it into a query visualizer and then you get some nice, easily digested overview of what is going on.

Teams either don't know how to do that, or don't do that, due to permissions or because it's a hassle. Having a slow "calculateFooReport()" trace go straight into a bunch of slow SequentialScan- and NestedLoop-Nodes would remove one excuse from that equation.

Kinda bummed that we're updating out of the supported versions starting next month.
by the_biot | 2026-02-01 10:07:57+00:00
This is the way. I disagree with your 24-hour timeline -- give it a week -- but whether and how they respond tells you a lot. Being welcoming to new contributors is crucial for the health of a project.

One time I was interested in contributing to an important part of some project, a part where they were nowhere and in dire need of help. As a first try I submitted a small patch correcting the README's build instructions, which were obviously wrong in one place. I got a lot of attitude and hostility, and they refused to accept the fix. Yeah, bye.
by INTPenis | 2026-02-01 10:07:58+00:00
It's a great book, I used to have some edition of it and it helped me a lot professionally with setting up firewalls, load balancing, traffic shaping and more.

I also had a book on Designing FreeBSD rootkits that was very educational.

Unfortunately I've given away all my books for more minimalistic living where I am instead dependent on digital information. Not sure how to feel about it.
Show HN: DiskScout – a simple tool to compare SSD and HDD prices
by matansfb | 2026-02-01 10:10:10+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a small web tool to compare SSD, NVMe and HDD prices.
The idea came from repeatedly checking storage prices manually when upgrading PCs or NAS setups.

It’s still early and pretty minimal, but it’s live.
Feedback is welcome.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2026-02-01 10:10:15+00:00
> it’s an appropriate question to ask to define if your outrage at its application is based on your political agreement with the protesters/disagreement with the religious group or if you are willing to allow a law to be applied without regard to which religion and which concept is being protested

Just to be clear, this is the ad hominem, which is moot. Even if this is true, it has no bearing on the case being discussed and the question is a foolish one for this silly political game you describe: firstly, it can easily be turned around on the asker and, secondly, it has an extremely obvious game theoretic answer of "yes" because that's the only option to get one's interrogator to continue with the actual discussion. (Thanks for proving the point.)
by Wilder7977 | 2026-02-01 10:10:28+00:00
You mention free will, but it would be an interesting conversation to discuss how much free will there is when people fight, without knowing it, against psychological manipulation, addition creation, all crafted with plenty of money and research. Especially when this people are young ones.
Can the behavior still be called free will when you get hooked to mechanisms specifically designed to exploit humans in this way?
by whatis991 | 2026-02-01 10:10:48+00:00
I am not sure that I understand you correctly, and I find the subject interesting.

Is it what the enum abstraction can model easily that is the issue?

If so, I believe the Rust community has similar issues regarding error handling. There are multiple libraries like thiserror and anyhow.

https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1mexsqr/the_way_rust_...

https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1q3wb3l/stop_forwardi...
by isoprophlex | 2026-02-01 10:10:54+00:00
Some of these companies don't make money from you, the end user, but by selling ads and data to more effectively deliver said ads.

Differences in capabilities, experience and implementation are all downstream from that. In other words, everyone pays lip service to privacy and security, but it's very difficult to believe that parties like Meta or Google are actually being honest with you. The incentives just aren't there.

With Apple, you get to fork over your wallet, but at least you seem the be primarily the user they've got to provide services to.

With Google/Meta, you're a sucker to bleed dry.
by roryirvine | 2026-02-01 10:11:08+00:00
And that's... fine. They're still giving away their code, and anyone is free to step up and mke sure that it builds or that internal dependencies are replaced.

And it's a completely standard situation for non-corporate open source software, too. OpenSSH, for instance, has OpenBSD-specific dependencies and can only be run on Linux because of the porting efforts by a separate group of volunteers.

Sure, it'd be event better if they went out of their way to facilitate external participation, but they don't have to. Not even GNU does so for everything they publish!
Show HN: I'm building a site to host 1k free, ad-lite calculators
by priteshgkoshiya | 2026-02-01 10:12:54+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm a full-stack developer who got tired of searching for simple calculators online and landing on pages that are 90% ads and SEO fluff, with the actual tool buried at the bottom.

I decided to build StraightCalculator.com. The goal is simple: straight-to-the-point tools with zero clutter.

The Plan: My goal isn't just 10 or 20 common tools; I am building an engine to support thousands of niche calculators (Finance, Health, Engineering, Physics, etc.).

Current Status:

Live with the first batch of financial tools.

