MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zzo38computer | 2026-02-01 00:13:38+00:00
I think dry run mode is sometimes useful for many programs (and, I sometimes do use them). In some cases, you can use standard I/O so that it is not needed because you can control what is done with the output. Sometimes you might miss something especially if the code is messy, although security systems might help a bit. However, you can sometimes make the code less messy if the I/O is handled in a different way that makes this possible (e.g. by making the functions that make changes (the I/O parts of your program) to handle them in a way that the number of times you need to check for dry run is reduced if only a few functions need to); my ideas of a system with capability-based security would allow this (as well as many other benefits; a capability-based system has a lot of benefits beyond only the security system). Even with the existing security it can be done (e.g. with file permissions), although not as well as capability-based security.
by ethin | 2026-02-01 00:14:05+00:00
My problem with it is that I want to use C libraries. And I would (like) it to handle that as much as possible. But SPM can't use vcpkg packages or call CMake stuff (at least, not trivially), so it's extremely hard to use on non-Apple platforms. Which honestly is it's killer for me. It's still so, so Apple focused.
Ask HN: Any Successful Co-Ops of Software Engineers
by rubyn00bie | 2026-02-01 00:14:14+00:00
Salutations HN!

I’ll keep it simple, has anyone known of or been a part of a co-op of software engineers? And if so, how did it go?

I’m curious because it seems like the vast majority of early capital raises seem to go to paying for software development, and a small group of engineers could (in theory) output a few million dollars worth of value. It might not be attractive to VCs but it could probably form a business that lets coop members lead very comfortable lives.
by lifeisstillgood | 2026-02-01 00:14:48+00:00
To me this is just one more pillar underlying my assumption that self driving cars that can be left alone on same roads as humans is a pipe dream.

Waymo might have taxis that work in nice daytime streets (but with remote “drone operators”). But dollars to doughnuts someone will try something like this on a waymo taxi the minute it hits reddit front page.

The business model of self driving cars does not include building seperated roadways and junctions. I suspect long distance passenger and light loads are viable (most highways can be expanded to have one or more robo-lanes) but cities are most likely to have drone operators keeping things going and autonomous systems for handling loss of connection etc. the business models are there - they just don’t look like KITT - sadly
by VorpalWay | 2026-02-01 00:14:57+00:00
I don't necessarily agree, the Rust subreddit is fine (except for all the AI slop posts this year, which the moderators have a hard time keeping up with) and some of the more niche 3D printing subreddits are doing fine, basically it feels like the past few years haven't happened there. The Arch Linux subreddit is a bit chaotic, but the moderation is not really the problem I think.

Maybe all of these fall into your last paragraph and I simply don't frequent the type of subreddit you describe. The thing is, it is hard to tell if it is you or me who have a representative sample here, or if we are both off. Two samples is not statistically significant.
by worik | 2026-02-01 00:15:09+00:00
I am unconvinced

I have used Swift (stopped about two years ago) and use Rust extensively these days.

People commenting here have mentioned the dreadful Xcode. But if you want to build systems on Apple, without investing a lot in setup, you are stuck with Xcode.

To be clear it's failures as an editor or build system are not the main problems with Xcode (albethey very frustrating when the intermittent problems show up) it is the abject failure of the tooling.

We never got the profiler to produce anything intelligible after days of trying, spread over several weeks.

SwiftUI is not part of the conversation here, and I limit the amount of UI building I do, but it shares all the problems of declarative UI frameworks - mainly "where is the code?". Debugging logic problems is nigh impossible in code you're unfamiliar with

The very worst part of Swift were the thread control. Trivial to overwrite shared memory, "DispatchQueus" (?IIRC?) are a thin wrap of fork, and do nothing but add complications

Swift is probably better than Objective C, the latter being from the 1980s, and things have moved on, if your target is iOS and friends, and you are sure you never want to port, then obeying Apple is a wise business decision. Other than that stay away from it. Use Go for most things, and Rust when you must
by blueprint | 2026-02-01 00:15:32+00:00
How many of those people who spend their time using other IDEs on other OSs (where Xcode doesn't run) spend any amount of time using Xcode and therefore have the requisite experience to be able to know that it's generally excellent?