Clean UI, focused on speed

I know "thousands" sounds ambitious, but I've set up a modular structure that allows me to deploy new logic rapidly.

I’d love your feedback on the UX and suggestions on which "niche" calculators are currently missing from the web.
by maqp | 2026-02-01 10:12:56+00:00
The ratchets would have different state yes. The MITM would mix in different entropy into the keys' states. It's only detectable if the MITM ever stops. But since the identity key exfiltration only needs to happen once per lifetime of installation (longer if key is backed up), the MITM could just continue forever since it's just a few cycles to run the protocol in the server. You can then choose whether to read the messages or just ignore them.

One interesting way to detect this would be to observe sender's outgoing and recipient's incoming ciphertexts inside the client-to-server TLS that can be MITM'd by users. Since the ratchet state differs, so do the keys, and thus under same plaintext, so do the ciphertexts. That would be really easy way to detect MITM.
by netsharc | 2026-02-01 10:13:25+00:00
Does the Spotlight calculator still expect you to respect the locale and ignores decimal points as if they don't exist, if you enter them not locale-compliant?

10 years ago I tried to add 640.9 + 2.73 on a German-locale Mac (Germany uses "," as the decimal separator), and it gave me 6682 as the answer...
by lelanthran | 2026-02-01 10:14:36+00:00
There's no valgrind equivalent, I guess?

I mean, even if valgrind ran on MacOS, it may still not give anything meaningful because the debug symbols are probably not going to be the same as that generated by GCC, and even if they were the same, there's still gonna be a bunch of symbols "missing" because of internal swift name-mangling, and even if that wasn't the case, the emitted code might just not be ABI compatible with C anyway.
by gucci-on-fleek | 2026-02-01 10:15:36+00:00
> Plants cannot obtain nitrogen from the air

That is literally true, but for anyone who hasn't studied plant biology, I think that "some plants have evolved specific structures to host obligate symbiotic bacteria that obtain nitrogen from the air and convert it into a form usable by the plant" is close enough to "many plants can obtain [nitrogen] from the air".

(A link for anyone not familiar with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_nodule)
by tonyedgecombe | 2026-02-01 10:16:21+00:00
>We need Anders to make one final language.

I do feel like there is a gap for a modern compiled, functional and garbage collected language.

Go isn't it because it lacks the functional constructs.

C# and Java aren't it because they depend on a VM.

Rust isn't it because of its difficult memory management.

Swift isn't it because it is so tied to Apple and their platforms.
by soulofmischief | 2026-02-01 10:17:28+00:00
The DS came out ~21 years ago, in 2004.

In 2004, the games I played that had come out ~22 years prior, give or take two years, were already considered retro: Donkey Kong, Pitfall, Pac-Man, Asteroids, etc. And ~21 years prior was the great video came crash of '83.

Suffice to say, we're dinosaurs. I've made my piece with it and spend a considerable amount of time listening to old British dudes break down 30 year old games.
by goku12 | 2026-02-01 10:19:07+00:00
Why does it matter if it was Obama or Bush in power? Sure, their politics influence the nation's foreign policies. But domestic partisan politics is largely irrelevant to the international partners. To the foreign nationals affected by it, you're just USA either way.

I mentioned just the other day, the problem with anti-intellectualism in the US and how it's fed by these sorts of egregious meddling by the administration. There are much less educated and affluent countries that are nowhere near as anti-science as the US. Yet unfortunately, the US exports it abroad too. I explicitly referred the same Pakistani case as an example of that. I'm all for Osama's elimination, but they jeopardized the entire humanity's future by misusing the vaccination program for it.

Despite a century of this nonsense (remember the radium girls?), neither political party cares enough to not pervert science in the interests of humanity. Smallpox and Polio were horrible diseases that caused untold miseries. Even the remote tribes of Pakistan knew their dangers well enough to participate in their elimination, until the US pulled off this dirty stunt. This is a deeply ingrained toxic culture that was reinforced by both parties over the decade. This should be a war crime irrespective of party allegiances.
by anmacri | 2026-02-01 10:20:04+00:00
I’ve been thinking about the attention economy lately, and it struck me that many of its core dynamics existed long before social media — particularly in Italian television.

Italy had an unusual media transition: a strong public broadcaster with a cultural and educational mandate (RAI), followed by the rise of a fully commercial TV system (Mediaset) built around ratings, advertising, and audience demand.

Looking at it structurally, it feels like an early, large-scale experiment in what happens when media shifts from:

instructing audiences

to listening to them

Many things we now associate with platforms — visibility as value, attention as currency, fame without institutional mediation — were already normalized on television decades earlier.