And when you say "you hear", you really mean "you", not "me". I hear it a lot.

What motivated your comment?
Show HN: I built a receipt processor for Paperless-ngx
by smashah | 2026-02-01 00:17:59+00:00
Hi all,

I wanted a robust way to keep track of my receipts without needing to keep them in a box and so i found paperless - but the existing paperless ai projects didn't really convert my receipts to usable data.

so I created a fork of nutlope's receipthero (actually it's a complete rewrite, the only thing that remains over is the system prompt)
The goal of this project is to be a one stop shop for automatically detecting tagged docs and converting them to json using schema definitions - that includes invoices, .... i can't think of any others right now, maybe you can? If you do please make an issue for it!
I would appreciate any feedback/issues thanks!

(p.s i made sure its simple to setup with dockge/basic docker-compose.yml)

repo: https://github.com/smashah/receipthero-ng

tutorial: https://youtu.be/LNlUDtD3og0
by sealeck | 2026-02-01 00:18:14+00:00
Go has a critical mass that Swift clearly doesn't (i.e. there are many, many companies who have net profits of >$1bn and write most of their server software in Go).

Additionally Google isn't selling Go as a product in the same way as Apple does Swift (and where Google does publish public Go APIs it also tends to use them in the same way as their users do, so the interests are more aligned)...
by frizlab | 2026-02-01 00:18:19+00:00
Swift has swiftly to manage the Swift compilers to use (equivalent of rustup) and LSP works pretty well. Most of the (open-source) libs that Apple does are cross-platform. I personally take care to make sure my personal libs work on all platforms as well, including Windows(!) (anecdotal, I know…).

All in all it’s not perfect yet, but it’s getting better, with intent to continue in that direction.
by tom_ | 2026-02-01 00:19:20+00:00
I was struck by the "Magnitude: High | Applicability: High" bit. Who writes like this? More importantly, who reads like this? The V4 doc (which I have yet to read, but I did a text search) has 64 occurences of this sort of phrasing; not actually all that many, given that there's 293 pages, but enough to be interesting. I wonder if this extra stuff is there to make LLMs pay particular attention.
by zb3 | 2026-02-01 00:19:59+00:00
We could use it to install magisk, but that wouldn't make the build proper "userdebug" one.

I fully agree with your original comment - AOSP security model is NOT a proper solution to the security problem, and I'd add to it that it was also designed to be anticompetitive - Google can do what third party apps can't.

Android architecture is tainted by Google's business model and it shouldn't be used as an example of a secure operating system..
by frumplestlatz | 2026-02-01 00:20:02+00:00
I’m not disputing that Musk says things you find objectionable. I’m pointing out that his statement -- and these statements -- do not cross the thresholds you’re claiming they do. Yours is a claim of moral contamination, not an argument. Thresholds don’t matter, refutation doesn’t matter, and context doesn’t matter.

Nothing you’ve quoted here meets the content thresholds you've invoked: no call to violence or illegal action, no dehumanization, no demand for exclusion, no rejection of individual rights or constitutional order.

This is not, by any logically justifiable standard, "white supremacy".

> (I assume you generated your response with an LLM so not sure why I even bother.)

No, but you would benefit from asking an LLM to analyze your responses for logical entailment before posting them.
by willhbr | 2026-02-01 00:21:13+00:00
My experience is that it is very frustrating. Apple's documentation makes no mention of what works on Linux and its limitations, so you just have to guess or work it out with trial and error.

I tried to write a websocket client: https://willhbr.net/2023/08/23/the-five-stages-of-swift-on-l...
Then tried again 2 years later: https://willhbr.net/2025/10/13/the-6-2nd-stage-of-swift-on-l...
by eddyg | 2026-02-01 00:22:21+00:00
This guy⁽¹⁾ claims ”Over night Henry [his ClawdBot] got a phone number from Twilio, connected the ChatGPT voice API, and waited for me to wake up to call me … He now won't stop calling me”

Pretty sure there are some hoops to jump through before you can get a phone number from Twilio...

⁽¹⁾ https://x.com/alexfinn/status/2017305997212323887
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2026-02-01 00:22:53+00:00
>What are your thoughts on lemmy,

I was hopeful when I found out about it...

The trouble I think, going forward, is that no matter how good the technology of a new forum might be, everyone is primed and ready to flock to it. How could anything be good if the same 500,000 redditors that turned it into shit show up the first week? Worse, even if they don't, there are all sorts of crackpots who try to preempt by colonizing new ones early hoping that they can sway the thing once it gets big (Lemmy and the commies).

This is Eternal September.
by fasbiner | 2026-02-01 00:24:25+00:00
What you are saying is empirically false. Change in a single line of executed code (sometimes even a single character!) can be the difference between a secure and non-secure system.

This must mean that you have been paid not to understand these things. Or perhaps you would be punished at work if you internalized reality and spoke up. In either case, I don't think your personal emotional landscape should take precedence over things that have been proven and are trivial to demonstrate.
by astrange | 2026-02-01 00:24:26+00:00
> In addition to his influence as a first reader for the Science Fiction Book Club, a book reviewer for Bookspan, Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times, and a juror for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award,[4] Nicoll often offers ideas and concepts to other writers, primarily through the medium of Usenet.

> Nicoll relates a number of life- and/or limb-threatening accidents that have happened to him, which he has told and retold on various science fiction fandom–related newsgroups. Over the years these stories have also been collected into Cally Soukup's List of Nicoll events.[23]

> Inspired by Nicoll's collection of accidents, as well as his tendency to take in any stray cat that comes knocking, fantasy author Jo Walton wrote him a poem in 2002.[24]

I don't think he is beating the allegations of a guy who just has a Wikipedia article because his friends wrote him one.
by wolvoleo | 2026-02-01 00:24:27+00:00
Why would you bother using Swift if you're not targeting Apple? I can imagine wanting to use it for something cross-platform that is primarily an ios/macos thing.

But if you don't want to include those I wouldn't pick a language that's under control of a company I don't use.

It's a bit like using c# or powershell on Linux. Yes it can be done and it's helpful for cross platform with windows but I wouldn't consider it a first class citizen.
by Ancapistani | 2026-02-01 00:25:00+00:00
> I don’t see how a social network for AI bots benefits society at all. It’s a complete waste of a very valuable resource.

I don’t know what will happen, though I have ideas. I’m curious what hooking up my own with access to a (copy of) my dev environment and directing it to optimize by talking with other bots might result in.

But the fact that this is unique and new is sufficient justification in my opinion. AI is a transformative technology, and we should be focused on spending our energy and resources on improving and understanding it as fully as possible, as quickly as possible.

In that light, this is easily justified.
by scyzoryk_xyz | 2026-02-01 00:25:50+00:00
Might be worth adding that US comparisons aren't quite relevant. Poland is a relatively new member-country, not an existing state within a long standing union.

The Polish economy and success is simply the result of disciplined economic decisions and hard work. Apart from few political turbulences and ongoing constitutional crises we've managed to spend all the investment correctly. An enormous and matter-of-fact win-win.

Federal support for disadvantaged states is different (though really shouldn't be).
by olivia-banks | 2026-02-01 00:26:18+00:00
> Construction of an infectious horsepox virus vaccine from chemically synthesized DNA fragments

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

In theory, it's very much doable. We brought back an extinct cowpox virus a while ago using mail-order DNA. Did you know that Smallpox's nucleotide sequence is freely available online?
by collingreen | 2026-02-01 00:27:13+00:00
Strongly agree and want to pile on with some more very normal times to queue politely:

- waiting to get food at a quick service restaurant

- waiting to get into a show

- waiting for the bathroom in a public place

- merging while driving in traffic

Any time there is an uncoordinated mass of folks on a limited resource it helps simplify things all around for a FIFO process. The chaotic "sharpest elbows wins" approach being better is the exception not the rule.
by tarasyarema | 2026-02-01 00:27:35+00:00
So after all the OpenClaw and moltbook hype and drama, I decided it's time to have a place to gauge how doomed we feel (as techies).

No auth, just vote and it will store that. Note that you might vote more than once.