I tried to write this up not as a political or nostalgic piece, but as a way to understand how demand-driven media systems outperform value-driven ones, and what that tells us about modern platforms.

Longer breakdown here if useful:
https://anthonynealmacri.com/mediaset-didnt-corrupt-italy-it...

Curious how others think about pre-internet media as a training ground for today’s attention dynamics.
by zeristor | 2026-02-01 10:20:30+00:00
Perhaps we need a public information film as to how to queue.

They had one for playing in dumped fridges, swimming in deep water, or playing frisbee next to an HV transformer.

Maybe there’re a couple of other things that need a Public information film for contemporary times. Such as “don’t use a VPN”, or how to travel to the USA without ending up in manacles.
by RealStickman_ | 2026-02-01 10:20:38+00:00
Could it be that Germany was the only nation willing to help Finland fight the Soviets?

From Wikipedia

> Interim peace
> ...
> Defensive arrangements were attempted with Sweden and the United Kingdom, but the political and military situation in the context of the Second World War rendered these efforts fruitless. Finland then turned to Nazi Germany for military aid.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finland_in_World_War_II
by ErroneousBosh | 2026-02-01 10:20:46+00:00
In general the emergency services would rather come out for something that sounds on the face of it stupid ("This sign is hanging down above the road and flapping in the breeze, can you come out to it?") and deal with it with plenty of time.

Far better than getting the call "This sign has come down and chopped a bus in half, and then four cars have run into the back of the wreckage".

Build the fence at the top of the cliff, not the hospital at the bottom.
by gucci-on-fleek | 2026-02-01 10:21:46+00:00
I completely agree, but to be fair, there are some people who are politicians and helped to eradicate a disease [0] [1].

[0]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/guinea-worm-disease-nearly-erad...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eradication_of_dracunculiasis
by vages | 2026-02-01 10:21:52+00:00
I think that this summary is oversimplifying: The rest of the blog post elaborates on how the author and Masley has a completely different interpretation of that bullet point list. The rest of the text is not only examples; it provides elaborations of what thought processes led him to his conclusions. I found the nuancing of the two opposing interpretations, not the conclusion, the most enjoyable part of the post.

(This comment could also be shortened to “that’s oversimplifying”. I think my longer version is more enjoyable.)
by Certhas | 2026-02-01 10:22:57+00:00
This is science for science sake. To advance knowledge. You argue for direct investment for building space faring capabilities, rather than for advancing knowledge, but then you should state why you want these space faring capabilities.

Because they are cool? I think that's essentially the reasoning behind putting people on the Moon. If you believe there are valifld economic reasons for space, why do we need tax dollars? And also: I don't see it. Space is so hostile an environment to humans, that it's hard to understand why we should invest in capability to be there personally. People aren't even investing to harvest Greenland's resources, and they are infinitely more accessible.
by whatthecloud | 2026-02-01 10:23:42+00:00
> If you go multi-cloud you need to learn a whole new set of systems.

Isn't the whole point of Kubernetes that you don't need to do this? Also, if you want to know for certain that you aren't "vendor locked", running on two clouds is a constant test of that fact. That is to say, have a stack that can deploy to Kubernetes then have two clusters in separate clouds.
by xg15 | 2026-02-01 10:23:44+00:00
The article describes the mechanism in some detail near the end. As I understand it, it's not really "coordination" in the sense that they exchange messages through the electricity.

It's more that every cell has to maintain a voltage difference between the inside and outside ("membrane potential"). A healthy cell does that constantly using "ion pumps" that use chemical energy (ATP) to increase the potential.

If that potential falls below a certain threshold, certain molecular mechanisms (voltage-sensitive ion channels) inside the cell are triggered that lead to ejection.

Interestingly, are also other mechanisms (pressure-sensitive ion channels) that will "intentionally" make it harder for a cell to maintain its potential if it's already weakened or if the surrounding region is very crowded.

As such, I think the effect of current would depend on the way how it would change the voltage differences of the individual cells.
by ben_w | 2026-02-01 10:25:59+00:00
> So let's keep an open mind, our ancestors were anything but idiots.

Just not so open our brains fall out.

Our ancestors were just like us, but fewer in number and inventing things from scratch. Miasma, spontaneous generation, Newtonian gravity, these were not people being idiots, and even though they have been shown to be wrong they are still close enough to still be useful today. Phlogiston also wasn't idiotic, but lacks utility vs being correct about oxygen.