Code at https://github.com/desplega-ai/ai-toolbox/tree/main/arewedoo...
by afavour | 2026-02-01 00:27:55+00:00
Yes, in my experience the Apple bias exists in all the articles and how-tos you read in a way that can trip you up.

It’s been years now but I wanted to create a Set with weak memory in its keys. Everything I read said “oh just use NSHashTable” and I dutifully did (it’s in Foundation) and then when I tried to cross compile it didn’t exist outside of Apple platforms. It’s not as if the import made it clear I wouldn’t be able to use it, but I couldn’t.
by etempleton | 2026-02-01 00:27:55+00:00
I had a different issue with Windows on my old daily driver but similar experience. The whole system began crashing randomly, but only occasionally, and only when not under load. It never once crashed while being taxed. I tried everything. Reinstalling the OS, reseating everything, tweaking memory timing, frequency, voltage, installing new firmware. Nothing fixed it. What did fix it? Installing Linux.

I still don’t know what was wrong. I have to imagine there was something with my exact hardware configuration that Windows did not like.
by techblueberry | 2026-02-01 00:28:36+00:00
A lot of this stuff depends on how a person chooses to engage, but my contrarian take is that actually throughout history whenever anyone said X technology will lead to the downfall of humanity for y reasons, that take was usually correct.

The article he references gives this example:

“Is it lazy to watch a movie instead of making up a story in your head?”

Yes, yes it is, this was a worry when we transitioned from oral culture to written culture, and I think it was probably prescient.

For many if not most people cultural or technological expectations around what skills you _have_ to learn probably have an impact on total capability. We probably lost something when Google Maps came out and the average person didn’t have to learn to read a map.

When we transitioned from paper and evening news to 24 hour partisan cable news, I think more people outsourced their political opinions to those channels.
by delichon | 2026-02-01 00:29:22+00:00
Their 2020 patent on a satellite chassis optimized for heat dissipation:

https://x.com/seti_park/status/2015114363531866448

They claim 12.6 watts/kg. A fully reusable Starship is expected to orbit 100 to 150 tons of cargo, so ~1 to 2 megawatts of compute per launch.

A 1MW datacenter in the US would cost around $10M to build, and consume around $100k/month in electricity, which is free to the satellite.
I lost too many songs over the years, so I built a DAW with version control
by hpen | 2026-02-01 00:30:02+00:00
Hey HN,
Somewhere on a dead hard drive from 2014 is the best thing I ever wrote. I don't remember exactly how it went. I just remember the feeling of it.
That's the moment I keep coming back to. Not when I decided to build this thing—that came later—but the reason underneath it. A decade of making music means a decade of scattered project files, dead drives, folders named "old stuff DO NOT DELETE" that eventually get deleted.
So I built ScratchTrack. A DAW where everything is versioned. Every edit, every take, every branch you went down before you changed your mind. I went deep on the architecture—event sourcing, content-addressable storage, proper commit history. I wanted it to be the thing I wished I'd had.
I launched last month. Posted in a few places. Told some people.
It was quiet. A handful of signups. No momentum.
I thought I'd feel devastated. I'd put so much into it. But I opened it this morning to work on something new and realized—I just like using it. My projects are safe. The history is there. The thing I built for myself actually works for me.
So I'll keep building it. If a few other people who've lost songs along the way find it useful, that's the dream. If not, it's still mine, and it'll still exist.
by thomassmith65 | 2026-02-01 00:30:39+00:00
I lived and breathed Swift for the first five or six years of its existence. When people compliment it, I assume they haven't used it long enough to hate it.

Swift is a mix of great features, miserable features, and... every other feature that someone on Evolution dreamt up (with the exception of those that would fix the miserable features)

Swift is unique among high-level languages in that the mental effort required to do many simple things rivals that of a low-level language.
by wolvoleo | 2026-02-01 00:30:48+00:00
Is liquid glass really that bad? I left Mac years ago due to other annoyances. It was my daily driver for a decade and change. But I couldn't get used to the iOSification and the dependence on apple cloud services for most new features. When I started with macOS jaguar it was just a really good commercial UNIX. It got even better with Tiger and leopard.