One of the shared ways we failed then and now is that what sounds true isn't the same as what is true; the modern easy example of this is how easily many of us get fooled by LLMs, and I suspect that's how a lot of ancient religions grew, with additions and copy-errors evolving them to be maximally plausible-sounding to a human mind.
by pseudohadamard | 2026-02-01 10:26:21+00:00
I've had a quick look and it's mentioned in a number of places, Matthew Aid's "The Secret Sentry" mentions it briefly, Bamford has a page or two in "Body of Secrets", and for honorable mention Jeffrey Richelson's "Wizards of Langley" doesn't have it but does cover the entire KH series across a span of around 250 pages. It may be in a few more books but it'd be a pile to go through.
by simonw | 2026-02-01 10:26:27+00:00
I worried about this a lot more at the tail end of 2003, when OpenAI's GPT-4 (since March) was still very clearly ahead of every other model. It briefly looked like control of the most useful model would stay with a single organization, giving them outsized influence in how LLMs shape human society.

I don't worry about that any more because there's so much competition: dozens of organizations now produce usable LLMs and the "best" is no longer static. We have frontier models from the USA, France (Mistral) and China now.

The risk of a model monopoly centralizing cultural power feels a lot lower now then it did a couple of years ago.
by mkagenius | 2026-02-01 10:26:40+00:00
> And with apple/container, it’s very easy to launch a semi-sandboxed Linux environment on macOS too.

I used apple containers and have put in a jupyter server in it and exposed it as an API/MCP. The isolation it provides is superior than docker.

Everything works locally.

Coderunner - https://github.com/instavm/coderunner
by Greed | 2026-02-01 10:28:19+00:00
I don't know that I care much for the mythologization of effective developers as "Wolves" and "10x-ers" which are this decade's equivalent of Ninja / Rockstar / Guru, but a similar less tech-centric version of that is just the concept of the "Maverick" within any organization and the parallels aren't too far regardless of the industry you're talking about. Outsized impact in undersold roles with a lot of heavy swinging soft power earned through merit.

It's strange to intentionally try to place or manufacture mavericks within your org for (at least) two reasons:

1. They're emergent phenomena. It's probably more valuable on average to examine WHY someone skipping all of your processes is effective than it is to make the conditions right for someone to become that maverick. Theoretically anyone CAN be that person, but unless something is actively going wrong it probably won't happen.

2. Process exists because it makes your org more efficient. When you start building your teams around the idea of someone explicitly being the maverick(s), ask yourself: "Who exactly is going to reconcile all of this against the framework that the entire rest of the company runs on? Is the rest of that person's team relegated to damage control and cleanup crew, and is that actually more effective than having an equivalent number of mid-level performers all pulling in the same direction?"

In the world of tech, the alleged 10x-er often manifests itself as: Tech Debt, but at High Volume™!
by tjpnz | 2026-02-01 10:29:30+00:00
As a non-American I don't care what you do, if you want to behave like irresponsible idiots without any regard for the lives of others you have that right. Just don't subject vulnerable individuals in other countries to your own bad choices (you can get the MMR vaccine as an adult if your parents were neglectful). Maybe visitors from the United States should have to present vaccine certificates at airports or be quarantined at their own expense.
by verdverm | 2026-02-01 10:30:10+00:00
The night and day difference after adopting Claude code prompts in my custom agent leads me to the opposite conclusion.

Everyone is not getting the same results. This is evident in the wide reporting in usefulness. Some people are producing production code while others claim they can't get the AI to to even basic things without error.

Something is def different. If we then look to human history and tool usage, never has there been a tool that is equally wielded by all members of the species. It's not magic, it's a tool. You know two plumbers can produce very different outcomes with the same tools, why do people expect developers with coding agent tools to exhibit different human-tool outcomes?
by pyrale | 2026-02-01 10:30:45+00:00
> This happens already in some areas and it is not cheaper or better.

The goal is not for it to be cheaper or better. The goal is to have money spent on domestic actors. Will some of them provide a dogshit service? Sure. Just like it happened in the US. Time will sort things out.

> What does it mean? VMware with Tanzu or OpenStack. And then some services thrown in to offer some S3 like buckets and that's it. The rest has to be built by the beneficiaries. Servers? Brand names like Lenovo/HP/Dell. Storage? Brand names like NetApp, HP, Dell, Lenovo, 3Par, IBM and the list goes on. Networking? Cisco (mostly), HP/Juniper. Firewalls? Cisco/Fortinet/PaloAlto/CheckPoint/etc.

You need to cut this purity bullshit where Europe must own all the stack from the foundry, or do nothing. What you're building is an unwinnable battle.