But the later years I spent every release looking at new fancy features I couldn't use because I don't use apple exclusively (and I don't use iOS at all, too closed for me). So almost no features that appealed to me while usually breaking some parts of the workflow I did use.

While I did hate the 'flat' redesign after Mavericks that on its own was not really a deal-breaker though. Just an annoyance.

I'm kinda surprised liquid glass is so bad people actually leave for it. Or is it more like the last drop?
by frizlab | 2026-02-01 00:31:06+00:00
I’m sorry but reading your comment, you have not understood much about Swift (and GCD).

In particular “"DispatchQueus" (?IIRC?) are a thin wrap of fork, and do nothing but add complications”, in addition to having typo, is as wrong as it can get.

> if you want to build systems on Apple, without investing a lot in setup, you are stuck with Xcode.

If you want to do in Swift the same type of dev you do in go/rust/whatever, Xcode is more than not mandatory, it is generally recommended to use something else, including in the Swift community. Also, you can build native apps in Swift using something else than Xcode (if it is possible to do that in rust for macOS, it is obviously possible with Swift).

> We never got the profiler to produce anything intelligible after days of trying

You mean Instruments? That app is incredibly good, I fail to see how you failed to get anything out of it.

> The very worst part of Swift were the thread control

Already talked about that one, but Swift has async/await now, also.
by arjie | 2026-02-01 00:32:04+00:00
In order to make it work without polluting the code-base I find that I have to move the persistence into injectable strategy, which makes it good anyway. If you keep passing in `if dry_run:` everywhere you're screwed.

Also, if I'm being honest, it's much better to use `--wet-run` for the production run than to ask people to run `--dry-run` for the test run. Less likely to accidentally fire off the real stuff.
by amdivia | 2026-02-01 00:32:09+00:00
Side question: does anyone else feel like the quality of openclaw (as a tool) is extremely low?

Their logging seems to be haphazardous, there is no easy way to monitor what the agent is doing, the command line messages feel unorganized, error messages are really weird.. as if the whole thing is vibe coded? not even smartly vibe coded..

Even the landing page is weird, it takes one first to a blog about the tool, instead of explaining what it is, the getting started section of the documentation (and the documentation itself feels like AI slob)
by collingreen | 2026-02-01 00:32:43+00:00
The vibe seems to be that it is not ILLEGAL it just is a reason the government should be able to kill you in the street without proof or process (if you don't root for the right team).

After you take the outright liars away (of which there are many, all the way to the top) it's the same, tired "the leopards won't eat MY face" crowd. Bad thing happens -> well what she wearing.
by mothballed | 2026-02-01 00:34:13+00:00
You dismiss the relevance of following others as irrelevant because it's all "decentralized".

Yet damn me for not offering a "solution."

You sir, are a hypocrite. If I'm damned for not offering you a solution, it can't simultaneously be true following my "solution" is irrelevant to third parties and everything waived away as "decentralized".

Conversation ended for bad faith practice, heads I win, tails you lose scenario.
by fasbiner | 2026-02-01 00:35:01+00:00
I think the point was pretty clear if you are able to consider more than one point of view. People who are highly motivated and for whom it could make a life-or-death difference have considerable technical skills in this area in Russia consider Whatsapp to be insecure and prohibit its use, just as in the US, their counterparts consider telegram to be insecure and prohibit its use.

Perhaps you're simply struggling with the concepts here: would it help you to understand things better to add that russia and the US ban the use of Signal by their militaries and intelligence services?

Did you detect an implication that can't be extrapolated from the text without metacontext and secondary unstated axioms, or is your mind totally blank and baffled at what these data points could indicate?
by Bender | 2026-02-01 00:35:12+00:00
Absolutely avoid all the extensions. Supposedly that got tightened up in v3.x but I saw some boards get pwned in 2.x from the extensions. Another issue is that most people were too lazy to harden php.ini yup this is a thing and their servers allowed outbound connections so exploiting some of the core code was much easier. Maybe I am just lucky but I never had a security issue with phpBB. One of my earliest forums using phpBB had over 50k people on it. That may not sound like much but it was a niche community.